Josselin Corea Escalante was 9 when she and her mother and younger brother left Guatemala to seek asylum in the United States, believing it would offer them safety. They ended up in Tennessee, where Josselin — whose family calls her Dallana, her middle name — celebrated turning 15 in 2023 with a spring quinceañera in a Nashville ballroom. But last week, another student shot and killed Josselin, 16, in her high school cafeteria. Now her family, still waiting for an asylum decision, is questioning whether it is worth staying. The main reason they made the harrowing trip to the United States — on foot, nearly two months — was fear that Josselin and her brother would be kidnapped or killed by gangs in Guatemala. “We had a dream for a better life,” her father, German Corea, said in Spanish this week. “But the reality is that it’s not better anywhere. In Guatemala, you’ve never heard of someone killing someone in school.”He and his wife have already made one wrenching decision: to send Josselin’s body back to Guatemala for burial, a way to guarantee that they will be reunited if they decide — or are forced — to leave the United States. Mr. Corea came to the country before his wife and children and is not part of the asylum case, so he is at more risk of being deported. “This is the country that took her away from me,” Mr. Corea said. “And if one day we go back to our country, she’ll be there with us.” Josselin had been thriving in Nashville, where she loved to sing and play soccer. She had once turned down a three-day trip to make sure she did not miss school. She wanted to become a doctor, her uncle, Carlos Corea, said: “A doctor saves lives, and this was not fair to her.” On Jan. 22, a student who the police said had espoused hateful rhetoric online brought a pistol to Antioch High School in South Nashville. He opened fire, killing Josselin and injuring another student before shooting himself. The police have not said whether the shooter was targeting Josselin. A month into 2025, there have been at least 15 shootings on or near a school campus, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database.The loss of Josselin, who frequently translated for her family, has driven some of them to speak out. “I am not scared — I’m telling the truth, I’m telling people how I feel,” Carlos Corea said in Spanish. That is why he and another of Josselin’s uncles, Juan Corea, found themselves on the steps of the Tennessee State Capitol on Monday, surrounded by a crowd of Democratic lawmakers, students and gun control activists. As they left the nearby church where they held a funeral service for Josselin, they saw people gathered with pictures of their niece and understood what was going on. “We never thought that we’d be in this position, but we wanted to give people our message,” Carlos Corea said later. The two men carried pictures of Josselin, in her quinceañera tiara and a glittering red gown. There have been protests for gun control in Nashville before, most notably in 2023 after three third graders and three staff members were killed at a private Christian school. But with lawmakers arriving to debate the creation of a state immigration czar, the crowd at this protest repeatedly tied together the threat of immigration enforcement with their fears of gun violence.Through a translator, Carlos Corea spoke to the crowd on behalf of his family. As they cheered, he raised a fist in the air. In the silence of the home where they gathered for weekly meals, Josselin’s relatives have been unable to rest. Her Uncle Juan has been thinking about the dance they shared during her birthday celebration, where he told Josselin he loved her. Her father is contemplating activism in her name. “We have support, but what I tell all parents that have had their children taken away in schools: Don’t let it stay that way,” German Corea said. “Continue doing what you can so that there is justice for our children. If we remain with our hands tied, this will continue to happen again.” While Antioch High School has reopened, with an additional school resource officer and new metal detectors, Josselin’s cousins who attended the school with her are too afraid to return. They will enroll soon at a new school, family members said. On Thursday, Josselin’s pink coffin was loaded onto a plane for her journey home to Guatemala. There, her grandparents and aunt were waiting for her.

The Education Department sent notice to K-12 schools and colleges on Friday that it would revert to policies put out during President Trump’s first term that limited schools’ liability in sexual misconduct cases and afforded stronger rights to students accused of sexual harassment and assault. The letter also instructed schools not to expect the department to enforce a revised interpretation of Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding. That change, announced during the Biden administration, broadened the law’s scope to recognize harassment or exclusion based on sexual orientation and gender identity to be a form of discrimination. The revised guidance issued Friday instructed educators to once again adopt new standards for enforcing codes against sexual violence and harassment on campus, a process they have had to undertake every four years as rules have whipsawed back and forth under the last four administrations. The old rules, set in 2018, eased the standards by which the department assessed schools’ liability in sexual misconduct cases, giving schools room to follow different evidentiary standards and appeals processes in investigations. They also required schools to hold live hearings in which accusers and students accused of sexual assault could cross-examine one another, including through a lawyer. In a break from recent changes surrounding the law, formally known as Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, the letter sent Friday stated that the changes in its implementations could begin immediately, after a federal judge in Kentucky blocked the Biden administration’s revisions from taking effect. That ruling was largely based on the Biden-era rules’ increased protections for transgender students, which the judge found to be unconstitutional. The letter also leaned on Mr. Trump’s executive authority to justify the immediate return to the old standards, circumventing the more standard practice of proposing new regulations through a lengthy federal rule-making process. It stated that the employees in the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, which enforces federal law across schools receiving federal funding, essentially answer to the president. “As a constitutional matter, the president’s interpretation of the law governs because he alone controls and supervises subordinate officers who exercise discretionary executive power on his behalf,” it said. “That unified control extends to Ed and OCR; therefore, Title IX must be enforced consistent with President Trump’s order.” Similar changes put forward under former President Barack Obama were also made informally through “dear colleague” letters like the one released on Friday, but informal guidance does not traditionally carry the force of law and can be easily overturned. Students’ rights groups focused on due process celebrated the development as a restoration of fair standards for those accused of serious offenses. “The return to the 2020 rules ensures that all students — whether they are the accused or the accuser — will receive fair treatment and important procedural safeguards,” Tyler Coward, a lead counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said in a statement. “That includes the right of both parties to have lawyers present during hearings, the right for both attorneys to cross-examine the other party and witnesses, and the right to receive all of the evidence in the institution’s possession.” Critics of the rules, dating to Mr. Trump’s first term, have said the requirements for live hearings force victims to relive the trauma of sexual violence and give the schools they attend more room to ignore or informally resolve many serious infractions. “This is an incredibly disappointing decision that will leave many survivors of sexual violence, LGBTQ+ students, and pregnant and parenting students without the accommodations critical to their ability to learn and attend class safely,” Emma Grasso Levine, a senior manager at Know Your IX, said in a statement. “Schools must step up to protect students in the absence of adequate federal guidance.”

