Fresh snow in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, helped police officers find a suspect in a business break-in and theft over the weekend. Police responded to a business alarm in the 1300 block of Southwest Market Street early Sunday. When they arrived, they discovered the front door was shattered. Officers checked the building and learned a “large quantity” of nicotine vapes were stolen. Outside the business, the suspect left behind a major clue: a trail of footprints in the snow. Police used a thermal-imaging drone, plus the assistance of K-9 officer Roy, to track the footprints back to a nearby home. Officers made contact with the residents inside, and a juvenile reportedly admitted to the burglary and showed officers the stolen vapes. “Thanks to a quick response, teamwork, and some helpful snowy conditions, the suspect was taken into custody, and the stolen property was returned to the business,” police said on social media. Charges are pending, police said. The suspect’s age was not specified, but the case was submitted to juvenile court.
LEE’S SUMMIT, Mo. —
Fresh snow in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, helped police officers find a suspect in a business break-in and theft over the weekend.
Police responded to a business alarm in the 1300 block of Southwest Market Street early Sunday. When they arrived, they discovered the front door was shattered. Officers checked the building and learned a “large quantity” of nicotine vapes were stolen.
Outside the business, the suspect left behind a major clue: a trail of footprints in the snow.
Lee’s Summit Police Department
Police used a thermal-imaging drone, plus the assistance of K-9 officer Roy, to track the footprints back to a nearby home.
Officers made contact with the residents inside, and a juvenile reportedly admitted to the burglary and showed officers the stolen vapes.
“Thanks to a quick response, teamwork, and some helpful snowy conditions, the suspect was taken into custody, and the stolen property was returned to the business,” police said on social media.
Charges are pending, police said. The suspect’s age was not specified, but the case was submitted to juvenile court.
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As flu cases in the U.S. are rising dramatically, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, overseen by the Trump Administration’s Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted vaccine skeptic, announced that it is endorsing fewer routinely-recommended vaccinations for all children.
As part of the new schedule, HHS will no longer broadly recommend influenza, COVID-19, rotavirus, and other previously recommended immunizations. It now recommends 11 vaccines for all children, down from previously recommending vaccinations to protect against 18 different diseases in 2024.
That’s happening as flu cases in the U.S. have reached their highest levels since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new data from the CDC, with children and teenagers among the worst affected.
“After an exhaustive review of the evidence, we are aligning the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule with international consensus while strengthening transparency and informed consent,” Kennedy said in a press release. “This decision protects children, respects families, and rebuilds trust in public health.”
Restoring trust in the public health system is a key reason behind the move, according to the government. A poll published last February by the AAMC Center for Health Justice found that from 2021 to 2024, public trust in institutions—including medical institutions, social services, fire departments, and others—declined. The decline in trust was sharpest for pharmacies and hospitals. Trust was lowest among members of Gen Z, adults living in rural areas, adults earning lower annual incomes, and individuals with less than a college degree.
But physicians, immunologists, and other medical experts have criticized the move as sowing distrust of vaccines and creating confusion among patients and healthcare providers. Some have argued that it may also lead healthcare providers to recommend fewer vaccinations.
“At a time when parents, pediatricians and the public are looking for clear guidance and accurate information, this ill-considered decision will sow further chaos and confusion and erode confidence in immunizations,” Andrew D. Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in a statement. “This is no way to make our country healthier.”
What’s new?
The CDC organizes childhood immunization recommendations into three categories: recommendations for all children; recommendations for high-risk groups; and recommendations based on “shared clinical decision-making.” The latter category requires patients to consult a healthcare provider before receiving a vaccine.
Under the new schedule, the CDC continues to recommend vaccinations for all children for chickenpox, tetanus, diphtheria, whooping cough, polio, pneumococcal conjugate, Haemophilus influenzae type b (HiB), measles, mumps, and rubella. The schedule also recommends one dose of the human papillomavirus (HPV) shot, as compared to previously recommending two doses.
Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)—a common respiratory virus affecting the lungs and the leading cause of hospitalizations for infants in the U.S.—is no longer broadly endorsed for all children. Instead, it is now recommended for high-risk groups.
Immunizations for rotavirus, COVID-19, influenza, meningococcal disease, and hepatitis A and B are now based on shared clinical decision-making.
The CDC report reasons that broadly recommending fewer vaccines “allows for more flexibility and choice, with less coercion.” Senior HHS officials reportedly cited “a drop in vaccine uptake of routine vaccinations for children” as a reason for the change. That includes plummeting measles vaccination rates amid several measles outbreaks across the U.S. last year.
No vaccines were taken off the schedule entirely, and all of the vaccines will still be available and covered by the Affordable Care Act and other federal insurance programs.
“No family will lose access,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said. “This framework empowers parents and physicians to make individualized decisions based on risk, while maintaining strong protection against serious disease.”
The new schedule follows a Dec. 5 presidential memorandum directing the HHS and the CDC to align the list of recommended vaccines in the U.S. with those in “peer, developed countries.” At the same time, the CDC’s vaccine advisors voted to narrow the agency’s hepatitis B recommendation for newborns.
“President Trump directed us to examine how other developed nations protect their children and to take action if they are doing better,” Kennedy said.
Medical experts have criticized the method, arguing that the review took only a month and is based on consensus among peer countries rather than scientific data. The new schedule is more similar to that of Denmark, a country of just 6 million people compared with 343 million in the U.S. For example, the CDC report cites Denmark as being “the first peer nation to remove its universal recommendation of the COVID-19 vaccine for children” in 2022.
“The United States is not Denmark, and there is no reason to impose the Danish immunization schedule on America’s families. America is a unique country, and Denmark’s population, public health infrastructure, and disease-risk differ greatly from our own,” Racine said.
“For decades, leading health experts, immunologists, and pediatricians have carefully reviewed new data and evidence as part of the immunization recommendation process, helping to keep newborns, infants, and children protected from diseases they could be exposed to in the United States as they develop and grow,” Racine added. “Today’s decision, which was based on a brief review of other countries’ practices, upends this deliberate scientific process.”
The report was led by Tracy Beth Høeg, acting director for the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, and Martin Kulldorff, a chief science and data officer at the HHS. The changes were made in consultation with experts at the CDC, Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, and CMS. It did not, however, invite formal public comment or consultation with vaccine manufacturers, officials reportedly said.
Public health nonprofit Trust for America’s Health, the Big Cities Health Coalition, and the National Association of County and City Health Officials criticized the move in a joint statement.
“For decades, each change to the schedule was discussed openly by experts, with both benefits and risks considered. However, today’s announcement places increased burden on parents and health providers to navigate an increasingly complex system and assure access to these life-saving products,” the statement said.
Rising flu cases
The new recommendations come amid the first “moderately severe” influenza outbreak of the season in the U.S., according to CDC data released on Monday. The CDC assesses the severity of an outbreak within a season using data beginning from Oct. 1, when influenza activity typically begins to rise. The CDC tracks a flu season from early fall to the following late summer.
At least 11 million people have contracted the flu, 120,000 people have been hospitalized for it, and 5,000 people have died from it this season, according to the CDC. Those numbers may still increase, as the flu season typically continues till May. Last week, New York health officials reported the highest number of flu hospitalizations recorded in a single week, with more than 4,500 hospitalizations in the seven-day period ending Jan. 2.
Children and teenagers have been hit particularly hard, with influenza being the reason for more than 20% of emergency department visits for children aged 5 to 17 and more than 18% of visits for children under the age of 4 in the last week of 2025. Nine children have died so far this season due to the flu. Last flu season, 289 children—most of whom were not fully vaccinated—died due to the flu in the highest levels of pediatric deaths recorded since mandatory tracking began in 2004.
The flu refers to an infection caused by any of four types of influenza viruses A, B, C, and D. Influenza A and B are the most common causes of seasonal outbreaks in humans. Medical experts across the board recommend annual vaccinations to ward off the flu.
Flu symptoms include fever, chills, cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, body aches, headache, tiredness, vomiting, and diarrhea.
Last fall, experts told TIME that lagging vaccination rates were likely responsible for a surge of influenza cases across Asia. Factors like the weather can also impact behavior such as crowding indoors, which can increase the spread of influenza, experts said.
“The key is to stay up to date with vaccinations,” Dr. Paul Tambyah, a former president of the Asia Pacific Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infection, said in October.
“There is still time to get a flu shot and remember, flu can be treated with antiviral medication if started within 48 hours of symptom onset and your doctor deems appropriate,” New York State Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald said in a statement.
Around 43% of the U.S. population are vaccinated against the flu, the CDC reported on Monday.
The most frequently reported cases of the flu in the U.S. this season have been due to a mutation of the H3N2 strain. Tambyah previously told TIME that because the influenza virus is able to evolve rapidly, having been previously inoculated or infected may not ensure immunity to new variants.
Nevertheless, experts broadly agree that keeping up with vaccinations is the best way to minimize the impact of the flu, including reducing the spread of influenza and protecting against severe infection or death.
“Immunizations are the most effective defense we have against a host of deadly and painful illnesses. Ensuring all children receive the vaccines they need on time stops diseases from spreading in the community and ensures healthy childhood development,” the joint statement from public health nonprofits and coalitions said. “Creating new barriers to immunizations, as today’s announcement does, will make it harder for children to have the opportunity to grow up healthy and strong.”
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Our easy overnight oats recipe only needs 2 ingredients, oats and chocolate milk! A healthy and simple breakfast for busy mornings when you’re in a hurry. Eat it warmed up or straight out of the fridge!
Breakfast Rut
I’m kind of in a meal funk lately. Dinners aren’t the problem though. It’s breakfast and lunch. Which is actually unfair because I’ve always loved breakfast! As a kid I loved something as simple as Cheerios (with more sugar than I care to admit) or as complex as omelets, french toast or muffins.
Lately nothing sounds good and nothing satisfies me.
Anyone else in a rut?
On a whim I threw together these Hot Cocoa Overnight Oats made with a limited edition TruMoo Chocolate Marshmallow chocolate milk and we ended up making them multiple times in a week!
What are Overnight Oats?
Overnight oats are a no-cook breakfast made by soaking raw rolled oats in a liquid, like milk or yogurt, in the refrigerator overnight. The soaking process softens the oats, creating a creamy, chilled dish similar to a pudding or porridge that can be eaten cold in the morning without any cooking. You can also give them a quick zap in the microwave if cold oatmeal isn’t your vibe. They are healthy make-ahead breakfast that are totally customizable to whatever your family loves.
Ingredients You’ll Need
You only need 2 ingredients for this easy overnight oats recipes!
Chocolate Milk: Adds rich cocoa flavor and sweetness while making the oats extra creamy.
Old Fashioned Oats: Soak up the milk perfectly for a soft, creamy texture that’s never mushy.
How to Make Chocolate Overnight Oats
Combine: Add the milk and oats to a mixing bowl and stir to combine.
Divide into Servings: Spoon into the containers you plan to use.
Refrigerate: Store in the fridge overnight. They will be ready to eat in the morning.
Garnish (Optional): Top with whipped topping, marshmallows and mini chocolate chips the next morning. Serve warm or cold. Feel free to stir in other add-ins! See section below.
