On Monday, Ulises Peña López, represented by Disability Law United and Pangea Legal Services, sued the US government and private prison contractors GeoGroup and CoreCivic over his arrest by ICE officers and his following treatment in ICE detention facilities. Peña López was deported to Mexico in October 2025 after spending over six months in ICE detention.

Before his arrest, Peña López, a carpenter, already lived with disabilities due to a mini-stroke, which was diagnosed in August 2024 and was managed before his detention. The lawsuit contends that after ICE officers detained Peña López in February 2025 in Sunnyvale, California, they took him to an alleyway and beat him until he lost consciousness and required CPR.

His wife, Aby, and their young daughter witnessed part of the beating by ICE, according to the lawsuit.

Peña López’s ongoing symptoms, the lawsuit says, include new and worsening “headaches, weakness and numbness on his right side, eye pain, hearing loss, insomnia and nightmares, blurry vision, back pain, and difficulty walking.” Peña Lopez is unable to work to support himself, according to an interview with the NPR affiliate KQED.

“What I want more than anything, I can’t get back: to recover my health, to be with my wife and daughter, and to be able to work again,” Peña López told KQED.

The lawsuit filed for Peña López’s complaints cites Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which mandates that places receiving federal funding, like ICE detention centers, accommodate disabled people, among other laws. Peña Lopez’s wife and children are also part of the lawsuit due to the distress his arrest and subsequent treatment caused them.

During Peña López’s eight months in ICE detention in facilities operated by GeoGroup and CoreCivic, the lawsuit says, López received inadequate medical care and was also mocked by employees for his disability.

The lawsuit alleges that staff’s verbal abuse was particularly cruel at Golden State Annex, operated by GeoGroup. Detention staff reportedly told Peña López that “motherfucker, you don’t get to be asleep” and “you’re never gonna walk again.”

During Peña López’s transfer to California City Detention Center last August, the lawsuit says, “detention staff denied Ulises timely administration of his daily medication, violated his disability rights, and subjected him to unnecessarily harsh conditions,” such as not getting adequate medical care. At the facility operated by CoreCivic, Peña López also struggled to get his medications. As a result, Peña López’s health worsened before he was deported.

A spokesperson for CoreCivic told Mother Jones that while the company does not generally comment on active litigation, “we can share that the safety, health , and well-being of the people in our facilities is our top priority.”

ICE and GeoGroup did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

For Peña López’s lawyers, this lawsuit represents not only a pursuit of López but also of others mistreated by ICE.

“This lawsuit seeks accountability for the physical and emotional harms our clients suffered, but it also joins a growing wave of lawsuits challenging abusive ICE enforcement and detention practices,” said Elena Hodges, co-director at Pangea Legal Services, which is representing Peña López and his family, in a press release.

“We hope this case will send a powerful message to immigrant communities that they are not alone,” Hodges said, “and that ICE officials and private prison contractors are not above the law.”

Update, July 10: After publication, an ICE spokesperson wrote to Mother Jones saying that “any claims of subprime medical care at ICE facilities are FALSE” and that “staff always use the minimum amount of force to safely deescalate situations.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Life has colonized every corner of the planet by evolving ingenious survival strategies, but these are increasingly being overwhelmed by destructive human activities, this year’s red list of endangered species has revealed.

Many snails, limpets and clams have adapted to life at crushing depths in the oceans on hydrothermal vents where water temperatures can reach 450 degrees C (842 F). But an assessment for the red list found that two-thirds of the hundreds of mollusk species found only on deep sea vents were at risk of extinction because of deep-sea mining.

Mining for diamonds has put another extraordinary creature at risk of disappearing—the desert rain frog. Most frogs rely on water for survival but the bulbous desert rain frog has evolved to need almost none. It hides from the southern African sun by burying itself deep in the sand, coming out only at night to hunt insects.

However, dwindling species can be saved, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which produces the red list, said. The new list shows the numbat, a stripy, termite-eating marsupial from Australia, has come back from the brink thanks to protection from feral cats and foxes.

“Life on Earth has adapted to survive in the most hostile and unusual habitats [but] as pressures on biodiversity mount across the planet, even the creatures with the most ingenious survival strategies are under threat,” said Dr Grethel Aguilar, the IUCN director general. “But there is a clear path out of the biodiversity crisis: Nature conservation works. By protecting the astounding range of biodiversity on this planet, we can preserve a welcoming environment for humans and wildlife alike.”

An IUCN update in April declared emperor penguins officially in danger of extinction owing to the mass drowning of chicks as sea ice is melted by the climate crisis.

More than 200 species of mollusk are known to live only on hydrothermal vents, where water heated by volcanic rocks jets out from the seabed. Many have been discovered only in the last decade but already face extinction.

The exploration and extraction of deep-sea minerals throws up sediments that smother the animals. One snail, Lirapex felix, is classed as critically endangered because of mining activity in the Indian Ocean.

However, more than 30 vent species are not in danger, as they live in marine protected areas where mining is not allowed. These include an ornately shelled snail, Provanna exquisita, that lives only in the Mariana Arc of Fire national wildlife refuge in the Pacific Ocean.

“This global assessment reveals that [vent] mollusks are one of the most highly threatened of all animal groups,” said Prof Julia Sigwart at Senckenberg Nature Research, the IUCN red list partner that coordinated the assessment. “It provides important information as the International Seabed Authority meets in Jamaica this month.” The IUCN voted for a moratorium on deep-sea mining in 2021.

