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As struggling drugstore chains work to regain their footing, Walgreens is doubling down on automation. 

The company is expanding the number of retail stores served by its micro-fulfillment centers, which use robots to fill thousands of prescriptions for patients who take medications to manage or treat diabetes, high blood pressure and other conditions. 

Walgreens aims to free up time for pharmacy staff, reducing their routine tasks and eliminating inventory waste. Fewer prescription fills would allow employees to interact directly with patients and perform more clinical services such as vaccinations and testing.

Walgreens first rolled out the robot-powered centers in 2021, but paused expansion in 2023 to focus on gathering feedback and improving performance at existing sites. After more than a year of making upgrades, including new internal tools, the company said it is ready to expand the reach of that technology again.

Walgreens told CNBC it hopes to have its 11 micro-fulfillment centers serve more than 5,000 stores by the end of the year, up from 4,800 in February and 4,300 in October 2023. As of February, the centers handled 40% of the prescription volume on average at supported pharmacies, according to Walgreens. 

That translates to around 16 million prescriptions filled each month across the different sites, the company said. 

The renewed automation push comes as Walgreens prepares to go private in a roughly $10 billion deal with Sycamore Partners, expected to close by the end of the year. 

The deal would cap a turbulent chapter for Walgreens as a public company, marked by a rocky transition out of the pandemic, declining pharmacy reimbursement rates, weaker consumer spending and fierce competition from CVS Health, Amazon and other retail giants.

Like CVS, Walgreens has shifted from opening new stores to closing hundreds of underperforming locations to shore up profits. Both companies are racing to stay relevant as online retailers lure away customers and patients increasingly opt for fast home delivery over traditional pharmacy visits.

The changes also follow mounting discontent among pharmacy staff: In 2023, nationwide walkouts spotlighted burnout and chronic understaffing, forcing chains to reexamine their operational models.

Walgreens said the investment in robotic pharmacy fills is already paying off.

To date, micro-fulfillment centers have generated approximately $500 million in savings by cutting excess inventory and boosting efficiency, said Kayla Heffington, Walgreens’ pharmacy operating model vice president. Heffington added that stores using the facilities are administering 40% more vaccines than those that aren’t. 

“Right now, they’re the backbone to really help us offset some of the workload in our stores, to obviously allow more time for our pharmacists and technicians to spend time with patients,” said Rick Gates, Walgreens’ chief pharmacy officer.

“It gives us a lot more flexibility to bring down costs, to increase the care and increase speed to therapy — all those things,” he said. 

Gates added that the centers give Walgreens a competitive advantage because independent pharmacies and some rivals don’t have centralized support for their stores. Still, Walmart, Albertsons and Kroger have similarly tested or are currently using their own micro-fulfillment facilities to dispense grocery items and other prescriptions. 

Micro-fulfillment centers come with their own risks, such as a heavy reliance on sophisticated robotics that can cause disruptions if errors occur. But the facilities are becoming a permanent fixture in retail due to the cost savings they offer and their ability to streamline workflows, reduce the burden on employees and deliver goods to customers faster.

How Walgreens micro-fulfillment works 

When a Walgreens retail pharmacy receives a prescription, the system determines whether it should be filled at that location or routed to a nearby micro-fulfillment center. Maintenance medications, or prescription drugs taken regularly to manage chronic health conditions, and refills that don’t require immediate pickup are often sent to micro-fulfillment.

At the core of each facility is a highly automated system that uses robotics, conveyor belts and barcode scanners, among other tools, to fill prescriptions. The operations are supported by a team of pharmacists pharmacy technicians and other professionals.

Instead of staff members filling prescriptions by hand at stores, pill bottles move through an automated and carefully choreographed assembly line. 

Pharmacy technicians fill canisters with medications for robot pods to dispense, and pharmacists verify those canisters to make sure they are accurate. Yellow robotic arms grab a labeled prescription vial and hold it up to a canister, which precisely dispenses the specific medication for that bottle.

Certain prescriptions are filled at separate manual stations, including inhalers and birth control pill packs. Each prescription is then sorted and packaged for delivery back to retail pharmacy locations for final pickup.

There are other security and safety measures throughout the process, said Ahlam Antar, registered group supervisor of a micro-fulfillment center in Mansfield, Massachusetts. 

