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

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

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      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

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      Trump confirms that he authorized covert CIA operations in Venezuela

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      Donald Trump confirmed reports on Wednesday that he authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela, marking a sharp escalation in US efforts to pressure President Nicolás Maduro’s regime.The New York Times first reported the classified directive, citing US officials familiar with the decision.The US president said he authorized the action for two main reasons.First, he claimed Venezuela had been releasing large numbers of prisoners, including individuals from mental health facilities, into the United States, often crossing the border due to what he described as an open border policy. Trump did not specify which border they were crossing.The second reason, he said, was the large amount of drugs entering the US from Venezuela, much of it trafficked by sea.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I think Venezuela is feeling heat,” Trump added, but declined to answer when asked if the CIA had the authority to execute Maduro. More

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      Trump says US looking at land attacks in Venezuela after lethal strikes on boats – live

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      Asked in the Oval Office if the US is considering strikes on suspected drug cartels inside Venezuela, after lethal strikes on suspected drug smugglers at sea, Donald Trump just said that the administration is “looking at land”.The president also claimed, without citing evidence, that every strike on a suspected drug smuggling speedboat saves thousands of lives in the US. “Every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 lives,” Trump said.Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, on Wednesday urged the Republican-led House oversight committee to launch an investigation into the “vile and offensive” text messages exchanged between leaders of Young Republican groups.The request follows a report in Politico that revealed more than 28,000 Telegram messages sent between Young Republican leaders over the course of seven months, in which they refer to Black people as monkeys, praise Hitler, and repeatedly make glib remarks about gas chambers, slavery and rape.“Calling for gas chambers. Expressing love for Hitler. Endorsing rape. Using racist slurs. This is not a ‘joke’, and it is not fringe,” Newsom said in a statement. “If Congress can investigate universities for failing to stop antisemitism, it must also investigate politicians’ own allies who are openly celebrating it.”With Republicans in control of the House, the oversight committee is unlikely to act.In the letter addressed to James Comer, the Republican committee chair and an ally of the president, Newsom notes that while House Republicans have made combating antisemitism a priority, few party leaders have publicly condemned the messages revealed in the report.Democrats such as the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, expressed outrage over the messages, and some GOP groups, like the Young Republican National Federation, have called for resignations.But the vice-president, JD Vance, said that he refused to “join the pearl clutching” over what he inaccurately described as “a college group chat”.Vance recently expressed support for the effort to track down, intimidate and harass people who voiced criticism of Charlie Kirk after his assassination.Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday that he might go to the supreme court next month when it hears his administration’s appeal of two prior court rulings against his imposition of sweeping tariffs under an economic emergency that appears to exist only in his mind.A trade court and an appeals court have both found that Trump exceeded his authority by imposing global tariffs citing provisions of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.On Wednesday, Trump also claimed that he had used the threat of tariffs to stop the escalation of fighting this year between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed nations.Indian officials have said that Trump’s intervention had nothing to do with the end of hostilities.Donald Trump has finished speaking in the Oval Office. After he recited a long series of previously aired grievances, he confirmed, for the first time, that he authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela, marking a sharp escalation in the administration’s apparent effort to drive the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, from power.Donald Trump just claimed that the number of Hamas fighters killed by Israel, with US support, exceeds the entire estimated death toll in the Gaza Strip in the past two years.