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Trump touts new fascist-inspired Space Force uniforms
The director behind “Starship Troopers” is used to people not realizing that the film is laden with satirical Nazi references, but President Donald Trump admitting he took inspiration from the film for new Space Force uniforms takes the cake. Earlier this month, the president released a mockup of new uniforms on his Truth Social account, explaining that the new fits were “inspired by…
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Photographer Exposes Trump’s Kennedy Center Plan—And It’s a Bombshell
President Donald Trump already has plans to demolish the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
One day after a federal judge ordered Trump to finally give up on plastering his name on the Kennedy Center, and the president’s handpicked board of trustees voted to close the center, Trump was spotted reviewing plans to destroy the nation’s prestigious national theater.
AFP photographer Brendan Smialowski captured a photograph through the window of Air Force One Wednesday night in which Trump can be seen looking at a large posterboard emblazoned with the words “KENNEDY CENTER DEMOLISH.”
Speaking to reporters on the tarmac earlier that evening, Trump made it clear that he couldn’t be bothered to renovate a former president’s memorial because he hadn’t been allowed to plaster his name on it.
“I’d like to be able to save it but it’s going to take a lot of subsidy into the future and for us as an administration to want to do that, I think the Trump administration should be recognized,” Trump said.
In a court filing last month, prosecutors suggested that the proposed $250 million renovation project was necessary for the institution’s survival. If the building wasn’t able to be renovated, they suggested constructing a “large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River.”
Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty, a Kennedy Center trustee and the plaintiff in the court battle to block the center’s renaming, requested an emergency hearing to challenge the sudden closure, calling it “unexplained and unlawful.”
But Trump may not be waiting for the hearing. A legal observer said in court filings Wednesday night that she had seen a “forklift run into and hit the pillars on the building several times.”
Trump Tells North Carolina Hurricane Relief Depends on Midterm Outcome
President Donald Trump told a North Carolina audience that if Republican Senate nominee Michael Whatley doesn’t win in November, he would withhold FEMA funds. But don’t worry, he’s only joking!
“We spent more than $2 billion, FEMA funding, and you know you’re waiting for some additional money to take care of some of the back, and I’m gonna get that to you, Michael. Now, if Michael loses, I’m not sending it, OK. No, I’m only kidding, you’re getting it. You’re going to get it, Michael, so. He’s been bugging me, he’s been bugging me,” Trump said to a packed rally in Gastonia, Whatley’s hometown Wednesday.
Trump: "We spent more than $2 billion in FEMA funding. You're waiting for some additional funding. I'm gonna get that to you. Now if Michael loses, I'm not sending it."
Crowd: *groans* pic.twitter.com/RdZBi1qLfq
Trump was in North Carolina to stump for Whatley and other Republicans in the state, which is still recovering from the aftereffects of Hurricane Helene two years ago. Democrats haven’t won a Senate seat in the state since 2008, but Democrat Roy Cooper is ahead in all of the state’s major polls, making Trump’s presence in North Carolina almost a requirement for the state GOP.
How much will a bad joke help, though? The Trump administration has been known to use federal funding to punish states that vote against him enough times that he has been challenged in court over it. While North Carolina hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since 2008, Trump and Republicans are polling historically underwater. Not only could they lose this Senate seat, but they could set the stage for an even bigger loss in two years.
Bo French Wants Texas to Be the New Rhodesia. His Opponent Just Wants to Keep the Heat On.
When Jon Rosenthal announced his campaign last fall for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, he never expected to talk about the short-lived Republic of Rhodesia.
Rosenthal, a 63-year-old mechanical engineer and Democratic state representative from northwest Houston, is the kind of politician you might expect to show interest in the influential but little-understood three-member board that, despite its antiquated name, regulates the oil and gas industry. He is an earnest, bald father of two—the kind of guy who uses phrases like “subsea production” and “deep-water intervention systems” in casual conversation. The Republican chair, he believed, was too cozy with the industry, and Rosenthal prepared a pragmatic slate of ideas to weatherize natural gas networks and clean up abandoned wells. It was shaping up as an important but low-profile race.
But Rosenthal is not facing that incumbent. In a bitter May runoff, Republicans instead nominated Bo French, an investor and former county GOP chair with only the vaguest glimmer of industry experience and a mostly irrelevant and racist political program that calls for deporting 100 million people, purging the nation of Muslims, and emulating a defunct apartheid state. Now Rosenthal is the only man standing between one of the most notorious bigots in North Texas and one of the country’s most powerful regulatory positions.
