Mother Jones

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

From disappearing manatees to bleached coral reefs, gender-changing turtles and oyster beds destroyed by hurricanes, no other state’s marine life faces the magnitude of climate-related challenges that Florida’s does.

Now, wildlife authorities are attempting to bring some cohesion to tackling the diverse slate of issues by borrowing from a playbook that has already proved successful on land.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), and its charitable arm, the Fish and Wildlife Foundation of Florida (FWFF), have announced the creation of an ambitious “coastal corridor,” an interconnected chain of ocean-based projects and enhancements designed to preserve and nourish vulnerable marine creatures.

It replicates to a significant degree the state’s wildlife corridor, an 18 million-acre project established in 2021 to provide a safe, contiguous habitat spanning much of Florida where rare or threatened land-based species including birds, reptiles, panthers, and bears can flourish.

“If you had to list what sets Florida apart and makes it such an iconic place…our coast is our treasure.”

Featuring projects including habitat restoration, fisheries enhancement, and improved public access and coastal resilience along Florida’s Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the project aims to create a connected network of artificial reefs, oyster beds, seagrass and mangroves on which marine life can thrive.

“The goal is to protect and connect all these important habitats for fish and wildlife,” said Nick Wiley, the former head of FWC who was appointed in April as executive director of FWFF. “Everyone has seen how successful the wildlife corridor initiative has been, rallying everybody around the mission. The wildlife species needed these travel lanes and corridors across the state, but it also highlighted how private landowners contribute to federal, state and county public lands and how all that fits together.”

“Our board members were really inspired by that, looking at our coast, our fisheries and the coastal communities, and from the beaches, estuaries, all the way out into the deeper water,” Wiley said.

The coastal corridor is designed to not only protect Florida’s precious marine legacy, but also the economic riches of its waters. Recreational fishing alone brings in $14 billion a year and provides 120,000 jobs, the foundation said. Another $3.1 billion and 39,000 jobs come from creating and maintaining artificial reefs.

Additionally, more than 2 million out-of-state anglers visit Florida each year, renting charter boats and plowing plenty of dollars into hotels and restaurants.

“If you had to list what sets Florida apart and makes it such an iconic place for people to go and enjoy the outdoors, and the water and the fish and everything, our coast is our treasure,” Wiley said. “But we hadn’t really looked at it as a connected corridor all the way around the coastline. It’s like the wildlife corridor’s sister on the coast that shows how you connect our estuaries all the way out through the grass flats into the deeper water.”

“We already have a lot of partners from local government, nonprofit, federal government, and state that are doing a lot of great work to protect our coastlines and provide habitat for fisheries, but it’s like here and there, scattered along the coastline,” he added. “This pulls us all together under one great umbrella to inspire and provide a vision that we can all celebrate and leverage, and identify where we need to do better, make improvements, where we need to restore places and where we need to add habitat, from coral reefs all the way up to the grass flats.”

FWC and FWFF leaders are partnering with local governments, scientists, reef builders, conservation organizations and coastal communities. One early project, planned for next month, is a collaboration with Collier county to lay a sizable new artificial reef about 13 miles from shore in the Gulf of Mexico.

“I see more excitement and opportunity on this one than anything I’ve touched.”

Mike Norberg, a marine biologist with decades of experience in artificial reefs, who is also the coastal corridor’s project director, said a chain of prefabricated concrete structures would be lowered on to the seabed, and would mimic natural reefs to attract fish.

“There’s a number of benefits for artificial reefs,” he said. “It removes pressure from natural reefs, which obviously have a lot of ongoing challenges, especially in south Florida, and also creates habitats in areas where none might have existed.

“In parts of the coastal waters, it’s largely just sand sea floor and not a ton of natural reefs, especially when you look in the northern Gulf or northeastern side of Florida. So it’s a win-win both for the ecosystem as well as recreational access opportunities, whether that’s fishing and diving or just going out and sightseeing and having fun.”

Norberg said strategic reef deployments were a priority for the first year, with other projects under way in Okaloosa county in the Panhandle, and Duvall county on the northern Atlantic coast.

Future plans, he said, include exploring coastal restoration projects to help address beach erosion, the loss of coastal mangroves that protect against storm surge during tropical events and the reduction in natural food stocks that sustain declining species, such as seagrass for manatees.

“We’ve got a number of different projects that are in various stages of development in different parts of the state,” he said. “We’re looking at various oyster bed restoration opportunities and how that can help tie in to this network of connected habitats, living shorelines. That’s a huge thing, one that helps improve coastal resiliency from a community perspective.”

“It also provides habitat for juvenile fish and adult fish to spend their time within an estuary before they move offshore. So there really is this opportunity to tie both inshore to offshore habitats and use that as a tool for marine resource management.”

To Wiley, the creation of the coastal corridor represents what he says is a peak of his decades-long career in wildlife conservation in Florida.

“I see more excitement and opportunity on this one than anything I’ve touched,” he said. “It speaks to me so well in my heart about bringing people together to do great things for Florida’s environment and Florida’s coast, and I just see so much potential and opportunity for everybody to come in and be a part of it.”

“As we’ve seen on the wildlife corridor, it will bring a deeper, richer identity to the state that will enrich and enhance the value of Florida for people that live here, and the people that want to come visit.”

The northern spotted owl is in trouble—per usual.

This vanishingly rare subspecies of spotted owl earned its iconic status in the late ’80s and early ’90s, during the height of the Timber Wars in the Pacific Northwest. For forest defenders, the spotted owl is a sacred totem. For loggers, it’s been a pest. In 1990, federal officials reclassified the raptor as a threatened species, and greens won the Timber Wars with the establishment of the Clinton-era Northwest Forest Plan. The spotted owl left the trees standing—yet the number of spotted owls continued to decline.

The culprit? The barred owl, a more aggressive species that has been expanding westward since the 19th century. While the northern spotted owl survives almost entirely on tree-dwelling rodents, the barred owl is a voracious predator that has easily outmuscled its more timid cousin. Today, just 15,000 spotted owls remain across North America; in comparison, there are some 3.5 million barred owls. So officials with the US Fish and Wildlife Service have come up with a bold plan to help the spotted owls: Shoot the barred owls.

