NASA names crew for Artemis III lunar lander rehearsal
Most New US Data Centers Are Slated for Drought-Plagued Areas
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
A record-shattering drought has racked much of the United States. But the artificial intelligence industry is pushing ahead regardless, with the majority of planned data centers set to be built in drought-ridden locations, a Guardian analysis has found.
About two-thirds of upcoming data centers, which typically require a large amount of water to operate, are set to be built in places that have been among the driest in the country over the past year.
Of 809 planned data centers, 517 are in locations that have been in drought conditions throughout the past year, according to data from Cleanview and the federal government, which grades drought across four levels of severity. A similar proportion of existing data centers are already situated in drought-affected areas.
More than 60 percent of the contiguous US is currently at varying stages of drought, the largest expanse for spring in modern records, with a particularly severe lack of rain and snow in the Southeast and West desiccating croplands and raising fears of a disastrous wildfire season.
“There isn’t enough water to go around. Now with this explosion of data centers, I think a crunch point is inevitable.”
Scientists have determined that the climate crisis, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, is worsening the duration and intensity of droughts in the US.
But a stampede of new data centers are adding extra demands via their hefty energy and water requirements. Large data centers, some the size of small towns, can require up to 5 million gallons of water a day, equivalent to the water use of up to 50,000 people, in order to provide cooling to arrays of humming networked computers.
Overall, the multiplying data centers are set to demand as much as 73 billion gallons of water a year by 2028, up from about 17 billion gallons in 2023. Each 100-word AI prompt uses up roughly a half-liter of water due to the cooling needs of data centers, researchers have estimated.
“The AI industry is sprinting as fast as it can to gain market dominance, and the rest of us have to deal with a great increase in water demand in places already in drought,” said Christopher Dalbom, an expert in water resources law at Tulane University. “Even if there wasn’t climate change, we’d be feeling the effects of droughts more acutely, because water demand is going up and up, to feed more people and water more lawns and crops. There isn’t enough water to go around. Now with this explosion of data centers, I think a crunch point is inevitable.”
“I mean, ChatGPT is a pretty nice tool, but most people would prefer to have a beef steak.”
Companies such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon are pouring billions of dollars into new data centers, with developers often drawn to dry, sparsely populated areas, due to the lower cost of land and generous tax breaks. Arid climates are also thought to cause the least amount of corrosion to equipment over time.
One of the world’s largest data centers, a complex twice the size of Manhattan, was controversially approved last month in a Utah county that has been deep in drought since summer last year. Meanwhile, Walla Walla county in Washington, site of a planned Amazon data center, has also been overwhelmingly in drought since July of last year.
In Texas, two of the largest new data centers are arriving in counties—Pecos and Carson—recently parched by drought. Data centers could account for 9 percent of Texas’s total water use by 2040, researchers recently calculated, with the state’s water development board forecasting Texas will have to deal with rising overall demand and falling supply of water in the decades ahead.
While an immediate water shortage is unlikely, hard choices will have to be made to avoid future clashes over water access, according to Dalbom. “When we get into a situation where there’s a limited amount of water available, are we going to limit water to residents and businesses before data centers?” he said.
“In the eastern US, we have always assumed an abundance of water, so the legal systems aren’t set up for shortages. We can’t just assume that people aren’t going to be asked to reduce their water use, while data centers and energy won’t be.”
Concerns over water use, as well as rising energy bills, have stirred local opposition to a rash of data center projects, causing some developments to be curtailed or canceled. These concerns have become a political headache for Republicans—Donald Trump has been a vocal supporter of the AI industry—with much of the opposition coming from rural, more conservative areas.
“Ranchers are being told to be conservative with water, to not waste water, and now there’s a new competing interest able to get near unlimited access to water,” said Andrew Coppin, chief executive of Ranchbot, a company that helps ranchers track their water use. “The concerns from farmers are real and justified. Data centers are flavor of the month now, but we wouldn’t make the choice to only be able to have a shower on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. I mean, ChatGPT is a pretty nice tool, but most people would prefer to have a beef steak if they had to choose.”
Data center developers say the industry’s current water use is still just a fraction of what much larger consumers, primarily agriculture, already take, causing growing strain on key sources such as the Colorado River. Even the irrigation of golf courses and lawns sucks up more water than data centers.
Guardian graphic based on data from Cleanview and NOAAGuardian graphic. Sources: Cleanview, Noaa“Data center operators work closely with local authorities to ensure compliance with all applicable rules and regulations and to ensure operations do not stress local water supplies,” said Dan Diorio, vice-president of state policy at the Data Center Coalition. “The industry is actively prioritizing responsible water use through operational best practices and innovative development strategies, often collaborating with local authorities and conservation organizations on water restoration and reclamation projects. Data center operators are among the few private sector industries actively investing in local water infrastructure.”