Polls suggest he has a shot. While this year’s US Senate race between state Rep. James Talarico and Attorney General Ken Paxton may represent Texas Democrats’ best chance to win a statewide race in more than 30 years, French’s lead over Rosenthal is just outside the margin of error.
Rep. Jon E. Rosenthal (D-Houston) speaks with Rep. Rafael Anchía (D-Dallas) inside the House Chamber at the Texas Capitol Austin, Monday, Aug. 18, 2025. Mikala Compton/Austin American-Statesman/Getty
That French could be vulnerable in a race Republicans have long taken for granted speaks to both his party’s weak standing and his own. But the fact that he’s made it this far tells a troubling story. The state’s Republican leaders have mostly not renounced French. Gov. Greg Abbott has endorsed him. Paxton has campaigned with him. The defeated incumbent—who once slammed French for his “ignorant bigotry” and “hateful attacks on the Jewish people”—has offered his congratulations. Because while French might say some things that others in his party won’t, or use language and imagery that many of them might avoid, the forces that increasingly power their movement are ones he embodies—Christian nationalism, internet-addled white supremacy, and a slow-building and then frighteningly sudden frenzy of state-sponsored Islamophobia. For a long time, much of the Texas GOP seemed to exist to serve oil and gas. Now the industry is a means to a culture-war end.
Rosenthal views the job as a culmination of his life’s work. Before launching an Indivisible chapter and flipping a Republican state House seat in 2018, he spent 25 years in and around the oil and gas industry, making service calls to Gulf platforms and West Texas rigs. He told me he was motivated to run after the state government’s muted response to Winter Storm Uri in 2021, in which hundreds of Texans died after a catastrophic power grid failure.
In addition to production and pipelines, the office also deals with the industry’s environmental footprint. When we spoke in August, Rosenthal had recently returned from a trip to the “Dead Sea of Texas” in the Permian Basin, where an uncapped well had swallowed a county road and created a turquoise-colored lake. In the nearby town of Grandfalls, a derelict oil well burst last April, spewing 1.5 million gallons of toxic water in a church parking lot. The RRC was responsible for mitigating such risks, he said, but ill-equipped to do the job.
“I present myself as serious-minded and keen on the issues and working with industry to protect our communities and strengthen our infrastructure and our economy,” he said, ““and [French] is, forgive the expression, tilting at Islamic windmills.”
He has done considerably more than tilt. A 56-year-old political activist who once ran a military and law enforcement training company with “American Sniper” Chris Kyle (French denied Kyle’s widow’s claim that he stole the firm, and the parties eventually settled), French gained notoriety chairing the party in Fort Worth’s Tarrant County and putting it at the forefront of Texas conservatives’ proudly Islamophobic shift. In 2025, around the same time the Tarrant GOP demanded Texas leaders acknowledge new Islamic centers as an “invasion” and “dangerous threat,”French polled his X followers: “Who is a bigger threat to America?” The two choices: “Muslims” and “Jews.”
The backlash, and French’s subsequent attempt to clarify that antisemitism “has no place” in the party, was revealing. The problem had not been that he demonized religious minorities, but that he was insufficiently clear which minority he was targeting. French’s Islamophobia is generally more direct: Last year, he said President Donald Trump should “denaturalize and deport” a Muslim state representative, then expanded it to say the president should “round up every Muslim in America, denaturalize them, and deport them.” To the extent that his candidacy is focused on the Texas Railroad Commission at all, it is because French believes the oil industry, too, must be purged of “the influence of radical Islam.” French, who did not respond to a request for comment, referred to Jim Wright, the Republican commissioner he defeated, as “Jihadi Jim” and alleged that Wright’s ties to a Saudi-owned company’s petrochemical facility had allowed “Islamic values and laws” to infiltrate the commission.
French’s assertion that the state’s fossil fuel industry is being overrun by Muslims is part of his broader and quite explicit call for ethnic cleansing, analogizing patriotic “heritage” Americans’ current situation to that of white settlers in Rhodesia. As tends to be the case, what starts with one villainized group extends to others: French has written that Trump should “denaturalize and deport all the third world savages who hate our country”—including some Native Americans. “Time to go round up all the Chinese and send them packing!” he wrote in July. (French has said the actual racists are Democrats who push DEI, not people like him.)
