The Anti-Immigrant Supreme Court

The Supreme Court made one thing plain this week: It is an anti-immigrant court. There were hints before—big ones, to be honest. But in three rulings this week, the Republican-appointed justices voted to green light Trump administration policies against immigrants that both defy federal law and carry a massive humanitarian toll. This week’s decisions display, at best, a callous disregard for the wellbeing and safety of millions of people. At worst, they signal that an anti-immigrant mindsethas taken hold of the court’s conservative wing.

On Thursday, the court issued two decisions with shocking human consequences. First, in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the court allowed the administration to deny immigrants the right to apply for asylumsimply by preventing them from technically crossing the border. The relevant law states that immigrants “arriving in” the US may apply for asylum. In a gotcha-type trick typical of a middle school bully, the administration claims that if it can prevent people from physically stepping across the border, they can ignore all the mandatory processes Congress set-up to process asylum seekers who come to the nation’s doorstep. The 6-3 majority agreed, using a juvenile grammatical argument to render the law contradictory and unenforceable. Because Congress used the preposition “in,” the administration is now free to defy the law and deny thousands of immigrants fleeing persecution their right to apply for asylum. The conclusion is as stupid as it is cruel.

Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in the case, joined by the other five GOP appointees, ignores the policy’s devastating toll. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent does not. She describes the violence visited upon immigrants as they endlessly wait in makeshift camps along the border to be able to apply for asylum, and the tragedy of mothers, fathers, and children drowning in the Rio Grande after being turned away from a port of entry.

“The consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die.”

“The current asylum system developed in response to the international moral reckoning that followed the Holocaust and World War II,” Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. In 1939, the United States turned away the M.S. St. Louis carrying Jewish refugees. Forced to return to Europe, many of its passengers died in concentration camps. “Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980 because it did not want this country to repeat the mistakes of its past,” she continued. “Yet if the refugees on the M.S. St. Louis were to walk up to a port of entry on our southern border today, the majority’s interpretation would allow immigration officers to refuse even to consider their asylum applications by physically blocking them from stepping foot onto U.S. soil.”

“The consequences of today’s decision are predictable,” she concluded. “More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.” Like in 1939, the blame for that bloodshed will be on the United States. In place of the statutory scheme Congress erected to remedy past mistakes, the majority lets the Trump administration repeat them.

Whereas the asylum case allowed the Trump administration to turn away people seeking humanitarian relief, the next opinion gave it effectively unreviewable power to strip millions of immigrants of humanitarian relief they are already receiving in the US. Under federal law, the executive branch can grant people from crisis-torn countries what’s known as Temporary Protected Status, allowing them to legally stay in the US while their home countries remain unsafe. These TPS designations are periodically reviewed and can be extended or terminated depending on if conditions have improved.

In Alito’s opinion in Mullin v. Doe, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to prematurely terminate TPS for 350,000 immigrants from Haiti and Syria. The decision frees theadministration to strip legal status from 1.3 million immigrants from 17 countries.

In revoking TPS for Haitians, the administration made a mockery of the legally-required process. Yet the Roberts Court blessed that lawlessness on Thursday by finding that the decision to revoke TPS is generallyunreviewable by courts. As a result, the rules Congress put into law to governTPS designations are now mere suggestions. Just as in the case about blocking immigrants from ports of entry, the six justices in the majority gave the president the authority to run roughshod over the law. In both cases, mostly nonwhite immigrants will suffer the dire consequences.

While the decision left the door open for people stripped of TPS to make a constitutional claim, as Alito’s opinion shows, it’s unclear whether this court would ever agree there was a valid one. In this case, the plaintiffs argued the revocation was driven by racial animus in violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection mandate. The majority brushed aside the cascade of racial dog whistles and stereotypes Trump targeted atHaitians in the US. “None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications,” Alito wrote.

In her dissent, Kagan accuses the majority of refusing to quote the presidential language that they claim is so innocent. So Kagan, joined by the other Democratic appointees, memorializes it in her dissent:

Haitians are “eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].” And: Haitians are also eating “other things too that they’re not supposed to be.” And: Haitians in the United States “probably have AIDS.” And: Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting.” And: Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” And: Haitians, along with some others, are “poisoning the blood” of our country. And: “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries” like “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?”

Under Supreme Court precedent, a plausible race-neutral justification is not enough to overcome evidence of a racist motive. And yet, just as it waved the law aside, the court waves away the pesky 14th Amendment (at least as it pertains to racial minorities). After oral arguments in the TPS case, the attorney for the Syrian plaintiffs, Ahilan Arulanantham, had said that the question before the court is whether the government can “ignore the law when it tries to take away someone’s immigration status.”

When it comes to TPS, the answer is yes. When it comes to asylum seekers, the answer is yes. And even for immigrants granted permanent residency, the Supreme Court placed executive caprice over the law.

In a third case this week, the Roberts Court also answered yes to demoting the status of green card holders, permanent residents who have lived in the United States for years, even decades. On Tuesday, in Blanche v. Lau, the same 6-3 majority gave border officials the discretion to take away a green card at a port of entry if they suspect that the legal permanent resident reentering the country may have committed a crime involving moral turpitude, a vague grouping of crimes in immigration law. As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote Tuesday, “agents at the border have just been given exceptional discretion to bypass protections generally afforded to green card holders.”

In her dissent, Jackson explained that the decision undermined the “benefits and security that come with having a green card,” empowering border officials to reclassify a permanent resident’s status on a hunch, then justify it later with “post hoc evidence.” Just as in the other two decisions from this week, in Lau the Supreme Court destabilizes the entire immigration system, relied upon not just by immigrants and their families—but also employers like hospitals and universities—by replacing the certainty of the law with the whims of the president and his agents.

With justa few days left before the justices begin their summer recess, we are still awaiting the court’s ruling on the meaning of birthright citizenship. The Trump administration is seeking to deny citizenship to thousands of people born in the US to parents of temporary visitors and undocumented immigrants. The justices are expected to reject this attempt and uphold the principle, written plainly in the Constitution, that virtuallyall people born in the US are citizens.

The justices may think that, by upholding birthright citizenship, they can wash their hands of the anti-immigrant stench from these three rulings. They may presume that their refusal to acknowledge Trump’s blatant racism will be cleansed when they sign an opinion bashing slavery and praising the principle of equality. They may hope that in recognizing the practical consequences of ending birthright citizenship, the cruel results of this week’s rulings will be overshadowed.

But no matter what happens in the birthright citizenship case, this court is a partner in the administration’s cruel, racist, anti-immigrant crusade. In just one week, the majority showed its true colors.

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They Found Tom Kean Jr.

Tom Kean Jr. was once lost, but now he is found. At home in Westfield, New Jersey, waiting for you in a suit and tie, with his wife silently smiling in the background.

Sound strange? Well, that’s how the New Jersey Republican greeted a New York Times reporter on Wednesday night, the first sighting since effectively vanishing in March due to an undisclosed health condition and missing more than 100 votes in the House. Kean’s absence sparked intense speculation, particularly in the lead-up to his primary election earlier this month. (He ran unchallenged, made zero campaign appearances, and won.)

So what was it like to see Kean in the flesh? Honestly, it seemed unsettling!

He could be seen from the street on Wednesday evening, standing in a brightly lit front room of his Westfield home just before 8:45 p.m.

“It’s good to see you,” he said after a reporter for The New York Times rang his doorbell. He was wearing a dark suit and a red tie. “I’ll talk to you next week,” he said. “Thank you.”

Mr. Kean’s wife, Rhonda, stood in the background, smiling pleasantly. He declined additional comment and closed the door.

Last week, Kean’s office announced that the congressman would return to Congress on June 30 and finally explain the mystery surrounding his monthslong absence. But will Kean explain walking around one’s house in formalwear? At bedtime? What about the ghost stock trades? That’s what I want to know.

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How Brad Lander Won

Rep. Dan Goldman didn’t just lose his primary Tuesday. He got trounced. With roughly 90 percent of votes counted, the incumbent New York congressman is trailing former city comptroller Brad Lander by more than 30 points. Goldman lost the Democratic primary despite his campaign spending more than $7 million—$2 million of which came directly from Goldman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune.

Lander’s victory is extraordinary. As a general rule, congressional incumbents don’t lose their primaries by dozens of points, absent personal or professional scandals. Goldman, who was first elected in 2022, has none. The exception to that rule is members of Congress who find themselves severely out of step during times of ideological realignment within their party. That is what happened in New York’s 10th Congressional District, which covers lower Manhattan, the wealthy neighborhoods of Brownstone Brooklyn, and sections of south Brooklyn.

A related dynamic played out in New York’s 7th and 13th districts, where Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier—two left-wing candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America—defeated Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Valdez leads Reynoso by more than 20 points, while Avila Chevalier—who ran in a less DSA-heavy district and was seen as a weaker candidate than Lander or Valdez—narrowly prevailed over Espaillat.

Israel and Gaza played a major role in the bitter contest between Goldman and Lander. Both men are self-described liberal Zionists who vocally condemned Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack. But beyond that, their approaches to Israel diverge drastically.

In November 2023, Goldman was one of just 22 Democrats who voted to censure his colleague Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) after she shared a video that included the line “from the river to the sea” to show her support for Palestinian rights. Last year, Goldman broke with most of his party by voting to sanction the International Criminal Court after it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and a Hamas military commander.

During a debate earlier this month, Goldman said he was “proud” to march in this year’s Israel Day parade in New York. Lander chose not to, saying he would not be attending “while Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, violating international law, [and] violating Palestinian human rights.” His differences with Goldman when it came to Israel, he said, were “profound.”

Lander and Goldman are both Jewish candidates who were running to represent one of the most Jewish congressional districts in the country. But Lander’s views on Israel appear to be much more in line with those of fellow progressive Jews in neighborhoods like Park Slope. (As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz has written, Lander’s children are named after a Jewish leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and a Jewish labor organizer.)

Lander’s victory wasn’t just about Israel. The former city comptroller is about as known a quantity in Brownstone Brooklyn as a politician can be. Before being elected comptroller in 2021, he represented Park Slope and nearby neighborhoods on the New York City Council for more than a decade. While in that role, he successfully pushed a major rezoning in Gowanus that has led to a boom in housing construction in the neighborhood.

Lander’s background and wonkish affect are also a natural fit in a progressive district that includes the Park Slope Food Coop. After growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, he attended the University of Chicago and became a Marshall Scholar. He later moved to Brooklyn, where he bought his home for a now-unimaginable price of $655,000. He is a quintessential Park Slope dad whose enthusiastic Pride-flag-waving has garnered affection on social media.

When Lander ran for mayor last year, he was considered one of Andrew Cuomo’s top rivals before Mamdani surged in the polls. But he accepted likely defeat rather than try to take Mamdani down. Toward the end of the primary, the two candidates cross-endorsed each other to take advantage of New York’s ranked choice voting system. After the mayoral election, Mamdani endorsed Lander in his bid to unseat Goldman.

Mayoral candidate Brad Lander was cuffed and detained by ICE agents after asking to see a warrant for people who were detained after an immigration hearing. Video from the city comptroller’s press secretary @chloecbristow. She says he’s still being held in 26 Federal Plaza. pic.twitter.com/cW9jIsp35b

— Jeff Coltin (@JCColtin) June 17, 2025

In Donald Trump’s second term, Lander has emerged as a prominent champion of immigrants’ rights. Last June, while running for mayor, he was arrested at a Manhattan immigration courthouse while trying to escort a man out of the building. Shortly before being detained, he told a reporter, “I don’t think there’s any place that’s more important to be right now than bearing witness and trying to stand up for the rule of law.”

In September, he was arrested again at the same federal building, along with other Democratic officials, after demanding to inspect immigration detention facilities. Earlier this month, he was found not guilty of charges stemming from that arrest.

Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who served as lead Democratic counsel during Trump’s first impeachment, was always an odd fit for the district. When he first ran in 2022, he spent nearly $5 million of an inheritance worth up to $250 million. Doing so allowed him to effectively buy his way through a crowded, low-turnout primary. He prevailed with just 26 percent of the vote—2 points above his closest challenger.

In 2022, Goldman, a rich Manhattanite, did best in wealthy sections of the island, like Tribeca and the West Village. He did much worse in more left-leaning and gentrified parts of Brooklyn. The dynamic repeated itself in the 2024 primary. Despite not facing a serious challenger—his main opponent spent less than $40,000—Goldman ended up with only 65 percent of the vote. In some areas, he actually lost—an obvious sign that he was vulnerable to being primaried.

Still, the scale of Lander’s victory is shocking. In some election districts (the New York equivalent of precincts), Lander appears on track to win more than 90 percent of the vote. Overall, Lander is winning Brooklyn by 45 points. And in Manhattan—Goldman’s home turf—Lander is up by about 10 points.

From an electoral perspective, the scale of his victory is reminiscent of recent primaries in which moderate Republicans have been ousted by right-wing challengers. In 2022, Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) ended up with 66 percent of the vote against Liz Cheney—the same percentage Lander has now.

Hageman and Lander, of course, belong to opposing parties and hold wildly different views. But they represent similar intraparty upheavals. In Wyoming, the lesson in Hageman’s race was that the GOP had no room for criticizing Trump, let alone voting to impeach him. In New York, Lander’s victory shows that being the public face of a Trump impeachment is no longer enoughfor Democrats. The party’s voters are increasingly unwilling to tolerate representatives who enable an Israeli state responsible for genocide.

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Supreme Court Gives Trump Green Light to End Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians

On Thursday, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to a humanitarian program that protects immigrants who can’t safely return to crisis-stricken countries. The decision effectively allows the Trump administration to move forward with terminating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for more than 350,000 nationals of Syria and Haiti who are living and working in the United States.

It also paves the way for the administration to potentially end the protection for several other countries experiencing wars, environmental disasters, and extraordinary circumstances. That push, which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has called the “largest de-documentation event in US history,” could strip away legal status from more than 1.3 million TPS holders from 17 designated countries.

In a 6-3 decision, the Court’s conservative supermajority sided with the federal government’s arguments that the executive branch’s determinations about TPS aren’t subject to judicial review. The Trump administration claimed that Congress, in enacting the 1990 statute that created the program, gave the Department of Homeland Security secretary full discretion to designate a country for protection, as well as to extend or terminate that designation.

The justices held that the federal law bars the courts from reviewing “non-constitutional” claims related to the humanitarian program. They took a broad view of the judicial bar provision in the TPS statute, which states that “[t]here is no judicial review of any determination of the [Secretary of Homeland Security] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.” They said “determination” encompasses not only the secretary’s final decision, but also the process to get there.

The majority also found that the Haitian TPS holders challenging the termination of the protection were likely to fail when they argued that the Trump administration violated the Equal Protection Clause by discriminating against them based on race. “None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial,” Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, said of the Trump administration’s disparaging public comments about Haitian migrants, “and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.”

The consequential ruling comes in a case that consolidated two lawsuits—Trump v. Miot and Mullin v. Doe—challenging the termination of TPS for more than 300,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. The Court agreed to hear the case in March after the Trump administration applied for a stay of lower court decisions postponing the terminations. Unlike in other similar TPS cases, the justices preserved the status quo, keeping protections against deportation for these groups in place while reviewing the government’s arguments.

Under the statute, the DHS secretary can designate a country for TPS for up to 18 months, after which time they’re required to conduct a review and assess whether countryconditions continue to merit thisdesignation before determining if it should be terminated, extended, or re-designated. Haiti was first designated for TPS in 2010 after a devastating hurricane, and its designation has been repeatedly extended.

On June 16, lawyers representing Haitian immigrants asked the Supreme Court justices to dismiss the case and allow the lower courts to resolve it in light of new evidence supporting their arguments that then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s termination of TPS for Haiti was a “preordained outcome” and that she had moved to end the protection even without receiving a recommendation from the State Department.

During her tenure, Noem tried to end the program for as many as 13 nations, including Venezuela, Yemen, and Afghanistan. District courts found that Noem violated requirements of the statute when terminating or, as in the case of Venezuela, vacating an existing extension of TPS designation, including by failing to properly consult with other relevant federal agencies on country conditions.