For example, the robot pods automatically lock and signal an error with a red-orange light if a worker attaches a canister to the wrong dispenser, preventing the incorrect pills from going in a prescription, she said. 

Properly training workers at the centers to ensure accuracy and patient safety is also crucial, according to Sarah Gonsalves, a senior certified pharmacy technician at the Mansfield site. 

She said a core part of her role is to make sure that technicians can correctly perform the different tasks in the process. 

Improvements to robotic prescription fills

Antar, who has worked at the Mansfield site since its 2022 opening, said Walgreens has made improvements to the micro-fulfillment process after considering feedback from stores and patients during the paused expansion. That includes establishing new roles needed to support the process at the sites, such as a training manager for all 11 locations. 

The facilities also plan to transition to using smaller prescription vials after hearing concerns that the current bottles are too large, according to a Walgreens spokesperson. They said that will allow the centers to ship more prescriptions per order and reduce costs.

Heffington said the automated locations have helped reduce Walgreens’ overall prescription fulfillment costs by nearly 13% compared to a year ago. 

She said Walgreens has also increased prescription volume by 126% year-over-year, now filling more than 170 million prescriptions annually. The company hopes to raise that number to 180 million or even more. 

Heffington added that Walgreens implemented new internal tools to track the work across all 11 centers and provide real-time data on where a patient’s prescription is in the micro-fulfillment process. 

“If a patient called the store and said, ‘Hey, can you tell me where my prescription is today?’ [Workers] can do that with great specificity,” thanks to the new tools, Heffington said. 

Despite the company’s progress, Gates said there is more work to be done with micro-fulfillment centers. 

For example, he pointed to the possibility of shipping prescriptions directly to patients’ doorsteps instead of putting that burden on retail stores. 

“It’s only step one right now,” he said. 

Other improvements may still be needed at facilities, according to some reports. For example, WRAL News reported in April that some customers at a Walgreens store in Garner, North Carolina, say they are only getting partial prescription fills, with several pills missing, or their medicine is being delayed.

Retail store pharmacy staff see benefits 

A customer views merchandise for sale at a Walgreens store in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Christopher Lee | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Before Brian Gange’s Arizona store started relying on an automated facility, he walked into the pharmacy every morning knowing that a massive list of prescriptions was in his work queue waiting to be filled for the day. 

Now, with help from micro-fulfillment, that list is significantly smaller each day, according to Gange. 

“We don’t have to spend as much time on just those repetitive fulfillment tasks,” he told CNBC. “It really takes a huge weight off our shoulders.” 

Gange said that gives him and his team time to step behind the pharmacy counter and interact with customers face-to-face, answering questions, providing advice, performing health tests or administering vaccines. 

That kind of attention can make all the difference for a patient.  

For example, Gange recalls stepping away for five minutes to take a patient’s blood pressure despite being overwhelmed with tasks while working at a different Walgreens location several years ago. He ended up sending that person to the emergency room because their blood pressure was “off the charts.” 

That patient’s wife visited the pharmacy the next day to thank Gange, saying her husband “probably wouldn’t be here with us today” without that blood pressure test. 

“I shouldn’t have to question whether I have that five or 10 minutes to check a blood pressure for a patient,” Gange said. “Micro-fulfillment and centralized services are really what are going to allow us to be able to do that, to have that time.” 

“That really allows us to provide better care for them,” he added.

Jupiter’s dazzling auroras are hundreds of times brighter than those seen on Earth, new images from the James Webb Space Telescope reveal.

The solar system’s largest planet displays striking dancing lights when high-energy particles from space collide with atoms of gas in the atmosphere near its magnetic poles.

Jupiter’s auroras and Earth’s Northern and Southern lights are all powered by high energy particles ejected from the sun during solar storms. But Jupiter’s lights are turned up even higher because the strong magnetic field of the planet also captures particles thrown into space from massive volcanoes on its moon Io.

Webb previously captured Neptune’s glowing auroras in the best detail yet, many decades after they were first faintly detected during a flyby of the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

The Webb telescope captured the fast-varying auroral features using a unique near-infrared camera.