The desert rain frog is classed as vulnerable owing to diamond mining and energy infrastructure expansion into its range along the west coast of South Africa and Namibia. There is further pressure on the frog because of rising demand from the exotic pet trade following a viral video of the species squeaking its distress call.

The good news on the numbat comes after decades of conservation work, which has helped numbers rebound from a low of just 300 in the late 1970s to between 2,000 and 3,000 today. The numbat has moved from endangered to near threatened on the red list.

The impact of feral cats and red foxes has been reduced by baiting and predator-proof fencing, as well as captive breeding at Perth zoo and translocations from healthy groups. As a result, at least five more self-sustaining populations have been established. However, the species occupies only 0.04 percent of its original range across southern Australia, meaning continuing conservation work is essential, experts said.

Another five Australian marsupials have been confirmed as extinct on the red list, with no sightings for at least 60 years. The crest-tailed, southern, northern, and little mulgaras were rat-sized carnivores, while the little bettong was a rabbit-sized jumping marsupial. They are likely to have fallen prey to feral cats and foxes. More than 40 modern mammal extinctions have been recorded in Australia.

“The [numbat] assessment shows that long-term conservation effort works; without it, invasive cats and foxes will continue to drive Australia’s small marsupials and native rodents to extinction,” said Prof John Woinarski, co-chair of the IUCN species survival commission group on Australasian marsupials and monotremes.

“Continued management is vital not only to maintain the numbat’s unique evolutionary line as the last surviving member of the Myrmecobiidae family, but also to support its role in maintaining a healthy ecosystem, as digging for the termites it eats increases rain penetration into the soil, helping protect woodlands,” he said.

The IUCN red list includes 175,909 species of which 49,505 are threatened with extinction, although many species have yet to be formally assessed.

One fall night in 1979, two best friends went to a small club in their hometown of Washington, DC, to see a band. The show was so extraordinary, the band so singular, that decades—and thousands of shows—later, even at “AARP age,” as one of them now puts it, they still talk about it. They were especially taken with the lead singer, a lanky, glamorous Frankenstein-esque character who, by the show’s conclusion, was up on the bar, crooning merrily as he punched through ceiling tiles while the club owner looked on and laughed. 

“I’ve never recovered from that show,” Henry Rollins recalls. “I’ve never gotten better. Ian and I talk every Sunday. We’ve been best friends for 52 years. We talk about that time we stood next to each other and watched the Cramps.”

Rollins, now 65, was a frontman for the legendary Southern California punk band Black Flag and later the MTV mainstay Rollins Band. Since retiring from music, he’s been a spoken word artist, radio host, actor, journalist, and TV presenter. The best friend he mentioned is Ian MacKaye, who fronted Minor Threat and Fugazi and co-founded and still co-owns Dischord, one of the most influential DIY record labels of all time. Their friendship is the stuff of punk legend; they also worked at Häagen–Dazs together as teens. And like so many punks and rockabilly fans—and millions of other freaks and weirdos—Rollins and MacKaye fell fast and hard for the Cramps. 

The Cramps were the brainchild of singer Lux Interior (Erick Lee Purkhiser) and guitarist Poison Ivy (Kristy Marlana Wallace), who met as art students in Sacramento in the early 1970s, when Ivy caught a ride with Lux and a friend while hitchhiking. They became partners in life and art for the next 37 years, and the only two continuous members of the band until Lux’s death in 2009.

The Cramps coined the word “psychobilly” to describe their music—a louche, wild, leering, slithering blend of surf rock, nascent punk, mutated doo-wop, and blues-derived guitar. This they combined with bizarro-Americana lyrical matter: teenage werewolves, bikini girls with machine guns, Elvis, witchcraft, B-movie horror flicks, insanity, lust, death, and the beyond. Lux and Ivy were the Cramps’ most memorable visual elements: tall, thin and cadaveresque, he would moan and writhe across the stage, often wearing high heels and lingerie—their song “I Want to Get In Your Pants” was, as Lux cheerily told interviewers, about his love for wearing women’s clothes.

Onstage, Ivy would stand watchfully nearby—lithe, implacable and feline, with curly red hair and a constantly changing selection of vinyl, latex, and animal-print garments. (She’d previously worked as a dominatrix, she once said, and between that and being in the Cramps, she eventually developed a latex allergy and had to retire her collection of such garments.) She often played a Gretsch 6120, an enormous, hollow-bodied electric guitar, and is rightfully included in Rolling Stone’s list of best guitarists of all time, often cited as central in shaping the “primitivist” rock-and-roll style.  

By the time Rollins and MacKaye first saw them, the Cramps had played a show at Napa State Hospital, a mental health facility, that became an instant legend. They brought the house down to the extent that about a dozen patients were inspired to escape during the show. (“Those people at Napa hospital were less unusual than some of the crowds we’ve played,” Lux wryly observed to Dick Porter, whose book Journey to the Center of The Cramps is considered the definitive work about the band.) The patients found the Cramps fairly unusual, Porter wrote, screaming “Ward T” at the stage. Ward T was, the band later learned, was the section for lifers, “the ward no one comes back from,” Lux told Porter. 

