Evelyn Reynolds

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    Trump moves to push employers on IVF coverage and lower fertility drug costs

    The Trump administration announced Thursday that it is urging US employers to create new fertility benefit options to cover in vitro fertilization and other infertility treatments.In an announcement from the Oval Office, Donald Trump also said his administration had cut a deal with the drug manufacturer EMD Serono to lower the cost of one of its fertility drugs and list the drug on the government website TrumpRx.These moves, Trump said, would lead to “many more beautiful American children”.“In the Trump administration, we want to make it easier for all couple to have babies, raise children and have the families they’ve always dreamed about,” Trump said.Employers are encouraged to offer the fertility benefit option separately from their medical coverage, similar to how dental and vision coverage is usually offered to employees. The labor department, the treasury and the health department will on Thursday also release guidance on how employers can legally create the option.However, Republicans who spoke at Trump’s announcement framed the benefit as a “recommendation”, indicating that employers will not be required to offer the coverage nor receive government subsidies for doing so. They also stressed that the benefit will be structured to give employers immense flexibility to determine what will or will not be covered.Without new incentives to offer IVF coverage, it is unclear how many employers will ultimately support it.Trump, who has called himself the “fertilization president”, made support for infertility treatments a major part of his re-election campaign, especially after the nation erupted in outrage when the Alabama supreme court deemed embryos “extrauterine children”. Because IVF can lead to the creation of unused or discarded embryos, that decision temporarily forced many Alabama IVF providers to stop working.Yet in the months since taking office, the Trump administration has remained quiet on the issue. In February, he signed an executive order directing the administration’s domestic policy council to make recommendations to “aggressively” reduce the price tag of IVF, which often costs tens of thousands of dollars and is frequently not covered by insurance.A detailed report on the recommendations was supposed to be made public by May. No report ever emerged.While IVF is extremely popular among Americans, the GOP’s deep ties to the anti-abortion movement have made it something of a political landmine among elected Republicans. The movement has long opposed IVF, as advocates believe that embryos are people.White House officials have in recent months discussed the possibility of supporting restorative reproductive medicine (RRM), a constellation of therapies that purport to restore people’s “natural” fertility.Although RRM is popular among anti-abortion advocates and adherents of the “make America healthy again” movement, several major medical organizations say there is little quality evidence that RRM is more effective at helping people have babies than mainstream fertility medicine.Trump did not mention RRM in his Thursday address. When a reporter asked if he had any thoughts on anti-abortion activists’ opposition to IVF, Trump said: “I think this is very pro-life.”Pronatalist rhetoric, which holds that having children is important to a county’s wellbeing and that the state should incentivize people to procreate, dominated the press conference that followed Trump’s address. Robert F Kennedy, the health and human services secretary, highlighted the falling US birthrate, while Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, claimed that Kennedy and Trump are “great leaders” because they have big families.People who want more children but can’t have them, Oz added, are “under-babied”.“There’s gonna be a lot of Trump babies,” Oz said. “It turns out the fundamental creative force in society is about making babies.” More

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    Former Trump adviser John Bolton indicted by justice department

    A federal grand jury has indicted John Bolton, the former national security adviser in Donald Trump’s first term, on charges of mishandling and transmitting classified information.The indictment, filed in Maryland, appears to ultimately have been signed off on from career prosecutors in the US attorney’s office there despite initial reluctance to bring a case before the end of the year.The 18-count indictment against Bolton involves eight counts of unlawfully transmitting national defense information and 10 counts of retaining classified information under the Espionage Act, according to the 26-page indictment.The charges nonetheless come at a fraught moment for the justice department, which has been rocked by extraordinary pressure from Trump to expand a vendetta campaign to pursue criminal cases against his political enemies.In recent weeks, Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s handpicked US attorney in Virginia, obtained indictments against James Comey, the former FBI director, and the New York state attorney general, Letitia James, over the objections of career prosecutors.Bolton has been a thorn in Trump’s side for years since he departed the president’s first administration, criticizing him on cable news and assailing him for his own mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club.Part of the criminal investigation into Bolton has focused on what resembled diary entries and private notes he made for himself on an AOL email account – and whether they contained classified information, according to people familiar with the matter.Bolton’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, has said the former national security adviser did nothing inappropriate with classified records. and documents with classified markings retrieved from his phone by the FBI were decades old.Bolton, a longtime federal government official with a top secret clearance who was UN ambassador before serving as Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, is widely known as a diligent note-taker.After he left the administration in Trump’s first term, Bolton continued to work in Washington and the investigation has examined whether his assistants had access to those notes, the people said.Bolton’s AOL email account was also hacked by a foreign adversary, according to a redacted US intelligence assessment that was included in the search warrant affidavit from the search of Bolton’s house.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe potential for disclosures of classified information are relevant in Espionage Act cases, because the justice department looks at so-called “aggregating factors” when deciding whether to mount such a prosecution.Broadly, the department pursues cases that have a combination of four factors: willful mishandling of classified information, vast quantities of classified information to support an inference of misconduct, disloyalty to the US and obstruction. More

