Building a Soft Landing for Haitians Heading Back to the Island

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how elder care services will be devastated by the end of the Temporary Protected Status program that has offered legal status to about 350,000 Haitians living in the US, many of them healthcare workers.

Since then, I’ve heard some harrowing anecdotes from sources following the Supreme Court decision to end the TPS program, and President Donald Trump’s administration’s efforts to target Haitian immigrants. Real estate agents report that many in the community are considering selling their properties or placing another relative on the title of their homes. The Haitian American Chamber of Commerce of Florida told me that employers are reluctantly letting go of employees now that their work permits are no longer valid.

As several immigration policy experts explained recently, Haitian TPS holders will either try to remain in the US as undocumented immigrants or find another pathway to legal status. Many will likely be deported.

But there’s another option many TPS holders are considering: voluntarily returning to the island. In recent years, the country has faced growing instability due to gang violence that has ravaged much of Haiti, including the capital of Port-au-Prince. The US Department of State has warned Americans to avoid travel to the country, citing armed conflict between these gangs, the risk of kidnappings and other violent crimes, and a ban on US commercial flights to the main airport in Port-au-Prince after several planes were struck by gunfire.

But in more rural communities, building a life is still possible, MarieGuerda Nicolas, a Haitian American psychology professor at the University of Miami and co-founder of Ayiti Community Trust, told me. For many Haitians, they may prefer to leave the US on their own terms instead of living under the growing fear of deportation.

MarieGuerda Nicolas, a psychologist, counsels Haitians returning to the island from the US. Photo courtesy of MarieGuerda Nicolas

Nicolas has been thinking about creating options for returning Haitians for years. When thousands of Haitians were deported during the Biden administration, Ayiti Community Trust partnered with several organizations in the US and Haiti to create a program that would assist them in safely and compassionately returning to the island. Called Ayiti Home Link, the program is basically a case management system that assists in accessing employment, housing, and other community resources. There’s also a resource guide that helps them navigate the nation’s bureaucracy—think driver’s licenses and passports—as well as listing available hospitals and health care clinics. Each region of the country also has a “hub,” as Nicolas calls it, a nonprofit on the ground that serves as the point of contact for someone just arriving in that area, should they need help settling in.

Ayiti Community Trust and its partner organizations have helped nearly 200 people return to Haiti. Now, with TPS protections gone, Nicolas anticipates many more will reach out for guidance. I talked to her on the phone last month about how this program works and what she’s hearing from the Haitian community during such a tumultuous time. Our interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

Can you tell me about the Ayiti Community Trust and the different ways the organization is helping TPS holders?

“What does resettlement of Haitians going back home look like? What are the models of resettlement across the globe so that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel? “

Clearly, TPS and people really thinking about coming back home havebeen a central part of what the community foundation engages in. We’ve been really working around this idea of, what does resettlement of Haitians going back home look like? What are the models of resettlement across the globe so that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel? One of the things we learned is how important it is to make sure that it doesn’t feel like a crisis response or humanitarian crisis response. There are about eight organizations that have been working on a resettlement plan and process for the country. And the first thing we put out was the resource guide in English and Creole that allows people to know: how do you get your identification card? Where do you go to get your passport? How do you enroll your kids in school? Where are the clinics? And so on.

There is a lot of instability and gang violence in Haiti that has been highlighted in the media as well as by human rights organizations. Despite these challenges, is it still possible to build a life in the country?

Port-au-Prince doesn’t represent the entire country. Whatever happens in Port-au-Prince permeates the narrative of the whole country, and that’s just not the case. So somebody who’s from Cap-Haïtien, of course they can go back home. They had homes there. They have communities there. The cost of living is not the same as it is in the US, in terms of being able to go back. Would people like to be in a country that feels sovereign, where the political situation is stable, where there are more economic opportunities? Absolutely. But I don’t think that the people who are back home are feeling like, “Oh my God, I’ve made the worst decision.” I haven’t seen that because I think the stress of being here and of being in a space where you don’t know what could happen to you…I think removing that stress has been a huge part of it as well.

“We never want anybody to come back to their home feeling like they’re going to hell. We want them to feel like they’re going home with dignity and a sense of humanity.”

We never want anybody to come back to their home feeling like they’re going to hell. We want them to feel like they’re going home with dignity and a sense of humanity. As part of this process, we have to recognize the sheer amount of struggle and difficulties and challenges for people to leave one country and go to another country, even if it’s their native country. We are supporting people through that process in a way that is dignified, considering that the experience that they just had in the United States is an undignified, inhumane experience.

In the last few weeks, what are some of the things that you’re hearing from people here with TPS who are just now assessing their options?

It’s incredibly stressful. I’m a psychologist, and I’ve seen 12 domestic violence cases and eight suicide attempts. People are stressed about this situation. So it’s incredibly difficult for people who are feeling the impact of all of this.

At the same time, not all TPS holders are the same or have the same options. I’m talking to a family where the mom is in the middle of chemotherapy right now. So that looks very different from this other person who I spoke to whose husband has TPS, and she’s a US citizen. They have two kids, but he went back to Haiti to situate himself and get things settled for the family to join him. It’s very different for different people in terms of figuring out what they need to do. How do I need to do it? Do I go back to Haiti or take my chances in Canada? Do I take my chances in the United States and live with the stresses of not being able to leave my house for fear that I might get picked up?

How are organizations in Haiti stepping up to help TPS holders?

They are thinking about welcoming them and making sure that people come back home in a really meaningful way. I was in a meeting a couple of weeks ago, and one of the organization’s leaders said, “The Haitian diaspora has been incredibly good to Haiti. It’s our turn to return the favor and be good to them.” How powerful is that? I want people to know that it’s not like people in Haiti are not thinking about the need to support people coming back home. They are dedicating their time and energy to that.

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An Infamous Attack Ad Just Got an AI Resurrection

In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign ran a terrifying 60-second advertisement. It opens with a three-year-old girl in a field, pulling petals off a daisy while counting to ten. Then, a man’s voice begins a countdown, and a nuclear explosion fills the screen.

The advertisement only aired once, but roughly 100 million people saw it. The message was clear: Johnson’s opponent, Barry Goldwater, was a warmonger who would put American children in danger and bring nuclear armageddon. Johnson won in a landslide, and the daisy video became America’s most infamous attack ad.

Now, a Super PAC acting on behalf of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Senatorial campaign is using an AI-generated, Frankensteined version of Johnson’s video to push a different message.

In this version, instead of being wiped out by a nuclear bomb, the daisy girl—resurrected via generative AI—lies on an operating table in front of an AI-generated version of Texas Representative James Talarico.

“She dreams of growing up, falling in love, becoming a mother,” a narrator intones. “The trans industry preys on confused children. Irreversible puberty blockers. Cross-sex hormones. Sex-change surgeries.” The Talarico campaign has stated that “James does not support gender reassignment surgery for minors,” and that “this AI deep fake ad is flat out lying.”

It’s not the only AI advertisement Paxton’s allies have produced this cycle, nor is it the first designed to attack Talarico’s support for transgender youth. Another advertisement, which ran in June, shows an AI-generated James Talarico dancing in a dress, singing a parody version of “My Favorite Things” from “The Sound of Music” reworked to be about giving girls hormones “til they grow mustaches.” Paxton has built his brand on ridiculing trans youth and making it as difficult as possible for them to access medical care. In May, he even took time during his runoff victory speech to call Talarico’s defense of trans youth “weird.”

This $10 million ad buy, though, might be the Paxton campaign’s most egregious attack yet. The ad was developed by the American Principles Project, one of the earliest groups to push anti-trans laws. Their ultimate goal, as my colleague Madison Pauly has reported, is to go beyond banning gender-affirming care for children and outlaw medical care for trans people of all ages. As the group’s president, Terry Schilling, admitted last year, he and his allies are starting with children because that’s “where the consensus is.”

The original “daisy girl” ad was effective because it was able to make people afraid. The campaign spot, which aired in the middle of a family television program, pushed parents to vote in the way they believed would protect their children from an unthinkable fate. Schilling and his allies hope to leverage parents’ fears of a supposed predatory medical establishment to push Paxton to victory.

But if previous attempts to remix the daisy video are anything to go by, the American Principles Project may not succeed. Bob Dole, in 1996, aired a version of the daisy video that concerned itself with teenage drug use. Audiences didn’t find that particularly compelling, and Dole lost. The Hillary Clinton campaign, in 2016, tracked down the actress who starred in the original video to shoot an ad for her presidential bid. Clinton lost, too. An atom bomb is terrifying because it is real, but an AI-generated three-year-old on an operating table is a manufactured threat.

This article has been updated to reflect a comment from James Talarico’s campaign.

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Anti-AI Populism is Reshaping American Politics

Opposing data center construction is one of the most popular positions a candidate can possibly take right now—and those who fail to do so are starting to lose elections.

Will Lawrence, the Sunrise Movement cofounder who ran for Congress in Michigan’s Seventh District, won his primary on Tuesday. In his first major TV ad, Lawrence aimed at “tech billionaires” who he said want to turn Michigan’s farms into data centers that will “jack up our energy bills and ruin our home values.” Abdul El-Sayed, running for Senate in Michigan, used an under-construction OpenAI data center as the backdrop for a rally. “Until we protect local communities from the power of corrupting money and politics, we’re going to continue to see projects like this get pushed,” El-Sayed said.

Justin Pearson, a progressive candidate in Memphis who made fighting back against xAI’s data center construction a centerpiece of his campaign, just won his Congressional primary, too.

“Before data centers were all the news every single day, our community was fighting Elon Musk,” Pearson said at a recent press conference. Musk began building data centers in Memphis—and gas turbines to power them—in 2024. People like SpaceX’s billionaire owner, Pearson said, “view these communities as sacrifice zones.”

But the data center backlash isn’t strictly a Democratic-party issue. It draws on a current of populism—and suspicion of big companies, and fear of AI-prompted job loss—that goes beyond party boundaries. Opposition to data center buildout is nearly as high among Republicans as it is among Democrats.

That fact could be good news for Pearson. His Memphis-based district had a Democratic-voting, majority Black population, but the district was splintered and redrawn by Republican officials this year following a Supreme Court ruling that gutted the federal Voting Rights Act.

Pearson’s anti-data-center positions could play well with the rural, white, Republican-leaning voters who now make up part of his district. As the industry group Data Center Watch reported in 2025, 55 percent of politicians who have taken public anti-data-center stances are Republicans, who often raise concerns about tax incentives and energy grid strain, as opposed to focusing on environmental concerns. About seven in ten Americans now oppose the idea of a data center being built near them. Even in staunchly red states like Texas and Utah, politicians like Texas Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller are warning those who won’t act on data centers that they might just lose their races.

“Republicans should be on this issue and we’re not,” Miller told the Texas Tribune this week. “The Democrats are, and they’re right on the issue. I’m not endorsing any Democrats, but we’re going to lose some elections in the midterms because of this one subject.”

Some Republicans are getting that message. Zach Lahn, who won the Iowa Republican gubernatorial primary in June, called for a full data center construction moratorium. Nancy Mace, running for governor in South Carolina, announced that she supports a moratorium, too. Even Ron DeSantis has signed legislation ensuring that “local governments maintain the authority to reject data center development in their communities.” And they’re not the only ones: candidates for governor in at least 12 states are running on data center moratoria, per Newsweek.

Data centers “broke American politics,” as Molly Taft of WIRED recently put it. The New York Times, in May, ran a headline calling data centers “the most bipartisan issue since beer.” Left-wing populists, far-right podcasters, and even the pope have all weighed in. (Will Lawrence, at a press conference, quoted Pope Leo’s recent encyclical on AI and the dangers of irresponsible technology development.)

“We know this crosses the political spectrum,” Pearson said in late July. “But the reality is the billionaire class are building these data centers in an attempt to destroy our water, to destroy our air quality, to take our land, all so that they can make more money. And at the center of it, that’s what we’re up against.”

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Good Luck Trying to Kill This Jellyfish

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

Immortality is generally considered the realm of the gods or science fiction, a fantasy that’s actively pursued by tech entrepreneurs in macabre experiments that include injecting “young blood,” cryopreservation, or resurrection in an AI afterlife.

But one ethereal, thimble-shaped jellyfish has already cracked the code.

As associate professor Maria Pia Miglietta, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University, explains, _Turritopsis dohrnii_has an incredible ability to cheat death.

**“**Turritopsis is unique, because when faced with unfavourable conditions—and I mean high temperature, physical cutting, starvation, chemicals in the water, you name it—when you try to kill the jellyfish, it doesn’t die.”

“Theoretically it never has to die from getting old, it just keeps hitting the reset button.”

Most normal jellyfish start off life as larvae. They metamorphose into polyps (tiny, stationary soft bodies) that bud off swimming medusas, which grow up to become adult jellies. Eventually, after reproducing, most will stop swimming, crumble a little and then die.

But the immortal jellyfish escapes that fate. It reverts to a juvenile form, and starts its life cycle again. The process is called “cellular transdifferentiation,” Miglietta says. The jellyfish looks like it’s dying and sinks to the bottom. Then—like a butterfly returning to a caterpillar—it shrinks into a ball, and within 24 to 48 hours, buds off a new polyp with the same identical genome, she says.

It’s one of “nature’s coolest tricks,” says reader Raquel López-Aragón, who took part in the Guardian‘s “Invertebrate of the Year” contest. “When this jellyfish gets old or gets hurt, instead of just dying like most animals, it transforms itself back into a baby jellyfish and grows up all over again. It can do this as many times as it wants, which means theoretically it never has to die from getting old, it just keeps hitting the reset button on its life.”

In the lab, where Miglietta studies them, these jellies can theoretically live forever. However, for some in the wild, getting eaten may eventually end that dream run.

“It’s so hardwired in humans to not want to die…and the absurdity of that being in a jellyfish…just entertains me to no end.”

Globally, there are eight accepted species of Turritopsis—but (so far) only one holds the key to eternal life.

Immortal jellyfish are only a few millimetres in size. But, if you know what to look for, they can be found in many places, from the Mediterranean sea, to the Atlantic, from the coast of Japan to Panama and Brazil.

As another reader remarks, the immortal jellyfish does “exactly what it says on the tin…They have the very enviable ability to simply turn back into a juvenile at any sign of stress, which is something that I’m sure we all wish extended to humans.”

With their delicate bodies and veil of tentacles, Lisa-ann Gershwin, a biologist specializing in jellyfish, describes Turritopsis as “exquisite” and “the most beautiful little creature.” But what makes them remarkable is their capacity for reincarnation.

Since ancient times, humans have speculated about eternal life, Gershwin says, it’s one of the things that unites us all: “It’s so hardwired in humans to not want to die. And I think the drive that we have to survive, and the absurdity of that being in a jellyfish—the juxtaposition of those two just entertains me to no end.”

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Trump’s Iran War Is Going Backward

On Saturday, a senior Iranian national security official issued a set of demands that the US must meet before a key waterway for oil shipping can be reopened—a statement that further suggests a lasting ceasefire will not be in the cards anytime soon.

Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, called for the US to lift its sanctions and naval blockade on Iran, “completely compensate” Iran for war damages, “unconditionally” release frozen Iranian assets, and end all attacks on Iran’s allies in the region.

According to multiple media outlets, the US government did not deliver an immediate response tothe demands. Many of them resemble those in the interim ceasefire deal signed by the US and Iran in June. Back then, the Trump administration said that it would only lift sanctions completely if the two countries came to an agreement on Iran’s nuclear development, a project that has become central to the country’s struggle for identity and sovereignty amid a long, violent history of foreign interference.While there was an initial ceasefire, it did not last. A couple of days later, Iran’s military closed the Strait of Hormuz, a critical oil transit point,stating the US violated their agreement by allowing Israel to continue bombing Lebanon. Combat resumed and even expanded to Saudi Arabia and the Houthis in Yemen.

The prospect that the Strait of Hormuz may reopen arose with the news that Iran and Oman, which share territorial waters in the strait, are close to an agreement on a new transit route through the passageway. But Iran’s stipulations presented to the US indicate that an agreement with Oman means little without US concessions. “The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz is contingent on other conditions, including the United States compensating for its violations of the Islamabad Memorandum,” Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said on Saturday, according to the New York Times, referring to the June interim deal.

So, once again, a needless war has killed thousands of people in Iran and 18 US service members, as well as injuring hundreds more US personnel. The war has also threatened thelong-term stability across the region by strikes on civilian infrastructure like water and energy facilities and food storage sites. The only certainty now appears to be that the conflict does not have a clear end in sight.

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The Internet Has Been Very Interested in Trump’s New Hair

For many of us, news about the new presidential coiffeur first appeared in our podcast feeds this week. But listening instead of looking at YouTube deprived us of the real transformation, the summer glow-up, that our commander-in-chief has enjoyed, seemingly overnight.

Fortunately, the internet has not let us down. The simple version is that President Donald Trump’s storied strawberry-blond-comb-over was looking a little, um, sparse recently. The before and after pictures are not subtle.

Trump’s hair, 2 days apart pic.twitter.com/fEtg6mVjt4

— 𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐔𝐍𝐄𝐒 (@Antunes1) August 6, 2026

But something important has happened. A weave? Extensions? Maybe a toupee? Perhaps he has miraculous abilities to just grow more hair when he decides to. There are so many theories, so many rich interpretations.

Trump's hair, uh, has a lot more volume than normal

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-05T21:13:12.264Z

Well, of course, the internet has embraced this story enthusiastically. And offered its customary subtle appraisals of what might be going on with the president. Some might not be entirely accurate.

What is the big fuss about Trump’s hair? I don’t get it! pic.twitter.com/sPDFXlr0qK

— Truth Will Reign (@TruthWill_Reign) August 6, 2026

Others have obviously exaggerated his new look.

Trump’s new wig tomorrow—

— Stone Cold Jane Austen (@abbyhiggs.bsky.social) 2026-08-06T12:59:15.836Z

President Trump when he sees all of @MAGADevilDog viral big Trump hair memes https://t.co/URx4fYpUqI pic.twitter.com/3IiNnKfK4O

— Politi_Rican 𝕏 (@TheRicanMemes) August 6, 2026

But the myriad stresses of being POTUS—the economy, the construction headaches of the East Wing ballroom, the war in Iran, the stepped up deportations, his dismal approval ratings—could exact a cost. And self-care, no matter how old one is, clearly pays off.

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Once More Cassidy Had the Deciding Vote. Once More He Folded.

Early Saturday morning, the Senate voted to confirm Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to the official role after Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) caved and publicly backed President DonaldTrump’s former personal lawyer the day before.

Blanche was confirmed on a narrow 50-49 vote, with almostall Republicans aligning with the president. Thetwo exceptions wereSens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). In other words, Cassidy, who initially withheld his approval overconcerns aboutBlanche helping Trump prosecute political enemies, pushing the $1.8 billion anti-weaponization slush fund, and exempting the president from IRS audits, capitulated—knowing that his was the deciding vote. He did so shortly after Murkowski announcedher opposition.

In his Friday remarks on the Senate floor, Cassidy raised several reasonable points on why Blanche should not be confirmed: “approving the anti-weaponization slush fund,” “exempting the president from IRS audits,” and the aforementioned “bringing suits against political enemies.”

But the senator—who recently lost his bid for reelection after being targeted as a “disloyal disaster” by Trump—summonedperplexing arguments from his familiar playbook: “Mr. Blanche has made commitments” to be better, Cassidy noted. “I have spoken to Mr. Blanche five or six times,” he assured his colleagues, and not approving Blanche “puts at risk the progress made fighting violent crime, human and drug trafficking, and fraud.” The Trump administration’s fight on crime and human and drug trafficking has led to significant increases in militarization domestically and abroad, while attacks on so-called widespread fraud have cut essential social programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

This isn’t Cassidy’s first rodeo in backing downfrom his principled opposition to a controversial or clearly unqualified candidate. He used similar logic to advance Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination as health secretary as the deciding vote, putting naivetrust in his “assurances on vaccines.” And the senator did so again earlier this week—although his wasnot the sole deciding vote—to confirm Erica Schwartz, the physician and attorney who wasTrump’s pick for CDC director**.** Schwartz repeatedly dodged questions on whether she would carry out all of Kennedy’s policies, even if she believed it contradicted scientific evidence.

On Friday, Cassidy said that confirming Blanche would give the Trump loyalist more power.But he also absolved Blanche of any responsibility should Trump ignore any pushback he might offer once he has been confirmed. So why vote in favor? Doing so normalizes and legitimizes the Justice Department and makes no attempt to address the many issues with weaponization that Cassidy and many of his Democratic colleagues have mentioned.

On Saturday morning on X, Blanche thanked Trump, the Senate, and Justice Department staff. Trump, on the other hand, threatened Sen. Lisa Murkowski, one of the two Republican dissenters on the confirmation vote, calling her a “traitor.” He re-posted a 2022 video of former Attorney General Merrick Garland asking for the release of the Mar-a-Lago raid search warrant next to a photo of Murkowski on Truth Social.

“Lisa Murkowski will not vote for Todd Blanche,” the president wrote. “After having no trouble voting for Merrick Garland. Claiming Blanche will weaponize the DOJ and is too political. The same Garland that personally signed off on a raid of President Trump’s home.” He then concluded, “Lisa Murkowski is owned. Traitor.”

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Trump’s EPA Is Using This Sneaky Tactic to Let Nasty Industries Foul Our Air

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

Recently, millions of Americans have faced orange skies and air-quality alerts. The struggles many people had with the smoke are a sad reminder of the importance air quality has for our health. Yet the Trump administration has done everything in its power to make our air less clean. Now it is adopting new, stealthier strategies to weaken clean-air standards.

During its first year, the second Trump administration used a “shock and awe” approach to environmental deregulation. In an effort to erase climate policies, the Environmental Protection Agency claimed that climate change was not a serious problem, pointing to a report by hand-picked climate skeptics. The criticisms of the National Academy of Sciences and other prominent scientific organizations were so devastating that the EPA abandoned its reliance on the report when it eliminated key greenhouse gas standards, instead basing its decision primarily on shaky legal arguments.

The agency is now routinely determining that the benefits of reducing air pollution are too uncertain to quantify or value at all.

In the second year of this term, the Trump administration has shifted gears, taking another legally indefensible approach that is less visible but even more pernicious because it extends to all pollutants, not just greenhouse gases. The EPA is now routinely determining that the benefits of reducing air pollution—that is, life-saving health benefits for Americans—are too uncertain to quantify or value at all in regulatory decisionmaking.

The administration is doing this without any analysis or citation to scientific studies. Extensive peer-reviewed science has used sophisticated techniques to quantify the impacts of pollution reductions and account for related uncertainty. And the EPA has relied on these findings for decades, including during the first Trump administration and other Republican administrations. But, beginning this year, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has decided that every health benefit from air pollution reductions is too uncertain to count—and every regulatory cost dispositive.

The EPA announced its new approach in January in a rule on emissions from gas turbines, stating that it would no longer value public-health benefits from reducing fine particulate matter and ozone—two of the most prevalent and damaging air pollutants. The agency referenced uncertainties in how different concentrations of pollutants translate into negative health impacts like premature deaths; uncertainties in mortality valuations, which assign a dollar value to these deaths; and uncertainties in growth and discount rates, which are used to translate future impacts to present values. But the EPA’s longstanding techniques already accounted for these uncertainties.

As a result of its new approach, the EPA no longer estimates the number of lives saved or diseases and hospitalizations averted. It is assigning no value whatsoever to these environmental benefits, thereby ignoring the very health concerns the agency was created to address.

Later, the EPA doubled down on its new approach when it repealed one vehicle emission rule and delayed another one. It similarly did not consider these adverse health consequences in an air pollution regulation for coal and oil power plants, another air pollution regulation for wood products, and, earlier this month, in relaxing emissions test procedures for heavy-duty vehicles.

When the EPA first announced its new approach in January, Zeldin insisted that even though the agency would not assign a dollar value to averted deaths, it would “still be considering lives saved when setting pollution limits.” The subsequent regulatory proceedings confirmed that Zeldin’s statement was false.

The EPA, whose actions here are plainly illegal, is basing some of its cost analyses on disputed industry claims.

Moreover, the EPA did not restrict its approach to particulate matter and ozone. The agency also refused to assign any benefits to the reduction of pollutants like nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide. And, similarly, in multiple proceedings, it ignored the benefits of reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrofluorocarbons.

On the cost side of its regulatory analysis, the EPA’s approach is entirely different. The EPA is continuing to fully quantify and consider the compliance costs for affected industries, even though those costs are subject to many of the same uncertainties as the benefits. For instance, like health benefits, compliance costs are borne at different times and must be translated into present value (using the same discount rates that the EPA had found too uncertain to use for benefits).

The EPA is basing some of its cost analyses on disputed industry claims, as long as they align with the administration’s favored deregulatory narrative. To justify weakening requirements to reduce hydrofluorocarbons and other potent greenhouse gases in new refrigeration equipment, the agency relied on unverified assertions about costs from certain supermarkets and other regulated entities, even though major refrigeration trade associations opposed these claims and explained that the EPA action would in fact raise compliance costs.

Without any empirical evidence, Zeldin claimed that the EPA’s action _“_will be felt directly by American families in lower grocery prices.” But the refrigeration rule did not impose any costs on regulated entities until future replacements of refrigeration equipment may be needed. Recent increases in grocery prices have been driven largely by supply-chain disruptions and rising energy costs arising from the war in Iran. Any cost savings from this rule, therefore, were unlikely to be felt in the near term.

The EPA’s actions are plainly illegal. Agencies cannot put a thumb on the scale by taking account of a rule’s costs but not its benefits, particularly when there are established techniques for valuing the benefits.

Because there is no “big ticket” action like last year’s questioning of climate change, the EPA’s approach has largely gone under the radar.Zeldin appears to be following John Oliver’s adage that if you want to do something harmful, “put it inside something boring” to avoid public scrutiny. But the American people will suffer greatly as a result of these illegal actions, in the form of additional premature deaths, asthma attacks, hospitalizations, and other serious health consequences.

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40 Acres and a Lie Part 1

Patricia Bailey’s four-bedroom home sits high among the trees in lush Edisto Island, South Carolina. It’s a peaceful place where her body healed from multiple sclerosis. It’s also the source of her generational wealth.

Bailey built this house on land that was passed down by her great-great-grandfather, Jim Hutchinson, who was enslaved on Edisto before he was freed and became a landowner.

“I know this is sacred land here,” Bailey says, “’cause it’s my ancestors and I feel it.”

Union General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15—better known as 40 acres and a mule—implied a better life in the waning days of the Civil War. Hutchinson is among the formerly enslaved people who received land through the field orders, which are often thought of as a promise that was never kept. But 40 acres and a mule was more than that.

It was real.

Over a more than two-year investigation, our partners at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed thousands of records once buried in the National Archives. In them, they found more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people who were given land by the federal government through the field orders—and then saw that land taken away.

None of the land Bailey lives on today is part of Hutchinson’s 40 acres. Instead, her family’s wealth is built on her ancestor’s determination to get and keep land of his own, after losing what he thought he had gained through the field orders.

This week on Reveal, with the Center for Public Integrity, we’re revisiting our three-part series in which we tell the history of an often-misunderstood government program. We explore a reparation that wasn’t—and the wealth gap that remains.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2024.

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The US Lost 23,000 Jobs in July

The Labor Department reported Friday that American nonfarm employers cut 23,000 jobs in July, a drop some attribute to employers’ wariness to hire amidst tariffs and the costs of the war in Iran.

At the same time, the unemployment rate fell slightly, from 4.2 percent to 4.1 percent, a drop economists attributed not to more people being employed, but rather to fewer people entering the labor force.

“The rate dropped to 4.1 percent in large part because labor force growth has stalled, not because opportunity is expanding,” Angela Hanks, chief of policy programs at the Century Foundation think tank, told CBS News.

Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, spoke to reporters this morning. He cited a burst in construction as a driver of American jobs. But experts have pointed to the boom in data centers as the primary driver of nonresidential construction growth this year—and the vast majority of those jobs are temporary.

On Fox Business, Hassett said this month’s job losses are seasonal, pointing to a “big decline in hospitality workers around the end of the World Cup.” He talked about construction, but did not bring up the healthcare sector, which has been the largest driver of job growth in the country for the past several years. Healthcare and education combined have accounted for more than 75 percent of all private-sector job gains since 2023, according to researchers for the ADP National Employment Report.

Administration officials are optimistic that this month’s numbers may be just a blip. “In the end, you know, the proof will be in the number that we get next month,” Hassett said, adding that the administration remains “very bullish.”

Don Beyer, the senior House Democrat on the Joint Economic Committee, took a different view of the numbers. “Today’s jobs report is deeply alarming and offers some of the clearest evidence yet that President Trump’s policies are doing serious damage to the American economy,” Beyer wrote in a statement. “Job creation has effectively ground to a halt, and businesses simply are not hiring at the pace a healthy economy demands.”

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Trump Keeps Spending US Tax Dollars to Kill Offshore Wind and Boost Oil and Gas

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

The German energy company RWE has reached a $1.22 billion deal with the US government to relinquish its offshore wind leases and instead redirect funds towards fossil fuel investments.

The agreement marks the fifth deal the Donald Trump administration has struck with energy companies, offering payouts in exchange for abandoning renewable energy projects and redirecting investment towards fossil fuels.

This latest deal takes it to almost $4 billion of taxpayer money spent on killing offshore wind projects.

Announcing the deal with the US Interior Department on Thursday, RWE said it had agreed to give up its offshore wind leases off the coasts of New York, California, and Louisiana. “After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the US for the foreseeable future,” the company said, referring to the leases it initially secured with a “long-term commitment to develop offshore wind capacity.”

The administration has also spent up to $1.1 billion to boost coal, which critics say is “fattening the wallets of his cronies.”

