Nikki Haley, like most candidates who have sought to deny Donald Trump the 2024 GOP nomination, has had to carefully calibrate her criticism of the former president, who remains overwhelming popular inside the party. One attack she’s been willing to deploy is to gently suggest that, at 77, he’s too old to be president again.

Trump helped make her case last night in the form of what seemed to be a senior moment, where he repeatedly confused Republican Nikki Haley, who spent years as his UN ambassador, with former Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi. In a rambling digression during a rally in New Hampshire, the former president blamed Haley for security lapses at the Capitol on January 6, even though Haley had left the federal government more than two years before the riot.

The moment came after Trump complained that the media never report on the size of his rally crowds, as compared with Haley’s smaller ones. But then he made his bizarre segue, as he seemed to blame his primary opponent for what happened at the Capitol. “By the way, they never report the crowd on January 6. You know Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, you know, they—do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things,” Trump said. “Like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guards, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people.”

A deeply confused Trump confuses Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley multiple times: Nikki Haley was in charge on January 6. They don’t want to talk about that pic.twitter.com/f3lhWgAzUw

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) January 20, 2024

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

The global transition to clean energy has a cost, but it may be a lot lower than the figures that sometimes get thrown around. The differences are large, amounting to trillions and even tens of trillions of dollars.

A new analysis from RMI, the clean energy research and advocacy group, identifies what its authors say is a basic flaw in many of those estimates: They don’t fully take into account the decrease in fossil fuel spending.

“This kind of narrative that there’s a massive surge in capital that’s required is simply incorrect,” said Kingsmill Bond, a co-author of the report and an analyst for RMI whose work covers the financial side of the energy transition.

The report finds that global capital spending (money used for equipment and property, among other things) on energy supply is on track to be about $2.5 trillion in 2030, up from $2.2 trillion in 2023.

On my way to Moms for Liberty’s New York City town hall last night, I passed a posh-looking elderly woman, decked out in a brown fur coat, matching fur hat, and bright red lipstick. 

This was a more typical sight on the Upper East Side—the wealthy enclave that has been home to characters like Carrie Bradshaw, Jared and Ivanka, and much of the cast of Gossip Girl—than the one I encountered at the end of the block. Outside the Bohemian National Hall—a Czech and Slovak cultural center on East 73rd Street that the right-wing group booked to great outrage—protesters wielding signs with slogans like “Moms for Bigotry” and “Protect Children From Hate” shouted down attendees who filed into the building (which included Rudy Giuliani’s son, Andrew, and disgraced former congressman George Santos) via a police-protected ramp. Moms for Liberty, the so-called parents’ rights group that has pushed book bans and helped stir the moral panic about pronoun usage in schools, promised the event would consist of “important discussions about education in NY.”

“They need to go back to Florida—take the bigotry back where it belongs,” said one protester. “If it works in DeSantis land, fine. It doesn’t work here.”

But the protesters were skeptical that the group had anything of substance to offer at its first formal event in deep-blue New York City. 

“They need to go back to Florida—take the bigotry back where it belongs,” said protester and Brooklyn resident Julie DeLaurier, who said her two kids were graduates of the city’s public schools. “If it works in DeSantis land, fine. It doesn’t work here.”

New York City schools, she added, need “full funding—not censorship.” (The city’s education department will face $100 million in new cuts during the next fiscal year, on top of $600 million in cuts Mayor Eric Adams already announced, Chalkbeat New York reported this week.)

Millionaires from around the world support wealth taxes as a way to curb extreme inequality, according to a new poll that was released to coincide with the meeting of the World Economic Forum wrapping up today in Davos, Switzerland. “Davos” has evolved into quite the place to be for the billionaire set, who fly in on their private jets to party and schmooze with government and business bigwigs from all over the planet—and basically get to feel important.   

