Everything to Remember About All the Members of the Thunderbolts* Team

Thunderbolts*, out May 2, features Marvel’s B-team superheroes—sidekicks and antagonists who have existed largely on the sidelines of the MCU for the past decade and a half. Now they are finally getting their moment to shine. The ragtag group joins together under the watchful eye of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a morally flexible private-sector spook who has been named the head of the CIA in the new film.

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Valentina, who was first introduced in the Disney+ series Falcon and the Winter Soldier and appeared in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever as the ex-wife of Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), has quietly been gathering together a group of assassins to work on covert operations and now dreams of her own very public superhuman—or superteam—that she can control.

But if you missed movies like Black Widow or Ant-Man and the Wasp or TV shows like Falcon and the Winter Soldier, you may be confused as to who these antiheroes who Valentina has collected are, what they’ve been up to for the last several years, and whether they’re good guys or bad.

Here is your spoiler-free guide to everything you need to know about the characters who make up the Thunderbolts team.

Read more: All the Future MCU Movies Announced in Marvel’s Major Revamp

Yelena Belova

Introduced in Black Widow as the little sister of Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johanson), Florence Pugh’s Yelena was raised from childhood to be an assassin in the Russian Red Room, just like Black Widow before her. Yelena and Natasha are not sisters by blood but by circumstance: When they were children they were sent as spies to America and lived with a fake family of other covert operatives. David Harbour’s Alexei Shostakov or Red Guardian (more on him later) and Rachel Weisz’s Melina Vostokoff acted as their parents until all four had to escape back to Russia.

The four reunite in Black Widow to eliminate the Red Room and save the women being brainwashed there. After the death of Natasha in Avengers: Endgame, Yelena became an assassin for hire working for Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who in Thunderbolts* is trying to build (and control) her own superhuman.

Bucky Barnes / The Winter Soldier

Sebastian Stan has been playing Steve Rogers’ best bud, Bucky Barnes, since 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger. A lot has happened to Bucky since he fought alongside Cap during World War II in that film. Bucky fell from a train in that movie, apparently dying, but his body was recovered by HYDRA, a science-minded organization within the Nazi party. Bucky was given supersoldier serum, brainwashed, and transformed into the Winter Soldier. He performed many dastardly deeds for HYDRA, including murdering Tony Stark’s parents.

Steve eventually helped Bucky recover his memories and break free of HYDRA, and the Wakandans gifted Bucky an indestructible arm. Bucky fought alongside the Avengers against Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and teamed up with Sam Wilson (The Falcon and, later, the new Captain America) in the Disney+ show, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Since then, apparently Bucky has become an elected official, representing Brooklyn in Congress. Whether his commitments to supersoldier-ing will interfere with his duties as an elected official remains unclear.

Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian

The USSR’s answer to Captain America, Harbour’s Red Guardian is a washed-up super soldier who dreams of his days of glory as a Russian emblem of strength. A surrogate father to Natasha and Yelena, he was living in an Eastern European prison when the two girls broke him out during the events of Black Widow.

John Walker

An antagonistic force in Falcon and the Winter Soldier, John Walker (Wyatt Russell) is a military vet who takes the supersoldier serum and, briefly, is dubbed by the U.S. government as the new Captain America. However, we learn that supersoldier serum has different effects on different people. In the scrawny but noble Steve Rogers, it brought out leadership qualities. For Walker, it enhanced his already-simmering rage and resentment. Though Walker isn’t a bad guy, per se—he is in pursuit of justice—he doesn’t have the moral compass of, say, Sam Wilson. Walker eventually kills an innocent man in front of a crowd in the streets, bloodying the sacred Captain America shield in the process.

Walker is stripped of his title after that incident. But Valentina Allegra de Fontaine recruits the shamed Walker to be part of her network of privately paid assassins.

Ghost

Another misunderstood villain, Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) is one of the antagonists in Ant-Man and the Wasp. The daughter of a former colleague of Hank Pym, Ava Starr has an encounter with the Quantum Realm as a child that grants her “phasing powers”—she can disappear and walk through walls—but leaves her in chronic pain. She joins S.H.I.E.L.D. as an assassin in exchange for a suit that allows her to control her instability and the promise of a cure that never manifests. By the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp, Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) uses the power of quantum physics to stabilize Ava.

