2026-04-01 20:30:00
由于中东冲突导致供应链中断，2026年3月10日，印度金奈出现因商用液化石油气钢瓶短缺而关闭的餐厅。尽管这些国家并未实际参战，但它们都受到数千英里外战争影响的波及。美国和以色列对伊朗的袭击始于2月28日，引发了霍尔木兹海峡的关闭，这一狭窄水道（最窄处仅21英里）原本承担着全球20%的石油、20%的液化天然气（LNG）、三分之一的海运化肥以及近一半的硫磺出口。如今，商品运输量下降了95%，导致全球约32亿人面临燃料配给、停电或能源限制的影响。
食品危机
首先，食品供应受到冲击。印度主要通过霍尔木兹海峡进口烹饪用液化石油气（LPG），供应中断迅速显现。黑市LPG钢瓶价格几乎翻三倍，全国餐馆纷纷缩减菜单，如孟买一家70年的老字号餐厅将斋月多道菜套餐简化为四道菜，另一家连锁餐厅因需要明火制作多萨（dosas）而完全停售。班加罗尔一家餐厅的手写告示“因伊朗与美国战争导致气罐危机，今日无烙饼供应”在社交媒体上引发热议。仅泰米尔纳德邦就有近1万名餐馆面临关闭风险。化肥短缺虽尚未立即显现，但长期影响令人担忧。海湾地区供应全球三分之一的尿素，而春季种植期正值农业关键时段，导致多个国家如孟加拉国关闭四家国有尿素工厂，尼泊尔因国内无化肥生产，尿素价格在关键稻季前上涨40%。巴西糖厂则转向生产乙醇，以应对油价高于每桶100美元的情况，可能影响全球糖供应数月。世界粮食计划署警告称，全球可能有4500万人因危机陷入严重粮食不安全，较当前饥饿水平增加15%。此外，海峡关闭还导致联合国粮食援助滞留在迪拜仓库，削弱了救济机构的供应能力。
可怕的环境影响
环境影响可能是这场危机最深远的长期后果。清洁的LNG供应受阻，亚洲及其他地区煤炭使用量回升。日本计划放宽对老旧燃煤电厂的运行限制，韩国取消了煤炭发电的季节性上限并推迟关闭三座燃煤电厂，泰国、菲律宾和印尼均扩大煤炭业务，德国则重新评估重启搁置燃煤电厂的可行性。煤炭企业因战争受益，如澳大利亚的Yancoal股价上涨40%，美国宾夕法尼亚州的Core Natural Resources上涨30%。一旦重启，煤炭电厂短期内难以关闭，可能加剧碳锁定问题。然而，印度政府允许餐馆和酒店使用木材、干作物和牛粪作为燃料，这推翻了多年清洁能源政策，增加了健康风险。尽管如此，亚洲部分国家如尼泊尔已有70%的新车销售为电动车，巴基斯坦的电动三轮车售罄，中国电动车企比亚迪预计海外销量将比战前增长15%。有分析师称这为“亚洲的乌克兰时刻”，可能加速向可再生能源转型。但短期内，更多煤炭等污染燃料的使用仍会威胁全球更多人的生命。世界贫困人口虽未参与伊朗战争，却无疑正承受其后果。本文最初发表于《未来完美》通讯，欢迎订阅！
Butter chicken has disappeared from some restaurant menus in India. Sri Lanka declared every Wednesday a public holiday. Laos cut its school week to three days. Egypt ordered shops and cafes to close by 9 pm. In Thailand, government workers were told to take the stairs instead of the elevator. And in South Korea, the president urged citizens to take shorter showers.
These are wartime policies, even though none of these countries are actually fighting a war. All of them, however, are caught in the blast radius of one being fought thousands of miles away. That’s because the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, triggered by the US-Israeli strikes on Iran that began on February 28, has detonated a crisis that reaches into kitchens, classrooms, hospitals, and fields across the Global South.
Twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point, before the war, the Strait carried 20 percent of global oil, 20 percent of liquefied natural gas (LNG), a third of seaborne fertilizer, and nearly half of the world’s sulfur exports. Commodity shipments have fallen by 95 percent. The Strait is, in effect, closed, and the consequences are cascading through the lives of an estimated 3.2 billion people in countries now subject to some form of fuel rationing, power cuts, or energy restrictions.
Start with food. India imports the majority of its cooking gas through the Strait, and the disruption hit almost immediately. Black-market prices for a single liquified petroleum gas (LPG) cylinder — the kind that powers a family kitchen there — have nearly tripled. Restaurants across the country have slashed their menus; a 70-year-old Mumbai institution trimmed its elaborate multicourse Ramadan offerings to just four dishes. A chain in the same city stopped selling dosa entirely, because the dish requires an open gas flame. A handwritten sign at a Bengaluru restaurant went viral: “There will be no roti due to gas cylinder crisis (due to war between Iran and USA).” Nearly 10,000 restaurants in the state of Tamil Nadu alone face closure.
The fertilizer crisis hasn’t yet had the same level of immediate effects, but the longer-term impact looks grim. The Gulf produces roughly a third of the world’s exports of urea, a key ingredient in fertilizer, and the closure hit at the single worst moment in the agricultural calendar — just as Northern Hemisphere farmers need to apply fertilizer for spring planting.
Bangladesh has shut down four of its five state-owned urea plants. Nepal, which produces zero chemical fertilizer domestically, has seen urea prices jump 40 percent ahead of its critical paddy season. In Brazil, sugar mills are diverting their new harvest toward ethanol — which is more profitable, with oil above $100 a barrel — which could tighten global sugar supplies for months.
