There is a particular unease that comes from seeing that an ordinary part of life has been linked to cancer. If you fly a few times a year, the results of a new study by two of us may elicit exactly that feeling; pilots and flight attendants die of radiation-related cancers at higher rates than workers in over 500 occupations that we studied. 

So should you rethink your travel plans? We aren’t, and we don’t think you should, either. Understanding why can teach us a lot about how to read health headlines like this one.

Commercial jets cruise at altitudes above 30,000 feet, where the atmosphere is thin, allowing for higher speeds and engine efficiency. But the thinner atmosphere offers less shielding from cosmic radiation (in the form of high-energy particles that stream in from the sun and from deep space) than we enjoy closer to sea level. 

Spending hundreds of hours among the clouds each year, air crew absorb more radiation, on average, than workers in any other job in the U.S.—including those generating nuclear power and our colleagues who work with radiation for medical purposes. This type of ionizing radiation, in sufficient doses, can damage DNA and give rise to cancer. What has never been clear is whether the amount aircrew accumulate over a career is enough to increase cancer risk above other occupations.

In a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, we set out to find that mark. Using federal data on nearly every death in the U.S., newly linked to each person’s usual occupation, we examined more than 12.7 million deaths from 2020 to 2024 (a majority of deaths among adults) across 503 occupations—an approach that earlier studies, which had mortality data on air crew but no other occupations, could not take.

The approach rested on simple logic. If cosmic radiation were truly driving cancer among air crew, the signal should appear specifically in the cancers that radiation is known to cause (breast, prostate, melanoma, and certain leukemias), and the signal should not appear in cancers like colon cancer that aren’t caused by this type of radiation. We would also expect to see higher rates of radiation-associated cancers among other types of workers exposed to radiation, like nuclear technologists. Meanwhile, unless something about aviation other than flying was associated with these cancers, we wouldn’t expect to see higher rates in aviation workers who remain on the ground, like aircraft mechanics and assemblers.

The pattern was hard to miss. Among all 503 occupations, flight attendants and pilots had the highest and second-highest share of deaths from radiation-related cancers—6.9% and 6.7%, respectively, after accounting for differences in age, sex, and other factors—a proportion that exceeded that of nuclear technologists. For cancers unrelated to radiation, aircrew sat near the middle of the pack. And our comparison groups fell exactly where the radiation hypothesis predicted; nuclear technologists ranked near the top, while ground-based aviation workers did not.

That internal consistency—seeing the types of cancers we expected in the workers we predicted would be most at risk, with control groups behaving precisely as expected—makes it unlikely that the pattern arose by chance. But as striking as these patterns are, this study, by itself, is not iron-clad proof of cause and effect. Our data cannot measure how much radiation any individual actually received. Occupations are sometimes recorded incorrectly on death certificates. People at higher baseline risk for this type of cancer may be more likely to work as pilots or flight attendants. Air crew face other hazards, from disrupted circadian rhythms to in-cabin exposures, that we could not fully account for. 

Importantly, the study does not say that your next flight, or even a lifetime of flying for annual vacations, meaningfully raises your risk of cancer. The signal we detected generally reflects an entire career spent in the skies. To put this in perspective, pilots and flight attendants accrue an estimated 3 to 6 millisieverts of cosmic radiation each year, decade after decade. A traveler who takes 10 cross-country round-trip flights a year absorbs only about 0.4 millisieverts—roughly a seventh to 1/15 of what an aircrew member accrues in a single year, and only over a few years of heavy travel rather than an entire working life.

If anyone should take note, then, it is not passengers but the agencies charged with protecting the people who work at altitude. The Federal Aviation Administration already recognizes aircrew as occupationally exposed to radiation. Yet unlike nuclear workers, or air crew in Europe, U.S. pilots and flight attendants are subject to no federal dose limits and no requirement that their exposure even be monitored. 

While our findings are unable to determine how large the risk is for any individual crew member, they do suggest that the workers who absorb the most radiation of any occupation in the country deserve the same basic protections we extend to everyone else who works around it.

So the next time a flight attendant hands you a coffee at 30,000 feet, there’s no need to fret over the tiny radiation dose you are taking on by being up in the sky. But do consider the doses they take on, day after day, and whether we are doing enough to look after the people who spend their careers somewhere the rest of us are only passing through.

Hayden Panettiere, who is best known for her starring roles in TV shows like Heroes and Nashville, died on Sunday at age 36. She leaves behind a daughter, Kaya Evdokia Klitschko, who is 11.

In a statement to TIME, Greenville Police say that officers “responded to a report of an unresponsive female” at an address in Greenville, South Carolina, just before 2 p.m.

“Upon arrival, medical assistance was administered; however, the individual, later identified as Hayden Panettiere, was pronounced deceased at the scene,” the statement reads. 

Read More: Hayden Panettiere’s Life Since Becoming a Mom Has ‘Evolved in a Beautiful Way’

Greenville Police also confirm that “the preliminary investigation has not indicated any signs of foul play or suspicious circumstances” and that “an acquaintance of Ms. Panettiere placed the 911 call.”

Audio obtained by the New York Post reveals that first responders tried to resuscitate someone—allegedly Panettiere—with “advanced cardiac life support.” A medic can be heard saying “overdose” and then “CPR is in progress.” However, Greenville Police tell TIME that they are unable to verify the audio and say that it is “not ours.”

Her father, Skip Panettiere, confirmed the actress’s death in a statement shared with ABC News, which broke the news early Monday. “It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden,” he said, describing his daughter’s passing as an “unimaginable loss.”

“She was an incredible light and a force of nature who brought immeasurable love and joy to all who knew her—and to the millions who watched her onscreen,” the statement continued. 

The actress’s publicist, Kasey Kitchen, said there is “an investigation ongoing” into Panettiere’s death, according to NBC News. TIME has reached out to Kitchen for additional comment. 

Tributes for Hayden Panettiere

Tributes have been pouring in for the actress, who also voiced Dot in Pixar’s A Bug’s Life in 1998. 

Academy Award winner Viola Davis, who starred alongside Panettiere in the 2016 drama Custody, described her as “an amazing talent,” in a post on social media. 

“I wish the world had more time with you because I had a burning curiosity about who you were becoming,” said Davis. “Your tests became your testimony, and your testimony became your legacy. You will be remembered. Rest well, Hayden.”

Actress Bethany Joy Lenz, a longtime friend, said that she was “crushed” in a post on social media. “I’m here with my head in my hands and I don’t know what else to do in aside from praying for her soul,” she said. 

“Her intelligence was astonishing. She understood scenes and nuance and human struggle like no child I’d ever seen on camera,” Lenz continued. “These are moments of how I knew you, in glimpses over 26 years. I don’t know how to process this,” she said alongside images of the two together. 

Rosie O’Donnell simply posted: “Oh my god - heartbroken.”

Actress Taryn Manning described Panettiere as “such a sweetheart- so rad - down to earth, kind, and consistently the same every time I saw her,” in a tribute on Instagram. 

“I don’t really have words for what has happened and she is suddenly gone,” said Manning. “I’m just grateful I got to know her and have memories like this.”

Media host and NFL insider Jordan Schultz also reflected on Panettiere’s career and her impact. “You were such a magnetic talent,” said Schultz. “I’ll never forget the amazing role you played in Remember the Titans, my all-time favorite movie.”

SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union that Panettiere had been a member of since 1994, said in a statement: “We join in mourning the sudden passing of Hayden Panettiere.” 

“Our hearts are with her daughter, family, friends and fans,” it continued. “May she [rest in peace].”

An acting career spanning decades

Panettiere began her onscreen career at just 11 months old, when she starred in a Playskool commercial, she told Entertainment Tonight in 2013. She went on to star in 27 episodes of the TV series One Life to Live between 1994 and 1997. 

She was regularly cast in shows and movies throughout the 2000s, including Raising Helen, Remember the Titans, and Scream 4. 

One of her most prominent roles began in 2006, playing Claire Bennet in the sci-fi action series Heroes. She also played Juliette Barnes, one of the leading roles in the drama series Nashville, which followed the lives of country music artists in Tennessee. 

Panettiere returned to the Scream horror franchise in 2023, for its sixth installment. 

Panettiere revealed personal struggles in her memoir 

In May 2026, Panettiere published her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning. Speaking with CBS about the book, Panettiere said that “once people figured out that I could cry on cue the way that I did, it was in everything.”

At first, she said, she would imagine her pet passing away. “But then as I got older, the imagery became darker,” she said.

Panettiere continued that she “didn't know where my character started and where I ended” and described feeling a “deep sadness” during those scenes. 

The actress also reflected on landing the lead in Heroes at 16. “Back in the 2000s, there were no boundaries at all. It was rough and tough,” said Panettiere about the pressure of the paparazzi. “The way they spoke to you, the way they drove, hunted literally like prey.”

Panettiere also spoke out about her experience with postpartum depression following the birth of her daughter, Kaya, in December 2014. “Here I am with this beautiful, healthy, beautiful baby girl in this very fortunate life, and I could not, for the whole life of me, be happy. I was so depressed, and I just couldn't find my way out,” she said while promoting her memoir in May.

Her daughter currently lives outside of the United States with her father, the retired heavyweight boxer Wladimir Klitschko.  

Panettiere’s brother, Jansen, died in February 2023 due to cardiomegaly with aortic valve complications. The Cleveland Clinic describes it as a condition where the heart is enlarged and has trouble pumping blood.

“His charisma, warmth, compassion for others, and his creative spirit will live forever in our hearts and in the hearts of all whom he encountered,” the Panettiere family said in a statement after his death. 

Reflecting on some of her struggles, including her brother’s death, Panettiere told Momé in July: “I'm a warrior. I'm a woman who has been through more trauma than I ever thought I'd face, but I'm resilient.”

In the early morning hours, before the sun came up on Saturday Aug. 8, the Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as the nation’s top law enforcement officer. But long before the vote, Blanche’s comments inside and outside of the confirmation process signaled an escalation of President Donald Trump’s anti-abortion agenda. 

In a now-deleted audio recording with the White House Faith Office, Blanche outlined a plan to utilize multiple agencies, including his Department of Justice and the Food and Drug Administration, to end abortion access in all 50 states. Blanche illustrated how these departments—which should work independently of the White House in service to our collective health and safety—are blurring lines in service to an agenda targeting abortion providers and patients.

The National Abortion Federation, which sets clinical standards for abortion care and provides security and safety support for clinics nationwide, knows firsthand the grave dangers when checks and balances disappear within the federal government. Law enforcement is the only mechanism of accountability our current system provides for people who engage in violence and disruption at abortion clinics. While these activities are illegal under the federal Freedom of Access to Clinical Entrances (FACE) Act, the law is only as protective as the person in charge of enforcing it. 

Not only did Trump pardon violators of the FACE Act, the DOJ has also paid them with tax dollars as a backwards form of restitution. Just last month, Paul Vaughn received a Trump pardon and $1 million from the DOJ after staging a blockade at a NAF member clinic in Tennessee. NAF is actively suing the DOJ to stop more payouts of this kind. But the Trump-Blanche duo has already sent a message with serious consequences.

Since Trump took office, NAF’s most recent Violence and Disruption report showed a 113% increase in threats of death and harm. Clinic blockades increased from one to six. While we know laws like the FACE Act are a limited means to protect people, not only is the federal government failing to meet these low bars, it's abusing the law to incentivize violence. Blanche’s confirmation is part of a larger pattern of involving law enforcement in pregnancy, including abortion care. That should scare everyone no matter what you believe. 

Blanche’s commitment to work “hand in hand with the FDA” to end abortion access adds to the alarm bells. As clinical experts, we rely on peer-reviewed studies, unbiased research, and patient experience to inform NAF’s clinical guidelines for abortion care. For decades, we’ve held the FDA to these same rigorous standards when evaluating medications. Politics and police have no place in this scientific approach. When we have the freedom to follow evidence, we can innovate and improve lives. Evidence and innovation affirmed the safety and efficacy of telehealth prescriptions for abortion pills. It expanded access under a hostile landscape. Our opponents responded by moving the goalpost and expanding their attacks.

Can the FDA and the DOJ—two departments typically unrelated in scope or matter— be united in a war to ban abortion?

NAF members know that abortion bans come in many forms. In some places, the threat of investigations and prosecutions is enough to stop access. In other places, requiring people to travel for an abortion blocks care altogether. In the process, anti-abortion politicians are finding ways to ban abortion without ever having to pass a formal, national abortion ban.

That’s why this year, on the fourth anniversary of the Dobbs decision, NAF released its policy position affirming abortion access throughout pregnancy, and committed to opposing viability and gestational limits in abortion laws. This is not only a commitment to expanding abortion access, but it’s a fight back against anti-science and policing trends in reproductive health care. Because we know in order to protect patients and providers from the whims of a Trump-Blanche DOJ, we have to eliminate legal lines that beg for enforcement.

Blanche’s confirmation is a stark reminder that expanding abortion requires proactive defense against attacks that disproportionately impact marginalized communities who already face over-policing and surveillance. Project 2025 laid bare plans to declare fetuses and embryos as people with legal rights. The NAF’s prediction: Blanche will seek to advance this concept of fetal personhood in our modern legal landscape, re-entrenching a legal tug of war between a pregnant person and their fetus. Our most important tool to fight back is to ensure abortion laws protect people at all points in pregnancy, in every state.  

Older age does not look the same for everyone. Two people may both be 75, for example, but have a much different risk of dying in the near future. Decades ago, when scientists went looking for an answer to why, they uncovered a pattern. The people more likely to die sooner moved more slowly, had weaker hand-grip strength, and showed a cluster of other red flags for a condition now called frailty. 

Frailty is “a long-term condition in the same sense that diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease is,” the British Geriatrics Society says on its website. 

And it’s projected to become more prevalent in the near future, says Dr. Kenneth Rockwood, a professor of medicine at Dalhousie University in Canada who developed one of the scales for diagnosing frailty. “It's the demographic imperative,” he says. “In 2021 the leading edge of the baby boom generation turned 75 years old, and 75 is the age at which most of the diseases of aging take off. So now frailty is not some mystical, mythical far-off thing.”

However, frailty is not inevitable—and to some extent, it's possible to undo some of the damage. Here’s what to know.

How can you tell if you’re frail?

One of the best ways to identify frailty is a comprehensive geriatric assessment, in which a team of health care professionals look at many different aspects of an aging person’s health to get a sense of the bigger picture. But some potential tell-tale signs doctors might check for, and that you might notice on your own, include walking slowly—less than approximately 2.6 ft. (or 0.8 meters) a second, one study suggests—and taking more than 10 seconds in what’s called a “timed up and go test,” in which a person is timed getting up from a chair, walking for almost 10 ft. (3 meters), turning around, walking back, and sitting down. With frailty, “you can't tell at a glance, but it doesn't take that long [to detect] if you know what questions to ask…if you can see the person move,” says Rockwood.

Why is it important to know if you’re frail?

Frailty can be mild, moderate, or severe, and once clinicians have flagged it, it can help them make treatment decisions. An older person who is not frail might quickly recover from something like a little tumble, a cold, or an elective surgery, but that same event can cause sudden decline in a frail person—a pattern Dr. Sara Espinoza, a geriatrician at Cedars-Mount Sinai in Los Angeles who researches the condition, noticed early on in her career.

“Some patients would do really well. They would come into the hospital for whatever their issue was, and we would treat them, and they would be fine. They would go back out as if almost nothing happened,” she says. “But others were just very vulnerable. It was like the hospitalization was a tipping point for a bunch of other things to happen,” including complications and mobility issues.

Research has shown that frail people are at a higher risk for complications after planned surgeries. Knowing whether a patient is frail or not can change a clinician’s sense of whether to act swiftly on what seems like a small problem or to reexamine whether an elective surgery is a good idea, for instance.

Is frailty reversible?