The sector claims it is making progress to replace standard evaporative cooling with more efficient technologies such as closed-loop cooling, whereby the same coolant, such as water or glycol, is continually piped among the servers to absorb their heat.
However, while such cooling systems save water, they need more energy to run. This power typically comes from fossil fuels, which unlike cleaner forms of energy require copious amounts of water to generate electricity.
Such a trade-off is evident at Meta’s huge proposed data center, called Hyperion after the father of the sun in Greek mythology, in Louisiana. While the facility will use closed-loop cooling, it will also need the energy input of 10 gas-fired power plants that will use large amounts of water as well as emit planet-heating emissions.
“It will be an issue for farmers near the data center and if more data centers are approved to draw down the same aquifer you get a death by a thousand cuts,” said Dalbom. “You may see the water table going down so wells will have to be deeper to access the groundwater. There will still be water there but cost more to access.”
Meta said that it will prioritize on-site water efficiency to the extent that its water use will be less than if the land was used for agriculture purposes.
“I think there is an emerging consensus among the major hyper-scalers about the importance of water stewardship.”
“Meta estimates the data center will use as much as 1 billion gallons of water per year, drawing it from an aquifer currently used for agriculture, not from the community’s drinking water,” a company spokeswoman said.
The overall water impact of AI is far larger than data centers themselves, however. A January study found that data centers will be responsible for just 4 percent of the 30 trillion gallons of extra water that will be needed, globally, for AI expansion by the midpoint of this century. Power generation and semiconductor fabrication for AI will suck up much more water than the data centers themselves, the report states.
“Data centers are the most visible element to people but they are only part of the picture,” said Albert Cho, chief strategy officer at Xylem, the company behind the study. Cho said that data centers’ water use will remain smaller than other large sectors, such as agriculture, and use of renewable energy and reduced water waste will help reduce demand.
“Water tends not to be the top-line consideration,” when data center sites are chosen, Cho said, but he added: “I think there is an emerging consensus among the major hyper-scalers about the importance of water stewardship.”
Yet the public backlash has been so strong—polling shows 70 percent of Americans don’t want to live next to a data center—that some states are considering new restrictions. California, Michigan and Iowa, for example, are mulling bills to require operators to submit regular reports on water use while others, such as South Carolina and Kansas, may force developers to use closed-loop cooling systems. Lawmakers in New York have gone further, with plans for an outright moratorium on data centers.
In Utah, the state’s governor, who last year asked residents to pray for rain amid a deep drought, has attempted to reassure voters that the enormous new Stratos data center will not endanger the Great Salt Lake, which was already shrinking due to water overuse and rising global temperatures. A group opposing the county approval of Stratos is aiming to overturn this decision via a public referendum.
The data center is backed by Kevin O’Leary, a Canadian businessman who has featured on TV shows such as Shark Tank and is a keen supporter of Trump. O’Leary has, without evidence, accused opponents of Stratos of being paid protesters or in league with the Chinese Communist party.
“There could not be a worse advocate for this project than Kevin O’Leary, who has been absolutely dismissive of people in Utah again and again,” said Ben Abbott, an ecologist at Brigham Young University and the executive director of Grow the Flow, a Utah environmental group.
Alexa Chandler holds a sign at a protest against the construction of a data center on May 4, 2026 in Tremonton, Utah.Natalie Behring via Getty“I haven’t found a single person in favor of this,” he added. “It has brought together urban and rural communities, farmers and environmentalists, linking arms against this. I think this project is mortally wounded as a result.”
The Great Salt Lake is “headed for an all-time low” and the massive 9 gigawatts of power needed for Stratos, as well as its cooling systems, will probably push the ecosystem into further water deficit, Abbott said.
“There couldn’t be a worse time to do this,” Abbott said of the Stratos project. “Climate change is causing important hydrological shifts and here in the west we have a less stable water supply due to the mega-drought. But, more importantly, we are also harvesting the fruits of a century of water overuse.”
O’Leary’s case for the project is that it would be a big economic win, bringing jobs and tax revenue to rural parts of the state while helping the US win on AI in its rivalry with China. Last week he agreed to make cuts to the scale of the project after pressure from state lawmakers and said in a post on X that he was “working around the clock to address every issue raised, from water usage and environmental impact to power generation and community benefits.”
