He Fled Torture in Uganda. ICE Is Trying to Send Him Back.

Last December, Steven Tendo stood on the steps of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington, Vermont, speaking to a crowd holding a candlelight vigil for immigrant justice.

“I believe that when we gather like this,” said Tendo, an ordained minister and asylum seeker from Uganda who fled torture and political persecution, “we are not only raising our voices, we are building a sanctuary in the public square—a sanctuary where immigrants can feel seen, heard and valued, a sanctuary where policies are challenged, but more importantly, where hearts are changed.”

Tendo thanked the community members who have been accompanying him to his regular check-in appointments with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in St. Albans. “I hold you dear in my heart when I walk out of my house to go to work at the hospital, not knowing whether I’ll be back or not,” he said.

Tendo’s words proved prescient. On Wednesday morning, he was arrested by immigration officers outside a Shelburne medical facility where he works as a licensed nursing assistant, just two days before a scheduled routine appointment with the agency.

“Everything seemed okay,” Tendo told me during a phone call on Sunday night from the Strafford County jail in Dover where he’s being detained. “And to my dismay, they came to my place of work and did all that kind of chaos there, shouting and yelling. The patients were like, ‘What’s going on?’ Everyone was scared.” Tendo said the officers “brutally” arrested him at gunpoint while his car was in motion and handcuffed his hands behind his back. “It was so scary,” he said. “I never expected that to happen in the United States. It happens in Uganda, but not here.”

“I followed the rules. I’ve done great in the community. I’ve never abused any of the conditions of the stay or of my supervision…I’m so scared, I cannot go back [to Uganda].”

Tendo came to the United States in 2018 seeking political asylum after becoming a target of the Ugandan government for his organization’s civic education and voter registration work. On one occasion, he was abducted by armed men and says he was taken to a secret facility where he was interrogated, beaten, and tortured. Some of his fingers were cut off. Another time, Tendo says he was placed in an underground room for hours with a python snake.

After fleeing to the United States, Tendo spent two years at the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas. Despite ample evidence of the harm Tendo endured in his home country and the risk to his life if he were sent back to Uganda, an immigration judge rejected his asylum claim in 2019, citing inconsistencies in his account. Tendo’s lawyers appealed the judge’s decision without success. His case drew attention and support from Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, as well as US lawmakers. In 2021, Tendo was released from detention and settled in Vermont as he continued to fight his case.

Tendo has an outstanding order of removal. But, until now, he has benefited from ICE’s discretion to temporarily halt efforts to remove him through what’s called a stay of removal. During the Biden administration, Tendo said he only had to check in once a year. After President Donald Trump returned to power, the appointments became more regular, first every six months and then every three months.

“Under the new administration they were less willing to continue agreements like that,” said Brett Stokes, an assistant professor of law and director of the Vermont Law and Graduate School’s Center for Justice Reform Clinic who works on Tendo’s case. The day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration for a second term, Tendo received a letter instructing him to report to ICE sooner than expected, which raised fears of deportation.

A rally outside the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on July 21, 2025. The community members gathered to support Steven Tendo.Boston Globe/Getty

At the time of his arrest on February 4, Tendo said his legal team had already communicated to the agency that they would be filing a new stay of removal request soon. “I’m so sad because I tried to do everything by the book,” he told me. “I followed the rules. I’ve done great in the community. I’ve never abused any of the conditions of the stay or of my supervision.” He added: “I’m so scared, I cannot go back.”

Tendo’s lawyers are also trying to reopen his case based on changed circumstances in Uganda and the increased harm he might face if deported due to his opposition to the ruling government. In the past, Stokes said, that might have been enough to dissuade ICE from taking a negative action against somebody—but not anymore. Stokes said the legal team was not informed of any changes to Tendo’s order of supervision that required him to report to the agency on a regular basis or of ICE’s intention to enact a removal order against him. They have filed a habeas petition seeking his release from detention and an emergency motion to stop his transfer.

“I think the most disturbing aspect of all of this is the fact that he had an ICE check-in scheduled for Friday and, all things being equal, was not necessarily expecting it to go differently than prior check-ins since his case has stayed the same,” Stokes said.

Tendo told me that while in custody ICE initially refused to give him his medication for diabetes for three days. “I never thought I would ever [be here] again,” he said. “I just have to be strong and pray that it will end soon. I don’t want to die here.” Chris Worth, one of Tendo’s lawyers, told a local news outlet that the government hadn’t acted on emails and calls about his client’s health condition. Tendo previously filed a civil complaint against the US government alleging “negligence, battery, assault, and intentional infliction of emotional distress” during his time in immigration detention.

“People like Pastor Tendo are exactly who our asylum system is meant to protect,” Democrat Sens. Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch and Rep. Becca Balint of Vermont said in a statement. Vermont AFL-CIO, the union Tendo is a member of, called his arrest “unnecessary, disruptive, and harmful to both workers and the communities that rely on them.” A crowdfunding campaign to help supplement Tendo’s income while in detention has raised more than $27,000, and some community members have been keeping watch outside the Strafford County jail.

“It’s just an unprecedented level of surveillance, harassment, and detentions, and we expect that to continue to increase.”

“It certainly seems quite plausible that ICE decided to detain him at his workplace, rather than at the check-in, to try to minimize the chance of community response,” said Will Lambek with the Migrant Justice organization. He estimated that about 50 people had shown up to an emergency rally on Wednesday to protest Tendo’s arrest, which coincided with the release of a Somali taxi driver who had been detained in January.

“That was a really jubilant moment that happened right on the heels of this very difficult moment of Steven’s detention,” Lambek said. “These two cases are part of this pattern of increasing enforcement from ICE and border patrol in Vermont. We’ve seen at least a tenfold increase in detentions in the state in 2025 compared to 2024. It’s just an unprecedented level of surveillance, harassment, and detentions, and we expect that to continue to increase.”

Tendo has called Vermont home for the past five years. He works as a licensed nursing assistant with the University of Vermont Medical Center and at an assisted living facility. He was also attending Vermont State University for his nursing degree.

“I don’t believe that what happened with Pastor Steven had anything to do with him as a person,” said Melissa Battah, executive director of the Vermont Interfaith Action. “I really believe that it was meant to instill fear into the immigrant community in Vermont…If the current administration thinks that they are just going to take this lying down, they have another thing coming for them. And if they think that the rest of the Vermonters that live here are going to allow our neighbors to disappear without us saying anything, they have another thing coming for them.”

Marybeth Redmond, an interfaith minister who spoke with Tendo on Wednesday, said he has left a deep imprint on the community. “He’s just a very deeply caring man,” she said. “He’s lived such a challenged life and yet to have the hopefulness and resilience that he has is nothing short of miraculous. I think most people would have crumbled under the things that he has had to navigate.”

Prior to Tendo’s unexpected arrest, Redmond had organized a group to show up at the Friday check-in outside the local ICE field office in his support. The plan was to send him in for the appointment with a blessing. Instead, a vigil took place without him. Redmond said somewhere between 150 and 175 people joined. “Steven, you’re not alone,” Tendo’s supporters chanted.

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Trump’s NIH Slashed Research on Chronic Diseases in 2025. Will It Happen Again?

As disease researchers around the country received letters last year that their grants had been cancelled, National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Jay Bhattacharya declared his agency was merely clearing out the clutter. Those terminated grants do “not actually have anything to do with promoting the health of the American people,” he told Science.

Experts weren’t buying that explanation at the time, and now they have the data to rebut it. A new report from the Senate health committee details deep cuts into research on some of the leading causes of death in the United States.

Over the last 12 months, the NIH has slashed hundreds of grants for research related to Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. These conditions also happen to be among the favorite talking points of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. In his 2025 inauguration speech, Donald Trump vowed to “end the chronic disease epidemic,” a promise repeated by Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., who has zeroed in on nutrition and environment as key factors.

Given RFK Jr.’s focus on “diet-related chronic disease”—a phrase he repeated as he unveiled his new food pyramid—one might expect he’d be a fan of Lisa Goldman Rosas, a Stanford epidemiologist who, last spring, received one of those emails saying her funding no longer aligned with the administration priorities and was therefore terminated. Rosas, who studies how diet affects human health, estimates that at least 1 million US deaths could be prevented each year if every American ate a healthy diet. But how to accomplish that is where she and the administration diverge.

That’s because Rosas focuses on Hispanic families, who are more than twice as likely as the average US family to experience food insecurity—a major risk factor for several chronic conditions. “There’s really strong evidence that programs that promote healthy eating and active living need to be tailored to people’s cultural backgrounds. It’s not a one size fits all,” she told me.

This evidence-based observation was how her work got entangled in Trump’s anti-DEI trap, even though “it’s really just implementing patient-centered care,” Rosas says.

Lots of studies have been cancelled for perceived connections to DEI, even the most tangential. “Anyone doing community outreach could have their research cut regardless of subject,” says an NIH employee who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. Such cuts affect everyone, the employee adds, by limiting our broader understanding of human health and disease: “If you’ve been to the doctor, you’ve been impacted by NIH research.”

Rosas’ work was cited in the Senate report alongside other major investigations into chronic disease the administration has defunded. Those include a 35-year study of Alzheimer’s risk, a cancer vaccine development program, and an NIH scientist’s work that another expert called, “the most important study in nutrition that’s been done since vitamins.”

In the wake of her grant cancellation, Rosas had to stop recruiting patients and scrape together what remained to keep paying her team. The lapse also disrupted her relationships with farms that supplied food for her study. “It’s a waste of money to cut funding partway through a study,” the NIH employee told me. And for patients midway through a course of treatment during a clinical trial, it poses serious safety issues.

Many of the hundreds of clinical trials cancelled last year involved chronic disease interventions, a separate analysis found, and about a third of them pertained to cancer treatment and prevention. The journal Nature reported that some of the highest dollar-value grant terminations were for cancer centers, which can provide cutting-edge treatments often not available at smaller hospitals.

Rosas eventually got her funding back by working with the program officer who’d been managing the grant at NIH. But due to staffing cuts and a hiring freeze, “every program officer is doing the work of multiple people,” the NIH employee told me. Researchers looking for help with getting their grants back may be reaching out to empty offices or waiting a long time for the overburdened employees who remain to get back to them. By the time Rosas’ grant was reinstated, she says, “a lot of the damage was unfortunately done.”

Another 2,000 NIH grants were restored by a federal judge’s order, but more than $700 million in grant money remains in limbo. Bhattacharya doesn’t seem inclined to dish those funds back out. In the past, grants for ongoing work were renewed periodically, and it was typically far easier to extend existing grants than secure new ones. Going forward, Bhattacharya has declared, “we won’t renew them.”

This move will compound the effects of reduced support for new grants. New funding for research on the above-mentioned diseases declined 16 percent overall in 2025 per the Senate report, with Alzheimer’s studies hit the hardest. That’s notable, because the number of people afflicted is expected to grow drastically as the the population ages over the next few decades.

The administration’s drastic cutshave not gone unnoticed. In the budget bill Congress passed last week, lawmakers rejected the president’s proposed budget, which would have cut spending on biomedical research in half. The NIH got $47 billion for the upcoming year—a slight increase over 2025.

Still, the NIH staffer I spoke with doesn’t foresee an end to the administration’s meddling. “It’s no longer about what’s being cut but what’s being politicized and restricted now,” the employee explains. “We got this full budget through, but how is that money going to be spent?”

Maybe not on improving the lives of the people with chronic conditions. “Those of us who focus on nutrition and chronic disease are hearing from this administration many messages that are aligned with what we’re doing,” Rosas told me. Yet its actions are “really confusing, not just for us, but for the people we serve.”

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Can He Really Do That? Black History Month in the Age of Trump

Last year, shortly after his second inauguration, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation on January 31 to mark the start of Black History Month the next day—just as presidents before him had done, beginning with Gerald Ford in the bicentennial year of 1976. He invoked “heroes such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Thomas Sowell, Justice Clarence Thomas, and countless others [who] represent what is best in America and her citizens.” A well-known golf enthusiast, he paid special tribute to Tiger Woods, one of many “who have pushed the boundaries of excellence in their respective fields.” Hailing the arrival of “a historic Golden Age,” Trump extended gratitude to “black Americans” (notably a lower case “B”) “for all they have done to bring us to this moment.”

A few weeks later, Trump hosted a Black History Month reception at the White House. Tiger Woods, wearing his Presidential Medal of Freedom (2019), was the guest of honor and gave brief remarks. The president acknowledged other attendees, including Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) and former NFL player Scott Turner, newly confirmed as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. The president touted his connections to the African-American community and paid tribute to “the generations of black legends, champions, warriors, and patriots who helped drive our country forward to greatness.”

Though nobody there mentioned it, Trump’s 2025 Black History Month reception took place in the shadow of a previous order from January 20, terminating “illegal” Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility offices and initiatives across all agencies of the federal government. According to the president, Americans deserved a government that hired and fired solely based on merit. Previous DEIA programs, the order stated, had not only been “[an] immense public waste,” but also an example of “shameful discrimination.” On the same day Trump proclaimed the start of Black History Month, his Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, issued his own stark directive: “Identity Months Dead at DoD.”

Fast forward to February 2026, and Trump’s latest Black History Month proclamation is something vastly different, both at the rhetorical level and in its deeper meaning. It begins in the usual way, by recognizing America’s Black heroes and “legends” (used, unironically, in its colloquial form), but then it veers into subtle diatribe. “As president, I proclaim that ‘black history’ is not distinct from American history—rather, the history of black Americans is an indispensable chapter in our grand American story.” Sticking with the lower case “B” in all references to Black people and Black history,Trump has further twisted the shape and meaning of Black History Month. What other presidents have recognized as a month for community education and public acknowledgement—a celebration of African-American achievements, but also an observance of past injustices—Trump has harnessed for his own purposes. Black History Month, perhaps unsurprisingly, has become a battleground of memory and a new front in MAGA’s broader culture war.

Presidents make history at two levels: first, by taking decisions and implementing policies that change the lives of millions (or billions), but also by invoking and narrating the past in their own, often idiosyncratic, ways.

From a historian’s perspective, Trump’s attempt to co-opt and reconstrue Black History Month isn’t surprising. In the courses I teach on “History and Memory” and “The Politics of History,” students learn that presidents have always taken a role in the construction of American collective memory. Presidents make history at two levels: first, by taking decisions and implementing policies that change the lives of millions (or billions), but also by invoking and narrating the past in their own, often idiosyncratic, ways. They do this to influence how they will be seen in the future, but also to legitimate (and lubricate) the exercise of power while still in office.

Whether Democrat or Republican, progressive or conservative, presidents have always instrumentalized the past to advance their political agendas. On the way to the 1776 Bicentennial, Presidents Johnson and Nixon both tried to orchestrate the celebration to calm and manage the crises of the day: Vietnam, the struggle for civil rights, urban unrest, student protests, and economic recession. In their inaugural speeches and State of the Union Addresses, presidents spin historical yarns and elaborate their platforms through historical analogies and homespun presentations of the past. All of that is normal, even if, for historians, these presidential forays into history can be exasperating.

Trump’s efforts to change the shape and meaning of Black History Month are something different. The production of historical knowledge, whether by presidents or academics, always reveals and depends on the existing power structure. It always entails distillation, sanitization, selectivity, and, of course, who gets a say when it comes to giving the past its meaning. No interpretation of the past is apolitical, but the question of power also begs the question of moral vision and practical outcomes.

To what purpose and in support of what principles and values do we put our investigations of the past? When we explain and interpret the past, we do so in pursuit of knowledge and understanding—but to what end? What other goals shape and drive historical inquiry besides familiarity with the facts? Facilitating justice by accepting responsibility for past violations and abuses committed in our names? Or is the purpose of the past merely to maintain the hierarchies of knowledge, opportunity, and citizenship that deliver benefits to some while sidelining and brutalizing others?

It isn’t Trump’s sophomoric dabbling in history that is unusual; it is his determination to use the past for baldly illiberal purposes. Not for the purpose of affirming the uniqueness and dignity of all individuals and groups, but to force all Americans into a framework that appears to be neutral on the outside, even as it gives credence and political standing to some groups more than others. What makes Trump’s history dangerous is how it camouflages identity politics with a slick veneer of group neutrality. Not the identity politics of the last 40 years, for which MAGA has so much contempt, but the identity politics of an earlier age, when Black equality may have existed on paper, but Black Americans faced cruel and violent barriers to full citizenship, and American history, where it featured Black bodies, rarely incorporated Black voices.

President Donald Trump listens as White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council Executive Director Scott Turner speaks during a reception in honor of Black History Month at the White House in February of 2025.Oliver Contreras/Sipa/AP

Consider, again, Trump’s use of language in his 2026 Black History Month proclamation. At first, he sticks with familiar tropes that recall the nation’s origins: “America’s founding was rooted in the belief that every man, woman, and child is created equal, ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,’ and free to live […] in ‘pursuit of Happiness.’” But things soon take a dark and radical turn. “For decades, the progressive movement and far-left politicians have sought to needlessly divide our citizens on the basis of race, painting a toxic, and distorted, and disfigured vision of our history, heritage, and heroes.” Yes, this certainlysounds dire, but fear not, Trump will correct the nation’s course, as only he can. “This month […] we do not celebrate our differences. Instead, we celebrate the contributions of black Americans to our national greatness and their enduring commitment to the American principles of liberty, justice, and equality.”

It isn’t Trump’s sophomoric dabbling in history that is unusual; it is his determination to use the past for baldly illiberal purposes.

