The water level at Lake Powell, the massive reservoir on the Colorado River whose southern reaches straddle the Utah-Arizona border, hit a record low this week, sinking to just 3,522 feet above sea level. A 23-year megadrought combined with climate change has left the reservoir at just 22 percent of its capacity—so low that it threatens to cause the collapse of a water supply system serving 40 million people throughout the arid west.

Created by the 1963 construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, Lake Powell is the nation’s second-largest reservoir. Over the past year, federal officials have ordered emergency water releases from upstream reservoirs, such as Utah’s Flaming Gorge, to prop up the lake and keep the dam’s turbines turning and providing electricity. While this year’s above average snowpack may help, even the Bureau of Reclamation, which historically has wildly overestimated the Colorado River’s flow, expects Lake Powell to drop another 30 feet by September.

One underappreciated element of this looming crisis is Glen Canyon Dam itself. If the water level in Lake Powell falls another 150 feet from its current level, the reservoir will hit dead pool, meaning that the Colorado River will no longer run through the dam, stopping flow to booming populations in Arizona and Nevada, as well as to Mexico and the agricultural areas of California’s Imperial Valley.

“Lake Powell is quickly approaching the point at which it may soon become physically impossible to pass enough water through the dam,” warned an August report by regional environmental groups. “Such an event would likely be the most calamitous in the Colorado River System’s history, causing legal complications, economic harm, and a water supply crisis across the seven states and Mexico.”

Environmentalists have long hated the Glen Canyon Dam, which submerged beautiful canyons, caused environmental degradation, and harmed endangered fish in the Grand Canyon. Edward Abbey’s landmark novel The Monkey Wrench Gang was based on a plot to blow up the structure.

Former President Jimmy Carter has decided to begin hospice care in his Plains, Georgia home. The news was disclosed on Saturday in a brief statement from the Carter Center:

After a series of short hospital stays, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter today decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention. He has the full support of his family and his medical team. The Carter family asks for privacy during this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers.

Carter is America’s longest-lived former president. After leaving the White House in 1981, he forged a remarkable second career as a statesmen and human rights advocate—not to mention Habitat for Humanity volunteer and Sunday school instructor. He turned 98 in October.

“You’re in!” the email said. “Welcome to the new Bing!” Last Sunday, I joined a small wave of users granted early access to Microsoft’s new chatbot backed search engine, put forward as an “AI-powered copilot for the web.” Given that “multiple millions” across 169 countries were stuck on the waitlist, I felt like Charlie waving a Golden Ticket. Little did I know that I, like Roald Dahl’s beloved character, would too be led by a mercurial and untrustworthy host into a world of pure imagination.

I have already spent months awe-struck by the new Bing’s underlying technology. It also powers ChatGPT, the wildly popular interface created by OpenAI, a lab backed by billions of Microsoft bucks. Since its founding in 2015 (co-chair: Elon Musk), OpenAI’s algorithms have devoured astonishing amounts of data to learn the intricacies of language, enabling programs to generate human-like responses—translations, summaries, essays, workout and recipe plans, sonnets… whatever you like. ChatGPT is a great party trick. It’s also a powerful work tool, capable of jumpstarting creativity, automating mundane tasks, or composing a bloodless email. It can function as a teacher, coder, or wedding planner. (I used it to proofread this paragraph.) But for all its potential, any user will tell you that it can deceive with the ease of George Santos.

I had my first chance to chat with Bing at length during two recent cross-country flights. At first, it was marvelous. To test how specific it could get, I asked Bing to provide a timeline of the development of China’s J-series fighter jet, complete with quotes from allies and enemies. Its answers were detailed and conveniently embroidered with links and references. I also learned how to write a lease renegotiation email, using templates, and with reference to New York City’s current rules. I asked it to locate my most recent Mother Jones article and to summarize it. Bing got this last task wrong several times, but I nudged it in the right direction, and eventually we got there.