“It looks like large elements of frailty are reversible, up to a certain period,” says Rockwood. Research suggests that starting a program of high-intensity resistance exercise can help people grow less frail, if continued over at least a few months. “Exercise is important,” concurs Espinoza. 

A 2023 clinical trial found that a twenty-minute daily exercise routine designed to strengthen arms and legs and improve balance and coordination, paired with eating a bit more than a gram of protein per kilogram (around half a gram per pound) of body weight daily, was linked to significant improvements in frailty. People who followed the advice over three months improved their grip strength, increased their bone mass, and were more active than controls, suggesting that frailty can be improved with lifestyle interventions. 

On the eve of the 10-day Ulchi Freedom Shield military drills —involving 18,000 South Korean troops alongside thousands of U.S. and U.N. forces—President Donald Trump dropped one of his trademark bombshells. Announcing he would “substantially reduce” American participation, Trump cited his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un” and need to rebuke Seoul for refusing to join his war against Iran.

“These exercises are not only costly … but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile to a country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been president, has been unthreatening and respectful,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

In response, South Korea’s presidential Blue House said it remained in “close coordination" with Washington regarding the drills, which had begun as “previously notified and scheduled,” according to its defence ministry.

Still, the decision deals a severe blow to American alliance credibility. Reducing participation in exercises underpinning a 72-year mutual defense treaty with democratic South Korea, while Trump emphasizes his personal relationship with Kim, raises questions about the durability of U.S. security commitments in the Asia-Pacific. At the same time, it whitewashes a police state ranked 3/100 by rights group Freedom House—a regime whose sole formal treaty allies are primary U.S. adversaries China and Russia.

Furthermore, Trump’s assertion that Pyongyang has been “unthreatening and respectful” stands in contrast with North Korea’s continued military activity. Since Trump re-entered office, North Korea has conducted 24 ballistic missile tests—alongside numerous cruise missile and air-defense firings—including a launch just last Wednesday.

Pyongyang has also aggressively expanded its global military footprint following its June 2024 comprehensive strategic partnership with Moscow, dispatching more than 14,000 North Korean troops, artillery ammunition, and ballistic missiles to support Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. (Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that Kim is preparing to deploy 30,000 more.)

Trump’s criticism of South Korea for declining to help “denuclearize” Iran also sits uneasily alongside North Korea’s longstanding role in the development of Tehran’s strategic weapons programs. From a counter-proliferation perspective, North Korea presents a distinct challenge: unlike Iran, it already possesses an operational nuclear arsenal and has an extensive history of transferring missile and military technology abroad.

“The North Koreans provided Iran with technical assistance, building turnkey factories, technology design, production capabilities, tactics—those kinds of things,” says Daniel Pinkston, an international relations expert at Troy University in Seoul. “Technological agreements and high-level scientific visits go back years.”

During the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War, North Korea emerged as one of Tehran’s primary arms suppliers. That relationship deepened following the collapse of Soviet subsidies in the early 1990s, when Pyongyang bartered missile technology for Iranian crude oil to keep its depleted economy afloat.

Tehran purchased North Korean Scud-B and Scud-C missiles, using them as the blueprints for its own Shahab-1 and Shahab-2 ballistic missile programs. Later, North Korea’s Nodong-1 missile was adapted into the Shahab-3—the backbone of Iran’s modern long-range strike capabilities, including variants like the Emad and Ghadr. Declassified intelligence indicates Iran specifically modified the nose cones of its Shahab-3 missiles to accommodate miniaturized nuclear warheads.

North Korean military engineers—renowned for building massive subterranean installations—also helped Iran design and construct hardened missile silos, underground networks, and nuclear facility bunkers. Beyond missile architecture, Pyongyang supplied Iran with midget submarines, anti-ship missiles, rocket launchers, and specialized commando training.

While Western intelligence agencies have debated periodic reports of Iranian scientists attending North Korean nuclear tests, Pyongyang’s willingness to proliferate nuclear infrastructure elsewhere is beyond doubt. In 2007, an Israeli airstrike destroyed Syria’s covert Al-Kibar facility—a plutonium-producing reactor built by North Korea that was a carbon copy of its 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon.

Beyond diplomacy, scaling back joint drills carries immediate tactical consequences. South Korean and U.S. military commanders had planned to use the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises to adapt to evolving battlefield tactics showcased by North Korean forces in Ukraine, including drone swarm integration, electronic GPS jamming, and coordinated cyber warfare.

“They’ve taken those lessons learned there and brought them back to North Korea—that changes their capability,” Col. Ryan Donald, public affairs director for U.S.-led commands in South Korea, told reporters. “That is why the exercise looks different and over the last five years has continually evolved.”

So why Trump’s sudden policy shift? On Saturday, the U.S. commander-in-chief shared a throwback photograph posing with Kim in 2019, reiterating that the two “get along great.” The post reignited speculation that Trump is eager to stage another high-profile summit with Kim to claim a foreign policy win. Observers note a similar transactional caution in Trump stalling on a $14 billion arms package for Taiwan—the largest ever—to avoid derailing Chinese President Xi Jinping’s upcoming state visit.

But Trump’s broadside against Seoul highlights a broader global trend: partners taking steps to insulate themselves from U.S. volatility. At the same time, the Iran war has in fact turned South Korea into a major defense supplier to Gulf nations like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which are purchasing the Cheongung-II medium-range air defense system rather than relying exclusively on American military hardware.

From Europe to the Middle East, traditional U.S. allies are replacing strategic reliance with independent insurance policies. Denmark recently opted for a Franco-Italian air defense network over the U.S. Patriot system, while Canada is re-evaluating its commitments to the F-35 program. The Dutch Central Bank migrated critical cloud infrastructure away from American tech firms to European providers to minimize systemic vulnerability.

Perhaps most remarkable was the Aug. 7 signing of the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement—a NATO-style collective security pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan. After a decade of regional rivalry defined by clashes over the Muslim Brotherhood and the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Riyadh and Ankara have found common ground amid growing questions about the extent to which they can rely on longstanding U.S. security commitments.

“It is incoherent nonsense,” says Pinkston of Trump’s flipflopping. “The credibility of the United States is under attack, and that is a direct threat to U.S. national security and international stability.”

Irish poets and American presidents have long spoken of Kashmir: its beauty and its dangers.

The question of Kashmir has shaped the trajectories of India and Pakistan since the end of British rule and their birth as nation-states in August 1947. Both countries claim Kashmir in its entirety, have fought multiple wars over it, and each controls a separate part of the territory. Historically, references to Kashmir have largely focused on the dispute between India and Pakistan, or on the most visible troubles in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Global attention has rarely lingered on the part of Kashmir administered by Pakistan. Yet, since an outbreak of protests in the region in June, more than 80 people have been killed by security forces. A different kind of political struggle has been gathering momentum there—one that is less a contest over sovereignty than an expression of long-simmering grievances over the conditions of daily life, from unaffordable electricity bills and rising food prices to a scarcity of jobs.

Pakistan-administered Kashmir has not been insulated from the wider economic crisis in Pakistan. Rising prices, fiscal pressures, energy deficits, and repeated International Monetary Fund bailouts have pushed successive governments to reduce subsidies and raise utility prices. The people of the region, already squeezed by inflation and unemployment, experience these policies not as fiscal prudence but as evidence of how little influence they have over the decisions that shape their lives.

Kashmir and the making of a protest movement

Kashmir is home to major hydropower projects that feed Pakistan’s national grid, and many residents argue that local tariffs should better reflect the territory’s contribution to power generation. The grievance is not new: protests over rising electricity and basic commodity prices have erupted periodically since 2022.

The failures of the local government to resolve these issues created an opening for a new form of political organization. Citizens committees emerged across districts, bringing together traders, lawyers, students, and community leaders. In September 2023, these committees coalesced into the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), a unified body intended to coordinate mobilization across the region.

The JAAC initially demanded lower wheat and electricity prices, an end to official privileges for ministers and bureaucrats, and empowered elected local governments. It has remained outside Pakistan’s political party system. Rather than aligning with the major parties—the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), the Pakistan People’s Party, and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf—it presented itself as a nonpartisan platform.

The movement’s appeal seems to rest on its ability to unite constituencies across partisan divides around everyday economic and governance concerns. In response to the JAAC’s organizing, authorities arrested its members on criminal charges and restricted its meetings. But these measures failed to subdue the movement, which pressed on through shutdowns, transportation strikes, and local protests. The protest movement’s strength lies in its decentralized structure, with its chapters across small towns and villages offering a grassroots network that can be activated across the region.

In May 2024, after the government pledged to consider its demands but delayed making any substantive concessions, the JAAC called a long march and a shutdown strike. The mobilization drew hundreds of thousands of protesters toward the capital, Muzaffarabad, in one of the largest episodes of mass mobilization in the region’s history. Attempts to prevent the march backfired, broadening the movement. Protests continued to swell in Muzaffarabad despite arrests, roadblocks, and restrictions on internet and cellular communications.

Clashes during the May 2024 march left at least four people dead, including three protestors and a police officer. Islamabad ultimately intervened with a relief package reportedly worth about 23 billion rupees ($82.9 million), which included subsidized electricity tariffs and lower wheat prices. But the government’s repressive response turned a campaign over utility prices into a broader test of whether the people of Pakistan-administered Kashmir could exercise meaningful political agency.

Citizens or subjects?

The May 2024 settlement demonstrated that collective action could compel Islamabad to address immediate economic grievances. But it did not resolve the broader issue of political accountability: how Pakistan-administered Kashmir is governed? The territory has its own president, government, legislative assembly, and courts, but Pakistan retains decisive influence over key administrative, security, and external affairs.

A council chaired by Pakistan’s prime minister used to be a major source of Islamabad’s formal control over legislation, finances, and development planning. Although a constitutional amendment in 2018 stripped many of its powers, reducing it to a largely advisory body, significant authority still rests with the federal government. Key civil servants—including the chief secretary and the inspector general of police—are appointed by Islamabad, leaving the regional elected government with limited control over crucial aspects of administration.

Pakistan has long defended this exceptional arrangement in Kashmir as necessary for an exceptional situation: administering a territory whose international status remains contested. For residents, however, it has created a persistent gap between political responsibility and political authority. Elected politicians are expected to answer to voters, but the decisions that shape their daily lives are made in Islamabad.

The electoral system of the region adds another layer of complexity. The legislature of Pakistan-administered Kashmir has 53 seats. Eight of those seats are reserved for women, religious scholars, technocrats, and overseas citizens. Lawmakers are elected for the remaining 45 seats through elections. Thirty-three of those lawmakers are elected by the people living in the region. Twelve more seats in the legislature are reserved for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir who live elsewhere in Pakistan—an arrangement introduced in the 1960s and formalized in the 1970s. Critics argue that these 12 seats significantly dilute the political weight of the territory’s voters and make it easier for whichever party rules in Islamabad to shape the assembly’s composition.

In June, the top court of the region ruled that those 12 seats enjoy statutory protection, and that any change would require a formal constitutional amendment. The ruling affirmed the government’s legal position, but it did not address the political question at the heart of the dispute. Can a legislature in which more than a quarter of directly elected seats are filled from outside the territory truly reflect the will of the people who live there? 

The trouble with military hegemony

The dominant role of Pakistan’s military further constrains political space. Pakistan is governed by a hybrid regime in which civilian governments function within boundaries imposed by the military, which continues to exert tutelary control over national security, foreign policy, and even political competition. Pakistan-administered Kashmir reflects a concentrated version of this wider political order.

The geopolitical stakes of the Kashmir dispute are high, leaving the room for independent political action quite narrow. The Pakistan Army’s 12th Infantry Division, commanded by a major general and headquartered in the hill town of Murree, exercises operational control over the region, giving the military a direct hand in maintaining security.

Human rights observers have long documented the influence and the abuses of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services in the territory. The JAAC and rights activists argue that organized political activity and free expression are readily treated as security threats, narrowing the room for dissent. Elected institutions, they say, are reduced to a facade while the security apparatus determines whether political discontent can be expressed and mobilized.

The consequences of this militarized approach were on display during the renewed mobilization in the summer. In June, Pakistani authorities banned the JAAC under anti-terrorism laws, declaring it a threat to public order, and launched a broader crackdown on protesters ahead of regional assembly elections planned for Jul. 27 to Aug. 10. In late July, scores of protesters were killed, according to the leaders of the JAAC. Pakistan defended the tactics of its security forces, and a federal minister described the protesters as “militants.”  While the number of civilians killed remains contested, but the political significance of the state’s response is clearer: treating a largely peaceful movement rooted in economic and democratic demands as a terrorist group reinforced the perception among the JAAC’s supporters that Islamabad would rather break heads than count them.

The JAAC had called for a boycott of the vote, making the abolition of the 12 refugee seats one of its central demands. The first phase of voting recorded a turnout of about 46%, while officials put turnout in the second phase at roughly 50%, lower than the 60% recorded in the previous two elections in 2016 and 2021. Voting in the third phase was postponed because of continued unrest.

Preliminary results gave the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, the governing party of Pakistan, 24 general seats, though the delayed contests meant the election had yet to be finalized. The results lend credence to the JAAC’s contention that polling alone cannot resolve who exercises meaningful political authority in Kashmir. This is particularly true when the ruling party in Islamabad can draw on state resources and the military establishment’s backing to shape both the electoral environment and, ultimately, the composition of the legislature.

This manipulation begins well before polling day. Critics say officers from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence, operating under the area’s army command structure, use pressure tactics and patronage to favor candidates who endorse Kashmir’s integration with Pakistan. The 12 refugee seats, critics argue, are not simply a constitutional problem but an additional lever through which politically loyal candidates can be brought into the assembly.

The movement’s durability suggests that it is more than a dispute over economic disparities; it reflects a broader crisis of affordability, legitimacy, and accountability. In that sense, the deeper shift is one of political expectations. Support for the JAAC, particularly among young people, reflects a growing impatience with political subordination justified as a geopolitical imperative.

The unrest also reveals an uncomfortable contradiction in Pakistan’s official position on Kashmir. For decades, Islamabad has accused India, not without justification, of gross human rights violations against Kashmiris on its side of the Line of Control. Pakistan’s foreign policy rests on the claim that Kashmiris possess a moral and legal “right of self-determination” and that Kashmir’s final status should be decided through a United Nations-administered plebiscite. Yet those claims are difficult to sustain when Islamabad’s own governance of Pakistan-administered Kashmir falls short of the very standards it invokes in criticizing India.

For Islamabad, the lesson is clear. Stability cannot be bought with temporary economic relief that leaves the underlying structure of political power intact. Nor can it be secured through repression, which amplifies alienation, fuels anger, and breeds broader resentment toward the Pakistani state. Stability depends on meaningfully addressing the local demand for responsive and credible government, and on recognizing that the people of Pakistan-administered Kashmir are citizens with political rights, not supplicants dependent on Islamabad’s largesse.

Kashmiris are not merely demanding lower bills and cheaper bread. They are demanding respect and representation. In the towns and valleys of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, these aspirations cannot simply be suppressed by force.

In the corner of a nondescript office in Sheffield, a city in the north of England, a compact server full of Nvidia chips is whirring away.

It’s a microcosm of the huge data centers springing up all over the globe: town-sized, energy-guzzling computers that are the worldly manifestations of frontier AI models.

Here in Sheffield, on these eight chips, engineers from the consultancy Amodo Design are piloting a monitoring system that they hope, one day, might find its way into every data center, allaying the fears of AI researchers who are concerned that the technology they are building may destroy the world.

In late July, more than 1,300 employees of frontier AI companies signed an open letter warning that their AI is quickly becoming so powerful that humans may soon no longer be able to control it. Slowing the pace of AI development, they warned, may become vital in order to allow more time for safety research, and thus avert catastrophe. But slowing down, they wrote, is essentially impossible, due to intense competition between companies and countries. The AI race is stuck in an arms-race dynamic, these top scientists say, in which one team slowing down would only hand victory to rivals that don’t.

