HBO’s The Last of Us Is in Danger of Becoming a Victim of Its Own Success

The second season of HBO’s The Last of Us offers plenty of the beautiful ruins, shocking violence, and baroque mushroom monsters fans have come to expect from the hit series. But when it comes to the ideas that are supposed to make the show more than just a video-game adaptation—just as they differentiated the game from so many other post-apocalyptic adventures—the pivotal moment comes at a council meeting in the relatively stable enclave of Jackson, Wyoming. Debating how to respond to an attack on their community, one resident objects to risking lives to avenge deaths. “Forgive and be forgiven,” says another. “That’s what separates us from the raiders and the murderers.” Someone else counters that if there aren’t consequences for messing with Jackson, it will remain vulnerable to malicious outsiders.

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The show is a parable of self vs. society that, in its first season, used an America reduced to Cordyceps-infected rubble to interrogate the ethics of survival. At its center was the tender relationship between Joel (Pedro Pascal), a cutthroat smuggler who lost his daughter in the fungal frenzy, and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), the mysteriously immune 14-year-old he was hired by a pro-democratic faction called the Fireflies to transport to a lab searching for a cure in Salt Lake City. But when they arrived, Joel realized that the Fireflies would have to kill Ellie to conduct their research. So he rescued her, not just murdering several Firefly soldiers and a doctor in the process, but also foreclosing the possibility of a cure that could’ve saved humanity. Love didn’t save the day. Quite the opposite. It metastasized into a form of selfishness so toxic as to deepen the misery of a desperate world. The flagrant unfairness of Joel’s choice, which he made on behalf of an unconscious Ellie and then lied to her about, was infuriating. So it makes sense that, in the inferior second season of a show whose thematic depth has, in practice, rarely matched its technical virtuosity, The Last of Us would home in on the idea of justice.

Premiering April 13, the season opens with a reminder of how, as they hiked home to Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) in Jackson, Joel doubled down on the lies he told Ellie. He swears that there were already many immune people at the lab; that the Fireflies had, by then, given up on finding a cure anyway. Meanwhile, back among the computer-generated giraffes of Salt Lake City, a young woman named Abby—a new character played by Kaitlyn Dever—vows to avenge the fallen Fireflies. “When we kill him,” she says, referring to Joel, “we kill him slowly.”

Five years later, Joel is still very much alive. He and Ellie have settled down in their own house in Jackson, though she lives in the garage following a rift between them whose cause we won’t learn for quite a while. Now 19, she’s one of the brave souls charged with defending the settlement’s perimeter from the clickers still wandering the countryside. She has a buddy, Dina (Isabela Merced), who just broke up with her annoyingly upstanding boyfriend, Jesse (Young Mazino from BEEF), and is hinting that she might see Ellie as more than a friend. As the distance separating surrogate father and daughter widens, Joel does something that no character in the history of television has ever more urgently needed to do—he goes to therapy. Yet the only therapist in Jackson, Catherine O’Hara’s spiky Gail, has her own baggage with him.

There isn’t much else I can reveal about what happens this season without violating HBO’s extensive spoiler list. Suffice to say that the characters will soon have more to worry about than the interpersonal dramas of Jackson. An adventure will inevitably ensue. Beyond Joel and Abby, questions of justice and vengeance emerge around a conflict between two militant groups (one led by Jeffrey Wright’s enigmatic Isaac Dixon) who do barbaric things to one another, though the aims of each side and the origins of their war remain murky. Does revenge constitute justice? Or is it always better to forgive and forget? If a person has done something so bad that they deserve to die, do they also deserve to suffer? Is there anything redeeming about being the kind of person who will protect the people they love, no matter how many others they hurt? 

When the season is at its best, creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann seem invested in whether Ellie, who everyone keeps saying is so similar to Joel, is doomed to repeat his dangerous moral errors. But those moments are few and far between. Most of the time, you could sum up the show’s take on justice—one it relentlessly hammers home—with the chestnut (often attributed to Gandhi) “an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind.”

