As Donald Trump prepares to fight his second indictment in two months—the latest stemming from Department of Justice allegations that he mishandled classified documents after leaving office—he seems to be facing a major, self-inflicted problem. Multiple news outlets are now reporting that they have obtained the transcript of an audio recording that appears to capture Trump bragging about retaining secret documents.

“Secret. This is secret information,” Trump says in the conversation, according to the transcript CNN received. “Look, look at this. This was done by the military and given to me.”

Perhaps more critically, the transcript also reportedly shows that Trump admitted to not declassifying the documents he is heard bragging about in the recording. This would significantly undermine Trump’s previous assertion that as president, he could declassify anything he wanted by merely “thinking about it“—and that the documents he retained were, therefore, no longer classified. Trump’s own lawyers notably declined to support that shaky defense after the FBI’s search at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, which, of course, uncovered among many items, dozens of empty folders marked “classified.”

“As president, I could have declassified, but now I can’t,” Trump reportedly says in the bombshell transcript.

The New York Times reports that the remark prompted a woman in the room to reply, “Now we have a problem.”

Like many households over the past year, Jose and his family were being squeezed by rising costs. “Everything is going up,” he said. “The food. The cost of day care.” To free up space in their budget, they turned to a company promoted by their apartment complex: Flex. A booming tech startup based in New York City, Flex says it helps consumers “improve cash flow” by splitting their monthly rent into two manageable installments instead of a single, larger payment.

The process was supposed to be simple. Flex offers to pay its customers’ rent—in full—directly to the landlord. For their part, customers pay their rent to Flex in two installments, one due at the beginning of the month and one later in the month. In essence, Flex promises to front a big chunk of the rent, allowing families to spread out one of their largest expenses.

“I couldn’t even describe it. It was a bad day for us.”

To Jose, this sounded like a good deal. “It was pretty much beyond convenient to split our rent,” he said. “That’s the reason why we used Flex—to make sure we can cover day care and have food in our house.”

But by August, what had started as a lifeline turned into a source of significant financial stress, after Flex issued confusing instructions. At the time, Jose said, his wife was set to receive a direct deposit on the fifth day of the month. The rent was due to their landlord company two days earlier, on the third of the month. But Jose said he was under the impression that Flex would pay the rent so long as funds were available in the family’s account by the fifth.

Jose’s belief was reinforced by a text message from Flex that said, “Please make sure you have funds available for your first payment of $585.25 by the 5th* in order for Flex to help you cover this month’s rent payment.” That message was accompanied by a perplexing caveat: “*disclaimer: if Flex has sent you a specific email stating a different deadline for payment, that email takes precedence.”

This article originally appeared in The Globe and Mail. John Vaillant’s latest book is Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast.

We weren’t a week into May before 30,000 people had been evacuated because of dozens of fast-moving wildfires in Alberta. Structure losses were mounting, and politicians were trotting out words like “unprecedented.”

Unprecedented? Where were they in 2017, when British Columbia had its worst fire season on record and generated four simultaneous pyrocumulonimbus thunderstorms? Where were they in 2016, when Fort McMurray burned—for days—along with 6,000 square kilometers of forest? What about 2011, when Slave Lake lost its town hall, library, radio station, and 500 houses in a few hours?

No, the current fire situation is not unprecedented, and calling it the “new normal” is offensive. There’s nothing “normal” about it. Do I sound angry? I have a right to be, and so do you. In the late 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists predicted that the effects of increased industrial CO2 would penetrate the “noise” of random climate fluctuations and become measurable in the form of rising global temperatures, especially at higher latitudes like ours.

I started working on my latest book, Fire Weather, in 2016, just days after Fort McMurray disappeared beneath a fire-borne pyrocumulus cloud 14 kilometers tall. I did so not because this was a once-in-a-lifetime fire (the intervening years have proven otherwise). I did it because I understood, way back in 2016, that if a fire could do that much damage to such a wealthy, well-equipped subarctic city when the lakes were still frozen and car-sized blocks of ice still lined the Athabasca River, imagine what it could do to more southerly towns filled with old, densely packed wooden houses? Places such as Vancouver, Moose Jaw, or St. John’s? Imagine what such a fire could do in cottage country, or in the thousands of rural communities located in the wildland-urban interface, where half of Canadians, and a third of Americans, now live.