The study of the planet was made on Dec. 25, 2023, by a team of scientists led by Jonathan Nichols from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. The results of their study were published today in the journal Nature Communications.

An early-season heat wave is set to bake huge swaths of the country this week, with record or near-record high temperatures expected across the northern and the southern Plains, the Southwest and much of central and southern Texas.

Temperatures will reach the 90s in North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota on Monday, with some areas potentially seeing highs in the triple digits, according to the National Weather Service.

Beginning Tuesday, the hottest conditions will be found in Texas, where temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher will be common for much of the state, the agency said.

“Expect record breaking heat across much of central and southern Texas through mid-week,” the weather service said Monday in its short-range forecast.

In a series of posts on X, the weather service office in San Antonio warned that many people will not be acclimated to such extreme heat so early in the year, increasing the risk of heat-related illness and death.

“Temperatures are forecast to surge above 100 Tuesday, and some places could approach 110 midweek. Ensure you have access to cooling and plentiful hydration before the heat arrives,” the office wrote on X.

As the week progresses, heat will build in the central and the southern Plains and expand through the Southeast and into Florida.

Cities that could set new daily temperature records this week include Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Houston in Texas; Oklahoma City; Shreveport, Louisiana; Charleston, South Carolina; and Tallahassee, Jacksonville and Orlando in Florida.

The unseasonably hot temperatures are caused by a strong high-pressure ridge parked over much of the country and centered over Texas. These kinds of “heat domes” essentially trap hot air over a region, sometimes driving up temperatures for days on end.

Southern California saw record highs over the weekend, with temperatures peaking at 103 in downtown Los Angeles, breaking a record of 99 set in 1988, according to the weather service.

Climate change is increasing the frequency, duration and intensity of heat waves around the world, studies have shown. Scientists are anticipating a hot summer again this year, after two consecutive years (2023 and 2024) that shattered global temperature records.

The back-to-back broken records are part of an alarming warming trend that has long been predicted by climate change models. The planet’s 10 hottest years since 1850 have all occurred in the past decade, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

WASHINGTON — About half of U.S. adults approve of how President Donald Trump is handling transgender issues, according to a new poll — a relative high point for a president who has the approval overall of about 4 in 10 Americans.

But support for his individual policies on transgender people is not uniformly strong, with a clearer consensus against policies that affect youth.

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey of 1,175 adults conducted this month found there’s more support than opposition on allowing transgender troops in the military, while most don’t want to allow transgender students to use the public school bathrooms that align with their gender identity and oppose using government programs to pay for gender-affirming health care for transgender youth.

Schuyler Fricchione, a 40-year-old stay-at-home mother from northern Virginia, is one of those who opposes the government paying for gender-affirming care, especially for young people.

She said she doesn’t want people to make major changes that they might later regret. But she said that because of her Catholic faith, she doesn’t want to exclude transgender people from public life. “It’s very important to me that everyone understands their dignity and importance as a person.”

“It is something I am kind of working through myself,” she said. “I am still learning.”

Most adults agree with Trump that sex is determined at birth

About two-thirds of U.S. adults agree with President Donald Trump that whether a person is a man or woman is determined by their biological characteristics at birth.

The poll found that Republicans overwhelmingly believe gender identity is defined by sex at birth, but Democrats are divided, with about half saying gender identity can differ from biological characteristics at birth. The view that gender identity can’t be separated from sex at birth view contradicts what the American Medical Association and other mainstream medical groups say: that extensive scientific research suggests sex and gender are better understood as a spectrum than as an either-or definition.

A push against the recognition and rights of transgender people, who make up about 1% of the nation’s population, has been a major part of Trump’s return to the White House — and was a big part of his campaign.

He has signed executive orders calling for the government to classify people by unchangeable sex rather than gender, oust transgender service members and kick transgender women and girls out of sports competitions for females. Those actions and others are being challenged in court, and judges have put many of his efforts on hold.

The public is divided on some issues — and many are neutral

Despite being a hot-button issue overall, a big portion of the population is neutral or undecided on several key policies.

About 4 in 10 people supported requiring public schoolteachers to report to parents if their children are identifying at school as transgender or nonbinary. About 3 in 10 opposed it and a similar number was neutral.

