By Alisha Ebrahimji, CNN

(CNN) — Human remains discovered by a hiker in a northern New Mexico national forest last week have been identified as Melissa Casias, a Los Alamos National Laboratory employee who disappeared nearly a year ago, authorities said.

The remains were found May 28, nearly 11 months after she disappeared, in the McGaffey Ridge area of Carson National Forest — nearly 15 miles from her home in Taos. A handgun was found alongside the remains, the New Mexico State Police said in a news release.

The state Office of the Medical Investigator positively identified Casias, but the cause and manner of death have not yet been determined, police said. The remains will undergo further anthropological examination by the Office of the Medical Investigator.

State police declined to comment further when reached by CNN on Monday. CNN has also reached out to the Office of the Medical Investigator and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Casias, 54, was last seen walking along a highway near Talpa, New Mexico, in June 2025, state police said. She had left her belongings — including her purse, identification and cellphones — at her home in Taos, nearly 8 miles away. One of her phones had been factory-reset, NBC News reported at the time.

She was reported missing on June 26, 2025, after failing to show up for work and never returning home following a visit to her daughter’s workplace, police said. At the time, the New Mexico Department of Public Safety told CNN no foul play was suspected.

Casias’ niece and sister told CNN affiliate KOAT last year the family was desperate for answers.

“No matter what, we need to find answers,” Jazmin McMillen, her niece, told the station. “We don’t want to stop looking. I think regardless of what the situation is, if she left on her own or if there’s foul play involved, we just want to find her.”

CNN has reached out to her family.

Casias is among at least 10 people tied to sensitive US nuclear and aerospace research who have died or disappeared in recent years, raising questions and fueling online speculation about possible links between the cases.

Another Los Alamos National Laboratory worker, 78-year-old retiree Anthony Chavez, also disappeared in May 2025, and police have said there are no signs of foul play.

Other cases include a retired Air Force major general who has been missing since February, when he left his New Mexico home without his phone, prescription glasses or wearable devices. That same month, nearly 800 miles away in Los Angeles County, Caltech astrophysicist Carl Grillmair was fatally shot outside his home. The suspect pleaded not guilty last week to murder and related charges and remains in custody ahead of a preliminary hearing later this week.

The Republican-led House Oversight Committee announced in April it would investigate the deaths and disappearances of individuals it said had access to sensitive scientific information. The Read more

By Ted Barrett, Adam Cancryn, CNN

(CNN) — Many Senate Republican remain furious at the Trump administration’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund and are refusing to advance a separate bill to fund immigration enforcement until they are satisfied that payouts won’t go to people who assaulted police during the January attack on the US Capitol and other guardrails are put in place.

Yet despite vocal public complaints from those GOP senators over the last two weeks, the White House has yet to offer a serious solution to their concerns, according to two Republican aides who say the immigration funding will remain stalled until it does.

The lack of what senators see as credible movement by the White House is further eroding the bond between the administration and Senate Republicans. Many are already angry that President Donald Trump targeted two popular GOP senators who recently lost their primaries for reelection. And many also want to kill money Trump has demanded for security of his desired White House ballroom as they believe it is out of touch with the economic trials of their voters.

Trump is meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson at the White House on Monday to discuss roadblocks to the bill to fund immigration enforcement — specifically, according to a person familiar with the meeting, the administration’s proposed “anti-weaponization” fund.

“The two are meeting to discuss a number of issues, but the fund is certainly a key one,” the source told CNN.

A spokesman for Johnson said the speaker was meeting with the president but declined to specify the topic of the conversation.

Amid the backlash, some Trump advisers have privately advocated adding guardrails to the fund to appease Republican lawmakers and to quell the public criticism, people familiar with the discussions said.

One common suggestion has been to restrict those convicted of assaulting police from accessing the fund, in an effort to prevent the most violent rioters from the Capitol attack from collecting taxpayer-funded payouts.

Some allies are even urging the White House to scrap the fund altogether.

But Trump has publicly defended the fund, and the administration has yet to land on a clear path forward — leaving GOP senators bracing for a week of Democratic efforts to exploit their divisions.

At stake is the fate of $70 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, which Senate leaders are attempting to pass in a budget process called reconciliation that allows them to adopt it on a party-line vote. Democrats are angry over tactics by those agencies they believe are too aggressive.

Trump had pressed for a June 1 deadline to pass the money that will fund those agencies through the end of his term. But the deadline was missed after GOP senators were enraged by the Department of Justice announcement about the “anti-weaponization” fund, whi

By Sana Noor Haq, CNN

(CNN) — The pro-Palestinian American streamer Hasan Piker and his uncle say Britain’s government has barred them from entering the country over their criticism of Israel.

Piker, 34, and Turkish-American broadcaster and attorney Cenk Uygur were scheduled to speak this week at the South by Southwest technology and business festival (SXSW) in London and address the Oxford Union, a debating society at the prestigious British university.

But on Sunday, Piker posted on X that the United Kingdom’s government had “revoked my visa, all at the behest of Israel.”

Uygur said he discovered he’d been barred when he tried to board a flight to the British capital.

“I’ve been banned for criticizing Israel. Are we free anymore? This is oppression of Western citizens by our own governments on behalf of a different country!” he posted on X.

Piker’s hours-long live-streaming broadcasts, in which he discusses breaking news and policy, reach more than 30,000 people daily, according to his profile on the SXSW website. It describes him as “an authoritative voice” for millennials and Gen Z. He has about 6.4 million followers across the social media platforms X, Instagram and Twitch.

Uygur founded the independent online talk show, The Young Turks, which has grown into the largest online news network in the US, according to the website. Uygur also campaigned for the Democratic nomination in the 2024 US presidential election.

