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When the US Supreme Court decided to overrule Roe v. Wade three years ago, the ruling had sweeping consequences for public health, making pregnancy much riskier, leading to the preventable deaths of pregnant women, and causing a spike in infant mortality. Now, research suggests the country has also suffered hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses, with the ripple effects being felt in abortion-friendly and -hostile states alike.

A new analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), a DC-based think tank, estimates that the 16 states with total or near-total abortion bans have sustained more than $64 billion in economic losses annually since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022. That’s enough to cover the average estimated health care costs related to pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period for nearly all of the 3.6 million births that occurred in the US last year, the IWPR fact sheet says.

Nationwide, the Dobbs decision that overruled Roe has led to a staggering $133 billion in economic losses each year, IWPR estimates. Beyond the 16 state bans, the loss of federal protections that Roe offered, plus restrictions in other states that reduce abortion access—such as mandatory pre-abortion counseling and waiting periods, restrictions on providers, and gestational limits—have had an enormous economic toll, the think tank says. The restrictions keep more than a half million women out of the labor force each year, with Black women and Latinas suffering the greatest impacts, according to IWPR’s analysis.

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In October 1978, two leaders of the Iranian opposition to the British-backed shah of Iran met in the Paris suburbs of Neauphle-le-Château to plan for the final stages of the revolution, a revolution that after 46 momentous and often brutal years may now be close to expiring.

The two men had little in common but their nationality, age, and determination to remove the shah from power. Karim Sanjabi, the leader of the secular liberal National Front, was a former Sorbonne-educated professor of law. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the leading Shia opponent of the Iranian monarchy since the 1960s. Both were in their 70s at the time.

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A few days after the 2024 election, Zohran Mamdani filmed the first video in a mayoral campaign that would come to be defined by them. Standing on street corners in the Bronx and Queens, the 33-year-old Democratic-Socialist state assemblyman asked a procession of New Yorkers two simple questions: Who had they voted for, and why?

There was nary a MAGA hat in sight. But voter after voter—across a range of ages and backgrounds—explained that they’d either voted for Trump or not voted at all. They were fed up with the rising cost of living. They wanted an end to the war in Gaza. And they felt like they were getting nothing from Democratic leaders.

The video, which has more than 2.6 million views on X, was both self-serving and illuminating—a campaign soft-launch rooted in a simple reality: If you want to understand the hole the Democratic Party is currently in, you have to get out of your swing-state bubble and join the Real Americans on the subway. The biggest on-the-ground development of the 2024 election was what happened in the places Democrats took for granted. In blue cities in blue states, President Donald Trump improved his performance among working-class nonwhite voters while Democratic support fell off dramatically. Trump’s popular-vote victory was an earthquake. And New York City was its epicenter.

Trump picked up nearly 100,000 more votes in his home city than he did four years earlier—while Kamala Harris ran more than half a million votes behind Joe Biden. And the more immigrant and working-class a neighborhood was, the greater the dropoff. The three congressional districts with the biggest swings toward Trump in the entire country last year were all in Queens or the Bronx (or both, in the case of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 14th District). While the city and the state stayed comfortably blue, the results embodied a worrisome national trend for Trump’s opposition: The places where support for Democrats eroded the fastest were also the places where they have been in power the longest.

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For a couple weeks, I’ve been getting negative campaign mailers for a New York City council district I don’t live in. I’m not really sure why. Maybe there was a data-entry error. Maybe someone’s used an outdated map. Maybe someone hates me. 

They’re the sort of mailers you tend to get if you live in a major city these days. Paid for by an innocuous-sounding group called New Yorkers for a Better Future, they attack the incumbent council member—a Democratic-Socialist—for supporting drug injection sites and decriminalizing prostitution, and backing calls to defund the police. The incumbent “doesn’t care about our community,” the flyer reads. And there, at the bottom, is a legally required disclosure of one of the PAC’s largest donors: William A. Ackman. 

You know, Bill.

