Iran Has Rejected Direct Negotiations With the U.S. in Response to Trump’s Letter

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran’s president said Sunday that the Islamic Republic rejected direct negotiations with the United States over its rapidly advancing nuclear program, offering Tehran’s first response to a letter President Donald Trump sent to the country’s supreme leader.

President Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran’s response, delivered via the sultanate of Oman, left open the possibility of indirect negotiations with Washington. However, such talks have made no progress since Trump in his first term unilaterally withdrew America from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers in 2018.

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In the years since, regional tensions have boiled over into attacks at sea and on land. Then came the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, which saw Israel target militant group leaders across Iran’s self-described “Axis of Resistance.” Now, as the U.S. conducts intense airstrikes targeting the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels of Yemen, the risk of military action targeting Iran’s nuclear program remains on the table.

“We don’t avoid talks; it’s the breach of promises that has caused issues for us so far,” Pezeshkian said in televised remarks during a Cabinet meeting. “They must prove that they can build trust.”

The White House offered no immediate reaction to the announcement.

Iran’s position hardens after Trump’s letter

Having Pezeshkian announced the decision shows just how much has changed in Iran since his election half a year ago after he campaigned on a promise to re-engage with the West.

Since Trump’s election and the resumption of his “maximum pressure” campaign on Tehran, Iran’s rial currency has gone into a freefall. Pezeshkian had left open talks up until Iran’s 85-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei came down hard on Trump in February and warned talks “are not intelligent, wise or honorable” with his administration. The Iranian president then immediately toughened his own remarks on the U.S.

Meanwhile, there have been mixed messages coming from Iran for weeks. Videos from Quds, or Jerusalem, Day demonstrations on Friday had people in the crowds instructing participants to only shout: “Death to Israel!” Typically, “Death to America” was also heard.

A video of an underground missile base unveiled by Iran’s hard-line paramilitary Revolutionary Guard also showed its troops stepping on an Israeli flag painted on the ground — though there was no American flag as often seen in such propaganda videos.

But Press TV, the English-language arm of Iranian state television, published an article last week that included listing U.S. bases in the Middle East as possible targets of attack. The list included Camp Thunder Cove on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, where the U.S. is basing stealth B-2 bombers likely being used in Yemen.

“The Americans themselves know how vulnerable they are,” warned Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf on Friday. “If they violate Iran’s sovereignty, it will be like a spark in a gunpowder depot, setting the entire region ablaze. In such a scenario, their bases and their allies will not be safe.”

However, Tehran’s two recent direct attacks on Israel with ballistic missiles and drones caused negligible damage, while Israel responded by destroying Iranian air defense systems.

Iran’s rejection is the latest in tensions over nuclear program

Trump’s letter arrived in Tehran on March 12. Though announcing he wrote it in a television interview, Trump offered little detail on what he exactly told the supreme leader.

“I’ve written them a letter saying, ‘I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing,’” Trump said in the interview.

The move recalled Trump’s letter-writing to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in his first term, which led to face-to-face meetings but no deals to limit Pyongyang’s atomic bombs and a missile program capable of reaching the continental U.S.

The last time Trump tried to send a letter to Khamenei, through the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2019, the supreme leader mocked the effort.

Trump’s letter came as both Israel and the United States have warned they will never let Iran acquire a nuclear weapon, leading to fears of a military confrontation as Tehran enriches uranium at near weapons-grade levels of 60% purity — something only done by atomic-armed nations.

Iran has long maintained its program is for peaceful purposes, even as its officials increasingly threaten to pursue the bomb. A report in February, however, by the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog said Iran has accelerated its production of near weapons-grade uranium.

Iran’s reluctance to deal with Trump likely also takes root in his ordering the attack that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a Baghdad drone strike in January 2020. The U.S. has said Iran plotted to assassinate Trump over that prior to his election this November, something Tehran denied though officials have threatened him.

—Vahdat reported from Tehran, Iran.

source https://time.com/7272914/iran-rejects-direct-negotiations-with-us-trump-letter/

Trump Increasingly Asks Supreme Court to Overrule Judges Blocking Key Parts of His Agenda

WASHINGTON — As losses mount in lower federal courts, President Donald Trump has returned to a tactic that he employed at the Supreme Court with remarkable success in his first term.

Three times in the past week, and six since Trump took office a little more than two months ago, the Justice Department has asked the conservative-majority high court to step into cases much earlier than usual.

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The administration’s use of the emergency appeals, or shadow docket, comes as it faces more than 130 lawsuits over the Republican president’s flurry of executive orders. Many of the lawsuits have been filed in liberal-leaning parts of the country as the court system becomes ground zero for pushback to his policies.

