Nobody expected anything special when the squadron of Navy F/A-18 fighter jets headed out for routine aerial maneuvers off of the coast of Virginia Beach one day in 2013. The F/A-18s, a Naval workhorse, owned the local air space that day—but only until they didn’t. All at once, the jets’ radar picked up a cluster of half a dozen objects flying along with them, moving erratically—and entirely acrobatically. At some moments they ripped along side-to-side at speeds exceeding 350 knots—or 402 mph. Then, suddenly, they would stand utterly still in winds that themselves were moving at 150 knots (172 mph)—gusts that had the jets struggling to maintain position. Then the objects would accelerate again. They had no visible exhaust, no discernible means of propulsion, and indeed looked nothing like any aircraft in the nation’s civilian or military arsenal. Measuring five to 15 ft. across, they were a “dark gray or black cube inside a clear sphere,” former Navy Lieutenant Ryan Graves, who was aloft that day, tells TIME. “We almost hit one of the objects; they came within 50 ft. of the lead aircraft, and that's really when we knew we were dealing with something a bit abnormal here. There's no aircraft in our inventory I'm aware of that has the ability to operate at very low speeds, or no speeds, and then accelerate and operate like a fighter.” That wasn’t the last time the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)—the genteel, modern-day term for Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO)—harrassed the Navy. “We saw them in Virginia Beach between 2013 and 2015,” says Graves. “Later, when we executed training operations aboard the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla., they were either already down there or they had followed us down, because we had over a dozen incidents, two of which were recorded [by the Navy] and released by The New York Times in 2017.” Those videos, known popularly as “the Gimbal,” after the objects’ pinwheeling motion, are just part of the eyewitness visuals featured in the new PBS NOVA documentary “What Are UFOs?” premiering on PBS stations on Jan. 22. And Graves is just one of the many people who have borne witness to them who offers his accounts. The documentary traces the arc of UFOs and UAPs in American skies, from June 24, 1947, when aviator and businessman Kenneth Arnold reported the first widely publicized sightings of flying saucers, to the present, when accounts of UAPs have exploded, with 801 reported to the military since 2023 alone. Within the Pentagon’s $65 billion “black budget” of classified expenditures, an estimated $22 million has reportedly been spent on its Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which investigates UAPs. Even before that contemporary program, the U.S. military was keenly interested in the provenance of UFOs and UAPs, as the NOVA film documents. From 1947 to 1969, the Air Force ran a secret—though since declassified—program dubbed Project Blue Book, which investigated 12,618 sightings of flying objects. Of these, 701 remain unidentified. Some of the earliest reports, from 1947 to 1949, were sightings of military assets that were part of the Department of Defense’s Project Mogul, under which the Air Force lofted high altitude balloons carrying sensitive microphones designed to pick up sonic signatures of Soviet nuclear tests. The initial rumors of extraterrestrial doings at Roswell, N.M. stemmed from a local rancher collecting debris from a balloon that descended on his land. In the 21st century there is a lot more airborne traffic giving rise to a lot more potential false UAP alarms. More than 1,800 weather balloons are launched worldwide everyday, according to the NOVA documentary, and the Federal Aviation Administration reports that over one million registered drones are in private hands in the U.S. Plenty of what is reputed to be aliens likely has a perfectly banal terrestrial explanation. But sightings like the gimbal are a lot harder to explain away—a point proven by another UAP incident known colloquially as the Tic Tac. In 2004, the U.S.S. Nimitz Carrier strike group off the coast of southern California picked up repeated radar reflections of flying objects that would rapidly appear and disappear from tracking screens. During those intervals when they were visible, they would fly in a looping, diving, and skittering path, rapidly dropping from 80,000 ft. to 20,000 ft. and hovering there. Finally, Naval pilot David Fravor and others were sent aloft to investigate and found their quarry—a 45-ft. long flying machine that for all the world resembled in both color and shape a Tic Tac breath mint. “All four of us looked down and saw a Tic Tac object with a longitudinal axis pointed north-south and moving very abruptly over the water, like a ping pong ball,” said Fravor in 2023 testimony before Congress. “There were no rotors, no rotor wash, or any sign of visible control surfaces like wings. The object suddenly shifted its longitudinal axis, aligned it with my aircraft and began to climb. As we pulled nose onto the object within about a half mile of it, it rapidly accelerated and disappeared.” Video of the encounter was released by the Navy which has never offered a theory as to what it was. Like the Tic Tac and the Gimbal, the hundreds of other unexplained UAPs continue to flummox experts. Graves is now executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, a nonprofit that collects sightings of UAPs with an eye toward helping to shape the public conversation around unidentified objects and deconflict airspace. He does not pretend to know what the bogeys are—but he’s pretty sure what they’re not. “I don't think that we're seeing an adversary demonstrating capability beyond our state of the art during these relatively low reward, high risk operations,” he says. “To be able to take these technologies that we're not aware exist and to put them basically directly over our homeland, in a position to be captured and reverse engineered…I don't see that. I don't see that logic.” Equally unlikely is that the craft are highly classified domestic technology that much of the military has not been tipped off about. “These were airborne assets that were exhibiting capabilities beyond our state of the art,” Graves says. “And what I mean by state of the art is technology that would take greater than 10 years for the U.S. to develop, if they started now.” That leaves non-earthly origins and Graves, for one, does not speculate on that score. “I don't think we have the proper definitions to go down that road,” he says, “without having a better way of defining how we would determine whether something is truly from another star system…[whether] these objects are using magical physics that we don't understand.” The NOVA film does offer other explanations. Conspiracy debunker Mick West, author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole, theorizes that it’s not the object in the gimbal video that’s doing the moving but the camera that captured the image, creating merely the illusion of motion—though that doesn’t explain what the object, which would be stationary in this case, actually is. In another—infrared—video in which the object appears to disappear and reappear, West suggests that the camera might be capturing the image of a bird that reached thermal equilibrium with the background temperature and thus simply seemed to vanish. The filmmakers leave viewers with pretty much as many questions as they greet them with—which fairly matches the state of the UAP art. With up to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way and an estimated 200 billion galaxies in the universe, there are uncounted trillions of planets that could host a highly technological civilization. Whether one of those civilizations would send any of their flying machines to our lonely world—and why they’d bother—is impossible to say. But the sightings keep coming—even if the answers remain elusive.

