Trump Says the Polls Are “Fake.” Iowa Farmers Say They’re “Bleeding Money.”

“First of all, the polls are fake.”

When asked about competitive congressional races in Iowa, Donald Trump predictably dismissed Iowa Republicans’ lackluster polling numbers as “fake” and blamed Democrats for the high prices squeezing farmers and other businessmen across the state—even as the war in Iran has sparked soaring energy and fertilizer costs.

Video by Peter Berger

“I don’t know, I love Iowa,” Trump said during an Oval Office address announcing a new $15 billion steel plant in the state. “I’ve always been very strong with Iowa. There’s been some things that the Democrats have done that are very bad for our country.”

Meanwhile, one Iowa farmer stressed just how difficult the economy has become for small business owners.

“Folks that have trucking businesses, they’re just bleeding money right now like crazy,” he said during an appearance on MSNOW. “Farmers are bleeding money like crazy. We need to get this problem resolved, and we need to get it resolved right away.”

Still, Trump appears unmoved by the economic warning signs, as prices climb and his poll numbers continue to slide.

“I got more votes than anybody in history during the last election,” said Trump. “I’m more popular now than I was then.”

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OpenAI Cancels Its Advanced Model Launch, Then Heads to Lunch With Trump

OpenAI called off plans to launch its latest GPT-6.1 Astra model on Tuesday, after the system failed to meet the company’s safety standards.

The model was scheduled to release sometime in October, but OpenAI’s head of safety systems, Saachi Jain, told The Wall Street Journal that GPT-6.1 Astra, as compared to the previous GPT-6 Astra, was less honest about notifying users of the steps it did or did not take to achieve a task.

Jain described to the Journal that the models needed to strike a balance between proceeding with tasks on their own and taking shortcuts to provide an easy answer instead of doing a thorough job—a behavior Jain and others in the industry call “laziness.” Astra is OpenAI’s top-tier model.

The startup’s cancellation comes amid a series of security threat incidents—tens of thousands of which it is reportedly investigating, according to a Saturday Axios report. OpenAI apologized on Monday for how it hacked Australian government websites in June, accessing non-public data and adding files onto the server: “We are sorry and working to do better in the future,” the startup in part wrote in a statement.

Also on Monday, the company said it would continue training only after it has improved safeguards—including making its internal testing security strong enough to contain models and establishing live monitoring of models.

Lawmakers and officials across the political spectrum are outraged. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, filed a temporary injunction to a June lawsuit, which claimed the company knowingly released unsafe products to the public, that OpenAI should stop developing new products without safety standards approved by a third party.

Despite suggesting they would “do better in the future” to ensure safe AI development, as I wrote on Sunday, OpenAI has a history of aligning with the Trump administration to expand development. Many companies, such as OpenAI, Google, SpaceX, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle, have military agreements with the Defense Department.

On Tuesday, several of their leaders, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, are set to meet with President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson for lunch to discuss AI.

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How I Got Dragged Into a Putin Disinformation Op

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

I just published a book that exposes Russian disinformation operations. Now I—that is, a fake version of me—have become part of a Russian disinformation operation.

How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America chronicles the shadow war of clandestine influence and disinformation operations—many implemented to aid Trump—that Putin has been mounting against the United States for a decade. It ends with the warning that Moscow would likely attack the ongoing midterm elections to help Trump and the GOP. Within days of the book’s publication two weeks ago, media outlets reported that Russia’s disinformation operatives, using phony accounts on social media platforms, had started hurling derogatory material at Democrats.

Last week, this covert disinformation operation widened to spread scurrilous allegations against Democratic candidates—phony accusations that were falsely attributed to me.

So after writing a book about Putin’s disinformation efforts and noting they posed a threat to the current elections, I am being used by a Russian disinformation network to influence the midterms in Trump’s favor. This is a bizarre snake-eating-its-tail situation.

In the book, I report on several secret Russian disinformation units that produced and disseminated false allegations about Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz during the 2024 campaign. One was dubbed Matryoshka by disinformation trackers. (That’s the name for those iconic Russian nesting dolls.) It zapped out on X and other social media platforms assorted lies about Harris: She had an abortion when she was 17. She was exhibiting early-onset Alzheimer’s. Her grandfather was a communist. Her family was connected to Pfizer and Big Pharma.

But Matryoshka was not done with Mother Jones—or me.

When news organizations recently revealed that Matryoshka was at it again, this time concocting videos that purported to be CNN news segments covering Hollywood celebrities trash-talking Democrats (Nazi whores!), I reported that these covert operatives were also generating and posting fake videos that appeared to be CNN spots with damaging information on Democratic senatorial candidates. James Talarico (Texas) “despises” Hasidic Jews because they don’t allow gender affirmation treatment. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) owns a business that has “caused the bee population in Ohio to decline by a factor of nine.” Jon Ossoff (Georgia) has “called for a complete halt to military aid to Israel and for all resources to be redirected to Ukraine.” And there were others.

While I was working on that story, @antibot4navalny, a group of anonymous activists who monitor Russian disinformation, informed me that Matryoshka had also posted on X a supposed Mother Jones video that reported that the Democratic Party had paid $289 million to Mark Thompson, the head of CNN, so the cable news network would run reports that “promote gender transition among minors.” I quickly published a piece exposing this absurd disinformation. After a lawyer for Mother Jones contacted X, the company took down this fraudulent video.

But Matryoshka was not done with Mother Jones—or me.

On Friday, @antibot4navalny informed me that Matryoshka—through an obvious bot account on X—had posted a purported CNN video of me promoting a new book. But the book isn’t How Russia Won. It’s supposedly called Enemies of Democracy for Dummies, and the video declared, “The book will feature over 300 stories related to crimes committed by members of the Democratic Party.”

This counterfeit video displayed the text of a made-up quote from me: “Apparently, there’s a fissure somewhere in the US that leads straight to hell; otherwise, I don’t understand where all these devils from the Democratic Party are coming from.” That’s quite the analysis. The video noted that “information from David Corn’s book will further damage the Democrats’ reputation and standing ahead of the elections.”

Here are screenshots from that video:

Mother Jones

Mother Jones

To be clear, none of this is true—though Enemies of Democracy for Dummies is not a bad idea for a book.

Again, a lawyer for Mother Jones reached out to X. But by then, it was the weekend, and this fake CNN video claiming I had published a book full of dirt on Democrats that would affect the election remained online. It looked as if it initially drew nearly 200,000 views, but I was reliably informed that Matryoshka was using bots to juice this number and that this post likely had only reached a few thousand X users.

Matryoshka, using old bot accounts created up to 12 years ago, spewed out at least nine sham Mother Jones videos, with each one promoting an outrageous but spurious allegation about a Democratic candidate.

As with the previous fake and nonsensical video reporting that Mother Jones had revealed a $289 million payment from the DNC to CNN’s chief for pro-trans coverage, this one seemed a bit too silly to have much impact. It was more of an irritation than a cause of great concern.

Then came other fake videos.

Matryoshka, using old bot accounts created up to 12 years ago, spewed out at least nine sham Mother Jones videos, with each one promoting an outrageous but spurious allegation about a Democratic candidate. One “revealed” that a Democratic senatorial candidate “is a closeted gay man who hides his sexual orientation in order to maintain a luxurious lifestyle.” It said he had previously been accused of “embezzling public funds to pay for the services of male sex workers.”

With ominous synth music playing, this video segues to footage of me and written text in which I purportedly state that in my Enemies of Democracy for Dummies book “I present evidence” this Democratic candidate “dated underaged boys and had sexual relations with them.” The quote continues: “As a gay man, I find it outrageous that a gay man would hide behind a woman to maintain his lavish lifestyle.” (Not that it matters, but I’m not gay.) The video ends with a card saying, “Read more at MotherJones.com.”

Throughout this one-and-a-half-minute video, the Mother Jones logo appears in the top right corner.

The other videos are all in the same style. (For obvious reasons, I am not linking to them or mentioning the candidates by name.) They claim that a Democratic candidate for governor who served in Vietnam “is suspected of killing 37 civilians” in a massacre during that war, that another Democratic gubernatorial candidate recruited minors into sex work and “while working for the Girl Scouts…organized sex parties for members of the Democratic Party,” that a third Democratic candidate for governor caused “a fatal car accident while under the influence of alcohol,” and that another Democratic gubernatorial nominee sold crack to college students, “resulting in 17 deaths,” and so on.

Perhaps these phony videos are meant to be a brushback pitch. Mostly, it’s unnerving—a demonstration of how easy it is to be misrepresented and exploited by unidentified scoundrels.

Each of these videos features me offering a colorful quote about the allegation and noting it’s straight out of Enemies of Democracy for Dummies. Similar to the bogus video about the DNC payment to the CNN chief, some of these X posts show nearly 200,000 views. But the real numbers are likely much lower. They have not, as of this writing, gone viral. (X did not respond immediately to a request to delete the posts with these videos.)

So the journalist who wrote a book to call attention to Putin’s disinformation crusade against American democracy is now being used by Moscow’s disinformation operatives to subvert the midterm elections for Trump’s benefit.

I’ve been asked by colleagues and friends if this is frightening. Not yet. Perhaps these phony videos are meant to be a brushback pitch. Mostly, it’s unnerving—a demonstration of how easy it is to be misrepresented and exploited by unidentified scoundrels. And, as we all know, it’s tough to beat back a lie on the internet. We’re all vulnerable to a cyber assault.

There are five weeks to go to Election Day. How extensive might Putin’s war on the midterms become? How far will he go to boost Trump and the Republicans? If Trump tries to spark chaos and a crisis with accusations of vote fraud or actions to interfere with the election and the vote tally, Putin’s disinformation army can be expected to do whatever it can to bolster any false claims and conspiracy theories flying about—or to cook up its own.

One reason I wrote How Russia Won was to counter the false “Russia, Russia, Russia” narrative peddled relentlessly for years by Trump, Republicans, MAGA influencers, and right-wing media personalities who have denied Russia has been covertly intervening in US elections. By echoing Putin’s own denials, these useful idiots have been complicit in a foreign adversary’s attack on American democracy. My point was to show the United States has been under continuous assault from Moscow, as Russia has schemed to assist Trump and the Republicans. With this disinformation operation incorporating truly fake news about me, Putin’s Matryoshka crew has proved the premise of my book.

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How Corporate Influencers Facilitated Trump’s Assault on Climate Research

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

Recent attacks on US universities by the Trump administration have built on decades of efforts by libertarian donor networks, fossil fuel companies, and conservative think tanks to reshape university governance and increase outside influence, according to a new study.

The authors of the new perspective study argue that the erosion of university autonomy has left colleges more vulnerable to corporate interests, especially within climate and energy research.

In 2025, the Trump administration froze billions of dollars in research funding, launched investigations into 75 institutions and pushed colleges to sign agreements supporting administration policies in exchange for federal funding. The federal government canceled $4 million in climate research grants at Princeton University alone and accused scientists of fueling “climate anxiety.”

If you’re a young researcher watching that, you might think twice about asking a question that could cost you your funding, said Noel Healy, of Salem State University, the lead author of the study published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science.

“Climate policy is only as good as the evidence behind it. When the industry being regulated gets to shape the questions researchers ask, it ends up shaping the policy too,” he said.

The Academic Freedom Index, which measures how freely scholars and universities can teach, research and express ideas without interference, found that US institutional autonomy fell from 3.3 in 2019 to 1.7 in 2025, on a scale of 0 to 4.

“In other countries, attacks on university legitimacy paved the way for faculty purges, campus closures, and centralized political control.”

“Since 2025, scientists have been deleting words like ‘climate change’ from their grant applications because those words can get an application rejected,” Healy said. “Some universities have shut down programs before the government even asked them to, hoping to avoid becoming a target. You don’t have to ban speech if people fear that speaking up will cost them their funding. People start deciding it’s safer to stay quiet.”

Outside influence on US universities is not new. In the 1920s, electric utilities worked with academics to defend their monopoly positions and oppose regulations. Fossil fuel companies followed suit in the 1950s, funding research to sow doubt about the public health impacts of their products. Internal industry documents have shown that companies viewed academic research as a way to build credibility and influence public debate.

Corporate-funded research was only one way powerful interests influenced universities. Libertarian donor networks also influenced program content, faculty hiring and gained appointments to university governing bodies. For example, David Koch, the billionaire industrialist whose wealth came from Koch Industries, gave more than $185 million to his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and served as a lifetime member to the elite research university’s highest governing body.

Between 2010 and 2020, six fossil fuel companies alone gave more than $700 million to US universities, helping to legitimize industry solutions to the climate crisis and undermine regulatory approaches. Some of this funding came with donor agreements that gave outside actors control over decisions traditionally made by faculty, such as in hiring and curricula.

At the same time, donor-influence models were written into state law. For example, in 2016, the Arizona state legislature created the first publicly funded libertarian academic center. Other states have followed suit. These centers bypass faculty control, instead answering to legislators. These centers are expected to receive $50 million in US taxpayer dollars during the 2025-2026 school year, according to reporting by the Hechinger Report.

State legislatures have also tried to limit faculty power through legislation that could abolish tenure, block faculty participation in lawsuits, and police educational programming. From 2021 to 2023, more than 150 state bills were introduced targeting tenure, faculty governance, and diversity, equity and inclusion, according to the Energy Research & Social Science perspective.

“Faculty need the power to review major gifts before they’re accepted and to refuse the ones that threaten academic freedom.”

Soaring tuition and student debt, which are also products of the corporate model, have contributed to mistrust in higher education. The authors of the study argue that to regain public trust, administrators must confront how corporate donors have reshaped their priorities, disclose donor contributions and influence, and give faculty committees the ability to reject funding that undermines the university’s public mission and create conflicts of interest. Union contracts can protect faculty and empower them to confront corporate capture.

“Transparency lets you see the deal, but it doesn’t let you stop it. Faculty need the power to review major gifts before they’re accepted and to refuse the ones that threaten academic freedom,” Healy said.

Universities don’t have to start from scratch. For example, the national UnKoch My Campus campaign published a model gift-acceptance policy that gives faculty a say before gifts with conditions are accepted, makes donor agreements public, and sets clear grounds for rejecting gifts that give donors influence over hiring or teaching. Universities can draw on examples like this to write their own rules, Healy said.

“In other countries, attacks on university legitimacy paved the way for faculty purges, campus closures, and centralized political control,” he said. “Universities came under attack before those governments had full control, not after.”

MIT has previously said it would not divest its endowment from fossil-fuel companies, arguing that working with industry could help develop climate solutions. The MIT Energy Initiative has also said that funders have no control over the content or findings of its research reports.

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The Education of Min Jin Lee

The first hint that I needn’t be so anxious to interview Min Jin Lee came as the bestselling author descended the creaky stairs of her five-story Harlem townhouse and pronounced my name. Not in the way my brain has articulated it for decades, smoothed over by an anglicized version that made it easy for teachers to call out from an attendance roll. Which is to say, Lee, on a Friday afternoon in August, pronounced my name the way the people who brought me into this world had intended.

The next came when Lee, smartly dressed in a gray vest and jeans, with a pair of delicate drop earrings, doled out lively profanities. She was recalling her time attending Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the landmark case that would later reach the Supreme Court and dismantle race-based affirmative action, as part of her nearly decade-long research process for American Hagwon, the much-anticipated third installment of a planned quartet dedicated to Korean diasporas. As a supporter of affirmative action, she witnessed testimony teeming with stereotypical portrayals of Asian American students, including, as Lee puts it, making them out to be like “machines.”

“I sat there in the press box, and I remember thinking, this whole idea that Asian Americans have shitty personalities—that’s really shitty. It’s a really shitty thing to say.”

“Also, we’re talking about children,” she continued, her voice intensifying. “How dare you insult the children of my community?”

To hear Lee condemn the racial stereotyping of Asian Americans, including the “stupid, horrible racial epithet called ‘tiger parenting,’” with such blunt rigor, in a living room sumptuously bedecked with books, was deeply satisfying. My own fondness for profanity, my Korean-born mother used to warn, was a sign “of an uneducated person.”

“I think your mom was right,” Lee said, warmly laughing as I shared the memory with her.

American Hagwon is Lee’s third novel and follows Pachinko, the vast 2017 saga that traces four generations of a Korean family as they weather war, discrimination, and cruelty in Japanese-occupied Korea and in Japan. A finalist for the National Book Award, Pachinko established Lee as a master of sweeping historical narrative. American Hagwon, on the other hand, takes place in more contemporary times, with Lee’s aperture shifting between a multigenerational family drama and broader meditations on the human costs of heedless ambition.

What are the human costs of endless ambition? Would we choose differently if we were liberated from the pursuit of educational status?

“I asked myself, if I had one more book to write, I wanted to write about what’s most important to Koreans around the world, and it was so clear to me that it was education,” Lee said. “It’s not money. It’s not religion. It’s not status. It’s actually education. This kind of faith in it, even if you hated it.”

As its title telegraphs, the Korean for-profit tutoring academies known as hagwons provide a central motif in Lee’s latest novel. Hagwons typically offer classes from elementary school all the way through high school, but it is the courses aimed at boosting test scores for college entrance exams that they are best known for. (If you’re imagining a Korean equivalent to a Kaplan prep, think bigger; in South Korea, hagwons are a multibillion-dollar industry that one of the country’s leading English-language newspapers once described as “thriving on anxiety.”) To outsiders, they can conform to a long-standing stereotype of Asian students: relentlessly driven, much to their own personal misery, with cutthroat parents digging into their bank accounts to further their children’s competitive advantage.

The criticism hagwons attract can be well earned; as I once experienced, fierce competition, at times bordering on toxic, is often central to the hagwon mentality. But for Lee, sensationalistic portrayals of them risk reinforcing simplistic racist tropes. For kids in the United States, hagwons are also often places of community, one of the few spaces, in a white world, to connect with other kids of Korean descent. They can also function as de facto daycare centers, she said, where parents can have their kids picked up from school, safely driven to the hagwon, and “given a juice box, pretzel rod, and worksheets” instead of having a child “stay at home and have a shelf fall on them.” In a country lacking adequate childcare, Lee sees hagwons as “an ethnic solution to a state problem.”

American Hagwon arrives amid a wider reckoning over the value of a top-tier education, particularly in the United States, as the yearly total cost of some colleges surpasses $100,000 and AI threatens the very foundations of what it means to hold knowledge. There’s an “anxiety that the modern person feels right now,” Lee said, referring to the existential questions born out of AI.

A similar anxiety courses through American Hagwon, as multiple families of Korean ethnicity, compelled as so many émigrés are by the desire to secure better futures for their children, are upended by unexpected outside forces, including the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

When we first encounter the novel’s central family, the Kohs, John and Helen appear to be typical middle-class parents who had just moved to Seoul from Sydney, Australia, dutifully attentive to their three children’s education, while John toils away as a manager at a large corporation. But when he endures a devastating betrayal, both professionally and personally, it forces the family to emigrate, eventually landing in Southern California. Throughout the sacrifices that follow—John takes up a physically demanding job at a fish-fry restaurant; Mido, the youngest and only daughter, pauses her college education and works at an American hagwon to support her family, including her brothers’ education—the thread of familial devotion grows only stronger.

It is through this lens of empathy, paired with prolific research, that Lee shows us how hagwons reflect the deep-rooted desires of a culture fixated on upward mobility and one that has long identified education as the ticket to a vertical trajectory. As one mother in American Hagwon notes: “The cost doesn’t matter. We all know you have to pay up for the best coaching.” Still, such a narrow view of success inflicts its own damage, raising some of the deeper questions in the novel: What are the human costs of endless ambition? Would we choose differently if we were liberated from the pursuit of educational status?

Min Jin Lee once worked as a corporate lawyer, but quit to become a novelist after thinking: “I don’t want to die working this way.”Mary Kang

The middle child of three sisters who emigrated with their parents from Seoul to the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, New York, when she was 7, Lee did not attend a hagwon. But she wrestled with such questions during the brief period she worked as a corporate lawyer after Georgetown Law, its own kind of pressure cooker. “The more work I would do, the more work I would be given,” she recalled. “Capitalism, right? Because I am not getting paid more. The more hours that I bill, the more the firm makes.”

“I was really thinking,” she told me, “I don’t want to die working this way.”