Federal judges have ruled against the administration more than 40 times, issuing temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions, the Justice Department said Friday in a Supreme Court filing. The issues include birthright citizenship changes, federal spending, transgender rights and deportations under a rarely used 18th-century law.

The administration is increasingly asking the Supreme Court, which Trump helped shape by nominating three justices, to step in, not only to rule in its favor but also to send a message to federal judges, who Trump and his allies claim are overstepping their authority.

“Only this Court can stop rule-by-TRO from further upending the separation of powers — the sooner, the better,” acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote Friday in the deportations case, referring to the temporary restraining orders.

Stephen Vladeck, the Georgetown University law professor who chronicled the rise of emergency appeals in his book, “The Shadow Docket,” wrote on the Substack platform that “these cases, especially together, reflect the inevitable reckoning — just how much is the Supreme Court going to stand up to Trump?”

In the first Trump administration, the Justice Department made emergency appeals to the Supreme Court 41 times and won all or part of what it wanted in 28 cases, Vladeck found.

Before that, the Obama and George W. Bush administrations asked the court for emergency relief in just eight cases over 16 years.

Supreme Court cases generally unfold over many months. Emergency action more often occurs over weeks, or even a few days, with truncated briefing and decisions that are usually issued without the elaborate legal reasoning that typically accompanies high court rulings.

So far this year, the justices have effectively sidestepped the administration’s requests. But that could get harder as the number of appeals increase, including in high-profile deportation cases where an extraordinary call from the president to impeach a judge prompted a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts.

Here’s a look at the appeals on the court’s emergency docket:

Trump’s deportation order will be a critical test

Immigration and the promise of mass deportations were at the center of Trump’s winning presidential campaign, and earlier this month, he took the rare step of invoking an 18th-century wartime law to speed deportations of Venezuelan migrants accused of belonging to the Tren de Aragua gang.

Lawyers for the migrants, several of whom say they are not gang members, sued to block the deportations without due process.

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge at the federal courthouse in Washington, agreed. He ordered deportation flights to be temporarily halted and planes already making their way to a prison in El Salvador be turned around.

Two planes still landed, and a court fight over whether the administration defied his order continued to play out even as the administration unsuccessfully asked the appeals court in the nation’s capital to lift his order.

In an appeal to the Supreme Court filed Friday, the Justice Department argued that the deportations should be allowed to resume and that the migrants should make their case in a federal court in Texas, where they are being detained.

Mass firings of federal workers have generated lawsuits

Thousands of federal workers have been let go as the Trump administration seeks to dramatically downsize the federal government.

The firings of probationary workers, who usually have less time on the job and fewer protections, have drawn multiple lawsuits.

Two judges have found the administration broke federal laws in its handling of the layoffs and ordered workers reinstated. The government went to the Supreme Court after a California-based judge said some 16,000 workers must be restored to their positions.

The judge said it appeared the administration had lied in its reasons for firing the workers. The administration said he overstepped his authority by trying to force hiring and firing decisions on the executive branch.

Anti-DEI teacher training cuts have been blocked, at least temporarily

Trump has moved quickly to try and root out diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the government and in education.

Eight Democratic-led states argued in a lawsuit that the push was at the root of a decision to cut hundreds of millions of dollars for teacher training.

A federal judge in Boston has temporarily blocked the cuts, finding they were already affecting training programs aimed at addressing a nationwide teacher shortage. After an appeals court kept that order in place, the Justice Department went to the Supreme Court.

The administration argues that judges can’t force it to keep paying out money that it has decided to cancel.

Trump wanted to end birthright citizenship. So far, courts have disagreed

On Inauguration Day, Trump signed an executive order that, going forward, would deny citizenship to babies born to parents in the country illegally.

The order restricting the right enshrined in the Constitution was quickly blocked nationwide. Three appeals court also rejected pleas to let it go into effect while lawsuits play out.

The Justice Department didn’t appeal to the Supreme Court to overturn those rulings right away, but instead asked the justices to narrow the court orders to only the people who filed the lawsuits.

The government argued that individual judges lack the power to give nationwide effect to their rulings, touching on a legal issue that’s concerned some justices before.

source https://time.com/7272806/trump-increasingly-asks-supreme-court-to-overrule-judges/

Myanmar’s Earthquake Death Toll Jumps to More Than 1,600 as Rescue Efforts Continue

BANGKOK — Myanmar’s ruling military said Saturday on state television that the confirmed death toll from a devastating 7.7 magnitude earthquake rose to 1,644, as more bodies were pulled from the rubble of the scores of buildings that collapsed when it struck near the country’s second-largest city.