In September 2024, the agency released its Barred Owl Management Strategy, which calls for trained “removal specialists” to kill up to 15,600 barred owls annually in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California over the next 30 years. By one estimate, this could cost up to $1.35 billion, or roughly $3,000 per feathered carcass.

The idea of blowing away nearly half a million owls to protect another owl has sparked green-on-green infighting and led to some strange bedfellows. Last year, the animal rights groups Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy worked with Republican lawmakers on a Congressional Review Act resolution that would have halted the owl-killing program. It failed to pass. But those animal welfare groups notched a win for their cause when Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency nixed some federal owl-related grants.

And if a hands-off approach leads to the extinction of the northern spotted owl? “I acknowledge that it’s a real risk,” says one advocate.

Meanwhile, some of the environmentalists behind the ’90s logging ban are in the odd position of siding with their age-old nemesis, the timber industry. Logging companies are now fans of the barred owl culling because, oddly enough, the program will reopen permits that waive penalties if the loggers accidentally kill spotted owls, thus enabling timber harvesting in habitats that were previously off-limits.

The controversy has split the National Audubon Society, whose staff did not respond to our request for comment. The group’s eponymous magazine has expressed cautious support for the barred owl culling, but at least 18 local chapters—including four in the Pacific Northwest—have come out against it. Biologists are also flummoxed. William Ripple, a professor of ecology at Oregon State University who was involved in some of the early research on the northern spotted owl, tells me, “Reasonable people can disagree on the best path forward.”

Noah Greenwald, endangered species co-director at the Center for Biological Diversity, says he and his organization take no joy in the prospect of shooting thousands of barred owls, but he insists there is no other choice. “We don’t love that an owl is being killed…I just don’t want to see the spotted owl go extinct, and it will go extinct without some barred owl control.”

Animal welfare advocates argue that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s plan is inhumane and unworkable. “In the long run, we don’t think it’s going to help any species,” says Jennifer Best, the wildlife law program director at Friends of Animals, which has sued the agency to halt the program. “And in the immediate term, it is cruel and will result in hundreds of thousands of owls being shot down from their homes.”

Lurking over the debate is the larger, knottier question of which species should be considered invasive. Greenwald argues that the barred owl is an invasive species, even if it made its way west due to vast ecosystem shifts wrought by people—“and invasive species are the second leading cause of extinction.”

But should we punish the barred owl for adapting to a human-created environment while the northern spotted owl has failed to do so? “The Fish and Wildlife Service is essentially saying that any species that changes its range can be considered an invasive species,” Best says.

And if a hands-off approach leads to the extinction of the northern spotted owl? “I acknowledge that it’s a real risk,” she says.

This isn’t the first time humans have targeted one bird with the goal of saving another. For decades, the Fish and Wildlife Service killed brown-headed cowbirds that were laying their eggs in the nests of the Kirtland’s warbler, an endangered species. The program worked, and in 2019, the Kirtland’s warbler was removed from the endangered list. But now, the little songster is what’s known as a “conservation-reliant species”—its survival depends on constant human intervention.

The spotted owl is on the path to becoming another conservation-reliant species. Such nonstop vigilance is the price we pay when humans pick winners and losers in the wild world. We might like to think that nature is a harmonic arrangement, but in truth, it’s a constant competition—red in talon and beak. “I see this as a complex ecological and ethical issue rather than a simple conflict between a good species and a bad species,” says Ripple, the Oregon State ecologist. “The challenge is that there are no easy solutions.”

Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, pushed the United Kingdom into a needless war in Iraq in a wild-goose chase for weapons of mass destruction. Then, he helped British companies make money from that war. Now, his son Nick is carrying on the family legacy.

Nick Blair, a 40-year-old former football agent, is seeking funding for a military technology startup called “Pyra” to the tune of 200 million dollars. It’s not clear what, exactly, Pyra needs all that money to do: its website only says “Deploying Summer 2026…Stand By.” Blair is at the moment the only active officer of the company, according to UK government filings. In an article published this week, an unnamed source told the Financial Times, vaguely, that Pyra “is developing technology that will allow users to integrate different systems into a single source.”

During his time as Prime Minister, Blair’s father helped UK companies cash in on the Iraq war. After he was forced to leave the country’s government amid growing discontent over the war, he built a dizzyingly massive global business empire. And he’s making moves that could allow him to profit from the reconstruction of war-torn places: in January, he was appointed to President Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace, charged with overseeing international efforts in Gaza.

Blair the younger, meanwhile, is now founding his second military-tech company. His first, Skyral, is a war-games simulator. Its co-CEO, Naomi Hulme, recently described its work as “Fortnite on steroids.” The company won a $2.7 billion dollar contract to train the British military, which is betting big on AI. Pyra, meanwhile, does not yet have a product—but hopes to raise a great deal of funding nonetheless.

Federal regulators have given President Donald Trump’s family crypto business a conditional approval to operate like a bank. On Friday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—led by Trump appointee Jonathan Gould—announced that World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture controlled by the Trump family, was on track to receive a banking charter. This will allow World Liberty Financial to issue its stablecoin tokens—called “USD1″—inside the United States without an intermediary.

“The decision stands to give new powers and federal credibility to a venture in which Trump and his family retain a substantial financial interest,” as Politico‘s Michael Stratford and Declan Harty put it. “It’s also among the most direct official actions that the administration has taken involving the president’s private finances.”

Zach Witkoff, son of Trump’s special diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff and co-founder of World Liberty Financial, applauded the decision on social media. “Our ambition is clear: to build the most trusted and widely used digital dollar in the world while strengthening the role of the U.S. dollar across the global economy,” he wrote.

The move certainly seems likely to strengthen the pocketbooks of the president and his family: as my colleague Russ Choma reported, Trump made $65 million in 2025 by selling shares in World Liberty Financial. According to his financial disclosures, Trump also made almost $600 million selling stablecoins and other digital assets through World Liberty Financial that year.

Democratic lawmakers are pointing to the regulatory green light as an example of Trump’s corruption. On Friday, as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency announced the move, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote on social media that “this is the most brazen act of self-dealing our system has ever seen.”