RWE paid $1.1 billion for its New York lease in a 2022 auction held by the Biden administration, while its leases in Louisiana and California cost a combined $163 million, Reuters reports.

“The settlement resolves RWE US Offshore’s legal claims and provides $1.22 billion in settlement funds,” RWE continued, adding that the deal would allow it to “direct resources toward energy projects that can be advanced with certainty.”

As part of the agreement, RWE will spend $900 million to acquire a 16 percent stake in an unnamed Louisiana liquified natural gas (LNG) project. The company said the settlement proceeds would be used to fund construction of the terminal.

RWE has also signed a $300 million turbine reservation agreement under which it will develop a pipeline of 15 natural gas peaker plants across the country.

The interior secretary, Doug Burgum, hailed the deal, saying on Thursday: “We welcome RWE’s agreement and voluntary investment in projects that strengthen our nation’s energy security, provide dependable baseload power, and help keep electricity affordable for hardworking Americans today while supporting our country’s long-term energy future.”

The RWE agreement appears to be the largest deal the Trump administration has struck with an energy company to kill clean energy projects. Earlier agreements with other companies, including TotalEnergies and Duke Energy, amounted to $2.7 billion in taxpayer money.

Following the Trump administration’s $928 million deal with French energy company TotalEnergies to cancel its offshore wind lease off the coast of New York, seven states, including New York, sued the administration over what the New York attorney general, Letitia James, described as a “sham deal” and “illegal agreement.”

The administration has also spent up to $1.1 billion to boost coal, a move critics argue is “fattening the wallets of his cronies” while raising working Americans’ energy bills, particularly as the US’s war on Iran drives up fuel prices.

At the same time, the federal government is seeking to slash public input periods for fossil fuel drilling on federal lands while shifting more of the financial risks of cleanup to taxpayers.

Meanwhile, a report released last fall by the Environmental Integrity Project found that every fully operational LNG facility in the US had violated federal pollution limits in recent years.

According to the nonprofit research organization, violations included the discharge of illegal amounts of bacteria, zinc, oil, and other pollutants into waterways, as well as failures of terminal managers to submit monitoring reports for waterway discharge.

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The Quiet War on Immigrants, Round Two

In 2019, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) denounced a “stealth anti-immigration campaign” by the first Trump administration. Through a combination of high-profile policy changes like the travel ban on foreigners from Muslim-majority countries and less visible administrative tweaks, a report from the senator comprehensively documented that the Republican president “surreptitiously remade” the immigration system to fulfill a “perverse vision that erases the existence of immigrants in the United States.”

As it turns out, that was only the beginning. Now, seven years later, the second Trump administration has expanded those “under the radar” attacks against the entire US immigration system, as the senator again details in a follow-up report shared exclusively with Mother Jones. Those efforts, the report says, have “destabilized lawful presence, expanded enforcement, and reengineered adjudication to accelerate and prioritize removal.”

“This report shines a light on Trump’s cruel project to dismantle due process, strip immigrants of their lawful status, and turn our immigration courts into deportation machines,” Sen. Markey told Mother Jones. “The Trump administration must be held accountable for its attacks on our immigrant neighbors.”

The report revealsan administration that is pulling all levers to completely reorient the immigration system—including the elements that had been intended to support immigrants.The sweeping goal appears to bedestabilizing the lives of noncitizens in the United States and boosting deportations. “Refugee admissions have effectively stalled, humanitarian protections have been withdrawn or narrowed, work authorization has become more tenuous, and avenues to secure or retain lawful status have grown increasingly uncertain,” the report reads.

The Trump administration has not only stripped the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, but it has also made the process of seeking lawful status and even citizenship more burdensome and riskier. (Not to mention the ongoing crusade to undermine birthright citizenship.) For instance, last August, the Department of Homeland Security’s agency in charge of visas and immigration benefits rolled out a policy expanding the “good moral character” standard requirement for citizenship applicants, a requirement that introduced more subjectivity and unpredictability into the process.

Another approach with sweeping consequences with which the administration is changing the playing field can be seen in the politicization of the immigration courts, which are part of the Department of Justice. In addition to firing more than 100 immigration judges and replacing them with temporarily assigned military lawyers, the administration has transformed the make-up of the Board of Immigration Appeals, which reviews judges’ decisions.This body, in turn, has issued precedent-setting rulings that restrict immigrants’ access to due process and relief from deportation.

Even without formal legislative changes and while ostensibly keeping protections on the books, Sen. Markey concludes, President Donald Trump has nonetheless managed to create “not an openly dismantled immigration system, but one transformed from within, appearing legally intact” in which “individuals are not only more likely to become vulnerable to enforcement, but less able to avoid or defend against it.”

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What Is the White House Hiding in Its Minerals Deals?

Today, the consumer protection watchdog group Public Citizen released a report detailing the Trump administration’s secretive web of critical minerals deals around the world. The report, exclusively shared with Mother Jones, shows that the number of deals the administration has publicly claimed to have does not match up with the number of countries known to have signed these agreements. The researchers also detail the many ways these deals can exploit countries experiencing violent conflict—and the ways they might enrich the President’s backers.

“This is now a huge web of deals that are being negotiated behind closed doors without any public scrutiny or oversight,” said Melinda St. Louis, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch research group. “Even the things they are announcing, the numbers don’t add up.”

It’s clear that Donald Trump and his administration are fixated on critical minerals— things like cobalt, lithium, and graphite, used for purposes as wide-ranging as building batteries or building missiles. “It’s really striking just how much President Trump is personally involved in this,” St. Louis said. Trump has released 12 executive orders related to critical minerals since the start of his second term, and the country has signed on to a bevy of trade agreements related to critical minerals. But, according to Public Citizen’s research, there’s no publicly available database of what exactly all those agreements are, which countries are involved, or who might be profiting. And many of these moves, based on executive orders, don’t require congressional approval.

“The most complete information available is from a February 2026 State Department fact sheet that stated that at least 38 international critical minerals agreements have been completed or were pending at that time,” today’s report says. But that fact sheet only names eleven of the countries involved, meaning 27 are unaccounted for. Public Citizen’s review of available documents was only able to confirm the existence of some of those agreements. “Less than half of the memoranda of understanding announced have been made fully public, only two of which were released by the US government,” they wrote. The rest are only public because the other country involved publicized them.

The Biden administration prioritized trade deals for critical minerals—like one signed with Japan—with the justification that securing resources for the green transition was a priority. “Now of course under the Trump administration, even the pretext of a clean energy transition is not even part of this. It’s really to seize these minerals for AI, military dominance, et cetera,” St. Louis said. In particular, the president is interested in military dominance over China.

“Trump and his acolytes all use this very apocalyptic language, that it’s about our security, that it’s about the future of Western Civilization,” Nghia Nguyen, a lead author on the report, said. “I think that says a lot about why the government is throwing so much into it.” Report after report says that military contractors are being pressured to limit their reliance on trade with China for weapons components, and the US government is now seeking out those same minerals wherever they can find them.

Sometimes, Trump’s own family members might profit. A group of American investors including two of the president’s sons got access to a massive untapped reserve of Kazakhstan’s tungsten (a mineral widely used in missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips) through a government-brokered deal. And agreements with other countries are even more exploitative. The Trump administration’s “minerals for security” deals with Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo sign over portions of those countries’ mining sectors to US actors as they experience active conflict.

The US deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo may have even been a pretext to make the country amend its constitution. “In practice, the deal gives sweeping financial and regulatory incentives to U.S. mining companies and grants the U.S. government unprecedented control over Congolese mineral resources,” the Public Citizen report says. “These are binding agreements devoid of meaningful labor, human rights, or environmental safeguards.” And in Zambia, as the New York TImes reported, the State Department has considered making medical aid contingent on a $2 billion critical minerals deal.

“In seeking to encourage mining, the Trump administration is prioritizing speed over corporate accountability and ethical safeguards,” the researchers wrote.

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Rep. Max Miller Has a History of Withholding His Daughter’s Blue Bunny

“Max, Can REDACTED please have her bunny back? She’s had it since birth, sleeps with it every night, carries it with her around the house… Please don’t punish REDACTED if you’re upset with me,” Emily Moreno once wrote in an email to her ex-husband, Republican Congressman Max Miller.

Miller, the Ohio lawmaker who has recently been fighting for his political life over allegations that he physically assaulted Moreno and other women, posted screenshots on X last night that he said prove he didn’t withhold their toddler’s stuffed animal during an August custody exchange. Earlier this week, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), Emily’s father, described the alleged incident to Congressional reporters.

“Max would not hand over the little blue bunny,” the Senator said when reporters in the Capitol asked about his ex-son-in-law. “Literally held it hostage for 48 hours. This girl is crying at night because she can’t sleep without her little blue bunny. And his answer is, ‘I’m just not going to give it to you.’ So finally, yesterday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, yesterday, he lets the little blue bunny go. This is the level of total and complete depravity.” Miller, in turn, told Sen. Moreno to “please stop the lies.”

“Max would not hand over the little blue bunny.”

But timestamps on the email from Miller’s former wife show the conflict over the bunny began earlier, back in March of 2025.

It’s one of several screenshots regarding the blue bunny that Mother Jones has obtained from a source familiar with the ongoing custody battle. Together, the screenshots of emails and text messages between Emily Moreno, Senator Moreno, Miller, a parent custody coordinator, and lawyers for the involved parties suggest that the alleged withholding of the stuffed animal was part of a pattern of behavior and not a single incident. Miller’s lawyers did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment.

Here’s what we know.

In March 2025, Emily Moreno asked Miller to return the blue bunny to their then-one-year-old daughter via email.

Emily Moreno

Can REDACTED please have her bunny back? She’s had it since birth, sleeps with it every night, carries it with her around the house, and sees it at a source of comfort. You have always delivered it back to me when you drop her off. Please don’t punish REDACTED if you’re upset with me.

I am willing to pick it up from your house, your mailbox, you can drop it in my mailbox. Please.

Thank you,
Emily

The next day, Moreno emailed Miller again about the same subject.

Emily Moreno

Max if you lost it please let me know. If you’re choosing to not return our daughters favorite toy for another reason that’s just cruel.

More than a year later, in May 2026, Sen. Bernie Moreno texted Rep. Miller asking about the blue bunny, which he was apparently supposed to receive during a custody exchange. “Evidently I was supposed to get REDACTED’S blue bunny at pickup. She’s asking for it. Do you have it by any chance?” Sen. Moreno said.

To which, Rep. Miller replied: “You can go through the parent coordinator.”

Sen. Bernie Moreno

Evidently I was supposed to get REDACTED’S blue bunny at pick up. She’s asking for it. Do you have it by any chance?

Max Miller

You can go through the parent coordinator. I’m sure l’ll see this one at the next hearing.

If you need anything, have Emily call Dr. REDACTED.

I have no notes or record of what you’re referring to.

Sen. Bernie Moreno

It’s the blue bunny she sleeps with, but got it.

Regarding what appears to be a third dispute over the stuffed animal in August, Miller posted screenshots of messages that he says prove he was not purposely hindering the child from getting her blue bunny back.

“So Sorry to bother you about this/I guess REDACTED left her blue bunny at your house and Emily is saying REDACTED wants it back-apparently her dad is offering to come pick It up From You- please Just let me know your response,” wrote the parenting coordinator in a text to Miller.

Miller replied, “Sure.”

According to the messages Miller posted on X, and the screenshots obtained by Mother Jones, the Morenos tried to send a friend of the family to pick up the bunny. “Sending Jared over to my home as a conduit was a bad idea,” Miller wrote on August 3, according to his own screenshot.

Around the time Miller refused to coordinate with the family friend, Emily Moreno’s lawyer, Andrew Zashin, sent Miller’s lawyers a note. “This is totally ridiculous,” Zashin wrote in an Aug. 3 email. “Please have Max return the bunny forthwith.”

Moreno’s lawyer, Andrew Zashin

Pam:
For no apparent reason, Max is not returning REDACTED’S blue bunny to Emily. Dr. REDACTED tried to get the blue bunny back. Dr. K made clear that despite her recommendation that the blue bunny stay with Emily, Max refuses to return it.

Why must this be a controversy?

This is totally ridiculous.

Please have Max return the bunny forthwith.

Thank you
Andrew

Throughout the fraught impasse, messages obtained by Mother Jones suggest that Moreno and Miller’s parenting coordinator played the referee.

“I advised him to Let your dad get the bunny from Preferably from The mailbox but he adamantly refuses,” the coordinator wrote, according to a screenshot of the erratically composed text reviewed by Mother Jones.

Miller and Moreno’s Parenting coordinator

I’m not coddling him I advised him to
Let your dad get the bunny from
Preferably from The mailbox but he adamantly refuses but l’ve suggested you keep the bunny at your house to Avoid these situations because unfortunately in a high conflict divorce these situations blow up
Often

Miller continues to defy calls for him to drop out of his campaign for reelection. August 10 is the deadline for him to withdraw and offer Republicans an opportunity to replace him with a less embattled candidate. Thus far, he shows no signs of doing so.

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A Commission Monitoring Human Rights Violations Is Concerned About the US

On Tuesday afternoon, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights convened in Washington, DC, to hear complaints about excessive use of force and suppression of freedom of expression during protests against immigration enforcement in American cities. One of those who attended and testified at the public hearing was Antonio Romanucci, a Chicago-based civil rights litigation lawyer representing the family of Renee Good, who was fatally shot by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis in January.

He began by thanking the commission for hosting a forum to examine “human rights atrocities” in the United States. “What we saw with Renee,” Romanucci said, “was a federal agent clearly using deadly force without any legal justification, in an extreme manner, shocking the conscience of our country.” Romanucci, who previously secured a settlement in a wrongful death civil rights case on behalf of George Floyd’s family, said “zero federal investigation” resulted in no accountability in Minneapolis, or elsewhere. “I have not seen these atrocities in my 41 years of practice,” he added.

The IACHR, an autonomous body of the Organization of American States, monitors human rights conditions in the hemisphere and hears complaints from civil society about alleged violations. Romanucci, along with Thomas Becker of the University Network for Human Rights, appealed to the commission, requesting a hearing on the US government’s actions against protesters, journalists, and bystanders at demonstrations opposing the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

“As Donald Trump attacks the courts, weaponizes the Department of Justice, and targets attorneys who challenge his administration,” Romanucci and Becker explained in an opinion piece published in the Guardian previewing the hearing, “we have been forced to seek justice beyond our borders.” They added: “Never before had the commission granted such a hearing, but the extraordinary nature of the Trump administration’s actions…warrants international scrutiny.”

“For years, the Commission has heard testimony about the attacks on protesters carried out by some of the region’s most repressive dictatorships. Now, it is the United States that will be called to answer for these abuses.”

A press release said this marked the first time the IACHR, which doesn’t have enforcement authority, held such a thematic hearing on freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly in the United States. “For years, the Commission has heard testimony about the attacks on protesters carried out by some of the region’s most repressive dictatorships,” James Cavallaro, former president of the IACHR, said in a statement. “Now, it is the United States that will be called to answer for these abuses.”