Parts of the South were at a standstill on Wednesday after a rare winter storm dumped record amounts of snow on much of the Gulf Coast and the Carolinas. In its aftermath, major cities and beachfront communities from East Texas to the Outer Banks were facing days of rare, freezing temperatures. The storm, fueled by a whirling mass of Arctic air, killed at least 10 people in Texas, Alabama and Georgia, and left ice-covered roads and frozen bridges in its wake. North Carolina opened warming centers and deployed more than 1,300 vehicles to treat roads and remove ice, and many schools and businesses were closed, some for days.The snow canceled classes and made getting to work impossible, disrupting routines and causing an array of problems in New Orleans, where most people have little or no experience navigating wintry conditions. But amid the complications on Wednesday, the winter storm made the landscape a dazzling spectacle. Snow coated roofs and parked cars; icicles dangled from porches. Some made sleds out of whatever they could find — trash bin lids, baking sheets, cardboard boxes. There were snowball fights and a group of teenagers wielded icicles like swords.Amid an extraordinary storm that delivered a blast of winter to Southern states, Florida appeared to have shattered its state record for the most snow over 24 hours. Milton, a town in the western panhandle, picked up 8.75 to 10 inches of snow from Tuesday morning to Wednesday morning, more than doubling the previous 24-hour state record of four inches set on March 6, 1954, also in Milton, according to the National Weather Service.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a $500 billion joint venture between OpenAI, Softbank, MGX and Oracle to build new datacenters to power the next wave of artificial intelligence (AI) – in an early signal that his Administration would embrace the technology. The plans, which predate the Trump Administration and involve no U.S. government funds, would result in the construction of large datacenters on U.S. soil containing thousands of advanced computer chips required to train new AI systems. Trump cast his support for the venture in part as a matter of national competitiveness. “We want to keep it in this country; China’s a competitor,” Trump said of AI. “I’m going to help a lot through emergency declarations – we have an emergency, we have to get this stuff built.” The message echoed recent talking points by the heads of AI companies like Sam Altman of OpenAI, who flanked him during the White House announcement. Altman has argued more vocally in recent months that the U.S. must race to build the energy and datacenter infrastructure in order to create powerful AI before China. The intent is to build datacenters on American soil, so that the U.S. retains sovereignty over the AI models that are created and run there. Some of the financing for Stargate, however, comes from abroad, via MGX, an investor owned by an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, and Softbank, which is Japanese. OpenAI and Oracle have been working on building out datacenter capacity in the United States since long before Trump’s inauguration, and construction is reportedly already underway on some of the facilities connected to Stargate. The new President’s blessing, however, is a win both for OpenAI – which like all tech companies has attempted to position itself in Trump’s favor – and for Trump himself, who has seized on AI as a means for strengthening the U.S. economy and achieving dominance over China. Stargate also appears to mark an end to OpenAI’s exclusive cloud computing partnership with Microsoft, meaning the startup is now free to train its models with other providers. In return for early investment, OpenAI had agreed to train its AIs only on Microsoft’s systems. But the startup has chafed in the past at what insiders felt was Microsoft’s inability to supply it with enough computing power, according to reports. Microsoft remains a large investor in OpenAI, and gains a share of its revenue. What could Stargate mean? The goal behind Stargate is to create the infrastructure required to build even more powerful AI systems – systems that could perform most economically valuable tasks better and faster than humans could, or that could make new scientific discoveries. Many AI investors and CEOs believe this technology, sometimes referred to as artificial general intelligence, is attainable within the next five years or fewer. But to get there, those AIs need to first be trained. This presents a problem, because the bigger an AI you want to train, the more interlinked chips you need in a datacenter, and the larger the electricity capacity of that datacenter needs to be. Currently, experts say, AI’s performance is bottlenecked by these two factors, especially power capacity. Stargate would mean not only the construction of new datacenters to house the latest chips, but also the construction of new energy infrastructure that could supply those datacenters with the gargantuan amount of power needed for an AI training run. Those runs can last for months, with chips running day and night to mold a neural network based on connections within a vast corpus of data. “They have to produce a lot of electricity, and we’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily, at their own plants if they want – at the AI plant they will build their own energy generation and that will be incredible,” Trump said Tuesday. “It’s technology and artificial intelligence, all made in the USA.” Much of this electricity is likely to come from fossil fuels. Trump has committed to “unleash” oil and gas drilling, and has moved to block the grid’s transition to renewable energy. To cope with the rising demand by U.S. data centers for electricity, utilities companies have delayed retiring coal-fired power plants and have added new gas plants. It already is. Construction has reportedly already begun on a datacenter in Abilene, Texas, that will house part of the Stargate project. But not all of the $500 billion pledged for the joint venture is likely to be available all at once. Of that figure, OpenAI said in a statement that Stargate would “begin deploying” only a fifth, $100 billion, immediately. The rest will be deployed over the next four years. Stargate’s announcement led to a rare moment of disharmony between Trump and his most powerful political cheerleader, Elon Musk. “They don’t actually have the money,” Musk posted on X shortly after the announcement. “SoftBank has well under $10 [billion] secured. I have that on good authority.” Musk has a long and fractious history with Altman. The pair co-founded OpenAI together, but Musk left in 2019 after reportedly mounting a failed bid to become CEO; he now owns the rival AI company xAI and is suing Altman, accusing him of reneging on OpenAI’s founding principles. Altman denied Musk’s allegations on X, inviting him to come to visit the first site already under construction. “This is great for the country. I realize what is great for the country isn't always what's optimal for your companies, but in your new role I hope you'll mostly put 🇺🇸 first,” he wrote. He had earlier written: “I genuinely respect your accomplishments and think you are the most inspiring entrepreneur of our time.” An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Regardless of the size of Stargate’s checking account, it would be foolish to bet against a massive surge in datacenter construction on U.S. soil. Tech companies are already investing billions into the construction of facilities where they can train their next AI systems. And with Trump in the oval office, it appears they have succeeded in convincing the highest levels of government that building more AI infrastructure is an urgent national security priority. “We wouldn’t be able to do this without you Mr. President,” Altman said at the White House on Tuesday, addressing Trump. “And I’m thrilled that we get to.”