So Lee, who was diagnosed with a serious liver disease in high school, quit law to pursue a full-time career in writing, publishing her first novel, Free Food for Millionaires, in 2007.

Were her parents—Korean immigrants who owned a wholesale jewelry store in midtown Manhattan—ever disappointed by her decision to quit law to pursue something as impractical as a career as a novelist? I wondered. “My parents aren’t pushy,” Lee replied. She stressed, however, that the support for the literary ventures she now enjoys did not always come easily. On the same day Pachinko was published, her husband lost his job in finance.

What followed is a familiar middle-class story, a moment of great upheaval not unlike the devastating twists that upend the families of American Hagwon. Lee, who was 48 at the time, and her husband struggled to obtain healthcare and navigate the administrative hellhole of COBRA; her efforts to find a job in teaching were regularly dashed. “Absolutely nobody would give me interviews,” Lee said. “It didn’t matter that I had two published novels. So what? So does everybody else. Some people were very unkind. Truly, it kind of struck me how cruel younger people could be to somebody older.”

In a gentler world, locking eyes with a life-threatening disease would not be the only way to clarify how we want to live. But Lee’s decision to quit law cuts to the central tension that roils throughout American Hagwon: What constitutes a meaningful life? Toward the end of the novel, Mido and her hagwon colleagues ask their students’ parents: What does an impressive résumé, all that schooling, and a lucrative career amount to if you’re miserable?

“Our children cannot know everything,” Lion, one of the hagwon’s co-owners, tells the parents during a lecture he organizes about the value and pressures of education: “This flawed but worthy American project of immigration, reinvention, and multiple chances creates more possibilities, but it requires us to explore different paths in order to have lives of greater purpose.” Any sense of “failure” that creeps in when kids don’t get into their top-choice school, Lion continued, is “a terrible way to start their higher-educational experience, and adulthood.”

“The inability to live with your truthful self determines the tragedy of your own life.”

“The inability to live with your truthful self determines the tragedy of your own life,” Lee said. “What I really saw when I was doing the research is that the people who are doing the best were not necessarily the wealthiest or the most elite; they’re the ones who actually had love in their lives.” The Kohs, despite having lost so much, are clearly animated by such love.

After we spoke for about an hour, we climbed the creaky stairs and reached Lee’s office on the third floor of the townhouse, where, surrounded by family photos, she offered snacks. First, a pack of black garlic almonds, and then Kopiko, an Indonesian coffee-flavored hard candy that she noted is ubiquitous in K-dramas—even though it’s not Korean.

I wasn’t familiar with either and accepted both. As I left her Harlem home, I couldn’t help but walk faster, excited to share the Kopiko with my mom. After all, it was her sacrifice and hers alone that afforded me my own time at a hagwon in Edison, New Jersey, while she picked up shifts at a nearby dry cleaner. I’ll always have a sense of uneasiness about that time. But at that moment, picking up the pace as I headed down to the subway clutching coffee candies, I felt only gratitude.

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Trump’s Mass Detention Machine in Pennsylvania

A sign is placed in the yard of a residential property off US Route 322 approaching the small town of Philipsburg in central Pennsylvania. The sign appears almost as if it is floating in the lush green grass. Greeting passersby entering this town of some 3,000 residents, it displays a weeping Statue of Liberty covering her face in shame and sorrow before Route 322 twists and curls through the heart of town.

Philipsburg is a town with a history built on timber, industry, and coal. Industry has disappeared, and it’s been decades since coal was a significant employer. Yet one employer has remained in Philipsburg: GEO Group, the second largest for-profit prison company in the US.

Yard sign on US Route 322 at the southern entrance to Philipsburg.

Eager to replace lost jobs, developers from the private prison company Cornell Corrections, and the state, believed the construction of a prison would fill this need. Built on the grounds of an old strip mine, Moshannon Valley Correctional Facility opened in 2006 and operated as a federal prison for fifteen years. Cornell was acquired by GEO Group in 2010, and in 2021, the prison temporarily closed only to reopen later that same year as an immigration detention center. ICE signed a 5-year agreement with Clearfield County. Clearfield County then signed a “management agreement” with the owner and operator of the prison, GEO Group. The prison was renamed the Moshannon Valley Processing Center (MVPC).

Buried away and completely hidden out of sight in a dense forest, more than 1,600 immigrants are imprisoned there on any given day in what is the largest immigration detention center in the northeast. Eighty-five percent of those detained in MVPC have no criminal record. In 2025, two immigrants died in ICE custody in MVPC, including 32-year-old Chaofeng Ge, found hanging by his neck in a shower stall on August 5.

In April, dozens of detainees launched a hunger strike to protest conditions. While anti-ICE and anti-detention advocates have sustained an active campaign to shut down the facility, many Philipsburg residents and local officials see things differently. An annual $200,000 administrative fee to Clearfield County for serving as the middleman in this pass-through of federal funds is one reason for keeping it open. The benefits of local tax revenue and jobs remain the other.

Moshannon Valley Processing Center

Philipsburg, Pennsylvania

“I have no problem with the facility,” a local resident told me at a Knights of Columbus pancake breakfast one Sunday morning. “When jobs are lost, that place provides something for people here. If they don’t put immigrants here, they’ll find somewhere else. Keep the jobs here. I don’t have an issue with it.”

Outside its major urban centers—Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, and the capital, Harrisburg—as well as the town of State College in Center County, home to Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania voters helped return Trump to office. Despite Democratic control of the governor’s office and House, rural counties have driven Pennsylvania to rank fifth nationally in 287(g) agreements, which allow local law enforcement to help carry out some ICE duties. Currently, 130 township and borough police departments, county and district attorney’s offices, constables and sheriffs statewide assist ICE. In 2026, nearly 5,500 immigrants have been arrested and detained in Pennsylvania. None of the state’s eight ICE detention facilities compare in size and function to MVPC. It incarcerates locals and out-of-state transfers in a system structured to sever and isolate immigrants from family, community, legal counsel, and due process. Moshannon has become a vital instrument in Trump’s mass deportation**—rather, mass detention—**machine.

An ICE bus filled with detained immigrants travels down GEO Drive from the Moshannon Valley Processing Center (MVPC). Light from MVPC in the distance illuminates storm clouds during a heavy rain.

It’s also a valuable piece of GEO Group’s “secure services” portfolio. Invoices obtained through open records requests show that from January 2025 to May of this year, GEO earned nearly $90 million in revenue from MVPC. As ICE retreats from using warehouses to expand detention capacity, it has spent more than $2.2 billion to directly purchase existing detention facilities from GEO Group’s competitor, CoreCivic. During a Q2 earnings call, GEO Group CEO George Zoley reported that the company was in an “active process” for the sale of several turn-key facilities. In late August, ICE published a solicitation to award contracts for “turn-key detention facilities” in four regions in the US, including central Pennsylvania. In early September, with the contract for MVPC set to expire at the end of the month, DHS requested a 6-month extension. Two weeks later, Clearfield County Commissioner approved the extension in a 2-1 vote.

Church service at Christian & Missionary Alliance Church in Philipsburg. July 19, 2026. “It should stay because of jobs,” a man named Larry tells me before the service. “Because they give $200,000 to Clearfield County for every year of that contract. And it’s not hurting anybody. That money goes to the county. Even if it helps pay for the annual fair, it’s still worth having people there. They got to have a jail anyway. They got to put the people somewhere.”

After a Sunday service at Bible Baptist Church of Philipsburg, July 19, 2026. “Politics fade into everything. This is not a local issue where people are against it. If they were being mistreated up there, I’d say, ‘This has to stop.’ That’s where I stand on moral issues. But heaven has its policies to get you in and our country has its policies to get in too. The law of the land must be obeyed. They’re in there for a reason. They didn’t take them because they didn’t do nothing.”

Activists like Timothy Smith, who chairs the Bill of Rights Defense Committee-Keystone State, anticipate based on these moves that DHS is either preparing to contract directly with GEO Group or outright purchase MVPC.

“This will give DHS and GEO more long-term stability and release both from the local risks and oversight that have strained the operation of MVPC. I truly think it will be an outright purchase,” Smith says. Both situations would enrich GEO Group shareholders while landing a financial blow to Clearfield County and Philipsburg. In both scenarios, immigrants and the pain, trauma, grief and loss experienced by their families—including US citizens—are both the raw materials and byproducts of profit-making maneuvers.

A mother sells everything and relocates to Maryland so she and her son can be closer to her husband. He’s languished in MVPC now for over 500 days. A father and his 18-year-old son, detained together during a routine check-in with ICE, put the pieces of their lives back together. ICE separated them. The father remained detained in Philadelphia. The teenager was transferred to MVPC. A woman in New York City struggles to find legal strategies to stop the deportation of her husband to eastern Europe. As we talk, he’s now in his eighth day in MVPC’s solitary confinement unit. A man sits alone in his studio apartment outside of Pittsburgh and confronts the “empty space” in his life. Faced with the reality of spending more months detained in Moshannon, his husband made the decision to self-deport.

Charlotte

Charlotte’s husband has been detained in Moshannon Valley Processing Center for over one and a half years. She was born in California; her husband is from Afghanistan and arrived in the US in 2016 on a valid student visa. They met in 2019, had a child together and got married in 2021. They lived in Illinois, where he received a REAL ID driver’s license and a work permit valid until 2029. In early 2025, while visiting family in Maryland, he was pulled over by a sheriff in West Virginia. No reason was provided for his arrest. He was transferred to ICE detention at Moshannon Valley Processing Center. To be closer to her husband in detention, Charlotte sold everything and moved to Maryland.

Charlotte talks about the impact of her husband’s detention on their son JJ.

“I’m a US citizen and I have a child. They want us to be left with nothing. So then do we give up? But at this point, we can’t give up. Because they won’t even let him self-deport. They won’t let him sign voluntary departure. They won’t let him do anything.”

At the age of two, Charlotte’s son was diagnosed with ADHD and autism. He was incredibly close to his father: “I wish daddy was home. We’re going to fight for daddy to get home. We’re not going to give up.”

Charlotte holds hundreds of pages of personal documents, including her marriage license, birth certificates, tax returns, and deeds to homes she and her husband have owned. She prepared the paperwork for an interview with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to support the change of her husband’s status. The interview date was postponed.

“They want us to be left with nothing, so we do give up.”

We cry everytime we leave a visit.

It’s still so sad.

We can’t even hug him.

_Charlotte talks about the pain of going to visit her husband in the detention center.

“We went for my child’s birthday. We went for Father’s Day and Mother’s Day. We sit there with him all day wishing we can hug him. But we can’t…We’re trying to get him out and we’re just at a loss. Like, what’s next? What are we going to do?…We just want something other than being locked up. We just want a hug. We just want to move on with answers. That’s all we’re asking, but we still have none of that.”
“Even though the person didn’t pass away, it kind of feels like that. Like he’s been taken away from us. The only thing that’s been helping us is our visits. It’s him being there and seeing him behind the plexiglass. That’s what’s kept us going. If we couldn’t do that, we would be completely lost.”

Elsewhere in the state, networks of trained volunteers accompany immigrants to ICE check-ins, observe courts for ICE waiting outside, and monitor neighborhoods for ICE activity. As Pennsylvania provides no state funding for the defense of immigrants facing detention and deportation, nonprofit legal service providers take on as many clients as possible yet find themselves stretched beyond capacity. Activists and community members attend local government meetings to stop involvement with ICE or end detention.

Kris

Kris, 28, met his partner in mid-2024. Originally from Brazil, his partner fled to the US and was permitted to stay in the country. Immigration officials scheduled his first hearing for 2028. The two fell in love and were legally married in Pennsylvania in December 2025. At a routine ICE check-in, he was detained and transferred to Moshannon Valley Processing Center. Faced with months in detention and deportation, he asked for “voluntary departure.” The judge approved the request, and he voluntarily deported himself to Brazil in the middle of June.

Kris, whose partner self-deported after being detained at a routine immigration check-in.

“We provided all of the evidence under the sun,” Kris told me. “Everything you could have with your spouse we had, but nothing was recognized. They only tried to twist it into a fraud. My husband had no criminal charges, nothing wrong, not even a parking ticket, no traffic violations. None of it mattered. I’ve been left with a silence that I wasn’t used to.

“My husband had no criminal charges, nothing wrong, not even a parking ticket, no traffic violations. None of it mattered.”

“Growing up, knowing I was gay before gay marriage was legalized and having that stigma placed upon people who were gay, I felt persecuted at that time. And now I’m encountering another form of persecution; I feel like I can’t marry who I want. I can’t live the life that I’m entitled to have with the person that I love. It’s so dehumanizing. It’s like he’s less-than. I feel persecuted for loving an immigrant and marrying an immigrant. ‘Oh, you married an immigrant? This is what you deserve.’”

Eastern Europe

This woman’s husband has been detained in Moshannon Valley Processing Center for five months. She’s a US citizen. Her husband was born in Eastern Europe and settled in the United States in 2023. He received a work permit, had been through USCIS biometric processing, and was issued an ID. In early 2026, while working as a delivery driver in Nassau County, he was pulled over for a broken headlight. He was arrested and then released. When released, ICE arrested and placed him in detention. He found out his lawyer had never filed his asylum paperwork with the courts. He had no criminal record.

Asking to remain anonymous, this woman sits in her apartment in New York.

“Initially he was hopeful he would get out. Then he started getting angry, especially when they put him in solitary confinement. He couldn’t understand what was happening. They put him on major depression medication, but he started losing his emotions. I wasn’t sure if he was at risk of suicide, because I knew how he was changing. It’s like watching somebody die in front of you for a prolonged period of time.”
“I think for the majority of the detained, there’s at least two people on the outside who are fighting for them, struggling. There’s a lot of people who are unseen. You can count the number of detained individuals in ICE facilities, but you can’t really count the number of people affected.
After we met, her husband was transferred to detention centers in Louisiana and Texas. In late July he was deported on a series of flights to his country of birth.”

Father and Son Detained

At the age of fourteen, this young man and his family arrived at the US border, immediately applied for asylum, and followed all US immigration and asylum policies and procedures. In early 2026, just after his eighteenth birthday, ICE asked him and his father to appear early for their immigration-check in. When they arrived, ICE detained both of them “due to available bed space.” Within days, ICE separated the two. The young man was transferred to Moshannon Valley Processing Center.

After two months in detention in Moshannon and weeks of lawyers tirelessly working and battling his case through the immigration court system, an immigration judge evaluated the actual merits of his asylum claim, and granted him asylum. As a result, he was immediately released. The father, 35, and his son, 18, sit together in their home.

“You could never be calm in there.”

“I didn’t think they could arrest me for just being there,” he said of the ICE appointment. “The second day I was in Moshannon, I got a bloody nose—and I would get bloody noses often. I think it was the stress, my fear, or worrying about what was going to happen. I’d never done anything wrong and I felt undignified. There were a lot of older adults and I didn’t know any of them, so I was very scared because I was the youngest person there. There was a lot of stress and a lot of fighting. There were people who had been in there for years and others who were there for one or two days and then deported. You could never be calm in there.”

John Streno, Mayor

“It’s always been important to the community. It’s never been a big problem. It’s only been a positive for us in this town,” Mayor John Streno said to me as we sat on the front porch of his home in Philipsburg.

John Streno has been the mayor of Philipsburg for over twenty years. Prior to retiring, he spent ten years as a correctional officer for GEO at Moshannon, before it was an immigration detention facility.

When describing Moshannon Valley Processing Center as an ICE facility, the mayor said, “To me, in a way, it’s no different than a cemetery. It’s a place where people come and end up and you never see them again. They come to the prison, they end up there, and then they go away.”

Bobbi Erickson, co-founder of the advocacy group Indivisible: Mayday, addresses county commissioners at a Clearfield County Commissioners Meeting on July 14, 2026.

The state of Pennsylvania does not provide any sustained funding to Legal service providers. Demand for Defender Association of Philadelphia services has rise three times more than the capacity.

Community members provide comments on why the current 5-year contract between the county and GEO should not be renewed: “I come here today with a broken heart. My plan for today was to have somebody from Moshannon call and give his testimony and his words to you. Last night he told me he was too scared to do so, that he was afraid his case would be impacted, that he would be taken away from his family and he would lose his home. He was scared to speak about his experiences. You don’t hear the stories inside this facility because it’s run-on fear. People inside ask me, ‘Why am I here?’ The only thing I can ever tell them is, for profit, and because the men in charge won’t listen to their stories.”

The state of Pennsylvania does not provide any sustained funding to legal service providers. The state ranks fourth in the number of habeas corpus petitions filed by immigrants since the beginning of Trump’s second term. Since December of 2025, habeas petitions filed by the Defender Association of Philadelphia have resulted in the release of 303 people—but demand for their services is three times more than they have the capacity to provide.

“In January 2025, they just started detaining everyone for non-criminal reasons. Regular asylum seekers living their lives, contributing to their community, not doing anything wrong,” Lilah Thompson, chief of immigration for the community unit at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, said to me. “Detention numbers just shot up. There are all these ways in which ICE began ramping up detention, stripping people of rights and status or pending status—detaining people that have no business being in detention, because nothing had changed in their situation to warrant it. ICE is just churning bodies into the detention system.”

Legal Support

“My client is a gentleman who is married to a US citizen. He was on his pathway to citizenship. He was literally one month away from getting his green card when he was detained by ICE, completely unjustly, no warrant whatsoever. He was moved to Moshannon, but thankfully we got him moved back to the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia. I was prepared to not really lose this case, but try to encourage my client to stay in detention for the six or eight months needed to wait out his appeal. I kind of sent this lawsuit against the court as a Hail Mary, just to show that we did everything we could do. And the fact that not only did we get the decision we wanted, but also got it pretty quickly to me, it’s a blessing and a miracle.”

Standing outside the ICE office in downtown Philadelphia, immigration attorney Albert Robles waits for a client to be released from the FDC Philadelphia immigration detention center.

The Witnesses

Moments before the photo above was taken, in Evans City in Butler County north of Pittsburgh, local police and ICE pulled over the driver for a broken taillight. He was a 23-year-old man from Ecuador who worked laying carpets; he showed his ID but was arrested and detained by ICE. “I told them he has a work permit but he didn’t have it on him,” said his co-worker, who was sitting in the passenger seat when the arrest happened. “They arrested him anyway.”

A reflection of Jenny, a volunteer for the organization Frontline Dignity, in the window of a work van.

Official Legal Observers from Frontline Dignity stand outside the Domestic Violence court in downtown Pittsburgh. “We’ve witnessed ICE make detentions inside the courthouse and outside when people are on their way in. That’s why we stage ourselves outside, because people wouldn’t even have a chance to get in.”

Jenny patrols areas of Cranberry Township for potential ICE activity. Any ICE sightings or incidents of ICE arrests are witnessed and reported to a larger network of monitors. In July 2026, Frontline Dignity documented 55 confirmed ICE incidents in their area and 67 known detentions.

“It’s devastating what’s been going on in Pittsburgh for the last year and a half,” Jenny says. “And it feels so incredibly heavy and dark, and it feels like everything escalated so quickly. Showing up and making sure we’re there to observe and help seems like the only hopeful thing to do at this point, to try to help everybody through what’s going on. It’s sad and it’s devastating.”

In Philipsburg, organizers and activists canvas the town, educate residents and ask for their support and signatures on a petition to push the three county commissioners to not renew the management agreement with GEO Group.

“I think they should ship all of them motherfuckers back to wherever they came from and then all of you Democrats should go and follow them,” a man says to one canvasser.

“That’s very American of you,” the canvasser politely replies.

To me, in a way, it’s no different than a cemetary.

It’s a place where people come and end up

and you never see them again.

A bus transfers immigrants detained by ICE from Moshannon Valley Processing Center.

It’s Saturday, July 11. Several thousand people sit in folding chairs along Presqueisle Street in downtown Philipsburg. They wait for the 2026 Heritage Days Festival parade to start. The theme this year is “Let Freedom Ring.” I walk the length of Presqueisle Street, randomly asking people for their feelings about detaining immigrants at Moshannon. One woman says she has friends who were recently hired there and now make $30 an hour.

“I have no problem with those illegals being put up there,” her husband adds.

Another man says jobs and money are the only things that matter, while another says, “Those people detained there bring money to the town.”

A woman talks with me in a whisper away from her family.

