2026-04-08 04:15:00
2026年4月4日，NASA宇航员兼阿尔忒弥斯II号任务专家克里斯蒂娜·科赫透过奥瑞恩飞船的主舱窗户向外眺望。这次阿尔忒弥斯II号任务创造了多项历史：人类首次远距离太空旅行、首次有黑人、女性和加拿大宇航员绕月飞行，以及首次将真正的厕所带上太空。尽管太空探索中有很多重大问题，但“在太空中如何如厕”这一问题尤为重要，因为这关系到未来更长时间的太空任务和月球基地建设。
在任务初期，宇航员报告称厕所出现故障，但很快被修复。然而，随着飞船接近月球，厕所问题再次出现。科学美国人撰稿人K. R. Callaway指出，解决太空如厕问题对于长期探索至关重要。她与主持人Sean Rameswaram讨论了太空厕所的发展历程。从上世纪60年代和70年代的阿波罗任务开始，宇航员只能使用粘贴在身上的袋子收集排泄物，缺乏隐私且容易泄漏。例如，阿波罗10号任务中曾出现排泄物漂浮在舱内的情况，而阿波罗8号任务中则有宇航员因生病导致呕吐物和粪便在舱内漂浮。
在阿波罗16号任务中，宇航员肯·马蒂格利曾表示，如果能去月球，他就不想再去火星了，因为太空厕所的问题实在令人困扰。如今，NASA的“通用废物管理系统”（即太空厕所）已升级为真空系统，利用气流收集尿液，而非依赖宇航员手动密封袋子。该系统还包括独立的座位和尿液收集装置，但仍在低重力环境下存在挑战，如噪音大、需要固定装置等。
尽管任务中出现了厕所故障，但NASA仍认为这一技术是未来探索的关键。尿液会被收集并释放到太空，而粪便会储存在飞船内，待返回地球时在再入大气层时烧毁。目前，工程师怀疑尿液收集系统的问题可能由冰堵导致，同时宇航员也报告了异味问题，这些问题仍在持续改进中。
太空厕所看似平凡，却是实现长期太空探索和建立宜居太空环境的重要一环。正如Callaway所说，如果无法解决如厕问题，就无法真正实现对火星的探索。
The Artemis II space mission is making history.
Farthest humans have ever traveled in space? Check.
First Black, woman, and Canadian astronauts to make it around the moon? Also check.
First time a toilet has made this journey? Big, important check.
Because while there are many significant questions about space — Is life out there? Could we settle Mars? How far does the universe stretch, really? — one question holds plenty of gravity: What happens when nature calls in space?
This mission hopes to return with answers.
After years of research, the Orion spacecraft used in the Artemis II mission has departed Earth with an actual toilet, door and all.
In the initial hours after the Orion capsule launched, some of the first reports from the astronauts were about their toilet malfunctioning. They quickly fixed it. But, as they approached the moon, potty problems reigned again.
“If you’re going to do longer missions and eventually potentially even have a base on the moon or go even further onto Mars, you first need to figure out: what are you going to be doing for food, for water, and also for peeing and pooping on the spacecraft and on the surface?” K.R. Callaway, a writer with Scientific American, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram.
So the simple presence of a toilet on this mission?
“Definitely history-making,” she said.
To understand the significance, Sean sat down with Callaway to discuss the history and future of space toiletry. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Tell us about the history of using the facilities in space.
So back in the ’60s and ’70s, [the] Apollo [program] used these bags. They had different ones for peeing, different ones for pooping, but it was still essentially a bag that you would tape onto your body and just go. It obviously didn’t provide a lot of privacy. We aren’t talking like going into a room with a door and doing this; this was just done in the cabin, and it was not super user-friendly either.
They had a lot of issues with leaks. You know, it’s just an adhesive. It can become unstuck and in low gravity, that can be a big problem for particles escaping.
I had a lot of fun going through the Apollo mission transcripts and just looking at all of the ways that astronauts were describing this after use. They were pretty upset about it. During the Apollo 10 mission, they said, There’s a turd floating through the air.
Wow.
So they had to wrangle that themselves. And even before that, they were having issues. During Apollo 8, there was another pretty notable mission where a crew member was ill. And so the other crew members were chasing down these blobs of both vomit and feces that were just floating wildly through the cabin.
And one of the astronauts you quote in your piece was Ken Mattingly, whose name people might be familiar with from the Apollo 13 mission and of course the Apollo 13 movie.
This was actually one of my favorite quotes that I came across while I was going through the mission transcripts. This is something that Ken Mattingly said on Apollo 16, which is that, “I used to want to be the first man to Mars. This has convinced me that if we got to go on Apollo, I ain’t interested.”
As in, this whole toilet situation is so insufferable, I maybe don’t really want to spend too much time in space anymore.
Exactly.
So NASA, I imagine, after all the Apollo missions, realizes it needs to advance this technology. How does it do so?
I spoke to Melissa McKinley over at NASA. She is the head of the Toilet Project — the Universal Waste Management System is their technical name, though I’ve been assured that just “toilet” is okay to say. And she mentioned that everything that’s happened from the ’60s and ’70s to now has really been a feat of engineering and design.
They’ve been able to implement a vacuum system that uses airflow to pull particles down instead of just having them float through space and relying on you to seal the bag yourself and keep everything in.
Help me picture what it looks like, because I’m guessing it does not look like any toilet in one of our homes.
More like an airplane toilet is how I would describe it.
The toilet has a seat and it has a funnel on the side for collecting urine and everyone gets their own separate piece to attach for the part that actually would touch your skin, luckily.
Oh!
For the toilet itself, it’s pretty loud in there.
Astronauts have to wear hearing protection and they also have handles to hold on to because you’re working in no gravity or low gravity and you need a little bit of help to stay in the right position.
So these aren’t plastic bags anymore. Where’s this stuff going? Are we just shooting it out into space?
