LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

2026-06-21T08:55:16.163-07:00

See the world of Stonehenge from your sofa this solstice

The original exhibition ran at the British Museum in 2022

University of Reading

A new free online experience allowing anyone in the world to step inside the world of Stonehenge exhibition and explore thousands of years of history launches today (Sunday, 21 June).

The Virtual World of Stonehenge, developed by researchers at the University of Reading and the British Museum, gives users an immersive digital tour of one of the most celebrated museum exhibitions in recent years. The original World of Stonehenge exhibition ran at the British Museum in 2022, attracting more than 190,000 visitors and bringing together over 400 objects from 36 institutions across Europe.

Timed to release alongside the summer solstice, the new virtual version goes well beyond a simple recreation of the gallery. Users can go inside Stonehenge itself and watch it change through time, explore Neolithic flint mines at Grimes Graves, and discover rarely seen prehistoric objects through animation, soundscapes and interactive content. The experience is free to access via the British Museum website and works on desktop computers, tablets and phones.

Professor Duncan Garrow, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading, said: "The original exhibition brought together an extraordinary collection of prehistoric objects, many of which had never been displayed together before. Now anyone, anywhere they are, can not only see those objects but understand the world of Stonehenge and experience how it looked and felt thousands of years ago. We hope it brings prehistoric Britain to life in a completely new way."

Dr Neil Wilkin, at the British Museum, said: “This has been an amazing opportunity to think about the future of virtual museum exhibitions, not just at the British Museum but everywhere across the world”.

Laser-scanning leaves, bracelets and crumbs

The project was funded by UK Research and Innovation and builds on AHRC-funded research led by British Museum curator Dr Neil Wilkin, in partnership with Professor Duncan Garrow at the University of Reading. The team worked with the University of Southampton and digital heritage specialists ArtasMedia to transform a 3D laser scan of the original gallery, captured during the final weeks of the exhibition in 2022, into a fully interactive online experience.

A particular focus of the project was making the stories behind lesser-known prehistoric objects more accessible. These include a 6,000-year-old elm leaf, a woven cow-hair bracelet, and the remains of a prehistoric feast, all of which are brought to life through new digital content developed specifically for the virtual exhibition.

The launch coincides with the summer solstice, the moment when Stonehenge's alignment with the rising sun has drawn people to the site for thousands of years.

The Virtual World of Stonehenge is free to access from Sunday 21 June: The World of Stonehenge: University of Reading and British Museum

FOR REPORTERS, USE CLOUD TOUR BEFORE 21 JUNE

2026-06-21T08:46:58.785-07:00

New battery management system makes electric car batteries safer and more durable

In the EU project Nemo, a research team involving TU Graz has developed new models that make battery management systems significantly more intelligent. They detect damage at an early stage and increase the service life of electric car batteries

Graz University of Technology

image:

Electric car batteries can be monitored much more effectively whilst in use thanks to the upgraded battery management system.

Credit: VSI - TU Graz

Just as an orchestra needs a conductor, a battery management system (BMS) controls the power storage of an electric vehicle. However, up to now the monitoring is only based on the voltages, currents and temperatures of the individual battery cells. Their ageing or possible damage can only be checked externally using complex calculations. In the EU project Nemo, Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and partners from industry have developed intelligent models and algorithms that enable the safety, service life and performance of batteries to be monitored directly in the vehicle’s system.

Avoiding dangers

“The battery management system is an important tool for operating electric vehicles more safely and sustainably,” says Christoph Drießen from the Vehicle Safety Institute at TU Graz. “If we recognise faults and damage to individual battery cells at an early stage via the BMS, many dangers can be avoided. And thanks to the monitoring of the ageing process of each individual cell, their service life can also be extended substantially through intelligent control.”

The team at the Vehicle Safety Institute at TU Graz focused primarily on the safety aspects of the batteries. To this end, the researchers at the institute’s Battery Safety Center examined battery cells that were mechanically deformed, for example to simulate parking damage. They used this laboratory data to train models and algorithms they had developed themselves so that the BMS can recognise damage independently and indicate when maintenance is required. In order to obtain the necessary data from inside the cell, the team is using new sensor technology known as electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), which measures the electrical resistance inside the cells in the vehicle.

Internal findings on ageing

In addition, the Graz researchers developed a model that predicts the change in physical volume of the cells during charging and discharging. As excessive expansion increases the mechanical pressure in the battery pack and can lead to cracks and deformations, this model helps to minimise the risk of internal short circuits and thermal peaks.

The algorithms and models pertaining to service life and ageing were developed at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Their implementation in the BMS offers clear advantages over previous models or external checks. “Up to now, a test only showed how much the capacity has decreased compared to the original battery condition,” says Christoph Drießen. “But the new models also give us an insight into the changes within the cells as they age. This enables adjustments that are beneficial for performance, service life and safety.”

Demonstrator as a model for series production

Despite the numerous new functions, the enhanced BMS would not be significantly larger or heavier than before. For the additional EIS measurements, however, additional sensors and a correspondingly adapted integration into the BMS are required.

In order to further demonstrate the developed technologies, a follow-up project will work on their continued development and transfer towards industrial application. A demonstrator at module level has already been set up for this in the current project.

The project was Co-funded by the European Union. Additional funding came from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation. In addition to TU Graz and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Infineon Technologies Austria, Ingenieurgesellschaft Auto und Verkehr (IAV) and the Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique (CSEM) were on board as hardware and software providers as well as TTTech for the cloud implementation and ICONS as partners.

As part of the development of the battery management system, battery cells were subjected to a number of tests.

Credit

VSI - TU Graz

Journal

Journal of Power Sources

DOI

10.1016/j.jpowsour.2026.240029

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Development of a P2D-based model for battery swelling prediction under mechanical constraints

2026-06-21T08:45:17.512-07:00

Cotton’s roots trace to Yucatan Peninsula, where wild gene pool runs deepest

Iowa State University

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Wild cotton, on left, has short, brown, and coarse fibers, while modern domesticated cotton has white, fine and abundant fibers. A new study led by Iowa State University scientists identified the northwestern Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico as the original source of domesticated cotton.

Credit: Corrinne Grover/Iowa State University

AMES, Iowa – There’s nothing like this in nature, Jonathan Wendel said as he showed a visitor in his Bessey Hall office the long white puffs billowing from a cotton boll – the protective flower capsule of the plant cultivated by humans for thousands of years. In the wild, cotton bolls are far smaller and hold darker, coarser and shorter fibers.

How did we get from there to here? Wendel, a distinguished professor of ecology, evolution and organismal biology at Iowa State University, has been asking that question for decades.

“This is my 40th year on faculty, and I came here with this project in mind. And it took 40 years to develop the resources, tools and technologies to solve the problem,” he said.

Wendel and a team of 19 co-authors outlined an answer in a paper published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showing that newly collected wild plant samples and advanced analysis of genomic sequencing data confirm modern cotton was domesticated from a diverse population native to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

Tracing the lineage of cotton gives scientists a better understanding of how plants evolve. But given the plant’s significance as a crop – cotton remains the most common source of natural textiles, by far – there are also direct practical benefits. Knowing where cotton came from is a genetic treasure map, pointing where to look for valuable traits such as disease resistance or salt tolerance that were lost along the way as farmers bred for other qualities.

“When humans domesticate a plant, you pick from a big population and everything else is left behind. Do that for 1,000 generations, and you have a very narrow genetic base,” Wendel said. “So we’re very interested in that wild genetic diversity. We want to know what’s still out there.”

Collections years in the making

Pinpointing modern cotton’s home in the Yucatan was not a surprise. Earlier studies by Wendel, a prominent expert in cotton genetics, used less precise methods to suggest the peninsula curling to the north in southeastern Mexico was a likely origin of the plant’s domestication – a process that began about 5,000 years ago.

The advent of quick, affordable genome sequencing put a more definitive determination within reach, if Wendel and his colleagues could gather a wide enough sampling of wild specimens. He’s been collecting wild cotton his whole career, scouring herbarium shelves and Caribbean coastlines for variants.

“If everything you're looking at has crazy new variation, you clearly haven't reached saturation. But if the next 10 things look like the last thing you picked and everything’s forming a nice tight cluster, well, why bother to keep doubling up?” Wendel said.

Cotton plants steadily gathered over the years were important contributions to the study, but systematic collection in known wild populations was the linchpin. Corrinne Grover, an Iowa State research scientist and assistant adjunct professor in ecology, evolution and organismal biology, led new specimen sequencing and analysis of the complex data.

“Our collaborators did an amazing job sampling across the Yucatan strategically, and once we had that sequencing data it was very clear that’s where it came from,” she said.

Researchers compared hundreds of cotton genomes in different ways to validate their findings, including quantifying the differences between individual genomes and mapping which are most similar. That analysis linked domestic cotton genomes most closely to the specimens from the northwest corner of Yucatan, Grover said.

“Essentially, we're building huge data-powered genealogies of these plants, just like you could with people,” Wendel said.

Mining old plants for new benefits

After cultivated cotton spread out of northwestern Yucatan, it went on to dominate the worldwide population, crowding out other varieties independently domesticated in South America, Africa and India. The species native to Mexico – Gossypium hirsutum, also called upland cotton – accounts for about 90% of cotton plants today, a takeover researchers say was based on gradual improvement as opposed to dramatic mutations.

The diversity left behind in the wild during thousands of years of selective human breeding is most concentrated in cotton’s ancestral home because domestication creates a genetic bottleneck, narrowing the gene pool in successive generations. The genomes of two random wild cotton plants from northwestern Yucatan have on average twice as many genetic differences as two random modern cultivars, researchers found.

“As it turns out, cultivated cotton was poured out of a very small genetic bottleneck,” Wendel said.

The benefits of that diversity are obvious when you walk through a greenhouse where both domestic and wild cotton are growing, Grover said. The shorter, more compact domestic plants have fluffier bolls, but their wild brethren are often in better health overall.

“We know there are genetic traits in wild populations that could be useful if we can figure out what they are and get them into domesticated cotton,” she said. “Now we have all this data from the Yucatan, and it’s ready to be mined.”

Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2607107123

Article Title

Genomic diversity and the domestication history of cotton Gossypium hirsutum

2026-06-21T08:40:13.801-07:00

Legalizing cannabis increases use and addiction – unless it is tightly controlled

Major global analysis finds that removing criminal penalties for cannabis possession is not associated with increased levels of use, but when cannabis can be sold for profit, use, addiction and psychiatric hospital admissions rise.

University of Bath

Removing criminal penalties for possessing cannabis for personal use, or introducing tightly controlled legalisation of cannabis, does not appear to increase levels of cannabis use.

However, the commercial sale of cannabis is linked to increased health risks, with large-scale for-profit markets – such as those seen in the US and Canada – resulting in more potent products and higher rates of addiction.

These findings are reported in a study published on Wednesday, June 17, in The Lancet Psychiatry led by experts in addiction and mental health at the University of Bath in the UK, together with an international team from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

Co-authors Professor Tom Freeman, and Dr Rachel Lees Thorne, both from the Department of Psychology at Bath, say their findings highlight the distinct effects of different policy approaches globally.

Evolving policies around the world

Cannabis policies are rapidly evolving worldwide. Today, they range from strict prohibition to fully commercialised legalisation. The new paper examines global changes in cannabis policy between 2000 and 2025, and how these are linked to changes in cannabis use, cannabis addiction and other psychiatric disorders.

In the UK, cannabis is a Class B controlled drug, with a maximum penalty for possession of up to five years in prison, an unlimited fine, or both. A 2025 report by the London Drugs Commission, commissioned by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, titled The Cannabis Conundrum: a way forward for London, proposed decriminalising possession of cannabis for recreational use.

Such a change could shift the focus from managing cannabis through criminal law enforcement to healthcare, and address the disproportionate level of cannabis policing found in black communities. The findings of this new global analysis indicated that when other countries had decriminalised cannabis, there was little evidence for changes in cannabis use.

Other countries have gone a step further by legalising cannabis. The first country in the world to do this was Uruguay, which today has a tightly controlled approach where adults can access a restricted range of cannabis products from pharmacies (with limits on their potency) as well as cannabis social clubs, or by growing cannabis themselves.

In Uruguay, along with other contexts in which cannabis legalisation is tightly controlled, there is little evidence of changes in cannabis use.

By contrast, in many US states and in Canada, cannabis is legally sold through well-established, for-profit markets, making cannabis widely available. In these commercialised legal markets, use of the drug has increased. Cannabis potency has also increased since the legalisation of commercial sales, along with rates of addiction among adults, characterised by people struggling to stop using the drug despite negative effects on daily life.

Professor Freeman said: “In a rapidly changing global cannabis policy landscape it is increasingly important to ask how policy will change, rather than if it will change at all. The type of policy change is critical.

“We found little evidence for changes in use after decriminalisation or tightly controlled legalisation. By contrast, in Canada and the US, policy changes have been more substantial through commercialised legalisation, which have increased sales and consumption.

“There are now more daily consumers of cannabis than daily consumers of alcohol in the US. What followed commercialised legalisation was a rise in cannabis addiction as well as increases in hospital admissions for psychosis, including cases where psychotic disorders occurred alongside cannabis addiction.

“The emergence of a for-profit cannabis industry can result in commercial interests being prioritised over public health – just as we have seen with the alcohol and tobacco industries. Increased availability of cannabis products, greater product strength and active marketing of these products can increase the risk of harm.

“Alternative policies – such as decriminalisation or strictly regulated legalisation – can remove the harms of criminalising people who use cannabis, while limiting changes in use.”

Medical cannabis

The researchers found that poorly regulated access to medical cannabis, particularly in the absence of clear evidence on its safety and effectiveness, may also increase the risk of harm to people’s health.

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs is currently reviewing evidence on the impact of the UK’s 2018 legalisation of medical cannabis, including whether it has achieved its desired aims and whether there have been unintended consequences.

Professor Freeman said: “As global cannabis policies continue to evolve, we need to do more to track their impact – particularly in countries outside of the US and Canada, where fewer studies are conducted.”

The new review is part of a collection of papers on cannabis published in The Lancet Psychiatry and led by the University of Bath in collaboration with international partners.

Cannabis products and mental illness

The second review finds evidence that daily cannabis use can act with other risk factors to increase the risk of psychosis, but its role in depression, anxiety and risk of suicidal thoughts or suicide was less clear.

The third paper synthesises evidence from clinical trials into the use of medical cannabinoids (the active ingredients in cannabis) for the treatment of psychiatric disorders.

Though there is a growing trend to prescribe these substances to treat mental health and substance use disorders, the researchers found little strong evidence of their effectiveness on the basis of the available evidence from clinical trials.

Across 54 trials, limited benefits were found: cannabinoids modestly reduced cannabis withdrawal and use, improved sleep in insomnia, and helped with tics and some autism traits. But they also increased cocaine craving in people with cocaine use disorder and showed no meaningful effect for anxiety, PTSD, psychosis or opioid dependence. There were no trials for the treatment of depression.

ENDS.

Journal

The Lancet Psychiatry

DOI

10.1016/S2215-0366(26)00087-8

Method of Research

Systematic review

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

International cannabis policies and their association with cannabis use, cannabis use disorder, and other psychiatric” disorders” published in The Lancet Psychiatry

Article Publication Date

17-Jun-2026

2026-06-21T08:40:00.633-07:00

Scientists just found something weird inside moss

Tiny desert plants may have unexpected fungal roommates

University of California - Riverside

image:

Moss collected at the Anza-Borrego Research Station. Tiny features help researchers identify the species.

Credit: Kian Kelly/UCR

Mosses are survivors. They can dry into what looks like green dust, only to spring back to life minutes after rain. They can grow on rocks, in deserts, and there’s talk of using them to terraform Mars someday. According to new research, mosses have also been hiding something.

UC Riverside researchers studying desert mosses have found evidence, presented in the journal New Phytologist, that these ancient plants may host fungi inside their tissues. This relationship has not previously been documented.

If confirmed, the finding could rewrite what we know about moss biology and even offer clues about how plants first colonized land roughly 470 million years ago.

More than 85% of land plants partner with fungi that help plants pull nutrients from soil in exchange for sugars made through photosynthesis. Around three-quarters of plants team up with a well-known fungal group called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, or AMF. Mosses, however? For decades, scientists have believed all 10,000 species were loners.

“That’s been the model,” said Jason Stajich, a UCR professor of microbiology and plant pathology and co-author of the study. Mosses, he explained, simply didn’t need fungi.

Investigating the accuracy of this model, UCR doctoral researcher Kian Kelly visited scorching landscapes in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, where temperatures climb over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. There he found strange living communities called biological soil crusts that consist of fungi, bacteria, algae, mosses, and even microscopic animals.

“Sometimes I couldn’t find the same species of moss,” Kelly explained, describing long stretches of wandering through extreme heat trying to collect matching species in the desert and less arid climates for comparison purposes. The authors were curious whether differences in climate might cause differences in fungal communities found inside of the mosses. This could help predict the effects of climate change on mosses as aridity increases in drylands.

Back in the lab, researchers ground up moss samples and searched for DNA from fungi living inside them. And they found it. In particular, they were surprised to find mycorrhizal fungi, which cannot survive without a plant partner.

But the fungi inside desert moss was not the same as the fungi found inside moss grown in less harsh conditions.

"We suspect that certain fungi are more helpful for surviving hotter, drier climates," Kelly said.

The fungal species inside the mosses also did not match what the researchers found in the surrounding dirt. That suggested the fungi weren’t random contamination or freeloaders munching dead plant tissue. Instead, something more deliberate might be going on.

But DNA alone isn’t enough to prove fungi are actually living in a plant. So, Kelly turned to microscopy.
One night, after staining moss tissue with a blue dye that sticks specifically to fungi, he peered through a microscope and spotted branching fungal structures inside moss cells.

“As soon as I saw that, I knew we had something really interesting,” Kelly said.

The fungal structures looked a lot like arbuscules, which are tiny tree-shaped formations fungi normally build inside plant roots to swap nutrients. Except mosses don’t have roots. In this case, the structures appeared in moss leaves. The researchers call them “arbuscule-like” because they’re not quite the same as the textbook versions seen in other plants. Future studies will need to show whether nutrients are moving between mosses and fungi before anyone can officially call the relationship a true symbiosis.

Still, if the partnership turns out to be real, it could help scientists more fully understand the origins of life on this planet. Mosses are closely related to some of Earth’s earliest land plants, meaning this discovery might offer a glimpse into the kinds of alliances that helped life crawl out of ancient oceans and survive on dry land in the first place.

The findings may also open new avenues for the restoration of damaged landscapes. Many desert mosses are essential parts of soil crusts that are increasingly threatened by warming temperatures and human disturbances. A single footprint can take decades to heal. If fungi help mosses survive heat, drought, or climate stress, researchers think the relationship could someday inspire ways to boost struggling desert habitats.

For now, the discovery serves as a reminder that the smallest patches of life may hold big secrets.

“The desert,” Kelly said, “is full of things people overlook. Sometimes, the biggest surprises are the ones growing quietly beneath our feet.”

Photos show moss's ability to spring back to life with exposure to moisture. Same species on both sides.

Credit

Kian Kelly/UCR

Journal

New Phytologist

DOI

10.1111/nph.71211

Article Title

Novel Glomeromycotina–moss associations identified in California dryland biocrusts

2026-06-21T08:39:18.012-07:00

New study led by South African scientists reveals how sea-ice microbes survive the Southern Ocean’s harsh winter, with implications for climate change

This study further reinforces the importance of the Southern Ocean marginal ice zone as a critical hotspot for global sulfur cycling where biogeochemical processes for climate regulation are enhanced.

Stellenbosch University

image:

The samples for the study were collected during the Southern Ocean Seasonal Experiment (SCALE) austral winter expedition on board the SA Agulhas II polar research vessel from 11 to 22 July 2022.

Credit: Dr Mayi Buthelezi

A study led by South African scientists reveal that during winter the sea-ice around Antarctica harbors a reservoir of microbes of which most have one thing in common – the ability to produce and breakdown a compound known to protect organisms in extreme environments.

The compound, known as DMSP (dimethylsulfoniopropionate), is one of Earth’s most abundant organic sulfur compounds in the marine environment. Apart from its ability to protect organisms against environmental stressors, its degradation yields dimethylsulfide (DMS) and methanethiol (MeSH) which are important climate-cooling gases.

In polar regions, however, the role of DMSP remains understudied. In the case of the Southern Ocean, sea ice has until recently been considered an inhospitable environment whose microbial communities contribute little to the ecology of the polar region.

In a new study published in Nature Communications today (18 June 2026), scientists reveal up to 38-fold higher DMSP concentrations in Southern Ocean sea-ice versus the surrounding seawaters during the Southern Ocean austral winter. This finding matters because at its maximum in September, the ice extends to cover about 20 million km2 encircling the Antarctic continent in a 400 to 1 900-km wide ring of ice.

The study was led by scientists from Stellenbosch University in South Africa, in collaboration with scientists from the United Kingdom and Italy.