In 2022, Assistant Chief Adam Glueck, of the Cape Girardeau Police Department in southeastern Missouri, purchased electric shock gloves for his officers after learning about them at a trade show. And his employees, he said, couldn’t get enough of them. “If I try to take away the gloves from those officers at this point I think we may have a mutiny on our hands,” Glueck joked on a podcast interview a couple of years later. “They’ve grown really attached.” 

The shock gloves, he went on to explain, allow their wearer to inflict pain without leaving the sort of marks that could look bad to witnesses or leave an officer vulnerable to lawsuits. 

“In today’s society, you know, everybody’s filming everything, everybody has a cell phone,” Glueck said. If an officer punches someone on camera, that can go viral in an instant; even a standard taser leaves puncture wounds. But “the glove is low optic, and it looks better on camera, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.” 

The gloves, manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies, have been used by police, sheriffs, jail wardens, and even school resource officers for years. They’ve been described by groups like Amnesty International as “readily misused for torture.” And this week, ICE published a plan to order $20 million worth of them. 

The device is called a GLOVE, which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter. It looks like a regular padded black utility glove, but when the wearer presses a small button on the glove’s wrist, it produces a painful electric shock. 

Nelson County, Ky., jailer Justin Hall shows an electric shock glove that is used at his facility, Thursday, Aug. 13, in Bardstown, Ky. Dylan Lovan/AP

“We have a saying: Feeling is believing,” Compliant Technologies CEO Jeff Niklaus said in one 2022 YouTube video. In promotional clips, you can see people losing control of their limbs, falling to the ground, and crying out in pain after a light touch from the GLOVE. In 2022, the company called it a “weapon” in Instagram posts. Since then, though, it’s downgraded the language to “a Conductive Distraction and De-escalation device,” branding the technology on its website as “humane.”

Human rights organizations like Amnesty International have long raised concerns about electric shock devices like the GLOVE, as well as other products that Compliant Technologies sells, like electric shock belts and vests, which the company recommends for prisoner transport, courtroom use, and use on “combative individuals” during medical procedures like blood draws. 

The technology is unregulated “despite the clear human rights risks associated with its use,” Amnesty International researchers wrote in a 2025 report detailing instances in which electric-shock devices have been used for torture. The report ends with a recommendation that countries “cease use of, decommission and destroy any stockpiles of such prohibited electric shock weapons.” Yumna Rizvi, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Victims of Torture, called the gloves “inherently abusive equipment that facilitates torture.” Some police departments that use the devices issue guidance saying they shouldn’t be deployed against pregnant women, the elderly, or people in shackles. A 2021 user manual for the GLOVE notes that it can cause an “increase in blood pressure” and “changes in heart rhythm,” and recommends that users avoid shocking “those with obvious health conditions.” The manual also includes a graphic saying “evil is powerless when the good are unafraid,” laid over a Blue Lives Matter flag.

“How in the world is ICE just going to be walking around with these gloves?” Rizvi asked. “It is inherently harmful. It has no legitimate law enforcement purpose.” 

 “Our officers are highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training,” an ICE spokesperson told Mother Jones; Compliant Technologies did not respond to a request for comment. The devices “will be issued to Homeland Security Investigations (H.S.I.) and Enforcement Removal Operations (ERO) officers and agents,”  according to a notice DHS published August 10. They will be delivered by the end of March 2027.

Compliant Technologies was founded in 2018 by Jeff Niklaus, a former Army Blackhawk helicopter pilot in Afghanistan and Somalia, who believes that President Donald Trump has been “anointed” by God. He is also a sometime conspiracy theorist: In a podcast interview in 2025, he blamed the fatal crash of a passenger plane and a military helicopter on “the vaccines,” and on the Biden administration’s inclusion of women and LGBTQ people in the military. 

In an interview with the International Law Enforcement Educators & Trainers Association last month, Niklaus said he was inspired to start his company after participating in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, on which the book Black Hawk Down is based. 

“If you look at the why…I mean, we lost 18 guys in one day,” Niklaus said. (Hundreds of Somali people were killed on that day, alongside 18 Americans.) “So, for me personally, if we can help save or stop the injury of at least 18 people, then I feel like we did something as a company,” he said. 

But his technology has also hurt people. A pending wrongful death lawsuit alleges that a 43-year-old man named Jonathan Mansfield died because corrections officers shocked him 27 times with the gloves and 13 times with a Taser. Two of the glove shocks lasted 45 and 99 seconds. The manufacturer’s recommended limit is 15 seconds. A man with heart problems sued over allegations that he was shocked at a Las Vegas trade show, as the Associated Press reported. And in 2023, a man who was incarcerated in Kentucky’s Bullitt County Jail sued an employee of that jail for shocking him repeatedly with the gloves. “The gloves feel just like a taser,” Josh Elswick, who was in handcuffs and shackles when he was shocked, said. Bullitt County Jail representatives told local media they would stop using electric shock gloves shortly thereafter. 

But local police across the country are still eagerly buying the gloves—in large part so that they can harm people and avoid being sued for it. It’s been successful “from the patrolmen to the jailers,” Lumpkin County Sheriff Stacy Jarrard said in a Compliant Technologies promotional video. “It’s been a great tool as far as mitigating liability,” according to Nelson County Jailer Justin Hall. Bob Couey of the Floyd County Sheriff’s Department sung the GLOVE’s praises, too: “I highly recommend these gloves to anybody that’s looking for a utility they can use that is conducive to not leading to lawsuits.”

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

Krzysztof Wasowicz, mayor of Justice, Illinois, has some concerns about solar: that it takes up farmland and enriches China. But he’s all-in on the community solar array that was recently deployed at a Public Storage facility in his village, a suburb of Chicago.

The panels are located on otherwise unused roof space and could provide significant savings for Illinoisans who subscribe to the project, while also helping the state meet its goal of 100% clean power by 2050.

“This creates more opportunities for people, job creation, and revenue that can be taxed by our state,” said Wasowicz, who has been mayor of Justice, home to about 12,000 people, since 2007. ​”This is going to be an excellent addition to this village.”

