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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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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. 

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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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.

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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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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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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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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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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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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.

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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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“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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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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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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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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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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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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Nearly 470,000 people in the Gaza Strip, or approximately one in five of its residents, could starve to death in the coming months under Israel’s total aid blockade, according to a new report published Monday.

The report, a product of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)—a partnership between 19 organizations including various United Nations agencies, Save the Children, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Food Programme (WFP)—states that while the entire population of the Gaza Strip, approximately 2.1 million people, will at best be able to meet basic food needs, approximately 470,000 of the area’s residents will struggle to obtain almost any food at all through September. Women and children will face disproportionate impacts, with nearly 71,000 kids and almost 17,000 breastfeeding and pregnant women expected to experience “acute malnutrition” through next March.

Life for civilians in Gaza has been hell under continual bombardment by Israel following the terror attack launched by Hamas on October 7, 2023, which killed approximately 1,200 Israelis and took more than 250 people as hostages, including a dozen Americans (the last living US citizen, Edan Alexander, was just released from captivity on Monday).

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Within the first few minutes of Tuesday’s House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing on planned Republican Medicaid cuts—which would render more than 8 million Americans uninsured—a contingent of protesters entered the room in Washington, DC’s Rayburn Building where members of Congress had gathered. The protesters, shouting “No cuts to Medicaid!” represented groups including the disability rights protest organization ADAPT. Twenty-five demonstrators were arrested and removed from the building.

The committee’s proposal for extensive cuts to federal health funding, including sweeping Medicaid cuts, are estimated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to likely “reduce the number of people with health insurance by at least 8.6 million” nationwide. The legislation would also enact more than $700 billion dollars in health-related cuts, in addition to also promoting work requirements for people on Medicaid—which tends only to serve as a means of of kicking them off, even though federal data shows that a majority of adults on Medicaid already work full- or part-time.

After the initial protests, committee Chair Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), who released the legislation on Sunday evening—Mother’s Day—threatened the protesters with arrest for disrupting the hearing, calling the outcry illegal and “a criminal offense.”

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Some of President Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters are not thrilled about his plan to accept a luxury jet as a gift from Qatari royals to use as Air Force One.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told CNN, “I don’t think another country should be providing America [a plane]. We don’t need that….I think America can afford their own plane and build their own Air Force One.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told reporters, “It would be better if Air Force One were a big, beautiful jet made in the United States of America.” And Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told CNBC Tuesday morning that he is “not a fan of Qatar,” adding, “The plane poses significant espionage and surveillance problems.” (Indeed, a Defense Department official told the New York Times it would take “years, not months” to make the necessary security upgrades for the plane.)

Democrats and legal experts have alleged the plan, first reported by ABC News on Sunday, violates the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits any person holding elected office from accepting gifts “from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Even Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) acknowledged that the gift appears to run afoul of the Emoluments Clause, telling Fox News host Jesse Waters, “There is a provision in the Constitution that says you can’t do this.” Paul also characterized accepting the plane as “a mistake,” adding, “I think it’s not worth the appearance of impropriety.”

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

Did you check the weather forecast today?

Whether it was on your phone, the five-day outlook in your newspaper, or your friendly TV meteorologist, that forecast was built on a massive government-run network of sensors and computers that get the weather right more often than not while rarely getting the attention they deserve. And now that system is being taken apart, piece by piece.

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Sungida Rashid had no intention of taking an Uber to the birth of her first child. She’d never been one to take the easy route, and besides, she wanted to get things moving—and walking seemed the best way to do it. So on an overcast Sunday in October 2023, Sungida and her husband, Nabil Haque, set out from their Boston apartment to St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, the local hospital where ­Sungida, nine months pregnant, was scheduled to be induced.

Sungida and Nabil had met 12 years earlier while working at a consulting firm in their native Bangladesh. Over lunches, they began strategizing about PhD applications, eventually spending years in a long-distance relationship as they fell in love and pursued their doctoral degrees in the United States. Then there was a tiny pandemic wedding, a move to Bangkok for work (she was an economics professor, he a climate researcher), a heartbreaking miscarriage, the cautious joy of another pregnancy, and finally, when Sungida was seven months along, a job opportunity for Nabil at Boston University.

