The Roberts Court Just Put Trump in Charge of Independent Agencies, Vastly Expanding His Powers

The Supreme Court on Monday gave the president the authority to remove the leadership of most agencies that Congress had set up to act independently of presidential control. The ruling in Trump v. Slaughter may seem technical, but it represents a radical change in how our American government has functioned since the 1930s and, in some cases, since the founding, by creating agencies that operate with independence from presidential control and the expediency of presidential politics. Rather than allow Congress to decide how much control the president can exercise over an agency that Congress creates, the Supreme Court has seized that power for itself. Starting today, nine justices will decide which agency heads can be fired by the president and which cannot.

Today’s decision overturns a 91-year-old precedent, called Humphrey’s Executor, in which a unanimous Supreme Court upheld Congress’ authority to give independent commissioners protection from presidential removal. In his majority decision, Chief Justice Roberts derides this critical precedent while downplaying the gravity of overturning it. “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it,” Roberts stated in his 6-3 opinion joined by other GOP appointees. “Humphrey’s has for decades been a result in search of a rationale.”

“The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow.”

The decision stems from President Donald Trump’s illegal firing of Rebecca Slaughter, a President Joe Biden appointee to the Federal Trade Commission. At the onset of his second term, Trump began firing Democratic appointees to independent agencies in violation of federal law, which protected their removal except for sufficient cause. He removed Biden appointees at the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit System Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, among others. These agencies are designed to be insulated from immediate presidential control. They are run by a bipartisan board of commissioners who serve staggered terms. And unlike appointees to cabinet departments, the president cannot remove them over policy differences. The power to remove is the power to control. An impending firing can sway the decision-making of commissioners—and if it doesn’t, they can get the boot.

In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that chaos will ensue. “Today, the majority reshapes our Government,” she wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President’s hands.” It does this, she wrote, in the service of the majority’s “half-baked theory of executive power that is simultaneously all encompassing yet also subject to necessary but undefined exceptions. The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow.”

The Roberts Court had already chipped away at Humphrey’s Executor, and it was clear that in their quest to realize a so-called unitary executive with dangerous amounts of power and vanishing guardrails around him, it would use this case to knock down the precedent. Roberts does this with gusto. His opinion is a sweeping recitation of all the history he has mustered in his march toward a unitary executive, and relies on his own prior opinions inching toward this very moment—treating his decision as inevitable and right, rather than the result of his own political crusade. Legal historians have long complained that Roberts’ history is a house of cards. This opinion is “embarrassingly thin, full of historical errors and cherry-picked sources,” posted Boston University law professor Jed Schugerman, “reverse engineered from unitary ideology.”

The tricky task for the Republican-appointed majority, however, was how to exempt the Federal Reserve Board, an independent agency upon which rests the stability of the entire economy and which, under presidential control, could tank the markets and plunge the country into even more economic chaos. Indeed, the court in deciding this case while also deliberating whether the president can invent a bogus “cause” to remove a member of the Fed whom he doesn’t like in a blatant attempt to seize control of the agency. Roberts issued that opinion Monday as well, arguing that the Fed is different because of its allegedly unique history and therefore Trump cannot fire targeted governor Lisa Cook without following proper procedures. Roberts left to another day whether the charges against Cook are sufficient, but did reinforce his decision that the Fed’s independence should be maintained.

The solution to this problem—the desire to hand Trump almost unlimited firing power but not when it would cause brutal economic fallout—is to strip Congress of its power to decide when an agency it creates is independent and instead hand that policy determination to themselves. The decision sets up a new regime whereby the justices themselves decide when firing protections are constitutional based on whether an agency’s work falls “within the President’s ‘general administrative control'”—an amorphous standard that surely can be manipulated as the justices see fit. That allows the 6-3 majority today to allow Trump to fire commissioners at the FTC, but preserve Fed independence.

There are other agencies whose independent status and the removability of their commissioners are now uncertain. Congress could try to weigh in, but its decisions are now relegated to suggestions. Roberts’ decision oozes disdain for Congress and alleges that its attempt to insulate agencies from presidential control was an unconstitutional power grab. He cloaks the unitary executive theory as a democratic approach, making all government administration accountable to one man and, ultimately, the people who elect him, even though the Founders intended Congress to be the most democratic branch. The chief justice disagrees.“Placing the power to administer laws in officers who enjoy ‘freedom from Presidential oversight (and protection),'” Roberts writes, “often results only in an ‘increased subservience to congressional direction.'” He continued to accuse Congress of using Humphrey’s Executor to take _“_more power for itself.”

“The Court takes one of the oldest debates in American history and decides that the six Justices in the majority, alone, ought to be the ones to settle it for all time.”

But in Monday’s opinion, it is the court that hijacks Congress’ power for itself. Now, the justices will decide the fate of each agency’s independent status on a case-by-case basis. This is undoubtedly a question for Congress to decide, but the six justices seize that policy-making authority for themselves. As Sotomayor stated in her dissent, “The Court takes one of the oldest debates in American history and decides that the six Justices in the majority, alone, ought to be the ones to settle it for all time.”

Trump v. Slaughter follows the clear modus operandi of the Roberts Court: disempower Congress, give more power to the president to buck the laws, and leave the nine justices as the only people who can shut down the president’s actions. The most infamous example is the court’s grant of criminal immunity to the president. Just as presidential immunity breeds corruption and political weaponization, this one will likewise turbocharge Trump’s ability to reward allies and donors and punish political enemies at the expense of good governance.

From approving mergers and regulating Wall Street and Crypto to determining which toys are safe for babies, independent agencies play a critical role in regulating the economy, the environment, our jobs, and the objects we rely on every day. Handing these decisions to donors or weaponizing them for political gain will line some pockets but almost certainly harm the public.

The Roberts Court claims to be an originalist court, basing its constitutional rulings on the document’s original public meaning. But ever since the Roberts Court’s hard turn toward unitary executive theory—the idea that the president has unrestricted authority over the entire executive branch—and its movements against independent agencies, scholars have gone back to the archives to investigate the originalist bona fides of these related judicial trends. It turns out that there is little historical evidence for a unitary executive (and mountains of evidence against) and that there are many instances of independent agencies in the founding era and the 19th century. They are not an invention of the New Deal, even though that is the time in which they grew in number and significance—and is indeed the era this court seeks to erase from the law books.

In her dissent, Sotomayor recounts the history that the majority eschews, demonstrating how Roberts’ opinion relies more on discredited fictions than sound history. “From the start, the majority’s theory rested on shaky ground,” she wrote. “Over time, its arguments have grown weaker still, as historical evidence has undermined key pillars of its theory. Today, the Court faced a choice: plow ahead… Unfortunately, the Court repeats and expands upon several prior errors that require correction.”

The historical anomaly is not independent agencies or presidents with limited authority, as Roberts asserts. It’s this court and the Trump actions it blesses.

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Supreme Court Temporarily Blocks Trump’s Attempt to Fire Fed’s Lisa Cook

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled against President Donald Trump’s attempt to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, dealing a setback to Trump’s campaign to take control of monetary policy. The court’s 5-4 decision preserves Cook’s job as she continues to fight her removal, but it is not the final word on Trump’s bid to fire her. The narrow decision almost guarantees that this same dispute will return to the high court soon.

The majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts expresses explicit support for Fed independence. As an independent bank regulator, the Fed is run by a board of presidentially appointed governors who serve 14 year terms and are only removable for cause. The Trump administration argued that it had cause and that the Supreme Court could not review its removal decision. But the majority found the government’s arguments at odds with an independent Fed.

“To accept any one of those arguments would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment—an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference,” Roberts wrote.

The decision comes at a time when the future of Fed independence is in doubt. Trump’s pick for Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, is awaiting confirmation by the Senate. Keeping Cook in her seat steadies the ship, if only a little. The majority’s decision, however, is explicitly “narrow.” It requires that Cook be given proper notice of the cause of her removal and an opportunity to contest those charges. The decision does not lay out what that process looks like. And it saves for another day—which will almost certainly come soon—a court decision on whether Trump’s obviously pretextual allegations will be enough to remove Cook.

In a post on Truth Social Monday, Trump called the Cook ruling “strictly procedural” and pledged to “take appropriate action immediately to make sure that someone who has committed wrongdoing will not be making vital decisions concerning the Welfare of the United States of America!”

In short, this is a loss for Trump at this stage—but it may not be a permanent one.

In its ruling, the court declined to define what for-cause protection requires in order for a firing to be valid. Indeed, it hints that rather than leave it up to the president, it may ultimately be the final arbiter of what constitutes cause on a case-by-case basis. “Only after Cook has had the opportunity to respond to the charges made against her…may a final decision be made…And only then can the courts assess the validity and sufficiency of such charges,” Roberts wrote.

“To be clear, the ultimate question of whether the President can remove Cook for cause will depend in part on the underlying facts,” the chief justice added. “In this opinion, we have not addressed the facts.”

Here are those facts, as we know them.

Last August, the president posted a criminal referral against Cook on Truth Social, his social media platform, and demanded she resign. The accusation—created by Bill Pulte, Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Agency director—is that Cook claimed primary residency on two different mortgage applications. If this charge sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same one Pulte cooked up against two other Democrats—and it has yet to win the day against any of the president’s targets because, at most, Pulte appears to have discovered clerical errors. Five days after Trump’s social media post, the president announced in another post that he was firing Cook.

Trump claimed that the mortgage document discrepancy dug up by a political lackey was sufficient cause to fire Cook, and that the courts couldn’t review his decision to boot her, anyway. In other words, Trump’s argument is that he can state any cause for removal he likes, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It’s an obviously absurd argument because it renders the “for cause” removal restriction meaningless. Cook sued, and a district court judge blocked her removal, as did the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Trump turned to the Supreme Court, which agreed to decide whether Trump could temporarily remove Cook while her legal challenge to her firing moves forward.

The Supreme Court handed down its ruling Monday in conjunction with a related case—Trump v. Slaughter—in which the court gave Trump the power to remove the commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission and other formerly independent agencies. That decision follows a string of cases in which the court’sthis conservative majority found that the president’s power over the executive branch trumped Congress’ attempt to insulate agencies from political pressure. During Trump’s second term, the court had alreadywaved through firings of Democratic commissioners on the National Labor Relations Board, Merit Systems Protection Board, and Consumer Product Safety Commission on its shadowdocket.

Logically, it’s hard to reconcile the court’s Cook decision with its rulings in Slaughter and other cases allowing Trump to fire independent agency commissioners. But the Federal Reserve Board’sindependence is a pillar of the United States’ economy, and the US’s dominant global position makes that independence critical to the world economy, as well. Allowing Trump to turn interest rates, loans, bailouts, and access to the US banking system into political weapons would fundamentally reshape the economy and our democratic order. The Fed, in other words, is too important for one man to control.