Southern Ocean sea-ice a reservoir of DMSP

Dr Mayi Buthelezi, a marine microbiologist from Stellenbosch University and first author on the paper, says their findings reveal that Antarctic sea ice is a concentrated reservoir of DMSP.

“Together with these high concentrations of DMSP, we also found an abundance of algal marker genes which are encoding for DMSP production, as well as diverse and previously unidentified bacterial producers. These processes are central to sustaining the ecological and physiological adaptions of microorganism in these extreme environments,” he explains.

Their findings reveal the widespread metabolic pathways for DMSP cycling in Southern Ocean sea ice microbes. It further underscores the role of this seemingly uninhabitable environment as a dynamic reservoir and transformation hub influencing climate-cooling cycles in the polar region.

Prof. Thulani Makhalanyane, holder of the South African research chair in African Microbiome Innovation at SU and senior author, says their findings contribute to our understanding of the role of the Southern Ocean in terms of global nutrient cycles and climate control.

“The specific contributions of microbial communities to Earth systems remain underappreciated. Until now we have just basically tried to describe what types of microorganisms are in the Southern Ocean, and how they differ from those that are found in other marine ecosystems that are not limited in trace elements such as iron and manganese.

“With this study we show how microbial communities are contributing to the recycling of important sulfur-related compounds with important contributions in climate cooling. Now we need to find ways to add these microbial communities as components to Earth system models to aid in predictions,” he explains.

Dr Stéphane Pesant, co-author and senior marine data curator at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in the United Kingdom, says the results of this study contributed key knowledge to the research and innovation project AtlantECO (Atlantic ECOsystems assessment, forecasting and sustainability), a collaboration between scientists in South Africa, Brazil and Europe.

“With the recent expansion of data infrastructures, bioinformatics skills and artificial intelligence, we are starting to exploit a treasure trove of historical data, and to identify important gaps in the geographic coverage of those observations. This study contributes to fill those gaps,” she adds.

Sampling the Southern Ocean in winter

The samples for the study were collected during the Southern Ocean Seasonal Experiment (SCALE) austral winter expedition on board the SA Agulhas II polar research vessel from 11 to 22 July 2022. During austral winter, the Southern Ocean sea ice expands far to its northern boundary. Coupled with some of the strongest winds on the planet, it is very difficult to access this region at this time to collect samples. That is why this type of data is of disproportionally high value (compared to an overrepresentation of data collected during summer).

Dr Buthelezi, who participated in this expedition, says his first objective was to determine the structure, composition and abundance of microorganisms during this time of year. But it soon became clear that he would also need to understand the ecological significance of finding such high concentrations of DMSP in this environment.

“Although DMSP production is exclusive to some microbial groups, the process is not metabolically expensive,” he explains. “Under stressful conditions, when organisms cannot afford to spend excessive energy for growth, they express metabolic pathways for either intercellular synthesis or extracellular import of DMSP as a buffering mechanism to survive. At the same time, DMSP is a vital source of carbon and sulfur for microorganisms, which further explain the multifaceted roles of DMSP within microbes trapped in sea ice.”

Elevated DMSP production in sea ice compared to seawater is clearly supported by metagenomic data showing enrichment of genes capable for DMSP synthesis. The results further show enhanced microbial demand for DMSP as an antistress in freezing and hypersaline environments of the sea ice. In sea water, the high abundance of genes for DMSP degradation compared to those for production shows that in this relatively less stressful environment microbes also disproportionately utilise DMSP as a sulfur and carbon source.

Altogether, the presence of DMSP cycling pathways in seawater and sea ice are sufficient markers for the production of the volatile climate-cooling gases dimethylsulfide and methanethiol. This study further reinforces the importance of the Southern Ocean marginal ice zone as a critical hotspot for global sulfur cycling where biogeochemical processes for climate regulation are enhanced.

Did you know

The sea-ice ecosyste is an extreme, low temperature environment with internal temperatures perpetually subzero, ranging from minus 1 degrees Celcius to minus 20 degrees Celcius in winter.
At its maximum extent in wintertime, the ice extends to cover about 20 million km2 encircling the Antarctic continent in a 400-1,900-km wide ring of ice.
Microbial communities are central to primary and secondary production of the global ocean, including the Southern Ocean. In this environment they are essential for nearly half of the atmospheric carbon uptake and nutrient recycling which is important for Earth’s climate system.

Sampling in pancake sea-ice from the SA Agulhus II [VIDEO]
Various video clips of sampling in the Southern Ocean from aboard the research vessel the SA Agulhas II.

Credit

Dr Mayi Buthelezi

Dr Mayi Buthelezi, a marine microbiologist from Stellenbosch University, collecting sea ice core samples from the Southern Ocean in July 2022.

Credit

Prof. Oliver Mogase

Close-up of pancake sea ice [VIDEO] |

Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-026-73596-x

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Dimethylsulfoniopropionate metabolism shapes microbial ecology and physiological adaptation during the austral winter in Southern Ocean sea ice and seawater

Article Publication Date

18-Jun-2026

2026-06-21T08:34:11.857-07:00

Climate change is now causing more local extinction in temperate regions than the tropics, surprising study shows

A global study of more than 5,100 species of plants and animals challenges long-held assumptions about which species are most threatened by climate change.

University of Arizona

image:

While many tropical species such as this Asian Tree Frog are threatened by climate change, species in temperate regions are affected by local extinction to an even greater degree, according to the new study.

Credit: John Wiens

Imagine returning to a favorite hiking trail 15 years after your first visit and discovering that many of the plants and animals that once lived there are gone. While these species may still exist elsewhere, these disappearances – known as local extinctions – are among the clearest signs that climate change is already transforming ecosystems and threatening species across the globe.

University of Arizona researchers compared local extinctions from recent climate change among more than 5,100 plant and animal species from around the world, including hundreds of species of moths and beetles, hundreds of fishes and birds, many mammals, frogs, salamanders, and lizards, and almost 3,000 species of plants.

In the study published in Nature Climate Change, the researchers found that 49% of temperate species experienced local extinction at the hottest parts of their ranges, compared with only 33% of tropical species.

The research drew on repeated biodiversity surveys from nearly 40,000 sites worldwide, allowing them to compare historical records with resurveys conducted years or decades later, making it the largest analysis of climate-driven local extinctions conducted to date.

"For decades, scientists generally believed that temperate species were less vulnerable to climate change," said Gopal Murali, the lead author of the paper and former postdoctoral scholar at the University of Arizona. "We were surprised by our results, which showed that was not the case."

These results were consistent across many different groups of organisms, including insects, vertebrates, plants, and marine and freshwater species.

"I actually published a study of 976 species in 2016 using the same type of data that showed the exact opposite pattern, with more local extinction among tropical species," said John Wiens, senior author of the paper and a professor in the University of Arizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the College of Science. "That's part of why we were so surprised."

To understand the unexpected pattern, the researchers analyzed multiple climate-related factors, including long-term warming trends, rainfall changes, drought conditions and heat waves across global sites. They also excluded sites that may have been affected by non-climatic stressors, such as deforestation.

The researchers found one main explanation for the pattern: temperate regions are warming faster than tropical regions.

"The world has changed since 2016," Wiens said. "There's been more heating in the temperate zone, especially at higher latitudes, and it's possible that the pattern has simply flipped in recent decades, and that helps explain the reversal in findings. For animals, we did not find that tropical extinctions were less common than we thought before. Instead, we found that temperate extinctions had outpaced tropical extinctions."

The researchers found that the maximum increase in temperature over a 25-year period was approximately 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit in tropical regions. In temperate regions, the maximum increase was about 6 degrees Fahrenheit – nearly twice as much.

The team also examined how species responded to warming in each region. For decades, scientists believed that tropical species would be especially vulnerable to climate change due to their physiology. Because tropical species evolved under relatively stable temperatures year-round, they were thought to have less tolerance for temperature changes than temperate species, which experience greater seasonal temperature variation.

"While faster warming in temperate regions appears to be the primary driver of local extinctions, we also found that temperate species are at least as sensitive to rising temperatures as tropical species," Murali said.

The observed local extinctions do not necessarily mean that the entire species went extinct, but they do show that the populations cannot survive the changing environmental conditions. Similar losses across a species' range can lead to extinction of the whole species.

"People often think that a species will simply move into cooler areas as the climate warms, but we found that more than 70% of the species were not doing so," said Wiens. "Essentially, the life and death of the majority of species may be determined by these local extinctions and whether local populations can survive in place or not."

For some species, moving to cooler habitat may not even be possible. Animals may be unable to cross highways, cities, or other developed landscapes, while fish and other aquatic species are often confined to specific lakes and rivers. On mountains, species can continue moving uphill as temperatures rise, but many may simply run out of mountain.

On some mountains, such as Mount Lemmon near Tucson, people can see the dead trunks of tree species that used to thrive at lower elevations that now only occur at higher elevations, said Wiens.

The study also revealed important differences in the patterns of extinction within tropical and temperate species. In tropical regions, climate-related local extinctions were concentrated at the warmest parts of each species' range. In temperate regions, however, populations often disappeared in many locations throughout the species' ranges.

"In the past, we have been laser-focused on the warmest areas," said Wiens. "But it turns out that nowhere is really safe for populations of many temperate species."

Across all species included in the study, researchers found that 45% had gone locally extinct at the warmest part of the region where they were previously found. For many groups, that number exceeded 50%, including insects, terrestrial vertebrates, and marine species.

The findings could have important implications for conservation planning. For years, tropical species were widely considered to face the greatest risks from climate change. While the new study does not suggest that tropical species are safe, it does indicate that temperate species may be in greater danger than previously recognized.

The researchers emphasized that the study is not based on projections of future impacts. Instead, it documents real biological changes that have already occurred.

"People often think climate change is something that will affect species in the future," said Murali. "But for both tropical and temperate species, we're already seeing the effects. The patterns we documented show that biodiversity is already changing in ways we are still working to understand."

A European fire salamander (Salamandra salamandra), one of the temperate species included in the study that has experienced climate-related local extinctions.

Credit

John Wiens

This dead alligator juniper (Juniperus deppeana) from near Bisbee, Arizona is one of the temperate species included in the study that has experienced climate-related local extinctions.

Credit

John Wiens

Journal

Nature Climate Change

DOI

10.1038/s41558-026-02669-y

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Temperate local extinctions from climate change are outpacing tropical extinctions

Article Publication Date

18-Jun-2026

2026-06-21T08:32:09.671-07:00

Op-Ed

Is Affordability a Climate Issue? Philadelphia Hunger Strikers Said Yes.

A recent hunger strike in Philadelphia demonstrated the expanding scope of environmental justice organizing.

By Andrew Lee ,

Truthout

June 15, 2026

Cherelle Parker is seen during her first press conference after winning the Democratic nomination for mayor in Philadelphia on May 22, 2023, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Gilbert Carrasquillo / GC Images

On May 21, activists with the Philadelphia chapter of the youth-led environmental justice group Sunrise Movement began a protracted hunger strike, vowing to starve themselves until Mayor Cherelle Parker committed to spending an extraordinary $1.19 billion municipal budget surplus on community programs. They were demanding investments in renewable energy alongside demands not traditionally associated with the environmental justice movement, including affordable housing, food justice, and increased funding for rec centers and public libraries.

When the activists began planning the campaign, called Make Philly Affordable, last December, they knew they needed broadly popular demands to win the support of working-class Philadelphians. To develop the campaign’s seven demands, Sunrise Movement activists assembled a de facto coalition comprising a broad swathe of local progressive groups including economic justice, racial justice, education, and transit equity organizations. As the hunger strike entered its second week, Brit Christopher from the Good Energy Collaborative at Swarthmore College and Seth Anderson-Oberman of Reclaim Philadelphia, which emerged from Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, joined as participants.

“The climate crisis compels us to act now and our cities need to be prepared. Our city is going to need to make sure that they are adequately preparing for the most devastating impacts of the planetary crisis,” Sunrise Philly hunger striker Giavanna Troilo told Truthout.

Sunrise Movement Philly’s members aren’t the only green activists pushing the boundaries of the environmental justice movement amid worsening climate catastrophe, accelerating authoritarianism, and international war.

In New York, Sunrise Movement activists confronted Sen. Chuck Schumer over his links to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “AIPAC has corrupted our democracy and bought off our politicians,” the Sunrise Movement wrote in a post, “and working people are paying the price.” In Los Angeles, Sunrise Movement members participated in a mass direct action to protest Home Depot’s collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as part of the Boycott Home Depot Coalition. Last year, the group formally expanded its mandate to include combatting authoritarianism. At the same time, Sunrise was labeled a “pro-terror group” by the far right Capital Research Center.

Sunrise Movement activists assembled a de facto coalition comprising a broad swathe of local progressive groups including economic justice, racial justice, education, and transit equity organizations.

Noted climate activist Greta Thunberg made international news when she sailed on the June 2025 Gaza Freedom Flotilla. The following year’s flotilla received operation support from Greenpeace’s vessel the Arctic Sunrise. Thunberg explained that “there is no way of distinguishing” between her climate activism and her pro-Palestine activism.

“No matter what the cause of the suffering is, whether that is CO2, whether that is bombs, whether that is state repression or other forms of violence,” Thunberg told Democracy Now!, “we have to stand up against that source of suffering.”

White Skin, Green Masks

Contemporary environmental activists are framing social justice as central to their work in a way that some storied environmentalists of the past would have found incomprehensible. U.S. environmental politics, both reformist and radical, have a fraught history when it comes to racial justice in particular.

John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, celebrated Indigenous people being “dead or civilized into useless innocence.” Almost eight decades later, a Sierra Club official would found the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform. Edward Abbey, author of the iconic eco-saboteur novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, fretted over non-white birth rates while confessing that he “certainly [did] not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks, or Mexicans, or Orientals.” Dave Foreman, co-founder of the radical environmentalist group Earth First!, militated against legal immigration and went so far as to argue for letting the victims of the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s starve.

A 2019 study found that leading environmental NGOs remain disproportionately white, including 96 percent of senior staff at environmental foundations. Meanwhile, the U.S. climate justice movement, especially at the grassroots, has steadily incorporated social, economic, and racial justice as integral elements of its work.

In 1991, the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit adopted 17 Principles of Environmental Justice, including “the fundamental right to political, economic, cultural and environmental self-determination of all peoples.” The 1996 Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing, ratified at a meeting of 40 activists hosted by the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, called for social movements to practice a pervasive inclusivity that “requires more than tokenism.”

By the time of the alter-globalization movement in the late 1990s, radical environmentalists were working alongside labor activists, Indigenous organizers, and anarchist militants, a coalition whose heterogeneity is echoed in the broad Make Philly Affordable demands of today’s hunger strikers. Thousands of environmental activists joined members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in an attempt to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, with the water protectors’ struggle and the broader #NoDAPL campaign drawing a clear connection between tribal sovereignty and environmental justice.

Against Apocalypse

The co-mingling of environmental and social justice demands has only grown stronger with the rise of U.S. authoritarianism, the unprovoked U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, and the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

“The U.S. military is the greatest carbon polluter that we have globally,” Philadelphia hunger striker Giavanna Troilo told Truthout. “The U.S. military is the climate crisis. The U.S. military is committing genocide as well as ecocide, and they are one and the same.” An analysis by the Climate & Community Institute found that the first two weeks of the U.S. war on Iran created over 5 million tons of carbon dioxide, more than was generated by the entire country of Iceland in 2024. Meanwhile, the dramatic increase in ICE deportation flights has released hundreds of thousands of metric tons of greenhouse gases as well.

The Trump administration has gutted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with one former EPA policy adviser opining that it ought to now stand for the “Environmental Pollution Agency.” In April 2025, Trump issued an executive order to revitalize the “beautiful, clean” domestic coal industry through sweeping deregulatory efforts across the federal government. This January, the United States’s (second) withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement went into effect. Scientists expect the climate to warm by more than 2.6°C by the end of the century, with catastrophic implications including agriculture failure, ecosystem collapse, severe flooding, and lethal heat. The authoritarian right has fully committed to an end-times fascism of “monstrous, supremacist survivalism,” while Democrats in opposition have largely abandoned even referencing climate change.

“There is no serious way to think about stopping the climate crisis under a fascist government. The path to climate lies through getting rid of the authoritarian government we’re in,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement.

U.S. activists aren’t alone in drawing the connections between authoritarianism and climate collapse. In 2025, a European network called The Surge launched combined demonstrations with environmental, anti-fascist, and anti-war organizations in 33 cities. “We have the climate crisis, the rise of fascism and the far right throughout the world, and the rise of wars and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people,” said network spokesperson Leonor Canadas. “Right now, the movements opposing these things are losing, and if we are to change the pathway on which we’re headed, we must come together.”

“There’s fascism and the apocalypse, and on the other side there’s utopia and organizing,” said Philadelphia hunger striker Erica Brown. “The result of these fascists, the result of these authors of the apocalypse, is our world being destroyed. So anybody who is an organizer needs to know that those are the stakes.”

Brown described feeling as committed and resolved as ever when she spoke to Truthout on the 17th day of her hunger strike, three days after being rushed to the hospital and released. Brown fasted until June 11, the longest of any of the hunger strikers, before calling off the nonviolent direct action once the City Council voted to pass the next fiscal year’s budget without the social programs insisted upon by activists. She believes that the Make Philly Affordable campaign is nonetheless just beginning, having already succeeded in heightening tensions between City Council and the Mayor’s office, demonstrating the nondemocratic nature of traditional municipal politics, and cohering a new, diverse coalition of social justice organizations with shared goals.

“This is a fight,” Brown said, “that’s for the rest of our lives.”

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Andrew Lee is the author of Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War from AK Press. His work has been published in outlets including Teen Vogue, Yes! Magazine, and The New Inquiry.

2026-06-21T08:31:31.122-07:00

Bonn Conference Confirms Climate Action Impossible Unless Corporate Capture of UN Process Ends

“A climate process that remains vulnerable to obstruction and corporate influence cannot deliver the action this crisis demands,” said one group.

Delegates take part in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Mid-Year Subsidiary Bodies meetings, or SB64, in Bonn, Germany on June 8, 2026.
(Photo by LDC Group on Climate Change/Facebook)

Brett Wilkins
Jun 18, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

As international climate talks backed by the United Nations wrapped up Thursday in Bonn, Germany, campaigners stressed that policymakers must do more to curb the influence of polluting industries if such negotiations are going to have any hope of helping the world bring the fossil fuel era to an end.

The Bonn climate talks—officially the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Mid-Year Subsidiary Bodies meetings, or SB64—serve as a technical and diplomatic staging ground for the next UN Climate Change Conference, or COP31, which is scheduled to take place in Antalya, Türkiye this November.

With current national climate pledges remaining far from what’s needed to limit planetary warming to 1.5°C—the increasingly moribund target at the heart of the Paris Climate Agreement—experts and campaigners are taking aim at the UNFCCC’s reliance on consensus-based decision-making, which allows a handful of fossil fuel-producing nations and the oil, gas, and coal industries to block ambitious climate action and weaken international agreements.

“At the climate talks in Bonn, States failed to make meaningful progress and pushed back on already established agreements, exposing a critical truth: Climate justice should not be vetoed, and reform of the UNFCCC is needed to enable climate action at the speed and scale the crisis demands,” Lien Vandamme, senior campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said in a statement Thursday.

Vandamme added that “effective multilateralism is the only way out of the climate crisis, and this process does not live up to that expectation.”

Rallying under a “Friends of Science” banner, dozens of nations are calling out coordinated attacks by fossil fuel producers and the oil, gas, and coal industries on science that threatens their economic prospects.

“We see coordinated efforts to cast doubt on the best available science driven by a narrow set of interests, not by the needs of our people,” lead Panamanian negotiator Ana Aguilar said during a Wednesday press conference.

“We have seen this playbook before,” she added. “Manufacture doubt, delay the response, and let the vulnerable people pay this bill.”

Lead Fijian negotiator Sivendra Michael put it more bluntly, telling reporters, “Anyone that is blocking references to science—they are not our friends.”

There has been some progress. As CIEL noted:
It is encouraging that, after more than three decades, the UNFCCC has begun to acknowledge concerns around the corporate capture of the process. The open dialogue on transparency and integrity that happened in Bonn represents an important—but long overdue—step towards addressing the influence of polluting industries in the climate negotiations. This dialogue must be the start toward a meaningful, comprehensive policy to address corporate capture of climate negotiations. A climate process that remains vulnerable to obstruction and corporate influence cannot deliver the action this crisis demands.

Erika Lennon, CIEL’s senior attorney, pointed to April’s First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia, as a hopeful sign. The Santa Marta conference, which was free of major polluters like the United States, China, Russia, and India, took aim at what climate defenders called the “shamefully weak” draft text—called the Multirão Decision—produced at last November’s COP30 in Brazil. The final document removed all mentions of fossil fuels amid pressure from oil and gas-producing nations like the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, and the presence of a record number of industry lobbyists.