When he heard rumors French was running, Rosenthal assumed it was a prank. And while Rosenthal is well aware of his opponent’s oeuvre, when I asked about French’s assertion that “We need to be Rhodesia,” Rosenthal did a double take.
“We need to what?” he asked. “‘Be Rhodesia?’ I don’t even—that’s…I…I haven’t heard that.”
“So Rhodesia is now, oh gosh…Zimbabwe?” he sighed, working it out. “He’s talking about apartheid and white minority rule—that’s just wild.”
French has begun to direct his venom Rosenthal’s way. Texas Monthly’s Robert Downen, the foremost chronicler of French’s rise and the Texas far-right, recently reported on a fundraising email from the campaign that accused Rosenthal, who is Jewish, of “mocking Christianity” and compared him to the Bolsheviks who killed Russia’s ruling Romanov family—a trope with a deep antisemitic history.
Tarrant County Republican Party Chair Bo French speaks during a rally, on Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Mansfield. Shafkat Anowar/The Dallas Morning News/Getty
Rosenthal’s challenge is that he has to persuade a significant percentage of Texans to change their voting tendencies in a race they may have paid no attention to, and for an office, he acknowledges, they may never have even heard of. While Democrats came within a few points of knocking off both Paxton and Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018, no candidate for railroad commissioner has cracked 45 percent since Bill Clinton’s first term.
“The hope for me actually in this whole election is that there’s a significant coalition among the rank-and-file—especially for Republicans, or people that consider themselves independent or unaffiliated, right-of-center—who don’t agree with this,” he said. “It’s not just partisan politics. It’s grossly embracing horrendous moral and ethical positions.”
French’s views leave the narrowest of openings. After all, more than 600,000 Republicans have already voted against him twice this year. No Republican running statewide this fall received fewer votes in the runoff. And while French’s primary campaign was backed by the West Texas billionaires who reliably bankroll the state’s far right—oilmen whose fervent right-wing Christianity is matched by their passion for deregulation—major Republican donors from Miriam Adelson to ExxonMobil opposed him. Rosenthal is, in addition to banking on a big Democratic turnout for Talarico and gubernatorial nominee Gina Hinojosa, making the case to energy-industry workers, along with farmers and ranchers who work downstream. He pitches himself as a “serious professional,” who can work productively with the two other Republicans serving on the commission.
French, for his part, seems determined to make new audiences aware of his candidacy. On Saturday, he shared an image of a group of University of Texas students of South Asian descent, celebrating the Longhorns’ victory over the number-one-ranked team in college football. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French wrote. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” The post prompted denunciations from a number of high-profile conservatives, including Republican Sen. John Cornyn and the current speaker of the Texas house of representatives. Longtime Republican operative Karl Rove announced in response that for the first time in three decades, he was going to vote for a Democrat for statewide office—Rosenthal.
More troubling, though, is the very real possibility that most Republican voters won’t think twice. French’s positions are extreme, but French himself is no longer fringe: His comments about deporting 100 million people who “shouldn’t be here” came at CPAC, one of the conservative movement’s premier confabs. Paxton stumped with French at his runoff launch party a few weeks after that. As the southern border has receded in salience during Trump’s second term, the state’s Republican leaders have filled the void with attacks on Islam. Paxton has attempted to ban the Council on American-Islamic Relations from operating in Texas. Abbott has designated the civil rights group a terrorist organization, while attempting to block a Muslim housing development near Dallas on the grounds it would spread Shariah. At June’s state convention, the Texas GOP chair told two Muslim delegates to leave the party.
Replacing an industry-friendly Republican with a wealthy activist who treats The Camp of the Saints like it’s a beach read is in many ways the defining story of the era. It’s how the party of George W. Bush became the party of Trump. People become Republicans now because they think like French thinks, and they get ahead by saying the kinds of things French says.
Texas state Rep Jon Rosenthal, right, takes a selfie with fellow lawmakers and friends, including Rep. Nicole Collier, third from left, before a debate on a redrawn U.S. congressional map in Texas during a special session, Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025, in Austin, Texas.Eric Gay/AP
Rosenthal is hoping enough voters will make a choice they have not made many times before. Beyond reminding them of French’s naked bigotry, his campaign is promoting a clip of Abbott telling an audience before the runoff that French “doesn’t know anything about oil and gas” and would “wreck the miracle” of fossil fuel production in the state. It’s a good clean hit, a story that, with enough saturation, could help Rosenthal pull off a historic upset. But at the same rally, Abbott offered another even starker warning. If Rosenthal wins, he said, “it would destroy Texas, it would destroy America, it would destroy the world.”