We are partially shooting it out into space. For urine, it is collected and then it’s going to be vented a couple of times. It’s going to be a controlled process, so it will be just a lot of liquid at once, but yeah, that is where the urine is going.
For poop, they are storing that on board and then it will be kept in an area of the spacecraft that will actually burn up upon reentry. It’s not coming back to Earth with them, but it is going to stay with them for a while.
And yet, all this testing, all this hype about this new toilet, and one of the first stories we get once the astronauts are up in Earth’s orbit is that something has gone wrong with the toilet! What happened?
Already the toilet has had a few issues. It’s kind of the equivalent of a plumbing issue, but for space.
When they were trying to use it on one of the early days of the mission, they found that there was an error. The issue ended up being with the fan that helps to get the airflow to help with the urine collection — kind of a big problem. And luckily with ground control support, [astronaut] Christina Koch was actually able to fix this almost immediately after it had happened.
The latest I heard over the weekend is that they had toilet trouble again, so maybe not the best plan to have your astronauts also be your plumbers. What’s the latest on this very expensive, very important toilet?
It did seem to break again over the weekend. From what the NASA people were saying, it seems like it’s the same problem again with the urine collection system. The engineers have looked into it a little bit more deeply and they think that it might be ice blocking the tube that would help fully collect the urine.
Astronauts have reported issues with that system collection and then also a smell coming from the toilet area. Definitely a problem that they say they’re going to just keep working on.
This whole toilet thing can feel inconsequential considering what we’re really doing up there in space: exploration, making history, trying to get to Mars one day, all the rest. Why is the toilet important?
One of NASA’s goals with this particular toilet is that it’s a modular design, which means that they can put it not just in the Artemis II capsule, but they can also put it in a lot of different space vehicles.
They could potentially even adapt it to be on a Mars mission and longer-term missions. They can adapt it so that they can do what the ISS does in terms of liquid recycling and make longer-term, more sustainable missions possible.
Even though it seems very mundane to us as something that you use every day, for being in space, it’s actually one of the key things that stands in the way of making space more homelike and more able to be a place where we can do longer-term science.
If you can’t figure out the facilities, you’re never gonna figure out Mars.
Exactly.
2026-04-08 02:15:00
2026年4月7日，美国和以色列对伊朗发动袭击，导致德黑兰的沙里夫理工大学遭到破坏，现场可见伊朗国旗。《今日解释》节目主持人诺埃尔·金与《纽约客》记者德克斯特·菲金斯（曾担任《纽约时报》巴格达记者）讨论了特朗普政府对伊朗的战争与美国2003年入侵伊拉克的相似之处。两者都体现了美国军事力量的压倒性优势，但目标模糊且难以实现。菲金斯指出，当布什总统在2003年4月9日美军进入巴格达后宣称“任务完成”时，实际上当时局势已陷入混乱，随后伊拉克国内爆发了持续多年的动荡。他强调，美国军队虽然擅长战斗，但无法维持秩序，导致战争后长期的不稳定。此外，美国在伊拉克战争中未能找到大规模杀伤性武器，引发了民众对政府的不信任和背叛感，这同样适用于当前的伊朗战争。菲金斯认为，美国在中东的干预缺乏明确目标，政府的解释也常常含糊不清，令人感到“似曾相识”的空虚与不安。他担忧美国似乎从未从过去的冲突中吸取教训，可能会再次陷入无休止的战争。他希望伊朗战争能有一个令人满意的结局，至少确保霍尔木兹海峡保持畅通，以避免全球经济陷入衰退，并防止该地区局势进一步恶化。
How closely does President Donald Trump’s war in Iran compare with America’s last conflict in the Middle East?
Both the Iran war and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq have paired conventional American military dominance with shifting, ambiguous objectives. And both feature an American president desperate to declare the mission accomplished.
“I do have this kind of really empty, terrible feeling, kind of déjà vu,” Dexter Filkins, a staff writer at the New Yorker who was the former Baghdad correspondent for the New York Times, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.
Filkins talked to King about America’s quick conquest of Iraq in 2003, the chaos that followed, what the Iraq War did to the American psyche, and where the similarities between that war and Trump’s war in Iran end.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
President Bush claimed to have won the conflict [in Iraq]; about six weeks in, he gets on an aircraft carrier, he’s got this banner behind him that says “mission accomplished.” What was the moment for you that it became clear that the mission had not been accomplished?
It was clear the moment that the US military entered Baghdad, and it’s April 9, 2003. The chaos and the looting and the bloodshed began immediately. By the end of the day, after the US military marches triumphantly into the capital; by nighttime, the capital is on fire. And there’s total anarchy.
When President Bush flew on the aircraft carrier and said, “mission accomplished,” it was absurd then. But then of course it became a cruel joke because the anarchy that we witnessed in the capital that day just spread far and wide across the country and engulfed the country and stayed that way for a very long time.
What allowed it to keep going? The anarchy starts in Baghdad and then it spreads. And there’s a world in which the US is there. We’ve got good troops, we’ve got good weapons, and so we just win. But that’s not what happened.
The important thing to consider is that it’s not enough. It’s never enough. And you could say that about the Iran war.
The US military is really good at what they do, and what they do is destroy their enemies. But that is not enough necessarily to make a just and lasting peace that will endure and that will, say, allow the United States to leave.
“The important thing to consider is that it’s not enough. It’s never enough. And you could say that about the Iran war.”
The United States had plenty of firepower, but it wasn’t enough to hold the country together. This was a very traumatized country that had been torn apart in many different ways, including by its own government, for many, many years. And so all these things kind of spilled out in front of us.
The overwhelming fact was that the United States military, after it destroyed the government, was unable to keep order. And until you can have order, you can’t build anything that will last. And it took many, many years for the United States to figure out a way to make that happen.
By the time we pulled out of Iraq in 2011, how had the region changed? What did that war do to the Middle East?