Reader Fave Add-ins & Flavor Combos
If you need some more ideas for mix-ins or other flavors, here are some reader favorites:
Nuts: sliced almonds, chopped pecans or walnuts, peanuts
Candy: cacao nibs, mini M&M’s, crushed peppermint candy
Drizzles: peanut butter, Nutella, maple syrup, honey
Spices: cinnamon, nutmeg
Other: chia seeds, scoop of protein powder
Tips for Making the Best Overnight Oats
Make it inside of a jar or a mason jar This way you can add the tight fitting lid and store all week in the fridge. Plus, it’s easier to take on the go!
Use plain old fashioned rolled oats, NEVER quick oats. Quick oats become very soggy and unappetizing. Also do not use steel cut oats which won’t soften enough, unfortunately.
Warm it up on cold mornings. Although overnight oatmeal is typically served cold, you can definitely eat them warmed. Just place them in the microwave for one minute (make sure it’s microwave safe!)
Meal Prep. Because overnight oats typically last in the fridge for up to 5 days, try making a batch at the beginning of the week so you have breakfast in the fridge for the whole week. Add fruit only on the day you actually eat it.
Milk-to-oats ratio is key! Sometimes the oats don’t absorb or absorb too much. If they look dry on top, add a splash more milk!
Chill for at least 4 hours. The longer the soak time the more the flavors have time to meld together better.
Carrian’s Trouble Shooting Tips
Why are my oats still hard after soaking?
If your oats haven’t softened after soaking, try adding a little more milk or extending the soak time. Make sure you used rolled, not steel cut oats.
Can I make this in one large batch instead of individual containers?
Yes! You can for sure make overnight oats in a large container!
How do I make my overnight oats creamier?
For a creamier texture, you can add a little Greek yogurt or try using a milk with higher fat content.
Can I heat up my overnight oats?
Absolutely you can warm them! In a microwave-safe bowl, heat the oats for about 60-90 seconds.
There’s nothing better than waking up on a chilly morning to a breakfast that’s already waiting for you. If you’ve ever wondered how to make overnight oats, this version couldn’t be easier—or cozier! With just two ingredients, you can turn your favorite hot cocoa flavor into a creamy, chocolatey bowl of oats that tastes like a winter treat but fuels your morning.
More Easy Breakfast Recipes:
Watch How to Make These 2 Ingredient Overnight Oats
Prevent your screen from going dark
Stir the milk and oats together and a mixing bowl and spoon into containers overnight.
1 Cup TruMoo Chocolate Marshmallow Milk, 1 Cup Old Fashion Rolled Oats
Top with whipped topping, marshmallows and mini chocolate chips. Serve warmed or cold.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary and man on a mission to “Make America Healthy Again,” has made no secret of his plan to change what he claims to be the country’s poison-riddled food culture. And he may soon bring back a relic from the past to help make that happen.
Bloomberg reported that the Trump Administration is considering reinstating the food pyramid when HHS and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) jointly update the U.S. Dietary Guidelines next month.
“We’re about to release dietary guidelines that are going to change the food culture in this country,” Kennedy told reporters earlier this month. HHS and USDA update the guidelines every five years.
An HHS spokesperson told Bloomberg Thursday that “Kennedy is committed to new dietary recommendations that are rooted in rigorous science” and that “the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans will be a big part of the Trump Administration’s commitment to Make America Healthy Again.” A USDA spokesperson said the updated guidelines “will address the chronic disease epidemic plaguing our nation, by prioritizing whole, healthy, and nutritious foods.”
TIME has reached out to both departments about the potential return of the food pyramid. Unnamed sources told Bloomberg that the visual is expected to focus on protein and whole foods, which Kennedy has long endorsed as he aims to steer the public away from ultra-processed food products.
Here’s what to know about the rise of the food pyramid as a guideline for the American diet, how it fell out of favor, and why it just may make a comeback.
The rise of the food pyramid
Nutrition advice from the USDA first came as a warning. Wilbur O. Atwater, a chemist and renowned nutritionist, published in an 1894 Farmer’s Bulletin: “Unless care is exercised in selecting food, a diet may result which is one-sided or badly balanced that is, one in which either protein or fuel ingredients (carbohydrate and fat) are provided in excess. … The evils of overeating may not be felt at once, but sooner or later they are sure to appear.”
Over the years, U.S. authorities have tried to make recommendations on what Americans should eat—and to create visuals so that the public can easily understand the dietary recommendations.
In 1943, during World War II, the USDA issued dietary advice in the form of the “Basic Seven,” which took into consideration potential shortages in food rations, according to a chapter by Carole Davis and Etta Saltos in the 1999 book America’s Eating Habits: Changes and Consequences. Three of the seven categories were dedicated to fruits and vegetables, and one slot each was dedicated to the following: milk and milk products; meat, poultry, fish, and eggs; bread, flour, and cereals; and butter or fortified margarine. But it didn’t recommend a portion size of each food group.
A poster shows the Basic Seven food groups in 1943. USDA/National Archives
In 1956, the Basic Seven was simplified to the Basic Four, organized into the groups: milk, meat, vegetable-fruit, and bread-cereal. It also provided rough daily serving suggestions for each group: four servings each for vegetable-fruit and bread-cereal, two for meat, and “some” for milk and milk products.
A USDA daily food guide in 1966. Courtesy of USDA
In the 1970s, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines as Americans know it today began to take shape, as disease became increasingly linked to unhealthy diets. Dietary fat was increasingly under scrutiny, and in 1977, a Senate committee led by Sen. George McGovern (D, S.D.) released Dietary Goals for the United States that recommended consuming less sugar, sodium, and fat—and more complex carbohydrates and “naturally occurring” sugars.
Then, in 1980, the USDA and the HHS released the seven-point Dietary Guidelines for Americans, as the overconsumption of sugar, fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium steadily gained recognition as risk factors for developing chronic diseases. To illustrate what a healthier diet would look like at the time, the USDA, in cooperation with the American National Red Cross, presented consumers with “The Food Wheel: A Pattern for Daily Food Choices” in 1984.
The “Food Wheel: A Pattern for Daily Food Choices” was created by the USDA in collaboration with the American Red Cross. Courtesy of USDA
Four years later, the food guide was released in a pyramid format. The width of the pyramid level roughly indicated the proportion of food servings: at its base were bread, rice, cereal, and grains, which should have the largest servings; and at its apex were fats and sweets, which should be consumed sparingly.
The Food Guide Pyramid. National Archives and Records Administration
The fall of the food pyramid
But even the pyramid drew flak for still being broad and vague. For instance, it recommended that Americans eat 6 to 11 servings of grains, but details such as serving sizes and which specific food items within each category were healthier options (like brown rice compared to white rice) remained unclear. Critics also highlighted how it failed to account for individual differences in dietary requirements, such as across different age and health demographics.
To address those concerns, work began in 2003 to update the pyramid, and two years later, the a new version was released, called MyPyramid. It was outfitted with stairs, meant to remind Americans of the need for exercise, and its food divisions were flipped to the side, in bands of varying colors to represent different food groups: orange for grains, green for vegetables, red for fruits, yellow for oils, blue for milk, and purple for beans and meats.
A display shows the new MyPyramid (left) that replaces the old Food Guide Pyramid, in Washington, D.C., on April 19, 2005. Joe Raedle—Getty Images
In 2011, the U.S. abandoned the food pyramid in favor of what it called MyPlate, which used a plate to represent what the average person should eat per the latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Tom Vilsack, then the Agriculture Secretary, described MyPlate as a “simple, visual, research-based icon that is a clear, unmistakable message about portion size.”
MyPlate’s recommendations are easy to follow: half of a plate should contain fruits and vegetables, and roughly a quarter each for grains and protein. A smaller plate to the side was for dairy. The goal, as then-First Lady Michelle Obama presented it, was to make the American plate look like the one shown in the MyPlate graphic.
A MyPlate graphic, which replaced the MyPyramid. MyPlate.gov/USDA
The potential return of the food pyramid
Details on what a new dietary guideline visual will look like are still under discussion, Bloomberg reports.
Kennedy, who as HHS Secretary oversees nutrition standards, has vocally advocated against ultraprocessed foods, which he claims are “poisoning” Americans, blaming such products for causing chronic diseases and high national obesity rates.
But Kennedy has also peddled misinformation about food. He’s spoken out against seed oils like canola and soybean, even though experts have touted their health benefits, and has endorsed beef tallow as a replacement. He has also embraced raw milk, even though food safety experts have warned of the high risk of contracting food-borne illnesses from consuming it.
The forthcoming guidelines have caused anxiety among nutritionists, given Kennedy’s beliefs. At a July event in Colorado, Kennedy said the guidelines will “stress the need to eat saturated fats,” which are associated with health risks. That same month, Kennedy also promoted full-fat dairy products, criticizing what he described as an “attack on whole milk, cheese, and yogurt” as he announced his overhaul of the nation’s dietary guidelines.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eats an ice cream cone during a press conference on the steps of the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., on July 14, 2025. Michael M. Santiago—Getty Images
“The dietary guidelines that we inherited from the Biden Administration were 453 pages long,” Kennedy said in August, though the current guidelines are only 164 pages. “They were driven by the same commercial impulses that put Froot Loops at the top of the food pyramid.”
While the food pyramid may be brought back, albeit likely with different details, Kennedy has indicated that the new guidelines in total will be just a few pages long.
Kevin Klatt, a research scientist and instructor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology at University of California, Berkeley, says that such a reform reflects “a bit of a misunderstanding of the role of the Dietary Guidelines.”
“The title indicates they are ‘for Americans’ but the user is not actually intended to be the American public,” Klatt said in August. “Since 2005, the dietary guidelines have really been intended to be used by healthcare professionals and as a policy document. The current administration seems to want to roll that back, and doesn’t seem to acknowledge that it’s a policy document.”
Three panelists engaged in a spirited discussion about longevity and disease prevention at a TIME100 Talks event moderated by TIME senior health correspondent Alice Park in New York City on Wednesday.
Dr. Raj Panjabi, senior partner of the bioplatform innovation company Flagship Pioneering, leading its Preemptive Health and Medicine Initiative; Jillian Michaels, creator of The Fitness App and host of the podcast Keeping It Real: Conversations with Jillian Michaels; and Dr. Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and president of the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research, joined Park on stage to discuss topics ranging from vaccines to weight-loss drugs.
During the conversation, Park asked Panjabi, who previously served as White House Senior Director for global health security and biodefense during the Joe Biden Administration, about growing mistrust in vaccines in the U.S. Panjabi emphasized that it’s important to approach any claim made about vaccines “with curiosity” and “help folks understand the science.”
He said, for instance, that scientists learned that the COVID vaccine was more effective at preventing hospitalizations than it was at preventing infection. In the first two years after the COVID vaccine was distributed in the U.S., more than 18 million hospitalizations and more than 3 million deaths were prevented, according to a 2022 report from The Commonwealth Fund.
“The takeaway that I have, from the work of vaccinations, is that it is still a proven, effective intervention. It’s worth studying them, continuing to study them, but then it’s worth actually looking at the data,” Panjabi said.