An active-duty Navy SEAL who led a grueling training session for the Tufts University men’s lacrosse team last year that led to the hospitalization of nine students did not appear to be qualified for that role, according to a review commissioned by the university that was released on Friday. Twenty-four of the 61 students who participated in the voluntary workout developed rhabdomyolysis, also known as rhabdo, a serious and somewhat rare muscle condition, the review said. The president and athletics director of Tufts, which won the Division III men’s lacrosse championship a few months before the September 2024 training session, acknowledged in a statement on Friday that the session had not been appropriate. “We would like to extend our sincere apologies to the members of the men’s lacrosse team, their families, and others affected by this situation,” Sunil Kumar, the university’s president, and John Morris, the athletics director, said. The university, in Medford, Mass., outside of Boston, declined to name the Navy SEAL involved in the exercise regimen, other than to say that he had recently graduated from Tufts and was an equipment manager for the lacrosse team. He did not cooperate with two independent investigators who prepared the report, according to its executive summary. “To our knowledge, the third party who led the Navy SEAL workout did not have any credentials that qualified him to design, lead or supervise group exercises,” the summary said. The review was conducted by Rod Walters, a sports medicine consultant, and Randy J. Aliment, a lawyer who specializes in internal investigations for universities and assessments of student-athlete safety and health. The Naval Special Warfare Command, which oversees the SEAL program, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. At the time of the episode, a spokeswoman for the command said that the SEAL was not at Tufts as part of a Navy-sanctioned event, and it was unclear if the sailor would face any disciplinary action. During the 75-minute workout, lacrosse players and two other students did a series of repetitions focused almost exclusively on upper extremity muscle groups, including about 250 burpees, according to the review. Popular with the military and in CrossFit gyms, burpees can involve quickly squatting down, jumping into a plank, performing a push-up, jumping forward into a squat, then jumping back into a standing position. But they have also been blamed for causing injuries when done incorrectly or quickly. The review found that the university’s director of sports performance approved the workout plan the same day that he received it from the Navy SEAL and did not share it with others in the athletics department in advance. The sports performance director, who was not named in the review, texted the plan to his staff about an hour before the students began the workout. In the report, the investigators found that the Navy SEAL who led the training had lacked familiarity with N.C.A.A. policies and regulations and did not follow the principles of acclimatization that are necessary to avoid injury during training. The review also faulted the university for its response to the situation, saying that there were no policies or procedures in place for transportation of students to and from hospitals, or direction of care from a medical perspective. About 40 percent of the students who participated in the training sessions completed the exercises, but the majority had to modify the routine because of its difficulty, the report’s executive summary said. “By the next morning, students began experiencing adverse effects and reported to the team athletic trainer,” the investigators wrote. “Two days later, several cases of Exertional Rhabdomyolysis had been identified.” High-intensity workouts can cause rhabdo, as can trauma like a car crash or a fall, medical experts say. It involves injuries to skeletal muscles, leading the muscles to die and release their contents into the bloodstream. Although rhabdo is an uncommon condition that affects about 26,000 people a year in the United States, according to the Cleveland Clinic, it can be life-threatening. In 2011, 13 University of Iowa football players were hospitalized with rhabdo when the team jumped back into workouts after taking some time off following a bowl game. In recent years, there have been reports of a women’s soccer team in Texas suffering from rhabdo, which left one player hospitalized. Guidelines developed several years ago by the N.C.A.A. that are aimed at preventing rhabdo said that college athletes should be given “transition periods” after a break in training or introducing new members to a team. During transition periods, the N.C.A.A. recommends, athletic trainers and coaches should ensure that intensity and volume of activity is gradually increased over time.