To get out of this bind, Roberts—who wrote both the Cook and Slaughter decisions—insists that the Fed is simply different. Roberts’ opinion cites a history of independent bank regulators going back to the country’sfounding and finds this history is relevant in determining whether it should uphold Congress’ legislative choice to make the Fed independent. “We see no reason to leave the public in limbo, or to sow doubt as to the status of one of our Nation’s (and the world’s) most important financial institutions,” Roberts wrote. “We would not so quickly unsettle this ‘special arrangement sanctioned by history.’”

This entire adventure stems from the Roberts Court’s own crusade to empower the president and hinder regulations disliked by big industry. The GOP-appointed majority has pushed forward its view of a “unitary executive” who controls all aspects of the executive branch, creating a roadmap for Trump to turn federal agencies into political weapons. Today, the court blesses Trump’s attempts to take control of most of the regulatory work that Congress deemed should be independent. But, at least to an extent, the Fed will be insulated from the consequences of that crusade.

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In a Rare Blow to Trump, the Supreme Court Just Saved Mail-In Voting—For Now

In a surprise victory for voting rights, the Supreme Court on Monday upheld a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted up to five days after Election Day, as long as they had been postmarked by the day of the election.

The 5-4 decision by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices, averts a major election disaster that would have injected chaos into the midterms. Fourteen states have mail-in ballot grace periods on the books, and 30 states accept ballots from overseas and military voters sent before or on Election Day but only received after. The New York Times found that during the 2024 election “at least 725,000 ballots were postmarked by Election Day and arrived within the legally accepted post-election window.” Changing mail-in ballot deadlines months before the general election could have disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters who could have been unaware of the stricter rules, or have their ballots thrown out because of postal delays, or because they live in remote, rural locations in states like Alaska.

Overruling the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Barrett affirmed that such laws are constitutional. “In sum, the election-day statutes require the electorate’s choice to be made on election day,” she wrote. “That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote—as it is in Mississippi. But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”

“But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”

Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. “The acceptance of these late-arriving ballots effectively postpones the date on which the electorate’s choice is made, and federal law precludes that postponement,” Alito claimed, even though late-arriving ballots do nothing to change a voter’s choice on Election Day, since ballots are still required to be submitted by then.

President Trump has long spread conspiracies about mail voting and most recently attacked California’s protractedvote count as a “rigged election.” The administration’s latest plan to undercut mail voting would require states to hand over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security for the Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots—a form of extortion that has generated furious pushback from election officials. The head of the Postal Service told the Senate they were following Trump’s directive, claiming that he wanted to ensure “the right ballots are going to the right people.” (A federal judge last week blocked key parts of a Trump executive order that authorized such a scheme.)

Alito’s dissent amplifies Trump’s conspiracies. “Today’s decision leaves open opportunities for voter fraud that may further undermine Americans’ faith in the integrity of this country’s elections,” he wrote. “Diverse sources have recognized that mail-in ballots increase the potential for fraud.”

In fact, every major study has shown that mail-in voting is safe and secure, but the fact that four justices signed on to Trump’s crusade to get rid of mail-in ballots is highly disturbing and could embolden the president to attempt to take even more drastic steps to make it harder to vote.

Today’s ruling should also not distract from the damage the Roberts Court has already done to voting rights. Its decision in late April**,** effectively destroying the Voting Rights Act**,** gave Republicans just enough time to dismantle majority-Black seats held by Democrats in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama. That was followed by a series of orders by the Republican-appointed justices on the shadow docket that expedited the GOP’s efforts to erase Black representation and give their party additional seats before the midterms.

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We’re Talking About “Hypocrisy” All Wrong

Pick any Trump-imposed crisis over the last year, and you’ll find prominent Democrats decrying the president’s actions with an all-too-familiar word. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Trump’s “hypocrisy knows no bounds” after he pardoned fraudsters while throwing “baseless allegations” of “massive fraud” at the Golden State. It was “beyond hypocritical,” California Sen. Alex Padilla said, for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act in Los ­Angeles after provoking an actual insurrection in DC. The Daily Show’s Jon ­Stewart responded to the president’s ­attack on a judge who blocked the deportation of Venezuelans—after previously saying it should be illegal to criticize judges he appointed—by straining his voice like a demon doused with holy water: “The hypocrisy! It burns!”

“Hypocrisy,” like democracy, was passed down to us from the ancient Greeks. Hypokrites was a word for stage actors—different people entirely, ­beneath their masks. But allegations of two-faced dealing are endemic to American politics. Benjamin Franklin took over his brother’s newspaper after he was sanctioned for printing an “Essay against Hypocrites” about the Puritan minister Cotton Mather. (“It is far worſe dealing with ſuch religious Hypocrites, than with the moſt arrant Knave in the World.”) Thomas Jefferson later lamented, in Notes on the State of Virginia, that the spread of Christianity and other religions imposed upon people through violence had made “one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.” Abraham Lincoln, in 1854, asserted that the existence of slavery “enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.”

Then, as now, allegations of “hypocrisy” are often infused with a note of spiritual censure. Jesus, after all, condemns the Pharisees as “hypocrites” in the Gospel of Matthew. In recent decades, the term has become a favored pejorative for the grifting preachers and fallen “family values” politicians of the religious right. There’s something both powerful and irresistible about that critique. It highlights the danger and the fallacy of puritanism: How can you demand that a society conform to a standard that its advocates do not even maintain?

“Hypocrisy” has been a useful framework for deconstructing an insidious strain of American life. But it can also be a bit of a trap. “Hypocrisy” assumes that the imposition of values is really about the values. Sometimes it’s as much about the imposition.

Trump’s conduct has helped dispel these illusions—or at least it should have. His “hypocrisies,” sketched out in late-night Truth Social rants and meandering answers to misunderstood questions, reflect a worldview that is as disturbing as it is coherent. He and his acolytes are telling you who can wield power, and against whom power can be wielded. You have not caught the president and his supporters off their line by noting that they attack others for conduct they themselves engage in; you have captured their essence—a desire for dominance and impunity, and an avowed illiberalism that has been incubating in the conservative movement for generations. Hierarchies of citizenship are the rule. Exulting in “justice for me and pain for thee” does not necessarily make someone a hypocrite; it might just make them a fascist.

Show me a case of Trumpian hypocrisy and I will show you a president living his values, with the unpleasant but predictable belligerence of a mob boss protecting his turf. Take the weaponization of the federal bureaucracy against broadcasters and the targeting of ordinary citizens for protected speech. His administration has threatened to suspend the licenses of broadcasters whose coverage of the Iran war is insufficiently flattering, leaned on Disney to fire Jimmy Kimmel for comments about the Charlie Kirk assassination, and attempted to deport a Turkish grad student for expressing support for Palestine in a student newspaper—after previously condemning “federal censorship,” and declaring that liberals were “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.” It is a reminder that the earlier backlash to purported liberal censoriousness—like the corresponding demand to replace “DEI” with “meritocracy”—was always about which voices were sacrosanct and which were an affront. It is the uncensored frustration of having to share space with the kinds of views (and the kinds of people) they considered illegitimate. Free speech, as the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer has written, means “they can say what they want and you can say what they want.”

Republicans are not roiled by contradictions when they spread conspiracies about mail-in voting by Democrats while casting mail-in ballots themselves. They are manifesting a deep-seated belief about who America is for and who it is not. It’s all right there in the racist Department of Homeland Security memes and the appeals from Vice President JD Vance for a “homeland” free of neighbors who aren’t like you. Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism—it’s an ethos.

It is not even hypocrisy to complain about election fraud and then attempt to commit election fraud by, say, telling an official in ­Georgia to “find 11,780 votes,” as Trump did in 2021. They are both attacks on democratic systems by someone who never truly subscribed to them—that’s the important part. Hypocrisy is a distraction that reduces core questions of power and ideology to a meta-commentary.

There is something overly familiar about seeing a Republican politician accused of hypocrisy. “It’s so blatant, the hypocrisy,” The Daily Show’s Stewart said during an episode covering Trump’s censorship of free speech. “It’s so old-school Daily Show gotcha.” For a late-night host, it’s an easy punch line. But as a broader criticism, it flattens the exceptional and discourages you from thinking deeper about the structures of power. It’s precisely because “hypocrisy” is a tag that you could lob at so many political figures over the last quarter century that it feels so insufficient to describe our current leaders. In a weird way, it’s almost not cynical enough.

I confess: I’m a hypocrite, when it comes to hypocrisy. I’ve written plenty of these stories in the past. I’ll write them again. There is still value in laying out the ways in which public figures deviate from their professed identity—to establish, for the record, that someone is full of it. Sometimes it just feels cathartic to fire up an old C-SPAN clip and say: Can you believe this guy?

But I often find “hypocrisy” stories limiting because they substitute the deep for the superficial. It feels less like a critique of a particular set of values than a way to talk about politics without having to talk about what politics is about—a language for discussing matters of consequence in inconsequential ways. “Hypocrisy” functions as a kind of political scrip, a facsimile of conflict that can be traded back and forth in perpetuity without ever being ­exchanged for the real thing. Shouting about it is an impulse in place of an analysis. It blurs the anodyne and the profound. Everyone is a hypocrite, but not everyone is cruel.

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Trump’s “America First” Fishing Policy Is a Recipe for Plunder

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

When Kekuewa Kikiloi boarded a research vessel to visit the northwestern Hawaiian islands in 2002, he didn’t know what to expect. Kikiloi grew up on O‘ahu, but like a lot of Native Hawaiians, he had never had the opportunity to visit the uninhabited islands and atolls scattered to the west of the main islands.

What he saw changed his life. “There’s no places left in Hawai‘i, or very few places, where the environment is so wild and intact that you have your ancestors who are embodied in the environment communicating with you every second: birds hovering over you, monk seals swimming up to you, fish trying to bite you,” he told Grist. “It’s so raw, the experience up there.”

“If anyone gains to benefit from this, it’s not going to be the traditional Indigenous communities.”

The trip, a monthlong research expedition with scientists and Native Hawaiians, sparked decades of advocacy within the Hawaiian community for the protection of the Papahānaumokuākea. “It ended up being this amazing journey of rediscovery for a lot of us. When we came back to the main Hawaiian islands, we started telling the community about how thereʻs a whole other side of our house that we didnʻt know about. We have to know about this place,” Kikiloi said. That support helped establish Papahānaumokuākea as both a marine sanctuary and a marine national monument.

Now Kikiloi is worried those protections are under threat. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump issued an executive proclamation to allow commercial fishing in parts of three national marine monuments in Hawai‘i, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI): the Mau and Ho‘omalu Zones of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, the Rose Atoll Marine National Monument, and the Islands Unit of the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument. Collectively, the areas under the proclamation span roughly half a million square milesin the Pacific Ocean and are home to thousands of plant and animal species in some of the planet’s most ecologically sensitive habitats.

