President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in as U.S. President for the second time, along with Vice President-elect JD Vance, by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in an Inauguration Ceremony. The ceremony is followed by an Inaugural Address from Donald Trump. Trump and Vance are replacing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

A significant winter storm settled into portions of the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast on Sunday ahead of dangerously low temperatures that will envelop much of the country in some of the coldest weather in years, National Weather Service forecasters said. The heaviest snowfall was expected north and west of the Interstate 95 corridor, with up to eight inches possible, according to the Weather Service. Parts of West Virginia reported getting up to seven inches of snow by Sunday afternoon, according to the Weather Service. Lighter accumulations were reported from Kentucky to Massachusetts by Sunday evening. In Philadelphia, football players for the Philadelphia Eagles made snow angels on the field before defeating the Los Angeles Rams. “Heavy snow bands” began to move across New York City and western Long Island Sunday evening, the Weather Service said. Forecasters at the New York office of the Weather Service said heavy snow was falling across parts of the Lower Hudson Valley and Northern New Jersey and warned that some areas could receive one to two inches per hour at times. Early reports estimated that three to five inches had accumulated in the Lower Hudson Valley and Northern New Jersey by Sunday night, the service said. The office also said on Sunday that it had received reports of the phenomenon known as “thundersnow” — when lightning and thunder occur during a snowstorm. Much of the Northeast is under winter storm warnings or winter weather advisories. A winter storm warning is issued when severe winter weather is expected or already occurring, and could make travel extremely dangerous or even impossible. An advisory is for less severe conditions. The New York City metropolitan area, Long Island, southern Westchester and coastal Connecticut are under winter weather advisories. Snowfall accumulations of three to five inches were expected, which may lead to slippery travel and snow-covered roads. Airports across the Northeast were experiencing delays and cancellations throughout Sunday afternoon and evening. Major airports around New York City, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, D.C., were clearing snow and ice from their runways throughout the day, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. After a light snowfall stopped on Sunday night in Washington, D.C., the district warned residents of falling temperatures that could turn the snow on their cars to ice by the morning. As the storm reached Massachusetts, the state reduced the speed limit for a portion of I-90 from the border with New York to Interchange 41. Immediately after the storm clears out early on Monday, arctic air will plunge across most of the south-central and southeastern parts of the United States, bringing several days of frigid conditions. The high temperatures will be from below zero to single digits in the Northern Plains and the Upper Midwest; single digits and teens across the Rockies, the central Plains and the Midwest; the teens and 20s across the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic; and between the 20s and 30s in Texas and the Southeast. The Weather Service said wind chills would be at dangerously low levels and hypothermia or frostbite could occur with prolonged exposure or lack of proper clothing. Wind chills from 30 to 55 degrees below zero are expected at times on Monday in the Rockies, the northern Plains and the Upper Midwest, and subzero as far south as Oklahoma and the Tennessee and Ohio Valleys. In Chicago on Sunday, temperatures were in the single digits at 11 a.m. Ann Marie Saviano, 51, who lives in the Garfield Ridge neighborhood on the city’s South Side, said she had plans to meet friends for brunch, go grocery shopping and attend a birthday party.“It’s that time of year we call hibernation season — when people retreat into their dens to stay warm and cozy for one to four days, and emerge ready to face the world when it’s a balmy 23 degrees,” Ms. Saviano said.Forecasters warned of a significant winter storm across the Gulf Coast states coming Monday, as a combination of frigid air and a storm system over the Gulf is expected to bring snow, freezing rain and ice to the region that could lead to major travel disruptions. As the storm moves eastward from Texas, it is forecast to sweep across Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and the Carolinas. The National Weather Service has issued winter storm watches for portions of Louisiana. The most snowfall is likely to be between the U.S. 190 and Interstate 10 corridors of Louisiana and southeast Texas, where four to six inches may accumulate.