Sungida had waved off her husband’s suggestion that they delay his start date so she could stick with her doctors in ­Bangkok. She’d long dreamed of teaching at an American university, and the pandemic had upended several job prospects. Living in Boston would give her the chance to pursue a professorship again and, more importantly, to raise their little girl far from Bangladesh, in a country that offered greater opportunities, cleaner air, and better medical care.

In their first days in Boston, Nabil set up appointments at two prospective hospitals: Brigham and Women’s, a world-­renowned nonprofit medical center, and St. Elizabeth’s, a humbler facility owned by a national for-profit hospital chain called Steward Health Care. The appointment at St. Elizabeth’s came first, and Sungida liked the midwife, so they canceled the other appointment. A few weeks later, they walked in and got ready for her induction.

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In early March, a 7-year-old boy in immigration custody received good news: He would finally be released to his mother’s care. Months earlier, he had been apprehended as an unaccompanied minor while crossing the US-Mexico border. Since then, he had been staying in a facility run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, waiting for his mother, who was already in the United States, to be approved as his sponsor. She had painstakingly jumped through the necessary hoops, submitting the required documents and undergoing a home study to show that she was a safe caregiver. But soon after the boy learned of his imminent release, a new federal policy abruptly made his mother ineligible as a sponsor.

Confused about why he is still in custody, the boy recently told his mother, through tears, that she must not want him after all.

Across the country, thousands of children are quietly lingering in ORR facilities, unable to reunite with parents or relatives because of new Trump administration policies limiting who can sponsor them. According to a class action lawsuit filed by immigration advocacy groups last week, children are “being separated from their loving families, while the government denies their release, unnecessarily prolonging their detention.”

Some of the kids in custody are appearing in immigration court alone, as a result of recent cuts to federal funding for legal representation for unaccompanied children.

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On Sunday, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) released budget reconciliation text that outlined extensive cuts to Medicaid planned by the Republican Party—which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office promptly estimated “would reduce the number of people with health insurance by at least 8.6 million” nationwide.

At least $715 billion would be cut from health programs, according to the CBO analysis, but it is unclear how much would be cut directly from Medicaid. Optional services under Medicaid—including physical therapy, hospice, and respiratory care for people on ventilators—would likely face cuts in many states.

“This bill confirms what we’ve been saying all along, Trump and Republicans have been lying when they claim they aren’t going to cut Medicaid and take away people’s health care,” Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a press release Sunday. “Let’s be clear, Republican leadership released this bill under cover of night because they don’t want people to know their true intentions.”

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On a recent Wednesday morning, a hot pink van emblazoned with the words “Keeping South Florida Babies in Need Clean, Happy & Healthy Since 2013” pulled into the parking lot of the North Miami Beach Library. The van’s side door opened, revealing a shelf packed with diapers and a counter stacked with baby wipe packs. 

The van belongs to the Miami Diaper Bank. The nonprofit collects diapers and other supplies from donors and distributes them to families in need, many of whom live in this area of Miami-Dade County. The library is one of their prime locations.

A slow trickle of families, many of them led by mothers pushing strollers, soon began to appear to collect tote bags filled with diapers, baby food, and other essentials. About three dozen families were expected that day. At an event a few days earlier, more than 100 families showed up. Miami Diaper Bank provides 50 diapers per child per month. Sizes range from preemie babies to pull-ups for toddlers; there are larger diapers for children who need them.

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

The world’s wealthiest 10 percent are responsible for two-thirds of global heating since 1990, driving droughts and heatwaves in the poorest parts of the world, according to a study.

While researchers have previously shown that higher income groups emit disproportionately large amounts of greenhouse gases, the latest survey is the first to try to pin down how that inequality translates into responsibility for climate breakdown. It offers a powerful argument for climate finance and wealth taxes by attempting to give an evidential basis for how many people in the developed world—including more than 50 percent of full-time employees in the UK—bear a heightened responsibility for the climate disasters affecting people who can least afford it.