“We, meaning Israel, but I knew everything they were doing, pretty much, I knew most of the things they were doing,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, “they’ve killed probably 70,000 of these people, Hamas.”As the United Nations reported last week, there have been 67,183 fatalities and 169,841 injuries reported to the Gaza ministry of health since 7 October 2023.The dead included 20,179 children, 10,427 women, 4,813 elderly people and 31,754 adult men.In May of this year, a joint investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call found that Israel’s military intelligence database of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters had 47,653 names. Of them, 8,900 were marked as killed or probably killed.Trump went on to claim that Hamas had agreed to surrender its weapons, but, while Hamas leaders said earlier this year that they would consider giving up the group’s heavy weapons, such as rockets and missiles, on Saturday a senior Hamas official told Agence France-Presse that disarmament was “out of the question”, adding: “The demand that we hand over our weapons is not up for negotiation.”Nevertheless, Trump said on Wednesday: “We want the weapons to be given up, sacrificed, and they’ve agreed to do it. Now they have to do it, and if they don’t do it, we’ll do it.”Asked by a reporter if that meant the US military might be directly involved in disarming the Palestinian militants, Trump replied, again apparently referring to US support for Israel’s military: “We won’t need the US military … because we’re very much involved.”To defend lethal US military strikes on suspected drug smugglers, Donald Trump just repeated his familiar but baseless claim that Venezuela “emptied” its prisons and “insane asylums” by sending incarcerated people into the United States as undocumented immigrants during the Biden administration.“Many countries have done it,” Trump claimed.As the Marshall Project reported a year ago, before the 2024 election, Trump had already made this claim more than 500 times without a shred of evidence.Asked in the Oval Office if the US is considering strikes on suspected drug cartels inside Venezuela, after lethal strikes on suspected drug smugglers at sea, Donald Trump just said that the administration is “looking at land”.The president also claimed, without citing evidence, that every strike on a suspected drug smuggling speedboat saves thousands of lives in the US. “Every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 lives,” Trump said.Kash Patel, the FBI director, is speaking to members of the press now.“In just a three-month span, you had 8,700 arrests of violent criminals. You had 2,200 firearms seized off the streets permanently, to safeguard our communities. You had 421kg of fentanyl seized. Just to put that in perspective, that’s enough to kill 55 million Americans alone,” Patel said.He then compared the number of arrests since Trump returned to the White House with the yearly arrests of violent criminals during the Biden administration.“You have 28,600 arrests of violent criminals in just seven months alone, because of your leadership,” Patel said, praising the president in the process.“It’s a mess, and we have great support in San Francisco,” Trump said of the city and California governor Gavin Newsom’s home town.“Every American deserves to live in a community where they’re not afraid of being mugged, murdered, robbed, raped, assaulted or shot, and that’s exactly what our administration is working to deliver.”Trump touted the success of federal law enforcement in Washington DC.“It’s been so nice because so many people, they’re going out to dinner, and they’re having dinners they wouldn’t, they didn’t go out for four years, and now they’re going out three times a week,” he said.He went on to complain that the only thing in his way in other major cities is “radical left governors”.The president begins his press conference saying that he’s here to talk about “Operation Summer Heat”. He’s flanked by the FBI director, Kash Patel.“Over the past few months, FBI offices in all 50 states made crushing violent crime a top enforcement priority. That’s what they did, rounding up and arresting thousands of the most violent and dangerous criminals,” Trump said.Brown University is the latest institution to reject the White House’s offer to join a “Compact of Academic Excellence” – the controversial agreement which would provide preferential treatment to colleges that carry out several of the administration’s education policies, including ending diversity initiatives and capping international student enrollment.In a letter to the education secretary, Linda McMahon, Brown’s president. Christina H Paxson, said she’s concerned the compact would “restrict academic freedom and undermine the autonomy of Brown’s governance”.She added:
      A fundamental part of academic excellence is awarding research funding on the merits of the research being proposed. The cover letter describing the compact contemplates funding research on criteria other than the soundness and likely impact of research, which would ultimately damage the health and prosperity of Americans.
      The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) became the first university to reject the invitation to join the compact, before the White House extended the option to all higher education institutes across the country.The Senate has rejected a House-passed funding bill to reopen the federal government, as the shutdown enters its 15th day.With a vote of 51-44, this is the ninth time that the funding extension has failed to meet the 60-member threshold needed to advance in the upper chamber.According to Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, the plane carrying the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, back from a meeting of Nato ministers in the UK had to make an unscheduled landing “due to a crack in the aircraft windshield”.Parnell added: “The plane landed based on standard procedures and everyone onboard, including Secretary Hegseth, is safe.”

