The Ticks Are Winning

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

Ticks are taking over the United States. Due to climate change, changing land use, and an explosion in the deer population, ticks have been expanding their territory and infecting more people than ever. They carry pathogens that cause everything from Lyme disease to the red meat allergy-inducing Alpha gal syndrome. In some cases, tick bites can be fatal.

Ticks usually lurk in the tall grass in wooded areas. That means going on a hike or even just hanging out in your backyard or a park can expose you to a tick bite. In many parts, of the country fear of ticks is changing how people live their lives, including the way they dress, how they enjoy their hobbies, or even whether they spend much outdoors at all.

The tick surge is catching public health officials off guard. Emergency room visits due to tick bites are the highest they’ve been since 2017. In spite of the uptick, most public health departments still focus on lowering the population of mosquitos in their areas over ticks.

“Thanks to warmer winters, ticks are expanding their hunting season.”

Climate reporter Jonathan Mingle says we can fix this problem. As Mingle explained in a recent New York Times op-ed, encouraging the public to do tick checks and use bug spray is a part of the solution, but we’re leaving a bunch of larger interventions on the table. Mingle joined Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram to explain why ticks are expanding their range and what we can do about it.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

We covered Lyme disease and tick bites on this show back in 2018 because the tick situation was getting out of hand. How much more out of hand has it become since then?

You know, some experts I talked to used the word exponential. So what’s happening is that some of these tick species are spreading into areas where people aren’t familiar with them, and doctors aren’t familiar with them. Thanks to warmer winters, ticks are expanding their hunting season. You may have a day that’s like 40 degrees in January; ticks are out looking for you, waiting for you to walk by and grab on and grab a meal.

“Why are we letting the ticks keep us, if not out of these places that we need and love, why aren’t we fighting back?”

In 2024, a pilot named Brian Weitzel, father of three in northern New Jersey, had a hamburger at a barbecue, went home to mow his lawn, and a few hours later was unresponsive on the floor, and he died that night. His family was left in shock, of course, trying to figure out why he had died. And it turned out that he had likely been bitten by the lone star tick and had developed an allergy to red meat. This is referred to as Alpha-gal syndrome, which is just the latest entrant into the files of all the many ways tick bites can make us sick. The most familiar one, of course, is Lyme disease. Each year, about half a million people are treated for Lyme disease. It’s the fastest-growing vector-borne disease in the US. Cases have more than doubled over the past decade, and those cases are mostly as a result of getting bitten by the black-legged tick or the deer tick. The thing is, both of these ticks—and many other ticks that are also marching northward and westward and expanding their empires rapidly across North America—can deliver all kinds of pathogens.

They’re claiming more and more of the map, and they’re claiming more and more of our psychic map, right? I tell people I’m not a tick expert, although I’ve talked to a bunch of them, but I’ve become a tick expert in the sense that I am very familiar with tick paranoia and how it can keep you from venturing out into the places you love: hiking paths or picnic grounds or parks. And so that was part of the story I wanted to write about, too—Why are we letting the ticks keep us, if not out of these places that we need and love, why aren’t we fighting back?

And why is it? Are we not fighting back against the ticks?

Not really. I mean, this is one of the surprising takeaways from my reporting is that we’re barely even trying. One way of understanding that is to think about two numbers. One number is 90 percent. 90 percent of vector-borne disease cases in the US are from ticks.

90 percent?

Yeah. And yet despite the fact that 90 percent of cases of vector-borne illness come from tick bites, if you look at what local city and county health agencies do in terms of vector control, 80 percent of what they do is mosquito control, and only about 10 or 11 percent of these local health agencies around the country do any kind of tick control. So why is that? It’s a familiar story in the public health world. It’s not enough funding or policy support for trying out, testing, and deploying new approaches to controlling ticks.

Even though people are dying?

We’re just kind of taking for granted that, ‘Oh, well, what can you do? You just tuck your pants in and spray some insecticide on your boots, and that’s all you can do.’ It’s like, well, actually we have a long history of going to war with mosquitoes. Before there was tick control, there was mosquito control. The CDC was founded with the sole mandate in 1946 of wiping out malaria and fighting mosquitoes.

It feels like they lost that fight because in my neighborhood you can’t go out between the hours of seven and nine o’clock.

The mosquitoes haven’t gone away, but malaria did, for the most part. You know, in talking to experts today, including folks at the CDC, they told me that there’s a suite of tools we could be using if we wanted to get serious about fighting ticks. As one veteran tick expert at the CDC told me, if you want to make a dent in this problem, you have to get to the deer. The deer are the engine driving a lot of these tick species spreading, and we just have way more deer than we did decades ago, especially in the eastern US and suburban parts of America. So how do you get to the deer? I had people in the comments section of my piece saying the clear answer is just we should all be hunting deer. But in talking to the experts, they’ll tell you it’s not really a feasible solution. You would have to knock deer populations way down to make a dent in the tick populations.

“We’re not even funding this research in a serious way. “

What is more promising is a combined approach of stuff like vaccines. There are people developing vaccines that you could deliver to deer or to rodents, which are another important host for these ticks, so that when the tick bites them, they’ll die. That, I learned from talking to folks who do this kind of research for a living, is a more promising avenue for controlling ticks than all of us picking up crossbows and becoming deer hunters.

So why is it that we’re not doing anything?

What I heard from experts is that we’re not even funding this research in a serious way. We do this stuff for mosquitoes. People don’t realize it, but your local county health agency they go out, and they find where the mosquito breeding grounds are and stagnant pools of water, and they treat it. It takes this sustained quiet effort.

We saw the consequences of not doing that recently. This is a bit tangential, but screwworm. Screwworm was this flesh-eating larval pest that devastates cattle herds; it was eradicated in the US in 1966, and it was kept at bay by the vigilance of people at USDA and USAID who ran these programs to release millions of sterile screwworm males out of airplanes. It created this wall that kept the screwworm from coming into the southern US. And probably if we stopped doing the mosquito control at a local scale, we’d see more cases of dengue fever, West Nile virus, and all these other rare but serious illnesses that climate change is making more of a threat here in the US.

Could you just practically help people understand how they can protect themselves in the absence of, I don’t know, a functional government?

Doing tick checks. And we do it in my household pretty much daily when you come home: do a thorough tick check, throw your clothes in the dryer. Ticks hate heat. And some people like to use permethrin spray, which is this insecticide that’s designed to kill ticks on your boots or your pants when you go out for a hike. Researchers have known these things are really effective if you keep doing them, if you stay vigilant. And all it takes is that one time, that one time you go out for a hike and you come back and you forget to do the tick check.

So we need those kinds of personal measures of vigilance and protection, but we still need to kind of push for a bigger public health response to this. The ticks are going to keep spreading into the calendar, too, in the sense that as winters get warmer, more and more days of the year when you’re outdoors, you’re going to encounter ticks who are hungry, and they’re looking for you.

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“If I Prove That You Can Win Statewide Taking on AIPAC, That is Catastrophic”

On July 8, Abdul El-Sayed had just wrapped up a campaign stop inside a sweltering church auditorium in Ferndale, Michigan. The room was packed with supporters fanning themselves with campaign signs, many braving the summer heat to hear the progressive Senate candidate make his case against his opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens.

Then came the applause.

It wasn’t for Medicare for All or his warnings about the rise of data centers. It was for a message that has come to define what is expected to be the most expensive Democratic Senate primary in history.

“The central corrupting feature of our politics right now is the power of money to buy politicians so that government is captured by them, not for us,” El-Sayed said as he fielded questions from the stagefrom the stage, wearing his signature black T-shirt and blue jeans. “AIPAC will spend huge amounts of money if you’re uppity like me and you speak out of turn to beat you, and you’re seeing it play out on TV every day.”

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its affiliated groups have poured more than $30 million into the race in support of Stevens. It is the largest investment the organization has made in an electoral contest since launching its United Democracy Project super PAC in 2021.

“I have been very clear, consistent and transparent, and I have continued to be,” Stevens said during a recent televised debate when asked about AIPAC’s support for her campaign. “I want to see long-term peace. I want to see a two-state solution. I am deeply proud to represent one of the largest Jewish populations in a congressional district in the country.”

The stakes in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary extend far beyond the state. The winner will face Republican Mike Rogers in one of the country’s marquee general election contests, and Democrats need to win races like Michigan if they hope to take control of the Senate.

But first, Democratic voters are deciding a different question: whether the party’s future lies with its establishment, represented by Stevens, or with an ascendant progressive movement embodied by candidates like El-Sayed. The race has become a proxy fight over money in politics, the influence of pro-Israel groups such as AIPAC, and whether Democratic candidates can openly criticize U.S. support for Israel without sacrificing electability.

It is also unfolding in the shadow of Michigan’s 2024 Uncommitted movement, which turned the state into the epicenter of Democratic dissent over the war in Gaza and exposed fractures that continue to divide the party’s coalition, including an ongoing debate over how much the issue contributed to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat.

We spoke with El-Sayed earlier this summer about AIPAC, electability and what he believes his race means for the future of Democratic politics.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Nearly two years ago, you joined members of the Uncommitted Movement at the Democratic National Convention asking them to have a Palestinian speak on stage. What was your involvement in that group?

I thought we needed to take a shot across the bow to remind the Biden administration that Arab and Muslim voters were an important part of his coalition, and that we would not stand by and watch him use our tax dollars to drop bombs on other people and their kids to do a genocide, and that he was at risk of losing a lot of important voters if they didn’t course correct.

When Vice President Harris became the nominee, I was the first Arab or Muslim leader to endorse her openly. I took it on the chin, you can imagine.

In both instances, I was trying to lead with my values. Because if you saw this election from the eyes of a child in Detroit, where I was leading Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human, and Veteran Services, or you saw it from the eyes of a child in Gaza, Trump would be worse.

But how does that contrast with the idea of where are now, where a number of progressive candidates who have campaigned around the issue of Palestine are winning Democratic primaries across the country?

That’s how democracy works. Democracy is supposed to work by giving the voters a choice about what vision they want. And I think voters are choosing their morals rather than political expediency.

When you started your campaign, it seemed like you had a Bernie-style approach centering on issues like Medicare for All. You even had a video where you interviewed a veteran who responded to the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. When did your race become so foreign policy focused?

My campaign is not really this heavy on foreign policy. It just happens to be what all y’all in the media want to talk to me about.

Respectfully, you bring it up yourself sometimes.

When a $30 million super PAC spend is being dropped on your face by an organization whose key interest is something happening over there, then it would be ridiculous not to name it. AIPAC is the biggest spender in this race by far, and that’s pretty insane. And they’re not spending to keep our money here, they’re spending to send our money there. So they’ve made it an issue, and it’s just another example of why we have to get money out of politics. Because so long as they can spend that kind of money buying attack ads against me, we are going to continue to watch as too many politicians bow out of having any kind of moral courage to keep our money here at home and actually do the things that we need here at home.

But I’m running on getting money out of politics, putting money in your pocket, passing Medicare for all.

It just so happens that the question right now that everybody’s asking is, “How are you gonna pay for it?” Well, look at what we’re doing abroad. Look at this ridiculous war we never should have fought or have been fighting. Think about the genocide that we backstopped, the apartheid that continues to be done, the attempted annexation of Lebanon. Like, why?

And what could we do with that money if we kept it here?

So all I’m saying is, if we wanna have nice things here, it’s better to use our money to do nice things here than to do bad things there. It’s not that hard.

You mention AIPAC repeatedly in your campaign speeches, debate responses and on and I’m curious why you think calling them out resonates with voters?

AIPAC is the biggest spender in this race, so you can’t talk about money out of politics without talking about AIPAC. You just can’t. Like, it’d be like ignoring the elephant.

But this is nothing new, no?

But I want people to see it anew. Because you’re right, it’s nothing new. It is so common in our politics that we take it for granted, and that’s some ridiculous shit. Like, it’s ridiculous that we take it for granted that we have a bipartisan consensus on the idea that your US senators wanna send your money to some other country to buy bombs and tanks instead of keeping your money here. And it’s not just about Israel, by the way. It’s also Egypt. It’s also Pakistan. It’s also Saudi Arabia. It’s all of these places where we send foreign military aid where we should not.

What do you say to Democratic old heads who are, you know, might look at your campaign, might look at you and be like, “You’re just throwing some, some red meat to, to the lefties,” so to speak, when it comes to the issue of Palestine, that this is politically advantageous for you?

People are asking two questions: what do you say you’re gonna fight for, and then do I believe that you’re gonna fight for it? The Democratic Party brand is in the shitter because nobody actually believes that we’re gonna show up and fight for the things that we say we wanna fight for. You know why? Because we say we’re for human rights, and then we watch them get viciously violated, and then we say nothing. So what that tells me is you’re gonna back down. So I would tell them, how about our party finds some courage, and I’m just telling you exactly what I believe, come what may. So when we beat $50 million of spending from AIPAC, I’d love to have a conversation with them.

What do you think Palestine or Israel or the two of them together symbolize for this year’s midterms?

Moral Rorschach test. Are you someone who is willing to be courageous and truthful, or are you someone who is willing to bend to money and power? And people are showing themselves in real time.

What do you say to people that think you are being divisive in your rhetoric, and that if you’re trying to coalition build, being this brash or loud only hurts your cause?

I’m building a coalition on the truth. And sometimes when a coalition is built on falsehood, you have to make sure that you can move it to the truth. And I’m finding that we’re building a much bigger coalition than the one that they think, you know, we’re breaking apart, because a lot of people wanna be a part of the truth. They want their kids to have good healthcare. They want to be able to travel good roads. They want good schools, and they wanna know that our tax dollars aren’t hurting other people.

What do you think the outcome of your race will say about the future of the party?

A lot. I think everybody and their mom running for president is watching this race with a very keen eye. And if we can demonstrate that campaigning on, on truth and on courage can win in Michigan, it can win anywhere.

If I prove that you can win statewide, taking on AIPAC and winning, that is catastrophic because of what it says about the future of the party. It is existential to oppose it. I think this race is going to change a lot of minds, and it’s going to scramble a lot of expectations.

This interview was originally conducted as part of an upcoming episode of Reveal, slated for release later this September about the role Israel has in reshaping American politics.

Subscribe to Reveal wherever you get your podcasts to hear the conversation and many more around this topic and other news of the day.

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The Post-Roe Surprise: More Abortions

Access to medication abortion in the years since Covid and the fall of Roe v. Wade has completely reshaped the abortion access landscape in America.

“There’s this irony that’s actually happened,” says Dr. Angel Foster, an abortion provider and researcher. “Tragically, 33 to 40 percent of women of reproductive age now have less of a right to an abortion. But access for many people has increased.”

Foster is the founder of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, a clinic whose work is one major player in why abortions are up. Massachusetts and almost half the states in the US have passed shield laws that legally protect abortion providers. The one Foster operates under allows her to prescribe abortion pills to patients in states with abortion bans.

And while the battleground may be shifting as medication abortions grow more common, the war is far from over.

This week on Reveal, we explore post-Roe America through the eyes of three women with three very different missions: Foster, who offers medication abortions nationwide; a courier who risks arrest to stockpile abortion pills for an uncertain future; and a conservative activist whose life’s work is trying to stop them both.

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How Michigan Became the Most Expensive Democratic Primary Ever

Next Tuesday’s contest in Michigan between Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens holds a dubious distinction: No Democratic congressional primary in history has ever attracted so much super PAC cash. The overwhelming majority of the outside money has gone toward ensuring that Stevens, a moderate, pro-Israel Democrat, defeats El-Sayed, a Bernie Sanders-endorsed champion of Medicare for All and Israel critic.

More than $60 million of outside spending has poured into the Senate contest, according to records from the Federal Election Commission and the Federal Communications Commission. The vast majority has come from super PACs that—unlike El-Sayed’s and Stevens’ own campaigns—can accept unlimited donations.

Brendan Glavin, the director of insights at OpenSecrets, which tracks money in politics, said the level of outside spending in Michigan far exceeds the top Senate races from 2024. “We’re taking this huge leap up,” he explained. “It’s really exploded.” Only this year’s Republican Senate primary in Texas, where John Cornyn lost to Ken Paxton despite a large funding advantage, appears to have attracted more outside money.

The biggest spender by far in Michigan is the United Democracy Project, a super PAC backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that works to elect pro-Israel candidates. UDP has spent more $30 million backing Stevens, according to FEC records—twice as much as it has ever spent on a single race. (The super PAC hit its previous high in 2024, when it spent more than $14 million to defeat former Rep. Jamaal Bowman in a Democratic House primary in New York.) Additional records show that Stevens has also benefitted from a super PAC that in the past has received donations from companies including Chevron and a subsidiary of the tobacco giant Philip Morris.

The race in Michigan—an open seat that Democrats need to hold to take back the Senate—started out as a competitive three-person contest that initially included Mallory McMorrow, a state senator backed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) who tried to occupy the ideological lane between El-Sayed and Stevens. But despite strong fundraising and early polling, McMorrow struggled to remain competitive and dropped out in early July.

