Early Saturday morning, the room on the fourth floor of the Washington, DC, church is full. It’s not yet 7 a.m. and already about sixty migrants, mostly men and a handful of families with children, some women breastfeeding, sit around nine round tables. Their scant belongings—keepsakes of the homes they had left behind and tokens of solidarity from strangers they encountered along the way—are preserved inside transparent Ziplocs and white trash bags. After a 1,700-mile, 40-hour journey from Texas, two of the more than 150 buses transporting migrants that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has sent to Washington, DC, had arrived at Union Station at dawn. One woman approaches me to ask where she can take a shower, telling me she really needs to clean up. Another wonders if she can have a new pair of shoes because the cheap rubber sandals on her feet are falling apart. Some people need diapers and ointment for their babies; others ask around for some medicine that could relieve a headache. 

David Swanson, a 60-year-old compliance manager with the Human Rights Campaign finance department volunteers at the church every other weekend. (Mother Jones is not disclosing the location of the church or the migrants’ full names to protect their identities.) Since the church started receiving migrants in late May, over a month after they began arriving in the city, he has met people from all over the world—Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, and even Afghanistan. During one of his shifts, a volunteer who happened to be a pediatrician noticed a woman who had surgical staples all over her chest. Swanson recalls that she had been shot many times, then hospitalized, but left her home country before she could get them removed. Another man had told him that he felt “a little bit like a prisoner” when he saw his final destination—Nashville, Tennessee—fly by the window as his bus raced towards the east coast without making a stop. 

This Saturday in August, Swanson is cooking breakfast for a group he had anticipated would number about 23 people. The gathering had more than doubled, and it turned out to be the biggest group the church had welcomed in a while. Dressed in an apron, Swanson started at 5 a.m. and prepared 130 eggs and eight rolls of pork sausage to be served with slices of melon, mandarin oranges, white bread, coffee, and apple juice. Still, he worries there might not be enough food for everyone. “Luckily we had a lot of leftover eggs from last week,” he tells me. Nearby, a young man thanks a volunteer, saying he hadn’t had a proper meal in several days. A mother breastfeeding a cheerful eight-month-old boy tells me she is happy to drink coffee for the first time in more than a week. Like so many people in the room, she and her husband hope to leave soon for New York.  

“We mostly stay out of the way and let them do their work,” Swanson says of the volunteers with the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, a coalition of about 20 grassroots groups from the DMV area and countless individuals who have mobilized to receive the buses at Union Station. “They work like a machine,” he says, coordinating with churches and other faith-based organizations to provide assistance and orientation to the migrants. 

A group of about 60 migrants arrived at a Washington, DC, church on a Saturday in August.

On August 11, thousands of Brazilians gathered inside and outside of the University of São Paulo’s law school to follow along with the reading of two letters in defense of democracy. The documents, which had been signed by former presidents, artists, scholars, and businesspeople, were in response to President Jair Bolsonaro’s repeated attacks on the Supreme Court and the electoral system ahead of the October presidential elections. One of the letters took as its inspiration a 1977 “Letter to Brazilians” that denounced the military dictatorship that ruled the country at the time.

“In today’s Brazil, there is no more room for authoritarian setbacks,” states the 2022 manifesto, which has collected more than 1 million signatures. “Dictatorship and torture belong to the past. The solution to the immense challenges facing Brazilian society has to be tied to respect for the results of the elections.” The pro-democracy statement also referenced “how authoritarian follies put the United States’ century-old democracy at risk” and those “efforts to disrupt democracy and people’s faith in the reliability of the [electoral] process did not succeed, and nor will they here.” 

With about a month and a half until the most polarized election in Brazil’s recent history, the most recent polls show the far-right incumbent president trailing 15 points behind his biggest rival, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from the left-leaning Worker’s Party. A cornered Bolsonaro, who has been in power since 2019, saw his approval ratings tank in no small part due to his disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which resulted in more than 680,000 deaths in the country. The unapologetically authoritarian leader is reportedly scared of being sent to prison for potential offenses that include corruption and crimes against humanity should he no longer be in office. “I have three alternatives for my future: jail, death, or victory,” Bolsonaro said last year. 

