Donald Trump has made it known far and wide that, as president, with the weight of the world on his shoulders, he’s too busy to attend his son Don Jr.’s second wedding to Florida influencer Bettina Anderson in the Bahamas this weekend.

Earlier this week, the president said that with “a thing called Iran” and “other things,” the timing of the nuptials was “not good.” He added with his trademark tact, family feeling, and care for choosing his words, “If I do attend, I get killed. If I don’t attend, I get killed—by the fake news, of course, I’m talking about.”

As the wedding weekend began, the president continued to express his regrets on TruthSocial, saying that “circumstances pertaining to Government, and my love for the United States of America” did not allow him to attend. Thus far, those “circumstances” have involved the president posting a volley of weird stuff on TruthSocial, including a bunch of AI-generated images and some general seething at Stephen Colbert. 

The president’s public schedule for the Memorial Day weekend is light, with a great deal of “executive time” on the docket. On Friday evening and Saturday morning, Trump devoted that time to posting several photographs of himself on TruthSocial, followed by an AI-generated image reading “GOLDEN DOME FOR THE WHITE HOUSE,” with a dome bathed in celestial light and surrounded by a clutter of satellites. He followed that up with a poorly Photoshopped image of himself looming like a harvest moon over a countryside dotted with houses and a mountain range, Trump’s fingers grasping one of its peaks. “Hello, Greenland!” the image read. (Apparently liking that image tremendously, Trump posted it again the following morning.) He also found time to post a tribute to late WWE wrestler Hulk Hogan, whom he mistakenly termed “the Huckster.” (Hogan was usually known by the nickname “the Hulkster,” but “huckster” might be a term Trump is more familiar with.)

The president, who is, again, reportedly very busy, followed these important insights with a tribute to NASCAR driver Kyle Busch, who died unexpectedly last week, followed by an AI-generated video of himself throwing former Late Show host Stephen Colbert into a dumpster. Colbert, who has been an outspoken critic of Trump, hosted his last show on Thursday. CBS said last year that it would end Colbert’s contract and retire the Late Show franchise entirely, a decision the network improbably claimed was “purely financial.” It’s one of several recent TruthSocial posts Trump has posted about Colbert in recent days. On Friday morning, around 2 a.m, the president dubbed him a “total jerk,” adding at 9:37 a.m. that his “firing” was, as he put it, “the ‘Beginning of the End’ for untalented, nasty, highly overpaid, not funny, and very poorly rated Late Night Television Hosts. Others, of even less talent, to soon follow. May they all Rest in Peace!” 

One could argue that these are not the actions of a man who’s too busy to attend his son’s wedding, or really, a man who’s busy at all. But given his recent, worryingly combative stance towards the Cuban government, his leering interest in Greenland, and a reported possibility that Trump will once again attack Iran, it is perhaps in everyone’s best interest that the president seems to be, for now, very, very busy posting on his phone.  

In a delightful Easter egg for fans of Stephen Colbert, local television, or the improbable combination of the two, following Colbert’s last-ever Late Show, he popped up the following day as the guest host of “Only in Monroe,” a public access show in Monroe, Michigan. Colbert presented an hour of local news, assisted, sort of, by his “volunteer musical director,” a deadpan Jack White hunched over a reel-to-reel tape deck with headphones clamped over his ears.

“It’s been an excruciating 23 hours without being on TV,” Colbert declared. “So I am grateful to be here on Monroe Community Media before they are also acquired by Paramount.”

“We don’t have any sponsors? We actually lost a lot of money making this show tonight?” he also asked, peering offscreen at the crew. “Now I know how CBS felt.”

Colbert previously guest-hosted “Only in Monroe” in 2015, and joked at the outset that he hadn’t slept since then. He led the guffawing camera crew through a series of jokes about local weed dispensaries, Monroe’s version of Comic Con, and a segment about a feud between two local hot dog businesses.

Colbert’s guests on the program included “Only in Monroe’s” usual hosts, Michelle Baumann and Kaye Lani Rae Rafko. Jeff Daniels, who was raised in Chelsea, Michigan, also sat down for an interview, while Steve Buscemi read an ad for a local pizza place, Buscemi Pizza, while reminding viewers, “I’ve got nothing to do with it.”

At another point in the broadcast, White, a native son of Detroit, joined Colbert to sample Monroe-style hot dogs. They consumed them, as White dryly put it, “Lady and the Tramp-style,” as the entire camera crew cracked up off-camera. Colbert also treated viewers to a helium-addled rendition of The White Stripes’ “Fell in Love With a Girl” as White struggled not to laugh. At the close of the program, Colbert gifted the show’s creative director Genevieve Benson a ham topped with a birthday hat and a lit sparkler.

The whole thing was hilarious, awkward, and gloriously pointless. While the president of the United States seethes over Colbert, the man himself made it clear that he intends to use his sudden wealth of freedom to enjoy himself.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced on Friday that she would resign, saying that her husband, Abraham, has been diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. “At this time, I must step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle,” Gabbard wrote in her resignation letter to Trump.

Gabbard, who represented Hawaii as a Democrat in Congress from 2013 to 2021, has been, from the start, a polarizing and intensely conspiratorial figure and a curious choice for this role. She grew up in a spiritual movement in Hawaii called the Science of Identity Foundation, an offshoot of Hare Krishna that some critics and ex-members have dubbed a cult. (A Gabbard spokesperson has said that such criticism is unfounded and amounts to “Hinduphobia.”) Each time she’s been considered for a more substantial role, and during her 2020 presidential campaign, observers have debated how her upbringing has influenced her beliefs.

