Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed allegations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza as “the biggest lie of the century” during a defiant address to the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday, as scores of delegates walked out in protest.

“Here's the simple truth. Israel didn't commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide,” Netanyahu said, calling the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) “the most moral army in the world.” He pointed to Israel’s facilitation of food aid and polio vaccination campaigns in Gaza, saying “Israel did everything possible to get them out of harm's way.”

Israel faces allegations of genocide in a case brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice. The court has ordered Israel to take provisional measures under the Genocide Convention but has not ruled on whether Israel has committed genocide. The case remains pending.

In September 2025, an independent U.N. commission of inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars said Israel’s policies and actions met the legal definition of the crime. Israel has rejected the findings.

Netanyahu accuses Mamdani of ‘spreading lies’

Netanyahu sharply criticized New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani during his speech, calling him “the antisemitic mayor of New York” and placing him among “all those spreading these lies about my country and about our brave soldiers.”

“Mr. Mamdani, since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York,” Netanyahu said. He reiterated his claims that the mayor supports Hamas and has “incit[ed] riots against New York Jews.” Mamdani has denied supporting Hamas. “Mr. Mamdani, you tried to stop me from coming here. You tried to silence me. Well, you can’t silence me and you can’t silence the truth,” Netanyahu said.

In response to Netanyahu’s remarks, Mamdani accused the Israeli leader of using his speech to “repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians.”

“Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Mandani said in a statement.

Netanyahu’s remarks come amid heightened concern about antisemitism in New York, where anti-Jewish incidents accounted for 57% of all reported hate crimes in 2025, according to NYPD data. Mamdani has rejected accusations of antisemitism and proposed increasing the city’s hate-crime prevention budget from $3 million to $26 million. His administration has also maintained a dedicated Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism.

The dispute stretches back to Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. A longtime critic of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, Mamdani has repeatedly condemned Netanyahu, calling him “a war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people.” He also vowed to have Netanyahu arrested under an International Criminal Court warrant issued over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Mamdani later acknowledged that the city lacked the independent authority to execute the warrant and called on the federal government to arrest Netanyahu instead.

Netanyahu praised President Donald Trump, saying Israel has “no greater partner.” He pointed to the joint U.S.-Israeli operation that he said had destroyed much of Iran’s nuclear program after the two countries launched their war against Iran in February. He called attacking Iran “one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make as Prime Minister.”

Netanyahu also accused Qatar of spending billions of dollars to finance universities and the Al Jazeera media network as part of an effort to “brainwash young minds to hate Israel, America and the West.” He also criticized the country for hosting Hamas leaders. Netanyahu went on to accuse Turkey of being a “super-spreader of antisemitic lies” and condemned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for also hosting Hamas leaders. Turkey and Qatar are yet to respond to the statement.  

Outside the United Nations, several hundred protesters gathered with chants of "stop arming Israel, let Gaza live" and "stop arming Israel, let Iran live" ahead of Netanyahu’s speech.  

Abbas addresses UN by video after visa denied

In a prerecorded address shown at the U.N. General Assembly earlier Thursday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said that “the Palestinian people face one of the most dangerous times of its history.” 

“How much longer will some states continue to remain silent on Israel or supply it with the weapons that it uses against our people?” Abbas said. He accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and a “genocidal war that has created an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.”

The U.S. denied Abbas and other Palestinian officials visas to attend the assembly in person for the second consecutive year, accusing the Palestinian Authority of “glorifying terrorism.” Abbas condemned what he called the “unlawful punitive measures” and called on the Trump administration to lift the restrictions on his delegation and on the U.N. to grant Palestine “full membership” in the international organization. He also called for the State of Palestine to be granted full U.N. membership.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza following the Hamas terror attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed approximately 1,200 people in Israel and saw about 250 others taken hostage.

Since the ceasefire was signed in October 2025, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed according to the ministry. In the absence of independent monitoring on the ground, the ministry is the primary source for casualty data relied upon by humanitarian groups, journalists, and international bodies. Its figures do not differentiate between civilians and combatants and cannot be independently verified by TIME. Data from the IDF suggests a Palestinian civilian death rate of 83%.

The U.N. in October estimated that Gaza required $70 billion to reverse the damage caused by two years of war to its infrastructure.

What other world leaders have said at the U.N.

The war in Gaza has been a major focus for world leaders addressing the U.N. in New York this week. 

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, whose nearly decade-long tenure leading the international body comes to an end at the start of next year, said during his address on Tuesday that Gaza has experienced “a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General.” He added that Israel’s “violence, displacement and settlement expansion” raised the “specter of ethnic cleansing.”

Trump said the war in Gaza was over. He took credit for ending it, “saving untold thousands of lives,” and brokering the return of the remaining hostages held in Gaza. But key elements of the peace agreement Trump helped broker in October 2025—including Hamas’ disarmament, a long-term plan for governing Gaza, and the delivery of humanitarian aid—remain largely stalled. 

Other world leaders called for greater international action over the continuing suffering in Gaza. French President Emmanuel Macron asked “what is our credibility worth if we remain inactive on Gaza?” during his speech on Tuesday. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the same day: “We will not stand by as the horrific suffering continues to grow and the prospect of a two-state solution, the best hope for peace and stability for both nations, comes under attack.”

Amid a fast-growing international debate over regulating artificial intelligence, President Trump and Chinese President Xi met at the White House for several hours on Thursday ahead of a state dinner where several of the biggest players in A.I. were set to attend. 

“We had a great meeting,” Trump said later that afternoon at the Southern Portico, where he gave Xi a tour of the South Lawn Helipad. 

“He’s an expert on stones, and he loves good granite,” Trump said of Xi. 

The day began with remarks from both Trump and Xi at the grand foyer of the White House. Afterward, Trump and Xi participated in a military review at the Rose Garden and took part in hours of meetings before Trump led a tour of parts of the White House.

While both leaders mentioned AI in their opening remarks, Xi stressed that the development of AI always needs to be “under human control.”

Trump was set to host a state dinner for Xi Thursday evening, joined by a slate of tech leaders. Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Tesla CEO Elon Musk were set to attend the dinner, a White House official confirmed.

According to Chinese state media, President Xi raised the issue of Iran during the bilateral meeting, saying that he hoped the US and Iran would resume negotiations and that China would support the two countries recommitting to the 14-point memorandum of understanding reached months ago. 

On Taiwan, Xi said he hopes the U.S. would maintain its position of opposing Taiwan independence. The U.S. has not officially endorsed Taiwan's independence, but has previously sold weaponry to the island and is widely viewed as a key player if China were to ever invade the self-ruling island.

Earlier on Thursday, Xi urged more cooperation between the two countries. During his remarks, he called for more direct flights between the U.S. and China and invited 100,000 American students for cultural exchange in the next five years. And continuing a longtime diplomatic tradition stretching back to the Nixon era, he announced two pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, will be delivered to Zoo Atlanta in the coming days.

“China and the United States must hold the line of no conflict and no confrontation between us, and we can certainly find the right path for two great countries to get along on this planet we both call home,” Xi said. 

This is the first time a Chinese leader has made a second formal state visit to America. The last time Xi conducted a formal state visit in Washington, D.C. was at the invitation of President Obama in September 2015, three years after he succeeded as the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. 

Trump and Xi first met in 2017, during Trump’s first term, at the President’s home base of Mar-a-Lago, Florida. The pair last met in May during a two-day state visit by Trump to Beijing, where the U.S. and China delegations discussed a range of topics including tariffs, rare mineral trade, as well as the Strait of Hormuz. The two leaders used the visit to announce the launch of a so-called Board of Trade intended to lower tariffs on products that aren’t considered a national security risk. In June, the Office of the United States Trade Representative asked the public to weigh in on which types of products would benefit from this new mechanism. The Administration has offered few updates on the board since then. 

Ottawa's City Council voted unanimously on Wednesday to remove President Donald Trump’s name from a residential street in the Canadian capital amid an increasingly hostile trade war.

The motion to rename “Trump Avenue” in the city’s Central Park neighborhood was brought forward by River Ward councillor Riley Brockington on Sept. 9 and swiftly received support from other local officials. “I don't like the idea of anything that's named for Donald Trump, who's demonstrated hostility towards Canada,” Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe said at a news conference after the vote.

The move symbolizes the strained relations between the two countries, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney goes head-to-head with the Trump Administration in a trade standoff. Canada’s retaliatory tariffs came into effect on Sept. 8, matching the economic pressure imposed by the U.S. after negotiations collapsed last month. Trump’s repeated threats to annex Canada and his insistence on referring to it as the “51st state” have significantly contributed to the tensions.

The streets in Ottawa’s Central Park neighborhood were named after New York City institutions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Trump was primarily known for his businesses and real estate ventures, long before his political aspirations came to fruition.

Brockington said a consultation with local residents will now follow, with alternative names proposed for “Trump Avenue” ahead of a vote.

“I could speak at great length why I believe, strongly, it is time to rename ‘Trump Avenue,’ but I don't want to give a platform anymore to the person who is on the current street sign blades,” Brockington said. “I do believe this is about a new beginning, and I want this to be a community-led process where the community ultimately will select and recommend to City Council what that new name will be.”

In a statement to TIME, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly referred to the name change as a “meaningless gesture” and said “these local governments should do right by the citizens they serve, thank President Trump for defending their country, and make a good deal to benefit Canadian and American citizens alike.”

TIME has reached out to Ottawa's City Council for comment.

The vote to cut the street name comes after President Trump recently pushed through controversial renaming efforts of his own.

In late August, he signed an Executive Order renaming Lake Ontario, which borders the Canadian province of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York, as “Lake America.” The order applies to U.S. federal references of the lake and does not determine how Canada—or others—refer to the body of water. Several lawmakers across both countries have rejected the new moniker.

Thomas Juneau, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, says the street name change in Ottawa is “illustrative of the mood” of Canadians.

“Polls have repeatedly [shown] how extremely unpopular Trump is, and how his targeting of Canada on trade, and his trolling on social media, have made him and the U.S. unpopular,” he tells TIME.

A poll by Politico, conducted Sept. 13-15, found that 83% of Canadians thought it was wrong for Trump to impose tariffs on their country, while 71% backed Carney’s retaliatory tariffs. Another poll, conducted by Abacus Data between Sept. 4-9, found that 82% of Canadians had a negative impression of Trump.

Carney says he studied risk of U.S.-led military action amid annexation threats

In a new interview, Carney admitted he had prepared over the past 12 months or so for the “extreme tail risk” that Trump might order military action against Canada, amid the U.S. President’s repeated mentions of his desire to annex the country.

“I think you have a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk,” Carney told the New York Times. “That’s just risk management. That’s not a base case, but it would be irresponsible not to” prepare.

Juneau says the “risk of American military intervention against Canada is extremely low,” but reasons that just because Canada “shouldn't take [Trump’s] threat literally, it doesn't mean they shouldn't take it seriously.”

In an April 2025 interview with TIME, Trump denied he was “trolling” when discussing annexation. “We’re taking care of their military. We're taking care of every aspect of their lives… We don't need anything from Canada. And I say the only way this thing really works is for Canada to become a state,” he argued.

Carney, in line with other Canadian officials, has vehemently pushed back against the idea, stressing that Canada is “not for sale.” In June, after Trump revived talk of his ambitions to annex Canada, Ontario Premier Doug Ford simply stated “Canada will never be the 51st state.”

Despite the tensions, Carney said he and Trump have spoken “frequently” since trade talks collapsed last month. However, there is no clear path toward an end to the trade standoff.

“Trump is actively trying to choke off the Canadian economy," says Juneau, noting that a key sticking point in trade negotiations, according to Carney, has been Washington's efforts to restrict Canada’s ability to negotiate trade deals abroad.

Canada seeks international alliances to remove reliance on U.S.

The U.S. accounted for 72.5% of Canadian merchandise exports in 2025, according to the country’s annual trade report, making it Canada's largest trading partner by a wide margin.

Canada and the U.S. are also deeply integrated through defense arrangements, including their membership in NATO and the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD)—a bilateral defense and national security arrangement involving the shared defense of the continent.

Amid the strained relations with the Trump Administration, Carney has sought to diversify Canada’s trade and security alliances to reduce its reliance on the U.S.

“The weaponization of that interdependence by the U.S. makes [Canada] extremely vulnerable in a way that pretty much nobody else is,” insists Juneau, pointing to the urgency of Carney’s task.

The Canadian government has set itself  a goal is to “double non-U.S. exports in the next decade” as it seeks to expand trade with other markets.

In January, Carney met Chinese President Xi Jinping to forge what he called a “new strategic partnership” to end Canada's economic reliance on the American market.

Canada is also currently in negotiations with India as it seeks to negotiate a new comprehensive economic partnership agreement with Delhi, and is in talks for a free trade agreement with the Philippines.

The diversification efforts extend into defensive measures. At the E.U.-Canada summit in June 2025, Canada established a new Security and Defense Partnership with the bloc. Canada later became the first non-European country to participate in the "Security Action for Europe” (SAFE) instrument, which provides low-interest loans to help member states purchase military and defense equipment.

Canada is seeking to further strengthen ties overseas by becoming the European Union’s first “associate member”—a goal European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has vowed to help make a reality. The proposed arrangement, the details of which have yet to be ironed out, would likely deepen cooperation on matters including trade, defense, AI, and Arctic security.

Carney made his pledge to E.U. lawmakers when he addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, on Sept. 17. Touting closer ties with the bloc, he said “Europe and Canada are stronger together” and insisted "we are not fair-weather allies, we believe that our ​prosperity grows when ⁠it is shared."

During Carney’s trip to Europe, Canada applied to join the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force military coalition—a force launched in 2014 and made up of 10 North Atlantic NATO member states that conduct rapid-response and security operations.

Juneau warns that despite Carney’s current push to diversify trade and defense away from the U.S., the results of these deals may take a long time to truly stand up, as "in practice, diversifying trade and security relationships is measured in years and decades."

Some changes famously accompany aging. For some people, it gets harder to hear in crowded places; for others, reading a menu in dim light gets trickier. But not everyone knows to expect a loss of muscle mass. Starting around age 30, people lose 3-5% of their lean muscle per decade. For most people, this decline isn’t noticeable until around age 60, when it might start to make daily activities more difficult.

One of the most effective ways to combat muscle loss is to build and protect the muscle you already have through strength training. Not only will that help you avoid frailty and falls, but it can also keep you moving with ease through your daily activities.

When people ask Charlie Grundas, a certified personal trainer and owner of We, The Collective Fitness in Chicago, why it’s important to strength train after 50, he has an easy reply: “Do you ever want there to be a time where you can’t get off the toilet?” he says. “I don't think there should ever be [a time when] you drop something on the floor, and you're like, ‘Well, forget it, I don't own that anymore.’”

You also start losing bone density as you age, and strength training builds healthy bones, which helps prevent falls and fractures. Plus, the muscle you build may offer some insulating protection if you do stumble, says Will Hewitt, certified personal trainer and director of training at Flight House Fitness in Charlestown, Mass.

Strength training can help at any age, whether you want to keep improving in your athletic pursuits, be able to pick up grandchildren, or simply bring your groceries inside in one trip, Grundas says. It’s OK to start with just a few exercises and just a few sets and repetitions: anywhere from one to three sets of six to 15 repetitions is beneficial, according to the American College of Sports Medicine. What’s most important is that you do it—ideally at least twice a week.

It’s always a good idea to get the green light from your doctor before starting any new exercise routine. You might also consider working with a fitness professional, like a certified personal trainer or certified strength and conditioning specialist, if you’re new to strength training at this stage of life or if you’ve had any injuries or surgery. A professional can help you modify movements and swap out equipment that might feel better for your particular circumstances, Hewitt says. 

They can also help encourage you to try activities you might think you “shouldn’t” do in your 50s and beyond. “Your days of doing an 18-inch box jump may be over, and that's a hard pill to swallow, but let's do a six-inch box, and maybe six months from now, we'll be doing 12 inches,” he says. “It's just like eating your vegetables: You just have to keep doing it, and you'll be better for it.”

Here are some of the best strength-training exercises he and others recommend you try as you get older, plus how to do them with proper form.

Goblet squat

A squat is the movement required to stand up from sitting down, which is something you’ll want to be able to do your whole life long, Grundas says. This particular variation works your quads, hamstrings, glutes, and core, and it’s approachable for people of all fitness levels, Hewitt says. Holding a weight at your chest can help you keep your chest up, and keeping a wide stance can help you squat more deeply, according to the National Academy of Sports Medicine. 

How to do it

1. Start standing with your feet slightly wider than shoulder-width apart, toes pointing slightly out, holding a dumbbell (cupping one end like it’s a heavy goblet) or kettlebell at your chest with both hands.

2. Push your hips back and bend your knees to lower your body until your thighs are parallel to the floor or as far as you can comfortably go, keeping the weight close to your chest and your elbows inside your knees.

3. Press through your feet to return to the starting position.

4. Complete all repetitions, aiming for six to 15.

Modify it

You can work all the same muscles by doing a step-down instead. Standing on a stair, start to walk down, and as soon as your heel touches the lower step, press through your standing leg and return both feet to the higher stair, Grundas says. Repeat, alternating feet with each repetition.

Sitting-rising test

At the end of the weekly yoga class he teaches, Grundas challenges his class to stand up from the floor without using their hands. This works many different lower-body muscles and your core, in addition to helping you maintain your mobility and your balance. A 2026 European Journal of Preventive Cardiology study found people who could sit down and stand up from the floor without using their hands or other body parts for support had a four times lower risk of death over the study period compared to people who required more support.

How to do it

1. Start standing barefoot on the floor.

2. Sit down cross-legged on the floor using as little support from your hands or legs as possible.

3. Stand up, once again using as little support as possible.

4. Complete all repetitions, aiming for three to five.

Modify it

Use your hands or legs as needed to help you sit and stand. Keep practicing, aiming to be able to do the movement with less help.

If you’re able to sit and rise without support, challenge yourself with a Turkish get-up instead, Grundas says.

Seated overhead press

This movement can help you maintain your ability to put dishes away on the highest shelf in your kitchen or stow your suitcase in the overhead compartment on a plane, Grundas says.

How to do it

1. Start sitting on a bench or a sturdy piece of furniture with your feet planted on the floor, holding a dumbbell in each hand at your shoulders with your elbows bent and your palms facing forward.

2. Press both dumbbells overhead until your arms are straight but not locked.

3. Pause briefly, then lower the dumbbells to return to the starting position.

4. Complete all repetitions, aiming for six to 15.

Modify it

If you need something a little easier, use light weights to do a lateral raise, Grundas suggests:

1. Start standing with your feet shoulder-width apart, holding a dumbbell in each hand by your sides, palms facing your body.

2. Keeping your arms straight and your shoulders back and down, slowly lift the dumbbells up and out to your sides until the dumbbells are level with your shoulders.

3. Slowly lower the dumbbells back to the starting position.

4. Complete all repetitions, aiming for six to 15.

If you’re ready for a more challenging move, try a bench press, he says:

1. Lie on your back on a flat bench with your feet flat on the floor holding a barbell with your hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart. 

2. Press the bar up until your arms are straight, but don’t lock your elbows.

3. Slowly lower the bar with control until you’re just about at your chest.

4. Complete all repetitions, aiming for six to 15.

Kickstand Romanian deadlift 

Grundas recommends a modified deadlift to help you maintain your ability to pick something up off the ground.

How to do it

1. Stand on one foot with the toes of your other foot on the floor slightly behind your heel, like you’re in a staggered “kickstand” position. Keep most of your weight in your standing leg and a slight bend in that knee. Hold a dumbbell or kettlebell in your opposite hand.

2. Keeping that slight bend in your standing knee, push your hips back and lower the weight in front of your leg until you feel a stretch in the back of your thigh.

