President Donald Trump stormed into the Justice Department on Friday to give a speech that news outlets described with a grab-bag of foreboding words, including “bellicose” and “unprecedented.” In the speech, Trump railed at his political opponents, whom he described as “scum” and “thugs,” and falsely claimed, once again, that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.

Seated in the audience was retired General Mike Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, who’s spent a great deal of time pushing both stolen election claims and QAnon-related ideas. (Flynn has distanced himself publicly from QAnon. Two of his family members also sued CNN for a chyron calling them “QAnon followers.” Flynn reportedly called QAnon “total nonsense” in a private conversation with attorney Lin Wood, who released a recording of the call on Telegram.)

Trump singled out Flynn for special praise during his speech; afterward, Flynn’s sister snapped a picture of him posing with FBI director Kash Patel. 

The speech, which lasted more than an hour, featured Trump claiming once again that law enforcement agencies had been unfairly weaponized against him. “A corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and goodwill built up over generations,” he declared. “They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people.” He also crowed about stripping security clearances from what he called “the Biden crime family,” and referred to previous elections as “rigged and crooked.” 

In an executive order signed late Friday, Donald Trump effectively dismantled seven more federal agencies, this time with cuts that will impact work on homelessness, libraries, support for minority-owned businesses, and the US Agency for Global Media, which funds Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia. The cuts are expected to leave thousands more federal workers unemployed; in the case of VOA, it furthers a specific vendetta Trump has had since his first term.  

The order will affect the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the United States Agency for Global Media, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, and the Minority Business Development Agency. It instructs the head of each agency to submit a report to the Office of Management and Budget “explaining which components or functions of the governmental entity, if any, are statutorily required and to what extent.” In practice, as has happened with other federal agencies in recent weeks, it’s expected to leave these agencies a shell of themselves and fundamentally nonexistent; in the case of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, it destroys the only federal agency solely focused on addressing the homelessness crisis. 

During his first term, Trump called VOA’s reporting “disgraceful.” This time around, he placed Trump loyalist and 2020 election denier Kari Lake as a “special advisor” to the agency.

The move against the US Agency for Global Media has attracted the most attention, and could have the largest implications abroad. VOA specifically has been active since the 1940s, where it broadcast stories into Germany that were meant to counter Nazi propaganda. During his first term, Trump called VOA’s reporting “disgraceful.” This time around, he placed Trump loyalist and 2020 election denier Kari Lake as a “special advisor” to the agency. In December, he wrote that she would “ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.”

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

This isn’t what I had in mind when I studied Edward Lorenz’s chaos theory.

Lorenz was a mathematician and meteorologist perhaps most famous for his description of the “butterfly effect,” which poses that small changes in initial conditions can produce large changes in long-term results. This became evident to him when running numerical weather forecasting models, in which even the rounding of a variable from six digits to three digits would lead to vastly different predicted outcomes in the atmosphere. His work led to great leaps in weather forecasting, and today’s era of ensemble forecasting in which multiple weather predictions are generated from the same set of different yet similar initial meteorological conditions.

The butterfly effect came to mind when I read that upper air weather observations were being temporarily halted by the National Weather Service in parts of Alaska, New York, and Maine due to staffing shortages. The Trump regime’s chaotic approach to so-called efficiency in the federal workforce has wreaked havoc upon civil service, including at NWS and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate who is Palestinian, was detained by the Department of Homeland Security almost one week ago. Since then, Khalil, who is in the United States on a green card, has still not been charged with a crime. And representatives from Columbia University remain markedly silent on his case. On Friday morning, the university said the Trump administration sent ICE agents to raid Columbia dorms. 

BREAKING: The US Justice Department is examining whether student protests at Columbia University over the genocide in Gaza violated federal terrorism laws, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said today.

Blanche’s department previously said the investigation is also looking… pic.twitter.com/sLuUs8dgjQ

Amid the crackdown, the arrest has sparked large protests—both for Khalil’s individual freedom, and for the Palestinian cause he publicly championed on Columbia’s campus.

“He has no connections to Hamas whatsoever. His one and only goal was to get Columbia University to divest from its complicity in Israeli government crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.” 

This week, Tulsi Gabbard had her first brush with controversy as President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, when it became known that she had picked as her deputy a right-wing podcaster named Daniel Davis, who had regularly assailed the Israeli government and its war in Gaza, accusing Israel of “pursuing ethnic cleansing” and criticizing US support for what he called “Netanyahu’s war.” Within hours of Jewish Insider breaking this story on Wednesday, which sparked immediate criticism, Gabbard reversed course on appointing Davis, a senior fellow at the Koch-funded Defense Priorities think tank, to this powerful position that oversees the compiling of the President’s Daily Brief, the collection of intelligence assessments that goes to the White House and top policymakers.