A lawsuit has also been filed against the project brought by five local residents and a progressive group.
Worldwide, three-quarters of people could face drought impacts by 2050 all while data centers use 2.5 trillion gallons of water in the coming decade, enough to meet the drinking water needs of the planet’s human population for over a year, the UN has estimated.
Even when some withdrawn water is recycled by data centers, “large-scale withdrawals can strain aquifers and river systems, particularly in arid or groundwater-depleted regions,” a recent UN report warned.
“We need to rethink our relationship with water because at the moment there is just this unrestricted demand everywhere,” said Abbott. “We are in systemic water deficit almost everywhere on the planet.”
Here’s What Pete Hegseth’s Religion Believes About Mormons
Last week, the Pentagon released a new list of 31 religions officially recognized by the US Department of Defense, edited down from more than 200 that had previously been accepted. The purpose of streamlining, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement, was not to delegitimize any one religion, but rather “to allow chaplains to quickly look at the religious composition of their units and determine how they structure resources to best provide for warfighters of all faith groups.”
But to some religious groups, the new list looked biased. Of the 31 groups listed, 22 were Christian. Atheists, pagans, and humanists, which had all been on the original list, were excluded. But the loudest complaints were about its structure. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints noted that while their faith was included, it had been sequestered from other Christian faiths—which they saw as part of a pattern of some denominations refusing to recognize LDS members as fellow Christians.
Indeed, Samuel Perry, a professor of rhetoric at Baylor University who studies Christian nationalism, noted that it wasn’t until evangelicals rallied around LDS politician Mitt Romney during his run for president in 2008 that mainline Christians accepted LDS as a Christian faith. That was, said Perry, “completely a political change in order to be able to move centrally around one candidate.”
Last week, after the Pentagon released its list, Utah’s two Mormon senators made their objections known on social media. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) tweeted, “Can anyone tell me why The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was left out of the list of Christian churches?” Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) was more pointed in his tweet:
Latter-day Saints are among the most patriotic, service-oriented individuals in our country. They are also unequivocally Christian—just look at who is in the name of the Church.
It is unacceptable for a government entity to characterize a faith in a manner that contradicts the… https://t.co/ywqk59ZtRz
On Monday, the Department of Defense released a new list—and that version did list LDS as a “Christian” faith. But the Pentagon’s perceived slight is still roiling Christian social media, with some accounts rushing to defend the LDS church, and others, like firebrand pastor Joel Webbon, declaring to his 111,000 followers, “Mormons will go to hell.”
So was the original listing of Mormons apart from other Christian faiths simply an oversight, or a snub? In a tweet about the newest version of the list, the DOD claimed the former. “The Pentagon list included redundant and unnecessary labeling,” the agency said in a tweet on Monday, “and the mistake has been fixed.”
But in the past few days, some accounts on social media have pointed out that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth belongs to a Christian nationalist denomination—called Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC)—that holds that Mormons aren’t Christians.
Which wouldn’t be terribly significant in the grand sweep of religious beliefs—except that CREC explicitly advocates for Christians to exert their faith’s influence over the government. Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho, pastor who founded CREC, has described his vision of “a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ and the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed.” He has long argued in favor of Christian nationalism, and he has likened his fiefdom in Idaho—which includes a church, school, college, and publishing house—to a “working prototype” of what Christian nationalism could look like.
One theological point of distinction between LDS and other Christian denominations is that LDS members don’t accept the Apostles’ Creed because it states that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are all one entity. In contrast, Perry, the Christian nationalism scholar, noted the LDS church teaches that they are three distinct beings. From Wilson’s description of his ideal version of America, it appears that everyone would have to live by the Apostles’ Creed—whether they believed in it or not. In Wilson’s Christian America, said Perry, “Anything that falls outside of the doctrinal vision that Wilson or CREC have would fall outside of what they consider to be kind of a true belief in Christianity, so there’s kind of an exclusivity that’s being cultivated.”
Over the last few years, Wilson has begun to move in influential political circles, speaking at the National Conservatism conference with Vice President JD Vance and appearing at an event about Christian political strategy with Project 2025 architect Russell Vought. Last year, he planted a new CREC church in Washington, DC, where Hegseth often attends services. Most significantly, in February, Wilson delivered a sermon at the Pentagon, at the behest of Hegseth.
In an email, Wilson confirmed that CREC’s version of Christianity doesn’t include Mormons. “We would consider the Mormons to be a non-Christian faith with Christian terminology,” he wrote, and added that his church would consider LDS people to be “polytheists.”
