Narciso Barranco, an undocumented father of three Marines, has lived and worked in the US for over 30 years. On June 21, Barranco was doing landscaping work at an IHOP in Santa Ana, CA, when he was suddenly swarmed by a group of armed, masked, unidentified Customs and Border Patrol agents who chased him down, brutally beat him in the middle of a busy intersection, and kidnapped him in broad daylight. “I believe he was racially profiled,” Alejandro Barranco, one of Narciso Barranco’s sons, tells TRNN. “My dad has never done anything wrong. They had no warrant for him.” In this on-the-ground report, TRNN editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Alejandro Barranco at the IHOP where his father was abducted about the cruel, terrifying reality of the Trump administration’s immigration raids.

Speakers:

• Alejandro Barranco is the eldest son of Narciso Barranco. He served in the Marines from 2019 to 2023
• Jose Francisco Negrete is a resident of Anaheim, CA, a rank-and-file Teamster, and a member of Labor for Palestine and Teamsters Mobilize
• We spoke with a number of undocumented day laborers near the site where Narciso Barranco was abudcted, including one eyewitness to Barranco’s abduction. To ensure their safety, we have kept their identities anonymous. 

Additional resources:

• Mona Darwish, Orange County Register, “‘I feel betrayed,’ US Marine says of seeing his father punched by federal immigration agent”
• Mona Darwish, Orange County Register, “OC father of 3 US Marines released from immigration detention center after multiple days of delay”
• Vera Institute of Justice, “Profile of immigrants in Santa Ana, California”
• NBC-LA, “Watch: Undocumented father of 3 US Marines speaks out”

Credits:

• Pre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez
• Studio Production / Post Production: Cameron Granadino

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

Once again, US media is helping take pressure off of the White House by parroting US officials and pro-Israel talking heads insisting that the president is more or less helpless to stop anything Israel is doing in the Middle East, up to and including their ongoing mass starvation campaign and genocide in Gaza. 

“‘He’s a madman’: Trump’s team frets about Netanyahu after Syria strikes,” Axios’s Barak Ravid breathlessly reported on July 20. “Trump was agitated all around…in a call with Bibi,” alleged Sohrab Ahmari, citing “sources in and near the administration.” 

“Trump’s frustration with the devastation in Gaza is real,” Semafor insists. “After angry call from Trump, PM says Israel deeply regrets mistaken shelling of Gaza church,” The Times of Israel claimed on July 18. “Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel: Trump administration has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in recent days,” The Wall Street Journal reported on July 26. 

If this particular genre of reportage looks familiar it’s because it’s a pared-down version of a PR campaign pushed out by former President Biden, his aides, and pro-Israel media allies. I wrote about the trope—Fuming/Helpless Biden—in both TRNN, and, in greater detail, for the Nation the following year. Now that it’s spanned party and administration we can simply call it Fuming/Helpless President. Put simply: it’s any report, analysis, or opinion that describes the president as unable to do anything to stop Israel from committing war crimes or end the genocide overall or, relatedly, any reporting that gives readers the impression that not only is the president helpless, but is very upset/angry/sad at not being able to change Israel’s behavior. It’s an essential media convention because it allows the president to continue all material support to Israel—the endless flow of bombs, military and intelligence support, vetoes at the United Nations—while distancing themselves from the deep unpopularity of Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate bombing and mass starvation. 

The primary conduit for Fuming/Helpless President nonstories is Axios’s Ravid, who, as I noted in the Nation last year, had written 25 different examples of this genre up to that point for then-President Biden, quoting either US officials directly or a string of anonymous “US officials”—often as alleged scoops—claiming that Biden and White House officials were some variation of “breaking with Netanyahu,” “increasingly frustrated,” “running out of patience,” or “deeply concerned” about civilian casualties. Ravid, a former member of Unit 8200, Israel’s “secretive cyber warfare unit,” was awarded for his endless Fuming/Deeply Concerned reports with the White House Correspondents’ Association’s award for journalistic excellence in April 2024. 

Ravid has emerged again as the most aggressive practitioner of the Fuming/Helpless President routine for the new Trump administration. In just the last two weeks, he has published:

• Israel bombs Syrian capital despite U.S. pressure to “stand down” July 16 2025
• “He’s a madman”: Trump’s team frets about Netanyahu after Syria strikes July 20 2025
• White House confirms Trump objected to Israeli strikes in Syria July 21 2025
• Trump team rethinks Gaza strategy after six months of failure July 26 2025
• Trump says kids in Gaza are starving in break with Netanyahu July 29 2025

What Ravid did for Biden he is now doing for Trump, permitting the White House to distance itself from the more extreme and unpopular of Israel’s policies while maintaining the status quo of unfettered material support. Obviously, demand for this genre of low-effort propaganda is far less than it was under Biden, especially when 71 percent of Republicans continue to support Israel’s genocide. But there is a nontrivial faction of MAGA media world—from Tucker Carlson to Theo Von to Dave Smith—that have pushed back on the president’s lockstep support. They have done so for many reasons—principled libertarianism, humanitarian instincts, or, in Tucker’s case, genuine white nationalism—but there’s a modest revolt in the ranks nonetheless, and one that increasingly needs to be damped down by the Trump-aligned Right. 

No doubt feeling the heat from this contingent, and recognizing that being associated with countless images of emaciated and maimed children is not good for the brand in general, the White House and zionist groups in their orbit have dusted off the Biden-era playbook of Helpless/Frustrated President and seek to use it to distance Trump from the horrors emanating from Gaza just as the Biden White House did with great success. It’s easy, low effort, panders to antisemitic tropes of our otherwise benevolent leaders being manipulated by a foreign other, and provides what any head of a criminal enterprise seeks: plausible deniability. 

Trump’s passing acknowledgement Monday that there’s mass starvation in Gaza was widely reported as a “break from Netanyahu” despite it being pure rhetoric. “What reporting in Gaza shows amid Trump’s break from Netanyahu on starvation,” NPR tells its listeners. “Trump, breaking with Netanyahu, acknowledges ‘real starvation’ in Gaza,” Politico insists. “Trump raises pressure on Netanyahu, Israel,” the Hill reports. 

This narrative, born entirely from off-the-cuff comments by Trump, was quickly rejected by US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee who, it’s worth noting, is playing to a different audience. Huckabee went on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom” Tuesday, and when asked about the supposed “break” with Netanyahu said, “Let me assure you that there is no break between the prime minister of Israel and the president. Their relationship I think to be stronger than it’s ever been. And I think the relationship between the US and Israel is as strong as it has ever been.”

So why did so many mainstream outlets rush to distance Trump from the horrific images of starving children coming out of Gaza of starving children? Because preservation of American Innocence is an ideological force greater than common sense and “mounting tensions” between US Presidents and Netanyahu is a genre of reportage requiring little evidence and even less effort. 

Another recent masterclass in Fuming/Helpless President stenography is a front page story in the Wall Street Journal, “Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel: Trump administration has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in recent days,” by Shayndi Raice and Alexander Ward. The article is littered with every cliche of the genre: Fuming Behind Closed Doors (“The Trump administration in recent days has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in Syria and Gaza”), Trump Forced to Do Israel’s Bidding Against His Will (“So far, they see Netanyahu leading Trump to act against his instincts”), and Out of the Loop (“The White House said this past week that Trump was “caught off guard” by the bombing in Syria and the strike that hit the Catholic church.”)

The piece even doubles as a means for ex-Biden officials Amos Hochstein and Phil Gordon to wash their hands of Gaza and insist they, too, were powerless, helping Trump officials and allies paint a picture of a White House getting run over by an increasingly powerful and willful ally. Kamala Harris foreign policy adviser Phil Gordon, who, on the eve of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, explicitly promised to never condition aid to Israel, wants WSJ readers to know that Trump is unable to do anything to “rein in” Israel for the same reason Biden was:  

Others say the reality of the relationship is far more complex. While the U.S. sells Israel advanced weapons and actively defends it against attacks, no American president would fully cut off the support to send Israel a message. Netanyahu knows this and operates knowing he can’t really lose U.S. backing for whatever it does. “Every president thinks they have some ability to constrain him and shape him, and they do,” said Philip Gordon, who in the previous administration was national-security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris. “But in the end, Netanyahu is an experienced, wily actor, and knows he can get away with a lot.”…

But this, of course, is simply argument by tautology: “No American president would fully cut off the support to send Israel a message” is a moral choice Biden and Trump decided to make, not a law of nature. It’s not imposed upon them by any outside force. They are not “forced” to back Israel anymore than any war criminal is forced to carry out any war crime in the history of war crimes. They support Israel because, despite some bickering around the margins over tactics and PR, they agree with and support what Israel is doing. This basic fact is simply hand-waved away, lampshaded with a throwaway line by friendly reporters about how the US cannot ever possibly condition aid to Israel without any explanation, treated as an unquestioned axiom. 

But it’s not. Both Trump and Biden are and were more than capable of “reining in” Israel. They can do so by conditioning military support or cutting it off altogether. But clearly laying out how those conditions would work is awkward and associates the US government, and leadership in both parties, with the 21st century’s most horrific and well documented genocide. A much easier approach, consistent with the increasingly popular Politics of Feigned Helplessness, is to manage perception and use court reporters to wash one’s hands of the consequences of their policies and actions. Actually cutting off Israel is difficult and would require a president who opposes what they’re doing. It’s far easier to paint the most powerful empire in the history of the world as bumbling, out of the loop, getting “played” by a country the size of New Jersey, and ultimately frame the US as a spectator that funds and arms countless war crimes but, somehow, is not responsible for any of them.  

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.

Several users on social media have claimed that he is a Muslim person who was on a flight to Glasgow. Some users have alleged that he is a Pakistani.

X user Tommy Robinson (@TRobinsonNewEra) shared the video with these claims. At the time of this article being written, the post has garnered more than 10 lakh views. (Archive)

Video footage of the Muslim on a flight to Glasgow screaming “allahu akbar”, threatening to bomb the plane and ranting about Trump.

He was arrested upon arrival.

No mention from the legacy media what he was doing. https://t.co/RL0xJJCfRc pic.twitter.com/3msqIXkT3A

— Tommy Robinson (@TRobinsonNewEra) July 27, 2025

X user Megh Updates also posted the video with the same claim — that the man i a Muslim. The post had around 43,000 views at the time of this article being written. Readers should note that this user frequently shares misinformation and communal propaganda on X. (Archive) 

Video footage of the Muslim on a flight to Glasgow screaming “allahu akbar”, threatening to bomb the plane and ranting about Trump.

He was arrested upon arrival. A Pakistani ? pic.twitter.com/deGaMYKAgt

— Megh Updates (@MeghUpdates) July 27, 2025

Other X users, like (@ocjain4), (@Basil_TGMD) and (@Incognito_qfs) also amplified the viral claims. (Archives: 1, 2, 3)

Screenshots below:

Fact Check

To verify the authenticity of the viral claims, we ran a relevant keyword search on Google to find out more about the incident. A BBC report identified the person shouting the slogans in a Luton to Glasgow flight on July 27 as 41-year-old Abhay Nayak, a resident of Luton.

We found several other reports in the incident in prominent media outlets, including The Times of India, The Telegraph, Deccan Herald, and Sky News. In every report, the individual was identified as Abhay Devdas Nayak, a man of Indian origin. He has not been charged with terrorism, but has been remanded in custody, and is due in court next week, according to the reports.

Some witnesses said Nayak had claimed he wanted to “send a message” to Trump he latter was visiting Scotland. the US President was on a trip to Scotland from July 27 to 29.

In conclusion, the video has been amplified with the suggestion that a Muslim man was threatening to bomb a plane, while shouting ‘Allah Hu Akbar’. On investigating, Alt News found that the man was a Hindu resident of Luton, named Abhay Nayak.

The post Man who shouted ‘Allah Hu Akbar’ & ‘Death to Trump’ on UK flight is a Hindu appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Prantik Ali.

President Donald Trump is standing by his August 1 deadline for other countries to reach new trade agreements with the United States or face steep new tariffs on their exports. The administration has announced a slew of deals, including with the U.K., Japan and the European Union, even as Trump has issued new tariff threats against India, Brazil and others.

“You’ve got total, random chaos,” says policy expert Lori Wallach, director of the Rethink Trade program at the American Economic Liberties Project and host of the podcast Rethinking Trade with Lori Wallach. “What the Trump administration is doing, basically, is an abuse of the tariff tool … to threaten countries based on foreign policy whims.”

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

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

If you have information about cases or investigations paused or dropped by either the Department of Justice or the Securities and Exchange Commission, contact Corey G. Johnson at corey.johnson@propublica.org or 917-512-0287.

The Trump administration has halted litigation aimed at stopping civil rights abuses of prisoners in Louisiana and mentally ill people living in South Carolina group homes.

The Biden administration filed lawsuits against the two states in December after Department of Justice investigations concluded that they had failed to fix violations despite years of warnings.

Louisiana’s prison system has kept thousands of incarcerated people behind bars for weeks, months or sometimes more than a year after they were supposed to be released, records show. And the DOJ accused South Carolina of institutionalizing thousands of people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses — sometimes for decades — rather than provide services that would allow them to live in less restricted settings, as is their right under federal law.

Federal judges temporarily suspended the lawsuits in February at the request of the states and with the support of the DOJ.

Civil rights lawyers who have monitored the cases said the move is another sign of the Trump administration’s retreat from the department’s mission of protecting the rights of vulnerable groups. Since January, President Donald Trump’s DOJ has dropped racial discrimination lawsuits, abandoned investigations of police misconduct and canceled oversight of troubled law enforcement agencies.

“This administration has been very aggressive in rolling back any kind of civil rights reforms or advancements,” said Anya Bidwell, senior attorney at the public-interest law firm Institute for Justice. “It’s unquestionably disappointing.”

The cases against Louisiana and South Carolina were brought by a unit of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division tasked with enforcing laws that guarantee religious freedom, access to reproductive health services, constitutional policing, and the rights of people in state and local institutions, including jails, prisons and health care facilities for people with disabilities.

The unit, the Special Litigation Section, has seen a dramatic reduction in lawyers since Trump took office in January. Court records show at least seven attorneys working on the lawsuits against Louisiana and South Carolina are no longer with the DOJ.

The section had more than 90 employees at the start of the year, including about 60 front-line attorneys. By June, it had about 25, including around 15 front-line lawyers, according to a source familiar with its operation. Sources said some were reassigned to other areas of the department while others quit in protest against the direction of the office under Trump, found new jobs or took early retirement.

Similar departures have been seen throughout the DOJ.

The exodus will hamper its ability to carry out essential functions, such as battling sexual harassment in housing, discrimination against disabled people, and the improper use of restraints and seclusions against students in schools, said Omar Noureldin, a former senior attorney in the Civil Rights Division and President Joe Biden appointee who left in January.

“Regardless of your political leanings, I think most people would agree these are the kind of bad situations that should be addressed by the nation’s top civil rights enforcer,” Noureldin said.

A department spokesperson declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica about the Louisiana and South Carolina cases. Sources familiar with the lawsuits said Trump appointees have told DOJ lawyers handling the cases that they want to resolve matters out of court.

The federal government has used settlement talks in the past to hammer out consent decrees, agreements that set a list of requirements to fix civil rights violations and are overseen by an outside monitor and federal judge to ensure compliance. But Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s appointee to run the DOJ’s civil rights division, has made no secret of her distaste for such measures.

In May, Dhillon announced she was moving to dismiss efforts to impose consent decrees on the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis police departments. She complained that consent decrees turn local control of policing over to “unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.”

A DOJ investigation in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer accused the department of excessive force, unjustified shootings, and discrimination against Black and Native American people. The agency issued similar findings against the Louisville Metro Police Department after the high-profile killing of Breonna Taylor, who was shot in 2020 when officers forced their way into her home to execute a search warrant.

Noureldin, now a senior vice president at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said consent decrees provide an important level of oversight by an independent judge. By contrast, out-of-court settlements can be subject to the political whims of a new administration, which can decide to drop a case or end an agreement despite evidence of continuing constitutional violations.

“When you have a consent decree or a court-enforced settlement, the Justice Department can’t unilaterally just withdraw from the agreement,” Noureldin said. “A federal judge would have to agree that the public interest is served by terminating that settlement.”

In the case of Louisiana, the Justice Department issued a scathing report in January 2023 about the state confining prisoners beyond their sentences. The problems dated back more than a decade and remained widespread, the report said. Between January and April 2022 alone, more than a quarter of everyone released from prison custody was held past their release dates. Of those, 24% spent an additional 90 days or more behind bars, the DOJ found.

Among those held longer than they should have been was Robert Parker, a disc jockey known as “DJ Rob” in New Orleans, where he played R&B and hip-hop music at weddings and private parties. Parker, 55, was arrested in late 2016 after violating a restraining order brought by a former girlfriend.

He was supposed to be released in October 2017, but a prison staffer mistakenly classified him as a sex offender. That meant he was required to provide prison authorities with two addresses where he could stay that complied with sex offender registry rules.

Prison documents show Parker repeatedly told authorities that he wasn’t a sex offender and pleaded to speak to the warden to clear up the mistake. But nobody acted until a deputy public defender contacted state officials months later to complain. By the time he walked out, Parker had spent 337 extra days behind bars. During that period, he said, his car was repossessed, his mother died and his reputation was ruined.

“I lost everything,” he told ProPublica in an interview from a nursing home, where he was recovering from a stroke. “I’m ready to get away from Louisiana.”

Louisiana’s detention system is complex. Unlike other jurisdictions, where the convicted are housed in state facilities, inmates in Louisiana can be held in local jails overseen by sheriffs. A major contributor to the so-called over-detentions was poor communication among Louisiana’s court clerks, sheriff’s offices and the state department of corrections, according to interviews with attorneys, depositions of state officials, and reports from state and federal reviews of the prison system.

Until recently, the agencies shared prisoner sentencing information by shuttling stacks of paperwork by van or truck from the court to the sheriff’s office for the parish holding the prisoner, then to corrections officials. The document transfers, which often crisscrossed the state, typically happened only once a week. When the records finally arrived, it could take staff a month or longer to enter the data into computers, creating more delays. In addition, staff made data errors when calculating release dates.

Two years ago, The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Parker could pursue a lawsuit against the former head of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, James LeBlanc. That lawsuit is ongoing, said Parker’s attorney, Jonathan Rhodes. LeBlanc, who resigned last year, could not be reached for comment, and his attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill acknowledged that the state’s process to determine release dates was unreliable but said the issue had been overblown by the Justice Department’s investigation, which she called “factually incorrect.”

“There were simply parts of it that are outside state control, such as clerks & courts,” Murrill stated.

Murrill said correction officials have been working with local officials to ensure prisoner releases are computed in a “timely and correct fashion.” Louisiana officials point to a new website that allows electronic sharing of information among the various agencies.

“The system has been overhauled. That has dramatically diminished, if not completely eliminated this problem,” Murrill stated. She did not address questions from ProPublica asking if prisoners were being held longer than their release dates this year.

Local attorneys who are handling lawsuits against the state expressed skepticism about Murrill’s claims.

William Most, an attorney who filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of incarcerated people who had been detained past their release dates, noted that as late as May 2024, 141 people who were released that month had been kept longer than they should have been, 120 of them for more than 30 days.

“I have seen no evidence suggesting the problem in Louisiana is fixed,” Most said. “And it seems unwise to dismiss any cases while that’s the situation.”

South Carolina’s mentally ill population is grappling with similar challenges.

After years of lawsuits and complaints, a DOJ investigation determined that officials illegally denied community-based services — required by the Americans with Disabilities Act and a 1999 Supreme Court decision — to over 1,000 people diagnosed as seriously mentally ill. Instead, the state placed them in group homes that failed to provide adequate care and were overly restrictive, the department alleged.

The DOJ report didn’t address why the state relied so heavily on group homes. It noted that South Carolina’s own goals and plans called for increasing community-based services to help more people live independently. But the investigation concluded that the availability of community-based services varied widely across the state, leaving people in some areas with no access. And the DOJ said the state’s rules for deciding when someone could leave were too stringent.

South Carolina funds and oversees more than 400 facilities that serve people with serious mental illness, according to a state affidavit.

Kimberly Tissot, president of the disability rights group Able South Carolina, said it was common for disabled adults who were living successfully on their own to be involuntarily committed to an adult group home simply because they visited a hospital to pick up medicine.

Tissot, who has inspected hundreds of the adult facilities, said they often are roach-infested, soaked in urine, lacking in adequate medicine and staffed by untrained employees. Her description mirrors the findings of several state and independent investigations. In some group homes, patients weren’t allowed to leave or freely move around. Subsequently, their mental health would deteriorate, Tissot said.

“We have had people die in these facilities because of the conditions,” said Tissot, who worked closely with the DOJ investigators. Scores of sexual abuse incidents, assaults and deaths in such group homes have been reported to the state, according to a 2022 federal report that faulted South Carolina’s oversight.

South Carolina has been on notice about the difficulties since 2016 but didn’t make sufficient progress, the DOJ alleged in its lawsuit filed in December.

After two years of failed attempts, state lawmakers passed a law in April that consolidated services for disabled people into a new agency responsible for expanding access to home and community-based treatments and for ensuring compliance with federal laws.

South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, has argued in the DOJ’s lawsuit that the state has been providing necessary services and has not been violating people’s constitutional rights. In January, his office asked the court for a delay in the case to give the Trump administration enough time to determine how to proceed.

His office and a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities declined to comment, citing the ongoing DOJ lawsuit.

Tissot credits the federal attention with creating a sense of urgency among state lawmakers to make improvements. While she said she is pleased with the latest progress, she warned that if the DOJ dropped the case, it would undermine the enforcement of disabled people’s civil rights and allow state abuses to continue.

“It would signal that systemic discrimination will go unchecked and embolden institutional providers to resist change,” Tissot said. “Most importantly, it abandons the people directly impacted.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Corey G. Johnson.

The obliteration of the clean vehicle standards is part of Trump’s frontal attack on the U.S. government’s ability to act on climate—the administration is also attempting to eliminate the 2009 “endangerment finding,” (EF) a bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives. See the Sierra Club’s statement on the EF here.

The endangerment finding requires the federal government to regulate climate pollution under the Clean Air Act. Eliminating it would gut key tools Congress gave EPA to address the immense harm wrought by the climate crisis and would undo regulations of industrial sources of greenhouse gas emissions like vehicles or power plants.

The transportation sector accounts for 28 percent of greenhouse gas emissions—more than any other sector in the US. The clean vehicle standards continue EPA’s decades-long effort under the Clean Air Act to set standards that successfully reduce vehicle pollution, improve public health and prevent the worst of the climate crisis. For this latest round of final standards, the EPA engaged in a years-long, multi-stakeholder, comprehensive rulemaking process that engaged industry and civil society alike and would collectively avoid over 8 billion tons of carbon emissions.

In response to the announcement, Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All Director Katherine García released the following statement:

“Vehicle pollution kills, and Donald Trump’s catastrophic rollback of the vehicle standards will eviscerate one of our most effective tools to tackle the nation’s top polluting industry. Trump’s short-sighted, anti-regulatory agenda will deny Americans the option to choose cleaner vehicles over inefficient gas guzzlers. In one fell swoop just months into office, Trump’s pro-polluter administration is trying to destroy the United States’s ability to fight climate change and protect our health and well-being while making us less globally competitive.

“Our federal clean vehicle standards protect American families by cutting down on toxic air pollutants and climate-disrupting emissions. Strong standards also protect our wallets by ensuring manufacturers produce cleaner, more fuel efficient cars that are cheaper to fuel and own long-term.

"These standards are the product of years of public engagement, in which a broad coalition—including thousands of Sierra Club members and supporters—advocated for the strongest possible protections. Time and time again, Trump has proposed irrational policies that fundamentally hurt Americans and the planet. And, once again, the Sierra Club will fight this senseless attack tooth and nail.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

“We know from over 30 years of challenging unlawful detentions in Guantánamo, that the government has always attempted to shield its operations there from the law and public scrutiny, which has produced a legacy of torture, suffering, and systemic human rights violations,” said Ayla Kadah, Staff Attorney and Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “That the Trump administration is openly embracing this very symbol of lawlessness and brutality – while refusing to provide any information about conditions or their legal authority – leads us to fear the worst of Guantánamo is happening again. We will continue our decades-long fight for accountability and to finally shutter this dark island prison.”

On January 29th, Trump issued an executive order to expand to “full capacity” the Guantánamo Migrant Operations Center (GMOC), a detention facility located on the naval base along with the infamous island prison where, in the name of fighting terrorism, the Bush administration detained and tortured hundreds of Muslim men and boys after 9/11. The Trump administration has denied immigrants at Guantánamo meaningful access to attorneys and the ability to challenge their detention. Those who have been detained there report brutal conditions: solitary confinement in windowless cells for at least 23 hours a day, invasive strip searches, extreme temperatures, a lack of food and medical care, and long hours in a “punishment chair,” all of which have led to several suicide attempts.

Brought by the Haitian Bridge Alliance, Detention Watch Network, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, the suit follows the administration’s failure to comply with the groups’ February FOIA request. The suit seeks information on, among other subjects, the claimed legal basis for detaining immigrants at Guantánamo, the criteria for sending them there, their identities, whether they face interrogation and, if so, by whom and for what purpose, which agency or agencies have custody over them, and the roles of each agency – whether, for example, the Defense Department is involved in civilian law enforcement.

Said Setareh Ghandehari, Advocacy Director of Detention Watch Network, “Guantánamo Bay’s abusive history speaks for itself. The Trump administration’s plans to massively expand ICE detention at Guantánamo jeopardizes the mental and physical health of immigrants, separates families, and upends communities across the United States.The intentional withholding of information about these plans, paired with ICE’s culture of secrecy, is yet another hallmark of an authoritarian regime. The result of Trump's cruel mass detention and deportation agenda so far is an exacerbation of inhumane conditions in ICE detention, with increasing reports of death, medical neglect, overcrowding, lack of food, and rampant transfers that cut people off from their loved ones and support networks. Detention in remote locations, like Guantánamo, amplifies these harms. Communities across the country are watching daily as their family members, friends, coworkers, and neighbors are being violently targeted and disappeared by ICE. Transparency into Trump's plans at Guantánamo is critical for oversight and accountability.”

Historically, the U.S. government has detained people at Guantánamo to try to evade the law, and, after 9/11, it became a site and symbol of torture and other human rights abuses. But litigation by the Center of Constitutional Rights yielded a 2008 Supreme Court ruling that people held at Guantanamo have the constitutional right to challenge their detention. At the same time, sporadic efforts by the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations, spurred by years of political and legal advocacy, had reduced the population of the “war on terror” prison to only 15. The Trump administration is breaking with these trends, detaining a large number of people at Guantánamo while denying them basic legal and human rights. This also marks the first time that the government has transferred people there from the territorial United States.

“The U.S. government has used Guantánamo as a key piece in its prevention through deterrence migration strategy for decades,” said Erik Crew, Staff Attorney with Haitian Bridge Alliance, “where the goal is to punish certain migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers who attempt to seek internationally-mandated humanitarian protection in the United States. Detention at Guantánamo is valuable to the U.S. government because it continues to use it as a legal black hole where rights don’t apply. Civil society organizations like HBA and our partners will continue to fight against this lawlessness in U.S. and international human rights fora. We, the people of the U.S. and the people of the world, need transparency here, and we will fight for it.”

The suit seeks all relevant records from the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, the Department of State, and Citizenship and Immigration Services.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Both the Biden EPA standards to reduce pollution from cars and trucks and the Obama EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding were based on overwhelming scientific evidence that has only become more robust. The proposals, if adopted, will create more pollution and lock in more damage to our air and climate in the future.

“This cynical one-two punch allows Trump’s Flat Earth EPA to slam the brakes on reducing auto pollution and ignore urgent warnings from the world’s leading scientists about the need for climate action,” said Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Safe Climate Transport Campaign. “By revoking this key scientific finding Trump is putting fealty to Big Oil over sound science and people’s health. These proposals are a giant gift to oil companies that will do real damage to people, wildlife and future generations. The administration can’t even pretend the science facts have changed. It’s purely a political bow to the oil industry.”

Revoking life-saving clean air standards that slash auto pollution will allow automakers to make cars that guzzle more gas and pollute more. Rescinding the endangerment finding will make it harder for federal agencies to take steps that cut heat-trapping greenhouse gas pollution from cars, trucks, power plants, factories and agriculture.

The administration falsely claims that U.S. pollution doesn’t matter. The United States is the second-largest carbon polluter in the world after China, and the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gasses. The U.S. emitted 11% of the world’s greenhouse gases in 2021, and during Trump’s first term his administration admitted that emissions in excess of 3% were “significant.”

“This is the most pro-combustion administration since Nero. Trump is delivering higher gas pump sales to Big Oil and higher gas pump costs and unhealthy air to us and our kids,” said Becker. “To famous lies like ‘cigarettes don’t cause cancer,’ we can now add Trump’s claim that pollution from millions of cars is healthier than rules cleaning them up. Trump’s lies have serious consequences, and this one is far worse than taking a Sharpie to a hurricane map. Generations of Americans will suffer because of it.”

The vehicle rules Trump plans to scrap would cut 7 billion metric tons of emissions and saved the average American driver $6,000 in fuel and maintenance costs over the lifetimes of the vehicles made under the standards.

“The EPA is revoking the biggest single step any nation has taken to save oil, save consumers money at the pump and combat global warming. The Trump administration’s actions will worsen heart and lung disease, sicken kids with asthma, and stoke deadly wildfires, storms and floods,” Becker said. “It’s outrageous to justify this recklessness with the ridiculous claim that cutting planet-warming pollution is more expensive than the billions it will cost consumers at the pump and the hospital because of climate devastation. We’ll fight them every step of the way.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

By Dionisia Tabureguci in Suva

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Laurie van der Burg, Oil Change International Global Public Finance Manager, said:

“The EU has just fallen into another dangerous fossil fuel dependency trap. Spending $250 billion a year on U.S. energy purchases, mostly oil and gas, is not just a bad deal for energy security, affordability, the climate and communities, it is also completely unnecessary. Even as it moves away from Russian LNG, the EU’s current gas supply contracts are sufficient to meet declining demand under the EU’s own Fitfor55 climate policies package.

“Increasing Europe’s imports of U.S. LNG is a disaster for our climate. Our recent analysis of five planned U.S. LNG projects finds that every one would worsen the climate crisis, and that further investment in U.S. LNG is incompatible with a liveable climate.

“Over 70,000 people signed a petition asking the EU to not just end reliance on Russian gas, but also break free from U.S. gas and double down on a fair and green future instead. Instead of pouring billions into an untrustworthy regime and investing in energy products that poison communities’ air and water and risks the habitability of our climate, the EU should use that money on renewables, energy efficiency programs, and paying the climate finance it owes to the Global South.”

Enrico Donda, Campaigner at Food and Water Action Europe, said:

"As part of yesterday’s EU-U.S. trade deal, the EU has pledged $750 billion, over three years, to, among other things, increase energy imports—even though gas demand is actually falling across Europe and this move contradicts its own climate commitments under the Paris Agreement.

“While the deal is presented as a way to enhance energy security and reduce reliance on Russian fossil fuels, it effectively locks Europe into decades of continued gas dependency. At a time when we should be ramping up renewables, improving energy efficiency, and cutting gas use, the EU is instead pouring billions into fossil fuel infrastructure that risks becoming stranded assets. This feels like a concession to fossil fuel interests and short-term politics. What we truly need is to phase out fossil gas now.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

In an announcement, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the administration would move around 2,600 employees out of the department’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and into five regional hubs located in Fort Collins, Colorado; Kansas City, Missouri; Indianapolis; Salt Lake City; and Raleigh, North Carolina. The administration is also planning on shuttering research facilities and eliminating the U.S. Forest Service’s nine regional offices.

The move has received pushback from Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who objected to the administration’s decision not to inform Congress of its plans before the announcement. The announcement is another blow to the Department of Agriculture, which has been significantly affected by budget and staffing cuts stretching back to the “fork in the road” memo issued by DOGE. Some estimates calculate the department could lose nearly one-third of its staff under Trump’s proposed FY26 budget, including nearly 90 percent of wildland fire management staff and 70 percent of national forest system staff.