Park went on to ask Michaels what questions she has about the safety of vaccines, in light of a post on X in September in which she said, “If we can recognize the undeniable success of vaccines historically, why is it treated as dangerous or taboo to raise legitimate questions about how we use them today?”
Michaels has sparked controversy in the past for expressing support for the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, led by prominent vaccine skeptic and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A New York Times story published over the summer described Michaels as “concerned vaccines haven’t been studied vigorously enough (though she does not consider herself broadly anti-vax).”
Michaels replied that her questions weren’t necessarily about safety but about some aspects of the vaccine schedule. She criticized the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that the first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine, which protects against a highly infectious disease that can damage the liver, is given at birth.
Critics, like Michaels, have questioned why a newborn should be vaccinated against a virus that can be transmitted through unprotected sex or shared needles. “Parents want to know these things,” she said. (Public health experts have emphasized that the sooner the vaccine is administered, the greater the chances of preventing early childhood exposures, including mother-to-child transmission of hepatitis B.)
Panjabi said that a key part of recommending any medical intervention—whether that be vaccines or drugs—is whether the benefits outweigh the risks. He urged people to have respect for one another when engaging in those discussions.
Park turned the conversation to GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, asking Barzilai if they are a good thing, to which he replied “definitely yes.” He said that “obesity accelerates aging,” so treating that can address that issue. And he cited new research that suggests that GLP-1 weight-loss drugs may have other positive health effects, such as reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
The topic sparked a question from an audience member. Andrea Deierlein, director of Public Health Nutrition and associate professor at the New York University School of Global Public Health, expressed concerns that the drugs could be used to replace other aspects of a healthy lifestyle. Barzilai replied that exercise, diet, sleep, and social connectivity are “good for everyone,” but as people age, it becomes harder to “optimize” those aspects of a healthy lifestyle.
“What we determined is that there are drugs that could, when you’re old, change the rate of your aging,” Barzilai said. But, he said, in a conclusion that spoke to the state of play across the topic: “How we’re going to do it and to whom is still a discussion.”
TIME100 Talks: Living Better, Longer—Reimagining Healthcare from Sickcare to Wellcare was presented by Shaklee.
President Donald Trump said he would personally intervene to try to help a prominent supporter with his cancer treatment.
Scott Adams, who created the workplace-set comic strip ‘Dilbert’ in 1989 and who revealed in May that he had prostate cancer that had spread to his bones and expected to only live months longer, said in a social media post on Sunday that he would be asking Trump for help to bring forward his treatment schedule from Kaiser Permanente, after the California-based healthcare provider “dropped the ball” in scheduling his intravenous infusion. The cartoonist said he had been approved to be treated with Pluvicto, a targeted radioligand therapy used to treat prostate cancer that was approved by the FDA in 2022. Adams appealed to Trump to reach out to Kaiser and get them to “respond and schedule it for Monday. That will give me a fighting chance to stick around on this planet a little bit longer.”
“On it!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Sunday, with a screenshot of Adams’ X post. Prior to Trump’s post, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded to Adams on X: “Scott. How do I reach you? The President wants to help.” Trump’s son Don Jr. also had responded to Adams’ post on X: “Going to make sure that my dad sees this. We’re all praying for you, keep fighting!”
It’s not clear how Trump will be able to intervene. TIME has reached out to Kaiser Permanente and the White House for comment. The medical provider, which said it has treated over 150 patients with Pluvicto in Northern California, told Reuters that Adams’ oncology team “is working closely with him on the next steps in his cancer care, which are already underway.”
Some on social media have criticized the Trump Administration for personally responding to Adams’ appeal while stripping research institutions of public funding that has fuelled scientific breakthroughs like Pluvicto. The drug was developed by researchers at the German Cancer Research Center and University Hospital Heidelberg in Germany, while research at Purdue University and Johns Hopkins funded through the U.S. National Cancer Institute and National Institutes of Health contributed to its development.
“It is not a cure,” Adams said of Pluvicto. “But it does give good results to many people.” Adams has not yet publicly responded to Trump’s post.
Here’s what to know about Adams and his connection to Trump.
Longtime cartoonist
Adams created Dilbert in 1989, while working at California-based telephone service provider Pacific Bell. The now-68-year-old became a full-time cartoonist in 1995, after the strip grew in popularity across the U.S.
Dilbert was adapted into an animated TV series of the same name in 1999, which was helmed by Adams and Seinfeld writer Larry Charles. The series won a Primetime Emmy Award in the year it premiered, and ran for two seasons on UPN before being canceled in 2000. In 2020, Adams claimed that the show had been canceled because he was white and the network wanted to cater to Black American viewers.
Adams has since gained controversy over other comments related to race and politics, many of which he made on his video podcast Real Coffee with Scott Adams and on social media. During a February 2023 livestream, Adams referenced a Rasmussen Reports poll that asked respondents if they agreed with the statement, “It’s okay to be white.” The phrase has been associated with the alt-right movement after it gained popularity in 2017 and has been co-opted as a slogan by white supremacists, according to the Anti-Defamation League. After pointing out that 26% of Black respondents disagreed with the statement and 21% were unsure, Adams called Black people a “hate group” and said “the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people; just get the fuck away.”
In the same episode, Adams also said he moved to a neighborhood with a “low Black population” and that “it makes no sense whatsoever, as a white citizen of America, to try to help Black citizens anymore.”
Several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the USA Today Network, as well as distributor Andrews McMeel Syndication dropped Dilbert in response to Adams’ comments. Book publisher Portfolio also dropped a forthcoming non-Dilbert book by Adams that was slated for release that September. Adams defended his remarks, calling them hyperbole, “meaning an exaggeration,” and said his words had been taken out of context. He relaunched the strip as Dilbert Reborn on Locals, a subscription website.
Adams has reportedly been a controversial figure among cartoonists, particularly after he called people not vaccinated against COVID the real “winners” of the pandemic and questioned the official death toll of the Holocaust.
Adams has published several books unrelated to Dilbert, particularly themed around religion. His 2001 novella God’s Debris describes a pandeistic philosophy, while his 2004 novel The Religion War tells the tale of a man on a mission to stop a calamitous war between Christians and Muslims. In 2017, Adams told Bloomberg that his religion-themed books, not Dilbert, would be his “ultimate legacy.”
Commentator on Trump
In 2015, Adams began writing about Trump in blog posts predicting his electoral victory in the 2016 presidential election. Adams endorsed Trump for President, just as he endorsed Republican nominee Mitt Romney for the 2012 election. He also criticized Trump’s opponent and 2016 Democratic nominee whom he’d initially endorsed, Hillary Clinton, suggesting that a Clinton presidency would diminish the status of men.
He has described his views as being “left of” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I, Vt.), who ran in the 2016 Democratic primary. At the same time, Adams said in 2016, “I don’t vote and I am not a member of a political party,” a view he reaffirmed in his 2017 Bloomberg interview.
Adams’ blog posts later evolved into daily videos shared on Periscope, which became an official video podcast in 2018. In 2020, Trump shared on X (then known as Twitter) an episode of the podcast in which Adams mocked then-presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Diagnosed with prostate cancer
In May, after former President Biden revealed his own prostate cancer diagnosis, Adams shared on his podcast that he also has prostate cancer. He told viewers that the cancer had spread to his bones, including his spine, and that taking ivermectin and fenbendazole had not helped. In June, he said he was in so much pain that he had prepared for physician-assisted suicide but was then able to manage his pain through testosterone blockers.
According to Adams, he has already been approved for Pluvicto. The drug was first approved for medical use in the U.S. in March 2022 and in the European Union in December 2022 for patients whose prostate cancer has progressed after previous treatments. In March, its indication was expanded by the FDA to be used by certain adults with metastasized prostate cancer earlier in their treatment journey.
Pluvicto, alongside standard care, has been shown to reduce the risk of progression or death in patients by 28%, according to Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis.
Donald Trump is ramping up pressure on drug companies to be more transparent about the risks associated with their prescription products.
In a memorandum signed on Tuesday, the President ordered federal health agencies to enforce existing rules about misleading prescription drug advertisements.
The order falls short of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pledge on the campaign trail last year to altogether “ban pharmaceutical advertising on TV” to solve the U.S.’s “chronic disease epidemic,” as part of his “Make America Healthy Again” movement. But Kennedy called the order a “historic change” in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday. “In some cases, that might create an advertisement that’s four minutes long,” he said, as companies are required to list out their products’ side effects.
TV ads won’t be the only ones affected by the order. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, in a video posted on X, said in the wake of the memorandum that the agency will send approximately 100 “enforcement action letters” and thousands of other warning letters to members of the industry, including online pharmacies, which have “increasingly been promoting drugs with no mention of side effects at all.”
“We are taking drug marketing claims seriously and making our regulatory standards transparent,” Makary said. “Ultimately, we believe that decisions about what drugs to take belong between a patient and their doctor.”
While the U.S. remains the only other country besides New Zealand to allow direct advertising of pharmaceuticals to consumers, the new crackdown risks further upsetting a multi-billion-dollar industry that Trump has repeatedly targeted as Americans have increasingly grown sick of high drug costs.
Here’s what to know.
Why the U.S. is an outlier
Across the globe, direct-to-consumer drug advertising faces restrictions: in the European Union, it is prohibited; in Australia, there’s a strict ban on prescription drug advertising; and in Canada, such ads are subject to stringent regulatory requirements. In 2007, during the 30th Annual Meeting of Countries participating in the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring, attendees made a “unanimous recommendation” to prohibit such advertising.
Direct-to-consumer drug advertising has been found to pose some public health risks, including patients overdiagnosing themselves and seeking unnecessary treatments that could end up becoming more costly for them.
But a full ban on direct-to-consumer drug advertising in the U.S. could run up against constitutionally-protected free speech.
Short of a full ban, in 1985, the FDA established strict guidelines for advertising prescription drugs. If the manufacturer wanted to mention a condition that the drug is intended to treat, the guidelines required more information to be made available to consumers, including all possible side effects. But that required more ad bandwidth and more money, so many companies saw the guidelines as a de facto barrier. Most ads only mentioned the names of the drug or a reminder to seek medical advice, resulting in confusion among patients.
But in 1997, the FDA relaxed its strict rules. The rationale was to “help promote greater consumer awareness about prescription drugs,” according to then-lead deputy FDA commissioner Michael J. Friedman. The change allowed ads that had “adequate provision” of information, which could mean mentioning side effects in part and redirecting consumers to doctors for other information on the drug. This led to a spending boom for direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising.
Direct-to-consumer drug advertising continued to be big business: according to advertising data firm MediaRadar, drug companies spent $10.8 billion in 2024 on direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising.
But advertising standards have declined as some advertisements have gone online. A 2015 study revealed that while 100% of the analyzed pharmaceutical social media posts included drugs’ purported benefits, only 33% discussed potential harms.
Johns Hopkins University epidemiology professor Caleb Alexander said in 2023 that “while regulations governing drug advertising were designed to target drug manufacturers, we now live in an era where other parties—health care insurers, start-up clinics, telemedicine start-ups—are getting into the business of marketing prescription drugs. And quite a business it is. The problem is that these entities are not being held to any standard regarding what they can say about the drugs in question—products like ketamine, testosterone, and stimulants for the treatment of ADHD, to name a few—and they are not only misconstruing the evidence, in many cases, they are making outlandish, pants-on-fire claims about these products.”
