Nearly two years after George Floyd’s murder sparked nationwide protests, Democratic mayors who once seemed sympathetic to reducing police brutality are now, more and more, pointing to law enforcement as a solution to the rising community gun violence around the country. New York’s Eric Adams, San Francisco’s London Breed, and Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot are among those who increasingly seem to be leaning on cops to stop shootings. “It’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city…come to an end,” Breed said in a news conference in December, vowing more aggressive policing.

But a major new study—highlighted this weekend by the Chicago Sun-Times—provides some of the best evidence yet that these mayors should not turn their backs on other, non-policing solutions to gun violence. University of Chicago researchers looked at a mentoring program that serves men with extensive rap sheets who are at a high risk of shooting someone or being shot. During the 18-month READI Chicago program, the men, many of whom have been shot in the past, are paid $15 an hour to join daily job training and counseling sessions, activities that can get them off the streets and help them support their families without throwing them in jail.

The results have been impressive. The researchers followed 2,500 men who participated in the intensive program. This group was two-thirds less likely to be arrested for a shooting or homicide than a similar group of men who didn’t participate. The results were even more astonishing for guys who’d been recruited to the program by outreach workers: Their arrests dropped nearly 80 percent. And they were half as likely to be shot and killed themselves. That’s a lot of impact for a program that costs about 1 percent of what the city of Chicago typically spends on policing.

The study is particularly exciting because of the rigor with which it was conducted. It was a randomized trial, which means it was the first one of its kind to examine a large group of men from an anti-violence program with the same degree of statistical precision that you’d see in a study to evaluate medical treatments. “These are significant results,” Roseanna Ander, executive director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, which conducted the study and helped develop the READI curriculum, told the Sun-Times. And perhaps the Biden administration is paying attention: It recently invited Eddie Bocanegra, who helps lead READI, to serve as a special advisor on gun violence.

When I saw the Chicago study, I couldn’t help but think of a similar mentoring program in Oakland, California, that I examined in 2020. I followed Andre Reed, a thirtysomething man with a lengthy criminal record who had been referred to the Community & Youth Outreach program after he was shot eight times. The program paired him up with a life coach, Leonard Haywood, who helped him turn his life around and became a close friend.

Are you at an interregnum point in your high-profile career? Did you recently come out of a very stressful situation? And are you trying to stay relevant but semi-retired and/or just have your hands in a lot of different things but still want to do a little more? 

Might I suggest that you consider becoming a disinformation guy? Since 2017, it’s been the move for at least a few people who maybe don’t have a lot going on, but soon will, or have a bit going on and want to add a bit more to it. After dipping his toes into it for the past year, President Barack Obama notably became the latest and most prominent disinformation guy in a speech yesterday on the subject at Stanford, but he is not the first.

The former Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign manager Robby Mook and former Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign manager Matt Rhoades were the earliest examples of disinformation guys I personally came across. In 2017, Harvard’s Belfer Center launched the D3P, which stands not for the next exceptionally talented dual-threat quarterback or the latest hot new point guard, but for Defending Digital Democracy. Shortly after its inception, it announced that Mook and Rhoades would be brought on as “co-leaders of the initiative.” The project said its mission was to “identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks.” 

More recently, after his very public break with the British monarchy, Prince Harry (now just Harry?) came out swinging hard as a disinformation guy. Last March, he was appointed to the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder to help with a six-month study on American misinformation and disinformation. At the end of the sixth months, he found that things were not good, calling misinformation a “global humanitarian crisis.”

And of course, by the very nature of being the most clouted human being alive, after his speech at Stanford yesterday and accompanying preview of it in the paper of record, Obama is now the preeminent disinformation guy.

For roughly the last six years, Republican politicians have essentially been acting like the adults in that one Twilight Zone episode with the kid with godlike powers, putting on a big show about how everything Donald Trump does is “good” out of fear that he’ll cast them into the otherworldly cornfield from which there is no return. But according to New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, there was at least one brief window where top GOP officials seemed ready to stiffen their spines and prevent their leader from ever holding office again: the days following the January 6 Capitol riot. 

On Thursday, the Times published an edited excerpt from Martin and Burns’s new book This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future, which claimed that Republican Party leaders Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) contemplated a series of drastic measures to remove Trump from office: including invoking the 25th Amendment, pressuring him to resign, and even impeachment. 

In public, McCarthy stayed true to his lily-livered persona, objecting to the election results and saying that the Democrats’ attempt to impeach Trump would “put more fuel on the fire.” He has since adopted a characteristically esoteric defense of Trump’s actions on January 6, saying that the real fault lies with Nancy Pelosi, who he (ridiculously) claims to have allowed a “security lapse” at the Capitol. 