The new total is a sharp rise compared to the 1,002 total announced just hours earlier, underlining the difficulty of confirming casualties over a widespread region and the likelihood that the numbers will continue to grow from Friday’s quake. The number of injured increased to 3,408, while the missing figure rose to 139.

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Rescue efforts are underway especially in the major stricken cities of Mandalay, the country’s No. 2 city, and Naypyitaw, the capital. But even though teams and equipment have been flown in from other nations, they are hindered by the airports in those cities being damaged and apparently unfit to land planes.

Read More: Photos Show Devastating Impact of Powerful Earthquake That Rocked Myanmar and Thailand

Myanmar, also known as Burma, is in the throes of a prolonged civil war, which is already responsible for a humanitarian crisis. It makes movement around the country both difficult and dangerous, complicating relief efforts and raising fears that the death toll could still rise precipitously.

The earthquake struck midday Friday with an epicenter not far from Mandalay, followed by several aftershocks, including one measuring 6.4. It sent buildings in many areas toppling to the ground, buckled roads, caused bridges to collapse and burst a dam.

In Naypyidaw, crews worked Saturday to repair damaged roads, while electricity, phone and internet services remained down for most of the city. The earthquake brought down many buildings, including multiple units that housed government civil servants, but that section of the city was blocked off by authorities on Saturday.

More damage in Thailand

In neighboring Thailand, the quake rocked the greater Bangkok area, home to around 17 million people, and other parts of the country.

Bangkok city authorities said the number of confirmed dead was now 10, nine at the site of the collapsed high-rise under construction near the capital’s popular Chatuchak market, while 78 people were still unaccounted for. Rescue efforrs were continuing in the hope of finding additional survivors.

On Saturday, more heavy equipment was brought in to move the tons of rubble, but hope was fading among friends and family members of the missing that they would be found alive.

“I was praying that that they had survived but when I got here and saw the ruin — where could they be? In which corner? Are they still alive? I am still praying that all six are alive,” said 45-year-old Naruemol Thonglek, sobbing as she awaited news about her partner, who is from Myanmar, and five friends who worked at the site.

Waenphet Panta said she hadn’t heard from her daughter Kanlayanee since a phone call about an hour before the quake. A friend told her Kanlayanee had been working high on the building on Friday.

“I am praying my daughter is safe, that she has survived and that she’s at the hospital,” she said, Kanlayanee’s father sitting beside her.

Thai authorities said that the quake and aftershocks were felt in most of the country’s provinces. Many places in the north reported damage to residential buildings, hospitals and temples, including in Chiang Mai, but the only casualties were reported in Bangkok

Myanmar sits on a major fault line

Earthquakes are rare in Bangkok, but relatively common in Myanmar. The country sits on the Sagaing Fault, a major north-south fault that separates the India plate and the Sunda plate.

Brian Baptie, a seismologist with the British Geological Survey, said that the quake caused intense ground shaking in an area where most of the population lives in buildings constructed of timber and unreinforced brick masonry.

“When you have a large earthquake in an area where there are over a million people, many of them living in vulnerable buildings, the consequences can often be disastrous,” he said in a statement.

A natural disaster on top of a civil war

Myanmar’s government said that blood was in high demand in the hardest-hit areas. In a country where prior governments sometimes have been slow to accept foreign aid, Min Aung Hlaing said that Myanmar was ready to accept outside assistance.

Myanmar’s military seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021, and is now involved in a civil war with long-established militias and newly formed pro-democracy ones.

Military forces continued their attacks even after the quake, with three airstrikes in northern Kayin state, also called Karenni state, and southern Shan — both of which border Mandalay state, said Dave Eubank, a former U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who founded the Free Burma Rangers, a humanitarian aid organization that has provided assistance to both combatants and civilians in Myanmar since the 1990s.

Eubank told The Associated Press that in the area he was operating in, most villages have already been destroyed by the military so the earthquake had little impact.

“People are in the jungle and I was out in the jungle when the earthquake hit — it was powerful, but the trees just moved, that was it for us, so we haven’t had a direct impact other than that the Burma army keeps attacking, even after the quake,” he said.

In northern Shan, an airstrike on a rebel-controlled village just minutes after the earthquake killed seven militia members and damaged five buildings, including a school, Mai Rukow, editor of a Shan-based online media Shwe Phee Myay News Agency, told the AP.