Taskmaster

Though she does not play as large a role as the rest of the team in The Thunderbolts, Taskmaster does work for Valentina too. Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko) is the daughter of General Dreykov, the head of the Red Room. During an assassination attempt targeting General Dreykov, Natasha Romanoff almost kills Antonia. Antonia still carries the scars from the explosion. General Dreykov then trained Antonia to become Taskmaster and used a substance to control her mind. In Black Widow, Natasha and Yelena redeem Natasha’s near-murder of Antonia by freeing her from the Red Room to restart her life.

Bob

Bob (Lewis Pullman) is a new character in the Thunderbolts, a mysterious man who seemingly appears out of nowhere inside Valentina’s secret bunker. We won’t reveal more about Bob here to avoid spoiling the movie.

source https://time.com/7281053/thunderbolts-team-members-what-to-know/

The History of Why Raw Milk Regulation is Necessary

On April 21, The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it will be suspending its oversight of the labs that conduct safety and quality testing on the nation’s milk supply. The move comes as raw milk is ascendant in federal public health policy. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for the end of what he deems the “aggressive suppression” of raw dairy by public health authorities, meaning that more deregulation may be on the way.

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Today’s raw milk evangelists like Kennedy claim that it has more nutrients, benefits the immune system, and that kids are healthier when they consume raw milk rather than pasteurized dairy. Public health authorities have debunked these claims while highlighting thousands of illnesses linked to raw milk. Nevertheless, raw dairy is increasingly popular with American consumers. It fits nicely into the “tradwife” aesthetic, personified by Ballerina Farm influencer Hannah Neeleman, who feeds her children raw milk on Tiktok for millions of viewers. Yet, like the rest of the aesthetic, the mainstreaming of raw dairy relies on consumers forgetting our history—in this case, a history in which kids got sick from raw milk.

The history of children’s health in the U.S. reveals an important truth. The U.S. government adopted a robust apparatus for regulating and monitoring the milk supply after an epidemic killed thousands of kids at the turn of the 20th century. This history offers a grim warning about what a future without milk regulation could hold for America’s children.

Nineteenth-century Americans recognized the dangers of an unregulated dairy industry. In 1843, the domestic writer Catharine Beecher warned parents that “diseased” milk was “the cause of extensive mortality among young children.” Yet, even after the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur patented the technology of pasteurization, or heating liquids to kill microorganisms, in 1865, Americans largely continued to consume raw milk for several more decades.

Read More: Public Health Experts Alarmed at Trump’s Pick of RFK Jr. to Lead HHS

They did so despite increasing fears about the dairy industry, driven by the way young children were consuming an increasingly dairy-centric diet. As America urbanized in the late 19th century, many mothers moved away from families who could have supported them in breastfeeding, while also working at Gilded Age jobs like textile factories without labor protections. The technologies of pumping and refrigeration, so essential to balancing work and breastfeeding today, were not yet widely available. This combination of barriers to breastfeeding proved insurmountable for many mothers.

Bad advice from their pediatricians compounded the situation. At the time, pediatrics was a new specialty trying to prove its worth, and practitioners mistakenly believed in sticking to a strict schedule for breastfeeding, which actually limited breastmilk supply. Hampered by this erroneous guidance, health authorities and the American public began to believe that women were physically incapable of producing enough breastmilk. 

The result of both inadequate support for new mothers and poor medical advice was that more and more mothers bottle-fed their babies cow’s milk. Young children drank lots of milk, too. Medical authorities like the pediatrician Luther Emmett Holt, whose 1894 The Care and Feeding of Children would become the most popular parenting manual of the early 20th century, advised parents to feed their toddlers milk at every meal.

But for kids at the turn of the century, milk came with dire risks. Amid the unbridled capitalism of the Gilded Age, the milk supply was a nightmare of corruption and contamination. On the farm, poor sanitation enabled cows and dairy workers to introduce tuberculosis, typhoid, and other pathogens into milk. Farmers or middlemen also frequently adulterated milk, watering it down to stretch supplies—with impure water likely to introduce further pathogens—or adding toxic substances, like formaldehyde or chalk, meant to conceal spoilage or make milk appear whiter. The milk was then shipped in open, unrefrigerated containers no matter the weather, vulnerable to even more contamination and spoilage. 

