Get a Rake: Dispatch From Suburban America’s Forever War

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

The push to ban gas-powered leaf blowers has gained an unlikely figurehead: Cate Blanchett, the Australian actress. “Leaf blowers need to be eradicated from the face of the Earth,” she said in an interview in March. Her complaints have gone viral on TikTok and other social media platforms. “It’s a metaphor for what’s wrong with us as a species,” Blanchett said. “We blow shit from one side of our lawn to the other side, and then the wind is just going to blow it back!”

Her complaints about leaf blowers—equal parts entertaining and earnest—stretch back nearly 20 years, and now the mood has caught up with her. Today, more than 200 local governments in the U.S. have restricted gas-powered lawn equipment or provided incentives to switch to quieter, less-polluting electric tools. The first bans date back to the 1970s, but the trend picked up after the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, when newly homebound workers discovered just how inescapable the whine of their neighbor’s leaf blower can be.

“With every year that passes, more and more communities across the country are taking action to address the shocking amount of pollution and noise from gas lawn equipment,” said Kirsten Schatz, clean air advocate at the Colorado Public Interest Research Group, called CoPIRG.

Gas-powered leaf blowers aren’t just annoying; they’re bad for public health. Closing the windows can’t shut out their low-frequency roar, which can be louder than the World Health Organization’s recommended limit of 55 decibels up to 800 feet away. The unwanted sound can lead to high levels of stress, along with disturbing people’s sleep and potentially damaging hearing over time.

Leaf blowers’ two-stroke engines also churn out a noxious blend of exhaust: fine particulate matter, smog-forming gases, and cancer-causing chemicals like benzene and formaldehyde. By one estimate, running a gas-powered leaf blower for an hour emits as much smog-forming pollution as driving a car from Los Angeles to Denver.

One partial solution: Homeowners could accept a scattering of leaves, instead of demanding a perfectly manicured lawn.

And while lawn and garden equipment is only a small slice of global carbon emissions, leaf blowers and other gas-powered tools “pack a big punch for the amount that they create based on the size of their engines,” said Dan Mabe, the founder of the American Green Zone Alliance, a group that works with cities and landscapers to shift to electric equipment. In 2020, fossil-fueled lawn and garden equipment in the United States released more than 30 million tons of CO2, more than the emissions of the city of Los Angeles.

Cities and states across the country have taken different approaches to dealing with the problem. California’s law banning the sale of new gas-powered blowers took effect last January, while cities like Portland and Baltimore are phasing out their use. Some places, like Wilmette, Illinois, have enacted seasonal limits, either permanently or until a full ban takes effect. Others, like Colorado, attempt to sweeten the deal of buying electric lawn care equipment, offering a 30 percent discount.

But implementing the bans is proving more challenging than many expected. Many communities are frustrated that the new rules are not being properly enforced, said Jamie Banks, the founder and president of Quiet Communities, a nonprofit working to reduce noise pollution.

Westport, Connecticut, fought for years to get a seasonal restriction on gas-powered blowers, only to find that local officials were not enforcing it, Banks said. Noise complaints are not exactly at the top of police officers’ priority lists, and sometimes ordinances are written in a way that’s hard to carry out—police aren’t usually expected to go around town taking noise readings, for example. Some communities are taking a deliberate approach to the problem: Banks pointed to a group of towns in the greater Chicago area, including Wilmette, that are trying to create consistent policies across the region and working with the local police.

Then there’s the matter that swapping gas blowers for ones powered by electricity isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. While the costs are comparable for homeowners—you can get electric blowers at a big-box store like Home Depot for around $200 or less, cheaper than most gas ones—electric blowers are more expensive for commercial landscapers. They require multiple batteries for workers to get through the day. While a typical professional gas-powered blower runs for $550, a comparable electric one costs $700 and requires thousands of dollars worth of batteries. Landscapers also have to buy hundreds of dollars worth of charging equipment and find ways to charge safely on the go.

Plus, it can be difficult to meet the standards customers expect with electric leaf blowers, which are less powerful than gas ones. “If you have customers that are demanding that you get everything off the ground, and you better do it quickly, and you’d better not charge me too much money, it’s really tough,” Banks said.

Bans have already generated a political backlash in some Republican-led states. Texas and Georgia have passed laws prohibiting local governments from regulating gas-powered leaf blowers. The Western States Petroleum Association, an oil industry group, launched a Latino-focused messaging campaign in California that pushes back against laws to electrify vehicles and leaf blowers. But leaf blowers aren’t just a culture-war lightning rod; in some places, they’re leading to personal conflict. In Evanston, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago, several landscape workers allege they’ve been harassed by people reporting violations of the local ban.

The American Green Zone Alliance noted in a recent statement that “heavy-handed bans on gas-powered leaf blowers can unintentionally create stress and hardship for workers who often labor for low wages, with limited benefits or control over their working conditions.”

Although there remain a lot of details to work out, the organization is still pushing lawn care to go electric. “We are trying to convince our industry, ‘Look, we need to accelerate this,’” Mabe said.

The alliance is advocating for incentives that are sufficient to make the new equipment affordable for landscaping businesses operating on razor-thin margins. (In the end, lower fuel and maintenance costs for electric blowers can save companies money if the equipment is properly cared for, Mabe said.) Seasonal bans on gas-powered leaf blowers may be more feasible in some places than year-round ones, because they leave short windows for using the fossil-fueled devices in the spring and fall to take care of heavy cleanup jobs.

Another solution: Customers could loosen their expectations and accept a scattering of leaves, instead of demanding a perfectly manicured lawn. “Now, if that aesthetic was more relaxed, that could help change things,” Banks said. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to carry so many batteries.” Leaving some leaves on the ground is, at least ecologically speaking, a good thing—decaying leaves fertilize the soil and form a protective layer that provides shelter for snails, bees, and butterflies.

And of course, in many cases, a leaf blower isn’t needed at all: You can do as Blanchett advises and take matters into your own hands with a good-old fashioned rake.

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Federal Judge Orders Release of Jeffrey Epstein Grand Jury Records in Florida

A Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida has ordered the public release of grand jury transcripts from the first federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of underage girls, which took place during the mid-2000s.

That investigation ended without any charges. In 2007, however, federal prosecutors in Florida did indict Epstein, who managed to obtain a plea deal, copping to relatively minor charges of procuring a person under 18 for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. He was given an 18-month sentence in the Palm Beach County Jail—with daytime work release—and served about 13 months.

Back in July, a different judge, at the request of the Trump administration, had declined to demand release of records from the earlier investigation. On Friday, however, US District Judge Rodney Smith, whom Trump appointed to the bench in 2018, stated that the Epstein Files Transparency Act that President Donald Trump signed into law on November 19, “overrides” rules that prohibit the public disclosure of “unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials”—including grand jury transcripts.

This same law compelsthe Department of Justice, federal prosecutors, and the FBI to release, by mid-December, materials they collected during their investigations into Epstein going back at least as far as the mid-2000s Florida case. The DOJ has not yet announced a timeline for making the information publicly available.

Earlier this year, three federal judges denied DOJ requests to unseal the federal grand jury transcripts. US District Judge Richard Berman framed the effort as a “diversion” strategy to distract from the agency’s slow-rolling of its own Epstein files: “The information contained in the Epstein grand jury transcripts pales in comparison to the Epstein investigation information and materials in the hands of the Department of Justice,” he wrote.

DOJ officials are now attempting to unseal materials from three different Epstein investigations. The Trump administration has asked two New York judges for grand jury transcripts from Epstein’s 2019 sex-trafficking case and Ghislaine Maxwell’s 2021 trial.

The state courts are now weighing privacy concerns from survivors and witnesses. The Epstein Files Transparency Act lists exemptions that may allow the DOJ to redact records that could result in personal identification.

The New York judges are expected to issue their decisions next week.

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Trump Puts Screws on Indiana Senators to Greenlight a GOP-Friendly Voting Map

The Indiana House voted on Friday to redraw the state’s congressional map with the aim to produce a 9-0 Republican delegation.

Lawmakers approved the redistricting proposal 57-41, despite 12 Republicans joining the entire Democratic House caucus in opposition. The bill now goes to the state Senate, where the outcome is unclear.Republican leadership has insisted for months that they do not have the votes to pass it. But President Donald Trump, who has asked Republican-led states to redistrict, has been putting the heat on holdout legislators.

According to the Indiana Capital Chronicle, at least 14 of 40 Republican senators have publicly voiced disagreement with the new map. Indiana has 10 Democratic senators, which leaves the tally roughly equal—for now.

On Friday night, Trump weighed in with a vaguely mob boss-style social media post calling on his followers to pressure the stragglers: “I am hearing that these nine Senators, some of whom are up for Re-Election in 2026, and some in 2028, need encouragement to make the right decision: Blake Doriot, Brett Clark, Brian Buchanan, Dan Dernulc, Ed Charbonneau, Greg Goode, Jim Buck, Rick Niemeyer, and Ryan Mishler. Let your voice be heard loud and clear in support of these Senators doing the right thing.”

This comes after at least 11 Indiana Republicans were the targets of swatting or other threats following a November Trump Truth Social campaign against the state’s reluctantGOP.

Indiana is just one of several states wrapped up in Trump’s redistricting crusade. On Thursday, the Supreme Court permitted Texas to use its new map in the 2026 midtermelections, which could hand Republicans five new seats. Missouri and North Carolina have also passed new maps that could enable the party to gain a seat in each state.

Florida may be next up, as lawmakers held a hearing on Thursday to consider redistricting. Florida has a constitutional amendment that prohibits gerrymandering, but Gov. Ron DeSantis said earlier in the week that the new map should be drawn in the spring so that the inevitable court debate could factor in a possible Supreme Court ruling in a Louisiana redistricting case that would further weaken the Voting Rights Act.

Democrats are countering with their own map in California, and are beginning efforts in Virginia with the potential to flip two seats from red to blue.

Mid-decade drawings are relativelyrare. According to the Pew Research Center, previous to this election cycle, only two states have passed new maps since 1970 for partisan gains on their own—Texas in 2003 and Georgia in 2005. Most other redistricting took place because courts threw out maps for legal violations.

This recent swell of gerrymandering is just one way the Trump administration is attempting to influence—and rig—the 2026 election. It has, for example, weaponized the Justice Department to pursue dubious claims of voter fraud to suppress specific voting groups. Notes my Mother Jones colleague Ari Berman, who has written extensively on the topic: “The sheer volume of threats to democracy can feel so overwhelming that some people may choose not to vote for fear that their ballot will not matter. And that may be part of Trump’s plan.”

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“Demoralizing”: How Donald Trump Undermined Coal Country’s Comeback

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

For a moment, Jacob Hannah saw an unprecedented opportunity to make Appalachia great again.

In 2022, the Biden administration earmarked billions of dollars to help revitalize and strengthen former coal communities. The objective was to lay down building blocks for the region to transition from extractive industries like coal and timber to a hub for solar and other advanced energy technologies, with a view to long-term economic, climate and social resilience.

But on his first day in office, Donald Trump scrapped Biden’s clean energy and environmental programs, which he lambasted as woke, anti-American, liberal hoaxes.

“We knew we were living in a historic moment, not just because of the amount of funding, but because the whole region mobilized to meet the moment,” said Hannah, 33. “It was a once-in-a-generation cash injection designed to prioritize extraction-based communities as part of the energy transition, which for the first time in almost a century made Appalachia very competitive. So to have it all taken away is deeply damaging and demoralizing.”

Hannah, a fifth-generation Appalachian with a bushy beard and signature wide-brimmed hat, has been crisscrossing the country on a mission to raise philanthropic capital to limit the economic damage caused by the Trump administration taking a chainsaw to Biden-era grants.

Hannah runs Coalfield Development, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Huntington, focused on rebuilding Southwest Virginia’s economy and social fabric through workforce training, job creation, and revitalizing abandoned buildings and mines in some of the most forgotten corners of coal country.

People shop at the Wild Ramp, a nonprofit local farmers’ market.Michael Swensen/The Guardian

Coalfield Development has trained more than 4,000 people—including many formerly incarcerated and/or in addiction recovery—over the past 15 years in everything from solar installation to drywalling and first aid. Yet, historically, federal grants for community regeneration efforts in Appalachia have been mostly top-down, project-based and short-lived.

The 2022 cash injection came through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s landmark climate and infrastructure legislation, and was designed to help revitalize and strengthen former coal communities over the long haul.

“These are not frivolous things: these are basic services.”

It was the largest investment in Appalachia since the 1960s’ “war on poverty” under Lyndon Johnson.

In response, Coalfield Development spearheaded a coalition of universities, unions, nonprofits, businesses, and local governments to create collective infrastructure and capacity, enabling coal-affected rural communities across the US access to more than $900 million of the historic IRA investment.

Rural communities in Appalachia were on the verge of breaking ground on projects when the grants were paused or terminated by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by the billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk. The wholesale cull included the $3 billion Environmental and Climate Justice Program created in the IRA to tackle the climate crisis and environmental harms at a local level.

A few grants have since been reinstated, but are subject to long delays—in part because so many staff at federal agencies were forced out by DOGE. Many remain the subject of litigation. Every single grant Coalfield Development was helping coordinate has been affected in some way.

Kalob Smith removes mud from the tracks of an excavator. Michael Swensen/The Guardian

The cuts have deepened existing mistrust in government, known colloquially as Appalachian fatalism, yet many of those interviewed by the Guardian blame Washington politics generally rather than Trump.

“This party has taken away that funding from Appalachia illegally: That’s the stone-cold fact. But by the time those facts reach communities on the ground, it’s just so muddy. I think some are asking questions about why training is being shut down and why they didn’t get their SNAP [food assistance] benefits, but where they’ll find the answers is the big issue,” said Hannah.

Huntington, the second largest city in West Virginia with 45,000 residents, was perhaps a perfect place to build a coalition for the massive IRA investment across coal country. Located on the Ohio river, it was once a major transportation hub for the region’s coalfields, but suffered major economic and social decline as the surrounding mines shut down—and then became an epicenter of the opioid epidemic.

It sits at the heart of the Bible belt, which once voted loyally with Democrats but like many blue-collar regions is now part of the loyal MAGA base who believed Trump when he pledged to resuscitate coal country and put America first.

Trump has won big in West Virginia in the past three general elections, securing every county in 2024 with an average of 70 percent of the vote—the highest percentage any party has won in the state’s history. His vote share was even larger in rural counties including Clay and Wayne, which Huntington straddles.

The Guardian’s visit coincided with the Democrats drubbing the Republicans in several state elections—including the governor’s race in Virginia.

