Mother Jones

On Sunday, after four weeks of absence from Congress caused by a medical emergency—which led to extensive speculation about his health—Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) released a letter to his constituents saying that his hospitalization was the consequence of a fall. The 84-year-old former Senate Majority Leader noted that he has lifelong mobility issues related to a childhood case of polio. 

Polio—largely eliminated in the US following the pathbreaking development of the Salk vaccine in 1955, when McConnell was 13—is a life-altering disease: if it doesn’t kill a person, it can lead to disabilities. Even decades after a polio infection, people can develop what is called post-polio syndrome, which contributes to symptoms such as muscle weakness and pain. Falls like McConnell’s are often related, at least in part, though McConnell has not publicly said whether he’s been diagnosed with post-polio syndrome, and falls not related to the condition are not unusual at his age.

Despite over a century of knowledge of the impacts of polio, and seventy years of widespread vaccine availability, some American parents are either delaying or avoiding getting their kids vaccinated against it. According to CDC data published in March, around 8 percent of toddlers born in 2021 and 2022 did not receive at least three polio vaccines by age two, with similar data available for kids born in the early 2010s. Unlike with measles , there have yet to be polio outbreaks as a consequence, with just one recent recorded case in the United States in an unvaccinated adult in 2022 (and none in children).

McConnell has consistently advocated for vaccines and spoken about his experience with polio decades after his infection at two years old—a voice that might help sway vaccine-hesitant parents who lean conservative, and a counterpoint to President Donald Trump’s expression of anti-vaccine sentiments, and appointment of anti-vaccine activists to top public health posts.

McConnell voted against confirming anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary in February 2025. In a statement released at the time, McConnell made his views on anti-vax sentiment clear. 

“I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world,” he wrote. “I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”

It would be ahistorical to portray McConnell as any sort of health care hero. As Senate Majority Leader during the first Trump administration, McConnell led efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which, among other things, bans insurance companies from refusing to cover chronically ill people based on their disabilities. He also voted for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the 2025 budget bill that has already resulted in major public health cuts and which will strip millions of people of Medicaid through administrative burden.

Texas pediatrician and vaccine advocate Vincent Iannelli, who maintains a website tracking anti-vaccine propaganda, says voices like McConnell’s have been important in containing anti-vax sentiment. Trump, meanwhile, has questioned whether McConnell truly had polio—and various anti-vaxxers have done the same.

“The polio vaccine in particular is one of the greatest accomplishments of our science innovation,” American Public Health Association executive director Dr. Georges C. Benjamin told me. Benjamin noted that polio has been detected in wastewater domestically, suggesting that there are further unreported cases. “In communities that are not picking up the vaccine, the risk of polio is occurring,” he added.

New York University Grossman School of Medicine professor emeritus Arthur Caplan had polio when he was six years old and experienced temporary paralysis. Decades later, Caplan is experiencing the effects of post-polio syndrome, and now uses a mobility aid.

“It’s hugely important that polio survivors bear witness to the terrible damage that polio did in the US,” Caplan told me.

Asked what he thought about parents not vaccinating their children on the grounds of parental autonomy, Caplan, a bioethicist, says: “That is utter bullshit.” 

Grace Rossow contracted polio in India as an infant in 1992, shortly before being adopted by a family in the United States. Despite access to quality medical care, Rossow’s symptoms, including paralysis in one leg and fatigue, persist. She’s had 19 surgeries to address the fallout.

Recovery from health problems, due to underlying neuromuscular issues, takes much longer after polio, Rossow, now 34, told me.

Right now, polio risk remains very low, Iannelli says. But if vaccination rates drop—as they have for other conditions, including measles, where such a drop was once hard for public health officials to imagine—that could change. Caplan cites the Florida surgeon general‘s efforts to end vaccine mandates in schools. 

“Polio can hide. It hides in animals. People are asymptomatic. You cannot let your guard down against polio,” Caplan said. “It’s especially important for McConnell and other people who had polio to speak up.”

On Monday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were involved in yet another fatal shooting. This time in Biddeford, Maine.

The Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine said the victim was a 26-year-old Colombian man who was authorized to work in the United States, according to the Portland Press Herald. “He was a member of our community, a neighbor, and a human being whose life was cut tragically short. We extend our deepest condolences to his family, loved ones, and everyone now grieving this unimaginable loss,” the two immigration organizations said in a statement.

Daniel Boucher, who witnessed the aftermath of the shooting, told the Portland Press Herald that he was getting ready for work in the lead-up to the killing. After hearing what sounded like fireworks, he witnessed agents remove the driver of the sedan. “He was bleeding profusely from the head,” Boucher told the Press Herald. “He was talking. He said, ‘I tried to stop.’” 

A representative of the Biddeford Police Department said that calls about the shooting should be directed to ICE. The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to a request for comment. FBI agents were photographed at the scene of the shooting as part of an apparent federal investigation.

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) told the Associated Press that he spoke with DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin about the shooting. Mullin reportedly told him that the victim “weaponized” his vehicle. Similar claims by DHS have fallen apart after video footage of shootings have come to light.

It is unclear whether video of Monday’s shooting will emerge. The ICE agents involved were not wearing body cameras, according to King.

Monday’s victim is one of more than 20 people who federal immigration agents have shot at since last year, according to the New York Times. Most of those shootings have involved people who were inside their cars. At least nine people have now been killed during encounters with immigration agents during President Donald Trump’s second term.

Another witness to the aftermath of Monday’s shooting, who asked to be identified as Em, told the Press Herald that she heard the gunshots then saw a white car whose driver appeared to have lost control of his vehicle. ICE then rammed into the car to get it to stop, she said.

Lucas Scott told the paper that he saw an ICE agent draw his weapon as he was yelling at the driver of the car. Scott then said he witnessed the driver try to hit the ICE agent with his car before the agent opened fire.

Images from the scene of the shooting show what appear to be bullet holes through the windshield of a white Kia sedan. The victim can be seen lying on the ground alongside the car.

A Kia sedan reportedly driven by the victim of a fatal shooting can be seen with bullet holes in its windshield on Monday.Gregory Rec/Getty

Governor Janet Mills of Maine said she has been “briefed on the shooting” and that the Maine State Police are on the scene. Other Maine politicians have been more outspoken. Ryan Fecteau (D-Maine), Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, was quick to name ICE as the agency involved. Troy Jackson, who is running to replace Graham Platner as Maine’s Democratic nominee for Senate, called for ICE to be abolished. “For too long, ICE agents have been abducting our neighbors in brazen violation of the Constitution, and today they have tragically escalated even further,” Jackson said. “This rogue agency must be abolished.” 

Last week, ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who lived in Texas for three decades. As Mother Jones has reported: 

Salgado’s son Ronaldo Salgado held a press conference Wednesday calling for an independent investigation into his father’s death. “I want to tell you about my dad,” he said. “He was a hardworking family man. He was also a man of routine.” Every day, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo got up before dawn and drove to work on a construction site, just as he had done for 35 years.

“At 6:45 a.m., he should have been picking up the last of his guys before heading to North Houston to finish up construction on some houses,” Ronaldo Salgado said. By 6:55, his father had been shot by ICE agents who followed him in an unmarked car.

In a statement, DHS said Lorenzo Salgado Araujo had attempted to evade arrest and “weaponized his vehicle,” echoing language used in the hours after an ICE agent shot and killed US citizen Renée Good in her car in Minneapolis in January.

DHS ran with the same story to justify the shooting of Marimar Martinez in Chicago. In both cases, video evidence greatly undermined the government’s claims. DHS’s lies following the killing of Alex Pretti in January further eroded the department’s credibility. 

After Good’s killing in Minnesota earlier this year, Seth Stoughton, a former Florida police officer who is now a professor of law and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, made clear in a Q&A with Mother Jones that cops have been trained for decades not to place themselves in front of a potentially moving vehicle and to avoid shooting at drivers. “If you imagine a vehicle driving toward you, shooting the driver is not going to cause that vehicle to stop,” Stoughton explained. “One, you might not actually incapacitate the driver. But even if you do, you’ve just gone from having a guided missile to having an unguided missile.”

Mufalo Chitam, executive director of the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, called for accountability in a statement shared with the press. “We are grieving, we are furious, and we will not allow his death to be treated as routine or inevitable,” Chitam said. “How much more harm must our communities endure before those with the power to act acknowledge that this has gone too far?”

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

The Trump administration has directly spent $2.7 billion of taxpayer money on its crusade against wind power while pouring $1.1 billion into boosting coal, which critics say is pushing up Americans’ bills.

They say the moves are evidence that the president aims to serve fossil-fuel companies like those which donated record sums to his presidential campaign, rather than the working-class Americans to whom he pledged to lower energy bills and other costs.

“Trump is getting Americans coming and going,” said Jay Inslee, the former governor of Washington state and a Trump detractor. “He’s forcing higher power bills on them by blocking clean energy, then he’s fattening the wallets of his cronies—all with billions of our tax dollars.”

The Department of Interior has, since March, struck four deals with energy companies, paying them to cancel a total of eight offshore wind projects and pledge to invest in fossil-fuel power. The first such agreement was announced in March with the French energy company TotalEnergies, sparking a lawsuit from seven Democratic-controlled states that alleged it was an illegal use of taxpayer money.

“Coal has largely died because of economics, and so forcing it to stay afloat is not a good energy decision, and not a good economic decision.”

The latest deal with Duke Energy was announced late last month.

The president has derided wind energy as “ugly” and “disgusting,” and called efforts to slash planet-warming pollution a “scam.” Previous administrations have canceled or delayed energy projects via permitting, litigation or regulatory changes, but there is no precedent for the federal government directly paying developers to relinquish legally acquired offshore wind leases, said Jenny Rowland-Shea, senior director for conservation policy at the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress.

“They are trying to snuff out an entire form of energy,” she said. “And it’s at a time when the United States needs more energy…as people’s rates are going up for electricity, as we see data centers gobbling up more energy.”

As it has worked to suppress offshore wind, which experts say should be a key part of any climate plan, the Trump administration has bolstered coal, the dirtiest and most expensive fossil fuel. In September, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced it would spend $625 million to “expand and extend the life of” coal-fired power plants, allocating $350 million to “modernize” coal plants, $175 million to fund coal projects powering rural communities, and $50 million to upgrade wastewater management systems to extend coal plants’ lifespans.

Trump’s second-term spending to kill offshore wind and boost coal

Guardian graphic. Sources: DOI, DOE

Last month, the agency also set aside up to $500 million from the Defense Production Act to “expand and reinvigorate” the capacity of 13 coal plants, and to help build a coal export terminal in Oakland, California. A week later, the department announced an additional $3.6 million to “refurbish or retrofit” nine existing coal plants.

In an email, a DOE spokesperson, Ben Dietderich, said the administration is “proud” of its efforts to boost coal. “Before President Trump ended the Green New Scam, taxpayers paid the bill for trillions of dollars of so-called green energy energy subsidies,” Dietderich wrote, saying this resulted in the “premature shutdown” of fossil fuel plants, higher energy costs, and increased blackout risk.

“It’s worth noting that states with their own anti-coal and gas policies experienced the highest price increases during that time period,” he said.

There is evidence that renewables can lower energy costs.

Reached for comment, a White House spokesperson, Taylor Rogers, said officials were “not spending taxpayer dollars on these deals.”

“The administration is returning the money that companies bid on offshore wind projects that are unable to be built due to national security concerns, and those companies are voluntarily redirecting those returned bid amounts to energy projects that will provide affordable, reliable, and secure energy for American families and businesses,” she said. “The reality is that the Biden administration lured companies into these projects with the promise of millions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies to make these offshore wind projects viable.”

“We’re paying as taxpayers to keep economically unviable plants open,” resulting in “immeasurable harm to the local environment.”

But money from energy leases on public lands and waters goes into public accounts, said Rowland-Shea. “They can use the word return, but they are paying the companies not to produce this energy or to give taxpayers what was promised,” she said. The Biden administration indeed made subsidies available for offshore wind, but fossil fuels have long been subsidized by federal administrations, she noted.

The Guardian has also contacted the interior department for comment.

