Many travelers are driven by a desperate desire to reach the last great undiscovered place before the rest of the tourist hordes. In 2025, though, that elusive location is becoming something of a mirage.

That is particularly apparent in Saudi Arabia, which opened itself to tourism nearly six years ago (before, only Muslims, traveling for religious reasons, had been allowed to enter). Things now are changing so fast in the desert kingdom that there has been a Dubai-esque feeling to its warp-speed transformation. My online visa application was approved in less than three hours. I almost thought it was a hoax.

Nowhere is this “get there before it’s ruined” feeling more urgent than in Al-Ula, a vast desert landscape of towering sandstone and granite rock formations in the northwest of the country that is, for now, barely untouched by time. The wind- and human-sculpted tombs chiseled into these mountains were the southernmost reaches of the Nabatean empire, which famously built Petra, some 550 kilometers, or about 340 miles, to the north, in Jordan.

But Petra now offers a glimpse of what Al-Ula will no doubt become in the next 10 to 20 years: dozens, if not hundreds, of hotels; donkey rides to overcrowded ruins; and tourists vying for the perfect Instagram shot.

That is, of course, if Saudi Arabia’s efforts to modify its global public image are successful. Its human rights violations, religious extremism and history of oppressing women already keep many travelers from even considering a visit. And alcohol still is banned, although there have been whispers that restriction is being reconsidered in light of the country’s role as host of the 2034 World Cup and as part of Saudi Vision 2030, the country’s ambitious project to diversify its economy.

Much of the rest of the kingdom has been moving forward, regardless. Riyadh, the country’s capital, and Jeddah, its major port, are both bustling modern cities, and women are now allowed to drive and travel freely around the country without a male escort, which was unthinkable even a decade ago.

While the Red Sea coastline outside Jeddah is virtually undeveloped for more than 1,100 miles, a resort area known as the Red Sea Project has several new five-star resorts, including the Nujuma Ritz-Carlton with its over-the-water podlike villas.

The Red Sea Airport, built in 2023, serves this area (Al-Ula has its own airport), as well as resorts farther inland, including the utterly isolated and pricey Six Senses Southern Dunes, with its mirage-like views of the rolling desert as it blends into the Red Sea about 45 minutes away. And the Desert Rock resort has villas with pools built into the sides of giant rock formations with views across seemingly endless valleys. Many of these resorts are not exactly packing in tourists yet, but they clearly are ready.

For now, however, Al-Ula might as well be on Mars. It’s far less developed than anything I have seen in the most remote parts of the Middle East, including the rugged mountainous villages of Oman, which now offer five-star resorts and hiking tours. The region is 22,550 square kilometers, or 8,700 square miles, though most of the 111 tombs are packed into an area of about six square kilometers.

Here, there are glamping sites under glittering stars at night, and morning treks to the massive tombs where only a dozen or so other visitors may have gathered. Travel Weekly magazine recently described the rock formations: “A gigantic elephant glows enchantingly at dusk, a guitar takes shape in the narrow crevice between two mountain peaks, a bowling pin juts over a sandstone outcrop.”

The area has had a bit of a spooky reputation, though. Many Muslims consider it to be cursed since the Thamud people of the region, who flourished there from as early as the eighth century B.C., were later denounced by the Prophet Muhammad as “wrongdoers.” The fact that Muslims have avoided the area for centuries, many local tour guides say, is exactly why it is so well preserved and seemingly trapped in time.

The Nabateans were a nomadic Arab tribe that flourished for centuries before being conquered by the Romans in the second century A.D. — and the nearby region, called Hegra, is where they carved huge tombs into the sides of enormous rocks. One of the most famous is the so-called Lonely Castle, or Qasr al-Farid, a meticulously sculpted facade of four columns that is a dramatic entrance to a 72-foot-high boulder. Coming to the site offers a glimpse of what visiting Egypt might have felt like when the Western world was first learning about the buried treasures of an ancient kingdom.

While Al-Ula offers a glimpse into a mysterious past, it already is focusing on the future. It has become an arts destination, with several galleries and public art spaces. A massive public art project of site-specific art and open-air sculptures is being created, scheduled to open sometime after 2027. It coincides with many celebrity architect-designed resorts in the works, including Sharaan by the French architect Jean Nouvel, which is being built into the side of a mountain. The current offerings of glamping — let’s just call them luxury hotels with a tentlike appearance and swimming pools that cozy up to the giant rocks around them — include the Banyan Tree and Our Habitas.