Then-Secretary Noem took “a hatchet to the TPS system,” US District Court Judge Katherine Polk Failla of New York wrote in her decision finding that the termination of TPS for Syria was arbitrary and capricious. “Once the Secretary was confirmed, she endeavored to terminate TPS status whenever presented with an opportunity to do so, resulting in termination decisions that are grounded not in law and not in fact, but that are in political considerations simply not relevant under the TPS statute.”

In the case concerning Haiti, District of Columbia federal Judge Ana C. Reyes concluded earlier this year that the evidence suggested that Noem’s decision to end the protection for that population was motivated, at least partially, by racial animus, given President Donald Trump’s disparaging comments about Haitian migrants. She also noted that while Congress gave the secretary ample discretion to make determinations about TPS, the goal in passing the statute was to standardize discretionary temporary protections and insulate them from political whims.

Last year, the Supreme Court twice tossed district court rulings blocking Noem’s actions against TPS for Venezuela, allowing the Trump administration to revoke protected status from hundreds of thousands of people pending appeal. In a dissent last October, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson chastised the Court for granting the government’s application for a stay in the Venezuela case.

“I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference with cases pending in lower courts while lives hang in the balance.”

“I view today’s decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” Justice Jackson wrote. “This Court should have stayed its hand. Having opted instead to join the fray, the Court plainly misjudges the irreparable harm and balance-of-the-equities factors by privileging the baldassertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our Government has promised them.” She added: “I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference with cases pending in lower courts while lives hang in the balance.”

During the oral arguments for Trump v. Miot and Mullin v. Doe in April, the liberal justices expressed skepticism at the government’s theory that the secretary’s decision-making process regarding TPS isn’t reviewable by the courts. “What was the point of Congress putting this statute into being and having requirements for the Secretary if there was no ability for anyone to challenge the Secretary’s compliance?” Justice Jackson challenged Solicitor General D. John Sauer. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that Congress could have been explicit about terminations of TPS being unreviewable, but it didn’t.

The lower courts found that Secretary Noem had failed to adequately consult with the State Department about country conditions, in violation of procedural requirements. Justice Jackson offered a hypothetical, asking if the secretary could use a Ouija board when deciding to terminate the protection, or randomly pick countries for designation from slips of paper in a hat.

They also addressed the plaintiff’s claims that the government’s push to terminate TPS for Haiti had been motivated by racial animus against non-white migrants. Justice Sotomayor said it was hard to see how Trump calling Haiti and other countries “shithole” places and accusing migrants with TPS of “poisoning the blood” of the United States as indicative that a “discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision.”

The conservative justices, on the other hand, appeared receptive to the government’s arguments that TPS “determinations” are beyond the federal court’s review power. The plaintiffs counter-argued that the DHS secretary’s final decision about terminating TPS may be immune to judicial review, but the procedural steps to make such a determination aren’t.

“After today,” Justice Elena Kagan dissented in Thursday’s ruling, “a Secretary can announce to the world that she didn’t consult with anyone—more, that she didn’t evaluate country conditions at all—before making, extending, or terminating a TPS designation.”

Todd Schulte, president of the advocacy organization FWD.us, called the Court’s decision “an astonishing human tragedy.” The ruling, he said in a statement, was “an awful harbinger for what we expect this administration to try to do for other TPS designations. Hundreds of thousands of people who have lived here for decades now see heartbreaking chaos ahead.”

“We’re talking about the power to mass expel people who have done nothing wrong to countries that remain unsafe,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, the attorney arguing for the Syrian plaintiffs. “And our view is it is unlikely that a refugee protection statute would have given that power to the Secretary.” The question before the Court, Arulanantham said in a statement following the April oral arguments, was whether the government could “ignore the law when it tries to take away someone’s immigration status.” Judging by the justices’ ruling on this case, the answer appears to be yes.

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Senate Democrats Rally Against Pro-Institutionalization DOJ Memo

On Thursday, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) will introduce a resolution that calls for the Department of Justice to rescind a memo issued last week that contests the longstanding interpretation of the Supreme Court’s 1999 Olmstead v. L.C. decision, a landmark case that limits states’ power to compel people to live in psychiatric and other institutions, such as nursing homes.

“I am not going to let this administration move us back to a time when people were ripped out of their communities, ripped out of their homes against their wills, and forced into institutions,” Duckworth told me in an interview.

The DOJ memo itself does not change the law, but it may influence how the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services approach agreements and programs that help disabled people live in their communities, outside institutions. Following the release of the memo, HHS took down its webpage on Olmstead and community living.

The slip opinion, which Bloomberg Law reported was allegedly driven by the demands of ultra-right Trump advisor Stephen Miller, was met with immediate backlash from disability advocates and legal experts. As George Washington University law professor Alison Barkoff told me when I covered the opinion last week, the Trump administration’s “interpretation is completely inconsistent with virtually all courts” with respect not only to the interpretation of Olmstead but also that of the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which the Olmstead decision builds on. That also greatly concerns Duckworth.

“This is taking us back to a time when there were forced lobotomies in this country,” Duckworth said. “We just cannot let that happen.”

The resolution is also co-sponsored by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), among others. The DOJ opinion, the resolution says, “rejects the integration mandate and threatens the hard-won progress towards full integration of individuals with disabilities into society in the United States,” compounded by GOP cuts to Medicaid-funded home and community-based services, which will also force more disabled people into institutions. The resolution also calls for the US government to recognize the importance of fulfilling Olmstead and a reversal of Medicaid cuts.

“This is clearly the ableism that exists in this administration that starts with Donald Trump, the president,” Duckworth told me. “He’s the guy who looked at wounded veterans, amputees, and said those guys are suckers and losers.”

Olmstead‘s integration mandate, Duckworth emphasized to me, is “critically important to our society.”

“We cannot be a leader of the free world if we continue to segregate groups of people in our own country, whether it is through racism or through ableism,” Duckworth said. “They underestimate the willpower of the disability community.”

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Even the Internet’s Favorite Pool Guy Has No Clue How to Fix the Reflecting Pool

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

Steve Goodale isn’t used to attention like this. It’s not that he’s unfamiliar with being on camera: His YouTube Channel, Swimming Pool Steve, has amassed nearly 91,000 subscribers covering topics like how to bond concrete and clean a used hot tub.

But the saga of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which an algal bloom turned green following a renovation that President Donald Trump’s administration claimed would make the pool “American flag blue” in time for the US’s 250th birthday celebrations, has left people searching for answers about what the heck is going on.

“You don’t need Swimming Pool Steve to tell you that when you see what appears to be the interior surface peeling up and floating in chunks, that’s an ‘oh, crap’ moment.”

The mystery has only deepened as chunks of the newly installed lining have appeared to break off and Trump has said the pool will be drained while, without evidence, blaming vandals for the problems. Add in US Park Police arresting people for touching the water like it’s some kind of biohazard, and that’s made Goodale, an award-winning pool expert, one of the most in-demand sources for anyone trying to figure out what’s happening to the iconic monument.

Pools are in Goodale’s blood: He learned the tricks of the trade from his Uncle Joe and refers to pools as “a family business.” I called him up to go over some of our most burning pool questions. This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Are you sick of talking about all this yet?

This is like the Simpsons episode where the devil force-feeds doughnuts to Homer. “So, you like talking about pools, do you?”

We heard you like talking about pools, so we’re going to give you pools 24/7. All the time.

I’ve been talking about them forever. It’s just now everybody is listening.

You’ve gotten a lot of reporters calling you and asking, What exactly is wrong with the Lincoln Memorial pool? But from watching your videos, it sounds like it’s hard to say there’s one definitive thing wrong with it.

There’s not enough information in terms of pictures, videos, water chemistry values. A natural pond, an open-air, clear-water environment—that’s what this thing is. There are so many moving parts here. It’s the structure, it’s the water chemistry, it’s filtration. There’s so much stuff that has to work in conjunction with each other.

I’ve been saying for decades now, I think swimming pools are the origin of the term “doesn’t hold water.” If you don’t do every part of your job properly, it’s very easy to see that there’s something going wrong.

Experts like you can see 101 ways a project like this could fail, even with a very talented, experienced team doing the renovation.

Pools are mercilessly complicated—and I’m talking about little ones. This is literally monumental in size. It would take a master class in technical execution to be able to work on this thing in a competent capacity. But you don’t need Swimming Pool Steve to tell you that when you see what appears to be the interior surface peeling up and floating in chunks. That’s an “oh, crap” moment.

A duckling swims in algae in the Reflecting Pool in Washington, June 16, 2026.Chip Somodevilla via Getty

I’ve seen some speculation that the hydrogen peroxide might be the cause of the bottom of the pool peeling. But you made a video about the lining, saying that it might be more complex than just that.

There is merit to this line of thought. These interior surfaces, they’re very chemically resistant, but they’re not infinitely chemically resistant. It would come down to what’s being used and what concentrations of it are being used—all these unanswered questions.

But with a membrane system like this, there’s a lot of technical points you have to nail during installation. You have to account for ambient conditions like rain, sun, humidity, moisture control in your substrate, thickness, evenness, and chemical compatibility. There are so many things that can go wrong with that process. If the material hasn’t bonded to the substrate for any number of reasons, then ultimately the entire system will fail.

Now the president is claiming that it’s vandalism.

I can’t really get my head around the mechanism of vandalism that could cause this kind of damage. In terms of pictures and videos, it doesn’t look good, but it was fairly localized stuff. I haven’t seen anything that shows the 250-foot gash. At this point, I’m sure you can understand, I, more than anybody, have questions too.

The Department of Interior keeps saying, “We’ve got the nanobubblers on, that should fix it.”

Nanobubbler technology is an ozone injection system—it essentially adds oxygen to the water. In theory, it’s used as a suppression system to kill algae directly, but it also has a secondary function of making an oxygen-rich environment in the water, which controls the release of phosphorus from the sediment layer at the bottom of the pool, the primary nutrient source for algae.

Will sediment at the bottom of the pool affect the blue color? Or is it scattered too thinly to affect it?

It certainly starts thin, but it has the potential to be a heavier layer. It really comes down to the quality of the source water being used and the design of the filtration system itself.

Water from the Tidal Basin is usually pumped directly into the pool, but when there’s a lot of algae in the basin, they switch to municipal drinking water. The administration hasn’t answered our questions about what the source of the water in the pool is right now.

I’ve also been trying to find answers to that. But the water that’s in the pool is really what matters here. Now that it’s in the pool, what’s the phosphate level? What’s the nitrate level? Those would be good things to know.

So just grab a little bottle of water to test?

Well, I’ve seen on the news that maybe you can’t even get near it anymore. But in theory, yes, if this were my swimming pool, I would walk right up to it, dunk my little bottle into it and take a sample. I would test for phosphates, and it would tell me an awful lot about the nutrients available for algae to grow.

In the big picture, how much of a mess is this to clean up? How much could it cost taxpayers?

I can’t speak to cost or budget issues. But I can tell you that draining a 6.5-million-gallon body of water is certainly a considerable thing to do. In terms of what it’s going to take to fix it, what really matters at this point is, how much damage are we talking about here? Is it a localized area that can be exposed and repaired? Or is this an indication that there’s some sort of systemic issue?

You have to look at it as a system as a whole.

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Dobbs Didn’t End Abortion. It Ignited a Movement.

After spending more than four decades studying abortion in American social, medical, and political culture, Carole Joffe was fully prepared for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. “Dobbs itself wasn’t that scary to me,” she says. “It was upsetting and politically outrageous, but because of our work, we knew abortion wasn’t going to go away.”

What she did find frightening was a Louisiana lawsuit last month challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s rules allowing the abortion pill mifepristone to be prescribed via telemedicine and sent through the mail. In the end, the justices kicked the case back to the lower courts, but abortion advocates were reminded of how much patients around the country still have to lose. “Things since Dobbs have gone better than many of us thought, but so much of that access has been dependent on telehealth,” says Joffe, a sociologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco. “So yes, the case felt scary, but then I got back to business as usual. ‘Abortion is still happening. Who do I want to interview?’”

Joffe’s mission is to try to understand the American abortion ecosystem through the people who populate it, including patients, providers, and fellow advocates. Her most recent book, After Dobbs_: How the Supreme Court Ended_ Roe But Not Abortion, co-written with Drexel University legal scholar David S. Cohen, tracked how that ecosystem adapted in the aftermath of the landmark ruling: the surge in abortion protections in blue states, the mobilization of activists to help patients in red states, the rage donations—and just rage—fueling it all.

Four years post-Dobbs, the right-wing legal and legislative attacks have been relentless, and the risks from the courts and the Trump administration are dire, but the abortion-access movement has proven to be more resilient than even Joffe foresaw. She points to new data from the #WeCount project showing that clinician-managed abortions approached 1.13 million in 2025, with the monthly average up 14 percent from April 2022. By the end of last year, almost 9,000 women a month were accessing care in states where abortion is banned. “David and I knew that there would still be abortions happening in the blue states, but we did not anticipate the [nationwide] numbers going up to the degree they have,” she says. “That has been astonishing.”

“Things since Dobbs have gone better than many of us thought, but so much of that access has been dependent on telehealth.”

Much of the movement’s strength is due to legal and medical innovations that have made abortion pills more accessible than ever before, including telemedicine and blue-state shield laws that protect providers in those states who care for patients from places where abortion is illegal. Cohen is one of the masterminds behind shield laws, which have been embraced by Democratic-run states. But when he and Joffe were working on their book, the laws had barely taken hold. Now, she says, “their impact can’t be emphasized enough.”

Still, those innovations have largely benefited women seeking what one recent law review article calls “everyday abortions”—those occurring for non-medical reasons, usually in the first trimester. For other segments of the population—women suffering from life-threatening pregnancy emergencies, those seeking abortions later in pregnancy, immigrants—the Dobbs era has been precarious indeed, and sometimes deadly. Nor is it clear why more abortions are happening, with some advocates worrying that women are choosing to end their pregnancies because their economic and social circumstances are so bleak. Another major fear: Self-managed abortions without sufficient medical or legal support is increasing women’s risk of being criminalized.

I reached out to Joffe by phone for an update on how Dobbs has remade the US abortion landscape—and how it hasn’t. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the numbers. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the last time the number of US abortions surpassed 1 million was back in 2012.

And those are just the clinician-managed abortions counted by the #WeCount project in the formal healthcare system. There are also a lot of self-managed abortions not being counted that are happening with the help of underground community networks and overseas pill-providers. If someone goes to their computer and orders from a website in India, that’s not counted. If someone gets their pills from one of those grannie expats living in Mexico who are bringing in [medication] over the border, that’s not counted.

A lot of the increase in the WeCount numbers seems to be because of shield laws.

Even though my co-author was one of the legal theorists behind them, I didn’t expect shield laws to happen so quickly and so effectively. It’s not just that shield laws and telemedicine mean women don’t have to travel, so abortion doesn’t cost as much money, and they can have privacy. There’s a provider in Massachusetts—The MAP—that offers pills for $150 but accepts as little as $5. So shield laws have also brought down the price of pills, which makes them even more accessible. I didn’t see that coming.

I was really worried that the criminal justice system in red states would go after providers, but so far, there has been remarkably little of that. I’m aware of only three criminal cases: two against shield law doctors in California and New York, and one against a midwife in Texas. There have also been some civil cases. I really hope things work out for the people being targeted. But that is not the massive wave of cases I was afraid of.

From what I hear from other advocates, the patients who have benefited most from these post-Dobbs improvements in access are women in their first trimester. Many telemedicine providers will only prescribe abortion pills through the 11th or 12th week of pregnancy, so patients who are further along may lie to get their pills or find another source, like an underground network. Who else is being left behind?

The people I most worry about are those with pregnancy emergencies—serious complications. These are not people who could get on a plane and travel from Texas to Illinois or Colorado for emergency abortion care. These are really sick women.

“Can you imagine living in Louisiana, going to your boss and saying, ‘I’m going to be gone for several days because I need to get an abortion?’ No.”

There are also patients whose social circumstances make it impossible to access telemedicine or travel out of state. Maybe you’re a single mother with several kids, and you can’t take time off work. Can you imagine living in Louisiana, going to your boss and saying, “I’m going to be gone for several days because I need to get an abortion?” No. I remember when Dobbs first happened, reading about a doctor in Texas who told his patient, “Well, you could go to New Mexico,” and the patient said something like, “If you sent a limo for me, I couldn’t leave.” Think of a woman living in her car, or someplace in the Mississippi Delta—if she doesn’t have a computer, how does she even know?