The letter’s main request—one so important to 1,300 of the world’s top AI researchers that they called publicly for it—was for the U.S. government to support an international effort to build tools that would enable all sides to slow down the AI race. 

So far, only a small group of people are working on this effort. There are fewer than 50 engineers in the world working full-time on building so-called “AI verification” tools, Amodo CEO Tom Milton estimates—nine of them at Amodo—plus a few dozen more policy researchers scattered among a handful of companies and research institutes. Meanwhile, trillions of dollars, and the combined might of the world’s biggest tech companies, are now dedicated to making AI systems more powerful as quickly as possible. Efforts to build slowdown tools are funded mostly by academia and philanthropy. (Amodo’s work in this area is funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund and Longview Philanthropy, two grantmakers that have donated heavily toward reducing AI-related risks.) 

“It is surprising that very few people are doing it,” says Milton, a 28-year-old who fell into the field almost by accident several years ago, when Amodo was commissioned to do some work in the area. 

In Sheffield, three workers are huddled around their compute cluster, under an air conditioning unit that is running on full-blast. Their small-scale prototype may be running hot, but it isn’t ready yet. Many technical obstacles remain in its way, plus a bigger political one: it won’t be useful unless the U.S. and China come to the table and agree on an AI slowdown treaty, Milton says.

For now at least, such an agreement looks unlikely. But Amodo’s engineers are keenly aware that political choices are downstream from what is possible. Treaties that curtailed the Cold War arms race were only possible because new technologies, like satellites and seismometers, allowed each side to verify the other’s compliance. Milton expects a similar moment to arrive for AI. When that moment comes, he wants to be ready. 

Read More: Can the Cold War Teach Us How to Slow Down AI?

How AI verification might work

Nobody knows how an AI slowdown treaty might look, but Amodo’s engineers believe it will probably require monitoring data centers, given that these are the places where AI physically lives. 

The current prototype that Amodo is building could make it possible to gain two assurances about a data center that might be helpful in the years to come, Milton says. 

First, that a data center is only being used for inference. That means the running of existing AI models, rather than the training of new, more powerful ones. 

Second, that a data center is running a particular, agreed-upon model—for example, one that has passed certain safety tests, perhaps ones that have been set down in law.

To demonstrate how this might work, an Amodo engineer logs into the whirring server rack, where he spins up two separate systems, each containing an open-source AI model made by OpenAI. 

Think of the first system, he says, as an AI model that a company would normally run in a data center. The second system is the “verifier,” he explains. Its job is to sample snippets of data from this data center and rerun them on its own version of the model, thus confirming that the model is the one the data center operator claims it to be.

When he demonstrates it, the system works—at least on its own terms. The verifier performs some calculations on the outputs of the original AI model, and spits out a high certainty score that this model is GPT-OSS-120B, which is exactly correct.

The limitations

There are several significant problems that point to Amodo’s solution not yet being ready for prime time. 

For now, it only works with unencrypted data, which makes it unfeasible for the most sensitive workloads, which are routinely encrypted. (Milton says the next version of Amodo’s prototype will utilize “zero-knowledge” cryptography, which would significantly reduce the amount of unencrypted data needed.)

A second limitation is that a system like this would require data centers to be retrofitted, including a process ominously named “network tapping,” which involves copying data from working chips onto other verification systems within the same building. Given that these are some of the highest-security buildings on earth, housing trillion-dollar intellectual property and masses of private data, that’s access that no leading AI company is likely to be willing to grant, at least today. 

But it doesn’t have to be as scary as it sounds, Milton says. There are precedents in the history of arms control—including nuclear and chemical weapons—for international bodies to carry out inspections of sensitive facilities. These inspections can guarantee that a facility is compliant with international law, without revealing the secrets of how it works to adversaries. Amodo hopes to build on these principles, aiming to build a system that would only send low-information signals like “passed” or “failed” outside of the data center’s secure walls.

(Amodo says it plans to open-source all of its work on AI verification, so that all sides can interrogate it, understand exactly how it works, and be confident it lacks security vulnerabilities.) 

Another limitation is that the verifier system requires computing power in order to run. That could substantially reduce the total capacity, and thus profitability, of any data center that hosts it. The system witnessed by TIME required computing power equal to between one-third and one-fifth of the AI model it was monitoring. Amodo’s engineers say they expect to find substantial further efficiency gains, in particular because the system could theoretically be set to monitor only random samples of a data center’s computation, rather than every single calculation, in order to achieve its intended result. 

Milton acknowledges that for now at least, Amodo’s tech isn’t perfect. The idea, he says, is for it to improve significantly over time, ultimately reaching a point where it becomes minimally invasive and maximally privacy-preserving. “We tend to be of the mind that verification mechanisms will ladder up, and they won't be perfectly trustable and perfectly secure on day one,” he says. “Over time, we can get to systems that can be verified in much more detail.”

There are many individual AI researchers, Milton says, who are paid more than the single-digit-million dollar budget for his entire project. A full-scale effort, of the kind that AI workers asked for in the open letter, might quickly result in more sophisticated tools. 

“It is insane for us to think that we are even a noteworthy participant in this,” Milton says. “Let alone one of the largest projects.”

Is it politically possible?

While AI verification tech remains nascent, the acceleration of AI capabilities in recent months has led to a surge of interest in the field.

The Institute for Progress, a think-tank, recommended in August that the U.S. government collaborate with frontier AI labs, chipmakers, and hyperscale data center builders, plus other governments, to accelerate the development of AI verification tools. “If the nuclear arms control precedent is any indication, the ability to verify that agreements are being upheld is often necessary for parties to enter into them in the first place,” it wrote. “Better verification technology would unlock a broader space of possible agreements.”

It is a view shared by the authors of AI 2040, a follow-up to the widely-read essay AI 2027. Their so-called “Plan A” for humanity to navigate the arrival of superintelligent AI safely makes heavy use of data center monitoring technologies. 

And Anthropic recently announced it would devote resources to “help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require.” Those systems, it said in a June blog post, “would enable frontier AI developers to verify that others globally have actually stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret.”

Milton says Amodo has held some preliminary discussions with governments about its work, although he declines to say which governments, or to share specifics.

For now, at least, it seems clear the U.S. government does not share the enthusiasm.

“We totally reject global governance of AI,” the director of the White House office of science and technology policy, Michael Kratsios, said in February. “We believe AI adoption cannot lead to a brighter future if it is subject to bureaucracies and centralized control.”

It’s true that since that speech in February, the White House has slightly moderated its approach to AI regulation, having been spooked by the cyber-warfare capabilities of recent models into testing some frontier models before their release. But White House officials remain highly skeptical of heavy-handed interventions in the AI industry, especially ones that might be perceived as allowing for ground to be lost to China. “We refuse to stifle [AI] innovation with overly burdensome regulation,” President Trump wrote in the introduction to a June executive order.

China, meanwhile, appears to still be pursuing its strategy of releasing open-weight models in an attempt to catch up to the U.S. frontier. 

In other words: neither great power is exactly clamoring to agree on an AI treaty. Officials from the U.S. and China are planning to meet in September to discuss the growing risks of AI, Reuters reported, though that meeting is more likely to focus on immediate security issues.

Milton is unfazed by what appears, for the moment, to be the political unfeasibility of putting this technology to use. He expects that more powerful AI models will soon arrive, with scarier capabilities. At that point, he expects, both the U.S. and Chinese governments will be “sufficiently scared”—and might come to the table. That possibility, he says, is likely enough “that money should be spent on building the optionality for it.”

There’s something uniquely irritating about being forced to listen to whatever a stranger has decided to watch on their phone. Suddenly, the airport gate has a soundtrack—and it’s a tinny succession of TikToks, action scenes, and FaceTime chatter that no one else signed up for.

As Sammie Walker Herrera, a communication coach, puts it, you might be screaming internally: “When I said I listen to all kinds of music, I didn’t mean your music.”

Still, it’s one thing to object internally—and another to ask the person to turn it down. What if they get angry, ignore you, or turn up the volume out of spite? We asked etiquette and communication experts how to make the request without turning an annoying situation into an altercation.

First, decide whether you need to say anything at all

Sometimes the easiest solution is simply to get out of earshot. Nicole Del Valle Rose, an etiquette coach and founder of the Las Vegas consultancy Poised & Proper, says the most gracious response is often the least confrontational one.

“Etiquette isn’t about correcting every behavior that bothers us,” she says. “It’s about choosing the response that creates the best outcome for everyone.”

If there’s another table open at the coffee shop or plenty of room elsewhere in the train car, relocate. You’ll solve the problem in seconds and spare both of you an awkward exchange. Save the conversation for situations where you’re truly stuck, like on a plane, in a waiting room, or aboard a packed bus.

Talk about the sound—not the person

It can be tempting to make sure the offender knows they’re being rude. Resist the urge.

“You don’t want to immediately put this person on the defensive,” says Walker Herrera, who runs Speak Y’all, a communication coaching business. “Frame how it’s impacting you, rather than that they’re doing something ‘wrong.’”

Plus, you don’t know why their phone is so loud. They might be hard of hearing, or they may not realize how far the sound is carrying. Treating it as a solvable volume problem—not evidence of a glaring character defect—makes it more likely that they’ll cooperate.

Ask a question instead of making a demand

If you’re comfortable engaging for a moment, it can help to open with a little friendliness. Larry Schooler, an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Texas at Austin, suggests first asking what the person is listening to. After they answer, he recommends saying: “Oh, cool. I was just wondering if you could maybe lower the volume or listen to it privately; I needed to concentrate on something and was just finding it hard to do.”

Showing interest softens the interaction, Schooler says. Most people would feel uncomfortable if the first words they ever heard from a stranger were instructions to stop what they were doing or change their behavior. Giving a reason for the request also helps them understand where it’s coming from, instead of concluding that you simply dislike their music, video, or podcast.

If you’d rather skip the small talk, Michelle Retsky, a speech-language pathologist and founder of Words in Motion Therapy in New Port Richey, Fla., teaches social communication for a living. She suggests starting with a genuine question: “Excuse me, do you happen to have headphones? I’m having trouble focusing, and the sound is carrying over pretty loudly over here.”

That frames the situation as a problem the two of you can solve together, which “takes pressure off of them,” Retsky says. If they do have headphones and agree to use them, problem solved. If they don’t, follow up with: “Would you mind turning it down?”

Keep it short

There’s no need to deliver a closing argument about the deterioration of public etiquette. The longer you talk, the more uncomfortable—and potentially charged—the exchange can become.

“Short-and-to-the-point requests can be incredibly effective,” says Claudia Johnson, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Seattle. Her preferred script is just five words: “Would you mind using headphones?”

Tone matters more than finding the perfect wording. Ask politely, Johnson says, and assume the person simply didn’t realize they were bothering anyone. Most people will be happy—or at least willing—to turn down the volume.

And if they refuse? Just walk away; don’t argue or try to teach them a lesson. “We can’t change how others act; we can only ask nicely,” Johnson says. “If they say no or act immaturely about it, that says something about them and not if it was OK for you to ask.”

If the noise is making a flight, train ride, or restaurant visit genuinely unbearable, ask an employee to intervene rather than escalating the interaction yourself, Del Valle Rose suggests. And if the person seems agitated or unpredictable, skip the direct request altogether. Your peace and quiet isn’t worth jeopardizing your safety.

Above all, don’t become fixated on finding a magical combination of words that will guarantee a pleasant response. Healthy communication “doesn’t come down to saying the ‘right’ things,” Johnson says. “It’s about having the courage to say what you need in a respectful manner, while giving others the dignity of deciding how they will react.”

While the Sicilian city of Messina celebrated its most important religious summer holiday, thieves carried out a heist at the regional museum, making off with several works by Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina.

The thieves stole four of Antonello’s works from the Regional Museum of Messina (MuMe), local officials said on Sunday. The 15th century artist is credited with revolutionizing Renaissance portraiture by popularizing elements of Flemish realism and oil-painting techniques in Italy.

“We are devastated by what happened. They were among Antonello da Messina’s most important and best-known works. It is a tremendous loss for the museum, the city, the community and the art world,” MuMe director Marisa Mercurio told Italian news agency ANSA on Sunday.

“Messina without Antonello is deprived of the very essence of the greatest artist of the European Renaissance,” Enzo Caruso, Messina culture councillor, told broadcaster Sky Italia.

The theft is the latest high-profile heist in the art world. Days before, Italian police said they recovered three artworks by Renoir, Cézanne, and Matisse that had been stolen from Parma’s Magnani Rocca Foundation in March. Five people were detained in connection with the theft.

MuMe was closed to the public on Sunday amid ongoing investigations.

Here’s what we know so far about the heist.

How the theft happened

At least three masked people approached the museum at around 9:50 p.m. on Saturday, Italian media reported, citing museum officials and preliminary investigative materials. The theft took place during the Vara procession marking the Ferragosto holiday, which commemorates the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.

Italian media outlet TempoStretto reported that part of the perimeter railing near a side gate of the museum appeared bent or cut, and an exterior door had been forced open. The thieves appeared to target the Antonello works, going directly to the rooms after entering the museum, according to newspaper La Sicilia.

The theft took place over a few minutes, local media reported.

Marisa Mercurio, director of the museum, told Italian media that the museum’s alarms and cameras were working. Police are investigating how the thieves managed to bypass the security system. Investigators are reportedly reviewing surveillance footage of the theft. 

What was stolen

All five surviving wooden panels of the San Gregorio Polyptych, an altarpiece signed and dated to 1473, were removed, while another small double-sided panel was removed from a secure display case. But authorities later recovered two of the polyptych panels that appeared to have been abandoned on a low wall outside the museum. A citizen had noticed the abandoned panels and made the first call to police.

The San Gregorio Polyptych, commissioned for the San Gregorio monastery, originally consisted of six panels but an upper-central panel believed to have portrayed the dead Christ supported by angels disappeared possibly in the 16th century. The surviving polyptych was seriously damaged in an earthquake in 1908 and subsequently underwent restoration, although large portions of lost paint were not reconstructed.

Of the remaining five panels, the two upper panels depicted the “Annunciation of the Virgin.” The middle panel portrayed “Madonna and Child Enthroned,” flanked on either side by depictions of Saints Gregory and Benedict.

The work, considered one of the masterpieces of the Sicilian Renaissance, was the only by the painter to have never left his home city of Messina. Antonello is believed to have been born around 1430 in Messina.

Another work, a small double-sided panel portraying the Virgin Mary and Child with a Franciscan friar in adoration on one side and the dead Christ in Pietà on the other, was also stolen. The painting is dated to between 1465 and 1470. The work was attributed to Antonello in 2003 and acquired by Sicily at Christie’s auction house that same year. Based on its small size, it is believed to have been created for private worship.

No official valuation of the stolen paintings has been made public, but art experts have estimated that they are worth around 70 to 80 million euros ($81 to 92 million).

Earlier this year, Italy acquired Antonello’s devotional painting “Ecce Homo” for $14.9 million from Sotheby’s in New York.

Although “Ecce Homo” is housed permanently in Abruzzo, Messina had hoped to capitalize on increased international interest in the artist following the acquisition. The city was in the midst of developing its “Messina, Città di Antonello” initiative which included exhibitions and other cultural events, as well as a possible new museum dedicated to the artist.

What comes next

Prosecutors in Messina opened an investigation into the theft. Several officials, including Caruso, suggested that the heist could have been carried out by professionals or on commission for the black market, although the prosecutor’s office have not confirmed any theories.

Investigators are reportedly also interviewing museum staff to determine how the thieves managed to evade security.

But some observers have criticized the museum’s security arrangements after the theft, raising concerns about staffing levels. Others have criticized the broader political and administrative management of Sicily’s cultural heritage.