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The Trump administration argues it has the right to deport certain immigrants to far-flung, dangerous locations such as Libya, South Sudan, and an infamous labor prison in El Salvador without the due process rights guaranteed by the US Constitution, immigration law, and international humanitarian treaties the United States has signed. In these countries, they face the possibility of torture, indefinite confinement, and death. Late on Monday, the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court told the administration to go right ahead. 

“Each time this Court rewards noncompliance,” Justice Sotomayor warned, “it further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law.” 

The majority’s one-paragraph order is stunning. Without a word of explanation, the justices may have condemned thousands to torture or death. Despite the GOP majority’s silence as to their motives, the balancing tests they weighed are evident. The majority found that the prerogatives of the president are more important than the lives of untold thousands, as well as domestic and international law. The majority also placed little importance on the fact that the Trump administration has defied and obfuscated lower court orders, both in this case and others on the president’s removal powers. The likely result is to encourage the administration to ignore future court orders—placing both individuals and the rule of law in jeopardy.

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

It was hard for me to ponder Donald Trump’s attack on Iran without thinking of this:

In the immediate aftermath of the US bombing raid on Iranian nuclear facilities, a careful evaluation of the mission and its purported success was impossible because Trump and his team lie.

We can surely state—as have Democratic and Republican critics of the strike—that the assault violated both the Constitution, which hands Congress, not the president, the authority to declare war, and the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which compels the president to obtain specific authorization from Congress before launching a military strike (unless the United States is attacked) and which, unfortunately, has often been breached by Republican and Democratic presidents.

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It would be an understatement to say that Zohran Mamdani was a bit of an unknown when he began his campaign for mayor of New York City. As recently as January, the democratic socialist state assembly member from Astoria, Queens, was polling at just 1 percent in some polls. But now Mamdani is poised to make history.

Mamdani held a commanding lead over former three-term Gov. Andrew Cuomo after the first round of voters were counted on Tuesday. The race won’t officially be over until the ranked-choice votes are tabulated next week, but Cuomo himself seemed to concede there was too much ground to make up, saying, “Tonight is his night. He deserved it. He won.” The result, if it holds, is a seismic event not just for the city but for the Democratic Party, making the 33-year-old the clear frontrunner heading into November.

As I explained in a story this week, and on a recent episode of Reveal, the mayoral race was the first really big primary since everything fell apart for the party last November, and it was unfolding in a city where Democratic support collapsed—at least at the presidential level. In neighborhoods like Corona, Queens, Donald Trump carried precincts he’d previously gotten just a quarter of the vote. Mamdani leaned into this uncertainty about the party’s direction. He soft-launched his mayoral campaign just a few days after Trump’s victory, with a series of man-on-the-street interviews in diverse outer-borough neighborhoods that had swung sharply toward the president. 

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It didn’t take long for conservatives to lose their minds after Zohran Mamdani’s apparent upset over Andrew Cuomo in the Tuesday night Democratic primary in the New York City mayoral race.

Why? He’s a 33-year-old democratic socialist who has promised free buses and free child care, and to freeze the rent. But the fact that seems to most trigger some on the right is that he is Muslim, and would be the first Muslim ever elected the city’s mayor if he wins in November.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Laura Loomer, and Charlie Kirk were among the right-wingers who fired off Islamophobic smears about Mamdani and Muslim New Yorkers to their millions of followers after Cuomo’s surprising concession. The posts come days after reports that Mamdani has faced threats and attacks prompting an investigation by the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force.

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Tanks, armored personnel carriers, and howitzers will roll through the streets of Washington, DC, on Saturday—coming to a halt just steps from where President Donald Trump once exhorted his supporters to “fight like hell” and march on the US Capitol. But the president’s grand military parade has something else in common with the “election integrity” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection: It’s being organized by some of the same political operatives.

The permit application for the parade—which celebrates the 250th anniversary of the US Army and, conveniently, coincides with Trump’s own birthday—lists former Trump aide Megan Powers as a point of contact. Powers, the document says, is a general contractor for America250.org Inc., the nonprofit helping organize the publicly funded, multiyear America250 commemoration of the country’s semiquincentennial.