The poll results were accompanied by a letter signed by 260 millionaires—including Brian Cox, who plays billionaire Logan Roy in Succession—and a few billionaires, asking world leaders to raise their taxes. It was conducted by UK firm Survation at the behest of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of affluent Americans that advocates for fairer tax policies.

The key takeaways:

More than half of respondents said extreme wealth is a threat to democracy, that it hinders social mobility and prevents others from improving their lots, and that it exacerbates climate change.Two-thirds said they would support higher taxes on themselves if the money were used to improve public services and infrastructure—70 percent felt such policies and investments would make their economies stronger.Three-quarters favored a 2 percent wealth tax on billionaires. Indeed, 58 percent said they would support such a tax for anyone with more than $10 million in assets.

The respondents consisted of 2,300 citizens of G-20 nations who have more than $1 million in “investable” assets—or net assets excluding a person’s primary residence. Globally, this puts them within the richest 5 percent, per Patriotic Millionaires—though only barely in the United States, where the average household in the top 10 percent has assets of $5.2 million, according to data from RealTimeInequality.org.  

There are 184,300 US households with average wealth of $141.5 million. I can’t imagine they would let their fortunes be taxed without making an epic stink.

The poll results accompanied PM’s Proud to Pay More report, which profiles a handful of very wealthy people who believe their class should be taxed much more heavily. “We have spent the last 50 years believing in and nurturing an economic idea: that intensifying investment in the individual and encouraging the personal protection of wealth will benefit everyone,” writes Giorgiana Notarbartolo, an Italian entrepreneur from an old, wealthy industrial family. “It’s not hard to see how much damage the reality of the application of this idea has brought to our society.”

District Judge Lewis Kaplan has said it multiple times: Donald Trump raped E. Jean Carroll in 1996. Kaplan wrote it in May 2023, when he presided over one of the trials against Trump. And he reminded jurors of the rape this week, during the latest proceedings in the multi-layered, winding rape and defamation cases brought against Trump by Carroll.  

Last spring, author and journalist Carroll sued Trump, testifying that he had raped her decades ago and had defamed her since by denying the accusations. Carroll won that suit. The jury found Trump liable for sexual assault and said he must pay $5 million—but they came short of saying he had raped her due to the legal scope of New York State’s penal code.  

In New York, someone can only be convicted of rape if they can prove vaginal penetration by a penis. In Carroll’s testimony, which mirrored what she had described privately for decades and publicly for the first time in 2019, she said Trump used both his fingers and his penis in the assault. But during the trial, the jury had only concluded that Trump had “deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm,” Kaplan’s decision from last year reads.   

That the jurors did not find that Carroll had proven rape, Kaplan explained, “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” “Indeed,” he continued, “as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.” 

Federally, rape is defined as “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” This broader explanation, while still dependent on penetration, would include assaults using fingers.  

The police response to the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which killed two teachers and 19 elementary school students at Robb Elementary School, was significantly botched by “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy, and training,” a damning review from the Justice Department found on Thursday.

The long-awaited report detailed systemic failures by both state and local law enforcement surrounding the massacre, one of the worst school shootings in US history, including the events that contributed to the 77-minute delay between the arrival of first responders and when the shooter was killed.

“The victims and survivors should’ve never been trapped with that shooter for more than an hour as they waited for their rescue,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said during a Thursday press conference discussing the contents of the report. “The families of the victims deserved more than incomplete, inaccurate, and conflicting communications from officials of their loved ones.”

According to the DOJ, several failures laid the groundwork for the much-scrutinized delay, including officers spending more than 40 minutes searching for a key to a door that investigators say had likely been unlocked. Investigators wrote: “Though the entry team puts the key in the door, turns the key, and opens it, pulling the door toward them, the CIR Team concludes that the door is likely already unlocked, as the shooter gained entry through the door and it is unlikely that he locked it thereafter.”

The report, based on a review of more than 14,000 pieces of data and more than 260 interviews, also directly called out Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department officials, including former police chief Pete Arredondo for instructing officers not to enter some classrooms until keys had been secured.