Rev. David Black, a pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was one of the speakers. He recounted how in September 2025, he was wearing his clerical collar when hejoined a protest outside the ICE detention facility in Broadview to say a prayer and stand in solidarity with the immigrant detainees. “My words were confrontational,” Rev. Black told the commission. “They were also peaceful.”

He said federal agents fired pepper-balls at him at least seven times, hitting his head, face, torso, arms, and legs. Other protesters tried to cover him, he said, but agents in full armor forced him down and sprayed the pastor with a chemical irritant. Rev. Black, who was part of a federal lawsuit against the US government last year decrying a “pattern of extreme brutality” by federal agents, recalled struggling to breathe. “What happened to me was not an isolated incident,” he said, stating that clergy have been “repeatedly assaulted” outside detention centers and prevented from ministering inside.

The delegation also condemned the Trump administration’s efforts to label protesters as domestic terrorists. Boston University law professor Susan Akram called the policies “blatantly illegal and draconian” and part of a “campaign to criminalize dissent, free expression, and ideologies that this administration dislikes.” Akram said the measures violated international law and “are frankly reviving McCarthyism in the United States.”

Andrea Pochak, one of the IACHR commissioners, said priests, journalists, human rights lawyers, and immigrants are not terrorists. She also inquired about cases in which federal agents engaged in excessive use of force had been disciplined or criminally charged. “The system of accountability is broken,” said Locke Bowman, an attorney representing Rev. Black and two other Chicago residents who have filed claims against the Department of Homeland Security.

The US government provided little in the way of response. Acting Deputy Chief of Mission to the OAS Julianna Aynes-Neville declined to answer questions, citing ongoing litigation. “I am circumscribed in what I am able to say today,” she said. “The United States must once again register dissatisfaction with the decision to convene this hearing on these matters.” She urged the commission to redirect its attention to backlogged cases and countries with “weak or nonexistent protections” for freedom of expression.

Cavallaro, the former president of IACHR, urged the commission to visit the United States to observe the human rights situation in the country. “If there’s nothing to hide, if the system is working, if cases are investigated, if abuses are addressed,” he said, addressing the US representatives, “please show that to the commission.”

“Without any transparent investigation there will never be any discipline,” Romanucci, the lawyer for Renee Good’s family, said, “there will never be any accountability.” After the hearing, Romanucci told Mother Jones the government’s evasiveness at the hearing mirrored its handling of Good’s killing. “Not only do we hear common design in justifying the narrative when there is deadly force or excessive force used,” he said, “this also, to me, is a common design of not answering questions or releasing information in order to make this process more transparent.”

Asked about the investigation into the fatal shooting of Good, Romanucci said, “the status today is the same as it was in January.” He added: “There has been no exchange of information with regard to the evidence of the case and we just hope to be able to get some answers very soon.” As for the IACHR’s hearing, Romanucci called for concrete action. “This was a good start,” he said, “but all that was exchanged today were words. We need to see much more.”

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What AI Regulation and Ownership Could Be

As an ordinary internet user, I am skeptical about AI. My colleagues and I have reported on several harmful aspects of the technology in the US: threats to democracy, its impact on the environment, mental health, the workforce, military intervention—the list goes on.

While researching the gaps in conversations around enforceable government regulation of AI startups, both big and small, eager to innovate and launch new products, I came across AI researchers, policy experts, and even “ordinary internet users” like me trying to reimagine how the industry could work. If AI is unstoppable, can we build it in a way where the public has more of a say in how the technology is made, used, and who it benefits?

To answer these questions, I spoke with B Cavello, the director of emerging technologies at the Aspen Institute. Cavello wants to make sure that ordinary users like you and me have some say in how this powerful technology is developed and regulated. I talked to Cavelloabout the gap between the recent proposals among tech executives and lawmakers to give Americans financial ownership stakes in major AI companies and what actually ensuringpublic safety could look like.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I’ve heard a lot of coverage on proposals of public ownership of AI from folks like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Are there other prominent proposals being discussed?

Ownership is complicated. I’m a big proponent of the movement for public AI. Public AI is open source, centering public access, accountability, and sustainable public goods. That means making sure that not only do people have free access to things, but also access to build models in their own local context.

When we say accountability, we don’t just mean regulation on harms we’re trying to prevent. We also mean the capabilities that we want to get built in the world. When we talk about AI leading to a new age of human flourishing, we often aren’t talking about the basics, and that’s an important place to start when we think about public accountability and then sustainable public goods.

When we build products within this framing, we want them to be essentially treated like public infrastructure.A lot of work in the public AI community has been on open source because that’s one of the spaces where people are able to continue to build on top of each other. CurrentAI [a public-private partnership of governments, companies, and organizations to fund public interest tech] announced in the last couple of weeks their AIPotluck initiative, which is bringing together different open-source AI builders to build a full open stack [meaning making the entire AI development process accessible to the public].

It’s less about trying to take the market share or revenues of big AI [companies, similar to Altman’s and Sanders’ proposals], but more that we’re going to distribute these capabilities, such that now they aren’t the only players in town—and we’re distributing [electrical] power that way.

Who are the types of people and communities that are participating in public AI discussions?

There’s a big movement around AI sovereignty across the African continent and Europe about trying to disentangle from American AI providers. To that end, ownership is about local representation and empowering a local tech community. There’s a conversation in the US, especially around a potential AI bubble, whether or not it might burst, and how we might have public ownership or public uptake of these technologies.

“I would like our AI future to look more like electricity: a reliable, publicly accountable utility that has universal service requirements to make sure that everyone can be connected. “

As you alluded to, there are folks like Sen. Sanders who are responding to the concerns around AI safety and power concentration, who are trying to look for interesting and creative avenues for trying to have some sort of power over these companies through partial ownership of them, but I think is like ultimately not where I would focus, especially per some of the conversations around the uncertainty of the [economic] future of these systems. It is sort of accepting defeat on other forms of regulation to say we’re just going to be passengers on this ride. I think Sanders’ team and a lot of people working in Congress don’t want that to be the only strategy going forward.

Windfall Trust, [a network of independent AI researchers and strategists], has been working on how to encourage people before a crisis happens [like mass unemployment] while the pressure is low, and get some pre-commitments on trigger conditions for different [ameliorating] policies.

Considering all the discussions around reimagining AI, how would these ideas become policy?

The thing I parallel it to is the renewable energy transition, where on one hand, we needed the tech to be there. We needed solar panels to get super good and cheap. But we also needed rebates on the policy side that enable us to leverage those technologies.

Congress and, broadly, governments tend to be reactive institutions.

The public is also becoming more aware and engaged on issues around AI. So some of these things will be showcased at a more local level before they make it into larger policy.

As a regular internet user, what are things that I should be thinking or concerned about?

How do we establish public accountability in how data centers are operated? For the last 20 years, there have been people demanding transparency in technology companies and basically being told we can’t do that because of the First Amendment. We have adopted this mentality that tech companies can be secretive—we can’t ask them anything, and they don’t divulge anything. We can absolutely require reporting about some of the ways data centers are operating.

I would love to see people pushing on public access to data centers. Let’s demand that we have set-asides that 20 percent of a data center is allocated toward publicly accessible, accountable, and sustainable public goods.

We already have the tools. We’ve seen a vast hollowing out of the apparatus that is meant to hold these entities accountable. Federal agencies are meant to do this work—the IRS. If somebody in the public cares about holding big AI companies to account, part of [the public effort] means championing the people who can do that work and encouraging the election of people who are interested in that.

I would encourage people in their own use of AI technologies to think about how to use open systems and run things locally. There are some folks who are engaging with public libraries across the country, where people can access these tools for trying things out. OpenAI and Anthropic don’t monopolize what is possible [with AI].

Is there something analogous to conversations that happened previously on how to think about what AI could be?

I would like our AI future to look more like electricity: a reliable, publicly accountable utility that has universal service requirements to make sure that everyone can be connected. And at the same time, we have batteries and home generators [as individuals].

It’s not to say that there can’t be interesting innovations on top of existing infrastructure. In many ways, I think of AI as the cool thing we can do with electricity. Here we are having a Zoom call—what an innovation in electricity! We should have public utilities, and we should have a thriving market of all different kinds of community solar and private companies that’ll build innovative batteries, but recognizing that we all deserve access, we all deserve accountability. We deserve, if we want, to have an innovation ecosystem. We need a sustainable infrastructure layer that people can count on and build on top of, and not be worried that [Anthropic] Mythos-style, suddenly everything is revoked.

There are things that are not great about our public utilities. People are having fights about data centers in part because of the way our electrical grid is run [such as prioritizing data centers over local residents]. So I don’t think that it is a perfect one-to-one.

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She Followed ICE’s Advice to Self-Deport. Five Weeks Later, She Was Dead.

When 25-year-old Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz took her three daughters and boarded a plane from St. Louis to Guatemala City on June 17, her friends begged her not to go. But Glendy had no other option: Her husband, Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz, who worked as a roofer and was the family’s breadwinner, had been deported a year earlier.

On July 22, just weeks after Glendy reunited with Nixon in rural Guatemala, neighbors found the couple bound and shot to death in a sugarcane field. Their 14-month-old daughter Giovanni was crying, dehydrated, next to their bodies. Two communities—one in Missouri, the other in the western Guatemalan region of Retalhuleu—are left to pick up the pieces.

In Guatemala, that includes Nixon’s older brother, Rolando Pérez Paz, who was deported alongside Nixon in 2025. Now, Rolando and his wife are caring for his three nieces. He can’t help but wonder what could have been.

“If my brother hadn’t been deported, he might—well, only God knows—but he might still be alive,” Rolando told me in Spanish from his home in Retalhuleu. “Both of them might still be alive.”

“If my brother hadn’t been deported…he might still be alive. Both of them might still be alive.”

News of the couple’s deaths slowly got back to St. Louis. Glendy’s friend Laura, who asked to use a pseudonym out of fear that she, too, might be targeted by ICE, got a call from another friend: “Glendy is gone.” An email circulated within the Fuerza organizing committee, a local immigrant workers rights group for which Glendy rarely missed a meeting. By the time St. Louis Public Radio picked up the story, Glendy and Nixon’s friends were already planning a vigil.

Asked about Nixon and Rolando’s deportations, an ICE spokesperson wrote that Nixon had two convictions for driving while intoxicated. Mother Jones was able to corroborate only one of those charges, and there are no court records under Rolando’s name.

To Alicia Hernandez, an organizer with the legal aid group MICA Project, the story was familiar: a husband taken in a traffic stop and sent away and a wife forced to leave the United States to reunite with him.Their deaths are part of a broader story of revenue-seeking policing in a region that once withstood intense federal scrutiny and has now become part of the Trump administration’s deportation machine.

The St. Louis area is home to 54 separate police departments. Some have fewer than 10 officers and serve townships with a thousand or so residents. Those municipalities—sometimes no larger than one or two subdivisions—rely on their police departments as a major source of local government revenue, extracting money through traffic stops and municipal court fines. ICE’s deportation surge presents a new financial opportunity.

“I asked if there was an arrest warrant for me, and he said no.”

After the 2014 police shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, the St. Louis area’s patchwork law enforcement apparatus came under national scrutiny. Some departments consolidated; others, under pressure from the federal government, enacted rules meant to limit racial profiling and profit-motivated traffic stops. But now, instead of pushing the region’s police toward reform, the federal government is offering financial incentives to target immigrants like Nixon and Rolando. ICE is paying six St. Louis–area police departments to deputize officers as federal immigration enforcers under what’s known as a 287(g) agreement.

“It’s quite a bit of money,” Scott Robinson, chief of police for Breckenridge Hills, a small municipality bordering Overland, told a local TV station earlier this year. ICE has promised some participating departments money for equipment, salary and benefits reimbursements, and $100,000 for new vehicles. For Breckenridge Hills, which employs just over a dozen officers, that’s a substantial sum. “They sign these 287(g) agreements to supplement their budgets,” Hernandez said.

About 60 percent of ICE arrests in St. Louis start as traffic stops. “We see situation after situation where someone is pulled over for rolling a red light, driving without a driver’s license, having a broken tail light,” Hernandez told me. “And then from there, they are put on an ICE hold.”

Locally, immigrants know where the “hot spots” are, Hernandez said. They issue warnings like “Don’t drive through Overland.” About a quarter of all ICE arrests in the St. Louis area during President Donald Trump’s second term so far have happened in Overland, a suburb of small midcentury brick homes. Glendy and Nixon settled there around 2020.

According to a statement from ICE, Nixon and Rolando were picked up by federal agents on April 15, 2025. “They got us at 5 in the morning—we were maybe 50 meters or so from our house when they grabbed us,” Rolando said. First, they spoke with Nixon, who was in his 40s, then they questioned his older brother. They shackled their hands and their feet. “I asked if there was an arrest warrant for me, and [the officer] said no,” Rolando said.

“This administration seems to believe that everybody requesting asylum must inherently be a bogus asylum seeker and not really an authentic humanitarian case.”

The two brothers were held in downtown St. Louis, Rolando said, then moved to Phelps County Jail, a small rural jail operated by a sheriff’s department that entered into a 287(g) agreement with ICE this year. (The Phelps County Sheriff’s Department refused to answer a Freedom of Information Act request, instead deferring to ICE.)

As the month dragged on, Rolando said, the Pérez brothers were moved to yet another rural Missouri jail, then to Louisiana. By the middle of May, Nixon and Rolando were back in rural Guatemala. There, Rolando was reunited with his wife, but Nixon’s family was left thousands of miles away.

Glendy, then 24 and nine months pregnant with her third child, was left to fend for herself. “Her world completely collapsed,” her friend Yohana, who asked to use a pseudonym, told me in Spanish, “because she was left all alone.”

She tried for a year to make it work without her husband, all while worried that she would be deported herself. The Department of Homeland Security had its own solution: self-deportation.

“Leave on your OWN terms,” ICE threatened in a September 2025 social media flyer. “Avoid the jail cell. Avoid the humiliation.” Last year, then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem spent over $200 million on advertisements pushing that same message. US Customs and Border Protection has even launched a “self-deportation app,” CBP Home.

But self-deportation, researcher Austin Kocher explained, is a marketing tactic meant to appeal to Trump’s base by declaring that if people would only follow the law and immigrate the “right” way, they could be safe. “It’s trying to develop legitimacy for a deportation program that is not always particularly popular if people understood the normalcy of the people who are wrapped up in it,” Kocher said.

Representatives with Fuerza, the immigrant rights group, said Glendy had an open asylum case with a hearing set for 2027. She came to the United States as a teen mother fleeing violence and poverty in Guatemala six years ago. But that likely would not have stopped her from being criminalized and deported, as the vast majority of asylum claims in Missouri are rejected.

“This administration seems to believe that everybody requesting asylum must inherently be a bogus asylum seeker and not really an authentic humanitarian case,” Kocher said. According to UN data, 32,000 people have been deported to Guatemala in the first half of 2026 alone. “This is a consequence of having a whole system that is so bent towards deportation that it can’t even listen to the legitimate claims of legitimate asylum seekers.”