Back in 2024, you and your UCSF colleagues published a report about how doctors in Texas and other abortion-ban states were being forced to delay abortion care for pregnancy emergencies that could endanger the life of the mother. How common are those kinds of situations today?

This is something that a colleague and I are studying now. I had thought that, four years after Dobbs, these kinds of questions would be resolved. Doctors who don’t know whether they’ll be arrested if they perform an abortion while there’s still fetal cardiac activity, and wondering: How sick does a patient have to be? Some state legislatures have taken some action to clarify medical exceptions for abortion care—when women die, it’s not good publicity. So in aggregate, the situation has seemingly improved somewhat for women suffering from ectopic pregnancies and PPROM [when the amniotic sac ruptures before the fetus is viable]. But there are still too many unforgivable instances of care withheld and delayed. We won’t know the full impact of Dobbs for some time, but we do know that rates of maternal and infant mortality in Texas have significantly risen since Dobbs.

Telemedicine only accounts for 30 percent of all abortions in the US, which means that more than two-thirds of patients are still getting their care in person. But abortion pills from a clinic can cost hundreds of dollars. How can clinics compete with a shield-law provider who charges much less? And that doesn’t even take into account the cuts in federal funding for Title X and Planned Parenthood.

I am worried about the viability of the brick-and-mortar clinic. Many clinics in red states have had to close after Dobbs. Some have been able to relocate to blue states, but not all. Many clinics operate on a tight budget. While the great majority of abortions in the US occur in the first trimester, one of the most important functions that some clinics provide is abortions in the second trimester or later. As more and more patients order pills and avoid clinics, the clinics may eventually have to close, leaving the minority of patients who require later abortions in a very dire spot.

While I applaud the creation of these new models that make abortion more accessible, I mourn the possible loss of the clinic-based model of abortion care, because what I have learned from my 45 years of studying this issue is that abortion is not one-size-fits-all. Many women are fine doing it themselves. They order the pills online, they take the pills at home, and they go on with their lives. Other women need more. For example, a very religious woman who believes, “God will punish me for getting an abortion—I am a murderer,” can really benefit from talking to someone who will reassure her that she’s not going to hell. Dr. George Tiller [the Kansas abortion provider who was murdered in 2009] had a chaplain on his staff. The best clinics deliver the kind of care that some women, often very young ones, really need.

And not everybody is a suitable candidate for pills. Some people have bleeding disorders, some may have ectopic pregnancies, and some will be past the gestational age at which the pill is offered. Many of the most serious fetal anomalies are only discovered around 18 weeks. I worry that these people will get lost. Some women need to be in a clinic for the abortion experience to feel real. Some women are afraid— “I’m talking to a disembodied voice on the phone, she sounds nice, but I don’t know. My friend had a really bad reaction when she took a pill that somebody sent her.” Even though the shield laws and telemedicine have been an enormous success, there are still people going to be left out.

There’s a narrative out there that people don’t care about abortion as much as they did four years ago, or during the 2024 elections. One measure of this supposed lack of engagement is the big drop in donations to abortion-related organizations over the past couple of years. What do you make of that?

I always expected the so-called rage spending would drop off. After Roe was overturned, people were furious, and the money came pouring in. So much of that immediate mobilization we describe in After Dobbs was dependent on millions and millions of dollars in donations—for airplanes, hotels, abortion procedures or pills. I knew it couldn’t be sustained. I knew other very important issues would arise, like immigration, although I didn’t predict the savagery we’ve seen under the Trump administration. I knew that decent people giving their money to abortion would feel it was important to give it to other things as well.

That said, I think about what happened to make sure that women in red states could access abortions—the volunteer networks, the people who are willing to drive strangers to get care. The participation of everyday people. I read a touching account that almost sounded like the Underground Railroad: “Someone has to get the patient from Texas to Illinois—this person will drive her to here, and then somebody else will drive her to there.” I think of this as part of the larger resistance we’ve been seeing in the Trump era.

When you think about the future of abortion in the US, what keeps you up at night?

We don’t know what’s going to happen politically. The midterms will be really important, but even if the Democrats win the House and Senate, the courts will be the ones calling the shots. What keeps me up at night is: Will they try to enforce the Comstock Act [the 19th-century obscenity law that would amount to a national abortion ban]? Will the FDA withdraw its approval of mifepristone or get rid of the rule allowing abortion pills via telemedicine? I am terrified of shield laws going before the Supreme Court. That’s really my biggest worry.

What if there’s a crackdown on providers to the extent we haven’t yet seen? I always worry about clinic violence, but I worry more now because the anti-abortion movement is furious: “We got Dobbs, so how in the hell have abortions gone up?” I worry that Republicans and the Department of Justice will figure out how to do surveillance on people who get abortion pills: “Why does this little town in Mississippi have somebody getting a package from India?” I am a Class A worrier, so I am worried about everything that one can possibly worry about.

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Is It Time For Jews To Leave New York?

New York City’s right-wingers, who evidently cannot handle losing elections, are dealing with their anger by once again attempting to fearmonger Jewish Americans into leaving New York, the most Jewish city in the country.

Last night, allies of Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept the New York City Democratic primaries. Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier—all of whom have condemned Israel’s genocide in Gaza—each won a congressional seat, consolidating socialist power in New York. The socialist New York Jews of generations past would perhaps have jumped for joy. But the Republican party figureheads of today would like Jews, specifically, to panic instead of celebrating.

“To my beautiful Jewish friends in America. We love you. You are not alone. We are just as freaked out as you are and see with clear eyes exactly what is happening,” Meghan McCain wrote on X. As a beautiful Jew in America, I was not initially sure what she was talking about.

Far-right activist Laura Loomer joined McCain in telling the one million Jews who call the five boroughs their home to go on ahead and pack their bags. Loomer, helpfully, made it clear that unconditional support for Israel is not and has never been about American Jewish safety: for her, it is about fighting the supposed “Islamic takeover of America.”

If you’re a Jew in NYC, now is your time to move. After tonight’s election in New York, nobody who is Jewish is safe.

I’d love to see the Trump administration address this Islamic takeover of America and the exploding Jew hatred.

We need leadership on this issue. It’s…

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) June 24, 2026

Loomer is, of course, a crank. But more serious people, like Dan Goldman—the Congressman ousted by Brad Lander last night—also invoked the specter of antisemitism in his concession speech.

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), in concession speech: “Jews have given back so much to this country. As history has taught us, antisemitic tropes and stereotypes, some of which I heard personally on this campaign, will ultimately be the undoing of our democracy if we all don’t lean in…

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) June 24, 2026

Goldman, who is Jewish, lost by an absolute landslide to the also-very-Jewish Brad Lander, a man who named his children after a Jewish leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and a Jewish labor organizer. Nonetheless, Goldman accused Lander of using “dangerous antisemitic tropes” to win. It is not clear whether the trope in question was Lander’s attack of Goldman for taking AIPAC money, something Goldman did do while publicly disavowing AIPAC donations.

Serious conversations beginning over whether there is a future for Jews in the United States. Israel is in a dangerous neighborhood but it controls its own borders. Nobody voted for the kind of migration that allowed New York to go from Jewish capital to capital of antisemitism.

— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) June 24, 2026

Some serious thinkers have once again begun to wonder whether New York Jews might be better off living in Israel than in the United States. Joel Pollak of the California Post wasted no time casting the blame for antisemitism vaguely on “migration,” by which he presumably means “very scary Muslim mayor” and/or “very scary immigration.” Stephen Miller and Katie Miller joined in: “New York will now be run by foreign communists.”

Jews, who not so long ago were being blamed for encouraging hatred of white people by supporting immigration, are now being told that in a city of immigrants they should be afraid of immigrants, because some of those immigrants might not like Israel.

When Zohran Mamdani was elected earlier this year, the very same commentariat crowed for a Jewish exodus from Gotham. Such an exodus, by all accounts, did not happen then, and won’t happen now.

Why would it? Antisemitism is real, but it isn’t caused by critics of Israel winning elections. And it isn’t solved by Jews fleeing New York.

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Can the Last Kennedy Running Please Turn Out the Lights?

It was a good night for a young and charismatic nepo-baby, leveraging his name to inject new energy and ideas into a moribund Democratic party. But it was a very bad night for John F. Kennedy’s grandson.

On Tuesday, as a slate of candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani knocked off two incumbent members of Congress and cruised to victory in another open House district, Jack Schlossberg finished a distant third in a race the Democratic Socialists had stayed clear of—the Democratic primary to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler. The Kennedy scion, a Democratic activist and content creator, entered the race last fall as a front-runner, but, with most of the votes counted, was hovering at just under 11 percent.

Instead, the race for a seat centered on some of Manhattan’s most affluent neighborhoods became an extraordinarily expensive proxy battle between Silicon Valley donors. Alex Bores, a state assemblyman who positioned himself as a Big Tech skeptic, benefited from $11 million inspending from Public First Action, an Anthropic-funded vehicle. Leading the Future, a super-PAC that’s been funded by the venture-capital firm Andreesen-Horowitz and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, spent $8 million attacking Bores—which boosted eventual winner Micah Lasher, another state assemblyman and a former Nadler chief-of-staff.

There’s an urgency in politics now that makes dynastic inheritance look small.

It would be unfair to view the results in the nation’s most geographically compact congressional district as a straightforward referendum on the Kennedy family (even if Schlossberg did helpfully include his more famous surname on the ballot). But the results suggest that voters weren’t exactly clamoring for a dynasticreboot, either—his loss is the third successive defeat for a prominent Kennedy in a Democratic primary, after uncle Bobby’s abandoned campaign against then-President Joe Biden, and cousin Joseph Kennedy III’s 2020 defeat to Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey. Caroline’s 33-year-old son learned the hard way that the Kennedy brand just doesn’t mean what it used to. His strange campaign only underscores why.

Schlossberg is not the worst kind of Kennedy, by any stretch. He didn’t kill anyone, for instance. He didn’t appease Hitler, grope a waitress, send troops to Vietnam, promote eugenics, or publish a book trampling on the legacy of Reconstruction. If the decline of the WASPs (and their WASP-like Hyannisport cousins) has taught us anything, it’s that there are much worse things in this world than over-educated, well-meaning dilettantes. But you can also perhaps understand why, in this moment of all moments, the Democratic voters of Manhattan weren’t lining up for someone who so closely matched that description.

Schlossberg’s qualifications were slim. None of his previous jobs could historically be described as stepping stones to Congress. He was a political correspondent for Vogue for a period of several months. He was a Democratic content creator—a role that often consisted him doing weird vocal impressions of personas he’d made up. (“I think satire is a really powerful political tool,” he told the New Yorker, which is the kind of statement that never seems to accompany powerful satire.) He was part of the committee that handed out the Profile in Courage awards, a prize that takes its name from the aforementioned book his grandfather mostly didn’t write. He may have meant to merely shore up his district bona fides, but it felt appropriate that the first candidate I’ve ever seen list his pre-school on campaign literature was a Kennedy—and that it came with a boast that he’d graduated not just from Yale, but from Harvard. Twice. (Do you know how hard it was for Boston Mayor John Fitzgerald’s great-great-grandson, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s great-grandson, and President John F. Kennedy’s grandson to get into Harvard?)

In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash last May, Schlossberg boasted that his campaign was catching fire because it had released more policy plans than anyone else in the race. You could argue that the idea that people (including House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi) were lining up to support JFK’s grandson because of his position on Social Security was as insulting as anything in Profiles in Courage.

Again, there are worse things than having a familial sense of responsibility to public service that you don’t quite know what to do with—you could instead have a familiar sense of responsibility to selling cryptocurrency and hotels. As Reeves Wiedeman reported in a deeply illuminating New York magazine story last year, being one of the political Kennedys can be a grind. No one’s sitting around the old compound telling you you should really become a dentist.

But if there’s one thing Tuesday’s results showed, it’s that there’s an urgency in politics right now that makes dynastic inheritance look small. The energy that’s animating Democrats in the city where Schlossberg attended pre-school isn’t nostalgia for the lost Kennedy idyll. Across much of the city, primary voters showed up at the polls to tear down the old way of doing things, newly empowered by their 2025 defeat of Andrew Cuomo, another Kennedy-adjacent scion. Like it or not, they’re motivated by idealism and a desire for something new—ironically, the kind of vibe shift the family once purported to embody.

The last few years ought to have once and for all blown up the myth of Camelot—that it was desirable, that it was ever even real. American politics is haunted by a different sort of Northeastern family, ruled by a calcifying and domineering patriarch, digging its pincers into the national story and flaunting its multi-generational ambitions in the service of a misbegotten golden age. The Kennedys are down to their last and thorniest public servant—a sun-baked, worm-addled, crank incubated in a world of entitlement and unaccountability.

Now all that’s left is the ruins. I’m reminded, like a good Kennedy, of Shelley: Look upon their works and despair.

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Prosecutors Can’t Demand New York Trans Kids’ Medical Records, Judge Says

Yet another Trump administration effort to gain access to trans kids’ private health information has been, for the moment, halted. A district judge today handed down a temporary restraining order, preventing the Trump administration from forcing disclosure of the health records of trans children treated at New York University Langone and Mount Sinai hospitals in New York City. The injunction will remain in place at least until July 8.

The US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas sent out a grand jury subpoena to the hospitals seeking confidential information about patients under age 18 according to a statement released by NYU Langone May 11.

The Trump administration spent much of the past year seeking similar information from hospitals across the country via administrative subpoenas, none of which have succeeded in court. “ But undeterred by its disastrous showing in the courts, DOJ decided to issue nearly identical document requests in the form of grand jury subpoenas emanating from the Northern District of Texas,” District Judge Katherine Polk Failla said.

Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, called the subpoena “a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate medical providers based on this administration’s ideological opposition to transgender people and to this healthcare.”

“It’s just an egregious abuse of federal power,” Minter told me at the time. “This is mafia-type behavior.” Three families of trans kids sued in early June, alleging the subpoena violated their children’s rights.

“We’re thankful the court has granted our emergency request to protect the privacy interests of transgender New Yorkers and their families,” said Chase Strangio, Co-Director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project, in a statement.

“For the past year, the Trump administration has not only decided that it knows better than these families and their doctors what their medical needs are, but has also sought to obtain troves of sensitive information about patients in New York.”

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The Defense Department Is Posting QAnon Memes

A division of the Defense Department has been rolling out posts on X that contain clear references to the QAnon conspiracy theory, for reasons they have, unsurprisingly, declined to explain. The X account for the so-called Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering produced three posts this week incorporating references to QAnon slogans and imagery, part of a broader pattern of weird, gross shitposting under Trump’s second administration.

The posts purportedly celebrated President Donald Trump’s Monday announcement that the United States would invest heavily in quantum computing systems to pursue “technological dominance,” an effort, the announcement said, that will involve “U.S. industry and research leaders” and stretch across “the Departments of Energy, War, Commerce, and the Intelligence Community.” In a related executive order, Trump said he would create a “National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee.”

In response, whoever runs the “Department of War CTO” X account posted a meme showing Donald Trump positioned in the middle of large letter Q, below the words “Quantum Dominance.”

“Are you enjoying the show? Refill your popcorn… you’ll love this next part,” it read.

“Enjoy the show” was a phrase that QAnon believers often repeated to each other, especially during the height of the movement, promising that a great battle was about to unfold in front of their eyes. The conspiracy theory broadly held that President Trump was, during his first term, secretly fighting a global battle against a cabal of evildoers, pedophiles, sex traffickers, and Hillary Clinton. A person claiming to have a “Q” level security clearance posted cryptic clues on the messageboards 8chan and 8kun, inevitably promising that some revelatory Trump plan was about to unfold. “Trust the plan” thus became another popular movement slogan, alongside the rallying cry “Where we go one, we go all.”

A few hours after the first post, the same Defense Department X account shared another “Quantum Dominance” meme, this one reading “Trust the plan, patriots.” A third post on Tuesday showed a drawing of a gun-wielding soldier in the middle of the letter Q and the phrase, “Where We Go One, We Go Quantum.”