Tensions are running high in Brazil and the risk of political turmoil and violence in the next few weeks appears to be increasingly likely. Bolsonaro’s supporters have attacked pro-Lula rallies with feces and urine, and in July one of the president’s backers shot and killed a Worker’s Party local official. Frontrunner Lula has since increased his security apparatus and started wearing a bulletproof vest to public events. On top of the escalating threat of even greater political violence, some worry about a scenario in which the democratic order would be completely disrupted. “The number of times people ask me if I fear a coup d’état means that there’s something strange going on,” Brazil’s Supreme Court Justice Luís Roberto Barroso told CNN. 

As the presidential campaign officially kicks off, Mother Jones spoke with Guilherme Casarões, a political scientist and professor at Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo about Bolsonaro’s radicalization, the possibility of “social chaos” ahead of the elections, and fears of a January 6-like scenario in Brazil. 

This spring, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who’s running for US Senate as a Republican in Pennsylvania, filmed himself in the produce aisle of a Redner’s grocery store as he shopped for “crudité” ingredients. The video, which resurfaced this week, was intended to spotlight high inflation under a Democrat-controlled federal government. Instead, it has been widely lampooned due to the multi-millionaire’s less-than-convincing performance as an everyman experiencing sticker shock at the cost of asparagus. But however out of touch parts of the video were, it did tap into a reality that has hit many Americans hard: rising prices.

It can be difficult to fully grasp just how much prices have risen—and why. And it might feel like a few cents here and there don’t add up to all that much. But they do. To the tune of an average $460 per month versus last year, according to Moody’s Analytics economic analyst Ryan Sweet. 

1. Gas

How expensive is it?

In June, the average price of gas in the US surpassed $5 for the first time in history. That grim milestone wreaked havoc on household budgets—and not just because car owners were now stuck paying more than ever to commute. Skyrocketing gas prices affect everyone, regardless of driving habits, because they’ve led companies that produce goods to inflate their own prices to cover higher shipping and transportation costs, passing on the higher expenses to their customers.

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Donald Trump has offered a swirling array of excuses for why he took secret documents from the White House, stashed them around his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, and refused to return them to the US government—which precipitated a raid by a team of FBI agents. The most recent Trump World narrative is not that the documents weren’t secret or needed to be kept secure. Actually, his lawyers now say, Trump is very interested in securing sensitive government documents. The reasoning seems to be that a country club allowing thousands of people to wander the grounds for a fee, will keep the material—said to include information labeled with the highest level of restriction, including some documents related to our nuclear arsenal—more secure than the ultra-secure, fortified residence of the most powerful person in the world, surrounded by law enforcement and military defenses. Also known as the White House.

On Laura Ingraham’s FOX News show Thursday night, Trump’s attorney Christina Bobb, told Ingraham that safeguarding the documents was all Trump was ever interested in.

Ingraham: Was there a limited number who had access to that storage room…
Bobb: Yes.. Mar-a-Lago is secure.. just getting on to the compound is hard.. Only certain members of staff can get down there.. It’s a very limited number of people that can get down there pic.twitter.com/5seWpty8h0

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 19, 2022

After all, documents were kept in a basement storage room that not many people had access to. Plus, only one key existed for the lock on the door, Bobb said. When Ingraham pressed her to clarify that only one or two people were able to access the room, Bobb demurred, settling on “a very small number of people.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will appear at a rally in Pittsburgh for Pennsylvania’s GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano on Friday, sparking outrage from Jewish groups in DeSantis’ home state. DeSantis is one of the few GOP politicians who comes close to former president Donald Trump in terms of popularity among conservative voters, and his fundraising is on a record-breaking pace. But Mastriano is considered to be much further on the extremist fringes of the political spectrum—even for a Republican. 

Mastriano, who easily won the GOP primary earlier this year, is facing Democrat Josh Shapiro in November and is currently trailing by a sizable margin. In fact, Mastriano may owe some of his success in the primary to a Democratic effort to back the candidacy of someone so far to the right, he would defeat moderate GOP candidates who might have been more palatable to voters. Mastriano, often described as a Christian-nationalist, supports a total ban on abortion, expanded gun rights, and claims climate change is just “pop science.” He also has denied that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and has said that if elected governor, he would force everyone in the state to re-register to vote. In May, he suggested he would only certify a national election result if a Republican won. 