“The Santa Marta Conference demonstrated that a fossil fuel phaseout is not out of reach,” Lennon said Thursday. “But Bonn showed that the institutions meant to deliver that accountability remain constrained by outdated rules and undue influence from polluting interests.”

“We need effective multilateralism and an effective climate regime, not one that is incapable of delivering accountability or tackling the root cause of the climate crisis, fossil fuels, at the speed and scale the crisis demands,” she added. “As attention turns to COP31, governments must confront the structural barriers that continue to delay meaningful action, from consensus rules that allow a small number of states to block progress, to the absence of robust safeguards against conflicts of interest, or violations of the rights of meaningful participation of representatives from climate-vulnerable communities.”

Nations allege ‘attacks’ on science at key climate talks

AFP
June 17, 2026

Delegates representing the EU, Switzerland and dozens of developing nations accused some countries of undermining the scientific consensus on global warming at climate negotiations underway in the German city of Bonn – Copyright AFP/File ANDRE PAIN

Crucial negotiations ahead of the COP31 summit have been frustrated by a “small group of fossil fuels interests” attacking the science of climate change behind closed doors, envoys said Wednesday.

Delegates representing the EU, Switzerland and dozens of developing nations accused some countries of undermining the scientific consensus on global warming at climate negotiations due to conclude on Thursday in Bonn, Germany.

“There are powerful interests desperate to protect their wealth and influence,” said Fiji’s head of delegation Sivendra Michael, flanked by supporters in T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Science is Not Negotiable”.

“We are seeing certain countries holding the process hostage as vulnerable people suffer heat stress, and king tides and storms, drought and famine,” he said.

Bonn is where texts are drafted and differences narrowed ahead of the decisions taken by political leaders at the UN-sponsored COP31 climate talks which are due to start November 9 in Antalya, Turkey.

The preparatory talks had seen “coordinated attacks across the negotiation rooms by the small number of fossil fuel interests”, said Manjeet Dhakal, an adviser to the 44-nation Least Developed Countries bloc.

These countries had tried to remove references to the IPCC — the UN’s expert scientific panel on climate change — and the need to limit warming to 1.5C in draft texts under negotiation, Michael said.

– Pressure for delay –

No country was singled out by name.

But oil-rich Saudi Arabia had opposed language expressing concern about the El Nino weather pattern and requesting the IPCC provide regular updates on climate science, reported the independent Earth Negotiations Bulletin.

India suggested deleting any reference to “irreversible changes”, added the bulletin, which tracks UN treaty negotiations and is permitted to observe talks not generally open to journalists or the public.

Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich states have been accused of frustrating climate action by exploiting the consensus-based process by which the UN-sponsored Conference of the Parties summits are governed.

India, Saudi Arabia and China have pushed for the publication of the IPCC’s next major climate assessment to be delayed by a year until 2029, a move opposed by the EU among others.

“The EU calls on all parties to uphold science, support the IPCC and promote information integrity here in Bonn and beyond,” said Demetris Psyllides, a representative for the 27-nation European Union.

Scientists say keeping global warming as close as possible to 1.5C relative to pre-industrial levels is essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

That limit was agreed by nearly 200 nations in the Paris Agreement of 2015 but could be breached by 2030.

On Tuesday, the chair and chief negotiator of the Alliance of Small Island States said she was “extremely troubled by the attempts to delink and undermine the best available science” at Bonn.

Samoan diplomat Anne Rasmussen urged all countries to “stop playing games. Do not abandon your commitment to the 1.5C goal”.

2026-06-21T08:31:16.282-07:00

INDIA

Green Energy, Old Inequalities?

Anusreeta Dutta | 16 Jun 2026

The land question in India’s renewable transition, and how rural communities are paying the biggest price.

Image Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

India’s shift to renewable energy is often narrated as a success story. Wind turbines tower over agricultural landscapes and solar parks spread across deserts and legislators celebrate ambitious targets for the production of sustainable electricity. The growth story of India has been renewable energy, with promises of 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity and net-zero emissions by 2070.

But there’s a problem that’s seldom discussed underneath the rhetoric of green development and sustainability: who is footing the bill for the move to renewable energy? The answer increasingly points to India’s development trajectory following a well-established pattern.

Urban consumers, businesses and investors usually benefit from renewable energy, but it is rural communities, farmers, pastoralists and Indigenous peoples – whose access to land and means of subsistence is being undermined in the name of green development – who often pay the price. The switch to clean energy could be key. But it isn’t always fair.

The Recent Land Boom

Renewable energy is frequently claimed to be environmentally benign relative to large hydroelectric projects or coal mining. While solar and wind energy projects avoid many of the pollutants tied to fossil fuels, they take a heavy toll on land. Utility-scale solar parks require large amounts of land. Wind farms require large land corridors, transmission infrastructure, roadways and sub-stations. Transmission networks, green hydrogen projects and battery manufacturing sites put even more pressure on land resources. States are competing for renewable energy investments. A new land rush is underway.

Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu all have vast renewable energy projects transforming their rural landscapes. Land that has traditionally been used by communities for communal resource management, forest-based livelihoods, seasonal farming or grazing is increasingly being tapped for energy infrastructure. This means local rights and climate goals are increasingly at odds.

The Invisible Nature of the Commons

Understanding land in policy contexts is one of the biggest hurdles. Governments often turn to official ownership data to see if property is available for renewable energy projects. “Wasteland” areas are often considered suitable for solar production because they seem underused in administrative records.

However, many "wastelands" are far from being empty. Commons support small farmers, forest-dependent communities, pastoral groups and landless households across rural India. These settings offer grazing areas, fuelwood, feed, access to water and seasonal revenue opportunities. Such uses often fall out of planning processes because they are poorly documented in official property records.

As renewable projects expand, communities can be stripped of resources that have supported livelihoods for generations, even if they are not considered displaced populations in official numbers. The problem is not just compensation. It is a recognition one.

Green Energy, Agrarian Distress

The lines between agriculture and renewable energy are increasingly blurred. In a number of states, private developers are leasing agricultural land for solar energy projects. Some of the farmers have a steady income through lease arrangements and it reduces the risk of unstable agricultural markets and climate uncertainty.

But they are not equal for everyone. Agricultural productivity is falling and the biggest beneficiaries of renewable leasing agreements are often big landowners but landless labourers, tenant farmers and farm workers may lose their jobs. This raises a more general question in the political economy: can the expansion of renewable energy have the unintended consequence of exacerbating existing rural disparities?

The conversion of agricultural land to energy infrastructure may generate novel forms of exclusion in areas already ailing from agrarian distress. Landowners are paid rent, but farm workers may have no such alternatives. And, so the transition to renewable energy is at risk of repeating the patterns that have attended previous waves of infrastructure expansion.

Advice From Coal-Producing Regions

Environmental movements have attacked coal mining for decades for its social and environmental damage. Mining operations led to the displacement of communities, the destruction of ecosystems and the concentration of benefits far from the areas affected.

Renewable energy was supposed to be a different model. Some recent conflicts, however, indicate that renewable energy projects can also generate local grievances when issues such as compensation, participation and land rights are not resolved.

Solar parks are not coal mines. These have significant difference in effects on the ecosystem. Rather, it points to an important reality: even if the energy source changes, questions of distribution, ownership and control persist. A shift that ignores local communities could repeat many of the governance mistakes associated with the development of traditional energy.

The Issue of Energy Justice

Increasingly, governments are recognising the importance of energy justice. The concept highlights three interrelated aspects: fair distribution of advantages and disadvantages, meaningful participation in decision-making and the identification of vulnerable populations.

This approach to India’s renewable energy transformation raises disturbing issues.

- Who decides where renewable projects are sited?

- Who is included in the planning?

- Who benefits financially from green infrastructure?

- Who pays the price when there is less access to resources and land?

Far too often, discussions around renewable energy are more about megawatts installed than justice served. In this narrow perspective, the energy transition is understood as a technological problem. Indeed, it is a social and political process.

Controversy Over Transmission Infrastructure

The land issue is not about the details of power projects. The transition to renewable energy in India will need a significant transmission infrastructure to transport electricity from resource-rich areas to urban and industrial demand centres. Transmission corridors transect communal land, woodland and farmland. Compared with solar parks they are less visible, but they create specific environmental and social challenges.

The increasing contestation around transmission projects shows how energy transitions are also about resource allocation and spatial governance as well as energy production. With greater renewable capacity there are likely to be more, rather than less, conflicts over land use.

Can Transition be Made More Just?

The question is not whether India should go for renewable energy. The change is needed because of problems with air pollution, climate change and energy security. The real question is how the change is managed. There are a number of legislative changes that could help address new inequities. Planning procedures first need to recognise the economic and social advantages of commons and move beyond rigid land classifications. Official statistics label land as “unused” but it could be essential to the local way of life.

Second, impacted communities should have a meaningful opportunity to participate in project planning and decision-making, not be asked to weigh in after important decisions have already been finalised.

Third, the benefit-sharing arrangements should include landowners as well as workers, tenant farmers, pastoralists and other groups affected by land-use changes. Finally, the renewable energy policy should be linked to broader rural development goals and not be viewed as a mere infrastructure project.

Clean Power Isn’t Enough for Fair Transition

India has some of the largest ambitions in the world for renewable energy. This has made the country a successful leader in the global energy transition and proved that clean energy can be implemented on a large scale. But installed capacity, investment levels or carbon reductions cannot be used as a gauge of the success of the transition in themselves.

Another issue to be considered when considering a shift is the extent to which inequality is decreased or increased. Climate disaster is an urgent business. But speed is not a reason to ignore fairness issues. If the growth of renewable energy follows the patterns of marginalisation, dispossession and unequal development, the transition might look green on the surface but be profoundly unequal in reality.

India is building its energy system for the future – today. The question is whether the benefits and disadvantages of such a future will be evenly spread. The answer will determine if India’s renewable revolution is a model of sustainable development or just another chapter in the country’s long story of uneven growth.

The writer is a columnist and climate researcher with experience in political research analysis, ESG research and energy policy. The views are personal.

2026-06-21T08:24:38.834-07:00

Faith is integral to a country’s fortunes, says research review

(RNS) — Religion is playing a far greater role in economic growth and prosperity than many people realize, affecting key economic behavior including education, family size and savings, according to the Berlin-based think tank the Rockwool Foundation.

Protesters are reflected in a puddle as they wave European flags to demonstrate against Brexit in front of the Parliament in London on Dec. 3, 2018. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

Catherine Pepinster
June 16, 2026

RNS

(RNS) — Religion is continuing to be a major influence in an increasingly secular Europe — not so much through church attendance and worship but because it is embedded in its values, especially those to do with the economy, according to a Berlin-based think tank, the Rockwool Foundation.

According to the foundation’s research review, religion is playing a far greater role in economic growth and prosperity than many people realize, affecting key economic behavior, including education, family size and savings.

“Anyone who regards religion as a marginal factor overlooks a part of the deep structure of our societies,” lead author and economics professor at the U.K.’s Warwick University Sascha Becker told Religion News Service. “Religion still matters because it has shaped, and in many places still shapes, the social norms and institutions through which policy operates.”

The paper, “Religion and Economic Growth: What We Know and Why It Matters,” surveys a wide range of economic literature. Its authors, including Becker, Jared Rubin of Chapman University and Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich, looked at evidence through the centuries and across the globe.

Becker cites education as a key area where policymakers need to understand the continuing role of religion in Europe. While most people would understand that religion played a key role in developing literacy because people were taught to read so that they could access the Bible, its influence is still evident today. Many European countries still have faith-based schools, religiously rooted educational traditions and minority communities for whom religious institutions are important.

“If policymakers want to improve skills, integration or female labor-force participation, they need to understand whether religious schooling complements secular skills, literacy, numeracy, science, or substitutes for them,” Becker said. He warned that a secular policy on education may look neutral in theory “but can trigger resistance if communities experience it as an attack on identity.”

The role of religion in schooling is particularly evident in England, where around a third of state schools have a faith designation, the majority linked to the Church of England, a substantial number to the Roman Catholic Church and a very small minority to Jewish and Muslim institutions.

“Even quite secular parents may value faith schools because they associate them with a clear ethos, discipline, good behavior and aspiration,” Becker said. “The point is not that religion automatically produces better schools: The evidence is complicated by selection and peer effects, but that religiously rooted institutions can still shape parental choices and the production of human capital in today’s Europe.”

According to the report’s authors, policymakers do not need to endorse religious doctrine, but they need to understand how the moral worlds in which people live affect choices they make about their lifestyles, such as family size and schooling.

Another example of how religion impacts Europe today is in attitudes to migration and social cohesion. Protests against migration have popped up across many European nations, often pushing for Christianity in rows about national identity. In the U.K., a movement called Unite the Kingdom has focused on the significance of Christianity in the heritage of Britain – something that many clergy have been wary of endorsing as it does not reflect the Christian ethos of welcoming the stranger.

Many religious organizations, such as the Jesuit Refugee Service, have been instrumental in helping migrants settle, learn a new language and understand local services and whether they can access them. While some migrants are Christian, others are not, and networks of Muslim institutions, for example, can also help people on their arrival in Europe.

“Understanding religion helps policymakers design integration policies that are neither naïvely multicultural nor simply assimilationist,” Becker said.

But Becker warns that religion is not the entire explanation for a nation’s strategy. In Spain there has been a more welcoming attitude to migrants than in other European countries, and Catholic charities and the Catholic Church have played a significant role in supporting migrants. According to Becker, there is a pragmatic reason for doing so, rather than a theological reason. “It reflects labor shortages,” he said.

Last week in Spain and the Canary Islands, Pope Leo XIV met migrants and the organizations that rescue, welcome and accompany them as they often arrive by boat across dangerous seas between Africa and Spain.

The gospel, said Pope Leo, “asks us if we have recognized Christ in those who disembark, marked by fear, hunger and violence, after enduring the desert, the night and the sea.” He went on to urge governments across the world to share responsibility for what happens to migrants, to protect them from criminal traffickers and help their countries of origin to improve their economic development.

Religion can also have a negative impact on society, the researchers warn, citing women’s absence from the Afghan labor force because of Taliban thinking on the role of women, which is contributing to a stunted Afghan economy.

Today, some Christian denominations are focusing increasing attention on the environment and the future of the planet, with believers encouraged to live more simply, encourage more sustainable development and limit consumption. “This could well impact economic growth,” Becker said, and he urged them to consider if it is possible to not hinder growth but encourage a different, greener kind of economic growth.

Still, Becker is not convinced that churches have significant ethical influence today on those in power, especially when it comes to some denominations’ thinking on capitalism and its adverse effects, such as the Catholic Church. “The U.S. has a large church attendance, yet it is the most capitalist society,” he said. “There is significant tension there.”

Back in Europe, ideas from Catholic social teaching, such as solidarity and subsidiarity, were adopted by the founders of the European Union but now function as secular constitutional principles.

Subsidiarity is a good example of a religiously rooted idea that has become secularized, Becker said. “In Catholic social teaching, it meant that higher authorities should support, not replace, families, communities and local associations.”

Today in the EU, subsidiarity has become a foundational legal principle, where decisions should be made locally under certain conditions.

“So, the religious roots are part of the genealogy, but the principles now have a broader, pluralist meaning,” Becker said.

2026-06-21T08:22:15.068-07:00

'They have already suffered enough': Central African clergy respond to US deportation

(RNS) — Faith leaders say they would welcome migrants deported from the United States but question the decision to send vulnerable people without ties to a nation still healing from years of sectarian violence.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detain a man during an operation in Escondido, Calif. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Tonny Onyulo
June 17, 2026

RNS

NAIROBI, Kenya (RNS) — Religious leaders in the Central African Republic say they were stunned by the arrival Friday (June 12) of migrants deported from the United States to their country without cultural or familial ties, questioning why people who fled religious and political persecution were sent to a nation still grappling with its own history of sectarian violence and instability.

The U.S. government flew at least two dozen migrants from countries including Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Armenia and Georgia to Bangui, the Central African Republic’s capital, as part of the Trump administration’s third-country deportation agreements with several African and Latin American countries.

Human rights groups and immigration lawyers say several of those deported had established credible fears of persecution in their home countries, including torture, imprisonment and death. Among them were Christian converts at risk and at least one Iranian pro-democracy activist who could face severe punishment if returned to Iran for her political activity and religious beliefs.

“I was surprised to hear that migrants who fled persecution in their own countries had been deported to ours,” Jean Ngaba, an evangelical pastor in southern Central African Republic, told Religion News Service.

Some of the deportees had been granted withholding of removal, a legal protection preventing their deportation to their countries of origin because of the risk of persecution. Rather than being returned home, they were transferred to the Central African Republic under a bilateral agreement between Washington and Bangui. Advocacy groups have expressed concern that the migrants could face onward refoulement, meaning they could eventually be sent back to the countries they originally fled.

In particular, the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund has warned that deporting Iranians to the Central African Republic is potentially fatal, pointing to close ties between the African country and Moscow, a key ally of Iran.

“The Central African Republic is poor and still trying to heal after years of conflict between Christians and Muslims,” said Ngaba, who works on local grassroots peace and reconciliation initiatives. “It is inhumane for any government to do this to people who have already suffered because of their beliefs or political views.”

So far, no church, mosque or faith-based charity has been formally tasked with receiving the deportees, although religious leaders interviewed by RNS said they would be willing to help if asked.

“As religious leaders, we are ready to assist them if we are called upon or if we meet them,” said Ngaba.

Central African Republic, red, in central Africa. Image courtesy of Creative Commons

According to immigration advocates and officials familiar with the operation, the deportees are being temporarily housed in apartments in Bangui while authorities determine their next steps. Their long-term future remains uncertain, and the Central African government has not publicly clarified whether they will remain in the country or eventually seek asylum elsewhere. The International Organization for Migration is providing post-arrival humanitarian assistance at the request of the Central African government but has stressed that it is not involved in the U.S. deportation process itself.

Cardinal Dieudonné Nzapalainga, the Catholic archbishop of Bangui and an internationally recognized advocate for interfaith peace, said he was aware of the arrivals but was still gathering information about the situation. The cardinal said the Catholic Church would be willing to assist the migrants if called upon, reflecting the church’s commitment to helping people in need.

Muslim leaders have also voiced concern over the deportations.

Cleric Moussa Ibrahim, a Bangui-based Muslim leader who has worked to promote peace and reconciliation, said many of the deportees had escaped religious persecution only to arrive in a country with its own complex history of sectarian tensions.

“Most of these people escaped persecution because of their beliefs,” Ibrahim said. “But here in the Central African Republic, we have a long history of religious violence because of conflict and weak state authority. Muslims have fought Christians and Christians have fought Muslims.”

For more than a decade, the country has experienced repeated cycles of violence involving the predominantly Muslim Séléka coalition and the largely Christian and animist Anti-Balaka militias. Although a ceasefire reached in late 2025 reduced large-scale fighting, insecurity remains a challenge in parts of the country where armed groups continue to operate. According to the Open Doors World Watch List 2026, the Central African Republic remains among countries where Christians face significant persecution, particularly in areas where government control is weak.

Ibrahim questioned how the migrants would rebuild their lives in a country facing enormous economic and social challenges.

“How are they going to survive here?” he asked. “Will they stay temporarily or eventually move somewhere else? These are the questions we are asking as religious leaders because opportunities are limited, and the environment can be difficult for both Christians and Muslims, especially for people who have converted from one faith to another.”

The arrival of the deportees has also raised broader humanitarian questions in the Central African Republic, where many communities continue to struggle with poverty, displacement and the lingering effects of conflict.

While the long-term future of the deportees remains uncertain, Ngaba said people of faith have a responsibility to welcome those who have lost their homes and communities.

“They have already suffered enough,” Ngaba said. “If they come to us, we will welcome them because that is what our faith teaches us. Before they are migrants or deportees, they are human beings, and every human being deserves compassion and dignity.”

2026-06-21T08:19:27.950-07:00

New book paints the ADL as a neoconservative bastion dedicated to US and Israel interests

(RNS) — The Anti-Defamation League may have appropriated the language of civil rights, writes Emmaia Gelman in a new book, but the group’s actions have mostly been in defense of state interests.

“The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State" and author Emmaia Gelman. (Courtesy images)

Yonat Shimron
June 18, 2026

RNS

(RNS) — Emmaia Gelman’s new book about the Anti-Defamation League opens with an almost forgotten incident. In 1993, the FBI raided the ADL’s San Francisco offices for “spying on civil rights groups and antiracist organizers.” The New York Times, which covered the incident, noted that the raid “caused confusion for some liberals” who thought the ADL was a paragon of civil rights activism, the book recalls.

As Gelman writes in her critical account, the ADL — a national group founded in 1913 to combat antisemitism and other forms of discrimination — may have appropriated the language of civil rights, but its actions have mostly been in defense of state interests. After the FBI raid, the ADL was accused by San Francisco authorities of spying on civil rights activists and other leftist groups for at least 30 years — allegations the group denied but accepted in a court-ordered settlement.