It was also five weeks into the government shutdown, just days after the Trump administration announced that millions of Americans would not receive food stamps and Tesla shareholders approved a trillion-dollar pay package for Musk.

The damage caused by Trump’s dismantling of Biden-era programs was visible all around Coalfield Development’s redbrick office, which is located in a former manufacturing hub between the rail tracks and the river.

Next door, a multimillion-dollar redevelopment of a sprawling industrial site known as the Black Diamond warehouse has stalled—at first due to grant suspensions and more recently due to the federal shutdown slowing down payments. Coalfield Development is still waiting for close to $3 million in overdue reimbursements.

An empty lot in Huntington, West Virginia. Michael Swensen/The Guardian

The warehouse, which once manufactured military planes, jeeps, and coal trains, is being repurposed as a hub for sustainable industries and training. But all six EPA grants for Reuse Corridor, a new social enterprise to salvage and repurpose mattresses, electronics, and other materials frequently dumped in the Ohio River, were cut, effectively killing the business and with it countless job opportunities.

Meanwhile, Solar Holler, a solar developer and installation company with 105 employees across Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, and Virginia, signed up for a new office in the warehouse as the business had been growing 20 percent to 30 percent annually.

But tax incentives for residential solar, which accounted for 70 percent of the company’s business, will be axed at the end of this year thanks to Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget. Commercial tax breaks will end in late 2027.

Solar Holler uses panels made in Georgia, yet Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions have caused supply chain delays and pushed up raw material prices across the board, as well as almost doubling the cost of solar energy on the market. The company’s forecast for 2026 is down from 30 percent to “roughly flat.”

“The massive increase in costs ends up being passed down to customers,” said Dan Conant, founder and CEO of Solar Holler. “The IRA rollbacks are obviously disappointing but that said, no matter how hard you make it on the ground for people, solar is the cheapest form of power on the planet so it’s going to happen one way or the other.”

Appalachian Voices is a nonprofit working with local communities—and in Washington, DC—on securing a just energy transition. In 2023, AV, which is part of the broader coalition with Coalfield Development, was awarded a half-million-dollar EPA grant to help five former coal communities in Virginia increasingly being hit by severe floods thanks to the climate crisis and the environmental legacy of mining.

The grant was among those summarily terminated by DOGE. It remains the subject of class-action litigation brought by 350 groups, tribes, and local governments that claim the wholesale termination of the $3 billion environmental justice and climate program is unconstitutional.

“I don’t think people know who or what to trust, because both [political] parties have failed us in big ways.”

In Lee county, where 85 percent of voters opted for Trump and almost half rely on food stamps, AV had earmarked $40,000 for an asbestos survey in Pennington Gap. This was among a stack of grants secured by the community to demolish a derelict supermarket—a concrete, asbestos-ridden eyesore that frequently floods and cuts off neighborhoods from the main town—to create a green space that would mitigate future flooding.

For small communities such as Pennington Gap, securing funding for revitalization projects is like a game of Jenga, and removing just one or two pieces can make the whole stack collapse, according to Emma Kelly, AV’s New Economy program manager. “People in Appalachia are used to being let down by the government, but this time we had the money. It was still taken away, and people feel betrayed.”

A Department of Energy grant that the community hoped to use to install rooftop solar on public buildings that would save $400 or so in monthly energy bills—a reliable income source that could be reinvested in sustainability projects such as communal fruit trees and electric bikes—was also cut.

“Regardless of who’s in power, there’s a lot of finger-pointing, while life gets worse for the common people and the oligarch class keep winning,” said Orville Overton, 34, a local business owner and member of the residents’ council. “I don’t think people know who or what to trust, because both [political] parties have failed us in big ways.”

Hannah, the Coalfield Development CEO, walks towards the Black Diamond warehouse.Michael Swensen/The Guardian

About 60 miles east, Dante, a sparsely populated former integrated mining community that was once the second largest in Russell county, suffers frequent power outages—including a four-day blackout during a major flood in July, and nine days after Hurricane Helene in August 2024.

Dante’s share of the terminated EPA grant was tagged for a feasibility study on the old railway depot, once the hub of mining operations and the whole town. This is the first step needed to convert the depot into a resilience hub with solar panels and battery storage, a place for residents to charge their phones and keep medication refrigerated during the next blackout.

The post office has been closed since July, due to flood damage. The only place still open for business in Dante is the volunteer-run mining museum.

Dante is also currently without a fire station, after nearly $400,000 appropriated by Congress to replace the one demolished due to subsidence was rescinded by the Trump administration.

“These are not frivolous things; these are basic services. And when you work hard for two or three years to secure federal funds, you expect it to be delivered,” said Lou Ann Wallace, Dante’s representative on the Republican-controlled Russell County Board of Supervisors.

“I don’t think the president knew. I’m one of his biggest supporters, but we’re dealing with the ills of industry here, and we’ve got to be able to clean this up so our people in these hollers can have a quality of life.”

Trump won 83 percent of the vote in Russell county in 2024 while Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate for governor, secured 81 percent last month.

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said: “President Trump cares about our miners more than any other president in modern history—which is why he has implemented his energy dominance agenda to protect their jobs and revive the mining industry…we can maintain the safety of miners while simultaneously rolling back Joe Biden’s Green New Scam regulations that were killing their jobs.”

Across Appalachia, people who believe in Trump will be hit hard by his wholesale cuts to Medicaid, Veterans Affairs, food aid, and education, among other public services. Simultaneously, the region is scrambling to save projects that would improve resilience and bring jobs.

It’s a race against the clock, according to Hannah, to find enough money to keep afloat and help people keep faith.

“The funding was committed by Congress, so we know the law’s on our side, and that we will eventually win back some of these grants,” Hannah said. “One objective was probably to remove confidence in the system, so we need to outlast what is a game of cashflow and the battle of morale.”

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The Gaza Flotilla Story You Didn’t Hear

Earlier this fall, hundreds of activists from all over the world crowded onto several dozen boats and set sail for Gaza. Their goal: Break through Israel’s blockade of the territory and end one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet. They thought that by sharing their journey through social media, they could capture the world’s attention.

At first, it was easy to dismiss the Global Sumud Flotilla—until it wasn’t. Before reaching Gaza, the flotilla was attacked by drones, and activists were arrested by the Israeli navy.

“We were at gunpoint; like, you could see the laser on our chest,” says flotilla participant Louna Sbou.

They were then sent to a high-security prison in the middle of the Negev desert.

“You have no control, you have no information, and you have no rights,” says Carsie Blanton, another participant. “They could do whatever they want to you.”

This week on Reveal, we go aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla for a firsthand look at what activists faced on their journey and whether their efforts made any difference.

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Science Journal Retracts Widely Cited Study That Claimed Roundup Is Safe

A landmark study on the safety of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the controversial herbicide Roundup, has been formally retracted by its publisher, raising new concerns about the chemical’s potential dangers.

Federal regulators have relied heavily on the study, published in 2000 by the science journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, in their assessment that the herbicide is safe and does not cause cancer. Indeed, the paper, which concluded that “Roundup herbicide does not pose a health risk to humans,” was among the most cited studies in government reports.

But the journal’s co-editor-in-chief, Martin van den Berg, said he no longer trusted the study, and that it appears to have been secretly ghostwritten by employees of Monsanto, the company that introduced Roundup in 1974. Officially, the paper’s authors, including a doctor from New York Medical College, were listed as independent scientists.

Van den Berg, a professor of toxicology in the Netherlands, concluded that the paper relied entirely on Monsanto’s internal studies and ignored other evidence suggesting that Roundup might be harmful.

“The MAHA world is losing their minds right now. They keep getting thrown under the bus.”

In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer determined that glyphosate probably causes cancer. Since then, Roundup’s manufacturer, Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, has agreed to pay more than $12 billion in legal settlements to people who claim it gave them cancer.

In 2020, the US Environmental Protection Agency released an updated safety assessment on glyphosate that again determined that it was safe and did not cause cancer. This EPA report is often cited in news reports that contend glyphosate is “fine” and important for modern food production.

But those reports failed to mention that the 2020 EPA health assessment was overturned in 2022 by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The “EPA’s errors in assessing human-health risk are serious,” the judges wrote, and “most studies EPA examined indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma”—a type of cancer.

The court told the EPA it needed to redo its human health assessment, meaning the agency now has no official stance on glyphosate’s risk to people. It is expected to release an updated safety report next year.

During the first Trump administration, Monsanto executives were told they “need not fear any additional regulation from this administration,” according to an internal Monsanto email cited in a Roundup lawsuit in 2019. Monsanto had hired a consultant, according to court documents, who reported back that “a domestic policy adviser at the White House had said, for instance: ‘We have Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation.’”

The retraction comes at an awkward time for the Trump administration, which just this week moved to support Bayer, whose potential cancer-related legal costs are now approaching $18 billion. On Tuesday, the US solicitor general asked the Supreme Court to consider a case that could help shield the manufacturer from further lawsuits. Bayer’s stock soared by 14 percent on the news.

Two states—North Dakota and Georgia—have passed laws this year that help shield Bayer from some cancer lawsuits arising from Roundup use. There is a push to enact similar laws in other states and on the federal level.

In July, New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker introduced the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act to push back against these new laws, and ensure that “these chemical companies can be held accountable in federal court for the harm caused by their toxic products.”

Zen Honeycutt, a key voice in the Make America Healthy Again coalition, has endorsed the legislation. Honeycutt is executive director of Moms Across America, which on Wednesday posted to its 144,000 followers on Instagram about the “good” news of the study’s retraction and the “bad” news that the Trump administration had moved to help Bayer in its lawsuits.

“We are calling on all Americans to remind President Trump of his promise to get toxic pesticides out of our food supply and to protect our children from harmful chemicals,” the post read.

Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which sued the EPA for its 2020 approval of the herbicide, said the glyphosate debate has become a key sticking point between President Trump and his MAHA base. “The MAHA world is losing their minds right now. They keep getting thrown under the bus by this administration,” Donley said. “He’s alienating a crucial voting bloc.”

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EU Fines Musk $140 Million for Violations of Online Safety Rules. Vance Calls It “Censorship.”

The European Commission announced Friday that it was fining Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, for the equivalent of $140 million, saying his company X had breached Europe’s Digital Services Act. The act, which took effect around the same time Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, is a kind of digital rulebook meant to crack down on illegal or potentially harmful content.

Vice President JD Vance, before the fine was even finalized, slammed the commission, claiming that it was targeting US companies.

“Rumors swirling that the EU commission will fine X hundreds of millions of dollars for not engaging in censorship,” Vance wrote on X Thursday. “The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.”

“Much appreciated,” Musk responded.

A key aspect of the alleged violation is how Musk handles account verification on his social media site. Musk’s X “allows users to subscribe to a tier of the platform that grants them a badge that had previously signified the person had been vetted and approved by X’s moderators,” the Washington Post reports. The European Commission said this system makes it “difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with.”

“This deception,” the body continued, “exposes users to scams, including impersonation frauds, as well as other forms of manipulation by malicious actors.” The commission also said X didn’t provide a transparent advertising repository, as the Digital Services Act requires, and “fell short of an obligation to let researchers access and analyze its public data,” per The Post.

It doesn’t look like Musk will face similar issues in the US.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr claimed on X that, “Europe is fining a successful U.S. tech company for being a successful U.S. tech company.” Musk reposted. “The European Commission’s $140 million fine isn’t just an attack on @X, it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote, adding, “The days of censoring Americans online are over.” Musk endorsed the post with a one word reply: “Absolutely.”

Once again, Europe is fining a successful U.S. tech company for being a successful U.S. tech company.

Europe is taxing Americans to subsidize a continent held back by Europe’s own suffocating regulations. pic.twitter.com/EzeOWZRC2t

— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) December 5, 2025

While Musk and his supporters herald X as a bastion for free speech, his tenure in the past few years has been more complicated.

In December 2022, Musk suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists—from outlets like CNN, The New York Times, and WaPo—after Musk claimed reporters were endangering his safety by sharing information on where his private jets were using publicly available data. “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” Musk posted at the time.

According to self-reported data, from the date of Musk’s takeover to April 13, 2023, the social media site fully or partially complied with 98.8 percent of takedown requests submitted by governments. Turkey was responsible for half of all the takedown requests, followed by Germany at 26 percent and and India at 5 percent, as reported by Al Jazeera.

During the 12-month period before Musk took over the site, Twitter fully complied with 50 percent of these kinds of requests, and partially complied with 42 percent.

Since the EU commission announced the fine, Musk has been using his X page to amplify critiques of the commission’s decision. “Total war on free speech,” one post Musk reposted read. “It’s real simple,” Peter Imanuelsen, a well-known far-right voice in Sweden, began in another, “The EU fined X €120 million because this is where the mainstream media narrative gets exposed.” Musk quoted the post with the 100 emoji.

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Border Czar’s Former Clients Cash in on Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

Jin Kang, the CEO of a telecom and IT company, was talking to stock analysts this past spring, when he was asked about the company’s prospects for winning government contracts.

Kang said his firm, WidePoint, had technology that could help the Department of Homeland Security track down cellphones given to immigrants who had been released on bail, pending deportation hearings. All the company needed was a foot in the door.

“So we’ve been trying to get access to Tom Homan and the folks over at DHS at the secretary level,” Kang said. “I think we’ve gotten some…traction, but it’s too early to tell, but we are knocking on the doors of the various political operatives so that they could get us in the door to talk about the potential savings that we could provide.”

Kang’s statement stands out because Homan, prior to joining the second Trump administration as its “border czar,” ran a consulting firm that helped companies pursue government contracts. It does not appear that WidePoint was a Homan client, but other current contractors were. Homan has vowed, as federal ethics guidance advises, to stay out of federal procurement decisions.

“We are knocking on the doors of the various political operatives so that they could get us in the door.”

Kang’s claim is even more striking in light of news reports that Homan was recorded last year accepting $50,000 in a Cava bag from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen paying for help winning government contracts in a second Trump administration. Homan has said he did nothing illegal and has stated that he “didn’t take $50,000 from anybody.” Trump’s Justice Department ultimately dropped the matter after investigators, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing.” The White House has called the FBI probe “a blatantly political investigation” by the Biden administration.

Kang’s WidePoint, which won a DHS cellphone contract in the last months of President Donald Trump’s first term and is angling to win another worth up to $3 billion, is just one of several companies that have reportedly tried to enlist Homan’s help in drumming up federal contracts.

In June, Homan met with companies seeking contracts to build new immigration detention facilities, Bloomberg reported. Many of those contracts are being awarded by the US military, and Homan, according to the report, “was then expected to discuss the matter with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.”