The FDA acknowledged in a statement on Tuesday that it failed to monitor and uphold these standards over the years. “The FDA used to send more than a hundred warning letters each year, and misleading ads were rare,” it said. “But over time, enforcement waned and the number of warning letters sent to pharmaceutical companies dropped to one in 2023 and zero in 2024.”
What will happen with Trump’s new order
While the order will only enforce existing laws, the FDA said it will also study potential policies to amend the “adequate provision” standard, which was part of the 1997 change. That provision, the agency said, provided a “loophole” for companies to redirect consumers elsewhere for additional information on the drug while keeping the ad brief.
During a Tuesday call with reporters, senior administration officials said the memorandum will also target ads on social media sites, such as Instagram and TikTok.
One official said, according to ABC News, that “there has been broad frustration with the increasing prevalence of these ads creating a misleading impression, specifically not disclosing side effects appropriately—ads that have encroached now into social media without proper disclosures, and ads of online pharmacies that are not following the same rules that many pharmaceutical companies follow.”
How else Trump has cracked down on Big Pharma
It’s not the first time Trump has targeted drug advertisements. During his first term, his Administration tried to require drugmakers to include their products’ sticker prices in TV ads, but a federal judge blocked it on the grounds that HHS was overstepping its authority.
The latest crackdown on drug advertisements appears to be part of Trump’s broader pressure on the sector.
In July, Trump wrote to 17 pharmaceutical companies and demanded that they lower prescription drug costs to match the lowest price offered in other developed nations or the “most-favored-nation” (MFN) price. He gave the companies until Sept. 29 to comply, warning that if they “refuse to step up,” the federal government “will deploy every tool in our arsenal to protect American families from continued abusive drug pricing practices.”
The President has also previously threatened that tariffs on imported pharmaceutical products could reach up to 250%, in an attempt to incentivize drug companies to bring back manufacturing operations to the U.S.—though those in the sector have warned that this could drive up the costs of medicines for Americans.
“In the past, we used to say that very rarely people lived to 70, but these days at 70 years old you’re still a child,” a Russian translator of Xi could be heard telling Putin.
“In a few years, with the development of biotechnology, human organs can be constantly transplanted so that people can live younger and younger, and even become immortal,” Putin responded, according to a Chinese translator.
Xi then predicted: “In this century, humans may live to 150 years old.”
Putin later confirmed the conversation at a news conference with Russian reporters, saying that “modern means of health support, medicine, and even some surgeries involving organ transplants allow humanity to hope that the active lifespan will not be like today. It differs from country to country, but there’s hope that our lifespan can increase considerably.”
Here’s what to know about Russia’s and China’s investments in anti-aging.
Russia’s obsession
Putin has a “particularly acute” fear of death, Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Institute, wrote for TIME in 2022.
While there have been unsubstantiated rumors over the years that he has cancer or Parkinson’s disease, the Russian President who is serving his record-breaking fifth term is said to be paranoid about his personal health, reportedly even bathing in Siberian red deer’s blood and subjecting visitors to two-week quarantines to avoid bringing him disease.
His government has also invested heavily in anti-aging research, including via Putin’s eldest daughter, endocrinologist Maria Vorontsova, who has received multi-million grants for her studies into cellular aging and longevity. When the U.S. issued sanctions against Putin’s children in 2022, the Treasury described Vorontsova as someone who “leads state-funded programs that have received billions of dollars from the Kremlin toward genetics research and are personally overseen by Putin.”
Last year, Putin called for a “national project” to “preserve the health” of the country. The result was the New Technologies for Health Preservation program, which has the goal to “increase the efficiency and effectiveness of medical research and development” in several areas, including “regenerative biomedicine, preventive medicine technologies, ensuring active and healthy longevity.” State-run TASS said about 210 billion Russian rubles ($2.6 billion) will be poured into the project through 2030.
Independent Russian news outlet Meduza reported that Mikhail Kovalchuk, who is a close friend of Putin and is “obsessed with immortality and the ‘Russian genome,’” lobbied for the project. Kovalchuk oversees Russia’s genetic research program where Vorontsova works.
Russia’s Health Ministry reportedly asked researchers in a June 2024 letter to provide “proposals for developments” in several longevity-related research areas, including cellular aging, bioprinting and organ printing, and even “correcting” the immune system based on “critical markers identified in the aging process.” One unnamed doctor described to Meduza the apparent urgency of the project: “They asked us to fast-track all of our proposals—it felt like the letter had just arrived today and the deadline was yesterday. To be honest, it was the first time I’d seen anything like it.”
Bioprinting, which Putin seemed to reference to Xi, faces ethical and legal concerns, but Russia has ramped up its investment in it. Rosatom, the state corporation that specializes in nuclear energy but also oversees organ-printing, previously said it hopes to master organ-printing by 2030, including producing blood vessels or even livers. Russian newspaper Kommersantreported in 2023 that the government had spent 57.3 million rubles (almost $700,000) on bioprinters and bioinks, a 47-fold increase from five years prior.
The Russian private sector is also making strides in anti-aging technology and chasing immortality: a 3D printing startup in Skolkovo implanted a 3D-printed thyroid gland into a mouse in 2015 and became the first to create live tissue in space in 2018—as part of a drive towards printing organs for humans. And Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov founded the 2045 Initiative, a life-extension project that envisions uploading human consciousness into computer avatars.
China’s research
While less obsessed with immortality than Putin’s government, Xi’s China has also invested in aging research, as the country has the world’s largest elderly population.
In 2016, the Chinese government launched the Major Program on Organ Aging and Degeneration, an initiative focused on studying cellular and molecular mechanisms of aging. And the state-funded Chinese Academy of Sciences published studies last year and this year on reversing aging in primates.
Is the U.S. falling behind?
Historically, there’s been concern in the U.S. that China would take the lead in biotechnological advancements. “Currently, the U.S. government has no cohesive, intentional biotechnology strategy,” said the U.S. National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology in April, “while China is gaining ground thanks to its aggressive and carefully coordinated state-led initiatives.”
But the Wall Street Journalreported in January that longevity researchers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts were hopeful that President Donald Trump’s second-term Administration would put more focus and funding into the once-fringe field.
“The science around aging,” James Peyer, chief executive of longevity biotech Cambrian Bio and board director of a longevity biotechnology nonprofit, told the Journal, “has hit a tipping point where it’s too big and too exciting for any government to ignore.”
The end may not be near, but the end is clear—according to those who have kept a close eye on Myanmar’s ongoing civil war, since a military coup toppled its civilian government in 2021. While the fighting between the junta and armed resistance groups was locked in a stalemate for the first two years of the conflict, observers note that the third year has seen the military on the back foot.
The protracted conflict has been estimated to have killed over 50,000 people and displaced around three million. But while much of the violence since the 2021 coup has been marked by a sense of intractability, and global attention has been overshadowed by wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, a series of resistance victories in the past year have rattled the Myanmar junta’s once ironclad grip on power, marking what seems to be a turning point.
One of the numerous camps scattered all over the region where between 150,000 and 250,000 internally displaced people have taken shelter after Myanmar military airstrikes and artillery forced them to leave their towns and villages, in Karenni State on Feb. 15, 2024. Thierry Falise—LightRocket/Getty Images
“The end of the war is clear-cut. The only thing that is not clear is the means by which it’s achieved and the timing,” Chris Sidoti, an international human rights consultant and a founding member of the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar (SAC-M), tells TIME. “One way or another, at some point the military will collapse.”
TIME spoke to eight experts, all of whom painted a similar picture of where the conflict stands—and where it may go from here. Here’s what to know:
Feb. 2021
The Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military, stages a coup to overthrow the civilian government—on the same day the parliament is set to swear in the winners of the 2020 election, in which Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won by a landslide. As the military accuses the party of election fraud and promises to hold new elections, power is transferred to military commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing, and the country is declared to be in a year-long state of emergency.
This is met with international condemnation and pro-democracy protests across the country, and the junta in turn responds with a brutal crackdown. (As people took to the streets, more than 500 are killed within two months of the coup.) Thousands of civil servants go on strike as part of a nationwide civil disobedience movement. The junta doubles down on its campaign of intimidation by killing civilians, burning villages in resistance strongholds across the country, and forcibly disappearing hundreds of its critics.
Smoke rises after protesters burn tires as they gather to continue their protest against the military’s coup and detention of elected government members, in Thakeyta Township, Yangon, Myanmar, on March 27, 2021.Stringer—Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
April 2021
A coalition of ousted lawmakers, protest leaders, and ethnic minorities form the National Unity Government, which aims to end military rule, restore democracy, and establish a federal system.
May 2021
The NUG announces its armed wing, the People’s Defence Force (PDF), and calls for a “people’s defensive war” against the junta across the country—a call that’s backed by ethnic armies, which have for decades fought against the military for self-determination in their home states.
August 2021
Min Aung Hlaing names himself the Prime Minister, announces a potential extension to the state of emergency, and repeats his pledge to hold elections.
General Min Aung Hlaing attends a military parade to mark the 78th Armed Forces Day in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar, on March 27, 2023. Myo Kyaw Soe—Xinhua/Getty Images
2022
Resistance forces become more united, with many PDF units and ethnic armies forming partnerships to launch joint attacks against junta troops.
The Three Brotherhood Alliance, a coalition of ethnic armies, launches Operation 1027 in northern Shan state, seizing control of key areas from the military, marking a key victory for the resistance and a turning point in the war.
January 2024
China brokers a ceasefire between the junta and the Three Brotherhood Alliance during negotiations held in the Chinese city of Kunming. While China has refrained from openly criticizing Min Aung Hlaing’s regime, it has also balanced unofficial relationships with ethnic armed groups in a bid to safeguard trade and security along its border with Myanmar.
February 2024
In what’s widelyseen as a sign of desperation, the junta announces mandatoryconscription for all men between 18 and 35 years old and all women between 18 and 27. This sparks panic among young people, many of whom swarm passport offices and embassies in effort to leave the country, while others opt to join the resistance and take up arms against the junta.
People gather outside the embassy of Thailand to get visas, in Yangon on Feb. 16, 2024, after Myanmar’s military government said it would impose mandatory military service.STR/AFP/Getty Images
April 2024
Myawaddy, a border township in the southeastern Kayin state and a strategically important trading hub with Thailand, finds itself at the center of offensives launched by resistance forces and the junta—amid a series of resistance victories.
June 2024
The Three Brotherhood Alliance launches the second phase of Operation 1027 in northern Shan State and Mandalay, after accusing the junta of violating the terms of the China-brokered ceasefire by bombing ethnic militia territory.
September 2024
The embattled military proposes a peace agreement with the resistance, urging them to “solve political problems politically,” but it is widelysnubbed by the NUG and ethnic armies who want the junta held accountable for their brutality and barred from politics.
The disintegration of the junta seems to be well underway, as it faces pressure on all fronts—from rumors of internal strife to territorial losses to fallout from the ongoing humanitarian crisis across the country.