Former President Donald Trump wrote on his social media site Thursday that he had been indicted for a second time, this time for taking classified documents with him to Florida when he left office in January 2021. The New York Times confirmed the indictment, reporting that he had been “charged with a total of seven counts, including willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and an obstruction of justice conspiracy, according to people familiar with the matter.” Trump is the first former president in US history to be charged with federal crimes.

“I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!”

Trump left the White House in 2021 with hundreds of documents that the National Archives and Records Administration considers federal records that do not belong to the former president. The charges against him, which the DOJ has not yet detailed to the public, would likely have resulted from his efforts to keep much of the material, some of it classified, despite repeated demands that he return it, including a May 2022 Justice Department subpoena. Trump lawyers claimed that he had complied with that subpoena, but a dramatic FBI search last year at Mar-a-Lago showed their claims were false. Trump was ultimately found to have taken to his club more than 300 documents with classified markings.

The charges, apparently related to illegal retention of documents, may strike many people relatively minor compared to some of conduct for which Trump has been investigated. Special counsel Robert Mueller found in 2019 that Trump’s campaign had hoped benefit from Russian hacking efforts designed to damage his opponent, Hillary Clinton. The House impeached Trump in 2020 over his effort to delay US military support from Ukraine in a bid to pressure that country to launch investigations Trump hoped would embarrass Joe Biden. Trump’s efforts to retain power after his 2020 election defeat—including his incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress, which led to his second impeachment—seems like a bigger deal than the documents case.

But lawyers and former prosecutors have argued that regardless of how bad Trump’s conduct in the documents matter may seem, the case is simpler than other matters for which Trump has been investigated. In other words, Trump appears to have clearly broken the law. Served with a federal subpoena after refusing to turn over records that belonged to the US government, he allegedly took steps to hide the material, some of it highly classified, from prosecutors.

In a stunning turn of events, the GOP-controlled Texas House of Representatives voted Saturday to impeach the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.

In a 121 to 23 vote, with five others absent or abstaining, the state House approved twenty articles of impeachment against Paxton on grounds including bribery, obstruction of justice, and dereliction of duty. Among other things, Paxton is accused of doing favors for a top campaign donor, then firing whistleblowers in his office—four high-ranking Republican staffers—who raised legal concerns about his actions. He subsequently tried to get the state legislature to cover the cost of a $3.3 million settlement over their claims.

“Attorney General Paxton abused his office and his power for personal gain,” said Republican State Rep. David Spiller, a member of the House Committee on General Investigating. “He put the interests of himself over the laws of the state of Texas.” 

Paxton will be temporarily removed from office pending a trial in the state Senate. Texas’ legislature is one of the most conservative in the country, which makes Saturday’s vote all the more remarkable.

Paxton is best known as a staunch ally of Donald Trump who in December 2020 filed a lawsuit on behalf of the state of Texas that sought to invalidate presidential election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. The Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the case because Texas did not have standing to challenge the voting procedures of another state.

Hours before announcing his 2024 campaign for the presidency on Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law allowing him to continue to serve as governor while he pursues the GOP presidential nomination. While that was the headline, the new law contains a series of provisions making it harder to vote in the state, including new restrictions on mail-in ballots, efforts to make it easier to purge voting rolls, and limitations on third-party voter registration groups that could gut community registration drives.

As a result, DeSantis is facing three new federal lawsuits from organizations including the NAACP, League of Women Voters, and the Hispanic Federation, which argue that the new restrictions violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, including the right to free speech and association, and fundamental protections of the right to vote.

Voting rights groups say the new rules for grassroots voter registration groups are particularly burdensome. According to a summary by Democracy Docket, the new law:

Requires organizations to reregister for every single election cycle,Prohibits prefilled information on registration applications,Shortens the amount of time organizations have to return registration applications from 14 days to 10 and increases the fine associated with late delivery,Bans noncitizens and individuals with certain felony convictions from handling voter registration applications and imposes fines for each violation of this requirement, andIncreases the total aggregate fine that an organization can be levied in each calendar year from $50,000 to $250,000.