The proclamation is Trump’s latest attempt to dismantle conservation guardrails for industrial fishing. Last April, the president signed a proclamation to open over 400,000 square miles of the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing. He also issued an executive order intended to boost domestic seafood production, and his administration has continued to increase several fishery quotas. Then, this February, Trump signed another proclamation removing commercial fishing from the prohibited activities in two national monuments in the Atlantic.

“AMERICA FIRST FISHING POLICY,” the White House posted on Facebook after this month’s proclamation. “MASSIVE WIN FOR AMERICA’S FISHERMEN!” During the signing in the Oval Office, Trump himself promised the move would generate “millions and millions of dollars in new business for our great, really great fishermen” and lower seafood costs.

Rep. Kimberlyn King-Hinds, the sole congressional representative from the CNMI, attended the signing and said in a press release that she hopes the federal government will work with local officials and communities to implement the directive and that it creates jobs. “For the CNMI, ocean policy is local policy,” she said. “If American fishing activity grows in these waters, our goal should be to connect that activity to local jobs, local businesses, port activity, seafood infrastructure, and long-term food security for the Commonwealth.”

“We are destroying the capacity of the oceans to make the food we need.”

Numerous commercial fishers and groups have also hailed the president’s move to roll back the restrictions in areas such as Papahānaumokuākea. “We need to eat fish caught by our fishermen who follow US laws,” Kitty Simonds, executive director of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, told Grist. Eric Kingma, executive director of the Hawai‘i Longliners Association, told Honolulu Civil Beat that he welcomed a review from the federal government “guided by sound science” on the scientific, economic, and cultural significance of the area, as well as management decisions that support “the long-term viability of Hawai‘i’s longline fleet.” After Trump signed the first commercial fishing proclamation last April, Kingma argued that ocean conservation and commercial fisheries can be compatible. “What we like about opening these up is the opportunity to fish there when the fish are there,” Kingma said at the time.

But the administration’s strategy for boosting America’s $319 billion-dollar fishing sector has been riddled with unresolved legal questions.

In spring of last year, just days after the president’s April 2025 proclamation, the National Marine Fisheries Service, known as NOAA Fisheries, announced in a letter to permit holders it had reopened commercial fishing in the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument. That ban was lifted for nearly four months, until last August, when a federal district judge ruled, in a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit law firm Earthjustice, that the move violated the federal rulemaking process.

Earthjustice attorney David Henkin believes that the lawsuit, which he led, may have prompted the administration to change its strategy for revising industrial fishing regulations. This shift became evident when, after the president’s Atlantic Ocean proclamation earlier this year, NOAA Fisheries went through the formal rulemaking process to change the regulation that previously banned commercial fishing in those monuments.

Still, there is another, more fundamental legal question that Henkin says remains open. Though Congress has absolute authority over the use and management of federal lands and waters, the Antiquities Act of 1906 also gave the president the authority to designate certain federal water and lands containing scientific, historic, or cultural resources as protected monuments. No federal court has yet ruled whether the Antiquities Act allows a president to undo a national monument or their protections, though several cases are pending. Earthjustice is again preparing to challenge the administration in court. “It’s anyone’s guess what these folks are going to do, other than play fast and loose with the law,” said Henkin.

Opening these areas to commercial fishing has the additional effect of edging out traditional Indigenous fishers, who not only tend to practice smaller-scale, more sustainable fishing, but are also largely exempt from the commercial fishing bans in protected waters. Indigenous fishers, for instance, still retained the right to subsistence fish under the protections Trump just stripped back within the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument.

“If anyone gains to benefit from this, it’s not going to be the traditional Indigenous communities,” said Steven Mana‘oakamai Johnson, Kanaka Maoli from the island of Saipan and an assistant professor at Cornell University. “It’s going to be businesses, corporations, and those who have these larger vessels.”

Even in American Samoa—where tuna is the biggest export and support for commercial fishing is widespread—some are questioning the expansiveness of Trump’s latest proclamation and its effect on Indigenous peoples. A year ago, congresswoman Uifa’atali Amata from American Samoa said of the Pacific marine monuments, “Neither presidents Bush, Obama, or Biden ever asked American Samoa what they wanted before they took away our Indigenous fishing rights without any science.” But now Amata is concerned about how fishing around Rose Atoll could also infringe on Indigenous rights. “Amata remains convinced that Rose Atoll should be off limits, her longstanding position, especially as she respects the cultural rights of the people of Manu‘a,” her office said in a press release.

“It’s hard to exist as Hawaiians nowadays if every aspect of your environment is degraded.”

Camilo Mora, a scientist at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, challenges the administration’s argument that deregulation will create jobs and strengthen the fishing sector. Mora has long studied the relationship between biodiversity, fisheries, and the global food system, and argues any short-term economic benefits of the move will be offset by the long-term ecosystem losses. Most US waters, in any case, are already open to commercial fishing—highly protected areas where all extractive activity is banned make up about 3 percent.

Papahānaumokuākea, for one example, is one of the largest marine protected areas in the world and is a refuge for rare and ecologically significant species. The Hawaiian monk seal, humpback whales, and green sea turtles are among the more than 7,000 species found there, many of which are critically endangered. Opening up the Mau and Ho‘omalu zones of the area to commercial fishing, Mora warns, could trigger a trophic cascade—when a change in the top predator’s population or behavior ripples throughout the food chain—that will then drive “all of these populations to collapse.”

“We are destroying the capacity of the oceans to make the food we need,” said Mora.

For Kikiloi in Hawai‘i, what’s at stake is not just food—it’s the ability for Indigenous people in Hawai‘i to stay connected to their ancestors. He’s not surprised that scientists like Mora have found some of the oldest living corals on Earth in Papahānaumokuākea, because Hawaiian oral histories describe it as the place where life began. “It’s the place where our souls return to after death,” he said. “It’s hard to exist as Hawaiians nowadays if every aspect of your environment is degraded.”

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Trump’s Sons Stand To Profit From The Critical Minerals Arms Race

Donald Trump’s network of family businesses—and network of US government deals with those businesses—is mind-bogglingly wide. A New York Times investigation reveals his sons’ latest venture: tungsten mining in Kazakhstan.

The US government recently cut a massive mining deal for the critical mineral with the government of Kazakhstan, whose leader recently said Donald Trump was “sent by Heaven.” Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr., and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons Brandon and Kyle, are all tied directly or indirectly to the American company, Kaz Resources, that plans to break ground on the tungsten mine. Kaz Resources is also slated to recieve at least $1.6 billion in government funding.

Tungsten, a mineral widely used in missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips, has become increasingly difficult for the US to access since China put export restrictions on it in 2025. Since then, the Pentagon has selected contractors to build small tungsten refineries on US military bases, while also looking to expand overseas mining—because no onshore mines are currently operational, and likely won’t be for a long time. And those offshore mining deals may mean big money for Trump and Lutnick-affiliated companies: at least 14 different companies affiliated with one or both families are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals.

The Kazakh deal was signed on November 6th, without disclosing the Trump or Lutnick families’ involvement. Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Brandon Lutnick and Kyle Lutnick were “doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history,” Paul Sonne and Eric Lipton of the Times wrote.

“I can see how the optics might be disturbing to some people,” Pini Althaus, the CEO of Kaz Resources, said. “But that’s unfortunate because this company and this project goes way beyond any one president, let alone any family.”

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Trump’s Next ICE Pick: A Trooper Poised to Turn Local Cops Into Deportation Agents

On Saturday, President Trump nominated Lance Schroyer, a former Oklahoma State Trooper, to serve as the Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If confirmed, he would become the agency’s first permanent director since 2017. The pick signals a broader push to integrate local and federal law enforcement.

Schroyer has 29 years of state law enforcement experience, but his federal resume is thin. A former member of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s security detail, Schroyer only joined ICE in March as a senior advisor. But according to Mullin, Schroyer is still qualified for the job because, in his role as a State Trooper, he worked “alongside state and federal partners to remove illegal aliens from Oklahoma under the 287(g) program.”

The 287(g) task force program, expanded by executive order at the start of Trump’s second term, essentially allows ICE to deputize local police and jails, transforming traffic stops and local arrests into a pipeline for federal deportation. Over 1,200 local partner agencies have reportedly signed up for ICE bounties. Schroyer’s selection is another step towards merging local law enforcement with ICE, integrating the controversial and violent agency further into America’s day-to-day policing apparatus.

While Schroyer worked on Oklahoma’s 287(g) program, Oklahoma police departments held some of the largest ICE contracts of any state. Second only to Florida, Oklahoma law enforcement agencies held at least $47 million in ICE contracts as of March, according to a payout ledger obtained by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein. At least 30 Oklahoma agencies signed 287(g) agreements under Schroyer’s watch—mostly local police departments, but also further-afield groups like the state narcotics agency. In March, one rural K-12 school district police chief almost entered into a collaboration with ICE by accidentally signing a 287(g) agreement.

A February ACLU report showed that the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol, as part of its ICE partnership, orchestrated “mass arrest events.”

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol used traffic stops and “Oklahoma’s ports of entry” to conduct two major operations in fall 2025 targeting drivers, interrogating more than 1,000 people and making 193 immigration arrests. “We set up a command post at the port, we provide troopers, our emergency response troopers, that come out to process them,” Oklahoma Commissioner of Public Safety Tim Tipton told a local outlet. “It’s really a mass arrest event once you do that, when you have hundreds of people that you’re detaining.

Immigrants’ rights advocates have stated that the 287(g) program takes resources away from local law enforcement—and that it makes immigrants less likely to report crimes such as domestic violence, out of fear that police will use any interaction as a pretext to hand them over to ICE.

At the National Sheriff’s Association Conference earlier this month, Mullin encouraged local police departments to work with Schroyer, the Wall Street Journal reported. Mullin said that Schroyer, then a major in the Oklahoma state highway patrol, had joined DHS to advise agencies newly joining the 287(g) partnership program.

“We have him on staff. You guys want to talk to him? You guys want to utilize him, see how he does it,” Mullin said. “He is fully committed and understands that the 287(g) program can be a tremendous asset to you and to the country.”

Current Acting ICE Director David Venturella, a former private-prison executive who took office earlier this month, will continue in his role until Schroyer is confirmed by the Senate, a DHS official told the Associate Press.