Davis’ fervent opposition to Israel’s war—rooted in the non-interventionist tradition of the far right—was too much to bear for senators and Trump administration officials. He became a victim of the never-ending campaign mounted by pro-Israel hawks to keep such critical voices far from positions of power. But the focus on Davis’ stance on Israel distracted from a truly scandalous aspect of this near-appointment: By picking Davis, a former Army lieutenant colonel with no intelligence community experience, Gabbard sought to hire for this important and highly sensitive position a prolific disseminator of pro-Russia messaging, who himself has been embraced by state-controlled Russian media outlets for the positions he espouses and platforms. Yet Davis’ extensive amplification of pro-Putin talking points received little, if any, attention in the media coverage of this hullabaloo.

Davis posts episodes of his YouTube Deep Dive podcast daily; sometimes he produces multiple episodes a day. In recent months, most shows have focused on the Russia-Ukraine war, with Davis and his guests usually pounding on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and criticizing US assistance for Ukraine. There is not much, if any, criticism of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, his launching of the war, or the atrocities committed by his forces.

In a January episode typical of the show, retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor called on Trump to walk away from Ukraine: “The win for us is extricating us from this tar baby, get out, say good bye move on… Announce we’re leaving, we’re out, we’re not going to do this anymore.” He noted that the United States should not even try to craft a negotiated end to the conflict. Davis agreed and said, “This is what makes sense.” He then cited a key Kremlin talking point, asserting that Russian leader Vladimir Putin has no interest in moving against other European nations and is only “focused on protecting the ethnic Russians in the eastern part of what was Ukraine.”

Last week, I reported on the long history of bigoted and xenophobic remarks by Kingsley Wilson, a 26-year-old MAGA enthusiast who’s now a deputy press secretary at the Department of Defense. Following that article and and other outlets’ reporting on Wilson, members of Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Jewish Committee, among others, have expressed concern about Wilson’s extreme rhetoric and her fitness for the job.

Most scandals pass with little comment from the White House, Trump, or the agencies involved.

The response from the White House and the Pentagon has been notable: near-complete silence. With Wilson, as with other recent controversies involving Trump administration officials, the White House and federal agencies are making a clear and somewhat novel choice to ignore them entirely.

Wilson spent years espousing extreme ideas on Twitter and on various podcasts, including promoting the debunked lie that Jewish lynching victim Leo Frank was guilty of the crime for which he was wrongfully accused, an idea that is rarely repeated outside of dedicated antisemitic and white supremacist circles. She also aligned herself with extreme anti-immigrant and nationalist sentiment, repeating a phrase associated with the German far-right, and, on Twitter, advocating to make “Kosovo Serbia again,” a particularly bizarre sentiment for someone who now works for the U.S. government, which supports an independent Kosovo and maintains military forces there. 

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

As fossil fuel interests attack climate accountability litigation, environmental advocates have sounded a new warning that they are pursuing a path that would destroy all future prospects for such cases.

Nearly 200 advocacy groups have urged Democratic representatives to “proactively and affirmatively” reject potential industry attempts to obtain immunity from litigation.

“We have reason to believe that the fossil fuel industry and its allies will use the chaos and overreach of the new Trump administration to attempt yet again to…shield themselves from facing consequences for their decades of pollution and deception,” reads a letter to Congress on Wednesday. It was signed by 195 environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and Sunrise Movement; legal nonprofits including the American Association for Justice and Public Justice; and dozens of other organizations.

The Trump family has allegedly been discussing a possible investment in the crypto exchange Binance—a deal that, especially in light of Binance’s multi-billion-dollar valuation, would raise a host of conflict-of-interest questions. The discussions were first revealed by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, which also reported that Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, is simultaneously seeking a presidential pardon after pleading guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering laws.

Zhao disputed the Journal’s reporting, posting on X Thursday that the paper “got the facts wrong” and that he’d “had no discussions of a Binance US deal with … well, anyone.”

On top of the ethical issues raised by the possible entanglement of executive clemency powers with a lucrative financial transaction, such an investment deal could also turn the Trump family into business partners with a Middle Eastern royal family.