“I picture the situation and ask myself, ‘My God, how did Glendy sleep?’ How could Glendy sleep peacefully, knowing she had to feed her daughters the next day?”

Records from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University show that there are 49,576 backlogged cases in the Kansas City Immigration Court, which oversees the state of Missouri. In the first half of 2026, over 95 percent of asylum applications processed by that court were denied. The same week Glendy and Nixon were killed, the Trump administration launched a new plan to expedite deportations of asylum seekers.

After her husband’s deportation, Glendy took on two jobs, working in a factory during the day and cleaning offices at night. Sometimes, Laura watched the kids while Glendy worked. Laura and Glendy’s daughters—girls so close they had their first communion together and saw each other nearly every day—had sleepovers that stretched from one night into the next. Laura and Glendy took turns driving them to school. Whenever Glendy made tamales, she shared some with Laura’s family. They helped each other out wherever they could.

But Glendy couldn’t stop worrying. She gave Laura and another friend power of attorney to help her children in case she was taken. “I won’t let that happen,” Laura said.

On June 17, Glendy and her daughters got on a plane to Guatemala at St. Louis Lambert International Airport. Courtesy Missouri Workers Center

This past April, police officers working with ICE arrived at Glendy’s local middle school, asking questions about three students there. District Superintendent Chris Kilbride rushed to the scene and “got the officers away from the school as quickly as possible,” he told me. Although no students were detained, parents in Overland were terrified.

A few weeks after Glendy gave birth to her youngest daughter, Giovanni, she started bringing Laura to monthly meetings held by the local immigrant advocacy group Fuerza. “She was like, ‘Hey, let’s go! You can get informed about what’s going on in the community,’” Laura remembered. There, they commiserated, shared meals, and got reports of the latest ICE arrests. At every meeting, there was childcare. “We would take our daughters for them to know what’s going on as well.”

As members of Fuerza, the women went door-knocking, asking neighbors to join their cause. They met with local officials to ask them not to sign 287(g) agreements. Organizing for their rights helped them feel less alone, but Glendy still feared leaving the house to go to work.

“For those of us without children, it’s a bit easier to manage,” said Yohana, a Nicaraguan Fuerza member who works in construction. “But if you have children at home, you can’t just tell them ‘there’s no food today.’” Glendy had no reliable transportation and worked irregular hours; the bills kept piling up. “I picture the situation and ask myself, ‘My God, how did Glendy sleep?’ How could Glendy sleep peacefully, knowing she had to feed her daughters the next day?”

Teachers from the Ritenour School District, which two of Glendy’s daughters attended, reached out to help; friends offered rides and childcare. But a year after Nixon’s deportation, it still wasn’t enough. By May 2026, Glendy was telling her friends she planned to return to Guatemala.

“I didn’t want her to leave. And she told me she didn’t want to leave but she was obligated to,” Laura said. “It’s just getting hard,” Glendy told her, shortly before getting on the plane. The last time the two saw each other was the first time Laura saw Glendy cry.

“They should never have gone back, but the laws of this country made them go,” Yohana said.In a photo taken June 17, the day Glendy returned to Guatemala, she grins alongside her daughters outside St. Louis Lambert International Airport. The two older girls carry large stuffed bears. Glendy’s youngest daughter is in a carrier strapped to her chest, smiling at the camera in pigtails. It’s a warm and sunny day in St. Louis, but they’re all wearing jackets in case it gets chilly on the plane.

A memorial from an August 3 vigil in Overland, where hundreds of people gathered to remember Glendy and Nixon. Courtesy Missouri Workers Center

Nixon and Glendy’s family buried the couple side by side after a procession through the Guatemalan countryside. The Guatemalan National Civil Police and Public Prosecutor’s Office are investigating the killing, but they have not publicly identified a suspect or motive. At an early August vigil for the couple outside Overland City Hall, the town’s mayor said Overland will not sign a 287(g) agreement—though two municipal police departments bordering Overland have already done so.

Laura and Yohana are fundraising for Nixon and Glendy’s three daughters and talking to the press. But neither was willing to use their real names in this article, out of fear that they, too, would be targeted. In late July, Laura tried to tell her 10-year-old daughter what happened to her best friend’s family.

“Why are people so mean?” Laura’s daughter asked. “She literally just left, and now she has no mom or dad, and I don’t get to see her anymore?”

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This Judge Figures Using the Misleading Recycling Symbol is Probably Free Speech

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

A pioneering California law meant to sharply limit use of the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol has been blocked by a federal judge who said it probably violates the First Amendment.

In a preliminary injunction issued last month, US District Judge William Hayes halted enforcement of SB 343 after food, packaging, and retail groups sued, finding that key provisions were “unconstitutionally vague” and likely infringed protected commercial speech. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2021, was expected to start this fall.

“The First Amendment protects free expression, not a corporation’s right to commit consumer fraud.”

The decision is a blow to environmental advocates, who had hoped to remove the familiar symbol from a huge array of plastic products, in line with a statewide study showing that only a fraction are widely collected and actually recycled. SB 343 said only goods and packaging accepted by recycling programs serving at least 60 percent of Californians and then actually sorted for recycling—not collected and thrown away—could bear the chasing arrows.

Hayes’ constitutional reasoning surprised supporters of SB 343 because similar arguments against environmental marketing regulations have historically struggled in court.

“The First Amendment protects free expression, not a corporation’s right to commit consumer fraud,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for the nonprofit Californians Against Waste. “We see this exact playbook every time the plastics industry is asked to stop misleading the public—they suddenly hide behind the Constitution.”

In his decision, Hayes applied a standard four-part test to determine whether SB 343 would unduly restrict companies’ speech rights. The law passed the first two tests handily, as it regulates “potentially misleading” speech and was intended to serve California’s legitimate interests in reducing consumer confusion and improving recycling rates.

The next tests are where the law ran into trouble. Hayes, siding with the industry trade groups, argued that the legislation would not advance those “legitimate interests.” Rather than encouraging companies to redesign their products and packaging to comply with California’s real-world recyclability criteria, he said the law would prompt them to remove the recycling symbol altogether. Products recycled at a rate below the 60 percent threshold that the law requires would no longer make it into recycling bins, which could in theory leave more of them bound for the landfill.

Hayes said a less stringent regulation could have better advanced California’s goals. For instance, the state could have passed a law requiring more descriptive qualifiers alongside the recycling symbol. He offered a hypothetical example of a label explaining that an item is “accepted by recyclers in the greater Los Angeles area but nowhere else in California.” Such a label would provide consumers with more and better information, he argued, but would not be allowed under SB 343.

Heidi Sanborn, executive director of the nonprofit National Stewardship Action Council, said the judge’s reasoning reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of the problems facing California recycling systems. People are throwing too much stuff into their blue bins, she said. In addition to not actually being recyclable, much of this refuse—including plastic bags and other plastic films—can gum up sorting machines, causing operational delays and creating safety risks.

Polluters regularly cite the First Amendment to fight regulations that require them to disclose information to the public.

“People are wish-cycling, they’re so desperate to recycle,” Sanborn told Grist. “We have to pull all this [contamination] out, which is very labor-intensive, and then everybody wants to know why their bills go up.”

Industry groups welcomed the injunction, saying it would prevent California from “censoring truthful information on packaging.”

Scott Hochberg, general counsel and litigation director for the nonprofit Earth Island Institute, said he’s seen free speech challenges to environmental rules many times before. Big polluters have frequently invoked the First Amendment to oppose regulations that require them to disclose information—like their greenhouse gas emissions—or tone down statements about their sustainability.

“What’s relatively new and concerning is when these arguments succeed and states are blocked from implementing common-sense initiatives to protect their residents,” he said.

A lawsuit Hochberg’s organization is pursuing against Coca-Cola illustrates the same debate. It alleges the company presents itself as a “sustainable and environmentally friendly company” despite its outsize contribution to plastic pollution. Coca-Cola argued that statements about its sustainability efforts—including plastics recycling—were protected political speech rather than commercial advertising. A federal judge rejected that argument in 2024.

The companies that sued California didn’t make that same distinction; their suit is more like one filed in 1992 that sought to block a California law restricting the use of terms like “biodegradable,” “ozone-friendly,” and “recyclable.” A judge upheld the law, ruling that it would not stifle free speech because corporations could still use a restricted word or phrase as long as they included qualifiers explaining how, where, or under what conditions it applied.

The injunction against SB 343 leaves California with few easy options. Hayes’ ruling suggests the state faces a difficult road if the case proceeds to trial. Lawmakers could amend the law to address some of the judge’s concerns, though that may be unlikely given the politics surrounding the issue. California could also appeal the injunction, but the lower court would still have to decide the case on its merits.

Earth Island Institute and Californians Against Waste announced on July 27 that they are joining California as defendants. Hochberg said he hoped to provide the court with more information “about how the recycling system actually works.” Losing the lawsuit will make it harder for other states to pursue similar labeling regulations, he said.

It could also jeopardize California’s nation-leading extended producer responsibility law, which shifts responsibility for collecting, recycling, and reducing plastic packaging from taxpayers and local governments to the companies that produce it. It relies on the same definition of recycling and is currently being challenged by a separate lawsuit.

Whatever happens next, Sanborn said she’s ready to work with industry to come up with other solutions—including legislation to clarify labeling rules at the national level. “We can and should work together to solve this,” she said. “But you should not have the right to lie to people.”

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The Lost Hiroshima Memoir

At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a minister who presided over a Methodist church in Hiroshima, was two miles outside the city, when a tremendous flash occurred in the sky. Uninjured by the blast, he rushed toward his home and his family, passing hordes of the dead and the gravely wounded—people severely burnt, some holding their eyeballs in their hands—and scenes of horrific devastation, as an immense conflagration consumed his city. He didn’t know what had happened. No one did. This level of destruction was incomprehensible. Tanimoto also couldn’t know at that moment, as he feared for his wife, young daughter, and his parishioners, that he would become one of the best-known survivors of this first act of nuclear warfare and devote the rest of his life to preventing a recurrence of such a hellish catastrophe.

Though I never met Tanimoto, I feel as if I know him. That’s because about two years ago, I was asked to edit his poignant and gripping memoir of that horrible day and the weeks and months that followed, an account that had been lost for decades. Today, the book is being published by Random House’s Modern Library under the title Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir. It’s a harrowing tale of the atomic bombing from ground zero and details the heroic action—though Tanimoto never called it that—he took to ferry the wounded across a river, using a small boat he found and only a pole to push it along, so these victims might find medical attention. As the city burned and he tended to survivors who had lost much of their flesh—many would not live long—he kept repeating to himself, “These are human beings.” The horror was numbing. An eyewitness later called Tanimoto a “rescuing angel.”

Kai Bird, a co-author of American Prometheus, the biography that inspired Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, praises Tanimoto’s work as a “stunning historical discovery and a heartrending testimony of human suffering.” Tanimoto bore witness to one of the most significant days in human history, and his remembrances—as gruesome and disturbing as they are—ought to be read by all.

My involvement in bringing his memoir to the public began with a trip I took to Japan two years ago. Early in my journalism career, I focused on arms control and nuclear proliferation issues—and then moved on to other topics after a year or two of having nightmares about nuclear attacks. In Japan, I felt compelled to visit Hiroshima, where I was moved by how the city had rebuilt, creating a Peace Park at its center, and dedicating itself to the abolition of nuclear weapons. The memorials to the estimated 140,000 killed by the atomic bomb were inspiring because they were free of bitterness and promoted a never-again message.

Upon my return to the United States, I wrote an essay for this newsletter, in which I observed, “Hiroshima is certainly a reminder that we live in a world imperiled by nuclear arsenals and that we have yet to fully address that danger—and that human cruelty can be excessive and that the total annihilation of human civilization remains a possibility. But the city’s commemoration of the tragedy has a beautiful side.”

A few months later, I was contacted by Donald Rosenfeld, a veteran film producer who as a young man was president of Merchant Ivory Productions (Howards End, A Room with a View, Jefferson in Paris, The Remains of the Day). He informed me he was currently developing a feature film dramatizing one of the greatest journalistic feats of the 20th century: John Hersey’s article on Hiroshima published by the New Yorker a year after the bomb was dropped.

This 30,000-word account—written after Hersey visited the devastated city—consumed a full issue of the magazine and was the first comprehensive depiction in Western media of what happened to the residents of Hiroshima that day, as well as how they were affected by radiation poisoning in the months afterward. For a year, the media had generally shied away from fully describing what had befallen the people of Hiroshima, and the military had downplayed—even dismissed—the injuries and deaths resulting from the bomb’s radiation. The American public had mostly been exposed to images of rubble, not photographs or accounts that showed the pain and suffering of the civilian victims.

The coverage was incomplete—or sanitized—for a variety of reasons. The US military, then occupying Japan, controlled access to the city and was not keen to have reports on the gruesome effects of the bomb, and anti-Japanese racism and antipathy toward a WWII enemy inhibited sympathy for those vaporized, crushed, or wounded in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hersey changed all this. His article, which would soon be a bestselling book, told the separate stories of six Hiroshima residents who had survived. The piece recreated the day from each of their vantages—a just-the-facts recounting of the horror, no adjectives. His intent was to let readers envision what would happen to them and their loved ones if their city or town were hit by an atomic bomb. One of the six witnesses was Tanimoto.

Hersey’s work was an instant phenomenon. The issue sold out. His article prompted stories in newspapers and magazines around the globe. It was serialized on the radio. Albert Einstein asked the New Yorker for a thousand copies that he could distribute. But no copies were left. Hersey made the world see—and understand—what an atomic blast truly did. It was one of the most consequential acts of journalism in modern history. Already a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and much-acclaimed war correspondent—he was only 32—Hersey went on to a long and illustrious career as a journalist and writer. He died in 1993.

Rosenfeld was looking to make a movie covering Hersey’s pursuit of the Hiroshima story—there are twists and turns to the tale—and he asked if I wanted to be part of the project. Of course, I did. While we were figuring out my role in this endeavor—I read an early script and gave notes—he informed me that among Hersey’s papers stored at Yale University was a 221-page manuscript in English that Tanimoto had written in 1947 chronicling his experiences in Hiroshima. It was a more detailed accounting than what had appeared in Hersey’s article, told from the Japanese minister’s distinct perspective. At some point, Tanimoto, who passed away in 1986, had sent the typewritten manuscript to Hersey, and for years it had sat in a folder in a box. Tanimoto’s own family did not know it existed. Only a few researchers and scholars had come across it, and then Hersey’s grandson, Cannon Hersey, spotted the manuscript in late 2022.

As a side project to the Hersey film, Rosenfeld hoped to publish Tanimoto’s memoir. He asked if I would edit it and compose an introduction. I immediately said yes. What an honor it would be to help bring Tanimoto’s story to the public. Rosenfeld’s aim was to try to find a publisher for the memoir, but if that failed, he had a small publishing company of his own that could publish the work. I didn’t foresee huge market potential for the memoir but believed it would be a good deed to turn this forgotten manuscript into a book, no matter what happened after that.