The World Food Programme warns that 45 million more people globally could be pushed into acute food insecurity — an increase of 15 percent on current hunger levels. As if that’s not enough, the closure of the strait has stranded vital United Nations food aid in warehouses in Dubai, crippling the ability of relief agencies to get supplies where they’re needed most.
Then there’s the environmental fallout, which may be the single most consequential long-term effect of the crisis.
The disruption of relatively clean LNG supplies has triggered a coal resurgence across Asia and beyond. Japan is planning to lift rules that required its oldest, dirtiest coal plants to run at less than 50 percent capacity, which means more carbon dioxide and other pollution spewed into the air. South Korea removed its own seasonal cap on coal power and delayed the retirement of three coal plants. Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia are all expanding coal operations. And in Europe, Germany is reviewing whether to restart mothballed coal plants.
Coal companies — whose product is the single-biggest contributor to climate change — are reaping the benefit. Australia’s Yancoal is up 40 percent since the war began, while Pennsylvania-based Core Natural Resources is up 30 percent. And once turned on, coal plants can be politically difficult to shut down again, which would risk a longer-term carbon lock-in. And it’s not just about climate change. In India, the government has formally permitted restaurants and hotels to burn wood, dried crops, and cow dung — undoing years of clean-fuel progress and putting more lives at risk in the process in a single directive.
If you squint, there could be an eventual silver lining to all of this. In Nepal, over 70 percent of new car sales are already electric. Electric rickshaws are selling out in Pakistan. The Chinese electric car maker BYD is now projecting overseas sales to be 15 percent higher than they were expected before the war. One energy analyst called this “Asia’s Ukraine moment” — a shock that could accelerate the shift to renewables the way Russia’s invasion pushed Europe toward wind and solar.
Hastening the clean energy transition, however, won’t put food on the table for billions of people throughout the Global South, and more coal and other dirty fuels in the short term will endanger more lives around the globe. The world’s poor may not be fighting the Iran war, but they are surely suffering from it.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
2026-04-01 19:15:00
NASA的“阿尔忒弥斯II号”太空发射系统火箭和“奥赖恩”飞船目前停驻在肯尼迪航天中心。尽管我尚未观看由瑞恩·高斯林主演的热门太空大片《Project Hail Mary》，但科学现实本身已足够引人入胜。根据计划，美国将于东部时间6月24日晚上6点24分发射四名宇航员，进行为期10天的绕月飞行。此次发射是“阿尔忒弥斯计划”的一部分，该计划旨在本十年内将人类重新送上月球，并在月球表面建立真正的基地。这标志着全球范围内重返月球的更大行动。因此，今天早上我们将探讨推动新一轮太空竞赛的动力，以及未来发射的可能方向。
“太空竞赛”再度开启：自上次人类登月以来已过去数十年，但过去五年中，无人月球任务和绕月飞行已显著增多。自2023年起，俄罗斯、印度、中国、日本等国的政府机构、非营利组织和私营企业都尝试了月球着陆，结果参差不齐但总体成功。例如，韩国于2022年发射了首个月球轨道器“丹-uri”，而以色列在2019年尝试无人登月但因引擎故障失败。美国最近的无人登月任务是在2024年2月，由德克萨斯州的Intuitive Machines公司制造的“奥德修斯”探测器成功着陆在月球南极附近，携带了六项NASA实验和六件商业物品，包括一件杰夫·昆斯的雕塑。
“阿尔忒弥斯计划”旨在为未来的火星任务铺路，即先将宇航员送回月球，作为迈向火星的跳板。载人月球任务有助于科学家研究长期太空旅行对人体的影响，并测试生命支持、通信和导航系统。此外，科学家还推测月球南极的冰层可能被转化为可呼吸的空气、饮用水或燃料，但这些目标仍需多年实现。目前，“阿尔忒弥斯计划”共有五次任务，其中“阿尔忒弥斯II号”是第二次，预计人类将再次登月是在2028年的“阿尔忒弥斯IV号”，而永久月球基地的建设则计划在“阿尔忒弥斯V号”中实现。无论计划如何，美国（以及加拿大！）宇航员重返月球的时间仍不确定。您可通过NASA的YouTube频道或C-SPAN直播观看此次发射。
I have yet to see Project Hail Mary, the buzzy space blockbuster starring Ryan Gosling. But who needs science fiction when you have…science reality?
At 6:24 pm Eastern, NASA is scheduled to launch four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon. The launch is part of the Artemis program, which hopes to return humans to the moon by the end of the decade and establish a bona fide base on the lunar surface.
This launch is part of a bigger, global push to return to the moon. So, this morning, we’re looking at what’s driving the new space race — and where it’ll blast off in the future.
It’s been many moons since a human last set foot on the lunar surface. But over the past five years, unmanned missions and lunar flybys like Artemis II have become markedly more frequent.
Since 2023, government space agencies, nonprofits, and private companies from Russia, India, China, and Japan have all attempted lunar landings to mixed (but generally successful) results. South Korea launched its first lunar orbiter, Danuri, in 2022. Israel also attempted an unmanned moon landing in 2019, though its craft suffered an engine failure.
America’s last lunar venture went down in February 2024, when the US landed an unmanned lunar spacecraft called Odysseus near the moon’s south pole; its first in 50 years. Odysseus carried six NASA experiments and six commercial items, including a Jeff Koons sculpture.
If all goes to plan, Artemis II will mark the first time humans have travelled into deep space since the Apollo program. (The astronauts are orbiting — but won’t land on — the moon.) They could also set a new record for distance travelled from earth.
“It is a fact: We’re in a space race,” former NASA administrator Bill Nelson told Politico.
The first space race was driven by geopolitical competition between nations — and there’s still an element of that, as Nelson’s full comments to Politico suggest. (He went on to warn that the Chinese could try to claim territory on the moon, though a 1967 treaty prohibits that.)