hen Russia invaded Ukraine nearly three years ago, President Joe Biden set three objectives for the U.S. response. Ukraine’s victory was never among them. The phrase the White House used to describe its mission at the time—supporting Ukraine “for as long as it takes”—was intentionally vague. It also raised the question: As long as it takes to do what? “We were deliberately not talking about the territorial parameters,” says Eric Green, who served on Biden’s National Security Council at the time, overseeing Russia policy. The U.S., in other words, made no promise to help Ukraine recover all of the land Russia had occupied, and certainly not the vast territories in eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula taken in its initial invasion in 2014. The reason was simple, Green says: in the White House’s view, doing so was beyond Ukraine’s ability, even with robust help from the West. “That was not going to be a success story ultimately. The more important objective was for Ukraine to survive as a sovereign, democratic country free to pursue integration with the West.” That was one of the three objectives Biden set. He also wanted the U.S. and its allies to remain united, and he insisted on avoiding direct conflict between Russia and NATO. Looking back on his leadership during the war in Ukraine — certain to shape his legacy as a statesman — Biden has achieved those three objectives. But success on those limited terms provides little satisfaction even to some of his closest allies and advisers. “It’s unfortunately the kind of success where you don’t feel great about it,” Green says in an interview with TIME. “Because there is so much suffering for Ukraine and so much uncertainty about where it’s ultimately going to land.” For the Ukrainians, disappointment with Biden has been building throughout the invasion, and they have expressed it ever more openly since the U.S. presidential elections ended in Donald Trump’s victory. In a podcast that aired in early January, President Volodymyr Zelensky said the U.S. had not done enough under Biden to impose sanctions against Russia and to provide Ukraine with weapons and security guarantees. “With all due respect to the United States and the administration,” Zelensky told Lex Fridman, “I don’t want the same situation like we had with Biden. I ask for sanctions now, please, and weapons now.” The criticism was unusually pointed, and seems all the more remarkable given how much support the U.S. has given Ukraine during Biden’s tenure—$66 billion in military assistance alone since the February 2022 Russian invasion, according to the U.S. State Department. Combine that with all of the aid Congress has approved for Ukraine’s economic, humanitarian, and other needs, and the total comes to around $183 billion as of last September, according to Ukraine Oversight, a U.S. government watchdog created in 2023 to monitor and account for all of this assistance. Yet Zelensky and some of his allies insist that the U.S. has been too cautious in standing up to Russia, especially when it comes to granting Ukraine a clear path to NATO membership. “It is very important that we share the same vision for Ukraine’s security future – in the E.U. and NATO,” the Ukrainian president said during his most recent visit to the White House in September. During that visit, Zelensky gave Biden a detailed list of requests that he described as Ukraine’s “victory plan.” Apart from calling for an invitation to join NATO, the plan urged the U.S. to strengthen Ukraine’s position in the war with a massive new influx of weapons and the permission to use them deep inside Russian territory. Biden had by then announced that he would not run for re-election, and the Ukrainians hoped that his lame-duck status would free him to make bolder decisions, in part to secure his legacy in foreign affairs. “For us his legacy is an argument,” a senior member of Zelensky’s delegation to Washington told TIME. “How will history remember you?” The appeals got a mixed reception. On the question of Ukraine’s NATO membership, Biden would not budge. But he did sign off on a number of moves that the White House had long rejected as too dangerous. In November, the U.S. allowed Ukraine to use American missiles to strike deep inside Russian territory. And in January, the Biden administration imposed tough sanctions against the Russian energy sector, including the “shadow fleet” of tankers Russia has used to export its oil. While these decisions fell short of what Zelensky wanted, they helped Biden make the case during the last foreign-policy speech of his tenure that the U.S. had met its goals in defending Ukraine. He remained careful, however, not to promise that Ukraine would regain any more of its territory, or even survive to the end of this war. Russian President Vladimir Putin “has failed thus far to subjugate Ukraine,” Biden said in his address at the State Department on Jan. 13. “Today, Ukraine is still a free, i The future that Zelensky and many of his countrymen have in mind is one in which Russia is defeated. But in rallying the world to the fight, the implication Biden embedded in his own goals was that defending Ukraine against Russia is not the same as defeating Russia. So it is not surprising if that goal remains far from Zelensky’s reach.

Strong, damaging Santa Ana winds are expected to bring extreme wildfire danger to Southern California Monday into Tuesday as the landscape remains dangerously starved of rain, and as firefighters continue to work to fully contain wildfires that left at least 27 people dead and destroyed thousands of homes this month. While an offshore wind pattern is expected across Los Angeles and Ventura Counties Monday through Friday, the winds are predicted to pose the highest danger Monday evening into Tuesday morning. There is a chance the winds could be similar in strength to the fierce gusts that topped 90 miles per hour and fueled the devastating wildfires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades. The big difference with these winds, though, is that they are expected to affect different locations, as they will blow with a more northeast-to-east tilt than the Jan. 7 event, which had a north-to-northeast tilt, said Rose Schoenfeld, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Oxnard, Calif.The areas likely to see the strongest gusts include the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys, the