The Best New TV Shows of January 2025

January should be a great month for television, as brutal cold makes captive, couch-potato audiences of us all. Sadly, in practice, a long holiday hangover tends to limit new releases; platforms’ reticence to compete for attention with an inevitable regime-change media frenzy could also be a factor this year. Happily, February looks a bit more promising (for the culture sphere, at least). In the meantime, here are a few January standouts you might have missed. 

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Asura (Netflix)

The great Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda is best known in the U.S. for his 2018 feature Shoplifters, a Cannes Palme d’Or winner about a poor family that subsists on equal parts love and theft. He brings the same keen understanding of familial dynamics—and the same delicate balance of warmth, poignance, and grit—to this lovely Netflix series, released with little stateside fanfare. Set in 1979 and based on a novel by Kuniko Mukôda, Asura follows four adult sisters who discover that their elderly father (Jun Kunimura, recently seen in Sunny and Pachinko) has been cheating on their mother. The news coincides with major developments in the women’s own lives around romance and fidelity. Eldest sister Tsunako (Rie Miyazawa) is sleeping with her married employer. A housewife and mother, Makiko (Machiko Ono) suspects her husband (Masahiro Motoki) of straying. Pretty Sakiko (Suzu Hirose), who’s dating a feckless wrestler, shrugs off men’s betrayals. It was her foil, prim, bookish Takiko (Yû Aoi), who hired a detective (Ryûhei Matsuda) to prove their dad had a mistress; now, Takiko may be falling for the sleuth.

Television tends to fixate on the salacious aspects of infidelity, treating it as a juicy twist or an excuse for a steamy sex scene. But Kore-eda takes a refreshingly humanistic approach. Through the sisters’ relationships with one another—which are at least as important to Asura as their romantic ties—we see the far-reaching effects of men deceiving the women they love. Yet Kore-eda would rather observe than vilify. The adulterers aren’t written off as bad people; their sins are legible within the context of their lives. And by sharing their struggles, the sisters learn to do what Asura itself does: show compassion toward others whose decisions might differ from their own. (Also, as in so many Japanese shows, the food scenes are scrumptious.)

Great Migrations: A People on the Move (PBS)

Harvard professor, public intellectual, and PBS stalwart Henry Louis Gates, Jr. returns to the platform with this four-part documentary on Black migration in the U.S. since the 1910s. The first half of the series is, unsurprisingly, devoted to the two waves of the Great Migration proper, in which descendants of the enslaved moved north and west to escape the Jim Crow South in the early and mid-20th century. A final pair of episodes traces immigration from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as many Black Americans’ return to the South post-civil rights. 

While Great Migrations is sure to be a useful teaching tool, it’s no audiovisual textbook. Gates recruited an engaging cast of experts to guide viewers through deep dives into Black enclaves from Harlem to South Central, cultural luminaries like Berry Gordy and Jacob Lawrence, and topics like the rise of the Black press. Nor does the series shy away from the darkest aspects of its subject, noting how fears of lynching drove many families north and acknowledging the more insidious forms of racism they encountered when they gor there. With DEI in crisis, the doc is a crucial reminder of how, in the past, the absence of proactive inclusion has yielded segregation. And as a panic over critical race theory continues to roil our education system, it makes an all-too-timely argument that Black history is both integral to and distinct within American history. 

The Pitt (Max)

For ER fans, the news that Noah Wyle had reunited with two of that show’s writer-producers, R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells, for another series set in an emergency room was all they needed to mark their calendars. I’m a harder sell on medical dramas. There are way too many these days, most of them mediocre, and if I have to look at human guts, I’d rather it be in a cartoonish slasher romp than on a realistic operating table. But The Pitt won me over. In fact, it might’ve been the only decent English-language scripted show to premiere this fallow January.

Set amid the pandemonium of an overcrowded, under-resourced Pittsburgh ER, the series, like 24 and Hijack, plays out in near-real time; the season splits a single shift into 15 hourlong episodes. This may be a gimmick to differentiate the show from its predecessor (it didn’t stop ER creator Michael Crichton’s estate from suing), but it makes narrative sense. Wyle’s capable attending physician treats (and charms) patients, orients new interns, and resists the meddling of admins, all while struggling to conceal his unresolved grief on the anniversary of a mentor’s death. The 1990s network-TV vibe is strong. Yet The Pitt‘s purpose is not primarily to celebrate doctorly heroism. The show is at its best when it illuminates the dire realities of frontline medical work, revealing the ER as a crucible where not just the health-care system, but also criminal justice, policy, the privatization of public goods, and a tattered social safety net ignite—daily—in all manner of emergencies.

source https://time.com/7211890/best-tv-shows-january-2025/

The Troubling Slavery-Era Origins of Inmate Firefighting

Fires continue to rage in Los Angeles, and already they have ranked among the most destructive urban blazes in American history. So far, they have killed at least 29 people, destroyed 17,000 structures, and caused, by one count, in excess of $250 billion in damages and loss. Strong winds and a sustained lack of water intensified by climate change led the fires to spread rapidly beyond hopes of containment.

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The federal, state, and local governments have turned to a diverse pool of manpower to fight the infernos. Some are local volunteer or state-funded professional firefighters, while others have come from all over the U.S. and even from other countries. The governments have also increasingly relied upon two polar opposite groups: well-compensated private fire crews, and prison inmates who are paid between $5.00 and $10.00 per day. California has deployed inmates to fight fires since 1915, and this year over 1,000 firefighters are inmates.

The public has become increasingly aware of inmate fire crews as California wildfires become a regular feature of the news cycle, even spawning the fictional CBS series Fire Country. Critics of the inmate firefighting program have long maintained that it is coercive — a form of servitude that is reminiscent of slavery. The parallel between inmate firefighting and slavery is more connected than critics likely realize. Inmate firefighting can trace its legacy to the practice of enslaved firefighting. The history of enslaved firefighters offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of relying on involuntary labor to fight blazes. 

In the 18th century, cities generally had small populations, and relatively few buildings, which were spread out, and rarely tended to top two stories. This landscape meant that a bucket brigade manned by residents passing water from wells to fires was generally enough to contain and stop most blazes. 

During the 19th century, however, firefighting underwent a major transformation. As urban boosters and capitalists increasingly invested in industrialization, cities expanded and concentrated flammable commodities together in previously unprecedented ways.

Read More: Why Incarcerated Firefighters Are Battling the L.A. Wildfires

This meant more — and more devastating — fires. In one New York fire, for example, whale oil caught fire resulting in 30 deaths and the destruction of over 345 buildings. 

Urban elites responded by starting to personally fund permanent volunteer firefighting corps, which they urged governments to institutionalize in the hopes of gaining government financing. 

Volunteer fire companies reflected many of the ideological impulses of the American Revolution. They largely resembled the sort of democratic institutions that the famous French observer Alexis de Tocqueville remarked upon as being the hallmark of the new U.S. Firefighters were exclusively men, but they came from all classes. Protecting neighbors’ property was one way in which American men demonstrated their fitness for citizenship. The elites paying for these companies saw funding them as one component of their broader responsibility to their communities; they often also helped provide limited social services like libraries and accident and fire insurance as well. 

