Annoyed with time changes in the fall and spring? So is President-elect Donald Trump. On Friday, Trump posted on Truth Social that the “Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time” because it is “inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”

Ending daylight saving time would also not be that original—two thirds of countries do not have it. Americans do seem to be split on the issue. In a 2019 poll, 7 out of 10 Americans said they did not like the biannual switches, but 4 in 10 wanted a fixed standard time and 3 in 10 wanted daylight saving time.

Even putting aside the economic argument for ending daylight saving time, some research suggests that the practice of putting the clock one hour ahead in the spring can negatively impact peoples’ mental health. When our internal clock is thrown off and we get less sleep, our mood can be impacted, leading us to feel less focused and potentially more depressed. This lack of focus can also be deadly—a February 2020 study that looked at two decades’ worth of traffic accidents found that there was a 6 percent increase in the risk of fatal traffic accidents in the week following daylight saving time in the United States.

In October 2020, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a professional society that represents medical specialists who focus on sleep medicine, even issued a statement in support of ending daylight saving time in favor of a fixed year-round schedule:

Every summer, 50 of the nation’s best and brightest teenage girls gather in Mobile, Alabama, to embark on two of the most intense weeks of their lives. Everybody wants the same thing: to walk away with a $40,000 college scholarship and the title of Distinguished Young Woman of America.

Reporter Shima Oliaee competed for Nevada when she was a teenager, and was invited back as a judge more than 20 years later. Oliaee accepted, and recorded the experience for a six-part audio series called The Competition.

In the final days of the competition, there was news from Washington that had big implications for women across the nation: Roe v. Wade had fallen. 

The girls are faced with a tough decision: Do they speak up for their political beliefs or stay focused on winning the money? And what might this mean for their futures—and their friendships?

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

In the landscape of international finance for fossil fuels, some of the most important players are obscure government bodies known as “export credit agencies.” These agencies provide funding to companies seeking to build large and risky infrastructure projects, often in developing countries. In return, the developers of those projects purchase construction materials or other goods from the country of the agency. For instance, an oil pipeline company might take a loan from a German export credit agency in exchange for using German steel in the pipeline.

Export credit agencies have become some of the world’s largest public funding sources for energy infrastructure, providing far more money than multilateral institutions like the World Bank, while avoiding much public scrutiny. 

Now, as Joe Biden’s administration winds to a close, officials are working with international partners to push forward an agreement that would see export credit agencies pull back almost all funding for oil and gas projects, a measure the administration had balked on supporting before Donald Trump’s reelection.

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

Shortly after he was reelected last month, Donald Trump announced an economic gambit that was aggressive even by his standards. He vowed that, on the first day of his second term, he would slap 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, and boost those already placed on Chinese products by another 10 percent. 

The move set off a frenzy of pushback. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even flew to the president-elect’s Florida resort to make his case. Economists say the potential levies threaten to upend global trade—including green technologies, many of which are manufactured in China. The moves would cause price spikes for everything from electric vehicles and heat pumps to solar panels. 

“Typically with tariffs, we’ve seen [companies] pass them along to the consumer,” said Corey Cantor, electric vehicles analyst at Bloomberg NEF. Ansgar Baums, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan foreign policy think tank Stimson Center, said retaliatory moves from the three targeted countries would only make things worse. “It will drive up consumer costs and hurt those who cannot afford it.”

In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters, which claims a supposed Deep State has been plotting against Donald Trump for years, Kash Patel, whom Trump has tapped to replace Chris Wray as FBI director, recounts his three-year stint as a mid-level attorney at the Justice Department. For him, this gig was apparently a radical learning experience. During that time, Patel writes, he came to see that the top leaders of the government were “political gangsters, frauds, and hypocrites.” Yet in the book and in interviews, Patel has embellished his own work at the department.

Patel, previously a public defender in Miami, was a lawyer at the Justice Department’s counterterrorism section from late 2013 until after the 2016 election. In his book, he calls it “a dream job for a young and ambitious lawyer,” and he states that he played a key role in the Benghazi case, in which the FBI and the Justice Department pursued the culprits responsible for the September 11, 2012, attack on a US diplomatic compound in Libya that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. “I was leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice in Washington, DC,” Patel writes.