This poisoned milk threatened America’s most vulnerable consumers: young children. Infant mortality skyrocketed in the second half of the 19th century, up to 20% nationally and closer to 30% in urban centers. Tens of thousands of babies died every year of gastroenteritis known as “the summer complaint,” an epidemic of diarrhea that worsened in the warmer months. Gastrointestinal infections were the third leading cause of death across all ages, but particularly impacted small children’s fragile immune systems.

Read More: Is Raw Milk Safe? Here’s What to Know

Parents, many mourning dead children, pushed for lawmakers to clean up the milk supply. They joined a movement of Americans calling for government regulation of the food industry. Progressive Era reformers chronicled the lax food safety and labor conditions that put Americans at risk. In 1902, a Department of Agriculture chemist named Harvey Wiley launched a brilliant but dangerous public relations campaign dubbed “The Poison Squad” dosing human test subjects with food additives like formaldehyde and chronicling their alarming effects on the body. In his famous 1905 novel The Jungle, the journalist Upton Sinclair exposed the horrors of meatpacking plants and the threat they posed to Americans.

This activism prodded state and federal authorities to enact a flurry of public health legislation. In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, leading to the creation of the FDA. In 1910, New York State mandated the pasteurization of all milk sold for human consumption. As an extra layer of oversight, public health authorities began testing cows for diseases like tuberculosis, to ensure that milk remained safe for American consumers.

Public health historians credit the cleanup of the milk supply as one of the major drivers of the dramatic decrease in child mortality over the course of the 20th century. Within two generations of the pasteurization mandates, “the summer complaint” had become a memory, so much so that Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician whose parenting advice defined childcare in mid-20th-century America, had to explain its history to the parents of Baby Boomers. In the 1964 edition of his bestseller Baby and Child Care, Spock described the terror of early 20th century doctors and parents who watched infants suffer “serious intestinal infections that afflicted tens of thousands of babies yearly.” Spock confidently asserted that pasteurization had made such suffering a thing of the past.

Yet as Kennedy’s attacks on dairy regulation illustrate, the memory of the infant mortality crisis has receded too far into the past. Unlike their turn-of-the-20th century forebears, most 21st century parents will never know the agony of losing a child, as infant mortality rates have fallen below 1%. Many Americans are unaware that government regulation of industry helped bring us these precious gains in children’s health, by keeping tuberculosis, E.coli, and yes, bird flu out of the milk people drink. If this important regulatory work is undone, Kennedy’s calls to “Make America Healthy Again” could bring back an infant mortality crisis previous generations of Americans thought they had overcome.

Carla Cevasco is associate professor of American studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is writing a book on the history of feeding children in the U.S.

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/7280534/why-raw-milk-regulation-is-necessary/

How TIME and Statista Determined the World’s Top EdTech Companies of 2025

For the second time, TIME is awarding the World’s Top EdTech Companies 2025, in partnership with Statista, a leading international provider of market and consumer data and rankings. The result of this quantitative study: 350 companies dedicated to the development and provision of educational technologies, encompassing both products and services. Here’s how the winners were selected.

Methodology

The research project “World’s Top EdTech Companies 2025” is a comprehensive analysis conducted to identify the top performing EdTech companies in the United States. First, companies had to primarily focus on developing and providing educational technologies, products, or services. The 350 companies with the highest score were awarded as “World’s Top EdTech Companies 2025.”

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The ranking is built on two pillars: financial strength and industry impact. Statista gathered and scrutinized data from over 7,000 companies through desk research, online application forms, and collaborations with other data and market intelligence companies. A company received scores in each of these dimensions, which were then combined into an overall score.

For the first dimension, financial strength, Statista analyzed revenue, employee, and funding data, obtained from publicly available sources like annual reports, company websites, through media monitoring, and via databases. Additionally, company disclosures submitted via an online application form, which was freely accessible via the TIME website, were considered.

For the evaluation of the industry impact, Statista cooperated with HolonIQ and LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions to assess companies in different impact dimensions, encompassing factors such as:

• quality and impact of their product/service portfolio
• quantity and value of a company’s IP (intellectual property) portfolio

In addition, Statista researched various metrics around web traffic, to assess the relevance of the products and services to the respective target groups.