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Our Climate Models Are Missing Something Crucial

This story was originally published b_yYale e360 a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For decades, climate scientists have issued warnings about positive global warming feedbacks, vicious cycles in the Earth system in which rising temperatures from burning fossil fuels beget more warming. The best tools we have to understand these feedback mechanisms are climate models, which simulate how the atmosphere, oceans, and land will respond under different emissions scenarios. Many feedbacks, like the loss of sea ice as the planet warms, are well-accounted for. Others, such as changes in cloud cover, remain far more uncertain but are still included in models. Feedbacks in which ecosystems emit more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere are so complex that they are often left out entirely.

For example, how much more carbon dioxide will be emitted as wildfires increase? How much more methane will bubble up from fermenting wetlands or seep from thawing permafrost? Remarkably, these so-called warming-induced emissions are poorly represented or absent from the most influential climate models—that is, those that inform the assessments of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Fires and permafrost melt have caused northern tundra to become a source of emissions, after acting as a sink for millennia.

A new study from a group of leading climate researchers suggests this information gap could make it even more difficult for nations to limit the rise in global average temperatures to well below 2 degrees C, the target set by the Paris Climate Agreement. The study found that emissions from natural systems could add as much as 0.6 degrees C to the rise in global average temperatures. That’s in line with earlier work that suggests such emissions could shorten by 25 percent the amount of time it takes to exceed 2 degrees C of warming. Shortcomings in climate modeling, scientists warn, could lead countries to overestimate how much fossil fuels can be burned before breaching climate targets.

“If you’re not including all the emissions going into the atmosphere, you’re hamstrung from the get-go,” says Brian Buma, a climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. “People are recognizing that the longer we go without taking these emissions into account, there’s just going to be a bigger gap.”

“Four decades ago, the scientific community was saying we think there are going to be these surprises in the Earth system as the planet warms,” says Benjamin Poulter, the lead scientist at Spark Climate Solutions, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that aims to identify climate “blind spots,” include them in policy frameworks, and assess the best way to deal with them. “Now, we’re starting to see these feedbacks become the reality.”

The biggest sources of warming-induced emissions are wildfires, wetlands, and permafrost—all of which have shown recent indications of rapid change. Since 2001, global carbon emissions from wildfires have increased by 60 percent. In 2020, researchers reported an alarming spike in the concentration of methane in the atmosphere, attributed partly to wetter conditions expanding wetlands in Africa and Asia and partly to warming temperatures, which accelerate the rate at which plants decompose in water.

Colder regions are seeing some of the fastest shifts: The 2024 Arctic report card found that wildfires and permafrost melt have caused the northern tundra to become a source of emissions, after acting as a sink for millennia. Hotter, drier conditions fuel Arctic wildfires, while thawing ice allows microbes to more rapidly decompose soil organic matter, releasing both CO2 and methane.

The challenges are exacerbated, experts say, by a lack of data from remote places, from the Congo basin to Siberia.

Those regional changes add up to global trends. In 2023 and again in 2024, record heat reduced the land carbon sink—the difference between the amount of CO2 emitted and the amount of CO2 absorbed by all terrestrial ecosystems—and contributed to a record jump in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. In 2025, the land sink appears to have recovered to its previous strength, although tropical forests in Southeast Asia and South America flipped from sink to source due to deforestation, wildfires, and more decomposition.

Like 2023 and 2024, 2026 will be an El Niño year, with elevated Pacific Ocean surface temperatures that are expected to boost global temperatures. These events are associated with hot, dry conditions in the Amazon, which can amplify wildfires and weaken the region’s carbon sink. The heat can also slow photosynthesis and increase the rate of decomposition in other tropical ecosystems.

Researchers are alarmed by these changes. “We’ve been worried about this for a long time,” says Rob Jackson, an environmental scientist at Stanford University and the chair of the Global Carbon Project, an international consortium of researchers tracking flows of carbon through Earth systems. Yet climate models have largely set the problem of warming-induced emissions aside: Of the 11 Earth system models used in the most recent IPCC assessment, none included warming-induced emissions from all of the main sources—wildfire, wetlands, and permafrost. Five included wildfire; just two included permafrost.

That’s largely because of the difficulty of the problem: The scientific challenge amounts to predicting the response of every ecosystem on Earth to warming temperatures. “It adds computational processing time, complexity, and there’s no good agreement about how to represent wetland emissions, permafrost, wildfire,” says Poulter. Modeling all of these emissions requires simulating diverse, nonlinear processes that behave in ways that can be difficult to predict. The basic modeling challenges are exacerbated, experts say, by a lack of monitoring in hard-to-access ecosystems, from Siberia to the Congo basin.

Just how much warming might be missing from the picture? In the new study, Poulter and a group of colleagues from leading climate modeling groups used a simplified climate model to estimate the volume of emissions that might be expected from these sources under a range of scenarios, using past estimates of the scale of the feedback for each source of warming-induced emissions. They then modeled how much those emissions would raise temperatures on top of the contribution from human emissions.

If humans quickly rein in their emissions, the researchers found, emissions from forests, wetlands, and other ecosystems might amount to anywhere between zero additional degrees and 0.4 additional degrees C this century, an amount that would accelerate warming due to human emissions by up to 60 percent.

Under a more pessimistic scenario, in which human emissions peak around 2060 and then decline, they found emissions from ecosystems could raise temperatures from between 0.2 to 0.6 degrees C. The lion’s share of the uncertainty stemmed from how researchers estimated ecosystems would respond to warming, rather than from the choice of warming scenario or any inherent ambiguities in the models.

“You can’t turn a wrench on a wetland,” Jackson says. But there are ways warming-induced emissions might be addressed directly.

Keeping the rise in average global temperatures well below 2 degrees C is already a huge challenge. “Something like these warming-induced emissions makes that harder,” says Chris Jones, a climate scientist at the UK Met Office working to integrate these emissions into climate models. Warming feedbacks could also add to the danger of overshooting Paris Agreement goals, given that they may not be reversible, he says. While a coal-fired power plant can be replaced with renewables, he explains, melting permafrost will continue to melt after a certain amount of warming.

To put the scale of the problem into perspective, the researchers estimated that by 2100, the annual contribution of warming-induced CO2 emissions could be equivalent to those from today’s power and building sectors, which together make up about half of global CO2 emissions due to direct human activities. Warming-induced methane emissions could be almost equivalent to today’s annual fossil methane emissions from Asia and North America combined, they found.

Now that the signal of these emissions has emerged, researchers say it is essential to get a better grip on how they work and what they mean for the future of the climate, and to get countries to start counting them. “We can quantify and measure these emissions, but then we also need to develop an accounting framework so that we can do something about them,” says Poulter.

Since launching last fall, Spark’s program on warming-induced emissions has connected more than 20 independent modeling groups from around the world to add those emissions to models, improve measurements, and explore ways to potentially reduce those emissions. “There’s a community of people now that are building this field,” says Poulter. Their aim is to make robust projections that can be used in the next IPCC climate assessment and thus play a role in global climate policy.

Work on the assessment is already underway, with a final report due by late 2029. The modeling work also feeds into efforts to improve measurements of ecosystems—to understand how they are changing and what role warming is playing. Modelers can identify gaps in observations and make decisions about where limited resources should be placed.

Scientists aim to make projections that can be used in the next IPCC assessment and thus play a role in climate policy.

One of the first projects coordinated through Spark’s warming-induced emissions campaign is the installation, by a team at the University of California, Los Angeles, of dozens of methane sensors at wetlands in central Africa, which are known to be major emitters of methane. Another measurement effort led by Jackson focuses on improving measurements of wetland emissions in the Amazon. In both regions, Jackson says there is a lack of data on baseline CO2 and methane emissions, which are essential to making reliable future projections. This also makes it challenging to know what is driving the change in emissions: Is it wetlands growing with more precipitation, or is it a warming-induced increase in microbial respiration, or other factors?

Unlike a leaky natural gas well, Jackson says, “you can’t turn a wrench on a wetland.” But there are ways that warming-induced emissions might be addressed directly.

Bronson Griscom, an ecologist and founder of a natural climate solutions company called Ceiba Earth, sorts ideas for addressing warming-induced emissions into three buckets. The first promotes the continuation of projects that will work even as temperatures rise. For example, reforestation efforts in temperate woodlands might actually see more growth and therefore more carbon storage with elevated CO2. Fuel reduction efforts, such as thinning and conducting controlled burns, will also reduce emissions.

The second bucket contains tweaks to existing projects to account for future warming. Teams working on restoration in the Amazon, for example, might consider picking tree species that are more resilient to hotter temperatures, says Griscom, something researchers are already experimenting with.

The third bucket of ideas addresses warming-induced emissions directly. In the Arctic, Cansu Culha, an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, is looking to slow the melting of permafrost by applying insulating “blankets” of vegetation to permafrost slumps, where the land is releasing carbon most rapidly. Jackson and other researchers have considered ways to manage wetlands to reduce the amount of methane they generate by changing cycles of wetting and rewetting, altering water chemistry to influence microbial activity, or reconnecting them with seawater. Managing a natural wetland in this way is complicated and controversial, but some of the approaches have been tested with success in rice paddies—another major source of methane.

Researchers and policymakers who are trying to tackle emissions say they would benefit from a clearer picture of feedback mechanisms as the signal of warming-induced emissions begins to emerge from the noise. “People are seeing this stuff happening,” says Buma. “It’s in front of their eyes.” Climate modelers are scrambling to catch up.

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Mark Zuckerberg Sure Sounds Eager to Get Young People Hooked on Online Gambling

Meta believes the future is gambling.

As prediction markets surge in popularity, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly calling for his company to consider partnering with Polymarket and Kalshi, two of the biggest platforms, while he develops a similar in-house app, Arena. According to a Friday report by the New York Times, Zuckerberg wants to design Arena to specifically target 18 to 34-year-olds.

Meta also hopes to implement parts of Arena into Facebook and its messaging app, Messenger, attaching betting options to group chats, news feeds, and videos.

“We believe that prediction markets are one of the more interesting new content types,” Ime Archibong, a senior Meta official leading Arena’s development, reportedly said in an internal company post last month. “The social conversation is the payoff as people aim to show off how good they are at predicting things to their friends.”

The strategy appears to be: betting as content, gamifying gambling to become social. It’s a framing that could open the door to harmful situations, especially for the young people he’s going after.According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, 2.5 million US adults, or about 1 percent of Americans, meet the diagnostic mental health criteria of severe gambling addiction. An Epic Research study published on Friday analyzing electronic health records found that gambling disorder diagnoses have risen more than 60 percent since 2018 in states that have legalized sports betting. The largest increase came from young people, aged 18 to 29, whose rate more than doubled.

“When markets are built into a personalized feed, they stop feeling like something for traders,” Archibong wrote in his same internal post. “They start to feel like part of the conversation that is tied to memes, moments, and whatever people are paying attention to.”

Yes. Right. Exactly. Meta appears to openly desire a world in which the company profits off addiction by blurring the lines between gambling and daily online conversation.