Several FBI and Justice Department officials who worked the Benghazi case say this description is an exaggeration. Asked about Patel’s characterization, a former FBI special agent who was on that investigation for years exclaimed, “Oh my god, no. Not on that case. Not on Benghazi.”

“Kash has claimed he made certain decisions on what crimes should have been charged and should not have been. He did not make those decisions. He had no major role.”

Last week, Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Kevin Kiley (R-Calif) introduced federal anti-SLAPP legislation, in a bid to protect journalists, whistleblowers, and individual internet users from those who use lawsuits as an intimidation tactic.

SLAPP suits—formally, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation—are designed to prevent people from exercising their free speech. A common example is a person suing a media outlet after unfavorable coverage—attempting to bankrupt journalists from lawyers’ fees, even if, in the end, the outlet wins the case. Such suits are already illegal in 34 states. But, on the federal level, there’s no such legislation. 

Raskin and Kiley’s bill, the “Free Speech Protection Act,” would allow people being sued over speech acts to file a special motion to dismiss by classifying a lawsuit as a SLAPP. The party who filed the SLAPP suit would then be required to pay the respondent’s legal fees. 

There is a rush to implement the bill before the next presidency. Trump and his companies have sued a broad range of media companies for defamation, ranging from the New York Times to a local Wisconsin local TV station. Most recently, Trump filed a lawsuit against CBS over the editing of  Kamala Harris’ “60 Minutes” interview, asserting that the interview’s presentation was “consumer fraud.” (CBS is moving to get that lawsuit thrown out before Trump assumes the presidency.)

Pete Hegseth, the Fox News anchor whom Donald Trump has tapped to be his defense secretary, has come under intense scrutiny for his mistreatment of women, including an allegation of rape. One of his critics was, at one time, his own mother.

“That is the ugly truth.”

In 2018, Penelope Hegseth wrote her son an email in which she laid into him for poor behavior and disrespect toward women. “You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” she wrote in the letter, obtained by the New York Times. 

Hegseth chastised her son for how he treated his wife, Samantha, in the divorce proceedings that prompted her to send her April 2018 email. She concluded it by writing, “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself…”

Democrats will have the unenviable task of pushing back against a second Trump administration as the minority party across Washington. And in the House of Representatives, some Democrats are openly wondering whether the septuagenarian leader of their caucus on the Judiciary Committee is up to the task.

According to the New York Times, a movement is afoot to force 77-year old Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a member from New York since 1992, to step aside and let a younger, more energetic opponent of Donald Trump take charge. If the motif sounds familiar, it may be because the Democrats are generally led by aging long-timers, from President Joe Biden in the White House to committee chairs like Nadler. Now, they must reckon with whether loyalty to these elder statesmen is a winning strategy.

The battle raises the question of how far Democrats will go to shake up their own ranks.

Two years ago, Nancy Pelosi, then 82, stepped down as leader of the House Democrats. Today, she is reportedly one voice urging a changing of the guard on the Judiciary Committee. According to the Times, Pelosi has encouraged Rep. Jamie Raskin, who first won his Maryland seat in 2o16, to challenge Nadler for the job of ranking member on the committee.

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

On Monday, Senator Debbie Stabenow, a longtime champion of programs that support farmers and increase access to nutritious foods, introduced a new version of the farm bill, a key piece of legislation typically renewed every five years that governs much of how the agricultural industry in the US operates. 

Stabenow, who is retiring next month after representing Michigan in the Senate for 24 years, has staked her career on her vision for a robust, progressive farm bill, one that, among other things, paves the way for farmers to endure the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

The text of her bill comes almost two months after the 2018 farm bill, which initially expired last year and was revived thanks to a one-year extension, expired for a second time on September 30. And it comes mere weeks before the end of the year, when funding for several programs included in the farm bill will run out. 