In response, Alex Craven, Sierra Club’s forest campaign manager, released the following statement:

“This isn’t a reorganization – it’s the continued dismantling of an essential department. This administration’s approach since January has been ‘fire first, ask questions later,’ and the U.S. Forest Service has suffered some of the worst consequences. The more the agency is cut, the harder it is for them to fulfill their critical responsibilities, and the easier it is for Donald Trump to claim it’s broken and pursue his ultimate agenda – privatization.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The importance of Latinos living and working in the US is enormous: if they were in a separate country, it would be the world’s fifth largest economy, bigger than even India. President Trump is recklessly attacking Latino migrants, inflicting calculated cruelty and disregarding the consequences for their home countries.

Disastrously, US immigration policy affects the very victims of Washington’s destabilization campaigns in Latin America and Caribbean, which drive people to leave their homelands in the first place. In effect, by exporting chaos, the hegemon paradoxically ends up importing immigrants. Then, the US contradicts itself by claiming that sanctioned countries are deemed safe for deportation.

Further, implementation is selective, privileging right-wing allies and punishing progressive states. The economic fallout from reduced remittances and mass deportations is not only politically opportunistic but has grave humanitarian consequences.

Take the case of Haiti, which Human Rights Watch says is on the “edge of collapse.” Armed gangs control most of the capital, over a million Haitians have been displaced and there is acute food insecurity. The State Department’s travel advisory puts Haiti at its highest level of risk (level 4): avoid travelling there because gun crime is “common” and kidnapping is “widespread.”

Yet, over at Homeland Security, Haiti is declared “safe” for people to return. Secretary Kristi Noem wants to force 348,000 Haitians who have temporary protected status (TPS) and another 211,000 who have humanitarian parole to leave for what Black Agenda Radio describes as “a country in turmoil.”

Migrants – a threat worse than communism to nativist America

Under President Biden, Washington’s ideology-driven immigration policy led to the “humanitarian parole” program. Citizens of the targeted countries – Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela – were said to be “fleeing communism” and warranted preferential treatment. Trump has ended the parole scheme for those countries and the TPS protection for Nicaraguans and Venezuelans (Cubans never had TPS protection), yet their revolutionary governments now suffer even tougher US coercive economic measures than with Biden.

Come Trump’s second term, US immigration policy sharply limits the pathways for Cubans to enter the US legally. Over a half a million Cubans in the US lost their status and work permission with the termination of humanitarian parole. Visa restrictions limit family, student, and visitor entry. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is now allowed to deport Cubans and other migrants to countries other than their own, with as little as six hours’ notice. Meanwhile US-Cuba bilateral immigration talks are indefinitely suspended.

Trump’s malice against Cuba – a nation already teetering under the six-decade illegal US blockade – is causing a mounting humanitarian crisis. Tightening the economic embargo followed further restrictions on foreign investment and expanded sanctions. Biden’s earlier attempts to strangle the Cuban economy cut remittances sent by migrants from about $800 million in 2019 to just $35 million by May 2024. Trump’s new measures could sever the lifeline completely.

Meanwhile Nicaragua, which has 93,000 in the parole scheme and about 4,000 under TPS, is deemed “safe enough” for its citizens to return home, according to US Homeland Security:

“Nicaragua has become a worldwide tourist destination, while also promoting sustainability and revitalizing local communities. Technological innovation is empowering local farmers and fishers, making the agriculture industry more competitive and profitable… Nicaragua continues to show stable macroeconomic fundamentals, including a record-high $5 billion in foreign reserves, a sustainable debt load, and a well-capitalized banking sector.”

No one seems to have told Kristi Noem that her cabinet colleague Marco Rubio regards Nicaragua as an “enemy of humanity.” His officials briefed the New York Times that the country was “perilous for tourists.”

Last month, President Daniel Ortega reassured Nicaraguans that the country’s “doors are open,” urging them to leave the “terror” of the US. Nicaraguan Eddy García, who along with 77 others arrived on a deportation flight in February, said that they were welcomed by officials, given refreshments and then offered transport home: “I’m extremely happy to be back because now no one is going to throw me out.”

Opponents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government have, until Trump’s shift in policy, chorused that an “unprecedented wave” of migrants fled the country as a result of government “repression” following the failed coup attempt in 2018. Opposition figures are struggling to explain why, if this were the case, so few Nicaraguans are being sent back. In the six months until June, they accounted for less than one percent of the 239,000 migrants deported.

Another political shift has been the marked hostility to Venezuelan migrants. By the end of Biden’s term, over half a million Venezuelans had been accepted under TPS and 117,000 given “humanitarian parole.” Under Trump, these Venezuelans are denounced for “invading” the US. Some are even accused of being affiliated to the violent Tren de Aragua gang which, Trump baselessly asserted, is directed by Nicolas Maduro’s government.

Meanwhile, US-Venezuela talks on migration continue. The Venezuelan government, for its part, has welcomed returning migrants under its “Return to the Homeland Plan.” Over 200 Venezuelans dubiously linked to gangs, incarcerated and tortured in El Salvador’s CECOT prison, have recently been freed. Caracas’s other priority is to reunite children, thrust into foster care in the US, back with their deported Venezuelan parents.

Driven out by ICE

Apart from the prospect of being dispatched to one of El Salvador’s notorious prisons or being abandoned to an unknown fate in a remote country like South Sudan, thousands of Latino migrants are leaving the US on their own faced with escalating threats from ICE.

Wilfredo, from the city of Masaya, Nicaragua, had voluntarily flown back from Miami with two others. Many more Nicaraguans were on the same flight anxious to leave, he told us, before ICE officials kidnapped them, took all their belongings and put them, handcuffed, on deportation flights. “The ‘American Dream’ has become a nightmare,” he said.

Even long-time naturalized citizens in the US are terrorized. In liberal Marin County, CA, Venezuelan-born Claudia now takes her passport with her whenever she leaves the house for fear of being seized. It’s happened already to other naturalized citizens.

Costa Rica and Panama were persuaded by Trump to accept around 500 deported asylum seekers from third countries as diverse as Iran, Cameroon and Vietnam. These migrants are now in limbo, receive little assistance and – in most cases – are unable to speak Spanish. Those in Panama have been pressured to accept repatriation flights but many face persecution if they return to their home countries.

Duplicitous immigration policy

The treatment of migrants from most Latin American countries contrasts sharply with Washington’s approach towards El Salvador. It has 174,000 citizens living in the US with TPS and – like Haiti – this protection was offered after the country suffered severe earthquake damage. However, El Salvador has been conveniently judged as “unable” to accept the return of so many of its citizens; their TPS continues.

Despite the supposedly unsafe conditions used to justify TPS, the State Department downgraded the risk of travel to El Salvador to its lowest level, ranking it as one of the safest countries in Latin America. “Just got the US State Department’s travel gold star: Level 1: safest it gets,” Bukele boasted.

Remittances from the country’s estimated 1.4 million migrants in the US provide El Salvador with a vital 23.5% of its national income. Bukele’s White House visits, hosting Marco Rubio at his home and, above all, incarcerating migrants on behalf of the US – along with groveling before Trump – paid off.

In a further attack on migrants, Trump is hitting them with new taxes on the remittances they send, which provide 23% of Central America’s GDP. Migrants struggling for survival are taxed in this way while the wealthy can move money abroad – through bank wires, investment accounts, shell companies, and real estate purchases – without similar penalties.

Many Latin American economies will be further strained by a combination of falling remittances, returning migrants who initially lack jobs, and, in some cases, harsher economic sanctions. Meanwhile, their exports to the US are being hit by new tariffs. Trump appears to be exacerbating the economic conditions that drove many migrants north under his predecessor’s administration.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Perry and Roger D. Harris.

As controversy over President Donald Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein continues to dog his administration, we speak with investigative journalist Vicky Ward, who has spent decades reporting on the deceased sexual predator, his rich and powerful associates, and the impact of his crimes. Much of Trump’s political base is in an uproar after federal officials declined to release government files about Epstein and his serial sexual abuse of women and girls, with Trump himself reportedly named in the documents.

“They were friends. They hung out with each other,” Ward says of Trump and Epstein.

Ward was among the first journalists to investigate Epstein when she profiled him for Vanity Fair in 2003. The magazine’s editor at the time, Graydon Carter, cut out the testimonies of two young women who had spoken on the record about Epstein’s abuse. Ward’s podcast and TV series of the same name is Chasing Ghislaine: The Untold Story of the Woman in Epstein’s Shadow, focusing on Ghislaine Maxwell’s role as a facilitator for Epstein’s crimes.

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

Before the Biden administration could finalize the rule, Donald Trump was re-elected president, ushering in another era of deregulation. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced plans to revise or repeal 63 workplace regulations that Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said “stifle growth and limit opportunity.” 

OSHA’s heat stress rule wasn’t among them. And though the new administration has the power to withdraw the draft regulation, it hasn’t. Instead, OSHA has continued to move it forward: The agency is currently in the middle of soliciting input from the general public about the proposed policy. Some labor experts say this process, typically bureaucratic and onerous even in the absence of political interference, is moving along faster than expected — perhaps a sign that civil servants at OSHA feel a true sense of urgency to protect vulnerable workers from heat stress as yearly temperatures set record after record. 

But labor advocacy groups focused on workers along the food supply chain — many of whom work outside, like farmworkers, or in poorly ventilated spaces, like warehouse and meat processing facilities — say workers have waited too long for basic live-saving protections. Earlier this month, Senator Alex Padilla and Congresswoman Judy Chu, both from California, re-introduced a bill to Congress that, if passed, would direct OSHA to enact a federal heat standard for workers swiftly.

It’s a largely symbolic move, as the rule-making process is already underway, and the legislation is unlikely to advance in a Republican-controlled Congress. But the bill signals Democratic lawmakers are watching closely and urgently expect a final rule four years after OSHA first began drafting its proposed rule. The message is clear: However fast OSHA is moving, it hasn’t been enough to protect workers from the worst impacts of climate change. 

“Since OSHA started its heat-stress rulemaking in 2021, over 144 lives have been lost to heat-related hazards,” said Padilla in a statement emailed to Grist. “We know how to prevent heat-related illnesses to ensure that these family members are able to come home at the end of their shift.” 

The lawmaker added that the issue is “a matter of life or death.” 

Heat is the deadliest form of extreme weather, according to the World Health Organization. In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 986 workers died from heat exposure on the job from 1992 to 2022, or about 34 per year. 

This is very likely an undercount. Prolonged heat exposure can exacerbate underlying health problems like cardiovascular issues, making it difficult for medical professionals to discern when illness and death is attributable to extreme heat. As heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions continue to push global temperatures higher, experts expect heat-related illnesses and deaths to follow.

The life-threatening impacts of exposure to extreme heat in the workplace have been on the federal government’s radar for more than 50 years. Labor unions and farmworkers have long pushed for federal and local heat standards. In 2006, California became the first state to enact its own heat protections for outdoor workers, after an investigation by the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health found 46 cases of heat-related illnesses the year prior. Legislative efforts to protect workers or nudge OSHA along often follow or name farmworkers who died from heat stress. Padilla and Chu’s bill from this year is named after Asunción Valdivia, a 53-year-old who died in California in 2004 after picking grapes for 10 hours straight in 105 degree Fahrenheit heat. 

OSHA’s proposed heat standard would require employers to establish plans to avoid and monitor for signs of heat illness and to help new hires acclimate to working in high heat. “That should be implemented yesterday,” said Nichelle Harriott, policy director of HEAL Food Alliance, a national coalition of food and farmworkers. “There really is no cause for this to be taking as long as it has.”

In late June and early July, OSHA held virtual hearings in which it heard testimony from people both for and against a federal heat standard. According to Anastasia Christman, a senior policy analyst from the National Employment Law Project who attended the hearings, employees from the agency seemed engaged and asked substantive questions. “It was very informative,” she said. OSHA didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.

As written, OSHA’s proposed heat rule would apply to about 36 million workers in the U.S. Christman noted that sedentary workers — those who sit for most of the work day — are currently excluded from the federal standard. Ironically, at one point during the agency’s hearings, participants had to take an unscheduled break after the air conditioning stopped working in the Department of Labor building where OSHA staff were sitting. “They had to be evacuated because it was too hot to sit there and be on a Zoom call,” said Christman. She estimated that if sedentary workers were non-exempt, the number of U.S. workers covered by the rule would nearly double to 66 million.

From her point of view, OSHA is moving “very fast on this — for OSHA.” But Christman acknowledged that, even in a best-case scenario, regulations would not be on the books for another 12 to 14 months. At that point, OSHA would publish guidance for employers on how to comply with the regulation, as well as respond to any legal challenges to the final rule. That process, “in an optimistic world,” she said, could take between two and four years. 

For many farmworkers, as well as other workers along the food supply chain, that’s too long to wait. 

“For decades, millions of workers have been waiting for federal heat standards that never came,” said Oscar Londoño, co-executive director of WeCount, a member-led immigrant rights organization based in South Florida. 

The group has spearheaded multiple campaigns to draw public attention to how sweltering temperatures impact outdoor workers in the region, including plant nursery workers. Londoño said some agricultural workers have told WeCount it already feels like the hottest summer of their lifetime.

In response to the news of Padilla and Chu’s bill, Londoño said, “We appreciate any step by a lawmaker trying to protect workers, especially as we’re seeing, once again, a record-breaking summer.” But he cast doubt on OSHA’s ability to enforce regulations around heat stress, particularly in the agricultural sector.

“We know that there are employers across the country who are routinely violating the laws that already exist,” said Londoño. “And so adding on new laws and regulations that we do need doesn’t automatically mean that workers will be protected.”

WeCount’s organizing is hampered by Florida’s Republican governor and state legislature, which passed a law last year prohibiting local governments from enacting their own heat standards. In the absence of politicians who will stand for workers, WeCount members are trying to publicize the risks that agricultural workers take on. Their latest campaign, Planting Justice, centers on local plant nursery workers, who grow indoor houseplants. 

The goal is to try and educate consumers about the labor that goes into providing their monsteras, pothos, snake plants, and other indoor houseplants. “If you buy indoor houseplants, it’s very possible that that plant came from workers in Florida,” said Londoño, “workers who are being denied water, shade, and rest breaks by working in record-breaking heat, including 90- or 100-degree heat temperatures.”

Down the line, the nursery workers hope to solidify a set of demands and bring those concerns to companies like Home Depot and Lowes that sit at the top of the indoor plant supply chain. Similar tactics have worked for agricultural workers in other sectors; the Fair Food Program, first established by tomato pickers in 2011 in Florida, has won stringent heat protections for farmworkers in part by building strong support for laborers’ demands among consumers.

“Right now we are looking at every possible solution or strategy that can help workers reach these protections,” said Londoño. “What workers actually need is a guarantee that every single day they’ll be able to go to work and return home alive.” This kind of worker-led organizing will continue, he said, whether or not OSHA delivers its own heat standard.

“Right now we are looking at every possible solution or strategy that can help workers reach these protections,” said Londoño. “What workers actually need is a guarantee that every single day they’ll be able to go to work and return home alive.” This kind of worker-led organizing will continue, he said, whether or not OSHA delivers its own heat standard.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A long-awaited rule to protect workers from heat stress moves forward, even under Trump on Jul 28, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

At issue is the administration’s sudden termination of two contracts guaranteeing legal and social services to clients covered in the 2023 agreement.

The ACLU filed a motion in April after the Trump administration abruptly notified the Acacia Center for Justice, the main contractor that oversees the legal services program serving those clients, that it did not intend to renew its contract.

On June 10, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw of the Southern District of California, ordered the government to reinstate its contract with Acacia so the organization can provide the required legal services under the settlement. He stressed that the Trump administration cannot “just simply disregard” a settlement the U.S. government agreed to.

Late yesterday, the judge rejected the administration’s request to evade that ruling, and also found a second major breach by the government when it abruptly terminated its contract with Seneca Family of Agencies, which provides social services to the separated families, without securing any replacement contract.

In this latest ruling, the judge wrote that the Trump administration “forced the separation of thousands of immigrant parents from their children, many of whom have yet to be reunified, and it caused profound, devastating, and lasting damage to those families.” The settlement agreement, he wrote, was the result of “painstaking negotiations” aimed to “address that damage” done to these families under the policy.

The judge reiterated the policy was “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country,” and again ordered the government to stop breaching the agreement and adhere to the settlement terms.

ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, lead counsel in the family separation lawsuit, had the following reaction:

“Rather than acknowledge the horrible abuses inflicted by the family separation policy, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to avoid its responsibilities under the settlement. Fortunately, the court has squarely told the administration, for the second time in six weeks, it cannot simply walk away from its obligations.”

The ruling is here.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Excess seaweed is a seasonal nuisance along the bays and inlets that twine throughout Puget Sound. But the issue has magnified as excess nutrient runoff has fueled sprawling blooms. It has become a bona fide threat to the business of Washington shellfish farmers like Joth Davis.

In the past, Davis has attempted to harvest the seaweed by hand to reduce the surging number of macroalgae menacing his catch. Alas, there is the “age-old problem of scale,” he said. “It is difficult work, and time available during low tides to tackle the problem is limited, with everything else we need to accomplish when the tide is out.” 

A couple years before the team got to work last May, researchers at the University of Washington approached Davis to see if he’d be interested in partnering with them to develop a new supply chain. The plan was simple: Harvest the seaweed from Davis’s farm, give it to small and mid-sized crop farmers in the area as a soil-building replacement for chemical fertilizer, and along the way study the effects — reduced emissions from a shortened supply chain, steady yields from shellfish and terrestrial farms, changes in soil chemistry, and possibly a way to sequester the carbon stored in the seaweed itself. They were also aiming to investigate the impacts of seaweed removal on shellfish survival and growth. 

A Department of Agriculture program established by the Biden administration, and funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, offered exactly the federal support they needed to make the vision happen. In February of 2022, the USDA launched the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative, or PCSC, which former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said at the time would “provide targeted funding to meet national and global demand and expand market opportunities for climate-smart commodities to increase the competitive advantage of American producers.”

Davis, who has a background in marine science, seized the chance. 

The aptly named “Blue Carbon, Green Fields,” project was selected by the USDA in 2023 to receive roughly $5 million of the climate-smart commodities money in a five-year agreement. In addition to Davis’s team at Baywater and the scientists from UW, the partnership consisted of researchers from Washington State University and Washington Sea Grant, conservationists from the nonprofit Puget Sound Restoration Fund, and the local farm incubator Viva Farms. In their first year in the field, the team harvested a little over 15,000 pounds of wet seaweed, which was stockpiled and distributed to four crop farms throughout the region. By laying the groundwork for the agricultural supply chain, the team was on track for the unthinkable — a quadruple win of sorts, where everyone involved benefitted, including the planet. 

Instead, not even halfway through a federal contract, their drying racks and other seaweed harvesting equipment are at risk of just gathering cobwebs on Davis’s farm; each unused tool a daily reminder of the progress they lost at the behest of President Donald Trump’s cultural politics. The supply chain, fragile in its novelty, is splintering apart.

Almost a year after the team began their field work harvesting seaweed in Puget Sound, the USDA announced that it would cancel the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative. In a press release issued on April 14, the agency called the $3.1 billion funding pot a “climate slush fund” and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins decried it as “largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers.” The USDA said that it axed the initiative due to the “sky-high administration fees which in many instances provided less than half of the federal funding directly to farmers.” 

Robert Bonnie, the former Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation at the USDA under the Biden administration, rejects this claim. He contends that the reason some projects reported higher administrative fees than others is because roughly half the awards were intended to boost markets for smaller projects. “You would expect those projects to have higher administrative costs because those farmers are harder to reach,” he argued. “Take the Iowa Soybean Association, or Archer Daniels Midland, where they’ve got established relationships with farmers, where they’ve got high demand amongst many of their farmers, you’re going to expect those projects to have lower administrative costs as a percentage because they’ve already got an extensive network. So we wanted to provide flexibility across projects to make sure that the door was open to everyone,” added Bonnie. 

In any case, USDA’s use of the term “cancel” was something of a misnomer. In the same announcement, the agency shared its plan to review existing projects under a new set of scoring criteria, to ensure that they align with the new administration’s priorities. The release noted that the program would be “reformed and overhauled” into a Trump-era effort to redistribute the pool of IRA money. So as the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program sunsetted, the Advancing Markets for Producers initiative was born. 

The Trump program’s criteria required grant awardees to ensure that a minimum of 65 percent of their funds go directly to farmers, that they enrolled at least one farmer in their program by December 31, 2024, and that they have made a payment to at least one farmer by that same date. According to a former senior USDA official, who spoke to Grist on the condition of anonymity, the USDA grouped the 135 PCSC grantees into three buckets: Fifteen projects were told they could keep going, as they met the new thresholds; five recipients were told they could continue on the condition that they modified their projects to meet the new priorities; and 115 were informed that their projects were terminated as they did not meet the new policy priorities and were invited to resubmit. A few weeks later, the official said that projects that initially received cancellation letters were told something different – that the termination would be rescinded and they could just modify their proposals to meet administration priorities.

The group behind Blue Carbon, Green Fields was among the 115. 

In the USDA’s official termination notice to the University of Washington, shared with Grist, the team was told that their project “failed to meet the first of three Farmer First policy priorities identified by USDA” — that at least 65 percent of the funds must go to producers. A second notice stated that because of that, “the award is inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, Department priorities.”

Sarah Collier, the UW assistant professor leading the initiative, remembers how the news of the termination hit her. When she got the letter, “everything had to come to a screeching halt.” She jumped into crisis-mode, notifying the 25 or so people working on the project, including students whom Collier said saw their “dissertation research derailed.” She then reached out to notify the farmers who had been receiving the seaweed fertilizer. The timing couldn’t have been worse: the team had just completed a round of farmer recruitment, and were in the middle of signing contracts with five more small and mid-sized farmers.  

“I have days where I am like, I can’t,” said Collier. “I can’t handle one more conversation where all I can say is, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do about this, because this isn’t the way that things are supposed to go. This isn’t the way that federal grants are supposed to work.’” 

In May, the USDA sent a letter to grantees who had received cancellation notices informing them of how to submit revised applications. According to the letter, which was also shared with Grist, grantees would need to arrange one-on-one meetings with Natural Resources Conservation Service representatives and submit a new budget narrative and statement of work incorporating Trump’s policy priorities. They had until June 20th. 

When they first learned that their funding had been culled, Collier’s UW team, as the main grantee, wasn’t sure they were going to resubmit — or whether they even could. At the time, nothing further had been disclosed about what it would entail, so Collier decided to wait to talk with the NRCS to find out more. After that meeting, they moved forward with resubmission, in a bid to salvage what funding they were able to. That required Collier to create “a very revised” narrative and restructure the budget, in addition to regular meetings with the NRCS. 

The former USDA official noted that specific details of the resubmission process have since largely been kept quiet, since the vast majority of former PCSC grantees are fearful of speaking out about their experiences in case of retaliation by the administration. The closed-door nature of it all, with a lack of clear communication from the Trump administration and changes in guidance leading up to the submission deadline, the official said, has sown confusion and distress among former grantees. 

Although no official verdict timeline has been communicated — Collier has heard everything from 60 days to sometime in September — she expects to be waiting on the final funding decision for at least two more months. Hannah Smith-Brubaker, executive director at the nonprofit Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, or Pasa, has been told something similar about her pending resubmission. Another PCSC grantee, Pasa also reapplied to the new USDA program after being informed they didn’t meet one of the Trump administration’s priorities. Doing so required a total revamp of what their old project had been structured to do. 

“In the end, we decided to completely rewrite our proposal rather than just alter our original proposal. We had already said goodbye to the old program and knew it wouldn’t be able to fit the new reality,” said Smith-Brubaker. She says she “lies awake at night” concerned over the outcome, including whether the USDA may choose to deny their resubmission because of Pasa’s involvement in a federal lawsuit filed earlier this year challenging the Trump administration’s funding freeze. 

“It’s hard to say right now which decisions and actions might unintentionally result in things going awry,” said Smith-Brubaker. “Even though we still feel it was not in farmer’s best interest to have this degree of disruption, and fear for what a new reality could mean where every change in administration could involve a complete dismantling of stability and promises, we are extremely grateful for the opportunity to still leverage these funds for what our farmers need most.”

In a series of separate recent actions, the USDA provided a peek into how leaders at the nation’s highest food and farming agency have taken strides to comply with the president’s executive orders targeting climate action, environmental justice, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In mid-June, the agency announced the termination of more than 145 awards totaling $148.6 million of “Woke DEI Funding.” Then, on July 10, the USDA posted a final rule in the Federal Register revoking a longstanding provision that ensured “disadvantaged” producers have equitable access to federal support, by allowing for carve-outs designed specifically for groups, such as Black and Indigenous farmers, that have historically faced discrimination. Shortly thereafter, the agency also revoked guidelines implemented during the Biden administration that mandated schools administering federal meal programs to ban discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. 

Some observers say that in the USDA’s rushed campaign to gut federal funding while erasing footprints of the Biden administration, the termination of the climate-smart project happened much too fast, and much too soon. For one, Bonnie, who helped design and implement the PCSC initiative, believes that the USDA’s invitation for grantees to resubmit their applications signals the administration’s initial lack of understanding about the bipartisan backlash to the decision. 

“The Trump administration was surprised at the amount of support for not only this program, but for climate-smart agriculture more broadly,” said Bonnie. Leadership at USDA were, he added, “under pressure to satisfy the far-right, to be anti-climate and anti-woke.”

“They try to paint with a broad brush about this being the Green New Deal,” Bonnie continued. “Most people that knew this program, knew that they were blowing smoke.” 

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While the Blue Carbon, Green Fields team is hopeful that, in time, an iteration of the project may continue, work on the ground has stalled. If they do receive a new round of funding from the USDA, Collier said, one change to their budget proposal will have considerable impacts on how the project will be carried out. To satisfy the requirements for resubmission, nearly two-thirds of the funds for the award will have to go directly to participating producers — rather than to the partners like the UW team, which is how it was originally structured.

“That does mean that, pending what we learn as we engage with USDA on this, that if we’re able to go forward, participants will have to seek out their own services to support the practices that they’re implementing, rather than having those services provided by the project partners, as part of the grant,” said Collier. “Instead, they will receive funds to seek out the services that they need, like technical assistance, or like harvesting and transporting seaweed.”

That modification, though seemingly minor, is rather significant, particularly for small farmers who already struggle with limited time and resources to allocate to anything beyond their day-to-day operations, some of whom say it presents an unjust burden. According to fellow PCSC grantee Smith-Brubaker, such a structural change will make things harder for them. “It’s really too bad to have to make it even more complicated for farmers to get the services they want and need,” she said.

Ellen Scheffer, who co-operates a 20-acre organic vegetable and grain farm in Fall City, Washington, is a small farmer involved with the Blue Carbon, Green Fields project. The funds “being yanked away” makes Scheffer “feel really defeated about the future.” A downside of USDA’s resubmission process, she noted, is that “any positive benefit that might help the future of our environment is going to have to be a side benefit, rather than the direct goal of the research. It feels very, very frustrating, especially as someone who is living every day trying to grow food in a way that is good for our planet.” 

Others, like project partner Viva Farms, the nonprofit farm incubator that connected producers in their network with the seaweed researchers, feels as if the group’s chapter together has already come to a close. “It did feel like the momentum was really a sheer drop-off,” said Viva Farms’ Elma Burnham. “We were about to prepare to onboard all sorts of new farms, to have seaweed drying here, to sort of get them more action of the program, instead of more of this, like, planning. And, yeah, it was challenging to see it sort of come to a halt,” she said. 

The likelihood of revival, according to Burnham, feels low. “Of course, we would love to see more organic, small-scale farmers pursue this research, we would love to see more innovation and collaboration happening in the Puget Sound region. But it feels over,” said Burnham. “This particular project feels over.” 

Davis, the shellfish grower, says he struggled to come to terms with the time and workload that would be demanded of him in the revised program — and what the restructuring of the proposal to align with the Trump administration’s policy priorities altogether represents. “I just thought it was kind of backwards, to be honest. It just didn’t seem like the right way to do it,” he said. For instance, directing most of the grant money to the farmers rather than project leads, he added, “didn’t make sense.”   

Instead, he’s going his own way. Davis has begun planning out an even shorter seaweed supply chain in tandem with his daughter Hannah and Emily Buckner, one of her colleagues at the Puget Sound Restoration Fund, just two of the six original partners. They’ve been busy identifying producers in the Chimacum Valley to collaborate with, all within a twenty mile radius of his farm. By narrowing the geographic range and foregoing much of the soil chemistry research, the scope of Davis’s new venture is limited compared to Blue Carbon, Green Fields, but, he said, “At the end of the day, I was, and I am, too invested in the parts that [the USDA] didn’t want.”

Still, not all the equipment that the USDA funds bought is laying idle around the farm, at risk of catching cobwebs: Davis is currently testing out a raft-based suction system to vacuum up the excess seaweed clustered around sensitive geoducks.

“We’ve got the equipment, and we’re going to harvest it and dry some and see where this can go,” he said. “We want to move forward with that, just to see if it works.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Seaweed brought fishers, farmers, and scientists together. Trump tore them apart. on Jul 25, 2025.

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

Over the past six months, JVP has repeatedly warned that the Trump administration is manufacturing false charges of antisemitism as a cynical ploy to fundamentally reshape higher education and, through it, American society. The Trump regime, which platforms white supremacists and neo-Nazi sympathizers, does not truly care for Jewish safety. Columbia’s agreement confirms our worst fears. The deal mandates measures to silence research, teaching and criticism of the Israeli government’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and system of apartheid. In addition, it includes broad limitations on the right to protest, reduces protections for trans students, places severe restrictions on international students and their rights, and establishes an effective ban on any considerations of diversity in hiring, promotions or admissions.

This is the latest in a series of recent moves by Columbia University that flagrantly — and falsely — invoke Jewish safety in an effort to appease authoritarian forces, including: the mass suspension of student protesters, the adoption of the discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism, draconian antidemocratic reforms to its disciplinary procedures, attacks on shared governance, new ideological tests for academic departments, silence in the face of ICE kidnapping one of its students, and shuttering its campus to the public. We refuse to allow Jewish identities and histories to be used as fuel for such heinous attacks on our fundamental rights.

These policies do nothing to advance Jewish safety. To the contrary, as the vast majority of Jews recognize, they endanger our community by making us the face of a broad right-wing attack on higher education, movements for social justice, and communities of color. This is especially the case on college campuses, where a great and growing number of young Jews, called by the social justice traditions of our faith, are mobilizing in an effort to end our universities and our government’s support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Jewish Voice for Peace urges other colleges and universities not to follow Columbia University’s dangerous example and to instead recommit themselves to academic inquiry free of outside political interference and to the pursuit of a more just and equal world. As the Trump administration pursues an authoritarian project at home and finances an ongoing genocide in Gaza, it is incumbent upon universities to recognize and respond to this historical moment with concrete actions.

Anonymous undergraduate Columbia University student, JVP-Columbia member:

“It is frankly terrifying to see how easily and shamelessly Columbia has thrown its international students, its students of color and its transgender students under the bus. The implementation of these fascist policies is not capitulation — it is exactly what Columbia has wanted to do all along. Even with all the dangers this agreement poses to us, we know that it pales in comparison to the suffering the Israeli government is inflicting upon Gaza. Columbia is trying to stop us from speaking out against forced starvation, but we know nothing is more important than fighting for the people of Palestine, and we will not be silenced when Gaza needs us to speak up.”

Joseph Howley, Associate Professor of Classics, Columbia University, JVP Academic Council:

“In a crisis of authoritarian attacks on democracy, universities have one job: standing up to tyrants. Columbia not only neglected that basic duty to the rest of society, but also sold out its own proud heritage of protest and social justice by making a deal that leaves every student, staff and faculty member studying and teaching under the threat that Trump will be back to shake us down again if someone with the right connections doesn’t like what gets said on campus or in a classroom. At a moment when Israel’s policies have hundreds of thousands of Gazans on the brink of starvation, the White House and Columbia’s Board are more focused on ending DEI and making it illegal to criticize the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

Jonah Rubin, Sr. Manager of Campus Organizing, Jewish Voice for Peace:

“Columbia has betrayed its core mission and set a dangerous precedent for the entire higher education sector. The once-great university is quickly transforming itself into an appendage of the MAGA movement, agreeing to anti-Palestinian, xenophobic, transphobic, racist, pro-genocide ideology. History will not forget their role in facilitating the rise of authoritarianism at home and genocide in Gaza.”

