• World Court rules countries that don’t act on climate crisis may be liable for violating human rights law;
• UN Security Council debates Gaza crisis amid questions over role of UN, humanitarian law;
• Civil disobedience at Wells Fargo offices in SF, NYC protest bank dropping DEI, climate goals;
• California AG asks judge to put LA juvenile detention facilities into receivership over poor conditions, abuse of power;
• Florida AG investigating restaurant that held LGBTQ pride event;
• UN says food deprivation, shattered health system leading to catastrophic birth outcomes for pregnant women and newborns

The post World Court rules countries failing to act on climate may be violating human rights law; UN Security council debates Gaza war, humanitarian crisis – July 23, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

As the federal government begins to implement some $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts called for in President Trump’s budget bill passed by the Republican-led Congress, a new investigative documentary, Life After, examines the moral dilemmas and profit motives surrounding assisted dying that could increasingly confront members of the disabled community. Reid Davenport, who directed the film, notes the “film is not about suicide. It is about the phenomenon that leaves disabled people desperate to find their place in a world that perpetually rejects them.” People with disabilities “already experience huge health disparities,” adds Colleen Cassingham, who produced the film. “When you introduce a policy like assisted suicide, it takes a group of people who are already incredibly marginalized by our system and gives the institutions and the people with power a profit motive for denying those people care.” Life After is now screening in person at select theaters and virtually online.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

A new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature estimates that the North Atlantic Ocean alone contains 27 million metric tons of nanoplastic — plastic particles 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair. That figure is 10 times higher than previous estimates of plastic pollution of all sizes across all the world’s oceans, according to the study’s authors. 

The research represents one of the first attempts to quantify marine nanoplastic pollution; previous efforts were constrained by limitations in detection technology. The study suggests that the mass of nanoplastics in the North Atlantic is greater than that of their much larger counterparts, microplastics and macroplastics. Microplastics range in width between 0.001 millimeters and 5 millimeters, making them up to 5 million times bigger than nanoplastics. Macroplastics are even larger.

Helge Niemann, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, a professor of geochemistry at Utrecht University, and one of the study’s authors, said the findings are concerning for marine biology and human health. Nanoplastics are “not conducive, generally, for life,” he told Grist. He emphasized that the study’s findings are limited to the North Atlantic, but said it is “likely the case” that nanoplastics are widespread across other oceans as well.

Studies suggest that nanoplastics cause inflammation to living cells when ingested, though it’s unclear whether this is because of the particles themselves, the plastic chemicals they can release, or pathogens that they pick up while floating around in the environment. Due to their tiny size, nanoplastics can more easily traverse biological membranes than their larger counterparts. 

Tracey Woodruff, a professor of reproductive health and the environment at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the new research, said she expects that nanoplastics will be linked to many of the same health risks as microplastics. In animals, these include reproductive issues, intestinal problems, and colon and lung cancer. Microplastics also bioaccumulate, meaning they travel up the food chain as larger animals eat smaller ones. 

“Our hypothesis is that … nanoplastics could travel more widely in the body even than microplastics, and therefore could have more adverse health consequences,” Woodruff said. It’s also possible that future research will discover that nanoplastics are present in the human body at even higher concentrations than microplastics.

The study’s authors obtained their data during a research cruise in 2020. They collected water samples at 12 locations of varying depths across the North Atlantic Ocean. Five samples were taken from within the North Atlantic gyre, one of the world’s five circular ocean currents that has become famous for its “garbage patch,” an enormous collection of plastic trash and other waste.

The researchers looked at nanoplastic concentrations at three different depths at each location: a layer just 10 meters below the surface, a middle layer at 1,000 meters deep, and 30 meters above the seafloor. Back in the lab, they used a novel type of mass spectrometry — an analysis that can identify different kinds of plastic — to distinguish between three polymers. Polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, the type of plastic used in water bottles, was the most widespread at every depth, followed by polyvinyl chloride, used in water pipes, upholstery, children’s toys, and other products; and polystyrene, used in plastic foam. 

Overall, nanoplastic concentration was the highest closer to the surface at 18 milligrams per square meter and lowest near the seafloor at about 5.5 milligrams per square meter. The researchers suspect that this distribution is due to the deterioration of bigger pieces of plastic that are suspended near the surface, which may sink slowly unless transported downward by, for example, animals that have eaten plastic and then died.

Eighteen milligrams per square meter might not seem like much. But, it’s the equivalent of containing seven mosquitoes in a 3-foot by 3-foot box, assuming each mosquito weighs roughly 2.5 milligrams. Multiply that by the vast volume of an ocean, and you end up with a whole lot of plastic. 

“I would argue as a toxicologist that if you see something in micrograms per liter in the open ocean, that’s quite a high concentration,” said Martin Wagner, a biology professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who was not involved in the study.

Wagner cautioned that the study’s major extrapolation — that there are 27 million metric tons of nanoplastic in the North Atlantic, more than the weight of 26,000 Eiffel towers — relies on “very few samples.” Still, Wagner said it makes sense that there would be an exorbitant amount of nanoplastic given the high volume of larger plastic fragments that end up in the oceans each year. According to the United Nations, roughly 20 million tons of plastic enter aquatic ecosystems each year. This includes lakes, rivers, and streams, as well as oceans, but for much of that pollution, the ocean is the final destination.

“We’ve basically been dumping plastic in the ocean for decades,” Woodruff said. “It doesn’t go away, it just breaks down into smaller plastics, so it does make sense that you would find more nanoplastics than macro and microplastics.”

Notably, the type of analysis that the study’s authors used was unable to detect the world’s two most common plastic polymers: polyethylene and polypropylene, meaning their estimate for overall nanoplastics is likely conservative. Still, the study’s findings could provide more realistic data for researchers who are trying to model the real-world impacts and toxicity of nanoplastic pollution.

Niemann said more research is needed on nanoplastics, including on their prevalence globally. He recently won a grant to research what happens to nanoplastics once they’re in the ocean, including whether any types of bacteria can naturally break them down. Manually trying to clean them from the global oceans’ more than 330 million cubic miles of water is “not really a good idea,” he said.

Both Wagner and Woodruff said the research adds to the growing body of  evidence supporting limits on global plastic production — rather than allowing it to triple by 2050, as projected by the United Nations Environment Programme. World leaders are expected to continue debating plastic production limits during the next round of negotiations over the U. N.’s plastics treaty, scheduled to take place next month in Geneva, Switzerland. 

“This reinforces how important it is to cap [plastic production], leave fossil fuels in the ground, and look to alternatives,” Woodruff said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The oceans may contain much, much more plastic than previously thought on Jul 11, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

Decades of scientific research has proven that human-caused climate change is making some disasters more dangerous and more frequent. The burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal releases carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it traps heat, warms the planet, and alters the conditions in which extreme weather forms. These changes are happening more rapidly than at any time in the last 800,000 years, according to climate records. 

Below, we break down what experts know — and what they don’t — about the connections between climate change and tornadoes. 

Readers from southern and central U.S. states are likely accustomed to the sound of tornado sirens during spring and summer. But tornadoes are not exclusive to that part of the world — they have been recorded everywhere except Antarctica. All it takes is a mass of cold, dry air colliding with a warmer, moist one, which usually happens during a thunderstorm. If these air masses begin to rotate, a funnel-shaped cloud forms, bringing dangerous high-speed winds that can rip homes from their foundations. 

In the U.S., these storms most frequently form in “tornado alley,” an area in the central U.S. that includes Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Kansas, and the Dakotas. But they’re also common in southern states, including Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and some parts of the Midwest. 

Predicting exactly when, why, and where a tornado may hit has long mystified meteorologists and forecasters. Tornadoes form fast and move unpredictably. The temperature, humidity, and wind speeds might be exactly right, but some thunderstorms produce dozens of tornadoes while other storm patterns don’t produce any. Forecasting and warning systems have gotten much better over the years, but the lead time for a tornado warning is still about 10 minutes, compared to days for a hurricane evacuation. 

Climate scientists haven’t yet established if global warming has impacted the frequency or strength of tornadoes. But there have been some unusual events in recent years, as more tornadoes have touched down in the eastern United States. In December 2021, an outbreak of thunderstorms and tornadoes made headlines after nearly 100 people were killed across several states in the Midwest, South, and Great Plains. Typically, tornadoes don’t occur late into winter months, so these communities were caught off guard, leaving many to scramble to seek shelter. Warmer winter temperatures may contribute to tornado conditions, but more research is needed to understand the link.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How climate change may be affecting tornadoes on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Amal Ahmed.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Upheaval at the nation’s top disaster agency is raising anxiety among state and local emergency managers — and leaving major questions about the whereabouts of billions of federal dollars it pays out to them.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency still has not opened applications for an enormous suite of grants, including ones that many states rely on to pay for basic emergency management operations. Some states pass on much of that money to their most rural, low-income counties to ensure they have an emergency manager on the payroll.

FEMA has blown through the mid-May statutory deadline to start the grants’ application process, according to the National Emergency Management Association, with no word about why or what that might indicate. The delay appears to have little precedent.

“There’s no transparency on why it’s not happening,” said Michael A. Coen Jr., who served as FEMA’s chief of staff under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

FEMA’s system of grants is complex and multifaceted and helps communities prepare for and respond to everything from terrorist attacks to natural disasters.

In April, the agency abruptly rescinded a different grant program that county and local governments were expecting to help them reduce natural hazard risks moving forward. The clawback of money included hundreds of millions already pledged. FEMA also quietly withdrew a notice for states to apply for $600 million in flood mitigation grants.

On top of that, on June 11, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem began requiring that she review all FEMA grants above $100,000. That could slow its vast multibillion grants apparatus to a crawl, current and former FEMA employees said.

FEMA did not answer ProPublica’s questions about the missed application deadline or the impact of funding cuts and delays, instead responding with a statement from DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin that Noem is focused on bringing accountability to FEMA’s spending by “rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and working to ensure only grants that really help Americans in time of need are approved.”

The memo announcing the change arrived the day after President Donald Trump said he wants to begin dismantling FEMA at the close of hurricane season this fall.

All of this has left states — some of which rely on the federal government for the vast majority of their emergency management funding — in a difficult position. While Trump has sharply criticized FEMA’s performance delivering aid after disasters strike, he has said almost nothing about the future of its grant programs.

“It’s a huge concern,” said Lynn Budd, president of the National Emergency Management Association and director of the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security, which houses emergency management. The state agency gets more than 90% of its operating budget from federal funds, especially FEMA grants. “The uncertainty makes it very difficult,” she said.

In North Carolina, a state hit hard by a recent natural disaster, federal grants make up 82% of its emergency management agency’s budget. North Carolina Emergency Management leaders are pressing state lawmakers to provide it with “funding that will sustain the agency and its core functions” and cut its reliance on federal grant funding, an agency spokesperson said.

A forced weaning off of federal dollars could have an outsize impact in North Carolina and the other states that pass on much of their FEMA grants to county and local agencies. Many rural counties have modest tax bases and are already stretched thin.

In May, ProPublica published a story detailing the horrors of Hurricane Helene’s impact on one of those counties, Yancey. Home to 19,000 people, it suffered the largest per capita loss of life and damage to property in the storm. Jeff Howell, its emergency manager, was operating with only a part-time employee and said that for years he had been asking the county commission for more help. It wasn’t until after the storm that county commissioners agreed with the need.

“They realized how big a job it is,” said Howell, who has since retired.

But even large metropolitan counties rely on the grants. The hold upin opening the grant applications concerns Robert Wike Graham, deputy director of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Emergency Management, which serves an area of 1.2 million people and is home to a nuclear power plant. The training and preparation FEMA grants help the agency pay for are critical to keeping the community safe in the face of a nuclear catastrophe.

Yet Graham said he has resorted to scouring social media posts and news reports for bits of clues about the grants — and the future of FEMA itself.

“We’re all having to be like, hey, what have you heard? What do you know? What’s going on? Nobody knows,” Graham said.

Trump is on his second acting FEMA administrator in five months, and the director who coordinates national disaster response turned in his resignation letter June 11. More than a dozen senior leaders, including the agency’s chief counsel, have left or been fired, along with an unknown mass of its full-time workers.

“Every emergency manager I know is screaming, ‘You’re screwing the system up.’ We’ve all been calling for reform,” Graham said. “But it’s too much, too fast.

Shortly after President Jimmy Carter created FEMA in 1979 to centralize federal disaster management, the agency began to dole out grants to help communities grappling with large-scale destruction. Over the years, its grants ballooned, especially after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when huge new programs helped states harden security against this alarming new threat.

Today, FEMA operates roughly a dozen preparedness grant programs. Among other things, the money serves as a financial carrot to ensure that even spending-averse and tax-strapped states and counties employ emergency managers who help communities prepare for and respond to terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

Former FEMA leaders said states have been largely content to sit back and let the feds pay up. As a result, they said, the grants have created a system of dependence that leaves emergency managers vulnerable to ever-shifting national priorities and, at the moment, a president set on dismantling the agency.

Across the country, the percentage of state emergency management agencies’ budgets paid by federal funding ranges from zero to 99.4%, a 2024 National Emergency Management Association report says. A spokesperson declined to provide a state-by-state breakdown, so ProPublica canvassed a few.

Wyoming tops 90%. Texas’ agency gets about three-quarters of its operational budget from federal funding. Virginia gets roughly 70%. South Carolina comes in around 61% federal funding for day-to-day operations.

Most state emergency managers agree that their states need to depend less on the federal government for their funding, “but there’s got to be some glide path or timeline where we can all work toward the goal,” Budd said.

Some states would need upwards of a decade to prepare for such a seismic shift, especially those like Wyoming that budget every other year, she added. Its Legislature is in the middle of budget negotiations for fiscal year 2027-28.

ProPublica is continuing to report on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. If you are an emergency manager who would like to tell us about your needs or share your experience with recovery efforts, please email helenetips@propublica.org.

If emergency managers instead are scrambling, “the effects that we’re going to see down the line is a lack of preparedness, a lack of coordination, training and partnerships being built,” Budd said. “We’re not going to be able to respond as well.”

A key reason states have become so dependent on FEMA grants despite the risk of national political upheaval is that state legislatures and local elected leaders haven’t always prioritized paying for emergency management themselves despite its critical role. With FEMA’s grants, they haven’t had to.

W. Craig Fugate has seen reluctance to wean off FEMA grants from all levels of government. He served as FEMA administrator under Obama and, before that, as head of Florida’s emergency management division under then-Govs. Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist.

“My experience tells me locals will not step up unless they are dealing with a catastrophe,” Fugate said.

Because most of the preparedness grants require no match from state or local governments, he said, it strips away any motivation for them to do so — especially with other pressing needs vying for those dollars.

“The real question is how much of this is actually critical and should be the responsibility of local governments to fund?” Fugate said. “Neither local governments nor states have been very forward in funding beyond the minimums to match federal dollars.”

After Hurricane Helene, North Carolina’s Emergency Management agency commissioned a report that pointedly criticized the state’s “over-reliance on federal grants to fund basic operations.” Only about 16.5% of the state agency’s budget comes from state appropriations.

The report noted that this reliance had led to an inadequate investment by the state in its emergency management staffing and infrastructure. A staff shortage at the agency “severely compromised the state’s response to Hurricane Helene.” Among other things, a lack of staff hampered the State Emergency Response Team’s ability to maintain a 24-hour operation that was supposed to support local and county officials who were overwhelmed by the massive storm.

North Carolina state Rep. Mark Pless, the Republican co-chair of the House Emergency Management and Disaster Recovery Committee, said the state’s conservative spending and $3.6 billion in reserves have “afforded us the ability to fund ourselves for preparedness” if FEMA suddenly yanks its grants.

But Democratic Rep. Robert Reives, the House minority leader, worried that any financial flexibility would dry up if planned and potential tax cuts in the years ahead create a budget shortfall, as some have predicted.

In mostly rural Washington County, along North Carolina’s hurricane-prone coast, Lance Swindell is a one-man emergency management office. His county, home to 11,000 people, lacks a big tax base.

Like other emergency managers across the state, Swindell said he supports cutting FEMA red tape and waste, but “grant funding is a major funding source just to keep the lights on.”

One of the grants in the FEMA program that blew past its deadline for opening applications pays half of his salary. That grant can fund core local operations such as staffing, training and equipment. It is critical to local emergency management offices: Almost 82% of counties across the country report tapping into it.

Cuts to this particular grant under the Biden administration already reduced what North Carolina gets — and therefore what gets passed down the governmental food chain to people like Swindell. North Carolina was allocated $8.5 million in fiscal year 2024, down from $10.6 million two years earlier.

Looking ahead, Swindell is still waiting for the applications to open while wondering if FEMA will more drastically slash the grants — and, if so, whether his county could find the money to continue paying his full-time salary.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

Last week, Russia’s Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu said North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has decided to send 5,000 military construction workers and 1,000 sappers, or combat engineers, to support demining and reconstruction efforts in the Kursk border region, according to Russian state media Tass and RIA Novosti.

Since last fall, North Korea has already deployed more than 12,000 troops to Russia to fight Ukrainian forces who occupied parts of the Kursk region in August, according to Ukraine, the United States, and South Korea. In April, Russia and North Korea confirmed their soldiers fought the Ukrainian forces together there but did not disclose how many.

In a closed-door meeting on Thursday, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) told a parliamentary committee that North Korea recently began recruiting additional troops and will likely send them to Russia in July or August.

The NIS noted that North Korea’s deployment of military troops to Russia last year also came just a month after Shoigu’s visit to the country where he signed an agreement with officials in Pyongyang, said South Korean lawmaker Lee Seong Kweun who attended the briefing.

(Russian state media)

The NIS also said North Korea has been continuing to contribute significantly to Russia’s war effort, including providing weapons. Moscow, in turn, provided Pyongyang with economic cooperation, air defense missiles, and radio jamming equipment, it said.

Russia has also been providing technical advice to North Korea on satellite launches, drones, and missile guidance capabilities, Lee said, citing the NIS.

“The National Intelligence Service reported that it is working to minimize the impact on the security of the Korean Peninsula as the close relationship between North Korea and Russia may expand due to the additional dispatch of North Korean combat troops,” Lee said.

Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited North Korea for talks with Kim Jong Un and signed a mutual defense treaty. Since then, the two countries have aligned closely through military cooperation, including the deployment of North Korean troops to Russia.

Reports of North Korean troop deployment to Russia first surfaced last October. While evidence of their presence grew – including when North Korean soldiers were taken captive by Ukrainian forces in Kursk and were interviewed – neither North Korea nor Russia acknowledged their presence until this year in April.

Written by Tenzin Pema. Edited by Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Han Do-hyung for RFA Korean.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday announced that the U.S. had conducted “massive precision strikes” on three Iranian nuclear sites – Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan – that has “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities.

The attack on Iran’s nuclear sites marks the first offensive U.S. military action in Israel’s war with Iran – a major escalation in tensions in the Middle East – which South Korean analysts warn will make North Korea increasingly resistant to any diplomatic efforts or talks aimed at convincing Pyongyang to give up its nuclear program.

“North Korea must have thought it was a good idea to have nuclear weapons after seeing the U.S. airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities,” Jeong Seong-jang, deputy director of the Sejong Institute, told Radio Free Asia on Monday.

In a statement Monday, a spokesperson for the North Korean Foreign Ministry criticized the U.S. airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, saying it “violated the U.N. Charter and international law, which have as their basic principles respect for sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs,” North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency reported.

(KCNA via Reuters)

Despite calls by the U.S. and its allies for denuclearization, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has pushed for his country to bolster its nuclear capabilities to defend itself, warning earlier this year that “confrontation with the most vicious hostile countries is inevitable.” While the “hostile countries” were not named, North Korea regards the U.S. and its ally, South Korea, as its main enemies.

In 2003, North Korea withdrew after acceding to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq. It cited concerns, at the time, that the U.S. was planning a preemptive strike against Pyongyang.

“North Korea is (likely to be) concerned that if it gives up its nuclear weapons, it will end up in a situation similar to Iran, and will not accept future proposals for denuclearization discussions.”

He warned the strikes may even prompt North Korea – which conducted its first underground nuclear test in 2006 – to accelerate the development of nuclear submarines in an effort to secure so-called ‘second-strike’ capabilities – or the ability to launch retaliatory nuclear strikes after a preemptive one.

Other South Korean experts echoed similar concerns.

“Kim Jong Un will probably order the relocation, hiding, and concealment of nuclear facilities, as well as the expansion of air defense systems,” Professor Nam Seong-wook of Sookmyung Women’s University told RFA.

(KCNA via Reuters)

In a social media post, Kim Dong-yeop, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies, argued that the U.S. strikes would cause North Korea to further solidify its perception that “only possession of nuclear weapons can lead to survival” and provide much-needed validation for Pyongyang to hold on to its nuclear arsenal.

Since 2006, North Korea has tested nuclear devices six times and has developed missiles believed to be capable of reaching the U.S. mainland.

During his first term, Trump held historic summits with Kim Jong Un, hoping to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons in exchange for sanctions relief, but his high-level diplomacy ultimately failed to achieve a breakthrough. The North has continued to build its nuclear and missile programs.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that North Korea has assembled around 50 warheads and possesses enough fissile material to produce up to 40 more warheads and is accelerating the production of further fissile material.

Earlier this year, Pyongyang reiterated that it has no intention of giving up its nuclear program.

North Korea would now view diplomatic engagement with the United States as “foolish” and any future negotiations of denuclearization as futile, Kim Dong-yeop wrote in a social media post on Sunday.

“North Korea will use the Iran situation as an excuse to strengthen its criticism of the South Korea-U.S. alliance and South Korea-U.S.-Japan security cooperation,” he added.

Written by Tenzin Pema. Edited by Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Han Do-hyung for RFA Korean.

As the climate changes, the far north is drying and warming, which means wildfires are getting bigger and more intense. The area burned in Canada is now the second largest on record for this time of year, trailing behind the brutal wildfire season of 2023. That year, the amount of carbon blazed into the atmosphere was about three times the country’s fossil fuel emissions. And the more carbon that’s emitted from wildfires — in Canada and elsewhere — the faster the planetary warming, and the worse the fires. 

“There’s obviously the climate feedback concern,” said Mike Waddington, an environmental scientist at McMaster University in Ontario who studies Canada’s forests. “But increasingly we’re also concerned about the smoke.”

That’s because there’s much more to wildfire smoke than charred sticks and leaves, especially where these blazes are burning in Canada. The country’s forests have long been mined, operations that loaded soils and waterways with toxic metals like lead and mercury, especially before clean-air standards kicked in 50 years ago. Now everyone downwind of these wildfires may have to contend with that legacy and those pollutants, in addition to all the other nasties inherent in wildfire smoke, which are known to exacerbate respiratory and cardiac problems. 

“You have there the burning of these organic soils resulting in a lot of carbon and a lot of particulate matter,” said Waddington. “Now you have this triple whammy, where you have the metals remobilized in addition to that.”

What exactly is lurking in the smoke from Canadian wildfires will require further testing by scientists. But an area of particular concern is around the mining city of Flin Flon, in Manitoba, which is known to have elevated levels of toxic metals in the landscape, said Colin McCarter, an environmental scientist who studies pollutants at Ontario’s Nipissing University. Flin Flon’s 5,000 residents have been evacuated as a wildfire approaches, though so far no structures have been destroyed. 

But a fire doesn’t need to directly burn mining operations to mobilize toxicants. For example, in Yellowknife, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, gold mining operations between 1934 and 2004 spread arsenic as far as 18 miles away, adding to a landscape with an already high concentration of naturally occurring arsenic. In a paper published last year, Waddington and McCarter estimated that between 1972 and 2023, wildfires around Yellowknife fired up to 840,000 pounds of arsenic into the atmosphere. Arsenic is a known carcinogen associated with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and developmental problems, according to the World Health Organization. (After the 2023 Lahaina fire in Maui, officials reported elevated levels of arsenic, lead, and other toxic substances in ash samples. California officials also found lots of lead in smoke from 2018’s Camp Fire.)

