A massive haul of classic cars has been uncovered by police in Ontario, Canada, following a months-long investigation into a spate of thefts north of the border. Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) recovered $3 million worth of classics, including old Corvettes and Ford trucks, and arrested two people in connection with…

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Canada’s wild hogs are apparently poised to invade America’s yard. In new research this month, scientists have found evidence that these invasive wild pigs have a “high potential” to cross over the Canadian border and establish new populations in mostly pig-free parts of the U.S., particularly South Dakota, North…

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There are still a few days left, but this month is on track to be the warmest May ever documented. In fact, every month since last June has broken worldwide temperature records. The world’s oceans, which were too hot last year, are still mostly too hot now. The combination of manmade global warming, an unnatural climate phenomenon, and El Niño, a natural one, has inflated temperatures around the globe over the past year; the current El Niño event, which emerged in the middle of 2023, has been among the strongest on record. This El Niño, at least, is nearly done—but its end likely won’t save the Northern Hemisphere from another sweltering summer.

El Niño episodes last only about nine to 12 months at a time, and forecasters predict that its cooler opposite, La Niña, will settle in sometime between this summer and early fall. La Niña should eventually lower the planetary thermostat, Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who studies the twin phenomena, told me. But a worrying amount of climate chaos still awaits us as La Niña asserts itself in the next several months, and the relief it may bring will be only temporary in the grand scheme of our warming world.

The transition to La Niña is not a flipped switch; the excess heat of El Niño conditions takes time to dissipate. As a result, “there’s a high likelihood that 2024 will be even warmer than 2023 because of this delayed effect,” McPhaden said. “La Niña may bring some relief, if not this year, then perhaps in 2025.”

For many people, though, 2025 is too far away. Right now, Southeast Asia is suffering from extreme heat. Europe is set to experience another brutally hot summer. In parts of the United States, heat-related health emergencies reached historic levels last summer, and we may experience a repeat this year. Some parts of Florida have already registered heat indexes—the “what it actually feels like” measure, combining air temperatures and relative humidity—well above the danger threshold this year, and it’s still spring.

[Read: We’re gambling with the only good oceans in the universe]

The extreme heat in Florida isn’t limited to land. Along its coasts, a marine heat wave caused massive coral bleaching last year, and marine scientists are not hopeful about this year either. Historically, such events were limited to August. But “last year, it all started in early July, and now this year, we’re seeing temperatures hit August levels in the middle of May,” Derek Manzello, a coral biologist and the coordinator of NOAA Coral Reef Watch, told me. “La Niña really can’t come soon enough,” he said, because “it should basically stop the bleeding.”

But for Florida especially, the transition to La Niña is its own kind of danger. During La Niña, high-altitude winds that might tear apart hurricanes in El Niño years weaken instead. So more storms spin into existence and strengthen on their way to land. To make matters worse, hurricanes intensify by feeding off warm seawater—and plenty of that is available in the Atlantic right now. The combination of La Niña and abnormally hot oceans is expected to produce a perilously strong hurricane season for the Eastern Seaboard, the Gulf Coast, and the Caribbean.

Both El Niño and La Niña deliver grief to some regions of the world—heavy rains, intense storms, droughts, wildfires—and a reprieve to others. In Canada, “we want to move from El Niño to La Niña,” Hossein Bonakdari, a University of Ottawa professor who specializes in the effects of climate change on civil-engineering infrastructure, told me. That’s because Canada experienced a staggeringly destructive wildfire season last year, and La Niña likely will bring much-needed rainfall that can reduce the risk of blazes. Meanwhile, “California loves El Niño because that rescued us last year from the drought,” Alexa Fredston, a quantitative ecologist at UC Santa Cruz, told me.

[Read: The oceans we knew are already gone]

And human-caused climate change is amplifying the effects of both phenomena. “In a warmer world, the atmosphere can hold more moisture,” McPhaden said, so El Niño– or La Niña–caused rainfall that might once have been severe instead becomes extreme. A warmer atmosphere also increases the rate of evaporation of water on land, so severe droughts turn into extreme droughts, too.