Gelman’s book, “The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State,” published Tuesday (June 16) by the University of California Press, seeks to show that the organization was created to defend white Western authority, principally that of the U.S. and later Israel. Insisting Jews were part of that white Western heritage, it set about to promote their assimilation to American values.

In a statement, the ADL said it was proud of its work. “Written by an avowed anti-Israel activist and Hamas apologist, this book should be understood for what it is: A work of historical revisionism in service of a political agenda,” a spokesman said.

As Gelman’s research shows, far from belonging on the left, it may be more accurate to describe the ADL as a Cold War neoconservative institution. While the ADL has fought against the Ku Klux Klan and later neo-Nazis, it has mostly seen the left – and especially those championing Palestinians, Muslims and diverse Arab communities — as a bigger threat, the scholar notes.

Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, the ADL has supported a crackdown on student protesters critical of Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza. It has opposed the election of New York’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, over his criticism of Israel and created the “Mamdani Monitor” to “protect Jewish residents” after his win. It has worked to appease the Trump administration and argued that what appeared to be a Nazi salute by Elon Musk was just an “awkward gesture.”

A scholar with a doctorate in American studies from New York University, Gelman wrote about the ADL for her dissertation and later added to it for the book. Gelman, who is Jewish, is also an activist. She is the founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, an independent anti-Zionist, anti-racist research institute.

RNS talked with Gelman about the ADL and what she describes as its conservative mission to protect the U.S. and Israel from any criticism and to label anyone who criticizes those states’ policies as antisemitic. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

You write that the ADL was founded by German Jews who had already established themselves in the U.S. as businesspeople committed to capitalist values, and they wanted to correct the behaviors of poor, pro-labor Eastern European Jews. Is that right?

The Anti-Defamation League was formed with this idea of opposing defamation very literally, but what defamation meant was often the portrayal of Eastern European Jewish formations. It first directed at the press to say, ‘Don’t use images of Jews as either dishonest or self-interested money lenders and don’t use the image of Jews as dirty immigrants, fresh off the boat.’ They did a lot of clarifying that actually Jews were part of the upper classes and the governing classes and contributed to nation building, but very quickly they turned to trying to censor Jewish immigrants’ representations of themselves. Within about 15 to 20 years, the ADL had turned to publishing facts and books that articulated that communism was not Jewish, could never be Jewish and was antithetical to Jewishness. So, yes, they absolutely did try to suppress various expressions of Jewish immigrant life and Jewish politics. They were intended to marginalize Eastern European Jewishness and redefine Jewishness as the German Jewish upper-class, pro-state, law-and-order version.

Why did the ADL turn to spying?

The ADL’s stock in trade was books and reports explaining things. It published reports on subversives. So it, for example, started reporting on white nativists, like Father Coughlin (the antisemitic radio broadcaster) and then on what they viewed as Arab subversives. Much of it was presented in this sort of espionage format: So-and-so received mail that said this, and so-and-so said that at a meeting. By the McCarthy era, they already had files on Jewish leftists that they were offering to (Sen. Joseph) McCarthy (who spearheaded a campaign of persecution against Americans suspected of communism).

You write that the ADL began to see the main threat to Jews in the United States coming from the left rather than the right. When did that start to happen?

In its early days it singled out white Christian nativists who were racist and antisemitic in the sense of holding old Christian antisemitic tropes. But the ADL was also anti-communist and anti-left because its whole premise was that U.S. capitalism, the colonization of North America, was a moral project that resonated with European morals. They believed themselves to be very much part of European national culture. The left, which had identified with the Soviet Union, was the primary threat there, and so the ADL took up anti-communism as its main gig. At that point, it was so focused on producing citizens who were loyal to the United States, and colorblind and devoted to individualism and individual rights, that it actually considered ending its identification as a Jewish organization and just acknowledging that as its main project. Irwin Suall, who joined in 1967 (and headed the ADL’s undercover investigations) reflected the new turn on the entire left — the anti-war movement, the Black Power movement, the Jewish left, anti-war protests, etc.

The ADL was critical in developing legislation on hate crimes. How did it land on that?

Throughout the early ’80s, the ADL and some other legislators had been trying to pass laws that added penalties for acts of religious vandalism that were already crimes. So, for example, if somebody broke the windows of a synagogue, there would be an extra penalty because it’s a synagogue, and it’s targeting a religious property. This was a response to the feeling that many conservatives had in regard to counterculture, that there was a loss of respect for things like religion and tradition.

In the late ’70s, early ’80s, a separate crisis arose of violence against people of color and immigrants and also anti-queer violence. President Reagan’s Department of Justice was refusing to intervene, saying it didn’t fall under their jurisdiction because it wasn’t a civil rights violation. Local police weren’t intervening, either. While the ADL hadn’t been able to galvanize public support for religious vandalism laws, there was public support for racially coded crimes. And so, the ADL was able to move into that space and combine the two things. So, in its 1981 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, the ADL appended a piece of model legislation that became hate crimes bills. Other states and other community groups took it up as a legislative action cause.

You write that these hate crime bills were a way to mask deeper structural issues.

Absolutely. The function of hate crimes bills was to try and force the state to do something rather than nothing about the immediate racist violence, but what it did actually was allow political legislatures and political figures to simply address the snipers, and not address the broader racial structures of states that were producing them and authorizing them. Police violence is not considered in hate crimes statistics or policy. So you end up with a law that only looks at what has happened between two individuals — the perpetrator and the target — rather than looking at the very extensive racial state system that has produced the conditions of that violence.

How do you see the ADL today? Has it become MAGA?

If going MAGA is very defined as having MAGA pastors as headliners in its antisemitism conferences, and exonerating Elon Musk and removing from its website the tracker of white nationalist organizations that (FBI Director) Kash Patel complained about, sure, the ADL has gone MAGA. But what about its long-running support for repressive policing, for surveillance of Muslim organizations, for whipping up fear that people who oppose capitalism or who propose ways of organizing our political system other than capitalism are quote-unquote, Soviet and insurgents? Those things have been part of the ADL political fabric for much longer than Trump has been in office. The push to declare all criticism of Israel to be antisemitic is (from) 2016. Even before that, the ADL was targeting Palestinian and Muslim and Jewish student groups who were opposing Zionism on their campuses. It was already doing those things before MAGA was a thing. In 2019, the ADL began leading the charge against ethnic studies programs on the basis that it was essentially critical race theory. It was doing those things long before, and we didn’t recognize them broadly as right-wing constructions.

Has its power waned?

The FBI broke with the ADL formally, so the ADL is no longer doing FBI training. But it’s not banished from the other spaces where it has worked. It is still treated as an anti-racist organization in schools and it’s brought in when there’s a racist incident or an antisemitic incident.

Its power is an interesting one because the ADL is not a membership organization. Partly its power comes from its ability to rely on megadonors who are deeply conservative and right wing, and who are seeing the way that the ADL is able to move in ostensibly liberal spaces is a unique weapon. It also gets its power from the press who continually publish its statistics and its claims about antisemitism with no scrutiny and no attention to the ADL’s broader political project. The fact that so many of us oppose it has not actually diminished its power in the way that it should have if the ADL were in any way grounded in community.

2026-06-21T08:16:28.364-07:00

Opinion

The quiet faithfulness of ordinary fathers in an age of performative masculinity

(RNS) — Conspicuously missing from the manosphere is a vision for fatherhood.

(Photo by Ketut Subiyanto/Pexels/Creative Commons)

Zachary Wagner
June 19, 2026

RNS

(RNS) — This past Sunday (June 14), the White House played host to a mixed martial arts event, which served as the unofficial launch of a weekslong celebration for America 250. The fight was attended by such cultural and political powerhouses as Mark Zuckerberg, Joe Rogan, Kash Patel, Dana White, Pete Hegseth, Ted Cruz and the most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump himself, whose 80th birthday occasioned the event.

“UFC at the White House perfectly fits the America of today,” an ESPN headline declared, before adding “love it or hate it.” Indeed.

Fittingly, the buildings of our nation’s capital hark back to Rome — an empire that also staged violent “games” for the entertainment of rulers and commoners alike. Roman society ran on pure “masculine” power. It was also this very empire that the early Christians denounced, rejected and “turned upside down” with their allegiance to another king (Acts 17:6). Their king exalted the lowly and the powerless, described himself as meek, even suffered humiliation and public execution.

Today, we are seeing the mainstream reassertion of a Roman-style culture — a vision for masculinity built on strength and spectacle. Cage-fight culture (like Trump himself) makes no apologies for its violent, offensive and macho tendencies.

But we also saw the mixing of this hyper-manliness with Christianity, most clearly in the post-fight comments of the victorious fighter Josh Hokit, who laced profanity and crass joking about former first lady Michelle Obama with praise for his “Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” As if to say to any seared consciences watching, “Don’t worry; Jesus is cool with all this.”

His interview reflects the muscular Christianity adopted by numerous politicians, influencers and pastors today. What often unites these threads of modern American “masculinism” is their emphasis on performance. Whether it’s the performance of reality TV stars, news anchors, podcast hosts or athletes, this vision for manliness urges men to show their physicality and prowess, to be seen as powerful or “high value” by others.

Such performances of masculinity leave little room for the virtues previous generations of Boy Scouts would have understood as indispensable. The manosphere majors on self-actualization and grievance-based content from influencers and pundits, but conspicuously lacking in such spaces is the wisdom of fathers.

Entertainers may offer a vicarious feeling of ascension toward some masculine ideal of bravado, physical fitness or courage. Fathers, in the best expression of their calling, offer something far more transformative: presence. Fathers carry a relational commitment to their sons and daughters. Unlike YouTubers and podcast hosts, they can be a stable and consistent advocate for their children, knowing them deeply, offering them personal insights and providing an example of virtuous living.

A reclaiming of a flourishing life for the men in this country will require, at the very least, a rehabilitation of the institution of fatherhood. For Christians, it will mean a recapturing of a faithful vision for fatherly wisdom — dads who say to their daughters and their sons, “Imitate me as I imitate Christ.”

A truly biblical vision for masculine identity will not be preoccupied with peak performance, but with inner transformation. It is man who looks at the outward appearance; God looks at the heart. Increasingly, however, the world of manosphere entertainment directs men’s hearts toward what Paul called “the works of the flesh” — sexual immorality, discord, selfish ambition, drunkenness, rage.

“Manly”? Maybe. Christlike? Absolutely not.

The New Testament authors instead call Christ followers to virtues of godliness, like gentleness, faithfulness, self-control, joy, kindness and love.

The question for Christian fathers in this moment is this: Which vision for male flourishing will you pursue? The Roman’s emphasis on strength, power and performance? Or the virtues Jesus and the apostles commended to the earliest Christians?

The good news is that this quiet faithfulness is already being lived out by millions of fathers across our society: dads who show up to dance recitals and baseball practices, who accept lower-paying career paths to spend more time with their families, who volunteer evenings in church and community mentorship programs, who pursue wholeness and healing from their own hurts so they don’t hurt those they love.

These men may sport “dad bods” instead of the physically imposing bodies of UFC fighters, but that’s because they’ve chosen the path of ordinary faithfulness over the path of bravado. As we read in 1 Timothy: “Physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.”

The performative masculinity of modern America is no harmless spectacle. It is culture and heart formation, and we should want and demand better for our sons and for ourselves. As Christians, our struggle is not ultimately against flesh and blood; it is against the principalities and powers at work to deceive and enslave humanity, including those seeking the ideological capture of the lost boys of this generation.

In Christianity, godliness is the basis for manliness, not the other way around.

So, if you’re reading this as a tired dad doing his best to follow Jesus and point the boys and men in your life to him — keep going. Keep showing up. Train your children for citizenship in the Kingdom of God. Commend the countercultural meekness of Christ over and against the muscled mania of this world.

I regularly say to my 6-year-old son, Charlie, “Jesus made men to be strong, but he also taught us and showed us how to be gentle. So, as we grow bigger and stronger, we should also be learning to be gentle like Jesus.”

I’m far from a perfect example of this, but I aspire to be a present, faithful and gentle father who raises up a faithful and gentle son. I also want to teach him when and where to direct his fighting spirit, such as it is. And that means being a father who is ready when Charlie approaches and asks — as he did on the morning I’m writing this — “Daddy, do you want to wrestle with me?”

I would have said “yes,” but he had already jumped on my back without waiting for an answer.

(Zachary Wagner holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and is the author of “Men of Virtue: How the Fruit of the Spirit Forms Male Character in the Modern World.” He is also a New Testament scholar, ordained minister and nonprofit director. You can receive updates from Zach and follow his writing on Substack. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

2026-06-21T08:16:12.248-07:00

Pope Leo is very popular in the US, though partisan polarization is growing, survey finds

(RNS) — More than three-quarters (78%) of US Catholics expressed favorable views of Leo, and about one in 10 (12%) expressed unfavorable views.

Pope Leo XIV arrives for his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Aleja Hertzler-McCain
June 18, 2026

RNS

(RNS) — Though Pope Leo XIV still enjoys high levels of support from U.S. Catholics, partisan polarization is growing, according to a new poll released by Pew Research Center on Thursday (June 18).

About three-quarters (78%) of U.S. Catholics expressed favorable views of Leo, and 12% expressed unfavorable views. Another 9% of U.S. Catholics said they had never heard of Leo — the first pope from the U.S.

Seventy-eight percent is the same favorability rating that Pope Francis received in February of last year, just months before his death in April 2025.

Broken down across party lines, 84% of U.S. Catholics who lean Democratic approved of Leo in Thursday’s poll, as did 72% of Catholics who lean Republican. Right before he died, Francis had been slightly more popular among Democratic-leaning Catholics at 88% approval, and slightly less popular among Republican-leaning Catholics at 69% approval.

In Pew’s first survey about Leo’s favorability last summer after his election last May, the partisan gap was only 5 points. Nearly nine in 10 (89%) of Democratic-leaning Catholics and 84% of Republican-leaning Catholics had favorable views at the beginning of his papacy.

But since last summer, Leo has been more outspoken about U.S. political issues, expressing concern about the “inhuman” treatment of immigrants in the U.S. in October, and later strongly criticizing war in the Middle East, where the U.S. has been a key actor.

In an April social media post, President Donald Trump accused Leo of being “weak” on crime and nuclear weapons and claimed that Leo was only elected pope because Trump occupied the White House. Trump followed that post with another that many interpreted as depicting himself as Jesus. The latter was later deleted while Trump has continued to criticize the pope.

Shortly after Trump’s April post, Leo told reporters on the papal plane, “I’m not afraid of the Trump administration or of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel, which is what the Church works for.”

In Pew’s new poll, 70% of Democratic-leaning Catholics said that Trump had been too critical of Leo, while a third (32%) of Republican-leaning Catholics agreed. But four in 10 (39%) of Republican-leaning Catholics said Leo had been too critical of the Trump administration, while only 3% of Democratic-leaning Catholics agreed. (A quarter — 26% — of Democratic-leaning Catholics said that Leo had not been critical enough of the Trump administration.)

Leo’s current favorability is higher than Pope Benedict XVI’s throughout much of his papacy, but lower than any favorability Pew collected for Pope John Paul II. Francis’ favorability fluctuated throughout his papacy.

The current pope is more popular among Catholics who go to Mass more frequently, with 85% of weekly Mass attenders expressing positive views, compared to 79% of monthly or yearly attenders and 73% of Catholics who attend Mass seldom or never, according to Pew.

The survey was conducted from May 26 to June 1 among 1,848 U.S. Catholic adults and has a margin of error of +/- three percentage points.

2026-06-21T08:15:43.598-07:00

Opinion

Young Americans are happy about the future. They’re also terrified of it.

(RNS) — We are a nation caught between generations, and we don’t have the language to talk about what comes next.

(Photo by Polina Zimmerman/Pexels/Creative Commons)

Liz Bucar
June 15, 2026

RNS

(RNS) — This past week, I lived the reality behind a new Pew Research study without leaving my own family. My in-laws were in town for my father-in-law’s sixtieth college reunion, a celebration of a version of America that delivered on its promises. My daughter was graduating from high school, excited and nervous about what comes next. Same week, same family. Different Americas.

On Friday (June 12), Pew Research Center released its analysis of the national mood timed to the country’s 250th anniversary, and the numbers confirm what I felt all last week: We are a nation caught between generations, and we don’t have the language to talk about what comes next. Most Americans think the country’s best days are behind us. Nearly 7 in 10 say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going.

The finding most concerning to me as a parent and educator is that while young adults (ages 18 to 29) report higher levels of happiness about the future than adults 65 and older, Gen Z is more pessimistic about what that future actually holds. Fewer than 4 in 10 believe the economy will be stronger or that the country will be less politically divided by 2050.

My daughter worries about all the unknown effects climate change will bring. She worries that getting into graduate school will be even harder than the brutal college application process she just went through. And she worries about what the job market will look like for her — whether there will even be the kinds of jobs she’s imagining, given how quickly AI is changing what human work means.

Hers is a generation that feels good, but they expect things to get worse. That makes me deeply sad, because it signals my daughter and her peers have been taught to manage their feelings while abandoning their expectations.

“Most Americans think the country’s best days are behind us”

(Graphic courtesy of Pew Research Center)

Part of the problem is that we have convinced them, and ourselves, to think about happiness in individualized, therapeutic terms. Optimize your morning routine. Manage your anxiety. Cultivate gratitude. Stay present. The promise is that if we tend to our inner life, the chaos outside will feel more bearable.

What that version of happiness can’t do is help us imagine a better future together.

There was a time when Americans located hope not just in personal improvement but in collective projects: the Labor Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the New Deal. These were endeavors oriented toward something larger than any individual’s mood or even one generation. That orientation has been missing for a while — but it requires a story about why the future matters beyond our own lifetimes.

One place humans have always gone for stories about the future is religion, and this is why I have spent my career studying religious traditions even as someone who is not myself religious. What I have learned is that religious traditions share something the self-optimization industry cannot offer: a vocabulary for collective futures.

Judaism’s concept of ‘tikkun olam’ (repairing the world) assumes the work will never be finished in your lifetime and insists that’s not a reason to stop trying. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) hold that decisions should be made with seven generations in mind, orienting us toward people who don’t yet exist. Islam understands humans as stewards of the earth on behalf of those who come after. Christianity at its best understands the Kingdom of God not as a postmortem destination but something being built now, collectively, by people who will not see its completion.

You don’t have to be religious to recognize this is something secular culture has never quite figured out how to replace.

“Adults under age 30 and those 65 and older express similar levels of satisfaction with how things are going in the country” (Graphic courtesy of Pew Research Center)

The Pew data shows a country that feels its feelings without any shared framework for what those feelings are pointing toward. This is a failure happening on multiple fronts simultaneously — in politics, in media, in our institutions and, yes, inside religious communities that have sometimes let their vision shrink down to the size of individual spiritual comfort. We have all forgotten the importance of a collective story.

My father-in-law and his fellow Boomers had a version of the American dream that was structurally possible for them: work hard, build a legacy, pass it on. That story included an economic promise, but it was also a narrative about their place in a timeline and how they could impact the timeline after them. That narrative worked for them. But it won’t work in the same way for my daughter.

She will not become a homeowner at 28 the way her grandparents did. Her college diploma will not carry the same guarantee of employment and social status her grandfather’s did. It will be much harder to raise a family on two incomes, let alone one.

What my daughter’s generation needs is a reason to rebuild. This can’t be an overly optimistic spin on the state of the world nor nostalgia for a version of the American dream that was never available to everyone. What we all need to find again is a collective story about what we owe each other and the future we share.

But how do we do this? The first step is recognizing that going it alone is not the answer, that human flourishing has always been a collective project. The second step is finding new ways to come together across generations to share the stories we love, name the futures we want and reject the ones being written for us by people with too much power and too little accountability. We’ve seen glimpses of what this can look like in the energy that surrounded Zohran Mamdani’s campaign — which felt less like everyday politics and more like a collective imagination exercise.

I think religion is probably how we used to do this, and we haven’t figured out what replaces it. Religious communities were places where people of different generations gathered regularly, told stories about the past and the future and held each other accountable to something larger than their own happiness.

We don’t need to rebuild traditional religion. But we need something that does what religion does at its best.

We have the feelings. My daughter deserves the story.

(Liz Bucar is a professor of religion at Northeastern University and the author of “Beyond Wellness: How Restoring the Religious Roots of Spiritual Practices Can Heal Us” (Tarcher/Penguin Random House, 2026). She writes the Substack bestseller newsletter Religion, Reimagined.)

2026-06-21T08:04:22.472-07:00

A judge orders ICE to free a Wisconsin mosque leader, citing a 'substantial' free speech claim

(AP) — The government has claimed he is a foreign policy threat, but Sarsour's attorneys say he was actually targeted for speaking out against Israel.

In this photo provided by Yaseen Jajeeb, Islamic Society of Milwaukee President Salah Sarsour smiles, Thursday, June 18, 2026, shortly after his release from a county jail in Indiana, where he was detained after his arrest by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in March. (Yaseen Najeeb via AP)

Rebecca Boone
June 18, 2026

(AP) — A federal judge ordered immigration officials to release the president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque from detention Thursday, finding that Salah Sarsour has raised a “substantial” claim that he was being targeted for speaking out in favor of Palestinian rights.