The American Airlines flight that collided with a U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter was carrying members of the figure skating community, the U.S. Figure Skating Association (USFSA) said on Jan. 30. In a statement, the USFSA said: “U.S. Figure Skating can confirm that several members of our skating community were sadly aboard American Airlines Flight 5342, which collided with a helicopter yesterday evening in Washington, D.C. These athletes, coaches, and family members were returning home from the National Development Camp held in conjunction with the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita, Kansas" The competition, which occurred from Jan. 20 to Jan. 26, crowned new champions in senior women’s, men’s pairs and ice dance. The event also included competitions at the novice and junior levels, as well as development camps that are the gateway for athletes to join the national team, which competes at the world and Olympic levels. The flight included 60 passengers (and four crew persons), but USFSA did not confirm how many passengers were members of the skating community. Russian news agency TASS, citing an unnamed source, reported that Russian-born world champions in pairs skating from 1994 Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov were among the passengers. “Our coaches Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov were on board the crashed plane,” a source is quoted as telling the news outlet. The couple, who competed for Russia and are believed to have married in 1995, moved to the U.S. in 1998 and now coach figure skating at the Skating Club of Boston. The Club has disclosed the names of its members who were on the flight—athletes Jinna Han and Spencer Lane, Han’s mother Jin, Lane’s mother Christine, and Shishkova and Naumov. Among Shishkova and Naumov’s students is their son, Maxim, who competed at nationals and finished fourth in the men's event. The Daily Mail reported that a teammate said he was not on the flight and had left Wichita earlier in the week. Maxim's performance earned him a spot on the U.S. team that is due to compete at the Four Continents Figure Skating Championships in Seoul, Korea, in late February. Doug Zeghibe, CEO of Skating Club of Boston, posted on the club’s Instagram account earlier Thursday, “Our sport and this DLub have suffered a horrible loss with this tragedy. Everyone is like a family. Of the skaters, coaches and parents on the plane, we believe six were from The Skating Club of Boston. We are devastated and completely at a loss for words. These athletes, coaches and parents were returning from the U.S. Figure Skating’s National Development Camp, following last week’s U.S. Championships in Wichita. This camp is for young competitive skaters of tomorrow with the most promise to be a champion of tomorrow. The Club sent 18 athletes to compete at the U.S. Championships. It sent 12 athletes to the National Development Camp.” Members of the figure skating community have been reacting to the news. Tara Lipinski, 1998 Olympic champion who served as commentator for the US championships on NBC with Johnny Weir, posted on her Instagram stories, “It’s unimaginable the loss. We will mourn their loss and ALWAYS remember them…So many of our own were on this tragic flight and my heart aches, for them and for everyone part of this devastating accident.” Weir also reacted, saying on Instagram, “I’m praying for everyone affected by this tragic accident. Members of our skating family were on that flight returning home from nationals in Wichita. We mourn their loss and pray for their families & loved ones.” Ilia Malinin, who just earned his third consecutive national title and trains in Virginia, initially posted, “I hope and pray for everyone who was on that flight is okay,” and after authorities said it was likely they would not find survivors, said, “I’m heartbroken by the tragic loss of my fellow skaters in this devastating accident. The figure skating community is a family, and this loss is beyond words. My thoughts are with their families, friends, and everyone affected. We will never forget them.

After multiple weeks without significant precipitation on the West Coast, an atmospheric river disrupted the spell of dry weather with rain and snow in Washington, Oregon and Northern California on Friday. A second system, also pulling in a stream of moisture, will arrive on the West Coast most likely on Monday, before the first one has exited. It is expected to stall over Northern California and bring continued rain and mountain snow to the region into next week. “These systems are right on each other’s tails, so in some places you might not get a break,” Julie Kalansky, deputy director at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, said of the storms’ impact on Northern California. Coastal areas of Oregon and Washington could receive three to five inches of rain from late Thursday into Saturday, while the coastal mountain ranges of Northern California are expected to be drenched with seven to 15 inches of rain over the next week, according to the National Weather Service. The northern Sierra Nevada could pick up over four feet of snow in the next three days. The first system pushed into the Pacific Northwest on Thursday night, and drifted south on Friday along the coast into Northern California, where it will linger through the weekend as the second system arrives. The second storm “is forecast to stall over California, wobbling up and down along the coastline,” said Roger Gass, a meteorologist with the Weather Service office in Monterey, Calif.Atmospheric rivers are ribbons of moisture carried by powerful winds. These storms have the potential to unleash deluges of rain when they reach land and especially when they push up and over mountains. But their paths are narrow, and it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly where they will line up and release the heaviest rainfall. This early in the forecast, meteorologists can confirm that a wet weather pattern will persist on the West Coast into next week, but they cautioned that the storms’ tracks could shift and the details of the forecast could change. There’s a slight chance for excessive rainfall that could lead to flooding in portions of the Northern California coastal mountains, the Bay Area, the Sacramento Valley and the northern and central Sierra Nevada from Saturday morning into Tuesday, according to the Weather Prediction Center. The risk also stretches inland across the Sacramento Valley and into the Sierra Nevada. Streams are predicted to swell in southwestern Oregon and Northern and Central California, and the greatest potential for flooding is expected in Northern California. “One of the more impressive things about this storm is how long it’s going to last in Northern California,” said Chad Hecht, a meteorologist at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Here’s how things may unfold Friday: After beginning to affect the Pacific Northwest on Thursday, the system spreads south into Northern California, while rain and snow continue to fall over Washington and Oregon. The system starts pushing into the Sierra Nevada late Friday. Saturday: The system exits Washington early in the day and Oregon by later in the afternoon or evening, while Northern California continues to get hit with heavy rain and snow. Sunday: A chance for rain and snow continues mainly in Northern and Central California. Monday through Wednesday: A second pulse of moisture or atmospheric river brings more heavy precipitation to Northern and Central California and a chance for rain and snow to Washington and Oregon. While Washington, Oregon and Northern California had wet starts to the rainy season late last year, these areas have not received significant