      A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from carrying out layoffs during the ongoing government shutdown. In a lawsuit brought by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) challenging the reductions in force that the Trump administration enacted last week, Judge Susan Illston said that the mass firings across agencies, which amounted to more than 4,000 layoffs, are an example of the administration taking “advantage of the lapse in government spending, in government functioning, to assume that that all bets are off, that the laws don’t apply to them any more”. Illston blocked the administration from laying off any federal employees because of, or during, the shutdown, and has stopped them from taking action on the already issued reductions in force for at least two weeks.

      While that hearing was under way, the White House budget director maintained that the firings are far from over. Russell Vought, the director of the office of management and budget – has said that the current reductions in force are just a “snapshot”. He added that the total amount could end up being about 10,000.

      The supreme court heard two and a half hours of oral arguments today in a case that could thwart a key provision of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The conservative majority on the bench seemed sympathetic to the case, made by lawyers for Louisiana, a group of “non-African American voters” and the Trump administration. They all argue that a 2024 congressional map, which created a second majority-Black district in Louisiana, violates the constitution. If the court rules in their favor, it could ultimately diminish section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits electoral practices that dilute the voting power of minority groups. It would also limit the ability of legislatures from drawing maps with racial demographics in mind, and could cost Democrats several House seats in Republican-led states.

      Also in Washington, the government shutdown enters day 15, with no end in sight. Republicans and Democrats in Congress held press conferences at the US Capitol, and continued to exchange barbs – blaming the other party for the lapse in funding. The House speaker, Mike Johnson, said that he spoke with Donald Trump on Tuesday, adding that Republicans are “forlorn” and not taking “any pleasure” in the length of the shutdown and the mass layoffs implemented by the White House budget office. Meanwhile, Hakeem Jeffries slammed the administration for offering a $20bn cash bailout to Argentina, but not “spending a dime on affordable healthcare for Americans”. CSPAN also reported that Johnson and Jeffries have both accepted an invitation to debate on the network. The date has yet to be announced.

      Today, Johnson also accused a group of Democrats of “storming” his office, showing “disdain for law enforcement” and playing “political games”. On Tuesday evening, a group of Democrats including Adelita Grijalva, the Democratic representative-elect for Arizona, marched to Johnson’s office, chanting “swear her in” and demanding that she be seated after she won a special election in her state over three weeks ago. Arizona’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, has threatened legal action against Johnson for failing to seat Grijalva, and Grijalva said she has also been exploring her legal options for officially claiming her seat.
      In her order, Judge Illston has temporarily blocked the administration from laying off any federal employees because of or during the shutdown, and has stopped them from taking action on the already issued reductions in force for at least two weeks.She’ll lay out further details in her written ruling later today, but said that the administration will need to provide a plan outlining how they have complied with her order within two business days. Illston said that she will schedule a preliminary injunction hearing in roughly two weeks’ time. “It would be wonderful to know what the government’s position is on the merits of this case,” Illston added. “My breath is bated until we find that.”Judge Susan Illston has issued a temporary restraining order, blocking the firing of federal workers during the ongoing government shutdown. More

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      ‘He may be watching’: Mamdani on Fox News speaks directly to Trump