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This week, President Donald Trump will head to the Middle East for the first foreign trip of his second term. While he is there, he will reportedly manufacture a new conflict of interest for himself by accepting a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet as a gift from the Qatari royal family.

Trump will use the plane as the new Air Force One until just before the end of his term, at which point the plane’s ownership will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, according to ABC, which first reported the news, citing sources familiar with the proposed arrangement. ABC reports that the gift of the plane—which is reportedly so opulent that it’s known as “the flying palace”—will be announced this week, when Trump visits Qatar.

According to ABC, the White House and Department of Justice concluded that the gift does not constitute bribery because it is “not conditioned on any official act.” The U.S. Air Force will modify the 13-year-old aircraft to meet the standards of a plane used to carry the president, and Attorney General Pam Bondi and top White House lawyer David Warrington reportedly believe that transferring the plane to the Trump library foundation before the end of his term will make the arrangement legally sound.

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Lisa Fazio expected her National Science Foundation grant to be cancelled. The associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University had watched, with apprehension, the GOP targeting disinformation in a series of legislative attacks.

She only grew more certain when, on April 18, the National Science Foundation (NSF) put out a statement on how grants would henceforth be evaluated for funding. In addition to limiting the inclusion of underrepresented groups, the statement cited Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” to cut funding for disinformation research:

“NSF will not support research with the goal of combating “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation” that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advances a preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”

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For over a decade, Americans with private health insurance have enjoyed free access to dozens of types of preventive health care: cholesterol medication, prenatal care, and many types of cancer screenings, as well as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), the “miracle drug” that prevents HIV infection. But on Monday, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could gut the part of the Affordable Care Act that requires insurers to cover these services at zero cost to patients. 

Kennedy v. Braidwood Management is at least the eighth time the Supreme Court has weighed in on a major element of the ACA since the health law was passed during the Obama administration in 2010. The lawsuit—filed by a group of Christian businesses and individuals who object to PrEP on religious grounds and Obamacare on ideological ones—takes aim at the US Preventive Services Task Force, a panel of independent, volunteer experts who rate the effectiveness of different types of preventive care. The ACA requires insurers to fully cover services rated “A” or “B” by the task force.

Currently, members of the task force are appointed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. But the case being heard by the Supreme Court argues that the Constitution requires officials who wield that level of power to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

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On Wednesday, a leaked draft Health and Human Services budget document revealed, among other sweeping cuts to health- and disability-related services, that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s department plans to defund protection and advocacy services for people with developmental disabilities—including autistic people, about whom Kennedy also spreads harmful disinformation. The budget document is a proposal, pending official release and eventually congressional approval; it’s also unclear whether suggested cuts originate with Kennedy’s HHS or Project 2025 architect Russell Vought’s Office of Management and Budget.

Federal funding for nongovernmental organizations to provide legal and advocacy services to people with developmental disabilities started in 1978 with the Developmentally Disabled Assistance and Bill of Rights Act. There are now 57 protection and advocacy agencies—one in every state, every territory, and in Washington, DC—that work to enforce the rights of people with developmental disabilities, those with mental health conditions, and other disabilities. The agencies, known as P&As, are overseen by HHS’s Administration for Community Living—which is being dismantled.

“What they’ve outlined here is eliminating almost all of the disability infrastructure in this country providing for services, supports, [and] research across the board to disabled people,” said Kate Caldwell, director of research and policy at Northwestern University’s Center for Racial and Disability Justice. Protection and advocacy agencies, Caldwell explains, are granted what’s called “access authority,” powers that allow them to independently investigate reports of abuse in facilities and community settings.

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On Monday, the New York Times reported that the Trump Administration is mulling a suite of initiatives aimed at encouraging Americans to have more babies. Some of the suggestions for these programs came from pronatalists, a loose network of activists who believe that the humanity is basically doomed unless people have more kids. A few weeks back, I hung out with some of them in Austin near their conference, which is called, naturally, NatalCon. To say that most of the conference goers leaned right would be an understatement; some of the topics under discussion were the ethics of gene-editing embryos to endow them with desired traits, how having more babies could save “the West,” and why most women should forego careers to be mothers.