News of the alleged Binance talks comes one day after an Abu Dhabi-based investment firm, MGX Fund Management, announced it is making a $2 billion investment in Binance, securing a minority stake in the exchange. MGX’s chairman is Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan—who is the national security adviser for the United Arab Emirates and brother of the UAE’s current ruler, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

More than a decade ago, the Center for Investigative Reporting had a big investigation into how the Department of Veterans Affairs was worsening the opioid overdose crisis, and a big idea: Could they take the impactful work CIR was already doing and make a weekly radio show with the potential to change laws and change lives?

“We weren’t sure if any public radio stations would even air it,” said Al Letson, who back then was the new hire asked to host this brand-new investigative radio show.

You’ve probably got a sense of what happened next: Reveal’s VA investigation sparked outrage. Radio stations did want to run their work. And today, the award-winning show is celebrating its 10th anniversary on more than 500 stations nationwide.

This week on Reveal, the team looks back at how they got here, from investigations into water shortages in drought-prone California to labor abuses in the Dominican Republic, and we hear from the journalists behind Reveal’s first decade of impactful reporting. 

In the fall of 1984, when I was a senior in high school in Washington, DC, the protests at the South African Embassy began. Civil rights leaders met with the ambassador of South Africa on Thanksgiving Eve. Timed for maximum press coverage, that meeting became a sit-in, and that sit-in launched a movement. Soon, there were protests at consulates across the country. College students held rallies, built “shantytowns,” and pushed their schools to divest.

Area high school kids like me got in on protesting the embassy too. And we had a soundtrack. “Free Nelson Mandela” had been released by the Specials in March. The leader of that British ska band, Jerry Dammers, later admitted he didn’t know much about Mandela before he went to an anti-apartheid concert in the UK, where a long-simmering boycott movement was rolling into a boil. The DC music scene was pretty wild then—a bouillabaisse of go-go, R&B, punk, New Wave; there was breakdancing in the hallways during lunch hour—and for some of us, ska was sort of a unified field theory. Musically but also culturally. (If you have a racist friend / now is the time, now is the time for your friendship to end.)

But it wasn’t just kids who cosplayed in checked socks or porkpie hats. In 1985, a month after I started college, Artists Against Apartheid recorded Steven Van Zandt’s “(I Ain’t Going to Play) Sun City”—essentially the music world launching its own boycott on South Africa. The song was not (like, at all) great, but the wild cross-genre supergroup—DJ Kool Herc, Lou Reed, Bonnie Raitt, Gil Scott-Heron, Pat Benatar, Bono, and Miles Davis to name but a very, very few—guaranteed continual rotation on a relatively new cultural phenomenon: MTV.

We were getting a collective education: Because South Africa was so dependent on Black labor and exports, if industrialized nations withheld trade and investments, we could backstop Black South Africans who’d been directly resisting the Afrikaner regime for decades. So, suddenly, amazingly, we did. By 1986, Congress had imposed sanctions on South Africa and banned direct flights to it. Coca-Cola became the first major company to pull out of South Africa. Sports teams joined the musicians in refusing to play there. Divestment battles raged on campuses and boardrooms for the rest of the ’80s. And they worked. South Africa’s economy ground to a near halt. Mandela was freed in 1990, and negotiations to wind down apartheid began. By 1994, free elections were held and Mandela became president.

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

In the open grasslands of South Dakota, not far from the dramatic rock formations of Badlands National Park, lives one of the continent’s cutest, fiercest, and rarest animals: the black-footed ferret.

Black-footed ferrets, weasel-like animals with distinctive dark bands around their eyes and black feet, are ruthless little hunters. At night, they dive into burrows in pursuit of juicy prairie dogs, their primary food source. Without prairie dogs, these ferrets would not survive.

From as many as a million ferrets in the 19th century, today there are only a few hundred of these furry predators roaming the Great Plains, the only place on Earth they live. That there are any black-footed ferrets at all is something of a miracle. In the 1970s, scientists thought black-footed ferrets were extinct, but a twist of fate, and an unprecedented breeding effort led by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, brought this critical piece of the prairie ecosystem back from the brink.

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

In December, Popular Information reported that Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun purchased $30 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial (WLF), a new venture backed by President Donald Trump and his family. Sun’s purchase resulted in a cash windfall for Trump. On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Sun sent a joint letter to a federal judge, asking for a stay of Sun’s case. Today, the judge granted the SEC’s request.

