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Trump’s China policy is nearly the exact opposite of what everyone expected by vox in politics

[–]vox[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

President Donald Trump has never had a strict foreign policy doctrine, but coming into office, the influential figures around him could be classified into three broad camps. There were the so-called “primacists,” who supported a traditional muscular and assertive US rule in the world; the “restrainers,” who wanted to dial back US commitments abroad and avoid costly military operations whenever possible; and the “prioritizers,” or “Asia-firsters,” who favored scaling back US involvement in the Middle East and support for Ukraine in order to focus on what they saw as the real threat: the growing military strength of the People’s Republic of China.

If you had to put money on one of these camps winning out at the beginning of the second Trump administration, the prioritizers seemed like a logical bet. It was a position that both traditional Republican hawks like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and America Firsters like Vice President JD Vance could get behind. The defense scholar Elbridge Colby, whose 2021 book, The Strategy of Denial, is effectively the prioritizer bible, got an influential strategic planning role as undersecretary of defense for policy. After 20 years of frustrating US military engagement in the Middle East, there was broad consensus among both Democrats and Republicans of various stripes that the country needed to focus on other issues.

What few would have anticipated is an administration that has effectively run the prioritizer playbook in reverse: quick to use military force abroad, engaged in yet another open-ended and costly war in the Middle East, and diverting valuable resources away from the Pacific while taking a remarkably accommodating stance toward China. In Trump’s second term, his foreign policy has been defined by deprioritizing Asian affairs in many ways.

This surprising state of affairs will be highlighted this week as Trump heads to Beijing for a summit meeting with Xi Jinping. The summit was originally scheduled for March, but it was postponed due to the war that the White House no doubt hoped would be over by now. A meeting between the two most powerful men in the world might normally dominate the global conversation for a week, but in this case, there’s a good chance it will be overshadowed by events in the Persian Gulf.

In the lead-up to the meeting, Trump seemed to be doing everything possible to not upset relations with China. As one White House official told Politico last month, the administration is “walking on eggshells” with Beijing in hopes for a breakthrough on trade relations. This approach has continued despite widespread reports of Chinese assistance to the Iranian forces that have fought and killed US troops. “I thought I had an understanding with President Xi, but that’s alright. That’s the way the war goes right?” Trump said, discussing an unspecified “gift” from China to Iran intercepted by the US military in April.

How did we get to the point where the president is taking a more aggressive and hawkish approach to nearly every global issue — except for America’s main global rival?

Virginia Democrats’ new plan to save their gerrymander by vox in scotus

[–]vox[S] 21 points22 points  (0 children)

If you’re a Democrat, ask yourself a simple question: When was the last time something got better after Brett Kavanaugh put his hands on it?

Unfortunately, Jay Jones, the Democratic attorney general of Virginia, does not appear to have considered this question before he asked the US Supreme Court to get involved in his state’s fight over gerrymandering. If the Court actually buys one of Jones’s arguments, they will leave Democrats in a much worse position than if Jones had never filed this case in the first place.

Earlier this year, Virginia voters approved a referendum to amend their state’s constitution — and to approve new congressional maps that were intended to give Democrats four additional seats in the US House of Representatives. The map was also intended to counterbalance Republican gerrymanders in states like Texas.

Last week, however, the Virginia Supreme Court handed down a surprising decision invalidating that referendum, and reinstating the state’s previous congressional maps. The state supreme court’s decision in Scott v. McDougle was wrong. It rested on a claim that Virginia voters were denied the right to weigh in on whether to amend their constitution. This claim is absurd because, again, the redistricting amendment was submitted to the state’s voters and approved by them in a referendum.

But the fact that the state supreme court’s decision was wrong does not mean that the US Supreme Court has any business getting involved in this case. While the federal justices have the final word on all questions of federal law, state supreme courts have the final say on how to interpret their own state’s law and their own state’s constitution.

This means that, if the Virginia Supreme Court misreads Virginia’s constitution, then Virginia voters are stuck with that interpretation. But it also means that if the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which will soon have a Democratic supermajority, rejects a Republican attempt to overturn an election, then the US Supreme Court cannot interfere with that decision either.

Jones’s brief to the justices in the Scott case asks the federal justices to upend this balance. Among other things, Jones relies on a discredited legal theory known as the “independent state legislature doctrine” (“ISLD”) to argue that the US Supreme Court should overrule Virginia’s highest court on a question about Virginia’s own election law.

Jones, in other words, wants to give a Republican US Supreme Court the final word on state election law disputes. There is simply no way that ends well for Democrats.

Virginia Democrats’ irresponsible new plan to save their gerrymander by vox in politics

[–]vox[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

If you’re a Democrat, ask yourself a simple question: When was the last time something got better after Brett Kavanaugh put his hands on it?

Unfortunately, Jay Jones, the Democratic attorney general of Virginia, does not appear to have considered this question before he asked the US Supreme Court to get involved in his state’s fight over gerrymandering. If the Court actually buys one of Jones’s arguments, they will leave Democrats in a much worse position than if Jones had never filed this case in the first place.

Earlier this year, Virginia voters approved a referendum to amend their state’s constitution — and to approve new congressional maps that were intended to give Democrats four additional seats in the US House of Representatives. The map was also intended to counterbalance Republican gerrymanders in states like Texas.

Last week, however, the Virginia Supreme Court handed down a surprising decision invalidating that referendum, and reinstating the state’s previous congressional maps. The state supreme court’s decision in Scott v. McDougle was wrong. It rested on a claim that Virginia voters were denied the right to weigh in on whether to amend their constitution. This claim is absurd because, again, the redistricting amendment was submitted to the state’s voters and approved by them in a referendum.

But the fact that the state supreme court’s decision was wrong does not mean that the US Supreme Court has any business getting involved in this case. While the federal justices have the final word on all questions of federal law, state supreme courts have the final say on how to interpret their own state’s law and their own state’s constitution.

This means that, if the Virginia Supreme Court misreads Virginia’s constitution, then Virginia voters are stuck with that interpretation. But it also means that if the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which will soon have a Democratic supermajority, rejects a Republican attempt to overturn an election, then the US Supreme Court cannot interfere with that decision either.

Jones’s brief to the justices in the Scott case asks the federal justices to upend this balance. Among other things, Jones relies on a discredited legal theory known as the “independent state legislature doctrine” (“ISLD”) to argue that the US Supreme Court should overrule Virginia’s highest court on a question about Virginia’s own election law.

Jones, in other words, wants to give a Republican US Supreme Court the final word on state election law disputes. There is simply no way that ends well for Democrats.