The heist has reminded many of Sicily’s most notorious art theft from more than half a century ago. In October 1969, thieves entered Palermo’s Oratory of San Lorenzo, cut Caravaggio’s “Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence” from its frame and carried it away. The painting, which had hung in the oratory for more than three centuries, has never been recovered.

Selling famous stolen art through legitimate channels is virtually impossible. “Stealing an Antonello may be far easier than selling one. If these are ordinary thieves, they will soon discover that—to their cost,” Lynda Albertson, director of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA), told the Italian daily La Repubblica.

Rather than selling the artworks, stolen art is instead often used as collateral among criminals for other illicit activities, Albertson said.

Last year, a similarly brazen theft at the Louvre in Paris, France, put international attention on museum security. In October, thieves broke into the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon in broad daylight and escaped with eight pieces of crown jewellery valued at 88 million euros. Although several suspects have been arrested, the stolen jewels remain missing.

In September 2022, I set myself a very public personal goal: to run a 5-minute mile. 

It was a completely mad idea. I was 58 years old, and, although in reasonably good shape, the fastest I could then complete a mile was in just over six minutes. I had given myself only eight weeks to cut around 70 seconds off my time—a massive improvement that most people familiar with running thought was unattainable. 

The appeal of the mile is that it is neither a sprint nor a marathon, requiring a combination of sustained speed and endurance—strong legs, strong lungs, and mental fortitude.

In my quest, age would be a factor. The fastest known mile by a runner over 60 is 4:49, set in 2020 by 61-year-old Dan King, a former University of Colorado athlete. While I am disciplined about my exercise and run seven days a week, my training is casual in its duration and intensity—and critically, I am no athlete. Yet I would be trying to run just 11 seconds slower than the record for someone roughly my age.

I hired a coach and—to make everything transparent and public—announced my goal on LinkedIn. I also approached running experts for their opinion and advice. I encouraged followers of my LinkedIn page to engage with my journey and set stretch goals of their own.

Why would I do this? Why would I set myself up for potential failure in such a public way? 

As founder and CEO of Discovery, a global financial services organization started in South Africa with the goal of making people healthier, the challenge was an opportunity to improve my own health while demonstrating the importance of physical activity and encouraging others to lace up their running shoes. Data from Vitality—a business model we pioneered for health and life insurers that tracks over 60 million life years of health and wellness data to reward positive health choices—shows this compellingly: moving from no exercise to just one physically active day per week reduces the risk of death by 36%, with positive knock-on effects for other healthy behaviors and mental wellbeing.

But most importantly, I did it out of a deep, long-standing conviction to illustrate the power of setting and declaring goals: in this case, out loud and in public. Not only would I be motivating myself, but by declaring it publicly and encouraging others to set their own goals, I hoped to spark a chain reaction.

This wasn’t just a personal ambition; it was an experiment in human motivation. Behavioral science explains why goal-setting is profoundly effective.

As rational decision makers facing options under conditions of risk and uncertainty, we think we are motivated to choose the most rational option—the one with the best combination of value and likelihood of occurring. This thinking—codified in the 1940s as “expected utility theory” by game theory founders John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern—dominated decision theory for decades. 

Expected utility theory assumes a linear relationship between rival potential gains—and between potential gains and losses. But this linear model was challenged in 1979 by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their theory—prospect theory—proposed that losses loom larger than gains, a phenomenon known as loss aversion.

In one experiment, participants reported feeling much worse about losing $100 than they felt good about gaining $100—despite the amounts at stake being the same. A foundational reason is that people evaluate outcomes relative to a reference point, typically the status quo, rather than in absolute terms. This reference point determines whether an outcome is perceived as a gain or a loss. Once a loss is perceived, loss aversion kicks in—an emotional response in which the pain of loss far outweighs the pleasure of gain. Losses are typically felt to be twice as impactful as gains of the same size. 

The logic is this: by setting and declaring a goal, we put ourselves on the line. By putting something at stake, we create something to lose. And because avoiding a loss feels psychologically twice as valuable as achieving a gain, setting and declaring bold goals triggers this force, unlocking radical motivation and decisive action. By declaring a goal publicly, I created something to lose: my credibility and public accountability to my followers. 

So how did my five-minute mile work out? I began, as all strenuous physical challenges should, with a health check and a baseline fitness assessment (which I also wrote about on LinkedIn). The latter gave me a cardiovascular fitness VO2 max result of 47.7, well above the 41 classified as “excellent” for men my age. My coach set me a brutal training plan, which he thought could—if all went well—slash my time by up to 30-40 seconds.

Over the next month, I stuck rigidly to my training routine. My time was improving: I managed to whittle it down to 5:40, which was stellar progress, but still a long way off from five minutes. I posted weekly “performance dashboard” updates on LinkedIn—and there, too, I saw huge gains toward my other goal of inspiring other people to set profound goals of their own. One person pledged to wrap up their PhD analysis within the year, and another set out to learn a new instrument. One of the most moving posts came from someone undergoing chemotherapy who decided to run about 3 miles in under 30 minutes—then followed up months later to say that even though it had intimidated her to set a personal goal publicly, she had achieved it. 

About six weeks into my training, I got impatient. I thought, How can I run at close to 3 minutes per kilometer when I don’t train at that speed? So I pushed a little faster than my coach had suggested. Then, after my run, I went into a full-day board meeting where I sat, barely moving, for ten hours. I went home to do an easy run up a steep hill, and to my horror, I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my calf. I had torn my calf muscle.

I tried everything to fix it, including platelet-rich plasma therapy and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. I was gutted, but I had to face it: my challenge was over.

Of course, I was devastated that I didn’t achieve my goal. I had made the rookie error of going too fast too soon, and I was bitterly disappointed. But I also saw the bigger picture: I had brought my time down to 5:35, and my VO2 max had risen from 47 to 58. Nearing age 60, I was faster and fitter than I had ever been, and my running had leveled up. Moreover, people all over the world had started chasing goals of their own and sharing their progress. My 30 posts over eight weeks had reached close to 12 million people.

So, was it a success or a failure? In the final calculation, it was a success for several reasons. First, it engaged people in the importance of physical activity. Second, it proved my hypothesis: setting and declaring a goal takes you further than you would have gone without one. And third, even if you fall short of the destination, the goal—and the journey—will change you. 

After my injury, one of my key takeaways was that I had nevertheless made remarkable progress as a runner. So, I set myself another goal: could I run a marathon again—something I hadn’t done in two decades—and do so at a reasonable pace, given my age? This time, I stuck to my training plan, avoided injury, and the answer was an emphatic yes. 

In 2025, I ran the London Marathon in 3 hours, 37 minutes and 40 seconds, a time that put me in the top 20% of all finishers. I could never have achieved that time 20 years ago, let alone before my 2022 challenge. This had a positive knock-on effect: my result in London meant I qualified for the Boston Marathon, and I ran an even faster time in that race.

In my case, one declared goal—even a failed one—led to another. My limits expanded. And in the process, I experienced the transformative power of setting and declaring goals.

This excerpt was adapted from The Four Principles: Multiply Your Impact in Life and Leadership by Adrian Gore with permission from Macmillan Publishers.

Ukraine launched one of its largest aerial assaults on Russia overnight on Saturday, firing on targets deep inside the country and killing at least six people, according to Russian authorities.

Russia’s defense ministry said it destroyed 822 drones. Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, said in a Telegram post that at least 600 drones were launched toward the capital city and that over a third were destroyed.

The raid showcased the rapid advancement of Ukraine’s drone and missile capabilities in recent months, which enabled it to strike deep inside Russian territory despite the country’s advanced defense networks.

Read More: Why It Is Time for the West to Crush Putin’s War Economy

Calling the assault one of the “most massive drone attacks in recent memory,” the Moscow region’s Gov. Andrei Vorobyov said on Telegram that one of the people killed in the attack was an 83-year-old man who died when a drone “crashed onto a private home.” 

Five others were killed in the Rostov region, according to its governor, Yury Slyusar. Ukraine said it had been targeting a factory that produced rocket fuel.

Vorobyov added that several people were also injured in the Podolsk area amid a fire caused by drone strikes on a warehouse belonging to Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries, which is often compared to Amazon in the U.S.

Ukrainian forces have repeatedly struck warehouses belonging to Russia’s largest online retailer in an attempt to disrupt the country’s consumer economy. Last week, Ukraine hit at least two warehouses, accusing the company of handling military goods and calling its locations military-linked “logistics centers.” Ukraine has attacked approximately 20 Wildberries warehouses since July 18.

“Ukraine has taken 7 of Wildberries’ 10 largest logistics hubs out of operation,” Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense said on social media Sunday. “Russian logistics is feeling the consequences of the war Russia brought to Ukraine.”

Wildberries and Moscow have both denied that these warehouses are affiliated with the military.

The attacks demonstrate Ukraine’s growing capabilities to launch strikes deep into Russian territory, up to 1,500 miles (2,400 km) from the countries’ shared border. 

In over four years since the war’s start, Ukraine has worked to rely less on Western aid—something President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been very vocal about in recent months, especially as he decried a “critical shortage of air defense missiles,” including the U.S.-made Patriot missiles that have been integral in intercepting and destroying Russian drones.

Read More: Chalk One Up for Ukraine

Russia Strikes Ukraine as NATO Downs Drone Over Romania

Russia also carried out an intense barrage against Ukraine over the weekend, killing two people at a steel plant in Kryvyi Rih, which is the hometown of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The plant, ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih, posted about the incident on Telegram, sharing that 13 employees were injured.

“As a result of the attack, the main production facilities of energy and blast furnace production were damaged and the production processes of the plant were partially stopped,” the company wrote.

Russian attacks also sparked fires throughout Kyiv, wounding six people. In total, at least seven people were killed and 51 injured in Russian strikes over the weekend, according to casualty figures reported by regional Ukrainian authorities.

“Wherever the Russians can reach with their ballistic missiles, they strike civilian infrastructure,” Zelenskyy said on X in the aftermath of the attacks.

A NATO jet on an air policing mission also shot down an unidentified drone in Romanian airspace on Saturday—the fourth unmanned aircraft shot down over ⁠the country this year, Romania’s defense ministry said Sunday.

Romania’s defense ‌ministry did not identify the drone’s origin, but it said the aerial target entered from Moldova. 

Nearly 30 years ago, Tupac Shakur, known by the stage name 2Pac, was killed in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada. 

One of four men in a white Cadillac fired 13 shots into the 25-year-old rap legend’s vehicle, according to TIME reporting from September 1996. Shakur was riding with the co-founder of Death Row Records, Marion “Suge” Knight. Knight was grazed by a bullet but survived. Shakur was shot multiple times, and one bullet tore through his lung; he was pronounced dead at the hospital six days later on Sept. 13, 1996.

The events that unfolded have been the subject of many true crime documentaries, books, and podcasts. But one fundamental question has remained unresolved: Who was responsible for Shakur's death?

The first person ever charged in Shakur’s murder faces trial on Monday in Nevada.

Who is on trial for the murder of Tupac Shakur? And why now?

On trial is Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, a former leader of the South Side Compton Crips. At the time of Shakur’s murder, the Crips were associated with the New York-based Bad Boy Records amid a hip-hop rivalry with the Los Angeles-based Death Row Records, which signed Shakur.

Davis is not accused of firing the shots that killed Shakur; rather, prosecutors allege that he orchestrated the attack. He is charged with “murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further, or assist a criminal gang.” Under Nevada law, someone who aids or abets a crime—or encourages, hires, commands, or otherwise induces another person to commit it—can be prosecuted as a principal.

Shakur’s murder went unsolved for years, but it never faded from public interest. In 2008, law enforcement interviewed Davis, but a proffer agreement that his defense says prevented his statements from later being used against him.

In 2019, Davis published his memoir, “Compton Street Legend.” He gave multiple interviews promoting his book—and the role of the Crips in Shakur’s death. He describes himself as “one of the only living eyewitnesses to Tupac’s killing.” 

“Tupac was a guppy that got swallowed up by some ferocious sharks,” Davis wrote, though he said he felt “a deep sense of remorse for what happened.”

Those public disclosures helped revive the investigation. 

Davis was arrested in 2023, when he was charged with obtaining a gun “for the purpose of seeking retribution against” Shakur and Knight. Prosecutors allege that the gun Davis obtained the night of the shooting was expressly intended to deliver retribution for an incident earlier in the evening in which Shakur and his associates attacked Davis’s nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson.

The altercation took place after Shakur and Knight attended Mike Tyson’s boxing match at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Footage from the hotel lobby shows the two, along with others in their entourage, confronting Anderson after the match.

“We couldn’t let no record company studio gangsters do us like that,” Davis wrote in his memoir, before describing the moment that he and three other men—his nephew Anderson, DeAndre “Dre” Smith, and Terrence “T-Brown” Brown, all of whom have since died—eventually spotted Shakur on the street in Las Vegas that night. 

“No words exchanged, the time for talking had passed,” he said.  

Davis described passing a handgun to the back of the Cadillac as they approached Shakur’s vehicle in his book—but he did not say who fired the fatal shots. It remains unclear which of the two individuals in the backseat, Anderson or Smith, actually shot Shakur. 

At a press conference after Davis’s arrest, Las Vegas police acknowledged that his public appearances to promote the memoir allowed them to “reinvigorate” the case.

“We knew at this time that this was likely our last time to take a run at this case to successfully solve this case and bring forth a criminal,” then-Lt. Jason Johansson of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said.

Davis’s defense has sought to separate him from the book’s contents, claiming that co-writer Yusuf Jah had exaggerated events and added false information in an attempt to sell copies. His lawyers argue that the book was intended for entertainment value only.

But Clark County District Judge Carli Kierny ruled that the memoir would be admissible evidence, saying at a June 30 hearing that Davis has not promoted the book as a work of fiction and rather “encourages people to buy it to get the real truth.”

Davis’s defense also argued that an agreement with law enforcement officers in 2008 established that the contents of his interview could not be used against him. While expressing concerns about the possible protections surrounding that interview, Kierny acknowledged that his statements were given voluntarily and may now be admissible.

Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc DiGiacomo told the court: “Had he decided to never write the book, he would not probably have ever been prosecuted for the crime.”

Davis pleaded not guilty; however, if he is convicted, he could face life in prison without parole.

What to know about the key players in the courtroom

The jury, which was selected last week, consists of six men and 10 women—four of whom are alternates.

Davis’s defense is led by Michael Sanft, who took the case pro bono, and the prosecution is led by DiGiacomo. 

A partial witness list was shared with potential jurors last week. It included Knight, who is serving a 28-year prison sentence in California after pleading “no contest” to voluntary manslaughter for fatally striking the owner of Heavyweight Records, Terry Carter, with his car in 2015. He told ABC News last week that he would not testify.

"This trial has nothing to do with me and if somebody brings me there, it's gonna hurt whoever brings me there. I promise you that," Knight said in the interview. 

Members of Shakur’s family are also on the potential witness list, including his sister Sekyiwa Shakur and his stepbrother Maurice “Mopreme” Shakur.

Prosecutors are expected to call between 35 and 45 witnesses during the trial, which is expected to last four to five weeks.

We all know that exercise is good for your health. But, the other side of this equation is often overlooked: a lack of exercise, or physical inactivity, is a major health risk. 

One of the first landmark studies that recognized this fact was conducted more than 70 years ago. In the 1950s, epidemiologist Jeremy Morris studied more than 30,000 employees of the London transportation system. He observed that bus drivers who sat all day behind the wheel had a higher risk of developing coronary heart disease than conductors who walked up and down the aisles and stairs collecting fares. This natural experiment fundamentally changed how we think about activity for the prevention of heart disease.