In addition, a review by Mother Jones and the Project On Government Oversight shows that a number of Homan’s former clients from his time in the private sector have been awarded lucrative border and immigration-related contracts during the second Trump administration. Those projects include constructing private prisons, sprawling migrant detention camps, and a section of border wall. It is not clear whether Homan has played any role in helping his former clients land these deals—the White House says he has no involvement in the “actual awarding” of contracts.

Regardless, the pattern highlights what critics call the legalized corruption of Washington. While Homan denies taking a bag of cash to rig a contract, he openly ran a business in which he traded on his years of government work and high-level contacts to help clients who paid him prosper in the procurement process. Now that he is back in government, even the impression that he can influence federal contract awards creates the appearance of corruption, ethics experts argue.

Among would-be contractors, “the perception is that Homan can put in a good word—whether compensated or not compensated in cash, with or without a bag man—and in some sense, the damage is done,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies government ethics. Homan’s perceived influence, even after the alleged bag incident, sends “the message…that this is not disqualifying and people who want some portion of the trough that is DHS at this point can look to Homan, among others, for assistance,” Clark said.

Homan referred questions to White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, who dismissed concerns.

“As the Border Czar, Tom Homan occasionally meets with a variety of people to learn about new developments and capabilities to serve the needs of the American people – in doing so he continues to adhere to the federal ethics and [conflict] of interests rules,” Jackson said. “Tom has no involvement in the actual awarding of a government contract. Tom is a career law enforcement officer and lifelong public servant, with the utmost integrity, who is doing a phenomenal job on behalf of President Trump and the country.”

A White House official also said Homan “has not had any conversations, nor been involved in any conversations,” with WidePoint or any of the other companies discussed in this article “regarding contracts or business interests.” The official said Homan, a White House employee, has “no role in deciding or awarding contracts for DHS.”

Homan was well-situated to capitalize on his insights and government connections. He spent three decades working for the US Border Patrol and in 2013 was appointed to a high-ranking position with ICE by President Barack Obama—a post in which Homan pioneered the idea of using family separations as a tool to discourage illegal immigration.

Homan stayed on into the first Trump administration, but left his role as acting ICE director in June 2018—soon after the public outcry over family separations reached a fever pitch.

Homan’s consulting company boasted that it has “a proven track record of opening doors.”

Apparently, he already had been planning a leap to the private sector. In May 2018—just days after he announced that he would leave the administration—the state of Virginia approved paperwork incorporating a new business he founded, called Homeland Strategic Consulting. He spent the rest of Trump’s first term and the Biden years transforming himself from a lifetime government official into an advocate with insider perspectives and connections to the powerful for the many business interests trying to score government deals.

As of last December, the website of Homan’s consulting company boasted that the firm has “a proven track record of opening doors and bringing successful relationships to our clients, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of federal contracts to private companies.”

In 2021, Homan’s firm registered to lobby in Texas for Fisher Sand & Gravel, a North Dakota-based construction company that was seeking work building portions of border wall. Texas records show Fisher paid Homeland Strategic Consulting up to $186,000.

Fisher is a controversial company. In 2019, it built short sections of border wall in Texas and New Mexico. The work was financed by “We Build the Wall,” an effort involving Steve Bannon in which organizers crowdsourced private donations to fence off the country from Mexico. In 2020, We Build the Wall founder Brian Kolfage, Bannon, and two other men were charged with defrauding donors by misappropriating money they raised. While the other three defendants were convicted and jailed, Bannon escaped federal prosecution when Trump pardoned him hours before leaving office in 2021. Bannon pleaded guilty in February to defrauding donors in a similar case brought by Manhattan’s district attorney.

The sections of wall Fisher did complete have been lambasted as poorly built. In 2022, Fisher reached an undisclosed agreement with the Justice Department to settle a lawsuit over the project. Fisher has also repeatedly been sued by environmental groups.

But Fisher, whose CEO Tommy Fisher has supported many GOP lawmakers, has tapped Trump world support to continue landing contracts. Last year, with Homan’s help, the company scored a $225 million contract from Texas to build a new section of border wall there. And in June 2025, this erstwhile Homan client won a $309 million contract from Customs and Border Protection to build a 27-mile section of wall in Arizona’s Santa Cruz County. The company did not respond to inquiries.

Fisher isn’t the only former Homan client continuing to seek federal contracts that intersect with Homan’s White House portfolio.

USA Up Star, a company that specializes in quickly constructing temporary buildings in response to emergencies, is a former client of Homan’s that donated $100,000 to the Trump-Vance inauguration committee in January and $15,000 in June 2024 to a pro-Trump super-PAC called Right for America. A Federal Election Committee database does not show any other corporate contributions from that company, though its owner and president, Klay South, previously donated to PACs supporting Ron DeSantis.

In the months before the 2024 election, according to Bloomberg, “USA Up Star executives had regular calls and meetings with Homan to explore an expansion into immigration detention.” The construction company, Bloomberg reported, was pitching “a sprawling tent camp in El Paso, Texas, where people would be held in pens and surveilled from overhead by guards in wooden structures.”

This September, the US Navy awarded a massive border security and immigration enforcement contract to dozens of companies, including USA Up Star. The deal could ultimately be worth up to $20 billion for each contractor over several years, according to a government press release. The contract includes work providing “safe and secure confinement for aliens in the administrative custody of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),” per contracting records, as well as less controversial work, such as providing support in response to natural disasters.

In response to written questions, South declined to comment. He also wrote: “Get Fucked.”

Another past Homan client is SE&M Solutions, a Pennsylvania-based consulting firm that, like Homan’s former consultancy, helps other companies win government contracts. SE&M’s CEO is Charles Sowell, who also serves as chairman of the board of the Border911 Foundation, a border security-focused nonprofit founded and led by Homan. According to Sowell’s bio, he served in the Navy for 27 years, managed a Texas-based federal facility for unaccompanied migrant children in 2021, and attended the Border Patrol Industry Academy. USA Up Star is also an SE&M client, per reporting from ProPublica. SE&M’s website has touted “access to senior leaders in government.”

In August, according to Bloomberg, two SE&M clients met with Mark Hall, a top adviser to Homan who works in the administration. Hall is a former longtime Border Patrol agent who also served as a Border911 Foundation board member. (Another former board member is Rodney Scott, the head of Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency for the Border Patrol.) SE&M Solutions and Border911 did not respond to requests for comment.

And then there’s GEO Group, a private prison behemoth that runs a sprawling network of immigrant detention centers. ICE’s largest contractor, GEO Group also offers related services such as transporting detainees and tracking immigrants who are not detained. Homan reported on his financial disclosure form that he had worked as a consultant for GEO’s health care arm during the prior year.

GEO Group donated $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inauguration. That’s in addition to 2024 contributions from GEO’s political action committee, senior executives, and a GEO subsidiary totaling more than $1 million to Trump-aligned political entities, according to a Project On Government Oversight review of Federal Election Commission records.

GEO has seen its fortunes rise this year as the current administration has set new records for the number of people held in immigration detention, recently hitting 66,000. The population of detainees is up nearly 70 percent since Trump’s inauguration—the vast majority have no criminal convictions. Since Inauguration Day, ICE has awarded GEO new detention contracts collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

“This represents the largest amount of new business we have won in a single year in our Company’s history,” George Zoley, GEO Group’s executive chairman, said in a November statement.

GEO did not respond to a request for comment. But it has been vocal about benefiting from the Trump administration’s immigration policies. “As a long-standing support services provider for ICE with a 40-year-long track record, we believe we are uniquely positioned to assist the agency to meet its objectives,” Zoley said over the summer.

This story was reported with the Project On Government Oversight.

Samantha Michaels contributed reporting.

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Alabama Wants to Lower the Bar for Executing Disabled People—If SCOTUS Lets It

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Hamm v. Smith, a death penalty case that will decide whether intellectual disability can be ruled out on the basis of IQ tests alone.

Long before he was convicted of murder in 1997, Joseph Clifton Smith was placed in schooling for an intellectual disability. Smith had five documented IQ test scores by the time he was tried, all around the bottom five percent of the population—four of which, his legal team has argued, fall in the range of mild intellectual disability.

The state of Alabama disagrees: anyone scoring 70 or above on one test, its attorney general contends, is intelligent enough to execute. In 2022, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that argument—setting the stage for a Supreme Court turnaround on IQ and capital punishment.

“If you tilt your head just right and squint…without considering anything else, then you get the result [Alabama] thinks you should get.”

The Supreme Court has previously stated that IQ tests alone fail to holistically determine intellectual disability, in 2002’s Atkins v. Virginia—which also established that executing people with intellectual disabilities violated the Eighth Amendment—reaffirmed in 2014 in Hall v. Florida, and most recently in 2017’s Moore v. Texas. But Atkins and Hall were close decisions, and the Court’s conservative majority has since grown.

“It’s important to have a holistic assessment of the person,” said Shira Wakschlag, general counsel and senior executive officer for legal advocacy at The Arc, such as educational records and other documentation from childhood. IQ scores are a factor in determining intellectual disability, Wakschlag said, but they vary, and the tests don’t always offer consistent results.

An amicus brief from the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and Alabama Psychological Association in support of Smith’s case similarly argued that “because the diagnostic inquiry is necessarily holistic and requires the exercise of clinical judgment, no single datum—such as IQ test scores—is dispositive of intellectual functioning.”

An October filing by Alabama’s Department of Corrections commissioner, John Q. Hamm, pushes for a very narrow definition of intellectual disability defined by an IQ below 70, and argues that “the ‘holistic’ rhetoric’ is ‘just window dressing’ for a novel and indefensible change in constitutional law.’”

“If you tilt your head just right and squint, and apply this particular statistical principle in isolation, without considering anything else, then you get the result that [Alabama] thinks you should get,” said University of New Mexico School of Law adjunct professor Ann Delpha, whose work focuses on intellectual disabilities and the justice system. “That’s not what intellectual disability is about.”

“The court has said repeatedly…at different times, that intellectual disability is determined through clinical judgment, through a comprehensive analysis,” Wakschlag said. “It is not a number.”

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case is perhaps unexpected, given the clear precedent in its rulings that IQ tests are not enough to establish intellectual disability, and may signal a likely break with precedent.

A decision that effectively overturns the Court’s past rulings on intellectual disability and the death penalty would encourage states to define down intellectual disability, and any safeguards that come with it, in their criminal justice systems—in line with a wider push, echoed by conservative proposals like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to strip disability protections from schools, workplaces, and other sites of public life.

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Even Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Is Helping Catch Immigrants

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

The Louisiana Department Of Wildlife And Fisheries (LDWF), typically responsible in part for overseeing wildlife reserves and enforcing local hunting rules, has assisted United States immigration authorities with bringing at least six people into federal custody this year, according to documents WIRED obtained via a public record request.

According to the documents, LDWF signed a memorandum of agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in May, which gives the wildlife agency the authority to detain people suspected of immigration violations and to transfer them into ICE custody. Since then, at least six men entered ICE custody after coming into contact with or being detained by LDWF officers. None of the men were issued criminal charges at the time they came into contact with LDWF officers, the documents show. Two of the men were known by ICE to have been in the country legally at the time the agency took them into custody.

The documents also indicate that at least one “joint patrol” took place in a Louisiana wildlife management area in which LDWF agents were accompanied by officers with Customs and Border Protection and the US Coast Guard. The memorandum of agreement between ICE and LDWF makes no mention of CBP or the possibility of working with the agency as part of the agreement. However, the documents indicate that a relationship with CBP may have been facilitated through LDWF’s partnership with ICE.

LDWF partnered with ICE under the agency’s 287(g) program, named after the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that enables officers and employees at the state or local level to perform some of the functions of US immigration officers, such as investigating, apprehending, detaining, or transporting people suspected of violating immigration law.

As of December 3, exactly 1,205 agencies have partnered with ICE through the 287(g) program. (An additional eight agencies are currently pending approval from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.) Some 1,053 of these agreements were signed this year, meaning enrollment has increased by 693 percent compared to the end of 2024. The LDWF is one of just three state wildlife agencies—the others being the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources—that have signed 287(g) agreements with ICE, according to public ICE records. All three agreements were signed this year.

The marked expansion of the 287(g) program this year has generated relatively little attention. However, the documents from the LDWF indicate that the state and local agencies enrolled are actively detaining people not guilty of any crimes, and facilitating their arrests and possible deportation.

CBP did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. The LDWF answered questions about one particular incident, but did not respond to WIRED’s complete request for comment. ICE spokesperson Angelina Vicknair—when given the men’s full names, the dates and locations they were detained, all known circumstances of their detainment, and all other identifying information included in the documents—said that the agency did not have enough information to determine if the men were in custody, released, or deported. She also said that the number of men WIRED asked about, seven, constituted “too large a query,” adding, “We’ll need you to narrow it down.”

Per a LDWF “After Action Report” obtained by WIRED, three men were taken into a federal custody after the agency conducted a joint patrol on August 11 with five US Coast Guard officers and an unknown number of CBP agents in Lake Borgne, which is in Louisiana’s sprawling Biloxi Marsh Complex. According to the report, the officers were looking for people allegedly violating state statues for seed oyster harvesting.

The report claims that no one on the patrol witnessed any crimes or civil violations. Despite this, it says that “the federal partners were able to identify and detain 3 subjects for immigration issues,” adding that “all arrestees were transported by Federal agencies to detention centers.” It’s unclear why these individuals were singled out, but all three appear to have Hispanic last names.

The report claims that two of the arrested individuals legally entered the United States but overstayed the amount of time they were allowed to remain in the country. The third person, it claims, entered the country illegally and had an unspecified “criminal history.” Given the report’s sparse information about the men, it’s unclear if any of them have been deported or remain in federal custody.

Some time after the August 11 patrol, the report claims, a CBP lieutenant asked LDWF about organizing “future patrol opportunities and joint patrols” with the agency.

“After this operation, CBP has reason to believe that future patrols will be beneficial and productive,” the report reads. “They also expressed how much they learned traversing some of the more specific waterbodies with the local knowledge of our agents, they were able to learn new routes across the area that will allow them to extend the effectiveness of their independent patrols.”

In an August 22 email obtained by WIRED, LDWF regional captain Tim Fox says that CBP wanted to organize future patrols “on a less formal basis.” It’s unclear whether a less formal patrol would still produce a paper trail.

According to a later LDWF incident report, the agency arrested three additional people in October, all of whom were taken into ICE custody. The men were issued civil citations for going to a wildlife management area and using their firearms without the proper permits, the report says, but none were issued any criminal charges.