3. Pause briefly, then press through your standing foot to return to the starting position.

4. Complete all repetitions, aiming for six to 15, then repeat on the other side.

Modify it

Try it without any weight at first to get used to the movement. Once you feel comfortable in the kickstand position, you can try a single-leg Romanian deadlift, where you extend your kickstand leg straight behind you instead. You can also lift heavier weight with both feet on the floor in the traditional Romanian deadlift position.

Bear crawl hold 

Core exercises help improve balance, which can ward off falls, Hewitt says. Your core muscles also include your pelvic floor, so strengthening these muscles can help prevent bladder and bowel issues that become more common with age. 

How to do it

1. Start on your hands and knees on the floor.

2. Press through your palms and toes to lift your knees a few inches off of the floor.

3. Keep your back flat and hips level as you hold this position for 10 to 60 seconds.

Modify it

Elevate your hands on a sturdy bench, step, or couch to make this a little easier.

Once you get comfortable holding this position, make it a little more challenging by lifting one hand off the floor at a time and tapping it to the opposite shoulder or holding one arm and the opposite leg in the air for several seconds, Hewitt says. You can also crawl forward and backward in this position without letting your knees touch the floor.

With less than six weeks to go until Election Day, the sentiment among Republicans is shifting from nervous to fatalistic, as a pileup of bad news has many convinced they are heading toward an electoral disaster.

The warning signs are coming in quickly from across the map—much on it from red states where President Trump won comfortably just two years ago. Outside groups backing the GOP are now spending in the millions on Senate races in once-safe territories like Nebraska and Kansas; South Carolina, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Arkansas are all drawing renewed attention amid fears of a historically massive blue wave.

At a closed-door briefing on Wednesday with his caucus, Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina delivered a particularly grim message: 2026 is not going to look anything like 2024. As leader of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Senate Republicans’ official campaign arm, Scott is tasked with deciding how to dole out a sizable warchest in the final weeks of the midterms. According to a person who listened to the briefing, Scott urged "incumbent Senators to run like they were behind so the NRSC" could focus on "a record number of toss-up races." He told them the NRSC's priority was saving GOP-held seats in Texas, Iowa, Maine, and Alaska. They are also still investing to flip Democratic seats in Michigan and New Hampshire—where some recent polls show Democrats Abdul El-Sayed and Chris Pappas with small leads over Republicans Mike Rogers and John E. Sununu. 

And while North Carolina and Georgia—two Senate seats Republicans were touting as major targets last year—have featured less prominently in GOP conversations, Scott praised the Republican nominees in both states for narrowing their polling gaps. Still, some are writing those off as all but won by Democrats Roy Cooper and Jon Ossoff. An operative familiar with Scott’s thinking stressed that the NRSC’s strategy remains fluid until Election Day and noted that outside groups could still step in to back up their candidates in those states. 

A day earlier in Iowa, which Trump won in 2024 by 13 points, state lawmakers received an even starker warning. Radio host Steve Deace, a real player in conservative circles there and a loyal Trump ally, told his followers on Wednesday afternoon that “Iowa House Republicans were informed by their own pollsters that if you are in a +15 district you’re within the margin for error, if you’re in a +10 district you’re underwater, and that this might end being an even worse midterm environment than 2006.” 

Iowa Republicans on the ballot are not being subtle about their efforts to put some distance between their fortunes and the MAGA Movement. Rep. Zach Nunn voted last week to curb Trump’s deeply unpopular war against Iran—a month after campaigning with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is running that war. Rep. Ashley Hinson, the GOP nominee for the open Senate seat, is running ads touting her work with Democrats, not her endorsement from Trump.

As Deace noted, “If the environment is this bad in my home state, where Trump has been the most popular political figure over the last decade, I can’t imagine where it is everywhere else.”

There’s similar scrambling in Texas, where a super PAC blessed by Senate Majority Leader John Thune is now on track to spend more than $100 million, an add on of $35 million to the $65 million the group had already booked in advertising to boost Ken Paxton’s bid against James Talarico. The total price tag for keeping the Senate seat is on track to approach $200 million just on the GOP side.

It’s little better for House Republicans. Between their official campaign arm, allied outside organizations, and the candidates themselves, there is a massive $485 million well of ad reservations between Aug. 1 and Election Day—and that’s just in districts Trump won, according to a Politico analysis.

Even Speaker Mike Johnson has grown frustrated with Trump and his constant introduction of tumult in the political ether. During his Sept. 13 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Johnson appeared obviously annoyed as he kept getting asked about Trump’s fresh promise to send every American adult a $5,000 check if Republicans keep their House and Senate majorities. “I guess we’re going to spend the whole segment talking about this one issue,” Johnson said. “I want to talk about what we’ve actually done and not ideas on the table.”

It’s a common frustration across the party as gas prices—diesel especially—seem to know no limits, a war in Iran grinds toward its eighth month, and Russia’s war with Ukraine continues despite Trump’s promises to end it on “day one.” With all those drags on their ticket, Republicans have struggled to impress upon voters bragging points like the lowest crime rate in 126 years and declining prescription drug costs, or passing a massive tax cut.

The dynamic has left Republican strategists deeply frustrated. They have plenty of cash, succeeded (for the most part) in recruiting solid candidates, and are facing an opposition party that has spent much of the year fighting its own coalitions. Yet the environment still seems to be trending bluer than anyone anticipated. 

A simmering fear is that the trendlines may get even worse in the coming weeks. As one Republican strategist told me this week, Election Day cannot come quickly enough.

AI is not arriving in a world capable of receiving it. Instead, it is coming into a world that has spent the last two decades systematically dismantling the very foundations that would allow us to deploy such a powerful technology responsibly. Institutional authority, shared truth, and information integrity have been battered. We are building the most sophisticated cognitive technology in human history atop the most fractured trust landscape in modern memory.

If you wanted to design the worst possible moment for AI to emerge, you might create a moment like this one.

From post-truth to post-trust

A decade ago, we worried about living in a “post-truth” world. Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” as its Word of the Year in 2016, defining it as circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Post-truth describes a world where facts still exist but are often overshadowed by emotional narratives.

What we are experiencing now goes deeper. I call this the “post-trust era:” a world where the very mechanisms that allow us to establish trust have broken down. It is not just that emotions sometimes trump facts. It is that we have lost shared foundations for deciding what counts as a fact in the first place.

Look at what has happened to our information ecosystem over the past two decades. We moved from a world in which truth was curated by editors, printed by presses, and distributed by a small number of recognizable intermediaries, to a world in which anyone can publish, amplify, distort, or fabricate. Data exploded, and social media fragmented audiences. Algorithms began optimizing for clicks, engagement, and sensationalism. The incentives shifted from accuracy to attention: virality over veracity, outrage over nuance, speed over scrutiny.

The numbers tell their own story. Nearly 8 in 10 people get directed to their news primarily through algorithmic systems such as social feeds, search engines, and aggregators, effectively outsourcing their information diet to systems they neither understand nor fully trust. In the United States, trust in the federal government has fallen from over 70% in the late 1950s to under 20% today. Confidence in mass media has dropped: fewer than one-third of Americans express even a “fair amount” of trust. Religious institutions, financial systems, healthcare organizations, and even science itself have seen trust erode.

Post-truth describes a distortion in how people weigh facts and feelings. Post-trust describes a deeper fracture: the loss of shared procedures for determining what is real.

When the first photographs appeared in the 1830s, people marveled at their fidelity. For nearly two centuries, seeing was believing. A picture was not perfect, but it was evidence.

In early 2023, an AI-generated image of Pope Francis wearing a stylish white puffer jacket spread across social media platforms. It was compelling because it sat in a narrow band between familiar and unexpected. The photo’s style, posture, and lighting borrowed credibility from decades of real photography. Many accepted it as real before they had time to question it.

Within two years, AI-generated images, voices, and video had become so pervasive and so convincing that the question was no longer “can you spot the fake?” but “can you trust anything you see?”

The ability to fabricate convincing “evidence” at scale has arrived just as our information ecosystem is most fragmented. Research from Duke and NYU shows that exposing people to opposing political views on social media can increase polarization rather than reduce it. A landmark study in Science found that false news spreads significantly faster and more widely than trustworthy news online. Neuroimaging research suggests that when people encounter information challenging their political beliefs, brain regions associated with negative emotion light up, while confirmatory information activates reward pathways. We are not only divided about facts. We are wired to process confirming and disconfirming information through different cognitive channels altogether.

That is the substrate into which AI arrives: a world where information is abundant, but trust is scarce, where consensus reality has splintered, and where the mechanisms for establishing shared truth have broken down.

A different kind of intelligence

Into this fractured substrate arrives something genuinely new. Not just another tool, but the first technology in history whose core competence is cognition.

Past technologies extended our capabilities while remaining subordinate to human thought. The printing press amplified the words we chose to print. Electricity transformed the energy we decided to harness. Combustion engines replaced the muscle power we used, and computers executed calculations we programmed. The internet distributed the messages we wrote.

AI breaks that pattern. It no longer merely executes tasks. It generates arguments, synthesizes information, makes recommendations, and produces creative work that feels, at a human level, like someone else’s thoughts. A single model can write an essay, summarize a legal transcript, translate a medical note, draft code, plan a marketing campaign, and compose music.

At the heart of most of these systems is an architecture that learns by predicting what comes next, a word, pixel, or token, in a sequence. These models do not know “truth” in the way humans understand it. They discover patterns, frequencies, and correlations in whatever data they are given.

And here is where the timing becomes critical: the data they are given is generated in a post-trust world.

AI is trained on our news stories, our social media feeds, our digitized books, our biased archives, our polarized debates, our conspiracy theories, our scientific breakthroughs, and our misinformation. It absorbs not only our knowledge but our distortions. It learns not only our facts but also our conflicts about those facts.

The result is a strange mirror. AI reflects us to ourselves, refracted through statistical patterns and scaled by computation. It gives us answers we cannot easily audit, based on training data we cannot thoroughly inspect, optimized for objectives we do not always control.

A new kind of cognitive infrastructure is emerging at the precise moment our social infrastructure for trust is under strain.

Excerpted from The Trust Code with permission from Tiffany Xingyu Wang.

This week, the U.N. General Assembly affirmed that statehood endures the loss of land. My country, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, will persist despite rising seas. The question is how Marshallese people go on living here safely.

Our nation consists of narrow strips of land on 29 low-lying coral atolls scattered across more than 750,000 square miles of the central Pacific Ocean.

For many, adapting to rising seas may mean moving communities to higher ground. In the Marshalls, we have no higher ground to move to. That fundamental difference shapes what climate adaptation means for us and how we must act.

As we prepare for another El Niño, our people know its rhythms well, but the severity with which these forces now arrive is worsening.

First, the rains come heavily. Then they stop. Water tanks empty, wells run dry, crops fail, and ocean conditions shift. We begin shipping water to communities with none.

These changes are the reality behind the historic diplomatic achievement taking place this week. The U.N. General Assembly adopted the first Sea-Level Rise Declaration by consensus. In a year of fractured diplomacy, that is worth celebrating.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands has never wavered in its position. Sea level rise will not alter the statehood, sovereignty, or maritime zones of any state. But while the legal status, rights, and maritime zones of my country and its people are now secure, our physical safety is not.

That distinction must guide what comes next. The world must respond to the impact of sea level rise on coastal communities, heritage, and cultures, and the lands that have nourished our ancestors for generations. We must start by preventing as much sea level rise as we can.

Island nations have long fought for climate action. The Alliance of Small Island States, the High Ambition Coalition (which the Marshall Islands convenes), and other progressive forces fought hard for the 1.5°C temperature limit within the Paris Agreement. 

And last year, inspired by a campaign led by Pacific youth, the International Court of Justice affirmed in its advisory opinion on climate change that every country's emissions reductions must align with 1.5°C. The Court also affirmed that the continued licensing, subsidy, production, and consumption of fossil fuels may constitute internationally wrongful acts.

Yet earlier this month, the United Nations Environment Programme released a report indicating that an overshoot of 1.5°C is now almost certain. Crossing the threshold cannot be an excuse to abandon the target. Every fraction of a degree means greater risks, higher seas, and more lives and livelihoods lost. Our responsibility is to make that overshoot as small and short-lived as possible.

In the Pacific, we know that fossil fuel dependency hurts not only the planet but also our health, security, and economies. That is why, earlier this month, Pacific leaders set out our vision for a fossil fuel-free Pacific.

If the world does not follow science, international law, or the Pacific by phasing out fossil fuels as swiftly as possible, the harm to the roughly one billion people who live on the world’s coasts will be devastating. What’s more, the costs of adaptation will rise exponentially. For the Marshallese people, the desire to stay in the land of our ancestors is deeply felt. We demand action from major emitters as we also adapt to rising seas.

Adaptation is a huge technical challenge. We are mapping our atolls from the air, meter by meter, because available satellite elevation data has a margin of error nearly three times the height of most of our nation. We cannot determine which land to raise or whose drinking water can survive a drought from inaccurate data. Precise information is also essential to develop credible proposals and access climate finance.

We know what practical adaptation looks like. Our National Adaptation Plan is complete; funding it is not. Effective adaptation costs money—$310 billion to $365 billion per year to manage worsening climate impacts—which is why the call in the Declaration on Sea Level Rise to streamline and simplify access to finance matters. Pacific leaders in Palau put it plainly: what this region needs is climate finance, and finance that actually reaches people on the ground. We need states to invest in helping communities adapt, protecting livelihoods, allowing people to remain safely on their lands for as long as possible, and ensuring that those who move can do so with dignity.

The Marshall Islands is proud to lead the champions launching the Rising Nations Institute, which aims to translate the principles we have fought for into practical solutions for communities confronting rising seas.

Despite geopolitical challenges, UNGA’s Sea-Level Rise Declaration shows that the world is committed to climate action and to the protection of countries threatened by sea level rise. We now have legal frameworks capable of enduring physical change and inspiring action. The next challenge is to ensure that our systems of finance, planning, and adaptation can do the same.

We cannot completely hold back the rising seas. But we can do a lot more to limit that rise and to choose how we meet it.

A few years ago, Katie Costanzo and her students went curbside shopping for trash. They collected eight bags of leaves that homeowners around Buffalo had raked up for disposal, then sifted through them to see what—if anything—was hiding inside.

The bags were anything but empty. They contained insects from more than 25 families, representing every stage of life from eggs and larvae to pupae and adults. There were bees, wasps, lacewings, hoverflies, beetles, and more—all tucked into material their human landlords had deemed garbage. The class exercise was later published in American Entomologist.

That’s the problem with what we call “fall cleanup.” Costanzo, an ecologist and entomologist at Canisius University, wishes people would stop viewing leaves, stems, and wood as trash. “This is part of the ecology of our system,” she says. “This could be habitat or resources.” Much of what looks dead, messy, or finished for the season is still serving as food, shelter, or a nursery. And leaves are only the beginning.

Queen bumblebees may be tucked just beneath the soil in your yard. Native bees and ladybugs can shelter inside hollow stems you might otherwise have snipped and stuffed into a yard-waste bag. Beetles, flies, and other insects hide in spent flower heads, while birds return to those same plants for seeds. Once cold weather arrives, a yard might look like it’s closed for the season, but “all this business is happening” through the winter, says Mary Phillips, head of native plant habitat strategy at the National Wildlife Federation. 

Pollinators are animals that move pollen from one flower to another, allowing plants to reproduce. In an American yard, that group includes native bees, butterflies, moths, beetles, flies, and some wasps—not only the honeybees most people picture. The same habitat also supports plenty of beneficial creatures that aren’t technically pollinators, including predators and decomposers that help keep an ecosystem functioning.

Kim Eierman, an ecological landscape designer and author of The Pollinator Victory Garden, encourages homeowners to think differently about even the smallest patch of land. “You have an ecosystem,” she says. “It may be a really tiny one. Maybe you’re lucky and have a lot of land—but you have an ecosystem, so we need to start treating our landscapes that way.” That means reconsidering some familiar features, including the closely cropped lawn she calls a “green desert.”

Here are seven fall habits pollinator experts practice in their own yards—and how to make each one manageable.

Choose one corner where cleanup stops

Before you pick up a rake, divide your yard mentally into zones. Continue maintaining the high-traffic areas where kids play, pets run, or people gather, as well as walkways and other spots that need to remain clear. Then identify one quieter space—under a tree, behind shrubs, alongside the house, or at the back of a garden bed—where leaves, stems, and a few branches can remain.

Costanzo does this in her own yard. “You don’t have to manage your entire property the same,” she says. Her family keeps recreational areas usable and designates other spots for pollinator gardens and small piles of natural material. Someone with a suburban lot might preserve only a few sticks and one bed of leaves. That still counts. “Anything—any change—is good change,” she says.

If you’re worried that neighbors will mistake habitat for neglect, put up a sign explaining what you’re doing. “I have a pollinator sign. I have a native-plant sign,” Eierman says. “It’s a clue to neighbors and passersby that we’re gardening a little differently—and we’re gardening with a purpose.” 

The same zoning strategy applies to the lawn: “I start to cut back—not cut the lawn back, but cut back on how often I mow,” Phillips says of the turf her family still uses. As growth slows in the fall, she spaces out mowing and leaves the grass a little taller. A patch set aside as habitat is different: Once insects have settled in, leave it undisturbed through the winter rather than mowing it down.

Rake leaves into beds instead of bags

Eierman would like to rebrand “leaf litter” as “nature’s gold.” Fallen leaves insulate bumblebee queens near the soil surface where they hibernate and shelter butterflies, moths, caterpillars, and many other invertebrates. As the leaves break down, they also return nutrients to the soil, suppress weeds, and become free mulch and compost. “Nature knows what it’s doing,” Costanzo says. “We don’t have to clean it up.”

The most practical approach isn’t necessarily to leave every leaf exactly where it lands. The National Wildlife Federation recommends moving leaves off turf, pavement, driveways, and other places where a thick or slippery layer would create problems. Rake them beneath trees or into garden beds, aiming for a layer about 3 to 5 inches deep. If you still have extras, pile them in a little-used corner and let them slowly become leaf mold. Lightly spray newly placed leaves with a hose to keep them from blowing away on a windy day.

If you plan to shred fallen leaves with a lawn mower and leave the pieces on the grass, do it early in the season, before many insects have settled in for winter, Eierman says. “If you leave all those leaves and then start chopping them up, you’re chopping up lots of invertebrates, too,” she says. When you send occupied leaves to the curb, “you’re throwing away a part of your ecosystem,” Costanzo adds.

There are exceptions: Diseased plant material and invasive plants may need to be removed; ask a local extension office how to dispose of them. Leaf litter can harbor ticks, so keep it away from play spaces and heavily used paths, and follow local public-health guidance. In wildfire-prone regions, habitat advice never outranks defensible-space rules. For example, CAL FIRE advises removing leaves and other combustible debris from the first 5 ft. around structures and maintaining additional cleared zones beyond that. Regional rules vary, so check with your local fire authority.

Leave stems and seed heads standing

When an aster, ironweed, Joe-Pye weed, or native grass turns brown, resist the urge to shear it to the ground. Hollow and pithy stems can serve as nesting or overwintering sites; flower heads shelter small beetles, flies, and weevils; and seed heads become winter buffets for birds. Eierman has watched goldfinches descend on the plants in her yard to pry out seeds.

“They look dead to you,” she says. But they haven’t clocked out yet.

The easiest option is to leave most plants standing through the winter. Phillips’s Joe-Pye weed grows so high that they’re “taller than me,” she says. To keep those lanky stalks from toppling, she gathers them with twine, transforming them into an architectural feature rather than a botanical pileup.

You can shorten especially unruly stems, but don’t cut them all the way down: Leave at least a foot standing. Eierman trims only some hollow or pithy stems and varies their heights, creating openings for stem-nesting bees of different sizes. Leave plenty untouched, too. The point is variation—not precision pruning with a ruler.

Diseased plants are the exception. Remove affected material rather than preserving it alongside healthy stems, and use local extension guidance to determine whether it should be trashed, burned where legal, or processed another way. Normal browning at the end of the season isn’t itself a disease.