Throughout the proclamation, Trump pulls in two opposite directions. On the one hand, there isan inclusive, even charitable, aspect. Black history is seemingly accepted and embraced here. It should be viewed, Trump declares, as “indispensable.” His language melds Black history with American history, imbuing it with grandeur. Black patriots, he says, have been “the vanguards of our freedom” and are “some of the most heroic Americans to have ever lived.” The emphasis is on the unum in our nation’s oft-cited motto: e pluribus unum (out of many, one).

On the other hand, for many African-Americans, it will be hard not to feel slighted. Trump frames Black history in language that suggests it does not—indeed, by implication, it cannot**—**stand on its own. It exists to be subsumed into something broader and deeper. There is no singular Black experience in America’s past, it seems, except what Trump and MAGA choose to remember. You can see this in Trump’s 1776 history project, where Martin Luther King, Jr., appears, unfathomably, as a warrior in the fight against reverse racism.

The scare quotes around “black history” (“I proclaim that ‘black history’ is not distinct from American history…”) are also telling. Black history isn’t history at all, but only a kind of pseudo “history.” It may entail real events and real people, but, until it is absorbed into the MAGA past, it holds no real value. When Trump said, during a Black History Month event in 2017, that the 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass was “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more,” some saw his framing as yet another product of his narcissism. But it is also an example of how Trump appeals to the past while simultaneously ransacking and appropriating it for his own purposes. If Trump could copyright or affix a trademark to the past—not to mention monetize it—does anyone believe he would miss that chance?

In the next section, the president invokes that hardy perennial, the Declaration of Independence—2026 being the country’s Semiquincentennial—and he cites America’s “bedrock belief in equality.” The word “bedrock” does a lot of heavy lifting here, signaling something consolidated and foundational. For Trump, equality is enmeshed deep in America’s historical DNA. The nation’s history is the story of its genomic expression, and in Trump’s world, that DNA must remain pure. Anything that doesn’t fit must be excised. The text continues: “The source of our strength is rooted not in our differences, but in our shared commitment to freedom under one beautiful American flag.” One people, one nation, one history. Every strand of the past must be smoothed, with no ends left frayed. You can almost imagine Trump in the archives, sorting through America’s messy past with a hot iron and a pair of golden scissors.

People walk past a panel on American slavery at the President’s House Site in Philadelphia in August of last year. The panel has since been removed.Matt Rourke/AP

Perhaps the best example of MAGA revisionism can be seen in the series of outsized claims Trump makes regarding America’s lead role in a story of liberation, technological achievement, and moral progress. America, he announces, “wrested the Western Hemisphere from monarchies and empires, ended slavery, saved Europe, put a man on the moon, and” (cough) “built the freest, most just, and most prosperous society ever known to mankind.” It’s not as if Black Americans aren’t present in the proclamation; indeed, they are remembered and honored for their contributions to a sweeping and triumphal story. But, at the same time, they are wrestled into place. They appear and attain their meaning in the distorted role Trump haschosen for them. Theymust live within a history that is imposed on them.

Clearly, Black Americans contributed enormously to their own emancipation and the writing of their own history. From the end of slavery to the civil rights movement to the 1619 Project—whatever one thinks of it—the story of Black Americans is fundamentally a story of the vast and complicated tapestry of Black memory. How could Donald Trump, or anyone for that matter, have the final say over Black memory? How can Black History Month ever be aligned with MAGA’s ideological project? Can it really be, as this year’s proclamation wants us to believe, that slavery was “ended” in the United States without ever having started—that is, without having been deliberately created and propagated and profited from by our patriots of yore?

The importance of Black History Month isn’t the way it can instill patriotic pride or paper over glaring inequalities and differences in lived experience. It is its ability to fill the voids in official accounts of the past and un-silence the voices that have too often gone unheard.

Since its observance began, Black History Month has been an opportunity to explore the nation’s past through new sources and to enrich our collective self-understanding through the cultivation and inclusion of new perspectives. The importance of Black History Month isn’t the way it can instill patriotic pride or paper over glaring inequalities and differences in lived experience. It is its ability to fill the voids in official accounts of the past and unsilence the voices that have too often gone unheard. We can, of course, celebrate and admire Black achievement and Black accomplishment and what Black excellence has added to America’s historical ledger. That was part of what led Carter G. Woodson to launch the first Black History Week in 1915. But Black history cannot be made to serve Trump’s memory of America except through deliberate and, I’ll say it, violent acts of erasure.

Before he was president and well before he became a fixture on our screens and in our feeds, Trump was a swaggering playboy New Yorker who fancied himself a builder. Recently, he has returned to form, demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build a giant ballroom and, more recently, announcing the closure of the Kennedy Center for the purpose of a major renovation. (Also, since he slapped his name on it, the collapse of ticket sales and artists refusing to perform there has made this important cultural venue unsupportable.) He appears to think obsessively about his legacy and how to leave an architectural imprint on the future.

On the National Mall, or perhaps the banks of the Potomac, Trump has proposed to raise a massive “Independence Arch” to commemorate the semiquincentennial. A 250-foot behemoth for our 250 years of self-governance. Elsewhere on the Mall, Trump has viciously attacked other monuments and sites of memory. Last summer, he railed against the National Museum of African-American History and Culture for having betrayed its mission. Instead of our country’s great success, he said, the museum was overly focused on “how horrible our Country is” and “how bad slavery was.” American history, Trump has said many times, should always be patriotic, and museums should not dwell on or stir up negative aspects of the past. There is only one American history for Trump; all others are untruthful and insane.

So, what is it he sees in his arch that is missing from the African-American history museum? Why is the Smithsonian’s cutting-edge museum of Black history and culture in the MAGA crosshairs while Trump’s monstrous arch is thought to embody the nation’s full glory?

The answers seem clear.

One remembers pain and broken promises, while the other erases them. One points to a multitude of experiences and perspectives, while the other flattens everything into a single unified plane. One demands moral reflection and soul searching, while the other hawks untarnished greatness. One is a space for civic dialogue, while the other dictates meaning and broaches no dissent. One is a story of democracy, imperfect but hopeful, while the other is a story of raw and ravenous power.

The Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote, famously: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” But sometimes it’s the struggle of memory against counter-memory, remembering against remembering otherwise. When it gathers up a selection of perspectives and discards others, when it engraves certain stories and sands down others, memory is a form of power. With power comes great responsibility.

That’s the struggle over Black History Month right now. In many ways, however, it has become a microcosm of a far greater struggle, even an existential one in the face of an authoritarian’s fever dream. Trump so desperately wants his monolith. All Americans need to fight now more than ever, for a complex, democratic past. In the end, that may become the real meaning of Black History Month in our semiquincentennial year.

Top image: Mother Jones illustration; PHOTO12/ZUMA; COVER Images/ZUMA; Molly Roberts/White House/Planet Pix/ZUMA; Tony Vaccaro/Getty; Wikimedia

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Native Families Were Promised Free Solar. Trump Took It Away.

This story is published in partnership with The Daily Yonder.

It was sunny and warm for the end of November on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation in northern Montana. Joseph Eagleman was standing on a grassy hill, looking at a 20-panel solar array in the backyard of a Chippewa Cree elder.

It was built under the Solar for All program, a Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act-funded project that distributed $7 billion to build residential solar across the country. Here on Rocky Boy’s, around 200 homes would have received solar funded by the federal dollars.

This was the first to get panels in Queensville, a small community of modest homes in one of the reservation’s valleys. The home is brown, two stories, and fully electric, which is one of the requirements to qualify for Solar for All funding. Eagleman met me there to give me a tour of the panels that all but eliminated the resident’s $200–$300 monthly electricity bills, according to Eagleman.

Eagleman is the CEO of the Chippewa Cree Energy Corporation, an organization that manages energy development for the tribe. Here in the Northern Plains, a coalition of 14 tribes received a $135 million grant. The money would have provided around $7.6 million for each reservation to build residential solar, and Eagleman would have managed the Solar for All funds for the Chippewa Cree.

Then came President Donald Trump. His administration cut Solar for All in August.

“It’s terrible. We were getting ready to take off,” Eagleman said.

Residents had seen this solar array, which was built in the fall of 2024, and were excited about the possibility of free solar. Eagleman had a list of 40 households that were applying for the first round of the project. But only this house got a completed array before the program was stopped.

“It was a gut punch,” Eagleman said.

Listen to this story, featured in a recent episode of Reveal, in the player below.

The reservation is about an hour and a half from the closest city, Great Falls, Montana, and has a population of 3,300. Driving down to meet Eagleman, I passed a cafe/casino/bar/gas station, a school, a skate park, and many residences, but little else. “There’s not a lot of opportunities, except for leaving the reservation,” Eagleman said.

Electricity costs are high on the reservation, as they are across rural America. Building and maintaining infrastructure without density drives up costs for these areas. Applicants showed Eagleman their bills to demonstrate why they wanted solar so badly, and some were up to $900 a month. Around 35 percent of the reservation’s residents live below the poverty line, more than double the rate for the United States. Solar installations like these cost thousands of dollars—money that most residents don’t have.

Eagleman had hired Zane Patacsil, a local resident who had experience installing solar, a month before the cuts. Patacsil joined us in the sunny backyard, overlooking the hills and valleys that make up the Rocky Boy’s Reservation.

He said Solar for All would have brought some economic development to Rocky Boy’s and the other reservations that received the grant: an office and people to manage it, as well as training and hiring solar installers to do the labor.

“There were even members who were talking about starting their own solar businesses so they could be installing,” Patacsil said. “It was very disheartening to hear that news, because we lost all of that with it.”

Eagleman, standing beneath the solar array, looks out onto the Rocky Boy’s Reservation. Ilana Newman/The Daily Yonder

When protests raged against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, Cody Two Bears was on the tribal council for the Standing Rock Sioux. He saw another layer to the dispute: energy extraction on tribal land that not only hurt residents, but also brought no relief for high energy bills.

Two Bears wanted to bring energy sovereignty to his community and other tribal nations. He started the nonprofit Indigenized Energy in 2017. “I do this because of energy and energy sovereignty as well, but it creates a sense of hope for our tribal nations,” he said.

Sovereignty and self-governance are what tribes allegedly gained in exchange for giving up traditional homelands when treaties were signed over the past centuries. Tribal sovereignty is about not only protecting culture and traditions, but also self-sufficiency. It’s also legally protected by the US Constitution. But that’s easier said than done without the resources to support true independence, which have been systemically removed by the US government.

Native Americans are more food insecure and rely on Medicaid at higher rates than their white counterparts, depending on the US government for subsidies while desiring the sovereignty that was promised. Energy independence is a way to regain a degree of that sovereignty, and Two Bears has made that his goal with Indigenized Energy.

“My ultimate goal is to work myself out of a job,” he said. “I want to build so much capacity into these tribes where they don’t need Indigenized Energy anymore.”

But the funding picture changed dramatically when Trump’s administration slashed solar spending.

Indigenized Energy had already been building residential solar on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation for a few years, and it ramped up to prepare for more work through Solar for All. But when the program was cut, Indigenized Energy laid off around half its staff, including Donica Brady, the coordinator for the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeastern Montana.

Turning off of Highway 87 in Box Elder, Montana, to the Rocky Boy’s Reservation, there’s not much around.Ilana Newman/The Daily Yonder

I first met Brady in September 2025, about a month after the layoff, and the pain of losing a job she loved was evident. Brady had spent the past couple of years building trust in a community where promises have been made and broken over and over again. Solar for All became yet another one.

Part of programs like Solar for All is job development within the solar industry. Brady was part of a training program through Red Cloud Renewable, funded by previous grants for solar on reservations. Solar for All would also have funded training and trade development on these reservations.

When I caught up with Brady again at her house in Busby, she was working two jobs, and the only time she had for me was at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday, after her daughter’s choir recital. I found her in the garage with a kitchen knife in hand, skinning a deer her wife had shot a few days previously. She asked if I wanted to help and handed me a knife.

Donica Brady in September 2025 outside Busby, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Ilana Newman/The Daily Yonder

We chatted as we worked on the deer skin, cutting fat and sinew away from the dark red meat. She’d returned to her previous job as a bus driver and was hired by Freedom Forever, a solar installation company based in California. She’s still working in renewable energy, and Freedom Forever does work on reservations at times, but Brady’s job is no longer on the ground working with her community like she craves.

“I want my people to be able to be self-sufficient, not have to rely on funding or things like that that can be taken away,” Brady said. I heard this over and over: People don’t want to have to depend on the federal government for “handouts.”

As Brady cut out the tender backstraps and set them aside to give to her auntie, she talked about solar’s deeper meaning. “People call it progress, but I see it as going back to what we were taught, but in a new way,” she said. It’s more than just energy; it’s harnessing the sun, an important reflection of Northern Cheyenne culture.

The deer we were cutting up felt like a symbol summarizing everything we talked about. It was one way Brady could become self-sufficient and support those she loves. If only the power of the sun could be harnessed as easily as a deer skinned in a garage.

Some time later, just outside Lame Deer, Montana, the tribal headquarters of the Northern Cheyenne, I got lost looking for Thomasine Woodenlegs’ house. My phone had no service, so all I had was Woodenlegs’ instructions: Look for a bright-green house at the end of the road. Many U-turns later, Woodenlegs welcomed me into her kitchen, where photos of loved ones covered the walls and two cats, one orange and one black, lounged on the couch.

Woodenlegs works for her tribe, and she has lived in this house for 50 years. She plans to pass it down to her family. But she knows she will be saddling them with a financial burden, too.

“How am I going to survive after I retire? And how is whoever inherits my house?” Woodenlegs asked. “I’ll need to warn them that the electricity runs like $400 or $500, and they’d have to have a really secure income to live here. Otherwise, they’d be without lights.”

Power lines cross the short grass prairie on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation.Ilana Newman/The Daily Yonder

Woodenlegs saw solar panels from previous grant programs like the White River Community Solar Project, funded by the Department of Energy, going up around the reservation in 2020 and 2021. Solar for All’s big allocation for Indigenous communities brought more hope. She put in her own applications, feeling jealous of friends and acquaintances who received them, wondering when it would be her turn. She’s still waiting.

Tina Cady, another Northern Cheyenne resident, lives just outside Busby and has applied for solar panels multiple times. She worked for the Indian Health Service for 25 years until she went on disability. Now she lives on a fixed income of about $1,000 a month, and her husband picks up as many hours as he can as an adjunct professor at the tribal college. She showed me her October electric bill, which was $225.13.

Brady handled her application and told Cady what she’d learned in the field so far: Cady was a prime applicant for solar panels and she should be at the top of the list. “I’m an elder, and I’m disabled,” Cady said. Plus, she owns her own land. But Cady never heard anything more about it.

I asked whether she felt betrayed by the funding cuts, after so many previous letdowns to tribal communities. Cady said no, because it wasn’t her money to be betrayed. But she was disappointed and disenchanted: “I have seen them do this before. You get so you don’t trust anybody anymore.”

Four different lawsuits have been filed in federal courts against the Trump administration for ending Solar for All. It was terminated after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act rescinded “unobligated funds for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund,” which had provided the funding for Solar for All.

The lawsuits claim that Solar for All was already a year into operation, so the funds were obligated, and that taking away already obligated funds is illegal.

All the lawsuits are still active. One from Climate United will move into oral arguments this month. Another from a coalition of 22 states is seeking an injunction to keep the Solar for All funds available.

But even without results from the lawsuits, solar installers like Two Bears and Eagleman plan to continue to fight for solar development on Northern Plains reservations.

Eagleman said he’s going to keep looking for funding to help bring affordable electricity to the Chippewa Cree on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation. He’s been looking at other public funding through the Department of Energy, as well as private philanthropic options.

Two Bears said he is moving forward with his company’s list of families awaiting solar. Indigenized Energy is ready to break ground on a project on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, which was next in line when the funding was cut. He said it found private funding for that project, as well as another solar array for the Rosebud Sioux.

“So even though the money is not there, we’re still finding alternative resources and funding to make these possible and make’em feasible,” Two Bears said. It’s just going to take longer.”

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The Right Is Terrified of Bad Bunny

Bad Bunny, the “King of Latin Trap,” will perform the halftime show at the Super Bowl, promising a “huge party.” But his opposition to the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdown has led MAGA politicos and media stars to spread rumors in an effort to stoke a backlash against the artist.

Let’s take a look at some of them:

• “He’s not an American artist,” said conservative political commentator Tomi Lahren on her show Tomi Lahren is Fearless last September.

Actually, Bad Bunny is a Puerto Rican native and therefore he’s legally a US citizen. When Lahren was called out for missing this fact, she clarified that she believes he is un-American due to his remarks against ICE and due to his refusal to tour in the US. (The artist has cited his concerns over ICE agents gathering outside his concerts to target his fans.)

• “He’s not someone who appeals to a broader audience,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told the immigration newsletter Migrant Insider in an interview posted on February 3. “There’s so many eyes on the Super Bowl—a lot of young impressionable children. I think in my view you would have Lee Greenwood or role models doing that,” he said, referring to the American country music singer. (Greenwood’s song “God Bless the USA” is Trump’s walkout song.)

Wake up, Mike. Bad Bunny is in fact immensely popular. He was the top artist on Spotify’s global charts from 2020-2022 and 2025. In 2025, he had about 19.8 billion streams on the platform. And he just made history to become the first artist to win the Grammy for Best Album for a record sung entirely in Spanish.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell backed Bad Bunny the day after his success at the Grammys, noting his popularity. “It’s one of the reasons we chose him,” Goodell said last Monday. “The other reason is he understood the platform he was on. This platform is used to unite people.”

He continued: “I think artists in the past have done that. Bad Bunny understands that and I think he’ll have a great show.”

• “All it does is sow hatred,” President Trump told the New York Post last month to explain that he planned to skip the Super Bowl due in large part to Bad Bunny’s appearance in the halftime show.