About the same portion of people — just under 4 in 10 — favored allowing transgender troops in the military as were neutral about it. About one-quarter opposed it.

Tim Phares, 59, a registered Democrat in Kansas who says he most often votes for Republicans, is among those in the middle on that issue.

One on hand, he said, “Either you can do the job or you can’t do the job.” But on the other, he added, “I’m not a military person, so I’m not qualified to judge how it affects military readiness.”

This month, a divided U.S. Supreme Court allowed Trump’s administration to enforce a ban on transgender people in the military while legal challenges proceed, a reversal of what lower courts have said.

Most object to government coverage of gender-affirming care for youth

About half oppose allowing government insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid to cover gender-affirming medical care, such as hormone therapy and surgery, for transgender people 19 or older. About two-thirds oppose it for those under 19.

And on each of those questions, a roughly equal portion of the populations support the coverage or is neutral about it.

One of Trump’s executive orders keeps federal insurance plans from paying for gender-affirming care for those under 19. A court has ruled that funding can’t be dropped from institutions that provide the care, at least for now.

Meanwhile, Trump’s administration this month released a report calling for therapy alone and not broader gender-affirming health care for transgender youth. Twenty-seven states have bans on the care for minors, and the Supreme Court is expected to rule in coming months over whether the bans can hold.

Forming a stance is easy for some

While Democrats are divided on many policies related to transgender issues, they’re more supportive than the population overall. There is no anguish over the issue or other transgender policy questions for Isabel Skinner, a 32-year-old politics professor in Illinois.

She has liberal views on transgender people, shaped partly by her being a member of the LGBTQ+ community as a bisexual and pansexual person, and also by knowing transgender people.

She was in the minority who supported allowing transgender students to use the public-school bathrooms that match their gender identity — something that at least 14 states have passed laws to ban in the last five years.

“I don’t understand where the fear comes from,” Skinner said, “because there really doesn’t seem to be any basis of reality for the fear of transgender people.”

President Donald Trump is set to sign a sweeping executive order Monday that aims to cut prescription drug costs in the U.S. by aligning what the government pays for certain medications to the prices paid in other countries.

The order, experts say, is a reimagined and far more aggressive version of Trump’s policy during his first term to cut drug costs, which failed to take effect after a federal judge blocked it.

Like the original policy, health policy experts expect it will meet significant pushback from the drug industry.

The new order directs Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to come up with price-cutting goals within 30 days, White House officials said on a call Monday. The move will kick off a round of negotiations between Kennedy and the drug industry.

Should talks stall, Kennedy will move to enforce the “most favored nation” pricing model, capping the U.S. prices at the lowest rates paid by other wealthy nations.

Most notably, officials said the policy will not be limited to certain drugs under Medicare, as it was in original version, but will also target medications covered by Medicaid and private insurance.

Weight-loss drugs expected to be targeted

The administration hasn’t singled out a specific class of drugs for price cuts, but officials said it’s fair to expect that GLP-1s — a class of drugs that includes Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound — will be included among them. Last month, the administration rejected a Biden-era proposal for Medicare to cover weight loss drugs. The move would have saved patients money but cost the government about $25 billion over 10 years.

The Food and Drug Administration will also consider expanding the importation of prescription drugs from countries beyond Canada, where prices are often cheaper than in the U.S, officials said, and the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission will be directed to act against “anti-competitive” actions by drugmakers that they say keep drug prices high.

”The president is dead serious about lower drug prices,” an official said on the call.

Prescription drug prices are notoriously high in the U.S. Although the country makes up less than 5% of the global population, it accounts for nearly three-quarters of global pharmaceutical profits, officials said Monday. According to the Rand Corporation, a public policy think tank, Americans pay up to 10 times more for medications than people in other similarly wealthy nations.

Will the drug pricing plan work?

While experts backed Trump’s approach, they questioned how the administration would legally pursue price reductions for drugs under private insurance. They also worried about its ability to withstand legal pushback from the drug industry.

“If this touches all drugs for all people, it’s far more ambitious, but the ripple effects are far more uncertain,” said Tricia Neuman, executive director for the program on Medicare policy at KFF, a health policy research group. “I would expect the drug industry to throw every legal argument at this proposal.”