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Does Trump Know How Passports Work?

President Trump on Friday unveiled the latest rendering of a special edition US passport to commemorate America’s 250th birthday that features a large image of himself hovering over the Resolute Desk, the latest in a series of plans to place Trump front and center of the anniversary.

But it’s the warning that will accompany the new passports that’s prompting a new kind of stress: “Welcome, but be good!”

The message instantly called into question Trump’s understanding of a passport, which is primarily obtained so that American citizens can leave the United States and travel abroad—no welcome needed. It seems likely that Trump was conflating a US passport with a visa. Either that or he feels a knee-jerk inclination to inject anti-immigrant, xenophobic themes into everything he does. Both feel too possible.

Truth Social

Meanwhile, the State Department hasn’t confirmed the new design. But American citizens with plans to obtain or renew their passports this summer may want to steer clear of the Washington Passport Agency. As CNN reported when an earlier rendering was released in April, the limited edition passport will be the “default option” at the DC processing center. “Online options or other locations will maintain existing passport design,” an official told CNN.

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How to Survive a Brutal Heat Wave in Italy

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

With Western Europe in the grip of a punishing early-summer heat wave, maximum health alerts have been issued in Rome, Paris, and even London. Thursday was the UK’s and Switzerland’s hottest June day on record, with each just below 100 degrees F, while France endured its warmest day ever on Wednesday, with temperatures in some areas rising to approximately 111 degrees F.

The toll of the sweltering temperatures driven by a heat dome has been stark: French authorities have recorded at least 48 drownings as people try to escape the heat, while hot cars have tragically claimed the lives of three young children. Spain is seeing a similarly tragic reality. Between Sunday and Thursday alone, an estimated 327 people lost their lives to the extreme conditions, according to data from the Spanish health ministry’s monitoring system.

Italy has recorded the highest heat mortality in Europe for three consecutive summers.

Italy, where I live, is under severe strain too. Even though this is the country that holds the title for Europe’s hottest-ever temperature (119.8 degrees F in Sicily in 2021), the current climate is testing those limits once again. On Friday, the Italian Ministry of Health placed 18 major cities on strict Level 3 red alert (bollino rosso), indicating immediate risk to even healthy adults. These cities include Rome, Milan, Florence, Venice, Turin, Bologna, Genoa, and Bari.

That warning seems prescient—of the five people who have died so far, one was a 61-year-old male in the Piacenza area who collapsed while working in his vineyard. Though this initial toll seems small compared to those in Spain and France, Italy has recorded the highest heat mortality in Europe for three consecutive summers, capturing a grim toll of roughly 18,800 deaths in 2022, 13,800 in 2023, and over 19,000 in 2024. (Numbers for 2025 aren’t in yet.)

Moreover, even as other places in Europe are looking toward relief this weekend, meteorologists warn that Italy’s anomalous heat wave will not ease significantly until early July. Yet, tourism figures for this summer indicate a record-breaking 172 million people are slated to come to the Bel Paese in July and August. Oh, and remember—we do not really do air conditioning in this country (more on that in a moment). If you are heading our way, how will you cope?

The Italian health ministry offered sage advice in their recent circular titled “Protect Me From the Heat”: Avoid going out between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. (when the weather is at its hottest), limit alcohol and coffee (sorry), dress in natural fibers such as linen (do this anyway), eat lightly (again, sorry), and drink at least a liter and a half of water.

Always carry a bottle with you, too; in both the countryside and cities in Italy, you are bound to come across a water fountain. If filling water from somewhere public grosses you out, fear not; there is a knack to it. There should be signs saying Acqua Potabile (drinking water) above the fountain. If it says Acqua Non Potabile, it’s a no-go. If you’re headed to Rome, there are specific drinking-water fountains called nasoni, named because they resemble long noses. There are about 2,500 dotted around the Eternal City.

On a much broader spectrum, there is an app called Acquea that pinpoints over 150,000 points with drinkable water throughout Italy. Run by Rome’s water company, Acea, the app also gives out the sodium and calcium levels of the liquid from the fountains and has a built-in tracker to monitor hydration (small amounts of sodium are essential to rehydrating effectively).

Lunch during hotter times tends to be a no-cook affair. Instead of devouring a plate of hot pasta or a whole pizza come midday, opt for timeless Italian summertime classics such as prosciutto-wrapped melon, a refreshing caprese salad, or an insalata di riso (rice salad) tossed with light ingredients such as vegetables and eggs. Back in 2023, the Italian Ministry of Health even advised swapping out pranzi freddi (cold lunches) for gelato instead. “Consuming an ice cream or a milkshake can be an alternative to a midday meal,” the guide suggested.

Speaking of sweet treats to cool down, Sicilian granita is a semi-frozen dessert similar to a slush, but with fresh ingredients and a more crystalline texture. Originating on the Italian island, but now found everywhere in Italy, popular flavors of granita include lemon and strawberry. In Rome, grattachecca (shaved ice) is king come the summer months. Vendors manually shave ice off of a block and into a cup. The ice is then drenched with flavored syrups, making for a perfect Roman summer street food.

Coffee doesn’t have to be a complete no-go either. There are plenty of cold coffee options, such as caffè shakerato, a drink made by vigorously shaking coffee with ice and a sweetener in a cocktail shaker, or c_affè leccese,_ a sweet, almond-based coffee from Puglia made by placing almond syrup and ice cubes in a glass and topping them off with espresso.

There are plenty of crisp indoor sights, such as art galleries and museums, catacombs, and stone churches filled with art.

While mastering the local food and drink menus is a delicious way to stay cool, surviving an Italian summer also requires a bit of structural strategy. Wherever you are staying or plan to eat, make sure you call before you book to inquire about whether they have air conditioning. The reason it is not a given in Italy is a somewhat unique belief called colpo d’aria (hit of air). According to Italian lore, a sudden exposure to a cold draft while you’re hot is believed to cause neck aches, stomach cramps, earaches, and headaches. Fortunately, recent market data shows unit sales have increased by 16 percent since last year, providing a glimmer of hope that this attitude is changing given the heat waves.

If you find yourself AC-less, the shutters found on the facades of all Italian residential properties can provide much-needed respite. Do as Italians do and keep them closed during the morning to stop the sunlight from getting in and warming up your hotel room.

The boiling weather doesn’t necessarily mean you have to skimp on major landmarks, either—it just means you may have to switch it up. If you fully intend to brave the heat between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., make sure you get tickets in advance to avoid queuing for hours in the blistering sun.

More importantly, make sure your midday landmarks are indoors; standing in the center of the Colosseum at noon during a heat wave is a surefire way to ruin your day. But Italy has plenty of crisp indoor sights to see, such as art galleries and museums, catacombs, and stone churches filled with art.

Taking a stroll (passeggiata) and sightseeing at night is also just as nice as doing it in the day. You’ll probably meet more locals along the way too, as they seldom step out when it is boiling. During summer, main attractions stay open until 7 p.m., and even offer exclusive night openings; after-hours entry at the Vatican or visiting the Colosseum by moonlight allow you to see world-class history under the stars.

And remember, Italy is more than its cities. With tourists never being too far from a beach or hills, and train travel being cheap (and air-conditioned!), holidaymakers can always substitute a day wandering around cobblestoned streets for white sands or grassy paths to keep out of the humidity. By learning to adjust your clock, leaning into the art of the pranzi freddi, and treating the midday heat as an excuse for an extra gelato, you won’t just survive the intense Mediterranean summer, you will get to experience Italy in a safer way, exactly the way the locals have become accustomed to.

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Has America Lived Up to Its Founding Promise?

Elizabeth Freeman was an enslaved person living in Massachusetts when the Declaration of Independence was signed 250 years ago. The document’s famous words “all men are created equal” did not apply to her, but she thought they should.

“She is somebody who heard the words of the declaration, knew that they were real in her life, and argued for that to be true,” says Errin Haines, editor-at-large at The 19th. Eventually, Freeman fought to abolish slavery in Massachusetts.

This week on Reveal, as America marks 250 years since its founding, we share stories of people who were denied equality and the battles they fought to attain it. In addition to Freeman’s story, we hear about one of the first Native American communities to encounter white settlers more than 400 years ago and learn why the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment for women continues to this day.

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Kylie Jenner and Meta Deserve Each Other

Long before today’s tech giants forced their way into co-chairing the Met Gala, Google co-founder Sergey Brin positioned himself in the front row of Diane Von Furstenberg’s 2013 spring show, sporting an early prototype of what would be known as Google Glass. Von Furstenberg herself donned a pair of the wearable smartglasses as she directed models, some also wearing Google Glass, down the runway. It seemed like a promising partnership between a powerful tech company and the woman who popularized the iconic wrap dress.

Yet despite the celebrity-packed promotions, generous Vogue spreads, and proclamations of one of the “Best Inventions of the Year,” Google Glass infamously flopped. It turns out there wasn’t much clamoring for clunky lenses that did little more than take photos and send alerts of incoming text messages. Which is to say nothing about the intense privacy concerns the technology appeared to present.

In pushing AI technology, the Meta-Jenner partnership reads like a poor misreading of our cultural moment, as well as a willful disregard of just how badly Google Glass pissed off people a decade prior.

It was around this time that the public was introduced to King Kylie, the internet persona fans bestowed upon the youngest of the Kardashian-Jenner machine as a testament to her cultural clout. In fact, Kylie Jenner was seemingly everywhere in the mid-2010’s, with a social media dominance that in 2018 commanded $1 million per sponsored Instagram post and an immensely popular cosmetics line.

So it makes sense, in a way, that Meta, which owns Instagram, is now turning to a veteran of the platform to sell its new line of AI glasses. “Cutest night with @metaglasses! My meta glasses are out now,” Jenner posted in a carousel from a party in New York, where she celebrated this week with Mark Zuckerberg. One can only imagine the regret felt by Snapchat, which Jenner also gamely used to fuel her rise and is now in the AI glasses business, upon seeing Jenner palling around with Zuck.

At the Meta Connect developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg, head of the Facebook group Meta, shows the prototype of computer glasses that can display digital objects in transparent lenses. Andrej Sokolow/dpa/Zuma

But outside Meta’s monied party on Tuesday, the reception has been scornful. “Meta glasses are cybertrucks for the face,” read a comment that has since gone viral. In fact, much of the negative feedback felt ripped straight from the criticism once aimed at Google Glass: “Mass surveillance predator glasses yesssss,” one user wrote on Jenner’s Instagram. “Legit people are putting others in danger with this technology.”

To be sure, Meta Glasses appear to avoid some of Google Glass’s pitfalls. For one, Meta’s glasses, designed in partnership with Ray-Ban parent company EssilorLuxottica, are more aesthetically pleasing than their Google forebearer. They’re also significantly cheaper, starting at $299. (Jenner’s limited Starfire edition is slightly more at $399.)