Over her career, Gabbard has shown a special soft spot for the world’s autocrats: in 2017, she secretly met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, going on to say that she was “skeptical” that Assad had carried out a chemical gas attack on his own people. “There’s responsibility that goes around,” she vaguely observed to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, in response to a question about whether she believed Assad, in Blitzer’s words, “bears any responsibility for the horrific deaths that have occurred in his own country.” Assad is believed to have carried out “widespread and systematic” gas attacks against the Syrian people, according to Human Rights Watch. Gabbard was also harshly critical of Ukraine preceding Russia’s invasion of the country, claiming that the invasion could have been avoided if NATO and the Biden Administration had acknowledged what she called Russia’s “legitimate security concerns.”

After she was appointed as DNI director, Gabbard quickly sought to curry favor with Trump, accusing the Obama administration of a “treasonous plot” against Donald Trump during the 2016 elections. But she fell out of favor with the president, and by April of this year, was reportedly not invited to strategy meetings on the Iran war.

Naturally, her departure spurred a raft of conspiracy theories, especially on the right, with observers unable to agree on who was responsible for her sudden exit. In their estimation, some likely candidates included the CIA, the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, and the broader, nonspecific Deep State. As the MAGA universe becomes increasingly fractured over issues like the Iran war, Gabbard’s departure not only opens up another position for Trump to fill with a loyalist, but also holds up a mirror to show just how distorted and contradictory their once lockstep views have become. 

Reuters reports that Gabbard was “forced out” by the White House, a claim a spokesperson there denied. Nonetheless, for months, rumors have swirled that she would be dismissed over differences with Trump over the Iran war. One of the most outspoken has been Laura Loomer, the far-right provocateur and close confidante of President Trump’s, who has claimed since earlier this year that Gabbard would be gone before the midterms, a prediction that proved to be correct.

Gabbard’s departure follows a slew of others. She’s the fourth woman to leave the Trump administration in recent months, following Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Just days ago, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, a former CIA undercover agent, also left two of her jobs, as a deputy to Gabbard and as ​​an associate director at the Office of Management and Budget. Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, also recently resigned, citing his opposition to the Iran war. 

The moment Gabbard’s resignation letter hit the internet, the speculation began. “The great Tulsi Gabbard, let’s be blunt, got fired,” former Trump advisor Steve Bannon declared on his show The War Room, swiftly conflating all the conspiracy theories into one. “This is Ratcliffe and the CIA and the Mossad. This is a hostile takeover of the DNI [Director of National Intelligence].” (“Ratcliffe” refers to John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA.)  

Other people in the MAGAverse also tied Gabbard’s departure to the false news of an alleged raid on her office by the CIA. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) previously claimed in mid-May that the CIA had raided Gabbard’s office, taking documents related to the JFK assassination and MKUltra, the CIA’s infamous mid-century mind control research program. Gabbard’s office quickly denied that such a raid had taken place, and the story was never corroborated at the time. But as soon as Gabbard announced her resignation, self-styled MAGA journalists and influencers quickly referred to it.

“So Tulsi Gabbard, who had her office raided just before she was set to disclose classified documents on JFK and MK Ultra last week, will now be stepping down to take care of ‘family matters,’” tweeted Rebekah Worsham, a conservative online political commentator who calls herself “The Patriotic Blonde,” adding, “Shocking.”

Meanwhile, Patrick Webb, the founder of a fake news website called Leading Report that often shares COVID and other conspiracy theories, echoed the idea. He baselessly claimed that the CIA had been “illegally spying” on Gabbard over her investigations “into the alleged COVID-19 cover-up, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, and UAPs” (unidentified aerial phenomena). 

Other observers weighed in with even more sweeping concerns. “We are witnessing the systematic purging of conscience from government,” tweeted MAHA influencer, Lauren Lee. “Charlie Kirk, MTG, Massie, Joe Kent, Tulsi Gabbard. Anyone who opposes the Iran war is getting eliminated or resigning for ‘family reasons.’ A very, very bad sign about what they’re planning next.”

It’s a fitting end to her tenure, as The Atlantic points out, given that she spent much of her brief time in office spinning conspiracy theories and taking pugnacious stances that seemed designed to win Trump’s attention and approval. She claimed that former US officials had tried to wage a “yearslong coup” on Trump and accused them, baldly, of “treason.”  She also released a highly classified document that shed light on Russian interference in the 2016 election over objections from other intelligence agencies.

In the end, none of this was enough to impress Trump, or detract from what he saw as her ultimate disloyalty: saying that Iran had not rebuilt its nuclear program. (In one hearing, she refused to say whether Iran posed an imminent nuclear threat to the United States, saying that assessment was up to the president, which it is not.) Axios reported that Trump planned to fire her last month before former Trump campaign director and confidante Roger Stone persuaded him not to. 

“Fortunately, I acted in time,” Stone tweeted, accusing Laura Loomer, with whom he’s been bitterly feuding, of orchestrating the situation. And while the tempting target of Gabbard may now be gone, the backbiting, feuding, and conspiracy theories will clearly find new targets soon.

This story was originally published by Grist in partnership with Chicago Public Media, and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Renee Costanzo cranked on the rusty pulley with both hands, watching the greenhouse roof creak open in sections. A breeze of spring air swept over 12,000 seedlings lined up in plastic trays in the Kilbourn Park greenhouse.

Costanzo, the Chicago Park District’s only full-time employee at the north-side greenhouse, spearheads a months-long effort to grow more than 15,000 plants, including vegetables, greens, and flowers, to get them ready in time for the Kilbourn Park’s annual plant sale.

The massively popular sale, which took place earlier this month, typically draws upwards of 1,100 people every year, with local gardeners lining up around the park waiting to snatch up plants at $4 a piece. But this year, attendance broke records — more than 2,300 shoppers turned out.

