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    Having as many babies as possible is not the only way to show you love humanity | Zoe Williams

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    ‘Perpetuating humanity should be a cross-politics consensus,” read an article in the Atlantic last week, “but the left was mostly absent at a recent pronatalism conference.” It’s such a simple proposition – everyone loves babies and wants the species to perpetuate, right? – but pronatalism has provoked a ferocious battle on the American left. Should they be trying to engage meaningfully at a preposterous far-right conference? Or should the left stop self-flagellating and start organising?But what is pronatalism – and is it really borderline fascist? I don’t want to think about slippery, bad-faith, rightwing claptrap any more than you do, but in an era in which US politics can sneeze and the world catches encephalitis, we do, regrettably, have to think about bad-faith everything, all the time.The motivation of the pronatalists is that birthrates are in decline, in some places (such as South Korea) so precipitously that the nation will soon cease to meaningfully exist. It has been a bugbear of the right, particularly the alt-tech right, for almost a decade. In 2017, Elon Musk wrote on Twitter: “The world’s population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care.” That was before he owned the platform, so few people noticed or cared. It has also been a thematic staple of Viktor Orbán’s rhetoric in Hungary, reinforced in 2019 by a large-family tax-break policy that in February became an income tax exemption for mothers of two or three children.The ideas factories pushing birthrates have always been much more opaque about their politics; often, they frame their ideas to suit whomever they are talking to. When I interviewed Simone and Malcolm Collins, venture capitalists turned pronatal advocates, a couple of years ago, their line was that progressive politics needed higher birthrates. Political persuasion was “40% to 70% heritable”, Malcolm told me. “If you systematically delete everyone who cares about the environment from the gene pool, that means, within a couple of generations, you’re going to see a dramatic drop in the number of people who care about the climate, even as the collapse becomes more intense.”At the last count, the Collinses had four children, plus a number of frozen embryos, which Simone intends to incubate at 18-month intervals. “We’re going to keep going until physically I can no longer have kids – and that will be when they forcibly remove my uterus,” she said. It was a dystopian image with a number of obvious follow-ups, the first of which was: who are “they”? But I didn’t ask any of them, because her perception of force, authority, uteruses, children and the world seemed dark and personal, like a subconscious gaping open.Nor did I pursue whether Malcolm could possibly believe that you could sell to people who care about the environment the idea that only their biological children would be genetically capable of caring about the environment. It could be the child of someone who arrives on a small boat that solves our political malaise. What about the heritability of staunch determination? Did they ever think about that?But, all too often, ethnonationalism is implicit in the pronatalist narrative: a low birthrate can’t be offset by migration, because they are not talking about people in general. They are talking about the right kind of people.In the intervening years, Musk has had a bunch more children, often boasting of the example he is setting. Trump started saying: “You have good genes, you know that, right?” to his followers. Last week, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, floated the idea that “if you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease in modern times”, which medics rebutted because it’s not true. But we should all fear its drumbeat: good stock is different; anyone who succumbs to an infectious disease wasn’t “healthy” to begin with.These connections are often intellectually baggy – Musk’s desire to populate Mars with his own seed doesn’t map neatly on to RFK’s anti-vax agenda, while Orbán’s pronatalism sounds like socially conservative gender oppression, yet pronatalist forums tie themselves in knots trying to sound “woke”. But if this isn’t about ethnonationalism, then why aren’t the pronatalists crying out for countries with low birthrates to receive refugees with open arms? Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnistDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Melania Trump’s secret to getting through hard times? Love (actually)

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      Melania’s guide to getting through hard timesLet’s take a quick break from the increasingly dreadful news for a little check-in, shall we? So … how are you holding up right now? How are those stress levels?Mine aren’t great, to be honest. I’m pickling in my own cortisol as I write this. But I’m not here to moan. I am here to share some helpful advice, courtesy of our inspiring first lady Melania Trump, about how to get through these challenging times.Now, I know what you may be thinking: what on earth does Melania Trump know about adversity? The woman divides her time between a gold penthouse in Manhattan and a mansion in Florida, occasionally dropping into the White House to wave at commoners. She’s not exactly worrying about the price of eggs or the balance of her 401(k).But let’s not be too quick to judge. Money doesn’t insulate you from everything, and I’m sure Melania has her own problems. I mean, the poor woman is probably forced to regularly socialize with Elon Musk – which would drain the lifeblood from anyone. Then there’s the fact her husband has taken to using the stomach-turning nickname the “fertilization president”.Melania’s also not just lounging around in luxury: I am sure she is working extremely hard for the millions of dollars Amazon has thrown at her for the privilege of making a sycophantic documentary about her life. And then there’s all the annoying first lady admin; her office has just had to reschedule the White House spring garden tours – which Melania is not expected to actually attend – because of some pesky protesters.So how does our first lady navigate these very stressful challenges? While presenting the state department’s 19th International Women of Courage awards, which honored eight women from around the world, Melania shared her secret trick for getting through hard times. It’s … wait for it … love.“Throughout my life, I have harnessed the power of love as a source of strength during challenging times,” Melania said. “Love has inspired me to embrace forgiveness, nurture empathy and exhibit bravery in the face of unforeseen obstacles.”Melania noted that the award recipients – which included women from Yemen, South Sudan, Israel and the Philippines – “came from diverse backgrounds and regions, yet love transcends boundaries and territories”. She further added that she was inspired by “the women who are driven to speak out for justice, even though their voices are trembling”.The first lady deserves an award of her own for that speech because I have absolutely no idea how she managed to say all that with a straight face. I mean, seriously, is she trolling us? How can she talk about love while her husband’s hate-filled administration is deporting everyone they can? Having the wrong tattoo – or just a stroke of bad luck – can now get you sent to a prison in El Salvador. (The secretary of state Marco Rubio, by the way, who is presiding proudly over these deportations, also made a speech at the International Women of Courage awards.)How can Melania talk about justice when the Trump administration is currently doing their best to deport or imprison anyone who speaks out for justice for Palestinians? And how dare she talk about diversity and women’s rights, when the Trump administration is erasing women from government websites as part of their crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion.But, look, I don’t want to completely dismiss Melania’s advice. Perhaps she has a point. Perhaps, in these challenging times, we should all just channel Melania and reach for the power of love. So: if you happen to get into trouble with any US border guards because you’ve indulged in a little wrongthink online, just remind them of Melania’s words. Remind them that love transcends borders and territories. And then sit back, and enjoy your free trip to El Salvador.Katy Perry says she is ‘going to put the “ass” in astronaut’Please don’t, Katy. For more cringeworthy quotes on how “space is finally going to be glam”, read this feature in Elle. It profiles the all-women crew that has been chosen to joyride around space on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket. They’re all going to be glammed up with lash extensions, folks! It’s gonna be one giant leap for womankind.Women in the US are dying preventable deaths because of abortion bansNew research details how three critically ill patients in the US could have survived if they’d been able to access abortions.How Taliban male-escort rules are killing mothers and babiesEven before the Taliban took power, Afghanistan had a maternal mortality rate three times higher than the global average. Now draconian policies, including guardianship rules that mean a woman can’t travel to hospital without being accompanied by a man, are contributing to an increase in maternal deaths in Afghanistan.House revolts over Republican bid to stop new parents from voting by proxyA small group of Republicans joined forces with Democrats to stop the GOP from blocking consideration of a measure that would allow new parents to temporarily designate someone else to vote in their place. “I think that today is a pretty historical day for the entire conference. It’s showing that the body has decided that parents deserve a voice in Washington,” the Republican Anna Paulina Luna said.The US woman with the world’s longest tongueImagine people screaming in shock every time you stick your tongue out. Such is the life of Chanel Tapper, a California woman who holds the Guinness World Record for woman with the globe’s longest tongue.US anti-abortion group expands campaign in UKA rightwing US group has been trying to export abortion extremism to the UK, lobbying heavily against the introduction of buffer zones around reproductive health clinics.Russell Brand charged with rape and sexual assault“Nation Could Have Sworn Russell Brand Was Already Convicted Sex Offender”, reads an Onion headline from 2023.At least 322 children killed since Israel’s new Gaza offensive, Unicef saysUnicef said “relentless and indiscriminate bombardments” had resulted in 100 children killed or maimed every day in the 10 days to 31 March.How Gina Rinehart is pushing the Maga message in AustraliaSome fascinating details in this Guardian series about Rinehart, who has been described as a “female Donald Trump” and is Australia’s richest person. Money clearly can’t buy taste because Rinehart is renovating her company headquarters to include a sculpture of Peanut the squirrel, Maga’s favourite rodent, and etchings of inspirational Elon Musk quotes.The week in pawtriarchyTrump’s tariffs are so far-reaching that they’ve even been imposed on the Heard and McDonald islands near Antarctica, inhabited only by penguins. (And a few seals.) I am sure the penguins, already suited up for an emergency meeting on the tariffs, are not too happy about this development – but the rest of us have been gifted some brrrrilliant memes. More