But he also has gushingly described DeSantis as the model governor and described his own vision of turning Pennsylvania into the “Florida of the north.” The flattery seems to have worked, as it appears that the invitation to DeSantis did not originate with Mastriano. In a Facebook posting, Mastriano said that DeSantis had contacted him about appearing.

Doug Mastriano says Ron Desantis reached out to him about doing a rally for him, and it will be Friday in Pittsburgh: “My goal as Governor is to make PA the Florida of the north. He set the gold standard for the good a Governor can do leading a state.” pic.twitter.com/KUzII1Mdnu

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 18, 2022

The Department of Transportation says that airlines must start providing more information to passengers stranded by flight delays and cancellations—and even start providing perks to passengers who have had their travel interrupted through no fault of their own. Letters signed by Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg were sent on Friday to major airlines warning that if they do not improve their treatment of customers, the Biden administration might create rules to formalize new rights for consumers.

The warning comes as 2022 has seen both a massive increase in travel—passengers are returning to the air following the pandemic—and a massive increase in flight disruptions. Airlines are largely blaming staff shortages, specifically a lack of pilots, whose ranks have been depleted over the course of the pandemic by voluntary retirements and a lack of recruiting new replacements. This summer thousands of flights have been canceled across the country, snarling air travel, and often leaving passengers stranded with few options to get to their destination. As many as 24 percent of flights in the United States have been delayed so far this year and 3.2 percent have been canceled. 

Earlier this month, the DOT said it would start making new rules in order to facilitate refunds from airlines to passengers when flights have been canceled or not taken for health reasons. On Friday, Buttigieg told NBC News that airlines were a long way from delivering the kind of service that should be expected of them.

“The message to the airlines is that you’ve got to make it easier for passengers to understand their rights,” Buttigieg said. “And you’ve got to support passengers when they experience delays or cancellations.”

In his letter, Buttigieg said airlines should begin offering passengers more help. Those who have delays of three hours or more should receive meal vouchers, for instance, and passengers forced to stay overnight due to delays or cancellations should be given free lodging or hotel vouchers.

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

The Democrats’ new climate legislation, which President Joe Biden signed into law this week, has been described as “transformative” and “game-changing.” But perhaps the most apt word is “shocking”—in a good way, for once. According to analysis after analysis, it’s become clear that this is what the United States needs to make good on promises to fight climate change. For climate scientists long accustomed to shouting into the wind—or at least their Twitter feeds—it’s something to celebrate. “We’re so pumped about this bill,” says Morgan Rote, director of US climate at the Environmental Defense Fund.

In a bill as sprawling as this one, compromises will always be necessary. Provisions for new oil and gas leases are the obvious doozy, slotted in to appease Senator Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.). So are potential compromises on environmental permitting, which include ample deference to oil and gas pipelines. But perhaps nothing is as confusing—or as potentially far-reaching and long-lasting—as the bill’s generous incentives for “clean” hydrogen. If this bill allows more fossil fuel development, it’s with the tacit hope that the industry is facing an inevitable decline. The theory is that it’ll kick the bucket anyway as demand for oil and gas withers, outmoded and outcompeted by cleaner sources of energy. Hydrogen? It’s here to stay.

That push isn’t new, exactly. The provisions, which are modeled after those that helped kickstart solar investment decades ago, build on other recent efforts, like an $8 billion investment in the Biden administration’s 2021 infrastructure bill to build Hydrogen Hubs across the country that can serve as epicenters of the fuel’s production and distribution. Those were widely derided as potential “bridges to nowhere,” without incentives that would ramp up hydrogen supply and demand. This bill has them, with production tax credits that get more generous depending on how “clean” the hydrogen is.

Using hydrogen is undoubtedly clean—it is combined with oxygen to produce water vapor and energy and has applications for powering utilities, homes, and cars. But it can involve dirtier sources of energy, often natural gas, which contains climate-warming methane. One reason hydrogen has backers in the oil and gas industry is because the fuel, which can come in gas or liquid forms, allows for the repurposing of fossil fuel infrastructure that is poised to be abandoned during the shift to renewables.

On Thursday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made a spectacle of a press conference to announce the arrest of 20 people with felony convictions for voter fraud. Surrounded by law enforcement, DeSantis, who’s running for re-election and has his eye on the GOP nomination for the 2024 presidential race, touted the work of the state’s newly created election crime task force and said the former felons, who make up a minuscule proportion of the more than 11 million Floridians casting ballots in the state, were ineligible to vote because they had previously been incarcerated for murder or sexual assault charges. The people arrested have since been charged with a third-degree felony that could lead to $5,000 in fines and up to five years in prison. “This is just the opening salvo,” the governor said. “This is not the sum total of 2020.” 

