Almost exactly a year ago, when NASA released the first photos from the James Webb Space Telescope, President Biden declared in a speech, “These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things, and then remind the American people, especially our children, that there’s nothing beyond our capacity.”

I agree with the sentiment. There are very few things about which Americans can agree, but we all live under the same moon and stars; it’s genuinely wonderful that scientific resources have been devoted to exploring the far reaches of the universe and expanding humanity’s understanding of the cosmos. I recalled Biden’s remarks again this week upon marveling at the newly released image of the birth of stars in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex:

The image was released to celebrate one year since scientists began collecting data from the telescope. The Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex is one of the closest star-forming regions to our solar system, about 400 light-years away. Per NASA:

The darkest areas are the densest, where thick dust cocoons still-forming protostars. Huge bipolar jets of molecular hydrogen, represented in red, dominate the image, appearing horizontally across the upper third and vertically on the right. These occur when a star first bursts through its natal envelope of cosmic dust, shooting out a pair of opposing jets into space like a newborn first stretching her arms out into the world.

Pretty neat.

But as with everything else in America, there is a more depressing element at play. The images were made possible by the Department of Defense’s procurement of beryllium and its continued promotion of the military-industrial complex. Still, looking at this image almost makes me forget that I no longer have the constitutional right to an abortion. No one has ever accused the United States of being bad at marketing.

A Wisconsin 16-year-old died this month from injuries sustained from an “industrial accident” while working on a sawmill, in a startling reminder of the rise of child labor in dangerous occupations throughout the country. Officials announced today they are investigating. A cause of death has not been released.

Department of Labor statistics show a steady uptick in child labor violations in recent years, with the number of minors employed in violation of child labor laws up 37 percent in 2022 from the year prior. Many of the children who are working in the most dangerous jobs, like construction, are unaccompanied migrant children who are often in debt to the people who smuggled them into the country.

When child labor abuse makes headlines, the companies responsible receive the financial equivalent of a slap on the wrist. One of the largest food sanitation companies in the US was fined $1.5 million earlier this year for employing more than 100 children to clean meat-cutting equipment with caustic chemicals. The fine, which amounted to $15,138 per illegally employed child, was the maximum allowed under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Critics called it “woefully insufficient.”

But instead of suggesting solutions like raising fines for companies that illegally employ children, Republicans in various state legislatures have recently proposed laws to loosen child labor restrictions. The bills range from seemingly innocuous (like allowing teens as young as 14 to serve alcohol in restaurants) to downright alarming (like letting kids of that age work in industrial laundries and meat coolers).

Proponents of these bills tout the merits of hard work, but child labor restrictions aren’t about taking away kids’ summer jobs at the car wash and the ice cream parlor; they’re about preventing children from doing dangerous work that will lead them to the morgue instead of the mall.

The largest American labor strike in over 60 years looks increasingly likely: Early this morning, negotiations between UPS and the Teamsters broke down, according to a press release from the union. 

In June, about 97 percent of the UPS rank-and-file voted to authorize a strike if the contract negotiations did not result in a new agreement. Their current contract expires on July 31. If negotiations aren’t revived, a massive action is set for August—340,000 UPS drivers, loaders, and package handlers will take to the streets.  

On June 28, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien said that UPS had two days to provide a “last, best, final offer.” On July 1, the union set a new July 5 deadline for an agreement so that union members would have sufficient time to review it before a vote. But after a weekend of “marathon” negotiations, the UPS Teamsters National Negotiating Committee unanimously rejected the shipping company’s “unacceptable” final offer.

The Teamsters had already made significant progress in the negotiations, as my colleagues Noah Lanard and Abigail Weinberg reported. They had won tentative wage increases, air conditioning in trucks, and an end to the much-maligned two-tiered driver system, where workers in the same position receive different wages based on when they were hired. 

Still, the union says it’s not enough for a company that earned a record revenue of $100 billion in 2022. Since the beginning of the pandemic, annual revenue for UPS has increased by 11 percent each year. According to the Teamsters, UPS CEO Carol Tomé earns more in a day than the average UPS worker earns in an entire year. 

The last UPS strike was in 1997 when 185,000 workers took to the streets for 15 days. A key plank of O’Brien’s election in 2021 was his vocal opposition to the current UPS contract negotiated by previous President James Hoffa in 2018. “If this company wants to negotiate a contract for 1997 working conditions, they’re going to get 1997 consequences. #GetFckingReal,” tweeted O’Brien.