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Within wildfire smoke is also PM 2.5, particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (a millionth of a meter) that gets deep inside human lungs. This can exacerbate conditions like asthma and raise the risk of cardiac arrest up to 70 percent. One study found that in California alone, PM 2.5 emissions from wildfires caused more than 50,000 premature deaths between 2008 and 2018. 

Canadian ecosystems known as peatlands are especially good at holding onto toxicants like arsenic.  These form in soggy places where wet plant matter resists decay, building up into layers of peat — basically concentrated carbon. Peat can accumulate over millennia, meaning it can also hold onto pollutants deposited there decades ago. “The peat soils are landscape hot spots for metals,” said McCarter. “When it’s dry and hot — like we’ve been seeing with the weather over the prairie provinces and central and western Canada — the peatlands can really start to dry out. Then the fire is able to propagate and get hot enough to start releasing some of these metals.”

A peat fire behaves much weirder than a traditional forest fire. Instead of just burning horizontally across the landscape, a peat fire smolders down into the ground. This is a slow burn that lasts not just hours or days, but potentially months — releasing toxic metals and particulate matter as smoke all the while. Peat fires are so persistent that they’ll sometimes start in the summer, get covered over with snow in the winter, and pop up once again in the spring melt. Scientists call them zombie fires. 

As Canada’s wildfire smoke creeps down into the U.S., it’s also transforming. Chemical reactions between gases and sunlight create ozone, which further exacerbates lung conditions like asthma. “Once you get six hours to a day or so downwind, the ozone formation inside smoke plumes can start being problematic,” said Rebecca Hornbrook, an atmospheric chemist at the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, who studies wildfire smoke.

People fleeing Canada’s fires have to worry not just about losing their homes, but also losing their health. More than 40 percent of wildfire evacuations happen in communities that are predominantly Indigenous — an irony given that First Nations people know how to reduce the severity of these conflagrations, with traditional burning practices that more gently clear out the dead vegetation that acts as wildfire fuel. That strategy of prescribed burns, though, has only recently been making a comeback in Canada. “Let’s not forget that it’s immediately affecting a lot of, in particular, First Nations communities in the northern parts of Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan,” said Waddington.

This haze is already bad for human health, and now there’s the added potential for arsenic and other toxicants in the Canadian landscape to get caught up in wildfire smoke. “It’s a bad-news scenario,” Waddington said. “It’s quite scary.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The smoke from Canada’s wildfires may be even more toxic than usual on Jun 5, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

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This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

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U.S. experts speak of war with China. The U.S. and China are apparently preparing for it (Peter Apps, “US Prepares for Long War with China that Might Hit Its Bases, Homeland,” Reuters, 19 May 2025). And according to opinion polls, a large percentage of Americans, if not the majority, do support using U.S. troops to defend Taiwan. Thus it is important in 2025 to understand Taiwan’s special status and U.S.-China relations.

The civil war between the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continued intermittently from 1927 until 1949, when the Communists won control over mainland China. The war resulted in the premature deaths of millions of people, with a large portion of those non-combatants. In 1949 the head of the Guomindang, Chiang Kaishek (1887-1975), known today as “Jiang Jieshi” by most mainland Chinese speakers, retreated to the Island of Taiwan with the remnants of his forces and “established a relatively benign dictatorship” there, executing one thousand farmers, workers, intellectuals, students, labor union activists, and apolitical civilians during the White Terror in the 1950s. (Po Chien CHEN and Yi-hung LIU, “A Spark Extinguished: Worker Militancy in Taiwan after World War II [1945-1950],” Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace, eds., Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour, Verso, 2022). The martial law that Jiang Jieshi imposed in 1949 lasted for nearly four decades, until 1987.

Under his reign there were two Taiwan Strait crises in which a hot war between the Guomindang and the CCP almost broke out. The most dangerous, in terms of the prospects for decent human survival, was probably the second crisis, in 1958. It almost resulted in a nuclear war, according to the late Daniel Ellsberg. At a point in time when U.S.-backed Jiang Jieshi aspired to take back all of China, the U.S. had a secret plan to “hit every city in the Soviet Union and every city in China.” The U.S. military was prepared to annihilate 600 million people, a “hundred Holocausts,” Ellsberg explained. Today the Island of Taiwan may or may not be the “most dangerous place on Earth,” as the Economist called it (Justin Metz, “The Most Dangerous Place on Earth,” The Economist, 1 May 2021), but given the constant tension between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (i.e., Taiwan) during the last three quarters of a century, the fact that the U.S. and the PRC are both nuclear powers, the fact that U.S. intelligence leaders have recently called the CCP the “most consequential threat” to U.S. national security, and the fact that the Trump administration is riddled with China hawks underscores how important it is, for our species as a whole, and especially for people in East Asia, that sincere agents of peace understand Taiwan.

Over the course of nearly half a century, Jiang Jieshi and his party received constant diplomatic support, weapons, and billions of dollars in aid from the U.S.  Our government has recently even “quietly unfrozen about $870 million in security assistance programs for Taiwan.” With all this U.S. “support” for, or U.S. domination of, Taiwan, what does the word “sovereignty” mean in Taiwan’s case? And what does it mean for an island of 23 million people to prepare to fight with the PRC, with its population of 1.4 billion? How can Lai Ching-te say that they must prepare for war?

To understand the fight between the Republic of China and the PRC, and the intervening/interfering role of the U.S., one must have a basic understanding of the nature of this fight. A little study of the historical context in which Jiang Jieshi first seized power a century ago might help. This month marks 100 years since the start of the May Thirtieth Movement, when Chinese workers stood up against the imperialism of the West and Japan, while at the same time taking on the greedy business class and the power-hungry warlords of China.

Chinese Workers Struggle for Dignity in 1925

Back in 1925, Shanghai was known as “the Paris of the East,” and like Paris, it was a place where the rich could have fun as they liked and the poor had to suffer as they must. The workers of Shanghai suffered the injustices of colonialism and racism. Rich Europeans and Japanese colonizer-parasites had carved up the city and set up their own “International Settlement,” that they, rather than the Chinese, governed. This Settlement allowed them to live among and exploit the local laborers even as they disrespected them with the pejorative “coolies.” Some Japanese said they were “worthless” and called them “foreign slaves” (S.A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927, Duke UP, 2002, page 163).

Shanghai had been a frequent site of labor “unrest” for some time. It was not a coincidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been founded there in 1921. Early in 1925 a Japanese company that owned a cotton mill had rejected an agreement made by the striking workers and a mediation board. The conflict reached a head on the 15th of May that year when the managers of the mill locked out the workers and stopped paying their wages. (Apo Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement to the Canton Strike,” Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour). In this conflict, Japanese supervisors physically beat several workers and one foreman shot and killed a 20-year-old worker, a Communist, by the name of Gu Zhenghong.

This was not the first time that foreign bosses had murdered Chinese workers, but it was said that “Japanese capitalists treat Chinese laborers like cattle and horses” (S.A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses 164). Many people, not only workers and students but also Chinese business persons, were fed up that year, in 1925. On the 30th of May nearly 10,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Shanghai to the International Settlement where the British, French, Japanese, and other privileged foreigners lived. It was guarded by foreign soldiers and police. (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”). The British chief of police gave orders to fire on the protesting workers and students, and thirteen people were killed, shot at “point-blank range” (Working Class History, PM Press, 2020, page 111-12).  Dozens were injured. This triggered what is known today as the May Thirtieth Movement. Through the cooperation of workers, students, and many Chinese businesses, a general strike was organized in Shanghai. There were at least 135 solidarity strikes in other regions. (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”).

By one estimate, there were already 84,000 unionized workers in Shanghai at this time and many unions had contributed to building worker solidarity (Smith, Like Cattle and Horses 154). Up until the May Thirtieth Incident, the Shanghai Federation of Syndicates (SFS) had been a leading labor organization, if not the leading organization in Shanghai. It had been established in 1924, mainly by right-wing members, but also by many anarchists, such as Shen Zhongjiu (1887–1968), the editor of the anarchist journal Free Man (Ziyou ren) and later the chief editor of Revolution (Geming). Anarchism was the “central radical stream” in China after the First World War. And there had been a “long-standing indigenous libertarian tradition” in China (Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, PM Press, 2010, page 519).

Many SFS labor activists distrusted the Communist Party because they felt that CCP intellectuals tried to speak for the workers. The SFS had a “vaguely anarchist orientation,” but did not espouse federalism. (Smith, Like Cattle and Horses 155-59). Chinese anarchists in general, regardless whether they were members of SFS, had vocally opposed the CCP’s statist goals and promotion of “proletarian dictatorship” and “iron discipline.” But the fledgling CCP was on the ball. They “instantly launched a campaign calling for solidarity with the textile workers, a boycott of Japanese products, and a public funeral” for Gu Zhenghong (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”).

In the city of Guangzhou, already an industrial center near Hong Kong then, anarchists had established at least 40 unions by 1921, and had been collaborating since 1924 with the Guomindang labor leaders in the syndicalist movement. The Guomindang was founded in 1924 by Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) in Guangzhou, and many anarchists and communists had collaborated with them for years.  In May 1925 the “Second National Labour Conference” was held in Guangzhou. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) was established, representing 166 trade unions and 540,000 members. It was a national umbrella organization that functioned as a platform to coordinate different forces among workers, including non-party actors. After the Shanghai Massacre, the ACFTU called for a demonstration on 2 June and a solidarity strike. In the wake of the Massacre, many more workers joined unions (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”).

Union leaders organized a strike in Guangzhou and in nearby Hong Kong. This strike began on 19 June. Soon, 250,000 workers hand had joined and many students in Hong Kong were also mobilized. In fact, half the labor force of Hong Kong was on strike, paralyzing the city. By the 21st of June, there was a full embargo against the foreign powers, and on the 23rd of June, a public procession in solidarity with the May Thirtieth Movement. The joint foreign security force with police from multiple countries opened fire on students and killed fifty-two people.

1925 was the beginning of a period of very active worker resistance, that is sometimes called the “Revolution of 1925-1927.” It was a time of many large uprisings, often or usually very violent, and a time of dedicated labor organizing. Through this revolution, Chinese workers regained some dignity, but true liberation was put on the back burner. According to the historian Gotelind Müller, “the CCP worked on Comintern instructions in a united front with the Guomindang, an authoritarian party populist in rhetoric but tied in practice to defending the interests of China’s business groups and rural elites. The terms of the alliance required the CCP’s subordination to the Nationalist [i.e., Guomindang] leaders and the submersion of its membership.” She explains that, just as with anarchists elsewhere, “Chinese anarchists were at first sympathetic to the Bolsheviks but by the mid-1920s they saw the regime in Moscow as oppressive.”

Meanwhile, Mao Zedong knew that something was happening, and he became very interested in this movement in the summer of 1925 (Rebecca Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth Century World, Duke UP, 2010, page 29). In addition to labor unions in the city, peasant unions were also forming, appearing in Hunan and surrounding provinces. Mao saw revolutionary potential among them, even more than among workers in the cities. This put him in opposition to the orthodox Marxist approach.

A Year of Strikes: 1926

There were even more strikes in 1926 than in 1925, and some of the rulers of China resorted to violence to keep them down. “During 1926 in Shanghai there were, according to one official survey, 169 strikes affecting 165 factories and companies and involving 202,297 workers.” Half of them were “wholly or partially successful.” (Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, 1938). In May 1926 the Third Labor Congress was held in Guangzhou, with the participation of 699 labor organizations, who claimed to represent 1.24 million workers.

And it was at this point, when things were going so well for the workers, that Jiang Jieshi started abandoning them and dismissed his Soviet advisors (Dennis Showalter, “Bring in the Germans,” The Quarterly Journal of Military History 28:1, page 60). It was the Soviets who had urged the Communists of China to work with the Guomindang.

On 18 March, there was a massacre of anti-imperialist protesters in front of Beiyang Government headquarters. The Beiyang Government was run by warlords like Duan Qirui (1865-1936), who was tight with Japan. They were the main government of China between 1912 and 1928, and were based in Beijing.

Among those injured during the 18 March massacre was the leader Li Dazhao (1889-1927), who had co-founded the CCP with Chen Duxiu (1879-1942). Chen Duxiu had also founded the progressive journal New Youth (Xin Qingnian) in 1916, advocating human rights, democracy, science, and even Esperanto. Influenced by the October Revolution, it was openly promoting communism in 1920.

The great writer Lu Xun, who is often credited with modernizing Chinese literature, wrote about the March 1926 massacre in some detail in “In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen.” Lu Xun wrote, “On March 18 in the fifteenth year of the Republic of China, Duan Qirui’s government ordered guards with guns and bayonets to surround and slaughter the unarmed protesters in front of the gates of the State Council, the hundreds of young men and women whose intent was to lend their support in China’s diplomatic dealings with foreign powers. An order was even issued, slandering them as ‘mobsters’!” (Lu Xun, “In Memory of Liu Hezhen,” Jottings Under Lamplight, Harvard UP, 2017, page 72).

Meanwhile in June, Jiang Jieshi was put in charge of the Northern Expedition aimed at removing the warlords from power and unifying the country.

Jiang Jieshi’s 1927 Slaughters

In 1927 rich men slaughtered workers like never before. Early on, the CCP suspected that something was up. On 26 January an internal Party memo read, “The most important problem which requires our urgent consideration at the moment is the alliance of foreign imperialism and the [Guomindang] right wing with the so-called moderate elements of the [Guomindang], resulting in internal and external opposition to Soviet Russia, communism, and the labor and peasant movements” (Michael D. Wilson, United States Policy and the Nationalist Revolution in China, 1925-1928, UCLA dissertation, 1996, page 121). The Communists knew that the Guomindang was allied with the “Powers,” i.e., the empires of the West and Japan. Yet they still encouraged workers to trust the Guomindang.

Around this time in early 1927, a powerful Communist-led union called the Shanghai General Labour Union (GLU) launched two insurrections. Their first insurrection was a general strike from the 19th to the 22nd of February, and their second was a strike supported by an armed militia from the 21st to 22nd of March. The strike in February “shut post offices, all cotton mills, and most essential services” (S.A. Smith, “The Third Armed Uprising and the Shanghai Massacre,” Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour, and Working Class History 41). This contributed greatly to the popularity of both the Guomindang and the CCP in Shanghai.

For their second insurrection in March, the GLU’s plan was “to take control of the city first and then welcome” Jiang Jieshi. But the British, the Americans, and the Japanese in Shanghai already knew the script. Written in 1938, Harold Isaacs’ historical account got to the heart of the matter:

The prevailing attitude among them during those early weeks of 1927 seemed to be to hear and protect the evils they had rather than fly to others they knew not of. For to your foreign business man, banker, soldier, consul, and missionary, this incomprehensible unrest, these endless slings and arrows for which they were the quivering targets, seemed the blows of a universally outrageous fortune. They could not make out who were the hares and who the hounds. So they barricaded their settlements behind gates and barbed wire. From overseas came regiment after regiment and whole fleets to protect them against all contingencies. Only the keenest among them understood from the beginning that their bread was buttered on the same side as that of the Shanghai bankers and oriented themselves accordingly. They knew Chiang Kai-shek [Jiang Jieshi] as a politically-minded militarist who wore a coat of many colours. If the Shanghai bankers were ready to back him, they knew they could follow suit. Only the workers of Shanghai stood between them and the consummation of the deal. Chiang’s coming would remove this obstacle. Thus by February when Chiang’s troops advanced into Chekiang, the situation was vastly clarified for all concerned except the workers and the Communist leaders for whom Chiang still remained the hero-general of the revolution. (Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, 1938).

But as evidenced by the quote from the CCP internal Party memo, the Communist leaders, too, knew what was happening, that Jiang Jieshi was not on their side.

“On 21 March between 600,000 and 800,000 workers struck in demand for an end to militarist rule of the city. Among the workers who played key roles were the printers, postal workers, and mechanics. Several thousand radicals also formed an armed militia that occupied key sections of the city” (St. James Encyclopedia of Labor History Worldwide: Major Events in Labor History and Their Impact).

On the same day that these Communist supporters of Jiang Jieshi launched their violent take-over of Shanghai, Guomindang troops took control of the City of Nanjing, attacked foreigners and looted foreign property there, “including the American, British, and Japanese consulates.” (Wilson, United States Policy and the Nationalist Revolution in China, 1925-1928, page 111). Foreigners were frightened by these attacks and they blamed it on communists, not on Jiang Jieshi. “Actually, however, the nationalists [i.e., Guomindang] were the perpetrators of this series of attacks on foreign civilians. Some foreign officials, such as the Japanese Consul General, thus advised [Jiang Jieshi] to crack down on the radical elements in the city” (St. James Encyclopedia…). This is remembered as the “Nanking Incident of 1927.”

On 22 March, the stage was set for the great betrayal and a years-long bloodbath. On that day, a subordinate of Jiang Jieshi, called off the strike in Shanghai and ordered the suppression of the labor unions and other radical groups (Wilson 110). With thousands of soldiers in toe and at his command, Jiang Jieshi himself arrived on 26 March and began meeting with members of the local Guomindang, the Shanghai business community, and the gangsters. He was promised financial support “if he broke from the communists and pledged to ‘regulate’ the relationship between labor and capital” (St. James Encyclopedia…).

April 1927: Let the Reign of Terror Begin

Jiang Jieshi agreed with these parasitic foreigners that the changes being proposed by the workers and the Communists were too radical. “It should have come as no surprise to anyone that [Jiang Jieshi] decided to move against the radicals, as he had already done so in several other cities in late March” (St. James Encyclopedia…), but many Chinese workers as well as French, German, and Russian communists continued to believe in him.

After the Guomindang’s attack on Westerners and Japanese in Nanjing (i.e., the Nanking Incident of March 1927), Jiang Jieshi started to seek support from Japan and the U.S. rather than the USSR and the CCP (Wilson 33, 72, 134).

Jiang Jieshi viewed the success of the peasants and the workers as a threat to his party’s political, military, and social control, and this is one reason why he initiated the April 12th Shanghai Massacre, in which the Guomindang slaughtered communists in Shanghai and other places. According to Vincent Kolo, the “capitalist class and rural landowners whose sons were well represented in the officer corps of the [Guomindang] armies grew fearful of the increasingly radical demands of the working class (for shorter work hours and against the terror regime in many factories) and the peasantry (for land reform and against the crushing taxes of the landlord class)” (Kolo, “90 Years since Chiang Kai-shek’s Shanghai Massacre,” Chinaworker.info).

On 5 April Jiang Jieshi “instituted martial law and ordered the disarming of all bearers of arms not properly registered with the Nationalist Army” (Wilson 123). On the 11th, Wang Shouhua [the President of the GLU] was thrown in a sack and “buried alive” (Smith, “The Third Armed Uprising”). By the morning of the 12th, the worker militias “had been crushed,” according to historian S.A. Smith. That day, Jiang Jieshi hired hundreds of armed gangsters to massacre labor leaders and communists (Wilson, page 124).

Even so, the tenacious workers, led mainly by the GLU, called a general strike for the 13th of April. “240,000 workers walked out” (Smith, “The Third Armed Uprising”). Machine gunners opened fire on their parade. “Attackers” engaged in “stabbing, shooting, and clubbing the panic-stricken crowd.” One hundred were killed. But even on the 14th, the majority of striking workers did not give up.

By the 15th, the GLU estimated that three hundred trade union activists had been killed. It is estimated that by the end of the year, two thousand “Communists and worker militants” had lost their lives. The Guomindang killed “thousands of worker activists” in Shanghai, Wuhan, and Guangzhou (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”). “Over the following twelve months, more than three hundred thousand people would be killed in the Guomindang’s anti-communist purges” (Working Class History 80-81).

The police of “Qingbang and Hongbang brutally executed the captured communist and union members by slaughtering them and putting them in the crater of a locomotive.” (“4.12 Shanghai Coup,” Namuwiki, 15 April 2025). Communists refer to the following years of Guomindang massacres as the “White Terror.” By one estimate, this White Terror resulted in the deaths of one million people (Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World 33). Enabled by the governments of the U.S. and other countries, Jiang Jieshi began in 1947 another White Terror on the Island of Taiwan. It did not end until 1987.

This is the way that Jiang Jieshi thanked the peasant and worker revolutionaries who had propelled his party to power. His rewards for this great achievement of “unifying” the nation included generous financial support from the business class of Shanghai (David Lowe, “Generalissimo,” The Weekly Standard 9:27:22, page 43), lots of help of various kinds from the Powers of the West and Japan, and recognition from the Empires that he was the legitimate ruler of China.

With his solid track record of bullying into submission Chinese workers, the U.S. showered Jiang Jieshi with treasure for decades, until his death in 1975. The U.S. was the first foreign country to step forward and grant recognition to his new regime (in 1928), and soon the U.S. would begin supporting him financially and militarily, too, even when informed U.S. observers, such as John King Fairbank (1907-91) labeled his Party as “proto-fascist.” For Fairbank, the Guomindang were a “small political group holding tenaciously to power…with hopes of using industrialization as a tool of perpetuating their power and with ideas which are socially conservative and backward-looking” (Wilson 2).

Yokomitsu Riichi, the Japanese ultra-rightist author who wrote the novel Shanghai (1931), presented in that story a surprisingly similar picture of the political and economic situation of China, a country where parasites of the West, Japan, and even China committed state violence against them and stole the fruits of their labor. For example:

He [Sanki] fell silent. He had detected the strength of will of the authorities who had hired Chinese to kill Chinese.

[Fang Qiu-lan, a woman to whom Sanki is attracted and a Communist who organizes workers in Japanese textile factories:]  “That’s right. The craftiness of the British authorities isn’t new. The history of the modern Orient is so filled with the crimes of that country that if you tried to add them up, you’d be paralyzed. Starving millions of Indians, disabling Chinese with the opium trade. These were Britain’s economic policies. It’s the same as using Persia, India, Afghanistan, and Malaysia to poison China. Now we Chinese must resist completely.” (Yokomitsu Riichi, Shanghai: A Novel by Yokomitsu Riichi, Dennis Washburn, trans., Center of Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001, page 153).

Since 1950, the United States has sold Taiwan nearly $50 billion in “defense equipment and services, with a number of large sales during recent U.S. administrations.” Is this how we deliver “power to the people” and peace in East Asia? Were we promoting industrial democracy by increasing the wealth and power of Jiang Jieshi even after he committed massacres of Chinese workers with impunity? Don’t the people of Taiwan, the vast majority of whom are Han Chinese, deserve credit for sprouting democracy even under the sun-starved, U.S.-backed dictatorship of Jiang Jieshi? Where in the U.S. is there any recognition of the crimes that the U.S. committed against the Han Chinese and other ethnic groups of Taiwan and the rest of China? How solid is the foundation on which the current President Lai Ching-te stands, the man who called himself a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence” in 2017? When we spend 250 million U.S. dollars on an upgrade on our “informal,” 10-acre embassy in Taiwan, is that an example of how we adhere to our One China policy? Even merely with the foregoing brief exploration of the history of the obvious class struggle in China a century ago, and quick examples of U.S. support for Jiang Jieshi’s attacks on the working class of China, one can see that U.S. dollars were spent on death, destruction, and tyranny rather than on democracy and peace.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Joseph Essertier.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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Then the plane’s whir gave way to the swarm’s buzz. It was 1952, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture was conducting a series of field tests with male screwworm flies that had been sterilized with gamma radiation. The experiment’s aim was to get them to mate with their female counterparts, reduce the species’ ability to reproduce, and gradually shrink the population — and its screw-shaped larvae’s propensity to burrow into living mammals before swiftly killing their host — into oblivion. 

It didn’t fully work, but the population did diminish. So the team of scientists tried again; this time in an even more remote location — Curaçao, an island in the Dutch Caribbean. That quickly proved to be successful, a welcome development after a decades-long battle by scientists, farmers, and government officials against the fly, which was costing the U.S. economy millions annually and endangering colossal numbers of livestock, wildlife, and even the occasional human. Within months, the screwworm population on Curaçao fell, and the tactic would be replicated at scale. 