The Iraq War was like a magnet for every lunatic — and I mean it, every lunatic — not just in the Middle East, but across the world. It was drawing people, particularly from across the Islamic world, into the country to fight the Americans. And so it became this kind of self-sustaining firestorm.
You could hear, you could see the propaganda, you could hear it on loudspeakers: Come to the fight, come and fight the Americans. And so we got ourselves into this kind of terrible situation where we saw ourselves as the saviors. But many people across the region saw us as invaders and as occupiers.
I wonder if you can reflect on what you think the Iraq War did to Americans. Because I remember the torture memos, I remember Abu Ghraib…I just remember — and again, I was young, but I remember these things where it was like, Oh shit, this is who we are now.
I would say it’s a bit of a sad ledger because I think when the Americans went in and couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction, didn’t find any nuclear weapons, people felt like they’d been lied to, that the government wanted this war, that they wanted to go to war no matter what and they made up this intelligence to go in.
Whether that’s true or not, I think there was a huge sense that people felt betrayed. We kind of lost our bearings, lost our way. I think, correctly, there was a feeling like, Oh my God, we embarked on this gigantic ambitious, bloody, expensive venture, and what did we get out of this? And I think the first and foremost, for a lot of people, it was a lot of pain that we got out of it.
As you’ve told the story of the war in Iraq, I am definitely hearing parallels to the war in Iran. What do you make of the comparisons? What is appropriate and what is going too far at this moment?
I’d say any war is horrible and terrible things inevitably happen. For instance, in the Iran war, it’s pretty clear that the United States bombed a school for children and killed 150 kids or so. That kind of thing happens, and it’s not to excuse it in any way — those things are kind of terrible across the board.
But I would say there’s a sense that I have, having lived through, and seen up close, the Iraq War — that the government once again is having a hard time speaking clearly about its goals and its justifications for being there.
That’s disturbing because we live in a democracy and the government should only be able to do what it is sanctioned to do by its people. President Trump has given out so many different justifications as to why we’re there. And so in that sense, I do have this kind of really empty, terrible feeling, kind of déjà vu.
One of the takeaways we hear is that America never learns its lesson. America is going back into the Middle East. America’s going to fight another stupid, forever war.
You clearly have a more nuanced perspective on this, and you were in the region, and that counts for a lot. What is the big lesson here for you after the last 25 years of US interference in the Middle East?
I think maybe that there isn’t a big lesson, but in the case of Iran, in the Iran war, I’ll tell you how I feel about it. I don’t like the way the war started. I’m very disturbed by it, but we’re in it and it’s too late to turn back now.
I think the best that we can hope for and that we should hope for is that we can get to a satisfactory resolution. At a minimum, I think that means for the Strait to be open so that the world economy doesn’t tumble into recession. My main hope is that we can somehow extricate ourselves from this war in a way that doesn’t leave the region in even greater chaos than what we have now.
2026-04-07 19:00:00
2026年4月6日，美国总统唐纳德·特朗普与国防部长彼得·海格塞思在白宫简报室举行新闻发布会。本文出自《Today, Explained》每日新闻简报，旨在帮助读者理解当天的重要新闻。如今，特朗普对伊朗的战争已持续五周多，但尚未取得决定性胜利。美国和以色列在军事行动中占据主导地位，但伊朗通过封锁霍尔木兹海峡这一全球能源贸易的关键通道，引发了油价、化肥等商品价格上涨，并导致数十个国家实施配给和宵禁。美国汽油价格目前已平均超过每加仑4美元。特朗普在应对这一复杂局势时不断变换策略，先是声称封锁问题不大，随后表示其他国家应负责解决，最后则在社交媒体上威胁要轰炸伊朗的发电站和桥梁，称“若不打开霍尔木兹海峡，你们将生活在地狱中”。然而，特朗普的威胁往往缺乏实际行动，网友甚至创造了“TACO”（特朗普总是退缩）这一缩写来形容他的行为。如果他真的采取行动，可能会在数小时内对伊朗9300万平民造成灾难性影响。
但为何美国要介入伊朗？美国和以色列于2月28日对伊朗发动了突袭，特朗普声称此举旨在消除“迫在眉睫的威胁”、阻止伊朗发展核武器，并推翻其长期统治的专制政权。尽管他可能试图以多管齐下的方式达成目标，但正如 NPR 的 Mara Liasson 所指出的，他的战略似乎是在“边走边想”。伊朗方面则采取了更具策略性的应对方式，利用大量廉价无人机将不对称战争带入美国和以色列的领地，迫使两国消耗昂贵的拦截导弹。同时，伊朗通过封锁霍尔木兹海峡，将国家地理优势转化为战略武器。重新开放海峡已成为军事行动的核心目标，而特朗普政府似乎意识到，除非实现这一目标，否则这场战争将被视为美国的失败。
那么，什么能让伊朗重新开放霍尔木兹海峡？这正是价值2000亿美元的难题。特朗普有时坚持认为问题会自然解决，有时则威胁要大幅升级打击行动。他多次设定截止期限，却不断推迟。例如，3月21日他威胁要在48小时内摧毁伊朗发电站，随后又将期限延长至3月26日以进行谈判，再延长至4月6日晚，并最终推迟到4月7日晚上8点。他还使用了带有侮辱性的措辞以显示决心。然而，这些威胁的严重性仍存疑，尽管它们可能违反国际法，且已导致伊朗1500名平民死亡和基础设施严重受损。目前，美伊双方均拒绝了暂停战斗45天并重启海峡的停火提议，使得局势陷入一种荒诞而不确定的倒计时中，唯有特朗普的社交媒体动态不断更新。
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
We’re now more than five weeks into President Donald Trump’s unpopular and apparently unprovoked war with Iran, and any decisive “victory” still seems far off. The US and Israel have dominated the battlefield from the start. But Iran successfully brought an economic crisis to a gunfight: By closing the Strait of Hormuz, a major chokepoint in the global energy trade, it spiked the price of oil, fertilizer, and other goods and triggered rationing and curfews in dozens of countries. A gallon of gas now tops $4, on average, in the United States.