But the more I ventured into this Willy Wonka-esque wonderland, the more I noticed strange inconsistencies, glimpses of Bing’s wiring, and dangerously convincing falsehoods.

Upon closer examination of our conversations about Chinese fighter jets, I discovered that I couldn’t independently find any of the direct quotes it presented. The chatbot quoted former Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell as saying, “it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they are testing it,” linking an article in The Diplomat. But Bing was deep-faking Morrell: He doesn’t appear anywhere in that story. In fact, I couldn’t find any proof that Morrell ever said these words, even using Bing’s regular search interface. (Or Google’s.) Likewise, quotes from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a former top Indian military chief, and a journalist, all appeared to be made up. This was an utterly convincing but ultimately synthetic history about a very real arms race between superpowers. What could go wrong?

On Friday evening, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted the “breaking” news that father would visit East Palestine, Ohio, next week, in the wake of the train derailment there whose aftermath has cloaked the region in a toxic cloud, killed thousands of fish, and required the evacuation of residents who fear longterm health risks. 

Breaking News: Trump will visit East Palestine, Ohio next week.
If our “leaders” are too afraid to actually lead real leaders will step up and fill the void.

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 18, 2023

On Saturday, the former president himself claimed, with no evidence, that news of his planned visit had prompted the Biden administration to finally send a disaster relief team to the beleaguered city. 

On Saturday, Vice President Kamala Harris told an international security gathering that the United States has formally determined that Russian forces have committed “crimes against humanity” during their invasion of Ukraine.

“Let us be clear: Russian forces have pursued a widespread and systemic attack against a civilian population,” she told an audience gathered in Germany for the Munich Security Conference. “Gruesome acts of murder, torture, rape and deportation. Executions, killings, beatings and electrocution. Russian authorities have forcibly deported hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine to Russia, including children.”

“In the case of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, we have examined the evidence, we know the legal standards, and there is no doubt: These are crimes against humanity,” Harris said, according to the Washington Post.

While President Biden labeled Russian President Vladimir Putin was a “war criminal” in March, shortly after he ordered troops to assault his neighbor, US officials moved to downplay the statement, saying that experts were still collecting evidence and weighing it against international law. While Harris’ statement did not specifically mention the Russian leader’s culpability, she committed the US to press consequences for those responsible.

“I say to all those who have perpetrated these crimes and to their superiors who are complicit in these crimes: You will be held to account,” she said, according to the New York Times.

On Friday, a federal judge in Washington, DC sentenced a veteran GOP operative to 18 months in prison for funneling $25,000 from a Russian businessman to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Jesse Benton, a longtime aide to both Ron and Rand Paul, was convicted in November on six related charges. The court found that he and another GOP operative accepted $100,000 from Roman Vasilenko, a St. Petersburg-based influencer who wanted photos with Trump to display on his social media accounts. Benton kept most of the money for himself but donated $25,000 to the Republican National Committee as part of a plan to secure two tickets to a fundraising event for Trump in Philadelphia. At the event, Vasilenko was allowed to sit close to Trump at a roundtable discussion and later took a photo with him. Foreign nationals, like Vasilenko, are not allowed to donate to US political campaigns or committees, and it is illegal to make a donation on behalf of someone else. 

Benton, who is married to Ron Paul’s grandaughter, was previously convicted in 2016 of a scheme to pay an Iowa state senator to switch his endorsement from Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul ahead of the state’s 2012 republican presidential caucus. In that case, Benton, after pleading that he had reformed and had a family to support, was sentenced to home confinement. Just six days later, the Trump fundraiser at which Vasilenko met Trump took place. A few weeks after that, Benton was caught in an undercover sting orchestrated by the British newspaper The Telegraph, whose reporters posed as representatives of a Chinese businessman who wanted to donate $2 million to Trump’s campaign. Benton told them he could arrange it. He apparently violated the terms of his home confinement in the Iowa case to meet with the undercover reporters.