However, in private conversations, McCarthy was irate and fully willing to lay the blame squarely on Trump’s shoulders. On Jan. 8, 2021, he reportedly told House Republicans that Trump’s conduct had been “atrocious and totally wrong” and blamed him outright for inciting the mob to storm the Capitol. During a Jan. 10 meeting, he claimed that he’d ask Trump to resign from office and allegedly said that he wished that the Big Tech companies would strip some far-right lawmakers of their social media accounts. 

“I’ve had it with this guy,” he reportedly ranted to a group of Republican leaders. “What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that, and nobody should defend it.” 

If you happen to be a pregnant person with questions—say, about the foods you should avoid, how big your developing fetus is, or when your morning sickness might finally abate—your online research may lead you to the cheerful and informative website of the American Pregnancy Association. In addition to providing answers to expectant parents, the site offers a wealth of other resources: advice about how to improve fertility, a due-date calculator, and even a hotline for pregnancy questions. For those seeking medical expertise about all things gestation-related, the American Pregnancy Association seems to be a one-stop shop. The group describes itself as “a national health organization committed to promoting reproductive and pregnancy wellness through education, support, advocacy, and community awareness.”

Better yet, it seems to be committed to science. “The Association believes that research is the foundation to significant reproductive discoveries,” the site says. Indeed, the group is cited as a source by many respected medical institutions, including the Cleveland Clinic, Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai, Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Maryland’s Johns Hopkins HealthCare. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN have included its advice in articles. The official website about women’s health at the US Government’s Department of Health and Human Services links to the American Pregnancy Association as a resource for those seeking information about pregnancy tests. The Office of Child Welfare recommends that parents considering adoption peruse its list of potential questions to ask adoptive parents.

So comprehensive and widely known are the organization’s offerings that it’s easy to overlook the section about unplanned pregnancies, where the tone is decidedly different—fewer facts, more feelings. “If you’re researching your options, you probably need to talk,” the page says, offering a hotline number. “There will be no judgment, no guilt, only a friendly caring person ready to listen and talk.” Actual information about abortion is hard to find, and what the site does provide is sandwiched between warnings. “Consider the impact the procedure may have on your future,” the site advises.

Here’s another thing it doesn’t mention: The American Pregnancy Association isn’t the dispassionate medical authority it might appear to be. Rather, it’s the brainchild of a Texas-based pro-life activist named Brad Imler, and it’s rife with medically inaccurate information—on both abortion and other reproductive health topics. The site hawks unproven blood tests, infertility treatments, and products purported to support the pregnant person and developing fetus. The American Pregnancy Association presents all of its information and products as evidence-based and medically accurate—but nowhere can one find its activist foundations or learn that it doesn’t have a single medical professional listed on its staff of a handful of people.

This veneer of medical expertise isn’t a new phenomenon in the anti-abortion movement. Over the last few decades, pro-life groups have built a robust network of crisis pregnancy centers designed to look like doctors’ offices, complete with ultrasound equipment and available nurses. The purpose of these offices is to dissuade people from getting abortions, yet the staff and marketing materials rarely mention this—crisis pregnancy centers’ misleading messaging has been the focus of several recent court cases. The American Pregnancy Association is set up like a virtual version of these crisis pregnancy centers, attracting expectant parents with its promises of need-to-know information—then gently leading them through an experience subtly laid out to discourage abortion at all costs. It’s a highly successful design: Even the pro-choice think tank the Guttmacher Institute lists the American Pregnancy Association among its sources for information about fetal development.

With Roe v. Wade at risk of being overturned by the Supreme Court, 2022 is shaping up to be a historically bad year for reproductive rights. And while anti-choice lawmakers have been working toward this for decades, they’ve only gotten bolder with their moves in the past few years. 

If the court does away with Roe, 26 states will put in place bans or severe abortion restrictions, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights think tank. Meanwhile, emboldened by the passing of other abortion bans in previous years, Republicans politicians have passed abortion bans left and right this year, setting reproductive rights back nearly half a century: In the first four months of this year alone, lawmakers across 42 states introduced a grand total of 536 bills restricting access to abortions—86 of which effectively banned abortion outright.

So far, six states have successfully passed versions of these bans, and most of them look eerily familiar. It appears as those legislators are taking a page straight out of either Texas or Mississippi’s playbook: In 2021, Texas passed a law that prohibited abortions only after six weeks of pregnancy, while three years prior, Mississippi passed a law preventing abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

The aftermath of these laws has been devastating. People seeking abortions in Texas have been forced to flee to other states—and sometimes other countries—to receive the procedure. Currently, there are eight states that have either banned or are attempting to ban abortions a maximum of 15 weeks after a pregnancy. Here’s a look at where they stand:

Arizona

On March 30, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill that mirrors Mississippi’s, forbidding abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The law also makes no exceptions for cases of rape or incest. “In Arizona, we know there is immeasurable value in every life—including preborn life,” Ducey said. “I believe it is each state’s responsibility to protect them.” The law will go into effect in late June.