“We generally start these annuals at the end of February,” said Costanzo, pointing to rows of popular annual flowers like zinnias, marigolds, and geraniums, which provide bright blooms all summer long before dying at the end of the season. “So we’ve been coddling and loving these babies for months now, and we just want to get them into happy homes.”

For decades, Chicago gardeners flocked to the Kilbourn Park sale to pick up tomatoes, cucumbers, and some annuals — the standard starter kit for backyard gardeners. But this year, the park responded to a relatively new demand: Nearly 1 in 5 plants for sale are native plant species that have adapted to the local climate and wildlife and are generally low maintenance. 

“Just in the last five years, people have asked for more natives, which is why we’ve been increasing our production,” said Costanzo, who experimented with 30 different native species in November ahead of the plant sale this year. 

For a long time, native plants were seen as little more than weeds, but their value has grown significantly in recent years. Other local plant sales across Chicago and the country are incorporating native species at a pace surprising to even veteran horticulturalists who remember a time when they couldn’t give them away. 

“I’ve watched this for 44 years, from almost zero to now,” said Neil Diboll, the president of Prairie Nursery, a Wisconsin-based nursery dedicated to growing and shipping native plants across the country. 

“It’s not a fad,” Diboll said. “This is a long, steady climb.”  

Last year, Diboll said his nursery experienced a 7 percent increase in native plant sales. This year, they’re shipping out about 500,000 plants and even more seeds. Back in 1982, when Diboll first started selling plants, business was tougher: The company grossed just over $13,000. These days, he said, “you can add a few zeros on there.”

That relatively new mainstream demand has been driven, in part, by concerns about dramatic declines in insect species and climate change-powered extreme heat, drought, and flooding. The caterpillars of the Monarch butterfly, for example, depend on native milkweed as a food source. But as land use patterns have changed, local milkweed species have disappeared, leading to recent declines in Monarch populations. 

“Native plants have been adapting to change for thousands of years,” said Tiffany Jones, who leads habitat education throughout the Great Lakes region for the National Wildlife Federation. “They need less water, less maintenance, and they’re incredibly resilient — not to mention they help flood prevention with their deep root systems and provide habitat for all kinds of crucial species and pollinators. They’re practical and beautiful.”

In Minnesota, Becky Klukas-Brewer, co-owner and head of marketing and sales at Prairie Moon Nursery, a popular native plant nursery, said the Midwest greenhouse is shipping more plants and seeds than ever before. “In the last seven years, we have seen a 350 percent increase in sales, which is pretty awesome,” said Klukas-Brewer. At the same time, the 44-year-old nursery has seen its orders triple. She credits that success, in part, to the growing number of local plant sales across the country, drumming up interest in ecologically-minded gardening. 

For nearly 50 years, Wild Ones, a national nonprofit, has been educating the public about the benefits of reintroducing native plants back into their habitat. What started as a gardening club in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has ballooned into a nationwide organization with over 14,000 gardening enthusiasts putting on plant sales, seed giveaways, and exchanges. The group has also been noticing an uptick in native plant sales. 

Over 110,000 native plants were sold last year through the organization’s 107 plant sales, according to Josh Nelson, development director with the Wild Ones. He added that another 40,000 native plants were distributed as part of the group’s various programs.

As the native plant business continues to grow, the annual Kilbourn Park plant sale is helping meet some of that demand. To make it happen, a team of local volunteers came out on a weekly basis over several months to help sort, pot, and move seedlings. 

“It’s completely worth it,” said Lourdes Valenzuela, a retired schoolteacher who has volunteered at the north side plant sale for 12 years. Valenzuela is part of the Friends of Kilbourn Park Greenhouse, a dedicated group of local volunteers who fundraise to help expand the resources at the nursery. With help from funds collected at previous plant sales, they’ve been able to buy benches, a shed, and even a patio — increasing the footprint of the educational center. The goal this year was to raise $25,000, about half of the total projected cost, for a new outdoor learning center. But Valenzuela said the plant sale was a huge hit, and they easily surpassed the goal. The Chicago Park District confirmed the sale generated approximately $48,000. 

“We literally sold every possible plant, all the compost, lots of baked goods,” she said. “We’re not fighting against the climate here. We’re working with it because it’s what’s native to this area, and they’re beautiful.”

Utah political consultant Gabi Finlayson was driving out of a canyon last week when she got the news that she had been accused of being a Chinese government operative. 

She was driving to a speaking engagement in central Utah with her colleague, Jackie Morgan. When their car climbed out of the canyon and back into cell service, their phones were going off. 

“Jackie and I each had like five text messages saying, you know, are you okay, did you see this, it’s gonna get worse before it gets better, but just hang in there.” They weren’t sure what happened, Finlayson said, until someone sent them the video. 

Kevin O’Leary, the Shark Tank billionaire investor trying to build a 40,000-acre data center campus in Finlayson and Morgan’s home state, had gone on Fox News. His “guys” had done a “deep dig into the IP addresses,” he said, and found “two cells inside of Utah” affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party: Finlayson and Morgan’s group, Elevate Strategies, as well as the nonprofit Alliance for a Better Utah. 

Finlayson and Morgan call the claim an out-and-out lie motivated by their opposition to a controversial Utah data center. “You don’t wake up in the morning often thinking, like, maybe I’ll get accused of sedition today on Fox News by Kevin O’Leary, but here we are,” Finlayson told me. “I’d probably get paid a lot more if I was” being paid by a foreign government, Elizabeth Huntchings, of Alliance for a Better Utah, told Fox News. 