In a letter submitted to the judge before his sentencing this week, Benton said he had suffered enormously in the face of federal investigations over the last eight years, which he said had nearly bankrupted him and ruined his good name. Benton wrote that he currently delivers for DoorDash to make ends meet, and, in asking for more home confinement instead of prison time, argued that being separated from his family would be painful for them, including his young daughter. In pleading for leniency, Benton cited his Christianity and claimed he was no longer involved with politics. (In 2016, he had also pointed to his faith and claimed to be out of the business.)

At Benton’s sentencing hearing Friday, U.S. District Court judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump-appointee whose light sentences of January 6 defendants have been controversial, was not in the mood for Benton’s argument. 

The Torah tells its followers to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth,” so that’s what Lisa Sobel, a devout Jewish woman from Louisville, Kentucky, set out to do.

It wasn’t easy. First, she endured three years of infertility. Then, she and her husband embarked on a $50,000 in vitro fertilization (IVF) journey, during which they had to discard four embryos before implantation because of genetic abnormalities. Finally, in April 2019, Sobel delivered a healthy baby girl. Immediately after, she began hemorrhaging and almost died.

Now 38, Sobel wants to have another child. It’s not the IVF process or her birth trauma that’s holding her back. Instead, she says the anti-abortion laws Kentucky enacted in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision prevent her from getting pregnant in a manner that complies with her religious views. It’s why she and two other Jewish women—both of whom also depend on IVF to conceive—are suing the state of Kentucky on the grounds that its laws are vague, difficult to understand, and that they violate their religious freedoms under Kentucky’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which stipulates that the “government shall not substantially burden a person’s freedom of religion.”

Kentucky’s abortion laws are so unclear, Sobel’s lawyers say, that it would be reasonable to infer it is a crime to discard unneeded or genetically imperfect embryos, a common outcome in IVF. The laws allow no exceptions for situations in which a fetus has a fatal medical condition yet still has a heartbeat, which would go against the plaintiffs’ religious belief that an abortion to prevent the physical suffering of a child or the mental anguish of a mother is justified. The laws are also somewhat contradictory when it comes to what steps a physician can take if a pregnant person’s life is in danger. One statute says abortion would be permitted only if a mother faces a serious risk of “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” or death; another requires physicians to “make reasonable medical efforts under the circumstances to preserve both the life of the mother and the life of the unborn.”

Doctors who fail to abide by these convoluted statutes risk monetary fines, the loss of their medical licenses, and prison time; pregnant people whose doctors are confused by the statutes risk death. Multiple pregnant women have almost died as a result of having incomplete miscarriages in several other states with similarly confusing abortion laws that prompted medical professionals to delay their care. Sobel, who bled during her first pregnancy and required emergency blood transfusions after delivering her daughter, fears she could face a similar fate. Even though her faith clearly prescribes that a mother’s life takes precedence over her fetus, Kentucky’s laws are more ambiguous.

Tesla just realized that testing “self-driving” vehicle technology on public roads isn’t such a good idea, after all.

Today, the automaker recalled nearly 363,000 cars equipped with its “Full Self-Driving” technology after a report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that the Autosteer feature “led to an unreasonable risk to motor vehicle safety based on insufficient adherence to traffic safety laws,” the Associated Press reports.

According to NHTSA, it sounds like FSD is bad at many of the crucial elements of driving, such as stopping, turning, and changing speeds:

The FSD Beta system may allow the vehicle to act unsafe around intersections, such as traveling straight through an intersection while in a turn-only lane, entering a stop sign-controlled intersection without coming to a complete stop, or proceeding into an intersection during a steady yellow traffic signal without due caution. In addition, the system may respond insufficiently to changes in posted speed limits or not adequately account for the driver’s adjustment of the vehicle’s speed to exceed posted speed limits.