This “hatred” is Bad Bunny’s criticism of Trump and his administration’s violence against immigrants, communities of color, and protesters. And this criticism has often been far from hateful. During the artist’s Grammy acceptance speech, he said, “If we fight, we have to do it with love. We don’t hate them. We love our people. We love our family.”

Criticism of ICE is popular—65 percent of Americans said the federal agency has “gone too far” in its brutal enforcement of immigration laws in polls conducted late last month.

“We don’t hate them. We love our people. We love our family.”

And in fact, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote last month, the push to “sow hatred” could better describe Trump’s campaign of terror to redefine who belongs in the US.

Last October, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said ICE agents would be at the Super Bowl. “There is nowhere that you can provide safe haven to people who are in this country illegally,” Corey Lewandowski, senior adviser to the Department of Homeland Security and Trump’s first campaign manager in his 2016 presidential campaign, said that same week. “Not the Super Bowl and nowhere else.”The NFL insisted on Tuesday that ICE officers would not be present at the game.
“There are no planned ICE enforcement activities. We are confident of that,” Lanier, the league’s chief security officer said at a security briefing. As of Sunday early afternoon, there have been no reports of ICE presence at the stadium.

The right has put together an alternative Super Bowl performance featuring Kid Rock. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Donald Trump would “much prefer to watch” Kid Rock over Bad Bunny.

But this attempt to replace Bad Bunny with who they consider a more “American” artist is clearly not working. Kid Rock’s televised performance of “The All-American Halftime Show,” which is sponsored by the late Charlie Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, has lost multiple performers in the lead-up to the Super Bowl. The rock band Shinedown announced on Friday that it would drop out as taking part would “create further division.”

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Watch the Epstein Survivors’ Powerful Super Bowl Sunday Ad

A group of survivors of abuse by Jeffrey Epstein released an advertisement that will air during the Super Bowl imploring for the full release of millions of government files revealing the connections between Epstein and many famous politicians and celebrities.

BREAKING: The Epstein survivors are releasing this ad on this Super Bowl Sunday to send the message that they will not “move on” from the largest sex trafficking scandal in the world. #standwithsurvivors pic.twitter.com/JehYZa1hGw

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) February 8, 2026

The ad was posted on X by journalist Jim Acosta. It comes a day before Congress is expected to be able to finally read unredacted versions of the Epstein files, according to a letter by a Justice Department official obtained by MS Now.

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The President’s Lawyers Submitted False Information About a “Law & Order” Plot to the Supreme Court

President Donald Trump’s legal team submitted false information to the Supreme Court in his ongoing legal battle against author E. Jean Carroll—who he was found liable for sexually assaulting in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1996—according to documents reviewed by Mother Jones.

Justin D. Smith, Trump’s lawyer in the case, misrepresented the plot of an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in a November 2025 petition to the court. Trump, along with some of his supporters, has for years claimed that Carroll’s account of him raping and sexually assaulting her was copied from the 2012 SVU episode.

Friends of Carroll confirm she told them about Trump’s assault years before the episode was filmed.

Trump is asking the Supreme Court to overturn a $5 million judgment from 2023, when a federal jury held that he sexually abused Carroll and then defamed her. (A separate $83.3 million defamation judgement against him from 2024 is not directly at issue, but could be in the future if the Court sides with Trump.) The justices’ are scheduled to review Trump’s petition on February 20.

In the Supreme Court petition, Smith describes the episode as featuring “a business mogul” who “fantasizes about raping a victim in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.” He writes that the “plotline is virtually identical to the false allegations that Carroll launched against President Trump.”

In the episode from season 13, entitled “Theatre Tricks,” there is a small plotline about a sexual encounter in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. But the man involved is a prominent New York City judge, not, as Smith claimed, a “business mogul.” And what happened in the dressing room, which is discussed but not shown in the episode, was pre-planned and by all accounts consented to. A person with knowledge of how the SVU episode came together told CNN in 2019 that there’s “no correlation—none whatsoever” between “Theatre Tricks” and Carroll’s allegations against Trump. Carroll has repeatedly denied she made up her allegation based on the episode. At least two friends of Carroll have confirmed the author told them about the assault shortly after it took place and years before the episode was filmed or broadcast.

Smith did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones on the false information included in the petition. Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer in the case, also did not respond to a request for comment.

The Rules of the Supreme Court say that petitioners must present information with “accuracy, brevity, and clarity.” Failure to do so, per Rule 14.4, “is sufficient reason for the Court to deny a petition.” It is unclear if Trump’s lawyer knowingly included inaccurate information or failed to confirm the details of the episode in question.

Carroll leaves a New York City court following the 2024 conclusion of her civil defamation trial against Trump.Michael M. Santiago/GETTY

The plot of “Theatre Tricks” involves a struggling young actress who seeks out sex work on a sugar daddy website, where she meets a judge who she helps fulfill a “stranger rape fantasy” that involves invading a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room while a woman tries on lingerie. It is one of over 550 SVU episodes spread across more than two dozen seasons containing hundreds of different examples of sexual violence—from harassment all the way to murder. The dressing room meet-up with the judge is mentioned for less than one minute in “Theatre Tricks,” which centers on a separate, nonconsensual sexual assault experienced by another character.

Carroll’s first public account of what happened with Trump in that dressing room around three decades ago came in a 2019 New York magazine article, excerpting her upcoming book. She detailed running into Trump when he asked her to advise him on a gift for, as she quoted him, “a girl.” They went around the store before he led them to the lingerie section, she wrote.

What unfolded next, as Carroll has since described many times, was Trump leading her into the dressing room, lunging at her, pushing her against the wall, pulling down her tights, using his fingers on her sexually, and penetrating her with his penis. Carroll wrote that she was eventually able to push him off and run out.

Carroll later sued Trump in 2022 for sexual battery and for defaming her by denying it through New York’s Adult Survivors Act. While Carroll has maintained that Trump used his fingers and penis in the assault, the jury, which ultimately awarded her $5 million, stopped short of finding Trump liable for rape under penile penetration. They found that Trump had “forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm,” according to District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the case.

The legal definition for rape differs by state and, at the time, New York’s law required penile penetration. (In January 2024, New York broadened its rape law to include other kinds of nonconsensual anal, oral, and vaginal sexual contact.) Despite that, Judge Kaplan wrote in 2023 that the jury’s decision “does not mean” that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” “Indeed,” he continued, “the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

Trump has consistently denied the claims, saying over the years that Carroll is a “nut job,” “mentally sick,” and “not my type.” He has posted on social media more than 100 times about her accusations.

Smith’s faulty description of the SVU episode was detailed by David Boyle, a California lawyer with a habit of filing amicus briefs on major Supreme Court cases. In his early January submission in support of Carroll, Boyle writes of “Trump’s disrespect for rape victims,” and calls out how the president’s filling “makes up a television-show character, or at least the character’s profession, to discredit Carroll.”

Why did Boyle write the brief? “It’s a famous case, and I don’t like rapists,” he says, “even if it’s quote-unquote ‘just’ a digital rapist,” dryly noting Judge Kaplan’s holding about penetration.

“This is the Supreme Court. People are supposed to be on good behavior, their best behavior, and do things in good faith,” Boyle says. “He’s the president. We’re paying him a salary to be president. He’s supposed to be—laugh as you will, knowing who he is—a role model.”

Boyle’s amicus brief was one of five submitted to the court. The other four are in support of Donald Trump and his argument that certain evidence used in the previous trial was inadmissible. Those briefs do not mention the SVU episode.

In this 2023 courtroom sketch, Trump defense attorney Joe Tacopina presents closing arguments as Carroll watches.Elizabeth Williams/AP

Trump, members of his legal teams, and some of his supporters have called on the SVU episode for years while attempting to discredit Carroll.

Within days of Carroll’s account originally being published in New York, a short clip from “Theatre Tricks” started circulating online. “Looks like that lunatic E. Jean Caroll got the idea about getting ‘raped’ by Trump in a dressing room at Burgdorfs while trying on lingerie from an episode of Law and Order SVU,” Mark Dice, a right-wing commentator with nearly 2 million YouTube subscribers, asserted. David J. Harris Jr, now host of The Pulse on Newsmax, wrote a post entitled, “Proof That Trump Accuser is a Fraud…Story Came From Law and Order SVU.” Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones also amplified the claim on his website InfoWars. Even Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, retweeted the clip, according to a CNN report from 2019.

During Carroll’s 2023 civil trial against Trump, his lawyer, Joe Tacopina, brought up the episode. While testifying in that trial, Carroll’s lawyer Michael Ferrara asked her if she was “making up your allegation based on a popular TV show?”

“No,” Carroll responded. “No.”

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JD Vance Booed at Winter Olympics Amid Anti-ICE Protests

Vice President JD Vance, standing alongside Second Lady Usha Vance, was met with a chorus of boos at Friday’s Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Milan. As team USA entered San Siro Stadium, the crowd cheered—but that was cut short when the Vances came on the big screen.

As the New York Times reported, “Their appearance on the screens lasted for only a few seconds,” but the boos “were audible despite the loud music playing for the parade.”

Hours before the ceremony, hundreds of protestors took part in a student-led demonstration against the presence of US immigration agents at the winter games. Officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations team are in Milan to “vet and mitigate risks from transnational criminal organizations,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi has said that the ICE personnel in the country “are not operational agents.” Protestors called for the removal of ICE, along with Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also attending, from the games.

When asked about Vance’s icy welcome on Air Force One, President Donald Trump said it was “surprising.”

“Is that true? That’s surprising because people like him,” he said. “I mean, he is in a foreign country in all fairness. He doesn’t get booed in this country.”

Trump reacts after a reporter tells him Vance was booed in Milan.Samuel Corum/GETTY

Except, Vance has been booed at events multiple times in the US.

While on the campaign trail in August 2024, Vance was booed at a firefighters convention in Boston after claiming that he and Trump were the “most pro-worker Republican ticket in history.” In March, the vice president received screaming boos as he attended a Kennedy Center symphony performance. A few months later, in August, Vance, Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth were all heckled and booed in Washington, DC’s Union Station as they went to meet National Guard troops deployed to the city.

At the opening ceremony, some in the crowd noted that the boos appeared to clearly be directed at the Vances—and not at the athletes competing for the US.

“It was quick but noticeable,” wrote Juliette Kayyem, an Obama-era DHS official who is attending the games, of the Vances’ booing. “But,” she continued, “I want to point out that the crowd was loud and supportive when Team USA came out. It was lovely to hear. And quite a juxtaposition.”

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Japan Embarks on a Deep-Sea Mining Experiment With Unknown Consequences

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

The year 2010 was a reckoning for Japan’s economic security.

On September 7, the Chinese fishing trawler Minjinyu 5179 refused an order by Japan’s coast guard to leave disputed waters near the Senkaku Islands, which are known in China as Diaoyu. The vessel then rammed two patrol boats, escalating a decades-long territorial feud.

Japan responded by arresting the captain, Zhan Qixiong, under domestic law, a move Beijing considered an unacceptable assertion of Japanese sovereignty. Amid mounting protests in both countries and the collapse of high-level talks, China cut exports of rare earth elements to Japan, which relied upon its geopolitical adversary for 90 percent of its supply. The move reverberated throughout the global economy as companies like Toyota and Panasonic were left without materials crucial to the production of everything from hybrid cars to personal electronics.

It wasn’t long before Japan gave in and let Qixiong go. The crisis, which garnered worldwide attention, became a catalyst for Japan’s push to secure a reliable supply of critical minerals. “That was the turning point,” said Takahiro Kamisuna, a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Fifteen years later, that reckoning has only deepened.

China still provides 60 percent of Japan’s critical minerals, a reliance that has grown riskier as Beijing asserts its position as the world’s dominant supplier. Last month, Japan took a bold step to break that dependence when it launched a five-week deep-sea mining test off Minamitorishima Island. A crew of 130 researchers aboard the Chikyu—Japanese for “earth”—will use what is essentially a robotic vacuum cleaner to collect mud from a depth of 6,000 meters, marking the world’s first attempt at prolonged collection of minerals from great depths.

“I think that they’re both pretty much going to destroy the habitat directly affected.”

Seabed mud off the coast of that uninhabited island, which sits 1,180 miles southeast of Tokyo, is rich in rare earths like neodymium and yttrium—distinct from the potato-shaped polymetallic nodules often associated with marine extraction. Such materials are essential for electric vehicles, solar panels, advanced weapons systems, and other technology.

The expedition, which is expected to end February 14, is being led by the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology, which did not respond to a request for comment. It comes three months after the country signed an agreement with the United States to collaborate on securing a supply of critical minerals. It also propels Japan to the forefront of a growing debate over how far nations should go to secure these materials. Deep-sea mining “is not a new thing,” Kamisuna said, “it’s just gaining more attention mainly because of geopolitical tensions.”

The trawler incident highlighted a vulnerability that successive governments vowed to alleviate. Many criticized then-prime minister Naoto Kan of the country’s center-left party for capitulating to China, but he pledged to never again let Japan’s industrial future hinge on a single supplier. His successor, Shinzo Abe of the center-right party, was more aggressive and saw critical minerals as not just an economic issue, but a matter of national security that must be addressed even if it meant exploiting the deep sea.

Establishing a domestic supply could help Japan reach its goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, a high priority for Yoshihide Suga, who succeeded Abe. Although Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, an Abe protégé who assumed office late last year, supports the 2050 timeline, she has said the transition must not risk Japan’s industrial competitiveness and energy stability.

Takaichi has proposed slashing subsidies for large-scale solar projects or batteries, largely because so much of that technology is imported from China. Instead, she has hailed nuclear power as the path toward carbon neutrality. With the mining experiment unfolding in the Pacific, Takaichi hopes to secure a strategic reserve of minerals to protect key industries.

But Japan doesn’t face an either-or choice, said Jane Nakano, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. “Energy security and energy transition are closely tied,” she said.

“To me, it’s much more about the pace, not so much the direction,” said Nakano, who has worked for the US Department of Energy and for the energy attaché at the US embassy in Tokyo. “I don’t find Takaichi’s way of framing this dual challenge—energy security and decarbonization—unique to Japan. A lot of G7 countries are starting to recalibrate again, so they do have to think about international competitiveness. Direction-wise, [Japan] is just aligning itself with the political establishment and the industry.”

Unlike China, Japan lacks the sedimentary geology associated with rare earth deposits, requiring it to look toward the waters within its exclusive economic zones. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Japan has the right to exploit the resources within 200 nautical miles of its coastline, which includes the atoll island of Minamitorishima.

Although the minerals to be found there lie nearly 20,000 feet beneath the surface, proponents of digging them up argue the challenge of extracting them and the cost of refining them is justified by mounting geopolitical tension. With Takaichi’s recent political jabs at Beijing, China has begun choking off its exports to Japan. Nakano said Japanese officials seem “confident” in the outcome of the experiment. “They’ve determined that it merits to have this demonstration of technologies and equipment this time around,” she said.

Japan’s foray into deep-sea mining comes amid mounting concern about the ecological cost of such technology. Scientists and environmental groups warn that marine extraction is racing ahead of our understanding of the impacted ecosystems. They are particularly concerned about sediment plumes, noise and light pollution, and damage to habitats and food webs, noting that scars left by equipment could render the seafloor uninhabitable for decades, even centuries.

“A tiny little nudge, and the whole seafloor is disturbed,” said Travis Washburn, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. He studies deep-sea environments and human impacts on marine ecosystems, and he has analyzed the waters around Minamitorishima Island and represented Japan at International Seabed Authority workshops. He believes that mining rare earths from mud could have the same impact as mining nodules. “I think that they’re both pretty much going to destroy the habitat directly affected.”

Government officials insist the ecological impacts will be closely monitored. But assessing them could be difficult, because the seafloor around the island, home to sea cucumbers, sponges, corals, and potentially rare endemic species—remains the subject of intense study. Scientists fear these ecosystems may be permanently altered before anyone assesses them. As with many extractive industries, Washburn noted, technology is often deployed before anyone fully understands its environmental impacts.

Shigeru Tanaka, deputy director general of the Pacific Asia Resource Center, is an outspoken critic of deep-sea mining. He argues that the industry as a whole disregards international law and that exploiting the seafloor will harm fisheries and trample upon the rights of Pacific Islanders who consider the sea as sacred. (The Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands have raised such concerns in opposing Trump administration plans to open the waters there to mining.) He also believes that some of the experts involved in Japan’s project “are not really taking seriously the risks to the environment and how irreversible it may be.”

Even some government officials have expressed concern. Yoshihito Doi of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy has said Japan should mine only “if we can establish a robust system that properly takes environmental impacts into account.”

It remains unclear what exactly is unfolding beneath the waves during this current test, but based upon his experience working with the Japanese government on similar research, Washburn said the top priority will be assessing whether the technology works. Researchers also will monitor how much material the system can hold and if the machinery can keep the sea mud contained without releasing a massive sediment plume on the seafloor or in the water column.

If Japan can successfully deploy a 6,000-meter pipe that can suck up 35 metric tons of mud under extreme pressure—about 8,700 pounds per square inch, or 600 times the pressure at sea level—government officials say a broader trial, which may include polymetallic nodules, could begin in February 2027.

One longer-term goal is to develop what’s called “hybrid mining.” Because deep-sea polymetallic nodules sit atop the rare-earth mud around Minamitorishima Island, researchers are exploring whether both could be collected and separated in a single operation.

Kamisuna said Japan faces another challenge: The energy needed to acquire and refine a stockpile. “If we want to create a sufficient reserve for rare earth [minerals], either using domestic or export, a large amount of electricity is required,” he said. “And the question is, What are we going to use, liquified natural gas or coal? What is the environmental cost?”