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    US admiral to retire amid military strikes in Caribbean and tensions with Venezuela

    Amid escalating tensions with Venezuela and US military strikes on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean, the US admiral who commands military forces in Latin America will step down at the end of this year, defense secretary Pete Hegseth announced on social media.The admiral, Alvin Holsey, just took over the US military’s southern command late last year for a position that normally lasts three years.A source told Reuters that there had been tension between him and Hegseth as well as questions about whether he would be fired in the days leading up to the announcement.The New York Times reports that an unnamed US official said that Holsey “had raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats”.Hegseth, in his social media post, did not disclose the reason for Holsey’s plan “to retire at year’s end”.The post noted that Holsey began his career “through the NROTC program at Morehouse College in 1988”. Morehouse is a private, historically Black college in Atlanta.In February, Donald Trump abruptly fired the air force general CQ Brown Jr as chair of the joint chiefs of staff, sidelining a history-making Black fighter pilot and respected officer as part of a campaign to purge the military of leaders who support diversity and equity in the ranks.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2021, Holsey recorded a public service announcement urging Black Americans to get the Covid-19 vaccine. More

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    US ‘on a trajectory’ toward authoritarian rule, ex-officials warn

    The United States is “on a trajectory” toward authoritarian rule, according to a sobering new intelligence-style assessment by former US intelligence and national security officials, who warn that democratic backsliding is accelerating under the Trump administration – and may soon become entrenched without organized resistance.The report, titled Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline, was released on Thursday by the Steady State, a network of more than 340 former officers of the CIA, the NSA, the state department and other national security agencies.To conduct the assessment, the authors applied the same analytic methods used by US intelligence agencies to assess the fragility of democracies abroad but turned them inward for what the group called a “first-of-its-kind” analysis of domestic democratic decline.“We wrote it because the same tools we once used to assess foreign risks now show unmistakable warning signs at home,” the group said in a statement upon its release.The authors conclude with “moderate to high confidence” that the US is moving toward what scholars call “competitive authoritarianism”, a system in which elections and courts continue to function, but are “systematically manipulated” to consolidate executive power and weaken checks and balances. According to the assessment, these trends are increasingly visible in the US, as part of a broader effort by Donald Trump in his second presidential term to “ensure loyalty and ideological conformity” across the federal government.“The speed with which we have devolved away from a fully functioning democracy is startling to me,” Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst and a member of the Steady State, said on a call with reporters after the assessment was published on Thursday. “In most cases, it takes longer than nine months to get where we are.”Since returning to the White House, the president has pardoned January 6 rioters who assaulted police, fired independent watchdogs, purged career officials viewed as disloyal, publicly urged his attorney general to prosecute political opponents, deployed troops to US cities, attacked judges who ruled against him, threatened universities and restricted press freedom – all while testing the boundaries of executive power in ways federal courts have repeatedly deemed to be unlawful and unconstitutional.Just last week, Trump’s justice department indicted Letitia James, the New York attorney general who successfully sued him for fraud, and separately charged the former FBI director James Comey, a longtime political adversary. He has also called for jailing the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, and the Chicago mayor, Brandon Johnson, both Democrats who opposed his deployment of federal troops there.The speed at which the administration was moving made it difficult to complete the assessment, Steven Cash, executive director of the Steady State, told reporters. “We would finish a draft and then five things would happen,” he said, adding that the document was published as a “baseline” that could be updated with new developments.While the report mirrors the “finished intelligence” model used by the US intelligence community, the assessment was prepared by former analysts who no longer work in government and relied entirely on open-source material such as news reports, public statements and independent watchdog analyses, as opposed to classified intelligence. Its authors also emphasize that they were not driven by politics, but by what they saw as a need for a “cold, analytic look” at how the indicators of democratic backsliding applied to the US.“These are people who have seen these indicators develop in countries that shifted dramatically away from democracy towards authoritarianism,” Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior intelligence official who spent two decades at the NSA, told reporters on Thursday. “And we’re seeing those things happening in our country today.”Among the key indicators of democratic decline identified in the report: the expansion of executive power through unilateral decrees and emergency authorities; the politicization of the civil service and federal law enforcement; attempts to erode judicial independence through strategic appointments and “noncompliance” with court rulings or investigations; a weakened and increasingly ineffective Congress; partisan manipulation of electoral systems and administration; and the deliberate undermining of civil society, the press and public trust.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We judge that the primary driver of the US’s increasing authoritarianism is the increased frequency of executive branch overreach,” the assessment states. It also cites a “worrying” shift in public opinion among Americans, pointing to surveys that show a growing share who think “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections” is a “very good or fairly good system”.Political scientists and human rights activists have increasingly drawn comparisons between the US and countries like Hungary or Turkey, where elected leaders retained power by weakening institutional checks while preserving a democratic facade. Helt also drew a comparison to Italy under Benito Mussolini “because of the relationship between organized religion and the state”.The Steady State assessment is echoed by democracy scholars and other analyses. A September Bright Line Watch survey found that expert and public assessments of US democracy have dropped to their lowest levels since 2017. On a 0–100 scale, the public rated American democracy at just 49; experts rated it 54.“Absent organized resistance by institutions, civil society and the public, the United States is likely to continue along a path of accelerating democratic erosion, risking further consolidation of executive dominance and a loss of credibility as a model of democracy abroad,” the assessment concludes.On the call, several speakers pointed to the upcoming No Kings protest as a potentially meaningful show of public resistance to the Trump administration. More