The USDA took its extermination campaign first throughout much of the south, and then all the way west to California. From then on, planes loaded with billions of sterilized insects were also routinely flown over Mexico and Central America. By the 1970s, most traces of the screwworm had vanished from the U.S., and by the early 1990s, it had all but disappeared from across the southern border and throughout the southernmost region of North America.  

Since 1994, the USDA has partnered with the Panamanian government to control and wipe out established populations all the way down to the country’s southeastern Darién province, where the Comisión Panamá–Estados Unidos para la Erradicación y Prevención del Gusano Barrenador del Ganado, or COPEG, now maintains what’s colloquially called the “Great American Worm Wall.” Each week, millions of sterilized screwworms bred in a nearby production facility are dropped by plane over the rainforest along the Panama-Colombia border — an invisible screwworm biological barrier zone, complete with round-the-clock human-operated checkpoints and inspections. But questions are now surfacing about its efficacy. 

The pest is attracted to open wounds as small as tick bites and mucous membranes, such as nasal passages, where the female fly lays her eggs. A single female can lay up to 300 eggs at a time, and has the capacity to produce thousands during her short lifespan. Those eggs then hatch into larvae that burrow into the host animals with sharp mouth hooks and feed on living flesh. 

To save the host, the larvae must be removed from the infested tissue. Otherwise the infestation can cause serious harm, and can even be fatal within a matter of days.

Female flies generally mate only once in their lifespan, but can continuously lay more than one batch of eggs every few days, which is why the sterile insect technique has long been considered a fail-safe tactic, when accompanied by surveillance, host treatment and quarantine, for wiping out populations. The best way to prevent infestation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is to avoid exposure.

About 20 years after the “Worm Wall” was created, the screwworm was spotted in the Florida Keys, the first sighting in the Sunshine State since the 1960s. An endangered deer population in Big Pine Key was discovered with the tell-tale symptoms of gaping wounds and erratic, pained behavior. The USDA responded rapidly, deploying hordes of sterilized flies, setting up fly traps in affected areas, and euthanizing deer with advanced infections. In totality, the parasite killed more than 130 Key deer, a population estimated at less than 1,000 before the outbreak. Though the threat was contained by the following year, the incident stoked concerns throughout the country. 

No one really knows why the “Worm Wall” has started to fail. Some believe that human-related activities, such as increasing cattle movements and agricultural expansion, have allowed the flies to breach the barrier that, until recently, has been highly effective at curbing the insect’s range expansion. Max Scott, professor of entomology and genetics at North Carolina State University, researches strains of livestock pests for genetic control programs, with a focus on the screwworm. 

“Why did it break down after being successful for so long? That’s the million-dollar question,” said Scott. 

Bridget Baker, a veterinarian and research assistant professor at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, thinks climate change may have had something to do with the screwworm’s sudden reappearance in the Florida Keys. “There was a major storm just prior to the outbreak. So the question is, ‘Were flies blown up from, like Cuba, for example, into the Florida Keys from that storm?’” said Baker. Though invasive in the U.S., the screwworm is endemic in Cuba, South America, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. 

“And if there’s more major storms, could that potentially lead to more of these upward trajectories of the fly? With climate change, all sorts of species are expected to have range shifts, and so it would be reasonable to assume that the flies could also experience those range shifts. And those range shifts are expected to come higher in latitude.”

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In the past few years, we may have seen just that happen. In 2023, an explosive screwworm outbreak occurred in Panama — the recorded cases in the country shot up from an average of 25 cases annually to more than 6,500. Later that year, an infected cow was found in southern Mexico not far from the border of Guatemala. In response, last November, the USDA halted Mexico’s livestock imports from entering Texas and increased deployments of sterile screwworm males south of the border. Early this year, the suspension was lifted, after both nations agreed to enhanced inspection protocols. 

Then, on May 11, the USDA suspended live cattle, horse, and bison imports from Mexico yet again. The fly had been spotted in remote farms in the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, only 700 miles from the southern U.S. border. Experts worry it may just be on the verge of resurging in the U.S. 

If the screwworm does regain its stronghold in the U.S., estimates suggest it will result in  billions in livestock, trade, and ecological losses, and the costs of eradication will be steep. It could also take years to wipe out again, and decades for sectors like the cattle industry to recover. But with President Donald Trump’s USDA overtly refusing to acknowledge climate change or fund climate solutions, and federal cuts resulting in a skeleton agency to tackle the issue, any attempts to halt the range expansion of the fly may ultimately be doomed.

In a press release about the temporary ban, the USDA noted that it would be renewed “on a month-by-month basis, until a significant window of containment is achieved.”

“This is not about politics or punishment of Mexico, rather it is about food and animal safety,” stated Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who previously criticized Mexico for imposing restrictions on a USDA contractor conducting “high-volume precision aerial releases” of sterilized flies in its southern region.

New Mexico Senator Ben Ray Luján, a Democrat and member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, co-sponsored the STOP Screwworms Act, a bill introduced to the Senate on May 14 that would authorize $300 million for USDA to begin construction on a new sterile fly production facility.

“It is vital that Congress act to pass this legislation to protect our farmers and ranchers and prevent an outbreak in the U.S.,” Luján told Grist. When asked about the absence of climate change in the USDA’s messaging about the screwworm, Luján said he’d “long fought to ensure our agricultural communities have the tools they need to confront climate change and its growing impact on farmers and ranchers. Unfortunately, this administration does not share those priorities.” 

The bill has bipartisan support, but another major concern is the USDA’s shrinking capacity to contain the screwworm threat. As part of an effort by the administration to gut spending across most federal agencies, the USDA has cut more than 15,000 staffers since January, leaving behind a skeleton workforce. Several hundred were employees at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service who were working to prevent invasive pest and disease outbreaks. The budget reconciliation bill currently making its way through Congress includes proposals to further cut USDA spending and gut the agency’s research arms.  

A spokesperson for the USDA declined to comment for this article, and did not respond to Grist’s questions about the role of climate change in escalating the screwworm expansion risk.

Andrew Paul Gutierrez, professor emeritus at University of California, Berkeley, has been investigating the relationship between invasive pests and weather since the 1970s. In 2014, he found that the screwworm moves northward to new regions on anticyclonic winds, or a high-pressure weather system, which scientists believe warming may be affecting — leading to prolonged and more intense heatwaves and shifting wind patterns.

Before it was widely eradicated, the screwworm had been considered somewhat of a seasonal problem in more northern climates where it wasn’t endemic, as it was routinely killed off by freezing temperatures. Though the metallic green-blue fly thrives in tropical temperatures, it doesn’t tend to survive in conditions lower than 45 degrees Fahrenheit, though the movement of livestock and wildlife has shown that colder spells aren’t a silver bullet. As the planet heats up, rising temperatures are creating more favorable conditions for a legion of agricultural pests, like the parasitic fly, to spread and thrive.

Thirty-year average coldest temperatures are rising almost everywhere in the U.S., a new Climate Central analysis found. Future climatic modeling predicts those average temperatures will only continue to climb — further influencing which plants and insects thrive and where across the country.

“With climate change … if it becomes warm enough, and you can get permanent establishment in those areas, then we got a problem,” said Gutierrez. 

By skirting the role of climate change and weather dynamics in escalating the threat, Gutierrez questions whether the USDA’s response and longer-term plan to combat the threat from screwworm flies is destined to fall short. The agency’s response is missing what Gutierrez designates “really critical” insight into how screwworms interact with temperature conditions, and what climate-induced shifts in those means for its survival and reproduction. 

The USDA, said Gutierrez, “spends an awful lot of money” on dealing with the screwworm issue, but he argues that is being hindered by a lack of understanding of the weather-pest-biology relationship, or how weather drives the dynamics of such a species. “And if you don’t know that, then you can’t, say, model the interaction of the invasive species and its natural enemies, or the effects of weather on the invasive species itself,” he said. 

“Without that kind of platform, you’re kind of flying blind.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s climate denial may help a livestock-killing pest make a comeback on May 27, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

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Familia Torres is already installing irrigation at its vineyards in Spain and California and is planting vines on land at higher altitudes as it tries to adapt to more extreme conditions.

“Irrigation is the future. We do not rely on the weather,” said its 83-year-old president, Miguel Torres. “I don’t know how long we can stay here making good wines, maybe 20 or 30 years, I don’t know. Climate change is changing all the circumstances.”

The family business has been making wine in Catalonia since 1870, but Torres said: “In 30 to 50 years’ time, maybe we have to stop viniculture here.

“Tourists are very important for Catalonia and we are very close to Barcelona. This area could be for activity for tourists but viniculture, I don’t think is going to be here.”

The group, which invests 11 percent of its profits every year to combatting and adapting to the climate crisis, may instead have to move at least some of its vineyards “more to the west because it is cooler and we have to have water.”

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Familia Torres has more than 1,000 hectares of vineyards in Catalonia, mainly in the Penedès region, as well as sites in other parts of Spain, Chile, and California.

It is now expanding to higher altitudes, producing grapes in Tremp, in the Catalan Pre-Pyrenees, at 950 meters, and acquiring plots in Benabarre, in the Aragonese Pyrenees, at 1,100 meters, where it is still too cold to grow vines. It is also using a variety of techniques to reduce or reuse water in its growing and processing practices.

That came after the family recorded a 1 degree Celsius rise in the average temperature in the Penedès region over the past 40 years. The change is causing the harvest to take place 10 days earlier than it did a few decades ago, while the family employs a variety of techniques to slow the ripening of the grapes to protect the right qualities for winemaking.

Torres’ comments come after a difficult few years for European vineyards. He said production was down as much as 50 percent in some of the winemaker’s regions in 2023 — “the worst year I have ever seen” — and still down on historic averages last year amid extreme heat and drought.

This year so far has been better — amid winter and spring rains and wider use of irrigation — but Torres said he was concerned that damper conditions bring the threat of mildew.

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“In the future if we want to have more continuity in the harvest we have to stop the warming,” he said. “The warming is killing the trade.”

The additional costs of irrigation are eating into profits in a highly competitive market with potential threats from U.S. import tariffs on top of additional duties imposed on wine in the U.K. in recent years, as well as a new packaging tax that is particularly high for glass bottles and jars.

Torres said exports to the U.K. have fallen by as much as 10 percent and absorbing some of the cost increases has further knocked profits.

“We have no profit in exports to the U.K., that is the reality. Hundreds of thousands of English people come to Spain on holiday and know the brand. We have to keep it alive in the U.K.”

He said Torres was considering bottling some of its cheaper wines in the U.K. in order to reduce cost — as it is less costly to import in bulk in tankers.

“At least by next year we should be already importing that way in the U.K.,” Torres said. “British consumers are paying more for wine and there is not another possibility [to importing]. Production in the U.K. is very little.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Top winemaker ‘may have to leave its Spanish vineyards due to climate crisis’ on May 24, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Sarah Butler, The Guardian.

Familia Torres is already installing irrigation at its vineyards in Spain and California and is planting vines on land at higher altitudes as it tries to adapt to more extreme conditions.

“Irrigation is the future. We do not rely on the weather,” said its 83-year-old president, Miguel Torres. “I don’t know how long we can stay here making good wines, maybe 20 or 30 years, I don’t know. Climate change is changing all the circumstances.”

The family business has been making wine in Catalonia since 1870, but Torres said: “In 30 to 50 years’ time, maybe we have to stop viniculture here.

“Tourists are very important for Catalonia and we are very close to Barcelona. This area could be for activity for tourists but viniculture, I don’t think is going to be here.”

The group, which invests 11 percent of its profits every year to combatting and adapting to the climate crisis, may instead have to move at least some of its vineyards “more to the west because it is cooler and we have to have water.”

Read Next

Mango farms where? Climate change is scrambling where the world’s food is grown.

Ayurella Horn-Muller

Familia Torres has more than 1,000 hectares of vineyards in Catalonia, mainly in the Penedès region, as well as sites in other parts of Spain, Chile, and California.

It is now expanding to higher altitudes, producing grapes in Tremp, in the Catalan Pre-Pyrenees, at 950 meters, and acquiring plots in Benabarre, in the Aragonese Pyrenees, at 1,100 meters, where it is still too cold to grow vines. It is also using a variety of techniques to reduce or reuse water in its growing and processing practices.

That came after the family recorded a 1 degree Celsius rise in the average temperature in the Penedès region over the past 40 years. The change is causing the harvest to take place 10 days earlier than it did a few decades ago, while the family employs a variety of techniques to slow the ripening of the grapes to protect the right qualities for winemaking.

Torres’ comments come after a difficult few years for European vineyards. He said production was down as much as 50 percent in some of the winemaker’s regions in 2023 — “the worst year I have ever seen” — and still down on historic averages last year amid extreme heat and drought.

This year so far has been better — amid winter and spring rains and wider use of irrigation — but Torres said he was concerned that damper conditions bring the threat of mildew.

Read Next

Why chocolate is ridiculously expensive right now

Ayurella Horn-Muller

“In the future if we want to have more continuity in the harvest we have to stop the warming,” he said. “The warming is killing the trade.”

The additional costs of irrigation are eating into profits in a highly competitive market with potential threats from U.S. import tariffs on top of additional duties imposed on wine in the U.K. in recent years, as well as a new packaging tax that is particularly high for glass bottles and jars.

Torres said exports to the U.K. have fallen by as much as 10 percent and absorbing some of the cost increases has further knocked profits.

“We have no profit in exports to the U.K., that is the reality. Hundreds of thousands of English people come to Spain on holiday and know the brand. We have to keep it alive in the U.K.”

He said Torres was considering bottling some of its cheaper wines in the U.K. in order to reduce cost — as it is less costly to import in bulk in tankers.

“At least by next year we should be already importing that way in the U.K.,” Torres said. “British consumers are paying more for wine and there is not another possibility [to importing]. Production in the U.K. is very little.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Top winemaker ‘may have to leave its Spanish vineyards due to climate crisis’ on May 24, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Sarah Butler, The Guardian.

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• House passes Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” of tax breaks for wealthy, cuts to safety-net programs
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• House passes Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” of tax breaks for wealthy, cuts to safety-net programs
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• CA planning lawsuit over Senate vote to repeal California’s vehicle pollution waivers
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• Trump announces plan for $175 billion Golden Dome missile shield
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• Trump announces plan for $175 billion Golden Dome missile shield
• UK, European Union sanction Israel over Gaza, West Bank violence
• Barbara Lee sworn in as Oakland mayor
• World Health Organization adopts world’s first pandemic agreement
• FDA will no longer routinely approve Covid-19 shots for healthy young adults and children

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This story originally appeared in Truthout on May 20, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Thousands of babies in Gaza may die over the next two days if Israel does not lift its near-total humanitarian aid blockade and allow the entry of a flood of food and other basic necessities, the UN’s humanitarian chief warned on Tuesday.

“There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them,” said Tom Fletcher, the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, in an interview on the BBC.

“This is not food that Hamas is going to steal,” Fletcher went on, contradicting Israel’s narrative about humanitarian aid. “We run the risk of looting, we run the risk of being hit as part of the Israeli military offensive, we run all sorts of risks trying to get that baby food to those mothers who cannot feed their children right now because they’re malnourished.”

The interview came after Israel allowed the entry of just five aid trucks into Gaza on Monday — a “drop in the ocean” of what Palestinians need. But any small measure of relief those supplies may bring is moot as even those trucks haven’t reached any Palestinians so far, Fletcher said.

“Let’s be clear, those five trucks are just sat on the other side of the border right now, they’ve not reached the communities they need to reach,” Fletcher said.

Meanwhile, the UN has said that there are thousands of trucks carrying crucial goods like baby food lined up and ready for entry at Gaza’s border, just miles away from the babies Israel is starving.

The UN said that Israel has cleared 100 trucks to enter Gaza on Tuesday — still a far cry from the hundreds of trucks per day that humanitarian groups say are needed to fulfill basic needs and relieve starvation for millions of Palestinians in the Strip.

Though the trucks have theoretically been approved for entry, Israel may still block the trucks from entering the region; indeed, though Fletcher said on Monday that Israel had approved the entry of nine trucks, only five were ultimately allowed in.

The starvation crisis in Gaza is dire, with food insecurity experts warning that the entire region is on the brink of or experiencing famine after nearly three months of Israel’s total aid blockade. It has been over a month since the UN said that its agencies had given out its last food stores in the region, with community kitchens forced to shutter their operations in recent weeks as a result.

Many Palestinians say that the starvation is even worse than Israel’s bombardments, having been starved by varying levels of Israel’s blockade for 19 months and with food costs constantly on the rise. The total aid blockade ushered in the worst conditions of the genocide so far; one Palestinian reporter said in March that children in the region are so hungry that they’re drawing pictures of food in the sand.

The World Food Programme has estimated that there are 14,000 children in Gaza with severe acute malnutrition, a deadly condition marked by a skeletal appearance and extreme weight loss, causing damage that can last a lifetime if untreated. According to an assessment by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, nearly 71,000 children are expected to experience acute malnutrition in the next year due to Israel’s blockade.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Sharon Zhang.

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One of Elon Musk’s employees is earning between $100,001 and $1 million annually as a political adviser to his billionaire boss while simultaneously helping to dismantle the federal agency that regulates two of Musk’s biggest companies, according to court records and a financial disclosure report obtained by ProPublica.

Ethics experts said Christopher Young’s dual role — working for a Musk company as well as the Department of Government Efficiency — likely violates federal conflict-of-interest regulations. Musk has publicly called for the elimination of the agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, arguing that it is “duplicative.’’

Government ethics rules bar employees from doing anything that “would cause a reasonable person to question their impartiality” and are designed to prevent even the appearance of using public office for private gain.

Court records show Young, who works for a Musk company called Europa 100 LLC, was involved in the Trump administration’s efforts to unwind the consumer agency’s operations and fire most of its staff in early February.

Young’s arrangement raises questions of where his loyalty lies, experts said. The dynamic is especially concerning, they said, given that the CFPB — which regulates companies that provide financial services — has jurisdiction over Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, which makes auto loans, and his social media site, X, which announced in January that it was partnering with Visa on mobile payments.

The world’s richest man has in turn made no secret of his desire to do away with the bureau, posting just weeks after Donald Trump’s election victory, “Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.”

“Musk clearly has a conflict of interest and should recuse,” said Claire Finkelstein, who directs the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. “And therefore an employee of his, who is answerable to him on the personal side, outside of government, and who stands to keep his job only if he supports Musk’s personal interests, should not be working for DOGE.”

Young, a 36-year-old Republican consultant, has been active in political circles for years, most recently serving as the campaign treasurer of Musk’s political action committee, helping the tech titan spend more than a quarter billion dollars to help elect Trump.

Before joining Musk’s payroll, he worked as a vice president for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the trade association representing the pharmaceutical industry’s interests, his disclosure shows. He also worked as a field organizer for the Republican National Committee and for former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, the New York Times reported.

Young was appointed a special governmental employee in the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on Jan. 30 and dispatched to work in the CFPB in early February, according to court records and his disclosure form. Someone with his position could be making as much as $190,000 a year in government salary, documents obtained by Bloomberg show. At the same time, Young collects a salary as an employee of Musk’s Texas-based Europa 100 LLC, where, according to his disclosure report, his duties are to “advise political and public policy.”

Beyond that description, it’s not clear what, exactly, Young does at Europa 100 or what the company’s activities are.

It was created in July 2020 by Jared Birchall, a former banker who runs Musk’s family office, Excession LLC, according to state records. The company has been used to pay nannies to at least some of Musk’s children, according to a 2023 tabloid report, and, along with two other Musk entities, to facilitate tens of millions of dollars in campaign transactions, campaign finance reports show.

As a special government employee, Young can maintain outside employment while serving for a limited amount of time. But such government workers are still required to abide by laws and rules governing conflicts of interest and personal and business relationships.

Cynthia Brown, the senior ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the administration to produce a range of public records documenting DOGE’s activities, said that Young’s government work appears to benefit his private sector employer.

“Which hat are you wearing while you’re serving the American people? Are you doing it for the interests of your outside job?” she asked.

In addition to his role at Europa 100, Young reported other ties to Musk’s private businesses. He affirmed in his disclosure form that he will “continue to participate” in a “defined contribution plan” sponsored by Excession, the Musk home office, and that he has served since February as a “vice president” of United States of America Inc., another Musk entity organized by Birchall, where he also advises on “political and public policy,” the records show. While he lists the latter among “sources of compensation exceeding $5,000 in a year,” the exact figure is not disclosed.

Young did not return a call and emails seeking comment. The CFPB, DOGE and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Musk didn’t respond to an email seeking comment, and Birchall didn’t return a call left at a number he lists in public formation records. A lawyer who helped form United States of America Inc. hung up when reached for comment and hasn’t responded to a subsequent message. Asked about how his business interests and government work may intersect, Musk said in a February interview that, “I’ll recuse myself if it is a conflict.”

The revelation of Young’s apparent violation of federal standards of conduct follows a series of ProPublica stories documenting how another DOGE aide helped carry out the administration’s attempts to implement mass layoffs at the CFPB while holding as much as $715,000 in stock that bureau employees are prohibited from owning — actions one expert called a “pretty clear-cut violation” of the federal criminal conflict-of-interest statute. The White House has defended the aide, saying he “did not even manage” the layoffs, “making this entire narrative an outright lie.” A spokesperson also said the aide had until May 8 to divest, though it isn’t clear whether he did and the White House hasn’t answered questions about that. “These allegations are another attempt to diminish DOGE’s critical mission,” the White House said. Following ProPublica’s reporting, the aide’s work at the CFPB ended.

On Monday, a group of 10 good government and consumer advocacy groups, citing ProPublica’s coverage, sent a letter to the acting inspector general of the CFPB, asking him to “swiftly investigate these clear conflicts of interest violations of Trump Administration officials acting in their own personal financial interest.”

ProPublica has identified nearly 90 officials assigned to DOGE, though it’s unclear how many, if any, have potential conflicts. Government agencies have been slow to release financial disclosure forms. But Finkelstein said the cases reported by ProPublica call into question the motivation behind DOGE’s efforts to undo the consumer watchdog agency.

“It matters because it means that the officials who work for the government, who are supposed to be dedicated to the interests of the American people, are not necessarily focused on the good of the country but instead may be focused on the good of themselves, self enrichment, or trying to please their boss by focusing on enriching their bosses and growing their portfolios,” she said.

Unionized CFPB workers have sued the CFPB’s acting director, Russell Vought, to stop his attempts to drastically scale down the bureau’s staff and its operations. Since taking office, the Trump administration has twice attempted to fire nearly all of the agency’s employees, tried canceling nearly all of its contracts and instituted stop-work mandates that have stifled virtually all agency work, including investigations into companies, ProPublica previously reported.

The parties will appear before an appeals court this Friday for oral arguments in a case that will determine just how deeply Vought can cut the agency while still ensuring that it carries out dozens of mandates Congress tasked it with when lawmakers established the bureau in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

The court records produced in the litigation offer a window into the role Young played in gutting the CFPB during the administration’s first attempt to unwind the bureau beginning in early February.

He was dispatched to the CFPB’s headquarters on Feb. 6, just two days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, then the agency’s acting director, told the staff and contractors to stop working. The following day, Young and other DOGE aides were given access to nonclassified CFPB systems, court records show. That same day, Musk posted “CFPB RIP” with a gravestone emoji.

On Feb. 11 and 12, Young was included on emails with top agency officials. One of those messages discussed the cancellation of more than 100 contracts, an act that a contracting officer described in a sworn affidavit as including “all contracts related to enforcement, supervision, external affairs, and consumer response.” Another message involved how to transfer to the Treasury Department some of the more than $3 billion in civil penalties that the bureau has collected from companies to settle consumer protection cases, a move that could deny harmed consumers compensation. A third discussed the terms of an agreement that would allow for the mass layoff of staffers, court records show.

In his financial disclosure form, which he signed on Feb. 15, Young listed his employment by Musk’s Europa 100 as active, beginning in August 2024 through the “present.”

Then, in early March, as the legal fight over the administration’s cuts played out before a federal judge, Young sent the CFPB’s chief operating officer a message about forthcoming firings, known as a “reduction in force,” or RIF, in government parlance. In the email, he asked whether officials were “prepared to implement the RIF” if the judge lifted a temporary stay, according to a March district court opinion that has for the moment stopped most of the administration’s proposed cuts.