Coal is the most carbon-dense fossil fuel, making it a major contributor to the climate crisis. It is also harmful to public health, with one 2023 study estimating that as many as 460,000 deaths in the US from 1999 to 2020 were attributable to tiny particles of air pollution from coal plants alone.

Coal plants are also more expensive to build and run than renewable alternatives, experts warn. “Coal has largely died because of economics, and so forcing it to stay afloat is not a good energy decision, and not a good economic decision for taxpayers,” said Rowland-Shea.

Taxpayers are likely to pay for the White House’s anti-renewable and pro-coal moves twice, critics say: first through the billions in direct public spending, and then through higher electricity bills as utilities continue relying on more expensive coal generation instead of cheaper renewable energy.

A 2025 analysis from research firm Grid Strategies suggests that if all 35,000 megawatts of large fossil power plants scheduled to retire by 2028 were kept running, this would cost ratepayers at least $3.1 billion by the end of 2028.

In an email, Rogers, the White House spokesperson, said without subsidies, offshore wind projects “are not only the costliest source of power, but also the least dependable.”

Yet 99 percent of domestic coal-fired power plants cost more to run than it would cost to replace them with renewable power sources, a 2023 report from the research organization Energy Innovation found. Generating power with coal in 2024 cost 28 percent more than the same amount would have cost in 2021, Energy Innovation found last year.

“The failure of this coal sale demonstrates the Trump administration’s willingness to use significant resources to subsidize a dying industry.”

“These coal plants that are being supported by the government are coal plants that were going to close down because they couldn’t keep themselves open on their own,” said Gabrielle Levy, spokesperson for green advocacy group Climate Action Campaign. “So we’re paying as taxpayers to keep economically unviable plants open, and meanwhile those are doing immeasurable harm to the local environment, to people’s health, and to the climate, which costs us more, too.”

The spending comes alongside a broader effort to tilt the nation’s energy policy toward fossil fuels and away from renewable power. In October, the energy department allocated an additional $1.5 billion in public money in the form of a loan to restart and repurpose a coal gasification plant. And in February, the president signed an executive order directing the Pentagon to purchase electricity from coal plants, in another attempt to boost the United States’ coal industry through federal funding.

Officials have also curtailed many of the clean-energy tax credits created under the Inflation Reduction Act; frozen or slowed permitting for new wind projects; and streamlined permitting for fossil-fuel projects while making it more difficult for renewable projects to move forward. They have also taken other steps to make coal more economical.

Through a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, officials lowered royalty rates on federal coal from 12.5 percent to just 7 percent, slashing the amount of money that coal companies pay to the federal government and states to extract on public lands—a change that Wyoming alone estimates could cost it $50 million per year. In October, when the administration also held the largest US coal leasing sale in over a decade, the only bid amounted to one-tenth of a penny per ton.

“Even though the bid was ultimately rejected, the failure of this coal sale demonstrates the Trump administration’s willingness to use significant resources to subsidize a dying industry,” Rowland-Shea said.

Inslee said the Trump administration’s actions amounted to a “mugging.”

“We pay more, Republicans rubber-stamp it, and Trump’s donors walk off with the bag,” he said.

In March 2022, Pete Hegseth, then a Fox News analyst and host, spoke at a dinner put on by the Israel Heritage Foundation, a conservative Jewish group that has worked to boost US support for the Israeli far right.

The mostly unmemorable event was held at a midtown Manhattan restaurant to honor former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, then a potential presidential candidate yet to fall from Donald Trump’s graces. But one notable aside came when Hegseth singled out the IHF’s honorary chairman, Jonathan Burkan, saying they had become friends.

“Jon has a force of personality that you will never underestimate,” Hegseth said, before adding. “He manages my money now. It’s true.”

Burkan, who works at Morgan Stanley, remained Hegseth’s wealth manager after the TV personality became defense secretary last year. A person with knowledge of the arrangement said Burkan works most closely with Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer Rauchet, who manages the couple’s finances and also functions as a Pentagon adviser. 

“No one is more pro-Israel than Pete.”

At the same time he’s working to make Hegseth richer, Burkan acts as a high-level advocate for Israeli interests. Burkan is not a registered foreign agent for Israel, but he has helped to organize trips to Israel for political figures. Burkan is also a founding member and director of another group, the Israel Justice Organization (IJO) that describes itself as working to “influence executive actions” to “promote pro Israel policies.”

Burkan vocally supported the US’ decision to wage war with Israel against Iran. In a March op-ed he co-wrote for a pro-settler media outlet, Burkan and IJO chair Joseph Frager praised Trump for launching airstrikes. “President Trump has prevented a Holocaust in both America and Israel,” they wrote. “One day the world will give him the credit he deserves.” Trump quickly posted that article on Truth Social.

Burkan, Hegseth, and Frager in a photo from the Israel Justice Organization’s website. Frager boasts Hegseth visited Israel five times on trips he arranged.

It’s not clear if Burkan has used his personal relationship with Hegseth to advocate attacking Iran or for other Israeli priorities. In a brief phone call, Burkan declined to comment, saying he does not “talk to the media.” He referred questions to Morgan Stanley. The Pentagon’s press office did not respond to emailed questions, including whether Burkan’s relationship with Hegseth mingled political advocacy with financial advice. 

But Burkan and Frager have touted their ties to and influence on Hegseth and other Trump administration officials. Hegseth is one of the various conservative figures who have joined trips that Frager, working with a rotating set of nonprofit organizations that include IHF and IJO, has organized to Israel and its West Bank settlements. “Without Joe Frager, I would not have the passion that I do for the state of Israel,” Hegseth said at the 2022 dinner honoring Pompeo. 

In April, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked Hegseth, in a letter and at a Senate hearing, about a Financial Times report that in the run-up to the US attack on Iran, Hegseth’s Morgan Stanley broker “contacted BlackRock in February about making a multimillion-dollar investment” in a defense-related fund.

Burkan was not named in the story, which said that Hegseth’s broker ultimately did not go ahead with the investment. Mother Jones has not independently verified the report. 

Hegseth has denied it. “That entire story is false—always has been, and was made up out of whole cloth,” he told Warren at the April hearing. Pressed by Warren on whether his broker required his sign off before making investment decisions, Hegseth said: “Of course.”

Morgan Stanley declined to comment. But a person familiar with the matter said the firm is legally prohibited from identifying clients, and that after looking into the Financial Times report it was “not aware of any Morgan Stanley representative having contacted BlackRock about making an investment” in the defense fund “in the weeks leading up to the launch of U.S. military operations in Iran.”

A map from a March 4 briefing where Hegseth discussed the US and Israel’s initial attacks on Iran.Konstantin Toropin/AP

The joint US-Israeli war against Iran, which Trump started on February 28 after lobbying by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been deeply unpopular—increasingly viewed in the United States and Israel as a humiliating disaster. The unprovoked attack sent gas prices soaring, costing American consumers well over $100 billion. It has killed and injured thousands of civilians.

Trump’s decision to attack followed an extraordinary feat of personal advocacy by Netanyahu. After failing to persuade past presidents to back Israeli strikes on Iran, Netanyahu convinced Trump to join a bombing campaign, despite ongoing Iranian efforts to negotiate with the US over their nuclear program. The New York Times reported that Trump agreed to Israel’s plan in the face of skepticism by several cabinet officials and a US intelligence finding that Israeli claims the attack could oust the Iranian regime were far-fetched.

But Hegseth, according to the Times, “was the biggest proponent” for the war in the cabinet. A US intelligence official familiar with the discussions told Mother Jones that Hegseth’s support “gave Trump the validation he needed to go ahead.”

“The intelligence community got Iran right,” the person said. “They warned him about all the bad stuff that was gonna happen. But fucking Trump decided to listen to the Israelis and Pete Hegseth.”

The White House defended Hegseth’s advice to Trump. “Secretary Hegseth’s extraordinary leadership at the Pentagon was on full display throughout Operation Epic Fury,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “The Secretary consistently provided accurate, unbiased information to the President.”

There is little indication that advocates like Burkan had a significant, direct role in the decision to launch the war. Netanyahu and David Barnea, then-director of Mossad, made that case directly to Trump and his cabinet. But pro-Israeli advocates can point to having laid the groundwork for Hegseth and other influential officials to unskeptically accept Israeli overtures. 

Critics of Israeli influence in Washington have long focused on groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that help tilt US domestic politics toward Israel. But those organizations, with traditionally bipartisan lobbying operations, are relatively mainstream compared to more hardline groups that have focused on building the alliance between the Israeli and American right. That includes Christian evangelicals, who have long been targets of Israeli influence operations.

“The whole picture is abhorrent… These are the people who are influencing the decision makers?”

Through his work since 2008 running prolific junkets for prominent conservative Americans to visit Israel and its West Bank settlements, Frager, a New York gastroenterologist, has sought to build influence at a personal level. His ties to top Trump administration officials appear to mostly rest on the trips. In a 2015 interview, Frager told an Israeli outlet that “our efforts here in America are enormous and extremely valuable for Israel, and I believe that this is my tafkid, my job,” invoking the Hebrew word for divinely ordained purpose. “That’s why I’m still here, and not living in Israel where I should.”

Hegseth joined Frager at private dinners and trips to Israel in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. In 2021, Frager began organizing trips through the Israel Heritage Foundation, a new entity he and fellow religious zionists created within a longstanding Hudson Valley rabbinical seminary. 

The IHF, which did not respond to requests for comment, describes itself as nonpartisan. But it has hosted a swath of mostly right-leaning or Trump-friendly politicos at its events and trips to Israel, including former New York Mayor Eric Adams, Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.), Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisc.), Mike Pence, Kari Lake, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), and Michael Whatley, a former Republican National Committee chair now running for Senate in North Carolina. Trump himself attended a 2023 IHF gala.

“You’re talking about people who had prominence,” former IHF president Farley Weiss explained in an interview. “I think it’s critical to get people in these positions to go to Israel and see it.”

Mike Huckabee, now US Ambassador to Israel, took his first trip to the country with Frager in 2008, while he was running for president and courting religious conservatives. The former Arkansas governor went on to take more than a dozen additional trips with him, Frager boasted to Queens Jewish Link in November 2024. 

That travel appears to have helped cement Huckabee’s adoption of the politics of the Israeli settler movement, a success that is evident in an ambassador who is steeped in the politics and language of Israel’s far right. Huckabee has even disputed the legitimacy of Palestinian identity: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria,” he’s said. 

Following a 2018 Huckabee visit to Israel, Frager arranged and accompanied him on a trip to Doha, Qatar. A federal filing by a lobbyist for Qatar shows Huckabee was paid $50,000 for coming, and $50,000 went to Frager for setting it up. The Qataris fund governance efforts in Gaza, and Frager has claimed the goal of the trip was to win their help retrieving the bodies of two fallen Israeli soldiers held in Gaza. 

Hegseth has proved an even greater success. At a 2018 visit to a purported West Bank biblical site, where he stood with Frager and Yossi Dagan, the head of an Israeli settlement council, Hegseth was on message. 

“Warriors are the reason why the Jewish people are free and they will have to continue to be vigilant,” Hegseth said. ”My prayer is that as Americans we will stand alongside, shoulder to shoulder.”

Following Trump’s announcement he would nominate Hegseth as defense secretary, Frager told Queens Jewish Link that the former Fox News host had joined five trips he organized. “There won’t be any distance between the Defense Department and Israel,” Frager told the outlet for an article that trumpeted his relationship with the incoming cabinet official. “No one is more pro-Israel than Pete.”

In his first term, and again last year, Trump named Burkan to the board that oversees the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He attended the 2020 White House signing of the Abraham Accords, and, along with Frager, has personally met Netanyahu and other high level Israeli officials. In December, Burkan declared Trump the “best friend Israel has had.” 

— IMAGE: Jonathan Burkan, the national chair of ‘Trump 47 Jewish Leadership’, with Donald Trump at the Ohel of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. pic.twitter.com/YUvlPW7jyT

— Belaaz News (@TheBelaaz) October 7, 2024

At a May 2024 IHF dinner hosted in Trump World Tower, Martin Oliner, another Trump appointee to the Holocaust museum’s board, urged an Israeli diplomat to convey home what Oliner said were the clear views of the crowd: “The state of Israel has to do what it has to do. Look, we’ve been accused of genocide, so maybe it’s up to us to actually kill civilians.” 