“The union has a responsibility to remain at the table,” UPS said in a statement. “Refusing to negotiate, especially when the finish line is in sight, creates significant unease among employees and customers and threatens to disrupt the U.S. economy.”

It is true that the strike will have a dramatic impact on the nation’s economy. But disrupting the economy is, of course, the precise purpose of a work stoppage. For workers, withholding labor is the main way to wield power and leverage over their bosses. While the union brass negotiated this weekend, UPS rank-and-file workers began to practice picketing.

Teamsters Local 174 practice picketing in front of the UPS district manager’s office 💪😜 pic.twitter.com/mTwnHcBkA3

— Barnes & Noble copy of the Beatles “1” on vinyl (@flieldy) July 3, 2023

With UPS negotiators walking out of negotiations after promising a tentative agreement that meets the needs of and rewards hardworking UPS Teamsters, I'd say today is an excellent day to show UPS what kind of power we have with our solidarity. #StrikeReady pic.twitter.com/Ka5gdrDcLq

— Rank and Filer (@TheArchenteron) July 5, 2023

How did you spend your Fourth of July? I spent a considerable amount of time in the ocean, floating above the hum of anxieties, both personal and existential, that typically soundtrack my days.

But outside the cocoon of cool waves, those gentle swells that numb the pain of existence, the earth around me apparently experienced its hottest day on record—or at least in 125,000 years, scientists at the University of Maine report.

That’s alarming stuff. Indeed, it prompted me to briefly pause a beat longer, a sure sign that I’ve encountered news to consider beyond mindless scrolling. But in an era defined by the same red-blinking stories that flow with eye-glazing repetition, all of them signaling our unrelenting climate emergency, how does the hottest day in human-record keeping hit you? Is it more or less troubling than the apocalyptic smoke we choked on the other week? Does our new normal of sweltering heat feel as dumb as the toxic fireworks we set off to celebrate patriotism? What about the hundreds of tons of toxins we release amid heat waves?

My dread is struggling to contemplate these questions. But I do look forward to my next torpefying ocean hang.

North Carolina, once an “abortion destination” for women throughout the South, will prohibit abortion after 12 weeks’ gestation starting July 1.

On Thursday, a federal judge allowed most of the law to go into effect as the court considers the measure. The ruling did temporarily block a provision requiring abortion doctors to document the existence of a pregnancy in a patient’s medical records.

In May, a Republican supermajority in the North Carolina General Assembly overrode Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of the 12-week abortion ban. A lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood South Atlantic prompted the state to pass a bipartisan amendment to the bill clarifying that medication abortions are legal up to 12 weeks.

The law still requires people in North Carolina to visit a clinic in-person 72 hours before receiving abortion care, even for medication abortions. The two in-person visits and the waiting period will likely present a huge impediment to those traveling from other Southern states for abortions, effectively ending North Carolina’s status as an abortion haven, against the wishes of Cooper and his constituents.

Perhaps it was foolish of me to assume that Aaron Rodgers’ keynote talk at last week’s Psychedelic Science 2023 conference in Denver—titled “How Psychedelics Can Unlock Elite Performance”—would touch on any actual neurological mechanisms at play. I had guessed that it might delve into the complex, controversial, but real science of how psychedelics can help athletes, both during their careers and, maybe more importantly, after.

What I heard instead was an hourlong paean to the healing power of ayahuasca, moderated by supplement brand founder Aubrey Marcus and delivered to a half-full auditorium that cheered when Rodgers said that his psychedelic journeys allowed him to unlock his purpose. Psychedelics might actually have the power to help athletes heal, both physically and mentally. But Rodgers, a four-time NFL MVP, focused more on the ways that this “medicine” allowed him to love himself than on how it actually works.

The conversation danced around Rodgers’ rejection of an actual, scientifically-backed form of medicine: vaccines. At one point, Marcus praised Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Democratic presidential candidate and promoter of the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. “I just see someone who’s sharing the truth from his heart,” Marcus said, “like a real guy, like a real dad, real guy, a real person who’s sharing from his heart.” (A man sitting behind me said, “Fuck that,” and walked out of the auditorium.) 

Later, Rodgers, who reportedly has refused to be vaccinated for Covid, explained that psychedelics allowed him to stand up to the critical voice in his head, which said things like, “You’re not good enough. You’re not gonna win this game. Nobody likes you. You’re a crazy anti-vaxxer.” Here, the audience laughed.

In the hands of a more critical moderator, Rodgers might have been able to offer real insight into the links between psychedelics and athletic performance. Instead, he and Marcus sang the praises of drugs that very little scientific evidence actually supports, while flirting with some very unscientific ideas about vaccines.