Using more environmentally friendly methods of extraction and processing can be expensive, he said—which is one reason many countries turn to China as a cheaper option.

For now, Japan’s deep-sea mining experiment seems to have drawn little public opposition at home, unlike in the United States and Australia where environmental activists and Indigenous communities have pushed back against such operations, particularly around the Pacific Islands. In the meantime, the country’s test moves forward, even as the implications of success, and questions about its long-term impact, remain unresolved.

“We are not prepared,” Tanaka said. “My personal take is that by the time we are ready, when the technology and the science is set, I really do not think there would be a demand for it.”

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How Minneapolis Taught America to Fight Back

In a Minnesota town outside the Twin Cities, Emily is a nurse who treats many immigrant patients. She can’t locate a patient who just had a test result that shows they might have cancer. The patient was recently detained by ICE; situations like these have forced the clinic to adapt, making house calls and triaging care.

“I’d love to know how well somebody’s kidneys are functioning today,” Emily said, but “I’m gonna wait till three months because I don’t want them to come in for a lab appointment that’s not critical.”

Emily is one of many Minnesotans mounting a quiet, secretive resistance to the Trump administration’s hard-nosed and often violent immigration agenda. Across the state, neighbors are helping neighbors and communities are building grassroot systems to support immigrant families.

This week on Reveal, our Minnesotan reporters Nate Halverson and Artis Curiskis report on how Minnesota is teaching the country to resist federal agents who have arrested children, killed citizens in the street, and pepper-sprayed high schoolers.

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Trump Posts Video That Depicts Obamas as Apes

Late Thursday night, President Donald Trump shared a video on Truth Social that depicts former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes.

The post, which was online all of Friday morning, appears to have been removed from the president’s page.

Toward the end of an unrelated video alleging interference in the 2020 presidential election, a clip that is around 2 seconds long features the first Black president and his wife on the bodies of apes as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background. That clip comes from a longer video that a meme account posted in October.

Mother Jones asked the White House a list of questions, including how Trump found the video, if he was aware that the 2020 election video contained that imagery when he posted it, and if the video depicting the Obamas was playing on the president’s device. The press office did not respond to specific questions but instead sent over a statement from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King,” Leavitt said. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

The video clip posted by the president just before midnight on the East Coast drew immense backlash, including from some Republicans.

Sen. Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, wrote on X: “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”

The Democrats X page also condemned the video, writing, “This is who Trump is: Sick, racist, and completely deranged.”

The original video of the Obamas was seemingly created by the same account that made the AI-generated video of President Trump flying a fighter jet and dropping feces on “No Kings” protesters. The user’s bio reads “God First | Trump ‘Fighter Jet Poop’ Guy.” In the full version of the video that Trump posted on Thursday, prominent Democrats are depicted as various animals, and President Trump’s head is on a lion with the caption “King of the Jungle.” The Obamas are not the only Democrats included in this video. Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, former President Joe Biden, and former Vice President Kamala Harris all appear, among others.

The president’s post is the latest in a decades-long history of sharing or amplifying racist claims, from taking out a full-page ad in 1989 calling for the death penalty for the young Black and brown Central Park Five to boosting the Obama birtherism conspiracy theory for years. He has also not restricted this behavior to social media; during both of his terms, he has enacted policies that uniquely target Black people, such as a comprehensive attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the federal government and private sector that began with an executive order on his first day in office.

It’s unclear how the video came across the president’s screen, but the original creator is celebrating. Under his initial post of the video, he shared a screenshot of Thursday’s Truth Social post.

Minutes before and minutes after sharing the video, which included the racist imagery of the former first family, Trump had posted two videos about how the Republican Party is the best political home for Black people.

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How to Resist Like Minneapolis

In the chaos of 2020, Minneapolis got angry and brave and tired and jittery (Was that shots or fireworks? Unclear, check the Signal chat). Many of us got comfortable with the idea of direct giving (Just, like, to a Venmo account? Yep. How do you deduct it? Can’t). Under nightly curfews and circling helicopters, the city was flooded with cortisol, and residents began to organize themselves in small groups to try to stay safe, register dissent, and figure out what the hell was going on.

Again in 2026, Minneapolis is the stitch in the center of the bullseye.

Again in 2026, Minneapolis is the stitch in the center of the bullseye—the focal point of national conversations about the unchecked use of force by state agents and the swells of protests against it. The enormous resistance that the city has mounted against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Operation Metro Surge was built on those foundations laid after the murder of George Floyd.

I grew up in South Minneapolis. I travel a lot as a touring musician, but still stay in a rented apartment in Uptown, not too far from where George Floyd, Renée Good, and Alex Pretti were killed. As the footage from the ground went around the world, friends and I received words of encouragement from Northern Ireland, Turkey, and Iran—keep marching, keep fighting. Before falling asleep at night, I got verklempt watching protesters in other American cities name-check Minnesota on their signs and in their chants, as a model to emulate. In that spirit, here is a short list of best practices to help your town respond quickly, should the need arise. It’s not exhaustive or absolute, and it’s definitely just not mine, but the product of a collective intelligence that’s coalesced in a city under duress.

The Minneapolis Model
Actionable steps today to be ready to resist tomorrow:

1. Mutual aid networks are made of neighbors who know each other. Ask to borrow a screwdriver from the new family in the apartment down the hall—find any excuse to meet your neighbors and trade numbers.

These will be the people in the encrypted chat.

2. Small businesses don’t have shareholders to answer to or boards to consult, so they can act on conscience quickly. Shop local when you can; visit immigrant-owned restaurants; chat at the register.

These will be the drop sites for food and supplies.

3. In a crisis, information must be shared quickly. Curate your online feeds now by following at least a few local non-profits, neighborhood groups, activists, and local reporters.

These will be your trusted sources to mobilize protests quickly and warn of new dangers to avoid.

4. Consider how the role you play in daily life can be useful in a crisis. Graphic designers can share signs to post in windows. Cooks can make soup to warm protesters. People with minivans can take cans to the food drive and children to school. The brewer’s empty beer boxes can be collapsed to make signs for the march. The affluent can donate money and ask their friends to do the same. Take stock of your personal skillset and assets.

These will be the resources that you can leverage without instruction.

5. Your community includes the people that you don’t like. Engage in conflict responsibly. Keep public arguments issues-focused, avoid trolling. The pay-what-you-can vegan cafe might not have much to say to the gun club during ordinary circumstances, yet find themselves partnered in exceptional times.

These will be the members of your coalition, even if they are not your friends.

6. The circumstances that call for a surge of public resistance are necessarily confusing, infuriating, painful, and surreal. You will be working tired, texting with shaking hands, possibly crying in the car. It’s easy to get spun up past the point of being useful to anybody. Check in on people you’re closest to—including yourself. Eat a vegetable, stretch your hamstrings, maybe get together with the crew for a few small beers.

This will be the rule that is most impossible to follow.

Because it all comes in too quickly to be filed in the mind. The local reporter will be tear gassed, a fellow musician will be tear gassed, a baby will be tear gassed. A Somali friend tells of rumors of denaturalization, wherein citizenship will be revoked. The mayor says agents have started going door to door, asking where the Asian people live. Cars are left running on the streets after their drivers have been pulled out and detained. Volunteers delivering food to families in hiding will be told not to use their phones to navigate—better to write the addresses on paper and if pulled over, eat it. There will be a video. And then another. There will be a pink jacket and a rabbit-eared hat.

Your nervous system feels like a toaster dropped into the bath.

So everyone gets a whistle to bring to the gun fight. They’re 3-D printed now and people wear them around their necks. At the big march, a man’s eyelashes freeze together. Friends volunteer to watch strangers’ kids. The sex shop receives so many donations on the sales floor that employees refer to it as Diaper Mountain. People place candles on the frozen surface of Lake Nokomis to spell ICE OUT in the flight path into MSP.

Yours may be the easiest part to play—blue passport, light skin, some folding money in your pocket. Still, your nervous system feels like a toaster dropped into the bath. The loud dinging says you’ve forgotten to buckle your seatbelt again and this is no time for unforced errors—everyone must cultivate fortitude alongside their resolve. At home, your pee is much too yellow, so you drink a full glass of water standing at the sink. Brush your teeth, you need to keep those. Go to bed without your phone beside you on the pillow. But then a remembered errand has you up again and putting on your shoes to return the screwdriver to the neighbor down the hall; your knuckles hit the door and your heart knocks against your sternum, hoping there is still someone safe inside to hear it.

The arc of history is not self-bending, but mittened hands with simple tools are working on the moral side.

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Michigan Lawsuit Calls Big Oil a “Cartel” That’s Driving High Energy Bills

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

Amid rising concern about global heating and soaring energy costs, Michigan has sued big oil for allegedly fueling both crises—a move experts have hailed as groundbreaking.

In a first-of-its-kind complaint, the state’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, accused four fossil fuel majors and the top US oil lobbying group last month of acting as a “cartel” to stifle the growth of renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs), while suppressing information about the dangers of the climate crisis. The conduct, the lawsuit alleged, violates federal and state antitrust laws.

The companies’ “collusion” drove up Michigan utility costs and slowed the transition away from gas-powered cars, according to the filing. Absent the industry’s efforts to repress clean technology, EVs “would be a common sight in every neighborhood—rolling off assembly lines in Flint, parked in driveways in Dearborn, charging outside grocery stores in Grand Rapids, and running quietly down Woodward Avenue,” it said.

“The Big Oil cartel conspired to deny Americans cleaner and cheaper energy choices and make life less affordable.”

Electricity costs in Michigan have surged, with average residential rates increasing by nearly 120 percent in the last two decades. And though electric car adoption is increasing, EVs and hybrids accounted for less than 4 percent of total registered vehicles statewide last year.

“Michigan is facing an energy affordability crisis as our home energy costs skyrocket and consumers are left without affordable options for transportation,” Nessel said in a statement. “These out-of-control costs are not the result of natural economic inflation, but due to the greed of these corporations who prioritized their own profit and marketplace dominance over competition and consumer savings.”

Michigan’s case specifically targets BP, Shell, Chevron, and ExxonMobil, as well as the largest US oil lobby group, the American Petroleum Institute (API).

“This is yet another legally incoherent effort to regulate by lawsuit,” an ExxonMobil spokesperson said. “It won’t reduce emissions, it won’t help consumers and it won’t stand up to the law.”

Ryan Meyers, general counsel for the API, said: “These baseless lawsuits are a coordinated campaign against an industry that powers everyday life, drives America’s economy and is actively reducing emissions. We continue to believe that energy policy belongs in Congress, not a patchwork of courtrooms.”

BP declined to comment on the pending litigation. The Guardian has contacted all defendants for comment.

The oil industry has long attempted to have lawsuits voided by saying they are pre-empted by policies, but plaintiffs say climate accountability lawsuits focus on business practices and the distribution of misleading information, not emissions regulations.

The 126-page lawsuit was brought by Nessel’s office alongside Sher Edling—a California-based law firm that is representing a slew of municipalities in climate accountability litigation—and two other firms, DiCello Levitt and Hausfeld, which have also handled climate complaints and are based in Chicago and Washington DC, respectively.

The new challenge accuses the defendants of engaging in a vast “conspiracy,” starting almost 50 years ago when a 1979 Exxon internal report predicted the world would see catastrophic global heating without a massive shift to renewable energy.

“Rather than compete as leading producers of renewable energy products, the defendants and their co-conspirators conspired to suppress their own output of renewable energy, and restrain output by others,” the lawsuit said.

To do so, the firms used an array of tactics, including employing patent lawsuits to stop their competitors, hiding information about fossil fuels’ dangers and the viability of renewables, using trade associations to coordinate “market-wide efforts” to skew investments toward oil and gas, and even hiring hackers to “surveil, intimidate and disrupt” journalists and activists, it claimed.

“Michigan’s groundbreaking case reveals how the Big Oil cartel conspired to deny Americans cleaner and cheaper energy choices and make life less affordable by keeping consumers hooked on their dirty fossil fuel products,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit that tracks and supports climate litigation.

With the challenge, Michigan joins 10 other states and about 60 local governments that have sued Big Oil for alleged climate deception in recent years. Together, the cases represent jurisdictions that are home to more than a quarter of the US population.

Nessel first announced plans to launch climate accountability litigation in 2024, stating concerns with the cost of climate damages in her state. The January 23 filing came despite attempts to thwart climate accountability litigation from the Trump administration. Last year, the Department of Justice took the unusual step of suing Michigan and Hawaii over the states’ plans to file such cases; despite the attack, Hawaii filed its lawsuit the following day.

In a blow to the Trump administration, one day after Michigan filed its lawsuit, a federal judge tossed out the justice department’s filing against the state.

But the oil industry and its allies are continuing their attempts to kill off climate accountability lawsuits. The fossil fuel industry is lobbying Congress to obtain immunity from climate-focused litigation and policies, and last month the API listed defeating climate accountability lawsuits as a top priority for 2026.

The sector and its allies have also been pushing the Supreme Court to weigh in on the legitimacy of climate lawsuits. Soon, the high court is expected to decide if it will hear arguments over a petition by ExxonMobil and energy giant Suncor seeking to end a lawsuit brought by the city and county of Boulder, Colorado.

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Illinois Representative Asks God to Get Trump to “Do What Is Right”

During his address to God at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Rep. Jonathan Jackson, a democrat from Illinois, called on President Donald Trump to be “invested in the elevation of suffering” of people in this country, including “the families preparing to bury their loved ones in Minneapolis.”

Rep. Jackson, son of civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson, asked God to “remind” the president “that he has the power to turn mourning into dancing or to reduce the country into a cosmic elegy of chaos and suffering” as Trump stood just feet away, his eyes fluttering open and shut during the prayer.

The representative’s prayer provided an uninterrupted moment in a crowded room to call attention to the ongoing and violent federal immigration operation in Minneapolis, which, as Jackson noted, included agents fatally shooting two US citizens: Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

Both men were on stage for the 74th National Prayer Breakfast, an event that every president has attended since Dwight D. Eisenhauer. It was Trump’s sixth time speaking at the breakfast, and his address lasted over an hour and 15 minutes.

In that address, Trump falsely claimed that he won the popular vote in the 2016 election, joked that “I really think I probably should make it” into heaven, and defended his Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who is facing increasing calls for her to be fired or impeached, among other boilerplate talking points for the president.

Rep. Jackson has been a critic of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s operations and was a part of the group of Illinois lawmakers who were denied entry into an ICE processing facility during the summer, before being granted access late last year. He’s faced pushback, though, for buying stock in Palantir, a major ICE contractor. The representative, according to NOTUS, “regretted buying this stock and that he asked his financial adviser to get rid of his Palantir holdings.”

Elsewhere in Rep. Jackson’s prayer about Trump, he asked God to “increase the stature of his wisdom,” to “lead this president into greater levels of compassion,” and to “give him greater clarity, greater courage, and greater capacity to do what is right.”

“For the sake of this nation, for the sake of this world, we pray that goodness and mercy would announce themselves in his life in new and powerful ways,” Rep. Jackson said, adding, “remind him that we are all Americans, all made in the image of God and that none of us are free unless all of us have our freedoms protected.”

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Health Department Will Mine Unverified Vaccine Injury Claims With New AI Tool

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

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is developing a generative artificial intelligence tool to find patterns across data reported to a national vaccine monitoring database and to generate hypotheses on the negative effects of vaccines, according to an inventory released last week of all use cases the agency had for AI in 2025.

The tool has not yet been deployed, according to the HHS document, and an AI inventory report from the previous year shows that it has been in development since late 2023. But experts worry that the predictions it generates could be used by HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to further his anti-vaccine agenda.

A long-standing vaccine critic, Kennedy has upended the childhood vaccination schedule in his year in office, removing several shots from a list of recommended immunizations for all children, including those for Covid-19, influenza, hepatitis A and B, meningococcal disease, rotavirus, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

Kennedy has also called for overhauling the current safety monitoring system for vaccine injury data collection, known as Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), claiming that it suppresses information about the true rate of vaccine side effects. He has also proposed changes to the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that could make it easier for people to sue for adverse events that haven’t been proven to be associated with vaccines.

Jointly managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration, VAERS was established in 1990 as a way to detect potential safety issues with vaccines after their approval. Anyone, including health care providers and members of the public, can submit an adverse reaction report to the database. Because these claims are not verified, VAERS data alone can’t be used to determine if a vaccine caused an adverse event.

“I would expect, depending on the approaches used, a lot of false alerts and a need for a lot of skilled human follow-through.”

“VAERS, at best, was always a hypothesis-generating mechanism,” says Paul Offit, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who was previously a member of the CDC’s Advisory Council on Immunization Practices. “It’s a noisy system. Anybody can report, and there’s no control group.”

Offit says the system only shows adverse events that happened at some point following immunization; it doesn’t prove that a vaccine caused those reactions. CDC’s own website says that a report to VAERS does not mean that a vaccine caused an adverse event. Despite this, anti-vaccine activists have misused VAERS data over the years to argue that vaccines are not safe.

Leslie Lenert, previously the founding director of the CDC’s National Center for Public Health Informatics, says government scientists have been using traditional natural language processing AI models to look for patterns in VAERS data for several years, so it’s not surprising that HHS would move toward the adoption of more advanced large language models.

One major limitation of VAERS is that it doesn’t include data on how many people received a vaccine, which can make events logged in the database seem more common than they actually are. For that reason, Lenert says it’s important to pair information from VAERS with other data sources to determine the true risk of an event.

LLMs are also famously good at producing convincing hallucinations, underscoring the need for humans to follow up on any hypotheses generated by an LLM. “VAERS is supposed to be very exploratory. Some people in the FDA are now treating it as more than exploratory,” says Lenert, who is currently the director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Health Artificial Intelligence at Rutgers University.

Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, reportedly proposed stricter vaccine regulation in a recent memo sent to staff in which he blamed the deaths of at least 10 children on the Covid-19 vaccine without citing evidence. The deaths were reported to VAERS and had previously been reviewed by FDA staff. More than a dozen former FDA commissioners responded with a letter in The New England Journal of Medicine, expressing concern about Prasad’s proposed guidelines. The changes, they wrote, would “dramatically change vaccine regulation on the basis of a reinterpretation of selective evidence.”

Jesse Goodman, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at Georgetown University, says that the use of LLMs could potentially detect previously unknown safety issues with vaccines. But since VAERS can contain inaccurate and incomplete data, he says it’s important that any leads are thoroughly investigated first.

“I would expect, depending on the approaches used, a lot of false alerts and a need for a lot of skilled human follow-through by people who understand vaccines and possible adverse events, as well as statistics, epidemiology, and challenges with LLM output,” he says.

With deep staffing cuts at the CDC, Goodman says it would be important to have plans and capacity in place to deal with any emerging data, including screening it and deciding what may need to be studied further and how.

In the past, VAERS has flagged legitimate safety issues, including instances of a rare clotting disorder among some people who received the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine and rare cases of myocarditis, particularly among younger males, who got the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.

HHS did not respond to a request for comment.

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Minneapolis Is the Violent Reckoning the Gun Rights Movement Has Long Wanted

This story was co-published with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America.

On December 31, in the waning hours of 2025, the Washington Post reported on an internal ICE document that concerned the agency’s “wartime recruitment” strategy, or rather its attempt to expeditiously swell its ranks of deportation officers. The memo, according to the Post, had in mind a pool of ideal candidates who lead a “patriotic” lifestyle and have an interest in “military and veterans affairs,” “physical training,” “gun rights organizations,” and “tactical gear brands.”

The memo’s logic was easy enough to understand, since what it described, if you read between the lines, was an informal paramilitary that was waiting to be tapped. Over the last month—as a violent federal occupation has unfolded in Minneapolis, where veteran immigration agents brutally killed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti—both the memo and the new recruits it would draw into the fold began to take up outsized space in my mind. For a long time now, the gun rights movement has been animated by the promise of a violent reckoning, a sentiment nurtured by the groups that represent it and Republican politicians, who seek to channel a wild, truculent energy into votes and profits. It seemed the promise was being fulfilled in Minneapolis, like the fatal denouement of a production that had one harbinger after another.

“Any mission, any condition, any foes, at any range.”

During the 2016 election cycle, when as a reporter I attended my first National Rifle Association annual meeting, I began to see that the promised reckoning could not be delayed forever. At the convention, in Louisville, Kentucky, there was the tradeshow floor, akin to a medieval arms bazaar and containing some 520,000 square feet of guns and tactical accessories. There were seminars covering “Defensive Shooting Skills Development,” “Methods of Concealed Carry,” “Current and Emerging Threats,” and “The Bulletproof Mind For The Armed Civilian.” And there was a line of some 7,000 people, leading into an arena called “Freedom Hall,” where there would be speeches by the emerging Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, and Mark “Oz” Geist, a member of the Benghazi diplomatic compound’s security team that had come under siege in 2012.

Three middle-aged white men stood in line in front of me making confident assertions about Barack Obama and “government cover-ups.” One informed the others that Obama, still president, had purchased a “$10 million mansion in Saudi Arabia,” where he and his family would flee after leaving the White House to “evade charges.” Trump would of course chase him down, the man assured everyone, while the United States reembraced frontier justice and flourished under his rule.

The line then moved inside, 7,000 people took their seats, and the Republican presidential candidate promised them: “I will never let you down.” Based on the ecstatic response from the crowd, it seemed to me that the message Trump had transmitted was about power—raw power—and who would wield it during his administration.

Going back to at least the early nineties, when President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was in office, gun rights organizations, led by the NRA, and various prominent Republicans pushed an argument for the Second Amendment that was disguised as a historical one. The right to bear arms, they said, was intended to be unfettered because its purpose was to provide citizens with the means to fight a tyrannical government that had turned against its own people. Federal agents, under Clinton, were “jack-booted government thugs,” according to a notorious fundraising letter signed by former NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre. These thugs, he said, had the power to “take away our Constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.”

It was often implied that such arguments, which grew in prominence during Barack Obama’s tenure, applied only to the Democratic Party, which posed a vague yet persistent threat to “freedom,” while the Republican party would preserve it. Republican values were antithetical to tyranny, whereas Democrats were inherently tyrannical, and therefore any actions taken by the former were in service of saving the country from the latter.

In 2016, while sitting in “Freedom Hall,” I began to feel a sense of alarm that I’d never before felt. Under Trump, this contingent would feel it had permission to act against the enemy. The carrot that was dangled during each election cycle—in fundraising pitches by gun rights groups and the sale of military-style firearms to civilians—was finally being fed to the horse. There would be no more “couch commandos,” as gun industry executives referred to their most enthusiastic customers in the years after 9/11. This was the period in which soldiers were in American streets, and the industry, en masse, had seized on a marketing opportunity to blur the line between soldier and civilian.

What the industry was selling was theatrical participation, the thrill of COSPLAY, except the props were real. “As close as you can get without enlisting,” one gun company, in 2010, boasted as it advertised its “semi-auto only version of the U.S. Special Operations Command’s newest rifle.” “Any mission, any condition, any foes, at any range,” said another manufacturer about its latest assault weapon. In the ad it was equipped with a scope and propped on a tripod, as if intended for a sniper, which of course was the point. Companies were selling military-style weapons with a “combat-proven design,” that provided “versatility on the range or during patrol,” and were a symbol of “bravery on duty.” To enhance the feeling of a simulated combat experience, manufacturers of AR-style firearms cut product placement deals with video game designers. An executive at the gun company Sig Sauer told authors Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, who co-wrote the book American Gun, that featuring the weapons in games was tantamount to “seed planting.”

Buying a gun had become a way to serve at home, and serving at home came to mean preparing for Democratic tyranny. In 2015, for instance, while Obama was still president, the Pentagon prepared for a training exercise across the American Southwest called Jade Helm 15. It was here that the performative, paranoid politics of the right during the Obama years reached something of a fever pitch. Conservative bloggers and commentators created widespread hysteria by alleging that the exercise was a veil for imposing martial law, confiscating firearms, arresting dissidents, and taking over Texas. The state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, called on the Texas State Guard to monitor developments. It was “important,” he said, that Texans know their “rights” and “liberties” would not be “infringed.” The last word did not seem like an accidental allusion to the Second Amendment.

For conservative elites, the preservation of power requires giving those beneath them a taste of it, without actually surrendering anything substantial, such as higher tax payments. In the meantime, they have created a shadow army, empowering them not with wealth but with the alluring prospect of crushing their opponents. A few months after the 2016 NRA convention, Trump said at a rally that Hillary Clinton “wants to abolish” the Second Amendment. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” he went on. “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.” Trump for much of his career had been the paragon of vapid wealth, but unlike other leaders of the right who came before him, he was signaling that he would take the army off standby, out of the realm of theater, and move the violent plot forward.

The 2020 anti-lockdown Covid protests were a stark indicator of the new paradigm under Trump, who directed blame for restrictions toward Democrats such as Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer. After state lawmakers voted to extend her state of emergency, a large group of men carrying assault rifles packed the Michigan Capitol rotunda and attempted to barge into the legislature, where a line of police guarded the doors. They screamed in the faces of the officers, who looked on impassively.

The lurid fantasy at the heart of the gun rights movement is playing out, but the leading roles, as they were previously imagined, have been reversed.

As the year wore on, Trump told the Proud Boys during a televised presidential debate to “stand back and stand by.” His loss to Joe Biden then set into motion the January 6 insurrection. Oath Keepers stashed an arsenal of weapons at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia. One member imagined a scenario in which “millions die resisting the death of the 1st and 2nd amendment.” A week later, a middle-aged white man named Ian Rogers, a California resident and proud NRA member, was arrested with his best friend for planning to attack the state’s Democratic headquarters. He owned roughly 50 firearms, including four illegal automatic weapons, and had stockpiled 15,000 rounds of ammunition. Writing to me from prison last year, he said that the Democratic Party was “the greatest threat facing the United States today.” He went on, “Just as Rome was brought down by enemies within, we have such traitors amongst us now,” adding, “These people fundamentally hate the country and they will do anything to impose their vision on the nation.”

Now, in Minneapolis, masked federal agents, dressed as soldiers, have fatally shot two American citizens. Both were victims of an occupation, in which the Trump administration has unleashed a savage campaign of terror against civilians. The lurid fantasy at the heart of the gun rights movement is playing out, but the leading roles, as they were previously imagined, have been reversed. The party in power is not a Democratic regime, but a Republican one, prompting accusations of hypocrisy against gun rights organizations, who have had little to say and have not called on their followers to face down tyranny in Minneapolis.

Following the merciless second killing, of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, federal officials, led by Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, concocted a false narrative alleging that Pretti had murderous intentions. Pretti had a sidearm on his waist, and they shamelessly pointed to it as evidence, even though the gun was holstered, he was legally carrying it, and agents shot him after they had removed the weapon.

Officials also tried to argue that, owing to the firearm’s presence, Pretti’s death was justified. This assertion presented an existential quandary for gun rights organizations, which have spent decades working to dismantle carry restrictions. One by one, the groups issued statements about how a holstered handgun did not give law enforcement the right to kill a person. That was the wrong message, the groups said, but the tyranny of the occupation itself was treated as legitimate. Gun Owners of America stated that “the Left must stop antagonizing @ICEgov and @CBP agents who are taking criminals off the streets and play a crucial role in protecting communities and upholding the rule of law.” The NRA similarly declared, “For months, radical progressive politicians like Tim Walz have incited violence against law enforcement officers who are simply trying to do their jobs.”

What is happening now, in other words, is a reminder that the argument about government tyranny was always a canard. Beneath it lurked what was really at stake, which was the right to assert control through force. Over and over, conservatives and Second Amendment stalwarts have claimed that right as their own, with Minneapolis being the latest example. The story they have told for decades is a binary one—good versus evil. In that framing, they are righteous and have but one job: Vanquish the enemy. Hold power. Save America.

The same day Pretti was shot, video surfaced of federal agents pointing their weapons at civilians. “It’s like ‘Call of Duty,’” someone could be heard saying, referencing the blockbuster military-style video game series. Since then, Trump has suggested he will deescalate in Minneapolis. But whatever happens, the players have had a taste of the real thing, and there’s no going back.

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700 Immigration Officers Are Leaving Minneapolis. The Rest Will Depend on “Cooperation.”

President Trump’s Border czar, Tom Homan, announced Wednesday that the Trump administration will remove 700 federal immigration officers from Minneapolis. The decision, effective immediately, still leaves over 2,000 agents in the area, nearly four times the number of officers in the Minneapolis Police Department.

Homan claimed that although he and the president shared the goal “to achieve a complete drawdown and end this surge, as soon as we can,” such a complete withdrawal would depend on the “continued cooperation from state and local law enforcement and the decrease of the violence, the rhetoric, and the attacks” against immigration officials.

The plan marked a stark contrast to ICE’s retreat in Maine, after Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican up for re-election this year, abruptly announced last week that ICE was ending its surge in the state, citing a conversation she had with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

In his press conference, Homan also said that Wednesday’s reduction did not signal a pause in Trump’s overarching goal of mass deportations.

“Let me be clear: President Trump fully intends to achieve mass deportations during this administration, and immigration enforcement actions will continue every day throughout this country, “Homan said. “President Trump made a promise. And we have not directed otherwise.”

Homan was sent to Minneapolis to take over what the administration calls “Operation Metro Surge,” replacing Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino after the fatal shootings of US citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents.

The presence of immigration officers over the last month has seen repeated use of chemical irritants on protestors, the targeting of children at school, the separation of families, and the detention of people here legally—all of which have created an environment of intense fear.

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Donald Trump’s Plan to Be King of the World

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land_. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial._

With so much going on these days—ICE murders, Venezuela, Epstein documents, and Melania—one development has not gotten enough attention: Donald Trump’s plan to become king of the world.

Last month, Trump announced he was establishing a so-called Board of Peace to oversee the rebuilding of Gaza, and the chair of this august group would be…him. And the executive board would include Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gabriel, and Trump donor and billionaire investment banker Marc Rowan, as well as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and World Bank head Ajay Banga.

Not a very independent board, is it? By the way, the latest release of Jeffrey Epstein documents shows that Rowan, the CEO of Apollo Global Management, according to the Financial Times, had “wide-ranging discussions” with Epstein, though Apollo previously insisted it had not done any business with the sex criminal. (Former Apollo chief Leon Black resigned his position in 2021 after an independent review showed he paid $158 million to Epstein for financial services.) And fun fact about Gabriel: During the January 6 riot, when he was a White House speechwriter, he sent a text message saying, “Potus im sure is loving this.”

Each member of the executive board, the White House said, will oversee “a defined portfolio critical to Gaza’s stabilization and long-term success,” and a Gaza Executive Board within the Board of Peace will also be set up, with Kushner, Witkoff, Blair, and Rowan as members, along with several others, including a Cypriot-Israeli billionaire, an Egyptian intelligence official, and a UN official. No Palestinians were recruited for either of these boards.

So it looked as if this Board of Peace would be a Trump-dominated, crony-ish operation deciding the fate of 2 million Gazans. Not surprising. But it’s turning out to be much more.

The opportunities for graft and grift are immense.

Shortly after the White House unveiled this outfit, it released the charter for the Board of Peace. Oddly, the document said nothing about Gaza. It proclaimed that the Board of Peace would seek to “promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.” That is, anywhere in the world. Under the rules presented in the charter, Trump would be the chairman and the US representative to the Board of Peace…forever. That is, until he resigns or is booted due to “incapacity”—which would require a unanimous vote by the executive board. And, according to the charter, he decides who’s on the executive board. Each member serves entirely at his pleasure (and whim).

Even after he leaves the White House, Trump will rule this competitor to the United Nations (which now is in danger of financial collapse). And the charter gives him “exclusive authority” to “appropriate,” which seems to mean total control over the funds. Also, he determines what nations can join. Nations can only serve a three-year term, subject to renewal by, of course, Trump. But if a country ponies up $1 billion (in cash) to the Board of Peace, the three-year limit is waived.

Trump is essentially cooking up a global slush fund over which he will exert complete control. Countries that get in early—while he’s president—will certainly be in a strong position to request preferential treatment in state affairs. The opportunities for graft and grift are immense. He will probably ask Congress to kick in the $1 billion pay-to-play membership fee to guarantee he’ll have a pot of money to spend (or pocket) at his fancy.

What’s to prevent him from naming Ivanka Trump his successor? Or Don Jr.? Or Jared? (Talk about a succession battle!) Under this charter, Trump could establish an international monarchy of sorts. Hail King Barron!

That’s not all. How will Trump’s successor as chair be picked? Silly to ask, right? By Trump, naturally. Per the charter, he will designate a successor who “shall immediately assume the position” if Trump leaves or is—ha ha ha—pushed out because he cannot do the job. The charter, as I read it, doesn’t say how long the successor will reign—presumably, under the same terms as Trump. What’s to prevent him from naming Ivanka Trump his successor? Or Don Jr.? Or Jared? (Talk about a succession battle!) Under this charter, Trump could establish an international monarchy of sorts. Hail King Barron!

At the recent World Economic Forum shindig in Davos, Trump held a charter signing ceremony for the Board of Peace, with representatives from Argentina, Turkey, Hungary, Bulgaria, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Qatar, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Morocco, Paraguay, and Pakistan. Not to be condescending, but this is not the A-team, and many of these nations have assorted human rights problems—an issue absent from the charter. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who backs this Trump venture, couldn’t be there because he’s subject to an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in Gaza. He was present in spirit, no doubt. Conspicuously missing from the lineup were the United States’ most important allies.

To add to the absurdity, Trump has invited Russia and China to join. Offering a spot on the Board of Peace to Vladimir Putin while his invasion force is killing civilians in Ukraine is quite a bad joke—and an insult to those Ukrainians losing their lives and their loved ones to combat Russia’s aggression.

Trump’s Board of Peace is another Trump scam—though much grander than Trump Steaks or Trump’s meme coin (which has dropped about 90 percent in value since being launched a year ago).

In fact, the whole thing is a bit of a joke. As Charbel Antoun, a writer who specializes in foreign policy, points out, “The Board of Peace lacks the basic components of a functioning international institution: no defined legal status within existing international law; no enforcement tools or dispute resolution procedures; no accountability mechanisms; a mandate that drifts from Gaza reconstruction into a vague promise to ‘address global crises.’” It can’t really do anything. Except be a platform for you-know-who.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear what the Board of Peace will be doing about Gaza. At Davos, Kushner unveiled a Gaza development plan that called for glittering high-rises on the coastline and gigantic data centers and industrial parks inland. He had a nifty PowerPoint presentation but apparently had not consulted with any Palestinians. He arrogantly signaled this scheme was not open to discussion, remarking, “There is no Plan B.” Kushner did not say who would finance this makeover—or profit from it.

Trump’s Board of Peace is another Trump scam—though much grander than Trump Steaks or Trump’s meme coin (which has dropped about 90 percent in value since being launched a year ago). Trump is looking to shake down nations that want to earn his favor—it’s only a billion bucks!—and set up an outfit he can exploit once he has wrung the Oval Office dry. The charter calls for an official seal for the organization—and the logo Trump approved shows only half the world—but it left out what Trump really wants: a crown.