Government forces have lost control of much of Myanmar, and many places are incredibly dangerous or simply impossible for aid groups to reach. More than 3 million people have been displaced by the fighting and nearly 20 million are in need, according to the United Nations.

“Although a full picture of the damage is still emerging, most of us have never seen such destruction,” said Haider Yaqub, Myanmar country director for the NGO Plan International, from Yangon.

Control tower at Myanmar airport collapsed

Satellite photos from Planet Labs PBC analyzed by the AP show the earthquake toppled the air traffic control tower at Naypyitaw International Airport as if sheered from its base.

Debris lay scattered from the top of the tower, which controlled all air traffic in the capital of Myanmar, the photos showed on Saturday.

It wasn’t immediately clear if there had been any injuries in the collapse, though the tower would have had staff inside of it at the time of the earthquake Friday.

Rescue groups head to Myanmar

China and Russia are the largest suppliers of weapons to Myanmar’s military, and were among the first to step in with humanitarian aid.

China said it has sent more than 135 rescue personnel and experts along with supplies like medical kits and generators, and pledged around $13.8 million in emergency aid. Hong Kong sent a 51-member team to Myanmar.

Russia’s Emergencies Ministry said it had flown in 120 rescuers and supplies, and the country’s Health Ministry said Moscow had sent a medical team to Myanmar.

Other countries like India and South Korea are sending help, and the U.N. allocated $5 million to start relief efforts.

U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday that Washington was going to help with the response, but some experts were concerned about this effort given his administration’s deep cuts in foreign assistance.

—Jerry Harmer and Grant Peck in Bangkok, Simina Mistreanu in Taipei, Tong-hyung Kim in Seoul, South Korea, and Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.

source https://time.com/7272793/myanmar-earthquake-death-toll-thailand-missing-persons/

A Texas Bill Claims to Clarify Near-Total Abortion Bans. Advocates Say It Won’t

Texas has one of the strictest abortion restrictions in the country, banning abortion in nearly all situations with very limited exceptions. Since the near-total ban went into effect, several women in the state have shared stories and filed lawsuits, saying that they were denied critical care while experiencing pregnancy complications. On March 14, one of the lawmakers behind the state’s restrictive abortion laws introduced a bill seeking to clarify medical exceptions. 

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But some abortion-rights advocates and legal experts say the bill won’t do what it claims to, and even worry that it could open the door to prosecuting pregnant people and people who help patients access abortions. 

Here’s what to know. 

What is current Texas law?

The only exception to Texas’ abortion ban is if a person is experiencing a “life-threatening” medical emergency “that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.” But the current version of the law does not get more specific than that. Doctors have said that the near-total ban causes confusion over when they can provide treatment in urgent situations, leading to care delays or denials. 

However, there is specificity over the potential severe penalties for doctors who are found to have violated the state’s ban: up to $100,000 in fines, 99 years in prison, and losing their medical license.

In the fall of 2024, ProPublica reported that three Texas women died after they didn’t receive appropriate care while experiencing miscarriages.

What is the new proposed bill, SB 31?

Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes—who has previously said that exceptions to the state’s near-total ban are “plenty clear”—said during a Senate committee hearing on March 27 that there have been “reports that some doctors and some hospitals are not following the law,” meaning that they have denied necessary medical care. He said he recently introduced a bill, SB 31, in order to “remove any excuse from a doctor or a hospital” from treating a patient experiencing medical emergencies. Republican Texas Rep. Charlie Geren has filed the same bill in the House. (Neither Hughes’s nor Geren’s office responded to a request for comment on this story.)

Read More: What Are Abortion Shield Laws?

The bill doesn’t expand abortion access in the state, but removes language from the state’s laws that requires a pregnant person to be experiencing a “life-threatening” condition for a doctor to provide care. The bill adds that it “does not require a physician to delay, alter or withhold medical treatment provided to a pregnant female if doing so would create a greater risk of the pregnant female’s death; or substantial impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant female.” It says that a patient’s emergency “need not be imminent or irreversible” for a doctor to provide care. It specifies that ectopic pregnancies are considered exceptions to the state’s near-total abortion ban, but doesn’t include exceptions for fetal anomalies, rape, or incest.

The bill also includes language that instructs the State Bar of Texas and the Texas Medical Board to hold education sessions for lawyers and doctors about the medical exceptions to the state’s ban.

Why is it controversial?

The bill has received some rare bipartisan support, as well as support from both anti-abortion groups and some medical organizations, including the Texas Medical Association. Dr. Julie Ayala, an ob-gyn who practices in Texas, testified during the Senate committee hearing on March 27 on behalf of the Texas Medical Association that she believes “this bill will clear up confusion” and “save women’s lives.” 