The Tatmadaw may be the most powerful institution in Myanmar and has ruled the country for many of the years since its independence—by decree, political maneuvering, and constitutional provisions—but the military leadership, analysts say, has a history of botching things. After the military seized power in a coup in 1962, Myanmar became internationally isolated, its economy floundered, and insurgencies grew—which ultimately resulted in the resignation of military leader Ne Win in 1988.
“The military has always been totally incompetent,” says Sidoti from the SAC-M. “They destroyed the economy. They have left Myanmar politically infantile. They have exacerbated internal conflicts, and they have not won a single war against any of the ethnic armies with which they have been fighting for 65 or 70 years.”
Indeed, the junta has been steadily losing ground, especially in the north. In the northeastern town of Laukkai, near the Chinese border, nearly 2,500 junta soldiers surrendered in January to the Three Brotherhood Alliance after weeks of fighting; the junta lost its first regional command base when its headquarters in Lashio fell to the resistance in August; and counter offensives launched by the junta this year to wrest back control of lost territories have struggled to make inroads.
A member of the Karenni Resistance Force scouts the movement of the military junta in the frontline of Shadaw township on Feb. 3, 2024. Thu Myae—SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images
Compared to the resistance forces fighting for self-determination and control over their home region, the junta troops, who increasingly include civilians who were forcibly conscripted to support the war effort, are from the outset less motivated to fight. “I think the resistance has a good chance of winning if they keep up the pressure, because the morale is very different for the resistance. The fighting spirit is strong,” says Mike, a member of the anonymous Myanmar Film Collective, which documents and protests the aftermath of the 2021 coup through film. “[The] junta’s side, they don’t even know what they’re fighting for.”
A key battle lies in the junta strongholds of Mandalay, located west of Lashio, where ethnic groups from the Brotherhood Alliance forces are pushing in. “They’re on the cusp of losing Mandalay, and if they do, then that’s going to be a huge blow to the entire military morale,” says Yanghee Lee, another member of the SAC-M and a former U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar.
The junta has also lost control over critical infrastructure. While it still maintains predominant control over airspace, large swathes of the country’s townships that share land borders with China, Thailand, and India are now controlled by the resistance. A SAC-M report in May determined that the junta “does not control enough of the territory of Myanmar to uphold the core duties of the state,” having lost authority in townships spanning over 80% of the country’s territory, which houses nearly 70% of its population. The NUG runs a network of education and healthcare services in resistance-controlled areas, staffed with personnel who refuse to work under the military government. And despite the junta’s tight grip over the internet, people have found ways to bypass censors.
Perhaps most crucially, the economic pressure of the protracted conflict is building: Half the population is in poverty, inflation is soaring, and one in four people are plagued by food insecurity. And since the coup, Myanmar has become the subject of international sanctions designed to punish members of the junta and curb the flow of weapons into the country.
A member of the ethnic armed group Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) keeps watch as people buy groceries at a street market in Kyaukme in Myanmar’s northern Shan State on July 3, 2024.STR/AFP/Getty Images
Such mounting economic troubles may compel the junta to change course. “But one thing we have to remember is the sanctions, of course, affect everyone,” says Amara Thiha, a doctoral researcher of Myanmar politics at Peace Research Institute Oslo. “So economic pressure may [bring the junta to] the table for certain forms of changes, but at what cost? The cost of millions of people.”
The collapse of social and economic order in Myanmar is watched carefully by its neighbors, fearful that instability will spill over. (Immigration and drugs—trafficked to fund rebel weapon purchases—have already surged along the Thai border.) And China, which is mostly concerned about the economic fallout of the Myanmar conflict, has been exerting influence over Myanmar’s ethnic armies while appearing to be running out of patience with the junta, with which it maintains high-level diplomatic engagements.
Members of the TNLA walk next to trucks in Hsipaw on Oct. 15, 2024. Fighters from the Myanmar ethnic armed group have seized another town along a strategic highway to China, the group and a resident said, in the latest setback for the embattled junta.STR/AFP/Getty Images
So how will this end?
The resistance may be making important gains, but it doesn’t mean that defeating the junta will be a walk in the park. Despite a grim outlook for victory, the junta has refused to concede in conflict zones. (In Lashio, where resistance forces have made major advances, the military has resorted to regular, indiscriminate aerial bombardment to destroy the city.) Its desperate conscription drive also has the power to prolong its capacity to fight. And on the other side, ethnic armed groups are unlikely to extend their support outside of their territories and to fight the junta in their strongholds.
“Ethnic armed groups are still not going to be fighting outside their ethnic territories primarily,” says Thomas Kean, analyst on Myanmar at International Crisis Group. “Ultimately, it will be up to PDFs and resistance forces to take the fight to the military in lowland areas, and I think they just don’t have the resources to match the military. That’s going to be a really hard struggle, so I think the military will be able to hold on in those areas.”
Already, the military has been retreating to its strongholds in urban central Myanmar, including Yangon and Naypyidaw. This could result in a scenario where the military retains control over a rump state—a remnant of a once larger territory—while the rest of the country is divided into various ethnic army-controlled regions.
Soldiers from the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force (KNDF) prepare on a map a military operation against the Myanmar military in southern Shan State.
The KNDF, mostly constituted of local young civilians, was created in May 2021, a few months after the coup perpetrated by the Burmese military. Thierry Falise—LightRocket/Getty Images
Another scenario could see the junta completely removed from power, though there are different ways that could come about—whether by complete military defeat and surrender, or more likely, through internal power struggle and external negotiations to cede power.
“It may be that they fight to the bitter end,” says Sidoti. “It may be that there is an internal implosion long before the war is finished and the military recognizes and accepts the inevitable.”
In a sign of desperation, the junta offered an unprecedented olive branch in September, urging resistance groups to participate in elections next year and “solve political problems politically.” That ceasefire proposal was rejected by both the NUG and ethnic armed groups, who have made clear their desire for the military to have no role in politics. The elections promised by the junta, slated for 2025, have also been denounced both domestically and internationally as a sham that would grant the junta the guise of legitimacy but offer little actual democracy.
What experts agree on is that the junta’s leadership turmoil, along with steady defections on the ground, spell impending collapse one way or another. But that won’t be the end of the story just yet.
An unexploded projectile stuck on the roof of a house following fighting between Myanmar’s military and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in Nam Hpat Kar, Kutkai township in Myanmar’s northern Shan State, on Feb. 4, 2024.STR/AFP/Getty Images
Even when the junta falls, experts warn that democracy—and even stability—in Myanmar will be far from guaranteed.
“On the resistance side, we see all these different groups having a hard time governing territories that they control. They’re very good at fighting against the military, but governance requires a different skillset,” says a photojournalist who spent the first two years of the war embedded with ethnic armed groups in Karenni state and spoke to TIME on the condition of anonymity for their safety. “There hasn’t been any cohesive, collected effort from the anti-military or the resistance side.”
Unlike the NUG, ethnic armed groups appear to be more guided by ethnocentric nationalism than actually implementing a democratic system—such as holding free and fair elections, legitimizing a central administration, and being transparent over their finances, says Amara. “These are the very basic three principles of democracy: election, control and accountability,” he adds. “If you’re putting on these lenses, it is very difficult to say that EROs [ethnic resistance organizations] are functioning on democratic principles.”
“The struggle against the junta and today’s civil war will not be resolved with a big group hug,” reads an op-ed published in January in The Irrawaddy, echoing a sentiment shared by many political observers. “And if care is not taken, regime collapse could simply lead to more war, with the same belligerents but new alliances.”
There have long been differing interests among different ethnic armed groups, which have fought one another before and during the ongoing civil war. Such tensions are likely to resurface. In Shan state, ethnic armed groups which had allied against military forces last year have increasingly found themselves at odds with one another over territorial disputes.
“The thing that holds all this together is a common enemy, the Myanmar military. But beyond that, there’s lots of divisions and disagreements,” says Kean.
Soldiers from the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA)—the armed wing of the Karen National Union (KNU), an ethnic Karen movement created in 1947 that is generally considered as the “oldest guerrilla movement in the world”—and members of the KNDF sit in the back of a pick-up truck on their way to a military operation, in Loikaw on Feb. 10, 2023.Thierry Falise—LightRocket/Getty Images
To be sure, there have been sustained efforts to enact a vision of governance in post-junta Myanmar. Many in the resistance have committed to the idea of a federal state—though agreement on the specifics of that vision of federalism remains wanting.
One prominent proposal came in the form of the Federal Democratic Charter introduced just one month after the coup by the National Unity Consultative Council, the advisory body of the NUG. A separate proposal backed by 12 political parties was introduced in February. Neither has managed to garner broad enough support among the resistance.
“The National Unity government and many of the resistance organizations talk about a Federal Democratic Myanmar, and that is a strong and essential commitment, but there has been too little work done so far on fleshing that out, on giving it substance,” says Sidoti. “It needs to be an equal society in which there is a high level of autonomy at the regional level, but international leadership through a national government.”
In at least one state, a hybrid model of governance is already being experimented—to significant success. The Karenni State Interim Executive Council has established administrations in 16 townships across the state, all elected by residents and consisting of leaders representing civil society and ethnic communities. This model of decentralized authority is unprecedented in the state, which before the coup had local leaders appointed by the central government.
“We call it bottom-up federalism,” says Khu Plu Reh, general secretary of the Karenni State Interim Executive Council. “It is very important, the recognition of the self-determination of each ethnic group.”
Khu Plu Reh says he’s not sure if this model can be replicated across the country—only that it is a “very suitable model for the Karenni state right now.” Still, the political innovation has sparked intrigue from other ethnic leaders, who Khu Phu Reh says have contacted them to learn more about their vision of governance.
Soldiers from the KNDF walk along a row of apartments bombarded by the Myanmar military in Loikaw on Feb. 19, 2024. Loikaw was partly seized during an offensive in November 2023 dubbed 11.11.Thierry Falise—LightRocket/Getty Images
There are doubts as to whether the NUG is capable of leading the charge to bring lasting peace to Myanmar. It has limited influence on the ground, where it has partnered with different ethnic armed groups to fight the junta but has not managed to strike a political consensus among its partners.
Many in ethnic rebel groups are cautiously skeptical of NUG leaders, who have not proven to be the biggest champions of ethnic minorities in the country. For all Aung San Suu Kyi’s government was associated with the fight for democracy and human rights, it was also criticized for its conspicuous silence on the military’s brutal campaign against the Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group in Rakhine state that now makes up one of the world’s largest refugee groups, most residing in exile in camps in neighboring Bangladesh.
Some temporary partnerships with the NUG are already falling apart. In September, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), a powerful pro-China ethnic armed group that’s part of the Three Brotherhood Alliance, publicly rejected the idea of working militarily or politically with the NUG and said that it would not help anti-junta efforts in the Shan state capital of Taunggyi or Mandalay.
A general view of Mandalay, the second-largest city in Myanmar, on July 5, 2024.Sai Aung Main—AFP/Getty Images
Time is ticking for the NUG, whose work analysts say is set to get more difficult as the junta weakens. “The NUG will no longer have this kind of a central power after the military collapses,” says Lee from the SAC-M. “And they cannot wait until, for instance, winning the war, until the military collapses, then think of how to form a new future Myanmar.”