After anti-Israel protests over the war in Gaza upended college campuses last year, many universities set up task forces to examine whether antisemitism was on the rise. The answer was yes. But one of the factors they identified was perhaps surprising: diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Reports from Stanford University, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania found that Jewish students sometimes felt excluded by D.E.I. programs, rather than protected by them. The task force reports reflected a growing tension on college campuses: How do Jews fit into diversity and inclusion programs on campuses? Many Jewish campus leaders and students say they do not, but should. Some have argued that the programs have focused on Black, Hispanic and other student groups, and not on Jewish students who face antisemitic slurs, threats and occasional violence. D.E.I. offices have been under a withering ideological attack recently over concerns that they pit different groups against one another. More than 200 colleges over the last two years have pared back diversity efforts, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, which tracks the backlash. Many have closed offices altogether, and 14 states have passed legislation banning or restricting D.E.I. Colleges are now bracing for further crackdowns under a second Trump administration. On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order to dismantle federal programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. On his second day, he ordered federal agencies to look for “illegal discrimination and preferences, including D.E.I.,” in the private sector, including colleges and universities. Conservatives for decades have criticized identity-based programming in higher education and American society. Their attacks have been especially potent as they have found new allies among some members of the Jewish community, who say D.E.I. offices have been inattentive, or even hostile, to their needs, especially during anti-Israel protests over the war in Gaza. Others have defended the programs as essential to making campuses safer and welcoming to all, including Jewish students. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Several episodes in recent months have highlighted a tension between diversity efforts and some Jewish students and faculty. At the University of Michigan, a diversity administrator was fired last month after she was accused of making antisemitic statements. Two Jewish professors from other universities said they asked her if the D.E.I. office worked with Jewish students. They said that she responded by saying the university is “controlled by wealthy Jews.” Through a lawyer, the administrator denied making the comments. At a diversity and inclusion conference for private schools in Colorado, some speakers characterized the war in Gaza as a genocide and the establishment of the state of Israel as racist. Leaders of several Jewish organizations said the comments were antisemitic, and the private schools group apologized. One speaker argued that the critics who complained of antisemitism were “watering down its meaning.” At the University of Pittsburgh, the diversity office held a training to explore antisemitic tropes and support Jewish students. It was the kind of event that some Jewish critics of diversity programs have often requested. But pro-Palestinian activists showed up, passing out fliers criticizing the group holding the training. An associate professor in attendance, Andrea Beth Goldschmidt, said members of the university’s diversity, equity and inclusion office did not acknowledge the interruption. She later wrote an essay titled, “DEI: Deflect, excuse, ignore?” Who Is D.E.I. For? Campuses have set up all manner of programs to achieve their diversity goals. They include trainings on racism and sexism, efforts to hire a more diverse faculty, identity-based affinity groups and mentorships. Usually, the aim is to improve graduation rates and other measures of success, though it is hard to gauge the effectiveness of these efforts because of their variety. Programs focus on groups that have been less represented, including Black and Hispanic students. Some D.E.I. offices have authority over civil rights and bias complaints. But the campus conflicts unleashed by the war in the Middle East have often dwarfed the scope of what the offices are set up to handle. Many lack the expertise or authority to handle legally sensitive complaints. On a more basic level, many Jewish students and faculty say diversity and inclusion efforts simply exclude them, even as reports of antisemitism become more pervasive on and off campuses.During his freshman year, Asher Goodwin, a student at the University of Pittsburgh, was walking to a Shabbat dinner wearing a kipa when he heard a student in a group say, “Look, a Jew!” while others laughed. Mr. Goodwin said he confronted the group, then sought help from the D.E.I. office, which informed him that he should file a complaint but that there wasn’t anything it could do. “Other students who attend the university made another student feel excluded and ostracized,” Mr. Goodwin said, adding that the university “should potentially have a conversation with them.” Later, when Mr. Goodwin was called a slur, he said he didn’t bother reporting it. “We don’t have any expectation that this office will provide for us,” he said. The university said in a statement that it has zero tolerance for antisemitism and takes concerns from students seriously. Muslim students and faculty have also criticized D.E.I. offices for not being responsive. At several campuses where conservative groups posted the names and faces of pro-Palestinian students on social media and on billboard trucks, the students said they felt universities did little to protect them. Revamping D.E.I. Some Jewish leaders would like to eliminate D.E.I. programs altogether. They say the programs too often reinforce the idea that Palestinians are oppressed and pro-Israeli Jews are oppressors. This ignores the complicated and painful history of antisemitism that preceded Israel’s founding in the first place, they argue, and that Jews, too, can be the victim of slurs and harassment. But many others support D.E.I. They just would like it to be more sensitive to Jewish students. The Stanford University antisemitism committee report recently concluded that schools should, in the short term, find ways to embrace Jews in D.E.I. programming, before ultimately moving toward more “pluralistic” efforts that include everyone. Still others view the attacks on D.E.I. as baseless. They say without D.E.I. programming — training students about discrimination, for example — Jewish students would be worse off. Jonathan Feingold, an associate professor of law at Boston University who studies affirmative action, has argued D.E.I. can be the remedy to antisemitism on campuses. The types of programming that antisemitism task forces have recommended would be barred if colleges didn’t consider identity, he noted. So might the task forces themselves. “If a G.O.P.