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    Who are the rightwing influencers filling Trump’s head with visions of antifa?

    Last week’s White House roundtable on antifa was an odd affair, mainly because the supposed experts who briefed Donald Trump on antifascism were rightwing influencers who make a living filming themselves confronting leftwing protesters.Videos of protests in Portland and Chicago produced by these conservative content creators have long shaped the president’s distorted view of reality.Although the influencers all describe themselves as “independent journalists”, they all frame leftwing protesters as nefarious or ridiculous in their videos, and eight of the 11 are current or former employees of Turning Point USA, the conservative advocacy organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk.None presented evidence to support the administration’s claim that antifascists, who disrupt white supremacist rallies or oppose the mass deportation of their neighbors, are “terrorists”. Instead, they shared personal stories of having been victimized by leftwing protesters.“Their job”, the extremism researcher Jared Holt said on his podcast, “is to make these viral clips that they can show on Fox News and scare your grandpa into thinking antifa is on the verge of a mass slaughter, and that Mr Trump is the only man who can put an end to this by sending the military to go crack some skulls”.Here is a guide to the conservative media activists whose work fills the president’s head with visions of antifa.Andy NgoNgo is a video journalist turned pundit with 1.7 million followers on X. View image in fullscreenSince Donald Trump first shouted the word “antifa” at a rally in 2017, a week after he accused antifascists of “violently attacking” white supremacists at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, no one has done more than Andy Ngo to promote the myth that black-clad protesters around the nation are part of a secret terrorist network.Ngo, the son of Vietnamese refugees in Portland, made his name on Twitter by posting video clips, often misleadingly edited or captioned, of street battles that broke out when far-right groups from surrounding counties descended on the liberal city to provoke antifascists.His willingness to selectively edit his reports to blame antifascists for the violence was revealed in 2019, when video recorded by an antifascist mole in a rightwing group Ngo had embedded with, Patriot Prayer, showed that Ngo had witnessed, and chosen not to report, the Christian nationalists planning to instigate violence at a leftwing gathering.A month later, Ngo was attacked by antifascists while filming their efforts to counter a Proud Boys rally in Portland. He was punched, kicked and doused with silly string and a milkshake he later claimed had been laced with quick-drying cement. (That accusation appears to have been a false rumor shared with the police by a rightwing activist who was caught on camera the same day dousing antifascists with grey powder.)That assault instantly made him a sought-after guest on Fox News. Two years later, he published Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, a best-selling book filled with exaggerated or inaccurate claims about leftwing protesters.Ngo’s use of the term “domestic terrorists” to describe antifa, now amplified in official US government statements, is not just inaccurate, it can be dangerous. In 2022, a Portland resident who followed Ngo on YouTube went to the site of a planned racial justice march Ngo had railed against, screamed that antifascist volunteers protecting the marchers were “terrorists” and opened fire. The rightwing gunman shot four traffic safety volunteers and a protest medic. One woman died at the scene, another succumbed to her injuries later.Katie DaviscourtDaviscourt is a video correspondent for the Post Millennial with 260,000 followers on X.View image in fullscreenKatie Daviscourt, a former Turning Point USA activist, is a correspondent for Post Millennial, a far-right Canadian website where Andy Ngo is an editor. A Portland police sergeant recently described her in an internal report as one of the “counter-protesters” filming protests outside a Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement office who “constantly return and antagonize the protesters until they are assaulted or pepper sprayed”. A week later, Daviscourt was struck by a protester who tried to block her from filming by swinging a Palestinian flag in her face.The next night, she appeared on Fox News with a black eye to accuse