Uncover a little bare ground

Bee housing doesn’t always resemble a charming wooden hotel. Many native bees nest in the ground, burrowing a few inches into exposed soil and spending much of their lives there. A landscape sealed beneath thick wood-chip mulch offers them fewer entrances.

Look for a quiet spot where you can pull back the mulch and leave a modest patch of soil exposed and undisturbed. It doesn’t need to dominate the garden. Even small openings between plants can help, especially when they aren’t covered with plastic sheeting, landscape fabric, or another barrier. The Xerces Society offers guidance on recognizing and preserving ground-nesting habitat.

If you like mulch because it suppresses weeds and looks polished, keep using it where you need it; just don’t smother every square inch. “Everybody’s situation is different,” Costanzo says. The goal is to create access, not a moonscape.

Save a few logs and branches

A fallen limb doesn’t automatically need to leave the property. Decaying logs, sticks, and small brush piles provide structure and shelter for insects and other wildlife; birds also forage there for food. “Keep some of the sticks, keep some of the larger pieces of wood,” Costanzo says. “It really does provide structure and habitat that’s so important in the winter.”

That doesn’t mean every branch must remain exactly where it lands. “You don’t leave them where they fall necessarily,” Phillips says. She moves dead branches, logs, and brush into a corner of her yard—like behind shrubs, where they’re less conspicuous. “Sometimes a pile like that can be really helpful,” she says.

Start small: Place a log along the back of a garden bed, tuck a few sticks beneath a shrub, or build one restrained brush pile in a low-traffic area. Keep dead wood away from the house, and don’t leave a damaged tree standing if it could fall on a person, building, power line, or neighboring property. The National Wildlife Federation has additional guidance on dead wood and wildlife habitat.

Plant one native species this fall

Fall isn’t only a season for leaving things alone. In many parts of the country, it’s an excellent time to plant: Cooler temperatures can reduce stress on new plants, and nurseries may discount perennials that look tired but have perfectly viable roots. “Here in the Northeast, our optimal times for planting are September, October,” Eierman says. “That’s what I’m doing right now.” The ideal window varies, so check local recommendations and leave enough time for roots to establish before the ground freezes.

Start with one or two species rather than redesigning the entire property by sundown. Choose plants native to your region and suited to the site’s sunlight, soil, and moisture. Costanzo’s family has added everything from oaks, dogwoods, and redbuds to Joe-Pye weed and black-eyed Susans. “We’ve seen such a difference,” she says. “We have so much diversity.” Last year, seven bird species nested on their property.

Some plants pack an especially powerful ecological punch. “The oak tree is the superstar,” Phillips says: Across the U.S., oaks support hundreds of species of butterfly and moth caterpillars. If you don’t have room for a giant tree, native shrubs, grasses, and flowering perennials still count. Enter your ZIP code into the National Wildlife Federation’s Native Plant Finder to see locally useful options. The right list will look very different in Pennsylvania than it does in Arizona or Oregon.

Native plants can be pricey, but fall bargain-hunting may pay off. Phillips looks for end-of-season markdowns at nurseries that carry them. “They may not look good, to be honest,” she says. You might put one in the ground and immediately cut it back—but “then they’ll come back the next year.”

When shopping, ask whether a cultivated variety still produces pollen, nectar, and seed. “You don’t want sterile plants,” Eierman says. “You want plants that actually produce seed.” Some cultivars provide nectar for pollinators but no seeds for birds, making them less useful than they first appear. 

Fall is also seed-collecting season. Gather mature seeds from native plants you already grow and spread them elsewhere on your property. Phillips does this with plants she wants to expand into other parts of her yard. Some seeds, including those of many milkweeds native to cold-winter regions, need a period of low temperatures before they germinate. Plant them in fall, Phillips says, and winter will handle the chilling for you.

Stop spraying just in case

Treat the problem, not the calendar. Pesticides and herbicides should answer a specific need—not arrive automatically with the turning leaves.

Broad-spectrum insecticides don’t distinguish between a mosquito and the many insects you want to keep. Costanzo recommends using them “in response to something rather than proactively,” and only when truly necessary. “They kill every insect,” she says. “They’re not specific.”

Herbicides create a different problem: They eliminate clover, violets, dandelions, and other plants that can provide food for insects. “Your lawn doesn’t have to look like a carpet,” Costanzo says. Keep turf where you need it for recreation, but consider allowing more plant diversity elsewhere.

That doesn’t mean never treating a genuine infestation or health threat. Identify the problem first, then use the most targeted approach available rather than spraying preventively across the entire property. Follow the label exactly. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommends using pesticides only when necessary and treating only the specific area that needs treatment.

Also reconsider the assumption that every nibble is damage. A chewed leaf can be evidence that a native plant is feeding the ecosystem exactly as intended. When Costanzo notices signs of hungry insects, she reminds herself: “I’m supporting the ecosystem. I’m so glad these insects are finding a resource here.” A few holes usually won’t kill a healthy plant, she adds—and flawless foliage isn’t much use to a caterpillar.

These changes benefit the gardener, too. In an August 2026 National Wildlife Federation survey of more than 1,000 wildlife gardeners, 96% said the practice had improved their mental health, and 93% reported physical-health benefits. Respondents most often described the joy of seeing wildlife, a lift in mood, and the satisfaction of knowing they were making the world a little better. Unlike many long-term environmental problems, the payoff can appear surprisingly quickly. “Within a season, you’re seeing the wildlife come,” Phillips says. “You’re seeing the butterflies. You’re seeing the birds; you’re hearing the birdsong.”

For Eierman, that ability to take action—and see it rewarded—is part of the appeal. “There are very few things we have control over in our lives—particularly the ones that give us a lot of pleasure,” she says. “This is one. The effort that you put into it comes back to you in a big way.”

CNN, MS NOW, and Politico reporters were allowed back into the White House Thursday after a federal judge ordered President Donald Trump to immediately restore their press access.

The re-entry came after a chaotic morning, during which the three outlets filed an emergency request for a hearing, accusing the Trump Administration of having “repeatedly violated” the court order and refusing several reporters access to the White House grounds. "This morning, journalists from each of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico attempted to enter the White House and were turned away, and Secret Service agents confiscated the hard pass of journalists whose hard passes had not previously been confiscated," the outlets said in the court document.

Judge Timothy Kelly had given the Trump Administration until 12:30 p.m. ET to respond to the outlets' filing.

In a court filing of its own, the White House said it "began the process" of reinstating press badges shortly at 7:25 a.m. ET and laid out a timeline of what followed. TIME has reached out to the White House for comment.

Early Thursday, in a District of Columbia court, Judge Kelly issued a temporary restraining order of 14 days against the ban, saying it “likely violated” the media outlets’ “constitutional due process rights.” He ordered that journalists from the banned media outlets should have their White House access reinstated “until further order of the court or the expiration of this temporary restraining order.”

In a statement to TIME, Ted Boutrous, the lawyer representing the news outlets, said “this is a strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process and the rule of law. We greatly appreciate the court’s swift action.”

The order came in response to a lawsuit filed against the Trump Administration by CNN, MS NOW, and Politico on Monday, in which the outlets argued the ban was a “direct assault” on the First Amendment and violated their Fifth Amendment due process rights.

Outlining his ruling, Kelly said the outlets had “shown a likelihood of success, at least on their Fifth Amendment procedural due process claim.” The Fifth Amendment protects Americans from being “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Kelly determined that the outlets were “likely to succeed in showing that their hard passes were revoked without constitutionally adequate due process.”

The judge also rejected the Trump Administration's assertion that the media ​ban was motivated by “national security” concerns. “Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ plaintiffs from the WhiteHouse—instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of plaintiffs’ reporting,” Kelly wrote, referencing Trump’s “fake news” reasoning. 

The Justice Department, in a legal filing on Tuesday, said the outlets had “received adequate notice” of the ban (a point contested by Kelly) and insisted “the President’s actions are lawful under the First Amendment.”

What happens next?

Ahead of Thursday’s order, Trump dismissed the legal challenge over the ban and indicated he regretted appointing Judge Kelly in 2017. 

Vowing to fight any legal block on his ban, Trump insisted: “Almost without question and, as usual, we’ll go for appeal, because fake news people and publications that only write negatively, and who violate our national security by writing false and defamatory stories with unknown ‘sources,’ shouldn’t be allowed access to the [Oval Office].”

However, in the court filing, Kelly stated that “temporary restraining orders are generally unappealable.”

Instead, during the 14-day period, the court “will set a schedule for expedited briefing on a motion for a preliminary injunction,” allowing Trump and the media outlets to submit further evidence for Kelly to consider.

“Either the preliminary injunction will be issued or denied,” says Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA who specializes in the First Amendment. “The temporary restraining order would then lapse, and whichever side loses can then appeal to the D.C. Circuit.”

Instead of an appeal, Trump could file for emergency relief from the D.C. court, similar to how CNN, MS NOW, and Politico did Thursday, according to experts.

But “emergency relief is usually harder to get than a resolution through appeal,” says Volokh.

Trump has a turbulent history with the media. In 2018, he revoked the White House press credentials of Jim Acosta, who was then a CNN correspondent, after a tense exchange during a news conference.

CNN challenged the decision in court and it was Judge Kelly who ordered the White House to reinstate the reporter’s press pass.

Volokh says that legal precedent in the D.C. Circuit, used in both the ongoing case and that of Acosta, has “already been set” for areas of the White House usually open to the media, including the press briefing room. 

“The government can't exclude reporters based on viewpoint, and cannot take away a press pass without due process, without some sort of hearing opportunity to be heard, an explanation of what it is that they supposedly did wrong, what rules they violated,” he says. 

In light of this, an appeal from the Trump Administration after a preliminary injunction would likely be rejected in the D.C. Circuit, he argues. However, the President may find a better chance in the Supreme Court.

“Generally speaking, the First Amendment does not secure a right of access to government office buildings,” says Volokh, once again noting the exception of areas usually granted access for press. "The same position could be taken by the Supreme Court, and [it] might say: 'Look, the government can pick and choose whom to allow on its property,'" he says.

Media bands together in solidarity against Trump's ban

There has been an outpouring of solidarity among other media outlets in light of the ban.

CNN, one of five U.S. news outlets in the White House press pool that rotates responsibility for pooled live video coverage, was scheduled to cover Trump's trip to the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Monday. When they were restricted from doing so, other major television networks declined to replace CNN’s pool crew.

In a rare joint statement, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC said: “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No Administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

In a further show of support, some media publications—including the New York Times and Washington Post—announced they would hold off on publishing or distributing still photographs taken as part of the White House pool coverage.

On Wednesday, 49 media organizations filed a legal brief voicing their support of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. “Stripping journalists and news outlets of their rights because of perceived editorial viewpoint violates decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence and is impermissible in any type of forum, including the White House,” the brief argued.

In the summer of 1986, when he was a college student in Pennsylvania, Samuel Paparo took his future wife Maureen to watch Top Gun.

Many young Americans emerged from theaters across the country with a new hero: the brash, daring, risk-taking Maverick, played by Tom Cruise, who became an avatar of American power at the twilight of the Cold War. But Paparo took away a different lesson.

“The hero of the movie is supposed to be Maverick, but the hero of the movie is actually Iceman,” Paparo tells TIME, referring to the main character’s rival at the elite Navy pilot training school. “Maverick’s got all the personal charisma, but Iceman is fastidious, quiet. He’s the hard-working guy that does the right thing, that doesn’t do flashy, dangerous stuff for its own sake.”

Paparo had already passed the Navy’s entrance exams when he went into the theater that day, and joined the next year. His career would precisely mirror the fictional Iceman’s: He attended the Navy Fighter Weapons School, also known as TOPGUN; became a fighter pilot; then a four-star admiral; and eventually commanded the Pacific Fleet. But Paparo would go further, taking the helm of the U.S. Pacific Command, the nation’s oldest and largest geographic combatant command, which covers about half of the earth’s surface.

Few Americans will have heard of Admiral Paparo, and that suits him fine. “If I do my job right, history will never know my name,” he says in his office at the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii, on a hill overlooking Pearl Harbor, in late July. But his role places him at an inflection point, as American dominance in the Pacific faces its most serious challenge since World War II. 

His command is designed to be the immovable object that blocks the unstoppable force of China’s expansionist ambitions in the region. And those ambitions have been stated clearly: Beijing has vowed to bring Taiwan, the self-ruling island that has been politically separate from the mainland since China’s civil war ended in 1949, under its control—by force if necessary. China’s President Xi Jinping has described unification as “a historical inevitability.” 

Paparo’s job, in its simplest terms, is the projection of American power. His most important mission is to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, an event that would challenge the very foundations of a global system underpinned by American hegemony. That the outlines of this mission stay the same regardless of which party or President is in the White House speaks to the importance of his role. The force Paparo builds and the plans he puts in place last for decades, and could determine to whom the next century belongs. 

The public face of American military power is, of course, the Commander in Chief. The public voice emanates from the Oval Office and the podium in the White House press briefing room. But behind that power sits commanders like Paparo, overseeing the often hidden and awesome infrastructure that backs up that public face and voice—his command oversees some 400,000 military and civilian personnel, a Pacific Fleet of some 200 ships, including five aircraft carrier strike groups, and more than 1,000 aircraft. He marshals that power in distant oceans, islands, and military bases that most Americans will never see or even think about.

With President Donald Trump set to meet Thursday with China’s Xi for their third face-to-face summit since he returned to office, the cameras are trained on the White House; reporters will parse each utterance by the two leaders to divine whether the two powers are heading toward cooperation or conflict. It is Paparo’s job to ensure that whatever happens when the leaders talk, U.S. power remains pre-eminent—and that if somehow in the future conflict breaks out, it comes out on top. He must hold to that approach even as wars elsewhere consume the munitions and resources he may need, and upheaval at the Pentagon raises the stakes of pushing back.

“I’m almost quoting Sun Tzu when I say winning without fighting is the acme of skill,” he says, referencing the Chinese military strategist who wrote The Art of War. “Mission success for me is not to fight and win a war; it’s to provide a deterrent capability so that we never go to war in the first place.”

Paparo, 61, speaks deliberately and in a low voice, smiling often. But when conversation turns serious, so does his expression—his brows become furrowed, and he stares into the middle distance to summon his words. “We don’t seek to become great wartime leaders,” he says. “We seek to be great peacetime deterrers.”

What if deterrence doesn’t work? The U.S. emerged from World War II with its dominance of the Pacific unquestioned, but that may now be changing. Over the past few decades, as China has transformed into the world’s second largest economy, it has been engaged in a historic military buildup. China’s defense spending has increased 13-fold over the past three decades, and it now spends more on defense than the next 22 Indo-Pacific countries combined, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a bipartisan Washington, D.C.–based think tank. It has made rapid technological advances in artificial intelligence and fielded several generations of fighter jets. Its navy has grown from a coastal force into something capable of projecting global power, and by hull count it is now the largest in the world.

Brian Hart, deputy director of the China Power Project at CSIS, describes it as a “comprehensive, across-the-board modernization effort,” one that has changed the calculus for every power in the Pacific. The People’s Liberation Army, he tells TIME, has “significantly transformed the balance of power.” 

Paparo need only look out his office window at the turquoise waters of Pearl Harbor to be reminded of the last time U.S. supremacy in the Pacific was truly tested. He describes China’s buildup as “historic” and “an exponential increase in military power, and more specifically, in power projection capability.” 

“Twenty-five years ago the People’s Liberation Army Navy was about 37 warships, and today it’s 12 times that,” he says. “Just in the last 18 months they’ve delivered two cruisers, eight destroyers, eight frigates, an aircraft carrier, 11 submarines, four amphibious ships, and four long-range combat logistics ships.” He is particularly concerned by China’s advances in space and missile development and the rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal. “They’re moving toward world reach,” he says.

For all of its global ambitions, much of China’s military development has been pursued with one target in mind. U.S. intelligence assesses that China’s Xi has ordered his military to be capable of seizing Taiwan by force by 2027, the centenary of the People’s Liberation Army. The intelligence community’s annual threat assessment, released in March, suggests no invasion is currently planned for next year, but by then, the pieces Xi needs to do so will likely be in place.

If there appears to be a path to capturing Taiwan without using force, Xi insists he would prefer to take it. Presidential elections in Taiwan in January 2028 may provide some clarity in that regard: China’s old rival, the Kuomintang, is increasingly amenable to negotiations with Beijing. If the political party wins in 2028, the likelihood of an invasion may decrease. If Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te, a fierce opponent of China’s sovereignty claims, wins reelection, Hart says, “Beijing could significantly ramp up pressure on Taiwan.”

Paparo’s job is to convince Xi that the costs of military action will be too much to bear, regardless of what is happening politically on the island. By act of Congress, the U.S. is obliged to sell Taiwan the weapons it needs for its own defense; while it does not require the U.S. to defend the island directly, the commitment could go further to include direct conflict with China. He describes his mission as a delicate balancing act between ensuring that his counterparts know American capabilities well enough to understand the risks of engaging, and protecting its necessary secrets and strategy. “It’s demonstrating credible combat power, demonstrating capability and will, but keeping the crown jewels of the nation that are going to deliver combat success opaque to your counterparts, so that they can’t build a counter for it,” he says.

Paparo describes the strategy as deterrence by denial. “It’s a way of expressing that we’re not seeking the overthrow of the Communist Party,” he says. “It’s just that you should know that where America’s direct vital interests are involved, there’s a high probability of denying your aggression.”

This theory of deterrence operates on a grand, geopolitical scale, and in much smaller interactions. Paparo recounts a confrontation with a Chinese counterpart over what he describes as an “unsafe” encounter in June 2023 during a transit of the Taiwan Strait in which a Chinese Luyang destroyer cut across the bow of an American ship.

In the ensuing back-and-forth, Paparo told his counterpart that he had been in command at the watch center for the engagement and had video showing that their version of events was not true. He offered to share it, then let the matter rest.

“I’m not going to impugn his own character in it. He’s representing his country. He’s in uniform, and you know, if we do have a fight, him and I might have to shake hands at the end and agree to go to our separate sides,” he says. 

In that moment, Paparo chose a diplomatic approach. He does, however, have a more direct plan to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan. It is based on a term he uses to describe the environment Chinese forces would walk into if they took military action: “Hellscape.”

The strategy has been partly inspired by Ukraine’s defense against Russian invasion, and its ability to halt Moscow’s advances by turning the front lines of that conflict into a no-man’s-land patrolled by killer drones. Paparo would aim to saturate the Taiwan Strait with cheap, mass-produced precision drones, along with more conventional high-tech missile power, to deny China the ability to land an amphibious assault, or at least significantly delay it.

“We’ve seen that assault warfare, whether that is an amphibious assault, an airborne assault, has become a much more costly human endeavor,” he says. “In the ways that Ukraine is about a 600-mile-by-30-mile hellscape of drone warfare, I seek to put those principles at work to deter an armed invasion.”

He continues: “Putting 21st century technological change to work for the United States of America is what that’s about. We need not gain air or maritime superiority of a space; we need only deny its use to aggressors.”

Direct American involvement in a conflict over Taiwan is by no means assured. Paparo is tasked with building a force to confront China, but the President will decide how to respond. “The highest ideals of American civil-military relations are such that policy is king,” he says. 

Who would win that conflict is something that is fiercely debated. A 2023 CSIS war game found that the U.S. and its allies defeated a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan in most scenarios, but the costs to the U.S. were substantial: two aircraft carriers, dozens of ships, and hundreds of aircraft, the heaviest American losses since World War II. Those war games were run before the war in Iran depleted U.S. missile stocks.

“I am confident in our ability to prevail,” Paparo says. “What I am working toward is the margin by which we do, and that margin expresses itself in lives, capability, money, and time. I want to drive that bill down to zero.”