rainfall for multiple weeks. Seattle has recorded about 1.2 inch of rain since Jan. 1, compared with five inches for a typical January. With the two storms, Seattle is expected to pick up as much as an inch and a half of rain, with some of the precipitation potentially falling as snow. Kayla Mazurkiewicz, a forecaster with the Weather Service in Seattle, said that these storms aren’t big rainmakers for Seattle, but that “it’s a change since we haven’t had much rain in two weeks.” Editors’ Picks Help! How Do I Make Sense of All These Trends? Is ‘Reef Safe’ Sunscreen Really Better? Kristen Stewart Thinks the Critics at Cannes Are Being Too Nice San Francisco has not received any rain in more than three weeks and has had little rain in all of January, recording less than a quarter of an inch since the start of the month. In a typical January, the city gets about 4.5 inches. The dry spell is coming to an end though, with San Francisco predicted to record over four to six inches in the next seven days. Just to the north, the mountains of the North Bay could receive more than eight inches, with valley locations recording about half as much as higher elevations. The Bay Area got soaked by an atmospheric river in November, and Brian Garcia, a meteorologist with the Weather Service office in Monterey, Calif., said this system was not expected to be as nearly as wet. “That storm was something special,” Mr. Garcia said. “We picked up about a foot of rain in Santa Rosa in 48 hours. That corresponds to pushing a 1,000-year event.” Southern California has had one of its driest starts to winter ever, according to records going back more than 150 years. The dry conditions helped fuel multiple devastating wildfires across Los Angeles County this month. While the storm systems are expected to be focused over Northern California, the second one could bring up to an inch of rain to Southern California and Los Angeles County next week. “Some forecasts have the rain tapering off before the storm gets down there, and others show it lingering and bringing some rain, but not a ton of precipitation,” Mr. Hecht said. “That’s not to say things can’t change.”

If the Senate votes to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as President Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, she will be the person briefing him each day on the nation’s most closely held secrets. At her confirmation hearing on Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senators from both parties expressed serious concerns about whether they trust Gabbard in that crucial role. While Gabbard, a former Democratic Congresswoman from Hawaii and U.S. Army Reserve officer with no background in intelligence, faced questions about controversial moments in her past—her 2017 meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, her expressing skepticism of U.S. intelligence assessments about Syria’s use of chemical weapons, and her criticism of how the intelligence community collects data on U.S. citizens—many Senators homed in on her praise of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden as a way to question her overall judgment. In 2013, Snowden fled the country after removing 1.5 million classified documents about military and intelligence programs, initially traveling to Hong Kong to share some of the files with journalists and eventually seeking asylum in Russia. Snowden leaked thousands of documents that revealed a broad collection of American telephone records by the U.S. government and other secret programs, prompting a national debate about civil liberties. Gabbard has called Snowden “brave.” Senators suggested Gabbard’s support for someone who so famously leaked classified documents would undermine her credibility as Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. Asked repeatedly on Thursday if she stood by that compliment, Gabbard wouldn’t back away from it. “Edward Snowden broke the law,” she said. “He also exposed information that revealed the United States’ government’s illegal activities.” Snowden’s leaks prompted Congress to pass the USA Freedom Act in 2015 that was designed to curtail the collection of American phone records. A bipartisan House intelligence committee investigation concluded in 2016 that Snowden’s theft caused “tremendous damage” to national security and quoted a Russian official saying Snowden did share intelligence with Moscow. Multiple senators pressed Gabbard to call Snowden a traitor. She steadfastly refused. Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma asked Gabbard if Snowden was “a traitor” when he leaked intelligence and fled to Russia. “Senator, I’m focused on the future and how we can prevent something like this from happening again,” Gabbard said. Another Republican, Indiana Senator Todd Young, pointed out that Gabbard has previously said Snowden should be pardoned and asked Gabbard if Snowden betrayed his duty to the American people. Gabbard wouldn’t go that far. Instead, she repeated that Snowden broke the law and said he “released his information in a way he should not have.” Young told Gabbard that Snowden was likely watching the hearing. Snowden himself weighed in on Thursday before Gabbard met with Senators, writing on X that Gabbard “will be required to disown all prior support for whistleblowers as a condition of confirmation.” Snowden wryly said he encouraged her to do so and to tell Senators that he “harmed national security and the sweet, soft feelings of staff.” “This may be a rare instance where I agree with Mr. Snowden,” Young said. Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat representing Colorado, became exasperated when Gabbard continued to talk around a condemnation of Snowden’s actions and refused to recant past comments justifying Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “Can’t we do better than somebody who can’t answer whether Snowden was a traitor five times today, who made excuses for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine?” “I’m questioning her judgment, that’s the issue that’s at stake here,” Bennet said. Asked if she was aware that her comments about Russia’s invasion in 2022 were amplified by Russian state TV, Gabbard said, “I don’t pay attention to Russian propaganda. My goal is to speak the truth whether you like it or not.” At the beginning of the hearing, Gabbard gave a scathing review of the track record of the American intelligence community. “For too long, faulty, inadequate, or weaponized intelligence have led to costly failures and the undermining of our national security and God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution,” she said. The false intelligence conclusion that Iraq’s former dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers, millions of deaths, the rise of Islamist terror groups in the region and the strengthening of Iran, she said. And the intelligence community overstepped in its investigation of Donald Trump during his first term to “falsely portray him as a puppet of Putin,” she said. If confirmed to be the country’s top intelligence official, Gabbard said she intends to “break this cycle of failure and the weaponization of and politicalization of the intelligence community.” As the hearing ended midday Thursday, it was unclear if the pushback Gabbard received on Snowden and other issues would stall her nomination. Nearly every Republican Senator has signed off on Trump’s nominees in the past few days. Enough Republicans were willing to brush aside allegations of heavy drinking and aggressive behavior by Pete Hegseth to confirm him as Defense Secretary. And most Republican Senators seemed poised to look past Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s extensive public campaigns against vaccines to sign off on him running Health and Human Services.