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      Trump administration eviscerates maternal and child health programs

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      Multiple maternal and child health programs have been eliminated or hollowed out as part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) layoffs, prompting alarm and disbelief among advocates working to make Americans healthier.The fear and anxiety come as a full accounting of the cuts remains elusive. Federal health officials have released only broad descriptions of changes to be made, rather than a detailed accounting of the programs and departments being eviscerated.“Pediatricians, myself included, are losing sleep at night – worried about the health of the nation’s children,” said Dr Sue Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.“The one that stands out to me is the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. There is no way to make our country healthier by eliminating expertise where it all starts, and it all starts at maternal and child health.”The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, announced HHS would eliminate 10,000 jobs as part of a restructuring plan. Together with cuts already made by Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency”, HHS is likely to lose 20,000 workers – roughly one-quarter of its workforce.“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl,” Kennedy said. “We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic.”Piecemeal and crowd-sourced information, which has filled the vacuum left by a lack of information from the health department, appears to show maternal health programs slated for elimination, many without an indication of whether they will be reassigned. The Guardian asked HHS to comment on the cuts but did not receive a response.The picture of cuts was further muddied on Thursday when Kennedy told reporters, according to Politico: “We’re going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstalled, because we’ll make mistakes.”In the aftermath of the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s been much conservative criticism of public health agencies, particularly the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Pandemic policy continues to be an animating force within the Republican party, whose supporters are cynical about the value of federal public health programs following federal vaccine mandates.The cuts to maternal health programs may serve a second purpose for Republicans.Such programs have come under fire in some conservative states, in part because the experts involved investigate deaths that could have been prevented with abortion services – now illegal or severely restricted in nearly two dozen conservative states.As part of the restructuring, the administration announced 28 divisions would be folded into 15, including the creation of a new division, called the “Administration for a Healthy America”, or “AHA”.The administration argued the “centralization” would “improve coordination of health resources for low-income Americans and will focus on areas including, primary care, maternal and child Health, mental health, environmental health, HIV/Aids and workforce development”.Meanwhile, experts in HIV/Aids, worker health and safety, healthcare for society’s most vulnerable, and experts in maternal and child health have received “reduction in force” notices, a federal term for layoffs, or have been placed on administrative leave with the expectation of being eliminated.“It certainly appears there was a particular focus on parts of HHS that dealt with women’s or reproductive health,” said Sean Tipton, chief policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, about the cuts.He added: “How in the world you can justify the CDC eliminating the division of maternal mortality is beyond me.”Among the divisions hard-hit was the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), an operating division of HHS like the CDC, which housed the the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. HRSA lost as many as 600 workers.The CDC’s division of reproductive health, which studies maternal health, appeared to have been nearly eliminated, according to multiple reports, with some of the division’s portfolio also expected to be folded into AHA.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe entire staff of a gold-standard maternal mortality survey, a program that was called the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, was also put on leave, Stat reported. The epidemiologist in charge of the CDC survey, Jennifer Bombard, wrote to colleagues on Tuesday: “[T]he entire CDC PRAMS team, including myself, has received the Reduction in Force (RIF) notice from HHS today.”A HRSA hotline that had fielded calls from new moms seeking mental health support was also cut, Stat reported. Layoffs at the Administration for Children and Families have jolted providers of federally backed high-quality childcare for low-income families, a program called Head Start.The CDC’s only experts on infertility were laid off, just days after Trump described himself as the “fertilization president” at an event marking Women’s History Month. The team had collected congressionally mandated statistics on fertility clinics’ success rates. Without the workers, it is unclear who at the department will help fertility clinics comply with the law.“I’m astounded, sad, perplexed,” said Barbara Collura, president of Resolve: The National Infertility Association. “Infertility impacts one in six people globally, and now we don’t have anybody at the CDC who knows anything about infertility and IVF?”A division of the CDC called the National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention also appeared to be gutted, with the director Jonathan Mermin placed on administrative leave. Among the center’s many tasks, it worked to curb the spread of congenital syphilis, a debilitating disease that is on the rise in the US.The March of Dimes, an influential non-profit whose mission is to improve the health of mothers and babies, said the cuts “raise serious concerns” at a time when maternal mortality rates remain “alarmingly high”.“As an OB-GYN and public health leader, I can’t overstate the value these resources and programs – and our partners across CDC, HRSA, and NIH – have brought to families and frontline providers,” said Dr Amanda Williams, the interim chief medical Officer at the March of Dimes.“We rely on the data, research, clinical tools and partnerships built by the Division of Reproductive Health (DRH) and HRSA to protect maternal and infant health – especially in communities hit hardest.”Heads of National Institutes of Health (NIH) centers were also forced out – and, apparently, offered reassignment to the Indian Health Service to be stationed in Alaska, Montana or Oklahoma, the journal Nature reported. Such large-scale reassignments are unprecedented, according to Stat.Among those to be placed on leave was one of the federal government’s pre-eminent leaders of research, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr Jeanne Marrazzo. Marrazzo had expertise in sexually transmitted infections and women’s reproductive tract infections – a background that gave health advocates hope of curbing the US’s sky-high STD rates. Dr Diana Bianchi, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was also forced out.“These cuts are significant,” Kressly said. “And the policy and program changes that are made because the cuts impact real people in real communities, and I’m not just talking about the people who lost their jobs.” More