But in pushing AI technology, the Meta-Jenner partnership reads like a poor misreading of our cultural moment, as well as a willful disregard of just how badly Google Glass pissed off people a decade prior. After all, is there a bigger unifying force than our current animosity for AI? Just look at all the college graduates, perennially the demographic of cool in any given era, roasting AI en masse. When they’re forced to use it, Gen Z absolutely loathes it.

But the hostility runs far deeper than young people. People on both sides of the aisle are actively rejecting the data centers popping up in their backyards; we have near-universal agreement that the aesthetics of AI suck; and there’s outright antipathy for the billionaire overlords, Zuckerberg included, hoping to shove AI into every inch of the public sphere. It feels appropriate, then, that a company that has been stuck in cultural freefall is trying to make AI glasses happen, when the same, decades-old question—who even wants them?—still looms large.

As for Jenner, the influencer remains relevant, and a willingness to cozy up to the worst people in any given room appears to run in the family. But it’s Jenner’s ability to sell things—which is ostensibly the root goal of the Meta-Jenner partnership—that is far shakier in 2026: Kylie Cosmetics is nowhere near as popular as it once was, and Jenner’s clothing line, KHY, has yet to make an impact since launching in 2023. As for Jenner’s boyfriend, Timothée Chalamet, the actor was also at Tuesday’s event, though apparently not wanting to be seen and, even perhaps even more notably, not wearing a pair of Meta Glasses.

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“We Want You Here”: Springfield Rallies—and Grieves—After SCOTUS Clears Path to Deport Haitians

Immigrants, faith leaders, and advocates in Springfield, Ohio, had cautiously hoped that when the Supreme Court decided whether to allow the expiration of Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status (TPS), they would celebrate outside City Hall. Instead, as the clouds over downtown Springfield cleared Thursday evening, they hastily gathered to grieve together. Hours earlier, the Supreme Court cleared the path for the Trump administration to deport 340,000 Haitians and Syrians back to the violence- and disaster-stricken nations they had fled. In a small city where up to a quarter of its residents are Haitians with TPS, the decision feels personal—and fatal: For Haitians who will be forced to return to an unsafe country, some after years of living in Springfield, and for a community that has grown to love and rely on their immigrant neighbors.

A sign planted in mulch outside City Hall in Springfield, Ohio.Sarah Szilagy

Before the gospel and protest songs, prayers, and calls to action, immigration advocates took to the podium to share urgent messages for the Haitian members of their community, first in English, then in Haitian Creole. “If you wish to stay in the United States, and you are afraid to return to your home country, you should speak with an immigration attorney,” one said. “Our immigrant community…they need to decide what will happen with their children if they are detained.” Only a handful of Haitians were around to hear them.

Under an overhang emblazoned with channel letters spelling the phrase “forward together,” hundreds of Springfield advocates stood solemnly in sticky summer heat as an immigration attorney explained the court’s ruling and consequences. “We’ve been talking about this moment for four or five years, and it’s here,” said Kathleen Kersh, an immigration attorney with the nonprofit firm Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE). “None of us are free until all of us are free, and the way you stand up in the next year is going to define who you are.” This was where, nearly two years prior, the white supremacist group the Blood Tribe claimed Springfield as its “property.” But Thursday evening, the mostly white crowd gripped signs reading “Immigrants make America great,” “Hillbillies for Haitians,” “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Chalk-wielding children doodled on the concrete while a Haitian pastor prayed and a local choir sang songs created in Minneapolis during the wide-scale and often violent immigration enforcement operations there last winter.

Haitian Pastor Jimmy Pierre, who has a green card, prays in Haitian Creole while Springfield faith leaders stand behind him.Sarah Szilagy

A local choir led the crowd in singing protest and gospel songs.Sarah Szilagy

Advocates told me that soon after the court’s decision came down, ABLE’s phone started ringing. On the other end of the line were Haitian immigrants, some so terrified they could only weep. The vast majority of Haitian TPS holders live in Florida. But Springfield, Ohio, was thrust under the national microscope during the 2024 campaign, when then-candidate Donald Trump falsely claimed Haitians were “eating the pets” of their American-born neighbors. Singling out Springfield, Trump promised to deport the Haitian residents there upon his reelection. The only thing standing in his way, he argued, was TPS, a humanitarian designation Congress established in 1990 for people fleeing war, natural disasters, epidemics, or unrest. Despite the “temporary” nature of TPS, many countries’ designations have been renewed for years because conditions remained unlikely to improve.

Such is the case in Haiti, which never recovered from a devastating earthquake in 2010 and whose government effectively collapsed after the 2021 assassination of its president, Jovenel Moïse. Speaking to reporters after the rally, Rev. Carl Ruby, a Springfield pastor and one of the leaders of G92, a local faith-based immigrant rights group, recalled the horrors Haitians endured before escaping to the US. He could not forget the story of the young boy he had met who watched a pack of feral hogs eat human remains that were left out in the open. “That’s what we’re sending them back to,” Ruby said. “We ought to be ashamed of that as Americans.”

“That’s what we’re sending them back to. We ought to be ashamed of that as Americans.”

Thursday morning, while waiting to learn whether the court would hand down its decision, Ruby sat with Vilès Dorsainvil under a wooden cross at Ruby’s Central Christian Church, which has become a refuge for the Haitian community and the home base for Springfield’s immigration advocates. Between the evidence of Trump’s racist claims against Haitians—calling Haiti, for example, a “shithole country” whose citizens had AIDS—and newly-discovered evidence that then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem decided to terminate TPS despite DHS officials initially recommending otherwise, they hoped the justices would at least take a more measured approach—perhaps the court wouldn’t wholly save TPS but would nevertheless recognize the racism underlying Trump’s anti-Haitian rhetoric as unconstitutionally prejudiced. Instead, in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the justices further cemented Trump’s executive power and the inability of federal judges to limit or even question it.

Dorsainvil came to the US in 2020 and, since 2021, has lived in Springfield, where he founded the Haitian Support Center, as thousands of Haitians settled there. A TPS holder himself, Dorsainvil knows what devastation awaits Haitians in the US and back on the island. As I previously reported:

Dorsainvil’s cases are a litany of awful experiences: women and men vulnerable to human trafficking because they lost their work authorizations; families coming home to eviction notices with less than $20 in their bank accounts; people who have “nothing” and nowhere to go. There is a parallel desperation between Haitian immigrants and the families they support back home that Dorsainvil can’t ignore; if a Haitian in the US gets detained or deported, it’s a matter of “life and death” for them and every person in Haiti who relies on them.

“My hope is that the United States, including our current government, will once again place its trust in justice, compassion, and human dignity,” Dorsainvil said Thursday. “This is not the time for people to be judged by the color of their skin, the language they speak, or the country from which they come.”

Vilès Dorsainvil, a TPS holder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center, thanked community members and the legal teams that fought for Haitians’ TPS at the Supreme Court.Sarah Szilagy

Dorsainvil was among the few Haitian TPS holders who attended Thursday evening’s vigil. Organizers, legal advocates, and immigrants didn’t know what to expect: Would ICE begin mass detainments that very day? Would they appear at all? Ruby said when he and Dorsainvil met with ICE officials months ago, they warned the advocates they would take a “carrot-and-stick” approach, which meant they intended “to make life so unbearable that they leave on their own.” But where would they go? Presumably not Haiti, because the country is under the State Department’s highest travel warning, and US commercial airlines cannot fly there.

Ruby told reporters that should ICE come to town, local churches were “committed” to offering sanctuary to Haitians. Advocates, meanwhile, told me they hoped that it wouldn’t come to that point; ICE may have learned its lesson in Minneapolis, and Springfield has had years to coordinate a sprawling volunteer defense and support network. One potential option for protection advocates pointed to was the US Senate, which could advance an existing bill that would extend TPS for Haitians for three more years.

As the sun sank behind downtown Springfield’s mid-rise apartments and office buildings, the crowd dispersed almost as swiftly as it arrived. Stragglers lingered in the courtyard, embracing their neighbors, while the few police officers stationed outside City Hall unhurriedly patrolled the grounds.

Hundreds of Springfield residents gathered Thursday evening, many bearing signs of support for Haitian immigrants.Sarah Szilagy

Community members left with to-do lists: Donate to the Haitian Support Center and the local St. Vincent de Paul chapter, a Catholic nonprofit that immediately launched a diaper and food drive after the decision came down; call Ohio’s US Senators, urging them to extend Haitians’ TPS; keep an eye on their Haitian neighbors. But even with the community’s steadfast support, Biassu Pierre, a Haitian TPS holder and community organizer with ABLE, said in the wake of the ruling, fellow immigrants have questions he cannot answer: What will happen to my children if I am deported? How can I feed my family without lawful work? One woman, Naomi, called him in tears. Her husband was deported to Haiti in December, and he has since “disappeared.” Her three children are among the 1,300 children of Haitian immigrants who were born in Springfield, and who, as American citizens, now face the increasing likelihood of family separation.

“Haitians are not just immigration cases or statistics. We are your neighbor, your co-worker, member of your church,” Pierre told the crowd. “We love Springfield. We would like to stay, to live with you.”

“We want you here!” a man in the crowd shouted back.

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These Dudes Don’t Think It’s Safe to Be a Straight White Woman in the WNBA

Caitlin Clark is in danger, but thankfully she has the good citizens of right-wing media to protect her.

On Wednesday night, Clark’s Indiana Fever took on the Phoenix Mercury when, in the second quarter, Clark lost her footing while driving to the basket. During a brief scramble for the ball, Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas lodged a fist into Clark’s throat. Thomas, known widely to people in the know as one of the more physical players in the league, was eventually given a flagrant 2 foul, the league’s most serious penalty, after league review and suspended for one game.

That’s not enough for right-wing media, which has gone overboard in her defense. Noted conservative commentator Benny Johnson, for instance, wanted justice, tweeting the next day to his four million followers, “This is our George Floyd.”

This is our George Floyd pic.twitter.com/TLEy6a7aPR

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 25, 2026

As of this writing, the pile-on continues:

This is absolutely vile.

I’m no WNBA fan but Caitlin Clark is CLEARLY being assaulted constantly just because she’s White.

I’m sick of pretending otherwise.

They are beating her because they are anti-White and they hate she’s better than them. pic.twitter.com/YNktm2bxGB

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) June 25, 2026

Boomer Esiason, a former pro football player turned radio personality, even floated the idea of Clark taking her talents over to Europe. “If I were Caitlin Clark, I would seriously consider going to play overseas somewhere and get the royal treatment,” Esiason said. “She’s a straight, white basketball player. And she is not being treated with any sort of respect.”

