The International Congress of Mathematicians met in Philadelphia last month, its first U.S. meeting since 1986. Minutes after accepting the Fields Medal, mathematics’s highest honor, Jacob Tsimerman told reporters he was leaving academia to work on AI safety. “I think the world is changing,” he said, adding that he did not expect the mathematical career to survive in its present form.
Two months earlier, he had been one of nine mathematicians asked to review whether an AI model had truly refuted an 80-year-old central pillar of modern geometry, known as the Erdős unit distance conjecture. Tsimerman and his peers determined that it had, and their commentary alongside the 18-page proof helped translate the machine's argument into mathematics a human could understand.
The breakthrough, and subsequent report, reflected how the bottleneck that holds us back from forging new discoveries in mathematics, and, increasingly, in every other field, is changing. For most of history, the scarce resource was discovery. With AI, discovery is nonstop, and human confirmation is now what is scarce.
To be clear, we are AI optimists. We believe AI tools will complement human ingenuity and expand what we can know and build, but our infrastructure for vetting and certifying discoveries was built for human throughput, and that is now the binding constraint. That is what holds innovation back. The answer to this problem is formalization: translating AI’s outputs into precise forms whose correctness can be checked automatically. Building the infrastructure to make verification routine is now a national-scale engineering problem.
Machines are outrunning us in more than math. The same is happening to the code that runs hospitals, banks, and power grids. In April, for example, Anthropic disclosed that its Mythos model could find unknown vulnerabilities in major operating systems and browsers, and restricted access to fifty organizations racing to patch them. Soon after, Microsoft engineers found 90 critical flaws in a widely used product; and in June, Sen. Mark Warner told a Senate hearing, citing the NSA director, that the tool "broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks but in hours."
All of this arrives in a world that already runs on code we assume is correct. In July 2024, a single faulty software update, not a cybersecurity attack, grounded flights and disrupted hospitals worldwide. Nowadays, developers can “vibe code,” or use generative AI to write code with natural language prompts. This lets teams build quickly, but at the same time can produce vast quantities of code nobody fully understands.
The same AI systems accelerating discovery can also solve the resulting information overload — if we pair their generative power with the rigor of mathematics.
For decades, researchers in defense, intelligence, academia, and industry have built an alternative to blind trust: formal methods, systems for proving that software mathematically will do exactly what it was designed to do. Like the way a software compiler translates a program into instructions a computer can execute, formal verification takes code, a specification of what it should do, and a proof connecting the two, and accepts the program only if every logical step checks out. This makes it possible to automatically validate AI output, and more broadly rigorize software and other security guarantees. And generative AI tools have made this sort of formalization broadly accessible in a way it never was before.
Once proof checking is cheap, the next bottleneck becomes writing the right specification. Deciding precisely what a system should do and capturing the world around it remains a matter of human judgment. A flawless proof of the wrong specification is still an answer to the wrong question. Formal verification cannot stop phishing, prevent every failure in a complex human system, or certify an AI model's overall safety—but it can eliminate whole classes of errors in critical software. For systems where failure can mean harm to millions, this should be a crucial step in the adoption of AI-generated code.
The Leiden Declaration, endorsed in June by the International Mathematical Union, warns that AI threatens the verifiability of proof. We would put it the other way around: mathematics offers the infrastructure to make generative AI more trustworthy. For this reason, the United States should treat that mathematical rigor as a national mission. We need public infrastructure for verified software: open libraries of verified components and specifications, standards and benchmarks, better tools for checking updates, and training programs that connect mathematics, computer science, engineering, and national security—coordinated across agencies rather than confined to one program. And because formal methods rest on deep mathematical foundations, this requires sustained investment in mathematics research and education, not only in the applications built on top.
Companies operating critical infrastructure should not rely solely on reactive patching and bug bounties where failure could hurt the public. Instead, they should aim to build in auditing and formal guarantees from the start. The goal is not to formally verify every line of every program, but to identify the logic of critical systems, specify what that logic must and must not do, and achieve mathematical assurance in that logic.
Mathematics has weathered crises of trust before. Geometry, infinity, logic, and the nature of proof each threw the field into foundational doubt, and each time the response was more precise languages, stricter standards, and better verification. That rigor is what made mathematics scalable, and software now needs the same transformation. As AI writes more of the code the world runs on, blind trust is no longer good enough. The question is whether the United States will lead the shift to mathematical trust, or wait for the failures that force it.
Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, are expected to move back to the United Kingdom later this year, after six years of living in the U.S. during a period of estrangement from the rest of the Royal family.
The couple are set to move with their children, Prince Archie, 7, and Princess Lilibet, 5, to a non-royal residence that is said to be outside of London, with both children enrolled to start at a British school in September. The news was first reported by the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, with multiple outlets since reporting similar details.
The move follows years of Prince Harry arguing that the security arrangements provided for his family in the U.K. were insufficient. In May 2025, Prince Harry lost an appeal after the British government downgraded his security arrangements following his decision, along with Meghan, to step back from Royal duties in 2020.
Asked on Thursday about the move and if the British government would pay for the family’s security, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the issue was “a private matter” and that he “wishes them well in the move that they are making.”
King Charles III was reportedly informed of the couple’s move on Sunday, and in line with their wishes, the Duke and Duchess will not return to their duties previously held as members of the Royal family.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex last visited the U.K. in July and were hosted by Charles and Queen Camilla at their private residence, Highgrove House, in Gloucestershire, west England.
Prince Harry also spent time attending events across the country linked to the Invictus Games, a sporting event established by the Duke involving injured or sick international servicemen and women.
Neither the Royal family nor Harry and Meghan have responded publicly to the reports. When asked about the speculation during a roundtable event in Washington on Wednesday, Harry said he had “nothing to say,” per the Associated Press.
TIME has reached out to Buckingham Palace, as well as representatives of the Duke and Duchess for comment.
Harry and Meghan initially lived and worked in the U.K. following their wedding in May 2018. But amid intense media scrutiny and other issues, they soon expressed desires to pull back from public-facing Royal duties.
In October 2019, the couple said they would be taking “family time” away from their duties towards the end of the year, CNN reported.
Then in January 2020, the Duke and Duchess announced their decision “to step back as ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family and work to become financially independent.” The couple said they would split time between the U.K. and North America, to “enable us to raise our son with an appreciation for the royal tradition into which he was born, while also providing our family with the space to focus on the next chapter.”
The late Queen Elizabeth II issued a statement in support of the decision after “constructive discussions” with the family, and following a 12-month review, Buckingham Palace confirmed in February 2021 that Harry and Meghan would not be returning as working members of the Royal family.
“While all are saddened by their decision, The Duke and Duchess remain much loved members of the family,” a statement read.
The next month, Harry and Meghan sat down with Oprah Winfrey for a now-infamous interview during which they detailed their decisions to move away from the Royal family and the apparatus around it, which Meghan referred to as “The Firm”.
In the interview, Harry said the decision to withdraw from public duties and move to California was both due to the amount of tabloid press scrutiny and harassment, as well as a lack of support from “The Firm.”
Tabloid headlines focused on Meghan have included descriptions of the Duchess as “gangster royalty” and coming from a “crime-ridden neighborhood.”
In 2023, Harry published his memoir, Spare, outlining details of Royal life. In his book, the Duke revealed how he learned of his grandmother’s death, Queen Elizabeth II, via the BBC, and how his father, Charles, did not hug him following the death of his mother, Princess Diana, in 1997.
While in the U.S., the couple have launched a number of business ventures, including several with Netflix. In December 2022, the couple released a six-episode docuseries on Netflix detailing more details about the early days of their relationship, as well as discussions around racism and stereotypes experienced by the Duchess since the start of their relationship.