Climate change also risks dampening the relief that La Niña has historically brought to regions warmed by El Niño. Manzello worries that La Niña won’t be enough to keep corals from bleaching this time, even moving into next year. “How much help is it really going to bring now that the global ocean is just so darn hot?” he said. La Niña’s cooler temperatures curb the formation of harmful algal blooms, which can be toxic to people, animals, and aquatic ecosystems, Julian Merder, a postdoctoral researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told me. But what happens if global warming nudges temperatures into algae’s preferred zone even during the cool phase? Such blooms thrive in warm temperatures and on nutrients flushed from land by heavy rains and runoff. Historically, El Niño has provided both of those conditions. But in a warmer world, heavy snowpack from a La Niña winter would melt during springtime into hotter conditions, making trapped nutrients available to algae. “It might even be the case that La Niña is getting us more harmful algal blooms than El Niño would,” Merder said.

The La Niña that perspiring Americans might long for now is not what it used to be. “La Niña years now are warmer overall on the planet than big El Niño years were 25 years ago,” McPhaden said. Both climate phenomena have always been powerful. But in the 21st century, the cool phase is only a temporary antidote to the symptoms of climate change, and a fainter one at that. If greenhouse gases continue to warm our world, La Niña’s reprieve will only grow weaker.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller says 5,000 visas will be offered to Palestinians seeking to join family in Canada.

Canada's largest city getting expansion team that will begin playing in Women's National Basketball Association in 2026.

In the Martian lowlands, one rocky crater is dotted with small holes, winding from the floor to the rim like breadcrumbs. Their clean and cylindrical appearance is distinctly unnatural, suggesting the work of aliens—which it is. For three years, a robot from Earth has been collecting samples of rock and soil into six-inch-long tubes, whirring and crackling on the otherwise quiet planet. The robot, a rover named Perseverance, has deposited some of the samples on the Martian surface in sealed tubes. The others, about two dozen so far, remain stored inside the rover's belly.

Perseverance will stay on Mars forever, but the majority of its carefully packaged samples are meant to return to Earth. The Mars Sample Return mission, known as MSR for short, is one of the boldest undertakings in NASA history, as consequential as it is complicated. The endeavor, which involves sending an extra spacecraft to the red planet to retrieve the samples, serves as a precursor to getting future astronauts home from Mars. It’s a test of whether the United States can keep up with China’s space program, which is scheduled to return its own Mars samples in the 2030s. It could uncover new information about our planetary neighbor’s history, and reveal a picture of the cosmic wilderness that was the early solar system. Some scientists hope the dusty fragments will contain tiny fossilized microbes that would prove life once existed on Mars. Those tiny life forms will have been dead for who knows how long—but still would be evidence of a second genesis in our own backyard.  

If, that is, the samples ever make it back to Earth. NASA officials recently announced that the sample-return effort has become too expensive and fallen worryingly behind schedule. The latest estimated cost of as much as $11 billion is nearly double what experts initially predicted, and the way things are going, the samples won't arrive home until 2040, seven years later than expected. At a press conference last month, NASA chief Bill Nelson repeatedly called the state of the Mars Sample Return mission "unacceptable," a striking chastisement of his own agency, considering that MSR is an in-house effort. Officials have put out a call—to NASA’s own ranks and to private space companies—for “quicker and cheaper” plans that don’t require “huge technological leaps” to bring the samples home.

[Read: Scientists really, really want a piece of Mars]

NASA officials say that they remain committed to the return effort, but researchers—including the agency’s collaborators who work on the project—are concerned. “The path forward is not clear,” Aileen Yingst, a geologist at the Planetary Science Institute who works on the Perseverance mission, told me. Scientists who study Mars are worried that the mission will be downsized. Scientists who don’t study Mars—and a few who do—are frustrated, because MSR consumes so much of NASA’s budget. Scientists can’t imagine NASA giving up on the mission entirely, but the debacle has even prompted some whispered jokes about China coming along and claiming the tubes on the surface before NASA can fly them home. Last year, an independent review ordered by NASA ominously warned that “by abandoning return of Mars samples to other nations, the U.S. abandons the preeminent role that [President John F. Kennedy] ascribed to the scientific exploration of space.”