I stayed two nights at Our Habitas, which also offers what it calls a more “rustic” experience in luxuriously appointed Airstream travel trailers that are parked even farther into the sprawling valleys for that true sense of getting away from your fellow tourists. All of these glamping sites are nestled among the boulders and the thin, dry air that seems to hold the silence naturally.

An early morning “run” to the rock formations, which is standard before the heat of the day sets in (temperatures from May to October can reach 40 Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit), sort of reclaims that old safari term.

Morning runs in Africa have morphed into traffic jams of all-terrain vehicles trying to get close to a lion or giraffe. Here, there is a sense of being a charter member of the Al-Ula Tourism Club. No tacky trinket shops, no groups of tourists flocking to get photos. Just a stillness among the Nabatean tombs as the morning light turns the beige rocks ever-shifting shades of orange.

And there is nothing more refreshing than tomblike silence when discovering what could be the last great unexplored tourist spot just waiting to be developed.

The Trump administration has abruptly laid off the entire staff running a $4.1 billion program to help low-income households across the United States pay their heating and cooling bills.

The firings threaten to paralyze the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which was created by Congress in 1981 and helps to offset high utility bills for roughly 6.2 million people from Maine to Texas during frigid winters and hot summers.

“They fired everybody, there’s nobody left to do anything,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which works with states to secure funding from the program. “Either this was incredibly sloppy, or they intend to kill the program altogether.”

The layoffs were part of a broader purge on Monday of approximately 10,000 employees from the Department of Health and Human Services on Monday, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. moved to drastically reorganize the agency. Roughly 25 employees had been overseeing the energy assistance program, which is also known as LIHEAP. All had been laid off, Mr. Wolfe said.

Congress had approved $4.1 billion for the program for fiscal year 2025, and about 90 percent of that money had already been sent to states in October to help households struggling with high heating costs. There is still about $378 million left to assist with summer cooling as households crank up their air-conditioners. Heat waves in the United States are growing more intense and lasting longer as a result of climate change.

Normally, the federal government sends the money to state agencies after allocating the funds using a complicated formula and performing various reviews and audits. Some states, like Maine, use the money to help low-income families to offset the cost of buying fuel oil to heat their homes in the winter. States also use the money to weatherize homes and provide emergency assistance to households at risk of being disconnected from their utility.

Now, it’s not clear how the remaining funds could be disbursed to the states, even though Congress has explicitly ordered the federal government to spend the money.

“If there’s no staff, how do you allocate the rest of this money?” Mr. Wolfe said. “My fear is that they’ll say we’ve got this funding, but there’s nobody left to administer it, so we can’t send it out.”

In an emailed statement, Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the agency “will continue to comply” with federal law “and as a result of the reorganization, will be better positioned to execute on Congress’s statutory intent.”

Over the past two months, the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to freeze or withhold spending authorized by Congress. Those moves have triggered a growing number of legal challenges and judicial rulings that say doing so is unconstitutional.

The firings at the energy assistance office triggered a furious response from several Democratic lawmakers.

“What ‘efficiency’ is achieved by firing everyone in Maine whose job is to help Mainers afford heating oil when it’s cold?,” Representative Jared Golden, a Democrat who represents a largely rural district in Maine that voted for President Trump, wrote in a social media post.

Senator Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, said he would work to try to unlock the program’s funding. “Eliminating the entire federal staff responsible for LIHEAP — a program that millions of households depend on to stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer — isn’t reform,” he said in a statement. “It’s sabotage.”

The office of Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, issued a statement saying: “Senator Collins has been a longtime advocate for LIHEAP and the critical financial assistance it provides to lower income families to help ensure that they can stay warm during the winter months. It is unclear how, and if, the administration of this program will be affected by the HHS staffing changes.”

A study published in The Economic Journal last year found that roughly 17 percent of U.S. households spend more than one-tenth of their income on energy, a threshold that researchers often define as a “severe” energy burden. The study also found a strong relationship between energy affordability and winter mortality.

“When home heating is less affordable, more people die each winter,” Seema Jayachandran, an economist at Princeton and one of the authors of the study, wrote on Monday. “That’s what our analysis found for a period when LIHEAP was in place. Without LIHEAP, the effect would presumably much larger.”