They spoke against the Stratos data center not because they’re being paid to do so, Finlayson said, but because it seemed like something that had been “very much imposed upon people”—a massive construction project undertaken with very little public knowledge, that could increase Utah’s net greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent, as one University of Utah professor estimates. 

To O’Leary, though, red spooks are the only reasonable explanation. “Who would want us to stop building our electrical grid? Who would want to stop us from having the compute capacity to develop AI? Which adversary would want that? There’s only one, it’s China,” O’Leary told Fox Business News host Maria Bartiromo earlier this month. 

This narrative—that hyperscale data centers like O’Leary’s in Utah must be built, as a matter of national security—echoes a 2025 executive order by Donald Trump accelerating the federal permit process for data centers. And more and more data center investors are picking it up—insisting that their projects must be built in order to out-compute China. 

“It is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance,” Trump wrote in his 2025 executive order. (The president has also invested millions of dollars in companies that build data center infrastructure.) 

But Finlayson and Morgan, in Utah, spend their working lives support local Democratic political campaigns—often a long shot in a Republican supermajority state—andrun a Substack on local news and politics. It’s an affiliation that may not endear them to O’Leary, who says he will provide proof, still to come, that his critics are foreign operatives; he has as yet not done so. His investment firm did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Finlayson says she’s part of a wave of real, unpaid outrage among Utahns. “Almost everyone in the entire state is so mad about this,” she said. “There’s obviously the folks that are concerned about the environmental impacts—I mean, it’s the largest proposed data center in the entire country—but then also you have a lot of more conservative people that are ranchers and farmers, people that live in these rural areas, that don’t want this infrastructure.” The backlash against data center construction has been called the “most bipartisan issue since beer”—and in Utah, that shows. 

In the west, Finlayson said, “we kind of have this libertarian streak”: her community does not take well to “investors and rich people wanting to come in and just impose this thing on people without really significant community input.” In effect, she said,  “the government is telling you what to do, and they’re not interested in having any feedback.” 

Utahns have given O’Leary and the data center’s other developers quite a lot of feedback. Hundreds showed up to protest at a Box Elder County commission meeting where the data center was approved earlier this month, and thousands of people filed formal protests against the data center’s water rights applications. 

While it’s not clear that overturning the county commission’s approval would stop the data center’s construction—it has already been approved by Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, a powerful state agency—one Box Elder County group wants to put the project on the ballot for a voter referendum. 

Caving to public pressure, the Utah legislature announced Wednesday that it will study the impacts of the proposed data center on the ever-shrinking Great Salt Lake’s water—a timely move, as Utah declared a statewide drought emergency this week. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, has publicly acknowledged that the rollout of O’Leary’s Stratos data center “was not good.” And more protests against the project are scheduled to descend on the Utah State Capitol during Memorial Day weekend. 

Finlayson is heartened by the pushback. “This is not about where you fall in the political spectrum, it’s about who has power to make decisions over your life and who doesn’t,” she said.  “Oftentimes, it feels like we don’t get to decide what happens to us, and we’re just getting things imposed on us by the government or by the wealthy.” 

In Republican-supermajority Utah, she said, this kind of alliance-building means a great deal. “I think that people that have had money and have had power for a long time forget what it looks like when real people have a real problem with a real issue, and they really push back.”

The 911 system functions as a sort of promise: Call for help and someone will be there to respond quickly. But in many American cities, it’s a broken promise.

Thanks in part to a widespread understaffing crisis across 911 dispatch centers, hundreds of thousands of callers are left waiting on hold during their most harrowing moments every year.

Reporter Byard Duncan has spent more than a year reporting on America’s flailing 911 system and what it might take to fix it. This week on Reveal, in partnership with Type Investigations, he traces the issue from California to Wisconsin and a final stop on Capitol Hill.

This week, Meta laid off 8,000 employees—10 percent of the company’s staff—and reassigned another 7,000 to train AI models. Fear of the layoffs had been building around the company for weeks, compounded by the way that Meta has taken a sharp turn from a company built by coders to a company that has staked its future on AI. So when a Meta software engineer named David Frenk posted a farewell parody video to the tune of “American Pie” in an internal message board, staff thought it perfectly captured how the culture of the company has fundamentally shifted. They begged him to post it to YouTube, making their plight inside the company public. 

“There’s a bit of a disconnect,” one former employee who asked not to be identified told Mother Jones, “This is a company of really smart people who work really hard—coders, engineers, designers—people whose creativity and intellect is a part of their job. And you are being told that this AI agent can do it better than you, and you are being asked to train it.”

At Meta, there’s a tradition: when you leave, you make a “badge post” on the company’s internal message board. Usually, it’s a tribute to coworkers and co-creation—very kumbaya. But Frenk turned his badge post into a crusade in C major. It became a runaway hit.

Frenk left of his own accord—his last day is today—and had a little time to decide how he wanted to go out. In an internal chat called “@shitposting” that has about 20,000 members, Frenk posted a high-production-value parody of the Don McLean song “American Pie.” You probably haven’t thought about “American Pie” in a while. The song is a lengthy ballad that unspools the history of rock and roll and laments the loss of innocence when the 1960s turned into the decade of disco. Frenk’s version recounts the recent history of Meta and its position at the edge of a tectonic shift as the company asks workers to train AI—and then lays off thousands of them. 

The song is a consummate parody, and the lyrics are laced with inside jokes and references best understood by those inside the company. Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s Chief Technology Officer and a 20-year veteran of the company, gets name checked multiple times for promoting an internal monitoring software called MCI, or Model Capability Initiative, that the company installed on the computers of US employees this spring. MCI tracks the way humans interact with their screens, capturing mouse clicks and keyboard strokes to train AI to appear more “human-like.” 