JVP staff, members and students are available to speak with media

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on July 24, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

A Trump administration appointee has been going hard after demonstrators in Los Angeles who in recent weeks have been protesting against Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations—but it seems like he’s having a hard time getting grand juries to go along.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Bill Essayli, who was appointed by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this year to serve as the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, recently became “irate” and could be heard “screaming” at prosecutors in the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles when a grand jury declined to indict an anti-ICE protester who had been targeted for potential felony charges.

And according to the LA Times’ reporting, this failure to secure an indictment against demonstrators was far from a one-off.

“Although his office filed felony cases against at least 38 people for alleged misconduct that either took place during last month’s protests or near the sites of immigration raids, many have been dismissed or reduced to misdemeanor charges,” the paper writes. “In total, he has secured only seven indictments, which usually need to be obtained no later than 21 days after the filing of a criminal complaint. Three other cases have been resolved via plea deal.”

It is incredibly rare for prosecutors to fail to secure indictments from grand juries, which only require a determination that there is “probable cause” to believe a suspect committed a crime and which do not hear arguments from opposing counsels during proceedings.

Meghan Blanco, a former federal prosecutor and current defense attorney representing one of the anti-ICE protesters currently facing charges, told the LA Times that there’s a simple reason that grand juries aren’t pulling the trigger on indictments: Namely, prosecutors’ cases are full of holes.

In one case, Blanco said she obtained video evidence that directly contradicted a sworn statement from a Border Patrol officer who alleged that her client had obstructed efforts to chase down a suspect who assaulted him. When she presented this video at her client’s first court hearing, charges against him were promptly dropped.

“The agent lied and said he was in hot pursuit of a person who punched him,” Blanco explained. “The entirety of the affidavit is false.”

One anonymous prosecutor who spoke with the LA Times similarly said that ICE agents have been losing credibility when their actions and statements are put under a legal microscope.

“There are a lot of hotheaded [Customs and Border Protection] officers who are kind of arresting first and asking questions later,” they said. “We’re finding there’s not probable cause to support it.”

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, was floored by the failures to secure indictments against the anti-ICE demonstrators.

“Incredible,” he wrote on social media website X. “Federal prosecutors are seeing many cases of people accused of assaulting Border Patrol agents being turned down by grand juries! Los Angeles federal prosecutors are privately saying it’s because CBP agents are just ‘arresting first and asking questions later.'”

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) similarly bashed prosecutors for using easily discredited statements from ICE officers to secure indictments.

“I’m a former prosecutor and can confirm that any prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich,” he wrote. “Except the top prosecutor in L.A. Why? Because this article points out ICE AGENTS ARE MAKING SHIT UP. You want your agents respected? Tell them to stop lying.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Brad Reed.

President Donald Trump has explicitly targeted climate- and justice-related programs and funding, but the resulting cuts have gone deep into services communities rely on to survive, like food aid in rural areas or improvements to failing wastewater infrastructure. Farmers have lost grants and support that help keep them going through increasingly volatile weather. Even your favorite YouTube creators may be affected.

We asked those who have lost their federal jobs or funding to tell us about what’s being lost: What was their work providing to communities, and what happens now?

Their stories, reflecting just a small sample of the many people who’ve been affected, illuminate  how deep these cuts go, not only into programs explicitly working to reduce emissions, but also into those keeping us safe, healthy, fed, and informed.

Have you been impacted, or know someone who has? We want to hear about it. Message us on Signal at 206-876-3147 or share your story using this form. (Learn more about how to reach us and how we will use your information.)

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline They lost their jobs and funding under Trump. What did communities lose? on Jul 24, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Grist staff.

Rep. Al Green stated, “I would like to thank Free Speech for People, Women’s March, and the nearly one million Americans whose petition signatures continue to show how the call for the impeachment of President Donald Trump is of paramount importance and must be addressed by Congress. We are laying the foundation for impeachment by raising our voices across America with a protest movement that is nearly one million strong, and in Congress, by continuing to introduce articles of impeachment because no president is above the law. His abuse of power, disregard for the Constitution, authoritarian dictatorship activity, and violations of the War Powers Clause demand a response. Impeachment and removal from office is the remedy provided in our Constitution to protect democracy from an authoritarian president whose threat to democracy has become an assault on democracy. This is why the article of impeachment filed in June is the first in the foundation to remove an authoritarian president, but not the last.”

Following a press conference outside the US Capitol, organizers hand-delivered the signatures to Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Jim Jordan, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

“What this campaign shows is that nearly 1,000,000 Americans across the country refuse to let Trump and his allies destroy our democracy,” says Alexandra Flores-Quilty, Free Speech For People’s Campaign Director. “It’s up to Congress to do their job, defend the Constitution, and impeach and remove Donald Trump from office for his grave abuses of power.”

“Donald Trump has repeatedly trampled on our Constitution and attacked our communities with cruelty and impunity. Nearly one million people demanding impeachment is proof that we will not back down. Congress must act now to protect our freedoms and our futures,” says Tamika Middleton, Managing Director of Women's March.

The signatures were gathered as part of the Impeach Trump Again campaign, led by constitutional lawyers at Free Speech For People, who have documented multiple abuses of power and violations of the Constitution Trump has committed since his inauguration. These include:

• Unconstitutionally usurping Congress’s power to declare war;
• Unlawfully mobilizing military forces against civilian protesters in the United States;
• Illegally kidnapping, detaining, and removing U.S. residents;
• Illegally and unconstitutionally removing U.S. residents, migrants, and asylum-seekers to foreign prisons;
• Unlawfully attempting to deport immigrants for peacefully protesting;
• Unconstitutionally usurping Congress’s powers;
• Defying court orders and unconstitutionally usurping judicial authority;
• Abusing his power to seek retribution against perceived adversaries;
• Co-opting and dismantling independent government oversight;
• Imposing unlawful tariffs;
• Receiving foreign and domestic emoluments;
• Unconstitutionally usurping local and state authority;
• Abusing the emergency power;
• Abusing the pardon power;
• Corruptly dismissing criminal charges against Eric Adams;
• Depriving citizens of their birthright;
• Blocking efforts to secure U.S. elections;
• Planning the forced removal of Palestinians from Gaza;
• Engaging in unlawful, corrupt practices during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Last month, Rep. Al Green introduced articles of impeachment against Trump for violating the War Powers Clause of the Constitution following the military attack on Iran without congressional authorization, and the Congressman forced a floor vote on the articles in the US House. Seventy-eight Members of Congress joined Rep. Green in voting to advance those articles of impeachment, nearly four times as many Representatives who were on record supporting the impeachment of Trump prior to the vote. Now, with nearly a million Americans joining the call for impeachment, Congress must do its constitutional duty and launch impeachment proceedings.

“The Framers designed the constitutional remedy of impeachment to deal with a president who would attack the Constitution, trample on the rule of law, and engage in High Crimes,” says John Bonifaz, Co-Founder and President of Free Speech For People. “The American people are demanding that Members of Congress abide by their oath to protect and defend the Constitution and impeach and remove Trump.”

For more information on the campaign and to read the case for impeachment, please visit impeachtrumpagain.org.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on July 22, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

In what has been described as a “barrage of attacks on workers,” the U.S. Department of Labor under President Donald Trump is planning to overhaul dozens of rules that protect workers from exploitation and wage theft.

The administration announced this month that it planned to change over 60 regulations it deems “unecessary” burdens to businesses and economic growth.

According to an analysis released Tuesday by labor policy experts at the Century Foundation—senior fellows Julie Su and Rachel West and director of economy and jobs Andrew Stettner—most of the changes “reverse critical standards that ensure workers get a just day’s pay and come home healthy and safe.”

In one of the most sweeping changes, the department plans to reverse a 2013 rule that extended minimum wage and overtime protections to home healthcare workers.

These workers, who care for elderly and other medically frail individuals, already make less than $17 an hour on average.

Stettner told Common Dreams that the changes will “suppress wages” and allow agencies to “put the screws on workers to work 50- or 60-hour weeks.”

The Trump administration is also rolling back a Biden-era rule that banned bosses from paying subminimum wages to disabled employees.

This discriminatory practice has been on the wane due to state-level bans in 15 states. But in the absence of a federal ban, nearly 40,000 employees—most of whom have intellectual disabilities—still received less than the federal minimum wage as of 2024.

The Century Foundation report says that by ending the rule, the Trump administration would be once again “relegating workers with disabilities to jobs that pay as little as pennies per hour.”

The department is also taking a hatchet to workers’ rights and safety. Another major change it proposed would do away with protections for seasonal migrant farmworkers under the H-2A visa program who raise complaints about wage and hour violations.

It was commonplace for farm owners to take advantage of these seasonal employees, whose legal status was tied to their work, and who therefore risked deportation if they lost their jobs.

Cases of exploitation, however, declined to an all-time low after the Biden administration introduced the rule, which banned employers from firing, disciplining, or otherwise retaliating against workers who attempted to participate in collective bargaining.

“These reforms protected the rights of farmworkers in the H-2A program to speak out individually and collectively against mistreatment and prevented employers from arbitrarily firing them from their jobs,” the report says.

The department also proposed weakening the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) general duty clause, which allows businesses to be punished for putting their employees in dangerous situations. The proposed change would exempt many jobs that are deemed “inherently risky” from protection.

The administration described it as a way to prevent OSHA from cracking down on workplace injuries among athletes and stuntmen.

However, Stettner suggested that the broad language could allow the administration to go much further in defining what is considered “inherently risky.” The report notes that the administration is “crowdsourcing” suggestions from employers about what other occupations to exempt.

“The employer community, they’re jumping onto this,” Stettner said. “They’re telling their members to write in to the Department of Labor about other inherently dangerous occupations they should except from the general duty clause.”

The authors pointed out that the administration has previously rolled back restrictions meant to protect workers from heat-related stress on the job, which results in more than 600 deaths and over 25,000 injuries each year.

As the administration pushes to expand coal mining, it is also weakening protections for the miners themselves. After laying off most of the employees at OSHA’s research arm—which monitors cases of black lung disease—earlier this year, it is now weakening safety requirements to prevent roof falls, mine explosions, and exposure to toxic silica.

“The DOL’s role should be to protect the most vulnerable workers: farmworkers, people with disabilities, people that have suffered discrimination,” Stettner said. “They’re showing their true colors as an anti-worker administration.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Stephen Prager.

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

On March 15, President Donald Trump’s administration sent more than 230 Venezuelan immigrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. Without providing evidence, Trump has called the men “some of the most violent savages on the face of the Earth.”

Last week, the men were released as suddenly as they’d been taken away. Now, the truth of all their stories — one by one — will begin to be told.

Starting here.

We’ve compiled a first-of-its-kind, case-by-case accounting of 238 Venezuelan men who were held in El Salvador.

ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of Venezuelan journalists from Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) spent the past four months reporting on the men’s lives and their backgrounds. We obtained government data that included whether they had been convicted of crimes in the U.S. or had pending charges. We found most were listed solely as having immigration violations. We also conducted interviews with relatives of more than 100 of the men; reviewed thousands of pages of court records from the U.S. and South America; and analyzed federal immigration court data.

Some of our findings:

• We obtained internal data showing that the Trump administration knew that at least 197 of the men had not been convicted of crimes in the U.S. — and that only six had been convicted of violent offenses. We identified fewer than a dozen additional convictions, both for crimes committed in the U.S. and abroad, that were not reflected in the government data.

• Nearly half of the men, or 118, were whisked out of the country while in the middle of their immigration cases, which should have protected them from deportation. Some were only days away from a final hearing.

• At least 166 of the men have tattoos. Interviews with families, immigration documents and court records show the government relied heavily on tattoos to tie the men to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — even though law enforcement experts told us that tattoos are not an indicator of gang membership.

• The men who were imprisoned range in age from 18 to 46. The impact of their monthslong incarceration extended beyond them. Their wives struggled to pay the rent. Relatives went without medical treatment. Their children wondered if they would see them again.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson did not respond to questions about the men in the database but said Trump “is committed to keeping his promises to the American people and removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegals who pose a threat to the American public.” She referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not respond.

Read the men’s stories in our database.

Reporting by: Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune; Melisa Sánchez, ProPublica; Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica; Gabriel Sandoval, ProPublica; Jeff Ernsthausen, ProPublica; Ronna Risquez, Alianza Rebelde; Adrián González, Cazadores de Fake News; Adriana Núñez Moros, independent journalist; Carlos Centeno, independent journalist; Maryam Jameel, ProPublica; Gerardo del Valle, ProPublica; Cengiz Yar, ProPublica; Gabriel Pasquini, independent journalist; Kate Morrisey, independent journalist; Coral Murphy Marcos, independent journalist; Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune; Nicole Foy, ProPublica; Rafael Carranza, Arizona Luminaria; Lisa Seville, ProPublica

Design and development by: Ruth Talbot, ProPublica

Additional design and development by: Zisiga Mukulu, ProPublica

Additional data reporting by: Agnel Philip, ProPublica

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

The top-ranked show on late-night television, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, has been canceled, just days after Colbert skewered Paramount, the parent company of CBS, for settling a lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump. The lawsuit accused another CBS show, 60 Minutes, of biased editing in an interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 election. Its settlement comes as Paramount works to finalize a lucrative merger with Skydance Media that must be approved by the Federal Communications Commission. On his show, Colbert called the settlement “a big fat bribe.”

“So many media conglomerates had already given thinly disguised bribes to Trump to settle lawsuits they could not possibly lose in court,” explains Jeff Cohen, co-founder of the online action group RootsAction and the media watch group FAIR, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. Cohen says he suspects Paramount agreed to cancel Colbert’s show — and will likely remove other programming critical of Trump — as part of a deal with the administration to win favorable conditions for its merger. But Cohen emphasizes that the erosion of a free press did not start under Trump. “Over a period of several decades, both Democratic and Republican administrations have placed our media and information system in the hands of giant media conglomerates who have only one value. It’s not freedom of press. It’s not free flow of information. It’s profit maximization.”

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

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on July 22, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Republicans on the House Rules Committee have ground business in the chamber to a halt to avoid having to vote on Democratic amendments calling for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

For weeks now, Republicans in Congress, facing pressure from the White House, have dodged efforts to force the release of the files, which may implicate U.S. President Donald Trump in crimes committed by the convicted sex criminal.

According to Axios, the House had been scheduled to vote on GOP legislation involving immigration and environmental legislation this week. But in order for these votes to reach the floor, they’d first need to pass through the Speaker-controlled Rules Committee, which has also been presented with multiple Epstein amendments.

Republicans on House Rules “don’t want to vote no because they’re then accused of helping hide the truth about Epstein,” Punchbowl News reported Tuesday morning. So instead, they’ve chosen to simply stop work for the week to avoid having to vote at all.

This has essentially ground all business in the House to a halt, potentially until after Congress gets back from its August recess.

On Monday, the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), told Politico reporter Mia Camille, “We’re done in [the] Rules Committee until September.”

“The Rules Committee decides what gets voted on in the House. It’s where Republicans have already voted six times against forcing the release of the Epstein files,” said Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-N.M.). “They’d rather shut down Congress than vote to release the files. What are they hiding?”

The Epstein cloud has only grown thicker over the White House over the past week after The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2003, Trump gave Epstein a salacious letter for his 50th birthday containing talk of a “secret” between the two men and a drawing of a nude woman. Trump has sued The Journal, calling the letter “a fake thing.”

The New York Times later reported that a decade earlier, Trump hosted a party full of young women where Epstein was the only other guest.

Amid the drip of scandal, the White House has remained dismissive of calls, including from the president’s own supporters, for the Department of Justice to release all its files related to Epstein.

Not long ago, officials in his administration made promises to release the files themselves, assuring damning revelations. But now, Trump describes the files as a “hoax” by the “radical left.” Of the Trump-faithful who have called for their release, he said, “I don’t want their support anymore!”

Late last week, Trump called for the DOJ to release grand jury transcripts pertaining to the investigation. But many other critical pieces of information, including ones that could implicate the president, would remain hidden.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has closely coordinated the House GOP’s response to the Epstein fiasco with the White House, saying repeatedly that there is “no daylight” between his position and that of the administration.

Johnson last week introduced a non-binding resolution to provide the public with “certain” Epstein-related documents, but it had no legal weight, allowing the White House to have total control over the information they disclosed. But even that resolution, Johnson said, would not be brought forth for a vote until after the August recess.

This has provoked the ire of a fellow Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who—along with Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.)—drafted a discharge petition last week in an attempt to force a vote on the Epstein files onto the House floor.

“I think this is the referendum on [Johnson’s] leadership,” Massie said. “Who’s he gonna pick? Is he going to stand with the pedophiles and underage sex traffickers? Or is he gonna pick the American people and justice for the victims?”

Last week, a CNN/SSRS poll found that just 3% of Americans were satisfied with the amount of information the government had released about the Epstein files, while more than half said they were dissatisfied.

“This is the ultimate decision the speaker needs to make. And it’s irrespective of what the president wants,” Massie said.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Stephen Prager.

That the United States of America is controlled by a criminally perverse, two party ruling class should be obvious to any reasonable (not rational, for the above-named people are very rational) person not living in what Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existential writer, called bad faith (mauvaise foi).

Bad faith is based on Sartre’s premise that people are radically free despite social and biological constraints; in each person’s consciousness they sense this but choose to play games, to perform for themselves and others, and to act as if they have no choices when they do. They deny their freedom. This is not lying but a form of self-deception since one cannot lie to oneself for “the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as a deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived,” writes Sartre. This should be so obvious but it escapes most people who imbibe psychobabble.

Lying is different since it involves other people. “The essence of the lie implies in fact that the liar actually is in complete possession of the truth which he is hiding,” added Sartre. This cynical consciousness that knows the truth but denies it to others is a perfect description of  politicians, propagandists, intelligence services, and their media mouthpieces. They know they are lying and are proud of it, but of course they will never admit it. Regular people also lie regularly but with not the same tremendous social consequences.

People often say that certain people really believes their own lies, that they are deluded, but this is impossible.

I begin with this brief excursion into philosophy (and psychology) because I recently read a fine journalist, Patrick Lawrence, in an otherwise excellent article – “Trump, Bibi, and Ayn Rand’s ghost” – write the following about war criminals Trump and Netanyahu’s recent dinner meeting in which  Netanyahu shows Trump a letter he wrote nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, that Medea Benjamin of Code Pink rightly called “surreal:

We must reason through the matter such that we are able to recognize that these two appalling men were serious in their self-congratulation. The idea of themselves they presented before the media cameras is to them genuine: They sincerely understand themselves in this way—virtuous, courageous, standing heroically alone, bearing the world’s banner forward. (my emphasis)

Of what are such people made? This is our question. Attempting our answer leads us beyond politics and policy and into the spheres of psychology and pathology. I have long contended that any true understanding of global affairs cannot leave out consideration of the mental and emotional makeup of those who, for better or worse, are in positions of leadership. The Israeli PM, a case in point, exhibits clear symptoms of clinical psychosis if by this we mean a frayed relationship with reality.

Now Patrick Lawrence most forcefully and eloquently often condemns Trump and Netanyahu and their ilk as the genocidal war criminals that they are. Because I admire his work so much, I hesitate to pick up on his point about their sincerity, but I think it is essential to do so because of its wider implications.

Sartre claimed “sincerity,” purportedly the anti-thesis of self-deception, takes one deeper into self-deception. It goes to Patrick’s  question of what are such people made, of what are we all made; it goes behind psychology to its philosophical presuppositions and beyond the issue of pathology to a theological analysis of evil. While Lawrence’s analysis is focused not on these matters but on Ayn Rand’s influence on Trump, Netanyahu, and the wider individualistic culture – an astute analysis – it respectfully needs an a priori corrective.

I maintain that not for a second do Trump and Netanyahu believe they are genuine or virtuous or believe their own lies. They are the perfect examples of hypocrites, as in the word’s etymological sense of stage actor; pretender, dissembler, from the Greek hypokritēs. To repeat: it is impossible to believe one’s own lies since one knows they are not the truth one withholds.

Since it is obvious from their own words and actions and can be followed in real time video by any concerned person that they enthusiastically support the genocide of the Palestinians without an iota of compunction, can we say they are mentally ill?  I think not. That would suggest that if in some alternative universe they were tried for their crimes and convicted, they should be sent to a mental institution, not a prison, because they are sick. They are far beyond sick and are the current examples of their nations’ predecessors’ support for massive war crimes for a very long time. Both the U.S.A. and Zionist Israel were founded on similar claims of being  God-ordained countries that hid the satanic violence they used against native peoples and anyone who dared to suggest God was not on their sides.

Are they, as Lawrence says of Netanyahu, out of touch with reality? I think not. In any case, whose reality? Those in power, with the corporate mass media and tech companies as accomplices, create their own reality, as in the famous quote attributed to a George W. Bush aid by Ron Suskind: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” This is even truer today with the use of artificial Intelligence. Their reality is not yours, mine, or Patrick Lawrence’s. Their facts are not ours. In any case, to suggest Netanyahu is out of touch with “reality” would suggest mental illness, not evil intent. Sartre would say that to do so is to excuse him, which is clearly not Patrick’s intention. The result, however, of saying that Netanyahu and Trump sincerely think of themselves as genuine does exactly that.

One can, of course, reject Sartre’s philosophical premise about freedom, bad faith, and lying in favor of psychological and biological explanations. This is the modern approach, which is commonplace. It assumes much. It needs to be understood within the historical context of the decline of religion and the rise of science, modernism, and post-modernism. It is not scientific, however, but pseudo-scientific, and delusional on its own claims to being scientific. I maintain that it fails to comprehend the nature of evil.

But like Sartre and Dostoevsky, I too believe we are fundamentally free. Which is not to say we are not confronted with biological and social limitations on that freedom. We are. But fundamentally we have free will.

In the ancient tragedy Oedipus Rex, known in its Greek original as Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus commits two heinous acts: he kills his father and marries his mother. He commits crimes against society and sins against the gods. But he does so unknowingly, unconsciously, as the play makes clear. Throughout the Western world in morality and law it has become accepted, as Aristotle argues in his Ethics, that consciousness and will are necessary for acts to be ethically bad or good.

If Netanyahu, Trump, and their ilk (to be clear, by ilk I mean Biden and former U.S. presidents and Israeli prime ministers before Netanyahu) are not conscious but believe they are being virtuous by mass murdering Palestinians and so many others, then they, like Oedipus, deserve sympathy. For they know not what they do. But they clearly know, so they deserve no sympathy. They deserve condemnation.

What could possess them, and all the other political leaders, to commit mass murder over and over again while reveling in their “accomplishments,” and to speak casually about using nuclear weapons? For that is what they do. I should emphasize that I am not referring to individuals who commit murder and other horrible crimes but to political leaders backed by millions of supporters. Institutional leaders who quite rationally sit in offices discussing the best methods for slaughtering millions.

Why do they act this way? Why did Hitler? Harry Truman with Hiroshima and Nagasaki? George W. Bush with Iraq? You know all the names, or should. They are legion, as are the statistics. The demonic nature of U.S. history from the start is there for all to contemplate, as the late theologian David Ray Griffin has documented in a number of books. No amount of feigned amnesia will erase the bloody truth of American history, the cheap grace we bestow upon ourselves. It is demonic, as is the history of Zionism in Palestine.

So we are left with the question that has engaged people for millennia: What is the nature of evil? The demonic? While not here entering into a long analysis of this question, I will cast my vote with those, such as Soren Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Herman Melville, et al., who have claimed it goes much deeper than psychological sickness to a spiritual level and that the Enlightenment’s error was that it lacked a devil.

Satan is hard character to fathom, but when he is strutting his stuff, the consequences of his evil are blatantly real in the actions of those who have sold their souls for his favors.

In Melville’s Moby Dick the possessed Ahab says to Starbuck and to us:

Ahab is forever Ahab, man. This whole act is immutably decreed. ‘T’was rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant, I act under orders.

The same clarity of mind and will can be said of Trump, Netanyahu, and their ilk. They know from whence their orders come; they echo Ahab’s words that “from hell’s heart” and “for hate’s sake” they will kill the innocent and exult in the slaughter.

God and Satan battle on.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

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The Trump administration is considering slashing rules meant to protect the environment and the public during commercial rocket launches, changes that companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX have long sought.

A draft executive order being circulated among federal agencies, and viewed by ProPublica, directs Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to “use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for launch licenses. It could also, in time, require states to allow more launches or even more launch sites — known as spaceports — along their coastlines.

The order is a step toward the rollback of federal oversight that Musk, who has fought bitterly with the Federal Aviation Administration over his space operations, and others have pushed for. Commercial rocket launches have grown exponentially more frequent in recent years.

Critics warn such a move could have dangerous consequences.

“It would not be reasonable for them to be rescinding regulations that are there to protect the public interest, and the public, from harm,” said Jared Margolis, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit that works to protect animals and the environment. “And that’s my fear here: Are they going to change things in a way that puts people at risk, that puts habitats and wildlife at risk?”

The White House did not answer questions about the draft order.

“The Trump administration is committed to cementing America’s dominance in space without compromising public safety or national security,” said White House spokesperson Kush Desai. “Unless announced by President Trump, however, discussion about any potential policy changes should be deemed speculation.”

The order would give Trump even more direct control over the space industry’s chief regulator by turning the civil servant position leading the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation into a political appointment. The last head of the office and two other top officials recently took voluntary separation offers.

The order would also create a new adviser to the transportation secretary to shepherd in deregulation of the space industry.

The draft order comes as SpaceX is ramping up its ambitious project to build a reusable deep-space rocket to carry people to Earth’s orbit, the moon and eventually Mars. The rocket, called Starship, is the largest, most powerful ever built, standing 403 feet tall with its booster. The company has hit some milestones but has also been beset by problems, as three of the rockets launched from Texas this year have exploded — disrupting air traffic and raining debris on beaches and roads in the Caribbean and Gulf waters.

The draft order also seeks to restrict the authority of state coastal officials who have challenged commercial launch companies like SpaceX, documents show. It could lead to federal officials interfering with state efforts to enforce their environmental rules when they conflict with the construction or operation of spaceports.

Derek Brockbank, executive director for the Coastal States Organization, said the proposed executive order could ultimately force state commissions to prioritize spaceport infrastructure over other land uses, such as renewable energy, waterfront development or coastal restoration, along the coastline. His nonprofit represents 34 coastal states and territories.

“It’s concerning that it could potentially undermine the rights of a state to determine how it wants its coast used, which was the very fundamental premise of the congressionally authorized Coastal Zone Management Act,” he said. “We shouldn’t see any president, no matter what their party is, coming in and saying, ‘This is what a state should prioritize or should do.’”

SpaceX is already suing the California Coastal Commission, accusing the agency of political bias and interference with the company’s efforts to increase the number of Falcon 9 rocket launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The reusable Falcon 9 is SpaceX’s workhorse rocket, ferrying satellites to orbit and astronauts to the International Space Station.

The changes outlined in the order would greatly benefit SpaceX, which launches far more rockets into space than any other company in the U.S. But it would also help rivals such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and California-based Rocket Lab. The companies have been pushing to pare down oversight for years, warning that the U.S. is racing with China to return to the moon — in hopes of mining resources like water and rare earth metals and using it as a stepping stone to Mars — and could lose if regulations don’t allow U.S. companies to move faster, said Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Space Federation, a trade group that represents eight launch companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab.

“It sounds like they’ve been listening to industry, because all of those things are things that we’ve been advocating for strongly,” Cavossa said when asked about the contents of the draft order.

Cavossa said he sees “some sort of environmental review process” continuing to take place. “What we’re talking about doing is right-sizing it,” he said.

He added, “We can’t handle a yearlong delay for launch licenses.”

The former head of the FAA’s commercial space office said at a Congressional hearing last September that the office took an average of 151 days to issue a new license during the previous 11 years.

Commercial space launches have boomed in recent years — from 26 in 2019 to 157 last year. With more than 500 total launches, mostly from Texas, Florida and California, SpaceX has been responsible for the lion’s share, according to FAA data.

But the company has tangled with the FAA, which last year proposed fining it $633,000 for violations related to two of its launches. The FAA did not answer a question last week about the status of the proposed fine.

SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab and the FAA did not respond to requests for comment.

Currently, the FAA’s environmental reviews look at 14 types of potential impacts that include air and water quality, noise pollution and land use, and provide details about the launches that are not otherwise available. They have at times drawn big responses from the public.

When SpaceX sought to increase its Starship launches in Texas from five to 25 a year, residents and government agencies submitted thousands of comments. Most of the nearly 11,400 publicly posted comments opposed the increase, a ProPublica analysis found. The FAA approved the increase anyway earlier this year. After conducting an environmental assessment for the May launch of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 9 from Texas, the FAA released documents that revealed as many as 175 airline flights could be disrupted and Turks and Caicos’ Providenciales International Airport would need to close during the launch.

In addition to seeking to cut short environmental reviews, the executive order would open the door for the federal government to rescind sections of the federal rule that seeks to keep the public safe during launches and reentries.

The rule, referred to as Part 450, was approved during Trump’s first term and aimed to streamline commercial space regulations and speed approvals of launches. But the rule soon fell out of favor with launch companies, which said the FAA didn’t provide enough guidance on how to comply and was taking too long to review applications.

Musk helped lead the charge. Last September, he told attendees at a conference in Los Angeles, “It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.” He called for the resignation of the head of the FAA, who stepped down as Trump took office.

Other operators have expressed similar frustration, and some members of Congress have signaled support for an overhaul. In February, Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., signed a letter asking the Government Accountability Office to review the process for approving commercial launches and reentries.

In their letter, Babin and Lofgren wrote they wanted to understand whether the rules are “effectively and efficiently accommodating United States commercial launch and reentry operations, especially as the cadence and technological diversity of such operations continues to increase.

The draft executive order directs the secretary of transportation to “reevaluate, amend, or rescind” sections of Part 450 to “enable a diversified set of operators to achieve an increase in commercial space launch cadence and novel space activities by an order of magnitude by 2030.”

The order also directs the Department of Commerce to streamline regulation of novel space activity, which experts say could include things like mining or making repairs in space, that doesn’t fall under other regulations.

Brandon Roberts and Pratheek Rebala contributed data analysis.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Heather Vogell and Topher Sanders.

ICE is reportedly racing to build more detention tent camps nationwide after Congress allocated an unprecedented $45 billion in new funding over the next four years to lock up immigrants, as part of Trump’s massive tax and spending package. The Department of Homeland Security is also preparing to start detaining immigrants at more military bases, including in New Jersey and Indiana, as well as to transfer more immigrants to the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to NPR. This comes as the Trump administration is moving to revoke access to bond hearings for people who entered the U.S. through “non-approved channels.” The new policy could potentially impact millions of undocumented people and orders officers to detain immigrants for the length of their removal proceedings — a process which can take months or even years. “This administration is using every tool that it has to target the immigrant community, to scare the immigrant community,” says Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council. Orozco notes that most immigrants will likely never get the chance to fight their case before a judge under Trump’s aggressive deportation policies.

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

ICE is reportedly racing to build more detention tent camps nationwide after Congress allocated an unprecedented $45 billion in new funding over the next four years to lock up immigrants, as part of Trump’s massive tax and spending package. The Department of Homeland Security is also preparing to start detaining immigrants at more military bases, including in New Jersey and Indiana, as well as to transfer more immigrants to the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to NPR. This comes as the Trump administration is moving to revoke access to bond hearings for people who entered the U.S. through “non-approved channels.” The new policy could potentially impact millions of undocumented people and orders officers to detain immigrants for the length of their removal proceedings — a process which can take months or even years. “This administration is using every tool that it has to target the immigrant community, to scare the immigrant community,” says Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council. Orozco notes that most immigrants will likely never get the chance to fight their case before a judge under Trump’s aggressive deportation policies.

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

The FOIA requests in question specifically seek information concerning Executive Orders 14210, 14154 and 14219. These orders direct all federal agencies to provide OMB with plans for massive restructuring, direct all agencies to provide OMB with lists of critical environmental and health protections they plan to withdraw, and direct EPA to provide OMB with recommendations related to its longstanding finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and must be subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. This “endangerment finding” underpins all of EPA’s authority to take action on climate change.