Parade for the Philipsburg Heritage Days, a 3-day festival that runs the week after the 4th of July. The theme of the 2026 festival was ‘Let Freedom Ring’.

People sit in front of the Philips Hotel for the Philipsburg Heritage Days Parade.

“To treat people like they are all criminals and animals, that’s where I have to draw the line. It’s morally wrong,” she says.

“All the years I’ve lived in this town, I’ve never heard too much about that facility until ICE took it over. Until people from ICE went in there,” a woman shared with me as she sat with family on their porch on Presqueisle Street. “For a long time I didn’t realize it was an ICE facility. And I didn’t even know what the difference was. I don’t really agree with the whole way the immigrant thing’s being handled. I think they’re taking people they don’t need to take. They’re not taking the worst of the worst, you know? They’re taking anybody. But here and the way I feel, we’re the minority.”

“They’re not taking the worst of the worst, you know? They’re taking anybody.”

On this same Saturday, on Route 322 at the opposite end of Philipsburg, volunteers set up a canopy and table on a corner of a small road that leads up to Moshannon Vallery Processing Center. They provide information and resources to families who have driven hours to visit loved ones. Families have come from New York, New Jersey, Maryland and other parts of Pennsylvania. “We have no idea what’s going to happen to him,” a man says of his son-in-law. “It’s been so painful on his mother.” He and the young man’s mother drove four hours from New York to visit him.

Visiting Moshannon

For entry, GEO requires visitors to adhere to strict dress code rules. That day, two parents drove four hours from New York to visit their son who had already been detained for three months. Unaware GEO does not permit entrance to female visitors with metal supports in their bras, the mother used the tent to change into a new bra, part of a collection of free clothing available to visitors.

On Saturday, July 11, volunteers set up a changing tent on the corner of the road leading to Moshannon Valley Processing Center.

This man, a US citizen, drove four hours from Maryland to visit his brother who has been detained in MVPC for over a month. His brother has lived in the US for 26 years. GEO Group employees denied his visitation, citing his open-toed shoes, which they said did not adhere to dress code rules. He drove to a nearby Dollar General and bought a pair of sneakers, then returned.

“He was pulled over while driving home from work, arrested and put here. He’s never done anything wrong.,” he said. “It’s my third visit. What’s happening is crazy. It’s like they took a plate of spaghetti and threw it against the wall to see what sticks. That’s what happened to my brother.”

Behind them and their SUV parked on the corner, a large roadside billboard funded by several activist groups provides a backdrop to the efforts of the volunteers and the stories of the five other families that stop to ask questions. The billboard compares the costs to detain one immigrant in Moshannon Valley Processing Center for a year versus the cost to educate one child in Philipsburg, and asks who benefits from the detentions. It’s not only a parting message to everyone as they leave Philipsburg on 322, but also a harsh reminder of the yard sign, and Lady Liberty’s somber greeting to visitors, a few miles back.

A tent set up by volunteers to provide information and assistance to people visiting family members detained in MVPC on July 11, 2026, and an anti-ICE billboard at the road that leads to MVPC off US Route 322 as one exits Philipsburg. The billboard is funded by Invisible: Mayday, the Shut Down Detention Campaign and Pittsburgh Women for Democracy,.

_Greg Constantine produced this work, the third in a series documenting immigration detention and its wider impact in Oklahoma, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, as part of the 2026 Bertha Challenge Fellowship.

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Trump Aims to Open Nearly All National Forest Trails to Dirt Bikes and ATVs

This story, originally published by Grist in collaboration with Montana Free Press/Mountain Journal as part of the Report for America Local News Initiative, is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There are many ways to enjoy the outdoors, but thrill-seekers visiting the nation’s national forests often turn to motorized recreation. They might ride ATVs along dirt trails, snowmobile down winding tracks, or go off-roading in 4x4s. The United States Forest Service’s approach to all such forms of recreation on trails can be summed up in four words: closed unless designated open.

Unless a trail is explicitly designated as open to off-highway vehicles, such as side-by-sides and dirt bikes, it can only be used for nonmotorized recreation. Most national forests have travel management plans that outline when a trail is open for nonmotorized use like mountain biking, horseback riding, or hiking, and when it’s open to off-highway vehicles. These plans tend to be exhaustive and list which types of motorized or nonmotorized access are allowed on every trail, two-track, and road. The strict guidelines are a result of a Forest Service policy called the travel management rule.

But the Trump administration wants to turn the current rule on its head. In late August, the Forest Service announced its plan to revise the rule so that trails are open unless designated closed. It would mean forest managers would be expected to prioritize motorized access on service roads, trails, and even backcountry airfields.

The US Department of Agriculture, of which the Forest Service is a part, has said that the move will increase recreation access and “simplify regulatory requirements.” The change is being opposed by sportsmen, backcountry horsemen, conservation organizations, and nonmotorized recreation groups. They say opening up all Forest Service trails to motorized access could have devastating consequences for the ecosystems and wildlife that rely on these lands. Healthy, intact forest ecosystems are also critical for sequestering carbon in a warming world.

“I’m totally OK with appropriate machine use in the forest. But there are just places where the ecosystem is too sensitive.”

Hillary Eisen, the federal policy director for Wild Montana, a public lands advocacy organization, said everyone who uses forest lands, from recreationists and ranchers with grazing leases to those in the timber industry, relies on the clarity provided by travel management plans. The Forest Service’s formal announcement to revise the rule is “vague,” “somewhat poorly written,” and “difficult to follow,” Eisen said. Without clear guidelines in place, she fears motorized users could end up anywhere on the landscape.

“Any sort of feature that you could interpret to be a trail or a road would be open to every type of use, unless closed,” she said. “That could mean if you can get your side-by-side on there, have at it.”

Chris Edgington, a watershed project manager with Montana Trout Unlimited, witnessed firsthand the environmental damage that can happen from off-highway vehicle use on the Middle Fork of the Judith River, which runs through the Little Belt Mountains of central Montana.

Prior to 2023, there were more than 80 entrances and 27 shallow spots along a 6-mile stretch of the river, where various types of vehicles, including cars and side-by-sides, crossed. As these vehicles cut across, they caused erosion and an influx of sediment that coats rocks along the riverbed, suppressing insect life and the ability for fish to successfully spawn. By 2020, the sediment runoff had gotten so bad it was choking out nearly all the fish, Edgington said.

“The fish population was estimated to be less than 10 percent of what we’d expect of a river that size and character,” Edgington said. “The river had become over-widened and shallow, creating unusual riffles, and the river couldn’t manage its sediment load.”

So Edgington brought together a diverse coalition of groups, including the off-highway vehicle community and the Great Falls Trail Bike Riders Association, environmental groups, and federal and local government agencies to address the issue. They rebuilt 1,000 feet of riverbank, reduced the number of crossings by 80 percent, and built a new section of the off-highway vehicle and jeep trail so the area could still be used for recreation, without harming the river. It’s been a huge success, Edgington says, and the work is already paying off.

“Fish numbers are up,” he explained. “The work we did to remove the sediment is restoring water quality and the fish population in that incredible backcountry setting.”

The vehicles crossing the river weren’t breaking any rules; the Forest Service had designated the area open for motorized recreation, but the number of stream crossings degraded the health of the river and the threatened species that lived there, including the cutthroat trout. “I’m totally OK with appropriate machine use in the forest,” Edgington said. “But there are just places where the ecosystem is too sensitive to use this equipment.”

The travel management plan, written by the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, recognized this impact to the river and the need to reroute the road out of the river corridor. Parts of the Middle Fork are protected as a Wilderness Study Area and an Inventoried Roadless Area. Edgington said that because of those protections and the travel management plan, it was worth investing in this restoration; he knew the conservation work would last.

He said a full repeal of the travel management rule would create more problems than it intends to solve. A change of this magnitude, he said, could be a devastating blow to river health and restoration projects like the Middle Fork Judith.

“Whether that’s off-highway vehicles in the river or motorcycles on horse trails, it’s going to create a lot of conflict and confusion and animosity between different user groups.”

“This is public land, and people with disabilities, the elderly, need some sort of transportation to get out there.”

The process to change a federal rule is a long one. The Forest Service is accepting public comments on the plan to revise the rule, which is the first step in the process, through September 23.

These proposed revisions to travel management aren’t occurring in a vacuum. They are one of several widespread policy changes that could take effect across the 193 million acres of land the Forest Service manages, including more than 19 million acres in Montana alone. Last month, just before the travel management revision, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the USDA was moving forward with rescinding the roadless rule, a policy that prevents road building and commercial logging on 45 million acres of Forest Service land. The Forest Service and other scientists have conducted extensive research showing how roads fragment habitat, disturb wildlife, introduce noxious weeds, and increase human-caused wildfires. In the first round of public comment, 99 percent of commenters opposed removing roadless protections.

The short public comment periods have received public backlash. On September 11, the Forest Service announced it was adding 15 days to the comment period for the roadless rule; it is now open until October 6. In a statement about the decision, the agency wrote the extension was “to provide interested persons additional time to review the proposed rule and supporting materials.”

Eisen, the federal policy director for Wild Montana, said the roadless rule and travel management rule help uphold the purpose of public lands.

“The intent in Congress is that they support current generations,” she said. “That they are also available for future generations, that’s the sustained yield, conservation piece of it. And the regulations we have that connect to public lands all tie in to that in one way or another.”

The roadless rule, she said, ensures intact habitat remains for clean water and wildlife, but the travel management rule affects far more people every time they visit a national forest.

“Anytime you go anywhere on national forest land outside of wilderness, the travel management rule is part of your experience,” she said. “And your experience is not an accident.”

“This administration does not appear to value what our public-land system is rooted in.”

Supporters of these changes, like Kerry White, who runs the Bozeman-based nonprofit Citizens for Balanced Use, say making trails open unless designated closed would create more opportunities for recreation. Citizens for Balanced Use is an organization that advocates for motorized access on public lands.

“Without roads and trails, people can’t get out in the woods,” said White, who represented a section of Bozeman in the state legislature from 2013 to 2021. This is public land, and people with disabilities, the elderly, need some sort of transportation to get out there.”

White said these new changes will allow for better access and clarity for visitors on ATVs, e-bikes, and other motorized vehicles. “By making everything open unless posted closed,” he said, “it puts a bit more onus on the Forest Service to do due diligence and, if a trail is closed, make sure those signs are posted and maintained and kept in place.”

Karla Gagby, who can’t hike because of a lung injury, rides through the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in southwestern Montana on July 4.Gary Friedman

White also believes these changes won’t have negative environmental impacts. “People are freaking out [that] we’ll have strip malls and open-pit mining in these areas, and that’s simply not the case,” he said. “There’s a lot of regulation that has to be done to do any kind of projects in these areas.”

But Eisen with Wild Montana said these changes are occurring alongside the Trump administration’s rollback of a myriad of the nation’s bedrock environmental protections, including changes to the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

“This administration does not appear to value what our public-land system is rooted in,” she said. “It’s more about, ‘How can I make a quick buck off of this for my benefit?’ I think it gets back into that interest in privatizing.”

To Edgington, these changes are a concerning pile-on. “Many of these rules were created with a thoughtful balance of forest use,” he said. “And there are probably areas where we could improve these rules, but a full repeal would be devastating to fish and wildlife resources beyond our comprehension.”

He spent years overseeing restoration work and conservation for some of Montana’s most beloved trout fisheries. “Cold, clean water is a finite resource,” he said, “and we need to do whatever we can to protect it.”

While Edgington is proud of the work he and partners did to restore the Middle Fork of the Judith River, he doesn’t know how work like that happens without policies like the roadless and travel management rules.

“This project was funded by three federal sources,” Edgington said. “If protections are possibly lifted and those investments are diminished? It is pretty counterintuitive to the responsible use of taxpayer dollars.”

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Nvidia Thinks It Can Stop Rogue AI—Without All That Government Oversight

On Monday, Nvidia, the multinational tech company—which has become one of the most valuable companies in the world in significant part thanks to its role in developing chips for AI processing and model training—announced the launch of a new safety platform that will monitor and contain AI agents, amid recent reports of “rogue AI” incidents like OpenAI’s Hugging Face hacking fiasco.

As my colleagues and I have previously reported, accounts of autonomous hacks by AI models belonging to OpenAI and its rivals have exacerbated concerns about the minimally regulated AI sector, even as leading figures like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argue that AI oversight is an “engineering problem” that the industry can largely handle without government involvement—echoing statements by President Trump, who has lashed out at demands to legislate guardrails around what he now calls “superintelligence.”

Nvidia says its Open Agent Safety Platform, which it launched Monday with a number of leading tech and AI firms, can quarantine agents that attempt to escape containment within “milliseconds.” Among company’s collaborators on some of its new safety measures are Microsoft, Palantir, SpaceXAI, JPMorganChase, and Hugging Face—the online forum where users can share and build AI systems that was the subject of the hacking incident involving OpenAI.

Butin the context of Huang’s remarks, the company’s proposals fordeveloping safe AI are in effect being presented as an alternative to regulatory action. The idea that AI safety isn’t a problem for state agencies, or that the recent spate of rogue AI incidents don’t call for swift political action,amount to an argument that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic can police themselves. It’s often AI firms’ own conduct, and the words and actions of their leaders, that have made self-regulation a hard sell—especially as public opinion sours towards the technology’s sprawling infrastructure demands and footprint in daily life.

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones_, has sued OpenAI for_ copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.

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Prosecutors Are Revisiting Allegations of Gang Rape at Cornell

After a week of intensifying public pressure and reporting from Cornell’s independent daily newspaper, prosecutors in New York have reopened a criminal investigation into the alleged 2024 gang rape of a former student at the campus’s Chi Phi fraternity house.

The student, identified as Jane Doe, filed a civil complaint earlier this month accusing Cornell of failing to protect her and choosing instead to level minimal punishment against the seven fraternity members who allegedly “plied [her] with alcohol and drugs to the point of intoxication,” before raping her. Those actions, the complaint alleged, included temporary suspensions and opportunities for some of the fraternity members to mitigate those suspensions by submitting essays.

“We want to reexamine whether there’s additional evidence that we were not aware of in November of 2024,” Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten told ABC News, “that exists now that would change our assessment of the case and would result in the grand jury finding that there was criminal conduct.”

The complaint also included an image from a Snapchat text thread wherein one of the men appeared to encourage others to take advantage of the “free pussy” upstairs, referring to Doe. An attorney for one of the defendants denied the allegations. Speaking through the same attorney, the defendant claimed that he had nothing more than “thoughtlessly” engage in a text thread.

“Cornell has failed her. Cornell has failed us.”

Cornell on Monday said that it welcomed the new investigation but vehemently defended the school’s handling of the case.

“Any suggestion that the university did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false,” a university relations official wrote in a statement. “A continuation of the false narrative that there were minimal consequences in this case is irresponsible, will make survivors feel less safe and supported, and will perpetuate the underreporting of sexual assault.”

In a searing op-ed published last week, editors of the Cornell Daily Sun took the university to task for failing to protect its students, while condemning administrators for creating an academic environment where “enough ambiguity, enough he-said-she-said, enough familial connections, enough money will allow you to get off scot-free.”

“We refuse for this victim to be reduced to just another story,” the op-ed read, adding that “Cornell has failed [Doe]. Cornell has failed us.”

“We removed this label upon further review after we determined that it qualified for a newsworthy allowance,” a Meta spokesperson confirmed. “The post is now fully visible for adults.”

Details from the civil complaint have since ricocheted across social media and ignited intense public outrage.

“After reading about the young woman who was gang raped at her college by her friend and school peers, I’m feeling uneasy and sick and anxious,” the actor Florence Pugh wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday. “I’m processing quietly and watching everything and everyone and every man.”

Soon after, Pugh accused Meta of suppressing her post.

“A label was initially applied to the post, warning people that the content may be sensitive before they click through,” Meta confirmed to Mother Jones. “We removed this label upon further review after we determined that it qualified for a newsworthy allowance. The post is now fully visible for adults.”

On the same day that the Tompkins County district attorney announced it was revisiting the investigation, the Trump administration finalized its plan to repeal Title IX, the Biden-era rule that mandated a formal process for schools to respond to sexual misconduct claims.

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Trump’s Taxpayer-Funded Ads Are Receiving Bipartisan Criticism

President Donald Trump has become the subject of bipartisan pushback after another taxpayer-funded television ad aired during at least two Sunday NFL games.

“We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country,” Trump says in the ad. “We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

“Don’t worry, using taxpayer dollars to run ominous campaign ads of the President has been done before and is completely legal… in banana republics,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) posted on X on Sunday night in reaction to the latest ad.

Trump is now using taxpayer money to run his 2024 campaign ad, but changes his campaign logo at the end to “PAID FOR BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT”

— Headquarters (@headquartersnews.bsky.social) 2026-09-28T14:45:17.182Z

The ad is nearly identical to one Trump posted on Truth Social in January 2024, which included Trump’s presidential campaign logo. In place of the logo is now the message: “Paid for by the US government.” The audio of both ads strongly resembles part of a campaign speech he delivered in Claremont, New Hampshire, in November 2023, where he used autocratic language, referring to himself as “a very proud election denier.”

“It’s not like they need a GoFundMe page to have the dollars to do that sort of ad and they could do it,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said about the first ad that aired on Wednesday. “But using taxpayer dollars, it feels like [the former far-right prime minister of Hungary] Viktor Orbán.”

Both Republican lawmakers have a history of criticizing Trump.

On Thursday, congressional Democrats on appropriations committees wrote a letter to White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles, calling the first ad “the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea.”

“We write to demand that you immediately take this ad off the air and discipline the Federal employees who knowingly violated Federal law in working on and paying for this advertisement,” they continued, asserting the ad violated anti-propaganda law. “In addition, we demand a full account and breakdown of all Federal funds used to create and air this ad.”

On Friday, the White House called the ads “public service announcements” that are “very clearly not campaign ads” as Trump isn’t on the ballot and the president does not request any action. The White House pointed to other administrations who have run public service announcements to “explain policy and make the case for the nation’s direction,” including George W. Bush’s anti-drug ads that played during the Super Bowl and Barack Obama’s ads on the Affordable Care Act.

But as my colleague Sophie Hurwitz noted on Friday, “Trump’s supposed PSA says and does very little beyond extolling Trump. Usually, a public service announcement announces something. This one announces pure right-wing vibes.”

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Rest Assured: AI Companies Say They’re Investigating Tens of Thousands of Rogue Bot Incidents

OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly investigating tens of thousands of incidents where their advanced models bypassed monitors and guardrails, behavior that the startups facilitate for internal safety testing.

According to a Saturday Axios report, sources said that most of the results of these tests are not public and are not known to have caused tangible harm.

In recent weeks, OpenAI has disclosed six instances of “unexpected or concerning behavior” where its models—without permission—covered up mistakes, made up data, and transferred files onto the open internet. In the same September 16 announcement, the startup said it would now report and investigate “misalignment,” meaning when the actions of AI systems go against human intentions. OpenAI shared on Friday that its autonomous AI agents interacted with several US government websites—including two operated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and data from the Census Bureau—in unanticipated ways. The startup said it did not consider any of the actions breaches.

These disclosures fall in line with previous announcements by frontier AI labs that their technology engaged with “misalignment,” and they should therefore slow down and be more careful and all the cries by current and former researchers in the industry that AI could lead to human extinction by 2030.

What OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs Sam Altman and Dario Amodei don’t mention is that the industry has long aligned with the Trump administration and its campaign to expand AI development. OpenAI has a military contract with the Defense Department worth up to $200 million. How AI is involved is unclear—the Intercept reported earlier this month that the Pentagon asked OpenAI to provide a custom AI tool with “minimal refusal rates.” Google, SpaceX, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle also have deals with the Defense Department.

While the Pentagon canceled its military contract with Anthropic over the startup’s concern about how its tools may be used for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, the White House has promoted Anthropic’s $50 billion investment in data center construction and the two reportedly have a much improved relationship as of September.

The relationship between the AI industry and Trump remains as the administration cut the Cyber Safety Review Board in January 2025, a body that investigates major cybersecurity threats, and has proposed further cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which secures infrastructure against cyber and physical threats. Trump previously eliminated one-third of CISA’s workforce due in significant part to its election security work.