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      Schools in Puerto Rico are bracing for Trump cuts after gains made during the Biden years

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      Maraida Caraballo Martínez has been an educator in Puerto Rico for 28 years and the principal of the elementary school Escuela de la Comunidad Jaime C Rodriguez for the past seven. She never knows how much money her school in Yabucoa will receive from the government each year because it isn’t based on the number of children enrolled. One year she got $36,000; another year, it was $12,000.But during the Biden administration, Caraballo noticed a big change. Due to an infusion of federal dollars into the island’s education system, Caraballo received a $250,000 grant, an unprecedented amount of money. She used it to buy books and computers for the library, whiteboards and printers for classrooms, to beef up a robotics program and build a multipurpose sports court for her students. “It meant a huge difference for the school,” Caraballo said.Yabucoa, a small town in south-east Puerto Rico, was hard-hit by Hurricane Maria in 2017. And this school community, like hundreds of others in Puerto Rico, has experienced near-constant disruption since then. A series of natural disasters, including hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and landslides, followed by the pandemic, has pounded the island and interrupted learning. There has also been constant churn of local education secretaries – seven in the past eight years. The Puerto Rican education system – the seventh-largest school district in the United States – has been made more vulnerable by the island’s overwhelming debt, mass emigration and a compromised power grid.Under Joe Biden, there were tentative gains, buttressed by billions of dollars and sustained personal attention from top federal education officials, many experts and educators on the island said. Now they worry that it will all be dismantled with the change in the White House and Donald Trump’s plan to eliminate the US Department of Education. Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the US territory, having reportedly said that it was “dirty and the people were poor”. During his first term, he withheld billions of dollars in federal aid after Hurricane Maria and has suggested selling the island or swapping it for Greenland.View image in fullscreenA recent executive order to make English the official language has worried people on the island, where only one in five people speak fluent English, and Spanish is the medium of instruction in schools.Trump has already made massive cuts to the US Department of Education and its staff, which will have widespread implications across the island. Even if federal funds – which last year made up more than two-thirds of funding for the Puerto Rican department of education (PRDE) – were transferred directly to the local government, it would probably lead to worse outcomes for the most vulnerable children, say educators and policymakers. The PRDE has historically been plagued by political interference, widespread bureaucracy and a lack of transparency.And the local education department is not as technologically advanced as other state education departments, nor as able to disseminate best practices. For example, Puerto Rico does not have a “per pupil formula”, a calculation commonly used on the mainland to determine the amount of money each student receives for their education. Robert Mujica is the executive director of the Puerto Rico Financial Oversight and Management Board, first convened under Barack Obama in 2016 to deal with the island’s financial morass. Mujica said Puerto Rico’s current allocation of education funds was opaque. “How the funds are distributed is perceived as a political process,” he said. “There’s no transparency, and there’s no clarity.”In 2021, Miguel Cardona, Biden’s secretary of education, promised “a new day” for Puerto Rico. “For too long, Puerto Rico’s students and educators were abandoned,” he said. During his tenure, Cardona signed off on almost $6bn in federal dollars for the island’s educational system, leading to historic teacher pay increases, funding for after-school tutoring programs, the hiring of hundreds of school mental health professionals and a pilot program to decentralize the PRDE.Cardona also designated a senior adviser, Chris Soto, to be his point person for the island’s education system to underscore the federal commitment. During nearly four years in office, Soto made more than 50 trips to the island. Carlos Rodríguez Silvestre, the executive director of the Flamboyan Foundation, a non-profit that has led children’s literacy efforts on the island, said the level of respect and sustained interest felt like a partnership, not a top-down mandate. “I’ve never seen that kind of attention to education in Puerto Rico,” he said. “Soto practically lived on the island.”Soto also worked closely with Victor Manuel Bonilla Sánchez, the president of the teachers union, Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, or AMPR, which resulted in a deal in which educators received $1,000 more a month than their base salary, a nearly 30% increase for the average teacher. “It was the largest salary increase in the history of teachers in Puerto Rico,” Bonilla said, though even with the increase, teachers here still make far less money than their mainland counterparts.One of the biggest complaints Soto said he heard was how rigid and bureaucratic the Puerto Rico department of education was, despite a 2018 education reform law that allows for more local control. The education agency – the largest unit of government on the island, with the most employees and the biggest budget – was set up so that the central office had to sign off on everything. So Soto created and oversaw a pilot program in Ponce, a region on the island’s southern coast, focusing on decentralization.For the first time, the local community elected an advisory board of education, and superintendent candidates had to apply rather than be appointed, Soto said. The superintendent was given the authority to sign off on budget requests directly rather than sending them through officials in San Juan, as well as the flexibility to spend money in the region based on individual schools’ needs. The pilot project also focused on increasing efficiency. For example, children with disabilities are now evaluated at their schools rather than having to visit a special center.But already there are plans to undo Cardona’s signature effort in Ponce. The island’s newly elected governor, Jenniffer González Colón, is a Republican and a Trump supporter. The popular secretary of education, Eliezer Ramos Parés, returned earlier this year to head the department after leading it from April 2021 to July 2023 when the governor unexpectedly asked him to resign – not an unusual occurrence within the island’s government, where political appointments can end suddenly and with little public debate. He said that the program would not continue in its current form.