The evaluation process involved assessing all relevant companies within the global EdTech sector that exhibited above-average performance on financial metrics in their geographical region. Subsequently, the selection was narrowed down to include only those companies that not only excelled financially but also demonstrated significant industry impact within their specific categories. This selection process allowed us to establish our final ranking of the World’s Top EdTech Companies 2025. Once the data was collected and evaluated, it was consolidated and weighted within a scoring model. The final score was calculated as follows: 70% x financial strength score + 30% x impact score. The companies with the highest score were awarded as “World’s Top EdTech Companies 2025” by TIME and Statista.

Alongside the list of 350 top EdTech companies, Statista and TIME are also publishing a “Rising Stars Ranking” highlighting the companies with the highest revenue growth rates over the past three years out of those who submitted company data via the online application process.

Applied criteria:

• company age 10 years and younger
• minimum revenue of 1 million U.S. dollars in 2022
• revenue growth rate of more than 20% over the last three years
  

Disclaimer
The selection of the companies and the definition of the evaluation criteria were based on independent journalistic criteria of TIME and Statista. The evaluation was carried out by the statistics and market research company Statista. TIME and Statista make no claim to the completeness of the companies examined.

The ranking only includes companies that qualify according to the criteria described in this document. A position in the ranking is a positive recognition based on research of publicly available data sources at the time and information received via an application process and through collaboration partners.

In addition, events after March 14, 2025, were not considered in the analysis. As such, the results of this list should not be used as the sole source of information for future deliberations. The information provided through this ranking should rather be considered in conjunction with other available information about a company.

The quality of companies that are not included in the ranking is not disputed.

source https://time.com/7280705/worlds-top-edtech-companies-2025-methodology/

Pierre Poilievre Is the Ron DeSantis of Canada

It’s easy to forget this now, but, not so long ago, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appeared poised to win the Republican primary. Mega-donors were lining up behind him. The New York Post, on behalf of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, dubbed him “DeFuture” on its front page. Polls showed him neck-and-neck with the scandal-plagued Donald Trump. DeSantis had, apparently, figured out a way to stuff Make America Great Again into a sleeker, less objectionable package, one that appealed to both traditional Republican business interests and the newly influential far right.

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Then DeSantis bombed on the national stage. He was a terrible retail politician, his utter lack of charisma a death knell in the early-voting primary states. He dropped out in January 2024 after blowing at least $160 million without a single victory to show for it.

Something similar looks set to befall Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party. Canadians head to the voting booth today, and, if the polls are accurate, the country will elect a Liberal government for a fourth consecutive term. Just a few months ago, this would have been unthinkable. The Conservatives enjoyed a 25-point lead over a Liberal Party led by Justin Trudeau. But then Trump started talking about annexing Canada, the deeply unpopular Trudeau resigned, former banker Mark Carney took his place, and a trade war got underway. Suddenly, Poilievre—who has spent the last several years remaking himself, and his party, in Trump’s image—started sounding like the enemy. Now he’s found himself in the very same predicament that DeSantis once did. The two men are an object lesson in the pitfalls of trying to do Trumpism without Trump.

Their similarities begin with their personalities. Neither man is exactly likeable. Both Poilievre and DeSantis look and sound like overgrown children, and that has made them vulnerable to ridicule. During his primary campaign, DeSantis was variously accused of wearing lifts in his cowboy boots, eating pudding with his fingers, and wiping his snot on other people. For his part, Poilievre appeared to stop wearing glasses after being compared to Milhouse from The Simpsons. (Unfortunately for him, Poilievre without glasses still looks like Milhouse without glasses.)

At the same time, both men struggle to talk like normal humans, especially when it comes to their pronatalist obsession with other people’s bodies and sexual proclivities. Poilievre, for example, can’t stop talking about women’s “biological clocks,” prompting a rival leader to quip, memorably, “I don’t think any woman wants to hear Pierre Poilievre talking about their body.” It would be petty to focus on their appearance and disposition were cruelty not so central to their political brands. Poilievre and DeSantis, both infamously thin-skinned, are the epitome of being able to dish it out but not take it.