Arthur Caplan, the head of the medical ethics division at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City, said the administration may need to set more realistic expectations for what it can achieve.

In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump claimed that prescription drug costs would be reduced “almost immediately” by 30% to 80% and that the U.S. “will pay the same price as the Nation that pays the lowest price anywhere in the World.”

In a follow-up post Monday, Trump said drug prices would be cut by 59%.

Caplan said immediate relief would be great — but argued it’s impossible for the U.S. to achieve the lowest prices in the world.

“We are not going to get the price paid by South Africa, Peru, Egypt, Bolivia and Laos,” Caplan said. “Drug companies usually give whopping discounts to very poor countries on humanitarian grounds they won’t give rich countries. The prices paid in the poorest nations have no chance of being the price paid by the Trump administration.”

Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, worried the policy might harm doctors and pharmacies if the price cuts were immediate.

“For retail pharmacies or clinician administered drugs, they buy their drugs ahead of time to stock the shelves or have them available to treat patients,” she said. “What the pharmacy or clinic paid to acquire their drugs is likely higher than the proposed new price, which means they would lose money when those drugs were filled.”

On Monday’s call, an official appeared to clarify Trump’s Sunday remarks, saying that drugmakers are expected to be “coming to the table very soon” and that the administration anticipates “action” and “relief very soon.”

Officials didn’t say how this would affect the ongoing Medicare drug pricing negotiations, a policy signed into law by President Joe Biden through the Inflation Reduction Act.

In the final days of the Biden administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced the next round of drugs up for price negotiations. The first round of negotiations is estimated to save Medicare $6 billion in 2026, when the prices go into effect.

But officials argued that the lower prices achieved through the Biden administration were “inadequate” and that Trump’s new policy would achieve more aggressive price cuts.

“We’ll be taking action to go beyond what was achieved under the Inflation Reduction Act,” an official said.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a drug industry trade group that filed a lawsuit against Trump’s original policy, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a statement last week, Alex Schriver, a spokesperson for the group, said the Trump administration should instead focus on so-called pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) to address high drug costs.

PBMs, also known as middlemen, work with insurance companies to negotiate discounted prices from drug companies in exchange for including the drugs in their coverage. In theory, PBMs are supposed to save patients money, but they’ve been the target of U.S. lawmakers after government findings accused them of inflating the price of drugs.

This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

Travel woes persisted Monday at beleaguered Newark Liberty International Airport Airport in New Jersey with a ground delay in effect.

The Federal Aviation Administration said departures from Newark would be delayed an average of 19 minutes through 9 p.m. ET.

There were over 45 delays at the airport and over 80 cancellations as of 9:30 a.m. ET, according to FlightAware data.

Passengers waited patiently for their flights at the airport, which has been at the center of a spate of issues, including a ground stop on Sunday, Mother’s Day.

“I was so nervous to fly into Newark,” one passenger said waiting for her flight Sunday told NBC New York. “Overhauling the whole system I think is going to take a lot — maybe we can just start with Newark.”

Newark experienced radar outages on Friday and Sunday, leading to dozens of cancellations and delays. 

Both cases were traced to the Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) network out of Philadelphia that guides flights in and out of Newark airspace. 

In the Friday outage, radar screens serving Newark went black shortly before 4 a.m. EDT for about 90 seconds on a limited number of sectors, the FAA said. 

And on Sunday, Newark said it issued a ground stop “due to FAA equipment outages” that lasted about 45 minutes. The FAA said there was a telecommunications issue at Philadelphia TRACON Area C, and the facilities backup system worked as it was intended, but the FAA slowed traffic to make sure it remained stable. 

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on “Meet The Press” on Sunday he was concerned about the events at Newark, and cast blame on telecommunications issues and glitches in software.

He said the system for monitoring airspace and flights is outdated, said the airport will be “up and running in short order.”

But the transportation secretary assured the public it’s safe to fly in and out of Newark.

In the interim, Duffy said Newark will experience “reduced capacity” in the coming weeks, and he’ll convene a meeting of all the airlines that serve Newark about that reduction.

People may come back to the church in part because it now has an American-born leader, Pope Leo XIV told NBC News’ Lester Holt at the Vatican on Monday.