If and when the MSR tubes come home, their contents could dramatically shift our understanding of Mars. The first NASA spacecraft to land on Mars, in 1976, carried instruments designed to examine Martian soil for evidence of tiny, metabolizing life forms but didn’t find anything conclusive. Some bits of Martian rock, ejected by colliding asteroids, have made it to Earth as meteorites. (And scientists have tried to find proof of life in these, too). But such fragments arrive scorched by atmospheric reentry, their composition altered and contaminated from the journey. Pristine samples are far more tantalizing.

MSR would deliver Martian dirt straight from an area that scientists believe holds a promising chance at containing signs of life from 3.5 billion years ago. The Perseverance rover is exploring the shores of what scientists believe was once a lake, at a crater called Jezero, where the sedimentary rock may bear signs of a once-habitable world, or preserved life itself. The samples might also offer hints about Earth’s origin story. The rocks that existed here 4 billion years ago, when the solar system was just getting started, have since been crushed, melted, and eroded away. But Mars, a world lacking plate tectonics and serious weather, still bears rocks from the time of its very formation.

[Read: The most overhyped planet in the galaxy]

The promise of such samples has been a top research priority for planetary scientists for over a decade. The original plan to do so, devised by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is accordingly ambitious, involving several different spacecraft to retrieve the capsules, launch them into Martian orbit, and fly them back to Earth. No astronauts are involved, but Mars scientists have likened the mission choreography to the Apollo program in terms of complexity.

That plan was apparently destined to unravel from the start. NASA’s independent review found that MSR had “unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning" and was "organized under an unwieldy structure," with "unclear roles, accountability, and authority.” Technically ambitious missions always cost more, and MSR is arguably one of the most complicated that NASA has ever undertaken. But the scientists who help NASA set exploration priorities have no control over the budgets of the resulting programs—Congress does.

Last summer, some congressional appropriators briefly threatened the entire MSR effort with cancellation. This February, facing uncertainty over the money that Congress would allocate for MSR in the next fiscal year, the JPL laid off more than 500 employees. (Congress has since allocated a fraction of what NASA spent on the mission last year.) Thanks to budget concerns, NASA has delayed the launch of a telescope that would monitor potentially hazardous asteroids near Earth, and put on hold a proposed mission to study Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field.

Some scientists fear that MSR will draw resources away from other potential projects to search for life in places that they now believe to be far more promising than Mars. The search for alien life in the solar system has long been guided by water, and in the 1990s, when NASA kicked off a golden age of Mars missions, the red planet’s ice regions seemed appealing. But in the years since, other celestial bodies have become more compelling. A moon of Saturn, Titan, is the only body in the solar system besides Earth that has bodies of liquid on its surface, even if that liquid is methane. Two moons of Jupiter, Europa and Enceladus, are likely icy worlds with subsurface oceans; on the latter, cracks in the ice release plumes of salty water, hinting at something like deep-sea hydrothermal activity on Earth. NASA is launching an orbiting mission to Europa later this year, and the latest survey of planetary scientists advised NASA to start working on another to Enceladus. “If I could go anywhere, I would go to Enceladus,” Brook Nunn, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington, told me.

[Read: Mars’s soundscape is strangely beautiful]

Even some Mars scientists believe that Mars is no longer the top candidate. Darby Dyar, a planetary geologist at Mount Holyoke College, has spent decades studying Mars. “If anybody should be enthusiastic about the returned samples, it’s me, and I am,” she told me. But now she works on a NASA mission to Venus, a planet that might rival Mars as a candidate for extraterrestrial life, and she says she wouldn’t prioritize MSR over her current research.