There’s a lot of uncertainty, observers all agree—but there’s also hope. The past three years of fighting the junta have fostered new bonds across different factions of the resistance, even as negotiations among various stakeholders for a post-war Myanmar remain challenging.
“We can see tensions in the future, but the commitment to a Federal Democratic Myanmar now is so widespread and so deeply grounded in the people’s aspirations that there is an opportunity like never before, and there are signs like never before of a commitment to national unity,” says Sidoti. “That’s what needs to be fostered. That can be built on, and I think it will be built on, but it’s going to require hard work.”
Climate change is increasingly disrupting people’s sleep.
High nighttime temperatures led to 5% more hours of sleep lost worldwide over the past five years compared to the period between 1986 and 2005, according to the latest edition of the Lancet’s study of climate and health. It marks the first time the prestigious medical journal has examined this metric. Sleep loss peaked in 2023, the hottest year on record, when there was a 6% rise.
The eighth annual Lancet Countdown on health and climate change report, authored by 122 global experts, found that high temperatures, drought and heavy rainfall are increasingly impacting people’s health. In 2023, a record 512 billion potential hours of labor were lost globally due to high temperatures. Heat-related deaths in people over the age of 65 reached the highest levels on record, 167% higher in the 1990s.
“This isn’t just about extreme weather events,” said Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist at the World Health Organization. “This is about every week, every month of the year, and the impact on all of our health.”
In many places, nighttime temperatures are rising faster than daytime temperatures. As well as impacting sleep, overheating at night reduces the body’s ability to cool down and recover from the heat of the day, exacerbating heat wave deaths, especially among people with pre-existing heart and respiratory problems.
The study used historic sleep-tracking and temperature data to estimate the effects on sleep from high nighttime temperatures across different years. The biggest increases in lost sleep were in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.
Even in more temperate climates, overheating at night can be exacerbated by poor building design that leaves indoor temperatures warmer than outdoor temperatures. Buildings can be better ventilated or shaded to reduce how much they heat up during the day and how much they retain that heat. Power demand from air conditioning use is expected to triple by 2050.
A lack of sleep negatively affects attention span and quality of life and can also have knock-on effects for other health conditions. Kevin Lomas, a professor of building simulation at Loughborough University who studies the relationship between heat and sleep, has found in the UK that bedroom temperatures higher than about 27C (80.6F) is the threshold at which people struggle to cool themselves down. “Once you start tinkering with how much sleep people get, then the consequences aren’t just relatively trivial things,” said Lomas, who wasn’t involved in the Lancet study. “They can be long term.”
SEOUL, South Korea — In a symbolic display of anger, North Korea on Tuesday blew up the northern section of unused roads that once linked it with the South, with the rivals exchanging threats days after Pyongyang’s claim that South Korea flew drones over its capital.
The roads’ choreographed demolition underlines North Korea’s growing anger against South Korea’s conservative government. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has vowed to sever relations with South Korea and abandon the goal of achieving peaceful Korean unification.
Observers say it’s unlikely Kim will launch a preemptive, large-scale attack on South Korea because of fear that an almost certain massive retaliation by the more superior forces of the United States and South Korea would threaten Pyongyang’s survival.
In response to the explosions, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said its military fired within southern sections of the border. The statement did not give details, but the move could have been an attempt to avert cross-border fire by North Korea. It wasn’t immediately known whether North Korea responded.
South Korea’s military said it is bolstering its readiness and surveillance posture in coordination with the United States.
Video provided by South Korea’s military showed a cloud of white and gray smoke emerging from the explosion at a road near the border town of Kaesong. North Korean trucks and excavators could be seen clearing out debris. Another video showed smoke emerging from a coastal road near the eastern border.
North Korea has a history of staging the choreographed destruction of facilities on its own soil as a political message.
In 2020, North Korea blew up an empty, South Korean-built liaison office building just north of the border in retaliation for South Korean civilian leafleting campaigns. In 2018, North Korea demolished tunnels at its nuclear testing site at the start of nuclear diplomacy with the United States. In 2008, North Korea blew up a cooling tower at its main nuclear complex when earlier disarmament-for-aid negotiations with Washington and others were happening.
Destroying the roads would be in line with leader Kim Jong Un’s order in January to abandon the goal of peaceful Korean unification and formally designate South Korea as the country’s “invariable principal enemy.” That order surprised many outside North Korea watchers because it seemed to break from his predecessors’ long-cherished dreams of unifying the Korean Peninsula on the North’s terms.
Experts say Kim likely aims to diminish South Korea’s voice in the regional nuclear standoff and seek direct dealings with the United States. Kim may also hope to diminish South Korean cultural influence and bolster his rule at home.
North Korea has accused South Korea of infiltrating drones to drop propaganda leaflets over Pyongyang three times this month and threatened to respond with force if it happened again. South Korea has refused to confirm whether it sent drones but warned that North Korea would face the end of its regime if the safety of South Korean citizens is threatened.
North Korea’s state media reported earlier Tuesday that Kim Jong Un called a meeting with his top military and security officials the previous day. During the meeting, Kim described the alleged South Korean drone flights as a “serious provocation” and laid out unspecified tasks related to “immediate military action” and the operation of his “war deterrent” for defending the country’s sovereignty, the North’s Korean Central News Agency said.
During a previous era of inter-Korean detente in the 2000s, the two Koreas reconnected two road routes and two rail tracks across their heavily fortified border. But their operations were suspended as the Koreas wrangled over North Korea’s nuclear program and other issues.
Last week, North Korea said it would permanently block its border with South Korea and build front-line defense structures. South Korean officials said North Korea had been adding anti-tank barriers and laying mines along the border since earlier this year. They said North Korea has also planted mines and removed lamps along its sections of the inter-Korean roads and taken out ties on the northern side of the railways.
In recent years North Korea has performed a run of provocative missile tests, and South Korea and the United States have expanded military drills and cooperation.
When an Iranian consulate building was destroyed in Syria in April, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed to punish Israel. What followed was a huge, yet telegraphed assault and no all-out war.
Three months later, the military chief of Iran-backed Hezbollah and Hamas’s political head were killed within hours of each other. The wider regional conflict seen by some as imminent didn’t end up erupting.
Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday in Beirut dealt an even bigger blow. But it’s still unlikely to trigger a direct war with the Islamic Republic, according to current and former U.S. and Middle East government officials and regional experts. Instead, Iran will focus on rebuilding the militant group in Lebanon and keeping its network of proxies in action for as long as possible, they said.
For all the saber rattling, what Iran calls its powerful “axis of resistance” in reality has seen its soft underbelly exposed again. Both Hezbollah, the most important asset in that axis, and Iran itself have been weakened and have few options, making it unlikely they will escalate the conflict, according to a person familiar with U.S.’s thinking.
More of a wildcard is whether Israel pursues further targets to hurt Hezbollah while the U.S. is focused on the presidential election campaign, one Arab official said. Already, the killing of Nasrallah followed an attack on the group’s nerve system by exploding pagers and walkie talkies they used for communication.
“Iran will be cornered into responding, with a bigger chorus of people demanding revenge,” said Dina Esfandiary, senior adviser on the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group. “But this administration doesn’t want to embroil themselves in a conflict they can’t win. So they will have to measure their response.”
There were early signs from officials that the Islamic Republic will exercise the kind of restraint it showed after Israel’s other recent provocations. That’s not least because Israel is superior militarily and the U.S. has moved more forces into the region to deter a major attack on its ally.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, a top aide to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and a former foreign minister, told state television on Sunday: “We will respond at a time that’s appropriate and our own choosing.”
Khamenei’s first statement a day earlier, meanwhile, emphasized the fact that Hezbollah has enough people who can replace Nasrallah and that the “axis of resistance will decide the fate of the region.”
The rhetoric from Tehran reflects the desire of the clerical and military establishment to keep war at arm’s length. In the immediate term, the task will be to recoup the strength of the militant groups it backs in the region and ensure it isn’t baited into a full-blown war.
In Lebanon, the priority is to preserve what’s left of Hezbollah, according to Vali Nasr, a former senior adviser to the U.S. State Department and professor of Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University. The group, like Hamas, is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. and many of its allies.
“The priority for Iran is deterrence — it does not want a larger war right now and it suspects that Israel wants one,” said Nasr. “It’s not about avenging Nasrallah, it’s about rebuilding their position.”
There’s no disguising Iran’s vulnerability of late. Amid the string of major attacks targeting Iranian allies and personnel, former President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash, leading to an election that ushered in reformist leader Pezeshkian in July. Yet the weakness goes back further.
The demise of the Hezbollah chief has echoes of the U.S.’s taking out of Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most prominent general and a national hero, in early 2020. That was during the presidency of Donald Trump, a hawk on Iran who one of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s key coalition partners has endorsed for a return to the White House.
“It’s a huge body blow after Soleimani was killed and in many ways his successor was Nasrallah,” said Nasr. “He was an iconic figure and a linchpin and he can’t be easily replaced and neither can Hezbollah be rebuilt this quickly.”
Allies Syria and Iraq will become key conduits for the transfer of Hezbollah’s resources, according to a source with direct knowledge of military movements in northeast Syria and Iranian militias operating in both countries.
Iran will now try to move thousands of fighters to border areas of Lebanon and Syria, the source said, adding that for the past two months several thousand fighters have gone from Iraq to Syria, suggesting that Tehran has been preparing to reinforce its deterrence.
Since its involvement in Syria in 2012 to defend Bashar al-Assad’s regime alongside other Iran-backed militias, Hezbollah has built bases and an elaborate network of tunnels in areas in Syria close to the Lebanese border. Many Hezbollah field commanders have also been fleeing to Syria from Lebanon with their families, according to a person familiar with the situation.
“Iran doesn’t fight for its proxies, its proxies fight for it,” said Jonathan Lord, a former Pentagon official and director of the Middle East Security program at the Center for a New American Security. “The regime is most interested in self-preservation and won’t knowingly put itself at risk.”
Israel’s massive strike on southern Beirut to take out Nasrallah also killed a commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. That raised the tally of assassinations of senior IRGC officers and personnel and top-ranking members of proxy groups to at least a dozen since last year’s Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.
While the loss of Nasrallah and depletion of Hezbollah’s top ranks is a major loss for both the organization and Iran, it likely won’t prompt a change or rethinking in Iran’s foreign and regional policy. Pezeshkian has gained Khamenei’s tacit support to pursue a policy of cautious engagement with the West in order to secure relief from economic sanctions.
That requires ensuring relations with the U.S. and Europe don’t deteriorate further even as Israel keeps pressuring Iran militarily.
As Miri Eisen, a retired Israeli intelligence colonel and former prime ministerial spokesperson, put it: the hit on Beirut and assassination of Nasrallah isn’t “check mate.”
“This does not eliminate Hezbollah,” she said. “Hezbollah’s arsenal is 10 times what Hamas ever had. Hezbollah still has the backing of and open road to the Islamic regime in Iran.”
Indeed, bombardment of Hezbollah’s leadership and members has again exposed the Islamic Republic’s limits when it comes to hitting back at Israel.