Speaking in 2021 the Duke also detailed his relationship with the British media which has been dominated in recent years by a number of legal battles. Most recently Harry lost a lawsuit against Associated Newspapers Ltd., the publisher of The Daily Mail, with a judge ruling a lack of proof for privacy invasion claims against the paper.
Before the legal defeat, expected to be the Duke’s last challenge against tabloids, the publisher of the Sun newspaper was forced in January 2025 to pay Prince Harry “substantial damages after using “unlawful techniques” to acquire information on his private life.
The Duke also won 15 claims in December 2023, accusing Mirror Group Newspapers of unlawfully gathering information for stories published about him through phone hacking and other methods.
During the March 2021 interview, the Duchess also opened up about her suicidal thoughts while pregnant with their first child, Archie, in 2019.
“I just didn’t want to be alive anymore,” she said. “And that was a very clear and real and frightening constant thought.” Meghan added that when she approached Royal staff about seeking outside support, her request was refused.
The Duchess also relayed conversations between Harry and family members, during which they raised concerns with the Duke about how dark Archie’s skin might be.
Harry said such conversations took place at the start of his relationship with Meghan. “There were some real obvious signs before we even got married that this was going to be really hard,” he said.
In 2016, when the couple began dating, a statement from Harry’s communications secretary denounced the wave of racist and sexist comments targeting Meghan, as well as the tone of some of the media coverage about her. “Some of this has been very public—the smear on the front page of a national newspaper; the racial undertones of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comment,” the statement from the Duke’s communications secretary read.
Shinya Yamanaka goes for a run almost every morning. So do a lot of people—but the habit carries extra weight when done by a Nobel-winning scientist whose discovery forms the foundation for one of the most exciting areas of longevity research today: reprogramming human cells to make them act younger. When someone like that makes a daily habit of anything, you take notice.
Yamanaka had just come back from a run in late July, during one of Kyoto's worst heatwaves, when he sat down with senior health correspondent Alice Park to talk about his career and the influence he’s had on the rapidly expanding longevity field 20 years after his landmark discovery. He is one of TIME’s 2026 Longevity Leaders highlighted in this week’s issue: 12 trailblazers marking the way to a longer, healthier life.
We set out to find some of the most innovative leaders who are starting to show concrete results in helping us to live longer, better. A few pioneering scientists—like Harvard geneticist David Sinclair and Altos Labs’ Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte—have put their own spin on Yamanaka’s discovery. They’re on a mission to reverse cellular aging in different parts of the human body. Others have stepped up to separate snake oil from legitimate science. Jamie Justice, for instance, runs XPrize Healthspan, a $101 million longevity science fair that is funding the most promising research around the world. And some are addressing the equally important question of how our society should change to accommodate an older population. AARP CEO Myechia Minter-Jordan, for example, is leading the group into a new era of aging advocacy.
We are squarely in a longevity boom, and the field is now well established as serious science. But we are still near the beginning. Right now, there is no proven longevity drug you can take to make yourself live longer. (That we know of: Nir Barzilai, who thinks some existing drugs could be repurposed as longevity-boosting treatments, is eager to change that.) Some things are within your control, however. You can exercise, like Yamanaka; build muscle, which Dr. Gabrielle Lyon calls the “organ of longevity”; and strengthen your social ties, which Dr. Robert Waldinger has learned are crucial from directing the world’s longest study of human happiness. TIME’s 12 Longevity Leaders know that all of these approaches—medical, physical, social—are key in the quest to live as well as possible for as long as possible.
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Outer Banks Season 5.
After years of treasure hunts, betrayals, shipwrecks, family feuds and increasingly improbable escapes, the Pogues finally make it home. The fifth and final season of Netflix’s Outer Banks sends John B (Chase Stokes), Sarah (Madelyn Cline), Kiara (Madison Bailey), Pope (Jonathan Daviss), Cleo (Carlacia Grant), and Rafe (Drew Starkey) through one last race for treasure—this time involving the Royal Merchant gold, the Blue Crown, a deadly hurricane, and the ghosts of everything they have lost along the way.
The finale takes the Pogues far beyond the Outer Banks before bringing them back. First, they learn that the arms dealer Anton Finch is planning to use the Blue Crown during a meteor shower. The group travels to Azerbaijan to stop him, while Cleo is arrested as they are leaving for the private plane. She tries to board as the plane is taking off, but a police officer shoots at the plane's stairs, causing her to fall. Pope is already in Azerbaijan with the others when he discovers that Cleo has been deported to Nassau, Bahamas.
Kiara eventually gets the Blue Crown from Finch and takes it to the lake during the meteor shower, hoping it can bring JJ (Rudy Pankow) back. The crown doesn't resurrect him, but it gives Kiara a powerful final connection to her memories of JJ and everything they shared. Finch later takes the crown back, meaning the Pogues return to the Outer Banks without it. They arrive just hours before Hurricane Cassandra hits.
Meanwhile, back in Kildare, Rose has the Royal Merchant gold after stealing it from the Pogues. Chandler Groff (J. Anthony Crane) attacks and tries to kill Rose, but Wheezie shoots him in the arm and saves her stepmother. Groff escapes in Rose's car with the gold. During the hurricane, Kiara finds him aboard the stolen boat and confronts him about killing JJ. Their fight ends with Groff going overboard and presumed dead, while Kiara discovers that the boat is sinking.
Trying to keep the boat afloat, Kiara begins throwing heavy cargo into the ocean. Among the crates is the Royal Merchant gold Groff stole from Rose. She reluctantly pushes the gold overboard and soon falls into the water herself, but the Pogues find and rescue her.
The gold, however, isn't lost for good. After the hurricane passes, Pope calculates where the treasure should have drifted by triangulating the fort, the lighthouse and the location where they rescued Kiara, while accounting for the currents and wind. John B dives into the ocean and discovers the gold beneath the debris and sand. The Pogues are able to recover part of it in the moment and retrieve the rest over the following days.
With the Royal Merchant fortune finally in their hands, the Pogues use the money to rebuild Kildare, buy back properties and restore their homes. They help create the community they always wanted, where Kooks and Pogues can live together.
So, where does everyone end up as the Outer Banks adventure finally comes to a close? Here's what happens to the Pogues, their families and the people who shaped their story.
After everything John B has been through, the finale gives him the future he has been fighting for: a family and a home. He and Sarah welcome their first child, a son named JJ in honor of their late best friend.
One year later, John B and Sarah get married in a ceremony surrounded by their friends and family. Their son is also part of the celebration, with Kiara carrying him into the ceremony before Sarah walks down the aisle with Pope.
John B and Sarah begin their married life raising their son in the community they helped rebuild. In the final moments, John B rings the bell near their home and calls for JJ.
“I think he's traveled the world searching for happiness and peace, and his identity has been around this treasure that is significant to him and his father, and it's this weird relationship to it,” Stokes says. “You can travel the world, you can see beautiful places and meet incredible people, but home is always going to be home.”
Meanwhile, Sarah finally gets the freedom and stability she has spent years searching for. After breaking away from the unstable[?] world she grew up in, she builds a family of her own with John B and their son.
With Kildare rebuilt and the Pogues no longer living from one treasure hunt to the next, Sarah can settle into a life she chose for herself. Her journey from the daughter of a powerful Kook family to a member of the Pogues ultimately brings her to the family and sense of belonging she had been looking for all along.
“And I think a very, very full heart,” Cline says. “She finally got out of the bubble wrap, and that's what she always wanted. She made her dreams come true, and I hope she feels that.”