The Cramps came to an abrupt end in 2009 when Lux, then 62, died suddenly and unexpectedly from an aortic dissection. Poison Ivy withdrew from the public eye: no interviews, no reunion tours with a stand-in singer, no reissues of Cramps records. Even so, the band’s legend continued to grow, attracting new generations of fans. Wednesday star Jenna Ortega had a surprise viral moment last year when her titular character, the Addams Family’s sullen Goth daughter, did an appropriately weird little dance to the Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck.” Bootleg albums and merch have proliferated. (Full disclosure: I may have a few off-brand Cramps shirts in my closet.) You can even buy a beer named after one of their most beloved albums, with a can that’s “a nod” to (translation: completely lifted from) the cover art.

Earlier this year, Rollins and MacKaye began working with a small group on a secret project: reviving the Cramps’ own Vengeance Records and starting a new business, Cramps Inc. The first order of business for the reformed Vengeance Records is to release a 1977 album that had, until earlier this year, been sitting unheard on tapes in Ivy’s Los Angeles garage. Titled Gravest Gravy, it was produced by Alex Chilton, a beloved producer, songwriter, musician, and co-founder of the iconic indie band Big Star. The album will be released on August 21, and Cramps Inc. intends to reissue at least nine other Cramps records.

MacKaye and Rollins are not being paid for this—in a meeting with Ivy, Rollins says, he told her, simply, “I would just love to be your archivist.” Cramps Inc. will also release merchandise—including t-shirts and highly sought-after colored-vinyl pressings of Gravest Gravy—to help Ivy benefit from the wildly popular, and mostly illicit, market for Cramps merch.

“Of course Ian and I are going to work for free,” Rollins told me via Zoom. “No money was ever offered or asked for. I don’t want a dollar. I’ve got the bucks. Isn’t this what you spend money on? What would you rather do? Do fentanyl or work with a Cramps catalogue?” 

Releasing an unheard Cramps album required listening to every mix of every song on Gravest Gravy and trying to decide which were the best, a task Rollins says he undertook “with fear, trepidation and awe.”

“This is not a small deal,” he says. “You’re now speaking for a band. One of the best bands ever, a band that means so much to me.” After listening to every version, he adds, “I sent my notes and mixes to Ian, whose ears I trust more than anyone I know.” (MacKaye offered his own notes, and adjusted the levels on a few songs, though they both found Chilton’s work nearly unimpeachable.)

“I’ve never been more excited about a record and I’m not even on it!” he says. “We’re not on the cover. We’re in the fine print at the bottom and that’s the way I want it to stay. When you go to the Smithsonian and see the big T. Rex bones standing up, you know that’s a team of expert people who put that up in a dark night and vanished like dew on the hood of the car. You don’t know their names. That’s what it’s all about. Me and Ian, we don’t need a hurrah.”  

Besides Rollins and MacKaye, the group reviving Vengeance Records includes Larry Hardy, owner and operator of In The Red Records and longtime friend of Ivy and Lux, and Jimmy Maslon, a producer who made some of the Cramps’ music videos. Poison Ivy is described as the “major beneficiary” of the project, which Rollins says is being undertaken with her full permission, although she’s not deeply involved in the day-to-day operations of Cramps Inc. (She also is still not doing interviews, even if you all but beg, and have been pestering her PR reps intermittently for a decade.)   

“If you’ve ever been in a band, it’s a very intense relationship,” Rollins explains. “You get to know your bandmates more than you really want to. I’ve been in bands with people I love like family and you hope you never see them again. For Ivy, the Cramps were the past, and when she remembers them, it comes with a lot of memories.” 

It doesn’t immediately make sense that Rollins would be such a diehard fan of The Cramps, who inhabited a completely unique sector of the music world: outside gender, genre, and preconceived notions about what a “rock” band should look or sound like. By contrast, Black Flag, Rollins’ most famous band, became singularly associated with the violence of the 1980s Southern California hardcore scene, which was often incredibly hostile to women and nonwhite people. Rollins recalls women getting their shirts torn off at Black Flag shows and a disturbing influx of neo-Nazis and skinheads who were more than happy to pay a cover fee for the chance to beat up Black or Hispanic fans, sexually harass women, and sieg heil the stage. 

The band didn’t want violent thugs at their shows, Rollins says, but he’s not surprised they were attracted. “Did Black Flag set up a permission structure? Perhaps. Wittingly? No.“

“I’m sure our very presence, we bore some responsibility,” Rollins adds. “Could we have been better actors in that scene? I’m not sure. I’m not sure if there’s more we could’ve done. It’s been so long ago. I can’t accurately tell you.”

Rollins says he responded to Nazis at Black Flag shows by mocking them. “I would call things out. I was the fake comedian. I’m getting sieg heiled by a bunch of overweight Anheuser-Busch fans between songs, and I said, ‘You can’t make Army boot camp, much less the Third Reich.’ The audience is laughing. The security has to get around me because now those eight knuckleheads want to beat me up. I made an enemy of those people very fast. I didn’t just let it go.”

Rollins also keeps an eye on the so-called manosphere, and “masculinity influencers” like Andrew Tate, viewing them as targeting the same kinds of young, impressionable, angry, horny young men who used to populate Black Flag shows. “They’re being sold a bill of goods,” he says, bluntly. “What I beg young men to do is listen to and believe women.”

He’s had to do so himself, he adds. “I listened. I paid attention. I read. I’m always trying to lose my primordial tail and the glistening gills that throb on my neck.”