"The Freedom of Information Act exists because the government must be accountable to the people it serves. Trump must not be allowed to flout the law and dismantle the agencies and regulations meant to protect public health and the environment in a black box – particularly when the health and safety of millions of people are at stake. We demand the transparency afforded to us by federal law, and we're not backing down until we have answers,” said Dani Replogle, staff attorney at Food & Water Watch.

Food & Water Watch is represented in this matter by the public interest law firm Eubanks & Associates, PLLC, as well as Ms. Replogle.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The decision came directly on the heels of a Supreme Court order that greenlit the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize and restructure the federal government. 

With approximately 1,115 employees — just 7 percent of the EPA’s headcount at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term — the research office has played an outsized role in helping the agency fulfill its legal mandate to use the “best available science” in its mission to protect human health and the environment. ORD science has underpinned many of the EPA’s restrictions on contaminants in air, water, and soil, and formed the basis for regulations on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS or “forever chemicals,” in drinking water, deadly fine particulate matter in air, carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, and chemicals and metals like asbestos and lead.

“Without a research arm, it will be very difficult for EPA to issue new standards for air or water pollutants, toxic chemicals, pesticides, or other hazards,” said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. 

ORD, which works with states, local governments, and tribes in addition to its federal work, has six national research programs, each one focused on a different aspect of health and the environment. Research being undertaken at those centers included studying how to safeguard water systems from terrorist attacks, understanding the impacts of extreme weather on human health, and modeling the economic benefits of reducing air pollution.

The EPA said it is moving some of ORD staff into other parts of the EPA, including into its air, water, and chemical offices and a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions within EPA administrator Lee Zeldin’s office. The agency said the moves will save taxpayers nearly $750 million, and produce an agency that closely resembles the shrunken version of the agency that existed under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. The aim, the agency said, is to “prioritize research and science more than ever before.” 

In an email to Grist, an agency spokesperson called media reports about the disbanding of ORD “biased” and denied that the changes will affect the quality of EPA science. “Friday’s announcement is not an elimination of science and research,” the agency said. 

But former EPA employees and environmental advocates say disbanding ORD will both weaken the EPA’s research capabilities and put its scientific independence at risk of political interference.

“Part of the reason why ORD is a separate office is to preserve scientific integrity,” said Chris Frey, an associate dean at North Carolina State University who worked in the office on and off from 1992 to 2024, most recently as its Assistant Administrator under former President Joe Biden. “From a societal perspective, it’s a huge win for the public that those decisions be based on evidence and not just opinions of stakeholders to have a vested interest in an outcome.” The EPA hasn’t said how many ORD scientists will be allowed to continue working at the agency. 

Already, the U.S. regulatory system gives chemical companies like 3M and DuPont a large degree of influence over how the chemicals they produce are controlled, a strategy that has been known to fail. Under the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, the EPA has 90 days to assess a chemical’s risks before it hits the market. 

The EPA’s decision to dissolve ORD and integrate a portion of its scientists into the agency’s policymaking infrastructure stands to benefit chemical companies and industrial polluters by rubbing away the boundaries between science and politics, science advocates argue. Research conducted at ORD not only grounded new EPA regulations, it also provided the scientific basis for TSCA enforcement. 

“There’s lots of ways that ORD speaking truth about impacts of pollutants was inconvenient for regulated industry,” said Gretchen Goldman, president of the nonprofit science advocacy organization the Union of Concerned Scientists. “They’re probably celebrating over this.” 

Despite recent wins, industry trade and lobby groups are pushing for even more freedom. Last week, on the same day the EPA announced it was disbanding ORD and a day after the EPA separately exempted dozens of chemical factories and power plants from Biden-era air pollution and emissions rules, the American Chemistry Council’s President and CEO Chris Jahn floated the idea of making changes to the Toxic Substances Control Act in an interview with The Washington Examiner. 

“EPA Administrator Zeldin, the White House, Congress are all looking at this right now,” he said, “to potentially make some updates to TSCA to make it work more effectively for the long run.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This EPA research office safeguarded Americans’ health. Trump just eliminated it. on Jul 21, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

We can only speculate why the Constitution’s Framers omitted a national recall in their lengthy deliberations in drafting the rules governing this young nation. They seem to have counted on a provision that a House impeachment and a Senate trial could oust a president. Somehow, they could not conceive of an autocratic or impaired president failing to uphold the Constitution, ruling a cowardly Congress, ignoring the courts, and crowning himself as the nation’s first lifetime dictator.

For starters, they obviously did not want a parliament or royalty to rule, nor voting by women, the property-less, and Native Americans. After all, how could the uneducated read or understand such ballot issues as budgets, taxes, war, corruption, property lines, gerrymandering, and the like? Besides, political leaders and officeholders recognized that voters might oust Senate and House members, Supreme Court judges.

Also, logistics of conducting a nationwide referendum or initiative was a factor, much less paying millions for it. Interestingly, it certainly hasn’t been a problem in electing a president in our 250-year history.

It also took a century before people recognized that state legislators failed to pass laws desperately needed. As an election expert on Ballotpedia’s website explained the origin of such oversight:

By the late 19th century, many citizens wanted to increase their check on representative government. Members of the populist and progressive movements were dissatisfied with the government; they felt that wealthy special interest groups controlled the government and that citizens had no power to break this control. A comprehensive platform of political reforms was proposed that included women’s suffrage, secret ballots, direct election of [legislative] senators, recall elections and primary elections.

The theory of the referendum process was that the individual was capable of enhancing the representative government. The populists—who believed citizens should rule the elected and not allow the elected to rule the people—and the progressives took advantage of methods that were already in place for amending state constitutions, and they began pushing state legislators to add an amendment that would allow for an initiative and popular referendum process.

Thus, the recall referendum/initiative system was born in those 19 states—but not for a president and other federal officials.

Soon, recalls took out mayors, judges, and two governors (North Dakota in 1921, California in 2003) and nearly California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021. He won by 69.1 percent of the vote, having raised $70 million for media promotion. And he also campaigned around the state to “meet-and-greet” voters. The estimated cost to California taxpayers: $215 million. Last year, Newsom faced yet another recall by opponents who then failed to get the required 1,311,963 petition signatures in time to make the state ballot.

A presidential recall referendum would require a Constitutional Amendment by passage from Congress and state legislators—and approval by 38 states with a seven-year deadline to gather signatures. So prospects for expelling Trump do seem bleak. But all the 27 Amendments once had the same challenges and met them despite geographic distances and lacking today’s electronic communication systems.

But the majority of states passed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) within the first year. Trump has three and a half years left to continue wreaking havoc on the American public and exchanging democracy for a dictatorship. If his first six months is any indication of peoples’ reaction to his rule, it brought at least five million angry protesters to the streets in a “No Kings” demonstrations against him a day before his 79th birthday. So consider what his continuing violations of the Constitution and democracy will do to destroy both during this term.

However, a new factor about election numbers can now foretell favorable outcomes if a recall movement gets started:

If the political marker of 3.5 percent of a nation’s voters opposes a dictator, the regime will fold, according to extensive long-term quantitative research noted recently by Harvard University professor Erica Chenoweth . America’s electorate was 154,000,000 in 2024, so 3.5 percent means it would take only 5.4 million voters to win a Constitutional Amendment referendum for recalling Trump.

Another factor is that far more millions would be voting in a Trump recall election than in 2024. For example, those five million No Kings protesters have family and friends who vote. So do those who couldn’t or wouldn’t participate. Then, add Trump’s social and healthcare victims affected by his “Big, Beautiful” budget-cutting bill he just signed into law. Like the 71, 258, 215 currently enrolled in Medicaid who will lose its benefits. Not to mention recipients’ families and friends. The 41 million on Trump’s chopping block for SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) certainly would vote for a recall Amendment. So would the 73.9 million receiving Social Security benefits he is threatening. Include, too, the tens of thousands of federal employees (plus family/friends) who have just been fired/laid off by Trump’s hatchet man Elon Musk.

Multiply the total by 3.5 percent.

Republicans in Congress who voted for that bill because of Trumpian and donor threats can count that percentage. If they can’t or won’t, furious and outspoken constituents in town halls or at campaign rallies will awaken them in the months before the 2026 mid-term elections. So will public confrontations of state legislators.

In such a hostile constituent climate, it would seem to be fairly easy for them to ignore heavy pressure by Trump and donors to pass a recall Amendment. He will, of course, veto it, but Congress can override the veto with a two-thirds affirmative vote in both houses (House: 290; Senate: 67). Apply that 3.5 percent to those totals.

Another supportive factor for a recall Amendment is the historical precedent of success by people finally ridding their countries from years of repressive and rapacious rulers. The French did it with revolution and guillotine, beginning in 1789. Our revolution began brewing in 1775 and took eight years of war to free us from Britain’s mad King George III. Both bloody uprisings were inspired and patterned by the achievement of democracy and people’s rights, first won 800 years ago in England. That’s when its barons forced King John to apply the royal seal approving Magna Carta (the Great Charter) June 15, 1215 on Runnymede meadows.

That monumentally important document ended immunity for imperious, narcissistic kings under the centuries-old “Divine Right” policy, starting with the feckless King John’s tyrannical reign (1166-1216). Most of its 63 clauses set out the rights of subjects and kings, established British law, and influenced the authors of both the U.S. Constitution and France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

John was a pampered, favored youngest son of Henry II and one of four brothers. He inherited a fortune, vast taxable properties in England and whole sections of France. With a lascivious nature, he married twice and had numerous mistresses despite often being away with the army to fight the French from stealing his holdings. His early struggle to seize the throne revealed deviousness, murderous ambition, insecurity, paranoia, physical cowardice—and greed. As a king, he jailed opponents, bullied absolute loyalty from his officials and the army, stole lands from the nobility. Worst of all, he never ceased extorting excessive taxes from the elite, commoners, and the English church.

Sound like a president we know?

The bad years began for King John in 1209. He was briefly excommunicated for opposing Pope Innocent III’s choice of England’s Archbishop of Canterbury. He suspected the candidate’s involvement with the growing unrest of barons and the people. After an attempted assassination in 1212 in the 14th year of his reign of terror, John went after the barons he suspected of the deed. But they had banded together, began drafting Magna Carta (chiefly protecting themselves from future kings), and raised an army against him for a civil war.

Only fear of certain defeat by the barons and a near-empty treasury could have brought a humbled King John to use negotiation to escape Magna Carta’s clauses. He had no intention of obeying them—especially the security clause (61) permitting 25 barons to seize his property and “distrain” him if he disobeyed the charter. He even got the Pope to annul the document a month later. The war ended with John’s death from dysentery the following year. By 1225, Magna Carta was in force.

This extraordinary historical event could now be repeated almost exactly 810 years later, lacking only the same solution: a final uprising of the high and low classes to strip Trump of his office and fortunes by a recall Amendment. It’s not so wild a dream at all.

We don’t have the vast organizational obstacles of the 13th century that took 17 years to put Magna Carta in place. But we do have the same furious energy and zeal of King John’s outraged public to oust a dictator and save the Constitution and democracy.

Consider that some 500 national organizations exist—MoveOn, Indivisable, and SEIU to Win Without War, Greenpeace, Patriotic Millionaires, and ACLU—to set up a nationwide alliance for such a cause.

The speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of the recent No Kings protest against Trump’s dictatorial regime shows what’s possible when a coalition is galvanized for a great historical cause. Its organizers in the 50-50-1 group (“50 states, 50 protests, one movement”), American Opposition, and Indivisible linked 193 powerful progressive “partners” driven by a singleness of purpose: to depose Trump and his regime.

So why not a repeat of this astonishing logistical success for a national recall referendum? Millions of volunteers would be more than willing to knock on doors, do teach-ins and phone-banking, lead rallies and marches, design signs and flyers, write articles, stuff envelopes, send emails and other electronic “reach-outs,”—and contribute funds large and small for expenses.

Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors against the American people will only get worse if we do nothing in the next few weeks. Let’s get to it!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Barbara G. Ellis.

The Trump administration has shuttered the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific arm, the EPA Office of Research and Development. Hundreds of chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists will lose their jobs under the administration’s plan to aggressively tear down environmental regulations and defund the EPA. Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, a former top administrator in the Office of Research and Development, says the loss of the division means the loss of essential services like air and water quality monitoring that protects public health. “We are losing a treasure trove of historical knowledge, of scientific expertise, and really it’s going to limit what information, what science would be available for the agency to consider in protecting our health and our environment,” she says.

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

“You need double the electric of what we have right now, and maybe even more than that,” Trump said, recalling a conversation with “David”—most likely White House AI czar David Sacks, a panelist at the summit. “I said, what, are you kidding? That’s double the electric that we have. Take everything we have and double it.”

At the high-profile summit on Tuesday—where, in addition to Sacks, panelists and attendees included Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google president and chief investment officer Ruth Porat, and ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods—companies announced $92 billion in investments across various energy and AI-related ventures. These are just the latest in recent breakneck rollouts in investment around AI and energy infrastructure. A day before the Pittsburgh meeting, Mark Zuckerberg shared on Threads that Meta would be building “titan clusters” of data centers to supercharge its AI efforts. The one closest to coming online, dubbed Prometheus, is located in Ohio and will be powered by onsite gas generation, SemiAnalysis reported last week.

For an administration committed to advancing the future of fossil fuels, the location of the event was significant. Pennsylvania sits on the Marcellus and Utica shale formations, which supercharged Pennsylvania’s fracking boom in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The state is still the country’s second-most prolific natural gas producer. Pennsylvania-based natural gas had a big role at the summit: The CEO of Pittsburgh-based natural gas company EQT, Toby Rice—who dubs himself the “people’s champion of natural gas”—moderated one of the panels and sat onstage with the president during his speech.

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All this new demand from AI is welcome news for the natural gas industry in the US, the world’s top producer and exporter of liquefied natural gas. Global gas markets have been facing a mounting supply glut for years. Following a warm winter last year, Morgan Stanley predicted gas supply could reach “multi-decade highs” over the next few years. A jolt of new demand—like the demand represented by massive data centers—could revitalize the industry and help drive prices back up.

Natural gas from Pennsylvania and the Appalachian region, in particular, has faced market challenges both from ultra-cheap natural gas from the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico as well as a lack of infrastructure to carry supply out of the region. These economic headwinds are “why the industry is doing their best to sort of create this drumbeat or this narrative around the need for AI data centers,” says Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. It appears to be working. Pipeline companies are already pitching new projects to truck gas from the northeast—responding, they say, to data center demand.

The industry is finding a willing partner in the Trump administration. Since taking office, Trump has used AI as a lever to open up opportunities for fossil fuels, including a well-publicized effort to resuscitate coal in the name of more computing power. The summit, which was organized by Republican senator (and former hedge fund CEO) Dave McCormick, clearly reflected the administration’s priorities in this regard: No representatives from any wind or solar companies were present on any of the public panels.

Tech companies, which have expressed an interest in using any and all cheap power available for AI and have quietly pushed back against some of the administration’s anti-renewables positions, aren’t necessarily on the same page as the Trump administration. Among the announcements made at the summit was a $3 billion investment in hydropower from Google.

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This demand isn’t necessarily driven by a big concern for the climate—many tech giants have walked back their climate commitments in recent years as their focus on AI has sharpened—but rather pure economics. Financial analyst Lazard said last month that installing utility-scale solar panels and batteries is still cheaper than building out natural gas plants, even without tax incentives. Gas infrastructure is also facing a global shortage that makes the timescales for setting up power generation vastly different.

“The waiting list for a new turbine is five years,” Williams-Derry says. “If you want a new solar plant, you call China, you say, ‘I want more solar.’”

Given the ideological split at the summit, things occasionally got a little awkward. On one panel, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, who headed up a fracking company before coming to the federal government, talked at length about how the Obama and Biden administrations were on an “energy crazy train,” scoffing at those administrations’ support for wind and solar. Speaking directly after Wright, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink admitted that solar would likely support dispatchable gas in powering AI. Incredibly, fellow panel member Woods, the ExxonMobil CEO, later paid some of the only lip service to the idea of drawing down emissions heard during the entire event. (Woods was touting the oil giant’s carbon capture and storage business.)

Still, the hype train, for the most part, moved smoothly, with everyone agreeing on one thing: We’re going to need a lot of power, and soon. Blackstone CEO Jonathan Gray said that AI could help drive “40 or 50 percent more power usage over the next decade,” while Porat, of Google, mentioned some economists’ projections that AI could add $4 trillion to the US economy by 2030.

It’s easy to find any variety of headlines or reports—often based on projections produced by private companies—projecting massive growth numbers for AI. “I view all of these projections with great skepticism,” says Jonathan Koomey, a computing researcher and consultant who has contributed to research around AI and power. “I don’t think anyone has any idea, even a few years hence, how much electricity data centers are gonna use.”

In February, Koomey coauthored a report for the Bipartisan Policy Center cautioning that improvements in AI efficiency and other developments in the technology make data center power load hard to predict. But there’s “a bunch of self-interested actors,” Koomey says, involved in the hype cycle around AI and power, including energy executives, utilities, consultants and AI companies.

Koomey remembers the last time there was a hype bubble around electricity, fossil fuels, and technology. In the late 1990s, a variety of sources, including investment banks, trade publications, and experts testifying in front of Congress began to spread hype around the growth of the internet, claiming that the internet could soon consume as much as half of US electricity. More coal-fired power, many of these sources argued, would be needed to support this massive expansion. (“Dig More Coal—The PCs Are Coming” was the headline of a 1999 Forbes article that Koomey cites as being particularly influential to shaping the hype.) The prediction never came to pass, as efficiency gains in tech helped drive down the internet’s energy needs; the initial projections were also based, Koomey says, on a variety of faulty calculations.

Koomey says that he sees parallels between the late 1990s and the current craze around AI and energy. “People just need to understand the history and not fall for these self-interested narratives,” he says. There’s some signs that the AI-energy bubble may not be inflating as much as Big Tech thinks: in March, Microsoft quietly backed out of 2GW of data center leases, citing a decision to not support some training workloads from OpenAI.

“It can both be true that there’s growth in electricity use and there’s a whole bunch of people hyping it way beyond what it’s likely to happen,” Koomey says.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump and the energy industry are eager to power AI with fossil fuels on Jul 20, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Molly Taft, WIRED.

The orders Trump signed Thursday evening are unprecedented and let facilities put off using better technology or even turn off the systems that filter out some of the most potent cancer-causing chemicals the Environmental Protection Agency regulates, including ethylene oxide, benzene, chloroprene and formaldehyde.

“Trump is illegally delaying clean air laws from his desk because polluters make more money when they just dump their toxic chemicals in our air,” said Patrice Simms, vice president of Litigation at Earthjustice’s Healthy Communities Program. "Trump’s action on behalf of big corporate polluters will cause more cancer, more birth defects, and more children to suffer asthma. The country deserves better.”

Now, more than 50 chemical facilities can turn off pollution controls or dodge recently strengthened emission limits, including those under the Hazardous Organic National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (HON) standards. Factories processing taconite iron ore, manufacturing chemical polymers and resins, and facilities using ethylene oxide, are also getting similar free passes to pollute, even though pollution controls are available.

EPA is also exempting over 30 commercial sterilization facilities. These include over half of the facilities that EPA already found to pose an exceptional cancer risk to their surrounding communities. Some facilities have cancer risk rates over 80 times EPA’s acceptable cancer risk rate, and are capable of causing a new cancer diagnosis every month and a half.

Neighborhoods next to chemical plants, power plants, commercial sterilizers, and metal processing sites in Texas, California, Utah, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Kentucky, and West Virginia, will face the worst of this continuing pollution, as these states are home to major facilities. Some of the protections being delayed, like the HON standards, prevent over 6,000 tons of toxic emissions each year and help protect more than 7 million people, many of them children, from breathing chemicals linked to cancer, asthma, and birth defects.

In April 2025, the Trump administration exempted 68 coal-fired power plants from pollution limits set in the strengthened MATS rule—even though pollution controls are widely available and already in use. These came after EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin invited corporations to email the agency to request exemptions from clean air standards. Companies were told they could cite “national security” or “lack of available technology” as justification.

Types of facilities exempt from clean air standards include:

• Ethylene oxide commercial sterilizers: At least 39 facilities in 23 states and territories (Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia).

• Chemical manufacturing facilities: 52 facilities in 13 states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia).

• Taconite iron ore processing facilities: Eight facilities in two states (Michigan and Minnesota)

• Coal-fired power plants: Three facilities in three states (Colorado, Ohio, and Illinois)

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

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The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is preparing to shut down seven major investigations and cases concerning alleged housing discrimination and segregation, including some where the agency already found civil rights violations, according to HUD records obtained by ProPublica.

The high-profile cases involve allegations that state and local governments across the South and Midwest illegally discriminated against people of color by placing industrial plants or low-income housing in their neighborhoods, and by steering similar facilities away from white neighborhoods, among other allegations. HUD has been pursuing these cases — which range from instances where the agency has issued a formal charge of discrimination to newer investigations — for as many as seven years. In three of them, HUD officials had determined that the defendants had violated the Fair Housing Act or related civil rights laws. A HUD staffer familiar with the other four investigations believes civil rights violations occurred in each, the official told ProPublica. Under President Donald Trump, the agency now plans to abruptly end all of them, regardless of prior findings of wrongdoing.

Four HUD officials said they could recall no precedent for the plan, which they said signals an acceleration of the administration’s retreat from fair housing enforcement. “No administration previously has so aggressively rolled back the basic protections that help people who are being harmed in their community,” one of the officials said. “The civil rights protections that HUD enforces are intended to protect the most vulnerable people in society.”

In the short term, closing the cases would allow the local governments in question to continue allegedly mistreating minority communities, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. In the long term, they said, it could embolden local politicians and developers elsewhere to take actions that entrench segregation, without fear of punishment from the federal government.

HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett declined to answer questions, saying “HUD does not comment on active Fair Housing matters or individual personnel.”

Three of the cases involve accusations that local governments clustered polluting industrial facilities in minority neighborhoods.

One concerned a protracted dispute over a scrap metal shredding plant in Chicago. The facility had operated for years in the largely white neighborhood of Lincoln Park. But residents complained ceaselessly of the fumes, debris, noise and, occasionally, smoke emanating from the plant. So the city allegedly pressured the recycling company to close the old facility and open a new one in a minority neighborhood in southeast Chicago. In 2022, HUD found that “relocating the Facility to the Southeast Site will bring environmental benefits to a neighborhood that is 80% White and environmental harms to a neighborhood that is 83% Black and Hispanic.” Chicago’s mayor called allegations of discrimination “preposterous,” then settled the case and agreed to reforms in 2023. (The new plant has not opened; its owner has sued the city.)

In another case, a predominantly white Michigan township allowed an asphalt plant to open on its outskirts, away from its population centers but near subsidized housing complexes in the neighboring poor, mostly Black city of Flint. The township did not respond to a ProPublica inquiry about the case.

Still another case involved a plan pushed by the city of Corpus Christi, Texas, to build a water desalination plant in a historically Black neighborhood already fringed by oil refineries and other industrial facilities. (Rates of cancer and birth defects in the area are disproportionately high, and average life expectancy is 15 years lower than elsewhere in the city, researchers found.) The city denied the allegations. Construction of the plant is expected to conclude in 2028.

Three other cases involve allegations of discrimination in municipal land use decisions. In Memphis, Tennessee, the city and its utility allegedly coerced residents of a poor Black neighborhood to sell their homes so that it could build a new facility there. In Cincinnati, the city has allegedly concentrated low-income housing in poor Black neighborhoods and kept it out of white neighborhoods. And in Chicago, the city has given local politicians veto power over development proposals in their districts, resulting in little new affordable housing in white neighborhoods. (Memphis, its utility and Chicago have disputed the allegations; Cincinnati declined to comment on them.)

The last case involved a Texas state agency allegedly diverting $1 billion in disaster mitigation money away from Houston and other communities of color hit hard by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and toward more rural, white communities less damaged by the storm. The agency has disputed the allegations.

All of the investigations and cases are now slated to be closed. HUD is also planning to stop enforcing the settlement it reached in the Chicago recycling case, the records show.

The move to drop the cases is being directed by Brian Hawkins, a recent Trump administration hire at HUD who serves as a senior adviser in the Fair Housing Office, two agency officials said. Hawkins has no law degree or prior experience in housing, according to his LinkedIn profile. But this month, he circulated a list within HUD of the seven cases that indicated the agency’s plans for them. In the cases that involve Cincinnati, Corpus Christi, Flint and Houston, the agency would “find no cause on [the] merits,” the list reads. In the two Chicago cases and the one involving Memphis, HUD would rescind letters documenting the agency’s prior findings. Hawkins did not respond to a request for comment.

The list does not offer a legal justification for dropping the cases. But Hawkins also circulated a memo that indicates the reasoning behind dropping one — the Chicago recycling case. The memo cites an executive order issued by Trump in April eliminating federal enforcement of “disparate-impact liability,” the doctrine that seemingly neutral policies or practices could have a discriminatory effect. Hawkins’ memo stated that “the Department will not interpret environmental impacts as violations of fair housing law absent a showing of intentional discrimination.” Four HUD officials said such a position would be a stark departure from prior department policy and relevant case law.

The reversal on the Chicago recycling case also follows behind-the-scenes pressure on HUD from Sen. Jim Banks. In June, Banks, a Republican from Indiana, wrote a letter to HUD Secretary Scott Turner and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in which he criticized the administration of President Joe Biden’s handling of the case as “brazen overreach.” Noting that the Chicago plant would supply metal to Indiana steel mills, Banks asked the Trump appointees to “take any actions you deem necessary to remedy the situation.” Banks did not respond to a request for comment.

That case and others among the seven had also received scrutiny from other federal and state agencies, including the EPA and the U.S. Department of Justice. The EPA declined to say whether it was still pursuing any of the cases. The DOJ did not respond to the same inquiry.

The case closures at HUD would be the latest stage in a broad rollback of fair housing enforcement under the Trump administration, which ProPublica reported on previously. That rollback has continued in other ways as well. The agency recently initiated a plan to transfer more than half of its fair housing attorneys in the office of general counsel into unrelated roles, compounding prior staff losses since the beginning of the year, four HUD officials told ProPublica.

The officials fear long-lasting ramifications from the changes. “Fair housing laws shape our cities, shape where housing gets built, where pollution occurs, where disaster money goes,” one official said. “Without them, we have a different country.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jesse Coburn.

We speak to Loris Taylor, president of Native Public Media, about the Trump administration’s drastic defunding of public media and its impact on tribal nations. Fifty-nine tribal radio stations and one tribal television station that depend on federal funding will be among the first to face possible closure, putting some of the essential services that public broadcasting provides, including warning systems for missing Indigenous women and girls, at risk. Taylor shares how Native-led public media helps preserve Indigenous languages and helped keep communities informed during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. She fears that without these same resources and “with the climate crisis increasing, [we] are going to be operating on the margins of information and are not going to have real lifesaving information available to our citizens when they need it most.”

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

A major rift has formed within Donald Trump’s MAGA base over his reversal of a campaign promise to release the “Epstein files” to the public. Many supporters see his denials of the existence of a “client list” belonging to Jeffrey Epstein, the powerful and well-connected investor who was charged with the sexual trafficking and assault of numerous teenage girls and young women before his death, as a betrayal of Trump’s promises to “drain the swamp” and expose what many supporters believe is proof of criminal corruption among primarily Democratic “elites.” Trump’s insistence that his supporters drop their fixation on Epstein-related “conspiracy theories that his people have long nurtured” is “making it exceedingly difficult for some of his biggest supporters and boosters to not start at least suspecting that he has something to hide,” says Rolling Stone's Asawin Suebsaeng, who has been reporting on the fallout from Trump and his Attorney General Pam Bondi's handling of the Epstein case.

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

But there’s going to be a new mine in East Tennessee — one of a few slated across the country, their permits expedited by President Donald Trump’s declaration of an “energy emergency” and his designating coal a critical mineral.

Trump was only hours into his second term when he signed an executive order declaring a national energy emergency that directed federal agencies to “identify and exercise any lawful emergency authorities available to them” to identify and exploit domestic energy resources. The administration also has scrapped Biden-era rules that made it easier to bring mining-related complaints to the federal government.

The emergency designation compresses the typically years-long environmental review required for a new mine to just weeks. These assessments are to be compiled within 14 days of receiving a permit application, limiting comment periods to 10 days. The process of compiling an environmental impact statement – a time-intensive procedure involving scientists from many disciplines and assessments of wildlife populations, water quality, and other factors –  is reduced to less than a month. The government insists this eliminates burdensome red tape.

“We’re not just issuing permits — we’re supporting communities, securing supply chains for critical industries, and making sure the U.S. stays competitive in a changing global energy landscape,” Adam Suess,  the acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management at the Interior Department, said in a statement. A representative of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement told Grist that community safety is top of mind, pointing to the administration’s $725 million investment in abandoned mineland reclamation.

The Department of Interior ruled that the Hurricane Creek Mine slated for Claiborne County, Tennessee, would have “no significant impact” and approved it. It will provide about two dozen jobs. The strip mine will cover 635 acres of previously mined land that has reverted to forest. Hurricane Creek Mining, LLC plans to pry 1.8 million tons of coal from the earth over 10 years.

The Clearfork Valley, which straddles two rural counties and has long struggled economically, bears the scars of more than a century’s underground and surface mining. Local residents and scientists regularly test the creeks for signs of bright-orange mine drainage and other toxins.

The land is part of a tract the Nature Conservancy bought in 2019 for conservation purposes, but because of ownership structures in the coalfields, it owns only the land, not the minerals within it. “We have concerns about the potential environmental impacts of the operation,” the organization said in a statement. “We seek assurance that there will be adequate bonding, consistent and transparent environmental monitoring, and good reclamation practices.”

Matt Hepler, an environmental scientist with environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices, has been following the mine’s public review process since the company applied for a permit in 2023. He remains skeptical that things will work out well for Hurricane Creek. Despite Trump’s promise that he is “bringing back an industry that’s been abandoned,” coal has seen a steady decline, driven in no small part by the plummeting price of natural gas. The number of people working the nation’s coal mines has steadily declined from 89,000 or so in 2012 to about 41,300 today. Production fell 31 percent during Trump’s first term, and has continued that slide. 

“What is this company doing differently that’s going to allow them to profitably succeed while so many other mines have not been able to make that work?” he said. “All the time I’ve been working in Tennessee there’s only been a couple of mines permitted to begin with because production has been on the downswing there,” Hepler added. 

Economists say opening more mines may not reverse the global downward trend. Plentiful, cheap natural gas, along with increasingly affordable wind and solar, are displacing coal as an energy source. The situation is so dire that one Stanford University study argued that the gas would continue its climb even with the elimination of coal-related regulations. Metallurgical coal, used to make steel — and which Hurricane Creek hopes  to excavate — fares no better. It has seen flat or declining demand amid innovation in steel production.

Expedited permits are leading to new mines in the West as well. The Department of Interior just approved a land lease for Wyoming’s first new coal mine in 50 years. Ramaco Resources will extract and process the material in order to retrieve the rare earth and other critical minerals found alongside it. The Trump administration also is selling coal leases on previously protected federal land. Shiloh Hernandez, a senior attorney at the Northern Rockies office of the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, thinks it is a fool’s errand.

“I don’t see them changing the fundamental dynamics of coal,” he said. “That’s not to say that the Trump administration won’t cause lots of harm in the process by both making the public pay more money for energy than they should and by keeping some of these coal plants and coal mines that really are zombies.”

Still, Hernandez said he isn’t seeing many new permits, just quicker approval of those already in the pipeline. That said, the Trump administration’s moves to streamline environmental review will reduce oversight and the time the public has to scrutinize coal projects.

“The result is there’s just going to be it’s going to be more difficult for the public to participate, and more harm is going to occur,” Hernandez said. “There’s going to be less attention to the harm that’s caused by these operations.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump is fast-tracking new coal mines – even when they don’t make economic sense on Jul 18, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

At 11:26PM, Sunday night, July 6, I received a text from my producers. 

I was in Rio de Janeiro, covering the BRICS summit for an international news agency. They wanted me to go live. The summit was only halfway done, but US President Donald Trump had already posted on Truth Social in retaliation.