In addition to his employment, Young’s disclosure presents another potential conflict.

He also lists owning as much as $15,000 in Amazon stock, a company that is on the bureau’s “Prohibited Holdings” list. Agency employees are forbidden from having such investments, and ethics experts have said that participating in an agency action that could boost the stock’s value — such as stripping the CFPB of its staff — constitutes a violation of the criminal conflict-of-interest statute.

Young hasn’t responded to questions about that either.

Al Shaw contributed reporting and Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jake Pearson.

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Anyone who witnessed or was affected by Baltimore’s failed experiment with zero-tolerance policing during the aughts remembers the unrelenting chaos it created. As reporters working for a newspaper, we witnessed the onslaught of so-called quality of life arrests as a fast-moving crisis that seemed to accelerate with each illegal charge.

The policy was driven by the idea that even the most minor infraction, like drinking a beer on a stoop, was worthy of detainment in the pursuit of stopping more violent crimes. However, it soon spiraled out of control to roughly 100,000 arrests per year between 2000 and 2006. It led to bizarre examples of over-policing, like Gerard Mungo, the seven-year-old boy arrested for sitting on an electric dirt bike, or the incarceration of attendees of an entire cookout over a noise complaint. 

But aside from the individual horror stories of people who ended up in jail without committing a crime, there was something else just as shocking: all of the suffering occurred in a blue city, with little if any political opposition or pushback from the Democratic establishment.  

If you’re skeptical, don’t be. Post 9-11 Democrats wanted to look tough. And they were looking for a political superstar to replace former President Bill Clinton. 

Then-Mayor Martin O’Malley fit the bill. He was a rising political star who the local Democratic establishment believed would eventually ascend to the presidency. Throughout his tenure, he oversaw this policy of mass arrests, hoping the ensuing drop in crime would bolster his future candidacy. Predictably, his presidential aspirations fizzled under the weight of the 2015 uprisings after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, and crime didn’t go down. 

But the results were undeniably horrific: tens of thousands of people placed in cuffs without committing a crime. An authoritarian policy embraced by a Democratic establishment that seemed to have few qualms with allowing police to create untenable conditions within predominantly African-American neighborhoods.

During the zero tolerance heyday, prosecutors were so overwhelmed by the onslaught of detentions that they invented a previously unheard-of legal terminology to address it: ‘abated by arrest.’ It was a legal classification intended to reckon with the fact that there was no legal basis for charging thousands of people police were putting into handcuffs. In other words, the arrest was illegal; prosecutors just invented a way to make it seem less so.  

The city’s Central Booking facility, constructed in the ’90s with the expectation it would process around 40,000 arrests annually, was so overwhelmed that many detainees would be given what was known as a ‘walk through,’ which entailed simply walking in and out of the facility in a long serpentine line guided by corrections personnel. This overcrowding was exacerbated by the jump-out boys, who would arrive in predominantly Black neighborhoods to lead people, whose only crime was living in an area police deemed suitable for mass illegal incarceration, into the back of vans.

The point was, and is, that zero tolerance was, in some sections of Baltimore, worse than authoritarianism—it led to a reconfiguration of the Constitution. People would be illegally detained and then disappear into the Central Booking facility for months without due process. Many victims weI interviewed were often released without charging documents, unable to describe or otherwise recount the crime that had landed them in jail. Baltimore was essentially non-constitutional—a bastion of notably unlawful law enforcement.  

All of this backstory is a prelude to the astonishing and terrifying argument made recently by prominent Johns Hopkins professor of Political Science and Africana Studies Lester Spence. 

Spence is one of a handful of innovative political scientists who examine national politics through the prism of urban governance. He is the author of Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics. In it he argues that cities, once bastions of progressive policymaking, have become laboratories for neoliberalism.  

But Spence has taken this idea one step further by making an argument that makes the Trump administration’s current unconstitutional actions even more terrifying. 

During an interview for the TRNN documentary ‘Freddie Gray: A Decade of Struggle,’  Spence linked the wildly unconstitutional policing that precipitated the uprising to the anti-democratic impulses from the Trump administration that are infiltrating the country’s institutions. 

“To the extent that if you looked at a map of the country and you looked and you layered density and then voted on that map, what you’d see is the most Democratic places are the densest places, and all the rest is red,” Spence explained. 

“Now, if you layer onto those values about democracy, should everybody be able to get a right to vote? Should people accept the results of elections? But then, should people have a right to healthcare? Should people have a right to solid education? Should people have a right to a living wage? All those attitudes are concentrated in metropolitan areas. If you constrain the ability of those spaces to articulate those values and policy, then you constrain the ability to state on one hand… and then the nation-state on the other to actually fight for those values,” he said. 

“So the sort of authoritarianism comes out of the policing and the lack of opportunity and the dysfunction of democracy.”

There are obvious connections that Spence is making here. Illegal arrests have been proven to diminish political participation. Specious criminal charges literally erode the type of citizenship that a democracy depends on.

It estranges, isolates, and otherwise marginalizes entire swathes of a community. Affected residents subsequently cannot access public housing, student loans, or even admission to higher education. All of these factors conclusively diminish the strength and vibrancy of our citizenry, and, as Spence suggests, mute the constituency most likely to advocate for progressive policies. 

But Spence’s idea has even more profound implications if you delve deeper into the history of policing in blue cities like Baltimore. To understand its true significance, just consider a less direct force undermining democracy which is precipitated by Democrats’ commitment to aggressive law enforcement. 

It starts with the conservative narrative of the failed city. 

The so-called failed “Dem-run city” is shorthand for broader attacks on Democratic competence. It boils broader ideas of liberal excesses into simple narratives: The chaotic blue communities are beset by criminals and immigrants. The lawlessness and moral bankruptcy of cities that have run amok. All of it espoused by Republican candidates and right-leaning news media outlets as probable cause to run Democrats out of Washington.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post published daily stories on crime and dysfunction in San Francisco. Similarly, in our own hometown, right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting has touted a ‘City in Crisis’ series that again equates crime to failed Democratic policies and the mayhem they supposedly engender. All of this, manufactured or true, creates a perception that Democrats are wildly incompetent.

That perception gains traction, according to Spence’s idea, because—in some cases—it’s accurate.

That’s because cities under Democratic administrations have invested billions in the ostensibly flawed idea that policing was a key to reducing crime. Just like with zero tolerance in Baltimore, many Democratic mayors and elected officials not just allowed but touted aggressive and illegal policing as a proficient means to an end.

That commitment to a flawed policy has not only led to failure, but has given Republicans plenty of fodder to justify the Trump administration’s authoritarian rule. The easy-to-construct narrative that Democrats can’t and will not impose order and don’t know how to do so has simply made right-wing talking points more salient and appealing.

The irony is, as Spence points out, that blue cities like Baltimore invested massive sums in policing for decades with meager results. Defunding the police has hardly been the problem. Here in Baltimore, for example, public safety spending has outpaced education spending for decades. 

Nevertheless, Baltimore’s recent drop in homicides suggests that all this spending overlooked what appears to be the most effective solution: investment in community-based programs. 

Dayvon Love, public policy director for the Baltimore-based think tank Leaders of Beautiful Struggle, made this point in the same documentary. The Baltimore Police Department, he noted, has been grappling with a historic number of vacancies, fluctuating somewhere between 500 and 1,000 officers. However, even with fewer officers to patrol the streets, violent crime and homicides have dropped significantly. In 2024 homicides dropped to 201, a 20% decrease from the year prior. This year, nonfatal shootings and homicides have continued to fall another 20% to a record low. 

Some have attributed this to a broader national trend towards lower homicide rates. But, as Mayor Brandon Scott recently pointed out, Baltimore has always bucked fluctuations in homicides and violent crime.  

Instead, Scott attributes the drop to the city’s commitment to community-based programs like the Gun Violence Reduction Strategy, which uses a coordinated community-based approach to persuade high-risk residents to get a job rather than commit a crime. The city, with the help of the state of Maryland, has also made historic investments in Safe Streets, a violence interruption program in which former felons mediate disputes before they turn violent. 

All of this points to the fact that Democrats’ past use of aggressive policing has been a boon for Republicans because it was not just the wrong solution, but a prescription for electoral failure as well. Whether or not the Republican depiction of this policy has been fair, the fact remains that Democrats across the country have invested countless billions into authoritarian policing with little impact on crime, and as a result have paved the way for an authoritarian national movement.

If these two trends continue, as Spence suggested is possible, then we are in big trouble. 

Just consider the findings of the Justice Department report that was released after its 2016 investigation into the Baltimore Police Department in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. It found that, among other abuses, police arrested one man 44 times. It also revealed that several extremely poor and mostly African-American neighborhoods were targeted with mass arrests to the point that a person could be detained for simply walking in an area where they did not live.

If that sounds scary, consider the fact that the editor of the paper I worked for was arrested after we published the overtime earnings of all the officers on the force during the zero-tolerance era. Police contrived a crime to effectuate the arrest, accusing him of pointing a shotgun at his neighbors. The case fell apart after his lawyers pointed out that all of this occurred in the privacy of his home and that the aggrieved neighbor had only witnessed the infraction through a shut window. However, that did not stop a cadre of heavily armed officers from dragging him into the same Central Booking facility as the other victims of the city’s mass arrest movement. 

Even more troubling were the sheer numbers of arrests effectuated by a relatively small number of officers. At its peak, BPD had roughly 3,000 sworn cops—and the number of people they managed to arrest was thousands of times greater. Imagine if the vast federal bureaucracy embarked on a similar program of nationwide detentions.

That program is, actually, already happening. The Trump administration has enlisted the FBI and IRS to help arrest immigrants, a task usually outtside their respective purviews. 

The point is, we have witnessed how over-policing changes the contours of government, and if this same mentality pervades the federal institutions and agencies, it will be more terrifying than it’s already been. 

Spence’s insight should be heeded as not just a cautionary tale, but a call to action. Baltimore has made positive changes to commit resources towards a community based approach to crime intervention. The question is, will it be enough?

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Stephen Janis and Taya Graham.

• Bay area childcare providers, parents, allies hold “Day without Childcare” to blast cuts to childcare, Head Start
• Democrats push back after ICE arrest of Newark mayor Baraka at controversial ICE detention center
• Homeless, advocates blast Oakland’s sweep of city’s largest unhoused community
• Governor Newsom urges cities to act swiftly on homelessness – by clearing homeless encampments
• Half a million people in Gaza face starvation between May and September, according to new IPC report
• UN chief Guterres marks Buddhist holiday Wesak, saying Buddha’s teachings of compassion, tolerance and selfless service resonate with UN values

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• Canadian PM Carney tells Trump Canada never for sale as leaders hold first meeting
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• Hamas says will no longer take part in ceasefire talks with Israel, citing “hunger and extermination war” in Gaza
• CSU students hold hunger strike calling for divestment from Israel
• Trump orders halt to US airstrikes on Yemen’s Houthis

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People around the world celebrated May Day, International Workers’ Day, on Thursday, including hundreds of thousands in the United States. Unions and immigrant rights groups led rallies from coast to coast, in every state, with much of their anger directed at the Trump administration.

Workers and activists in New York demanded workers’ rights, freedom for Palestine and protections for immigrants. Democracy Now!’s María Inés Taracena spoke to some of the marchers as they took to the streets.

“It’s just giving me a huge boost of hope that we’re going to get over this authoritarian scheme and we’ll come out on top,” said Barry Knittle, a protester in New York.

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It’s been called the most influential protest you’ve never heard about. 

50,000 people in the streets

Descended on Washington

Day after day of nonviolent protests

Blockading roads 

Shutting down streets

Standing up for one cause: End the war in Vietnam. 

The year was 1971. The height of the war overseas.

Anti-war activists and groups, such as the May Day Collective said they would shut down Washington to demand that the troops be sent home.

That is what president Richard Nixon had promised to do when he took office, but he had only expanded operations in Vietnam.

The name of the protests was a play on words. They would take place around May 1, May Day. 

But the word mayday also means “emergency” or “crisis.”

The first days of protests began in mid-April 

With an occupation of the National Mall by Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

There were marches.

Big marches. Half a million people in the streets.

“Good evening… Marching behind flags and banners and picket signs demanding peace now, at least 200,000 anti-war protesters jammed the streets of Washington today in what was probably the biggest peace demonstration to be held since they began six years ago.”

Tent camps.

The protesters promised to disrupt activity in the city, make it impossible for politics and business to carry on as usual.

To stop government workers from getting to their jobs.

Their slogan: “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.”

Richard Nixon responded with force. 

20,000 police officers, National Guard, US Marines, paratroopers and the calvary. 

One person who participated described it: “As protesters roamed downtown DC, dodging huge tear-gas barrages, they created small barricades, left disabled cars in roadways, or temporarily blocked intersections with mobile sit-ins.”

It was the quote, “Asymmetrical warfare of a guerilla force against a standing army. It was nearly impossible to defend against small decentralized bands who could shift on a dime, tie up police or troops at one spot, and then get to another place before the authorities could adjust.”

“Incredibly, the Supreme Court became involved in the camping permits. the capitol became a stage for guerrilla theater. Labor leaders and suburban mothers marched behind the leadership of hardcore anti-war activists. And thge final stages brought confrontation and vandalism in the name of peace… Every part of Washington seemed to be touched by some aspect of the intense three weeks.” 

But the police cracked down, making arrests, like the city, and the country, had never seen. 

7,000 people arrested in just one day—May 3. 

12,000 people arrested in total that week. 

It was and continues to be the largest mass arrest in the history of the United States.

Amid the dragnet, reporters and non-protesters were also ripped from the streets and locked up.

Protesters filled jails beyond capacity. People were detained in makeshift open-air prisons and in sporting arenas: The Washington Coliseum. The practice field for RFK Stadium.

They were held in deplorable conditions, often without much food, water, or bedding.

And in the end, years later, only a handful of people were convicted. 

The ACLU brought class action lawsuits.

Juries and judges awarded millions to thousands of those who were detained. 

They said their rights to free speech and due process had been violated. 

They said the arrests were unconstitutional.

Even Congress said the police and the federal government were in the wrong.

The US government’s use of preemptive mass arrests has continued as a means to clear streets, regardless if anything illegal has taken place…

…But so have the protests. 

50 years after the end of the Vietnam War, today, people are standing up in defense of Palestine. 

And they, too, have been targeted and detained, without doing anything wrong. For only exercising their First Amendment right to free speech.

And so long as there is injustice, so long as the United States is fueling violence and war abroad, there will be people in the streets.

People who will stand up. 

People who will resist. 

Like those who descended on Washington five decades ago.

On May Day 1971. 

With one demand:

“If the government won’t stop the war, we will stop the government.” 

This is episode 27 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow Michael’s reporting and support at patreon.com/mfox.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

You can check out this excellent short documentary film about the protests:

Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman covered the 50th anniversary of the protests and arrests in 2021:

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

Organizers across the United States are planning a massive day of May Day protests against the Trump administration. Organizers say that they have broad support from groups targeted by the administration, including immigrants, federal workers and more. “Instead of attacking only one community … they are attacking everybody at the same time, and that enabled us to gather a really broad coalition,” says Jorge Mújica, strategic organizer for Arise Chicago.

In New York, organizers are calling on people to march alongside them in Foley Square. “We need to fight this corporate takeover,” says Nisha Tabassum, lead organizer for worker issues at Make the Road New York. “We are the many; they are the few.”

Los Angeles organizers are expecting hundreds of thousands of protesters to join them in opposition to Trump’s policies. “We are taking our power back,” says Georgia Flowers Lee, National Education Association vice president for United Teachers Los Angeles.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The new guard of kleptocrats are seeking quick deals on Gaza and Ukraine, not because they want peace but because they’ve found a better way to make themselves even richer.

Anyone trying to make sense of the Trump administration’s policy towards Gaza should have a thumping headache by now.

Initially, US President Donald Trump called for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the tiny territory wrecked by Israel over the past year and a half, so that he could build the “Riviera of the Middle East” on the crushed bodies of Gaza’s children.

He followed up last week with an explicitly genocidal threat addressed to “the people of Gaza” – all two million-plus of them. They would be “DEAD” if the Israeli hostages held by Hamas were not quickly released – a decision over which Gaza’s population has precisely no control.

To make this extermination threat more credible, his administration has expedited the transfer of an extra $4bn worth of US weapons to Israel, bypassing Congressional approval.

Those arms include more of the 2,000lb bombs sent by the Biden administration, which turned Gaza into a “demolition site“, as Trump himself called it.

The White House also nodded through Israel’s reimposition of a blockade that has once again choked off food, water and fuel to the enclave – further evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent.

But while all this was going on, Trump also dispatched to the region a special envoy, Adam Boehler, to negotiate the release of the few dozen Israeli hostages still held in Gaza.

He was given permission to break with more than 30 years of US foreign policy and meet directly with Hamas, long designated a terrorist organisation by Washington.

‘Pretty nice guys’

The meeting reportedly took place without Israel’s knowledge.

One Israeli official observed: “You can’t announce that this organisation [Hamas] needs to be eliminated and destroyed, and give Israel full backing to do it, and at the same time conduct secret and intimate contacts with the group.”

In an interview with CNN at the weekend, Boehler remarked of Hamas: “They don’t have horns growing out of their head. They’re actually guys like us. They’re pretty nice guys.”

Then, in another unprecedented move, Boehler gave interviews to Israeli TV channels to speak directly to the Israeli public – apparently to prevent Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, from misrepresenting the content of his talks with Hamas.

In one interview, Boehler said Hamas had proposed a five to 10-year truce with Israel. During that period, Hamas would be expected to “lay down its arms” and forgo political power in Gaza. He the proposal as “not a bad first offer”.

In another, he referred to Palestinian prisoners as “hostages”.

His approach left Israel quietly seething but unable to say much for fear of antagonising Trump.

‘No agent of Israel’

In parallel, Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff – who reportedly laid down the law early on to Netanyahu by ordering him to attend a meeting on the Sabbath – headed to Doha this week to try to restore a ceasefire deal he had previously negotiated.

He appears determined to push Israel into honouring the second phase of that agreement, which requires the Israeli army to withdraw from Gaza and halt its war on the enclave. That would pave the way for a third phase, in which Gaza is reconstructed.

Witkoff’s terms, according to reports, are that Hamas agrees to demilitarise and its fighters leave the enclave.

Israel is deeply opposed to a second phase. It wants to stick with phase one, in which it finishes swapping the remaining Israeli captives held by Hamas for some of the many thousands of Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli torture camps.

The idea is that, once completed, Israel will be free to restart the slaughter.

Boehler reinforced Witkoff’s message, saying the White House hoped to “jump-start” talks and that the US was not “an agent of Israel” – implicitly acknowledging that, for many decades, it has very much looked like one.

Trump indicated a change of heart himself on Wednesday, telling reporters at the White House: “Nobody will expel the Palestinians.”

Sword of retribution

Apparently confounding Boehler’s claim that the US is able to make its own decisions about the Middle East, Trump was reported on Thursday to have removed him from dealing with the hostages issue following Israeli objections.

Meanwhile, Trump noisily shredded First Amendment protections on political speech, specifically in relation to Israel.

He signed an executive order empowering US authorities to arrest and deport visa holders protesting Israel’s year-and-a-half-long slaughter in Gaza – or what the world’s highest court is investigating as a “plausible” genocide.

That quickly resulted in the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last spring’s student protests at New York’s Columbia University – one of the most high-profile of dozens of protracted demonstrations on US campuses last year, which were often met with police violence.

The Department of Homeland Security accused Khalil of “activities” – namely, campus protests – supposedly “aligned to Hamas”. These demonstrations, it alleged, threatened “US national security”.

“This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump wrote on social media, declaring that his administration would be coming after anyone “engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”. Axios reported last week that Secretary of State Marco Rubio planned to use AI to search through foreign students’ social media accounts for signs of “terrorist” sympathies.

These developments formalise Washington’s working assumption that any opposition to Israel’s killing and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children should be equated with terrorism – a view increasingly shared, it seems, by UK and European authorities.

In concert, the White House announced that it was cancelling some $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University over its “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”.

Confusingly, the university administration was among the most hardline in calling in police to crush the protests against the genocide. But the financial cuts had the intended effect, with Columbia announcing on Thursday it would inflict stringent punishments, including expulsions and degree revocations, on students and graduates who had taken part in a campus sit-in last year.

Some 60 other institutions have reportedly received letters warning that they are in danger of funding cuts if they do not “protect Jewish students” – a reference to those who cheerlead Israel’s war crimes.

That will come at a heavy price for other students, including many Jewish students, who have been exercising their constitutional right to criticise Israel’s crimes.

A sword of retribution now hangs over every single publicly funded centre of higher learning in the US: crush any sign of opposition to Israel’s destruction of Gaza, or face dire financial consequences.

‘Baffling rhetoric’

Does any of this amount to a clear strategy? Does it make any sense?

These mixed messages fit a pattern with the Trump administration. Its wider strategy is, as Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied territories, calls it: psychological overwhelming.

“Hitting us every day with XXL [extra-extra large] doses of baffling rhetoric and erratic policies serves to ‘control the script’, distracting and disorienting us, normalising the absurd, all while disrupting global stability (and consolidating US control).”

The White House is doing something similar over Ukraine.

It is now talking directly to Russia, shutting the door on Nato membership for Ukraine, publicly humiliating Ukraine’s president, while also threatening more sanctions and tariffs on Moscow unless it agrees to a rapid ceasefire.

The Trump administration’s goal is to normalise its inconsistencies, hypocrisies, lies and misdirections so they become entirely unremarkable.

Opposition to its will – a will that can change from day to day, or week to week – will be treated as treasonous. The only safe response in such circumstances is acquiescence, passivity and silence.

In the tumultuous political landscape Trump has created, the one constant – our North Star – is the western media’s uncritical cheerleading of the West’s war industries.

Consider the Biden administration. The media’s harshest condemnation came not over the destruction Washington wrought on Afghanistan during its 20-year occupation, but for ending the war – a war that had left the country in ruins and the official enemy, the Taliban, stronger than ever.

Contrast that with the media’s resolutely muted response to Biden’s 15 months of arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In doing so, the media eagerly cast aside their supposed humanitarian concerns, including their ritualistic nods to the post-Second World War global order and international law.

Similarly, the media have been openly critical of Trump’s overtures to Russia over Ukraine, siding with European leaders who insist the war must continue to the bitter end – regardless of how much higher the death toll of Ukrainians and Russians climbs as a result.

And predictably, the media have gone out of their way to accommodate Trump’s Israel-supporting, openly genocidal rhetoric and actions towards Gaza.

It was astonishing to watch outlets that regularly portray Trump as a threat to democracy contort themselves to whitewash his explicit call to exterminate “the people of Gaza” should the hostages not be immediately released. Instead, they mendaciously suggested he was referring only to Hamas leadership.

It is not just Trump and his team who are well practised in the dark arts of deception.

Illegitimacy trap

While the Trump administration may be playing fast and loose with Washington’s political culture, it is largely adhering to the West’s traditional script on Israel and Palestine.

Witkoff and Boehler are deploying a well-worn strategy, binding the Palestinians into what could be called an illegitimacy trap. Damned if you do; damned if you don’t.

Whatever Palestinians choose – and however much they are dispossessed and brutalised – it is they, and anyone who supports them, who are cast as the villains. The criminals. The oppressors. The Jew-haters. The terrorists.

This applies not only to Hamas but also to the accommodationists of Fatah.

Faced with relentless dispossession through decades of Israeli colonisation, Palestinian factions have responded in the two main ways available to them.

One is to adopt the course enshrined in international law as the right of all occupied peoples: armed resistance. This is the path Hamas has taken as it governs the concentration camp that is Gaza.

Every US administration, including the current one, however, has conditioned any talks about statehood on Palestinians renouncing armed resistance from the outset, dismissing their right in international law as terrorism.

For that reason, until now, Hamas has always been excluded from negotiations. The talks that have taken place – over its head – have operated on the assumption that Hamas must be disarmed before Israel is expected to make any concessions.