“Take the lessons from Dresden. Take the lessons from the firebombing,” Oliner said. “Take the lessons from America when they dropped atomic bombs on Japan…Maybe we need to kill more civilians.” 

Oliner’s comments drew applause. But after Prism reported on them, they drew condemnation, and later a disavowal from the IHF. In the wake of that controversy, Burkan, Farley, Frager, Weiss, and others launched the Israel Justice Organization, a new group that appears to operate similarly. (Oliner didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Burkan has acted as a public face for the IJO; its website and his social media highlight his meetings with officials including Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Vice President JD Vance, and Trump. Burkan was part of a group of Jewish leaders who gathered with Trump in the Oval Office in April during Passover, and he returned to the White House in May as part of a Shabbat celebration.

A photo Burkan (fourth from left, in red tie) shared online showing his April White House visit.

In June, the month after Oliner’s remarks about killing civilians, Oliner and Burkan joined other Jewish leaders there for another event, where Oliner appears to have given Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, a self-published book of his columns. It is titled “In Praise of Donald Trump.”

The Israel Heritage Foundation continues on, maintaining active social media accounts. In March, a few days after a US Tomahawk missile killed more than 150 at an Iranian girls’ elementary school, most of them children, the IHF reposted a video in which Hegseth described the Iran war as an unmitigated success. The group’s post read: “A hero!”

Burkan’s friendship with Hegseth and his work as his financial adviser—like the defense secretary’s ties to Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson—highlight the extent to which the secretary is personally enmeshed, socially, financially and religiously, in a culture where views that would have been too extreme even for the first Trump administration are standard fare.

“The whole picture is abhorrent and abominable—that these are the people who are influencing the decision makers in this country,” says human rights attorney Azadeh Shahshahani. “This web of influence of these organizations and people who basically have no regard for the human dignity and the lives of Palestinians, Iranians, and Lebanese, are dictating the foreign policy of the US.”

Exactly how much sway this group has remains murky. But Burkan and Frager can fairly claim to have helped shape the views of key decision makers that led the Trump administration to embrace Netanyahu’s goals and start a war with Iran. 

They seem happy to tout that success. In an email, Weiss boasted that Israel Justice Organization “members have had relationships with Secretary of War Hegseth before he got his Cabinet position. They remain on friendly terms.” He said Hegseth has done “an incredible job” at the Pentagon, in part by leading “the U.S. military to work seamlessly with” Israeli forces.

In May, IJO helped convene several far-right Israeli government ministers in New York City as the conflict in Iran continued. Burkan offered remarks touting Frager’s years of success influencing Trump administration officials.

“People don’t realize Dr. Frager took Mike Huckabee multiple times,” Burkan said. “He took Pete Hegseth multiple times. This guy has literally changed America.”

When Sam Levine, Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), was eleven, he signed up for a service that would send him ten free CDs in the mail. “I didn’t know it then, but I had just signed up for my first subscription,” Levine said. A few months and a pile of bills later, he was begging his parents to help him cancel the membership he’d unknowingly purchased.

It’s been 28 years since Levine was lured in with the promise of a Cher CD, but the problem of “subscription traps”—subscriptions which are easy to get, but a minefield to cancel—has only gotten worse. At a press conference Friday, Levine joined New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and former FTC Commissioner Lina Khan to present a municipal-level solution: New York City’s Click To Cancel Rule.

“These are now part of the business model for some of the largest companies in our economy.”

The idea behind the regulation is simple. A subscription should be as easy to cancel as it is to sign up for. A person should not be required to cancel a gym membership in-person if they got that membership online, or mail in a letter, or spend hours on hold with customer service in order to stop being charged for a service they aren’t using. Click to cancel is not a new idea: Under Joe Biden and Commissioner Khan, the Federal Trade Commission approved a federal click to cancel rule in 2024—only for that rule to be struck down on procedural grounds by the Eighth Circuit Court a year later, after a trade group representing major cable and internet providers sued to block it from going into effect. (Trump’s FTC may revive the rule, which was widely popular with consumers, later this year.)

“At the Federal Trade Commission, we would receive tens of thousands of complaints each year from people who had lost hard-earned money to these predatory schemes,” Khan, a member of Mamdani’s transition team, said at Friday’s press conference. “People wrote to us about spending days trying to cancel a gym membership, about charges that kept appearing months after they’d been canceled…These are not just the tactics of fly-by-night scammers. These are now part of the business model for some of the largest companies in our economy.” Uber, for instance, is currently being sued by the FTC and a coalition of state Attorneys General for allegedly “misleading customers by trapping them in recurring subscriptions to its Uber One service that were exceedingly difficult to cancel.” Adobe, too, has been accused of using these practices: An Adobe executive, according to court documents unearthed in 2024, called hidden early-termination fees “a bit like heroin” for the company.

Now, under Andrew Ferguson, the FTC is less aggressive about consumer-protection enforcement than it was under Khan. But on the state and city levels, consumers still have advocates. In California, Maryland and Colorado, statewide Click To Cancel rules are in effect. In New York, too, statewide consumer protections are already among the strongest in the country. But when New York City’s rule goes into effect this October, it will be the first municipal law of its kind, Mamdani said. It will add a local enforcement mechanism, DCWP Commissioner Levine said, giving New Yorkers the opportunity to complain directly about subscription traps by calling 311. And it’s expected to collectively save New Yorkers somewhere between $21.5 and $162.5 million per year, according to the Roosevelt Institute.

Friday’s announcement—held, notably, in a gym, in front of a cluster of elliptical machines—is part of a broader crackdown on predatory pricing. New York City is also targeting so-called “junk fees” that raise the final price of everything from apartments to sporting events, requiring companies to advertise final prices including additional charges or fees up-front. “It is estimated that the average family of four loses more than $3,200 per year on junk fees and hidden costs,” Mamdani said at the press conference.

Enforcement will begin October 1, with businesses that don’t provide easy cancellation processes facing civil penalties starting at $525 per violation. For 187 New York City gyms, warning letters were already sent out this past February. New Yorkers will be able to file complaints through the Department of Consumer and Worker Protections, which may then take subscription-trapping companies to court.

Under Trump’s regulation-averse federal government—one that in fact brands itself as having the “most ambitious deregulation agenda in history”—big companies tend to be able to extract value from people and come out on top without repercussions. Unwanted subscription fees, Khan said, “represent an upwards transfer of wealth; often from people who are already living on the financial margins of this city, to people who ultimately looking to buy a private jet or a second yacht.” So it’s nice to see that, at least on the local level, protecting people from predatory corporate tactics might still be possible.

Within moments of the early Sunday morning announcement that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had died, there was much obvious commentary about his journey from Trump foe to Trump suck-up. During the 2016 GOP presidential primary, when Graham was competing with the onetime reality TV celebrity, he blasted Donald Trump as a “demagogue” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” He urged voters to tell Trump to “go to hell.” He predicted his party would be “destroyed,” if it nominated Trump.

Yet after Trump won, Graham became a full-fledged Trump lackey. He played golf with his new buddy and relished the access to power he now possessed. After the 2020 election, he joined Trump’s effort to pressure Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to rework the state’s vote count so Trump would prevail. And when Graham won a hard-fought Senate primary last month, he lavished praise on Trump, exclaiming, “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.”

Graham lavished praise on Trump, exclaiming, “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.”

One sign of Graham’s descent into the abyss of Trump toadyism is not likely to receive much attention: his acrobatic flip-flop on the Trump-Russia scandal.

After the 2016 election, during which Russia mounted a covert hack-and-leak attack and an extensive clandestine social media operation to cause chaos, hinder the Hillary Clinton campaign, and boost Trump, Graham was one of the Republican legislators who was boiling mad. He proclaimed, “I think they did interfere with our elections, and I want Putin personally to pay the price.” Graham even lobbied Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, to lead the Senate’s investigation of the Russian assault. (McConnell opted to hand the probe to the Senate intelligence committee, where it would be less visible to the public.)

In this regard, Graham was at odds with Trump, who had falsely denied Putin had interfered in the 2016 election and who derided the scandal as a “hoax” and not worthy of an investigation, which he repeatedly called a “witch hunt.” Graham also joined with Sen. Marco Rubio to press the Trump administration to impose tough sanctions on Russia—which Trump was not keen on doing.

But eventually Graham got on board with Trump’s Russia denialism. He mounted a side investigation that focused not on Putin’s operation but on the FBI’s investigation of the Russian operation and the Steele dossier, the series of memos produced by a former British intelligence official that contained uncorroborated allegations of Trump-Russia collusion. Attacking the FBI probe and the Steele dossier—which was paid for by an opposition research firm retained by a lawyer working for the Clinton campaign—became the Republican’s main tactic to divert attention from Putin’s assault on the 2016 campaign and from Trump’s complicity (that is, his false insistence that there had been no Russian intervention).

Shortly before the 2020 election, Graham urged John Ratcliffe, a Trump devotee who was then director of national intelligence, to declassify intelligence that suggested that the Clinton campaign in 2016 had concocted a scheme to “stir up a scandal against US Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee,” with the goal to “distract the public from her use of a private mail server.”

Graham, who once decried Putin’s covert attack on the United States, now was an obsequious Trump foot soldier.

What neither Graham nor Ratcliffe told the public was that this intel was based on Russian intelligence reports that had been pilfered by the Dutch intelligence service and that CIA analysts believed were not credible and perhaps even disinformation. Graham was deploying unverified Russian intelligence to back up Trump’s phony claim that there had been no Russian assault on the 2016 election and that the whole thing was a Democratic hoax. He had pulled a complete 180.

Graham, who once decried Putin’s covert attack on the United States, now was an obsequious Trump foot soldier. He recklessly and irresponsibly called the suspicious Russian intelligence that Ratcliffe made public “the smoking gun.”

And he stuck to this line. Last year, when Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, appeared before the Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing, Graham railed against the Trump-Russia investigation and called it “one of the most disgusting episodes in FBI history…led by corrupt people.” He falsely stated that a Justice Department inspector general’s investigation had declared the inquiry “fraudulent.” (The IG report concluded it was legitimately opened but identified several problems with the probe.) Graham had become a pit bull for Russia denialism.

What’s odd is that while Graham was helping Trump cover up Putin’s attack on American democracy, he was also a fierce advocate for Ukraine. “Lindsey was a true defender of freedom and the values that make our world safer,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote after learning of Graham’s death, saying he was “deeply saddened.”

So when the issue was Ukraine versus Russia, Graham was fervently opposed to Putin’s barbarous war and tried to nudge Trump into maintaining US support for Kyiv. But on the matter of Putin’s attack on the United States, Graham fully caved in order to protect Trump—and became a useful idiot for Putin. No matter which principles Graham held and which policies he cared about, ultimately what mattered most was the influence he gained by serving a demagogue.

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

This year’s El Niño is shaping up to be among the strongest on record, and it’s set to create chaotic weather around the world.

A new study suggests that there could be a way to mitigate some of the impacts of future El Niños and global warming: dimming the sun.

El Niño develops naturally in the tropical Pacific every few years, caused by weakened trade winds that push heat from the ocean toward the coast of South America. This tilts the odds toward higher-than-average global temperatures, as well as droughts in some regions, intense rains and floods in others, and more cyclones in the Pacific. Piled on top of warming driven by burning fossil fuels, a strong El Niño can mean hundreds of billions in economic losses.

“The thesis seems quite reasonable,”… but actually executing something like this would be “a political nightmare.”

The new study argues that deflecting solar energy could cool the ocean and help moderate El Niño events before they become too strong, staving off the worst impacts.

“El Niño is one of these things where something happens in the tropical Pacific, and then it rearranges the way the entire global atmosphere is holding energy that year,” says Katherine Ricke, a coauthor of the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances and a climate scientist at UC San Diego and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “It’s an ultimate pressure point in the climate system.”

Ricke and her coauthors looked at using marine cloud brightening, or MCB, as a way to dim the sun in the Pacific. The technique entails spraying seawater into marine clouds to enhance the clouds’ reflectivity. While some pilot projects and randomized controlled trials have tested the technique’s efficacy, they’ve only been on very small scales.