Bilal Mohammad Ramadan AbuKresh has lost his home, his job, his wife and seven other relatives during the war in Gaza. Now, as the United Nations closes 25 bakeries across the territory, he is also losing his only reliable source of food.

Before Wednesday, Mr. AbuKresh, 40, said he would leave his tent in a camp for displaced people in northern Gaza at dawn and stand in line for hours at one of the bakeries, waiting for bread for his four children.

“The line was unimaginable, like the Day of Judgment,” Mr. AbuKresh said on Wednesday, the day after the World Food Program, a U.N. agency, said it had run out of the flour and fuel needed to keep the bakeries in Gaza open.

But at least it was affordable, compared to the $30 he paid for a bag of pasta that he bought recently to feed his family.

The lack of humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza over the past month has prompted violent competition for food and driven up prices.

Mr. AbuKresh said he has resorted to selling his children’s jewelry and collecting trash to sell to scrounge up enough money just to buy a bit of food. “To secure a bag of bread for my children, I risk death a hundred times,” he said.

As well as the bakery closures, the World Food Program said on Tuesday that it would distribute its last food parcels by Thursday, and that its remaining supplies in Gaza were expected to run out within two weeks.

The announcement prompted desperate Gazans to rush to U.N. warehouses this week to haul away heavy bags of flour that were being handed out.

The decision to close the bakeries came almost a month after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel ordered a halt to all humanitarian aid into Gaza, in an attempt to pressure Hamas into accepting a new hostage release deal as cease-fire negotiations have stalled.

The aid has not resumed and a fragile two-month truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed two weeks later, when Israel launched new airstrikes on the territory.

The bakeries used as much as 300 tons of flour each day, producing enough bread to supply about 70 percent of Gaza’s population, Abdel Nasser al-Ajrami, head of the enclave’s bakers’ association, said in an interview. Five other bakeries in Gaza had already closed last month, he said, when they ran out of supplies.

“Where will people get their food from?” Mr. al-Ajrami said, worrying aloud that Gaza was headed toward an even deeper humanitarian crisis. The United Nations has said the escalating war in Gaza has led to “unprecedented” need for aid, estimating 91 percent of its population is facing acute food insecurity.

Nearly one-third of the bread made at the U.N.-funded bakeries was distributed for free, he said, and much of the rest was sold as packets of pita for as little as 50 cents.

“It was a way to support thousands of Gazans who lost their jobs and a source of income during the war,” Mr. al-Ajrami said, voicing concern that food shortages could lead to unrest.

“This might cause chaos again across Gaza as people would start fighting for a piece of bread. There might be looting again,” he said.

For weeks, the United Nations has sounded the alarm that humanitarian aid supplies were dwindling, and that attempts to gain access for aid convoys lined up at the border crossings had failed. It has accused Israel of routinely denying U.N. requests for broader efforts to coordinate humanitarian movement inside the enclave, and has said the Israeli army’s no-go zones and evacuation order areas covered more than half of Gaza.

COGAT, the Israeli military unit responsible for coordinating aid deliveries to Palestinian territories, said in a social media post on Tuesday that 450,000 tons of assistance was delivered to Gaza during the two-month cease-fire, and less than 30 percent of it was from the United Nations.

“Meaning, when the U.N. say they have 2 weeks worth of aid left in Gaza, there are plenty of other aid organizations and other actors with food aid,” COGAT said. “Much of the aid was diverted and available on the markets,” it added. “There is enough food for a long period of time, if Hamas lets the civilians have it.”

In a sharp response to Israel, U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said aid must be allowed into Gaza immediately and called claims that Gaza had enough food “ridiculous.”

“W.F.P. doesn’t close its bakeries for fun,” he told reporters at the U.N. headquarters in New York. “If there’s no flour, if there’s no cooking gas, the bakeries cannot open.”

During the cease-fire, “we saw humanitarian aid flood Gaza,” he said. “We saw markets come back to life. We saw prices going down. We saw hostages released, we saw Palestinian detainees released. We need to go back to that.”

Mr. AbuKresh said his family was living in “unimaginable circumstances” and barely surviving.

“This is beyond description,” he said. “We’ve surrendered to death.”

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.

Getting vaccinated against shingles can reduce the risk of developing dementia, a large new study finds.

The results provide some of the strongest evidence yet that some viral infections can have effects on brain function years later and that preventing them can help stave off cognitive decline.