The report claims that on October 23, two LDWF officers patrolling the Maurepas Swamp Wildlife Management Area heard several gunshots in an area where “people often illegally target shoot.” The suspects, three men in their twenties, all cooperated with LDWF at the scene. When asked to show their weapons, they showed the officers a pistol, an AR-15, several magazines, and a few dozen rounds of ammunition. The officers confirmed that none of the firearms were stolen. One of the men also showed the officers where they had been shooting.

The men showed identification—a Louisiana ID card, a Honduran ID card, and a Honduran passport, respectively—when asked, but did not have the appropriate permits for being in a Wildlife Management Area and firing a weapon. The two men who fired weapons were issued three civil citations, while the one who didn’t was issued two. At some point during LDWF’s interactions with the men, the agency called immigration authorities.

“Due to the unknown immigration status and them possessing firearms, we made contact with Homeland Security Investigations,” the report reads. A HSI agent reportedly told LDWF that one of the men had a final removal order, one had “pending” immigration proceedings, and one man had legal parole to be in the US. When LDWF contacted the local ICE field office, ICE sent two agents to the scene.

Upon arrival, the report claims, “The ICE Officers made several phone calls and they decided to take custody of all three subjects.” All three men were placed in handcuffs and escorted to the ICE officers’ vehicles.

It’s unclear if any of these men were deported, but based on information in the report, none of them appear to currently be in ICE custody, according to the agency’s detainee locator.

In response to WIRED’s public record request, LDWF also included an incident report filed on October 6. The report describes a man who allegedly littered “roofing shingles, nails and other assorted building materials” near Cypress Lake for which he was issued one civil citation for “gross littering.” It notes that the man didn’t speak English, but “was cooperative during this investigation” with the help of a translator.

The incident report says that the man had “unverified citizenship,” but it does not specify whether he was taken into ICE custody. When asked about the incident and why it was included in the response to WIRED’s public record request, a LWFD spokesperson clarified that the agency reported the man to ICE after he was issued the littering citation.

The spokesperson said that as a result of the man’s “unverified citizenship,” the LDWF “forwarded the citation and report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

“LDWF has no further information regarding Mr. Garcia’s current status or location,” the spokesperson said.

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Zillow Nixes Feature That Helped Home Buyers Assess Climate Risks

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

Zillow, the US’s largest real estate listing site, has removed a feature that allowed people to view a property’s exposure to the climate crisis, following complaints from the industry and some homeowners that it was hurting sales.

In September last year, the online real estate marketplace introduced a tool showing the individual risk of wildfire, flood, extreme heat, wind, and poor air quality for 1 million properties it lists, explaining that “climate risks are now a critical factor in home-buying decisions” for many Americans.

“The risk doesn’t go away; it just moves from a pre-purchase decision into a post-purchase liability.”

But Zillow has now deleted this climate index after complaints from real estate agents and some homeowners that the rankings appeared arbitrary, could not be challenged, and harmed house sales. The complaints included those from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which oversees a database of property data that Zillow relies upon.

Zillow said it remains committed to help Americans make informed decisions about properties, with listings now containing outbound links to the website of First Street, the nonprofit climate risk quantifier that had provided the on-site tool to Zillow.

Matthew Eby, founder and chief executive of First Street, said that removing the climate risk information means that many buyers will be “flying blind” in an era when worsening impacts of extreme weather are warping the real estate market in the United States.

“The risk doesn’t go away; it just moves from a pre-purchase decision into a post-purchase liability,” Eby said. “Families discover after a flood that they should have purchased flood insurance, or discover after the sale that wildfire insurance is unaffordable or unavailable in their area.

“Access to accurate risk information before a purchase isn’t just helpful; it’s essential to protecting consumers and preventing lifelong financial consequences.”

Eby claimed that the push to delist the First Street ratings from Zillow is linked to a challenging real estate environment, with a lack of affordable housing and repeated climate-driven disasters that are causing insurers to raise premiums or even flee states such as California. “All of that adds pressure to close sales however possible,” he said. “Climate risk data didn’t suddenly become inconvenient. It became harder to ignore in a stressed market.”

“Brokerage firms know they cannot stop the transmission of climate risk information because climate impacts are already being felt far and wide.”

As the US, along with the rest of the world, has heated up due to the burning of fossil fuels, worsening extreme weather events have taken their toll directly upon people’s homes, as well as other infrastructure.

Last year, disasters probably amplified by the climate crisis caused $182 billion in damages, one of the highest on record, according to a government database since taken offline by the Trump administration.

As a consequence of these mounting risks, the home insurance required for buyers to obtain a mortgage is becoming scarcer and more expensive across much of the US. These changes are running headlong into an opposing trend whereby more Americans are moving to places such as Florida and the Southwest, which are increasingly beset by threats such as ruinous hurricanes and punishing heatwaves.

But assigning climate risks to individual properties has been controversial within the real estate industry, as well as some experts who have questioned whether such judgments can be made at such a granular level.

Warnings of such perils deterred some buyers, especially if the home was particularly costly anyway. Last year, a sprawling Florida mansion was put on sale for $295 million, making it the most expensive property in the country and in a place also ranked as one of the most at-risk in the US for flooding. After several cuts to the asking price, the house has been taken off the market.

Jesse Keenan, an author and expert in climate risk management at Tulane University, said many scientists and economists have argued that “proprietary risk models that provide highly uncertain assessments can have the perverse effect of undermining the public’s confidence in climate science.

“There has been a growing bipartisan recognition that the government should play a more active role in supporting and standardizing risk assessment for properties,” Keenan said. “At the same time, the science is limited in its capacity to assess property-by-property assessments.

“I do not believe that this is a sign that the brokerage industry is trying to hide climate risks,” he added. “Brokerage firms know they cannot stop the transmission of climate risk information because climate impacts are already being felt far and wide in the sector.”

Eby defended First Street’s methods and accuracy, pointing out that the models used were built on peer-reviewed science and validated against real-world outcomes.

“So when claims are made that our models are inaccurate, we ask for evidence,” he said. “To date, all the empirical validation shows our science is working as designed and providing better risk insight than the tools the industry has relied on historically.”

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For Many Contractors, Losing ACA Subsidies Means Losing Health Care

Comedian Megan Sass has been struggling to get their health insurer to cover intravenous immunoglobulin for more than a year. The treatment, which addresses a genetic antibody deficiency, requires antibodies from blood donors. Without insurance, it’s unaffordable. And with the looming expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies, Sass’ insurance will soon cost $1,300 a month.

“I am not at a place where I’m been able to joke about this,” they said.

ACA marketplace subsidies, first implemented in 2014, expanded greatly during the Biden administration, allowing millions more people to afford private health insurance. But enhanced premium tax credits are set to expire at the end of 2025. As ACA architect Jeanne M. Lambrew told me in October:

When the Biden administration came in during the pandemic, they tweaked the premium tax credits to improve them, which doubled enrollment. It increased the racial diversity of enrollment. It increased [the number of] low-income people enrolled. It removed a cliff, so when people’s income increased, they didn’t like fall off and have nothing. All that led to great gains and all that is at risk.

For contractors and freelancers in particular, the expiration of these enhanced subsidies could decide whether or not they can afford health insurance. According to KFF, around half of adults who purchase ACA marketplace plans are self-employed, small business owners, or their employees. Disabled people who work are 50 percent more likely to be self-employed than non-disabled people, meaning that people with existing health issues are at disproportionate risk of losing private health insurance for affordability reasons.

The ACA offers disabled people “options that many other people take for granted,” said Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the Center for American Progress’ Disability Justice Initiative, especially given the ties between insurance and employment.

The situation is especially frustrating for chronically ill and disabled contractors who watched Democratic leadership in Congress abandon a shutdown meant to protect those subsidies; President Donald Trump, during Thanksgiving week, then backtracked on a supposed plan to extend the tax credits when faced with the displeasure of congressional Republicans.

New Hampshire therapist Amanda McGuire is infuriated that Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) voted to end the government shutdown without a deal to extend ACA tax credits: after all, McGuire created a video that Shaheen’s team posted on social media during the shutdown advocating for the importance of the ACA. McGuire feels betrayed.

McGuire doesn’t qualify for ACA subsidies, though she expects to have to buy a marketplace plan next year as her disabilities, including multiple sclerosis, increasingly compel her to reduce her working hours. McGuire’s therapy practice focuses on patients with chronic illnesses and disabilities, and she’s even more afraid of what the future holds for them.

“A lot of them can’t even look at the options in the marketplace right now, because they know they’re going to be priced out of policies,” McGuire told me. “As someone with chronic illness, you can’t just go without insurance.”

Kathryn Sullivan Graf, a contractor who works as a writer and editor in Arizona, has multiple sclerosis; she expects to pay around $300 more a month and to have to seek new specialists. She was relieved when her neurologist assured her that he’d remain her neurologist no matter what happened—”but that’s just one of my providers,” Sullivan Graf said.

Sass doesn’t believe that politicians on either side of the aisle are doing enough. Members of Congress, Sass noted, get comprehensive health insurance through the government—so they can’t personally experience the stakes.

“Obviously, the main culprits are Republicans,” Sass said. “But the system,” they said, was either “broken, or it was intentionally designed badly.”

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USDA To Blue States: Hand Over Personal Data Or Lose SNAP Funding

The United States Department of Agriculture is threatening to withhold federal funding for food stamps for more than 20 Democratic-led states that have refused to hand over sensitive personal data about millions of participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The agriculture department is seeking personal information like Social Security numbers, birth dates, and home addresses—information it claims will aid officials in rooting out fraud. Democratic leaders have warned the data could be used for other policies not related to keeping people fed, like immigration enforcement.

During a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, USDA Secretary Brooke L. Rollins said that leaders have until next week to send in data or the department will “begin to stop moving federal funds into those states,” adding that her office wants the data to “protect the American taxpayer.” If the administration follows through on this deadline, according to The New York Times, more than 20 million beneficiaries could be affected.

“NO DATA, NO MONEY,” Rollins wrote on X, “it’s that simple.”

According to the agency, since the administration asked states for SNAP recipients’ data in May, 28 largely Republican-controlled states have already complied.

The move comes after SNAP recipients across the country have just recently emerged from the confusion and frustration surrounding whether they would get money for food during the longest government shutdown in US history. It’s unclear how the secretary’s current request will impact—or avert—the ongoing SNAP-related legal battles between states and the Trump administration.

Just last week, Democratic attorneys general from 21 states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration over language within the GOP’s tax and spending package, which the group says unlawfully blocks certain groups of legal immigrants from accessing SNAP benefits.

Following the secretary’s Tuesday announcement, Democratic governors across the country accused the Trump administration of, once again, playing politics with peoples’ hunger.

“We no longer take the Trump Administration’s words at face value — we’ll see what they actually do in reality,” Marissa Saldivar, a spokesperson for California Governor Gavin Newsom, said in a statement. “Cutting programs that feed American children is morally repugnant.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul posted on X, “Genuine question: Why is the Trump Administration so hellbent on people going hungry?”

Claire Lancaster, a spokesperson for Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, said the state’s leader “wishes President Trump would be a president for all Americans rather than taking out his political vendettas on the people who need these benefits the most.”

“The Trump Administration is once again playing politics with the ability of working parents with children, seniors and people with disabilities to get food,” Maura Healey, the governor of Massachusetts, said in a statement, calling the move, “truly appalling and cruel.”

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ICE Targets New Orleans In Latest Operation, Aims for 5,000 Arrests In The Region

The Department of Homeland Security officially launched what they’re calling “Operation Catahoula Crunch” in New Orleans on Wednesday, expanding President Donald Trump and his administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown in Louisiana. Federal immigration officers, in coordination with local law enforcement, are aiming to arrest 5,000 people in southeast Louisiana and into Mississippi.

The wider operation is called “Swamp Sweep.”

New Orleans Mayor-elect Helena Moreno, a Democrat who was born in Mexico, has been critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s impending presence in the city. “You have parents who are scared to send their children to school,” Moreno told the local CNN affiliate WWL. “At my church,” she said, “there is a one o’clock service, Spanish-speaking service every Sunday, that keeps getting smaller and smaller. People are really, really scared.”

Moreno’s office has released guidelines instructing residents on how to interact with ICE. “Always comply with lawful orders from Law Enforcement,” the website reads, adding that local law enforcement “will not ask about your immigration status.” “Most of all,” the guidance continues, “keep each other safe.”

The governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, is more eager to comply with the administration’s deportation efforts.

“Thank you President @realDonaldTrump and @Sec_Noem for putting AMERICANS first,” Governor Landry said, tagging President Trump and the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem in a post on X. “We welcome the Swamp Sweep in Louisiana.”

Thank you President @realDonaldTrump and @Sec_Noem for putting AMERICANS first.

We welcome the Swamp Sweep in Louisiana. pic.twitter.com/mlyjFAFsOx

— Governor Jeff Landry (@LAGovJeffLandry) December 1, 2025

Landry, a Trump-ally, has also been working with the president to send National Guard troops into the state in coming weeks. A presence that the governor says will continue through Mardi Gras, which is scheduled for February of 2026.

Trump and Landry claim that the efforts are to address crime across New Orleans and the state, though the city “has logged significant drops in crime and is on pace to have its lowest number of homicides in nearly 50 years,” according to reporting from NBC News based on crime data from the police department.

DHS’s campaign in New Orleans is the administration’s latest stop in a cross-country immigration crackdown. Officers, under Trump’s guidance, have been picking up people from New York City to Portland to Tucson to Minneapolis.

Newly elected Councilmember at-Large Matthew Willard (D-La.) told CNN that there has been “mass chaos and confusion” ahead of ICE’s operation in New Orleans on Wednesday.

“We’re really just fearful of the unknown, and looking at the coverage that we’ve seen in other cities by CNN,” he said, adding, “we certainly don’t want that here in the city of New Orleans.”

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Why Did Trump Pardon the Former Honduran President? Follow the Tech Bros.

Last year, a US district court sentenced Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking. Orlando was convicted of accepting millions of dollars in bribes and importing 500 tons of cocaine into the United States, where he was extradited after completing his second presidential term in 2022.

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice considered the Hernández conviction a victory. “As President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world, and the people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences,” wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement last year. “The Justice Department will hold accountable all those who engage in violent drug trafficking, regardless of how powerful they are or what position they hold.”

“I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.”

That is, until this week, when President Donald Trump abruptly pardoned Hernández in the midst of a tumultuous Honduran election. “I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The pardon came during the same week that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was facing scrutiny for his role in lethal strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats, and Trump accused Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro of “narco terrorism.” So why would an administration hell bent on punishing drug traffickers pardon a kingpin like Hernandez?