The meathead and white supremacist presence at Black Flag shows seemed to peak in 1986 or so, Rollins says, and those people didn’t come to shows for his next project, the Rollins Band, at all. “Either the tickets were too expensive or they hated the music. They simply stopped showing up.” 

Since retiring from music, Rollins has slipped comfortably into a role as a music archivist, moving to Nashville about three years ago to try to open a punk rock museum. Given the expense of owning or leasing a building, the “museum” is much more likely to be a series of pop-up events, Rollins says, with one planned for “later this year,” although he’s not yet ready to provide details. Besides the Cramps, he’s also now working with the “estates” of other great bands, he says. “That’s equally bitchin’ news for another time.” 

Having known Poison Ivy since the Black Flag days, Rollins says, he’s happy to be part of any structure that allows her to benefit from the Cramps’ legendary status while living the quiet, private, deeply spiritual life she wants. “I don’t need to speak to Ivy,” he says. “I need to work for the Cramps.” 

“We’ll be the historians,” he adds. “We’ll do the heavy lifting.”

He means that literally. When Hardy, Ivy’s old friend, discovered that the tapes in her garage “were showing signs of moisture,” Rollins says, they needed to be moved, very quickly, to a climate-controlled environment. Rollins flew from Nashville to LA, rented a cargo van, and drove “30 hours and 45 minutes” back to Nashville, pounding energy drinks, the van sagging under the weight of the tapes. Rollins was pulled over in Arkansas for drifting across the white line. He told the cop, cheerily, “I’m riding the Red Bulls, sir!” and was let off with a warning. 

“I paid to do this!” Rollins said, referring to financing the trip with his own money, “Because in my mind I owe the Cramps a part of my life.”

It can be hard, at this moment in time, to imagine caring deeply about something like a newly released album, no matter how legendary the band or thrillingly obscure the recording.  The chaos of the second Trump administration has taken its toll on Rollins too. He’s a DC native, after all. He says he wept when Trump paved over the White House Rose Garden. “I try not to let any of this stuff get to me, but that got to me.”

For years, Rollins volunteered with the USO, doing tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt, and visiting wounded soldiers in their beds at Walter Reed. (“You see a person half your age and half their face is gone…You do five hours of that and get back to me.” At the end of a day like that, he says, “I have no appetite. All I can smell is that antibacterial soap.”) He’s particularly outraged by the 13 American service members who have thus far died in the war with Iran. “Every day, Trump and Vance are covered in their blood like a patina.” 

But Rollins also argues that art still matters—even amid the chaos, outrages and endless travails of Trump 2.0. “No one will say ‘bad dog,’ for putting on a record in the middle of all of this horror,” he says.

“If you lose culture in your society, the society dies,” Rollins says. “If you lose your art museums and your galleries, all you have is thugs and fighting and people being mean. In times of trouble, art gives us the backbone to keep fighting. It gives you inspiration…You want to rebel against this awful war and this awful situation we’re in, you don’t take your eyes off the ball. But it’s not bad to have a soundtrack. Keep your eyes on the ball and have a beat.”

Art and culture are “what you have to lose with an administration like this,” Rollins adds. “They hate science. They hate literacy. They hate women. They hate nonwhite people. They hate LGBTQ people. Those aforementioned groups, they make things that make life great. They want to eradicate it and erase it. You can do more than one thing at once. You can entertain many things. And so you can be concerned and fight the good fight, and you can also put a record on and love the Cramps.”

On Tuesday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant and three-decade Houston resident. It was the second ICE-involved shooting this week alone; since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, federal immigration agents have shot and killed at least 10 people.

Now, as hundreds march in Houston and Salgado’s family demands an impartial investigation, the Department of Homeland Security is using a familiar playbook: Officials are blaming Salgado for his own death by asserting he “weaponized his vehicle.”

Salgado’s son Ronaldo Salgado held a press conference Wednesday calling for an independent investigation into his father’s death. “I want to tell you about my dad,” he said. “He was a hardworking family man. He was also a man of routine.” Every day, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo got up before dawn and drove to work on a construction site, just as he had done for 35 years.

“At 6:45 a.m., he should have been picking up the last of his guys before heading to North Houston to finish up construction on some houses,” Ronaldo Salgado said. By 6:55, his father had been shot by ICE agents who followed him in an unmarked car.

In a statement, DHS said Lorenzo Salgado Araujo had attempted to evade arrest and “weaponized his vehicle,” echoing language used in the hours after an ICE agent shot and killed US citizen Renée Good in her car in Minneapolis in January.

DHS at the time alleged that Good, too, had “weaponized her vehicle.” Independent investigators disputed that characterization, but the officer who killed Good was never indicted. Before Good, there were Carlitos Ricardo Parias and Marimar Martinez. Both were shot at by federal agents in 2025 and were accused of trying to ram those agents with their vehicles. Both survived. Ruben Ray Martinez, who was shot by an ICE agent in March 2025, was killed. The agent who shot him in the heart said Martinez was using his car as a weapon.

It’s a narrative that law enforcement agencies frequently employ to justify fatally shooting unarmed motorists. A New York Times investigation found that US police officers killed over 400 unarmed drivers between 2015 and 2021. In many of those cases, the officers involved said they fired because the vehicle itself was a weapon.