The study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that people who received the shingles vaccine were 20 percent less likely to develop dementia in the seven years afterward than those who were not vaccinated.

“If you’re reducing the risk of dementia by 20 percent, that’s quite important in a public health context, given that we don’t really have much else at the moment that slows down the onset of dementia,” said Dr. Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at Oxford. Dr. Harrison was not involved in the new study, but has done other research indicating that shingles vaccines lower dementia risk.

Whether the protection can last beyond seven years can only be determined with further research. But with few currently effective treatments or preventions, Dr. Harrison said, shingles vaccines appear to have “some of the strongest potential protective effects against dementia that we know of that are potentially usable in practice.”

Shingles cases stem from the virus that causes childhood chickenpox, varicella-zoster, which typically remains dormant in nerve cells for decades. As people age and their immune systems weaken, the virus can reactivate and cause shingles, with symptoms like burning, tingling, painful blisters and numbness. The nerve pain can become chronic and disabling.

In the United States, about one in three people develop at least one case of shingles, also called herpes zoster, in their lifetime, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. About a third of eligible adults have received the vaccine in recent years, according to the C.D.C.

Several previous studies have suggested that shingles vaccinations might reduce dementia risk, but most could not exclude the possibility that people who get vaccinated might have other dementia-protective characteristics, like healthier lifestyles, better diets or more years of education.

The new study ruled out many of those factors.

“It’s pretty strong evidence,” said Dr. Anupam Jena, a health economist and physician at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the study but reviewed it for Nature.

The study emerged from an unusual aspect of a shingles vaccine rollout in Wales on Sept. 1, 2013. Welsh officials established a strict age requirement: people who were 79 on that date were eligible for the vaccine for one year, but those 80 and older, were ineligible. As younger people turned 79, they became eligible for the vaccine for one year.

The age cutoff — imposed because of a limited supply and because the vaccine was then considered less effective for people over 80 — set up a “natural experiment,” said Dr. Pascal Geldsetzer, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford and the study’s senior author.

It allowed scientists to compare relatively equal groups: people eligible for the vaccine with people just slightly older who couldn’t get it. “If I take 1,000 people born one week and 1,000 people born one week later, there shouldn’t be any difference between them, except for the large difference in the vaccination uptake,” Dr. Geldsetzer said.

Researchers tracked health records of about 280,000 people who were age 71 to 88 and without dementia when the rollout began. Over seven years, nearly half of those eligible for the vaccine received it, while only a tiny number from the ineligible group were vaccinated, providing a clear before-and-after distinction.

To limit the likelihood of differences between the groups, researchers used statistical analysis to more heavily weigh data from people just one week on either side of the cutoff: those who turned 80 in the week before rollout and those who turned 80 in the week after.

They also examined medical records for possible differences between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. They evaluated whether unvaccinated people received more diagnoses of dementia simply because they visited doctors more frequently, and whether they took more medications that could increase dementia risk.

“They do a pretty good job at that,” said Dr. Jena, who wrote a commentary about the study for Nature. “They look at almost 200 medications that have been shown to be at least associated with elevated Alzheimer’s risk.”

He said, “They go through a lot of effort to figure out whether or not there might be other things that are timed with that age cutoff, any other medical policy changes, and that doesn’t seem to be it.”

The study involved an older form of shingles vaccine, Zostavax, which contains a modified version of the live virus. It has since been discontinued in the United States and some other countries because its protection against shingles wanes over time. The new vaccine, Shingrix, which contains an inactivated portion of the virus, is more effective and lasting, research shows.

A study last year by Dr. Harrison and colleagues suggested that Shingrix may be more protective against dementia than the older vaccine. Based on another “natural experiment,” the 2017 shift in the United States from Zostavax to Shingrix, it found that over six years, people who had received the new vaccine had fewer dementia diagnoses than those who got the old one. Of the people diagnosed with dementia, those who received the new vaccine had nearly six months more time before developing the condition than people who received the old vaccine.

There are different theories about why shingles vaccines might protect against dementia. One possibility is that by preventing shingles, vaccines reduce the neuroinflammation caused by reactivation of the virus, Dr. Geldsetzer said. “Inflammation is a bad thing for many chronic diseases, including dementia,” he said, so “reducing these reactivations and the accompanying inflammation may have benefits for dementia.”