Some have argued that this could simply be a way to make trouble for the left- wing successor to Hernández, the current Honduran president Xiomara Castro, who has been a strong critic of Trump’s mass deportations. In a recent thread on X, right-wing extremism researcher Jennifer Cohn unearthed an article from January that Trump’s longtime adviser Roger Stone—the convicted and now pardoned felon and political strategist—wrote with conservative commentator Shane Trejo. They suggested that Trump pardon Hernández as a way of trolling Castro:

Castro’s statements in recent weeks in defiance of President Trump’s proposal of mass deportations have raised her profile and caused enmity to build against her from the ‘America First’ right. Castro’s provocations of President Trump, a desperate attempt to rally Hondurans to her side in an election year, may backfire and prove to be her undoing as Trump has quite a bit of leverage at his disposal to upend her fledgling regime.

But they went further in elaborating the benefits of this strategy. In helping to unseat Castro, Stone and Trejo wrote, Trump could both “crush socialism and save a freedom city in Honduras.” The “freedom city” in question, they explained, was Próspera, a special economic zone founded in Honduras by a cadre of American tech titans including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen—both friends and fans of Trump family.

While Hernández strongly supported Próspera, his successor, Castro, spoke out against the project, which she saw as merely a shelter for foreign actors to undermine Honduran sovereignty and to skirt labor and environmental regulations they may face elsewhere. Last year, the Honduran Supreme Court declared special economic zones like Próspera unconstitutional, a move that Stone and Trejo described as “a starkly political maneuver.”

Próspera is an example of the tech-right concept of the network state, a phrase coined by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan. I wrote about it earlier this year:

In a 2021 essay on his website, Srinivasan laid out his vision for people seeking to build a new utopia or, as he put it, “a fresh start.” Sure, there were conventional ways to do this—forming a new country through revolution or war. But that would be, well, really hard, not to mention unpredictable. A cruise ship or somewhere in space were appealing options, but both presented ­logistical challenges. Far simpler and more practical was “tech Zionism,” creating an online nation, complete with its own culture, economy, tax structure, and, of course, startup-friendly laws.

Eventually, Srinivasan mused, such a community could acquire actual physical property where people would gather and live under the laws dreamed up by the founders—a “reverse diaspora,” he called it—but that land didn’t even need to be contiguous. “A community that forms first on the internet, builds a culture online,” he said, “and only then comes together in person to build dwellings and structures.” Acknowledging that the idea might sound a little goofy—like live-action Minecraft—he emphasized that it was also a serious proposition. “Once we remember that Facebook has 3B users, Twitter has 300M, and many individual influencers”—himself included—“have more than 1M followers,” he wrote, “it starts to be not too crazy to imagine we can build a 1-10M person social network with a genuine sense of national consciousness, an integrated cryptocurrency, and a plan to crowdfund many pieces of territory around the world.”

A network state would, like a kind of Pac-Man, gobble up little pieces of actual land, eventually amassing so much economic power that other nations would be forced to recognize it. Once that happens, laws in more conventional nations could become almost irrelevant. Why on earth would, say, a pharmaceutical company with a new drug choose to spend billions of dollars and decades on mandated testing when it could go to a deregulated network state and take it to market in record time? As Srinivasan argued in a Zoom talk at last year’s conference, “Just like it was easier to start bitcoin and then to reform the Fed,” he said, “it is literally easier to start a new country than to reform the FDA.”

Trump has expressed some interest in this idea; on the campaign trail, he proposed building “freedom cities” on federal land.

Still, it’s not entirely clear why the American president would care so much about saving a special economic zone in Latin America. That is, until one takes a look at Próspera’s Trump-aligned investors. That list includes Paypal’s Thiel, a Trump campaign donor who also is said to have played a key role in the selection of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate. Another prominent Próspera investor is venture capitalist Andreessen, who made significant campaign contributions to Trump and has also served as an adviser. Both Andreessen and Thiel have investment companies that benefit from government tech and defense contracts awarded under Trump.

At any rate, Stone appears to be taking a victory lap for having engineered the pardon. “Thank you, President Trump, for doing justice and granting the presidential pardon in the case of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was framed by Biden for an alleged drug trafficking that never existed,” he posted last week. “For a long time, I have advocated for a pardon in this case.”

Indeed, as he put it in his January article:

Castro’s regime could be upended and Honduras liberated without firing a single shot or deploying a single troop in what would be a massive strategic victory for US interests in the region. May the Próspera experiment prevail, the common good be saved, and global leftism be damned by the benevolent hand of President Trump!

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Team Trump Strips “Renewable Energy” From the Name of an Iconic National Lab

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

The Trump administration has renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, now calling it the National Laboratory of the Rockies, marking an identity shift for the Colorado institution that has been a global leader in wind, solar, and other renewable energy research.

“The new name reflects the Trump administration’s broader vision for the lab’s applied energy research, which historically emphasized alternative and renewable sources of generation, and honors the natural splendor of the lab’s surroundings in Golden, Colorado,” said Jud Virden, laboratory director, in a statement.

He did not specify what this “broader vision” would mean for the lab’s programs or its staff of about 4,000.

The renaming is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to deemphasize or cut the parts of the federal government that support renewable energy, while also expanding federal support for fossil fuels.

Asked for details, the Department of Energy said in an email that the renaming “reflects the Department’s renewed focus on ‘energy addition,’ rather than the prioritization of specific energy resources.”

If the name change heralds a shift in the lab’s direction, it would be “like losing several major land grant research universities all at once.”

A lab spokesman had no additional information about whether there will be changes to programs or headcount at the lab.

Bill Ritter, a Democrat who was governor of Colorado from 2007 to 2011, said it’s reasonable to worry that the name change signals that the federal government is abandoning the lab’s status as a world leader in renewable energy research. “It’s an iconic research facility,” he said.

Underscoring this point, he recalled a trip to Israel while he was governor. “The head of their renewable energy laboratory said, ‘I have nothing to tell you, because you come from the place that has the best renewable energy laboratory in the world,’” Ritter said.

After leaving office, Ritter founded the Center for the New Energy Economy at Colorado State University, which specializes in energy policy research, and is now a consultant on energy business and policy.

Based on this experience, he thinks that anything the Trump administration does to divert from the lab’s mission is harmful to the United States’ ability to remain a major player in the energy economy of the near future.

“We’ll no longer be competitive in renewables research with China or India or other countries that are still heading toward the renewable energy transition at a very fast pace,” he said.

People with close ties to the lab were not surprised by the name change, given the administration’s broader goals.

“In the early days of DOGE people there were whispering about a name change to avoid the ire of MAGAs,” said Matt Henry, a Montana-based social scientist who worked at the lab from February 2024 to August 2025, in a post on Bluesky. “It pissed me off—prioritizing the preservation of the institution at the expense of its [stated] mission? So disappointing.”

He was referring to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which sought to cut federal spending in the early months of the Trump administration. The term MAGA refers to President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan and movement.

Dustin Mulvaney, a San Jose State University environmental studies professor, said if the name change is a sign of a significant change in the lab’s work, it would be “like losing several major land grant research universities all at once.”

Mulvaney has done projects in partnership with people at the lab. An important part of the institution’s work, he said, is that its research is free and accessible to the public, helping businesses and universities that may not be able to afford the work of private research firms.

The lab’s mission has included consulting to help communities benefit from new energy technologies, and ensure smooth transitions away from fossil fuels.

This work meant that the lab was out of step with an administration that has said it disagrees with the idea of a transition away from fossil fuels and has sought to impede funding and development of renewable energy.

The lab was established in 1974 as the Solar Energy Research Institute, part of a law signed by President Gerald Ford to facilitate alternatives to importing oil from the Middle East, according to a history on the lab’s website. The US was suffering through high gasoline prices amid tensions with oil-producing nations such as Saudi Arabia.

“The energy crisis we face today is unlike the crisis that gave rise to NREL,” said Audrey Robertson, assistant secretary of energy, in a statement. “We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources. Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand.”

In 1977, the federal government selected Golden, Colorado, as the location for the lab. In 1991, the Solar Energy Research Institute became the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, part of a change by the administration of President George H. W. Bush that also elevated the institution to become part of the country’s national lab system.

But the lab’s history has also included budget cuts and periods when its work fell out of favor with presidential administrations, including layoffs and funding cuts under President Ronald Reagan. Trump proposed substantial cuts during his first term, but Congress retained much of the funding.

The Trump administration’s budget proposal, issued in May, calls for cuts across non-defense discretionary spending, including on energy research, but the budget process is still underway.

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One on One With Trump’s Black MAGA Pastor

Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell is one of the most prominent Black conservatives in President Donald Trump’s orbit. It all started last summer when the president visited Sewell’s 180 Church while campaigning in Detroit. A month later, Sewell spoke at the Republican National Convention. And in January, he prayed for the new president during his inauguration inside the US Capitol. As Sewell’s voice echoed around the domed rotunda, the prayer sounded familiar to many. That’s because Sewell adapted Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

As Trump dismantles DEI policies around the country and pushes efforts to erase Black history from schools and museums, Sewell remains one of the president’s most prominent Black defenders and argues that the Trump presidency is actually improving Black Americans’ lives.

“I believe that racism is when you close the door of opportunity to people because of their skin color, intentionally or unintentionally,” Sewell says. “And I believe President Trump is a anti-racist because he opened the door of opportunity to somebody like me, in a context where nobody would vote for him.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Sewell sits down with host Al Letson to talk about his upbringing as a drug dealer in Detroit, his conversion to Christianity, and his inauguration prayer. Letson challenges Sewell’s ideas about racism, his support of Charlie Kirk, and his defense of the Trump administration’s rollback of DEI policies.

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Pete Hegseth Finds His Fall Guy

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remains under intense scrutiny following reports that he gave a spoken order to kill survivors of a boat strike, an allegation that has since labeled Hegseth the “Secretary of War Crimes.” But it appears that amid the fallout, Hegseth has found a potential fall guy: Admiral Frank Bradley, the Special Operations commander who oversaw the September 2 strikes.

Here is Hegseth on Monday referring to the September 2 strikes as “the combat decisions [Bradley] has made,” a line many viewed as attempting to directly place blame on a subordinate.

Let’s make one thing crystal clear:

Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since.

America is fortunate to have such men protecting…

— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) December 1, 2025

Then again, on Tuesday: “All these strikes, they’re making judgment calls, ensuring they defend the American people,” Hegseth told reporters, saying nothing of his own role in the strikes, which have more generally been likened to extrajudicial killings.

Hegseth: "As President Trump always has our back, we always have the back of our commanders who are making decisions in difficult situations. All these strikes, they're making judgement calls ensuring they defend the American people. They've done the right things. We'll keep doing that."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-12-02T17:27:58.563Z

A similar framing came from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who said on Monday that Bradley “worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed.”

The apparent, coordinated effort to distance Hegseth from the September 2 boat strikes stems from an exclusive report from the Washington Post last week alleging that Hegseth ordered a follow-up strike on two people who had survived the initial bombing of their boat on September 2. The attack kicked off what has since exploded into an extended campaign of lethal hits on suspected drug boats from Venezuela, despite mounting evidence that casts doubt on the assertion that those killed were even trafficking drugs into the United States. According to tracking work from the New York Times, at least 80 people have been killed in 21 strikes.

Hegseth has since blasted the allegations as “fake news.” He also respondedwith his version of an apparent joke: a fake image of a Franklin the Turtle children’s book titled Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists, with the titular character shown in military gear, firing at targets in the sea from a helicopter.

Kids Can Press, which has published many of the Franklin the Turtle books, condemned Hegseth’s post on Monday night, saying it contradicted its values of “kindness, empathy, and inclusivity.”

Lawmakers, including at least one top Republican, have indicated targeting shipwrecked survivors may constitute a war crime. (The Department of Defense’s own “Law of War Manual” prohibits “no quarter” declarations, which includes “conduct[ing] hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors.”) Republican-led committees in the House and Senate have since announced investigations into the report.

“If [the order] occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act,” Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) and a former chair of the Intelligence Committee, said on CBS’s Face the Nation.

“Pete Hegseth is a war criminal and should be fired immediately,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) posted on X.

The timing of Hegseth’s latest scandal hits at a larger irony, as it follows a November social media video featuring six Democratic lawmakers that sought to remind military officers that they “must refuse illegal orders” and “stand up for our laws and our Constitution.” The video enraged both Hegseth and President Donald Trump, who promptly accused the Democrats, many of whom are former military or intelligence, of “seditious behavior, punishable by death.”

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The Trump Administration Won’t Stop Firing Immigration Judges

The Trump administration has axed another group of judges from immigration courts. On Monday, the New York Times reported, eight judges serving on the bench at New York City’s 26 Federal Plaza—ground zero for courthouse arrests—were terminated. Among them was Amiena A. Khan, the court’s supervising assistant chief immigration judge.

Trump is trying to reshape immigration courts to fit his mass deportation agenda.

The latest firings, which were confirmed by the National Association of Immigration Judges and a Department of Justice official, add to an estimated 90 judges who have been terminated so far this year without stated cause. (Immigration judges are employed by the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR.) Federal Plaza, one of the city’s three immigration courts, now lists the names of just 25 sitting immigration judges and one temporary judge.

As I’ve previously reported (here and here), the sweeping purge of dozens of immigration judges across the country is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to hollow out the already overburdened courts—charged with making decisions on deportation and life-or-death asylum cases—and reshape them as a tool forthe mass deportation agenda. Since President DonaldTrump took back the White House, more than 130 adjudicators have been terminated or transferred, or have voluntarily left the workforce.

A recent NPR analysis of the professional backgrounds of 70 immigration judges fired between February and October found that judges with deportation defense experience and who hadn’t previously worked for the Department of Homeland Security accounted for 44 percent of the dismissals. That rate was “more than double the share of those who had only prior work history at DHS.” (In a statement to NPR, a DOJ spokesperson said it didn’t target or prioritize immigration judges based on past experience.)

David S. Kim was in the middle of a hearing in September when a termination email landed in his inbox. Kim had been an immigration judge for almost three years and had the highest asylum grant rate among the judges at 26 Federal Plaza.

“I know they will try their best to comport with due process and at the same time try to be efficient,” Kim told me in October of the judges who remained on the bench, “but it’s going to make their job that more difficult, especially knowing that their colleagues have been terminated for an unknown reason.”