Which brings us to another challenge both men face: they can’t stand up to Trump. Even as they copied his language and playbook, they couldn’t predict, control, or outdo the man himself. The basic premise of DeSantis’s primary candidacy—that Republicans wanted Trumpism without Trump—fell apart once the former president started hoovering up media attention and gained a wide lead in the polls. He was especially brutal with DeSantis, making fun of his height and name, and baselessly accusing him of being a pedophile.

Poilievre’s predicament might be worse. Even more so than DeSantis, he cribbed Trump’s talking points, railing against woke ideology and globalist elites so often that the Liberals, in an attack ad, intercut clips from Poilievre’s and Trump’s speeches, just to drive the point home. But his campaign has struggled amid resurgent Canadian nationalism and voters’ deep dislike of the president.

Over the past decade, the far-right resurgence around the world has prompted a lot of comparisons between Trump and other leaders. But most of these politicians—Hungary’s Viktor Orban, France’s Marine Le Pen, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and so on—speak in their own vocabularies and draw on their countries’ deep-rooted traditions of reactionary populism. DeSantis and Poilievre, on the other hand, are mere imitators. This was especially egregious in Poilievre’s case; he imported culture-war dogma from the U.S. even as the Canadian government slapped actual U.S. imports with reciprocal tariffs. There has never been a worse time for a Canadian politician to sound American.

In some ways, both DeSantis and Poilievre are pitiable. They’re classic Napoleon-complex figures: minor men with big dreams and a self-regard at odds with the limits of their talents. Like DeSantis, Poilievre was thought to be the face of conservatism’s future; he’s reportedly told allies he has no right to lose this race. But it looks as though he will.

Of course, it’s possible that the polls are wildly inaccurate, and that Canada’s Conservative Party will somehow eke out a win tonight. But, right now, Poilievre, like DeSantis, looks an awful lot like one of Trump’s favorite insults: a loser.

source https://time.com/7280859/canada-poilievre-election-trump/

What to Know About the Power Outage that Hit Spain, Portugal, and France

A countrywide power outage impacted Spain—as well as swaths of Portugal and smaller portions of France—Monday afternoon, affecting essential services and wreaking chaos across the Iberian Peninsula. 

The cause of the outage is currently being investigated by Spanish and Portuguese officials and ministers. 

“We have activated the procedures planned for restoring power supply; in this phase of the work, the objective is to provide power to the generating units so they can start up and propagate power to the grid and other units,” electricity company Red Eléctrica said in Spanish in a press release on Monday. 

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But in the interim, residents are experiencing traffic delays as traffic lights stopped functioning, the shutdown of nearby grocery stores, and other disruptions.

Spanish officials have asked residents to steer clear of the roads and only request emergency services in serious cases. Similarly, Portuguese police asked locals to only travel if necessary, warning that street and traffic lights could collapse.

“Something like this has never happened before,” Red Eléctrica told El Pais. Eduardo Pietra, director of operations for the electricity grid added that there was “no record of the cause of the incident” and that the company could not “speculate about its origin.”

Red Eléctrica shared that there was a drop in power at about 12:30 p.m. local time. While some power began to be restored by 1:00 p.m. local time, electricity will only return gradually. The company estimates that power will return throughout Spain between 9:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. Electricity is now available in some areas of Catalonia, Aragon, the Basque Country, Galicia, Asturias, Navarre, Castile and León, Extremadura, and Andalusia, Red Eléctrica told TIME.

While hospitals will continue operating thanks to generators, other sectors remain impacted. Transportation has been temporarily paused across airports and train stations. In a post on X, Spanish train company Renfe said that all trains are detained and will have no departures, citing the fact that the national electricity grid was cut. Portuguese airline TAP Air asked its customers to not go to the airport as flights remain suspended. Air Europa asked patrons to remain patient due to expected delays. “Flexible date changes are being made to assist all passengers,” the airline said in a post on X.  Spain’s flagship airline Iberia said that their systems were fully operational despite the outage, but were giving passengers the option to reschedule their trips given the problems reported at numerous airports. 

Renfe did not respond to TIME’s request for comment.

The outage also prompted the suspension of the international tennis tournament Madrid Open. 

source https://time.com/7280916/spain-portugal-france-power-outage-what-to-know/

7 Things to Do When Your Memory Starts Slipping

Changes in memory as you get older—frustrating as they might be—are completely normal.