The posts found their intended audience: QAnon adherents. “Q IS REAL!!!!,” celebrated one X user with multiple QAnon references in his bio. “These Government pages are getting more and more blatant! NCSWIC!!!!” (That acronym stands for “Nothing can stop what is coming,” another QAnon slogan.)

When reached for comment, Defense Department spokesperson Joe Loewy wrote, “We have nothing for you on this.” He did not respond to followup questions.

While the first Trump presidency ended without QAnon’s promised great global battle where President Trump revealed and conquered forces of pedophilic evil, related ideas have nonetheless thoroughly suffused and saturated our culture. The conspiracy’s adherents have also committed acts of violence, often against those close to them: in 2021, for instance, a California father killed his young children after becoming more enmeshed in QAnon beliefs, claiming he’d murdered them to “save the world” from the “serpent DNA” he believed his wife had passed down. Edgar Maddison Welch, who shot up Comet Pizza in Washington D.C. in 2017 in an attempt to “save” children he delusionally believed were held hostage in the restaurant’s non-existent basement, died in a 2025 traffic stop shootout with police.

The Trump administration, which has branded itself “the most transparent administration in history,” has previously refused to disclose the authors of its social media posts. Those posts have contained white supremacist language, virulently anti-immigrant statements, and even a Michael Jackson lyric that used an antisemitic slur. When journalists ask about these statements, the agencies involved tend to deflect, insult the questioner, or, as happened in this case, simply decline to answer.

The Defense Department itself employs Kingsley Wilson, a Pentagon spokesperson, who before her time in government had a long history of posting bigoted and xenophobic statements, including the extremist slogan “Ausländer Raus,” a phrase meaning “foreigners out” that is viewed as a neo-Nazi rallying cry in Germany. Wilson also explicitly supported the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which holds that non-white people are being deliberately sent to the United States to replace white populations.

The Pentagon also never responded to reporting about Wilson’s history of extremist statements.

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We Are Drinking the Earth—and Eating It

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

Not so long ago, the Central Highlands of Vietnam were blanketed by forests so dense they blotted out the sun. The American soldiers who slogged through the area during the Vietnam War complained about leeches, mosquitoes, and snakes, but those triple-canopy jungles also teemed with tigers, elephants, and monkeys. The unrelenting darkness and tropical monsoons that made the highland woodlands so inhospitable to humans made them excellent habitat for wildlife.

But now they’re blanketed by coffee farms.

Sorry to be a buzzkill, but your morning buzz kills nature. Agriculture is by far the leading driver of deforestation, and coffee is the sixth-leading driver of agricultural deforestation; coffee farms are also parching the aquifers and ravaging the soils they’ll need to sustain future harvests. A new report by the nonprofit Coffee Watch documents that in Vietnam, which grows about one of every five coffee beans on Earth, about half a million acres of Central Highlands forest have been cleared for coffee since 1990, an area the size of Luxembourg. There are no longer any wild tigers in the region, and very few elephants; the saola, an adorable local antelope known as the ​“Asian unicorn,” is feared to be extinct.

“Most people are good people; they’d never dream of going to Starbucks and ordering a latte plus a dead elephant,”

Again, I apologize for being a Debbie Downer. But while it’s fairly common knowledge that carbon-belching coal plants and gas-guzzling SUVs are environmental menaces, people should know that our diets also degrade our planet, causing most global water shortages, nutrient pollution, and habitat destruction while generating a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture has overrun nearly half of our habitable land, and it replaces more forests, wetlands, and other wildlands every day. That’s why I wrote ​We Are Eating the Earth—and as Coffee Watch founder and director Etelle Higonnet reminded me, we are drinking the Earth, too.

“Most people are good people; they’d never dream of going to Starbucks and ordering a latte plus a dead elephant,” Higonnet said. ​“But that’s basically what we’re doing. We’re raping and poisoning the planet with every cup we drink.”

Vietnam is now the No. 2 coffee-growing nation, behind Brazil; and it’s the leading producer of the cheaper ​“robusta” beans used for most instant coffee, serving nearly 40 percent of the global market. And over the last generation, Vietnam has had one of the world’s fastest deforestation rates; the Coffee Watch report used satellite imagery and other records to show that in the Central Highlands, forest cover has shrunk by a third, while coffee’s footprint has expanded fourteenfold. Traditional jungle provinces like Dak Lak and Dak Nong and Gia Lai have seen less destruction in recent years, but only because there’s so little jungle left to cut.

“If this system collapses, shock waves will be felt in every supermarket and every café.”

At the same time, intensive irrigation is lowering the region’s water table, forcing farmers to extend wells as deep as 150 feet, while intensive chemical use is depleting soils, putting farmers on a ​“nutrient treadmill” in which they have to spray even more fertilizer and pesticide to maintain their yields. And when natural forests are cleared, the ecological services they provide—recharging groundwater, controlling erosion, buffering extreme temperatures—are lost with their trees. ​“The production system is eroding the ecological foundations on which it depends,” the report concluded. Droughts are already creating bean shortages, which contributed to record-high coffee prices last year, and as the climate warms, scientists believe half the area’s coffee acres might be unviable by midcentury. That could mean even more deforestation, as production expands elsewhere, and even higher prices.

“If this system collapses, shock waves will be felt in every supermarket and every café,” Higonnet said.

Higonnet is a badass do-gooder, a Yale Law School graduate who was a human rights activist for Amnesty International before joining Greenpeace to focus on climate. She got frustrated by Greenpeace’s exclusive focus on the four most prominent deforestation commodities—beef, soy, palm oil, and wood/​paper—so she helped found a well-respected organization called Mighty Earth that works on rubber and cocoa as well as the Big Four; she was knighted by the French government for her efforts to stop child labor and slavery along with deforestation. But she always wanted to expose coffee farming, which also has extreme labor and poverty problems as well as environmental problems, so she started Coffee Watch in late 2024. Coffee is responsible for only about 1 percent of deforestation, but as she points out, it receives way less than 1 percent of the attention paid to deforestation.

Drinking a cup of coffee every morning contributes about as much to global warming as driving a gasoline car 100 miles.

The Coffee Watch report does make a compelling case that the world’s coffee addiction has destructive consequences for nature. There’s something depressing about losing a Luxembourg-sized jungle to farmland in a generation. Then again, Luxembourg is just about the size of Rhode Island; around the world, coffee has replaced about a New Jersey–sized swath of forest. That’s certainly not nothing, but cattle replaced an entire California-size area of forest between 2000 and 2015, more than 200 times what’s been lost in Vietnam, and twice as much as what was lost to all other commodities combined. Globally, pastures now cover an area about twice the size of South America. In the United States, we use about half our agricultural land to produce beef, which only provides about 3 percent of our calories.

So yes, we are drinking a bit of the Earth, but nowhere near as much of it as we’re eating; the 1 percent of current deforestation driven by coffee is a drop in the pot compared with the 40 percent by cattle or the 18 percent by soy and oil palm. I did some crude calculations using this emissions data, and it looks like drinking a cup of coffee every morning contributes about as much to global warming as driving a gasoline car 100 miles—maybe twice as much if you add milk, but that’s just another reminder that cattle are the real climate menaces. They’re coal plants with tails.

Of course, coffee’s relatively modest impact is no consolation to the Asian unicorn. It would be better for the planet if people drank less coffee. Since that probably won’t happen, because people love coffee, and since lab-grown coffee isn’t ready for prime time, there ought to be more pressure on major coffee buyers to green their supply chains.

Coffee grows well in the shade of other trees, and while most of the world’s beans come from monocultures, about 20 percent are now grown through more sustainable agroforestry practices that combine reforestation with production, like planting ​“doughnuts” or ​“zebra stripes” of trees around or through plantations. Brazil has also reduced deforestation by helping farmers get more efficient; in one generation, they’ve doubled production while reducing their land footprint, and Nestlé is developing new climate-resilient varieties that could boost yields even further. Governments can also encourage farmers to use less irrigation water and fertilizer, or ban imports of coffee grown on recently deforested land.

From a policy perspective, though, it makes more sense to focus on beef, even if nobody wants to hear that just before firing up the grill on July 4. We need to get the rich world to eat less beef, even if that means eating more chicken and pork, and helping ranchers produce more beef on less land. We have to go hunting where the ducks are.

The real lesson of the transformation of the Central Highlands is not that drinking coffee is uniquely damaging to the climate or the environment. It’s that everything we consume does at least some damage—and until we start taking that seriously, our diets and our farms will keep ravaging the natural world.

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SCOTUS Gave the Government a “Blank Check” to Weaken Due Process for Green Card Holders

This Supreme Court term has no shortage of high-profile immigration-related cases. But as the justices wait until the last minute to rule on the more controversial ones—namely birthright citizenship—on Tuesday, they delivered a decision in a sleeper case that could have implications for millions of green card holders living in the United States.

In a 6-3 decision signed by Justice Clarence Thomas, the conservative supermajority held that border officers don’t need to have “clear and convincing evidence” that a lawful permanent resident committed a crime involving moral turpitude—a vaguely defined immigration law term that can cover a wide spectrum of crimes generally involving intent to defraud or cause bodily harm**—**before jeopardizing their rights and ability to stay in the country. In other words, agents at the border have just been given exceptional discretion to bypass protections generally afforded to green card holders.

Inthe case at issue, Blanche v. Lau, Muk Choi Lau, a Chinese-born green card holder was charged in New Jersey in 2012 with trademark counterfeiting. Lau then traveled abroad and tried to re-enter the United States at the airport with his green card. Under federal statute, returning lawful permanent residents are supposed to be treated as having already been admitted into the country—meaning they are essentially just coming back home.

But a border agent determined that, because of Lau’s pending criminal charges for a crime involving moral turpitude, he fit into an exception and could be classified as someone “seeking admission” (rather than already admitted) into the United States. Lau was paroled in, but had his green card confiscated. After he pleaded guilty to the charges, the federal government started removal proceedings against him.

An immigration judge found that Lau could be removed**,** but following an appeal, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. The appeals court concluded that the border office didn’t have enough evidence at that time to show that Lau had committed a crime and that he should have been treated under the default presumption that he had already been admitted into the United States due to his lawful permanent status.

“Critically,” Judge Richard J. Sullivan and the appeals panel ruled last year, “the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act] does not provide that an LPR (Lawful Permanent Resident] may be treated as seeking admission when he has been ‘charged with a crime’ or is ‘believed to have committed a crime; it permits such a treatment only when an LPR ‘has committed’ a crime.”

In Tuesday’s decision, the Supreme Court majority led by Justice Thomas vacated the Second Circuit’s judgment, arguing that the government had correctly reclassified Lau and that the federal statute didn’t actually require the border officer to “have clear and convincing evidence that Lau had committed a crime involving moral turpitude before deeming him an applicant for admission.”

The ruling in Blanche v. Lau is likely to create a chilling effect on lawful permanent residents traveling overseas. Notably, it follows proposed rules by the Trump administration to force immigrants to pursue green card applications from abroad, and make it considerably more expensive for green card holders to apply for US citizenship.

In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the Court’s decision undermined the “benefits and security that come with having a green card.” In the worst-case scenario, Justice Jackson reasoned, the government could “merely assume” at the border that a green card holder should be demoted to “seeking admission” and only justify that determination with “post hoc evidence.”

“I worry that the Court has now handed the Government a massive blank check.”

“I worry that the Court has now handed the Government a massive blank check,” Justice Jackson wrote. Green card holders, she added, “are as close to citizenship as one can get absent naturalization…Today, the majority ignores that crucial fact and empowers Government officials to act accordingly.”

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick with the American immigration Council noted on social media that the Supreme Court’s ruling does not mean that green card holders can simply be ordered deported by border agents. But classifying lawful permanent residents returning from abroad as “seeking admission” could open up a wide range of negative legal and practical consequences for them, including the possibility of detention and, eventually, deportation proceedings requiring a higher burden of proof for defense.

“It is very disturbing in the breadth of its reach, and I think we can expect border officers to overuse the power that they’re given here,” said Nancy Morawetz, a law professor and director of the Crimmigration Clinic at NYU. She worries about the implications for green card holders who could be subject to other grounds of inadmissibility, such as offenses involving controlled substances. “There are a lot of people who could be at real risk if the government doesn’t really have to have any proof…It’s very, very dangerous.”

Allen Orr, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the ruling lowers the due process standards green card holders are entitled to. “We’re giving a border officer the ability to determine if it’s a crime of moral turpitude and you might not even be guilty of it,” he said. “If the facts are clear and the person is excludable and does not deserve to be in the United States, then take their green card but afford them a process greater than some border officer at the port of entry.”

He warned on Bluesky: “The danger of this ruling is that it creates an incentive to use the border as a place where rights are diminished.” Orr said it further sends a troubling message to lawful permanent residents. “I already have clients who have green cards who are just afraid to travel,” he said, “because the government has said, as a green card holder, you’re just now a long-term visitor, we could deny you for anything.” The decision, he concluded, “aligns with the goal of excluding and removing people from the United States that are not US-born nationals.”

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Prairieland ICE Protesters Sentenced to Decades in Prison

On Tuesday, eight protesters who the Justice Department accused of having connections to antifa were sentenced to decades in federal prison over a shooting outside a Texas immigration detention center that left one police officer wounded.

The demonstrator who was convicted of shooting and wounded the officer, former US Marine Corps reservist Benjamin Song, was convicted of attempted murder in March and received a 100-year prison term. Seven other protesters received sentences ranging from 30 to 70 years.

US District Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush nominee, said the defendants in what has become known as the Prairieland trial, didn’t participate in a protest but “an assault on democracy.”

Justice Department prosecutors under the Trump administration have made extensive use of wide-ranging conspiracy charges in cases like Prairieland, where some of the defendants who received decades-long sentences were not involved with the planning of the protest in question and left when guards at the facility asked them to.

As my colleague Schuyler Mitchell wrote in September, the Trump administration signed a September 22 executive order designating “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization and a memo three days later, known as NSPM-7, assigning federal agencies to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” protesters engaging in “anti-capitalism,” “anti-fascism,” and “anti-Americanism.” The Prairieland trial was one of the first tests of the White House’s ability to make such claims stick.

The defendants, who were protesting the Prairieland immigration detention center in Alvarado, Texas, denied that they were affiliated with antifa, a decentralized term for various left-wing activists and anti-fascist groups, and were demonstrating in support of immigrants being detained at the facility.

In November, seven other defendants who were present at Prairieland pleaded guilty to federal charges of providing material support for terrorism or damaging property.

The Trump administration has deployed allegations of terrorism against protesters at an unprecedented scale. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz pointed out, the Justice Department charged 15 Minneapolis-area residents last week with felony “conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers,” and secured a conviction on the same charges against three Spokane, Washington, protesters. Both groups protested ICE facilities.

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The Supreme Court Deals Major Blow to Congressional Authority

In a single opinion, the Supreme Court on Tuesday took a swipe at Congressional authority while at the same time stripping some victims of religious violations the ability to sue over illegal treatment. The decision weakens a law guaranteeing freedom of religious expression in federally-funded prisons. But with time, the ruling may prove far moredisastrous and far-reaching, unleashing illegal behavior that both Congress and the victims are powerless to prevent.

The decision achieves this dual result by limiting Congress’ authority to require that terms in its funding laws can be enforcedthrough private suits against the individuals who violate them—making it harder for Congress to give these laws teeth and for victims to seek damages. The Constitution “may confer on Congress the power to spend money for the general welfare,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his majority opinion, but “it does not ‘endow Congress with [any] power to regulate conduct.’”

The majority’s decision demotes certain legislation to a merecontract.

This attack on Congress and the victims of unlawful behavior stems from a violation of one man’s religious rights while in a federally-funded prison. A former inmate with the Louisiana Department of Corrections, Damon Landor is a devout Rastafarian who follows the religious command not to cut his hair. When he was transferred to a new facility, Landor worried that the intake guards might shave his head, so he brought along a paper copy of a court case explaining his right to keep his hair long. The prison guards threw it in the trash, held him down, and shaved his head. Congress had passed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act to protect inmates against such abuses, and in that law, gave inmates like Landor the right to sue the individual guards who violated his rights. So in this case, Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, Lander sought damages under RLUIPA from the guards who shaved him.