Sarsour, a Palestinian-born legal permanent resident of the United States, was taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on March 30. The government has claimed he is a foreign policy threat, but Sarsour’s attorneys say he was actually targeted for speaking out against Israel.

U.S. District Judge James Patrick Hanlon wrote in a decision Thursday that attorneys for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not provide enough evidence to refute Sarsour’s claims of retaliation for free speech, nor did they explain why Sarsour was suddenly considered a threat now after more than three decades of legal residency in the United States.”The mere invocation of foreign relations concerns does not automatically trump First Amendment rights,” wrote Hanlon, who was nominated by Trump in 2018. Hanlon ordered that Sarsour be released from the Indiana county jail where he was being held, and allowed to return to his Milwaukee home while his immigration case moves forward

Sarsour was released a few hours after the ruling.

“I am so relieved to be with my family. For 80 days, I haven’t been able to step outside and breathe fresh air,” Sarsour said in a prepared statement. “This experience is a reminder to all of us that we must fight together for our right to be a voice for the silenced. I will never stop speaking for Palestine and humanity, wherever I am.”

Sarsour, who has Type 2 diabetes, has lost more than 30 pounds (14 kilograms) during his incarceration and his attorneys say his blood sugar levels were only being checked once a month in the jail, putting him at risk of organ failure or death. He was released from the jail Thursday afternoon, said Malak Saleh, the communications manager for the Institute for Middle East Understanding, which has been assisting with the case.

Sarsour’s legal team said in a statement that they were ecstatic, and said he never should have been detained in the first place.

The ruling is also “a sober reminder that, if the government can target Mr. Sarsour, everyone’s free speech rights are at risk,” they wrote.

A statement from the Department of Homeland Security called Sarsour “a terrorist who was convicted of throwing Molotov cocktails” and said any accusation of discrimination by ICE agents is false.

An investigation by KFF Health News and the AP found that hundreds of detainees in at least 33 states have filed federal lawsuits with similar allegations of medical neglect.

Sarsour has no criminal record in the U.S. He was convicted by the Israeli Ramallah Military Court in 1989 of throwing a Molotov cocktail and stones at Israeli army forces, and by the same court in 1995 of attempting to hold weapons and ammunition. Sarsour has denied committing those crimes.

The Israeli military courts have faced scrutiny over allegations of limited due process and high conviction rates of Palestinians. Israel rejects those claims.

The U.S. government has been aware of the charges against Sarsour for 25 years, Hanlon wrote, and considered them at least four times when evaluating his eligibility for naturalization. Still, Hanlon noted, the government didn’t arrest and detain Sarsour until 2026.

Attorneys for DHS and ICE contended that Sarsour doesn’t have the same First Amendment rights as citizens, but the judge rejected that argument. People who enter the U.S. lawfully are invested with the same rights guaranteed by the Constitution to everyone within U.S. borders, Hanlon wrote.

Sarsour’s deep ties to the community — including his spouse, six children and nine grandchildren who are all U.S. citizens — and health concerns also weighed in favor of his release, Hanlon wrote.

“We’re getting our dad back!” Salah’s son, Kareem Sarsour, said in a prepared statement. “This experience has been a nightmare to wake up to every day, with his health at risk in a cruel basement cell simply for speaking up for Palestine. But we know who my dad is, he’s a voice for the voiceless and the heart of our family and our community. I can’t wait to hug him, and I hope everyone like him will be released.”
___

Boone reported from Boise, Idaho.

Jewish groups rally in support of Milwaukee Muslim leader detained in ICE jail

(RNS) — Progressive Jewish advocacy organizations condemn what they view as a misguided attempt to fight antisemitism by targeting Palestinian permanent residents, such as Salah Sarsour.

Faith leaders, community advocates and family members of Salah Sarsour gathered for a vigil outside the Clay County Jail on Sunday, June 14, 2026, in Brazil, Ind. The group is calling for the release of detained Milwaukee-based Palestinian activist and green card holder Salah Sarsour. Photo courtesy of Jews for Salah

Ulaa Kuziez
June 17, 2026

RNS

(RNS) — The closest Kareem Sarsour had come to seeing his father in more than two months was standing outside an Indiana county jail where he is being held by immigration officials.

Salah Sarsour, a Muslim Palestinian leader and green card holder, was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in March. Kareem Sarsour’s visit requests have been repeatedly denied.

“It’s heartbreaking and deeply upsetting to know my father is only a few steps away, yet I can’t see him, check on him, or give him a hug,” Kareem said. “It was a very painful ride back knowing we left my father there.”

But on Sunday (June 14), Kareem Sarsour’s spirits were buoyed as he stood beside dozens of American Jews who drove in from neighboring states to rally outside the Clay County Jail to demand Sarsour’s release.

Jodi Melamed, leader with the Milwaukee chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, speaks during the event. Photo courtesy of Jews for Salah

Many American Jews feel an obligation to support Sarsour, said Jodi Melamed, an organizer with the Milwaukee chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace.

“It is very rare, especially since Oct. 7, 2023, to have so many Jews from such a wide variety of perspectives on Israel come together to defend a Palestinian for Palestinian speech,” said Melamed.

National Muslim advocacy groups see Sarsour’s arrest as part of a politically motivated campaign to stifle pro-Palestinian speech in the United States. That view is increasingly shared by other faith groups in the U.S., including some Jews.

Progressive Jewish advocacy organizations condemn what they view as a misguided attempt to fight antisemitism by targeting Palestinians like Sarsour.

“The administration is specifically conflating the fight for Jewish safety with the ways that people are standing up for Palestinian rights, and then using that as a strategy to push an anti-immigrant agenda and crack down on civil liberties broadly,” said Jamie Beran, chief executive officer of Bend the Arc, a Jewish social justice organization.

Homeland Security officials have described Sarsour as a national security threat with ties to terrorist groups.

In an April statement, the agency said Sarsour, who grew up in the occupied West Bank, had been convicted of throwing molotov cocktails at armed Israeli forces before being granted entry to the United States in 1993. A spokesperson also alleged that Sarsour lied in his green card application.

Sarsour’s lawyers have argued that U.S. officials knew about his history since 1993, when his visa application was approved. They say his detention was politically motivated.

In a status hearing on June 8, Sarsour’s attorneys asked a federal judge to release him, saying his health has deteriorated.

Sarsour was also denied a Quran and has been repeatedly interrupted by guards when he is trying to pray, his attorneys wrote in a May 29 letter to U.S. District Court Judge James Patrick Hanlon. When Sarsour, who is diabetic, asked for an adequate diet, his lawyer Luna Droubi said he was told to purchase barbecue pork rinds from the commissary, which would violate Muslim dietary laws, which forbid pork products.

U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis., who was able to visit Sarsour on the day of the protest, said he was not receiving adequate medical care for his diabetes.

“Salah is being targeted for his advocacy for Palestinians, but his mistreatment is part of the Trump administration’s larger campaign of hate against immigrants,” she said in a statement Sunday.

Sarsour was president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, the largest mosque in that city, before his arrest. He was also a board member of American Muslims for Palestine, a national organization focused on education about Palestinians.

Kareem Sarsour, Salah’s son, spoke during the event calling for the release of his father. Photo courtesy of Jews for Salah

U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore speaks with Kareem Sarsour, son of Salah Sarsour. Moore was one of multiple elected officials to attend the event. Photo courtesy of Jews for Salah

Melamed, a longtime friend of Sarsour’s, described him as a bridge builder with strong ties to interfaith communities in Milwaukee. As a board member of the mosque’s K-12 school, Sarsour helped create a strong Holocaust education program, helping bring Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein to the school more than once.

“He’s the papa bear of our interfaith community, and that’s why it’s so hard and so shocking and really cruel,” Melamed said of Sarsour.

American Jewish communities are divided over support for Israel. But there is wide agreement among American Jews that the Trump administration’s massive deportation agenda is unjust and in many cases unlawful.

“It should be a given that we’re here because we are Jews,” said Rabbi Bruce Elder of Congregation Hakafa in Glencoe, Illinois, who spoke at the protest. “You cannot separate the Jewish immigrant experience from other immigrants that are coming through. Our Jewish textual tradition calls for us to be here.”

Elder, who is also affiliated with the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs and T’ruah, the rabbinical human rights group, said he does not think support for the Palestinians should be tied to antisemitism.

“The cover of fighting antisemitism from an administration that has some of the most racist antisemites — using that to try to divide us against other folks, to me, is an incredible concern,” he said.

A group of attendees takes a photo together, many wearing shirts that read “Free Salah” on the front. Photo courtesy of Jews for Salah

Progressive Jewish groups have also supported and advocated for several international student leaders targeted with detention or deportation for their pro-Palestinian activism, including former Columbia University students Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi.

In Colorado Springs, Colorado, local Jewish advocates and Christian groups have supported Hayam El Gamal and her five children, who were released after 10 months from ICE custody. ICE had been trying to deport the family since El Gamal’s ex-husband was charged with attempted murder for throwing molotov cocktails at protesters who’d gathered in support of Israeli hostages in Gaza — an attack his family said it knew nothing about.

Erin Adlerstein, who organized a Jewish-led rally last month asking for due process for Hayam El Gamal and her children, acknowledged the horror of Mohamed Soliman’s attack on the Boulder Jewish community. “But as a neighbor of the El Gamal family, it just does not serve me in any way to hold these children responsible for the actions of their father,” Adlerstein said.

For Kareem Sarsour, the presence of Jews at the protest demanding his father’s release was meaningful.

Interfaith unity, he said, counters ICE’s goal of “breaking us as a community and picking on us one by one.”

2026-06-21T07:54:09.029-07:00

Opinion

Is this the civil rights moment of our day?

(RNS) — The hard-won gains of the civil rights era are steadily being eroded by political pandering to white anxiety in the midst of growing diversity.

The U.S. Supreme Court photographed April 13, 2026, in Washington.

(AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)

Lovett H. Weems Jr.
June 18, 2026

RNS

(RNS) — On April 29, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map that included two majority Black districts constituted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. This decision will likely go far in resegregating the U.S. Congress. It was yet another court ruling undercutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act, rendering it virtually meaningless. In fact, columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote in The New York Times that this decision might facilitate “the largest reduction in Black representation at the federal and state levels since the end of Reconstruction.”

Indeed, historian Jemar Tisby responded by saying, “We are living through the Civil Rights movement of our day.” He cautions Christians not to miss the historical moment in which we live.

The Black Church and the Gutting of the Voting Rights Act with Rev. Thomas L. Bowen

The era between Reconstruction and Jim Crow

After the Civil War (1861-1865), the Reconstruction period (1865-1877) provided protections for the rights of Black people never seen before in the country. But in 1877, those rights crumbled and would not be regained for nearly a century, in the mid-1960s when civil rights and voting rights were finally guaranteed nationwide. The dark period of Jim Crow segregation laws is sometimes referred to as American apartheid.

However, I think we need a term for the period in between Reconstruction ending and the onslaught of Jim Crow implementation by the Southern states — a period facilitated by Supreme Court decisions. During this era, the Supreme Court issued several decisions that adopted a narrow interpretation of the 14th Amendment (1868) and the 15th Amendment (1870), which had been added to protect Black persons after slavery. The effect of the court’s decisions was to limit federal efforts to enforce those protections while ceding control to white Southerners to dismantle Black political participation and civil rights.

What followed Reconstruction was a white backlash that virtually wiped out the gains from the Civil War. A political compromise permitted states to limit Black rights to the point of virtually no political rights.

We need to name the backlash era because it is occurring again today. Slowly but steadily, the hard-won gains of the civil rights era are being eroded by political pandering to white anxiety in the midst of growing diversity. And that movement is aided by a Supreme Court apparently so out of touch with the racial dynamics of this nation’s history that they fail to see what looks obvious to many others. Otherwise, why would a series of Southern states move immediately after the decision to redo their congressional district lines, with the result of eliminating people of color from their congressional delegations?

State troopers swing billy clubs to break up a civil rights voting march in Selma, Ala., March 7, 1965, on what became known as Bloody Sunday. (AP Photo, File)

Religious leaders and the Voting Rights Act

Religious leaders were intimately involved in the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Bill of 1965. Most observers credit their efforts with some of the critical influence in securing the votes necessary for passage. As it turned out, Republican votes were essential for passage. Those working for passage came to realize that it was religious groups that had connections with Republicans that other groups, such as labor groups, did not. This became the high point for religious influence on national legislation in recent eras.

These commitments to civil rights continue today and are reflected in some immediate actions after the Supreme Court issued its opinion. In my denomination, the United Methodist Church, two agencies, the General Board of Church and Society and the General Commission on Religion and Race, issued a joint statement:

“After decades of historically protected equitable political representation,” they said, “the Court’s decision exposes Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities to renewed disenfranchisement. The potential loss of districts and voices from people of color that have been meaningfully represented, is a direct threat to a fair and equitable Democracy.”

They went on to say that “the Voting Rights Act is a testament to the courage of those who marched, prayed, and organized for a more just democracy.”

The GOP was for the minority districts they now are disbanding

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law on Aug. 6, 1965. In 1982, Congress passed an amendment prohibiting the drawing of electoral boundaries or the use of other electoral devices that result in a denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race or color. In 1986, the Supreme Court in Thornburg v. Gingles concluded that “unlawful dilution of the voting strength of racial minorities may be caused by the dispersal of blacks into districts in which they constitute an ineffective minority of voters or from the concentration of blacks into districts where they constitute an excessive majority.” This led the Reagan Department of Justice to mandate the drawing of minority-majority districts in a state whenever voter dilution was in question.

Instead of seeing this as a threat, Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich saw that if people of color could be “packed” into a few districts, then the other districts in the South were more likely to elect Republicans since Southern whites were increasingly voting Republican. The result was an increase in both people of color representatives and Republican representatives. This was one factor in Republicans winning the House majority in 1994 for the first time in almost 40 years.

So in 1992, 12 new Black members of Congress from the South were elected, bringing the Black House membership to 38 from 26. For most of the 12, they were the first Black representatives from their states since Reconstruction. Now the GOP is rushing to undo a system that served it well in the 1990s. The results could be risky, but the intent is clear.

There continues to be a concentration of Blacks in the South, where over 50% of the Black population lives. This is precisely where state legislatures are already meeting to restructure congressional districts to eliminate Black representation. They claim that the action is strictly political with no reference to race, but that is not credible. In 1967, after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Robert Clark Jr. became the first Black lawmaker elected to the Mississippi Legislature since Reconstruction. He served until 2004. His son, and successor in the Legislature, said that claiming actions are political and not racial in Mississippi makes no sense when most Black voters are Democrats and most white voters are Republicans. “The two are often indistinguishable,” he said.

A Christian challenge

Christians are called to approach public issues from a different perspective than many advocacy groups. We seek not special treatment or advantage but rather the common good. Methodists seek to follow John Wesley’s example. He offered spiritual and religious reasons for Methodist behavior, but when he approached public officials, he cited the public interest at stake in any actions sought. He strived for what was best for all the people.

Ethicist Walter Muelder once said that “the message of Christianity should throw a searchlight on the actual facts of the existing situation and reveal the concrete consequences of political behavior.” This is a time when public officials need to see this big picture and how their actions will impact the lives of so many others. Christians are called today to point the searchlight.

(Lovett H. Weems Jr. is the Distinguished Professor of Church Leadership emeritus at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., and the author, most recently, of “An Aura of Hope: United Methodism’s Next Chapter in the United States.” A version of this article first appeared on his Substack newsletter, United Methodist Focus. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)

Opinion

161 years after Juneteenth, there is unfinished work of freedom

(RNS) — The forces that threaten freedom continually take new forms.

People cheer during a Juneteenth parade, June 19, 2025, in Galveston, Texas.

(AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Kelly Brown Douglas, Stephanie Spellers and Winnie Varghese
June 18, 2026

RNS

(RNS) — Not every proclamation is true. Some we must struggle and keep the faith to make true.

On June 19, 1865, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and issued General Order No. 3, announcing that “all slaves are free.” He was conveying news of the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Abraham Lincoln had issued two years earlier on Jan. 1, 1863.

Granger’s declaration of freedom was aspirational. While the enslaved were legally emancipated, they remained bound by entrenched systems of white supremacy and enduring prejudices that denied their humanity and reduced them to property. In the years that followed, African Americans continued to live in the “afterlife” of slavery, as new and more insidious shackles emerged.

Vagrancy laws, convict-leasing schemes, debt bondage and the expanding architecture of Jim Crow segregation all served to reproduce many of the conditions of the old slave order under new legal and social guises.

Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor General Order No. 3 was yet true. Both ushered in a new reality of “unfreedom.” Both expressed the enduring tension within the American freedom experiment itself: the gap between our proclaimed ideals and our lived realities.

This paradox lies at the heart of the American story. It is the story of a nation whose Declaration of Independence announced that “all men are created equal,” even as it restricted the promise of freedom to propertied white men, enslaved more than a fifth of its population, and pursued the genocide of Native peoples.

The story of freedom is unfinished in a nation that pledges “liberty and justice for all,” while it systematically advances policies, practices and ideologies that diminish human dignity.

We know these gaps and indignities too well, as women of color in this nation, and especially as ordained women of color in the Episcopal Church. Our tradition has often mirrored and blessed American systems of white supremacy, elitism and patriarchy. But our tradition also proclaims a commitment to Jesus and to God’s beloved community, where all human beings are sacred.

We are compelled by this faith to name the gap between what our nation promises and what our nation does, to recognize the same gaps and untruths in our own churches and to join in shared struggle to make freedom real.

Here is what we know: Freedom is not an achievement to be declared and celebrated once and for all. The work of freedom is perpetually unfinished because the forces that threaten it continually take new forms, as we see today in restrictions on voting rights, challenges to citizenship and the denial of due process to immigrants.

We know the work of freedom dies when we believe that we are powerless, that we are alone, that certain lives matter less than others, that my gain is your loss, that despair and defeat are inevitable, that not everyone deserves to be free.

But we also know this: No matter what political, social or even religious institutions may proclaim, we are all human beings created in the image of a God who is free. True freedom — God-given freedom — liberates us from illusions of superiority and entitlements of privilege. It calls us beyond the domination and exclusion of any people. Our freedoms are bound up in one another.

Faith does not permit us to be passive observers of history, remaining silent and on the sidelines while others proclaim and enact untruths in the name of God. Indeed, faith compels us to participate in God’s liberating work in the world. Faith calls us to lead the struggle for freedom. Faith propels us to refuse to be divided against one another.

Faith urges us to attend to our well-being, to nourish our capacity to risk together, and to shield our joy so we can stay in the struggle. Faith demands that we proclaim freedom in word and in deed.

As our nation marks 161 years since the proclamation of emancipation to enslaved peoples — and as the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches — we can never forget that freedom remains unfinished business. We have soul work to do and truths to proclaim and make real.

The truth is, we must be honest about our history as a nation and church — we cannot heal what we have not named.

The truth is, all institutions — political, social and religious — must work for the freedom of all people.

The truth is, every form of oppression is a desecration of the image of God.

The truth is, we are endowed by our Creator with freedom, love and power that the world cannot take away.

The truth is, until all God’s children can live with dignity, justice and genuine freedom, the 1865 Juneteenth proclamation is not yet true.

This Juneteenth, we recommit with you to the work of making it true.

(The Rev. Kelly Brown-Douglas, the former dean and interim president of the Episcopal Divinity School, is a visiting professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School. The Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers is an author and Episcopal priest. She was canon to former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and will become priest-in-charge of St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco this summer. The Very Rev. Winnie Varghese is dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. The opinions expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

2026-06-21T07:43:38.265-07:00

For preservers of lynching history in the US, Juneteenth is a religious reckoning

(RNS) — The Equal Justice Initiative’s Bryan Stevenson says confronting America’s lynching history is a matter of faith that demands truth-telling and repentance — especially on America’s most recently recognized national holiday.

The Rev. Marcus A.L. Freeman III, center, leads a Communion service at the historic Wesley United Methodist Church, Sunday, June 7, 2026, in Austin, Texas. (Video screen grab)

Chloe Landen
June 18, 2026

RNS

AUSTIN, Texas (RNS) — In 2016, 89-year-old Opal Lee walked from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., in hopes of establishing Juneteenth as a national holiday. Partly due to her efforts, it became one in 2021.

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when the nation’s last enslaved people in Texas learned of their freedom. The news arrived over two years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

But for “the grandmother of Juneteenth,” the holiday carries a grief more personal than for most living today. When she was 12 years old, her family moved into a predominantly white neighborhood in Fort Worth. Shortly after, on June 19, 1939, a mob of over 500 white residents burned the family’s home down.

“It’s just another iteration of a lynching, in a way,” said the Rev. Marcus A.L. Freeman III, senior pastor of the historic Wesley United Methodist Church in Austin. “To just take everything you work for and just burn it down.”