As it removes seasoned judges with diverse backgrounds, the Trump White House is also working to replace them with adjudicators it expects will be more aligned with its anti-immigration push. Earlier this year, the administration eased the requirements to hire temporary judges with limited immigration law experience and started recruiting military lawyers for temporary assignments, a move legal experts have warned could undermine due process.

More recently, the official DHS account on X started calling on candidates to apply to join the bench to work under a new title:“Deportation Judge.”

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Why Do We Trust ChatGPT?

In the summer of 2019, a group of Dutch scientists conducted an experiment to collect “digital confessions.” At a music festival near Amsterdam, the researchers asked attendees to share a secret anonymously by chatting online with either a priest or a relatively basic chatbot, assigned at random. To their surprise, some of the nearly 300 participants ­offered deeply personal confessions, including of infidelity and experiences with sexual abuse. While what they shared with the priests (in reality, incognito scientists) and the chatbots was “equally intimate,” participants reported feeling more “trust” in the humans, but less fear of judgment with the chatbots.

This was a novel finding, explains Emmelyn Croes, an assistant professor of communication science at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. Chatbots were then primarily used for customer service or online shopping, not personal conversations, let alone confessions. “Many people couldn’t imagine they would ever share anything intimate to a chatbot,” she says.

Enter ChatGPT. In 2022, three years after Croes’ experiment, OpenAI launched its artificial intelligence–powered chatbot, now used by 700 million people globally, the company says. Today, people aren’t just sharing their deepest secrets with virtual companions, they’re engaging in regular, extended discussions that can shape beliefs and influence behavior, with some users reportedly cultivating friendships and romantic relationships with AIs. In chatbot research, Croes says, “there are two domains: There’s before and after ChatGPT.”

Take r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, a Reddit community where people “ask, share, and post experiences about AI relationships.” As MIT Technology Review reported in September, many of its roughly 30,000 members formed bonds with AI chatbots unintentionally, through organic conversations. Elon Musk’s Grok offers anime “companion” avatars designed to flirt with users. And “Friend,” a new, wearable AI product, advertises constant companionship, claiming that it will “binge the entire [TV] series with you” and “never bail on our dinner plans”—unlike flaky humans.

The chatbots are hardly flawless. Research shows they are capable of talking people out of conspiracy theories and may offer an outlet for some psychological support, but virtual companions also have reportedly fueled delusional and harmful thinking, particularly in children. At least three US teenagers have killed themselves after confiding in chatbots, including ChatGPT and Character.AI, according to lawsuits filed by their families. Both companies have since announced new safety features, with Character.AI telling me in an email that it intends to block children from engaging in “open-ended chat with AI” on the platform starting in late November. (The Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones, is suing OpenAI for copyright violations.)

As the technology barrels ahead—and lawmakers grapple with how to regulate it—it’s become increasingly clear just how much a humanlike string of words can captivate, entertain, and influence us. While most people don’t initially seek out deep engagement with an AI, argues Vaile Wright, a psychologist and spokesperson for the American Psychological Association, many AIs are designed to keep us engaged for as long as possible to maximize the data we provide to their makers. For instance, OpenAI trains ChatGPT on user conversations (though there is an option to opt out), while Meta intends to run personalized ads based on what people share with Meta AI, its virtual assistant. “Your data is the profit,” Wright says.

Some advanced AI chatbots are also “unconditionally validating” or sycophantic, Wright notes. ChatGPT may praise a user’s input as “insightful” or “profound,” and use phrases like, I’m here for you—an approach she argues helps keep us hooked. (This behavior may stem from AI user testing, where a chatbot’s complimentary responses often receive higher marks than neutral ones, leading it to play into our biases.) Worse, the longer someone spends with an AI chatbot, some research shows, the less accurate the bot becomes.

People also tend to overtrust AI. Casey Fiesler, a professor who studies technology ethics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, highlights a 2016 Georgia Tech study in which participants consistently followed an error-prone “emergency guide robot” while fleeing a building during a fake fire. “People perceive AI as not having the same kinds of problems that humans do,” she says.

At the same time, explains Nat Rabb, a technical associate at MIT’s Human Cooperation Lab who studies trust, the way we develop trust in other humans—perception of honesty, competence, and whether someone shares an in-group—can also dictate our trust in AI, unlike other technologies. “Those are weird categories to apply to a thermostat,” he says, “But they’re not that weird when it comes to generative AI.” For instance, he says, research from his colleagues at MIT indicates that Republicans on X are more likely to use Grok to fact-check information, while Democrats are more likely to go with Perplexity, an alternative chatbot.

Not to say AI chatbots can’t be used for good. For example, Wright suggests they could serve as a temporary stand-in for mental health support when human help isn’t readily accessible—say, a midnight panic attack—or to help people practice conversations and build social skills before trying them out in the real world. But, she cautions, “it’s a tool, and it’s how you use the tool that matters most.” Eugene Santos Jr., an engineering professor at Dartmouth College who studies AI and human behavior, would like to see developers better define how their chatbots ought to be used and set guidelines, rather than leaving it open-ended. “We need to be able to lay down, ‘Did I have a particular goal? What is the real use for this?'”

Some say rules could help, too. At a congressional hearing in September, Wright implored lawmakers to consider “guardrails,” which she told me could include things like stronger age verification, time limits, and bans on chatbots posing as therapists. The Biden administration introduced dozens of AI regulations in 2024, but President Donald Trump has committed to “removing red tape” he claims is hindering AI innovation. Silicon Valley leaders, meanwhile, are funding a new PAC to advocate for AI industry interests, the Wall Street Journal reports, to the tune of more than $100 million.

In short, we’re worlds away from the “digital confessions” experiment. When I asked Croes what a repeat of her study might yield, she noted that the basic parameters aren’t so different: “You are still anonymous. There’s still no fear of judgment,” she says. But today’s AI would likely come across as more “understanding,” and “empathetic”—more human—and evoke even deeper confessions. That aspect has changed. And, you might say, so have we.

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FEMA’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year

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

As 2025 draws to a close, the departure of the beleaguered acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Richardson, caps a tumultuous year for FEMA.

In January, President Donald Trump took office and vowed to abolish the department. Though the administration subsequently slow-walked that proposal, its government-wide staffing cuts have led to a nearly 10 percent reduction in FEMA’s workforce since January. Now it faces a long-awaited report issued by a review council, commissioned by the president and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, just as a new interim FEMA chief prepares to take the reins in December.

Although some expected the review council to recommend further cuts or try to fulfill the president’s suggestion of disbanding FEMA entirely, a leaked draft of the report, obtained by the New York Times, recommends preserving the agency. “There’s been a need for emergency management reform for a while,” said Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, a professor at the Columbia Climate School and the director of its National Center for Disaster Preparedness. “But the wrecking balls came in before there was a blueprint for what to do.”

The Trump administration’s first pick to lead FEMA, Cameron Hamilton, was fired after telling Congress that the agency should not be eliminated. Richardson was tapped to replace him, despite a lack of emergency management experience; he reportedly told staff members he had been unaware the United States had a hurricane season, although he later claimed to be joking.

“There’s been a lot of mistrust with expertise in this administration,” said Schlegelmilch, when asked why Richardson was chosen as FEMA administrator.

Richardson’s first test in the national spotlight came in early July, when devastating floods struck Central Texas, killing 135 people. A month earlier, Noem had instituted a new rule requiring her personal sign-off on any FEMA expenditures over $100,000. That meant that, in order to get aid to the region, FEMA officials needed Richardson to get Noem’s approval.

But according to reporting from the Washington Post, Richardson made a habit of not checking his phone outside of traditional working hours. This made it a challenge to contact him when the floods hit over the July 4 holiday weekend. As a result, it took over three days for Noem to sign off on expenses for swiftwater rescue teams. It was also later reported that nearly two-thirds of calls to FEMA’s emergency assistance line went unanswered during the floods, because a critical call center was severely understaffed.

A final recommendation on suggested FEMA reforms will arrive by the end of the year, but a leaked draft report supports preserving the agency and restoring it to a cabinet-level agency that reports directly to the president, rather than to the Department of Homeland Security, where it’s been housed since 2003. This has been a longtime goal pursued by emergency management experts, according to Schlegelmilch, because it would give the department more autonomy, reduce red tape, and hopefully improve the speed and efficacy of disaster response in general. A bipartisan bill called the FEMA Act of 2025, which would elevate the department to a cabinet-level agency, was introduced in Congress in July, but it’s stalled in committee.

How the administration will receive the final report from the task force is uncertain, but FEMA’s new interim director, Karen Evans, may not bring much stability to the agency. Although Evans has some emergency management experience, it is largely in cybersecurity rather than disaster response, and the Trump administration’s disinterest in appointing a permanent director may bode poorly for the agency’s long-term future.

“This is the third acting FEMA administrator within a year,” said Shana Udvardy, senior climate resilience policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “What the Trump administration is doing is sidestepping the Senate confirmation process for a FEMA administrator, someone we just desperately need in place, given how turbulent it’s been over the past year.”

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This Confusing Supreme Court Case Could Reshape Oversight of Crisis Pregnancy Centers

Even if you have no idea what a crisis pregnancy center is, the donor website for the First Choice Women’s Resource Centers chain in northeastern New Jersey offers plenty of clues: Prominent logos for the anti-abortion groups Heartbeat International and CareNet. A home page banner proclaiming “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday 2026.” An agreement for prospective volunteers that states, “I openly acknowledge my personal faith in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior,” and “[I] reject abortion as an acceptable option for any woman.”

That’s what appears on the website directed at First Choice’s donors. The chain also has two websites targeted at potential clients—pregnant women who might be seeking an abortion but end up on the crisis pregnancy center website instead, where First Choice is less clear about its religious ties and anti-abortion mission. “Learn more about the abortion pill, abortion procedures, and your options in New Jersey,” one site urges on its home page. “We specialize in pre-termination evaluations,” another site says, with services that include “free and confidential Abortion Information Consultation” and “post-abortion support.” On most pages, it is only at the very bottom that the qualifier, First Choice “do[es] not perform or refer for” abortions, appears.

Websites that tell anti-abortion supporters one thing and pregnant women something else are common among the country’s 2,500 crisis pregnancy centers, or CPCs—part of a well-documented history of using misinformation and deception, as well as free ultrasounds and other services, to deter women from having abortions. Some of the best-known strategies include opening “fake” clinics near real abortion clinics, misstating the purported harms of abortion and emergency contraception, and pushing the unproven medical procedure known as “abortion pill reversal.”

Blue states have repeatedly tried to rein in CPCs. But as faith-based organizations, pregnancy centers have a powerful shield—the First Amendment.

Blue-state lawmakers and attorneys general have repeatedly tried to rein in CPCs. But as faith-based organizations, these pregnancy centers have a powerful shield—the First Amendment. When states try to regulate them, CPCs invariably claim that these efforts violate constitutional protections for free speech, religious expression, and freedom of association. In a landmark 2018 decision, the US Supreme Court sided with the CPC industry, blocking a California law that would have required pregnancy centers to inform patients about state-funded family-planning services, including abortion.

That decision chilled state and local efforts to curb CPCs’ more controversial practices, creating what one legal scholar has called “a regulatory dead zone.” Meanwhile, since the fall of Roe v. Wade, the number of CPCs has grown—boosted by a surge in state funding and private donations—and reproductive rights supporters have renewed their push for greater oversight, this time focusing on consumer protection.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in its latest CPC case, this one involving New Jersey’s efforts to investigate whether First Choice may have misled consumers. The question before the court is technical: Can CPCs run directly to federal court to fight an attorney general’s subpoena, as First Choice did, or must they first go to state court? As reporters Garnet Henderson and Susan Rinkunas recently wrote in Mother Jonesand Autonomy News, the answer could have sweeping consequences for the $2 billion-a-year CPC industry:

Boring as this procedural quibble may seem, a favorable decision would be a significant win for CPCs. They have a much better shot at winning any case in the Trumpified federal courts than they do in state courts that may be more supportive of abortion rights. What’s more, the ability to use friendly federal courts as a shield from state regulation would set pregnancy centers up for success in other lawsuits making their way to the Supreme Court—ones that could eliminate states’ ability to crack down on [abortion pill reversal] and other questionable practices entirely.

But the case has also raised concerns among groups aligned with progressives that the same type of subpoenas issued by New Jersey against First Choice could be weaponized against humanitarian groups, journalists, and protesters. “The problem is bipartisan,” the ACLU wrote in one amicus brief. While New Jersey focuses on crisis pregnancy centers, “Florida’s attorney general pursues restaurants for hosting drag shows,” and Missouri’s attorney general investigates chatbots “to find out why they express disfavored views about President Trump.”

In another brief, lawyers for Annunciation House, a Texas nonprofit that has been targeted for providing shelter and support to immigrants, wrote, “Nonprofit organizations—which rely heavily on volunteers—bear the heaviest burdens when faced with…state investigatory demands.” The stakes, the brief said, “can be existential.”

The case datesfrom November 2023, when New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin—an abortion rights supporter and CPC critic—issued a subpoena against First Choice as part of an investigation into whether the pregnancy chain was “misleading donors and potential clients into believing that it was providing certain reproductive health care services,” Platkin’s office states in a brief. The subpoena was broad, seeking 10 years’ worth of emails, videos, handbooks, the identities of many of its donors, and other information about First Choice’s ads and solicitations, its services and staff, and its claims about medical procedures, including abortion pill reversal.

State and federal agencies have been using similar subpoenas to investigate potential violations of the laws they enforce for over 150 years, Platkin’s brief points out. Such subpoenas are not “self-executing,” meaning that Platkin’s office didn’t have the power to enforce them. Instead, in New Jersey and the rest of the country, the long-accepted procedure for enforcing or challenging a state agency’s subpoena is to seek relief in state court. If First Choice disagreed with the ruling from a New Jersey court, it could then plead its case in federal court.

But First Choice’s attorneys—the conservative legal behemoth Alliance Defending Freedom—cried foul, saying the CPC had done nothing wrong and accusing Platkin of “selectively target[ing] the nonprofit based on its religious speech and pro-life views.” Pregnancy centers “have been subject to a shocking level of violence and intimidation,” ADF asserted in one court filing. “First Choice is concerned that if its donors’ identities became public, they may be subjected to similar threats.”

“We haven’t forced those services on anyone. We haven’t charged any women for the services we provide…. Yet Platkin calls this kind of caring ‘extremist.’”

The lawyers also pointed to a 2021 Supreme Court precedent blocking California’s efforts to force charities and nonprofits in the state to report the identities of their major donors. According to ADF, the Platkin subpoena was so concerning that First Choice should be able to seek immediate relief in the federal courts, rather than having to expend time and resources litigating the issue first in state court. The ADF team—including Erin Hawley, wife of Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley—compared Platkin’s investigation to Southern states’ attempts to force the NAACP to produce member lists in the late 1950s and early ’60s.