In the North, under pressure from a burgeoning insurance industry, governments moved to fireproof their cities. In 1818, for example, Boston banned wooden structures. They also professionalized their firefighting corps after incidents like the Ursuline Convent riot of 1834 when Boston firefighters actively participated in the burning of a Catholic nunnery. Finally, they used new technologies like the telegraph and the steam fire engine (colloquially known as “steamers”) to improve firefighting.

The South took a similar but divergent path towards firefighting — one guided by its practice of slavery. 

Southern cities also had white volunteer corps, but Black labor was integral to their fire management strategy. Enslaved children cleaned chimneys, one of the most common sources of fires, under the direction of a white chimney inspector. They also had standing Black volunteer crews composed mostly of free Black firefighters, but also some enslaved members. These crews had white presidents until after the Civil War. 

Additionally, when fires broke out, white fire officers had the power to impress free and enslaved Black men into service (as in the North, women were excluded from firefighting). They forced Black workers to do the most dangerous parts of the job — and the ones that required the most brute force. 

Black workers impressed into service, both free and enslaved, did receive compensation, but how much varied from place-to-place and person-to-person. In 1854, for example, Charleston’s Washington Fire Company recorded paying unfree Black firefighters between $5.00 and $37.75 in a month. Free Black volunteer firefighters could also be exempted from poll taxes.

In some cases, fighting fires could provide a pathway to freedom for enslaved people. In the 1810s and 1820s, Richmond repeatedly celebrated the enslaved Gilbert Hunt for heroically saving people and buildings from fires. Even so, it took 18 years after Hunt first received plaudits until he could use his wages to purchase his freedom. Further, his firefighting wages were so paltry that he had to pool wages from other odd jobs together to afford his freedom. 

Because of their supply of unfree labor to fight fires, Southern leaders felt little need to fireproof their cities, or adopt the innovations in firefighting made possible by new technologies. While cities like Augusta, Ga., did ban wooden structures, officials in Charleston defeated a proposed 1838 ban — even after fire destroyed the city that year. As late as 1861, the city’s fire chief advocated against adoption of a steam pump because it was cheaper to continue using enslaved firefighters to pump the water.

Rejecting such cutting-edge technology, however, meant that Northern insurance companies wouldn’t write policies in the South. This refusal forced Southern newspapers to advertise charity drives for fire victims and Southerners to attempt to found their own fire insurance companies. Southerners took Northern refusal to extend them insurance as proof of anti-Southern discrimination, helping to bolster a sectional identity.

Read More: How Authorities Define Fire ‘Containment’ and ‘Control’

The Civil War and the end of slavery brought about the end to this Southern approach to fighting fires. Yet, crucially, the years of using enslaved men to fight fires had set the precedent for putting those thought to be inferior on the front lines in this fight. It cemented an association between Black and other non-white male bodies and forced firefighting that would later inform decisions to use inmates for this task.

This was legal because the 13th Amendment, which banned slavery, continued to allow involuntary servitude when it was “punishment for a crime…” Southerners quickly adopted the practice of forced prisoner labor as a way of restoring coerced labor in a supposedly free labor market. Southern whites imprisoned a disproportionately Black convict population, often for minor and outright fictional crimes, and put them to work, especially in building the highways that brought the South into the modern age.

But prison labor wasn’t exclusive to the South: California had used it since 1850, and in 1915, the state began using inmates to fight fires. The program greatly expanded after World War II. Advocates championed the rehabilitative potential for inmates exposed to the outdoors. Inmates have remained a staple of California firefighting ever since.

These roots help connect inmate firefighting in 2025 with enslaved firefighting in the antebellum South. Enslaved fire crews did some of the most grueling work like hand-pumping water, while today inmate crews likewise dig fire breaks by hand. Today, inmate fire crews are likewise four times as likely to be injured fighting fires as non-inmate crews, speaking to the increased danger of their jobs — like those of enslaved firefighters. Elites justify giving them the most dangerous work in part because there are potential benefits accruing to those doing the jobs: inmate firefighters generally get time off of their sentences, just as some enslaved firefighters could buy their own freedom.

While there are differences between the two, the history of enslaved firefighters offers a cautionary tale for California and other states that use inmate firefighters. Antebellum Charleston long felt that it did not need to change the way that it fought fires because its leaders could call on their perceived greatest asset: enslaved labor. Yet, their failure to modernize their firefighting techniques proved devastating in 1861 when a fire destroyed a third of the city. California threatens to make the same mistake if the access to inmate firefighters prevents policymakers from focusing on the structural challenges caused by environmental factors and climate change that are producing more — and more destructive — fires. 

Justin Hawkins is a Ph.D. Candidate in history at Indiana University and assistant editor of the Indiana Magazine of History. His research focuses on arson as part of enslaved resistance and labor struggles in 19th century America.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/7210800/inmate-firefighters-history/

What Historians Hope to Learn From Trump Releasing JFK, RFK, and MLK’s Assassination Files

One of Donald Trump’s first actions after taking office as President on Jan. 20 was signing an executive order to declassify any remaining files related to the assassinations of the most prominent American leaders of the 1960s: the 35th President John F. Kennedy in 1963, his brother, the presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. in that same year.

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The Jan. 23 executive order gives intelligence officials two weeks to come up with a plan to make the remaining JFK assassination files available to the public, and 45 days for the RFK and MLK assassination files.

“That’s a big one. A lot of people have been waiting for this for years,” Trump said as he signed the executive order. “Everything will be revealed.”

What exactly Trump hopes to find out from the files is unclear. RFK’s son Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services, has expressed skepticism about whether Sirhan Sirhan was his father’s killer and whether there was some larger conspiracy going on.

The “truth” in these files, however, will likely be anticlimactic, scholars tell TIME. The basic facts of these assassinations are unlikely to change: Lee Harvey Oswald fatally shot JFK; Sirhan Sirhan fatally shot Robert F. Kennedy; and James Earl Ray fatally shot MLK. Most of these documents have been released; for example, 99% of the JFK assassination files have been made public, after nine investigations and the definitive account of what happened the day of the assassination produced by the Warren Commission in 1964.

But the quicker files are made available, the quicker conspiracy theories could be quelled. There are conspiracy theorists who think that because the files haven’t been released yet, the government is hiding some evidence of larger conspiracies to kill these figures. “I actually think Trump did the right thing in opening these files,” says Burt Griffin, assistant counsel on the Warren Commission, arguing that it will hopefully dispel any notions that “something is being concealed.”

TIME talked to people who have researched these assassinations about what they hope to learn from the remaining files. 

Sensitive personal details

Griffin, who is also the author of JFK, Oswald and Ruby: Politics, Prejudice and Truth, believes that much of the information that’s been withheld about the JFK assassination are the names of investigators and details of the investigative process. “Some of the people were doing illegal things,” Griffin says, like wiretapping Mafia leaders. “We knew they were doing things that were illegal. We didn’t know the details of how they were doing it.” 