As I’ve written previously, FSD has been linked to multiple deaths. While Elon Musk has claimed that the software operates “better than a person,” Tesla’s website clarifies that the vehicles are not fully autonomous.

Wednesday’s confirmation hearing for Daniel Werfel, President Biden’s nominee for IRS commissioner, though not nearly so contentious as it might have been, hinted at partisan battles to come over America’s most beloved federal agency. 

Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden commenced the hearing by calling out America’s “two-tiered” tax system—one set of rules for most of us, another for big companies, superwealthy folks, and their complex and seldom-audited business partnerships.

Werfel pledged to tackle the agency’s audit imbalance, wherein a kneecapped IRS came to over-rely on “correspondence audits” of low and moderate earners and less on very high-earners whose tax filings tend to be exceedingly complex—often deliberately so. In 2018, for example, the IRS audited virtually zero partnerships—which include law and accounting firms, real-estate partnerships, hedge funds, private equity firms, and the like.

As I wrote in my 2021 book, Jackpot, the gutting of the agency’s enforcement budget by Republican lawmakers during the 2010s “resulted in an exodus of experienced auditors, people with the expertise required to decode the financial voodoo of the wealthiest taxpayers and their deliberately opaque partnerships. (It can ‘take months to identify the person who rep­resents the partnership,’ IRS auditors told the Government Account­ability Office in 2014.)”

The need for more IRS scrutiny of super-rich tax avoiders was among the primary reasons that the Democrats included close to $80 billion in new funding for the agency (over 10 years) in the Inflation Reduction Act. House Republicans have already voted to repeal most of that funding, more than half of which is slated for tougher tax enforcement, with the rest going to things like oversight, improved customer service, and an overhaul of the IRS’s seriously outdated tech capabilities.

President Biden on Thursday, in his most detailed remarks addressing the recent spate of aerial objects that were shot down over North American skies, said that there is no evidence tying the three unidentified objects to foreign surveillance programs. Officials, however, are still working on confirming the exact details of the objects and their provenance.

“The Intelligence agency’s current assessment is that these three objects were balloons tied to private companies, recreational groups, or research institutions,” Biden said in a brief televised address. The president also defended shooting down a suspected Chinese spy balloon earlier this month, a dramatic action that has since inflamed tensions between the two countries.

“We seek competition, not conflict with China. We’re not looking for a new Cold War,” Biden said. “But I make no apologies and we will compete.”

Since taking down the objects, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have demanded answers. But in recent days, there has been growing consensus that they were likely benign in origin, almost certainly not evidence of aliens, and perhaps even belonging to hobby groups simply enthusiastic for “pico balloons.”

“We acted out of an abundance of caution and with an opportunity that allowed us to take down these objects safely,” Biden said on Thursday.

The giant white, aerial blob that US officials described as a Chinese spy balloon was seen plummeting towards the Atlantic Ocean near Surfside Beach, South Carolina, on Saturday afternoon, having been shot down by a US military fighter jet.

“I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday, as soon as possible,” President Biden told reporters in Hagerstown, Maryland, en route to Camp David. Military officials advised that the best time to do so was when the device was safely flying over water off the East Coast, he said.

Biden: "On the balloon, I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday as soon as possible [for safety] … they successfully took it down." pic.twitter.com/2GbSzejnZI

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 4, 2023

Live television images showed the balloon suddenly losing shape amid a plume of smoke and falling towards the ocean over several minutes. The dramatic turn of events came after the Federal Aviation Administration closed airspace and halted departures of planes to three Atlantic coast airports due to “national security initiatives.” Contrails from fighter jets were seen streaming across bright blue skies near the balloon.

Bucking decades of political tradition, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted for a new line-up of early primary dates in the 2024 presidential cycle. It was a long-awaited move that top Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have championed for years in hopes of making the country’s nominating process more representative of the party’s voters.