The LDS Church did not respond to a request for comment for this story, and the US Department of Defense directed me to its tweet about the most recent revision of the list.
RFK’s Answer to the Maternal Health Crisis: Hide the Data
In April, during a congressional hearing that coincided with Black Maternal Health Week, Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the US’ abysmal and largely preventable rates of maternal death compared to its peers.
Black women, Lee pointed out, fare three times worse than their white counterparts, even as the Trump administration continues to cut both health funding and research into racial health disparities.
She posed a question: “How are we going to solve the Black maternal mortality crisis if we cannot say ‘Black’?”
The GOP’s attacks on Medicaid—which finances health care for more than two in five births across the country—and the White House’s termination of thousands of federal health and science workers, including those tasked with compiling the country’s most comprehensive data on maternal and infant health, give even more weight to independent research like Listening to Mothers, a nationwide survey published by the nonprofit National Partnership for Women and Families on Monday.
The report—the group’s first nationwide survey since 2013—surveys thousands of mothers who gave birth in a hospital in 2023 and 2024 about their experiences with the maternal care system, revealing pervasive barriers to quality care and widespread failures by health systems.
The report ends by warning that “modest gains” like expanded postpartum Medicaid coverage “are now at risk of being rolled back.”
Around 40 percent of respondents said they’d been disrespected, dismissed, or ignored by providers during labor and delivery. More than a third reported unmet social needs during pregnancy—mainly a lack of income, difficulty paying utility bills, or finding childcare—particularly Black and indigenous respondents and those on Medicaid. After having their children, more than a fifth said at least one of those needs still hadn’t been met.
Before, during, and after their pregnancies, up to a fourth of respondents reported experiencing depressive symptoms. Symptoms of anxiety were even higher. Yet most people with either symptom received no treatment, even as late as 12 weeks after giving birth. And while research suggests that support from doulas and midwives improves outcomes, only a small fraction of respondents reported having access to or using either.
The report ends by warning that the “modest gains of recent years,” such as the expansion of Medicaid coverage to one year postpartum in all 50 states but Arkansas, “are now at risk of being rolled back.”
“We’re not where we should be,” said Nan Strauss, National Partnership’s senior director of maternal care. “We need to be adding to and improving people’s lives, making it easier for them to focus on their families at this really critical moment, and instead their own efforts to be the best new mom that they can are being undercut every step of the way.”
In July, congressional Republicans enacted major cuts to SNAP and Medicaid; my colleague Daniel Friedman noted at the time that the bill would cost millions of people their health insurance and reduce access to birth control and other reproductive care—imperiling maternity services at more than 140 rural hospitals, as my fellow colleague Nina Martin also reported.
As the administration slashes the social safety net, it’s also suppressing vast amounts of data on maternal health. For decades, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Reproductive Health Division partnered with a majority of state health departments to survey tens of thousands of women about their experiences before, during, and after pregnancy as part of the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System. But last April, the CDC team that oversaw PRAMS was put on leave, indefinitely cutting off federal support to the states collecting this data. (The termination of thousands of federal workers, including those at the CDC, is currently being challenged in court.)
In the aftermath, said Rita Hamad, a social epidemiologist at Harvard University who has used PRAMS data to research safety net policies like paid parental leave, “some states were not able to continue their data collection, in part because they were losing out on that technical assistance from the CDC.”
“One really heartbreaking example is Mississippi, which stopped data collection for most of 2025,” Hamad said, noting that the state declared infant mortality a public health emergency the same year. “I was just thinking, gosh, how are they going to be able to address this crisis?”
Cassondra Marshall, an associate professor in UC Berkeley’s Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health Program, has used both PRAMS and Listening to Mothers data in her research. The data is “needed to develop interventions” by policymakers, Marshall emphasized. Yet policies like the Momnibus bills, which were reintroduced in March and seek among other things to expand the perinatal workforce and improve data collection, face an uphill battle in the Republican-dominated Congress.
As my colleague Madison Pauly put it last June, “With the White House and state governments denying the very idea of systemic racism and targeting anything that smacks of [DEI], structural change seems further away than ever.”
To make matters worse, the information the government is releasing isn’t exactly reliable. Last month, on Mother’s Day, HHS launched moms.gov, a website it described as offering “guidance and information to support the health and wellbeing of mothers and their families.” Yet the homepage contains no mention of parental leave or contraception, includes minimal mental health resources, and directs people to crisis pregnancy centers through another website operated by the Christian, anti-abortion Heartbeat International.
For decades, mothers and maternal health experts have been talking about the need for evidence-based, community-focused interventions. Under RFK Jr., public health seems to be moving in the opposite direction.