The 763-kilowatt array, which went online in March, is one of 60 planned projects for the rooftops of Public Storage facilities in Illinois. Ten such projects are now online, and once completed, the portfolio will cover 5 million square feet of roof space, provide 44 megawatts of solar capacity, deliver $36 million total savings, and create 300 construction jobs, according to Solar Landscape, a leading developer of rooftop community solar sites nationwide.

Only a fraction of industrial and commercial roof space is currently used for solar, because those projects are generally more expensive to build and interconnect than ground-mounted arrays in rural areas. But thanks to new incentives, developers, utilities, and building owners nationwide are increasingly considering the possibilities.

Federal data analyzed by the solar company Lumen Energy found that commercial, industrial, and school rooftops could host enough panels to provide 581 gigawatts of power, nearly enough to meet the entire country’s energy demand. Cook County, Illinois, which includes Justice, is among the metropolitan areas with the greatest potential, that analysis found.

Mark Schottinger, president and chief legal officer of Solar Landscape, said that working with large companies like Public Storage allows his company to deploy rooftop projects quickly at multiple sites.

“The beauty of commercial-industrial real estate is the speed and scalability,” he said, noting that major logistics, storage, and big-box companies ​”have millions of square feet around the country.”

Community solar allows households, businesses, and organizations to reap savings and support clean energy even if they can’t have their own solar panels. By subscribing to a community solar array, customers get credit on their energy bill for a portion of the solar power generated.

Illinois is among the nation’s leaders in community solar capacity, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, with more installed than even California. It is among the two dozen states that have laws enabling community solar, which typically leads to more arrays than in states without specific policies.

Illinois’ 2016 clean energy law created generous incentives for community solar, leading to a boom in projects of up to 2 MW each. An energy law passed last fall made the incentives available for projects of up to 10 MW.

Most of the state’s community solar has been built on rural land or industrial brownfields. About a fifth of the arrays are on rooftops, with the rest being ground-mounted. The rooftop arrays are concentrated in the Chicago area, and rooftops are an increasing priority for community solar, according to Paul Kovacs, project execution manager for distributed energy resources for utility ComEd, which serves northern Illinois.

Solar developers are still in the ​”early innings” of using rooftops for community solar. But ​”it’s growing exponentially.”

At a July 30 event promoting the Justice project, Melissa Washington, ComEd’s senior vice president for government relations and external affairs, called rooftop community solar ​”an elegant solution” for deploying clean energy to meet rising demand.

She listed three mandates for the utility: supplying power to businesses and residents, keeping electricity affordable, and addressing climate change—a necessity underscored by violent storms three days earlier that had left many ComEd customers without power.

Rooftop community solar, she said, ​”checks the box for every single one of those three critical priorities.” The utility plans to have over 400 community solar arrays in service by the end of this year, she added. Kovacs said about 100 of those will be on rooftops.

In a typical setup, a company like Solar Landscape develops and owns the array and collects revenue from incentives and subscribers. Those subscribers get savings on their energy bills, the property owner hosting the panels gets lease payments, and the utility gets credit toward renewable energy mandates. The utility works with the developer to make any upgrades needed to connect the array to the grid, which the developer pays for so that costs are not passed on to ratepayers.

The Public Storage projects are part of Illinois’ Community-Driven Community Solar program, meant to incentivize solar arrays whose subscribers are predominantly local households and small businesses or nonprofits, as opposed to a few large subscribers hogging the savings.

Under state law, owners of community solar can sell renewable energy credits to utilities for revenue that makes the financing equation more favorable for all the partners involved. The incentives are awarded through a highly competitive process, and proposals gain points for being in designated low-income or environmental justice census tracts, having a large proportion of local subscribers, involving the community in design and planning, and hiring through the state’s workforce training programs, among other factors. The community solar credits are also worth $5 more per megawatt-hour for rooftop installations.

The Justice project earned points for making charitable contributions and for hosting a workforce training program in conjunction with the New Jersey–based training and education nonprofit STEP-UP Solar, according to Solar Landscape marketing director Samantha Kanipe.

State incentive programs are critical to facilitating community solar development since the expiration of federal tax credits under the Trump administration’s 2025 spending bill, advocates note. Meanwhile, arrays on industrial and commercial sites, like the Public Storage ones, can still qualify for federal tax credits if they are operational by the end of 2027, or if they started construction by July 4 of this year.

“We began construction on a ton of projects before July 4,” including all the Public Storage ones, said Schottinger of Solar Landscape, noting that his company can build an array like the one in Justice in about six months.

He said his company and other solar developers are still in the ​”early innings” of using rooftops for community solar. But, ​”it’s growing exponentially,” he added. ​”There’s a lot of blank space out there.”

Skidaway Island, Georgia, is home today to a luxurious community that the mostly white residents consider paradise: waterfront views, live oaks, and marsh grass alongside golf courses, swimming pools, and other amenities. 

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In 1865, the island was a thriving Black community, started by freedmen who were given land by the government under the 40 acres program. They farmed, created a system of government, and turned former cotton plantations into a Black American success story.

But it wouldn’t last. Within two years, the government took that land back from the freedmen and returned it to the former enslavers. 

Today, 40 acres in The Landings development is worth at least $20 million. The history of that land is largely absent from day-to-day life. But over a two-and-a-half-year investigation, journalists at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed records that prove that dozens of freed people had, and lost, titles to tracts at what’s now The Landings. 

“You could feel chills to know that they had it and then they just pulled the rug from under them, so to speak,” said Linda Brown, one of the few Black residents at The Landings.

This week on Reveal, with the Center for Public Integrity, we also show a descendant her ancestor’s title for a plot of land that is now becoming another exclusive gated community. And we look at how buried documents like these Reconstruction-era land titles are part of the long game toward reparations.  

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2024.

Let me tell you about the very rich. 

They own yachts that have yachts. They leave Earth just to feel something. They buy art they don’t like and tout books they don’t read and play God with things they don’t comprehend. Above all, they live by their own set of rules.