The calendar assigns South Carolina as the first state to hold a 2024 presidential primary on Feb. 3, 2024, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada on Feb. 6. Georgia and Michigan would also move up in the nation’s primary order, whereas Iowa—which has been the first state to participate in the nominating process for decades—would be moved out of the early window entirely.

The DNC’s goal is to make the nominating process more equitable. Iowa and New Hampshire have long been the first states to get a say in which candidate should be the party’s nominee for President, but those states are not among the most racially or economically diverse, and people of color make up sizable blocs of the party. “Our early states must reflect the overall diversity of our party and our nation—economically, geographically, demographically,” President Joe Biden wrote to the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee in December. “This means more diverse states earlier in the process and more diversity in the overall mix of early states.” 

So congrats to South Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Michigan for moving up in the (political) world? Not so fast.

New Hampshire has a state law that stipulates it must be the first state in the nation to hold presidential primaries. Changing this law may be difficult given that Republicans control both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature and the governor’s mansion and aren’t eager to comply with DNC rules. New Hampshire Democrats aren’t exactly trying very hard to get their state Republican counterparts to help them on this matter, either. 

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

Deep in the confines of the hulking, brutalist headquarters of the US Department of Energy, down one of its long, starkly lit corridors, sits a small, unheralded office that is poised to play a pivotal role in America’s shift away from fossil fuels and help the world stave off disastrous global heating.

The department’s loan programs office was “essentially dormant” under Donald Trump, according to its head, Jigar Shah, but has now come roaring back with a huge war chest to bankroll emerging clean energy projects and technology.

Last year’s vast Inflation Reduction Act grew the previously moribund office’s loan authority to $140 billion, while adding a new program worth another $250 billion in loan guarantees to retool projects that help cut planet-heating emissions. Which means that Shah, a debonair former clean energy entrepreneur and podcast host who matches his suits with pristine Stan Smiths, oversees resources comparable to the GDP of Norway: all to help turbocharge solar, wind, batteries and a host of other climate technologies in the US.

With a newly divided Congress stymieing any new climate legislation in the foreseeable future, Shah has emerged as one of Washington’s most powerful figures in the effort to confront global heating. Shah says such focus on him is “hyperbolic” but the White House is pinning much of its climate agenda on an office that barely had a dozen people when Shah joined in March 2021. It now has more than 200 staffers as it scrambles to distribute billions in loans to projects across the US.

President Joe Biden seems to be pretty unhappy about the suspected Chinese spy balloon flying over Montana. His administration signaled this by postponing Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing—less than a day before Blinken was supposed to depart.

Donald Trump apparently prefers a different response. “SHOOT DOWN THE BALLOON!” the former commander-in-chief Truthed this morning. A few hours later, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley demonstrated her status as the sane, serious alternative to Trump by tweeting the same thing, but with some lowercase letters mixed in.

Shoot down the balloon. Cancel Blinken’s trip. Hold China accountable.

Biden is letting China walk all over us. It’s time to make America strong again.

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 3, 2023

The past two weeks have marked a significant escalation in the years-long struggle over the proposed construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center (PSTC), a $90 million project that would be built on nearly 100 acres of city-owned land in an unincorporated section of DeKalb County—Georgia’s fourth largest county that encompasses a sliver of southeast Atlanta. The forest—once the homeland of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, then the site of a slave plantation and notorious prison camp—for at least a year has been occupied by activists who call themselves “forest defenders.” They have camped among the trees with the goal of blocking the construction of the PSTC, a massive complex for law enforcement that would include training and recreational facilities.  For them and other opponents of the project, PSTC is known instead as “Cop City.”

On January 18, a multi-agency task force that included Atlanta police, the Georgia State Patrol, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided what they estimated to be about 25 campsites throughout the forest. During the operation, a Georgia state patrol trooper shot and killed a 26-year-old activist named Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, who went by the nickname “Tortuguita.” The state’s Bureau of Investigation released a statement claiming that officers approached Terán in a tent, and then Terán shot at a state trooper first, wounding him, before officers returned fire. Law enforcement has said there is no body camera footage. 

