U.S. News

When the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights notified George Mason University on July 1 that it was opening an antisemitism investigation based on a recent complaint, the university’s president, Gregory Washington, said he was “perplexed.”

Compared with other campuses, where protesters had ransacked buildings and hunkered down in encampments, George Mason had been relatively quiet over the past year, he said. His administration had taken extensive steps to improve relations with the Jewish community, had enacted strict rules on protests and had communicated all of that to the OCR during a previous antisemitism investigation that remained open.

By the next day, though, there were signs that the new investigation was part of a coordinated campaign to oust him.

One piece of evidence: the speed with which conservative news outlets reported on the OCR’s action, which hadn’t been publicly announced. The OCR letter was embedded in a July 2 article published by a right-wing news outlet, The Washington Free Beacon. The next day, the City Journal, published by the influential and conservative Manhattan Institute, ran an opinion essay headlined “George Mason University’s Disastrous President.” The article accused Washington, the university’s first Black president and a first-generation college graduate, of backing “racially discriminatory DEI programs” — referring to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and failing to address campus antisemitism. It concluded that “Washington’s track record warrants his resignation or dismissal.”

Surely this has nothing to do with race or intimidation ... just "antisemitism" concerns from a junta whose leader happily uses the term Shylock.

The Democratic party and the climate movement have been “too cautious and polite” and should instead be denouncing the fossil fuel industry’s “huge denial operation”, the US senator Sheldon Whitehouse said.

“The fossil fuel industry has run the biggest and most malevolent propaganda operation the country has ever seen,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in an interview Monday with the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. “It is defending a $700-plus billion [annual] subsidy” of not being charged for the health and environmental damages caused by burning fossil fuels. “I think the more people understand that, the more they’ll be irate [that] they’ve been lied to.” But, he added, “Democrats have not done a good job of calling that out.”

While Whitehouse slams his fellow Democrats for timidity, he blasts Republicans for being in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, an entity whose behavior “has been downright evil”, he said. “To deliberately ignore [the laws of physics] for short-term profits that set up people for huge, really bad impacts – if that’s not a good definition of evil, I don’t know what is.”

"Every one of our national park battlefields and historic sites are going to have special events in honor of America 250," Trump said at the Iowa State Fairgrounds Thursday. "We're going to have a UFC fight—think of this—on the grounds of the White House."

Many observers couldn't help but notice parallels with the plot of Mike Judge's 2006 film "Idiocracy," a satirical skewering of issues including the erosion of White House decorum in a future when IQs have plummeted and a sports drink corporation owns the country, whose voters elect Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho, "five-time ultimate smackdown champion and porn superstar," as president.

Corpus Christi will run out of water if it does not find new water sources outside of the western watershed. That’s according to new research from 3NEWS, interviews with leading experts and scientists, as well as data from the city and state.

Over the past 15 years, our consumption averages 153% of the available water coming into our western watershed—Choke Canyon Reservoir and Lake Corpus Christi. Anything over 100% that's not offset from our eastern supplies drains our lakes.

The following is the most comprehensive look at our current water situation. Research from 3NEWS Weather Impact meteorologists and reporters will show the following:

• At current consumption levels and without new water sources, Corpus Christi risks running out of water
• Evaporation is a far bigger problem than previously reported since 96% of Nueces County’s water comes from surface water
• Mandatory water releases stopped in March 2024, but prior to that they averaged nearly 80,000 ac-ft/yr (acre-feet per year)
• Drought is far from the lone cause of our current water situation, and the 2011 drought was significantly worse than our current drought
• Despite water scarcity concerns following the 2011 drought, Corpus Christi agreed to new water contracts with large-scale industrial water consumers
• Industrial consumption continues to rise even as municipal consumption falls

The City of Corpus Christi's own projections indicate our area will fall below 10% combined lake levels by November and both Choke Canyon and Lake Corpus Christi will be without water by April 2027.

At that time, Corpus Christi would not be able to meet the city's water needs.

In a break with decades of tradition, the Internal Revenue Service says it will allow houses of worship to endorse candidates for political office without losing their tax-exempt status.

The surprise announcement came in a court document filed on Monday.

Since 1954, a provision in the tax code called the Johnson Amendment says that churches and other nonprofit organizations could lose their tax-exempt status if they participate in, or intervene in "any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office."