DeSantis’ latest political stunt scapegoats ex-felons and willfully ignores the shortcomings in the implementation of an amendment to restore voting rights, which the governor himself has tried to undermine, and that has led to confusion about voting eligibility. In 2018, 65 percent of Florida voters approved a change to the state’s constitution known as Amendment 4 to allow people convicted of felonies who had completed their sentences to vote, with the exception of those convicted of murder or a sexual offense. My colleague Pema Levy wrote about the potential impact of the historic amendment at the time: 

Returning the franchise to formerly convicted felons could upend the political landscape in Florida, a state divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans. The majority of those who were disenfranchised are expected to support Democrats, since felon disenfranchisement, a policy embraced and expanded after the Civil War specifically to deny voting rights to black men, has always had a disproportionate effect on African Americans and Latinos in Florida. This gives the Legislature, the incoming Republican governor, and his cabinet an incentive to thwart the will of the people. 

Five of the people arrested on Thursday told the Miami Herald they were unaware that they weren’t eligible to vote because of the nature of their offenses “and had faced no issue registering.” They’re not alone in facing criminal charges over voting fraud allegations. In 2019, DeSantis signed a bill requiring that felons pay court fines and fees before having their rights to vote restored. Opponents of the bill compared it to a “modern poll tax” and pointed out that the state doesn’t keep a centralized database tracking people’s legal financial obligations, which has led ex-felons to unknowingly register to vote without having paid outstanding fees and being charged with voter fraud as a result, a ProPublica investigation showed. 

“What DeSantis wanted from his event on Thursday was for the media to elevate his assertion that he’s taking a hard-line position against fraud,” Philip Bump writes in the Washington Post. “What he demonstrated most effectively, though, is how he has repeatedly taken steps that restrict voting access despite the undeniably minor frequency of fraud in Florida elections (as he himself has pointed out).” 

Federal Judge Leigh Martin May from Georgia rejected a request from Sen. Lindsey Graham to delay his testimony before a grand jury investigating former President Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 elections in the state. Graham is scheduled to testify next week. “Under the circumstances, further delay of Senator Graham’s testimony would greatly compound the overall delay in carrying out the grand jury’s investigation,” the Obama-appointed judge wrote in a ruling. “Further delay thus poses a significant risk of overall hindrance to the grand jury’s investigation, and the Court therefore finds that granting a stay would almost certainly result in material injury to the grand jury and its investigation.” Sen. Graham’s legal team had appealed an earlier ruling by Judge May ordering him to testify and asked her to stay the order pending the appeal, but she found that granting the request would not serve the public interest. 

Last month, Fulton County issued subpoenas for Graham, Rudy Giuliani, and other Trump allies as part of a probe into what prosecutors have characterized as “coordinated attempts to unlawfully alter the outcome of the 2020 elections.” The South Carolina GOP senator initially tried to quash the subpoena by arguing the District Attorney’s questioning focused on two phone calls he made to made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger following the November 2020 election, which constituted “legislative acts” as part of his work as senator and former chair of the Judiciary Committee.and were, therefore, protected under the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution. 

The blow to Sen. Graham’s legal maneuvering comes a few days after Giuliani gave a six-hour closed-door testimony at an Atlanta courthouse. “Grand juries, as I recall, are secret,” Trump’s former personal lawyer told reporters. “They ask the questions and we’ll see.” Giuliani’s lawyers had tried to postpone his testimony saying he had undergone a stent heart surgery that prevented him from flying.

The unprecedented FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents former President Donald Trump allegedly took from the White House—for which he’s being investigated for potential violation of federal laws that include the Espionage Act—set Republicans and Trump supporters off on a frenzy earlier this month. From Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene calling to defund the law enforcement agency to several GOP lawmakers fear-mongering over the weaponization of IRS agents to come after citizens, the reactions, in the words of my colleague Inae Oh, were “extremely amped up, conspiratorial, and ready for battle.” 