Kiara’s final chapter is defined by what comes after JJ’s death. The Blue Crown gives her an unexpected sense of closure, allowing her to revisit the memories she shared with him rather than simply focusing on what she lost.
Back in Kildare, Kiara confronts Groff and eventually turns her attention toward the future. She buys back the Maybank property with her share of the fortune and begins rebuilding it, while also pursuing her passion for marine life as an intern with North Carolina Marine Fisheries.
“I feel at peace with where she ends up,” Bailey says. “It’s a sweet ending for her, and I hope the fans love it too.”
After being arrested while trying to board the plane with the Pogues, Cleo is deported to Nassau, Bahamas and separated from Pope. But their story doesn’t end there. Pope eventually makes his way to Nassau and proposes to Cleo. She accepts and once the Pogues recover their fortune, Pope and his family are able to help Cleo resolve her immigration situation so they can live in Kildare together.
Cleo settles into a life with Pope and becomes part of the community the Pogues helped rebuild.
“It’s just a full 360 of how we met her,” Grant says. “We met her sort of on her own, or with a group of robbers, and now we see her in family, in a relationship, really blossoming into a young woman—still badass, but showing other sides of herself.”
Back home, Pope helps his father rebuild Heyward’s Seafood and uses his share of the fortune to buy a house for himself and Cleo. He also repairs his relationship with his father, bringing his personal and family lives into a more stable place.
“I think he's proud of his growth as a person, and he's proud of his relationship with the people he loves,” Daviss says. “His relationship with Cleo, his relationship with the Pogues, his family, him mending that relationship with his father, his own relationship with himself, growing up from a kid to being grown and being more confident.”
Rafe leaves Kildare with Sofia after helping her escape from jail during the evacuation. Sofia was arrested after helping Rafe evade the police, following the discovery of new evidence linking him to the murder of Sheriff Peterkin. Rafe believes the authorities will come down hard on Sofia if he doesn't turn himself in, so he cuts the power to the station, frees her from her cell, and flees with her.
They are later confronted by Sheriff Shoupe, who reminds Rafe that he killed Peterkin, one of Shoupe’s friends. Rafe admits that he was responsible for her death, saying he never wanted it to happen. He tells Shoupe that he plans to disappear after the hurricane and asks him not to come looking for him.
Rafe and Sofia eventually take shelter from the storm before the Pogues help them leave Kildare by boat. Pope gives them enough fuel to reach New Bern, from where they plan to make their way to South America. Before leaving, Rafe says goodbye to the Pogues, thanking Sarah and telling John B that he is happy for him.
“I think Rafe in the end feels finally important, wanted and loved,” Starkey says. “There’s a lot of things that he’s leaving behind. It kind of feels like he’s leaving behind the worst parts of himself, and I think he needs to leave that location in order to do so. It’s a bit of a rebirth for him at the end.”
Rose and Wheezie evacuate Kildare along with the other residents as Hurricane Cassandra approaches, leaving the island behind as the storm tears through the community. With the Cameron family’s old life permanently changed, the two eventually return to Kildare as the island begins to recover.
Rose and Wheezie are among the guests at Sarah and John B’s wedding, marking their continued place in Sarah’s life and in the community the Pogues helped rebuild.
Dale’s plans to reshape Kildare fall apart after an insurance investigation discovers that his financing was illegitimate. He had been trying to acquire land to build apartments and pressured Pope’s father to sell his property, threatening to use a video of Pope and the Pogues trespassing on private property against him.
After Hurricane Cassandra damages the island, the Pogues use their fortune to buy back the properties and rebuild Kildare on their own terms, leaving Dale without the foothold he had been trying to establish. In the final moments, Shoupe arrests Dale, bringing his attempt to take over the island to an end.
A year later, Shoupe is among the guests at Sarah and John B’s wedding, showing how his relationship with the Pogues has also evolved over the years.
This year, governments and businesses across Europe,North America and parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean have been contending with the impacts of severe drought and wildfires. Every year, drought-induced losses alone cost the global economy an estimated $307 billion. Yet one of the assets that could make economies more resilient remains dangerously underfunded: healthy land.
This week, leaders gathering in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia for COP17 of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) will have an opportunity to change that. What happens on Mongolia’s vast rangelands—and in degraded landscapes around the world—matters far beyond the environment. It is increasingly central to food and water security, supply chains and economic stability. In other words, the soil beneath our feet is essential to protecting livelihoods and economies from growing shocks.
The economic opportunity is significant. The UNCCD estimates that financing land conservation and restoration could generate up to $1.8 trillion annually, driven by strengthened agricultural and supply chain resilience, new revenue opportunities, and mitigated physical risks like drought-related losses. It could also generate employment for an additional 65 million people by 2030, resulting in a net gain of 37 million jobs. Business investment is already responding to this opportunity: the COP Action Agenda on Regenerative Landscapes reported more than a fourfold increase in business investment between 2023 and 2025. But fragmented and misaligned policies continue to hold investment back.
The COVID pandemic exposed how vulnerable global supply chains can be. Recent wildfires and droughts have exposed another weakness: the deteriorating natural systems on which those supply chains depend. Healthy land is not simply an environmental asset. It is economic infrastructure.
For farmers already contending with increased costs of necessities like seeds and fertilizer, land degradation, and increasingly severe drought add another layer of risk. For businesses, these physical risks directly affect the availability, cost, and quality of natural resources on which they depend within and beyond their value chains. And for governments, the consequences arrive as costly crises to manage. The imperative is clear: we need to invest in restoring land and supporting the people who manage it, before the economic and social costs of inaction become even greater.
The UNCCD estimates the combined cost of land degradation, drought, and desertification to the global economy at $878 billion annually. Governments routinely spend billions responding to and rebuilding after floods, wildfires, droughts, and other disasters—with US Government spending on wildfire suppression only set to grow—yet they invest only a fraction in preventing the degradation that makes economies and communities more vulnerable to these shocks. From an economic perspective, this is a poor allocation of capital.
When we think about economic infrastructure, ports and power grids loom large. However, what stewards of the land—including farmers, herders, and pastoralists—have understood for generations is that healthy land is infrastructure too. It underpins livelihoods, food production, water security, the production of raw materials, and, by extension, the economy.
In fact, roughly $44 trillion of global GDP, around half of global output, is moderately to highly dependent on natural capital, including healthy land. Restoring degraded land should therefore be viewed as an investment in economic resilience. An added benefit is that responsible management and restoration of degraded agricultural land can help reduce emissions, including agricultural methane through improved livestock health and feed quality.
By 2050, three in four people worldwide are projected to be affected by drought, with significant knock-on effects for businesses and supply chains through disrupted production, higher input costs, and increased commodity-price volatility. For developing countries, the challenge is particularly acute. The countries most exposed to drought and land degradation are often those with less financial capacity to invest in resilience. A drought that reduces agricultural output can quickly become a wider economic shock by raising food-import bills, reducing rural incomes, and increasing pressure on public budgets and foreign-exchange reserves.
This is the context in which COP17 opens in Ulaanbaatar, and rangelands are top of the agenda. They make up more than half of the earth’s land surface, and 70% of host country Mongolia’s territory. They provide 16% of global food supply, 70% of livestock feed, and support the livelihoods of up to 500 million pastoralists—land stewards who sustain the adaptive knowledge and land management practices on which food systems depend.
Rangelands are part of a much bigger economic story. Land restoration is a long-term investment, and many of its benefits are public goods that cannot easily be captured as private returns. In developing countries, high borrowing costs and constrained public finances make even economically attractive projects difficult to fund. Public and concessional finance therefore has a critical role to play in reducing risk and crowding in private capital where commercial opportunities exist.