The data shows that ICE is no exception. In 2024, journalist Lila Hassan identified 18 ICE shootings that involved a moving vehicle between 2015 and 2021. Over that same time period, public records show ICE agents shooting at least 59 people total and killing at least 23. Not a single indictment resulted from those incidents. Since that study, ICE’s budget has ballooned by tens of billions of dollars and its internal oversight offices have been gutted. The killings haven’t stopped.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo “did not deserve to die,” Ronaldo Salgado said Wednesday. “He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of Mexican man shot and killed by ICE.” Ronaldo Salgado learned of his father’s passing, he said, from a video on social media. He recognized him immediately: “Not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street bleeding out.”

Graham Platner, the scandal-ridden populist Senate candidate from Maine, suspended his campaign Wednesday night. His announcement came two days after a rape allegation against him was made public in a Politico report, and prominent Democrats—many of whom had looked the other way at Platner’s Nazi tattoo and prior abuse allegations—one by one dropped their endorsements.

In an 11-minute video posted to social media, Platner categorically denied the allegation and lashed out at “the corporate media system and the political establishment,” which he said acted as “judge, jury and executioner.” He insisted that his video was not an admission of guilt—but after nine minutes, he nonetheless said: “I intend to file my paperwork to withdraw.” 

If Platner does file that paperwork before 5 p.m. ET Monday, he will be leaving the Maine Democratic Party with just 19 days to nominate a replacement. The Maine Democratic Party has released a statement saying it will hold a nominating convention before the July 27 deadline.

Devon Murphy-Anderson, the Maine Democratic Party’s executive director, posted a video to social media on Tuesday promising an “open, inclusive, transparent and fair” convention—and accused Platner’s team of trying to “manipulate this process” and select his successor themselves.

The Maine Democratic Party has approved plans for a nominating convention that will involve roughly 600 delegates, most of whom will be local party officials from around the state. They will pick a candidate to replace Platner—who got over 150,000 votes, the most of any Democratic Senate candidate in Maine primary history. Then, that candidate will face off against incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November.

At least eight candidates’ names have been floated to replace Platner: brewery owner Dan Kleban, social worker Paige Loud, former Maine CDC director Nirav Shah, former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, and former political staffer Jordan Wood among them. But in Platner’s Wednesday night announcement, he said he believes his volunteers—not the Maine Democratic Party—should be the ones to choose his replacement. “These decisions need to be made in the open by the people of this state, the people who got us here,” Platner said. “My name might be on the ballot right now, but that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine.”

“There is an unprecedented amount of energy and enthusiasm among Maine Democrats, driven in part by many of the dedicated volunteers and supporters who were inspired by Graham Platner’s campaign,” Maine Democratic Party leaders said in a statement. “We look forward to coming together and harnessing that energy around our new nominee as we work to defeat Susan Collins in November.”

Eduardo Zayas-Bazán was a 24-year-old lawyer when he left Cuba for the United States and joined about 1,400 other Cuban exiles, who were known as Brigade 2506, to participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion, the botched 1961 mission to overthrow Fidel Castro’s communist regime.

Always a gifted swimmer, he was a frogman, and when he stepped on the shores of Playa Girón on the southern coast of the island, he was shot in the right knee by friendly fire. When the US government-backed incursion failed —largely due to President John F. Kennedy’s decision to withdraw plans to strike Castro’s airfields—the human cost was significant: about 100 exiles died during the attacks, and Zayas-Bazán was arrested along with hundreds of others. He had served for about a year when the Kennedy administration negotiated for the return of exiles from the island to the US. 

Fast forward more than half a century, and Zayas-Bazán is now a 90-year-old retired professor who taught at East Tennessee State University. His experience has become memorialized in the new Bay of Pigs Museum and Library in Miami’s historic Little Havana, which opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 17, the 65th anniversary of the disastrous invasion. After five years of planning, the 11,000 square foot building was erected on the site of the original Brigade 2506 meetinghouse, a one-story building with a Spanish-tile roof where veterans gathered regularly. At a cost of more than $8 million, the new two-story facility contains numerous glass displays, multiple screens playing interviews of veterans, and a towering mural of the Cuban flag that greets visitors near the entrance.  

The museum has been a rare point of unity for Florida Democrats and Republicans. President Donald Trump stopped at the original house during his 2016 campaign, and the site has also been visited by politicians like Marco Rubio and Florida Sen. Rick Scott. Eileen Higgins, who was elected last year to be Miami’s first Democrat mayor in nearly 30 years, secured funding for the museum. “We’ve got to put party lines aside,” Carlos Luis, the museum president, told me. “This is so important for the Cuban community, and overall, this is the identity of the county and the city.”

Most of the men involved in the mission were young with no military experience, many of whom received only a few months of training before the invasion. One of them was Luis’s father, René Luis, who ran an accounting firm in Cuba with his family. When the elder Luis was released from prison after 22 months following the Bay of Pigs, he settled in Miami with his wife. They had seven children. Before dinner, Carlos recalled, the family sang Cuba’s national anthem. His father didn’t open up much about his experience, apart from blaming Kennedy for the failed mission, and he died in 2024 without ever setting foot on the island again. “My involvement here,” Luis said, “is the least I can do for my father.”

For Zayas-Bazán, president of the Brigade’s association and a member of the museum’s board, the new building provides a vivid excursion through his memories. Wearing a crisply ironed guayabera, a traditional linen shirt popular in Cuba, he strode through the exhibits, stopping at the front entrance to point out a video playing black-and-white footage of Havana’s waterfront lined with hotels and bustling city streets; his glasses reflected images of a now-vanished Cuba. “This shows what Cuba was like,” he told me. “So that the people can see what Havana was like before 1959”—the year Fidel Castro took control of the island. 