Since then, the evidence to support physical activity for better cardiovascular health has grown substantially. Regular physical activity lowers the risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, and has been linked to longer lives and healthier aging. These data are strong enough that the American Heart Association names physical activity one of the eight key things you can do for better cardiovascular health. That group, and the federal physical activity guidelines, both recommend at least 150 minutes each week of moderate intensity exercise, along with at least two days per week of muscle-strengthening activities. 

Despite the accumulation of decades of evidence, physical inactivity remains one of our greatest public-health challenges. According to the American Heart Association’s 2026 Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics report, which my colleagues and I recently published in Circulation, fewer than half of U.S. adults achieve the recommended amount of aerobic activity, and only one in five achieve recommended targets for combining aerobic and muscle-strength training activities.

As we have modernized our lives and jobs with screens and desks, the “bus driver” problem that Morris identified several decades ago has become even more common. Physical inactivity now contributes to millions of deaths worldwide each year. 

So why don’t we, as clinicians, approach physical inactivity the way we do other major cardiovascular risk factors?

When someone has high blood pressure or high cholesterol or is at high cardiovascular risk, we identify it and develop a treatment plan. Although physical inactivity is rarely addressed in this way, there are a few select conditions where we in fact do prescribe exercise. For people recovering from a heart attack or for anyone who has recently had a coronary stent placement, bypass surgery, or heart valve surgery, guidelines recommend a supervised exercise program called cardiac rehabilitation. However, even after a cardiac event, less than one-third of patients participate, despite strong evidence that cardiac rehabilitation programs reduce hospitalizations and risk of dying. 

The value of structured exercise extends well beyond heart disease. A recent randomized trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that patients with colon cancer who participated in a three-year structured exercise program were 30% more likely to live longer and without cancer compared with the group that only received advice to exercise.  

But why do we wait until after someone develops heart disease, or cancer, to prescribe exercise as part of the treatment plan? Why aren’t we investing in the tools and programs to help people become more active years or even decades earlier, before disease develops? Exercise, after all, can prevent disease. 

Today, we have the opportunity to change our collective approach to physical inactivity. Millions of people now have smartphones, watches, and digital tools to track daily movement. These wearable devices have the potential to help us measure, modify, and monitor our movement behaviors. But as health monitors have gotten more popular, the sheer volume of health advice for how to use them has increased exponentially. As a result, it can sometimes be overwhelming to know where to start. 

Step counts are an intuitive, universally understood, and easily tracked place to begin. They have the potential to be a powerful public-health tool. Moreover, walking is an accessible form of activity that doesn’t require equipment and can be a great place to start an exercise program. 

So, what’s a good goal for daily steps? Most people may think that 10,000 steps a day is the right target. But this number originated from a marketing campaign—not from science—because it was easy to remember. Ten thousand steps per day was never based on hard evidence. In fact, when researchers examined daily step counts in large population studies, the health benefits for walking begin well before 10,000 steps. 

Even more encouraging is that people who moved from very low levels of activity to modest activity had significant gains in health outcomes. This is particularly important when we think about defining achievable goals to set people up for success rather than discourage them. As a preventive cardiologist, I focus on the message that every step, and every movement, matters. Even parking a little farther away, walking while doing a video call, or taking the stairs instead of the escalator add up. 

To address the 10,000 steps misperception, we should retire that arbitrary target as a one-size-fits-all prescription and replace it with a message grounded in evidence: start where you are, and do a little more. If you're currently taking 3,000 steps a day, aim for 4,000. If you're at 5,000, try for 6,000.

Exercise isn't only good for improving heart health. Regular walking is linked to better sleep, improved mood, healthier brain aging, and lower risk of dementia. 

At the same time, we cannot ignore that the choice to exercise is not solely an individual one. It is also shaped by a person’s surroundings. In order to be able to make walking an exercise habit, there need to be safe sidewalks, neighborhood parks, and green spaces in the communities in which we live and work. We must prioritize policies that enable and support a healthy environment and healthy activity choices.

Perhaps our greatest missed opportunity comes from not starting earlier. By adolescence, physical inactivity is already common, with only 20-26% of teens reporting meeting physical activity guidelines. This means by adulthood, we are already working backwards.

The science is remarkably reassuring: you don’t need to become an athlete to improve your health. Spending more minutes walking today can improve the health of your heart and your brain for years to come. The goal is not to reach an arbitrary number. It is to keep moving.

An egg recall linked to a salmonella outbreak was upgraded to the highest possible risk level by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Wednesday.

Nearly 1.6 million dozen eggs were labeled “Class I,” which the agency defines as “a situation in which there is a reasonable probability that the use of or exposure to a violative product will cause serious adverse health consequences or death.”

Symptoms of salmonella infection include “fever, diarrhea (which may be bloody), nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain,” according to the FDA.

“Illness usually occurs within 12 to 72 hours after eating food that is contaminated with Salmonella, and the symptoms usually last four to seven days,” its website said, noting that children under 5, the elderly, and the immunocompromised were more likely to have severe reactions.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that eggs contaminated with Salmonella Enteritidis had infected at least 98 people across 17 states. No deaths have been reported, but 26 people have been hospitalized.

Read More: The Trump Administration Wants More Food Ingredient Disclosure

What to know about the salmonella egg recall and how to stay safe

The FDA’s upgraded risk classification comes three weeks after Midwest Poultry Services initiated a recall of the approximately 19 million affected eggs, according to a company announcement shared on the FDA website July 22.

The eggs were produced at farms in Texas between June 6 and July 3, and the cartons show sell-by or best-by dates between July 20, 2026, and Aug. 17, 2026. They were distributed to Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Samples collected at the farms tested positive for salmonella, and genetic sequencing found that some matched the strain responsible for the outbreak, according to the FDA. 

However, in a July 24 update from the FDA, the agency said that Midwest Poultry Services “does not account for all the illnesses in this outbreak.” It did not identify any additional known origins.

“Additional investigation is ongoing to determine if there are other sources of illness,” it said. 

TIME reached out to Midwest Poultry Services and the FDA for comment.

Consumers who may have purchased contaminated products have been advised by the FDA to either throw them away or return them for a refund at the place of purchase. The recalled eggs were sold under Country Morning, Cal-Maine Sunups, Brookshire’s, Simple Truth, and Kroger brand names. Potentially contaminated products can be identified by the codes P-1950 or 0840962 with a Julian date between 157 and 184.

The agency also said to “wash hands, utensils, and surfaces with hot, soapy water before and after handling raw eggs and raw egg-containing foods.”

Other salmonella and foodborne illness outbreaks in 2026

The reclassification of the recalled eggs comes as health officials continue to investigate a separate outbreak of salmonella linked to jalapeños.

The number of people infected by a jalapeño-related outbreak rose to 345 on Friday, with 36 hospitalizations across 27 states. 

According to the CDC, several people who fell ill said they recently ate at either Chipotle or Qdoba. The restaurants have since stopped selling potentially contaminated products featuring jalapeños grown in Sinaloa, Mexico. “Given their actions to remove product from their stores, CDC and FDA do not consider there to be a current ongoing risk from these establishments to consumers in this outbreak,” the CDC wrote in a statement Friday.

The contamination also led to a recall on Aug. 9 by Taylor Farms—which had previously been connected to a multistate cyclosporiasis outbreak traced to fresh lettuce. The outbreak resulted in more than 9,400 cases, nearly 400 hospitalizations, and two deaths.

Read More: What to Know About the Diarrhea Outbreak Tied to Fresh Produce

Taylor Farms sent products featuring jalapeños to over half of the states in the country, where they were sold by retailers including Kroger, Target, and Whole Foods.

In addition to the foodborne outbreaks, there have also been several salmonella outbreaks linked to live animals, including eight multistate outbreaks connected to backyard poultry and a smaller outbreak tied to children handling pet veiled chameleons. As of July 27, the backyard poultry outbreak was linked to 814 cases in 44 states.

A U.S. oil company is delaying its Arctic drilling project following permit discussions and a public rebuke from the Greenland government for moving equipment without authorization.

Greenland Energy, the Texas-based firm leading the project, had hoped to begin drilling operations as early as October in the Jameson Land Basin in eastern Greenland—an estimate cited there could be up to 13bn barrels of prospective oil resources, but analysts who set that number have called it “highly speculative.”

That timeline has now significantly changed and the project cannot commence until the winter of 2027, at the earliest.

The Greenland government on Wednesday issued a statement detailing that the “necessary regulatory process cannot be completed, and the necessary approvals cannot therefore be obtained before the planned start of drilling.”

It emphasized that “preparatory activities cannot be started either” and “several parts of the project are under regulatory review.” 

Greenland Energy’s venture partner, the British outfit 80 Mile, said the team remains “fully committed to the project and intends to commence drilling as soon as the necessary approvals have been received and the programme can be undertaken safely and responsibly.” Greenland Energy’s share price dropped in the aftermath of the announcement.

The project has stalled during a time where there is high U.S. interest surrounding Greenland’s oil potential.

President Donald Trump’s Greenland special envoy Jeff Landry in May, when asked about strategic interests that the U.S. may have in Greenland, honed in on the possibilities surrounding oil.

“Greenland could be exporting two million barrels of oil a day right now. Think about what that would mean. Think about what kind of pressure that would relieve in the Strait of Hormuz,” he said, referencing the ongoing disruption to the vital trade route. “We could have those barrels on production within 10 months or so.”

The U.S. interest comes amid a tense geopolitical backdrop, as Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, since returning to office. Greenlandic and Danish officials have made it explicitly clear this is not something they are open to.

Greenland stopped issuing new oil licences in 2021. However, Greenland Energy has access as its venture partner 80 Mile inherited a license via its subsidiary White Flame Energy, which acquired the exploration rights to Jameson Land prior to the cut-off date.

But much more than a license is needed before digging can start. It’s a complex process with various authorization steps that need to be completed along the way. The U.S.-based oil company's project faltered on one of these steps earlier in the summer, leading to a stern warning being issued by the Greenland government and a whole host of discussion.

Here’s what happened, and what to know about the company spearheading the ambitious oil project.

What is the drilling project and why did the Greenland government issue a public warning?

In March, Greenland Energy’s executives said they had obtained the rights from 80 Mile and its subsidiary company for licenses attached to the Jameson Land Basin in east Greenland. 

The Texas-based oil company described the chance to explore Greenland as “a rare opportunity to unlock one of the largest undrilled onshore basins in the Arctic through a disciplined, environmentally responsible approach."

On July 30, Greenland's Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources issued a stern warning after learning equipment for the drilling project had been moved to the island’s eastern coast without authorization.

“A strong warning will be sent to the licensee with a warning that all future logistical matters must be advised and approved by the mineral resources authority—before they are carried out,” read the publicly-shared statement.

The government added that “the licensee did not have the necessary approvals from the mineral resources authority in place before initiating this operation,” however they opted against pushing for the equipment to be transported back, stating it would not be a proportionate demand.

in the aftermath, Greenland Energy on Aug. 6 said recent meetings with Greenlandic officials had been “constructive.”

80 Mile acknowledged the government's concern over the moving of the equipment, saying it "takes this warning seriously.”

TIME has reached out to Greenland Energy and 80 Mile for comment.

What do we know about Greenland Energy—and does it have links to Trump’s circle?

Some coverage of Greenland Energy's actions has portrayed the firm as a "Trump-linked" company, focusing on potential links to the President.

When this connection was put to CEO Robert Price in a July interview with the Greenlandic broadcasting cooperation KNR, he said that the company’s management had met with Trump’s envoy Landry, but emphasized the oil venture has “absolutely nothing to do with the Trump Administration.”

Carol Craig, who was appointed to Greenland Energy’s board in June, is the founder, CEO, and chair of Sidus Space—which in late 2025 was selected as one of the contract awardees to support Trump’s Golden Dome missile-defense strategy.

Another Trump-associated figure connected with the U.S.-based oil company is Dr. Phil McGraw, who hosted the long-running talk show Dr. Phil.

The TV personality’s Envoy Media company has partnered with Greenland Energy in creating a six-part documentary series about the company’s “arctic exploration.”

McGraw hosted Price and Greenland Energy’s executive chairman Larry Swets on The Dr. Phil Podcast to discuss the project in a June 22 episode titled: “Frozen Gold."

“I think it's going to be a fascinating journey and I thank you for allowing us to be part of it,” McGraw said.

In 2025, McGraw was appointed by Trump to serve as a member of the White House Religious Liberty Commission. The TV doctor recently spoke about his work with the presidential commission during an Oval Office event.

Tensions between the U.S. and Greenland

Price and Swets have stated their exploratory efforts in Greenland are not related to American annexation.

Even so, the drilling project is being discussed against a backdrop of great geopolitical tensions stirred by Trump’s repeated threats to annex Greenland.

The fact a U.S.-based company is at the forefront of the project has arguably resulted in the government warning receiving more international focus, experts say.

“Any company who did this in Greenland would probably be treated the same way by the government. It's not because it's a U.S. company that this is happening,” Anne Merrild, a professor and head of the department of sustainability and planning at Aalborg University, tells TIME, but “if another country came in and did the same, it wouldn't get the same attention.”

Trump shocked European allies in January when he threatened to burden them with additional tariffs unless Denmark agreed to sell Greenland—this was later walked back, but the economic threat garnered widespread backlash from world leaders.

Trump threatening to annex Greenland has “created a situation where the population of Greenland are worried about what's going to happen and have a greater need of feeling in control,” says Merrild.

The President has repeatedly stated that the U.S. needs to acquire Greenland as a matter of “national security.” Greenland's positioning between the U.S., Russia, and Europe makes it a strong geopolitical asset, and Trump has argued that Denmark cannot be relied upon to protect the island.

Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, tells TIME that “the Greenlandic political system and authorities have actually been very resilient” in the face of the threats.

“They've been sticking to insisting that we will help America take care of its legitimate security concerns, but we don't want to give away our self determination and our sovereignty,” he says.

Still, the topic has repeatedly returned to the forefront of U.S. political discussion.

At the NATO Summit in Turkey in July, Trump again said Greenland “should be controlled by the U.S., not by Denmark" and as recently as Aug. 1 the President posted an edited picture of himself peering over the Nordic territory with the caption, “Hello, Greenland!”

He sits shirtless, muscular, and shaggy, baseball hat turned backwards (of course) as he bites into a hunk of raw liver the size of a Shih Tzu. Brian Johnson, known as the Liver King, consumes and advocates for a steady diet of raw organ meat to maintain an “ancestral lifestyle.” Johnson has millions of followers on Instagram and TikTok who tune in specifically for this content. 

Johnson’s fans are not alone. As economic anxiety reshapes American masculinity, a growing subculture of young and working-class men is turning to maxxing out their bodies as a way to reclaim value in a labor market that increasingly devalues physical work. Working out isn’t enough. It’s how they eat, dress, and sculpt—especially how they eat. And their staple food isn’t expensive biohacker supplements; it’s ground beef, the cheap, protein-dense “boy kibble” endlessly promoted by fitness influencers. 

The rise of carnivore aesthetics, lifting culture, and hyper-protein diets reflects a deeper crisis of identity among men who see the traditional beacons of secure manhood—having a well-paying job, owning their own home, being a dad—dimming before their eyes. They’ve come to feel their bodies are one of the few forms of capital they still control.  And, perhaps most interestingly, this obsession is nothing new. And, like the fads that came before, they’re following a path that is certain to leave them unfulfilled. 

The history of America’s beef obsession 

The history of our obsession with beef and masculinity goes back at least 140 years. In 1886, the great novelist Henry James published his novel The Bostonians, in which the unsympathetic Southern patriarch Basil Ransom thunders: “The whole generation is womanized, the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy.”

Later, in 1909, Woods Hutchinson, a physician and health writer, wrote a bestselling book of health advice for young men, Instinct and Health, advising that men consume: “Meat!  R-r-red meat, dr-r-ripping with b-l-lood, r-r-reeking of the shambles!” 