Holt was part of NBC News’ team covering a news conference for some 6,000 journalists from around the world when he conducted a brief interview with the new pope.

“At the end of his remarks, he stood up and he went into the crowd,” Holt said on NBC’s “TODAY” show. “He came down several aisles, and eventually came to me, and I asked him I think the question a lot of people have, ‘What’s the importance of having an American pope?’ And he said to me, ‘You tell me.’”

“Then he went on to offer an anecdote he had heard that suggests that people are coming back to the church because there is an American pope,” Holt said.

As for whether the Chicago-born leader is coming back to visit his hometown soon, that seems unlikely. “I don’t think so,” he told Holt.

“And that falls in line with much of what we’ve heard from experts here, that he’s got a lot of work to do on this end, at the Vatican before we see him on the road,” Holt added.

The NBC Nightly News anchor, who has reported from across the world, described the unexpected encounter a “highlight-of-the-career type moment for me.”

The pontiff spoke with Holt after he made an impassioned plea for peace and expressed solidarity with imprisoned journalists in his first news briefing since becoming the pope Monday. Leo called for “the precious gift of free speech and of the press” to be protected.

Leo, 69, was elected last week as the first pope born in the United States. The 69-year-old Augustinian led Sunday prayers at the Vatican.

Some have asked whether Leo, who is seen as a progressive within the Catholic Church, could become an influential voice in the U.S. on the febrile debate over immigration.

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian authorities said Russian attacks against Ukraine continued on Monday, including an overnight assault using more than 100 drones, despite a ceasefire proposed by Europe and Ukraine that Russia did not agree to abide by.

The leaders of four major European powers traveled to Kyiv on Saturday and demanded an unconditional 30-day ceasefire starting Monday. Russian President Vladimir Putin, implicitly rejecting the offer, instead proposed direct Russia-Ukraine talks in Istanbul that he said could potentially lead to a ceasefire.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Sunday that the ceasefire offer remained on the table and that he was still waiting for a response from Moscow, but that Ukrainian forces would respond in kind if Russia flouted it.

The air force said in its morning readout that Ukraine came under attack overnight from 108 long-range combat drones starting at 11 p.m. (4 p.m. ET), an hour before the ceasefire was due to kick in. Attacks of this kind unfold over the course of hours, as drones fly much slower than missiles.

“As of 08:30 (1:30 a.m. ET), it was confirmed that 55 Shahed attack (drones)… were shot down in the east, north, south and center of the country,” it said, adding that 30 others had been lost on radars and caused no damage.

A woman was injured by a strike drone in the small port city of Bilhorod-Dnistrovsk in the Black Sea region of Odesa overnight, the regional governor said.

Russia also launched guided bombs at targets in the northeastern Kharkiv region and the northern Sumy region, the air force said.

The Ukrainian railway company said a Russian drone attacked a civilian freight train in the east.

“The truce proposals are being ignored, hostile attacks on railway infrastructure and rolling stock continue,” it wrote in a statement on Telegram.

The train’s driver received a shrapnel wound in his leg after the train was struck by a drone, it said. “His life is currently no longer in danger,” it added.

The state of play on the sprawling front line was not immediately clear. The military has not yet given a readout that specifically addresses the period from midnight.

Russia and Ukraine are both trying to show U.S. President Donald Trump that they are working toward his objective of reaching a rapid peace in Ukraine, while trying to make the other look like the spoiler to his efforts.

Kyiv is desperate to unlock more of the U.S. military backing it received from Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden. Moscow senses an opportunity to get relief from a barrage of economic sanctions and engage with the world’s biggest economy.

Europe, meanwhile, is doing its best to preserve good relations with Trump despite him imposing tariffs, hoping it can persuade him to swing more forcefully behind Ukraine’s cause, which they see as central to the continent’s security.

A group of European foreign ministers and E.U. foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas were set to hold talks in London on Monday.

The leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Poland on Saturday threatened Russia with new sanctions if the truce was violated, though it is unclear what firepower they are able to muster on that front in the near term.

Putin dismissed what he said was an attempt to lay down “ultimatums.” His foreign ministry spelled out that talks about the root causes of the conflict must precede discussions of a ceasefire.