The conference, hosted by the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, aimed to legitimize scientific inquiry into psychedelics and hosted some serious talks about placebo-controlled trials of the use of such drugs to treat various mental illnesses. But I wasn’t the only person unnerved by the conference’s decision to mix publicity and science. “Any kind of overselling is not good for science because science should be accurate rather than pushing things,” historian of science Nicolas Langlitz told the Associated Press. “It’s a tradeoff. (The conference) generates interest, it generates ultimately more research, even though the research might be skewed toward positive results.”

Psychedelics will likely have a place in medicine going forward, and in sports medicine specifically. It’s certainly worth taking seriously anything that can help athletes battered by injury. And maybe it’s even performance-boosting. Despite some journalists’ skepticism, Dock Ellis famously claimed that he was tripping on LSD when he pitched a no-hitter in 1970. (“Richard Nixon was the home plate umpire,” he recalled.)

But Aaron Rodgers and anti-vaccine chatter don’t help. “I would just try to keep my mind open to the possibility that in retrospect we will tell a very different story from the one that the protagonists of psychedelic therapies are currently predicting,” Langlitz told AP.

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the use of race in college admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, dealing a potentially lethal blow to affirmative action programs in colleges throughout the country. 

The decision, which civil rights groups say effectively bans affirmative action, a policy widely viewed as an “irreplaceable tool” to improve higher education, will have enormous consequences all but certain to reverse progress in the United States. Look no further than the dissenting opinions of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who blasted the majority’s decision for showcasing a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” that would ultimately deliver a “tragedy for us all.”

We’ve combed through the most searing lines below:

• “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.” —Jackson

• “The Court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.” —Sotomayor

• “Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal. What was true in the 1860s, and again in 1954, is true today: Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality.” —Sotomayor

• “No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal racelinked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better.” —Jackson

• “This contention blinks both history and reality in ways too numerous to count. But the response is simple: Our country has never been colorblind. Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored race-based preferences in America, to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well-documented ‘intergenerational transmission of inequality’ that still plagues our citizenry.” —Jackson

• “In so holding, the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.” —Sotomayor

• “The Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom (a particularly awkward place to land, in light of the history the majority opts to ignore).” —Jackson

• “The only way out of this morass—for all of us—is to stare at racial disparity unblinkingly, and then do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together, collectively striving to achieve true equality for all Americans.” —Jackson

• “Entrenched racial inequality remains a reality today. That is true for society writ large and, more specifically, for Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC), two institutions with a long history of racial exclusion.” —Sotomayor

As my colleague Isabela Dias observed yesterday, Republican presidential hopefuls spent the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade kowtowing to the religious right, attempting to outdo one another with deeply anti-abortion rhetoric. 

But as the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s keynote speaker, it was Donald Trump who took center stage. The former president boasted about his role in appointing three of the five Supreme Court justices in the Dobbs majority decision. “I got it done and nobody thought it was even a possibility,” Trump boomed on Saturday. Nodding to some form of a national abortion ban, he also claimed that there is “a vital role for the federal government in protecting unborn life.”

The crowd, by all accounts, appeared to relish the speech. One headline concluded that Trump had hardened his anti-abortion stance. But if you look at the actual words, you’ll notice that Trump was repeating the same performance voters have witnessed since 2016. Once again, Trump’s remarks—as they do every time he speaks on abortion—rang hollow when it came to any real policy. For every piece of bombast he threw at the fawning audience on Saturday, the former president ducked, declining to offer the specifics his rivals were eager to provide. That included Mike Pence, who urged GOP presidential candidates to embrace a 15-week national abortion ban. “We must not rest and we must not relent until we restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law in every state in this country,” Pence said during his turn at the lectern, as he challenged his rivals to support the 15-week ban.

Trump didn’t bite. But at this point, why would he? Committing to a specific number of weeks for a national abortion ban would open him up to attacks that he’s either too soft or extreme on an issue the GOP keeps fumbling. Landing on a real policy would render him unable to say in one month that Republicans are losing elections because of hardline abortion policies, only to declare, “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade” a few beats later. As I wrote last month when Trump tried to thread the needle on abortion over the course of one week:

Many things can be evinced from these chaotic remarks: Trump is an idiot in the English language, and he still posts with abandon. But perhaps the most important point is that for Trump, an abortion debate doesn’t even exist. His policies, if you can call it that, have always been reactionary, designed in his brain to please whoever happens to be in the room…He correctly asserts that he was a critical player in removing the constitutional right to an abortion—and that should speak for itself.