Ivanti tells Sentry customers to patch now as critical bugs hit 10.0 and 9.9
Brussels' datacenter efficiency scorecard may come with a credit warning
Trump’s “Weaponization” Claim Is Total BS
A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
Donald Trump’s pathetic and sleazy effort to create a slush fund of $1.776 billion that his lieutenants could dole out to his political allies, including, possibly, his violent January 6 brownshirts, appears to be dead. After even Republicans howled about this brazen corruption, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former (and, in a way, still) personal lawyer, proclaimed the so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” kaput—though Trump continues to support this idea and there remains a possibility it could be revived in some form. But in all the brouhaha over this attempt by Trump to swipe nearly 2 billion smackers from American taxpayers, one damn big point has gotten lost: The claim that past administrations weaponized government against Trump and his right-wing confederates is complete bullshit.
There was no need for such a fund, because there were no such victims. This chief grievance of Trump and his MAGA cult is a myth that’s been created to cover up the many transgressions of Trump himself. And any acceptance of this notion of weaponization is a win for Trump.
Official reviews of the Russia investigation repeatedly declared it was a legitimate enterprise that was justifiably initiated and not a political hit job.
Trump has been braying for years that he has been the target of politically motivated investigations and prosecutions—what’s called lawfare. But that’s not true. The granddaddy of all this, as far as he is concerned, was the Russia investigation. He’s been moaning about the “Russia, Russia, Russia” probe for a decade, and through that stretch, he, his GOP lickspittles, and his right-wing media enablers have contended the investigation was a fraud cooked up by the Deep State, the Democrats, and the media.
But…no. Official reviews of the Russia investigation repeatedly declared it was a legitimate enterprise that was justifiably initiated and not a political hit job. This included a Justice Department inspector general report issued in 2019, a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee released in 2020 (when then-Sen. Marco Rubio chaired the committee), and the 2023 final report produced by special counsel John Durham, who had been appointed in 2019 by then–Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the investigation.
Each of these reviews concluded that inquiry was neither a hoax nor a witch hunt, as Trump and his lackey have never stopped proclaiming. (The IG report and Durham did criticize elements of the Russia investigation, most notably the FBI’s improper surveillance of Carter Page, a former adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign.) And the Senate Intelligence Committee report reaffirmed (as did special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report) the intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow covertly attacked the 2016 election in part to help Trump win the White House.
There was no weaponization on this front. The Russia investigation led to solid indictments of several Trump aides, including Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, George Papdopoulos, and Roger Stone. Each of them either pleaded guilty or were convicted by a jury. It was Trump who then politicized the process by pardoning all four at the end of his first term. (Trump’s Justice Department in April handed Flynn $1.25 million to settle an iffy lawsuit he filed that alleged he had been maliciously prosecuted, and the department can be expected to be sympathetic to similar claims from other Trump devotees.)
Trump’s other two big gripes about supposed weaponization concern the federal investigations mounted by special counsel Jack Smith of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged swiping of top-secret documents when he left the White House. Both these inquiries were fully justified. During the House January 6 committee’s investigation, multiple Republican witnesses testified that Trump took actions that were possibly criminal to try to retain power. And a bipartisan majority of the Senate voted to convict him of impeachment charges following his incitement of the January 6 riot. (It was not the supermajority needed for a conviction.)
In each of these cases, a jury or judge found Trump guilty—a sign the cases had merit.
As for the stolen-papers case, throughout 2021 and the first half of 2022, the National Archives and the Justice Department repeatedly tried to retrieve from Trump the sensitive records he held on to when he departed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Had Trump returned the records, there would have been no prosecution. He did give back some of the material, and one of his attorneys certified that all documents had been sent back. But that was false, and an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago found 25 boxes that contained documents of the highest classification. The subsequent criminal case was no witch hunt.
Neither the stolen papers nor the 2020 election case went to trial because Smith closed them after Trump won the 2024 election, citing a Justice Department policy that states that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted on federal charges. (That’s the reason Mueller did not file obstruction of justice charges against Trump during the Russia investigation.)
Trump also argues that he was unfairly investigated in New York for tax fraud and for falsifying business records to cover up the hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had an extramarital tryst with Trump. In each of these cases, a jury or judge found Trump guilty—a sign the cases had merit.
Beyond Trump’s own personal beefs, the MAGA crowd claims that the federal government in the Biden years was weaponized against right-wingers. They assert that the FBI targeted conservative Christians and school-board activists. An internal memo from the FBI’s Richmond, Virginia, field office, which was leaked in 2023, cited “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology as a possible pathway for domestic extremist violence. GOP officials and conservatives were outraged by this. But the memo was rescinded, and there was no evidence that it had resulted in any investigations or prosecutions. It was essentially the work of one junior analyst in a field office.