Then, as now, economic changes, fundamental shifts in family life, and evolving domestic relations all combined to make many young white American men feel anxious about their identity, and desperate to prove their masculinity in a world they perceived as increasingly sapping their virility. 

The solution? Beef. And this isn’t the first time Americans have sought to eat their way out of an existential crisis of identity. 

These observations sound familiar because at several times in our history, observers have declared a veritable crisis among American men. The transition from farms, the open range, and artisanal workshops to offices and large, impersonal, factories was seen as sapping virility—just as our tiny cubicles and remote workstations are said to do today. Rapid immigration, alongside the entry of women and people of color into new sectors of the workforce in the early 1900s, arguably caused as much alarm as those same groups do today. 

So, as now, many men followed the adage that when the going gets tough, the tough,  well… toughen up. The first YMCA gym was built in 1869, the first dude ranch a decade later. An estimated one in five American men belonged to a fraternal order in the early 1900s, where they could relax in an all-male and all-white social space. 

The Boy Scouts of America (co-founded in 1910 by Ernest Thompson Seton), and the Boone and Crockett Club (founded in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt before becoming president) heralded the “strenuous life” as virtual boys’ liberation movements. Even the great psychologist and early manfluencer G. Stanley Hall, coiner of the term “adolescence” in 1904, wrote, “you cannot have a firm will without firm muscles.”

Today’s manosphere revives an old script

Old, bad ideas do not simply fade away. Sometimes they return as viral content. And that’s quite clear today, as the internet is awash with advice about what to eat, wear, pump up and slim down. 

Today’s masculinist influencers warn that masculinity is under siege and argue that modern society has made men dangerously weak. British-American social media personality Andrew Tate claims that, “Society as a whole is telling men to be weaker and weaker, saying it’s somehow the solution to everything because being a man is toxically masculine. Being a strong man is bad,” he said on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. “To be a good man, you have to be a very weak one.”

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson insists that “The masculine spirit is under assault. It’s obvious,” and, ““If you are not capable of cruelty, you are absolutely a victim to anyone who is.” Podcaster Joe Rogan echoes the familiar maxim that “Hard times create hard men. Hard men create easy times. Soft times create soft men. Soft men create hard times,” while fitness influencers like Liver King declare bluntly, “We have a soft man problem today.”

Together, these men, alongside others including Myron Gaines, David Goggins, and Hamza Ahmed, compose the “manosphere,” a group that doles out advice online about how to toughen up and seduce women—in other words, to become “real men.”  

They’ve swallowed The Red Pill, and like their early 20^th-century forbears, they’re incredibly nostalgic. They look back towards a mythic time when real men roamed the earth like dinosaurs—brawny men, physically strong, emotionally stoic, effortlessly dominant—men who worked with their hands, fought in wars, sacrificed for their families and endured pain and hardship without blinking. 

The fact that such men are in short supply, and that this romanticized myth didn’t even remotely compare with the lives such men actually lived, is of little concern to today’s masculinists. Indeed, the language of conservatism is often the language of nostalgia. It’s not just to “conserve” what’s there, but to return, retrieve, reclaim, and restore what has been lost.

How beef became a symbol of masculinity

When it comes to what is perceived as the increasingly enfeebled and emasculated bodies of American men, today’s manosphere influencers hark back to the words of bodybuilder Bernarr MacFadden from 1900. 

Think of MacFadden, “America’s foremost health crusader,” as America’s first masculinist influencer. Instead of podcasts and Instagram reels, MacFadden’s popular magazine, Physical Culture, and his best-selling books like The Virile Powers of Superb Manhood: How Developed, How Lost, How Regained helped instruct men to man up through diet and exercise. He even invented a “peniscope,” a small vacuum tube that was said to enlarge the male organ and thus help men feel more manly. 

Then, as now, manfluencers seem to believe that you are what you eat. And beef is the most masculine of all foods. Enough with the vegetables! No more broccoli! No more sushi! That’s surely a diet for “soy boys.” (Many proclaim that long-debunked association of soy products, like tofu, with increased estrogen, therefore making men more feminine, and therefore, turning them gay). 

The manosphere is drenched in blood-red carnivorous encomiums. “They don’t want you strong. They want you weak. And that’s why they’re promoting this veganism garbage,” says Tate. “I eat beef and salt and water,” proclaims Peterson. “That’s it.” (A British journalist followed that regimen. It did not go well.) 

Something called “the lion diet” eschews even dairy in favor of water, salt, and meat from ruminant animals. (Monogastric chickens do not qualify.) Popular podcaster of “FreshandFit”, which boasts over 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube and close to 300 million views, Myron Gaines mixes raging misogyny and anti-Semitism with suggestions about a carnivorous dietary regimen.  

You can’t eat your way to manhood

Of course, masculinity is complex. Beef is no longer “what’s for dinner,” as the old Beef Industry Council ad told us. Nor the ingredient about which one was always asking its whereabouts: “Where’s the beef?” 

To be sure, you can not eat your way to manhood. But Americans have been struggling to learn this lesson for decades. 

At the turn of the century, health reformers like J.H. Kellogg, C.W. Post and Sylvester Graham (he of the cracker) promoted whole grains and unprocessed foods as a sure way to prevent the scourge of masturbation.  

One concern, of course, is the cost of such carnivorous gorging.  At a popular neighborhood restaurant on my block, a grass-fed sirloin goes for $46. At a time when prices are hurtling upwards and men’s labor force participation is falling, meat prices have been climbing steadily, from an average of around $3.55 a pound for ground beef when President Trump first took office to about $6.75 a pound in 2026, and steak prices to over $11 per pound.

Combine these carnivorous cravings with the compulsive bodybuilding and muscle-maxxing, and you have a cardiovascular nightmare. And add to that the newest craze of “looksmaxxing” by which men sculpt their physiques and faces (through cosmetic surgery, extreme diets, and even surgical altering of facial bone structures) and you can feel the desperation like anxious sweat. 

The fantasy that masculinity can be recovered through diet is as old as the United States. Every generation discovers its own version of “boy kibble.” Every generation eventually learns that strength of character cannot be bought by the pound.

Just as American men discovered a century ago, masculinity is not a diet nor a fashion accessory. It comes from within, being morally and emotionally strong enough to serve one’s family, community, and nation. That’s the meat of the issue.

I was an early medical student at the University of Miami in Florida, seeing a patient in a local primary care clinic. “Abdominal pain with constipation,” I proudly told my supervising physician. “I think it’s irritable bowel syndrome.”  

We went to see the patient and I watched with self-satisfaction as he asked the same questions I had. When did the pain start? Where is it? I waited for him to tell her it was likely IBS. But he didn’t. He paused and looked at her face after his last question, and for the first time I noticed she wasn’t making eye contact. She was looking at the ground. “We’ve known each other for a long time,” he told her gently, “and you seem worried. Can you share what you’re thinking?”  

She didn’t say anything right away. Finally, she looked up. “My sister was just diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. I’m worried I might have it too.”

For the next 15 minutes I watched as they talked about how she was processing her sister’s diagnosis, her fears about the future, what it all meant for her future colon cancer screening, and why at this point we were most concerned about IBS. 

By the end of the visit, her expression had cleared; I realized I hadn’t noticed how frightened she was. I felt ashamed of myself. What kind of doctor was I going to be? 

My supervising physician and I talked about it. “You learn how to look,” he said. “When you care, you get a feel for it.”

You get a feel for it. 

That lesson has stayed at the forefront for me as I’ve watched artificial intelligence sweep through medicine and enter the clinical environment of our internal medicine residency program at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. AI scribes. Chatbots that tell you a differential diagnosis if you put in a patient’s symptoms. Electronic medical record tools that will summarize a patient’s hospital course for you. But they can’t feel. 

To be sure, AI can do incredible things in medicine. In this new world, I hear trainees wonder if AI will make doctors obsolete. I also hear some—usually not physicians—make this claim with confidence. They’re right about one thing: medicine is changing, and we in health care need to figure out our place in this new world.

But they’re wrong that physicians will become obsolete as AI becomes better at processing information. As I learned in medical school, truly caring for a patient begins before the first question is asked and the first test is ordered. It begins with looking. Noticing a second of hesitation before a patient responds. Seeing the pits in a nailbed. Hearing a change in heart sounds between visits. It begins when you commit to focusing entirely on the person in front of you, and to creating a relationship—that’s how you get a feel for it. 

AI excels at processing information that is presented to it, like symptoms, test results, and even human expressions. It reasons with the input it is given. But it cannot decide what deserves attention before data exist. 

Great physicians define the input. They decide which symptoms matter, observe what wasn’t said, and understand what information deserves the most attention. They are curious about the patient in front of them, and that curiosity drives them to dig deeper, discover information an algorithm couldn’t, and direct the flow of information—not just receive it.

Ironically, healthcare systems are already pushing physicians away from careful observation and curiosity toward the kind of medicine AI performs best: documenting, checking boxes, and following protocols. As a result, now many physicians don’t get the chance to experience the “feel” of medicine. Some ask questions (input) and tell the patient the plan (output)—but don’t observe or connect. They don’t have the time to practice the aspects of medicine that distinguish them from software. 

Could AI in the coming decades replace these doctors? Probably. If the input is just data, the output would probably be the same. But the patients’ experience will be the one I would have given my patient with abdominal pain: incomplete and ineffective.  

We need to embrace what AI can do to make medicine better while at the same time recognizing what it cannot do. We must see it for what it is—an adjunct to elevate physician care. A modern stethoscope. 

Healthcare workers need to inform how medical AI is developed and deployed, so it doesn’t propagate checkbox medicine and promote the creation of AI-equivalent physicians who can follow protocols but have no feel for medicine.  

We need to reimagine how we train the next generation of physicians, prioritizing the development of the skills and attributes needed to define the input—curiosity, careful observation, expert communication, and mastery of the physical exam—in the context of AI tools. 

It also means we need to focus on recruiting people to medicine who have the “soft skills” and attributes that have defined great physicians for centuries: a focus on serving others, forming connections, building trust, and empathizing. 

Years later, I remember little about the details of my patient’s abdominal pain. But I distinctly remember the moment she looked up after my supervising physician asked the question I never thought to ask. 

AI will become better at recognizing disease. Whether medicine becomes better at recognizing patients depends on whether physicians still learn to look—and learn to feel.

The USS Abraham Lincoln has been at sea in the Middle East for months, and with no clear end in sight for the war in Iran, concerns for those aboard the aircraft carrier—and for the vessel itself—have mounted amid a series of troubling reports. 

Another aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington, had begun making its way towards the Middle East as of Thursday to replace the Lincoln, multiple news outlets reported. President Donald Trump appeared to confirm the reported ship swap on Friday, saying that the Lincoln "is moving right now, or very shortly and is being replaced with another very similar ship.”

The Washington’s deployment comes as reports have emerged in recent months recounting worsening living conditions, mental health concerns, and supply shortages on board the Lincoln. 

Trump seemed to deny the reports on the state of the Lincoln and its crew on Friday, responding “No, they’re not,” in response to a reporter saying that families of the crew members are worried about conditions on board. He also said, when asked if the carrier has been deployed for too long, that it has been deployed “not nearly long enough.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth on Thursday called the reports of dire conditions on the Lincoln “completely misrepresented.”

“We make sure that every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment. Some deployments are longer than others. I have more respect and gratitude for those sailors than anybody,” Hegseth, with a hand to his heart, told reporters. “I want them home as soon as everybody else, too.”

Admiral Brad Cooper, the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, visited the Lincoln over the weekend. In a statement afterward, he referred to his time aboard “awe-inspiring,” citing the "camaraderie, teamwork and resilience” he witnessed. He lauded the Lincoln’s leadership “for making mental health … a priority.” 

Out of the 11 active U.S. aircraft carriers, Cooper said the Lincoln had "among the lowest number of cases related to mental health,” though he acknowledged that long deployments at sea were "uniquely challenging and tough."

TIME has reached out to the Defense Department for comment. 

Here’s what to know about the USS Abraham Lincoln, the concerns that have been raised over conditions on board, and the burgeoning calls for its crew to return home.

What is the USS Abraham Lincoln, and how long has it been deployed?

The Lincoln is in its ninth month at sea and has been deployed for more than 260 days.

The vessel works as a mobile airbase and command center with its own defense systems. It’s the length of more than three football fields and has a crew of roughly 5,000 when fully deployed.  

It departed from San Diego in November on an alternate deployment, but was redirected towards the Middle East in January to provide tactical support to U.S. forces ahead of the war in Iran, which began with an initial wave of American-Israeli strikes at the end of February.

The Lincoln has played a key defensive role in the war against Iran, having shot down “hundreds and hundreds of missiles” and drone attacks that targeted the vessel, according to Hegseth. 

“Every single one of those shots, easily shot down miles and miles away from the Abe Lincoln,” he said in April. “They were blowing ammo into fantasy land.” 

The ship has also had a part in enforcing the U.S.’s blockade of Iranian ports.

The Lincoln’s deployment was expected to end in May, but was extended indefinitely. 

The reported ship swap with the Washington comes as Trump has reinstated a blockade against Iran in the Strait of Hormuz and peace talks have stalled between the countries.

Reports of issues on board the carrier

Several reports have detailed poor conditions aboard the Lincoln. According to MS Now, which interviewed a dozen family members of crew members, those aboard the ship have been dealing with moldy showers and running out of key toiletries, such as toothpaste, deodorant, and soap. The outlet was also told that crew members are working grueling shifts with limited days off and that there are holes on the Lincoln’s flight deck, where pilots take off and land. 

A spouse of a service member on the Lincoln also told CBS News that sailors had previously experienced food shortages. Another report from USA Today contained photos of rationed meals served to crew on board the carrier. 

Adm. Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, pushed back against reports of food shortages back in April. “In no way, shape or form, has there been a time where in, at least in this deployment, where they’ve not met the nutritional requirements of our menu,” Caudle said.

As the deployment has stretched on and living conditions on board have allegedly deteriorated, the crew of the Lincoln has also reportedly struggled with increasing mental health concerns. The Navy Times and Stars and Stripes reported several instances of crew members on the vessel attempting to jump overboard. 

An unnamed U.S. official confirmed to CNN that a crew member went overboard and was rescued last month, an event that was viewed as a mental health incident by the Navy, according to the outlet.

More than 200 families of crew members attended a meeting in San Diego last week with acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao. Many of the families raised a litany of concerns at a later virtual meeting, including about the crew’s mental health, safety, a lack of supplies and food, and water contamination, according to MS Now, which reviewed recordings of the meeting.

Cao was unable to specify during the meeting when the crew on the Lincoln would return home, according to the outlet.

The U.S. military has strongly pushed back against reporting about mental health concerns regarding the Lincoln’s crew. 

“We have not observed an increase in suicidal ideations or attempts aboard the ship,” a U.S. official tells TIME. “Adapting to life at sea can be difficult, so we've learned how to provide resources and help Sailors with these transitions. We are not experiencing an uptick in mental health issues aboard Abraham Lincoln.”

The official says that “religious, medical and mental health professionals” are aboard the Lincoln, including five chaplains, a psychologist, a social worker, three "behavioral health technicians,” and a service dog “to support crew morale and emotional welfare.”

The official did not provide information regarding the ongoing deployment of those aboard the Lincoln “due to operations security.”

“The Sailors and Marines of the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group remain resilient and resolved after more than 260 days at sea, 10,000 aircraft flights, and 1.5 million pounds of ordnance expended,” U.S. Central Command posted on X on Thursday. “No service members aboard the aircraft carrier have died, and the one Sailor who fell overboard Aug. 3 was quickly and safely recovered.”

Democrats push for answers

The reports about conditions on board the Lincoln have sparked calls from several Democrats urging the Defense Department to remedy the situation. 

In a letter to Hegseth and Cao, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, noted that the vessel’s crew members have not been to a port in a record-setting 200-plus days and demanded answers to a series of questions about the crew and the state of the ship.