Wesley United Methodist Church in Austin, Texas. (RNS photo/Chloe Landen)

Founded in 1865 by newly freed people, Wesley is one of Austin’s oldest Black institutions. It’s also home to the city’s only lynching marker, which serves to document the history of lynching in America for current and future generations.

Installed in December 2017, the marker is one of over 80 such plaques erected across the nation by the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project, which began placing the markers to help communities face the violent truths of their past. EJI also constructed the country’s first lynching memorial, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Alabama.

Bryan Stevenson, EJI’s executive director, told RNS that Juneteenth is a time to celebrate emancipation but also to acknowledge continued harm. Despite the positive development in recognizing Juneteenth nationally, “Black people in this country were subjected to another century of torture violence.”

Montgomery, Ala., churches part of city’s 200-year history of slavery, civil rights

For Stevenson, the work is a matter of faith. Drawing on his own religious community, Stevenson told RNS that people cannot claim to want “heaven and redemption and salvation” but be unprepared to acknowledge, repent or confess to anything. The fact that very few people can name a single Black lynching victim, he added, reveals how much work remains.

Several of EJI’s lynching markers are placed on or near church properties. The Community Remembrance Project erects markers at locations where lynchings occurred, which in some cases have been churches. Yet in instances where very little is known about a lynching, the EJI has asked local Black churches to house the markers.

Black churches served as vital protective spaces for Southerners terrorized by lynchings near and far — which has made them appropriate homes for lynching history, Stevenson said.

That was the case for the marker at Wesley in Austin.

The plaque commemorates a triple lynching in August 1894 after a white child’s death while in the care of a Black female domestic laborer. Without evidence or investigation, the woman and two Black men presumed to be accomplices were quickly arrested. A white mob then abducted the three from jail, took them to a neighboring city, tied them to stakes and shot them to death. No one was ever charged with their killings. The few surviving records suggest the victims were innocent.

A lynching marker from the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project on the property of Wesley United Methodist Church in Austin, Texas. (RNS photo/Chloe Landen)

Their tragic story was not unique. From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, Texas was a leader in mob violence. The Tuskegee Institute recorded 493 lynching victims in Texas between 1882 and 1968 — 352 of whom were Black. Nationally, the same archive documented 4,743 people killed by lynching during that period — 3,445 of them Black. But many lynchings went unreported, and the actual statistics are believed to be far higher.

Like the three individuals commemorated by Wesley’s marker, many lynching victims were held in jails, often on false charges or scant evidence, when white mobs came for them. Law enforcement routinely served as willing accomplices and sometimes participated in lynchings.

In some cases, lynchings were communal spectacles that drew thousands and generated a tourist economy. The 1893 lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, was attended by at least 10,000 white men, women and children. Bound to a 10-foot-tall scaffold bearing the word “JUSTICE,” Smith was tortured for nearly an hour before his body, still alive, was set aflame. Smith’s bones, pieces of his clothing and photographs of his death became fiercely sought-after souvenirs.

No white person was ever convicted of lynching a Black American. And mob members did not conceal their identities when posing beside corpses they had lynched.

Religious leaders mark centennial of S.C. lynching

Several historians of religion have interpreted lynching as a form of Southern religious practice. Lynch mobs frequently conceived of their violence as divinely ordained justice and were known to praise God amid killings. The ritualized elements of lynching, including forced confessions, drawn-out physical torture and the exchange of relics in a post-lynching marketplace, bear unmistakable resemblances to religious ceremony.

Columns memorializing lynching victims at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala. (RNS photo/Adelle M. Banks)

And justifying it all were powerful mythologies of Black criminality, none more enduring than the myth of the “Black rapist.” Though accusations of sexual assault were mostly false — and though rape in the South has historically manifested as a crime with Black women as the primary victims — the defense that lynching was necessary for the protection of white women outlived all others.

These myths about Black criminality and inferiority trace their roots to enslavement, Stevenson said, allowing some to “feel moral and decent and Christian” as they sold human beings and then lynched them decades later.

With this context, placing a lynching marker at a Black church carries theological weight, functioning as a counternarrative on sacred ground. For Wesley’s church historian Arlene L. Youngblood, the symbolism is direct. “When you put daylight on something that’s ugly, something that’s shameful,” she told RNS, “Satan has to run.”

According to Youngblood, Wesley was the only Black church in Austin that agreed to take the EJI’s marker. “Even though it’s a sad circumstance,” Youngblood said it was an honor to be asked. And it took courage for Wesley’s reverend at the time, Sylvester Chase, to say yes, she added.

Church historian Arlene L. Youngblood, left, and senior pastor the Rev. Marcus A.L. Freeman III at Wesley United Methodist Church in Austin, Texas. (RNS photo/Chloe Landen)

“It was a public acknowledgment (that) something has happened to us,” Youngblood said.

Since then, Freeman, the current senior pastor, has observed that the marker engenders a discerning “reverence” in those who walk by it, sometimes so totalizing that they don’t turn their heads as he passes behind them. “It’s amazing to watch,” he said.

Freeman sees those moments as an extension of what he calls Wesley’s “ministry of presence” and “ministry of information.” The church has a long educational history rooted in the traditions of the Black church and the theological commitments of the United Methodist denomination. The lynching marker, in his view, is fully consistent with Wesley’s tradition.

“If we don’t learn our history,” Freeman said, “we’re likely to repeat it.”

“And it’s still happening — that’s the killer,” Youngblood added.

For many Black Americans, the history of lynching has never felt distant. Instances of racial terror were not isolated events but part and parcel of systemic racism and white supremacy. Lynchings’ expansive violence reshaped the American landscape, leaving thousands dead and fueling the Great Migration of more than 6 million Southern Black refugees to the North and West, in addition to contributing to the continued disenfranchisement of African Americans.

As EJI research has shown, communities where lynchings occurred are areas that remain disproportionately poor and highly incarcerated. The Center for Justice Research has similarly demonstrated that states’ lynching rates predict current poverty levels, which in turn emerge as the strongest predictor of incarceration. The national incarceration rate of Black Americans is six times the rate of white Americans. Black people are also disproportionately sentenced to death, particularly when the crime involves white victims.

Notably, the first piece of anti-lynching legislation to be signed into law was the 2022 Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which made lynching a federal hate crime. The victory came decades after several failed attempts in the early to mid-20th century.

Stevenson and Youngblood join countless others who understand the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbery and far too many more as modern-day lynchings.

“They were victims of these presumptions of dangerousness and guilt because of their color,” Stevenson said, adding these presumptions are themselves an enduring legacy of slavery’s “great evil” — the false narrative “that somehow Black people aren’t as good as white people or less human, less evolved, less decent.”

“We are not yet free of that narrative,” Stevenson said. “The work remains.”

Vice President Kamala Harris welcomes Opal Lee to the stage during a Juneteenth concert on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, June 13, 2023. Lee is considered the grandmother of Juneteenth. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Stevenson envisions America’s 250th birthday, like Juneteenth, as an opportunity to celebrate but also to acknowledge persisting challenges and commit to overcoming them. The effort of installing lynching markers that draw people of diverse racial backgrounds together “to talk about these tragic incidents of the past and to commit to a healthier future” is, he said, “a microcosm of what the whole nation must do.”

Those at Wesley who shepherd Austin’s only lynching marker are similarly sitting with the full weight of that paradox. Youngblood cited a lack of affordable housing, widespread homelessness, the school-to-prison pipeline that disproportionately affects Black youth, deep cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and ongoing redistricting and gerrymandering as reasons for grief, not celebration.

“This is the best country in the world,” Youngblood said. “But right now, this is not a pretty year to celebrate America.”

Freeman has found inspiration from Opal Lee herself. In a recent Texas Co-op Power article, Lee, now nearly 100 years old, laughed off the idea of retirement. “People who are old can’t sit in a rocking chair and wait for the Lord to come and get them,” she said. “There’s still plenty of work to be done.”

“The struggle continues, as we say,” Freeman concurred.

In Richmond, churches retrace the path of the enslaved to confront their own history

RICHMOND, Va. (RNS) — Just as the country prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — and Juneteenth — Virginia Episcopalians are trying to reckon with the role of their city and their denomination in slavery as a founding reality of the United States.

Fiona André
June 18, 2026

RNS

RICHMOND, Va. (RNS) – From 1830 to 1860, tens of thousands of enslaved people disembarked ships at Richmond’s Manchester Docks, an entry point into a bondage system that built Virginia’s wealth and shaped the city’s history. Shackled together, the enslaved people trudged along a muddy trail connecting the docks to the city’s auction house, where they were sold and bought as property.

Today, the path, known as the “slave trail,” is part of a citywide walking tour exploring Richmond’s role as a major hub of the domestic slave trade.

As about 20 Virginians marched in line, in silence, over the muddy trail on Saturday (June 13) — some clinging to one another to understand the experience of enslaved people who walked the trail in chains — a gospel singer performed the African American spiritual “Wade in the Water” alongside them.

Walking silently, Renee Munford, who is Black, said she felt her ancestors. The 65-year-old wondered what they thought as they walked, whether they were afraid, confused or both. At some point, she cried.

“Every time I looked out at the water, all I could see was people coming in on ships and disembarking, and just in a frenzy, so my heart bled for that,” she said.

The silent walk was the first part of a historical and spiritual pilgrimage through Richmond led by two local Episcopal churches. The gathering, called “Walking With the Enslaved: The Church’s Role in Slavery Pilgrimage,” seeks to cover the city’s racial history from the steps of Virginia’s state Capitol to a notorious 19th-century slave jail to Richmond’s first African church.

Participants in a slavery pilgrimage visit State Capitol square, Saturday, June 13, 2026, in Richmond, Va. (RNS photo/Fiona André) TOP PHOTO: Docent Glyn Hughes, center right, speaks to a group at the Richmond Slavery Reconciliation Statue, Saturday, June 13, 2026, in Richmond, Va. (RNS photo/Fiona André)

The daylong retreat grew out of a partnership between St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Virginia’s largest Episcopal parish that was once attended by Confederate army Gen. Robert E. Lee and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, one of the South’s oldest Black Episcopal churches, founded in 1861 by enslaved and freed Richmonders. The two congregations designed the experience centered on stories of enslaved people and enslavers, prayer and African American spirituals, which they hope will make for a transformative and eye-opening encounter for all who take part.

Just as the country prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — and Juneteenth, the commemoration of when enslaved people of Galveston got news of their liberation on June 19, 1865 — these Episcopalians are trying to reckon with the role of their city and their denomination in slavery as a founding reality of the United States. The churches’ collaboration reflects both the Episcopal Church’s racial reconciliation focus, announced in 2016, by then-Presiding Bishop Michael Curry — the first African American to lead the denomination nationally — and a broader citywide effort to confront the city’s slave-trading past.

St. Paul’s and St. Philip’s, both of whose histories were shaped by Richmond’s role as a major slave-trading center and the capital of the Confederacy, are hoping to translate these efforts into personal transformation.

Before they embarked on the pilgrimage, the group gathered for an introduction session at St. Philip’s. Nikki Fernandes, one of the tour’s docents, reminded them of the day’s spiritual goal. “We hope you leave this pilgrimage with something, and that the Holy Spirit will guide what that something is,” said Fernandes, a Virginia native and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.

Walking through these historic sites is more likely to transform people and help the history solidify in their minds than something less immersive, said Jerry Gilbert, one of the pilgrimage’s co-chairs and a vestry member at St. Paul’s. “That may be what people would call the ancestors talking to you, or the place talking to you. … But I think it really happens because I’ve felt it happen,” Gilbert told RNS in an April interview.

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Saturday, June 13, 2026, in Richmond, Va. (RNS photo/Fiona André)

Many participants had heard about the pilgrimage through the churches. The project started at St. Paul’s and took off after the congregation reached out to St. Philip’s to collaborate. Gilbert said the church needed a “nonwhite majority” partner to improve the walks.

“We knew that sometimes white privilege is very blind to seeing all of the aspects of a situation when race is involved,” he said.

St. Paul’s, perched on Richmond Hill near the Virginia Capitol, traces its roots to Monumental Church, established in 1814 by prominent Richmonders — “nearly all” enslavers, according to the church’s website. During a tour stop on Richmond Hill, Glyn Hughes, another docent, stressed that the freedom ideals that fueled America’s founding collided with Virginia’s reliance on slave trading and its leaders’ affiliation with Episcopal and Presbyterian churches.

In front of the state Capitol, which once held church services for Presbyterians and Episcopalians but also served as the Confederate States Congress during the Civil War, Hughes invited participants to “think about how they were mingling Christian values to their ideals.”

Docent Nikki Fernandes, center, addresses a slavery pilgrimage group on Saturday, June 13, 2026, in Richmond, Va. (RNS photo/Fiona André)

After the 2015 killing of nine Black worshippers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, St. Paul’s started examining its own racist past. Five years later, the church removed Confederate symbols from the sanctuary, shedding the most visible reminders of its support for the Confederacy and cutting off its embrace of Lost Cause ideology after the Civil War.

St. Philip’s, nestled in Richmond’s North Side, has served as a refuge for Black Richmonders through the Civil War, the Jim Crow era and today. Despite its prominence for the city’s Black Episcopalians, the church didn’t gain full representation at the diocesan convention until 1937.

The churches’ partnership has been “transformational,” said Crystal Green, a co-chair of the project and a member of St. Philip’s. “It’s part of a healing process that is 400 years in the making, so it’s transformed our lives, our worship styles, and it’s also built a lifetime of friendships.”

Beginning at the “slave trail” shapes participants’ experience of the pilgrimage’s nine remaining stops, organizers noted. The recovered stories of Black Richmonders also ensure participants center the perspectives of enslaved people during the pilgrimage.

At the fifth stop, the First African Baptist Church, Fernandes recounted the story of Henry “Box” Brown, a member of the congregation born into slavery on a Louisa County plantation. In 1849, Brown escaped by shipping himself to Philadelphia in a wooden box to reach freedom in the North.

Four years after promising $10M for racial reparations, Virginia’s Episcopalians have little to show

The tour cultivates a sense of sacredness through prayers, silent reflections and songs. The pilgrimage’s opening prayer, which invites participants to “leave the familiar, the comforting, the known” to find a deeper sense of God, is echoed through the Bible verses associated with each stop. A preacher-style call and response ritual in front of each site also reinforces the pilgrimage’s spiritual dimension.

Participants in a slavery pilgrimage take some quiet time in St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Saturday, June 13, 2026, in Richmond, Va. (RNS photo/Fiona André)

“God of love who traces our journeys,” Hughes said as the group approached each stop. “Enlighten the eyes of our hearts,” participants replied in unison.

The spirituals — including “Amazing Grace,” a hymn that predates the United States, and Thomas Dorsey’s 1930s classic “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” — also help set the pilgrimage’s solemn tone. For Shauntae Lilly, the gospel singer who accompanies the group, the songs are a tribute to the enslaved.

“My voice provides the voice of the journey,” said the 43-year-old singer. “ … Sometimes stories are easier felt than heard.”

Lilly, who grew up attending both Southern Baptist and Black Episcopal churches, said years of observing and listening to church choirs compensate for her lack of classical training. Like some Black participants, Lilly said she feels the presence of her ancestors during her performances.

“I feel as if the good Lord uses my voice to do that,” she said.

The pilgrimage’s last stops — the Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground, the sunken slave jail of Shockoe Bottom and its dried-up reconciliation fountain — sit under the shadow of Interstate 95. Built in 1958, the highway severed Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church, a 150-year-old Black Baptist congregation and the pilgrimage’s final stop, from Jackson Ward, Richmond’s historical Black neighborhood.

Participants in a slavery pilgrimage stop under Interstate 95, Saturday, June 13, 2026, on the way to Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground in Richmond, Va. (RNS photo/Fiona André)

To Hughes, the interstate’s path through Jackson Ward is an example of “infrastructural violence” and a reminder of continued harm inflicted on Black Richmonders, he told participants on the bus ride back to St. Philip’s.

After lunch at St. Philip’s, participants scattered across the sanctuary and garden for a period of silent reflection. Guided by a Gospel of Matthew verse quoting the Prophet Isaiah about people who “listen, but never understand … look, but never perceive,” participants then shared their emotions, frustrations and awakenings. Equipped with a form inquiring about how they felt, what they thought and what value they carried as they completed the walk, the group embarked on an hourlong discussion on the pilgrimage.

As she sat on a bench by herself in St. Philip’s garden after the walk, Monica Melton, an educator who has lived in Richmond for 20 years, said she was thinking about how to get more involved.

Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against a Louisiana congressional map that included two Black-majority districts, thereby hollowing out a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Melton said she has been concerned about Black voters’ political power in the South.

“I was really thinking less, maybe about the experience throughout the day, but like ‘where is my voice?’ like my political voice,” she said.

The personal stories of the enslaved, which she called the “most powerful piece,” also changed how she plans to approach discussions on racial history with her students.

Her husband, the Rev. Brent Melton, has also been impacted by the enslaved people’s stories. When the couple, who are white, got home on Saturday, Brent Melton modified the sermon he had prepared for the next-day service to mention the pilgrimage.

As he told the parishioners of Richmond’s Grace & Holy Trinity Church that the “work of the Kingdom coming near” requires building communities, Brent Melton noted how the pilgrimage created community by pushing participants to convene with strangers.

“It was kind of like doing the stations of the cross, we had a simple liturgy, the story slowly unfolded, we even had music with a cantor,” he said. “Before we met in our small group, we were asked to do the most hated thing: do not sit with anyone you know. It was a God experience of movement with strangers. We were in the action of bringing God’s kingdom near.”

As she stepped into St. Philip’s that morning, Munford said, she felt weary of the experience ahead. Time invested in multiple racial reconciliation efforts that ultimately stalled had left her skeptical. “It made me kind of bitter towards the whole reconciliation thing,” she said. But seeing white Virginians willing to face this history gave her hope.

“All I could think is, you’ve got these white people that are interested enough to take out time on their Saturday and go through this process with us,” she said.

2026-06-21T07:35:46.598-07:00

Five things resettlement orgs want you to know this World Refugee Day

(RNS) — As the U.S. welcomes individuals from all over the globe to celebrate the world’s game, most refugees remain largely shut out. On this World Refugee Day, faith-based resettlement organizations say caring for the stranger is a spiritual concern.

Pastor Jennifer Castle joins others outside the U.S. District Court after a federal judge blocked President Donald Trump’s effort to halt the nation’s refugee admissions system, Feb. 25, 2025, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Ryan Sun)

David Katibah
June 18, 2026

(RNS) — 5.4 million people became refugees in 2025. With the global total eclipsing more than 35 million refugees — not including the 69 million internally displaced persons — resettlement remains a vital lifeline for the most vulnerable communities.

For more than four decades, the U.S. has been on the front lines of that process. But in 2025, the U.S. only resettled 11,500 refugees, a sharp drop from the more than 100,000 in 2024. In 2026, the number so far is less than 6,000 — all of them from South Africa.

As the U.S. welcomes individuals from all over the globe to celebrate the world’s game, most refugees remain largely shut out.

This Saturday (June 20) is World Refugee Day, celebrated by the U.N. since 2001. In light of ongoing changes to U.S. immigration and refugee policy, we asked faith-based resettlement organizations what communities of faith should know about current U.S. refugee policy.

The U.S. refugee program has been devastated in recent years.

Matthew Soerens. (Photo courtesy of World Relief)

The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, a bipartisan effort established in the wake of the fall of Saigon, has all but been gutted. Some of the most vulnerable communities in the world are now barred from seeking entry into the United States.

But many Christians are not aware, said some of the major faith-based refugee resettlement agencies.

“The average person in the average church I go to has no idea that the refugee resettlement program has been shut down,” Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief, told Religion News Service.

The change in policy has meant these agencies have had to make major staffing and programming adjustments. Some of them have had to survive the termination of significant U.S. grant funding. But more importantly, they say, the change has felt like an abandonment of these needy communities.
RELATED: After refugee aid cuts, faith groups help Afghan women connect through sewing

During the first Trump administration, the number of refugees admitted to the U.S. was cut drastically, leading resettlement agencies to cut staff and reduce programs. Those programs were rebuilt during the Biden administration, only to be shut down again when Trump returned to office.

In fiscal 2026 (which began Oct. 1, 2025), the vast majority of refugees who have been resettled are white Afrikaners, a minority community from South Africa. Persecuted Christians and other religious minorities, who have historically been a priority for the USRAP — such as through the Lautenberg Program — are no longer given special consideration.

“We’re unfortunately quite confident that zero Christian refugees from countries where Christians are known to face persecution will come to the United States as refugees this year, down from more than 29,000 two years ago,” said Soerens.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau greets Afrikaner refugees from South Africa, May 12, 2025, at Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Va. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Despite the restrictions by the current administration, most Protestant pastors prefer a much wider net for refugee admissions. Only 18% of pastors in a 2026 poll run by Lifeway identified Afrikaners as a priority for refugee resettlement.

On the other hand, 70% of pastors identified those who have fled persecution and have family members already in the U.S. as a priority.
Families have been separated, and more families are at risk of separation.