Critically for this case, Congress enacted RLUIPA in 2000 under its broad Constitutional authority to spend money for the “general welfare,” or what is known as its Spending Clause authority. In today’s 6-3 decision along partisan and ideological lines, the court’s Republican appointees threw out Landor’s suit and, more broadly, limited Congress’ authority under the Spending Clause. In time, Landor and RLUIPA may prove to be vehicles through which the court’s conservative wing limits Congressional authority—while leaving victims of illegal behavior, like Landor, unable to seek damages.

Spending clause legislation is a common exercise of Congressional authority. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent points out, Congress has used the clause to protect people in federally funded nursing homes and people receiving emergency care at federally funded hospitals. It powers the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on discrimination in federal assistance, combats pollution under the Clean Air Act, and protects Medicare and Medicaid patients’ rights.

Yet the crux of the majority’s decision in Landor is to demote Spending Clause legislation to, essentially, a merecontract between the federal government and the party that receives the funds. Even though the Constitution says no such thing, the Roberts Court declares that Spending Clause legislation can only be enforced against violators who consent to be held liable, in the same way a contract is only valid of both parties consent. Under the court’s new holding,if, as in this case, prison guards violate RLUIPA, Congress’ only enforcement mechanism is to withdraw the prison’sfunding. It’s a cramped vision of Congressional authority that couldultimately allow states and individuals to overrule Congress’ ability to govern.

The Democratic appointees found the notion ridiculous. The Spending Clause gives Congress the “power to legislate, not merely to negotiate,” readJackson’s dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. “The Court reduces some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements—federal laws that secure civil rights, environmental stability, healthcare, and more—to nothing more than the wheelings-and-dealings of an especially wealthy private party.”

This case is in line with the Roberts Court’s broader project to grow the powers of the president and Supreme Court while limiting Congress’ authority. Often, this happens through decisions that take powers once exercised by Congress and hand them to the president or the courts. But in this case, the court went directly after Congress’ power to pass laws.

It’s possible that Congress can get around this swipe by adding language to spending laws requiring, in the case of RLUIPA, that guards at federally funded prisons explicitly consent topersonal liability under the law—providing that ingredient necessary to a contractual obligation. The majority decision acknowledges such a workaround could allow Congress to once again authorize private suits. But as the court pursues its limited view of legislative authority, such promises are unlikely to broadlypreserve Congress’ Spending Clause powers.

One reason to be suspiciousis that the majority’s decision invokes paeans to federalism and states rights—principles that the court has turned to in the past to gut civil rights laws. If Landor prevailed in his argument that the guards are liable under RLUIPA, Gorsuch writes, it“would be inconsistent with principles of state sovereignty and a federal government of limited and enumerated regulatory powers.” Perhaps, consent alone, achieved by Congress tweaking the language of Spending Clause legislation, will be enough to satisfy the majority’s objections to Landor’s suit and others like it.

But Landor‘s limits on legislators and citizens are no outlier. Just one year ago, the court, in another Gorsuch opinion, limited individuals’ ability to protect certain rights as Medicaid recipients through private suits. And on the same day as Landor, the same six-justice majority broadly interpreted one law in order to green light certain suits by oil companies, while shutting the courthouse doors to victims of human rights abuses under another law, the Alien Tort Statute.

“So tally today,” University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman posted after the court released its opinions, “victims of human rights violations & beneficiaries of public benefits programs can’t sue. oil companies can.”

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The EPA Relied on an Influential Glyphosate Study Even After Learning Monsanto Was a “Ghost Writer”

The US Environmental Protection Agency has known for nearly a decade that an influential 2013 scientific paper that concluded glyphosate is safe was actually ghostwritten by developer Monsanto. But the agency never informed the public and continued to rely on it, according to an EPA memo obtained by Mother Jones and revealed here for the first time.

The EPA cited the compromised paper as evidence that the world’s most widely used herbicide glyphosate—the key ingredient in Roundup—is safe to use in its 2020 assessment, despite its own internal investigation that concluded the research paper hid Monsanto’s role as an author. Now, nearly ten years after the agency came to its conclusion, the paper’s publisher, Taylor & Francis, said it has opened its own investigation into whether the paper was ghostwritten following a formal request made by a Harvard professor and her research associate to retract the study, as first reported by Retraction Watch last week.

The EPA’s Inspector General’s Office opened its investigation into the research paper in 2017, a few years after the paper was published in the influential science journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology with independent toxicologists Larry Kier and David Kirkland listed as its authors.

The Monsanto employee was therefore a “‘ghost writer’ which is a form of research misconduct.”

But the EPA memo concluded that Monsanto and one of its employees—with the financial backing of a consortium of other glyphosate manufacturers—seemed to have contributed key criteria including the “intellectual content” of the report. The Monsanto employee was therefore a “‘ghost writer’ which is a form of research misconduct,” according to the memo, which was written by a US special agent in the EPA Inspector General’s Office’s crimes division. The memo does not make clear whether Monsanto disclosed to the consortium, known officially as the Glyphosate Task Force, that it would be a “ghost writer” on the report.

This is the latest example to emerge of Monsanto’s concerted efforts to sway public understanding of its blockbuster herbicide glyphosate. In December, another influential review article that had found glyphosate to be safe was retracted after the publisher announced the paper’s authors had not disclosed Monsanto’s role. And a Mother Jones investigation about glyphosate being sprayed in forests found other examples of Monsanto’s hand in secretly orchestrating research papers. Now, Taylor & Francis said it is investigating both the 2013 research paper and a second peer-reviewed 2015 article also published in its journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology to assess whether they were ghostwritten by Monsanto employees.

Bayer, the German chemical company that purchased Monsanto in 2018 and continues to generate billions of dollars of revenue from Roundup every year, said in a statement that the EPA memo’s “allegations about the Kier & Kirkland paper was based on a limited set of documents that didn’t include elements such as sworn testimony from the authors.” Aside from the sworn testimony, it’s unclear what, if anything else, should have been included given the Inspector General relied on company emails and documents made public during litigation.

Since the late 1990s, studies by non-industry scientists showing glyphosate can damage genetic material in lab tests have set off a debate about whether the herbicide can cause cancer. According to the EPA Inspector General memo, a consortium of 25 glyphosate manufacturers wanted to publish their own research paper citing unpublished internal studies conducted by company scientists that showed glyphosate does not damage DNA.

“But once they had pulled all of the various studies together on genotoxicity for this review paper,” wrote the special agent in the EPA memo, “it was hard to present a ‘story’ that glyphosate was not genotoxic, because of ‘…the complicated ‘noise’ out there,’”—meaning the growing debate about whether it causes cancer—and “‘the story as written stretched the limits of credibility among less sophisticated audiences.’”

So “to add credibility to the proposed manuscript” they decided to pay a scientist named David Kirkland—considered a “heavy-hitter in the area of genotoxicity”— to be one of the named authors, along with scientist Larry Kier. The report that was eventually published presented Kier and Kirkland as the “sole” two authors who were “independent” of Monsanto and the consortium.

Yet there was another person helping shape the paper’s assessment: a Monsanto employee named David Saltmiras, according to the EPA memo. While all three of their names are redacted in the memo, they are found in now-public company emails that were exposed during litigation brought by people who said glyphosate made them sick.

In one of those emails from 2012, Kier said they should include Saltmiras as a co-author. “He is very deserving of this recognition and he was a co-author on the original literature review manuscript which was a predecessor to this publication,” Kier wrote.

Kirkland, in an email response, replied that if they included Saltmiras as a co-author they would no longer be “independent” of the company, and in that case he doubted the scientific journal would publish their report.

The Inspector General determined they hid Saltmiras’s contributions. “Because [Saltmiras] does not appear as a co-author on this manuscript, Monsanto’s involvement is also hidden,” wrote the US special agent, whose name was also redacted from the memo. The EPA memo continued: “Monsanto does have a vested interest in portraying glyphosate as a safe to use herbicide…By not making their involvement known in the manuscript discussed above, and the revenue generated by the sales of glyphosate products on a global basis, Monsanto appears to have a conflict of interest.”

The EPA memo concluded that the study’s named authors, Kier and Kirkland, “were not ‘the authors [which] had sole responsibility for the writing and content of the paper.’” The unnamed Monsanto employee Saltmiras “was a co-author of this report” for his substantive contributions on behalf of Monsanto, but was only named “in the acknowledgement section of this manuscript.”

“Why cite this paper when they knew that it was ghostwritten?”

Kier could not be reached for comment, and Saltmiras referred questions to Bayer, his current employer. Kirkland disputed the EPA memo’s findings. “I believe the memo is incorrect and I reject the claim. Our 2013 paper was NOT GHOSTWRITTEN,” he wrote an email. Saltmiras “did not contribute to or influence the analysis of the reports I reviewed,” he added in a later email.

Yet two researchers, Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes and Alexander “Sasha” Kaurov, who study corporate influence on science and who looked at the company emails made public during litigation came to a similar conclusion that the paper was ghostwritten. “The authors tried to mislead the public intentionally,” said Kaurov, a research fellow at Motu Economic & Public Policy Research in New Zealand.

And he questions why the EPA would have continued to rely on it. “It’s upsetting. Why cite this paper when they knew that it was ghostwritten?” asked Kaurov.

For instance, in the EPA’s revised “Evaluation of Carcinogenic Potential,” issued as part of its glyphosate assessment that concluded the herbicide was safe in 2020, the agency relied on the 2013 report for its data and its summaries of 16 other studies, meaning the agency accepted the compromised review as essentially a collection of studies finding that glyphosate was safe to use.

An EPA spokesperson in a statement wrote that its review of glyphosate “evaluated more than 6,000 studies across human-health and ecological disciplines, and its determinations reflected that full body of evidence.” But the agency did not respond to the question of why it continued to rely on the 2013 study despite concluding it was ghostwritten. The spokesperson confirmed that the agency never informed the public or other regulatory agencies abroad about that discovery.

The 2013 paper did make its way abroad: The European Food Safety Agency also cited the Kier and Kirkland study for its 2023 re-assessment of glyphosate that determined the herbicide is safe.

Evidence that glyphosate may be harmful to health continues to mount: Recent studies suggest the herbicide could contribute to metabolic disorders, brain inflammation, and damage to the gut microbiome. Notably, after a group of environmental and labor groups filed a lawsuit challenging the EPA’s 2020 assessment that glyphosate was safe to use, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the EPA’s safety assessment, ruling that the agency’s “errors in assessing human-health risk are serious” and “most studies EPA examined indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” a type of cancer. The EPA, which is currently relying on its 1993 safety assessment of glyphosate, is expected to release an updated review of the herbicide this year.

And Bayer is now on the hook for more than $12 billion in payouts to people who say the herbicide made them sick. The Supreme Court is currently considering whether to shield Bayer from some of these lawsuits. The Trump administration, which reportedly said in 2017 that it had “Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation,” also intervened in the Supreme Court case to support Bayer. As Bayer argued in court, the company believes it should largely have immunity from lawsuits since the EPA concluded that glyphosate products were safe.

But it’s now becoming clearer that the EPA came to that conclusion based in part on compromised scientific research that Monsanto secretly orchestrated.

“It’s just sad,” Kaurov said.

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DHS Still Has a Civil Rights Team. Aliya Rahman Is Testing It.

When Aliya Rahman’s lawyers approached her about filing a complaint with the civil rights office of the Department of Homeland Security, she almost laughed in their faces.

“It’s hard to imagine that sending a letter to DHS to ask them to respect our civil rights will do anything,” said Rahman, a disabled US citizen who was dragged from her car and detained by DHS agents during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. Today, Rahman, who also has an ongoing civil tort claim against DHS, filed that complaint anyway.

On January 13, ICE agents detained Rahman as she tried to drive to a doctor’s appointment, punching out the window of her car and carrying her by her arms and legs, ignoring her requests for mobility and communication aids, which Section 504 of the federal Rehabilitation Act is meant to guarantee. Eventually, the pain caused her to black out in her cell. Rahman contends that the agents’ aggressive treatment violated her civil rights as a disabled person.

“I asked for my cane and was told no, pulled up by my arms, and prodded forward in leg irons by an agent saying ‘Walk! You can do it. Walk.’”

“We request that DHS take corrective action to not only redress these violations, but also to ensure all individuals with disabilities who interact with DHS officers are treated with dignity and respect,” Rahman’s lawyers wrote in their complaint.

Rahman described how ICE agents harmed her in congressional testimony organized by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.): **“**Shooting pain went through my head, neck, and wrists when I hit the ground and people leaned on my back…I was carried face down through the street by my cuffed arms and legs while yelling that I had a brain injury,” Rahman said:

“Agents repeatedly had to stop and ask how to do tasks. I received no medical screening, phone call, or access to a lawyer. I was denied a communication navigator when my speech began to slur. Agents laughed as I tried to immobilize my own neck. I asked for my cane and was told no, pulled up by my arms, and prodded forward in leg irons by an agent saying “Walk! You can do it. Walk.” Agents did not know if the facility had a wheelchair. When I was finally placed in one to be taken to interrogation, an agent taunted: “You were driving right? So your legs do work.”

Section 504 prohibits discrimination against disabled people in programs and organizations that receive federal funding, which includes ICE. But Rahman’s experience, her lawyers said, was “not an aberration.” In one 2022 complaint, a Border Patrol officer allegedly took away the crutch of a child they apprehended and didn’t provide an alternative. Between 2019 and 2023, at least seven people with mental health disabilities were placed in solitary confinement in ICE custody. And in 2025, a Deaf DACA recipient was reportedly denied access to an American Sign Language interpreter for weeks.

DHS’ Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), an internal body meant to investigate exactly these types of abuses, was gutted by then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March 2025, reducing its workforce from over 150 full-time federal employees to fewer than 40 a year later, nearly all of whom are contractors.

DHS spokespeople did not provide current employment figures when asked, but stated that all of the office’s “All of the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties’ legally required functions continue to be performed, but in an efficient and cost-effective manner and without hindering the Department’s mission of securing the homeland,” further alleging that “these offices obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission. Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often functioned as internal adversaries.”

Before CRCL was functionally dismantled, a complaint like Rahman’s would be read by its staffers, who would then issue recommendations. Now, though, she doesn’t necessarily expect that it will be read at all. “I don’t think I’m going to hear from these folks,” Rahman said. “Typically, what they do is put out social media content when they’re mad at me.” (DHS has issued posts implying that Rahman’s conduct was criminal.)

“I’m still rocking my supervillain braces, my shoulders aren’t healed yet,” Rahman told me June 22, showing off her shoulder support gear. “I’m just trying to put my body back together.”

Thanks to her injuries, Rahman can only leave the house two or three days per week, she said. But as she heals, she’s become an advocate for others who have been detained or harmed by ICE, particularly those who are also disabled, many of whom don’t have the privileges she does: that she is a citizen, that she has savings, that she speaks English and has access to lawyers.

“Many of them also had disabilities or chronic illnesses that were impacted by how they were handled, or they developed them afterwards,” Rahman said, and have learned—like her—that disclosing their disabilities can draw officers’ ridicule rather than accommodation.

“People will say things like, you’re not disabled, you wear eyeliner,” Rahman said. “The guy inside [Whipple Detention Center] was like, ‘Your legs work, you were driving, right?’” Online, she sees families with autistic kids saying that they are terrified of any interaction with law enforcement. She doesn’t blame them.

“I experienced people doubling down on violence when I raised that I was disabled, and that is not a society we can live in,” Rahman said.

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Did Trump Get Special Access to Retatrutide?

While members of his cabinet stuff sauerkraut down their wives’ handbags to maintain diets, speculation is suddenly mounting over whether President Donald Trump may have received early access to retatrutide, the potent experimental weight-loss drug from Eli Lilly and eagerly anticipated by millions.

The questions come amid a new report in STAT News pointing to a certain 79-year-old man with special insider connections who somehow managed to gain access to retatrutide, which has not received FDA approval, through the agency’s “compassionate use” program. You know, the kind of powerful individual with extraordinary ties to the Food and Drug Administration, as well as Eli Lilly, the same pharmaceutical company Trump bought stock in through the end of March and has partnered with the Trump administration to hash out pricing structures.