Portland police officers who spent 2020 battling with antifascists of being part of antifa. “The Trump administration needs to start treating antifa like Isis, the terrorists that they are, and put an end to them for good,” she told Jesse Watters.Nick SortorSortor is an influencer who confronts protesters and Democrats for his 1.2 million X followers.View image in fullscreenNick Sortor, a former real estate agent from Kentucky, made his name during the Biden administration by going to the scenes of disasters, in East Palestine, Ohio, and Lahaina, Maui, to scream at officials and push conspiracy theories in interviews with Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.In February, he claimed that Elizabeth Warren, the 76-year-old Massachusetts senator, has “assaulted” him as she pushed past him to get into her car while he was peppering her with questions based on viral misinformation.Sortor has been involved in multiple physical altercations with protesters in Portland this month, some of which he clearly initiated. Video shot by a Fox News correspondent one night showed Sortor ripping a burning American flag from the hands of an elderly protester he later described as an “Antifa thug”. Later that night, Sortor was arrested after exchanging blows with protesters, who reportedly objected to him filming closeup images of a teenage girl who had just been maced by a federal officer.The charges against Sortor were later dropped by a local prosecutor after his arrest prompted an outcry in the conservative media. Sortor received a sympathetic text from Trump and a phone call from the attorney general, Pam Bondi, who ordered the head of the justice department’s civil rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, to open an investigation of the Portland police bureau over supposed anti-conservative bias. Dhillon was previously Andy Ngo’s lawyer.Julio RosasRosas is a correspondent for Glenn Beck’s Blaze TV with 230,000 followers on X.View image in fullscreenJulio Rosas got his start working for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, writing last month that meeting the conservative activist “is THE reason why I have my career in politics today”.The marine reservist spent much of 2020 filming undercover video of racial justice protests, highlighting rare instances of violence in clips that helped Fox News and the Trump White House frame demonstrations that were about 94% entirely peaceful as anarchic.Rosas’s openly partisan approach to covering protests was reflected in his comment to Trump that the “sustained political violence that we’re seeing in this country is not a ‘both sides’ issue”.Rosas did not tell the president that, in previous years, he had filmed two infamous acts of rightwing political violence: Kyle Rittenhouse shooting two people, one fatally, in 2020; and Trump supporters hurling a metal barricade into the doors of the Capitol, striking police officers, and attacking journalists on 6 January 2021.Savanah HernandezHernandez is a contributor to Turning Point USA and a former Infowars host with 700,000 followers on X.View image in fullscreenSavanah Hernandez, a former host for the far-right, conspiracy theory outlet Infowars now creating videos in Portland for Turning Point USA, was celebrated on Fox News in the summer of 2020 for a stunt in which she had herself filmed holding up a sign that read “Police Lives Matter” during a Black Lives Matter protest that followed the murder of George Floyd.At the White House roundtable, she directed her rage at reporters from the White House pool covering the roundtable. “The same media that’s sitting in this room with us, has declared all of us at this table Nazis and fascists, and they’ve been doing this for years,” Hernandez said. “This is why Antifa feels emboldened to attack us.”What Hernandez was apparently not aware of is that, since the Trump administration now selects members of the press pool to be admitted to events with the president, many of the people she was yelling at actually worked for pro-Trump outlets.Cam HigbyHigby is a Turning Point USA media activist with 190,000 followers on X.View image in fullscreenCam Higby is a Turning Point USA activist who got his start creating videos for PragerU, a rightwing media outlet that promotes climate-crisis denialism and soft-pedals the brutal reality of American slavery in educational films now approved for use in K-12 schools in 10 states.In recent weeks, Higby has spent time in Portland, but has also been emulating Turning Point’s murdered founder Charlie Kirk, by setting up tables on