He stopped at a glass display lined with photos from 1962, when hundreds of Brigade 2506 members who had been imprisoned in Cuba returned to Miami. The photos show young men stepping off airplanes and into the arms of loved ones waiting for them on the tarmac. One such photo is of Zayas-Bazán and his then-wife, her smiling face pressed against his chest. In another corner of the museum, he pointed to a collection of items that Brigade 2506 members kept from that era: metal bowls and plates, spoons, rosaries, and tattered books. Zayas-Bazán read Don Quixote while in prison. 

After the invasion, several men were captured and forced into a crowded truck with no ventilation in the blistering heat. The episode was known as La Rastra de la Muerte, the “trailer truck of death,” because nine men of the dozens who were trapped died of asphyxiation. One exhibit focuses on what happened. “As oxygen dwindled,” the display reads, “some prisoners scraped open tiny holes in the walls and moved dying prisoners to them, an act which saved many.” The names of the men who died were listed, and Zayas-Bazán brushed his hand over those of three of his friends who had perished.

As I reported in March, Cuba is in the midst of the worst economic crisis ever to grip the island. Food is scarce, blackouts are constant, the medical infrastructure is collapsing, and inflation is astronomical. In the spring, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel confirmed he was in talks with the Trump administration regarding the island’s future, a few months after the US government imposed an oil blockade, further harming the struggling nation. In recent weeks, the situation in Cuba has worsened as the population grapples with water shortages in the midst of the summer’s heat.

The new museum is a reminder for the Cuban exile community of “what could have been” if the Bay of Pigs mission had succeeded, Andy Gomez, one of the leading scholars on Cuba, told me. Without any major changes in the country, he worries that the next generation of Cuban Americans will not travel there and eventually lose ties with the island. “As the Eduardo Zayas-Bazáns of the older generations pass away, that will be another experience that will be lost,” he told me. “It’s important to somehow continue to tell that story.”

And that is what the museum strives to do. Its executive director, Yuleisy Mena, teaches a course about the invasion at the local Florida International University. The museum has also invited teachers from the Miami-Dade County school district to visit. “We have to start getting the next generation ready to take on the baton,” Luis told me. 

The Bay of Pigs veterans were among the first generation of Cubans to leave the island after Castro took power, and today about 200 of them are still alive. After Zayas-Bazán left his homeland more than six decades ago, he became chair of the Foreign Language Department at East Tennessee State University and co-authored Spanish language textbooks. In 1985, he became the first Cuban to lead the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.

After retiring in 1999, he moved back to Miami to be within the Cuban exile community in case democracy returned to the island nation. “I came thinking that there had to be a change in Cuba,” he told me. “I don’t want to return until I can speak my mind without having to worry, until I can go everywhere I want to and see whomever I want to. I refuse to go and be spied on.”

Despite a life filled with professional and personal successes in the US, “I think about Cuba every day,” Zayas-Bazán said. 

For Brigade 2506 veterans like Zayas-Bazán and their families, the end of Cuba’s current government is more than half a century in the making. “I have never felt more optimistic about changes in Cuba than right now,” he told me, acknowledging that any changes may not happen in the near future with the ongoing disputes with Iran and the earthquake aftermath in Venezuela. “We, the Cuban people, have suffered so much in 67 years.”

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Energy efficiency standards can make it more expensive to construct new buildings, but they save money for residents in the long run. In a new analysis, the Trump administration ignored the second half of that equation—a move that energy experts fear could undermine efficiency efforts nationwide.

Late last month, the US Department of Energy announced it found that if every state adopted the model 2024 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) instead of following a 20-year-old building code, the move would drive up housing construction costs by $9.2 billion annually. It’s a break with decades of DOE analysis, spanning Republican and Democratic administrations, which has reported significant energy and financial savings under each iteration of the code.

“The Energy Department is completely contradicting its own findings,” said Donna Stanley, vice president of communications at the nonprofit International Code Council, which develops the model code. ​“The DOE’s new methodology is a deep mystery.”

The DOE did not respond by Monday to Canary Media’s question of why it chose to exclude energy bill savings in its analysis.

The IECC, which is updated every three years, has cut energy use in new homes in half since it was first enacted in the late 1970s. While the code is fuel-neutral, meaning that builders can install fossil-fueled equipment, it still has a positive impact for the climate because it reduces energy demand that would be met at least in part by burning fossil fuels.

Most states adopt the IECC or an amended version rather than create their own rules from scratch. Some states, like Alabama, don’t impose statewide standards. In those cases, local governments may choose to use the IECC themselves; as the city of Montgomery does, for example.

Depending on the code-adoption cycle, there can be a lag of several years before a state or local jurisdiction takes up the latest iteration of the IECC. To date, 10 states have adopted the 2024 code, per the International Code Council.

The DOE’s analysis could have a chilling effect on other states still in the process of locking in the 2024 code, including Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Ohio. Lawmakers who have sought to restrict more-efficient building codes—such as those in the Missouri House of Representatives—could use the analysis as fodder for their arguments, according to Ben Rabe, associate director of codes and policy at New Buildings Institute.