Fellow activists dispute this account and have called for an independent investigation. Terán’s mother, who is originally from Venezuela but now lives in Panama City, Panama told The Guardian that she believes her child was “murdered in cold blood” and that she will work to “clear Manuel’s name.” Protests following Terán’s killing led to a police cruiser in flames and smashed windows at the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters, Wells Fargo, and Truist Bank branches in downtown Atlanta. In response, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp called a state of emergency and activated the Georgia National Guard (though they were not deployed).

In his State of the State address the day before the state of emergency was declared, Kemp decried the violence of “out-of-state rioters” and applauded the police response to the protests. “That’s just the latest example of why here in Georgia, we’ll always back the blue!” he said. 

In countries in the global south that are on the frontiers of resource extraction, being an environmental activist is extraordinarily dangerous. A 2021 Global Witness report estimated 1,700 environmental activists have been killed in the last decade. But, as Kate Aronoff wrote in The New Republic, Terán’s death is a worrisome sign that this deadly violence against environmental protesters could become a reality in the United States, too. Terán’s death is the first known example of someone killed by law enforcement while engaged in environmental “land defense” activism.

On January 5, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) tweeted about the unexpected passing of Quentin Williams, a Democratic member of the Connecticut House of Representatives. “Terrible news today of Q Williams sudden death,” he wrote. “I’m sending every good thought I have to his family and friends today.” Most of the replies to Murphy’s tweet echoed the senator’s sentiments; many commented that it was especially sad to lose someone so young—Williams was just 39 when he died. But some of the commenters seemed determined to take the conversation in an entirely different direction. “Vaccine related?” asked one. “How many shots did he get?” wrote another. “Let me guess he has taken the Covid vaccine,” speculated a third. At least one tweeter added a hashtag you may have seen popping up: #diedsuddenly.

Williams’ vaccination status had nothing to do with his death—he was one of two people killed in a head-on collision. But the commenters on Murphy’s tweet reflect an increasingly popular conspiracy theory that healthy people are dying shortly after receiving the vaccine. Indeed, in the last two months, every time a celebrity dies—from former NFL player Ahmaad Galloway to Lisa Marie Presley—adherents of this theory have swarmed social media to blame the shots. Despite no evidence that such a correlation exists, this myth is remarkably persistent, especially since the November 2022 release of a slickly produced documentary called Died Suddenly, which baselessly claims that many people who take the vaccines develop potentially fatal blood clots.

The film has been widely debunked, even by some people within the anti-vaccine movement, but that hasn’t stopped it from going viral. By late December, the phrase “died suddenly” was surging on Twitter, with an average of nearly 4,000 mentions per day. Then, on January 2, NFL player Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field from cardiac arrest after a relatively routine tackle. Experts believe the most likely cause was a rare phenomenon called commotio cordis, which can happen if a person receives a blow to the chest between beats of the heart. According to an analysis by the online extremism watchdog group Center for Countering Digital Hate, the morning after the game, the number of mentions skyrocketed to nearly 17,000—an increase of 328 percent. Hamlin did not die—after a week in the hospital, he was discharged—and neither did the hashtag. Nearly a month after Hamlin’s collapse, it’s still trending on Twitter.

The 16 million people who have watched the film Died Suddenly on the far-right platform Rumble may have been expecting more of what they saw on social media: titillating speculation about Covid vaccines’ role in celebrity deaths. Yet viewers of Died Suddenly encounter much more than just a tired and repeatedly discredited strain of medical misinformation. Its premise is that the vaccines are a tool of global elites who want to “depopulate” the world—a variation on the “Great Reset” narrative that “globalists” like George Soros and Bill Gates orchestrated the pandemic in order to reprogram people to accept a new age of Marxism. This conspiracy theory gained traction in neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups, which are increasingly intermingling with the anti-vaccine movement.