In extremist online circles, calls for civil war and violence against law enforcement picked up, with analysts identifying rhetoric such as “lock and load” and “when does the shooting start?” On August 11, that discourse and increased online threats against federal officials and facilities translated into real-world violence when an armed Ohio man was killed after trying to breach an FBI office in Cincinnati. A few days later, a man in Pennsylvania was arrested and charged with threatening the FBI for posts saying ““My only goal is to kill more of them before I drop” and ““If You Work For The FBI Then You Deserve To Die.” 

Now, House Democrats are urging social media companies to address the spike in calls for violence against law enforcement on their platforms in the aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago raid. “We are concerned that reckless statements by the former President and Republican Members of Congress have unleashed a flood of violent threats on social media that have already led to at least one death and pose a danger to law enforcement officers across the United States,” the letter signed by Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, the chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee and Rep. Stephen F. Lynch of Massachusetts, thee chairman of the National Security Subcommittee, reads. “We urge you to take immediate action to address any threats of violence against law enforcement that appear on your company’s platforms. The letters were also sent to executives of eight companies, including Facebook’s parent group Meta, Twitter and TikTok, in addition to far-right websites such as Gab, Gettr, Rumble, and Trump’s Truth Social, according to the New York Times.

The letter asks for information about how many identified threats to federal law enforcement have been removed from the platforms and whether they have experienced an increase in such threats since the FBI raid of Trump’s Florida estate.

The first time Loretta Chou drilled a hole in a bone, as a medical student in the mid-80’s, she thought it was the most fun thing she had ever done.

“I liked that you could actually make people better—almost immediately better—by operating on a fracture,” she recalls.

When she decided to specialize in orthopedic surgery, the branch of medicine that treats the musculoskeletal system, she knew that her chosen profession was a boys’ club. Just six percent of orthopedic surgeons are women. But it didn’t dawn on her that her job could be a health risk until the mid-2000s, when Chou, by then the chief of foot and ankle surgery at Stanford University, noticed that an alarming number of female colleagues were being diagnosed with breast cancer.

She got to wondering: Was this a fluke, or did female orthopedic surgeons have high rates of cancer? On some level, it wouldn’t be surprising if they did. Radiation exposure is a known carcinogen—the closer you are to the radiation source, the higher the risk—and orthopedic surgeons are often the closest in the operating room to x-ray beams. The surgeries typically involve the use of a technology called fluoroscopy, which shines an x-ray beam onto the patient during operations, providing the surgeon with real-time images over the course of the operation. The procedures can be lengthy, exposing surgeons to radiation over several hours. Yet surgeons aren’t always diligent about wearing the lead shields aimed at protecting from radiation, and, critically, the shields often leave the outer edges of the breast uncovered.

In the summer of 2007, Chou and her colleagues at Stanford mailed surveys to the women in the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, the field’s main professional association, asking if the surgeons had had cancer. More than eighty percent of the recipients, or 499 women, responded; 29 of them had a history of cancer. While the sample size was small, the results, published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, were startling, suggesting that female orthopedic surgeons were nearly twice as likely to have cancer as women in the general population, and nearly three times as likely to have breast cancer. A follow-up study of similar sample size in 2012 had nearly identical findings. Another, in 2015, found significantly higher rates of breast cancer among orthopedic surgeons than plastic surgeons or urologists, both of whom generally use fluoroscopy less frequently than orthopedic surgeons. Chou’s latest study, a survey of nearly 700 female orthopedic surgeons published earlier this year, found that the surgeons have rates of breast cancer nearly four times higher than the general population.

In 2018, two years before YouTube de-platformed “Dark Web philosopher” and alt-right star Stefan Molyneux for violating its hate speech policies, he was one of the big names featured at the first American Priority Conference in DC. The event was marketed as a free speech extravaganza of Trump-supporting activists and influencers not welcome at more traditional Republican confabs like the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the oldest, largest, and most influential right-wing gathering in the country. But when Molyneux showed up, he discovered conference rooms mostly full of empty chairs. So he bailed.

Embarrassing turnout might have put an end to this event. Instead, AMPFest, as it’s now known, relocated to the Trump National Doral Miami hotel in 2019, added a golf tournament and a $75,000 sponsorship package, and scored appearances by Donald Trump Jr. and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). Suddenly it became a top destination in the right-wing convention circuit, providing yet another platform for disgraced MAGA-world politicos like former national security adviser Lt. General Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, campaign operative George Papadopoulos, and right-wing filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, all of whom were pardoned by President Donald Trump for various crimes.