Trump has veered from one approach to another as he struggles to resolve this thorny situation. First he tried suggesting that the closure of the strait was not actually a problem at all. When that failed, he said other countries would handle it. On Sunday morning, he took a very, er, different tact: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” he posted on Truth Social, where he threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants and bridges.
The thing about Trump’s threats is that he often doesn’t follow through on them. Online commentators have even coined an acronym for this: TACO, or “Trump always chickens out.” Should Trump not chicken out, however, then the US could be bombing 93 million civilians “back to the Stone Ages” in a matter of hours.
The US and Israel launched surprise airstrikes against Iran on February 28. Trump has variably claimed those strikes were intended to eliminate an “imminent threat,” to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, and/or to oust the repressive, theocratic regime that has ruled the country for generations.
You might generously assume that, in pursuing multiple and occasionally conflicting objectives, Trump is taking something of a many-birds-with-one-stone approach. But as NPR’s Mara Liasson put it Monday, it certainly looks like he’s making the strategy up “as he goes.”
The Iranians, on the other hand, have been very strategic. Using a vast supply of small, cheap drones, the regime has brought the (asymmetric) fight to the US and Israel, forcing both countries to drain their supply of expensive interceptor missiles.
They also weaponized the country’s geography by blockading the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway that many — dare I say most? — Americans could not name or place before last month. Reopening the strait is now a central objective of the military action, and the Trump administration seems to understand that the war will be perceived as a loss for the US unless/until it reopens.
That’s the $200 billion question. At times, Trump has seemed determined to make the problem go away by insisting it doesn’t exist. Just last week, he claimed that the strait would “open up naturally” after the conflict ended and said other countries that rely on Gulf oil should take on the task of getting tankers through again.
At other times, Trump has taken a starkly different approach — threatening to dramatically and aggressively escalate strikes if Iran didn’t reopen the strait. On each occasion, however, he’s given the Iranian regime a deadline…and then delayed. And delayed.
On March 21, he threatened to “obliterate” Iranian power plants if the strait was not opened within 48 hours. He then extended that timeline until March 26 to allow for negotiations.
On March 26, Trump again extended the deadline, this time until the evening of April 6. On April 5, he bumped it to 8 pm Eastern today, April 7. He also threw in a couple well-placed profanity to signal he meant business.
If you mean “serious” as in “sincere” or “likely,” we have no earthly clue. And reasonable people can probably disagree on whether swearing makes you sound like a more or less serious person.
But in terms of how significant or worrying these threats are, the answer is: incredibly. International law permits military strikes on power plants and similar infrastructure only if they contribute to military operations. Widespread strikes on civilian targets are likely “illegal and unacceptable,” as one high-ranking European Union official put it.
US and Israeli strikes have already killed 1,500 civilians and badly damaged infrastructure in Iran, including highway bridges, energy and industrial sites, residential neighborhoods, and school campuses. These new threats would go considerably further, potentially disrupting electricity, health care, clean water, and other critical services for millions of Iranians.
Both the US and Iran have rejected ceasefire proposals that would have paused fighting for 45 days and established a path for reopening the strait. In the absence of that kind of negotiated off-ramp, we have a surreal, uncertain countdown…and Trump’s Truth Social feed.
2026-04-07 05:00:03
2026年4月3日，伊朗卡尚市以西的德黑兰附近，B1桥在空袭中被摧毁。特朗普在社交媒体上威胁称，若伊朗不于本周二前开放霍尔木兹海峡，他将兑现此前威胁摧毁伊朗全国桥梁和发电厂的承诺，并威胁攻击伊朗的海水淡化厂和霍尔木兹岛的石油出口设施。当被问及此举是否构成战争罪时，特朗普回应称，伊朗领导人“在过去一个月内杀害了4.5万人，他们是野兽”。他的言论引发了对违反战争法的指控，因为其针对伊朗民用基础设施（如电力和供水系统）的威胁可能超出合法军事目标的范畴。参议院少数党领袖查克·舒默警告称，特朗普的言论可能构成战争罪。
根据国际法和美国军事规定，合法军事目标需满足两个条件：一是对军事行动有实质性贡献，二是其摧毁或占领能带来明确的军事优势。法律专家指出，虽然某些设施（如发电站、桥梁或海水淡化厂）可能被认定为合法目标，但特朗普的威胁是大规模摧毁，而非针对具体军事目标，这可能构成非法行为。此前美国在伊拉克和塞尔维亚的军事行动中曾针对电力设施，使用特殊炸弹造成短路而非永久破坏，但近期针对伊朗的行动似乎更倾向于无差别打击。
特朗普的威胁还显示出对伊朗政权的集体惩罚倾向，这与以色列将加沙平民伤亡归咎于哈马斯的策略相似。尽管美国和以色列的军事行动可能在法律和道德层面存在争议，但其对平民的伤害程度可能远不及加沙。此外，特朗普在战争初期曾表示避免打击伊朗的电力基础设施，但近期行动已突破这一界限，引发对战争目标和策略的质疑。
特朗普的威胁可能标志着冲突升级，且其目标可能并非军事优势，而是通过施加痛苦迫使伊朗领导人让步。然而，伊朗领导人若愿意牺牲大量民众以维持政权，可能不会因民众受苦而妥协。这种策略不仅可能违反战争法，还可能加剧地区紧张局势。
For someone who claims to be unconcerned about the Strait of Hormuz, President Donald Trump seems increasingly desperate to open it.
In a Truth Social post over the weekend that was extreme even by his standards, Trump instructed Iran to “open the fuckin’ strait” by this Tuesday or he would make good on earlier threats to destroy bridges and power plants across the country. He has threatened attacks against Iran’s desalination plants and the oil export facility on Kharg Island as well.
Asked Monday by reporters at the White House whether this would constitute a war crime, Trump replied that the Iranian leaders who had killed “45,000 people in the last month” were “animals.”