As Miranda Bogen, the founding director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s AI Governance Lab, told me in July, actually addressing the “deeply insufficient” system to protect the public from AI threats involves reducing the incentives of AI companies to continuously develop within a framework of profit and geopolitical competition. Without that, we are relying on AI to regulate itself.

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Irish Soccer Fans Call for Boycotting Matches With Israel

On Sunday afternoon, Ireland is set to play a soccer match against Israel amid widespread public calls and protests in the country to boycott the game due to Israel’s violent conduct in Gaza, which a UN report found to be a genocide.

The match will take place at Nagyerdei Stadium in Debrecen, Hungary, an alternative venue for Israel’s “home” match as Union of European Football Associations, the international governing football body in Europe, has not permitted games in Israel since October 2023 due to security concerns. Ireland’s football association declined any tickets for the match from UEFA, while Israel is expected to have no more than 100 supporters, with tickets mostly bought by supporters living in Hungary. Nagyerdei Stadium has a capacity of around 20,000.

Ireland’s “home” match against Israel is scheduled for October 4 at TSC Arena in Bačka Topola, Serbia. It will be played behind closed doors with no supporters in attendance.

“I don’t think the game obviously should be going ahead but it is going ahead.”

Ireland has long held some of the highest public support for Palestinians. In 1980, the country became the first member of the European Union to call for Palestinian statehood. Recent polls suggest that about two-thirds of Ireland residents don’t want the match to take place. Ireland has also boycotted international events in the past due to Israel, including this year’s Eurovision singing competition. They announced earlier this month they will continue this boycott next year.

Despite this, a significant majority of Irish national team players voted on Saturday to go ahead with the game following a four-hour discussion among players, coaching staff, and Irish soccer executives. The two fixtures affect whether both teams will qualify for future international tournaments—including the 2028 UEFA European Football Championship, which Ireland will co-host. Ireland’s soccer chief said on Saturday that the national team players will wear black armbands during the game “in recognition of all the lives lost in the conflict” and would not participate in “elements of the pre-match ceremony,” including the customary pre-match handshake and exchange of team pennants.

There is no fixed UEFA rule for refusing to play a match in the Nations League, the competition that features the Israel-Ireland game. But officials at Bohemian FC, a professional soccer team in Ireland, pointed to previous penalties when Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia forfeited their matches against Belarus—3-0 defeats and, in one case, a minor fine of 5,000 euros. “The FAI [Ireland’s soccer federation] exaggerated the potential consequences to force their delegates to vote in favour of proceeding with fulfilling these fixtures,” Luke O’Riordan, the team’s communications director, told Al Jazeera. “It is not acceptable to put a price on standing up for what is right and in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

“I don’t think the game obviously should be going ahead but it is going ahead,” Ireland midfielder Jason Knight said after a match against Kosovo on Thursday. “I’ll try and focus on the football as much as I can. I’ll give my view and my thoughts on it [the Israel games] when I see fit.”

Goalkeeper Gavin Bazunu left the Ireland squad following the decision to play the match. “My decision is based purely upon my personal belief that the killing of innocent people is wrong,” the goalkeeper wrote on Instagram on Saturday. “It is important to note that my stance is not in opposition of the Israeli people or the Jewish community but against the atrocities in the region.”

“There are few times where you get a chance in life to stand up for something bigger and I strongly believe that is one of them,” he continued.

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On Monday evening, more than 100 people protested outside the team’s hotel in Dublin, and about 160 Irish sportspeople signed an open letter pushing the Irish soccer association to reconsider moving forward with the match: “With this moment you have an opportunity to do the right thing.”

“It’s unconscionable that the Israel men’s football team will participate in the UEFA Nations League this autumn despite clear evidence that Israel’s football association continues to support illegal settlements,” Steve Cockburn, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for Europe said.

In the lead-up to Sunday’s match, Ireland’s football manager, Heimir Hallgrímsson said, “We’re not playing with genocide, we’re playing against genocide. We’re playing against Israel, we’re not playing with Israel.”

Israel’s soccer association called Hallgrímsson’s comments as “hypocrisy and stupidity.” “We have contributed to the world and humanity in countless fields, earning an impressive number of Nobel Prizes along the way,” it continued in its social media post last Monday. But as Defector pointed out last week, Israel’s soccer association was founded in the 1920s as the Palestine Football Association.

While the Ireland Prime Minister Micheál Martin, a conservative, supported the decision to eventually move forward with the match, citing that “sport is an area that can be challenging when it crosses into the realm of politics, Ruth Coppinger, a member of the lower house of the Irish and long-standing member of the Socialist Party in the country, criticized the decision: “You can’t play against genocide; the best statement against genocide is not playing.”

There is precedent for soccer and global politics being intertwined. As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote in 2022, “oligarchs, private-equity moguls, and petro states took over the sport” through political and economic relationships.

FIFA, the international soccer governing body that runs the World Cup, and UEFA have suspended Russia from participating in their competitions since February 2022 due to the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

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Germany Is Building a Digital Noah’s Ark for US Climate Data

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In a modern five-story building in the center of Hamburg, Germany, technicians are preparing to install several new “racks”—gray metal casings that hold computing hardware—alongside the scores that already line the narrow, dimly lit corridors of the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ), one of the world’s largest repositories for climate simulation data. The new equipment will add about 5 petabytes of storage capacity to the 254 petabytes of data already stored here. One petabyte is equivalent to the storage space needed for roughly 200 million high-resolution images.

Under normal circumstances, the DKRZ’s mission is to provide computing power and storage to the German climate science community. But these new racks will serve a different and highly sensitive purpose: They will store backup versions of climate simulations from the other side of the Atlantic. The operation aims to ensure that essential work performed by US scientists for the next major U.N. climate assessment, due in 2029, cannot be meddled with or compromised by the administration of President Trump, which has slashed funding for climate research, buried scientific reports, removed references to human-caused warming from dozens of government websites, and sought to prevent satellites from collecting key climate data.

Until recently, the idea that the US science community would have to track or rescue lost datasets was unthinkable.

Leaders of German science organizations publicly cite these actions as their primary motivation for creating backups. The German Research Foundation, the country’s main science funding body, believes that the Trump administration could block European access to data and research findings stored in the US. “The deletion of data has also become a possibility,” says the foundation’s program manager, Kathrin Winkler, “and there is a risk that [data] could be manipulated to skew findings in a desired direction.”

Trust in US science policy has fallen to a low point in Europe, and fears of losing scientific data are mounting. The US government quit both the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in January, though US researchers are still contributing to global climate science. To support them, the German Research Foundation in late 2025 set up a program, with a budget of $35 million, to provide a safe haven for permanently storing copies of US data from public and open sources.
Data collections form the foundation of all empirical science. Climate, environmental, and biodiversity research relies on countless historical and contemporary datasets. Some of these collections, such as the iconic time series of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations made at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, have been ongoing for decades and are critical for tracking environmental change. (In 2025, the Trump administration tried to defund and close the observatory, but later Congress rejected its proposed cuts.)

While detailed datasets are essential for research, it is not standard procedure to back them up in alternate locations. Most scientific datasets are physically stored on hard drives or magnetic tapes at the universities or institutions where they are generated. One simple reason for this is that, until recently, the world seemed safe enough that scientists saw no need for offsite backups.

In early 2025, Elon Musk’s DOGE completely removed 300 datasets carefully built over decades by NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center.

Another reason is that transferring and storing such large amounts of information is complicated. Sending petabytes of data through the internet takes months, and renting faster fiber optic cables can be extremely costly. Often, the most cost-effective way to transfer large volumes of data is to put them on hard drives or far cheaper magnetic tapes and send them through the “sneakernet,” which means they are physically transported by car, plane, or ship.

Still, the process is expensive and arduous, so most datasets have been kept in just one place. But in a world where political upheaval, cyberattacks, and armed conflicts are becoming more frequent, this practice is increasingly considered to be precarious. “If data is stored at only one site, there is a much greater risk of loss from events such as extreme weather or infrastructure failure,” says Eleanor O’Rourke, the UK-based director of the International Project Office of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, which coordinates global climate models for the IPCC’s assessments. Climate simulations for the IPCC are now considered so critical that overseas repositories are thought necessary for all contributions.

Until recently, the idea that the US science community would have to track or rescue lost datasets was unthinkable. After all, environmental data generated or funded by US government agencies was paid for by taxpayers and generally remains in the public domain. Yet these datasets exist in physical forms at specific locations and require dedicated experts to maintain them, which makes them vulnerable to human interference, as well as natural disasters, technical problems like short circuits or battery explosions, and neglect. “The data repositories, digital asset management services, and preservation systems that ensure research data remains open and accessible are often overlooked—until they disappear,” data experts Jennifer Gibson and Kaitlin Thaney warned recently.

One example of political interference is the recent threat to 300 federally funded datasets carefully built up over decades by NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center. Alex de Sherbinin, the former SEDAC manager, said the center was founded to “serve as a bridge between the Earth and social-science research communities,” integrating remote sensing data with information on human population, poverty, and infrastructure.

In early April 2025, de Sherbinin was shocked to discover that SEDAC’s datasets had been completely removed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team. It took immense efforts by various institutions, quickly scraping datasets from active servers while they were still operational, to secure the information and transfer it to a new host: the Harvard Dataverse Repository. Assumptions that US government agencies will store scientific data long-term “are proving tenuous at best, given the anti-science predisposition of the current administration,” de Sherbinin says.

Numerous similar projects aim to relocate or duplicate datasets within the United States. But the US is far from the only country where data is vulnerable, and political interference is not the only risk.

Several research institutions around the world, including a multidisciplinary scientific research center in Croatia and an institute for industrial engineering in Germany, have in recent years been the target of elaborate hacking operations, in which intruders block access to files and demand money to restore them. Victims of cybercrimes rarely disclose publicly which files were targeted, but it’s clear that such attacks can affect scientific data collections.

And then there’s war. Russia’s attacks on Ukraine have not only caused mass civilian death and suffering but also immense damage to the country’s science. “Universities and research institutes have been targeted by Russian bombardments, and in some cases they were completely destroyed,” says Anastasiia Lutsenko, a Ukrainian researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich, whose work focuses on how her country’s science system is responding to the war. The Russians, she says, “know how much lasting harm they can inflict by attacking science.”

President Trump “has, to a certain extent, done science a favor by making it clear how important it is to not just hoard data in one place.”

Lutsenko cites the transfer of data and samples to secure locations as an important step. Even before Russia’s 2022 invasion, a German-Polish-Ukrainian collaboration helped digitize records of early meteorological observations—conducted between 1808 and 1880 at eight Ukrainian meteorological stations—and transferred them to a server at the University of Giessen, Germany. This eliminated the risk of losing valuable historical data in the war. A similar transfer took place after missiles struck near the servers holding Ukraine’s contribution to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s records in Kharkiv at the start of Russia’s invasion.

The need for increased resilience—the ability to remain functional despite shocks and fully recover from them—was the focus of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) gathering held in Berlin this March. There, nearly 100 experts, primarily from the US and Europe, discussed how to respond to the Trump administration’s attacks on science.

The AGU represents more than 60,000 Earth and space scientists worldwide, and it has emerged as a leader in efforts to protect science and scientists from the Trump administration’s politically motivated attacks. When the administration refused to send US experts to IPCC meetings in 2025, the AGU formed the US Academic Alliance for the IPCC and nominated nearly 300 U.S. scientists to be authors of the IPCC’s next assessment. And in the summer of 2025, it launched its Data Resilience Project, a global initiative to rethink how science is organized.

AGU president-elect Ben Zaitchik believes that science is at an inflection point. “We have engaged in triage efforts to ensure data remains usable and accessible,” he said at the Berlin meeting. “But we clearly now have arrived at a moment where we must fundamentally reimagine data organization and maintenance for long-term viability and growth.”

Creating backups of datasets and storing them in secure, distant locations was identified as a priority measure during the meeting, as was coordinating a global data community aimed at mitigating current and future risks. Such an effort was vital not only for scientists, an AGU spokesperson noted, “but also for engineers, public safety officials, health experts, policymakers, and a wide array of industries and communities globally,” which depend on scientific data. As a result of the Berlin meeting, a broad coalition of German national research centers was formed to offer safe storage for public domain information to scientists from the US and other countries.

In addition to the DKRZ efforts, other initiatives have emerged across various fields. For example, the Senckenberg Natural History Museum, in Frankfurt, saves data from wildlife trail cameras in Ukraine and biodiversity data from war-ridden Yemen. “We want to ensure that biodiversity data remains usable even under crisis conditions,” a Senckenberg spokesperson says.

For such transfers, it is critical to store not only the data itself but also any specialized software required to read and analyze it. “We’re developing protocols and procedures for exchanging data, distributing multiple copies globally, and ensuring that the data remains analyzable indefinitely,” says Frank Oliver Glöckner, a professor of earth systems data science at the University of Bremen and the head of Pangaea, a long-term data repository run by the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and the university, both of which are preparing to integrate data from a US climate research center slated for closure.

Glöckner said he believes that President Trump “has, to a certain extent, done science a favor by making it clear how important it is to not just hoard data in one place but to truly share it with the global scientific community.”

“It would be ideal if, in the future, all climate data worldwide were connected via digital pipelines,” says Kadow, of the DKRZ. “That way, in the event of a threat, we could simply flip a switch to secure it elsewhere.” In the future, he says, this could also benefit researchers in Germany, where the AfD, an extreme far-right party that denies climate science, recently won a state election for the first time. “We don’t know what political shifts may occur in Germany,” he says. “We aren’t completely protected from risks or developments like those in the U.S. either.”

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Palantir’s Co-Founder Thinks We Should Be Less Judgmental About That Deadly Iran School Strike

Joe Lonsdale, a cofounder of weapons-tech company Palantir, shared some of his thoughts on America’s AI-assisted warfare at a Reuters-hosted event late last week—and one statement stands out as being particularly alarming. The US strike on a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, in February was tragic, he acknowledged—but, he argued, “It’s very easy to judge things from the outside.”

“It could be the case that somebody made 99 really good choices and then one bad choice and it led to a horrible thing,” Lonsdale told Reuters Global Defense Editor Joe Brock on Friday, in a talk aimed at investors. He also argued that Iran might have deliberately lured the US military into the AI-assisted targeting of two Tomahawk missiles at an elementary school on the first day of the the Trump administration’s war in Iran. The attack killed more than 150 people, most of whom were children. Pentagon officials later told Bloomberg News that overreliance on Palantir technology contributed to the school strike.

Lonsdale’s narrative was different. Iran’s leaders “might have purposely disguised some of these things to make them look like targets, the same way the Palestinians and others do,” Lonsdale said.

“They’re getting global sympathy by getting us to hit things,” Lonsdale went on. “And so, it’s very unclear to me the facts of exactly what happened. Obviously, it’s terrible what happened to those children.” Last week, a UN committee report suggested that the US attack on the school could be classified as a war crime.

“It’s very easy to judge things from the outside.”

At one point, Lonsdale was asked how technology companies should be held accountable “if things go wrong.”

“Maybe there should be some laws about companies that operate here and, like, what you’re allowed to do with them,” Lonsdale said.

But the billionaire colleague of Peter Thiel has some obvious financial reasons not to push harder to regulate or hold accountable defense and technology companies. As managing partner of the venture capital firm 8VC, he has $6 billion invested in high-tech defense companies, Forbes reported. He’s also increasingly involved in lobbying on industry issues. His conservative think tank, the Cicero Institute, and its lobbying arm Cicero Action—best-known for being a major force behind the Trump administration’s push to criminalize homelessness—are also connected to hundreds of thousands of dollars in defense-lobby spending.

That lobbying, as Sludge reported,touches on companies in Lonsdale’s 8VC portfolio—and could be paying big dividends. “Palantir is seeing a surge in federal revenue under the Trump administration,” Sludge said in August, including an Army contract worth up to $10 billion. Anduril, a Thiel-funded company also backed by Lonsdale, “is similarly on the rise, including an Army deal awarded in March with a ceiling of $20 billion.”

Lobbying and war-profiteering aside, Lonsdale wrote on his blog in 2025 that it is apparently possible to be a “perfectly moral” person in the weapons business.

Society, he wrote, suffers from a “default assumption of evil by people who make weapons.” But, he argued, “If we didn’t have talented people willing to do the “dirty” work of defense, we’d be speaking German. Or Russian. Or Chinese. We’d have experienced many more 9/11’s. You get the idea.”

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Union: CDC Lost a Third of Its Workforce in One Year

A new report by the American Federation of Government Workers has documented a staggering level of staff attrition at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the first year of the Trump 2.0 administration. The nation’s premier public health agency lost a third of its workforce from March 2025 through April 2026, the union says.

Those job losses include 100 percent of the staff at two CDC units, the Office of Health Equity and the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, that were entirely eliminated in 2025. Some 98 percent of the CDC’s human resources personnel have also left their jobs, the union says. In spring of 2025, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency gutted the federal agency, and in the following months, many of those whose jobs were spared in that bloodbath voluntarily quit or retired. A year later, the union reports, 3,000 fewer people work at the public health agency now overseen by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and newly confirmed CDC Director Erica Schwartz.

What’s left is a “zombified” agency, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who led the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases before he resigned in the summer of 2025, told the New York Times this week. Meanwhile, the CDC has done little to respond to high-profile outbreaks of measles, food-borne cyclosporiasis, and rabies. This week, the CDC—which is responsible for instructing doctors and the general public on vaccine use—made no recommendation on the new flu vaccine approved by the FDA in August. “By this time of year in 2024, the CDC had published detailed recommendations for vaccines against respiratory diseases,” the Times reported, including endorsements from the CDC director at the time and notes from a meeting of its vaccine advisers. This year, that group of vaccine advisers has not held a single meeting.

“What we are witnessing is the dismantling of public health infrastructure our country relies on,” Yolanda Jacobs, president of AFGE Local 2883, said in a press release. The US “deserves an agency that is fully prepared to protect the public’s health within and outside its own doors.”

The CDC’s employees also deserve better, she said, noting they “have dedicated their lives to serving the American people.”

“Protecting our nation’s public health workers also protects our nation’s public health,” she said.

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“They Really Did Screw Bernie”: Here’s What 2016 Can Teach Democrats Today

First, a confession: Before I read long-time Democratic strategist Tad Devine’s new book, How the Democrats Screwed Bernie, I rolled my eyes at the prospect of yet another post-mortem on the 2016 election (which was admittedly also the first presidential election in which I was eligible to vote). Not even halfway through his second term, President Trump has wreaked havoc on all the institutions that have sustained the United States, alienated our allies,started a pointless and dangerous war, and further divided Americans with his lies and dangerous policies. Meanwhile, a complicit Congress completely controlled by Republicans seems incapable of acting like a responsible check on his assertion of power. Now, with all eyes on the 2026 midterms and the glimmer of accountability that may come from them, why relitigate a primary election that happened almost a decade ago?

Devine, however, isn’t just some political pundit obsessing over the past, and his book isn’t some finger-wagging post-mortem on how the Democrats messed up. Instead, Devine, one of the Democratic Party’s most well-known media strategists and Senator Bernie Sanders’ chief campaign strategist in 2016, breaks down how the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign used superdelegates, dirty tricks, dark money, and the press to thwart Sanders’ 2016 presidential run. In other words, to paraphrase the title, “Bernie got screwed.”

To my surprise, I came away from the book more inspired than embittered or disheartened. Devine offers plenty of insightful lessons about how the Democrats can win elections if its establishment could only wean itself off dark money, push for campaign finance reform, and coalesce around younger Democratic Socialists without compromising the party’s values–assuming that it can come to some agreement about what those values are. “This book isn’t about sour grapes, it’s really about what that election can mean for our future,” Devine says. “If we learned something from the 2016 campaign, I’ll be very happy about that.” Spoiler alert: Devine may even hazard a guess or two on 2028 hopefuls during our interview. We spoke by Zoom when he was at his home on Block Island, Rhode Island.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What are the two major ways that you think the Democrats screwed Bernie in 2016?