college campuses and challenging students to debate him.At the White House roundtable, however, Higby cast himself as a reporter unfairly targeted by antifa. “I’m attacked every time I do my job. When I leave my house to go to work, I’m violently assaulted. I’ve had guns pulled on me. I’ve been bear-sprayed. I’ve been beaten down. I’ve been almost killed,” he said.Nick ShirleyShirley is a YouTube influencer with 880,000 subscribers.View image in fullscreenNick Shirley, 23, started out making prank videos during his high school years in Utah but last year he began to make YouTube videos aimed at boosting Donald Trump.In February 2024, Shirley recorded himself asking migrants if they supported Joe Biden and shared video on X of several saying they did with the caption: “Confirmed: Migrants for Biden 2024”. Three months later, Shirley hired Latino day laborers at a Home Depot parking lot and paid them $20 each to appear in a video holding signs outside the White House with the slogans: “I Love Biden” and “I Need Work Permit for My Family.”Last month, he produced a friendly profile of the English racist organizer Tommy Robinson, and called a protest he attended in Paris an “antifa riot”.Shirley has been in Portland in recent weeks, making a video he titled, “Portland has Fallen… ANTIFA Take Control of City”, and telling Fox News that Oregon’s governor, who refused to give him an interview during a protest march, had “sided with antifa”.Jonathan ChoeChoe is a Turning Point USA correspondent with 180,000 followers on X.View image in fullscreenJonathan Choe, now a Turning Point USA correspondent, was fired from his job as a reporter for the ABC affiliate in Seattle in 2022 for producing what looked like a promotional video for the Proud Boys, set to a song by a white supremacist, in his spare time.In addition to reporting on leftwing protests for rightwing outlets, he covers homelessness in Seattle as a fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Christian conservative thinktank .In May, Choe was filmed striking a protester in the face with a baton and then insisting to police that he was the victim. “He assaulted me,” Choe shouted, in video recorded by Daviscourt.Last week in Portland, Choe filmed a man he identified as “Maga patriot Thomas Allen” punching a protester and knocking them to the ground during a skirmish initiated by Sortor. When Allen was then arrested by the police, Choe suggested it was unjust because “antifa militants” had earlier in the night briefly seized Allen’s red Maga cap.Allen was arraigned last week for misdemeanor assault.James KlugKlug is a Turning Point USA ambassador with 617,000 YouTube subscribers.View image in fullscreenJames Klug is affiliated with Turning Point USA and known for videos in which he argues with and mocks liberals.On inauguration day 2021, Klug offered his followers a behind-the-scenes look at how influencers like Rosas go undercover to capture violence at leftwing protests in the city and then appear on Fox News to put all the blame on antifa.The violence in that case was from a small group of anarchists who smashed windows at the Oregon Democratic party’s headquarters in Portland, as Joe Biden was sworn in as president.Rosas told Laura Ingraham on Fox it was the work of antifa, although Rose City Antifa, the Portland group that helped revive the Nazi-era concept of antifascist organizing, said in a statement this was an anarchist action antifascists played no part in.Brandi KruseKruse is a former local TV reporter from Seattle who has 165,000 followers on X.View image in fullscreenBrandi Kruse, a Republican podcaster who quit her job as a reporter for Seattle’s local Fox affiliate in 2021, recently spent 48 hours in Portland for her podcast, a city she subsequently described as a “shithole”. She told Trump that she was a former critic who now endorsed him.Kruse also claimed the president’s antifascist rhetoric had already had an effect. “I genuinely believe there would be people at these tables who would be dead today, and would have been killed in Portland, had you not called them a terror organization and said we’re going to bring the full weight of the federal government to bear.”Jack PosobiecPosobiec, who has 3.2 million followers, hosts a podcast sponsored by Turning Point USAView image in fullscreenJack Posobiec, a former One America News host who left the fringe cable channel to start a show on the far-right network Real America’s Voice sponsored by Turning Point USA, is best known for promoting the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. More