AMPFest is just one new entry on a right-wing event scene that has exploded in recent years. When I first started covering conservative conferences, in 2009, the options consisted mainly of the annual Values Voter Summit, sponsored by the evangelical Family Research Council, and the then-annual CPAC. Now there are dozens of events, and they reflect how the GOP marketplace incentivizes and rewards the worst actors the party has on offer, and distills it to a roux of disinformation and commercial opportunity for all who participate.

Just a small sampling of the summer ’22 offerings: In June, AMPFest held a new extravaganza in California, branded as a MAGA Coachella. That same weekend, former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and Lara Trump were lighting up 2,500 conservative students in Dallas at the Turning Point USA Young Women’s Leadership Summit. Two weeks later, Ralph Reed, one of the original whiz kids of the religious right, hosted his Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference at the Opryland Resort in Nashville, starring Donald Trump, with a roster of special guests that commingled Republican members of Congress with anti-vaccine activists such as Stella Immanuel (the Texas doctor who believes some gynecological problems are caused by having sex with demons), and, yet again, McEnany. In late July, Trump appeared at TPUSA’s Student Action Summit in Tampa, with Don Jr., Gaetz, and Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). McEnany was there too.

The September lineup offers the Truth & Liberty Coalition Conference in Colorado, starring Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), and the Family Research Council’s new Pray Vote Stand event. Taking into account the various anti-vaccine conventions, Trump’s American Freedom Tour, and Flynn’s ReAwaken America tour—held at megachurches and showcasing conspiracy theorists, QAnon devotees, and MyPillow’s Mike Lindell—a partisan could attend a spectacle every other weekend.

Before Celsius filed for bankruptcy last month, the company seemed optimistic about its future. In a June 7 blog post titled “Damn the Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead,” the crypto-lending firm took aim at the “vocal actors” who were “spreading misinformation and confusion.” It assured its customers that it was “online 24–7” and said it was continuing to “process withdrawals without delay.”

Celsius—which offers bank-like services for crypto enthusiasts, including the chance to earn eye-popping interest rates by depositing digital assets and the ability to borrow using crypto as collateral—boasted that it had “one of the best risk management teams in the world.” 

“We have made it through crypto downturns before (this is our fourth!),” the company assured consumers. “Celsius is prepared.”

Five days later, Celsius paused all customer withdrawals—a move that essentially froze the assets of its hundreds of thousands of users. A month after that, Celsius filed for bankruptcy. During the bankruptcy proceedings, it became evident that the company did not offer the same protections that traditional banks do. Since 2019, “the Company has been clear” that it may have to temporarily or permanently pause withdrawals due to a variety of potential circumstances, Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky wrote in a legal declaration. When customers deposit their savings with Celsius, they “transfer ‘all right and title’ of their crypto assets to Celsius,” he stated.

According to a presentation filed in court, Celsius now hopes to offer its customers a choice: accept a cash payment worth just a fraction of their investments, or opt to “remain ‘long’ crypto”—that is, continue to hold their digital currency on Celsius’ books in the hopes of eventually being able to recover their money.

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

Phoenix is America’s hottest city, and it’s getting hotter. The global climate crisis and decades of sprawling urban growth have turned this desert city into a hazardous heat island with dwindling water supplies and inadequate shade.

An assortment of programs to cool down Phoenix and help people survive the heat have not been working: in Maricopa county, which includes Phoenix, record high temperatures contributed to at least 662 deaths between 2020 and 2021, while thousands more people needed emergency medical treatment.

That’s where the city’s new Office of Heat Response and Mitigation comes in. The pioneering heat team was created last September amid pressure from activists, researchers, faith groups, and health experts for a dedicated team responsible—and accountable—for making Phoenix more livable.

David Hondula, a climate and health researcher at Arizona State University, was hired to lead the four-person team and coordinate the city’s immediate efforts to cut heat deaths and illness, and come up with ways to cool the city and make it more comfortable in the long term. It’s the first local government-funded heat team in North America, possibly the world. “It’s a long game—we’re fighting for small wins that we hope will accumulate into larger wins,” said Hondula. “We need to prepare for and recover from every summer, not occasional heatwaves.”