She hadn’t even reached the border when she felt her teeth crack. Diana Kyrychyk had just finished getting a root canal in Ukraine the previous day, but she still had four temporary fillings that needed to be replaced and now they were disintegrating. She pulled two bits of broken teeth from her mouth, carefully tucked them into her front jeans pocket, and kept moving. On a crowded road in northwest Ukraine, she was fleeing Russian missiles by foot with two suitcases, her husband, her sister, her three young children, and her 6-month-old niece.

At around five in the morning three days earlier, on Thursday, February 24, Diana was asleep in her apartment in Kyiv when she was awakened by the sound of explosions. She realized that, as unbelievable as it had seemed only days before, the Russian army was dropping deadly mortar shells on the country’s capital.

Diana and her husband, Dima Kyrychyk, packed up their essentials—laptops, documents, winter boots, medication, sandwiches, some toys for the kids. They loaded up the gray Citroën sedan they’d bought in 2013, soon after their wedding. They asked their children—Evangeline, 7, Oskar, 5, and Oliver, 3—to be obedient and attentive because anything could happen, even to their parents, and it was extremely important to listen and follow instructions. 

They drove toward her parents’ house in Volhynia, about 100 kilometers from Lviv and only 20 kilometers from the border with Belarus. A drive through the Rivne region that normally takes six or seven hours took 15. Along the road, they saw tanks and Ukrainian soldiers. They managed to make only two pit stops so the kids could use the bathroom. Their trusty Citroën was fuel-efficient, so they didn’t need to wait in the long lines for gas. 

Diana alternately cried and prayed for God to save them from explosions. “Every minute we were afraid of missiles,” she says. On February 26, two days after the Kyrychyks crossed over it, the bridge they took to leave the region was blown up by Ukrainian troops to prevent the Russian army from getting any closer to Kyiv.  

Sarah Palin made me laugh this morning. 

I was looking at my inbox and spotted a fundraising email from her. The subject heading was, “Did you see my interview?” Had I missed something important? Then again, how important could a Palin interview be? Yes, she’s running for Congress to replace Republican stalwart Rep. Don Young, who died in office last month, having served 49 years in the House as Alaska’s at-large congressional representative. But she is just one of 48 candidates competing for his seat. 

Regarding the question she posed, the email had a link to a segment she did with Fox News host Jesse Watters. I wondered what she might have said, so I clicked on it. But instead of being forwarded to a clip of the interview, in a classic bait-and-switch, I landed on a fundraising page for “Sarah for Alaska,” which notes she was endorsed by Donald Trump. 

I returned to the email—which addressed me as “Patriot”—to see how Palin is pitching herself these days. This is what she said:

A lot of people are asking me why I decided to run. The simple answer is: I’m in it for the right reasons. I’ve got a public servant’s heart, and I’m willing to serve the American people.

Editor’s note: This column by David Corn first appeared in his newsletter, Our Land. But we wanted to make sure as many readers as possible have a chance to see it. Our Land is written by David twice a week and provides behind-the-scenes stories about politics and media; his unvarnished take on the events of the day; film, book, television, podcast, and music recommendations; interactive audience features; and more. 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.

In July 1980, President Jimmy Carter got some bad news. The Justice Department had filed a complaint against his younger brother, Billy, for failing to register as a lobbyist for Libya. Billy had taken two all-expenses-paid trips to Tripoli pursuing business deals there, and he had accepted $220,000 from the Libyans to develop what he called a “propaganda campaign” to promote the foreign policy objectives of dictator Moammar Qaddafi. In response to the Justice Department action, Billy belatedly registered as a foreign agent.

But the scandal persisted, and Carter handled the controversy well. Everyone knew he had little control over the irrepressible Billy, who had long struggled with alcoholism and only that summer sobered up. The president released a statement saying, “I do not believe it is appropriate for a close relative of the president to undertake any assignment on behalf of a foreign government.” The Senate Judiciary Committee, controlled by Democrats, initiated an investigation into what became known as Billygate, and Carter announced the White House would cooperate fully and waive any claims to executive privilege. Carter held a press conference and spent an hour taking questions about the matter, and he went further. He issued an executive order prohibiting relatives of the president from lobbying or interacting with US government officials, and he released a 92-page report that criticized Billy but refuted allegations of wrongdoing. The report even included excerpts of the president’s diary. His reaction was widely regarded as transparent and honest.