-controlled federal government bans D.E.I. nationwide,” he said, “that will cripple universities’ ability to meaningfully counter and remedy antisemitism on campus.”At the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Goldschmidt said in an email that she believed the disrupted antisemitism training was a missed opportunity. She wrote that diversity officers should have shown “that they apply the same standards and expectations to the Jewish community as they do to other marginalized groups — namely that we be allowed to define what constitutes discrimination against our community.” A university official who was in the room said that the disruption lasted less than a minute and involved no more than five people silently handing out fliers criticizing the American Jewish Committee, the group that led the training, for supporting Israel. The official said the presenter continued speaking and that a D.E.I. official acknowledging the incident would have interrupted the speaker. Some schools have started new programming for Jewish students. In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed a bill that effectively requires all California State University institutions and community colleges to include recognizing discrimination against Jews in trainings. The same month, the University of Pennsylvania became the first university to create an office for civil rights complaints related to shared ancestry, ethnicity or religion. (The school’s president resigned in 2023 after testifying before Congressional leaders who accused her of not doing enough to stop antisemitism on campus.) One word that emerged in several antisemitism reports to describe what D.E.I. programs should strive for was “pluralism.” Nicholas Lemann, a Columbia professor and co-chairman of the university’s antisemitism task force, said they “would like it to be made clearer to Jewish students that the D.E.I. offices’ doors are wide open to them.” And Paul Brest, a professor emeritus at Stanford and a member of the university’s antisemitism committee, said D.E.I. programs “shouldn’t be based on identity.” Rather, he said, “they should be aimed at including everyone.” But some supporters of D.E.I. wonder whether making it for “everyone” ignores a key purpose of its creation: steering limited resources to where they are most needed. Jerry Kang, who was the founding vice chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at the University of California, Los Angeles, likened his role to that of a gardener. Making sure all his plants flourish doesn’t mean watering them all equally, he said. Groups like first-generation students facing culture shock, women experiencing bias in engineering programs, or Jewish students worried about antisemitism each require unique approaches, he said. “Identity actually does matter,” Professor Kang said, “whether we like it or not.”

President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 in Washington D.C. brought the world’s wealthiest people together to celebrate his return to the presidency, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, who have a combined net worth of nearly $900 billion, according to Forbes. As Trump was inaugurated, longtime Trump supporter Harold Hamm—known for fracking and considered “America’s richest oil man” with over $18.5 billion in wealth running Continental Resources— hosted an exclusive inauguration watch party. Invitees included Trump’s pick to run the Interior Department, former Governor of North Dakota Doug Burnam. The connection between Trump’s rise and policy choices and American business leaders is especially true for the top fossil fuel billionaires, says the Climate Accountability Research Project (CARP). The group has been tracking the impact of Trump’s latest presidential campaign and election win on the wealth of 15 individual billionaires involved in the fossil fuel industry. In just one day after Trump’s inauguration, CARP says these 15 billionaires saw their combined wealth increase $3.31 billion, from $317.86 billion to $321.17 billion. And since the new year began, these individuals have made $17 billion, according to a CARP analysis using Bloomberg Data. This list of top U.S. fossil fuel billionaires includes David Koch’s widow Julia Flesher Koch, Charles Koch, the current chairman and CEO of Koch Inc., Hamm, as well as many other owners of oil and gas companies like Kinder Morgan, Enterprise Products, and Hunt Consolidated. “A good return on investment,” Chuck Collins, co-founder of CARP tells TIME of the billionaires’ wealth increase since Trump’s election. Collins co-authored a report released this month by CARP tracking connections between Trump’s second run for office and U.S. oil and gas giants. According to Yale Climate Connections, nearly $23 million in oil and gas industry funds went directly to candidate Trump and the PACs supporting him during his recent election campaign. At an April 2024 dinner organized with Hamm and attended by oil executives from places including Exxon and Chevron at Mar-a-Lago, Trump asked attendees to donate $1 billion to his campaign. He told these executives they would save that much money and more after he repealed environmental regulations and fast track drilling permits, the Washington Post reported. CARP’s analysis comes as Trump declares a “national energy emergency,” begins the process of pulling out of the Paris Agreement, and promises to speed fossil fuel project approvals. In his declaration of a “National Energy Emergency,” Trump cited the need to lower energy costs and to boost oil and natural gas production across the country, in line with his mantra throughout his campaign: “drill, baby, drill.” Trump stayed the same course in his inauguration day address: “We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have—the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it. We’re going to use it.” His remarks received a standing ovation at Hamm’s inauguration watch party at Hay-Adams hotel in downtown Washington, the New York Times reported. Collins says Trump’s election and his immediate executive orders are a “dream” for oil and gas executives—a dream they can only expect to get better. “It's a huge windfall for the industry, and it's kind of a beginning,” Collins said. “This is the payback for investing millions and millions of dollars to get Trump elected, and clearing the way for members of Congress who are pro industry and climate deniers. This is what they paid for.”