In a statement to CNN, he claimed he had been “banned from entering the country for doing a news show.” “Are there any other countries you’re not allowed to criticize, or just Israel? If their point was to show that Israel does not get any special privileges in Western countries, they have found a deeply ironic way to deliver that message,” he said.

CNN has also reached out to Piker’s representatives for comment.

British media reported that Home Secretary Shabhana Mahmood canceled Piker and Uygur’s Electronic Travel Authorization (ETA), which permits non-UK citizens to visit the country without a visa for up to six months. The decision to bar Uygur from traveling to Britain is “understood to have been based on several grounds,” including that his presence in the UK would “risk exacerbating antisemitism,” London’s Times newspaper reported on Monday.

The UK Home Office told CNN that such decisions “are based solely on an assessment of potential risk an individual may pose to UK society” and that “individuals may choose to apply for a visa if they still wish to travel to the UK.”

In April, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned that a recent spate of antisemitic attacks left Jewish people “scared to show who they are.”

Some Jewish groups say criticism of Israel has fueled intimidation and antisemitism. But others say accusations of antisemitism have been u

By Katie Hunt, CNN

(CNN) — Experts advise that adults should sleep for around eight uninterrupted hours in a cool, dark room. If you do so consistently, they say, you can add years to your life.

It’s an ideal many people fail to live up to. It’s also, according to “The Sleepless Ape: The Story of Sleep in Human Evolution,” which published May 19, not how humans have slept for most of our evolutionary history.

Anthropologist David Samson, the book’s author and an associate professor at the University of Toronto, has scaled trees to study chimpanzee beds and visited remote tribes to understand how the story of human sleep unfolded.

Samson’s findings reveal how human sleep patterns became shorter, deeper and more flexible than those of our more ape-like ancestors, freeing time to spend on toolmaking, social interactions and migration around the world.

He argues that these unique sleep habits fostered survival, innovation and shaped our species’ behavior in pivotal ways. Today’s sleep-deprived humans can also learn a great deal from how our ancestors used to sleep, he adds.

“Sleep governs so much of our mental and physical performance throughout the day,” he told CNN. “How is it then that we are the shortest sleeping primate on the planet?”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

CNN: Your book is called “The Sleepless Ape.” Why’s that?

David Samson: It took about 15 years to get the prerequisite number of primate sleep studies to be able to actually run these stats, and it turns out these models were predicting that humans should sleep 10 ½ hours. I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t sleep 10 ½ hours. The human average across cultures is probably something like seven hours. The model was predicting that we sleep much longer, which means that humans are an evolutionary outlier.

Humans are not only the shortest sleeping primate, but we also get the greatest proportion of REM sleep of any primate on the planet. And what “The Sleepless Ape” tries to explore and disentangle is the story of how that came to be.

CNN: Your book details how our ancestral species left the safety of sleeping in trees for the dangerous ground as a result of shelter, fire and social sleeping. How did that shift benefit us?

Samson: What we created was a completely new innovative space for sleep, and the analogy I’ve been using here is a shell.

We do know that early humans like Homo erectus were sleeping in groups. We can tell that right around this time there was likely the controlled use of fire. And because of the fact that you have a much larger group with demographic variability — you’ve got some grandparents in the group, you got some teens in the group —you likely had a situation where someone was awake 24/7 to sound the alarm in case of danger. It’s very clear to me that a hunter-gatherer camp would have been adapted to have larks and owls relatively distributed, such that the shell is a little bit more safe during a 24-hour period.

CNN

By Eric Bradner, CNN

(CNN) — Former first lady Jill Biden says she felt she “had to support” President Joe Biden publicly in the wake of his disastrous 2024 debate with Donald Trump, despite acknowledging now that she feared her husband might have been having a stroke.

Her latest comments came in an interview Monday with NBC in which she was pressed on her public insistence that Joe Biden was capable of serving four more years in the Oval Office. It comes as the former first lady launches a tour to support her new memoir, “View from the East Wing,” which is being released Tuesday.

She said Monday that during the debate, she was “watching, just like everybody else was, scared to death, like, ‘What is going on?’”

“He gets off the stage. I see he appears to be OK. He says to me, ‘Jill, I really, in other words, messed up, didn’t I?’ And I said, ‘Yes, you did,’” she told NBC. (According to The Atlantic, Jill Biden writes her husband said, “I really f**ked up, didn’t I?”)

In a post-debate event that night, Jill Biden said, “Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question. You knew all the facts.”

“What do I say to him? I’m his wife. I’ve got to lift him up,” she told NBC, describing her thought process. “So, we go to the next event, and I’m thinking, what do I say that will lift him up that is true? I want to say things that are true.”

“And so, I said, ‘You answered every question,’” she said, recalling her comments onstage. “My mind’s racing.”

“I had to sort of lift him up. I’m his wife. I’m not going to get out on the stage there and say, ‘Joe, you really screwed that up.’ And we have all of our supporters there,” she said, adding, “That’s who we are. I had to support him.”

In late July — less than four weeks after the debate, and with the Democratic Party in a panic — Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race and threw his support behind his vice president, Kamala Harris.

Jill Biden was asked about Harris’ assertion in her own memoir last year that it was “recklessness” to leave the decision about whether Joe Biden should seek reelection to the president and first lady alone.

“That is her point of view, and if she felt that way, she should have said it,” Jill Biden said.

She also acknowledged in the Monday interview that Joe Biden was aging in office.

“He got older, and we all saw him aging. There were words that he would forget. But, you know, we were all aging,” she said.

However, she said, the two were also assured by doctors that he was healthy, and she “saw him doing his job” and “work hours into the night” every day.

“Yes, did I see him slowing down a little bit? When he got tired, did he stutter a little bit at night? Yeah, sure. But he was still doing the job, and he was doing a good job,” she said.

In the interview, Jil