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      Zohran Mamdani, the leading candidate to be the next mayor of New York, stepped into the lion’s den on Wednesday when he sat for an interview with Fox News, the rightwing news organization that has spent weeks demonizing him and his democratic socialist goals.Speaking to host Martha MacCallum, Mamdani was asked about funding for his proposals, which include freezing increases on rent-stabilized apartments, providing free buses and offering free childcare – and whether other services would be cut to achieve those goals.“I don’t think we have to cut,” Mamdani said. “I’ve spoken about raising taxes on the wealthiest. And, frankly, this is an issue that we have here in New York City, and, frankly, even across this country.”Mamdani said he had spoken to people who voted for Donald Trump in New York who told him it was the “cost of living” that “drove them to vote” for the president.Mamdani said that, despite that, “what we’re seeing time and time again is we’re more focused on the question of billionaires and the most profitable corporations than we are on people who can’t even afford to make ends meet in the city”.Following his surprise victory over Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, Mamdani has for months led the polls to be New York’s next mayor. A survey released by Quinnipiac last week showed Mamdani winning 46% of the vote to the former New York governor’s 33%. The Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, was at 22%.That rise has brought attention from outlets such as Fox News, which has closely covered Mamdani, sometimes publishing multiple news stories on him a day. Jesse Watters, the network’s primetime host, has been a frequent critic, describing Mamdani as a “communist”, which he is not, and calling him “Kamala Harris with a beard”, while Sean Hannity suggested that the rise of Mamdani, who is Muslim, is evidence that “an extremism is taking root right before your very eyes”.In an interview that rehashed several rightwing critiques of Mamdani, MacCallum suggested he may lack the qualifications for the role. “President Trump said that you never worked a day in your life,” MacCallum told Mamdani, before asking what qualifies him to run the city.In response, Mamdani spoke directly into the camera, alluding to how the outgoing mayor, Eric Adams, bowed to pressure from the Trump administration to cooperate on immigration crackdowns – before the Trump-led justice department dropped a federal corruption case against him.“I want to take this moment, because you spoke about President Trump, and he may be watching right now, and I just want to speak directly to the president,” Mamdani said.“I will not be a mayor like Mayor [Eric] Adams, who will call you to figure out how to stay out of jail. I won’t be a disgraced governor like Andrew Cuomo, who will call you to ask how to win this election. I can do those things on my own. I will, however, be a mayor who is ready to speak at any time to lower the cost of living.“That’s the way that I’m going to lead this city. That’s the partnership I want to build, not only with Washington DC, but [with] anyone across this country.”The interview came as Mamdani prepared for a debate with Cuomo and Sliwa on Thursday night. Adams suspended his re-election campaign in late September.Cuomo, who has centered his campaign on reducing crime, will likely seek to contrast his decades of experience in politics with Mamdani’s newcomer status. The former governor, who resigned in 2021 after he was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, has run numerous ads attacking Mamdani.The issue of the Israel-Hamas peace deal is likely to come up, given Cuomo’s strong support for Israel and Mamdani’s opposing stance. Mamdani has criticized Israel’s war in Gaza and called the bombing of the territory a “genocide”. Mamdani was asked questions about the region on Wednesday, including whether he would give credit to Trump for the fledgling deal.Mamdani, stressing that his focus would be on New York rather than international politics, said he was thankful for the ceasefire, adding: “I have hope that it will actually endure and that it will be lasting.”“I think it’s too early to [give credit],” Mamdani said. “But if it proves to be something that is lasting, something that is durable, then I think that that’s where you give credit.” More

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      ‘My vote is my voice’: protesters fight for democracy as Trump casts shadow