“Any Country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% Tariff,” he wrote. “There will be no exceptions to this policy. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Why was the president of the most powerful nation in the world worried about a group of a dozen countries meeting in Brazil? Because that bloc comprises some of the most powerful developing nations in the world, including Trump adversaries like China—but also Iran, who joined BRICS last year as a partner member, alongside Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates. And because, as the world seems to be unraveling, the BRICS group is moving to reform world governance and global trade. And they likely have the best chance of doing it.

“I can affirm that if they keep with the agenda, and they implement what they put down on paper, we don’t see any block in the world that’s pushing much more than the BRICS,” Maureen Santos, the coordinator of the BRICS Policy Center’s Socio-Environmental Platform, told me.

The Summit

“For the fourth time, Brazil is hosting a BRICS Summit,” said Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to kick off the summit on Sunday morning, “Of all the summits, this one is taking place in the most adverse global scenario. The UN turned 80 on June 26, and we have witnessed an unparalleled collapse of multilateralism.”

In Lula’s 10-minute opening speech, he denounced the “genocide” in Gaza and called for a two-state solution. He condemned the “violations of Iran’s territorial integrity” and reminded those in attendance that the BRICS was the heir of the non-aligned movement—the group of 121 nations that did not align with neither the US nor Russia during the Cold War. 

These sentiments were included in the final “BRICS Leader’s Declaration,” which was released on Sunday July 6—the first day of the summit—before Trump’s threats over social media.  The document didn’t explicitly mention the United States, but it rejected “unilateral protectionist measures” and condemned the violence in Gaza and Iran. 

Among the 126 final resolutions in the document were agreements on promoting peace, strengthening cooperation on health and sustainable development, combating climate change, battling hunger, reforming global governance and ensuring equal access to—and global regulation of  artificial intelligence. 

“A collective global effort is needed to establish an AI governance that upholds our shared values, addresses risks, builds trust, and ensures broad and inclusive international collaboration and access, in accordance with sovereign laws,” read the document. The common theme across all these issues was how to build a more equitable global system.

The leaders were vocal about a need to overhaul the global system of governance, where the United States, the EU, and the G7 countries are at the top, and everyone else is picking up the scraps.

The BRICS leaders called in the declaration for a “comprehensive reform of the United Nations, including its Security Council, with a view to making it more democratic, representative, effective and efficient.”

“The BRICS represents a proposal against hegemony,” BRICS Policy Center Director Marta Fernandez told me at a cafe in Rio de Janeiro. “They are demanding multipolarity—financial, cultural, and political multipolarity. And the United States is fighting to maintain a hegemony that is in crisis. It’s US hegemony that is in crisis. And in that sense, the BRICS represents a threat to the US.”

Probably the top issue of concern for the US president are calls to democratize the currency used in trade amongst BRICS countries. Currently, more than half of global transactions are in the US dollar. De-dollarization, or moving away from the US dollar as the top reserve currency, would mean a huge hit for the United States and a big win for democratizing global trade and finance.

Shortly after winning the November 2024 presidential elections, Trump fired off a warning to the BRICS countries.

“We are going to require a commitment from these seemingly hostile countries that they will neither create a new BRICS currency, nor back any other currency to replace the mighty US dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “There is no chance that BRICS will replace the US dollar in international trade, or anywhere else, and any country that tries should say hello to tariffs, and goodbye to America!”

The BRICS nations were not deterred. In the final declaration they called for the increased use of “local currencies,” and the incorporation of the use of these currencies in the BRICS interbank system in order to “facilitate and expand innovative financial practices” and “support greater trade and investment flows.” The head of the BRICS New Development Bank, former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff announced last week that already a quarter of the bank’s lending portfolio was in local currencies and that they are looking to hit 30% by next year. 

“Obviously, the big BRICS demand is for monetary multipolarity, which goes against the hegemony of the dollar, which has become the reserve currency since World War II,” says Fernandez. “So it’s a direct attack on this system, controlled by the dollar.”

BRICS has many challenges, in part due to the diverse makeup of the cultures, countries, and governments that make up the eclectic, yet powerful international alliance.

The group is not looking to upend the global capitalist system. It’s not proposing socialism. The BRICS countries aren’t going to usher in revolutionary change. But they are pushing to alter the balance of power in the world to move from the hegemony of the United States and the European powers toward something more equal.

“Can anyone tell me why India can’t be included in the UN Security Council? Or a country like Brazil? Or Mexico?” Lula said during the summit. “Or Nigeria or Ethiopia, which has a population of just over 120 million people, or Egypt, which has over 100 million, or South Africa? Why not? There’s no reason why.”

Currently only China, France, Russia, the UK, and the United States have veto power in the Security Council. This structure was implemented at the end of World War II and has remained in place ever since—something the BRICS countries say has to change.

BRICS Popular Council

The BRICS summit did not occur in a vacuum. Representatives say that ahead of the meeting, negotiators from the BRICS countries—which they call “sherpas”—met hundreds of times over the last year to come to agreement on such a wide range of topics.

This past year also saw the creation of a new Popular Council. The council was created last year as a space for grassroots groups to contribute to the BRICS agenda, policies, and future. Representatives from 120 groups from across the BRICS countries met in the months leading up to the summit.

“The existence of this Popular Council is amazing,” said Santos. “Because you know that the majority of the BRICS countries, right now, are very conservative and some of them even undemocratic and don’t have the civil space inside their countries. So bringing this agenda for the BRICS, it’s pushing the other countries to open space for civil society.”

For two days before the official BRICS summit, members of social movements, civil society, and academia from across the BRICS countries met in a large hall in Carlos Gomes Theater, in downtown Rio de Janeiro, for the Popular Council Forum.

Colorful banners from diverse social and labor movements, including Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), were laid out in front of the stage, where panels were held throughout the day. 

They delivered their recommendations to BRICS leaders on Sunday. Delegates of the Popular Council presented their findings, analysis and process during a press conference following the Popular Council forum.

Raymond Matlala, from the BRICS Youth Association of South Africa, said, “What I like about BRICS and why I think BRICS is so appealing to the global majority, the Global South is the principles of BRICS, the mutual respect. The people are leveled. No one comes with superior power. It’s also the respect of one country’s sovereignty. BRICS does not enter in domestic issues.”

How will BRICS respond to Trump?

Early on Monday morning, I responded to the text from my producers and went live at both 1AM and 2AM.

The presenter asked me how BRICS would respond to Trump’s late-night threat over social media. I said it was unclear, but I was sure it was not going to make them change course.

At a press conference the next day, following the close of the summit, Lula stood at a microphone in front of the hall in white shirt and a black suit. Blue carpeted floors. Blue wall behind him, “BRICS – Brasil 2025″ written across it. Journalists packed in rows of chairs before him. Camera shutters clicking. Cold air pumped into the room from two huge air conditioning units.

The first three questions were variations on the same theme: How would BRICS respond?

The answer: They wouldn’t. They didn’t have to.

“The world has changed. We don’t want an emperor,” said Lula, referring to Trump. “We are sovereign countries.” He said Trump’s threat of raising tariffs on BRICS countries wasn’t brought up at all during their meetings that day. It was not even an issue.

This is a subtle, but important point. Trump wants to be the center of attention. That’s how he derails and wins debates, with ever-more shocking statements, actions, decrees, and threats. In Trump’s world, the United States—backed by the US dollar and the US military—should be first, with the rest of the countries of the world revolving around it. That is exactly what the BRICS countries want to change. And the more Trump pushes, the more they are going to look the other way.

“At the moment the United States declares ‘America First,’ the BRICS are saying ‘we all come first,’” international relations analyst Pedro Costa Junior told me at the summit. “The Global South comes first. The community comes first. Not for one. But for everyone.”

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

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on July 14, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Monday delivered a blistering dissent to an emergency decision that enables President Donald Trump to plow ahead with laying off nearly 1,400 employees at the Department of Education while a case challenging the plan plays out.

“This case arises out of the president’s unilateral efforts to eliminate a Cabinet-level agency established by Congress nearly half a century ago,” wrote Sotomayor, joined by her liberals, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “As Congress mandated, the department plays a vital role in this nation’s education system, safeguarding equal access to learning and channeling billions of dollars to schools and students across the country each year.”

“Only Congress has the power to abolish the department,” she continued, calling out Trump’s executive order and Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s subsequent move to fire half the agency’s workforce. “When the executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it.”

Sotomayor explained that “two lower courts rose to the occasion, preliminarily enjoining the mass firings while the litigation remains ongoing. Rather than maintain the status quo, however, this court now intervenes, lifting the injunction and permitting the government to proceed with dismantling the department.”

“That decision is indefensible,” she argued. “It hands the executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out. The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave. Unable to join in this misuse of our emergency docket, I respectfully dissent.”

The high court’s right-wing majority—which includes three Trump appointees—did not write an opinion, as is customary for shadow docket decisions. The administration responded by pledging to proceed with its efforts to eviscerate the department.

“It is a shame that the highest court in the land had to step in to allow President Trump to advance the reforms Americans elected him to deliver using the authorities granted to him by the U.S. Constitution,” McMahon said in a statement. “We will carry out the reduction in force to promote efficiency and accountability and to ensure resources are directed where they matter most – to students, parents, and teachers.”

McMahon and Trump’s mass firing effort—part of a broader effort to shutter the department—had been blocked by a U.S. district court in Massachusetts and the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in response to a lawsuit in which Democracy Forward is representing a coalition that includes the American Federation of Teachers and Service Employees International Union.

“We are incredibly disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the Trump-Vance administration to proceed with its harmful efforts to dismantle the Department of Education while our case moves forward,” the coalition said in a Monday statement. “This unlawful plan will immediately and irreparably harm students, educators, and communities across our nation.”

“Children will be among those hurt the most by this decision,” the coalition stressed. “We will never stop fighting on behalf of all students and public schools and the protections, services, and resources they need to thrive.”

The Associated Press reported that “separately on Monday, more than 20 states sued the administration over billions of dollars in frozen education funding for after-school care, summer programs, and more.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

“Judge Sean Jordan, a Trump-appointed judge, joined congressional Republicans in making it easier for the Trump administration to raise costs on millions of Americans. Not only are they dismantling healthcare for 17 million through their big, ugly betrayal, but they’re dooming millions more with low credit scores due to illness and injury. Republicans are holding a grudge against the CFPB and it’s costing Americans money.” —Accountable.US Executive Director Tony Carrk

Reporting from Accountable.US revealed earlier this year that House Financial Services Committee (HFSC) Republicans accepted a combined $867,000 from trade groups opposed to the CFPB’s medical debt rule. In turn, HFSC Republicans voted to block the rule.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

“Trump’s radical AI agenda entails abusing emergency authorities to usurp state and local laws to accommodate Big Oil and Big Tech’s profits at the expense of everyone else. While no public interest consumer or environmental groups are invited, the president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute are slated to speak, along with EQT’s Toby Rice, and the CEOs of ExxonMobil (Darren Woods), Shell (Wael Sawan), Chevron (Mike Wirth), OpenAI (Sam Altman), Meta (Mark Zuckerberg), Microsoft (Satya Nadella) and Alphabet (Sundar Pichai) are on the guest list.

“Trump’s scheme is to abuse an array of emergency powers to force communities to host energy-gobbling AI data centers by designating such facilities and all associated energy infrastructure as national security assets, thereby crushing any state and local zoning laws and other public health and safety protections. Trump’s actions will promote dirty natural gas and coal as the fuel of choice, which will raise Americans’ energy bills while contaminating the environment. Trump’s agenda will put Big Tech in control of America’s AI policy, despite the industry’s widespread abuses. Trump’s radical AI plan is yet another example of the President siding with powerful corporations ahead of the American people.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Second, Trump kept saying no more wars. He would be the man who’d end the special military operation by Russia in Ukraine in 24 hours. He’d stop sending weapons to Ukraine. That supplying of weapons adduces US involvement in a proxy war, as it was under Joe Biden, and continues to be under Trump. Then Trump allied with Israel against Palestinians, exposing his hypocrisy. Trump would often whine about how grief-stricken he is about the killing of people in the fighting between Russia and Ukraine. Yet, he takes a decidedly different stance on the killing of Palestinians by Israeli Jews. The Palestinians need to be expunged from the territory to erect a riviera on the beaches of Gaza. And then the “peace president” launched an aggression against Iraq. And let’s not forget that Ansar Allah sent the ill-fated US navy away from the waters near Yemen.

To put absurdity over the top, the genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu has nominated the warmaking Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, a prize he has long pined for. Forthrightly or not, Trump downplays his chances of winning the Nobel recognition he covets: “It’s too bad. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.”

Third, Trump has promised repeatedly to release all the JFK documents, the RFK documents, and the Epstein documents. Trump only made a partial release of the JFK files, many heavily redacted, during Trump 1. He promised the rest would be forthcoming. No release has occurred at the time of this writing during Trump 2. In the latest bit of gaslighting, the public is expected to believe that there are no Epstein files. Apparently, the associates of Epstein can now relax and breathe much easier. As to what became of Epstein videos, files, notes, it leads to a suspicion. There is a high likelihood that this escaping the gun also applies to Trump who had a relationship with the deceased financier Epstein. Equally oleaginous is the poor quality video of Epstein’s cell that has a missing one-minute. In other words, much of the documentation to imprison Epstein is missing, and the same goes for his imprisoned partner in recruiting underage females, Ghislaine Maxwell. Much of the evidence to put her behind bars is now deemed non-existent.

Trump is relying on his bluster (i.e., lies) to confuse Americans — in particular, his MAGA base. The media is on notice that it will be ridiculed for asking questions about Epstein. Said Trump who interjected himself to a question posed by a reporter to attorney general Pam Bondi:

Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? Been talked about for years. You’re asking, we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things, and are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable.

However, the gaslighting surrounding the Epstein sex trafficking ring has caused rumblings among some of the MAGA people.

*****

Such is the power of gaslighting that if some people are told something often enough, even when there is powerful evidence to the contrary, that the gaslighter can confuse the gaslit people. The media and fact checkers have been playing a big role in this.

In a 16 August 2024 essay, professor T.P. Wilkinson wrote: “George Soros, who by his own public admission already enriched himself at the age of 14 with the help of Nazi occupiers of his native Hungary.”

He had not provided substantiation for this claim, so I asked. He said that he had cited his source in a previous article. Indeed, he had done this in his essay “The Health which I See is Disease (… if the Hierarchical Church so Defines)” on 5 March 2021.

This led me to a 1998 60 Minutes interview, where Georg Soros openly admits that as a 14-year-old boy he helped Nazis dispossess Jews of their property. It is crystal clear in the video and undeniable. But the mass media has seemingly built up a huge wall of gaslighting around Soros ever having worked for the Nazis against fellow Jews.

Wilkinson does not mince words, George Soros is a serial murderer.

Yet, there are a plethora of refutations of Soros having worked for the Nazis. These charges against Soros can be fought through gaslighting or orchestrated whitewashing. Yet, despite the concrete evidence of the video interview, it is the videotaped words of Soros versus the words that gaslighters use to frame the admission of Soros.

For example, Reuters sets up a strawman. It does not deal with the criticism that Soros helped dispossess Jews of their property for the Nazis. It deflects by stating that Soros was not a Nazi. So Soros wasn’t a card-carrying member of the National Socialist Party of Deutschland. But there is a well known refrain about ducks. If Soros quacks like a Nazi and behaves like a Nazi, ergo he must be a Nazi.

Newsweek even denies in its fact check that Soros assisted the dispossession of Jewish property for the Nazis. Perplexing. In other words, either Newsweek is lying or it is calling Soros a liar.

The Independent writes:

Of all the conspiracy theories spun around the 87-year-old [soon to be 95-year-old] Jewish billionaire George Soros – that he is the “puppet master” of all liberals, that he owns Black Lives Matter, that he is secretly building a new world order – the most demonstrably insane may be the claim that he was a Nazi.

That is: That the 14-year-old boy who had to hide from his own government during the German occupation of Hungary was a war criminal who sent his own people to gas chambers.

*****

Nowadays, given the proliferation of the internet and the reposting and archiving of e-information, it is nigh impossible to remove regrettable words from the information universe.

If Soros regrets his admission, how then should he elude his own words? When you are a billionaire, you can build your own media empire and gaslight. The Soros Economic Development Fund says:

We invest in critical media companies to foster their growth and safeguard their editorial independence. This work helps to promote freedom of expression and dissent, the fight against disinformation, and the imperative to develop new business models as cornerstones of democracy.

Sounds impressive. However, Xinhua reports on a study conducted by Media Research Center Business:

Soros spent hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars in bribes to build his own “network of media ties” so as to manipulate public opinion, U.S. media said.

Is this how Soros manages to use his deep pockets to influence all these media (including, apparently, the Reuters fact check) to deny what he said during his 60 Minutes interview?

I lived in Hungary for two years, so of course, I had heard of Soros and his financial corruption. Reuters did not hide Soros’s shady business practices, headlining “Hungary court confirms $2.5 mln fine on Soros fund,” and reporting, “New York-based Soros Fund Management LLC will have to pay a fine of 489 million forints ($2.5 million) for unlawful trades in shares of OTP Bank.”

Before I had ever ventured to Hungary, I had worked as a dive instructor in the Maldives. At the resort restaurant, I once engaged in conversation with a businessman who worked for a company buying bad debt from companies going under. During our conversation, I brought up Georg Soros. He expressed surprise that a random dive instructor knew who Soros was and asked how I knew this?

My terse reply: “I read.”

However, reading, per se, is insufficient. It may even be harmful. Gaining knowledge is not simply comprehending what one reads. The source of the information, what questions are raised about what is written, analyzing the evidence, and the ability to rationally consider the information is vital to coming to a reasoned conclusion. This is especially important given the widespread gaslighting and disinformation. It is imperative that readers and viewers regard information with open-minded skepticism.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

A man hugs former Foreign Service employee Bob Gilchrist, of Washington, left, outside the State Department headquarters, Friday, July 11, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein).

• State Department fires more than 1,300 in sweeping Trump administration reorganization.
• Senate Democrats clash with Forest Service chief over Trump’s proposed firefighting budget cuts.
• House Democrats kick off campaign to hold Republicans accountable for Medicaid cuts in GOP budget bill.
• California leaders warn of severe fallout from federal workforce and program cuts.
• Los Angeles officials condemn ICE raids staged from historic Terminal Island site.
• Los Angeles mayor signs an executive directive to protect immigrant residents of the city.
• Federal immigration raid at Camarillo cannabis farm sparks protest, 200 arrests.

The post State Department fired more than 1,300 in sweeping Trump administration reorganization – July 11, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

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

A federal judge in New Hampshire has issued a nationwide injunction against President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born in the United States since February 20. In a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of immigrant parents, the ACLU argued that the order would leave children born to undocumented parents “effectively stateless.” We speak to ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt about the case, which he calls “cruel” and without merit, as well as new evidence that the Trump administration is lying about its power over people it has expelled to the Salvadoran mega-prison CECOT.

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

Rescue teams in central Texas are still searching for about 160 people who went missing in the catastrophic flash floods on July 4. The official death toll has climbed to at least 121 victims. State policymakers are now in the spotlight, as questions swirl around Texas’s lack of emergency precautions and the climate denialism of Republican political leaders. “Many of those lost lives could have been saved if links in our disaster response chain hadn’t been broken,” says Monica Medina, a former official at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal administration that, among other tasks, monitors extreme weather. NOAA has been hit by major cuts to funding and staffing under Trump, despite the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters from climate change. Medina is among many climate and policy experts sounding the alarm on the defunding of NOAA and other meteorological and disaster preparedness services. “We are firing the people. We’re stopping taking in the data. We’re ending the research. We’re turning off the satellites. We’re doing everything we possibly can to put our heads in the sand in the midst of what is increasingly dangerous weather.”

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

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When the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights notified George Mason University on July 1 that it was opening an antisemitism investigation based on a recent complaint, the university’s president, Gregory Washington, said he was “perplexed.”

Compared with other campuses, where protesters had ransacked buildings and hunkered down in encampments, George Mason had been relatively quiet over the past year, he said. His administration had taken extensive steps to improve relations with the Jewish community, had enacted strict rules on protests and had communicated all of that to the OCR during a previous antisemitism investigation that remained open.

By the next day, though, there were signs that the new investigation was part of a coordinated campaign to oust him.

One piece of evidence: the speed with which conservative news outlets reported on the OCR’s action, which hadn’t been publicly announced. The OCR letter was embedded in a July 2 article published by a right-wing news outlet, The Washington Free Beacon. The next day, the City Journal, published by the influential and conservative Manhattan Institute, ran an opinion essay headlined “George Mason University’s Disastrous President.” The article accused Washington, the university’s first Black president and a first-generation college graduate, of backing “racially discriminatory DEI programs” — referring to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and failing to address campus antisemitism. It concluded that “Washington’s track record warrants his resignation or dismissal.”

The similarities to recent events at another public university in Virginia were hard to ignore. The OCR’s George Mason investigation was opened just four days after the University of Virginia’s president, James E. Ryan, announced that he was resigning to help settle a federal probe into the university’s DEI commitments.

That happened after a group of conservative University of Virginia alumni, the Jefferson Council, published blog entries and newspaper ads decrying the president — in part for focusing too heavily on diversity efforts — and demanding that he resign. The council’s connections to board members and Justice Department lawyers led many observers in higher education to conclude that Ryan’s forced resignation was the result of a coordinated assault.

Now, Washington is feeling the same heat coming from similar sources.

The temperature cranked up several degrees Thursday morning, when the Education Department notified George Mason that it’s opening a second investigation — this one alleging the university illegally considers race in hiring and promoting employees. The department said it was acting on complaints from “multiple professors” at GMU.

In a press statement Thursday, Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, suggested that the agency has already reached sweeping conclusions about the university’s hiring practices. “Despite the leadership of George Mason University claiming that it does not discriminate on the basis of race, it appears that its hiring and promotion policies and practices from 2020 to the present, implemented under the guise of so-called ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,’ not only allow but champion illegal racial preferencing in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This kind of pernicious and wide-spread discrimination — packaged as ‘anti-racism’ — was allowed to flourish under the Biden Administration, but it will not be tolerated by this one,” he wrote.

The university rebutted those accusations in a statement saying it is complying with all federal and state mandates and does not discriminate. The university “received a new Department of Education letter of investigation this morning as it was simultaneously released to news outlets, which is unprecedented in our experience,” the statement said. “As always, we will work in good faith to give a full and prompt response.”

Meanwhile, dozens of Jewish faculty members at GMU have signed on to a statement condemning “an attack on our university community and our GMU President that is quickly intensifying under a false, racially divisive, and deeply cynical claim of combating antisemitism.”

Even before Thursday’s announcement, Washington said he had detected a pattern that’s been playing out at other universities targeted by President Donald Trump’s administration: Multiple investigations are filed in quick succession and word leaks to news organizations.

“It seems like this is orchestrated,” Washington said during an interview Wednesday. “The same people who are kind of aligned that got rid of Jim Ryan are aligned against me.”

He finds the timing of the attacks against him and his university troubling.

“Given that the Office for Civil Rights doesn’t publicly announce who is under investigation, we were wondering how these conservative outlets even got the information in the first place,” Washington said. The “almost hateful discussions of me” in the City Journal article looked like “a concerted effort to try to paint the institution in a negative light.”

Washington said the piece seemed to be urging the Trump administration to take the investigation to the next level, the Department of Justice, which could levy punishments against the university.

Many faculty members at George Mason agree. They worry that despite the OCR’s insistence in its letter to the university that its investigation will be unbiased, the Trump administration has already reached a verdict on the institution’s president and wants him out. As evidence, they point to a web of ties between right-wing news organizations and politicians — including Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin — as well as some George Mason board members.

“The same unfounded and coordinated attacks that pushed Ryan out of UVa are now being leveled at GMU President Greg Washington,” the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors wrote in an online post. “We think the DOJ, Governor Youngkin, and Youngkin’s appointees” to GMU’s governing board “are trying to force President Washington out so they can hire an ideological ally who will impose the Governor’s political ideologies on Mason’s governance and curriculum.”

Late Wednesday, Virginia’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine, doubled down on those warnings, publishing an opinion piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch saying that the Trump administration “appears to be eyeing its next target” with George Mason’s president.

“The accusations — which are pushed by bloggers with ties to ultra-conservative groups with histories of false claims about Mason and advocacy for the removal of university presidents — are eerily similar to those lodged against Ryan,” they wrote. “They include vague and politically charged accusations centered around ‘DEI’ and suggestions that the university’s administration has been insufficiently responsive to concerns raised by Jewish students about their safety on campus. That’s despite the fact that the university’s leaders have repeatedly and publicly condemned antisemitism and actually been praised by the local Jewish Relations Council and campus Hillel for their leadership and commitment to Jewish members of Mason’s community.”

The education department’s July 1 letter notified George Mason that it was investigating a complaint, filed in June, that Jewish students and faculty members faced a hostile environment at the Virginia university between October 2023 and the end of the 2024-2025 academic year. It gave the university until July 21 to turn over voluminous information about its response to antisemitism complaints.

It also assured the university it would take a neutral stance in evaluating the information.

Warner and Kaine are skeptical that the investigation will be fair and impartial: In their opinion piece, they said it’s more likely “to serve as yet another smokescreen to punish universities and leaders who don’t align with their ideological goals.”

Some George Mason faculty members share these concerns.

“When you start seeing these hit pieces come out one after another in a matter of days, you know it’s coordinated,” Bethany L. Letiecq, a professor in the College of Education and Human Development, said in an interview.

Indeed, higher education leaders have accused the Department of Justice’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which officially oversees investigations by several federal agencies, of ignoring procedures intended to provide due process, racing toward predetermined results, and then punishing universities by stripping them of billions of research dollars.

Washington’s critics have ties to right-wing advocates of eliminating diversity efforts and other examples of what they see as higher education’s “woke” policies. The author of the essay calling Washington a “disastrous” president, Ian Kingsbury, has co-published articles promoting conservative causes with Jay P. Greene, a senior research fellow with The Heritage Foundation. Christopher F. Rufo, one of the nation’s most aggressive and influential opponents of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, is among the contributing editors at City Journal.

Such critics are well represented in George Mason’s leadership as well.

Youngkin, the governor, appointed most of GMU’s governing board, known as the board of visitors. The university’s general counsel, Anne Gentry, is married to a longtime conservative activist and executive with the Koch Foundation, Letiecq pointed out. “At Mason, the foxes are in the henhouse,” she said. “It’s an inside job.”

Letiecq worries that Youngkin might exert the same kind of influence that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a fellow Republican, has in trying to reshape higher education to fit a conservative playbook. Neither Youngkin nor the board of visitors immediately responded to requests for comment.

“I have suspected that Youngkin, in his quest for political capital, has been following the DeSantis playbook and sees Mason as a potential New College that they can take over and take down,” she said. New College of Florida, once a progressive institution, underwent substantial changes to its curriculum and staff beginning in 2023 when DeSantis stacked its board with conservative members.

Neither Kingsbury, the author of the City Journal piece, nor the Department of Education responded to inquiries about the patterns Washington saw. Eliana Johnson, editor of the Washington Free Beacon, said in a statement that “our reporting speaks for itself.” City Journal did not respond to requests for comment.

Washington defended his record in a public statement on July 3. “As we prepare a response to the complaint, it is important that we all have an accurate understanding of how safe and welcoming the George Mason community is, particularly as we prepare to welcome tens of thousands of students to campus in just a few short weeks,” he wrote.

“George Mason has not been marred by the sort of violence that has rocked so many other campuses elsewhere in Virginia and around the nation following the Hamas attacks of 2023. It is a distinction we are proud of, and work hard each day to maintain.”

In 11 messages that were sent to the campus community detailing the university’s responses to the Hamas attacks and that were shared with The Chronicle of Higher Education, his office denounced “craven acts of terrorism as we have seen in Israel,” urged “civil discourse, understanding, and peaceable assembly” on campus and denounced the “disgusting behavior” of those who were attempting to distribute antisemitic leaflets. University leaders coordinated with law enforcement to respond to two violent antisemitic actions.

It’s been more than a year since the last campus demonstration related to Gaza, Washington said. That protest remained safe and legal and did not disrupt university business. “No encampments have ever formed at George Mason, and we will not permit them in the future,” Washington said. The university was one of the first to introduce a comprehensive safety and well-being plan, which remains in effect.

“Our data continues to show that our environment has dramatically improved since the horrific Hamas attacks of 2023, so we are perplexed to be receiving this investigation at this time. Nevertheless, we will respond in a forthright, direct, and timely manner to this and any inquiry.”

In the 2023-2024 academic year, the university received 31 bias-incident reports based on antisemitism, according to Rose Pascarell, vice president for university life. Last year, that number dropped to 12.

Plus, she said, the university “responded fully” to a previous OCR complaint related to antisemitism — but never heard back from the government.

Letiecq said that, in her view, Washington has overreacted, not underreacted, to complaints of antisemitism, instituting restrictions on protests and punishments for protesters that she considers “oppressive.”

“This is an insatiable campaign on the right and it seems there’s nothing you can do to satisfy them,” she said.

George Mason, with more than 40,000 students, is the most racially diverse public research university in the state, university officials say. To comply with Trump’s executive orders, the university has repurposed its DEI office to focus on compliance and community. It has cut six positions, eliminated diversity training and expanded a program in constructive dialogue. All of those changes are outlined in a lengthy report to the board. Washington insists, though, that the university won’t abandon its commitments to the underlying principles its diversity efforts support.

“When you are a diverse institution, you have to operate from that diverse framework,” Washington said. “I don’t run away from that. I run toward it.”

DEI expenditures represent 0.1% of the university’s budget, GMU officials say.

Asked why he agreed to speak out publicly when so many presidents have stayed silent to avoid angering the administration, Washington said the attacks were too personal to avoid.

“My philosophy is: Sunlight is disinfectant. We’re going to be transparent with the community throughout the process,” including the back-and-forth with OCR, he said.

Washington says if the university is asked to make significant changes without a standard investigation and discussion of the facts, it will deal with that as necessary. “We will work in good faith to move through this,” Washington said. “We will know if we’re given due process by how they manage our particular case.”

Katherine Mangan is a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Katherine Mangan, special to ProPublica.

• Judge orders pause for Trump executive order ending birthright citizenship;
• Secretary of State Rubio describes Trump disappointment with Russia over Ukraine;
• Palestinians describe indiscriminate killings at aid distribution sites after Israel kicked UN aid program out of Gaza;
• US sanctions top UN human rights official on Occupied Palestinian Territory, UN calls it “dangerous precedent”;
• Conspiracy theories about Epstein sex trafficking come back to haunt Trump administration;
• Mahmoud Khalil files $20 million lawsuit after release from immigration jail, will share any settlement with other targeted activists

The post US sanctions top UN human rights official on Occupied Palestinian Territory; Judge pauses Trump order ending birthright citizenship – July 10, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

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

For generations, the Statue of Liberty has stood as a beacon representing the promise of America as a land of freedom and opportunity for immigrants from all over the world. But in 2025, as immigrant communities are being vilified and terrorized across the US, as people of color are being kidnapped off the street by armed, masked agents of the state, as immigrants are kidnapped and disappeared to prisons in foreign countries like El Salvador, as billions of taxpayer dollars are allocated to erect migrant concentration camps and a giant wall on the US-Mexico border, it should be horrifyingly clear that the promised America embodied in the Statue of Liberty is not the America we live in today. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen about the reality immigrant families face in the US today and about the critical relationship between the rise of authoritarianism at home and the violent expansion of American imperialism abroad.

Guest:

• Viet Thanh Nguyen is a professor of English, American studies and ethnicity, and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. His novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His latest feature piece for The Nation Magazine is titled “Greater America has been exporting disunion for decades”

Additional resources:

• Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Nation, “Greater America has been exporting disunion for decades”
• Michael Fox, The Real News Network, “Families of the detained see echoes of dictatorial past in El Salvador’s gang crackdown”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “A dangerous myth: The US has never been ‘a nation of immigrants’”

Credits:

• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

There is no question that cybersecurity and protecting the privacy of Americans’ health care records are important issues that we need to deal with.