After spreading baseless claims of election fraud in the Arizona gubernatorial primary, Republican Kari Lake has won her party’s nomination. The Donald Trump-backed candidate and former FOX 10 Phoenix anchor defeated real estate developer Karrin Taylor Robson, who received endorsements from former Vice President Mike Pence and current Gov. Doug Ducey and invested $15 million of her own money in the campaign. Lake, a steadfast proponent of the Big Lie, had been the frontrunner, building her campaign around Trump’s stamp of approval—and the support of election deniers like Rep. Paul Gosar, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and My Pillow’s Mike Lindell. Lake campaigned on election conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant and pro-border enforcement rhetoric, and her repudiation of the very media that gave her a platform. 

Lake announced she was running for governor three months after ending her 22-year career with the Fox affiliate. In a video making her resignation public, Lake said she no longer approved of the direction journalism was going and that media needed more balanced and diverse viewpoints. “Not everyone is dedicated to telling the truth, but thankfully many of you have figured that out,” she said. “I promise you: If you hear it from my lips, it will be truthful.” She has continued to call the media the “enemy of the people” and appeared in a campaign video smashing televisions while vowing to take a “sledgehammer to leftist lies and propaganda.” Her conversion from TV personality to media-basher seemed to be a strategy intended to turn a “potential liability with Republican voters to an asset,” as Melanie Mason writes in the Los Angeles Times. 

Kari Lake has been contending for weeks now their is fraud & irregularities in her *primary* election — yet, below, she’s unable to offer a single specific allegation & refuses to answer why she wouldn’t take such intel to authorities. https://t.co/wxi4z0X2Ha

— Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) August 2, 2022

On various occasions during the campaign, Lake has hinted at supposed attempts to steal the primary election, but she has refused to provide any evidence to support her claims. “I’m not going to clarify it,” she recently said on a radio show. “We are on to some things that are very suspicious and possibly illegal. We’re working on it. I don’t want to ruin the investigation.” The chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which oversees elections in the state’s largest county, called her allegations “beyond irresponsible.” As part of her election integrity platform, Lake has proposed a ban on ballot-counting machines. 

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

The US is, following decades of political rancor and fossil fuel industry obfuscation, on the verge of its first significant attempt to tackle the climate crisis. Experts say it will help rewire the American economy and act as an important step in averting disastrous global heating.

Independent analysis of the proposed legislation, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, shows it should slash America’s planet-heating emissions by about 40 percent by the end of the decade, compared with 2005 levels.

This cut would bring the US within striking distance of a goal set by Joe Biden to cut emissions in half by 2030, a target that scientists say must be achieved by the whole world if catastrophic global heating, triggering escalating heatwaves, droughts and floods, is to be avoided.

“This is a massive turning point,” said Leah Stokes, a climate policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “This bill includes so much, it comprises nearly $370bn in climate and clean energy investments. That’s truly historic. Overall, the IRA is a huge opportunity to tackle the climate crisis.”

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), a crucial vote in an evenly divided Senate, announced last night that she would support a key piece of Biden’s legislative agenda—with some caveats.

Last week, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a longtime holdout, stunned his colleagues when he announced that he had struck a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,” which “includes roughly $370 billion in energy and climate spending, $300 billion in deficit reduction, three years of subsidies for Affordable Care Act premiums, prescription drug reform and significant tax changes,” per Politico.

But the bill was not going to move forward without the support of Sinema, who demanded that Democrats drop a provision that would place new limitations on the carried interest loophole—which many of her donors happen to benefit from—and garner roughly $14 billion in funding. Instead, the bill will reportedly include a 1 percent excise tax on stock buybacks—the practice of corporations repurchasing their own stock to drive up share prices—that’s set to garner $73 billion in federal revenue. Sinema also reportedly managed to win $5 billion in drought resiliency funding, a boon to Arizona.

NEW: DEMOCRATS REACH DEAL WITH SINEMA ON TAXES.

“We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate's budget reconciliation legislation." She will move forward after parl review.

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

The plastics had only been submerged in the ocean off Falmouth, England, for a week, but in that time a thin layer of biofilm, a slimy mix of mucus and microbes, had already developed on their surfaces. Michiel Vos, a microbiologist at the University of Exeter in England, had sunk five different types of plastic as a test. He and his colleagues wanted to know which of the myriad microbes living in the ocean would glom on to these introduced materials.