There is a crude but undeniable logic to the rise of the American Oligarchy. As I argued in a cover story for the magazine earlier this year, decades of deregulation, concentration, opportunism, and no small amount of generally-quite-legal corruption have allowed a small group of people (mostly in Silicon Valley) to control an ever-greater share of the economy and bend the political process toward their own ends. Money begets power begets money. It’s why, laid out on the page, the net worths of the world’s richest men currently look like they’re heading for outer orbit. Seriously, have you seen the charts?

But as I’ve delved deeper and deeper into this world over the last few years, the thing I keep coming back to is not how all of these structures favor the very rich, but how wealth and power, in large enough quantities, allow you to simply bypass the structures that constrain everyone else. Gravity doesn’t really exist in the same way when you’re an oligarch. If your products drove people insane, they would be taken off the shelves. If you did a Hitler salute, people would probably just call it that. If you were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, you would be ostracized from polite society, and maybe even CNBC. If you invented the Metaverse, people would stop asking you to invent more things. And if you didn’t pay taxes, dear reader, you might eventually go to prison. 

It’s this alternative physics that gives the American oligarchy, at this particular moment, its uniquely off-putting funk—a sense that, beyond all the hockey-stick wealth charts, the centibillionaires of Silicon Valley can pursue whatever bored or perverted or maniacal project they want without fear of censure or even market correction. Time and money just don’t mean the same things they do to the rest of us. (Maybe that explains the clock.) Laws become more like suggestions. Deadlines aren’t real. Or at least: They don’t have to be.

Welcome to Billionaire Math, where we make sense of the things that don’t make sense about the world’s ruling class.

“He’s just on a grab!”

Joe Rogan is not exactly the paragon of good sense. So you know things are bad when even he is outraged about Trump’s latest moneymaking scheme. The president introduced a new Truth Social feature this month that sells early access to his posts to subscribers willing to shell out up to $100,000 a month. 

Trump has used his social platform as an official White House channel to unveil major policy initiatives, deliver updates on Iran ceasefire negotiations, and fire government officials. With access to those announcements before they go out to the general public, subscribers can turn to the betting markets to get a return on their investment. 

The feature violates the First and Fifth Amendments, a lawsuit filed against Trump alleged this week. It also may amount to insider trading and market manipulation. 

Watch the gears turn… ever so slowly… when Rogan learns about the scheme from comedian Shane Gillis during the Aug. 13 episode of his podcast.

Video by Peter Berger

Newly released court records show the Department of Homeland Security conducted a months-long surveillance campaign against left-wing groups in Minnesota after the January killing of Alex Pretti by a federal agent. The records were released Thursday as part of an ongoing criminal case the DOJ filed against 15 Minnesota activists for “felony conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers.”

In January, the Department of Homeland Security launched “Operation Puppet Master” to investigate a “network” of anti-ICE groups the agency believed to be behind protests against the federal occupation of the Twin Cities. As part of that operation, DHS used secretive, invasive tactics: staking out apartment buildings, tracking the license plates of cars parked outside a local church, and attending boxing lessons and art club meetings undercover. At one point, an informant dropped her audio device on the floor during a boxing lesson held by the group “Left Jab,” and then had to circle back to go get it.

Federal officials also, as the New York Times reported, used administrative subpoenas to obtain years’ worth of financial records from the climate activist organization Sunrise Movement and the Communications Workers of America. They acquired years of wire transfers by the Service Employees International Union, the nation’s largest healthcare workers union. This, they said, was an inquiry into “domestic terrorist financing.” (This revealed nothing except the expected minutiae of running a union: membership payments, strike funds, retiree dues, pension expenses.)

None of the organizations investigated have faced any charges, though many of the 15 individual defendants charged in the so-called antifa case are affiliated with labor unions or activist groups.

Kevin Riach, attorney for Minnesota activist Isaac Sant, called this “an unprecedented campaign by DHS to spy on Minnesotans” in a court filing Thursday. “With no evidence, the government alleged to the grand jury that the conspiracy in this case extends far beyond the defendants to include the AFL-CIO, the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, Monarca, Veterans for Peace, and the Grease Pit bicycle repair shop, among others,” Riach wrote. In one PowerPoint slide shown to members of the grand jury, prosecutors asserted that these groups are all connected.

CourtListener

This is not the first time federal agents have spied on anti-ICE protesters. As my colleague Schuyler Mitchell has reported, FBI agents in Spokane secretly extracted data from protesters’ phones. Separately, Homeland Security agents systematically collected vehicle, license plate, and social media information from everyday people in Spokane last summer, and at times entered that data into a digital evidence management platform. There, as in Illinois, Texas, and Minnesota, anti-ICE activists have been targeted on conspiracy charges for basic acts of protest like blockading a road or sharing information in a group chat.

“These wild conspiracy allegations are born from the fantasies of political retribution that animate the Trump Administration,” Riach wrote.

“While federal agents repeatedly broke the law, ordinary people exercised their First Amendment rights to protect their neighbors,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, in a statement to the Times. “The Trump administration is now trying to intimidate individuals and organizations who opposed his agenda.”

The people targeted in the “Minnesota 15” trial face between six and ten years in prison for alleged “conspiracy” against federal officers.

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

Matthew LaPlante doesn’t have to go to a lab to see his research in action. On some mornings, he can just look out his own window in the mountains high above Salt Lake City. After a warm night when the temperature stays above freezing, he’ll wake up and see that the snow level has dropped by inches, revealing more of the aspens he taps for syrup.

“It feels like a monster came and just in the middle of the night, took a bite out of a snowpack,” said LaPlante, a journalist and climate scientist at Utah State University.

So it’s fitting that scientists have started calling these kinds of heat waves, marked by unusually high temperatures in the spring and early summer, “snow eaters.” 

LaPlante was part of a recent study, published in the journal Science Advances, that attempted, for the first time, to identify what conditions exactly make for a “snow eater.” Compared to normal warm spells or heat waves, the researchers determined that these events happen when temperatures stay above freezing through both day and night for multiple days, typically three to five. These events can roughly double the rate at which snow melts, causing flooding and making it challenging to manage water resources. 