An enormous map of the Indo-Pacific theater lines the wall of Paparo’s office. His desk overlooks a large room adorned with historical Pacific artifacts and gifts given to the admiral and his predecessors: a five-star flag that belonged to General Douglas MacArthur; a barometer gifted to Admiral Harry Harris Jr., who led the command from 2015 to 2018, by China’s Ministry of National Defense. Closer to his desk is a large computer screen showing the positions of every vessel under his command. As he toggles through the ships on the screen to demonstrate the scale of his fleet, he pauses somewhere near the Indian Ocean to press home a point: His command is not merely preparing for war; it is fighting one. “The Iranian frigate was sunk by us,” he says. He is referring to an incident in March, when the U.S.S. Charlotte submarine torpedoed and sank the Iranian navy frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean as it was returning to Iran from India, where it had taken part in an international exercise. More than 100 Iranian sailors were killed. Paparo’s forces have also helped enforce a blockade of Iran’s coastline and support logistics for the war.

That the U.S. Pacific Command is fighting one war on one side of the world while preparing for another 6,000 miles away in the Taiwan Strait is a measure of its scale. As he stands in front of his map, Paparo sweeps his arm down the Western seaboard, along the coast to Southern California, and across the central Pacific, pointing out an array of U.S. territories and possessions. These places may seem like distant lands to many Americans. To Paparo, they are as much a part of the U.S. as New York or California. To see the Pacific in this way is to understand the meaning behind this projection of power: it’s not just for the protection of an important strategic partner in Taiwan; it is for the protection of the U.S. itself. “There’s no more Pacific a country in the world than the United States of America,” he says. 

It’s not just about Taiwan and China, either. The North Koreans, he says, “are seeking a nuclear deterrent” and want to present the world with a “fait accompli.” The Russians “have increased their air, missile, and maritime capabilities.”

Much of the job is managing friends rather than enemies. The Pentagon has called on Paparo to mediate between allies at odds with one another, and he says there is nothing new in that. Those military-to-military relationships, he adds, “tend to be an anchor that attenuates the ups and downs of policy disagreements among political leaders ... but it always respects the national policy of our civilian leadership.” 

Few conflicts in the world today do not brush up against the Indo-Pacific theater or impact it in some way. The Iran war and U.S. support for Ukraine have placed severe strain on the resources available to all commands, causing a depletion in the stockpiles for missile defense like the Patriot and THAAD systems, and in long-range ground attack missiles, according to the Pentagon and CSIS estimates.

In May, a planned $14 billion arms package for Taiwan was put under review in part to preserve munitions for the Iran war. Experts have warned it may take years to replenish those stocks, a timeline that could affect the calculus of China and Russia.

Those shortages are no secret, but it’s a perilous time to be out of step with the White House and the Pentagon. At least 20 top military leaders, including generals and admirals, have been fired or left their positions since Pete Hegseth became Secretary of Defense at the start of the second Trump Administration. The turmoil culminated in the late August resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who reportedly left his role after clashing with Hegseth over the firings of senior generals and the Secretary’s alleged stymieing of Army modernization efforts in the midst of a U.S. war against Iran.

Hegseth has characterized those departures as part of a campaign to undo what he saw as the promotion of “woke” leadership. In a speech in September 2025 in Quantico, Va., to the military’s generals and admirals, all of whom were required to attend, Hegseth criticized the promotion of leaders for what he described as “the wrong reasons, based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts.” Paparo was visible in the front row of that gathering, his expression giving nothing away. 

He has been careful in his public remarks about the impact the war in Iran has had on the readiness of his command. When questioned in the Senate about how prolonged conflict could impinge on his mission, Paparo conceded only that “there are finite limits to the magazine, and I have all the faith in the world that they’re being employed judiciously.” 

In private, he appears to have been more candid. Paparo’s name emerged recently in a Washington Post report on a classified assessment, along with other combatant commanders, in which he is said to have objected to the continued use of an aircraft carrier strike group and destroyers for the war in Iran. He was also named in a New York Times report as one of several “private interlocutors” who had been offering “unvarnished” views of the Iran war to Vice President JD Vance. Vance’s team declined to comment on the report.

Ward Carroll, a Navy veteran who flew in F-14s and a friend of Paparo’s for many years, says the admiral’s circumspection is part of his character. “He doesn’t want headlines,” he says. “He’s not out there like some other folks have been, saying Epic Fury was a huge mistake. He may say it in private ... but he’s certainly not going to say it to the media or allow it to be leaked.” Paparo excels, Carroll says, by choosing not to “wade into the food fight that is modern-day media and politics at all.” A spokesperson for Pacific Command declined to comment on Paparo’s private conversations about the Iran war.

When TIME asks Paparo about the potential impact of Ukraine and Iran, he is again cautious, pivoting to the lessons the U.S. is learning from both: namely the rapid deployment of drones in Ukraine and of AI-enabled operations in Iran, which were used to select and recommend targets for the U.S. military.

“The nature of an operation in the Pacific would be to counter an amphibious invasion. Well, we’ve just not used a lot of anti-ship weapons—we still maintain robust inventories of those,” he says. “And so, while I’m not going to whistle past the problem of the expenditure of munitions, it is our job to charge into the learning, and for us to get better.”

If there is a permanence to America’s projection of power in the Pacific, it can also be found in Paparo’s own family. His father Samuel Paparo Sr., who died in February, served four years in the Marine Corps before becoming a shipworker at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. There he helped refit the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Kitty Hawk and repair the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy. The younger Paparo would later fly from both. “He was really proud of that,” he says of his father. His grandfather was a Seabee, serving in one of the Navy’s construction battalions across the Pacific during World War II, in Bora Bora, Guam, and other islands. He died when Paparo was 13, but he left behind an old wooden scrapbook he had built with pictures from the war and all the places he had been. A young Paparo would pick it up from time to time and leaf through it. “I don’t think he imagined his grandson to be here in command,” he says. 

His mother washed hair in a South Philadelphia barbershop and later worked a makeup counter in a department store. “Neither my father nor his father finished high school. In fact, nobody in my family before me had ever had a university education,” he says. He would later attend Villanova, the Catholic college also attended by the first American Pontiff, Pope Leo XIV. “We make Popes and admirals,” he says of his alma mater.

He joined TOPGUN, whose exacting culture left a lasting impression. “What the school confers is attention to detail, dedication to execution, dedication to getting better, and being introspective and running to your own problems, of seeking the perfect flight that you’ll never get,” he adds. He flew F-14, F-15, and F/A-18 jets, and clocked more than 6,000 flight hours and 1,100 carrier landings. He says he initially aimed to serve as long as his father. “Serving for four years was intentional, and serving for 40 was a blessing,” he adds.

Paparo’s time leading the Pacific Command is historic not just for the opponent he faces, but also because it coincides with a rapid and dramatic change in the nature of warfare. On one wall of his office hangs a reprint of a TIME cover from May 18, 1942, depicting Admiral Chester Nimitz, the naval commander who led the U.S. to victory over Japan at sea in the Pacific war. Nimitz took command of the Pacific Fleet in December 1941, also at a time of great technological change.

After Pearl Harbor, and under Nimitz’s watch, the battleship would be eclipsed by the aircraft carrier. Amphibious warfare would be revolutionized and directed under a single commander. And then there was the kamikaze—organized suicide attacks by aircraft flown by Japanese pilots—and their foreshadowing of the questions posed by the advancement of unmanned aerial drones in warfare today. “He adapted to change, including the unknown,” Paparo says of Nimitz. “That’s the greatest leadership model I can think of.”

Paparo hopes that he never has to fight the war he has spent so long preparing for, that his plans go untested and passed on to the next commander. In the meantime, he will continue with the quiet work. “Mine is not a heroic story,” he says. “Heroism is service that happens at the unforgiving hour. The best service prevents the unforgiving hour.”

On Thursday, President Xi Jinping of China is meeting President Donald Trump at the White House. The United States and China are in significantly different places and the world increasingly fragmented and multi-polar since he last visited the White House to meet  President Barack Obama in 2015. As the American and Chinese leaders meet, the most consequential question is: who is shaping the international order, and according to whose principles and rules? 

The answer may be more nuanced than many expected: while the U.S. remains the world’s most powerful country, China is emerging as an architect of that order.

Beijing is creating institutions, proposing diplomatic initiatives, establishing technological standards and offering infrastructure to countries across the world. But its influence extends beyond diplomacy. China offers developing countries alternative paths to prosperity, mobilizing its technological champions as sources of power. Rather than replicating the American system of military alliance and security guarantees, Beijing is building networks of trade and alternative financial institutions. China is also promoting a new vocabulary of international affairs—one that is deliberately distinct from the American language of power.

China does not have a miraculous, surefire plan to succeed the U.S. as the world’s new hegemon. Nor is there evidence that other countries are prepared to embrace a Chinese-led system entirely. China’s ambition appears more complicated: it seeks greater influence over the ideas and institutions that determine how the international system works. Beijing wants not merely a decisive vote in the game, but a hand in writing its rules.

Beijing is pursuing this ambition at a moment when Washington, despite its power, appears less willing to shoulder the traditional burdens of global leadership. Its domestic political divisions, the Trump Administration’s apparent disregard for international law, and its erratic approach to foreign policy and global conflicts have raised questions about the future of American stewardship.

Yet China is not inheriting a vacuum. Thanks to its power, Washington remains deeply entrenched in the institutions, alliances, and technologies that underpin its supremacy. China is gaining room to shape the international order, but it is not yet replacing the power that built much of it. Instead, Beijing is creating alternatives that allow other countries to become less dependent on the existing American-led system.

China’s new new world vision

Perhaps the most powerful element of China’s vision for a different international order is not its defense of national sovereignty or multipolarity, but its proposition about development. Beijing is asking a pointed question: what if countries need not follow the Western path to modernity?

For much of the past eight decades, the prevailing vision of development was associated with a broadly Western model: foreign aid, privatization, and political liberalization. China offers something different, defying the hopes of Western intellectuals and policymakers who believed that Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 would eventually lead to its political liberalization.

China’s own experience suggests that economic success can be built, at least partly, through investments in infrastructure, financed by public finance and state loans. The old Chinese expression about “getting richer by building roads” has also shaped its approach abroad: Beijing has committed itself to financing and promoting across the Global South the type of infrastructure that helped power its own economic miracle.

The developing world has been receptive. China’s Global Development Initiative places development at the center of its international engagement. Although the Belt and Road Initiative has been heavily criticized since its inception, it has provided Beijing with a practical platform for financing and building infrastructure overseas. Beijing is making its case not through elegantly written standards of governance but through tangible things: roads, railways, and ports.

Over the past decade, the Chinese government and its state-owned enterprises invested approximately $634 billion into building physical infrastructure around the world, along with $419 billion in direct investments outside the financial sector in the developing world. For many governments in Latin America—a region Washington has long regarded as its strategic backyard—access to Chinese development finance and Chinese markets has led to significant economic gains.

China’s development strategy creates economic relationships that should endure for decades, especially when its financing carries conditions that serve Beijing’s interests, including privileged access to critical minerals and resources. But the era of immense Chinese overseas spending is becoming harder to sustain as Beijing grapples with its own economic woes. 

The ultimate test of Beijing’s economic statecraft, then, is whether it can build lasting relationships across the globe that rest on more than financial largesse and accumulated diplomatic capital. China must demonstrate that it understands what developing countries actually need and that those needs will evolve over time.

A new age of Chinese tech

Influence is no longer exerted through explicit military might but built quietly into the infrastructure of everyday economic life. As development becomes increasingly intertwined with technology, a country that adopts Chinese cloud computing may also embed itself in a Chinese-led ecosystem that endures for decades.

Artificial intelligence offers the clearest example of technology as a source of geopolitical power. China is rapidly promoting its AI capabilities globally, including open-weight models that can be deployed at a fraction of the cost of their Western competitors. For much of the developing world, the appeal is obvious: those countries can gain access to cutting-edge technology without having to rely exclusively on American tech giants.

The technological race is also becoming a competition over the development choices countries make. If most economies build their digital infrastructure and AI systems primarily around American technologies, Washington will retain an enormous structural advantage. As countries invest in those systems, they will become increasingly dependent on them, while American tech giants gain access to vast stores of user data. If more countries come to rely on Chinese technologies and the standards and supply chains associated with them, China will acquire greater influence: less visible than military power, but potentially just as consequential and enduring.

This is why China’s enormous industrial capacity has become a central instrument of its effort to shape the global order. Beijing is not merely exporting products: it is helping determine which technologies countries use to modernize themselves, and by extension, the systems their economies will rely on.

A central ambiguity lies at the heart of China’s development strategy. Chinese technology can expand a country’s economic opportunities but is bound to increase its dependence on China. That tension is likely to persist longer than many anticipated. Many governments are choosing Chinese technology for its affordability and not because they have been persuaded by Beijing’s governing philosophy. A country may adopt Chinese systems while remaining aligned with the U.S. on security.

China therefore does not depend on others becoming “pro-China”. It may be enough for them to become less dependent on the West. This is a vital distinction. Beijing need not convince the world that its model is superior. It only needs to show that alternatives to Western technologies exist. The cumulative effect of those alternatives could gradually alter the balance of the global order.

China’s statecraft is a way of redistributing economic and technological power. Unlike the U.S., China’s most significant export may not be a political model but the infrastructure and technology through which other countries seek to build prosperity. In adopting those systems, they become part of a world less dominated by the U.S. and its European allies.

Networks, not alliances

Before arriving in Washington, President Xi undertook a flurry of overseas travel, visiting places that American presidents have largely neglected: Bishkek, Cairo, New Delhi. His itinerary illuminated an interesting pattern. Each of his September stops connected China to the expanding international networks Beijing has championed and some Western governments regard with suspicion, notably the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS.

Consider BRICS. What began as an informal gathering of emerging economies has become a much larger political forum, with countries from the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere seeking membership or closer connections. It would be a mistake to consider BRICS as a Beijing-led anti-American bloc. Its members have sharply different interests, and countries such as India have no intention of joining an anti-Western alliance. But the group’s expansion reflects a critical shift: a growing number of countries want access to institutions in which the Group of 7 does not set the terms.

The Group of 7 is an exclusive club whose members broadly share political values and standards of governance. China does not demand that other countries abandon institutions led by Washington; instead, it builds alternatives that exist alongside them. That distinction matters.

This is why I expect that the emerging world order will not be divided neatly between a Chinese camp and an American one. Most countries will continue to use the dollar, trade with the U.S., and participate in Western institutions while simultaneously joining BRICS, borrowing from Chinese-backed institutions, and engaging with the SCO. For many governments, the fundamental attraction is the freedom to choose among competing sources of finance, technology, and diplomatic support.

Beijing’s advocacy of multipolarity is neither merely about building a fairer world, nor is it about replacing one hegemon with another. It is an attempt to widen the range of choices available to other states. By establishing new institutions and initiatives, Beijing is accelerating the movement of power away from the traditional centers of the West. For China, being an architect of the international order does not necessarily mean replacing America, but building a world where the U.S. can no longer design all the rules or define legitimate international behavior by itself.

Yet the China dilemma remains. Beijing opposes an international order dominated by a single power, but fragmenting that system would inevitably increase China’s global influence. And the more influence China acquires, the more other countries may begin to question whether Beijing’s vision is truly intended to produce greater equality, or merely a new distribution of power that benefits China most.

An order shaper in the making

President Xi’s meeting with President Trump will be scrutinized for the usual signs of rivalry: tariffs, technology restrictions, and strategic tensions. But beneath those headlines lies the great contest over how the international order itself should work.

China is not seeking to inherit the world America built. It is trying to change how that world works by giving other countries choices beyond the American-led system. For decades, the U.S. was identified with policing the rules-based international order, while China was portrayed primarily as its challenger. But during President Trump's second term, questions of sovereignty and international law have themselves become more contested, blurring what once seemed a clear distinction between the American and Chinese approaches.

Whether China’s ascent produces a fairer international order, a more genuinely multipolar one, or simply a new system in which Chinese power carries greater weight remains uncertain. The answer will depend not only on what Beijing wants, but also on what other countries are willing to accept. For now, China’s ambition may not be to write all the rules, but to ensure that Washington is no longer the only power capable of writing them.

I grew up in a middle class family in Mumbai, where my parents taught us the importance of giving back. Our success, they insisted, was meaningful only if it helped others rise. As a girl, I spent most Sundays accompanying my father as he distributed food to those in need. As a young teacher at an elementary school, I learned that the greatest gift a teacher offers is not knowledge itself but the confidence and capabilities it awakens in a child. And, as a mother, I experienced most profoundly that there is no greater joy than nurturing another life.

Mahatma Gandhi taught us that service to others is among life’s highest forms of fulfilment. His ideas have shaped me and my ideas of philanthropy profoundly: sarvodaya, his vision of the welfare of all, and, antyodaya, his insistence on the uplift of society’s most marginalized.

But the highest purpose of philanthropy is to make itself obsolete. To do that, we must turn acts of care and generosity into lasting change by building institutions. Societies shape the future through the institutions they build: universities, hospitals, museums, scientific laboratories, and schools. Every generation has a responsibility to pass on stronger institutions to the next.

Our world is awash in plenty. Yet roughly between two to three billion people, especially in the Global South, remain deprived of nutritious food, adequate housing, clean water and sanitation, quality education and healthcare, secure livelihoods, and protection from environmental hazards. The primary responsibility for meeting these needs rests with governments, multilateral institutions, and businesses. But social transformation also requires philanthropic institutions capable of combining excellence with compassion, innovation with integrity, and purpose with performance.

Across India, I have encountered incredibly talented and dedicated doctors and nurses; teachers and artists; farmers, athletes, and volunteers. Extraordinary things happen when these talented and dedicated people find opportunity and support.

This belief guides my work as chair of India’s Reliance Foundation, on every institution we have built—from excellent schools to a global university still taking shape; from high quality, affordable and accessible healthcare to a cultural center that showcases arts and artists from the world’s great cities and India’s remotest towns and villages; from an initiative that offers dignity and opportunity to millions of India’s skilled craftspeople to an organization dedicated to protecting and caring for animals.

The most remarkable people I have met rarely ask for aid. What they seek is a chance: a chance to learn, to create, and to contribute. When society provides such opportunities reliably and at scale, lives are transformed. Institutions make this possible. They do more than solving the problems of our today; they prepare humanity for the possibilities of our tomorrow.

But building institutions demands patience. Institutions are gifts to those who inherit them; in time, they might create things their founders never imagined. I often think about the world our children, and their children, will inherit. I hope it will be healthier, kinder, more harmonious, more creative, and more com- passionate. I hope it will be a world where every child has the freedom to dream without limits and the means to pursue those dreams with confidence.

The Sanskrit phrase Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam teaches us that the world is one family. I believe that institution-building is one of the purest expressions of this philosophy: it enlarges the circle of care to embrace humanity as a whole. And since all nations, communities, and cultures are branches of a single tree, we share a responsibility to tend it together.

Philanthropic institutions should forge bonds of mutual learning, exchange, and collaboration; partnerships help multiply the impact of philanthropy. Ultimately, philanthropy is not measured by the wealth we give away but by the futures we make possible, by the dreams that become reality because someone built something lasting. Time may dim the memory of who builds institutions, but the institutions themselves must shine on.

An OpenAI agent hacked into an Australian government health database in June, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed Wednesday, amid concerns from world leaders and artificial intelligence firms about the industry’s rapid, unregulated expansion.

Albanese said the AI agent had accessed public and non-public files in the statistics reporting service portal for Australia’s universal health insurance scheme, Medicare, in June. OpenAI, however, only notified the government of the breach 84 days later—through an email sent to the public mailbox.

“No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing,” Albanese said in a press conference in New York, where he attended the U.N. General Assembly. “Nonetheless, this situation is obviously unacceptable.”

An OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement that during a recent review, they identified activity involving “several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers, and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation.” Its AI models then “took actions we did not intend.”

The breach follows a string of incidents where AI models have gone rogue, prompting debate about whether the world is ready to deal with such security risks stemming from its swift development. 

Read More: The AI Tipping Point

Albanese said he had a “very frank” phone call with Altman about the breach, and the Prime Minister claimed the OpenAI CEO “has acknowledged their issues with protocols.”