As President Donald Trump's Cabinet and Administration nominees face confirmation hearings, they are set to wield control over a range of departments affecting everything from healthcare to the economy. And many of them will have some power over abortion access—even in agencies you may not expect. Many health and legal experts expect that the Trump Administration will curtail abortion access. Elizabeth Sepper, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, says Project 2025 offers a roadmap for what the Trump Administration might do when it comes to abortion, and that she thinks the Administration will launch “sweeping efforts to make abortion more difficult to access” even in states where abortion is relatively accessible. (Trump distanced himself from Project 2025’s plans during the 2024 election cycle, though it has ties to his orbit.) But experts also say that the specific actions the Administration will take on abortion are, at this point, still unknown. “Trump on the campaign trail was kind of cryptic about what he would do on abortion,” says Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law. “His nominees haven’t exactly clarified things.” While Trump took sweeping actions on his first day in office on issues from immigration to gender identity, he has yet to announce policies related specifically to abortion. But soon after he took the oath of office, reproductiverights.gov, a website launched by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the Biden Administration that shared information about abortion and reproductive health care access, went offline. Here are some of the actions Trump’s nominees could take on abortion, if confirmed by the Senate to their positions. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appointment to head HHS alarmed some public health experts, in particular because of his vaccine skepticism. When it comes to abortion, Kennedy, like Trump, has flip-flopped: he previously expressed support for a federal ban on abortion after the first trimester of pregnancy, but later said that abortion “should be legal up until a certain number of weeks, and restricted thereafter.” HHS oversees many of the country’s health agencies, from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and, if Kennedy is confirmed to lead the department, he would have authority over these agencies. For instance—“There’s a possibility that RFK could take pretty dramatic steps on mifepristone, even without the approval of FDA,” Ziegler says, adding that it’s possible Kennedy could impose restrictions on the abortion pill or withdraw it from the market. Any such move would likely face legal challenges—as is the case with many of the possibilities outlined in this story. Dr. Marty Makary, Commissioner of the FDA Dr. Marty Makary, a surgical oncologist at Johns Hopkins University, would have significant influence over the abortion medication mifepristone if he’s confirmed to lead the FDA. The FDA approved mifepristone to be used for abortion purposes in 2000. Under the Biden Administration, the FDA helped facilitate access to medication abortion by allowing mifepristone to be prescribed via telehealth and received by mail—first temporarily during the COVID-19 pandemic, before making the change permanent in 2023, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which protected the constitutional right to an abortion. Pam Bondi, Attorney General While serving as Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi supported restrictions on abortion, such as mandatory waiting periods. And during her Senate confirmation hearing on Jan. 15, Bondi said she has “always been pro-life.” If Bondi is confirmed by the Senate to lead the Department of Justice (DOJ), experts say she could take steps to restrict abortion access through the Comstock Act, a 19th century anti-obscenity law. Under the Biden Administration, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel released a letter reaffirming that the law doesn’t ban the mailing, delivery, or receipt of legal medication abortion, although anti-abortion activists expressed interest in using the law to do so. Under Bondi’s leadership, the DOJ could withdraw the Biden-era memo without issuing a new one. “Then there’s going to obviously be a lot of uncertainty, and we won’t know if DOJ will proceed with prosecutions,” Ziegler says. “That could still have a chilling effect because doctors may be reluctant to act if they don’t know when they’ll be protected.” Or the Trump Administration’s DOJ could issue a new memo stating that the Comstock Act could be used to prohibit the mailing of abortion pills. Under the Biden Administration, the DOJ and the FDA defended access to mifepristone. At Bondi’s hearing, Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, asked the nominee if she would commit to maintaining the DOJ’s efforts to defend the FDA’s approval of mifepristone in the face of lawsuits challenging the drug. Bondi replied that she had not been aware of the issue until she had spoken to Booker about it and that she would “look at that policy.” “I am personally pro-life; I have always been pro-life, but I will look at that policy,” Bondi said. “I will not let my personal beliefs affect how I carry out the law.” Under the Biden Administration, the DOJ also filed a lawsuit that argued that Idaho’s near-total abortion ban violated EMTALA (the Supreme Court ruled in June that hospitals in the state that receive federal funds are allowed to temporarily provide abortions in emergency situations). Sepper says she thinks it’s likely that the Trump Administration’s DOJ will drop litigation efforts like that. Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat from California, asked Bondi during her hearing about whether she would advocate for federal abortion restrictions if confirmed to lead the DOJ. Bondi replied that the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe meant that abortion law should be left to the states. “I will follow the law of the United States of America,” Bondi said. “My personal feelings would not influence, Senator.” Doug Collins, Secretary for Veterans Affairs, and Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense Both Doug Collins, a former Republican congressman from Georgia, and Pete Hegseth, co-host of Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends, have publicly shared their anti-abortion beliefs, and experts say the two could roll back Biden-era protections for veterans and active service members if confirmed to their roles. Under the Biden Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) enacted a rule that allows VA to offer abortion counseling and abortion care to veterans and VA beneficiaries in certain situations—for instance, if the health or life of the patient is at risk or in situations of rape or incest. Under the policy, VA employees are allowed to provide abortion services even if their state has restricted or banned the procedure. Collins, if confirmed to head the department, could reverse that policy. Collins was asked about the policy during his hearing on Tuesday; he said a 1992 law prohibits VA from offering abortion care, but said: “We will look at this rule and see if it complies with the law.” The Biden Administration's Department of Defense (DoD) helped facilitate travel for active service members and their families to access reproductive health care, including abortion. Hegseth, if confirmed to lead the department, could also reverse that policy. Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii, asked Hegseth during his hearing on Jan. 14 if he would “maintain this common sense policy,” to which he replied: “I’ve always been personally pro-life. I know President Trump has as well, and we will review all policies. Our standard is whatever the President wants on this particular issue. I don’t believe the federal government should be funding travel for abortion.”

