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2025-11-08 23:51:45

The knock-on effects from the government shutdown, now the longest in US history, continue apace, with the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) cuts to air traffic at 40 of the nation’s busiest airports now officially in effect.

The mandate, which kicked off on Friday with an initial 4 percent reduction, has already cancelled more than 1,700 flights this weekend alone. Though disruptions were said to be limited on Friday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned that cuts could rise to as much as 20 percent by Thanksgiving weekend, one of the busiest travel periods of the year, if the shutdown drags on.

Since announcing the unprecedented plan, Duffy has insisted that such reductions are necessary to keep air travel safe, while some air traffic controllers and airport screeners go without pay. But prior to the FAA’s flight cuts, there had been little evidence to suggest that staffing shortages from the shutdown had been creating widespread disruptions, prompting some to accuse the Trump administration of weaponizing air travel as leverage aimed at getting Democrats to bend on the shutdown standoff.

That impasse is about healthcare, with Democrats refusing to vote for a spending bill that allows Obamacare subsidies to expire—a move that would cause the cost of health insurance for millions of Americans to skyrocket.

Duffy has denied the assertion that Republicans are needlessly using air travel as political leverage. Yet some Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz, have made a point of hanging blame for the flight disruptions on Democrats, accusing them of “flirting with disaster.”

The blame game comes as Republicans rejected a new offer by Democrats to end the shutdown on Friday that proposed a one-year extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies.

2025-11-08 23:06:12

President Trump’s vehement refusal to make full SNAP benefits available to the nearly 42 million Americans who rely on the food aid program scored a temporary win at the Supreme Court, after Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson temporarily allowed the federal government to continue withholding $4 billion in SNAP funding.

Friday’s late-night order came hours after the Trump administration rushed to the Supreme Court to block a lower court’s order requiring it to use emergency funds to pay out SNAP aid while the government remains shut down. In it, US District Judge John McConnell accused the government of defying a previous order to make at least partial payments and required that the government complete full payments by Friday night. McConnell pointed to Trump’s own words on social media earlier this week, which, if interpreted by their plain meaning, signaled the president’s intention to defy multiple court orders to make the SNAP benefits available to low-income families. The administration then turned to a federal appeals court to ask it to undo McConnell’s order.

Jackson’s temporary stay, then, merely gives the appeals court time to rule on that request. Critically, it did not rule on the legality of the Trump administration’s efforts to resist payments, which ramped up over the last week after SNAP lapsed on payments for the first time in its 61-year history. The lapse came as the Trump administration argued that it is barred from using emergency funding to make the payments because of the government shutdown, even though previous administrations in similar impasses have done so.

Two federal judges, both of whom admonished the administration for needlessly plunging SNAP into crisis, rejected that argument. And what quickly followed was a full-throated crusade by Trump to continue withholding funding and thereby using hungry Americans as a political weapon in a government shutdown. In the meantime, the lapse in SNAP has sparked a surge in demand nationally to food banks, with lines growing and some pantries being unable to keep up with demand.

The appeals court now has 48 hours to weigh in. Meanwhile, deep uncertainty for SNAP beneficiaries—39 percent of whom are children—continues.

2025-11-08 20:30:00

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

Tuesday was a great day at the ballot box for the planet, with climate-friendly initiatives and candidates winning nationwide. 

In races from New York to Georgia to Washington, voters backed funding renewables, reining in energy costs, and building out mass transit—and the people promising to deliver those policies. On the whole, the results suggest Americans are pushing back against President Donald Trump’s efforts to roll back climate action.

“This election was a decisive rejection of the Trump Administration’s ban on clean energy, multimillion-dollar taxpayer bailouts for expensive dirtier energy sources like coal, and other ineffective proposals that will make costs go even higher,” Sara Schreiber of the League of Conservation Voters said in a statement.