So I have to push back on the notion that any hardening, or really any kind of evolution, has taken place here. It’s the same sidestepping dance as usual, while, as Alexandra Petri excruciatingly put it in a column I can’t stop thinking about this weekend, someone’s life is ruined, every day.

Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee are waging war on Washington, DC’s traffic laws.

In their proposed spending bill for fiscal year 2024, House Republicans tacked on several policy riders that would alter laws in the nation’s capital. Most of the riders are standard conservative fare: repealing DC’s Death with Dignity Act, banning needle exchanges, retaining limits on contraception. But Republicans are also targeting less obviously partisan issues, like DC’s traffic rules.

One GOP proposal takes on traffic cameras, promising to prevent the city from “carrying out automated traffic enforcement.” Speed and red light cameras are not without controversy, even among safe streets advocates—but they are often touted as a way to reduce police interactions during traffic stops, and some studies have found that they decrease the frequency of crashes. In DC, traffic cameras also generate revenue from tickets, so it’s unclear how the proposal would account for this hit to the budget.

Republicans also want to override DC’s pending ban on right-turns-on-red, a dangerous maneuver and relic of the 1970s oil crisis that doesn’t actually help drivers save gas. In addition to imperiling cyclists and pedestrians, these traffic proposals impinge on DC’s right to decide how it governs itself. So much for the party of “small government.”

Update, June 15: In a statement sent after the publication of this article, Senator J.D. Vance’s office noted that Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown called the changes made a “reasonable compromise.” This story has been updated to reflect Brown’s statement.

In his brief tenure, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) has touted a signature piece of legislation to show his New Right bonafides: The Railway Safety Act of 2023. A bipartisan bill, co-authored with fellow Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, the legislation would implement new regulations in order to prevent another catastrophic train derailment like the one that occurred in East Palestine, Ohio in February. It’s something Joe Biden and Donald Trump can agree on. And, importantly, it’s theoretically Vance sticking to his word in looking to work on issues that affect the working-class Americans he feels have been left behind.

But there’s a hitch. A new report in Lever News today by Julia Rock says Vance watered down the bill at the behest of the chemical industry, who Vance receives donations from.

One of the new regulations in the bill was to upgrade tank cars that carry flammable chemicals so that they are less vulnerable to leaks and punctures if a train derails. In a previous version of the bill, the old tank cars were set to be phased out by 2025. But on May 10, Vance and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) amended the bill to push back the adoption of safer tank cars until 2027 or 2028. The American Chemistry Council told Lever they had lobbied for a “realistic and workable timetable” for these upgrades. Sen. Brown called the changes a “reasonable compromise.”

“I think the agreement of 2027, again, is very good when we’re going up against historically one of the two or three most powerful interest groups in America,” Brown told Cleveland.com. “We’ve had success taking the railroad lobby on when they have been untouchable, and have had their way with Congress and the regulators for far too many years. Nobody thought we could get this far.”

Vance has not addressed this change directly. In a statement made in May after the bill passed the Senate Commerce Committee, he framed any concessions as proof of his deal-making acumen. “We’ve made a number of concessions to the rail industry, a number of concessions to various interest groups, which is why we have so much bipartisan support in this body, but also we have a lot of support from industry,” he said. This counters his huffing about how he’s taking on the railway industry.

As Vance attempts to remake the Republican Party from a business-friendly party into a working-class party, he’ll continue to run up against an issue: if given a chance, most congressional Republicans will side with business. In theory, the change from 2025 to 2027 or 2028 is just part of the process of deals made to pass legislation. But it’s interesting when you consider how Vance has staked his career on saying he is in the Senate to be a new kind of Republican.

“Do we do the bidding of a massive industry that is embedded with big government or do we do the bidding of the people who elected us to the Senate into the Congress in the first place?” Vance asked his fellow Republicans in March.

He may want to ask himself the same question. 

You can read the full report from Lever here.

Donald Trump is struggling to find a lawyer…again. According to reports from the Washington Post, the ex-president, who’s facing 37 charges related to allegations of mishandling classified documents, spent most of the day before his arraignment searching for an advocate to take his case. Several high-profile Florida attorneys have declined the task, after two lawyers—Jim Trusty and John Rowley, who played until recently had played critical roles in Trump’s defense—unexpectedly resigned last week. Trusty and Rowley are the two latest departures from a rotating cast of Trump attorneys who have, over the years, often been entangled in nearly as much controversy as their infamous client.