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Kristi Noem’s Throttling of FEMA Funds Constitutes a Preventable Disaster

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

Kristi Noem faces intensifying public scrutiny over her leadership of the Department of Homeland Security. Criticism of the former South Dakota governor has focused on her handling of the killing of Alex Pretti by a federal immigration agent and her oversight of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The controversies have prompted calls from Democratic lawmakers—and a small but noteworthy group of Republicans—for her resignation or impeachment.

The immediate flashpoint has been the January 24 killing of Pretti, which occurred during ongoing protests in Minneapolis. Noem initially described Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, as a “domestic terrorist,” a narrative repeated by others in the Trump administration. Her account was almost immediately contradicted by numerous videos that showed Pretti was unarmed and restrained when federal agents shot him repeatedly.

“She should be out of a job,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said after the videos emerged. While President Donald Trump has publicly said Noem’s position is secure, a number of potential successors have reportedly emerged, including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Lee Zeldin, who leads the Environmental Protection Agency.

“It’s magic-wand policymaking, where you need a crisis in order for something to happen.”

Noem’s handling of the killing—which came two weeks after a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis fatally shot protestor Renée Good—follows sustained criticism of her management of FEMA. Lawmakers, disaster response experts, and disaster survivors say her policies have slowed emergency response and delayed recovery funding. Long before the crisis in Minnesota, concerns were building over her approach to FEMA preparedness and spending and its response to calamities like last year’s devastating floods in the Texas Hill Country.

“It’s a policy of chaotic austerity,” said Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies disasters and adaptation. “It’s magic-wand policymaking, where you need a crisis in order for something to happen.”

FEMA helps coordinate the response to major disasters like last year’s Los Angeles wildfires, but the agency more often acts like a bank, reimbursing states and cities for their disaster preparedness and recovery spending. When Noem took office, she throttled that spending by, among other things, requiring her personal sign-off on all expenses over $100,000. The pace of disbursements has since slowed to a trickle.

Those restrictions reportedly hindered the agency’s response to emergencies like July’s floods in Texas because officials could not pre-position search and rescue teams. The acting head of FEMA at the time, David Richardson, was reportedly unreachable for several hours, and the agency did not answer two-thirds of calls to its hotline. More than 130 people died in the floods.

On Thursday, a coalition of disaster survivors released a “report card” that gave Noem’s leadership an “F.” Brandy Gerstner, a member of that coalition, lost her home and belongings in the Texas flood. She and her family live in the rural community of Sandy Creek and spent three days without power or water waiting for federal assistance.

“Official help was scarce,” she said. “Despite that, Kristi Noem and Texas Gov. [Greg] Abbott have described the response as exceptional, a lie that insults the memory of those lost in the floods.”

Beyond floods in Texas and fires in Southern California, the United States experienced relatively few major disasters last year. Even so, Noem’s restrictions on FEMA spending has also slowed payments to local governments still recovering from past catastrophes. The reimbursement backlog has reached $17 billion, according to the New York Times—more than the agency spends on such things in a typical year.

Delays have also affected FEMA’s efforts to reduce the impact of future catastrophes. A Grist analysis found that the agency’s net spending on resilience grants declined over the past three quarters, even as climate-driven disasters intensified nationwide. The nonprofit news outlet NOTUS identified a $1.3 billion backlog of such allocations, the primary source of federal funding for states and cities seeking to harden infrastructure. FEMA terminated another climate resilience program last year, though a court has ordered it to reinstate that program.

Former FEMA chief of staff Michael Coen Jr. said Noem’s departure could ease the logjam. “I don’t see another secretary coming in that is going to want to review every single grant,” said Coen, who served in the Obama and Biden administrations. “I would think that most executive leaders…are gonna find that that is micromanagement.”

“There’s plenty of towns in Vermont that would still say they’re waiting.”

Beyond Noem’s leadership lie other questions about the agency’s direction. The Trump administration has yet to nominate a permanent administrator, leaving Karen Evans, a former cybersecurity official, in charge since Richardson departed in November. Agency leaders have suggested firing more than 11,000 employees, many of them contract workers involved in local response and recovery efforts.

The Trump administration’s touted “review council” was set to produce a report on FEMA’s future, but Noem reportedly pared the council’s final report to a fraction of its original length. The panel abruptly cancelled its plans to present the findings in December, and its deadline has been pushed to March.

“I think whether she stays or goes, there are huge issues that have been created in the last year at FEMA that have to be resolved quickly ahead of hurricane season,” Labowitz, said, referring to the season to come.

Noem appeared to soften her approach last week. The agency paused its planned terminations, and Noem hosted her first in-person briefing with agency employees, whom she attempted to rally ahead of Winter Storm Fern. She also appeared to respond to mounting criticism on Thursday when she announced the release of $2.2 billion in disaster response funds.

The money will reimburse states and local governments for repair costs associated with events like Hurricane Helene, the 2023 floods in Vermont, and coastal erosion in Louisiana. A press release frames the allocation as “additional” recovery money, but recipients told Grist that FEMA is merely following standard procedure in granting reimbursements.

“We were all quite surprised yesterday when we were informed that the payment was coming as quickly as it came,” said Joe Flynn, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Transportation. FEMA told his agency that it would provide $22 million to help rebuild a fleet garage destroyed in the 2023 floods. “There’s plenty of towns in Vermont that would still say they’re waiting.”

The offer was less than the state had requested, but Flynn accepted it given uncertainty about future funding. “With everything going on in the federal government, an adequately granted award is a bird in the hand,” he said.

The press release appeared to have been composed in haste. It contained multiple typos, including a misspelling of Louisiana as “Louisianna.” The director of the Greeneville Water Commission, after confirming that FEMA will reimburse the cost of rebuilding infrastructure lost to Helene, noted that her own town’s name was spelled wrong as well.

“By the way,” said commission director Laura White, “they spelled Greeneville wrong!”

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Bad Bunny, Billionaires, and the Business of Sports

From financial scandals to transgender rights, DEI, and Bad Bunny performing in this weekend’s Super Bowl, there’s no shortage of sports stories to tell. However, investigative sports journalism is a shell of its former self. That’s where Pablo Torre comes in.

A longtime sports journalist and now host of the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, Torre prides himself on digging into the important stories that affect not only sports, but American culture and politics. And that often means investigating the intersection of money and sports. “In sports, unlike in business, you can even argue, there is something resembling a meritocracy that is enforced and cared about by fans, let alone the officials that are meant to tend the store of what it is to have integrity in professional sports,” he says.

Torre’s reporting has shined a light on many stories that have gone unnoticed or underreported, like his investigation into LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer potentially violating the NBA salary cap. He also recently collaborated with Mother Jones reporter Madison Pauly on a story about former college swimmer Riley Gaines’ rise to MAGA prominence through anti-trans activism. Gaines, Torre says, turned her grievance against one trans athlete into a career and political platform, “such that she is in real intimate connection with not just the White House, but the superstructure of political organizations that crop up to turn her cause as this supposed victim into a way to truly victimize trans people in America.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Torre sits down with host Al Letson to discuss what it’s like investigating the complicated world of sports.

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

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Federal Judge Calls Out the Racism of Trump Admin’s Plan to End TPS for Haitians

A federal judge issued a last-minute temporary stay on Monday to block the Trump administration’s attempt to remove temporary legal protections for up to 350,000 Haitian immigrants across the United States.

In a brutal 83-page takedown, Judge Ana C. Reyes of the US District Court for DC specifically laid into a December X post from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that claimed foreign “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” are ruining the vision of the founding fathers.

“The plaintiffs are five Haitian TPS holders,” Reyes wrote. “They are not, it emerges, ‘killers, leeches, or entitlement junkies.’ They are instead: Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, Rudolph Civil, a software engineer at a national bank, Marlene Gail Noble, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department, Marica Merline Laguerre, a college economics major, id., and Vilbrun Dorsainvil, a full-time registered nurse.”

I just met with the President.

I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that's been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.

Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign…

— Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) December 1, 2025

“One of those (her word) ‘damn’ countries is Haiti,” Reyes continued. “Three days before making the above post, Secretary Noem announced she would terminate Haiti’s TPS designation as of February 3, 2026.”

Reyes said that it was therefore “substantially likely” that Noem had moved to end TPS status for Haitians due to “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.”

Temporary Protected Status is a designation that allows people who have moved to the US from countries enduring ongoing armed conflicts, environmental disasters, or epidemics to legally work and reside in the US. It was set to expire on Tuesday, meaning many Haitian immigrants who came to the US legally would be subject to deportation.

As of March 2025, the US provides TPS protections to roughly 330,000 Haitians, according to the National Immigration Forum. Former President Barack Obama designated Haiti for TPS after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck the country in January 2010, in which an estimated 220,000 people died and over 300,000 were injured.

As Isabela Dias wrote last year: “The Trump administration has moved to end TPS for Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans and canceled a humanitarian parole initiative, known as CHNV, that had allowed more than 500,000 migrants from four countries, including Venezuela, to come to the United States and work for up to two years.” In fact, as Reyes notes, “Noem has terminated every TPS country designation to have reached her desk—twelve countries up, twelve countries down.”

Bigotry toward immigrants has long been a cornerstone for Donald Trump and his followers. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeated unfounded claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating other residents’ pets. The rhetoric resulted in dozens of bomb threats [link please]. Springfield, a city with fewerthan 60,000, is home to about 15,000 Haitians. In 2018, Trump called Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations “shithole” countries.

Since Reyes’ ruling, Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the DHS, posted on X that the department would take the case to the Supreme Court.

“Haiti’s TPS was granted following an earthquake that took place over 15 years ago, it was never intended to be a de facto amnesty program, yet that’s how previous administrations have used it for decades,” McLaughlin wrote. “Temporary means temporary and the final word will not be from an activist judge legislating from the bench.”

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Snowstorms Are Hell for Wheelchair Users—But They Don’t Have to Be

It took over a week for Mia Ives-Rublee, a wheelchair user and senior director of the Center for American Progress’s disability justice initiative, to be able to move more than a block past her home after one of the country’s most extensive winter storms in years hit her home of Washington, DC, at the end of January.

“Living in a city that you know has the resources, and still dealing with these issues, shows just how poorly cities are ready to deal with accessibility issues,” Ives-Rublee told me.

When sidewalks in her area were cleared, she said, the snow was moved into curb cuts, making it practically impossible for people with mobility devices to cross the street.

Disabled people are uniquely impacted by climate events, including that system of snowstorms, which impacted more than half the United States. ~~i~~The failure of even some of the best-resourced cities to adequately clear snow so that disabled people with mobility devices can safely get around is both an infrastructure failure and a policy choice, leaving those people stuck in one area and stripping them of their autonomy.

“People with a range of disabilities need clean sidewalks for safe mobility, and many in the disability community experience restricted access to food and healthcare when public infrastructure becomes unusable in the aftermath of extreme weather events,” sociologist Angela Frederick, the author of Disabled Power, told me. “For community members with disabilities, the impact of extreme weather can go on and on, even after life has returned to normal for others.”

A 2015 study published in the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation looked at the challenges that Canadians with wheeled mobility devices faced during the winter months. More than 90 percent reported that their devices got stuck in the snow, that they slipped on the ice, and that they had difficulty using ramps. 99 percent said that using sidewalks and roads became problematic.

Living in Arkansas, Bailey Hunter, a wheelchair user, is less used to dealing with the snow. Hunter has not always used a wheelchair, and January’s snowstorm was the first time she had to be out and about with one in winter weather. She was unable to go to work for five days because the snow was not properly cleared.

“You have no autonomy, because you can’t physically move on the snow,” Hunter told me. “You can’t push yourself, you can’t do anything.”

And while losing access to the community can be burden enough, being snowed in can also be dangerous for disabled people.

“This isn’t just about us being able to get outside, but it’s actually a safety hazard,” Ives-Rublee continued. “If I need to go to the hospital, or if I need to go to the doctor’s office, I can’t do that with the snow being how it is.”

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The US Government Is Trying To Make Coal Cute. It Isn’t.

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

Can a lump of coal ever be…cute?

It’s a question no one was thinking about until last Thursday, when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted a cartoon of himself on X kneeling next to “Coalie”—a combustible lump with giant eyes, an open-mouthed grin, and yellow boots, almost like a carbon-heavy Japanese video game character.

![X Post from Secretary Doug Burgum @SecretaryBurgum that says "Mine, Baby, Mine!

@POTUS made it a top priority for @Interior to unleash Beautiful, Clean Coal and @OSMRE is leading the charge!

Learn more about how @OSMRE is advancing @POTUS ' American Energy Dominance Agenda from their new spokesperson, Coalie!" with an illustration of a coal lump wearing saftey gear and Doug Bergrum wearing a Mine, Baby, Mine hard hat. ](https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/coalie-tweet.webp)

Department of the Interior

It might seem like a strange mascot to promote what Burgum calls the “American Energy Dominance Agenda.”

“Especially for this administration, I would have expected a little bit more macho twist to it,” said Joshua Paul Dale, a professor of literature and culture at Chuo University in Tokyo, and the author of Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World.

In Japan, Dale said, seemingly everything gets a cute character attached to it—not just in TV shows and games, but also as part of government public relations efforts. This ultra-adorable aesthetic, associated with rounded shapes and huge eyes, is so common it has a name: kawaii. Even the Tokyo police department has an orange, mouselike mascot, with a disarming cuddliness that serves to make law enforcement feel softer and less threatening.

“There’s nothing funny about black lung disease. There’s nothing funny about the water pollution.”

Coalie appears to do something similar, countering Burgum’s “mine, baby, mine” message with a kawaii-style innocence. “You know, it makes us feel more familiar,” Dale said. “It makes us want to get closer.” Those warm, fuzzy feelings come from how our brains are wired to respond to babylike characteristics. Give a character a round body, big eyes, and chubby arms and legs, and you can even make a lump of coal look huggable.

Coalie is just the latest in a long line of characters used by controversial industries, from tobacco to nuclear energy, that seem designed to make their risks feel less threatening—though they typically looked less cute, at least in the United States. David Ropeik, a risk expert, sees Coalie as part of a tradition of advertising strategies that widely disliked companies use to push back against criticism.

“It’s a common response from cultures that feel themselves under attack, looking for ways to make their case in a less than adversarial way to sell their point of view,” Ropeik said. President Donald Trump has been working on rehabilitating coal’s image as the administration tries to stall the fuel’s decline. Trump has even said he has a standing order in the White House for staff to use the phrase “clean, beautiful coal.” He explained why in November, saying, “It’s ‘clean and beautiful’ because it needs public relations help.”

Even cuteness can backfire, though, if people notice that an extra-adorable character is trying to coax them into liking something dangerous. Consider Pluto-kun, a cherubic mascot from the 1990s who promoted the Japanese nuclear company Tepco—at one point by cheerfully drinking a glass of plutonium as if it were harmless. The character attracted little attention until the nuclear accident at Tepco’s Fukushima plant in 2011, when people began resurfacing Pluto-kun online to point out the irony of its upbeat reassurances as the threat of nuclear disaster felt real and immediate.

Some felt a similar dissonance when Interior Secretary Burgum posted the image of Coalie. Chelsea Barnes, director of government affairs and strategy at Appalachian Voices, an environmental nonprofit, said the character was mocked by some of her friends and colleagues who work to support coal communities because of the serious damage they see firsthand from coal. “There’s nothing funny about climate change,” she said. “There’s nothing funny about black lung disease. There’s nothing funny about the water pollution that many people in Appalachia experience because of coal mining.”

Part of the problem was that the timing was bad, Barnes said. The day after Coalie showed up on Burgum’s social media feed, Trump signed a law that redirects $500 million in funding originally set aside for cleaning up abandoned coal mines to the Forest Service and federal wildfire management programs. On top of that, the administration has been trying to roll back safety programs for miners. To people who care about the health of people working in mines and living near mines, Barnes said, Coalie “comes across as a middle finger, in a way.”

For Coalie’s creators, the backlash was a bit surprising, according to Simone Randolph, the communications director at the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, or OSMRE. The thing is, Coalie wasn’t initially intended as a mascot for “American Energy Dominance.” Its story actually started way back in 2018, when a social media manager at OSMRE put googly eyes on a picture of coal.

“Coalie” became a running joke in the office and an icon on their Teams channel, evolving into different versions over the years, Randolph said. “If you walk down our hallway in the D.C. office, people have pictures of Coalie on their doors.”

Despite the uproar over Coalie, Randolph hopes the mascot can help people learn about her obscure federal office. OSMRE oversees the permitting and regulation of the country’s coal mines and is responsible for cleaning up old, polluted mining land. The agency has transferred and authorized billions of dollars to restore mining lands for better uses—like what’s now the Pittsburgh Botanical Garden.

“So often, communication boils down to something that’s kind of bland,” Randolph said. “It doesn’t really catch the public’s attention. And so we were hoping to do something that would be a little bit more attention-grabbing.” Last week, OSMRE posted an explainer of its work using Coalie as a guide to walk readers through the agency’s responsibilities.

But the office’s character has notable differences to the version of Coalie that Burgum posted on X, which has tiny pink circles next to its eyes. Its features show a clear link to kawaii, an unusual move for an American institution, Dale said. It’s possible that it’s the result of somebody in Burgum’s department using AI to generate the image. In his own experimentation, Dale has found that AI will often add kawaii features to cute characters. Randolph said that OSMRE’s team uses AI tools, encouraged by Burgum, and that the version of Coalie he posted was designed to align with the secretary’s existing “Cartoon Doug” character.

Randolph said that it was an intentional decision to have the interior secretary introduce Coalie online, to bring more attention to OSMRE’s work. “The response has been extreme on both sides,” she said. “And my hope is that we can capitalize upon this moment to at least show the good work that is happening.”