It means that Michigan primary voters now have an unusually clear choice to make. El-Sayed has the endorsement of key players on the left like Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and the United Auto Workers. Stevens is understood to be the favorite of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and was recently endorsed by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

At a national level, the results on Tuesday will be closely watched to see if populist outsiders like El-Sayed can continue to topple favorites of the Democratic establishment from coast to coast. It will also be a measure of whether AIPAC can still upend Democratic primaries in which voters increasingly oppose its agenda. If El-Sayed wins, the general election will then test how left-wing candidates perform in swing states.

El-Sayed, a 41-year-old Rhodes scholar and doctor, worked as the head of Wayne County’s department of health before running for Senate. In 2018, he unsuccessfully ran for governor in Michigan. After the race, he hosted a podcast for Crooked Media and further established his left-wing credentials by writing a book on Medicare for All that included a foreword by Sanders.

In this year’s Senate race, El-Sayed is not being outspent due to poor fundraising. His campaign raised more than $14.5 million through July 15, according to FEC records. Stevens’ campaign raised less than $12 million by the same date, despite her being a sitting member of Congress. Stevens’ advantage comes entirely from super PACs and other outside groups that can spend independently to support her.

The outside spending has become a major issue in the race. At a May debate, Stevens made national news for dodging a question from a moderator about what AIPAC does or doesn’t get from backing her campaign. El-Sayed returned to the theme at a July debate when he asked Stevens what she had “given away” for AIPAC’s support. Stevens replied that no one owns her vote and then claimed that anyone spending on her behalf was doing so because of her record of “fighting for Michigan.”

El-Sayed talked more about AIPAC’s role in the race in an interview earlier this month with my colleague Najib Aminy. “AIPAC is the biggest spender in this race by far, and that’s pretty insane,” he said. “And they’re not spending to keep our money here, they’re spending to send our money there … it’s just another example of why we have to get money out of politics.”

The Senate race is not the first time that UDP has backed Stevens. In 2022, the group spent more than $4 million to help her defeat Rep. Andy Levin in a Michigan House primary. Although Levin is Jewish and Stevens is not, he was deemed too critical of Israel by AIPAC despite having served as the president of his synagogue. Since her 2022 victory, Stevens has remained an ardent supporter of Israel, a nation that she has said “comes to me in my dreams.”

El-Sayed, on the other hand, has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide and campaigned with the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker. UDP’s unprecedented spending is a recognition of the threat that El-Sayed poses to its agenda. But the super PAC is also aware that focusing on Israel is not the best way to win. Like in other races, its ads in support of Stevens appear to make no mention of Israel.

The full extent of pro-Israel funding being deployed against El-Sayed may significantly exceed the more than $30 million spent by UDP so far. In October 2025, Delaware corporate records show a new entity called the Center for Democratic Priorities was incorporated in the state.

The Center for Democratic Priorities quickly spent $6.5 million backing Stevens, the New York Times has reported. But the ads did not explicitly tell Michiganders to vote for Stevens. Instead, one ad touted Stevens’ efforts to “hold ICE accountable.” Michael Beckel, an expert on money in politics at the nonprofit Issue One, explained that, due to the vagaries of campaign finance law, groups like the Center for Democratic Priorities can skip reporting to the FEC by avoiding direct endorsements and running ads more than 30 days before an election.

As a result, it is even harder than usual to know who funded the group. But there are potential identifiers. In 2024, a super PAC called Blue Wave Action sprang up to help elect Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) in his House primary in Detroit. After the election, FEC records showed that most of the $2.4 million that Blue Wave Action received came from UDP and a related pro-Israel group.

As the Detroit Metro Times has reported, federal records show that a “John Jones” filed paperwork for both Blue Wave Action and the Center for Democratic Priorities. Federal Communications Commission filings I reviewed strongly suggest that the same John Jones worked with both groups: Jones signed paperwork for both groups using Docusign; both signatures have the same string of 15 identifying numbers and letters that are unique to an individual’s account on the digital signing service.

Who John Jones is has been a mystery but FCC records contain significant clues. Advertising agreements that Jones signed for Blue Wave Action in 2024 list the group’s address as a UPS Store in East Lansing and also include a Gmail address for him. According to open source records, the email address is tied to the LinkedIn page of a John Jones who previously worked on government affairs for Sprint and now handles fundraising for a Christian school in Lansing.

Jones did not respond to multiple requests for comment via email and phone. A colleague at the Christian school where he works was surprised to hear that he may be involved in the Michigan race. His wife, Sandi Jones, who co-owns a Michigan lobbying firm, told me that she did not think the Gmail address listed on FCC records belongs to her husband. But there is reason to doubt whether that is correct. Among other things, the avatar for that Gmail account is a photo of a man who appears to be her husband, the same account has written Google reviews for businesses near the Jones’ Michigan home as recently as this month, and the East Lansing UPS store listed as Blue Wave Action’s address in 2024 is about 15 minutes from their home.

Who funded the the Center for Democratic Priorities remains unclear. AIPAC has denied being behind it, but there is no way to verify that from public records. Down to the common name of its director, the group appears designed to be as opaque as possible.

The second largest spender in the Michigan race is another innocuously named super PAC called A Stronger Michigan. FEC records show that the group has spent more than $17 million supporting Stevens—more than El-Sayed’s entire campaign had raised as of mid-July.

A Stronger Michigan, which did not register with the FEC until June, is based at a residential address associated with Jeff Murray, a Virginia-based lobbyist who has represented groups ranging from the Boy Scouts to the tobacco giant Altria. Murray has longstanding ties to Center Forward, a nonprofitthat backs moderate Democrats and Republicans that is the source of nearly all the donations disclosed by A Stronger Michigan. (A related super PAC called Center Forward Committee has spent about $1 million backing Stevens in addition to the money routed through A Stronger Michigan.)

As a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, Center Forward does not have to disclose its donors. But it is possible to put together a partial picture of its funding from other public records. The group, for example, has received millions of dollars from PhRMA, a trade group that represents drug manufacturers. The related Center Forward Committee, formed by Murray in 2014, lists only three corporate donors this election cycle: Chevron, a subsidiary of Philip Morris, and UnitedHealth Group. But those donations do not show where the specific funds given to A Stronger Michigan to support Stevens came from. Murray did not respond to a request for comment.

The outside spending picture for El-Sayed looks much different. The biggest individual donor to Fighting for Michigan—El-Sayed’s main outside backer—is the candidate’s father-in-law, a nephrologist at a Detroit hospital who had given $300,000 as of July 15. Overall, the super PAC has expended about about $2.8 million—less than one tenth of what has been spent against El-Sayed by the United Democracy Project alone.

When it comes to the role of AIPAC and UDP, El-Sayed sees the results next Tuesday as being about about much more than a single Senate seat. “If I prove that you can win statewide, taking on AIPAC and winning, that is catastrophic because of what it says about the future of the party,” he said. “It is existential to oppose it. I think this race is going to change a lot of minds, and it’s going to scramble a lot of expectations.”

Additional reporting by Najib Aminy.

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How Can US Factories Get Cleaner Heat? These Ideas May Help.

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

American households are all too familiar with the pain of high electric bills, which are climbing nationwide. The same problem is quietly hindering the country’s factories from cleaning up their operations, too.

Hundreds of thousands of US manufacturing facilities burn fossil fuels to produce the heat they need to make packaged foods, bottled drinks, construction materials, and likely everything in your bathroom cabinet. It’s why the industrial sector accounts for nearly one-third of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions from energy use.

Cleaner technologies like industrial heat pumps, electric boilers, and heat-storing batteries are already commercially available. Yet even companies that are committed to decarbonizing can find it hard to justify making the switch. The underlying problem is that in virtually every state, electricity costs more than natural gas for industrial users.

“We have to have solutions that are at the very least competitive with the existing cost of fuel,” said Neil Brown, a chemical engineer at Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical, which has over a dozen manufacturing sites in the US and more abroad. ​“In some places where Eastman operates, in parts of the Southeast and Texas, it is very difficult to compete with the low cost of natural gas.”

Brown was speaking on a webinar last month held by the Renewable Thermal Collaborative and Industrial Heat Pump Alliance. The groups looked at electrifying low- to medium-temperature processes, and estimated it would add roughly 250 terawatt-hours to the industrial sector’s annual electricity demand by 2035—or nearly 25 percent more power than manufacturers currently use.

On the plus side, deploying clean industrial technologies could generate around $471 billion in total economic output over the next decade, even when accounting for the lost jobs and diminished business activities of gas utilities and equipment makers, according to the groups’ June report.

“In states where you have very good solar quality and natural gas prices are high, … it makes economic sense for the industry to do this.”

But reaping those benefits will first require finding ways to drive down the cost of electricity for manufacturers. A growing number of climate and energy experts are studying that challenge and proposing solutions for policymakers and utilities to consider.

One of those strategies could be to build renewable energy projects directly beside factories.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, recently modeled what would happen if factories themselves installed off-grid solar or wind projects on-site and used the clean electricity to power thermal storage systems and heat pumps. The team looked at nearly 3,600 locations across the country, evaluating land availability, solar-power potential, and local natural gas prices for each site.

Renewable-powered heat systems could economically supply up to one-third of the studied industrial heat demand by 2035, they said in an analysis announced last week.

The researchers found that such an approach would make it more cost-effective to run heat pumps than gas boilers for industrial processes below 200 degrees C (392 degrees F)—a broad category that includes beer making, paper production, and textile manufacturing. Meanwhile, thermal batteries would offer ​“competitive or lower costs” for scorching-hot operations like glass melting and steel manufacturing.

“In states where you have very good solar quality and natural gas prices are high, like in California, it makes economic sense for the industry to do this, because they will save some money on their heating costs,” said Amol Phadke, a co-author of the report and an adjunct associate professor at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.

However, even states without California’s abundant sunshine can still produce low-cost solar power, thanks to declining solar-panel prices. The vast majority of sites in the study have sufficient buildable land to install solar projects.

Phadke added that building off-grid systems would give factories faster access to renewables, since grid-tied wind and solar farms have to wait in long interconnection queues, which can delay projects for years. Ditching the utility would also let manufacturers avoid paying steep grid-delivery charges and other expenses—and sidestep competition with data center operators for power from an increasingly strained grid.

The new site-level data ​“is really helpful for project developers and technology developers to know how to prioritize their efforts, in terms of where to go and pitch industries on,” said José Domínguez, the study’s lead author and a research affiliate at the Goldman School.

The fact remains, though, that many factories will continue to rely on the electric grid in the near term. To get these facilities to consider transitioning to cleaner heat, the cost of electricity needs to come down.

The concept of electricity rate reform is gaining traction among decarbonization advocates, state policymakers, and manufacturers like Eastman as a tool for narrowing the gap between electricity and natural gas prices.

“Reforming electric rates is a good way to improve the economics of electrification while taking advantage of our clean electricity generation.”

In California, Senate Bill 943 would authorize the state’s Public Utilities Commission to fix utility rates and fees to make it more affordable for large industrial and commercial customers to switch from fossil fuels to electric heat. The bill passed the Senate in May and is now headed to the state Assembly’s Appropriations Committee.

In the Upper Midwest, the utility Otter Tail Power recently developed a novel electricity tariff that is designed to boost the bottom line of thermal energy systems and to ensure they benefit everyone on the grid. The first project to take advantage of this new rate is Antora Energy​’s 5-gigawatt-hour battery in South Dakota, which turns cheap wind energy into clean industrial steam for Poet​’s nearby ethanol-production plant.

“Reforming electric rates is a good way to improve the economics of electrification while taking advantage of our clean electricity generation,” said Lauren Kubiak, a senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council who works on California climate and energy policy.

Kubiak led a new study analyzing how this strategy could improve the costs of operating industrial heat pumps in two major manufacturing states: California and Michigan. While heat pumps are significantly more energy-efficient than gas-fueled boilers, they’re typically not cost-effective to operate in either state, given current electricity prices.

The study examined what would happen if companies paid only ​“marginal” electricity costs, which reflect the actual cost of generating and transporting an additional unit of electricity. Today, ratepayers also pay ​“non-marginal” costs that help cover things like grid maintenance and infrastructure upgrades, net-metering programs for rooftop solar, and, in California, wildfire-prevention efforts.

“In California, [marginal-cost] rates enabled heat pumps to become pretty cost-competitive with gas boilers,” Kubiak said. That’s particularly true for major subsectors that require low-temperature heating.

For Michigan manufacturers, the impact is more muted, since the state’s electricity rates are lower than California’s and don’t include as many non-marginal costs. However, charging factories marginal rates would still reduce the size of the electricity-gas cost gap, enough that layering on other industrial policies—such as a tax credit that rewards low-carbon heat production—could bridge that divide almost entirely.

In the report, Kubiak and her co-authors suggest that utilities could offer marginal cost rates only to new heat pumps that displace fossil fuel–generated heat. These rates could also be set to encourage manufacturers to use electricity during times when solar projects are producing excess electricity, or when overall grid demand is low. That should help avoid saddling other ratepayers with the non-marginal costs that these new heat pumps won’t be paying.

“Electric rate reform is a tool in our toolbox that hasn’t been used to its fullest extent just yet,” Kubiak said.

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Can Opposing Data Centers Help Progressives Win?

When Donald Trump came to Michigan last week to speak at a General Motors vehicle-testing facility, he likely expected to find a friendly crowd.

That wasn’t entirely the case. A group of protesters holding yellow signs that read “stop data centers” interrupted the president, chanting, “Data centers no, people pay the bill,” until they were removed by security.

Will Lawrence, a progressive Democratic candidate in Michigan’s seventh congressional district—where that General Motors plant is located—was unsurprised by the protesters’ fury. “That’s what we’re tapping into,” he posted on social media.

People across Michigan have pushed back on data center proposals in recent months, raising concerns about the facilities’ energy demands. In response, Lawrence, a climate activist turned politician, has made opposition to hyperscale data centers central to his campaign. And he’s betting that standing up to data centers will help him get votes from across the aisle, too.

“Since I declared my candidacy last August, we’ve had four major data centers, including three hyperscalers, proposed in the district in Lansing, in Mason, in Howell Township, and in Lyon Township,” Lawrence said at a panel discussion earlier this month. He has been attending township meetings as Michiganders try to stop the often-secretive data center permitting process in its tracks. MAGA Republicans and true-blue Democrats all stood up to protest, Lawrence said. “It became very clearly obvious to me that this is a totally cross-partisan rebellion that’s happening from the bottom up.”

America’s data center backlash refuses to stick cleanly to partisan boundaries, with opposition to data center buildout nearly as high among Republicans as it is among Democrats. In his first major TV ad, Lawrence took aim at “tech billionaires” who he said want to turn Michigan’s farms into data centers that will “jack up our energy bills and ruin our home values.”

Lawrence is just one of a growing crop of progressive candidates who see, in opposing AI data center buildout—and condemning the tech oligarchs behind it—a path to victory.

“Fights all over the country about AI data centers and AI more broadly are shifting the usual political lines,” said Saul Levin, a Michigan community organizer who runs a podcast about data centers called The Hum. That political shift is happening in battleground states like Michigan, but also in more clearly Democratic states like Colorado.

Melat Kiros, who recently won Denver’s Democratic congressional primary, credits her win in part to her ability to vocalize constituents’ anger about the data center permitting process, which can operate in near-total secrecy: companies often ask municipal decisionmakers to sign non-disclosure agreements, which can mean that people don’t find out a data center is moving into their neighborhood until the process is half-complete.

That secrecy and anger can translate to votes. “There’s a lot of candidates that are making this a front and center issue and are winning as a result of it,” Kiros said.

In Memphis, Tennessee State Representative Justin J. Pearson has made opposition to Elon Musk’s xAI data center, and its associated neighborhood-polluting gas turbines, a core part of his campaign for Congress. In his district, voters are worried about becoming sick thanks to Musk’s data centers—which Trump’s Justice Department has thrown its weight behind.

The Department of Justice intervened in a lawsuit against xAI, saying they should not have to conform to the Clean Air Act—because Grok, which xAI powers, is being used to bomb Iran. “That’s the logic,” Pearson said. “Violate the Clean Air Act, allow the pollution to kill American citizens because we’re killing people overseas with this technology.” And even in communities less directly affected by data centers than Memphis, populist opposition to their construction is gaining strength.

Candidates for governor in at least 12 states are running on data center moratoria, per Newsweek. Centrist Democrats, meanwhile, are more likely than ever to experience voter pushback when they’re perceived to be overly friendly to data center developers. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer appeared onstage with OpenAI’s Sam Altman earlier this year, and was roundly condemned for doing so by Democratic and Republican constituents alike.

Some, like Lawrence, blame the governor in part for bringing the data centers to Michigan. “Here in Michigan, the reason why this all started to arrive in late 2025 is because in late 2024 the state passed a set of tax breaks for data center development, and that was passed through the state legislature on a bipartisan basis and signed by our Democratic governor.”

“I think people see that the ruling class is united behind this plan to push data centers in our communities,” Lawrence said. “That’s a place that you can fight from.”