At this point, the names of the people involved won’t do much good because they have since died, but that doesn’t mean Americans should think there was a missed opportunity to interview them. The Warren Commission took the testimony of more than 550 people. 

Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Asassination of JFK, questions if Americans will finally learn more of First Lady Jackie Kennedy’s account of the fateful day, as she ordered the notes from her interview with historian William Manchester be sealed.

Posner, who also wrote Killing the Dream James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., is expecting the remaining MLK assassination files to provide more proof of “how much the FBI tried to not protect King, but spy on him.” It’s well-known that the activist was under illegal FBI surveillance for years, as the agency’s infamous director J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that the preacher was part of some broader communist conspiracy while the U.S. was in the middle of a Cold War with the communist Soviet Union.

But Posner is more worried that incriminating information about King might be revealed. There have long been rumors about King’s infidelity, and there are even reports that he saw a mistress the night before he was killed.

“Those files would be just personally embarrassing, and there’s no reason to release them,” says Posner. King’s family issued a statement after Trump’s executive order, requesting to see any MLK files before they are released to the general public.

Debunking broader conspiracies

The Warren Commission already concluded six decades ago that there is “no evidence” Oswald was part of a domestic conspiracy or that a foreign government was behind JFK’s assassination. But to put conspiracy theories to rest, Griffin wonders if the tax returns of an acquaintance of Oswald’s, Ruth Paine, are in the remaining files because they have never been revealed. The question is whether they show that she was getting money from the federal government, and if they don’t, then that could put to rest a conspiracy theory that the federal government was behind the assassination of JFK in some way. Likewise, if the tax returns did not show that she was getting money from people with ties to communists or foreign governments, then it could further prove that a foreign government did not orchestrate the plot to kill JFK.

However, it’s possible the files could provide more insight into what was going on in Cuba at the time of JFK’s assassination. Posner wonders if there are files showing what the CIA really knew about Oswald’s erratic behavior during visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City six weeks before the assassination: “I’m hoping [the remaining files] will answer the question of whether the CIA could have potentially prevented the assassination by letting the FBI know how unhinged and unstable he was during this visit.” 

Larry Sabato, founder and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy, is on the lookout for more information on U.S. policymakers’ deliberations about overthrowing the Castro regime: “There’s one document that is very intriguing, in which they’re discussing ways of embarrassing or dethroning Castro through damaging events that will be linked to him. There’s just one problem. We know they’re in there. We know that they discuss specifics, but every one of them is redacted…I think it’s interesting historically to show the extent to which the U.S. government was willing to go to rid itself of a communist government.”

But the big unsolved mystery—why Oswald shot JFK—is not likely to be answered by any of these remaining files. As Griffin puts it, “We saw all of the substantive things that were in the files.”

William Klaber, a researcher who has read through many files related to the RFK assassination for his book Shadow Play, says “I don’t think there are any bombshells” in the remaining files related to that tragedy because the FBI played a much smaller role in that investigation. Many of the most relevant records are in California. He explains: “RFK files were really released in 1988, and they were the police files because the police ran that investigation. The FBI helped a little, and those files have also been opened.”

He is also not convinced every file will be released because of Trump’s executive order. As he puts it, “My fear is that when we get closer to the date that these things are going to be released, national security concerns will be raised, and we’ll be back where we were. Those very files that we want won’t be the ones that are released.” 

source https://time.com/7210786/trump-jfk-files-declassified/

Everything Trump Has Said About the Fatal Passenger Jet and Army Helicopter Crash

In the deadliest U.S. major commercial aviation incident in 16 years, no one is believed to have survived a collision between a commercial aircraft and an Army helicopter by Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington D.C. on Wednesday, Jan. 29.

There were 64 people on board the jet, and three military personnel on the helicopter. Recovery operations are underway at the Potomac River, over which the crash occurred.

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This is President Trump’s first major incident to lead the country through in his second term at the White House. Late Wednesday night, Trump’s Press Secretary posted a statement from him on X (formerly Twitter), in which he thanked first responders and said he had been “fully briefed on the terrible accident.” He later posted this same statement on his Truth Social account.

“I am monitoring the situation and will provide more details as they arise,” Trump said.

Read More: What to Know About the Passenger Jet, Army Helicopter Collision Near Washington, D.C.

Trump posted another remark about the incident just after midnight on Thursday, seemingly suspicious of the incident, and saying the situation “looks like it should have been prevented.”

“The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time,” he wrote on Truth Social. “It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane.”

On Thursday morning, Trump posted: “I have been fully briefed on the terrible accident which just took place at Reagan National Airport. May God Bless their souls. Thank you for the incredible work being done by our first responders. I am monitoring the situation and will provide more details as they arise.”

Later on, just before 11:30 a.m., the President  delivered remarks about the crash to press in the White House briefing room. He was joined by Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

After beginning with a moment of silence for the victims, Trump spoke about the timeline of the crash, and confirmed, once more, that there are no survivors. 

Trump emphasized putting aside differences and grieving this “tragedy” as a nation, also stating he would contact the countries of origin of the non-Americans on board, including the Russian figure skaters.

Read More: Passenger Jet That Crashed Near Washington D.C. Carried Champion Figure Skaters

“On behalf of the First Lady, myself, and 340 million Americans, our hearts are shattered alongside yours, and our prayers are with you now and in the days to come, we’ll be working very, very diligently in the days to come,” he said. “In moments like this, the differences between Americans fade to nothing compared to the bonds of affection and loyalty that unite us all, both as Americans and even as nations, we are one family, and today we are all heartbroken.”

Soon after, Trump went on to call out former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s air traffic policies. He then started to focus on “diversity” within the Federal Aviation Administration.

Last week, on his second day in office, Trump signed an Executive Order to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs (DEI) in the Federal Aviation Administration, proclaiming that DEI “penalizes hard-working Americans who want to serve in the FAA but are unable to do so, as they lack a requisite disability or skin color.”

When asked by a reporter if he had any evidence to show that DEI policies were to blame for the crash, Trump said “it just could have been.” When asked if he was getting ahead of the investigation, he said he did not think so. 

“Because I have common sense,” Trump said when asked how he could already come to the conclusion that diversity had something to do with the crash. “We want brilliant people doing this. This is a major chess game at the highest level when you have 60 planes coming in during a short period of time and they’re all coming in different directions.”

Trump also fleshed out his suspicions about how this tragedy occurred, again emphasizing the visibility during the clear night, and the potential maneuvers the pilots could have made to prevent the crash.

“We don’t know that necessarily it’s even the controller’s fault, but one thing we do know: there was a lot of vision, and people should have been able to see that,” Trump said. “At what point do you stop at what point you say ‘wow that plane’s getting a little bit close,’ so this is a tragedy that should not have happened.”

source https://time.com/7211616/passenger-jet-army-helicopter-crash-washington-dc-president-trump-response/

The Best Super Bowl Ads of 2025

Millions are expected to tune in to watch the Kansas City Chiefs face off against the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans for Super Bowl LIX on Sunday, Feb. 9. 