Voting rights groups told the GOP-controlled legislature before the bill’s final passage that these measures “create an overwhelming chilling effect, and groups will have to decide between risking fines of magnitude they cannot shoulder, or simply cease undertaking voter registration activities altogether.” The lawsuit by the League of Women Voters said the restrictions will have “devastating consequences” that could lead it to “severely curtail” voter registration drives.

The new law is likely to have a disproportionate impact on voters of color, who are five times more likely than white voters to be registered by a third-party group.

A South Carolina judge temporarily blocked the state’s new six-week abortion ban on Friday, one day after it was signed by Republican Gov. Henry McMaster.

“The status quo should be maintained until the [state] Supreme Court reviews its decision,” said circuit court Judge Clifton Newman. “It’s going to end up there.”

The state Supreme Court blocked a similar ban on abortion at the roughly six-week mark, which the GOP-controlled legislature passed in 2021, and which took effect after the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturning Roe v. Wade last June. In January 2023, South Carolina’s Supreme Court called that law “an unreasonable restriction upon a woman’s right to privacy.” That kept abortion legal in the state until around 20 weeks of pregnancy.

In response, Republicans passed a new abortion ban, which Planned Parenthood South Atlantic immediately challenged in court, alleging that it “violates the South Carolina Constitution’s right to privacy and its guarantees of equal protection and due process.”

The composition of the South Carolina Supreme Court has changed since its ruling blocking the first abortion ban. Judge Kaye Hearn, who wrote the 3-2 decision, retired earlier this year and was replaced by Appeals Judge Gary Hill, who was selected by the legislature. That made South Carolina the only state in the country to have an all-male state supreme court.

Nearly two months ago, a pandemic-era policy that prevented states from dropping ineligible people from Medicaid ended. Now, we’re starting to see the fallout. According to a recent New York Times report, hundreds of thousands of low-income people have already lost their health insurance, including those who may still qualify for coverage but appear to have been booted for “procedural reasons,” like failing to turn in paperwork. 

At the start of the pandemic, the policy was initially created under the First Coronavirus Response Act, allowing families to preserve their insurance under Medicaid even if they hadn’t filed the necessary forms to re-enroll. As I’ve previously reported, the program saw 20.2 million new recipients over the course of two years, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Since the program’s expiration at the end of March, states have begun checking Medicaid eligibility once again, requiring households to file paperwork in order to verify their eligibility. 

While a definite total of those who’ve lost coverage is currently unknown, nineteen states have already begun the process of purging people from the health insurance program. Arkansas, one of the first states to start ending coverage, has already stripped at least 73,000 people of their insurance, including 27,000 children, reports the Times. Unlike other states, Arkansas has aimed to do this at a quicker rate—planning to get it done in only six months, instead of the year president Biden has allotted. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders framed the process as necessary in order to “preserve resources for those who need them and follow the law.” 

Editor’s note: The below article is a preview of the lead item in the next edition of  David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Please check it out.

Imagine I come home and find a crazy man in my house. He is holding a full gas can and a lit match. “If you don’t sign over the deed to your house,” he screams, “I will burn this place down.” I refuse, and we enter a standoff for days. Neighbors gather around my home. The police arrive. It is a major scene. The media show up. The newspaper and TV reporters see this as a big story and slap it on the front page and lead the evening news with it: “Two local residents caught in fierce negotiations. If their talks don’t succeed, a house will go up in flames.”

That seems to be the general media framing of the debt ceiling debate in Washington, DC. In horse-race style, much of the press has covered this episode as a political battle of two opposing forces: President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. And there’s been much breathless and up-to-the-minute reporting of the ins-and-outs of the deliberations between the White House and the House Republicans, with each side treated as equal partners in this tale of high-stakes politics.

Earlier this week, the New York Times front-paged a report on how McCarthy was “attempting a difficult balancing act” in the negotiations, trying to cobble together a budget deal that would win enough Republicans without alienating the most extremist members of his caucus, who—thanks to the agreement that landed McCarthy in the top House post—could easily boot him out of the speakership. Meanwhile, Politico focused on Biden’s negotiating stance, noting he has “prioritized deal-making through much of the debt ceiling talks, laboring to work across the aisle even at the risk of alienating the liberal wing of his own party.”