Many of the individuals who come to the U.S. are hoping to chart a path for their families, said Matt Misterek, director of communications at Lutheran Community Services Northwest, one of the plaintiffs in an ongoing case against the U.S. government’s refugee restrictions.

“When individuals come, they’re often almost always here to put their front foot forward with the hope that in fact they’re going to be able to reunite with their families in the United States,” said Misterek.

Family reunification is considered a priority by Congress, especially uniting children with their families that are already stateside. Yet while exceptions to the ban are being made for South African refugees, the same is not true for these children.

One such child is a 9-year-old boy from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He’s been stuck alone in Burundi, even though his parents and siblings are already in the U.S.

“These actions are discriminatory, cruel and arbitrary,” said Mevlüde Akay Alp, senior litigation attorney for IRAP and lead attorney in the case against the selective application of the refugee ban. The boy’s family is a new plaintiff in an amended complaint put forth by IRAP.

Other policies put in place by the Trump administration in November have made reunification much more difficult. They included a freeze on all asylum applications and a pause on immigration applications for individuals from a list of 39 countries.

The result? Millions of people whose cases were in process were left in limbo.

As of last week, a judge determined the policies were “arbitrary and capricious” and forced U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to restart processing applications. Milagro Sique is the CEO of Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island, the primary plaintiff in the case that led to this ruling. She told RNS the ruling means folks can finally escape this limbo.

“It gives them some clarity, so that (they) the petitioner can make a meaningful decision on their lives,” Sique said.

For many, however, the pause on refugee resettlement means there is still no pathway for their families to join them.
Some refugees already in the U.S. could be in jeopardy.

As part of a crackdown, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested some refugees already legally in the country and detained them for questioning. A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to pause these detentions.

But refugees remain at risk of a “revetting” process, which could result in revocation of their permanent status.

Leliz Bonilla Castro, left, and her sister Xochina Michelle Castro, refugees from Honduras, participate in an English class for refugees, April 11, 2024, in Columbia, S.C. (AP Photo/Erik Verduzco)

For HIAS, the world’s oldest refugee resettlement agency, restrictions on immigration are something it has weathered in the past, particularly in the 1920s. But the refugee revetting process, which risks separating families who believe they have finally made it to safety, is unprecedented.

“This is one of the instances where there is a really fundamental attempt to transform the nature of immigration and refugee resettlement in the U.S. in ways that we haven’t previously seen,” said Noah Gottschalk, chief external relations officer at HIAS.

Gottschalk said the intention in revetting refugees — who already go through one of the most stringent vetting processes in the world — is to create a “climate of fear, a climate of confusion.”
Caring for refugees is a spiritual concern.

For HIAS, caring for refugees is not altruism; it’s an outgrowth of a deeply felt experience.

“We are motivated as we are, by our Jewish values, by the Jewish experience of being persecuted, of being discriminated against for who we are and what we believe,” said Gottschalk.

In June of 1939, the St. Louis, a ship carrying nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees from Germany, was refused entry into the U.S. Forced to return to Europe, 254 of its passengers were eventually murdered in the Holocaust.

For HIAS, remembering this tragedy is an inspiration to welcome refugees today.
People of faith have stepped up.

Many people of faith have done that and more in the past two years. Synagogues, mosques and churches have all met the gap in her community, Sique said, even though DIIRI is not a faith-based organization itself.

Some church members have even gone to great lengths to assist refugees impacted by the recent policies, such as a pair of families who traveled from Minnesota to Texas to assist a refugee who had been detained and released without documentation. For some detainees, this is a deadly experience.

Jewish communities across the country, likewise, have rallied in support of refugees, even in places where such support has come at great cost.

Despite the funding restrictions, many faith-based resettlement organizations have found new ways to support vulnerable communities.

Nevertheless, the support faith communities can offer is not sufficient to meet the needs long term. This is why Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island has turned to fighting some of the restrictions in court.

“We need more of a sustainable plan for these folks,” said Sique.

2026-06-21T07:03:46.258-07:00

German chemical company to cut 3,200 jobs as crisis worsens

AFP
June 18, 2026

vonik cited uncertainty and a week economy as it announced job cuts

– Copyright AFP PAU BARRENA

German chemical company Evonik said Thursday that it would cut 3,200 jobs, or around 10 percent of its workforce, by 2029 as a crisis battering the energy-intensive industry accelerates.

Chemicals is one of the most important sectors in Europe’s biggest economy, but it has been struggling with high costs, exacerbated recently by the energy price shock from the Iran war.

Evonik, which is headquartered in the western city of Essen and makes a range of specialised chemicals, said the cuts were aimed at advancing the company’s transformation.

“The global political situation remains uncertain, and economic growth is persistently weak,” CEO Christian Kullmann said.

“At the same time, international competition is becoming increasingly fierce,” he added.

The job losses will be across all business and administrative departments worldwide, Evonik said.

A total of 2,150 of the positions being axed are in Germany, with talks to be held with staff representatives in the coming weeks.

The company also said it would close its polyester business entirely next year, with sites in Germany and China affected.

The cuts announced Thursday follow a previous round of job losses at Evonik in recent years. Evonik now has around 31,000 employees globally.

The government and industry groups announced in March a plan to help the chemical sector, which includes subsidising power prices and seeking changes to the European Union’s flagship carbon market scheme.

2026-06-21T06:56:50.005-07:00

Cuban economy needs ‘urgent changes’ to overcome crisis: Cuban president

AFP
June 18, 2026

People board a private vehicle transporting passengers on the outskirts of Havana — new restrictions on transport in Cuba are coming into force amid a severe fuel shortage – Copyright AFP YAMIL LAGE

Cuba’s economy needs “urgent changes” to overcome a major crisis intensified by a US oil blockade, President Miguel Diaz-Canel said in a speech to Communist Party leaders broadcast on Thursday.

“The situation calls for urgent and necessary changes,” Diaz-Canel told the party’s politburo in his frankest admission yet of the need for an overhaul of the country’s communist model.

He cited China and Vietnam as possible models for opening Cuba’s economy to the world in order to “create economic wealth and distribute it equally.”

Diaz-Canel made the remarks at a meeting called to fast-track reforms aimed at boosting the growing private sector and attracting more capital from millions of Cubans who have fled the crisis abroad.

Some of the reforms “will not have absolute consensus but cannot be postponed,” Diaz-Canel stressed.

“When people’s lives become this hard,” the Communist Party and government had a responsibility to “change what needs to be changed” rather than try to explain away the crisis, he said.

The oil blockade imposed by President Donald Trump in January has brought Cuba’s already moribund economy to the brink of collapse, marked by power cuts sometimes lasting over 30 hours and shortages of food, fuel, drinking water and medicine.

While Havana’s position has been to blame its woes on a more-than-six-decade US trade embargo and the blockade, Diaz-Canel admitted there were “obstacles that don’t come from outside, nor the blockade.”

He pointed to “slowness, bureaucracy and norms that impede those who want to produce” as well as “decisions that we have put off.”

The reforms were widely seen as a desperate, eleventh-hour bid to stave off economic collapse.

It is unclear, however, whether they will satisfy Trump, who is pushing for a change in Cuba’s leaders as well as its economic model.

With Cuba in crisis, faith groups work to influence policy, deliver aid

(RNS) — U.S. Republican administrations have long seen faith groups as a cornerstone for humanitarian aid and community trust as they push for regime change in Cuba.

Youths carry freshly caught fish from the sea in Havana, Cuba, Monday, June 1, 2026.

(AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

Aleja Hertzler-McCain
June 19, 2026

RNS

(RNS) — In the face of an accelerating U.S. pressure campaign, deteriorating public utilities and economic inefficiency, Cuba’s communist government on Thursday (June 18) announced sweeping economic reforms, the largest privatization since before Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959.

threats of military action, and its sanctions and an oil blockade have been compounding Cuba’s existing fuel shortages, power outages and scarcity of food and medicines.

Amid the mounting internal and external pressure, faith communities have been speaking up and meeting with both the U.S. and Cuban governments.

U.S. Republican administrations have long seen faith groups as a cornerstone for humanitarian aid and community trust as they push for regime change in Cuba. In the last few months, the top U.S. diplomat in Cuba, Mike Hammer, has met with top Catholic bishops, a Catholic priest known for being critical of the Cuban government, a Methodist bishop and members of the Alliance of Evangelical Churches in Cuba, which includes several groups more often critical of the government, including the Assemblies of God.

Despair has become intense, said Rita María García Morris, the executive director of the Centro Cristiano de Reflexión y Diálogo (Christian Center for Reflection and Dialogue) based in the Cuban province of Matanzas, who with her team has helped meet the daily needs of vulnerable people and to advocate for peace, including several meetings with Hammer and U.S.-based pastors.

“Suicide, mental illnesses and hopelessness are extreme, extreme,” said García Morris in Spanish. “Our psychologists cannot keep up. We have a team of psychologists working even at night with phone calls, and they cannot keep up.”

A pile of trash burns in Havana, Cuba, Wednesday, June 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Jorge Luis Banos)

García Morris, a Presbyterian ruling elder, said that suffering due to days-long blackouts and spoiled food is widespread. In December, she had to travel to the Dominican Republic because she had developed diabetic ketoacidosis, a condition that can become life-threatening, because she was not able to keep her insulin refrigerated.

She told RNS she is waiting to see how the economic reforms will affect the population. “Where does that leave the poor people and the humble people?” she asked.

Cuban state media has said the survival rate for children with cancer has fallen from 85% to 65% since the oil blockade began and that more than 75% of essential medications produced on the island can’t be made right now because of unavailable components.

The power outages and lack of flour are also limiting the Catholic church’s ability to produce unconsecrated bread for Communion. Puerto Rican parishes and Dominican religious sisters worked to send nearly 300,000 hosts to Cuba this month.

Outreach Aid to the Americas (OAA) distributes humanitarian aid to Cuba through largely evangelical churches independent from the government.

Teo Babun, OAA’s Cuban-American president and CEO, was quoted on the important role of faith communities in a 2004 Bush administration report issued by the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba. The evangelical businessman told RNS that “most of those reports interestingly enough are applicable today.”

He expressed confidence that the U.S. government and evangelical organizations are ready to provide a greater surge of humanitarian aid, even before a regime change.

“ We are aware of a lot of conversation taking place regarding Cuba and the aid that needs to be put together,” he said. “ They are becoming more and more familiar with the fact that the evangelical church has tremendous, broad resources and experience working in Cuba to be able to assist in providing humanitarian assistance at the right time.”

Since the beginning of the year, the U.S. State Department has funneled humanitarian aid to Cuba through the Catholic church, citing concerns about government corruption. The first batch of $3 million was designated after last fall’s Hurricane Melissa and took over four months to distribute.

The State Department announced in February another $6 million in aid to be distributed through the Catholic church, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in May that half of that amount was still being held up by Cuban government permitting. The department made a third offer of $100 million in assistance distributed through both the Catholic church and “other reliable independent humanitarian organizations” last month.

The Catholic Church has also been continuing their long history of diplomacy promoting dialogue, rather than military conflict, in the U.S.-Cuba relationship. In February, several high-level meetings at the Vatican involving U.S. and Cuban leaders speaking about the Cuban crisis were publicized.

Carmen Casado, 84, is served a free meal of ground meat, rice, red beans and crackers through a program run by the Church of the Holy Spirit at a dining hall adjacent to the Catholic church in Old Havana, Cuba, Thursday, April 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

“This is the oldest diplomatic corps in the world and is certainly one of the most effective,” said Peter Martin, a former U.S. diplomat to the Holy See who now teaches at Boston College.

Those diplomats have played key roles in Cuba’s recent history. On Pope Francis’ 78th birthday, President Barack Obama announced that he would begin normalizing relations with Cuba, a sharp break in over 50 years of policy — and he personally thanked Francis for his “moral example” and role in brokering key prisoner releases that allowed for the agreement.

That announcement came after decades of work by the Vatican and U.S. bishops. U.S. bishops began to back Cuban bishops’ calls for an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba in 1972, and Vatican leaders had played a key role in easing government repression of religious groups in the once-atheist country, starting with a 1989 trip by Cardinal Roger Etchegaray.

“Vatican officials always urge leaders to consider the human cost of war, aggression and economic sanctions,” Martin said. “In my experience, when Holy See officials raised these issues, they weren’t asking us to turn a blind eye to the Cuban government’s abuses; they were simply pressing us to engage in dialogue and consider policies that would not harm the most vulnerable.”

Anna Lee Stangl, head of advocacy for CSW, an ecumenical Christian religious freedom organization, told RNS that it was possible to both believe that U.S. sanctions are “unjust” and that the Cuban government is engaging in “the systematic and serious violation of individual people’s basic human rights.”

Her organization’s research with sources on the ground in Cuba informs the U.S. government’s assessment of religious freedom in Cuba, and she said they continue to collect credible reports about religious leaders experiencing harassment, fines, surveillance and unjust incarceration.

Cuba’s Santeros offer gifts and ask deities for peace as tensions rise with US

Catholics weren’t the only religious groups to contribute to the Obama administration policy.

“They wanted to hear from us and valued the expertise because they knew that our partners on the ground had the knowledge of exactly what was happening on the ground unfiltered,” said Catherine Gordon, Presbyterian Church (USA)’s representative for international issues, citing high-level meetings between denominational faith offices and the National Security Council.

Though the Vatican has continued to play a role in U.S.-Cuba diplomacy, faith groups opposing punitive U.S. economic policy on Cuba had not seen much success since the Obama years. In his first term, President Donald Trump reimposed restrictions on the island country, and despite some faith groups expecting the Biden administration would echo Obama’s Cuba policy, he continued Trump administration policies and added new sanctions.

Gordon said her coalition, largely left-leaning Protestant faith groups who had helped shape Obama’s Cuba policies, have been shut out ever since. Under Biden, “ we were seen as another network to promote their agenda with,” said Gordon, but despite assurances the administration was reviewing Cuba’s state sponsor of terrorism designation, “ they were never working on it,” she said, saying the Biden administration’s engagement with those groups was in “bad faith.”

Under Trump, those organizations, which work together under the Interfaith Working Group on Cuba, have tried alternate strategies to keep their ideas in conversation. In February, they delivered a letter to the White House and Congress calling on policymakers to end sanctions, enable humanitarian assistance and engage in diplomacy.

At the end of March, a group including leaders from the World Council of Churches, World Communion of Reformed Churches, the Anglican Communion, the World Methodist Council, Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Church of Canada made a solidarity visit to Cuba, designed to highlight Cuban suffering and condemn U.S. sanctions, and met with Cuban government leaders.

And in April, Gordon and the working group also organized a webinar with Obama administration alumnus Ben Rhodes, who highlighted the importance and potential power of faith communities in shaping policy on Cuba. “There are faith-based arguments that can be made about the human suffering,” Rhodes said.

But they say they’ve largely been hitting walls in their efforts. Carol Blythe, the advocacy coordinator for the Alliance of Baptists, described feeling unheard in a January Zoom meeting with a State Department staffer when she asserted that their counterparts in Cuba are able to worship freely, counter to the department’s assessment of Cuba as a Country of Particular Concern for religious liberty.

At the end of 2024, Blythe, along with Stan Hastey, a retired denominational leader for the Alliance of Baptists, spearheaded a report about religious liberty based on a survey of pastors in Cuba and the testimonies of U.S. partners, which they delivered to the State Department.

“We contend that there is no systematic, ongoing, egregious violations of religious freedom that specifically include (1) torture; (2) prolonged detention without charges; (3) forced disappearances; or (4) other flagrant denial of life, liberty, or security of persons,” several denominations wrote in a letter introducing the report to then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

In the report, which emphasizes the improvements in religious liberty in Cuba, one U.S. pastor who served in Cuba argued that policing seditious political dissidence and controlling religious expression are significantly different.

The State Department and the U.S. embassy in Cuba did not respond to requests for comment.

“I believe that the church, international Christian leaders, can really call for peace and insist that the governments have a dialogue,” García Morris said. “The church in Cuba and the United States has not been indifferent. I believe that it has worked and continues working to prevent a much bigger and worse catastrophe.”

2026-06-21T06:54:56.209-07:00

Palantir wants to ‘defend the West,’ but the West is wary

AFP
June 18, 2026

Palantir, founded in 2003 by former founders of PayPal, has grown from a CIA-backed startup into one of the most powerful technology players of the current era – Copyright AFP INA FASSBENDER

France’s move Tuesday to drop Palantir from its intelligence services is the latest sign of European unease with the American data-mining firm — a company that has grown from a CIA-backed startup into one of the most powerful technology players of the Trump era.

– ‘Lord of the Rings’ –

Palantir was born in 2003 from former founders of PayPal — known as the PayPal Mafia — in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

It pitched software that could sift through vast intelligence datasets to flag threats — an idea adapted from PayPal’s fraud-detection systems.

Peter Thiel, the arch-conservative PayPal co-founder, believed better data-sharing between agencies might have prevented 9/11, and built the company around a mission of “defending the West.”

The name came from the “seeing-stones” of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.”

The other co-founders included Alex Karp — a Stanford Law School classmate of Thiel’s who became chief executive despite having no engineering background — as well as Joe Lonsdale, who espouses a hawkish, pro-innovation agenda focused on preserving US national power.

– CIA to ICE –

In 2005, In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, began investing in Palantir, cementing its link with the US national security universe. Palantir was quickly put to use by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For two decades the company worked across the administrations of both US political parties. According to government tracking site usaspending.gov, Palantir has won more than $2.7 billion in defense contracts since 2008.

The company’s fortunes have soared as it has aligned closely with President Donald Trump’s second term.

Palantir’s US government revenue this year reached $687 million in the first quarter, an 84 percent jump year-on-year, according to Karp’s letter to shareholders in May.

Its highest-profile military work is Project Maven — the Pentagon’s AI targeting system, which Palantir took over from Google in 2019 after the search giant abandoned it under pressure from its own staff.

The Maven contract has vastly expanded since then and was used to help identify targets in recent operations including the US-Israel war on Iran.

Palantir’s most contested work involves immigration.

The company has signed more than $81 million in contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since January 2025.

Reports say ICE relies on a Palantir tool that mines health agency records to identify people for deportation, prompting an outcry from rights groups.

– Philosopher Karp –

CEO Karp, who holds a philosophy PhD from Germany, is Palantir’s showman — a regular fixture on talk shows and conferences, where he expounds on his vision of business and society, often publishing long letters to shareholders or “manifestos.”

He insists he is bipartisan, though his rhetoric often veers into libertarian, anti-government slogans that can put off a client base which includes governments around the world.

Karp justifies Palantir’s role by arguing that the company helps Western governments reduce terrorism, counter adversaries and strengthen democratic institutions.

Co-founder Lonsdale is far more strident in his defense of conservative values, regularly railing against “woke” culture and defending US supremacy against China and European regulators.

Thiel, the dominant figure in the conservative tech world, has cast those who would slow technology as “legionnaires of the Antichrist,” whom he warns could usher in global totalitarian rule.

– Whose side are you on? –

Palantir’s full-throated support of America and anti-establishment rhetoric may be backfiring, with governments or lawmakers rethinking ties with the firm, notably in France, Germany and Britain.

Foreign clients are left to wonder whether Palantir will side with them or the White House “when they have to make hard decisions,” said Aalok Mehta, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“Will they accede to a Trump administration demand if it involves something that is sensitive or classified?”

These are questions that government customers outside the United States are starting to take seriously.

2026-06-21T06:47:36.784-07:00

Sanders Introduces Bill to ‘Thwart Big Tech Oligarchs’ Via 50% Public Stake in AI Giants

The senator said his legislation aims to ensure “that AI benefits humanity, not just the richest people on the planet.”

US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks at a town hall event focused on taxing billionaires and the future of artificial intelligence, at Stanford University in Stanford, California on February 20, 2026.
(Photo by Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Jun 18, 2026

COMMON DREAMS

US Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday introduced legislation that would give the American public a 50% ownership stake in the largest artificial intelligence companies, a move that comes as AI capitalism is rewarding a handful of plutocrats with unprecedented wealth at the eventual expense of many millions of jobs—and possibly humanity’s very existence.

Sanders’ American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America via a one-off 50% tax on the companies’ stock. The taxed shares would be deposited into the sovereign wealth fund, a state-owned investment vehicle similar in purpose to Norway’s Government Pension Fund, which is funded by oil revenue.

Sanders Sovereign Wealth Fund Plan Would Give US Public ‘Direct Ownership Stake’ in AI Giants

Sanders Makes Clear That He and Trump Have Different Ideas When It Comes to AI

The senator estimates that the tax would generate around $7 trillion for the fund.

“The principle is simple: When a public resource generates wealth, the public should share in that wealth,” Sanders said in a statement. “The future of AI and the fate of humanity must not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley by billionaires seeking to maximize their power and profit. It must be decided by workers, parents, teachers, artists, scientists, communities, and the American people.”