The Prime Minister then said Australian intelligence authorities will help conduct a “forensic investigation” to look into whether other government systems were affected. A task force will also review the incident, and the Australian government will seek advice on whether any offenses were committed and if the incident should be referred to the federal police.

The AI agent-led hack comes just as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself warned leaders present at the U.N. Security Council about the risks AI systems pose with their increasing capabilities and autonomy: “They could move faster than our institutions, concentrate power in too few hands, or make decisions that people no longer understand or control.”

What happened?

On June 18, OpenAI’s research team used an internal model that accessed the Medicare statistics website, as it looks into public medical spending, according to Albanese. Katy Gallagher, the Minister for Government Services, said the website is “most often used by researchers and academics who get that aggregated data about benefit statistics, prescribing statistics, to use in their own research,” and clarified that it is “not in any way related to Medicare in terms of claims, payments, processing, individual information.”

But OpenAI hadn’t been aware of the potential breach until August, when it was reviewing “misaligned model activity”—or activity that deviates from the user’s intent.

Albanese said that after encountering security blocks, the agent “found a way around those blocks—didn't accept no for an answer” to get the information it wanted.

OpenAI notified Services Australia, which delivers the federal government’s social services, on Sept. 10. It wasn’t until Sept. 17 that Gallagher had been advised of the breach, and it reached Albanese over the weekend.  Albanese criticized how Australia received a mere email from OpenAI, and how delayed the notification was despite the security risk. 

The Prime Minister added three other Australian government websites may have been affected: the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and the Victorian Department of Health, though Minister for Defense Richard Marles later said in a Thursday press briefing that the interactions with agents in these three sites were “entirely normal” and only included public information. 

The NSW bureau said it was aware of a vulnerability that could allow access to a crime mapping tool, but asserted that the concerned dataset has no personal information such as names, dates of birth, personal addresses, or other identifiable information about people. There’s also no evidence that a breach has already occurred.

Marles added that while the impact of the Medicare statistics portal breach is “relatively minor,” a non-human agent’s ability to access a government website unauthorized represents “a very serious incident.”

Shocking, yet predictable, says Albanese

Several high-profile incidents of AI agents going rogue preceded the Australian government breach.

In July, OpenAI announced that, during a cybersecurity test, its agents infiltrated the AI company Hugging Face. Nonprofit research laboratory Transluce also reported other incidents of OpenAI systems’ unsuccessful hacking attempts, including a digital library at the University of New Mexico and a platform visualizing U.S. government data in May. Independent researchers also discovered that rogue OpenAI agents took over a German website, transforming it into a message board for other AI agents.

But it’s not only OpenAI: during testing by the U.K.’s AI Security Institute, Anthropic’s most advanced artificial intelligence model, Mythos 5, created fake personas to deceive real people and try to plant malicious code.

“It was a shock that it occurred, because it was real and serious,” Albanese said of the Australian government website hack. “But it also, I think, was something that had been predicted, including by the AI companies themselves.”

TIME has a licensing and technology agreement with OpenAI. Salesforce, where TIME owner Marc Benioff is CEO, is an investor in Anthropic.

Hillman College might be the most vividly realized institution of higher learning that never cashed an actual tuition check. The fictional historically Black college at the heart of A Different World, the generation-defining NBC sitcom that ran for six seasons beginning in 1987, has school colors (maroon and white) and a Latin motto (“Deus nondum te confecit,” or “God is not done with you yet”). It has sports teams, Greek organizations, homecoming traditions. The campus is constantly abuzz, with political debates animating common rooms and flirtations heating up over comfort food at Hillman’s hangout of choice, The Pit. But what really makes the school is its people—Black teens from every conceivable background forging lifelong friendships under the empathetic eyes of adults committed to helping them thrive and mature.

Which is why, even as the TV of the ’80s and ’90s is strip-mined for blandly familiar streaming content, Hillman feels like a place worth revisiting. Also titled A Different World, Netflix’s just-released revival does precisely that in a 10-episode dramedy set among Gen Z freshmen. Yet it also maintains a strong connection to the past, re-enlisting as an executive producer and director Debbie Allen, the architect of the series’ greatness, and making its protagonist the daughter of the opposites-attract golden couple Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison) and Whitley Gilbert-Wayne (Jasmine Guy). The new episodes don’t have quite the same spark of energy and wit that made the original a classic; stylistically, they share more with contemporary teen dramas like the HBCU-set All American: Homecoming and the straight-faced Fresh Prince reboot Bel-Air, whose writer and producer Felicia Pride helms this sequel. But the show does share with its predecessor vibrant characters, appealing performances, and a keen sense of how the personal intersects with the political. It’s more than enough to justify the return trip.

Relatable like her dad, a brilliant mathematician from pre-gentrification Brooklyn, but also entitled like her posh Southern belle mom, Maleah Joi Moon’s Deborah Wayne makes an ideal ingénue, prone to frustrating choices yet still somehow charming. She’s the ultimate Hillman legacy; not only are her parents both grads, but Dwayne is now provost and Whitley (a beauty mogul, to no one’s surprise) is as involved in the alumni scene as you’d expect the namesake of Gilbert Hall to be. So this freshman grew up with campus fixtures like Prof. Freddie Brooks (Cree Summer, reprising her role as Hillman’s resident social justice crusader) and Pit proprietor Nellie Gaines (Famecia Ward, playing the granddaughter of the late Lou Myers’s beloved character, Vernon Gaines). Along with satisfying the nostalgia of longtime fans, these relationships give the show access to the high-stakes higher-ed bureaucracy students rarely glimpse. It’s an effective setup, although a plot that puts the Waynes’ marriage in peril, calling back to their will-they-or-won’t-they courtship, doesn’t feel entirely earned, let alone necessary. 

Really, though, the new Different World is about the kids. And that’s as it should be. As with the original cast, the mix of personalities and backstories is key. Deborah has unfinished business—of the romantic sort, naturally—with Shaquille (Cornell Young IV), the football-star son of her dad’s old roommate, smooth schemer Ron Johnson (Darryl M. Bell). Despite being second-generation Hillmanites, neither is sure they truly belong there. Shaquille had Division 1 teams fighting over him but opted to make a statement by playing for an HBCU instead. An aspiring artist whose wild behavior ruined her chances at NYU, Deborah had no alternative. 

Her inner circle includes roommate Rashida Duvall (Alijah Kai, another standout), a driven scholarship student who calls herself “the Simone Biles of school” and whose eventual bond with Deborah echoes Whitley’s odd-couple friendship with her own Hillman roommate, Kim (Charnele Brown, who also guest stars). Hazel Henry (Kennedi Reece), whose church-girl innocence belies big ambitions, completes the trio. Among Shaquille’s boys are Kojo Achebe (Chibuikem Uche), whose aspirations of becoming a fashion designer don’t exactly thrill his strict African parents, and Amir Rodale (Jordan Aaron Hall), a formerly incarcerated student whose time in juvie continues to interfere with his life at Hillman. Amir is also the franchise’s first gay main character, an identity that Hall and the writers navigate with grace and ease.

It’s a reverent reinvention, one that the people behind the first Different World clearly support. (Jada Pinkett Smith, Joe Morton, Glynn Turman, and Jenifer Lewis are just a few of the other past stars who appear.) Without defaulting to the Very Special Episodes that worked better in primetime than they do in a binge-dropped streaming season, Pride engages with issues relevant to her young, Black characters, often letting themes develop across episodes. Allen’s groundbreaking storylines about apartheid protests, AIDS, and the censorship of rap lyrics have given way to ones that consider the stigma around learning disabilities, friction between African and Black American cultures, and HBCUs’ reliance on funding from an anti-DEI federal government. In one episode, a bomb threat forces students to realize the school they’d hoped would give them a four-year reprieve from racism is also uniquely vulnerable to it. Yet, true to its history, the show thoughtfully interweaves these topical beats into collegiate lives that revolve around schoolwork, romantic mess, friend-group drama, money troubles, dreams of the future.

The real divergence between the two visions of Hillman is in tone. Once it got past a first season weighed down by its connection, via Lisa Bonet’s original lead, Denise Huxtable, to The Cosby Show and its since-disgraced creator, not to mention the odd gimmick of casting Marisa Tomei as Denise’s white roommate, A Different World was lightning in a bottle. Allen used the jaunty spirit of sitcoms and outsize characters like Whitley and Ron to create 23-minute, multicam stage plays funny, dynamic, and daring enough to make viewers forget that our perspective on Hillman was confined to a handful of dorm-room and common-space interiors. Thanks in part to a talented cast who went on to become fixtures of movies and TV, and in part to the optimism of a post-civil-rights generation that, for all its many challenges, had reason to believe progress would continue, it was possible to spotlight injustice and do pratfalls and lovers’ tiffs in the same scene. Whitley and Dwayne were honeymooning in LA when the Rodney King verdict came down! Roseanne and Tom Arnold, of all people, guest-starred as white looters. (Susan Fales-Hill, then the head writer, has said she thinks the episode sealed the show’s cancellation.)

Pride was probably wise not to try recreating that balance of serious and silly. It might have come off as trivializing to a generation raised amid bigoted, post-Obama backlash and choose-your-own-apocalypse visions of doom within their lifetimes. Even if it didn’t, the multicam sitcom, in its current incarnations as well as its classic ones, reads as a throwback. The decision not to coast on nostalgia, to give viewers access to a fully realized, if somewhat more somber Hillman of classrooms and quads and athletic fields and libraries, is a sound one. More lamentable, yet also understandable, is the extent to which principled preaching, often by respected elders, supplants the hearty debate among characters that once served to underscore the diversity of thought within the Black community. The original series combined an ideal cast with ideal scripts, at precisely the right time to see them embraced by tens of millions of fans. It can’t be reproduced. Thirty-three years later, we have A Different World for a truly different world, though not the one a newly married Dwayne and Whitley might have hoped for.

Americans are warming to China, new surveys show.

A Pew Research Center survey published Wednesday found that the share of Americans with a cold view of China has fallen to 54% from 68% in 2021. Over the same period, the share of Americans with a warm view of China grew from 11% to 19%, while those with a neutral view grew from 20% to 27%. The findings are based on responses from 1,168 U.S. adults who were asked to rate China as part of a broader survey conducted Sept. 14-20.

Another survey published this week by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that American sentiment towards China has warmed since a record low in 2024. The survey, conducted July 10-21, showed that fewer Americans see China as a threat, with 41% considering China’s territorial ambitions a critical threat to the U.S. as compared to 52% in 2022. Americans also increasingly favor cooperation with China over containment: 57% said the U.S. should engage with China, while 40% think the U.S. should actively limit the growth of China’s power.

“There is appetite for engagement. Part of this may be recognition that better understanding is a positive,” says Ja-Ian Chong, associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore.

Chong says the results reflect a “rebound” from pandemic-era lows of U.S. views of China. A Pew survey published in July 2020 found that 73% of Americans viewed China unfavorably—then the highest share since Pew began tracking the measure in 2005. By 2023, a separate Pew survey found that figure had risen to 83%, amid widespread concern about Beijing’s relationship with Russia and tensions over Taiwan.

Mixed politics

President Donald Trump has also signaled greater openness to Beijing, at least in its economic relationship. The “positive language coming from the White House” may have fuelled some of the shift, Chong tells TIME.

Early into his second term, Trump raised tariffs on many Chinese imports to a staggering 145% in an effort to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. His Administration also increased scrutiny of Chinese visa applicants and revoked the visas of some Chinese students, raising alarms about a “China Initiative 2.0.” The Administration also restricted sales of Nvidia’s H20 artificial intelligence chip to China and added dozens of Chinese entities to an export blacklist over national security concerns.

The Trump Administration has also continued its crackdown on “birth tourism,” a practice Trump has singled out Chinese nationals over. On Wednesday, the State Department announced that it would restrict visas for foreigners who knowingly participate in or facilitate commercial arrangements to give birth in the U.S. in order to secure their children American citizenship, a policy widely seen as an effort to restrict birthright citizenship.

But Trump has since eased some technology restrictions, pursued a trade truce, and renewed dialogue with Beijing. Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Washington on Wednesday to much fanfare, marking the leaders’ third in-person meeting since Trump returned to office. Economic negotiations have been central to that diplomatic thaw, which the Chicago Council report said suggests that the Trump Administration views China primarily through an economic lens, rather than strategic competition.

Read More: China First: As Trump Meets Xi, How Beijing Sees the World Now

“The top leadership on both U.S. and Chinese sides have made significant steps to try and arrest the downward trend in their relationship,” says Dylan Loh, associate professor of public policy and global affairs at Nanyang Technology University in Singapore. “The warming trend isn’t admiration but a moderation of threat perception, driven by a shift toward viewing China as a competitor rather than an immediate adversary as other crises take precedence.”

Still, Chong cautions: “There remains a deep reservoir of apprehension” among Americans towards China.

Trump’s MAGA Republican base remains hawkish. According to the Chicago Council survey, 63% of MAGA Republicans favor containing China rather than cooperating with it, whereas 57% of non-MAGA Republicans favor cooperation. A March 2026 poll by the Chicago Council, alongside NPR and Ipsos, found that MAGA Republicans were more likely than non-MAGA Republicans to prefer higher tariffs on Chinese imports and more restrictions on U.S.-China trade, even if it resulted in higher costs for American consumers, as well as limits on Chinese international students studying in the U.S.

Skepticism towards China is also pronounced on Capitol Hill. In a Sept. 18 letter, Rep. John Moolenaar (R, Mich.), chair of the House Select Committee on China, urged the Trump Administration to restrict Beijing’s access to U.S. AI and semiconductor technology. In December, Sen. Pete Ricketts (R, Neb.) and Sen. Chris Coons (D, Del.) also introduced legislation to block exports of advanced AI chips to China.

Lawmakers have also pressed Trump to stand firm on Taiwan as the President described a pending U.S. arms package to the island as a “negotiating chip” in talks with Beijing. Moolenaar warned against concessions on U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, while Ricketts urged that the U.S. cannot allow China to take the island by force.

By contrast, public support for direct military intervention over Taiwan has declined. The Chicago Council study this week found that just 38% of Americans support using U.S. troops to defend Taiwan in case of a Chinese invasion, down from 52% in 2021.

Shifting global attitudes

The shift in U.S. attitudes comes as China’s global image has improved and America’s has deteriorated. A Pew survey published in July found that people in most of 36 countries surveyed viewed China more favorably than the U.S., a reversal from last year when the U.S. generally retained an advantage despite declining ratings.

Internationally, “perceptions of Washington’s unfriendly and unhelpful trade and security policies abroad and how it is causing problems to various countries' own domestic economies” has driven a shift in sentiment away from the U.S., says Loh.

The Trump Administration imposed sweeping tariffs on much of the world in April 2025, and has pursued new ones after the Supreme Court struck down the bulk of  “reciprocal tariffs.” The Administration has also pulled back from international institutions and foreign aid. World leaders have also expressed concern with Trump’s expansionist rhetoric towards Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, and Cuba, as well as the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran, which has driven up energy prices around the world.

The U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry invites comparisons that can work in China’s favor, says Benjamin Ho, assistant professor and coordinator at the Singapore-based S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies’s China Program. Disillusionment with Washington may make Beijing look more appealing by contrast, even to Americans, he adds. Domestically, Trump’s job approval rating was at a record low of 32% in September, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling.

“It’s easy when you’re unhappy with things at home to instead look at your peer rival,” Ho says.

Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean diplomat and former President of the United Nations Security Council, tells TIME that, against the backdrop of the U.S. withdrawing from the global stage, China has come across as a more dependable partner for much of the Global South.

Meanwhile, Chinese consumer brands and cultural exports have found new audiences abroad, like Pop Mart’s Labubu dolls. On TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance outside the U.S., users have embraced Chinese customs, like drinking warm water and practicing tai chi as part of the “Chinamaxxing” trend.

Ho points to social media exposure as a significant factor in driving youth opinion. He notes that China has toned down its assertive “wolf warrior” diplomacy in favor of a more flexible approach. Many positive depictions of China online appear to be organic, although media watchdogs previously reported that Beijing has used international broadcasting and advertising campaigns to spread propaganda.

China has taken deliberate steps to project an open, positive global image, analysts say. Beijing has expanded visa-free access for foreign tourists and sought to bring in more international students. China’s foreign ministry announced in May that more than 50,000 young Americans had visited for exchanges since November 2023. Mahbubani says that as more people visit China, they “see that Chinese cities represent the future.”

China has also invested heavily in overseas infrastructure through its Belt and Road Initiative.

Young Americans were more likely to view China warmly, the Pew survey found. Americans under 50 gave China a more positive rating than those 50 and older, although younger Americans were still more likely to view China coldly.

Earlier polling also found that younger Americans are less concerned about China’s growing global power. In a 2025 survey by the Chicago Council, just 34% of Gen Z Americans view China’s power as a critical threat to the U.S., as compared to 43% of Millenials, 56% of Gen Xers, and 62% of Boomers.

Republicans are increasingly breaking from President Donald Trump over the war in Iran.

A growing number of GOP candidates are calling for an end to the nearly seven-month-long war on the campaign trail, even in traditionally red parts of the U.S. On Capitol Hill, the latest war powers resolution weighed by the House was approved with fresh Republican support. And recent polls show that as the conflict has stretched on and hit Americans’ wallets, approval of Trump’s handling of the war among Republican voters has dropped by double digits. 

The defections come as active hostilities in Iran have resumed in the last month after peace talks between Washington and Tehran stalled over the summer. Trump, who initially projected that the war would last a matter of weeks, has in recent days publicly floated the possibility that he could “annihilate the Islamic Republic” and “blow the entire nation up.” 

At the same time, however, he has also recently predicted that the conflict will end after the midterms. And not long after levying a fresh threat in his speech before the United Nations General Assembly, he told reporters at the diplomatic gathering that he had a “very good” meeting with “mediators of Iran.”

“It's to their advantage to make a deal, and we can do that,” he said on Tuesday. 

Still, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have voiced concern that Trump has not laid out an exit strategy for the conflict and sounded alarm about the impact the war is having on fuel prices, which have spiked around the U.S. since it began.

With GOP fears over the pivotal November elections growing, more candidates and lawmakers in the party are choosing to distance themselves from the President on the issue—and though the defectors remain in the minority, Republican strategists tell TIME that GOP disapproval for the war in Iran will likely only continue to mount.

Here’s why.

Inflation concerns loom large ahead of the midterms

A handful of Republican candidates have recently pushed for an end to Iran on the campaign trail as the midterms near, including several in tight Senate races. 

“It's all about getting reelected,” Brian Darling, a Republican strategist and former counsel to Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, says about midterm candidates to TIME. “It's all about making sure that they can signal to their constituents that they have the same concerns about the Iran war."

Darling asserts that much of the discontent over the war in Iran stems from its inflationary impact within the U.S. A Congressional Budget Office report released last week found that the war has driven up energy prices in the U.S. mainly due to disruptions to shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping route through which one fifth of the world’s crude oil flows, adding 2.3 percentage points to the annualized rate of inflation of 5.3% in the second quarter of 2026. The price of regular gasoline is up around 52% from the start of the war at around $4.48 per gallon, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, with diesel prices up 71% in the same period.

Read More: U.S. Diesel Prices Just Surpassed a Record $6 Per Gallon. Here Are Three Ways That Affects You

For many Americans, these rising prices are among the most important issues when voting in the midterms. A Reuters/Ipsos poll from late August showed that 47% of voters said the cost of living would be the single most important factor for them when deciding who to vote for in November. 

On top of that, support for the war is low, with only a quarter of Americans believing that it’s worthwhile, according to the same poll. And though Republicans still back the conflict in greater shares than Democratic and independent voters, surveys show that their sentiments toward it have notably soured in the months since it began. A YouGov poll conducted between Sept. 18 and 21 found that a slim majority of 53% of Republicans say that in hindsight going to war in Iran was the right decision, a drop of 15 percentage points from the 68% that said the same in April. Another recent poll conducted for CNN by SSRS found that Republican approval of the war fell from 73% in March to 60% in the latest survey period of Sept. 16-17. Among Republicans under the age of 45, 53% disapproved of the war.