The White House on Tuesday denied that Trump was the applicant who made the retatrutide request. Eli Lilly, meanwhile, declined to outright deny the report. “In rare situations, when individuals can’t join a clinical trial and have run out of treatment options,” a spokesperson for Eli Lilly told Mother Jones, adding that the company does “not comment on the specifics of individual cases.”

None of which is likely to quell the theory. After all, Trump, according to his most recent health evaluation, just about hits the threshold of clinical obesity; he approvingly refers to GLP-1’s as the “fat shot” and has publicly complained about the high costs of accessing the weight loss medications in the United States. Trump has also been something of a pioneer when it comes to experimental drugs. In 2020, after infamously suggesting people could inject themselves with bleach if they got infected with Covid, the president opted for an unapproved antibody treatment after testing positive himself months later.

But perhaps the biggest tell is the president’s unflinching record of indifference when it comes to outcries over inappropriate behavior, general shadiness, and conflicts of interest. So did Trump use the levers of power to gain unusual access to retatrutide? Time will tell if the president starts to debut a trimmed-down physique. It’s either that or the kimchi.

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Downballot Democrats Are Smashing Recruitment Records

When the Kansas legislature took up a bill in early 2026that would strip transgender residents’ driver’s licenses and bar them from government bathrooms, Bobby Joe Robertson Jr., a financial analyst at apetroleum refinery in the small town of McPherson, about an hour north of Wichita, decided to write her state representative a letter.

“Technically, I wrote three,” Robertson says. There was the original letter, asking her legislator if he’d be up to meet with her, a trans woman, to discuss the painful effects the law would have on her family. And then a follow-up asking the legislator if he could please respond. “The third one,” she recalls, “was me telling him that I’m going to take his job.”

It will be an uphill battle. President Donald Trump carried McPherson by a more than two-to-one margin in 2024, as Robertson’s current Republican state representative was running unopposed in HD-73. A different Republican legislator had run unopposed in 2022. And 2020. And 2018. But this year, the incumbent has chosen not to seek re-election—and Robertson has been knocking doors after work for months, organizing her neighbors, and raising money for the race ahead. “I don’t think it’ll be a landslide or anything,” she said. “But I think I have the potential.”

“The power that is built in November in our state capitals…is going to have a national impact.”

Robertson is one of 18 Kansas Democrats contesting a state house seat this fall that went unopposed in the last election. Some of these districts have gone years without even token Democratic opposition—two will feature their first contested election since 2006. You have to go all the way back to 1990 to find this many Democrats running for Kansas’ legislature—incidentally, the last year they won a majority. Most of these races, in deep-red areas, will likely stay out of reach for the party. But Brandon Woodard, the Democratic minority leader in the lower chamber, believes another goal is achievable: that at least five out of the party’s more than 100 local recruits can flip districts—enough to break the Republicans’ supermajority—while turning out extra voters to keep the governor’s mansion in Democratic hands.

It’s not just Kansas. Across the country, Democrats are smashing downballot recruitment records, fielding more candidates in more races than they have in decades—or ever. For the first time, the party has a candidate for every Minnesota state legislative race, as it hopes to build on a one-vote majority in the state senate and break a 67–67 logjam in the house. In Texas, where Democrats are looking to make inroads in a Republican-dominated legislature and get out the vote for Senate candidate James Talarico and other statewide candidates, the party is also fielding candidates for every legislative seat for the first time in history. They’ve got candidates in every race in North and South Carolina (where the party hopes to break Republican supermajorities), and in Arizona (where it’s seeking to flip both chambers).

And in New Hampshire, in a bid for a governing trifecta, Democrats are contesting every state senate race, and at least 361 of 400 state house seats—57 more than Republicans. According to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which invests in state-level downballot races, the party is also contesting a 21st-century record number of races in Indiana and Georgia.

As I reported previously, the DLCC has ambitious targets this fall, with hundreds of seats in play across the country. Democrats have been buoyed by dominant showings in 2025’s off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey, and a string of victories and overperformances in special elections—including, this spring, a win in the Florida state house district that includes Mar-a-Lago. DLCC president Heather Williams has argued this November has the potential to be “2010 in reverse”—a reference to Barack Obama’s first midterm shellacking, when Republicans picked up 700 legislative seats that allowed them to gerrymander their way to enduring majorities in states like North Carolina. Now, with both parties in the midst of a redistricting arms race, these elections could help determine which politicians control the next stages of the battle—a significance that will be felt far beyond any state’s borders.

“On the other side of this election, we’re going to sharply go into a continued conversation about redistricting, the need to shore up the path to the presidency, and ensure that our voting laws and our certification processes are strong as we go into a big 2028 presidential cycle,” Williams says. “On top of all of that, this Republican administration continues to move policy work of dealing with the issues of today into the states.

“The power that is built in November in our state capitals is not only going to affect those that live in those communities,” Williams adds. “It is going to have a national impact.”

Downballot recruitment is no guarantee of success—particularly in the sorts of ruby-red areas Democrats like Robertson will be contesting. Republicans’ power in Kansas’ legislature will likely hinge on a small number of competitive districts. But the presence of candidates in almost every race isa useful barometer for an energized base and party organization. In Kansas, Woodard said, the numbers reflect, in part, a strategic shift. Last year, his caucus hired a political director earlier than it ever had, as the state party launched a tour of Republican-dominated areas to drum up interest from local parties and activists.

“If we’re having a wave year, some of those districts that are having the candidate on the ground doing the work might end up in picking up a seat that maybe wasn’t on our radar,” Woodard says. “More than anything, if we can move the needle on a district that we lose by 20 percent, and someone does the work and we only lose by 15 percent, that’s a win in my book as well.”

Other Kansas Democrats, like Pete Ferrell, a rancher and self-described “former Eisenhower Republican” who threw his hat in the ring for a seat east of Wichita, are running for less tangible reasons. No one has contested the district in ten years, and while Ferrell told me he hadn’t raised any money and wasn’t yet sure what his campaign would look like, to him it’s about the principle of the thing.

“I’m 73. I’ve probably got no business doing this,” he said. “But my God, I wasn’t gonna open that ballot up and not see a Democrat.”

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“Water-Gate”: FIFA’s Solution to World Cup Heat Is Seen as a Cash Grab

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

When the United States took the pitch against Australia last week, millions of soccer fans tuned in. Anyone who hadn’t watched a match since the last World Cup might have noticed something new: players stopping midway through each half to drink some water.

Introduced in the name of player safety, these mandatory three-minute breaks are a surprise controversy that has shoved climate change into the spotlight. Water-gate, blared a headline in The Independent, a UK newspaper. The chief sportswriter at the Daily Mail called the breaks a “momentum killer” and a “money-grabbing disgrace.”

“**I think you have ⁠to look at it in every game separately…**We’re inundated with commercials.”

Fans were equally outraged. Spectators at the match between England and Croatia booed when the referee blew the whistle, and comments poured in on Reddit. “I’m booing from home,” read one. Another said, “FIFA ruined the beautiful game.”

FIFA, the sport’s governing body and organizer of the tournament, declined to comment and referred Grist to its announcement of the policy in December. “The use of hydration breaks is part of a focused attempt to ensure the best possible conditions for players,” the statement read.

Before this World Cup, cooling breaks only occurred when the wet bulb temperature—essentially a measure of air temperature and humidity combined—reached 32 degrees C, or about 90 F. Now the rule applies to all games, regardless of temperature, humidity, or other factors. It even applies to matches played indoors with air conditioning.

The move came after criticism of a tournament in the United States last summer, when the organization representing players, FIFPRO, said extreme heat should have canceled matches. “It has never been more important,” the organization said in a press release before the World Cup, “to give space to scientific knowledge and find mitigation strategies that protect the health and wellbeing of our players.”

There is no doubt that rest and water can help protect players in a world where extreme heat is becoming more common and increasingly dangerous. But many fans, and even athletes, think FIFA has gone too far. “If it’s really hot, obviously it will be good to put them in. But I think you have ⁠to look at it in every game separately, in my opinion,” said Virgil van Dijk, captain of the Netherlands’ squad. One Reddit user complained, “We’re inundated with commercials.”

“I don’t think the health of the players is their primary concern.”

That’s been a frequent complaint, and it has led to speculation that FIFA implemented the breaks to boost the number of ads that are shown. Broadcasters aren’t required to go to full-screen commercials during hydration breaks—Telemundo and the BBC, for instance, don’t. FIFA also dictates that ads must start 20 seconds into the pause and end 30 seconds before play resumes. But that still creates 2 minutes and 10 seconds of extra ad time available per half, which can be extremely lucrative. The Wall Street Journal reports that a 30-second spot during early games sells for roughly $200,000 and rises to around $750,000 when the US national team plays.

“They’ve essentially divided the game into quarters,” John Kosner, a former ESPN executive, told the Journal, “and made enormously valuable breaks.”

About 67 minutes into the opening game of the World Cup, the referee signaled for a mandatory hydration break. The American broadcaster, Fox, cut to commercials. But they ran longer than the respite, so players were left stalling and many viewers missed the restart entirely. Fox said it didn’t see the referee signal the start of the break because it came during a replay. FIFA doesn’t plan to punish the network. But the incident did little to quell people’s fears about commercialization—in part because the temperature at kickoff was a relatively balmy 74 degrees F.

FIFA has required the breaks in all matches as an effort to be fair across a tournament that sees teams playing in 16 stadiums and three countries. That argument, though, has again done little to ease criticism. “That doesn’t ring true to me,” said Chris Taylor, the head coach of the Vermont Green FC’s men’s team, explaining that every soccer game has different stoppages and different lengths.

The Green are a climate-focused organization, so the dangers of extreme heat are particularly front of mind. Taylor sees hydration breaks as critical when the conditions warrant them, which they have numerous times during his decades-long career as a player and coach. Still, he questions FIFA’s motives at this World Cup.

“I don’t think the health of the players is their primary concern,” he said. “This World Cup has felt that every angle has been monetized.”

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Trump Is Losing His War On Algae

Like the Strait of Hormuz, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has exposed the limits of American power: President Donald Trump is also losing his war against algae.

In the face of thriving algal blooms and peeling “American flag blue” paint, the National Park Service on Monday began draining the pool for repairs. A contractor performing the work told E&E News that those repairs would not be done by July 4. The prior rehab, which Trump rushed to complete via no-bid contracts and more than $14 million in spending so far, has failed.

Trump, though, has blamed the problems on vandalism. And he has dispatched a hodgepodge army of law enforcement to protect the pool from “Radical Left Lunatics,” who he has said should face “Years in jail!”

Observing the action at the pool over much of the long weekend, we did not spot any antifa dumping algae, as MAGA conspiracy theorists allege. The hot temperature, shallow water and flawed filtration system means the green Scenedesmus algae can conquer the pool without human help.

There were, however, lots of cops. Walking around the pool at about 4 p.m. ET on Saturday, we counted at least seven US Marshals, some in “fugitive task force” tactical gear. They were supported by around 30 local police officers, volunteers who said they had been deputized for 30 days by the Marshals Service to help provide security for 250th anniversary celebrations. They came from Oklahoma City; Idaho Falls; Sarpy County, Nebraska; as well as Ontario, Wayne and Monroe counties in New York. They were mostly standing in the shade, and friendly. Some were hoping to catch Nationals game on a day off. They seemed sort of bored.

The cops were coordinating with a handful of Park Police officers and maybe a dozen National Guard troops from Georgia and Louisiana, who were patrolling the pool in small groups. Over the last few days, agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have also appeared poolside.

On Saturday, there were issues with radio frequency connections, so a mounted Park Police officer rode a white horse between groups of officers to share information on potential threats to the pool. He was less chatty than the volunteer officers, but he said that the horse’s name was Delilah, and that she was 21 years old.

The officers explained that visitors could take paint chips, but peeling paint still attached was forbidden.

In the pool, seven or so Park Service employees, wearing boots, waterproof overalls and NPS hoodies for the sun—it was about 86 degrees and sunny—were vacuuming up algae using pumps attached to long poles. (They had by then given up pouring in hydrogen peroxide.) Machines were pushing what looked like white foam into the water: the “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” that the administration has claimed would kill the algae. Generators powering the pumps hummed loudly as green-tinted water poured out into drains on the Mall.

Another dozen or so uniformed Park Service employees looked on from the shade. On the north side of the pool, a duck and eight ducklings sat on the edge of the water. A park ranger sitting nearby said neither the algae nor cleaning efforts would hurt them.

From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, tourists took pictures of the scene. A band, in traditional Polish garb, prepared to play folk music for a holiday marking the summer solstice. A tourist shop nearby sold $18 water bottles with stickers advertising Freedom 250, the semi-private group Trump is using to organize highly personal celebrations linked to the 250th anniversary.

By the pool, a person in a pink frog costume brandished a “Team Algae” sign and heckled two National Guard troops. “Let’s go algae, let’s go,” the frog chanted, along with something about “pond scum.”

A small boy, in an ice cream cone shirt, asked his mother if the critics were protesting the algae. “No,” she answered. “They’re mad at the president.”

“Did he mean to grow the algae?” the boy asked. “No,” she said. Then they went to get ice cream.

Near one of the drains, an older couple, maybe in their sixties, picked through the grass nearby for loose pieces of blue paint, having first checked with the Park Police that doing so was permissible.

The officers explained that visitors were allowed to put their hands in the water. They could even take paint chips that were already detached. But peeling the paint still attached to the pool was forbidden.

The administration said Monday that Park Police have made five arrests and issued five citations for alleged vandalism. But an officer on the scene Friday evening said that they had also detained more than 20 people, in many cases without further action, for suspected pool tampering.

On Sunday afternoon, Trump posted that he had “just inspected the pool” and decried the vandalism he said he observed.

“WOW, who would do such a thing?,” Trump wrote. “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE!”

The president, though, didn’t view the pool from the ground. He appears to have formed his impression from a helicopter as he returned to the White House from Camp David.

Down below, one of the ducklings was photographed floating dead in water. (Experts note that most ducklings in the wild die before reaching maturity, so it’s not clear whether the algae or chemicals used to clean the pool were to blame.)

On Saturday around 5:30 p.m., the radios of the marshals we were walking past barked. “One male, black shoes, white socks, currently being detained,” someone said. “Eleven Charlie moved to intercept.” Two officers sped away in a golf cart.

Across the pool, Delilah galloped toward a group of National Guard troops surrounding a young man, in white socks, seated with his ankles crossed on the grass by the north side of the pool. A Park Police cruiser, siren on, pulled up.

By the time we made it around, a half dozen of the local police, seven National Guard troops and a couple Park Police officers surrounded the suspected vandal in a semi-circle, facing a small crowd of onlookers.

After a few minutes, they let the guy go. He declined to give his name. But he said he was from Indiana, and that he had stuck his hand in the water and pulled out a piece of floating paint. The officers had suspected that he pulled it off. He received a citation, he said. He walked off with his family, looking embarrassed.

The cops dispersed. There was a big pile of poop where Delilah had stood. In the water, the feds kept vacuuming the algae.

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In This Utah Primary, Trump Endorsed One Candidate, Pardoned the Other

Last Wednesday night, President Donald Trump inserted himself into a Utah GOP primary by endorsing incumbent Rep. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) for Congress. “Celeste has a strong Record of Success, and resounding support from her Community,” he wrote on Truth Social. “SHE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN!”

Maloy’s opponent, however, former state legislator Phil Lyman, has his own MAGA cred. In 2020, Trump pardoned him for an old conviction for illegally riding an ATV on public lands. And in this mostly rural district full of Sagebrush Rebellion supporters, the pardon might be more of a selling point.

“He absolutely could win,” says Bryan Schott, founder of the online news site Utah Political Watch who has been closely tracking the under-the-radar race. “He is a true iconoclast. His supporters are very passionate.”

Back in May 2014, Lyman, then a San Juan County commissioner, organized a protest against the Bureau of Land Management for banning motorized vehicles in Utah’s Recapture Canyon. The canyon had been closed since 2007 to protect prehistoric archeological sites, but just weeks before the protest, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy had led an armed standoff with the BLM after it attempted to impound his cows that were illegally grazing on federal land. The standoff set off a wave of anti-government activism across the West, including in Utah.

During their protest, Lyman and others, including Bundy’s son Ryan, illegally rode ATVs through the fragile canyon, a brazen move that got Lyman prosecuted for riding off-road vehicles on closed roads. A federal jury convicted him of two misdemeanors. He was sentenced to 10 days in jail and three years of probation, and ordered to pay nearly $96,000 in restitution.