Some of the pronatalist proposals that the White House is said to be considering include are practical in nature: issuing a baby bonus of $5,000, reserving 30 percent of Fullbright Scholarships for applicants who are parents or are at least married, and offering classes to women to help them identify the most fertile times in their menstrual cycle.

Other proposals, meanwhile, seem aimed at changing cultural attitudes toward childbearing. A prime example of this is the idea of bestowing a special medal on mothers of six or more children. This suggestion came from Malcolm and Simone Collins, a Pennsylvania couple who seem to have appointed themselves heads of the pronatalist movement and were the belles of the ball at NatalCon. The medal was part of a collection of draft executive orders on pronatalism that the Collinses recently sent to the Trump administration.

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On February 13, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that would allow state law enforcement to arrest and prosecute undocumented immigrants for being in the state without legal status. It was quickly paused. On April 4, United States District Judge Kathleen M. Williams temporarily blocked the law from being enforced, saying that enforcing immigration is strictly the work of the federal government.  

But law enforcement from at least one agency, the Florida Highway Patrol, continued to make arrests under the law, according to local reporting and a Mother Jones analysis. The arrests were in clear violation of Williams’ order.

At a court hearing on Friday, attorneys representing immigrant advocacy groups told Williams, the federal judge, that they know of at least 15 such arrests, the Miami Herald reported. Williams said she was “astounded” that the arrests continued in spite of her order. “When I issued the temporary restraining order, it never occurred to me that police officers would not be bound by it,” Williams said at the hearing. “It never occurred to me that the state attorneys would not give direction to law enforcement so that we would not have these unfortunate arrests.”

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On Sunday evening, The New York Times published details of another potentially damning security scandal involving the chat app Signal and discussions of “detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15″—this time centered on a group chat created by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Citing four people with knowledge of the group chat, the report describes strikingly similar details to those revealed last month by The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who earlier disclosed that he had been inadvertently added to a different Signal group chat discussing the same Yemen war plans.

According to the Times, Hegseth shared information that “included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis” in a “chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer.” The Times noted that Hegseth’s brother, Phil, holds a job at the Pentagon, as does his lawyer, Tim Parlatore. His wife, Jennifer, has recently become notable for accompanying her husband to high-profile meetings abroad.

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Donald Trump’s inaugural committee raised almost $250 million, much of it from donors who are seeking—and in many cases have already received—valuable favors from the administration of the famously transactional president.

The Wall Street Journal, which reviewed the committee’s filing ahead of a Sunday deadline, reported that the funding haul far exceeded what the committee needed for the January 20 event, leaving millions of dollars (it’s not clear exactly how much) in a fund Trump can use for other purposes. His aides have said the surplus will help fund Trump’s planned library and charities aligned with the president.

Donations to the inauguration by tech giants like Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta—apparently eager to display fealty to Trump—have previously drawn criticism, but the new filing reveals that a far larger group of companies and rich Americans also kicked in.

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Miles Guo, an exiled Chinese billionaire best known for his ties to Steve Bannon, is in a Brooklyn jail awaiting sentencing following his conviction for orchestrating a massive fraud scheme. But Guo’s years of using his wealth to forge ties with people close to President Donald Trump appear to be bearing fruit.

As my colleague Stephanie Mencimer reported yesterday, far-right activist Gavin Wax just announced he is taking a job as chief of staff to Federal Communications Commissioner Nathan Simington. Wax would be one of several Trump advisers and administration aides who have previously worked for or been paid by Guo or his allies.

Others include top Trump aide Peter Navarro, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and senior Justice Department official Emil Bove. Bannon—whom Guo paid millions between 2017 and 2020 as an adviser—and former campaign aide Jason Miller, who ran Gettr, a social media company that Guo appears to have controlled, hold no official White House roles, but remain Trump advisers.

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This story was originally published on the substack Public Domain to which you can subscribe here.