One of the day’s biggest wins came in New York City, where Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral race in a landslide victory called just 35 minutes after polls closed. More than two million New Yorkers voted, the most in a mayoral race since 1969. Although Mamdani, who at 34 will be the city’s youngest mayor in more than a century, made affordability the predominant focus of his campaign, he garnered an endorsement from the youth-led climate organization Sunrise Movement. Many saw his campaign promises, which included calls for free mass transit and the greening of public schools, as the seeds of a populist climate movement. 

“Zohran was talking about climate action in a way people could understand, and people were able to see the impacts of this climate action in their everyday lives,” Denae Ávila-Dickson, Sunrise’s communications and political manager, told New York Focus.

Dan Jasper, of the nonprofit group Project Drawdown, said Mamdani’s transit proposal “is not as sexy as something like solar. But these are the exact type of policies we’re going to need to actually address climate change, because it addresses people’s standards of living.” 

Mamdani’s challenge will be assembling the coalition needed to make those policies happen. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who has also promoted a municipal green new deal agenda, may not have similar difficulty. Yesterday, Wu’s City Council allies retained their seats, giving her a fighting chance at success. 

As far as statewide elections go, Georgia was a point of contention: There, electricity prices were on the ballot. Democrats won two of the five seats on the Public Service Commission, a regulatory agency that oversees utilities and has approved six rate increases in three years. 

Democrats have not held a seat on the board since 2007, but clean energy consultant Peter Hubbard  and anti-poverty advocate Alicia Johnson tapped voter outrage over climbing prices and notched upset victories over Republican incumbents, who had embraced fossil fuels and backed away from clean energy at a time when demand for power is rising.

“I think for a lot of folks who have felt powerless over rising utility bills, especially in a state like Georgia where they’ve gone up for the average household by more than $500 in just the last couple of years, they can finally breathe a sigh of relief knowing that potential change is coming,” said Charles Hua, founder of the utility advocacy nonprofit PowerLines. 

Rising energy bills emerged as a top issue in other races, too, including the governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia. For political scientist Leah Stokes, who studies public opinion around climate change, Tuesday’s results weren’t unexpected. 

“I think yesterday was a repudiation of the idea that Americans don’t care about energy or climate and these are losing issues, which is what all of these pundits have been going on and on about for about 9 months now. That’s really wrong,” Stokes said on Wednesday. “Everyday people understand that clean energy is cheap energy—they can easily make those connections.” 

In New Jersey, governor-elect Mikie Sherrill vowed to declare “a state of emergency on energy costs” on her first day in office. She plans to roll out expanded generation capacity, including rooftop solar and battery storage, and “immediately develop plans for new nuclear capacity.” 

In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger won the governor’s seat on a platform that included data center operators paying for their own electricity costs in a region that currently hosts over 13 percent of the world’s data center capacity. Her “Affordable Virginia” plan included calls to expand wind and solar power, promote home weatherization to ease power consumption, and streamline permitting and other requirements for expanding generation.

To the west, California voters approved Proposition 50, which will allow the state’s Democratic majority to sidestep the statewide redistricting commission and redraw congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The move was designed to give Democrats as many as five more seats in Congress in an effort to, among other things, combat further dismantling of climate and environmental policy. Governor Gavin Newsom and a slate of prominent Democrats nationwide championed the proposal as a counterbalance to Republican-led redistricting in states like Texas, where a similar effort earlier this year carved out 5 new seats for the GOP. 

In a speech Tuesday night, Newsom said California voters approved the measure “to send a message to Donald Trump. No crowns, no thrones, no kings. That’s what this victory represents. [It] is a victory for the people of the state of California and the United States of America.”

Climate-friendly policies—those centering on transit, in particular—won on a local scale, too. Voters in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, which includes the city of Charlotte, handily approved a 1 percent increase in the sales tax to finance nearly $20 billion in transportation improvements. Although 40 percent of the additional revenue will be allocated to roads, some of that funding will support new bike lanes and sidewalks. Another 40 percent will go toward rail, and the remainder will be dedicated to buses and microtransit. In Ellensburg, Washington, 65 percent of voters approved a permanent 0.2 percent sales tax to fund the municipal bus system. 