In an op-ed for NJ.com, First Choice’s executive director, Aimee Huber, noted that in 2022 alone, CPCs throughout the US provided 500,000 free ultrasounds, 200,000 STI tests, 3.5 million packs of diapers, and 43,000 car seats to women and families in need. “Over the last 40 years, First Choice has been privileged to offer crucial resources to more than 36,000 women across our state. We haven’t forced those services on anyone. We haven’t charged any women for the services we provide…Yet Platkin calls this kind of caring ‘extremist.’”

But courtsrepeatedly ruled that the case wasn’t ready—or “ripe”—to be litigated in federal court. A state judge, meanwhile, ordered Platkin and First Choice to negotiate to narrow the subpoena’s scope. The first time First Choice asked the Supreme Court to weigh in, back in February 2024, the justices declined. But when ADF tried again, this past spring, the court took the case.

Most of the amicus briefs siding with First Choice are from a predictable collection of anti-abortion and conservative or libertarian groups, including red-state attorneys general, Republican members of Congress, the Second Amendment Foundation, and the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. But the CPC chain also received support from some unexpected quarters, including animal rights activists, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, represented by the ACLU.

In its brief, the humanitarian relief group Annunciation House described being hit with an investigative subpoena by Ken Paxton in 2024 demanding that it immediately turn over thousands of documents about immigrants and refugees it has helped—including sensitive medical and personally identifiable information—or face being shut down. The subpoena touched off a grueling, costly fight in state courts, with the Texas Supreme Court ultimately siding with Paxton.

“The chilling effect impacts not only the targeted nonprofit, but also the broader nonprofit community, as organizations may avoid lawful speech or actions out
of fear that they will lead to investigatory scrutiny,” the AnnunciationHouse lawyers write. “Left unchecked, the [subpoena] process becomes the punishment.”

In an interview with Mother Jones, Grayson Clary, a lawyer at the Reporters Committee, raised similar concerns. “Well beyond the context of this crisis pregnancy center, we have seen more state attorneys general trying to use their consumer protection authorities in new and potentially troubling ways, including to investigate news organizations,” he said, pointing to a Missouri case targeting the left-leaning Media Matters. “Saying, ‘We’re not after the journalism—we’re just protecting the consumers’ is often a fig leaf for efforts to control the content that a news organization is putting out.”

“In practical terms,” Clary said, “what’s at stake in this question is how much of a tax does a state attorney general get to place on you for speaking, or for publishing news that they might disagree with, before you get a chance to ask a court to put a halt to it? And that question really can, in practical terms, be life or death, especially for a smaller or nonprofit news outlet,”

On the abortion-rights side, what is most surprising about the amicus briefs is that they are nonexistent. But one group paying close attention to the case is Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch, a CPC watchdog. “If the Court finds in favor of this pregnancy center,” executive director Debra Rosen says, “I worry that it’s going to chill further scrutiny into this massive [CPC] industry.”

Instead, amicus briefs in support of keeping the First Choice case out of federal court come from agencies that routinely issue investigative subpoenas, including blue-state attorneys general and state medical boards. The consequences of adopting First Choice’s argument would be “far-reaching,” Platkin’s office argues, “turning every quotidian subpoena dispute into a federal case.”

The Supreme Court is expected to rule in the case by next summer.

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“Climate Smart” Beef Was Never More Than a Marketing Fantasy

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

Shoppers have long sought ways to make more sustainable choices at the supermarket—and for good reason: Our food system is responsible for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. The vast majority of emissions from agriculture come from raising cows on industrial farms in order to sell burgers, steak, and other beef products. Beef production results in two and a half times as many greenhouse gases as lamb, and almost nine times as many as chicken or fish; its carbon footprint relative to other sources of protein, like cheese, eggs, and tofu, is even higher.

If you want to have a lighter impact on the planet, you could try eating less beef. (Just try it!) Otherwise, a series of recent lawsuits intends make it easier for consumers to discern what’s sustainable and what’s greenwashing by challenging the world’s largest meat processors on their climate messaging.

Tyson, which produces 20 percent of beef, chicken, and pork in the United States, has agreed to drop claims that the company has a plan to achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050 and to stop referring to beef products as “climate smart” unless verified by an independent expert.

“Even if you were to reduce [beef’s] emissions by 30 percent, it’s still not gonna be a climate-smart choice.”

Tyson was sued in 2024 by the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, a nonprofit dedicated to public health and environmental issues. The group alleged that Tyson’s claims were false and misleading to consumers. (Nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice represented EWG in the case.) Tyson denied the allegations and agreed to settle the suit.

“We landed in a place that feels satisfying in terms of what we were able to get from the settlement,” said Carrie Apfel, deputy managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Sustainable Food and Farming program. Apfel was the lead attorney on the case.

According to the settlement provided by Earthjustice, over the next five years Tyson cannot repeat previous claims that the company has a plan to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 or make new ones unless they are verified by a third-party source. Similarly, Tyson also cannot market or sell any beef products labeled as “climate smart” or “climate friendly” in the United States.

“We think that this provides the consumer protections we were seeking from the lawsuit,” said Apfel.

The settlement is “a critical win for the fight against climate greenwashing by industrial agriculture,” according to Leila Yow, climate program associate at the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy, a nonprofit research group focused on sustainable food systems.

In the original complaint, filed in DC Superior Court, EWG alleged that Tyson had never even defined “climate-smart beef,” despite using the term in various marketing materials. Now Tyson and EWG must meet to agree on a third-party expert that would independently verify any of the meat processor’s future “net zero” or “climate smart” claims.

Following the settlement, Apfel went a step further in a conversation with Grist, arguing that the term “climate smart” has no business describing beef that comes from an industrial food system.

“In the context of industrial beef production, it’s an oxymoron,” said the attorney. “You just can’t have climate-smart beef. Beef is the highest-emitting major food type that there is. Even if you were to reduce its emissions by 10 percent or even 30 percent, it’s still not gonna be a climate-smart choice.”

A Tyson spokesperson said the company “has a long-held core value to serve as stewards of the land, animals, and resources entrusted to our care” and identifies “opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the supply chain.” The spokesperson added: “The decision to settle was made solely to avoid the expense and distraction of ongoing litigation and does not represent any admission of wrongdoing by Tyson Foods.”

The Tyson settlement follows another recent greenwashing complaint—this one against JBS Foods, the world’s largest meat processor. In 2024, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued JBS, alleging the company was misleading consumers with claims it would achieve net-zero emissions by 2040.

Industrial animal agriculture “has built its business model on secrecy.”

James reached a $1.1 million settlement with the beef behemoth earlier this month. As a result of the settlement, JBS is required to update its messaging to describe reaching net-zero emissions by 2040 as more of an idea or a goal than a concrete plan or commitment from the company.

The two settlements underscore just how difficult it is to hold meat and dairy companies accountable for their climate and environmental impacts.

“Historically, meat and dairy companies have largely been able to fly under the radar of reporting requirements of any kind,” said Yow of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. When these agri-food companies do share their emissions, these disclosures are often voluntary and the processes for measuring and reporting impact are not standardized.

That leads to emissions data that is often “incomplete or incorrect,” said Yow. She recently authored a report ranking 14 of the world’s largest meat and dairy companies in terms of their sustainability commitments—including efforts to report methane and other greenhouse gas emissions. Tyson and JBS tied for the lowest score out of all 14 companies.

Industrial animal agriculture “has built its business model on secrecy,” said Valerie Baron, a national policy director and senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in response to the Tyson settlement. Baron emphasized that increased transparency from meat and dairy companies is a critical first step to holding them accountable.

Yow agreed. She argued upcoming climate disclosure rules in California and the European Union have the potential to lead the way on policy efforts to measure and rein in emissions in the food system. More and better data can lead to “better collective decision making with policymakers,” she said.

But, she added: “We need to actually know what we’re talking about before we can tackle some of those things.”

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Trump’s Brand Is Tanking

In the wake of the longest government shutdown in US history, an ongoing self-inflicted tariff war, and his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, President Donald Trump’s approval rating has cratered to 36 percent, the lowest of his second term. Gallup, which conducted its latest poll between November 2 and 25, reports that disapproval of Trump’s performance climbed to 60 percent—including his ratings from Republicans and Independents, which dropped significantly.

The dismal numbers follow a Politico poll that appeared to show cracks emerging within Trump’s MAGA base.

But it isn’t just Trump’s approval ratings that are taking a heavy hit these days. The Wall Street Journal reports that stocks tied to the president and his family, including [$MELANIA and $TRUMP,][4] two “meme coins” launched just days before Trump returned to office in January, have plummeted by as much as 86 and 99 percent. It’s unclear if the staggering losses reflect Trump’s dismal approval ratings; the notoriously volatile industry is experiencing a wider rout that has lost more than [$1 trillion in recent weeks][5]. But Trump’s free-falling assets also reflect something directly related to the president’s own policies: investor shakiness over his tariff policies. From the Journal:

Trump stocks benefited from expectations that the incoming administration would usher in an era of deregulation, tax cuts and supportive crypto policies—and that assets tied directly to Trump and his family would continue to rally. With the president’s return to the White House, though, his policies on global trade have upended some of those bets now that investors are paying more attention to the performance of those companies than to his political future.

Despite months of market volatilityand economic warning signs, Trump remains steadfast in his commitment to his trade war. As he declared on Truth Social on Saturday: “Tariffs have made our Country Rich, Strong, Powerful, and Safe. They have been successfully used by other Countries against us for Decades, but when it comes to Tariffs, and because of what I have set in place, WE HAVE ALL THE CARDS, and with a smart President, we always will!”

He also urged the Supreme Court, which [expressed rare skepticism][6] about the president’s sweeping tariffs, to uphold his policy. “Pray to God that our Nine Justices will show great wisdom, and do the right thing for America!” A ruling is expected by the [end of this year][7].

[4]: http://$MELANIA and $TRUMP. [5]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/business/dealbook/bitcoin-crypto-wall-street.html [6]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/tariffs-supreme-court-donald-trump/ [7]: https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2025/11/greer-says-supreme-court-tariff-ruling-likely-before-end-of-the-year-00639556

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Pete Hegseth Is Finally Getting Investigated

In a rare instance of bipartisan alarm, Republican-chaired committees in the House and Senate announced that they have launched inquiries into an explosive Washington Post report alleging Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given a spoken order to “kill everybody” aboard a vessel carrying suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean. The occupants included two people who had survived an initial missilestrike on the vessel and were seen “clinging” to the wreckage.

“We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question,” the leaders of the House Armed Services Committee said in a joint statement on Friday.

“The Committee has directed inquiries to the [Department of Defense], and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances,” leaders in the Senate Armed Services Committee said.

The September 2 attack kicked off what has now been nearly two dozen attacks, killing at least 83 people, who the US military claims, without evidence, had been attempting to smuggle drugs into the US. The attacks, which President Trump justifies as a part of an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, have been likened to extrajudicial killings.

Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona told CNN on Sunday that Hegseth’s actions, as reported by the Post, appear to be a war crime.

“If what has been reported is accurate, I’ve got serious concerns about anybody in that chain of command stepping over a line that they should never step over,” Kelly said. “We are not Russia. We are not Iraq. We hold ourselves to a very high standard of professionalism.”

Kelly is locked in a related battle of words with Hegseth after Kelly participated in a social media video with five other Democrats seeking to remind members of the military that they can “refuse illegal orders.”

Hegseth has blasted the _Post’_s reporting on the missile strikes as “fabricated.”

“As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland,” he wrote on X.

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Colorado Finally Got Its Wolves Back. Why Are So Many Dying?

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

On a sunny morning two years ago, a group of state officials stood in the mountains of northwestern Colorado in front of a handful of large metal crates. With a small crowd watching them, the officials began to unlatch the crate doors one by one. Out of each came a gray wolf—arguably the nation’s most controversial endangered species.

This was a massive moment for conservation.

While gray wolves once ranged throughout much of the Lower 48, a government-backed extermination campaign wiped most of them out in the 19th and 20th centuries. By the 1940s, Colorado had lost all of its resident wolves.

But, in the fall of 2020, Colorado voters did something unprecedented: They passed a ballot measure to reintroduce gray wolves to the state. This wasn’t just about having wolves on the landscape to admire, but about restoring the ecosystems that we’ve broken and the biodiversity we’ve lost. As apex predators, wolves help keep an entire ecosystem in balance, in part by limiting populations of deer and elk that can damage vegetation, spread disease, and cause car accidents.

“This was not ever going to be easy.”

In the winter of 2023, state officials released 10 gray wolves flown in from Oregon onto public land in northwestern Colorado. And in January of this year, they introduced another 15 that were brought in from Canada. Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW)—the state wildlife agency leading the reintroduction program—plans to release 30 to 50 wolves over three to five years to establish a permanent breeding population that can eventually survive without intervention.

“Today, history was made in Colorado,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said following the release. “For the first time since the 1940s, the howl of wolves will officially return to western Colorado.”

Fast forward to today, and that program seems, at least on the surface, like a mess.

Ten of the transplanted wolves are already dead, as is one of their offspring. And now, the state is struggling to find new wolves to ship to Colorado for the next phase of reintroduction. Meanwhile, the program has cost millions of dollars more than expected.

The takeaway is not that releasing wolves in Colorado was, or is now, a bad idea. Rather, the challenges facing this first-of-its-kind reintroduction just show how extraordinarily difficult it is to restore top predators to a landscape dominated by humans. That’s true in the Western US and everywhere—especially when the animal in question has been vilified for generations.

One harsh reality is that a lot of wolves die naturally, such as from disease, killing each other over territory, and other predators, said Joanna Lambert, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Of Colorado’s new population, one of the released wolves was killed by another wolf, whereas two were likely killed by mountain lions, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

The changes that humans have made to the landscape only make it harder for these animals to survive. One of the animals, a male found dead in May, was likely killed by a car, state officials said. Another died after stepping into a coyote foothold trap. Two other wolves, meanwhile, were killed, ironically, by officials. Officials from CPW shot and killed one wolf—the offspring of a released individual—in Colorado, and the US Department of Agriculture killed another that traveled into Wyoming, after linking the wolves to livestock attacks. (An obscure USDA division called Wildlife Services kills hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of wild animals a year that it deems dangerous to humans or industry, as my colleague Kenny Torella has reported.)