But, Mr. Chairman, let me be very clear. That is not the issue that is right now on the minds of the American people. What people are worried about is the catastrophic impact that the reconciliation bill that was passed last week will have on the health and well-being of the American people. And that is the issue that I'm going to be focused on today.

That legislation, passed by one vote here in the Senate, will be making the largest cut to Medicaid in American history to pay for the largest tax break for billionaires in American history.

At a time when our current health care system is broken, dysfunctional and cruel — 85 million today are uninsured or underinsured. This bill will make a horrible situation even worse.

This legislation will cut Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act by more than $1.1 trillion.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that this bill, along with the expiration of the enhanced premium tax credits, will cause 17 million people to lose their health insurance.

Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health and health care economists at the University of Pennsylvania have found that these health care policies would cause over 50,000 people in our country to die unnecessarily every year. That's what happens when you can't get to a doctor.

I am delighted that one of the lead researchers of this report, Dr. Alison Galvani, is here with us today to talk more about that study.

Mr. Chairman: it is not rocket science. You're a doctor, you know this. If people don’t have access to health care, if they can’t get to a doctor when they need to, people will suffer and tens of thousands will die. It happens today and it will only get worse.

Make no mistake about it: This bill is a death sentence for working-class and low-income Americans.

Further, as a result of this bill, more than 300 rural hospitals are now at risk of closing down altogether or substantially reducing their services. That is not my estimate. That’s what the Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina recently estimated.

And we are already beginning to see the devastating impact this bill will have on rural America: The Curtis Medical Center in Southwest Nebraska has already announced that it will be shutting down because it cannot withstand the cuts to Medicaid contained in this bill.

It’s not just rural hospitals that are now in crisis as a result of this legislation.

According to a recent survey from the American Health Care Association, as a result of this bill, 27% of nursing homes have indicated that they will be forced to close their doors and 58% will have to reduce staff. And it’s not just nursing homes.

Health care researchers at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University have found that this bill will be a disaster for community health centers.

They have estimated that as a result of the passage of this bill, over 40% of community health center sites will shut down. Today, there are over 15,000 community health center clinics throughout America. This could result in the shutting down of some 9,000 of them.

And it's not just community health centers, it's not just nursing homes and it's not just individuals.

This legislation will substantially increase the uninsured rate in every state in this country.

As a result of this bill, the uninsured rate in my own state of Vermont would go up from 3.3% to 6%.

In Louisiana, the Chairman's state, the uninsured rate will go up from 6.7% to 12.4%.

In Florida, the uninsured rate will go up from 10.4% to 18.8%.

In Texas, the second largest state in this country, the uninsured rate will go up to 20% — in the United States, in the richest country in the history of the world.

Mr. Chairman, this is an issue that needs to be explained to the American people, and I look forward to discussing it with all of our panelists.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The first trial in a case challenging the Trump administration’s policy of detaining and deporting international students and professors who participate in pro-Palestinian activism is underway in Boston. The American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association brought the lawsuit. Government lawyers tried to get it dismissed, but U.S. District Judge William Young, an 84-year-old Ronald Reagan nominee, ordered a trial, saying it was the “best way to get at truth.”

“Students and faculty all over the country are quite literally terrified about the possibility that their advocacy and expression will lead to detention,” says Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and one of the lawyers challenging the Trump administration. “They are terrified that ICE agents will show up at their door any day and take them away.”

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

“We know we get rains. We know the river rises,” he said as a desperate search for survivors continued along the Guadalupe, a river that rose more than 30 feet in just five hours last week. “But nobody saw this coming.”

County records show that some Kerr County officials did see it coming and raised concerns about the county’s outdated flood warning system nearly a decade ago. 

Their first request for help updating the technology was denied in 2017, when Kerr County applied for roughly $1 million in federal Hazard Mitigation Grant Program aid from the Texas Department of Emergency Management. County officials tried again in 2018 after Hurricane Harvey swept Texas, killing 89 people and causing some $159 billion in damage. Again, the state denied the request, directing most federal assistance toward more densely populated areas, including Houston.  

As neighboring counties invested in better emergency warning systems, Kerr County — the heart of Flash Flood Alley — never modernized an antiquated flood warning system that lacks basic components like sirens and river gauges. At least 110 people, including 27 children, have died so far in the deadliest floods the state has seen since 1921. Most of them drowned in Kerr County, largely because they didn’t know the water was coming. The search for at least 161 other people continues.

The matter of who should have fronted the money for flood system upgrades is at the heart of swelling controversy in Texas. Public outrage has spurred the kind of action that, had it happened years ago, might have saved lives. “The state needs to step up and pay,” said Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick on Monday this week. “The governor and I talked this morning at length about it, and he said, ‘We’re just gonna do it.’”

But even as Texas races to prepare Kerr County for future extreme weather events, the federal government is speeding in the opposite direction. Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has taken an ax to the country’s resilience efforts, undoing years of progress toward helping communities withstand the consequences of climate change.  

In April, the Trump administration canceled the Building Resilient Communities Program, or BRIC, which funnels billions of dollars to states, municipalities, and tribal nations so they can prepare for future disasters. Ironically, Trump signed this program into law during his first term. But now, in the name of eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse,” the Trump administration has cut $750 million in new resilience funding and clawed back nearly $900 million in grant funding already promised but not yet disbursed to states for improvements like upgrading stormwater systems, performing prescribed burns, and building flood control systems. FEMA also cancelled $600 million in Flood Mitigation Assistance funding to communities this year, money that helps states protect buildings from flooding. Government analyses have determined that every dollar spent preparing for a disaster reaps $6 or more in costs saved down the road.

The federal Hazard Mitigation Program funding that Texas Governor Greg Abbott requested alongside his request for a major disaster declaration following the catastrophic flooding that began July 4 — the same pot of money Kerr County tried to tap to modernize its flood warning infrastructure in 2017 and 2018 — is still pending as of Tuesday, according to the governor’s office. 

“Historically, if a state has requested Hazard Mitigation Grant Program funding as part of the disaster declaration, it’s been approved,” said Anna Weber, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. But the government hasn’t approved that type of funding in months. “Ultimately, the president has the authority to declare the disaster declaration and determine what’s included in that declaration.”

In sum, these actions at the federal level make it more likely that communities across the country will be caught flatfooted as climate change makes extreme weather events more intense and unpredictable. “There’s so many communities that, when they look at their flooding data, their disaster risk data, their future climate projections, they understand their risk and they understand what their new normal may be,” said Victoria Salinas, who led FEMA’s resilience initiatives under former president Joe Biden. “But then they are powerless to do things about it because it often requires money, expertise, and people power.” 

Rural and underprivileged areas like Kerr County are at particular risk. They often lack the resources and know-how to obtain resilience funding from state and federal officials. The BRIC program had a technical assistance arm dedicated to helping these “lower capacity” communities develop strong applications. That’s also gone. “As far as we know, not only will there not be technical assistance provided through this program going forward, but there are communities out there that were, say, one year into a three year technical assistance agreement through this program that are now unsure about whether or not they’re going to be able to continue,” Weber said.

That means it’ll largely be up to states and counties to fund preparedness projects. It’s not a guarantee that states will take action or that communities will embrace solutions. Even a state like Texas, which has the second-biggest economy in the country, has been loath to help counties pay for disaster resilience initiatives. A measure that would have established a government council and grant program to reform local disaster warning systems across Texas failed in the state Senate this year. 

“I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now,” said state Representative Wes Virdell, a Republican from central Texas who voted against the bill.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Amid historic Texas floods, Trump retreats from disaster preparedness on Jul 8, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

On June 13, military veterans and their families and supporters protested in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, demanding that taxpayer dollars for Donald Trump’s ill-fated military parade and decision to send troops to Los Angeles should be used for housing, healthcare, food, and taking care of veterans. Around 60 demonstrators were arrested by Capitol police. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with veterans Michael T. McPhearson, Kevin Benderman, and Amber Mathwig, two of whom were arrested on June 13, about the duty they feel to oppose the Trump admistration’s actions and the vital role veterans have to play in the larger fight against the Trump agenda.

Guests:

• Michael T. McPhearson enlisted in the US Army Reserve while in high school at age 17 in 1981. A distinguished military graduate, McPhearson received an ROTC commission from Campbell University. He served five years on active duty as a field artillery officer in the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division during Operation Desert Shield/Storm (the Gulf War). McPhearson separated from the US Army as a Captain in 1992. He is a member and the Executive Director of Veterans for Peace. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
• Kevin Benderman served in the US Army for ten years of active duty, eventually reaching the rank of E-5. He deployed to Iraq in 2003. He became opposed to the continued occupation of Iraq after his initial deployment, and he filed for conscientious objector status and was eventually court-martialed. He is a disabled veteran and lives in Augusta, Georgia. Kevin is a longtime member of About Face: Veterans Against the War.
• Amber Mathwig enlisted in the US Navy in 2002, serving 10 years in various duty stations, including a deployment to Baghdad, Iraq, in 2008-2009 and a deployment to the Middle East in 2010-2011 on a ship that participated in the bombing of Libya.
• These experiences, combined with what she witnessed in regards to the culture of sexism and sexual assault in the military, sparked her journey to understanding the stranglehold the military-industrial complex has on our country. In addition to being a longtime member of About Face: Veterans Against the War, she is a member of Teamsters Local 638, and an organizer who focuses on the intersection of labor and the military-industrial complex.

Additional resources:

• Veterans for Peace website
• About Face: Veterans Against the War website
• Katie Bauer, HuffPost, “Storming the steps of the Capitol: Why I got arrested with other veterans to protest Trump”

Credits:

• Producer: Rosette Sewali
• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

Since the beginning of its genocidal assault on Gaza twenty-one months ago, the Israeli government has deprived millions of Palestinians of food and other basic necessities for life. Now, amid the widespread starvation that it has created, the Netanyahu government has sidelined the U.N.’s neutral, internationally recognized Gaza-wide system of aid delivery in favor of GHF’s privatized and militarized model, which one U.N. expert describes as a “death trap.” Israeli soldiers were ordered to fire on Palestinians waiting for food, according to a report in Haaretz.

GHF’s system was designed to align with the Israeli’s government stated goal of forcibly displacing Palestinians from the north to the south of Gaza – a war crime under international law. While the UN’s 400 distribution sites largely sit dormant, GHF delivers aid at a handful of sites primarily located in the south. In fact, internal planning documents reveal that people involved in the development of GHF understood the risk that its distribution hubs would force the displacement of Palestinians.

In its FOIA request, the Center for Constitutional Rights seeks records that could reveal whether GHF was also created to further President Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” redevelopment – and ethnic cleansing – plan. The Center of Constitutional Rights has previously joined other human rights and legal organizations in warning that individuals and entities involved in GHF could face legal liability for complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

It is against this backdrop that the State Department approved a $30 million United States Agency for International Development (USAID) grant for GHF, which is chaired by Johnnie Moore, an evangelical preacher who worked in the first Trump administration. GHF has not disclosed information about its funding, yet in announcing the grant, the State Department exempted it from the audit required for groups receiving USAID funds for the first time.

“It is outrageous that rather than investigating GHF and the private military contractors at its distribution hubs for complicity in war crimes, the Trump administration has doubled down in furthering Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by giving GHF tens of millions of dollars,” said, Center for Constitutional Rights Senior Staff Attorney Katherine Gallagher. “The GHF operation raises many concerning questions about U.S. long-term plans for Gaza, and we will use this FOIA to get answers. The United States must stop sending arms and contractors to Gaza, and instead demand that the United Nations be permitted to resume its aid operations until Palestinians can fully return and rebuild a free Gaza.”

With its FOIA request, the Center for Constitutional Rights seeks all relevant records from the State Department and USAID from October 1st, 2024 to present, including information about GHF’s creation, the role of consulting groups like the Boston Consulting Group, its leadership, and financing. The FOIA also seeks information about the U.S. government links to the newly formed private military contractors in Gaza, Safe Reach Solutions (SRS) and UG Solutions.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

What is MAGA imperialism? Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster says that, despite its feints toward anti-imperialist isolationism, President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has coalesced into a “hyper-nationalist” form of populism that rejects the U.S.'s post-WWII adherence to liberal internationalism and promotes dominance over other countries via military power rather than through economic globalization. Foster explains that this “Trump doctrine is opposed to multi-ethnic empires and multi-ethnic nations,” operating under a “racial definition of foreign policy, with the notion that the United States is a white country and other ethnicities don't belong.” And while some analyses of the Trump coalition locate its base in the “white working class,” in reality this ideology is rooted in the lower middle class, which owns more property and is less opposed to the wealthy capitalist class. “If you go back to the 1930s, to Italy and Germany, it’s the same constituency that drove the fascist movement, but it’s a result of an alliance between big capital … and the lower middle class.”

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

This is the first time governments have gathered to discuss deep sea mining since The Metals Company (TMC) submitted the first ever application to commercially mine the international seabed. The move was encouraged by an executive order signed by US President Donald Trump aimed to fast-track deep-sea mining operations in both US and international waters, and has bolstered opposition to deep sea mining, not only to protect the environment but also to defend international cooperation and international law.[1]

Greenpeace International campaigner Louisa Casson, who is attending the meeting, said: “We are witnessing the dangers that arise when nations take unilateral action without regard for collective consequences. We should learn from nature that ecosystems collapse without cooperation; our global systems are at risk when we fail to work together for the common good. The deep sea must not fall victim to predatory corporate seizure. It is time for governments at the ISA to commit to a moratorium—this is the only viable path to prevent the irreversible harm that deep-sea mining would unleash.”

Nearly 200 governments have signed the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), often referred to as the “constitution of the ocean”, which establishes a global legal framework that prevents states from taking unilateral action to exploit them.

In its latest financial filings, TMC acknowledged that many governments and the ISA are likely to view any deep sea mining permit issued under the Trump administration as a violation of international law.[2] This could result in lawsuits, being unable to sell minerals, and companies refusing to work with TMC throughout the supply chain.

Pressure is already mounting on Allseas, a company headquartered in Switzerland with significant presence in the Netherlands, who own the deep sea mining ship and machinery that TMC intends to rely on for commercial operations, and are also one of its largest shareholders. Last week, Greenpeace activists hung a banner from Allseas office in Delft, urging the company to break ties with Trump.[3]

Recently, Dutch media reported that Climate Minister Sophie Hermans is raising concerns directly with Allseas over their involvement with TMC, while the Swiss government outlined its expectations for companies registered or active in Switzerland to follow international law and norms.[4][5] Allseas’ CEO has stated that the company “would not do anything illegal”.

Moreover, TMC’s strategic collaboration with PAMCO is coming under new scrutiny, with the Japanese metal processing company admitting that it “consider(s) the establishment of the business via a route that has earned international credibility to be a material issue”.[6]

The ISA risks caving in to corporate pressure with the President of the Council, H.E. Duncan Laki, circulating instructions to ISA parties to speed up discussions in an attempt to finalize a Mining Code by this year, which would pave the way for commercial deep sea mining to begin in the international seabed.[7] These included strong limitations of intervention times or recourse to smaller meetings where observers were excluded. In response, Greenpeace has sent a letter to Secretary General Leticia Carvalho, warning that the ISA must not reward industry-led efforts to rush the adoption of the Mining Code.[8] Several governments have also voiced strong opposition, stating, “We categorically disassociate ourselves from any suggestion or interpretation that the Council is bound, legally or politically, to adopt the regulations by the end of the year.”[9] Other NGOs, Indigenous peoples and some States also addressed the issue.

Louisa Casson added: “Governments are not powerless in the face of deep sea miners doing a doomed deal with Trump. They have both the authority and, now more than ever, the responsibility to act. With growing scientific concern, mounting public pressure, and unprecedented risks to fragile marine ecosystems, the time for courageous leadership is now”.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

During the days of McCarthyism in the 1950s, and probably before then, self-righteous conservatives used this word as a smear against people on the political Left. “Comrade” was a word used before and after the Russian Revolution in 1917 by members of the Bolshevik Party which led that revolution and dominated the USSR government for decades afterwards. I suspect, without knowing for sure, that members of the Communist Party in the USA from the 1920s on, at least until McCarthyite repression in the 50s, used that term also, given the CPUSA’s very close connection to the Soviet CP during that time.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm, published in 1945, had a lot to do with the comrade word becoming much more widely discredited. Animal Farm is the story of a revolution gone bad, corruption of once-revolutionary and brave leadership upon gaining power, and even as those bad things happen and demoralization sets in among many of the animals, use of the word comrade is continued by those in power.

As a young person growing up in the 1950s and 60s, I absorbed much of the dominant conservative ideology of those days and as a result never used, and still don’t use, the comrade word in any way. To me, it has been seen as a problematic word.

But there are other-than-leftist groups in the USA that use the word. Doing some google searching I learned that it is in use in both the US military and among veterans groups, which is surprising. Why would that be the case?

In a Random House dictionary published in 1966, they give three definitions for the word: “1) a person who shares closely in one’s activities, occupation, interests, etc: intimate companion, associate, or friend. 2) a fellow member of a fraternal group, political party, etc. 3) a member of the Communist Party or someone with strongly leftist views.”

I think it’s telling that the US military and veterans groups apparently use the word. Clearly, their doing so would fall under definitions 1 and 2, not 3. There is something about the word, something about the idea of comradeship, that connects people who are working “closely” together in a shared task, shared “interests.”

Many of us today, literally millions, are standing up and taking action against the Trumpfascists. 5 million or more took part in 2,200 local actions in all 50 states on June 14, No Kings! Day. Probably millions are going to take part in local “Good Trouble Lives On” actions on July 17, the 5th anniversary of the death of longtime freedom fighter John Lewis; there are already over 1,000 planned. And I feel a sense of comradeship, progressive comradeship, with this so-very-important mass political force, this popular resistance movement.

“Progressive comradeship:” that’s a phrase I’m comfortable with. It fits with definitions 1 and 2 above. It clarifies that this movement is broadly-based, representing tens of millions of people, going from “strong leftists,” including communists, on one pole to decent, concerned people on the other who believe in “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

During Hakeem Jeffries’ record-breaking, 8 hour and 44 minutes, impressive speech right before the Big Ugly Bill was narrowly passed in the House of Representatives on July 3rd, he quoted more than once a passage from the Bible that clearly resonated with the many Democratic Congresspeople sitting, and sometimes standing in loud applause, behind him. That passage? Matthew 25: 35-40. It’s one that should undergird all that we do as we keep building and strengthening the Resistance.

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me. Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

We must do all we can as long as we are alive to try to bring into existence a world motivated by these words in Matthew. It’s a certainty that the warped and twisted, pro-oligarch, obscene policies of the current federal government, combined with the day-to-day organizing of the millions of us, is going to lead to many more millions joining with us in this profoundly important task history has placed before us.

Our mass democracy movement is now and must continue to be characterized by progressive comradeship in the way we interact and a deep, abiding love for others and the natural world. Nothing can defeat that kind of movement, nothing. We really can change the world.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick.

At least 82 people have died and dozens are still unaccounted for after flash flooding in central Texas over the weekend, when the Guadalupe River rose about 26 feet in less than an hour on Friday amid torrential downpours. At least 10 girls who attended Camp Mystic, a girls’ summer camp located on the banks of the river, are among the missing. In Kerr County, the most devastated area, at least 40 adults and 28 children have died. The speed and scale of the natural disaster has raised questions about why officials weren’t better prepared, and whether the Trump administration’s cuts to scientific positions exacerbated the situation.

“The National Weather Service, like a lot of federal agencies, went through significant loss of staff back in the spring,” says retired NOAA meteorologist Alan Gerard, now the CEO of Balanced Weather, which provides critical weather and climate alerts. Gerard says that while it appears there was appropriate staffing ahead of the Texas flood, the impact of current budget cuts and even deeper reductions being considered by the administration are a cause for concern. “We still have all of hurricane season to deal with,” he says.

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

“That sounds really hard,” the other man replied.

“Not as hard as it’s going to be to go accept this award and talk to a room full of people,” joked Yerman. Moments later, his name was called, and he walked onto a professionally lit stage to accept a small crystal trophy from the Oceantic Network, a leading trade group for the burgeoning multibillion-dollar U.S. offshore wind industry.

It was an unlikely sight. America’s fishermen have long treated wind developers as their sworn enemies.

The conflict started in the early 2000s, when the first plans for New England’s offshore wind areas were sketched out. In packed town hall meetings that often devolved into shouting matches, fishermen claimed the projects would make it harder to earn a living: fewer fishing grounds, fewer fish, damaged ocean habitat.

Few of these predictions have come to pass in places like the U.K., which has already built over 50 offshore wind farms in its waters. Wind areas there are thriving with sharks and serving as a surprising habitat for haddock. But even today, fisher-led groups in the U.S. are spearheading lawsuits aiming to halt at least two offshore wind farms under construction on the East Coast. One former offshore wind executive told Canary Media that the amount of pushback from fishermen in America has made offshore wind investments riskier than in Europe.

Yerman was one of the first fishermen in the U.S. to cross this bitter divide. He’s become the reluctant face of a group of over 100 fishermen and fisherwomen who go by the name Sea Services North America. They’ve decided to work for offshore wind farms — not against them. Doing so supplements their income from scalloping, a centuries-old bedrock of the New England fishing economy that has seen revenues dry up.

Pursuing work in wind power has come at a cost. After the awards event, back in blue jeans and with a celebratory beer in hand, Yerman recounted the exact word New England fishermen used when he and his crew first crossed the Rubicon.

“They called us traitors,” he said.

Those tensions have become supercharged with the election of President Donald Trump, who has called offshore wind ​“garbage” and ​“bullshit” and, in the weeks leading up to his inauguration, pledged that ​“no new windmills” would be built in the U.S. during his presidency. He’s backed up those words with action since taking office, stopping new projects from proceeding and attempting to block some of the country’s eight fully permitted offshore wind projects, too.

Yerman and his crew are left wondering if the industry they’ve bet their livelihood on — and work they’ve risked their reputations for — will all come crashing down.

Many of the fishermen who work through Sea Services voted for Trump. And if the president fulfills his promise to halt the industry, it would be devastating not only for the Northeast’s climate goals and grid reliability — but for thousands of workers in the region, from electricians to welders to Sea Services’ fishermen.

One of Sea Services’ captains, Kevin Souza, put it simply: The impact would be ​“big time.”

‘Everyone was skeptical‘

Six years ago, Yerman was like the others — angry with offshore wind developers, particularly Danish giant Ørsted, which had set up shop in his hometown of New London, Connecticut.

Concerned that wind turbines might push his son out of the scalloping business, he pulled one of the only levers he could think to pull and contacted his state senator at the time, Paul Formica, a Republican who owned a local seafood restaurant.

Formica wanted to see the two sides get along. He arranged a meeting between Yerman and an Ørsted executive named Matthew Morrissey, who happened to be a native of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the most lucrative commercial fishing port in America.

Yerman found in Morrissey a sympathetic ear, and in turn, he listened to what the executive had to say — that Ørsted was open to partnering with fishermen. Morrissey had seen, with his own eyes, fishers working for and coexisting with Ørsted in a tiny port in Kilkeel, Northern Ireland. The energy firm had a team of about two dozen marine affairs employees, Morrissey relayed, who could help make something like that happen in America if Yerman was on board. He pitched it as a win-win.

“Everyone knows that fishermen hate offshore wind companies. Well, guess what? Offshore wind companies hate fishermen, too,” Morrissey, who no longer works at Ørsted, told Canary Media earlier this year. ​“Our goal here is to spread the understanding that these two industries can and do and will work together.”

The idea intrigued Yerman. In the U.S., profits from scalloping have fluctuated from year to year, and, following a crash in the 1990s, scallop numbers remain unpredictable. In his view, if offshore wind companies were moving into their waters — like it or not — they might as well make some money from it.

Yerman got to work.

His first call was to Gordon Videll, a longtime friend and affable small-town lawyer, who knew things about contracts that Yerman didn’t. The two flew to Kilkeel — on their own dime — to see the model for themselves. Videll noticed that some of Kilkeel’s fishermen were driving cars nicer than his. He and Yerman were inspired.

When they returned to Connecticut, Yerman recruited about a half dozen of his commercial fishing buddies, and Videll started putting together the paperwork. They dubbed themselves Sea Services North America and in 2020 landed their first small contract, with Ørsted. It was a pilot, said Morrissey, to see if this arrangement would work here in America.

“Everyone was skeptical,” recalled Morrissey with a laugh. ​“Because their boats were in such poor safety condition. But you know what? They pulled it off.”

Today, Sea Services operates like a co-op and has brought 22 fishing boats up to certified safety standards. With Videll at the helm as part-time CEO, the group has completed over 11 contracts in eight different wind farm areas, from Massachusetts to New Jersey. Instead of hiring ferries or work boats, developers rely on Sea Services fishermen to provide safety and scout services for offshore wind vessels.

It’s important work: making sure, for example, no fishing gear, like crab traps, is in the way of cables, monopiles, or survey operations. If necessary, Sea Services fishermen move gear — with the owner’s approval. When not cleared, these obstacles have caused days and sometimes weeks of costly delays for developers, according to Morrissey.

Sea Services was an ​“indispensable partner” in helping to build South Fork Wind, which went online last year and became America’s first large-scale offshore wind project, wrote Ed LeBlanc, a current Ørsted executive, in an email to Canary Media. The firm has since contracted the group for other projects, in no small part because of their expertise about local waters, he added.

Cooperation between these two sides — offshore wind and commercial fishing — does exist elsewhere in America. For example, Avangrid and Vineyard Offshore, the codevelopers of the Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, have paid out $8 million directly to local fishermen unaffiliated with Sea Services for similar safety jobs over the past two years.

But Sea Services is unique. Today the group offers an expansive network of 22 partner vessels based in six states and is led by a commercial fisherman. Videll brought on new technology, allowing developers to track their work in real time. He said they adopted a co-op model to maximize the amount of money going into participants’ pockets.

Receiving the Oceantic Network award in late April was a big deal for the collective, said Videll. It’s an example of how successful the venture has been in a short period of time — and, more importantly, it should be good for business. Industry awards mean visibility. More visibility could mean more Sea Services contracts.

But, right now, the Sea Services business faces headwinds that no award can help overcome.

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has launched an all-out assault on the offshore wind industry. On his first day in office, he halted new lease and permitting activity and called for a review of the nine projects that already had their federal permits in hand. In March, his Environmental Protection Agency chief revoked a key permit for Atlantic Shores, a fully permitted project that has since been called off in part due to roadblocks created by the administration.

The most eyebrow-raising step came in April, when Trump’s Interior Department issued a stop-work order for Empire Wind 1, two weeks after the project had begun at-sea construction.

It was a wake-up call for Sea Services, which works for Norwegian energy giant Equinor on the project. Videll, Sea Services’ CEO, said at the time that the cessation of Empire Wind would be a crushing blow that could cost the co-op a total of $9 million to $12 million worth of work.

In May, the administration suddenly lifted the stop-work order. Sea Services’ contract was safe, at least for the time being. But it was the most bracing illustration yet that the business, in spite of all its success, now faces very choppy waters under the Trump administration.

Taking a risk

On a cloudless late-February day at the New Bedford port, 57-year-old Souza hovered over a checklist and laptop in the captain’s quarters of the Pamela Ann. Souza is the captain of the boat, and he needed to make sure everything was in order before he and his crew left New Bedford that afternoon. They’d be at sea for 10 days, working in many of the spots Souza had fished in for decades.

Those 10 days at sea would not be spent dredging up scallops from the seafloor and tallying their catch, however, but conducting safety operations for the Revolution Wind offshore wind project, which is being built off the coast of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

The hulking scalloping boat, with its ebony-painted hull and wood-paneled interior, was bustling ahead of the journey. In the galley, Souza’s 25-year-old son, one of the three mates onboard, sorted through the food they’d need. Jack Morris, a 73-year-old scalloper and Sea Services manager, paced around the Pamela Ann checking in on its recently updated safety assets, like a new tracking beacon and safety suits.

Trips like these have become a lifeline for Souza, his crew, and an increasing number of fishermen who depend on the struggling scalloping industry.

Today, there are roughly 350 vessels sitting in ports from Maine to North Carolina that have licenses to harvest sea scallops. For several decades, East Coast scallopers managed to eke out a comfortable middle-class lifestyle on scalloping alone. Morris said that ​“years ago” he’d pull in $200,000 to $300,000 of profit annually as a scallop boat captain.

“Yeah, those days are gone,” scoffed Morris.

While the price of scallops remains high, making it one of the most lucrative U.S. fisheries, rules passed over the last 30 years have restricted when and where scallopers can harvest, resulting in fewer days at sea, fewer scallops caught — and less money for the entire industry.

Souza has mixed emotions about the regulations.

On the one hand, scallops are no longer being overfished. A 2024 third-party audit of the fishery said it ​“meets the requirements for a well-managed and sustainable fishery.” In fact, for over a decade, U.S. sea scallops sold on grocery store shelves have carried a little blue-check label — the mark of a seafood certified by the Marine Stewardship Council.

But most scallop fishermen are now limited to an extremely short window of time during which they can harvest scallops — in 2025, it was just 24 days. Some of their favorite fishing grounds are regularly closed for scallop recovery. There are simply fewer scallops to go around. Souza estimates that captains who stick to scalloping alone are making half of what they did in years past: ​“They’re probably lucky to make a hundred [thousand].”

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Emily Jones

Offshore wind work has helped fishermen like Souza and Morris ease the sting of that lost income.

Across Revolution Wind’s two-year construction window, Souza expects to make over $200,000 as a part-time boat captain. For the younger generation, who Souza said as deckhands can expect to make only around $30,000 per year from scalloping, offshore wind work makes it possible to keep earning a middle-class wage.

In the past year, Souza has recruited to Sea Services both of his sons, his nephew, and a few other young folks from longtime fishing families who might have otherwise left the scallop industry if not for the supplemental income.

“This wind farm business is the number one way for scallop guys, captains, mates, deckhands, to make extra money,” said Morris.

It’s also helping to revitalize the port of New Bedford, a city of 100,000 that is not only the most valuable fishing port in America but also a place of tremendous historic importance to the industry. It was once the epicenter of the whaling world and serves as the backdrop for the opening scenes of Herman Melville’s ​“Moby Dick.”

In just 10 years, the offshore wind industry has ushered in a transformation the city hadn’t seen ​“since the whaling era,” according to Jon Mitchell, the city’s mayor since 2011.

The companies building Vineyard Wind now stage their offshore wind infrastructure in New Bedford. Their presence has brought a flood of public and private funding to the city, with over $1.2 billion already invested and pledged to help give the terminals, docks, and harbor a facelift, according to Mitchell.

For all the money offshore wind has brought to the city — and into the pockets of locals like Souza and Morris — offshore wind remains highly controversial among many commercial fishermen in New Bedford.

That’s in spite of Mitchell’s insistence that, when push comes to shove, New Bedford’s local government will always side with scalloping.

Still, Mitchell, one of New England’s fiercest offshore wind defenders, remains unpopular with many down at the boat docks. ​“I’ve put myself in the loneliest place in American politics, which is right in the middle. Between offshore wind and commercial fishing,” he said.

Trump flags, full pockets

The fishermen who take part in Sea Services also float in that lonely place.

It’s not uncommon for them to face harassment from other fishermen over the radio when out on the water, Yerman said. One time, he said a Sea Services fisherman was turned away from a Rhode Island dock, in what Yerman characterized as an act of revenge.

The hardest part of Yerman’s job is overcoming this cultural aversion and getting fishermen to the table, convincing them that working for the offshore wind developers is a way to sustain a livelihood whose viability has begun to fade.

“You’ll have the lobster guys and they’ll say shit to you — like, ​‘traitor.’ Or ​‘Trump’s gonna shut that down, ha ha ha,’” Souza said, imitating the taunts he receives over the marine radio bolted to the wall near the helm of the Pamela Ann.

The lobstermen have a point regarding Trump. As frustrating as their remarks may be, the biggest threat to offshore wind is not snipes from colleagues, but the actions of a president who many Sea Services members — including Souza — voted for. 

As Souza prepared to leave the New Bedford port in February to go help Ørsted build giant wind turbines in the ocean, something Trump swore would not happen during his term, he explained his support for the president.

“Trust me, I want Trump to ​‘drill, drill, drill.’ I’m all for it,” said Souza of the president’s plans to expand oil and gas production.