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

When Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January 2023, he inherited environmental protection agencies in shambles and deforestation at a 15-year high. His predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, had dismantled regulations and gutted institutions tasked with enforcing environmental laws. Lula set out to reverse these policies and to put Brazil on a path to end deforestation by 2030. 

Environmental protection agencies have been allowed to resume their work. Between January and November of 2023, the government issued 40 percent more infractions against illegal deforestation in the Amazon when compared to the same period in 2022, when Bolsonaro was still in office. Lula’s government has confiscated and destroyed heavy equipment used by illegal loggers and miners, and placed embargoes on production on illegally cleared land. Lula also reestablished the Amazon Fund, an international pool of money used to support conservation efforts in the rainforest. Just this week, at the G20 Summit, outgoing US President Joe Biden pledged $50 million to the fund.  

Indeed, almost two years into Lula’s administration, the upward trend in deforestation has been reversed. In 2023, deforestation rates fell by 62 percent in the Amazon and 12 percent in Brazil overall (though deforestation in the Cerrado, Brazil’s tropical savannas, increased). So far in 2024, deforestation in the Amazon has fallen by another 32 percent.      

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

At an upscale sushi bar in New York last week, a smattering of media and policy types chowed down on a menu of sushi rolls, Peking duck tapas, and mushroom salad. But what made this menu unusual was the one ingredient that ran through the dishes—foie gras made from quail cells brewed in a bioreactor. The event, catered by the sushi chef Masa Takayama, was a launch party for Australian cultivated meat firm Vow, which will sell its foie gras at a handful of restaurants in Singapore and Hong Kong.

The meal was decadent—one course featured a mountain of black truffle—but that was mostly the point. Vow and its CEO, George Peppou, are angling cultivated meat as a luxury product—an unusual positioning for an industry where many founders are motivated by animal welfare and going toe-to-toe with mass-produced meat. But while growing meat in the lab still remains eye-wateringly expensive, Peppou is trying to turn the technology’s Achilles’ heel into his advantage.

“I feel like the obituary has already been written for our industry,” he says. “But just because Californians can’t do something doesn’t mean something can’t be done.”

In recent days, an invitation from people affiliated with American Values 2024, a super-PAC that supported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign, has been sent to people in his sphere offering “cocktails and dinner” with Kennedy at Mar-a-Lago.

The invitation refers to Kennedy as “incoming secretary, Health & Human services,” although Kennedy has not yet been formally nominated, let alone confirmed by the Senate for that position.

“These donors are getting special access to someone who’s trying to serve the public.”

The price of enjoying Kennedy’s company at the fundraiser, set to take place on the Trump-owned club’s Lakeview Terrace, is $25,000 each, or $40,000 for a couple. Experts on federal election law say that such a bald exchange—a large donation in exchange for access to a powerful incoming government official—is technically legal, but ethically ill-advised. 

When Gwen Williams’ mother was dying, taking her to an in-person appointment to get more medicine seemed impossible. So Williams made a telehealth appointment with the doctor—a video call. It was that easy.

“Her comfort was paramount,” Williams, who lives in Minnesota, recounts. “My mother wasn’t conscious during the visit, but [the doctor] was able to see her and was able to get the hospice medications and everything refilled.” 

Williams’ mother was on Medicare, as is she. Since 2020, Medicare has covered a wide range of remote medical services, some in critical situations like theirs, and others for routine care. Around one in four telehealth appointments are made by people on Medicare.

Around one in four telehealth appointments are made by people on Medicare.

Weekend Fox News host Pete Hegseth has already been an exceedingly controversial choice as Donald Trump’s pick for his Secretary of Defense. Hegseth and the Trump camp have spent recent days pushing back against two simultaneous controversies: allegations that Hegseth has “extremist” tattoos, as some critics have charged, and news broken by Vanity Fair on Thursday that Hegseth was previously investigated by police in California over a sexual misconduct claim. Hegseth has denied the allegations and no charges were ever filed against him. 

Hegseth is a veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lately, media scrutiny has focused on his tattoos, one of which depicts a Jerusalem cross, a Christian symbol first popularized during the Crusades, and one that reads “Deus Vult” (“God wills it” in Latin), which refers to divine providence. A slogan for Catholics during the First Crusade, this phrase has more recently been chanted by white supremacists and co-opted by the far right. 