"If I were Caitlin Clark, I would seriously consider going to play overseas somewhere and get the royal treatment…she's a straight white basketball player. And she is not being treated with any sort of respect" – Boomer Esiason pic.twitter.com/zeFRdOMLVn

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) June 25, 2026

And look, maybe Boomer has a point. Maybe players are being unnecessarily mean to Caitlin Clark. After all, young, popular athletes in other leagues are never targeted like this by their peers, and it’s only been Black women who have publicly challenged Clark’s dominance. Maybe she should go to some peaceful majority-white oasis where she can be free of dumb squabbles about race and gender. She could probably become the multi-million dollar face of a league, even get her own signature shoe. Caitlin Clark could become an icon.

Oh, wait.

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The Death Rate for ICE Detainees Has Skyrocketed Under Trump

In February 2025, Maksym Chernyak had a medical emergency. There were multiple signs that Chernyak—a 44-year-old from Ukraine detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Florida—was suffering a severe stroke. But ICE’s medical personnel missed those clues. By the time 911 was called, it was too late. Chernyak’s systolic blood pressure was more than 280 when he got to the hospital. He died soon after.

Chernyak is one of 52 people who died in ICE custody during the 500 days after President Donald Trump returned to office. A new report from two watchdog groups argues that ICE’s mistakes “almost certainly” cost Chernyak his life. It also reveals that he was far from alone in receiving abysmal medical treatment while in immigration detention.

The analysis—released on Thursday by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights—found that the mortality rate for people in ICE custody has skyrocketed during Trump’s second-term mass-deportation campaign. It’s nearly three times what it was during Joe Biden’s presidency and about two times higher than during Trump’s first term—a period that covered the first 10 months of the Covid-19 pandemic. In other words, far more people are now in ICE detention than in prior administrations, and a far greater percentage of those detainees are dying.

The report combines statistical analysis with detailed reviews of specific deaths in ICE custody. It states that PHR—whose medical experts investigate allegations of abuse across the world—identified a “high suspicion of inadequate or delayed health care” in several deaths that raised “serious concerns that the deaths may have been preventable.”

Along with calling for improved medical care within ICE detention, the report recommends that ICE reduce the number of people in detention and prevent overcrowding. Reagan Williams, a researcher in the Crisis, Conflict, and Arms division at HRW, told me that could partly be done by ending mandatory immigration detention, which has been greatly expanded under Trump.

The current policy, which is the subject of an ongoing legal battle, subjects people who entered the country without inspection to mandatory detention regardless of criminal history or how long they have lived in the United States. In the past—including during Trump’s first term—the people covered by the policy would have been eligible for bond hearings and could be released as their immigration cases proceeded.

NBC News reported on Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general is launching a review of the increase in deaths in ICE detention centers. ICE did not respond to my request for comment.

Williams said that HRW and PHR are also asking Congress to mandate detailed independent reviews of deaths in ICE custody. Additionally, HRW and PHR are calling for a new independent entity that would have authority and jurisdiction over the quality of medical services that are provided to people in detention.

Some of the most disturbing sections of the report focus on the medical treatment received by men like Chernyak in the lead-up to their deaths. In Chernyak’s case, HRW and PHR were able to gain a much more detailed understanding of what happened after obtaining medical records from his family. In other cases, they had to rely on inadequate information released by ICE that can obscure the scale of the agency’s mistakes.

Oksana Tarasiuk shows a picture of herself and her late husband, Maksym Chernyak, inside the couple’s apartment in Florida.Rebecca Blackwell/AP/AP

Dr. Katherine Peeler, a PHR medical adviser and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard, told me that Chernyak’s case was “shocking” on many levels. One of the most concerning things noted by ICE’s medical staff while Chernyak was at the detention center was that he was unresponsive and had “dilated equal but nonreactive pupils.” He also experienced “seizure-like” activity. Peeler said medical staff should have recognized that Chernyak may have been experiencing potentially life-threatening brain swelling.

Nevertheless, it was recommended that Chernyak be sent to an emergency room via “non-emergency, medical transport.” Thirty minutes later—while Chernyak was still waiting at the detention center—he began having “additional seizures, vomited, and his pupils became unequal and remained non-reactive,” according to the report from HRW and PHR. Medical staff at the detention center then finally called 911. At the hospital, Peeler said, medical professionals immediately recognized that he was suffering from what proved to be a fatal stroke.

While conditions in ICE detention have deteriorated since Trump returned to office, HRW and PHR’s investigation makes clear that many of the problems are longstanding. That can be seen from the death of Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, a 45-year-old man from Ethiopia, on January 29, 2025. Dejene—who was first detained during the Biden administration in August 2024—began suffering from back pain around November 2024, according to information released by ICE.

During one six-week period, he was evaluated four different times by medical staff at an Arizona detention center. On the last of those visits, after a nurse noted that he had an “abnormal slow gait,” he was provided with pain medication and instructions for spine exercises. The nurse recommended a follow-up in two weeks, but Dejene needed medical attention again just four days later.

This time, medical staff noted that Dejene had lost 20 percent of his body weight and sent him to a local emergency room, which then returned him to the detention center with a diagnosis of “probable lymphoma.” Dejene’s condition quickly deteriorated and he was sent back to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Dejene died soon after. Peeler said the autopsy revealed that Dejene had a number of conditions that stemmed from AIDS that somehow went unnoticed by medical providers. According to the autopsy, those included “central nervous system toxoplasmosis, tuberculosis, Diphyllobothrium tapeworm, pneumocystis pneumonia, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Candida albicans, and Cytomegalovirus.” (ICE’s detainee death report for Dejene states that he denied having “any medical history.”)

“He was immunocompromised, which led him to have all these infections,” Peeler explained. “Which is how people used to die from AIDS. But people don’t typically die from AIDS in this country anymore because we have such effective antiretrovirals.” Peeler emphasized that ICE medical staff had multiple opportunities to potentially save Dejene’s life. “He must have looked sick,” she said. “There’s no way that he looked okay.”

“This one I found really, really egregious,” Peeler added. “It was over so many weeks. There were so many opportunities that he presented where they should have drawn labs.”

Williams, the HRW researcher, said she was struck in her research by just how little information is provided to people whose loved ones have died in ICE custody. She mentioned talking to a mother who “was desperate to know more about what had happened to her son.”

Williams stressed the human lives behind the numbers in the report. “When we talk about a rising death rate,” she explained, “we’re talking about a mother losing her son who cooked for her, who cared for her, who she loves deeply, and who she is now suffering without.”

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John Bolton Pleads Guilty, But He Is Also the Victim of a Double Standard

Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton pleaded guilty on Friday to keeping security information from his work in his personal records—an act less egregious than what Donald Trump and Joe Biden previously got away with unscathed.

A Florida judge dismissed Trump’s case in 2024 for allegedly retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, saying that special counsel Jack Smith, who filed the charges against Trump, was illegally appointed by the Justice Department—rather than the President and confirmed by the Senate.

And Biden was not charged for purportedly keeping documents in a former D.C. office and his personal residence in Delaware. One reason given was that Biden would likely present himself before a jury “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” which would make it difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him for “a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

But, as of Friday, Bolton has pled guilty to one count of unauthorized retention of national defense information out of a total of 18 official charges. Prosecutors said that Bolton faces a prison sentence of up to five years and agreed to pay $2.25 million in fines. His sentencing date is set for October 28.

Since leaving his position in the first Trump administration in 2019, Bolton has become a vocal critic of the president. When he was first indicted last October, Bolton saidthe case was an attempt by Trump to use the Justice Department to punish his political enemies. The president has gone after officials like former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and former Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell.

The Justice Department under Joe Biden continued to gather evidence in the case and the 18-count indictment focused on Bolton’s private messages containing national security information—not the contents of the memoir. The indictment alleged that Bolton used his personal email and a messaging app to share more than 1000 pages of notes with two family members.

The indictment said that Bolton’s emails were later hacked by someone with ties to the government of Iran. “A representative for Bolton notified the U.S. government of the hack in or about July 2021,” the filing reads in part, “but did not tell the U.S. government that the account contained national defense information, including classified information.”

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How Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump Sparked a Movement to Overthrow the Government of Albania

Every day, for more than three weeks running, tens of thousands of Albanians have taken to the streets, a peaceful mass movement seeking nothing less than a complete overthrow of the government.

The “Flamingo Revolution,” as local activists have dubbed it, was set off by the luxury resort projects that Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, plan to build on nature reserves in Albania. At the beginning of May, a barbed-wire fence was erected in the Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape in Zvërnec, restricting access to one of the most treasured natural coastlines and one of the Mediterranean’s last untouched coastal ecosystems.

Activists, residents, and members of the Levizja Bashkë political party gathered to protest the fences, and after security guards violently dragged a demonstrator through the property, more protests erupted and the story went global.

A protester speaks his mind during the early days of the so-called Flamingo Revolution.

Protesters gather nightly in the Boulevard of Martyrs, even in the rain.

The Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape in Zvërnec, Albania, one of the Mediterranean’s last untouched coastal ecosystems and home to hundreds of protected species, is where Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump aim to build a new luxury resort.

The Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape is home to flamingos, pelicans, migratory birds, and hundreds of protected species. It includes lagoons, wetlands, and habitats of exceptional ecological value. And it is one of many protected nature zones now at dire risk of destruction.

In February 2024, led by Prime Minister Edi Rama of the center-left Socialist Party, Albania’s parliament passed Law 21/2024, which allows the National Territory Council to grant permits for luxury tourist resorts anywhere in the country, even inprotected landscapes. Three days later, Kushner went public with plans to create two luxury developments in the region, including a resort on Sazan, a protected nature zone and one of Albania’s only major islands.

Javanka’s vision includes up to 10,000 “units of villas,” priced far beyond what most Albanians can afford, to be built in an area where many locals lack access to 24-7 running water. Albania, which has set a goal of 2030 for admission to the European Union, is obligated to repeal Law 21/2024, which clashes with EU conservation standards, but so far has failed to do so.

The ongoing protest movement set off by the Kushner projects, has turned into something much larger, with youth chanting “Çohuni nga kafja! (Get up from the cafes!)” each night as they flood the streets of Tirana,Albania’s capital.

Protesters atop the Skanderbeg statue in Tirana’s main square. Skanderbeg was a national hero who fought for Albania’s independence from the Ottoman Empire.

A view from the crowd at the foot of the Skanderbeg statue.

Their immediate goal is Rama’s resignation and the dissolution of his government; in its place, the protesters are demanding a year-long, interim technocratic leadership to prepare Albania for new elections, along with a two-term limit for prime ministers, nullification of Law 21/2024, and legislative reforms related to foreign investment and elections.