Across the country, one thing was clear: Wallet-friendly climate policies—and candidates presenting themselves as helping people pay their bills—won. “Climate change isn’t at the forefront of every election, but at this point, every election is a climate election,” Jasper of Project Drawdown said. “‘Climate action equals affordability’ seems to be the winning message of the day.” 

Emily Jones contributed reporting.

2025-11-08 16:01:00

When Andrea Dettore-Murphy first moved to Rankin County, Mississippi, she didn’t believe the stories she heard about how brutal the sheriff’s department could be when pursuing suspected drug crimes.

But in 2018, she learned the hard way that the rumors were true when a group of sheriff’s deputies raided the home of her friend Rick Loveday and beat him relentlessly while she watched. 

A few years later, Dettore-Murphy says deputies put her through another haunting incident with her friend Robert Grozier. Dettore-Murphy was just the latest in a long line of people who said they witnessed or experienced torture by a small group of deputies, some of whom called themselves the “Goon Squad.” 

For nearly two decades, the deputies roamed Rankin County at night, beating, tasing, and choking suspects in drug crimes until they admitted to buying or selling illegal substances. Their reign of terror continued unabated until 2023, when the deputies were finally exposed.

“Rankin County has always been notorious,” says Garry Curro, one the Goon Squad’s many alleged victims. “They don’t follow the laws of the land. They make their own laws.”

This week on Reveal, reporters Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield with Mississippi Today and the New York Times investigate the Goon Squad, whose members have allegedly tortured at least 22 people since the early 2000s.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in March 2025. 

2025-11-08 03:51:19

At this point last November, Zohran Mamdani was a largely unknown state assemblyman, and the Democratic Party’s brand in New York City was at rock bottom. 

In the 2024 election, President Donald Trump picked up about 100,000 more votes in the city than in 2020; Kamala Harris fell more than half a million votes shy of Joe Biden’s total. And some of the most dramatic shifts in the entire country could be found in immigrant neighborhoods in Mamdani’s home borough of Queens. The party’s outer-borough collapse mirrored the party’s national crack-up; as it spent millions to court college-educated voters in the suburbs, Democrats were losing ground with the sorts of working-class, non-white voters in blue cities who traditionally helped form the backbone of the party. The term you kept hearing over and over was “realignment.”

When we chatted with residents and elected officials this spring, in the Queens neighborhoods of Jackson Heights and Corona, we found deep-seated frustrations with Democratic governance—and concerns about crime, immigration, sex-workers, poor services, and the cost of living. Many people brought up the pandemic, which had hit the area hard and damaged people’s faith in the social contract.

“The former governor, Andrew Cuomo, never stepped foot in Corona, even during the pandemic,” Democratic state assemblywoman Catalina Cruz told us. “I had to fight him to get a vaccination site in my district because while we were the epicenter, because my community was undocumented and immigrant, we were the last ones to get help.” Corona, she said, was what you get “when the government ignores its community.”

Mamdani’s victory on Tuesday over Cuomo was the product of a relentless campaign that united a broad multi-racial coalition with a focus on affordability. But it was also a test of how well the Democratic Party was recovering in the places where it has suffered the most. This outer-borough collapse, clustered most intensely in working-class Latino and Asian communities, loomed over the New York City mayoral race from the start. Mamdani soft-launched his candidacy by talking to Trump voters and non-voters in outer-borough neighborhoods about what it would take to win them back. 

So: How’d he do?

Comparing off-year races with presidential elections can be a little difficult, but Mamdani’s vote total—the highest for a winning mayoral candidate since the 1960s—offered some clear takeaways. Although 700,000 fewer people voted in the city this November compared to last, Mamdani actually earned more votes than Harris in a few notable areas. 

