2026-01-16 01:58:04
The Trump administration’s offensive against immigrants in Minneapolis—and those who seek to help them—continued to intensify Wednesday night and into Thursday after a federal agent shot another person during an immigration operation.
President Donald Trump, in a Thursday morning Truth social post, threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act—a centuries-old law that allows the president to deploy the US military domestically.
The move comes after another chaotic night in Minneapolis during which a federal agent shot a man in the leg, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The City of Minneapolis said that the man was taken to the hospital with a non-life threatening injury.
According to DHS, the man was a Venezuelan national who was a target in an immigration operation. The federal agency claimed in a statement on X that officers were assaulted on the scene prior to the shooting and that an agent was also taken to the hospital.
This latest shooting by a federal agent comes just one week after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in her car.
In a post commenting on initial reports of the shooting, US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said Wednesday evening that there was a “Minnesota insurrection” happening. Blanche, who used to be Trump’s personal attorney, accused Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz of “encouraging violence against law enforcement.” Both Frey and Walz have multiple times called for peaceful protests against ICE’s actions in the city.
“Walz and Frey,” Blanche wrote, “I’m focused on stopping YOU from your terrorism by whatever means necessary. This is not a threat. It’s a promise.”
President Trump threatening to send the military into a US city under the Insurrection Act isn’t a new idea for the administration. Back in 2023 in an interview with the New York Times, Stephen Miller, Trump’s longtime adviser, said that they were already planning to invoke the law to apprehend immigrants.
The ongoing situation in Minneapolis has been intensifying for over a month and has only become more acute after the killing of Good. Videos from the frontlines, including many published by Mother Jones, show federal agents violently pulling a woman from her car, repeatedly deploying chemical agents on protesters, and otherwise continuing their offensive against those DHS claims are in the country without legal status—in their home, at school, and at work.
In a Wednesday night address, Gov. Walz spoke directly to Minnesotans, urging them to continue to record ICE’s actions. “If you see these ICE agents in your neighborhood, take out that phone and record. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans. Not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution,” he said, once again telling protesters to respond peacefully. “Trump wants this chaos,” Walz added. “He wants confusion. And yes, he wants more violence on our streets. We cannot give him what he wants. We can’t. We must protest loudly, urgently, but also peacefully.”
“This long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement, instead, it’s a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by the federal government,” Walz said, telling Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to “end this occupation.”
2026-01-15 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking a major step toward changing its math to favor polluters over people: It’s going to stop tallying up the dollar value of lives saved and hospital visits avoided by air pollution regulations.
Instead, the agency will consider the effects of regulations without attaching a price tag to human life.
In particular, the EPA is changing how it conducts the cost-benefit analysis of regulations for two major pollutants, fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns—usually referred to as PM2.5—and ozone. The change was buried in a document published this month analyzing the economic impacts of final pollution regulations for power plants, arguing that the way the EPA historically calculated the economic benefits of regulations had too much uncertainty and gave people “a false sense of precision.”
So to fix this, the EPA will stop tabulating the benefits altogether “until the Agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.”
The news was first reported by the New York Times. On X, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin pushed back on the reporting, calling it “another dishonest, fake news claim” and that the agency is still considering lives saved when setting pollution limits.
“You’re not able to compare the cost to the benefits unless you’re talking apples-to-apples, or in this case dollars-to-dollars.”
I spoke with several experts, including former EPA officials, and in fact, the change could lead to worsening air quality and harm public health.
The EPA exists to regulate pollution that harms people, and when it comes to things like ozone and tiny particles, there is robust evidence of the damage they can do, contributing to heart attacks and asthma attacks. Measured over populations, air pollution takes years off of people’s lives. Every year in the United States alone, air pollution pushes 135,000 people into early graves.
“There is a lot of science that shows very clearly that being exposed to increasing levels of PM2.5 has significant health impacts,” said Janet McCabe, who served as the EPA’s deputy administrator under President Joe Biden.
Anytime the EPA wants to issue a new regulation—say, revising how much mercury a power plant is allowed to emit—it looks at both the costs and the benefits before finalizing the rule. The EPA adds up how much companies would likely have to spend on things like installing upgraded scrubbers in smokestacks. Then the agency estimates the economic benefit of imposing the regulation, such as more days with cleaner air or fewer workers calling out sick. The biggest benefits usually come from improving health through things like avoiding hospital visits and reducing early deaths.