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

Puerto Rico has begun using batteries connected to residents’ rooftop solar panels to provide backup power for its grid, helping prevent blackouts and offering an alternative to fossil fuel-burning peaker plants. It could be the first step toward building one of the largest virtual power plants of its kind.

The yearlong pilot, launched late last year by Puerto Rico’s utility Luma Energy, will pull power from up to 6,500 households during energy shortages. It is part of a transformational effort to modernize a deteriorating grid and transition to clean energy. 

If the program is successful, it could lead to a much larger virtual power plant with the potential to make peaker plants, which run only when demand spikes, unnecessary. “It could be really significant,” said Ben Hertz-Shargel, a grid expert at the research firm Wood Mackenzie, adding that if it were expanded to include all home batteries on the island, it would be larger than any residential-storage virtual power plant in North America.  

Virtual power plants, or VPPs, are networks of distributed energy resources—like home batteries, electric water heaters, or heat pumps—that can help the grid. They can manage energy demand, such as by adjusting smart thermostats during peak hours. Some can also supply power to the grid, by drawing from home or even EV batteries.

Idaho has among the strictest abortion bans in the country. It’s so strict, in fact, that in 2022, the Biden administration sued the state, arguing that it violates a federal law regulating medical emergencies. The legal battle went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which said on Friday that Idaho’s law could go into effect—at least until the court reviews the case in April.

In Idaho, it’s illegal to perform an abortion—punishable by up to five years in prison—except when “necessary to prevent the death of a pregnant woman.” But doctors have faced confusion over when, if ever, they can step in to perform emergency abortions: What if, as US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar poses, a patient’s condition isn’t life-threatening, but could become so? How long are doctors supposed to watch their patients’ conditions deteriorate before stepping in?

“Doctors in Idaho are afraid,” Julie Lyons, a family physician who sued the state over the law, told the Idaho Capital Sun in December. “We are afraid to provide simple obstetric care because of the fear that what we do with our patient could lead to prosecution.” Similarly, an Idaho OB/GYN told the Washington Post following the court’s decision on Friday, “I could take care of a patient in [a life-threatening] scenario tomorrow—and now I have to wait for months to figure out what I can do. It just makes me question what I am doing in this state anymore.”

It’s not just Idaho. As my colleague Madison Pauly wrote in July 2022:

The ambiguity in Wisconsin’s state abortion ban, for instance, has left doctors like Abigail Cutler, an OBGYN in Wisconsin, in an impossible bind. Wisconsin’s law, written in 1849, allows abortions to “save the life of the mother.”

When Donald Trump’s lawyers head to the Supreme Court next month, they’ll be making their case to some familiar faces: three justices that Trump appointed.

On Friday, the court agreed to hear the ex-president’s appeal of a recent Colorado ruling that Trump, due to his role in fomenting the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, is prohibited by the 14th Amendment from running for office again. The case—which could impact the presidential election in other states, as well—will likely be one of the most important that SCOTUS has ever considered. The constitutional issues are incredibly complex, and the stakes are as high as they get. The right answer isn’t obvious. Some influential conservative legal scholars have argued that Trump should be legally barred from the ballot; some high-profile liberals have countered that in a democracy, the decision should be left to the voters.

No one knows how the case will come out, and it’s entirely possible that the court will rule overwhelmingly, perhaps even unanimously, to let Trump run for office. But one thing seems reasonably clear: If the Supreme Court does decide to ban Trump from running (or to allow individual states to keep him off their ballots), it will likely be because at least one of the justices Trump appointed votes to do so.

The math is fairly simple. Assuming Clarence Thomas doesn’t recuse himself, it will take five votes to uphold the Colorado decision. Three of those would presumably come from the three Democratic appointees. The two most conservative justices on the court—Thomas and Samuel Alito—are probably the least likely to vote against Trump. So to win, Trump will probably need to convince three of the remaining four jurists, a group that includes Chief Justice John Roberts and the three associate justices that Trump himself put on the court.