“Snow eaters” appear to be occurring earlier in the year and becoming more widespread in the Western United States as the climate warms. Since the 1850s, the study found, the area affected by snow eaters has increased by an average of about 40,000 square miles per century, and the first snow eater of the season has been arriving about one month earlier per century. 

“Water that would otherwise be stored as snow comes out early, and then we have to deal with it as a hazard instead of a resource.”

The term “snow eater” has a murky history. By at least the 1880s, people in the West were talking about “snow-eating” chinooks, warm mountain winds that make snow disappear quickly. More recently, the phrase “snow-eater heat wave” first made headlines in March, when an early heat wave enveloped much of the West, quickly wiping away snowpack in the Colorado Rockies and California’s Sierra Nevada. The scientists hope the catchy, evocative term can help draw more attention to this type of heat wave, since there’s still a lot to learn. The study only looked at the Western US, but snow eater heat waves almost assuredly occur elsewhere, LaPlante said.

Solar radiation is a major, but sometimes overlooked, driver of snowmelt, said Noah Molotch, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved in the new study. When it interacts with heat waves, those impacts are amplified. As snow crystals warm up, they lose some of their structure and light-reflecting abilities, causing snowpacks to absorb more sunlight and melt faster. “It’s a little bit of a—no pun intended—a snowball effect,” he said.

Much of the Western U.S. saw record-low snowpack this spring. What was really unusual about it, Molotch said, was how widespread it was. Colorado received less precipitation than normal this winter, while California got lots of precipitation, but in the form of rain instead of snow. But across the region, “the one thing in common was above-average air temperatures,” Molotch said.

These conditions have likely helped fuel exceptionally severe wildfires in the West, from Utah to Spokane, Washington, where hundreds of homes burned earlier this month. “Drought stress for mountain forests around the Western US is heavily dictated by the snow that accumulates each winter and then melts through the spring and summer,” Molotch said. “There is a direct connection there in terms of the water availability and drought stress that can provide one of the important ingredients for increases in wildfire intensity and frequency.”

Source: Emma Tyrrell/CU Boulder/National Interagency Fire CenterSachi Kitajima Mulkey/Grist

If scientists are able to better predict what will happen to snowpack, it could help water managers plan for what’s coming. Early or rapid snowmelt poses problems for managing water resources in the West, where snowpack serves as a key source of fresh water in the drier summer months. “Water that would otherwise be stored as snow comes out early, and then we have to deal with it as a hazard instead of a resource at our reservoirs and along the rivers and streams,” said Ben Hatchett, a co-author on the study and a scientist at Colorado State University’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere.

Snow-eater heat waves also may pose risks to skiers, hikers, and anyone else on or near mountains. They could be linked to hazards such as avalanches, glacial collapses, and permafrost melt, Hatchett said, though scientists are still investigating those connections. He lives in the Sierra Nevada, and he’s noticed one tangible change over his lifetime: The soundscape has changed.

“At night, it used to be quiet,” he said. “And now it’s not quiet, because everything’s melting all the time.”

It seems extremely unlikely that accused rapists and sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate will be released from Miami’s federal detention center, where they’re being held. For one thing, the brothers are awaiting extradition to the United Kingdom to face sprawling charges related to sex trafficking, rape, assault, and indecent images of a child, and the Trump administration has declined to step in. For another, as government prosecutors laid out in a filing opposing pre-trial release earlier this week, there is something of a flight risk, given that Andrew Tate previously used an alter-ego Twitter account to brag about being, in his words, “above the law” and “hard to kill,” as well as having of four or five passports and nine drivers’ licenses in several names. “I have had warrants out for my arrest and travelled freely,” @OfWudan, an account linked to Tate, tweeted in 2019. “I am smarter than you. I am Steven Seagal. I am above the law.” (Tristan Tate, according to the prosecutors’ filing, is similarly alleged by UK authorities to have a Mexican passport bearing his photo and date of birth, but with the name “Vladimir Scorpius,” a James Bond villain.) 

The mountain impeding the Tates’ pretrial release, then, is extremely high, but Joseph McBride is determined to climb it. McBride, a New York attorney representing both brothers, has launched an aggressive, quixotic, and highly public quest to free the Tates and promote a positive image of the two men. He’s using several tools to do so, including podcasting (both on his own, entitled Judgment Day, and through appearances on others’ shows), intense media engagement, a rally outside the jail, verbose tweeting, and, most unusually of all, a flood of AI-generated images released on X and Instagram.

The conditions Andrew and Tristan Tate are being held in are a disgrace.

Small filthy cell.
Cockroaches.
Shower water to drink.
No chair.
Lights they cannot control.

Food that makes Taco Bell look like a Michelin restaurant.

Beds too small for men who are 6’3” and 6’5”.

Three… pic.twitter.com/gVZC0zwyI6

— Joe McBride (@McBrideLawNYC) July 28, 2026

The faked images typically show the Tates manfully bearing their suffering in the clink: meditating in orange jumpsuits together atop a bunk, for instance, or dually staring at the viewer from inside a filthy cell. He also shared a striking image of the Tates sitting around a table with prominent men from across the historical spectrum—from Joe Rogan back through George Washington, with his tricorn hat looming oddly behind his head—accompanied by a lengthy caption on the importance of masculinity. It begins with a claim that the “manosphere built Western society.” 

McBride, who previously represented a series of January 6 defendants, describes himself on social media as a “traditional Catholic Warrior” and a “Defender of American Patriots, The Constitution, and Andrew & Tristan Tate.” (Besides the extradition case, he’s also representing the Tates in a Florida defamation lawsuit they are waging against one of their accusers.) McBride has cast the cases against the brothers as an attack by “the system”—a term that the Tates also use—due to their purported advocacy for men. 

“His message is male empowerment,” McBride tweeted in May, referring to Andrew Tate. “The system cannot control strong men. That is why he is public enemy number one. Escape the Matrix.” This week, McBride told podcaster Michael Malice that he fears the Tates will be “Epsteined” in jail, by which he meant murdered. 

“Strategically, a picture is worth 1,000 words,” claims the Tates’ lawyer.