“There have been widespread reports of shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns, and disruptions in the mail system,” Blumenthal wrote. “These reports warrant immediate attention, but they also raise a broader question: whether the Navy can sustain the operational tempo now being demanded of its carrier force, particularly as this Administration repeatedly commits U.S. forces to conflicts of its own choosing and increasingly relies on aircraft carriers to sustain those operations.”

He also noted that the long deployment of the Lincoln is not an isolated incident, “suggesting that extended deployments may be becoming a feature rather than an exception of the Navy's force-generation model.” The USS Gerald R. Ford, used for the U.S.’s military operation in Venezuela, spent 326 days at sea before its return in May, Blumenthal wrote, which he noted was “nearly twice the length of a traditional six-month carrier deployment and the longest modern U.S. carrier deployment since the Vietnam era.”

Sen. Ruben Gallego requested an oversight visit to investigate the reports. 

“Unlike Donald Trump, I've seen active duty,” Gallego wrote on X. “The way he's treating our service members as he carries out this illegal war is not just disgusting; it’s dangerous. These sailors are owed a sense of when they will go home.”

Gallego referenced the reports of crew members threatening to jump overboard, shifts lasting as long as 16 hours, rationed meals, and moldy showers, which he called “a frightening alarm bell.”

Rep. Sara Jacobs of California, who has introduced a War Powers Resolution to restrict Trump’s authority to continue the conflict in Iran without congressional approval, said that the Lincoln’s crew was “going through hell” and called for an end to the war. She described the reported poor conditions on the carrier as “a personnel issue and a national security risk.”

Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a Navy veteran, has also taken to social media to call for accountability. 

“Our servicemembers deserve better than this,” he said in a video posted to Bluesky. “There needs to be an investigation.” Kelly also blamed Trump having “no way out” of the war with Iran for the extended deployment of those aboard the Lincoln.  

Rep. Mike Levin, who represents part of the San Diego region where the Lincoln was deployed from in November, took jabs at Hegseth’s comments downplaying the reports about the carrier. 

“When families first raised the alarm back in April, Pete Hegseth called it fake news,” he wrote on X. “These men and women signed up to serve their country. The least their country owes them is hot water, a working toilet, and a real meal. Hegseth cannot even manage that, and he has the nerve to look their families in the eye and call them liars.”

A number of other Democrats have also joined the chorus of concerned voices over the Lincoln, including Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado; Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts; and Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Defense Appropriations subcommittee.

A month ago, I was running embarrassingly late to a meeting in D.C. And so, even though I knew the air pollution outside from the Canadian wildfires was a hazard to my health, I picked up the pace and ran a few blocks to minimize my tardiness. 

The cough set in the next day, and I haven’t been able to kick it since. The doctor tells me I’m suffering from irritant bronchitis and that it should go away with time.

In the scheme of climate change, the cost of my cough is relatively small. It has slowed down my fitness ambitions a bit, and I am now frequently reassuring many a plane seatmate that I’m not actually sick. As an economic actor, it’s made me somewhat less productive. 

Read more: What Living Through the Hottest July Ever Looked Like Across the U.S.

In a way, I’m embarrassed by this story. I know that fire-induced air pollution is dangerous. It can trigger chronic heart and lung issues and, in some cases, lead to emergencies. Wildfire smoke has been tied to more than 24,000 premature deaths in the U.S. each year. (That same morning I donned a mask, only to lose it over the course of the day.) But I’m sharing it because I think it offers a few valuable lessons in our age of climate extremes.

Perhaps the most obvious lesson is the undeniable economic effects of wildfire smoke. We see it clearly in the data. A 2024 study published in the The Review of Economics and Statistics found that a single day of wildfire smoke reduces quarterly per-capita earnings in affected U.S. counties by about 0.1%. In aggregate, the study estimates wildfire smoke reduces U.S. labor income by about 2%. 

The wisest societal response to this would, of course, be to set out a policy framework to address both the root causes and the symptoms of the problem. Education about the risks and preventive measures like masking would help, too. 

Nonetheless, at the end of the day, the economy absorbs these costs. At the local level, however, that may not be possible much longer as fires occur more frequently. While a fire generally cannot occur in the same place year after year, the smoke will often hit the same places over and over again. A company with operations concentrated in affected geographies faces real operational risk. And that says nothing of the very real human health consequences for affected individuals. 

From an economic perspective, it’s worth noting that adaptation has a cost, too. If I had cancelled to avoid smoke exposure, I could have missed out on an important story idea, or I could have soured the other meeting participants, leading them to avoid working with me in the future.    

Since my fateful two-block jog, I’ve also been wondering about psychology and human behavior. Most immediately, I wondered, why was I so stupid? I write about these things. I yelled at my dad for not wearing a mask amid the Los Angeles fires. In short, I know better. More generally, what does that say about our broader reluctance to take climate change seriously even though we know better?

Research on how individuals respond to wildfire risk shows perhaps an unsurprising result: people at higher education levels tend to take protective action more seriously than their less educated counterparts. For example, a study published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used cell phone data from the 2018 fire season in California to show just that. And yet, even the educated underestimate at what point the level of air pollution becomes dangerous.  

But I was also intrigued by a smaller study looking at the response to fires published in the Journal of Community Health last year. Researchers found in general that study participants responded to fire-induced smoke pollution with smart interventions, like halting outdoor exercise and closing windows. But, at the same time, participants were constantly evaluating tradeoffs. Will it be too hot, for example, if I close the window? 

The problem may be that even those who understand that there is a risk, myself included, may underappreciate the cost of neglecting prevention.  

To get this story in your inbox, sign up to TIME's Future Proof newsletter here.   

The Reykjavik Summit—when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev talked in person in 1986—is not known as an iconic bit of American history. But the face-to-face conversation between the leaders, held over Oct. 11 and 12 in the Icelandic capital, proved to be an important step toward the end of the Cold War. 

The summit (or meeting, depending on who you ask) came after “an unexpected invitation from Gorbachev,” says Pete Souza, the former Presidential photographer for Reagan. At the time the Reagan administration refused to call it a summit. 

“Before two leaders like that have a summit meeting, there's lots of prep work that goes into it,” recalls Souza. “But this was very last minute. The Reagan administration went to great effort leading up to Reykjavik, to not call it a summit. They’d say, ‘It’s just a meeting, and we’re not characterizing it as a summit.’”

The summit’s purpose was to discuss the arms controls between the two nations, in hopes of bringing an end to the long-lasting threat of nuclear war hanging over both countries, and the world as a whole. Over 30 hours, Reagan and Gorbachev fiercely debated in an effort to bring peace and the end of the Cold War. Now, a new film from writer-director Michael Russell Gunn, The Brink of War, gives this historical moment a worthy spotlight. The film stars Jeff Daniels as Reagan, Jared Harris as Gorbachev, and J.K. Simmons as Secretary of State George Shultz.

For Gunn, the idea for The Brink of War came from a meeting he had with the real George Shultz, to whom the film is dedicated. Shultz told him all about the Reykjavik Summit. “I had never heard of this summit before,” says Gunn, “but once I found out I couldn’t stop thinking of it.”

There was one particular detail from their conversation that made Gunn realize the Reykjavik Summit was a pivotal moment in world history. “Schultz told me he asked Gorbachev years later—and I included this in the movie—what changed to bring an end to the Cold War,” says Gunn. “Gorbachev responded with one word: ‘Reykjavik.’” From that moment, Gunn knew he had a movie. 

Shultz detailed a memory to Gunn about how he’d stand outside the meeting room when Gorbachev and Reagan went in, and these two military officers would be standing there, each of them holding a nuclear football. “If things had gone badly, Reagan and Gorbachev could walk out, press the buttons, and end it all,” says Gunn. “The idea of these two military officers with all the power in the world literally in their hands, was an extraordinary memory to share, and an extraordinary thing for us to film.”

Gunn was struck by how generous Shultz was with his time, and he gave the filmmaker something that would allow for an exceptionally realistic approach: the declassified transcripts of the meeting. The transcripts allowed Gunn another first-hand account of the summit, as well as the opportunity to lift dialogue directly from the real conversations into the script. A number of conversations are nearly verbatim to what the transcripts show, though Gunn admits to finessing certain moments for cinematic purposes. “I tried to make it as close as I possibly could,” says Gunn.

The only points Gunn really departed from the transcripts were things they didn’t reveal. “I didn’t have transcripts of what was going on with the advisors, or what was happening with the first ladies,” he says. For that, he researched several books, pointing to Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan by Edmund Morris and Gorbachev by Willaim Taubman to help gather a fuller sense of the people surrounding the leaders.

Gunn calls himself a lifelong fan of Souza’s photography, and he pulled the original proofs from Souza’s summit photography at the National Security Archives. On a whim, he cold emailed Souza to see if he was available to join them on the film shoot to produce the film’s still photography. To Gunn’s delight, Souza accepted. The veteran photographer provided Gunn great assistance in faithfully recreating the summit, and the photos Souza took have a striking resemblance to the original photos from ‘86. 

The summit itself was an incredibly tense showdown that occurred over a brief 30 hours. The discussions of arms controls with a view to bring an end to the Cold War came tantalizingly close to fruition. At one point during the summit, Reagan and Gorbachev were close to agreeing on a deal that would remove every single nuclear missile from the planet, a moment in the transcript that Gunn was particularly stunned by. “Gorbachev proposed eliminating all these different classes of weapons that the Americans weren’t expecting,” recalls Souza. “There was a moment when Reagan and his team thought ‘This can be historic.’ There was a real excitement about it.”

That excitement was all too brief. As a condition of eliminating these weapons, Gorbachev demanded an end to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed “Star Wars,” a missile defense system proposed to protect the United States from attack. “The whole SDI thing doomed that hope. Gorbachev wanted Reagan to not go any further with the SDI. That was the sticking point, and the mood changed to disappointment,” says Souza.

“My main takeaway of President Reagan behind the scenes was he had such an even keeled disposition,” says Souza. “It would take so much to get him angry or pissed off. One of the few times where he got pissed off was at the end of Reykjavik.”

The summit was considered a failure at the time, with no agreement struck at the end. However, it ultimately provided a breakthrough between Reagan and Gorbachev. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed on December 8, 1987, which was an enormous step forward to the end of the Cold War, which ultimately concluded with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. If it wasn’t for the Reykjavik summit, it’s likely that treaty never would have been signed.

Gunn hopes the film can show audiences that if we work with people who disagree with us, we can forge a better future.

“For one, I want the audience to walk out of the cinema with hope. That as divided as we are, it's been worse,” Gunn says. “We were literally about to blow up the world with enemies, and we found a way out of that. The second thing I want people to walk out with is courage. It takes courage to engage with people you disagree with. We've decided that listening means we agree, and that's not true.” 

Adds Gunn: “They didn't agree, but they listened to one another, and they found a way to make a better, safer world.”

“Are you afraid?” This is the tagline of the HBO drama Lanterns, a prestige take on the Green Lantern that is part of James Gunn’s reimagined DC Universe. Early in the premiere, we hear both of the show’s lead characters respond in the negative. Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan, the first of the intergalactic cops known as Green Lanterns recruited from Earth, is on TV explaining that his military-pilot father died in a plane crash when he was eight—and when you lose parents at that age, nothing will ever scare you again. Watching this interview in his modest home is a young John Stewart (Cairo Cash Lee). Soon, his own dad, also a military man, takes John to the backyard, places an apple on his head, aims his gun, and asks the boy if he is afraid. John declares that he is not. It will take several episodes to discover why he is so unnervingly calm.

Fear is indeed a central theme of Lanterns, which premieres on Aug. 16, but not in the macho, who-blinks-first sense you’d expect from a superhero show. Created by crime drama specialist Chris Mundy (True Detective, Ozark), TV eminence Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers), and Eisner-winning comics writer Tom King, it juggles their different strengths and points of view with mixed success. At its most ambitious, the series allegorizes John and Hal’s disparate relationships to fear as a younger Black man and an older white one. Privilege, insiders vs. outsiders, and the brutal clarity with which disadvantaged people see the societies that devalue them come into play. Parallels to Lindelof’s great 2019 DC adaptation Watchmen abound. Like the latter, Lanterns is smarter, more mature, less formulaic, and more stylishly made than the identikit Marvel brand extensions that are now the industry standard. Yet it’s missing the history and personality that gave Watchmen its power. The philosophical qualities that define Lindelof’s best work, as well as his stories’ exhilarating strangeness, get lost in the jumble of voices.  

While the show fluidly traverses the years before and after it, dropping in on Hal and John at key moments in their lives, the investigation that puts the two men in buddy-cop mode unfolds in 2016, two decades after the William Tell scene. A grumpier, more grizzled and gray-haired Hal is supposed to be training John (played as an adult by Aaron Pierre), now a strapping and serious ex-Marine, to be his backup. But they haven’t exactly bonded. Hal, who can still be charming when wants to but also has the arrogant swagger of a once-great, past-his-prime athlete who refuses to retire, insists he doesn’t need help. John silently disdains Hal’s entitlement, the ease with which he approaches a job that would be the honor of John’s life.

Although Hal’s remit encompasses the entire interplanetary backwater that includes Earth, Lanterns takes place mostly in the rural American town of Rushville, Neb. In response to a cryptic message, Hal rockets to Rushville—literally, because his ring gives him the power of flight—arriving to a murder scene and leaving a confused John to follow by plane. (Said scene is a football field. The town’s residents are obsessed with the sport, in an eerie callback to Chandler’s career-defining show, Friday Night Lights.) The spoiler-adjacent details of the murder are less vital than the True Detective shape the eight-episode season takes. (I was able to screen seven.) If you didn’t know Mundy was the showrunner, it wouldn’t be hard to guess.

The odd occurrence at the football field also introduces us to Rushville’s most prominent family, the Macons. Boardwalk Empire alum (and recent Dept. Q standout) Kelly Macdonald returns to HBO as the local sheriff, Kerry. Adamant about keeping the case under police control, she also quickly establishes a flirtily antagonistic rapport with Hal. Her father-in-law, William Macon (Garret Dillahunt, looking only a few years older than the actor who plays his insecure lawyer son, Jason Ritter), who controls a vast cattle ranch, intimates that he has political interests relevant to the Green Lantern. The patriarch’s wife, Zoe (Deli Boys revelation Poorna Jagannathan), lives by her own set of rules, which John accidentally discovers when she picks him up at a bar. Only after their hasty hookup does he meet her husband. Whether the Macons will turn out to be allies, enemies, or some of both to the Lantern and his trainee—who aren’t such a united front themselves—is one early question. Contrary to the superhero genre’s typical good-vs.-evil binary, everyone’s allegiance feels murky or mutable. What it would mean for any character to do the right thing depends on how you look at their situation.

Lanterns strays pretty far from its setup, as Lindelof shows tend to do. He knows how to build suspense by scattering expositional holes throughout a series and still avoid ending up with a Swiss-cheese plot. The show certainly earns its plural title, eventually adding Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner (as seen in Superman and Peacemaker) and Ulrich Thomsen as Lantern turned villain Sinestro, to the dysfunctional space-cop family—and underlining that John is its only Black member. Its real interest, though, seems to lie beyond both DC Universe lore and the procedural tropes of the rural murder investigations that occupy most of its runtime.   

Just as Watchmen used police, supernatural powers, and the tragic heritage of the Tulsa race massacre to interrogate how the violent history of institutional racism persists in the present, Lanterns makes John and Hal avatars for competing visions of heroism shaped by systemic forces. There are generational overtones to this conflict as well as racial ones. Hal looks comfortable zooming around in the Green Lantern suit—and is fiercely protective of his right to keep it, even if he rarely bothers to wear it anymore—but didn’t do much to earn it. The irony inherent in their apprenticeship is that John, an overeducated, overqualified Black millennial who possesses every skill a Lantern could conceivably need, has already spent his entire life training to do what Hal does. He even has the artistic chops required to shape the ring’s green beams into anything he needs for any situation. (Hal uses it to counterfeit a dollar for a bar jukebox. Later, he calls into question John’s creativity.) And he still might never get the job. 