For scientists who support Mars exploration, MSR is a problem, siphoning funds away from other efforts to study it. “There’s so many aspects to studying a planet that do not involve analyzing small amounts of rocks in the lab,” says Catherine Neish, a planetary scientist at Western University, in Canada, who’s working on an international mission to map the ice deposits on Mars’s polar regions. NASA pulled its financial support from that project in 2022, citing MSR’s cost as part of its motivation. Planetary scientists have recommended prioritizing a mission to drill deep into the ice at the Martian poles, far from Perseverance’s domain, where conditions could be just comfortable enough to support small life forms now.

NASA is well aware of the all-consuming nature of MSR. As the mission is redrawn, officials have said they are even willing to consider proposals that would bring home just 10 sample tubes, one-third of the amount initially planned. Lindsay Hays, a program scientist at NASA’s planetary-science division, told me that NASA will seek input from the science community about which sample tubes to return. “NASA has a responsibility to use taxpayer funds in the most effective and efficient way possible,” she said. “But it’s also part of our mandate to the nation to do things that have never been done before.”

[Read: Too much of a good thing at NASA]

Most planetary scientists aren’t happy with a potentially scaled-back approach either. “You’ve decimated the science, because now you’re not going to get the diversity that you could have if we brought back the full suite of samples,” Phil Christensen, a geologist at Arizona State University who co-chaired the community’s latest decadal survey, told me.

A badly delayed sample-return mission would fracture NASA’s grand vision for its Martian future. By the 2040s, NASA intends to be focused not on the red planet’s soil, but on sending astronauts there and, crucially, bringing them back. That operation relies on having successfully practiced launching off from Mars, which NASA hasn’t yet managed with MSR. Instead, the agency is back at the drawing board, hoping to find a way out of an $11 billion pit. Officials expect to finish reviewing new proposals and come to a decision on the mission’s future in the fall. Meanwhile, Perseverance chugs along, excavating the mythical oasis of Jezero Crater with each curated tube.

We’d gathered that day at the cafeteria’s “Black” table, cracking jokes and philosophizing during the free period that was our perk as upperclassmen. We came in different shades: bone white, tan and brownish, dark as a silhouette. One of my classmates, who fancied himself a lyricist, was insisting that Redman, a witty emcee from nearby Newark, New Jersey, was the greatest rapper ever. This was the late ’90s, and for my money, no one could compete with Jay-Z. I said so, and the debate, good-natured at first, soon escalated in intensity, touching on feelings and resentments that ran far deeper than diverging claims about artistic merit.

“How can you even weigh in?” I still remember the kid fuming. “You ain’t even the pure breed!”

With that, there was nothing left to say. Friends separated us, the bell rang, and I headed home. A short time later, I went off to college, where I would meet a wider assortment of Americans than I had realized existed. But over the years, I have been reminded of that boy’s slicing racism, the lazy habit of mind that required no white people to be present but would nonetheless please the most virulent white supremacist.

Recently, two public controversies spirited me back to the suspicion and confusion of my high-school cafeteria. All spring long, an unusually nasty feud between the rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar has been captivating audiences, both for the quality of the music it has engendered and for the personal and malicious dimensions of the attacks it has countenanced. Much has been written about the fight, in particular about the two men’s treatment of women, which I won’t rehash here except to point out that it’s a little funny that they both portray themselves as enlightened allies while also acting as if the ultimate disparagement is to call another man feminine. Less has been said about the potency of the racial dimension, which feels like a throwback to a time before Drake’s pop-culture dominance—indeed, to a time before the historic hybridity of the Obama era—and like a distillation of the skin-deep racialism of the current social-justice movement.

Drake, who grew up in Toronto, is the son of a white Jewish mother from Canada and a Black father from Memphis. Since the release of his 2009 mixtape, So Far Gone, he has been not only the most successful visibly mixed-race rapper—and arguably pop star—but also the most visible Black male musician for some time now. Anyone at the top will attract criticism. But not even a white rapper like Eminem has been subject to the kind of racial derogation that has been hurled at Drake.