Trump’s team is well aware of this dynamic. Appearing on Fox News this week, Trump attorney Alina Habba said, “I think it should be a slam dunk in the Supreme Court. I have faith in them.”

On Friday, ahead of the third anniversary of the January 6 Capitol attack, President Joe Biden delivered an impassioned campaign speech on what he framed as an urgent matter: This year, “democracy is on the ballot.” 

Much of the 30-minute speech—delivered near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and available to watch in full here—stayed true to Biden’s familiar brand of American patriotism. The president revisited the day we “nearly lost America,” condemned political violence, and praised the “ordinary citizens, state election officials,” and “the American judicial system,” which, he said, “put the Constitution first” in the fallout from the 2020 election.

“Because of them, because of you,” he said, “The will of the people prevailed.”

But the address was also a searing indictment of Donald Trump—and a warning. Biden reminded viewers of Trump’s plans if he wins the presidency in 2024, repeatedly invoking the former president’s own words and actions. “Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past,” Biden said. “It’s what he’s promising for the future. He’s been straightforward.”

“His first rally for the 2024 campaign,” Biden said of Trump, “opened with a choir of January 6th insurrectionists singing from prison on a cellphone while images of the January 6th riot played on the big screen behind him at his rally.”

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

Last year, climate change came into sharp relief for much of the world: The planet experienced its hottest 12-month period in 125,000 years. Flooding events inundated communities from California to East Africa to India. A heat wave in South America caused temperatures to spike above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of winter, and a heat dome across much of the southern United States spurred a 31-day streak in Phoenix of 110 degree-plus temperatures. The formation of an El Niño, the natural phenomenon that raises temperatures globally, intensified extreme weather already strengthened by climate change. The US alone counted 25 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023—more than any other year. 

Yet this devastation was met by some of the largest gains in climate action to date. World leaders agreed for the first time to “transition away” from oil and gas at the annual United Nations climate summit, hosted last month by the United Arab Emirates. Funds and incentives from President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, started to roll out to companies and municipalities. Electric vehicle sales skyrocketed, thousands of young people signed up for the first-ever American Climate Corps, and companies agreed to pay billions of dollars to remove harmful chemicals called PFAS from drinking water supplies.

As we enter a new year, we asked Grist reporters what big stories they’re watching on their beats, 24 predictions for 2024. Their forecasts depict a world on the cusp of change in regard to climate—both good and bad, and often in tandem. Here’s what we’re keeping an eye on, from hard-won international financial commitments, to battles over mining in-demand minerals like lithium, to the expansion of renewable energy.

 

One student has died and four others, as well as an administrator, have been injured in Perry, Iowa early Thursday, in what appears to be the year’s first mass school shooting. 

The attack, which unfolded at Perry High School just after 7:30 a.m. local time, led to the death of an unnamed sixth-grader, according to Mitch Mortvedt, assistant director of the Division of Criminal Investigation at the Iowa Department of Public Safety. It was not immediately clear why that victim, a student at Perry Middle School, was at the high school; NBC News reported that the shooting unfolded during a breakfast program, before classes began, and that students of different ages may have been on campus. 

The five injured people are being treated at local hospitals, Mortvedt told reporters Thursday afternoon. Their conditions weren’t immediately clear Thursday night. 

The attacker, a 17-year-old student at the high school, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Mortvedt said, adding that authorities believe the shooter acted alone, employing a pump-action shotgun and small-caliber handgun. Authorities who swarmed the school following reports of gunshots also found an improvised explosive device on campus, which officials from the State Fire Marshal and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms “rendered…safe,” Mortvedt said. 

The shooting came on the first school day of 2024 in Perry, some 40 miles northwest of Des Moines. 