Hamas must relinquish its weapons voluntarily – against an opponent armed to the teeth, whose bad faith in negotiations is legendary – or it will be forcibly disarmed by Israel or its rival, Fatah.

In other words, peace with Israel is premised on civil war for Palestinians.

That appears to be the course the Trump administration will pursue. For now, it is demanding that Hamas “demilitarise” voluntarily. When that fails, Hamas will find itself back at square one.

Endless accommodation

Faced with Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from Gaza, Hamas has precisely no incentive to disarm.

In fact, it has a further disincentive. Its rivals in Fatah are all too visibly caught in their own, even more fatal, illegitimacy trap.

Mahmoud Abbas’s faction, which heads the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, has chosen the alternative to armed resistance: diplomacy and endless political accommodation.

The problem is that Israel has never shown the slightest interest in granting the Palestinians – even Fatah’s “moderates” – a state.

Even during the so-called apex of peacemaking – the Oslo Accords of the 1990s – Palestinian statehood was never mentioned.

Oslo was simply a nebulous process in which Israel was supposed to gradually withdraw from the occupied territories as Palestinian leaders took responsibility for maintaining “security” – meaning, in practice, Israel’s security.

In short, the Oslo concept of “peace” was little different from the catastrophic status quo in Gaza before the genocide began.

During its so-called disengagement in 2005, Israel pulled its soldiers back to a fortified cordon, and from there controlled all movement and trade in and out of the enclave.

In the vacated space, Israel allowed only a glorified local authority, running the schools, emptying the bins and acting as a security contractor for Israel against those not ready to accept this as their permanent fate.

Hamas refused to play ball.

Abbas’s PA, on the other hand, accepted this kind of model for its series of cantons across the West Bank – on the assumption that obedience would eventually pay dividends.

It hasn’t. Now Israel is gearing up to formally annex most of the West Bank, backed by the Trump administration. Behind the scenes, the White House is finagling support from the Gulf states.

Fatah cannot extricate itself any more than Hamas from the illegitimacy trap set for it by Washington and Europe.

Clinging to the old order

Paradoxically, critics in Washington – backed by the media and European elites – dismiss Trump’s moves on Ukraine as appeasement of a supposedly resurgent Russian imperialism, rather than as peacemaking.

These same critics are equally discomfited by the Trump administration’s meetings with Hamas.

All of this breaks with the decades-old Washington consensus, which dictates who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, who are the law enforcers and who are the terrorists.

In typical fashion, Trump is disrupting these former certainties.

The reassuring, knee-jerk response is to take one side or another. Either Trump is a mould-breaker, remaking a dysfunctional world order. Or he is a fascist-in-the-making, who will hasten the collapse of the established world order, bringing it crashing down on our heads.

The truth is he is both.

There is a consistency to Trump’s approach to both Ukraine and Gaza – despite the apparent contradiction. In both he appears determined to bring to an end a failing status quo. In the former, he wants an end to war and destruction by forcing Ukraine’s surrender; in the latter, he wants the running sore of a Palestinian concentration camp gone by forcibly emptying it of its inhabitants.

This new consistency replaces an older one, in which Washington’s elite perpetuated forever wars against painted devils that justified the siphoning of national wealth into the coffers of the war industries on which that elite’s wealth depended.

The pretexts for those forever wars had become so threadbare, and so destabilising in a world of ever-depleting resources, that the elites behind those wars were utterly discredited.

The far-right, most especially Trump, is riding that wave of disillusionment. And its success stems precisely from this rule-breaking, by presenting itself as a new broom sweeping away the old guard of corporate war-makers.

As the Bidens, Starmers, Macrons, and Von der Leyens sink deeper into the mire, the more desperately they cling to a crumbling system. Trump’s disruption works against them.

Feathering their nests

But the new guard is no more invested in peace than the old, as Gaza makes clear. It is simply looking for new ways to do business – new deals that still siphon national wealth away from ordinary people and into the pockets of billionaires.

Trump would rather strike lucrative deals with Russia’s Vladimir Putin over resources – in both Russia and Ukraine – than sink more money into a futile war that locks up the region’s vast potential profits.

And he would rather put an end to Gaza’s decades-long status as a no-go zone, a holding centre for Palestinians, when it could instead be transformed into a playground for the rich, its vast offshore gas reserves finally exploited.

The new guard of kleptocrats is less interested in forever wars – not because they have any love for peace, but because they believe they’ve found a better way to make themselves even richer.

This newfound openness to “doing things differently” has an appeal, especially after decades of the same cynical elites waging the same cynical wars.

But make no mistake: the fundamentals remain unchanged. The rich are still looking out for themselves. They are still feathering their own nests, not yours. They still see the world as their plaything, where lesser humans – you and me – are expendable.

If he can, Trump will end the war in Ukraine by cutting a money-making deal, over Kyiv’s head, with Russia.

If he can, Trump will end the slaughter in Gaza by striking a deal with Israel and the Gulf states, over the heads of Hamas and Fatah, to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their homeland.

And if he can get away with it, Trump is ready for something else, too. He’s prepared to break heads at home to ensure his critics can’t stop him and his billionaire pals from getting their way.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

During the Cold War and in the Vietnam era, the Supreme Court’s decisions favored the free speech rights stipulated in the First Amendment over the view that some speech represented a crime if it compromised the national security interests of the United States.  In the seminal Pentagon Papers case, involving a secret history of the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court blocked the Nixon administration’s efforts in1971 to stop the New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing the papers.  The court didn’t buy the government’s warnings that publishing would imperil intelligence agents and peace talks.  Indeed, the Court defended the First Amendment’s right of free press against prior restraint by the government.

In 2010, when liberal jurist Elena Kagan was the solicitor general in the Obama administration, she successfully argued that the courts needed to defer to the government’s assessments of national security threats.  Only several months before she was appointed to the court, the Supreme Court in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project had ruled in favor of Kagan and the Obama administration that it was a crime to provide “even benign assistance in the form of speech of groups said to engage in terrorism.”  Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court were willing to defer to the government, whereas earlier courts had been skeptical about limiting the free speech rights of the First Amendment.

Robert Reich and the mainstream media believe that the Supreme Court’s unanimous 9-0 decision that refused to block a lower court’s order to “facilitate” bringing back Abrego Garcia would ultimately lead the Court to stop Trump’s efforts to keep Abrego Garcia in the notorious Cecot prison in El Salvador.  My concern is that the Trump administration is basing its case on the Constitution’s provision that the “president, not federal district courts,” are charged with the “conduct of foreign diplomacy, and protecting the nation against foreign terrorists, including by effectuating their removal.”

The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, issued its decision in an unsigned order, refusing to give the Trump administration a deadline for when Abrego Garcia should be freed.  Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with deputy chief of staff Steve Miller and Attorney General Pam Bondi, hewed to Trump’s party line, insisting that “no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.”

Trump’s Department of Justice concluded that the Supreme Court “correctly recognized it is the exclusive prerogative of the president to conduct foreign affairs.”  It is additionally troubling that last year the Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed by a president within his core constitutional purview and for official acts within his official responsibility.  This decision poses a risk to our system of governance, forfeiting critical checks on executive power.

The court’s majority claimed that its ruling restored the Founding Father’s designs for an “energetic executive,” but in doing so the conservative majority essentially invited a future president to use the levers of the federal government to commit crimes.  It is possible the Supreme Court will give deference to the “core executive functions” of the president in cases that involve foreign affairs, national security, terrorism, and national emergencies.  I would expect the Trump administration to argue the Abrego Garcia case on the basis of any, even all, of these “core executive functions.”

It was this kind of behavior by a future president, who could become a future tyrant, that led George Washington and Alexander Hamilton to warn against leaders who are mad for power, which represents a mortal threat to democracy.  Tom Nichols, a staff writer at the Atlantic, wrote recently that “Trump is the man the Founders feared might arise from a mire of populism and ignorance, a selfish demagogue who would stop at nothing to gain and keep power.”  Washington, in his farewell address, warned that “sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction” would manipulate the public’s emotions and their partisan loyalties “to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”

It is particularly bizarre that two of the most powerful and authoritarian presidents in the world–Donald Trump and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele–could sit in the Oval Office of the White House and argue with straight faces that they have no power to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an innocent man, to his home in Maryland.  Duke law professor Marin Levy noted that “It is alarming that we are even having to ask whether the government is failing to comply with court orders.”

The post Why the Supreme Court May Ultimately Side With Trump in the Abrego Garcia Case appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mel Goodman.

As many as 12,000 North Korean soldiers are in Russia, according to Ukraine and the United States, to fight Ukrainian forces who occupied parts of Russia’s Kursk region in an August counter offensive. Neither North Korea nor Russia have acknowledged their presence.

“Russia plans to use the DPRK soldiers for war on the territory of Ukraine,” said Andrei Kovalenko, head of the National Security Service’s Center for Countering Disinformation.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK, is North Korea’s official name.

“But the Russians will manipulate and indicate that the North Korean soldiers are fighting on Russian territory by the Russian Constitution,” he said in a post on the Telegram messaging app on Tuesday.

Russia annexed four Ukrainian regions – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson – after holding widely condemned referendums in September 2022. Kovalenko suggested that these occupied territories are the most likely destinations for North Korean troops.

The international community has not recognized Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian land and fierce fighting continues as Ukraine pushes back in those areas.

Kovalenko said Russia is also importing labor from North Korea, mainly young people aged 18-25, for industrial work. In return, the North Korean authorities receive US$1,000 per person from Russia.

Radio Free Asia has not independently verified his claims.

South Korea’s main spy agency reported in October that Russia would pay North Korean troops about US$2,000 per month each, although it was likely that most of the money would “remain with the state.”

Kovalenko’s remarks came amid reports that Russian artillery units were relying almost entirely on ammunition supplied by North Korea to sustain their bombardments along the Ukrainian front.

Between September 2023 and March 2025, four Russian-flagged vessels made 64 trips transporting nearly 16,000 containers from North Korea to Russian ports, according to satellite data analysed by the U.K.-based Open Source Centre. The shipments are estimated to have included between 4 million and 6 million artillery shells.

By comparison, Russia is believed to have produced no more than 2.3 million artillery shells domestically in 2024, according to Ukrainian and Western officials.

Although the Kremlin denied any arms transfers from North Korea in October 2023, at least six Russian artillery unit reports reviewed by Reuters news agency confirmed that between 50% and 100% of the munitions used in Ukraine this year were of North Korean origin. Three other unit reports made no mention of North Korean ammunition.

North Korea and Russia have been deepening their military and economic ties in recent months, with Pyongyang reportedly supplying Moscow with large quantities of munitions and other military aid for its war in Ukraine.

In return, Russia has provided technological assistance and expanded cooperation in various sectors, fueling concerns over potential arms transfers and security threats.

High-level meetings between officials from both countries, including defense ministers, have signaled a growing strategic partnership.

Edited by Mike Firn and Stephen Wright.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Taejun Kang for RFA.

Yangshan containership terminal. Photo: Bruno Corpet (Quoique). CC BY-SA 3.0

When Donald Trump pulled back on his plan to impose eye-watering tariffs on trading partners across the world, there was one key exception: China.

While the rest of the world would be given a 90-day reprieve on additional duties beyond the new 10% tariffs on all U.S. trade partners, China would feel the squeeze even more. On April 9, 2025, Trump raised the tariff on Chinese goods to 125% – bringing the total U.S. tariff on some Chinese imports to 145%.

The move, in Trump’s telling, was prompted by Beijing’s “lack of respect for global markets.” But the U.S. president may well have been smarting from Beijing’s apparent willingness to confront U.S. tariffs head on.

While many countries opted not to retaliate against Trump’s now-delayed reciprocal tariff hikes, instead favoring negotiation and dialogue, Beijing took a different tack. It responded with swift and firm countermeasures. On April 11, China dismissed Trump’s moves as a “joke” and raised its own tariff against the U.S. to 125%.

The two economies are now locked in an all-out, high-intensity trade standoff. And China is showing no signs of backing down.

And as an expert on U.S.-China relations, I wouldn’t expect China to. Unlike the first U.S.-China trade war during Trump’s initial term, when Beijing eagerly sought to negotiate with the U.S., China now holds far more leverage.

Indeed, Beijing believes it can inflict at least as much damage on the U.S. as vice versa, while at the same time expanding its global position.

A changed calculus for China

There’s no doubt that the consequences of tariffs are severe for China’s export-oriented manufacturers – especially those in the coastal regions producing furniture, clothing, toys and home appliances for American consumers.

But since Trump first launched a tariff increase on China in 2018, a number of underlying economic factors have significantly shifted Beijing’s calculus.

Crucially, the importance of the U.S. market to China’s export-driven economy has declined significantly. In 2018, at the start of the first trade war, U.S.-bound exports accounted for 19.8% of China’s total exports. In 2023, that figure had fallen to 12.8%. The tariffs may further prompt China to accelerate its “domestic demand expansion” strategy, unleashing the spending power of its consumers and strengthening its domestic economy.

And while China entered the 2018 trade war in a phase of strong economic growth, the current situation is quite different. Sluggish real estate markets, capital flight and Western “decoupling” have pushed the Chinese economy into a period of persistent slowdown.

Perhaps counterintuitively, this prolonged downturn may have made the Chinese economy more resilient to shocks. It has pushed businesses and policymakers to come to factor in the existing harsh economic realities, even before the impact of Trump’s tariffs.

Trump’s tariff policy against China may also allow Beijing a useful external scapegoat, allowing it to rally public sentiment and shift blame for the economic slowdown onto U.S. aggression.

China also understands that the U.S. cannot easily replace its dependency on Chinese goods, particularly through its supply chains. While direct U.S. imports from China have decreased, many goods now imported from third countries still rely on Chinese-made components or raw materials.

By 2022, the U.S. relied on China for 532 key product categories – nearly four times the level in 2000 – while China’s reliance on U.S. products was cut by half in the same period.

There’s a related public opinion calculation: Rising tariffs are expected to drive up prices, something that could stir discontent among American consumers, particularly blue-collar voters. Indeed, Beijing believes Trump’s tariffs risk pushing the previously strong U.S. economy toward a recession.

Potent tools for retaliation

Alongside the changed economic environments, China also holds a number of strategic tools for retaliation against the U.S.

It dominates the global rare earth supply chain – critical to military and high-tech industries – supplying roughly 72% of U.S. rare earth imports, by some estimates. On March 4, China placed 15 American entities on its export control list, followed by another 12 on April 9. Many were U.S. defense contractors or high-tech firms reliant on rare earth elements for their products.

China also retains the ability to target key U.S. agricultural export sectors such as poultry and soybeans – industries heavily dependent on Chinese demand and concentrated in Republican-leaning states. China accounts for about half of U.S. soybean exports and nearly 10% of American poultry exports. On March 4, Beijing revoked import approvals for three major U.S. soybean exporters.

And on the tech side, many U.S. companies – such as Apple and Tesla – remain deeply tied to Chinese manufacturing. Tariffs threaten to shrink their profit margins significantly, something Beijing believes can be used as a source of leverage against the Trump administration. Already, Beijing is reportedly planning to strike back through regulatory pressure on U.S. companies operating in China.

Meanwhile, the fact that Elon Musk, a senior Trump insider who has clashed with U.S. trade adviser Peter Navarro against tariffs, has major business interests in China is a particularly strong wedge that Beijing could yet exploit in an attempt to divide the Trump administration. A strategic opening for China?

While Beijing thinks it can weather Trump’s sweeping tariffs on a bilateral basis, it also believes the U.S. broadside against its own trading partners has created a generational strategic opportunity to displace American hegemony.

Close to home, this shift could significantly reshape the geopolitical landscape of East Asia. Already on March 30 – after Trump had first raised tariffs on Beijing – China, Japan and South Korea hosted their first economic dialogue in five years and pledged to advance a trilateral free trade agreement. The move was particularly remarkable given how carefully the U.S. had worked to cultivate its Japanese and South Korean allies during the Biden administration as part of its strategy to counter Chinese regional influence. From Beijing’s perspective, Trump’s actions offer an opportunity to directly erode U.S. sway in the Indo-Pacific.

Similarly, Trump’s steep tariffs on Southeast Asian countries, which were also a major strategic regional priority during the Biden administration, may push those nations closer to China. Chinese state media announced on April 11 that President Xi Jinping will pay state visits to Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia from April 14-18, aiming to deepen “all-round cooperation” with neighboring countries. Notably, all three Southeast Asian nations were targeted with now-paused reciprocal tariffs by the Trump administration – 49% on Cambodian goods, 46% on Vietnamese exports and 24% on products from Malaysia.

Farther away from China lies an even more promising strategic opportunity. Trump’s tariff strategy has already prompted China and officials from the European Union to contemplate strengthening their own previously strained trade ties, something that could weaken the transatlantic alliance that had sought to decouple from China.

On April 8, the president of the European Commission held a call with China’s premier, during which both sides jointly condemned U.S. trade protectionism and advocated for free and open trade. Coincidentally, on April 9, the day China raised tariffs on U.S. goods to 84%, the EU also announced its first wave of retaliatory measures – imposing a 25% tariff on selected U.S. imports worth over €20 billion – but delayed implementation following Trump’s 90-day pause.

Now, EU and Chinese officials are holding talks over existing trade barriers and considering a full-fledged summit in China in July.

Finally, China sees in Trump’s tariff policy a potential weakening of the international standing of the U.S. dollar. Widespread tariffs imposed on multiple countries have shaken investor confidence in the U.S. economy, contributing to a decline in the dollar’s value.

Traditionally, the dollar and U.S. Treasury bonds have been viewed as haven assets, but recent market turmoil has cast doubt on that status. At the same time, steep tariffs have raised concerns about the health of the U.S. economy and the sustainability of its debt, undermining trust in both the dollar and U.S. Treasurys.

While Trump’s tariffs will inevitably hurt parts of the Chinese economy, Beijing appears to have far more cards to play this time around. It has the tools to inflict meaningful damage on U.S. interests – and perhaps more importantly, Trump’s all-out tariff war is providing China with a rare and unprecedented strategic opportunity.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post In Trade War With the US, China Holds a Lot More Cards Than Trump May Think − In Fact, It Might Have a Winning hand appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Linggong Kong.

The leviathan has been heard many times since, but never seen. Some suspect it might have some deformation that alters its voice. Others think it might simply exhibit a highly unusual vocalization — a tenor among baritones. But Marine biologist John Calambokidis of Cascadia Research Collective suggests another possibility: “The loneliest whale,” so named because there may be no one to respond to its unique call, may not be an anomaly, but a clue.

Calambokidis, who has spent more than 50 years studying cetaceans, suspects Whale 52 may be a hybrid: Part blue whale, part fin whale.

Such a creature, often called a flue whale, is growing more common as warming seas push blues into new breeding grounds, where they are increasingly likely to mate with their fin relatives. A survey of north Atlantic blues published last year found that fin whale DNA comprised as much as 3.5 percent of their genome, a striking figure given the two species diverged 8.35 million years ago. If Whale 52 is indeed a hybrid, its presence suggests genetic intermingling among Balaenoptera musculus, as blues are known among scientists, and Balaenoptera physalus has been occurring for decades, if not longer. The North Atlantic findings suggest it is accelerating.

Cetacean interbreeding has been documented before, notably among narwhals and belugas and between two species of pilot whales, combinations attributed largely to warming seas pushing these animals into new territory and closer proximity. But hybridization has been more closely studied among terrestrial creatures like the pizzly bears born of grizzlies and polar bears. It is scarcely understood in marine mammals, and little is known about what intermingling will mean for the genetics, behavior, and survival of the largest animal to have ever lived.

“Blue whales are still struggling to recover from centuries of whaling, with some populations remaining at less than 5 percent of their historical numbers,” Calambokidis said. While the number of confirmed hybrids remains low, continued habitat disruption could make them more common, eroding their genetic diversity and reducing the resilience of struggling populations.

Before the arrival of genomics 30 years ago, marine biologists identified hybrids primarily through morphology, or the study of physical traits. If an animal displayed the features of two species — the dappled skin of a narwhal and stout body of a beluga, for example — it might be labeled a hybrid based on external characteristics or skeletal measurements. Anecdotal evidence might also play a role: Historical whaling logs suggest blues and fins occasionally interbred, though such pairings went largely unconfirmed. But morphology can, at best, only reveal the first-generation offspring of two distinct species.

By analyzing DNA, marine biologists like Aimee Lang can now identify intermingling that occurred generations ago, uncovering a far more complex history than was previously understood. This new level of detail complicates the picture: Are flues becoming more common, or are researchers simply better equipped to find them? As scientists probe the genetic signatures of whales worldwide, they hope to distinguish whether hybridization is an emerging trend driven by climate change, or a long-standing, overlooked facet of cetacean evolution.

In any case, some marine biologists find the phenomenon worrisome because flues are largely incapable of reproducing. Although some females are fertile, males tend to be sterile. These hybrids represent a small fraction of the world’s blue whales — of which no more than 25,000 remain — but the lopsided population of the two species suggests they will increase. There are four times as many fins as blues worldwide, and an estimate of the waters around Iceland found 37,000 fins to 3,000 blues. 

“Three thousand is not a very high density of animals,” said Lang, who studies marine mammal genetics at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “So you can imagine if a female blue is looking for a mate and she can’t find a blue whale but there’s fin whales all over the place, she’ll choose one of them.”

This has profound implications for conservation. If hybrids are not easily identifiable, it could lead to inaccurate estimates of the blue whale population and difficulty assessing the efficacy of conservation programs. More troubling, sterile animals cannot contribute to the survival of their species. Simply put, hybridization presents a threat to their long-term viability.

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“If it becomes frequent enough, hybrid genomes could eventually swamp out the true blue whale genomes,” Lang said. “It could be that hybrids are not as well adapted to the environment as a purebred blue or fin, meaning that whatever offspring are produced are evolutionary dead ends.”

This could have consequences for entire ecosystems. Each whale species plays a specific role in ensuring marine ecosystem health by, say, managing krill populations or providing essential nutrients like iron. Hybrids that don’t play the role evolution has assigned to them undermine this symbiotic relationship with the sea. “Those individuals and their offspring aren’t fully filling the ecological niche of either parent species,” Calambokidis said.

All of this adds to the uncertainty wrought by the upheavals already underway. Many marine ecosystems are experiencing regime shifts — abrupt and often irreversible changes in structure and function — driven by warming waters, acidification, and shifting prey distributions. These alterations are pushing some cetacean species into smaller, more isolated breeding pools.

There is reason for concern beyond blue whales. Rampant interbreeding among the 76 orcas of the genetically distinct and critically endangered Southern Resident killer whale population of the Pacific Northwest is cutting their lifespans nearly in half, by placing them at greater risk of harmful genetic traits, weakened immune systems, reduced fertility, and higher calf mortality. Tahlequah, the southern resident orca who became known around the world in 2018 for carrying her dead calf for 17 days, lost another one in January. The 370 or so North Atlantic right whales that still remain may face similar challenges.

Some level of cetacean interbreeding and hybridization may be inevitable as species adapt to climate change. Some of it may prove beneficial. The real concern is whether these changes will outpace whales’ ability to survive. Flue whales may be an anomaly, but their existence is a symptom of broader, anthropogenic disruptions. 

“There are examples of populations that are doing well, even though they have low genetic diversity, and there are examples where they aren’t doing well,” said Vania Rivera Leon, who researches population genetics at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts. “They might be all right under current conditions, but if and when the conditions shift more, that could flip.”

“The effect could be what we call a bottleneck,” she added. “A complete loss of genetic diversity.”

These changes often unfold too gradually for humans to perceive quickly. Unlike fish, which have rapid life cycles and clear population booms or crashes, whales live for decades, with overlapping generations that obscure immediate trends. There have only been about 30 whale generations since whaling largely ceased. To truly grasp how these pressures are shaping whale populations, researchers may need twice that long to uncover what is happening beneath the waves and what, if anything, Whale 52 might be saying about it.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What ‘the world’s loneliest whale’ may be telling us about climate change on Apr 2, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Avery Schuyler Nunn.