Generally speaking, however, today’s wave of lunar exploration is driven less by Cold War-style rivalry than by commercial interests. Private equity firms have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into private space companies over the past 10 years, seizing on lucrative government contracts and aiming to capture a share of a fast-growing market.
The unmanned lunar spacecraft that landed on the moon in February 2024, for instance, was produced by Intuitive Machines, a Texas-based engineering firm. For the Artemis missions, the US has relied heavily on technology developed by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin.
These companies hope to supply the infrastructure for future space exploration, transportation and logistics, which will — according to plans NASA announced last week — include a $20 billion US base on the moon. Longer-term, the lunar surface could also theoretically be mined for valuable resources or used as a refueling station for longer, deep-space missions.
That is, after all, the ultimate ambition of the Artemis project: to put astronauts back on the moon, yes — but as a stepping stone to one day getting them to Mars. Manned lunar missions help scientists better understand how extended space travel affects the human body, as well as test life-support, communication, and navigation systems. Researchers have also hypothesized that the large ice deposits at the moon’s south pole — first discovered in 2008 — could be transformed into breathable air, drinkable water, or fuel for longer trips.
But those sorts of ambitions are still years away, at best. Artemis II is the second of five planned missions in the Artemis program, each intended to build on the one before it. Humans aren’t expected to return to the lunar surface until Artemis IV, currently slated for 2028. And it won’t be until Artemis V that NASA lays the planned groundwork for that permanent lunar base.
This is all the more reason to seize your chance to watch the launch tonight. Whatever the plans, we don’t know for sure when American (and Canadian!) astronauts will head towards the moon again. You can stream it on NASA’s YouTube channel or via C-SPAN.
2026-04-01 18:30:00
自1981年艾滋病病毒（HIV）疫情爆发以来，已有超过4400万人因此丧生。在很长一段时间里，HIV感染的诊断几乎等同于死刑，而在全球许多地区，它仍然是日常的威胁，仅2024年就有约130万人新感染。然而，令人瞩目的进展正在发生：自艾滋病相关死亡达到顶峰以来，死亡率已下降了70%。目前，约3000万人正在接受抗逆转录病毒治疗，这些药物将原本的“死刑”转化为可控的疾病。我们正站在一些突破的边缘，这些突破在十年前还只是幻想：例如，每六个月只需注射一次的长效药物，以及真正可能的疫苗。如今，结束HIV疫情已成为一个可行的目标。然而，这也正是全球资金和政治承诺开始撤退的时刻。挽救数百万生命的健康项目正面临国内外的严重削减。在未来几个月内，《Future Perfect》将探讨美国及全球范围内抗击HIV的斗争，涵盖政治、制药、个人及痛苦等多方面。这一报道尤为重要，因为我们现在面临的首要问题不再是能否终结HIV，而是我们是否愿意这么做。本系列由吉利德公司赞助，但Vox对内容拥有完全的编辑自主权。
Since it first began in 1981, the HIV epidemic has killed more than 44 million people. For a generation, a diagnosis was essentially a death sentence, and for much of the world it remains a daily threat, with some 1.3 million people newly infected in 2024 alone.
But something remarkable has happened. Deaths from HIV-caused AIDS have fallen 70 percent since their peak. Around 30 million people are on antiretroviral treatment, drugs that turned that death sentence into a manageable condition. And we’re now on the cusp of breakthroughs that would have seemed like fantasy a decade ago: long-acting drugs that can prevent infection with a single injection every six months, and even the real possibility of a vaccine.
For the first time, the end of HIV is a plausible goal. Yet this is also the moment when the global funding and political commitment that made this progress possible are being pulled back. Health programs that have saved millions of lives face deep cuts, both abroad and at home.
Over the next several months, Future Perfect will be exploring the fight against HIV, here in the US and overseas, from the political and the pharmaceutical to the personal and the painful. There’s never been a more important moment for this coverage, because the overriding question in front of us is no longer whether we can end HIV. We know we can. It’s whether we will.
This series was sponsored by Gilead. Vox had full editorial discretion over the content of this reporting.
2026-04-01 18:30:00
1981年6月5日，美国疾病控制与预防中心（CDC）在《发病率与死亡率周报》中发布了一篇简短的临床报告，首次描述了洛杉矶五名年轻男性患上罕见致命性肺炎的情况。这篇报告在当时并未引起足够重视，但事实上，它标志着自1918年流感以来最严重的传染病大流行——艾滋病（AIDS）的开端，最终导致全球约4400万人死亡，并深刻改变了医学、政治和文化。最初，HIV感染被视作死刑判决，因为病毒迅速变异，治疗手段难以跟上，而社会对感染者充满歧视。直到1985年9月，里根总统才首次公开提及“AIDS”，此时美国已有约6000人死于该病。到1993年，HIV已成为美国25至44岁人群的主要死因，影响范围远超同性恋者和吸毒者，波及所有人。
1996年在温哥华举行的国际艾滋病大会上，大卫·霍博士等研究人员展示了联合抗逆转录病毒疗法（HAART）的成果，通过多种药物组合攻击HIV生命周期的不同阶段，显著降低了艾滋病、死亡和住院率。然而，早期治疗费用高昂，使得非洲等贫困地区难以获得药物。2003年，布什总统宣布启动“总统紧急艾滋病救济计划”（PEPFAR），承诺五年内投入150亿美元，推动全球艾滋病治疗。此后，PEPFAR帮助非洲数百万患者获得治疗，使低收入国家治疗成本从每年约1200美元降至2023年的58美元。到2024年，全球艾滋病死亡人数从2004年的210万降至63万，降幅达70%。
尽管取得巨大进展，目前仍有超过63万例艾滋病死亡，每年约有920万人未接受治疗，儿童治疗率仅为55%，而成年人为78%。全球新增感染中，性工作者、男同性恋者、注射吸毒者和跨性别者占比超过55%，比2010年上升了11个百分点。非洲仍是HIV感染最严重的地区，占全球患者总数的三分之二，但全球艾滋病防治资金面临严重威胁。2025年3月，美国国际发展署（USAID）的资助授权到期，全球项目陷入停滞，部分国家甚至裁撤了数千名医护人员。美国部分州也考虑削减艾滋病药物援助计划（ADAP）的预算，这可能使美国主要城市的新感染率在2030年上升近50%。
如今，我们拥有治疗和预防HIV的有效工具，包括药物、每日药丸（PrEP）和注射剂（如lenacapavir），甚至有望开发疫苗。但要彻底终结这场大流行，关键在于资金和政治意愿。HIV的历史证明了人类在决心和行动上的潜力，但问题在于我们是否能再次做出同样的决定。
On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a brief, clinical report in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report about five young men in Los Angeles who had developed a rare and deadly form of pneumonia.