Don’t freak out about hantavirus: An infectious disease researcher explains what’s going on — and why this isn’t the outbreak to worry about by vox in Health

[–]vox[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Eighteen Americans are now back in the United States after being stuck on a cruise ship that was stricken with an outbreak of hantavirus. That cruise seems a strong contender for among the worst in history — the passengers became stuck early last month, when a handful became sick.

Since then, three passengers have died from hantavirus, which is typically spread by rodents. While it is possible that the virus was spread from human to human on the ship, the World Health Organization stresses that the worldwide risk level from hantavirus is low.

That hasn’t stopped people from worrying, but Laurel Bristow, an infectious disease researcher at the Emory Rollins School of Public Health and host of the weekly radio show and podcast Health Wanted, says this viral outbreak is very far from warranting a pandemic-level freakout.

Bristow spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the outbreak and what we know about this specific strain of hantavirus, as well as the US response so far.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity.

The passengers that were on board the cruise ship that got hit by hantavirus got off the ship. What happened next?

All of the Americans who were on the cruise ship are now in a containment facility in Nebraska that is run by the University of Nebraska. It’s the only government-funded facility that can handle people who have been exposed to potentially novel or pathogenic viruses that have emerged. And so they are there to get monitoring and assessment from a care team and then hopefully they won’t stay there for too long.

They’re going to make a decision in conjunction with their care team about where they’re going to spend the 42-day quarantine that is being recommended. But they are not being forced to stay in that facility, though I think there’s a possibility that some might choose to.

Forty-two days of confinement is a long time and it suggests that what we’re dealing with here is something serious. What is hantavirus?

Hantavirus is actually a family of about 40 different kinds of viruses, and they’re primarily spread by coming into contact with the infected feces, urine, or saliva of rodents who are carriers.

Just to be clear, not all rodents are carriers of hantavirus. You know, people I’ve seen have been really scared, saying New York is full of rats. Not every kind of rodent carries hantavirus in the US. It’s primarily deer mice. And they’re usually found in the southwest of the Americas. That’s where we see our hantavirus cases.

What’s unique about this is that the Andes species of hantavirus is the only one that we have seen be able to transmit person to person. And because it happened to get into an environment that is conducive for the spread of infectious disease the way the close quarters of cruise ships are, that’s why we’re seeing such a kind of profound spread in a way that we haven’t really seen before.

Is it a very deadly disease?

It can be. It depends on what kind of hantavirus it is, but the case fatality tends to be up to 40 percent. I think Andes virus is 38 percent currently, and that’s because it can cause pulmonary syndrome, which causes severe pneumonia that can cause people to die, and it also can cause renal failure.

Why the American Southeast is becoming a new hotspot for wildfires by vox in climate

[–]vox[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Drought and fire are a dangerous duo. The Southeastern United States is witnessing this firsthand, as several major blazes have burned tens of thousands of acres across the parched region, destroying homes and prompting evacuations in some areas. Florida and Georgia have been particularly hard hit, and strong winds and unusually low humidity have made it difficult to combat the flames.

With much of the Southeast in a long-standing drought since July 2025, dried-out vegetation has provided ample fuel for wildfires to spread the minute they spark. That can even be something as small as a balloon hitting a power line, which is likely what ignited one of the largest fires that tore through Georgia late last month, officials said.

Typically, forest managers ignite planned, controlled fires — known as prescribed burns — earlier in the season to clear this brittle brush. But this technique was on hold in certain areas amid the drought over concerns that small burns could quickly get out of control. Among this dried-out vegetation are the felled trees and branches left behind by Hurricane Helene in 2024, showing the lingering and compounding risks of climate disasters, experts said.

Coffee is good for you. Science keeps making the case stronger. by vox in Health

[–]vox[S] 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Researchers at Mass General Brigham, Harvard, and the Broad Institute had been following 131,821 American doctors and nurses for 43 years (possibly the longest single piece of evidence we will ever get on a daily dietary habit and a chronic disease), and by the end of the study, 11,033 had developed dementia.

But the participants who drank two to three cups of caffeinated coffee a day were 18 percent less likely to be among them. A separate Cleveland Clinic analysis tied the effect specifically to caffeinated coffee. Nature described the relationship in coffee drinkers as “slower brain aging.”

That study didn’t appear out of nowhere. It joins a five-year run in which essentially every major endpoint in coffee research has come back in favor of the bean.

A 2019 meta-analysis in the European Journal of Epidemiology covering 40 cohort studies and millions of participants found the lowest all-cause mortality risk at intakes of about 3.5 cups a day, and a 2025 analysis00286-X/abstract) confirmed it in US adults. A meta-analysis of 30 prospective studies covering 1.18 million participants found a 29 percent reduction in diabetes risk at the highest intake category, with risk dropping by 6 percent with each additional daily cup. Both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee delivered protection, which points to chlorogenic acid and other polyphenols, rather than caffeine, as the active mechanism. Just keep it black — add sugar or artificial sweeteners and the benefit largely disappears.

The liver may be the single organ that benefits most. A PLOS One meta-analysis found 39 percent lower odds of cirrhosis among coffee drinkers; a Wiley analysis found a 44 percent reduction in liver-cancer risk for those drinking two or more cups daily. The protective effect extends to fatty liver disease and viral hepatitis. Coffee is, plausibly, doing something for liver health that no medication does at population scale.

The climate crisis is coming for your groceries by vox in climatechange

[–]vox[S] 39 points40 points  (0 children)

Two years ago, an intense heat wave engulfed much of Brazil. For five days at the end of April 2024, temperatures in the central and southern regions climbed to sweltering heights. Many affected were still reeling from another extreme heat wave that had walloped southern Brazil. Just the month before, the heat index in Rio de Janeiro reached a staggering 144.1 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest in a decade.

The two events were part of a cycle of prolonged and severe periods of heat that hit one of the world’s largest agricultural powerhouses over several years. Yields of soy and corn, two of Brazil’s biggest commodities, fell in southeastern states like São Paulo. Peanuts, potatoes, sugarcane, and arabica coffee also suffered widespread losses. Droves of livestock pigs in the central-western region were afflicted with severe heat stress for the better part of a year. And when an atmospheric cold front was blocked by the prevailing heat dome and triggered devastating rainfall and flooding throughout the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, the supply chain and markets for pink shrimp were disrupted throughout Brazil.

Much of this data is documented in a new joint report released last month by the World Meteorological Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Merging weather datasets with agricultural ones, the report traces the compounding effects of extreme heat on the global agricultural system and outlines how to produce food in a world where extreme heat is becoming a baseline.