There is some fuzziness in the numbers on both sides of the ledger though. If a bunch of companies turn to a handful of suppliers for pollution control equipment, that could drive up compliance costs. And how exactly do you price a hypothetical emergency room trip that didn’t happen?
“In my experience at EPA, there’s never a perfect estimate of costs or benefits,” McCabe said. Yet even with imperfect calculations, regulators could get a decent sense of whether the juice was worth the squeeze when it comes to a new pollution standard, and the public would get a window into how the decision was made.
Under the Biden administration, the EPA found that enforcing the more stringent PM2.5 regulations it issued in 2024 would add up to $46 billion in health benefits by 2032, vastly more than the cost of complying with the rule.
The EPA now effectively wants to put receipts from the benefits side of the ledger through the shredder.
In theory, the EPA could still include the number of lives saved in how it considers the upside of a regulation without attaching a dollar value to it. But experts say that in practice, leaving the dollar costs of compliance in the equation and ignoring the economic value of the health benefits will likely skew the balance toward less regulation.
“You’re not able to compare the cost to the benefits unless you’re talking apples-to-apples, or in this case dollars-to-dollars,” said Christa Hasenkopf, director of the Clean Air Program at the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute.
This change in math is part of a broader pattern at the EPA—and across the federal government—of just measuring and counting fewer things under the second Trump Administration. The EPA has already closed its Office of Research and Development, which was meant to provide the scientific basis for environmental regulations, like tracking the effects of toxic chemicals on the human body.
With less data on science and economics, agencies like the EPA have less accountability for their actions as they face more pressure from the White House to cut regulations and craft policies benefiting politically favored industries. It also sets the stage for taking the teeth out of other regulations, like the Clean Air Act. The EPA has already dismantled its legal foundation for addressing climate change.
Joseph Goffman, who served as assistant administrator of the EPA’s air and radiation office under Biden, said this change in how the EPA calculates health benefits is part of a broader campaign against air pollution regulations.
“It really illustrates what the ulterior motive is and that is to mute or mask the true impact of [particulate matter] exposure and the huge benefits that flow from reducing it,” Goffman said. “Suddenly deciding that you can’t ascribe a dollar value to reducing PM really is convenient to the point of being instrumental to Zeldin’s efforts to weaken PM standards.”
If the EPA never comes up with a new way to monetize the health benefits of regulations, it’s likely that improvements in air quality will stall, and air pollution could get worse. “One would anticipate that we could see PM 2.5 levels rising across the country,” Hasenkopf said.
2026-01-15 09:40:47
One of the oddest occurrences in the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein imbroglio was the trip that Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, took in July to Tallahassee, Florida, to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s serving a 20-year sentence for procuring underage girls, some as young as 14, for Epstein to sexually abuse. Prior to being nominated by Trump to the No. 2 position in the Justice Department, Blanche was Trump’s criminal attorney in the porn-star-hush-money-forged-business-records case in New York, in which Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts.
Blanche never provided a compelling explanation for this unprecedented act. Why was Trump’s former personal lawyer and a top Justice Department official meeting with a sex offender whom the US government had previously assailed for her “willingness to lie brazenly under oath about her conduct”? Legal observers scratched their heads over this. Months later, Blanche said, “The point of the interview was to allow her to speak, which nobody had done before.” That didn’t make much sense. How often does the deputy attorney general fly 900 miles to afford a convicted sex offender a chance to chat? It was as if Blanche was trying to create fodder for conspiracy theorists.
What made all this even stranger is that after their tete-a-tete, Maxwell was transferred to a minimum-security, women-only, federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, that houses mainly nonviolent offenders and white collar crooks. This facility—home to disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star and fraduster Jen Shah—is a much cushier facility than the co-ed Tallahassee prison.