The analysis comes as the Trump administration has sought to squelch energy-efficiency efforts across the country. In 2025, it sued two California cities over their superefficient all-electric codes, and this year it has barred households from using federal home-electrification rebates to swap fossil-fueled appliances for heat-pump options. In May, the Trump DOE also rescinded a Biden-era requirement that new homes meet the 2021 IECC standard to qualify for federal mortgage loans.

The moves to crush efficiency measures could exacerbate the country’s energy-affordability problems, making people spend more at a time when electricity and fuel costs have risen fast.

The DOE has done a cost-benefit analysis of every version of the IECC, but this latest one is the first time the agency has tallied only the upfront costs from home construction and ignored the long-term bill savings, said Ted Tiffany, senior technical lead at the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group.

That’s like comparing cars based solely on their sticker prices while ignoring fuel costs and maintenance expenses, he added. ​“A cheaper car may cost less on Day 1, but a more efficient vehicle can save money and provide better performance, safety, and last longer over its lifetime.”

In a report for the DOE last year, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory calculated the utility bill savings for people who move into homes built to the new standard. The 2024 model code generates an average life-cycle cost savings of nearly $3,000 per residence over the 2021 code, it estimated, though in specific regions that could rise to almost $9,500. The average payback time for a buyer paying for a home in cash, it found, is 2.5 years. Those who get a mortgage would typically see net savings on their combined home and utility payments in just one year.

The adoption of the IECC’s latest residential and commercial energy codes would save US homes and businesses $182 billion between 2010 and 2040, according to a DOE webpage that was removed shortly before the announcement.

“This is the definition of cost-effectiveness,” Tiffany said.

The DOE’s new analysis also rests on a questionable time-period comparison: It benchmarked the 2024 IECC against the 2006 version. Forty-nine states have already adopted more advanced energy codes for new residential units, according to Tiffany; they’re not building to 2006 standards. The DOE’s comparison really works only ​“for perhaps Arkansas,” he said, which lags the rest of the US in building energy codes.

The agency has estimated the added construction costs for compliance with the 2024 IECC over the 2006 IECC at $14,000 per home. 

“But we’ll save way more than that over the life of these buildings,” Rabe said.

When Donald Trump gets into a loop, it’s hard to get him out. He’ll just talk in a circle until he’s bored and moves on to the next thing. He has fixated on Greenland and ruminated on his reflecting pool. Right now, though, his focus is The Communists. And as a new Reuters analysis reveals, he’s really into it: Over the past two weeks, Trump has brought up communism a full 81 times. 

Communism is an old rhetorical obsession for Trump—who was in first grade when Joseph Stalin died—and his allies. In 2025, he introduced a “National Anti-Communism Week.” He blamed communists for his 2023 criminal indictments. During his 2020 campaign, he accused his opponents of (you guessed it) communism.

It may be a product of his deep relationship with Roy Cohn, a lackey of Red Scare architect Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Trump’s longtime mentor and personal lawyer. 

But over the past week, the president appears to have hit overdrive, sermonizing against communism at fever pitch. And like his Red Scare predecessors, Trump is also using the label to go after immigrants, decrying a “resurgent communist menace” from “newcomers to our country” in a July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore—designed by an anti-immigrant crusader and Ku Klux Klan associate—that also characterized communism as “a mortal threat to American liberty” and “the greatest threat” to the United States, surpassing Pearl Harbor, both World Wars, the September 11 attacks, et cetera.

Then Trump really got going: “You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America,” he continued. “You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. The godless communist morality states that anything is justified to bring about inhuman visions…They don’t want good. They don’t love God, and they don’t want God. They don’t love religion, and they don’t want religion, and they won’t have it, but we will not let them win.” 

The actual communists of the Communist Party USA have spent the past week sending strident press releases to clarify that they are not, in fact, the Democratic Socialists of America.

Maybe Trump’s handwringing over so-called communists isn’t entirely misguided. After all, capitalism hasn’t been looking too good lately. A recent Gallup poll showed that less than half of young Americans feel positively toward our economic system. The libertarian Cato Institute found last week that a majority of Americans under 30 feel positively about socialism, and more than a third report a favorable view of communism. So if communism is a “cancer” that Trump must “cut out fast,” as he threatened to do at an America250 event, he certainly has his work cut out for him.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the US would continue strikes on Iran for a second night, and—if it had to—seize much of the country’s oil and target electric and desalination plants. 

The desalination plants are part of Iran’s vital civilian infrastructure, and, as I wrote in April, international law experts consider hitting these facilities to be war crimes because of the disproportionate harm targeting them would cause to civilians. 

On Wednesday, Trump also said that the US-Iran ceasefire agreement was over and that he would allow US officials to continue current negotiations to end the war, but they would be “wasting their time.”

Trump’s threats come amid multiple American strikes against Iran since it signed an interim deal with Iran on June 17. The US strikes came in response to Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a passageway that carried about 20 percent of the world’s crude oil and natural gas before the 2026 war began.

In late June, during the first major US strikes on Iran since the interim deal, Trump posted on Truth Social that if Iran continued its strikes, “we will be forced to military complete the job…if that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”

As part of the US and Iran’s June agreement, Iran would allow ships to pass through without paying tolls for 60 days. But the country’s leadership has stated that oil tankers passing through the strait must use approved routes. According to a Wednesday report by the Associated Press, the ships Iran struck on Tuesday appeared to deviate from the designated route.

These recent maneuvers put more lives at risk. As of June 10, multiple Iranian government ministries reported that about 3,500 people have been killed in Iran since the war began in February.