mountains and foothills of Los Angeles County and much of Ventura County. Amid the windy conditions, downed trees, power outages and dangerous ocean conditions are also likely. The persistent offshore pattern will suck any remaining moisture out of the vegetation, which is already dangerously dry because rain in southwestern California has been “historically scarce,” the Weather Service said. Relative humidity levels are poised to plummet, especially on Tuesday, and will reach the single digits in some cases. The winds, along with dry fuels and bone-dry air, “would yield locally rapid fire growth with any new fires,” Ms. Schoenfeld said. Southern California is primed to burn. Big storms soaked the landscape during the previous two winters, allowing vegetation to thrive. But since the spring, the region has had scant rainfall, and grasses and brush are withered and flammable.The weather gauge in downtown Los Angeles, a good indicator of rainfall for the county, has only recorded 0.29 inches of rain since May 1. This would put it on track to be the lowest amount of rain ever measured between May and January, with records going back to 1877. At least two inches of rain is needed to significantly lower fire risk, according to Brian Newman, who analyzes wildfire behavior for Cal Fire. Of the upcoming weather conditions, he said, “Hopefully we get no new ignitions, no new fire starts — at all.” Santa Anas are those desiccating winds that occur commonly in winter, blowing out of Nevada and Utah and into southwestern California. Carrying dry desert air, they push over the mountains in the Transverse Ranges and accelerate as they move downslope, howling into the canyons and valleys. The winds are expected to affect most of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. At their peak, isolated gusts of 50 m.p.h. to 70 m.p.h. are expected along the coast and in valleys, while gusts up to of 80 m.p.h. to 100 m.p.h. are possible in the foothills and the mountains. On Tuesday, warm weather with afternoon temperatures in the high 60s to low 70s, as well as low relative humidity levels in the teens and single digits, will add to the high fire risk. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Winds are expected to continue Wednesday and Thursday before relaxing on Friday. The Weather Service alerts the community of dire fire conditions through red-flag warnings, and the agency has issued one from 10 a.m. Monday to 10 p.m. Tuesday for portions of Los Angeles County and much of Ventura County. A less extreme fire weather watch was issued from Tuesday evening through Thursday evening. In the extreme wind event earlier this month, the Weather Service heightened the severity level of the warning with the designation of a “particularly dangerous situation” because isolated gusts of up to 100 m.p.h. were forecast to occur. The agency may issue another one, potentially for Monday into Tuesday. Los Angeles has not seen any rain in January, but there is finally a chance for some at the end of the month — though it looks like it may be on the lighter side. “That’s honestly bad news for our fire weather season here going forward,” Ms. Schoenfeld said.

A yellow crane hovers above a building site in Sickla, a former industrial neighbourhood that’s home to one of Stockholm’s biggest real estate projects. But instead of delivering concrete, it’s manoeuvring giant chunks of wood to construction staff working in sub-zero winter temperatures. This is the beginning of what Swedish property developer Atrium Ljungberg describes as “the largest mass timber project in the world.” On the outskirts of Sweden’s capital, construction of ‘Stockholm Wood City’ began in October, several months ahead of schedule, and is set to provide 2,000 new homes by 2027. The company’s core goal is to improve the sustainability of construction projects. Building with wood instead of concrete and steel in 80% of new buildings would, according to a 2020 study by Aalto University and the Finnish Environment Institute, help offset half of Europe’s construction industry emissions. Atrium Ljungberg is also championing the idea that spending time in buildings made with natural materials can help improve our wellbeing. “We can tell the story about how to build a liveable city, how to add nature into the city and build something sustainable,” says Håkan Hyllengren, business development director for the project. “It's not just about wood, it’s the whole concept.” Large-scale wooden building projects are growing in popularity globally. Two years ago, Singapore opened a 468,000 square-foot wooden college campus building. Seattle opened a landmark eight-storey affordable housing block, also in 2023. And in Sydney, a giant timber retail and office space is currently under construction. But Scandinavia—with both a long tradition of building wooden villas and cabins, and prioritising environmental issues—is perhaps unsurprisingly, ahead of the curve when it comes to ramping up construction of multi-storey mass-timber properties. Norway’s third-highest building, Mjøstårnet, was built out of wood in 2019. Finland’s capital Helsinki already has a small wooden district, completed four years ago, and there are state subsidies designed to promote increased wood use in public buildings. Skellefteå, a small, discreet city in northern Sweden nudged its way into must-visit global tourist rankings after the country’s tallest wooden hotel and cultural center opened there in 2022. Hyllengren hopes Stockholm Wood City will become “an international showcase” due to its sheer scale. The project is set to become the biggest “mixed-use” wooden neighborhood on the planet—alongside the apartment buildings rapidly taking shape, there’s also a high school opening in the fall, and around 7,000 office spaces will be available within two years. Like most multi-storey wooden properties, the buildings are largely constructed using an engineered product called CLT (cross-laminated timber). This is made by bonding together layers of wooden panels at right angles, giving it a stiffness and strength that is almost comparable with steel or concrete. In Scandinavia, it’s easy to produce CLT locally—and sustainably—thanks to the region’s abundance of forests. Around 70% of Sweden is covered in woodland, and in 1903 it became the first nation in the world to require compulsory reforestation. “We don't have a problem where we will run out of