The prosecution turned an unrepentant Lyman into something of a local folk hero for facing off with the federal government, which owns 64 percent of the land in Utah. Utah Republicans of all stripes, including then-Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox, tripped over each other to show their support for him. Gov. Gary Herbert even tried to use $100,000 in state tax money to pay for Lyman’s appeal.

When that failed, Republican politicians pledged thousands of dollars of their own money to pay Lyman’s legal fees. “We are proud to support one of our own,” Cox said, after adding $1,000 to a pile of cash collected by lawmakers at a meeting in the state capitol. “Commissioner Lyman is one of the finest individuals I know.”

“We are proud to support one of our own.”

Lyman lost his appeal, but in 2020, after urging from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), Trump pardoned him, suggesting he’d been a victim of selective prosecution. “Mr. Lyman is known to be a man of integrity and character,” White House officials wrote.

In 2018, his notoriety propelled him into the state legislature, where he was a member of the Yellowcake Caucus, a group of conservative legislators from rural counties known for uranium mining. During the extreme drought in 2022, when many state Republicans were taking steps to keep Great Salt Lake from drying up, Lyman organized a meeting at the state Capitol to expose what the caucus considered the real culprit behind the lake’s plight. “Trees are the enemy,” said one of the witnesses, suggesting that trees sucked up too much water. Lyman had been lobbying legislators to devote money to tree-thinning projects rather than forcing alfalfa farmers to conserve.

Then, in 2024, Lyman launched an upstart campaign to run against incumbent Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, who only a few years earlier had been chipping in for Lyman’s legal defense. During the campaign, he took aim at Cox’s signature initiatives: Disagree Better, a program he’d created as head of the National Governors Association to urge people to dial back exactly the sort of polarizing rhetoric Lyman specializes in. It won Cox plaudits nationally, but in Utah, Lyman found “Disagree Better” a rich source of campaign punchlines. At an event I attended in 2024:

Lyman told the crowd that basically, Cox’s initiative is predicated on a lie. The notion that “you either agree with me, or you disagree with me on my terms. And that’s what’s happening right now in this in this state and this election with Governor Cox.” In fact, the whole effort was “a leftist, Marxist tactic to get people to drop their opinions. It’s manipulation to silence them.” He insisted that the whole enterprise might work if people on the other side would tell the truth, “Then maybe,” he said, “we could disagree better.”

Lyman ultimately lost the GOP primary but ran as a write-in candidate in the November general election, which he also lost. Undeterred, he filed challenges and lawsuits against various state officials, trying to prove that Cox had stolen the election. He had some familiarity with this strategy, having been active in the “election integrity” movement kicked off by Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Lyman even appeared at events with My Pillow guy Mike Lindell that promoted fraudulent election conspiracy theories.

Politically, there’s not a whole lot of distance between Lyman’s views and those of his much better-funded opponent, Celeste Maloy, particularly when it comes to federal control of public lands—a hot-button issue in the district. In fact, while Lyman protested in Recapture Canyon with the Bundys in 2014, Maloy is actually related to them. She’s Cliven Bundy’s niece by marriage and cousin of the far-right militant Ammon Bundy, Cliven’s son who staged an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016.

Maloy’s ties to Utah don’t run particularly deep. She grew up in a small town in Nevada but did attend college and law school in Utah. She was first elected in a special election in 2023 to fill the remaining term of retiring Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), for whom she’d worked as an attorney. Stewart backed her campaign, but even then, Maloy barely made it through the three-way primary.

A challenger unsuccessfully sued to get her off the primary ballot, arguing that she was ineligible to run because her voter registration in Utah was inactive before she filed as a candidate, and she hadn’t voted in the state in 2020 or 2022. As a Hill staffer, she’d been living in Virginia, but Maloy had claimed her sister’s address in Cedar City as her permanent residence. She ultimately prevailed and remained on the ballot. But even cousin Ammon endorsed someone else in the race.

When Maloy ran for her first full term in 2024, Trump backed her, as did most of the Utah congressional delegation—except Sen. Mike Lee, who supported one of her opponents. Even with the support of the state’s Republican establishment, she won the GOP primary by just 176 votes—less than one percent and hardly a sign of a deep well of support. This year, she’s had an 8-1 fundraising advantage over Lyman. Yet Maloy barely bested him at the GOP nominating convention in April.

Utah candidates have two paths for getting on a primary ballot. They can collect petition signatures or win enough delegate votes at a state nominating convention. Lyman has been wildly popular with convention delegates, who tend to be more MAGA than other Republicans. When he ran for governor in 2024, convention delegates overwhelmingly voted for him over Cox, whom they booed.

Lyman ultimately lost that primary—but by less than 9 points, which was far closer than anyone expected him to get. (Democrats are such a nonfactor in Utah that the winner of the GOP primary generally wins in November, a problem that prompts many Democrats to register as Republicans so they can influence the process—even a little.) This year, Maloy beat Lyman at the convention, but by a razor-thin margin: 50.9 to 49.09 percent. Both of them advanced to the June 23rd primary.

The 3rd district congressional race may be surprisingly close because the district is new, redrawn this year in response to a court order ending partisan gerrymandering. Maloy had previously represented the 2nd district but switched to run in the new 3rd after redistricting. The 3rd district includes a lot more counties that Lyman won handily in his statewide race against Cox. According to Schott’s math, 60 percent of registered Republicans in the district have never seen Maloy on a ballot, even though this will be her fifth election in three years. If Lyman wins the congressional primary, says Schott, “it’s because people know him.”

There’s little polling in the race. Prediction markets suggest Maloy will crush Lyman. Yet the ultimate results will rest on turnout, and Lyman is “a partisan warrior. She’s a technocrat,” Schott says. “Partisan warriors inspire people to vote.”

Maloy hasn’t made much effort to counter Lyman’s base by reaching out to more moderate voters—and there are some. In this rural, red Utah district, tourism has become a growth industry since President Clinton created the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument 30 years ago over objections from many local officials, who to this day would prefer to see it turned into a coal mine.

Blake Spalding is one of the two founding executive chefs of the award-winning Hell’s Backbone Grill & Farm in Boulder, Utah, and co-owner of Boulder Mountain Lodge next door. Located inside the monument, the operation is one of the largest private employers in Garfield County, which is in Maloy’s district. Spalding says Maloy has never been there. She’s voting for Lyman.

“It’s not like I love Phil Lyman,” she explained. “And he has definitely never eaten in my restaurant.” As a longtime public lands advocate, Spalding is well aware that both Lyman and Maloy are hostile to federal protections for Grand Staircase. But she believes “it’s better not to vote for Trump- endorsed candidates, and Trump endorsed Celeste.”

That said, she’ll be voting for a Democrat in November. “I’m gonna vote for whoever is going to do the best job for the hummingbirds.”

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Why GM Is Betting on a Future With Sodium-Ion Battery Storage

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

Peak Energy announced last week that it has entered a new partnership with General Motors to manufacture sodium-ion batteries for energy storage systems.

The deal marks a pivotal moment for Peak, a startup founded three years ago, and an opportunity for GM to branch out into a battery technology that is largely limited to China.

I spoke last week with Cameron Dales, Peak’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, and I started by asking him how he would explain a sodium-ion battery to a 10-year-old.

“It’s the same raw material that goes into table salt. It’s an abundant element.”

A good place to start, he said, is to understand that the market-leading technology—lithium-ion batteries—gained a foothold in the 1990s because of high energy density. So it has a long track record of success.

“They pack a lot of power into a small package, which is why they’re so great for mobile applications, because you’re carrying this battery around with you in your phone, you’re carrying it around with you in your car, which is a large mobile device,” he said.

But there are downsides. Lithium-ion batteries use rare and expensive materials such as lithium and cobalt, and they are highly flammable.

Sodium-ion is a sister technology, he said. The main difference is that it uses sodium to carry the charge inside the battery, rather than lithium. “It’s the same raw material that goes into table salt,” Dales said. “It’s an abundant element.”

Also, fire risk is much lower.

The main downside is that a sodium-ion battery has lower energy density than a lithium-ion one, so an energy storage project requires a larger battery or batteries to achieve the same capacity.

But what about the cost?

Right now, sodium-ion batteries cost more than lithium-ion because the latter has economies of scale from being the dominant technology and companies have spent decades honing the manufacturing process. But companies such as Peak are confident that sodium-ion batteries will be less expensive, and eventually much less expensive, as the product moves from the fringes of the market to the mainstream.

“Sodium-ion battery technology has advanced rapidly over the past two years, moving from lab-scale validation to early commercial deployment.”

The world’s leading battery-maker, CATL of China, has invested in developing sodium-ion batteries for cars and energy storage, citing cost and safety advantages.

In the United States, Peak is one of about a dozen companies working on the technology. One of its peers, Natron Energy, abruptly closed last year when its funding dried up. It had about 100 employees and operations in California and Michigan.

Peak, which is based in Burlingame, California, in the Bay Area, has about 125 employees. It also has a cell engineering center in Broomfield, Colorado, near Denver. The company demonstrated its technology by completing a 3.1-megawatt-hour sodium-ion battery in the Denver area last year.

Peak was founded in 2023 by Landon Mossberg, the CEO, who came from the battery maker Northvolt and had prior experience at Tesla, and Dales, who previously was at the battery maker Enovix.

Under the partnership with GM, the automaker will develop sodium-ion batteries in its Michigan battery lab, and Peak will be able to use them in its energy storage systems.

The agreement helps GM build an energy business that includes electric vehicles, charging and stationary energy storage. Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president for battery and sustainability, said in a news release that his company believes “sodium-ion will be a defining chemistry for grid-scale energy storage systems.”

GM is one of several automakers branching out into energy storage systems. One reason for this is that the companies built battery manufacturing capacity that exceeds current EV demand, so they are looking to new markets.

“The ability to store energy is so foundational to so many things we do in the world.”

Based on manufacturing capacity, sodium-ion battery market share is essentially zero in North America, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. It will still be less than 1 percent in 2030, according to the research firm’s forecast.

In China, sodium-ion’s market share is 1 percent and on track to rise to 3.4 percent by 2030.

“Sodium-ion battery technology has advanced rapidly over the past two years, moving from lab-scale validation to early commercial deployment,” said Anya Sidhu, a battery analyst for Benchmark, in an email.

Sidhu said sodium-ion batteries are emerging as a complementary technology to lithium-ion rather than a replacement.

“The partnership between GM and Peak Energy signals growing commercial confidence, particularly for stationary energy storage, where cost and supply chain resilience matter more than energy density,” she said.

Dales said the market is large and diverse enough that several, if not many, battery technologies will be major contributors. For example, analysts and battery scientists have long made the case that solid-state batteries—with a solid instead of a liquid or gel as a key component—are the future because of high energy densities.

“The ability to store energy is so foundational to so many things we do in the world,” he said. “There’s no reason why a single solution should be the thing that works best for every single application.”

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Trump Threatens Iran as JD Vance Announces “Great Progress” on Ceasefire

This morning, Vice President JD Vance touched down in Switzerland for the first round of talks with Iran. The stated goal: extending last week’s interim mediated ceasefire and the Memorandum of Understanding signed by President Donald Trump into a more permanent peace in the 110-day US-Israeli war on Iran. But as those talks continued, Trump lost no time in taking to social media and Fox News to threaten Iran.

“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump wrote on his platform Truth Social Sunday morning. “Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”

Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP

( TS: Jun 21 2026, 9:30 AM ET )​​​‍​​‌‍​​‌‍​​​​​​​‌‍​​​​​​​​‌‍​​​​​​​​​‌‍… pic.twitter.com/4FYtEyoF8s

— Commentary Donald J. Trump Truth Social Posts On X (@TrumpTruthOnX) June 21, 2026

Lebanon’s civil defense reported that Israeli strikes had killed at least 16 people on Saturday morning, and the country’s health ministry said at least 47 people were killed on Friday. In response, Iran once again closed the Strait of Hormuz shipping pathway, which before the war carried a fifth of the world’s oil and gas, saying the US violated its deal to end the war by allowing Israel to continue to bomb Lebanon.

Meanwhile, in the Bürgenstock resort near Lake Lucerne where the talks are being held, Vance said that “great progress” was being made, without being explicit about the steps that had been taken. He noted that the gathering would “allow us to sit together as teams for the first time in history,” with the goal of turning “over a new leaf to transform our relationship with the people of Iran, and to extend an outstretched hand.”

Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a lead negotiator, said Iran’s military is prepared to react to Trump’s verbal aggression. “They better be careful with their statements; our armed forces are ready to respond in a different way,” he wrote on X. Iranian officials reportedly walked out of Sunday’s talks, protesting Trump’s threats.

A Washington Post report today reveals the devastating human toll of the war. “Months after the war began with a wave of US and Israeli airstrikes on February 28, the scale of civilian casualties and destruction in Iran remains difficult to measure,” Post reporters Dylan Moriarty and N. Kirkpatrick wrote.

In a single airstrike, 100 buildings were damaged in one civilian neighborhood in Tehran. Almost a third of the city has been hit by US and Israeli missiles. One report on civilian harm puts the death toll from late February to mid-April at 1,701 civilians, including 307 children. Across both Iran and Lebanon, over 7,000 people have been killed since mid-February, according to official casualty figures.

In a Sunday morning phone interview with Fox News, Trump expressed some willingness to continue the carnage. “You close it, and you won’t have a country,” he warned. Fox News reporter Trey Yingst said the president told him that he told Iranian officials. “You won’t even make it back to your fucking country,” if they did not open the essential transportation lanes for oil in the Strait of Hormuz.

"You close it and you won't have a country." President Trump said he told Iranian officials about the Strait of Hormuz. "You won't even make it back to your fu*king country."

"We may take over the Strait, if we have to," Trump said. "If they don't make a deal, we'll collect… pic.twitter.com/cErvdjCJmK

— Trey Yingst (@TreyYingst) June 21, 2026

Trump has repeatedly referred to himself as the “Guardian Angel” of this particular body of water. “We may take over the Strait, if we have to,” Trump told Yingst.

Hawks like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are pushing in that same direction. Graham reportedly spent over four hours with the President on Friday, outlining a plan to “take the Strait of Hormuz over by force” even as the clock starts on a 60-day negotiating period. On Face the Nation Sunday, Graham told host Margaret Brennan, “If Iran contests control of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we will obliterate them.” He added, “Let’s try a diplomatic solution. I think it’s going to fail. What happens next?”

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“Willful Neglect”: A New Report on the State of Fatherhood Pulls No Punches

In many countries around the world, it’s Father’s Day, a time to celebrate the contributions of dads. But aside from the inevitable barbeques and dad jokes, what does fatherhood actually look like in June 2026?

A new report, “State Of The World’s Fathers 2026” from the nonprofit research group Equimundo takes a snapshot of the life of fathers worldwide, and its findings do not suggest that the social role of the father as secondary parent has changed as much as many dads themselves would like. Researchers have found that globally, fathers want to be involved in parenting their children—but economic insecurity and cultural backlash often find them sliding back to the more uninvolved and traditional role of breadwinner.

Its findings paint a picture of parenthood all over the world defined by precarity and sacrifice—regardless of the parent’s gender. But the 5,000 fathers interviewed—in countries as diverse as Brazil, Canada, and Croatia—seem stuck between a rock and a hard place: retrograde cultural values (and a healthy dose of manosphere YouTube influencers) teach men that their greatest value in society and in a family unit lies in being a provider. But economically supporting a family is now more difficult than ever.

“We see that more fathers, and even more mothers, are reverting to traditional norms about fathers as providers and mothers as carers. This is driven both by financial pressures and systems that do not support equal parenting, and by the anti-equality backlash that is spreading around the world.”

“We see that more fathers, and even more mothers, are reverting to traditional norms about fathers as providers and mothers as carers,” the Equimundo researchers wrote. “This is driven both by financial pressures and systems that do not support equal parenting, and by the anti-equality backlash that is spreading around the world.”