You can tell a lot about a movement from protesters’ chants. One that has united Albanians left and right is “Rama Burg, Berisha Burg” (Rama jail, Berisha jail), a call for the imprisonment of the country’s two most predominant political bosses, Socialist Rama and Democrat Sali Berisha, whose parties have been mired in corruption scandals eversince Albania transitioned from state socialism to democracy in 1991.

Berisha has been charged with corruption directly, while Rama’s Deputy Prime Minister Belinda Balluku, her predecessor, Arben Ahmetaj, and Tirana’s mayor, Erion Veliaj, have all been indicted by Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Prosecution agency. Among the other chants: “Revolution!” “The end has come for you!” “We are the opposition!” “Cancel the Project!” “Rama, resign!” And “A new Albania!”

During a nightly march, protesters encourage bus riders to join in.

An elderly resident shows support for the protesters.

Savvy Gen Zers, content creators, and influencers have flooded Instagram with protest videos, memes, informational content, and revolutionary posters and artwork that are helping to fuel the movement—and prompting Rama to blame the protests on social media algorithms he says are being hijacked and fueled by foreign agents.

In interviews, the PM has downplayed the opposition. Rama says the Kushner-Trump project will proceed even if 500,000 Albanians take to the streets—and that the Socialist Party’s sweep in 2025 is evidence of his popular support. He also has referenced the investment of roughly $4.6 billion in the Vlorë region, with an estimated $1.6 billion just for Sazan island—a no-brainer, he says, for a nation whose GDP is only about $33 billion.

But the unprecedented youth protest movement signals something else—widespread discontent. It has spawned the largest public demonstrations since the collapse of the communist regime in 1991. Since then, approximately 40 percent of the population has left Albania, and more than 50,000, mostly young adults, still migrate abroad annually—an exodus driven by official corruption, Albania’s high cost of living, and the lack of economic opportunity.

A sizable diaspora has spawned sister protests in several European and American cities; on June 20, hundreds of Albanian expats flew in and descended on Tirana in support of the protesters, leading to the movement’s largest rally yet, with more than 100,000 in attendance. Outside the city, in beach towns such as Kakome and Rrjoll, protesters followed the example set by their peers in Zvërnec, tearing down the fences and barriers blocking coastal access to protest the privatization of natural areas by powerful business interests.

The movement has attracted many young families with children, thanks to its nonviolent nature.

Protesters impersonate Sali Berisha and Edi Rama, heads of the two main political parties, complete with chains and prison colors.

The movement is grassroots and decentralized, with no clear leaders, only protest “coordinators.” It is a revolt against the status quo and the political establishment that has ruled Albania for the past 36 years. It is a protest against corruption, and oligarchy.

It has united people across the political spectrum—youth, environmental activists, pensioners, young families, and influencers coming together to build momentum and pressure Rama to resign. Nightly rallies at the Boulevard of Martyrs are family-friendly, with a dedicated children’s drawing area run by local artists and volunteers, and a “people’s podium” where citizens can voice their discontent. Each night, after the rallies, protesters march through the streets of Tirana, with residents waving them on from balconies, taxi drivers honking their horns, and tourists looking on from cafes—and sometimes even joining in.

In a country as small as Albania, with just 2.3 million residents, 100,000 protesters is the equivalent of 12.7 million in the United States. And it doesn’t appear as though the movement will lose steam anytime soon.

Cafe patrons watch as thousands of protesters march through Tirana.

Protesters on the march after a nightly rally.

For three weeks now, thousands of people have come out on Tirana’s streets every night. Protesters call it the Flamingo Revolution.

Hundreds of Albanian expats returned home to join the protests on June 20. Many plan to do the same over the July 4 weekend.

A young woman displays a Monopoly box with “Albania” written on it during one nightly march.

The “people’s podium” is a key part of the nightly rallies, open to anyone who wants to speak.

A protester waves an Albanian flag atop the Pyramid of Tirana, which was originally built as a museum to Communist leader Enver Hoxha. Now it’s a cultural hub and tourist attraction.

On Day Three of the protests, police unleash water cannons and teargas after protesters stormed through barricades set up to thwart them. There have been no such confrontations since.

Environmental activists march with hand-painted flamingos in protest of the Kushner-Trump resort plan.

The protests are widely seen as family friendly, which has added to the appeal.

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The Mighty Colorado Is Vanishing, and the Fixes Are Getting Weird

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

The crisis on the Colorado River is simple: The seven Western states that border the essential waterway use more water than it contains. Chronic overuse has drained its two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and a two-decade drought cycle has pushed them to the point of collapse.

The dream solution to this crisis is an agreement among all involved to use less water. Such a deal would decide who must reduce consumption, which means asking which cities would ban irrigating lawns and washing cars and which farmers would rip up their fields.

“The basin should not be forced to choose between stabilizing the present and negotiating the future.”

This has proven impossible. The states have been trying to work this out since the last dry spell, in 2022, but talks have ended in frustration and name-calling. The main sticking point is between the Upper Basin states, led by Colorado and Utah (along with Wyoming and New Mexico), and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada. Each side believes the other has a legal and a moral responsibility to cut usage during dry years. The stalemate means the Trump administration must design a schedule of restrictions ahead of a crucial deadline in September. So far, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has balked at resolving the quarrel.

Instead, the administration is turning to a far less controversial plan: Throw money at the problem. The Interior Department and Congress are pondering a slew of projects that could increase supply—a reversal of President Trump’s zeal for cutting federal grants. The seven state governors have sent Washington a “wish list” of over $50 billion, and several startups have their hands out as well.

Federal investment makes sense given the scale of the problem and the intractable impasse, said Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director at the National Audubon Society and an expert on the governance of the river.

“It is something easier for people to agree on,” she said. “This is a slow moving crisis, but it is a crisis, and we do see the federal funding come in to address crises in other parts of the country. Just because this is a slow moving one doesn’t make it any less worthy.”

During a Senate committee hearing last week, the Interior Department’s top water official, Andrea Travnicek, said the agency has yet to vet the wish list. She didn’t offer a specific funding request, and urged lawmakers to be “thoughtful” about how they spend taxpayer money. But senators in both parties seemed to encourage new investments. “The basin should not be forced to choose between stabilizing the present and negotiating the future,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico.

The possibility of new funding marks a return to the policy of Joe Biden’s administration. During the last extreme drought in 2022, the Interior Department paid farmers billions to leave their fields fallow, but that money, from the Inflation Reduction Act, has almost run dry.

The difference now is that the roster of proposals is far more ambitious, and some far less certain to bolster the basin’s water supply. They range from desalination plants and desert groundwater pipelines to forest ecosystem restoration.

Here are a few of the major solutions state officials and companies are proposing.

Desalination
As the Colorado River crisis has deepened, some cities in the Southwest have eyed desalination, which extracts salt from sea water. A company called Poseidon Water opened such a plant in San Diego in 2015 and tried for decades to open another in Los Angeles. The wish list to the Interior Department requests as much as $6 billion to build one across the border in the Mexican state of Baja California to supplement Arizona’s vanishing Colorado River supplies.

The Interior Department also signed an agreement in early June with San Diego’s water agency that explains how that plant would help. Rather than sending treated seawater inland, states would pay the city to take less from the Colorado River. Arizona stands to lose the most water during drought years, and it would be the most likely to participate in that exchange.

But desalination is expensive, requires enormous amounts of electricity, and state-of-the-art industrial technology. The Poseidon facility cost $1 billion, but San Diego has diversified its water portfolio so much that it no longer needs all the water it must purchase from the plant. Trading water could help it offset some of that cost.

Taming tech and power
Nevada uses less water than any state on the river and has cut usage in Las Vegas by replacing grass with artificial turf. It is now seeking money to slake some of its last thirsty industries: power plants and data centers. These facilities need a fraction of what agriculture requires, but they dominate usage in the Silver State.

The state’s wish list includes $300 million to retrofit its largest natural gas plant and reduce water consumption by an amount equivalent to more than 3,000 average homes. It also seeks $650 million to install zero-water cooling systems in airports, schools, and industrial facilities. These closed-loop systems, which recirculate the same cooled water or, in the case of data centers, blast hot servers with cold air, have become more popular in Western states amid concerns about the tech boom’s growing thirst.

Squeezing rain from the clouds
Whereas Lower Basin states like Arizona and California can draw from the Colorado River’s big reservoirs on demand, northern states at its headwaters only receive the rain and snow that feed it.

These Upper Basin states have been trying for decades to engineer more precipitation, with support from Washington, DC. It sounds futuristic, but cloud seeding—spraying salt or silver iodide into clouds, forcing them to release water they might otherwise retain—has proven fairly effective on a small scale. Utah spends a few million dollars each year doing this, and officials say it could boost annual snowpack by as much as 10 percent.

In addition, a few startups are pitching cheaper and more scalable versions of this technology. Rain Enhancement, a Florida-based outfit, says it has brought about 15,000 homes’ worth of rain to a river tributary in Utah this year; another, Rainmaker, says it can produce 1,000 times that much by 2031. That’s enough to close the supply gap on the river. That promise is fanciful, but these companies could secure federal funding from an administration that loves the tech industry.

Mining a hoard of desert groundwater
The West teems with companies that have promised miracles, from building a 300-mile pipeline to tapping a hoard of groundwater in Nevada. But perhaps no project has had a longer and more turbulent history than Cadiz, a proposal, almost 30 years old, to export groundwater from an aquifer in the Mojave Desert.

This has drawn vicious opposition from environmentalists and the late California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who called it a “grave threat” to the desert. Cadiz experienced several setbacks during the Biden administration: It lost a federal permit, California ended its pipeline lease, Arizona declined to support it, and its stock price fell to almost zero. But Susan Kennedy, its CEO, says Cadiz is flowing again with a funding agreement from the Interior Department to study exchanges between Cadiz and the Colorado River.

The company still needs to finish two pipelines, one to the Central Valley and another to the aqueduct that carries Colorado River water to California. It also must build a plant to remove contaminants in the water, but Kennedy believes she can have the tap running by 2028.

“This isn’t a competition; it’s an all-of-the-above situation,” she said of the situation on the river. That may be so, but the seven states did not include Cadiz on the wish list sent the Interior Department.

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The Anti-Immigrant Supreme Court

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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They Found Tom Kean Jr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How Brad Lander Won

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Jeff Coltin (@JCColtin) June 17, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Senate Democrats Rally Against Pro-Institutionalization DOJ Memo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you sick of talking about all this yet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now the president is claiming that it’s vandalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So just grab a little bottle of water to test?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Is It Time For Jews To Leave New York?

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need leadership on this issue. It’s…

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) June 24, 2026

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

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

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) June 24, 2026

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

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

— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) June 24, 2026

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

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

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

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

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Can the Last Kennedy Running Please Turn Out the Lights?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Defense Department Is Posting QAnon Memes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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