In an email, McBride told me the allegations in the government’s filing opposing the Tates’ release are false. “On Monday, the government filed a brief that drips with falsehood from every page. Our reply will be filed on or before August 21, and it will answer that brief lie by lie and line by line, on paper, with documents,” he wrote. “Every claim in the government’s filing,” he added, “will be tested against the record.” 

McBride was less eager to discuss the AI images of the Tates he’s been posting—there have been at least nine since July—and declined to disclose what image generating tool was used to construct the memes. “This is my favorite question,” he told me. “Two men who are convicted of nothing, on any continent, in any court, are sitting in solitary confinement at the request of a foreign government that has not even filed its extradition papers, and Mother Jones wants to know what software their lawyer uses to make pictures. You found the scandal, Ms. Merlan. It is not the unconvicted men in the SHU. It is the memes. When you are ready to ask a question about the Constitution, you know how to find me.”

I did not ask a question about the Constitution—I couldn’t think of a relevant one at the moment—but in a followup email, McBride clarified that the AI-generated images are part of his overall plan to represent the Tates. “Strategically, a picture is worth 1,000 words,” he told me. 

McBride outside Miami’s federal courthouse in July.Joe Raedle/Getty

McBride also said that despite the previous tweets from the @OfWudan account, Andrew Tate does not consider himself to be above the law. “No one is above the law, and no one is beneath its protection,” he wrote. “Andrew Tate is convicted of nothing and charged with no American crime. The government is quoting tweets in a federal court filing. That tells you everything you need to know about the strength of its case.” 

The Tates are, as New Yorker reporter Heidi Blake laid out in a lengthy June investigation, intensely politically connected, with fans in Trump’s administration and family, including Donald Trump Jr. and Barron Trump. Blake’s piece describes McBride himself as “a star in MAGA circles, dining at Mar-a-Lago and befriending Donald Trump, Jr.” (The two were photographed together at a 2022 New York Young Republican Club gala.)

Yet those political connections haven’t served them particularly well lately; in his emails, McBride decried the “gutless pussies” in Congress, as he put it, who have privately voiced fandom for the Tates but haven’t spoken up in their defense. 

“Many members of Congress have, at different places and times, privately expressed their disapproval of the allegations against Andrew and Tristan Tate,” McBride wrote. “They have also asked for social media advice, messages for their kids, and have asked to take photos with the brothers. Andrew and Tristan give of their time freely. There was never an ask or expectation of anything in return. I am simply voicing my displeasure with their predictable silence regarding speaking out against injustice during times where courage is needed.” 

For now, the Tates remain in the Miami facility’s special housing unit, separate from the general population. Andrew’s X account continues to proclaim the brothers’ innocence and protest their jail conditions. Neither McBride nor anyone else connected with the Tates have disclosed how he’s tweeting from jail, or who else may be posting on his behalf. The government, meanwhile, has said in their filings that the Tates are being held in the SHU for their own protection, that conditions at the jail are reasonable, and that the brothers have been accorded things other SHU inmates are not, including joint meetings with their lawyers and access to the commissary. To drive the point home, the prosecutors included a receipt detailing the brothers’ purchases of ramen, coffee, Doritos, and Twix. 

A hearing on their pretrial release motion is scheduled for August 27.

The plane was stuck on the tarmac of a Louisiana airport, but Yurin Quiroa Ralda, 21, was not particularly eager to take off. He was being deported, based in part on misinterpreted records. And not to his birthplace, Guatemala, but to Ecuador, where he’d never even been.

That alone was a nightmare, but Yurin’s situation was even more frustrating: After he’d crossed the US-Mexico border alone at age 16, the US government told him that if he waited patiently, he could apply for a green card because he had Special Immigrant Juvenile status, a classification reserved for kids who were abused, abandoned, or neglected by a parent. Congress created SIJ status in 1990, to give these kids a pathway to legal permanent residency so they wouldn’t have to go back to families that harmed them. Yurin, whose dad had abandoned him before he was born, had followed the rules and waited—and he’d recently became eligible to apply for a green card. Yet here he was on a plane bound for Ecuador.

A judge in a similar case cited the administration’s “reprehensible act of unimaginable cruelty,” noting, “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”

Thousands of kids with SIJ status live in the United States, though many have grown into young adults. Like Yurin, whom I wasn’t able to interview directly for this story, they’ve spent years on waitlists because the government has a cap on visas that it can issue each year. While they waited, the Biden administration gave them deferred action, a designation that temporarily shields a person from deportation and allows them to work. But despite this safeguard, President Trump’s immigration officers detained about 400 people with SIJ status and deported 132 of them during his first year back in office, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data shared with Congress.

These kids were told, “‘You should stay here; here’s your protection,” says Molly Huffaker, an attorney who represents Yurin at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. “All they’ve gotten is a broken promise,” adds Ellie Norton, an attorney at the National Immigration Project who focuses on SIJ cases.

The Trump administration officially ended Biden’s policy for SIJ youth in June 2025, saying it would no longer offer deferred action to people on the government waitlists. A court blocked that move on the grounds that DHS hadn’t jumped through the necessary bureaucratic hoops. The administration tried again in April (a lawsuit against its second attempt is ongoing), emphasizing that the restrictions would only apply to new cases, and that people who already had deferred action, like Yurin, could keep their status.

Yet Trump’s immigration officers are detaining those young men and women anyway, says Rachel Davidson, who directs the End SIJS Backlog Coalition at the National Immigration Project, which helped file the aforementioned lawsuit. “If the courts are going to impede [DHS] on a systemic level from terminating the policy writ large,” she told me, “then what they’re doing is going after young people individually, one by one.”

Yurin’s nightmare began last November, when local law enforcement pulled over his cousin for speeding in West Virginia. Yurin, a passenger, had an immigration background that should have helped him: He’d gotten SIJ status because his dad had abandoned him and his mom in Guatemala, leaving them financially insecure and facing eviction. He had to drop out of school at age 12 to work construction. He arrived in the United States in 2021, fleeing gang violence and seeking asylum. Most recently, he’d lived in Michigan with relatives and in Maryland, taking English classes and dreaming of becoming a mechanic.