There was nothing wrong with these stories in and of themselves, but this coverage underplayed the core element of the story: GOP radicals, by refusing to sign off on raising the debt ceiling so the US government could pay bills already accrued (many of which were the results of what Congress voted for), were threatening to trigger a financial crisis and blow up the US economy.

On Thursday, a Texas house panel voted to recommend impeachment proceedings for Republican attorney general Ken Paxton. Investigators for the committee concluded that the state’s top law enforcement official broke a number of laws—including felony statutes—by using his office to help a friend and political donor named Nate Paul. (You can read more about the scandal, and the committee’s investigation, here.)

Paxton, you may be surprised to learn, is not taking this well. In a statement after the committee’s announcement, Paxton, who was reelected last fall, accused his fellow Republicans of carrying water for liberal Democrats and claimed that the committee was trying “to use their unsubstantiated report to overturn the results of a free and fair election.” It was an “illegitimate attempt to overthrow the will of the people and disenfranchise the voters of our state.”

As the Texas Observer’s Justin Miller noted, Paxton and his team are floating a legal argument that holds that a public official can’t be impeached after an election for actions that were widely established before that election. This idea that all the facts were known, though, would seem to be undercut rather severely by Paxton’s continued insistence that the facts we think we know are wrong, as well as the fact that he was literally trying to get the state legislature to pay the whistleblowers he fired $3.3 million to settle their claims, rather than face a public trial—which is what prompted the legislature’s investigation. It wasn’t as if his reelection slogan was “Yes, I did it.”

But more importantly, this is Ken Paxton we’re talking about. You know, the guy who famously tried to overturn an election.

After the 2020 presidential election, as Donald Trump and his team were scrambling to come up with a way to reverse his loss, Paxton stepped forward. As I recounted in a profile of Paxton last year, his office asked the Supreme Court to throw out the election results in four states that Joe Biden won, claiming, among other things, that “the statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in these four States collectively is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.” The brief was a disaster, recycling claims that had already been rejected. Even fellow Republican-run AG offices wanted to keep their distance. In internal emails obtained through a records request by the group American Oversight, staffers in the Florida attorney general’s office called Paxton’s brief “batshit” and wondered if “this is Paxton’s request for a pardon.”

Is the federal government helping companies sell surveillance technology to repressive governments? Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wants to know, but a federal subagency has been cagey about the information. 

In a letter sent on Friday, Wyden asked the International Trade Administration (ITA), a subagency of the Department of Commerce, for details about its role in helping US firms sell their surveillance technology to other countries. In the letter, Wyden—a privacy-minded lawmaker who chairs the Senate Committee on Finance—noted that he had been asking for an answer on the matter since last summer.

In August of 2022, the ITA confirmed to Wyden that it “provides assistance” to companies selling surveillance technology. But when asked, the subagency, Wyden writes, “did not provide details on these activities” or the specific help ITA has offered because of “unspecified legal barriers to revealing more [information].” In theory, this work falls within ITA’s purview of promoting US exports: ITA’s website touts that it will help companies compete in foreign markets on everything from “Steel” to “Aerospace and Defense.” But that does not account for the potential buyer: repressive regimes looking to crack down on civil liberties.

Wyden has good reason for suspicion. When the ITA published posts on its website showcasing arenas that are ripe for surveillance and security technology sales, the countries mentioned include not only obvious allies like the United Kingdom, but also others with a history of abusing surveillance technologies, including Honduras, the Philippines, and India.

Amnesty International has warned of the possible harms of India’s growing appetite for surveillance technology, which is particularly concerning in light of the increased persecution of Muslims in the country. In its market intelligence post on India, the ITA did not mention this repression. Instead, in February, the ITA told US firms that the “surveillance systems market in India is growing” and “provides opportunities for U.S. exporters.” Another post on “India’s surveillance and security market” noted “huge opportunities for U.S. companies,” and that “surveillance systems are in demand across all sectors.” 

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

The scope of a landmark law to protect America’s waterways has been shrunk by the US Supreme Court, which has sided with an Idaho couple who have waged a long-running legal battle to build a house on wetlands near one of the state’s largest lakes.