“Everyone is saying no,” an anonymous source told the Washington Post. Alan Dershowitz, the former Harvard Law School professor who has advised Trump in the past, didn’t seem too encouraging either, telling the Post that “good lawyers should have been working on this case for months.”

But clearly, such “good lawyers” have eluded Trump as he sinks further into a legal hot mess. Perhaps lawyers aren’t touching the case with a 10-foot pole in order to avoid the fate of Trump’s former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, whose own role in the Big Lie now has him embroiled in the criminal investigation into election interference in Georgia. Let’s also recall that Giuliani’s deeply problematic television interviews were reportedly central to his firing from his own law firm. He eventually got his license suspended by the New York Bar last year. 

Trump, who’ll be arraigned in a Miami courthouse on Tuesday at 3 pm, will be reportedly represented at the hearing by Todd Blanche, who’s also handling Trump’s Stormy Daniels case in New York, and Christopher Kise, a well-compensated Florida lawyer who’s reportedly led the charge to find Trump representation that fits within the state’s legal guidelines.

After spending the weekend publicly screeching about the 37-count criminal indictment over his mishandling of classified documents, former president Donald Trump is set to be arraigned at a federal courthouse in Miami tomorrow. The appearance will mark Trump’s second surrender in a little over two months. Once the arraignment wraps up, the former president—just as he did after his first arrest in April—is expected to deliver an evening speech from one of his golf clubs. The next day, Trump will celebrate his 77th birthday.

The federal indictment is nothing short of unprecedented. But as with nearly everything relating to Donald Trump, the threat of exhaustion—and even worse, indifference—looms. Who could blame anyone after surviving the relentless everyday bile from the Trump White House, two impeachments, and endless scandal? So here’s a helpful download on what to know, the stunning and the stupid, as the first former US president prepares to surrender to federal charges so damning that if even half is true, his own attorney general believes he is “toast.”

Here's what to know before Donald Trump surrenders to federal charges today. pic.twitter.com/ZXU9E7iYfG

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) June 13, 2023

Ok, I truly haven’t paid attention to any of this. What’s going on? He is in trouble for boxes? And didn’t he already get indicted? 

Oh wow. Deep breath. First of all, Trump was indicted in April on another matter. That was about his payoff of Stormy Daniels. (You can read a ton of backstory about that here—but also don’t, because that isn’t what’s going on right now.)

Last week, Trump was indicted for the second time (and the first time federally) for what you mentioned: boxes. As we reported, Trump left the White House with hundreds of documents that the National Archives and Records Administration considers federal records. In the indictment—you can read the full thing here—the Department of Justice describes the mishandling of those documents. It’s serious stuff. But also, sorry, pretty funny and wild. As I wrote previously, look at this photo of a bunch of documents stacked in a bathroom. For a full analysis of the indictment, my colleague David Corn has you covered. 

But the topline is this: Tomorrow, Trump has to go to a courthouse in Miami because he reportedly took materials from his time in the White House—including sensitive ones that are labeled as secret—to his home in Florida and when he was told to give them back, there was some lying.

Cool. That sounds bad. I’m sorry to be so blunt but could Donald Trump actually go to prison this time?

That’s complicated. One of the many distinguishing features of this indictment, at least with respect to Trump’s previous legal troubles, is the real potential for a prison sentence, with prosecutors accusing Trump of violating the Espionage Act by willfully keeping—and refusing to return—classified information. Vox reports that each count related to Espionage Act violations carries a maximum sentence of up to 10 years. But Trump has not been tried or convicted yet. So at this point, though the threat of prison time may be real, the discussion of a sentence is premature. He’s also vowed to continue his 2024 run for president even if he is convicted. “I’ll never leave,” he told Politico in a deranged interview.

I think I saw someone else got in trouble too. Who is the other person that got indicted with Trump? 

That man is Waltine Nauta. You can think of him as a more buff Gary Walsh, an aide described as both a body man and butler to the former president. Nauta is a former Navy veteran, who the Wall Street Journal reports became Trump’s primary Diet Coke fetcher. Federal investigators identified Nauta in surveillance footage moving boxes at Mar-a-Lago before and after they were requested as a part of the ongoing investigation. The New York Times reports that a December 2021 incident suggested that Nauta likely knew that the boxes contained classified information. But he denied information about the boxes’ movement, which investigators say was a lie. He now faces six federal charges for his devotion to Trump. Here’s a sad paragraph from the Times report:

Former aides to Mr. Trump who observed Mr. Nauta closely said that unlike many who have gotten close to Mr. Trump over the years, Mr. Nauta did not seem to be working a “side hustle” to monetize or get famous from his access to the former president.