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The Next Victim of Trump’s Political Prosecutions? Congressional Oversight.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who helped lead the national response to the Covid-19 pandemic as the country’s longtime chief infectious disease expert, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at least 90 times Wednesday in a contentious hearing focused on the origins of the virus in China. Fauci was clear about his reason for pleading the 5th: He believes the hearing was a set-up for a perjury investigation by the Justice Department—a realistic assessment of how the Trump administration is wielding its prosecutorial powers to go after people the president doesn’t like.

The hearing was chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a harsh Fauci critic. “Given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me,” the NIH veteran said in his opening statement, “the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”

This isn’t a hypothetical concern, and it’s not simply animated by Paul’s animosity toward Fauci. Congressional Republicans and the Justice Department, now under the control of former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, have repeatedly used testimony to gin up perjury investigations and charges against people the president doesn’t like. That’s turned testimony before Congress—which should be a public service sharing information to inform our laws—intothe first step toward a criminal investigation.

Pleading the Fifth is not a clean solution.

Just a week ago, House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) sent the DOJ a criminal referral accusing former special counsel Jack Smith of lying to Congress in testimony last December. During his confirmation hearing, Blanche told the Senate that the department, like his boss the president, is serious about investigating Smith. Similarly, federal prosecutors are already investigating former CIA director John Brennan, a Trump critic, over testimony he gave in 2023, also via a Jordan referral. Perjury before Congress is also one of the speciouscharges the department unsuccessfully brought against former FBI Director James Comey. An accusation of lying to Congressis alsohow the DOJ set out to pressure and possibly oust Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell before that investigation was dropped to smooth the way for Senate confirmation of Kevin Warsh as Fed chair.

Though wise as a form of self-preservation, it’s unclear if Fauci’s use of the Fifth is kosher. On Bluesky, Georgetown Law professor Josh Chafetz commented that he didn’t see a legal basis for it. “It certainly sounds like Fauci is saying that he thinks Paul is trying to trick him into perjuring himself,” he posted. “But that can’t justify invoking the Fifth Amendment, otherwise anyone could get out of testifying anytime by claiming that, if they testified, they might lie. That can’t be right.” Later, he added, “I don’t want a world in which witnesses get to decide for themselves whether or not a congressional investigation is a farce and therefore whether or not they’ll ‘play along.’”

Clearly, Fauci’s lawyers don’t think the threat of prosecution is idle, and there are at least four other former officials they can point to explain why. At the close of the hearing, Paul said the committee would meet next week to vote on holding Fauci in contempt of Congress, which would have to be upheld by a vote in the full Senate.

Paul could have assuaged Fauci’s fears and elicited testimony in the public interest if the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee had granted him immunity for anything said in his testimony, a rare move but one within the committee’s power. In Fauci’s case, this would not have let him off the hook for any crime that theoretically could come to light during questioning—because President Joe Biden already did that when he granted Fauci a sweeping, preemptive pardon covering the his last nine years in government.

Some Republicans on the committee argued that this pardon meansFauci shouldn’t be able to plead the Fifth. “You don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment because you’ve been pardoned, as you very well know,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said. Paul said the question is unsettled. But Fauci’s lawyers evidently disagree; indeed, it makes little sense that a perjury investigation into current statements would be ruled out by a pardon for past offenses.

Either way, the politicization of DOJ complicates the situation: Fauci might not fear actually committing perjury, but it is reasonable to assume that he was at risk of saying something that could form the basis of an investigation that could drain his bank account and make life much more difficult for years, even if it doesn’t end in a guilty verdict.

Bynot offering immunity, Republicans on the committee are preserving the possibility of an investigation based on his testimony. That tells us that Paul and his fellow Republicans are more interested in prosecuting Fauci than learning more about the origins of Covid-19.

Wherever the courts come down on Fauci pleading the Fifth, it’s yet another example of how the theory of expansive presidential power endorsed by the Supreme Court and deployed by this president crashes into not just norms, but also laws and the Constitution. Over the past few years, the court’s Republican-appointed majority has increasingly expanded the powers of the president and clarified that the prosecutorial functions at DOJ are not independent enforcement of the rule of law but rather under the sole purview of the president, who can even direct completely unfounded prosecutions.

In his second term, Trump has embraced this power as he demands the prosecutions of his perceived enemies. One result is a loss of faith in the Justice Department. Ironically, on Wednesday evening, Senate Republicans delayed a vote to confirm Trump’s next pick for attorney general, Todd Blanche, because Blanche would not commit to reversing his decision to give Trump immunity from tax investigations—an indication that Blanche, currently the acting attorney general, is not just working at the behest of Trump to punish the president’s critics, but using the DOJ to prevent any scrutiny of his actions. It’s the latest sign that the DOJ has been transformed from an entity walled-off from presidential interference to one in which the president calls all the shots.

But the Fauci debacle shows thatthe blast radius goes far beyond DOJ’s sullied reputation and political vendettas. Prosecutors going on fishing expeditions through congressionaltestimony at the behest of a vengeful president will ultimately harm lawmakers’ ability to do the critical work ofholding hearings and gathering testimony,along withwitnesses’ ability to give that testimony. Fauci was compelled to testify under subpoena, and yet Congress was still deprived of his answers.

Pleading the Fifth is not a clean solution for Fauci either; he couldstill be prosecuted if the Senate votes to hold him in contempt. If that happens, then the courts—even the Supreme Court, which helped create this mess—may ultimately decide how to resolve the spreading fallout from a politicized prosecutorial machine. Will Fifth Amendment rights win out over Congress’ fact-finding powers? Or will Congressional testimony become an accepted precursor to unwarranted criminal investigation? Either way, the problem lies not with Fauci, butwith the weaponization of the Justice Department.

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The Kushner-Backed FIFA Takeover Tearing the Soccer World Apart

For a long time, Gianni Infantino, the ubiquitous president of FIFA, and Jared Kushner, the businessman and Middle East peace envoy, have seemed inseparable. When the US was awarded a joint bid to host this year’s men’s World Cup, all the way back in 2018, Jared was quick to take credit. It was Jared who arranged Infantino’s first meeting with Trump, at the White House in 2018, where the president flashed a red card at the assembled members of the press. They have had dinner together on the exclusive island in South Florida where President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and his wife, Ivanka, now live. Infantino invited Kushner and his family to participate in the official draw for the 2025 Club World Cup and they currently serve together on Board of Peace. Kushner, according to New York Magazine, has done so many favors for the head of FIFA that he calls himself an “unpaid intern.” But when Infantino had a plan to sell a stake in the world’s game to private equity…well, he went to Josh.

Infantino, with help from JP Morgan, is proposing to sell an up-to-20-percent stake in FIFA’s marketing and events business to a “geographically-diversified investor group” of investors helmed by Thrive Capital, the investment shop run by Jared’s younger brother, Josh Kushner. Under the proposal, Thrive and its partners would raise $4.2 billion and FIFA’s 211 member nations would each walk away with a onetime $40 million payday. As it happens, those 211 associations are also the ones who are supposed to vote on this proposal. A simple majority is needed to pass, and without being too coy about it, money has historically proven to be a powerful motivator in FIFA politics. The proposal hit the world of soccer this week like a free kick to the face. The Independent called it “an existential threat to football.” A source told the Telegraph it was a “nuclear bomb.”

The proposal, which Infantino reportedly cooked up without much, if any, consultation from other high-ranking officials, also amounts to a potential golden parachute for the Swiss-Italian bureaucrat. Infantino would be term-limited after his expected re-election next year. According to the The Athletic, the deal would create a new position, analogous to an NFL commissioner, with pay in the range of roughly $60 million a year, and which Infantino would be expected to fill. If that were to happen, Infantino would end up making orders of magnitude more money out of this deal than the soccer federations it purports to enrich.

For the soccer world, this marks a dramatic escalation on two fronts. One of them is something you should care about if you care about soccer, and the other is something you should care about if you care about anything else. The first concerns a conflict between FIFA and its European confederation, UEFA, which is the hegemon of club soccer and also home to most of the world’s top national teams, but which comprises a fraction of FIFA’s voting membership. FIFA and UEFA have clashed in the past over similar cash grabs, and Infantino—despite hailing from Switzerland—has drawn much of his political support and financial backing from outside the continent. If the plan does fail, it will be because Europe was willing to use its substantial non-voting leverage to blow it up. On Thursday, after a hastily-arranged meeting, UEFA pledged to boycott all FIFA competitions not just until after this proposal is tabled, but until FIFA formally commits to never proposing anything like it again. It is not hyperbole to say it is a showdown over the entire structure of the sport.

But the other conflict goes beyond the game, to some familiar questions about finance and politics and power. This FIFA story resonates not because it has been proposed happening at FIFA but because the thing that is happening at FIFA is happening everywhere—investors swooping in to buy a stake in something that doesn’t feel like it should really be anyone’s to sell.

Not all private investment shops are the same, of course. Some of them are sell-off specialists. Some of them just bleed service-oriented professions and make them progressively worse. Some of them, indeed, inject much-needed capital in the right place at the right time. And some of them embed themselves in a venerable kind of place, in a put-together and normal-sounding way, until you wake up one day and realize it’s becoming the kind of thing it was never meant to be. Aside from the extremely self-interested and not necessarily altruistic suits of Europe, that is the fear above all fears: Inviting private investment into your organization is a recipe for private investment dictating what your organization is and does. Maybe sometimes the result is “better marketing and streaming deals.” But probably it’s more tournaments, more teams, more product. The incentives change. The demands change. And the accumulated century-plus of tradition and joy and sweat equity becomes an asset on someone else’s books.

FIFA has been synonymous with big, dubious deals for a long time, of course. But as I explained in a recent episode of Reveal, Infantino’s FIFA marks a significant departure from the sort of corruption that defined the organization under his predecessor, Sepp Blatter.

In the old system, people handed out literal envelopes of money to people you’ve probably never heard of for TV rights to events you probably didn’t watch. That was a very specific kind of corruption. There was a unique FIFA flair to it—a weird tri-state guy and a Trinidadian member of parliament and a bunch of former players and sportocrats hashing out deals in a literal underground chamber in a $250 million compound in a place in Zurich called “Dividend Hill.” It is the kind of arrangement that could only exist in international soccer, and at a particular point in time, when the cash flows were growing at a rate that exceeded the sport’s capacity to exploit it in an organized and notarized way. On balance, it was not a particularly good way of conducting business and the outcomes were scandalous but you have to admit that sometimes it was also pretty funny.

But FIFA under Infantino has become something different. The scandals aren’t necessarily illegal nor are they happening in secret (even if the planning process for this was). The money is on a different level, and the people who want a piece of it are too. Before there was Josh Kushner and JP Morgan and a stake in the World Cup, there was Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and SoftBank trying to do the same for the FIFA Club World Cup.

Infantino’s FIFA has crossed the threshold from a sports story involving money and power to a money and power story involving sports, and the scandals of his tenure, while draped in a distinctive soccer-like gloss, have concerned the kinds of mergers and acquisitions that have disrupted seemingly every other sector as well. International soccer is an uniquely prominent front in a familiar battleground: A few rich guys stepping in to extract value in perpetuity from something they didn’t build, in exchange for an extremely unevenly distributed short-term windfall. Europe just might succeed in killing it off this time. But you’ll experience it again soon enough wherever you are.

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Democrats Call For Ethics Investigation into Congressman Max Miller

Several Democratic members of Congress are requesting the House Ethics Committee investigate their colleague, Congressman Max Miller (R-OH), over allegations that he assaulted his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, and possibly injured their child.

“The recent reports of domestic violence and child abuse against Representative Max Miller are deeply disturbing, and Congress can’t ignore them. Allegations of violence against women and children have to be met with the utmost seriousness. We therefore call on the House Committee on Ethics to swiftly and thoroughly investigate these allegations,” said a statement by the 96-member Democratic Women’s Caucus chairwoman Leger Fernandez (D-NM), and vice chairs Hillary Scholten (D-MI) and Emilia Sykes (D-OH).

Their calls for a formal probe into the embattled Congressman follow the publication of a July 18 profile in Mother Jones that drew from thousands of pages of public records alleging numerous episodes of misconduct. As I wrote in the story:

The summary of the Zoom meeting and investigative report are among more than 2,000 pages of court filings and police reports pertaining to Miller that Mother Jones obtained through public records requests. The trove of documents contains allegations of drug use by Miller, misogyny and verbal abuse, and violent behavior against multiple women. The filings also include evidence that Miller implicitly threatened his ex-father-in-law, Sen. Bernie Moreno.

Some of the allegations were documented in a police report regarding an investigation into potential child abuse after Miller’s daughter wound up with a broken collarbone.

Neither the child’s father, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), nor mother, conservative policy adviser Emily Moreno, admitted to knowing what caused their daughter’s injury or that it occurred while their daughter was under their care. Miller’s primary theory was that the bruising resembled marks from a seat belt. Moreno, who discovered the bruises and took the child to an emergency room, suggested the cause may have been something more sinister. Records of the investigation into potential child abuse show that Moreno told detectives that Miller had previously thrown hot water at her, shoved her, and held a gun to her head; therefore, she couldn’t rule out that Miller caused their daughter’s fracture. Moreover, a child protection specialist reviewing the incident had characterized the bruising near the fracture as resembling a “handprint.”

The police investigation into possible child abuse was ultimately “unsubstantiated.” That means there was not enough evidence to support a finding of neglect or abuse.

Though Miller repeatedly declined to answer questions from Mother Jones, he has elsewhere denied ever being violent towards women.

“Every woman and child deserves to live free from fear of violence, especially within the sanctity of their own home, and we will not stop fighting until that’s the reality,” wrote the leaders of the Democratic Women’s Caucus in a statement first provided to Mother Jones.

The caucus was joined in calling for the investigation by several lawmakers. Rep. Sam Liccardo, a California Democrat, wrote on X Wednesday, “Allegations that Max Miller abused his wife and child demand an immediate House Ethics Committee investigation. Congress must never serve as a safe harbor for abusers.”

He was joined by Rep. Gwen Moore, a Wisconsin Democrat who has previously spoken about surviving domestic violence, told Mother Jones, “The domestic abuse allegations against my colleague, Rep. Max Miller, are disturbing.” She added, “I am especially concerned about the claims of abuse against his 2-year-old daughter whose collarbone was broken. Every child deserves to feel safe in their home, and that is the responsibility of all investigative authorities involved.”

No Republican members of Congress have yet called for an investigation into Miller—including Miller’s former father-in-law, Sen. Bernie Moreno.

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France Had Never Seen a “Fire Cloud” Until This Month’s Record-Smashing Blazes

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

Firefighters in France are confronting a phenomenon never seen in the region before: fire clouds. It’s a sign of the intensity of the blazes burning—and how climate change is upping the odds that they appear.

A wave of fires has swept over France and Spain, sending hundreds of thousands fleeing. Firefighters on the front lines are facing what a spokesperson for the French firefighter association told AFP was an “operational impossibility”—in other words, a “natural force beyond our control.”

As evidence of how out of control the wildfires in France are, look no further than the skies where the blazes have, in some cases, created their own weather. To form a fire cloud—what meteorologists call a pyrocumulonimbus or the even more metal-sounding cumulonimbus flammagenitus—you first need heat, which fires have in spades.

While the country is no stranger to wildfires, the size and ferocity of this summer’s blazes is well outside the normal.

But just as important are dry conditions near the ground and cool, relatively moist conditions aloft in the atmosphere. As superheated smoke rises miles above the flames and into the cool atmosphere, water vapor condenses around the particles of ash to form water droplets. (Yes, water vapor and water droplets are two different things.) As the air keeps rising, those water droplets eventually become ice crystals.

At this point, the smoke and water droplets have created a cloud, but unfortunately one that’s unlikely to provide much relief in the form of rain. Instead, these towering fire clouds can unleash lightning strikes that start more fires and generate powerful downdrafts that reach the ground to fan flames further. At their worst, pyrocumulonimbus clouds can even spawn tornadoes.

Pyrocumulonimbus clouds have been documented in the US, Canada, and Australia, among a handful of other locations. But until now, there were no documented fire clouds in France. While the country is no stranger to wildfires, the size and ferocity of this summer’s blazes are well outside the norm.

Last week was France’s single most destructive week for wildfires over the past 20 years, according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System. It more than doubled the previous record during that period, which coincides with accurate satellite data. This isn’t an isolated bad week either. More than 220,000 acres have burned across the country so far, six times the annual average. That’s 61,000 acres higher than the previous yearly record.

If that sounds like a familiar trend, well, it unfortunately is. Burning fossil fuels has heated the planet up, making explosive wildfires more common and destructive around the world. A 2024 study found the incidence of extreme fires globally more than doubled from 2003 to 2023. Six of the seven most extreme years have happened since 2016.

After a slight weekend reprieve as temperatures dipped, they’re expected to rocket back up above 104 degrees F (40 degrees C) in France and 108 degrees Fahrenheit in Spain later this week. That means firefighters will have to contend with more extreme fire weather—including the possibility of clouds created by the blazes themselves.

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California Does Medicaid Home Care Well. They’re Being Punished For It.