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From Prison to a Preschool

This story was co-published with The 74_,_ a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on education in America.

It was January 2022, and Rhian Allvin was in search of a space that could bring her vision to life.

The early childhood leader had just finished up her nearly decade-long tenure as CEO of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a large, national, nonprofit that promotes high-quality early learning. She’d been steeped in early childhood policy, advocacy, and research for years. She was ready for something new, something hands-on. She wanted to start her own early care and education program.

That’s how she found herself, on that winter day, driving alongside a red-brick prison wall, past imposing watch towers, and onto the sprawling grounds that were once home to a notorious maximum-security prison at the Lorton Reformatory, a correctional complex in Lorton, Virginia.

“Because the ceiling is so tall, and the kids are so small, we wanted to bring the scale down.”

A pair of the former penitentiary’s buildings was among the first Allvin toured in her pursuit of a property that would become her flagship location. The site intrigued her—how could it not? But she walked away, at least at first.

“I said, ‘I’m already out over my skis. This isn’t a great idea,’’ Allvin recalled. “I must’ve looked at 40 or 50 other spaces in Virginia. They were all so vanilla. Office buildings. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I took friends to see it.”

Allvin saw, in the former prison, a possibility for a second life, a rebirth. Eventually, she decided she would turn this historic site, awash in nearly a century of violence and trauma, “into a place of light and joy.”

It took over a year to prepare the space, but Allvin opened the doors to Brynmor Early Education & Preschool in October 2023, with the capacity to serve up to 152 children. Today, the shuttered correctional facility is home to a thriving, high-quality early learning program.

Inside the 15-foot-tall walls, where blood was shed and brutality unfolded, babies now sleep soundly, practice newfound motor skills, learn to communicate with gestures and words, and explore the boundaries of their bodies.

Under a roof that has overseen riots, escapes, and assaults, toddlers now sit at tiny tables for mealtime, learn to wash their hands at little sinks, and attempt to regulate their big emotions under the tutelage of patient caregivers.

On the same grounds where prisoners were once on lockdown for 23 hours a day, children now move about the courtyard freely, riding bicycles and scooters around a racetrack, letting their imaginations guide them in a mud kitchen.

To get to this point, Allvin and many others had their work cut out for them. But the program is named Brynmor — Welsh for “great hill” — for a reason. Though Allvin saw a “steep hill to climb” in transforming this site and in creating a high-quality, profitable, early care and education business, she decided to take that first step anyway.

Brynmor Early Education & Preschool now occupies a pair of red-brick buildings that once housed inmates in a maximum-security prison. By the time CEO Rhian Allvin saw them, they had been gutted for redevelopment.Maginniss + del Ninno Architects

The Lorton Reformatory comprised eight prison facilities across three campuses in the relatively small Northern Virginia community, located about 20 miles outside of Washington, DC.

The complex, which operated from 1910 to 2001 and was primarily used to incarcerate DC inmates, began as a progressive work camp and evolved to include distinct buildings for women, youth, and eventually a maximum-security penitentiary.

By the late 20th century, the Lorton Reformatory, like so many other maximum-security prisons in the United States, had become overcrowded. Violence became an everyday occurrence, according to former guards and inmates featured in Lorton: Prison of Terror, a documentary produced by former inmates and released in 2022. The facility was described as “unfit for humans” and “dusty, dirty, and dangerous.”

“I had moments where I was like, ‘Was this really a good idea?’ There were days where it felt like too much work.”

After it closed, the site was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Over subsequent years, much of the old prison complex was gutted, redeveloped, and converted into art studios, gyms, and luxury apartments.

There have been several comparable efforts to repurpose closed prison facilities across the United States over the last couple of decades, said Nicole D. Porter, senior director of advocacy at The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that studies policies impacting the criminal justice system.

Each building has 50 tall, rectangular windows, allowing natural light to pour in. The windows created design challenges and opportunities for the architects.Maginniss + del Ninno Architects

Though a common outcome is mixed-use developments, she has noticed a trend of these spaces being converted into education centers to serve youth—typically teenagers already involved in the criminal justice system or viewed as “at risk.”

But Porter believes Brynmor is unique; she’s not aware of any other former prison facility that hosts young children. And she pointed out the irony of a program serving early learners in a building that once housed incarcerated people, since early childhood investment has been associated with lower rates of crime in adulthood.

“The idea that a site that caused so much harm … is converted into a site of learning, of teaching young people in a healthy way and a holistic way, is very encouraging,” Porter said of Brynmor. “I would hope it serves as a point of inspiration in what could be possible at closed prisons going forward.”

To take full advantage of the natural light coming in from 100 large windows, the architects made cutouts in interior classroom walls and added windows along the corridors.Judy Davis

By the time Allvin was touring the maximum-security unit in 2022, only a small portion of the original prison cells were intact, preserved in a separate, undeveloped building on the grounds.

The two buildings she visited—9050 and 9060 Power House Road—had already been hollowed out. The two-story-high cell blocks had been removed. There was no HVAC or plumbing, just two vast rectangular buildings.

“I got a cold, dark shell,” said Allvin, who signed a long-term lease for the buildings.

But the high ceilings and large, striking glass windows, which Allvin described as “cathedral-like,” drew her in.

“The buildings were completely empty. We had a blank slate here,” said Theresa del Ninno, principal at Maginniss + del Ninno Architects, a small, women-owned architectural firm that has done a number of adaptive reuse projects for early childhood, including Brynmor. “You don’t really think, ‘This was a maximum-security prison.’”

One might imagine a former prison as gray and drab, an eyesore. That is not the reality of the Lorton site.

“There was always talk about what’s going to happen with these beautiful, historic brick buildings,” said del Ninno. “For years we’ve seen them there, so it was exciting to get a chance to work in two of them.”

The symmetrical Brynmor buildings, at about 6,700 square feet apiece, are connected by a brick colonnade portico, with ample green space in between. Inside each two-story building, the ceilings are nearly 20 feet tall. Great big windows—100 in all—allow natural light to pour in.

These elements created design challenges and opportunities.

Natural light is an obvious advantage, the architects shared. “It’s so bright and light-filled and open,” del Ninno noted.

“I could picture a child care center being there,” said Kim Jesada, project architect, about her first impressions upon seeing the space.

But the same tall, rectangular windows that allow all that light in also created challenges. “We like to have windows down at a child’s eye level,” del Ninno explained. The bottom sills of these windows, however, sit nearly eight feet off the ground.

The architects made cutouts in interior classroom walls and added internal windows along the corridors to allow light from outside to penetrate the innermost parts of each building.

They also had to do something about those two-story ceilings, which are more than twice as high as a standard room.

“Because the ceiling is so tall, and the kids are so small, we wanted to bring the scale down,” del Ninno said.

They added acoustic baffles—sound-absorbing panels that hang from the ceiling—to create the feeling of a lower ceiling and smaller space without obstructing natural light.

The buildings’ shape is “very unusual,” Allvin said. That, too, was a problem to solve.

“Because the buildings are so long,” Jesada said, “we didn’t want to have one single corridor running down that feels like one endless shaft.”

Instead, the corridor charts a diagonal path through each building. That design choice resulted in what del Ninno called “non-rectilinear” classrooms—or what Allvin described as “funky-shaped.”

“I would hope it serves as a point of inspiration in what could be possible at closed prisons going forward.”

They landed on a design that had infant and toddler classrooms in one building and Pre-K in another. The buildings are connected by an open, covered walkway that overlooks a shared play area that’s almost as big as each of the buildings. It includes an outdoor storytime space, a concrete racetrack, an infant play area, and natural climbing structures with timber.

The process of transforming the buildings into the welcoming, child-friendly haven they are today was long and arduous.

“I had moments where I was like, ‘Was this really a good idea?’” Allvin recalled. “There were days when it felt like too much work.”

It was an expensive undertaking, she said. “I was building a 14,000 square-foot child care center on a family child care home budget mentality.”

The two symmetrical Brynmor buildings, at about 6,700 square feet apiece, are connected by a brick colonnade portico, with ample green space in between.Maginniss + del Ninno Architects

A portion of the former maximum-security prison unit at Lorton Reformatory remains intact, with cell blocks preserved.Maginniss + del Ninno Architects

She paid for the multimillion-dollar project with a combination of “socially conscious” investors, a loan from a community development financial institution and private foundation support, she said. And fortunately, there was no shortage of help.

Allvin’s own children, now grown, assembled cribs. A network she built throughout her career, including leaders of other early care and education organizations such as ZERO TO THREE and Child Care Aware of America, pitched in too, putting together furniture. But it wasn’t just friends and family who stepped up. Members of the community were moved by the transformation and wanted to be a part of it.

Shortly before the center opened, Allvin realized she needed more hands on deck, so she hired a few workers through a local company to help. One of the workers shared with Allvin that he’d grown up in DC with a very clear idea about what Lorton Reformatory represented. “He said, ‘Anytime you need help, let me know. All I knew this place to be was where people came to die. Now it’s a place where babies are born, where light happens,’” Allvin recalled. “So many people have had that reaction.”

Around two weeks before opening day, a local couple who had heard about the preschool showed up to see it for themselves, Allvin said. Both of them were former prison guards at Lorton. Allvin took them inside to see the progress, and standing in the infant classroom, the man commented that he wished society designed spaces as intentionally for incarcerated people as it does for kids, she recalled. The woman, Allvin said, returned every day for two weeks to help get the space ready to serve children and families.

When the ribbon cutting ceremony came, Jesada, one of the architects, brought her young daughter with her. She got to see the space anew through her daughter’s eyes. The girl was not privy to the buildings’ history. Her face lit up as she walked in, Jesada remembered.

“The kids aren’t coming into this space thinking, ‘I’m going to preschool in what used to be a prison,’” Jesada said. “[My daughter] saw a warm and inviting space filled with light.”

She added: “I think that with any project, seeing any of the users walk in and their reaction to the space, is what makes me want to keep designing. You see how people get to enjoy the space. Seeing this space filled with kids was my favorite part of it. They feel comfortable and safe learning.”

“He said, ‘Anytime you need help, let me know. All I knew this place to be was where people came to die. Now it’s a place where babies are born, where light happens.”

Tiara Smith, an infant teacher at Brynmor who joined a few months after the center opened, didn’t realize the program was housed in a former prison until she started the job. After seeing the still-intact cells on campus, though, she said the significance of the turnaround is not lost on her.

We’re the change,” she said. “We’re making a difference to new lives—infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. We can give them that foundation to learn to love school, and love life, and enjoy life. We can be that partnership with families. It’s definitely a powerful thing.”

Brynmor has been open for just over two years, and already it has demonstrated what so many in early care and education believe to be impossible.

From the start, Allvin was committed to serving children from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing from her experience as a national early childhood leader, Allvin has been able to build a thoughtful revenue and fee structure that makes that possible. About 60 percent of Brynmor families receive some form of financial assistance — either through government subsidies, child care scholarships with the support of a private foundation, or military subsidies. The rest pay the full price out of pocket.

The center recently earned National Association for the Education of Young Children accreditation—the gold standard for quality in the field, yet a designation that only a fraction of programs can claim. And it invests in its staff. In a field where the average wage is $13 per hour and nearly half of early childhood educators use at least one form of public assistance, Brynmor pays its teachers on par with public school employees, and provides them with health insurance, retirement matching, paid leave, and other benefits.

“That’s why we exist,” Allvin said. “That’s our North Star.”

The model is working so well that Allvin is busy scaling the business. Brynmor now has two more locations, one in the heart of D.C. and another inside a 250-year-old Baptist church in Virginia. Next up, she said, is an effort to convert a former elementary school into an early learning program.

In a field where scarcity is the default, each of these realities is rare. Together, they’re remarkable.

Yet it tracks with the narrative surrounding this project. Light chases out darkness. Hope overcomes despair.

And bit by bit, the promise and potential of our nation’s youngest children rewrites the story of a space that, for decades, represented pain and despair.

Children play outside at Brynmor Early Education & Preschool in Lorton, Virginia. Rhian Allvin

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The Army Veteran Arrested for Protesting at a St. Paul Church Was Just Set Free

Ian Austin, the Army veteran who was arrested in Minneapolis on Friday by federal agents for participating in an anti-ICE protest, has been released without conditions.

Austin was featured in a viral Mother Jones video last week in which he was protesting outside the Whipple Federal Building, where ICE is based and detainees are held. “When they say, ‘Why would you be out here?’ How the fuck could I not be out here?” he said at the time. “My nation is under attack.”

“He loves his country so much, and he sees coming here and standing up for the values that he truly believes in as an extension of that act of service.”

Austin was one of nine defendants, including journalist Don Lemon, who were taken into custody for participating in or reporting on a demonstration last month at a St. Paul church where a local ICE official serves as a pastor. They face federal charges, including for interfering with religious freedom in a place of worship.

The arrests have alarmed free speech advocates, who say the protesters were peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights.

“He loves his country so much,” said Sarah Gad, the defense attorney representing Austin, “and he sees coming here and standing up for the values that he truly believes in as an extension of that act of service.” Gad said that the gallery at Monday’s hearing was full of observers supporting Austin, including many veterans.

Austin said on Monday that he appreciated the support, but he felt uncomfortable that his case was getting so much attention. “As a white person, and as a veteran, it’s like, ‘Oh, some big deal,'” he said. “Meanwhile, families are being ripped apart.”

He said that he plans to continue protesting in the days to come, though he wants to make sure he’s not arrested again. “I’ve been pretty vocal and very willing to be on the front lines,” he said. “Now, I sort of have to shift my tack.”

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Report: Education Department’s “Efficiency” Layoffs Cost At Least $28 Million

The Education Department spent an estimated $28 to $38 million on attempted staff cuts last year at its Office of Civil Rights, according to a report from the US Government Accountability Office released Monday.

The department initiated a reduction in force last March, pushing nearly 50 percent of its more than 4,000-strong workforce onto administrative leave. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon called the cuts a “commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers.”

Later that month, Donald Trump signed an executive order stating that the Secretary of Education should “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities.”

At the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which enforces federal civil rights laws in schools and other institutions that receive Education Department funding, close to half its 575employees were put on leave in March. In October, they were officially laid off. In November, they were taken off the payroll. The department’s cuts were challenged in court, and in December, some fired staff were told to return to work.

This back-and-forth doesn’t scream “efficiency.” Andthe cuts to OCR did not, in fact, save money.

But they did have real consequences: From the beginning of the layoffs in March to September 23, Americans filed more than 9,000 federal complaints about discrimination in education. Of the 7,000 cases resolved, about 90 percent were thrown out.

From Trump’s first inauguration through the end of 2017, OCR reached a resolution agreement in more than 30 racial harassment cases. From his second inauguration through the end of 2025, it resolved only two, a review of public OCR data by NPR found. In 2017, the office reached about ten times as many agreements in disability cases than in 2025. And while even Trump’s first-term OCR resolved about 60 sexual harassment cases and 15 sexual assault cases in 2017, it did not reach a single agreement on either kind of case in 2025.

The Department of Education declined to comment regarding the cost of its staff cuts and the stark increase in civil rights complaint dismissals, citing the temporary government shutdown.

“Every child in America should be able to get a good education no matter where they live, what their religious beliefs are or whether or not they have a disability,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who commissioned the GAO report. “Instead, the Trump administration fired half of the Education Department employees working to protect the civil rights of students and wasted as much as $38 million in taxpayer dollars by preventing investigators from doing their jobs. That is unacceptable.”

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The Power of Mocking Trump’s Pathetic Monsters

Over a few weeks this January, two Minneapolis sisters repeatedly left their homes and headed out to mock, insult, and record Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, who until recently was leading the disastrous and violent anti-immigrant operation of the city. The first time they heard him speak, the women, who uploaded their street surveillance of Bovino to TikTok, howled with laughter: Bovino’s voice is somewhat high and surprisingly nasal. “Wait, your voice is not what I expected,” one of the women hollered through a megaphone, sounding near tears with hilarity. “Speak again! Talk again!”

“When I realized that I had eyeballs on these videos, I had some power.”

The first time they had seen Bovino, things went differently. The two women, who are both in their 20s and asked that they not be named or have their videos linked, were standing on a public sidewalk after spotting ICE vehicles nearby, when Bovino walked out of a local TV-affiliate’s building flanked by masked men.

“I had my megaphone,” one sister told me. “And I just screamed at him with all the rage in my body from across the street.” While righteously venting was, she says, “cathartic,” she noticed that Bovino also seemed to enjoy it. “He was energized by it. It was so gross.”

With their anger seeming to backfire, the sisters “realized we need to strategize,” she says. After some research, “we chose mockery as a deliberate tactic,” she says, a way to try to respond to and puncture the image that Bovino has carefully crafted. “His social media presence, his news appearances—everything he does—leans into these theatrics,” she says. “He posts what I call thirst traps to his Instagram, these edited videos of him walking around and detaining people. It was so clear that it was the attention that he wanted.”

Luck was on their side; the next time they saw Bovino again, he looked at the sisters and chirped, “All right! Title 8 immigration enforcement!”

Her laughing response of borderline hysteria worked, she says: “You can see in his body language that it just shuts him down.” The video went viral, and prompted the sisters to create a series of riotously funny and often uncomfortable videos based on their continued birddogging of Bovino and the agents accompanying him.

“I wanted to put a video out there so other people could see him and make sure they could recognize him in public and make sure he didn’t have peace,” the Minnesota woman explains. “I wanted to alter public perception of him. He works so visibly hard to portray a powerful image. When I realized that I had eyeballs on these videos, I had some power myself to alter that perception.”