At an all-hands meeting of Interior Department employees on April 9, Secretary Doug Burgum stressed that managing and protecting federal public lands “must be held in balance.”

“It says in the mission statement the job of Interior is to ‘manage and protect,’” he said. “It doesn’t just say ‘protect,’ it says ‘manage and protect.’”

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This weekend, national protests broke out once again to demand an end to creeping authoritarianism and to defend the rule of law—sparked by the chaotic opening months of the Trump administration, defined by the flouting of judicial authority, executive overreach, and a subservient Congress. You can find a wrap-up of those protests, organized under the banner “50501”—meaning “50 protests, 50 states, 1 day”—here.

Over on Bluesky, we asked readers to share their own images from wherever they showed up, and we were flooded with responses, from tiny towns and a highway overpass, to sprawling cities—all forming a vivid, grassroots tapestry of resistance.

Readers sent photos and videos from Clarksburg, West Virginia; Columbus, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; Flagstaff, Arizona; Hartford, Connecticut; Honolulu, Hawaii; Indianapolis, Indiana; Las Vegas, Nevada; Lisle and Macomb, Illinois; Livonia, Michigan; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Monterey, Paso Robles, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Thousand Oaks, California; New York City, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; Raleigh, North Carolina; Rochester, New York; Roswell, New Mexico; St. Paul, Minnesota; Suffolk, Virginia; and more.

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A Louisiana immigration judge ruled Friday that recent Columbia graduate and Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil can be deported—even though Khalil has a green card, is a lawful permanent resident, and has not been charged with any crimes.

The judge gave Khalil’s attorneys until April 23 to ask for a stay of the deportation. There is a separate case in federal court in New Jersey still ongoing over whether Khalil’s arrest on March 8th violated his First Amendment rights.

The rationale for deporting Khalil is obscure. Secretary of State Marco Rubio submitted a two-page letter arguing, essentially, that Khalil is deportable on the basis of ideas: his “past, current, or expected beliefs.” Rubio relied on a 1950s law that says the Secretary of State can determine whether a noncitizen’s presence in the US harms national security goals.

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Democratic lawmakers are calling for federal agencies and state attorneys general to investigate whether President Donald Trump, members of his administration, or any of his associates manipulated markets or helped enrich allies in connection with Trump’s sudden reversal on tariff polices Wednesday.

Six top Democrats wrote to SEC Chairman Paul Atkins Friday, asking the agency to investigate “whether the tariff announcements, which caused the market crash and subsequent partial recovery, enriched administration insiders and friends at the expense of the American public and whether any insiders, including the President’s family, had prior knowledge of the tariff pause that they abused to make stock trades ahead of the president’s announcement.”

In varied missives over the last few days, Democrats—who for months have publicly struggled with how aggressively to combat Trump—have taken direct aim at the economic damage inflicted by the president’s erratic tariff policy. And they have zeroed in on seemingly suspicious trading activity that took place ahead of Trump’s about-face.

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On Wednesday, S.W., an award-winning probationary worker at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), spent the day crying in bed. 

S.W., who is being identified by her initials due to fear of retaliation for speaking out, is one of more than 24,000 federal probationary employees, those who have been in their jobs for a year or two or less, who were fired en masse on Valentine’s Day as part of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)’s purge of federal workers. A month later, in mid-March, she and thousands of other probationary workers were reinstated following a court order. For S.W., who said she is five months pregnant and her family’s breadwinner, getting that news felt like a win. “I felt so happy, I was on top of the world.” 

Her hope was dashed Wednesday, when an appeals court allowed the Trump administration to resume terminations of probationary workers. It was one of two court rulings this week that allowed the firings of federal probationary workers to proceed, along with a Tuesday decision from the Supreme Court in which a majority of the justices ruled that the nonprofit organizations fighting the firings lacked standing to sue over them.

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President Trump’s overarching embrace of fossil fuels includes repealing a landmark Biden legislative achievement, the Inflation Reduction Act, which has helped support major investments in clean energy infrastructure. 