Outside a hearing room in the Hart Senate Office Building, there was a long line of expectant MAGA supporters. Many had been waiting for hours, hoping to witness a defining moment ushering in a Trumpian takeover of one of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agencies. They may well have. On Thursday, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, endured hours of questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, in what seemed more like a ceremonial exercise than a high-stakes confirmation hearing. The former Trump official faced no resistance from Republicans, who hold a 52-seat majority and can confirm him without any Democratic support. Even Democrats, who say Patel is unqualified and unfit for the role, seemed resigned to his fate. Still, the more Democrats grilled Patel, the more he distanced himself from the no-holes-barred bombast that made him a darling of the America First movement. He scaled back his fierce criticisms of the FBI as a cesspool, saying 98% of its agents are “courageous apolitical warriors for justice.” He repudiated far-right QAnon conspiracy theories. When pressed on comments he’s made on right-wing podcasts, he denied that his own words reflected his views, calling them “false accusations and grotesque mischaracterizations." Most notably, Patel broke with Trump on granting clemency to all of the Jan. 6 defendants: “I do not agree with the commutation of any sentence of any individual who committed violence against law enforcement,” he said. It was no secret why. With nearly the entire Republican Party under Trump’s control, Patel needs only to avoid alienating a small cohort of GOP Senators whose opposition could imperil his nomination. To that end, Patel played it safe, hoping to abate fears that he would end the bureau's longstanding tradition of independence from the White House. He often tiptoed around potential tripwires and stripped Democrats of the chance to land any fatal blows. At the same time, though, he sent enough signals to Trump World that he would fulfill the President’s plan to refashion the FBI and impose his will on its far-flung investigators and prosecutors. During the hearing, Patel refused to rule out opening investigations into former Attorney General William Barr, former FBI Director Christopher Wray, or any of the other people on a 60-person “deep state” roster included in his 2023 book, Government Gangsters. The list also includes Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Merrick Garland, Robert Mueller and James Comey. Patel eschewed direct questions about specific actions he would take in office, instead committing to avoid wrongdoing more broadly. “I would never do anything unconstitutional or unlawful,” he said. When Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey asked him to share his grand jury testimony on Trump’s classified documents case, Patel rebuffed the request, saying (incorrectly) that he didn’t have the authority to do so. At another point, he refused to say whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Those evasions may be simply to get over the finish line. If the Senate confirms Patel, he will enjoy a 10-year term granting him enormous power over American life, leading a law enforcement entity of more than 38,000 agents who do everything from hunting down terrorists and prosecuting child sex predators to investigating political corruption. To MAGA, he offers a revolutionary opportunity to smash an institution that has investigated Trump and his allies. To critics, Patel is a Trump acolyte who represents a danger to constitutional norms. Recalling J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses—greenlighting improper investigations into Martin Luther King Jr.—they worry he would exploit his power to curtail Americans’ freedoms and target Trump’s political adversaries. Most of the Democratic line of questioning focused on Patel’s past statements. Patel told Senators that he “rejected outright QAnon baseless conspiracy theories”—a carefully worded answer that rhetorically disassociated himself from the far-right online community without technically contradicting his once partial embrace of it. In 2022, for instance, he said: “I disagree with a lot of what that movement says, but I agree with a lot of what that movement says.” In a surprising move, Patel said he didn’t agree with Trump commuting the sentences of people who assaulted Capitol police officers on Jan. 6, 2021. “There can never be a tolerance for anyone who committed violence against law enforcement,” said Patel, who has called the rioters charged with crimes “political prisoners.” Multiple Democrats pressed Patel on his long-held support for those involved with the attack, including producing a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by a choir of defendants imprisoned for storming the U.S. capitol, which topped Billboard’s Digital Song Sales chart and became a staple at Trump rallies. Under questioning from Sen. Adam Schiff of California, who said it “glorified” the brutality of that day, Patel downplayed his involvement in the project. Another point of contention was Patel’s dramatic designs to remake the bureau. “I’d shut down the F.B.I. Hoover Building on Day 1 and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state,’” Patel said last year on a popular podcast. “Then, I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops—go be cops.” Democrats persistently rung alarms about Patel’s professions of obeisance to Trump. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island suggested Patel fit the mold of an authoritarian foot soldier, characterizing him as vengeful, intemperate, and servile. “I’m afraid that the history of this nominee’s conduct raises those warnings,” he said. Republicans, for their part, defended Patel as the victim of partisan attacks. He was joined in the hearing room by allies such as Trump advisor Alina Habba, former Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grennell, and former Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker. His supporters depict him as a crusader for FBI reform who wants to tamp down prosecutorial misconduct and surveillance abuse. Senate Republicans seem to agree. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the committee chairman, said Patel has “exactly the qualifications we need,” describing his career as “a study in fighting for unpopular but righteous causes.”