With Russian forces grinding forward, the Kremlin chief has offered few, if any, concessions so far. Russia says a ceasefire would allow Ukraine to catch its breath and rebuild its military.

Zelenskyy initially responded guardedly on Sunday after Putin, in a nighttime televised statement that coincided with prime time in the U.S., proposed direct talks in Istanbul this Thursday.

But after Trump told Zelenskyy to agree to Putin’s offer “immediately,” the Ukrainian leader challenged the Kremlin chief to meet him in person in Istanbul on Thursday.

It was far from clear, however, if Putin meant he would attend in person. Putin and Zelenskyy have not met since December 2019 and make no secret of their contempt for each other.

U.S. Treasury yields moved higher on Monday after the U.S. and China agreed to slash tariffs on each other’s goods, in a move welcomed by investors.

At 5:09 a.m. ET, the 10-year Treasury yield was up nearly 6 basis points to 4.433%, while the 2-year Treasury yield jumped 10 basis points to 3.996%

One basis point is equal to 0.01% and yields and prices move in opposite directions.The U.S. and China negotiated a trade deal to lower tariffs, with both countries announcing on Monday the suspension of most levies implemented on each other’s imports.

Tariffs between both countries will come down from 125% to 10%, according to the terms of the deal. The U.S.′ 20% duties on Chinese imports relating to fentanyl are still in place, bringing total tariffs on China to 30% currently.

Previously U.S. tariffs on China stood at 145%, while China implemented 125% levies on U.S. goods.

“We had very productive talks and I believe that the venue, here in Lake Geneva, added great equanimity to what was a very positive process,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a news conference, after holding talks in Switzerland with China’s trade representatives over the weekend.

“We have reached an agreement on a 90-day pause and substantially move down the tariff levels. Both sides on the reciprocal tariffs will move their tariffs down 115%,” Bessent said.

Investors will also be looking ahead to a batch of economic data this week, which will offer an outlook on how trade tensions have impacted the economy since U.S. President Donald Trump implemented “reciprocal” tariffs on global trade partners in early April.

Investors will parse through the consumer price index reading for April, due on Tuesday morning. They will also await the producer price index and retail sales data on Thursday.

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To hear him tell it in sermons, Campbell has experienced trials and triumphs so epic, his life could be a tale out of the Old Testament.

He was 21 when he made a bargain with God after being ejected 56 feet in a car crash. His body slammed into a stop sign, he says, breaking his neck. Lying on a train track, he remembers praying: “You give me another chance … I will do anything you ask me to do.”

God spared him, he says, and in the years after, blessed him with the power of the Holy Spirit. He was given the gifts of prophecy and faith healing. Once, he says, he raised a man from the dead.

And in 1988, he convinced the men leading the Assemblies of God district council to take his side, just as Jackson had feared. They shared their conclusion in a letter, which Kloefkorn said he reviewed, and allowed Campbell to continue leading Versailles First Assembly.

Seven months after the hearing, he invited a new child into his home.

Phaedra Creed had never met her father. Her mother struggled with addiction and was living in another state. But her pastor wanted to take her in. She remembers jumping up and down and screaming after Campbell told her. 

He and his wife went to court to make the guardianship official, and, in September 1988, they set up a room for Creed in the basement of their parsonage, a ranch home across a parking lot from the church.

The 14-year-old had caught Campbell’s attention while singing in the church choir, she said. He told her God had special plans for her. “Many are called,” he would say, quoting scripture, “but few are chosen.”

One night she was lying awake clutching her Bible after seeing Campbell cast a demon out of a man at church, shouting: “In the name of Jesus!” It terrified her. That night, the pastor came to comfort her, and she felt safe in his arms.

Within weeks, though, she wondered if the real demon was the one tucking her in at night.

It started with a bedtime kiss on the lips, she said, and quickly escalated. Three months later, Creed sat in an interview room at the Versailles Police Department. Afterward, the police chief typed his notes:

THE SUBJECT JOE CAMPBELL ENTERED THE VICTIMS BEDROOM AND HAD INTERCOURSE…

BETWEEN 15 AND 20 DIFFERENT TIMES…

CAMPBELL COMMENTED SEVERAL TIMES ON HER BEING HIS PRECIOUS BABY…

A doctor’s examination confirmed Creed had been penetrated. Campbell was arrested and released on $25,000 bond. After a preliminary hearing, a judge found sufficient evidence to send the case to trial. 