Republicans might not want to be Rhodesians. They live in mortal fear of becoming Democrats.
The Term Working Class Is Useless
The Center for Working-Class Politics, a relatively new research institute helmed by political scientist Jared Abbott, and the Equality Action Center’s Joan C. Williams released a report Monday about how progressive candidates could win working-class voters. The report detailed a survey of 40,000 voters produced by the socialist magazine Jacobin (whose editorial director, Bhaskar Sunkara, is on the CWCP’s board), and its analysis relied on an almost laughable definition of the working class: “those with no four-year college degree and a household income in roughly the middle 60% of the national distribution (about $30,000 to $150,000).” The report compared that group’s responses to a middle- and upper-class group defined as those with a four-year degree and a household income of at least $80,000.
By this logic, a household with a social worker married to a teacher, together making just over $100,000 a year, is not working class, but a master electrician making six figures is. The report thus repeats a common, fatal flaw in how many people define the working class today: relying largely on education level leaves us with an income range so wide it tells us little about how much those folks struggle—or not—to make ends meet.
I can’t really fault the CWCP, though. The left’s collective freakout over working-class voters—mainly, but not exclusively, “white working-class” voters—began in earnest when Donald Trump pulled off his surprise win in the 2016 election. So many years, so many takes about what happened and how to win those voters back. And throughout this time, writers, pundits, and voters themselves have tossed around the term working class without remembering or thinking about what it means. It’s now a term that doesn’t mean anything at all. And we should stop using it, because it’s been used as a sloppy shorthand for a group that’s so broad, varied, and voting on so many different issues that we’re often misdiagnosing our political and economic problems.
This is not to say that the term never meant anything. For some researchers, especially economists and sociologists, working class has always referred to people who earn hourly wages, often in unskilled or low-skilled jobs (or jobs perceived as not requiring skills, which is an entirely other conversation). Their bosses largely control their workdays. They don’t own assets, except maybe the house they live in, and don’t have investments or another financial cushion to rely on if they lose their jobs. They can work their way into financial security over time but are vulnerable to their factory or office closing—and, even worse, to finding that their skills aren’t easily transferable or are becoming entirely outdated in a rapidly changing labor market. They just don’t have a lot of economic power. They’re not quite in poverty, but also not quite middle class.
This is how I’ve always defined it, and some experts I spoke to recently do, as well. “Our foundational definition is people who have to work for a living and have little or no financial security to fall back on if they lose their job or are unable to work,” said Ravi Mangla, the press secretary for the Working Families Party. “So it could include people of a higher income that have no safety net underneath them and exist in a precarious state. So our formula factors in family income, education, and occupation and type of work (not just income). And we estimate that working class comprises roughly 63 percent of the electorate.”
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research relies on a similar definition, but one that emphasizes lower incomes. “One definition that IWPR considers for working-class workers is workers making two-thirds or less than the median wage, and who might be employed in manual labor or jobs that don’t require a college degree,” said Kate Bahn, the organization’s chief economist and senior vice president of research. “More than half of those workers are women, and a disproportionate share of those workers are Black and Latinx workers.”
These are complicated definitions that don’t lend themselves to easy shorthand. Maybe that’s why many journalists, pundits, and pollsters began to search for a different meaning, and settled on one that relies on education level, like the CWCP’s definition: It simply lumps all voters without a bachelor’s degree into the working class. “When I first started working in political journalism, I found the idea of a definition of working class that included Bill Gates (at the time the richest man in the world) somewhat absurd,” Matthew Yglesias wrote in his newsletter in July, referring to the fact that Gates famously dropped out of Harvard University. “But I was beaten down by convention and have generally used the term the way everyone else does.” (Not everyone!)