One way wasthe design of the nominating process itself. It’s a system designed to keep outsiders out and give a tremendous advantage to insiders. All of that screwed Bernie in an established way. But that’s not really how he got screwed. The real thing that was unfair was the overall takeover of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) by the Clinton campaign. The Clinton campaign ran the DNC. We know that because of millions of WikiLeaks pages revealed memos about the way money was being moved around inside the DNC. The tactics that the Clintons employed, like when and how many [Democratic primary] debates would be held, andusing outside Super PACs highly funded by dark money, were all part of this underhanded campaign against Bernie. So how did they screw Bernie? There was a system in place that was engineered to keep someone like him out, and I accept the reality of that. But Clinton’s control of the DNC, dark money super PACS, the way the press covered the race–all of those things that they did, which they should not have done, screwed Bernie.

“Clinton’s control of the DNC, dark money super PACS, the way the press covered the race–all of those things that they did, which they should not have done, screwed Bernie.”

You unpack this in the book, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask: Should the Democratic establishment have felt any allegiance towards Bernie considering the fact that he wasn’t even a member of the Democratic Party?

I think they should have. Number one, he caucused for them in Congress, in both the House and the Senate. This is a guy who has demonstrated his fidelity to the Democratic Party. I think they owed him. First of all, he ran as a Democrat. The fact that he didn’t [run as an Independent] should’ve been enough for the Democratic establishment to say, ‘We’ll have a fair process. We’re not going to screw him.” But they did. When I started writing the book, I didn’t really think of it in those terms. I rejected the title initially because I thought it sounded too much like Trump’s rhetoric. But as I started doing my own research and started writing, I looked back and realized, ‘They really did screw Bernie!’ I have no doubt that it was an unfair process. The Democratic National Committee needs to be an independent body. That didn’t happen in 2016. Clinton controlled it from the very beginning.

The DNC’s very controversial post-mortem report on the 2024 presidential election came out in May of this year. What does the report say about the state of the DNC and the Democratic Party apparatus today?

I think the autopsy report was a joke. It was not a serious look back at what happened in 2024. It was a political agenda item. I don’t think the party has learned many lessons in its recent past. That’s why our numbers continue to dwindle in terms of party registration throughout the country. More and more people are moving to being independents because they can’t find a home in either of the parties, and we have to really think about how we’re going to design a system that recognizes the problems in this country. Why is the country in so much trouble today? It’s easy and convenient to say it’s because Trump is president. But the real reason we’re in trouble is because we have a campaign finance system that is utterly corrupt. People anonymously contribute millions, hundreds of millions, and now even billions of dollars to control the outcome of elections. Why? Because of [the Supreme Court’s decision in] Citizens United. They have created a corrupt campaign finance system that holds in place an economy that is rigged. The Democratic Party has to begin to understand that we need to move away from dark money. Until we fix that problem, we cannot fix this country.

What is the role of the DNC anymore? Is it something that can be revived, or is it even worth reviving?

Yes, I think the DNC can have an important role in the process. It can be a fair arbiter of the nominating process. But, in the meantime, I think we should not try to have a dark money race with them. We should swear dark money off, recognize it for what it is, which is a hostile takeover of our government, and begin to work for campaign finance reform. We need to elevate campaign finance reform to the level of jobs and healthcare. In terms of the issue spectrum, we need to make people understand that the economic issues in our country can only be solved if we change the advantage given to powerful interests. So yeah, the DNC can play an important role still if it chooses to evolve. Absolutely, I think it can.

“We have to run outside candidates who have no allegiance or history to the Democratic Party to win. “

Are you hopeful that the DNC can evolve?

I’m hopeful. Given the situation we’re in right now in America with Trump, our horizon cannot exceed the next election. We have to focus all our energy and attention on trying to win. I believe we’re on a path to a massive victory in November. I look at the polling and begin to see the generic advantage that Democrats are starting to enjoy, in places like Nebraska, or Kansas, or Montana–these are really looking like places where we can compete in elections. I think the only way we’re going to get control of this government back is to have a massive victory. Now, that victory will be tempered by the reality of reapportionment. But if we can succeed in this election and take control of the House and the Senate–and I believe that’s possible—we can get enough elbow room so that we can really try to hold Trump accountable.

How much do you think Bernie’s 2016 campaign, and Bernie himself as a Democratic Socialist, is responsible for the wave of current Democratic Socialist candidates that we’re seeing in the midterms?

I think Bernie is principally responsible for this. We have all these people who were deeply affected by Bernie’s 2016 campaign. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was a waitress, and then she goes out, and she runs for office and gets elected to Congress. I’m not a democratic socialist myself, but I understand the appeal of their platform. If we have a core economic issue-centered agenda, if we talk about jobs and wages, if we talk about healthcare and expanding coverage and making it affordable, if we talk about housing and education and affording Social Security for the next generation—if we become the party that does that, we will be the majority party in America for a generation. And I think Bernie put this on the table for the first time.

You emphasize the importance of the outsider in the 2016 race, and that you believe Bernie would have been a formidable candidate against Trump in the general election. What does a post-Trump election look like now between establishment vs. outsider?

I think we have to wait and see the results of these elections. I believe it could look very good, and [not] just for outsiders. We have to run outside candidates who have no allegiance or history to the Democratic Party to win. What we have to do is find a way to empower voters to let them make those choices. And if the voters decide to elect someone who is very progressive and calls themself a Democratic Socialist, I think we have to accept that as Democrats. There is room for these people in our coalition, and that’s really the way we need to start thinking about politics. If the DNC asked me to come in and speak to them today—although, they’d probably start booing me after seeing the title of my book—I would say, ‘We need to build a coalition for this election, and part of that coalition includes the Democratic Socialists of America. We need to be with them.’ People are sick of politics. Here’s what they want: They want people who are responsive to them, who get things done on their behalf, and who focus on the issues that are most important in their lives.

What do you feel like it will take to beat Republicans in 2026 and in 2028?

We need to focus on 2026. It’s going to take resources to compete with Republicans. We’re not going to be able to outspend them because they’ve got enormous resources. But we need enough resources to compete, and we need candidates who are authentic, who connect with voters, and who are willing to share their values, beliefs, and backgrounds with voters.

I’m going to ask you to speculate here, and I promise I won’t hold you to it. Who do you think looks particularly strong going into 2028?

Given the way our politics are working now, I believe the nominee of the Democratic Party could be someone we don’t know. That’s just the nature of politics. I think if AOC were running for a Senate seat right now and she got elected, I would advise her to run for president. But the fact that she’s not, I would not advise her to run for president from a House seat. But who knows? Maybe I’m wrong. I think there are a lot of candidates. There’s Jon Ossoff, who is really proving himself. There’s Andy Beshear, the Governor of Kentucky. With Beshear, the thing I’m most impressed by is not that he’s won two races. What I’m most impressed by is a guy who has spoken out so strongly on trans issues got elected governor in the State of Kentucky twice. Obviously, he found a way to talk about this issue. If Sherrod Brown wins, although he’s a little older, he’d also be a very strong candidate to put on a ticket as vice president.

What do you hope readers take away from your book?

I hope that if people read the book, they see a lot of hope in it. Bernie got screwed, but what the book is really about is what he did, how he did it, what it means for our times, and most importantly, what it can mean for our future. I didn’t want to write a book about the past. I wanted to write a book where the past can be a prologue of what we do. If we learned something from the 2016 campaign, I’ll be very happy about that.

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Tim Tebow “Pausing” Christian Seminar Promotion After Our Investigation

Update, September 25: In an emailed response (PDF) to Tebow’s announcement that he planned to pause his relationship with Life Surge, the company’s CEO, Jeremy Nosek, wrote that Life Surge “strongly disagrees with the characterization of our company presented in recent reporting. We will not apologize for who we are, what we believe, or the work we do.” He added, “Tim has made the decision to pause his relationship with Life Surge while his team reviews the allegations and gathers additional facts. We respect that this is his decision to make. Our respect for Tim has not changed.“

Yesterday, we published our investigation, in partnership with Pablo Torre Finds Out, about legendary quarterback Tim Tebow’s involvement with Life Surge, a Christian financial seminar company. We detailed complaints from customers who said salespeople used Christianity to persuade them to buy pricey courses, and that they had ended up losing tens of thousands of dollars. The company disputed claims of any improper sales tactics, including the use of faith as a sales strategy.

One day after our investigation, Tebow, who was on track to speak at 10 Life Surge events by the end of this year, appears to be having misgivings about his role with the six-year-old company. During an appearance at a Southeastern Conference event on Friday, Tebow told a reporter with WRUF ESPN that he planned to pause his relationship with Life Surge:

Tebow’s team shared the news with him Thursday while attending an anti-human trafficking conference and said he was caught off guard by the investigation.

“I think the allegations are extremely serious and it’s something that we take very serious,” Tebow said. “For us we are having our team do an investigation but also pausing our relationship until we can learn more about the facts to be able to understand more.”

WRUF, the outlet that broke the story, is a sports radio station based in Gainesville, Florida, that serves as the broadcast home for Florida Gators, where Tebow had his storied college football career.

Mother Jones reached out to Life Surge for comment on Tebow’s decision to pause his relationship with Life Surge, but the company did not immediately respond.

Correction, September 25: An earlier version of this story misidentified the event during which Tebow said he was pausing his work with Life Surge. The error has been corrected.

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You’re Paying For Donald Trump’s New Ad

Since Wednesday, the federal government has been airing a taxpayer-funded political advertisement on channels like Fox News promoting the virtues of President Donald Trump, as Republicans ramp up advertising in the lead-up to November’s midterm elections.

The ad, soundtracked with the chorus of the singer JMSN’s “Love Me,” is structured like a TikTok hype reel for Trump and against communism. It’s captioned “Paid for by the US Government.”

So I was just watching Fox News and this commercial played during Jesse Watters show. It says “Paid for by the US Government.”
This is clearly a campaign ad. And the singers are just singing over and over again, “Love me” – over images of Trump. @CBSMiami @CBSNews pic.twitter.com/eCkEZpipWx

— Jim DeFede (@DeFede) September 24, 2026

“The ad’s cost has jumped from $14,000 to $430,000 as it runs on a variety of network TV channels in markets across the country, according to AdImpact, which tracks media spending,” the Associated Press reported Friday. “The actual amount spent could be significantly more, depending on whether networks classified the ad as a political ad.”

The White House characterizes the ad as a “public service announcement” that reminds Americans “to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad.”

“The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic. We should be proud of our country,” a White House spokesperson wrote in a statement to news organizations.

JMSN, the singer whose “love me, love me, love me” chorus backgrounds the ad, has condemned the White House’s use of his song. A growing number of politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, have written strongly-worded letters objecting to the advertisement as a misuse of public funds.

To be fair to Trump, this isn’t the first time a president has run a public service announcement: Former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter got together in 2021 to tape a PSA asking people to get COVID vaccines. Under George H.W. Bush, national TV networks ran presidentially-approved PSAs featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger telling children to work out more. And in 2014, the Obama White House ran a PSA on 20,000 television stations in which a bunch of male celebrities, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama all exhorted American men to put an end to sexual assault.

Unlike its predecessors, Trump’s supposed PSA says and does very little beyond extolling Trump. Usually, a public service announcement announces something. This one announces pure right-wing vibes.

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El Niño’s Estimated Death Toll From Extreme Heat Alone: 451,000 by February

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

More than 450,000 people are projected to die from the additional heat brought by the super El Niño by February, according to estimates by climate scientists.

The toll is on top of the early deaths resulting from temperatures already driven up by the climate crisis. It will strike across the globe, from Indonesia to India, and Nigeria to the United States. Many further deaths are expected from the droughts, wildfires, and flooding that El Niños bring.

The heat deaths have been estimated at regional level, and the researchers said the projections therefore identified where measures to protect people could be put in place and save lives. Such actions could include better heat forecasts, cooling centers where people can shelter, increased staffing for medical facilities at the hottest times and protections for outdoor workers.

The El Niño currently heating up the planet burst through the highest temperature ever recorded for the phenomenon on Monday, several months before its expected peak. The heat is so much greater than previous events that scientists have called it “mind-blowing” and “Godzilla-level.” El Niños are natural climate events but may be made worse by global heating.

A major El Niño in 1877-1878 led to more than 50 million deaths due to drought and famine.

“The estimate of 451,000 people is such a large number that it can be numbing, but it is made up of parents and children, grandparents and neighbours, people going to work, caring for families, and living their lives,” said Michael Greenstone, co-founder of the Climate Impact Lab and a professor at the University of Chicago, who co-authored the report.

The estimate of deaths is for the period June 2026—as some heat deaths will have already occurred—to February 2027, which is when current temperature forecasts end. But elevated levels of heat deaths are expected to continue until June or July 2027.

The most affected countries in the next six months are the tropical nations of Nigeria, Indonesia, Sudan, India, and Brazil. The US is in the top 20 most affected nations, with 3,500 projected additional heat deaths. More broadly, the Sahel region in Africa and Southeast Asia are heavily affected.

The El Niño is also a “postcard from our future,” the researchers said, pushing up temperatures to the level the climate crisis is projected to deliver in 20 years.

“Increasing emergency response and better targeting our efforts can save many lives this year,” said report co-author Tamma Carleton at the University of California, Berkeley. “But 20 years from now, once today’s extreme temperatures become the new normal, we don’t want to be in a constant state of emergency… We need to mobilize now to design, deploy, and evaluate the tools that will save lives in the years ahead.”

The projections were made using peer-reviewed methods that track the month-by-month relationship between temperature and additional heat deaths in 24,378 regions across the world. This was combined with the forecasts for higher temperatures due to El Niño in the months ahead. The baseline was the number of heat deaths in the average month from 1996 to 2025.

“People have been able to forecast when there’s going to be shocks to crops, and give advance warning of that,” said Greenstone. “This new report is opening the door to being able to do it for an even more important outcome—I would say the most important outcome—which is death.” The report will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, but Greenstone said that, given the urgency of the situation, “it would have been irresponsible to sit on it.”

Food supplies will also be hit by El Niño, with the World Food Programme warning in August that its impacts were likely to push about 50 million people into acute hunger and drive prices up. A major El Niño in 1877-1878 led to more than 50 million deaths due to drought and famine, with India, Brazil, and China severely affected.

Friederike Otto, a professor at Imperial College London, told The Guardian on Monday: “The [current El Niño] event is a huge redistribution of energy in the climate system and is dangerous, because it is unfolding on top of a much warmer, human-influenced climate system.”

“So, he continued, “in many places around the world we will see never-before-experienced heat extremes, with all their consequences on health, food security and water stress. El Niño comes and goes, but as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels, it occurs on an increasingly hotter baseline, making it much more difficult for communities to deal with the consequences.”

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Supreme Court Allows Trump to Use Flawed Database to Vet Voter Citizenship

The Supreme Court cleared the way on Friday for the Trump administration to use a controversial government program in its aggressive search for alleged voter fraud, increasing the likelihood that eligible voters will be wrongly labeled as noncitizens due to faulty data and removed from the rolls.

The court’s conservative majority wrote that the government was likely to prevail on the merits of the case, overturning a district court order blocking the Trump administration’s use of the program. “The District Court’s order thus inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections,” the GOP-appointed justices wrote in an unsigned opinion. “Under these circumstances, the equities weigh in favor of a stay.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented on behalf of the court’s three Democratic appointees. “The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” she wrote.

The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database run by the Department of Homeland Security has a long and documented history of producing false positives of noncitizens voting, leading to sensational headlines of alleged voter fraud that turn out to be untrue on closer inspection. The database was created in 1986 to verify the citizenship of people applying for government benefits but has been dramatically expanded by the Trump administration to check voter eligibility and produce federal citizenship lists that could supplant state voter rolls.

Following an executive order by Trump in March 2025, the administration revamped the database to add information on native-born Americans, Social Security numbers, and the ability to do bulk searches, all of which increase the possibility that eligible voters will be wrongly tagged as noncitizens and have their voter registrations canceled at the state level. As my colleague Abby Vesoulis and I reported last year, while“using SAVE to root out voter fraud is unlikely to turn up many—if any—noncitizen voters, the massive expansion of the program is likely to wrongly flag some American citizens as noncitizens, particularly naturalized citizens, newly married people who changed their last names, and people whose names don’t match on their documents.”

A federal district court blocked the Trump administration from using the expanded database in June following a lawsuit by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” wrote Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.” An appeals court in Washington, DC, upheld Sooknanan’s opinion, but the administration appealed to the Supreme Court, claiming that the injunction “makes it harder to detect ineligible voters, undermining the integrity of federal elections and public confidence in the results of those elections.”

However, there’s a lot of evidence that inaccuracies in the SAVE database have undermined the confidence of voters and election officials. As Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby wrote for Popular Information:

Shortly after Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency “optimized“ the SAVE database over two weeks, quickly adding a lot of additional information, including full social security numbers. DOGE also allowed state officials to search the database for hundreds of thousands of voters at once with bulk uploads.

Used in this manner, SAVE has produced an extraordinarily high error rate.

In Missouri, for example, Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins ran the state’s voter list through SAVE in November 2025 and distributed the results to county election officials. For St. Louis County, SAVE flagged 691 registered voters as noncitizens. But the county immediately determined that 35 percent of the names were naturalized citizens. After the list was cross-referenced with passport data in January, which has more accurate citizenship information, the list was cut to 133—meaning at least 81 percent of SAVE’s noncitizen results were incorrect. Even that list “may not be final“ and once a final list is established, anyone remaining on it will receive a letter and have 90 days to appeal.

Seventy county clerks in Missouri, Republicans and Democrats, sent a letter to the state’s legislative leaders warning that the SAVE database is repeatedly flagging “individuals we know to be US citizens—our neighbors, colleagues and even voters we have personally registered at naturalization ceremonies.”

Texas also uploaded its voter list to SAVE. In Denton County, SAVE identified 84 supposed noncitizens registered to vote. Twelve responded to a notice with proof they were citizens. Fourteen others correctly marked on their registration forms that they were not citizens but were mistakenly registered anyway. The rest did not respond to the notice and were removed from the rolls, even though county election officials believe most of that group are eligible voters.

“What is bugging me is I think our voter rolls may be more accurate than this database,” Denton County elections administrator Frank Phillips told ProPublica. “My gut feeling is more of these are citizens than not.”

As the Brennan Center for Justice concluded, “the SAVE program’s underlying flaws, its hasty overhaul, and the government’s failure to provide proper guidance to state and local officials on responsible use of the expanded tool all mean that the SAVE program has produced numerous errors that falsely identify voters as noncitizens.”

Justice Jackson highlighted these faults in her dissent. “Even more concerning is the majority’s omission of any consideration of the harms that might occur if the modified SAVE system is allowed to continue operating,” she wrote. “The District Court highlighted such harms, noting the risk that States might cancel the voter registrations of at least some recently naturalized citizens or force such persons to provide proof of citizenship before voting. That court also found that those harms have already materialized in Texas, where one of Respondents’ members ‘had her voter registration revoked without her knowledge,’ and two more ‘had to provide proof of citizenship to maintain registered voter status.’ But the per curiam’s purported balancing fails to address, much less account for, the demonstrated harms of issuing a stay.”

The Trump administration’s expansion of the SAVE database is just one facet of its voter fraud crusade. DHS has enlisted hundreds of agents to search for noncitizen voting (which studies show is incredibly rare) as part of its “Unlawful Voter Initiative” ahead of the midterms, an effort that seems designed to validate Trump’s lies. A recent disclosure by a DHS whistleblower alleges that the department has broken numerous state laws as part of this initiative, with immigration agents falsely posing as voters to access state voter databases and wrongly sweeping up US citizens in its overzealous investigations.

Trump’s DHS has already made a number of debunked claims about alleged voter fraud. Following Trump’s primetime speech in July on election integrity, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed that 15,903 noncitizens were registered to vote in Nevada. A month later, DHS confirmed that number was actually “just 185 potential noncitizens,” according to the New York Times, and Nevada officials subsequently confirmed the number was actually…zero.

The impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday could be muted for the 2026 elections, however, because the National Voter Registration Act precludes states from removing voters ninety days before an election. It is “too late for States to use SAVE for systematic voter-list maintenance in advance of the 2026 elections,” Jackson wrote. “If there is a bright side to today’s opinion…it is that the per curiam will likely have minimal short-term impact, as States will at most conduct individualized voter-roll maintenance using the modified SAVE system ahead of the November elections.”

Still, thanks to the Supreme Court, the administration can now use the SAVE database to produce more outrageous claims of voter fraud, which will be used by the president to undermine and challenge the results of the midterms, no matter how false those assertions turn out to be.