Back in 2018, the rapper Pusha T released a diss track about him for which the cover art was an old photograph of Drake performing in a cartoonish blackface. The image makes you cringe, but—as Drake explained—that was the point. Drake began his career as an actor, and he wrote that the photograph was part of a “project that was about young black actors struggling to get roles, being stereotyped and typecast … The photos represented how African Americans were once wrongfully portrayed in entertainment.” But presented without context, it appeared to be a self-evident statement of inauthenticity.

Another rapper, Rick Ross, calls Drake “white boy” again and again in his song “Champagne Moments,” released in April. In an op-ed for The Grio, the music journalist Touré explains why the insult is so effective: “We know Drake is biracial. He’s never hidden that, but many of us think of him as Black or at least as a part of the culture … On this record, Ross is out to change that.” Touré calls this “hyperproblematic,” but his tone is approving—he admires the track. “We shouldn’t be excluding biracial people from the Black community, but in a rap beef where all is fair as a way of attacking someone and undermining their credibility and their identity, it’s a powerful message.”

In a series of more high-profile records, Lamar has built on Ross’s theme, both implying and stating directly that racial categories are real, that behaviors and circumstances (like Drake’s suburban upbringing) correlate with race, and that the very mixedness of Drake’s background renders him suspect. It is an anachronistic line of ad hominem attack that is depressing to encounter a quarter of the way into the 21st century.

Lamar’s most recent Drake diss is called “Not Like Us,” and reached No. 1 on Billboard Hot 100. It goes after Drake’s cultural affiliations with the American South. “No, you not a colleague,” Lamar taunts. “You a fucking colonizer!”

It’s hard to hear that and not remember that Drake’s mother is Jewish, and that this is the same invective used to undermine Jews’ sense of belonging in Israel. Such racist habits of thought have become potent rhetorical weapons in the progressive arsenal.

The second (if smaller) controversy followed an essay on language and protest published in The New Yorker earlier this month. The novelist Zadie Smith, who is of European and African descent, argued—carefully—that it is too simplistic to regard the world as sortable into categories of oppressor and oppressed. “Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them,” she writes, “a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands.” This was an attempt to take seriously the tangible fate of Hamas’s victims on October 7, the broader implications of anti-Semitism that can at times be found in criticism of Israel’s response, and the ongoing tragic loss of Palestinian life.

Despite praising the protests that have engulfed college campuses and describing a cease-fire in Gaza as “an ethical necessity,” Smith was derided on more than intellectual grounds. One widely shared tweet, accompanied by a photo of Smith, stated the criticism plainly: “I feel like Zadie Smith uses black aesthetics to conceal her deeply pedestrian white middle-class politics. People see the head wrap and the earrings made of kente cloth and confuse that for something more substantive.”

This was not the first time Smith had been regarded as a racial interloper. The author Morgan Jerkins once wrote of the emotional “hurt” she felt reading another thoughtful essay Smith published in Harper’s asking “Who owns black pain?” Smith’s transgression here, according to Jerkins, was “intellectualizing blackness” from a distance instead of feeling it. “Do not be surprised,” Jerkins warned, “if a chunk of that essay is used in discussions as to why biracial people need to take a backseat in the movement.”

The retrograde notion that thought and action necessarily flow from racial identities whose borders are definable and whose authority is heritable is both fictitious and counterproductive. “Something is afoot that is the business of every citizen who thought that the racist concepts of a century ago were gone­—and good riddance!” Barbara and Karen Fields write in their 2012 masterpiece, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. “The continued vitality of those concepts stands as a reminder that, however important a historical watershed the election of an African-American president may be, America’s post-racial era has not been born.”

Of course, the first African American president was, like our nation and culture, himself both Black and white. One of the most disappointing—and, I have come to realize—enduring reasons the “post-racial era” continues to elude us is that it is not only the avowed racists who would hold that biographical fact against him.

Police said the suspect, who died in an Idaho prison in 2011, may be behind other unsolved killings.

Several fires are burning across the country, with a few dangerously close to towns and cities.

Long-lost siblings - one from Londonderry, one from Canada - meet for first time in Ireland.