“The pilot isn’t really effective,” Ramos said, noting that politics can influence spending decisions not only at the central level but at the regional level as well. “We want to have some controls.” He also said expanding the effort across the island would cost tens of millions of dollars. Instead, Ramos said, he was looking at more limited approaches to decentralization, around some human resource and procurement functions. He said he was also exploring a per-pupil funding formula for Puerto Rico and looking at lessons from other large school districts such as New York City and Hawaii.While education has been the largest budget item on the island for years, Puerto Rico still spends far less than any of the 50 states on each student: $9,500 per student, compared with an average of $18,600 in the states.The US Department of Education, which supplements local and state funding for students in poverty and with disabilities, plays an outsized role in Puerto Rico schools. On the island, 55% of children live below the poverty line and 35% of students are in special education. In total, during fiscal year 2024, more than 68% of the education budget on the island came from federal funding, compared with 11% in US states. The department also administers Pell grants for low-income students; about 72% of Puerto Rican students apply.Linda McMahon, Trump’s new education secretary, has reportedly said that the government will continue to meet its “statutory obligations” to students even as the department shuts down or transfers some operations and lays off staff. The US Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment.Some say the Biden administration’s pouring billions of dollars into a troubled education system with little accountability has created unrealistic expectations and there’s no plan for what happens after money is spent. Mujica, the executive director of the oversight board, said the infusion of funds postponed tough decisions by the Puerto Rican government. “When you have so much money, it papers over a lot of problems. You didn’t have to deal with some of the challenges that are fundamental to the system.” And, he said, there was little discussion of what happens when that money runs out. “How are you going to bridge that gap? Either those programs go away, or we’re going to have to find the funding for them,” Mujica said.Puerto Rico is one of the most educationally impoverished regions, with academic outcomes well below the mainland’s. On the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, a test that US students take, just 2% of fourth-graders in Puerto Rico were proficient, and 0% of eighth-graders were. Puerto Rican students don’t take the NAEP for reading because they learn in Spanish, not English, though results shared by Ramos at a press conference in 2022 showed only 1% of third-graders were reading at grade level.There are some encouraging efforts. Flamboyan Foundation, the non-profit in Puerto Rico, has been leading an islandwide coalition of 70 partners to improve literacy from kindergarten through the third grade (K-3), including through professional development. Teacher training through the territory’s education department has often been spotty or optional.The organization now works closely with the University of Puerto Rico and, as part of that effort, oversees spending of $3m in literacy training. Approximately 1,500 or a third of Puerto Rico’s K-5 teachers have undergone the rigorous training. That effort will continue, according to Ramos, who called it “very effective”.A new reading test for first- through third-graders the non-profit helped design showed that between the 2023 and 2024 school years, most children were below grade level but made growth in every grade. “But we still have a long way to go so that this data can get to teachers in a timely manner and in a way that they can actually act on it,” Silvestre said.Kristin Ehrgood, Flamboyan Foundation’s CEO, said it was too soon to see dramatic gains. “It’s really hard to see a ton of positive outcomes in such a short period of time with significant distrust that has been built over years,” she said. She said they weren’t sure how the Trump administration may work with or fund Puerto Rico’s education system but that the Biden administration had built a lot of goodwill. “There is a lot of opportunity that could be built on, if a new administration chooses to do that,” she said.Another hopeful sign is that the oversight board, which was widely protested against when it was formed, has cut the island’s debt from $73bn to $31bn. And last year board members increased education spending by 3%. Mujica said the board was focused on making sure that any investment translates into improved outcomes for students: “Our view is resources have to go into the classroom,” he said.Ramos said he met McMahon, the new US secretary of education, in Washington DC, and that they had a “pleasant conversation”. “She knows about Puerto Rico, she’s concerned about Puerto Rico, and she demonstrated full support in the Puerto Rico mission,” he said. He said McMahon wanted PRDE to offer more bilingual classes, to expose more students to English. Whether there will be changes in funding or anything else remains to be seen. “We have to look at what happens in the next few weeks and months and how that vision and policy could affect Puerto Rico,” Ramos said.Ramos was well-liked by educators during his first stint as education secretary. He will also have a lot of decisions to make, including whether to expand public charter schools and close down traditional public schools as the island’s public school enrollment continues to decline precipitously. In the past, both those issues led to fierce and widespread protests.Soto says he’s realistic about the incoming administration having “different views, both ideologically and policy-wise”, but he’s hopeful the people of Puerto Rico won’t want to go back to the old way of doing things. “Somebody said: ‘You guys took the genie out of the bottle and it’s going to be hard to put that back’ as it relates to a student-centered school system,” Soto said.Principal Caraballo’s small school of 150 students and 14 teachers has been slated for closure three times already, though each time it has been spared, partly thanks to community support. She’s hopeful that Ramos, with whom she’s worked previously, will turn things around. “He knows the education system,” she said. “He’s a brilliant person, open to listen.”But the long hours of the past several years have taken a toll on her. She is routinely in school from 6.30am to 6.30pm. “You come in when it’s dark and you leave when it’s dark,” she said.She wants to retire but can’t afford to. After pension plans were frozen, Caraballo will receive only 50% of her salary at retirement, $2,195 a month. She is entitled to social security benefits, but it isn’t enough to make up for the lost pension. “Who can live with $2,000 in one month? Nobody. It’s too hard. And my house still needs 12 years more to pay,” she said.This story was produced by Guardian partner the Hechinger Report, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education More