Last year’s game, which saw the Chiefs’ clinch a 25-22 overtime victory over the San Francisco 49ers, was the most watched program ever, with an average of 123.4 million viewers across all platforms. 

For advertisers, it’s an opportunity to get their products in front of millions. Advertisers pull out all the stops for their biggest— and often most expensive—ads of the year. This year, ads reportedly sold for north of $8 million, a record price.

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Here is our round-up of the best and worst Super Bowl ads that have been released so far.

Most Appetizing: Hellmann’s

Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal return to Manhattan’s iconic Katz’s Deli to recreate an iconic scene in When Harry Met Sally. In the 1989 movie, Ryan’s Sally was trying to show Crystal’s Harry how easy it is for a woman to fake an orgasm, but in the 2025 ad, the intense reaction is brought on by a sandwich generously schmeared with Hellmann’s mayonnaise.

Most User-Generated: Doritos

The popular chip brand relaunched their famous “Crash the Super Bowl” contest, asking fans to come up with their own ad for the snack. The competition is down to three finalists—the winner will see their ad featured during the game and receive a $1 million prize.

Most Fraternal: FanDuel

In an ad for the online gambling company, brothers and retired NFL stars Eli and Peyton Manning prepare to face off for the “Kick of Destiny 3,” a field goal-kicking competition that will occur during the Super Bowl. In the ad, Eli confesses to a childhood dream of being a kicker, only to be ridiculed by his older brother.

Most Revved Up: GoDaddy

The ad teaser for the domain registry site GoDaddy features a mysterious race car driver shifting gears. “Who is that?” someone asks from the sidelines in Italian. “No really, who knows?” The company has historically partnered with Danica Patrick, the most famous American female race car driver.

Most Pastoral: SquareSpace

In a 10-second teaser trailer for the company’s main Super Bowl ad, “A Tale as Old as Websites,” a man rides through the countryside on what appears to be a donkey or a mule as bagpipes play behind him, not a laptop or a webpage in sight. 

Most Inspiring: Budweiser

Continuing in the tradition of the beer brand’s equine-oriented advertising, a young Clydesdale foal looks on as older horses embark on a beer delivery, but he is too young to join. As the delivery team departs, a keg falls off the wagon, and the determined foal sets out on a journey to deliver the keg and prove his mettle. 

Most in Touch With Bodily Functions: Angel Soft

In the run-up to the big game, Fox Sports analyst and former wide receiver for the New England Patriots Julian Edelman is nowhere to be found. Fellow Fox Sports analyst Charissa Thompson wonders why he’s not seated for the start of the game, only to learn he’s been in the bathroom when he returns with toiler paper stuck to his shoe.

Most Ironic: Hims and Hers

The Super Bowl of Football is also the Super Bowl of Snacks, right? So it’s ironic that Americans are stuffing their faces while watching a commercial about the obesity epidemic in America and weight-loss drugs. Hims and Hers offers low-cost pills and treatment plans, but it’s a good idea to ask your doctor before trying any new supplements.

source https://time.com/7211183/best-super-bowl-ads-2025/

Passenger Jet That Crashed Near Washington D.C. Carried Champion Figure Skaters

The American Airlines flight that collided with a U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter was carrying members of the figure skating community, the U.S. Figure Skating Association (USFSA) said on Jan. 30.

In a statement, the USFSA said: “U.S. Figure Skating can confirm that several members of our skating community were sadly aboard American Airlines Flight 5342, which collided with a helicopter yesterday evening in Washington, D.C. These athletes, coaches, and family members were returning home from the National Development Camp held in conjunction with the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita, Kansas”

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Read More: What to Know About the Passenger Jet, Army Helicopter Collision

The competition, which occurred from Jan. 20 to Jan. 26, crowned new champions in senior women’s, men’s pairs and ice dance. The event also included competitions at the novice and junior levels, as well as development camps that are the gateway for athletes to join the national team, which competes at the world and Olympic levels.

The flight included 60 passengers (and four crew persons), but USFSA did not confirm how many passengers were members of the skating community. Russian news agency TASS, citing an unnamed source, reported that Russian-born world champions in pairs skating from 1994 Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov were among the passengers.

“Our coaches Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov were on board the crashed plane,” a source is quoted as telling the news outlet. The couple, who competed for Russia and are believed to have married in 1995, moved to the U.S. in 1998 and now coach figure skating at the Skating Club of Boston.

Among their students is their son, Maxim, who competed at nationals and finished fourth in the men’s event. The Daily Mail reported that a teammate said he was not on the flight and had left Wichita earlier in the week. Maxim’s performance earned him a spot on the U.S. team that is due to compete at the Four Continents Figure Skating Championships in Seoul, Korea, in late February.

source https://time.com/7211377/passenger-jet-army-helicopter-crash-washington-dc-victims-figure-skaters/

The Los Angeles Fires Expose the Problem With American Conservation Policy

Fires continue to burn outside of Los Angeles and they have become a partisan football. President Donald Trump has blamed California governor Gavin Newsom for the devastation, making inaccurate accusations about poor water management and federal environmental protections of endangered species. But, to the President’s credit, he also included the failures of American forest conservation practices in his bill of horribles supposedly responsible for the fires. Though his claim that these practices failed to prevent the fires was misleading, he was right about one thing: forest conservation practices are central to the ongoing battle between humans and nature in Southern California.

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Despite its importance, this topic has received little attention in the coverage of the fires. But it’s crucial to understanding the destruction of the fires — and crafting policies to prevent future disasters. In the late 19th century, progressive politicians and bureaucrats began focusing on conservation. They saw it as a way to boost the economy and businesses, develop rural areas, and wisely use America’s natural resources. For more than a century those have remained the core principles of American conservation policy. Yet, as the L.A. fires expose, that’s no longer tenable in a world confronting climate change.

Conservation gained traction in the U.S. during the late 19th century as Americans — and the Western world more broadly — looked to address the consequences of industrial growth through what became known as progressivism. Progressivism became a popular (at first mostly local and state-driven) movement propagated by middle-class professionals and “experts” that soon permeated both major political parties. The reformers driving this movement believed in human progress, scientific management, the use of government power for the public good, and replacing political patronage with the hiring of experts.

Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who ascended to the Presidency after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, cemented the role of these ideas in running the federal government. He used the executive branch to greatly expand the government and lay the foundation for the modern state.

Conservation was essential to the mission of progressives like Roosevelt. The President had long been an outdoor recreation enthusiast, and the famed story of him sparring with a black bear cub during a 1902 hunting trip—which prompted the invention of the “teddy bear”—spotlighted his passion for the environment. Roosevelt extended his relationship with the natural world during his Presidency and championed federal conservation policies with the assistance of bureaucratic lieutenants: James R. Garfield at the Department of Interior, Frederick Newell heading the Bureau of Reclamation and, most notably, Gifford Pinchot at the Forest Service. Pinchot became a leading voice in the push for conversation. In a 1910 book, he offered the progressives’ definition of the practice: conservation was a set of policies that emphasized development, the reduction of waste, and the management and maintenance of natural resources in order to do in his words, “the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time.”