The write-up, barely a page long, ran in between a report on dengue infections among US travelers and an assessment of measles cases. No one who read it could have known this was the opening chapter of the deadliest infectious disease epidemic since the 1918 flu — one that would kill an estimated 44 million people worldwide and reshape medicine, politics, and culture in ways we’re still reckoning with. It would eventually be called human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.
For the next 15 years, an HIV diagnosis was, functionally, a death sentence, as the immune system was hollowed out on a slow march to full-blown AIDS. The virus mutated so rapidly that every early attempt at treatment felt like trying to hit a moving target in the dark. And the dark was where many of the earliest victims were forced to live, stigmatized by society. It took until September 1985 for President Ronald Reagan to even say the word “AIDS” publicly, by which point some 6,000 Americans had already died.
By 1993, HIV had become the leading cause of death for all Americans aged 25 to 44. Not just gay men. Not just intravenous drug users. Everyone in the prime of their lives. In 1995, at the epidemic’s American peak, 50,628 people died of AIDS in a single year. Globally, new infections peaked the following year at around 3.4 million. In the hardest-hit cities of sub-Saharan Africa, one in five adults were HIV positive. Entire generations of parents were being wiped out. By 2000, AIDS was the leading cause of death on the African continent.
The story could have ended there: The virus had won while the world looked away. But it didn’t. What happened instead, through a combination of activist fury, scientific ingenuity, and an act of bipartisan political will that still seems improbable in hindsight, is one of the great reversals in the history of medicine. It’s a narrative that provides hope not just that we might one day get to zero and eradicate HIV, but that the world can overcome what may seem like the most hopeless challenges.
For the first decade of the epidemic, the US government’s response was defined by indifference, until activists decided to make that impossible. The group Act Up turned unimaginable grief into political force, storming the Food and Drug Administration, shutting down Wall Street, and transforming funerals into protests. They were loud and furious and provocative — and effective: Act Up and allied organizations pressured the FDA into creating accelerated drug approval pathways and shamed pharmaceutical companies into expanding access to experimental HIV treatments.
The clinical turning point came at the 1996 International AIDS Conference in Vancouver. Researchers including Dr. David Ho presented data on combination antiretroviral therapy — what would become known as HAART. Scientists combined multiple drugs into a cocktail that attacked HIV at different stages of its life cycle — basically surrounding the virus so it had nowhere to evolve to.
The results were staggering: 60 percent to 80 percent declines in rates of AIDS, death, and hospitalization. Patients who had been days from death recovered so dramatically that doctors called it the “Lazarus effect.” One physician’s practice went from 37 patient deaths in 1995 to zero in 1998. Nationally, AIDS deaths in the United States fell 63 percent in three years. HIV dropped from the No. 1 killer of young Americans to No. 5 by 1997 — an unprecedented decline for any leading cause of death in modern history.
But the Lazarus effect had a brutal asterisk. Early antiretroviral therapy cost $10,000 to $15,000 per patient per year. For most Americans with HIV, that was doable with a mix of insurance and government funding. For the tens of millions infected in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa — where the epidemic was orders of magnitude worse than in the West — those lifesaving drugs were all but unobtainable. In January 2003, nearly a decade after antiretrovirals had become widespread in the US, only about 50,000 people in all of sub-Saharan Africa were on the drugs. Thirty million were infected. Roughly 12 million Africans died of AIDS between 1997 and 2006 while high costs and supply bottlenecks kept the treatment that would have saved their lives out of reach.
It’s not hard to imagine an alternate history where this inequality of death persisted. After all, we implicitly accept this ingrained inequality in so many other areas, from extreme poverty to childhood mortality.
But that’s not what happened. The same activist energy that had forced the FDA’s hand in the 1990s turned its attention to the global treatment gap, joined by an unlikely alliance of evangelical Christians motivated by faith, public health officials who saw a security threat, and a president who cited the parable of the Good Samaritan.
During his 2003 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush pledged $15 billion over five years to fight AIDS abroad through what he called the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. The House passed the legislation that created PEPFAR 375-41, a sign of just how broad the coalition behind it was.
In April 2004, a 34-year-old man in Uganda named John Robert Engole became the first person in the world to receive PEPFAR-supported antiretroviral therapy. By the end of 2005, some 400,000 people were on treatment through the program. By 2008, it was 2 million around the world — a 40-fold increase from the 50,000 Africans on ART when Bush made his speech.
PEPFAR has since invested over $120 billion and, by its own estimates, saved 26 million lives. The cost of treating one patient in a low-income country fell from roughly $1,200 a year in 2003 to $58 by 2023. As my former colleague Dylan Matthews once wrote, PEPFAR is “one of the best government programs in American history.”