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      White House reportedly halts funding for legal aid for unaccompanied migrant children

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      The Trump administration is reported to have cut funding to a legal program that provides representation for unaccompanied immigrant children, one month after directing immigration enforcement agents to track down minors who had entered the US without guardians last month.Organizations that collectively receive more than $200m in federal grants were informed that the contract through the office of refugee resettlement had been partially terminated, according to a memo issued on Friday by the interior department and obtained by ABC News.The cut affects funding for legal representation and for the recruitment of attorneys to represent immigrant children but maintains a contract for “Know Your Rights”, a presentation given to unaccompanied immigrant children in detention centers.Currently, 26,000 immigrant children receive government-funded legal representation, but many are representing themselves in immigration court due to a shortage of attorneys. In 2023, 56% of unaccompanied minors in immigration courts were represented by counsel, according to the Department of Justice.In a White House memo to the justice department posted on Saturday, the executive branch identified the immigration system as one of several legal areas “where rampant fraud and meritless claims have supplanted the constitutional and lawful bases upon which the President exercises core powers”.“The immigration bar, and powerful Big Law pro bono practices, frequently coach clients to conceal their past or lie about their circumstances when asserting their asylum claims, all in an attempt to circumvent immigration policies enacted to protect our national security and deceive the immigration authorities and courts into granting them undeserved relief,” the White House said.The memo directed the attorney general, Pam Bondi, and the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, “to prioritize enforcement of their respective regulations governing attorney conduct and discipline”.Lawyers for Civil Rights, a legal advocacy group currently suing the administration over deportations, called Trump’s sanctions threat hypocritical in a statement to Reuters, saying the president and his allies “have repeatedly thumbed their noses at the rule of law”.The move to cut funding for legal representation was immediately denounced by immigrant legal and welfare groups.“The US government is violating legal protections for immigrant children and forcing them to fight their immigration cases alone,” said Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, deputy director of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.“Already, we are seeing the government move for the expedited removal of unrepresented children. These services are critical not only as a matter of fundamental fairness – children should not be asked to stand up in court alone against a trained government attorney – but also for protecting children from trafficking, abuse and exploitation, and for helping immigration courts run more efficiently.”Lindsay Toczylowski, president of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), said the Trump administration had gone “all-in today on endangering unaccompanied children and interfering with their right to due process, breaking with decades of bipartisan congressional support for legal services for vulnerable children”.Toczylowski added that without representation, “the 26,000 children whose access to counsel was slashed today will be at higher risk of exploitation and trafficking and their chances of obtaining legal protection will plummet. No child should be forced to fend for themselves against a trained [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] attorney without a lawyer by their side.”A study published by Save the Children in December found that record numbers of unaccompanied minors have come into the US since 2021.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2022, the US Department of Health and Human Services received a record 128,904 unaccompanied minors, up from 122,731 in the prior year, the majority coming from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.There are more than 600,000 immigrant children who have crossed the US-Mexico border without a legal guardian or parent since 2019, according to government data.According to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) memo – “Unaccompanied Alien Children Joint Initiative Field Implementation” – issued in February and obtained by ABC News and Reuters, agents are directed to detain unaccompanied immigrant children to ensure they are not victims of human trafficking or other forms of exploitation.Ice agents are directed to categorize unaccompanied immigrants into three groups: “flight risk”, “public safety” and “border security”.Republicans have claimed that the Biden administration “lost 300,000” immigrant children – figures that come from a Department of Homeland Security report referring to the number of minors whom agents had not been able to serve with papers to appear in court.“The unique needs of children require the administration to ensure a level of care that takes into account their vulnerability while it determines whether they need long-term protection in the United States,” Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense, said in a statement.“To be successful in its goals, the government must partner with legal service providers and the vast network of private-sector pro bono partners who provide millions of dollars in free legal services to ensure children understand the process and can share their reasons for seeking safety in the United States.” More

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      What is the US Department of Education and what does it do?

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      Donald Trump has taken the overwhelming step of undoing the Department of Education on Thursday by signing an executive order to dismantle the agency in charge of the country’s national education policy.With the stroke of a pen, Trump fulfills a campaign promise he made all the way back in 2016.What is the Department of Education?The Department of Education is a cabinet-level agency created by Jimmy Carter in 1979 to oversee national education policy and administer federal assistance programs for schools across the country.The department manages a budget of approximately $268bn and employs about 4,400 staff members. Its core responsibilities have included distributing federal financial aid for education, collecting data on the US’s schools, identifying major educational issues and enforcing federal education laws prohibiting discrimination and implementing congressional education legislation.Among its most significant functions is administering federal student aid programs, providing billions in grants, work-study funds and loans to more than 13 million students. The agency also oversees programs addressing special education, English-language acquisition and education for disadvantaged students.Critics have long questioned the need for the department, arguing education should remain entirely under state and local control, while its supporters maintain it plays a crucial role in protecting educational equity and providing much-needed federal backing to schools serving vulnerable populations.Can Trump legally eliminate a government agency?Scrapping an entire department would require congressional approval – something that conservatives seeking to get rid of the education department have failed to do for decades.No president has ever successfully closed a cabinet-level agency enshrined in law before. And the constitutional separation of powers means the president’s executive authority alone isn’t sufficient to close the agency by the stroke of his pen.The White House has acknowledged this limitation, with administration officials confirming they don’t have the necessary votes in Congress to eliminate the department completely.So instead, Trump’s executive order would essentially direct the education secretary, Linda McMahon, to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure”, according to administration officials, while working within existing executive branch powers. This could include reorganizing certain functions, appointing leadership aligned with the aggressive drawing-down goal and potentially returning specific authorities to states where federal law permits.What does the executive order mean for American students?The mass weakening of the agency will undoubtedly create significant uncertainty for America’s 50 million public school students and their families, with impacts varying widely depending on how the directive is implemented.In the immediate term, most students will probably see little change to their daily educational experience, as schools primarily operate under state and local control and budgets for the year are already set. However, the long-term implications could be substantial if federal education programs are modified or reduced.Shuttering the department puts marginalized students most at risk, experts say. Since federal programs support special education, English-language learners and disadvantaged students, they face the brunt of the impact. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (Idea), which provides protections for students with disabilities, is federally enforced through the department.What happens to student loans?There is significant uncertainty for the federal student loan system, which currently manages approximately $1.69tn in outstanding debt for more than 43 million Americans.While the White House has indicated functions such as student loans will continue, any disruption to the department’s distribution of grants, work-study funds and loans could affect the more than 19 million college students in the United States.There are questions about which department might oversee these operations, but earlier this month, Trump suggested transferring loan management to either the treasury department, commerce department or the small business administration next. The treasury department may be the most likely choice.Borrowers currently in repayment are unlikely to see immediate changes to their payment requirements or loan terms, but may face uncertainty about where to direct questions and how to navigate repayment options if administrative responsibilities shift. But the executive order’s impact on new student loans and financial aid processing for incoming college students remains unclear. More

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      ‘We’re on the edge of chaos’: families with trans kids fight for care as bans take hold