wood,” smiles Hyllengren. “We’ve actually got more forest now than we had 100 years ago, because we replant.” Hyllengren says carbon emissions can be halved in the building construction process, since wood is lighter and quicker to build with than concrete, limiting the use of heavy machinery and energy. The 2020 research from Aalto University and the Finnish Environment Institute also highlights that wood stores carbon rather than emitting it (since it is made from trees which absorb CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow). Plus, if for any reason a wooden building is no longer needed in the future, it is easier to disassemble than concrete, and the wood can be reused or recycled, further extending its life cycle. Using global data projections based on 50 wooden building projects around the world, the researchers concluded that if 80% of new buildings in Europe had structures, cladding, surfaces, and furnishings made of wood, this could sequester up to 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2040. That’s equivalent to 47% of the European cement industry’s annual CO2 emissions. Lena Dahl, a senior forest expert for WWF Sweden, says the growing trend for building with wood is supported by environmentalists. “Wood has a lower carbon footprint than concrete or steel, so provided that the wood comes from sustainably managed forests it is a better choice,” she says. However, there are concerns about biodiversity loss linked to forestry. Despite reforestation efforts in Scandinavia, Dahl says extensive logging has led to the decline of some plant and animal species, and argues that Nordic forestry companies need to adapt their management practices to ensure nature remains protected as demand for wood increases. Another potential challenge for the industry is fire safety. But Hyllengren points out that building regulations in the Nordics are among the strictest in the world, and suggests properly designed and treated engineered wood buildings offer levels of heat protection and durability on a par with conventional building materials. “I think it's a bigger talking point abroad where you haven't built with wood before or not as much as we've done,” he says. All of the buildings in Stockholm Wood City are required to have inbuilt sprinklers, and CLT tolerates extremely high heat levels. “It’s hard for the wood to actually catch fire,” explains Hyllengren, and if it does, it will char on the outside from around 300°C (626°F), which creates a protective barrier that limits the spread of flames. Atrium Ljungberg estimates that engineered wood is approximately 10% more expensive to buy than steel or concrete, depending on the project. Hyllengren, however, says that the extra costs can be recouped elsewhere by the company. “You have to look at the whole project,” he explains. Since many wooden building parts arrive preassembled, and you don’t have to mix wood or wait for it to dry, like concrete, this helps save money by saving labor hours, argues the business development director. “By building so much faster than when we build with normal concrete, we can reduce the [project] time,” he adds, pointing out that this also means that tenants can move in and start paying rent earlier. Inside Atrium Ljungberg’s warm head office, just a few blocks from the emerging Stockholm Wood City, there is a miniature light-up model of what the suburb will eventually look like—and how it plans to reduce inhabitants’ environmental impact. This showcases some of the other cornerstones of the development, which Hyllengren hopes will improve “liveability” and create a “really unique environment.” There will be bike storage facilities, a new subway station and rooftop gardens and solar panels. “Pocket parks” between condo blocks and offices will be populated with wild flowers, designed to improve biodiversity. There will even be neighborhood beehives. Atrium Ljungberg also hopes the wooden buildings themselves will boost locals’ wellbeing. There is already a small but growing body of academic research linking wooden materials with lower stress levels. “Generally speaking, whenever there have been interviews [of] people visiting wooden buildings, they have said that there’s a kind of fresh feeling and also ‘living in nature’ feeling,” explains Ali Amiri, a sustainable buildings researcher at Aalto University in Finland, and co-author of the 2020 emissions paper. There is currently little research into the greater impact of living or working in wooden properties, although his team is planning a long-term study of young people living in wooden campus accommodation. Back on the building site at Stockholm Wood City, there are already signs that working with and around wood is having a beneficial impact on the construction team. The material provides a brighter, less grey environment, and not as much heavy, brash machinery is required. “It’s really much better for the workers since it's more light, there's less noise—when you work with concrete, there is a lot of noise,” says Sara Coletti, business manager for building firm TL Bygg, which is spearheading the construction side of the project. “It's a positive environment.” In Sweden, the proportion of new, multi-storey buildings constructed with wood—or at least with a wooden frame—is currently around 16%, compared to 9% a decade ago. Hyllengren believes that’s likely “to increase a lot in the coming years,” as construction firms increasingly prioritize sustainability and liveability. At Aalto University, Amiri, the sustainability researcher, is also hopeful that the trend can grow globally—including in the U.S. However his research suggests progress may be slower in countries where there are no local forests, more limited access to affordable engineered wood, specialized construction technologies, and design talent. “Also in countries that are not familiar with wooden construction even in low-rise [homes], it’s going to be harder,” he says. Hyllengren points out many of the architects, engineers, and construction teams working on Stockholm Wood City have already been involved in similar, smaller projects around the Nordics. He believes the regional buzz around building with wood has led to a “really open” climate that’s enabling its rapid evolution in the region. “Companies are sharing knowledge with each other,” he says, “in a way that I haven't really seen in the same way in construction with concrete or steel.”