On July 21, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who heads Medicaid programs federally, announced they’re deferring over $850 million from the state of California over its Medicaid-funded home and community-based services program called In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS). The Trump administration has attacked IHSS for the program’s growth over the past decade.

Their argument: the program is so successful there must be rampant fraud.

Home and community-based services got started under President Ronald Regean to help disabled people remain in their communities with the assistance of paid aides, including family members, instead of being institutionalized. From a purely economic standpoint, home and community-based services care is cheaper than care in hospitals or nursing homes. And disabled people find the right to remain in their communities to be so crucial that it has become an essential tenet of disability rights activism.

Hagar Dickman, who directs California-focused long-term services and support at Justice in Aging, told methat disabled people “are entitled to the life that we expect to have of independence, of autonomy, of self-actualization, and agency.”

As of May 2026, nearly a million disabled and aging Californians are authorized for home and community-based services through IHSS. Unlike in some states, like Texas, where people can lag on waiting lists for over a decade, once a disabled Californian goes through the process of qualifying for IHSS, they are able to get services to help them live independently immediately.

The program’s growth, according to Tyler Sadwith, who directs Medicaid services in the state, is proof that it’s working. In February, Sadwith wrote a letter to Dr. Oz’s agency defending it against allegations of fraud. “Outcomes that CMS has repeatedly endorsed and promoted through federal approvals of California’s IHSS and [home and community-based services] programs, because they deliver care at a fraction of institutional costs.”

Experts I spoke with are concerned that the attacks specifically on California could be used to make an example of paid caregiving, which Kennedy has attacked profusely. Attacks on paid caregiving are also happening at the same time that the Department of Justice is trying to undermine Olmstead, a Supreme Court decision which granted disabled people the right to remain in their communities, in addition to brutal federal Medicaid cuts.

“One of the incredible things about paid family caregiving models is that it allows people to have culturally competent care,” Sabrina Epstein, Disability Rights California policy analyst, told me. “The program is set up for people with needs above and beyond the usual care that a family member would provide, and so these claims of fraud are ableist and racist.”

And unlike attacks towards Minnesota and Medicare-funded home health in Los Angeles, there isn’t even a “few bad apples” argument to be made when attacking IHSS. California, like every state, also investigates Medicaid fraud.

“There’s an existing framework to ensure that there’s not fraud. You can’t bill for more hours than you’re allotted,” Elizabeth Zirker, a senior attorney with National Health Law Program, told me. Additionally, Zirker notes, in California, Medicaid home care is not administered through private companies, unlike some other states.

Additionally, getting IHSS is not automatic for disabled Californians on Medicaid who apply. “It’s not as simple as applying for in-home supportive services and then being awarded hours,” Zirker said. “Counties are not incentivized to pay for services people don’t need.”

And California’s model is still not perfect; experts I spoke with cited waiting lists for some smaller Medicaid-funded programs outside of IHSS, people needing more hours than they are given and pay for care workers needing to be higher.

“The whole assumption that you know growth means fraud is absurd,” Dickman said, “especially given all of the investments that the state has made to actually intentionally grow the program in order to benefit its disabled population and to support people living at home.”

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Covid Truthers Are Claiming Fauci’s Diary Was “Scrubbed”

On Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) released a trove of diary entries from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 85-year-old immunologist and public health veteran who led the US response to the Covid pandemic in 2020. On X, Paul posted an AI-generated image of a grinning, pastel-sweater-clad Anthony Fauci lying on his stomach on a purple shag carpet, poring over a unicorn-themed diary and surrounded by teen girl accoutrements. Paul explained to his 5.9 million followers that the image was “What Anthony Fauci looked like every night when he wrote about how great he is in his diary.”

The diary entries contain plenty of cringeworthy moments—Fauci congratulating himself on how famous he had become, for example, and basking in the attention of female celebrities like Julia Roberts and Barbra Streisand. What they don’t contain—much to the dismay of Paul and Fauci’s other critics—is any kind of smoking gun proving that the public health leader deliberately misled the American people.

Undeterred, Covid truthers have only amped up their efforts to prove that Fauci lied—and they’re spinning up conspiracy theories about crucial information they say is missing from the diary.

In an email newsletter Wednesday morning, MAHA Action, the political lobbying group founded by key allies of Health and Human Services Secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., presented a complex theory concerning University of North Carolina coronavirus researcher Ralph Baric’s absence from the diaries. He has emerged as an important figure for people seeking to prove definitively that Covid came from a lab. Margaret Menge, the author of the newsletter who describes herself on LinkedIn as a “truth seeker and news innovator,” argues that the diary’s omission of Baric is fishy, because Fauci was meeting with him in 2020. “What did Fauci really know or suspect about the origin of the virus?” Menge writes and then expands her thesis. “It’s not in the diary entries. But leaving Baric’s name off the list is a sign that he was hiding something, and an indication he suspected that the diary entries would one day be made public.”

If Fauci had imagined a future diary release scenario, would he not have allowed that his Barbra Streisand fangirling might make him seem, well, uncool?

While it’s theoretically possible that this happened, the idea of Fauci practicing self-restraint by deliberately omitting the name of a virologist seems dubious, considering the verbose nature of the rest of the diary. If Fauci had imagined a future diary release scenario, would he not have allowed that his Barbra Streisand fangirling might make him seem, well, uncool?

Baric’s absence isn’t the only thing that Covid skeptics find suspicious about the diary. There are the theories from Mary Talley Bowden, the Texas otolaryngologist who gained notoriety during the pandemic for her advocacy around discredited Covid treatments and criticism of vaccines. “I think Fauci scrubbed his diary of all mentions of ivermectin when we sued the FDA and overcame their motion to dismiss,” she posted to her 641,000 followers on X. “It’s odd that there is no mention of it at all. What else have you noticed that’s missing?” The lawsuit she refers to is one that she and several colleagues filed in 2022, accusing the US Food and Drug Administration of overstepping its authority by issuing public warnings advising against using one of President Donald Trump’s treatments of choice, ivermectin, to treat Covid. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately ruled in favor of Bowden, saying the FDA had gone too far in its warnings—but overwhelming evidence still suggests that the horse dewormer ivermectin isn’t an effective Covid treatment.

While the MAHA Action newsletter writer and Bowden appear to believe that Fauci was censoring himself, others in the Covid denialist universe seem to think that nefarious government forces censored the diary. KanekoaTheGreat, an anonymous right-wing account with a million followers, notes that a June 2021 entry about a lung blood clot that Fauci suffered was originally published and then redacted. “Did Fauci’s lawyers demand the redaction?” reads the post. “Why scrub a lung blood clot from 2021 after it went public?”

While KanekoaTheGreat doesn’t allege that the blood clot was connected to Fauci receiving a Covid vaccine, anti-vaccine activists were quick to spin it that way. Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group co-founded by RFK Jr., published an article titled “Fauci Treated for Pulmonary Infarction Months After Getting COVID Vaccine, Diaries Show.” Vince Langman, a MAGA influencer with 565,000 followers on X, posted, “I was suspended from Twitter 1.0 for telling people the Covid Vaccine can cause blood clots! This makes my blood boil!” But there’s a much simpler explanation for the redaction: It contained personal health information, which would put Paul in violation of federal medical privacy protocol.

At a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer Rand’s questions, arguing that the hearing was little more than a witch hunt. “The sole reason [Rand] is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,'” Fauci said. “Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.”

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Maine Just Told ICE to Get Out

A suite of new laws restricting cooperation between Maine law enforcement and Department of Homeland Security agents is set to take effect today, less than three weeks after an ICE agent shot and killed 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. These “ICE Out laws,” as they’re collectively known, will limit collaboration between state and local police and federal agents, and forbid landlords, hospitals, and schools from sharing personal information with ICE.

“What we saw in Biddeford was not an aberration,” said Zach Heiden of the ACLU of Maine at a press conference Tuesday. “It was the result of intentional changes at ICE that have unleashed thousands of masked and menacing agents on communities across the country.”

The new laws, Heiden explained, are meant to reshape the relationship between those agents and local institutions such as elementary schools, libraries and the DMV. “These new laws will affect hundreds of entities, including 253 school districts, 107 police departments, and 17 housing authorities,” Heiden said.

Since the start of Donald Trump’s second term,a dozen states have passed similar laws. These are outgrowths of the “sanctuary city” and “sanctuary state” laws of the first Trump term, which generally limited local police partnerships with ICE. Those policies, according to a landmark Stanford study released in 2020, did effectively reduce deportations—and, contradicting right-wing narratives about immigration, did not lead to an increase in crime rates. But laws like Maine’s go further, extending these non-cooperation agreements beyond police.

“That includes not just police departments and sheriff’s offices, but also state agencies responsible for enforcing labor law, environmental law, housing law, or any other state or local law,” said Michael Kebede of the ACLU of Maine at Tuesday’s press conference. The goal is to “make sure local resources are not used to support the deportation machine.”

Data from the Migration Policy Institute shows that the number of state-level laws relating to immigration surged in the first year of Trump’s second term. A total of 106 immigration-related laws were enacted in 2024—which more than doubled to 213 in 2025. Meanwhile, tracking by the National Immigration Law Center indicates that at least 12 states have passed laws this year restricting ICE’s operations within their borders. But at least eight states have passed laws mandating local agency cooperation with ICE, instead. These states now require participation in 287(g) deputization programs, and some have outlawed local sanctuary policies.

Maine advocates hope that new “ICE Out” policies—signed into law months before Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero’s death, but only now coming into effect weeks after he was killed—will help prevent further violence.

“Every day, we hear from families who are afraid to participate in ordinary life, workers who are afraid to speak up, parents who are afraid to take their children outside, send them to school, or seek medical care,” said Ruben Torres of the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition.

“We see businesses lose employees, communities lose opportunities, and all of us lose something when fear becomes a part of everyday life.” Because ICE is a federal agency, Maine cannot fully bar it from operating in the state—but there are some things states can do to restrict the agency’s movement. ICE Out laws, Torres said, “offer a different path.”

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What “You Only Get 18 Summers” Gets Right About Parenting

Technically speaking, August is not the last month of summer; the season officially ends on September 21. But among faithful disciples of the fun season, it prompts urgency, for it contains what seems like the final stretch before grim responsibility sets in and the self-serious soup fans come out in earnest. It is during these weeks when last-minute beach trips are summoned. When we commit ourselves to plans defined by leisure, not labor. Will it ever be this good again, we ask.

Now, the soup people like to argue that it is precisely this attitude, one they dismiss as panicked and mawkish, that informs much of their opposition to summer. There’s so much pressure, they argue, to build out action-packed days and perfect vacation photos. Let me say emphatically: This camp is wrong. And the same forces that guide them animate the hum of outrage over the sentiment, “You only get 18 summers with your kids.”

Not familiar? Well, like most sources of derision on the internet, “you only get 18 summers” is something of a Rorschach test; its meaning, as much as there is one, depends on who you ask. But lately, my algorithm is brimming with denunciations from parents who see it as just another form of “mom guilt.” As a popular Instagram account for parents wrote in May, the phrase creates “pressure to make every summer magical. Every moment meaningful. Every memory count.” Another influencer lamented similarly on Substack: “The pressure of the ‘you only have 18 summers with your child’ content [pushes] us towards trying to create core memories every summer, to try and make it unforgettable for our kids, while maintaining our jobs, cooking 3 meals a day, and making sure everyone has their basic needs met.”

Does it? I searched for the same militant instructions to build five-star memories, but they eluded me. Instead, I was surprised to find the phrase to be an oddly useful, even if corny, reminder to drop one of the worst habits I have as a parent: constantly counting down to the next activity, whatever thing that gets me closer to an imaginary finish line. To stop planning the next memory, quit all that counting, and just sit in it.

Now, finding an internet headline like “you only get 18” meaningful is a bit embarrassing to admit, like finding insight in “life’s a beach.” But for me, “you only get 18” echoes one of the most cosmic things I’ve discovered about parenting: the feeling of nostalgia for the present, even when it sucks. It’s a bittersweet yearning that defies logic, and yet, for so many of us, it’s real. As Stephanie Murray wrote in the Atlantic about why we long for difficult days of parenting:

Only with distance from the minute-to-minute anxieties of caring for a small child does its sweeping beauty come into full view. But this isn’t so much a shortcoming of youth as it is a gift of age. The experiences that follow early parenthood enrich our understanding of it, allowing us to ponder it anew. Hindsight allows us to put suffering into context and recognize the purpose it served in our lives. Hohlbaum likened it to laying bricks in a road: Only after we find out where the path leads are we able to see the purpose each brick served in getting us there. People with grown children have a deeper appreciation for the initial years of parenthood, because they are observing it from a perspective that only time can grant.

Don’t get me wrong. I relate, so acutely, to the parts of parenting that can reel the mind. (This includes the gauntlet of summer activities that, as Caitlin Murray of Big Time Adulting said in a recent video, can leave parents feeling like we are stuck in a “wet paper bag.”) Still, I can’t help but find the irritation over “you only get 18 summers” misplaced. Is it not an invitation for gentleness, to pause and consider, even mawkishly, to give grace to ourselves when we’re in the wet paper bag? Nothing about parenting will ever be perfect, just like those final weeks of August will never deliver the perfect summer. But it’s never been about the pursuit of some elusive perfect summer anyway. Summer is a season that celebrates saying fuck it: Slam those sweating hot dogs even when the meal prep is right there. Trade nice drinks in favor of cheap, ice-cold beers. Celebrate magic in the ordinary flecks of sunlight. Couldn’t we all use that reminder once in a while?

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Big Oil Is Getting Sued for Heat Deaths. It’s Fighting Back With an Army of Immunity Laws.

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

Could the oil industry be held responsible for fueling the extreme heat that led to a woman’s death?

That’s the question at the heart of a novel lawsuit in Washington state. Misti Leon’s mother died from overheating during the hottest day in state history in June 2021, when temperatures climbed to 108 degrees F. Scientists said the unusual heat dome that descended on the Pacific Northwest would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. So last year, Leon sued Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron, Shell, and other oil majors for wrongful death, alleging that they had known for decades that fossil fuel emissions would lead to destructive consequences, but deceived the public about it, delaying action that could have prevented her mother’s death. An estimated 1,200 people in the region perished from the heat during that simmering week in June.

Earlier this month, a King County judge ruled against the oil companies’ motions to dismiss Leon’s lawsuit, allowing it to proceed toward trial. The ruling was a signal that this kind of case has merit, said Mike Meno, the communications director at the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit supporting climate accountability cases. “It’s the latest type of legal liability that the oil companies are absolutely terrified of and are going to fight like hell to try to escape,” he said.

“Quite simply, Big Oil is in panic mode.”

More than a decade after investigations found that Exxon Mobil had known about the dangers of global warming since the 1970s but publicly downplayed the threat, lawsuits against oil companies have proliferated. There are nearly 40 of these cases pending across the country, according to Margaret Barry, who manages a climate litigation database at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center. After years of delay tactics from the oil industry, at least five of these lawsuits—from Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, and Honolulu—have proceeded to the discovery stage, in which both sides try to uncover evidence to bolster their case in court. That’s the last major step before a trial, when oil executives would be forced to defend their actions in front of a jury.

Some cases are on hold as judges wait to hear how the Supreme Court handles a lawsuit from Boulder, Colorado, this fall. The city and county of Boulder allege that Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy violated state laws by concealing the dangers of their products and they want money to pay for the rising costs of improving infrastructure to deal with heat waves, wildfires, and floods. The outcome could affect existing climate lawsuits, or push plaintiffs to take different approaches.

In the meantime, the industry has been mobilizing a counterattack against the lawsuits with the help of the Trump administration and Republican politicians. The American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s biggest lobbying group, has said that one of its priorities for 2026 was to “stop extreme climate liability policy.” The industry has begun challenging “attribution science,” a rapidly developing field that seeks to quantify how climate change, and even emissions from specific companies, have intensified extreme weather.

The flurry of activity suggests that the industry feels like it’s under threat, Meno said. “Quite simply, Big Oil is in panic mode.”

Republicans are trying to pass laws to grant oil majors immunity to these kinds of lawsuits, with success in several states so far. Utah, Iowa, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Louisiana have recently signed laws shielding fossil fuel companies from lawsuits related to greenhouse gas emissions, while Montana and Utah (again) reformed existing laws to narrowly define what counts as a “public nuisance,” effectively blocking lawsuits against oil companies to recover damages from climate change under that legal theory. The effort has gone national: Republicans in both chambers of Congress introduced bills this spring that would give oil companies broad immunity from lawsuits seeking to hold them accountable for climate damages, with the backing of the American Petroleum Institute.

In April, an investigation from ProPublica revealed a coordinated effort behind these “liability shield” laws from conservative groups tied to the activist Leonard Leo. Evidence provided to Grist from the watchdog group Fieldnotes shows that Koch Industries and Exxon, in particular, have extensive ties to the organizations pushing for these laws, including the American Legislative Exchange Council and the American Tort Reform Association.

“If these companies have done nothing wrong and they think the law is on their side, why are they lobbying Congress for immunity?” Meno said.