Season 2 feels insubstantial in other ways, too. Probably because its seven episodes constitute only a partial adaptation of The Last of Us Part II, whereas the nine-part first season covered the entire original game, the story is stretched too thin. Development of apparently crucial new characters like Abby and Isaac is minimal. While Season 1 had a few dazzling standalone episodes that broadened and deepened the show’s world, this follow up is oddly workmanlike; one flashback episode plays like a pale imitation of those highlights. And the finale is so abrupt and unsatisfying, it took me a while to realize it was the finale. In that sense, The Last of Us’s sophomore outing reminds me of Squid Game’s glacially paced second season, which ends just as the action is ramping up, in what comes off as a ploy to mine an international smash for maximum content. Both shows are in danger of becoming victims of their own success.

Not that The Last of Us has ever been, for all the breathless praise it’s received, a flawless work of art. It’s true that the performances are excellent and the production design astounding. These elements remain the show’s biggest assets in Season 2, even if the attenuated plot restricts the visual inventiveness somewhat. While her character is a bit of a dream girl, Merced (Alien: Romulus) makes a charming addition; Dever, Wright, and O’Hara are predictably wonderful, though I wish we got to see more of them. Amid goofy fan service like Twisted Metal and The Witcher, it’s still the best video-game adaptation on TV. Yet to pretend that The Last of Us completely transcends its original medium would be to ignore the hole at the center of the show where insight and complexity and rich supporting characters should be. What fill out the episodes instead are extended zombie-battle scenes and long, silent sequences where people explore gorgeously decaying spaces. At those moments, you might as well be watching someone play a video game.

source https://time.com/7273394/the-last-of-us-season-2-review-hbo/

The Myth of the Male Breadwinner

Women contribute most to society when they raise their children full-time, while the main role of men is to “protect and provide”—and this is the way it’s always been. That, at least, is the impression given by current trends, from “tradwives” to “alpha” males to, even, proclamations made by members of the Trump administration themselves (a mention of “childless cat ladies” comes to mind).

“Just to be sexist, and put it in sexist terms, women think of a man as a provider,” Joe Rogan said on his wildly popular podcast in 2023. “There’s this, like, evolutionary aspect.” In March 2025, parenting author Erica Komisar argued that mothers should stay at home for at least the first three years of their children’s lives, commenting on The Diary of a CEO podcast that, “from an evolutionary perspective,” this type of caregiving was standard.

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The problem? It’s untrue. As the evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Hrdy put it to me, “Except for blips in history, men have never really been breadwinners, supporting a woman at home.”

Even now, globally, “the male breadwinner–female homemaker division of labour is… unusual,” writes evolutionary behavioral scientist Rebecca Sear. “Childcare is not the exclusive preserve of women in most societies and, even more so, productive labour is not the exclusive preserve of men.”

That includes during our hunter-gatherer days, which account for some 95% of human evolutionary history. The idea of “man the hunter, woman the caregiver,” widely popularized by (male) anthropologists in the 1960s, is, Hrdy notes, a massively “mistaken trope.”

There’s growing evidence that, in many hunter-gatherer cultures, women hunted. How common this was is debated, but it may not matter—because either way, women were key in provisioning food for their community. In fact, in several foraging societies in sub-Saharan Africa, often considered the closest likenesses to our shared evolutionary past, women’s average contribution to their community’s calorie intake range between 60 and 80%. These societies could survive without the sporadic acquisition of meat, anthropologists note. But they could not survive without the tubers and other plants reliably, and consistently, dug up or picked by women.

It’s true that women have historically combined caregiving and work duties, especially in infancy: think foraging with a baby on the back. But they also had a lot of help. Take central Africa’s Efe society in the Ituri Rainforest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At 18 weeks old, Efe infants already spend 60% of their time being cared for by someone other than their mother; they are passed from one caregiver to the next more than eight times per hour. While the Efe are on the extreme end, “alloparents”—nonbiological parents—are on hand across foraging societies, so a mother can focus on acquiring food, water, or firewood. As Hrdy argued 16 years ago in her book Mothers and Others, communal care may have been the very foundation for how modern humans came to be. And it didn’t just mean mothers and fathers had help caring for their children—it also meant they had help provisioning them. In other words, the idea that any family unit had to rely entirely on a mother and father in isolation for breadwinning (never mind a father alone) is a myth.