A global consultation led by the WBCSD and mandated by the UNCCD Secretariat has called for governments to create a coherent and stable policy environment, develop a long-term investment vision, and strengthen trusted accountability frameworks. These would give businesses greater confidence to invest in shared socioeconomic objectives.
There are already mechanisms through which this can happen. In 2024, COP16 in Riyadh launched the Riyadh Action Agenda (RAA), bringing public, business, and community actors together around land and drought resilience. Together, it has mobilized more than $2.9 billion for land conservation, restoration, drought and water resilience. For 2026 to 2030, participating initiatives have set mobilization goals of more than $130 billion.
The next step is to make this investment progress more coordinated and measurable. At COP17, the RAA will launch the Land & Soil Breakthroughs: time-bound, measurable milestones designed to aggregate non-state actor commitments, reduce overlap, and make collective progress visible and investable. The RAA will also launch a Community Platform to visualise progress towards conserving and restoring 1.5 billion hectares of degraded land by 2030.
The investment return could be significant. Globally, every $1 invested in landscape restoration can create between $7 and $30 in economic benefits for local people.
For too long, healthy land has been treated as an environmental concern rather than the economic asset it is. At a time when governments are under pressure to strengthen economic resilience while managing constrained public finances, and businesses are facing increasing climate shocks, these are the investments we need.
COP17 is an opportunity to change the narrative on land. The question is no longer whether we can afford to invest in its restoration, but whether we can afford not to.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced Tuesday that “all trade, commercial exchanges, and financial transactions with Iran have been halted until further notice,” alleging that Iran had fired two ballistic missiles toward it.
The country’s foreign ministry said the decision comes “in light of regional escalations that undermine regional and international peace and security.”
Earlier Tuesday, the UAE’s Ministry of Defense reported that two missiles launched from Iran toward the country, both of which fell into the sea. The statement said it “affirms its readiness to respond to any threats and to resolutely counter any attempts to undermine the security of the country or the safety of maritime navigation in the region.”
Read More: Trump Again Threatens to Bomb Oman
Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry, rejected the Emirati claim on Tuesday, saying that it “undermines ongoing efforts to strengthen trust between countries in the region and prevent the escalation of insecurity,” according to the semi-official Fars news agency.
“The impact on the Iranian economy could be significant,” Simon Henderson, director of the Bernstein Program on Gulf and Energy Policy at the Washington Institute, tells TIME. “The UAE is one of the top non-oil trading partners with Iran.”
As of April, the UAE accounts for 12.5% of Iran’s exports and 30.43% of its imports, according to Iranian news agency WANA.
Iran’s dollar currently ranks as the least valuable currency in the world, and its government told a Russian news agency in April that the war has already cost it some $270 billion in direct and indirect damages.
Stability in the region is fragile, as a number of incidents have been recently reported in the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday, a vessel reported that it had been struck by an unknown projectile, causing damage to the engine room and a crew casualty, according to the U.K. Trade Maritime Operations Centre (UKMTO). Last Thursday, a separate vessel was struck by a drone.
The UAE has previously reported the detection of missiles coming toward it, most recently on July 12, when it confirmed that a missile fell outside of its borders.
In May, the defense ministry reported that it had intercepted six unmanned aerial vehicles within 48 hours that “attempted to target civilian and vital areas in the country.”
One drone, launched from the direction of the UAE’s western border, struck an electricity generator near the Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant on May 17. Its origin has not been confirmed and is under investigation.
During the first few weeks of the conflict, Iran launched a series of more aggressive strikes on targets in the UAE, hitting military, energy, and civilian infrastructure. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) vowed at the time to “punish aggressors throughout the region,” pointing toward U.S. military assets stationed in the country, as well as other Gulf states.
Tehran resumed targeting U.S. allies in the Middle East, including Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain during the return to hostilities in early July, when negotiations based upon a Memorandum of Understanding collapsed.
Peace talks between the United States and Iran have made little progress in recent weeks.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that “there are no talks or conversations going on, or scheduled,” between the U.S. and Iran. He also reaffirmed that the naval blockade on Iranian ports and vessels remains in place, amid ongoing claims that the Strait of Hormuz is “open and operating.”
Marine traffic data suggested Wednesday that some ships were indeed passing through the Strait, but still at significantly lower levels than before the conflict began.
Earlier this week, the President also threatened to “bomb the s---” of Oman, a U.S. ally and mediator between Washington and Tehran, should it “get in the way” of U.S. attempts to gain effective international control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Oman and Iran have reportedly been working toward an agreement to manage traffic through the Strait, which carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supply.
As students go back to school in the midst of record-breaking summer heat, many are returning to overheating classrooms whose aging air conditioning systems can't keep up with extreme heat waves—if they even have air conditioning at all.
Extreme heat has already caused school closures and disruptions across the country. In July, Milwaukee Public Schools shut down its Summer Academy and other indoor school programs for two days because of extreme heat. One day in May, 57 Philadelphia schools went remote and canceled all in-person activities due to soaring temperatures. That same month, a Washington, D.C. high school carried out a "heat evacuation" as classroom temperatures reached the mid-90s. Eight elementary schools in Doylestown, PA also closed for a day because old buildings couldn’t protect students from the heat. And in recent years, schools in Memphis dismissed students early as temperatures climbed to 110 degrees.
During the 2024-25 school year alone, more than 9 million students at 10,000 schools nationwide experienced extreme heat- and weather-driven school closures or disruptions. These are not isolated inconveniences. They are warning signs that our school buildings and grounds were not designed for today’s new weather patterns.
It’s important to understand that students struggle to learn in hot, stuffy classrooms. Air quality, temperature, and ventilation can affect how students think, focus, and perform. Poor ventilation can impair cognitive function, while excessive heat diverts the body’s energy from learning, slows reaction time, and weakens attention.
In fact, research has shown that in schools without cooling, each 1° Fahrenheit increase in school year temperature reduces the amount learned that year by approximately 1%.
Extreme temperatures (80 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit and above) are known to exacerbate student absenteeism and disciplinary referrals, while poor indoor environments can also contribute to the spread of illness and exacerbate respiratory conditions like asthma, one of the leading causes of missed school days. Younger children, whose bodies and brains are still developing, are especially susceptible.
In medicine and education alike, we have seen how the environments where people spend their time can directly affect their health, well-being, and ability to thrive. We would never accept these conditions in a hospital. We should not accept them in a classroom.
At the same time, outdated heating and cooling systems are placing a growing financial strain on school districts. Across the country, energy costs are rising and becoming more unstable. For school leaders, that often means tradeoffs: dollars spent on inefficient energy systems are dollars not spent directly on teaching and learning. But there is a better path forward.
Modern HVAC systems, often paired with on-site solar energy, offer schools a way to deliver reliable heating and cooling while reducing exposure to volatile fossil fuel costs. These solutions can stabilize energy budgets over time and are increasingly supported by domestic manufacturing, including the production of heat pumps here in the United States.
Just as important, new federal tools make these upgrades far more accessible than they once were. Through energy tax credits and a mechanism known as Elective Pay, public school districts can receive direct financial support to invest in these improvements. That means lower upfront costs and faster payback, turning what was once out of reach into a practical, near-term option.
We are already seeing what this looks like in practice.