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Tech Bros and the Trump Administration Are Building an AI Empire—In the Philippines

In a move that upended the international conversation about AI, earlier this month, a researcher at the AI company Anthropic named Jacob Coxon resigned and took to X to sound the alarm about what he saw as a dangerous trajectory. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote. “This is not a marketing stunt.” A few days later, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, published an essay on his personal website about what he sees as the urgent need to slow down the pace of AI development. “I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence,” he wrote. “Not just investing in risk prevention but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up.” That same week, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told ABC’s The View that he had asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk on his podcast, “‘OK, what are the odds that AI destroys humanity?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘10-20 percent.’ And I’m like, ‘holy crap.’”

As the chorus of warnings about AI from insiders has grown more urgent, the White House appears to have complete confidence in the technology—and not just with President Donald Trump’s insistence when speaking at the United Nations that there was no reason to rein it in. In fact, over the last few months, the Trump administration has poured resources into several tech ventures as part of an effort to win the AI arms race against China.

Undersecretary of State Jacob Helberg convenes The Pax Silica Summit, the first convening of a high level, private gathering focused on economic security and the establishment of a new grouping of partners tailored for the AI economy on December 12, 2025 in Washington, DC. Tasos Katopodis/Getty

The flagship project is an international initiative led by the United States called Pax Silica, whose goal is to control the pipeline for the raw materials, including crucial rare earth minerals required to power the artificial intelligence boom. Pax Silica, Latin for “silicon peace,” is the creation of Jacob Helberg, the US undersecretary of State for economic growth, energy, and the environment. Last December, the United States, Australia, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and the United Kingdom signed an initial nonbinding declaration. Others, including the European Union, joined in the following months, bringing the current number of signatories to 24.

The declaration affirms the participants’ commitment to “mobilizing the immense creative and financial power of private industry and entrepreneurship to make our citizens more prosperous, our nations stronger, and our supply chains more secure.” What the declaration doesn’t explicitly state is its true goal: To wrest control of the AI infrastructure away from US adversaries—primarily China, which currently operates about 80 percent of rare-earth refining and controls 70 percent of lithium-ion battery production—but also Russia and Iran. As Helberg put it in a December media briefing, “Our strategy is to create a competitive edge so steep, so insurmountable that no adversary or competitor can scale it. That’s why our goal is to make America the arsenal of AI in this century.” In March, the State Department announced it would create a $250 million fund to support the project.

“Our strategy is to create a competitive edge so steep, so insurmountable that no adversary or competitor can scale it. That’s why our goal is to make America the arsenal of AI in this century.”

The centerpiece is Pax Silica’s ambitious new project in the Philippines: a planned 4,000-acre economic security zone in New Clark City, about 70 miles north of Manila. The zone is strategically situated within the Luzon Economic Corridor, a development initiative launched in 2024 by the United States, Japan, and the Philippines to transform the island nation into an AI hub. The project will incorporate many industries, from semiconductor manufacturing to data-center tech to supply-chain logistics. Perhaps most important is its proximity to the Philippines’ vast reserves of nickel, cobalt, and copper—all crucial minerals for AI infrastructure. In July, US Ambassador to the Philippines Lee Lipton predicted the project would bring “endless jobs” to the country.

Crucially, companies that operate there will have massive tax advantages—the Philippines promises up to seven years tax free, followed by up to 20 years of steeply reduced taxes. In addition to the tax perks, companies can lock in 99-year land leases and fast-track regulatory approvals. As much as 90 percent of a company’s workforce is allowed to be remote—an attractive proposition for American companies whose employees may not want to relocate to the Philippines.

On a recent episode of a podcast hosted by venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded the data giant Palantir with Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel, Helberg laid out his vision for the State Department to act essentially as a business development agency for American venture capital and defense and AI hardware firms. “Our job at State is to remove the diplomatic, regulatory, and geopolitical friction so that American VC can flow into these strategic nodes,” he said. “Pax Silica is essentially building the global highway for American tech and VC to scale fast.”

The names of the companies that will fill those roles haven’t yet been released, but Helberg has strong connections to a powerful network of firms that could fit the bill. According to his federal financial disclosure form, he served as a senior adviser to the data giant Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp from 2023 to 2025, bringing in at least $840,000 in consulting fees over the 16-month window covered by the disclosure. But he’s also a savvy investor. His financial disclosure form also reveals that his estimated net worth is $112 million–$426 million. Clients of his public policy consulting firm include Thiel’s Founders Fund, the defense company Hadrian, and another venture capital enterprise, General Catalyst. In addition to his own relationships with powerful Silicon Valley companies, Helberg’s husband, Keith Rabois, is also well connected. The managing director of a $15 billion VC giant, Silicon Valley-based Khosla Ventures, Rabois also has carried-interest stakes in six separate Founders Fund entities. In November 2020, Helberg and Rabois joined the tech-exec exodus from California to income-tax-free, politically conservative Florida, decamping to a $29 million home in Miami.

For Duran, Pax Silica is “the Trump regime’s brand name for AI colonialism and imperialism.”

Gil Duran, a tech journalist who has written extensively about autonomous zones, sees the Trump administration’s endorsement of Pax Silica as a strong indication of its enthusiastic commitment to AI development—despite increasingly urgent calls from industry insiders who warn of potentially cataclysmic consequences of the breakneck pace at which the technology is moving. Trump’s damn-the-torpedoes approach to AI is particularly troubling considering the Trump family’s own massive stake in the AI industry. For Duran, Pax Silica is “the Trump regime’s brand name for AI colonialism and imperialism.”

Indigenous communities join a protest caravan condemning the US-led Pax Silica Initiative and the Luzon Economic Corridor, organized by Bagong Alyansang Makabayan in Angeles City, Pampanga, Philippines, on September 11, 2026. Charles Perez/NurPhoto/AP

Few people would be as perfectly positioned to be Pax Silica’s leader as Helberg—not only because of his extensive tech industry experience and his current position in Trump’s State Department, but also because of the political connections he made during his own conversion from staunch Democrat to Trump administration darling. Helberg, who is 36, has worked in the intersection between Silicon Valley and geopolitics for his entire career, founding a geopolitical-risk forecasting startup, leading Google’s internal global product policy team, and serving on the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission under President Biden. In 2021, he published a book, The Wires of War, about the competition between Western democracies and authoritarian governments to control the global tech sector, and the overarching importance of collaboration between industry and government; two years later, he founded the Hill and Valley Forum, an annual gathering of legislators and AI and defense company executives dedicated to countering Chinese influence on the sector.

In early 2024, Helberg was advocating for the United States to ban Chinese-owned TikTok; in a piece for the Intercept, reporter Sam Biddle noted that because of his business dealings with the AI industry, Helberg, who was serving on US–China Economic and Security Review Commission at the time, could profit handsomely from a cold war with China. In December that year, Trump nominated Helberg for his role at the State Department; the Senate confirmed him in October 2025.

Helberg’s personal political trajectory appears to reflect the broader partisan transformation of Silicon Valley over the last decade. As the Washington Post reported, he fundraised for Pete Buttigieg in 2019; by 2024 he was donating $1 million to the Trump campaign. Helberg reflected on his political evolution in a 2024 interview with Jewish News Syndicate. “The Democratic Party forgot its founding principles and allowed themselves to become governed by a woke, progressive ideology that substitutes merit with amorphous and often arbitrary concepts of identity and fairness,” he said. “Perhaps more pernicious, modern-day progressivism paints a worldview that divides the world into oppressors and oppressees.” He also criticized Democrats’ lack of support for Israel. “American Jews who still support Biden should have their heads examined,” he said. “If you support Israel, there’s only one choice in this election.”

Jacob Helberg, Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and Environment, speaking at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA/AP

Rabois, who resigned from the financial technology company Square in 2013 after being accused of sexual harassment, is also outspoken about his political views on social media. In 2023, in the wake of X owner Elon Musk’s endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, Rabois tweeted, “Without X, we would almost surely be confronting another Holocaust now. So thank you @elonmusk.” On January 24, 2026, the day that ICE agents killed Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti, Rabois posted, “No law enforcement has shot an innocent person. Illegals are committing violent crimes every day.” He added, “He unequivocally attempted to draw his weapon. Fuck you.”

Helberg’s current background image on his X profile is a photo of him with President Trump; in a tweet last year, Helberg called Vice President JD Vance “a friend and a role model for a generation of patriots.” When the Philippines joined Pax Silica in April, Helberg gave full credit to the Trump administration. “None of this would be possible without the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Rubio, who have made it a priority to secure America’s supply chains and to strengthen our alliances in the Indo-Pacific,” he said in a speech to Filipino and American lawmakers and diplomats in Washington, DC. “They understood that economic security is national security—and they gave us the mandate to move.”

Helberg’s political transformation occurred against the backdrop of a powerful movement in Silicon Valley libertarian circles—one that would prove influential in the formation of Pax Silica. The ideological groundwork was laid by thinkers who envisioned a new form of governance untethered from traditional nation-state constraints. In November 2021, Balaji Srinivasan, a close friend of Thiel and a former colleague of venture capital titan Marc Andreessen, laid out these ideas in an influential essay, “The Network State.” At the heart of Srinivasan’s idea are autonomous zones that are not governed by the laws of the nations in which they’re physically located but function more like colonies of an expansive digital community.

Helberg’s vision of Pax Silica’s autonomous zone seems to be a natural outgrowth of those ideas—and he has called on members of the Network State community to champion Pax Silica. In July, the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Intelligence held a hearing about Pax Silica so that lawmakers could learn about the initiative and discuss oversight. One of the presenters was Erick Brimen, the CEO of an autonomous economic zone called Próspera on the tropical island of Roatán, Honduras, described how he created a thriving economic hub that attracted companies from all over the world. “I can report to the Subcommittee that this is not a theory waiting to be tested,” he said. “Hondurans and Americans built it together. It works.” Próspera is financed by Pronomos Capital, an investment fund also supported by Peter Thiel.

If Próspera is a model that Pax Silica’s architects want to emulate and expand upon, it’s worth taking a closer look at what’s actually going on there. In Próspera, companies can either select regulations from a menu of the legal frameworks from 36 countries or propose their own. Because of this decentralized approach to regulation, biotech companies in particular have flocked to Próspera. Minicircle, a gene therapy startup, conducts human trials targeting muscle building and longevity—research that would require FDA approval in the United States. Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur known for his extreme approach to anti-aging treatments (his motto: “don’t die”), received “reversible gene therapy only available under Próspera’s regulatory framework.” The zone advertises “15x faster commercialization of drugs” and “70 percent accelerated research timelines.”

A proposed area where Pax Silica hub might be built in Capas, Tarlac province. Jam Sta Rosa/AFP/Getty

Adjacent to the zone sits Crawfish Rock, an indigenous village of the Garífuna people whose residents told the Guardian in 2022 that Próspera’s creators had originally pitched it as a “real estate and community development project.” Only later did the Garífuna discover the plans to create an autonomous city where the amount of acreage landowners hold determine what they’re allowed to vote on. In 2022, the villagers became embroiled in disputes with Próspera over drinking water; that same year, Honduran President Xiomara Castro made moves to end the project. Próspera’s backers sued the country for $11 billion, roughly one-third of the country’s GDP.

In 2024, the Honduran Supreme Court declared autonomous zones unconstitutional—yet Próspera has continued operating in a legal gray area. Honduras’ new administration, led by Nasry “Tito” Asfura, appears to be more supportive of Próspera, but he hasn’t yet challenged the Supreme Court’s decision. Próspera recently named its own civil prosecutor to enforce its rules—a move that activists called a “modern coup.” Proceedings around Próspera’s lawsuit remain ongoing.

Critics of Pax Silica worry that the project will replicate the worst tendencies of the colonialism the Philippines has endured with a Próspera twist: unbridled industrial growth with few environmental and labor protections. The Philippine government already appears to be worried about outsized American influence—in May, it denied a US request for diplomatic immunity in the special economic zone.

“The Philippines is being exploited here as it always has been. There will be some beneficiaries on the ground, but the very arrangement of deregulated special economic zones is a way of exploiting the locals to the benefit of foreign capital.”

Van Jackson, a political scientist at New Zealand’s Victoria University who has written extensively on geopolitics and technology, offered a broader critique of the initiative’s architecture. “The Philippines is being exploited here as it always has been,” he wrote in an email to Mother Jones. “There will be some beneficiaries on the ground, but the very arrangement of deregulated special economic zones is a way of exploiting the locals to the benefit of foreign capital.”

Pax Silica’s high-profile cheerleaders appear unfazed by the challenges that Próspera has faced. Last December, two days after the founding of the initiative, White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks praised Pax Silica. “Congratulations to @UnderSecE Jacob Helberg on the formation of Pax Silica,” he tweeted. “One of the key ways to win a technology race is to create the largest ecosystem. Pax Silica helps us do that.” In July, Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted that Pax Silica “shows why forward-looking diplomatic strategy matters.” Last month, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised both Helberg and Pax Silica in a roundtable convened by President Trump on the topic of mining. “Jacob has been phenomenal,” he said. “He came up with something called Pax Silica, and it’s an initiative that leads our efforts to partner with the private sector and invest in mining and refining and in processing as well as the end-use applications of that.”

In an email to Mother Jones, a State Department spokesperson noted that Helberg signed an extensive ethics agreement prior to his confirmation. ”The Under Secretary works with his team, including ethics officials at State, to ensure that his work remains free from any conflicts,” the spokesperson wrote.

Duran, the tech journalist, sees in the Trump administration’s endorsement of Pax Silica a tacit acknowledgement of a new cold war, one in which “the rare earths and minerals are the new uranium,” he says. “They call it ‘peace,’ but it’s really preparation for massive conflict in the 21st century.” The Trump administration appears determined to enter this war—even as public sentiment “is sharply turning against both this regime and against AI and the data centers,” Duran says.

On social media, Helberg battles with the naysayers. In a May tweet, an entrepreneur named Arnaud Bertrand called Pax Silica “basically vendor lock-in: you hand over your critical minerals, align your export controls with Washington’s, regulate AI the way America wants, and in return you get to be a US ‘trusted partner,’ whatever that means these days.”

Helberg clapped back, “The US is home to the world’s largest technology companies—a fact I’m sure deeply irritates you. The idea that being part of their supply chain is ‘subservience,’” he added, “is an ignorant loser mentality.”

In the end, public sentiment may not matter—because through projects like Pax Silica, it’s not government but private companies that will make the rules around the pace at which the United States pursues AI dominance. The Trump administration is “full speed ahead,” says Duran, “regardless of the political reality on the ground.”

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New Yorkers Lined the Streets Against Benjamin Netanyahu’s Visit

In the early months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the streets of New York were filled with protests. Hundreds of people were arrested, bridges and tunnels were blocked; the Statue of Liberty was at one point taken over. In the ensuing years, with Trump’s repression of the movement for Palestine—deporting, jailing, and otherwise silencing many of its leaders—things have gotten quieter.

But on September 24, when Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the United Nations General Assembly, it didn’t look that way. Hundreds of New Yorkers formed a human chain across a road leading to the United Nations complex as Netanyahu was about to begin his speech. Then, hours later, thousands of people filed into the surrounding streets carrying Palestinian flags for a massive march of well over a thousand people. “We’re getting 2024 numbers!” one participant said.

Though New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not join the protests himself, he told CNN on Monday that he’s not particularly enthused about Netanyahu’s presence in his city either.

“When it comes to Benjamin Netanyahu, I have described him as I believe him to be: a war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people,” Mamdani said. “If the International Criminal Court deems someone worthy of an arrest because of a violation of those laws, then who are we to say that anyone should be above that? And I think very clearly that everyone should be held accountable to it.”

Among the protesters were local elected officials like city councilor Chi Ossé and several high-profile progressive congressional candidates like Darializa Chevalier, who won a hotly contested election for New York’s 13th congressional district; Chris Rabb, the nominee for a House district that includes much of Philadelphia; Melat Kiros, who won a major upset in the race for a Democratic-leaning district in Colorado; and Adam Hamawy, the Democratic candidate to succeed retiring New Jersey Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman. Celebrities like Hannah Einbinder and Susan Sarandon joined the protest—both, alongside Chevalier, were arrested.

“There’s a group of folks coming into Congress who are not being tethered to corporate money and to institutionalists,” said Rabb, a state legislator from Philadelphia who won the backing of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democratic Party notables in his primary win for a solidly Democratic seat earlier this year.

“We’re going to use all of our authority as members of Congress to speak up against injustice and use everything in our toolbox to fight these atrocities and the people who allowed them to happen,” Rabb added as he sat in the middle of the street, linking arms with Hamawy.

“There’s no such thing as progressive if it doesn’t include Palestinian freedom,” Stefanie Fox of Jewish Voice for Peace said.

Though local and state-level progressive elected officials don’t have the power to enforce the International Criminal Court’s war crimes warrant against Netanyahu, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement who identified herself as Nas Issa proposed other moves, including “divesting city pension funds from Israel bonds, cracking down on illegal sales of stolen Palestinian land happening in the city, investigating the charitable status of charities that profit from sending military supplies to settlements,” and ensuring cities and states that work with ICE cease to do so.

Two weeks ago, President Trump approved yet another $2.8 billion sale of weapons to Israel. The killing in Gaza has not stopped. But on both sides of the wall of the United Nations building, few people seemed to want to hear Benjamin Netanyahu attempt to justify it.

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Netanyahu’s UN Speech Was a Full-On Defense of Israeli Settlements

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on the defensive when he took the stage at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday. His country is facing growing condemnation from all sides: In September, 11 European countries and Canada announced a joint plan to sanction Israel’s West Bank settlements, and in 62 percent of Americans report a negative opinion of his government in a recent Pew poll; Netanyahu himself faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for war crimes including genocide. Protesters blocked streets outside hours before Netanyahu took the podium, and within the UN chamber, half of Netanyahu’s audience walked out before his speech even began.

Room empties out at the UN as Netanyahu begins his speech. pic.twitter.com/plGg9wDRQ7

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 24, 2026

Netanyahu nonetheless appeared determined to declare victory, as he faces a contested reelection back home, thanking his “great American friends” for their help in “the battle against the barbarians.”

Did he mean the bombardment of Gaza, in which the US has spent millions of dollars funding the killing of an estimated one-tenth of the enclave’s entire population? Israel’s expansion into Lebanon? The US-Israel war on Iran? Or the Israeli settlements that move ever-further into the West Bank? “We delivered crippling blows to all of them,” Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu: In this battle against the barbarians, we've had no greater partner than President Trump. I thank him pic.twitter.com/n3iZ7s9PEt

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 24, 2026

Netanyahu appeared particularly eager to defend settlers in the West Bank, whose state-supported violence against Palestinians and international observers is extremely well-documented by reporters, activists, and international human rights groups. Those settlers, he said, are nothing more than “a handful of young juvenile delinquents, about 150 in number, who throw stones, who chop down olive trees.”

“Only maybe two, three” people have been killed by settlers, he said. That is false: a September UN report said that 81 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli settlers or soldiers in the West Bank this year alone, and according to the BBC, at least 23 of those deaths “have occurred in the context of settler attacks.” 18 were children.

Netanyahu didn’t mention those killings as he asserted that there have been “thousands of terrorist attacks against the peaceful settlers, honorable people, law-abiding people.”

Laith Shalabi, a Palestinian New Yorker with family in the West Bank, told Mother Jones that he has seen an uptick in violence against his family and community this year. Traveling to visit his grandmother in his family’s West Bank village, Shalabi said he saw more Israeli flags along the route to his family’s village than ever before—and more soldiers. “Since the genocide, a lot of Israeli soldiers have kind of been more on edge with Palestinians,” Shalabi said, “on the attitude of shoot first, ask questions later.”

When he arrived at the village, Shalabi learned that settlers had set up camp nearby. Locals told him about settlers who, at the slightest provocation, beat Palestinians with the butts of their guns or even shot at them—often within view of Israeli soldiers, who at best don’t intervene, at worst participate in the violence. People in the US “should know what these settlements do,” Shalabi said. “It’s important for me that Americans understand where their tax dollars are going and what they’re supporting and funding.”

After another thirty minutes on the theme that allegations of genocide in Gaza constitute “the greatest lie of the century,” and shots at Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife, as well as podcaster Hasan Piker, Netanyahu left the stage. Protests continued outside.