With a series of executive orders, President Trump has demonstrated that he has the appetite for an audacious fight to remake public education in the image of his “anti-woke,” populist political movement. But in a country unique among nations for its hyperlocal control of schools, the effort is likely to run into legal, logistical and funding trouble as it tests the limits of federal power over K-12 education. On Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump signed two executive orders. One was a 2,400-word behemoth focused mainly on race, gender and American history. It seeks to prevent schools from recognizing transgender identities or teaching about concepts such as structural racism, “white privilege” and “unconscious bias,” by threatening their federal funding. The order also promotes “patriotic” education that depicts the American founding as “unifying, inspiring and ennobling” while explaining how the United States “has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The second order directs a swath of federal agencies to look for ways to expand access to private school vouchers. Both orders echo energetic conservative lawmaking in the states. Over the past five years, the number of children using taxpayer dollars for private education or home-schooling costs has doubled, to one million. More than 20 states have restricted how race, gender and American history can be discussed in schools. States and school boards have banned thousands of books. It is not clear what real-world effect the new federal orders might have in places where shifts are not already underway. States and localities provide 90 percent of the funding for public education — and have the sole power to set curriculums, tests, teaching methods and school-choice policies. The orders are likely to strain against the limits of the federal government’s role in K-12 education, a role that Mr. Trump has said should be reduced. That paradox is a “confounding” one, said Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, a nonpartisan group that supports private school choice. He applauded the executive order on vouchers and said that taken together, the two orders mark a major moment in the centuries-old debate over what values the nation’s schools should impart. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “You can like it or not, but we’re not going to have values-neutral schools,” he said. Still, there are many legal questions about the administration’s ability to restrict federal funding in order to pressure schools.The major funding stream that supports public schools, known as Title I, goes out to states in a formula set by Congress, and the president has little power to restrict its flow. “It seems like a significant part of the strategy is to set priorities through executive order and make the Congress or the Supreme Court respond — as they are supposed to in a system of checks and balances,” Mr. Bradford said. The executive branch does control smaller tranches of discretionary funding, but they may not be enough to persuade school districts to change their practices.In Los Angeles, Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the nation’s second-largest school district, said last fall that regardless of who won the presidential election, his system would not change the way it handles gender identity. Transgender students are allowed to play on sports teams and use bathrooms that align with their gender identities, policies the Trump order is trying to end. On Wednesday, after it became clear that Mr. Trump would attempt to cut funding, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles public school district released a more guarded statement, saying, “Our academic standards are aligned with all state and federal mandates and we remain committed to creating and maintaining a safe and inclusive learning environment for all students.”One big limit to Mr. Trump’s agenda is that despite official federal, state and district policies, individual teachers have significant say over what gets taught and how. Even in conservative regions of Republican-run states, efforts to control the curriculum have sometimes sputtered. In Oklahoma, for example, where the state superintendent, Ryan Walters, is a Trump ally, some conservative educators have pushed back against efforts to insert the Bible into the curriculum. Nationally, surveys of teachers show that the majority did not change their classroom materials or methods in response to conservative laws. Some educators have reported that they are able to subtly resist attempts to control how subjects like racism are talked about, for example, by teaching students about the debate for and against restrictive curriculum policies. Florida has been, in many ways, an outlying case — and one that has served as a model for the Trump administration. There, Gov. Ron DeSantis created powerful incentives for teachers to embrace priorities such as emphasizing the Christian beliefs of the founding fathers and restricting discussions of gender and racism. Teachers could earn a $3,000 bonus for taking a training course on new civics learning standards. If their students performed poorly on a standardized test of the subject, their own evaluation ratings suffered. On race and gender, the DeSantis restrictions were broad and vaguely written. Schools accused of breaking the laws could be sued for financial damages, and teachers were threatened with losing their professional licenses. This led many schools and educators to interpret the laws broadly. Sometimes they interpreted them more broadly than intended, the DeSantis administration claimed. A ban on books with sexual content led one district to announce that “Romeo and Juliet” would be pulled from the curriculum. A ban on recognizing transgender identities led to schools sending home nickname permission slips to parents, which were required even if a student named William wanted to be called Will. Public school educators are often fearful of running into trouble with higher-level authorities. It is possible, and even likely, that Mr. Trump’s executive orders will lead to some measure of self-censorship. Adam Laats, an education historian at Binghamton University, said one potential historical antecedent for Mr. Trump’s executive order was the Red Scare in the mid-20th century, during which many teachers accused of Communist sympathies lost their jobs or were taken to court. “To my mind, this executive order is a blast of steam,” he said, “dangerous especially because it can encourage local aggressive activism.” But, he noted, political attempts to ban ideas from the classroom have rarely been successful.