In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies, accusing him of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token. The SEC accused Sun of wash trading, which involves buying and selling a token quickly to fraudulently manufacture artificial interest. Sun was also charged with paying celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, and Soulja Boy, for endorsing his crypto “without disclosing their compensation,” which violates federal law.

A few weeks after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Sun publicly announced that he had become WLF’s largest investor, buying $30 million of its tokens. Sun added that his company, TRON, was “committed to making America great again.”

On Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi boasted that she had “declassified and publicly released files” related to the crimes of the dead and well-heeled pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Because this is the Trump administration, though, that release was carried out in a bizarre and hamfisted fashion, with binders of materials handed out to 15 right-wing, pro-Trump figures handpicked by the administration. While the recipients exuberantly waved them around for the cameras just outside the White House, it quickly became obvious that these particular files, which included flight logs and a heavily redacted contact list, presented nothing new. Some had already been public for close to a decade. 

Some MAGA figures denounced the release, while others suggested a new conspiracy.

Over the course of the day, the “release” devolved into a broad-scale civil war on the right, with Bondi accusing the FBI of failing to follow her declassification orders, and the MAGA influencers who were involved in the stunt trying to defend their role. In a predictably short period of time, some of those influencers quickly suggested that a deeper conspiracy was afoot. 

“These swamp creatures at SDNY deceived Bondi, Kash, and YOU,” tweeted conservative commentator and binder recipient Liz Wheeler, who seemed to be pinning the blame on FBI agents in the Southern District of New York, the federal court district where both Epstein and Maxwell were charged. “Be outraged that the binder is boring. You should be. Because the evil deep state LIED TO YOUR FACE.”

This story was originally published on the author’s substack, Field Notes with Alexander C Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here.

Costa Rica is positioning itself to take on Taiwan—and not just in the exports of pineapples.

In 2023, the Central American nation forged a new partnership with the United States to start manufacturing more semiconductors as Washington looked for new and less geopolitically sensitive sources of microchips. Last March, the Costa Rican Ministry of Foreign Trade issued an 80-page National Semiconductor Roadmap outlining plans for expanding the country’s so-called “Silicon Jungle.”

Any concerns that President Donald Trump might retreat from the Biden administration’s initiative were put to rest last week when Secretary of State Marco Rubio specifically singled out semiconductors during a summit with Costa Rican Rodrigo Chaves Robles.

The Trump White House is taking extra steps to try to deliver on the president’s signature campaign promise to conduct the largest mass deportation operation in US history. In an internal US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) memo from February obtained by the Washington Post, the administration instructs immigration officers to look for potential targets for “expedited removal,” a process that enables fast-track deportations without a court hearing.

The memo reportedly identifies migrants who crossed the border unlawfully between ports of entry, as well as those who were allowed into the country but haven’t applied for asylum, as examples of people whose deportations could be facilitated under this program. It also mentions immigrants who lawfully presented themselves at ports of entry but lacked documents or “misrepresented themselves.”

That could potentially include migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba who came to the United States as part of a Biden-administration parole initiative the Trump administration has since terminated, in addition to those who used a now-defunct Customs and Border Protection (CBP) application to make appointments to come apply for admission at the US-Mexico border.

The decision to boost “expedited removal” likely signals Trump’s growing frustration with the pace of interior immigration and enforcement and deportations, which he and border czar Tom Homan consider insufficient in light of the goal of deporting around 1 million people a year. Just a couple of weeks ago, the president removed Caleb Vitello from his role as ICE acting director, in what was widely seen as a sign of Trump’s impatience.

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

The world’s largest island is known for its vast ice sheet, sprawling fjords and abundance of wildlife—from polar bears to narwhals. 

It’s also one of the latest targets in President Donald Trump’s bid for US energy and military expansion. Since his first term, Trump has talked of securing Greenland for its critical minerals, untapped oil reserves, opportunities for military positioning and central location in the international shipping network, particularly as melting sea ice opens up new trade routes. Now, he is pushing for a Greenland land grab with renewed vigor, offering to purchase the island from Denmark or even potentially take it by force. 

But the same warming temperatures that may transform the island into a trading hotspot are making it more inhospitable to development, research shows. Thawing permafrost and ice triggers landslides along jagged fjords and destabilizes the landscapes that infrastructure would need to lie on top of, while loose sea ice makes passing through Greenland’s waters a perilous journey. 

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

Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced last week that he had uncovered evidence of a massive fraud perpetrated by the Biden administration. In a video posted to social media, the former Republican congressman from New York said that Biden’s EPA had “parked” roughly $20 billion at a private bank, “rushing to get billions of your tax dollars out the door before Inauguration Day.” 