When the transfer was first reported in August, the Bureau of Prisons refused to explain the reason for the move, which Epstein abuse survivors protested. So I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the BOP asking for information related to this relocation. Specifically:
all records mentioning or referencing Maxwell’s transfer to Federal Prison Camp Byran. This includes emails, memoranda, transfer orders, phone messages, texts, electronic chats, and any other communications, whether internal to BOP or between BOP personnel and any other governmental or nongovernmental personnel
Guess what? The BOP did not jump to and provide the information. After a months-long delay, the agency noted it would take up to nine months to fulfill this request.
We are suing. That is, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal assistance to journalists, today filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington, DC, on behalf of the Center for Investigative Reporting (which publishes Mother Jones), to compel the BOP to provide the relevant records. The filing notes that the BOP violated the Freedom of Information Act by initially failing to respond in a timely manner.
We’re not the only ones after this information. In August, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) sent a letter to William Marshall III, the BOP director, requesting similar material. “Against the backdrop of the political scandal arising from President Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, Ms.Maxwell’s abrupt transfer raises questions about whether she has been given special treatment in exchange for political favors,” he wrote. Whitehouse asked for a response within three weeks. He received no reply—and, along with Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), filed a FOIA request.
In November, a whistleblower notified Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee that at Camp Bryan Maxwell was receiving preferential treatment that included customized meals brought to her cell, private meetings with visitors (who were permitted to bring in computers), email services through the warden’s office, after-hours use of the prison gym, and access to a puppy (that was being trained as a service dog). That month, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the senior Democrat on the committee, wrote Trump requesting that Blanche appear before the committee to answer questions about Maxwell’s treatment. That has not happened.
Given the intense public interest in the Epstein case—and the scrutiny it deserves—there ought to be no need to go to court to obtain this information about Maxwell. But with Trump’s Justice Department brazenly violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which mandated a release of the federal government’s Epstein records by December 19 (by which time only 1 percent of the cache had been made public), it’s no shocker that the Bureau of Prisons has not been more forthcoming regarding Maxwell’s prison upgrade.
Our in-house counsel, Victoria Baranetsky, says, “At a time when public trust in institutions is fragile, FOIA remains essential. Our lawsuit seeks to enforce the public’s right to know and to ensure that the government lives up to its obligation of transparency.” And Gunita Singh, a staff attorney for RCFP notes, “We’re proud to represent CIR and look forward to enforcing FOIA’s transparency mandate with respect to the actions of law enforcement in this matter.”
When might we get anything out of BOP? No idea. But we’ll keep you posted, and you can keep track of the case at this page.
2026-01-15 09:31:33
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) decried Republican efforts to discredit medication abortion in an interview Wednesday with Mother Jones, saying that “the only reason they’re going after mifepristone is because it is the way most women get their abortive care.”
Mifepristone is one of the pills used in medication abortion, which in 2023 accounted for 63 percent of all terminations in the United States.
On Wednesday morning, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a hearing on “protecting women” from the “dangers of chemical abortion drugs.”
Chaired by Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, the hearing centered on conservative demands for further regulation of abortion medication; two of its three witnesses were medication abortion opponents, including Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who on Tuesday pushed to extradite a California abortion provider on felony charges, accusing him of sending abortion pills into her state.
Democrats taking part, including Sen. Murray, argued that the hearing wasn’t geared toward protecting women but discrediting settled science. In November, Murray led the Senate Democratic Caucus in sending a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Martin Makary expressing concern over the Trump administration’s review of mifepristone.
“Republicans are holding this hearing to peddle debunked junk ‘studies’ by anti-abortion organizations which have no credibility and have been forcefully condemned by actual medical organizations,” Murray said in her opening statement. The hearing, she continued, was “really about the fact that Trump and his anti-abortion allies want to ban abortion nationwide.”
According to a New York Times review of more than 100 studies spanning 30 years, abortion medication is safe and effective; mifepristone, used both in medication abortion and to treat miscarriage, has had FDA approval for more than 25 years. In October, the FDA approved another generic version of the pill.
“You can see that they’re just pulling straws from absolutely everywhere, because they want to obscure the whole goal” to “ban abortion nationwide,” Murray said to me.
Republican officials insisted that medication abortion is too easy to get. Yet in 13 states, abortion is banned in nearly all circumstances. Another seven states have enacted time restrictions earlier than what was outlined in Roe v. Wade.