Right-wing groups also howled when the Biden Justice Department—following complaints that some parents protesting at school board meetings were threatening board members—issued a memo directing US attorney and FBI agents to discus this matter with local officials. They objected to comparing concerned parents—who often were religious conservatives—to terrorists. But this, too, did not lead to sweeping investigations of conservatives.
Then there’s January 6. MAGA luminaries—and Trump himself—have long championed the convicted rioters as victims of unfair and overreaching criminal investigations. A White House website—paid for with your tax dollars—makes this ludicrous case. And there was much worry that the Trump slush fund would dole out millions to these violent insurrectionists, thus endorsing and encouraging political violence.
Trump and his cult will continue insisting that he and his loyalists have been victimized by law enforcement. That’s what many crooks do.
To dub the prosecution of the J6 marauders “weaponization” of government is one of the biggest acts of gaslighting a White House has ever tried to pull off. It illustrates the fundamental absurdity of this propaganda campaign. We all saw what happened on that horrific day. Assailing the subsequent quest for justice as repressive federal overreach is bonkers and Orwellian in the extreme.
The investigations and prosecutions Trump bitches about were not acts of weaponization. They were appropriate government activity. But for years, Trump and his handmaids have been mounting this disinformation crusade without much opposition to its big lie. On top of that, Trump has shown us what the weaponization of government truly looks like with the criminal investigations he has ordered up of former FBI Director James Comey, New York state Attorney General Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), former CIA Director John Brennan, and others, as well as the assaults he has launched on major law firms and universities.
The idea that he should be given $1.8 billion to hand out to his supporters who ran afoul of the law was preposterous but so too is the assertion that Trump and his comrades have been the targets of pervasive government weaponization. Yet that’s a major component of Trump’s self-glorifying mythology: He’s the target of a Deep State cabal and a martyr for MAGA. The pot of money for his malfeasants may be gone for now—though Trump still says, “I love it. I think it’s so important.” Whatever ultimately happens, Trump and his cult will continue insisting that he and his loyalists have been victimized by law enforcement. That’s what many crooks do. In this case, it’s a MAGA fairy tale and a cover story for a criminal president that deserves as much resistance as the corrupt slush fund has drawn.
As Martinelli’s pulls back, local schools and nonprofits rally to support Pajaro Valley apple growers
After Martinelli’s announced it would not renew contracts with local apple growers, one Pajaro Valley farmer has been flooded with calls, ideas and offers from community members eager to help replace the major buyer. While potential partnerships with school districts, nonprofits and other local organizations show promise, growers say finding markets large enough to absorb the thousands of tons of apples once sold to Martinelli’s remains a significant challenge.
Heather Cox Richardson on the Real Genius of America
Heather Cox Richardson is one of today’s unlikeliest social media stars. The Boston College historian has been teaching and writing about 19th-century America, Reconstruction, and the Civil War for decades. But it was only in 2019 that her work took off when she began writing her daily newsletter, Letters from an American, a no-nonsense analysis of the news through the lens of US history.
jQuery(document).ready(function(){prx("https:\/\/play.prx.org\/e?ge=prx_149_4648b33c-66b4-4d36-b6e1-11ee6c71e8bf&uf=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.revealradio.org%2Frevealpodcast", "prx-1", "embed")});Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.
The newsletter became one of the most popular on Substack. And today, Richardson has millions of loyal fans who rely on her to make sense of American politics and provide a little sanity and democratic reassurance even as she herself is concerned about the direction of the country today.
“I’m worried about where we’re going. Just don’t even start me,” Richardson tells host Al Letson. “But I am heartened in this moment by the number of people who are rediscovering that they do have agency to change the future. And of course, that’s always been the story of our democracy.”
On this week’s More To The Story, Richardson talks about the decades-long failure to hold corrupt American leaders accountable, the still-resonant death of Reconstruction, and what she sees as the tragic hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
Note: If you buy a book using our Bookshop link, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.
This week in Santa Cruz County business: Events aim to boost visitors to Seabright amid latest Murray Street Bridge closure; air corridor project underway; Joby-Archer lawsuit developments
With the Murray Street Bridge set to be closed through September, business owners and community leaders have plans to bring visitors to the neighborhoods around the Santa Cruz Harbor this summer. Jessica M. Pasko’s weekly look at local business also includes updates on a project to connect four regional airports, including Watsonville’s; legal jabs between air mobility rivals; and plenty more names, numbers and dates to know.