The downstream effects of PEPFAR and other advances in HIV treatment and prevention are extraordinary.
Annual global AIDS deaths have fallen from a peak of 2.1 million in 2004 to 630,000 in 2024 — a 70 percent reduction. Some 30.7 million people in low- and middle-income countries are now on antiretroviral therapy worldwide, up from fewer than 400,000 just two decades ago. That’s nearly an 80-fold increase.
What this all means is that someone diagnosed with HIV today who gets on treatment can expect a near-normal lifespan, which is an outcome that would have been literally unimaginable to anyone living through the 1980s and early 1990s.
On top of far better treatment, the toolkit for preventing people from getting HIV in the first place has become far more effective, which has helped lead new infections to drop more than 60 percent from 3.4 million in 1996 to 1.3 million. PrEP — a daily pill that reduces the risk of contracting HIV by up to 99 percent — has been available since 2012, and more than 3.5 million people around the world have taken it at least once. Last year the FDA approved lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injection that Science magazine named its 2024 breakthrough of the year. In the PURPOSE 1 trial of the drug, among more than 2,100 women in South Africa and Uganda, there were zero HIV infections. Not a low number. Zero.
HIV treatment, essentially, has become so effective that it now acts as prevention as well. HIV experts call it Undetectable equals Untransmittable, or U=U. Studies encompassing over 100,000 acts of condomless sex where one partner is HIV positive and another is not have found zero linked transmissions. That means someone living with HIV who is virally suppressed cannot pass the virus on sexually, which is a step toward both normalizing a disease that was once so feared and further curtailing the epidemic. And these tools can work at scale: The SEARCH trial showed that community health workers in rural Kenya and Uganda, armed with smartphone apps and the ability to immediately provide antiretroviral treatment to anyone testing positive, cut new infections by 70 percent.
And yet, more than 630,000 people still die of AIDS every year — roughly one every minute. Some 9.2 million people who need treatment still aren’t getting it. Children are the worst off: only 55 percent of those under 14 with HIV are on therapy, compared to 78 percent of adults. And the epidemic’s burden falls hardest on the most marginalized: sex workers, men who have sex with men, people who inject drugs, and transgender people now account for over 55 percent of all new infections globally — up from 44 percent in 2010.
Two-thirds of all people living with HIV are in sub-Saharan Africa, where external funding finances around 80 percent of prevention programs. That has left them vulnerable as the global HIV response faces its gravest funding threat in decades.
PEPFAR’s statutory authorization lapsed in March 2025 without congressional reauthorization. A January 2025 stop-work order froze programs worldwide. The effective dismantling of USAID — with 90 percent of contracts canceled — has gutted the program’s infrastructure. UNAIDS modeling suggests that if these disruptions become permanent, the result could be 6 million additional infections and 4 million additional deaths by 2029. South Africa alone has already laid off some 8,000 health care workers because of funding cuts.
And the threat isn’t only abroad: More than 20 US states are now considering cuts to the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, the safety net that covers a quarter of all Americans living with HIV — including Florida, where 16,000 people briefly lost coverage before an emergency fix that lasts only through the summer. A recent Johns Hopkins study estimated that eliminating the program’s parent legislation could increase new infections in major US cities by nearly 50 percent by 2030
For the first time in the 45-year history of this epidemic, we have genuinely effective tools to end it: drugs that treat, pills and injections that prevent, even hopes for a potential vaccine. The gap between where we are and where we need to be is no longer a question of science. It is a question of money and political will — the same forces that, two decades ago, helped produce the most effective global health program in American history.
The story of HIV is a story of what humanity can accomplish when it decides something matters enough. We’ve made that decision before. The question is whether we’ll make it again.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
2026-04-01 18:00:00
美国是世界上少数不提供产假福利的国家之一，新父母难以获得用于恢复、与新生儿建立联系以及家庭重新站稳脚跟的时间。目前，只有约四分之一的私营部门员工能享受此类福利，而低收入群体几乎无法获得。其余人只能依靠假期、病假或无薪休假，且往往难以负担。尽管美国存在广泛的跨党派支持，但将产假与医疗和育儿假捆绑在一起的综合政策却始终未能在联邦层面通过。相比之下，几乎所有其他国家都从基础的产假或育儿保护开始，逐步扩展至涵盖父亲、严重健康状况或照顾病患家庭成员的场景。美国的综合政策因过于复杂和昂贵，导致立法进展缓慢，且未能覆盖所有新父母的需求。
近年来，美国国会已出现跨党派支持育儿假的迹象。2017年，保守派与自由派智库联合提出一项八周的育儿假方案，支付约70%的工资。2019年，共和党参议员比尔·卡西迪和民主党参议员基尔斯滕·西奈玛提出一项拨款5000美元的育儿假法案，通过削减儿童税收抵免来支付费用。2023年，参众两院均成立了跨党派工作组，推动育儿假立法。尽管如此，综合政策仍面临巨大阻力，部分州已采取行动，如共和党主导的州扩大了育儿假福利，将其视为“生命权”政策。
文章指出，美国的综合育儿假政策因过于复杂和成本高昂而难以推进，而更务实的方案是提供一项普遍适用的育儿假保障，至少为低收入群体提供全额工资替代，同时为其他人提供有意义的福利。这不仅能帮助新生儿获得更好开端，还能弥合育儿假与日托服务之间的差距，使所有父母的生活更健康、更负担得起。虽然这不会是国会关于育儿假的最后一次斗争，但经过30年的努力失败，现在是时候推动一项可实现的立法。
The United States is one of the only countries on Earth that doesn’t guarantee new parents paid leave after a child is born — time to recover, bond with a newborn, and get on your feet as a new family. Only about one in four private-sector workers has access to it, and among the lowest-wage workers, virtually none do. The rest must cobble together vacation days, sick time, or unpaid leave, if they can afford to take any time off at all.