MCB is one of a few different solar geoengineering methods intended to reflect sunlight back into space. Other methods, like using planes to inject aerosols into the stratosphere, can only work globally. But MCB has the potential to be a regional cooling solution.

To get around the lack of MCB experiments, researchers looked at a recent natural phenomenon that mimicked it: the catastrophic 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season. More than 10,000 bushfires raged across the country, producing almost 1 million metric tons of smoke. That represents one of the largest inputs of smoke into the stratosphere that humans have observed with satellite technology.

While the effects of this massive amount of smoke were complex, previous research shows it helped trigger a rare triple-dip La Niña—the opposite phase of El Niño—thanks in part to reflective particles in the smoke.

This event, Ricke says, enabled her and her coauthors to finally address a question they’d had for years about whether regional interventions can help relieve the pressure events like El Niño put on the global climate system. The researchers created a model based on the MCB effects of the Australian bushfires, and ran it against two different historic El Niño events to observe its effects. The modeling showed that lowering the amount of sunlight reaching the Pacific’s surface would have significantly reduced the magnitude of those El Niño events and their global impact.

Geoengineering techniques have traditionally been viewed as a method to cool the entire planet, acting as a counterbalance to humans’ use of fossil fuels—albeit an extremely controversial one. The new study makes the case that some forms of geoengineering would be better used to target regional events, like El Niño. Doing so has the potential to avoid—or at least lower the risk—of the compounding effects of El Niño piled on top of rising temperatures due to human activity.

“There’s the possibility that you’ll create an unpredicted problem that is worse than the problem you’re trying to solve.”

“The idea of having to sustain geoengineering indefinitely gives a lot of people pause—we all understand that cooperation at that magnitude would be hugely complicated in the world we live in,” Ricke says. “This is a totally different way to think about geoengineering.”

Geoengineering techniques like using planes to inject aerosols into the stratosphere—or even more fantastical ideas like space mirrors—have been met with skepticism from scientists, policymakers, and the public. This is mainly due to their unpredictability—altering the weather can come with a lot of unintended consequences—and their potential to create political instability. It’s likely even a regionalized approach like the one proposed in the new study would run into the same issues, but it appears to be scientifically feasible—or at least worth further study.

“The thesis seems quite reasonable,” Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University, says of the Scripps study. But Dessler warns that actually executing something like this would be “a political nightmare,” resulting in conflict or war if something goes wrong in what would be a worst-case scenario.

“These models are imperfect, and there’s the possibility that you’ll create an unpredicted problem that is worse than the problem you’re trying to solve,” Dessler says. “I think this is a really interesting paper, and I learned a few things reading it, but I certainly would not say that this is a great idea and we should implement it.”

Ricke agrees: “There’s a lot of things we need to figure out from models before trying it in the real world,” she says. Still, she says, this research could prove crucial for the future if humanity fails to address fossil fuel pollution. “The reason people do research on solar geoengineering is because we might end up in a world where we need it.”

As someone who watches too much soccer and knows Erling Haaland as perhaps the world’s most formidable striker playing today, seeing friends and acquaintances show me viral videos of the player as an onion has been quite funny. 

@mw10.03

Every household has some Halaand onions. My garlic has become a spirit. Strange garlic heads. Halaand. Halaand Song. Haaland. World Cup Meme King Tournament.

♬ 原声 – mw10.03

Despite my distaste for his club team (Manchester City is effectively owned by the United Arab Emirates, in large part to launder its image amid human rights violations), I do find Haaland very fun, especially in a sports industry where unrefined celebrity is rare. I particularly like this one:

Ok, I'm a fan of Haaland now after that smack he gives the 2nd kid

— Razzball (@razzball.bsky.social) 2026-07-06T21:28:15.170Z

Over the past month’s FIFA Men’s World Cup matches, fans have called the Norwegian striker various versions of “babygirl” and “princess.” The names largely come from the sharp contrast between his gigantic frame and endearing personality both on-camera and online. Haaland posts selfies with his “twin”—a low-res image of the animated character Shrek—on his Snapchat, and has a large designer bag collection—Chanel, Hermès, Louis Vuitton, etc. He is tailor-made for internet fandom.

But a lot of the most viral content is AI-generated, gets endlessly reshared, and is often uncannily accurate—including one where Haaland appears to get scared by his own reflection while eating.

I'm seriously going to die laughing at Haaland. pic.twitter.com/1Wfcbz2qza

— Crazy Moments (@Crazymoments01) June 29, 2026

We’re now at the point where news organizations and AI experts are fact-checking viral Haaland posts.

It’s unfortunate because I have enjoyed much of the internet’s newfound love affair with the player: comparisons to Dragon Ball Z villain Majin Buu, or the Heated Rivalry-inspired, if imaginary, shipping of Haaland and former teammate Jude Bellingham that has spiraled into yaoi lore fan-fiction.

bellingham vs haaland… heated rivalry https://t.co/7qQ8wtONDu pic.twitter.com/oo0Uf2CsFN

— currently clowning for BP3 (@sauritgaurs) July 6, 2026

The guy is showing many people how the sport, and the culture inseparable from it, can be fun. He effortlessly creates content on his own and inspires fans to run with it. We’ve got the memes and the fan fiction, so why do we need AI?

Computer, I beg you, please show me the true creativity and passion of the internet.

The New York Times said that at least four of its journalists received subpoenas on Friday from the Justice Department following their report on concerns over insufficient security on the new, Qatari-donated Air Force One. 

The Times said that federal agents went to some of the reporters’ homes to deliver their subpoenas—an act of intimidation that David McRaw, the paper’s top newsroom lawyer, called “an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country.”

The subpoenas order the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury on Wednesday but, according to the Times, do not clearly indicate what they are expected to testify on. The newspaper also said the subpoenas were issued by Jay Clayton, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York and Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence.

On Wednesday, four New York Times reporters wrote that security concerns led Trump to use the old old Air Force One jet that same day to leave the NATO summit in Turkey, following a recommendation from the Secret Service. The reporters cited “people briefed on the plans” who called the move a precautionary measure due to antagonistic relations with Iran. 

When Trump presented the new $400 million jet from Qatar last month, he boasted that it “is considered the world’s most luxurious plane” and was “built at a level that will probably never be seen again.” In addition to questions over the propriety of accepting a donation from a foreign government, the “luxurious plane” required the Air Force to beef up the jet’s security. In fact, the Air Force has reportedly been working on upgrading security since September, likely at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. 

The subpoenas represent yet another significant attack on press freedom by the Trump administration. The Times said that before its Wednesday story was published, a senior FBI official asked the newsroom not to release it due to an issue of national security but did not offer further explanation.

“When the government claims it needs to investigate journalists to protect national security, it really means its own reputational security,” Seth Stern, the chief of advocacy of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit that supports journalists with digitally-secure communication tools, said in a Saturday statement. “The administration’s embarrassment that it reportedly charged taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars to retrofit a flying bribe that still isn’t secure enough for hostile times does not supersede the need for a free and independent press.”

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

For a few weeks each summer, the Sebasticook River in Benton, Maine, is paved with flashing silver scales, so thick it seems you could almost walk across. The alewives have returned for their annual migration.

On a mid-May weekend, Benton held its annual Alewife Festival on the riverbank. With the tunes of a local steel drum band in the background, families made fish-themed crafts, sampled smoked alewives, and watched the migration in progress. Below Benton Falls Dam, fishermen hauled alewives into their boats one full net at a time.

Looking at this scene, it’s hard to believe that 35 years ago, fewer than 800 alewives were making this trip upriver. Last year, they numbered 9 million.

The story of Maine’s alewives is a conservation success decades in the making—and unmatched on the rest of the Atlantic coast.

Like Benton, several Maine towns hold spring festivals or 5K runs to celebrate the alewives’ return. In the coastal town of Penobscot, it’s the biggest event of the year, according to Bailey Bowden, who heads the local alewife committee.

Bowden, age 60, is a ninth-generation resident of Penobscot, population 1,100. He first learned about alewives from older relatives when he was around five years old. There’s something special about this fish, he said.

“It’s pretty impressive to see a brook full of fish, thousands and thousands of these fish that you can just reach down into the water and catch them with your hands,” said Bowden, who sports a dark ponytail and a gray beard under his Alewife Harvesters of Maine cap.

The alewife, or river herring, doesn’t sound like a source of such enthusiasm. The name supposedly comes from the fish’s rotund silver bellies, an unflattering comparison to female tavernkeepers. 

The species lives mostly in the Atlantic Ocean, from Newfoundland to South Carolina, but in early summer the adults migrate as far as 100 miles inland to spawn in ponds and lakes. 

“This is a right that towns have had forever…It was a pretty big slap in the face to lose the right to harvest this fish.”

Alewives aren’t considered a game fish, though some people do catch and smoke them. But they are a linchpin for Maine’s river ecosystems—one that basically disappeared from many of those rivers for decades.

They act as a “biological conveyor belt” of nutrients between the ocean and inland waters, said Rustin Taylor, the executive director of the Alewife Harvesters of Maine. Seals, otters, bald eagles, ospreys, pollock, trout, and other carnivores eat alewives. The fish fed generations of Native communities and colonial and industrial American towns. The Passamaquoddy tribe’s name for the species, siqonomeq, translates to “the fish that feeds all.”

Today, lobster boats use alewives as a favorite and affordable bait, said Taylor, 47, who spent 12 years as part of a lobstering crew. “Maine fishermen are very lucky to have that resource,” said Taylor, whose home in Somesville, near Acadia National Park, overlooks the local alewife run, which he helps to steward. 

Part of the alewives’ charm is that “they swim up right into the heart of your town,” said 32-year-old Anne Zegers, the sea-run fisheries monitoring coordinator for Manomet Conservation Sciences, and a coordinator of the Gulf of Maine River Herring Network.

Alewife festivals, Zegers said, are a chance to celebrate alewives’ role in local ecosystems and economies and to talk about conservation. Plus, their migration coincides with returning warm weather, which after a long Maine winter is reason enough to hold a party, she said.

Taylor recalls seeing alewives in childhood, “before they disappeared in Somesville” during his teenage years. “I remember being mesmerized,” he said.

But even then, he was only seeing a remnant of the tens of millions of fish that once made the annual trip up Maine’s rivers. 

Beginning in the 1700s, dams created a series of aquatic roadblocks. Alewives can wriggle their way through shallows and rocky water, but they can’t make the giant leaps required to cross significant gaps. Instead, they get trapped downstream as easy pickings for predators, Zegers said.

As far back as colonial Maine, some dams were built with chutes or other methods to allow migration, but not all were well designed or maintained. It wasn’t enough to sustain the fish’s population. Dams downstream of Benton, for instance, decimated the town’s alewife harvest by the 1840s.

Even some modern dams had the same issues. In the town of Phippsburg, a fish channel from the 1980s sat more than 2 feet above the water at low tide, blocking migration for more than half of every day, said Troy Wallace, the town’s alewife committee chair. 

Overharvesting also hit alewife populations. In the 1950s, at the height of fisheries activity, Maine’s town harvests and offshore commercial fishing contributed to a nationwide catch that averaged about 170 million pounds per year, according to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC).

Alewife populations spiraled downward. Several rivers that had once supported millions of fish dwindled to fewer than a thousand.

“It takes a village to help the fish.”

Some communities took a hands-on approach to try to keep their alewife runs going. Bowden remembers scooping buckets of fish and depositing them upstream of Penobscot’s dams as a teenager.

Maine progressively placed more limits on commercial harvests from the 1960s through the 1990s, hoping to counter the downward trend. More and more harvests closed or became infrequent.

At their lowest in 1994, Maine’s town harvests caught only 150,000 pounds of alewives, down from more than 3 million at their peak.

In 2012, the ASMFC instituted a moratorium on all commercial alewife fishing on the Atlantic coast until states could demonstrate sustainable management plans. Local harvests also had to prove their sustainability before they could resume.

“This is a right that towns have had forever,” Bowden said. “It was a pretty big slap in the face to lose the right to harvest this fish.”

Since the 1990s, dam removals and fish channel construction have gradually reopened sections of the state’s rivers to migration.