Republicans are standing with Donald Trump in record numbers—and a majority consider him to be a “person of faith,” according to two polls that dropped this week. 

Republicans today are more likely to be sympathetic to Trump regarding his involvement in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, compared to the week after the insurrection, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found. Fourteen percent of GOP-identified respondents said last month that Trump bears a great or good amount of responsibility for the deadly insurrection, compared to 27 percent who said the same nearly three years ago. Only 18 percent of Republicans in that survey said the insurrection was “mostly violent,” compared to 26 percent who said so in 2021. (As a reminder, the insurrection led to injuries to approximately 140 police officers.)

The Washington Post reports that, in follow-up interviews, some participants said their views changed over the past couple years—because they’ve grown to believe the conspiracy theory that January 6 was an inside job. (GOP presidential candidate and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy has espoused this theory during his campaign and did so again today in response to the Post story.) 

Additionally, only 31 percent of Republicans surveyed said they believed President Biden was legitimately elected in 2020, compared to 39 percent in 2021; overall, the poll found, 36 percent of Americans don’t accept Biden’s presidency as legitimate. 

“From a historical perspective, these results would be chilling to many analysts,” Michael J. Hanmer, director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland, told the Post. But the results also provide some insight into why polling continues to show Trump as the likely GOP presidential nominee; that is, his role in the insurrection isn’t hurting him. Among his base, it appears to be helping cement his image as a martyr unfairly targeted by the DC establishment. 

SpaceX, the space flight company owned by Elon Musk, illegally fired eight employees after they criticized Musk’s social media behavior, a new complaint from the National Labor Relations Board alleges.

The complaint stems from a June 2022 open letter that was shared on the company’s internal chat system in which the fired employees called on SpaceX to “swiftly and explicitly separate itself” from its owner because of Musk’s increasingly erratic and inflammatory social media posts. The letter also claimed that SpaceX had failed to uphold its zero-tolerance sexual harassment policy, as well as its “No Asshole” policy. Now, after a yearlong investigation, the NLRB has found evidence of at least 37 labor violations. 

“Elon’s behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us,” the letter stated, according to a report by The Verge. “As our CEO and most prominent spokesperson, Elon is seen as the face of SpaceX—every Tweet that Elon sends is a de facto public statement by the company.”

Nine employees were terminated shortly after the letter’s release. (The NLRB’s complaint involves eight of them.) According to reports from the Associated Press, five employees were fired one day after the letter was sent, while the remaining four were terminated weeks later. 

 The new NLRB complaint adds to the growing labor complaints surrounding Musks’s companies. In February 2022, Tesla employees filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against Tesla, with one Black employee claiming to hear racial slurs at least 50 to 100 times a day. As my former colleague, Edwin Rios wrote: 

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

A change to the federal EV incentive that took effect Monday could widen access for low and middle-income buyers who want to go electric but have been excluded by high prices. 

The clean vehicle tax credit, which offers up to $7,500 toward a new electric, hydrogen, or plug-in hybrid vehicle, and up to $4,000 for a used one, is now available as an instant rebate at approved dealers. Until now, buyers could not take advantage of the credit until they filed their taxes. 

EV-equity advocates said the change will put buying an electric vehicle within reach of more buyers. “It’s a huge help,” Irvin Rivero, e-mobility associate at the Bay Area nonprofit Acterra, told Grist. Rivero consults prospective buyers on how to apply for financial incentives, and said some clients either can’t afford the upfront cost or do not earn enough to owe taxes.

“A lot of people were getting the tax credit, but the people who didn’t have tax liability weren’t benefiting from this program,” Rivero said.

More Americans are stockpiling abortion pills in case they need them in the future, according to new research published Tuesday.

The relatively new practice of requesting a prescription for abortion pills before potentially needing them—known as advance provision—has spiked during two periods of recent uncertainty about the future of abortion access, the study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found. Those periods included two critical moments: the weeks following the May 2, 2022 leak of the Supreme Court’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and amid conflicting rulings last April about the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, the first pill in the two-pill regimen that comprises medication abortion.