As Frenk sings:

And now I’m singing bye, bye, to professional pride
Sign the petition, no more wishing, just deny MCI
It’s the human touch that lets you know you’re alive
Maybe this can’t be replaced with AI

When the initiative was rolled out internally, the former employee said, one of the top comments on an internal message board was “how do I opt out?”

Frenk’s video currently has tens of thousands of views on Meta’s internal messaging system, though many of the comments are from accounts deactivated after Wednesday’s layoffs. The video seems to have captured a shift inside the company where profits are at a record high, executives are receiving huge raises, and yet 8,000 people have lost their jobs. (“When investors pressed us to get more lean,” Frenk asks in his parody, “Why did execs’ paychecks grow so obscene?”)

“It all feels a bit off,” the former employee said. “In a lighthearted way, even if you really, fully believe that this is the direction to go down, everything [in the video] still rings true.” (Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The comments bled over into Blind, a message board for current and former tech workers from places like Meta and Google to chat without their companies monitoring them. On Blind, people posted that the video “made me tear up” and “touched my soul.”

But the thing that really is most evil
And the reason that morale’s in freefall
Is you forgot we’re all just people
When you abused AI

Do you work at Meta? Send tips securely to the Center for Investigative Reporting at cirtips@protonmail.com.

This past Sunday, I found myself walking across the snowless ski runs of Sierra-at-Tahoe in California, which sits on public land in the El Dorado National Forest. I had come to chase down a rumor.

Numerous Tahoe-area residents had told me the Forest Service’s plan to spray the controversial herbicide glyphosate—part of the agency’s forest restoration plan for about 75,000 acres scorched by the devastating 2021 Caldor Fire—had been delayed until 2028. A local news site, along with a major local environmental group—Keep Tahoe Blue—were telling people some version of that.

But I had my suspicions. I dug up maps from the Forest Service’s website, and headed to a spot where one of them indicated spraying might already be happening. It was strange to be standing in the middle of a ski run, with neither snow nor skiers around. But I knew if spraying were happening, it would be obvious.

Public uproar has echoed across the Tahoe area since April, when our yearlong Mother Jones investigation revealed that, in California, the fastest-growing use of glyphosate—the main ingredient in Roundup—is to spray forested areas, including this massive new project around Lake Tahoe. Everyone from environmentalists to an Olympic snowboarder and a prominent voice in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement have since condemned the Forest Service’s plan. 

A petition on Change.org gathered about 10,000 signatures in less than two weeks. And people have taken to social media to call for action, generating hundreds of thousands of views, with companies and organizations like Patagonia and Greenpeace sharing information about the spraying. “Pesticides have no place in our forests!” Greenpeace wrote on its Instagram.

Snowboarder Hannah Teter, who won gold in the half pipe at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, and Silver at the 2010 games in Vancouver, has voiced her opposition on Instagram, where she has 275,000 followers, as well as on her Facebook page.

“It’s so stupid. Everyone in Tahoe is so bummed,” she told me. “How the heck did they get this approved?”

The Forest Service did allow for public comment back in 2023 on its initially smaller proposal for herbicide use in the Caldor Fire scar, which most people in the area seemingly never heard about. Then a 2025 executive order by President Trump to expand timber harvesting on national forestland allowed the Forest Service to more than double its proposed herbicide use within the Caldor Fire scar without soliciting public feedback.

As the outcry grew over the past few weeks, news begin circulating on social media that the Forest Service was backing off. “They cancelled the plan!” one person wrote. “People showed up to meetings, called our representatives and it’s finally cancelled. OUR VOICES MATTERED ON THIS ONE.”

But that wasn’t true. At Sierra-at-Tahoe, I stood on a mountainside that clearly had been doused in glyphosate. The plants around me were nearly all dead—killed with the controversial herbicide, which the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has deemed a probable human carcinogen—and that a 2020 report from the US Environmental Protection Agency said likely harms 93 percent of endangered species.

Roundup’s manufacturer, Bayer, is currently on the hook for more than $12 billion in legal payouts to more than 180,000 people who say glyphosate made them sick—the company is now seeking immunity from some of its liability in a case recently heard by the Supreme Court. (In a statement, the company said glyphosate products are safe when used as directed and that regulators around the world have approved its use.)

Standing on the slopes of Sierra-at-Tahoe, it was clear to me that the Forest Service is moving ahead. It began spraying glyphosate in the Tahoe area last year, including here at the ski resort, and has been spraying elsewhere this spring. 

Down the ski slope from me, I could see hillsides teaming with life, painted in the lush greens and brightly colored petals of spring. But where I stood, next to a ski run called “Marmot,” the land was devoid of spring flowers; the bushes leafless, brittle, and dead by all appearances. Practically the only thing growing was what the Forest Service intended—pine trees: Its workers had hand-planted baby conifers all across the slope.

This scene of devastation is part of the Forest Service’s pivot towards embracing glyphosate in its efforts to reforest in the wake of massive wildfires. The agency’s herbicide use in the Tahoe area is mirrored by another fire-restoration plan in Northern California’s Lassen National Forest, where the Forest Service plans to spray about 10,000 acres with Roundup or a similar product.  

As our investigation revealed, the deployment of glyphosate in California’s forestlands has been growing for decades, driven in part by the worsening fires, as companies and government officials scramble to harvest burned wood and replant trees for future timber sales. Glyphosate is among the effective methods—and the Forest Service says the cheapest—to get pine trees to grow back faster, as it kills any other plant that might compete for sunlight, soil nutrients, and water.

These new projects are expanding the agency’s historic use of the herbicide. In 2023, it  sprayed 14,900 pounds of pure glyphosate across California, according to an analysis of more than 5 million state records that my colleague Melissa Lewis and I compiled as part of our investigation.