In Indiana, Center Grove Community Schools are demonstrating how modern HVAC upgrades can improve classroom comfort while helping manage energy costs, in part by replacing aging boilers, chillers, and fan coils with a geothermal heat pump system. In Virginia’s Prince William County, at the heart of the nation’s data center corridor, district leaders are acting to shield their budgets from steep projected utility increases. And in Wisconsin, a school in Menasha modernized its facility with a ground-source heat pump system, solar panels, and energy storage to deliver better air quality, lower costs, and create local jobs.
The benefits extend well beyond temperature control. Students are better able to focus and learn. Districts gain predictability in their operating costs. And communities benefit from more resilient, efficient infrastructure that reduces strain on the grid during periods of peak demand.
For school and district leaders, this moment calls for action. Now is the time to explore how these solutions can work in your community.
The environments we live in shape the health within us. Nowhere is that more immediate, or more consequential, than in the classroom.
We can improve student health and learning, strengthen our schools, and protect public resources at the same time. And we have real-world proof from communities across the country that this is not only possible, but doable.
The real risk is not the price of modernization, but the cost of continuing to send students and teachers into unhealthy, inefficient buildings unprepared for the realities ahead.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) said Wednesday that it “deplores” sanctions imposed this week by the U.S. State Department on its president, Judge Tomoko Akane, and Abdoulaye Seye, a Senegalese senior trial lawyer for the Office of the Prosecutor.
The State Department announced the sanctions Tuesday, accusing Akane and Seye of having “directly engaged in efforts by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute officials whose government has not consented to ICC jurisdiction.”
The sanctions include the freezing of assets in the country, blocking financial transactions, and prohibiting entry to the U.S. They were imposed under an Executive Order issued by President Donald Trump in February 2025, which reads: “The United States unequivocally opposes and expects our allies to oppose any ICC actions against the United States, Israel, or any other ally of the United States that has not consented to ICC jurisdiction.”
Neither the U.S. nor Israel is a state party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that founded the ICC and went into effect in 2002, and therefore do not recognize the jurisdiction of the court.
Read More: Trump Administration Vows to Dismantle the International Criminal Court
“These sanctions are a flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution which operates pursuant to the mandate conferred by its states parties,” the ICC statement said. “Such measures targeting judges, prosecutors and staff who work towards the fulfilment of the mandate that was conferred to the ICC by states undermine the rule of law.”
The Court further warned that the sanctions put “international legal order” at risk.
In his first term, Trump imposed sanctions on ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and another senior official, Phakiso Mochochoko. These were later lifted under the Biden Administration.
The ICC says that nine of its 18 judges are now under sanctions from Washington, as well as both deputy prosecutors, a former prosecutor, and one other member of staff.
Announcing the sanctions on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the ICC a “corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court.” He accused it of repeated attempts “to assert authority over nationals of the United States and other countries that have not consented to its jurisdiction or ratified the Rome Statute.”
The Trump Administration has long pushed back against the ICC’s investigations and charges against nationals from both the U.S. and Israel. February’s Executive Order said the ICC’s recent actions against both countries “set a dangerous precedent.”
The State Department also launched a campaign in July to “dismantle” the ICC’s jurisdiction, saying it will “systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.”
But the tensions trace back to Trump’s first term, when the ICC sought to investigate possible war crimes committed by the CIA and military personnel in Afghanistan. Bensouda requested authorization in 2017 to investigate those allegations. Trump then brought sanctions against her in 2020.
The U.S. has also rebuked its actions in recent years against Israel.
In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the recently dismissed Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Both were accused of “crimes against humanity and war crimes" pertaining to the ongoing Israel-Hamas War, including “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” and “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.”
The conflict was ignited by Hamas’s terror attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which left some 1,200 people dead and 250 taken hostage. Since then, over 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza—1,262 of whom have been killed since a cease-fire began last October, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Public Health on Aug. 15.
The prosecutor also pursued arrest warrants for Hamas leaders Mohammed Deif, Ismail Haniyeh, and Yahya Sinwar, all of whom have since been killed.
During Rubio’s Senate confirmation hearing in 2025, he addressed the warrant for Netanyahu. “This is a test run. This is a trial run to see, ‘Can we go after a head of state from a nation that’s not a member?’” he said, adding: “If we can go after them and we can get it done with regards to Israel, they will apply that to the United States at some point.”
Israel has denied the ICC’s war crimes accusations and challenged its jurisdiction. The Pre-Trial Chamber initially rejected that challenge, but in April 2025 the Appeals Chamber sent it back for reconsideration. The arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant remain in effect.
Netanyahu commended Rubio’s sanctions announcement on Tuesday, describing the ICC as “a kangaroo court that cloaks its abuse of power in the language of international law while undermining the very principles of justice.”
In late July, the Federal Bureau of Investigation received reports of cyberattacks on water facilities from utility companies in at least seven states in the United States.
One of those attacks, in Braham, Minnesota, a city of around 1,800 people, affected the functioning of a pump at a water treatment plant and threatened the water supply. Public works crews in the city quickly and impressively isolated the system, restored a backup, and had the water plant back up and running in around 90 minutes, according to Nate George, the mayor of Braham.
While this ad hoc response worked this time, much more is needed to make America truly resilient to hybrid attacks by malicious actors on the critical infrastructure that Americans depend on every day for water, power, healthcare, and financial transactions.
In April, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a warning saying that Iranian-backed groups are targeting America’s critical infrastructure, including water systems. More capable adversaries of America, China and Russia, are also actively targeting critical infrastructure in the United States, according to U.S. officials.
President Donald Trump said he does not believe that Iran is behind these most recent cyberattacks. Unnamed U.S. officials reportedly believe that Iran-backed groups are the likely culprits but also caution that the findings are preliminary and that there is a chance that the attackers may be impersonating Iran to stoke tensions.
Meanwhile. the Trump Administration has been gutting U.S. cybersecurity capabilities, cutting roughly a third of the federal cyber agency’s workforce at exactly the moment small utilities need it most. A new approach is needed. Washington needs a whole-of-society, resilience-based approach to deter and defend against these increasing hybrid threats to the American homeland.
Washington can learn a lot from its European allies. Europe has spent decades hardening its systems through a whole-of-society effort it calls “total defense.” Finland and Estonia are especially instructive examples. Finland runs a national supply agency that holds reserves of fuel, grain, and medicine and rehearses shortages alongside the private companies that would actually have to manage them.
Estonia fields a volunteer cyber unit within its Defense League, a militia under the command of its defense ministry. The volunteers are civilians with day jobs who train with the state and show up when attackers strike. They run exercise programs built around cyber resilience, information sharing, and public-private partnerships.
So what does Washington need to do to harden America’s water systems and other critical infrastructure? First, America needs to broadly embrace a whole-of-society “total defense” approach to homeland security, adopting and adapting innovative ideas from partners and allies.
More specifically, policymakers can take three specific steps now that will help prepare for, and perhaps deter, the next attack. First, they should renew the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program, a small grants program for states that helps build state and local level cyber defenses. The program has already lapsed once and now runs on year-to-year extensions, which is no way to fund a defense. Make it permanent and carve out a sizable share for water.
Second, Washington should set a response floor for water municipalities and measure it in hours. Electric utilities operate under binding federal cyber standards backed by real financial penalties. Water utilities have no equivalent, and the Environmental Protection Agency currently has no authority to impose one. Congress should give it a narrow version: every system above a modest size must be able to run manually for 72 hours and must prove it in an annual drill. This is not a technology mandate; it is a time standard, and it is the only number that matters once the pumps stop. Braham did it in 90 minutes. That should be the benchmark.