Four and a half years ago, Powers was on the permit for the infamous January 6 Ellipse protest, where Trump demanded that Vice President Mike Pence overturn the 2020 election. So was Hannah Salem Stone, another former Trump White House staffer now involved in running the upcoming parade. Stone and Powers were subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee and cooperated with the panel; neither was accused of wrongdoing.

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The Trump administration is investigating whether former President Joe Biden was so enfeebled that his advisers secretly ran the country on his behalf. House Republicans and Trump’s obsequious new pardon attorney are likewise probing whether Biden’s aides issued pardons without his knowledge. “Although the authority to take these executive actions, along with many others, is constitutionally committed to the President,” stated Trump’s executive order initiating the investigation, “there are serious doubts as to the decision making process and even the degree of Biden’s awareness of these actions.” If Biden wasn’t aware of them, the order states, the actions may be void.

Trump’s indifference to the job is the modern incarnation of a problem that defenders of a strong presidency have always ignored.

The country is only starting to understand the extent of Biden’s decline, with the truth somewhere between the fully capable Biden his White House insisted on and the Weekend at Bernie’s presidency Trump has conjured. But the ongoing investigations by Trump and his allies must inevitably reckon with a separate but important question: What exactly is the job of the president, and how much incapacitation or delegation is too much?

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A day after videos emerged of ICE agents chasing after farmworkers across California, forcing immigrants to hide in fields, President Donald Trump appeared to say, in a Truth Social post, that he would not fully pursue his core policy proposal of mass deportation. He had sympathy, if not for the workers then for the agricultural industry—his fellow bosses—who needed the hunted men for labor power.

“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” he wrote on Truth Social, before issuing a vague declaration, “Changes are coming!” Speaking to reporters later on Thursday, Trump reiterated the sentiment. “Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers…They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great.”

A quick look at similar remarks should disabuse you of such hope.

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As Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem talked about the need to apply constitutional rights to all citizens in a Thursday press conference, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), ostensibly an unannounced guest, approached the podium.

“I’m Sen. Alex Padilla,” he is seen stating. “I have questions for the secretary.”

Despite the disclosure that he was a sitting US senator, at least four security members were seen forcibly pushing and dragging Padilla out of the room as he condemned the false narrative that the immigrants targeted in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda are criminals. Noem did not appear to acknowledge Padilla’s presence or his forced removal, while she continued with her speech defending the president’s deployment of the military in Los Angeles. Another video showed officers handcuffing Padilla.

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On Monday, as ICE swept Los Angeles with raids in President Donald Trump’s escalating drive for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, a client of the Survivor Justice Center had an appointment for a court hearing. 

The purpose was to secure a permanent, five-year restraining order against her abuser, who had already violated a temporary restraining order, according to Carmen McDonald, executive director of the organization, which supports immigrant survivors of domestic violence. The woman had been dealing with extensive physical abuse, McDonald said, which—coupled with her abuser’s violation of a prior order—made getting stronger protection critical.

But on Tuesday, the day after the hearing was to take place, McDonald learned from a staffer that the survivor had not shown up. Based on the woman’s immigration status, prior concerns she had shared with staff, the fact that ICE has been ramping up arrests at courthouses, and the agency’s ongoing raids across LA, McDonald and her staff believe the woman was likely afraid of being detained. As of Thursday, their client remains missing—“likely back with her abuser,” McDonald says. If so, she could be in serious danger: Advocates say survivors wind up at increased risk just after they file for a restraining order or try to leave an abuser.

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To the untrained eye, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Ice Core Facility in Lakewood, Colorado, doesn’t look like much: a boxy brick building packed with shelves of ice-filled metallic cylinders 10 centimeters in diameter. But to the more than 100 scientists who pull from its frozen records annually, it’s a treasure trove of information on our changing climate.