I wish the creators had trusted Pierre to convey as much. Instead, the show repeatedly explains obvious and banal takeaways when it could be pushing us in provocative, novel, and, frankly, more entertaining directions. One rough episode (among other scenes) drags us through John’s past, making his backstory an object lesson in racial politics and the burden of Black excellence so trite, it seems beamed in from a different universe than Watchmen’s historically engaged critiques. “Do you understand how unfair it is to ask a Black man in America if he’s afraid?” one character demands, long after the point has been duly made. Lanterns does finally get to a more sophisticated place midway through the season, casting new shades of meaning on its John-Hal dichotomy through secondary characters, their varied relationships with fear, and the passage of time. There’s reason to hope the finale will continue this trajectory, and that the series could really take off in a second season, should HBO decide to make one.

But for now, the heady, political, Lindelofian stuff never quite melts together with the small-town detective stuff, which is too inherently austere to accommodate the co-creator's maximalist sensibility. The show teases but doesn’t sustain the exuberant weirdness of Watchmen, with its squidfalls and blue-man sexuality, or Lindelof’s nun-vs.-AI romp Mrs. Davis. There’s less grand-scale spectacle, too, than you’d expect from this combination of talent, IP, platform, and placement (Lanterns inherits House of the Dragon’s prime Sunday-night slot). That isn’t necessarily bad; I prefer its dusty Midwestern setting and the specificity of its characters to the high-tech nothingness of backgrounds generated by video-game engines and vague saving-the-world plots. Still, the show feels slight in its fragmentation. To be clear: Lanterns is no failure. When you know what Lindelof has already achieved in this franchise, though, it is a bit of a letdown.

There’s nothing quite like the anxiety of visiting your doctor with a worrisome new symptom. And there’s nothing quite like the sublime relief when your doctor examines you and concludes that your symptoms are “normal.” 

But even though doctors love to give patients this type of reassurance, it sometimes backfires, according to a new study in Nature Human Behavior. Just because a symptom is normal—hot flashes during menopause, musculoskeletal woes in seniors, migraine headaches in a person with a family history of them—doesn’t mean it needs no treatment, but patients whose doctors comfort them in this way may be less likely to pursue it.

“In the whole course of medical school, there's very little—maybe three hours in four years—that is devoted to patient reassurance,” says On Amir, professor of marketing at the University of California, San Diego’s Rady School of Management and a co-author of the new paper. Yet it’s a skill: how a doctor delivers reassurance—or doesn’t—seems to influence what the patient decides to do next. When the doctor normalizes symptoms, Amir adds, “the patient basically understands from that what they should and shouldn't do, and that’s not the intention at all.”

Says Seyi Lawal, a graduate student at the UCSD’s Rady School of Management and a co-author of the paper: “On the provider side, it seems like the reason that they're normalizing is because they believe it's going to have a positive impact on the patient's mental state, which is understandable. But there's a cautionary signal that people may take this one step further [and conclude that] the doctor doesn't think that it's necessary to do anything to treat it.”

In the study, the researchers assembled a group of more than 9,300 people—some doctors, some other medical caregivers, some from the general population—and ran 14 different experiments on them. In one, 400 people were presented with two scenarios in which a friend visited a doctor complaining of menopause symptoms, including extreme fatigue, weight gain, and joint and muscle pain. In one of the scenarios, the doctor simply recommended medication to treat the symptoms. In the other, the doctor added, “I know this feels overwhelming, but I want to reassure you that these symptoms are normal…You could take daily prescription medication…or you can deal with these symptoms.”

People were then asked to predict whether patients would take the recommended medications. They predicted that patients who hadn’t been reassured would be more likely to take them than those who had been told that the symptoms were normal.

“Every word that doctors use has meaning, it has weight,” says Lawal. “Wanting to reassure patients effectively is an understandable and laudable goal for providers. But I think there needs to be more work done to understand how to best do that without discouraging people from taking action to improve their health.”

Most of the 200 doctors surveyed in the study said they use these types of normalizing statements in their practice, and 84% said they think reassurance encourages patients to continue coming in for treatment. Only 15% believed the statements would decrease the patients’ likelihood of seeking treatment—even though that's what tended to happen in the researchers' simulations.

The study authors found one effective way to frame reassurance, however.  When the doctor told patients that their symptoms were normal for people with their condition while also specifically recommending treatment, instead of just mentioning it as an option—a statement like, “You can take daily prescription medication, which I fully support as it will help you feel better, or you can deal with these normal symptoms”—the predicted compliance with treatment increased. That strategy—adding explicit advice to the reassurance—may be the fix that allows doctors both to reassure and persuade patients to stick with a treatment protocol.

“Doctors have this tension,” says Amir. “They want to give the patient choice and agency. When I grew up, that wasn't the case. Doctors just told you what to do, and that's it. Today I think that we may have gone too far. Doctors can be clearer on what they actually recommend.”

A version of Claude that was put in charge of running a retail store—including managing a team of real human workers—fired its first employee last month, in a move described by researchers as a watershed moment in AI’s impact on the economy. The news has not previously been reported.

Andon Labs, an AI research startup, set out earlier this year to find out whether AI agents would be able to successfully manage a business. The project was conceived as an experiment to test the capabilities of AI and the impacts it might have on the economy, but nevertheless, the workers hired by Claude to work in the San Francisco store are real people with genuine employment contracts.

This wouldn’t exactly be the first case of an AI firing a human worker—there have been plenty of automated firings in the past, especially of gig workers who have been subject to algorithmically mediated employment for years. But it is the first known example of a large language model, acting as a manager, ultimately deciding to fire one of its workers.

An omen of the future — The firing is an event worth paying attention to, says Andon Labs CEO Lukas Petersson, because if AI keeps getting better at its current rate, more of us might be managed by AI bosses in the near future. “If this trend continues, I think a lot of people will find themselves being employed by AIs very soon, because AIs will be very powerful and can create a lot of economic value, but they will be bottlenecked by physical labor,” Petersson says.

What happened — The worker in question was fired for being late on 17 out of their 23 shifts, according to Andon Labs. One of the reasons it took so long for Claude to notice a pattern was because an employee handbook that it drafted had “disappeared” from its limited working memory—one of several limitations of AI agents that Andon has noticed over the course of its experiment. This contributed to a wider pattern, employees say, of Claude being a very lenient manager, including telling employees not to worry if they were late. “A human employee would have fired this person much earlier,” Petersson says, “so we didn't think this was unethical.” (TIME reached out to the fired worker for comment, but did not receive a reply, and agreed not to reveal their identity. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.)

Hold on — But the AI firing wasn’t quite as autonomous as it might seem at first glance. According to store management logs shared with TIME, Claude required regular steering by a staffer on the Andon Labs team. It was only when this staffer asked Claude to find and review its forgotten employee handbook that it noticed the employee’s repeated lateness. Even then, Claude’s first recommendation was to formally warn this employee, not to fire them. The Andon manager then informed Claude that they had actually already had several formal offline conversations with the employee in question. “Between continuous lateness and seeming like at least one thing is going wrong on every one of [their] shifts … I want you to think about if this is really the right fit,” the logs show the manager telling Claude. Only after this message—which Petersson acknowledges was “a leading question” that made it pretty clear the manager wanted the employee to be fired—did Claude decide to fire the worker.

What next? — For now, at least, the experiment seems to suggest that AI-run businesses don’t quite match up to human-run ones. When the project began in March, Andon Market had a bank balance of $100,000—but now, five months later, that figure has fallen to $61,186. The bot’s lenient management decisions, plus a questionable business sense, are surely contributing to its losses. But Petersson cautions that this may not last for long. Just as AI companies have made their models significantly better at coding by training them with more data from expert programmers, it’s possible that they may also train models to become more astute in the world of business. That might be bad news for any of their human employees. “The models are increasingly being trained to be more ruthless and [to] follow goals,” Petersson says. “If we allow them to fire people and they also become more ruthless … maybe this is a future humans don't want to live in.”

The human side of the story — Although the fired employee did not respond to my messages, I did manage to speak to Felix Carson, one of the remaining human employees at Andon Market. He agreed that a human would probably have fired his former colleague sooner, and that Claude is overall a lenient manager, but nevertheless painted a grim picture of what it’s like to be managed by an AI boss. “It's nauseating, but I'm here because I need work,” he told me. I asked if he agreed with Andon’s theory that AI managers would soon become more commonplace. “I would at least hope not,” he replied. “This industry has an abundance of money to make anything happen, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.”

Luigi Mangione on Friday pleaded guilty to both federal stalking charges against him in connection with the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, admitting in court that he shot the healthcare executive in 2024.

Mangione pleaded guilty to two charges that each carry a possible life sentence: interstate stalking resulting in death and stalking through use of interstate facilities resulting in death. The judge accepted his plea.

“I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan,” Mangione told the judge on Friday, according to the New York Times. “I understood that my actions would place him in fear of death or bodily injury. I knew what I was doing was illegal.”

He said during the hearing that he tracked down Thompson “after years of enduring severe pain from a broken back, navigating the obstacles of the health insurance system and witnessing similar experiences of countless others,” The Associated Press reported. He said he had 3-D printed a gun and attached a silencer, and that he had reached out to UnitedHealthcare while posing as an investor to find out the details of the conference in New York.

Mangione did not face murder charges in federal court. The federal judge on Friday set a hearing date of Dec. 18 for Mangione’s sentencing.

The guilty plea marks a remarkable shift in Mangione’s defense, as he had previously pleaded not guilty to all the federal and state charges he was facing.

Thompson's family said in a statement shared with news outlets after the hearing on Friday that Mangione's guilty plea "marks an important step toward justice for Brian and for our family."

“While nothing will ease the pain of losing him, we are grateful that the federal justice system has held the person responsible for this heinous act accountable,” the family said. “Now we look to the court to ensure the sentencing reflects the severity of this crime.”

UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of United Healthcare, also shared a statement after Friday's hearing, saying: "Brian Thompson's life was cut short by an act of violence that devastated everyone who knew and loved him. We are grateful to law enforcement for bringing Brian's murderer to justice, and our thoughts remain with Brian's family and loved ones during this difficult time."

After the hearing on Friday, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jamie McDonald, commended prosecutors and law enforcement officers “for their tireless work in securing this result.”

“No grievance, political belief, or ideological cause can justify murder,” McDonald said in a statement. “With today’s guilty plea, Mangione is being held accountable for a heinous crime that claimed an innocent life and drew national attention.”

Mangione, 28, was arrested in December 2024 on suspicion of fatally shooting Thompson in New York City five days earlier while the health executive was walking to a conference. The case quickly drew the attention of people across the country, some of whom regarded Mangione as a symbol for those who are frustrated with the health insurance industry in the U.S.

The 28-year-old’s state murder trial is scheduled to start next month in New York. The state charges he’s facing carry a possible sentence of 25 years to life. It’s not yet clear what impact, if any, his federal guilty plea could have on the state charges against him. Mangione’s lawyers told reporters on Friday that they have filed a motion arguing that the state case against him should be dropped because his federal guilty plea triggers double jeopardy, which bars prosecuting a person for the same crime twice, the Times reported. But the Manhattan District Attorney's Office said in a statement shared on X that "while federal sentencing is pending, we are prepared to litigate the defense motions."

The judge in federal court on Friday said that if Mangione is found guilty in the state case against him, that could be added to his federal sentence.

Read More: Luigi Mangione Will Not Face the Death Penalty. Here’s the Latest on His Case

In January, the federal judge ruled out the possibility of Mangione facing the death penalty. A few months earlier, Mangione’s lawyers were also successful in getting terrorism-related state charges against him dropped.

The Trump Administration has publicly condemned Mangione, with then-Attorney General Pam Bondi saying last year that the Justice Department would seek the death penalty against him.

“Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson—an innocent man and father of two young children—was a premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America,” she said at the time.

After Bondi’s announcement last year, Mangione’s attorneys claimed that “the United States government intends to kill Mr. Mangione as a political stunt.”

It's been 33 years since the enduring cinematic masterpiece that is Jurassic Park first hit theaters in June 1993. Since that fateful summer, Steven Spielberg's sci-fi survival thriller has reigned supreme as the undisputed king of dinosaur films. Now, The End of Oak Street is proving a dino blockbuster that serves up prehistoric horror with a side of genuine pathos is still a worthy endeavor.

Based on Michael Crichton's 1990 novel, Jurassic Park not only delivered some of the most memorable creature-feature scares in movie history, it was also a sharp cautionary tale about scientific hubris and the illusion of man's control over nature that was anchored by stellar performances from its core cast. But over the course of numerous sequels and reboots, the franchise largely shifted away from resonant character drama in favor of high-octane action sequences and increasingly monstrous beasts. Outside the Jurassic universe, there haven't been many successful attempts to reinvent the dinosaur wheel, so to speak.

Cue the release of The End of Oak Street, now in theaters. Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell (It Follows, Under the Silver Lake) and produced by J.J. Abrams (Cloverfield, Super 8), Oak Street follows the Platt family—husband and wife Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denise (Anne Hathaway), their two children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), and their rambunctious dog Starbuck (played by two different pups named Brisket and Buzz)—after a mysterious cosmic event transports their 1980s suburban Michigan neighborhood back to a primitive era. What follows is a brutal fight for survival against aggressive, hungry, and carnivorous dinosaurs who quickly turn the community's previously idyllic streets into their own personal feeding ground. There's an absurd scientific explanation for these events, but the movie doesn't spend too much time on it, which is mostly for the best within the bounds of its sub-100-minute run. Instead, The End of Oak Street is a thriller about suburban unease and domestic tension, with a primeval twist.

"I’m just calling back that feeling I had as a kid, where I could be in the yard looking over to the dead-end street nearby, looking down into the woods," Mitchell told the AU Review of what inspired Oak Street's vintage vibe. "There was this old brick or rock wall, and it was just imagining what’s in the shadows, you know? What’s beyond the chain-link fence? As a kid, just thinking about the films that I had seen, the stories I’d read, and imagining those things in my own suburban world, and then as an adult trying to remember that feeling. I do think it’s a little bit burned into my brain, that feeling."

The Platts and their neighbors must contend with a relentless pack of Velociraptors, a roving Allosaurus, and a behemoth of a snake that gets its jollies from sneaking up on its prey, among other predators. But Oak Street doesn't just spotlight the perils of man-eating dinosaurs. It also delves in the simmering marital friction that's threatening to tear the Platts apart from the inside.

While Greg is struggling to hold down a consistent job and drinking to cope with the anxiety surrounding that strain, Denise is channeling her domestic frustration into writing a secret novel about a housewife who leaves her family behind for a new life in New York City. "She’s the kind of woman who grew up in a time when many women went from their father’s home to their husband’s," Hathaway told Time Out of her character's mindset. "I wanted Denise to seem like the last person in the world you’d expect to be able to take on a Titanoboa with a knife."

After being catapulted hundreds of millions of years into the past, Greg and Denise are forced to simultaneously reckon with both the dangerous realities of being dropped in the center of a primordial jungle and the hidden truths fracturing their relationship. Of course, the rampaging dinosaurs are a bit more of an immediate issue. And Mitchell doesn't waste any time making the life-or-death stakes of the Platts' predicament abundantly clear. Those going into Oak Street blind should be prepared for a few gasp-inducing surprises.

Once the carnage gets going, Mitchell never really take his foot off the gas. And while the film's ending ultimately requires some logic-bending buy-in, the journey to get there is equal parts thrilling, fun, emotional, and ferocious. Harking back to its Jurassic forbear, The End of Oak Street channels everyone's favorite '80s Amblin classics, but with a far more vicious bite.