Finally, the U.S. needs to build the bench. There are roughly 50,000 small water systems in this country, and most have no dedicated IT staff at all. No grant program can hire its way out of that. Governors can act tomorrow with authorities they already have: cyber teams in the National Guard on standing state active duty orders, tied to a water mutual aid compact modeled on the one power companies use to restore each other’s lines after hurricanes. When a plant serving 1,800 people gets hit at two in the morning, somebody should already have the phone number.
A country that can afford 11 aircraft carriers can afford to teach 50,000 water operators to turn a valve by hand. Resilience is not a consolation prize for failed deterrence. By forcing an adversary to think twice about whether an operation will succeed, resilience is deterrence.
The Trump Administration ordered 30 universities to audit their foreign research partnerships or risk losing funding.
The order, issued Monday by the Defense Department, instructs universities to review their ties to 130 foreign institutions, mainly Chinese, that “engage in activities that increase the likelihood of U.S. government-funded research and development efforts being misappropriated.” Schools that fail to terminate any “problematic” partnerships within two weeks may lose their eligibility for future federal research funding.
The order is intended to protect taxpayer-funded research from “unauthorized technology transfer, intellectual property theft and adversarial exploitation,” the Pentagon said in the announcement.
“The Department of War has zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security,” Emil Michael, undersecretary of war for research and engineering, said.
The announcement did not identify which schools had received the order or how they were selected, but a U.S. official told the Associated Press on Tuesday that they include Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Johns Hopkins University.
The order is the latest effort to clamp down on alleged Chinese influence in the U.S., including in higher education. The Trump Administration and several lawmakers from both parties have argued that China exploits U.S.-funded research to obtain sensitive technology and intellectual property.
U.S. concerns about Chinese intellectual property theft and espionage have grown in recent years. Last year, a federal jury convicted former Corning scientist Ji Wang of stealing files containing trade secrets from a Pentagon-funded project. Prosecutors said he planned to use the technology in a Chinese business backed by government entities. In May, Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, Calif., resigned after admitting to acting as an unregistered Chinese government agent before taking office.
But some observers have warned that the crackdown unfairly politicizes academic collaboration, stigmatizes Chinese academics, and could weaken American scientific competitiveness.
The Chinese embassy in Washington said in a statement to news outlets that it opposed “the overstretching of the concept of national security and the politicisation or instrumentalisation of normal scientific, educational and academic exchanges.”
“The U.S. side should abandon the Cold War mentality and foster an open, fair and non-discriminatory environment for educational, scientific and people-to-people exchanges between China and the United States,” it added.
Here’s what to know about the raft of policies aimed at curbing institutional ties to China.
The foreign institutions the U.S. seeks to blacklist were identified by the Pentagon last month. Eighty-eight of the 130 institutions are in mainland China, while the remaining institutions are in Russia and Iran. The list has been updated annually since an earlier version was first released in 2023. It was established under Section 1286 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which was enacted during President Donald Trump’s first term.
While some Chinese universities on the list have more explicit ties to the military, others are prominent civilian institutions with extensive international research partnerships. These include Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The updated list also added a number of other Chinese institutions with varying links to China’s defense and security establishment, including Shandong University, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Shenyang Aerospace University, and the University of International Relations.
People familiar with Chinese academic institutions previously told TIME that Chinese Communist Party structures are embedded throughout the country’s universities, making institutional links to the government common, even though individual students or researchers may not be engaged in political or military work.
The Pentagon also instructed universities to audit collaborations with organizations associated with “rebranded Confucius Institutes.” Confucius Institutes are non-profit language and cultural programs funded by the Chinese government and hosted in universities around the world. Launched in 2004, there were at one time more than 100 Confucius Institutes operating on U.S. college campuses. But most U.S. programs closed after 2019 amid congressional scrutiny and federal funding restrictions. By late 2023, there were fewer than five active Confucius Institutes in the U.S.
Many universities, however, retained partnerships with their former Chinese partner institutions or established successor language and cultural programs under different names. Critics characterized some of these arrangements, particularly those that continued to receive Chinese funding or instructors, as “rebranded Confucius Institutes.” Of 74 former Confucius Institute hosts surveyed by the Government Accountability Office in 2023, 43 said they maintained ties to their former Chinese partner institutions. Nine reported receiving continued funding or other support for programming from those institutions, although eight of the nine said the partnerships predated their Confucius Institutes.
The Trump Administration has pursued a slate of policies that build on Trump’s first-term “China Initiative.” These have included tighter scrutiny of universities’ foreign funding and research partnerships and restrictions on collaborations with blacklisted Chinese institutions. The Trump Administration has also increased vetting of Chinese student visa applicants, threatened visa revocations for some students, and renewed investigations of China-linked researchers.
Since last year, the Pentagon has prohibited funding fundamental research projects conducted in collaboration with a listed foreign institution or its employees. The policy was expanded in March to bar the use of equipment from listed entities in certain Pentagon-funded projects.
Meanwhile, China has sought to bring in more foreign talent and investment, including by seeking to attract more international students to its universities and exchange programs, and by introducing a K visa for young foreign STEM professionals.
Dozens of Chinese tenure-track scholars have left U.S. universities for China over the past year.
Days before the latest announcement, the Republican-led House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the House Education and Workforce Committee released a report accusing Harvard of failing to adequately screen its relationships with Chinese institutions linked to the People’s Liberation Army and China’s defense industry. The investigation said it identified more than 140 publications co-authored by Harvard-affiliated researchers and scholars at certain Chinese defense-linked civilian universities.
Harvard disputed the report’s “mischaracterizations,” and said it follows federal national security standards.
The changes also come as the U.S. seeks to maintain its lead over China in the global AI race. A 2025 report warned that major AI data centers in the U.S. were vulnerable to Chinese espionage, sabotage, and intellectual property theft.
In July, the Administration recommended redirecting potentially billions of dollars of federal research funding from universities toward individual scientists and AI-focused projects as part of an effort to counter Chinese scientific advances.
Last week, Reuters also reported that the Administration was preparing to tell 35 partner countries that participation in Pax Silica—a U.S.-led initiative to strengthen supply chains for semiconductors, critical minerals, and AI infrastructure—was conditioned on their refusal to join China’s rival AI framework. The reported demand appeared in an internal draft and has not been formally issued.
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A new ruling by an administrative immigration court ends a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients who are married to U.S. citizens.
Iran is betting that military pressure will ultimately force the United States to accept Tehran's control over the Strait of Hormuz — and that time is on its side. But its strategy carries risks.
© Anatoly Maltsev/Pool/Associated Press
Francesca Hong is the frontrunner to win the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin next week. If she goes on to win the general election, she’ll become the first democratic socialist governor in American history.
But, when Bernie Sanders, the most famous democratic socialist in the country, was asked Wednesday if he’d endorse her, he said: “I don’t think so.” He said he’d met her a few years ago, and that she “seems very very nice” — but said he wasn’t familiar with her race.
Indeed, while leftists and socialists who’ve long been eager to overthrow the Democratic establishment are excited about Hong’s campaign, some are increasingly sounding a bit wary of her chances — and wondering whether she’s the best representative the movement has to offer given the electoral stakes in this swing state.
For instance, when Hong was asked this week about an old deleted tweet in which she called to cancel Thanksgiving due to its celebration of colonialism, she didn’t exactly disavow it. Instead, she told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that “views can evolve” while also stressing the holiday was “incredibly painful for many people in our communities.”
Moderate Democrats cringed, of course. But what was more notable was how many fellow leftists joined in — even to some of her biggest fans, the answer seemed like political malpractice. It also brought to the surface simmering tensions within the left over how to navigate social issues more broadly, a divide that’s becoming more relevant now that their candidates are on the cusp of wielding actual power.
Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, fresh off campaigning with Hong, posted on X: “love fran, this was an opportunity to turn this back on how thanksgiving is about to be unaffordable due to trumps wars.” (Two days later, Hong tried a do-over on the answer, claiming Thanksgiving was actually her favorite holiday.)
Another source of concern, for some, is Hong’s tendency of giving elliptical answers when asked about her old support for abolishing police and prisons — saying she won’t do it as governor, but remaining reluctant to disavow the idea as a long-term goal.
Sanders has been a longtime critic of “defund the police” rhetoric. And in the same interview where Sanders said he likely wouldn’t endorse Hong, he said, in response to a separate question: “No serious person that I know who is running for office believes in quote-unquote defunding the police.”
Hong’s rhetoric is reminiscent of how many people in progressive spaces talked about culture, identity, policing, and prisons back during the “Great Awokening” era, peaking in the “racial reckoning” of 2020. But some on the left increasingly believe that those positions alienate voters — particularly the working-class voters they’re trying to mobilize.
This new left conventional wisdom, said to be embodied in Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign, is that socialist candidates for office should quietly downplay or even explicitly renounce those old causes — as Mamdani did for police defunding — in favor of a laser focus on issues like affordability, stopping data centers, and opposition to Israel, where public opinion is on their side.
It’s a sort of left-wing version of “popularism” — the center-left credo that Democrats should campaign on popular ideas that poll well, and abandon unpopular progressive stances. In other words: Don’t scare the normies.
But not everyone on the left is so eager to jettison these stances for purportedly optimal campaign messaging: After all, a major organizing principle for many on the left is their willingness to stand up for what they believe in even when it isn’t popular.
For instance, Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Mamdani ally who successfully challenged a House Democratic incumbent this year, stood by her old calls to abolish policing and borders — though, unlike Hong, she’s running in extremely blue terrain.
“Five years ago, the left was collectively making the case for abolition &/or defund, & gaining public opinion wins,” leftist podcaster Briahna Joy Gray wrote. “Today, they’re making the case for why elected progressives are justified in abandoning this agenda.”
All this is symptomatic of a deeper divide on the left, not just about today’s political strategy, but about race, class, and gender more broadly, and how 2020-era cultural issues fit into their movement today.
Many class-focused leftists view the period they now jokingly call “woke 1.0” or “woke 1” as a cringey mistake, and seek to blame Democratic elites for it. But others on the left still think and talk about race, identity, and social justice causes just like they did in 2020 — indeed, to them, these issues might be why they joined the left in the first place.
In 2021, Chi Ossé, campaigning for New York City Council, tweeted: “A cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council.”
When a critic of his on X unearthed that old post earlier this year, Ossé — now a council member — gave a pithy response: “Woke 1 was crazyyyy”.
The citation of “woke 1.0” or “woke 1” is a now-common shorthand among parts of the online left to describe — and distance themselves from — what they now view as the more dated or inconvenient aspects of the impassioned social justice activism they participated in during the late 2010s and early 2020s.
Typically, this doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting causes like racial justice altogether. Rather, it is often intended to acknowledge that the tactics used a few years back didn’t work, and that a new approach is necessary to try and achieve those goals. (Indeed, “woke 1.0” implies that “woke 2.0” is either coming or already here.)
Among those who use the term, there isn’t a consensus about what’s an outdated relic worth abandoning, and what’s a worthy cause worth preserving. However, there’s probably the most consensus that the sweeping, totalizing identity-related rhetoric and assertions that were common at the time haven’t aged well. Not only did they repel winnable voters, but they fueled constant arguments inside progressive organizations, to the point that some activists likened the discord to undercover federal plots to disrupt left-wing groups in the 1960s.
Take it from Chevalier. The victorious congressional primary challenger has stood by her old tweets about police and borders being fundamentally wrong. But when the New York Editorial Board asked her about “woke 1,” she said it was “indeed crazy” — because there was too much “divisive rhetoric” that hurt the left’s effort to build solidarity.
“At the core of what it means to organize is to bring people together behind a vision,” Chevalier said. “And you can’t do that when you are spending time trying to show who’s more progressive or who’s more woke. That actually causes more division, and it makes folks feel that there is no space for them in our movements.”
To others, the true core of “woke 1.0” is unpopular, fringe-sounding cultural causes — like, say, calling Thanksgiving problematic. In response to the Thanksgiving clip, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein posted: “Hong has a lot of strengths but this woke 1 stuff is a major weakness.”
“Socialists must practice effective communication,” Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of the socialist publication Current Affairs, wrote. “Reply to a Thanksgiving question: The only thing threatening to cancel Thanksgiving is the rising cost of groceries.”
Underneath some leftists’ attempt to turn the page from “woke 1.0,” there’s a deeper and more longstanding divide on the left between those who want to prioritize economic issues — and those who care deeply about identity-related causes too.
To broadly generalize, we can think of the left as having three main strains, focused on economic justice (class politics), social justice (causes related to identity and culture), and foreign policy (war, empire, and — especially nowadays — Israel). But not everyone prioritizes them in the same way, or joined the movement because of the same issue.
Amid the rise of social media-powered identity related activism, some on the economics-focused left have expressed concern that progressives’ language, approach, and tactics were hampering what should be the left’s top priority: mobilizing the working class. The Marxist scholar Adolph Reed, for instance, has criticized “left identitarians” as “fundamentally antagonistic to working-class politics.”
Some on the class-focused left go further, characterizing “wokeness” as essentially an op by their political enemies.
According to this potted history, it was Hillary Clinton who first opened the Pandora’s box of weaponized identity politics, and she did this to defeat a Bernie Sanders campaign that was overwhelmingly focused on economic justice. Clinton characterized Sanders as insufficiently attentive to gender and racial issues, famously questioning whether breaking up the big banks would solve racism and sexism. His record of more moderate positions on hot-button issues like guns and immigration, which had helped maintain support with culturally conservative independents back in Vermont, also came under attack.
But by 2018, the rising left — embodied by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, all first elected that year — had fulsomely embraced identity-related causes alongside economic ones, believing them to be compatible and interconnected.
All this built up to the 2020 racial reckoning, in which the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin spurred massive nationwide protests and impassioned demands from the left for societal change. And some activists insisted this change had to include not just defunding but outright abolishing the police.
Yet the racial reckoning ended in disappointment, an “anti-woke” backlash soon followed, and rising crime seemed to discredit the idea of doing away with police. And though the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America still calls for taking “steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system,” there’s an increasingly open debate on the left about whether it should.
“The idea that police/prison abolitionism flow from ‘core socialist principles’ is pretty odd,” Ben Burgis, a columnist for Jacobin magazine, posted recently.
“We need to create a permission structure on the left that allows socialists to have normal socialist beliefs about police & prisons (fairer, fewer, and more humane) instead of “abolish” which is flatly anarchist, and incompatible with any form of state socialism,” the socialist Cassie Pritchard wrote.
Sociologist Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, fired back: “In what fantasy land are police not the natural enemies of workers and their movements? There is no ‘reforming away’ that core truth.”
With Hong holding a large lead in recent polls, some Democrats — fearing what lies ahead for her in the general election — have essentially been trying to coach her into giving what they view as better answers on these “woke 1.0” questions.
When Jon Favreau interviewed Hong on Pod Save America this week, he asked about her old tweets — saying he was only focusing on this because Republicans would be sure to spend millions attacking her, and “I just want to make sure you have the best possible answers to what’s coming.”
Asked about how her views on policing have evolved, Hong said: “My views have only become stronger in that I’m serious about public safety and I will not abolish the police.”