Node4 CEO Neil Muller found dead at home after suspected stabbing
SpacemiT shows off usably quick RISC-V mini desktop
Letter to the editor: We must maintain Medi-cal benefits
In a letter to the editor, the CEO of Central California Alliance for Health underlines the importance of Medi-Cal for all current members and urges readers to push their state representatives to maintain current coverage statuses.
Santa Cruz women have more freedom than ever — so why can’t we get away from the beauty mirror?
In a county known for barefoot hippies, natural beauty and anti-establishment culture, Santa Cruz women still feel intense pressure to curate how they look, says writer and radio host Suki Wessling. She reflects on Botox appointments over the hill, Zoom beauty filters, punk-rock rebellion and a lively Santa Cruz Feminist Society debate about beauty, aging and self-expression. Her argument: Even here, women are spending too much time staring into the digital mirror — and not enough time simply living.
Waymo says it built a better benchmark for comparing robotaxis to humans
France and Germany agree to disagree, ditch joint next-gen Euro fighter
Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton will face off in California governor’s race
The race for California governor this fall will be a battle between a Democrat promising to cement the state’s status as a stronghold of liberal policies and a Republican pledging to dramatically reverse course in the nation’s most populous state.
Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News commentator backed by President Donald Trump, has won enough votes to advance to the general election, The Associated Press determined Tuesday. He’ll face Democrat Xavier Becerra, a former state attorney general and health secretary under President Joe Biden.
The winner will succeed Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom to lead the state that is home to roughly 39 million people, Hollywood, a booming tech industry and a vast farming region that helps feed the nation. By itself California represents one of the largest economies in the world.
The next governor will have to take on stubborn issues including a high cost of living, housing shortages and homelessness.
Democrats outnumber Republicans in CaliforniaHilton is banking his campaign on voters being frustrated enough to do something they have not done in two decades: elect a Republican to statewide office. The last time that happened was when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger won a second term in 2006. Hilton has campaigned as an outsider who would bring change after more than 15 years of one-party rule.
“If you’re happy with the way that California is being run, Xavier Becerra is your guy,” Hilton said in a recent interview. “If you want change, vote for me.”
But simply having an “R” next to his name stacks the odds against Hilton, since Republicans make up just about 25% of registered voters compared with Democrats’ 45%. Trump’s endorsement likely boosted Hilton with GOP voters during the primary but could be a major liability in the general election.
Becerra was a chief architect of the state’s resistance to Trump during the first years of his presidency after then-Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, appointed him attorney general in 2017. In that role Becerra filed at least 120 legal actions against the federal government.
Becerra has made pushing back against Trump’s incursions a central piece of this campaign, as the president has repeatedly gone after the state during his second term including by curbing a signature plan to reduce planet-warning emissions from cars, withholding aid for wildfire recovery and suing over state policies supporting transgender student-athletes.
“Donald Trump is doubling down on decline and counting on people being too fearful, distracted or gullible to fight back,” Becerra told a crowd on primary night. “As governor I will never back down from the threats of small cowards in big offices.”
Results conclude a chaotic primaryIt took nearly a week to determine the general election matchup for governor due to California’s notoriously slow vote-counting process. Ballots are mailed to every eligible voter and they are counted if they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive at an election office within seven days. Counties process and count mail ballots in roughly the order they are received, so the last ones returned are the last ones counted.
The AP determined Friday that Becerra had won enough votes to advance to November. Hilton had been vying for a second spot against Democrat Tom Steyer, a billionaire hedge fund manager turned climate activist who poured $215 million of his personal fortune into the campaign and blasted Californians’ screens with ads.
California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer speaks during an election night event June 2 in San Francisco. Credit: Noah Berger / Associated PressSteyer steadily narrowed Hilton’s lead for second place every day since Election Day on June 2. But he was never on track to fully close the gap. The AP advanced Hilton to the general election on Tuesday after determining there weren’t enough outstanding votes for Steyer to catch Hilton.
Election data shows that large numbers of Democratic voters held onto their ballots until the final days of the election. That helped explain why Steyer did better than Hilton in the votes counted after Election Day.
Steyer conceded Tuesday and urged his supporters to back Becerra.
“It would be a travesty for Steve Hilton to win the governorship, and Californians must unite behind Xavier Becerra to ensure he does not,” he said in a statement.