What changed? First, the move to farming. As nomadic societies settled and began to grow their own food, the average number of children per mother rose sharply, even doubling, tethering women more to caretaking responsibilities. Divisions of labor sharpened, with women’s work increasingly taking place within the home. Then came Christianity, with its Biblical injunctions that man must provide for their families or be “worse than an infidel.” (Women, meanwhile, should be “keepers at home.”)

Still, more women labored in farming communities than you might think. In medieval Europe, “peasant women worked alongside men doing almost exactly the same jobs in the fields,” medieval history Eleanor Janega noted previously. In cities, they worked as servants, nannies, craftspeople, or bookkeepers for the family business.

Read More: Medieval Women Were a Vital Part of the Workforce. We Can Learn from Them

Even as the Industrial Revolution turned society upside-down, women continued to work outside of the home. (And, it goes without saying, then, as now, they worked hard inside the home, too—whether by taking on paid work, like sewing, being lodgers, or handling unpaid domestic duties.) At factories, they were seen as such attractive employees, often because owners could pay them lower wages than men, that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to limit women’s work hours. Female employment also was kept down through policies like “marriage bars,” which banned married women from paid work. Even so, women often sought paid work outside of the home. By 1900, the census reported that 1 in 5 U.S. workers were women. Yet actual numbers were likely far higher, given that paid work was narrowly defined to be work that, among other criteria, someone chiefly depended for support—unlikely for many married women—not to mention that the stigma against working women meant that few families were likely to report this work accurately to a census taker.

Meanwhile, women educated themselves in great numbers: by 1930, around 4 in 10 students graduating with a bachelor’s or master’s degree were female.

So while World War Two’s “Rosie the Riveter” might have been new, “Rosie the worker,” even “Rosie the provider,” was not. When the war ended, considerable cultural, economic, even legal efforts were put into convincing women that they should stay at home. Yet women still worked. Even through the “happy housewife” decade of the 1950s, female labor participation continued to rise.

Today, two-thirds of U.S. mothers work outside the home, in almost equal measures across party lines.

“We developed this expectation of ‘man as breadwinner’ very recently in our evolution. And it’s bad for everyone,” says Melissa Hogenboom, author of the forthcoming book Breadwinners. “It is terrible for female equality. But it’s bad for men too. The pressure for fathers to work long hours is harmful for their relationships, their children and their marriages—and for their mental health.”

By foreclosing on the possibility that men can be equal, never mind primary, caregivers, our “man the provider” trope has also done fathers a disservice. Much has been made of recent findings that mothers’ brains change in pregnancy. But, as Hrdy explores in her latest book, Father Time, men’s brains and hormones also change—and the more involved a father is, the more pronounced these changes are.

That we aren’t tapping into this caregiving potential of men is hurting them. “It’s no accident that a lot of men feel unneeded, cast aside, that three out of five deaths of despair from drug addiction and suicide are men,” Hrdy says. “There is a vast untapped potential for caring in men, and by expressing it, they may find new sources of meaning.”

To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a mother raising children full-time; for many families, it can be ideal. Implying it should be the standard for all because it is the way it “always” was, however, is wrong—literally, and because it holds everyone back from their full potential: both women and men.

source https://time.com/7275453/male-breadwinner-myth-essay/

The Science Behind the Return of the Dire Wolf

Nature gave the world the dire wolf 2.6 million years ago, and then, through the hard hand of extinction, took it away—some 10,000 to 13,000 years ago when the last of the species died out. Now, the dire wolf is back, brought bounding into the 21st century by Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based biotech company. On April 8, Colossal announced it had used both cloning and gene-editing based on two ancient samples of dire wolf DNA to birth three pups, the six-month-old males Romulus and Remus and the two-month-old female Khaleesi.

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“Our team took DNA from a 13,000 year old tooth and a 72,000 year old skull and made healthy dire wolf puppies,” said Colossal CEO Ben Lamm in a statement that accompanied the announcement of the births. “It was once said, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Today, our team gets to unveil some of the magic they are working on.”

Read more: The Return of the Dire Wolf

So what, exactly, does that work involve?

Traditional cloning—the kind that famously resulted in Dolly the sheep in 1996, and has since been used to create clones of pigs, cats, deer, horses, mice, goats, gray wolves, dogs and more—is a relatively straightforward, if invasive, process. First, a single cell is taken from a tissue sample of the animal to be cloned. That cell’s nucleus—which contains the individual’s entire genetic code—is then extracted and inserted into a donor ovum from the same species whose own nucleus has been removed. The ovum carrying the new genetic material is allowed to develop into an embryo and then transferred into the womb of a surrogate, which ultimately gives birth to an exact duplicate of the animal from which the donor cell was taken.