The National Religious Broadcasters and several churches sued the IRS over the rule, arguing that it infringes on their First Amendment rights to the freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion.

The IRS rarely enforced the rule. During President Trump's first term, he promised to "get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution."

On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway.

Over the days and weeks to come there will be tireless — and warranted — analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss. Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Did the National Weather Service, enduring steep budget cuts under the current administration, adequately forecast this storm?

Those questions are critical. But so is a far larger concern: The rapid onset of disruptive climate change — driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal — is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it.

Armed and masked men leaping out of unmarked vehicles. Latino men taken from their places of work or while waiting for the bus. Street vendors roughly tackled to the ground and forcefully held down.

Since early June, the streets of Los Angeles have borne witness to frequent and aggressive immigration raids that have seen people suspected of being undocumented migrants detained. Some have been rapidly deported.

Footage shows officers from agencies including US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which operate under DHS, arresting people in public spaces, in places of work and outside residences. In some cases, it was unclear what agency officers were with due to a lack of clear identification.

In others, officers can be seen using significant force to detain people. In most cases officers keep their faces covered, concealing their identity. Unmarked vehicles were also used on numerous occasions.

Even before Grigsby and his team began studying psilocybin, magic mushrooms were on a fast track toward cultural acceptance in Colorado. Denver residents voted to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms in 2019, making the city the nation’s first to ease psilocybin restrictions. A groundswell followed: Oakland and Santa Cruz, California, decriminalized mushrooms, followed by Washington, D.C.; Seattle; Detroit; and several cities in Massachusetts. Oregon voters legalized supervised psilocybin use in 2020. Two years later, Colorado voters approved Proposition 122, a ballot initiative similar to Oregon’s that allows people 21 and older to grow, possess, and share psychedelic substances. (They’re still illegal to sell for personal use.) It also created an eventual pathway for approved healing centers to bring supervised trips to the masses.

Colorado’s newly created Division of Natural Medicine began accepting applications this year and granted its first official license in late March. Eight days later, I walked to a LoDo office building, took an elevator to the third floor, and met the recipient: Elizabeth Cooke, owner of the Center Origin.

Cooke co-founded Coda Signature, a popular cannabis edibles company that once made some of the state’s best-selling infused chocolates. She sold shares of Coda in 2019 and left her operational role around the same time Denver decriminalized psilocybin. COVID-19 hit the following year. “There was nothing to do,” she told me, “so I started developing businesses and verticals.” After initially looking into industrial hemp production, Cooke settled on magic mushrooms, which she’d consumed recreationally as a teen in Denver in the 1970s and later came to see as an important therapy. “I thought, This is really wonderful,” said Cooke, 61, who worked as a clinical social worker in New York City and later as a psychotherapist. In 2023, Cooke purchased a 1,025-square-foot space near 14th and Blake streets. She made the office available to a magic mushroom grower who taught classes to shroom gardeners interested in cultivating the fungi at home.

Today, she is researching a line of edibles that contain “functional mushrooms” (nonpsychedelics marketed for their supposed immunity-boosting and stress-reducing properties), but Cooke has bigger plans. Once she got her healing center’s license—“a pretty easy process” compared with cannabis, she said, that included a $1,000 nonrefundable application fee, a $5,000 licensing fee, and a criminal background check—Cooke partnered with a state-licensed facilitator who can guide several psychedelic journeys each week.

The Center Origin’s pamphlet said a single session would cost $2,000, but Cooke informed me the price had increased to $3,500. Two facilitators (one of whom would likely be a student studying for a state-issued license) would watch each client, and journeys could stretch up to six hours. A session would include a magic mushroom dose as high as 50 milligrams plus one post-trip integration with the licensed facilitator immediately afterward. Additional post-journey therapy would cost $125 for individuals and $20 for group sessions, which Cooke anticipated clients would probably want after such an intense experience. “How do you clean your toilet after seeing God?” she asked.

Getting to that treatment phase, though, was proving difficult. Approved healing centers aren’t allowed to source their products from just anyone; they have to buy magic mushrooms from state-licensed growers, who have to get the shrooms tested at a state-licensed facility. (Psilocybin healing centers can’t legally sell the drug to clients and instead offer the product as a gift that’s part of paid, licensed therapy.) When I visited the Center Origin, at least 23 healing centers had applied for licenses, but only one supplier and one tester had been approved.