The cops called ICE, which shipped him to a detention center in Pennsylvania hundreds of miles away. For months, he was trapped in bureaucratic hell: The legal status he’d obtained seemed meaningless, and deferred action wasn’t enough to get him out of detention. And though there was good news on the horizon—he would become eligible to apply for a green card in March, after years of waiting—a judge ordered him deported in February.

When his attorneys pushed back, the judge said—confusingly—that he couldn’t budge because Yurin had a criminal record. Three years earlier, when he was 18, he’d gotten into a car accident while driving his cousin’s kids to school and wound up with a misdemeanor. He’d allegedly rear-ended someone and then run a stop sign, whereupon another car hit him, injuring the kids. His relatively minor offense—a moving violation resulting in physical injury—didn’t affect his SIJ status, according to his attorneys.

But immigration officials were now claiming he had four assault charges from the same year. Yurin insisted he had no idea what they were talking about. His attorney, Molly Huffaker, reached out to the relevant police department for clarification and requested records of the alleged incident, but nobody responded.

I recently obtained those records, along with records from the county sheriff and local prosecutors. It’s now clear that federal officials either mischaracterized or misunderstood the situation, or that they had bad documentation. On August 12, 2023, the same day they claimed four assault charges were filed against him, Yurin had reported to the jail for booking on four initial charges related to the car accident. None of them involved assault, and he was never charged with assault in the police records I obtained. In other words, Yurin was being blamed for a crime that never happened.

“It’s devastating that that mischaracterization may be the only reason he was detained and deported,” his attorney Huffaker told me after I showed her the records. She says a witness at the scene of his arrest in West Virginia overheard the officers say they were specifically detaining Yurin for his “assault record.”

In April, stuck in detention with his deportation looming, Yurin filed a habeas corpus petition arguing that his incarceration was unlawful because he had deferred action. The court dismissed his petition on a technicality—federal law says that anyone with a final deportation order is subject to mandatory detention for 90 days, and he was still within that 90-day window; he could resubmit his petition when the window ended June 11.

If only.

Less than a week before June 11, the administration terminated Yurin’s deferred action. This was always a possibility. Deferred action is a temporary protection and the government has discretion to end it on a case by case basis, typically if a person’s circumstances change significantly and they’re no longer eligible for SIJ. But the timing, so long after his alleged criminal offenses and his arrest by ICE, and just days before he could refile his habeas petition, seemed suspicious.

Yurin’s attorneys accused the administration of retaliating against him for pursuing habeas claims, in violation of his First Amendment rights as well as his Fifth Amendment right to due process. Its actions in this case were hardly a one-off, according to the National Immigration Project: “It’s an unwritten practice,” says attorney Norton.

In March, a federal judge in New York slammed the administration for doing something similar to Garcia Lanza, a 24-year-old from Honduras who came to the country at age 9, graduated magna cum laude from the New York City College of Technology, and had no criminal record. US District Judge Gary Brown described the termination of Lanza’s deferred action as “seemingly retaliatory”: It appeared the government was trying to “rationalize his illegal arrest and detention,” he wrote, calling the termination a “reprehensible act of unimaginable cruelty.”

“He cannot understand why the same government that once granted him protection is now trying to send him to a foreign country.”

“This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” the judge wrote. “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.” He reinstated Lanza’s deferred action.

That precedent might have helped Yurin. Unfortunately, the jurist overseeing his case in Louisiana, US District Judge Jerry Edwards Jr., paid more attention to a less favorable ruling in Tennessee that essentially says people don’t have due process rights when it comes to discretionary benefits like deferred action. On that basis, Edwards declined to reinstate Yurin’s deferred action, writing that the government “owed him no notice or opportunity to be heard before terminating it.”

“It’s so sad and problematic,” attorney Norton says of the ruling. These young immigrants “followed all the rules and did everything right—they were on the path to lawful status, and the government promised them that unlike when they were let down by their parents, someone was going to protect them and cared about what was best for them. It’s difficult for them to be in detention and not understand what they did wrong and what they did to deserve that.”

DHS defended its decision. “Special Immigrant Juvenile classification or providing a path to a Green Card does NOT confer lawful status,” a department spokesperson told me. “This is standard procedure and there is nothing retaliatory about enforcing the nation’s immigration laws. Yurin was afforded due process before the Executive Office for Immigration Review.”

The DHS spokesperson emphasized Yurin’s alleged assault history. When I showed them the records indicating that the assault never happened, they declined to comment other than referring me to the local police department and adding that Yurin would have been eligible for deportation anyway. The spokesperson also said that “hundreds of suspected and confirmed adult gang members” were let into the country under the SIJ program, and that the program is “infected with fraud and abuses.” A DHS report last year made similar claims and accused people of lying to receive the status.

Before his deportation, Yurin’s attorneys begged the court to reconsider. The judge had opted to send him to Ecuador because his asylum application said Guatemala was too dangerous. The attorneys pointed out that he had no status in Ecuador, had never been there, and knew nobody. “He cannot understand why the same government that once granted him protection,” they had written earlier, “is now trying to send him to a foreign country.”

The judge held firm, and on June 11, seven months after he was detained, Yurin boarded the plane in Louisiana. It was not what he wanted, but he figured at least his bureaucratic hell might finally be over.

Or not.

As he waited for the plane to take off, an officer approached and told him to get up. He would not be going to Ecuador after all. (Huffaker, his attorney, isn’t sure why, but notes that sending someone to a country where they have no history is more difficult and requires certain paperwork.)

Yurin called his cousins the next day to let them know he was still in the United States. Then the family lost touch with him. Huffaker reached out to all the government contacts she could think of to ask where he was.

Almost a week later, he called his cousins again—from Guatemala.

Soon after, ICE reached out to Huffaker with an offer: The agency admitted that Guatemala was not listed on Yurin’s official removal order; he should not have been sent there. So if he wanted, they would bring him back to the United States.

But there was a caveat: If Yurin agreed to return, the agency said, they would keep him in detention until they found a way to deport him again. The nightmare would continue.

Huffaker hasn’t had the opportunity to relay the offer, in any case. She hasn’t been able to reach Yurin since he was shipped back to Guatemala.