“It might become more difficult to access things as quickly, but you get into that state of, ‘If you give me a couple minutes, or you give me a cue or a clue, then yes, it’ll come back,’” says Dr. Daniel Lesley, a neurologist at Remo Health, a virtual dementia care company. “You aren’t quite as sharp as you were, but as long as you can set up strategies for yourself—like learning to write things down—you can make information much more accessible and know what’s important.”

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We asked Lesley to share what to do the moment you start to feel your memory slipping, and little things you can do every day to keep your brain sharp.

Figure out if something reversible is going on

If you’ve noticed you’re having more frequent memory lapses, mention it to your primary care doctor—and be prepared to share specific examples. You could be experiencing something reversible. “Anybody of any age can look like they have some form of dementia if they’re very stressed, if their sleep is poor, if their B12 is low, or if they have an ongoing infection or inflammation or some other psychological thing happening,” Lesley says. For example, infections like Lyme disease and autoimmune diseases like lupus are linked to brain fog that causes cognitive difficulties such as trouble concentrating or recalling words, as well as a drop in working memory, which allows people to do tasks and solve problems without looking up information. “If you feel that you’re having problems,” Lesley says, “look at the things we can fix.”

Set up a routine

The more things you can automate, the more reserves you’ll have to focus on whatever you’re doing at the moment. “If you’re juggling a crazy schedule that always changes, or you’re putting things in different places, then you’re having to relearn or redo the same things differently every time,” Lesley says. “That’s a cognitive load.”

Read More: Why We’re Obsessed With Other People’s Morning Routines

Instead, make it a point to do your activities at the same time each day (and consider using alarms to signal it’s time to start each one), set up spots where you always drop your keys or set your glasses, and make a to-do list that you cross off as you go along.

Exercise your brain

Many so-called brain games won’t actually help keep you sharp. If you play a computer game where you follow a fish with your cursor, for example, “then you’ll be good at using a mouse to catch fish,” Lesley says. “It doesn’t necessarily translate to anything that matters to you.”

Instead, prioritize increasing your cognitive reserves through continuing education like signing up for a class that fascinates you or using an app to learn a new language, he suggests.

Talk to other people every day

The single best thing most people can do to improve their memory and thinking skills is have a social circle. “Social activity is what people are built for,” Lesley says. Talking to others expands the pool of what you’re exposed to every day, which helps ensure you’re constantly learning. Plus, “you don’t know what’s going to come out of another person’s mouth, so you keep yourself sharper to respond to those comments,” he says.

Read More: How to Make Friends as an Adult—at Every Life Stage

If you have trouble hearing what your friends are saying, talk to your doctor. Research has found that mild hearing loss doubles the risk of dementia, while moderate loss triples it, and severe loss increases it fivefold. “If you have hearing problems, that interferes with your social activity, which interferes with your memory more than almost anything else,” Lesley says.

Write things down—or make a jingle about them

“If you just listen to somebody, then it’s going in one ear and it may be going out the other,” Lesley says. If you write it down, however, and then read it out loud—or make a catchy jingle or joke about it—you’ll have many more routes back to easily summoning whatever it is you want to remember.

Cut back on clutter

Keep your life as uncomplicated as possible, Lesley advises. That doesn’t just mean monitoring how much stuff is on your desk or in your office. Even your wall art matters: “If you’ve got different pictures on every part of your wall, and you’re getting distracted every time by a different picture, then there’s more to keep track of,” he says. Going in a more minimalist direction could benefit your brain health.

Take care of financial concerns right away

Tending to money matters efficiently can curb stress and anxiety. Budgeting, planning for the future, and enlisting professional help if you need it around financial concerns is good for your brain. “The anxiety of living on the edge actually can drop your IQ,” Lesley says. Research has found that when farmers are dealing with financial concerns like damage to their crops, for example, their IQ dropped 13 points compared to when they weren’t anxious about their financial stability.