Colossal says its dire wolf work had key differences. Scientists first analyzed the genome of the dire wolves contained in the ancient tooth and skull. Comparing those genomes to that of the gray wolf—the dire wolf’s closest living relative—they identified 20 differences in 14 genes that account for the dire wolf’s distinguishing characteristics, including its greater size, white coat, wider head, larger teeth, more powerful shoulders, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining. 

Next, they harvested endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of bloodvessels, from the bloodstreams of living gray wolves—a less invasive procedure than taking a tissue sample—and edited the 14 genes in their nuclei to express those 20 dire wolf traits. This is trickier than it seems, since genes often have multiple effects, not all of them good. For example, as the company explains in its press release, the dire wolf has three genes that code for its light coat, but in gray wolves they can lead to deafness and blindness. The Colossal team thus engineered two other genes that shut down black and red pigmentation, leading to the dire wolf’s characteristic light color without causing any harm in the edited gray wolf genome.

Once this was finished, the edited nuclei were next extracted from the cells and inserted into denucleated gray wolf ova. The ova were left to grow into embryos and 45 were transferred into the wombs of two domestic hound mixes. One embryo in each surrogate mother took hold, and after 65 days of gestation, Rolulus and Remus were born. A few months later, the procedure was repeated with a third surrogate who ultimately gave birth to Khaleesi.  All three births were conducted by scheduled cesarean section to minimize the chances of injury during delivery. No surrogate dogs had a miscarriage or stillbirth during the process.

Colossal plans to use similar techniques to bring back the Ice Age woolly mammoth in 2028, editing living cell nuclei from Asian elephants—the mammoth’s closest living kin—to express mammoth traits preserved in nearly 60 sets of Ice Age remains. In early March, the company announced that it had successfully tested its methods in laboratory mice, producing 38 woolly mouse pups which bear the mammoth’s signature shaggy coat. Now it says it’s on track to have a surrogate elephant pregnancy in 2026 (elephants take nearly two years to gestate).

Other work in Colossal’s labs involves not bringing back extinct animals but attempting to save endangered ones. Endangered species can suffer from several issues, including a lack of genetic diversity—known as a “genetic bottleneck.” The relatively few animals left repeatedly mate with one another, and the inbreeding results in birth defects, sterility, and health problems proliferating through the species. Colossal has targeted some species with these problems, and is working to genetically edit more diversity into their populations.

One such project involves the all-but vanished pink pigeon. The pink pigeon species is indigenous to the island nation of Mauritius and once thrived there, until it lost its habitat as more and more of the island was given over to sugar plantations. Humanity’s introduction of rats and cats—which attack pigeon nests—drove the bird’s numbers down to just ten individuals. With the help of captive breeding programs, more than 650 pigeons were hatched and raised and released back on Mauritius. But with so few birds from which the captive population was bred, the species is experiencing high levels of infertility because of the genetic bottleneck.

To get around that, the scientists first tap into the fertilized egg of a pink pigeon and extract what are known as primordial germ cells (PGCs)—the cells that eventually become sperm and egg. In the lab, scientists then genetically edit the PGC genome to introduce greater genetic diversity—though at the moment Colossal is still studying the pink pigeon alleles and doesn’t yet know what traits that more-diverse coding will produce. Then, using the fertilized egg of a common chicken—which is far more plentiful than a pink pigeon egg—they inject the PGCs into the embryo. Once there, the cells travel to the gonads and create an embryo that, after it hatches, grows, and reaches sexual maturity, will produce not chicken chicks, but pigeon chicks. Eventually, those pigeons would be released into the wild population, producing genetically diverse young and helping to fortify the species.

None of this is easy and none of it comes cheap—though with a valuation of $10.2 billion, Colossal has the resources to pursue the science without too much concern about the price. And the company is not going it alone. It is partnering with conservation organizations such the American Wolf Foundation, The Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, Save the Elephants, and Conservation Nation. The company worked with the indigenous MHA Nation tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) on the dire wolf project, and the tribes have expressed a desire to have dire wolves live on their lands in North Dakota. Colossal also says it’s in advanced negotiations with the government of North Carolina to use its conservation strategies to help strengthen the endangered red wolf population there.