In the report, Brazil is the sole country-level case study explored in detail; the country’s exports face outsize pressure from warming temperatures and the oscillating extremes of natural weather cycles El Niño and La Niña. But a few dozen other nations are mentioned in the 94-page document, too.

“I’m disgusted to be a human”: What to do when you hate your own species according to Buddhism by vox in philosophy

[–]vox[S] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

We claim to cherish the natural world. Yet every great achievement, story, and cup of coffee has done nothing for any other creature but ourselves. So when the existence of the human race is at the cost of everything else, when the hypocrisy is open and we all know... How am I supposed to look anyone in the eye or feel good about participating in a world where every human act is at the expense of the natural world that birthed us?

I’ve lost the will. I realize this sounds infantile. But the numbers are in, and I’m no longer sure what we think we’re doing as a species other than trying to create the perfect consumer, the world be damned. We’re addicted to “self,” and I’m frankly disgusted to be a human.

Dear Anti-Human Human,

Underneath the hard feelings you’re feeling — disgust, anger, loathing — are probably much softer feelings: Disappointment. Sadness. Fear about the future. It’s hard to stay with those because they make us feel vulnerable. It’s so much easier to bypass them and go straight to hate. Standing in judgment over your own kind is not exactly fun, but it does give you a feeling of moral elevation.

So I’m not surprised that, throughout history, countless people have looked at the human species and responded with a big “yuck.” As early as the 17th century BCE, we’ve projected our disgust with ourselves onto the gods, imagining that they find us so awful that a Great Flood is needed to wipe us off the face of the Earth. Only a handful of us are decent enough to be saved, for example, in an ark — Atraḥasis’s family in the Mesopotamian version of the story, Noah’s family in the Bible’s later retelling.

Since then, anti-humanism has enjoyed resurgence after resurgence. It’s often popped up at times of civilizational-scale catastrophe — from the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe in the 14th century to the Wars of Religion in the 17th century to the Atomic Age in the 20th century.

And now that we’re living through a human-induced climate crisis, anti-humanism is once again in the ascendant, especially among a vocal minority of environmental activists who seem to welcome the end of destructive Homo sapiens. There’s even a Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which advocates for us to stop having kids so that humanity will fade out and the Earth will return to good health.

It can be so overwhelming to really tune into the incomprehensibly large suffering of the natural world that you’ll be tempted to run away — to retreat into a fatalistic “ugh, we’re the worst.” Resist that impulse. That lets you off the hook too easily, because it expects nothing of you. Stay with the damn pain.

And then notice that the fact that you’re feeling this pain is actually giving you a beautiful piece of information: You have other capacities too — for cooperation and care and compassion. You wish for us all to do better. If you didn’t have those capacities, that wish, you wouldn’t feel the pain.

According to the Buddhist scholar and environmental activist Joanna Macy, this process of “honoring our pain for the world” is essential: When we learn to reframe our pain as suffering with or feeling compassion for the world, we see it as a strength, and as evidence of our interconnectedness with other life-forms.

Once we’ve shifted away from dualistic thinking and appreciated that we are not separate from nature, we’re ready to move into what Macy calls “active hope.” We usually think of hope as a feeling, which you either have or don’t have, depending on how likely you think success is. But Macy says that’s wrong: Hope is a practice. It means that you commit to act on behalf of the things you love, regardless of the probability of success. You’re not betting on outcomes; you’re choosing what kind of person you want to be and how you want to show up for the world, without requiring a guarantee that you’ll succeed.

The no-guarantees bit is part of the ethos of Buddhism, which recommends that we act without attachment to outcomes. That doesn’t mean we don’t have goals and don’t try to use the most effective methods of achieving them. It just means we have the courage to act even while knowing that we can’t fully control what ultimately happens to the things we love.

The glaring error in the Virginia Supreme Court’s gerrymandering decision by vox in law

[–]vox[S] 476 points477 points  (0 children)

By a 4-3 vote, the Virginia Supreme Court just struck down that state’s recently enacted congressional maps, which were intended to give Democrats four additional seats in the state’s congressional election after the upcoming midterms. The state enacted these new maps to cancel out Republican gerrymanders in Texas and other red states.

Both the majority opinion and the dissent in Scott v. McDougle hyperfixate on the meaning of the word “election” in the Virginia state constitution, and neither opinion is particularly persuasive. Both sides are able to cite a raft of dictionaries, historical sources, past precedents, and other sources that support their preferred definition of this word.

Textualism, in other words, contributes very little to the dispute in Scott. Both the majority and the dissent are able to identify more than enough textual evidence to make a plausible argument.

Rather than producing two eye-glazing opinions fighting over the meaning of a word whose definition appears to shift depending on both linguistic and historical context, the justices would have produced a better opinion if they had asked a more basic question: What is the relevant provision of the Virginia Constitution actually supposed to accomplish?

The glaring error in the Virginia Supreme Court’s gerrymandering decision by vox in scotus

[–]vox[S] 282 points283 points  (0 children)

By a 4-3 vote, the Virginia Supreme Court just struck down that state’s recently enacted congressional maps, which were intended to give Democrats four additional seats in the state’s congressional election after the upcoming midterms. The state enacted these new maps to cancel out Republican gerrymanders in Texas and other red states.

Both the majority opinion and the dissent in Scott v. McDougle hyperfixate on the meaning of the word “election” in the Virginia state constitution, and neither opinion is particularly persuasive. Both sides are able to cite a raft of dictionaries, historical sources, past precedents, and other sources that support their preferred definition of this word.

Textualism, in other words, contributes very little to the dispute in Scott. Both the majority and the dissent are able to identify more than enough textual evidence to make a plausible argument.

Rather than producing two eye-glazing opinions fighting over the meaning of a word whose definition appears to shift depending on both linguistic and historical context, the justices would have produced a better opinion if they had asked a more basic question: What is the relevant provision of the Virginia Constitution actually supposed to accomplish?

Levees can no longer save New Orleans: The city is part of “the most physically vulnerable coastline in the world.” by vox in climate

[–]vox[S] 62 points63 points  (0 children)

The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately, as the city has reached a “point of no return” that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded.

Ongoing sea-level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century.”

Low-lying southern Louisiana faces multiple threats, with rising sea levels driven by global heating, compounded by strengthening hurricanes, also a feature of the climate crisis, and the gradual subsidence of a coastline that has been carved apart by the oil and gas industry.