The common assumption is that America just doesn’t care enough about parents to fix this problem. But the policy has actually long drawn broad bipartisan support in the United States.
The real problem is that parental leave has been yoked to a far more ambitious federal package for over 30 years, one that faces a much steeper price tag and an uphill battle to passage. It’s a strategic political choice advocates and Congress have made, and keep making.
By contrast, virtually every other country started with basic maternity or parental protections — and built outwards over decades, eventually adding paid time off for fathers, for workers with serious health conditions, and for those caring for sick family members. In most countries, parental leave isn’t bundled with medical or caregiving leave either — it’s its own program, designed specifically around the needs of new parents.
In the US, though, efforts to provide paid leave have been aimed at addressing a wider variety of situations and needs all at once. That approach goes back decades, to when a coalition of disability rights groups, feminist organizations, seniors’ groups, and labor unions teamed up to pass the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. The FMLA guarantees eligible workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave, and Democrats have been trying to make it paid ever since.
Their latest version, put forth in 2025, is the broadest it’s ever been, encompassing paid leave circumstances like caregiving for step-grandchildren and the spouse of a sibling, as well as leave for survivors of stalking or sexual assault. It’s an admirable effort to define all the relationships and situations that might require love and support, but one that makes the legislation even more expensive and challenging to get over the finish line.
The evidence for what paid parental leave can do is extensive: it’s been linked to lower infant mortality, fewer hospitalizations, more timely vaccinations, and better maternal mental health. When fathers take leave, researchers have found improvements in children’s school performance and mothers’ postpartum health. And employers have little to fear — studies of state programs have consistently found no adverse effects on productivity or costs.
A more realistic path to reform could start with a modest federal guarantee — say, six weeks of paid leave for parents, both mother and father, after their baby is born. That would still allow lawmakers to add other kinds of federally guaranteed medical or caregiving leave later, or extend parental leave itself over time.
That’s how virtually every other country has done it. But lawmakers in the US are reluctant to push for anything less.
“We may only have one bite at the apple, so the idea is not to undercut ourselves before negotiations even begin,” a staffer for New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the lead sponsor of the Democrats’ flagship bill, the FAMILY Act, told me. It’s a version of the same logic that guided Democrats’ push to pass child care, paid leave, elder care, pre-K, and an expanded child tax credit all at once in 2021 — but, in that case, when advocates were loath to prioritize, they ended up with nothing.
The fear that Congress only gets one shot per generation at legislating a big social policy has shaped Democratic thinking for years, but it’s increasingly at odds with recent history. Federal lawmakers have returned to the same big issues — health care, climate, economic relief — multiple times within just a few years, often building on earlier efforts rather than waiting for one perfect bill.
“Bipartisan proposals to make progress on paid leave won’t inhibit passing broader social insurance efforts,” said Curran McSwigan, an economic policy expert at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank. “Laying some of that groundwork now can actually help achieve that goal.”
During the pandemic, when support for federal paid leave surged, advocates believed a comprehensive bill was finally within reach. But among at least some advocates, there’s a growing realization that the window for one big paid leave package has closed.
“That coalition might no longer want to get something real done,” one longtime activist, speaking on background to talk candidly about the politics, told me. “They might want to talk about something beautiful, it’s become more a soapbox to stand on than a possible reality.”
The pursuit of federally guaranteed paid leave goes back to the mid-1980s, when advocates began drafting federal legislation to ensure women didn’t lose their jobs after having a baby. But the bill quickly evolved. Opponents of maternity-leave mandates, led by pro-business interest groups, argued that pregnancy-only leave gave women “special treatment” under federal anti-discrimination law, prompting sponsors to reframe their proposal as gender-neutral. They also expanded it to cover workers caring for sick relatives, aging parents, and their own serious health conditions. Disability groups, unions, and senior organizations like AARP signed on, and the coalition grew.
After nine years of legislative battles and two presidential vetoes, the FMLA finally passed in 1993. Compared to what was first proposed, it had a shorter leave period (12 weeks, down from 18), a higher threshold for which employers qualified (those with 50 employees, up from 15), and stricter eligibility requirements. But sponsors preserved the broad architecture that covered new parents alongside workers with their own health conditions, those caring for sick relatives, and aging family members — and that became the template Democrats have worked to establish ever since.
Even in the states that have adopted a comprehensive model, new parents often fall through the cracks.
When states started creating their own paid leave programs — California first in 2004, then New Jersey, and eventually 14 Democratic-led states in all — they adopted the FMLA’s comprehensive framework, bundling medical, caregiving, and parental leave into a single social insurance program. Those early state programs were relatively modest, and most gradually expanded their wage replacement rates, duration, and worker eligibility as political support and funding allowed.
At the federal level, a comprehensive paid leave approach has been a harder sell. It’d cost hundreds of billions of dollars and has never come close to passing, not even when Democrats had unified control of government.
Comprehensive paid family and medical leave bills also have other problems. They treat leave as a form of worker insurance, meaning you pay in through your job earnings and draw benefits when you need time off. That works reasonably well if you’ve been steadily employed, but not if you’re young, just out of school, or between jobs. Even a parent who qualified for leave for their first child might not qualify with their second if they haven’t been back at work long enough. The 2020 version of the FAMILY Act would have excluded 30 percent of new parents from qualifying altogether.
And because the FAMILY Act is so expensive, Democrats have had to water down their proposed benefits, replacing only a portion of workers’ income. That might be manageable for an older worker earning a decent salary, but it doesn’t come close to covering the bills for a young parent making near minimum wage. The result is that many low-income parents who are eligible for paid leave don’t end up taking it because they can’t afford to live on a fraction of their already meager salaries — or they take on new debt or put off paying their other bills to do it.