He now finds himself in a position several others have: attached to Mr. Trump as he’s targeted by prosecutors.

So, what kind of secrets are we talking about?

According to the unsealed indictment, everything from nuclear secrets to military plans. Some documents were even marked as part of something called Five Eyes, which my colleague Jacob Rosenberg tells me started as a War War II alliance for signal intelligence between the US and the United Kingdom (initially used to crack Japanese codes) that has continued—adding New Zealand, and Canada—to allow the coordination of espionage among allies. These boxes were allegedly strewn about Mar-a-Lago. Some were stuffed into that grotesque bathroom I mentioned above.

Set the scene for tomorrow. 

According to Trump, the hearing starts at 3 pm ET—and you can fully expect intense security.

While the protests outside Trump’s first arraignment in New York were peaceful—in fact, they were really more of an open call for a bad performance art piece—tomorrow’s appearance is sparking serious concerns of violence. (It’s useful to remember that this is happening in far more Trump-friendly territory, where this sort of thing happens whenever Trump is in trouble. And that this is about something related to the so-called Deep State instead of hush money.)

It doesn’t help that the former president and his allies, including Kari Lake, have ginned up the dangerous rhetoric in recent days. “If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me,” Lake said on Friday, “and you’re going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.”

I heard something hilarious is happening with Trump’s lawyers.

Yes. One day after the federal indictment was unsealed, two of Trump’s lawyers who had been representing him in this classified documents legal drama resigned. There’s the matter of Evan Cocoran, a potentially critical witness in this very case. As the Guardian reported last month:

Donald Trump’s lawyer tasked with searching for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after the justice department issued a subpoena told associates that he was waved off from searching the former president’s office, where the FBI later found the most sensitive materials anywhere on the property.

The lawyer, Evan Corcoran, recounted that several Trump aides had told him to search the storage room because that was where all the materials that had been brought from the White House at the end of Trump’s presidency ended up being deposited.

Who is the judge in this case?

Aileen Cannon, a Trump-appointed federal judge, is presiding over this one which has many concerned. Last year, Cannon delivered Trump several shocking victories in the case.

Who is the other person I see on TV who seems official?  Who is that guy and does he have a specific hobby?

Jack Smith is the special counsel pursuing criminal charges against Trump. He does have a hobby. Described by friends as an “insane cyclist,” the special counsel is quite fit for someone who presumably sits in an office all day, tying together the endless ways that Trump may have broken the law. The public got a rare glimpse of Smith on Friday when he gave a short but decisive statement on the criminal charges he’s brought against the former president. “We have one set of laws in this country and they apply to everyone,” he said. Here are his triathlon times.

Did any of this have to happen?

No. As Maggie Haberman noted this morning, the National Archives had asked Trump to return the documents for almost a whole year. His lawyers had reportedly urged him to keep things simple and comply. Did he take the advice? Of course not. Now the world is forced to keep tabs on yet another Trump shitstorm of his own making; the inexorable march of time trudges on.

This post has been updated.

In the wake of his federal criminal indictment, Donald Trump dropped a new video on Truth Social on Saturday. And it is cringey-as-hell. The two-minute spot, complete with gauzy, quasi-cinematic shots of the ex-president walking away from his helicopter like an action hero, is pretty standard messianic Trump fare. 

But here’s the weirdest part, reported by Axios today: For its narration, the video steals a monologue performed by Matt Damon in “Air”, the new biographical film about the rise of Air Jordans and the Nike salesman who created them. The film was directed by Ben Affleck, stars Damon, and has absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump.

“You’re going to change the fucking world. But you know what, once they build you as high they possibly can, they’re going to tear you back down,” Damon’s voice is heard saying, as a shot of a stadium filled with Trump supporters morphs into an ABC news headline about the indictment.

I guess the trailer’s creators thought the speech would paint Trump as a dynamic underdog betrayed by the world, and not a man who has been found liable of sexual abuse; accused of inciting a riot to steal an election; and indicted on 37 felony charges.

As is the case for many things that have (allegedly) found their way into Trump’s possession, he had not sought permission. In a statement to Axios, Artists Equity, the production company run by Affleck and Damon, said they did not consent to Trump’s campaign using the dialogue. They added that they don’t “endorse or approve” of any footage or audio from “Air” being used in the former president’s campaign.

Swiping creative properties without permission is nothing new for Trump. From Adele to Neil Young, the GOP candidate’s team is notorious for using songs throughout his 2016 and 2020 presidential runs without the green light from artists.