So as the second Trump administration began, I found an escape from that chaos in editing Tanimoto’s terrifying reminiscences of August 6, 1945, and the months afterward, during which he contended with severe health problems, strove to rebuild his church, and headed toward what would be a decades-long career as an international peace activist.

Tanimoto had studied at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta prior to World War II and knew English. But passages in the memoir were written in a stiff English, some tough to understand. The manuscript included loads of details about routine church affairs. My goal was to make his memoir readable so this act of witnessing would have a chance to reach a wide audience. I dug up old maps of Hiroshima to check the names of streets, neighborhoods, rivers, and other geographic features. (In the memoir, Tanimoto notes his spelling skills were lacking.) I had to make sense of sections with confusing chronologies.

I did what editors do—and preserved Tanimoto’s straightforward recounting of the apocalyptic scenes he experienced, his rescue efforts, the many tragedies he saw, and the hardships he and other Hiroshima residents endured long after the bombing. In his memoir, he contemplated the morality of the nuclear attack—without bearing any ill will against the Americans—and its impact on human society. He described how he came to see his duty to spread the Christian faith as intertwined with his mission to prevent any more atomic bombings. As I note in an introduction to the book—which serves as a biography of Tanimoto and covers his long-lasting relationship with Hersey—Tanimoto encountered many travails as an antinuclear campaigner. His projects did not always pan out. But he stayed true to this cause until his last days.

Tanimoto’s memoir is more than a historical document. It’s a warning that the existential threat posed by the nuclear arsenals held by nine nations remains. We all live in peril, and human extinction—and global destruction—is only a few bad decisions away. That prospect is hard to grasp and absorb into our daily lives. As did Hersey, Tanimoto shows us the ghastly and inescapable reality of nuclear war—an alert that cannot be sounded often enough. The editors at Modern Library agreed. They acquired the memoir and are now enthusiastically promoting it widely.

As for the Hersey movie, the project is moving forward. Director Phil Joanou has written a script, and Rosenfeld is lining up financing. Tanimoto is a main character in the film, which, if it comes to be made, will further spread his crucial testimony. Until then, this book will share the simple but profound message to which he devoted his life: Do not forget.

In a moving foreword, his 81-year-old daughter, Koko Tanimoto Kondo, who as an infant survived the bombing because her mother managed to push her through an opening in the burning wreckage of their home that had collapsed on them, writes, “Human memory is fragile. It’s so convenient to forget unpleasant things, much easier than facing them. But if nuclear weapons are never used again, it will only be because of the memory of what happened to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. My father was one of the first to understand this clearly.” Tanimoto spent decades prodding people and governments throughout the world to not permit the memory of Hiroshima to fade. With this book, he is still reminding us.

Here’s an excerpt from the book.

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Trump-Endorsed Candidate Loses Michigan Primary to a Man Who Suspended His Campaign

A candidate who suspended his campaign a month ago, spent no money, and endorsed his own rival won Michigan’s 8th Congressional District GOP primary on Tuesday, handily defeating Amir Hassan, the candidate President Donald Trump endorsed.

The victor, Thomas J. Smith, won 50 percent of the vote in the state’s 8th Congressional District, according to theNew York Times, while Amir Hassan only had about 33 percent. That’s a difference of over 10,000 votes. Smith suspended his campaign in mid-July—too late to get his name off the ballot.In a July 16 video, he formally endorsed Al Lemmo, donning an “Al Lemmo for Congress” hat. Lemmo ended up with 16 percent of the vote on Tuesday.

Trump endorsed Hassan on Truth Social in June, but supporters opposed the move, some with significant anti-Islamic sentiment. Hassan’s campaign website says the congressional candidate “recently reaffirmed his commitment to Christ” and stated that “Jesus Christ is his Lord and Savior.” Hassan also received support from House Republicans’ campaign committee, which highlighted his service in the Navy and as a former federal law enforcement officer.

According to FEC campaign filings, Hassan spent over $600,000, while Smith has no FEC filings.

According to the Detroit News, Smith spoke for about 13 seconds at a Wednesday Republican event at a restaurant in Warren, Michigan: “I’m running for the 8th Congressional District to unseat communist comrade Rivet.”

In a statement to Politico earlier on Wednesday, Smith said: “I look forward to working with Speaker [Mike] Johnson and the entire Republican team to expand our House majority and advance President Trump’s America First agenda to lower costs for working families and make America affordable again.”

Smith is set to face Kristen McDonald Rivet, the Democratic incumbent who has served as the representative for the district since 2025.

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Police Footage Shows Rep. Max Miller Downplaying His Daughter’s Broken Collarbone

On July 18, Mother Jones published an exhaustive article on a number of assault and domestic abuse allegations swirling around Ohio Republican Rep. Max Miller.

The report was based on more than 2,000 pages of court filings and police records, including a 48-page investigatory file relating to possible child abuse after their toddler experienced a broken collarbone. This file included numerous troubling allegations from Emily Moreno—Miller’s ex-wife and the daughter of US Sen. Bernie Moreno—who accused Miller of throwing scalding water at her, shoving her against a wall during a heated custody exchange, and holding a gun to her head while she was trying to change their daughter’s diaper. Other public records accused Miller of drug abuse and threatening behavior.

Today, we’re publishing a video that includes select clips from seven hours of police interviews and bodycam footage related to the child abuse probe. This adds to interview footage CNN published in June relating to the same investigation.

Police ultimately concluded that a finding of child abuse was “unsubstantiated.” That means there was not sufficient evidence to prove abuse or neglect occurred.

Nonetheless, the clips we are publishing show a child protection specialist indicating the collarbone injury was accompanied by a bruise resembling a handprint. Emily Moreno also tells police that their daughter expressed fear of her father.

This week, Sen. Moreno weighed in on the personal drama roiling his family, calling it the “seventh circle of hell.”

“My daughter lives in constant fear of this man,” Sen. Moreno continued.

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This Data Center Foe Just Won His Democratic House Primary in Michigan

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

William Lawrence, a prominent environmental organizer who foregrounded his support for a data center moratorium, has won the Democratic primary in Michigan’s seventh congressional district in a victory for progressives.

Lawrence was a co-founder of the youth-led climate justice organization the Sunrise Movement, the group that in 2018 mainstreamed calls for a Green New Deal to battle economic injustice while rapidly phasing out planet-warming fossil fuels. The 36-year-old defeated Bridget Brink, a former US ambassador to Ukraine and Slovakia, and Matt Maasdam, a former US Navy Seal and military aide to Barack Obama.

In the November general election, Lawrence will face off with incumbentRepublican Tom Barrett. Lawrencesecured endorsements from Senator Bernie Sanders, as well as Representative Rashida Tlaib and progressive US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. On the campaign trail, he highlighted his support for universal healthcare, boosting taxes on billionaires, and ending the war in Iran and arms sales to Israel.

A recent poll suggests roughly two-thirds of voters, and nearly half of Republicans, likely favor candidates who call for pausing data center construction.

But his biggest focus may have been his opposition to the unchecked build-out of AI data centers; he focused on the issue in his first television ad.

“Will made opposing data center development a core part of this campaign and it helped power him to victory all across the district, including massive margins in small towns where DC insiders didn’t expect him to compete,” Stevie O’Hanlon, Lawrence’s campaign manager, said. “In Mason, where one data center is being proposed, Will won with 49 percent of the vote in a three-way race.”

In May, Lawrence said “data centers put a tremendous, unprecedented and unexpected burden on the grid to increase overall demand” and that there is “no plan to do that in a clean way.”

Survey research conducted by the left-learning polling firm Data for Progress found that 63 percent of US voters, including 66 percent of independents and 47 percent of Republicans, were more likely to support a candidate calling for pausing data center construction.

“Tonight the people of Michigan’s 7th district sent a clear message: They are tired of Silicon Valley billionaires and DC insiders determining the future of our towns and our country,” he said in a Tuesday night statement. “They want an unbought representative who isn’t afraid to stand up to leaders of both parties and fight for working people.”

Lawrence’s district in central Michigan is one of just 18 House seats that the Cook Political Report called “toss-ups.” Barrett has often voted with Trump.

“Tom Barrett may have the high-powered DC consultants and corporate CEOs in his corner, but our movement is made up of real Michiganders, coming together across political differences,” Lawrence said in his election night statement.

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Michigan’s Primary Reckoning for the Democrats

No congressional candidate in Democratic history ever had as much outside money dumped on them in one primary as Abdul El-Sayed. But El-Sayed has now survived the onslaught in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. Barely. The Bernie Sanders-endorsed champion of Medicare for All defeated Rep. Haley Stevens by about a one-point margin on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.

The dynamics of the election in Michigan were not new. Like in other recent primaries spanning from Manhattan to California’s Central Valley, a populist outsider ran against an establishment Democrat backed by millions of dollars of super PAC money—much of it from AIPAC allies that aim to keep critics of Israel out of Congress. What sets El-Sayed’s victory apart are the stakes and the scale of the effort to defeat him.

Democrats need to keep the Michigan seat that Sen. Gary Peters is retiring from if they hope to take back the Senate. To do that, they now have to defeat former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in a swing state that has gone for Donald Trump twice, and where Rogers barely lost to Sen. Elissa Slotkin in 2024. It is far from certain that El-Sayed will prevail in November—just as there were no guarantees that Stevens would have won.

After a polarizing primary, El-Sayed has just three months to consolidate Democratic support and make his case to independent voters. El-Sayed began that work in an election-night speech before the race was called. “However much we might disagree with our Democratic opponent, there is so much more that unites us than divides us,” he told supporters. “Tomorrow, we begin to mend fences.” In a Wednesday speech after the race was called, El-Sayed said he had a “great conversation” with Stevens, and called his former opponent “one of the most committed public servants that you’ll ever meet.”

El-Sayed’s margin of victory was much smaller than expected heading into Tuesday: Polls tracked by the New York Times showed El-Sayed leading by double digits in eight surveys in a row. Instead, the results closely resembled Michighan’s 2016 presidential primary, when Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton by 1.4 points. As of Wednesday morning, El-Sayed is leading Stevens by an even smaller margin.

Stevens, who was endorsed by Peters and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, was the favorite of much of the Democratic establishment including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. But the results on Tuesday were yet another reminder this primary season that much of the Democratic base wants to go in a different direction than party leadership.

The general election will provide a rare chance to help answer a question that is often litigated online but rarely tested offline: Can progressive populists win a swing state like Michigan? A loss by El-Sayed, on the other hand, would likely lead to many warnings from moderate Democrats about what kind of candidate the party should nominate for president in 2028. Republicans have not won a US Senate election in Michigan in more than three decades; the seat El-Sayed is running for has been held by Democrats since 1979—five years before the 41-year-old candidate was born.

El-Sayed’s victory was not the only win for the left wing of the Democratic party in Michigan on Tuesday. In Michigan’s 7th congressional district, which is centered around Lansing, Will Lawrence pulled off a shocking win. The 7th district is a tossup seat held by Republican Rep. Tom Barrett that Democrats hope to flip in November. To do that, Democratic primary voters had two traditionally safe picks: Bridget Brink, who resigned as the US Ambassador to Ukraine soon after Trump returned to office, and Matt Maasdam, a former Navy SEAL who carried the so-called nuclear football for Barack Obama.

Brink and Maaasdam ended up roughly tied with each getting about 28 percent of votes on Tuesday. That may have allowed Lawrence, a millennial founder of the Sunrise Movement who capitalized on local opposition to AI data centers, to prevail with only about 43 percent of the vote. Many Democratic strategists like David Axelrod believe the seat will now be harder to flip in November.

In the Detroit area, Rep. Shri Thanedar narrowly lost his primary to state Rep. Donavan McKinney, who was endorsed by Sanders, El-Sayed, and the Democratic Socialists of America. Thanedar was a notably weak incumbent who has irritated fellow Democrats in Congress. As a largely self-funding Indian American multimillionaire, he was also an unusual fit in a district where more than 40 percent of residents are Black and more than 40 percent of children live in poverty.

The race between El-Sayed and Stevens was one of the most closely watched primaries this year, but it did not attract record spending because super PACs wanted Democrats to control the Senate. About half of the roughly $60 million spent by outside groups came from the AIPAC-backed United Democracy Project, which has worked to elect pro-Israel members of both parties. The Michigan race was UDP’s top priority; the group spent twice as much as it ever had in a single race. (Overall, super PACS favored Stevens by a more than 10-to-1 margin.)

The total amount put into the race by pro-Israel groups may be even higher: A recently formed dark money group called the Center for Democratic Priorities spent a reported $6.5 million backing Stevens, whose views on Israel are captured by her claim that the country “comes to me in my dreams.” As I reported last week, little is known about the Center for Democratic Priorities beyond the fact that its low-profile director apparently served in a similar role for an AIPAC-backed super PAC in Michigan in 2024.

El-Sayed, a doctor and public health expert who served as the health director for Wayne County, is an unapologetic critic of Israel who has accused the nation of committing genocide in Gaza. If elected, he could quickly become Israel’s most vocal opponent in the Senate—as well as one of its most charismatic members. He would also be the first Muslim senator in US history and one of the youngest members of the chamber. (El-Sayed is younger than all but two sitting senators.)

El-Sayed’s victory—along with those of House candidates like Daniel Biss earlier this year in Illinois—is a clear sign to people running for Congress across the country that pro-Israel spending can be successfully resisted. As El-Sayed told my colleague Najib Aminy before the primary, “ If I prove that you can win statewide, taking on AIPAC and winning, that is catastrophic because of what it says about the future of the party. It is existential to oppose it. I think this race is going to change a lot of minds, and it’s going to scramble a lot of expectations.”

On the campaign trail, El-Sayed was highly effective at depicting AIPAC and the corporations spending against him as villains trying to buy the Senate race. He returned to that theme repeatedly in ads, speeches, and his campaign’s call and response slogan: “Money out of politics. Money in your pocket. Medicare for All.” The tens of millions of dollars in television ads super PACs spent against him presumably cost him the support of some voters, but it also gave him one of his most powerful talking points.

In Illinois this March, AIPAC-backed groups spent about $7 million trying to defeat Biss, the mayor of Evanston. (Biss, who is Jewish, is the descendant of Holocaust survivors and has noted that some of his relatives live in Israel.) Like El-Sayed, Biss capitalized on the spending by AIPAC, which has supported many election deniers and Trump supporters. He won narrowly, while Kat Abughazaleh—who is further left than Biss—who came in second. (Abughazaleh is a former Mother Jones contributor.) AIPAC’s pick, Laura Fine, came in third with only 20 percent of the vote. After he won, Biss wrote an op-ed for The Nation under the headline: “I Was AIPAC’s Number 1 Target—and I Beat Them. Here’s How to Do It.”

Still, AIPAC has not yet suffered a total defeat in Michigan. Two-thirds of the money UDP spent in the primary went to attacking El-Sayed—who it misleadingly accused in one ad of “sexist attacks” against women—rather than promoting Stevens. That spending, along with whatever UDP and its allies may put in for the general election, could make it easier for Rogers to defeat El-Sayed in November. If that happens, AIPAC will almost certainly try to take some of the credit.