The company also believes that the new EPC cloning technique will allow them to save blood samples of existing species in a biobank as a hedge against their ever becoming endangered in the future. Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, the most conspicuous of the animals to emerge from Colossal’s labs, will surely not be the last.

source https://time.com/7275439/science-behind-dire-wolf-return/

Trump and Netanyahu Set to Meet Again on Monday to Discuss Gaza, Tariffs, and More

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — President Donald Trump plans to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday in what would be their second White House sit-down since Trump’s return to office.

The visit, confirmed by a White House official and Netanyahu’s office Saturday, comes as Israel deploys troops in a new security corridor across Gaza to pressure the Hamas militant group. Netanyahu’s defense minister has said Israel will seize large areas of the territory and add them to its so-called security zones.

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Last month, Israel shattered the cease-fire with a surprise bombardment in Gaza after trying to pressure Hamas to accept proposed new terms for the cease-fire, a move supported by the White House. Hundreds of Palestinians have since been killed.

Israel has pledged to escalate the war in Gaza until Hamas returns the remaining hostages seized in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that sparked the war, disarms and leaves the territory. Israel also has halted all supplies of food, fuel and humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Netanyahu’s office in a statement on social media said he and Trump would discuss “the tariff issue, the efforts to return our hostages, Israel-Turkey relations, the Iranian threat and the battle against the International Criminal Court.” Israel faces a 17% tariff.

Netanyahu is wanted by the court for alleged crimes against humanity in Gaza. The U.S. is not a member of the court.

In February, Netanyahu became the first foreign leader invited to the White House during Trump’s second term. Their meeting focused on Israel’s war with Hamas and the next steps as a cease-fire deal took hold.

At a joint news conference afterward, Trump made the surprise proposal that displaced Palestinians in Gaza be permanently resettled outside the territory and the United States take “ownership” in redeveloping the area into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Palestinians objected to leaving their homeland, and Arab nations and rights groups sharply criticized the idea.

That February meeting gave Netanyahu a chance to remind the world of the Trump administration’s support for Israel, defend the conduct of the war and distract from political pressures back home.

Those pressures have only grown as Israelis protest both the lack of a deal to bring remaining hostages home from Gaza and Netanyahu’s moves to fire the head of the country’s domestic security agency and its attorney general. He also faces calls to accept responsibility for his role in failing to prevent the Oct. 7. attack.

In a statement Saturday, relatives of hostages held in Gaza pleaded with Trump to “please use all your power to pressure Netanyahu to end this war and bring our hostages back now.”

“We are addressing President Trump: Netanyahu is lying when he says that military pressure will bring back the abductees. The only way to quickly return all the abductees is to end the war and return them all in one fell swoop,” Ifat Calderon, aunt of hostage Ofer Calderon, said in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Hamas says it will only release the remaining 59 hostages — 24 of whom are believed to be alive — in exchange for the release of more Palestinian prisoners, a lasting cease-fire and an Israeli pullout from Gaza.

The Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Some 251 hostages were taken, most of them since released in cease-fire agreements and other deals.

More than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza as part of Israel’s offensive, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t say whether those killed are civilians or combatants. Israel says it has killed around 20,000 militants, without providing evidence.

Meanwhile, police arrested two of Netanyahu’s close associates this week on suspicion of accepting money from Qatar to promote a positive image of the Gulf Arab state in Israel. Qatar is a key mediator for Hamas in its negotiations with Israel but denies backing the militant group. Netanyahu says the case is baseless.

The prime minister is also the subject of a long-running corruption trial and regularly rails against a “deep state” that he alleges is out to get him.

Trump says the first foreign trip of his second administration will include stops in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and possibly the United Arab Emirates, and “other places.” The trip could come as soon as May. Trump has said he wants to reward Saudi Arabia for its investment in the U.S. and that all three Gulf countries would be making commitments to creating jobs in the U.S. during his trip.