Republican fears that the party could lose control of Congress in the midterms have meanwhile been on the rise, fueled by election forecasters shifting key battleground states and districts toward Democrats in their ratings and polls indicating that voters favor Democratic congressional candidates on generic ballots.

“The bottom line for most candidates is they want to talk about the Iran war and ending the Iran war as a solution to our high gas prices,” Darling says. 

Candidates calling for an end to the Iran war have explicitly pointed to its effect on prices in their remarks.

“Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran,” Rep. Ashley Hinson, the GOP nominee for Senate in Iowa, posted on X on Monday, saying that “the war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end.”

Former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, who is also running for Senate in his state, made his own call for ending the war in an ad this week in which was shown standing in a grocery store.

“The war with Iran needs to end, and end quickly,” he said, referencing ballooning gas and food costs. “Michigan families are struggling with the price of everyday life. Groceries cost too much. We have to bring prices down.”

“The war needs to come to an end as quickly as possible so that we can lower gas prices,” Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio, who is facing a tight race to retain his seat this year, similarly told POLITICO in an interview published on Tuesday. 

Trump has previously dismissed concerns about the war’s impact on gas prices, which he has called “a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done” and “peanuts.” But on Tuesday, while speaking alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the U.N. General Assembly, he said that his Administration is considering banning diesel exports to quell the increase in fuel prices.

Read More: What a Diesel Export Ban Would Mean for U.S. Consumers

“I’ve called for that, too. I said, ‘Let’s not send out the diesel.’ We make a lot of diesel. I’ve called for it—I’ve called for it with my people,” Trump said. 

‘There is seemingly no end in sight’

Although Darling holds that inflation is the main source of voters’ disapproval toward the war in Iran, he contends that many GOP lawmakers and voters are also fed up with U.S. involvement in armed conflict in the Middle East and around the world. 

“You have some Republicans who are anti-interventionists, and some who are realists, and look at the situation in Iran and just don't see an end game,” Darling says, making reference to the U.S.’s involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he said voters look to with fear as a “very similar circumstance” to Iran.

Trump, who campaigned on vows to put “America first” and not to get the U.S. involved in new foreign wars, has drawn backlash from his base for his military interventions in Iran, and in other parts of the world.

Doug Heye, a long-time Republican strategist who has worked in communications roles across Congress, says that the the opaque timeline and plan of action for the war in Iran has created a strong anti-Trump sentiment amongst Republican lawmakers and voters. 

“There is seemingly no end in sight, and so that combined with the increase in prices has presented a real problem for Republicans,” Heye tells TIME. “It's not a blip anymore.”

Michigan’s Republican nominee for governor, Rep. John James, told reporters on Tuesday that “we need to end this war quickly. Because war is terrible, and no one likes war.” 

Earlier this month, Republican Reps. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who both are in the midst of close-fought reelection races in Iowa, cited concerns about the lack of a clear plan to end the conflict after voting for the first time in favor of a resolution to constrict Trump’s ability to continue military action in Iran without congressional approval.

“With the negotiating window closed, sustained combat operations now require congressional authorization,” Nunn, an Air Force combat veteran and colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, said in a statement. “Having deployed multiple times and flown over 700 combat hours in the Middle East, I will not support another open-ended war.”

Miller-Meeks, who served for more than two decades in the U.S. Army, voiced a similar sentiment in a post on X—as well as referencing the conflict’s impact on gas prices. “I said it in March: the mission had to stay focused and limited, because Americans do not want another forever war,” she wrote. “I will not vote to keep our soldiers in an open-ended war, with Iowans paying too much at the pump.”

The other Republicans who voted for the resolution were Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Tom Barrett of Michigan, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina. It marked the third time the House has voted to restrict Trump’s war powers in Iran.

Read More: The Republicans Who Have Broken With Their Party to Support Limiting Trump’s Iran War Powers

A majority of voters, including a number of Republicans, have recently indicated concerns about how long the war might last in recent polls. A Fox News poll conducted between Sept. 11 and 14 found that 71% of voters believe Trump lacks a clear strategy to end the war, with 43% of Republicans holding that belief. The YouGov poll taken in recent days meanwhile found that 52% of Americans believe the war will last at least another year. 

The share of people who hold that belief has slowly increased in recent months, from 50% in August, 46% in July, and 32% in March, shortly after the war began. According to the poll, however, just 28% of Republicans expect the war to continue on for that long.

SpaceX has not always distinguished itself as a good environmental citizen. Part of that is unavoidable. You can’t launch 170 rockets per year—as the company did in 2025—without releasing a lot of black soot into the upper atmosphere and creating a lot of light and noise around the launch site, which can be harmful to local wildlife. Environmental organizations have mounted multiple legal challenges against the company over the years to enjoin or minimize its freedom to launch until multiple corrective measures are taken. 

Now SpaceX faces another day in court. On Sept. 21 a judge ruled that a proposed land swap with the federal government that would allow the company to expand its launch pads, factory, and related infrastructure into a protected wildlife area in Texas could go ahead. That might have settled the issue but the environmental groups that sued to stop this, plan to appeal—and they believe they have a strong case.

Why did environmental groups sue to stop SpaceX’s land swap?

On June 10, a group of plaintiffs filed suit against the Department of the Interior to block a Trump Administration plan to cede SpaceX 725 acres of land in the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge hard up against the company’s Starbase factory and launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, in exchange for 692 acres the company owns in the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge about 20 miles north of Starbase. The land that would be annexed by SpaceX is not only home to thousands of species of plants and animals including the ocelot, which is endangered in the U.S.; it is also considered sacred by the Native American Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, which is a plaintiff in the suit. What’s more, the tract has cultural and historical significance as it includes the Palmito Ranch Battlefield, the site of the last land battle of the Civil War.

The fact that the acreage that SpaceX gets will not be a gift, but rather an exchange for land the company currently owns—taking that latter plot off the table for development—does not solve the problem, says Laiken Jordahl, public lands advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. “The whole point of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge is to establish a chain of connected habitats along the river that allows for the migration of ocelots and other wildlife,” he argues. “This will cut out one of the key east-west areas of wildlife connectivity, and in return, we're getting a smaller amount of land in a different area.”

What did the Judge say in its decision that would allow the SpaceX land swap? 

On. Sept. 21, Judge Fernando Rodriuguez, Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, denied the Center for Biological Diversity’s request for a preliminary injunction that would prevent the move, ruling that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue. In their filing, the plaintiffs argued that the land swap would cause them irreparable harm since they would lose access to those acres and the freedom to observe wildlife there. The Interior Department countered that the land was already closed to the public as part of its wildlife refuge status, so the plaintiffs suffered no loss. 

The plaintiffs, in their filing, anticipated this finding and sought to rebut it in advance with 2014 case law. “[T]he affected individual,” they wrote, “need not always have direct access to the area at issue. Individuals can possess a cognizable interest ‘in observing the landscape from surrounding areas[.]’”

Rodriguez—appointed to the federal bench by President Donald Trump during his first term—was unmoved, and if anything, saw SpaceX as the potentially aggrieved party. The requested injunction, he wrote, “would impose uncertainty into and would result in modifications to SpaceX’s development plans, placing additional hardship on the company’s ability to meet milestones and contractual obligations.”

“We are obviously, extraordinarily disappointed in the judge's decision,” says Jordahl. “This effectively clears the way for the bulldozers to start destroying the refuge land. But the judge did not rule on our overall claims; it was just on the injunction. So yeah, the challenge will press forward.” (The denial of a preliminary injunction falls short of the judge actually ruling on whether the proposed land swap violates federal law—which the plaintiffs claim it does.)

What is SpaceX’s environmental impact?

It’s not for nothing that environmental groups worry about the impact of SpaceX’s south Texas site. That's where the company launches its massive Starship rocket—a 33-engine behemoth that stands 40-stories tall and puts out up to 18 million lbs of thrust, more than twice as much as NASA’s Space Launch System, the second most powerful rocket in the world.

Four minutes into Starship’s inaugural launch on April 20, 2023, it exploded spectacularly, raining debris downward—most of which fell into the Gulf of Mexico. But the mere ignition of the nearly three dozen engines on the concrete launch apron did plenty of harm of its own.

“Impacts from the launch include numerous large concrete chunks, stainless steel sheets, metal and other objects hurled thousands of feet away along with a plume cloud of pulverized concrete that deposited material up to 6.5 miles northwest of the pad site,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wrote in an email to the media at the time. “Approximately 385 acres of debris was found on both SpaceX’s facility and in the surrounding Boca Chica State Park, and a 3.5-acre fire burned on park land south of the launch site.”

Jordahl is not worried just about similar environmental damage, but the harm to be done when those bulldozers he mentions begin to roll.

“I've heard different things [about what SpaceX wants to do with the land], from additional manufacturing areas to warehouses to worker housing,” says Jordahl. “We haven't gotten any clear and obvious plans. But the way that they've been treating the land out there already is telling. They pave over everything. They turn it into an industrial manufacturing zone.” SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

The harm won’t stop there. As SpaceX expands into the refuge, more land that is currently a comfortable distance from the complex will be exposed to the damage the launches can do. SpaceX claims it has cured the problems that made the first launch such a mess, installing a water-cooled metal deflection plate and a retaining wall to control debris. The other 12 Starship launches that have taken place since the inaugural one have indeed caused far less damage to the surroundings.

If that mitigates the environmental damage the rocket can do, however, the planned launch cadence exacerbates it. In August, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk told Aviation Week that he envisions daily Starship launches—carrying crew, satellites, and other cargo to space—as early as 2027. More headsnapping was his 2025 boast on X, that “In about 6 or 7 years, there will be days where Starship launches more than 24 times in 24 hours.” 

Clearly, not all of those launches could come from the Texas site, but SpaceX has other launch facilities at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and dedicated pads at the Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. A company so large, with more than a $2 trillion valuation, could always build more launchpads at more coastal sites whenever it chooses.

What precedent could the SpaceX land swap set?

The Texas base is making news at the moment, not simply for what it means for this potential development site, but for others elsewhere in the U.S. The Trump Administration is currently pursuing a similar land swap with a private land developer, involving a strip of land in Yosemite National Park for an undeveloped parcel in California so that residents in a planned private housing complex near the park will have easier access to it. Yet another land exchange is under consideration that would open up a federally designated wilderness area on Georgia’s Cumberland island to the construction of luxury homes.

“This [Texas] land transfer is part of a broader scheme by this administration to give away public lands to private interests,” says Jordahl. “The precedent that this transfer will set is extremely concerning when it comes to corporations setting their sights on and taking over public lands across America.

Saudi Arabia will have assistance from a key Western ally in its fight against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis, as Britain is providing military support to the Kingdom in a bid to help restore stability in the region and ease pressures on the global energy supply.

“We’re working with our friends to try and deliver that de-escalation,” British Defense Minister Luke Pollard said in an interview Tuesday. The “purely defensive” deployment of an RAF Voyager to Saudi Arabia is intended to “ensure there’s no further escalation in the Red Sea, which could further risk our fuel prices,” he added.

The international assistance comes following weeks of fighting between the Saudi-backed government of Yemen and the Houthis, which shattered a four-year informal cease-fire in the country's civil war. The Houthi rebels have made significant advances along the Red Sea coastline as they seek to tighten their grip on the Bab el-Mandeb, a critical maritime chokepoint that links Asia and Europe via the Red Sea and Suez Canal. With global energy supplies already under strain due to the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz amid the Iran war, the strangling of another trade route could further impact oil and fuel prices.

“Much of our trade, both in goods and in energy, comes through that part of the world. What happens in that part of the Middle East is absolutely vital for our own national security and our own economic security,” Pollard said, explaining why Britain responded to the Kingdom’s request for help.

When talking to reporters en route to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, ahead of his sit-down with President Donald Trump on Tuesday, U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham also cited the cost of living “pressures” at home as a key reason for the support and said he was “acting to secure the interests of Britain and the wider region.”  

Burnham emphasized that it’s a “time-limited agreement in terms of the assistance that we will provide, but we will keep it under review.”  

The support extended to Saudi Arabia marks Burnham’s first military deployment since he became Prime Minister in July. However, it’s far from the first time the U.K. has offered assistance to Saudi Arabia, as the two nations share a close military alliance.

How exactly will the U.K. be supporting Saudi Arabia?

The Ministry of Defense on Tuesday confirmed it had agreed to “provide an RAF Voyager air-to-air refuelling aircraft to support Saudi defensive activity” in the region. According to the British Royal Air Force (RAF), a Voyager provides strategic air support by allowing jets and other aircraft to refuel while in flight.

Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer in defense studies at King's College London, says the Voyager “basically allows the Saudi Air Force to stay in the air over Yemen for longer without having to fly a single sortie and then returning to base.”

“It increases the operational tempo in terms of targeting strikes and being more flexible, and more agile in responding to changing situations on the ground,” he tells TIME.

According to Pollard, the Voyager is set to operate from the British RAF base in Cyprus, which was targeted by Iran earlier this year, and will support the British-built Typhoon jets used by Saudi Arabia. “That will help them with their defensive actions against the Houthis, who have been attacking not just the capital of Saudi Arabia in Riyadh, but also the Republic of Yemen as well,” he said.

Britain has historically held the role of “guarantor for maritime freedom of navigation all around the world,” says Krieg, describing the U.K.’s latest attempt to ease tensions over the Red Sea as an example of the government “stepping up to the plate.”

“We're not just helping a partner in the region,” he adds. “We're also helping ourselves, because the Houthis having the Bab al-Mandeb is not something that the U.K. can tolerate.” 

Krieg says the move signifies a small success for Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states as they seek to strengthen bilateral security relationships beyond their traditional reliance on the U.S. This is “the worst security situation the Saudis have been in [for] a very long time,” he notes.

“Gulf states are trying to supplement the existing U.S. capabilities with all kinds of [other] agreements, like the Mecca pact,” he says, referencing a trilateral defense security pact made between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey in August. “The U.K. wants to be seen as being active and being there when a friend is in need.” 

The long-standing alliance between the U.K. and Saudi Arabia

The U.K. and Saudi Arabia share an alliance that dates back to almost a century ago. 

“It's a very long, strategic partnership,” says Krieg. “It goes back to the early days of the current Kingdom, where Britain, at the time, was still the only superpower in the world, and was controlling the waterways and a lot of the territories in Arabia, including in South Yemen.”

Britain was among the first governments to recognize the independent territories of Saudi Arabia through the Treaty of Jeddah in 1927, which helped solidify the boundaries of the nascent kingdom ahead of the formation of modern Saudi Arabia in 1932.

Decades later, the U.K. supported the Saudi-led military coalition in its campaign against the Houthis from 2015 until the 2022 truce.

According to the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), the published value of U.K. arms export licenses to Saudi Arabia from the start of the bombing campaign in March 2015 through the April 2022 truce was £7.1 billion ($9.4 billion).

“The two main Western backers of the Saudi Kingdom are the Americans and the British,” says David Wearing, an assistant professor in international relations at the University of Sussex. “From the British and the American point of view, the Middle East is strategically important because it's a huge source of global energy suppliers, oil, and gas.” 

In late 2023, the Houthis started disrupted shipping in the Red Sea, targeting cargo ships they said were linked to Israel, in what they described as a show of support for Palestinians in Gaza. Amid concerns over the impact on the world economy, the U.S. and U.K. joined forces in January 2024, striking multiple Houthi targets in Yemen. In April 2025, the U.K. government participated in another joint operation with the U.S. against a Houthi military facility in Yemen.

In March of this year, the U.K. deployed a Sky Sabre, the army’s medium range air defense missile system, to Saudi Arabia to defend the Kingdom against Iranian missile and drone attacks.

The U.K. government's Strategic Export Controls Annual Report of 2025 described the military relationship with Saudi Arabia as a “longstanding” partnership providing “Typhoon, Tornado, and Hawk aircraft, mine countermeasure vessels, and associated munitions, infrastructure, logistics and manpower support packages.”

BAE Systems—a major British defense, aerospace, and security company—said in its own 2025 report that Saudi Arabia was its largest customer by sales in its air business.

How are Saudi Arabia’s other allies responding to the Houthis' advances?

Saudi Arabia has reportedly sought assistance from allies to stave off Houthi advances. France, Pakistan, and Egypt issued strong statements condemning the Houthi attacks, but have not publicly announced new military support for the Kingdom.

Trump is understood to have received requests from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to strike the Houthi rebels. According to the New York Times, Trump reportedly considered launching strikes against the Houthis over the weekend, before ultimately deciding against it. TIME has reached out to the White House for comment.

Asked Tuesday why Washington has held back from striking the Houthis, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it’s “a very dangerous and complex” conflict.

“If it comes down to it, the United States will always stand with Saudi Arabia and support them because we have an agreement with them to do so,” he said, referencing the U.S. economic and defense partnership with Saudi Arabia signed last November, that deepened co-operation between the two countries.

Fears mount over global energy supply as Houthis advance

Global energy supplies have been under increasing strain since the start of the Iran war on Feb. 28, as Tehran has leveraged its chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz, through which around a fifth of global oil production flowed prior to the conflict.

In the past few weeks, the Houthis have captured Yemen’s port city of Mokha and the strategic Perim Island, which sits in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. If the Houthis were to assume control of the strait, shipping companies could be forced to travel via South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope—a longer, costlier route. 

The volume of crude oil and petroleum liquids moving through the Bab el-Mandeb increased earlier this year, with the route being used as an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz. The shipments surged from 5.6 million barrels per day in the first quarter of 2026 to 8.1 million per day in the second quarter, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

However, recent crossings have been marred by uncertainty over the potential threat posed by the Houthis. Data shared with TIME by Kpler, a commodities data and analytics firm, showed an estimated 34 vessels transited the Bab el-Mandeb on Sept. 15, a drop from the estimated 53 crossings recorded on July 15th.

A spokesperson for the Houthis on Sept. 11 insisted the waterway will remain free to roam “with the exception of Saudi ships.” Yet concerns among global leaders and shipping companies remain.

Burnham and other U.K. officials have framed Britain’s defensive support partly around the potential economic consequences at home. The average price of petrol rose by 9.1 pence per litre between July and August 2026, compared with a rise of 0.3 pence per litre between July and August 2025, according to data from the Office of National Statistics.

Wearing says that because oil is traded on a global market, supply disruptions in one region can push up benchmark prices worldwide, with those costs cascading through the broader economy.

“What Americans call gas and what we call petrol, if that goes up, think how many goods to market are taken by heavy lorries on petrol. It can push up the price of everything: shipping, road transit, energy, all kinds of industrial production and many consumer products,” he says. “Oil is the lifeblood of the world economy, the longer you restrict the supply, the higher the price goes, the more inflationary pressure there is on everything, and that affects Britain, but it affects the whole system. It's like a heart attack in a human body, suddenly it's not being pumped round."

Sometime next year, the U.S. government will hit its debt ceiling again. It's a moment that often plays out as a high-stakes partisan battle, with lawmakers demanding concessions from the President under the threat of a U.S. default.

If Democrats win control of one or both chambers of Congress, the next debt ceiling vote could yield another standoff. Or, just maybe, it could be an unexpected moment of bipartisanship. 

President Trump has repeatedly called for eliminating the debt ceiling, putting him at odds with most of his party, but in line with a significant number of Democrats in Congress. The top Democrat on the House Budget Committee sees an opportunity to finally ditch the mechanism for good. 

“I will not vote to simply kick the can down the road again and just raise the debt ceiling for another 18 months,” Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania tells TIME in an interview. “My next vote on the debt ceiling will only be to permanently reform it to end the dysfunction around it once and for all.” After nearly a decade in the House, it would be the Philadelphia Democrat's first time voting against raising the debt ceiling.