In parts of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, home to many young and left-leaning voters, overall turnout matched or exceeded 2024 totals, and nearly all those votes went to Mamdani. That’s a major achievement for an off-year election, and a reflection of the mayor-elect’s appeal among younger Americans who opposed Trump and were unenthusiastic about the Democratic Party. 

But Mamdani also ran well ahead of Harris in another, much different area: along parts of Hillside Avenue in Queens. This is one of the two neighborhoods Mamdani visited last November to talk to residents about the presidential election. In the now-famous video, voters expressed their frustration with the Democratic Party’s appeasement of Israel and their sense that politicians had done little to address the high cost of living. In one heavily Bangladeshi precinct on Hillside Avenue, Mamdani ended up winning more raw votes than Harris on Tuesday—despite 14 percent fewer people showing up. 

The story was similar in other pockets of the city with large South Asian and Muslim populations, and where Democratic support lagged in 2024. Mamdani, despite running against a prominent Democratic former governor, scored a 24-percent improvement on Harris’ vote total in one precinct in Brooklyn’s “Little Bangladesh”—where turnout was just as high as last year.

Mamdani’s energetic emphasis on affordability, his implicit and explicit rejection of unpopular Democratic figures like Cuomo and Mayor Eric Adams, and his unique appeal as one of the city’s first major-party Muslim mayoral candidates helped him make up ground that Democrats had recently lost.

On Tuesday, a few hours before polls closed, we returned to the Queens neighborhoods we profiled earlier this year for Reveal, to see how Mamdani’s pitch had gone over. What we found was backed up by the numbers. It would be wishful thinking to call Mamdani universally beloved, but there were signs that his message of affordability resonated with voters who had been on the fence about Democrats, and that Trump’s 2024 coalition was beginning to fracture.

In conversations with about two dozen voters, we heard firsthand from people who voted Democratic after rejecting Harris last year, and from voters—particularly young voters—who were drawn to Mamdani by his emphasis on issues that affected their lives on a daily basis.

“I don’t take buses because I don’t trust them—I pay for the bus, it just, like, skips my stop or something,” said a young Elmhurst voter named Diego. Another voter outside the precinct said he voted for Trump as “the lesser evil” in 2024, but felt that Mamdani offered a new direction and saw promise in his plans to make the city “affordable.”

“The free bus thing, I think, is great,” he said. “A lot of the time people don’t want to pay for the bus anyway. That’s a good incentive, and honestly, I’d rather if we all paid a little more tax and make the MTA free.” 

Beyond Mamdani convincing some Trump voters, there were signs of dissatisfaction in the Republican electorate, too. More than one voter mentioned that they voted for Trump—and not for Mamdani—but were disappointed by the administration.

A senior citizen in Jackson Heights who voted for Cuomo because of his emphasis on public safety told us that he and his wife had both voted for Trump last November. 

“He promised a lot of things [were] going to change,” he said. 

“But nothing’s changed,” his wife added.

Mamdani had some of his strongest performances in Jackson Heights, an extraordinarily diverse neighborhood with large South Asian and Latino populations. In one heavily South Asian voting district in the neighborhood, Mamdani ran 20 percentage points ahead of Kamala Harris and netted more votes overall. 

Outside a polling site in the neighborhood on Tuesday, Abdul Aliy said that he left the presidential line blank last November. “I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for Harris, [and] obviously I wasn’t gonna vote for Trump, so there wasn’t really an option I saw,” he said. But he told us he voted for Mamdani enthusiastically, because the democratic socialist’s platform aligned with his own values: “Free transit, free buses,” he said, rattling off the campaign promises that resonated. “He has this idea of a public market that will stabilize the prices of certain goods—I like that idea.”

Outside of P.S. 89Q in nearby Elmhurst, Rina Hart, a 32-year-old user interface designer, said that she and her family were long-time New Yorkers who had voted for Cuomo in the past. Hart initially thought she would do so again in the primary. But she was turned off by the former governor’s campaign and the wealthy donors backing him. “I was concerned about Mamdani’s experience,” she explained, “but at least he has integrity.”