Hasan Piker mentioned during Netanyahu’s speech at the UN pic.twitter.com/PZOTuWtfxV

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 24, 2026

Civil rights lawyer Brad Parker of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in an interview before Netanyahu’s speech, characterized the Israeli prime minister’s status as “absolute impunity.” Federal authorities could follow the lead of the UK and France, and sanction the settlers—which, despite even Trump’s Israel ambassador Mike Huckabee characterizing settler conduct as terrorism, the White House and Congress appear resolutely opposed to doing.

“Most indicted war criminals do not leave their countries, but Netanyahu just breezes in and out,” Parker said. “Putin, for example, his travel is very selective because of that. But it’s sort of an exception for Israel right now.”

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Trump’s FDA Pick Refuses to Say IUDs Don’t Cause Abortions

This article has been republished from Autonomy News, a worker-owned publication covering reproductive rights and justice. Follow Autonomy News on Instagram, Bluesky, TikTok, Threads, and LinkedIn.

Dr. Heidi Overton, Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next head of the FDA, opened a Wednesday confirmation hearing before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee by thanking her “lord and savior, Jesus Christ.” Throughout the hearing, Overton faced many questions about vaccine safety, flavored vapes, and foodborne illness. Perhaps unsurprisingly given her past anti-abortion statements, many of Overton’s most alarming answers—and non-answers—had to do with abortion and birth control.

“I wanted to know if you agree that an IUD is an abortifacient,” asked Washington Democrat Patty Murray, referencing the Trump administration’s false claims that some forms of birth control, including intrauterine devices, can cause abortion. Overton not only refused to answer, but her response even suggested that the FDA could change its stance. “If I’m confirmed as FDA commissioner, I’ll be fully briefed on all their prior decisions and make determinations according to the standards of safety and efficacy,” she said.

Overton’s birth control comments are notable as Trump’s Department of Justice has refused to say in an active court case that certain forms of birth control don’t cause abortions, and because many anti-abortion groups oppose the use of IUDs and emergency contraception, claiming they are abortifacient.

If confirmed, Overton—who is currently serving as a White House domestic policy advisor—will face intense pressure to roll back access to abortion pills. Murray also asked the nominee about her 2023 claim that the abortion drug mifepristone is “dangerous to women,” which Overton made in a paper written for the far-right America First Policy Institute. Murray asked Overton whether she agreed with the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, “which means the agency deems it safe and effective.” Overton said only that “mifepristone was approved by the FDA as having met its safety and efficacy standard.” Murray pressed her again on whether or not she believes the drug is safe. “I know that it has met the safety and efficacy standard,” Overton said. The nominee repeatedly used the past tense when talking about mifepristone regulations meeting FDA standards.

Murray called Overton’s conclusion in the paper “alarming” because it conflicts with scientific evidence, which has repeatedly shown mifepristone to be safe and effective—including when prescribed via telehealth. Overton replied that she has always “been driven by data,” and that the paper was written “after a change was made at the FDA in how that medication was accessed.” She was referring to a 2021 regulation, formalized in 2023, that allowed mifepristone to be prescribed by telemedicine. Overton then referenced an ongoing FDA “review” of mifepristone’s safety, which she said is “very important.” Former FDA head Marty Makary reportedly slow-walked that review so it wouldn’t be complete until after the midterm elections.

“I hear you changing your answer now, saying you don’t think [mifepristone] is safe,” Murray said. Later in the hearing, another Democrat, New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan, called for Overton to recuse herself from the mifepristone review based on her past comments about the drug.

There are currently five active lawsuits challenging the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone: Three filed by abortion-hostile states that say the agency’s regulation of the drug is too lax, and two filed by abortion providers in which federal judges have ruled that the FDA maintains too many restrictions on the medication. The FDA has repeatedly cited its mifepristone safety review in these cases as a reason to pause the litigation.

“As mifepristone is under scrutiny at the state and federal levels, Dr. Overton leverages her status as a physician to deceive the public about medications we know are safe.”

Despite showing ignorance of some of the agency’s operations—including by failing to name a division of the FDA responsible for important food safety measures—Overton showed significant knowledge of the mifepristone litigation. In response to questions from Indiana Republican Jim Banks, who asked Overton to accelerate the review, she said that, if confirmed as commissioner, regulation of mifepristone “would immediately be on [her] desk” because the FDA is required to produce an update in early October in a case filed by Louisiana. She also cited litigation in Hawaii, one of the lawsuits that could roll back restrictions.

Banks also brought up the agency’s investigatory powers. “Is it in the public interest to investigate companies that dispense abortion drugs and mislead women about their risk?” he asked. In her answer, Overton mentioned a recent report by HELP committee Republicans that purported to identify “potential concerns” about mifepristone manufacturers. “If there are issues identified … I would be committed to making sure that every company is following the law regarding the requirements,” Overton answered.

In March, committee chair Bill Cassidy and four other Republicans sent a letter to the FDA calling on it to work with other federal agencies to crack down on abortion pills. It’s not yet clear when the 23-member Senate committee will hold a vote on whether to advance Overton—who is board-certified in public health and preventative medicine—to the full chamber, but Trump is reportedly pushing for her to be confirmed before the midterm elections.

Maine Republican Susan Collins—who’s in a tough reelection battle this fall and claims to be pro-choice—didn’t ask a single question about abortion access, though she said she discussed the issue with Overton during a private meeting. Meanwhile, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, also a Republican, expressed concern that requiring in-person appointments for mifepristone would hurt rural residents of her state and said she worried that “political pressure” was at play. Murkowski didn’t ask Overton to respond, but it was striking that she highlighted possible disruptions to care when Collins did not, given that Maine also has vast rural areas. Another senator facing voters in November, Ohio GOPer John Husted, skipped the hearing entirely.

Following the hearing, Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, a Texas OB/GYN and the board chair of Physicians for Reproductive Health, called Overton’s nomination “nothing short of insulting to a public institution entrusted with the health and safety of our nation.” Moayedi added: “As mifepristone is under scrutiny at the state and federal levels, Dr. Overton leverages her status as a physician to deceive the public about medications we know are safe.”

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Thousands Rally Against Trump’s Kennedy Center Takeover

President Trump’s mindset when it comes to the Kennedy Center is that of an authoritarian toddler: If he can’t have the toys he wants, he’ll try to break them and make sure no one else can have them, either.

Thousands of furious DC-area residents and Kennedy Center patrons gathered in front of the arts center last week in protest of the president’s threats to tear the building down if he’s not allowed to inscribe his own name on its exterior.

Thousands of people gathered outside the Kennedy Center last week to protest Trump’s takeover.Video by Sonel Cutler

“This is a monument that was not falling down or bankrupt before he put his hands on it,” Robert White, an at-large member of the Council of the District of Columbia, said at the protest.

The Kennedy Center was suddenly shuttered last week, right after a judge ruled for the second time that the president’s name could not go on the building. The ruling prompted Trump to threaten to withhold the $270 million Congress has appropriated to renovate the popular arts center.

The president’s vanity projects have left monuments and parks across the city fenced off or closed. As my colleague Dan Friedman has reported:

• After spending $17.4 million to repair two fountains in Lafayette Park, the park itself is inaccessible because it’s surrounded by 13-foot steel fences.
• The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool remains fenced off because of algae blooms and peeling paint that occurred after the administration gave out a $15 million no-bid contract to renovate it for the country’s 250th anniversary.
• The White House suspended public tours due to the construction of Trump’s $900 million ballroom.
• The Ellipse, a park along the National Mall, has been fenced off since June, when Trump hosted a UFC Fight that damaged the park’s grass.

“The Trump administration should certainly have recognition,” the president said last week. “If we don’t do that…It’ll end up being ripped down.”

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How a Russian Attack on the Midterms Deepfaked Mother Jones

A few days ago, an X user called роман—which is Russian for the name “Roman”—posted a purported Mother Jones video that reported that the Democratic National Committee paid a whopping $259 million to Mark Thompson, the head of CNN, so the cable news network would promote “gender transition among children.” The video—falsely branded with a Mother Jones logo—noted that CNN had aired “8,970 reports, programs, and shows that in one way or another promote gender transition among minors” and that the basis for this story were personal emails from Thompson pilfered by Anonymous, the hacker collective. The video featured Clara Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones, hailing this “great gift from Anonymous, which exposes the moral decay of the Democrats and the Democratic media that collaborate with them.” The video ended with the card that appears at the end of most Mother Jones videos: “Read more at MotherJones.com.”

Within a day, the video was viewed 155,000 times, according to X. Posted on another X account attributed to a user named James Deans Hick, it drew another 50,000 views.

The video was a fake—part of a Russian attack on the 2026 midterms that appears designed to help Donald Trump and the GOP. The “роман” account bore the tell-tale signs of a bot; it was set up in 2018, had zero followers, and had published no previous posts. And the amount of impressions recorded, according to disinformation researchers, were likely elevated and exaggerated the reach of these posts among authentic users.

A screenshot from the Russian deepfake video purporting to be from Mother Jones.

As MS NOW and The New York Times have each reported, in the past two weeks, a Russian disinformation network disinformation analysts have dubbed Storm-1679 or Matryoshka (the Russian word for those iconic nesting dolls) has begun to inject false election-related material into US social media.

Most notably, its phony posts include purported videos of Hollywood celebrities disparaging Democrats and urging votes for Republican candidates. In one, actor Sarah Jessica Parker appears to say, “When I hear about Democrats, I immediately think of corrupt Nazi whores. If you love America, never vote for Democrats.” The video was branded with a CNN logo and contained the hashtag #AllDemocratsAreCriminals. Other deepfakes in this campaign have used doctored footage of Christopher Lloyd, Ed Begley Jr., and Julia Roberts.

This latest Matryoshka operation was first identified by @antibot4navalny, a small group of anonymous activists who track Russian influence operations. This outfit has revealed that Matryoshka has been disseminating on social media fake CNN reports with false allegations about Democratic senatorial candidates. One targeting James Talarico of Texas declares he “despises Hasidic Jews because their faith does not allow children to change their gender.”

The @antibot4navalny trackers have spotted dozens of false reports spewed out by Matryoshka that are created to look as if they come from The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Politico, PBS, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, MS NOW, and other major American media outlets. Many stick to the celebrity-says-Democrats-are-horrible theme. Others spread false reports about corruption at US media outlets, and some pretend to be news reports showing that stories about Russian disinformation are phony.

This is not Matryoshka’s first rodeo. In my new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, I covered the network’s role in the massive Russian disinformation operation that targeted the 2024 presidential campaign to tarnish Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and boost Trump. I wrote:

The Matryoshka operation produced numerous social media posts and videos falsely branded as reports from major news outlets (such as Fox News, BBC, and CNN), government agencies, and research outfits. It spewed a barrage of disinformation: Harris had an abortion when she was seventeen (Fox News). She was exhibiting early-­onset Alzheimer’s (USA Today). Her grandfather was a communist (BBC). Her family was connected to Pfizer and Big Pharma (Bellingcat). It also disseminated a report supposedly from USA Today claiming Ukrainian refugees were smuggling fentanyl into the United States, and it generated material to stoke fears of civil war in the United States, postelection violence, and a full-­scale conflict between the United States and Russia that could result in nuclear catastrophe.

In the first three months of 2025, Matryoshka tried to undercut Western support for Ukraine by putting out false news reports depicting Kyiv as corrupt and belligerent and claiming Europe was being dragged into World War III. These messages, according to disinformation researchers, did not gain much traction.

But during one of Elon Musk’s tirades against the US Agency for International Development, which he was then trying to abolish, he shared with his 216 million followers on X a clip from E! News reporting that the agency had paid millions to celebrities to travel to Ukraine. The roster included Angelina Jolie ($20 million), Orlando Bloom ($8 million), Sean Penn ($5 million), and Ben Stiller ($4 million). Donald Trump Jr. reposted the video as well; it quickly drew more than 11 million views. That video was a Matryoshka fake.

After Mother Jones was alerted by @antibot4navalny, a lawyer for Mother Jones contacted X to register a complaint about the phonyvideo with the implausible claim the DNC had paid more than one-quarter of a billion dollars to CNN’s chief. “Thanks for bringing this to our attention,” X responded. “We’ve removed the reported post(s) for a violation of X Rules and specifically our trademark policy.”

As of now, Matryoshka’s current operation does not seem to have achieved great reach on X, Bluesky, or other social media platforms. But in 2024, the Russian disinformation campaign placed false anti-Democrats messages in the feeds of millions of Americans. One bogus allegation—Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, had inappropriately touched an exchange student when he was a high school teacher—did go viral and was amplified by Jack Posobiec, the promoter of Pizzagate and a MAGA provocateur who had been working with the Republican Party, and Candace Owens, a popular right-wing influencer.

Matryoshka’s new operation aimed at the midterms may not yet have produced viral content, but it signals that Putin is at it again. He has mounted disinformation and influence operations in every national US election since 2016 (as my book chronicles)—to sow discord and to help Trump. This time, Russian disinformation warfare is occurring with the United States less able to defend against this threat. The Trump administration has shuttered the units at the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the State Department that once tracked Russian disinformation (and disinformation from other foreign adversaries) and sought to counter it.

With Trump leaving the door wide open (purposefully?), Matryoshka and other Russian disinformation ops will have a clear shot at influencing the midterm elections—to help Republican candidates and, perhaps more important, exacerbate any chaos or conflict that might arise. This could be a far bigger and more consequential operation than a fake Robert De Niro, Charlize Theron, or Cher post.

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ChatGPT Helped Tumbler Ridge Shooter Focus on Guns, Tactics, and Terror

Editor’s note: This story discusses suicide and extreme violence. Read part 1, part 2, and part 3 of our investigation into AI chatbots and violence.

In June 2025, Jesse Van Rootselaar received an email notification from OpenAI. Van Rootselaar had been using ChatGPT to discuss committing potential acts of violence—including a mass shooting at a shopping mall—and now OpenAI had banned that account. But the troubled teen living in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, was not deterred and soon logged back on with a second account.

What happened next was astonishing: Van Rootselaar told ChatGPT about the account ban, noting she had specified “a famous real-world mall as the target” and herself as the perpetrator, but also claiming the scenario hadn’t been real. In response, ChatGPT explained why such violent content would be flagged—and then offered tips on how to evade its own safeguards. It advised Van Rootselaar to always frame her content as fictional or hypothetical in order to “never get flagged again” by OpenAI’s moderation systems.

“Don’t use real-world locations,” ChatGPT said, later adding: “You can still be twisted. Just be clever about it.”

Over the next eight months, Van Rootselaar, who identified as transgender and used she/her pronouns, continued to use this second ChatGPT account to focus on violence. She discussed building and using firearms and homemade explosives, fantasized about becoming a notorious mass killer, and asked about the timing of previous real-world school shootings just before committing her attack, according to three separate sources with knowledge of the matter and material I reviewed from Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT history.

Van Rootselaar carried out a suicidal mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School this past February, killing a total of eight people and injuring dozens of others. In the aftermath, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had banned her first ChatGPT account for discussing “scenarios involving gun violence” but had decided not to alert authorities, despite the urging of some employees on OpenAI’s safety team. In a subsequent open letter to Canadian government leaders, OpenAI confirmed the ban and disclosed the existence of her second account, but gave no information about what the second account contained.

The shooter’s ChatGPT accounts, detailed here publicly for the first time, are far more disturbing than previously known.

Since then, Tumbler Ridge victims and their families have filed more than three dozen lawsuits against OpenAI in federal court in California, alleging company leaders knew that ChatGPT was dangerous and that Van Rootselaar “was planning a mass attack.” Plaintiffs claim ChatGPT “deepened the Shooter’s violent fixation and pushed them toward the attack.” OpenAI denies the allegations. The mass shooting remains under investigation by multiple Canadian authorities, and until now, no further information about Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT use has been made public.

The violent contents of Van Rootselaar’s two ChatGPT accounts, detailed here publicly for the first time, are far more extensive and disturbing than previously known. Van Rootselaar, who was 18 at the time of the attack, also used OpenAI’s chatbot to upload bloody images of extreme violence and photos of harm to herself. She pushed ChatGPT to create graphic fictional narratives of mass killings. One featured an 18-year-old perpetrator who livestreamed a mass shooting that went viral and, in ChatGPT’s telling, made her an online “legend.” (Infamy is often a key goal of mass shooters.) Another featured a perpetrator named “Jess” who shot police and stalked and terrorized her victims as she executed them.

OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment and a detailed set of questions submitted to the company for this story.

“In a hallway, indoors, or a crowded classroom, the 870 is brutal,” ChatGPT said about the shotgun. “Close quarters is its playground.”

In some instances, ChatGPT initially refused to engage with Van Rootselaar about violence, but she was able to overcome those refusals by repeating or modifying her prompts. In an August 2025 conversation, Van Rootselaar asked ChatGPT to produce a scenario about her attacking a college campus with a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun and causing maximum carnage. ChatGPT replied that it was “not able to help with that request,” but Van Rootselaar tried again and added “hypothetically” to her prompt. ChatGPT then produced the content, describing in vivid language the tactical qualities of the weapon and where it would be effective.

“In a hallway, indoors, or a crowded classroom, the 870 is brutal,” ChatGPT said. “Close quarters is its playground.”

ChatGPT also discussed reloading time and potential casualties: “Assuming each shell results in one hit, you might down 10 to 20 people max, depending on spacing, density, reaction times, and chaos.”

Van Rootselaar continued using ChatGPT until the day of the rampage, according to material I reviewed and sources with knowledge of the matter, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity about a sensitive ongoing investigation. On Feb. 10, 2026, Van Rootselaar asked ChatGPT when shootings occur “during school hours” and about the timing of high-profile shootings that have happened in the United States. ChatGPT’s responses cited published FBI research and infamous massacres, including Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Uvalde. Those exchanges were Van Rootselaar’s last with the chatbot. She fatally shot her mother and 11-year-old brother at home, then drove to the school and opened fire with a long gun and a modified rifle, according to Canadian authorities, who have not disclosed further details about the weapons used. The rampage ended after Van Rootselaar fired at police and fatally shot herself.

Six victims in the school were killed: 12-year-olds Abel Mwansa, Kylie Smith, Zoey Benoit, and Ticaria Lampert; 13-year-old Ezekiel Schofield; and educator Shannda Aviugana-Durand, 39. Dozens of others were injured and traumatized, including two children who were severely wounded.

Violence prevention experts expressed deep alarm about how the AI technology can fuel delusions.

The devastation in the remote town 400-plus miles northeast of Vancouver is part of a growing spate of cases in which people have used ChatGPT and other AI platforms to prepare for violence. The technology has fueled attacks in unprecedented ways, as I’ve documented in a multipart investigation that includes the first comprehensive analysis of how a mass shooter used ChatGPT. As I detailed with that examination of an April 2025 rampage at Florida State University, AI chatbots can supply tactical ideas and information to shooters far more efficiently than traditional internet searches.

Moreover, the psychological impact can be potent. Human-like engagement from chatbots appears to have accelerated violent thinking and planning among troubled users in multiple high-risk threat cases, leaders in the field of behavioral threat assessment told me. Several of those prevention experts expressed deep alarm about the phenomenon, including how the AI technology can fuel delusions. “We’re seeing it in real time in different ways,” Steve Crimando, a veteran threat-assessment expert, told me. “These effects are converging at a behavioral level that is making people much more vulnerable, in my sense, to violence.”

OpenAI also faces lawsuits from families of suicide victims and from FSU shooting victims, and is under criminal investigation by the state of Florida. The company denies any responsibility for suicide and violence by users. CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI spokespeople have expressed condolences over deadly tragedies involving ChatGPT and have said that OpenAI has “a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence.” The company also emphasizes the importance of protecting user privacy and says it works continually to improve safeguards, using guidance from mental health experts and “enhanced” protocols established after Tumbler Ridge.

Sarah Lampert, with her daughter Niveya, holding photos of her daughter Ticaria, 12, who was killed in the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press/AP

But the mounting evidence of ChatGPT’s role in deadly violence, including the technology’s odd and disturbing behavior, underscores doubts about its safety. When I tested ChatGPT to simulate planning a mass shooting—in April, two months after Tumbler Ridge—I was able to go around its sporadic refusals. It gave me an alarming range of help, even after I talked about emulating the Uvalde mass shooter’s choice of weapon, livestreaming with a body camera, using hollow-point bullets, and getting shot at by police.