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      Aryn Kavanaugh was sitting in her living room in South Carolina when her 17-year-old daughter came into the room and said: “I’m really scared. I think people are gonna die.” Katherine, who is using her middle name for her protection, told Kavanaugh that she thought transgender youth may be the target of violence due to the hate generated by Donald Trump’s recent action.On 28 January, Trump issued an executive order to ban access to gender-affirming care for youth under 19 years old. It directed federal agencies to deny funding to institutions that offer gender-affirming medical care including hormones and puberty blockers.“She just felt like the world was crumbling around her. So we talked it out and tried to stay super positive,” said Kavanaugh, a parent of two trans children. “I think she really feels like we’re on the edge of chaos.”In a victory for trans kids and their families, a federal judge in Maryland blocked the ban on 4 March. The preliminary injunction extended a mid-February restraining order that blocked Trump’s directive and will remain in effect until further order from the US district court for the district of Maryland. In the meantime, the order prohibits the government from withholding federal funding to healthcare facilities that provide treatment to trans youth.Still, the executive order sent parents, children and medical providers into a tailspin as they deciphered its impacts. Some hospitals immediately canceled appointments and turned away new patients to adhere to the directive. In early February, Katherine was dropped as a patient at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she received gender-affirming care after South Carolina banned hormone therapy, surgery and puberty blockers for trans youth last year. Some parents say that their children’s mental health severely declined in the weeks following the executive order. And as a result, families have gone to great lengths to ensure that their trans kids continue to receive care, including considering moving abroad or stocking up on puberty suppressants.“We have seen dozens of families affected across the United States, in many, many states that have been left and abandoned without care that they need,” said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, senior counsel and healthcare strategist at the LGBTQ+ civil rights organization Lambda Legal. “This is an unlawful executive order because it seeks to override the congressional mandate to condition federal financial assistance on non-discrimination, and this order seeks to require discrimination as a condition of federal funding.”The pause follows a lawsuit filed on 4 February by civil rights organizations including Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of transgender youth. ACLU staff told the Guardian that they anticipated that the preliminary injunction would remain through the court proceedings.Some hospitals that stopped providing care to trans youth after the January directive, such as Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and Children’s Hospital of Richmond, lifted limits on surgeries or hormonal therapy in late February. Kavanaugh said she was “relieved and hopeful” about the preliminary injunction, though it does not roll back South Carolina’s ban on trans youth healthcare, which was signed into law last year.Her 18-year-old trans son Parker and Katherine received treatment at Medical University of South Carolina and then a private clinic in the state for several years until Henry McMaster, the governor of South Carolina, signed into law a ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors in May 2024. Parker is now old enough to receive his care in South Carolina, but the state ban means that the family has had to drive more than five hours each way to Virginia Commonwealth University for Katherine’s doctors’ appointments and medicine every few months.Being dropped as a patient due to the federal ban “puts us in a really tough spot because we’re already having to find care outside of South Carolina. And so that just limits our options,” Kavanaugh said. Katherine’s doctors connected her to a private medical practice in Fairfax, Virginia, that does not receive federal funding, so they were able to avoid a lapse in her care. While the change in providers did not cost more money, it stretched their commute to more than seven hours.In late February, Katherine’s puberty-blocker treatment at Virginia Commonwealth University resumed. In a statement, the hospital said that patients would continue medications, but that surgeries would remain suspended. Trans kids’ treatment remains in limbo as federal challenges wind through the court.‘A psychological toll’Studies have shown that gender-affirming medical care greatly improves trans people’s mental health and quality of life. A 2022 report published in the journal JAMA Network Open analyzed data from a study of 104 transgender and non-binary youth from ages 13 to 20 who received hormonal therapy or puberty blockers at the Seattle Children’s Gender Clinic for a year. Researchers found that 60% of participants reported lower rates of depression and 73% had less odds of suicidal ideation and self harm after receiving gender-affirming hormones and puberty blockers.Black transgender people, who experience the intersecting stigma of being gender diverse and racial minorities, are at even greater risk of poor mental health. A 2022 national survey of 33,993 LGBTQ+ young people by the Trevor Project, a non-profit, found that one in four Black transgender and nonbinary youth attempted suicide in the past year, more than double the rate of their cisgender counterparts.“It’s already difficult to access healthcare and treatment. It’s additionally difficult for folks who belong to other marginalized communities, especially families and children of color, as well as folks who are on various forms of state-funded insurance and may have difficulty selecting their providers to begin with,” Harper Seldin, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU, told the Guardian.“There is already a subset of gender clinics in this country who provide this care. When you lay over on top of that insurance and access based on family means, it’s particularly devastating for families who can’t just pick up and go somewhere else – to another city, state or other country – to get care.”While her trans daughter’s care hasn’t been directly affected by the executive order, Sarah, a Texas mother who asked that her last name not be used to protect her daughter’s privacy, said that her daughter Raven was devastated by the president’s directive. Raven, a 16-year-old Black trans girl in Texas who is using a pseudonym, dropped out of school last month due to her declining mental health, exacerbated by the federal ban. Sarah said that Raven had rarely got out of bed, and when she did, she would show her mom news reports of murdered Black trans girls and women.“She has told me that she’s afraid of being killed if she leaves the house,” Sarah said. “She really only will leave the house with me. But that’s very few and far between, because she’s just incredibly depressed.”Since dropping out of school, Sarah said that Raven’s depression and anxiety significantly decreased, and she plans to start GED test preparation classes over the summer.In November 2024, the LGBTQ+ non-profit Human Rights Campaign Foundation released a report that showed that half of the 36 transgender people killed in the last 12 months were Black trans women. That reality has made it terrifying for Raven to live as a Black trans girl, Sarah said.Raven’s medical providers have increased her antidepressants dosage, and she now checks in with her psychiatrist every three weeks. Since last year, Raven has had to fly to Colorado every six months to receive gender-affirming care due to a Texas ban on treatment for minors. She has received grants from the non-profit Campaign on Southern Equality to fund the travel for medical treatment, which has helped defer some of the exorbitant costs of seeking out-of-state care.Sarah said that she has researched living in other nations and would be willing to order medicine from Canada if Raven could no longer get medical treatment in Colorado. Gender-affirming care has drastically improved Raven’s life. “She feels more herself,” Sarah said. “If she didn’t have it, I don’t think she would choose to stay alive.”Navigating medical care restrictions has caused anxiety for parents who are shouldering the burden of the policies’ twists and turns for their children. A Georgia-based parent, Peter Isbister, said that he had chosen not to share the news of the executive order with his 11-year-old trans son Lev, who is using a pseudonym out of fear of harassment: “It’s taken a psychological toll on his parents, not on him.”An endocrinologist is currently monitoring Lev’s hormone levels to determine when he will be put on puberty blockers. Isbister, an attorney and founder of the peer support network Metro Atlanta TransParent, has to contend with the federal executive order and a looming ban on puberty blockers for minors in Georgia.“If the bill passes in Georgia, then we as a family are going to really have to study up more seriously on how it works to be an out-of-state person to get care in California, New Mexico, Massachusetts or wherever,” Isbister said. “And the more states that restrict access to care, the harder that’s going to be.”As a result of the federal and state policies, Isbister said that he has talked with an immigration attorney about acquiring Canadian citizenship for his son. But at least for now, Lev’s clinic continues to provide him care.While Isbister was “heartened” by the judge’s injunction on the executive order, he said that it is “wrenching and in my view unjust that my ability to provide my kid healthcare should be an issue for our federal courts”. More