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      Wearing a T-shirt proclaiming “We won’t Black down”, Wanda Mosley had made the trip from Atlanta. “I had to be here because the Voting Rights Act is on life support,” the 55-year-old explained. “Today the court will synthesise the arguments and decide if they’re going to kill it – or allow it to live.”Mosley was among a few hundred protesters who gathered in warm October sunshine outside the supreme court on Wednesday. Inside the building, whose facade was obscured by scaffolding, justices were weighing arguments in a case involving Louisiana electoral districts and section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.From afar, it might seem like a dry debate over an arcane law enacted by Congress half a century ago. But to those gathered at the court steps, most of whom were Black, there was a palpable consciousness that the legacy of civil rights giants such as Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King and John Lewis was on the line.Speakers noted that the Voting Rights Act had been a landmark law intended to prevent racial discrimination in voting. Undercutting it would reverse decades of progress.People held aloft signs that said “Black voters matter”, “Build Black political power”, “Fight for fair maps”, “Fight like hell!”, “It’s about us”, “My vote is my voice”, “Protect people, not power”. One said, “Protect our vote” around a photo of Lewis, the Georgia congressman who died five years ago.Donald Trump cast a shadow. An African American man waved a black-and-white flag that declared: “Fuck Trump and fuck you for voting for him.” A white woman carried a sign with a mocking cartoon image of the president and the slogan: “Trump’s afraid of free and fair elections.”Another held a sign that referenced Marshall, the first African American supreme court justice, and current justice Clarence Thomas, a conservative who is also African American. “Thurgood is watching you, Clarence,” it said. The back of the sign added: “Stop legalizing Trump’s race war.”There were chants of “Power to the people” and “We shall not be moved”. Songs including Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come, Common and John Legend’s Glory and Jill Scott’s Golden boomed from loudspeakers.Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, admitted mixed feelings to the crowd: “There’s a part of me that gets sad at the impending death of this thing that has meant so much. I feel that sadness. There’s a part of me that feels weak, that feels small as I stand outside this huge building with so much history.”But Albright also insisted on hope, referencing Lewis’s role in the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965, where he led peaceful protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “When we believe, we got the power to move mountains, we got the power to cross the bridge in a city called Selma and changed the course of history.“We got the power to make good trouble and we’ve got the power to move this court. This court ain’t nothing but another mountain for us to move. We’ve got that kind of power but we’ve got to believe, y’all.”A great cheer went up when Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who had been arguing on behalf of a group of Black voters, emerged from the court building and descended the steps that have witnessed many past triumphs. Two white women in police uniform and sunglasses looked on.Nelson struck an optimistic tone, telling the gathering: “We believe in the future of this multiracial democracy. We believe that, no matter what assaults and attacks we are currently facing, the right to vote is still the lifeblood of our democracy and that it must be protected at all costs.“And we know that the law is on our side. We know that if these justices follow their own words, we will prevail in this case and so that is the argument that we made today.”Speakers framed the legal fight as the latest chapter in a long, generational struggle for civil rights, frequently invoking the movement’s heroes.Terri Sewell, a Democratic congresswoman who represents Alabama’s seventh congressional district, which includes her home town of Selma, said: “I want to remind all of you of what John Lewis said on his very last time on that bridge in Selma.“John’s body was riddled with cancer but he stood up tall and strong at the apex of that bridge and he said with a very strong voice: ‘Never give up. Never give in. Keep the faith and let’s keep our eyes on the prize.’”Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, cited King’s “promissory note” analogy from the March on Washington, stating that “America had defaulted on that promise” and that generations later the question remains: “When will this country make good on what it put down on paper?”As the crowd dispersed, Mosley, the activist from Atlanta, lingered a while and reflected on why she had come. “It’s frustrating because I’m as American as anybody else,” she said. “I’m a descendant of enslaved Africans that literally built this country.“I deserve to have unfettered rights to vote, and I deserve to have representation that lives in my neighborhood, that comes from my community and knows what our community needs. And we’ll fight for those things.” More

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      ‘The city that draws the line’: one Arizona community’s fight against a huge datacenter