One of the leaders in combining these two movements is Stew Peters, the 42-year-old producer of Died Suddenly. Although his name may not be as well-known as Alex Jones or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his influence is considerable. He didn’t start out as an anti-vaccine crusader. Rather, Peters launched his far-right media career several years ago, when he began posting videos of himself monologuing about his work as a bounty hunter in Minneapolis. Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, suggests that Peters has discovered that vaccine skepticism is a powerful way to mobilize new followers. “This is a guy from the far right who sees an opportunity to weaponize the pandemic, to increase distrust in the government,” he says. “Even among otherwise hostile, non-aligned groups, if they can find a point of mutual interest, they will coalesce around it.”

At first I figured the Republicans would be all over this. I guess I figured wrong.

I’m referring to the bombshell working paper that made headlines earlier this week, in which a team of academic and Treasury Department economists found that the IRS audits Black taxpayers at roughly three to five times the rate of non-Black taxpayers. 

The authors, whose findings were based on an anonymized 2014 dataset consisting of more than 148 million tax returns and 780,000 audits, write that the disparities seem to be driven largely by racial differences in audit rates among taxpayers claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit.” 

The IRS has long scrutinized claimants of the EITC and certain other refundable tax credits at higher-than-average rates, regardless of race, in part because they are low-hanging fruit. The credit—aimed at low- to moderate-income taxpayers—is often claimed in error, and such audits are a cheap and easy by-mail job for a chronically underfunded tax agency.

Even among those claimants, the study found, Black taxpayers, who accounted for an estimated 21 percent of EITC filers, were selected for 43 percent of the audits. Now, IRS staffers don’t sit around deciding whom to audit—the selection is algorithmic and nominally race-blind. But the agency’s secret sauce somehow produced results that are far from colorblind.

House Republicans removed Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from the Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday because she is a Black, Muslim woman. Officially, that’s not the reason. But the facts speak for themselves: The removal is the culmination of years of targeting Omar by Donald Trump, the rightwing media, and Republican lawmakers who attacked her religion, ethnicity, and history as a refugee. The GOP majority has an official reason for ousting Omar—and then there’s the reason both they and everyone else know is really behind this outrage. 

There's only one Reason why House Republicans have punished Ilhan Omar https://t.co/xzpis2vYmn pic.twitter.com/ERdFLHiNBK

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) February 2, 2023

Their nominal reason is that past anti-Semitic comments make her unsuited to serve on the Foreign Affairs Committee. The resolution to remove Omar contains a list of offenses. Read closely, it reveals how the party (along with some moderate Democrats) have targeted Omar since she was elected in 2018, taking her words out of context to make her a boogeyman for the right. 

The first offense is a February 2019 tweet in which Omar attributed lawmakers’ support for Israel to the deep pockets of the pro-Israel lobby, touching on the anti-Semitic trope that Jews buy influence and control. That tweet caused outcry on both sides of the aisle. Omar’s response included the words: “I unequivocally apologize.”

Misdirection, an essential tool for magicians, is not usually a component of media criticism. But in a lengthy critique of the coverage of the Trump-Russia scandal published this week by the Columbia Journalism Review, veteran investigative reporter Jeff Gerth deflects attention from the core components of Russiagate, mirroring Donald Trump’s own efforts of the past six years to escape accountability for his profound betrayal of the nation. Though Gerth’s target is media outlets, particularly the New York Times (where he worked for 29 years), Gerth ends up bolstering Trump’s phony narrative that there was no Russia scandal, just merely a hoax whipped up by reckless reporters and Trump’s enemies in the press, with the assistance of the Deep State. 