But other abortion rights advocates, doctors, and legal experts say the bill won’t do what it claims.

“It’s an attempt to add some clarity, but I think the underlying reasons that we’re seeing what we’re seeing with denials to care aren’t really changed in the bill,” says Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law with expertise in abortion. While the bill specifies some situations in which abortion is permitted, “pregnancy is complicated, so there are a lot of other scenarios that aren’t going to be enumerated in the bill where physicians aren’t going to know what to do,” Ziegler says. 

The bill also doesn’t remove the severe penalties for doctors who are found to have violated the state’s near-total ban—one of the reasons “we’re seeing physicians refuse to provide care,” Ziegler says.

Read More: IVF Patients Say a Test Caused Them to Discard Embryos. Now They’re Suing

Samantha Casiano, an advocate for the reproductive rights advocacy nonprofit Free & Just, also criticized the bill. Casiano, who lives in Texas, was forced to carry her baby to term even after doctors told her at 20 weeks of pregnancy that her baby had anencephaly, a fatal birth defect, and wouldn’t survive. Her baby died four hours after being born. Casiano was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit Zurawski v. State of Texas that was brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights and made national headlines for challenging Texas’ abortion ban. The Texas Supreme Court ruled against the women at the heart of the lawsuit in May 2024, refusing to clarify the exceptions to the state’s abortion ban.

“Nothing in [SB 31] would’ve helped my situation at all,” Casiano says. “I’m just so upset that I felt like from 20 weeks to 32 weeks, I was basically a walking coffin for my daughter until I had to give birth, and then she had to suffer and be in agony. So where in that [bill] does that help my situation, or families and mothers like me? It was really upsetting and disappointing to read it.”

Dr. Austin Dennard is an ob-gyn practicing in Texas who joined the Zurawski v. State of Texas lawsuit after she was forced to travel out of state to receive care when she learned that her baby had anencephaly. Dennard says that while she believes some of the people behind the bill had good intentions, she doesn’t think the bill “is going to make a lick of difference in the real practicality of practicing medicine.” She says the bill’s language is still very confusing, even to reproductive rights lawyers she’s spoken with, adding that “exceptions don’t work” to ensure access to care.

As for the education sessions about the medical exceptions, Dennard questions who would be creating that guidance, and if it would be coming from anti-abortion sources.

“It’s extremely disappointing to me, and if anyone is celebrating, I think that they are extremely naive to think that these individuals actually really want to make a change,” says Dennard, who is an advocate for Free & Just. “It feels like a political publicity movement rather than [a] true desire to help people.”

A cracked-open “door” to further restrictions

Advocates and experts also point out that SB 31 amends a 1925 law predating Roe v. Wade. The 1925 law bans abortion and penalizes anyone who “furnishes the means for procuring an abortion,” with the possibility of up to five years in prison. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had previously tried to enforce the 1925 law after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe, but a federal judge blocked the move in 2023. Now, advocates and experts worry that the bill could “open the door” to the 1925 law being used to prosecute abortion patients, as well as people and groups who help patients access care, such as through abortion funds.

“If there is even a sliver of [a] chance that that bill could open the door to that 1925 criminalization of women and people that help you get an abortion, we have to be concerned,” says Kaitlyn Kash, a Free & Just advocate. Kash was forced to travel out of Texas to receive an abortion after learning that her baby had severe skeletal dysplasia, which impacts bone and cartilage growth, and that her baby likely wouldn’t survive.

Texas is also considering a separate bill that would allow authorities to charge people who obtain abortions with homicide, making it one of at least 10 states that have introduced bills for the 2025 legislative session that open the door for penalizing patients—a growing trend since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe.

Read More: Some States Consider Bills That Would Punish People Seeking Abortions

According to Ziegler, SB 31 carves out some situations that wouldn’t be considered “aiding and abetting” an abortion, but in doing so, leaves open the possibility that other situations would be. “It’s sort of a similar dynamic to what you see with the exceptions,” Ziegler says. “There’s some clarity in a few narrow situations, and then a lot of gray area and threat of prosecution in most others.” She adds that Hughes has also introduced another bill, SB 2880, which—among other attempts to crack down on abortion—would expand who could be penalized for “aiding and abetting” abortions, including people who pay for or reimburse the costs associated with obtaining an abortion.

Amanda Zurawski, the lead plaintiff in the Zurawski v. State of Texas lawsuit, was denied an abortion after experiencing a complication called preterm pre-labor rupture of membranes (PPROM) because doctors said they detected fetal cardiac activity. A few days later, she developed sepsis, a life-threatening condition. Doctors performed an emergency induction abortion, and she had to spend several days in the ICU.