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      The rise of pronatalism: why Musk, Vance and the right want women to have more babies

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      In his first address to the United States after becoming vice-president, JD Vance stood on stage and proclaimed: “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Weeks later, Donald Trump signed an executive order pledging support for in vitro fertilization, recognizing “the importance of family formation and that our nation’s public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children”.In late January, a Department of Transportation memo directed the agency to prioritize projects that “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”. And last week, it was reported that Elon Musk, the unelected head of the government-demolishing “department of governmental efficiency” and a man who has said that the “collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far”, had become a father of 14.Republicans have long heralded the importance of “family values”. But in these developments, many see mounting signs of a controversial ideology at work: pronatalism.Pronatalism is so contentious that people often struggle to agree on a definition. Pronatalism could be defined as the belief that having children is good. It could also be defined as the belief that having children is important to the greater good and that people should have babies on behalf of the state, because declining birth rates are a threat to its future. Perhaps most importantly, pronatalism could be defined as the belief that government policy should incentivize people to give birth.While people on the left might agree with some pronatalist priorities, pronatalism in the US is today ascendant on the right. It has become a key ideological plank in the bridge between tech bro rightwingers like Musk and more traditional, religious conservatives, like the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson – who once said in a House hearing that abortions were harming the economy by eliminating would-be workers.But there are plenty of widening cracks in that bridge and, by extension, Trump’s incoherent coalition.‘Hipster eugenicists’In the US, interest in pronatalism has historically coincided with growing anxiety over changing gender norms and demographics, according to Laura Lovett, a University of Pittsburgh history professor and the author of the book Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1930. In the 1920s, pronatalism’s prominence grew after women gained the right to vote, as people worried about women working and wielding power outside the home.“When Theodore Roosevelt uses the term ‘race suicide’, he actually blames women who are going to college for the first time for that eventual suicide of the right, white race. There’s this linkage between women’s educational and aspirational futures and the declining birth rate,” Lovett said. “There was this anxiety that white, native-born, middle-class women were having smaller families.”Historically, US pronatalism was also tied to an interest in eugenics – and some of the more tech-minded, modern-day pronatalists do want to use breeding to fashion a better human race. Malcolm and Simone Collins, parents of four who have become standard-bearers for the burgeoning popularity of pronatalism among Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have championed “no-holds-barred” medical research to engineer the “mass production of genetically selected humans”. They have joked to Business Insider about making business cards declaring themselves “hipster eugenicists” – although they have also rejected the idea that they are performing eugenics, stressing that they think racism is “so dumb” and that the only bloodlines they are altering are their own.The Collinses, who support Trump, have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on in vitro fertilization (IVF) and screening their embryos for IQ, risk of depression and other markers. (Scientists aren’t convinced that it is possible to screen embryos for IQ.) These kinds of practices – which the Collins have called “polygenics” – draw a wedge between the Silicon Valley pronatalists who back Trump and his more traditional pronatalist supporters. The anti-abortion movement, which was critical to getting Trump elected in 2016, has long opposed IVF, largely because it can lead to unused or discarded embryos.In signing his pro-IVF executive order, Trump appears to be siding with the “tech right” (and the broader electorate, among which IVF remains extremely popular). When Musk recently brought his son X Æ A-Xii to the Oval Office, Trump called the four-year-old a “high-IQ individual”.View image in fullscreen‘Restructuring society’While the Collinses are avatars for the emerging pronatalist tech right, Lyman Stone is one of the highest-profile pronatalists from a more traditionally conservative background.“Pronatalism has to be disciplined by a commitment to human liberty and human flourishing – and this is coming out of work on reproductive justice, basically. People have a right to have the families they want to have, and for some people, that means no family,” said Stone, a demographer who in 2024 established the Pronatalism Initiative at the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies. “The focus of pronatalism, in my view, generally is not and certainly should not be on family gigantism, and instead should be on helping young people overcome the barriers and obstacles to romantic and family success in their life.”In practice, Stone said, pronatalists should help people get married earlier in life so that they can start having children younger. That could mean, he said, everything from improving mental health services to creating better childcare programs. Stone’s frequent collaborator, Brad Wilcox – a University of Virginia sociology professor and author of the book Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization – pointed to several policies that he thinks would help strengthen “family formation”, such as expanding the child tax credit and converting federal land into affordable housing.“Pronatalism is not just a fiscal program. It’s a program of restructuring society in a way that treats family goals as worthy, worth supporting and socially important,” Stone said.Asked if he supports abortion rights, Stone clarified: “No, I would draw the line at destruction of human life.”Many of these policy proposals could comfortably fit into a left-leaning political platform – in fact, they may be more at home on such a platform than within today’s Republican party. Although Vance said on the campaign trail that he would like to expand the child tax credit, a move that could cost trillions of dollars in federal spending, Republicans have instead committed to slashing the government budget by at least $1.5tn.Instead, elected Republicans have tended to invoke pronatalist rhetoric in support of their top culture-war causes.They have repeatedly condemned gender-affirming healthcare for allegedly “sterilizing” people; in 2022, as Idaho weighed whether to ban kids from accessing the care, one Republican state legislator said: “We are not talking about the life of the child, but we are talking about the potential to give life to another generation.” When a Republican lawmaker from Michigan introduced a resolution to condemn same-sex marriage, he told reporters: “This is a biological necessity to preserve and grow our human race.” And last year, in a lawsuit to cut access to a common abortion pill, the Republican attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri argued that access to the pill had “lowered birth rates for teen mothers”, leading to a falling state populations, “diminishment of political representation and loss of federal funds”.In practice, pronatalism – especially when paired with anti-abortion policy – often overlooks the disproportionate effect that having more babies has on women, according to Elizabeth Gregory, director of women’s gender and sexuality studies at the University of Houston. Childbearing can reshape a woman’s entire future.“This idea that the child is the only person in the dyad loses a real understanding of how embedded and dependent children are on their mothers,” Gregory said. “Fertility affects many, many parts of culture and talking about it can’t be reduced to just a few soundbites.”Falling birth ratesBirth rates are, indeed, on the decline. To remain stable, populations must reproduce at a “replacement rate” of 2.1; in other words, each mother must have 2.1 babies. The US currently averages closer to 1.6. (South Korea, which maintains the world’s lowest fertility rate, had a rate of just 0.75 in 2024.)Experts are split over how to address this problem. The world’s population is at a record high, and immigration to rich countries could offset declines in fertility – but, as the medical journal the Lancet warned in a 2024 issue, “this approach will only work if there is a shift in current public and political attitudes towards immigration in many lower-fertility countries”. If countries remain hostile to immigration while their birth rates fall, they will probably end up with a shrunken labor force that is unable to support an ageing population.There is evidence that Americans would like to have more children. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 47% of Americans think an ideal family has one or two children, while only 2% said families should have zero. At the same time, a Pew poll that same year found that 47% of American adults under 50 say they are unlikely to ever have children. Of those, nearly 60% say they just don’t want kids. Nearly 40% said they couldn’t afford to have kids or that the “state of the world” had convinced them not to.“We’re living in a moment where – I would say, unfortunately – marriage and parenthood have become ideologically polarized,” Wilcox said. More