Billygate is a good point of reference when assessing what could be called Jaredgate. On April 10, the New York Times revealed that Jared Kushner, son-in-law and adviser of the 45th president, secured a $2 billion investment for his new private equity firm, Affinity Partners, from a fund controlled by the Saudi crown prince—even after advisers to the Saudi fund raised serious objections to the investment. The screening panel for the Saudi fund had cited “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management”; an “unsatisfactory in all aspects” due diligence report; a proposed asset management fee that seemed “excessive”; and “public relations risks.” Yet the panel was overruled by the fund’s board, which is headed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s autocratic de facto leader, who, according to US intelligence, green-lit the operation that resulted in the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

It’s damn hard to not see the $2 billion investment as either a payoff for past services rendered or a preemptive bribe should Trump manage to regain the White House. And it could be both. It’s a wonder that the disclosure of this deal hasn’t created more of a fuss and prompted congressional investigations. (Imagine what Republicans and Fox News would be doing if Hunter Biden received $2 billion from a Ukrainian government leader who was responsible for the gruesome murder of an American resident.) A 10-figure payment to a relative of a former president who is essentially the current (though undeclared) GOP frontrunner in the 2024 contest and possibly the next inhabitant of the White House is a major scandal.

Nurses at Stanford Health Care and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital are ready to exchange thermometers and scrubs for picket signs in a planned strike starting on April 25. To avoid burnout and to continue to offer care during the chaos of the pandemic, the nurses say they need more staff, better mental health resources, better pay, and more paid time-off. More than ninety percent of the 5,000 nurses who belong to the Committee for Recognition of Nursing Achievement (CRONA) union at the two hospitals voted for the strike. 

Rather than cave to their demands, Stanford had another message for them: Be prepared to lose your health care. On April 15, right before the Easter weekend and amid Passover and Ramadan, Stanford Health Care announced that in addition to withholding pay, it would also be suspending health insurance benefits for striking nurses and their families beginning on May 1.

Stanford isn’t outside of its rights to withdraw health care from picketing nurses, but it hasn’t been a common practice during recent hospital strikes. Workers at another one of California’s largest medical providers, Cedars-Sinai, are planning an upcoming strike, and the provider has not threatened to revoke their health care. The workers striking at Cedars-Sinai include nursing assistants, transportation workers, surgical technicians, and others. Workers at 15 Sutter Health locations in California also participated in a one day strike on Monday. 

Stripping nurses of their health care is a “bullying” intimidation tactic that targets some of the most vulnerable nurses, says Kathy Stormberg, vice president of CRONA. Without pay and health benefits, strikers are left to pay for care completely out of pocket through the federal COBRA program. “Targeting those among us with cancer or who are single moms is a really horrible look for a hospital,” she adds, though she said she didn’t think the intimidation tactic will have a significant effect on the number of nurses who plan to strike.

In an online petition urging Stanford Health Care not to cut benefits for the strike, CRONA members expressed their disappointment at the hospitals’ tactics, writing: “Instead of trying to address why 93% of eligible nurses voted to go on strike, the hospitals responded with this cruel move that’s clearly designed to punish nurses and break their resolve.” More than 25,000 people have signed the petition in just two days. 

The Democratic Party has taken steps to ban consultants from participating in anti-union activity, amid reports that a Democratic polling firm created anti-union videos and attended presentations designed to thwart a union drive at an Amazon warehouse, Politico reported today. 

The party plans to add an addendum to contracts between its political committees and their consultants. According to Politico, the provision would bar consultants from helping clients “persuade employees or workers to not form or join a union or otherwise discourage employees or workers from unionizing.” It would also prevent consultants from helping clients pass “legislation, ballot measures or other public policies” opposed by the labor movement or from working to defeat legislation that the labor movement supports. 

Last month, CNBC reported that Amazon had hired Global Strategy Group, an influential Democratic firm, to help fight unionization efforts at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island and at three other facilities. The firm reportedly created anti-union materials that were used as part of the company’s aggressive anti-union push. In a stunning win, workers at the JFK8 warehouse voted to unionize by a wide margin. 

After the CNBC report emerged, several large unions, including the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union, said that they would not work with GSG going forward. AFT President Randi Weingarten tweeted that GSG’s actions were “really really disgusting.” 

GSG later apologized for the role it played in the union drive, telling CNBC that “while there have been factual inaccuracies in recent reports about our work for Amazon, being involved in any way was a mistake, we have resigned that work, and we are deeply sorry.”

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

Executives from six major oil and gas companies testified during a congressional hearing this past week as gasoline prices neared record highs and a calamitous report on the urgency of fighting climate change was released.