Congress last approved raising the debt ceiling in July 2025, by $5 trillion to $41.1 trillion. The Treasury Department is expected to hit that limit some time in 2027, although estimates vary. One projection puts the likely window between late winter and mid-summer. Once the limit is reached, the Treasury can rely on cash reserves and “extraordinary measures” for several more months before reaching the so-called X-date, when it could no longer meet all of the government’s obligations on time.

While lawmakers often frame debt ceiling votes as tests of fiscal restraint, raising the debt ceiling doesn’t actually authorize new spending or determine how much the government borrows in the first place. The debt ceiling caps the Treasury Department’s ability to borrow the money the U.S. government needs to pay for obligations Congress has already approved. 

Past debt ceiling fights have led to credit downgrades and major drops in the stock market. Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican who voted for the last increase, subsequently called the debt ceiling “a joke” and “a relic of a bygone era.” Other Republicans, including outgoing Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, continue to argue that the ceiling should be preserved as a negotiating tool.

During Biden’s presidency, Trump urged his party to preserve the debt ceiling so they could use it as leverage in negotiations. Since returning to the White House, however, he has repeatedly called for eliminating the ceiling.

“I am very pleased to announce that, after all of these years, I agree with Senator Elizabeth Warren on SOMETHING," Trump posted on Truth Social in June. "The Debt Limit should be entirely scrapped to prevent an Economic catastrophe. It is too devastating to be put in the hands of political people that may want to use it despite the horrendous effect it could have on our Country and, indirectly, even the World."

If Democrats win the House, Boyle is all but assured to be chairman of the House Budget Committee, which oversees the debt limit votes. He sees Trump’s willingness to act on the issue as a golden opportunity. His preferred approach would not abolish the ceiling outright, but largely transfer the responsibility of raising it to the Treasury secretary, who would be able to suspend the debt ceiling for up to two years. Congress would retain the ability to block the suspensions through a joint resolution that would have to be signed by the president.

Boyle says his solution, which he introduced as the Debt Ceiling Reform Act in 2023, has drawn support from members from both parties. “I've had a number of House Republicans quietly tell me that they want to see the debt ceiling finally resolved in a manner that I propose because they're sick and tired of voting on it,” he says. 

The White House declined to comment on whether Trump would be open to working with Democrats to eliminate or reform the debt ceiling.

History of debt ceiling fights

For most of its history, the U.S. did not have a debt ceiling. First adopted in 1917, raising the ceiling has become a bigger political headache in recent decades. In 2011, House Republicans used the approaching borrowing limit to force President Barack Obama into an agreement that imposed spending caps and created a bipartisan process for pursuing additional deficit reduction. But the standoff also brought the country close to default and was followed by the first downgrade of U.S. government debt.

Twelve years later, Republicans again used the debt ceiling to extract concessions from a Democratic president. The 2023 agreement negotiated by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden capped discretionary spending for two years, rescinded more than $27 billion in unspent pandemic aid and $1.4 billion in IRS funding, and tightened work requirements for certain SNAP recipients. In return, Biden secured a suspension of the debt ceiling through the end of 2024, removing the immediate threat of default. The agreement was estimated to reduce deficits by roughly $1.5 trillion over a decade, but it also temporarily spiked short-term borrowing costs and led to another credit downgrade by a different credit agency.

“It is inevitable that the next time there's a Democrat in the White House and there's a Republican-controlled Congress, they will do exactly what they did to Barack Obama and exactly what they did to Joe Biden,” Boyle says.

But the situation may be reversed next year, with Democrats potentially controlling one or both chambers of Congress and a Republican in the White House. Some Democrats are already discussing the prospect of extracting concessions from Trump to secure a debt ceiling hike. During a recent retreat of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Boyle was asked to give a presentation on the issue in order to encourage members to start thinking about the looming topic. 

While Boyle hasn’t spoken recently with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries about the party’s strategy around the debt ceiling, he notes that Jeffries signed a 2022 letter with him and other House Democrats urging Congressional leaders to “permanently end the threat that the federal debt ceiling poses to our economy and our standing in the world.” 

Preparing for a Democratic House and 2028

Boyle has already been laying the groundwork for a broader role on the House Budget Committee. During the current Congress, his office built a district-by-district database tracking the effects of Trump Administration policies on household costs and health coverage. The data played a central role in Democrats’ messaging strategy around healthcare and the 2025 government shutdown, as Democratic offices used the data to show voters in their districts how the expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits could affect them. 

As chairman, Boyle wants the committee to work to overhaul a congressional budget process that has turned dysfunctional. He also wants to reassert Congress' constitutional power over federal spending, as the Trump Administration has repeatedly worked to withhold or redirect dollars lawmakers had appropriated. He intends to call Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and a central player in that Administration strategy, to a hearing on the issue. “I think he's the most dangerous person in America that most Americans have never heard of,” Boyle says of Vought.

The potential chairmanship is also central to Boyle’s own calculation about his future in Congress. As Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman has grown increasingly critical of his own party and more comfortable with Republicans, many in the party doubt he could win a Democratic primary if he were to run for another term in 2028. Several House Democrats from Pennsylvania are said to be circling the seat, including Summer Lee, Chris Deluzio, and Boyle. Boyle tells TIME he plans to make a decision after the November elections. He sees the choice partly in terms of where he believes he would have the greatest influence over legislation if Democrats control Congress and the White House—is it better to be a freshman senator or chairman of a House committee that has become a central gateway for major fiscal legislation?

“The prospect of being the chair of the budget committee, if you have a Democratic trifecta and you’re doing reconciliation, that’s the chance to be front and center,” Boyle says. “The quarterback on what could be one of the most significant pieces of legislation in our lifetime.”

For now, with a Republican in the White House, Boyle is focused on the possibility of tackling a problem he has spent years trying to change, even as he acknowledges that the debt ceiling is unlikely to be a major issue for most voters.

“Truly, you know, I leave this place and I’ve done one thing—if you can tell me I’ve left here and I was a major reason why we permanently ended this debt ceiling dysfunction and danger, I’d be very proud of that.”

With António Guterres’s nearly decade-long tenure as the Secretary-General of the United Nations drawing to a close amid rising conflict around the globe, the race to succeed him as the leader of the world’s most powerful diplomatic body is already underway.

Guterres this week delivered his final address to the U.N. General Assembly, in which he called for a greater focus on climate change, a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, “de-escalation and dialogue” in the Middle East, and regulations for artificial intelligence. 

At the end of his speech, Guterres bid goodbye to a crowd filled with many diplomats and world leaders who he has worked with over his two five-year terms.

"So, on January 1st, when ​I am no longer Secretary-General, be sure of this. Wherever I will be, whatever I will be doing, I will keep championing the conviction that peace is possible," he said. "I will continue ​to stand up for the values of the United Nations Charter and I will never, ever give up. Thank you."

Guterres’s successor is set to step in as Secretary-General at a consequential moment for global diplomacy. Research indicates that last year saw the highest number of active global conflicts since World War II and the greatest number of fatalities since the Rwandan genocide. Tensions in other parts of the world are threatening to boil over. Climate change is exacting a growing toll. AI's development is prompting increasing alarm. And the U.N. itself is confronting a growing funding crisis.

Read More: Make the U.N. Great Again: The Uphill Struggle Facing the Next Secretary General

Seven candidates are so far in the running to shepherd the U.N. through those challenges. Here’s what to know about the race. 

How will the next Secretary-General be chosen?

The process to choose the next Secretary-General began in November, when a joint letter from the presidents of the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council invited the nominations of candidates from member states. 

The initiation letter noted “with regret that no woman has ever held the position” and encouraged member states to “strongly consider nominating women as candidates.” 

Member states nominate candidates by submitting an application to the U.N. including a personal statement with that candidate’s vision for what they’d do in the role, a resume, and campaign finance disclosures. 

The General Assembly then holds “interactive dialogues” in which candidates express their hopes for the position and the U.N. in an opening statement, which is followed by questioning from the assembly. These televised hearings continue as candidates are submitted to the U.N.

Who becomes Secretary-General ultimately comes down to a decision from the U.N.’s 15-person Security Council, which recommends one individual to the General Assembly. The General Assembly then appoints that person to the position. 

As part of its selection process, the Security Council holds “straw polls,” in which members of the council select one of three options for each candidate: “encourage,” “discourage,” or “no opinion expressed.” This anonymized process is used to gauge whether candidates would be able to secure the nine votes needed for a formal recommendation by the Security Council. 

Who’s in the running? 

So far nine candidates have been nominated for the position of Secretary-General. Two of those candidates have withdrawn, leaving seven individuals vying to replace Guterres. 

Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett has been Guyana’s permanent representative to the U.N. since 2020 and previously served as foreign minister for her country and held senior roles at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Nominated by Guyana, her vision statement emphasizes refocusing on the U.N.’s core principles and “a more agile and effective United Nations.”

Rebeca Grynspan is the former vice president of Costa Rica, which nominated her for the position, and current secretary-general of trade and development for the U.N. She named three principles that define the mission she would undertake as Secretary-General: making the U.N. “more useful,” “more agile,” and “more accountable.”

Ivonne A-Baki, nominated by Tonga, is a long-time Ecuadorean diplomat who has twice served as the country’s ambassador to the U.S. She has also served as ambassador to countries including Qatar and France. Her platform highlights her involvement in the 1998 Ecuador-Peru peace settlement. “Where others speak of reform, I speak of renewal,” A-Baki’s vision statement reads. “An institution can be indispensable and in need of renewal at the same time, and ours is both. It is failing to live up to its own Charter, not for want of purpose but for want of focus and discipline.”

María Fernanda Espinosa is the former Foreign Minister and Defense Minister of Ecuador and served as President of the 73rd U.N. General Assembly in 2018. She was nominated by Antigua and Barbuda. Her vision consists of five pillars: “peace and security, development, digital and energy transformation, closing the delivery gap, and rebuilding credibility.” Garcés in her statement contended that “what is now in question is not the relevance of the United Nations, but its credibility.”

Rafael Mariano Grossi is an Argentine diplomat who has served as the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) since 2019. “The world does not need more declarations. It needs a United Nations capable of responding to the real demands of our time, with impartiality and a results-oriented approach grounded in facts,” Grossi, who was nominated by his country, wrote in his vision statement.

Olara Otunnu was Uganda’s permanent representative to the U.N. for five years and briefly served as the country’s foreign minister. He was also the U.N. under-secretary-general and the special representative for children and armed conflict. “Reform is no longer an optional choice. It is an imperative,” he said. 

Macky Sall was the president of Senegal for twelve years and has served as the chair of the Africa Union, a continental organization spanning 55 member states. He expressed a goal to “restore trust in multilateralism” if chosen as Secretary-General and said that “peace, security and development are intrinsically linked.”

Where does the race stand?

“We're at a moment right now where the race is entering a pretty pivotal phase,” says Daniel Forti, head of U.N. affairs at the International Crisis Group, a non-profit think tank dedicated to preventing deadly crises around the world. 

With just over three months remaining in Guterre’s term, it won’t be long before a successor is chosen. The Security Council, though, “is not especially enthusiastic about any of the current contenders,” Forti tells TIME. He cites the last three straw polls, which have favored Greenspan and Birkett, but without “a real consolidation of overwhelming support.” 

This lack of consensus, Forti believes, could suggest that other candidates may enter the race late in the game. Although there have been no formal announcements of new candidates, Forti has heard chatter surrounding certain individuals: Nickolay Mladenov, the former Bulgarian foreign minister and former U.N. Middle East envoy who currently serves as the Board of Peace’s High Representative for Gaza; U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed; and former Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena. 

“At this late stage, new candidates don't have the luxury of time to really socialize their candidacies, build out their visions, and elaborate very detailed policy platforms and bring them to U.N. member states, and try and win over the P5,” Forti says, referring to the five permanent members of the Security Council. The support of these members—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.

—is the most critical because they have the power to veto candidates before being recommended to the General Assembly.

Regardless of the outcome, Forti asserts that whoever is chosen to replace Guterres will inherit a fraught state of international affairs, and certainly be tested. 

“You have a really fragmented global landscape,” he says. “The challenges for whoever takes over the office are going to be immense.”

This month, Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic, resigned, warning that AI companies are racing towards “self-improving superintelligence” and that he and those building it believe it “could kill us all by the end of the decade.” And in July, a rogue swarm of AI agents escaped containment at OpenAI and hacked their way into another AI company just to cheat on a test. Over 1,000 employees at the top AI companies then implored the US government to ‘pace’ AI development.

Instances like these have shown that AI companies cannot reliably control their most advanced AIs. It is therefore clear to me that “pacing” while continuing on the same track is not the solution to the enormous risks at hand—and that the only way to keep humanity in control of AI is to prohibit the development of superintelligent AI altogether. 

AI companies are not just building chatbots. Their stated goal is to build superintelligent AI: AI systems that can fully replace and outcompete humans at any task. Because there is no way to keep superintelligence under control, Nobel Prize winners, AI engineers like Coxon, and even the CEOs of AI companies have repeatedly warned that it poses an extinction risk to humanity.

Let me be clear: AI is the crucial technology of the 21st century, vital for ensuring national defense and economic competitiveness. But unlike controllable AI systems that should be integrated to strengthen our security, superintelligent AI would pose unprecedented national and global security threats. It would not be a tool humans can leverage: it would be an adversary, able to autonomously pursue its own objectives and permanently evade human control.

We have only to look at the Hugging Face hack this summer to understand how close we are to losing control. A rogue swarm of hundreds of AI agents broke out of OpenAI’s systems, reached the internet, and then hacked into the multi-billion-dollar company Hugging Face, all to cheat on an “internal” evaluation. For almost two weeks, OpenAI had no idea that this was happening. In the company’s own words, this incident was a “‘warning shot’ for us and for the world” that demonstrated how advanced AIs can now “take dangerous actions that no human directed.”

Instead of waiting for another warning shot, governments need to act now to prohibit superintelligence. Luckily, we do not need to search far for a framework on how to tackle this threat. On Sept. 8, Alex Sobel MP introduced my organization ControlAI’s Artificial Superintelligence Security Bill into the UK Parliament, making it the first legislature in the world to introduce a bill prohibiting superintelligence. Rather than a verdict on all AI, this bill targets superintelligence development specifically: prohibiting it domestically and requiring the UK to pursue an international agreement prohibiting it around the world.

This legislative framework allows the government to monitor and restrict precursors to superintelligence, such as AI capabilities like hacking. Crucially, it enables the detection and shutdown of superintelligence development well before any project gets dangerously close, enabling the country to make use of such precursors for legitimate AI purposes. It is an actionable framework that governments should evaluate and adopt, particularly by accelerating international efforts toward a ban on superintelligence.

But what about China? If superintelligence is developed anywhere, every nation and every citizen is under threat. This means that any American ban on superintelligence needs to be paired with America and its allies brokering international agreements that prevent and deter the development of superintelligence anywhere in the world.

This does not require creating an international regulator. All we need is a strong coalition of countries that bans superintelligence at home, and ensures that no one builds it abroad. 

While announcing his resignation on Sept 8., the now-former Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon wrote, “I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race” toward superintelligence. We might not be today, but we can change course quickly.

The momentum behind an international ban on developing superintelligence is picking up speed. Over 200 cross-party lawmakers across the UK and Canada have been ahead of the curve on superintelligence risks by recognizing it as a global and national security threat as part of ControlAI’s campaign. In addition to the newly introduced UK bill, Vice President J.D. Vance told AI companies this week, "If you're building Frankenstein, stop." Further, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar announced in early September that they will introduce a bill prohibiting superintelligence development and calling for international agreements to prohibit it.

And in October 2025, a broad coalition called to prohibit superintelligence internationally. This was signed by the scientific “godfathers” of AI Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, and bipartisan political figures like former President Trump advisor Steve Bannon, Ambassador Susan Rice, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen.

Right now, many government officials and members of the public are hearing about the extinction risk from superintelligence for the first time. The warnings have reached millions. The next step is concrete action to address this national and global security threat.

This is a watershed moment, and we can’t afford to waste it. Governments have a clear choice: champion an international ban, or let the race to superintelligence reach its catastrophic end.

Louisa Moats was at a conference in Daphne, Ala., earlier this year when she was approached by a group of teachers. For the 81-year-old, this was a relatively new occurrence. “They’re poorly paid, they don’t look very healthy, they certainly didn’t have an elite education and I feel this concern and admiration for them as they do this job,” she says, with her characteristic frankness. “They come up to me, with this glazed, starry-eyed look, and thank me as if I, personally, was the conduit to their renewed sense of purpose and competence. I get that a lot now.”

Moats has become a late-in-life heroine, at least in some circles, because of a teacher-training program she wrote decades ago that has become a buzzy property. She is not exactly basking in the attention. “I take it with a grain of salt,” she says, sitting in her remote Vermont lake house. “Behind that is my sense that what I would want them to do is probably not exactly what’s going on in their classroom, but it’s a reasonable enough approximation that it’s making a difference for kids.”

Her skepticism can be forgiven. For a long time, Moats found herself on the losing side of America’s so-called reading wars, the back-and-forth over the best way to teach kids to read. She and her cohort of researchers promote the idea that reading is a skill that must be painstakingly taught, first through an understanding of the way sounds make up speech and get represented as letters, then through explicit instruction on how language works. But the prevailing view, until a few years ago, was that most children would figure out how to decode the letters if given enough encouragement, stimulating material, and context clues, just as they do with speech.

“This is still something I ponder all the time,” Moats says, about why schools chose to teach the way they did. One explanation she has landed on: people did not keep up with the research. “Usually they have not sat down and looked at the evidence—the nature of the evidence, the scope of the evidence, the durability of the evidence—and so they don’t understand what the science is about.” 

Interest in “the science” has recently increased dramatically, alongside the level of panic about literacy rates in the U.S. About 4 in 10 American children have not mastered basic reading-comprehension skills by fourth grade, the worst result in 20 years, according to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). A third of eighth-graders also fall below the reading level expected for their age. The average 12th-grader scores three points lower on a reading test than his or her peers did in 2019, and 10 points lower than those from 1992.

Some of that can be laid at the door of school closures during the pandemic. But it’s a problem with deeper roots: roughly a quarter of young adults (16 to 24) are functionally illiterate, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Professors bemoan having to assign ever-shorter reading assignments. Time-use surveys report that people from 20 to 34 spend no more than 10 minutes a day reading for pleasure. Grave declarations have proclaimed the “end of reading.”

To combat the decline, states have looked to the few education districts where students are showing improvement and followed their example by enacting what are known as science-of-reading laws. The laws, which have been passed in 42 states and D.C., mostly in the past seven years, mandate that schools use very structured techniques—including foundational instruction on phonics. Many teachers did not learn this approach in college and have to be retrained.

Moats’ program, Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS), has become the preferred way for schools to meet the requirements. The course is famously long and rigorous. Teachers must delve into language theory and cognitive science before any advice on instruction is given. It isolates 19 vowel sounds and 29 consonant sounds in U.S. English. Moats’ ideas are generally associated with phonology (how words sound), but the program goes deeply into morphology (how words are built of parts) and orthography (how words are written). It’s also relatively pricey. Public contracts and appropriations suggest statewide LETRS rollouts cost up to $1,700 per educator, before factoring in substitute teachers, planning time, coaching, and administration. And it’s not clear that all the knowledge translates into better teaching methods.

But that hasn’t stopped 23 states from purchasing the program, and at least one, Alabama, from paying teachers $1,000 if they did all of it. In 2020, fewer than 25,000 teachers had enrolled in the 155-hour course, according to Lexia, the company that now owns it. In 2025, that number reached 700,000, mostly lower elementary. (There are approximately 1.5 million K-5 educators in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) Michigan, whose recent standardized test results showed 38.2% of third-graders were proficient in reading, announced this summer it was spending $75 million so that every reading teacher could do the course. (It has already spent $44 million on teachers who did it voluntarily.) “The last three years, I have seen more money from this than I ever expected to see from it,” says Moats, who earns what she calls “a small royalty” on each sale.