At the same time, maternity care deserts are expanding across the nation. According to a 2024 report by infant and maternal health nonprofit March of Dimes, more than a thousand US counties—together home to more than 2.3 million women of reproductive age—lack a single birthing facility or obstetric clinician. Since 2020, 117 rural hospitals have stopped delivering babies, or announced that they would stop before the end of 2025, according to a December report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. A National Partnership for Women & Families analysis from June warned that 131 rural hospitals with labor and delivery units are at risk of closing altogether due to Republican-led cuts to Medicaid through President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
I asked Sen. Murray about requiring consultations for medication abortion—and why pregnant people aren’t going in person to seek out that route.
“It’s pretty stunning to watch these Republicans talk about this with a straight face,” she told me. “The reason many women don’t,” Murray continued, “is the abortion bans that in Republican states don’t give women the option to see a provider.”
Murray expressed concern, “especially after we have a hearing like this, where we heard so much misinformation,” that an already confusing landscape for those seeking abortion could be further obscured.
And a new study, published Monday in the leading medical journal JAMA, found that the FDA has repeatedly reviewed new evidence about mifepristone and reaffirmed its safety.
Abortion medication, Murray pointed out, is less deadly than both penicillin and Viagra.
“We didn’t have a hearing today on Viagra,” she told me. “We had a hearing on mifepristone, so their whole thing about safety and all this is just hogwash.”
2026-01-15 06:38:34
Trump’s pursuit of Greenland is becoming increasingly unpopular: Denmark, Greenland, many NATO allies, and even some Republican lawmakers are in direct opposition.
Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, said there is a “fundamental disagreement” with the Trump administration after he and his Greenland counterpart met with JD Vance and Marco Rubio at the White House on Wednesday.
“Ideas that would not respect territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark and the right of self-determination of the Greenlandic people are, of course, totally unacceptable,” Rasmussen continued. But they agreed to try to “accommodate the concerns of the president while we at the same time respect the red lines of the Kingdom of Denmark.”
Some GOP senators criticized the Trump administration’s actions toward Greenland on Wednesday.
“I have yet to hear from this Administration a single thing we need from Greenland that this sovereign people is not already willing to grant us,” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said in a speech on the Senate floor. “The proposition at hand today is very straightforward: incinerating the hard-won trust of loyal allies in exchange for no meaningful change in U.S. access to the Arctic.”
A bipartisan group of senators also introduced a bill on Tuesday to prevent Trump from using Defense Department or State Department funding to occupy, annex, or otherwise assert control over Greenland without congressional approval.
“The mere notion that America would use our vast resources against our allies is deeply troubling and must be wholly rejected by Congress in statute,” Sen. Murkowski (R-AK) said in a statement.
Earlier on Wednesday, in a Truth Social post, the president insisted that NATO should be “leading the way” to help the US get Greenland, otherwise Russia or China would take the island. He added that the US getting Greenland would make NATO’s military might “far more formidable and effective.”
Following the meeting, Trump repeated the importance of acquiring Greenland for national security and to protect the territory and the Arctic region: “There’s not a thing that Denmark can do about it if Russia or China wants to occupy Greenland, but there’s everything we can do.”
But as former American military and diplomatic officials told the Wall Street Journal in a Monday report, the US already has a dominant group of overseas military bases—121 foreign bases in at least 51 countries—without taking over other land. There is also no evidence of a Russian or Chinese military presence just off Greenland’s coast.
In response to pressure from the Trump administration, Denmark’s defense ministry announced an increased Danish military presence—including receiving NATO-allied troops, bringing in ships, and deploying fighter jets—in and around Greenland, noting rising “security tensions.”
“Danish military units have a duty to defend Danish territory if it is subjected to an armed attack, including by taking immediate defensive action if required,” Tobias Roed Jensen, spokesperson for the Danish Defense Command, told The Intercept, referencing a 1952 royal decree that applies to the entire Kingdom of Denmark, including Greenland. Denmark’s defense ministry confirmed that the directive is still in effect.
Sweden Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said Wednesday that several officers of their armed forces would be arriving in Greenland that same day as part of a multinational allied group to prepare for Denmark’s increased military presence. Germany will send 13 soldiers to Greenland on Thursday and Norway’s defense minister said they have already sent two military personnel.