Jill Falcon Ramaker couldn’t believe what she was hearing on the video call. All $5 million dollars of her and her colleagues’ food sovereignty grants were frozen. She watched the faces of her colleagues drop.

Ramaker is Turtle Mountain Anishinaabe and the director of Buffalo Nations Food Sovereignty at Montana State University – a program that supports Indigenous foodways in the Rocky Mountains and trains food systems professionals – and is supported by the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA. 

“The funding that we had for training and infrastructure leading to raising our own foods that are healthy and not highly processed and culturally appropriate, has stopped.” Ramaker said. “We don’t have any information on when, or if, it will resume.”

In his first two months in office, President Trump has signed over 100 executive orders, many specifically targeting grants for termination that engage with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and climate-related projects associated with the Inflation Reduction Act. Climate change destroys the places and practices central to Indigenous peoples in the United States, and is exacerbated by droughts and floods that also affect foods essential to Native cultures. Food sovereignty programs play a crucial role in fighting the effects of climate change by creating access to locally grown fruits, vegetables, and animal products.

 “It feels like we’re just getting started in so many ways,” Ramaker said. 

The funding freeze from the USDA is sending shockwaves throughout the nation’s agriculture sector, but their effect on tribal food initiatives raises even larger questions about what the federal government’s commitments are to Indigenous nations. That commitment, known as the federal Indian trust responsibility, is a legally enforceable obligation by the federal government to protect Indigenous lands, assets, resources and rights. It is grounded in treaties made with Indigenous nations in exchange for the vast tracts of land that allowed America to expand westward. 

“That general trust responsibility I think absolutely encompasses food sovereignty and tribes ability to cultivate their lands,” said Diné attorney Heather Tanana at the University of California Irvine.

As the U.S. gained territory in the 19th century, Indigenous nations were largely successful at resisting incursions by settlers. Because tribes were typically more powerful, militarily, then American forces, federal officials turned to peace treaties with tribes. Often, these treaties signed away large areas of territory but reserved certain areas for tribal use, now known as federal Indian reservations, in exchange for guarantees like medical aid, protection, and food. Some tribes specifically negotiated to preserve traditional food practices in their treaty rights. Examples include the right to hunt in the Fort Bridger Treaty for tribes in the mountain west, the right to fish in the Medicine Creek Treaty in the pacific northwest, and the right to gather plant medicines. 

“It would be odd not to consider the federal responsibility of including food security along with water access and healthcare services,” Tanana said. 

But the United States has failed to uphold those obligations, taking land and then ignoring legal responsibilities, including provisions for food and sustenance. Hunting, fishing and gathering rights weren’t upheld and in the mid-1800s rations designed to replace traditional foods that were delivered to reservations were “low cost and shelf-stable” while many arrived to reservations rotten. Combined with federal policies that prevented tribal citizens from leaving their reservations to hunt and gather, malnutrition was widespread. For instance, a quarter of those on the Blackfoot reservation in Montana died of starvation in the winter of 1884. 

In 1974, the USDA began its Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations. The monthly package of foods like flour, beef, and coffee, colloquially known as “commodities” or “commods,” was meant to provide Indigenous households with breads, fats, and sugars. But many of the foods provided by the USDA were, and remain, low in nutritional value, contributing to high rates of obesity-related diseases and other health issues. In 2023, around 50,000 Indigenous people per month accessed the program. 

“That’s what we are trying to address with Buffalo Nations,” Jill Falcon Ramaker said. “Our communities have gone through a lot.” 

Montana’s reservations continue to be hit hard by lack of healthy foods, and roughly 25 percent of Indigenous people face food insecurity.

Last year the Biden administration announced new initiatives aimed at strengthening tribal food sovereignty. This included funding meat processing facilities, support for Indigenous children’s nutrition in schools, and food and agriculture internships for those in higher education. The administration’s goal was to directly address the adverse effects of climate change on Indigenous peoples, as tribes are often “disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.”

However, it’s unclear just how many programs the Biden administration funded or how much money went to those efforts. A request to the USDA for a list of food sovereignty grants was not answered. 

“USDA is reviewing the programs for which payments have been on hold to ensure they align with the Department’s goals and priorities,” a spokesperson said in an email statement. “Secretary Rollins understands that farmers and ranchers, and other grant-funded entities that serve them, have made decisions based on these funding opportunities, and that some have been waiting on payments during this government-wide review. She is working to make determinations as quickly as possible.” 

Earlier this month, the Pueblo of Iseta, Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, and Cheyenne Arapaho Tribes along with five Indigenous students sued the Trump administration for violation of trust and treaty responsibilities after cutting funding to the Bureau of Indian Education. The cuts resulted in staff reductions at tribal colleges like Haskell Indian Nations University and Southwestern Polytechnic Institute and the lawsuit alleges that the move is a violation of federal trust obligations.

“Tribes have not historically had a good experience hearing from the government,” said Carly Griffith Hotvedt, an attorney and director of the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative and member of the Cherokee Nation. “That doesn’t always work out for us.” 

Hotvedt added the way the Trump administration is playing whack-a-mole with funding tribal food programs will continue to erode the little trust Indian country has in the federal government. 

In Montana, Jill Ramaker said Buffalo Nations had planned to build a Food Laboratory in partnership with local tribes. The project would have developed infrastructure and research for plains Indigenous food systems. That plan is now permanently on hold for the foreseeable future.

“We are used to and good at adapting,” said Ramaker. “But it’s going to come at a tremendous cost in our communities.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Trump’s funding freeze for Indigenous food programs may violate treaty law on Mar 31, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Taylar Dawn Stagner.

He stood up against genocide. 

And for this, he was ambushed at his home, abducted, and arrested. Arrested without cause. Arrested without a warrant. By plainclothes officers who refused to give their names.

Just handcuffed and shoved into the back of a car, while his wife — eight months pregnant — watches and tries to understand what’s happening.

This is not a scene from some dark chapter of a distant past filled with black-and-white photos of bygone dictatorships. This happened here, in the United States of America, in March of this year. It’s happening here right now. 

Mahmoud Khalil was a graduate student at Columbia University last year when he led protests against Israel’s US-backed Occupation of historic Palestine and genocidal slaughter of Palestinians. 

But now, speaking out carries a high price.

And free speech is no longer so free.

Mahmoud Khalil is a U.S. resident, born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. But Trump officials say they’ve striped him of his Green Card, and they’re holding him in an ICE jail in Louisiana… far from his home in New York. Far from his wife. Unable to communicate with his lawyers or the outside world for days after his illegal abduction.

But Mahmoud Khalil is, still, not silent.

And he is not alone. 

As he stood up for the Palestinians facing Israeli bombs and the barrels of their guns, others are standing up for Khalil. People have rallied for his freedom. Hundreds. Thousands.

From New York City to Boston. Phoenix to Miami. North Carolina to Oklahoma City. Jewish peace activists protested inside Trump Tower. The people will not be silent as the powerful try to silence the people’s freedom to speak.

To be willingly silent now will mean more unwilling silence later. 

Because, as we’re already seeing, Mahmoud Khalil is only the first of many. The first of many to be detained. The first of many to be silenced. For themselves standing against occupation and violence. Or even standing next to those who do.

But the people will not be quiet.

Not in the 1960s, denouncing the war in Vietnam.

Not in the 1980s, against the war in Nicaragua.

Not in the 2020s, against the war in Palestine.

And not now… 

In defense of those standing up for what’s right and for their rights.

In defense of the people’s inalienable right to speak up and speak freely.

In defense of life and those who fight for peace. 

In defense of Mahmoud Khalil. 

On March 8, 2025, ICE agents detained, without a warrant, Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil at his home in New York City. Khalil is a US resident, but Trump officials said they’d stripped him of his green card. His crime? Standing up and speaking out against the US-backed Israeli attack on Palestine. As a graduate student at Columbia University last year, he helped to lead protests against Israeli genocide in Gaza.

And just as he stood up for the Palestinians, others are standing up for Khalil. People have rallied for his freedom across the country.

Folksinger David Rovics latest song is called Mahmoud Khalil, you can listen to it here. You can check out and subscribe to Rovics’ Substack, here, and sign up for his podcast on Spotify. 

This is episode 13 of Stories of Resistance—a new podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

You can see his exclusive pictures of many of the episodes and support Stories of Resistance at www.patreon.com/mfox.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

While I have tried to limit them as much as possible, these reviews may contain spoilers.

The East, directed by Zal Batmanglij; starring Brit Marling, Alexander Skarsgård, and Elliot Page (2013)

The East tells the gripping story of Jane, a young woman (played by Brit Marling) who is employed at a private intelligence company, and who is awarded the sought-after assignment of infiltrating a radical environmental organization called The East. Like many Americans who have “good jobs,” Jane is zealously devoted to her career and devoid of a moral compass. Her unbridled ambition is on full display when Jane is told by her boyfriend that she’s still a winner to him if she doesn’t get this coveted commission (the details of which are unbeknownst to him), to which she responds, “I’m only a winner if I get it.”

When Jane infiltrates the group, which she is able to do because of her youth and because of certain strategies she employs to gain the group’s trust, she realizes that she is unable to intellectually counter any of their arguments regarding ecological degradation caused by unfettered corporate power. Indeed, Jane is a conformist, and like many highly credentialed Americans has never learned to think for herself. This raises the possibility of her potentially becoming a double agent.

The environmentalists are exquisitely cast, and the leaders of the group possess remarkable depth. They are also well educated, having come from privileged families and having attended elite schools. Their dilemma is that they have managed to retain firm moral convictions making them unemployable.

In a more democratic and civilized society, the leaders of The East would likely hold positions of power and influence. Instead, they live as outcasts. The time Jane spends with the radical collective forces her to reexamine her preconceived understanding of success. Is true success possible without principles and ideals?

The two worlds Jane navigates, the ruthless corporate world of violence and skulduggery and an America enraged at corporate malfeasance, shake the foundation of her identity and sense of reality. The East’s methods for combatting corporate villainy – actions they call “jams” – are extreme and of dubious legality, further straining the protagonist’s sense of right and wrong. What happens to the rule of law when what is legal and what is moral no longer coincide?

Having never spent time around articulate people who value honor over money (in stark contrast with her pitiless boss and hard-driving colleagues), the time Jane spends with the collective catapults her into an existential crisis where her value system is upended and she is forced to make extremely difficult and life-altering choices.

Wendy and Lucy, directed by Kelly Reichardt; starring Michelle Williams (2008)

No film in the post-New Deal era embodies the tragic destruction of the American working class more than Wendy and Lucy. In this harsh world millions have been left without jobs, health insurance; or in the case of the film’s protagonist, Wendy, even a family member to crash with.

Caught up in a tempest of economic devastation, Wendy is left with nothing except a few hundred dollars, a jalopy which serves both as makeshift home and means of transportation, and her beloved dog Lucy – her only companion.

The grave circumstances of her situation are tragic and soulful cinema viewers will all feel a deep sense of compassion for her increasingly dire situation. As she passes through flyover country the lack of communities and economic life almost resemble that of a post-apocalyptic tale. Deindustrialization, the outsourcing and offshoring of countless jobs, and the financialization of the economy have cut millions of Americans adrift, of whom our suffering protagonist is one.

Wendy and Lucy is the antithesis of mass market Hollywood cinema where everyone seems to magically have friends and money. Wendy’s brother-in-law and an elderly security guard she meets feel pity for her plight, yet they are also “strapped” and are in no meaningful position to assist her.

How many trillions of dollars have been spent on wars, cannibalistic proxies, and on maintaining hundreds of bases around the world while destitute Americans drown in a sea of oligarchic avarice?

Having heard that there is work there, Wendy is headed to Alaska. Yet when her car breaks down and events threaten to separate her from Lucy her poverty, loneliness, and despair become almost unbearable. Instead of job opportunities, friends, and family she is enveloped by a shroud of silence.

Margin Call, directed by JC Chandor; starring Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore and Zachary Quinto (2011)

Perhaps the best movie ever made about Wall Street, Margin Call tells the story of the financial crash of 2008. The story, which unfolds over a 24-hour period, revolves around a powerful Wall Street investment bank, and one of the key motifs of the film is not only how these demonic corporations treat their fellow Americans, but how they treat their own workers.

When an entry-level analyst is covertly handed a flash drive by his recently fired boss, he discovers that the firm is in danger of going bankrupt due to having invested too heavily in unstable mortgage-backed securities whose value is rapidly deteriorating.  He alerts his superiors and senior management calls an emergency meeting in the dead of night. The firm’s CEO (brought to life in an unforgettable performance by Jeremy Irons), whose helicopter makes a dramatic landing on the roof of their skyscraper, reminds everyone that his motto is, “Be first, be smarter, or cheat.” Only concerned with self-preservation, he is prepared to do virtually anything to prevent the firm from going under, and this rabid tribalism supersedes loyalty to one’s country and even to the financial services industry itself whose fellow vultures they are preparing to swindle.

The firm is infested with sociopaths like New York City garbage is crawling with cockroaches. At one point a young analyst is found crying in the bathroom after being notified that he will shortly be let go, and one of the senior managers indifferently takes note of his distress while simultaneously shaving with a cold-blooded hauteur and likely pondering ways to unload “The biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism” (to quote their CEO). Here, apart from one’s ability to generate significant profits, human life has no value. There are only “winners” and “losers,” and the “winners” are the ones that continue to make the big bucks.

No less disturbing are instances where employees are not allowed to quit, such as one Kafkaesque situation where the firm sends its people scouring the bars of lower Manhattan to try and find the recently laid off and now distraught head of risk management, who they learn has important insights into how they ended up in this disastrous situation in the first place, yet who was cruelly fired after nineteen years of devoted service with even his phone being shut off. Despite his wife informing the firm that her husband doesn’t want to speak to them, he is eventually located and forced to return to work when threats are made to revoke his severance package.

There is a scene where one of the senior managers played by Kevin Spacey comes out of his office applauding after a huge number of the firm’s employees were just laid off. Participating in this death cult ritual, his obsequious subordinates mimic his behavior. Speaking of those recently sacked, he says, “They were good at their jobs. You were better.”

Spacey’s character is later treated in a similar fashion when he returns to his former home to bury his dog (whom he evidently cares for far more than the small business owners undoubtedly run into the ground by his firm), only to be told by his ex-wife that, “You don’t live here anymore,” and that, “The alarm is on so don’t try to break in.” In a mirroring of how he has long treated his employees, his wife has replaced him with another husband.

Margin Call vividly portrays a diseased America that is at war with the world and at war with itself.

Martha Marcy May Marlene, directed by Sean Durkin; starring Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson, and John Hawkes (2011)

Dying societies invariably become a field of lost souls, and no soul is more lost than the protagonist of Martha Marcy May Marlene, a profound examination into how a disintegrating society can facilitate the rise of cults that prey on, ensnare, and entrap vulnerable human beings. The lead character, Martha, is renamed Marcy May by the cult leader (who is reminiscent of Charles Manson), while Marlene is the name female cult members use when answering the phone and following a script designed to attract new followers.

In a neoliberal America where people increasingly no longer identify themselves as Americans but by their profession, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, Martha no longer has any idea who she is, thereby offering easy prey to the cult. All the ties that may have once bound her to an American history or a personal history have been severed, making her as impressionable as a small child.

Part of the cult’s seductive nature is how it makes use of a vaguely anti-capitalist language. However, its raison d’être is ultimately to annihilate all vestiges of privacy and individuality, resulting in a violent and authoritarian existence for the cult’s members who are taught to share their clothes, their beds; and ultimately, their bodies. The protagonist has many names, and yet no name. For her lack of a cultural value system has dissolved her sense of self.

Initiation into the cult is done by drugging a young woman so that she can be raped by the cult leader, yet the protagonist is told that this is actually a good thing, revealing a Tartarean world where ethics are amorphous and reality is something that can be invented. (To quote Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”)

Martha represents millions of young Americans who grow up without a loving family, a real community, and are denied a proper humanities education. Indeed, she is a shell of a human being, a cultural amnesiac devoid of reason, a sense of the past, and a sense of the sacred.

The only place Martha can seek refuge is with her sister and brother-in-law, shallow people concerned only with money and accumulating possessions. Their crass consumerism and indifference to serious socio-economic problems is cultlike in and of itself, offering Martha no clear way to escape from this existential crisis she finds herself in.

The harrowing tale unfolds in a disjointed and fragmented manner, which mirrors the fragmented psyche of the suffering protagonist – and in many ways, of American society itself.

The Girlfriend Experience, directed by Steven Soderbergh; starring Sasha Grey, Chris Santos, and Philip Eytan (2009) 

Steven Soderbergh’s thought-provoking film The Girlfriend Experience (not to be confused with the mini-series) takes us on a journey through another dark circle of this second Gilded Age, where sexual relations have been rendered largely transactional and thereby stripped of tenderness and romance.

Chelsea (Sasha Grey), the film’s protagonist, works as a high-end prostitute for an affluent Manhattan clientele, while her boyfriend is employed as an honest athletic trainer earning a small fraction of what she makes – an all too common paradox, yet one which also serves as a metaphor for how incomes are typically doled out in 21st century America.

In this nihilistic culture that places profit-making over all other considerations, the protagonist has come to believe that one’s sex partner is no different than one’s tennis partner, and that her life as a prostitute for jet-setters will lead to freedom and liberation.

Chelsea worships wealth and will do anything to be with those who have it. In a country where the masses are saddled with trillions of dollars of household debt while a small group of plutocrats enjoy unbridled power, there is virtually no moral barrier she won’t violate in order to spend time with the mega rich, even if it means becoming their plaything and forgoing all traces of dignity.

The film raises disturbing questions about the nature of a hyper-privatized America and its impact on social relations. If a society ceases to hold anything sacred, is it still a real society? Is it possible to retain one’s humanity when one regards people as mere commodities to be used and then discarded? Due to its adoration of materialism and emotionless sexual encounters, is contemporary Western feminism compatible with love?

Chelsea’s hapless and no less delusional boyfriend initially approves of her degenerate lifestyle, and only insists that she doesn’t go on any trips with her “clients,” which, during one heated quarrel, she condemns as “selfish.” Like his wayward would-be lover, he has been taught by the media and education system that his girlfriend can work as a prostitute and that this somehow won’t inevitably destroy their relationship.

The Girlfriend Experience depicts a dystopia where people are incessantly using one another for material gain and real communities have been eradicated under a deathly hand of relentless exploitation, job destruction, and hyper-consumerism which for many Americans have swept away all traces of trust and love.

Michael Clayton, directed by Tony Gilroy; starring Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, and George Clooney (2007)

There is a riveting scene in Michael Clayton that unfolds in a lower Manhattan neighborhood I know all too well, where Arthur Edens (in a role masterfully executed by Tom Wilkinson), one of his law firm’s lead litigators, is berating Michael Clayton (George Clooney) for continuing to blindly follow their firm’s orders, to which a defensive Clayton says, “I’m not the enemy.” To which Arthur replies, “Then who are you?” Michael Clayton is a story about a society drowning in corporate savagery and two men who are consciously or subconsciously trying to reclaim their humanity.

Arthur represents U-North, an agricultural corporation that has polluted the environment with a carcinogenic weed killer. The problem – at least for his law firm and the corporation they are defending – is that Arthur knows that he has squandered years of his life defending diabolical corporations and, wracked with guilt, has decided that he is tired of fighting on the side of these dastardly forces. To the amazement of his colleagues, one day he suddenly snaps and goes rogue, turning on U-North, which his law firm has been hired to defend in a multibillion dollar class action lawsuit. While initially exasperated, Michael can’t help but be influenced by his friend’s strange behavior, and his amoral ethos is challenged.

Of great significance are the unhappy private lives of Michael, Arthur (who lives alone in an enormous dimly lit Soho loft), and the loyal corporate soldier Karen Crowder (performed chillingly by Tilda Swinton), all of whom make significant six figure salaries yet live lonely lives devoid of meaning and a sense of purpose.

Michael Clayton underscores the catch-22 that many Americans find themselves in, where those who are able to break out of the ignominious cycle of debt slavery and modern serfdom often do so by selling their souls and relinquishing all semblance of morality and freedom of speech, while many of those who have “made it” don’t have time to think about anything other than their extremely demanding jobs which devour every waking moment. Leaving this information bubble by exploring alternative news sources in an attempt to search for answers to these troubling times can lead to thinking, thinking can lead to posting heretical thoughts, which in turn can only lead to being ostracized from elite circles, unemployment, and death – professional, or even literal. And so it pays not to think.

In one haunting scene Clayton is driving in a rural area in upstate New York when he suddenly exits his car to approach three mysterious and strikingly beautiful horses. Like the inversion of the three witches in Macbeth, the animals seem to be calling on him to abandon a life of ambition and to return to a simpler and more humane existence devoid of materialism, dissembling, and relentless competition. The mysticism and primordial timelessness of this moment mesmerize the mind of a man who has lost his way in a brutal world, and serve as a clarion call to reclaim a life that is more dignified and honorable before it is too late.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Penner.

An executive order issued by U.S. President Donald Trump late Friday calls for the reduction of non-statutory components of the United States Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, the federal agency that funds RFA and several other independent global news organizations.

The U.S. Congress appropriates funds to USAGM, which disburses the monies to the grantee news outlets.

The brief order calls for the elimination “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law” of USAGM and six other unrelated government entities that work on museums, homelessness, minority business development and more. While the order addresses “non-statutory components” of USAGM, RFA is statutorily established, meaning it was congressionally established by a statute in the International Broadcasting Act .

But a letter sent to the president of RFA Saturday and signed by USAGM special adviser Kari Lake, whose title is listed as “Senior Advisor to the Acting CEO with Authorities Delegated by Acting CEO,” notes that the agency’s federal grant has been terminated and that RFA is obliged to “promptly refund any unobligated funds.” It says that an appeal can be made within 30 days.

It was not immediately clear how and when operations would cease, but RFA is solely funded through federal grants.

In a statement issued Saturday, RFA President Bay Fang said the outlet planned to challenge the order.

“The termination of RFA’s grant is a reward to dictators and despots, including the Chinese Communist Party, who would like nothing better than to have their influence go unchecked in the information space,” the statement says. “Today’s notice not only disenfranchises the nearly 60 million people who turn to RFA’s reporting on a weekly basis to learn the truth, but it also benefits America’s adversaries at our own expense.”

An editorially independent news outlet funded through an act of Congress, RFA began its first Mandarin language broadcasts in 1996, expanding in subsequent years to a total of nine language services: Cantonese, Uyghur, Tibetan, Korean, Khmer, Vietnamese, Burmese and Lao.

RFA news programming is disseminated through radio, television, social media and the web in countries that have little to no free press, often providing the only source of uncensored, non-propaganda news. Because RFA covers closed-off countries and regions like North Korea, Tibet and Xinjiang, its English-language translations remain the primary source of information from many of these areas.

Its parent agency, USAGM, oversees broadcasters that work in more than 60 languages and reach an audience of hundreds of millions. These include Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which reported Saturday that its grants had also been terminated. Voice of America and the Office for Cuba Broadcasting, which are directly run by USAGM, put all staff on paid administrative leave Saturday.

In a post on Facebook, VOA Director Michael Abramowitz wrote: “I learned this morning that virtually the entire staff of Voice of America—more than 1300 journalists, producers and support staff—has been placed on administrative leave today. So have I.”

Committee to Protect Journalists Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna urged Congress to restore funding to USAGM, “which provides uncensored news in countries where the press is restricted.”

“It is outrageous that the White House is seeking to gut the Congress-funded agency supporting independent journalism that challenges narratives of authoritarian regimes around the world,” he said in a statement.

China watchers cautioned that cuts to RFA in particular could impact Washington’s ability to counter Beijing.

“Radio Free Asia plays a vital role in countering China’s influence by providing accurate and uncensored news to audiences facing relentless propaganda from the People’s Republic of China,” Rep. Ami Bera, a California Democrat, wrote in a post on X. “RFA helps advance American values amidst our ongoing Great Power Competition with China and exposes egregious human rights abuses like the Uyghur genocide and Beijing’s covert activities abroad.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul called the dismantling of RFA and its sister publications “giant gifts to China,” while Human Rights Watch’s Maya Wang posted that in places like Xinjiang and Tibet: “Radio Free Asia has been one of the few which can get info out. Its demise would mean that these places will become info black holes, just as the CCP wants them.”