But he still thinks offshore wind is necessary to get more power onto New England’s grid and lower energy costs. Experts say that the federal permitting process for offshore wind in America takes too long — about four years. But, in the Northeast region, according to energy analyst Christian Roselund, finishing the deployment of the offshore wind projects already in the permitting pipeline will be much faster than starting up new nuclear or fossil-gas power plants.

“Once we ​‘drill, drill, drill,’ you’re still gonna need more electricity,” Souza said. ​“Where are you gonna get it? My electric bill at my house is stupid high!”

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Most of the fishermen in New Bedford are Trump supporters, he insisted. Morris, who also voted for Trump, agreed. Overall, Trump won 46 percent of the city’s votes in last November’s election — a much higher proportion than his Massachusetts statewide total of 36.5 percent. The ​“TRUMP 2024” flags flown from the dozens of scallop boats docked across New Bedford’s port underscored the point. A few of those Trump flag-flying boats even work for the offshore wind companies, Morris claims. The Pamela Ann, for its part, does not have a Trump flag.

“I support Trump even though I know he’s against wind. … I believe this will still be around,” said Souza, gesturing toward the ocean, where somewhere over the horizon an array of wind towers was being erected. ​“He’s gonna see the light.”

Trump, of course, has not seen the light — though he did revoke his stop-work order against Empire Wind.

After being grounded for a month, Sea Services fishermen began operations on Empire Wind again in early June, when the project resumed at-sea work. The co-op’s members are helping Equinor’s construction vessels lay boulders on the seafloor to stabilize all 54 wind towers that will be raised over the next two years and eventually supply much-needed carbon-free power to New York City.

But nothing is certain. When the Trump administration unpaused the project, it left open the door to stopping it again — or killing it altogether. A May letter from the Interior Department to Equinor noted that it is still conducting an ​“ongoing review” to determine if the project’s permits were ​“rushed” and therefore illegitimate in the eyes of the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, a coalition of a dozen fishing companies and several anti-offshore wind groups typically allied with Trump sued the administration on June 3, just days before Empire Wind restarted at-sea construction, in an attempt to reinstate the stop-work order. The move came weeks after wind opponents asked Trump to also pause Revolution Wind, one of the more lucrative contracts Sea Services holds.

In his opposition to offshore wind, Trump has positioned himself as a defender of the commercial fishing industry, claiming falsely at a May 2024 campaign rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, for example, that the turbines ​“cause tremendous problems with the fish and the whales.”

But for the increasing number of fishermen working with offshore wind companies, halting the industry would not help — it would crush a financial lifeline.

Not long ago, in 2017, Sea Services captain Rodney Avila remembers being one of the only fishers in New Bedford willing to seize this lifeline. He recalled with a laugh what a long-time fisherman friend said to him then: ​“When you put that first wind turbine up there … we’re going to hang you from it!”

Times have changed. In the New Bedford area, almost 50 local fishing vessels have performed some kind of safety or scouting work for Vineyard Wind. At least one captain lowers his MAGA-supporting flag before setting out to work on the projects the president has sworn to stop, according to Avila. He said politics has always been tangled up in fishing. And work is work.

“They don’t care whether it’s red, or blue, or whatever color. … They don’t care,” Avila shrugged, while sipping coffee inside a Dunkin’. Five scalloping boats bobbed on calm water just beyond the parking lot. ​“It’s money that they need to support their families, wherever it comes from.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline These fishermen made peace with offshore wind. Then Trump came along. on Jul 6, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Clare Fieseler, Canary Media.

STATEMENT from AMY HANAUER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE INSTITUTE ON TAXATION AND ECONOMIC POLICY:

“This abominable bill will make history – in appalling ways. Never before has legislation taken so much from struggling families to give so much to the richest. It makes the biggest cuts to food aid for hungry families, executes the largest cuts to health care ever, adds trillions to the national debt – all to give $117 billion to the richest 1 percent in a single year. It’s no wonder that this bill is also extremely unpopular. Historians – and voters – will look back at this as a dark day in U.S. history.”

BY THE NUMBERS:

Analysis of Tax Provisions in the Senate Reconciliation Bill: National and State Level Estimates

The megabill’s tax impact is highly regressive, a regressivity that is amplified by the legislation’s deep cuts to health care, food assistance, and other services:

• More than 70 percent of the net tax cuts would go to the richest fifth of Americans in 2026, only 10 percent would go to the middle fifth of Americans, and less than 1 percent would go to the poorest fifth.
• The richest 5 percent alone would receive 45 percent of the net tax cuts next year.
• The richest 1 percent of Americans would receive an average net tax cut of $66,000, many, many times more than the average tax cut received by other income groups.
• The richest 1 percent of Americans would receive a total of $117 billion in net tax cuts in 2026. The middle 20 percent of taxpayers on the income scale, a group that has 20 times the number of taxpayers as the richest 1 percent, would receive less than half that much, $53 billion in net tax cuts that year.
• The $117 billion in net tax cuts going to the richest 1 percent next year would exceed the amount going to the entire bottom 60 percent of taxpayers (about $77 billion).
• The effects of President Trump’s tariff policies alone offset most of the tax cuts for the bottom 80 percent of Americans. For the bottom 40 percent of Americans, the tariffs impose a cost that is greater than the tax cuts they would receive under this legislation.
• Even foreign investors who own shares in U.S. companies would benefit more than many Americans. These foreign investors would enjoy $32 billion in tax cuts in 2026 compared to just $1.5 billion for the bottom 20 percent of Americans.
• The legislation provides the greatest rewards to high-income people living in states that have low state and local taxes on the wealthy. In these states, high-income people are not much affected by the cap on deductions for state and local taxes, which the Senate bill would make permanent. The states where the richest 1 percent of residents receive the largest average net tax cuts would mostly be states that have particularly unfair tax systems because they have no personal income tax.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The final text—the product of a legislative process coordinated by Republicans that seemed designed to do the most harm possible to working families—would expand on- and off-shore drilling, end nearly all clean energy tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, gut fuel efficiency standards for cars, stifle industrial innovation, and give massive handouts to fossil fuel companies and polluters.

Several studies of the legislation found that termination of the clean energy tax credits repealed in this bill could raise the average American family’s energy bills by as much as $400 per year by 2035. Additional analyses released earlier this week by the non-partisan CBO estimates that the bill will add $3.4 trillion in debt and result in more than 12 million Americans losing their health care coverage.

In response, Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous released the following statement:

“This is a sad and scary day for all who work to build up our communities, care for our friends and neighbors, and wish to leave this planet in a better place for future generations. Instead of working to make life better for American families and communities, what Donald Trump and his loyalists in Congress have delivered today will mean higher energy costs for working families and small businesses, the end of life-saving health care that millions rely on, and ceding the race to build the clean energy economy of tomorrow to China. Trump and Congressional Republicans have advanced the most anti-environment, anti-job, and anti-American bill in history. The Sierra Club will not forget it. America will not forget it.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

“Congress enacted NEPA to give the American public a voice in projects affecting their communities and our nation’s irreplaceable public lands, including national parks, wildlife refuges, and forests,” said Mike Senatore, senior vice president of conservation programs at Defenders of Wildlife. “Now the administration is robbing the public of that right so businesses and billionaires can exploit communities and public lands under cover of darkness. Without the ability to know about or comment on federal land projects, people will see their most cherished wildlife habitats and outdoor recreation areas bulldozed without warning.”

The administration’s proposed changes will:

• Eliminate the requirement for federal land management agencies to inform Americans about most proposed projects and permits.
• Eliminate required opportunities for Americans to participate meaningfully in government decision-making, including for projects that can be devastating for wildlife and endangered species such as oil and gas drilling and roadbuilding.
• Eliminate requirements for federal agencies to consider and meaningfully respond to public comments to explain the human and environmental effects of their decisions.
• Limit the scope of environmental effects that federal agencies must consider when conducting an environmental analysis of proposed projects.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

“This is a major blow for press freedom in the United States: A network news outlet has just caved to groundless threats from the president over its coverage,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg in New York. “This signals that the current administration–as well as any future administrations–can interfere with, or influence, editorial decisions.” 

In a lawsuit filed last year, Trump accused CBS, whose parent company is Paramount Global, of deceptively editing a ’60 Minutes’ interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris to interfere with the election. Paramount Global will pay the settlement amount, including legal fees, to Trump’s future presidential library, according to news reports.

Last month, CPJ wrote to the chair of Paramount Global, Shari Redstone, warning her that a settlement would signal that political figures can pressure news organizations into altering or censoring editorial decisions.

The FCC is investigating a merger deal between CBS parent company Paramount and Skydance, a deal that could have been endangered by the possibility of litigation from Trump. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) earlier this year re-opened a news distortion investigation into CBS.

CPJ’s request to Paramount Global for comment on the settlement’s editorial implications did not receive an immediate reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

During the Biden administration, the fate of the founding publisher of WikiLeaks, an Australian national who had never been on American soil and had published classified US defence and diplomatic material outside the country (Cablegate was a gem; Collateral Murder, a chilling exposure of atrocity in Baghdad), was decided. Kept in the excruciating, spiritually crushing conditions of Belmarsh Prison in London for over five years, Julian Assange was convicted under the US Espionage Act of 1917 in June 2024, the victim of a relic dusted and burnished for deployment against the Fourth Estate. Assange’s conviction on one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information has paved a grim road for future prosecutions against the press, a pathway previously not taken for its dangers.

With this nasty legacy, recent threats by Trump against journalists who published and discussed the findings of a leaked preliminary report from the Defense Intelligence Agency are hard to dismiss. The report dared question the extent of damage inflicted on Iran’s nuclear facilities by Operation Midnight Hammer, which involved 75 precision guided munitions in all. “Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images,” Trump asserted with beaming confidence. “Obliteration is an accurate term!”

CNN and the New York Times duly challenged the account in discussing the findings of the short DIA report. Damage to the program had not been as absolute as hoped, setting it back by a matter of months rather than years. This sent Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth into a state of apoplexy, haranguing those press outlets who “cheer against Trump so hard, it’s like in your DNA and in your blood”. For his part, Trump accused the Democrats on a Truth Social post of leaking “information on the PERFECT FLIGHT on the Nuclear Sites in Iran”, demanding their prosecution. He further charged his personal lawyer to harangue the New York Times with a letter demanding it “retract and apologize for” the article, one it claimed was “false” and “defamatory”.

To Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business, Trump also added that reporters could be forced to reveal their sources on “National Security” grounds. “We can find out. If they want to, we can find out easily. You go up and tell a reporter, ‘National security, who gave it?’ You have to do that, and I suspect we’ll be doing things like that.”

According to RollingStone, the President has already queried whether the press could be snared by the Espionage Act. While the magazine misses a beat in ignoring the Assange precedent, it notes the current administration’s overly stimulated interest in the statute. Prior to returning to the White House, Trump and his inner circle considered how the Act could be used not only to target leakers in government and whistleblowers “but against media outlets that received classified or highly sensitive information”. The publication relies on two sources who had discussed the matter with the President.

One source, a senior Trump administration official, insists that the Act has again come up specifically regarding reports on the efficacy of the US strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Members of the administration are “looking for the right case to launch their ‘maiden voyage’ of an unprecedented type of Espionage Act prosecution”, one designed to deter news outlets from publishing classified government information or concealing the identities of their leaking sources. “All we’d really need is one text or email from a reporter telling a source: ‘Can you pull something for me?’ or something very direct of that nature’.” A less ignorant source would not have to look far for the one existing, successful example in the US prosecutor’s kit.

When pressed on the issue of whether the espionage statute would become the spear for the administration to target leakers and journalists, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly was broad in reply: “Leaking classified information is a crime, and anyone who threatens American national security in this manner should be held accountable.”

The unanswered question regarding Assange’s prosecution and eventual conviction remains the possible and fundamental role played by the Constitution’s First Amendment protecting press freedom. Unfortunately, the central ghastliness of the Espionage Act is its subversion of free speech and motive. Given the Australian publisher’s plea deal, the mettle of that defence was never tested in court.

Some members of Congress have shown a worthy interest in that valuable right, notably in the context of defending Assange. In their November 8, 2023 letter to President Joe Biden, sixteen lawmakers spanning both sides of politics, including Trump loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene and progressive Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, declared their commitment “to the principles of free speech and freedom of the press” in urging the withdrawal of the US extradition request for Assange. Unfortunately, and significantly, that request was ignored.

Where Greene and other MAGA cheerleaders sit on Trump’s dangerous enchantment with the Espionage Act remains to be seen, notably on the issue of prosecuting publishers and journalists. MAGA can be incorrigibly fickle, especially when attuned to the authoritarian impulses of their great helmsman.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Senate Republicans voted Tuesday to advance Donald Trump’s massive spending and tax bill, which will now go back to the House of Representatives for final approval. President Trump has publicly pushed his party to get the bill on his desk to sign by July 4. Dozens of peaceful protestors, including disabled people in wheelchairs, were arrested last Wednesday, June 25, in Washington, DC, while protesting Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which will slash taxes, dramatically increase funding for war and immigration enforcement, and make devastating cuts to vital, popular programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Lorraine Chavez, an educator, researcher, and community leader based in Chicago, and Christine Rodriguez, a legal assistant from Pasadena, California, both of whom traveled to DC with the Debt Collective and were arrested for participating in the peaceful act of civil disobedience.

Guests:

• Lorraine Chavez is an educator, researcher, and community leader based in Chicago. She is also a student debtor and traveled to the Washington, DC, protest with the Debt Collective.
• Christine Rodriguez is a legal assistant and student debtor from Pasadena, California, who also traveled to the Washington, DC, protest with the Debt Collective.

Credits

• Studio Production / Post-Production: David Hebden

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

The Supreme Court’s term ended Friday with a decision that promises to further expand the power of the president. Conservative justices argued lower federal courts cannot issue nationwide injunctions — a decision that limits judicial checks on presidential power. “We have an imperial court that has created an imperial presidency,” says Dahlia Lithwick, writer and host of the legal podcast Amicus. The 6-3 decision, split along ideological lines, could dramatically reshape legal citizenship in the United States and clears the path for many other Trump orders to potentially go into effect. The court also ruled on a case that will allow parents to pull their children from classes including LGBTQ+ books. The conservative justices “cast these books as coercive simply because they have LGBT characters,” says Chase Strangio, lawyer and co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project.

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

The administration’s rationale was that the “outdated” Roadless Rule has exacerbated wildfire risks. In a statement announcing the policy change, U.S. Agriculture Department Secretary Brooke Rollins said that “properly managing our forests preserves them from devastating fires and allows future generations of Americans to enjoy and reap the benefits of this great land.” 

Fire ecologists agree that the U.S. needs to step up land management efforts to reduce the likelihood of dangerous conflagrations. But experts don’t think more roads penetrating the country’s protected national forests is the best way to do that. Most fires — especially those that significantly affect communities — start on private lands that aren’t affected by the Roadless Rule, and remote areas can usually be managed for fire risk using flown-in firefighters. 

Rescinding the Roadless Rule “does not change our current federal land management capacity to improve management and stop wildfires,” said Camille Stevens-Rumann, interim director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute and an associate professor of forest management and rangeland stewardship at Colorado State University. “What opening up currently roadless areas really does is allow for timber extraction.”

Before the Forest Service — an agency of the USDA — finalized the Roadless Rule at the very end of the Clinton administration in 2001, the agency struggled to pay for the maintenance of existing roads in national forests, let alone the construction of new ones. 

But the policy has been controversial, facing multiple challenges from states, private companies, and GOP lawmakers who saw the rule as an impediment to commercial logging. It was repealed in 2005 by the administration of then-president George W. Bush, but reinstated the following year by a federal district court. Lawsuits from states including Alaska and Idaho have attempted to carve out exemptions for their forests, and some Republican lawmakers have facilitated land transfers from federal ownership in order to circumvent Roadless Rule protections. 

Most recently, in 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first term, the Forest Service rolled back the Roadless Rule for the 9 million-acre Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Republican Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska praised the repeal “fostering opportunities for Alaskans to make a living.” But that decision was reversed in 2023 under then-president Joe Biden. 

This time around, the Trump administration is deemphasizing logging as a rationale for nixing the Roadless Rule. The USDA press release on the decision only briefly touches on the industry, saying that the Roadless Rule “hurts jobs and economic development” and that repealing it will allow for “responsible timber production.” The communication devotes more attention to the supposed wildfire risk that the rule creates, pointing out that 28 million acres of land covered by the rule are at high risk of wildfire, and arguing that repealing it will “reduce wildfire risk and help protect surrounding communities and infrastructure.”

Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, in a column posted to the Forest Service website, said the amount of land lost to wildfire in roadless areas each year has “more than doubled” since the Roadless Rule’s inception, though he does not provide evidence that this is because of the Roadless Rule and not other factors like climate change and the hotter, drier conditions associated with it. Schultz did not respond to a request for comment.

The implication of the USDA and Forest Service’s statements is that roads can help get firefighters and equipment to remote forests to reduce their risk of fires, or fight fires when they break out. It’s true that land managers sometimes need access to densely forested areas to get rid of overgrown plants and dead wood that could fuel a small blaze and turn it into an out-of-control fire. They do this with practices known as tree-thinning, which involves the removal of small shrubs and trees, and prescribed burns — intentionally set, carefully managed fires. 

But five experts told Grist that the relationship between roads and forest fires is not as simple as the USDA’s announcement implies. Although roads can help transport firefighters and their gear to the wilderness — whether to fight existing wildfires or to conduct prescribed burns — they also increase the risk of unintentional fires from vehicles and campfires. 

“If we’re gonna say which one leads to a greater risk” — roads or no roads — “I don’t think we have the full picture to assess that,” said Chris Dunn, an assistant professor of forest engineering, resources, and management at Oregon State University. “Those two components might counteract each other.”

In a 2022 research paper looking at cross-boundary wildfires — meaning those that move between private lands and lands managed by the Forest Service, including roadless areas — Dunn and his co-authors found that the vast majority of wildfires start on private lands, with ignitions rising as a function of an area’s road density. In other words, more roads are associated with more fires. This research also showed that most fires that destroy 50 buildings or more are started by humans on private lands.

Another study, this one from 2021, focused on roads and roadless areas within 11 Western states’ national forests. Dunn and his co-authors found that most wildfires between 1984 and 2018 started near roads, not in roadless areas, and that there was no connection between roadlessness and the “severity” of a fire — the amount of vegetation it killed. However, fires in roadless areas were more likely to escape initial suppression efforts, and they tended to burn a larger area.

Dunn noted that not all big, severe, remote fires are bad. Some ecosystems depend on occasional burning, and his research suggests that the greater size of fires in roadless areas can make landscapes more resilient to climate change. A problem arises when forest managers look at forests exclusively “through the lens of timber and dollar signs on trees,” he said, which can create a bias against tree mortality — even if it’s ecologically healthy for trees to burn or get thinned out by workers. That economic perspective seems to match that of the Trump administration, which has repeatedly referred to public lands and waters in terms of their “resource potential.” 

Steve Pyne, a fire expert and emeritus professor at Arizona State University’s Center for Biology and Society, agreed with other experts Grist spoke with that rescinding the Roadless Rule “is not about fire protection; it’s about logging.” In April, USDA Secretary Rollins directed regional Forest Service offices to increase timber extraction by 25 percent, in line with an executive order Trump signed in March ordering federal agencies to “immediately increase domestic timber production.”

In response to Grist’s request for comment, a USDA spokesperson said that, “while some research indicates that roads can increase the likelihood of human-caused fires, they also improve access for forest management to reduce fuels and for fire suppression efforts.” They declined to respond to a question about opening up public lands for logging interests, except to say that the agency is “using all strategies available to reduce wildfire risk,” including timber harvesting.

Even if it were certain that more roads mitigate fire risk, it’s not clear that rescinding the Roadless Rule will lead to more of them being constructed. James Johnston, an assistant research professor at the University of Oregon’s Institute for Resilient Organizations, Communities, and Environments, said the Forest Service lacks the personnel and funding to maintain the road system it already has, and building new ones is likely to be a challenge. The Trump administration has only exacerbated the problem by firing 10 percent of the agency’s workers since taking office. 

“Nobody is going to next week, next month, or any time in the future build roads across an area the size of the state of Idaho,” he said, referring to the 58 million acres covered by the Roadless Rule. Private companies that want to build new roads on public lands also face barriers to road construction because they need to obtain environmental permits, he added. New roads on Forest Service land would have to comply with statutes like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. Johnston also noted that many roadless areas are unsuitable to roads because they are too steep or rocky. 

Ryan Talbott, Pacific Northwest conservation advocate for the nonprofit WildEarth Guardians, noted that it will take time for the USDA to legally rescind the Roadless Rule. “There’s a process,” he said. “In ordinary times they would put a notice in the Federal Register announcing that they intend to rescind the Roadless Rule, and then there would be a public comment process and then eventually they would get to a final decision.” The USDA spokesperson told Grist that a formal notice would be published in the Federal Register, the government’s daily journal that publishes newly enacted and proposed federal rules, “in the coming weeks.” 

Stevens-Rumann, at Colorado State University, said that if the Trump administration were serious about mitigating wildfire risk, it would make more sense to increase Forest Service funding and personnel, and, critically, to conduct tree-thinning and prescribed burns in areas that already have roads. “We have a ton of work that we could be doing in roaded areas before we even go to roadless areas,” she said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Trump administration claims roads in forests prevent wildfires. Researchers disagree. on Jun 27, 2025.

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

Janine Jackson interviewed the Joint Center’s LaToya Parker about the Trump budget’s racial impacts for the June 20, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

MarketWatch (3/7/25)

Janine Jackson: “Most Americans Can’t Afford Life Anymore” is the matter-of-fact headline over a story on Dow Jones MarketWatch. You might think that’s a “stop the presses” story, but apparently, for corporate news, it’s just one item among others these days.

The lived reality is, of course, not just a nightmare, but a crime, perpetrated by the most powerful and wealthy on the rest of us. As we marshal a response, it’s important to see the ways that we are not all suffering in the same ways, that anti-Black racism in this country’s decision-making is not a bug, but a feature, and not reducible to anything else. What’s more, efforts to reduce or dissolve racial inequities, to set them aside just for the moment, really just wind up erasing them.

So how do we shape a resistance to this massive transfer of wealth, while acknowledging that it takes intentionality for all of us to truly benefit?

LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.” She joins us now by phone from Virginia. Welcome to CounterSpin, LaToya Parker.

LaToya Parker: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: I just heard Tavis Smiley, with the relevant reference to Martin Luther King, saying: “Budgets are moral documents.” Budgets can harm or heal materially, and they also send a message about priorities: what matters, who matters. When you and Dedrick Asante-Muhammad looked at the Trump budget bill that the House passed, you wrote that, “racially, the impact is stark”—for Black people and for Black workers in particular. I know that it’s more than one thing, but tell us what you are looking to lift up for people that they might not see.

OtherWords (5/28/25)

LP: Sure. Thank you so much for raising that. This bill is more than numbers. It’s a moral document, like you mentioned, that reveals our nation’s priorities. What stands out is a reverse wealth transfer. The ultra-wealthy get billions in tax breaks, while Black families lose the very programs that have historically provided pathways to the middle class.

JJ: You just said “historic pathways.” You can’t do economics without history. So wealth, home ownership—just static reporting doesn’t explain, really, that you can’t start people in a hole and then say, “Well, now the Earth is flat. So what’s wrong with you?” What are some of those programs that you’re talking about that would be impacted?

LP: For instance, nearly one-third of Black Americans rely on Medicaid. These cuts will limit access to vital care, including maternal health, elder care and mental health services.

Nearly 25% of Black households depend on SNAP, compared to under 8% of white households. SNAP cuts will hit Black families hardest, worsening food insecurities.

But in terms of federal workforce attacks, Black Americans are overrepresented in the public sector, 18.7% of the federal workforce, and over a third in the South. So massive agency cuts threaten thousands of stable, middle-class jobs, undermining one of the most successful civil rights victories in American history.

LaToya Parker: “The ultra-wealthy get billions in tax breaks, while Black families lose the very programs that have historically provided pathways to the middle class.”

So if I was to focus on the reverse wealth transfer, as we clearly lift up in the article, the House-passed reconciliation bill is a massive transfer of wealth from working families to the ultra-wealthy. It eliminates the estate tax, which currently only applies to estates worth more than $13.99 million per person, or nearly $28 million per couple. That’s just 1% of estates. So 99.9% of families, especially Black families, will never benefit from this.

Black families hold less than 5% of the US wealth, despite being over 13% of households. The median white household has 10 times the wealth of the median Black household. Repealing the estate tax subsidizes dynastic wealth for the majority white top 1%, and does nothing for the vast majority of Black families who are far less likely to inherit significant wealth.

JJ: I feel like that wealth disconnection, and I’ve spoken with Dedrick Asante-Muhammad about this in the past, there’s a misunderstanding or just an erasure of history in the conversation about wealth, and Why don’t Black families have wealth? Why can’t they just give their kids enough money to go to school? And it sounds like it’s about Black families not valuing savings or something. But of course, we have a history of white-supremacist discrimination in lending and loaning and home ownership, and in all kinds of things that lead us to this situation that we’re in today. And you can’t move forward without recognizing that.

LP: Absolutely. Absolutely.

JJ: I remember reading a story years ago that said, “Here’s the best workplaces for women.” And it was kind of like, “Well, if you hate discrimination, these companies are good.” Reporting, I think, can make it seem as though folks are just sitting around thinking, “Well, what job should I get? Where should I get a job?” As though we were just equally situated economic actors.

But that doesn’t look anything like life. We are not consumers of employment. Media could do a different job of helping people understand the way things work.

LP: Absolutely. And I think that’s why it’s so important that you’re raising this issue. In fact, we bring it up in our article, in terms of cuts to the federal workforce and benefits. So, for instance, to pay for these tax breaks to the wealthy, the bill slashes benefits for federal employees, and it guts civil service protections, saving just $5 billion a year in the bill that costs trillions, right?

So just thinking about that, Black employees make up, like I said before, 18.7% of the federal workforce, thanks to decades of civil rights progress and anti-discrimination law. Federal jobs have long provided higher wages, stronger benefits and greater job security for Black workers than much of the private sector.

And the DMV alone, the DC/Maryland/Virginia region, more than 450,000 federal workers are employed, with Black workers making up over a quarter in DC/Maryland/Virginia. In the South, well over a third of the federal workers in states like Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina and Louisiana are Black. In Georgia, it’s nearly 44%. So federal employment has been a cornerstone for Black middle-class advancement, helping families build generational wealth, send children to college and retire with dignity.

JJ: And so when we hear calls about, “Let’s thin out the federal government, because these are all bureaucrats who are making more money than they should,” it lands different when you understand that so many Black people found advancement, found opportunity through the federal government when they were being denied it at every other point. And it only came from explicit policies, anti-discriminatory policies, that opened up federal employment, that’s been so meaningful.

LP: Exactly. Exactly. Federal retirement benefits like the pensions and annuities are a rare source of guaranteed income. Nearly half of Black families have zero retirement savings, making these benefits critical to avoiding poverty in retirement. So these policies amount to a reverse wealth transfer, enriching wealthy heirs while undermining the public servants and systems that have historically offered a path forward for Black workers. Instead of gutting the benefits and eliminating the estate tax, we should invest in systems that have provided pathways to the middle class for Black workers, and expand these opportunities beyond government employment. Ultimately, this isn’t just about policy, it’s about what kind of nation we want to be, right? So that’s what it’s all about.

JJ: And I’ll just add to that with a final note. Of course, I’m a media critic, but I think lots of folks could understand why I reacted to this line from this MarketWatch piece that said, “Years of elevated prices have strained all but the wealthiest consumers, and low- and middle-income Americans say something needs to change.” Well, for me, I’m hearing that, and I’m like, “So it’s only low- and middle-income people, it’s only the people at the sharp end, who want anything to change.”

And, first of all, we’re supposed to see that as a fair fight, the vast majority of people against the wealthiest. But also, it makes it seem like such a zero-sum game, as though there isn’t any shared idea among a lot of people who want racial and economic equity in this country. It sells it to people as like, “Oh, well, we could make life livable for poor people or for Black people, but you, reader, are going to have to give something up.” It’s such a small, mean version of what I believe a lot of folks have in their hearts, in terms of a vision going forward in this country. And that’s just my gripe.

LP: I agree. These aren’t luxury programs. They’re lifelines across the board for all Americans. The working poor—if you like to call it that, some like to call it that—cutting them is just cruel, right? It’s economically destructive, it’s irresponsible. Fiscally, states would lose $1.1 trillion over 10 years, risking over a million jobs in healthcare and food industries alone. So I agree 100%.

JJ: All right, we’ll end on that note for now. We’ve been speaking with LaToya Parker, senior researcher at the Joint Center. They’re online at JointCenter.org, and you can find her piece, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, on the impact of the federal budget on Black workers at OtherWords.org. Thank you so much, LaToya Parker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

LP: Thank you again for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Democrat Pramila Jayapal is holding a series of “shadow hearings” in Congress on Trump’s immigration actions. Jayapal, the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Immigration, Integrity, Security and Enforcement, explains how Trump’s immigration crackdown has created a “Catch-22” for asylum seekers, who are being targeted for “expedited removal” at their own immigration hearings. “If you show up, you could get detained and deported. … If you don’t show up, then you are now in violation of the immigration regulations, and you’re deemed as an absconder.” Jayapal also comments on Trump’s “big, beautiful budget bill,” which she calls the “big, bad, betrayal bill” for its cuts to Medicaid and other social services.

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

President Donald Trump has returned to Washington after a NATO summit where leaders agreed to increase their military spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, more than doubling the current target of 2%. The increase comes after years of pressure from Trump, who accuses other countries in the military alliance of not spending enough. “What he is interested in is catering to the military-industrial complex of the United States,” says Gilbert Achcar, emeritus professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS, University of London. “When he asks these NATO countries to increase their military expenditure, he means 'buy more U.S. weapons.' That’s what he is doing. He’s a salesperson for the military-industrial complex.”

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

We speak with former Labor Secretary Robert Reich about the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York Democratic primary for New York mayor, the rise of Donald Trump, and the role of big money in politics. “This is the one thing that I agree with Donald Trump about: The economy is rigged — but it’s rigged against working-class people. And I think Mamdani understood that. He understood that people have got to want a change, but also they want affordability. They want an economy that is working for them.”

We also speak with him about his decades-long career as a teacher and The Last Class, a new documentary that follows Reich over his last semester at the University of California, Berkeley. The class, and much of Reich’s career, has focused on rising inequality and its impact on society. “Most Americans feel powerless,” says Reich. “This is a crisis right now.”

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

The former head of Human Rights Watch — and son of a Holocaust survivor — says Israel’s military campaign in Gaza will likely meet the legal definition of genocide, citing large-scale killings, the targeting of civilians, and the words of senior Israeli officials.

Speaking on 30′ with Guyon Espiner, Ken Roth agreed Hamas committed “blatant war crimes” in its attack on Israel on October 7 last year, which included the abduction and murder of civilians.

But he said it was a “basic rule” that war crimes by one side do not justify war crimes by the other.

• READ MORE: Israel kills over 70 in Gaza as 549 killed seeking aid in past month
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

There was indisputable evidence Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza and might also be pursuing tactics that fit the international legal standard for genocide, Roth said.

30′ with Guyon Espiner Kenneth Roth    Video: RNZ

“The acts are there — mass killing, destruction of life-sustaining conditions. And there are statements from senior officials that point clearly to intent,” Roth said.

The accusation of genocide is hotly contested. Israel says it is fighting a war of self-defence against Hamas after it killed 1200 people, mostly civilians. It claims it adheres to international law and does its best to protect civilians.

It blames Hamas for embedding itself in civilian areas.

But Roth believes a ruling may ultimately come from the International Court of Justice, especially if a forthcoming judgment on Myanmar sets a precedent.

“It’s very similar to what Myanmar did with the Rohingya,” he said. “Kill about 30,000 to send 730,000 fleeing. It’s not just about mass death. It’s about creating conditions where life becomes impossible.”

‘Apartheid’ alleged in Israel’s West Bank
Roth has been described as the ‘Godfather of Human Rights’, and is credited with vastly expanding the influence of the Human Rights Watch group during a 29-year tenure in charge of the organisation.