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      A company’s opaque plan to build a huge datacenter outside Tucson, Arizona has roiled the desert city over the past few months, the latest US community to push back as tech companies aggressively seek to build out infrastructure for cloud computing and to power the AI boom.The proposed datacenter, known as Project Blue, would span 290 acres in Pima county, and become the biggest development ever in the county, or anywhere in the southern part of the state.The $3.6bn project wasn’t on most Tucsonans’ radar until 17 June, when the county board of supervisors narrowly agreed to sell and rezone a parcel of land just south-east of town to the developer Beale Infrastructure.The San Francisco-based company hoped to get the project annexed by the city, a necessary step for it to be supplied by the public utility, Tucson Water.But since the parcel sale agreement, the proposed center has faced stiff pushback from a community upset over the enormous amounts of water and electricity it would require, and the lack of transparency with which the developers and some in local government have pursued the project.Conflict over the project made what is normally a sleepy time for Tucson politics – the city council is off in July amid searing heat and, with luck, monsoon downpours – into “the craziest seven weeks I’ve seen in Tucson”, said Michael Bogan, an aquatic ecologist and hydrologist at the University of Arizona who has long worked in the area.View image in fullscreenThe episode in Tucson illustrates the secretiveness and tenacity with which developers are rushing to build datacenters throughout the US, and the emotionally charged mix of issues that confront communities, weighing sometimes murky promises of economic incentives and jobs against effects on the environment and natural resources.In Memphis, Elon Musk’s xAI built one of the world’s biggest supercomputers, bringing in tax revenue to an economically depressed area, while also setting off a battle over air quality concerns related to the development’s methane turbines. Phoenix has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of datacenters, which keeps expanding, encouraged by tax incentives and local business leaders; local opposition and ordinances around noise pollution and water use are also on the rise. High-profile projects have been postponed or cancelled due to local pushback in recent months in northern Virginia, the nation’s biggest datacenter hub; in St Charles, Missouri; and in several towns in Indiana.But in even more locations, datacenters are moving forward, often under a cloud of secrecy.Quest for AI computing powerThe project in Tucson is one of many emerging in the quest for AI computing power and to serve data-intensive companies.The project envisions a vast warehouse full of computers in the Sonoran desert, including $2.4bn worth of equipment. Community outrage over the project grew soon after the city council’s 17 June vote, and much of it centered around the issue of water.Datacenters use water in two ways: to maintain a steady humidity, and to cool off the hot computers, which is often accomplished by running cold water past the machines, consuming water in the form of steam.Communities throughout the US have seen groundwater depletion and contamination after datacenters crept up. Tucson has long embraced water conservation, and this protective ethos is more salient there than many other communities, said Ed Hendel, president of Sky Island AI, a Tucson-based company. As one example, the city treats wastewater and releases it to the Santa Cruz River, home to wildlife such as endangered fish.Hendel’s daily work relies on datacenters, but he said they should be built where they make sense. Placing water-guzzling warehouses of computers “in a hot desert is not a good starting point”, he said. “Putting them in a hot desert in the midst of a drought is even more absurd, because that water is precious.”View image in fullscreenBeale did not detail exactly how much water it would use and from where in the weeks after the June vote, even though it claimed the project would be “water positive”. In the absence of details, Bogan set out to analyze how the project would be water positive, projecting it would be most likely to use treated water that now flows into the Santa Cruz. But even if the company went that route, Bogan wrote in a white paper on 11 July, it could dry up significant portions of the river, harming the many plants and animals that live there.The city manager, Tim Thomure, acting as an intermediary between Beale and the public, released the first concrete details about the project’s planned water use in mid-July after Bogan’s white paper came out: Project Blue would not affect the Santa Cruz River, he said. It would use three sources of water, including from two locations where treated wastewater is currently stored underground for future use, as well as the Tucson airport remediation plant, which treats contaminated groundwater that currently stays on site. And it gave an estimate of water use: over 1,900 acre-feet, or 620m gallons, enough to supply more than four typical 18-hole Pima county golf courses, according to Thomure.Beale also pledged to invest $100m in a pipeline to transport and use treated wastewater, and create 180 jobs.But this is not “water positive”, and it would rather cause “net depletion of our groundwater resources to supply Project Blue”, said Bogan, the aquatic ecologist. He pointed to a city document which notes that if Project Blue were to use more groundwater than it could replenish, it could make payments, or “water positivity rates” to make up for it.Lisa Shipek, executive director of southern Arizona’s Watershed Management Group, agreed with Bogan’s assessment. By possibly paying for using up groundwater, Project Blue, Shipek said, would potentially “replace wet water with ‘paper