The hearing before a House Committee on Energy and Commerce subcommittee focused on whether the industry is prioritizing profits over increased domestic production, and lawmakers from both parties called on industry executives to get to work and boost output in order to provide relief at the pump. It was also, however, a rare opportunity for lawmakers to press major oil executives on what they are doing to combat climate change, which their industry has played an outsized role in driving.

This week, a new United Nations report warned that global greenhouse gas emissions must peak no later than three years from now, then be slashed nearly in half by 2030 in order to stave off the worst effects of climate change.

But that’s nothing to worry about, according to Republicans. Instead, two GOP members of the oversight and investigation subcommittee urged industry leaders to stop catering to environmentalists and instead double down on the very energy sources that have put the world on a path toward catastrophic and irreversible climatic change.

Nearly three years ago, a University of Kansas chemistry professor named Feng “Franklin” Tao was arrested and accused of concealing his work for a Chinese university. His arrest “disrupted the transfer of American intellectual property to China,” then-Assistant US Attorney Tony Mattivi would tell the New Yorker. It also inaugurated a new stage in the China Initiative, a Trump-era Justice Department program aimed at fighting Chinese espionage. Tao became the first academic charged under that program.

The Biden administration ended the China Initiative in February after years of heated criticism from academics and Asian American advocates, who have decried the program as overzealous and far-removed from its original national security goals. But Tao’s case lived on, trudging its way through federal court in Kansas City even as nine other scholars of Asian descent had their China Initiative cases dropped by prosecutors or dismissed by federal judges. This week, he was convicted on four charges of wire fraud and making false statements.

“While we are deeply disappointed with the jury’s verdict, we believe it was so clearly against the weight of the evidence we are convinced that it will not stand,” Tao’s attorney Peter Zeidenberg said in a statement. The judge in the case did not immediately set a date for sentencing. 

While billed as a broad counter-espionage program, the bulk of China Initiative cases in the past two years involved research integrity issues like lying on a grant application, not spying or theft. During Tao’s trial, the judge barred mention of the China Initiative and the controversy surrounding the program, even as DOJ acknowledged its flaws publicly. “By grouping cases under the China Initiative rubric,” DOJ official Matthew Olsen said in February, “we helped give rise to a harmful perception that the department applies a lower standard to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct related to that country or that we in some way view people with racial, ethnic or familial ties to China differently.”

That “harmful perception” stems from the department’s own caseload. Nearly 90 percent of the people charged under the China Initiative were of Asian descent, according to data compiled by the MIT Technology Review. Meanwhile, the only high-profile academic in that span to be convicted was Harvard chemist Charles Lieber, who is white. (His attorneys have since argued for a new trial.)

On Thursday, Alabama legislators approved one of the most draconian anti-trans bills in the country seeking to criminalize gender-affirming care for transgender youth. 

The bill comes amid a wave of anti-trans legislation that has swept conservative states from Arizona to Texas, prompting widespread alarm among medical experts and the transgender community. In February, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott urged the Department of Family and Protective Services to reclassify gender-affirming care as child abuse, leading it to initiate investigations into parents with transgender children. (The directive was later temporarily enjoined by a state court.) 

But even at a time of rising anti-trans sentiment, the Alabama bill stands out as extreme. If Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signs it into law, medical practitioners who provide hormone treatment, puberty blockers, and gender reassignment surgery to minors would be threatened with a felony charge carrying up to a decade in prison. 

The bill was one among a bevy that the Alabama legislature approved yesterday, designed to punish queer youth and the people who support them. Alabama lawmakers also voted to advance legislation that forces trans students to use locker rooms and restrooms for the sex they were assigned at birth. An amendment to that bill added language that resembles Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, restricting discussions of gender and sexuality from kindergarten through fifth grade.  

My colleague Samantha Michaels spoke to David Fuller, a Republican-voting veteran police sergeant in Gadsden, Alabama, for a heart-wrenching story we published last month. Fuller’s trans daughter came out when she was 16. He told Michaels: 

In 2018, my partner and I—she is Ukrainian, I am American—put together a Google spreadsheet called “Home – Kyiv.” I was due to finish a mission with a humanitarian organization in western Africa and planned to return to Ukraine, where I had worked from 2014 to 2016, and where my partner lives. She had left her home in Donetsk in 2017 with her daughter and mother and was ready to build a life in a new place. After several trips to scout out neighborhoods in Kyiv and its suburbs during my leave visits, we landed on what felt like a perfect option: Irpin, a town of 60,000, 20 minutes from the Kyiv metro, bustling with young families and energy.

Good fortune seemed to be with us as the second house we visited ticked all our boxes: big yard, surrounded by pine trees, close to a park and grocery stores, a short walk to the woods, and space for our family to grow. Two years later, we had finished remodeling, put in raised beds to grow vegetables, bought bicycles, found a dog-walking group, and converted a spare bedroom into a nursery. In the summer of 2021, we welcomed a baby girl.