Universities have set up task forces, tightened discipline policies and used surveillance cameras to track protesters’ movements. They have hired private investigators to examine cases of anti-Israel speech and activism. These are just a few of the measures administrators have taken to curb criticisms that they have allowed antisemitism to fester as pro-Palestinian demonstrations spread across campuses during the last academic year. On Wednesday, President Trump signed an order meant to push them to do more — to “prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.” Specifically, it directed several agencies, including the State and Education Departments, to guide colleges to “report activities by alien students and staff” that could be considered antisemitic or supportive of terrorism, so that those students or staff members could be investigated or deported as noncitizens. A fact sheet distributed with the order quotes President Trump promising: “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.” The order worried some students. A student activist on a visa at the University of California, Los Angeles, said she was concerned that the order was broad enough to implicate almost any student who participated in a pro-Palestinian protest. She spoke on the condition that her name not be used, for fear she would become a target of deportation. Like other international students she had spoken to, she said, she was now considering leaving the country after graduation rather than pursuing a master’s degree in the United States. Jewish organizations had mixed reactions. Amy Spitalnick, chief executive officer of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, warned against rising antisemitism but argued that the president’s order was problematic. “Everyone in the United States has basic due process rights, and when we start applying them selectively, we don’t only threaten our values, we ultimately threaten our safety, too,” she said. The Anti-Defamation League, by contrast, was more supportive. “The increased enforcement of university policies already has started to make a significant difference in the campus environment, and more should be done,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive, said, adding that individuals should be given due process and should not be targeted for constitutionally protected speech. The wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations following the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel have mostly been nonviolent. Protesters have said they are exercising their right of free expression, by demonstrating against Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza. But some protests have led to vandalism and clashes between pro- and anti-Israel demonstrators. The police have been called to campuses to break up encampments and protests, and in the process, hundreds of students have been arrested. Many Jewish students have said they felt unsafe or unsettled by the yelling outside their dormitory and classroom windows and threatened by the chanting of slogans that some construe as antisemitic. After several university presidents were pulled in front of congressional committees to testify about their responses to the unrest, many have taken action to quell protest activity. At Columbia, for example, administrators pledged quick disciplinary action this month after four masked protesters interrupted a “History of Modern Israel” class and handed out fliers with antisemitic themes, such as one image of a jackboot crushing a Star of David. Three of the protesters have been identified; one, a Columbia student, was suspended. The other two, students of an “affiliated school,” were barred from campus. “Disruptions to our classrooms and our academic mission and efforts to intimidate or harass our students are not acceptable, are an affront to every member of our University community, and will not be tolerated,” the institution said in a statement. At New York University, administrators updated the nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policy to clarify that discriminatory or hateful language against protected groups, even if masked in “code words, like ‘Zionist,’” could be examples of potentially discriminatory speech at the school that merits punishment. “For many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity,” the document states, referring to the belief that Jewish people should have a state in their ancient homeland. “For example, excluding Zionists from an open event, calling for the death of Zionists, and applying a ‘no Zionist’ litmus test for participation in any N.Y.U. activity” would all be discriminatory actions. A growing number of universities, including N.Y.U. and Harvard, are recognizing a definition of antisemitism that considers some criticism of Israel — such as calling its creation a “racist endeavor” — antisemitic. This has prompted concern among pro-Palestinian students and professors that their freedom of speech and their ability to protest Israeli actions will be severely curtailed. The presidential order comes against a backdrop of both debate over what constitutes antisemitism and Republican insinuations that foreign students have played a particular role in the protests. Foreign student visas were discussed in a December 2024 staff report on antisemitism, conducted on behalf of six House committees in coordination with the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. The report complained that three weeks after the Hamas attacks on Israel, Alejandro Mayorkas, the former homeland security secretary, declined to say whether foreign students should have their visas revoked if they “advocate for the elimination of Israel and attacks on Jewish individuals.” He said it was a matter of legal interpretation. The report said that the Biden administration had rebuffed requests from the House Judiciary Committee for documents and information, such as nationality, on “aliens on student visas who endorse Hamas’s terrorist activities.” In May, the State Department told the committee that it had not revoked any visas for students related to their on-campus protest activity. During testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in December 2023, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T. were grilled on whether they had suspended or planned to suspend foreign students who violated the law or school policies. Claudine Gay, then the president of Harvard, who was later forced to resign in part over her testimony on antisemitism, replied that international students were a source of pride and that all students were held accountable in the same way. At Harvard’s commencement, hundreds of students walked out in protest over the university’s decision to bar 13 seniors from the ceremony in the wake of campus protests against the war in Gaza. Among 25 students who were punished for their participation in protests were two Rhodes scholars. One of the Rhodes scholars was an international student from Pakistan. At Cornell, Momodou Taal, a British national in his third year of Ph.D. studies, was among a group of about 100 protesters who shut down a recruitment event last fall that included weapons manufacturers. Suspended twice by the university for his pro-Palestinian activism, Mr. Taal was at risk of losing his student visa, which could lead to deportation. In the end, the Cornell provost allowed him to retain his official status as an enrolled student, although he was banned from campus.