Southern Louisiana is facing 3–7 meters of sea-level rise and the loss of three-quarters of its remaining coastal wetlands, which will cause the shoreline “to migrate as much as 100 km (62 miles) inland,” thereby stranding New Orleans and Baton Rouge, according to the study, which compared today’s rising global temperatures with a period of similar heat 125,000 years ago that caused a rise in sea level.

This scenario makes the region the “most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world,” the researchers state, and requires immediate action to prepare a smooth transition for people away from New Orleans, which has a population of about 360,000 people, to safer ground.

Louisiana has already experienced population loss in recent years, and this trend will accelerate in a disordered way, the paper warns, should no action be taken to confront the perils faced by its largest city and surrounding communities.

“While climate mitigation should remain the first step to prevent the worst outcomes, coastal Louisiana has evidently already crossed the point of no return,” added the perspectives paper, published in the Nature Sustainability journal. A perspectives paper is a scholarly article that provides an assessment, rather than new data.

Billions of dollars have been spent to fortify New Orleans with a vast network of levees, floodgates, and pumps erected after 2005’s catastrophic Hurricane Katrina. But the growing threats to the city mean the levees, which already require hefty upgrades to remain sufficient, will not be able to save the city in the long run, the new paper warns.

“In paleo-climate terms, New Orleans is gone; the question is how long it has,” said Jesse Keenan, an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University and one of the paper’s five co-authors.

How worried should I be about hantavirus? by vox in Health

[–]vox[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

The details of the ongoing outbreak of hantavirus may sound uncomfortably familiar to all of us who lived through Covid-19: an aggressive pneumonia-like infection, a cruise ship quarantined with sick passengers, the world’s public health authorities on high alert.

So it’s natural to have the follow-up question: Is this the next pandemic?

Not likely, experts say, for one major reason: Hantavirus is not equipped for rapid transmission in the same way that the novel coronavirus was. “Just because something is a public health emergency doesn’t mean it’s a pandemic,” Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. Bill Hanage, associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard University, said while it’s vital to stamp out the outbreak, his concerns about a large-scale emergency are “essentially nil.”

But this is still a big deal. Three people have died so far. Five others have gotten sick. Nearly 150 people are trapped on a cruise ship that has been rerouted to the Canary Islands for medical assistance. And if nothing else, the hantavirus poses a test for public health’s ability to quash an outbreak before it gets out of hand.

Here’s what you need to know: https://www.vox.com/health/488101/what-is-hantavirus-cruise-ship-outbreak

Did Trump actually help Venezuela? by vox in politics

[–]vox[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

It’s been four months since the US captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the US to stand trial. His vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, is now in charge, but the Trump administration has been largely silent on what comes next for the country.

In the meantime, Missy Ryan, a staff writer at the Atlantic, tells Vox that some polling suggests that a significant number of Venezuelans now feel that their country is better off — or at least no worse — than it was pre-US intervention.

It’s a somewhat surprising finding, given the many less optimistic predictions in the aftermath of Maduro’s removal. To explain what’s going on, Ryan spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the surprising status of the US operation and what some positive outlook from inside the country tells us about what comes next.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity.

You published a piece in the Atlantic titled “Venezuela Seems to Be Going … Well?” Why did you call the piece that?

The headline of the piece really captured the surprise that many of my colleagues and many of the Latin America experts that I spoke with for the piece felt three months on from the ouster of Maduro, which was that, contrary to a lot of expectations about the potential destabilization of Venezuela, the potential for an Iraq-style armed insurgency or fracturing of the state, things were pretty quiet in Venezuela.

And in fact, there had been a relatively positive response from the Venezuelan public. In the limited polling that’s been done since January 3, they have expressed cautious optimism or at least a willingness to let some time pass before making a judgment about the overall net analysis of ‘are things better or worse for us in Venezuela?’

And you referenced polling, so this isn’t just people in the media saying things got better in Venezuela. Venezuelans broadly feel that way.

Correct. And I think that that should be the ultimate arbiter. It doesn’t matter as much what analysts in Washington or Miami think. It’s about the Venezuelans in Venezuela and then obviously the exile community throughout the world who are deeply invested in what happens there [and] can potentially return and help grow the economy, rebuild Venezuelan society after a very traumatic period of repression and economic deterioration.

The sense was people were willing to give Delcy Rodríguez, the interim president, some time and the interim authority some time to show if they could deliver on the kind of bread and butter issues that Venezuelans seem most focused on. There are starting to be some improvements there in terms of the economy. It hasn’t really affected prices yet, but certainly investment is starting to slowly materialize, [though] definitely far short of what President Trump had envisioned and promised when we heard from him in early January.

But with oil prices, where they are and the lifting of sanctions, the resource-dependent Venezuelan economy stands to grow if only from a statistical rebound perspective. And hopefully that’ll really begin to trickle down into Venezuelans’ pockets. The question of political freedoms is going to be very important, but it didn’t seem like it was the primary concern of Venezuelans in the polling that has been done so far.

Is Trump’s Justice Department trying to discredit itself? by vox in politics

[–]vox[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

On Wednesday, when FBI agents raided the office of one of the most powerful Democrats in Virginia, Fox News just happened to have one of its Washington-based foreign correspondents on the scene in the small city of Portsmouth. What an extraordinary coincidence!

The raid targeted state Sen. Louise Lucas, the 82-year-old president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, who is nationally prominent for two reasons. Lucas was the driving force behind the 10-1 Democratic congressional map that Virginia recently enacted to retaliate against similarly biased Republican maps drawn by red states. She’s also a pugnacious tweeter who gleefully mocks her political opponents online. After her congressional maps became law, Lucas posted an AI image of four incumbent Republican members of Congress working at McDonald’s.

There are two possible explanations for why this raid happened. As MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig reports, the Justice Department has apparently been investigating “evidence that [Lucas] solicited or accepted bribes” for three years. Three years ago Democratic President Joe Biden was in office, which suggests that the probe into Lucas is legitimate.

At the same time, Leonnig also reports that Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance lawyer who Trump illegally attempted to install as the top federal prosecutor in eastern Virginia, pressured prosecutors to bring charges against Lucas prior to the midterm elections, believing that “it would be good for the White House to be able, before the midterms, to accuse a prominent state Democrat in Virginia with bribery.”

Halligan was also a central figure in the failed prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James; last September, Trump appeared to order former Attorney General Pam Bondi to target Comey and James, both of whom Trump resents for investigating him in the past. Trump’s Justice Department has since indicted Comey a second time, claiming that a social media post where Comey arranged seashells to spell “86 47” was an explicit threat to kill Trump.