There’s a logic to this: The skill levels and economic opportunities available to those who have completed a college education and those who have not are roughly analogous to the differences between a middle-class worker or manager and one who is working class. Another, and perhaps bigger, reason that analysts have relied on education level as a proxy for working class is that voter education level is reliably measured in polls and surveys, while other parts of the more accurate definition of working class aren’t. When news stories interpreted exit polls from the 2024 presidential election as showing that Trump won over some working-class Latinos, for example, they largely relied on the fact that Trump won Latino voters without college degrees. The terms are often used interchangeably.
Because the term working class has a long history in economics, sociology, and Marxist politics, its usage suggests that we’re automatically talking about those voters’ material conditions—and that, as a group, these voters share those conditions. But actually, we’re talking about their education levels. Whether someone goes to college at all or gets a degree can be influenced by economics, but also where they’re from, how fundamentally liberal or conservative their upbringing was, their cultural concerns, and a host of other things that might impact how they vote. And in fact, the biggest political shift this century is best described by education level, not income: Since President Barack Obama’s first term, college-educated voters have moved to the Democratic Party, and non–college educated voters have moved to the Republican Party—regardless of class.
Emphasizing college education so heavily in a definition of the working class leaves out a lot of the workers in the health care, education, and service economy, rapidly growing fields where so many workers make below the median income—in 2025, $66,620 for full-time workers—despite having degrees. Their degrees also cost them: They had to pay or borrow for their tuition and possibly didn’t work while earning the degree, which means they have more bills to pay. And women, especially Black and Latino women, need degrees to even get their feet in the door, while some workers, especially men, can still rely on apprenticeships for trades that make much more money. These are college-educated members of the true working class, and they overwhelmingly vote Democratic.
I’ve always objected to using working class to mean non–college educated, in part because it ignores these kinds of workers. Mary Alice McCarthy, a senior director for the Center on Education & Labor at New America, agrees. “Defining the ‘working class’ as non-college workers conflates two very different descriptors of individuals: The first corresponds to an individual’s position in the labor market, and the second to their highest credential,” she said. She said they can serve as effective proxies but aren’t perfect, especially for women and people of color. “More importantly, it masks enormous variation in the types and quality of the jobs that college-educated workers have and also obscures the role of employment arrangements and whether or not someone is a boss or not a boss.”
Using education as a proxy becomes even less useful among older voters, who were less likely to go to college, and rural voters, who live in places with dramatically fewer college graduates and where the job market is more limited and idiosyncratic than in cities. And these demographics also happen to be heavily Republican. A non–college educated voter in my home state of Arkansas, for example, could own a car dealership or a large family farm. That makes them bosses and owners, who comfortably make six figures, if not more. It’s hard to see how business owners who employ people are working class, whether they went to college or not. These local elites are Trump’s base, while those with the least amount of education and lowest incomes are less likely to vote at all than more educated, higher-earning voters.
Our political imagination has had a hard time catching up to this reality—that someone who drives a truck (which are very expensive, by the way) and wears a trucker hat and has literal grime on their hands from work might be better off than someone who’s filing patient financial forms at a desk in a hospital’s back office. It doesn’t fit our traditional image of working-class America. That’s why so many people reach for a definition that is kind of cultural and feels right.
Americans are even doing so in defining themselves. The Pew Research Center released a report just before Labor Day revealing that 60 percent of Americans—across education, income, occupation, and racial and ethnic groups—say they’re “working-class.” This percentage has ticked up over the years, but the term has increasingly taken on a partisan tinge. Two-thirds of Republican voters say the term describes them well, versus 55 percent of Democrats, and Republicans are more likely to do so regardless of their job, level of education, or income. Which means, increasingly, people who vote Republican just describe themselves as working class. Many Democrats worried about winning more working-class voters who vote Republican could just be chasing solid Republican voters who now use that label. That’s a losing game.
All of this is why many researchers often tend to stick to more precise definitions, like income brackets, or describe the specific community they’re discussing in a report. I think analysts writing about Democrats and their voters should also aim for more precision. If we mean someone without a college degree, we can just say that. We can also use income levels or types of jobs when we mean specific workers.
Perhaps Americans are increasingly identifying themselves as working class because they work for a living but still feel like they’re struggling, or aren’t getting ahead as much as they expected to. It’s getting harder to own assets and to build a financial cushion. That sense of precarity, of living paycheck to paycheck, keeps people from feeling middle-class, which connotes a sense of financial security. But that doesn’t necessarily make them working class—not by any useful definition, anyway.