In a statement issued by USAGM Saturday evening and posted to X by Lake, the agency deemed itself “not salvageable” due to a range of alleged findings of security violations and self-dealing, though few details were provided.

“From top-to-bottom this agency is a giant rot and burden to the American taxpayer — a national security risk for this nation — and irretrievably broken. While there are bright spots within the agency with personnel who are talented and dedicated public servants, this is the exception rather than the rule,” the statement read.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.

Growing up, Mashharawi had been accustomed to life with inconsistent power — as little as three hours a day. “It’s not easy to describe unless you live it,” she said. “Your life is completely messed up. Everything is controlled by others. Your life is controlled by when power is on and off.”

Last week, Israel cut off all electricity to the Gaza Strip in an effort to strengthen its hand against Hamas in ceasefire talks. But in fact, the two parties’ dysfunctional relationship around energy has a long history. In 2007, after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip, Israel established a land and sea blockade. This included electricity: Israel came to control 10 power lines running into Gaza, as well as the diesel fuel needed to run its one power plant. The blockade also gave Israel gatekeeping power over any materials — cement, steel, batteries — needed for domestic infrastructure, if Israeli authorities judged they could help militants.

Israel’s security establishment thought this hammerlock over Gazan energy meant leverage over Hamas, said Elai Rettig, a lecturer in energy politics at Bar-Ilan University. As for Hamas, many Gazans felt the group was more interested in its crusade against Israel than addressing public works.

For the people of Gaza, the conflict meant energy poverty. The Strip’s combined power resources could at best meet a quarter to a third of demand. This translated to daily power outages averaging 12 to 16 hours a day. Even worse, Mashharawi said, the outages were unpredictable — whenever the power flicked on, you had to scramble. This maddening unreliability landed especially hard on women, who had to jam all their chores into these fleeting windows of opportunity.

But over the last decade, as solar prices tumbled worldwide, more Israeli leaders started thinking that getting solar into Gaza had a strategic benefit. Gaza’s energy dependence wasn’t cheap. Years of Palestinian counterparties failing to pay Gaza’s power bill — for financial and political reasons — had by 2023 racked up a debt to Israel of 2 billion shekels, about $500 million.

In 2016 and 2017, Israel approved about 100,000 solar panels to enter Gaza, according to researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Satellite imagery soon showed solar arrays sprouting on thousands of buildings across the Gaza Strip, especially in crowded areas like refugee camps. 

Around the time of Mashhawawi’s trip to Tokyo, she’d been working to start a company that manufactured Gaza’s war rubble into bricks. But her production lines were being constantly kneecapped by the start-stop of the grid. It occurred to her that unreliable power was not just a burden in households, like the one she grew up in. Thousands of businesses across Gaza — restaurants, workshops, bakeries — yearned for a source of energy more reliable than what they had. Mashharawi decided to get into the energy business.

She started Sunbox, a social enterprise promoting solar power, in 2017, working doggedly with Israeli authorities to get the equipment approved. She started by selling small arrays — 1 kilowatt and up, about enough to power a home with a small fridge — to families. She soon helped supply bigger projects. Sunbox equipped 20 small desalination plants, the engines of Gazan water production, with solar. It set up solar-charged streetlights so girls could feel more confident walking to school in the wee hours.

Large international organizations like the World Bank and U.N. were also getting in the game, decking hospitals and schools in solar. A 7-megawatt system, partly financed by the International Finance Corporation, or IFC, got bolted onto the Gaza Industrial Estate, a manufacturing complex. The IFC said the smoother power supply made it possible to expand output and hire workers.

It was a renewable revolution born of political dysfunction. The total number of solar arrays in the Gaza Strip vaulted from about a dozen in 2012 to 8,760 in 2019, mostly in the form of small rooftop systems. The extraordinary growth made the Occupied Palestinian Territories one of the fastest-growing renewable energy markets in the world. By 2023, solar represented 25-40 percent of daytime power generation on the ragged Gazan grid, Rettig, of Bar-Ilan University, estimated.

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Then came October 7, 2023. Mashharawi was abroad at the time on business travel. She spent the first two months of the war calling in favors and trying to get her family to Egypt. Meanwhile, Sunbox’s offices and warehouses were destroyed. Mashharawi is mourning the loss of a dear coworker, Mahmoud Abushawish, who she said was venturing north to help a school set up solar — and find some candy for the kids.

Israel’s military assault on Gaza has taken at least 48,000 lives and left its infrastructure in tatters. In February an interim assessment, led by the World Bank, estimated $53 billion in reconstruction needs. It said that 80 percent of Gaza’s power infrastructure is wrecked and that Gazans have experienced a “near-total blackout” since the start of the war. Because Gaza’s water supplies depend on energy to pump and purify it, availability has fallen to sub-critical levels. “There is no water and no electricity. It is stunning just how much damage occurred there,” Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, told Axios after visiting the territory in January.

A ceasefire signed in January, which has been roughly observed even as its first phase expired March 1, has paused the bombing for now. But talks to end the war haven’t gained traction, and many sense that Israel’s ultra-right-wing government, emboldened by Trump’s return, wants to resume fighting. Meanwhile, today most of Gaza’s 2.1 million people live in desperate conditions in displacement camps and other makeshift shelters, often exposed to the elements and possessing minimal access to basic services. Humanitarian groups are begging Israel and the international community to preserve the ceasefire and rush aid to improve conditions at these camps — hopefully, as a precursor to reconstruction.

With Hamas weakened, world powers are deciding the future of Gaza. In February, Trump whimsically proposed to empty Gaza of Palestinians and redevelop it as a luxury riviera. The idea won plaudits from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and categorical rejection by America’s Arab and Western allies. Trump’s vision is out of step with the majority of governments and experts who think that the reconstruction of Gaza can, and should, be done in a way that empowers Palestinians to live better lives on their land, without posing a threat to Israel.

Energy access is minimal in Gaza today. But solar has become one of the few ways to get it. About half of the electrons Gazans are using today come from solar power, according to a December estimate by the Shelter Cluster, a group that coordinates among aid organizations working in Gaza. The other half is coming from diesel, the customary fuel for post-disaster scenarios, but aid groups say Israel is withholding the necessary supplies.

With virtually no new hardware getting in, Gazans have created an internal economy for used cleantech. Solar units and their peripherals are being ripped from roofs, salvaged from rubble, and sold on Facebook. In the many camps of internally displaced people now dotting the strip, you’ll see solar panels leaning against walls and chairs — facing the sun. Some serve commercial ends. “You can find a guy with one panel, and a table, and his business is actually to charge cell phones and to charge batteries,” said one 55-year-old Gazan whose family has been displaced several times during the war.

The aid groups serving these encampments are hoping the most violent stage of the war is past and that they can switch to establishing basic services: food, water, shelter and critical health care. With diesel supplies scant, some are trying to import solar-powered gear instead. The U.N. Development Programme wants to deploy 1,100 prefab housing units, each equipped with a kilowatt of solar and rudimentary plumbing, as part of a $27 million program. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said in a statement that setting up off-grid photovoltaic systems is crucial to restoring agricultural activities like irrigation and cold storage.

Jumpstarting Hope in Gaza, a coalition of Palestinian, Israeli, and international NGOs, is supporting Palestinian-run IDP camps with 12,000 people in the south of Gaza with goods and equipment. The group aspires to set up a suite of solar-powered services — electricity, wastewater treatment, even units that produce drinking water from the air — to make them self-sufficient, dignified places to live during reconstruction, whenever that should begin. But in actuality, only a bit of traditional equipment got in before the ceasefire, and all equipment entries have stopped since then, said David Lehrer, a co-leader of the initiative.

Though the war isn’t formally over, many Gazans are returning to their homes, or the places their homes once stood. Some are beginning the early work of clearing rubble and laying to rest the bodies they find — a glimpse of the immense mourning that lies ahead. 

As for the longer term, powerful parties are already competing to advance their respective visions of reconstruction. This month, Egypt, along with the 21 other members of the Arab League, issued a plan meant to counter Trump’s “riviera” concept. It proposes building 2,500 megawatts of power generation — about 20 times what Gaza had before the war — including solar, wind, and fossil-fuel generation. They’re not alone in envisioning Gaza as a renewable-energy powerhouse. The Palestinian Authority, which hopes to replace Hamas as Gaza’s ruling body, is developing a master plan of infrastructural priorities to be finalized with the World Bank, European Union, U.N., and Arab States. Wael Zakout, the Authority’s Minister of Planning and International Cooperation, has said solar and wind farms across Gaza could make it “the first region in the world to reach zero carbon emissions.”

Another idea that’s been mooted — one that Trump endorsed in his first term — is to build a solar farm in the sun-blasted deserts of the Sinai, just across Gaza’s southern border. Proponents say this has twin benefits: It frees up land in Gaza for other uses, and because it’s in Egypt, Israel’s not likely to target it.

But renewable energy won’t be the only resource considered for the repowering of Gaza. A modestly sized natural gas field was discovered offshore of Gaza in 2000. Political and economic conditions kept it from being developed, but the U.S., Egypt, and Israel have described it as an untapped energy reserve for Gaza. In November 2023, Amos Hochstein, a Middle East envoy for President Joe Biden and a former energy executive, said “as soon as we get to the day after and this horrible war ends, there are companies willing to develop those fields.” Supporters say gas-fired electricity would bolster Gaza’s overall energy supply and enable major new industrial infrastructure, like desalination plants and wastewater treatment, that would improve everyday life.

Josef Abramowitz, an Israeli-American solar developer who’s worked with Palestinian partners before, thinks the emphasis on large projects loses the decentralized character that has proven the most successful in Gaza. “The story of Gaza is: big projects that don’t get done,” he said.

Abramowitz’s favored model is minigrids: localized networks of solar panels and battery storage, which he said can supply round-the-clock energy at a fraction the cost of gas-fired generation. They’re flexible, sustainable, and — important in the Gazan context of blockade, frequent war, and poor governance — feasible with or without a grand resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

As for Mashharawi, she said her vision for reconstruction involves something a lot more basic than energy: peace and quiet.

“One to two years from now, where are we going?” she said. “We don’t want to keep building and rebuilding things that are destroyed.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The future of Gaza’s recovery may rely on solar power on Mar 14, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Saqib Rahim.

When the U.S. government deported 177 Venezuelans on Feb. 20, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security alleged that 80 of the deportees were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

U.S. news outlets report that members have set up shop in at least 16 states and are “wreaking havoc on communities across the nation.”

According to Fox News, in February 2025 there was an “infestation” of Tren de Aragua members in an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado.

Suspected Tren de Aragua members have been arrested in Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, California, Texas and other states.

The U.S. State Department went so far as to designate Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization in an effort to stop “the campaigns of violence and terror committed by international cartels and transnational organizations.”

There is little reliable information about Tren de Aragua – but no shortage of sensationalist news reports and Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids claiming to target them.

We are sociologists who have spent a combined 37 years researching gangs, crime and policing in Venezuela. Our research in Venezuela, and our colleagues’ research in other countries, suggests that incarceration and mass deportations of Venezuelans living in the U.S., whether they have ties to the group or not, will likely strengthen Tren de Aragua rather than cripple it.

Indeed, we have already seen how these strategies contributed to the expansion of street gangs in El Salvador and Honduras by creating new opportunities for members to network and become more organized.

What is Tren de Aragua?

According to investigative journalists and a handful of academic studies, Tren de Aragua was initially founded by Hector “El Niño” Guerrero and two other men in 2014. The three men were imprisoned in Tocorón prison in the state of Aragua.

By 2017, Tren de Aragua began to be known as a “megabanda,” a category the local press in Venezuela use to refer to large organized criminal groups. The term arose to highlight the size of some street gangs, which at the time was unprecedented in Venezuela.

Since its beginning, the gang has depended heavily on extortion. It also sells street drugs, but that has been a much less important source of revenue for it.

Tren de Aragua’s growth surged as a result of mass incarceration policies that began under Venezuela’s former President Hugo Chávez and expanded under current President Nicolás Maduro. Incarceration rates began to increase in 2009 and were exacerbated by police raids deployed in 2010 in marginalized neighborhoods across the country. Venezuela’s prisons became filled with young, poor men.

Crowded together in inhumane conditions, the men began to organize into prison gangs with clear hierarchies. They accumulated vast profits by charging prisoners fees for food, use of space and protection from inmate violence. They also opened and ran businesses, including a club, inside Tocorón prison.

Members of different gangs in and outside the prison also began to communicate and share information about criminal activities such as kidnapping and extortion. This strengthened social networks and expanded their illegal enterprises.

Tren de Aragua eventually took control of Tocorón prison as the government became unable to manage daily life inside its walls. It had become one of the largest and best organized gangs in Venezuela.

Criminal enterprise grows

Since 2014, an economic and humanitarian crisis has devastated Venezuela, causing many Venezuelans to migrate.

Venezuela had one of the highest displacement rates in the world between 2014 and 2018, when at least 3 million people left the country.

Tren de Aragua, still based in the Tocorón prison at that time, took advantage of this mass migration. It expanded the group’s business portfolio to include human trafficking and sexual exploitation of Venezuelan female migrants in Chile, Colombia and Peru.

It’s unclear how far beyond Venezuela Tren de Aragua has spread. While the group has certainly expanded operations into the Latin American countries mentioned above, research shows common criminals have posed as Tren de Aragua members in both Colombia and Chile.

Moreover, the arrest of alleged Tren de Aragua members for committing crimes in the U.S. and other countries does not mean that the gang has set up shop in those places. Gang members, same as non-gang members, migrate during crises. They may continue to commit crimes in new places after they arrive. However, it’s important to note that immigration in the U.S. is consistently linked with decreases – not increases – in both violent crime and property crime.

Even some local police departments have questioned the gang’s expansion into the U.S.

In Aurora, police refuted both the mayor’s and President Donald Trump’s claims about the apartment complex being taken over by the gang. And the New York Police Department recently reported that suspected Tren de Aragua members there are largely focused on snatching mobile phones and robbing department stores – hardly the crimes of a transnational criminal empire or terrorist organization.

Making matters worse

Deportations do not address the urgent situation faced by many migrants who leave their homelands in search of a better, safer future.

When governments prioritize the spectacle of deportations to deal with migration, they contribute to the expansion of even more resilient networks of criminal enterprises.

Recent history bears this out.

In El Salvador in the 1990s and early 2000s, incarceration, deportations and repressive policing policies contributed to the evolution of youth street gangs such as the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, into transnational extortion rackets that spread across Central America.

These same policies could also contribute to the growth of Tren de Aragua within Latin America.

Prison isolates large groups of excluded and marginalized people and constrains them to brutal conditions. This enables and encourages the social networks that fuel illegal markets and criminal activity beyond the walls of prisons.

Rising xenophobia

Another harmful outcome of the policies we have discussed here is that they may fuel xenophobia toward and criminalization of Venezuelan immigrants living in the U.S.

This closes off opportunities and harms people already devastated by economic, political and humanitarian crises in their home country.

Venezuelans have responded with their characteristically incisive and biting humor.

Many have used social media to parody news outlets and political speeches, and Venezuelans regularly post memes and videos that mock the automatic association made between them and Tren de Aragua.

The satiric news site El Chigüire Bipolar posted stories titled “The United States confirms that Venezuelans are Tren de Aragua members from birth” and “ICE agents detain newborn that might be Tren de Aragua leader in the future.”

Meanwhile, recent cuts in U.S. foreign aid to countries with large Venezuelan populations, such as Colombia and Peru, will likely exacerbate the migration crisis by constraining opportunities for Venezuelans.

Future waves of migrants will be easy prey for criminal organizations like Tren de Aragua, which has turned human trafficking into a lucrative business. And with current policies of cutbacks, incarceration and repression, Tren de Aragua will likely continue to grow and fill its coffers.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post The Origins of the Venezuelan Gang Tren de Aragua and Why US Policies May Only Make it Stronger appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Verónica Zubillaga – Rebecca Hanson.

A system increasingly loaded with wind and solar will require customers to send power back into the system.  If the traditional grid centralized generation at power plants, experts believe the system of tomorrow will be more distributed, with power coming from what they call the “grid edge” — household batteries, electric cars, and other gadgets whose relationship with the grid has been one way.  More people, for example, are installing solar panels on their roofs backed up with home batteries. When electricity demand increases, a utility can draw power from those homes as a vast network of backup energy. 

The big question is how to choreograph that electrical ballet — millions of different devices at the grid edge, owned by millions of different customers, that all need to talk to the utility’s systems. To address that problem, a team of researchers from several universities and national labs developed an algorithm for running a “local electricity market,” in which ratepayers would be compensated for allowing their devices to provide backup power to a utility. Their paper, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, described how the algorithm could coordinate so many sources of power — and then put the system to the test. “When you have numbers of that magnitude, then it becomes very difficult for one centralized entity to keep tabs on everything that’s going on,” said Anu Annaswamy, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the paper’s co-author. “Things need to become more distributed, and that is something the local electricity market can facilitate.”

At the moment, utilities respond to a surge in demand for electricity by spinning up more generation at power plants running on fossil fuels. But they can’t necessarily do that with renewables, since the sun might not be shining, or the wind blowing. So as grids increasingly depend on clean energy, they’re getting more flexible: Giant banks of lithium-ion batteries, for instance, can store that juice for later use. 

Yet grids will need even more flexibility in the event of a cyberattack or outage. If a hacker compromises a brand of smart thermostat to increase the load on a bunch of AC units at once, that could crash the grid by driving demand above available supply. With this sort of local electricity market imagined in the paper, a utility would call on other batteries in the network to boost supply,  stabilizing the grid. At the same time, electric water heaters and heat pumps for climate control could wind down, reducing demand. “In that sense, there’s not necessarily a fundamental difference between a battery and a smart device like a water heater, in terms of being able to provide the support to the grid,” said Jan Kleissl, director of the Center for Energy Research at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn’t involved in the new research.

Along with this demand reduction, drawing power from devices along the grid edge would provide additional support. In testing out cyberattack scenarios and sustained inclement weather that reduces solar energy, the researchers found that the algorithm was able to restabilize the grid every time. The algorithm also provides a way to set the rates paid to households for their participation. That would depend on a number of factors such as time of day, location of the household, and the overall demand. “Consumers who provide flexibility are explicitly being compensated for that, rather than just people doing it voluntarily,” said Vineet J. Nair, a Ph.D. student at MIT and lead author of the paper. “That kind of compensation is a way to incentivize customers.”

Utilities are already experimenting with these sorts of compensation programs, though on a much smaller scale. Electric buses in Oakland, California, for instance, are sending energy back to the grid when they’re not ferrying kids around. Utilities are also contracting with households to use their large home batteries, like Tesla’s Powerwall, as virtual power plants. 

Building such systems is relatively easy, because homes with all their heat pumps and batteries are already hooked into the system, said Anna Lafoyiannis, senior team lead for transmission operations and planning at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. By contrast, connecting a solar and battery farm to the grid takes years of planning, permitting, and construction. “Distributed resources can be deployed really quickly on the grid,” she said. “When I look at flexibility, the time scale matters.”

All these energy sources at the grid edge, combined with large battery farms operated by the utility, are dismantling the myth that renewables aren’t reliable enough to provide power on their own. One day, you might even get paid to help bury that myth for good.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Utilities may soon pay you to help support a greener grid on Mar 5, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

• Federal workers sue over Musk firing threat, as Trump posts SpongeBob SquarePants meme mocking federal employees
• Trump talks about getting Ukrainian minerals to pay for aid, while France’s Macron says truce may be weeks away with Europe providing peacekeepers
• Judge blocks immigration raids at 5 Quaker meetings, Georgia Baptist church network, and California Sikh temple
• Protesters blast Musk role in mass layoffs at rally outside Tesla facilities in Berkeley
• Israeli tanks move into occupied West Bank for first time in decades, Palestinian authorities call it “dangerous escalation”

The post French president says peace in Ukraine may be weeks away; Protesters at Berkeley Tesla facility blast Musk role in federal mass layoffs – February 24, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

China tops the world when it comes to cases of lung adenocarcinoma, a form of cancer that is becoming more prevalent, possibly due to particulate air pollution, according to a recent report from a body linked to the World Health Organization.

Lung adenocarcinoma has emerged as the predominant form of lung cancer around the world in recent years, with increasing risks observed among younger generations, particularly females, in most countries, according to a recent study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

Published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, the study “highlights that the largest burden of lung adenocarcinoma attributable to ambient particulate matter pollution was estimated in East Asia, particularly China,” the agency said in a statement marking World Cancer Day.

In 2022, more than 68% of global adenocarcinoma cases in men were in China, while Chinese women accounted for more than 70% of global cases in women.

(Andy Wong/AP)

The study authors think there could be a strong link to particulate air pollution.

“We examine changes in risk in different countries across successive generations and assess the potential burden of lung adenocarcinoma linked to ambient PM pollution,” study lead author Freddie Bray said.

“The results provide important insights as to how both the disease and the underlying risk factors are evolving, offering clues as to how we can optimally prevent lung cancer worldwide.”

Shift to another form of cancer

The study analyzed global, population-based cancer data for 2022, and found that adenocarcinoma was now the predominant form of lung cancer, a shift away from squamous cell carcinoma.

It said the shift was likely linked to changes in smoking patterns and exposure to environmental pollutants, estimating that 114,486 cases in men and 80,378 in women were related to air pollution, with East Asia, especially China, being the most affected region.

Global ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) air pollution is responsible for millions of annual premature deaths and trillions of US dollars of social costs.

There has been a marked post-2011 decrease in particulate pollution, largely driven by decreasing PM2.5 exposure in China, Nature Communications reported in 2023, adding that India has become the leading contributor to global ambient PM2.5 exposure since 2015.

But some 99% of the global population lives in an area where air quality doesn’t meet international standards for good health, currently set at 5 micrograms per cubic meter for the smallest and most lethal particle, PM2.5.

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In 2017, more than 30% of Chinese households still used solid fuels for heating and cooking, suggesting that indoor air pollution could also be a driving factor behind this type of cancer.

Charles Swanton, clinical professor at the Francis Crick Institute, a British biomedical research institute, discovered in 2022 that EGFR genetic mutations cause lung cancer in non-smokers.

He told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview that the EGFR mutation is a common driver mutation associated with lung adenocarcinoma.

“We don’t know why EGFR mutant lung cancer is so prevalent in Asia,” Swanton said. “One of the theories that we have is that air pollution is a contributor to the prevalence of these mutations.”

“Data from our lab shows that, in normal tissue that’s been exposed to air pollution, it’s easier to identify EGFR mutant clones- suggesting that these clones expand preferentially in lung damaged by particulate matter,” he said.

“In other words, the air pollution creates a fertile soil upon which the seed, which is the EGFR mutation, can grow.”

But he said the biggest risk factor for lung cancer is still smoking.

“[Smoking] puts you at about a 30-fold increased risk of lung cancer,” he said. “The risk of air pollution... is a lot less, probably less than threefold, (or at least 10 times lower than tobacco exposure) depending on the area you live in on the planet.”

“The reason why it’s such a problem is that so many more people are exposed to air pollution than they are to tobacco smoke,” Swanton said.

Cases of never-smokers

As smoking rates decline in many countries around the world, the proportion of lung cancer cases in people who have never smoked has increased, making it the fifth most common cancer to cause death.

Almost all cases in never-smokers are lung adenocarcinoma, which is also the most common form of lung cancer in women and residents of East Asia.

While CAT scans have boosted survival rates with better imaging allowing cancers to be detected sooner, Swanton said his lab is also working on ways to screen non-smoking populations for lung cancer, and that concrete progress could be seen in as little as 18 to 20 months.

The number of smokers in China has fallen significantly since the 1990s, but lung cancer edged out liver cancer as the top cancer killer in China in 2012.

