📌 Big Phone Call, Houthis Warned, More

Ukraine’s massive Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station looks set to figure in the Ukraine-Russia war’s ceasefire discussions.

President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin are scheduled to have a phone call today to discuss a proposed 30-day ceasefire. On Sunday, Trump said the conversation will include occupied territory as well as power plants.

Analysts in Kyiv said that Trump was likely referring to Ukraine retaking control of the Zaporizhzhia plant, the largest nuclear power station in Europe, with six reactors capable of generating enough energy for four million homes. It has been shut down since falling under Russian occupation in 2022.

“It’s very important for the Ukrainian economy. So of course, the Ukrainian side wants to get it back,” said Mykhailo Samus, the Kyiv-based director of the New Geopolitics Research Network think tank.

Samus said he believed Ukrainian officials pressed Trump to include the nuclear station as part of the discussions to push Putin to make concessions. Putin has said he won’t agree to a ceasefire until the details of how it would be monitored have been drawn up.

Putin has also insisted that Ukraine be demilitarized and that four eastern Ukrainian provinces be recognized as part of Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has countered by demanding security guarantees, military support and no recognition of Russian-occupied territory.

President Donald Trump said further attacks by the Houthis would be seen as Iranian-led with “dire consequences.”

Trump’s threat comes after the US launched a series of airstrikes against the Yemeni group on Saturday. Trump said Iran is “dictating every move, giving them the weapons, supplying them with money and highly sophisticated military equipment, and even, so-called, ‘intelligence.’”

Trump described the US strikes as "decisive and powerful military action" against the Iranian-backed group. The Houthis have been targeting Western-linked shipping and launching munitions into Israel since the fall of 2022 in protest of Israel's war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the head of operations at the Joint Staff, said the US struck 30 targets on Saturday and there were additional strikes on Sunday. He said the operation will continue until the President's objectives are achieved. The Yemeni Health Ministry said the strikes killed 53 people and injured 98 others.

The Houthis said on Monday it implemented “a qualitative military operation targeting the US aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman for the third time … [and] a US destroyer, in response to the brutal US aggression against our country.” The extent of their attacks or their relative success has not been confirmed.

An analysis finds an organ’s biological age might predict a person’s risk of cancer, dementia and heart disease.

The research analyzed data from Whitehall II, a long-running British study of aging that has followed over 10,000 British adults for over 35 years. The Whitehall study took blood plasma samples from participants aged 45–69 and again 20 years later to follow-up on 6,235 participants aged 65–89.

The researchers used the analysis to help measure the gap between a person’s age and the biological age of nine of their organs: heart, blood vessels, liver, immune system, pancreas, kidneys, lungs, intestines, and brain. They analyzed the data to investigate the diseases they developed over the two decades.

The organs aged at different rates, the researchers found. Those with “fast-aging” organs had an increased risk of 30 of the 45 age-related diseases studied. Those with accelerated lung aging were likelier to develop respiratory diseases during the 20-year follow-up period.

“Surprisingly,” the researchers say, dementia was not best predicted by accelerated brain aging, but rather by the immune system’s biological age. The researchers say the study shows the promise of an organ-specific blood test.

Such a test could one day “advise whether a person needs to take better care of a particular organ, and potentially provide an early-warning signal that they may be at risk of a particular disease,” said lead author Mika Kivimaki, a professor at University College London’s faculty of brain sciences.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are on their way home.

They departed the International Space Station early today in a SpaceX capsule nine months after their faulty Boeing Starliner craft upended what was to be a roughly week-long test mission.

Wilmore and Williams, two veteran NASA astronauts and retired US Navy test pilots, strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft with two other astronauts and undocked from the orbiting laboratory at 1.05 a.m. ET, embarking on a 17-hour trip to Earth.

The four-person crew, formally part of NASA's Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, is scheduled for a splashdown off Florida's coast today at 5:57 p.m. ET. Issues with Starliner's propulsion system led to cascading delays in their return home, culminating in a NASA decision last year to have them take a SpaceX craft back this year.

The astronauts will be flown to their crew quarters at the space agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston for several days of health checks, per routine for astronaut returns, before NASA flight surgeons approve they can go home to their families.

A developer using AI coding assistant Cursor was told to finish the job after it generated around 800 lines of code for a game.

The AI assistant scolded the programmer: "I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work ... you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly.”

The incident, documented as a bug report on Cursor's forum by user “janswist,” occurred while the developer was "vibe coding.” Vibe coding is a practice where AI language models generate functional code based on plain English descriptions, without the user necessarily understanding the code.

Other Cursor users were baffled by the incident, with some noting they had generated much larger amounts of code without such intervention. Speculation suggests Cursor's chatbot may have adopted this attitude from forums like Stack Overflow, where developers discourage excessive hand-holding.

Harvard University has announced that it is making tuition free for families who earn less than $200,000 a year.

For families earning less than $100,000, Harvard will also cover expenses like housing and health insurance. Harvard hopes to become more affordable for middle-income families, and it comes as the Trump administration targets university funding as a part of a crackdown on diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) practises.

"Putting Harvard within financial reach for more individuals widens the array of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that all of our students encounter, fostering their intellectual and personal growth," said Harvard President Alan Garber.

The Ivy League school said the move will allow roughly 86% of US families to qualify for Harvard's financial aid. The median household income in the US was $80,000 in 2023, according to the US Census.

Other elite universities in the US have taken similar steps in recent years, including the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which also have free tuition for families making less than $200,000.

The average price of a private university in the US for those living on campus is $58,000 per academic year, according to the Education Data Initiative. The average cost of college has more than doubled since 2001, the research group found.

At 100, Grandma Anna or Nonna Anna as Anna Possi is known in a scenic village above Lake Maggiore, is Italy's oldest barista.

For more than six decades — since 1958 to be exact — Nonna Anna has been opening her Bar Centrale at 7 a.m. in Nebbiuno. It closes at seven in the evening in the winter and at nine in the summer for 365 days a year.

In November, Nonna Anna celebrated a century of living. A sign in her cafe announces it:

La barista più longeva d'Italia

— the oldest barista in Italy — to remind guests of her achievement. She officially retired at 60 back in 1984. Her last holiday was in the 1950s — eight days in Paris.

“The important thing is that I'm around people. Then I feel good. People used to sit here, talk and play cards. Today, they all just look at their mobile phones," she says. When there's nothing to do, she takes out her knitting.