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    A surge of visitors to Yosemite overwhelms a skeleton crew: ‘This is exactly what we warned about’

    Cars and RVs surged into Yosemite national park throughout the weekend, as visitors from around the world came to enjoy the crisp autumn weather, undeterred by a lack of park services and the absence of rangers.National parks have largely been kept open through the lapse in US federal funding that has left workers furloughed and resources for the parks system more scarce than usual. But as the US government shutdown enters its third week and legislators warn that their impasse could linger even longer than the one in Donald Trump’s first term – which currently holds the record at 35 days – concerns are mounting over how the nation’s treasured public lands will fare.Even with winter weather setting in along the Sierra, which will create more dangerous conditions, visitors continued to pour into the park, filling campgrounds and parking lots over the long weekend.Already, there have been widespread reports of illegal activity in Yosemite. People have been spotted Base jumping off high granite peaks, swimming in reservoirs where it is prohibited, camping and parking in unauthorized areas and climbing Half Dome’s cables without permits.The issues aren’t only affecting Yosemite. A fire ignited near a Joshua Tree campground on Sunday morning, forcing evacuations and closures in the park.Wildland firefighters are exempt from the shutdown and responded rapidly, according to a National Park Service spokesperson, and by Monday afternoon, crews had mostly contained the small blaze. But advocates voiced concerns that the fire – which is still under investigation but is believed to be human-caused, according to NPS officials – is a reminder of the increased risks posed by the public during staff shortages.In Yosemite, one of the limited park employees seen on duty during the holiday weekend, who spoke under the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to comment publicly, said it had been chaotic. “Then again, when is it not?” he added sardonically.Relying on funds pulled from entrance fees collected before the shutdown – a budget kept separate from federal appropriations – Yosemite has retained maintenance and emergency services to ensure bathrooms, trash and campgrounds are kept up and emergency operations continue. A concessionaire, Yosemite Hospitality, has also continued to operate.View image in fullscreenPrevious use of these fees, collected under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act, to support park operations during shutdowns was found to be a violation of the law by a 2019 Government Accountability Office analysis.And, even with trash cans emptied and toilets cleaned, the loss of key staff could be keenly felt.“It felt like you showed up to school and none of the teachers were there,” said Mark Rose, the Sierra Nevada & clean air senior program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, after spending a portion of last week at Yosemite. “You could tell the janitors had been there the night before and maybe there were hall monitors there – but we are missing this big piece.”Workers who provide other essential functions such as trail maintenance, those who offer support and monitor visitation at entrance gates, and staff responsible for ongoing conservation or maintenance projects have not been able to continue working. Half of all staff at Yosemite have been furloughed, according to the NPCA.On Saturday, as droves of vehicles rolled through entrances where fees typically would have been collected and guidance given, they were met with signs on the empty booths that read: “During this lapse in appropriations parks will remain as accessible as possible. We are doing our best to take care of your parks at this time, but some amenities and services may not be available.”In one booth, the sign was accompanied by a second: a hand-drawn bluebird with the familiar scrawl of a child pleading: “Put park rangers first.”Dangerous, damaging and illegal activity was a chief concern among advocates when the administration opted to keep parks accessible without adequate staffing. Before the start of this shutdown, national park leaders and advocates had pushed the Trump administration not to repeat its previous policies of 2018-19, when the parks were kept open and unstaffed, leading to widespread destruction.View image in fullscreen“National parks don’t run themselves. It is hard-working National Park Service employees that keep them safe, clean and accessible,” 40 former superintendents said in a letter issued to Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, in the week leading up to the lapse. “If sufficient staff aren’t there, visitors shouldn’t be either.”Irreversible damage was done at popular parks, including Joshua Tree in California, following a month-long shutdown in Donald Trump’s first term, when his administration demanded parks be kept open while funding was paused and workers were furloughed.Without supervision, visitors left behind trails of wreckage. Prehistoric petroglyphs were vandalized at Big Bend national park. Joshua trees, some more than a century old, were chopped down at Joshua Tree national park, as trash and toilets overflowed. Tire tracks crushed sensitive plants and desert habitats from illegal off-roading vehicles in Death Valley. There were widespread reports of wildlife poaching, search-and-rescue crews were quickly overwhelmed with calls, and visitor centers were broken into.“This is exactly what we warned about,” Emily Thompson, executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, said in a statement issued following the reports of how visitors were behaving in Yosemite. “This shutdown is making an already bad situation at national parks and public lands far worse. And the longer this goes, the worse it is going to get. The situation is dangerous and reckless for our parks, public lands, and the visitors who love them.”Burgum called the Yosemite incidents “misinformation” in a post on the social media platform X on Tuesday, and falsely claimed the park was “fully staffed”.“Yosemite has a full team working to uphold public safety and preserve the integrity of the park,” he said, before blaming Democrats for the shutdown. “Unauthorized camping, squatting, and illegal activities like BASE jumping are being addressed with firm, appropriate law enforcement action.”Katie Martin, Department of Interior’s communications director, echoed Burgum’s claims and disputed that there are unmonitored campgrounds and widespread squatting.“Our on-the-ground teams confirm that these reports do not accurately reflect current operations or visitor conditions,” Martin said, adding that all law enforcement rangers in the park remain on duty and have been handling both frontcountry and backcountry patrols.There are 1,545 campgrounds within the park, but the 13 major sites are staffed, according to Martin, who also said visitor disputes and etiquette issues are not unusual and are being handled as they typically would under normal operations.“Yosemite remains safely managed. Law enforcement, emergency response, and campground staff are on duty, and visitation levels remain well within normal ranges,” Martin added.According to a recent National Park Service contingency plan created to guide parks during the shutdown, more than 9,200 employees were furloughed system-wide, reducing NPS staff by roughly 64%. Only workers deemed necessary to protect “life and property”, were set to remain on duty.Even before the shutdown began, sharp reductions in staffing that came as part of the Trump administration’s plans to shrink the federal government left gaps in an NPS workforce already stretched thin. According to Rose of the National Parks Conservation Association, the long-term strain has only been exacerbated by the shutdown as advocates grow exceedingly concerned that more cuts could be coming.Close to $1bn in funding cuts have been proposed by the administration, and Rose said there were fears that the administration may argue operations were successful during the shutdown as a way to validate their calls for a smaller workforce. With toilets clean and law enforcement on patrol in popular places like Yosemite, visitor experience has been prioritized while other important NPS responsibilities, including conservation, science and education, remain on the chopping block.“This is a skeleton crew and we have been seeing this from the beginning,” Rose said. “But you can only keep up the facade for so long before major cracks start showing.” More