“That’s a huge problem for us,” said Jillian Gordon, whose Lakewood-based Go Within Collective was waiting for its license as of press time. Healing centers are essentially just leveraged startups, she said—psychedelics pioneers with steep financial risks and little control over the supply chain. Gordon wants proper testing “for heavy metals and contaminants,” but what if too few testing companies receive licenses and the shortage creates bottlenecks for healing centers? Or what if the limited number of state-approved growers produce inferior products or lose mushroom crops that can’t immediately be replaced? “It’s a catch-22,” Gordon, 37, said. “You’re already cutting off the only revenue stream [for an industry] that’s a giant question mark.”

MacArthur Park has long been an immigrant neighborhood, with a history of political activism. In 2007, it was the center of the May Day rallies demanding amnesty for undocumented people, which were met with exceptional brutality by the Los Angeles police department.

The neighborhood was also where the Trump administration kicked off its ramped-up raids in LA, sending agents to arrest undocumented day laborers at the local Home Depot store and street vendors along bustling commercial corridors.

A Defense Department official told reporters the operation on Monday was not a military operation, but said that the size and scope of the guard’s participation could make it appear as one to the public, according to the Associated Press.

“It’s just going to be more overt and larger than we usually participate in,” one of the officials said before the raid ended abruptly with no explanation.

Los Angeles residents lobbed profane insults at U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents on Monday after they swept through the city's MacArthur Park.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, condemned the federal operations in Los Angeles shortly after they occurred.

"The actions of [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and CBP during the raids in Los Angeles are not about safety or justice—they're about meeting enforcement quotas and striking fear in communities," he wrote on Bluesky. "We've filed a brief supporting a challenge to ICE and CBP's unlawful practices. We won't back down and we won't be silent."

Thought recess appointments were fun? Now we have recess rulings!

The US supreme court has cleared the way for Donald Trump’s administration to resume plans for mass firings of federal workers that critics warn could threaten critical government services.

Extending a winning streak for the US president, the justices on Tuesday lifted a lower court order that had frozen sweeping federal layoffs known as “reductions in force” while litigation in the case proceeds.

The decision could result in hundreds of thousands of job losses at the departments of agriculture, commerce, health and human services, state, treasury, veterans affairs and other agencies.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/20996269

I flew out of Denver on Monday and was told I didn’t have to take off my shoes.

The warehouse was managed by Devastating Pyrotechnics, which has more than 30 years of experience designing and producing fireworks shows, according to a screenshot of its website before it was taken down.

Nice to see truth in business naming.

Jails are notorious for inhumane conditions. Detainees often complain of violence, inedible food, limited programming and subpar healthcare. Lack of sunlight may be an unexpected addition to the list. But sunlight deprivation causes a myriad of serious issues, including high blood pressure, osteoporosis, and an increased risk of diabetes, as well as a host of mental health problems such as depression and sleep disorders.

Jails built in the last century often have few windows and little room for recreation and natural light, making them “obsolete” by today’s design standards, according to Kenneth Ricci, prison and jail architect with Nelson Worldwide, a design firm.

Bringing sunlight and fresh air into jails often takes a back seat to other pressing issues. But a lawsuit in San Francisco suggests forcing detainees to live in the dark could violate their constitutional rights. In 2021, a group of men awaiting trial at two California jails sued the city and county of San Francisco for being confined without fresh air and sunlight.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim ultimately agreed with the men. In 2023, she ruled that the jails had violated the Constitution’s due process clause. The officials “created the problem by building a jail without a secured outdoor exercise yard and then relies upon that problem to claim that it cannot provide a secure way for inmates to have access to direct sunlight,” she wrote.

These issues are top of mind for residents who have followed the opening and closure of jails in St. Louis, Cleveland, and Jackson, Mississippi, where detainees can go years without seeing the sun. The jails in all three cities have requirements to provide sunlight and fresh air, either mandated by jail policy, or by the state or federal governments. Yet all three have consistently fallen short, according to jail officials and state and federal inspection reports.

"I think it probably should be a concern for the government, the declining birth rate," Sarah Brewington told NPR. "There is going to come a time when everyone is retiring and there's not going to be a workforce."