In general, the modern dads surveyed said they are more involved in the care work of raising a child than their own fathers were—but they are still far less involved in parenting than mothers. One reason, researchers found, is a lack of infrastructure to explicitly support fathers. Very few countries mandate paid paternal leave, for instance, while many more legally require paid maternal leave. Thanks to the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, employers must provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for the parents of newborns—but the average American father only takes 10 days off, since the US is one of the few countries where there is no requirement for employers to pay for parental leave. Mothers working full-time earn approximately 63 to 74 cents for every dollar paid to fathers, which incentivizes fathers to deprioritize spending time on the grueling tasks of raising a family. As Equimundo researchers note, “Because, in general, men still earn more than women, if leave is not adequately paid, families can often not afford for the man to take leave.”

That’s not to say that there aren’t some solutions: universal pre-K, universal parental leave, and even the greater provision of parenting resources explicitly geared toward fathers, like parenting classes and support groups. Fewer than half of the fathers Equimundo surveyed even knew such resources exist. And this lack of support can lead to hidden consequences beyond the economic realm —as New York Magazine recently reported, up to one in ten new fathers experiences depression after the birth of their child, but such challenges are rarely taken seriously.

At a January 2026 March for Life speech, Vice President JD Vance told Americans “you will find great meaning if you dedicate yourself to the creation and sustenance of human life.” Elon Musk, the noted father of at least fourteen, has also urged Americans to “have more children.” But this ascendant pronatalist movement often fails to account for the actual economic constraints parents face. The United States, in particular, boasts some of the highest parental distress levels, the priciest childcare, and the weakest paid leave laws of any peer nation.

In that context, all parents are forced to make daily sacrifices: in the Equimundo survey, nearly a quarter of all fathers worldwide reported overall poor well-being. Over a quarter had refinanced their homes to pay for childcare expenses, and three-quarters took on overtime work to do so. Nearly half took on second or third jobs to make ends meet. Nonetheless, the fathers surveyed consistently said they wanted to spend more time with their families.

In the US, even under a purportedly family-focused administration, raising a child—becoming a parent—is now harder than ever. A Surgeon General’s report in 2024 classed parental stress, in a country with only a bare-bones safety net, as a public health crisis. Other researchers have joined them in that claim—and have gone even farther.

“We find ourselves running out of adjectives to convey this level of stress,” the Equimundo researchers wrote. “We’ve called it a crisis, which it is. We’ve called out the indifference of policy makers, workplaces and others, which is still the case. Now we’re tempted to call it the willful neglect and destruction of our humanity.”

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“Super El Niño” Is Terrible News for Farmers Around the World

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

The oceanic phenomenon known as El Niño, which increases temperatures worldwide, has officially begun, according to US weather forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Meteorologists have warned that this could be the strongest El Niño this century. It is expected to drive extreme weather events around the world, including both severe droughts and heavy rainfall, likely leading to major disruptions in agricultural production and food security.

El Niño is part of a cyclical, naturally occurring weather pattern that redistributes warm air, surface water temperatures, and moisture across the tropical Pacific Ocean. During El Niño, trade winds that typically blow east-to-west from the Americas to southeast Asia slow down or sometimes reverse. Normally, these winds push warm water along the equator—but during El Niño conditions, that warm water shifts back east. Although El Niño does not follow a specific timeline, it typically occurs every two to seven years.

Certain policies may ensure there’s “enough food,” but “that’s not going to take care of the people whose livelihoods depend on” agriculture.

Beginning in the summer, El Niño typically peaks around December or the following January. (The pattern was named El Niño—Spanish for little boy—by fishermen in South America who noticed warmer waters around Christmas time, and associated it with the birth of Jesus Christ.) That means the most significant impacts of the cyclical weather phenomenon may not be felt until months from now.

NOAA’s most recent calculations show a high likelihood of a “very strong” El Niño, meaning average surface temperatures in the Pacific jump by more than 2 degrees C. (Some experts are calling this year’s a “super” El Niño, although some agencies, like the World Meteorological Organization, reject this language.)

Because it impacts a “diverse set of geographies,” said Weston Anderson, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland, “there is no one set of impacts.” El Niño can contribute to severe droughts in one part of the world and heavy rainfall in others—both of which can disrupt growing seasons in key breadbaskets of the world.

But the ways in which this year’s El Niño will interact with the effects of global warming—and what that means for food security—is something scientists are still actively observing and untangling. “That question is still really important open science,” said Jennifer Burney, a professor at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability whose work focuses on climate and food security.

History can give us some examples. In 1877, one of the strongest El Niños ever recorded was associated with historic droughts across Asia, as well as in parts of Brazil and northern Africa. These droughts, “along with colonial policies, contributed to famines in many regions which were really devastating,” said Deepti Singh, an associate professor at Washington State University who co-authored a study on this period of global famine.

The fatalities associated with these famines, upward of 50 million people, said Singh, “are humbling to think about.”

The last El Niño occurred in 2023 and 2024. It was one of the five strongest El Niños ever recorded, according to the World Meteorological Organization, and is considered to have contributed to the historic temperatures in 2024, making it the hottest year on record.

The exact way that this El Niño will unfurl is yet unknown.

That year came with devastating consequences for growers, especially in arid regions where agricultural producers primarily rely on rainfall to irrigate their crops. Droughts driven by El Niño across southern Africa contributed to increased food insecurity and malnutrition in several countries.

Burney noted that in some vulnerable regions, local governments may have adaptive strategies in place to grow key crops earlier in the growing season or to increase imports during El Niño years, which can help offset food insecurity. But even in those cases, local farmers who depend on growing and selling crops to support themselves and their families may still experience economic setbacks. In other words, certain policies may ensure there’s “enough food,” but “that’s not going to take care of the people whose livelihoods depend on” agriculture, Burney said.

This year, El Niño conditions are expected to impact a number of growing areas—another setback for agricultural producers who have faced higher input costs stemming from the Iran war. Although the United States and Iran are potentially set to unveil an agreement to reopen the all-important Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil flows, farmers worldwide have already been impacted by fertilizer shortages and price hikes since the passage closed this spring.

Weather variability fueled by El Niño will add to growers’ woes. India, where the majority of the world’s rice comes from, is projected to have a weaker monsoon season, which could reduce yields. Drier, hotter conditions could lead to diminished maize production in southern Africa. The southern US states, from California all the way to the eastern seaboard, will experience a wetter year than normal, which could lead to flooding and upend crop production.

But the exact way that this El Niño will unfurl is yet unknown. As El Niño interacts with the additional warming and moisture currently in our atmosphere caused by climate change, “there is likely to be a change in which regions are likely to be affected” by extreme weather, said Singh. Still, she added, we can expect “the severity, extent, and likelihood” of extreme weather events like droughts “to be higher” in today’s warmer climate.

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The Reflecting Pool Mess Is Right Out of Trump’s Destructive Playbook

President Donald Trump is blaming “Vandalism” by “Radical Left Lunatics” for some of the struggles of his beloved Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool remodeling project.

“Just like three days ago, they destroyed the grass outside of the Pool, they’ve also done everything possible to hurt the inside surface that was just installed,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Friday night. “Law Enforcement is actively investigating this situation.”

Just six minutes later, he posted an image of what appears to be a green-haired protester wearing a shirt with the words “TEAM ALGAE,” presumably as evidence of said vandalism.

This appears to be the president’s "proof" that vandals are sabotaging the Refelecting Pool.

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) 2026-06-20T03:00:18.373Z

Although Trump announced the renovation in April—which he initially said would take one week and cost just $2 million—the Reflecting Pool is still not “American flag blue,” as fighting the algae has proved to be a larger task than the administration can handle.

As the Washington Post noted that month, major projects on the National Mall not only typically require congressional authorization, but are subjected to federal reviews. That doesn’t appear to have happened with Trump’s pool makeover.

Indeed, the sequence of events here follows a pattern characteristic of many of the presidents’ projects and policies. While the steps may occur in different orders, they end in the roughly the same place: failure, with regular people paying the price. Let’s take a look at Trump’s destruction playbook:

1. Make the thing in my image and promise perfection

After vowing to clean “Biden filth and incompetence” from the Reflecting Pool last November, he posted on Truth Social in April that although he was warned it could take years to make it “much more beautiful,” it would in fact only “take a fraction of that time, at a fraction of the cost.”

2. Sprinkle some inside dealing

According to a Thursday report by the New York Times, a company with connections to a longtime Trump supporter was handed a no-bid contract worth $1.7 million to install a new water purification system. A larger $14.7 million-contract to put blue waterproofing material on the Reflecting Pool’s floor also had no other bidders.

3. Declare success, despite overspending

The Trump administration said it finished the renovation on June 4 and it would fill the pool with water within days. According to a summary of the Department of Interior’s contract with Atlantic Industrial Coatings reviewed by CNN, the price ballooned up to $14.7 million, despite promises it would cost a seventh that figure.

4. Trouble emerges

CNN reported on Thursday that blue material on the bottom is starting to peel off. Also, the algae is back.

5. Blame the left

Ludicrous claims of sabotage? With Trump’s Friday night post, it looks like we’re at this step right now.

6. Forget it

Trump has publicly downplayed previous failed projects, dating back to his US-Mexico border wall through, most recently, his Kennedy Center takeover.

Last month, after a federal judge ruled his name be removed from the performing arts institution, Trump said he had “no interest” in continuing his remodeling project there. “Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else,” he posted, “we are going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them.”

As nature clearly outpaces efforts to clean the pool, keep your eyes peeled for this one.

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Trump Takes Two Steps Back in Ending His Iran War

On Saturday, Iran’s military announced it had closed shipping along the Strait of Hormuz, saying the US violated its deal to end the war by allowing Israel to continue to bomb Lebanon. Iran had just signed on to a preliminary agreement with the US to reopen the strait and allow for safe passage of commercial vessels for 60 days.

Lebanon’s state media and civil defense officials reported that Israeli strikes killed at least 16 people on Saturday morning, and the country’s health ministry said at least 47 people were killed on Friday. The Israel Defense Forces stated on Friday that four of its soldiers were killed in Lebanon. It also claimed its airstrikes hit 80 targets connected to the militant group Hezbollah, killing “dozens” of its members.

This isn’t the best start.

Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon on Friday after the fighting looked like it would break up talks between the US and Iran in Switzerland. Earlier in the day, Iranian officials declined to meet with US negotiators, citing the fighting in Lebanon. JD Vance, on who Trump and Republicans have pushed responsibility for the negotiations, also postponed a trip to Switzerland.

As I wrote on Wednesday, the first point in the US-Iran deal released this week requires Iran, the US, and all of their allies to immediately end all military operations, with the text explicitly including a close to bombing in Lebanon. But Israel did not agree to the deal, after repeatedly stating it will continue attacking southern Lebanon. Trump has recently criticized Israel for its military campaign in Lebanon, noting that it could dismantle his announced deal.

Before Israel and the United States launched their current war, roughly 20 percent of global crude oil and natural gas transited through the strait. Closing the passage has led to massive increases in petroleum prices.

This week, the Trump administration said it would commit to finalizing an agreement to end the war in 60 days. Getting Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz again isn’t the best start.

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Our Hidden Fungal Networks Could Reach Beyond the Solar System

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

Hidden underground around the world lie 110 quadrillion kilometers of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks—webs of ultrathin threads that, if connected in a single line, would stretch almost a billion times the distance between the Earth and the sun, according to new research published in Science on June 11.

These fungal communities form intimate relationships with the roots of plants, which they provide with nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon, 1 billion tons of which the networks sequester underground annually, previous research has found. If the fungal network wasn’t storing it, that carbon would be warming the atmosphere.

But those networks have never been mapped globally until now. The new study led by Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), an organization founded to map mycorrhizal fungi networks, used a combination of literature review, soil samples from around the globe, machine learning, and laboratory testing to estimate the distribution and mass of these systems and map where they are densest.

“This is the moment where we went from knowing that this system exists to really knowing where it is, how dense it is and where it’s been,” said Toby Kiers, executive director and co-founder of SPUN and a co-author of the study.

“You’re getting a win-win. The plants are growing better, and carbon’s being drawn down. ”

For decades, researchers have known arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi form intimate symbiotic relationships with roughly 80 percent of the globe’s plant species and are found nearly everywhere plants are. But the extent of those networks and where they are densest, such as grasslands, and where they are being lost, like in agricultural areas, hasn’t been well understood until now.

“[The study] helps us come to grips with how important these below ground organisms can be to everything that we see above ground,” said James Bever, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas who studies the interactions between plants and microbes like fungi in soils but was not involved in the new study.

Justin Stewart, an evolutionary ecologist at SPUN and lead author of the study, said previous studies the team had done on biodiversity of fungi were similar to asking someone to describe the forest outside their home.

“They could say, ‘Well, there are three tree species in it.’ That’s great. That tells me about the biodiversity,” he said. “But you don’t actually know how big the forest is, how far apart the trees are. You don’t have information on its structure.”

Mycorrhizal fungal networks are made up of hyphae, each smaller than a strand of human hair. These living pipes transport the nutrients and carbon between the plants and fungi.

Because they are so long and thin, Stewart said, they can reach deeper into soils than roots, getting nutrients deep underground that plants can’t reach, while simultaneously storing carbon where it can stay put for a long time under the right conditions.

“You’re getting a win-win,” Stewart said. “The plants are growing better, and carbon’s being drawn down. That all depends on having dense fungal networks and soils that are active and alive.”

Quantifying these fungal networks started with a review of existing studies on mycorrhizal fungi. Those studies contained 16,000 core samples taken from ecosystems around the world to understand the length of the fungal threads in a volume of soil. Each sample was geolocated, and from there the team was able to use machine learning to create predictive maps of fungal networks globally, and identify where the model is performing well and where uncertainties show more data is needed.

Working with AMOLF, a research institute in Amsterdam, they developed a technique using a robot with a camera that recorded fungal networks growing over time in a lab, to get better estimates of their widths. From there, the team was able to calculate the network’s mass, which amounted to about five times the weight of all humans on Earth.

The study only covers living arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks, Stewart said, and doesn’t include dead fungal networks, which also help to store carbon and add to the total biomass and influence of the networks on ecosystems. Research into dead fungal networks is still being explored.

Ninety percent of fungal communities across the globe are unprotected.

The study also found where these networks are most threatened. Fungal network densities across croplands are about half of what they are in wild ecosystems. Meanwhile, wild grassland ecosystems hold about 40 percent of the world’s arbuscular mycorrhizal biomass. Yet those grasslands are among Earth’s least protected ecosystems, and they are converted into farmland at four times the rate of forests, posing a potential threat to these networks and the benefits they bring to plant life and carbon storage.

Previous research from SPUN has found 90 percent of fungal communities across the globe are unprotected, and many ecosystems, like the deserts of the American Southwest, are understudied.

What exactly is driving mycorrhizal fungi losses, and the consequences of that decline, need to be explored next, the researchers said, which is why the SPUN team will be at this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference—COP31—to present to policymakers about the importance of the networks and the role they could play in protecting ecosystems and sequestering carbon.

Understanding mycorrhizal fungi more deeply at the ground level is key, said Corentin Bisot, an AMOLF biophysicist and co-author of the study.

“We’re still far from completely understanding how, if you have a grassland next door, and you want to [increase] microbes and fungi there,” Bisot said. “We don’t have the toolbox for you to do it.”

This study, Stewart said, is just the first map. And like the first maps the Spaniards drew of California—which presented the state as an island, he said, there will be new discoveries about the density of fungi networks around the globe to grow the public’s understanding of them.

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The Beautiful Game Is More Unaffordable Than Ever

The World Cup is here.

For the first time, the tournament is happening in three countries at once: the United States, Mexico, and Canada. It’s bigger than ever, with more teams, more games, more viewers, and more money on the line.

This special World Cup episode of Reveal looks beyond the spectacle of the beautiful game to the organization behind it: FIFA. The global soccer body stands to take in billions from the tournament, while fans face soaring ticket prices and host cities pay massive sums for transportation, security, and infrastructure.

“Sport is this incredible glue that brings people together,” human rights advocate Mustafa Qadri tells Reveal. But he says that also makes it “highly vulnerable to cynical people coming in and exploiting it for their own gain.”

This week, reporters Alex Shephard, Tim Murphy of Mother Jones, and Reveal producer Artis Curiskis follow the money, power, and politics behind the World Cup—and ask who gets to be part of the world’s biggest game.

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