“Some of those dam removals have led to incredible restorations of alewife migrations much faster than anticipated,” Taylor said.

Ecologically speaking, dam removal is the best method for reviving alewife migration. Taylor described removal of two dams on Maine’s Penobscot River as “probably one of the premier success stories of our time” for fish conservation. The effort started in 1999 and was completed in 2016.

When removal isn’t an option, bypasses are the go-to solutions.

In Benton, engineers built the fish equivalent of an elevator on the local hydroelectric dam in 2006. A large bucket dips into the downstream side of the river and attracts alewives with an artificial current. Every five minutes, the bucket closes and lifts to meet a chute at the top of the dam, where the fish are dumped out to continue upstream.

During the Alewife Festival in May, attendees got to observe buckets of alewives being lifted past the once-impenetrable barrier.

Towns with smaller dams can often get by with less-sophisticated solutions. In Penobscot, the fishway is a series of rocky pools that gradually change the elevation. Phippsburg replaced its inefficient 1980s channel with a similar rock-pool solution in 2025, said Wallace, a 54-year-old father of two who has been on his town’s alewife committee for 14 years. 

Designing an alewife highway comes with challenges. Downstream access is critical, since alewives don’t die after spawning, unlike salmon.

Both adults and juveniles can get trapped if a channel is poorly designed or if a drought lowers water levels, said Theo Willis, the Department of Marine Resources (DMR) sea-run fish restoration coordinator. 

Last summer’s drought in Maine led to mass die-offs of alewife spawn, Zegers said. 

About five years in advance of a fish-access project, the DMR must stock alewives in the pond or lake so the next generation will return to spawn. Willis described it as the “secret sauce” of successful alewife conservation. The state stocks more than 3 million fish annually.

Sometimes the challenges come from people, not fish. Businesses and private landowners can be resistant to modifying or removing their dams, requiring years of lobbying and negotiations. Citizens who have spent decades enjoying an artificial lake may not want to see it disappear.

“Getting people to realize that a different landscape, a flowing river landscape, is not the wrong landscape is probably one of the biggest challenges we face,” Willis said.

“We’ve gone from losing the fish completely in a lot of river systems…and now we have some of the largest populations in the globe.”

Zegers said removal has become “much more palatable to a lot of communities” as dams age and upkeep becomes more expensive.

A fish channel also requires ongoing maintenance. Every spring, people like Bowden, Taylor, and Wallace are out in the streams resetting rocks, replacing worn infrastructure, cleaning debris, clearing beaver dams, and filling cracks in concrete. 

“It takes a village to help the fish,” Taylor said.

Plus, there’s the cost, which can outstrip municipal budgets.

In Phippsburg, Wallace said the original plan to replace the fish channel in the mid-2010s would have cost more than $1 million, beyond what the 2,000-person town could afford. The rock pools installed last year instead cost about $200,000, half of which was covered by donations. Penobscot’s fishways and related projects have cost at least $6 million in grants and donations, Bowden said.

Nonprofits like the Nature Conservancy have funded some of these projects, including in Phippsburg. The state budget, federal grants and congressional discretionary spending usually cover most of the costs for major projects, according to the DMR. The 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act were windfalls for Maine’s migratory fish, with more than $60 million to fund 23 public-private projects.

The DMR still has a laundry list of dam removal and fish access projects for the near future, Willis said.

Today, Maine’s alewife population is looking better than it has in decades—and better than populations on most of the Atlantic coast.

“We’ve gone from losing the fish completely in a lot of river systems due to damming and pollution, and now we have some of the largest populations in the globe,” Taylor said.

In 2025, more than 20 million alewives were counted migrating in Maine, Zegers estimated from River Herring Network data. Benton Falls Dam, at 9 million fish, was the largest run in the state and one of a handful of sites with more than a million fish. Most runs range in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Penobscot had 169,000 alewives enter its two ponds to spawn last year, according to the River Herring Network. “It was definitely a cool thing to see these fish swimming where I watched them 30 years ago,” Bowden said.

In their wake come the eagles, seals, and other creatures searching for a meal. When alewives are running, the river downstream of Benton Falls Dam has the largest number of bald eagle sightings anywhere in New England, according to the DMR. In Penobscot, Bowden once counted 42 eagles in a half-mile area.

“Growing up, it was rare to see an eagle,” he said. “It’s just incredible how many eagles there are now.”

South of Maine, states aren’t seeing the same positive trend, and in some cases their populations are declining, according to the ASMFC. The commission still considers alewives to be significantly depleted.

Zegers said scientists aren’t sure of the cause, since other states are also pursuing dam removal and fish access. It may be because of differences in ocean fishing activity, she said, so fewer Maine alewives are caught at sea. Warmer oceans may be driving the fish north, away from their spawning grounds.

Or, it could just be that Maine’s alewife runs were bigger to begin with, so even a diminished population was still large enough to recover, she said.

With alewives on the rebound in most of Maine, the state is now expanding towns’ harvesting rights. It is one of only five states that have gotten federal approval for sustainable river herring fisheries. 

As of last year, 25 Maine municipalities have been granted the ability to commercially harvest alewives, according to Maine DMR data. 

In 2024, 2.5 million pounds of alewives were commercially harvested in Maine, all through local catches. Most former fisheries off the coast, which were historically the largest harvesters, remain closed, according to the DMR.

While harvesting alewives may seem contradictory to conservation, Taylor said they actually work in tandem. Harvesters’ knowledge of their rivers makes them the “canary in the coal mine” when something’s amiss in the migration, he said.

They also are active in cleanup and maintenance of their local fish channels, since that improves their future catch. 

“There needs to be an incentive to have this stewardship take place, and either that comes from the profit of an alewife harvest or it’s going to have to come out of local taxes,” Bowden said. 

Today, the Maine DMR and ASMFC maintain more control over harvests than in the 1950s. Towns manage their own harvests, but the state sets limits on when, where, and how much they can catch to make sure enough fish are reaching spawning grounds.

“We have seen enough abuses of over-harvests that the awareness is strong enough now that that’s not going to work out well.”

A town must track populations for 10 years to show at least 235 fish per acre in its spawning pool before getting approval to harvest. The DMR also studies scale samples to estimate the age, size, and gender ratio at each run.

Six municipalities are actively collecting data to reach that 10-year benchmark, including Phippsburg.

Wallace said Phippsburg’s run has been unpredictable. The town saw peak migrations of 50,000 to 60,000 fish each year in 2018 and 2019, followed by three years where fewer than 10,000 were counted. “We just never had what [the DMR] wanted to see for a fishery,” Wallace said.

Bowden, who is Penobscot’s contracted harvester, believes requiring a decade of data is too much, and that towns should be allowed incremental quotas as they continue to track populations. “Counting fish for 10 years is a drag, for sure,” he said.

When he first started working on restoring his local harvest, Bowden only needed five years of data. As the state gradually increased that threshold, he felt like the goalposts kept moving even though Penobscot’s run had reached healthy numbers. “The whole point was I want to catch a fish. That was where this all started. It was just ridiculous government red tape that I couldn’t, because the fish were there,” he said.

Taylor said some towns lost interest in their alewife work when the requirements changed.

Penobscot was allowed a small pilot harvest program in advance of the 10-year threshold, but last year was the town’s first full commercial harvest in more than 50 years. 

“It was a great feeling knowing that we were finally able to reclaim our rights to the fishery,” Bowden said.

Even as Maine’s alewife population trends upward, Zegers said their future is complex. 

The fish still contend with declining numbers in other states, plus threats like fishing on the open ocean and climate change–driven droughts. This summer, Zegers said several towns have reported lower-than-usual migration numbers. It will take time to figure out why.

There are “so many things to keep you up at night,” she said.

Meanwhile, Taylor said he feels reasonably optimistic. Since many harvesters grew up during the days when alewives had all but disappeared from their hometown rivers, he thinks this generation is likely to avoid the errors of the past.

“We have seen enough abuses of over-harvests that the awareness is strong enough now that that’s not going to work out well,” Taylor said.

Community awareness seems to be heading in the same direction, he said. After all, what other fish inspires so many parties in its honor? “Maybe people take care of things once it’s been lost and regained a little bit,” he said.

Sam Bankman-Fried was once called the “crypto king.” But in November 2022, his company, FTX, imploded within a matter of days. All around the world, customers of the cryptocurrency exchange were suddenly cut off from their money. 

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“I tried to withdraw an amount, you know, and it would spin and say, your, your withdrawal is pending,” says Tareq Morad, an investor from Canada. “I remember myself doing that around 7, 8 o’clock at night, checking back, going to look: Okay, did it go through? Did it go through? No. No. No.”

Meanwhile, inside the company, employees were panicking. “All that we were told was there’s been a run on the bank and, somehow, money is missing and we don’t know who to trust,” remembers Caroline Papadopoulos, part of FTX’s accounting leadership at the time. 

This week on Reveal, through prison interviews with Bankman-Fried, his parents, FTX insiders, and customers, we take you through the frantic week of FTX’s collapse and the controversial and less well-known bankruptcy that followed. At a cost of nearly $1 billion, it has become one of the most expensive in history. 

Read the FTX bankruptcy estate’s on-the-record statement to Reveal. 

This is an update of a show that originally aired in September 2025.

On Monday,  Ulises Peña López, represented by Disability Law United and Pangea Legal Services, sued the US government and private prison contractors GeoGroup and CoreCivic over his arrest by ICE officers and his following treatment in ICE detention facilities. Peña López was deported to Mexico in October 2025 after spending six months in ICE detention.

Before his arrest, Peña López, a carpenter, already lived with disabilities due to a mini-stroke, which was diagnosed in August 2024, and was managed before his detention. The lawsuit contends that after ICE officers detained Peña López in February 2025 in Sunnyvale, California, they took him to an alleyway and beat him until he lost consciousness and required CPR.

His wife, Aby, and their young daughter witnessed part of the beating by ICE, according to the lawsuit.

Peña López’s ongoing symptoms, the lawsuit says, include new and worsening “headaches, weakness and numbness on his right side, eye pain, hearing loss, insomnia and nightmares, blurry vision, back pain, and difficulty walking.” Peña Lopez is unable to work to support himself, according to an interview with the NPR afilliate KQED.

“What I want more than anything, I can’t get back: to recover my health, to be with my wife and daughter, and to be able to work again,” Peña López told KQED.

The lawsuit filed for Peña López’s complaints cites the Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which mandates that places receiving federal funding, like ICE detention centers, accommodate disabled people, among other laws. Peña Lopez’s wife and children are also part of the lawsuit due to the distress his arrest and subsequent treatment caused them.

During Peña López’s eight months in ICE detention in facilities operated by GeoGroup and CoreCivic, the lawsuit says, López received inadequate medical care and was also mocked by employees for his disability.

The lawsuit alleges that staff’s verbal abuse was particularly cruel at Golden State Annex, operated by GeoGroup. Detention staff reportedly told Peña López that “motherfucker, you don’t get to be asleep” and “you’re never gonna walk again.”

During Peña López’s transfer to California City Detention Center last August, the lawsuit says, “detention staff denied Ulises timely administration of his daily medication, violated his disability rights, and subjected him to unnecessarily harsh conditions,” such as not getting adequate medical care. At the facility operated by CoreCivic, Peña López also struggled to get his medications. As a result, Peña López’s health worsened before he was deported.

A spokesperson for CoreCivic told Mother Jones that while the company does not generally comment on active litigation, “we can share that the safety, health and well-being of the people in our facilities is our top priority.”

For Peña López’s lawyers, this lawsuit represents not only a pursuit of López, but also of others mistreated by ICE.

“This lawsuit seeks accountability for the physical and emotional harms our clients suffered, but it also joins a growing wave of lawsuits challenging abusive ICE enforcement and detention practices,” said Elena Hodges, co-director at Pangea Legal Services, which is representing Peña López and his family, said in a press release.

“We hope this case will send a powerful message to immigrant communities that they are not alone,” Hodges, said, “and that ICE officials and private prison contractors are not above the law.”

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

Life has colonized every corner of the planet by evolving ingenious survival strategies, but these are increasingly being overwhelmed by destructive human activities, this year’s red list of endangered species has revealed.