Sanders’ proposal comes as AI and related companies have generated trillions of dollars for their shareholders and executives. Meanwhile, AI deployments have resulted in thousands of lost jobs per month in the United States, with that number expected to increase dramatically as the technology improves exponentially.

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Eventually, recursive self-improvement—AI that evolves independently of human control—is widely expected to result in Artificial General Intelligence, a tipping point when AI matches or exceeds human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks. Experts say that this could lead to wildly varying outcomes, ranging from a “golden age” of AI-driven prosperity to techno-authoritarian government to malicious artificial intelligence wiping out humanity.

In addition to the sovereign wealth fund proposal, Sanders is also calling for a nationwide moratorium on AI data centers, which cause tremendous environmental harm while consuming a staggering amount of energy amidst a worsening climate emergency.

“As a society, we can no longer sit back and allow a handful of Big Tech oligarchs to determine the future of this revolutionary technology with no democratic input,” Sanders said Thursday.

“AI was not created out of thin air. It was not a brilliant idea that just popped into Mark Zuckerberg’s head or Elon Musk’s imagination,” he added. “The foundation of AI is based on the collective knowledge of humanity and the creative work of tens of millions of people. The American people must have the ability to slow it down and make sure that AI benefits humanity, not just the richest people on the planet. That’s precisely what this legislation does.”

Bell, Cohere, and partners announce sovereign AI deal

Digital Journal Staff
June 19, 2026

People working in a server room. – File photo by Digital Journal

Bell Canada, Cohere, Hypertec, and BUZZ High Performance Computing announced a partnership today for a major AI infrastructure deal.

The collaboration will combine Bell AI Fabric’s data centre and connectivity out of its Merritt, British Columbia facility, Cohere’s enterprise-grade AI solutions and LLM, and BUZZ HPC will handle the accelerated computing infrastructure, running on Hypertec’s Canadian-manufactured hardware and NVIDIA’s DSX AI factory platform.

“Canada has the talent and innovation to lead in AI,” said Michel Richer, president of Bell AI Fabric, in a news release. “What’s been missing is the ambition to bring the right ingredients together. This landmark deal helps close that gap.”

With Canadian partners using Canadian infrastructure, R&D on AI models can be refocused, and the country’s digital sovereignty and economic resilience prioritized.

“For enterprises and governments, adopting AI is not just about having access to powerful models,” said Michael Pelosi, country manager (Canada) at Cohere. “It’s about knowing where those models run, how data is protected and whether the technology can be deployed with the security and reliability their work requires.”

The deal builds on the previously announced Canadian Sovereign AI Alliance and the launch of Bell AI Fabric.

Demand for Canadian AI infrastructure is growing as organizations move from experimentation to large-scale deployment, though outcomes will depend on infrastructure performance, and whether enterprise and government customers follow through on that demand.

“AI does not scale on ideas alone, it scales on data centres, specialized GPU compute, sophisticated models and operational execution,” said Craig Tavares, President and COO of BUZZ HPC. “This partnership brings together a combination of capabilities that does not exist anywhere else in Canada today.”
Final ShotsBell AI Fabric’s Merritt, BC facility is purpose-built for advanced AI workloads and serves as the data centre and connectivity foundation for the partnership.
The deal builds on the Canadian Sovereign AI Alliance, positioning the four partners as a combined alternative to US-based hyperscaler infrastructure.

Op-Ed

Corporate Media Covers AI as a Contest of Elites. In That Framing, We All Lose.

Reporting on Elon Musk’s OpenAI lawsuit said it would “shape the future” — but never covered whose futures are at stake.

By Andy Lee Roth ,

Truthout

PublishedJune 17, 2026

Elon Musk is seen through glass at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Oakland, California, passing through security as he continues his testimony in the OpenAI trial on April 29, 2026.Karl Mondon / AFP via Getty Images

Corporate news outlets frequently frame stories about artificial intelligence (AI) as contests. The most basic version of this frame — metaphorical “races” between rival tech companies or nations, in which speed of innovation is presumed to determine the victors — is so widely used, it’s easy to take for granted.

As AI systems shift power throughout society, from health care and law enforcement to education and marketing, frames premised on contests or races distort, marginalize, or even erase fateful power dynamics. Reporting that represents AI tech development primarily as a contest among elite rivals typically buries questions about how new technologies are likely to impact the general public. The recommendation of journalism professor Jay Rosen holds true: Informative reporting highlights “not the odds, but the stakes.”

The recent coverage of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against his former business partner Sam Altman and OpenAI exemplifies the problems with framing AI developments primarily as contests among rival elites, in which the majority of the public are bystanders whose only choice is to start using AI or get left behind.

Trial Coverage: “The Landing of the Hindenburg on the Deck of the Titanic”

Established in 2015 by Altman and Musk, OpenAI claimed that its mission was to develop tech that would benefit “all of humanity.” In October 2025, OpenAI announced a new for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Group, a public benefit corporation. The move, The New York Times reported at the time, “firmly establishes OpenAI as one of the tech industry’s standard-bearers in the AI boom, allowing the San Francisco company to compete on more solid footing with giants like Google, Amazon and Meta.”

Google’s New AI-Fueled Search Bar Threatens to Further Upend Journalism Industry
Independent journalism needs a lifeline to survive as Google urges readers toward AI summaries instead of article links. By Negin Owliaei , Maya Schenwar , Ziggy West Jeffery , Truthout June 9, 2026

In his lawsuit, Musk contended that Altman and Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, enriched themselves by betraying OpenAI’s founding mission. For its part, OpenAI characterized Musk’s lawsuit as an attempt to set it back while Musk sought to fortify his own struggling AI startup, xAI.

The nation’s major national news outlets provided day-by-day trial coverage, which regularly characterized Musk and Altman as “titans” and the case as a “blockbuster.” On the eve of the trial, one expert source told The Washington Post, “We are about to witness the landing of the Hindenburg on the deck of the Titanic.” (The examples of news framing cited here are drawn from a sample of 104 news articles about the lawsuit, identified using ProQuest’s U.S. Major Dailies archive.)

Heaps of subsequent coverage focused on the two larger-than-life protagonists’ personalities, the power struggles between them, even the clothes they wore to court — and the market stakes for OpenAI and xAI.

Acknowledging the “billions of dollars and the future of the A.I. industry at stake” in the lawsuit, The New York Times highlighted another reason the trial mattered: “It has given an up-close-and-personal look at how two men worth more than a combined $670 billion function under extreme pressure.”

“What happens in the weeks and months to come will define Altman’s legacy,” one Wall Street Journal article asserted. At the trial’s conclusion, The Washington Post quoted a corporate litigation lawyer: Altman had gone “toe-to-toe with the world’s wealthiest man and won.”

When the jury and judge ultimately rejected Musk’s case — on the technical grounds that he’d waited too long to file — the Times described the judgment as “a major blow to Mr. Musk’s credibility and his effort to become a serious competitor in the artificial intelligence race.”

Overall, the coverage reflected the old (but still apt) insight that, for establishment news media, news is primarily about what powerful elites do and say.

Outside the Frame: Omitted Issues, Missed Opportunities

“This is not a trial on the safety risks of artificial intelligence,” Federal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers told Musk’s lawyers on the trial’s opening day. “We aren’t going to get into those issues.”

Neither did the establishment press covering the case. Consequently, the coverage missed opportunities to serve the public good in at least two ways.

First, despite an obsessive focus on the power dynamics between Musk and Altman, corporate news coverage of the trial almost never addressed the broader issue of how new AI-powered technologies are shifting power across social, economic, and political spheres.

Establishment coverage of the trial missed opportunities to show how journalists and ordinary people can potentially have a say in AI’s development and application.

Although such coverage frequently asserted that the case would “shape the future of artificial intelligence” — a passing nod to Rosen’s “not the odds, but the stakes” — little to none of it actually examined whose futures hung in the balance. The breadth and speed of AI tech developments are challenging independent researchers to develop new analytic tools to measure the increasing power disparities, which threaten to undermine any democratic, transparent development or use of AI-powered systems.

But existing research has already established that those systems amplify existing inequities and mask injustices, due to prevalent but faulty assumptions about the objectivity of AI systems. A 2023 risk assessment of generative AI and journalism found that concentrated corporate control of AI systems ripples out to other domains of society, potentially undermining public trust in information, devaluing human labor, and degrading the environment. Thus, even as a boom in construction of data centers threatens scarce water sources and drives fossil fuel extraction and pollution, the algorithms they power routinely distort the news, erase marginalized groups, and promote a dangerous sycophancy, in both politics and peoples’ personal lives.

As if the judge’s admonition to Musk also applied to them, the corporate press covering the trial “just weren’t going to get into those issues.” One rare exception was a New York Times report that quoted Max Tegmark of the Future of Life Institute, who quipped that AI is “less regulated in America than sandwiches,” and warned that, absent meaningful regulation, “Trials are all we have right now.”

Second, and perhaps predictably in light of the first omission, establishment coverage of the trial missed opportunities to show how, outside the Oakland courtroom, journalists and ordinary people can potentially have a say in AI’s development and application. This omission reflects a recurrent pitfall in AI journalism: coverage that narrowly reflects industry perspectives and interests. As Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan, authors of AI Snake Oil, point out, this exclusive perspective often goes hand-in-hand with unjustified optimism about the potential benefits of AI systems.

Three Resources for Better Framing — and Understanding — of Artificial Intelligence

These gaps in establishment news coverage of the Musk-Altman trial were especially glaring given the increasing availability of carefully vetted, practical guidance for better AI journalism.

The FrameWorks Institute has conducted surveys, focus groups, and interviews in an effort to understand not only how AI systems “replicate social systems of power” but also how we can galvanize public support for more just development and use of the technology. In “Framing the Social Implications of AI,” the Institute recommends practical principles of counter-framing that journalists, activists, and news audiences can use to influence public discussion about how AI systems “echo” existing biases and power structures, and to shift debate from a consumerist perspective to one focused on public good.

Likewise, Project Censored’s own Algorithmic Literacy for Journalists is a free, online repository of resources for journalists, including relevant questions to ask when reporting on new AI systems, directions for finding newsworthy sources outside industry, and news frames that serve public, rather than industry, interests.

The high-profile Musk-Altman trial provided news organizations with a clear opening to convey the promises, risks, and ethics of AI as a technology. Instead, the corporate press highlighted the moguls’ personalities and financial interests.

Algorithmic Literacy for Journalists warns about reporters unconsciously adopting “horse race” frames from election campaigns to report on AI developments. A substantial body of research has established that “horse race” coverage of elections increases public distrust in both politicians and news outlets and ultimately leads to an uninformed public, as Shealeigh Voitl and I reviewed in an article for the Reynolds Journalism Institute.

The same is true when reporters use contest or race frames to cover developments in artificial intelligence.

The journalists covering the Musk trial might also have benefited from new research by Trusting News, which reported in May 2026 that news audiences expressed increased trust in news organizations that share AI literacy content. Although the public has mixed feelings about artificial intelligence, Trusting News found that, after viewing just a single example of AI literacy content, even audiences with “low trust in news reported increased willingness to return to the news organization for information.”

The high-profile Musk-Altman trial provided news organizations with a clear opening to convey the promises, risks, and ethics of AI as a technology. Instead, the corporate press highlighted the moguls’ personalities and financial interests, substituting sensational hyperbole (‘the Hindenburg landing on the Titanic’) for informative analysis.

Lost in the pervasive framing of elite rivalry was a rich opportunity to explain the development of artificial intelligence as a matter of social power. Omitted altogether was any explanation of how, developed justly, the frequently touted “future of AI” might be harnessed for public good.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Andy Lee Roth
Andy Lee Roth is editor-at-large at Project Censored, a news watch organization that promotes independent journalism and critical media literacy education. He co-edits the Project’s State of the Free Press yearbook series, and is a coauthor of The Media and Me, a guide to media literacy for young people.

AI museum brings sights, sounds and smells of the rainforest

AFP
June 19, 2026

Attendees interact with immersive visualizations from the inaugural exhibition Machine Dreams: Rainforest are projected at DATALAND, the Museum of AI Arts – Copyright AFP Patrick T. Fallon

The squawks of macaws, the smell of wet earth after rain and a swirl of colors will transport visitors from a Los Angeles museum to the heart of the Amazon rainforest — or rather, an AI version of it.

Data collected from those visitors — their movements, their heartbeats and even the temperature of their skin — will feed the computer that is creating the immersive display, using a network of sensors, including those on the wrists of ticket-holders.

“Machine Dreams: Rainforest” is the inaugural exhibition at Dataland, a new museum in the heart of America’s second biggest city that is the brainchild of Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkilic, whose 10 million lines of code power the animations — using 1.5 billion pixels.

Anadol said he was inspired by a visit to the Brazilian Amazon, a place he thinks everyone should experience.

“But I do not believe we should all go to the rainforest,” he told AFP.

“The question was: can the rainforest come to us? Can we still connect, feel special, respect and love nature, learn about it?”

Wall-mounted sensors will track visitors’ movements, and guests will wear a medical-grade, watch-like device to monitor their emotions and heart rate for interacting with the model. They will also carry a portable scent diffuser throughout the experience.

Using billions of images and datapoints, the model will create a constantly evolving experience.

It is as if the system were “dreaming,” Erkilic explained.

“It’s moving all the time, because it’s gathering data. As soon as it builds one structure, it also affects the overall storytelling,” he said.

“It’s coming from a more poetic place instead of a scientific place. The machine itself is trying to recreate the reality based on the data points, it’s like bringing all the little bits and dots and trying to build the reality itself.”

At the end of the experience, visitors can sample chocolates with flavors generated by the model, or print T-shirts and paintings resulting from their interaction.

These are intended to serve as tangible souvenirs of the ephemeral dream in Dataland.

“The system forgets you; that is the beauty of it,” says Anadol.

Dataland opens to the public on June 20.

2026-06-21T06:46:36.138-07:00

Robots pour cocktails and run marathons, but still can’t multitask

AFP
June 18, 2026

A humanoid robot that can do a bit of everything is still years off – Copyright AFP JULIEN DE ROSA

They can mix cocktails, run marathons and fold laundry. But humanoid robots are still a long way from doing lots of different jobs on command, whatever the marketing says.

The gap was easy to spot at the Robotics Summit in Boston in late May. The glossy brochures promised one thing. The people who actually build the machines said another.

Elon Musk loves to show off his Optimus prototype, recently filmed jogging in short strides. Figure 03, a third-generation robot developed by Figure AI, can tidy and clean a living room by itself.

China’s AgiBot and Matrix Robotics say their robots can greet visitors, serve coffee and give them a tour, a little like C-3PO from “Star Wars.”

The reality is more modest.

“Most of the humanoids you see are being teleoperated, or they’ve got very specific paths and chores that they do,” said Chris Matthieu of startup RealSense, which makes cameras for robots.

In other words, many are either run by a human with a remote control or stuck doing one narrow task.

Take Neo, the robot that 1X launched with great fanfare last October. It was billed as “the world’s first consumer-ready humanoid robot designed to transform life at home” — but was actually steered by a person off to the side.

Progress is real, though, and artificial intelligence is driving it. “I think AI has extremely accelerated that growth,” said William Okazaki of sensor maker Renesas.

One big hurdle is the hands. Long the holy grail of robotics, they are getting close: robots can now grip with a delicate touch, and some sensors can even tell when they are touching human skin.

Much of this comes from a new kind of AI known as a VLA model, short for vision-language-action. It blends written instructions with what a camera sees in real time, so the robot can link what it is looking at to what it should do.

There is also the “world model” — an AI that learns from vast amounts of images and video until it can predict what will happen next in the real world, such as how an object will shift when it is squeezed.

— Hunt for data —

But an android that can do a bit of everything is still years off.

“For general purpose robots, it will take longer,” said Daniel Fan of Innodisk, which makes parts for robots.

Plenty of humanoids are already out in the world — Boston Dynamics’ Atlas at Hyundai, Hexagon Robotics’ AEON at a BMW site — but these are trials, not final products.

“Until you actually get the robot actually trying to do the thing you think it can do, you don’t really know,” said Charlie Kemp of Hello Robot, which sells robots for people with limited mobility.

Running fully on their own, at scale, is not yet possible, “because there is not enough data,” said Xinrui Bi of AgiBot.

To gather it, companies are setting up cameras everywhere to record human movement — from people cooking at home to workers in a textile workshop in India.

The stakes are higher than for a chatbot like ChatGPT. A robot acts in the physical world, so its mistakes can hurt someone.

“If you want to move into a more social domain, it really has to be safe for the users around the robot,” said Valentino Fagard of Japan’s XELA Robotics, which works on giving robots a sense of touch.

Engineers can set limits — telling the machines not to grip too hard, or not to get too close to a person. But there is a catch. Like chatbots, these AI systems don’t always behave the same way twice, which makes them hard to predict.

“The issue with, call it the world model, or the end-to-end VLA, is they’re non-deterministic, they’re a black box,” said John Black of Brain Corp, whose robots stick to a very specific task, like cleaning floors or checking store shelves.

“They’re nowhere close to reaching the safety levels required,” he said, because even the people who build these systems can not fully see why they do what they do.

‘Alter-Ego’: An Italian hospital’s little robot carer

AFP
June 19, 2026

Humanoid robot Alter-Ego is designed to perform basic tasks to free up healthcare workers – Copyright AFP MARCO BERTORELLO

A robot with expressive eyebrows that is designed to perform basic tasks to free up healthcare workers is being given a trial run by a hospital in Milan.

Named “Alter-Ego”, the 1.2-metre tall robot can stand in for a doctor working remotely, bring a patient a bottle of water or guide them to treatment.

Daniel Senna, a 31-year-old patient at the Maugeri Hospital, transmits his pain level on a screen attached to the robot’s chest.

“Hi Dani. How are you? Do you need anything?” Ego asks wheelchair-bound Senna, as the data collected is sent instantly to the ward’s nurses.

The robot has been undergoing testing since April in a department which treats people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative disease.

“At first, we were afraid the patient might have a negative reaction,” Christian Lunetta, director of the hospital’s neuromotor rehabilitation department, told AFP.

But they soon were “very satisfied, because the robot was designed to spark curiosity and its movements, or at least its functions, suggest a wide range of potential uses”.

The project is a collaboration between the Italian Institute of Technology and the University of Pisa in northern Italy and is currently being remotely controlled by an operator.

From July, the robot will work autonomously.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly accelerated progress in robotics but robots still need a great deal of training to operate independently.

The aim with the Milan experiment is to work with patients and caregivers to better understand the limits of what a robot can or should do in a hospital ward, said Manuel Catalano from the Italian Institute of Technology.

“Alter-Ego” could also eventually assist patients and their caregivers at home, he said.

Lunetta pointed out that hospitals “have repetitive tasks” which “could be delegated to a good robot”.

“This would also allow us to better value human beings, giving them the time to focus on the human relationship they must maintain with the patient,” he said.

Nurses monitor patients while handing out medicine, picking up signals about physical or mental health.

“Alter-Ego” may seem capable but “no-one has considered directly delegating the administration of pills” to it, neurologist Rachele Piras said.

It can be helpful in other ways though, “as the (neurodegenerative) disease progresses”, she said.

Patients could find it liberating to be able to directly ask the robot for things, while doing so would also reduce the tasks of a caregiver, allowing him or her to “revert to simply being a companion, mother or daughter”.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Avoiding dangers

Internal findings on ageing

Demonstrator as a model for series production

As part of the development of the battery management system, battery cells were subjected to a number of tests.

As part of the development of the battery management system, battery cells were subjected to a number of tests.

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Sampling in pancake sea-ice from the SA Agulhus II [VIDEO] Various video clips of sampling in the Southern Ocean from aboard the research vessel the SA Agulhas II.

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Dr Mayi Buthelezi, a marine microbiologist from Stellenbosch University, collecting sea ice core samples from the Southern Ocean in July 2022.

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A European fire salamander (Salamandra salamandra), one of the temperate species included in the study that has experienced climate-related local extinctions.

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This dead alligator juniper (Juniperus deppeana) from near Bisbee, Arizona is one of the temperate species included in the study that has experienced climate-related local extinctions.

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The Recent Land Boom

The Invisible Nature of the Commons

Green Energy, Agrarian Distress

Advice From Coal-Producing Regions

The Issue of Energy Justice

Controversy Over Transmission Infrastructure

Can Transition be Made More Just?

Clean Power Isn’t Enough for Fair Transition

You write that the ADL was founded by German Jews who had already established themselves in the U.S. as businesspeople committed to capitalist values, and they wanted to correct the behaviors of poor, pro-labor Eastern European Jews. Is that right?

Why did the ADL turn to spying?

You write that the ADL began to see the main threat to Jews in the United States coming from the left rather than the right. When did that start to happen?

The ADL was critical in developing legislation on hate crimes. How did it land on that?

You write that these hate crime bills were a way to mask deeper structural issues.

How do you see the ADL today? Has it become MAGA?

Has its power waned?

Sampling in pancake sea-ice from the SA Agulhus II [VIDEO]
Various video clips of sampling in the Southern Ocean from aboard the research vessel the SA Agulhas II.