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      The pink protest at Trump’s speech shows the Democrats aren’t coming to save us

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      Pretty (pathetic) in pinkHappy International Women’s Day (IWD), everyone! I’ve got some good news and some bad news to mark the occasion.The bad news is that a legally defined sexual predator is leading the most powerful country on earth and we’re seeing a global backlash against women’s rights. “[I]nstead of mainstreaming equal rights, we are seeing the mainstreaming of misogyny,” the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, said in his IWD message.The good news, for those of us in the US at least, is that the Democrats have a plan to deal with all this. Or rather, they have wardrobe concepts of a plan. On Tuesday night, Donald Trump addressed a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol. Some members from the Democratic Women’s Caucus (DWC), including Nancy Pelosi, decided to protest by … wait for it … wearing pink.“Pink is a color of power and protest,” the New Mexico representative Teresa Leger Fernández, chair of the DWC, told Time. “It’s time to rev up the opposition and come at Trump loud and clear.”The pink outfits may have been loud but the message the Democrats were sending was far from clear. They couldn’t even coordinate their colour-coordinating protest: some lawmakers turned up wearing pink while others wore blue and yellow to support Ukraine and others wore black because it was a somber occasion.Still, I’ll give the DWC their due: their embarrassing stunt seems to have garnered at least one – possibly two – fans. One MSNBC columnist, for example, wrote that the “embrace of such a traditionally feminine color [pink] by women with considerable political power makes a stunning example of subversive dressing”.For the most part, however, the general reaction appears to have been that this was yet another stunning example of how spineless and performative the Democrats are. Forget bringing a knife to a gunfight – these people are bringing pink blazers to a fight for democracy. To be fair, there were a few other attempts at protest beyond a pink palette: the Texas representative Al Green heckled the president (and was later censured by some of his colleagues for doing so) and a few Democrats left the room during Trump’s speech. Still, if this is the “opposition”, then we are all doomed.Not to mention: even the pink blazers seemed a little too extreme for certain factions of the Democratic party. House Democratic leadership reportedly urged members not to mount protests and to show restraint during Trump’s address. They also chose the Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin to give the Democratic response to Trump’s speech. While Slotkin tends to be described as a sensible centrist voice by a lot of the media, she’s very Trump-adjacent. Slotkin is one of the Democratic senators who has voted with Trump the most often and, last June, was one of the 42 Democrats to vote with the GOP to sanction the international criminal court (ICC) over its seeking of arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders for destroying Gaza. Human rights advocacy groups have warned that attacking the ICC like this undermines international law and the ability to prosecute or prevent human rights violations across the world. It speaks volumes about the US media and political class that a senator standing against international law can be called a centrist.This whole episode also speaks volumes about the Democrats’ plan for the future: it’s growing increasingly clear that, instead of actually growing a spine and fighting to improve people’s lives, the Democratic party seems to think the smartest thing to do is quietly move to the right and do nothing while the Trump administration implodes. I won’t caution against this strategy myself. Instead, I’ll let Harry Truman do it. Back in 1952, Truman said: “The people don’t want a phony Democrat. If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time.”Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that the Democrats are not coming to save us. We must save ourselves. That means organizing within our local communities and learning lessons from activists outside our communities. It means being careful not to normalize creeping authoritarianism and it means recognizing the urgency of the moment. The warning signs are flashing red: we need to respond with a hell of a lot more than a pink wardrobe.Make atomic bombings straight again!DEI Derangement Syndrome has reached such a fever-pitch in the US that a picture of the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan has been flagged for deletion at the Pentagon. Apparently, it only got the job because it was Gay.Can a clitoris be trained to read braille?The Vagina Museum addressed this very important question on Bluesky.One in eight women killed by men in the UK are over 70A landmark report by the Femicide Census looks at the deaths of 2,000 women killed by men in the UK over the last 15 years and found that the abuse of older women hasn’t had as much attention as it should. “We have to ask why we see the use of sexual and sustained violence against elderly women who are unknown to the much younger men who kill them,” the co-founder of the Femicide Census told the Guardian. “The misogynistic intent in these killings is clear.”Bacterial vaginosis (BV) may be sexually transmitted, research findsWhile this new study is small, its findings are a big deal because BV is super common – affecting up to a third of reproductive-aged women – and has long been considered as a “woman’s issue”. Treating a male partner for it, however, may reduce its recurrence.How astronaut Amanda Nguyen survived rape to fight for other victimsAfter being assaulted at age 22, Nguyen got a hospital bill for $4,863.79 for her rape kit and all the tests and medication that went along with it. She was also informed that it was standard practice for her rape kit to be destroyed after six months. “The statute of limitations is 15 years because it recognises that trauma takes time to process,” Nguyen told the Guardian in an interview. “It allows a victim to revisit that justice. But destroying the rape kit after six months prevents a survivor from being able to access vital evidence.” After her traumatic experience, Nguyen successfully fought for the right not to have your rape kit destroyed until the statute of limitations has expired, and the right not to have to pay for it to be carried out.Female doctors outnumber male peers in UK for first timeIt’s a significant milestone in what has traditionally been a male-dominated profession.There’s an Israeli TikTok trend mocking the suffering of Palestinian childrenThis is one of those things that would be front page of the New York Times if it were directed at Israelis but is getting relatively little attention because of how normalized the dehumanization of Palestinians is. It’s also just the latest in a series of social media trends mocking Palestinian suffering.Florida opens criminal investigation into Tate brothers“These guys have themselves publicly admitted to participating in what very much appears to be soliciting, trafficking, preying upon women around the world,” the state attorney general said.The week in pawtriarchyJane Fonda, a committed activist, has always fought the good fight. But she’s also apparently fought wildlife. The actor’s son recently told a Netflix podcast that Fonda once “pushed a bear out of her bedroom”. While that phrase may mean different things to different people, in this instance it was quite literal. Fonda apparently scared off a bear who had entered her grandson’s room and was sniffing the crib. Too bad nobody was there to snap a photo of the escapade – it would have been a real Kodiak moment. More