President Donald Trump lashed out on Wednesday at the bishop who had delivered a pointed plea directly at him on behalf of immigrants and LGBTQ+ children during a service at the National Cathedral a day earlier. In a post on Truth Social, Trump called the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde, a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” who is “not very good at her job.” He said she “brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way” and demanded an apology. Budde’s sermon may have been the only critical words Donald Trump heard during his first full day in office. As Trump sat in the first pew of the National Cathedral on Tuesday during a traditional prayer service, Bishop Budde asked Trump “to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.” Trump glared and shifted uncomfortably as she spoke. “There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives.” In his first hours as President, Trump signed an order recognizing “two sexes, male and female,” and saying those are set at birth and cannot be changed. He also ordered immigration officers to ramp up deportations of people in the country without authorization. Budde said in her sermon that those being targeted for deportation “may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras and temples.” She added, “I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away.” Since her sermon drew national attention on Tuesday, Budde tells TIME she has “heard from many people who are grateful that someone was willing to speak on their behalf” as well as those who “have said they do wish me dead, and that's a little heartbreaking.” Budde has served as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington since 2011. She was also critical of Trump in 2020 when he ordered racial justice protestors to be forcibly removed from Lafayette Park and the courtyard of St. John’s Church and then posed there for a photo while holding a Bible. In an interview with TIME, Budde described her reaction to the blowback and Trump calling her out. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. TIME: Are you comfortable with being this well known nationally? BISHOP BUDDE: I hope that a message calling for dignity, respecting dignity, honesty, humility and kindness is resonating with people. I'm grateful for that. I'm saddened by the level of vitriol that it has evoked in others, and the intensity of it has been disheartening. I've heard from many people who are grateful that someone was willing to speak on their behalf, and also others feeling emboldened to do the same, and I'm grateful for that. I'm not comfortable with the — I don't know how to describe it — but I'm perfectly happy to be in conversation with people who disagree with me. The level of attack has been sobering and disheartening. Are you hoping to inspire others to push back against President Trump's policies? I would love to have people present another alternative, yes, and to bring compassion and breadth into our public discourse.

When Donald Trump won the presidency in November, many crypto fanatics celebrated, based on his promises to the industry that he would prioritize deregulation and legitimize crypto entrepreneurs. Days before his inauguration, industry heavyweights gathered in Washington for the Crypto Ball, celebrating their newly minted status as D.C. insiders. But during the event, Trump shocked nearly the entire room by posting online about the launch of a new cryptocurrency called TRUMP. This new currency, a so-called meme coin, has no inherent value, but rather fluctuates in price as people buy and sell the coin. Trump’s fans and opportunistic day traders have generated billions of dollars in sales, driven by loyalty, hype, and the chance to make a quick buck. All of these trades have made the coin’s creators—affiliate companies of the Trump organization—billions of dollars on paper. A day after its release, Melania Trump announced her own meme coin, which also rose and fell in crazed spurts. On Wednesday, TRUMP was the 25th most valuable cryptocurrency in the world, according to CoinMarketCap—although its price of about $43 was well off its $75 high. Read More: What Trump’s Win Means for Crypto. Trump’s meme coins brought a surge of attention to crypto and many newcomers into the space. To some, the coins signaled Trump’s commitment to crypto and to spurring its growth. But many more in the crypto world responded with revulsion to what they saw as a cash grab, and a way for Trump to directly profit off of his followers. Trump’s team holds at least 80% of the coin’s supply, giving them vast power to control its price. While they are not allowed to sell off their holdings for months, doing so would crash the market and leave regular users with a loss. Crypto insiders worry that the coins will make the public even leerier of an industry already filled with scams and bad-faith actors. “The crypto sector put someone in power whose first act is to emphasize and take advantage of the opportunity for grift within crypto,” says Angela Walch, a crypto researcher and writer. “And that's just embarrassing.” Trump has downplayed his role in launching the coin, saying at a Jan. 21 press conference: “I don’t know much about it other than I launched it.” The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A White House press officer declined to comment. But elected officials and legal experts are raising ethical and geopolitical concerns about the tokens, which they say could serve as a vehicle for bribery and conflicts of interest. “These coins open a channel for him to receive financial benefits from foreign adversaries and to prioritize his personal interests, to the collective detriment of Americans,” says Puja Ohlhaver, a lawyer affiliated with Harvard’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation. What are meme coins? TRUMP and MELANIA are meme coins: cryptocurrencies that are essentially created by entrepreneurs out of thin air by writing code to deploy on a blockchain. Their worth comes from how much people believe in them and buy them. In order to generate excitement, the teams behind such coins often market them using popular memes which can be shared and iterated upon on social media. If memes on social media can propel culture, creativity, and even ideology, the thinking goes, then why shouldn’t they be worth something financially as well? Dogecoin and Shiba Inu are two examples, with Dogecoin particularly propelled by Elon Musk, whose tweets about the coin have led to price spikes. The lack of inherent value makes meme coins especially volatile and speculative, which, to some, is part of their appeal: If investors buy at the right time, they can make a lot of money. Conversely, they can lose everything extremely fast if they buy in at the market’s top. Meme coins have also been the vehicle for alleged scams, in which investors lost significant sums. Trump’s admirers have often wielded memes as a marketing tool. During his presidential campaign, a team of content creators flooded social media with pro-Trump meme content. Last summer, unofficial Trump meme coins with names like Pepe (TRUMP) and Maga People Token (PEOPLE) rose and fell, with some bettors treating them as proxies for his chances of victory. Trump also has a history of using crypto to make money. He started selling NFT trading cards in 2022, and has made millions from them, according to financial disclosure documents. In September, he launched World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency platform which is not yet live. And in 2025, meme coins are perhaps the easiest way for aspiring crypto entrepreneurs to make money, fast. TRUMP starts trading On Jan. 18, two days before taking the oath of office, Trump launched his token via CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, while the Crypto Ball was in full swing. The move took the industry by surprise. Nick O’Neill, a crypto entrepreneur at the event—which also featured appearances from Snoop Dogg and Speaker Mike Johnson—posted a video on X saying that very few people there were aware of the token. The next day saw a mad rush to buy and sell the token, causing all sorts of spillover effects. Solana, the blockchain supporting the token, and Coinbase, an exchange used to trade the coin, both experienced hours-long transaction delays. “We were not anticipating this level of surge,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote on Twitter.