The missile attack by Tehran in April, thwarted by Israel with the help of its allies, has been the extent of Iran’s response to Israel so far, despite its generals often warning of a “crushing” or “severe” retaliation. It raised questions of whether Iran actually had the capability to follow through on the threats.
“It’s very clear that Iran is also somewhat stunned by all of this and needs time to regroup,” said Barbara Slavin, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, a foreign affairs think tank in the U.S. “Iranians are going to remain cautious, they understand that Israel is still in a mood to escalate and strike. They will go back to guerilla tactics and strategic patience.”
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Golnar Motevalli, Sam Dagher and Peter Martin / Bloomberg
When Japan’s ruling political party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), votes on Friday for its next leader, it will effectively be choosing the country’s next Prime Minister.
A record nine lawmakers are standing in the intra-party election, competing for majority support among the party’s 368 members of parliament and 368 representatives of its more than a million dues-paying rank-and-file members. Most candidates, according to AP, have vowed to call for a general election, which isn’t due until October 2025, shortly after being elevated within the party, to try to capitalize on their fresh image.
The key issue at stake for the LDP is restoring public trust. That change, many observers have noted, could come in the form of a first-ever female LDP president. Two of the nine candidates—including one of the three top contenders—are women. Japan is the only G7 country other than the U.S. that has never had a female head of government, and some within the party have said such a move could go a long way toward boosting its image.
But experts tell TIME that despite the momentum and opportunity, the party is unlikely to pick a female leader, citing its patriarchal history, internal politics, and lack of political competition.
Among the women floated for the Sept. 27 LDP presidential election is Economic Security Minister Sanae Takaichi, 63, a veteran LDP politician likened to the U.K.’s Margaret Thatcher. Takaichi ran in 2021, backed by the late premier Shinzo Abe, and came in third. LDP supporters prefer her as the next Japanese Prime Minister, according to a Kyodo News poll.
There’s also incumbent Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa, 71, who was praised as a “rising star” by party vice president and former Prime Minister Taro Aso, a reputed “kingmaker.”
A Pew Research Center poll earlier this year found that Japan has a high share of citizens who “say that men and women generally make equally good leaders.” But the LDP cares little about public opinion, at least in the context of female representation. “For the LDP, the inside politics, inner politics is the most important issue,“ Mikiko Eto, professor emerita on gender and politics at Hosei University in Tokyo, tells TIME, adding that for the LDP, women have been used primarily as tokens. In 2021, LDP seniors had called on women party members to join key meetings in the wake of sexist remarks from a former Prime Minister, but it was revealed that the women members were only permitted to observe and not speak.
Hiroko Takeda, who teaches political science at Nagoya University’s Graduate School of Law, says the LDP has become “a separate universe” in Japan. Parliamentary posts are treated by LDP members as house or family businesses which are “inherited,” says Takeda, making it hard for political novices—especially women—to get into key positions.
While opposition parties have elevated women to leadership positions, Emma Dalton, senior lecturer in Japanese Studies at La Trobe University in Australia, says they are too weak to ramp up pressure on the LDP to demand greater inclusivity. “[The LDP] are in a little bit of trouble, and I think they recognize that. But at the same time, the Japanese public, I think, just look around and say, ‘Well, where is the realistic opposition?’”
Among the other frontrunners in the LDP presidential election are former defense minister and LDP veteran Shigeru Ishiba, 67, who is running for the fifth time. Another favorite is Shinjiro Koizumi, the 43-year-old son of former premier Junichiro Koizumi. Shinjiro Koizumi, who is more than a decade younger than the average Japanese member of parliament, would also offer a stark shift for the LDP, which has struggled to enthuse youth voters. Also running is maverick-turned-insider Taro Kono, the current digital minister who previously ran to lead the party in 2021 and lost to Kishida in a run-off.
Still, it’s not impossible to see either of the female candidates win the Friday election, which is expected to go to a run-off. But while a victory for either would be a feat for Japan on the international stage, it would not necessarily indicate a shift in how the LDP treats women. Eto from Hosei University predicts that while Kamikawa could steer the LDP to be more women-friendly, “she won’t act in accordance with her campaign pledges because of political conventions and customs within the party.” As for the more conservative Takaichi, “she behaves like men,” Eto says, “often hostile toward feminist issues or gender matters.”
Singapore’s former transport minister pleaded guilty bribery and obstruction of justice after the city-state’s prosecution amended the indictment against him, a surprising twist to the biggest political scandal in nearly four decades.
S. Iswaran, 62, was convicted on Tuesday after the amended charges were read out to him. It was unexpected as the former politician had vowed to defend himself against a raft of charges including corruption.
The court will sentence Iswaran on Oct. 3 and he is out on bail. The prosecutors asked for a seven-month jail term while his defense lawyers sought no more than eight weeks.
The case comes at a politically sensitive time as Prime Minister Lawrence Wong prepares to lead the ruling People’s Action Party in a general election after he took over from Lee Hsien Loong in May. The case against Iswaran, who has left the PAP, is a test for a party whose reputation for clean governance has helped it win all elections since Singapore’s independence in 1965.
“My lawyers have stated the position clearly,” Iswaran told reporters outside the courthouse. “Let’s see it how it goes.”
The last time a former minister was sentenced to jail in Singapore was in 1975. Then-Minister of State for Environment Wee Toon Boon was sentenced to 18 months in jail for accepting a two-story house and land.
“The Singapore government is well-known for its longstanding commitment to integrity and honest government,” Deputy Attorney General Tai Wei Shyong said during the hearing. “The accused’s acts have had a significant impact on this hard-earned reputation.”
Iswaran was initially charged with 35 counts including graft. He was alleged to have obtained more than S$403,000 ($312,000) in luxury goods including tickets to musicals and soccer matches in the UK.
His lawyer Davinder Singh said there was no suggestion that Iswaran’s loyalty to the government was compromised. Still, prosecuting Iswaran sent a “powerful signal” about the country’s zero-tolerance on graft, Singh added.
F1 races
The probe against Iswaran came to light last year when Lee ordered him to go on leave, and he was later arrested together with property tycoon Ong Beng Seng. Iswaran was charged in January for allegedly taking favors from Ong, such as tickets to musicals on the West End. Ong hasn’t been charged and was recently seen at the sold-out Formula 1 night race over the weekend in Singapore.
Known for bringing F1 racing to Singapore, Iswaran is the first minister to get embroiled in a graft probe since 1986 when then-Minister for National Development Teh Cheang Wan was investigated for accepting bribes. Teh denied receiving the money and died before he could be formally charged.
For Iswaran, most of the prosecution’s charges deal with his interactions with Ong, who owns the rights to the Singapore Grand Prix and is chairman of race promoter Singapore GP Pte Ltd. The allegations range from Iswaran obtaining tickets for UK soccer matches and taking a flight on Ong’s private jet to obtaining tickets to the F1 race in Singapore.
Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry has said there was nothing to suggest that the F1 contracts were disadvantageous to the government and said it would review the terms. A ministry spokesman said the review is ongoing.
Another round of charges in March had accused Iswaran of obtaining nearly S$19,000 of luxury items, including whisky bottles, a Brompton bicycle and golf clubs, from a managing director of a local firm in relation to a construction contract related to a train station. The executive hasn’t been charged.
While the next general election must be held by November 2025, it could come sooner as observers say Wong is likely to seek an early mandate before brewing economic uncertainties have a greater impact on the trade-reliant nation. The PAP had its worst-ever showing in 2020—despite winning 89% of the parliamentary seats—due in part to concerns about the economy.
When Iswaran was charged in January, Wong said that the city-state’s stance on maintaining clean government was “non-negotiable.”
“This is part of our DNA,” he said. “There can be no compromise, no relaxation, no fudging of this, no matter the political price.”
China handed a nine-year prison term to a Taiwanese political activist convicted of “separatism,” a rare sentence that prompted Taiwan to warn its people about the dangers of traveling across the strait.
Yang Chih-yuan received the term in a court in the eastern Chinese city of Wenzhou, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said in a briefing on Thursday, according to the semi-official Central News Agency.
China’s ruling Communist Party intended for the “case to intimidate the people of Taiwan,” said council Deputy Minister Liang Wen-chieh, adding that travelers from the democracy of 23 million should be prudent when considering going across the strait.
This was the first time China jailed a Taiwanese person on a charge of trying to break up its territory, according to the council, a government department in Taipei that handles cross-strait relations. In recent years, Chinese prosecutors have leveled the charge against Uyghurs, a minority group in the restive far western region of Xinjiang.
The episode involving Yang adds to tensions between Beijing and Taipei that have mounted since Lai Ching-te took over as Taiwan’s president in May. China deeply distrusts Lai, accusing him of pushing to formalize Taiwan’s independence.
China held a major military drill earlier this year around Taiwan, a chip hub that the U.S. backs economically, politically and militarily. Beijing has also stepped up pressure on offshore islets that Taipei controls and, in January, peeled off Nauru, one of the archipelago’s few remaining diplomatic allies.
Last year, former Taiwan Premier Chen Chien-jen urged China to free Yang, who was arrested in 2022 in Wenzhou. At the same time, China said a publisher from Taiwan had come under investigation for alleged involvement in activities that hurt national security. There’s been no update to that case.
China’s state security authorities detained Yang for setting up an illegal party to promote Taiwan’s independence, the official Xinhua News Agency reported earlier.
He was also accused of advocating for Taiwan to join the United Nations as an independent, sovereign country, the report said. In 1971, the U.N.’s General Assembly voted to give the seat Taiwan had held to China.
Yang appears to have been living in China in the first half of 2022, though it’s unclear what he was doing there. When he was still in Taiwan, he co-founded a minor political party.
Chinese state media has not reported on Yang’s sentencing and judicial authorities have not released documents about it.
As much as the French capital reveled in the celebratory air of the Olympics this summer, many are less than thrilled to discover Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s plan to keep the iconic Olympic rings on France’s most iconic monument even after the Games.
“The decision is up to me, and I have the agreement of the [International Olympic Committee]. So yes, they will stay on the Eiffel Tower,” Hidalgo said in an interview published in Ouest-France on Saturday. She told the news outlet that, thanks to the Olympics, the French “have fallen in love with Paris again” and that she wanted “this festive spirit to remain.”
Hidalgo’s plan to permanently alter the facade of the Eiffel Tower has sparked opposition from heritage conservation advocates, her peers, and even the family of the monument’s architect Gustave Eiffel.
The Association of Descendants of Gustave Eiffel, consisting of about 70 living descendants of the architect, said in a press release cited by French media on Sunday that “it does not seem appropriate to us” that the Eiffel Tower, a historical symbol of Paris and France, “should be added to the symbol of an external organization in a lasting way, whatever its prestige.”
Built for the 1889 World’s Fair, the Eiffel Tower was initially meant to be dismantled after 20 years. But the structure was retained after Eiffel suggested that it be used for a variety of scientific purposes, including meteorological research and optical telegraph communications. It was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1991.