The Forest Service has authorized the spraying of glyphosate over about 75,000 acres within the Caldor Fire scar at up to the legal limit of eight pounds per acre. This means the Tahoe project could deploy more than 584,000 pounds of glyphosate over the next few years. In a document outlining how to transform the fire-scarred land into an ideal timber producing forest, the agency noted that “multiple herbicide applications may be required,” which could further increase the total.

This approach treats portions of the National Forest similarly to farmland, where managers aim to maximize yields and minimize costs. After all, the Forest Service exists within the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The agency has not said exactly how much of the designated area around Tahoe it actually plans to spray, although its documents note that spraying herbicides is “the most effective method available for achieving reforestation objectives in the majority of situations.” Officials did not respond to my questions about how much glyphosate the agency will use, nor whether it still considers the chemical safe for people and the environment—especially now that we know that key research papers vouching for glyphosate’s safety were secretly orchestrated by its manufacturer.

This month, the nonprofit Keep Tahoe Blue sent a message to a concerned local, who then posted it online, saying “no glyphosate has been applied as part of the Caldor Fire Restoration Project, and the USFS has stated the earliest any potential herbicide application could occur is now 2028.” But this was inaccurate.

The Forest Service, as part of the Caldor Fire Restoration Project, has indeed been spraying outside the Tahoe basin, where officials plans to reforest 73,000 acres, including the work already done at Sierra-at-Tahoe.

A big source of confusion is that the Caldor Fire Restoration Project actually consists of two separate plans. One involves the Lake Tahoe watershed (a.k.a. the Tahoe basin), meaning the forest creeks that drain into the lake. This smaller portion of the project includes reforestation and potential herbicide use on about 3,000 acres. It was in relation to this area that the local news site SouthTahoeNow.com reported the Forest Service had held off on spraying until 2028.

But a Forest Service spokesperson told me there has been no delay or change of plans: The agency had never intended to spray in that section—which includes areas near Meyers and Heavenly ski resort—this year or next. But its public documents are unclear on this, and they don’t reveal when or under what circumstances that spraying might commence.

On May 7, the Forest Service posted maps online showing it had sprayed glyphosate around and within Sierra-at-Tahoe in spring 2025. When I called and emailed the local officials to confirm, I got a reply saying they’d need to consult with colleagues on the “East Coast” before answering my question. That’s when I decided to drive out and see for myself.

The Forest Service later confirmed that the area I visited indeed had been sprayed, and that the maps I found online were posted this month—a year after the spraying at Sierra-at-Tahoe—“to facilitate awareness.”

It also released maps showing where the agency is spraying in 2026. Those areas were either already treated with glyphosate in April, a government spokesperson told me this week, or the spraying is “ongoing” and expected to wrap up “within the next couple of weeks, weather conditions permitting.”

All of the spraying, they said, has been accomplished by crews using backpack sprayers. These tend to be contract workers, often Spanish speaking immigrants who may not be aware of the potential safety risks. Mother Jones obtained a photo of one work crew that was cited by a county inspector for failure to wear the mandated protective gear—their exposed skin was purple, covered with the chemical.

The spokesperson said the agency posts signs at locations where it sprays herbicides—and typically removes them within 48 hours. Several research papers indicate that glyphosate can persist in the environment and even plant tissue for months, even years, raising risks to the ecology and human health.

One Forest Service map shows areas outside the Tahoe basin that the agency plans to reforest as part of its restoration project—and which it says will likely require glyphosate and other herbicides. The USDA has defended the Forest Service’s use of glyphosate, noting that it relies on the EPA’s “use of gold-standard science to assess pesticide safety.”

Attorney George Kimbrell, co-executive director of the Center for Food Safety, scoffs at that assertion. “It has a well-established toxicity to the environment. And, for endangered species, Roundup is a significant risk,” he told me.

In 2020, the EPA concluded glyphosate was safe for humans when used according to the label, and any environmental concerns were outweighed by the benefits. But that decision was quickly challenged in court by Kimbrell, who represented a coalition of environmental and farm labor groups arguing that the agency did not adequately assess health and ecological risks.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, overturning the EPA’s decision, noting that most of the studies the EPA examined had “indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma” and that the agency had shirked its duty in properly assessing the ecological risks. The EPA is expected to announce an update on its glyphosate safety assessment this year.

People in Tahoe, worried about glyphosate’s potential health and environmental harms, have begun organizing to slow or stop the Forest Service’s plan. That effort includes Kelly Ryerson—Glyphosate Girl on Instagram—an influential voice who visited the White House earlier this year with other members of the MAHA coalition.

The group met with President Trump and his staff and discussed the risks of glyphosate, among other issues. Trump has angered his MAHA base this year by taking action to protect Bayer from lawsuits, both via the Supreme Court case and in an executive order issued in February that sought to boost domestic protection of the chemical and shield it from legal liability.

Ryerson told me she is now committed to reversing the Forest Service’s plan in Tahoe. “It’s ludicrous,” she said. “To be spraying glyphosate in such an environmentally sensitive and pristine place, where it can get into the water that so many people drink, or swim in, I mean, who thought this was a good idea?”

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

The Texas sun keeps rising, as Texas coal wanes.

For the first time ever, solar is set to generate more electricity than coal in the power market managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Nobody is building new coal power plants in the state, but developers are adding more solar there than anywhere else in the country. As a result of those diverging trajectories, the federal government expects ERCOT will receive 78 billion kilowatt-hours from solar in 2026, and just 60 from coal.

This trend does have seasonal variations. Last year, solar output beat coal on a monthly basis from March through August, and this year it is expected to do so from March through December, per the US Energy Information Administration at the Department of Energy.