Many researchers believe this accelerating global shift is being driven in large part by a positive reality. Young couples, and women in particular, have far more freedom and economic independence. They're weighing their options and appear to be making very different choices about the role of children in their lives.

"It's not that people don't like kids as much as they used to," said Melissa Kearney, an economist who studies fertility and population trends at the University of Notre Dame. "There's just a lot of other available options. They can invest in their careers, take more leisure time — it's much more socially acceptable."

This change in decision-making and behavior appears to be accelerating. New research from the United Nations found that the number of children born to the average woman worldwide has reached the lowest point ever recorded. In every country and every culture, women are having fewer than half as many children as they did in the 1960s.

I, for one, am glad I got snipped. I've no interest in contributing to this pyramid scheme.

Israel’s war in Gaza is chipping away at so much of what we – in the United States but also internationally – had agreed upon as acceptable, from the rules governing our freedom of speech to the very laws of armed conflict. It seems no exaggeration to say that the foundation of the international order of the last 77 years is threatened by this change in the obligations governing our legal and political responsibilities to each other.

"I think it probably should be a concern for the government, the declining birth rate," Sarah Brewington told NPR. "There is going to come a time when everyone is retiring and there's not going to be a workforce."

Many researchers believe this accelerating global shift is being driven in large part by a positive reality. Young couples, and women in particular, have far more freedom and economic independence. They're weighing their options and appear to be making very different choices about the role of children in their lives.

"It's not that people don't like kids as much as they used to," said Melissa Kearney, an economist who studies fertility and population trends at the University of Notre Dame. "There's just a lot of other available options. They can invest in their careers, take more leisure time — it's much more socially acceptable."

This change in decision-making and behavior appears to be accelerating. New research from the United Nations found that the number of children born to the average woman worldwide has reached the lowest point ever recorded. In every country and every culture, women are having fewer than half as many children as they did in the 1960s.

I, for one, am glad I got snipped. I've no interest in contributing to this pyramid scheme.

A nationwide US network of dozens of far-right, men-only fraternal clubs has what members describe as “literally hundreds” of participants who include past and currently serving military personnel, lawyers, civil servants, and prominent antisemitic influencers, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

The Old Glory Club (OGC) – which has at least 26 chapters in 20 US states and until now has drawn little attention – exemplifies the alarming rise of organized racist political groups in the past few years but especially during the rise of Donald Trump and his return to the White House.

The OGC network has held conferences, meetups and other events. Key members like podcaster Pete Quinones use their platforms to push far-right ideas about Jewish people and immigrants. Other members have used their platforms to respond to political events, and to advocate measures including “cancellation insurance” for members whose extreme political views might impede their professional lives.

On 2 June, at St Mark’s Episcopal church in Washington DC, people packed the sanctuary – elders in denim jackets, seminarians in collars, organizers clutching clipboards. Some had come in from North Carolina; others walked from their homes just a few blocks away. The seats were full, so the crowd lined the aisles and leaned against the red-brick walls beneath stained-glass windows that cast streaks of light across the floor.

It was the first Moral Monday of the summer – a tradition of weekly, nonviolent protest that began in North Carolina in 2013 and now serves as the beating heart of the Rev William Barber’s national movement to end poverty and systemic injustice. “I am not afraid,” the congregation sang.

“There can be no healing of the soul of America without healing the body,” Barber said. “Not while people are starving. Not while they’re uninsured. Not while injustice is passed off as fiscal responsibility.”

The Old Glory Club (OGC) – which has at least 26 chapters in 20 US states and until now has drawn little attention – exemplifies the alarming rise of organized racist political groups in the past few years but especially during the rise of Donald Trump and his return to the White House.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said the OGC “appears to be another major new network of racists, too many of which are springing up in the era of Trump”.

She said the group was “pushing violent ideologies, including race hate and antisemitism and has links to prominent figures on the far right”.

In the aftermath of the Eaton Fire that destroyed over 6,000 homes in Los Angeles’s Altadena area in January, another kind of potential crisis is unfolding. In a town once built by working families and craftsmen, the new face of development doesn’t carry a hammer or a blueprint—it carries a spreadsheet.