Oil executives have also gotten help from the federal government, following an executive order from President Donald Trump last year directing the attorney general to prioritize blocking climate lawsuits by states. This May, the Justice Department responded to Minnesota’s climate lawsuit against Big Oil with a lawsuit of its own, just as the state’s case was moving into the discovery phase. It said Minnesota was undermining “American energy dominance” and attempting to regulate greenhouse gases, which should fall under the purview of federal law—echoing the oil industry’s well-known argument. In a related development, Robert Levy, a longtime Exxon lawyer, recently joined the Department of Justice in the newly dubbed “Energy and Natural Resources Division” (instead of the “Environment and Natural Resources Division”).

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The Rapid Rise of Right-Wing Militias

A photo went viral on Independence Day this year. It showed a Black woman on a Metro train in Washington, DC, surrounded by members of Patriot Front, a far-right white nationalist group. The picture, taken on America’s 250th anniversary, seemed to encapsulate not only the continuing story of race in America, but also this current moment when right-wing groups seem louder, prouder, and more public than they’ve been in decades.

Mary McCord has been working to prosecute groups like Patriot Front for years. Following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, the Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor successfully won a consent decree that banned the rally’s lead organizer from planning future paramilitary activity in the city. Still, McCord says right-wing militias are benefiting from a friendly administration that has stretched back to Donald Trump’s earliest days campaigning for the presidency.

The president is “aligned with them, whether he believes in white nationalism, Christian nationalism, or not,” McCord says, referring to far-right groups. “That permission that he started giving back in 2016 and 2017 is just even greater permission now.”

On this week’s More To The Story, McCord sits down with host Al Letson to talk about Patriot Front’s origins, a decade of growing white nationalism in America, and the troubling direction of the US Department of Justice under the Trump administration.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

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Trump Administration Moves to Open American Samoa’s Waters to Deep-Sea Mining

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

The Trump administration is moving closer to opening up US waters for deep-sea mining—a contentious and largely untested industry focused on extracting mineral-rich deposits from the ocean floor containing cobalt, copper, nickel, and manganese.

Last week, the Department of the Interior’s newly created Marine Minerals Administration (MMA) announced a proposal to hold a lease sale for deep-sea mining activities in federal waters off the coast of American Samoa in the South Pacific. If the plans move forward, it would be the first deep-sea mining lease sale in the world. Interested deep-sea mining companies could bid for 20 years of mining rights across more than 31 million acres of American Samoa’s outer continental shelf in an auction tentatively scheduled for November 19, 2026.

The announcement has drawn widespread criticism from environmental advocates and scientists who say any deep-sea mining activities, including preliminary exploratory activities, could pose irreparable harm to the marine environment and the American Samoan people, whose culture and livelihoods are deeply entwined with the ocean.

“Pacific people have made our position clear: we do not want deep-sea mining in our waters,” Sabrina Suluai-Mahuka, founder of Finafinau, an environmental advocacy group in American Samoa, said in a press release. “Our ocean is our home, our food, our culture, and our future, and we are calling on the Administration to stop this reckless lease sale before irreversible harm is done.”

The proposal marks the latest step in the Trump administration’s push to pave the way for deep-sea mining in the US and abroad. Since President Donald Trump signed an executive order last April directing federal agencies to fast-track the issuance of seabed mining permits, the government has sought to position the US as a leader of the emerging industry, despite global opposition.

Supporters of deep-sea mining say critical minerals found on the seafloor may be eventually used to manufacture green technologies and military defense systems.

“It is an incredibly reckless and destructive move to deep seabed mine in this area.”

“Critical minerals have become a strategic asset in global competition, and China’s dominance in the supply of many of these materials creates unacceptable risks for America’s energy, defense and manufacturing sectors,” said Matt Giacona, acting director of the Marine Minerals Administration, in a statement about the latest proposed lease sale. “Advancing this notice is an important step toward building a secure domestic critical minerals supply chain, strengthening US economic and national security, and ensuring America can compete and win in the 21st century.”

But deep-sea mining has not yet been conducted at a commercial scale anywhere in the world. There are still no formalized regulations to govern the industry in the US or globally.

In fact, global delegates are gathering this month in Kingston, Jamaica, at the International Seabed Authority to continue negotiating a long-debated Mining Code that would regulate activities related to extracting deep-sea minerals, including prospecting, exploration, and commercial exploitation in international waters.

Forging ahead without such regulations in place and paving the way for future mining near American Samoa will inevitably result in harm to critical marine ecosystems and the people who depend on them, said Taryn Kiekow Heimer, a senior attorney and director for ocean energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“It is an incredibly reckless and destructive move to deep seabed mine in this area,” she said.

In a statement to Inside Climate News, the MMA wrote that “plans will not be approved before completion of additional technical and environmental reviews to ensure that the activities described will be carried out in a safe and environmentally responsible manner.”

Directly adjacent to the proposed lease area is the Rose Atoll, a national wildlife refuge and marine national monument that was established by President George W. Bush in 2009.

For generations, the remote coral atoll served as a waypoint for Polynesian navigators, and it is still highly revered amongst Indigenous peoples in the Pacific as part of their cultural heritage.

Activities associated with deep sea mining would likely disrupt this precious interconnected ecosystem.

From an ecological standpoint, this atoll is extremely important, said Alan Friedlander, an affiliate researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, based at the University of Hawaii, who conducted a survey of the area with NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in the early 2000s.

“It’s one of the last largely intact marine ecosystems that we have under US jurisdiction,” Friedlander said.

Its remote location and protected status have allowed its colorful reefs to flourish even as others around the world suffer from global warming and threats like overfishing, dredging, and pollution. The corals are largely nourished by nutrients deposited by thousands of seabirds that nest on the remote atoll’s two islands. Sharks and other apex predators are abundant in surrounding waters, as are giant clams, which are now scarce throughout much of the Pacific due to overharvesting. Migrating humpbacks pass by the atoll, and critically endangered hawksbill sea turtles also nest on its shores.

Activities associated with deep-sea mining would likely disrupt this precious interconnected ecosystem, Friedlander said. That includes everything from increased shipping traffic and underwater noise to sediment plumes generated by some of the machinery that is needed to extract mineral deposits from the seabed.

“We probably should take the precautionary approach to this, and try to understand this complex ecosystem better before we go into activities that potentially have pretty long-term deleterious effects,” he said.

There are still several steps that must be completed before the Marine Minerals Administration finalizes the decision to hold a mining lease sale, including the publication of a final leasing notice.

“Issuance of the notice does not guarantee that a lease sale will be held, nor does it guarantee that any exploration or collection activities will occur should MMA move forward with a sale,” officials said in a public statement.

American Samoa’s governor, Pula’ali’i Nikolao Pula, has 60 days to review and comment on the proposed leasing notice.

“The governor does have a chance to object during these next 60 days,” said Kiekow Heimer.

In the meantime, the governor has encouraged his constituents to share their thoughts on deep-sea mining and any recommendations they have.

“This is an opportunity for our community to provide informed input,” Gov. Pula said in a statement. “I remain steadfast in my position that any such development must be fully transparent, responsible, science-based, and carefully managed to protect our environment, safeguard our vital tuna fisheries and cultural heritage, and deliver meaningful, tangible benefits for the people of American Samoa.”

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The IRS Is Imploding

In many years of paying taxes, I’ve never had a problem with the IRS. So, I was surprised to receive a letter dated May 25 informing us that my husband and I owelots more money than we had paid for our 2025 taxes—and of course interest and fines. After reviewing the somewhat cryptic letter, we realized that we did not, in fact, owe any money. The IRS had simply failed to credit quarterly payments thatwe’d made on time. Because we had all the bank records, it seemed as if this would be a relatively straightforward problem to fix—until I picked up the phone and called the IRS.

Two hours on hold later, I gave up. When I tried again a few days later, the outgoing message informed me, “Due to the high call volume, we are unable to answer your call. Please call back later today or tomorrow.” And I was disconnected. After several more fruitless phone calls over the next week, I asked my accountant for advice. Unfortunately, she said, the dedicated lines for tax practitioners were going unanswered, too. She had never seen it so bad. She had clients who had serious issues to resolve, and there was “no contact available at all.”

At that point, I realized the IRS was finally imploding.

Tax professionals, journalists—including those from Mother Jones—members of Congress and former IRS commissioners had warned this would happen. When Elon Musk’s DOGE service swept into the federal government like a buzzsaw in February last year, one of the first agencies it targeted for wholesale destruction was the IRS. DOGE slashed about a third of the entire IRS workforce in just a few short months. The agency hasn’t had a confirmed commissioner since August last year.

“When, literally overnight, you lose that many people, you’re losing leadership,” former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told my colleague Michael Mechanic last year. “You really are disabling the IRS.”

“You can’t get rid of 30 percent of your staff and expect to be functional. Things are starting to break.”

In October, the administration created what members of Congress have dubbed the “fake job” of IRS CEO, which Congress never authorized. Trump filled the post with former finance executive Frank Bisignano, even though he is simultaneously in charge of the Social Security Administration.

At an April congressional hearing, Bisignano assured lawmakers that IRS customer service had not suffered at all from the sudden, massive cuts in its workforce. He called 2026 “the most successful filing season in IRS history” and claimed that the Trump administration was proving it was possible to have both “less people and better results.”

My experience, that of many other taxpayers and tax professionals I have spoken with over the past month, as well as the IRS’s own data, suggest otherwise. “You can’t get rid of 30 percent of your staff and expect to be functional,” says Traci DiMartini, the former IRS human capital officer who was one of the first high-ranking officials DOGE pushed out last year. “Things are starting to break.”

Members of Congress have also started to notice. “The Administration laid off close to a third of the IRS workforce, sabotaging its mission, and making it impossible to get someone on the phone to answer even the simplest of questions, let alone resolve issues,” Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), ranking member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement to Mother Jones. “Yet this Administration refuses to acknowledge the predictable consequences of gutting an agency and keeps telling taxpayers not to believe what they are experiencing.”

Contacting the IRS has never been easy. The agency has been badly underfunded for decades, as Republicans have made it the bête noir of the federal government and starved it for resources. Several of them, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), have called to abolish the IRS outright. “There are 93,000 agents at the IRS,” he said in June. “I think we should put a padlock on that building and put every one of them down on our southern border.” (His numbers were actually outdated: Thanks to the DOGE cuts, as of January 2026, the IRS had fewer than 75,000 employees, according to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration.)

In 2022, under President Joe Biden, Democrats in Congress pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act, a kitchen-sink bit of legislation that included some $80 billion over 10 years to shore up and modernize the IRS. The new funding allowed the agency to hire and train thousands of new customer service employees.

Republicans like Cruz, who have long believed that the IRS has unfairly targeted conservatives, immediately launched a conspiracy theory suggesting that Biden was going to use the money to hire a shadow army of 87,000 armed agents to harass innocent Americans. They eventually clawed back most of that funding, but the IRS nonetheless invested what remained in trying to make life better for ordinary taxpayers. In 2024, the service answered more than 1 million more calls from taxpayers during filing season than it had the previous year, and reduced the average hold time from 28 minutes to 3, according to IRS data.

Since Trump took office, all of those metrics have reversed, particularly after the DOGE workforce cuts fully took effect in October. “It’s infinitely worse in 2026 than it was in 2025,” says Richard Champion, a New Jersey lawyer who has practiced tax law for nearly 50 years and represents low-income taxpayers in federal tax court pro bono. When he used to call the IRS practitioner line, he says he used to be able to get into the call-back queue so he didn’t have to sit on hold for hours. That option is increasingly unavailable. Now even when he does manage to reach someone, he says, they are often new and can’t help, so they forward him to someone else, and those calls inevitably get dropped. “I have at least four or five cases where I’m just stymied,” he says.

“There are some days I will literally be on the phone with the IRS five or six hours. And that’s because my call dropped, so I’m calling back again. It’s horrible. It’s the worst that I’ve seen.”

Sakinah Tillman runs the tax clinic at the University of the District of Columbia’s David Clark School of Law. She has worked with low-income taxpayers for more than a decade and says a few years ago, she’d get someone on the phone in 15 minutes. Now, however, “There are some days I will literally be on the phone with the IRS five or six hours,” she told me. “And that’s because my call dropped, so I’m calling back again. It’s horrible. It’s the worst that I’ve seen.” Even more troubling, she told me, is that the managers have all but disappeared. “Every time I’ve been making a request for a manager in the last year,” she said, “I’m not getting a call back.”

These aren’t just anecdotal one-offs. A June report to Congress from the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent agency within the IRS, found that live humans answered 20 percent fewer calls during this year’s tax filing season and that hold times jumped anywhere from 81 to 161 percent, depending on the line called. Only 17 percent of the calls handled by the “voicebot” system were completed. Most callers got frustrated and either asked to be transferred to a live person or hung up.

The worst service came on phone lines dedicated to people who owed money and needed help, such as an installment plan. Live operators answered only 30 percent of more than 3 million such calls this year between January and April 18. Those lucky taxpayers who got through waited an average of 45 minutes on hold.

The nonprofit Center for Taxpayer Rights this year also conducted its own research on how bad the IRS call responsiveness has gotten. The group discovered that the government’s own measurements showed that wait times increased more than 70 percent in 2026, even though the agency received 50 percent fewer calls to its main 1040 help line than during the previous year. CTR testers then called various IRS phone numbers and found that nearly 40 percent of the calls were disconnected—mostly by the IRS.

Nina Olson, the executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, ran the Taxpayer Advocate Service inside the IRS for nearly 20 years. She spent a day on hold herself during filing season as part of the study. Since then, she says, the service has likely gotten even worse because the IRS had shuffled staff to cover the phones during that busy time. “Where I deal is the morning after,” she said. “The morning after April 16.” Which is exactly when people like me start getting threatening notices from the IRS and can’t get anyone to pick up the phone. “There’s no one there,” Olson said.

During my many hours on hold with the IRS, the outgoing phone messages encouraged me to try to resolve my issues online. But when I logged into my IRS account, I discovered this message: “Account features limited due to partial outage. While you can still access your account, some features are unavailable, including account balance and payment history. If you don’t see what you need, please come back later.” After more than a month of coming back later, I still couldn’t access my payment history.

Tech problems have been a persistent problem at the chronically underfunded revenue service, which is why Biden’s IRA had allocated money for upgrades. Fixing IT problems, though, requires actual humans to do the work. Last year, the Trump administration pushed out more than 40 percent of the agency’s IT department. Most of the remaining employees were moved to Bisignano’s office or deployed to answer the phones during the greatest filing season of all time. Needless to say, the tech-forward team at DOGE did not improve the IRS technology.

Stephanie Liuzzi, a seismic engineer in California, got a letter from the IRS this year saying her tax payment had been rejected because of a problem with the bank account number on her return. The letter instructed her how to pay online, which she did. But in May, she got another letter saying that not only does she still owe money, but she now also owes penalties. After hours on hold with the IRS, she finally reached someone who confirmed that she had in fact paid her bill. But that person couldn’t waive the penalties and transferred Liuzzi to another line for help, where no one ever picked up. “I think everyone just went home,” she told me.

“It is currently refusing to let me reset my password. It keeps trying to send a text to a cell phone I had years ago. I have emailed in scans of my ID, my passport, but without access to that phone, it won’t let me in.”

After many more fruitless calls, she finally paid an $8 penalty online, but she hasn’t been able to confirm that her case is resolved because she can’t access her online account. “It is currently refusing to let me reset my password,” she told me. “It keeps trying to send a text to a cell phone I had years ago. I have emailed in scans of my ID, my passport, but without access to that phone, it won’t let me in.”

As the deadline for responding to my IRS letter rapidly approached and I continued to fail to reach anyone on the phone, I thought perhaps I could try to seek assistance in person at one of the IRS’s Taxpayer Assistance Centers. The Inflation Reduction Act had included funding to expand them, but the Trump administration has cut the number of fully staffed TACs to 42, from 102, according to a report by the Taxpayer Advocate. But the one where I live is still open, so I was hopeful—until I discovered that taxpayers can’t just walk in without an appointment. And the only way to make an appointment? Call the IRS.

I never got an appointment.

DiMartini, the former IRS human resources chief, has a vivid memory of her first time volunteering to help people with their taxes at a walk-in clinic in Philadelphia in 2024. “It was so humbling,” she recalled. DiMartini encountered lines of people around the block who had been victims of identity theft or unscrupulous tax preparers and women whose ex-husbands had illegally claimed their kids on his taxes. “What are these people going to do now?” she wonders. “As much as the tech bros want to automate everything, you still have to meet people where they’re at. People just want to pay their goddam bills. Why are we making it so hard?”

The IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate Service can help people cut through the bureaucracy, but Trump has decimated that office, too. Barbara Heggie, the managing attorney of Empire Justice Center’s Tax Advocacy Program in Rochester, NY, told me that now, when she really gets stonewalled by the IRS, she goes straight to Congress. “Every congressional office has staff who work on constituent services dealing with federal agency problems,” she said, “including IRS problems.”

“As much as the tech bros want to automate everything, you still have to meet people where they’re at. People just want to pay their goddam bills. Why are we making it so hard?”