The life we built in Irpin is now far away.

On February 14, we packed the roof box of our car and made a nine-hour drive from Irpin to western Ukraine, heeding increasingly urgent warnings from the US government of an imminent attack. For 10 days, we watched and waited, hoping for the best and coping with the feeling of shame that we weren’t home, standing in solidarity with our neighbors and friends in the face of Russian threats. On February 24, I awoke in the dark, flicked on my phone, and was met with a cascade of updates—Russian Federation missiles had struck locations across Ukraine. Our discussion about what to do was brief. My wife, my mother-in-law, and my stepdaughter had already lived through war once. We re-packed the car and made plans to head to the Romanian border the following day. That evening I watched our infant daughter playing with her toys on a colorful baby mat we had squeezed into the roof box and thought about what her life would look like and what the word “refugee” would come to mean to her.

The path of those forced to flee their homes by conflict or disaster is one I had come to know through my work. In 2014, I began managing humanitarian projects in eastern Ukraine for those displaced by the Russian annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas region. My work later took me to Greece, northeast Nigeria, Mali, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and to support responses in Nepal, Indonesia, Timor Leste, and Tonga. Humanitarian work at its best is grounded in nuanced assessments of material and nonmaterial needs, and a sincere effort to understand the plight of those we serve, but it is also a professionalized endeavor of project proposals, budgets, databases to be managed, coordination meetings, and compliance issues. All of this can reduce the people we serve to “beneficiaries”—objects counted in spreadsheets and reports based on their demographics. Like most of my colleagues, I have always strived to be the most empathetic and perceptive listener possible when interacting with people who have lived through conflict. But my understanding had always been limited by my own capacity to listen and imagine.

New York Attorney General Letitia James appears to be at the end of her rope with Donald Trump’s legal delay tactics, asking a judge on Thursday to hold the former president in civil contempt of court and fine him $10,000 a day for his failure to turn over documents in response to a subpoena. The judge in the case, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, has already ruled that Trump must turn over the documents, setting an original deadline of March 3. James’ office agreed to wait until March 31 after Trump requested more time, but in Thursday’s filing she said that deadline has come and gone without the Trump Organization producing anything but arguments about why it won’t comply.

James is pursuing a civil investigation into the Trump Organization’s finances and probing whether the former president may have committed bank, insurance, or tax fraud by improperly manipulating the value of various assets to receive more favorable treatment from lenders, insurance companies, and tax assessors. The investigation has been ongoing since at least 2019. The Trump Organization cooperated initially, but as the 2020 election approached, the company and members of Trump’s immediate family became increasingly combative. For the last year, James has been battling the Trumps to produce more documents and to force Trump, along with Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., to sit for depositions. James’ investigators have already deposed Eric Trump and several top Trump executives. 

Last month, Engoron ruled that the Trumps must sit for the depositions, which will be conducted under oath, but allowed the family to appeal his ruling. The Trumps did not, however, appeal the part of his ruling involving turning over documents. 

James has already obtained a large cache of Trump’s financial records from his former accounting firm Mazars, which helped prepare statements of financial condition to provide to lenders and insurance companies so they could assess the Trump Organization’s financial health. Mazars has since disavowed those statements, saying they should not be relied upon. James has also disclosed in court filings that she has evidence showing the Trump Organization used wildly incorrect valuations for various properties in different situations. For example, the Trump Organization created statements that claimed that the Trump’s triplex in Trump Tower was worth as much as $327 million, a valuation premised on the contention that the apartment was 30,000 square feet. But the apartment is allegedly nowhere near that size—James says that former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg testified that it was only about 10,000 square feet and that the $327 million evaluation was inflated by “give or take” $200 million.

In last month’s ruling Engoron noted that there is “copious evidence” of fraud, allowing the case to continue after the Trumps argued James’ investigation was politically motivated.

The Senate voted 53–47 today to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson as President Joe Biden’s first Supreme Court nominee. Only three Republicans joined all of the Senate Democrats in voting to confirm the court’s first Black female justice.

Jackson, 51, will be the first justice to join the court with any experience as a defense attorney since the retirement of the legendary Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1991. A mother of two daughters, she brings to the court extensive experience as a federal trial court judge, having served for eight years on the US District Court for DC before Biden nominated her last year for a seat on the DC Circuit. Jackson will join fellow Harvard Law graduates Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Chief Justice John Roberts on the court. She brings more legal experience to the job than four other justices currently on the court at the time of their nominations.