But for now El-Sayed can claim victory. In his Wednesday speech, El-Sayed pointed out that he and his supporters had taken on a “machine” and record-breaking outside spending. “You’re not supposed to be able to beat that,” he said. “What we showed is that the power of our many is greater than the power of their money.”

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Heat Is Killing Texas Prisoners, and State Leaders Won’t Shell Out for AC

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

Bernhardt Tiede has diabetes and hypertension, and is obese. In the summer of 2023, he suffered a stroke in a Texas prison cell that court documents say regularly exceeded 110 degrees. If there were ever a person the state should flag as vulnerable to extreme heat, it’s him.

He is also the reason Texas has spent the past two years fighting a federal lawsuit, brought by Tiede, over air conditioning in its prisons. And this spring, right before trial, the state’s own heat-tracking system did for him what it’s done for tens of thousands of other people: nothing. Officials removed him from the case, successfully arguing before the court that a policy update meant he’d now get priority for a cool bed on account of his current age: 67. They got that result due to a state formula for determining who gets air conditioning. Not the diabetes. Not the hypertension. A number.

No score means no priority placement, no restriction list, no AC. You’re in the same building as everyone else, whether or not your body can handle it.

That number is the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s “heat-sensitivity score,” a rating a computer assigns based on medical conditions and medications that could make someone more susceptible to heat. It’s supposed to identify who’s medically at risk in a cell with no air conditioning. In practice, according to the federal judge who’s spent two years staring at how it works, it identifies almost nobody. Only about 10 percent of Texas prisoners have a score at all, even though the roughly 134,500 people the state incarcerates all face what Judge Robert Pitman called a substantial risk of serious harm from the heat.

Pitman found the system “in practice, arbitrary, inadequate, and ineffective,” and gave an example that should embarrass the agency more than it apparently has: A 90-year-old with hypertension could still fail to qualify for a score at all. Have the condition without whatever else the formula is looking for, and as far as the algorithm is concerned, you’re fine.

A two-week trial over this system, and over the state’s broader refusal to air-condition its prisons, wrapped up on April 9 in Pitman’s Austin courtroom. As of this week, he still hasn’t ruled. Texas is in the middle of another heat dome. And Tiede, whose stroke started this whole thing, was dropped from his own case before trial after TDCJ pointed to the policy update prioritizing inmates 65 and older.

Here’s what the heat score is actually supposed to do: It’s a legacy of Cole v. Collier, the litigation over conditions at the Wallace Pack Unit that settled in 2018. In that case, Judge Keith Ellison defined “heat-sensitive” broadly, covering people taking antipsychotic, anticholinergic, or diuretic drugs, along with anyone diagnosed with psychiatric conditions, obesity, diabetes, or hypertension, among other things. In August 2017, he ordered TDCJ to move everyone who fit that description into cooled housing.

Rather than treat that definition as a floor, TDCJ turned it into a gate, giving people who fit a certain description a score based on the judge’s demands. A score gets you “priority placement” for one of the prison system’s roughly 52,000 air-conditioned “cool beds.” That total is barely enough for a third of the people the state holds. Placement gets you onto restriction lists for wellness checks that they say may result in an AC bed. No score means no priority placement, no restriction list, no AC. You’re in the same building as everyone else, whether or not your body can handle it.

The gap between whom the score covers and who actually gets hurt is the whole story. The Texas Newsroom obtained autopsies for prisoners named in the litigation, and three of those reports named heat as a contributing factor in the deaths. John Castillo had a seizure disorder and went to the water cooler 23 times in the day before he was found unresponsive at the Hughes Unit; his core body temperature was 107.5 and his autopsy called high environmental temperature an important contributory factor.

Politicians are leaning on a scoring system that lets state officials describe the problem as smaller than it really is.

Patrick Womack was found at the Coffield Unit with a core temperature of 106.9 in a cell registering 96.6 degrees, hours after anyone had checked on him, long enough that rigor mortis had begun to set in. Elizabeth Hagerty told prison doctors she had heat rash covering her body and couldn’t keep fluids down; they sent her back to her cell, and she died two days later, a month short of release. Her autopsy listed obesity, diabetes, and elevated environmental temperature as possible contributors.

TDCJ’s position on all three is that heat wasn’t the real cause of death. Underlying conditions were. The agency does not count a death as heat-related unless heat was the primary or sole cause, which is a strange standard for a system whose entire heat-protection apparatus is built around identifying people with underlying conditions.

A 2022 study in JAMA Network Open put a number on the pattern: Researchers estimated that 13 percent of deaths in un-air-conditioned Texas prisons between 2001 and 2019, roughly 271 people, were attributable to extreme heat, an average of 14 a year. Lead author Julianne Skarha described it as a 30-fold increase over heat-related mortality estimates for the general US population. Not a single heat death occurred in the climate-controlled facilities. TDCJ’s own count is far lower, and it almost always is, because the score, the death classifications, and the agency’s institutional incentive all point the same direction: Fewer people counted as vulnerable means fewer people the state has to protect, and fewer deaths to attribute to a problem it says it can’t yet afford to fix.

And to be fair to Texas, the fix is genuinely expensive. TDCJ initially said it needs at least $1.1 billion to fully air-condition its 101 prison facilities, an estimate that by this year’s trial had climbed to $1.5 billion, with officials suggesting a complete build-out might not finish until 2033. Lawmakers did put money toward new cool beds in the last supplemental appropriations bill. But House Bill 3006, which would have required climate control in phases by the end of 2032, passed the House and then died when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick never assigned it to a Senate committee. It was the third consecutive session in which a prison-cooling bill failed to clear the Senate. Nobody in Austin is pretending this is easy or cheap. What they’re doing instead is leaning on a scoring system that lets them describe the problem as smaller than it is.

That’s the real function of the heat score. It isn’t a medical tool. It’s a legal one. It gives the state a number to point to, a process it can hold up in filings and hearings as proof that vulnerable people are being found and protected. Pitman’s finding that the process is arbitrary is really a finding that the number doesn’t mean what the state says it means. Bernhardt Tiede can have a stroke in a cell recorded to be above 110 degrees, sue over it, and still not carry a score by the time his own case reaches trial.

Plaintiffs have asked Pitman to order the entire system air-conditioned by the end of 2029, a deadline the state would then have to explain to a Legislature that has spent three sessions declining to mandate exactly that. Whatever he decides, the underlying design problem doesn’t go away on its own. A state can build all the cool beds it wants; if the formula deciding who gets one keeps failing the people standing in front of it, the beds don’t matter much.

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How Elon Musk Is Re-Engineering the World

Elon Musk is an avatar of digital capitalism: He both embodies and defines it. In “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed,” co-author Quinn Slobodian examines how Musk’s actions have altered American capitalism by changing its relationship with the federal government while ushering in a new, technologically driven political economy that’s upending our lives.

On this week’s More To The Story, Slobodian talks with host Al Letson about how the world’s richest person exploits government investment to his own financial benefit and the many ways this intersects with his views on race and technology. It’s nothing less than a futuristic vision of a frightening new world order.

“What is the social contract of Muskism?” Slobodian asks. “You will be locked into a kind of cult of Elon and so ideologically bolted onto him that you’d never question his decisions.”

Slobodian also touches on the ways Musk fused himself to the American economy—and our imagination—and how growing up in South Africa shaped Musk’s white supremacist worldview.

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

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“Not All Cubans Are MAGA”: The Cuban Women Who Broke With the GOP

Maria Eugenia Laurencio—who was 12 years old when her family left Cuba and settled in Beaumont, Texas— was a lifelong Republican. When her parents became US citizens, they registered as Republicans. “We hated Kennedy,” she told me, referring to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 that led many exiles to permanently abandon the Democratic Party.

Laurencio, a retired anesthesiologist who now lives in Miami, followed in her parents’ footsteps, happily supporting the Republican ticket, from Ronald Reagan to both George Bushes. In 2015, excited at the prospect of having the first Cuban-American president, she volunteered for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, phone banking and canvassing for him in Miami. “He was not radical at the time,” she told me. She liked his pro-immigrant and anti-communist views, and his public dislike—back then—of Donald Trump. “I never liked him, not even when he was a TV star,” she told me about Trump. “I really couldn’t conceive that he would be president.”

But when Rubio lost the primary, Laurencio knew she had only one option if she wanted to stop Trump from winning: Vote for Hillary Clinton. When Trump won, Laurencio says she cried. Surely, she thought, the GOP would not support Trump after his first term in office, punctuated by a flurry of scandals like the impeachment hearings, the separation of thousands of families at the US-Mexico border, and his administration’s haphazard response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But when the Republican Party backed Trump once again, Laurencio had enough. She registered as a Democrat and voted for Joe Biden. Then came Trump’s denial of the results of the election, the January 6 insurrection, Biden’s presidency, and Trump’s shocking return. In 2024, she voted for Kamala Harris.

Over the years, her decision to switch parties withered ties with friends and family members. She noticed fewer invitations to dinners or other social gatherings. “We continue to be friends, but I notice the coldness,” she told me. “I felt very distraught and alone because I had lost my community.” Then a supportive neighbor showed her a letter to the editor that had appeared in the Miami Herald, written by a group called Cuban American Women Supporting Democracy. Reach out to them, the neighbor suggested.

“I didn’t leave the Republican party. The Republican party left me. It’s not the party of Reagan or George Bush.”

When she attended her first meeting in 2019, Laurencio was relieved to find a group of like-minded women. “I could express myself and not be looked at as some kind of weirdo or communist, like they all say,” she told me. “I didn’t leave the Republican party. The Republican party left me. It’s not the party of Reagan or George Bush.”

Now, she is part of Cuban American Women Supporting Democracy, a nonpartisan organization that since its officialfounding in 2023 has championed immigration reform, opposed the book ban in the Miami-Dade County school district, supported abortion rights, voting access, and various local and state political candidates. Their members attend protests, including at the notorious Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention facility, as well as school board meetings. In 2024, they mailed thousands of cards to eligible voters, urging them to support Amendment 4, the failed ballot initiative to preserve the right to an abortion in Florida, which now has a six-week ban.

What started as a WhatsApp group chat among a few acquaintances during Trump’s first term has now grown into a network of about 250 members, many of them, as their name suggests, Cuban women. Miami-Dade County residents are heavily represented, but some members reside elsewhere in Florida. While many of them are lifelong Democrats, others like Laurencio are former Republicans who broke with their party over support of Trump. They are largely retired professionals—ranging in age from the mid-60s to the mid-80s—and include company executives, business owners, engineers, doctors, and published authors. One trait they all share is that they are a minority within the Cuban exile community, which for decades has generously supported the Republican Party, including President Donald Trump.

“In a sea of red, the blue dots congregate,” said Carolina Camps, president of the group, known by its acronym, CAWSD (pronounced CAUSED). Camps described how effectively, when so many people felt disconnected from others who agreed with them politically, the word-of-mouth process worked. “It was friends of friends of friends, and then beyond that. Now we’ve got people who just hear about it and want to join because they feel at home.”

“We have to let the community know,” Camps added, “not all Cubans are MAGA.”

From left to right: Carolina Camps, Annie Betancourt, Esther De Varona, Maria Eugenia Laurencio, and Delia de Varona Garcia. Laura C. Morel

I first heard about CAWSD when I was covering the end of humanitarian parole protections for Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. At a press conference in Miami, one of their members called on Republicans “who believed Trump’s promise to deport immigrants did not include their loved ones, to raise their voices in protest and total disregard for human life.” As the daughter of a Cuban exile and a Miamian myself, I was struck by her words.I’m all too familiar with the deep ties between Cubans and the Republican Party. Seeing a Cuban speaking out against the GOP so publicly got my attention.

“There was an assumption that because I’m Cuban, automatically my vote was going to be Republican. So there was a great sense of isolation for me after that first term.”

I spoke to several members of the group in a Zoom call in April. During our first meeting, they shared stories about what drew them together. Like Laurencio, many felt shunned by their families and social circles. Rosemary Ravinal, a speaker coach living in Miami, recounted how, shortly after Trump won the 2016 election, a cousin asked, “Aren’t you happy we won?” She hasn’t spoken to that cousin since. “There was an assumption that because I’m Cuban, automatically my vote was going to be Republican,” she said. “So there was a great sense of isolation for me after that first term.”

A few years ago, she heard Carolina Camps being interviewed on a local radio station, and Ravinal decided to reach out. “There was a sense of really being so cornered, not being able to talk among my brethren, my people,” Ravinal recalled, “that I felt that finally, there was a little bit of sunlight and a possibility that I could make a difference in terms of shaping issues and moving the community forward.”

Even as the women of CAWSD have rallied against the policies of the Trump administration, among the Cuban exile community support for Republicans has grown—especially over the last decade, according to the Cuba Poll, which Florida International University conducts, regularly surveying Cuban Americans living in Miami-Dade County.

In the 2016 poll, for instance, conducted before the presidential election, 35 percent of Cuban Americans said they would vote for Trump. In 2024, the most recent poll conducted, that percentage nearly doubled to 68 percent. Meanwhile, support for Democratic candidates dwindled: In 2016, 31 percent of Cuban-Americanvoters polled said they would support Hillary Clinton. In 2024, only 23 percent said they would vote for Kamala Harris.

I asked historians and political analysts what dynamics had turned the Cuban- exile community into such a GOPmonolith. History points to a few key events, they said. Many Cubans of a previous generation lost faith in the Democratic Party following President Kennedy’s decision in the midst of the failed Bay of Pigs operation to pull back support to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime. The Republican Party took advantage of this sentiment when Cubans began to pursue US citizenship following the passage of the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966, which created a pathway to legalization for them.Spanish-speaking GOP officials attended naturalization ceremonies, passing out pamphlets congratulating newly minted citizens and inviting them to register as Republicans.

The GOP recruited sons and daughters of the original emigrés into their political ranks, which led to the rise of prominent political figures such as Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the first Cuban American elected to Congress. “Certainly, the Republican Party earned the Cuba vote,” said Guillermo Grenier, sociology professor at Florida International University and the lead author of the Cuba Poll. The Democratic Party’s focus on social justice wasn’t appealing to many Cubans, Grenier added, while the GOP spoke openly about ending communism. “They put boots on the ground.”

But over the years, allegiance to the Republican Party has not been completely consistent. Many Cuban Americans supported Bill Clinton and later Barack Obama, for example, though that support waned, in large part, after his efforts to normalize relations with Cuba failed to create significant political changes on the island. “When the Cuban government refused to engage in serious reforms, both economic and political, there was a huge disappointment in the Cuban American community,” said Sebastián Arcos, interim director of the Cuban Research Institute at FIU. “The pendulum swung back and swung hard in the opposite direction.” Cuban Americans were once more in the Republican fold.

I asked Grenierif he thinks Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda—which has touched many Cuban families in the last year—may pull more votes for Democratic candidates in future elections. ICE arrests of Cubans have increased to about 1,000 a month, according to the Cato Institute.Grenier thinks it’s unlikely. “I don’t think that will happen. Now, they might stay home,” he said. “They might not vote, and that might give an opportunity for some kind of leverage for the Democrats.”