The most famous beastly sculpture in the college town of Athens, Ga., is — improbably — not a bulldog. It is an 11-foot-tall welded steel horse, an abstract labyrinth of undulations and crescents, created at the University of Georgia by a visiting Chicago sculptor, Abbott Pattison, in 1954. When a crane first heaved Pattison’s mammoth steed from the basement of the university’s Fine Arts Building that spring, it was unlike anything the campus had seen before, with a cage-like midsection of pointed ribs, flat, Cubist planes, and a wavy, squared-off mane and tail. It was recognizably a horse, but it was no classical equestrian sculpture. And the artwork had many on campus seething. Last spring, when the sculpture — briefly titled “Steel Horse” and then “Pegasus” by the artist, but popularly known as Iron Horse — was extricated from a concrete pad in a cornfield outside Athens for conservation, it was missing 32 pieces and bore decades-deep scars of etching and graffiti, and a bullet wound in its neck. Its hooves had rusted the color of Georgia clay. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Statues on college campuses have long been lightning rods for the issues and debates coursing through society. But exactly why the Iron Horse was attacked by students may always be a mystery.“There’s all this mystery and misinformation around it,” said Donald Cope, a designer and metal fabricator who spent six months restoring the sculpture to its original condition with a conservator, Amy Jones Abbe, both based in Athens. “It has this lore, it has an aura.” Cope painstakingly repaired corrosion and reproduced missing parts (all but one, for which he could not find photographic support), mimicking the artist’s rugged welds. Before then, the Iron Horse had not been seen in its complete form since the day it was unveiled 70 years ago. Scholars today are hard-pressed to distinguish a significant large-scale, modern steel public sculpture in the South that predates it. “If I were teaching at the University of Georgia and I was wanting to split my classes into modern and traditional art, I could use this piece as the perfect pivot point,” said David Raskin, a professor of contemporary art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Pattison taught in the 1940s and ’50s. For a brief few hours after it was first installed at the University of Georgia campus, the sculpture stood unbruised on a lawn between men’s dormitories. But curious crowds began to gather, and by nightfall hundreds of students had descended on the horse, marking it with graffiti (“What the hell is this thing?”), shoveling manure under its tail, and, among other indignities, tying two balloons between its hind legs. Old tires were set ablaze beneath it and the fire department was called to subdue the flames, and the mob. “Essentially, I see a reaction to modernism, which was an issue they didn’t understand, which a lot of Americans didn’t understand,” said William U. Eiland, who was the director of the Georgia Museum of Art from 1992 to 2023 and pushed for the sculpture’s conservation for years. “They were reacting to change.” It was a “heady time” on campus, added Eiland, who wrote a biography of Lamar Dodd, the influential head of the art department during that period. It was the era of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the Brown v. Board of Education decision that would desegregate schools, and campus dress codes and curfews for women. Did the Iron Horse represent something disruptive or unknown? Did its Cubist lines somewhat resemble the horse in Picasso’s famed protest piece, “Guernica,” as some have suggested? Maybe. But several of those involved in the incident said later in a University of Georgia alumni newsletter that they were motivated more by a tiff between Pattison and the university community, reflected in the campus newspaper, The Red & Black. Prank or Grudge? Pattison came to the university as an artist in residence in 1953 on a grant from the General Education Board, which was devoted to the cause of improving education throughout the United States and supported by John D. Rockefeller Sr. The artist, who died in 1999, saw wide success with more than two dozen works on public display in the Chicago area and pieces in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was initially well-received in Athens, with a newspaper reporting that an exhibition of his work at the new academic Georgia Museum of Art was extended due to popularity. Students observed him on the campus lawn hand-chiseling his first commission — an abstract rendition of a mother and child from an 8-foot-tall block of Georgia marble, which was installed next to the Fine Arts Building that fall. But a student journalist, Bill Shipp, writing in the Red & Black, called the four-sided totem of polished curves and rough planes “ridiculously complex.” A cartoon of the sculpture ran alongside his story, with the caption, “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s….” Then one night, after Pattison returned for the spring semester in 1954, the modern marble was met with a can of green paint.Pattison penned a letter to the editor, stating: “The green paint on my marble sculpture doesn’t hurt me as much as it does the University upon which is cast the shadow of the presence of spite, ignorance, and intolerance.” Two months later, the Iron Horse landed on the lawn. But for Don McMillian, who was a veterinary student at the university at the time, and procured the manure in his Studebaker Commander convertible, it was just an end-of-the-year prank. “It wasn’t a big, deep, dark problem with the art or anything like that,” said McMillian, now 91 and a retired veterinarian living in Jonesboro, Ga. “It was just a bunch of crazy boys having fun.” (This was, he noted, the era of the panty