Read More: How to Help Victims of the Los Angeles Wildfires

That same year, an unprecedented fire broke out in the West, burning millions of acres of forest in Idaho, Montana, and Washington in just two days. 

In 1911, Congress responded to the “Big Blowup,” as the fire became known, with the Weeks Act, which created a national conservation policy for managing wildfires. Conservationists, driven by the progressive mindset, viewed forest fires—which they did not connect to being part of the natural ecosystem—as wasteful, inefficient, and a hindrance to development. Therefore, the Weeks Act established a system for collaboration between federal and state agencies and, later, private organizations, to prevent and extinguish them.

This policy would evolve over two decades, before eventually coalescing into the “10 a.m. policy,” which mandated suppressing forest fires—or at least attempting to—by the morning following their reporting. Such a policy was essential, the progressives believed, because forests were a crucial part of American agriculture and development. Everything from building homes to laying train tracks depended on the ability to harvest lumber in forests. Protecting property from wildfires was also crucial for industrial development.

The government implemented this policy in the 1930s, just as another Roosevelt, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was shifting the focus of conservation beyond natural resources like water and forests. The Great Depression, and changing American geographical demographics, prompted Roosevelt to adjust the purpose of Progressive ideas about conservation.

In the New York state senate, he had represented rural upstate constituents, and Roosevelt himself dabbled with farming and forest management after inheriting his childhood home along the banks of the Hudson. This experience led the future president to view rural American prosperity, especially for farmers, as essential to overall economic growth. As industrialization spurred urban growth, it also created disparities between rural and urban areas and, in Roosevelt’s mind, that demanded the government stepping in to create geographic parity in the interest of the public good. To him, this was the essence of conservation: developing the country’s natural resources in such a way as to drive economic growth.

Roosevelt became president during the Great Depression, which was exacerbated by environmental disasters—floods, soil erosion, and most memorably, the Dust Bowl in the southern plains. 

Roosevelt saw conservation as a crucial part of his New Deal and a way to both reverse the environmental degradation that had caused these disasters, as well as a means of providing work opportunities through programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Members of the CCC, for example, developed state parks throughout the country and planted billions of trees in the plains to protect farms from wind erosion and another Dust Bowl. Other programs, such as building hydroelectric dams, mitigated flood damage and provided electricity to rural Americans to expand the consumer market for goods produced in urban factories. 

These policies furthered all of Roosevelt’s conservation goals: developing rural areas, providing work to the unemployed, and improving the climate for business and development. Conservation was about the economy, not the environment.

Read More: The Conditions That Led to the ‘Unprecedented’ Los Angeles County Fires

In the 1960s, however, a burgeoning environmental movement challenged this understanding of conservation. Activists exposed unsafe business practices and pushed for environmental protections. In the 1970s, their efforts bore fruit. In 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which mandated that the government consider the environmental impact of any federal development or decision, such as highway construction or granting permits. 

Yet, even as Congress mandated considering the environment in policy decisions, the new laws still emphasized the need for development and for collective action in the public interest—as conservation policies had for seven decades. Laws like the Clean Air Act forced businesses, like automakers, to adopt practices to safeguard the environment, but in ways that wouldn’t materially impact their bottom line. 

Even as Ronald Reagan ushered in a much more conservative political direction for the country in the 1980s—one focused on cutting regulations and government, not adding new protections—American support for conservation remained strong. In 1985, for example, Congress enacted a farm bill, which used agricultural subsidies to incentivize farmers to refrain from developing designated wetlands and highly erodible lands. Yet, legislators envisioned this provision not as an environmental protection measure, but as a way to drive economic development by raising crop prices and ensuring soil quality for sustainable production. 

The environmental importance of conservation would only warrant a greater focus in the 1990s, as Congress enacted waste reduction programs like EnergyStar. Initially, the voluntary labeling program focused on encouraging the purchase of office electronics that reduced energy consumption but evolved to include all large electronics, appliances, and buildings. Even then, the Clinton Administration emphasized the importance of the program both as a means of saving money and of addressing growing concerns over climate change—or, “global warming,” in 1990s terminology. As EPA Administrator Carol Browner described, the program would enable Americans “to see that saving energy is not only good for the environment and good for the country, but also good for business.”

This history makes clear that conservation in the U.S. has always been about economic growth and development in the public interest, and the environmental impact only became part of its focus in recent decades. Yet, that is no longer sustainable in a world beset by climate change. To protect development and economic security, the top priority of conservation programs needs to be safeguarding the environment—and not just in rural areas.

Decades of a focus on development, especially in rural areas, has left the U.S. ill prepared for the challenges presented by climate change. American environmental policy has had successes in creating resilient solutions to immediate problems, but they have not been evenly applied throughout the country to prepare for unprecedented environmental dangers such as the Los Angeles wildfires. Yet, adjusting conservation policy doesn’t have to be an either/or situation: protecting the environment and making the U.S. more climate change resistant can also create jobs and drive economic growth.

Johnathan Williams is an assistant professor of instruction in the history department at the University of Northern Iowa. His current book project, The Retail Exception, examines the history of Target and the retail industry to understand modern American environmental politics.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/7210798/los-angeles-fires-conservation-history/

RFK Jr. Denied He Is Anti-Vaccine During His Confirmation Hearing. Here’s His Record

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the most famous vaccine skeptics in the U.S., tried to distance himself from his decades of anti-vaccine sentiment during his Jan. 29 hearing to be confirmed as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). If confirmed, Kennedy would oversee agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institutes of Health.

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“News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry. I am neither. I am pro-safety,” Kennedy said in his opening statement before the Senate Committee on Finance, prompting a protester to shout, “He lies!” Kennedy added that all of his children are vaccinated—a decision he has previously said he regrets—and said vaccines “play a critical role in health care.”

Some Republican senators accepted Kennedy’s pro-vaccine comments at the hearing. But many senators—including Oregon’s Ron Wyden, a Democrat—pressed Kennedy on discrepancies between his past public statements—in which he has repeatedly questioned the safety and necessity of vaccines and said they are linked to autism and chronic diseases—and his sanitized comments during the hearing. “Mr. Kennedy, all of these things cannot be true,” Wyden said. “So are you lying to Congress today when you say you are pro-vaccine, or did you lie on all those podcasts?”

Here’s what to know about Kennedy’s history on vaccines.

What RFK has said in the past about vaccines

Despite Kennedy’s efforts to distance himself from the anti-vaccine movement during the hearing, he has “made a career” out of “planting seeds of doubt about vaccines,” says James Hodge, director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University.

Kennedy has for years questioned vaccines and spread misinformation about them, ignoring broad scientific consensus about their safety and efficacy to argue that they have not been adequately studied. He has also perpetuated the thoroughly disproven idea that vaccines cause autism. “I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” Kennedy said in a 2023 interview with Fox News. Kennedy repeated that view in private emails recently published by STAT, along with other false claims—including that one COVID-19 vaccine had a “100% injury rate” in early clinical trials.

Read More: The Origins of the Anti-Vaccination Movement

He “has a series of beliefs that are not supported by science,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in a November interview with TIME.