Sadly, I am a disenfranchised resident of the District of Columbia, where we are taxed without representation. The closest thing we have to a member of Congress is Eleanor Holmes Norton, an 89-year-old nonvoting delegate with the same power as someone from Guam. Last year, I wrote about her mental deterioration and figured no one in her office would lift a finger to help resolve my tax issues, even if they did such things.

All of these roadblocks left me with one final option: snail mail.

The US Post Office is the last resort for the ever-growing cadre of people who can’t get through the IRS phone lines. Of course, the Trump administration has also gutted the IRS mail room—with predictable results. According to a recent report by the Taxpayer Advocate, the number of unprocessed correspondence and amended returns languishing at the IRS jumped from 3.8 million in 2025 to 7 million this year. “And that was before all the people like you were sending in letters,” CTR’s Nina Olson told me.

The Biden administration had been making some headway in reducing the mail backlog after it had reached epic proportions during the Covid pandemic. With funding from the IRA, the tax agency was able to staff up critical chokepoints in the system, including the mailroom. Charles Garn was one of the recruits hired in 2024 to work at the massive Ogden, Utah, IRS service center, where he was on the frontline opening the mail and sorting and processing 1040 forms and other correspondence from taxpayers.

Almost as soon as he finished his training, DOGE pushed him out. He left in October, along with thousands of other IRS workers who’d taken the “deferred resignation” plan that paid them not to work for three months and then essentially fired them. But he was there long enough to see first-hand the impact of “crippling” staff losses.

When Garn first started, his division would get a massive delivery of papers first thing in the morning. “We’d wipe it all out by the end of the day,” he explained. By the time the staffing cuts had fully kicked in, “We weren’t clearing out the deliveries. People were working harder and pumping out more, but we still weren’t able to meet what we needed to.”

The IRS might not be opening a lot of the mail it receives, but somehow it’s still sending it out. Even before the deadline to respond to my first letter had passed, the IRS sent me a new one reminding me that I have a past-due balance. “If you don’t act now, the IRS may consider levying (seizing) your income or bank account,” my newest missive warned.

The letter was a stark reminder that the collapse of the IRS customer service functions isn’t just an occasional annoyance for taxpayers. It can literally ruin people’s lives. If a taxpayer fails to respond to letters like the ones I got, and to pay an outstanding balance, even if it’s wrong, the IRS can eventually garnish their wages, seize bank accounts, or even take their cars or houses to settle the bill.

These consequences land heavily on those who can least afford it: the elderly, people whose first language is not English, and of course, poor people of all sorts. “Clients don’t have scanners,” says Tillman, who says a lot of correspondence with the IRS now requires such things. “Some don’t have laptops, or if they do, they don’t know how to use them.”

Low-income people are also particularly vulnerable to fraud. “Tax season is one of the most vulnerable times for low-income taxpayers because you have crooked preparers that prey on them,” Tillman says. She usually sees these clients after they get a letter from the IRS ordering them to repay thousands of dollars of the refund they weren’t entitled to.

The Trump administration’s destruction of the IRS has other less obvious harms—even beyond the nearly $900 billion in revenue it won’t be able to collect over the next decade thanks to the staffing cuts. “A lot of the anti-poverty structure of the safety net is embedded in the tax code,” explains Omeed Firouzi, director of the low-income tax clinic at Temple University law school.

The Earned Income Tax Credit, child tax credit, plus the new provisions in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that exempted tips, overtime and some Social Security payments from taxes—all of that requires people to accurately file a tax return. At the same time, the Big Beautiful Bill also made massive cuts to anti-poverty programs like SNAP and Medicaid, making the credits provided through the tax code even more important.

The Trump administration seems to have grudgingly recognized that the IRS needs more people, if only to collect taxes to pay for its ruinous war in Iran. In February, the Treasury Department gave the IRS permission to hire 8,000 people through September. “These hiring events are an important step in strengthening our workforce and improving the taxpayer experience,” Bisignano said in a June press release announcing a series of hiring fairs across the country.

“Kudos for that, but no one is showing up [to the fairs] because they don’t trust the federal government,” says DiMartini. “It is going to take decades to recover.”

In the meantime, I worked on this story one day to the backdrop of IRS hold music. After an hour and a half of waiting, I stayed on the phone while I went to Sweetgreen and got lunch, ate my salad while I watched Todd Blanche testify before Congress, and then at the two-hour mark … got disconnected.

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EPA Ordered—Again—to Release $2.8 Billion in Climate Justice Funds

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

A South Carolina federal judge this week ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to resume distributing funds designed to address environmental and health challenges in underserved communities.

In June, US District Judge Richard Gergel voided the Trump administration’s termination of the $2.8 billion Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program. But the court ruling did not explicitly require the Environmental Protection Agency to resume distributing the block grants.

Although Gergel ruled that the government’s internal actions terminating the grants were “unlawful,” he declined to order the EPA to immediately restart the program, saying such a move would be “impractical.”

Last month, emails between the EPA and the Southern Environmental Law Center, which filed the lawsuit in partnership with the Public Rights Project, showed that government officials believed that no “specific agency action is required to comply” with Gergel’s ruling.

After reviewing additional court filings from both sides, Gergel confirmed this week that the EPA must resume distributing the grant funds. He rejected the Trump administration’s argument that his decision “required no further agency action.”

“When federal agencies ignore court orders, communities pay the price.”

In his latest order, Gergel wrote that the Trump administration’s interpretation of the initial ruling relied on an interpretation of the facts the court had already “specifically rejected.”

“The court made it clear that EPA has to follow the law, not keep making the same arguments the court has already rejected,” Toby Merrill, the litigation director for Public Rights Project, said in an email. “When federal agencies ignore court orders, communities pay the price.”

Gergel ordered that the agency “must comply with its statutory obligations to administer the [Environmental and Climate Justice] Program” through the end of September, when the grants were originally scheduled to expire under President Joe Biden.

Since the latest order was issued, Kym Meyer, the Southern Environmental Law Center’s litigation director, said her organization “hasn’t heard” from the EPA.

The Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program, created under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, was designed to help communities address problems like air pollution and extreme heat and bolster local infrastructure, according to federal budget documents.

“While the EPA has tried to evade the court’s order, families in north Mecklenburg were left waiting for basic transparency about the air they breathe.”

At the start of his current term, President Donald Trump issued executive orders that put the disbursement of Inflation Reduction Act funds on hold and directed agencies to eliminate environmental justice offices and positions, to the maximum extent allowed by law. An EPA official told the court that he decided to terminate the program in February 2025 because of “policy reasons,” court documents show.

One $500,000 grant was intended to help CleanAIRE NC, a North Carolina-based nonprofit, install air quality monitors throughout Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte. Residents there face health impacts from air pollution because of their proximity to major highways and industrial activity.

“While the EPA has tried to evade the court’s order, families in north Mecklenburg were left waiting for basic transparency about the air they breathe,” said Jeffrey Robbins, the executive director of CleanAIRE NC, in an email. “We are ready to put these critical air monitoring resources to work in north Mecklenburg the moment the agency complies.”

In response to questions from Inside Climate News, a spokesperson for the EPA said in an email that the agency “is reviewing the decision and working to comply with the court’s order.”

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It Looks Like Sen. Bill Cassidy Is Hurting Public Health Again

When Sen. Bill Cassidy on Thursday expressed his support for Erica Schwartz, President Trump’s pick for CDC director, he signaled that he may once again cast a critical vote for a candidate that poses a risk to US public health.

At her confirmation hearing earlier this month, Schwartz, who has a medical degree,sidestepped questions on whether she would resist pressure from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to carry out policies that she believed contradicted scientific evidence.

After this, Cassidy, a physician and chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, withheld his support of Schwartz. But on Thursday, he pivoted, telling committee members: “I’m confident that she knows what she is doing and will stand against those who do not.” The Louisiana senator said he now trusts Schwartz after they spoke privately, and after federal officials made a “good faith” change to the CDC’s website that linked vaccines and autism. The webpage still cites the retracted study that makes this vaccine-autism link, and now includes an asterisk with a note that “Scientists have not identified the root causes of autism.”

The page also still states that “studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” This idea has been disproven by decades of scientific research.

In a Sunday interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Cassidy admitted that this version ofthe website is not, in fact, a “good faith” attempt to stop spreading vaccine misinformation. But he added that parents probably don’t look at that CDC webpage anyway:“I’ve never met a parent who wasn’t a pediatrician who’s gone into the website to look for information about vaccines.”

BASH: When you pledged to support Dr. Schwartz, you said it's a sign of good faith the CDC agreed to modify their website. But the CDC's vaccine page still says 'the claim vaccines do not cause autism is not evidence-based.' Is that a good faith attempt to stop spreading misinfo?CASSIDY: It is not

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-07-26T13:56:56.113Z

In response, Bash noted that the CDC sets public health policy, which makes it likely parents do seek guidance from the agency.

Cassidy responded that he is continuing to discuss the CDC’s stance on vaccines with the health department, and that they have made additionalconcessions,but did not disclose what those were.

Cassidy’s pivot on Schwartz echoes his actions last year, when he cast the deciding vote in favor of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination for health secretary. Cassidy had initially withheld support for RFK given the Trump ally’s statements that vaccines are unsafe. But Cassidy changed his mindafter receiving assurances from Kennedy that he would work within existing vaccine approval and safety systems and would collaborate with Cassidy—promises that implied Kennedy would not undermine vaccine access.

Since then, Kennedy has done the opposite, turning fringe conspiracy theories about vaccine safety into health policy—including cutting nearly $500 million in research funding for mRNA vaccines, the vaccine technology used in many COVID vaccines.

Cassidy directed the Senate health committee to delay a vote on Thursday on whether to advance Schwartz’s nomination following Republican attendance issues. They are expected to vote next week.

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The US Pause in Iran War Escalation Probably Won’t Last

The Trump administration has paused its latest, 13-night bombing campaign on Iran,reportedly following concerns within the administrationover the past few days about American military resources and casualties.

The dwindling amount of US air defense munitions was a key concern, administration officials told the New York Times, as well as hurting relations with allies in the Gulf and worsening economic, energy, and refugee crises. A senior US official stated that three US soldiers were killed in Jordan just over a week ago when a ballistic missile passed through US air defenses.

This pause in fighting comes after a relentless stream of suffering for Iranian civilians following US bombing. The Iranian health ministry’s spokesperson, Hossein Kermanpour, said on Friday that US strikes have killed 59 people—including six women and three people under the age of 18—over the past month. And as I wrote last week, the US military bombing has destroyed key infrastructure that Iranians need to survive, such as water and energy facilities, food silos, and bridges.

When a reporter asked Trump on Friday whether striking civilian sites constituted a war crime, the president refused to answer—not the first time he has dismissed the suggestion that the devastation of his administration’s strikes are war crimes.

On Sunday, Mike Waltz, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, told NBC News’ Meet the Press that the pause in airstrikes gives “some space” fornegotiationbetween the US and Iran.

Still, past precedent suggests that the administration’s Iran strike pause may not last: Since the US and Israel first struck Iran in February, the Trump administration has several times stopped fighting to negotiate, only to later escalate the war again. This may be because, as Michael Froman of the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan US foreign policy think tank, wrote on Friday, Trump is taking a middle-ground, simultaneous military and diplomacy approach to prevent extreme political fallout. He wants to avoid complete targeting of Iranian critical infrastructure and seizing oil with a military invasion or concedingto Iranian control of oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

In June, the US and Iran managed to strike an interim ceasefire deal. Just a couple of days later, Iran’s military closed the Strait of Hormuz, stating the US violated their agreement by allowing Israel to continue bombing Lebanon. Iran then began targeting ships passing through the strait, including those appearing to deviate from approved routes, prompting US airstrikes on Iran at the end of the month.

The US faces other obstacles to negotiating a lasting solution: Nate Swanson, the National Security Council’s former Iran director under Joe Biden, told me last month that the US government’s material and political support of Israel has ruined many of its relationships with countries in the Gulf region and made negotiations with Iran practically impossible.

All this means that it is unlikely this war will end soon. When_Meet the Press’_ Kristen Welker asked Waltz whether the war would end by the end of the year, the ambassador refused to give a timeline. Last week, Democrats called on Trump to end the war, citing the deaths of four American soldiers. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who brought a war powers resolutions aimed at forcing the president to abandon the war that failed on Thursday, wrote on X shortly before the vote, “This senseless war should never have been started and it needs to end NOW.”

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It Took a Decade, Two Sniffer Dogs, and a Lot of Mud to Protect This Orchid

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

Arizona’s rarest orchid, when not in bloom, resembles a blade of grass. It vanishes easily in the lush greenery of the Canelo Hills Cienega Preserve—even to the eyes of the botanists who plant it.

On a mild April morning, after a decade of preparation, a group of scientists gathered at a desert wetland cradled in southern Arizona’s hills to reintroduce a federally endangered orchid. Aside from the researchers’ chatter, the only sounds were water trickling from a spring and boots squelching through mud.

Steve Blackwell, conservation biologist at the Desert Botanical Garden (DBG), ventured into the wetland, using tussocks of grass as stepping-stones. He wanted to see if a small test plot of orchids planted months before had survived. He returned at a run, fists pumping the air. “I found one!”

The rest of the team, made up of orchid experts from DBG and the North American Orchid Conservation Center (NAOCC), followed him to a soil moisture sensor stuck into the boggy ground. He pulled aside sedges and grasses to reveal a thin, grass-like leaf.

“We did it, guys,” NAOCC technician Hope Brooks said.

“Now we just gotta do 360 more,” Blackwell replied.

“Desert wetland” sounds like a contradiction. Known regionally as ciénegas, they’re pockets of green in an arid landscape, fed by freshwater springs. They’re among the rarest habitats in the Southwestern United States, making up just a tiny fraction of the landscape but home to a vast array of species.

The Canelo Hills ladies’-tresses, one of the most endangered orchids in the United States, contributes to that diversity. But only a few hundred remain in the wild, and none had been seen at the Canelo Hills Cienega Preserve, where the species was first documented in a scientific publication, since the early 2000s.

In 2020, the US Fish and Wildlife Service asked DBG botanists whether they could grow the orchid from seed. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure I can,’” Blackwell said, chuckling at his own confidence. “I love getting these problems that are difficult and then trying to work through them.”

The first challenge was locating the remaining wild orchids; there were only two known populations, both in southern Arizona. Canelo Hills ladies’-tresses bloom in late summer, sending up a stalk spiraled with white flowers. The rest of the year, they’re essentially invisible. The team had to recruit two specially trained “ecology detection” dogs to sniff them out.

The seeds are minuscule, optimized for wind dispersal. “They’re like dust,” said ecologist Melissa McCormick, who directs NAOCC. “They don’t have nutrients in them to support the developing seeds.” Instead, baby orchids draw their nourishment from a particular type of mycorrhizal fungus.

“When you lose one ciénega, you’re losing something that really can’t be replaced.”

Enter the second challenge: cultivating the right fungus in a laboratory. Researchers at NAOCC, a program of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland, led this task. They scrubbed orchid roots with toothbrushes and shaved off tiny pieces under a microscope. “All the little balls of fungus pop out,” McCormick said, enabling researchers to cultivate them in petri dishes. The ladies’-tresses, grown in glass flasks, can germinate with a substitute supply of nutrients, but they sprout much faster with a dab of lab-grown fungus.

The scientists also checked for the presence of Sonoran bumblebees at the Canelo Hills to ensure the orchids would have a pollinator, and they conducted a prescribed burn to push back trees encroaching on the wetland. All these pieces had to come together to give the reintroduction a chance. But McCormick rejected orchids’ fragile reputation: “They can grow in really tough conditions.”

Including, apparently, underwater. The team was surprised to find one of the test orchids fully submerged and still green. Fine silt clouded the water as the researchers rooted around, feeling for the metal tags that marked the planting locations.

Ultimately, the scientists located seven of the 20 orchids in the test plot; the others may have died, gone dormant, or simply remained hidden. Reassured, the team set to work planting hundreds more, enough to test different restoration techniques. The first question: Can orchids thrive if they go straight from flask to ground, or do they need to spend some time potted in soil first?

Another variable is the fungus, which occurs naturally in some parts of the ciénega. This first batch of orchids was grown without the aid of the laboratory-cultivated fungus, which the plants need in the soil. The researchers placed fungus-inoculated cotton balls in the planting holes with some of the orchids. Others got cotton balls without fungus or nothing at all, to see whether the orchids grow better with a fungal boost. And they planted some orchids in a part of the wetland where tests didn’t turn up the right fungus in the ground. Would the fungus-spiked cotton balls open up new habitat for ladies’-tresses?

DBG conservation researcher Luis Romero lifted the first orchid out of its pot, brushed dirt from its roots, and put it on a scale. It was too light to register, so he counted the plant’s leaves and roots instead as a baseline to measure its growth later on. Brooks recorded the data while Romero improvised a pair of forceps out of charcuterie skewers and poked a cotton ball into the mud. The orchid sprout followed, and a peaty, plant-rot smell rose from the disturbed earth. It was the first of 15 orchids planted in a half-meter-by-half-meter square, all part of one experimental treatment.