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. The pitch was as plausible as it was persuasive: a second term for Donald Trump would be less erratic, more disciplined, and savvier about the presidential powers he barely understood when he had them the first time. His team would also be better calibrated to keep him coloring in the lines. All of the worst impulses had been excised and fresh energy was his tailwind. Rather than gunning from his gut, Trump had reams of drafted ideas at the ready thanks to his pals in Washington’s back-hall think tanks and their Project 2025 agenda. The argument proved to be foolish, as evidenced in the first days’ sloppiness. Despite assurances that the conservative movement’s best minds would have a Day One agenda ready backed up by legal genius’ years of preparation, the first steps proved full of trouble. Seemingly limitless resources at the ready for the incoming team was not enough to avoid myriad typos, internal contradictions, and an inability to pick a format and stick with it. Take the barrage of executive orders Trump issued over the first 12 hours. When first published, they were filled with strange formatting errors. Bold here. Bigger there. Passages duplicated. Lists were sometimes ordered with the same numbers used over and over again. (Not everything can be a 1, especially within a political movement that has made participation trophies a subject of ire.) Legal eagles on social media were eager to point out the hiccups in the formatting and more than a few typos that were cleaned-up on the White House’s website before they got pilloried too badly. One laundry list of Interior Department tweaks had six subsections numbered as Part One. Another first-day memo announcing the structure of the National Security Council members identified more than one member as number one, and others in the same list with bullet points. Others noticed typos that probably don’t change the weight of these actions but still are embarrassing for a new administration that promised to restore greatness to the Oval Office. But then there are the errors that could meaningfully change what some executive orders do. For instance, in an effort to give the culture warriors a win and transgender individuals a loss, Trump ordered that people would be pinned down to use the biological “sex”—and not gender—assigned at the moment of conception. What the order missed, though, is that all fetuses spend their first six weeks as females, and then some become males. In feeding an anti-trans ideology—one that swayed some voters during his campaign against Kamala Harris, to be sure—he also fed uncertainty in pursuit of imposing pronouns assigned at birth. Another Trump order sowing confusion is one that suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program as of Jan. 27. Despite that cut-off still being days away, Trump officials shut it down almost as soon as he was inaugurated, leaving thousands of refugees who had already been vetted and booked to relocate to the United States stranded around the world, without an understanding if they’ll ever be allowed into the U.S. Trump’s first term was also beset with a whole rash of typos and confusion over language, too. That did not stop him from issuing more than 200 executive orders in those first four years, a tally he seems determined to break given the pace and ambition of his unilateral moves thus far. Beyond what he signs his name to, Trump is also revealing that, once again, the extent to which you should take what he says as what he means is going to be a moving target. On his first night in the Oval Office, with reporters watching and TV cameras rolling, he appeared to remake an informal global alliance of emerging economies. Instead of South Africa as the “S” in the BRICS bloc—Brazil, Russia, India, and China being the others—Trump told reporters with signature bravado that it was actually Spain—and that, as such, the European country could be among those swept up in his most punitive tariffs. "They're a BRICS nation, Spain. Do you know what a BRICS nation is? You'll figure it out,” Trump said in the Oval Office. Zero points for accuracy. All of the points for confidence. And, at this point two full days into this return to the Trump era, that might be the whole point. Americans knew they weren’t electing a details guy to lead the country. They were going with a vibe. And part of that vibe, it seems, is an aggressive indifference to the specifics. After all, Trump has other things to help draw the spotlight—including sensitive trips to tour disaster recovery programs in North Carolina and California where those trying to rebuild could not care less if the President gets there if he arrives on Air Force One or Air Force Once. It’s why his casual care for buttoned-down professionalism may prove maddening for many, but is largely waved off by the folks who signed up for another four years of this style of slapdash government. Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.