While this will be the 55th time Republicans will have tried to roll back part or all of the $370 billion IRA, a Mother Jones analysis shows that most of the spending under the bill—and its associated jobs—went to areas represented by Republicans in Congress.

As the Biden White House explained, the 2022 law aimed to make sure the U.S. remained “the global leader in clean energy technology, manufacturing, and innovation.” That logic—and the jobs and tax credits spun off by the spending—conviced 18 Republican House members to sign a letter last summer asking their GOP colleagues not to go through with a “full repeal” of the bill, a move that was largely seen as an effort to appeal to voters ahead of the 2024 elections. 

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This story was originally published on the Substack Public Domain, to which you can subscribe here.

Kathleen Sgamma, a longtime oil and gas activist, withdrew her nomination to lead the federal Bureau of Land Management hours before her confirmation hearing Thursday.

The move comes two days after a watchdog group surfaced private comments in which Sgamma condemned President Donald Trump’s actions during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

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President Donald Trump’s convulsive tariff policy, which all but reversed course Wednesday with the caveat that the same pain would return in 90 days, continues to scramble the world’s economic order. But against the upheaval of broken alliances and global supply chains, a small anxiety is emerging among Americans with wanderlust: how to travel with the world’s most toxic passport.

Because who wants to host visitors who, if electorally judged, voted for this tumult? Even the Brits seem over us. In some ways, the question is an extension of the long-held stereotype that American travelers can be obnoxious. That they are loud and generally indifferent to local cultures. But under Trump, the stereotype feels rife for explosion.

So ahead of summer travel, I wondered: Will an American accent get your ass kicked? Should I pack a bunch of Resistance era clothing? What should I know about unlawful detentions? I called Amy Tara Koch, a travel reporter and lecturer at Northwestern University, for some quick answers on how to think about global travel during these strange times.

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

In 2021, James Kenney and his husband were at a big box store buying a piece of furniture when the sales associate asked if they’d like to add fabric protectant. Kenney, the cabinet secretary of New Mexico’s Environment Department, asked to see the product data sheet. Both he and his husband were shocked to see forever chemicals listed as ingredients in the protectant.

“I think about your normal, everyday New Mexican who is trying to get by, make their furniture last a little longer, and they think, ‘Oh, it’s safe, great!’ It’s not safe,” he says. “It just so happens that they tried to sell it to the environment secretary.”

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Elon Musk has already spent more money—$20 million and counting—to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court than any individual donor in the history of US judicial races.

His tactics go well beyond the usual campaign spending. First, he offered to pay voters $100 each for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges.” Even the Musk and Trump-backed candidate, Brad Schimel, said he wouldn’t feel comfortable signing it. Then Musk said he’d awarded Scott Ainsworth, a mechanical engineer from Green Bay, $1 million for signing the petition.

“It’s clear what the intention is,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler said. “He’s trying to bribe voters. He’s trying to buy an election. This is totally out of line. This should not be how American democracy works.”

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Robert F. Kennedy’s Jr. war on vaccines just landed another major blow as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services successfully forced one of the nation’s top vaccine officials out of his position.

Dr. Peter Marks, who was given the choice by HHS officials to either be fired or step down as the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, announced his resignation on Friday.

“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Marks reportedly wrote in his letter of resignation. He added that leaving his position was a “weight lifted from me” as working in this environment “was spiraling deeper and deeper into danger.”

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

Once upon a time, not long ago, Elon Musk was worried sick about climate change. Stopping it became an overarching career mission, reflected in both his business decisions and everyday actions. He gave the electric vehicle industry a jolt after taking over Tesla Motors in 2004. He joined President Donald Trump’s first business advisory council in 2017, then resigned in protest when Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement. He directed Tesla to buy up $1 billion worth of Bitcoin in 2021 and accept the cryptocurrency in formal transactions, only to backtrack when he remembered that Bitcoin mining is, by design, a heavily energy-intensive process that requires masses of fossil fuel­–powered computer servers to run at all times. It was such a notorious moment in the crypto world that one speaker led “FUCK ELON” chants during that year’s Bitcoin conference.