raid craze on campuses across the country.) Pattison himself was offended. “I was rather shocked, to say the least, to see the painting on it, and to see the manure and the litter all around the place, and things hanging off of it,” the artist said in a 1981 documentary by William VanDerKloot about the sculpture that aired on PBS. “It was a rather devastating experience to me.” The morning after the attack, university officials carted the sculpture out of sight, hiding it behind an off-campus barn where it languished for five years until a horticulture professor, L.C. Curtis, got permission to take it to his farm in Greene County, 20 miles south of Athens. He positioned it right alongside Georgia State Route 15 for passing motorists to see.And there the Iron Horse has sat for decades, where it has morphed from a pariah into a kind of icon, a destination for selfies, a landmark for visiting football fans, a symbol for the community — featured on town murals, in brochures, on student bucket lists. McMillian, the veterinarian, visited a few years ago for the first time since 1954 to have his picture taken, he said. For years, the university and the Curtis family disputed the fate of the Iron Horse and where it belonged. But for now its future seems set in the cornfield. The Curtis farm was sold to the university in 2013 and renamed the Iron Horse Plant Sciences Farm, but the family maintained ownership of the sculpture and the 400 square feet surrounding it. Last January, the family gifted the sculpture to the university, on the condition that it be restored by the school and returned to the farm, said Alice Hugel, granddaughter of L.C. Curtis, who died in 1980. Her mother, Patty Curtis, was newly married to L.C. Curtis’s son, Jack, when the family acquired the sculpture.The university would not disclose the amount of the restoration, except to say in a statement that private funds were allocated. Eric Atkinson, the school’s dean of students, said, “This restoration is an important step in ensuring the Iron Horse remains a part of the U.G.A. experience.” In late November, the Iron Horse was set back out to pasture in the cornfield, now in a shiny new coat of black paint, sitting atop a Georgia granite plinth. But many believe it should be returned to the main campus, where the artist intended and where it might be better protected. One advocate has been the artist’s son, Harry Pattison, a working artist living in Bellingham, Wash., who was 2 years old when his father completed the Iron Horse. He said he had several conversations with his father about the fate of the sculpture before his death. “Abbott wanted it back where it originally belonged,” Pattison said. “He thought, someday the university will want it back.”Out in the field, over decades, the sculpture was subjected to the elements — and campus high jinks. It was spray-painted at least twice by opposing football fans (and spray-painted back to black by a secret Greek society, the Order of the Greek Horsemen, that considers the horse its symbol). Underwear has been fashioned into a hat stretched over its forelock. Climbing atop the horse became the custom, which over time caused welds to give. Carved initials once speckled its hide. “It’s sort of the price of celebrity for the horse,” said Alice Hugel, who, with her mother, argued that it should remain at the farm, where it would continue to be accessible. Raskin, the art history professor, noted, “There is something really wonderful that this horse on campus, even if it was controversial, somehow managed to at least focus people’s attention on modern art — or on art at all.” Now, its conservators Cope and Abbe hope the sculpture can enter a third phase of life where it is admired as a museum-worthy work rather than something like a roadside attraction.“I just hope going forward people have a different kind of appreciation for it, even if it came from a place of affection,” said Abbe, who previously worked as a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On a recent windy afternoon, the Iron Horse stood peacefully on its hilltop, seemingly untouched since its re-installation nearly two months ago. Olen Anderson, a senior at the university and a member of the Order of Greek Horsemen, said the organization and its alumni supported the restoration and had offered to donate funds for the work if needed. “We feel very sentimental toward it,” he said. Still, part of the group’s ritual each year is climbing atop the horse for the cover of The Fraternity Way magazine. What about the conservators’ wish that it be admired from the ground instead? “I think we’d honor that. Because above all, we want it to last.”

Dikeledi was a tropical cyclone in the Indian Ocean late Friday Eastern Africa Time, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center said in its latest advisory. The tropical cyclone had sustained wind speeds of 52 miles per hour. Where will it rain? Flash flooding can occur well inland and away from the storm’s center. Even weaker storms can produce excessive rainfall that can flood low-lying areas.Only about a quarter of the Earth’s tropical cyclones form in the Southern Hemisphere. When these storms have sustained winds of 74 m.p.h. or greater, they would be called hurricanes in the Atlantic, but here, they are called cyclones. The only other difference is that, in the Southern Hemisphere, cyclones spin clockwise (hurricanes spin counterclockwise). Cyclones can strike eastern Africa, primarily Madagascar, as well as the western, northern and eastern coasts of Australia and surrounding island nations. The season here runs opposite the rest of the world, typically beginning in late October and running through May. Peaks in activity vary depending on the region, but normally, activity is highest in late February and early March.