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    The US supreme court appears ready to nullify the Voting Rights Act | Moira Donegan

    The last remaining piece of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – section 2, which empowers the federal government to protect voters from racial gerrymandering meant to dilute Black political power – appears headed for an untimely end. At oral arguments in Louisiana v Callais on Wednesday, the US supreme court appeared ready to strike down section 2, effectively completing the gradual nullification of the Voting Rights Act that it has pursued for over a decade.The case stems from new congressional districting maps that were drawn in Louisiana after the 2020 census, which found both that the state was eligible for six seats in the House of Representatives and that its population was about one-third Black. The state initially drew maps that featured only one majority-Black congressional district, rejecting seven more racially fair maps; voters sued, and federal courts ordered Louisiana to comply with the Voting Rights Act by drawing new maps in which Black voters would be a majority in a second district, thereby reflecting their share of the population and giving Black Louisianans an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.But now, a group of people identifying themselves as “non-African-American voters” have sued to get those racially proportionate maps thrown out, arguing that enforcement of the VRA violates their own rights under the 14th and 15th amendments. They claim the maps drawn to remedy racial discrimination against Black people in fact constitute racial discrimination against non-Black (read: white) people. The court seems likely to side with them.If they do, it will mark the end of the Voting Rights Act, widely considered the crowning achievement of the civil right movement, which the supreme court, under John Roberts, has been dismantling for years. In 2013’s Shelby county v Holder, the court struck down much of section 5, which had required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get federal preclearance for changes to its voting laws.In subsequent cases, the court has repeatedly narrowed the conditions under which litigants can bring voting rights claims and expanded states’ leeway to make voting laws that would have previously been deemed discriminatory. Writing for the majority in Shelby, Chief Justice Roberts claimed that racial animus and inequality had diminished enough that such a regime was not necessary, and indeed violated the rights of states. As states imposed a slew of new voting restrictions in the aftermath, the gap between Black and white voter participation rates grew dramatically. It expanded twice as much in districts that had previously been subjected to the section 5 preclearance regime.On Wednesday, the court seemed determined to apply the same logic that it used in Shelby county to section 2, demanding that Janai Nelson, the head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, justify why section 2 should still be efficacious and should not be considered to have somehow expired. Justices Kavanaugh and Alito asserted that the racial gerrymander was justified if it was intended as a partisan gerrymander – that is, that the lawmakers’ stated or professed intentions was what mattered, and not the racially discriminatory impact of the gerrymander.Previous supreme court precedent, as well as ample evidence from the congressional record, has said that discriminatory impact, rather than intent, is sufficient to constitute illegal racial discrimination – but at oral argument, the Republicans on the court, along with those representing the litigants, did not seem to think that this should matter. As she rebutted these arguments in the guise of asking questions from the bench, one could hear the exhaustion in Ketanji Brown Jackson’s voice. The remedies, she sputtered, “are so tied up with race, because race is the initial problem!” Jackson has been the court’s most passionate and articulate advocate for the Reconstruction amendments and for the legacy of the civil rights movement, but she seemed to know that her colleagues were not listening to her.The case reflects two major trends of the Roberts court: hostility to racial justice claims brought by minorities, and a willingness to invert civil rights law and the Reconstruction amendments alike to create interpretations in which these legal traditions function to entrench, rather than challenge, historical hierarchies of race and gender. Louisiana’s attorney general – who has switched sides in the case since it was initially argued last year, joining an opposition to the Voting Rights Act – claimed that to assume that Black voters would vote differently than white voters – which in Louisiana, they overwhelmingly do – would be to unconstitutionally impose a racial stereotype. This facile fiction elicited exasperation from Justice Kagan.But the attorney general knew his audience. Roberts has long been an enemy of practices that attempt to remedy historical and ongoing racial discrimination, claiming that the law mandates that state and private actors alike take no interest in such projects and attempt facially race-blind policies in everything from voting rights enforcement to college admissions – no matter how racially discriminatory against Black Americans such practices prove to be in reality. “The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he once memorably said, “is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” – that is, to stop trying to account for or combat racism with official policy. The result will be that if the court rules in Louisiana’s favor, it will no longer be illegal, in practice, to racially gerrymander congressional districts to minimize and dilute Black voter power. But it will be illegal to use race to redistrict in such a way that restores Black voter power.It is apparently through this fanciful and motivated reasoning that Roberts and his colleagues have decided that any move to secure Black Americans’ voting rights and equality in fact violates the very constitutional amendments that were meant to secure their voting rights and equality. The Voting Rights Act does not violate the 15th amendment; it enforces it, and gave the United States, during the 60 years or so of its enactment, its only plausible claim to being a real democracy. To say that the VRA contradicts the 15th amendment is more than just bad reasoning. It is bad faith. But bad faith, increasingly, is what the supreme court operates under.If the supreme court rules in favor of the “non-African-American” voters and vacates what is left of the Voting Rights Act, as they are expected to, then a decision will probably come down sometime in June, just a few months before the November 2026 midterms. The resulting racial gerrymanders are expected to net Republicans 19 House seats.