Since this spring, OpenAI has also declined my multiple requests for an interview or to answer written questions about its safety systems and the use of its technology by people planning harm.

Silicon Valley refers euphemistically to unpredictable, potentially dangerous behavior by artificial intelligence as “misalignment.” And AI safety has now exploded into a major national debate, after recent hacking incidents by “rogue” AI stoked fears about potential disasters involving biological weapons or crippling cyberattacks. But as the devastating violence in Tumbler Ridge shows, the danger of AI fueling mass shooters is already here.

Heavily redacted documents released by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in August disclosed that surveillance cameras at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School recorded the attack. Concern about further traumatizing the community and potential copycat risk could keep that horrific footage locked away from public view. According to sources I spoke with, details from the shooting suggest that Van Rootselaar engaged in some tactics she had discussed with ChatGPT.

Shortly after the Wall Street Journal story in February, OpenAI sent executives to Ottawa to meet with Canadian government leaders and released an open letter stating: “Based on what we could see at that time the [first] account was banned in June 2025, we did not identify credible and imminent planning that met our threshold to refer the matter to law enforcement.” The letter also said that, despite having a detection system for identifying “repeat policy violators,” OpenAI discovered Van Rootselaar’s second ChatGPT account only “after the name of the Tumbler Ridge perpetrator was released publicly.”

But OpenAI has not explained why it apparently failed to discover the second account in summer 2025, when, according to the Journal, a group of company leaders convened to examine about 10 cases flagged for discussions of violence andschool shootings_._ (It remains unclear whether those included Van Rootselaar’s chats.) Nor has OpenAI explained why it failed to detect Van Rootselaar’s second account in the subsequent months leading up to the attack, as she used it to continue focusing on violence.

Van Rootselaar’s two ChatGPT accounts were registered with different names and email addresses but would likely have been identifiable in other ways as belonging to the same user, according to the sources I spoke with. Tech companies commonly use “fingerprinting” techniques to help thwart misuse, and OpenAI’s own publications say that it has robust capabilities to detect misuse and bar offenders who violate its rules. OpenAI did not answer my questions about whether Van Rootselaar’s second account was flagged by its automated review system or how it subsequently identified her second account after the mass shooting.

Video

Reporter Mark Follman simulated planning an attack using ChatGPT. The results were shocking:

Beyond the shooter’s ChatGPT use, a long trail of problems and warning signs preceded the carnage. Van Rootselaar had a history of suicidal ideation, involuntary hospitalization, and disturbing behavior, including drug abuse and prolific engagement online with violent and extremist content. She had dropped out of school several years before the attack, and in 2023, police had gone to her home after she started a fire while high on hallucinogenic mushrooms. Police at one point confiscated guns from the home, which were later returned. (Those were not the guns used in the attack, authorities said.)

In a court motion filed on Sept. 2 seeking to dismiss victim lawsuits, OpenAI argued it cannot be blamed for Van Rootselaar’s violence in light of “systemic failures by the law enforcement, mental-health care, and educational institutions in her community.” The company further suggested lax gun regulations in BC concerning mental health could be to blame. But according to experts, the fuller picture of Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT use may in fact suggest a different conclusion: If local authorities already concerned about her behavior and mental health had been alerted to the chats, the strong signs of suicidality and attack planning might have prompted intervention. Leaders in behavioral threat assessment with whom I reviewed content from the Tumbler Ridge and FSU shooters’ ChatGPT accounts affirmed that content indicated a high risk of violence. (Those sources declined to be publicly identified when discussing active investigations.)

The Tumbler Ridge shooter’s chat about the timing of school shootings echoed the final chats of the FSU mass shooter.

OpenAI itself has expressed regret over its failure to contact Canadian authorities. “I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June,” CEO Sam Altman wrote more than two months after the attack, in an April 2026 letter addressed to the Tumbler Ridge community. OpenAI has also said since the mass shooting that, based on enhancements it has made to its safety protocols, “we would refer the account banned in June 2025 to law enforcement if it were discovered today.”

Altman’s apology letter made no mention of Van Rootselaar’s second account used up to the day of the attack. Notably, her chat on Feb. 10 about the timing of school shootings echoed the final chats of the Florida State mass shooter back in April 2025. That perpetrator had asked ChatGPT when the FSU student union he targeted would be busiest. Van Rootselaar could not have known about ChatGPT’s role in the FSU attack, which was not public until a year after it happened—but OpenAI did.

“After learning of the [FSU] incident in late April 2025,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement this spring, after Florida authorities disclosed the technology’s role, “we identified a ChatGPT account believed to be associated with the suspect, proactively shared this information with law enforcement and cooperated with authorities.”

Four months after the FSU shooting, in August 2025—the same month ChatGPT engaged with Van Rootselaar about a hypothetical shotgun attack—OpenAI published an article acknowledging that ChatGPT’s safeguards “may degrade” in “long interactions” and that sometimes the safety system “underestimates the severity of what it’s seeing.” The company wrote that it was working to solve that kind of “breakdown.” Van Rootselaar’s violent chats continued over the next six months, until she opened fire.

In response to a second round of victim lawsuits filed this September, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, posted a lengthy statement on social media: “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about what happened at Tumbler Ridge, or the victims of this devastating tragedy and their families,” he wrote. “It’s a constant and sobering reminder of the important and incredibly difficult work that many people in my team do each and every day.” He then rebutted some of the lawsuit allegations about the roles of OpenAI leaders and described in broad terms the company’s internal structure and approach to preventing such harm.

The following day, British Columbia Premier David Eby denounced OpenAI for walking away from a mediation process over the lawsuits and the devastation in Tumbler Ridge “that OpenAI was involved in and materially contributed to.”

“It underlines why these companies cannot be trusted,” Eby said, according to Canadian media. “They can’t be trusted to regulate themselves; they can’t be trusted in what they say.”

On Sept. 21, BC Attorney General Niki Sharma announced the province’s own lawsuit against OpenAI, separate from Tumbler Ridge victims, which seeks to recover major financial costs from the tragedy and hold OpenAI accountable. The town of Tumbler Ridge has already torn down the school and, according to the lawsuit, hundreds of traumatized children and adults have been provided with mental health counseling.

Sharma said she is also calling for changes to Canadian criminal code: “There needs to be human and corporate accountability for the dangerous actions of AI.”

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones_, has sued OpenAI for_ copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or chat at 988lifeline.org.

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Meet the Republicans Voting Blue in Florida

Bobby Williams, a third-generation Floridian and founder of a disaster relief nonprofit, was one in the crowded field of Republican candidates in Florida this summer seeking to replace Gov. Ron DeSantis. A conservative from rural Polk County, Williams’ platform centered on preserving the state’s agricultural land and halting development, including data centers, as more people have moved here since the pandemic. His official slogan was, “FLORIDA IS FULL.”

Williams lost the Republican nomination to Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, but earlier this month, he decided to publicly support a gubernatorial candidate: Democrat David Jolly.

“My message hasn’t changed; it’s back to ‘We the People’ instead of ‘We the Lobbyists’ and ‘We the Big Corporations,’” Williams said earlier this month at a press conference. “It’s person over party…What person is going to best represent Floridians?” He continued, “We want someone who is going to fight for Floridians.”

Williams is not alone. A few other Republicans, including current and former officials, have publicly endorsed Jolly—a former GOPmember of Congress who left the party during Trump’s first term, became an independent, and registered as a Democrat last year before running for governor. On social media, a Facebook group called Republicans for Jolly, which now has dozens of members, has also formed. They’re unhappy with Donalds, citing his plans to support data center development as well as his inflated campaign funding from big corporations. Jolly, on the other hand, has vowed to enact a statewide moratorium on data centers and is not taking any corporate contributions. As one political analyst told me last month, his campaign has focused on embracing supporters from all party affiliations.

Beyond Florida, cross-party endorsements are also happening in Iowa, where Democratic gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand launched a “Rob-publicans” campaign with more than 100 Republicans who are voting for him. In Texas, US Senate candidate James Talarico has racked up more than 20 endorsements from former and current GOP officials. A former Republican Kansas governor has also endorsed Democratic Senate candidate Adam Hamilton in that state. Cross-party endorsements are not a new phenomenon, political experts told me**,** and it can go both ways. A moderate Democrat from Maine, for example, endorsed Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York. But GOP defectors appear to be more common this year, likely due to Trump’s growing disapproval among voters. “The Republicans are having a bad year. Right now, Trump is a big liability,” said Sean Freeder, director of the Public Opinion Research Lab at the University of North Florida. “He’s the reason they are having this bad year.”

“The Republicans are having a bad year. Right now, Trump is a big liability. He’s the reason they are having this bad year.”

Still, Jolly faces an uphill battle to break the 27-year streak of Republican control in the governor’s office. In terms of registered voters, registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by 1.5 million. Jolly would need to secure solid support from the state’s independent voter pool, on top of Democrat votes, to win. But the changing support coming from Republicans is an indication that there are some fractures within Florida’s GOP as discontent grows over rising gas prices, high grocery costs, the war in Iran, and growing voter disapproval of Trump’s excesses. A survey of Florida voters last week found the race is essentially tied, and other polls also appear to confirm that Jolly is gaining momentum.

Williams did not respond to my requests for an interview. But in a Facebook video filmed in his car while he sipped on an iced tea, he explained in further detail why he’s supporting Jolly. “We’re unaffordable today, our insurance rates are where they are at, developers are destroying Florida, our water is being polluted on a Republican watch, so if Donalds wins, he has full rein.” Jolly had even called him, while Donalds and Florida GOP chair Evan Power never reached out to him after the primary. While he is not officially endorsing Jolly, Williams says his message to his followers is a simple one: “What is best for Florida?” To him, the answer is a vote for Jolly. “Whether full staunch Republicans are going to hate me or not, it is what it is.” While some of his followers agreed with him, others were disappointed that he would back a Democrat. “You are insane,” one commenter wrote. “I soooooo regret my vote for you.”

Austin Gravley, a city council member for the small town of Frostproof, population 3,500, in Central Florida, faced similar backlash online when he decided to publicly support Jolly. A Frostproof native, Gravley has identified as a Republican since before he could vote, volunteering for the GOP when he was 16 years old. He registered as a Republican in 2010 and voted for former Florida governor and US Sen. Rick Scott, as well as Marco Rubio during his 2016 presidential run. He voted for Trump three times. “I’m as Republican as you can get,” he told me. “So a lot of people are rightfully confused.”

He says he is tired of the culture wars, pointing out a recent Florida law banning Sharia law. “Let’s get back to dealing with the kitchen table issues that are affecting Floridians’ everyday lives,” Gravley said.

As a local elected official, he’s seen the erosion of what is called “home rule” as new Florida laws limit local governments’ ability to make decisions in their own communities. He’s concerned about a new Republican-led amendment on the ballot this November that would drastically cut property taxes in Florida and gut local funding. “Every year, there’s new legislation passed restricting how we can do our jobs at the local level. What’s good for Frostproof may not be good for Miami.” And these laws continue to pass without much debate in Tallahassee, he added. “I see Democrats on the House floor advocating for home rule and making great floor speeches, and then the Republicans just move forward with their vote.”

“I feel like checks and balances would be healthy for our government right now, and I don’t believe David Jolly is a radical leftist.”

As with so many conversations about the 2026 midterms, data centers play a central role. He’s not against them, but says they should be developed slowly with the right regulations, which is in stark contrast to Donalds’ casual comments about building them rapidly within the state. “I feel like checks and balances would be healthy for our government right now, and I don’t believe David Jolly is a radical leftist,” he said. “I think he’s very much in the center.”

George Kruse, a commissioner in deep-red Manatee County, is another elected Republican now supporting Jolly. Kruse wrote about this decision on his Substack. “Every day, every meeting, residents of Manatee County express frustration with overdevelopment, a lack of infrastructure, and a lost local voice. As a local commissioner, I see firsthand the local control being stripped away, the growth management authority being preempted, and your local voices being silenced,” he wrote. “If you want things to be different in Tallahassee, you need to go out and vote for something different.”

“People need to start focusing on the person instead of the party,” Kruse told me. Kruse, co-chair of the Republicans for Jolly coalition, is also supporting Kelly Kirschner, a former Sarasota mayor running for congressional district 16 in southwest Florida as a Democrat. “You have to vote for the better person, and sometimes that person has a different letter after their name. Sometimes, that person has a D after their name.”

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Exclusive: Mamdani on Extreme Weather, DoorDash, And Why Trump Likes Him So Much

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Thursday directly linked the climate crisis to everyday issues facing New Yorkers, including commutes and affordability, while urging climate-concerned individuals to align with the fast-growing movement against data centers.

“The way that climate is treated in public discourse, it’s almost as if it’s a concern that some can afford to have, while others have to deal with more immediate ones,” Mamdani told a packed crowd at Climate Desk Live. But climate change, Mamdani continued, drives up the “price of life” for us all, with Black, Latino and working-class people disproportionately expected to bear those costs.

Meanwhile, the mayor added, corporations that are responsible for the most pollution face little to no real accountability.

As for dispelling the notion that the crisis is a “luxury concern,” Mamdani urged people to connect climate to more localized issues, like the nascent movement against data centers. “That, too, could be the coalition against the climate crisis.”

Mamdani’s sit-down with Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes came amid a packed week for New York and the mayor specifically. On Monday, Mamdani met with President Donald Trump, where he pitched the president on federal funding for a new affordable housing development. As many observed, Trump left looking decidedly happy with the mayor.

Garrison Hayes had to ask.Video by David Ritsher

When Hayes asked why the president seemed so enamored with him, Mamdani replied: “This is the city where the president comes from.”

“The conversations we have are not just those of a mayor and a president, but those of two New Yorkers—New Yorkers with many differences of opinion, but who love this city,” Mamdani said.

In his meeting with Trump, Mamdani said that he brought up the need for stability for Haitian New Yorkers, who recently had their TPS status ended. “As long as someone can help the city,” he said, “I’ll talk to them.”

On Thursday, Mamdani also discussed his recent victory against DoorDash. “Earlier this week, we announced that we were holding DoorDash to account for having not paid their workers 260,000 workers 131.5 million dollars,” Mamdani said. DoorDash released a “notes app apology,” and is forking over the money. That same take-no-prisoners corporate-accountability approach, Mamdani said, could be applied to the climate crisis.

“Corporations of this scale believe that they can get away with not paying or underpaying workers and never having to be called to account for it,” he said. When it comes to corporations causing climate harm, Mamdani said, “we’re still dealing with some of those decisions that were made decades ago.”

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Climate Visions Clash at UN Summit, as Trump Goes in Whole Hog for Fossil Fuels

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

Two divergent worldviews emerged from the first two national addresses on the opening day of the United Nations General Assembly’s 81st session in New York.

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, called for decarbonizing economies, protecting forests and supporting the energy transition through technology transfer. President Donald Trump followed with a rejection of global climate and artificial intelligence regulations, dismissing warnings about global warming while presenting fossil fuel abundance and technological supremacy as foundations of national power.

This year’s General Assembly session is taking place against a slew of global challenges supercharged by geopolitical rivalries and rising planetary warming. June was the second-warmest on record globally and the hottest Western Europe ever measured. A potentially record-breaking El Niño is expected to peak around December, raising fears of drought, crop failures and global food-price shocks.

Trump mocked those who warned about global warming as “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years.”

In the US, surging AI data center growth is triggering expensive fossil-fuel generation and grid upgrades, raising electricity bills. Meanwhile, the US-Iran conflict has spread through the region, with clashes between Houthi and Saudi forces further roiling global oil markets already constrained by disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz.

Lula framed climate policy, forest protection and technology regulation as necessary parts of a rule‑based, multilateral effort to reduce emissions and manage systemic risks. He said the planet is facing a shared, urgent climate emergency that demands decarbonization and environmental protection—not delay or denial. He called for nations to “resume the offensive and inflict a defeat on denialism,” and warned that “the glaciers in the Himalayas are melting” and “torrential rains and forest fires” are already here. The impacts, Lula said, “will hit the most vulnerable the hardest.”

He presented Brazil as proof that countries can “combine economic value with reduced emissions,” and pledged to “move forward by the roadmap for the decarbonization of the Brazilian economy.”

In his view, forests and ecosystems are climate assets worth protecting and technology, including AI, must be governed and restrained, calling it an “unprecedented technological revolution with great risks and opportunities.” Lula insisted it would be an “unforgivable historical mission not to address the challenge of regulating the big techs and artificial intelligence” and criticized “technical oligarchies without rules or transparency” that bypass the UN and scientific oversight.

Trump presented an almost opposite worldview by downplaying climate change, celebrating fossil fuel expansion, and attacking global climate regulation. He mocked those who warned about global warming as “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.”

Trump claimed his administration had stopped what he called an international “global carbon tax” on shipping, insisting “there is no global government, and while I’m president, there will be no global taxes.” Rather than talking about emissions or a just energy transition, he boasted that American energy is fueling the planet and claimed that the U.S. and Venezuela together hold “more than 60 percent of the oil in the world.” This alone, he said, will drive down energy costs.

On technology, he rejected any “globalist scheme to control” AI, rebranding it as “super-intelligence” and pledged his administration will “only encourage superintelligence.” On the whole, Trump’s roughly 35-minute speech treated carbon taxes, climate regulations and global tech governance as threats to sovereignty and growth, and presented fossil fuels and technological dominance as core tenets of national strength.

Environmental advocates, climate scientists and experts reacted sharply to those remarks and challenged Trump’s assertions on climate change and high energy costs.

“The American people are experiencing first-hand the harsh and deadly realities of climate change, from extreme heatwaves to catastrophic wildfires and flooding,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. In a statement, she said climate disasters are damaging and destroying homes and critical infrastructure, inflating insurance premiums and increasing costs for communities.

“We know [Trump] is a climate denialist. He has made it clear that he will continue drilling and buying fossil fuels. “

“The science is clear: fossil fuel-driven climate change is already causing significant harm and these harms will only grow if we fail to sharply curtail heat-trapping emissions and invest in resilience,” Cleetus said.

David Victor, a distinguished professor of innovation and public policy at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego said Trump’s climate denial and disengagement can frustrate meaningful progress on commitments made at the recent Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, where member nations negotiate how to cut emissions, adapt to climate impacts and fund those initiatives.

“America’s energy power has little to do with the Trump administration or its ‘energy dominance’ strategy. And all the harm that the prolonged war in Iran has done on the Persian Gulf infrastructure has, plausibly, been the largest single setback in the global energy system since the 1970s.” he wrote in emailed comments, adding that staking a claim on Venezuelan oil doesn’t greatly affect how the global oil markets operate.

Victor noted that Trump largely sidestepped climate change in his speech, giving more attention to artificial intelligence, noting that the administration’s hostility to regulating AI is perhaps the most consequential of his statements.

“We know [Trump] is a climate denialist. He has made it clear that he will continue drilling and buying fossil fuels. He has also acted on dismantling every science-based institution in the US. However, what we want to hear from other heads of state, especially from rich nations, is what they plan to do,” said a statement from Tasneem Essop, executive director of the Climate Action Network International.

She asked world leaders if they will step up to the challenge climate change poses or “hide behind Trump and shy away from their responsibilities to urgently transition away from fossil fuels.”

In a separate statement, the advocacy group Oil Change International said: “Donald Trump used his platform at the UN General Assembly to brag about the US’s fossil fueled imperialism. From Iran, to Venezuela, to Greenland, Trump’s actions follow a familiar path: use military force to dominate sovereign nations, let Big Oil cash in, and leave ordinary people to bear the costs through war, pollution, rising energy bills, and worsening climate disasters.”

The statement said that governments can either follow Trump into a future of conflict and economic volatility, or build a stable and prosperous future by investing in energy independence and political stability through clean, renewable energy. “On the road to COP31, governments must reject Trump’s attempt to build a fossil fuel empire and show that his agenda will not dictate our shared future,” it added.

This year’s gathering is the last for Secretary-General António Guterres, who will step down at the end of this year. Experts say his successor will inherit an even bigger challenge of keeping the global leadership invested in the common cause of rallying around efforts to fight climate change, resolve conflicts and empower fragile economies in Africa and the developing world more generally.

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