Trump’s renewed threats to target Iranian infrastructure that supplies civilians with basic necessities like power and water, and his increasingly harsh rhetoric — like threatening to send Iran’s government “back to the Stone Ages where they belong” — have led to accusations that he’s violating domestic and international laws of war. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned Sunday that Trump was “threatening possible war crimes.”
To this point, most of the US strikes in Iran appear to have followed a pre-determined target set and focused on degrading the country’s nuclear, missile, and naval capabilities — all legitimate military aims. The killing of a head of state like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is probably also lawful, even if extremely unusual, though Israel’s apparent targeting of diplomatic officials involved in negotiations is harder to justify. The strike on a girls’ school in Tehran that killed around 150 students on the first day of the war appears to have been the result of negligence rather than intent.
A shift toward the deliberate targeting of Iran’s civilian infrastructure, however, could mark a hard turn into deliberate lawbreaking, as well as a dramatic escalation of a conflict the president has been promising is close to over. And while not every attack on energy or bridges is inherently a war crime, the scale of destruction Trump is threatening, if carried out, would have dire implications — sending a signal that the nation that helped institute and police the modern rules of warfare is now proudly and openly flouting them.
Under international law, also codified in US military regulations, a military target is legal if it meets a two-part test: The target must “make an effective contribution to military action” and its destruction or capture must “offer a definite military advantage.”
Legal experts who spoke with Vox said that while there are definitely cases in which a power station or bridge, and possibly even a desalinization plant, could be a legitimate military target, those determinations would need to be made on a case to case basis, as opposed to Trump’s threat to destroy them en masse in order to pressure Iranian leaders into concessions. On Monday, Trump specifically threatened to destroy every bridge and every power plant in Iran if his demands were not met.
“The targeting is not being driven by considerations of military advantage, but to politically coerce the opposing party and inflicting pain, things which would not be legitimate aims,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser now with the International Crisis Group.
The United States targeted electricity grids in previous bombing campaigns in Iraq during Desert Storm and Serbia in 1999. In both cases, it used specially designed graphite bombs designed to cause short-circuits without permanent damage. There was a deadly and controversial bombing of a civilian bridge in the Serbia campaign as well.
But “indiscriminate attacks” like the ones Trump is describing not only be a violation of the laws of armed conflict by the US but could arguably be considered “war crimes by those who are involved in the strikes,” said Michael Schmitt, a former US Air Force judge advocate who now teaches at the University of Reading in the UK. Though the two terms are often used interchangeably, “war crimes” are violations serious enough that the political leaders and military commanders involved could face criminal charges.
By the prevailing standards, many of Iran’s own strikes — from hitting gas fields, desalination plants, and data centers in the Gulf to using cluster munitions in Israel — are also illegal, clearly meant to impose economic costs or terrorize populations rather than gain military advantage.
Enforcing violations is a more complicated story. Neither Iran nor the United States recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court — and in fact the Trump administration has imposed sanctions on it — but Schmitt notes that war crimes are matters of universal jurisdiction, meaning any country could theoretically launch a prosecution for them.
For his part, he is hopeful that whatever the rhetoric coming out of the White House, “at the military level, cooler heads will prevail, and there will be a very surgical by the numbers assessment of every target meant to be struck to ensure that it’s a military objective, that harm to civilians is justified under the rule of proportionality, and that every effort that’s feasible has been taken to avoid civilian harm.”
Thus far, Trump has generally made a distinction between the Iranian population and its regime. The escalation toward this war began, after all, when Trump threatened strikes against the Iranian government for its mass killing of protesters in January. And while it’s nearly impossible to gauge public opinion in Iran right now, it’s clear that at least a significant segment of the population is hoping these strikes, regrettable as they might be, could still bring down the regime.
Trump had made a point in the first few weeks of the war of saying he was avoiding targeting Iran’s power infrastructure. After Israel bombed a major gas field, spiking global energy prices, Trump promised it would never happen again. In his public statements, Trump appeared to be hoping to allow a more pliant and militarily-weakened new Iranian government to rebuild its economy after the war.
More recent strikes, however, have begun to test these boundaries. Last week, a US airstrike destroyed a major Iranian highway bridge. US officials suggested it was used to transport drone and missile parts, though other reports suggest it was still under construction and hadn’t been opened to traffic. The United States and Israel have also, in recent days, been stepping up attacks on nonmilitary targets, including steel and petrochemical plants.
Trump appears, in his rhetoric at least, to be shifting toward a strategy of collective punishment of Iran as a whole for the actions of its government. When he threatened to bomb Iran back to the “Stone Age” in his address last week, that did not sound like just a reference to its nuclear enrichment facilities.
Intentionally or not, Trump’s description of Iranian leaders as “animals” evokes Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s 2023 description of Hamas as “human animals” to justify the “complete siege” of Gaza. The consistent Israeli government justification for the harm inflicted on civilians was that it was the result of the actions of Hamas.
This is not to say that the level of physical destruction in Iran will come anywhere close to Gaza. But aside from questions of legality and morality, the comparison raises troubling strategic questions for the US.
Trump often appears to be vacillating between a plan to simply pack up and leave Iran once a certain set of military objectives are complete, and continuing the war until Iran’s leaders agree to concessions. The latest threats seem to suggest the latter, but there’s little to indicate that Iran’s leaders are close to making concessions, particularly on the Strait of Hormuz, which has emerged as their main form of deterrence and leverage in this conflict.
A government that, as Trump noted, is willing to kill tens of thousands of its own people to stay in power, is probably not one that is likely to surrender because its people are suffering without power.