Thursday morning traffic: South Hwy 1 closed at Park Ave.; Hwy 9 lane closures
This post is updated throughout the day to reflect the latest incidents. It was last updated at 6:31 a.m..
Here’s what’s happening on the roads this morning…
▼︎ new incidents
Road incidents as of 6:30 a.m. on September 17- South Highway 1 is facing closures at Park Avenue in Capitola / Soquel because of paving work. The closure will last until Nov. 19.
- Highway 9 at Pool Drive in San Lorenzo Valley has alternating lane closures because of bridge work. The closures are expected to end at 6:59 a.m. on April 30, 2027.
- There is one-way traffic on North SR-236 at Boulder Brook Drive in San Lorenzo Valley because of pavement repair. This closure will last until 1:59 p.m. on Sept. 21.
- A trailer carrying office supplies had a blown left tire and was leaning into lane 2 on northbound Highway 17 at the Pasatiempo Drive offramp. Tow services were requested but later cancelled. The incident was reported today.
- CHP helped Caltrans with maintenance work at the northbound Highway 17 and Pasatiempo Drive offramp in the Eastside / Live Oak area. This was reported on Sept. 16.
Disclosure: Traffic incidents are partially generated by artificial intelligence. We are constantly working to improve the accuracy and quality of our AI-generated content. However, there may still be errors or inaccuracies. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.
The post Thursday morning traffic: South Hwy 1 closed at Park Ave.; Hwy 9 lane closures appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
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Microplastics in Soil Act Like a Tiny “Trojan Horse” for Delivering Toxins
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Microplastics act like a “Trojan horse,” delivering pollutants, pesticides, and bacteria through the soil, a five-year multinational research project has found.
The EU-funded project, which has so far resulted in 22 peer-reviewed studies, found microplastics in the soil of all 227 agricultural fields it tested across 11 European countries. The researchers said this poses a global threat, with healthy soils essential for life on Earth.
“Once these plastics fragment into the ground, they’re practically impossible to remove.”
In many cases, this contamination reflected current farming practices as well as historical land use, demonstrating that plastic pollution can persist for many years.
The researchers also found that microplastics could interact with other agricultural stressors such as pesticides and veterinary drugs.
One study in Switzerland found that fields with the highest levels of tire-wear particles also had the highest levels of other toxic chemicals and metals.
Microplastics can create new microbial habitats on their surfaces. Known as the plastisphere, these surfaces form a hotspot for interactions between plastics, microbes, and agrochemicals, the researchers found.
An increase of antibiotic-resistant genes was found within plastispheres when compared with controls. Pesticides appeared to amplify this effect further.
Edoardo Puglisi, a partner of the project and professor of microbiology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Piacenza, Italy, said the smaller the microplastics were, the more they tended to adsorb pollutants, microbes and DNA, leading to a “Trojan horse effect that can potentially increase the diffusion of pathogens and antibiotic-resistance genes.”
This Trojan horse effect can have an impact on earthworms and soil organisms by disrupting critical processes such as nutrient cycles, one study found.
Biodegradable plastics were not automatically safer and could still degrade into microplastics.
Earthworms play a vital role in shaping the composition of the soil microbiome as well as the ecological functions of soils.
The EU-funded Minagris research project, in collaboration with the Countryside and Community Research Institute at the University of Gloucestershire, also found microplastics could affect plant growth and function. One study found that higher concentrations of microplastics reduced leaf area, chlorophyll content, photosynthetic efficiency, and plant biomass in lettuce.
When drought conditions were added, these effects became even more pronounced, with plants performing less well than under either stress alone.
Environmental assessments often consider pollutants individually, but the findings show pollutants can behave differently when they occur together. The researchers say policy needs to recognise that plastic contamination is part of a wider picture of soil degradation and pollution.
In an effort to reduce plastic pollution, there has been an increase in the use of biodegradable plastics. However, the project found biodegradable plastics were not automatically safer and could still degrade into microplastics, potentially causing ecological damage.
“Once these plastics fragment into the ground, they’re practically impossible to remove, acting as vectors for agrochemicals and altering critical soil ecosystems,” said Esperanza Huerta Lwanga, a research associate in soil physics at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
“To protect long-term food production and soil health, policy must catch up. We urgently need standardised plastic monitoring, full manufacturer transparency, and risk assessments that evaluate through different species how microplastics interact with co-pollutants.”
Is Meta Using Disabled People to Promote Its Glasses?