—Associated Press writers Natalie Melzer in Jerusalem, Darlene Superville in Washington and Cara Anna contributed to this report.

source https://time.com/7275319/trump-netanyahu-white-house-meeting-gaza-tariffs-foreign-relations/

The U.S. Has Revoked Visas for South Sudanese While Civil War Threatens at Home

The United States once cheered the creation of South Sudan as an independent nation. Now the Trump administration has abruptly revoked the visas of all South Sudanese, saying the country’s government has failed to accept the return of its citizens “in a timely manner.”

The decision means South Sudanese could be returned to a nation again on the brink of civil war or unable to seek the U.S. as a haven.

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There was no immediate response from South Sudan’s government, which has struggled since independence from Sudan in 2011 to deliver some of the basic services of a state. Years of conflict have left the country of over 11 million people heavily reliant on aid that has been hit hard by another Trump administration decision — sweeping cuts in foreign assistance.

Here’s a look at South Sudan, whose people had been granted temporary protected status by the U.S. because of insecurity at home. That status expires on May 3.

A deadly divide

The euphoria of independence turned to civil war two years later, when rival factions backing President Salva Kiir and deputy Riek Machar opened fire on each other in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, in 2013.

The two men’s tensions have been so much at the heart of the country’s insecurity that Pope Francis once took the extraordinary step of kneeling to kiss their feet in one of his pleas for lasting peace.

Five years of civil war killed hundreds of thousands of people. A peace deal reached in 2018 has been fragile and not fully implemented, to the frustration of the U.S. and other international backers. Notably, South Sudan still hasn’t held a long-delayed presidential election, and Kiir remains in power.

His rivalry with Machar, compounded by ethnic divisions, has simmered through multiple attempts to return Machar as a vice president. Machar has long regarded himself as destined for the presidency, citing a prophecy years ago by a seer from his ethnic group.

Late last month, the threat of war returned. Machar was arrested and his allies in the government and the military were detained following a major escalation: A militia from Machar’s ethnic group had seized an army garrison upcountry. The government responded with airstrikes. Dozens of people were killed. A United Nations helicopter was attacked.

Following the arrest, Machar’s opposition political party announced South Sudan’s peace deal is effectively over.

“Let’s not mince words: What we are seeing is darkly reminiscent of the 2013 and 2016 civil wars, which killed 400,000 people,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned days ago.

Some Western countries have closed their embassies there while others, including the U.S., have reduced embassy staff.

A country in disarray

South Sudan’s government has long relied on the country’s oil production. But little of that money has reached the people, in part because of official corruption. Civil servants at times go months without being paid.

Conflict in neighboring Sudan has affected landlocked South Sudan’s exports of oil. Refugees spilling over from Sudan have added to instability at home.

Climate shocks including flooding have caused mass displacement and closed schools. South Sudan’s health and education systems were already among the weakest in the world. Aid organizations have run or supported many. Now that support network has been hit by sweeping cuts in U.S. aid.

The Trump administration’s announcement Saturday evening revoking visas for all South Sudanese with immediate effect is in sharp contrast to Washington’s past warm embrace as its rebel leaders — including Kiir and Machar — fought for independence.

Educational and other opportunities for South Sudanese have been available in the U.S. for years. On Saturday, hours after the State Department announcement, a freshman from South Sudan was in Duke’s starting lineup at the men’s NCAA basketball tournament Final Four. Duke spokesman Frank Tramble told The Associated Press the university was aware of the announcement and was “working expeditiously to understand any implications for Duke students.”

It was not immediately clear how many South Sudanese hold U.S. visas or how American authorities will follow up. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said on social media the dispute centers on one person, certified by South Sudan’s embassy in Washington, that Juba has refused to accept. That person was not named.

No new visas will be issued, the U.S. said, and “we will be prepared to review these actions when South Sudan is in full cooperation.”

—Associated Press sports writer Jim Vertuno in San Antonio, Texas, contributed.

source https://time.com/7275312/us-revokes-visas-for-south-sudanese-civil-war-threatens-at-home/

What to Know About the Severe Storms and Flash Flooding Devastating Parts of the U.S.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Parts of the South and Midwest, still reeling from violent storms, tornadoes and flooding that have killed more than a dozen people, face new flooding and tornado warnings that forecasters said could last for days.

Severe thunderstorms have swept through a swath of the country with a population of 2.3 million people from northeast Texas through Arkansas and into southeast Missouri.