Both the new study and the Shingrix study provide support for that theory.

Another possibility is that the vaccines rev up the immune system more broadly. The new study offers some evidence for that theory too. It found that women, who have more reactive immune systems and larger antibody responses to vaccination than men, experienced greater protection against dementia than men, Dr. Geldsetzer said. The vaccine also had a bigger protective effect against dementia among people with autoimmune conditions and allergies.

Dr. Maria Nagel, a professor of neurology at University of Colorado School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study, said both theories could be true. “There’s evidence for a direct effect as well as an indirect effect,”, said Dr. Nagel, who has consulted for the manufacturer of Shingrix, GSK.

She said some studies have found that other vaccines, including those against flu, create a generalized neuroprotective effect, but that because the shingles virus hides in nerves, it makes sense that a shingles vaccine would be particularly protective against cognitive impairment.

The study did not distinguish between types of dementia, but other research suggests that “the effect of the shingles vaccine for Alzheimer’s disease is much more pronounced than for another dementia,” said Svetlana Ukraintseva, a biologist at Duke who coauthored a recent study on Alzheimer’s and other dementias and vaccines. She said that might be because some Alzheimer’s cases are associated with compromised immunity.

The Welsh population in the study was mostly white, Dr. Geldsetzer said, but the report also suggested similar protective effects by analyzing death certificates in England for deaths caused by dementia. His team has also replicated the results in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

Dr. Jena said the connection should be studied further and noted that reducing dementia risk is not the same as preventing all cases. Still, he said, the evidence suggests that “something about the exposure or access to the vaccine has this effect on dementia risk years later.”

Three American citizens who were sentenced to death over a failed coup attempt in the Democratic Republic of Congo have had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, according to a spokeswoman for the Central African country’s president.

The three Americans were among 37 people condemned to death last September after taking part in a May 2024 attack on the government that was streamed live and included a gun battle near the presidential palace.

Security forces killed the coup leader, Christian Malanga, a minor opposition politician. But his son, Marcel Malanga, was arrested along with his high school friend Tyler Thompson and Benjamin Zalman-Polun, a business associate of Christian Malanga’s.

Those three men — who are all American citizens — were singled out and granted “individual clemency,” Tina Salama, the Congolese president’s spokeswoman, said in a post late Tuesday on X. There was no immediate comment from the U.S. State Department.

Congo has been trying to enlist American support against neighboring Rwanda and a rebel militia that Rwanda directs and arms, M23. Since January, M23 has torn through eastern Congo, seizing vast tracts of land and major cities. Thousands of civilians, soldiers and allied militia fighters have been killed in the rebel offensive, which has also left millions destitute.

In an interview with The New York Times in February, Congo’s president, Felix Tshisekedi, offered the United States a stake in his country’s vast mineral wealth, saying that such a deal would bring his country more security and stability. Experts agree that U.S. pressure on Rwanda could be one of the few things that might induce M23 to pull back.

But later that month, President Trump’s special envoy for hostages, Adam Boehler, linked the conflict to the fate of the three American citizens.

“The President of Congo is holding 3 Americans now,” he wrote on X. “Perhaps it would be better if Rwanda won the war?”

Marcel Malanga has denied involvement in planning the coup, saying that he and Mr. Thompson were forced to join in while visiting his father.

At around the same time that Ms. Salama announced clemency for the men on Tuesday, the U.S. State Department released a statement saying that it had appointed a senior adviser for Africa, Massad Boulos. It said that Mr. Boulos would travel to Congo on Thursday and then to neighboring countries, including Rwanda, “to advance efforts for durable peace in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and to promote U.S. private-sector investment in the region.”

Mr. Boulos — whose son is married to one of Mr. Trump’s daughters — has spent much of his career in Nigeria, where he is chief executive of a family business that sells trucks and heavy machinery. He was previously named as the president’s senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs after helping persuade Arab American voters in Michigan to support Mr. Trump, though it was unclear what exactly that role entails.

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has taken a transactional approach to foreign policy, seeking deference and business deals from U.S. allies in return for help.

Some Congolese observers said that in the context of a possible minerals deal, the clemency granted to the three Americans was to be expected. But others criticized their president for applying double standards to Americans and Congolese.

“When we say that in Congo foreigners are treated better than citizens, here is the proof,” Sylvain-Parizel Kapay, a lawyer based in Kinshasa, wrote on social media.