Many snails, limpets and clams have adapted to life at crushing depths in the oceans on hydrothermal vents where water temperatures can reach 450 degrees C (842 F). But an assessment for the red list found that two-thirds of the hundreds of mollusk species found only on deep sea vents were at risk of extinction because of deep-sea mining.

“There is a clear path out of the biodiversity crisis: Nature conservation works.”

Mining for diamonds has put another extraordinary creature at risk of disappearing—the desert rain frog. Most frogs rely on water for survival but the bulbous desert rain frog has evolved to need almost none. It hides from the southern African sun by burying itself deep in the sand, coming out only at night to hunt insects.

However, dwindling species can be saved, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which produces the red list, said. The new list shows the numbat, a stripy, termite-eating marsupial from Australia, has come back from the brink thanks to protection from feral cats and foxes.

“Life on Earth has adapted to survive in the most hostile and unusual habitats [but] as pressures on biodiversity mount across the planet, even the creatures with the most ingenious survival strategies are under threat,” said Dr Grethel Aguilar, the IUCN director general. “But there is a clear path out of the biodiversity crisis: Nature conservation works. By protecting the astounding range of biodiversity on this planet, we can preserve a welcoming environment for humans and wildlife alike.”

An IUCN update in April declared emperor penguins officially in danger of extinction owing to the mass drowning of chicks as sea ice is melted by the climate crisis.

More than 200 species of mollusk are known to live only on hydrothermal vents, where water heated by volcanic rocks jets out from the seabed. Many have been discovered only in the last decade but already face extinction.

“This global assessment reveals that [vent] mollusks are one of the most highly threatened of all animal groups.”

The exploration and extraction of deep-sea minerals throws up sediments that smother the animals. One snail, Lirapex felix, is classed as critically endangered because of mining activity in the Indian Ocean.

However, more than 30 vent species are not in danger, as they live in marine protected areas where mining is not allowed. These include an ornately shelled snail, Provanna exquisita, that lives only in the Mariana Arc of Fire national wildlife refuge in the Pacific Ocean.

“This global assessment reveals that [vent] mollusks are one of the most highly threatened of all animal groups,” said Prof Julia Sigwart at Senckenberg Nature Research, the IUCN red list partner that coordinated the assessment. “It provides important information as the International Seabed Authority meets in Jamaica this month.” The IUCN voted for a moratorium on deep-sea mining in 2021.

The desert rain frog is classed as vulnerable owing to diamond mining and energy infrastructure expansion into its range along the west coast of South Africa and Namibia. There is further pressure on the frog because of rising demand from the exotic pet trade following a viral video of the species squeaking its distress call.

The good news on the numbat comes after decades of conservation work, which has helped numbers rebound from a low of just 300 in the late 1970s to between 2,000 and 3,000 today. The numbat has moved from endangered to near threatened on the red list.

The impact of feral cats and red foxes has been reduced by baiting and predator-proof fencing, as well as captive breeding at Perth zoo and translocations from healthy groups. As a result, at least five more self-sustaining populations have been established. However, the species occupies only 0.04 percent of its original range across southern Australia, meaning continuing conservation work is essential, experts said.

Another five Australian marsupials have been confirmed as extinct on the red list, with no sightings for at least 60 years. The crest-tailed, southern, northern, and little mulgaras were rat-sized carnivores, while the little bettong was a rabbit-sized jumping marsupial. They are likely to have fallen prey to feral cats and foxes. More than 40 modern mammal extinctions have been recorded in Australia.

“The [numbat] assessment shows that long-term conservation effort works; without it, invasive cats and foxes will continue to drive Australia’s small marsupials and native rodents to extinction,” said Prof John Woinarski, co-chair of the IUCN species survival commission group on Australasian marsupials and monotremes.

“Continued management is vital not only to maintain the numbat’s unique evolutionary line as the last surviving member of the Myrmecobiidae family, but also to support its role in maintaining a healthy ecosystem, as digging for the termites it eats increases rain penetration into the soil, helping protect woodlands,” he said.

The IUCN red list includes 175,909 species of which 49,505 are threatened with extinction, although many species have yet to be formally assessed.

One fall night in 1979, two best friends went to a small club in their hometown of Washington, DC, to see a band. The show was so extraordinary, the band so singular, that decades—and thousands of shows—later, even at “AARP age,” as one of them now puts it, they still talk about it. They were especially taken with the lead singer, a lanky, glamorous Frankenstein-esque character who, by the show’s conclusion, was up on the bar, crooning merrily as he punched through ceiling tiles while the club owner looked on and laughed. 

“I’ve never recovered from that show,” Henry Rollins recalls. “I’ve never gotten better. Ian and I talk every Sunday. We’ve been best friends for 52 years. We talk about that time we stood next to each other and watched the Cramps.”

Rollins, now 65, was a frontman for the legendary Southern California punk band Black Flag and later the MTV mainstay Rollins Band. Since retiring from music, he’s been a spoken word artist, radio host, actor, journalist, and TV presenter. The best friend he mentioned is Ian MacKaye, who fronted Minor Threat and Fugazi and co-founded and still co-owns Dischord, one of the most influential DIY record labels of all time. Their friendship is the stuff of punk legend; they also worked at Häagen–Dazs together as teens. And like so many punks and rockabilly fans—and millions of other freaks and weirdos—Rollins and MacKaye fell fast and hard for the Cramps. 

The Cramps were the brainchild of singer Lux Interior (Erick Lee Purkhiser) and guitarist Poison Ivy (Kristy Marlana Wallace), who met as art students in Sacramento in the early 1970s, when Ivy caught a ride with Lux and a friend while hitchhiking. They became partners in life and art for the next 37 years, and the only two continuous members of the band until Lux’s death in 2009.

Poison Ivy and Lux Interior, September 1994.Bertrand Alary/Dalle/ZUMA

The Cramps coined the word “psychobilly” to describe their music—a louche, wild, leering, slithering blend of surf rock, nascent punk, mutated doo-wop, and blues-derived guitar. This they combined with bizarro-Americana lyrical matter: teenage werewolves, bikini girls with machine guns, Elvis, witchcraft, B-movie horror flicks, insanity, lust, death, and the beyond. Lux and Ivy were the Cramps’ most memorable visual elements: tall, thin and cadaveresque, he would moan and writhe across the stage, often wearing high heels and lingerie—their song “I Want to Get In Your Pants” was, as Lux cheerily told interviewers, about his love for wearing women’s clothes.

Onstage, Ivy would stand watchfully nearby—lithe, implacable and feline, with curly red hair and a constantly changing selection of vinyl, latex, and animal-print garments. (She’d previously worked as a dominatrix, she once said, and between that and being in the Cramps, she eventually developed a latex allergy and had to retire her collection of such garments.) She often played a Gretsch 6120, an enormous, hollow-bodied electric guitar, and is rightfully included in Rolling Stone’s list of best guitarists of all time, often cited as central in shaping the “primitivist” rock-and-roll style.  

By the time Rollins and MacKaye first saw them, the Cramps had played a show at Napa State Hospital, a mental health facility, that became an instant legend. They brought the house down to the extent that about a dozen patients were inspired to escape during the show. (“Those people at Napa hospital were less unusual than some of the crowds we’ve played,” Lux wryly observed to Dick Porter, whose book Journey to the Center of The Cramps is considered the definitive work about the band.) The patients found the Cramps fairly unusual, Porter wrote, screaming “Ward T” at the stage. Ward T was, the band later learned, was the section for lifers, “the ward no one comes back from,” Lux told Porter. 

The Cramps after their legendary show at Napa State Hospital, June 13, 1978.Ruby Ray/Getty

The Cramps came to an abrupt end in 2009 when Lux, then 62, died suddenly and unexpectedly from an aortic dissection. Poison Ivy withdrew from the public eye: no interviews, no reunion tours with a stand-in singer, no reissues of Cramps records. Even so, the band’s legend continued to grow, attracting new generations of fans. Wednesday star Jenna Ortega had a surprise viral moment last year when her titular character, the Addams Family’s sullen Goth daughter, did an appropriately weird little dance to the Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck.” Bootleg albums and merch have proliferated. (Full disclosure: I may have a few off-brand Cramps shirts in my closet.) You can even buy a beer named after one of their most beloved albums, with a can that’s “a nod” to (translation: completely lifted from) the cover art.

“I’ve never been more excited about a record and I’m not even on it!” Rollins told me. 

Earlier this year, Rollins and MacKaye began working with a small group on a secret project: reviving the Cramps’ own Vengeance Records and starting a new business, Cramps Inc. The first order of business for the reformed Vengeance Records is to release a 1977 album that had, until earlier this year, been sitting unheard on tapes in Ivy’s Los Angeles garage. Titled Gravest Gravy, it was produced by Alex Chilton, a beloved producer, songwriter, musician, and co-founder of the iconic indie band Big Star. The album will be released on August 21, and Cramps Inc. intends to reissue at least nine other Cramps records.

MacKaye and Rollins are not being paid for this—in a meeting with Ivy, Rollins says, he told her, simply, “I would just love to be your archivist.” Cramps Inc. will also release merchandise—including t-shirts and highly sought-after colored-vinyl pressings of Gravest Gravy—to help Ivy benefit from the wildly popular, and mostly illicit, market for Cramps merch.

Henry Rollins. Courtesy Ross Halfin/Vengenance Records Ian MacKaye at Dischord Records HQ. Courtesy Pat Graham/Vengeance Records

“Of course Ian and I are going to work for free,” Rollins told me via Zoom. “No money was ever offered or asked for. I don’t want a dollar. I’ve got the bucks. Isn’t this what you spend money on? What would you rather do? Do fentanyl or work with a Cramps catalogue?” 

Releasing an unheard Cramps album required listening to every mix of every song on Gravest Gravy and trying to decide which were the best, a task Rollins says he undertook “with fear, trepidation and awe.”

“This is not a small deal,” he says. “You’re now speaking for a band. One of the best bands ever, a band that means so much to me.” After listening to every version, he adds, “I sent my notes and mixes to Ian, whose ears I trust more than anyone I know.” (MacKaye offered his own notes, and adjusted the levels on a few songs, though they both found Chilton’s work nearly unimpeachable.)

“I’ve never been more excited about a record and I’m not even on it!” he says. “We’re not on the cover. We’re in the fine print at the bottom and that’s the way I want it to stay. When you go to the Smithsonian and see the big T. Rex bones standing up, you know that’s a team of expert people who put that up in a dark night and vanished like dew on the hood of the car. You don’t know their names. That’s what it’s all about. Me and Ian, we don’t need a hurrah.”  

Larry Hardy and Henry Rollins.Courtesy Robyn Ginsburg/Vengeance Records

Besides Rollins and MacKaye, the group reviving Vengeance Records includes Larry Hardy, owner and operator of In The Red Records and longtime friend of Ivy and Lux, and Jimmy Maslon, a producer who made some of the Cramps’ music videos. Poison Ivy is described as the “major beneficiary” of the project, which Rollins says is being undertaken with her full permission, although she’s not deeply involved in the day-to-day operations of Cramps Inc. (She also is still not doing interviews, even if you all but beg, and have been pestering her PR reps intermittently for a decade.)   

“I listened. I paid attention. I read. I’m always trying to lose my primordial tail and the glistening gills that throb on my neck.”

“If you’ve ever been in a band, it’s a very intense relationship,” Rollins explains. “You get to know your bandmates more than you really want to. I’ve been in bands with people I love like family and you hope you never see them again. For Ivy, the Cramps were the past, and when she remembers them, it comes with a lot of memories.” 

It doesn’t immediately make sense that Rollins would be such a diehard fan of The Cramps, who inhabited a completely unique sector of the music world: outside gender, genre, and preconceived notions about what a “rock” band should look or sound like. By contrast, Black Flag, Rollins’ most famous band, became singularly associated with the violence of the 1980s Southern California hardcore scene, which was often incredibly hostile to women and nonwhite people. Rollins recalls women getting their shirts torn off at Black Flag shows and a disturbing influx of neo-Nazis and skinheads who were more than happy to pay a cover fee for the chance to beat up Black or Hispanic fans, sexually harass women, and sieg heil the stage. 