Kennedy’s views are amplified by Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a nonprofit he founded and recently resigned from as he’s considered for HHS secretary. CHD’s website implies, without qualitative evidence, that vaccines are to blame for rising rates of autism and chronic disease in the U.S. The organization has also brought legal challenges against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and laws that allow minors to be vaccinated without parental consent.

What happened with the measles outbreak in Samoa 

Kennedy and CHD have reportedly exploited tragedy to spread anti-vaccine sentiment. In 2018, two babies in Samoa died after they received improperly prepared measles, mumps, and rubella shots, leading to a temporary pause on vaccine distribution. Even after regular vaccination resumed, some parents were afraid to have their children vaccinated, worsening a dramatic drop in the small South Pacific nation’s vaccination rates.

In the aftermath of the incident, Kennedy traveled to Samoa and met with numerous health officials, apparently to perpetuate anti-vaccine ideas. (Kennedy denied that characterization during the hearing, saying that his trip had “nothing to do with vaccines.”) CHD also used the situation as fodder for social media posts questioning vaccines, as NBC News recently reported.

Read More: Trump’s Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Health Agenda Is a Wake-Up Call for Cities and States

Not long after Kennedy’s visit, a measles outbreak killed 83 people—most of them children—in Samoa. While Kennedy has repeatedly denied responsibility for the outbreak, many scientific experts disagree. Offit said in November that there is “no better example” of the real-world consequences of vaccine skepticism.

Kennedy again denied blame during the hearing. “You cannot find a single Samoan who will say, ‘I didn’t get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy,’” he said.

Kennedy’s stance on banning vaccines 

During the hearing, Kennedy said he will “do nothing, as HHS secretary, that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking” vaccines, saying specifically that he supports the polio and measles vaccines. 

But his past actions—and ongoing alliances—make experts and lawmakers doubt those assurances. In 2021, on behalf of CHD, Kennedy unsuccessfully petitioned the FDA to reverse its emergency authorization of COVID-19 vaccines and refrain from fully approving any COVID-19 shots in the future, according to the New York Times. The following year, Aaron Siri, a lawyer working closely with Kennedy, petitioned the FDA to revoke approval of the polio vaccine, the Times reported in December. (The petition is reportedly still under review.) And, as of 2024, Kennedy had ongoing financial relationships with law firms suing vaccine manufacturers.

Read More: RFK Jr.’s Confirmation Hearings Could Be Banner Moment For Anti-Vax Movement

Kennedy tried to walk back some of his most blatantly anti-vaccine statements during the hearing, sparking anger from several lawmakers. “There is no reason that any of us should believe that you have reversed the anti-vaccine views that you have promoted for 25 years,” said New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat.

How Kennedy could shape vaccine policy as HHS secretary

HHS wouldn’t need to ban or rescind approvals of vaccines to affect U.S. health policy, Hodge says. His research has outlined numerous ways that a Kennedy-led HHS could erode current vaccine standards, from adding additional warning labels to vaccine packaging to refusing to stock the Strategic National Stockpile with shots needed for emergencies. Kennedy outlined some similar possibilities in his 2023 book Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, listed others during the hearing, including making it easier for people to sue vaccine makers based on “junk science” or seek compensation for allegedly vaccine-related health issues. “No one should be fooled,” Warren said. If confirmed, “Kennedy will have the power to undercut vaccines and vaccine manufacturing across our country.”

Even seemingly small changes, Hodge says, have the potential to chip away at the confidence Americans have in vaccines, thereby reducing vaccination rates and increasing the chances of disease outbreaks. Hodge also points to three major pathways by which Kennedy could act. First, he could influence people who hold key roles at the FDA and CDC as well as on those agencies’ vaccine advisory committees, potentially slow-walking the approval of new vaccines and influencing guidance about which already-approved shots should be recommended for the general public and covered by insurance. 

Second, his HHS could attach strings to federal funding for vaccines. While states set their own vaccine policies, including which are required for children entering school, the CDC provides much of the funding states use to carry out their vaccination programs. The federal government could require states to comply with certain policies set by Kennedy’s HHS if they want to continue to receive that money, Hodge says.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Kennedy would have a major and official platform from which to spread vaccine skepticism. “The anti-public-health impact of that, from a pure influencer perspective, is profound—even though it doesn’t require any legal action,” Hodge says. “It would be damaging beyond all control.” 

source https://time.com/7210943/rfk-confirmation-hearing-vaccines/

Why AI Safety Researchers Are Worried About DeepSeek

The release of DeepSeek R1 stunned Wall Street and Silicon Valley this month, spooking investors and impressing tech leaders. But amid all the talk, many overlooked a critical detail about the way the new Chinese AI model functions—a nuance that has researchers worried about humanity’s ability to control sophisticated new artificial intelligence systems.

It’s all down to an innovation in how DeepSeek R1 was trained—one that led to surprising behaviors in an early version of the model, which researchers described in the technical documentation accompanying its release.

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During testing, researchers noticed that the model would spontaneously switch between English and Chinese while it was solving problems. When they forced it to stick to one language, thus making it easier for users to follow along, they found that the system’s ability to solve the same problems would diminish.

That finding rang alarm bells for some AI safety researchers. Currently, the most capable AI systems “think” in human-legible languages, writing out their reasoning before coming to a conclusion. That has been a boon for safety teams, whose most effective guardrails involve monitoring models’ so-called “chains of thought” for signs of dangerous behaviors. But DeepSeek’s results raised the possibility of a decoupling on the horizon: one where new AI capabilities could be gained from freeing models of the constraints of human language altogether.

To be sure, DeepSeek’s language switching is not by itself cause for alarm. Instead, what worries researchers is the new innovation that caused it. The DeepSeek paper describes a novel training method whereby the model was rewarded purely for getting correct answers, regardless of how comprehensible its thinking process was to humans. The worry is that this incentive-based approach could eventually lead AI systems to develop completely inscrutable ways of reasoning, maybe even creating their own non-human languages, if doing so proves to be more effective.

Were the AI industry to proceed in that direction—seeking more powerful systems by giving up on legibility—“it would take away what was looking like it could have been an easy win” for AI safety, says Sam Bowman, the leader of a research department at Anthropic, an AI company, focused on “aligning” AI to human preferences. “We would be forfeiting an ability that we might otherwise have had to keep an eye on them.”

Read More: What to Know About DeepSeek, the Chinese AI Company Causing Stock Market Chaos

Thinking without words

An AI creating its own alien language is not as outlandish as it may sound.

Last December, Meta researchers set out to test the hypothesis that human language wasn’t the optimal format for carrying out reasoning—and that large language models (or LLMs, the AI systems that underpin OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DeepSeek’s R1) might be able to reason more efficiently and accurately if they were unhobbled by that linguistic constraint.

The Meta researchers went on to design a model that, instead of carrying out its reasoning in words, did so using a series of numbers that represented the most recent patterns inside its neural network—essentially its internal reasoning engine. This model, they discovered, began to generate what they called “continuous thoughts”—essentially numbers encoding multiple potential reasoning paths simultaneously. The numbers were completely opaque and inscrutable to human eyes. But this strategy, they found, created “emergent advanced reasoning patterns” in the model. Those patterns led to higher scores on some logical reasoning tasks, compared to models that reasoned using human language.