Olivier Berthelot-Eiffel, president of the descendants group, told AFP that while they “don’t see any problem” with the Olympic rings staying on the tower “a little longer” after the Paralympic Games, which conclude on Sunday, “the Eiffel Tower is not intended as an advertising antenna.” He added that Hidalgo should have consulted the Paris Council and other experts about such a decision.
Meanwhile, heritage conservation group SOS Paris accused Hidalgo of trying to leave her personal legacy on the iconic architecture. “Using the most famous monument in France to establish one’s dogma and remind the whole world, forever, that Anne Hidalgo made the 2024 Olympics, is going really far,” the group posted Sunday on X.
Even for Hidalgo, there are a few issues still to be ironed out. She said that the current Olympic rings attached to the Eiffel Tower, which are too heavy to permanently withstand winter weather conditions, will need to be replaced with lighter replicas from the same manufacturer. She also said that the city would have to think of a way to conceal the rings when needed, to protect it from breaching the Olympics’ political neutrality rules. (Last year, the tower was lit up with customized colors and messages in shows of solidarity with women’s rights protesters in Iran and a warring Ukraine.)
A Change.org petition opposing the move to keep the Olympic rings on the Eiffel Tower was started on Sunday and has garnered thousands of signatures as of Monday. “Once the party time is over, our emblematic monument must return to its natural state,” it reads.
Culture Minister Rachida Dati, who unsuccessfully ran against Hidalgo for mayor in 2020, also weighed in on Sunday: “The Eiffel Tower is a protected monument, the work of an immense engineer and creator,” she posted on X. “Before any decision is made or any announcement is made in this matter, it is important that all procedures and consultations aimed at protecting heritage are respected.”
Criticisms have also reverberated among social media users, who are increasingly echoing calls to classify the Eiffel Tower as a historical monument. While the Eiffel Tower was listed as a historical monument in 1964, it has not been classified as one—a status that would give it the highest level of protection. In February, a proposal by Dati to classify the Eiffel Tower was struck down by Hidalgo.
Others have decried the Olympic rings as having “no place” on the Eiffel Tower.“Keeping the Olympic rings on the Eiffel Tower after the Olympics,” a popular French account posted on X, “is exactly like refusing to take down the Christmas decorations in your house because you had a great Christmas Eve.”
More than 20 people returning to the U.S. from Cuba have been infected with a virus transmitted by bugs in recent months, federal health officials said Tuesday. They all had Oropouche virus disease, also known as sloth fever.
None have died, and there is no evidence that it’s spreading in the United States. But officials are warning U.S. doctors to be on the lookout for the infection in travelers coming from Cuba and South America.
Here’s a look at the illness and what sparked the alert:
What is Oropouche virus?
Oropouche is a virus that is native to forested tropical areas. It was first identified in 1955 in a 24-year-old forest worker on the island of Trinidad, and was named for a nearby village and wetlands.
It has sometimes been called sloth fever because scientists first investigating the virus found it in a three-toed sloth, and believed sloths were important in its spread between insects and animals.
How does Oropouche virus spread?
The virus is spread to humans by small biting flies called midges, and by some types of mosquitoes. Humans have become infected while visiting forested areas and are believed to be responsible for helping the virus make its way to towns and cities, but person-to-person transmission hasn’t been documented.
How many cases have there been?
Beginning late last year, the virus was identified as the cause of large outbreaks in Amazon regions where it was known to exist, as well as in new areas in South America and the Caribbean. About 8,000 locally acquired cases have been reported in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, and Peru.
Some travelers have been diagnosed with it in the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday said 21 U.S. cases have been reported so far—20 in Florida and one in New York—all of whom had been in Cuba. European health officials previously said they had found 19 cases, nearly all among travelers.
What are the symptoms and treatments?
Symptoms can seem similar to other tropical diseases like dengue, Zika or malaria. Fever, headaches and muscle aches are common, and some infected people also suffer diarrhea, nausea, vomiting or rash.
Some patients suffer recurring symptoms, and 1 in 20 can suffer more severe symptoms like bleeding, meningitis and encephalitis. It is rarely fatal, though there are recent reports of deaths in two healthy young people in Brazil.
There are no vaccines to prevent infections and no medicines available to treat the symptoms.
Are there other concerns?
In Brazil, officials are investigating reports that infections might be passed on from a pregnant woman to a fetus—a potentially frightening echo of what was seen during Zika outbreaks nearly a decade ago.
The CDC has recommended that pregnant women avoid non-essential travel to Cuba and suggested all travelers take steps to prevent bug bites, such as using insect repellents and wearing long-sleeved shirts and long pants.
WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence officials said Monday they were confident that Iran was responsible for the hack of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, casting the cyber intrusion as part of a brazen and broader effort by Tehran to interfere in American politics and potentially shape the outcome of the election.
The assessment from the FBI and other federal agencies was the first time the U.S. government has assigned blame for hacks that have raised anew the threat of foreign election interference. The hacking also underscored how Iran, in addition to more sophisticated adversaries like Russia and China, remains a top concern to U.S. officials tasked with protecting democratic processes.
Besides breaching the Trump campaign, officials also believe that Iran tried to hack into the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris.
The hacking and similar activities, federal officials said, reflect Iran’s determination to “complicate the ability of any U.S. administration to pursue a foreign policy at odds” with its own interests. The goal is to sow discord, weaken faith in democratic institutions and influence the outcome of elections that Iran perceives to be “particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests,” officials said.
“We have observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting Presidential campaigns,” said the statement released by the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations denied the hacks, saying that Iran had neither the motive nor intention to interfere with the election, and challenged the U.S. to provide evidence.
The statement was released at a time of significant tensions between Washington and Tehran as the U.S. hopes to halt or limit a threatened threatened retaliatory strike on Israel over the assassination of Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh. An Israeli strike last month in southern Beirut killed Hezbollah’s top commander, but while Tehran and Iran-backed Hezbollah have vowed to retaliate, they have not yet launched strikes as diplomatic endeavors and Gaza cease-fire talks continue in Qatar.
The U.S. did not detail how it reached the conclusion that Iran was responsible, nor did it describe the nature of any information that may have been taken from the Trump campaign. But it said the intelligence community was confident “the Iranians have through social engineering and other efforts sought access to individuals with direct access to the Presidential campaigns of both political parties.”
At least three staffers in the Biden-Harris campaign were targeted with phishing emails, but investigators have uncovered no evidence the attempt was successful, the Associated Press reported last week.
“Such activity, including thefts and disclosures, are intended to influence the U.S. election process. It is important to note that this approach is not new. Iran and Russia have employed these tactics not only in the United States during this and prior federal election cycles but also in other countries around the world,” the statement said.
The Trump campaign disclosed on Aug. 10 that it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. At least three news outlets—Politico, the New York Times and the Washington Post—were leaked confidential material from inside the Trump campaign, including its report vetting J.D. Vance as a vice presidential candidate. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what it received.
Earlier this month, Microsoft issued a report detailing foreign agents’ attempts to interfere in this year’s election, citing an instance of an Iranian military intelligence unit in June sending “a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor.”
In a separate report, Google said an Iranian group linked to the country’s Revolutionary Guard has tried to infiltrate the personal email accounts of roughly a dozen people linked to President Joe Biden and Trump since May.
—Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
Japan replaced the head of its navy and punished more than 200 defense officials after a string of scandals that include mishandling of classified information and overclaiming on pay.
The array of misconduct is some of most widespread revealed in the Japanese defense establishment in recent years and casts a shadow over Tokyo’s efforts to bolster its military to deal with rising challenges from China and North Korea.
“These problems have betrayed the public trust and are unacceptable,” Defense Minister Minoru Kihara said Friday in Tokyo, adding he would return one month of his salary to acknowledge his own responsibility. He pledged steps to prevent a recurrence.
The scandals included classified information on warship movements being made accessible to individuals without security clearance, as well as dozens of navy divers claiming hazard pay for duties they hadn’t actually performed, the ministry said. There were also cases of ministry officials verbally harassing subordinates, the ministry said.
Around 220 officials are being punished with penalties ranging from dismissals to formal reprimands, according to the ministry.
Japan’s navy, known as the Maritime Self-Defense Force, is at the center of many of the misconduct charges. Admiral Ryo Sakai, the MSDF chief of staff, said in a statement that he would step down on July 19 to take responsibility.
“Taking this opportunity, please accept my deepest apology for the disappointment caused,” he said in the statement posted to a ministry webpage.
The revelations may increase public reluctance to foot the bill for a rapid build-up in defense spending.
Japan is in the middle of lifting defense outlays to around 2% of gross domestic product from around 1% over five years through 2028. The government has put off a decision about how it will fund much of the additional spending for weapons like missiles and fighter jets, and polling shows public opposition to tax hikes to pay for extra defense spending.
In its annual defense white paper, released Friday, Japan said it had secured 42% of the ¥43.5 trillion ($273 billion) total needed to fund the planned defense build-up.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, speaking after attending a NATO summit meeting in Washington, said he had instructed Kihara to root out problems and strengthen leadership to recover public trust.
“Looking back on the NATO meeting, it’s clear that we are facing an extremely serious security environment. With that in mind, Japan can’t afford to have any lapses in our own security,” Kishida said.
The defense scandals add another headache for Kishida’s own prospects of staying in power. His support ratings are at historic lows over his handling of a separate political funding scandal and as households are battered by rising prices.
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Ryotaro Nakamaru, Mia Glass and Alastair Gale / Bloomberg
The plague sounds like something out of a history book. But the disease—nicknamed the “Black Death” or “Great Pestilence”—that killed more than 25 million people, about a third of Europe, in medieval times is very much still with us today.
Colorado officials confirmed Tuesday a human case of the plague was detected in Pueblo County. It comes after another human case in Oregon in February.
Caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is often transmitted by fleas and passed through small animals like rodents or cats, the plague has been responsible for more than 200 million deaths throughout history, dating as far back as 3,800 years ago, according to an article published in the American Journal of Medicine. While the bulk of its casualties came during three major pandemics—in the 6th century in and around Constantinople, in 14th century Europe, and in 19th century Asia—outbreaks have persisted to modern day.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says an average of seven cases are reported in the country each year, mostly in the western and southwestern states. Globally, there are about 1,000–3,000 cases per year, with the three most endemic countries being the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, and Peru, according to the World Health Organization.
There are two main forms of plague infection: bubonic, which is caused by a flea bite or blood contact with another infected animal or material and is characterized by swollen lymph nodes or “buboes”; and pneumonic, a severe lung infection caused by inhaling droplets, such as the coughs of infected humans or cats. Over 80% of plague cases in the U.S. have been the bubonic form, according to the CDC, though the pneumonic form is more dangerous.
There is currently no vaccine available in the U.S. that can prevent plague infection, though there are steps you can take, including wearing insect repellent and applying flea control products to pets, to reduce the risk of infection. Today, however, most plague cases don’t result in death because of advances in treatment, including with commonly available antibiotics—though untreated cases can be fatal. The overall risk of death for all types of plague in the U.S., according to Mayo Clinic, is around 11%.
The most important factor for survival is that medical attention begins promptly. Symptoms to watch out for include swollen lymph nodes, sudden fever, head and body aches, weakness, vomiting and nausea, shortness of breath, chest pain, and cough, particularly with bloody mucus.