Studying data from the nonprofit organization Aid Access, whose doctors prescribe and mail abortion pills to people in all 50 states, researchers found that the average number of daily requests for advance provision increased nearly tenfold—to about 247 a day—in the seven weeks between the leak of the Dobbs draft and when the Supreme Court issued its final decision. Once the Supreme Court issued its final ruling in June 2022, requests decreased to about 89 per day—but then they spiked again last April when conflicting rulings about the FDA approval of mifepristone thrust abortion pills back into the headlines, leading to an average of about 172 daily requests for advance provision of the pills. (While a lawsuit challenging the FDA approval brought by anti-abortion activists is currently pending before the Supreme Court, abortion pills remain available by mail.)

“I think it shows people are paying attention” to threats to access, Abigail Aiken, the study’s lead author and associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas-Austin, said, emphasizing that nearly three-quarters of participants cited wanting “to ensure personal health and choice” and “to prepare for possible abortion restrictions” as their reasons for requesting advance provision.

“I think one of the perhaps unintended consequences of abortion bans, or of the Dobbs decision, is that it really does shine a light on medication abortion, and probably made it more visible to a lot of people out there,” she added.

Florida authorities are trying to determine whether Christian Ziegler, the embattled head of the Florida Republican Party, engaged in “video voyeurism” by filming a sexual encounter with a woman without her consent.

The new investigation, which was undertaken based on a police affidavit unsealed earlier this week and obtained by the Florida Trident, is the latest chapter in the ongoing sex scandal roiling the Florida Republican Party. At its center are Christian Ziegler; his wife, Moms for Liberty co-founder and crusading Sarasota School Board member Bridget Ziegler; and an unnamed woman who has accused Christian Ziegler of raping her in October, and with whom the couple had engaged in a previous sexual encounter. So far, no criminal charges have been filed against Christian Ziegler, and he has denied the claims made by the accuser.

According to the Florida Trident:

In a police interview on Nov. 2, Ziegler claimed the encounter was consensual and showed detectives a two-and-a-half minute video of the sex act he’d taken on his iPhone, according to the new affidavit. 

Ziegler’s attorney, Derek Byrd, told police during the same interview the woman sent an Instagram message to Ziegler shortly after the sexual encounter asking him if he’d shown the video to Bridget Ziegler. Byrd said the message was sent in “vanish mode.” 

Rudy Giuliani filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, a step he said was unavoidable after he was ordered to pay $148 million to two former Georgia election workers he defamed by falsely accusing them of election fraud. The former New York mayor’s Chapter 11 filing was no surprise. It came the day after federal district court judge Beryl Howell ordered Giuliani to immediately pay Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss before entering an appeal regarding the award.

A Giuliani spokesperson, Ted Goodman, cast the filing as a tactical move. “No person could have reasonably believed that Mayor Rudy Giuliani would be able to pay such a high punitive amount,” Goodman said in a statement Thursday. “Chapter 11 will afford Mayor Giuliani the opportunity and time to pursue an appeal, while providing transparency for his finances under the supervision of the bankruptcy court, to ensure all creditors are treated equally and fairly throughout the process.” 

The man once known as “America’s mayor” has now become arguably the country’s best-known debtor. Among the debts cited in Giuliani’s filing today are legal bills going back to his role as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, in the former president’s first impeachment, along with mounting legal fees from his involvement in Trump’s effort to use election fraud lies to steal the 2020 election. Obviously, Giuliani is unable to pay Moss and Freeman $148 million. His personal lawyer and friend, Robert Costello, is suing Giuliani for $1.4 million in unpaid legal fees. Giuliani also reports about $3.5 million in additional debts to lawyers.