The Biden administration’s plan, Zeldin said, was for the bank to distribute the money to a handful of nonprofits, which would then send it out to “NGOs and others” for climate-related spending. But he vowed to stop that plan. “The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” he said. 

But the scheme Zeldin described is not novel or a secret. The $20 billion he is trying to recover is money that Congress passed in 2022 for a program known as the “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund,” also known as the “green bank” initiative. This kind of program once enjoyed bipartisan support in states like Nevada, which opened a clean energy fund under a Republican governor in 2017, and Connecticut, where green bank legislation passed in 2011 with unanimous support from both parties. At least two centrist Republicans, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Don Young of Alaska, endorsed a national green bank bill in 2021. 

On Tuesday, leaders at the National Science Foundation reportedly laid off about 170 employees, many via Zoom—an estimated 10 percent of the agency’s workers. One of those workers spoke to Mother Jones, requesting anonymity, about the chaotic and emotional meeting, and what the job losses mean for the $9 billion agency, which is tasked with funding and supporting the country’s academic research. Here’s their account in their own words.

At 9 a.m., we got an email from HR calling us for a meeting at 10 am. There was no agenda offered. But many of us suspected what it was.

Initially, the Zoom invitation listed all of the people who were going to be fired as co-hosts of the meeting, so they sent a second invite. Because of the confusion about which invitation was the correct one, a lot of people joined late. And so, at first, people who came late didn’t hear what the meeting was about.

They told us we were being terminated. People were angry. People were crying. It was just confusing, too. We were told, you could resign or you could be terminated. How do I know what to do? Some people had thought, I had finished my one-year probation. I am not a probationary employee. We were told the agency had made a mistake—it should have been two years, and they’d corrected that.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference, a new group pushed for President Donald Trump to serve an unconstitutional third term.  

The effort, called the Third Term Project, is being led by Shane Trejo, who once co-hosted a neo-Nazi adjacent podcast called “Blood Soil and Liberty.” An episode of the now-deleted show was titled “Tanner Flake for Fuhrer,” an homage to a senator’s son who’d posted racist and anti-gay comments under the screen name “n1–erkiller.”

The imagery and language being used by the Third Term Project is transparently authoritarian. The group’s poster at CPAC features Trump in the style of Julius Caesar. Trejo told the independent journalist Ford Fischer on Thursday that the group did so because “Trump is the Caesar figure that America has needed.” 

“We’re putting that out there, Trump as Caesar,” Trejo continued. “We think it’s great optics. We love the idea of Trump as our Julius Caesar-type figure.” He also argued that Trump is the “Napoleonic figure that has emerged to lead our country out of perdition and into greatness.”

It’s hard to imagine a better opportunity to oust an incumbent than the one currently before the Democratic primary candidates challenging New York City Mayor Eric Adams. In the last few weeks, Adams has been engulfed in a growing scandal surrounding the Trump Justice Department’s decision to dismiss his federal corruption charges and the mayor’s corresponding willingness to cooperate with the administration’s mass deportation agenda. Though Adams has denied any quid pro quo, the administration’s border czar Tom Homan did threaten—on national television—to be “up [Adams’] butt” if the mayor doesn’t allow immigration enforcement officers on Rikers Island.  

Adams—who is battling a crowded field of challengers in June’s mayoral primary—now faces escalating calls to resign or be removed from office. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has decided against removing the mayor for now, but he could also be ousted by an “inability committee” made up of top city officials. Comptroller Brad Lander, who is running for mayor, has floated convening it. Adams, meanwhile, shows no sign of retreat, writing on X over the weekend, “I’m not stepping down, I’m stepping UP.”

If Adams does leave office before his term is up—voluntarily or not—he’d be replaced by New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. According to the city charter, if that happens before March 27 (90 days before the primary), the city would hold a nonpartisan special election to replace Adams. If it happens afterward, Williams would remain acting mayor until the general election in November. Either way, both the primary and general election would proceed as normal. But the process is untested, and it’s not clear if Adams could run again if removed. 

So where does that leave New York City’s sizeable but scattered progressive wing? They’re hoping to capitalize on Adams’ increasing vulnerability and what they see as a resurgence in anti-Trump momentum to elect one of several left-leaning candidates for mayor. But no definite frontrunner has appeared in the pack of progressive challengers. Instead, New Yorkers could see a familiar name atop the ballot in November: Andrew Cuomo.