Though the Meta research project was very different to DeepSeek’s, its findings dovetailed with the Chinese research in one crucial way. 

Both DeepSeek and Meta showed that “human legibility imposes a tax” on the performance of AI systems, according to Jeremie Harris, the CEO of Gladstone AI, a firm that advises the U.S. government on AI safety challenges. “In the limit, there’s no reason that [an AI’s thought process] should look human legible at all,” Harris says.

And this possibility has some safety experts concerned. 

“It seems like the writing is on the wall that there is this other avenue available [for AI research], where you just optimize for the best reasoning you can get,” says Bowman, the Anthropic safety team leader. “I expect people will scale this work up. And the risk is, we wind up with models where we’re not able to say with confidence that we know what they’re trying to do, what their values are, or how they would make hard decisions when we set them up as agents.”

For their part, the Meta researchers argued that their research need not result in humans being relegated to the sidelines. “It would be ideal for LLMs to have the freedom to reason without any language constraints, and then translate their findings into language only when necessary,” they wrote in their paper. (Meta did not respond to a request for comment on the suggestion that the research could lead in a dangerous direction.)

Read More: Why DeepSeek Is Sparking Debates Over National Security, Just Like TikTok

The limits of language

Of course, even human-legible AI reasoning isn’t without its problems. 

When AI systems explain their thinking in plain English, it might look like they’re faithfully showing their work. But some experts aren’t sure if these explanations actually reveal how the AI really makes decisions. It could be like asking a politician for the motivations behind a policy—they might come up with an explanation that sounds good, but has little connection to the real decision-making process.

While having AI explain itself in human terms isn’t perfect, many researchers think it’s better than the alternative: letting AI develop its own mysterious internal language that we can’t understand. Scientists are working on other ways to peek inside AI systems, similar to how doctors use brain scans to study human thinking. But these methods are still new, and haven’t yet given us reliable ways to make AI systems safer.

So, many researchers remain skeptical of efforts to encourage AI to reason in ways other than human language. 

“If we don’t pursue this path, I think we’ll be in a much better position for safety,” Bowman says. “If we do, we will have taken away what, right now, seems like our best point of leverage on some very scary open problems in alignment that we have not yet solved.”

source https://time.com/7210888/deepseeks-hidden-ai-safety-warning/

AI Could Reshape Everything We Know About Climate Change

With one announcement, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek shook up all of Wall Street and Silicon Valley’s conventional wisdom about the future of AI. It should also shake up the climate and energy world. 

For the last year, analysts have warned that the data centers needed for AI would drive up power demand and, by extension, emissions as utilities build out natural gas infrastructure to help meet demand.

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The DeepSeek announcement suggests that those assumptions may be wildly off. If the company’s claims are to be believed, AI may ultimately use less power and generate fewer emissions than anticipated.

Still, don’t jump for joy just yet. To my mind, the biggest lesson for the climate world from DeepSeek isn’t that AI emissions may be less than anticipated. Instead, DeepSeek shows how little we truly know about what AI means for the future of global emissions. AI will shape the world’s decarbonization trajectory across sectors and geographies, disrupting the very basics of how we understand the future of climate change; the question now is whether we can harness that disruption for the better.

“We’re just scratching the surface,” says Jason Bordoff, who runs the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University about the implications of AI for emissions. “We’re just at inning one of what AI is going to do, but I do have a lot of optimism.”

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Many in the climate world woke up to AI early last year. Over the course of a few months, power sector experts issued warnings that the U.S. isn’t prepared for the influx of electricity demand from AI as big technology companies raced to deploy data centers to scale their ambitions. A number of studies have found that data centers could account for nearly 10% of electricity demand in the U.S. by 2030, up from 4% in 2023.

Many big tech companies have worked to scale clean electricity alongside their data centers—financing the build out of renewable energy and paying to open up dormant nuclear plants, among other things. But utilities have also turned to natural gas to help meet demand. Research released earlier this month by Rystad Energy, an energy research firm, shows that electric utilities in the U.S. have 17.5 GW of new natural gas capacity planned, equivalent to more than eight Hoover Dams, driven in large part by new data centers. 

All of this means an uptick in emissions and deep concern among climate advocates who worry that the buildout of electricity generation for AI is about to lock the U.S. into a high-carbon future.

As concerning as this might be, the projections for short-term electricity demand growth might mask much more challenging risks that AI poses for efforts to tackle climate change. As AI drives new breakthroughs, it will change consumption patterns and economic behavior with the potential to increase emissions. Think of a retailer that uses AI to better tailor recommendations to a consumer, driving purchases (and emissions). Or consider an AI-powered autonomous vehicle that an owner leaves to roam the streets rather than paying for parking.  

At the most basic level, AI is bound to generate rapid productivity gains and rapid economic growth. That’s a good thing. But it’s also worth remembering that since the Industrial Revolution, rapid economic growth has driven a rise in emissions. More recently, some developed economies have seen a decoupling of growth from emissions, but that has required active effort from policymakers. To avoid an AI-driven surge in emissions may require an active effort this time, too. 

But AI isn’t all risk. Indeed, it’s very easy to imagine the upsides of AI far outweighing the downsides. Most obviously, as DeepSeek shows, there may be ways to reduce the emissions of AI with chip innovation and language model advances. As the technology improves, efficiencies will inevitably emerge.

The data center buildout could also catalyze a much wider deployment of low-carbon energy. Many of the technology companies that are investing in AI have committed to eliminating their carbon footprints. Not only do they put clean electricity on the grid when they build a solar farm or restart a nuclear power plant, but they help pave the way for others.

“Governments are starting to realize that if they’re going to attract data centers, AI factories, and wider technology companies into their countries, they have to start removing the barriers to renewable energy,” says Mike Hayes, head of climate and decarbonization at KPMG.

And then there are all the ways that AI might actually cut emissions. Researchers and experts group the potential benefits into two categories: incremental improvements and game changers. 

The incremental improvements could be manifold. Think of AI’s ability to better identify sites to locate renewable energy projects, thereby greatly increasing the productivity of renewable energy generation. AI can help track down methane leaks in gas infrastructure. And farmers can use AI to improve crop models, optimizing crop yield and minimizing pollutants. The list goes on and on. With a little consideration, you could probably identify a way to reduce emissions in every sector.  

It remains difficult to quantify how these incremental improvements all add up, but it’s not hard to imagine that emissions reductions thanks to these developments could easily outweigh even the most dramatic estimates of additional pollution. 

And then there are the game changers that could, in one blow, completely transform our ability to decarbonize. At the top of that list is nuclear fusion, a process that could generate abundant clean energy by combining atomic nuclei at extremely high temperatures. Already, start-ups are using AI to help optimize their fusion reactor designs and experiments. A fusion breakthrough, supported by AI technologies, could provide a clean alternative to fossil fuels. It could also power large-scale carbon dioxide removal. This would give the world an opportunity to suck carbon out of the atmosphere affordably and pull the planet back from extreme temperature rise that may otherwise already be baked in. 