The facility holds more than 13 miles—200 football field lengths—of tubes of ice collected from Antarctica, Greenland, and other parts of North America. Their contents can date back hundreds of thousands of years, allowing researchers to engage in scientific time travel. Crucially, the ice provides clues as to what’s in store for our climate down the road. But now President Donald Trump’s assault on science has put this invaluable resource at risk.

“If you drill down in an ice sheet, the deeper you go, the older the ice gets,” says Benjamin Riddell-Young, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies methane isotopes. One recent experiment involved analyzing molecules trapped in ancient ice from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide, including cores recovered from around 2 miles underground. “When the snow falls and compresses into ice, it forms these little bubble cavities that trap the air at the time the ice was formed,” he explains.

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“This is Donald’s room,” Phyliss Shobe says as she ushers me into the neat, spare room where the 81-year-old retiree has covered almost every available space with MAGA memorabilia. Arrayed on the bed, there’s the Gulf of America shirt she got for a friend, as well as a Trump calendar, a Melania book, a fake American Express card identifying her as a charter member of the 2020 Republican Presidential Task Force bearing Trump’s signature, and of course, the “MAGA King” hat she was wearing when I first met her last year at a Trump rally in Richmond, Virginia.

When I arrive at her house, Shobe apologizes for not having a cake ready for my arrival. She bakes cakes for everyone, including her doctors, but a family emergency the night before had kept her out of the kitchen. She’s dressed up for the occasion, her nails expertly painted purple. She’d gone to the hairdresser that morning. Shobe’s home, 20 miles south of Richmond, is modern but comfortably cluttered with her well-organized collections of elephant figurines, antique tea cups, and other “junk,” as she calls it.

The “junk,” however, can’t possibly compete with the spread in Donald’s room. When we enter the shrine, Shobe narrates a tour with the confident delivery of a professional docent. She points out the special shelves her son designed to display more Trump tchotchkes than I’ve ever seen outside of a Trump rally.

There’s the iconic photo of him, bleeding, with his fist in the air after he was shot at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally in 2024. Christmas ornaments, glasses and coffee mugs, lighters, bottle openers, coasters, and every sort of pin are laid out with care, not a speck of dust on them. The 2024 Trump “revenge tour” gold coin takes center stage on one shelf, along with a Make American Great wristwatch. Trumpy Bear presides on a little chair in the corner.

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In late March, the US Department of Education put state education officials on notice: No longer would the federal government tolerate what the agency described in a Dear Colleague Letter as the widespread infringement on parents’ rights to direct the schooling of their kids. “By natural right and moral authority, parents are the primary protectors of their children,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon declared in a cover letter attached to the guidance. “Yet many states and school districts have enacted policies that presume children need protection from their parents.”

Like many of the executive orders and other directives coming out of the Trump administration since January, the guidance focused largely on trans and queer students—in this case, their right to privacy (or lack thereof). But McMahon’s sweeping rhetoric framed the issue as something much bigger. “Attempts by school officials to separate children from their parents, convince children to feel unsafe at home, or burden children with the weight of keeping secrets from their loved ones is a direct affront to the family unit,” she wrote.

The US Supreme Court has long held that the parental right to direct the upbringing of one’s children is fundamental. But McMahon’s letter highlights how the Trump administration is weaponizing that idea to a degree that scholars and advocates say is unprecedented at the national level. The ideology of parental rights has emerged as a cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda, repeatedly invoked by him and others to justify the rollback of a wide range of policies—involving civil rights, education, public health, and reproductive health—that conservatives have vociferously opposed. 

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In May, the Department of Energy quietly introduced a proposal to eliminate its longstanding requirement that new buildings receiving funds from the agency be accessible to disabled people—a rule in effect across the federal government since 1980, thanks to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.

“Disability rights,” professor Jasmine Harris said, “are not uncontroversial as the Department of Energy claims.”

According to a document published in the Federal Register, the final rule will become effective July 15—unless it receives “significant adverse comments” before Tuesday, a month after the rule was proposed.