water’”. The tactic – paying for consuming wet water, or offsetting it in another way, whether in the form of water conservation or education measures – has been used to deplete groundwater throughout the world.Water not the only concernWater wasn’t community members’ only concern. Beale Infrastructure is not a typical developer, but rather a subsidiary of the asset management company Blue Owl. On 21 July, the local news site Arizona Luminaria published a story revealing that Pima county staff possessed a memo stating that Project Blue would be financed by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The story prompted fresh outcry from community members frustrated with Amazon’s anti-union actions, and overtures by its owner, Jeff Bezos, to the Trump administration.An AWS spokesperson said: “AWS has previously engaged in standard due diligence processes in Arizona, like we do in any geographic location we consider building and operating our infrastructure. We do not have any commitments or agreements in place to develop this project.”But the company declined to answer a question about whether AWS was affiliated with Project Blue in the past, or, potentially, in the future.A Beale spokesperson said: “We cannot comment on our tenants until a more advanced stage of the project.”Another wrinkle that added to the uproar was a news release from Tucson Electric Power (TEP) put out hours after the county vote on 17 June, announcing it was requesting a 14% rate increase to offset grid investments and inflation. With datacenters driving up electricity demand across the country, many community members assumed the rate hike was related to Project Blue, said the county supervisor, Matt Heinz.It wasn’t. The timing was coincidental, and a huge mistake, he said. “It’s unfortunately really plagued this whole project.”A TEP spokesperson, Joseph Barrios, said that the rate increase had nothing to do with Project Blue, but was based on costs already incurred in 2024 and before.View image in fullscreen“We understand that any rate increase could have an impact on our customers and it’s not something we take lightly,” he said.Outrage over Project Blue grew rapidly over the summer. Eliseo Gomez, a local high school teacher and organizer, convened with a small group at the base of Tucson’s “A” mountain shortly after the 17 June vote. “We were like: what can we do?” They decided to target the annexation vote. The group started a website and social media channels named No Desert Data Center, encouraging people to express their concerns with the mayor and city council.In response, the city arranged for two public meetings with presentations from Beale Infrastructure, as well as Tucson Water and TEP. The majority of attenders at both meetings were clearly opposed, most wearing red shirts saying “no to Project Blue” or holding protest signs. Union members, enticed by promises of construction jobs, made up a supportive minority at the events. Attenders grew increasingly upset, Gomez said, as they felt their concerns and queries were dodged or ignored. By the second meeting, on 4 August, many locals appeared fed up. Beale executives gave similar speeches, without providing much further detail, incensing the crowd, whose boos and shouts made it difficult for presenters to continue.Many citizens presented their own research. “I feel like I learned more about Project Blue from the public than the city,” said city councilman Rocque Perez.On 6 August, in an unscheduled vote, council members unanimously decided to discontinue discussions with Beale, each sharing short speeches revealing sharp opposition to Project Blue. Tucsonans packing the council chambers cheered and celebrated; Beale executives, appearing stunned, were booed as they left.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionImpact on Tucson politicsStill, Beale hasn’t given up. In mid-September, the company proposed moving forward with an air-cooled system that uses less water than the original design. Beale co-filed a state application with the TEP, to be supplied with up to 286 megawatts – enough to power to up to 250,000 homes.In a statement, Beale has described the new design as a closed-loop system that “uses minimal amounts of water that are continuously recirculated, thereby eliminating water loss”.Several local leaders said the Republican-led Arizona Corporation Commission, which oversees electricity use in the state, is likely to approve the project’s electricity request. That would mean Beale’s main remaining hurdle is finding a water source. The company has not said how it would obtain any such water, however, and given the city council’s vote, they cannot be supplied by the city’s public utility.Meanwhile, the controversy has had a profound impact on Tucson politics. Even supporters acknowledge the Project Blue process started poorly, partly because non-disclosure agreements between Beale and city staff dating back to 2022 meant that most elected leaders knew little to nothing about it until some time this year.Supervisor Jennifer Allen said the first meeting between Beale and the board in late May was short on details, including water use, and her requests for more information turned up nothing concrete. It was “a lot of greenwashing”, she said. She voted no on 17 June, as did her colleague Andrés Cano.Heinz, a longtime Democrat, said he voted for the rezoning and sale because the project had long been championed by city staff, including city manager Thomure, and because the tens of thousands of hi-tech jobs in the area will need access to nearby datacenters.Though there weren’t detailed water use estimates at first, Heinz said he wasn’t worried as Beale would be working with Tucson Water and the city would be “putting in those guardrails”.View image in fullscreenThe new design, he said, “will be an even better fit for southern Arizona”.