Hegseth confirmed in a November interview with a podcaster that he was one of 12 National Guard members removed from working at Joe Biden’s inauguration after vetting by the FBI and U.S. military, adding: “I was deemed an extremist because of a tattoo by my National Guard unit in Washington, D.C., and my orders were revoked to guard the Biden inauguration.” A fellow National Guardsmen, DeRicko Gaither, confirmed to CBS that he’d reported Hegseth as being a possible “insider threat” due to the Deus Vult tattoo.  

The other controversy is fresh: journalist Gabriel Sherman reported on Thursday that Hegseth was investigated by Monterey Park police in 2017 over an allegation of sexual misconduct. He was not arrested or charged with a crime. 

On Thursday afternoon, a federal bankruptcy judge in Texas ordered an evidentiary hearing to review the auction process that resulted in Infowars being sold to satire site the Onion, saying he wanted to ensure the “process and transparency” of the sale. Infowars’ founder, the conspiracy mega-entrepreneur Alex Jones, has unsurprisingly declared that the auction process was “rigged” and vowed that the review process will return the site to him, while the Onion’s CEO told Mother Jones and other news outlets that the sale is proceeding. For reasons that no one has yet explained, attorneys for X, formerly known as Twitter, the social media giant now owned by Elon Musk, entered an appearance during the hearing and asked to be included on any future communications about the case.

“I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this,” Jones said during a live broadcast on X. After Infowars was seized and the site shut down, Jones promptly began operating under the name and branding of a new venture, dubbed the Alex Jones Network, which streams on X. Jones noted that lawyers for X were present at the hearing, adding, somewhat mysteriously, “The cavalry is here. Trump is pissed.” (He later elaborated that “Trump knows I’m one of his biggest defenders.”)

“I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this,” Jones said.

An attorney who entered an appearance for X didn’t respond to a request for comment; nor did X’s press office. Onion CEO Ben Collins, previously a journalist at NBC News covering disinformation, told Mother Jones on Friday morning, “We won the bid. The idea that he was just going to walk away from this gracefully without doing this sort of thing is funny in itself.” In a statement reprinted by Variety and other outlets, Collins said that the sale is “currently underway, pending standard processes.” Collins had said previously that the plan was to relaunch Infowars as a satirized version of itself in January.

As Donald Trump prepares to enter the White House for a second term, the reasons people voted him into office are becoming more clear. 

For Micki Witthoeft, it’s cause for celebration. Her daughter, Ashli Babitt, was shot and killed by a police officer after storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Today, Witthoeft is confident Trump will stand by his word and pardon everyone involved. 

“He said his administration’s going to be one on ‘promises made and promises kept,’ ” she said. “I felt like he was talking right to me.”

But it’s not the same sentiment for all voters. This week, the Reveal team looks at the many contradictions behind Trump’s victory, with stories from hosts Hanna Rosin and Lauren Ober of the new podcast from The Atlantic, We Live Here Now; Mother Jones reporter Tim Murphy; and Reveal producer Najib Aminy. The show delves into January 6ers seeking pardons, “messy middle” voters who split their ballots, and members of the Uncommitted movement who wouldn’t vote for Kamala Harris despite being opposed to Trump.

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

Some of the votes Americans cast on Tuesday that may have mattered most for the climate were quite a bit down-ballot from the presidential ticket: A handful of states held elections for the commissions that regulate utilities, and thereby exercise direct control over what sort of energy mix will fuel the coming years’ expected growth in electricity demand. In three closely watched races around the country—the utility commissions in Arizona, Montana, and Louisiana—Republican candidates either won or are in the lead. While they generally pitched themselves to voters as market-friendly, favoring an all-of-the-above approach to energy, clean energy advocates interviewed by Grist cast these candidates as deferential to the power companies they aspired to regulate.