What a remarkable thing, then, for Musk to embrace Trump more closely than ever as the reelected president decorates his administration with oil-industry shills and with crypto insiders, whose energy-intensive mining rigs and data centers make them something of a natural complement to the fossil fuel industry’s expansionist goals.

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On Tuesday afternoon, a federal judge in New York’s Northern District heard opening arguments in the case of Momodou Taal v. Trump. Neither party was present in the courtroom—in large part because Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has been trying to find Taal for days, reportedly staking out his home and entering his university’s campus.

Taal, a British-Gambian doctoral student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, sued the administration on February 15 to challenge Trump’s executive orders curtailing free speech and seeking to deport pro-Palestinian activists, which have been paired with a wave of attacks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers—in some cases masked and hooded—on graduate and undergraduate students.

At 12:52 a.m. on Friday—within five days of Taal’s lawsuit—Taal’s lawyers received an email “inviting” their client to “surrender to ICE custody.” At 7:00 p.m. the following day, Trump’s lawyers filed a brief informing Taal that the State Department had already revoked his visa, without his knowledge, on March 14—the day before Taal filed his lawsuit. Days later, ICE agents arrived on Cornell’s campus attempting to find and seize him.

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Amid intense outrage over the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student who was ambushed and detained by plainclothes federal immigration officers this week, Marco Rubio appeared gratified.

“We revoked her visa, it’s an F-1 visa, I believe,” the secretary of State told reporters at a press conference in Guyana on Thursday when asked about the arrest. “We revoked it and I’ll tell you why.”

“If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student,” Rubio continued with increasing conviction, “and you tell us that the reason you are coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we are not going to give you a visa.”

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On Thursday, the federal Department of Health and Human Services moved, through a department-wide restructuring order, to eliminate the Administration for Community Living (ACL), a subsidiary established in 2012 to support disabled and aging people—part of a broader series of cuts that will see the firing of some 10,000 HHS staff. HHS’ press release on the restructuring claims that ACL’s responsibilities will be redesignated elsewhere within the department, which has yet to issue further details or clarify its plans. An unknown number of the administration’s workers will also be laid off.

Jill Jacobs, a Biden-era commissioner of ACL’s Administration on Disabilities, was shocked to hear the news. “It’s not something that’s been on anyone’s radar, not a conversation that anyone’s been having,” said Jacobs, who is now the executive director of the National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities.

“Where exactly are they going to go? Who is going to implement [it]? Is this the first step in cutting further programs?”

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This story was originally published on the author’s substack, Field Notes with Alexander C Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here.

Last week, Greenlanders trudged through snow and ice to cast ballots in their most closely watched parliamentary elections in modern history—possibly ever.

Just two months earlier, Donald Trump had returned to power, vowing to achieve what American presidents had tried and failed to do before: bring the world’s largest island under Washington’s direct control. Since World War II, the United States has boasted a large security presence in the autonomous Arctic territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. During a speech before Congress a week before the March 11 election, Trump repeated his offer for Greenlanders to join the United States but vowed to take the island “one way or the other.”

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s remaking of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) entered a new phase on Thursday, when officials announced that the department’s workforce would shrink by another 10,000 staff to comply with President Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s orders to drastically shrink the federal government.

HHS announced that the “dramatic restructuring” of the agency will include cuts to offices including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Combined with HHS’s other efforts to reduce its workforce—the buyout offers it recently made to employees and its January “fork in the road email” that offered federal workers eight months’ pay to resign—the department’s overall workforce will go from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees, a reduction of nearly 25 percent. In a six-minute video posted to X detailing the plans, Kennedy acknowledged that the cuts will bring about “a painful period for HHS.”

The agency offered some details on the specific offices that will see cuts, including the NIH, which will lose about 1,200 employees; the FDA, which will lose about 3,500 employees, which HHS claims “will not affect drug, medical device, or food reviewers, nor will it impact inspectors”; the CMS, which will lose about 300 employees, which the agency says “will not impact Medicare and Medicaid services”; and the CDC, which will lose about 2,400.