Ted Kaczynski, known widely as the Unabomber, was found dead in his prison cell Saturday morning, according to the Associated Press, which cited a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons. The 81-year-old, who was serving a life sentence in Colorado, had been moved to a North Carolina medical facility due to poor health. The cause of death was not immediately known.

Across nearly two decades of terror starting in 1978, Kaczynski fashioned 16 “increasingly sophisticated” bombs, which he then mailed or hand-delivered, killing three people and injuring scores more. The name, “Unabomber” derived from a six-letter acronym used by the FBI’s taskforce investigating the cases, UNABOM, the “UNA” being a reference to some of his targets, university campuses and airliners.

Kaczynski was finally captured in 1996, a year after he sent the FBI a 35,000-word manifesto that was published by the Washington Post and the New York Times, causing family members to tip off authorities. He pleaded guilty in 1998, and was sentenced to a Supermax facility in Colorado.

Kaczynski’s deadly spree, and the accompanying manhunt, reverberated for decades through American politics and culture. The current Attorney General, Merrick Garland, oversaw the case against Kaczynski—a high-stakes investigation that made a lasting impression on the then-prosecutor. He described the raid on Kaczynski’s Montana cabin to students at the University of Chicago Law School in 2017: “You can read about criminal law as much as you want,” he said. “But sitting around a table trying to figure out whether you have enough probable cause to search the cabin—that was a really complicated problem.”

Kaczynski’s stated desire to attack industrialized society was seized upon by some in an attempt to link his crimes to the environmental movement at large. In 2012, the ultra-conservative Heartland Institute (described by environmentalist Bill McKibben as the “nerve center of climate change denial”) put up a billboard near Chicago that compared anyone who thought climate change was real to Kaczynski, in an attempt to show that “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” The billboard screamed, “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” in giant, crimson letters. (Heartland eventually removed the billboard.) The group also wanted to feature the faces of Charles Manson, Fidel Castro, and Osama bin Laden.

This is a breaking news post and will be updated.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump became the first former president to face a federal indictment. Today, federal prosecutors released a scathing indictment outlining charges stemming from Trump’s decision to bring classified documents with him to his Florida estate after his term as president ended.

The 37 charges brought by a grand jury include conspiracy to obstruct justice and willful retention of classified information. 

You can read the full indictment here:

Large swaths of the United States are buried under a blanket of smoke, with some states facing the worst air pollution in decades. Virginia is no exception; state officials have warned that the air quality is too hazardous for prolonged public exposure in certain regions.

But while Virginians breathe in toxic wildfire smoke this week, state regulators appear more concerned with helping Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s plans to exit a coalition largely credited for incentivizing utility companies to cut carbon emissions. On Wednesday, in a 4-3 vote, the state’s Air Quality Control Board approved the governor’s plan to remove Virginia from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, an 11-state coalition environmentalists have praised as an effective, low-cost tactic to fight climate change.

Virginia joined the group in 2020, becoming the first southern state to participate in the program that creates mandatory caps on carbon emissions from power plants. Power sector companies are also required to receive allowances for every short ton of carbon dioxide they emit, money that, in turn, is used to fund energy-efficient initiatives. 

Since coming into office, Youngkin has made it a priority to remove the state from the RGGI, claiming that the program is an unfair tax on residents and businesses that doesn’t help the environment. But environmentalists say otherwise. During Wednesday’s hearing, the Southern Environmental Law Center cited recent EPA data that showed Virginia’s carbon emissions from power plants declined by about 5.5 million tons a year or 16.8 percent since 2020.

Nikki Haley is once again trying to have it both ways. In response to a question asking her to define “woke” during a CNN town hall on Sunday, the Republican presidential candidate suggested that transgender girls in sports can be blamed for a rise in suicide rates among teens. 

“How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker rooms? And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year,” Haley said, calling the topic the “women’s issue of our time.”

“We should be growing strong girls, confident girls,” she continued.

The former South Carolina governor appeared to be citing a recent CDC survey that found nearly a third of teenage girls have seriously considered suicide. But there is no evidence to support Haley’s assertion, which was swiftly blasted as anti-trans. In fact, the same CDC study revealed that LGBTQ teens are at higher risk of suicide and that transgender youth experience greater levels of violence.

Haley’s remarks, which come amid a sharp rise in anti-trans laws across the country, are an escalation of a 2021 editorial she wrote for the National Review, in which she called the inclusion of trans women in sports an “attack on women’s rights.”