2026-04-06 21:00:00
《美国，其实》（America, Actually）由阿斯特德·赫尔顿（Astead Herndon）主持，于4月11日首播。该节目由Vox推出，专为视频平台设计，旨在通过沉浸式报道、深入分析和人性化叙事，让观众深入了解美国政治在特朗普时代后的演变。节目将探讨一个核心问题：没有特朗普作为中心人物，美国政治会是什么样子？节目形式多样，包括与政界人士的一对一访谈、专家解读以及记者和播客主持人的小组讨论，内容将无缝适配YouTube、社交媒体视频和音频平台。
《美国，其实》延续了Vox标志性的解释性新闻报道，同时结合实地采访和鲜明的观点，为观众提供更清晰、更贴近现实的美国政治视角。该节目还与“报告美国”（Report for America）合作，致力于提升本地新闻报道质量，扩大对弱势社区的覆盖。通过这一合作，Vox将借助“报告美国”的记者网络，挖掘被忽视的声音，呈现更具代表性的报道。
赫尔顿自2025年起担任Vox的主持人和编辑总监，以其深入的实地报道和对美国选民及政治格局变化的洞察力而闻名。他曾为《纽约时报》撰写政治报道，并主持过政治播客《The Run-Up》。其作品曾获得多项荣誉，包括纽约大学颁发的杰出记者奖和美国黑人记者协会评选的年度记者称号。此外，他还为CNN担任政治分析师。
Vox成立于2014年，致力于弥合新闻报道与公众理解之间的鸿沟，推动解释性新闻的普及。而“报告美国”作为非营利组织，专注于支持美国各地新闻机构，提升本地新闻的可持续性和影响力。截至2026年7月，该组织已在全国465家新闻机构中安置了超过850名记者，并帮助这些机构筹集了超过6000万美元的本地捐款。
Today, Vox announced the launch of America, Actually, a new video-first podcast hosted by Astead W. Herndon. Designed from the ground up for video platforms, the show will bring audiences inside the forces shaping American politics for a post-Trump era through immersive reporting, sharp analysis, and deeply human storytelling. America, Actually will explore the question: What does American politics look like without Trump at the center? It’s been a one-man show for more than a decade, but now, the country is heading toward the first open presidential election since 2016. With episodes rolling out on YouTube and social platforms alongside audio, America, Actually reflects Vox’s continued emphasis on premium, multiplatform journalism that meets audiences where they are.
“A decade in politics journalism has only made me more certain that America is a more diverse country changing faster than our political system reflects, and the centrality of Donald Trump has only further flattened that nuance,” says Herndon. “My goal with America, Actually is to make a program that highlights that broad landscape of often ignored people and ideas — while remaining accessible and inviting. We will lead with the kind of rigor and curiosity that is Vox’s signature, but we will also have fun.”
The show will take a variety of platform-native formats, from one-on-one interviews with compelling elected officials (Herndon has recently interviewed New York City Mayor Zohran Mandani and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker as a guest host on Vox’s flagship podcast Today, Explained), to classic Vox explainers with outside experts, to group discussions with an eclectic mix of journalists and podcasters. Each episode is built to travel seamlessly across YouTube, social video, and audio. The show expands on Vox’s signature explanatory journalism by pairing it with firsthand reporting and a strong point of view, offering a clearer, more grounded understanding of American politics.
The launch is further strengthened through a partnership with Report for America, a national program dedicated to revitalizing local journalism and expanding coverage in underserved communities. Through this partnership, Vox will deliver community-centered reporting, drawing on Report for America’s network of journalists to elevate diverse voices, surface overlooked perspectives, and help audiences understand how power and policy shape their lives.
“America, Actually represents exactly where we see the future of Vox storytelling — journalism that is rigorous, ambitious, and designed first for video,” says Swati Sharma, editor-in-chief of Vox. “Astead has a rare ability to connect deeply with people and translate complex political dynamics into stories that feel urgent and accessible. This show is not just about explaining the news; it’s about showing it, in a way that brings audiences closer to the realities shaping the country.”
Herndon joined Vox in 2025 as a host and editorial director, and is known for his deeply reported, on-the-ground coverage of American voters and the changing dynamics of the political landscape. As a national politics reporter for the New York Times, he was a central part of election coverage for seven years and previously hosted the politics podcast, The Run-Up. His reporting has taken him across the country, chronicling how identity, culture, and power intersect in modern American politics, and he is widely recognized for his ability to surface nuanced perspectives from voices often left out of the national conversation. Herndon’s profile of Vice President Kamala Harris for the New York Times Magazine was nominated for a National Magazine Award in profile writing. He has received the Distinguished Journalist Award from DePaul University and was named 2025 Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists. Herndon is also a political analyst for CNN.
About Vox
When Vox was founded in 2014, it was animated by a simple observation: The media did a good job of reporting the news and commenting on it, but there was a disconnect between that work and the audience truly understanding why something happened. Vox started as — and remains — an organization dedicated to addressing that gap, which not only persists but has grown.
We are proud to have popularized explanatory journalism in many forms, across many mediums. Our work has been used to educate people everywhere, from elementary schools to college classrooms to vaccination sites in Taiwan to footnotes in congressional memos.
About Report for America
Report for America recruits, places and supports talented journalists in local newsrooms across the United States. We provide salary support, training, and newsroom sustainability coaching, enabling our partners to expand coverage on critical, often overlooked issues and strengthen trust with their audiences. By July 2026, Report for America will have placed more than 850 journalists in 465 newsrooms nationwide and will have helped newsroom partners raise more than $60 million in local donations. Report for America is an initiative of Report Local, a nonprofit journalism organization dedicated to strengthening local journalism across the US and around the world.