In a ruling passed down on Thursday, the conservative-dominated court decided that the federal government was wrong to use the Clean Water Act, a key 50-year-old piece of legislation to prevent pollution seeping into rivers, streams and lakes, to prevent the couple building over the wetland beside Priest Lake in Idaho.

Just hours before the pandemic-era immigration rule Title 42 was set to lift on Thursday, a Florida judge blocked President Joe Biden’s plan to release some migrants on “parole,” a policy aimed at reducing overcrowding in migrant detention facilities. Late Friday, the Biden administration asked for an emergency stay of the judge’s order, saying it plans to appeal.

In Florida, US District Judge T. Kent Wetherell has been busy. Thursday’s ruling, issued in response to a lawsuit brought by Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, was the second of two of his orders that have delayed and complicated Biden’s immigration plans in recent months. In March, Wetherell also blocked a Biden administration policy to release migrants with minimal supervision, an order that the Department of Justice is also planning to appeal, Politico reports. “The Solicitor General has authorized an appeal of both orders,” a DOJ filing in the Florida court reads. “The Court should immediately stay its orders to prevent those harmful consequences while the government seeks review in the court of appeals.”

The language in the filing echoes comments made by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. While speaking on MSNBC on Friday, he called the ruling “very harmful” and noted that its parole policy is a practice that already has been used by “prior administrations,” (Mayorkas didn’t cite any administrations by name, but the practice has been deployed by both the Bush and Obama administrations.) Similarly, while speaking to reporters also on Friday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “The way we see that is, it’s sabotage. It’s pure and simple.” (Jean-Pierre declined to specify whether she was referring to the judge’s decision or the lawsuit itself.) “The claims that [US Customs and Border Protection] is allowing or encouraging [the] mass release of migrants is just categorically false,” she added. “That’s not what’s occurring; that is not what’s happening.”

Meanwhile, at the border, officials say there was a steep increase in people crossing into the US without documentation on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, before the suspension of Title 42, but the number of migrants at the border dropped on Friday after the policy expired. The mixed reports, however, haven’t stopped GOP lawmakers from capitalizing on the situation. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), for instance, called it an “absolute travesty” and an “invasion at our southern border,” while Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) said the situation at the border is “as chaotic as Afghanistan was.”

In this week’s New Yorker, JR Moehringer breaks all the rules of ghostwriting by ceasing to be invisible and asserting his hiding-in-plain-sight presence as the writer for Britain’s exiled Prince Harry’s blockbuster memoir Spare. Moehringer offers plenty to satisfy Royal obsessives, providing glimpses into their process, their relationship, and the genuine affection and respect that seems to have grown between him and his subject. Here are two guys, from unfathomably different worlds, connected by nearly obsessive love for their deceased mothers, and calling each other “dude.”

We are given the opportunity to witness Harry’s stubbornness as an example of the inevitable tensions that arise between the writer and the author. In the opening scene, Moehringer describes Harry’s repeated insistence on including his retort to soldiers who tortured him during his military training, and Moehringer’s repeated refusal to do so. (Moehringer won that one.) We see Meghan providing treats while Moehringer labors in his word factory on their California estate. And we have an intimate view of the outsized controversies that appeared after the memoir was published. Moehringer sets the record straight about an egregious passage in the book that mentions a TK Maxx sale the prince claimed to wait for every year.  As Moehringer writes:

Not so fast, said the monarchists at TK Maxx corporate, who rushed out a statement declaring that TK Maxx never has sales, just great savings all the time! Oh, snap! Gotcha, Prince George Santos! Except that people around the world immediately posted screenshots of TK Maxx touting sales on its official Twitter account. (Surely TK Maxx’s effort to discredit Harry’s memoir was unrelated to the company’s long-standing partnership with Prince Charles and his charitable trust.)

Quite a relief to have that sorted out.

But for those of us, who have ever been ghostwriters, and I have ghosted seven books, (please don’t ask for whom) the real revelations were in Moehringer’s descriptions of his own experiences in the ever-mysterious process between writer and author: the back and forth, the disagreements, the negotiations, the sometimes confused pride of authorship. I’ve always said that what appeals to me about this role is the opportunity to do two professions that always interested me but ones I would never have managed: actor and psychoanalyst. But I am a mere mortal.