Loretta Ford, who co-founded the first academic program for nurse practitioners in 1965, then spent decades transforming the field of nursing into an area of serious clinical practice, education and research, died on Jan. 22 at her home in Wildwood, Fla. She was 104. Her daughter, Valerie Monrad, confirmed the death. Today there are more than 350,000 nurse practitioners in America; it is one of the fastest growing fields, and last year U.S. News and World Report ranked it the top job in the country, a reflection of salary potential, job satisfaction and career opportunities. That success is in large part the result of a single person, Dr. Ford, who in 1965 co-founded the first graduate program for nurse practitioners, at the University of Colorado, and subsequently mapped the outlines of what the field entailed. At the time, nurses were important figures in the medical field, providing not just administrative support but also vital services where and when doctors were unavailable. But the training and career framework for nurses was almost completely absent. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “In nurses’ training, the focus is too much on teaching and administration,” Dr. Ford said in a speech at Duke University in 1970. “We want to make the nurse into a clinician.” She went further in 1972, when she was hired as the first dean of the school of nursing at the University of Rochester. There she implemented the “unification” model of nursing, in which education, practice and research are fully integrated.“It gives the profession the ability to study itself with the research, and have nurse-practitioner researchers conducting that work while educating the future work force,” Stephen A. Ferrara, the president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, said in an interview. Dr. Ford’s work in the 1970s often faced resistance from doctors, who scoffed at the idea of nurses wielding influence within the medical field and, perhaps, threatening their dominance of it.“We actually got hate letters in the mail,” Eileen Sullivan-Marx, who studied under Dr. Ford at Rochester and is now the dean emerita of the school of nursing at New York University, said in an interview.But Dr. Ford and others pushed on, establishing state-level licensing protocols, standardizing curriculums and adjusting insurance programs to allow nurse practitioners to have a substantive, and often independent, role within the health care system. And she emphasized that nurse practitioners were not there to replace doctors but to complement them — to do the frontline work in hospitals, but also to be out in the community, focused on health and prevention at a grass-roots level. “It was obvious to me,” she told Healthy Women magazine in 2022, “that we needed advanced skills and an expanded knowledge base to make the decisions. Because it happens in a hospital. Who do they think makes decisions at 3 a.m.?” Loretta Cecelia Pfingstel was born on Dec. 28, 1920, in the Bronx and raised in Passaic, N.J. Her father, Joseph, was a lithographer, and her mother, Nellie (Williams) Pfingstel, oversaw the home. As a child, Loretta hoped to become a teacher, but the onset of the Great Depression hit her family’s finances hard, and she was forced to find work at 16. She became a nurse, and in 1941 earned a diploma in nursing from Middlesex General Hospital in New Jersey. Her fiancé was killed in combat in 1942, inspiring her to join the U.S. Army Air Forces, intending to be a flight nurse. But her poor eyesight disqualified her from flying, and by the end of the war she was based at a hospital in Denver. She received a bachelor’s degree in nursing in 1949 from the University of Colorado, and a master’s in public health there in 1951.Early in her career she specialized in pediatric public health, while also teaching in the nursing program at the University of Colorado; by 1955 she was an assistant professor, and in 1961 she earned a doctorate in education from the school. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT She married William J. Ford in 1947. He died in 2014. Their daughter is her only survivor. Dr. Ford’s work took her into rural parts of Colorado, where doctors were few, poor families were many and the need for basic preventive medical care was acute. She found herself playing many roles under the title “nurse” — she was part public health official, part counselor, part all-around clinician. At the same time, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were bringing a new sense of urgency to the issues of rural public health and supporting innovation across all medical fields. Working alongside Henry Silver, a pediatrician at Colorado, Dr. Ford created a graduate program for nurses, though at first it was in the form of continuing education, without a degree. But the kernel of her vision was already there: that nurses should be sufficiently trained to make independent decisions, have their own practices and participate in health care as part of a team. “Complete independence for any health practitioner today is a myth,” she said at Duke. “It could be downright poor practice.” By the time she retired from Rochester, in 1986, there were thousands of licensed nurse practitioners, and many doctors had come to accept them as colleagues, not supporting players. Dr. Ford continued to write and lecture, and in 2011 she was inducted into the U.S. Women’s Hall of Fame. “I get a lot of credit for 140,000 nurses, and I don’t deserve it,” she said in her acceptance speech. “They’re the ones who fought the good fight. They took the heat, and they stood it, and they’ve done beautifully.”