2026-04-06 19:00:00
2025年3月，华盛顿特区举行的“为科学站出来”集会上，抗议者们呼吁重视科学。据《Grist》报道，美国农业部（USDA）下属的研究机构中，有一项“禁忌词汇”政策，禁止使用与气候相关的术语。Ethan Roberts，伊利诺伊州皮奥里亚市国家农业利用研究中心的工会主席表示，过去十年中，他见证了多个政府任期，但当前的转变尤为剧烈。2024年3月，USDA发布了一项备忘录，要求员工避免使用超过100个被禁止的词汇和短语，其中约三分之一与气候变化直接相关，如“全球变暖”、“气候科学”和“碳封存”等。
为应对这一政策，研究人员开始使用更温和的替代词，如“气温升高”、“土壤健康”和“极端天气”。这种语言调整是更广泛趋势的一部分，自特朗普政府上台以来，美国的“气候沉默”现象逐渐加剧，企业和媒体也减少了对气候变化的讨论。此外，联邦政府的运作方式也发生了变化，例如埃隆·马斯克创立的“政府效率部”（DOGE）大规模裁员，而特朗普政府还削减了与环境和公共土地相关的科研经费。
研究人员正在适应这一新环境，一些人通过调整措辞或寻找其他资金来源继续进行气候研究。例如，研究天气模式与大豆病害关系的团队，会将研究重点从气候变化转向病害本身。美国国家科学基金会（NSF）的资助数据也反映了这一趋势：2023年有889项资助项目标题或摘要中提及“气候变化”，而2024年骤降至148项，降幅达77%。部分原因是NSF工作人员在特朗普任期内减少了对气候变化相关项目的审批，但研究人员自我审查、避免使用“气候变化”一词的现象也起了作用。
一些科学家开始寻求私人资金支持，如Dana Fisher教授通过私人渠道资助研究，以改善北美对气候变化的传播方式。她还寻找海外资金，因为在共和党执政期间，美国政府对气候研究的资助较为谨慎。例如，当乔治·W·布什总统在任时，她曾获得挪威研究理事会资助，研究美国城市和州的气候行动如何影响联邦政策。
然而，某些与气候相关的术语仍被视为政治敏感。例如，“公平性”和“环境正义”在特朗普政府时期成为更危险的词汇。美国环保署（EPA）的环境正义办公室被关闭，相关工作人员也被裁员。NSF的资助分析也显示，特朗普任期内与DEI（多样性、公平性和包容性）相关的词汇几乎完全消失，而“清洁能源”和“污染治理”等术语的使用也有所减少。
美国农业部的Roberts认为，这种语言上的压力可能是一种政治审查，也可能只是资助方要求研究符合其政策。尽管如此，许多气候研究项目仍因政治敏感词汇而陷入资金困境。研究人员正努力调整研究框架，以符合白宫的优先事项，同时避免使用被禁止的术语。例如，Roberts提到，通过巧妙使用词汇和控制研究呈现范围，科学家们仍能继续工作，但目前尚未有大规模的追查行动。
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
At the Department of Agriculture’s research division, everyone knows there’s one word they should never say, according to Ethan Roberts. “The forbidden C-word” — climate.
Roberts, union president at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Illinois, has worked for the federal government for nearly a decade. In that time, the physical science technician has weathered several political administrations, including President Donald Trump’s first term. None compare to what’s happening now.
The sweeping transformation became apparent last March, after a memo from upper management at the USDA Agricultural Research Service instructed staffers to avoid submitting agreements and other contracts that used any of 100-plus newly banned words and phrases. Roughly a third directly related to climate change, including “global warming,” “climate science,” and “carbon sequestration.”
Roberts met with his union to figure out how to respond to the memo. They concluded that the best course of action was just to avoid the terms and try to get their research published by working around them. Throughout the federal agency, “climate change” was swapped for softer synonyms: “elevated temperatures,” “soil health,” and “extreme weather.”
It’s part of a bigger trend. Across federal agencies and academic institutions, scientists are avoiding words they once used without hesitation. When Trump took office last year — calling coal “clean” and “beautiful” while deriding plans to tackle climate change as a “green scam” — a so-called climate hushing took hold of the United States, as businesses, politicians, and even the news media got quieter about global warming. There’s a long list of supposedly “woke” words that agencies have been discouraged from using, many tied to climate change or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
The language changes were accompanied by larger shifts in how the federal government operates. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), laid off hundreds of thousands of federal workers last year. The Trump administration also slashed spending on science, cutting tens of billions of dollars in grants for projects related to the environment and public lands. Researchers are adapting to the new landscape, with some finding creative ways to continue their climate research, from changing their wording to seeking out different sources of funding.
For federal researchers studying, say, the interplay between weather patterns and soybean diseases, the key is to reframe studies so they don’t clash with the Trump administration’s politics. “Instead of making it about the climate, you would instead just make it about the disease itself, and be like, ‘This disease does these things under these conditions,’ rather than ‘These conditions cause this disease to do this,’” Roberts added. “It’s just changing the focus.”
You can see how federally funded research has changed by looking at the grants approved by the National Science Foundation, or NSF, an agency that provides roughly a quarter of the US government’s funding to universities. Grist’s analysis found that the number of NSF grants whose titles or abstracts mentioned “climate change” fell from 889 in 2023 to 148 last year, a 77 percent plunge. Part of that’s a result of NSF staffers approving fewer grants related to climate change under Trump. But researchers self-censoring by omitting the phrase in their proposals also appears to play a role, evidenced by the corresponding rise of “extreme weather” — a synonym that gets around the politicized language.
Trent Ford, the state climatologist for Illinois, said he’s started using terms like “weather extremes” and “weather variability” in framing his proposals for grants.
“It’s sort of a weird thing, because on principle, if we’re studying climate change, to not name climate change feels dirty,” said Ford, who’s also a research scientist at the Illinois State Water Survey at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. But it’s more of a practical decision than anything else: “We’ve seen where grants that say everything but ‘climate change’ and are obviously studying the impacts of climate change get through with no problem.” He only uses the phrase in grant proposals when he thinks it’s absolutely necessary and when efforts to steer around the term would look too obvious to a reviewer.
Researchers have always had to tailor their framing to align with a funder’s priorities, in this case the federal government. Near the end of President Joe Biden’s term in late 2024, when Ford’s team applied for an NSF grant to study how climate conditions could affect Midwestern agriculture, it made sense to include a line about talking to a diverse group of farmers. But that word became a problem after Trump returned to office.