In July, the team will return to check the results. Blackwell, half-jokingly, said he dreamed of returning to “a field of just white flowers.” But Romero said he will consider the project a success even if only a few orchids survive. At this early stage, both failures and successes provide lessons for future attempts. He aims to develop a blueprint for orchid reintroduction: a protocol that can be adopted by other institutions.

Julie Stromberg, an Arizona plant ecologist who wasn’t involved with the reintroduction project, echoed Romero’s emphasis on good experimental design. That way, even if a project’s orchids don’t survive, she said, “at least you’re going to learn something about what’s driving the system and why it’s failing.”

“[Restoration] can take a long time, but you just need to start the healing.”

Ciénegas face many threats, including climate change, drought, groundwater pumping, diversions of spring water, overgrazing and fire suppression. Trees have overtaken many places, consuming water that used to sustain wetland flora. Human developments, such as roads and culverts, also take a toll. “A lot of these ciénegas, as a whole, have blinked out,” Stromberg said.

Because ciénegas are so isolated, they’re all different. Each holds a unique mix of rare species. “When you lose one ciénega, you’re losing something that really can’t be replaced,” she said.

Tracing the causes of a ciénega’s decline is part science, part detective work. Upstream from the orchid-planting site, DBG botanist Andrew Salywon pointed out a roughly 10-foot-deep drop in a creek bed. It was a headcut, a site of dramatic erosion that would continue to carve its way upstream, deepening the creek as it goes. In a healthy wetland, water slows down and spreads out. A deep channel has the opposite effect.

“Historically, this probably was all wetland vegetation,” Salywon said, gesturing at the tree stumps on the streambanks. Now, it’s an example of a dying ciénega.

Headcutting happens in natural cycles but is worsened by extreme rainfall, which is becoming more frequent in a climate-changed world. It may also be a sign of the preserve’s ranchland history: Long-abandoned culverts and berms still capture and channelize water, which can cause headcuts and other erosion.

Years ago, while surveying for orchids, Salywon noticed the 10-foot headcut and decided to try to save this ciénega. Restoring fire, removing trees, and remediating earthworks are all part of that rescue effort. But Salywon acknowledged this damaged area may never recover enough to support ladies’-tresses—at least, not in his lifetime. Restoration, he said, “can take a long time, but you just need to start the healing.”

The new orchids, if they survive, will help cushion shocks to existing populations. They are currently the only ones known to be living on protected land; the Canelo Hills preserve was purchased by The Nature Conservancy in 1969 and is now closed to the public.

The researchers hope one day to expand the project to surrounding ranchland. Light grazing, like fire, may benefit these orchids by knocking back competing vegetation.

Curt Bernal, owner of the neighboring Z Triangle Ranch, said he welcomes opportunities to aid the restoration effort. For any rare plant, he said, “it’s incumbent upon us humans to do what it takes to make sure they continue to exist long after we’re gone.”

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The Year Climate Change Came for the Tour de France

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

Tadej Pogačar is expected to ride to victory on the Champs-Élysées in Paris when the Tour de France ends Sunday. While his commanding performance has left little doubt about the outcome, the journey to the finale has been remarkable for another reason: climate change.

The grueling 23-day trek through France has seen a barrage of emissions-driven extremes, from wildfires to blistering heat. It was so dry at one point that organizers banned TV crews from a French pastime, smoking. Pogačar even suggested that the race, which has almost always spanned late June and early July, no longer occur during the summer.

“If I had the power,” he said, “I would change all the calendar and not race in July and August in hot places.”

“I’ve never seen weather conditions this hot every single day.”

The trouble started earlier this month when wildfires threatened the Pyrénées-Orientales region during the third stage, as each day’s race is called. Organizers considered cancelling it, but decided it would continue. Still, they limited the caravan that typically follows it to essential vehicles. They also asked fans, a fixture along every route, to stay away from the last 27 miles of the day’s 121-mile race.

“We invite the public not to come to the edge of the race or to the finish site,” race director Christian Prudhomme told France TV. “With exceptional fires, exceptional measures on the Tour, the first thing is the protection of the people.”

The more persistent problem has been a record-breaking European heatwave. According to ProCyclingStats.com, the first two weeks of the Tour brought the highest average temperature of the past two decades: 87 degrees F, compared to 79 degrees in 2022.

“I’ve never seen weather conditions this hot every single day,” said XDS-Astana Team sports director Yvon Ledanois. “It isn’t a case of having one extremely hot day and then returning to normal conditions the next.”

Things got so bad that race organizers shortened one leg for the first time in Tour history .

Enduring such heat for one race would be rough, but each of the 21 stages is effectively a race of its own. Competitors ride an average of about 100 miles daily for the better part of three weeks, and it isn’t unusual to see them maintain speeds around 30 mph for hours at a time. Much of the Tour crosses the Alps and Pyrenees, with treacherous climbs. Through it all, riders get just two days of rest.

That kind of prolonged exertion during extreme heat can be dangerous, even for athletes with the specialized training required to complete the Tour. Pogačar reported having a “full headache” at the start of Stage 4 as temperatures topped 100 degrees. Officials relaxed their rules around food and hydration, and one team said each of its riders was drinking around 28 bottles of water every day, which is several times the norm. Many also wore “ice vests” before the start of each day’s ride, and “ice socks” during it. Things got so bad that race organizers shortened one leg for the first time in Tour history when they cut 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) from Stage 9. The government told regional officials they could cancel them entirely in the event of a red heatwave alert.

Even when the sun went down, the respite was minimal. Temperatures didn’t ease much, and many European hotels do not have air conditioning. “When we have these high nighttime temperatures, the body isn’t able to recover sufficiently,” Kurt Shickman, who works on heat issues at the World Resources Institute, told Grist when asked about early July’s heatwave. “They’re going into the next hot day with a couple strikes against you from a health perspective.”

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Trump’s Push to Build Data Centers for the US Military

If you live near a military base, there’s a chance you’ll soon find that a privately owned data center has moved into your area. A year ago, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Department of Defense to lease land to private developers for this purpose. “You can’t fight it,” Trump said this week of data centers, which have grown wildly unpopular.

Amid concerns about massive electricity use and pollution, data center buildout on military bases is happening at hyperspeed. In March of this year, two private developers—the Carlyle Group and CyrusOne—were selected to develop hyperscale data centers, built for cloud computing and AI, on federally owned land in Texas and Utah. The Department hasn’t explained where they’ll get their power, though—and as El Paso Matters reported recently, the proposed Texas data center alone could require more power than all of El Paso itself. Andin May, the DOD asked for an additional $30 billion to build hyperscale data centers that would, according to Defense One, “integrate largely untested hardware and software used to make life or death decisions into the military.”

Military spokespeople are framing this as critical to national security. “Nearly a century ago, President Roosevelt urged Americans to build the military infrastructure needed to preserve our democratic ideals during a time of profound global crisis,” Assistant Secretary of the Army Marc Andersen wrote in Fortune in June. “As we celebrate our country’s 250th anniversary, we once again find ourselves at a pivotal moment…The battlefield now begins long before the first shot is fired. It begins in mines, factories, power plants, laboratories, data centers, and logistics networks.”

As I’ve previously reported, the federal government is using national security to justify allocating billions of dollars to tech companies, including Elon Musk’s xAI. In one legal filing on behalf of xAI’s right to avoid permitting processes, Cameron Stanley, the Department of War’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, wrote that “Grok’s continued operation and availability is a matter of paramount national security.” The Department of War used Grok to “deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury,” he added. The Pentagon has paid Musk’s company at least $200 million for use of its technology.

Placing data centers on federal land may be a workaround for rising backlash over potential environmental harm caused by the facilities. Throughout the 20th century, under the legal doctrine of “sovereign immunity,” the federal government has historically exempted military bases from much pollution regulation by citing the primacy of national security. Bases such as Camp Lejeune in North Carolina have leaked volatile organic compounds, jet fuel, and heavy metals into nearby groundwater, rendering them what Abre’ Connor of the NAACP calls “sacrifice zones.”

Members of Congress across the political spectrum are raising questions about the military’s move into public-private data center partnerships. But Republican appropriators rejected several data-center-related amendments to a current Defense spending bill, including one from Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) that would have fully prohibited the construction of AI data centers on federal lands, including military installations. (Tlaib later introduced that amendment as a standalone bill.)

The only regulatory provision that actually made it into the House Armed Services Committee’s version of the fiscal year 2027 defense authorization bill was put forth by Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fl.) It would prohibit data centers built on military installations from using Chinese-built components. The Army said in a statement that Mills’ measure would create an “unworkable standard,” which would “drive world-class commercial partners—and over $1.3 billion in private capital—away from Army land.”

Individual bills like Tlaib’s, however, may still move forward. “Public lands should not be turned into sacrifice zones for the AI arms race,” said Shayna Lewis, Deputy Director of Win Without War, in a press release. “This bill is a wakeup call and a necessary safeguard that would protect communities from being forced to shoulder the energy, water, pollution, and infrastructure costs of systems designed to accelerate war-making and deepen the Pentagon’s deference to Big Tech.”

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How Fossil Fuel Companies Made Us Believe Gas Was Clean

About half of Americans think natural gas—a methane-based, planet-warming fuel—is a “clean” energy source, according to a recent poll. And a long-running fossil fuel industry marketing campaign might be to blame.

The “clean natural gas” label is a myth. Methane, the primary component of natural gas fuel, is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But the myth persists in large part due to a savvy, decades-long branding campaign by oil and gas corporations.

A new report released by the Center for Climate Integrity, a research and advocacy group, reveals that fossil fuel companies knew as early as the 1960s that branding gas as “clean” was deceptive.

An internal report from Shell in 1966 indicated that methane gas was released in “embarrassingly large quantities” at oil fields. And in 1968, a review sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute declared that methane in the atmosphere was connected to “oil fields,” and that methane seepage was “not unlikely.” So in response, fossil fuel companies sponsored and promoted their own research, founding entities like the Gas Research Institute to create an appearance of objectivity and change the narrative. They aimed to drown out research that indicated gas might be harmful to the environment or human health, the Center for Climate Integrity suggests.

Throughout the 1970s, the American Gas Association, a trade group, worked with public relations firms to sell gas as a “clean” and environmentally-friendly fossil fuel. The gas industry launched a public relations campaign in 1971 called “GAS, CLEAN ENERGY FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW.” A 1972 report from the American Gas Association (AGA) said the “environmental benefits of an adequate natural gas supply are outstanding,” in that it offered a “very positive answer” to collective concern about the planet.

As the report further details, by 1996, the AGA was co-running studies with the Environmental Protection Agency. Internal communications published in the report show that EPA officials said they “simply do not have the expertise” to independently review the data presented by the gas industry in the study and they were “unlikely to find problems even if they exist.” (The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the CCI report.)

The public-relations campaign was effective—and in the 2000s, with the advent of fracking, American natural gas-extraction infrastructure expanded dramatically. The companies building that infrastructure were sometimes even eligible for “green” fuel subsidies and tax breaks. Today, natural gas is still classed as “green” in at least four states. The gas-appliance industry, meanwhile, still lobbies relentlessly against labeling standards that might designate its products as harmful.

“Officials who continue to justify expanding natural gas reliance by still claiming it’s clean or safe for the climate are using the same script and manipulated science that gas executives and their PR teams concocted decades ago,” Center for Climate Integrity President Richard Wiles said in a statement published with the report. “It’s time that these profoundly dangerous lies are finally put to rest.”

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Trump’s EPA Wants Fewer People Asking Questions About Data Center Pollution

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

The Trump administration is quietly considering a rule change that could make it easier for polluters to build facilities—including certain gas plants and diesel generators that power data centers—with little to no notice to the public.

On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency held a public hearing on a proposed rule change that would hand the power to states to decide how the public participates in the permitting process for certain new sources of air pollution. The proposed rollback comes as data centers face greater pushback across the US, with many communities using the permitting process to try to slow down development. Any changes could have major consequences for how ordinary people are given notice about new or expanded polluting facilities coming into their neighborhoods.

“As someone actively working in communities with data centers, I know this to be fundamentally true: People want to have a say,” Vanessa Lynch, a Pennsylvania organizer with Moms Clean Air Force, said at the EPA hearing.

“Georgia is an example of a place where I can say I’m concerned.”

Companies building any kind of facilities that release air pollution are required to get permits under the Clean Air Act. Polluting sources can either be put through a “major” permitting process, meaning that they meet or exceed thresholds for certain pollutants, or a “minor” one for those that don’t.

Major sources of pollution are reviewed by both federal and state regulators and have extensive requirements before and after construction. However, there’s less oversight of minor sources. The scope of what gets permitted as a minor source is extremely broad and can include everything from dry cleaners and auto body shops to diesel and gas engines. The latter two are increasingly being used to power data centers, with operators such as xAI and Meta using minor source permitting processes to build behind-the-meter gas plants.

The Clean Air Act does require the public to be involved in permitting processes; Congress has specified that major sources need to have several public steps, including a public hearing. EPA rules require some public participation for minor source permits. But thanks to a patchwork of state enforcement laws, that engagement process—and whether state agencies are actually complying with EPA requirements—varies across the US.

If the proposed rule is finalized, “it would put state and local agencies most familiar with local issues in the driver’s seat to determine whether, when, and for how long to provide opportunities for public participation for proposed new minor sources and modifications,” an EPA spokesperson tells WIRED, noting the rule wouldn’t alter emissions standards.

These state-by-state differences can make a big difference in how the public gets involved. Keri Powell, an Atlanta-based attorney at the environmental legal advocacy group Southern Environmental Law Center, says that groups like hers often end up taking on cases in states like Georgia, which, she says, has a more robust public notification and participation process for minor sources. Earlier this month, the group alerted the state utility about construction issues at a data center, based on information they’d gotten from the companies’ public air permit applications. But if the EPA removes the federal requirement, community and legal groups in the state could get little to no heads up about upcoming projects and be shut out of participation and review.

“Georgia is an example of a place where I can say I’m concerned,” Powell says.

Sara Lips, the director of communications at Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division, says that the agency is “determining whether proposed federal rule changes would affect the public participation requirements per the state regulations.”

The EPA is working to make the US “the AI capital of the world.”

Kentucky also has stronger public participation laws for minor source permits. Byron Gary, a senior attorney at the Kentucky Resources Council, says state agencies have made an “informal commitment” behind the scenes to keep their public participation rules the same, even if the EPA changes its rules. But, he says, that could shift: “Who knows [if] the next administration, whether they would actually change it.”

Texas is an example of what lower levels of engagement look like. The data center boom there has driven a massive buildout of private gas plants, many of which rely on minor pollution permits. The state’s lower levels of enforcement have left some communities living in the shadows of data centers surprised at the scope of fossil fuel infrastructure being installed near their homes.

Since coming into power, the Trump administration has gone all in on artificial intelligence, removing multiple roadblocks for data center development at the federal level. That includes efforts at the EPA, which is working to make the US “the AI capital of the world,” the agency spokesperson says.

Companies are also spending vast sums of money on the data center buildout: Spending on data center construction outpaced spending on public transportation infrastructure for the first time in June. Given that public opposition is creating a new bottleneck for data center development, the timing of the rule revision, Powell says, is probably not an accident.

“I think it’s part of a package of rules that the Trump administration is pushing through to make it easier for AI data centers to be constructed,” she says.

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OpenAI Hacking Fiasco Exposes a “Deeply Insufficient” System to Protect the Public

The incident sounded straight out of a science fiction movie: OpenAI’s super-advanced tool hacked another AI company’s systems in an attempt to pass its owndevelopers’ cybersecurity test. Just replace the AI tech with a newly engineered virus and you have an entire existing subgenre.

“We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities,” OpenAI wrote in a Tuesday blog post explaining the incident. The tech giant said their tool, designed to execute tasks without anyhuman assistance, independentlybreached Hugging Face, another startup that hosts a voluminous number of publicly available AI models, while it was testing internally how good it was at “advanced exploitation using complex attack paths” within a supposedly enclosed lab environment called a sandbox. In other words, OpenAI was testing its own hacking capabilities, and the brakes came off; the tool broke out and onto the open internet, and that’s when the mischief began.

OpenAI said they had the situation under control: Hugging Face detected the breach last week and stopped the activity on their own (and called the cops). Since then, OpenAI said it was working with Hugging Face on addressing vulnerabilities.

But the incident—along with many others my colleagueshave reported about—brings up countless regulatory concerns as the industry, and the public at large, grapples with what actually went down at OpenAI and the safety of autonomous agents. (The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.)

To better understand what actually happened—and to what extent we should be worried—I spoke with Miranda Bogen, who works on developing and promoting AI governance that incorporates technical expertise as the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology and the founding director of its AI Governance Lab.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What was your immediate reaction to hearing the news come out on Tuesday?