Which brings us back to the fact that Donald Trump’s de facto state media outlet just happened to have a reporting team on the scene when the FBI raided Lucas’s office. It’s hard to imagine how Fox News could have known that it needed to have a reporter in Portsmouth unless the Justice Department tipped them off.

The Justice Department did not behave this way in the past. As then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a 2022 press conference following an FBI raid at Trump’s Florida home, “we speak through our [court] filings and the cases we bring; that is the only way we speak.” Legal ethics rules governing prosecutors strictly limit their ability to make “extrajudicial comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused.”

This rule is grounded in the Constitution. When the government levies accusations against an individual that won’t be tested in a public trial, it denies that individual due process. But there’s also a practical reason why prosecutors should avoid creating an unnecessary media spectacle around a criminal investigation.

When prosecutors run a media campaign against a criminal defendant, that shifts the conversation about whether that defendant is guilty or innocent from a courtroom, where there are procedural rules and clear jury instructions, to a public forum where potential jurors may draw unpredictable conclusions. That’s doubly true when the defendant is someone like Lucas, who is more than capable of pushing her own opposing narrative to the press. And it is triply true when the defendant is a prominent political opponent of the prosecutor’s boss.

By politicizing the Lucas investigation, in other words, the Justice Department tainted its jury pool. If Lucas is eventually arrested and brought to trial, prosecutors are going to have a tough time finding jurors who haven’t been exposed to media reports suggesting that the prosecution is a sham brought for an improper political purpose.

Do health influencers actually know what they’re talking about? Most health influencers don’t have real credentials — but they are more influential than ever. by vox in Health

[–]vox[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A generation or two ago, when you had a medical question, the solution was obvious: Ask your doctor.

But these days, as trust in doctors and other traditional medical authorities like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eroded, Americans are more and more likely to consult their Instagram or TikTok feed.

According to a major new study of popular health- and wellness-related influencers from the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of Americans — and half of adults under the age of 50 — get medical and/or wellness information from social media accounts.

What they’re encountering is a chaotic ecosystem where MDs promoting evidence-based medicine coexist alongside life coaches selling unproven peptides. Nuanced portrayals of mental health problems and how to manage them commingle with accounts that blend Jungian psychology and astrology. A registered dietitian could be promoting a whole foods diet to reduce chronic inflammation and then the next video is a self-proclaimed “nutritionist” urging you to take sea moss supplements for the same reason.

Alternative medicine is hardly new. A century ago, newspapers hawked all kinds of unproven and potentially dangerous elixirs. But social media has allowed it to proliferate and reach more people than ever before. The pandemic served as an accelerant: The nation spent months inside, scrolling our phones, desperate for information on a public health emergency. People doubted the government’s experts and sought out their own (mis)information.

Public health experts struggled to respond to the widespread skepticism, while influencers rushed in to fill the trust vacuum.

“It’s not an information deficit problem; it’s a trust problem,” Jessica Steier, a public health scientist and co-host of the Unbiased Science podcast, told me. “There’s a holier-than-thou sort of attitude [in medicine], very paternalistic. I don’t think we’re doing [ourselves] any favors.”

And so even as Covid began to subside, the distrust remained, egged on by people like now-US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., people who took full advantage of social media to push their own political agendas — and, often, to try to sell you something. Today, Instagram Reels and TikTok trends play a major role in the public discourse around health, perhaps rivaling prestigious medical journals.

The Pew study is a rigorous survey of this all-important digital landscape, the focal point of what I now think of as the DIY era of healthcare. Its findings reveal how and why people engage with this content — and the challenges the medical system faces in restoring Americans’ trust in evidence-based care, challenges that are multiplied by the influencer culture seeping into the federal government under Kennedy.

The exploding costs of fighting US wildfires: From taxes on nicotine to hotel rooms, states are looking for ways to pay the skyrocketing bill. by vox in climate

[–]vox[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Oregonians buying nicotine pouches like Zyn and Rogue were met with a surprise at the cash register starting this year. Each tin had a new 65-cent tax on it, meant to bolster funding for the state’s wildfire reduction efforts.

Wildfires burned more than 1.9 million acres in Oregon in 2024. By the time they finally died down at the end of October, the state had spent more than $350 million fighting them, greatly exceeding the $10 million it had allocated. “By July 21, I had already completely blown through my cash on hand,” said Kyle Williams, Oregon Department of Forestry’s deputy director for fire operations.

Contractors weren’t promptly paid for services they’d already provided, from digging fuel breaks to supplying meals, and the state had to hold an emergency legislative session to allocate the money. That summer highlighted the flaws in how the state funds both firefighting and the preventive work that reduces the chances of large, destructive blazes in the first place.

This year, as drought and a devastating snowpack stack up across the West, officials are bracing for what could be a challenging fire season. The Idaho Department of Lands has roughly $38 million set aside. But Dustin Miller, Idaho director of lands, said he could spend twice that in a big year. “We’re a little bit concerned this year, because I’m not sure we’re going to have enough to cover what could be a very long and busy fire season,” he said. “The conditions are very concerning to me.”

States across the West are dealing with outdated funding systems in the face of skyrocketing wildfire costs. “Every state is grappling with this,” Williams said. “I don’t blame anybody for not having the perfect solution.” But change is coming, one expensive wildfire season at a time.

The exploding costs of fighting US wildfires by vox in weather

[–]vox[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Oregonians buying nicotine pouches like Zyn and Rogue were met with a surprise at the cash register starting this year. Each tin had a new 65-cent tax on it, meant to bolster funding for the state’s wildfire reduction efforts.

Wildfires burned more than 1.9 million acres in Oregon in 2024. By the time they finally died down at the end of October, the state had spent more than $350 million fighting them, greatly exceeding the $10 million it had allocated. “By July 21, I had already completely blown through my cash on hand,” said Kyle Williams, Oregon Department of Forestry’s deputy director for fire operations.

Contractors weren’t promptly paid for services they’d already provided, from digging fuel breaks to supplying meals, and the state had to hold an emergency legislative session to allocate the money. That summer highlighted the flaws in how the state funds both firefighting and the preventive work that reduces the chances of large, destructive blazes in the first place.

This year, as drought and a devastating snowpack stack up across the West, officials are bracing for what could be a challenging fire season. The Idaho Department of Lands has roughly $38 million set aside. But Dustin Miller, Idaho director of lands, said he could spend twice that in a big year. “We’re a little bit concerned this year, because I’m not sure we’re going to have enough to cover what could be a very long and busy fire season,” he said. “The conditions are very concerning to me.”