Republicans had tried to paint Jackson as soft on crime and attacked her for representing terrorism suspects detained indefinitely without trial at the Guantánamo Bay naval base. They used much of their time during her confirmation hearing to pepper her with questions unrelated to the law, but ones that tapped into hot-button issues among the GOP party base. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) suggested that Jackson was the pick of “radical leftist groups” and that she was the “most extreme” nominee Biden could have picked, echoing a campaign by right-wing dark money groups to complain that left-wing dark money groups were involved with Jackson’s selection and promotion. Cruz even quizzed her about critical race theory, referring to a book that was used at a Washington private school and asking her if she thought “babies are racist.” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), diving into anti-trans politics, asked her, “What is a woman?”

Cruz had joined Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in pandering to their party’s QAnon conspiracy theory wing by falsely alleging that Jackson had been soft on child pornographers during her time as a federal trial court judge. The systematic GOP red-meat attacks depressed support for Jackson among Republicans, nearly 60 percent of whom had told pollsters before Biden nominated her that she was qualified for the high court. But after the confirmation hearing, that fell to around 30 percent.

Overall, after watching her graceful performance under pressure, Americans were not happy with the Republican attacks on Jackson, who proved to be anything but a fiery leftist radical. A Quinnipiac poll indicated that only 27 percent of respondents approved of the way Republicans had treated her. And in the end, Republicans never had the votes to block her nomination as long as every Democrat voted in her favor. (Wildcard West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin said early on he would support Jackson.) The only open question during the confirmation process was whether any Republicans might cross the aisle. Initially, only Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who had come under intense fire for her vote in favor of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, as well as Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski seemed on board to support Jackson.

Late in the 2020 presidential campaign, trailing in the polls, Donald Trump and his allies worked to make a campaign issue out of a trove of files on a laptop that his opponent’s son, Hunter Biden, had apparently abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. The effort to publicize compromising emails, images, and videos from the device involved prominent Trump confidants including Rudy Giuliani and Steven Bannon. But it also featured an unexpected player: Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese tycoon who was working with Bannon to build a small empire of Chinese-language media outlets, nonprofits, and other ventures.

Mother Jones obtained scores of WhatsApp audio messages Guo sent to supporters, along with underlying material from Biden’s hard drive that Guo’s assistant distributed at his behest. Previous reports have noted the role of Guo allies and companies in publicizing sex tapes and other material involving Hunter Biden. But the WhatsApp messages, and sources who were involved in the effort, reveal that Guo—who has been accused in lawsuits of fraud and rape and of secretly acting as an agent for the Chinese Communist Party—played a larger role than previously known in ensuring that explicit images and videos from the laptop appeared online, and in spreading lies about them. (Guo has denied the allegations made in the lawsuits against him.)

Guo stage-managed an October 2020 effort to disseminate videos and pictures showing Hunter Biden engaged in sex acts and using drugs. After Giuliani, then President Trump’s personal lawyer, gave him material from Hunter Biden’s laptop, Guo issued detailed instructions to two WhatsApp groups that included dozens of Guo’s supporters. Guo directed these supporters to package, post, and promote hundreds of explicit images and other material about Biden on websites Guo controlled, people involved in the effort said.

The material Guo publicized seems to be real, but he instructed supporters to couple it with false claims that it came from Chinese sources, and that the Chinese government had used it to obtain leverage over Hunter Biden and his father, Joe Biden. “We have to express…The Chinese Communist Party used these to threaten Hunter and [Joe] Biden,” Guo told supporters in an October 24, 2020, message. (Mother Jones is quoting English translations of messages that were originally in Chinese. Multiple people independently verified the translations.)

People who helped Guo publish the material online said that it quickly became clear to them that he was lying about China’s role. “They tried to link the Biden family to the [Chinese Communist Party],” said a person involved in the effort, who shared Guo’s WhatsApp messages with Mother Jones and requested anonymity. “They wanted to help Trump win.”

The United States is at risk of running out of money to fight Covid. Without additional funds from Congress, the White House warned last month, the country will see immediate consequences. Additional, free booster doses for all Americans won’t be possible. Medical providers won’t be reimbursed for treating, testing, or vaccinating uninsured patients. And the federal government won’t have enough cash to make new purchases of treatments like monoclonal antibodies or oral antiviral pills.

Much of the media attention around this possible crisis has focused on these immediate effects—some of which we’re already starting to feel. But perhaps equally concerning, experts say, is how a lack of money may hinder our ability to monitor possible future Covid outbreaks. As I wrote back in December, the United States managed to massively expand its genomic surveillance efforts—that is, our system for tracking new variants—over the course of 2021, in large part due to a boost in federal funds, around the tune of $2 billion. Over the course of the year, the country’s labs went from sequencing a few thousand genomes per week to nearly 100,000 per week by late November. And while Covid cases have since dropped dramatically, the country still sequences tens of thousands of samples per week—critical work that allows scientists to monitor which variants are circulating in the country.