Affordability is a central issueHow to make the state more affordable was a major theme throughout the primary. Hilton promised to make Californians’ first $100,000 free of income tax, create a loan program for first-time homebuyers and freeze in-state tuition at public colleges. Becerra, meanwhile, said he would declare states of emergency to address high energy costs and housing shortages and to freeze home insurance rates.
The two have one thing in common: They both come from immigrant backgrounds.
Hilton moved to California from the United Kingdom in 2012 and became a citizen in 2021. Back in the U.K., he was an adviser to Conservative Party officials including former Prime Minister David Cameron.
California Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton gestures after speaking at a news conference at the San Mateo County Elections office on June 5 in San Mateo. Credit: Jeff Chiu / Associated PressHilton has poked fun at his British accent by comparing himself to the Austria-born Schwarzenegger.
“I know that some of you may be watching and saying, ‘Who is this guy with a funny accent?’” he said on election night. “Well you know there was actually an immigrant who was governor of California not that long ago.”
Becerra was born to Mexican immigrant parents in Sacramento and also raised there. He said his family’s story mirrored his “underdog” campaign for governor.
“Like my parents, I never gave up,” he told supporters on election night. “I never stopped believing in the beaconlike goodness of California. And thankfully, neither did you.”
Becerra would be the state’s first Latino governor since the late 1800s.
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.
The post Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton will face off in California governor’s race appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
Ray Myers named Pajaro Valley High’s newest head football coach
The Ray Myers era is officially under way at Pajaro Valley High this week after he was formally introduced as the new head football coach Tuesday afternoon.
The longtime local defensive coordinator was already in full spirits by sporting the green, silver and black colors at Grizzly Stadium prior to a meeting with some of the incoming players.
“Being a coach basically is just an extension of the classroom,” Myers said. “It’s just another chance for me to teach and help impact people’s lives. Not just in the classroom, but on the field, too. It’s a great opportunity for that.”
Myers, 42, will replace Casey Neligh after he was pink-slipped by the Pajaro Valley Unified School District following three seasons (2023-25) at the helm.
Neligh led the Grizzlies to the program’s first-ever winning season after they finished with a 6-4 overall record. They were runners-up in the Pacific Coast Athletic League’s Santa Lucia Division with a 5-1 record in league play.
Pajaro Valley Athletic Director Joe Manfre said he opened the position not thinking he’d find somebody extremely qualified for the position in such a short period.
That’s when Myers’ name popped up on the EDJOIN website.
“I was like ‘holy moly,’” Manfre said. “The Myers name carries a lot of weight in the city of Watsonville and Santa Cruz County.”
Myers has been a physical education teacher at Pajaro Middle School for the past 18 years. He received his master’s degree in strength and conditioning, and taught a weightlifting class for the Cabrillo College football team the past four years.
Myers played his first three years of prep football at Monte Vista Christian in Watsonville, followed by his senior season at Gilroy High and two years at Cabrillo College.
In 2007, Myers got his first gig as a defensive line coach at Soquel High under his dad, Ron, who spent 47 years on the football sidelines, and was the mastermind behind the Black Death defense at Watsonville High in the 80s.
“I think it’s kind of cool that Ray’s wanted to step into that space, and make a name for himself a little bit, too,” Manfre said.
Myers was promoted to defensive coordinator for six more years until he jumped ship with his dad for his second stint at Watsonville from 2014-19.
He took two years off during the Covid-19 pandemic before making a return to his alma mater at Cabrillo College as a defensive line coach for four years (‘22-25).
Myers now will have a chance to lead a program for the first time in his career, and he’s bringing his mentor, Ron, along for the ride as one of his assistant coaches.
“I feel like [Ray Myers] brings a wealth of knowledge, and he’s a teacher too. He knows how to deal with kids,” Manfre said. “I think it’s going to be a really good fit.”
Myers will become a physical education teacher at Pajaro Valley, and run a weightlifting class for the football team. He said a benefit to being an on-campus coach is having contact with players for constant grade checks.
Myers also mentioned building relationships with teachers on campus is critical because he wants to make sure students are passing classes outside of athletics.
“The goal for us, and it always has been, is if you play four years of football you’re going to be able to graduate to be eligible to do that,” Myers said.
Myers can already see the bigger picture, which starts with recruiting as many student-athletes as possible to join the Grizzly football program.
After that, he’s hoping to create a pipeline to send those same players to the next level whether it’s at Cabrillo or another school of their choice.
“I want it to be a positive experience for them,” Myers said. “I want to have that positivity spread to the school. [Casey Neligh] did a great job with the program. I’m not inheriting a program that is down, it’s a program that is on its way up, and he’s done a really good job of getting the place ready.”