Zurawski, now a Free & Just advocate, criticized SB 31 for attempting to create “blanket rules over every single pregnancy in the state of Texas, because no two are the same.” 

“I like to believe—I think I have to believe—that the intent of this bill is not malicious,” she says, but she adds that Texas officials have attempted to penalize people providing access to abortion care. The Texas Attorney General’s office recently announced that it had filed criminal charges against a midwife and medical assistant, accusing them of illegally providing abortions in Texas.

Dennard says she has received pressure from some people behind the bill and other physicians who disagree with her to support it. While some doctors and legal experts have said that the clarity would make “modest but not meaningless” changes and could save some lives, advocates say they don’t believe it will work.

“We shouldn’t be begging for scraps,” Kash says.”You don’t legislate medicine.”

source https://time.com/7272512/texas-bill-abortion-ban/

Dying for Sex Is an Audaciously Raunchy Celebration of Life in the Face of Certain Death

The first thing Molly, the protagonist of the new FX dramedy Dying for Sex, does after learning she has incurable cancer is run to the bodega for a green plastic two-liter of generic diet soda. Then she lights up a menthol cigarette. Across the street, her husband Steve, who nursed Molly through her first fight with breast cancer a few years earlier, sits bewildered in the office of their couples therapist. When Molly’s oncologist called with the awful news, they had been arguing about her longing for sex and his refusal to touch her.

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Molly, played with impish vivacity and quiet resolve by Michelle Williams, bears little resemblance to the Hollywood archetype of the beautiful young woman dying of cancer. Neither a doomed dream girl like Ali MacGraw in Love Story nor a driven genius struck down in her prime like Florence Pugh in the latest Love Story riff, We Live in Time, she’s no vehicle for some devoted man’s epiphanies about what really matters. Despite her terminal diagnosis, Molly’s story rarely plays like a tragedy. It is, instead, a brutally frank, disarmingly raunchy, often uproariously funny rejoinder to the perfect-patient narrative—an affirmation of life through the insistence that there’s no wrong way to face the certain death that ultimately awaits us all.

Read more: The Best New TV Shows of February 2025

The title Dying for Sex evokes trashy reality series like Sex Sent Me to the ER, but the show takes its name from the acclaimed podcast that the real Molly Kochan recorded with her best friend, Nikki Boyer (an executive producer of the adaptation), about Kochan’s radical response to her Stage IV diagnosis. Rather than resign herself to a chaste marriage with a husband who treated her as a patient more than a lover, she left him and embarked upon a sexual odyssey. By the time she died, in 2019, she had explored her desires with more partners than most people would rack up in 10 lifetimes.

In the brilliantly cast show, Molly briefly tries to make it work with Steve (a concerned yet condescending Jay Duplass). But when he bursts into tears as she goes down on him, she realizes that living the rest of her life on her own terms will mean parting ways with him. So she moves out and recruits Nikki (a radiantly flustered Jenny Slate), a theater actress who’s finally settling down with a sweet single dad (Kelvin Yu), to be her caretaker. “I wanna die with you,” Molly tells Nikki. The request will upend Nikki’s life, and she knows it, but she loves Molly too much to consider saying no.

Convinced she’s squandered her 40ish years on earth, Molly must decide what to do with her newfound freedom. A breakthrough comes in an appointment with Sonya (Esco Jouléy), a cool, young palliative-care social worker. “Everybody has a bucket list,” Sonya insists. “I’ve never even had an orgasm with another person,” Molly blurts out. “And now I’m gonna die.” So begins said bucket list.

With Nikki and Sonya as her wingwomen and support system, Molly throws herself into hookups. She discovers an appetite for dominance, and her fumblings lead to a moving encounter with an experienced top. She isn’t looking for romantic love but accidentally finds it with the man in the apartment across the hall. A slovenly dreamboat known only as Neighbor Guy (a gloriously game Rob Delaney), he takes prurient pleasure when Molly scolds him for eating in the elevator.

Dying for Sex co-creators Kim Rosenstock (Only Murders in the Building, GLOW) and Elizabeth Meriwether (The Dropout), who worked together on New Girl, have a track record of blending tones and outsize characters in a way that reads as honest about life’s absurdities, rather than contrived. This series is their deftest tightrope walk yet. Scenes where Molly struggles to reconcile with a mom, Gail (Sissy Spacek), whose former boyfriend abused Molly when she was a child comfortably coexist with a raunchy scene where Molly’s—enthusiastically consensual—attempt to kick Neighbor Guy in the crotch lands her in the hospital. Viewers who never thought to wonder about the toxicity of post-chemo urine will be graphically enlightened.