In the full interview with Guyon Espiner, Roth defended the group’s 2021 report that accused Israel of enforcing a system of apartheid in the occupied West Bank.

“This was not a historical analogy,” he said, implying it was a mistake to compare it with South Africa’s former apartheid regime.

“It was a legal analysis. We used the UN Convention against Apartheid and the Rome Statute, and laid out over 200 pages of evidence.”

He said the Israeli government was unable to offer a factual rebuttal.

“They called us biased, antisemitic — the usual. But they didn’t contest the facts.”

The ‘cheapening’ of antisemitism charges
Roth, who is Jewish and the son of a Holocaust refugee, said it was disturbing to be accused of antisemitism for criticising a government.

“There is a real rise in antisemitism around the world. But when the term is used to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel, it cheapens the concept, and that ultimately harms Jews everywhere.”

Roth said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had long opposed a two-state solution and was now pursuing a status quo that amounted to permanent subjugation of Palestinians, a situation human rights groups say is illegal.

“The only acceptable outcome is two states, living side by side. Anything else is apartheid, or worse,” Roth said.

While the international legal process around charges of genocide may take years, Roth is convinced the current actions in Gaza will not be forgotten.

“This is not just about war,” he said. “It’s about the deliberate use of starvation, displacement and mass killing to achieve political goals. And the law is very clear — that’s a crime.”

Roth’s criticism of Israel saw him initially denied a fellowship at Harvard University in 2023. The decision was widely seen as politically motivated, and was later reversed after public and academic backlash.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

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

The Trump administration has launched a major reorganization of the U.S. fight against drug traffickers and other transnational criminal groups, setting out a strategy that would give new authority to the Department of Homeland Security and deepen the influence of the White House.

The administration’s plans, described in internal documents and by government officials, would reduce federal prosecutors’ control over investigations, shifting key decisions to a network of task forces jointly led by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, the primary investigative arm of DHS.

Officials said the plan to bring law enforcement agencies together in the new Homeland Security Task Forces has been driven primarily by President Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, who is closely overseeing the project’s implementation.

Current and former officials said the proposed reorganization would make it easier for senior officials like Miller to disregard norms that have long walled off the White House from active criminal investigations.

“To the administration’s credit, they are trying to break down barriers that are hard to break down,” said Adam W. Cohen, a career Justice Department attorney who was fired in March as head of the office that coordinates organized crime investigations involving often-competing federal agencies. “But you won’t have neutral prosecutors weighing the facts and making decisions about who to investigate,” he added of the task force plan. “The White House will be able to decide.”

The proposed reorganization would elevate the stature and influence of Homeland Security Investigations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement among law enforcement agencies, while continuing to push other agencies to pursue immigration-related crimes.

The task forces would at least formally subordinate the Drug Enforcement Administration to HSI and the FBI after half a century in which the DEA has been the government’s lead agency for narcotics enforcement.

Trump’s directive to establish the new task forces was included in an Inauguration Day executive order, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” which focused on immigration.

The new task forces will seek “to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States,” the order states. They will also aim to “end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children.”

Since that order was issued, the administration has proceeded with considerable secrecy. Some Justice Department officials who work on organized crime have been excluded from planning meetings, as have leaders of the DEA, people familiar with the process said.

A White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, did not comment on Miller’s role in directing the task force project or the secrecy of the process. “While the Biden Administration opened the border and looked the other way while Americans were put at risk,” she said, “the Trump Administration is taking action to dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute immigration laws and to Make America Safe Again.”

The task force project was described in interviews with current and former officials who have been briefed on it. ProPublica also reviewed documents about the implementation of the task forces, including a briefing paper prepared for Cabinet-level officials on the president’s Homeland Security Council.

The Homeland Security Task Forces will take a “coordinated, whole-of-government approach” to combatting transnational criminal groups, the paper states. They will also draw support from state and local police forces and U.S. intelligence agencies.

Until now, the government has coordinated that same work through a Justice Department program established by President Ronald Reagan, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces — which the Trump administration is shutting down.

Known by the ungainly acronym OCDETF (pronounced “oh-suh-def”), the $550-million program is above all an incentive system: To receive funding, different agencies (including the DEA, the FBI and HSI) must come together to propose investigations, which are then vetted and approved by prosecutor-led OCDETF teams.

The agents are required to include a financial investigation of the criminal activity, typically with help from the Treasury Department, and they often recruit support from state and local police. The OCDETF intelligence center, located in the northern Virginia suburbs, manages the only federal database in which different law-enforcement agencies share their raw investigative files.

While officials describe OCDETF as an imperfect structure, they also say it has become a crucial means of law enforcement cooperation. Its mandate was expanded under the Biden and first Trump administrations to encompass all types of organized crime, not just drug trafficking.

As recently as a few months ago, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, declared that OCDETF would play a central role in stopping illegal immigration, drug trafficking and street gangs. He even suggested that it investigate the governments of so-called sanctuary cities for obstructing immigration enforcement.

But just weeks after Blanche’s announcement, the administration informed OCDETF officials their operations would be shut down by the end of the fiscal year in September. In a letter to Democratic senators on June 23, the Justice Department confirmed that the Homeland Security Task Forces would absorb OCDETF’s “mission and resources” but did not explain how the new structure would take charge of the roughly 5,000 investigations OCDETF now oversees.

“These were not broken programs,” said a former Homeland Security official who, like others, would only discuss the administration’s plans on condition of anonymity. “If you wanted to build them out and make sure that the immigration side of things got more importance, you could have done that. You did not have to build a new wheel.”

Officials also cited other concerns about the administration’s plan, including whether the new task force system will incorporate some version of the elaborate safeguards OCDETF has used to persuade law enforcement agencies to share their case files in its intelligence database. Under those rules, OCDETF analysts must obtain permission from the agency that provided the records before sharing them with others.

Many officials said they worried that the new task forces seem to be abandoning OCDETF’s incentive structure. OCDETF funds are conditioned on multiple agencies working together on important cases; officials said the monies will now be distributed to law enforcement agencies directly and without the requirement that they collaborate.

“They are taking away a lot of the organization that the government uses to attack organized crime,” a Justice Department official said. “If you want to improve something, great, but they don’t even seem to have a vision for how this is going to work. There are no specifics.”

The Homeland Security Task Forces will try to enforce interagency cooperation by a “supremacy clause,” that gives task force leaders the right to pursue the cases they want and shut down others that might overlap.

The clause will require “that any new or existing investigative and/or intelligence initiatives” targeting transnational criminal organizations “must be presented to the HSTF with a right of first refusal,” according to the briefing paper reviewed by ProPublica.

“Further,” it adds, “the supremacy clause prohibits parallel or competitive activities by member agencies, effectively eliminating duplicative structures such as stand-alone task forces or specialized units, to include narcotics, financial, or others.”

Several senior law enforcement officials said that approach would curtail the independence that investigators need to follow good leads when they see them; newer and less-visible criminal organizations would be more likely to escape scrutiny.

In recent years, those officials noted, both Democratic and Republican administrations have tried at times to short-circuit competition for big cases among law enforcement agencies and judicial districts. But that has often led to as many problems as it has solved, they said.

One notable example, several officials said, was a move by the Biden administration’s DEA administrator, Anne Milgram, to limit her agency’s cooperation with FBI and HSI investigations into fentanyl smuggling by Los Chapitos, the mafia led by sons of the Mexican drug boss Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as “El Chapo.”

Although the DEA eventually indicted the Chapitos’ leaders in New York, officials from other agencies complained that Milgram’s approach wasted months of work and delayed the indictments of some traffickers. Later, when the FBI secretly arranged the surrender of one of the sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, DEA officials were not told about the operation until it was underway, officials said. (Guzmán López initially pleaded not guilty but is believed to be negotiating with the government. Milgram did not respond to messages asking for comment.)

As to the benefits of competition, prosecutors and agents cite the case of El Chapo himself. Before he was extradited to the United States in January 2017, Guzmán Loera had been indicted by seven U.S. attorneys’ offices, reflecting yearslong investigations by the DEA, the FBI and HSI, among others. In the agreement that the Obama Justice Department brokered, three offices led the prosecution, which used the best evidence gathered by the others.

Under the new structure of the Homeland Security Task Forces, several officials said, federal prosecutors will still generally decide whether to bring charges against criminal groups, but they will have less of a role in determining which criminals to investigate.

Regional and national task forces will be overseen by “executive committees” that are expected to include political appointees, officials said. The committees will guide broader decisions about which criminal groups to target, they said.

“The HSTF model unleashes the full might of our federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to deliver justice for the American people, whose plight Biden and Garland ignored for four years,” a Justice Department spokesperson said, referring to former Attorney General Merrick Garland. “Any suggestion that the Department is abandoning its mission of cracking down on violent organized crime is unequivocally false.”

During Trump’s first term, veteran officials of the FBI, DEA and HSI all complained that the administration’s overarching focus on immigration diverted agents from more urgent national security threats, including the fentanyl epidemic. Now, as hundreds more agents have been dispatched to immigration enforcement, those officials worry that the new task forces will focus on rounding up undocumented immigrants who have any sort of criminal record at the cost of more significant organized crime investigations.

The first task forces to begin operating under the new model have not assuaged such concerns. In late May, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced that the Virginia Homeland Security Task Force had arrested more than 1,000 “criminal illegal aliens” in just two months, but the authorities have provided almost no details connecting those suspects to transnational criminal organizations.

On June 16, the Gulf of America Homeland Security Task Force, a new unit based in Alabama and Georgia, announced the arrests of 60 people, nearly all of them undocumented immigrants, at a cockfighting event in northern Alabama. Although cockfighting is typically subject to a maximum fine of $50 in the state, a senior HSI official claimed the suspects were “tied to a broader network of serious crimes, including illegal gambling, drug trafficking and violent offenses.” Once again, however, no details were provided.

It is unclear how widely the new task force rules might be applied. While OCDETF funds the salaries of more than a thousand federal agents and hundreds of prosecutors, thousands more DEA, FBI and HSI agents work on other narcotics and organized crime cases.

In early June, five Democratic senators wrote to Bondi questioning the decision to dismantle OCDETF. That decision was first reported by Bloomberg News.

“As the Department’s website notes, OCDETF ‘is the centerpiece of the Attorney General’s strategy to combat transnational-organized crime and to reduce the availability of illicit narcotics in the nation,’” the senators wrote.

In a June 23 response, a Justice Department official, Daniel Boatright, wrote that OCDETF’s operations would be taken over by the new task forces and managed by the office of the Deputy Attorney General. But Boatright did not clarify what role federal prosecutors would play in the new system.

“A lot of good, smart people are trying to make this work,” said one former senior official. “But without having prosecutors drive the process, it is going to completely fracture how we do things.”

Veteran officials at the DEA — who appear to have had almost no say in the creation of the new task forces— are said to be even more concerned. Already the DEA has been fighting pressure to provide access to investigative files without assurances that the safeguards of the OCDETF intelligence center will remain in place, officials said.

“DEA has not even been invited to any of the task force meetings,” one former senior official said. “It is mind-boggling. They’re just getting orders saying, ‘This is what Stephen Miller wants and you’ve got to give it to us.’”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Tim Golden.

The four-day long armed clash between India and Pakistan, after India launched Operation Sindoor on the intervening night of May 6 and 7, came to a close after both countries agreed to a ceasefire on May 10. Interestingly, Trump announced that ceasefire even before the Indian and Pakistani sides issued statements. In his post and remarks afterwards, he emphatically took credit for maintaining peace between the two countries and even wrote that the United States mediated talks between India and Pakistan.

This claim by the US President led to several questions from the Opposition to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party on whether India “opened the doors to third-party mediation“. India downplayed the US’s role in brokering the deal. According to a Hindu report from May 13, Trump, in an in-person meeting at the White House, claimed that the US did not just ‘broker’ the ceasefire deal but averted a major nuclear conflict. The US president reportedly ‘threatened’ to stop trade with both countries if they refused to de-escalate. But those within the government, privy to the discussions, told the news outlet that there had been “no reference to trade” during de-escalation talks.

On a June 18 NDTV broadcast, senior journalist and the channel’s managing editor, Shiv Aroor, did a segment on United States President Donald Trump’s ‘u-turn’.

“Trump has changed his tune. After speaking to Prime Minister Modi for 35 minutes on the phone today, a big ‘u-turn’ by the US President, who last month had tried to take complete credit for the ceasefire after Operation Sindoor. Trump has said it was Modi who stopped the war on the Indian side, but he still says that he was the one who stopped the war on the Pakistan side. That [latter] part could actually be true because it was after all Pakistan that went running to the United States, and then the US had told Pakistan to get on the hotline and ask for a ceasefire from India. This is Trump taking the biggest u-turn of the season and saying, it was India, it was the Indian Prime Minister that caused the ceasefire from the Indian side and stopped the war…” Aroor said.

After showing Trump’s statement on this issue, he goes on to say, “Trump changes his stance after all and it took a 35 minute conversation with the Indian Prime Mister where he was very mildly told that this is credit that you cannot take, this was something that India imposed on Pakistan, not giving them a choice. And there is Trump giving that credit to the Indian Prime Minister”.

News agency Press Trust of India (PTI) was among the first to report that US President Trump backtracked from his initial claim that he brokered the ceasefire deal between India and Pakistan. They cited him as saying that “two ‘very smart’ leaders of India and Pakistan ‘decided’ not to continue a war that could have turned nuclear”. The report was later updated with more information, where it was mentioned that this comment could be “seen at variance with his claims over a dozen times in the last few weeks” where he took credit for the ceasefire between the neighbouring nuclear-armed nations. (Archives 1, 2)

Several other news outlets, such as The Hindu, NDTV, Indian Express, National Herald, Vartha Bharati, published the same PTI wire. (Archives 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Other outlets such as the Times of India, Hindustan Times, India TV, Firstpost and Business Standard also reported that Trump did a ‘u-turn’ by saying that the leaders of India and Pakistan were ‘very smart’ and ‘decided’ to stop the war. (Archives 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Is it a U-Turn?

We carefully heard Trump’s statement, which was referenced by the above media outlets, and found that this was from a flagpole installation event at the White House’s South Lawn on June 18. A reporter asked him what the US President wished to achieve diplomatically from his upcoming lunch with Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir and that’s when Trump talks about the conflict. Here’s his statement verbatim:

“Well, I stopped a war… between Pakistan… I love Pakistan. I think Modi is a fantastic man. I spoke to him last night. We’re going to make a trade deal with Modi of India. But I stopped the war between Pakistan and India [sic]. This man (Asim Munir) was extremely influential in stopping it, from the Pakistan side. Modi, from the India side, and others. And they were going at it. And they’re both nuclear countries. I got it stopped. I don’t think I had one story… did I have one story written about? I stopped a war between two major nations, major nuclear nations. I don’t think I had a story written about it… but that’s okay. You know why? The people know”.

Evidently, Trump’s words can hardly be called a u-turn. The American President reiterates 4 times that it was he who stopped the war. He gives the Indian PM the same credit as Pakistan’s army chief for being ‘influential’ in stopping the war. But he emphasises his own role in ghis. A mere mention of the two leaders does not imply that he went back on his word, especially when he leaves no room for doubt that he had a huge role to play in it.

Note that his June 18 statement is not too different from his May 10 statement on the ceasefire wherein he congratulated the two countries for using “common sense and great intelligence”.

It would be fair to say that Indian news outlets may have read too much into Trump’s latest statement. Nowhere does he go back on his stance nor can this be seen as a softening of his earlier approach. He is still very much of the opinion that he “got it stopped” and repeats it more than once.

It would be misleading to say that Trump mentioning Modi in the same vein as Munir is akin to him doing a u-turn on his earlier approach.

The post Did Trump make a ‘u-turn’ on his role in the India‑Pakistan ceasefire, as news outlets claimed? appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.

“Trump and the billionaire-backed GOP majority in the Senate are on the verge of creating a crisis for state governments across the country. Trump’s reconciliation bill would cut billions from life-saving programs like Medicaid and SNAP while slashing funding for education and environmental programs—all to pay for a massive tax giveaway to billionaires and wealthy corporations,” said ATF Executive Director David Kass. “If this bill is enacted, states will have to shoulder the burden of not only raising costs for their residents but also administrative and benefit costs due to the draconian SNAP provisions in this bill. Some states, which want to ensure their residents still have access to Medicaid, may be forced to raise taxes or cut other public goods, while others risk thousands of residents losing vital access to healthcare. We applaud these state legislators for signing on and standing up for their constituents. Senators from both parties should follow their example and reject this truly disastrous bill.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

In Los Angeles, CA, armed, masked agents of the state are snatching and disappearing immigrants off the street, peaceful protestors and journalists are being attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets, National Guard troops and active-duty Marines have been deployed to police and intimidate American citizens. Fear and uncertainty have gripped America’s second largest city as a barrage of misinformation obscures the reality on the ground; nevertheless, Angelinos continue to defy the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrant communities and authoritarian crackdown on civil rights. In this episode of Working People, we take you to the streets of LA and speak with multiple on-the-ground eyewitnesses to the events of the past two weeks to help you better understand what’s actually happening and where this is all heading.

Guests:

• Sonali Kolhatkar is an award winning journalist, broadcaster, writer, and author; she is the founder, host, and executive director of Rising Up with Sonali. She is the author of Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World is Possible and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice.
• Javier Cabral is the editor-in-chief of the award-winning, independent outlet L.A. Taco
• Michael Nigro is an award-winning filmmaker and multimedia journalist who is among the numerous journalists to have been assaulted by police while reporting on assignment in LA.

Additional links/info:

• Javier Cabral, L.A. Taco, “A ride-along with Union Del Barrio, L.A.’s leading community patrol against ICE”
• David Folkenflick, NPR, “Press group sues L.A., alleging police abuse of reporters at ICE rallies”
• Luis Feliz Leon, In These Times, “Trump has put a target on SEIU, and the labor movement is fighting back”

Featured Music:

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Credits:

• Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

All those who have been wondering when mass resistance to Trump 2.0 would materialize need wait no longer. It is here. It is happening. It is now.

In truth, the new wave of defiance has been swelling for some time.

Following last November’s presidential election, media outlets such as the New York Times steadily pushed a story of progressive demobilization. The narrative went something like this: back in 2016, Trump opponents were fired up and ready to fight back, but this time around, in 2024, those who voted against his return were merely dispirited and resigned, hardly in the mood to take to the streets again. Oftentimes, commentators piled on by expressing skepticism about whether protesting was even worth it to begin with.

This story was flawed from the start.

Sure, in the immediate aftermath of the election, progressives took time to grieve Trump’s return. But already in November, mass organizing calls led by groups including the Working Families Party were drawing upwards 50,000 participants. (I don’t know about you, but for me anything over 10,000 people counts as being larger than my typical Zoom session.)

Within a week after Trump’s inauguration, protests were fomenting in earnest. We saw rallies outside of federal buildings and weekly boycott vigils at Tesla dealerships. Soon, there were calls for nationwide days of action, first taking the form of the 50501 protests in February. Then, on April 5, the Hand’s Off rallies took place at locations across the 50 states.

Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman, leaders of an effort called the Crowd Counting Consortium, reported in March that “our research shows that street protests today are far more numerous and frequent than skeptics might suggest.” They also noted that in February “we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago.” Last week, they released an updated tally, stating that “protest has been surging” since then and that “Overall, 2017’s numbers pale in comparison to the scale and scope of mobilization in 2025 — a fact often unnoticed in the public discourse about the response to Trump’s actions.”

All of this came before the events of the past two weeks, which further augmented the size and scale of anti-Trump mobilization. First came large demonstrations in Los Angeles against ICE immigration raids and the deployment of the National Guard. (Manuel Pastor has a very nice report from the frontlines of the protests over at Dissent.) Then came the No Kings actions last Saturday, which were massive and took place at as many as 2,000 locations, organizers told NPR. Data journalist G. Elliot Morris, formerly of FiveThirtyEight, estimated the total number of participants at No Kings events between 4 and 6 million.

These are historic numbers.

By way of comparison, gigantic protests against the Iraq War on February 15, 2003 drew possibly 3 million demonstrators in the U.S. (along with between 12 and 30 million worldwide). The Crowd Counting Consortium estimated that the original Women’s March on January 21, 2017, acknowledged as a gargantuan mobilization, attracted between 3.3 million and 5.6 million protestors. In another historic deployment, Black Lives Matter protests may have drawn many millions more in 2020, but with the caveat that actions were spread out over multiple weeks.

In terms of single-day events, No Kings may not have reached the heights of the first Earth Day celebration, in 1970, which is sometimes cited as the largest day of action in U.S. history, but it’s up there with all the big ones.

Our team witnessed strong turnout in Philadelphia (around 80,000) and in New York City (upwards of 100,000). Organizers reported crowds of as many as 500,000 in Boston, 70,000 in Seattle, 200,000 in Los Angeles, and 100,000 in Chicago, among gatherings in other major cities. On his Facebook page, organizer Chris Crass did a wonderful job of compiling photos of No Kings protests from around the country. The images are inspiring: People swarming intersections in Evanston, Illinois, braving the rain in Little Rock, Arkansas, filling Liberty Plaza outside the state capitol in Atlanta, Georgia, and lining roads in Indianapolis, Indiana and Gainesville, Florida. All this stood in stark contrast to Trump’s gloomy, expensive, and under-attended military parade the same weekend.

Now, if you will allow a digression, there are a variety of quirks to consider when talking about the size of any mobilization. Crowd-counting numbers can be notoriously flexible and politicized. In Armies of the Night, his Pulitzer Prize winning “history as a novel” narrating a fall 1967 March on the Pentagon, author Norman Mailer jokingly suggested a rule of thumb for triangulating protest attendance: “[T]he police estimate multiplied by four might be as close to the real number as the Left Wing estimate divided by two and a half,” he wrote. “Thus a real crowd of 200,000 people would be described as 50,000 by police and a half million by the sponsors.”

Even when the numbers are reliable, comparisons between protests are not always apples to apples. For at least five decades after the 1963 March on Washington, the dominant model for a national day of action was to try to get everyone to a single location, often Washington, DC. Success was measured by how many people you could rally in that one spot. In some instances, such as the 2003 Iraq war protests, there might be one leading location on the West Coast (say, San Francisco) and another in the East (New York City), but the general model held. If the protest was to be a success, organizers needed to spend a lot of time thinking about filling buses and transporting people significant distances to join in a collective mass gathering.

By the time of the Women’s March in 2017, this dominant model was being replaced with something different. There was indeed a large central event in Washington, DC for the Women’s March. But there were also sizable events in other big cities such as New York City and Philadelphia, and even gatherings in smaller cities like Harrisburg and many points in between. Previously, the going wisdom had been that sending people by bus to the main event would be mutually exclusive with getting decent turnout locally. But that was not the case for the Women’s March. The big numbers in DC did not really seem to eat into crowds in smaller cities. Success was no longer measured by the numbers of people who showed up in one location, but how many events across the country could be hosted and what the cumulative attendance might be.

As it turns out, having protests everywhere is conducive to participation. Regarding last weekend’s No Kings demonstrations, famed Rabbi Arthur Waskow wrote about attending a modest event in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia:

“Why did my beloved life-partner… and I choose to join about 200 people at the Lovett Library to say ‘No Kings!’ Instead of 80,000 demonstrators downtown where they swallowed up and liberated whole neighborhoods? Because I am 91 years old and my life partner is 82. We were sure that the massive downtown crowd, impressive as it was for demanding change, would make it impossible for the two of us to navigate. The library was one of countless small gatherings across the country and in big and even middle size cities the turnout was enormous.”

Lowering the bar for participation is undoubtedly positive in this respect. Of course, there are trade-offs. Because it’s easier to show up to your local town square than it is to spend a day or a weekend bussing back and forth to DC, participants are investing less time in the collective experience of traveling and assembling with others, things that can be good for cultivating further commitment. And, as I have written elsewhere with my brother Paul, the success of civil resistance often involves demonstrating the hardship voluntarily taken on movement participants—meaning that actions which require people to make higher levels of sacrifice can have their own benefits.

All this is to say that the size of any given crowd is not the only thing that matters.

In some ways, a variety of the smaller No Kings gatherings may have been more politically significant than the largest metropolitan ones. A friend of mine estimated that upwards of 5000 people turned out in his South Jersey town of Collingswood, a huge number for that area—arguably more impressive as drawing twenty times as many in nearby Philadelphia. Another organizer friend went to a protest in a small Pennsylvania town about an hour outside of Philly’s blue bubble. There, she reported, between 500 to 700 people lined a major roadway for a long stretch, encouraging passing drivers to sound their car horns in support. The steady, if intermittent, stream of honks gave courage to neighbors whose town borders a county that went solidly for Trump in 2024.

In Jacobin, Branco Marcetic argued that the presence of events deep into MAGA country signals a notable shifting of political energies. “[There is an] important point to be made here,” he wrote:

“The turnout in liberal cities and even in Trump-voting towns and counties doesn’t necessarily mean that anti-Trump voters outnumber the president’s supporters in these areas or their states—in many cases, they don’t. But it does suggest that voters opposed to Trump’s agenda—who across the country were met with few to no counterprotesters, even in deep red parts of the country—are vastly more energized than his supporters, and that despite his having won the popular vote…that Trump’s public support is a lot softer and more passive than his 2024 victory made it seem.”

In an article a couple of months ago, Paul and I outlined the key characteristics that define “moments of the whirlwind”—or periods of intensified social movement upsurge. It is clear that the current moment exhibits these qualities: Demonstrations are sparked by highly publicized “trigger events” (think ICE raids at Home Depot or a U.S. Senator in handcuffs), and participation is decentralized, not driven through pre-established organizational structures. The No Kings events of last weekend were led or sponsored by groups including Indivisible, the American Federation of Teachers, and the ACLU. All of the 200 organizations that signed on for the protests, especially the more established ones, deserve credit for refusing to bow to the authoritarian impulses of the Trump administration—especially when we have seen some leading law firms, media organizations, and universities fail to muster such bravery. Nevertheless, recruitment of the millions of people to the protests did not come through organizational phone trees or people’s individual relationships with organizers, but through momentum driven by widespread outrage at Trump’s actions.

Wired magazine published an article this week contending that defiance this time around, aided by new technologies, is far more decentralized than the Women’s March in 2017 and other resistance in Trump’s first term. The article reflects the magazine’s techno-fetishism, and its argument is a bit comical, given that the Women’s March itself was no august and long-standing institution but rather an ad hoc formation that swiftly coalesced in the whirlwind following Trump’s first election. Nevertheless, the article showed how abundant dissident energy is bubbling up in countless places and often has yet to be absorbed by formal organizations.

The article also pointed to a third common trait of whirlwinds: In addition to drawing in new participants from unexpected quarters, these moments spur a wealth of activity among these newcomers that is not dictated by any centralized command. As Wired reported, “the Tesla Takedown protests began with a single Bluesky post that exploded in large part thanks to social media posts, including protesters’ pictures and videos outside dealerships.” (Even Elon Musk himself ultimately acknowledged the success of demonstrations in shrinking Tesla’s earnings, although he blamed the impact on “paid protesters.”)

Or, as another example, the magazine profiled a couple in the Deep South that got involved by creating a website that allows people to order free stickers that they can post in high-traffic areas in their neighborhoods. The stickers display a QR code that directs users to resources about the warning signs of fascism: “What began with 500 stickers posted all over their small town,” reporter David Gilbert wrote, “quickly grew—with the help of an appeal on Reddit—to a campaign that has so far seen the couple and their children send 750,000 stickers to more than 1,000 people in all 50 states.”

All this raises the question: What should we do now that the whirlwind has arrived?

Paul and I hope to write on this in more depth, but there are many things that can be noted at least in passing: First, people should contribute however they can, and they should work to convince organizations that they are a part of to join in as well. Many established groups are still hesitant to throw down, yet the addition of their credibility and resources can make an important difference. It is hardly too late to get started: The most sweeping whirlwinds form not when a single trigger event gives rise to protest, but when a succession of triggers result in a series of escalating civil resistance. Along these lines, we can be sure that Trump will present more provocations, giving more opportunities for creative responses.

Protests are polarizing, meaning that they make people who might otherwise have been undecided or inattentive choose a side. Movements should focus on maximizing positive polarization and minimizing the negative. As we have previously argued, this means being smart in framing the demands of an action, highlighting sympathetic protagonists and unsympathetic oppressors, and heightening the contrast between the inventiveness and determination of resistance and the repressive violence of the state.

Trump is unpopular. There is clear evidence—from public opinion polling to pushback on the streets—that he is wildly overreaching his mandate. It is important to remember that Trump’s 2024 election victory was a narrow one: he carried 49.8% of the popular vote, as opposed to 48.3% for Kamala Harris (and even his electoral college win was nowhere close to the commanding totals amassed by Ronald Reagan in 1984, Richard Nixon in 1972, or LBJ in 1964). Since November, Trump’s popularity has tanked, even on issues where he once enjoyed an edge, such as the economy and immigration. The rank cruelty of his ICE raids is becoming increasingly clear, and Republicans have touched a third rail of American politics by slashing programs like Medicare.

Civil resistance plays an important role in solidifying this unpopularity and—as Trump perpetually lies about the impact of his policies—in educating the public about what is really going on. It helps to generate momentum for backlash at the polls, not just in the midterms or the next presidential elections, but in a plethora of state and local contests already taking place. And, in the interim, mass demonstrations encourage noncooperation at many levels that make the implementation of the White House agenda more difficult.

In short, popular resistance boosts the costs of overreach. Let us hope that we can watch the defiance grow.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mark Engler.

The report, published June 17 and authored by a group of eight environmental nonprofits, found that banks financed oil fields, pipelines, and coal mines to the tune of $869 billion in 2024 — up by $162 billion, or almost 25 percent, from 2023. Over the past eight years, the 65 banks profiled in the report financed almost $8 trillion in fossil fuel expansion.

Meanwhile, in 2024, the world passed the much-feared 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming target set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, which Trump again withdrew the U.S. from almost immediately after returning to office. Experts attribute the increase in many natural disasters to climate change; in the U.S. alone, 27 separate natural disasters in 2024 individually surpassed $1 billion in damages, with a cumulative 568 fatalities and $182.7 billion in costs.

But banks abandoned net-zero and climate-friendly pledges in droves last year, in addition to backing fossil fuels. “This year, banks have shown their true colors,” said Lucie Pinson, one of the co-authors of the report.

With President Trump’s pro-fossil fuel executive orders, even more commercial lenders ditched climate agreements in the first half of 2025. Sierra Club’s Jessye Waxman described the retreat as a “clear capitulation to political pressure.”

Overwhelmingly, the report found, both the banks financing fossil fuels and the companies they financed were U.S.-based. Four of the 5 top banks investing in fossil fuels were also U.S.-based.

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Liquid natural gas is the fastest-growing fossil fuel in the world, and the U.S. is its largest exporter. When calculating the 20-year emissions footprint of both liquefied natural gas, or LNG, and coal, researchers have found that LNG has a 33 percent larger footprint than coal.

Climate impacts aside, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says that there’s no need for more LNG projects — and that the “glut” of projects will likely lead to higher gas prices for consumers in the long run, in addition to community impacts zeroed in on by the “Banking on Climate Chaos” report.

In Mozambique, for example, four active LNG projects have forced hundreds of families to relocate, with a Mozambican NGO receiving more than 1,000 complaints about compensation, resettlement, and housing from families forced to relocate. TotalEnergies, one of the project’s owners, helped fund a paramilitary to “ensure the security of Mozambique LNG project activities,” which investigations have found abused and killed residents. Fifteen separate banks finance the four projects, including a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase.

A 2024 report from the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice catalogued parallel harms to U.S. communities near natural gas projects, finding that predominantly low-income communities of color near such developments had higher rates of pollution, emissions, asthma, and cancer.

“Facilities [are] being sited in our most vulnerable communities and placing our most vulnerable populations at risk — while providing the lion’s share of economic benefits to more affluent populations and communities,” said Dr. Robert Bullard, the center’s head.

“I dream of a time when we don’t have to produce this report any more,” said Diogo Silva, one of its co-authors and a campaigner with the nonprofit BankTrack, “as we would finally be protecting present and future generations from catastrophic living conditions.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Boosted by Trump, banks resume their love affair with fossil fuels on Jun 21, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Henry Carnell, Mother Jones.