The rhetoric was very overblown. The headlines made it out that a model had run amok, and that it was a complete surprise, and that it was something people might be exposed to. But what was really happening was that OpenAI was testing a new version of a system made up of multiple of its models. It was specifically within a sandboxed environment, and they were basically trying to get it to demonstrate capabilities in executing cyber attacks. What ended up happening was that the system identified a vulnerability in a part of the sandbox setup, and it used that vulnerability to access the internet to find the answer key for the test, which led it to try to figure out if the answers to the test were on Hugging Face in a non-public setup.

That still demonstrates a quite advanced set of tasks that these systems are able to do now. But all of the safeguards had been removed for the purposes of this test, and it was doing the type of thing it was being tested to do—it just ended up finding a different channel to do that.

You mentioned some of the rhetoric being overblown. Are you referring to media coverage, what OpenAI and Hugging Face have said, or something else?

The real active debate is: “Is the government the right actor to decide that, especially when there are potential national security implications?”

I think the headline [of] “models escaped containment and hacked into a startup” is not necessarily wrong, but it makes it sound much more “run amok” than a particular contained experiment that was noted and caught. While I do think that the incident is something that’s important to look at and figure out what would be needed to prevent this from happening in the future, we can’t lose sight of the fact that there are very active conversations in AI policy going on about under what conditions models are permitted to be released and who needs to see them before they’re released.

The attention that companies get when they talk about very advanced capabilities gives them airtime with decision-makers. I can’t speak to the motivation that [OpenAI] had in how it characterized the incident, but that’s certainly something going on in the background.

OpenAI has product rollouts where there’s a version for regular users and a more advanced one for a set of trusted people. Could this specific OpenAI incident have escalated to a point where it was something actually concerning?

I think this incident was just a breach of a private part of the Hugging Face platform and didn’t lead to material harm beyond the fact that it was able to be breached. An incident like this could have had a material impact had the model been attempting to take actions that included taking down a website, exfiltrating information, or sending a huge volume of traffic to another party or platform. The fact that the model was operating in an external environment does suggest that it could have been possible that those actions could have had some consequences. In this case, they didn’t, but this was a test that was intended to be purely internal, as far as I can tell, among employees.

Even when there’s a trusted set of actors who are given access to advanced models, there are still some safeguards and monitoring, as far as I understand. In this case, I believe they were trying to understand the underlying capabilities of the model without those safeguards, because that informs how strong the safeguards need to be. I don’t think they are typically giving the rawest version of those models, even to the trusted parties, but I don’t have the details of exactly how those trusted party agreements are playing out.

We’re mostly basing our assessment on what Hugging Face and OpenAI have said publicly. Are there more details we should know about this incident?

The fact that this incident was disclosed is a good thing. There are no requirements that these incidents are disclosed yet. There are some laws coming online at the state level where incidents are reported to a relevant office, but it’s still pretty nascent, such that these reports are somewhat voluntary. I do think sharing the incident is important to build on this practice of companies sharing details.

The challenging thing with incidents like this is that these details have real security salience for the ecosystem and figuring out how much information you share, and with whom, so that someone else can’t figure out how to exploit the same vulnerability. I don’t know precisely where that line ought to be, but those are active debates right now. The real active debate is: “Is the government the right actor to decide that, especially when there are potential national security implications?”

You mentioned the federal government’s decisions around regulation as arbitrary. Could you elaborate more on why you think that?

When Anthropic released Fable, which was a version of the Mythos model that had additional safeguards, there were a few days where there was uncertainty around who was allowed to use it because the company didn’t have a way to verify who were foreign users, and there was no established test to say this is the amount of cyber capability that a model can have before it triggers some kind of intervention under the auspices of a national security justification. So when I say the actions are arbitrary, that’s what I mean.

I know some folks who are also concerned about models that are only deployed internally at these labs because it’s clear that even in the most contained of environments—[the OpenAI] model figured out a way to take steps beyond the borders of what they thought was a secure environment. Are there [internal uses] that should cause concern? And who are the right actors to determine if even those internal uses are safe? These are all questions that are being sorted out at the moment, and the conversations are still pretty early.

We’re talking about companies already making models, releasing them to the public, and testing very advanced internal models as we have these regulatory conversations. Where do you think the progress of implementing real regulations is today?

What laws have been able to move in a few states are laws that ask companies to come up with their own safety plan and to follow that safety plan.

The question is whether critical infrastructure providers —industry, banks, schools, hospitals— can sufficiently protect against those types of attacks, because that would be another place that harm could happen to people.

That seems deeply insufficient for the types of risks and harms there are. At the same time, those [laws] are really focused on these so-called frontier risks [from research labs training models from major companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google]. This incident is very much about what the most advanced thing these models could potentially do is, and what risks that will pose. I’m not saying that isn’t worth attention, but there are already models out there that are being used in all sorts of places that are not undergoing this same level of rigour in testing.

I don’t see a lot of policy interventions that are poised to move the needle on creating the incentives for that breadth of testing to happen. There was just a new bill floated out by some of the key folks in Congress [Thursday], that would attempt to tackle the type of issue that just happened with OpenAI and Hugging Face, but it’s a much bigger world out there with the types of harms these systems can have, and I think we’re quite behind the ball on tackling all those risks.

Given how insufficient this regulation policy framework is right now, what do you think should be done for laws to be passed that are more informed and effective?

The requirements that folks want to put on frontier developers are robust, which is important, but I think companies don’t want to be subject to many of these robust protections because they take a lot of work [and] they slow things down. They worry that competitors and foreign developers will get ahead of them.

The fear that lawmakers have of slowing down and losing a race to a geopolitical adversary is also really getting in the way. I think without really robust interventions that actually change the incentives that companies face in what they’re testing, when they’re testing it, how robustly they’re testing it, and what they’re doing to fix problems, I don’t think we’re gonna address the risks that are coming online.

If you’re a regular internet user, how worried should you be?

Ordinary users have a lot more to fear from basic data processing practices of both AI companies and every other company using AI to do their work than they do these types of incidents that are demonstrating very advanced capabilities because AI is being broadly used across the economy. It’s processing a lot of people’s data, and very few deployers of AI know how to test that AI well.

That said, the development of these very advanced models is changing the cybersecurity landscape quite significantly. To the extent there are actors who are trying to actively breach companies and get their data or other types of harmful actions, that risk does seem to be growing. The question is whether critical infrastructure providers —industry, banks, schools, hospitals— can sufficiently protect against those types of attacks, because that would be another place that harm could happen to people.

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Trump Ended TPS Overnight. Deporting 350,000 Haitians Is a Different Story.

Since the US Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the green light to end the Temporary Protected Status designation for Haitians, immigrant rights groups, local government officials, and lawmakers—Republicans and Democrats alike—have been rallying for an extension of the program.

They’ve yet to succeed. A bill to preserve the program until 2029 was rejected Wednesday in the Senate. Another measure, the American Dream and Promise Act, which would provide a pathway to legal status for TPS holders and many otherimmigrants, is likely to face the same fate. Scheduled to expire on July 24, as a result of an appeals court order,TPS protections for Haitians are now in place until at least July 27, the Miami Herald reported.

The end of TPS would mean that about 350,000 Haitians—roughly the population of New Orleans or Orlando—would be added to the ever-growing pool of immigrants at risk of deportation. I spoke to immigration policy experts this week to understand how quickly the US government could target this community once they are stripped of their legal status. They all told me the process would be slow and would face many logistical hurdles. The likely scenario is that for the Haitian community, some may be deported, others may find another pathway to legal status, and many will remain undocumented within the US.

“It’s not like the minute TPS ends, the government can simply go out, arrest people and have them on a plane 24 hours later.”

“It’s not like the minute TPS ends, the government can simply go out, arrest people and have them on a plane 24 hours later,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “The vast majority of people with TPS are not currently in any sort of removal process…The US government has to find them, arrest them, take them into custody, process them, then determine whether they are subject to detention or not.”

Complicating matters for the Trump administration is their deportation operations capacity. In thelast fiscal year ending July 11, ICE carried out about 350,000 removals. “That would mean the entire system would have to stop everything else it was doing and focus entirely on the Haitian population if they wanted to deport them in a year,” Reichlin-Melnick added. “I don’t think they’re going to do that. They have other priorities. They have other people they’re going to be after.”

Another challenge is the limited air travel available to Haiti, which has been ravaged in recent years by gang violence. Flights have all but stopped to the airport in the capital of Port-au-Prince after some US planes were struck by gunfire. Since December 2023, there has been a monthly deportation flight to Haiti that lands at the Cap-Haïtien airport on the northern coast, according to Human Rights First, which tracks ICE flights. In recent days, Haitian officials have been told by the Trump administration that they should expect two weekly flights carrying a total of 250 people, the Herald reported. “The conditions to be able to deport people to Haiti are so complicated and logistically difficult within themselves that it’s very unlikely that they’ll be able to do this quickly,” said Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.

Even though Haitians would be joining the millions of other immigrants who are on ICE’s radar, the fact that TPS holders have been sharing their contact information with the US government for years would make them easier targets, John Sandweg, a former ICE director under President Obama, told me this week. TPS holders are required to report to the government for background screenings every few years. “The lowest public safety threats are the most vulnerable,” Sandweg said. “I guarantee it is easier for ICE to target those people than somebody who just crossed the border two years ago, but didn’t get apprehended.”

Meanwhile, Haitians here under TPS brace for whatever is to come. As I reported earlier this week, many Haitians are consulting with attorneys to assess their legal options. Others plan to continue to report to their jobs until their work permits expire. “TPS holders don’t know what’s next for them,” Sui Chung, the executive director of the Miami-based legal nonprofit Americans for Immigrant Justice, told me. “It is such a sense of terror and disbelief that they could be returned to a country that is so completely in chaos and so very dangerous.”

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Trump Calls Climate Change a Hoax. Americans Aren’t Buying It.

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

Amid a summer of dangerous heat, drought, and floods, a majority of Americans are connecting increasingly severe weather to the climate crisis, new polling shows, despite efforts by Donald Trump to dismiss global heating as a “con job” and a “hoax.”

It’s a sign that attempts to suppress and polarize climate concerns may not be seeing full success, said Grace Adcox, senior climate strategist at Data for Progress.

“We started with the question of ‘are extreme weather events increasing,’ because we thought [that] if we can find consensus on that, that can be an entry point to being able to have a more bipartisan conversation about climate and climate intervention,” she said.

About 61 percent of likely American voters believe extreme weather events have become more frequent over the past five years, the survey from the progressive polling firm Data for Progress, shared exclusively with the Guardian, found. That includes 72 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Independents, and nearly half—46 percent—of all Republicans.

Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island senator who has long criticized Democrats for quieting their talk of global warming—or “climate-hushing”—said the new data “adds to the mountain of evidence that the public is way ahead of the politicians on the dire consequences of climate change.”

“Extreme heat happens to have the biggest footprint in the American context compared to some of these other types of extreme weather.”

“Climate hushers who ignore this righteous fight should take note,” he told the Guardian.

The researchers also asked participants about whether or not specific forms of extreme weather are being “worsened by climate change.” Majorities linked climate change to worsening wildfires (64 percent), droughts (63 percent), flooding and flash flooding (62 percent), hurricanes (59 percent), and severe thunderstorms and hailstorms (59 percent). But heatwaves topped the list, with 67 percent saying climate change is making them worse—including 48 percent of Republicans, the highest share for any of the extreme weather events surveyed.

That could be because nearly everyone in the US has experienced unusually hot days or weeks in recent years, said Adcox. High temperatures kill more people annually in the US than hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods combined.

“There are regional differences across experiences with extreme weather,” said Adcox. “Extreme heat happens to have the biggest footprint in the American context compared to some of these other types of extreme weather.”

The finding indicates that scorching conditions could provide an “interesting opening salvo” to speak about the climate crisis, she added.

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said the new poll’s findings are “very consistent” with the conclusions researchers have drawn based on Yale’s surveys, which have shown Americans are increasingly linking extreme weather to the climate crisis and want to protect workers from heat.

But Jennifer Marlon, a senior research scientist at Yale who also focuses on climate communications, said despite this, it’s not clear if most Americans understand why exactly the climate is changing.

“This is probably the biggest misconception out there—many Americans still think the warming is due to some kind of natural cycle. But it isn’t,” she said, adding that a spring survey from Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found 27 percent of people think that the changes are mostly natural.

The survey findings could help inform how to frame future conversations about the climate crisis with skeptical Americans, said Adcox. For instance, the data indicates heat may be the form of extreme weather that invites most conversation about climate.

“You can say, hey, this extreme heat event is crazy, so let’s talk about it, let’s talk about why it’s happening,” she said.

“These findings send a powerful message: protecting workers from dangerous heat isn’t a partisan issue.”

Another survey finding also indicates that even Americans who may not be convinced that the climate crisis is human-caused—or even that it is happening—would support some climate justice-focused measures.

Amid global and national rising temperatures, workers who labor outdoors—such as construction workers, farm workers, and roofers—are among the populations most vulnerable to heat-related illness.

In fact, extreme heat is a leading contributor to workplace injuries and deaths. Some indoor workers, including those in warehouses, commercial kitchens, and manufacturing facilities, can also face severe heat risk due to a lack of air conditioning, poor ventilation, humidity, and other factors. It’s a risk that the polling indicates most Americans think lawmakers should address.

About 88 percent of participants in the Data for Progress survey said they favor policies in their own state requiring employers to provide heat protections like access to drinking water, shade, breaks, and air conditioning. Only 7 percent of likely voters said they oppose the policy, indicating broad support for the protections that previous Data for Progress polls have also shown.

“These findings send a powerful message: protecting workers from dangerous heat isn’t a partisan issue,” said Jessica E Martinez, executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a network of two dozen local grassroots worker organizations. “When 88 percent of likely voters … support requiring employers to provide basic, lifesaving heat protections, it’s clear the public expects every worker to be protected.”

She said the polling indicates the public would support the creation of a federal heat standard—something workers have demanded for years, but on which progress has stalled under Trump.

The current administration this April also allowed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s nationwide enforcement initiative focused on protecting workers from heat illness, then later issued a revised but vastly weakened program.

“Our hope in continuing to profile the broad and particularly strong support that we see across partisanship for extreme heat protections for workers is a way for us to illustrate what it could look like to take an approach to climate that puts working people first,” said Adcox.

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How to Keep an Alleged War Criminal Out of New York

Earlier this month, Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—possibly the most prominent figure on Israel’s extreme right—cancelled a visit to New York amid legal pressure, in a rare moment of accountability for a regime that generally operates with near impunity where the United States is concerned.

Ben-Gvir, who is best known for attempting to build a crocodile moat around one of his prisons, advocating to bring back hanging, starving prisoners, and pushing for Israel to settle Gaza, was scheduled to attend an international police summit at the UN. But after the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy group, and the Hind Rajab Foundation, a Belgium-based group that files war crimes claims against individual Israeli soldiers, asked New York Attorney General Letitia James to investigate Ben-Gvir for war crimes, he bowed out.

“I think it’s a big win,” said Jake Romm, the organization’s US spokesperson. “Anything that signals that impunity is going away is a victory, even if it’s not an arrest. He’s being made afraid of accountability. It’s a sign the impunity is starting to crumble.”

The lawyers asked New York Attorney General Letitia James to investigate Ben-Gvir. His policies, they contend, have harmed residents of New York, where multiple participants in the Global Sumud Flotillas to Gaza—attempts to deliver aid through Israel’s blockade that have repeatedly been attacked by the Israeli military—reside and are prepared to testify that they were harmed by Ben-Gvir. Najeh Abduljalil, a New York resident who served as an EMT on a boat full of military veterans sailing to Gaza with aid last year, witnessed Ben-Gvir’s threats towards his group—then watched as the Israeli military allegedly firebombed a boat 70 meters away from him. “The whole idea was to psychologically terrify us,” Abduljalil said.

Michael Fix, another flotilla participant, alleged “physical and mental abuse” in Israeli prisons under Ben-Gvir’s administration. And a Palestinian-American New York resident who spent time in Israeli jails said in an interview that Ben-Gvir was to blame for “severe changes in conditions” when he took over Israel’s prison ministry: an increase in physical beatings, alongside the elimination of family visitation for some Palestinian prisoners, and reduction of the prisoners’ food allowance.

The Center for Constitutional Rights and Hind Rajab Foundation both argue that Attorney General James would have jurisdiction to investigate Ben-Gvir, though James hasn’t spoken publicly on the matter. Her office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

But in September, an even more significant architect of genocide in Gaza is scheduled to come to New York: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has presided over the killing of at least 73,000 Palestinians.

During Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, he promised to arrest Netanyahu. But in a video posted Tuesday, Mamdani acknowledged that he lacks the independent legal authority to put Netanyahu in handcuffs, calling on the federal government to do so.

Donald Trump, in apparent response, posted on social media that Netanyahu “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while ​in the United States of America.”

That doesn’t mean Netanyahu is immune to the tactics fielded against Ben-Gvir—or that he and his collaborators can’t be made unwelcome in New York. The mayor could follow the example of Rudy Giuliani, who in 1995 had Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, ejected from a Lincoln Center UN concert. He could direct the New York Police Department not to assist with Netanyahu’s motorcade. Or he could join the calls for James to open an independent investigation into how Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu, or other Israeli officials may have harmed New Yorkers.

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