The band didn’t want violent thugs at their shows, Rollins says, but he’s not surprised they were attracted. “Did Black Flag set up a permission structure? Perhaps. Wittingly? No.“

Henry Rollins with Black Flag in 1983.Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times/Getty

“I’m sure our very presence, we bore some responsibility,” Rollins adds. “Could we have been better actors in that scene? I’m not sure. I’m not sure if there’s more we could’ve done. It’s been so long ago. I can’t accurately tell you.”

Rollins says he responded to Nazis at Black Flag shows by mocking them. “I would call things out. I was the fake comedian. I’m getting sieg heiled by a bunch of overweight Anheuser-Busch fans between songs, and I said, ‘You can’t make Army boot camp, much less the Third Reich.’ The audience is laughing. The security has to get around me because now those eight knuckleheads want to beat me up. I made an enemy of those people very fast. I didn’t just let it go.”

Rollins also keeps an eye on the so-called manosphere, and “masculinity influencers” like Andrew Tate, viewing them as targeting the same kinds of young, impressionable, angry, horny young men who used to populate Black Flag shows. “They’re being sold a bill of goods,” he says, bluntly. “What I beg young men to do is listen to and believe women.”

He’s had to do so himself, he adds. “I listened. I paid attention. I read. I’m always trying to lose my primordial tail and the glistening gills that throb on my neck.”

The meathead and white supremacist presence at Black Flag shows seemed to peak in 1986 or so, Rollins says, and those people didn’t come to shows for his next project, the Rollins Band, at all. “Either the tickets were too expensive or they hated the music. They simply stopped showing up.” 

“In times of trouble, art gives us the backbone to keep fighting… Keep your eyes on the ball and have a beat.”

Since retiring from music, Rollins has slipped comfortably into a role as a music archivist, moving to Nashville about three years ago to try to open a punk rock museum. Given the expense of owning or leasing a building, the “museum” is much more likely to be a series of pop-up events, Rollins says, with one planned for “later this year,” although he’s not yet ready to provide details. Besides the Cramps, he’s also now working with the “estates” of other great bands, he says. “That’s equally bitchin’ news for another time.” 

Having known Poison Ivy since the Black Flag days, Rollins says, he’s happy to be part of any structure that allows her to benefit from the Cramps’ legendary status while living the quiet, private, deeply spiritual life she wants. “I don’t need to speak to Ivy,” he says. “I need to work for the Cramps.” 

“We’ll be the historians,” he adds. “We’ll do the heavy lifting.”

Poison Ivy plays with the Cramps at the Town & Country Club, London, April 1, 1990.Rudi Keuntje/Geisler-Fotopress/DPA/ZUMA

He means that literally. When Hardy, Ivy’s old friend, discovered that the tapes in her garage “were showing signs of moisture,” Rollins says, they needed to be moved, very quickly, to a climate-controlled environment. Rollins flew from Nashville to LA, rented a cargo van, and drove “30 hours and 45 minutes” back to Nashville, pounding energy drinks, the van sagging under the weight of the tapes. Rollins was pulled over in Arkansas for drifting across the white line. He told the cop, cheerily, “I’m riding the Red Bulls, sir!” and was let off with a warning. 

Gravest Gravy, recorded in 1977, will be released for the first time on August 21 on the revived Vengeance Records.Vengeance Records

“I paid to do this!” Rollins said, referring to financing the trip with his own money, “Because in my mind I owe the Cramps a part of my life.”

It can be hard, at this moment in time, to imagine caring deeply about something like a newly released album, no matter how legendary the band or thrillingly obscure the recording.  The chaos of the second Trump administration has taken its toll on Rollins too. He’s a DC native, after all. He says he wept when Trump paved over the White House Rose Garden. “I try not to let any of this stuff get to me, but that got to me.”

For years, Rollins volunteered with the USO, doing tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt, and visiting wounded soldiers in their beds at Walter Reed. (“You see a person half your age and half their face is gone…You do five hours of that and get back to me.” At the end of a day like that, he says, “I have no appetite. All I can smell is that antibacterial soap.”) He’s particularly outraged by the 13 American service members who have thus far died in the war with Iran. “Every day, Trump and Vance are covered in their blood like a patina.” 

But Rollins also argues that art still matters—even amid the chaos, outrages and endless travails of Trump 2.0. “No one will say ‘bad dog,’ for putting on a record in the middle of all of this horror,” he says.

“If you lose culture in your society, the society dies,” Rollins says. “If you lose your art museums and your galleries, all you have is thugs and fighting and people being mean. In times of trouble, art gives us the backbone to keep fighting. It gives you inspiration…You want to rebel against this awful war and this awful situation we’re in, you don’t take your eyes off the ball. But it’s not bad to have a soundtrack. Keep your eyes on the ball and have a beat.”

Art and culture are “what you have to lose with an administration like this,” Rollins adds. “They hate science. They hate literacy. They hate women. They hate nonwhite people. They hate LGBTQ people. Those aforementioned groups, they make things that make life great. They want to eradicate it and erase it. You can do more than one thing at once. You can entertain many things. And so you can be concerned and fight the good fight, and you can also put a record on and love the Cramps.”

On Tuesday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant and a three-decade Houston resident. It was the second ICE-involved shooting this week alone—and since the start of Donald Trump’s second term, federal immigration agents have shot and killed at least ten people.

Now, as hundreds march in Houston and Salgado’s family demands an impartial investigation, DHS is using a familiar playbook: they are blaming Salgado for his own death by asserting he “weaponized his vehicle.”

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, held a press conference Wednesday calling for an independent investigation into his father’s death. “I want to tell you about my dad,” Ronaldo Salgado said. “He was a hardworking family man. He was also a man of routine.” Every day, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo got up before dawn and drove to work on a construction site, just as he had done for 35 years.

“At 6:45 a.m., he should have been picking up the last of his guys before heading to North Houston to finish up construction on some houses,” Ronaldo Salgado continued at the press conference. By 6:55 his father had been shot by ICE agents who followed him in an unmarked car.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said had Lorenzo Salgado Araujo had attempted to evade arrest and “weaponized his vehicle,” echoing the language used in the hours after an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good in her car in Minneapolis in January.

DHS, at the time, alleged that Good, too, had “weaponized her vehicle.” Independent investigators disputed that characterization, but the officer who killed Good was never indicted. Before Renée Good, there were Carlito Ricardo Parias and Marimar Martinez. Both were shot at by federal agents in 2025, and were then accused of trying to ram those agents with their vehicles. Both survived. Ruben Ray Martinez, who was shot by an ICE agent in March of 2025, was killed. The agent who shot him in the heart said Martinez was using his car as a weapon.

It’s a narrative that law enforcement agencies frequently employ to justify fatally shooting of unarmed motorists. A New York Times investigation found that US police officers killed over 400 unarmed drivers between 2015 and 2021. In many of those cases, the officers involved said they fired because the vehicle itself was a weapon.

The data shows that ICE is no exception. In 2024, journalist Lila Hassan identified 18 ICE shootings that involved a moving vehicle between 2015 and 2021. Over that same time period, public records show ICE agents shooting at least 59 people total and killing at least 23. Not a single indictment resulted from any of those incidents. Since that study, ICE’s budget has ballooned by tens of billions of dollars—and its internal oversight offices have been gutted. The killings haven’t stopped.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo “did not deserve to die,” Ronaldo Salgado said on Wednesday. “He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of Mexican man shot and killed by ICE.” Salgado learned of his father’s passing, he said, from a video on social media. He recognized him immediately. “Not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street bleeding out.”

Graham Platner, the scandal-ridden populist Senate candidate from Maine, suspended his campaign Wednesday night. His announcement came two days after a rape allegation against him was made public in a Politico report, and prominent Democrats—many of whom had looked the other way at Platner’s Nazi tattoo and prior abuse allegations—one by one dropped their endorsements.

In an eleven-minute video posted to social media, Platner categorically denied the allegation and lashed out at “the corporate media system and the political establishment,” which he said acted as “judge, jury and executioner.” He insisted that his video was not an admission of guilt—but after nine minutes, he nonetheless said: “I intend to file my paperwork to withdraw.” 

If Platner does file that paperwork before 5:00 PM Eastern Time on Monday, he will be leaving the Maine Democratic Party with just nineteen days to nominate a replacement. The Maine Democratic Party has released a statement saying it will hold a nominating convention before the July 27 deadline.

Devon Murphy-Anderson, the Maine Democratic Party’s executive director, posted a video to social media on Tuesday promising an “open, inclusive, transparent and fair” convention—and accused Platner’s team of trying to “manipulate this process” and select his successor themselves.

The Maine Democratic Party has approved plans for a nominating convention that will involve roughly 600 delegates, most of whom will be local party officials from around the state. They will pick a candidate to replace Platner—who got over 150,000 votes, the most of any Democratic Senate candidate in Maine primary history. Then, that candidate will face off against incumbent Senator Susan Collins in November.

At least eight candidates’ names have been floated to replace Platner: brewery owner Dan Kleban, social worker Paige Loud, former Maine CDC director Nirav Shah, former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, and former political staffer Jordan Wood among them. But in Platner’s Wednesday night announcement, he said he believes his volunteers—not the Maine Democratic Party—should be the ones to choose his replacement. “These decisions need to be made in the open by the people of this state, the people who got us here,” Platner said. “My name might be on the ballot right now, but that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine.”

“There is an unprecedented amount of energy and enthusiasm among Maine Democrats, driven in part by many of the dedicated volunteers and supporters who were inspired by Graham Platner’s campaign,” Maine Democratic Party leaders said in a statement. “We look forward to coming together and harnessing that energy around our new nominee as we work to defeat Susan Collins in November.”

Eduardo Zayas-Bazán was a 24-year-old lawyer when he left Cuba for the United States and joined about 1,400 other Cuban exiles, who were known as Brigade 2506, to participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion, the botched 1961 mission to overthrow Fidel Castro’s communist regime.

Always a gifted swimmer, he was a frogman, and when he stepped on the shores of Playa Girón on the southern coast of the island, he was shot in the right knee by friendly fire. When the US government-backed incursion failed —largely due to President John F. Kennedy’s decision to withdraw plans to strike Castro’s airfields—the human cost was significant: about 100 exiles died during the attacks, and Zayas-Bazán was arrested along with hundreds of others. He had served for about a year when the Kennedy administration negotiated for the return of exiles from the island to the US. 

Fast forward more than half a century, and Zayas-Bazán is now a 90-year-old retired professor who taught at East Tennessee State University. His experience has become memorialized in the new Bay of Pigs Museum and Library in Miami’s historic Little Havana, which opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 17, the 65th anniversary of the disastrous invasion. After five years of planning, the 11,000 square foot building was erected on the site of the original Brigade 2506 meetinghouse, a one-story building with a Spanish-tile roof where veterans gathered regularly. At a cost of more than $8 million, the new two-story facility contains numerous glass displays, multiple screens playing interviews of veterans, and a towering mural of the Cuban flag that greets visitors near the entrance.  

Eduardo Zayas-Bazán, a Brigade 2506 veteran and retired professor, stands in the Bay of Pigs Museum and Library, which opened in Miami this year. Laura C. Morel/Mother Jones

The museum has been a rare point of unity for Florida Democrats and Republicans. President Donald Trump stopped at the original house during his 2016 campaign, and the site has also been visited by politicians like Marco Rubio and Florida Sen. Rick Scott. Eileen Higgins, who was elected last year to be Miami’s first Democrat mayor in nearly 30 years, secured funding for the museum. “We’ve got to put party lines aside,” Carlos Luis, the museum president, told me. “This is so important for the Cuban community, and overall, this is the identity of the county and the city.”

“We’ve got to put party lines aside. This is so important for the Cuban community, and overall, this is the identity of the county and the city.”

Most of the men involved in the mission were young with no military experience, many of whom received only a few months of training before the invasion. One of them was Luis’s father, René Luis, who ran an accounting firm in Cuba with his family. When the elder Luis was released from prison after 22 months following the Bay of Pigs, he settled in Miami with his wife. They had seven children. Before dinner, Carlos recalled, the family sang Cuba’s national anthem. His father didn’t open up much about his experience, apart from blaming Kennedy for the failed mission, and he died in 2024 without ever setting foot on the island again. “My involvement here,” Luis said, “is the least I can do for my father.”