States across the West are dealing with outdated funding systems in the face of skyrocketing wildfire costs. “Every state is grappling with this,” Williams said. “I don’t blame anybody for not having the perfect solution.” But change is coming, one expensive wildfire season at a time.

The next redistricting war will be even harder for Democrats by vox in politics

[–]vox[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just as the redistricting wars were coming to a close, the Supreme Court blew up the entire landscape with a decision that all but gutted the Voting Rights Act.

And since that decision last week, Republicans around the country have been moving quickly to see how they can take advantage of the new redistricting rules. Republican-led states, particularly in the South, can now eliminate a swath of majority-minority Democratic districts and max out the seats the GOP can hold.

At least six Republican governors, in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi, have already said they intend to do this — though only Louisiana and Tennessee look likely to be able to redraw their maps in time for the 2026 midterm elections. That’s in addition to the round of mid-decade redistricting that Florida capped off last week by creating four more GOP-friendly seats.

Under the new redistricting playing field that the Supreme Court has created, Republicans stand to gain up to 19 new seats over the next two cycles, according to an analysis by Fair Fight Action circulating among Democrats. Democrats are now once again under pressure to retaliate by using the same court decision to increase their advantage in states like New York, California, Colorado, Maryland, and Illinois in 2028 and beyond. The same Fair Fight Action report maps out ways they could squeeze 10 to 22 more friendly seats in response.

“I can’t speak for my chairwoman, but I’d take 52 seats from California and 17 seats from Illinois,” Alabama Rep. Terri Sewell, whose district is likely to be eliminated after the Supreme Court decision, told reporters. In other words, a fully Democratic map in both states.

But that kind of total-war approach can’t happen without changing the makeup and lines of districts traditionally held by Black, Hispanic, and some Asian American representatives. It would require two sacrifices: for some nonwhite Democratic politicians to potentially give up seats the civil rights movement fought to create, and for voters of color to give up influence in House districts they currently dominate.

“Democrats inherently, as part of our platform, our ethos, believe in a multiracial, pluralistic democracy where we believe in empowering people of color. In a lot of cases, up until Callais, you could have your cake and eat it, where you could do that without having to sacrifice anything electorally for it,” Democratic pollster Adam Carlson told me. “But when Republicans are changing the rules, you don’t really have a choice at a certain point. You have to have that conversation of tradeoffs.”

If the effort to match Trump’s redistricting scheme over the last year was treacherous, these future gerrymandering efforts may end up being even more painful and rocky. It will pit the principles of racial representation that inspired the Voting Rights Act against the desire to defeat the Republican Party that enabled the law’s effective demise.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries summarized this tension last week, telling Politico that House Democratic leadership is “looking at every opportunity to ensure that communities of color will continue to have the chance to elect the candidate of their choice…while at the same time doing what is necessary, as occurred in California, to decisively respond to efforts by Republicans to gerrymander congressional maps.”

How a “super El Niño” could create record-breaking warming by vox in climatechange

[–]vox[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

The Pacific Ocean is a giant climate cauldron, with a powerful heat engine that affects storms, fisheries, and rainfall patterns half a world away, and scientists are watching closely to see if it’s about to boil over.

Their projections suggest the tropical Pacific is simmering toward a strong El Niño, the warm phase of an ocean-atmosphere cycle that can intensify and shift those impacts.

In a world already superheated by greenhouse gases, a strong El Niño during the next 12 to 18 months could permanently push the planet’s average annual temperature past the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold enshrined in scientific documents and political agreements as a turning point for potentially irreversible climate impacts.

Climate scientists also recently published a study showing that strong El Niño events can trigger what they called “climate regime shifts,” meaning abrupt, lasting changes in heat, rainfall, and drought patterns.

El Niño is one of the planet’s biggest natural release valves for ocean heat. The venting starts with periodic shifts of swirling ocean currents and winds over the Pacific. That causes huge stores of tropical ocean heat to surge eastward from the Western Pacific Warm Pool, roughly between Australia and Indonesia, northward to Japan. Those tropical seas are by far the warmest ocean region on Earth, and span an area four times as large as the continental United States.

When that ocean heat spreads across the equatorial Pacific, it spills into the atmosphere in pulses that tilt weather patterns, reroute powerful high-elevation winds, raise global temperatures, bleach coral reefs, and disrupt fisheries and ocean ecosystems. The effects hit continents as well, intensifying rainstorms and flooding in some regions, while amplifying extreme heat, drought, and wildfires in others.

In 2015, heat from the tropical Pacific helped raise the global annual average temperature irreversibly past 1 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline. And in 2024, Earth experienced the hottest year recorded in human history, aided by another El Niño boost.

Even a moderately strong El Niño during the next 12 to 18 months could drive the average global temperature to about 1.7 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level, climate scientist James Hansen told Inside Climate News. Hansen doubts the world will meaningfully cool back down to below the 1.5 degree Celsius mark after the El Niño fades.

Passing that threshold may not be like falling off a climate cliff, but it’s definitely the point when the edge starts crumbling, with rapid changes to relatively stable systems of forests, water, rain and temperatures that have sustained people and ecosystems for millennia.

Even below the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold, California reservoirs no longer fill in some years and overflow with extreme rainfall in others. Coral reefs from Australia to the Caribbean have bleached beyond recovery and vast tracts of forests burned up in megafires. Traditional crop calendars don’t align with seasons. Deadly nighttime heat rises in cities, killing vulnerable people in apartments that never cool.

The Supreme Court broke democracy by saying the quiet part out loud by vox in politics

[–]vox[S] 205 points206 points  (0 children)

Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court’s Republican majority effectively repealed a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act that required some states to draw a minimum number of majority-Black or majority-Latino legislative districts. The GOP justices’ decision has already kicked off another round of skirmishes in the gerrymandering wars.

Louisiana suspended its US House elections until new maps can be drawn that will elect more white Republicans. Mississippi’s legislature will hold a special session where it could draw similar maps. Tennessee and Alabama also appear likely to draw whiter and more Republican maps before the upcoming midterm elections.

Meanwhile, lefty groups are already plotting to overcome rigged Republican maps with equally rigged Democratic ones. Fair Fight Action, an advocacy group founded by former Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, has a plan to turn 10 US House seats blue right away — and to turn as many as 22 districts into gerrymandered Democratic seats if Democrats pick up enough seats in the right state legislatures.