In the wake of natural disasters, families often face immense pressure to sell—whether from rising insurance costs, the emotional and logistical burden of rebuilding, or uncertain timelines for recovery. Into this vulnerable window steps a wave of acquisitions, often quiet and fast moving, led by companies with opaque ownership structures that capitalize on disrupted communities before they’ve had a real chance to regroup. In Altadena specifically, since the fire, nearly 150 damaged properties have been sold in this close-knit foothill community just northeast of Los Angeles, known for its mix of cottages, midcentury bungalows, and multigenerational households.

After combing through public records and deed filings, I discovered that of those post-fire home sales, at least 50 percent were purchased by corporate entities. This on its own isn’t inherently alarming, as individuals can purchase property through LLCs to limit legal exposure. But it is a rate that far exceeds the national average, where corporate buyers account for roughly 23 percent of single-family home sales. Even more striking, 42 percent of those sales are now held by just six companies, each of which has acquired four or more homes. While this sample size is limited, the concentration of ownership points to a pattern of land consolidation that warrants attention—particularly in a community still recovering from disaster. The paper trail leads to a small group of repeat buyers.

Let’s break down who they are. (None of the representatives associated with these companies responded to a request for comment by the time of publication.)

In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshaled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. An updated version of the book includes a section on what they called “sludge”—tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives.

The whole idea of sludge struck a chord. In the past several years, the topic has attracted a growing body of work. Researchers have shown how sludge leads people to forgo essential benefits and quietly accept outcomes they never would have otherwise chosen. Sunstein had encountered plenty of the stuff working with the Department of Homeland Security and, before that, as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “People might want to sign their child up for some beneficial program, such as free transportation or free school meals, but the sludge might defeat them,” he wrote in the Duke Law Journal.

The defeat part rang darkly to me. When I started talking with people about their sludge stories, I noticed that almost all ended the same way—with a weary, bedraggled Fuck it. Beholding the sheer unaccountability of the system, they’d pay that erroneous medical bill or give up on contesting that ticket. And this isn’t happening just here and there. Instead, I came to see this as a permanent condition. We are living in the state of Fuck it.

Some of the sludge we submit to is unavoidable—the simple consequence of living in a big, digitized world. But some of it is by design. ProPublica showed in 2023 how Cigna saved millions of dollars by rejecting claims without having doctors read them, knowing that a limited number of customers would endure the process of appeal. (Cigna told ProPublica that its description was “incorrect.”) Later that same year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Toyota’s motor-financing arm to pay $60 million for alleged misdeeds that included thwarting refunds and deliberately setting up a dead-end hotline for canceling products and services. (The now-diminished bureau canceled the order in May.) As one Harvard Business Review article put it, “Some companies may actually find it profitable to create hassles for complaining customers.”

Sludge can also reduce participation in government programs. According to Stephanie Thum, an adjunct faculty member at the Indiana Institute of Technology who researches and writes about bureaucracy, agencies may use this fact to their advantage. “If you bury a fee waiver or publish a website in legalese rather than plain language, research shows people might stay away,” Thum told me. “If you’re a leader, you might use that knowledge to get rid of administrative friction—or put it in place.”

Fee waivers, rejected claims—sludge pales compared with other global crises, of course. But that might just be its cruelest trick. There was a time when systemic dysfunction felt bold and italicized, and so did our response: We were mad as hell and we weren’t going to take it anymore! Now something more insidious and mundane is at work. The system chips away as much as it crushes, all while reassuring us that that’s just how things go.

The result: We’re exhausted as hell and we’re probably going to keep taking it.

Flint, Mich. – A decade after lead contaminated water was found in Flint, Michigan’s water system, the legal battle to replace lead water pipes is finished, a landmark milestone for a city defined by its dangerous water. Today the State of Michigan submitted a progress report to a federal court confirming that, more than eight years after a court-ordered settlement required Flint officials to replace pipes and restore property damaged in the process, nearly 11,000 lead pipes were replaced and more than 28,000 properties were restored. There is no safe level of lead exposure.

“Thanks to the persistence of the people of Flint and our partners, we are finally at the end of the lead pipe replacement project. While this milestone is not all the justice our community deserves, it is a huge achievement,” said Pastor Allen C. Overton of the Concerned Pastors for Social Action. “We would not have reached this day without the work of so many Flint residents who worked to hold our leaders accountable. I have never been prouder to be a member of the Flint community.”