“By the time the proposal got reviewed by the program manager at NSF, that same language that was required four months ago was now actually a death sentence on it,” Ford said. The NSF liked the proposal, but wanted the researchers to remove the line about reaching a diverse set of agricultural stakeholders and confirm that they would talk to “all American farmers,” Ford said. The team sent it back in, and the NSF approved it last April.
Others weren’t so lucky. Another scientist at the Agricultural Research Service, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, said DOGE eliminated major research programs at the agency and, in the process, wiped out hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds for an initiative to grow plants without soil that “really didn’t have anything to do with climate change.” The scientist said it had only been labeled as climate research to “satisfy the previous Biden administration.”
“Anything, any project, that had ‘CC’ in front of it, was eliminated. Because ‘CC’ stands for climate change,” the staffer said. “So, unfortunately, that came back to bite them during this administration.”
Though not to this extreme, researchers have found themselves staying away from politically fraught terms like “climate change” before. During the first Trump administration, Austin Becker, a professor at the University of Rhode Island who studies how ports and maritime infrastructure can be made more resilient to hazards like storms and flooding, started avoiding the phrase, even though it’s what motivated his research. “Everything that was ‘climate’ just became ‘coastal resilience,’” he said. “And we’ve kind of just stuck with that ever since.”
Ford initially resisted pressure to stop using the phrase from colleagues he was writing grants with, but he gave in this time around for financial reasons. “Getting a grant could be the difference between a graduate student getting a paycheck and us having to let a graduate student go, or having to let a full-time employee of the university go,” he said.
Some researchers have been looking for grants in new places as federal money dries up. Dana Fisher, a professor at American University and the director of its Center for Environment, Community, and Equity, has procured private funding to research ways to improve and expand communication about climate change in North America. She’s also looking overseas for funding, where she’s had success during past Republican administrations that were hesitant to approve grants for climate research. When George W. Bush was president, Fisher got a grant to study how climate action in US cities and states could influence federal policymaking, an effort funded by the Norwegian Research Council. That fact raised some eyebrows when she mentioned it to people she was interviewing in Congress. “They’re like, ‘Huh?’” Fisher said. “I was like, ‘Well, that’s what happens when there’s a Republican administration.’”
As scarce as funding for anything related to the climate has become under Trump, some topics appear to be even more politically toxic. In Ford’s experience, and from what he’s heard from other researchers, “equity” and “environmental justice” are “actually dirtier words.” The Trump administration has closed the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice offices at its headquarters and in all 10 of its regional offices, and continues to lay off EPA staff who helped communities dealing with pollution. Grist’s analysis of grants reveals a similar pattern: Under Trump, mentions of DEI have vanished from NSF grants entirely. Terms like “clean energy” and “pollution” have also declined, but not as sharply as climate change.
You could view the federal government’s pressure on scientists to change their language in different ways. Is it Orwellian-style censorship, silencing dissent and policing language? Or simply the right of a funder, whose politics changes with each administration, to ask for research that reflects its concerns? Does it affect what research gets done, or will applicants simply swap in harmless synonyms to ensure the work can continue?
The answer is complicated, according to the USDA’s Roberts. Many of the climate projects at the agency’s research division that have so far avoided cancellation are stuck in funding purgatory, awaiting a fate that could hinge on a politically charged word or two. Scientists are adapting their research to better align with White House priorities, hoping to continue equipping farmers with the knowledge of how to adapt to a warming world — and scrubbing any forbidden language in the meantime.
“Clever word usage, and controlling the scope of how the research is presented, allows for scientists to keep doing the work,” Roberts said. “There’s no one going around hunting these people down, thankfully. Not yet, anyway.”
A list of words related to climate and the environment included in the leaked USDA ARS banned words memo
Climate: climate OR “climate change” OR “climate-change” OR “changing climate” OR “climate consulting” modeling” OR “climate models” OR “climate model” OR “climate accountability” OR “climate risk adaptation” OR “climate resilience” OR “climate smart agriculture” OR “climate smart forestry” O[–] “climatesmart” OR “climate science” OR “climate variability” OR “global warming” OR “global-wa[–] “carbon sequestration” OR “GHG emission” OR “GHG monitoring” OR “GHG modeling” OR “carb[–] “emissions mitigation” OR “greenhouse gas emission” OR “methane emissions” OR “environmen[–] “green infrastructure” OR “sustainable construction” OR “carbon pricing” OR “carbon markets” O[–] energy”
Clean energy: “clean energy” OR “clean power” OR “clean fuel” OR “alternative energy” OR “hyd[–] OR “geothermal” OR “solar energy” OR “solar power” OR “photovoltaic” OR “agrivoltaic” OR “wi[–] OR “wind power” OR “nuclear energy” OR “nuclear power” OR “bioenergy” OR “biofuel” OR “biogas” OR “biomethane” OR “ethanol” OR “diesel” OR “aviation fuel” OR “pyrolysis” OR “energy conversion”
Clean transportation: electric vehicle, hydrogen vehicle, fuel cell, low-emission vehicle
Pollution remediation: “runoff” OR “membrane filtration” OR “microplastics” OR “water pollution” OR “air pollution” OR “soil pollution” OR “groundwater pollution” OR “pollution remediation” OR “pollution abatement” OR “sediment remediation” OR “contaminants of environmental concern” OR “CEC” OR “PFAS” OR “PFOA” OR “PCB” OR “nonpoint source pollution”
Water infrastructure: “water collection” OR “water treatment” OR “water storage” OR “water distribution” OR “water management” OR “rural water” OR “agricultural water” OR “water conservation” OR “water efficiency” OR “water quality” OR “clean water” OR “safe drinking water” OR “field drainage” OR “tile drainage”
Note: The original leaked memo screenshot was obtained by More Perfect Union. Cut off words or phrases are marked with [–].