Smoking rates among Chinese adults fell from 28.1% in 2010 to 24.1% in 2022. In 2019, the smoking rate among Chinese men aged 15 and over was 49.7%, a fall of 18.2% from 1990, while the smoking rate among women was 3.5%, down 20.9% from 1990.

A 2022 report from China’s National Cancer Center showed that of the 2.5742 million people who died of cancer that year, 733,300 died from lung cancer and 316,500 from liver cancer.

Norman Edelman, Professor of Preventive Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Physiology and Biophysics at the State University of New York, said the change in lung cancer types was “a kind of conundrum.”

“The evidence is pretty strong that particulate air pollution is a risk factor for lung cancer,” he said. “And it is true we’re beginning to see more women, especially young women, have lung cancer even though they haven’t smoked.”

“The prevailing hypothesis about the cause of many cancers is the so-called inflammation hypothesis, so things that get into the lung and cause inflammation and cause outpouring of all kinds of chemicals and response to the inflammation... which applies to both cigarette smoke and air pollution,” Edelman said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Lucie Lo for RFA Mandarin.

A few days later, on February 1, over 1,100 EPA workers, all of whom are still in the trial period of their positions, received a second email informing them that the administration has the right to immediately terminate them. While some of these employees are in their first year at the EPA, others had recently switched into new roles after spending decades in the agency. 

The following week brought another blow. The new Trump-appointed management announced their plans to close the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and place 168 of its employees on administrative leave. 

Staffers that spoke to Grist under the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs blamed new EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, and the director of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, for the job-cutting measures. 

Zeldin has said he is committed to protecting Americans’ clean air and water. But, as Margot Brown, the senior vice president of environmental justice and equity at the Environmental Defense Fund told Grist, he has offered no plan towards achieving that goal. “It is the height of irresponsibility. It is the height of inefficiency,” Brown said, referring to the Trump administration’s actions so far. 

Steve Gilrein, who spent 40 years working in the air division of the EPA’s regional office in Dallas, before retiring in 2022, echoed Brown’s concerns and chalked the agency’s moves up to a public relations stunt. “It’s for a splash and I think it’s the wrong way to do it,” he told Grist. “I’m not saying the government can’t be more efficient. But I wish there was a plan that focused on keeping a healthy EPA that provides the services it’s meant to provide.”

Amid a storm of rhetoric about a bloated federal government, the events of the past two weeks raise questions about whether the EPA, an agency long plagued by budget and staff shortages, can continue to fulfill its legal obligations with a contracted workforce. Even before “efficiency” became the highest priority for federal agencies, the number of workers employed by the EPA had been declining for decades. “We’ve been steadily shrinking,” Gilrein said. “They just didn’t tell people.”

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In the years after its founding in 1970, the EPA had only a few thousand staff members. Then, as the number of laws and programs under its purview grew — the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act — so did its workforce. The 1990s are often thought of as the agency’s golden years. During that decade, the workforce reached around 18,000 employees — a staffing apex that produced a flurry of new regulations for protecting the public from chemical dumping, tailpipe pollution, and petrochemical plant emissions.  

Staff numbers then began a long decline. The EPA shrank the most dramatically during President Barack Obama’s administration, then further during Trump’s first term. Federalism, Gilrein explained, was the reason for the trend that has continued until this moment. Federal programs to ensure compliance with laws like the Clean Air Act were increasingly outsourced to the states to run. But, for agencies like the EPA, federalism must have a balance point; there are certain things that states can’t — or shouldn’t — do on their own. 

During Trump’s first year and a half in office, approximately 1,600 workers, or 18 percent of the EPA workforce, left. The exodus caused widespread “brain drain” that continues to afflict some agency programs to this day. Nonetheless, Brown, who worked at the time in the agency’s Office of Children’s Health Protection, recalled that there continued to be some level of cooperation between Trump’s first term appointees and EPA staff. Structural changes handicapped certain offices, and the budget limped along, but many staff members were able to keep their heads low and do their jobs.

“There was an unbelievable amount of oversight because there was immense mistrust in the staff, but it was nothing like today,” Brown said.

President Biden’s four years in office amounted to a momentary aberration. Biden and his EPA administrator Michael Regan added hundreds of new staff members, advanced the federal climate policy objectives, and strengthened enforcement against companies in industrial corridors like Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.” For as much promise as Biden and Regan brought, their approach angered conservative state politicians known to favor the oil and gas industry, resulted in a spate of lawsuits against the EPA, and set the stage for Trump’s second term.

Trump’s renewed mission to crush the agency promotes a severely limited type of federalism in which states have full power to administer the nation’s environmental laws as they please, with minimal oversight from the federal government. The problem with that approach, Gilrein said, is that it overlooks state environment agencies’ reliance on the EPA to fulfill practically every aspect of their mandates. 

During his four decades in the Region 6 office, Gilrein said that federal staffers worked “hand in hand” with the states, offering everything from technical guidance on regulatory decisions to millions of dollars in federal grant money. Agency staffers, many of whom have advanced degrees in fields like chemical engineering and toxicology, simply have expertise that states cannot afford with their limited budgets, Gilrein said. He recalled that under Obama and the first Trump administration, the regional office maintained positive relationships with the states in its jurisdiction, often helping them review permits and plan inspections. 

“We wanted our states to be as strong as they could be,” he said. 

One current staff member in the air division told Grist that few colleagues he knew were even considering taking the “deal,” believing that it was legally dubious and a bullying tactic to spur mass resignations. Furthermore, he continued, it was insulting to the American public that he should be able to collect a government salary while doing nothing for eight months. 

Trump and his appointees are explaining their early actions against the EPA as measures to spur economic growth. But current and former staff told Grist that the importance of the EPA will come into sharper focus when it is no longer able to fulfill the duties that staff have long dedicated themselves to.  

For instance, the Office of Environmental Justice, which Trump recently announced would be closing, is responsible for administering billions of dollars in funds to communities on the front lines of the climate crisis. Under the previous Trump administration, the office had about 30 staff members; today, that number is over 160. If the plan to dismantle the office is seen through, Brown warned, “it will be impossible for those funds to be managed appropriately.” 

Gilrein wondered aloud if Trump had been able to get away with a lot of his rhetoric about the agency because the services it provides have long been invisible to the public. 

“Why are you celebrating the dismantling of an agency that’s proven critical to human health and the environment?” Gilrein asked. “You take for granted that you can drink the water out of your faucet. You can do that because of the EPA.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s push for ‘efficiency’ may destroy the EPA. What does that mean for you? on Feb 12, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lylla Younes.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

It was the week President Donald Trump had signed a sweeping executive order shutting off the funding for foreign aid programs. Inside the U.S. Agency for International Development, his political appointees gathered shell-shocked senior staffers for private meetings to discuss the storied agency’s new reality.

Those staffers immediately raised objections. USAID’s programs were funded by Congress, and there were rules to follow before halting the payments, they said. Instead of reassuring them, the agency’s then-chief of staff, Matt Hopson, told staff that the White House did not plan on restarting most of the aid projects, according to two officials familiar with his comments.

Then Hopson added a stark coda: Trump could not have a higher tolerance for legal risk, the officials recalled. They understood the message to mean that the administration was willing to bend or even break laws to get what it wanted, and then take the fight to court. (Hopson, who resigned shortly after, did not respond to numerous phone calls and written messages requesting comment, and he turned away a reporter who came to his door.)

No president in history has unilaterally shuttered an agency formally enshrined in law — let alone deputized his wealthiest donor, Elon Musk, to carry out that task in his name with little oversight or accountability.

While USAID was first created by President John F. Kennedy in a 1961 executive order, Congress passed a law in 1998 to make it an “independent establishment” like others in the cabinet. Multiple administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, built USAID into an institution that has helped save millions of lives around the world, promoted U.S. interests in remote corners of the globe and employed thousands of Americans.

Now Trump and Musk have nearly destroyed it in three weeks. “It’s very hard not to see what’s going on as a constitutional crisis,” said Peter Shane, a law professor and one of the country’s leading scholars on the Constitution. “It’s very scary and tragic.”

Several experts consulted by ProPublica said the new administration may have broken the law almost immediately.

Around Jan. 31, Jason Gray, the acting administrator of USAID, passed along orders to the agency’s IT department to hand the entire digital network to Musk’s engineers, Luke Farritor and Gavin Kliger, among others. (Farritor, Kliger and Gray did not respond to requests for comment.)

Do you work in the federal government? Have information about humanitarian aid? Reach out via Signal to reporters Brett Murphy at 508-523-5195 and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at 408-504-8131.

From there, the engineers from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency quickly gained access to USAID’s financial system. On top of that, they became “super administrators” and had access to thousands of employees’ personal information, including their desktop files and emails, two USAID officials told ProPublica. The material also included information gathered during security clearance background checks, ranging from Social Security numbers and credit histories to home addresses.

“They had complete access to everything you could think of,” one official said. “The keys to the kingdom.”

By providing that access, USAID may have violated the Privacy Act of 1974, three experts on the law told ProPublica, regardless if the engineers were government employees at the time. The law requires consent from individuals before the government gives their private information to anyone.

“It is a catastrophic privacy and information security violation for a band of some government and some nongovernment personnel to barge into an agency and take over systems that contain personal information,” said John Davisson, director of litigation at Electronic Privacy Information Center and one of the country’s foremost authorities on the Privacy Act. Breaking the law can carry civil penalties and a minimum $1,000 fine for each violation if the victim can prove they were harmed, or much more if there were damages like loss of income.

With a series of executive orders, Trump established DOGE as a technology unit to improve IT and human resources functions at government agencies. He ordered his cabinet to give “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.” There are exemptions to the Privacy Act if those accessing the personal files have proper authorization, which includes special training and other rules for each set of records, and if they are conducting routine USAID business. But the three experts ProPublica consulted said that doesn’t appear to be the case here.

Davisson and others said that the law, which Congress passed with overwhelming support from both parties in the wake of Watergate, is meant to prevent presidents and others in high office from abusing their access to records for political ends. “The Privacy Act stands at the fountainhead of all this,” he added. “It stops that constitutional crisis from tipping off in the first place.”

For this story, ProPublica spoke with dozens of current and former USAID officials — many of whom requested anonymity because they feared retribution from the administration — and consulted the country’s leading authorities in government structure, federal law and the Constitution. While other media accounts have detailed several key moments in the blitzkrieg on USAID, this article provides new details about what Trump and Musk’s lieutenants did, what they said at the time and the objections that those within the government raised along the way.

In addition to the Privacy Act, experts told ProPublica the administration may have broken other laws while violating the Constitution itself, including the separation of powers and a president’s duty to faithfully execute the laws of the land. Failing to notify Congress before making major changes to the agency may have transgressed the Administrative Procedures Act, and freezing money appropriated by Congress for foreign aid could be in violation of the Impoundment Control Act.

Officials and experts have been closely watching the developments at USAID out of fear that Trump will deploy the same playbook to target other agencies he has publicly criticized, including the Department of Education.

The Republican-controlled Congress and Trump’s Department of Justice are unlikely to initiate investigations into allegations of wrongdoing by administration officials. In fact, the DOJ’s acting U.S. attorney in Washington, who was a lawyer for Jan. 6 defendants, signaled the very opposite in a recent series of letters to Musk, promising to investigate people who illegally impeded DOGE’s efforts or even those who just acted unethically “and chase them to the end of the Earth.” The DOJ did not respond to requests for comment.

That leaves lawsuits. On Thursday, federal worker groups sued the administration, accusing Trump of violating the Constitution by systematically disemboweling the agency without congressional approval. The next day, a Trump-appointed judge issued an injunction temporarily halting a major part of the administration’s efforts to reduce USAID’s more than 10,000-person workforce to a few hundred.

The administration argued during a hearing on Friday that the president has acted within his authority and continues to press its case. Trump and his advisers have long planned to assert in court that presidents have sweeping power to withhold funding from programs they dislike.

The lawsuit is so far the only substantive challenge Trump and Musk have faced since they began dismantling the agency. The judge’s ruling raises questions about what will happen if workers try to use USAID systems or buildings on Monday and are denied access.

“USAID is driving the radical left crazy, and there is nothing they can do about it,” Trump posted that same day, in all capital letters. “Close it down!”

The White House, USAID, the State Department and Musk did not respond to detailed lists of questions for this article. Previously, the administration has said, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities.”

Over the past week, they have defended their assault on the agency by repeatedly amplifying the once-fringe sentiment that USAID had become a conduit for wasteful spending, fraud and corruption. The judge on Friday noted the administration provided no evidence to support those claims. But Musk and Trump have successfully fueled intense animosity toward the agency anyway, drumming up support for their effort to destroy it.

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper,” Musk posted Monday on X. He is the richest man in the world, and his company SpaceX has received at least $15.4 billion in contracts over the past decade from the same government he has pledged to cleanse of wasteful spending.

“USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk said on X. “Time for it to die.”

In the frenzied days after the arrival of Musk’s engineers at USAID, they used their access to the agency’s IT systems to begin identifying bureaus to cull and programs to terminate, USAID officials told ProPublica. They were working under the direction of another political appointee named Peter Marocco, the director of foreign affairs at the State Department.

Around that time, Marocco drafted the order that required American-funded aid projects around the world to close down. Marocco — who held a leadership role at USAID during Trump’s previous administration, where staff formally accused him of undermining the agency’s mission — did not respond to a list of questions from ProPublica.

After the stop-work orders began going out, Trump’s aides and the DOGE team then turned their focus to the agency’s workforce, which is staffed by civil servants, foreign service officers and contractors. Their initial step was to oust about 60 top supervisors, including the agency’s attorneys.

Next, the administration issued stop-work orders to staffing companies in Washington, effectively laying off hundreds of workers at once. Presidents generally have wide latitude to cancel such contracts, though there is typically a deliberative process. A move like that has never been done at this scale before, experts said. The workers who lost their jobs had no civil service protections.

But that still left the bulk of the direct government workforce. The administration managed to figure out a way to sideline civil servants without officially firing them: They placed hundreds of USAID’s career staff on indefinite administrative leave — with pay but without explanation — or simply locked them out of the agency systems. Some who received no notice used their personal email addresses to ask about their status and received a reply from human resources that they “have likely been placed on administrative leave,” without official confirmation, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

Taxpayers are currently paying for them not to work. That maneuver went at the heart of what was regarded as a sacrosanct tenet in American government: that civil servants remain outside partisan politics and can’t be fired without due process.

In another stunning move, Marocco recalled back home 1,400 of USAID’s overseas foreign service officers, who were supposed to have similar job protections.

“This is a masterpiece of administrative design,” said Donald Kettl, the former dean in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland who has written multiple books about government structure. “It’s unprecedented in its scale,” Kettl added. “Each of these things has been done individually, but never all rolled together as one package and focused strategically like a series of intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

Musk’s employees told staff they could not come to USAID’s headquarters. Guards now stand sentry with a clipboard to block almost everyone from getting inside. On Friday, a maintenance crew took the agency’s title off the building’s facade.

What happens now is unclear. Friday’s court injunction temporarily prevents the administration from placing about 2,000 more people on leave, orders the reinstatement of 500 others and stops the recall of foreign service officials from abroad.

In recent days, ProPublica has interviewed dozens of USAID officials and contractors who have found themselves suddenly out of work and cut off from the government they had devoted their lives to serving. “I am a combat veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and not a deranged Marxist as Elon is shouting,” one employee told ProPublica.

“I have lived through a dictatorship before,” said another. “I know what these look like, and the writing is on the wall for me.”

A third: “I don’t think Americans seem to understand what’s at stake here. This is a heist. It’s a hostile takeover by malicious actors of our entire government.”

At various points, those within the agency who tried standing up against what they considered to be illegal abuses or immoderate management say they were punished for it. “There are no guardrails left,” another USAID official told ProPublica. “And there’s nobody left to stop it.”

The agency’s heads of security were put on leave after they blocked Musk’s engineers from accessing the classified servers last weekend. Then the same happened to the top human resources officer after he refused to put an additional 1,400 staffers on leave Tuesday. Both episodes were first reported by the trade publication Devex.

Likewise, when the USAID labor director reversed the administration’s decision to place almost 60 senior civil servants on leave at the onset, he was put on leave too. “The agency’s front office and DOGE instructed me to violate the due process of our employees by issuing immediate termination notices,” the labor director wrote in an email to staff.

“It is and has always been my office’s commitment to the workforce that we ensure all employees receive their due process,” he added. “I will not be a party to a violation of that commitment.”

Early last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio — a staunch supporter of USAID during his time in the Senate — sent Congress a letter saying that the administration “may move” some of the agency’s bureaus under the State Department, the kind of notification that is required 15 days before any major overhaul can take place, according to federal law. He told the lawmakers that the administration intended to work with them on a “review and potential reorganization of USAID’s activities,” and that Marocco would lead the effort.

If it were true, experts say his sentiment would more closely reflect the legal requirements that Congress has laid out since establishing USAID as an independent agency. But experts and government officials said the letter is an inadequate attempt to retrospectively justify what has already occurred.

That difference — between what the administration told lawmakers it was doing to USAID and what it was actually doing — was on display during a previously unreported episode in late January.

In late January, Marocco spoke with congressional aides representing both parties and both chambers. During a series of a half dozen phone calls — he declined to see them in person — the aides asked him to explain the rationale behind the stop-work orders the administration had sent around the world and the process for organizations to receive a waiver from program freezes.

Marocco declined to give substantive responses and claimed the waiver process was operating smoothly, one of the aides told ProPublica.

Marocco said shutting down USAID programs would give the administration an opportunity to see which ones would make America safer and stronger, which was Trump’s promise to voters. He added that he would be personally reviewing programs that requested a waiver and decide which ones should go to Rubio for final approval.

Meanwhile, organizations all over the world remain either grounded under stop-work orders or unable to draw on U.S. funds to continue working, as ProPublica previously reported. The agency put many people who could help process those payments on leave. Among the programs affected were efforts to feed malnourished children in Sudan, bring clean water to refugees in Yemen and deliver medicines to people living with HIV.

During the briefings, the congressional aides acknowledged that there are legitimate things to criticize about USAID. In the past, the agency has been accused of poor oversight of its contractors and interminable support for projects that were meant to end years ago. “I believe the purpose of foreign assistance should be ending its need to exist,” the agency’s former administrator Mark Green once said. And it was the president’s prerogative to focus on programs that align with his agenda. “But,” one of the aides told Marocco, “none of that justifies anything you’re doing.”

Days later, during a recent meeting with USAID staff in Guatemala, Rubio claimed they’d had a “problem” with some people back in the U.S. and that some of the agency’s programs undermined the Trump administration’s goals, according to a transcript of his comments. He also suggested that exceptions to Marocco’s foreign service recall could be made for people with extenuating circumstances, such as pregnant staffers in their third trimester or a person on dialysis.

By Thursday, there were plans to decimate entire USAID bureaus without inviting back the majority of staff on administrative leave. A group tracking the fallout estimates nearly 52,000 American jobs, including those working for vendors and contractors, were already eliminated in the last two weeks. “I fail to understand how having thousands of Americans lose their jobs puts America first,” said Nidhi Bouri, who worked for nearly a decade at USAID, the last two as a political appointee of President Joe Biden.

It’s legally murky if Trump simply keeps them on indefinite administrative leave. Under the Administrative Leave Act of 2016, an individual can only be placed on paid leave for 10 days a year. But a regulation issued by the Biden administration specifies that limitation only applies when that person is under investigation. Legal experts say the interpretation has since been that if there is no investigation, an employee can be placed on leave indefinitely, so long as they continue receiving a paycheck.

Not everyone is sure the Biden-era regulation will hold up in court. “That hasn’t been challenged, and it’s relatively new,” said Nick Bednar, a law professor at the University of Minnesota. “There’s enough of us that think that regulation is inconsistent with statute and if argued in court it might be considered invalid.”

It is illegal for the Trump administration to unilaterally dissolve an agency created by Congress, according to legal scholars, government experts and the congressional research facility.

“For all intents and purposes you are dismantling an agency created by Congress, and that’s a violation of the law,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown Law. “It can’t stand unchallenged, in my view.”

And while a president has broad discretion to make changes to programs and reduce the workforce, the Impoundment Control Act prevents him from withholding money appropriated by Congress, the experts said.

“If it turns out that the president can eliminate or defund an agency on a whim, then ultimately Congress is stripped of all power over the budget,” said Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “That would create a precedent that destroys the separation of powers.”

It will be the courts that decide if and to what extent Trump’s takeover of USAID violated federal law.

Many legal experts in and outside of government believe this was the administration’s plan all along: drag out Trump’s most aggressive and controversial policy decisions in court for so long that by the time any permanent judgment comes down, favorable or not, USAID will be nothing but a memory.

“They don’t seem to care what the statutes say,” said Kevin Owen, an attorney who represents both management and federal workers in employment disputes. “The plan from the employment perspective was to fire them all and make them sue. If the administration loses the court cases, so be it. The damage is done.”

Do you work in the federal government? Have information about humanitarian aid? Reach out via Signal to reporters Brett Murphy at 508-523-5195 and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at 408-504-8131.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy.

Paetongtarn will travel to China on Wednesday to mark the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations and for talks with President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Li Qiang on economic cooperation, her government’s spokesman said, adding that she would not raise the issue of the Uyghurs.

Thailand has said it has no plan to deport the men from the mostly Muslim minority from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, who have been held at a Thai Immigration Detention Center since 2014 after attempting to escape Beijing’s persecution through Thailand.

Nevertheless, rights groups worry that they could be deported back to China where they would face the risk of torture.

“The CCP has a pattern of pressuring foreign governments, and bending international law for its own agenda,” Rushan Abbas, executive chair of the World Uyghur Congress, which advocates for Uyghurs around the globe, told Radio Free Asia on Friday, referring to the Chinese Community Party.

“If Thailand is truly committed to human rights and international law, it must immediately release the Uyghur refugees and facilitate their safe resettlement. The world is watching, and these Uyghurs must not be sent to their deaths,” Abbas said.

The rights group Justice for All said last month that reports from the detained Uyghurs indicated that Thai authorities were coercing them to fill out forms in preparation for their deportation.

But the Thai government has denied that.

Asked about the Uyghurs last week, Defense Minister Phumtham Wechayachai reiterated that the detained Uyghurs would not be deported.

“It is important to abide by international laws, human rights basis and non-refoulement principle. These remain Thai government principles. Don’t you worry,” he told reporters.

Uyghurs in China’s vast Xinjiang region have been subjected to widespread human rights abuses, including detention in massive concentration camps.

The group of refugees in Thai detention is part of an originally larger cohort of over 350 Uyghur men, women and children, 172 of whom were resettled in Turkey, 109 deported back to China, and five who died because of inadequate medical conditions.

In 2015, Thailand, Washington’s longest-standing treaty ally in Asia, faced stiff international criticism for those it did deport back to China.

Thailand is not a signatory to the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, and therefore does not recognize refugees.

New U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at his confirmation hearing last month that he would reach out to Thailand to prevent the return of the Uyghurs to China.

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Thai government spokesman Jirayu Huangsab said the Uyghurs would not be on the prime minister’s agenda during her China visit.

“There won’t be talks on the Uyghur, it’s not on the agenda. There’s nothing to this issue,” Jirayu told RFA on Tuesday.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, asked about the Uyghurs in Thailand at a Jan. 22 briefing, said she was not familiar with the issue but said that more broadly, China was resolutely opposed to illegal immigration.

The international rights group Amnesty International has told Thailand that it too was concerned the men “would be at risk of human rights violations, including arbitrary detention, torture and other ill-treatment, if returned to China.”

“The organization calls on your government to strictly adhere to domestic and international legal obligations not to forcibly return individuals in violation of the internationally recognized principle of non-refoulement,” the group said in a Jan. 27 letter to Phumtham, who is also a deputy prime minister.

The prohibition on refoulement prevents the forcible transfer of people to a place where their life and liberty may be at risk.

The rights group called for the release of the Uyghurs.

U.N. experts last week joined rights groups in raising concern about the Uyghurs.

A Thai lawyer has submitted a petition to a court calling for the release of the Uyghurs on the grounds that they have spent enough time locked up. The court is due to consider the submission on Feb. 17.

Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.