“If you think like a venture capital investor, you’re betting 1 or 2% of incremental emissions, but what could the payoff potentially be?” asks Cully Cavness, co-founder of Crusoe, an AI infrastructure company. “It could be things like fusion, which could address all the emissions.”

For those of us, myself included, who haven’t spent the last decade thinking deeply about AI, watching it emerge at the center of the global economic development story can feel like watching a juggernaut. It came quickly, and it’s hard to predict exactly where it will go next. 

Even still, it seems all but certain that AI will play a significant role shaping our climate future, far beyond the short-term impact on the power sector. Exactly what that looks like is anyone’s guess.

TIME receives support for climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation. TIME is solely responsible for all content.

source https://time.com/7210942/deepseek-ai-climate-change-reshape-what-we-know/

Why DeepSeek Is Sparking Debates Over National Security, Just Like TikTok

The fast-rising Chinese AI lab DeepSeek is sparking national security concerns in the U.S., over fears that its AI models could be used by the Chinese government to spy on American civilians, learn proprietary secrets, and wage influence campaigns. In her first press briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the National Security Council was “looking into” the potential security implications of DeepSeek. This comes amid news that the U.S. Navy has banned use of DeepSeek among its ranks due to “potential security and ethical concerns.”

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DeepSeek, which currently tops the Apple App Store in the U.S., marks a major inflection point in the AI arms race between the U.S. and China. For the last couple years, many leading technologists and political leaders have argued that whichever country developed AI the fastest will have a huge economic and military advantage over its rivals. DeepSeek shows that China’s AI has developed much faster than many had believed, despite efforts from American policymakers to slow its progress.

However, other privacy experts argue that DeepSeek’s data collection policies are no worse than those of its American competitors—and worry that the company’s rise will be used as an excuse by those firms to call for deregulation. In this way, the rhetorical battle over the dangers of DeepSeek is playing out on similar lines as the in-limbo TikTok ban, which has deeply divided the American public. 

“There are completely valid privacy and data security concerns with DeepSeek,” says Calli Schroeder, the AI and Human Rights lead at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “But all of those are present in U.S. AI products, too.”

Read More: What to Know About DeepSeek

Concerns over data

DeepSeek’s AI models operate similarly to ChatGPT, answering user questions thanks to a vast amount of data and cutting-edge processing capabilities. But its models are much cheaper to run: the company says that it trained its R1 model on just $6 million, which is a “good deal less” than the cost of comparable U.S. models, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in an essay..

DeepSeek has built many open-source resources, including the LLM v3, which rivals the abilities of OpenAI’s closed-source GPT-4o. Some people worry that by making such a powerful technology open and replicable, it presents an opportunity for people to use it more freely in malicious ways: to create bioweapons, launch large-scale phishing campaigns, or fill the internet with AI slop. However, there is another contingent of builders, including Meta’s VP and chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, who believe open-source development is a more beneficial path forward for AI.

Another major concern centers upon data. Some privacy experts, like Schroeder, argue that most LLMs, including DeepSeek, are built upon sensitive or faulty databases: information from data leaks of stolen biometrics, for example. David Sacks, President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, accused DeepSeek of leaning on the output of OpenAI’s models to help develop its own technology.

There are even more concerns about how users’ data could be used by DeepSeek. The company’s privacy policy states that it automatically collects a slew of input data from its users, including IP and keystroke patterns, and may use that to train their models. Users’ personal information is stored in “secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China,” the policy reads. 

For some Americans, this is especially worrying because generative AI tools are often used in personal or high-stakes tasks: to help with their company strategies, manage finances, or seek health advice. That kind of data may now be stored in a country with few data rights laws and little transparency with regard to how that data might be viewed or used. “It could be that when the servers are physically located within the country, it is much easier for the government to access them,” Schroeder says.

One of the main reasons that TikTok was initially banned in the U.S. was due to concerns over how much data the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, was collecting from Americans. If Americans start using DeepSeek to manage their lives, the privacy risks will be akin to “TikTok on steroids,” says Douglas Schmidt, the dean of the School of Computing, Data Sciences and Physics at William & Mary. “I think TikTok was collecting information, but it was largely benign or generic data. But large language model owners get a much deeper insight into the personalities and interests and hopes and dreams of the users.” 

Geopolitical concerns

DeepSeek is also alarming those who view AI development as an existential arms race between the U.S. and China. Some leaders argued that DeepSeek shows China is now much closer to developing AGI—an AI that can reason at a human level or higher—than previously believed. American AI labs like Anthropic have safety researchers working to mitigate the harms of these increasingly formidable systems. But it’s unclear what kind of safety research team Deepseek employs. The cybersecurity of Deepseek’s models has also been called into question. On Monday, the company limited new sign-ups after saying the app had been targeted with a “large-scale malicious attack.”

Well before AGI is achieved, a powerful, widely-used AI model could influence the thought and ideology of its users around the world. Most AI models apply censorship in certain key ways, or display biases based on the data they are trained upon. Users have found that DeepSeek’s R1 refuses to answer questions about the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, and asserts that Taiwan is a part of China. This has sparked concern from some American leaders about DeepSeek being used to promote Chinese values and political aims—or wielded as a tool for espionage or cyberattacks.

Read More: Artificial Intelligence Has a Problem With Gender and Racial Bias.

“This technology, if unchecked, has the potential to feed disinformation campaigns, erode public trust, and entrench authoritarian narratives within our democracies,” Ross Burley, co-founder of the nonprofit Centre for Information Resilience, wrote in a statement emailed to TIME.

AI industry leaders, and some Republican politicians, have responded by calling for massive investment into the American AI sector. President Trump said on Monday that DeepSeek “should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win.” Sacks posted on X that “DeepSeek R1 shows that the AI race will be very competitive and that President Trump was right to rescind the Biden EO,” referring to Biden’s AI Executive Order which, among other things, drew attention to the potential short-term harms of developing AI too fast.

These fears could lead to the U.S. imposing stronger sanctions against Chinese tech companies, or perhaps even trying to ban DeepSeek itself. On Monday, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party called for stronger export controls on technologies underpinning DeepSeek’s AI infrastructure.

But AI ethicists are pushing back, arguing that the rise of DeepSeek actually reveals the acute need for industry safeguards. “This has the echoes of the TikTok ban: there are legitimate privacy and security risks with the way these companies are operating. But the U.S. firms who have been leading a lot of the development of these technologies are similarly abusing people’s data. Just because they’re doing it in America doesn’t make it better,” says Ben Winters, the director of AI and data privacy at the Consumer Federation of America. “And DeepSeek gives those companies another weapon in their chamber to say, ‘We really cannot be regulated right now.’”

As ideological battle lines emerge, Schroeder, at EPIC, cautions users to be careful when using DeepSeek or other LLMs. “If you have concerns about the origin of a company,” she says, “Be very, very careful about what you reveal about yourself and others in these systems.”

source https://time.com/7210875/deepseek-national-security-threat-tiktok/