Before his apparent demotion and unceremonious return to the arid confines of El Centro, California, Bovino had come to stand in for the proudly amoral, violent, lie-riddled way that ICE has conducted operations in Minnesota and elsewhere. He’s also an excellent representation of how monumentally cheesy these guys are. The Border Patrol commander, who is, as many protesters have pointed out, quite diminutive in stature, likes to stride around in a long military-style green coat and a questionably useful leather cross-body strap, both of which clearly resemble outfits donned by Nazi SS commanders. “Get your Hitler coat off, you little bitch,” one of the Minneapolis women recommended during one of their on-camera interactions. (In a sympathetic interview with the outlet News Nation, Bovino claimed that the coat is “Border Patrol issued,” adding, “I’ve had it for over 25 years.”)

More broadly, the clothes that ICE and CBP agents wear are a fine example of the powerful blend of menace, deadly incompetence, and total lack of drip they constantly display. Having made anonymity a hallmark, they virtually always appear masked, sometimes sporting neck gaiters with skulls on them, when they’re not wearing what GQ has called “Dropshipped Normcore,” “a kind of algorithmically-influenced, masculine mish-mash of the kind of high-crowned baseball hats, tight graphic T-shirts, open plaid button-ups, slim stretch denim jeans or cargo pants, and anonymous walking sneakers or trail shoes.” The author and illustrator Molly Crabapple has called them a “Temu death squad.” It’s no surprise that masked ICE agents slipping on (real) ice have provoked such intense hilarity that Homeland Security officials apparently instructed FEMA workers to avoid using the term “ice” in recent winter storm warnings, to avoid having their posts “being turned into internet fodder.”

It is, of course, not just ICE and CBP who look and sound like tremendous dorks while doing real and frightening damage. The Trump administration has adopted a cruel, gross, and weird way of communicating, blending moldy internet memes with overt white supremacy. The way they perform impunity when they are caught doing that is also a blend of chilling and deeply uncool. After Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Twin Cities activist was arrested after allegedly disrupting a church service, the White House was caught circulating a manipulated image showing her in tears. (Actual photos of the arrest show her looking calm and serious as she’s led away.) After The Guardian broke that story, the White House responded with what they clearly considered to be an epic clapback. As deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr posted, “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

The response from the American public has been to continue making fun of this administration.

“The memes will continue” is incredibly weak: it sounds like something Elon Musk would tweet in his frenzied and thus far unsuccessful efforts to be funny online. The White House’s memes about taking over Greenland last month also had an unpleasantly Musk-like aroma: an AI-generated image of Donald Trump walking hand-in-hand with a penguin that is holding an American flag, for instance, along with the words “Embrace the penguin.” (There are no penguins in Greenland, or really anywhere in the northern hemisphere.)

These attempts at meme-based relevance go hand-in-hand with all the unsuccessful pivots and impersonations that people in the Trump orbit have tried to look cool, culturally relevant or even, God help us, badass: Katie Miller’s excruciatingly dull fascist wine mom podcast, say, or Pete Hegseth’s American flag-lined suit, camo ties, and ongoing impression of Slim Pickens‘ atomic bomb-riding cowboy character in Dr. Strangelove. There’s also JD Vance pretending he enjoys the Internet jokes about him having sex with a couch. All of these gambits try—and fail—to serve the same purpose: to make these people look cool, funny, or with it while they advance a profoundly unpopular agenda.

Not surprisingly, the response from a large sector of the American public has been to continue making fun of this administration, from our increasingly exasperated and radicalized late night hosts—minus the always gutless Jimmy Fallon—to Minnesota protesters braving subzero temperatures to throw snowballs at ICE vehicles, pour a little freezing water on the ground, and let Greg Bovino know his coat looks stupid. Even world leaders openly mock Trump, as in a viral video from earlier this year of the leaders of France, Azerbaijan, and Armenia joking about Trump’s inability to keep the later two countries straight, or who might be at war with whom.

Trump’s opponents have tried this before: the former-reality TV star was treated like a joke almost right until the moment he won the 2016 election. It was hard not to, what with his surreal Baked Alaska hair, his ridiculous braggadocio, his weird grudge against windmills, and other endless things about him to mock—physically, financially, and spiritually. Recall, if you will, that the Huffington Post classified Donald Trump under “entertainment” news until, at the end of 2015, they had to stop doing that. Personally, in the time I worked at the feminist website Jezebel, we came up with dozens of creative nicknames to describe the then-candidate, including ones like “future leader of the free world” that I imagine were somewhat funny at the time.

Srdja Popovic, a self-described “revolution consultant” whose activism helped overthrow Slobodan Milosevic, calls mocking the powerful “laughtivism”—using humor and creativity to effect profound social change. The Minnesota woman says that in their video-recorded beclowning of Greg Bovino, she and her sister happened on a central principle of mocking a powerful public figure, one that Popovic also understood: forcing the target into a situation where he would wind up looking silly no matter what. Popovic calls it a “dilemma action.”

“We put him in a lose-lose situation,” the Minnesota woman says. “He could’ve kept talking and we would make fun of his voice, or he shuts up and we looked like we shut him down.”

Dictators and despots understand the dangers of humor: early in his rule, Vladimir Putin was reportedly enraged by a depiction of him as an ugly, weird-looking puppet on “Kukly,” a show put out by the then-independent TV channel NTV. He demanded his puppet avatar never appear again and the show, as the New Yorker has written, cheekily obliged: a subsequent episode showed Putin as various weird manifestations of God, like “as a burning bush and a storm cloud.”

In Nazi Germany, people also mocked Reich officials for being unpopular, incompetent, sweaty losers; so-called “whisper jokes” proliferated as a way to express discontent. Germans did this even when the stakes were deadly: in 1943, a woman named Marianne K cracked a joke about Hitler standing atop a radio tower with with Goering, trying to come up with something that would cheer up Berliners. “Why don’t you jump?” Goering suggests. After someone ratted her out, Marianne was soon executed.

By clumsily attempting to get in on the jokes, the people in charge try to defuse their power.

In an echo that might sound familiar today, Hitler and other Reich officials also took their own stabs at humor to make themselves more popular: a New York Times article from 1940, with the unfortunate headline “Hitler’s Fun,” says that a recent speech by the dictator was full of “merry quips,” adding, “He was very jovial about the thousands and thousands of bombs he promised to drop on England nightly for every hundred the British raiders scatter over Germany.”

By 1944, mockery was firmly entrenched in Germany as a form of dissent, the Times reported, including widespread parodies of popular Nazi songs. “None of the joking is very brilliant humor,” the paper sniffed, “some descending to gutter level, but showing, nevertheless, the general discontent with the Nazi regime on the part of vast numbers who have been deprived of other means of registering their disapproval.”

The danger with merely making jokes, then as now, is that they serve as a way to let off steam without effecting actual change. The Nazis, for instance, tried to at first stem the tide of parody songs, as the Times reported, before eventually thinking the better of it: “Goebbels evidently has decided on second thought that this sort of activity was a safety valve that would be dangerous to remove.” Similarly, JD Vance has not only pretended to love being called a couch-fucker, but, on Halloween, dressed as one of the memes of himself that has circulated online. By clumsily attempting to get in on the joke, the people in charge try to defuse the power those jokes have against them.

These days, it feels borderline delusional to think it will do any good to mock Trump or the various maladaptive, malevolent dorks around him. Every joke that could be made has been, and all of them have bounced off him like a million arrows against the carapace of an armadillo streaked with cheap self-tanner. (See, I couldn’t resist one more, and look where it’s gotten us: nowhere.) Most credit for how Minnesota is prevailing against ICE should go to serious, effective, broad-scale activism, resistance, and community solidarity—and not just jokes about Greg Bovino.

Yet the two things aren’t mutually exclusive. And in a way, jokes about Trump, ICE, and all the rest of them are a way of reasserting and insisting upon observable reality: what’s taking place is shocking, reprehensible—and also powerfully wack. When then-vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called Trump and his gang “weird,” it went over remarkably well, a rare example of a politician simply saying what so much of the public was thinking.

Humor alone will not save us. But perhaps it allows us to continue the painful task of looking at what’s really happening here, and, in the words of the artist Barbara Kruger, “the ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers” who are doing it to us.

The day that we spoke, the Minneapolis woman was digesting Bovino’s departure, and Tom Homan’s installation. “I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing and learn about the new guy,” she told me. If ICE ever actually leaves her city, she adds, “I think sharing what we as a community have learned with the other cities that they’re going to go to will be huge. I think we’re going to be a model for the resistance of the occupation. I hope my videos showed one way of doing that, but there are so many more.”

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Trump Goes Public With Plan to “Take Over” Elections

Days after the FBI seized 700 boxes of ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, President Trump called on Republicans “to take over the voting in at least 15 places” in advance of the next election, raising new fears that his administration plans to interfere in the midterms and beyond.

“Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump told former deputy FBI director and conservative commentator Dan Bongino on his radio show on Monday. “We have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you’re going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get, with a court order, the ballots. You’re going to see some interesting things come out.”

Trump is once again saying the quiet part out loud, suggesting that the FBI raid in Georgia was a prelude to how his administration intends to interfere in state and local election processes in advance of the midterms.

There are still many unanswered questions about the Georgia raid, such as why a criminal investigation has been opened into an election that took place six years ago and was audited three times and why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present for the operation when she is barred by law from participating in domestic law enforcement operations. The New York Times reported on Monday that Gabbard called Trump and put him on speakerphone with FBI agents who took part in the raid, which represents yet another erosion of democratic norms.

I wrote last week that “the raid was as much about the next election as the one six years ago.” Trump confirmed that on Monday, making clear that his administration’s end goal is to seize control of election administration at the state and local level to prevent his party from losing power.

As Trump and the GOP became more unpopular, the tactics they’ll use to attempt to remain in control are sure to become more radical and extreme.

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Snowflake Trump Can’t Take Kennedy Center Heat

Donald Trump announced on Sunday night that the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will close its doors for two years while it undergoes renovation, following artists calling off performances and ticket sales nosediving.

The cultural institution is scheduled to close on July 4, “in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our Country,” to undergo “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding” and become “the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World,” the president posted on Truth Social.

But it remains unclear what renovations need to be completed. The Kennedy Center underwent a $250 million expansion in 2019.

In his announcement, the president stated that “financing is completed, and fully in place.” The One Big Beautiful Bill Act set aside $257 million for “necessary expenses for capital repair, restoration, maintenance backlog, and security structures” for the Kennedy Center—possibly, as he previously stated, to adorn the building with “24 karat gold” similar to his remodeling of the Oval Office.

Trump noted that his decision will be “totally subject to Board approval”—a Board that he took over after kicking out many Joe Biden appointees, handpicking replacements, and declaring himself chairman last February.

In December, the president renamed the Kennedy Center “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” As I wrote then, only Congress holds the authority to rename the building. President Lyndon Johnson in 1964signed a law that designates the arts institution as a “living memorial” to the late President Kennedy.

Members of Kennedy’s family condemned the decision to close the cultural center. The former president’s niece, Maria Shriver, ridiculed Trump Sunday on X, writing a “translation” of his announcement: “It’s best for me to close this center down and rebuild a new center that will bear my name, which will surely get everybody to stop talking about the fact that everybody’s canceling… right?”

Translation: It has been brought to my attention that due to the name change (but nobody’s telling me it’s due to the name change), but it’s been brought to my attention that entertainers are canceling left and right, and I have determined that since the name change no one wants… https://t.co/BDsjQeOAC9

— Maria Shriver (@mariashriver) February 2, 2026

“He can change the name, shut the doors, and demolish the building. He can try to kill JFK,” Jack Schlossberg, Kennedy’s grandson, wrote the same night on X. “But JFK is kept alive by us now rising up to remove Donald Trump, bring him to justice, and restore the freedoms generations fought for.”

In a Monday statement, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which has jurisdiction over public buildings, and an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees, said Trump’s year-long attempt to “commandeer the Kennedy Center as a clubhouse for his friends and political allies and install leadership who will satisfy his every whim” has led to the destruction of the cultural institution.

“With his hostile takeover leading to artists’ withdrawals and declining ticket sales, he is covering up his failures by shuttering a national landmark that belongs to the American people,” Whitehouse continued.

Whitehouse launched an investigation into corruption at the Kennedy Center under Trump-appointed interim president Richard Grenell following the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee obtaining documents revealing millions of dollars in lost revenue and luxury spending. According to Whitehouse’s Monday statement, Grenell has not provided financial transparency, despite public promises to do so.

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Something Unexpected Is Happening With Norway’s Polar Bears

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

Polar bears became the poster child for the peril of climate change for obvious reasons: They hunt seals from the ice, and as fossil fuels warm the planet, the ice where these bears live is melting.

For more than three decades, scientists have been warning that climate change could drive polar bear populations extinct. That message infiltrated the public psyche, perhaps more than any other about the scourge of global warming.

But as scientists are continuing to learn, the reality for these iconic bears is more complicated.

In 2022, scientists published a study showing that polar bears in southeastern Greenland were able to use glacial ice instead of sea ice to hunt, sheltering them from some of the impacts of warming. And a study published late last year revealed some changes in polar bear DNA that may help them adapt to hotter weather.

“There’s variability in how bears are responding. This [research] adds to the variability story.”

Now, research in the journal Scientific Reports adds yet another wrinkle of hope for the species. The study, an analysis of hundreds of polar bears in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, found that declining sea ice is not causing polar bears to starve. They actually appeared healthier in the last two decades of the analysis, from 2000 to 2019. The overall population, meanwhile, is either stable or growing, according to Jon Aars, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute.

“I was surprised,” Aars told Vox from Svalbard. “I would have predicted that body condition would decline. We see the opposite.”

The new study makes clear that, in other regions, the loss of sea ice from warming is indeed linked to ailing polar bear populations. In Canada’s Western Hudson Bay, for example, researchers have tied melting ice to lower bear survival and a shortage of food, finding that the population has roughly halved since the 1980s. Climate change remains the largest threat to these animals.

Yet, there are 20 distinct polar bear populations around the world, and they all behave slightly differently. Warming is not uniformly killing them.

Perhaps, then, polar bears aren’t the best mascot for the climate crisis—a point some advocates have been making for a while—especially when there are countless other species imperiled by rising temperatures.

Polar bears need fat to survive the harsh Arctic cold; that’s why they eat blubbery seals. Seals, meanwhile, need ice to rest and birth pups. Without that ice, polar bears have a hard time finding and catching them.

Since the late 1970s, the Arctic—the northernmost region of the planet, including parts of Alaska, Canada, Europe, and Russia—has lost more than 27,000 square miles of summer ice. That’s an area larger than the state of West Virginia. Some estimates suggest that the region could be ice-free by the middle of the century, even under optimistic emissions scenarios.

That melting ice is what’s harming polar bear populations in Canada’s Hudson Bay; the Beaufort Sea, located north of Alaska and the Yukon; and Baffin Bay in Greenland. And it’s why they’re listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, a global authority on endangered species.

But the story in Svalbard—an icy archipelago in the Barents Sea, north of Scandinavia—is different.

Magnus Andersen and Jon Aars, researchers at the Norwegian Polar Institute and co-authors on the new study, measure a polar bear in Svalbard.Jon Aars/Norwegian Polar Institute

Between 1992 and 2019, scientists in Svalbard darted hundreds of polar bears from helicopters and measured their bodies. Then they compared those measurements to sea ice conditions, such as the number of ice-free days, and other climate variables.

Remarkably, the number of days with no ice in the region increased by roughly 100 during that period. And yet, as the authors found, the body condition of both male and female polar bears—i.e., how fat and healthy they are—increased from 2000 onward. Female bears were actually in worse condition when the sea ice lasted longer.

Often, the message about polar bears is “100 percent doom,” said Kristin Laidre, a polar bear researcher at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study. “But that’s not true,” Laidre told me. “There’s variability in how bears are responding. This [research] adds to the variability story.”

If polar bears in Svalbard are healthy, that means they’re finding food. So what are they eating?

One possibility, said Aars, the lead author, is that there may be higher densities of ringed seals, their primary food source, in years with less ice, so they’re easier to catch. Even if polar bears have less time to catch the seals—because there are fewer days with ice—they can put on loads of weight quickly and rely on that for months.

The bears may also be eating other animals on land that don’t require ice. Reindeer on the archipelago are increasing, for example, and Aars says he’s seen bears eat them. Walrus populations are increasing, too. Although polar bears can’t easily kill a walrus, they can scavenge their tusked, fat-filled carcass when walruses die from other causes.

“Bears in Svalbard are potentially changing their diet, and that might account for the increase in body condition,” said John Iacozza, a senior instructor and polar bear expert at the University of Manitoba. That’s a luxury that polar bears elsewhere might not have. “You wouldn’t see the same effect happening in Western Hudson Bay, just because the availability of other species is less,” said Iacozza, who was not involved in the new research.

While the Svalbard bears might be fine for now, researchers still worry about the long-term impacts of warming in the region. “We do think there’s a threshold,” Aars told me. “The difficult part is that we don’t know what it is.”

No other animal has been so closely tied to climate change as the polar bear. It was on the cover of TIME’s 2006 global warming issue. It was featured in Al Gore’s seminal documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which premiered the same year_._ It was used in funding campaigns for environmental groups. (One year, I even dressed up as a drowning polar bear for Halloween with a friend who went as a melting ice cap.)

The bear’s symbolism is rooted in good science. Those early studies were in places like Canada’s Western Hudson Bay, where these Arctic apex predators were clearly dying from melting sea ice. Media outlets amplified the most sensational conclusions—and they stuck.

That’s partly because the message is simple, Laidre said: Polar bears need ice, and warming is making it disappear. “The relationship between [climate and] an animal that needs a platform to eat is easy to wrap your brain around,” she said.

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