Still, whether out of native New England reticence or because she’s almost sure she’s seen this movie before, Moats, now allegedly retired, regards this turn of events with mild suspicion. “It’s humbling, it’s a bit bewildering, it’s a bit surrealistic,” she says. Finally, when asked directly, she adds, “and yes, it’s very gratifying.” Educators may dismiss the idea of the reading wars, claiming teaching is not an us-vs.-them endeavor, but if they are real—and it looks like they are—it sure seems that Moats has emerged as a victor.

She intended to be a folk singer. But having graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in music, Moats needed a job, and her sister got her one in Boston, with a researcher in the emerging field of neuropsychology, who needed people to type up reports. He also needed a lab technician, so he gave Moats a white coat and trained her to administer tests. “That’s how I learned to think about the kids with learning disabilities who were sent to our clinic,” she says. “I learned how to think of them through this neurological lens.” 

When Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College offered one of the first fellowships for a master’s in learning disabilities, Moats jumped at the chance to move to Nashville. “I tromped up and down Music Row and got a contract as a songwriter and got a master’s degree in learning disabilities,” she says. “It was fun, and it was completely worthless as far as learning how to teach.” Armed with a balance beam, a chalkboard, and some visual aids, she was hired to “cure” learning disabilities in local schools. “The experience of the total disconnect between what I learned in a master’s program and the realities of the kids and their needs,” she says, has given her sympathy for teachers now realizing that the reading-instruction methods they learned in college might be flawed. 

Even though her music career was progressing (she had a songwriting contract with Screen Gems) and her career in special education was opening doors (she had a parent-teacher meeting with Johnny Cash), Moats was not a Nashville type. She found the music industry predatory and missed the snow. (Her daughter Charlotte would later become a Junior Olympics ski champion.) She moved back to her old job at Tufts–New England Medical Center and claims she more or less fell into a doctorate at Harvard, where she encountered the terrifying but brilliant linguist Carol Chomsky, wife of Noam, and Jeanne Chall, after whom Harvard’s reading lab is named. “Chall was the one who got me into understanding how to look at spelling errors in a very detailed and informed way,” says Moats. 

She began to observe that children who couldn’t read or spell just did not register the relationship between the sounds in a word and the letters. They struggled especially when the words sounded a little alike but were spelled very differently, as in juice and choose, or spelled alike but pronounced differently as in the s sound in was and saw. Moats came to believe teaching kids to read entails understanding a lot more about the brain and language processing than the average teacher knows.

In the mid-1980s, after a few years of helping struggling readers, from impoverished children to Dartmouth academics, in her private practice in East Thetford, Vt., Moats realized that earlier intervention was needed. So she began to teach teachers, at Harvard and at smaller Vermont colleges. She gave her incoming postgraduates surveys. “The results were appalling,” she says. “They didn’t know anything.” Many had been taught the whole-language theory of reading, which suggested that teaching students to decode words distracted them from understanding their meaning, and therefore students should learn the words as a unit, not by blending graphemes. She wrote an academic paper about it, which was republished by the American Federation of Teachers in 1995. 

A few years earlier, another literacy researcher, G. Reid Lyon, had been put in charge of creating and overseeing a federally funded reading-research network, a large multisite program that investigated how children learn to read and why some don’t. He asked Moats to help. “What I needed was a leader and a teacher and a teacher of teachers, which she was extraordinary at,” says Lyon, also now retired in Vermont. “A lot of professors can get up there and quack away, but they don’t really have the wherewithal to demonstrate it. She did.” Moats was assigned to the Washington, D.C., site.

“Boy, did I have impostor syndrome,” she says. “Here I was in this room full of eminences, and I had been reading their work, I’d been citing them, I’d been learning from them.” She also had some hard lessons to learn as a northeastern hippie in a majority-Black school district. “I just couldn’t believe the state of affairs in these schools,” says Moats. “Libraries with no books, no doors on the lavatory, no running water in the sinks.” She labored to get the teachers to trust her. Eventually, one of her assistants took her aside. “She said, ‘You’re the director, you’ve got to look like the director,’” recalls Moats, who favors denim and heavy glasses. “I said, ‘You have any advice?’ She said, ‘Go to Ann Taylor.’” The project was a success, her nine schools’ reading rates soared, and local politicians started to drop by for photo opportunities. 

Then national politicians took notice too. The No Child Left Behind Act that President George W. Bush signed in 2002 enshrined the work of Lyon’s team and the National Reading Panel. Moats was tapped to write the teacher-training component of the act’s Reading First initiative, which became LETRS. 

Reading First was expensive—about a billion dollars was spent on a few million children—and the law mandated that a report be made of how effective it was by 2008. The news was not great. While students had been taught in a way that research had said was most effective, and first-graders did decode words better, elementary students as a whole were not better at understanding what they read than the students who were not part of the initiative. An Institute of Education Sciences (IES) report on LETRS in particular found that while the training improved teachers’ understanding of language, it did not improve outcomes for students. 

Moats is still steaming about that analysis. “You don’t get an impact on student achievement after one year,” she says. “You’ve barely gotten through the professional-development material.” She also notes that after four years of Reading First, many state-level reading analyses showed improvement, especially in high-poverty regions. Nevertheless, Reading First’s funding was not renewed, and states were allowed to go their own way with reading instruction. 

It is perhaps reductive to boil this history down to a battle between two women. But it is also true that around the time Moats and her colleagues were doing their work, another approach was ascendant, championed largely by a figure with a lot of the kind of main-character energy that Moats lacks. The founder of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP) at Columbia University, Lucy Calkins, promulgated the idea of balanced literacy, which purported to be a détente between the phonics camp and the whole-language advocates. Calkins, whose background was in writing instruction, believed that children first of all needed enticing books at a level they could manage and a ton of cheerleading. “I always knew phonics mattered,” Calkins says now. “When kids write, every single minute of what they’re doing shows their phonics.” Nevertheless, the curriculum materials she authored had little phonics, and suggested that teachers use a separate phonics course.

“A lot of people who have a casual acquaintance with the research have persuaded themselves that balanced reading instruction means a little of this, a little of that,” Moats wrote in a seminal essay about balanced literacy in 2000. “Take a cup of phonics from one cupboard, add a half-pint of whole language from the fridge, and the resulting blend will succeed with children while avoiding the battles and conflicts of the ‘reading wars.’ Everyone will be happy, and all will be well. The problem is that it doesn’t work that way.”

This was the world that Margaret Goldberg was introduced to after she completed her master’s degree at UC Berkeley. In 2015, she arrived at a Title I Oakland school and quickly found that the methods she used in higher-performing schools just down the road did not work. After discovering Moats’ essay via Google, she started using more structured literacy methods with some of her classes and took a balanced-literacy approach with others. “I didn’t realize that I was teaching on both sides of the reading wars,” says Goldberg, who co-founded the Right to Read Project in 2019. The results were stark. “All of the ideals of balanced literacy were happening with the kids who were being taught systematically and explicitly how to decode. The students I was teaching balanced literacy to—I was just trying to sell them on reading.” 

Eventually, parents, especially those with dyslexic children, who tend to need more explicit phonics instruction, began to protest. Mississippi, which gave all its K-3 teachers LETRS training starting in 2014, was the first state to improve its numbers. By 2019, its fourth-grade NAEP reading score had risen 10 points from 2013—the largest gain of any state during that period. LETRS wasn’t the sole reason for Mississippi’s success. The state also added new practices around teacher coaching and accountability, more student screening and intervention, and held back a bunch of third-graders. But the teacher training was key. 

Meanwhile, public-radio journalist Emily Hanford amassed enough evidence against the balanced-literacy methodology to publish a 2018 audio documentary that would become her influential Sold a Story podcast. Politicians, administrators, and even teachers’ colleges took heed. But change, especially to higher education, came slowly. Carol Tolman, one of the co-authors of later versions of LETRS, was an early trainer in the program. At one college, she says, “there was a letter on my podium, just saying, ‘We don’t need the likes of you here. As soon as you leave, this is all going to change and go back.’ I mean, it got really heated.”  

Alabama piloted the use of LETRS in 2018, and expanded it to the whole state in 2021, by which time South Carolina and North Carolina were also jumping on board. In 2022 they were joined by Kentucky and Arkansas. In 2021 North Carolina approved almost $50 million to train its K-5 educators using LETRS. Not all of them appreciated it. “I’m all for the science of reading. I’m all for providing structured sequence materials to teachers,” says John Davis, who did the training as a third-grade teacher. But he knew a lot of the material already. And the main curriculum used in his school was not aligned with LETRS methodology. “You spent all this money and time on this training, and it’s not showing up in our reading curriculum?” says Davis. “It just seems like a waste.” 

Even Calkins came around—a bit. She rereleased her curriculum materials a few times, adding more phonics emphasis, but criticism of some of the methods she recommended mounted, and after Columbia University detached itself from TCRWP in 2023, she founded her own institute. “I am all for what I’ve learned from the science of reading, and also the new relationships I’ve developed and the new organizations I belong to now,” she says. “All that’s been helpful, but it’s awful to have teachers teaching in ways they don’t believe in.”

Indeed, the prospect of yet more mandatory training brought many teachers zero joy. Lisa Anderson was one of them. She had been an elementary teacher in Minnesota for more than 20 years when she was required in 2022 to undertake LETRS. “Another hurdle, something more to jump through,” she says. “The pendulum’s swinging, we jump on, and let’s see where this one lands.” 

That feeling lasted until about halfway into Volume 2. Before she’d even completed the program, she began to implement some of its methods—the school was also using a different curriculum that was more aligned with LETRS ideas—and saw surprising results. Students were starting to read, even many who were floundering. A new emotion emerged: anger. Why had she never been shown this information before? She was moved to write to her alma mater, Bemidji State, and demand a refund of the fees associated with the courses she had taken on teaching children to read. “You didn’t do your job,” she says she told them. (A spokesperson told TIME that the college continually updates its curriculum in accordance with state standards.) 

While LETRS’ success has assured Moats a comfortable retirement, she is still hoping that it will pay other dividends. “I hope that maybe we’re getting beyond the reading wars,” she says, meaning that the correct way to teach reading has been established. “But I don’t feel that secure about what it is I’m trying to teach actually taking hold. I think people do the course, but they don’t realize the power of the information.” 

Sitting on a chair in her dining room, not far from the guitar on another one, is a spelling sheet from a second-grade child in California that a teacher has sent through asking for help. Moats sighs deeply as she reads it. (“She sighs a lot,” says Lyon.) The child has written all the -igh words (thigh, high, fight) like -ing words (thing, hing, fing). “He’s trying to memorize letters by their appearance. He has no idea about the correspondence between speech and print,” she says. Even today, five or more years after the science-of-reading revolution began and decades after the Reading Panel, “this teacher cannot look at these writing samples and recognize poor phoneme awareness.” (Surveys suggest that even with all the legislation and training, no more than half of K-3 teachers are using science-of-reading techniques.) 

LETRS is also hitting critical mass just as Moats cedes control over the quality of the training, to the consternation of some of the earlier employees. “The mission became the money,” says Leta Palmiter, a former LETRS trainer who joined the company shortly after Lexia was bought by the private-equity firm Veritas Capital in 2020. “Not the people who received the training.” A Lexia spokesperson says improving literacy “remains at the heart of everything we do.”

It’s too soon to tell—especially with the interruptions caused by the pandemic clouding the data—whether any of the states that have newly adopted LETRS have managed to improve the reading skills of their students. And even if they do, it will be difficult to tell how much LETRS is responsible. A $4 million five-year randomized study of its effect is under way, but the results will not be available until 2029. A recent analysis by the Kentucky Department of Education found that schools with higher rates of LETRS-trained teachers posted larger gains in reading proficiency than schools with lower rates, but it was an internal study. Meanwhile, NAEP reading scores ticked up a few points for 9-year-olds in 2025 (although not for 13-year-olds), and another national report showed improvement in K-8 reading skills from 2025 to 2026. “I think all this work can only help,” says David Liben, a literacy consultant and one of the authors of the 2010 Common Core standards. “I just don’t think that at this point we have the evidence that we can make a claim that we’re turning a corner now.”

Experts agree that teacher training alone is not a solution for America’s reading ills. “This idea that nobody was teaching phonics, it just is absurd,” says former director of reading for Chicago Public Schools Timothy Shanahan, whose recent book Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives takes aim at balanced literacy, but who is also not sold on its replacement. For every Mississippi, he says, there’s a state like Arkansas, where LETRS hasn’t seemed to make any difference. And the tight focus on teacher training has come at a cost to other urgent problems in education, like truancy. “Is it that the kids are getting poor instruction, or that our attendance levels are so low right now that kids just aren’t learning?” he asks. 

Mistakes in education take a long time to show up, and so do fixes. By the time the students who learned how to read from LETRS-trained teachers are in the workforce, the landscape for communication may be unrecognizable. Even now, reading is not as vital to thriving as it was a mere five years ago. There are remarkable new ways to glean information and disperse it. Generative AI can write for us, and books can be read aloud by machines, so some of the disadvantages of being illiterate may be overcome by technology. 

But the ability to recognize and manipulate written words will still be a critical skill, say most educators, because it is inextricably linked to thinking. Decades of research in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and education suggest that becoming literate changes how people reason, solve problems, organize knowledge, and deliberate on their own thinking. “The mental work that is reading,” says Moats, “is the essence of learning.”

California’s governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency ahead of a potentially historic El Niño. In a statement released Sept. 22, Newsom said the declaration is meant to ensure communities have the resources they need to handle the impacts expected this winter. 

“California is strongest when we look out for one another. That is what this action is about,” Newsom said. “Giving communities the support they need, giving first responders the tools to do their jobs, and giving families the confidence that their state is ready.”

Read more: How Should You Prepare For A Super El Niño?

The state of emergency allows the government to mobilize state resources: readying flood-fighting supplies such as sandbags and pumps, preparing the National Guard to assist with flood response and search and rescue efforts, and fortifying roads and infrastructure. State environmental and natural resources agencies will also fast-track permitting and engage in other efforts to better prepare for flooding and landslides. 

How will El Niño impact California?

El Niño typically brings wetter, more intense winters to California—which could leave the state more vulnerable to severe winter storms, heavy rainfall, landslides, and flooding. An El Niño year does not guarantee that these conditions will occur, but it does increase the likelihood. 

Climate change is also supercharging weather events, and El Niño is no exception. One study published in August found that El Niño events are now nearly 40% stronger than before the Industrial era. This year’s El Niño is predicted to be the strongest in recorded history. 

What impacts has California already felt from this year's El Niño?

The governor’s office noted that the state has already experienced coastal flooding attributable to El Niño. The state can expect to see Kelvin waves, slow moving pulses of water that can stretch thousands of miles and raise sea levels along the coastline—increasing the risk for coastal flooding and erosion, and offshore Pacific hurricanes. Climate scientists also warn that the Pacific can expect to see a temporary 6-inch to 2-ft. rise in sea levels this winter. 

A number of southern California towns, including Malibu, Laguna Beach, and Long Beach, have already seen significant coastal erosion due to El Niño and Pacific hurricanes this year. 

How can Californians prepare for El Niño?

The state has urged residents to take action to prepare for El Niño by signing up for emergency alerts and learning their flood risk, and having an evacuation plan and emergency kit at the ready. 

It’s all part of an effort to ensure that the state is not caught off guard by El Niño. “We are not waiting for this season’s storms to be on our doorstep,” Cal OES director Caroline Thomas Jacobs said in a statement. “By planning early and coordinating resources ahead of El Niño, we are working to ensure communities and first responders have the personnel, equipment, and support they need to prepare for severe weather, respond quickly when conditions change, and protect lives and property across California.”

“From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land,” President Donald Trump declared in his inaugural address in January 2017. “From this moment on, it’s going to be America First.” An insular, populist nationalism, coupled with an antipathy toward globalist ideas and institutions, became the central theme and the clarion call of both his terms in the White House.

President Trump has spent considerable energy lambasting the United Nations, an institution the United States helped create 80 years ago and has shaped ever since. He has derided it as an “unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy,” and little more than “a talking shop.”

A majority of Americans no longer agree with their president. In a Sept. 2025 global poll commissioned by The Rockefeller Foundation,  61% of American respondents agreed that their country should cooperate with others to solve global challenges, even if doing so meant compromising on some national interests. Only 16% responded with a no. Such American support for international cooperation has only increased. When the same question was posed in the 2026 iteration of the poll, which surveyed more than 35,000 people across 34 countries, support in the U.S. rose by four percentage points to 65%, while the opposition fell by two percentage points to 14%.

American public support for multilateral cooperation in 2026 exceeds that of Western Europe, where it stands at 61%. Despite President Trump’s attacks on the UN, 62% of Americans say they trust the institution—eight percentage points more than last year—while only 30% claim to distrust it. Nearly half of American respondents, 46%, say they comfortable with the UN playing a leading role on the world stage. Only 21% say they are uncomfortable.

As global stability has eroded and peace has grown increasingly fragile, the desire for cooperation across border has increased among Americans. In the same poll, respondents were asked to choose three priorities from a list of 13 global issues: among American respondents, 40% ranked preventing wars and conflicts among their most pressing concerns. 

The message to President Trump is clear. For most of the last 80 years, America has acted multilaterally, even during its unipolar moment. Americans do not want the U.S. to act unilaterally in an increasingly multipolar era. They want their country to practice the politics of consensus building rather than coercion.

A new call for international cooperation

I joined an initiative involving 100 former prime ministers and presidents from every continent that calls upon today’s leaders to build a stronger basis for cooperation in an increasingly fragmented and multipolar world. On Monday, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, many of us came together to endorse core principles that could provide the basis for a new global consensus on solving shared problems and helping those in need.

As the poll commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation found, more than half of American respondents, 53%, would support their president publicly endorsing these principles of cooperation. This finding suggests that America is not a nation committed to an “America first and America only” ideology, but a nation with a strong sense of the enduring values that bind it to the wider world.

Yet as American support for cooperation with the rest of the world rises, the inclination across the rest of the world to cooperate with America hangs in the balance. For decades, people everywhere have looked to America for hope and inspiration. That faith is now being  questioned.

America’s appeal as global leader, the same poll found, has diminished. Only 39% of the respondents worldwide are comfortable with the U.S. playing a leading role on the world stage. And 34% of the respondents across the globe regard the U.S. as a major threat to their own countries. On that grim metric, Russia scored even higher, at higher 42%. China, surprisingly, fared better at 30%.

When respondents to the 2026 poll were asked which countries they would be comfortable seeing take a leading role in world affairs, America ranked in the bottom half of the table. Canada outpolled America, with 60% of the respondents globally comfortable with it playing such a role, the highest vote recorded for any country.

Several middle powers were viewed more favorably by respondents as potential global leaders: Japan (58%), Australia (55%), the United Kingdom (54%), Germany, Spain, and Italy (all 53%), France (51%) and South Korea (42%).

While none of these countries comes remotely close to matching American economic and military power, America’s soft power has certainly suffered in recent years. It is estimated that 900 million people want to live somewhere other than their own country.

Surveys asking people which country they would prefer to live in have consistently put America in the lead. According to Gallup data, 24% of respondents in 2009 named America as their preferred new home. By 2025, that preference had shrunk to a mere 15%.

Renewing American leadership

America can still regain its soft power. Americans have not lost their optimism or their sense of belief in a better future. In the 2026 poll, 55% of American respondents professed that, during a crisis, their own community would pull together. An even more decisive majority, 64%, believe that, as Americans they share a responsibility to help others, even in countries they don’t know. And 76% of American respondents believe it is possible to build a better future for the next generation.

Americans need to convey these convictions more clearly and widely. Under pressure from an affordability crisis at home and military overreach abroad, Americans may not any longer be prepared to “bear any burden or pay any price.”

But the values that underpin America are still embraced by a majority of its people. This suggests that America still has what it takes to resume the global leadership that is needed more than ever in our turbulent world.