On Thursday, the Louisiana House passed a bill to make some juvenile criminal records public in three majority-Black parishes. Sponsors argue that providing the public with these records would offer transparency in crime-afflicted areas. If signed into law, the measure would serve as a two-year pilot program.

Critics of the measure, House Bill 321, say the measure is racist, noting that the three parishes to which it would apply—Caddo, East Baton Rouge, and Orleans—are 50 percent, 47 percent, and 60 percent Black, respectively, with Black residents making up the majority of their populations, according to US Census Bureau data. The bill would not be rolled out in Jefferson Parish, however, which is larger than both Cado and Orleans parishes and is majority white.

“Let’s be real. We know what this is about. The optics are obvious. Let’s stop playing around with this,” Rep. Edmond Jordan (D-Baton Rouge) told the Times-Picayune. “If you’re from Baton Rouge, if you’re from Shreveport, if you’re from New Orleans, you should be offended by this.”

Advocates in favor of the bill have said its aim is to increase accountability. “This bill is about public safety,” Republican Rep. Debbie Villio, who represents Jefferson Parish and sponsored the bill, said on the House floor, according to the Times-Picayune. “The public has a right to know.”

But criminal justice advocates question why juvenile court records—which would include not just convictions but also accused crimes—need to be made public in the first place. “I think, in this instance, it is becoming very clear because of the locations [for this legislation] that there are certain children—particularly Black children—who we are unwilling to provide a second chance to, and we quickly look at them and decide, ‘Oh, they are just not going to be better,’” Kristen Rome, the co-executive director of Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, told the Associated Press. “Those records are going to always be available for everyone to see…and that creates a stigma, which creates an environment where they can’t thrive.”

This piece was published originally by Capital & Main.

Business groups are vigorously opposing Julie Su, President Joe Biden’s nominee for labor secretary, and they are counting on a handful of votes from swing senators to defeat her confirmation.

Leading the charge are trade groups representing companies like McDonald’s and Uber that currently are not the employers of record for workers in fast-food franchises or drivers who are treated as independent contractors. Because of that arm’s length relationship, those corporations are often shielded from responsibility for labor law violations. They fear Su would more aggressively enforce labor laws that could expose them to penalties for infractions.

Those fears stem from Su’s record. She rose to prominence in the 1990s for representing Thai seamstresses who were enslaved in a sweatshop in El Monte, California. She brought a suit on their behalf that held retailers and manufacturers liable for using slave labor that resulted in $4 million in restitution for the garment workers.

She served as the state’s top labor-law enforcer under Gov. Jerry Brown, launching a “Wage Theft Is a Crime” campaign and aggressively pursuing claims on behalf of restaurant, car wash, and garment workers. As California’s labor secretary under Gov. Gavin Newsom, she steered the department’s expanded unemployment system for those thrown out of work by the pandemic. Her opponents are also attacking her for the fraud that emerged in that program, although such fraud was common nationwide. Now serving as acting secretary of labor, she has the support of organized labor, some business leaders and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. 

“Live through Jim Crow, so you can live off of Harlan Crow.”

That’s how MoJo’s Garrison Hayes archly summarizes the hypocrisies of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in light of recent blockbuster revelations that he accepted elite private school tuition money from the real estate mogul for his grandnephew, alongside other lavish, all-expense-paid holidays and gifts from the Texas billionaire.

“If these things are true,” Garrison observes, ironically, in his new video about the many contradictions of Thomas, “your favorite Black conservative appears to be the most exaggerated version of a welfare queen, feeding off the generosity of a wealthy white benefactor who showers him and his family with unlimited trips.”

Since discovering that Thomas once identified as a Black nationalist, Garrison has been fascinated with better understanding the events that led him to become one of the most prominent figures in right-wing politics. Garrison has spent the last few weeks diving deeply into Thomas’ on-the-record speeches, biographies, interviews, and judicial opinions. In this video, he highlights instances where Thomas has opposed programs designed to help Black communities, despite personally benefiting from similar programs. Thomas attended Yale’s law school in 1971 through an affirmative action program but later opposed a similar program in a judicial opinion. When he couldn’t find a legal job after graduation, he saw affirmative action as the reason for his difficulties, writing in his 2007 memoir, “Now I knew what a law degree from Yale was worth when it bore the taint of racial preference. I was humiliated—and desperate.”