It would probably be impossible to puncture pieties around cancer, sex, and death without a few missteps. In a concession to Hollywood norms, the show makes its dying woman unfeasibly gorgeous all the way to hospice. Molly’s relationship with the health care system is a bit fantastical. Money isn’t an issue. Sonya doesn’t hesitate to take her patient to a sex party. A doctor’s (David Rasche) brusqueness is a chance for Molly to flex her domme muscles more than a sign of overwork. 

But it would be misguided to begrudge the show its creative license, and specifically its refusal to fixate on the bureaucratic nightmare that is being gravely ill in America, when so many of its enormous swings connect. Mirroring Molly’s openness, Rosenstock, Meriwether, and Williams explode clichéd depictions of common human experiences that are perennially misrepresented in pop culture, from BDSM to the process of “active dying.” The dialogue is equally sharp in funny moments (Molly longs to be “one of those fully realized women who have sex while wearing jewelry”) and painful ones (Gail: “I’m the one who let him ruin you.” Molly: “I’m not ruined!”). Nikki’s perspective is a crucial foil to Molly’s; we sense the effort she has to put into being the kind of person a terminally ill friend can rely on. In giving the love between these two singular women the same emotional weight as any ill-fated romance, Dying for Sex becomes the rare cancer story that celebrates life in all its perverse idiosyncracies without shrinking from the specter of death.

source https://time.com/7271754/dying-for-sex-review/

Why Prince Harry Resigned From His African Charity

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Prince Harry’s surprising resignation from an African charity he co-founded in memory of his mother, Princess Diana, came this week amid allegations of bullying, harassment, sexism and racism made by the organization’s chairperson against unnamed board members.

Harry announced his resignation in a joint statement with Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, who he co-founded the Sentebale youth-focused charity with in 2006. The princes were patrons of Sentebale and weren’t on the board of trustees.

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They said they were quitting in support of the trustees, who left after a dispute with chairperson Sophie Chandauka.

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Sentebale works in the southern African nations of Lesotho and Botswana and was started to help young people affected by AIDS after Harry spent part of a gap year in 2004 working at an orphanage in Lesotho for children whose parents died of the disease.

Sentebale means “don’t forget me” in the Sesotho language, and Harry and Seeiso set it up in memory of their mothers.

Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997. Seeiso’s mother, the former queen of Lesotho, died in 2003.

What Harry has said

In their statement, Harry and Seeiso said they were in shock at the developments at the charity, where the trustees had asked Chandauka to step down. She refused and filed papers at a British court to prevent her from being removed.

The princes said the trustees were acting in the best interests of Sentebale and had now resigned, and the breakdown in relationships was “devastating.”

“What’s transpired is unthinkable,” the princes said.

Allegations of sexism and racism

Chandauka, a Zimbabwean corporate lawyer, said in her own statement that she had “dared to blow the whistle” about poor governance, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, sexism and racism at the charity, and said there had been a cover-up. Her allegations appeared to be directed at the trustees, but she didn’t name anyone or give any details.

The trustees who resigned included Mark Dyer, a longtime mentor of Harry’s. One of the other trustees, Kelello Lerotholi, told British television channel Sky News that Chandauka’s allegations were surprising and “there was never even a hint” of misconduct by trustees.

Chandauka said that she had reported some of the board members to the U.K.’s Charity Commission, where Sentebale is registered. A spokesperson at Sentebale didn’t respond to a request for more information on who Chandauka’s allegations were specifically directed at or what they involved.

What does Sentebale do?

Sentebale has a special place for Harry and continued some of the work Princess Diana did by supporting AIDS charities and trying to remove stigmas around the disease. Diana visited South Africa to promote AIDS awareness in March 1997, five months before she died.

Sentebale was initially set up to help vulnerable children and young people affected by AIDS with health care services, education and vocational training. Lesotho, a poor mountainous kingdom surrounded by South Africa, is one of the worst-affected countries in the world by HIV.

Harry’s charity had recently evolved to also address issues of youth health, wealth and climate resilience in southern Africa under Chandauka, and the future direction of the charity was a point of disagreement among its leadership, according to British media reports.