Even in the states that have adopted a comprehensive model, new parents often fall through the cracks. A 2024 Niskanen analysis estimated that in six states with paid leave, between 18 and 26 percent of residents of childbearing age are ineligible because they haven’t worked recently enough to qualify.
The latest version of the FAMILY Act tries to fix some of the earlier problems by providing more generous benefits for low-income workers and loosening eligibility rules. But it still requires a recent work history to qualify, and the benefits still aren’t generous enough for many low-income parents to afford to actually take time off.
Gillibrand’s office told me that they don’t know how much their new bill would cost, or how many new parents would be eligible or likely to use the benefit. But it makes sense to hew to FMLA’s structure, they said, because people are already familiar with that framework.
Other advocates said providing the same amount of leave, regardless of the reason, helps prevent employers from discriminating against those they think are more likely to take leave, like women of childbearing age, and sends a positive message that people with different needs should be treated equally. “It’s a sound way to ensure you’re not inadvertently creating disincentives to hire particular types of people,” Vicki Shabo, a paid leave expert at New America, told me.
But other experts disagreed. Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project argued that it made no sense to treat all forms of paid leave the same: They serve different purposes and different populations. And amending the FAMILY Act or some other federal proposal to focus on parents would be easy, he adds. “Give me a day, and I’ll put a couple sentences in there that’ll make sure that everyone who has a newborn at least gets $800 a week,” Bruenig said.
Maya Rossin-Slater, a health economist at Stanford, added that the evidence that parental leave in the US leads to hiring discrimination is “really, really thin and limited,” largely because the leave on offer here is just not very long. In European countries where parental leave can stretch for several years, she said, there’s a clearer case — but that’s a far cry from the few months being discussed in America.
Parental leave has quietly been building real momentum in Congress over the past ten years. In 2017, a joint working group from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and the Brookings Institution, a liberal one, proposed eight weeks of paid parental leave that would pay new parents roughly 70 percent of their usual wages. Their idea never became legislation, but Adrienne Schweer, who leads the Paid Leave Task Force at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said the effort helped bolster more concerted bipartisan efforts.
Momentum came from unexpected places. Ivanka Trump made six weeks of paid parental leave her signature cause in her father’s first term, even getting the president to call for it in his 2019 State of the Union. Sen. Marco Rubio introduced a bill in 2018 that would let new parents draw from their own Social Security savings to cover the months around birth, delaying retirement by about six months in exchange. That proposal had critics across the spectrum, but Schweer praised it for establishing the principle that parental leave could apply to parents regardless of whether they were currently working.
“It was bold because it was creative,” she said. “If you were a stay-at-home mom who had worked in your teens and twenties and built up some Social Security credits, you could still access the benefit. You didn’t need a current employer. You didn’t need to return to work afterward.”
That principle — that parental leave should reach all new parents, not just those currently in the workforce — is central to the case for splitting it off from other kinds of worker leave.
A newborn’s need for care doesn’t depend on whether their parents had recent earnings. And most daycares won’t even accept infants younger than six weeks for liability and vaccination reasons, meaning families without paid leave have no source of income and no child care option during those early weeks that matter most.
By 2019, the Republican-led Congress passed 12 weeks of paid parental leave for all 2.1 million federal civilian employees, tucked inside a bipartisan defense bill signed by Trump. The same year, Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy and then-Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema introduced a bill that would have given new parents up to $5,000 after the birth or adoption of a child — money they could use to cover lost wages while taking time off. Their bill was paid for by slightly reducing the child tax credit over the following decade.
The bipartisan energy hasn’t faded. More recently, in 2023, working groups on paid leave launched in both chambers, co-chaired by Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) and Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-OK) in the House, and Cassidy and Gillibrand in the Senate. The House group rallied around draft legislation to help coordinate paid leave benefits across state borders and establish federal grants to allow states to start or expand their own programs.
The Senate group didn’t make any formal proposals, but a staffer from Gillibrand’s office told me Cassidy’s goal was to bring more Republicans into the fold, and that “the way Republicans now talk about paid leave is different from five years ago, which is a win.” This past winter, the influential and Republican-led House Education and Workforce Committee held a hearing on paid leave.
Red states have taken action too. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, at least a dozen GOP-led states have granted or expanded paid parental leave for state employees — framing it as “pro-life” policy. The benefits are modest, but they show that parental leave specifically is a less partisan issue, especially in a political climate where both parties are competing to prove they’re better for families.
Still, not everyone is convinced a narrower parent-only approach would break the federal logjam. Shabo, of New America, is skeptical. “This often comes up as a possibility, but we have seen no evidence that it would garner more support from people who wouldn’t support comprehensive paid leave,” she told me.
Patrick Brown, a family policy expert at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, acknowledged the challenge is convincing more Republicans to get on board. “Lots of GOP lawmakers want to provide paid leave through some way that isn’t raising taxes, mandating benefits, or creating new entitlements,” he said. “The problem is, that’s kind of an impossible circle to square.”
The pandemic briefly made the comprehensive approach seem within reach. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act, signed by Trump in March 2020, created temporary federal paid leave. The government paid people to stay home, and wage replacement at scale became politically normal. Support for paid leave also surged in polling, and employer support grew alongside it. When the Democratic-controlled Congress in 2021 began working on a massive reconciliation bill, advocates decided to go big or go home.