In July, Meta published a press release saying that it would issue $2 million worth of grants to 30 organizations that would test ways its AI glasses could “help people work safer, learn faster, and live more independently.” The grantees include organizations that would develop workshops to help Blind people utilize the devices and assist people with intellectual disabilities prepare to enter the workforce.
“We want to ensure the future is for everyone—giving every person the tools to reach their full potential,” Meta wrote in the release. Meta also maintains a program to distribute its AI glasses to Blind veterans in the United States, which it has highlighted in recent advertising. The company, a viewer may conclude, is doing actual good. The full story is more complicated.
Meta first released its smart glasses, which include multiple cameras and speakers, in 2021; its latest version, launched in June, includes a raft of AI capabilities, which have drawn considerably more attention—and alarm.
As my colleague Anna Merlan recently wrote,
The company describes the glasses’ AI capabilities as “a helpful voice in your ear,” which is probably meant to be less chilling than it sounds. But the glasses, too, have been met with intense controversy over privacy and nonconsensual filming. They are unpopular in a rich variety of settings: UK cinemas are considering banning them entirely, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement has banned employees from wearing them at work. HateAid, a German digital advocacy group, has lodged a criminal complaint seeking to stop them from being sold in that country at all.
New technology can be immensely helpful for disabled people navigating the world. Smart glasses, which are not exclusive to Meta, can have legitimate benefits for Blind people and others with low vision: hearing a dictated description of what’s in front of them, or having texts read aloud. For users with hearing loss, Meta glasses can be helpful with captioning. People with limited or no mobility in their arms can use the glasses to take photos of loved ones.
In a 2025 review of Meta glasses for the American Foundation for the Blind, vision rehabilitation therapist Steve Kelley weighed the pros and cons of the devices, writing that Meta glasses were affordable but “not instantaneous or accurate enough for something like street crossings” and cannot “replace tools like a white cane for orientation and mobility.”
Noah Currier, president and founder of the Oscar Mike Foundation, said that his team has been working with Meta in the development phase of newer versions of Meta glasses for about three years. “They brought veterans with disabilities, including people with spinal cord injuries, memory loss, and low vision, into the room early to shape how the hardware and features actually work,” Currier said.
Currier, who is quadriplegic, told me that his organization got in touch with Meta when the tech giant did outreach to disability organizations.
“I have really thought it was responsible,” Currier told me. I asked Currier about privacy concerns around Meta glasses; he told me he was not “real invested in knowing what any sort of policy or answer should be moving forward,” but feels the positives outweigh the negatives.
But disabled people, like anyone else, may not want to be filmed by strangers in their day-to-day lives—and are uniquely affected by surveillance in ways that predate smart glasses. Insurance companies have surveilled disability claimants through the use of private investigators. Disabled people seeking accommodations at work face stifling scrutiny; the rise of “bossware,” surveillance technology used to monitor employees, has an outsized impact on disabled people.
Experts I spoke with raised similar concerns that the spread of ubiquitous surveillance harms disabled people overall. Some advocate bans on smart glasses in medical settings, arguing that they may inadvertently capture HIPAA-protected personal health information or simply “change behavior, increase anxiety, and undermine trust.”
Posters on social media have reported pharmacy workers wearing smart glasses, nursing professionals wearing them on the job, or themselves using smart glasses to subtly photograph private health documents left visible at a doctor’s office. One law firm has documented an array of concerns around smart wearables in nursing homes, particularly that people with cognitive disabilities “may not fully understand that footage could be uploaded or shared, that the glasses contain a camera and microphones, when recording has started, what will happen to the recording [or] who might eventually see it.”
Meta has faced other criticism around its record on disability and health generally. In 2023, the mental health app BetterHelp faced federal fines for sharing protected health data with platforms including Meta. In 2025, a California jury held Meta liable for violating California privacy laws by improperly collecting reproductive health data from users of FloHealth, a period tracking app. And an ongoing class-action lawsuit alleges that Meta’s Pixel tracking software “allowed Facebook to receive data about users’ medical conditions, doctors searched, and appointments booked, all without patients’ knowledge or HIPAA-compliant authorization.”