For Zayas-Bazán, president of the Brigade’s association and a member of the museum’s board, the new building provides a vivid excursion through his memories. Wearing a crisply ironed guayabera, a traditional linen shirt popular in Cuba, he strode through the exhibits, stopping at the front entrance to point out a video playing black-and-white footage of Havana’s waterfront lined with hotels and bustling city streets; his glasses reflected images of a now-vanished Cuba. “This shows what Cuba was like,” he told me. “So that the people can see what Havana was like before 1959”—the year Fidel Castro took control of the island. 

He stopped at a glass display lined with photos from 1962, when hundreds of Brigade 2506 members who had been imprisoned in Cuba returned to Miami. The photos show young men stepping off airplanes and into the arms of loved ones waiting for them on the tarmac. One such photo is of Zayas-Bazán and his then-wife, her smiling face pressed against his chest. In another corner of the museum, he pointed to a collection of items that Brigade 2506 members kept from that era: metal bowls and plates, spoons, rosaries, and tattered books. Zayas-Bazán read Don Quixote while in prison. 

After the invasion, several men were captured and forced into a crowded truck with no ventilation in the blistering heat. The episode was known as La Rastra de la Muerte, the “trailer truck of death,” because nine men of the dozens who were trapped died of asphyxiation. One exhibit focuses on what happened. “As oxygen dwindled,” the display reads, “some prisoners scraped open tiny holes in the walls and moved dying prisoners to them, an act which saved many.” The names of the men who died were listed, and Zayas-Bazán brushed his hand over those of three of his friends who had perished.

Eduardo Zayas-Bazán points out a photograph taken of him and his wife after his release from a Cuban prison in 1962. Laura C. Morel/Mother Jones

As I reported in March, Cuba is in the midst of the worst economic crisis ever to grip the island. Food is scarce, blackouts are constant, the medical infrastructure is collapsing, and inflation is astronomical. In the spring, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel confirmed he was in talks with the Trump administration regarding the island’s future, a few months after the US government imposed an oil blockade, further harming the struggling nation. In recent weeks, the situation in Cuba has worsened as the population grapples with water shortages in the midst of the summer’s heat.

The new museum is a reminder for the Cuban exile community of “what could have been” if the Bay of Pigs mission had succeeded, Andy Gomez, one of the leading scholars on Cuba, told me. Without any major changes in the country, he worries that the next generation of Cuban Americans will not travel there and eventually lose ties with the island. “As the Eduardo Zayas-Bazáns of the older generations pass away, that will be another experience that will be lost,” he told me. “It’s important to somehow continue to tell that story.”

And that is what the museum strives to do. Its executive director, Yuleisy Mena, teaches a course about the invasion at the local Florida International University. The museum has also invited teachers from the Miami-Dade County school district to visit. “We have to start getting the next generation ready to take on the baton,” Luis told me. 

The Bay of Pigs veterans were among the first generation of Cubans to leave the island after Castro took power, and today about 200 of them are still alive. After Zayas-Bazán left his homeland more than six decades ago, he became chair of the Foreign Language Department at East Tennessee State University and co-authored Spanish language textbooks. In 1985, he became the first Cuban to lead the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.

After retiring in 1999, he moved back to Miami to be within the Cuban exile community in case democracy returned to the island nation. “I came thinking that there had to be a change in Cuba,” he told me. “I don’t want to return until I can speak my mind without having to worry, until I can go everywhere I want to and see whomever I want to. I refuse to go and be spied on.”

Despite a life filled with professional and personal successes in the US, “I think about Cuba every day,” Zayas-Bazán said. 

For Brigade 2506 veterans like Zayas-Bazán and their families, the end of Cuba’s current government is more than half a century in the making. “I have never felt more optimistic about changes in Cuba than right now,” he told me, acknowledging that any changes may not happen in the near future with the ongoing disputes with Iran and the earthquake aftermath in Venezuela. “We, the Cuban people, have suffered so much in 67 years.”

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

Energy efficiency standards can make it more expensive to construct new buildings, but they save money for residents in the long run. In a new analysis, the Trump administration ignored the second half of that equation—a move that energy experts fear could undermine efficiency efforts nationwide.

Late last month, the US Department of Energy announced it found that if every state adopted the model 2024 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) instead of following a 20-year-old building code, the move would drive up housing construction costs by $9.2 billion annually. It’s a break with decades of DOE analysis, spanning Republican and Democratic administrations, which has reported significant energy and financial savings under each iteration of the code.

“The Energy Department is completely contradicting its own findings,” said Donna Stanley, vice president of communications at the nonprofit International Code Council, which develops the model code. ​“The DOE’s new methodology is a deep mystery.”

The moves to crush efficiency measures could exacerbate the country’s affordability problems.

The DOE did not respond by Monday to Canary Media’s question of why it chose to exclude energy bill savings in its analysis.

The IECC, which is updated every three years, has cut energy use in new homes in half since it was first enacted in the late 1970s. While the code is fuel-neutral, meaning that builders can install fossil-fueled equipment, it still has a positive impact for the climate because it reduces energy demand that would be met at least in part by burning fossil fuels.

Most states adopt the IECC or an amended version rather than create their own rules from scratch. Some states, like Alabama, don’t impose statewide standards. In those cases, local governments may choose to use the IECC themselves; as the city of Montgomery does, for example.

Depending on the code-adoption cycle, there can be a lag of several years before a state or local jurisdiction takes up the latest iteration of the IECC. To date, 10 states have adopted the 2024 code, per the International Code Council.

The DOE’s analysis could have a chilling effect on other states still in the process of locking in the 2024 code, including Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Ohio. Lawmakers who have sought to restrict more-efficient building codes—such as those in the Missouri House of Representatives—could use the analysis as fodder for their arguments, according to Ben Rabe, associate director of codes and policy at New Buildings Institute.

The analysis comes as the Trump administration has sought to squelch energy-efficiency efforts across the country. In 2025, it sued two California cities over their superefficient all-electric codes, and this year it has barred households from using federal home-electrification rebates to swap fossil-fueled appliances for heat-pump options. In May, the Trump DOE also rescinded a Biden-era requirement that new homes meet the 2021 IECC standard to qualify for federal mortgage loans.

The moves to crush efficiency measures could exacerbate the country’s energy-affordability problems, making people spend more at a time when electricity and fuel costs have risen fast.

Adoption of the latest codes would save US homes and businesses $182 billion from 2010 to 2040.

The DOE has done a cost-benefit analysis of every version of the IECC, but this latest one is the first time the agency has tallied only the upfront costs from home construction and ignored the long-term bill savings, said Ted Tiffany, senior technical lead at the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group.

That’s like comparing cars based solely on their sticker prices while ignoring fuel costs and maintenance expenses, he added. ​“A cheaper car may cost less on Day 1, but a more efficient vehicle can save money and provide better performance, safety, and last longer over its lifetime.”

In a report for the DOE last year, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory calculated the utility bill savings for people who move into homes built to the new standard. The 2024 model code generates an average life-cycle cost savings of nearly $3,000 per residence over the 2021 code, it estimated, though in specific regions that could rise to almost $9,500. The average payback time for a buyer paying for a home in cash, it found, is 2.5 years. Those who get a mortgage would typically see net savings on their combined home and utility payments in just one year.

The adoption of the IECC’s latest residential and commercial energy codes would save US homes and businesses $182 billion between 2010 and 2040, according to a DOE webpage that was removed shortly before the announcement.

“This is the definition of cost-effectiveness,” Tiffany said.

The DOE’s new analysis also rests on a questionable time-period comparison: It benchmarked the 2024 IECC against the 2006 version. Forty-nine states have already adopted more advanced energy codes for new residential units, according to Tiffany; they’re not building to 2006 standards. The DOE’s comparison really works only ​“for perhaps Arkansas,” he said, which lags the rest of the US in building energy codes.

The agency has estimated the added construction costs for compliance with the 2024 IECC over the 2006 IECC at $14,000 per home. 

“But we’ll save way more than that over the life of these buildings,” Rabe said.

When Donald Trump gets into a loop, it’s hard to get him out. He’ll just talk in a circle until he’s bored and moves on to the next thing. He has fixated on Greenland and ruminated on his reflecting pool. Right now, though, his focus is The Communists. And as a new Reuters analysis reveals, he’s really into it: Over the past two weeks, Trump has brought up communism a full 81 times. 

Communism is an old rhetorical obsession for Trump—who was in first grade when Joseph Stalin died—and his allies. In 2025, he introduced a “National Anti-Communism Week.” He blamed communists for his 2023 criminal indictments. During his 2020 campaign, he accused his opponents of (you guessed it) communism.

It may be a product of his deep relationship with Roy Cohn, a lackey of Red Scare architect Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Trump’s longtime mentor and personal lawyer. 

But over the past week, the president appears to have hit overdrive, sermonizing against communism at fever pitch. And like his Red Scare predecessors, Trump is also using the label to go after immigrants, decrying a “resurgent communist menace” from “newcomers to our country” in a July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore—designed by an anti-immigrant crusader and Ku Klux Klan associate—that also characterized communism as “a mortal threat to American liberty” and “the greatest threat” to the United States, surpassing Pearl Harbor, both World Wars, the September 11 attacks, et cetera.

Then Trump really got going: “You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America,” he continued. “You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. The godless communist morality states that anything is justified to bring about inhuman visions…They don’t want good. They don’t love God, and they don’t want God. They don’t love religion, and they don’t want religion, and they won’t have it, but we will not let them win.” 

The actual communists of the Communist Party USA have spent the past week sending strident press releases to clarify that they are not, in fact, the Democratic Socialists of America.

Maybe Trump’s handwringing over so-called communists isn’t entirely misguided. After all, capitalism hasn’t been looking too good lately. A recent Gallup poll showed that less than half of young Americans feel positively toward our economic system. The libertarian Cato Institute found last week that a majority of Americans under 30 feel positively about socialism, and more than a third report a favorable view of communism. So if communism is a “cancer” that Trump must “cut out fast,” as he threatened to do at an America250 event, he certainly has his work cut out for him.

President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the US would continue strikes on Iran for a second night, and—if it had to—seize much of the country’s oil and target electric and desalination plants. 

The desalination plants are part of Iran’s vital civilian infrastructure, and, as I wrote in April, international law experts consider hitting these facilities to be war crimes because of the disproportionate harm targeting them would cause to civilians. 

On Wednesday, Trump also said that the US-Iran ceasefire agreement was over and that he would allow US officials to continue current negotiations to end the war, but they would be “wasting their time.”

Trump’s threats come amid multiple American strikes against Iran since it signed an interim deal with Iran on June 17. The US strikes came in response to Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a passageway that carried about 20 percent of the world’s crude oil and natural gas before the 2026 war began.

In late June, during the first major US strikes on Iran since the interim deal, Trump posted on Truth Social that if Iran continued its strikes, “we will be forced to military complete the job…if that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”

As part of the US and Iran’s June agreement, Iran would allow ships to pass through without paying tolls for 60 days. But the country’s leadership has stated that oil tankers passing through the strait must use approved routes. According to a Wednesday report by the Associated Press, the ships Iran struck on Tuesday appeared to deviate from the designated route.

These recent maneuvers put more lives at risk. As of June 10, multiple Iranian government ministries reported that about 3,500 people have been killed in Iran since the war began in February.

Nate Swanson, President Joe Biden’s director for Iran at the National Security Council, told me two weeks ago what he considered the strategy at play here. The US doesn’t seem to be interested in making complex concessions to Iran, Swanson said, and Iran may be unwilling to agree to a deal with Trump specifically, given his support of the Gaza war and his strikes on the country in June 2025.

On Wednesday, Trump told reporters that Iran’s leaders were “scum” and “sick people.” “Based on their actions over the last week or two, they’re not doing a service to the people,” he said. “I’m not sure I want to make a deal with them.”

The Trump administration’s efforts to end the war appear to be going backward. Republican lawmakers criticized the June ceasefire deal with Iran as “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.” While many publicly blamed JD Vance, whom Trump said was responsible for Iran negotiations, the war is extremely unpopular with his base, which could hurt the GOP’s chances in the upcoming midterms.