The Trump administration’s threats make all of these moves necessary.
2026-01-15 06:34:19
At the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions’s abortion pills hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri spent the whole of his allotted time reiterating disinformation about transgender people.
And, this isn’t the first time he’s utilized a hearing about reproductive healthcare to do so.
During an interaction at the hearing, Sen. Hawley asked Dr. Nisha Verma, who provides reproductive care in Georgia and Massachusetts, “Can men get pregnant?” Hawley asked this question over 10 times, repeatedly cutting her off when she attempted to answer.
Verma, along with Dr. Monique Wubbenhorst and Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, was called on by the committee for the hearing. Wubbenhorst previously testified in support of anti-abortion initiatives, and AG Murrill just indicted a California abortion provider on felony charges, accusing him of sending abortion pills into her state.
Before Hawley had the chance to share his views on gender, Florida Sen. Ashley Moody kicked off the topic by asking, “Miss Verma, can men get pregnant?”
“Dr. Verma,” she corrected.
Moody repeated:“Dr. Verma, can men get pregnant?” Verma paused. Moody asked the other witnesses, who quickly replied “no.”
Later in the hearing, before handing off the mic to Sen. Hawley, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who chairs the committee, said, “I think it’s science-based, by the way, that men can’t have babies.”
Then, it was Hawley’s turn.
“Since you bring it up, why don’t we start there,” he began. “Dr. Verma, I wasn’t sure I understood your answer to Sen. Moody a moment ago. Do you think that men can get pregnant?”
“I hesitated there because I wasn’t sure where the conversation was going or what the goal was,” Dr. Verma responded, adding, “I mean I do take care of patients with different identities, I take care of many women, I take care of people with different identities.”
“Well,” Hawley returned, “the goal is the truth, so can men get pregnant?” “Again,” Dr. Verma said, “the reason I pause there is I’m not really sure what the goal of the question is—” Hawley cut her off, in part saying, “the goal is just to establish a biological reality.”
“I take care of people with many identities—” Dr. Verma began, before being cut off by Hawley.
“Can men get pregnant?”
“I take care of many women, I do take care of people that don’t identify as women—”
“Can men get pregnant?”
“Again, as I’m saying—”
Hawley cut in. This tempo continued, with the senator at one point saying that he was “trying to test, frankly,” Dr. Verma’s “veracity as a medical professional and as a scientist” and “I thought we were passed all of this, frankly.”
Transgender men can and do get pregnant, as detailed in several different reports currently posted on The National Library of Medicine, which operates under the Department of Health and Human Services. Scientific research on this community is still limited, in part due to transgender men being hesitant to seek medical care in hospitals. Research out of Rutgers University found that about 44 percent of pregnant transgender men seek medical care outside of traditional care with an obstetrician, like with a nurse-midwife.
During the hearing, Republican members described abortion medication as dangerous and in need of further restriction. Their Democrat colleagues said that the hearing, entitled “Protecting Women: Exposing the Dangers of Chemical Abortion Drugs,” was a way to discredit settled science.
Mifepristone, one of the pills used in abortions with medication, has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for over 25 years and, just this past October, the FDA approved another generic version of the pill. A New York Times review of more than 100 studies on abortion medication found that it is safe and effective.
The current pushback against abortion medication, which accounted for 63 percent of all abortions in the US in 2023, is being spearheaded in part by Erin Hawley—the senator from Missouri’s wife. Erin Hawley works for the Alliance Defending Freedom and, in 2024, unsuccessfully argued for further restrictions on abortion medication in front of the Supreme Court. In December, the couple launched “The Love Life Initiative,” which aims to support anti-abortion ballot initiatives.
Back in 2022, at a different hearing on abortion access, Sen. Hawley focused on the same topic with another witness: law professor Khiara Bridges. Hawley began, as he did on Wednesday, by saying he “wants to understand.”
“You’ve referred to people with a capacity for pregnancy. Would that be women?” Hawley said. Bridges responded, explaining that some cis women can get pregnant while others can’t—and that people who don’t identify as women get pregnant, too. “So,” the senator returned, “this isn’t really a women’s rights issue.”
Bridges replied, smiling: “we can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups. Those things are not mutually exclusive, Senator Hawley.”