A lot of hardware destined for space went to pieces this week, but to hear the rocket companies responsible for the messes tell it, little untoward happened at all. “We did it! Orbital. Great night for Team Blue,” David Limp, the CEO of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin posted on X, after the Jan. 14 maiden launch of the company’s New Glenn rocket ended with an upper stage payload successfully reaching orbit. The first stage, which was supposed to land gently on a downrange barge, however, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, meanwhile got cheeky two days later after the launch of its giant Starship rocket on Jan. 16 flipped that script. The rocket’s first stage was successfully recovered between a giant pair of chopstick-like tongs on the Texas launch pad but the second stage was lost in a massive explosion eight minutes and 27 seconds into flight. “Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly,” the company euphemistically posted on X. It was the second part of both those X posts, however, that told the real story of the imperfect flights. “On to spring and trying again on the landing,” Limp wrote of Blue Origin’s plans for a second launch in just a few months. “Teams will continue to review data from today's flight test to better understand root cause,” SpaceX wrote. “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability.” Rocket science has always been an exceedingly iterative process, one in which a whole lot of launches have to come to ruin before the engineers get things right. During NASA’s early days, nearly half of the Atlas boosters that lofted the Mercury astronauts into space failed their test flights before they were finally rated safe to carry men. The Titan missiles that launched the two-man Gemini crews practically shook themselves to pieces in their first uncrewed flights. And as for the celebrated Saturn 5, the magnificent machine that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon? “This was a disaster,” Chris Kraft, NASA’s director of flight crew operations, told the press in 1968 after the final uncrewed flight of the Saturn 5 almost ended in a crash landing in the ocean. “I want to emphasize that. It was a disaster.” But the Atlases flew and the Titans flew and the Saturns flew, and if space history is any guide, the New Glenns and the Starships will fly too—but not without a lot of work. Of the two new rockets that had their try-outs this week, it was the New Glenn that had the most to prove. Blue Origin, founded in 2000, is the brainchild of Amazon CEO Bezos who envisions the company as a regular provider of space transport for both cargo and crew and a major player in making humanity both an on-world and off-world species, with millions of people eventually living in space. While the company has successfully launched 28 of its small New Shepard rockets on pop-gun suborbital missions—nine with passengers on board—it had never before placed any payload in orbit. That’s compared to a staggering 423 successful launches of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket and 11 of its bigger Falcon Heavy. Starship, still very much experimental, has flown seven times. New Glenn, which has been in development for a decade and was expected to have its first launch in 2020, has had nowhere near the breakneck R&D of the Falcons. But by many measures it has been worth the wait. The first stage is powered by seven methane-burning BE-4 engines—a cleaner fuel than the kerosene used in the Falcon 9. Together the engines put out 3.85 million pounds of thrust—about half of what the Saturn 5 produced, and just under the 5 million pounds of the Falcon Heavy. But New Glenn still counts as a muscle-bound missile. “A single BE-4 turbopump can fit in the backseat of a car,” wrote Limp on X. “[But] when all seven pump fuel and oxygen from the BE-4's common shaft, they produce enough horsepower to propel two Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at full tilt.” This week’s failure to stick the first stage landing notwithstanding, the New Glenn is designed for reusability—with each rocket built for up to 25 flights—and is intended to carry both cargo and crew. With SpaceX already dominating the commercial launch field, Blue Origin would seem something of an afterthought—but it’s not. If the long drought between crewed launches from U.S. soil after NASA’s shuttles stood down in 2011 and before the first crewed Falcon 9 flew in 2020 proved anything, it’s that it is never a good idea for a country or an industry to be dependent on just a single launch system. “Most satellite providers want to have at least two options for dissimilar redundancy,” says Scott Pace, the director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. This is truer than it’s ever been now that NASA has gotten largely out of the launch business, ceding that work to the private sector. The closest thing the space agency has today to the Saturn 5 is the Space Launch System (SLS), the massive rocket designed to be used in the Artemis program, which aims to have American astronauts back on the moon by the end of this decade. With 8.8 million pounds of thrust, the SLS is the most powerful rocket NASA has ever launched, though it still puts out just over half as much muscle as the 16 million pounds produced by the Starship. Still, SLS is a boutique machine: It has flown just once, uncrewed, in 2022, costs over $2 billion per launch, and is not set to fly again until the crewed, circumlunar mission of Artemis II in April, 2026. “SLS operates in a hardware-poor environment,” says Pace. “You’ve only got one or two of these things. The great advantage that SpaceX has and hopefully New Glenn will have is that they operate in a hardware-rich environment. They have lots and lots of [rockets] to work with.” Starship is proving that already. SpaceX could afford its flippancy on X because the company has always operated with a fly-fast, fail-fast, fly-again metabolism. The seven Starship launches since 2023 easily beat the poky pace of the SLS, and NASA has enough faith in the rocket that it tapped the upper stage of the Starship to serve as the Human Landing System—the 21st century version of the Apollo era lunar module—for the Artemis III lunar landing mission. Much of the work the Falcon 9 does today involves carrying cargo and crew to the International Space Station. After the station is deorbited in 2030, however, the rationale for the Falcon 9 might go with it, especially if Starship is in the flight rotation by then. “There’ve been rumors that at the end of the space station program SpaceX doesn’t really intend to keep flying Falcon 9s,” says Pace. “So a high flight-rate Starship environment is what the New Glenn will be looking at.” That environment, with both Starship and New Glenn flying regularly both to Earth orbit and, eventually, to the moon and beyond, will be a good one for the commercial launch sector and the U.S. in particular—especially with other countries’ boosters not viable options for American and other western customers. “We don’t use Chinese launch vehicles,” says Pace. “Russian launch vehicles are largely gone because of sanctions.” Japan’s H3 booster and the Europeans’ Ariane 6 would, meantime, welcome U.S. business but they are not now competitive with SpaceX in terms of price and likely won’t be with New Glenn either. Even as the debris from this week’s problem-plagued launches was still hissing into the ocean, both SpaceX and Blue Origin were thus ginning up for their next flights. Space launches have always been equal parts high adventure and bruising business, and the two companies are aiming to play both bracing games.