Nate Swanson, President Joe Biden’s director for Iran at the National Security Council, told me two weeks ago what he considered the strategy at play here. The US doesn’t seem to be interested in making complex concessions to Iran, Swanson said, and Iran may be unwilling to agree to a deal with Trump specifically, given his support of the Gaza war and his strikes on the country in June 2025.

On Wednesday, Trump told reporters that Iran’s leaders were “scum” and “sick people.” “Based on their actions over the last week or two, they’re not doing a service to the people,” he said. “I’m not sure I want to make a deal with them.”

The Trump administration’s efforts to end the war appear to be going backward. Republican lawmakers criticized the June ceasefire deal with Iran as “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.” While many publicly blamed JD Vance, whom Trump said was responsible for Iran negotiations, the war is extremely unpopular with his base, which could hurt the GOP’s chances in the upcoming midterms.

Moments after scoring Belgium’s fourth goal against the hapless US men’s national soccer team, Romelu Lukaku ran to the corner flag and joined his teammates in a mocking “Trump dance.” The scene was repeated soon after in the Belgium locker room, this time as they sang the Village People’s “YMCA”—a staple of President Donald Trump’s political rallies. It was a final humiliation on one of the worst days in US soccer history.

It was also a sign of how quickly things have changed—of how toxic the US president’s attempts to rig everything from the economy to soccer tournaments have become. Back in 2024, right after Trump was elected for the second time, his signature dance move was everywhere. NFL stars, third-tier British professional soccer players, and even Team USA’s Christian Pulisic and his teammates were seen celebrating with the stunted boogie. The dance’s cultural emergence was an indicator of Trump’s personal soft power as he reclaimed the White House in the wake of the January 6 insurrection and multiple criminal prosecutions. But now—18 months into a second term marked by chaos, corruption, and war—Trump’s brand has been reduced to a symbol of American failure.

The US men’s national team is not new to humiliation or drama. The team crashed out of World Cup group stages in 1998 and 2006 and failed to even qualify for the tournament in 2018. Its 2022 campaign ended in the bizarre “ReynaGate” controversy. But none of that compares to what happened in the week between the team’s triumph against Bosnia-Herzegovina and its lopsided loss to Belgium on Monday night.  

In the Bosnia-Herzegovina game, US striker Folarin Balogun received a controversial red card just past halftime, leaving the US down a man as it clung to a narrow lead. Throughout the rest of the match, the team showed a fight and grittiness that propelled it to a historic win. But the red card meant that Balogun—the team’s leading scorer—would miss the round of 16 match against Belgium. 

The next day, Trump called Gianni Infantino—the FIFA president who infamously awarded Trump a knock-off “peace prize”—to discuss Balogun’s red card, according to Politico. This was followed by days of lobbying and legal maneuvering as US government and US Soccer Federation officials explored arguments to convince FIFA to overturn the decision. This reportedly included White House FIFA World Cup Task Force Executive Director Andrew Giuliani and Scott Goodwin—a hedge fund founder who personally contributed the salary of US coach Mauricio Pochettino—researching other controversial calls from the referee who dished out the red card. Trump would soon describe the referee as “very suspect.”

Then came Sunday, a day before the Belgium game. Suddenly, FIFA announced that an independent committee had decided to “suspend” Balogun’s red card suspension and he would be allowed to play after all. As news spread about the lifted suspension, fingers started to point to Trump and his close relationship with FIFA—a relationship that Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy laid out in a recent Reveal episode about the World Cup. 

FIFA’s announcement sparked an uproar. The Royal Belgian Football Association appealed the decision, and Belgium’s coach, Rudi Garcia, portrayed the fight as an existential one for the sport itself. Belgium was “defending football,” Garcia said. Europe’s governing soccer body, UEFA, said FIFA’s move “crossed a red line.”

“Where does this start and where does this end now?” England coach Thomas Tuchel asked reporters as he discussed the implications for other refereeing decisions in the tournament. One reporter asked, presumably jokingly, whether Harry Kane could persuade Trump to reverse a red card issue to an England fullback. “Maybe, yeah,” Tuchel said with a smile.

At the White House on Monday morning, Trump spoke triumphantly about the outcome, acknowledging that he’d reached out to Infantino but insisting FIFA made its decision independently. “All I did: I asked for a review because I didn’t think it was a foul,” the president said. “I didn’t tell him what to do.” Trump said it would be a “big stain” on the World Cup if the best players didn’t get to play. The president was apparently oblivious to the inevitability that it was his own actions that would leave the biggest stain on US soccer and the World Cup itself.

After the US lost in a 4–1 blowout, Belgian players said the scandal gave them additional motivation, with midfielder Nicolas Raskin stating that “there’s always a justice somewhere in life.” Announcers from around the world mocked Trump’s intervention. The Belgian football association tweeted, “Overturn this.”

It would probably be unreasonable to blame Trump for the US loss on the field. But the president’s attempt to insert himself into the game—and the international blowback it caused—was a far bigger blunder for the sport and the country than the shambolic defending by Matt Freese and Tim Ream.

Trump still has the ability to corruptly wield power. But as this fiasco makes clear, he’s no longer able to convince the world to dance along. After the game, Balogun approached Belgium’s coach and attempted to clean up at least some of the political stain. “It is not his fault,” Garcia told reporters, praising the US forward’s gesture. “He is not the one to blame.”