    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Proposed UK cuts to global aid fund could lead to 300,000 preventable deaths, say charities

    The UK is expected to slash its contribution to a leading aid fund combating preventable diseases, with charities warning this could lead to more than 300,000 otherwise preventable deaths.If confirmed, the anticipated 20% cut in the UK contribution to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, would be announced on the sidelines of next month’s G20 summit in South Africa, which Keir Starmer is due to attend.Aid groups said such a reduction, on top of a 30% cut to the UK contribution at the previous funding round for the group three years ago, would further risk years of progress in combating the disease after Donald Trump slashed US aid.No decision has been publicly announced before the Global Fund’s “replenishment” summit, covering 2027-29, and one government official said this did not recognise the extent of the cut predicted.However, aid groups say a proposed reduction in UK funding from £1bn to £800m is being widely discussed by senior government officials.If confirmed, it would follow a 25% reduction in UK money towards another aid organisation seen as being highly efficient in saving lives, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi). The eventual £1.25bn commitment over five years to Gavi was nonetheless higher than many aid agencies had feared.The Switzerland-based Global Fund is credited with helping to save tens of million of lives in combating the three diseases. One aid agency estimated a £200m cut could lead to up to 340,000 avoidable deaths and nearly 5.9 million avoidable infections over the three-year funding period.Gareth Jenkins, an executive director at Malaria No More UK, said: “The world stands on the brink of a malaria resurgence, which will be so much more likely triggered if the UK makes a cut to its contribution to the Global Fund.“In this scenario many more children will lose their lives, health systems will be overwhelmed and economies dragged down – with huge knock-on effects for UK trade and health security.”Mike Podmore, the chief executive of StopAids, said the cut “would send a terrible message”, particularly as the UK is officially co-hosting next month’s funding event.Podmore said: “Not only did the UK already make a 30% cut three years ago, but to date no host has ever reduced their commitment from their previous pledge. This would represent a serious lack of leadership and undermine the UK’s reputation and soft power.”Adrian Lovett, the UK head of the development campaign One, said the cut would “put at risk decades of progress in the fight against Aids, TB and malaria – and as diseases do not stop at borders, it would jeopardise our own health security here at home too”.Monica Harding, the Liberal Democrats’ international development spokesperson, said cutting funding as co-host would be “an indictment of our global leadership in diplomacy and development”.She said: “Stepping back now and reducing our contribution to the fund at a time when the United States is abandoning vaccination programmes wholesale would be devastating to some of the world’s most vulnerable people. It would risk undoing much of the progress we have made in the global fight against disease.”A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “The UK has not yet decided what its pledge to the Global Fund will be. We will announce this in due course.” More