Nationally, the combination of wind and solar surpassed coal generation in 2024, as noted in an analysis by Ember, a think tank that conducts research on clean energy. In other words, the solar industry is further along in Texas than it is nationwide.

The Texas solar surge undercuts the prevailing energy narratives coming out of the Trump administration, which has attempted to boost coal and gas as tools of ​“energy dominance,” while blocking or canceling American energy that comes from renewables. The Department of Energy, for instance, is keeping struggling coal plants on life support at great expense to taxpayers. Meanwhile, the Department of the Interior is blocking wind and solar developments that intersect with public lands.

Trump officials have argued that coal is more reliable than solar because it can generate power around the clock. But even with that advantage, coal plants in Texas can’t keep up with the total annual and monthly production from the rapidly growing solar fleet. This has not damaged grid reliability, because ERCOT meets evening demand with a diverse portfolio, including gas plants, nuclear, wind, and, increasingly, batteries, which store all that excess solar power for use when the sun stops shining.

Of course, Texas leaders did not set out to disprove the Trump administration’s energy claims. The maverick Lone Star State kept its electricity system out of the hands of federal regulators, and in the 1990s and early 2000s reformed it to promote free market competition instead of centralized planning by monopoly utilities. That market, coupled with lots of space and lax building regulations, has made an ideal environment for wind, solar, and batteries to flourish. Now, Texas is fortified with tens of gigawatts of new capacity with which to tackle heat waves and temper price spikes.

Deep-red Texas offers lessons for the liberal states that have committed to lofty climate goals yet failed to build much solar or batteries so far. They can’t immediately switch over to an ERCOT-style market, but they can take steps to speed up the time it takes to get permits and grid connection, dial back the level of deference to habitually conservative legacy utilities, and make sure that clean energy gets a fair shot in the race to serve surging energy needs. And it’s always a good time to reexamine old market rules that subtly privilege entrenched players at the expense of new entrants that would make cheaper and cleaner power.

After more of the rapid-fire solar buildout, EIA expects ERCOT will produce 99 billion kilowatt-hours of solar power in 2027, up 27% from 2026. At that point, the upstart industry will have left its well-established coal competition in the dust.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging 94-year-old former Cuban head of state Raúl Castro with murder and conspiracy to kill US citizens. It’s a move that may signal potential military action to abduct Castro from the country, as with Donald Trump’s January raid on the compound of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. 

The indictment targets Raúl Castro, the brother of the late Fidel, and five other members of the Cuban military, for the 1991 downing by Cuban forces of two aircraft operated by anticommunist Cuban exiles. While the indictment was filed last month, the unsealing coincides with Cuban Independence Day, celebrating 124 years since the US ended its military occupation of the country. 

But Cuban Independence Day comes this year amid a debilitating oil blockade imposed by Trump, which has devastated Cuba’s already struggling health system and economic infrastructure and worsened living conditions across the board. This year alone, residents have dealt with nationwide blackouts, food shortages, hospitals without power to operate, and constant worry over their economic and political future. The Trump blockade and associated policies, which many humanitarian groups view as human rights violations, have deprived the country’s residents of basic necessities and exacerbated the impact of the decades-long US embargo on its neighbor.

Cuba produces enough oil to meet about 40 percent of its needs domestically. It imports the remainder, mostly from Venezuela and Mexico. But following the US attack on Venezuela and additional tariffs imposed on countries that sell or provide oil to Cuba, both countries halted oil exports to the island. And while the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs, the president continued his naval blockade on Cuba, seizing many vessels that have sought to ship goods to, or that have simply been linked to, the country. 

According to a March report by the Atlantic, the US attorney’s office in South Florida is building further indictments against Cuba’s military and government leadership, including Castro family members. The US cited a 2020 indictment against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to justify his capture in January. In the week prior to the report, Trump said he believed that he would have “the honor of taking Cuba.”

And earlier, at the end of his first term, Trump added Cuba to the federal list of state sponsors of terrorism, a policy that “put the brakes on some private investment on the island,” Will Freeman, a Latin America fellow at the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations told me in an April email. “And [it] did no favors to tourism, which the Cuban regime had made the island’s economic engine.”

The Biden administration largely carried on Trump’s Cuba policy, further hindering Cuba’s tourism in 2022 by barring foreign travelers from visa-free travel to the US if they visited Cuba after the Trump-initiated state sponsor of terrorism designation went into effect in January 2021.

Claims of state terrorism, as M. Victoria Murillo, a professor of political science and international and public affairs at Columbia University, said to me last month, were the linchpin of US justifications for military assaults on Venezuela, and for the campaign of attacks on civilian vessels by US naval forces in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea.

In January, Trump declared Cuba an “extraordinary threat” to national security on the basis of its alignment with countries like Russia, China, and Iran and his allegations, made without evidence, that Cuba “welcomes transnational terrorist groups” like Hamas and Hezbollah. The executive order imposed additional US tariffs on goods from countries who supply oil to Cuba, which effectively eliminated all support for Cuba from Venezuela and Mexico. 

These latest restrictions have been implemented amid a US embargo that has stopped US businesses from trading with Cuba since the 1960s. While former President Barack Obama eased many economic constraints on Cuba and allowed some travel, he ended the policy that gave Cubans arriving in the United States a guaranteed pathway to legal status. That, according to Murillo—along with Trump and Biden’s reimplementation of economic restrictions—led to growing inequality between Cubans with access to foreign currency and those who rely wholly on state salaries, wages that in 2025 amounted to about $18 a month.

The first group, who constitute an upper class, may have connections to private businesses, tourism, or remittances from relatives who live abroad.