But if additional funding disappears, experts say, so may a significant amount of that data, leaving us unprepared to detect and respond to the virus’ evolution. In a March 15 letter to Congress, Biden administration officials said that genomic surveillance efforts may be on the chopping block. “With reduced capability to perform adequate surveillance, the country will be prone to being ‘blindsided’ by future variants,” the letter states. The administration will be forced to “wind down” its surveillance programs, it reads, “leaving us less able to detect the next variant.” Making matters worse, the UK and Denmark, which until now have led the world with their variant-tracking efforts and have served as a sort of early warning signal to the US and other countries, are also making cuts to their programs, prompting concern from health experts.

There are signs that Congress is starting to listen: This week, the Senate unveiled a $10 billion Covid aid bill—less than half of what the White House initially requested—to continue testing, distributing vaccines, and purchasing therapeutics. But it’s unclear how much of that funding, if passed, will specifically go to genomic surveillance efforts and also how long the Covid cash would last. And the bill still needs to overcome significant political hurdles in the Senate and be approved by the House. (The White House and CDC did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the details of the bill.)

With funding up in the air, I reached out to Joseph Fauver, a genomic epidemiologist at the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, which is working with the state to track variants, to get a better sense of what the lack of money from Congress may mean for Covid surveillance. It could be “a huge problem,” he emailed back immediately. Below is a lightly edited and condensed version of our phone conversation earlier this week.

When Donald Trump announced he planned to launch his own social media platform—and eventually his own streaming and web-hosting MAGA-verse—his allies speculated it could launch him into another stratosphere of messaging power and wealth. The idea was to wed the former president’s new venture to a so-called “SPAC” (a Special Purpose Acquisition Company)—a publicly-traded empty shell of a corporation that would allow Trump to turn his digital empire into a virtual money machine.

It hasn’t worked out that way.

Since its launch in February, TruthSocial has seemed far more like vaporware than a serious competitor to Twitter or Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of users apparently remain on the waiting list to get in—despite the fact that last week it was reported that new downloads of the platform had fallen 93 percent from its launch, to just 60,000 per week. Hardly anyone wants to get on TruthSocial, and many of those who do want to apparently can’t. When they do get on, there’s very little content. Trump himself has “truthed” just once, back in February, in a short message promising he’d be there more often.

Over the weekend, Reuters reported the platform’s woes extend beyond its users and content—two top executives, who the news service reported were largely responsible for the technical underpinnings of the platform, have quit. And as anemic as the downloads are said to be, a version of TruthSocial isn’t even available yet for Android phones, which account for as many as 72 percent of smart phones worldwide, and 40 percent of smart phones in America.

Former congressman Devin Nunes—a Trump ally who was extraordinarily sensitive about people saying things he didn’t like on social media, to the point where he sued an anonymous Twitter user pretending to be a cow—promised the hiccups of the original rollout would be solved by March 31. But that didn’t happen.

This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. Get their investigations emailed to you directly here.

When conservative legal provocateur Jonathan Mitchell published his 2018 law review article laying the groundwork for Texas to ban most abortions, some of the ideas he outlined were so far-fetched that they read more like thought experiments than legitimate legal theories. One was that state legislatures could give private individuals, rather than government agencies, the right to enforce abortion restrictions and other controversial statutes—a “bounty hunter”-type mechanism he claimed could make such laws all but impossible to challenge through the usual legal processes.

Another of Mitchell’s theories was even more radical: that courts don’t have the power to strike down old laws they think are unconstitutional—for example, Texas statutes first enacted in the 1850s that made it a crime to help “procure” an abortion or furnish “the means” for it. Judges can only stop those laws from being enforced, he claimed. Unless legislators actually repeal them, America’s old laws never really die; instead, they linger in a kind of limbo, automatically springing back to life if a future court issues a new, contrary ruling. They can even be enforced retroactively, he argued. 

At first, Mitchell’s ideas generated little attention outside conservative circles, where some of his own ideological allies were incredulous at the notion that overturned laws might rise from the grave like zombies and be used retroactively to lay waste to the foundations of contemporary American society in a legal version of “The Walking Dead.” The University of Chicago’s Richard Epstein, Mitchell’s former teacher and one of the most eminent legal scholars on the right, told a Federalist Society panel in 2018, “Jonathan always puts the fear of God in me, because God forbid he should be right on this particular question.” Epstein added, “I think most people would say that this is an enormously dangerous-type situation.” 

Undeterred, Mitchell worked with the Texas legislature to enshrine his theories in Texas Senate Bill 8, also known as the Texas Heartbeat Act. The measure not only bans abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, but it also takes the extraordinary step of giving private citizens the right to sue anyone who helps someone obtain one.