Despite receiving extraordinary opportunities and assistance throughout his life, Justice Thomas, Garrison concludes, seems committed to subjecting other groups—particularly Black people—to a rigid “bootstrap” individualism. In other words: opportunity for me, but not for thee.

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

Utilities across the country use money collected from customers’ monthly bills to fund political campaigns and lobbying efforts, often with the goal of blocking climate progress. But in Colorado, that’s about to change. This week, the state passed the country’s most comprehensive legislation to prevent utilities from using customer funds to support political activities. 

Colorado’s new Utility Regulation Act was passed on Monday by the state Senate after clearing the state House two days prior, and is expected to be signed by Governor Jared Polis soon. It prohibits investor-owned utilities from charging their customers—known as ratepayers—for any membership dues in trade associations, lobbying expenses, or any other activities influencing legislation, ballot measures, and other regulatory actions. It also bars utilities from spending ratepayer money on political advertising or any messaging intended to boost the utility’s brand.

“This is the first comprehensive effort by a state to protect utility customers from being forced to fund gas and electric utilities’ political machines,” said David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog group. 

The first time I spoke with Olga Shpak, I made the mistake of beginning as I often do when interviewing researchers: by asking for some basic biographical information. “I used to be a scientist,” she said, not sounding bitter, only a bit nostalgic. Now, she clarified, she’s a war volunteer.

Shpak built a storied career studying Arctic and sub-Arctic marine mammals as a researcher at Moscow’s prestigious A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her work inspired some of Russia’s most significant whale conservation measures over the last decade, including protections for bowheads in the Sea of Okhotsk, an Alaska-sized body of water on the country’s Pacific coast. But in February last year, just as Vladimir Putin prepared to invade her home country of Ukraine, Shpak abruptly left, ultimately saying goodbye to her life in Russia—and the whales.

“There were relatively very few projects in Russia aimed at actually protecting marine mammals, rather than exploiting them,” Phil Clapham, a retired biologist and a leading expert on large whales, told me. “And with Olga’s loss to the war, they lost one of the absolute—probably the best one of all.”

Today, Shpak is working near the front lines of the war, helping nonprofit aid groups supply civilians and soldiers with everything from underwear and tourniquets to drones, wood-burning stoves, and pickup trucks. When we spoke, bomb sirens blared in the background, a numbingly routine occurrence for Shpak, who told me her focus had been entirely consumed by the war effort. “To do science you have to concentrate,” she said. “You have to kind of put your brain in a certain mode. And that switch is broken.”

Shpak is one of thousands of researchers whose life’s work has been set adrift by the war, as she and her peers have been forced to flee the region or stay and fight. International collaborations with Russian institutions have been put on hold, and scientists around the globe tell me they’ve abandoned or modified projects, canceled conferences, forgone necessary supplies, or lost funding. Even the world’s biggest scientific endeavors haven’t been spared: In early 2022, for instance, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, which runs the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, said it would “not engage in new collaborations” with Russia “until further notice.” Similarly, after being sanctioned by the United States, European Union, and Canada, Russia said last year that it planned to leave the International Space Station when its current agreement ends in 2024, meaning the program would lose one of its principal members. (In late April, Russia backtracked, saying it would stick around through 2028.)

Yesterday, a federal jury found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. As soon as journalist Kaitlan Collins mentioned the verdict during this evening’s CNN town hall with the former president, the audience of Republican-leaning New Hampshire voters started to laugh.

“I never met this woman. I never saw this woman,” Trump said, before launching into a mocking retelling of Carroll’s allegations about what Trump did to her in a New York department store. “What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room?”

Trump swore “on my children” that the alleged attack never happened, despite a jury of nine people unanimously finding otherwise. He also repeated an insult he has frequently lobbed at Carroll, calling her a “wack-job,” to rapturous laughter from the audience.

Trump swears on his children that he didn't assault E Jean Carroll pic.twitter.com/YyHDBSy2LZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 11, 2023