Nikki Haley discussing trans girls in kids sports: "How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker room. And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year." pic.twitter.com/rA2lD06yVe

— Abby D. Phillip (@abbydphillip) June 5, 2023

When pressed on whether there was any room for “humanity” in the so-called debate, Haley, in typical fashion, seemed to slightly backtrack, insisting that “we need to take care of these kids.”

“I think there is a humane way to do it,” she continued. “Let’s get them the help, the therapy, whatever they need so that they can feel better and not be suicidal, but don’t go and cause all these other kids to feel like that pressure is on them. They don’t deserve that, and they don’t need that, either.”

Haley did not offer advice on how to square that call for humanity with her own suggestion that trans people in locker rooms could be responsible for suicidal ideation.

Update, June 1: In a 52-46 vote, the Senate passed a resolution to overturn Biden’s student debt cancellation plan. The bill now heads for the president’s desk. He has already vowed to veto it.

If you’re one of more than 43 million people with student loan debt in the United States, you may soon be forced to start repayments once again. On Wednesday, the House passed a deal to raise the debt ceiling, which includes a provision ending the pandemic-era pause on student loan payments. The agreement now heads to the Senate where lawmakers on both sides of the aisle hope to pass it by late Friday.

So what do borrowers need to know? If the deal passes in its current form, repayments and interest accrual will kick in at the end of August. That’s roughly the same time the Biden administration had previously said that the federal pause would finally end after more than three years, eight extensions, and two presidencies. But those hoping for another last-minute extension this time around are out of luck; the debt ceiling agreement specifically blocks President Biden from issuing one without congressional approval.

Biden’s plan to cancel student debt—something House Republicans sought to kill in an initial debt ceiling draft—was spared, and the proposal to eliminate $20,000 worth of debt for Pell Grant recipients and up to $10,000 for borrowers who earn less than $125,000 a year remains in the hands of the Supreme Court. Court observers, as my colleague Hannah Levintova reported, are pessimistic that student loan forgiveness will survive the high court’s conservative majority. And even if justices do allow Biden’s plan to continue, future legal challenges are expected. There is, however, a whole other Republican-led measure seeking to repeal the student loan forgiveness plan that just advanced in the Senate. But Biden has vowed to veto it.

If all this sounds confusing, rest assured, you’re not alone. Both the debt ceiling provision and the upcoming high-stakes Supreme Court ruling are all but certain to add to the general confusion over repayments. One thing that isn’t confusing, however, is the immense relief that would affect countless lives if student loan forgiveness actually wins. 

In a move lauded by safe streets advocates, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed a new rule this morning that would require automatic emergency braking (AEB) on new cars and light trucks.

AEB uses sensors to detect objects in a car’s path, like pedestrians or other vehicles, and automatically brakes if the driver fails to react. Most light-duty vehicles sold in the US are already equipped with some level of AEB, but the proposed rule would hold the braking systems to a higher standard. Among the new rules would be a requirement for AEB to detect cyclists and pedestrians at night, which is when most pedestrian fatalities occur, according to NHTSA. The new rule also seeks to increase safety for cars traveling at higher speeds.

Today .@NHTSAgov is proposing a rule to make AEB mandatory in all vehicles and pedestrian AEB mandatory in light duty vehicles, requiring FULL crash avoidance, a shift that would make roadways safer for all. 🙌🏼 pic.twitter.com/VlKQvZt64z

— danisimons (@danisimons) May 31, 2023

NHTSA estimates that the rule, if finalized, could save at least 360 lives and prevent at least 24,000 injuries a year. The provision comes amid a nationwide surge in traffic fatalities. While the proposal would not address the nation’s lurch toward the ever-larger SUVs that often prove deadly in pedestrian crashes, it is a small but significant step toward preventing crashes in the first place.

You can read the full proposed rule here. And if you’re interested in how new technology could be implemented to increase safety, here’s my report on the possibility of ending drunk driving under a new regulation passed as part of the infrastructure bill.

If you haven’t ordered your free Covid tests yet, you might want to hurry. US residents are still allowed to order free tests online until 11:59 p.m. PT on May 31. After that, the federal program will be officially terminated. According to the Covid.gov website, every US household is eligible for up to four at-home testing kits, as long as their last order was before December 15. 

Since the World Health Organization officially declared an end to the Covid public health crisis on May 11, a slew of pandemic-era resources and protections have ended.

Now, anyone looking to purchase once-free Covid tests will have to discuss the cost with their personal insurer, regardless of whether it is a laboratory or at-home test. Those without insurance can reportedly receive free tests via outreach programs.