And in July, the company was sued under allegations that it used artificial intelligence to target people who took medical leave. One former employee with a serious health condition alleged in the lawsuit that he was told by his management that taking leave “would result in his selection for the anticipated reduction in force”; in a statement to my colleague Alex Nguyen, a spokesperson said that “workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI.” Right before the start of the second Trump administration, Meta killed its major DEI programs, another blow to disabled employees.
It’s not the first time that Meta, which has faced waves of criticism around privacy, surveillance, data mining, and its handling of user information, has met pushback in trying to provide what the company sees as a vital service. More than a decade ago, Mark Zuckerberg personally headed up a push to provide a form of free internet access to millions of people in India, only to be rebuffed by regulators.
Experts raised the concern that Meta’s efforts with disabled people would stymie regulators and politicians taking on smart glasses.
From Meta’s point of view, the potential benefits of the glasses should again put skeptics on the back foot. Why question its motivations for partnering with disability groups? Surely Meta is already subjected to enough critique around the placement of its data centers, alleged efforts to secure preferential treatment from government officials, high-dollar lobbying against regulation, and the effects of its products on young people, scrutiny that led to a landmark settlement in August, with Meta paying some $18 billion to resolve claims that it knew its products were addictive, underregulated, and harmful to youth.
In a statement to Mother Jones, Meta spokesperson Dana Still said that the company “builds for everyone and has a long history of working with partners like the Blinded Veterans Association, Lighthouse Guild, and Oscar Mike. As part of this work, we gather feedback and create capabilities and programs to build products and technology that better serve people.” The firm did not respond to privacy concerns directly in its statement. A spokesperson for Meta previously told CBS News Texas in May that “privacy and data protection are core to every product we build at Meta,” including its glasses.
“Certain companies have used accessibility and disability rights as a Trojan horse for a tool that poses significant privacy and security threats,” Center for Democracy and Technology disability lead Ariana Aboulafia told me, “and to be clear, the privacy concerns affect disabled people too.”
While critical of Meta’s corporate record, My Tech for All founder Mark Friedman understands why disability organizations would work with the company—in part because of its resources. Many disability groups, Friedman points out, are “cash-strapped.”
“This stuff is going to benefit people greatly, and it’s going to harm people” as an inevitable product of widespread opportunities for instantaneous filming of the general public—including disabled people—in day-to-day life. “I don’t think [the disability organizations] are being bought out. To the extent that they become knowledgeable, they’ll be able to raise the flag to say, ‘Wait a second,’” around privacy.
Virginia Tech science, technology, and society professor Ashley Shew, author of Against Technoableism, expressed serious concerns about the tension between Meta’s profit motive and its ostensibly public-interest partnerships. Disabled people, she argued, can be viewed as a particularly promising market for a product that urgently needs one—and one that reflects well on the firms who sell to them. Shew thinks the benefits to firms like Meta are relatively clear—including the obvious benefits, beyond raw sales, of buyers who rely on a product rather than approaching it as a fun gadget.
Rebecca Monteleone, a University of Toledo disability studies professor and author of The Double Bind of Disability: How Medical Technology Shapes Bodily Authority, raised a related concern: that Meta could be using its efforts with disabled people to build a case for its technology more widely. This could render products like smart glasses a more challenging case for regulators and politicians.
“We’re seeing the systematic deconstruction of disability rights in the United States,” Monteleone said. “A company like Meta can justify the development of this technology based on all of these assumptions that there must be a social good here” in a moment when wins for disabled people are depressingly rare.
That speaks to a wider problem, Monteleone told me:
“Disabled people have to operate within this commercial system,” she said. “So often, the better product or the more useful product is a product that either is ridiculously expensive and unable to be obtained, or you have to go through a million different hoops through your insurance.”
Shew is also concerned that for-profit firms, and in particular giants like Meta—among the largest companies in the world—will crowd out opportunities for disability organizations and other advocates to find alternatives that are easier to trust. Backlash to smart glasses has reportedly already made some users hesitant to wear them in public.
“I worry that it will prevent better technology,” Shew told me, whether on the part of “companies that could do so more responsibly, or by disabled people themselves who make and hack and trade for themselves.”
Issues regarding Meta AI glasses speak to larger issues on privacy and data collection that Friedman, who remains skeptical, doesn’t believe will be addressed under the Trump administration—despite cross-the-political-aisle backlash to a wide range of AI and data center development.
“The real issue,” Friedman said, “is the public can accept” their privacy being undermined—whether or not the glasses are ultimately worth that tradeoff.