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Read More: How to Best Prepare For a Storm, According to the Experts

What has happened?

In Kentucky, more than 500 roads were closed by Sunday because of the floods and mudslides. Two people were killed, including a 9-year-old boy who was swept away as he walked to a school bus stop.

The downtown area of Hopkinsville, Kentucky — a city of 31,000 residents 72 miles (116 kilometers) northwest of Nashville, Tennessee — was submerged.

The first wave of storms killed at least five people in Tennessee and one each in Missouri and Indiana on Wednesday and Thursday.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee called the devastation in his state “enormous” and said it was too early to know whether there were more deaths as searches continued.

There was massive destruction in Lake City in eastern Arkansas, where homes were flattened and cars were flipped and tossed into trees.

More than 300 tornado warnings were issued by the National Weather Service since the tornado outbreak began early Wednesday, and new warnings followed overnight in Alabama and Mississippi, along with flash flood warnings in Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. The number of tornado warnings eclipsed those issued during last month’s deadly outbreak in Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri and other states.

Not all tornado warnings involve an actual tornado, and it was too early to know how many were actually produced by the current outbreak.

The severe weather also caused travel headaches.

Hundreds of flights have been canceled and more than 6,400 flights delayed, according to FlightAware.com, which reported 74 cancellations and 478 delays of U.S. flights early Sunday. The flooding also led to road closures in Kentucky and southern Illinois, among other places.

The severe weather hit at a time when nearly half the National Weather Service’s forecast offices have 20% vacancy rates — twice that of a decade ago — according to data obtained by The Associated Press.

What’s causing this wave of storms?

Forecasters attributed the violent weather to warm temperatures, an unstable atmosphere, strong wind shear and abundant moisture streaming from the Gulf.

The prolonged deluge, which could dump more than a foot (30 centimeters) of rain over a four-day period, “is an event that happens once in a generation to once in a lifetime,” the National Weather Service said.

What’s next?

Private forecasting company AccuWeather said northeastern Arkansas, southeastern Missouri, southern Illinois, western Kentucky and northwestern Tennessee needed to prepare for a catastrophic risk from flash flooding.

“This is a rare and dangerous atmospheric setup,” said Jonathan Porter, AccuWeather chief meteorologist.

Forecasters have also warned of major disruptions to shipping and supply chains. Shipping giant FedEx, for example, has a massive facility in the danger area, in Memphis Tennessee. Barge transportation on the lower Mississippi River could also be affected.

Water rescue teams and sandbags were being set up across the region in anticipation of flooding, and authorities warned people to take the threat of rising water seriously and to not drive through water.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said flooding had reached record levels in many communities.

“Kentuckians and communities have been affected across the state, and teams are working around the clock to support them,” he said Sunday on social media platform X.

—Associated Press writers George Walker IV in Selmer, Tennessee; John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio; Jeff Martin in Atlanta; Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee; Jonathan Mattise in Nashville, Tennessee, Seth Borenstein in Washington; Bruce Schreiner in Shelbyville, Kentucky; and Sophia Tareen in Chicago, contributed.

source https://time.com/7275281/us-weather-severe-storms-flash-flooding-midwest-south/

Is Your 401(k) Affected by Trump’s Tariffs? Here’s What to Know and What You Should Do

The U.S. and global stock markets have been hit hard since President Donald Trump announced his latest tariffs on April 2. The so-called “Liberation Day” saw the introduction of blanket 10% tariffs on all imported goods, and additional import taxes placed on 60 other countries.

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In the worst week for U.S. stocks since the markets crashed in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dow Jones closed on Friday 2,000 points down, the S&P Index plunged 6%, and Nasdaq dipped almost 6%.

The volatility of the market has risen significantly, causing concern from investors and businesses alike.

There has also been a surge in concerns being voiced by people worried about the impact on their 401(k), as many have noticed a dip in their investments.

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Here’s what you need to know about how the economic turmoil resulting from Trump’s tariffs will affect your 401(k) and what you should do moving forward.

How is your 401(k) affected by the tariffs?

A 401(k) is an employer-sponsored retirement plan where a person has the option to make contributions that are deducted from their paycheck. In some cases, the company will match your contributions up to a certain percentage of your salary.