In a massive 24,000-word, four-part article, Gerth dissects how the Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other news organizations during the 2016 election and afterward reported on Trump’s and his campaign’s interactions with Russia. (He briefly references, without criticism, the story I published that first revealed the existence of the dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and that reported that the FBI was investigating its allegations.) Gerth does probe genuine errors committed by his former employer and others. The Times, for instance, reported shortly before the 2016 election that the FBI’s investigation had found no link between Trump and Russia, when the bureau had barely begun its inquiry and had reached no final conclusions. And after the election, the Times produced a report in early 2017 that seemingly went too far in the opposite direction when it reported that US intelligence had evidence that “Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.” (Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, we later learned, had been huddling with a suspected Russian intelligence official during the campaign, but FBI officials handling the Russian investigation at the time saw this Times article as going too far.)

Gerth finds plenty of ammo for his assault on the media. But here’s where he goes wrong: He misrepresents the scandal that is the subject of the media coverage he is scrutinizing. He defines the Trump-Russia affair by only two elements of the tale: the question of Trump collusion with Moscow and the unconfirmed Steele dossier. This is exactly how Trump and his lieutenants want the scandal to be perceived. From the start, Trump has proclaimed “no collusion,” setting that as the bar for judging him. That is, no evidence of criminal collusion, and he’s scot-free. And he and his defenders have fixated on the Steele dossier—often falsely claiming it triggered the FBI’s investigation—to portray Trump as the victim of untrue allegations and “fake news.” Gerth essentially accepts these terms of the debate. 

Yet the focus on collusion and the Steele material has been a purposeful distraction meant to obscure the basics of the scandal: Vladimir Putin attacked the 2016 election in part to help Trump win, and Trump and his aides aided and abetted this assault on American democracy by denying such an attack was happening. Trump provided cover for a foreign adversary subverting a US election. Throughout the thousands and thousands of words Gerth generates, he downplays or ignores these fundamentals and how the media in 2016 covered them (which was shoddily). Instead, he zeroes in on the reporting related to collusion and Steele. In doing so, he offers an examination predicated on a skewed view of reality.

Gerth sets off a worrying signal in the fifth paragraph of this opus, when he writes that there was “an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth.” Hyperbolic version of the truth? What does that mean? Gerth does acknowledge that the Washington Post “has tracked thousands of Trump’s false or misleading statements,” but to cast Trump’s lies as “hyperbolic” truth—as if there are two morally equivalent sides here—indicates this analysis is not going to fare well. (Trump, of course, lied repeatedly about his doings in Russia.)

Three weeks after his death at the hands of Memphis police, Tyre Nichols is finally being laid to rest. On Wednesday, friends and family gathered to celebrate Nichols’ life at the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis, Tennessee. Several lawmakers and civil rights advocates, including the Reverend Al Sharpton and Vice President Kamala Harris, attended the ceremony and expressed their condolences. 

“On the night of January 7, my baby brother was robbed of his passion, his talents, his life, but not his light,” said Nichols’ older sister, Keyana Dixon, through her tears. “All I want is my baby brother back. And even in his demise, he was still polite. He asked the officers to please stop. He was still the polite young man he always was. My family will never be the same.” 

Following the release of body-camera footage from the brutal beating by police, much of the world knows Tyre Nichols, a Black man, for his death. But today’s service was dedicated to remembering how Nichols—an avid skateboarder, loving son, and father to a 4-year-old boy—lived. 

“He set his own path. He made his own light,” said Nichols’ older brother, Jamal Dupree, who said he originally didn’t plan on speaking. “He was very peaceful and very respectful. I spent a lot of time away from my brother, and I wish that I hadn’t because I want to know the person everyone else knew. And now five officers made it so I’ll never be able to. But I’ll never forget my brother. I’ll never forget my Gemini twin.”

A Sacramento native, Nichols traveled to Memphis to visit his family in 2020 but, according to his mother, RowVaughn Wells, remained in the city when the pandemic hit. He eventually got a job at FedEx and settled down in the area. Wells has spoken openly since his death of an intensely close bond she shared with her son, who she said had a tattoo of her name on his arm.