While it was pending, Creed went to Springfield to testify in the same room where Jackson had stood. Confronted by the results of their earlier decision to let Campbell continue preaching, the Assemblies of God’s Southern Missouri District Council banned him from the denomination.

The months that followed were hell, Creed said. She moved in with her mother, who had returned to Missouri. Some church members accused Creed of seducing Campbell, whispering insults behind her back at the grocery store. They said Satan was using her to take down the church.

Back in Tulsa, Jackson and Williams said they received subpoenas to testify. The girls weren’t told the name of the alleged victim, but they were eager to support her.

They never got the chance. 

Weeks before the case was set for trial in October 1989, Creed’s therapist warned her mother, Rita Aye, that testifying might break her daughter, who had moved to a group home for children suffering severe psychological distress. “She had gone through enough,” Aye said of their decision to not continue with the case. 

When the charges were dismissed, Campbell’s lawyer accused Creed of fabricating the story, telling a local newspaper the teen did it to retaliate after “Mr. Campbell denied her request to marry a 32-year-old man.”

For years afterward, Creed panicked anytime a thunderstorm rolled in; it had been raining, she said, the night Campbell took her virginity. Eventually she learned to bury the memories, pushing the pain deep inside.

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After being ousted from the Assemblies of God, Campbell says God gave him a new assignment: to start a church of his own and build a children’s camp on 40 remote acres in the Missouri Ozarks.

The Family Worship Center of Marshfield — later renamed Lakeside Family Worship — had only a handful of members when it opened in an old Methodist church in 1990 but grew into the hundreds. Campbell soon launched Camp Bell on a wooded lot 20 minutes away. Volunteers added a swimming pool, showers and dorms for the thousands of children who visited.

“For one week the kids are separated from the world and can focus on God, and it changes their lives,” Campbell told a newspaper years later. “They’re never the same.”

As he was rebuilding his career, the women who say he abused them were starting families and quietly struggling to cope with the lingering harm. Cheryl Almond, who says Campbell molested her around 1978, thought for decades she was the only one.

After returning to Eastland to raise her own children, Almond finally built the courage to tell someone. She confided in her spiritual mentor, a longtime church member. 

The woman gasped: “Oh my gosh, you too?”

Almond froze: “What do you mean, ‘You too’?”

The woman told her about Jackson, whose family had long since left the church, and about others who had accused Campbell of abuse. Horrified to learn he’d found a new flock of believers in Missouri, Almond sent Campbell a letter at Lakeside Family Worship in 1999.

“After years of hiding this awful sin, God has instructed me to write this letter,” Almond wrote. “Such a great pain you have caused to me, my family, and so many other great children.”

She received no reply.

A year later, Almond felt God nudging her again: It was time to find Jackson.

Jackson was 27, newly divorced, raising a first grader and struggling with panic attacks that hit with such ferocity, they left her hyperventilating and vomiting. The first one came as she was walking near a forest; the smell reminded her of Campbell’s family farm in Missouri. Ever since, she’d been begging God to help her forget. Now Almond was on the phone, asking to meet. 

Jackson invited Almond to her house; Williams joined them. Around a kitchen table, they shared their stories, finding parallels. After years of feeling trapped by grief that no one else could understand, each of them felt empowered. Together, they decided to channel their pain into holding Campbell accountable.

Remembering the subpoena she’d received in 1989, Jackson called authorities in Versailles and convinced someone to pass her number to the victim in the case. A few days later, Creed called.

And then there were four.

“Just knowing that I wasn’t alone,” Creed wrote to the women the next day. “I can’t even express those feelings.”

Over the following decade, emails between the women describe a flurry of efforts to alert authorities in Oklahoma and Missouri. A message to the FBI went unanswered. Tulsa police told them the statute of limitations had passed and suggested they file a report where Campbell lived now. When Jackson tried calling the sheriff’s office in Webster County, Missouri, she thought she heard Campbell’s brother on the other end. He worked in dispatch, they learned. They filed reports nonetheless, but it didn’t matter.

Years rolled by, with no results.