On a recent afternoon, I visited Laurencio at the Mediterranean-style home in Coral Gables, a historic and affluent city on the edge of Miami, where she lives with her husband, a retired ophthalmologist. Palm trees lined the pathway to the entrance, where Laurencio’s orange tabby cat, Lotus, greeted me before Laurencio opened the front doors. We walked toward the kitchen, bathed in sunlight from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Bougainvillea bushes of orange and fuchsia could be seen on the pool patio. Laurencio’s refrigerator, decorated with photos of family and cards, included a magnet that said in bold letters, “Is it 2028 yet?”

As we sat at her kitchen counter, nibbling on cookies and drinking Cuban coffee, more CAWSD members arrived until about five of them were there. They included two retired school counselors, Camps, who worked in sales for a pharmaceutical company, Laurencio, the retired anesthesiologist, and Annie Betancourt, a retired state representative who served in the Florida Legislature between 1994 and 2002.

“It’s good to have, in a time of darkness and not a lot of positivity, that we have each other.”

Seated on sofas and easy chairs around the family room, the women told me about the issues they have focused on in the last year. They’ve attended the weekend vigils outside Alligator Alcatraz, which shut down in June, as well as joining other demonstrators outside the local ICE office. They’ve helped secure donations for families of people who have been deported. The group has also mailed more than 50,000 postcards to voters with instructions on how to sign up for vote-by-mail. Betancourt, the former state representative, points out that one of the advantages of the group is that their members simply have time to engage with the issues. Most are retired, many with grown children. “It’s the civic engagement component,” she said. “You can stand in line, you can go, you can mobilize.”

I asked what the Democratic Party is missing from their strategy to attract more Cuban voters. Betancourt, who had a front-row seat to internal political discussions for decades, called the Republican Party “extremely focused and methodical.” She saw how carefully theyselected candidates whothey believed had a strong chance of winning. Democrats have also failed to shake off the socialist label, which, in a city like Miami, is almost insulting, Laurencio said, adding that Democratic candidates need to be very direct and say on the record that they are not communist or socialist. “You cannot allow them to label you,” she said.

Have they heard of any changes of heart among their Republican friends and family? Has anyone become disenchanted with MAGA? Was there anything during this second term that might have unsettled supporters of the president?

Betancourt told the story of a call she had received just that morning from a Republican friend, a former CEO of a Miami company. He wanted to know her opinion of David Jolly, a Democratic candidate for Florida Governor. In a recent call, Laurencio’s 50-year-old nephew told her he regretted havingsupported Trump. Laurencio, who listens to conservative Spanish radio shows in Miami, hears the dissent growing among callers who complain about inflation, high gas prices, and the current political state of Venezuela and Cuba.

During our first interview, Camps told me about a Republican friend who had recently told her he was unhappy with the current state of the country. “They realize that it’s their neighbors that are being deported, their gardeners are being deported,” she said. “I think that there’s a softening.” Then she added a cautionary note: “Now, whether or not they will vote Democrat—that’s a whole different animal.”

No matter what the future elections bring, the women of CAWSD have built a foundation of solidarity, and even friendship. During our meeting, Esther De Varona, one of the retired counselors, jokingly said, “Gracias, Trump,” evoking chuckles from the other women. She was alluding to the adage in communist Cuba, “Gracias, Fidel.” Because of their mutual opposition to the current president, “we now have this fabulous network,” she told me. “It’s good to have, in a time of darkness and not a lot of positivity, that we have each other.”

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Rep. Max Miller’s Withdrawal Window Closes in Six Days

Facing allegations of domestic violence against ex-wife Emily Moreno, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) said via livestream on Sunday that he has no intention of withdrawing his name from the November ballot.

“I’m not getting out of this race, and I’m winning in November,” Miller said.

His comments come a couple of weeks after Mother Jones published an article, based on thousands of pages of court filings and police records, detailing allegations of assault, misogyny, and verbal threats by the two-term congressman. In the records, Moreno accuses Miller of scalding her with hot water, shoving her against a wall, and holding a gun to her head. We also reported that, according to police records and legal documents, Miller has been accused of getting violent with other women, including a woman he allegedly pushed down the stairs in high school and an unnamed woman who he is accused of assaulting in college. (Miller has strenuously denied Moreno’s claims, as well as allegations of assaulting other women.)

Many of the allegations are contained in court documents Moreno filed weeks ago amid her messy custody fight with Miller, but only recently have Republican lawmakers called for Miller to withdraw from his race. This includes Miller’s ex-father-in-law, Sen. Bernie Moreno, who issued a sharp rebuke of his fellow Ohio Republican on Sunday.

“As he has admitted privately, Max Miller needs serious psychological help. He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter,” Sen. Moreno wrote in a social media post. “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives.”

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican, told Politico she agreed. “I don’t know [Miller],” she said. “I haven’t read a whole lot about him, but if [Moreno] thinks he ought to resign, I’m supportive of that.”

Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas also condemned Miller. “He should resign. He should quit,” Marshall said, according to Politico.

The Democratic Women’s Caucus called for an official House Ethics investigation last week. Today, Miller personally requested an ethics investigation into himself to help clear his name.

“In light of all the renewed interest in my family affairs, I am going to file my own paperwork for an ethics investigation into myself. I have absolutely nothing to hide.”

“In light of all the renewed interest in my family affairs, I am going to file my own paperwork for an ethics investigation into myself,” he said on X. “I have absolutely nothing to hide.”

But as the calls for Miller to step aside get louder, Republicans are running out of time to replace him on November ballots. Ohio statute dictates that if a primary winner is to be replaced on the ballot by another Republican, Miller would have to withdraw and a new candidate would need to be named “not later than four p.m. of the eighty-sixth day before the day of the general election.”

That’s next Monday afternoon.

If Miller were to withdraw by tomorrow, there would be a special election to name a new Republican candidate. If he withdraws after that but before Aug. 10, local party officials would instead get to pick Miller’s GOP replacement.

The seat is of particular importance to Republicans, who possess a slender majority in the House and counted on Miller’s district as safe GOP territory.

Former Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost hinted at the impending math equation in a recent social media post. “I am concerned about the allegations against US Rep Max Miller. Given the narrowness of control of the US House, it is much bigger than one race for one House seat,” he wrote on X Monday.

Axios also reported this week that President Trump called Miller on Monday and expressed concerns about him staying in the race. On the call, Trump reportedly told Miller that “things aren’t looking good.”

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Wesley Bell and Cori Bush Head for a Rematch

In Tuesday’s Democratic congressional primary, voters in Missouri’s first district will decide whether to re-elect moderate incumbent Congressman Wesley Bell or replace him with Cori Bush, the Democratic Socialist who was the district’s Congressional representative until Bell ousted her two years ago.

Alongside Michigan’s Democratic congressional primary, Missouri’s first district race has become a referendum on pro-Israel money in American politics. In 2024, in what was then one of the most expensive primary races in history, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its affiliated groups spent more than 8 million dollars backing Bell. Over half of all outside money spent on the race came from the United Democracy Project (UDP), AIPAC’s electoral arm.

Both Bush and Bell came to prominence during the Ferguson uprising, after the fatal shooting of Black teenager Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer in 2014. Bush rose to prominence as an activist, while Bell became the St. Louis County Prosecutor in 2019, running on a police-reform agenda. Bush was elected to Congress in 2020 and reelected in 2022. But in 2024, Bell announced a late-in-the-game run against her. Though he’d initially floated a Missouri Senate run, Bell saw an opening after Bush introduced a resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. He pivoted to challenge her from the center, and won by roughly 6 points.

But in the last two years, Democratic public opinion on Israel has shifted dramatically: about 58 pecent of Democrats now say the U.S. is “too supportive” of Israel, up from 45 percent in an AP-NORC poll from January 2024. And multiple polls indicate that the majority of Democrats now believe what Cori Bush was saying back in early 2024: that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. A growing number of Congressional Democrats are casting votes against unconditional aid to Israel. AIPAC funding has become politically toxic, so much so that the group now generally channels its funding through shell groups rather than funding candidates directly. But AIPAC is still one of the biggest spenders in elections nationwide: a report from Sludge shows that the super PAC has spent upwards of $100 million so far this election cycle.

“AIPAC, I am coming to tear your kingdom down,” Bush said in a fiery concession speech when she lost to Bell two years ago. In the years since then, she’s attacked Bell for what she calls an “abandonment” of St. Louis after a devastating tornado hit the district, and for his support of a resolution expressing gratitude to ICE. Bell has brought up Bush’s criticism of Kamala Harris, and her payments to her husband to serve as her security detail.

Bell also comes into this race with more establishment support than he had last cycle, carrying endorsements from figures like Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi. And he says the AIPAC money shouldn’t matter, pointing instead to his local track record: “Voters in our district are worried about the cost of living. They’re worried about health care costs. If you don’t have anything to run on, well, you got to create something. And that’s what other folks in the race are doing,” Bell said.

Bush is banking on the idea that AIPAC money does make a difference, as she hopes to take back the MO-01 seat and join a nationwide wave of Democratic Socialist primary victories. Darializa Chevalier and Claire Valdez unseated more moderate incumbents in New York City last month; Melat Kiros, a young, outspokenly pro-Palestinian socialist in Denver, defeated one of the longest-serving members of Congress, Diana DeGette. Each of these candidates defeated an opponent with AIPAC support—in part by directly attacking AIPAC.

AIPAC’s open support “is becoming a kiss of death to candidates they support in deep-blue districts,” Usamah Andrabi of Justice Democrats, a group which has endorsed Bush, told me last month.

On AIPAC’s involvement in her election, Bush told St. Louis Public Radio in February, “The tide has already turned, and people are saying no. They want to be the ones to pick their representatives. And so, whether that money filters into the community or not, I think the community is also going to call out any candidate who is accepting that money.”

This primary will test whether that is true.

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Right-Wing Media Is Attacking Francesca Hong for Mental Health History

Over the weekend, right-wing media, including the Post Millennial and the Gateway Pundit, resurfaced a 2023 interview featuring Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, wherein Hong opened up about a hospitalization for a mental breakdown as a teenager and a previous bipolar disorder diagnosis.

“Wisconsin Dem candidate for governor Francesca Hong admitted to being diagnosed as mentally ill,” read the Post Millennial headline.

“In typical liberal fashion, Hong tried to paint herself as a victim in the interview, blaming the crisis on feeling like an outsider as the daughter of Korean immigrants,” blogger Patty McMurray wrote on the Gateway Pundit’s site.

Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is arguably the frontrunner to win the Democratic primary for the Wisconsin gubernatorial election, which will take place on August 11. Hong’s campaign includes mental health policies that would coordinate social workers, nurses, community health workers, and peer counselors in more neighborhoods throughout Wisconsin.

“My own mental health journey has given me a much deeper sense of empathy and compassion,” Hong said in a statement to Mother Jones. “I’m a stronger leader because of the times that I struggled, and it’s important to talk openly so that others aren’t isolated and can take that first step to get help.”

“Mental healthcare is a basic need, and we have to invest in community resources, training, accessibility, and culturally-relevant care,” Hong continued in her statement.

Hong is currently in treatment for depression and takes antidepressants, Hong’s team said.

The current right-wing attacks on Hong’s mental health history—at a time when Republicans outlined their support for Rep. Tom Kean (R-N.J.)’s months-long, opaque absence for depression treatment—seem particularly cruel and partisan.

“Even if the authors of the articles disagree with Ms. Hong’s politics, the inclusion of her mental health history is a blatant attempt to ignite fear in readers by fanning the flames of stigma,” said California-based therapist Andrea B. Vassilev, who has bipolar disorder.

Hong’s statements about her mental health were incredibly vulnerable, particularly for someone already in public office at the time of the interview. But the remarks likely struck a relatable chord for many people who have struggled with mental illness.

In the 2023 interview, Hong also talked about how, with her immigrant parents, they “never talked about processing emotion and feelings,” an issue that can be rooted in immigrant families’ focus on survival in a new country.

“I just felt like nothing had meaning anymore. It was a numbness that took over, and a pain that I couldn’t describe,” Hong, a member of the Wisconsin State Assembly at the time, reflected in the2023 interview. “I couldn’t feel anymore, and that scared the hell out of me.”

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New York Tackles the Myth That Solar is Swallowing Farmland

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

In rural areas across the US, solar power opponents keep leaning on the argument that utility-scale arrays are gobbling up valuable farmland. But plenty of evidence proves that’s just not true, and now, New York is tackling the misinformation head-on.

After the Trump administration accused the state of fast-tracking solar farms on prime farmland, New York leaders fired back last week, saying that renewables ​“empower our farmers to keep their land in use and in their family, while avoiding the threat of permanent conversion or abandonment.” That’s because farmers can lease a plot to solar developers and return it to agricultural use at the end of the array’s life, as the state officials explained in their 11-page letter.

“A recent study by Cornell found that the overwhelming majority of farmers who received solar lease payments used that income to continue or even expand farming on their land, not to exit farming or scale back operations,” the leaders wrote. ​“Discouraging or inhibiting property owners’ ability to independently make choices about what they can and cannot do with their land can cause financial harm and undermine fundamental property rights.”

Anti-solar advocates often ignore the good that the clean energy source can do for farmers nationwide.

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority has more proof that solar and farming can work hand in hand, and outlined all that in a major guidebook it released last year. Sheep and cattle are munching below panels on several New York farms, the guidebook notes, and the state has zoning rules and protections in place to preserve undeveloped land.

New York’s pushback squares with the findings of a recent report from the Solar Energy Industries Association. That study shows solar farms currently take up a mere 0.13 percent of New York’s roughly 13,000 square miles of federally designated prime farmland, a stat that resonates across the country. Solar covers just 0.07 percent of all US farmland, according to SEIA. That’s three times less than golf courses and six times less than suburban development.

And yet solar panels, not cul-de-sacs, are the focus of a particularly potent campaign from upstate New York influencer Alexandra Fasulo. Fasulo has amassed more than a million followers across TikTok and other social platforms, where she’s constantly posting videos that inflate solar’s threats to agricultural and undeveloped land. Similar sentiments are being spread on social media by John Rich. He’s one half of the ​“Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” guys, and was recently hired by the White House to advocate for landowners on a national scale.

These and other anti-solar advocates often ignore the good that the clean energy source can do for farmers nationwide. In California’s Central Valley, for example, years of drought have led hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural land to go fallow. Economics and water availability have driven farmers to stop growing there, but they can still make money and hold on to their land by leasing their plots to solar developers.

Plus, as New York’s guidebook points out, farming is still happening alongside solar installations. I recently visited an Illinois solar farm where sheep were grazing underneath and around panels—an arrangement that the sheep’s owners love because they don’t have to maintain expansive pastures back at home. Meanwhile, researchers have found that tomatoes, saffron, and other crops can thrive below panels, and so can native plants.

That’s not to mention the climate benefits of ditching planet-warming fossil fuels, which are driving droughts, floods, and other weather disasters that are legitimately threatening farms in the US and beyond.

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