Favreau then asked if she still believed police exist to uphold white supremacy (as she tweeted in 2021), and Hong said, “No.”
But when Favreau asked specifically why she changed her mind on that, her answer was difficult to parse.
“When you talk to people who are most justice-impacted — a mother who lost a child to police violence, people who have contended with injustices in historically marginalized communities — justice also looks like making sure that we are implementing solutions and helping to change the material conditions of people’s lives,” she said.
Then, when asked how her long-term vision of a world without prisons would work, Hong said: “What I know is attainable and the policies that actually meet the urgency of the moment and understanding the realities of it, means that we have to ensure that we’re funding our local governments, that we’re bringing justice to victims.”
She added, more succinctly: “What may have been aspirational is not primary.”
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In the teensy Midwestern town of Braham, homemade pie capital of Minnesota, something unusual in the municipality’s computer systems knocked the city’s entire water supply offline last week.
Within a few hours, dozens of other Minnesota cities discovered that their water and wastewater utilities, too, had been compromised, most likely as part of a massive Iranian cyberattack, the kind that US officials have been warning about since the war began.
At least a dozen states have been affected by the attack, which briefly led to a flurry of small-town service disruptions, boil-water notices, and local flooding. Water wells, dams, sewers, and pipelines are some of America’s oldest and creakiest pieces of infrastructure, built long before the internet existed, and certainly long before AI made hacking much easier. While you may assume most hackers are in it for the money or for data, some have targeted critical infrastructure like water systems or energy grids in ploys for control or disruption — or worse still, as acts of war.
And, as last week’s attacks show, the nation’s water system is woefully unprepared. But how worried should you be that the very infrastructure that keeps our water taps running is, apparently, hackable?
Quite worried, indeed.
When we say the water supply got hacked, what we really mean is that someone, somewhere has broken into the computer that controls a local water treatment plant or reservoir, and is now pulling the levers, like the one that decides how much of a corrosive chemical can safely go into cleaning the water that comes out of your tap.
These levers were once manual buttons and knobs operated in-person by real live humans, meaning that — barring a natural disaster, bomb, or break-in — protecting them was about as simple as building a fence and hiring guards. Increasingly, however, these levers have gone digital, meaning that they are now remotely operable from anywhere in the world.
Those upgrades have been convenient, allowing technicians to monitor and troubleshoot problems in real time. But, in the process, they have exposed at times centuries-old infrastructure to distinctly modern vulnerabilities. Most local water systems are operated by local authorities, don’t have a dedicated IT team, and lack the money or resources to thoroughly protect themselves without some extra help. Hackers know this, which is why they’ve increasingly targeted local agencies in such attacks.
“With great connectivity comes great responsibility,” said Joshua Corman, founder of I Am The Cavalry, a nonprofit focused on helping critical infrastructure withstand hackers. And yet, even when it comes to critical services like water, “our dependence on connected technology is growing faster than our ability to secure it.”
About 97 percent of water systems are small, run by local agencies that often barely lock the proverbial front door. America’s water system is like an expensive heirloom bicycle that’s been left on a busy street, protected by only the flimsiest of padlocks. And that very vulnerability has made tiny towns like Braham prime targets for faraway adversaries. Accessing the computers that operate most water systems — known as programmable logic controllers or PLCs — is often as simple as entering a username and password on a public-facing webpage. Sometimes, there is no real password at all, because PLCs were initially intended to be accessed only within locked, secure facilities, not on the open internet. If the US wants to avoid a far more severe version of what happened last week, then it will need to start taking the security of tiny water systems like Braham’s seriously.
“Any sociopath from anywhere in the world can see these things on the internet,” said Corman. And in the case of last week’s attacks, “these were devices with no password, no firewall or VPN shielding them — they just had to log in” as whoever the intended operator was, and just like that, they were inside a local water plant.
When municipalities began hooking up their old water and wastewater systems to the internet — a trend that accelerated during the pandemic as water operators, like everyone else, adapted to remote work — cybersecurity was rarely front of mind, neither for individual utilities nor for regulators as a whole.
“We have more cybersecurity regulations for your credit card than we have for the nation’s water supply,” said Corman. Only recently have some municipalities begun to take steps to decrease the exposure of their water plants to hacks. In March, New York state, for example, launched a set of grants and basic cybersecurity regulations mandating security training for all water operators.
Basic cybersecurity hygiene isn’t always enough. More than half of all credit card holders have been hacked, even with the help of mandatory firewalls and data encryption. You can imagine how vulnerable our water must be without the assistance of such guardrails. In a worst-case scenario, a malicious actor could quite literally open the floodgates, as Russian hackers did to a Norwegian dam last year. They could poison the tap water, as a still unidentified hacker almost did in Florida in 2021, dialing up the levels of sodium hydroxide used at a water treatment plant by over 100 times its normal levels. In a severe scenario, they could indefinitely cut off access to all water entirely.
The good news is, none of this happened last week. Nobody died, nobody lost water for more than a few hours, no fire hydrants ran dry, and no hospitals were forced to cut off their dialysis machines (which can use more than a hundred gallons of water per treatment session). There’s no need to panic, and your drinking water is almost certainly still safe to drink, assuming it was safe before. Even the city of Braham, within a few hours, was able to bring its water tower back online, pumping groundwater back to its 1,800 residents.
If you’ve watched the Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali-starring thriller Leave the World Behind, in which a cyberattack apocalyptically spoils a family vacation, then you might have some idea of where this story could go.
Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure can be extraordinarily dangerous, but thankfully, none have directly cost lives or severely disrupted services in this country so far. If the US wants to keep it that way, that will mean doing more to help small cities like Braham adapt and better monitor for potential threats. As it stands, of the roughly 151,000 water facilities in the US, only about 420 participate in voluntary information sharing on their own cybersecurity practices, says Corman, who has been leading his own project that recruits volunteers to give free cybersecurity support to water utilities in the nation’s roughly 6,000 hospital towns, where a disruption could be particularly deadly.
Cybersecurity experts like Corman believe that hackers from other nations like China have already quietly established cyber intrusions in countless local US utilities, water systems, and power grids, lying in wait to attack or act as leverage if a conflict arises.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration has hardly treated last week’s attacks as symptoms of a system in need of much broader strengthening, at least in its public statements. “I think Minnesota is behind it. You know who’s behind it? Minnesota,” the president baselessly claimed during a Cabinet meeting last Friday. “I think the governor is behind it. I don’t think there was an Iranian cyber attack.”
Just a few months ago, he proposed $707 million in cuts to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the agency responsible for protecting the nation’s infrastructure from cyberattacks. He did so, at least in part, out of anger over the agency’s role in confirming the validity of the 2020 election results. If Iran is, indeed, responsible, for the recent water system intrusions, all of this means that Trump has effectively made us more vulnerable to the consequences of a conflict he initiated.
At the end of the day,“nation-state hackers do not respect the jurisdictional lines separating federal, state, and local responsibility,” Jen Easterly, who led CISA under the Biden administration, wrote in the New York Times this week. “They search for the most vulnerable way to disrupt American life, and too often they find it in small communities that lack the resources to defend themselves.” Easterly’s role has remained vacant for the past 18 months.
Kurt Gaudette, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity firm Dragos, told me that water systems have got to get into the habit of monitoring their networks for suspicious activity. Most power utilities have begun doing so in recent years, with some bipartisan backing from Congress.
In some cases, however, the most cost-effective and safest way to avoid a repeat of last week’s mess might be to unplug the most vital controls — like the one that decides the chemical levels in a water treatment plant — from the web entirely.
As Corman puts it, “if you can’t protect it, disconnect it.”
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