But as Senate holdouts forced Democrats to pare back the package, last-ditch proposals to save paid leave — including one that would have limited it to new parents only — came too late. Paid leave was cut, and then the bill itself collapsed. The result today is strategic paralysis. Democrats have shown they’re willing to make real concessions on policy — the 2025 FAMILY Act abandons the payroll tax that funded earlier versions, for example, and it still doesn’t push for full wage replacement, even though its drafters know that’s important for low-income workers. But the one thing they’ve been unwilling to seriously reconsider is the comprehensive structure that bundles several different kinds of leave.
As wonks continue to debate the details, Schweer told me she hopes her fellow advocates will be brave enough to try something different. “Don’t let great be the enemy of the good,” she said. “Look for the spaces where there’s bipartisan interest and push it as far as it can go to cover the most people — especially the people least likely to get it from their employers.”
A modest but universal paid parental leave guarantee — one that offers at minimum full wage replacement to low-income workers and a meaningful benefit to everyone else — would accomplish a raft of goals both parties claim to care about.
It would give every newborn a better start, close the gap between birth and the earliest age most daycares accept infants, and make life healthier and more affordable for all parents. It would also establish a floor that Congress could build on, just as every other country has done. It wouldn’t be the last fight Congress ever has on paid leave. But after 30 years of failing to pass a dream bill, it’s time for lawmakers to pick one they can win.
2026-04-01 05:00:00
2026年3月30日，美国帕萨迪纳的一家加油站显示汽油价格。| Mario Tama/Getty Images 本文出自《Logoff》每日简报，帮助您了解特朗普政府的动态，而不会让政治新闻占据您的生活。订阅这里。欢迎来到《Logoff》：总统唐纳德·特朗普与伊朗的冲突使美国汽油价格达到近三年来的最高点。是什么导致了这一变化？周二，全国平均汽油价格首次突破每加仑4美元，自伊朗战争爆发以来，汽油价格已上涨超过1美元/加仑。这一上涨主要归因于伊朗在战争初期关闭霍尔木兹海峡，导致约五分之一的全球石油供应受阻。为什么汽油价格如此重要？虽然汽油不是大多数美国人预算中的最大支出项，但它是一个人们日常接触并广泛张贴在道路附近的衡量生活成本的重要指标。特朗普经常声称能降低汽油价格，但往往提供虚假数据。此外，汽油价格也反映了全球能源市场面临的广泛冲击：油价徘徊在每桶100美元以上，柴油价格达到每加仑5.45美元，喷气燃料价格则翻了一番。高昂的能源价格将很快影响美国生活的方方面面，使食品、航空旅行和消费品价格上升。霍尔木兹海峡的中断影响也不止于此：正如我的同事布莱恩·沃尔什所解释的，化石燃料是制造全球粮食所需肥料的重要原料，供应短缺将对全球产生严重影响。接下来会发生什么？目前尚无定论。周二，特朗普在Truth Social上表示，即使霍尔木兹海峡仍大部分关闭，他可能也会考虑结束美国在战争中的参与，这与《华尔街日报》的报道一致。此前特朗普试图说服盟友帮助打开海峡的努力并未成功。然而，海峡仍保持关闭状态，全球能源危机将日益加剧，而特朗普无法置身事外。至此，《Logoff》结束。如果一切按计划进行，美国将在明天首次将宇航员送上月球，距上次阿波罗任务已超过53年。与1972年的阿波罗任务不同，本次阿耳忒弥斯II号任务的宇航员不会登陆月球表面，而是像阿波罗13号一样绕月飞行后返回地球。阿耳忒弥斯火箭将于今晚从佛罗里达州卡纳维拉尔角发射，时间为东部时间下午6点24分（假设天气良好）。我们今天也特别报道这一事件，因为太空探索令人兴奋，这样您就有更多时间阅读这篇精彩的《连线》文章，了解此次任务的细节。祝您度过愉快的夜晚，我们明天再见！
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s war with Iran has pushed US gas prices to their highest point in more than three years.
What happened? On Tuesday, the national average for a gallon of gasoline cleared $4 for the first time since August 2022, capping an increase of more than $1/gallon since the war with Iran began.
The spike is largely a consequence of Iran’s decision early in the war to close the Strait of Hormuz to most traffic. Until recently, about one-fifth of the global oil supply flowed through the strait.
Why do gas prices matter so much? While gas isn’t the biggest item in most people’s budgets, it’s one measure of the cost of living that many Americans interact with on a regular basis and is prominently posted near roads everywhere. Trump has also regularly boasted about bringing gas prices down, often offering false statistics.
They’re also an indicator of the broader energy shock wracking global markets: Oil prices are hovering somewhere above $100/barrel, diesel prices are at $5.45/gallon, and jet fuel prices have doubled.
High energy prices will soon trickle down to many other aspects of American life, making food, air travel, and consumer goods more expensive. Disruptions caused by the Strait of Hormuz won’t stop there, either: As my colleague Bryan Walsh explains, fossil fuels are an input in the fertilizers that help feed the world; a shortage will be felt acutely.
What comes next? It’s anyone’s guess. In a Truth Social post on Tuesday, Trump suggested that he could be looking to bring US involvement in the war to an end with the Strait of Hormuz still largely closed, matching reporting by the Wall Street Journal. An earlier effort by Trump to recruit US allies to help open the strait fell flat.
The strait remains closed, though, the worse the global energy crisis will get — and that’s not something Trump can opt out of.
If all goes to plan, the US will send astronauts to the moon tomorrow for the first time in more than 53 years. Unlike the Apollo mission in 1972, the Artemis II crew won’t land on the lunar surface; for this trip, they’ll slingshot around it Apollo 13-style before returning to Earth.
The Artemis rocket is set to lift off tomorrow evening from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 6:24 pm ET (assuming the weather is good). We’re covering it today too, though, because space is exciting, and that way you’ll have more time to read this great Wired story about what the mission will entail.
Have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!