Yet, another wolf was killed after trekking into Wyoming, a state where it’s largely legal to kill them. Colorado Parks and Wildlife has, to its credit, tried hard to stop wolves from harming farm animals. The agency has hired livestock patrols called “range riders,” for example, to protect herds. But these solutions are imperfect, especially when the landscape is blanketed in ranchland. Wolves still kill sheep and cattle.

This same conflict—or the perception of it—is what has complicated other attempts to bring back predators, such as jaguars in Arizona and grizzly bears in Washington. And wolves are arguably even more contentious. “This was not ever going to be easy,” Lambert, who’s also the science adviser to the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project, an advocacy organization focused on returning wolves to Colorado, said of the reintroduction program.

There’s another problem: Colorado doesn’t have access to more wolves.

The state is planning to release another 10 to 15 animals early next year. And initially, those wolves were going to come from Canada. But in October, the Trump administration told CPW that it can only import wolves from certain regions of the United States. Brian Nesvik, director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal agency that oversees endangered species, said that a federal regulation governing Colorado’s gray wolf population doesn’t explicitly allow CPW to source wolves from Canada. (Environmental legal groups disagree with his claim).

So Colorado turned to Washington state for wolves instead.

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But that didn’t work either. Earlier this month, Washington state wildlife officials voted against exporting some of their wolves to Colorado. Washington has more than 200 gray wolves, but the most recent count showed a population decline. That’s one reason why officials were hesitant to support a plan that would further shrink the state’s wolf numbers, especially because there’s a chance they may die in Colorado.

Some other states home to gray wolves, such as Montana and Wyoming, have previously said they won’t give Colorado any of their animals for reasons that are not entirely clear. Nonetheless, Colorado is still preparing to release wolves this winter as it looks for alternative sources, according to CPW spokesperson Luke Perkins.

Ultimately, Lambert said, it’s going to take years to be able to say with any kind of certainty whether or not the reintroduction program was successful. “This is a long game,” she said.

And despite the program’s challenges, there’s at least one reason to suspect it’s working: puppies.

Over the summer, CPW shared footage from a trail camera of three wolf puppies stumbling over their giant paws, itching, and play-biting each other. CPW says there are now four litters in Colorado, a sign that the predators are settling in and making a home for themselves.

“This reproduction is really key,” Eric Odell, wolf conservation program manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, said in a public meeting in July. “Despite some things that you may hear, not all aspects of wolf management have been a failure. We’re working towards success.”

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GOP State Senator Balks at Redistricting After Trump Again Uses the R-Word

On Thursday, President Donald Trump once again found it acceptable to use the r-word, directing it towards Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, in a Truth Social post which also attacked Somali immigrants in the state.

“The seriously [r-tarded] Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both,” Trump posted.

For Republican Indiana State Senator Michael Bohacek, Trump’s most recent use of this anti-disability slur was “the final straw” in his decision not to support Indiana redistricting in support of Republicans winning more seats. On Friday, Rep. Bohacek posted the following on Facebook:

Many of you have asked my position on redistricting. I have been an unapologetic advocate for people with intellectual disabilities since the birth of my second daughter. Those of you that don’t know me or my family might not know that my daughter has Down Syndrome. This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences. I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.

In a Facebook comment, Bohacek’s wife, Melissa, said she supported her husband, writing, “for families like ours, hearing the same mocking, derogatory language from our president isn’t abstract. He didn’t almost say or do something hurtful, he did.”

According to the Indy Star, the Indiana State House of Representatives is set to meet on December 1 to discuss a redistricting map, and the Indiana State Senate is supposed to vote on the map on December 8.

As I’ve previously outlined, Trump has a long history of making ableist statements and holding deeply harmful ideas about disability. In October 2024, at a dinner for Republican donors, Trump referred to then-Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris the r-word. He also has a pattern of referring to people he doesn’t like as “intellectually disabled” in a negative way, underlining his ableist views.

The National Down Syndrome Society also condemned Trump’s latest use of the r-word, writing that “as the language used by our leaders carries significant weight in shaping actions and societal attitudes toward individuals with disabilities, we are dismayed and disheartened that President Trump used this harmful term in a recent social media post.”

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This Disability Education Law Turned 50 Today. Disability Advocates Want More.

On November 29, 1975, Republican President Gerald Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act into law, which later became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). IDEA requires that disabled students have access to public education, discourages segregating disabled kids from their peers, and that qualifying students have access to individualized education plans, more commonly known as IEPs. IDEA does not apply to education in private schools.

“Before our disabled elders secured our rights under the law, disabled kids were locked out of systems and out of their potential,” Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-Ca.), who is blind, told me in a statement.

Many disability advocates are concerned about the state of education for disabled kids. Continued attempts to dismantle the Department of Education by President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, as well as attempts to fire their staff, put the oversight that disabled kids’ needs are met at risk. Such oversight includes putting districts on notice for funding if they overpenalize Black disabled students, for instance. Then, there is the longstanding issue that IDEA has never been fully funded, meaning that the federal government is not funding IEPs to 40 percent.

“Congress must protect and fully fund the IDEA to ensure future generations of disabled children have the supports and services they need to thrive in school,” Simon continued. “Our civil rights are not up for negotiations.”

This is not to say that all students’ needs are adequately met under the IDEA. Jordyn Zimmerman, a nonspeaking autistic person, told me that she did not have access to effective communication via iPad until she was 18.

“When I finally gained access to effective communication, required under IDEA and also the ADA, there was a realization that I could learn, and I was slowly included in the school community, until I graduated at the age of 21,” Zimmerman said, who is the board chair of CommunicationFIRST. “So that really highlights, both the flaws, but also the power in when the spirit is fulfilled with intentionality.”

Zimmerman is also very concerned about attacks on the Department of Education. “Without a strong Department of Education, states can redirect money away from students with disabilities, so that high-quality education will only exist for some,” Zimmerman said. “Students also won’t get the funding for the therapies, assistive technology, and specially-designed instruction that students need, and families depend on.”

“I will fight that with everything that I have, because IEPs are protection for these kids.”

Samantha Phillis, an advocate with Little Lobbyists, told me that her two daughters, who are in public school, are on IEPs, one of whom is autistic and one has spinal muscular atrophy. Phillis is currently experiencing her school trying to walk back her IEP, which she suspects is common for kids with disabilities who appear to have lower support needs.

“I will fight that with everything that I have, because IEPs are protection for these kids,” Phillis said.

Phillis’ daughter with spinal muscular atrophy also has a nurse with her at all times in school due to her complex health needs. The nurse receives some funding through Medicaid, so Phillis is also terrified about how Medicaid cuts will impact her daughter’s ability to attend school. “It’s one of the biggest heartbreaks I think I’ve ever experienced in my entire life is seeing how people like my daughters are affected by this administration,” Phillis told me.

There have not been recent attempts to repeal IDEA yet, though Project 2025 encourages funding to be given directly to states, but this is a concern for Nadia Hasan, a woman with cerebral palsy who credits IDEA with helping her succeed in school. “There’s just a lot more like isolation and lack of opportunity,” Hasan told me.

Marleen Salazar, a Texan with learning disabilities who is now an undergraduate student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, credits her special education teachers for helping her learn to advocate for herself.

“They were very much a very key part of building me that confidence and advocacy to make sure that I expressed what I needed and what I didn’t need,” Salazar told me. This advocacy included being able to take standardized tests in a room by herself, as well as getting extended time.

Salazar’s younger sister, who is dyslexic, now has accommodations as well. Salazar has concerns about what will happen if funding is rolled back. “The fear is if funding is cut, or the state doesn’t want to provide these resources anymore, what does that mean for her in the future?”

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The Mystery of the Missing Porcupines

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

Porcupines are easy to recognize but hard to find—so elusive, in fact, that few people have ever seen one in the wild.

Emilio Tripp, a wildlife manager and citizen of the Karuk Tribe in Northern California, might have been one of the lucky ones. On a nighttime drive with his father in the late 1990s, a ghostly silhouette flashed by the window. “That was my only time I’ve even thought I’ve seen one,” he recalled decades later. Tripp still can’t say for sure whether it was a kaschiip, the Karuk word for porcupine, but he holds on to the memory like a talisman.

The 43-year-old hasn’t seen another porcupine since. Porcupine encounters are rare among his tribe, and the few witnesses seem to fit a pattern: Almost all of them are elders, and they fondly remember an abundance of porcupines until the turn of this century. Now, each new sighting rings like an echo from the past: a carcass on the road; a midnight run-in. The tribe can’t help wondering: Where did all the porcupines go?

“It’s important for (porcupines) to be a part of our landscape. That’s part of why they’re chosen to be part of this ceremonial item.”

“Everyone’s concerned,” Tripp said. “If there were more (observations), we’d hear about it.”

The decline isn’t just in Northern California: Across the West, porcupines are vanishing. Wildlife scientists are racing to find where porcupines are still living, and why they’re disappearing. Others, including the Karuk Tribe, are already thinking ahead, charting ambitious plans to restore porcupines to their forests.

Porcupines are walking pincushions. Their permanently unkempt hairdo is actually a protective fortress of some 30,000 quills. But their body armor can be a liability, too—porcupines are known to accidentally quill themselves. “They’re big and dopey and slow,” said Tim Bean, an ecologist at California Polytechnic State University who has collared porcupines as part of his research. They waddle from tree to tree, usually at night, to snack on foliage or the nutrient-rich inner layer of bark.

But these large rodents are far from universally beloved. Their tree-gnawing habits damage lumber, and the timber industry has long regarded them as pests. Widespread poisoning and hunting campaigns took place throughout the 1900s in the US Between 1957 and 1959, Vermont alone massacred over 10,800 porcupines. Forest Service officials in California declared open season on porcupines in 1950, claiming that the species would ultimately destroy pine forests.

Though state bounty programs had ended by 1979, porcupine numbers have not rebounded. Recent surveys by researchers in British Columbia, Arizona, western Montana and Northern California show that porcupines remain scarce in those regions today. Historically, porcupine populations haven’t been well-monitored, so scientists can’t say for sure whether they are still declining or simply haven’t recovered after decades of persecution.

“We still don’t understand (why) they’re not reproducing and filling back in.”

But anecdotal evidence from those who recall when sightings were common is enough to ring alarm bells. Similar patterns appear to be playing out across the West: Veterinarians are treating fewer quilled pets, for example, and longtime rural homeowners have noticed fewer porcupines lurking in their backyards. Hikers’ accounts note that porcupines are harder to find than ever before. Some forest ecosystems are already showing the effects of losing an entire species from the food chain: In the Sierra Nevada, an endangered member of the weasel family called the fisher is suffering from lack of the protein porcupines once provided. As a result, the fishers are scrawnier and birth smaller litters in the Sierras than they do elsewhere.

Porcupines are culturally important to the Karuk Tribe, whose members weave quills into cultural and ceremonial items, such as baskets. But these days, the tribe imports quills more often than it harvests them. That’s more than just an inconvenience: Not being able to gather quills locally constitutes a form of lost connection between tribal members and their homelands. “It’s important for (porcupines) to be a part of our landscape. That’s part of why they’re chosen to be part of this ceremonial item,” Tripp said.

Erik Beever, an ecologist at the US Geological Survey, worries that the great porcupine vanishing act points to a broader trend. Across the country, biodiversity is declining faster than scientists can track it. The porcupine might just be one example of what Beever calls “this silent erosion of animal abundance.” But no one really knows what’s going on. Beever said, “We’re wondering whether the species is either increasing or declining without anybody even knowing.”

Scientists are racing to fill this knowledge gap. Bean and his team combed through a century’s worth of public records to map porcupine distribution patterns in the Pacific Northwest. Roadkill databases, wildlife agency reports and citizen science hits revealed that porcupines are dwindling in conifer forests but popping up in nontraditional habitats, such as deserts and grasslands. Beever is now leading a similar study across the entire Western United States.

Concerned scientists have several theories about why porcupines have not returned to their former stomping grounds. Illegal marijuana farms, which are often tucked away in forests, use rodenticides that kill many animals, including porcupines, while increased protections for apex predators like mountain lions may have inadvertently increased the decline of porcupines. On top of all this, porcupines have low reproduction rates, birthing only a single offspring at a time.

“Things don’t seem to be getting better in over the course of my lifetime.”

Understanding porcupine distribution isn’t easy. Porcupines are generalists, inhabiting a wide variety of forest types, so it’s challenging for researchers to know where to look. As herbivores, porcupines aren’t that easy to bait, either. Scientists have experimented with using brine-soaked wood blocks, peanut butter and even porcupine urine to coax the cautious critters toward cameras, but with only mixed success. In 34 years of both baited and unbaited camera surveys by the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center in the Sierra Nevada, porcupines have only shown up three times.

“It’s a mystery,” said John Buckley, the center’s executive director. “We still don’t understand (why) they’re not reproducing and filling back in where there’s very little disturbance of their habitat, like Yosemite National Park.”

The Karuk tribe is eager to bring porcupines back. But first, the tribe needs to figure out where healthy populations may already exist. Years of camera trap surveys have turned up scant evidence of the creature’s presence; one area that Tripp considers a “hotspot” had photographed a single porcupine. “That’s how rare they are,” Tripp said. So Karuk biologists are considering other methods, including using trained dogs to conduct scat surveys.

Reintroducing the species would require a delicate balancing act. Porcupines are already scarce, and it’s unclear whether already-small source populations could afford to lose a few members to be reintroduced elsewhere. Still, Tripp feels like it’s time to act, since the ecosystem doesn’t appear to be healing on its own. “Things don’t seem to be getting better in over the course of my lifetime,” Tripp said.

Yet his actions betray some lingering optimism. Tripp, his wife and daughter still regularly attend basket-weaving events involving quills, doing their part to uphold the Karuk’s age-old traditions that honor the porcupine. It’s a small act of stubborn hope—that, perhaps in a few years, the tribe will be able to welcome the porcupine home.

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Alabama’s Threats to Prosecute Abortion Helpers

In August 2022, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall made a guest appearance on a local conservative talk radio show. It was two months after the US Supreme Court had overturned R_oe v. Wade_, and abortion was now illegal in Alabama. And Marshall addressed rumors that he planned to prosecute anyone helping people get abortions out of state.

“If someone was promoting themselves out as a funder of abortion out of state,” Marshall explained to the host, “then that is potentially criminally actionable for us.”

This particular threat launched an epic legal battle with implications for some of the most basic American rights: the right to travel, the right to free speech, the right to give and receive help.

This week on Reveal, reporter Nina Martin spends time with abortion rights groups in Alabama, following how they’ve adapted to one of the nation’s strictest anti-abortion policies—and evolved their definition of help.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in May 2025.

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