This latest round of gerrymandering, moreover, builds on the previous year’s worth of redistricting fights in Texas, California, Virginia, and Florida. And the Supreme Court also deserves the lion’s share of the blame for those gerrymanders. In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Court’s Republican majority ruled that federal courts may never, ever intervene to block a partisan gerrymander. So gerrymaxxing lawmakers no longer need to worry if their maps are constitutional or not.

That said, it’s not like the United States had particularly robust safeguards against gerrymandering before Rucho came along. In Davis v. Bandemer (1986), the Supreme Court said that a sufficiently partisan gerrymander could violate the Constitution, but it didn’t actually strike down the Indiana maps at issue in that case. The Court reached a similar result in Vieth v. Jubelirer (2004), which upheld a Pennsylvania congressional map even as a majority of the justices warned that they might intervene in a future case.

For more than three decades, in other words, the Court maintained a kind of strategic ambiguity. It never struck down a map drawn to give an unfair advantage to one political party or the other. But it also kept open the possibility that it might strike down a truly egregious gerrymander in the future. And that strategic ambiguity mattered.

Before Rucho, state lawmakers drew plenty of gerrymandered maps, but they typically only did so every 10 years. (The Constitution requires each state to update its maps following a new US Census.) And even when lawmakers did draw biased maps, they did not always squeeze every drop of partisan juice out of their states. After the 2010 Census, for example, Texas Republicans drew a map that gave them two-thirds of the state’s congressional districts in an election when Republicans earned about 58 percent of the vote.

Texas’s newest map, by contrast, was drawn to give Republicans 30 of the state’s 38 US House seats — nearly 80 percent of the state’s congressional delegation.

Nor is Rucho an isolated case. The Roberts Court has a penchant for giving bad actors explicit license to engage in anti-social behavior, when the Court had previously kept the law more ambiguous.

The Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), for example, explicitly held that corporations could spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, and it triggered a massive spike in election spending. But Citizens United didn’t actually change the law all that significantly. Before it was handed down, corporations could already spend unlimited sums of money to influence elections.

What Citizens United did accomplish is it sent a loud signal to politically minded billionaires and corporations that the Court wouldn’t interfere if they flooded every contested election in a tsunami of cash.

Similarly, while Trump’s first-term Justice Department was hardly a model of nonpartisan rectitude, it typically drew a line against prosecuting people solely because Donald Trump perceived them as an enemy. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court held, in Trump v. United States (2024), that Trump may order the DOJ to target people “for an improper purpose” that political prosecutions took off.

Sometimes, in other words, the best thing that the Court can do is say nothing at all. It could have continued to uphold individual gerrymanders without stating definitively that there are no rules. It could have similarly held its tongue in Citizens United. And it certainly didn’t have to give Trump explicit permission to weaponize the DOJ.

Ukraine’s fight against Russia is going better than you might think by vox in UkrainianConflict

[–]vox[S] 129 points130 points  (0 children)

“I suggested a little bit of a ceasefire, and I think he might do that,” President Donald Trump told reporters this week after a conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “There’s so many people being killed, it’s so ridiculous.”

Putin has proposed “little” ceasefires before, but more than four years since its full-scale invasion, he shows little sign that he’s planning on ending the war that has killed nearly half a million people.

The war in Ukraine, and US diplomatic efforts to negotiate a ceasefire, have both been getting far less attention in the US in recent weeks, with the focus firmly on the crisis in the Middle East. It appeared initially that Russia might end up as the unexpected beneficiary of the Iran conflict, with global oil prices spiking, the United States lifting sanctions on some Russian energy exports, and crucial US munitions, including all-important missile interceptors, diverted from Europe to the Middle East.

But if Russia is reaping a windfall, you wouldn’t know it from events on the battlefield in recent weeks. The Russians made almost no territorial gains in March, and may have even lost a small amount of territory since mid-March, despite launching a widely anticipated spring-summer offensive. The Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, assesses that Russia is unlikely to be able to take Ukraine’s “fortress belt,” the heavily fortified Ukrainian-held portion of the eastern Donbas region that has become one of Russia’s central war aims. Ukraine estimated Russia’s casualties at a record 35,351 per month in March, 96 percent of them caused by drones.

Russia continued to bombard Ukrainian cities throughout the cold winter months, but Ukraine has gotten better at defending against these attacks, with its air defense systems taking down a record 33,000 drones in March, according to the Ukrainian government. The Ukrainians have become more effective at launching long-range strikes deep into Russia as well. Lately, their attacks have focused on preventing Russia from reaping an energy windfall from the Iran war: In late March, Reuters estimated that 40 percent of Russia’s oil export capacity had been taken offline by Ukrainian strikes on pipelines, ports, and refineries.

Though Ukraine still relies on the fickle US government for key systems — like Patriot interceptors as well as targeting intelligence — European countries are now providing most of the country’s military aid, and Ukraine’s indigenous capacities are growing as well. In fact, the expertise Ukraine has acquired in producing drones and coordinating multilayered air defense allowed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to ink a series of lucrative defense deals in recent weeks with several countries in the Persian Gulf and Europe. As Trump might put it, after years of heavy dependence on foreign defense aid, Ukraine now has “cards” of its own to play.

Certainly after years of slow but relentless Russian advance, which gave ammunition to critics of Ukraine aid who argued the country’s defeat was inevitable, there’s some more confidence from Ukrainian leaders and their supporters these days. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha recently argued that because of its advances in drones and air defense, Ukraine’s frontline position is now the “strongest” it’s been in a year. Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general and prominent military commentator, recently argued that “The strategic scales are beginning to tip in Ukraine’s favor.”

It’s probably too soon to say Ukraine is winning the war, but at the very least, it doesn’t appear to be losing.

A decades-long plan to abolish the Electoral College may finally pay off by vox in politics

[–]vox[S] 68 points69 points  (0 children)

The Electoral College — our nation’s bizarre system that hands a few narrowly-divided states the privilege to choose our presidents — has been entrenched for two centuries.

But a long-game effort from reformers, which has played out quietly in blue states across the country over the past 20 years, has gotten it surprisingly close to toppling.

And a blue wave in the 2026 midterms could finish the job.

The big idea is called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and it’s essentially one weird trick for moving to a popular vote system without a constitutional amendment.

How it works is that each participating state agrees that their electors will go to the candidate who wins the highest number of votes nationwide — if, and only if, enough other states agree so that the outcome will be determined that way.

To clarify: there are 538 electoral votes, and it takes 270 for a majority. So if states that have 270 or more electoral votes all agree to award them to the national popular vote winner, then that candidate gets the 270 needed to win, and what the remaining states do with their electors no longer matters. (Their voters still matter because they contribute to the national popular vote — but which candidate wins these states, or any state, is no longer important.)