It was 48 degrees at noon on Jan. 20, 2017, when Donald J. Trump was first sworn in as president at the Capitol. This time around, with a forecast high of only 23 degrees, he would have been taking the oath during one of the coldest inaugurations in decades. Facing such frigid conditions, he announced on Friday the ceremony would be moved indoors. The last time a presidential inauguration was held indoors, it was for Ronald Reagan’s second on Jan. 21, 1985. The parade that day was also canceled because of the bitter cold. (“This shivering city reacted with relief tonight to the announcement that the inaugural parade had been canceled,” The New York Times declared at the time.) According to records from the National Weather Service, the temperature at noon that day was only 7 degrees, the morning low was 4 degrees below zero, and the daytime high was only 17. Wind chill temperatures that afternoon were 10 to 20 degrees below zero. The conditions anticipated for this year, as arctic air moves across much of the United States in the next few days, are not quite so brutal. Nevertheless, temperatures in Washington will begin to plummet on Sunday, and wind gusts of up to 30 miles per hour are expected to sweep through the National Mall on Monday. There is a moderate likelihood of some snow in the city on Sunday. And with temperatures already below freezing, the wind will make the open space in front of the Capitol feel much colder, said Jeremy Geiger, a forecaster at the Weather Service office in Sterling, Va. The wind chill is forecast to reach 5 degrees in the city early Monday morning. It was a sunny but bitterly cold 28 degrees when Barack Obama was sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2009, one of the coldest inaugurations of the modern era. Until the 1930s, most presidential inaugurations were held on March 4, but even that late-winter day could be bitterly cold. It was 16 degrees and windy in 1873 when President Ulysses S. Grant was sworn in for his second term. Sometimes the cold weather’s place in inaugural history isn’t the result of a record temperature. The 1841 swearing-in of William Henry Harrison was held on March 4, with an overcast sky, blustery winds and an estimated noon temperature of 48 degrees.His speech, the longest in presidential history, lasted an hour and 40 minutes, and he delivered it without a hat or an overcoat. He was dead a month later, of what has long been thought to have been a case of pneumonia that he developed that day. (In 2014, researchers advanced a theory that Harrison’s death was not solely the result of the weather on his inauguration, but instead may have been caused by typhoid fever he contracted because of Washington’s unclean water supply at the time.)

An error in the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s projection of the number of first-year students starting college last fall caused the organization to report incorrectly that freshman enrollment last year had dropped when in fact it had increased, its director said in a statement this week. By mistakenly mislabeling a number of first-year college students as high school students taking college or university courses, the center said it underestimated the true number of incoming college students. That led it to erroneously project the largest drop in freshman enrollment since 2020 in a report it published in October. The acknowledgment on Monday amounted to a reversal of the report’s top-line findings. Those conclusions fed into anxieties in higher education about long-term challenges, including a coming “demographic cliff” caused by a drop in births during the Great Recession and more general doubt about the value of a college degree. The report was based on preliminary enrollment data that the research center gathered from slightly more than half of all U.S. colleges and universities. After catching its error, the center said it expected to show that enrollment had risen in a report next Thursday, which includes data from nearly all institutions of higher education. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT It said that the error had affected previous reports as well, but that “the effect was magnified” last year because of an unusually large number of dual-enrolled high school students. That may have obscured the fact that the number was inflated even more by the center’s overcount. “The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center acknowledges the importance and significance of its role in providing accurate and reliable research to the higher education community,” the center’s executive director, Doug Shapiro, said in a statement. “We deeply regret this error and are conducting a thorough review to understand the root cause and implement measures to prevent such occurrences in the future.” The faulty numbers were reported by a wide range of news media and trade publications, including The New York Times. The National Student Clearinghouse, founded in 1993, is a nonprofit that provides services to thousands of U.S. institutions of higher learning, including by maintaining student records and enrollment, degree and student loan data. While it walked back its conclusions about freshman and dual-enrolled students on Monday, the center said its other findings — including that total undergraduate enrollment had increased — remained sound. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The report last fall also raised alarms that a comparatively tumultuous year for college students applying for federal financial aid might have led to a significant number of students postponing or abandoning college. Concerns about how the problematic rollout of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid early last year would affect college enrollment left many schools and higher education groups nervously anticipating the center’s October findings. In a statement on Monday, the Education Department’s under secretary, James Kvaal, said officials were “encouraged and relieved” by the revised assessment. “The increase is consistent with what we are seeing on the financial aid side: More than 5 percent more students are receiving federal aid this year,” the statement said. “Thank you to the high schools, college counselors, colleges and universities, and community organizations for pulling together to help students and families through a tough year.” When the report was published in October, the department did not directly dispute its conclusions, but provided a list of other factors that could have explained the apparent decline. Those included a longer-term downward trend in undergraduate enrollment as documented by the National Center for Education Statistics, a strong labor market drawing high school students directly into the work force and falling rates of college attainment among men. The revised numbers expected next week instead suggest a modest recovery in the number of students starting college after a steep drop-off during the pandemic, according to the research center’s statement.