Giuliani faces substantial additional expenses from his Georgia indictment for trying to interfere in the counting of votes during the 2020 election. He’s also an unindicted co-conspirator in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Despite Trump’s assurance in August that he would help his former lawyer pay off additional legal debts, Trump’s Save America PAC only has helped Giuliani pay some $340,000 in legal expenses.

The IRS in August filed a $549,435 tax lien against Giuliani for the 2021 tax year, and his bankruptcy petition says he now owes a total of about $989,000 in unpaid taxes. He also cites “unknown potential obligations” to Dominion and Smartmatic voting machine companies who have sued him for defamation, and to Hunter Biden, who has sued Giuliani for violating his privacy by “hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and generally obsessing over” material on Hunter’s laptop. He also cites potential obligations to Noelle Dunphy, a former employee who has sued Giuliani for “sexual assault and harassment, wage theft,” and “rape.”He denies those allegations and well as claims in other suits against him.

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

The Environmental Protection Agency announced last week that vinyl chloride would be among five chemicals to begin the process for risk evaluation prioritization under the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, an early step toward potentially banning the chemical.  

The news comes after environmental groups campaigned this summer for the chemical to be banned, visiting EPA offices in Washington in July and gathering thousands of petition signatures. Vinyl chloride is a colorless gas that is used to make PVC, a common material in construction products like flooring, siding, pipes, and roofing. Vinyl chloride has been known as a human carcinogen since the 1970s. 

“The announcement is very significant because EPA announced that they’re only going to look at five chemicals for a new evaluation,” said Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator and the president of Beyond Plastics, an organization working to end plastic pollution. 

Enck was part of the team that traveled to Washington this summer. She brought a large vinyl rubber ducky to the EPA meeting to illustrate the fact that PVC is used to make children’s toys. 

Almost three years ago, during his first week in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order instructing the Justice Department to stop renewing its contracts with private prison companies. The news was like a glimpse of blue sky for critics of the controversial sector—especially after four years of Donald Trump, who had fostered a cozy, mutually lucrative relationship with the private prison industry.

The order restored an Obama-era policy first announced in 2016—and later suspended by Trump administration—after a damning federal report found that private federal prisons were less safe and less secure than their publicly run counterparts. No longer would the Bureau of Prisons sign deals with corporations to lock up people serving federal prison sentences. Nor would the US Marshals Service, in charge of detaining people while they await trial on federal criminal charges, enter or renew contracts with those same companies. 

Or, at least, that was the idea. And over the last three years, the Bureau of Prisons has indeed ended its use of private prisons—moving the roughly 14,000 people it previously held in private facilities into government-owned ones as of last December. But the Marshals Service is a different story. Among the roughly 63,000 people held in USMS custody each night, the ACLU has found that about 1 in 3 still go to sleep in a detention center run by a private prison company. “As far as we can tell, the numbers remained about constant,” says Kyle Virgien, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project. 

So what gives? That’s the question at the heart of a new letter sent by nine Senate Democrats to Marshals Service Director Ronald Davis and Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday, seeking more information on two workarounds USMS has been using to avoid moving its detainees out of private prisons. “The Marshals Service must end its abuse of loopholes to circumvent the order, which allow these private jails to operate unsafe facilities and profit from mass incarceration,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the letter’s lead signatory, said in a statement to Mother Jones. “We have a basic responsibility to keep detainees safe.”

The letter notes several ways in which USMS has continued to house people in private prisons. First, the agency has been using municipalities as go-betweens to avoid directly hiring private prison companies. USMS has long made deals with town or county governments to keep USMS detainees in their local jail. But in some cases, that local government then turns around and hires a private prison company as a subcontractor. This pass-through mechanism allowed USMS to keep detainees in the 2,016-bed Northeast Ohio Correctional Center, owned and run by CoreCivic, one of the country’s largest private prison operators. When USMS’s contract with CoreCivic expired in May 2021, USMS signed a new contract with Mahoning County, which in turn signed a deal with CoreCivic.