The value of 401(k) accounts is closely tied to fluctuations in the stock markets, as the portfolio allows you to invest in assets which are directly tied to the market’s performance. As such, when the stock market fluctuates, so too does a 401(k). With a 401(k), you carry all the risk because the investment decisions are yours.

With such extreme dips in the stock market, some Americans are seeing their retirement savings take an intense hit.

Remarking on the turbulence, Teresa Fort, associate professor of business administration at Dartmouth, says: “The U.S. market has outperformed everywhere for the last couple of decades, but I don’t know if it’s clear that this is going to continue… the entire world economic order has been shifted, and people are going to need to rethink what [their] optimal allocations should be.”

On April 3, when aboard Air Force One, Trump was asked by a reporter about the rising concerns among Americans and whether he has checked his own 401(k) since his tariff announcements stunned the stock market.

Trump said: “I haven’t checked my 401(k).” The President also doubled down on his belief that though the markets look bad now, his tariffs will ultimately be a good thing for the economy. “I think our markets are going to boom; we’ve got to give it a little chance,” he said.

The President once again shared his optimism about the economy in an update he posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Saturday, April 5. “This is an economic revolution, and we will win. Hang tough, it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic. We will Make America Great Again,” he said.

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What do experts advise you should do about your 401(k)?

Brad Clark, founder and CEO of Solomon Financial, says that this is not the time to panic and take your money out of savings. “It’s scary,” he admits, but the response to fear, in his professional opinion, is to stay the course—especially if you are a younger investor preparing for future retirement.

“When you’re flying somewhere and you’re in the worst turbulence you’ve ever been in, all you can think is, ‘I’ve just got to get off this plane,’” says Clark. “But the plane was built to handle this. That’s kind of like your portfolio.”

For people two or three years from retirement, Clark says their portfolios should already be less risky, and they should not have full market exposure to their investments.

However, for those who are still 10 or more years away from retirement, there could be positives to note. “What a great buying opportunity,” Clark argues. “This is how the Warren Buffetts of the world make money. Greedy when everyone else is fearful, and fearful when everyone else is greedy.”

Clark’s advice to those people—who are a decade or more away from retirement— is to “continue to invest like you’ve always invested,” and he is confident that this will pay off in the long run.

In a column for the Washington Post, personal finance columnist and author Michelle Singletary echoed this sentiment. “If you’re in your 20s, 30s, or early 40s, don’t let what’s happening now scare you away from the stock market. Keep investing,” she said.

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Laurence Kotlikoff, professor of economics at Boston University, takes a more cautious approach for people of all ages. 

He recommends not investing in anything risky now, instead starting back from a safe investment position and eventually building your investment portfolio back into something more risky. By starting conservatively and building up, Kotlikoff says that investors can save themselves from pain later on.

“There’s no reason to believe that the market will reverse itself,” he says. “Leave only in the market what you can afford to lose and don’t spend outside of it.”

He also recommends people consider doing what he and his wife did soon after Trump’s Inauguration Day. In preparation of potential market fluctuations, they built a TIPS ladder, which is a portfolio of Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities. 

TIPS are U.S. government bonds that adjust for inflation, ensuring that the bond’s principal increases with inflation and decreases with deflation.

“It’s a combination of spending and investing behavior that is called ‘upside investing’ that leads you just to have upside risks,” Kotlikoff says. “You’re losing that downside because you’re never spending out of anything that’s risky, you’re just spending out of this TIPS ladder.”

Fort echoes Kotlikoff’s caution, noting that while some economists are saying to stay the course as usual, these are not usual times, and she thinks that it is likely that the markets are only going to dip further. For her own mother, who relies on her 401k, Fort has reduced her exposure to the market as much as possible.

“This is a fundamental shift in the world order,” Fort emphasizes once more. “If you are close to retirement age, you’ll want to look for the safest assets if you cannot afford another 20% to 30% decline in the market.”

Overall, it’s worth noting that expert advice varies depending on the age of the person with the 401(k) and what stage they’re at in their working lives. For example, Fort did not take the same measures for her own financial portfolio as she did for her mother’s, since she is younger and has more time until retirement. Across the board, expert guidance tells us not to panic and not to make any rash financial decisions.

source https://time.com/7275216/is-your-401k-affected-by-trump-tariffs-what-you-should-do/