Arizona is, in a word, sunny. Its geography makes it “the famously obvious place to build solar,” said Caroline Spears, executive director of Climate Cabinet, a nonprofit that works to get clean energy advocates elected. But its utilities have built just a sliver of the potential solar energy that there is room for in the state—and the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates the state’s investor-owned utilities, is partly to blame for that. That commission’s most recent goal for renewable energy, set in 2007, was an unambitious 15 percent to be reached by 2025. “Their goals are worse than where Texas currently is and where Iowa currently is on clean energy,” Spears said. What’s more, the current slate of commissioners is in the process of considering whether to ditch that goal altogether.

Louisiana’s Public Service Commission is described as “one of the most reviled utilities in the country by its customers.”

Donald Trump has made it clear that there are groups he’d like to punish.

Much attention has been paid to the president-elect’s planned crusades for his next term against immigrants and transgender people. But less discussed has been another group on the list: protesters. Building off the bipartisan crackdown on anti-war student dissent last year, Trump has made clear he hopes to discipline, and potentially prosecute, civil disobedience with increased force.

In May, he promised a group of donors that “any student that protests, I [will] throw them out of the country.” Trump hoped this would serve as a warning. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” he continued. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.” 

This is more than just bluster. Reuters reported that sources said Trump hopes to follow through on the promise on day one of his administration, by signing an executive order prioritizing deporting “international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas.” 

Public health experts, physicians, and scientists responded with fury and disgust to the news that President-elect Donald Trump will nominate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the secretary of health and human services. If Kennedy—who has also promoted dangerous and ludicrous ideas about fluoride, 5G technology, and the causes of HIV/AIDS, among innumerable other pseudoscientific claims—assumes the position, “the damage he could do is near infinite,” warns Dr. Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist.

“He will do great harm—generational harm.”

The scope of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is immense: It sits over 13 other agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Indian Health Service.

Kennedy, an environmental attorney by training with no background or credentials in medical or public health, is the founder of the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense. He became one of the loudest voices in the anti-vaccine movement when he began falsely claiming nearly 20 years ago that the shots are tied to autism.

In the days before the election, when too many stories about deadlocked polls and undecided voters and the MAGAfication of young men began to wear on my soul, I turned to TikTok to see what women were thinking. Soon enough I was swimming in a sea of female excitement and angst. I watched videos of ordinary women of all ages and races—in deep blue districts and deep red ones—describing what this election meant to them. Women who had just voted, sitting in their cars and sobbing about what it would mean to elect the first female president, what it would mean to defeat a vitriolically sexist candidate who’s been found liable for sexually assaulting one woman and who stands accused by dozens more, whose campaign gleefully demeaned women as “trash” and “childless cat ladies.” What it would mean to elect someone who’d spent the last three months, and the two years before that, connecting reproductive freedom to economic concerns. What it would mean to elect someone taking the stress of caring for both kids and parents seriously, who recognizes the housing crisis is hurting all but the richest, who has more than a concept of a plan for how to address such problems.

I watched one young woman driving 10 hours to her home state because her absentee ballot never arrived, muttering “10 and 2, 10 and 2” as she stared out at the road ahead. I watched women flying across the country to vote. I watched women take part in the “They both reached for the gun” Chicago meme as they talked about canceling out the vote of their Trump-supporting father, brother, or husband. Or bragging on husbands or dads whose vote they didn’t have to cancel. One who said she wouldn’t have to cancel out her husband’s vote because he’d forget to do it if she didn’t remind him.

One woman told of breaking off her engagement when she found out her fiancé was for Trump. (“I can’t share my life with someone who is going to vote in that direction…Ladies, we need to stick together.”) I watched as young woman after young woman testified that they’d never, ever consider dating anyone who voted for Trump. I watched as women who were in middle or high school in 2016 reacted in horror at seeing, for the first time, Trump bragging on an Access Hollywood bus about grabbing women by the pussy and moving on them “like a bitch,” or stalking Hillary Clinton around a debate stage, or seeing the testimonies of the more than 25 women who have reported being sexually assaulted by him. “Dads voted for this?” read one incredulous caption.

There can be no doubt that there is fertile ground for those who find prominence and profit in nurturing resentment of women.