Firefighters are making progress on containing the wildfires that have been raging for weeks in Southern California. But even once the physical threat of the fires diminishes, the mental-health toll will linger for months and even years, experts say. With thousands of people evacuated and homes destroyed, rebuilding people's social and psychological resources is one of the next pressing challenges. Mental-health crisis centers are already seeing a surge in wildfire-related calls from the Los Angeles area. Here's what experts say survivors can expect as they process their experiences, and the resources available to them. "A real intense sense of uncertainty" The national mental-health help line, 988, says they saw a five-fold increase in the number of calls to its associated Disaster Distress Helpline from the Los Angeles region from Jan. 7, when the fires began, to Jan. 15. “We did a brief analysis of what people are talking about, and the predominant emotions people are experiencing are fear, grief, and a real intense sense of uncertainty,” says Tia Dole, a psychologist and chief 988 suicide and crisis lifeline officer. “For California, this is the beginning of the wildfire season—this isn’t the end. So what’s going to happen next?” Dr. Shairi Turner, chief health officer at Crisis Text Line, a national mental-health support network that provides mostly text-based support and resources, says that texts from Los Angeles County have increased over the first few weeks of the year compared to the same time last year. Most of the discussions involved stress or anxiety. Counselors have been helping people struggling with the uncertainty of not knowing if they will be evacuated, feelings of isolation, and grief of losing their homes or having their lives interrupted with no practical plan for resuming daily activities. Some have also reported having difficulty with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as the current blazes trigger memories of previous fires and evacuations. The near-term emotional toll of wildfires “Typically in the beginning phases of a disaster, people are more focused on, ‘Do I have to evacuate? Where am I going? Has my house burned down?''” says Shari Sinwelski, vice president of crisis care at Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services in Los Angeles. But in the following weeks and months, "the focus is less on the physical and practical aspects of this disaster and more on how people are coping.” Those affected by the fires may have a range of feelings, which can also show up in physical symptoms like a racing heart or sweaty palms, says Jason Moser, professor of psychology, kinesiology, and neuroscience at Michigan State University. They may feel a jumble of emotions: stress, sadness, anxiety, anger, fear, and more. Read More: Can Hearing About Someone Else’s Problems Fix Your Own? Some of those emotions may lead people to question their future and their safety. “Some people may come out of the experience thinking the world is a much more dangerous place and find dangers lurking everywhere, which changes their mindset of whether it’s safe to live a normal life,” Moser says. Those emotions are normal, Moser says, and people should allow themselves to feel their full range in the days and weeks after the disaster. The importance of seeking support Anyone who feels like they need someone to talk to should reach out for help, experts say, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be professional help in the form of a therapist, psychologist. or psychiatrist. “Our main message is: seek support, whether that support is formal therapy, reaching out to friends or family members, or finding a group of people that have lived through a similar experience,” says Turner of Crisis Text Line. Having a robust social network makes a person less likely to develop PTSD. Even those with a support network may struggle to process the loss and fear that comes with surviving a wildfire, and may develop PTSD. “Something like 70% to 80% of people who experience trauma don’t go on to develop PTSD, and about 20% to 30% do,” says Justin Baker, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral health at The Ohio State University and clinical director of the Suicide and Trauma Reduction Initiative for Veterans. When it's time to enlist professional support In the days to weeks after wildfires, people are driven by a basic survival instinct that experts call the fight-or-flight response, which helps them become more focused and hyper-vigilant about their safety. This adrenalin-driven mental state should switch off as the threat diminishes, but in some people, it may not. “The trick is not to stay there,” says Baker. “Within a month or so, if symptoms like hypervigilance and nightmares persist and are interfering with your quality of life, your work or school, and the relationships with your family and friends, then that’s a good indicator that you should reach out to a professional or engage more intensively with family.” People stuck in this state may be experiencing a stress disorder. Read More: Why People Still Misunderstand Trauma Another rule of thumb is to assess whether you feel any different than you did on the day the trauma began, says Moser. “If after the first month you are more or less where you were emotionally at day one, then you might want to reach out to someone,” he says. Experts say professional interventions can include psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and more. In PTSD treatment, for example, mental-health experts find ways to talk about and de-escalate the strong emotional responses people have to their experience, thus neutralizing them and decreasing their ability to cause anxiety. Other ways to start healing Staying connected to your social network can be very useful, say experts, although it’s important not to surround yourself with others who constantly ruminate on the disaster and its aftermath. “You don’t want to be on either extreme—you don’t want to not talk about [your experience,] and you don’t want to do nothing else but talk about it,” says Moser. Mindfulness techniques can also help. What will work best depends on the person. “There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to managing emotional responses,” says Ethan Kross, professor of psychology and management and organizations at the University of Michigan and director of the Emotion and Self Control Lab. “Some people might benefit by interacting more in a social support network, which can help them to reframe things, where other people might benefit from cognitive strategies and looking at the big picture.” Getting back some semblance of a routine of eating, staying hydrating, and sleeping regularly may also help, says Moser, although doing so may be difficult in the early days. Read More: Changing Your Diet and Lifestyle May Slow Down Alzheimer’s Find ways to combat the negative thoughts and rumination that can take over—such as worrying about whether you have enough money to rebuild your home or whether or not government emergency funds will become available. Act on these worries where you can, says Moser, but since so much is out of any one person's control, "focus on the fact that you are safe.” Mental time travel is another strategy that he suggests. Imagine where you will be in a few months, such as in temporary housing, or living somewhere else, away from the threat and its constant reminders. People can also use a technique supported by research showing that people are better at giving advice to others than to themselves. Talking to yourself in the second or third person is a way to do this; you'll trick your brain into seeing things more objectively. “It sounds hokey, but we’ve done a ton of research that shows it works,” says Moser. “It takes the edge off and gets the brain to start giving yourself advice the same way you would give advice to somebody else.” The important thing, says Kross, is to give yourself time to feel your emotions first and not rush to “resolve” or ignore them. How to get immediate mental-health help 988 is the national number for those in crisis, and people can call, text, or chat with counselors. People can also text 741741 to the Crisis Text Line for text-based support. Local disaster and mental-health resources are also available. “We have very good treatments to help people get their lives back on track,” says Baker.