“Cuba is in a situation similar to when the Soviet Union fell,” Murillo says. The US embargo, starting in the 1960s, led Cuba to depend on the Soviet Union, which supplied the island with oil at subsidized prices. Early oil shipments were delivered to US-owned refineries, but they refused to refine in part due to pressure from the US government.

“That started the escalation of nationalization,” Murillo says. “They had no energy, they had to bike places because they had no gas, [and] they lacked food.”

This time, Murillo says, it’s even worse: “Cuba is now on its own.”

The Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba to supposedly encourage popular rebellion against the island’s government has not worked. “Social movement theory says that when people are really desperate, they cannot protest. That requires certain resources,” Murillo says. “If you are spending all your time trying to get food, you don’t even have the time to protest.” Anti-government protests in Cuba are rare.

The failure to rouse popular protest—even against unpopular leaders—is increasingly familiar to the Trump administration, which expected an Iranian public uprising to follow its war on that country. In the immediate wake of the Iranian government’s violent crackdown on a series of protests that began in December, I had the opportunity to talk to historian Behrooz Ghamari, who explained the situation succinctly:

“The paradox is the US imposes crippling sanctions while also saying, ‘I’m going to liberate your people.’ This rhetoric about helping people contributes to delegitimizing the Iranian people’s legitimate protests. It gives the Iranian government the excuse to claim conspiracy and say that protesters are acting on behalf of foreign interests and can react severely and violently. If the US actually wanted to help, the only offer is to not intervene and allow these movements to unfold on their own terms.”

In 2021, President Miguel Díaz-Canel called large-scale protests then taking place “a plan orchestrated by the exterior,” claiming that the US government was directing protesters.

Why does Cuba think the US is directing opposition to its government? Historically, it has—Cuba is a longstanding fixation of US foreign policy, dating to generations before Castro. In 1898, Murillo explained, after winning the Spanish-American War, the US began driving towards hegemony, taking Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain and establishing a protectorate in Cuba. Cuba had no choice but to sign off on the Platt Amendment, which guaranteed the US sweeping powers—including the right to intervene unilaterally in Cuba’s politics, as Trump seeks to do again now—in return for withdrawing its troops from the island at the end of the war.

US domination remained the status quo for more than half a century. At the time of the Cuban revolution, in the late 1950s, American companies owned or controlled 90 percent of Cuba’s electricity, as well as significant parts of its sugar, communications, and mining industries. In large part to take ownership of domestic industries, the Cuban revolution established a socialist political system—one that the US wanted rid of by any means possible.

The rush of exiles from that revolution, and the proximity between the two countries, helped facilitate the establishment of a powerful Cuban-American lobby, founded by Cuban elites who were exiled after the revolution—which got us our current Secretary of State.

Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban parents who fled to the US in the 1950s, announced in March that Cuba would “have to get new people in charge.” Rubio has become by far the most visible and influential face of the Cuban-American exile movement, pushing the Trump administration to heap pressure on the country. (Rubio’s family, ironically, fled the country under the US-aligned government of Fulgencio Batista—the one Castro toppled. Rubio has repeatedly claimed otherwise.)

“The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not due to an oil ‘blockade’ by the US,” Rubio said in a Spanish-language video message to the Cuban people Wednesday, but because Cuba’s ruling officials “have plundered billions of dollars” from the nation.

Although some Democratic US lawmakers have called for the end of the oil blockade, only one oil tanker has reached Cuba. “We have absolutely no fuel [oil] and absolutely no diesel,” Cuba’s energy minister, Vicente de la O Levy, said last week.

In February, United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk called for the lifting of US sanctions that impede oil deliveries to Cuba: “Policy goals cannot justify actions that in themselves violate human rights,” Marta Hurtado, Türk’s spokesperson, said at the time.

“Cubans should be able to exercise their rights freely, including their rights to political participation, and the Cuban government’s policies of repression and censorship should stop,” the Washington Office on Latin America, a US advocacy organization promoting human rights and social and economic justice in Latin America and the Caribbean, wrote in a statement last month. “At the same time, U.S. policy towards Cuba, focused on coercive measures such as the embargo and other sanctions, is outdated and has failed to produce U.S. policy goals, while causing severe harm.”

“It is the Cuban people, with the concerted support of the international community, who should determine their future and be a core part of any bilateral discussions,” the statement continued.

Since then, the Trump administration has increased sanctions on Cuba, and Wednesday’s news of Castro’s indictment is the strongest signal that the Trump administration is considering switching from mostly economic and diplomatic pressure to military assault. The US military has sent at least 25 intelligence-gathering flights since February and has begun to increase its number of ships in the area.

In response, Cuba President Miguel Díaz-Canel warned that US military strikes could lead to a “bloodbath” on Monday. A Sunday Axios report cited classified intelligence that Cuba had acquired more than 300 military drones and were discussing a possible attack on the US base at Guantánamo Bay.

In his public rhetoric, Trump appears to be framing Cuba and Venezuela similarly. On Wednesday, he called the indictment of Castro a “very big moment” for Cuban Americans but suggested that he didn’t expect there to be an increase in hostilities between the two countries; Trump surprised and upset much of the Venezuelan opposition by taking such a tack with Venezuela, leaving its ruling party in power after the initial assault that abducted Maduro. “Look, the place is falling apart,” Trump told reporters that same day. “[The Cuban government has] really lost control of Cuba.”

But Trump’s remarks on Thursday may be more revealing. “Other presidents have looked at [Cuba] for 50, 60 years, doing something,” Trump said. “And, it looks like I’ll be the one that does it. So, I would be happy to do it.”

If Trump—a teenager when Fidel Castro came to power—sees overthrowing Cuba’s leadership as part of the legacy he’s increasingly concerned with, then a US escalation may well be in the cards.