Harry visited Sentebale in Lesotho as recently as October, when he spent an evening around a campfire speaking with young people and said the charity was building a force of young advocates. On the same trip, Lesotho Prime Minister Sam Matekane said the country would always be Harry’s “second home.”

source https://time.com/7272165/what-to-know-after-prince-harry-resigned-from-his-african-charity/

Why Climate Change is a National Security Threat

The U.S. intelligence community published its 2025 annual threat assessment on March 25. Missing from the document was any mention of climate change—marking the first time in over a decade that the topic has not appeared on the list.

“What I focused this annual threat assessment on, and the [Intelligence Committee] focused this threat assessment on, are the most extreme and critical direct threats to our national security,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in response to questioning on the removal during a Senate Intelligence Committee. 

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Gabbard said she “didn’t recall” instructing the intelligence community to avoid mentioning climate change in the report. But the change comes amid the Trump Administration’s continued push for a deprioritization of climate change in the federal agenda. 

Read more: Here Are All of Trump’s Major Moves to Dismantle Climate Action

The U.S. government has considered climate change a global security threat for at least three decades. Academic reports at the Naval War College included environmental stressors and climate change in the 1980s, says Mark Nevitt, associate professor of law at Emory University. On the federal level, climate change was first acknowledged as a national security threat by President George W. Bush in August 1991, and the U.S. national security community first listed the issue as a threat in 2008. 

The issue has typically been included on the annual threat assessment list because of its destabilizing impact—both domestically and abroad. “The annual threat assessment is projecting forward about where the areas of concern and the areas of competition [are], and where the U.S. national security sector should be focusing its attention,” says Nevitt. “Because climate change is just destabilizing different parts of the world, through extreme weather, through droughts, through sea level rise…the intelligence community wants to be ready for future conflicts and future areas of competition.”

Climate change is often referred to as a “threat multiplier” by the intelligence community, because it aggravates already existing problems, while also creating new ones. 

“It takes things that we were already worried about, like extremism or terrorism, and exacerbates the scale or nature of those threats,” says Scott Moore, practice professor of political science, with a focus on climate and security, at the University of Pennsylvania. “If you have these intensified climate change impacts, they place stress on things like food systems, and worsen already existing tensions within countries.”

Climate migration, for example, is on the rise around the world—more than half of new internal displacements within countries registered in 2023 were caused by weather related disasters, according to the Migration Data Portal. 

“Mass migration leads to a lot of political and social tensions as well as border issues,” says Karen Seto, professor of geography and urbanization science at the Yale School of the Environment. “That … could affect national security, because it could destabilize an entire region.” One study from the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that extreme weather is contributing to migration into the United States through the southern border—with more migrants from agricultural regions in Mexico settling in the United States following extreme drought. 

Such displacement can have major impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods, experts say—especially in already fragile regions. “If you have, for example, a really extreme and intensified drought in a country in which extremist ideologies are percolating, these climate change impacts may make it more likely that people are going to stop farming, or might migrate to cities where they may face difficult employment prospects, be socially dislocated and may be more vulnerable to extremism or engaging in some type of violence,” says Moore.   

On a domestic level, considering climate change helps the U.S. military ensure that infrastructure is built to withstand extreme weather events—and respond to national disasters both domestically and abroad. “You need the National Guard, the Coast Guard, the U.S. military, to basically help out their community when there’s an extreme weather event,” says Nevitt. As extreme weather events intensify with climate change this could strain military resources and put more lives at risk if the military does not prepare to address the threat.

Infrastructure within the U.S., like energy and internet grids, also need to be fortified. If regions were to lose power in the case of an extreme weather event, the networks could be vulnerable to attack. 

“Our energy grid is highly at risk, and we’ve seen wildfires happening across the country, and so these could again be threat multipliers,” says Seto. “I think the national security risk is that we are not ready to respond to any threats from foreign agents that may take advantage of the weaknesses that we might have.”

Showing that the climate crisis is a priority is also necessary to maintain the United States’s diplomatic strength—especially in regions that see climate change as a top concern. “Other countries, in particular countries that are very significant for the U.S. defense posture, like the Pacific Island countries, really care about climate change a lot. They want to hear what the United States is willing to do to help them deal with climate change,” says Moore. “And so when you have the instructions to essentially ignore climate change, or in an extreme version almost censor mention of climate change, that’s going to have a harmful effect on diplomatic engagement with some pretty important countries.”

And experts say that removing climate change from the list—and deprioritizing the issue writ large—is only going to leave the U.S. more vulnerable. “This is going to make the administration and national security sector less nimble, because they might not have the people, the plans, the policy, [and] capacity in place when disaster inevitably strikes,” warns Nevitt. “You can’t just wish climate change away.” 

source https://time.com/7272152/climate-change-national-security-threat/