“I frankly wish they’d approached us with this air-cooled design to begin with.”Heinz, as well as supervisors Rex Scott and Steve Christy, have come under withering scrutiny from constituents, who have implored the board to revisit the sale agreement. Heinz said that wasn’t going to happen. “There’s no vote before the board,” Heinz said. “It’s done. And I don’t want to reverse it.”Scott acknowledged that NDAs played a negative role in the affair and noted that both the county and city had already implemented new guidelines for handling them, which should grant more transparency to the process, Scott said.The city council has also since passed new rules to give more transparency and oversight over big water users, and they are developing specific guidelines and guard-rails to govern any future proposed data centers.‘Cities across the country are being sold the same story’While Beale’s air-cooled system may use less water, it has highlighted the other enormous costs of datacenters: electricity. Air-cooled systems use huge amounts of energy and are less energy efficient – especially in a desert where the daily average high is 29C (84F).It’s now a national issue – a 2024 report to Congress co-authored by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher AB Siddik estimates that datacenters consumed 4.4% of the nation’s total electricity as of 2023, which could rise to as much as 12% by 2028.TEP’s involvement has brought scrutiny to the private utility; locals have recently been protesting at their headquarters. On 23 September, the mayor and council announced they plan to intervene in the utility’s request to the state for the rate hike, saying in a statement such an increase “will strain families and small businesses and slow the transition to clean, affordable energy”.View image in fullscreenThe saga has also raised the possibility that the Tucsonans or their leaders could consider pursuing a public utility to replace TEP when its contract is due for review in 2025, though that could be an enormous effort, Perez said.“I’m disappointed that Tucson Electric Power is partnering with Beale despite strong community concerns,” said councilman Kevin Dahl. “It certainly makes an argument for public power.”TEP spokesperson Joseph Barrios said that the utility’s involvement with Project Blue would not raise customers’ rates or affect their service.“We have an obligation to serve, and that includes all customers within our service area,” Barrios said.As far as the possibility of public power, “we feel our community is better served by continuing to work together”, he added.Council member and vice-mayor Lane Santa Cruz said this wasn’t just about Tucson, though.“What’s happening here isn’t unique to us: cities across the country are being sold the same story, with promises of jobs, innovation and progress,” she said. “But what’s not being talked about is who really benefits and what it costs us.”Too often, she added, these projects are extractive, using a community’s water, electricity, and labor – while providing only a small number of jobs – instead of being a sustainable partner.“We need to be the city that draws the line,” she said. 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      Where do babies come from? Robert F Kennedy Jr doesn’t seem to know | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr is the father of six children. He’s also the US health secretary. Two facts that might lead a reasonable person to assume he possesses a basic understanding of how foetuses develop.In a shocking development, however, it seems that Kennedy – an anti-vaxxer who says his brain was partly eaten by a parasitic worm – may not know what he’s talking about. During a cabinet meeting last Thursday, Kennedy reasserted unproven claims that taking the common painkiller acetaminophen, also known as Tylenol or paracetamol, while pregnant causes autism. Doubters of this theory, he said, were motivated by Trump derangement syndrome. To underscore his point, he referenced a TikTok video he’d seen of a pregnant woman “gobbling Tylenol with her baby in her placenta”.Foetuses, of course, develop in the uterus, not the placenta. It’s possible, if we are being generous, that Kennedy misspoke. Then again, he would hardly be the first US politician to make it clear he knows nothing about the female bodies he is so keen to legislate, would he?In 2019, for example, 25 Republicans – all white men – voted for a near-total ban on abortion in Alabama. During the debate, Clyde Chambliss, one of the bill’s sponsors in the Senate, noted that while he didn’t have medical training, “from what I’ve read, what I’ve been told, there’s some period of time before you can know that a woman is pregnant … It takes some time for all those chromosomes and all that.” Chambliss went on to say the generous bill allowed a woman to end her pregnancy “up until the point she is known to be pregnant”. Yeah, I don’t know what he means either.Then there’s the Ohio Republican John Becker, who once co-sponsored a bill prohibiting insurers from covering abortion services, except for a procedure “intended to reimplant” an ectopic pregnancy in a woman’s uterus. This is medically impossible. After this was pointed out, Becker said he’d never actually researched the issue.And there’s the Idaho lawmaker who once asked if a woman could swallow a small camera so doctors could conduct a remote gynaecological exam. No, he was told by a doctor, because swallowed pills don’t end up in your vagina. “Fascinating,” he replied.I could go on; I’m afraid there are endless examples. But I’ll end with the late Todd Akin, a conservative Missouri Republican, who said in 2012 that “legitimate rape” rarely results in pregnancy because “the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down”. Yep, that same crafty female body that grows babies in its placenta. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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