Read More: 8 Ways to Talk About Money With Your Partner

Not all financial concerns are in your control. But taking care of the ones that are, by incorporating a financial routine, “will do wonders in terms of memory and thinking,” he adds.

source https://time.com/7280043/memory-slipping-what-to-do/

Canada Votes as Trump Overshadows a Crucial Election. Here’s What to Know

Canadians head to the polls today to cast their vote in a snap election called by Prime Minister Mark Carney, in what may be the most consequential vote in the country’s history.

The contest has been completely transformed by U.S. President Donald Trump, who has launched a trade war on arguably his nation’s closest ally, and threatened to annex Canada and make it the “51st state.”

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These actions have infuriated Canadians and helped spur a stunning Liberal comeback. The Conservative Party—led by the populist Pierre Polievre—had been ahead of the Liberals by 25 points before Justin Trudeau resigned in January and Carney replaced him as leader.

Read More: Why Canadians Are Giving Mark Carney a Shot

On election day, Carney’s Liberals sit at almost 43% in the opinion polls, compared to 39% for the Conservatives. The Liberals are heavily favored to win the most seats in Parliament. 

Here’s what you need to know about the 2025 Canadian election.

How does the Canadian election work?

The election was called by Carney on March 23, a week after he was sworn in as Liberal Party leader and therefore Prime Minister following Trudeau’s resignation.

The first polls have already opened in Newfoundland, Canada’s most eastern province, at 7 a.m. E.T. Polls in other provinces will open later, staggered by timezones. The last polls close in British Columbia at 10 p.m. E.T.

Canadians will vote for a candidate from one of the political parties in their federal “riding,” or district. Whichever candidate gets the most votes in a riding will become a Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons, and the party with the most MPs wins the election.

The Liberal Party currently has a minority government with 153 seats, the Conservatives have 120, followed by the separatist Bloc Québécois with 33, the social-democratic New Democratic Party with 25, as well as the Greens with two, and four Independent MPs.

What are Canadians saying about Trump?

Trump’s dealings with Canada have angered many, with sports fans booing the U.S. national anthem and Canadians boycotting American goods.

Carney, who did not hold elected office before becoming Prime Minister, has taken a firm line on Trump. In his first address, he said: “We will never, in any shape or form, be part of the U.S.”

He recently revealed that Trump had brought up the 51st state issue in their most recent conversation on March 28. “The president brings this up all the time,” Carney added.

Carney has been vocal about his approach toward U.S. tariffs. After President Trump’s announcement of global tariffs on April 2, or “Liberation Day,” the former central banker responded with a promise of retaliatory tariffs.

Poilievre has taken aim at Carney’s approach to Trump and tariffs, arguing that he failed to secure relief even as other countries managed to.

But a March poll by Ipsos suggested more Canadians think Carney is better able to deal with Trump and tariffs. The Liberals have also worked to paint Poilievre as a “Maple MAGA” and “Trump-inspired” figure at a time of resurgent Canadian nationalism.

Read More: How Trump Revived Canada’s Liberals

When can we expect a result for the Canadian election?

The counting of ballots begins once polls close in each province and territory. Mail-in ballots can be counted ahead of polls closing if there is a high volume of them. This year has seen a record 7 million votes cast ahead of election day.

Early indications of the results should come after 9:30 p.m. E.T., when polls close in Quebec and Ontario. These provinces are home to the majority of Canadians, and could give a good indication as to how different demographics and ridings nationwide have voted.

The CBC usually declares a winner on Election Night based on results from Elections Canada. But a close contest could mean it will take more time to determine whether Canadians elected a minority or majority government.

What are polls saying?

At the start of the year, the Conservatives looked set for an election win for the first time since 2011. Support for the Conservatives had been on a steady rise since June 2023, amid a global anti-incumbent wave and anger over the cost-of-living crisis.

Despite hitting a low of 20% at the start of January, according to CBC polling, the Liberals are now on track to win the election. Much of this climb has been at the expense of the more left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP), which has fallen by roughly 11 points in the same period.

The CBC is projecting 161-204 seats for the Liberal Party. The Conservatives are projected to win between 111-146 seats, the Bloc Québécois between 19-26, and the NDP between 3-15. The Economist’s election model gives the Liberals a 72 in 100 chance of winning an outright majority in parliament, which is equivalent to more than 170 seats.

source https://time.com/7280857/canada-election-carney-poilievre-trump-explainer/