Vos and his colleagues’ chief concern was pathogenic bacteria. To understand the extent to which plastic can be colonized by potentially deadly bacteria, the scientists injected wax moth larvae with the biofilm. After a week, four percent of the larvae died. But four weeks later, after Vos and his team had let the plastics stew in the ocean for a bit longer, they repeated the test. This time, 65 percent of the wax moths died.

The scientists analyzed the biofilm: the plastics were covered in bacteria, including some known to make us sick. They found pathogenic bacteria responsible for causing urinary tract, skin, and stomach infections, pneumonia, and other illnesses. To make matters worse, these bacteria were also carrying a wide range of genes for antimicrobial resistance. “Plastics that you find in the water are rapidly colonized by bacteria, including pathogens,” says Vos. “And it doesn’t really matter what plastic it is.”

It’s not just bacteria that are hitching a ride on plastics. Biofilms on marine plastics can also harbor parasites, viruses, and toxic algae. With marine plastic pollution so ubiquitous—it’s been found everywhere from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to Arctic beaches—scientists are concerned that plastics are transporting these human pathogens around the oceans.

Senate Democrats’ climate and health care bill is one big step closer to becoming law after the body’s parliamentarian signed off on most of the package on Saturday morning.

The “Inflation Reduction Act,” which Vox called “the biggest thing the US has ever done to tackle climate change,” includes nearly $370 billion of climate spending. It would also allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices and reduce the deficit through measures including a new minimum tax on some of the country’s largest corporations. 

Less than two weeks ago, there seemed to be little chance of Democrats passing major legislation before the midterm elections in November. But in late July, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin, who’d helped tank President Joe Biden’s more ambitious Build Back Better package, shocked Washington by reaching a deal that they said would lead to hundreds of billions in climate spending while also raising revenue.

The key question then became what Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the other major Democratic obstacle to Senate action, would do. Late Thursday, Sinema said she was largely behind the bill aside from a provision that would have removed a tax break used by private equity billionaires that even Donald Trump has said allows plutocrats to get “away with murder”. Sinema added, however, that her overall support was still “subject to the parliamentarian’s review.”

On Saturday, Democrats cleared that hurdle when they announced that Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough—the nonpartisan expert in charge of determining whether legislation conforms with Senate rules—concluded that most of the bill can be passed through reconciliation. It means that Democrats only need a bare majority—not the 60 votes required to overcome a Republican filibuster—to pass the bill. The votes in favor are expected to be 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaker.

An Austin, Texas, jury on Friday found that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones must pay Sandy Hook parents $45.2 million in punitive damages for broadcasting defamatory claims that the 2012 school massacre was a government plot—and that the parents were in on the operation. That was on top of a separate set of compensatory damages issued this week, totaling $4.1 million.

The long-awaited ruling came after Jones, the founder of InfoWars, was found liable last year for defaming the parents, and it represented the first climax of three such hearings to assess how much Jones owes his victims.

But along with the other future hearings, Jones could soon be embroiled in another high-stakes legal drama after his lawyers in the defamation case mistakenly sent an enormous trove of his personal phone data to the legal counsel … for the Sandy Hook parents. This jaw-dropping development produced considerable courtroom drama—as my colleague Abigail Weinberg documented on Wednesday (watch to see Jones’s reaction happen in real-time). It also opened a surprise door for investigators working for the January 6 commission, which is trying to piece together how the Capitol Insurrection was potentially coordinated among a band of far-right operatives and extremists.

News quickly broke that the committee was preparing to issue a subpoena for the data, which apparently consists of two years’ worth of texts. Mark Bankston, a lawyer representing the parents, told the Texas court he was now in the possession of “intimate messages with Roger Stone”—the Trump-aligned operative—and that he was prepared to hand the cache over if the judge, Maya Guerra Gamble, cleared the way. She did just that on Friday. As Mother Jones has previously reported, Stone has multiple connections to a group of Oath Keepers, the far-right militia accused of helping to orchestrate a plot to disrupt the 2020 presidential election. (Both Stone and Jones have maintained they played no role in promoting violence.)

So, what would investigators be looking for exactly? Bankston doesn’t know. “We certainly saw text messages from as far back as 2019,” he said. “In terms of what all is on that phone, it’s going to take a little while to figure that out.”