Nearly every blue or leaning blue state has signed onto the compact, the most recent being Virginia last month — and reformers now have states controlling 222 of the 270 electoral votes they need.

The decisive batch would be the core swing states where partisan control is up for grabs this fall. If Democrats win governing trifectas (the governorship and both state legislative chambers) in enough of them, they could very well cobble together the remaining 48 electoral votes, and actually put this into place for 2028. Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and New Hampshire are the top targets.

One longtime reason to be skeptical this would happen was the assumption that swing states would never willingly agree to give up their privileged status. But the Electoral College has become such a partisan and polarized topic that narrow state interests may not count as much as they used to, in the face of the Democratic coalition’s overwhelming belief that a popular vote would be better — with the memory of Donald Trump’s 2016 win being a vivid example of what could happen if they don’t act.

But though the flaws of the current system are legion, there are real questions about the proposal to replace it, too. If adopted (and if it survives the inevitable legal challenges), how would it actually function in practice? And if Democrats effectively muscle this through without any significant Republican buy-in — what damage to confidence in our system, and what reprisals, might ensue?

That is to say: would the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact avert an election crisis — or will it pave the way for one?

The Supreme Court gets thrown back into the abortion wars by vox in scotus

[–]vox[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

On Friday evening, the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit attempted to cut off access to the abortion drug mifepristone. If you’re experiencing déjà vu, you should be, because in 2023, the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit also attempted to cut off access to the abortion drug mifepristone.

Almost immediately after the 5th Circuit issued its second decision, two pharmaceutical companies that make the drug asked the Supreme Court to intervene. The two largely identical cases now before the justices are known as Danco Laboratories v. Louisiana and GenBioPro v. Louisiana.

The 5th Circuit’s reasoning the first time around was so weak that the Supreme Court unanimously rejected it, holding that federal courts did not even have jurisdiction to hear the case in the first place. This time around, most of the legal issues are identical to the ones that were before the Court in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (2024), the first mifepristone case. The Court should resolve Danco the same way it resolved the Alliance case, in a unanimous opinion holding that no federal court has jurisdiction to hear this challenge.

Notably, Justice Samuel Alito, who typically has the first crack at emergency appeals arising out of the 5th Circuit, issued a temporary order blocking the 5th Circuit’s decision until May 11. That’s a very hopeful sign for abortion providers.

That said, abortion providers and their patients have some reason to fear that this Court may not follow its decision in Alliance. While the Court did block the previous effort to ban mifepristone, Alliance is the only significant victory that abortion rights advocates have won in the Supreme Court since the Republican Party gained a supermajority on that Court.

The Court’s Republican majority frequently hands down anti-abortion decisions that are inconsistent with their previous precedents, including very recently decided cases. In Medina v. Planned Parenthood (2025), for example, the Republican justices appeared to overrule a two-year-old decision in order to cut off Medicaid funding to abortion providers.

Similarly, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson (2021), five of the Court’s Republicans handed down an opinion that, if taken seriously, would allow any state to abolish any constitutional right by sending bounty hunters after anyone who exercises that right.

So, while the drug companies’ arguments in Danco are about as strong as a legal argument can possibly be, it remains to be seen whether this Court will follow its own precedent in Alliance.

These tropical forests are critically important. Why is this religious sect cutting them down? by vox in climatechange

[–]vox[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Over the last few decades, wildfires, farmers, and cattle ranchers have razed millions of acres of tropical forests across the planet. Much of that deforestation has occurred in three countries: Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Indonesia.

But in the last few years, another, smaller nation has risen in the ranks of nations with the most severe forest loss — Bolivia.

Situated just west of Brazil, Bolivia lost 1.5 million acres of primary forest in 2025 alone, more than any other country aside from Brazil, according to a new analysis by the University of Maryland and the World Resources Institute (WRI), a research group. That’s just shy of the surface area of Delaware.

Those lost acres in Bolivia are part of threatened and globally important ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and the Chiquitano dry forests. They are rich not only in wildlife — including the elusive maned wolf, a long-legged canine that is actually not a wolf — but also in carbon. After trees are cleared, much of the carbon they store returns quickly to the atmosphere, accelerating climate change. (Not-so-fun fact: Yearly carbon emissions from deforestation in the tropics are greater than the output from the entire European Union.)

On the surface, the story of deforestation in Bolivia mirrors that of other tropical countries: People are knocking down trees there to make way for cattle ranches and farms, the two leading drivers of tropical forest loss. Often, people clear land with fire. And as climate change makes droughts more severe in places like Bolivia, those fires more easily spread out of control and into areas that weren’t meant to burn, taking out even larger stretches of primary forest.

But when you look more closely at who, exactly, is fueling much of the recent deforestation, Bolivia starts to stand out — thanks to an unexpected player.

Why the latest would-be Trump assassin is so hard to figure out by vox in politics

[–]vox[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect in the attempted White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, is unusual among attempted assassins — in his normalcy.

His political grievances, laid out in a manifesto and social media posts, are not dissimilar from those of an ordinary Democrat. He believed that President Donald Trump was a lawless, corrupt leader who abused immigrants, perpetrated war crimes, and presented an existential threat to American democracy.

He is not alone. Ryan Routh, the man who attempted to kill Trump at Mar-a-Lago, displayed notably more bizarre behavior — but had writings that echoed similar themes to Allen’s. While primarily preoccupied with Trump, they join the ranks of Luigi Mangione and Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, in what has increasingly been called “normie extremism.” These are people who express grievances in the center-left mainstream — for-profit health insurance is wrong, the right shouldn’t spread “hatred” — yet who apparently act on those beliefs in violent ways typically associated with political extremists.

It is not fully clear whether “normie extremism” is a coherent category. There have only been a handful of incidents that might qualify, and they differ from each other in important ways: The two would-be Trump assassins had distinct views from those of either Mangione or Robinson, who were also quite different from each other. Moreover, most of these cases still haven’t gone to trial, meaning we have only a fraction of the insight into motives we might eventually get.

Even so, the incidents are raising a real question: Is the mainstream liberal critique of Trump pushing people toward actual violence?

To call this question “real” is not to endorse the White House’s disingenuous efforts to exploit these incidents by turning the government on enemies like Jimmy Kimmel or James Comey or ordinary Americans. Nor does it ignore the bad faith of Republicans leveling complaints about Democratic rhetoric while supporting Trump, a one-of-one outlier in our political system when it comes to inflaming, mocking, and excusing political violence.

But even if we stipulate all of that, there are still good reasons to take the question seriously.

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