Her parents ended up voting for Cuomo in the primary, while she and her brothers went for Mamdani. There was no generational divide in the general election: They all backed Mamdani. Hart explained that her mom, who is South Asian, had been alienated by the racist videos promoted by Cuomo’s backers. 

“It’s been a really tough time to be a Democrat. And you’re kind of seeing why we didn’t win,” Hart said about Mamdani’s rise in the wake of recent Democratic losses. “It’s been really hopeful.” She now wants the party to move on from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who did not endorse the mayor-elect. 

“That’s the only way we can get out of this MAGA cycle that we’re in,” Hart said.

Glacel, an Ecuadorian immigrant who has worked at one of the original Equinox gym locations for the past 31 years, went with Cuomo.

She said she didn’t vote in last year’s presidential election because of the local crime and disorder. It was the worst she’d ever seen things get in Queens, and she blamed the decay on Democrats not dealing with the migrant crisis. “Disgusting. Filthy. Messy,” she said. “Ecuador is better than here.” 

Another Elmhurst voter, an Argentine immigrant named Miguel Mendez, described himself as a sometime-Democratic voter. He opposed Trump during his first election and had once been curious about Bernie Sanders, but came around to the Republican nominee by 2024. He believed the neighborhood was deteriorating and that Democrats were more interested in pushing their ideology than in fixing it up.

“If it wasn’t the Salvadorans, the MS-13—it was the Tren de Aragua, or even cartels,” he said. “I mean, you can ask anyone over here where the gangs are. You can go to Roosevelt, you see what I mean. The prostitution, it’s everywhere.

Mendez chose Curtis Sliwa. (His girlfriend, he said, told him he couldn’t back Cuomo.) 

Despite voting for Trump, he wasn’t happy with how things were playing out in Washington. The second Trump term had been “a big disappointment for me, because I was begging him to talk about all the weird drones that came in New Jersey and New York,” he said. “He said that he was gonna bring that out, same thing with the Epstein names, a bunch of stuff that he’s not doing—so that makes me think that no matter what party the guy who’s in office, they just have to follow an agenda.”

Further along Roosevelt Avenue, in the heavily Latino parts of Queens that swung heavily toward Trump in 2024, the picture was mixed. Turnout in Corona, a working-class Latino neighborhood, was up dramatically from the last mayoral election, but still well short of a presidential year. Among those who voted, data from the New York Times shows Mamdani winning the neighborhood by 11 points.

Ana, a 58-year-old Democratic voter in Corona from the Dominican Republic, said she voted for Cuomo after backing Kamala Harris last year. Like other voters in Corona, the problems along Roosevelt Avenue, which she also blamed on more recent immigrant arrivals, were front of mind.

“I like the Democrats because they’re humanitarians but as a result they’re hurting us,” Ana said. She lamented that her own Democratic representatives had not done enough when it came to immigration.

That included her own member of Congress, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). But Ana still mostly liked her congresswoman, who unlike Mamdani, she thought had enough experience.

Ana was skeptical about the feasibility of Mamdani’s plans to make the city more affordable. Free buses won’t make her daily 4 am subway commute to a restaurant job at Google’s Manhattan campus any cheaper. Nor would his proposed rent freeze for stabilized units cover her market-rate apartment. 

“You can’t offer free things in New York,” Ana explained in Spanish. “Even looking at something here costs something.” Then she laughed with a sigh of resignation.

Mamdani now has four years to prove voters like her wrong.

2025-11-07 20:30:00

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

Last Tuesday, as the strongest Atlantic storm in 90 years slammed the western coast of Jamaica with 185-mph winds, Bill Gates was downplaying climate change.

In a lengthy blog post published on his personal website, Gates purported to offer some “tough truths about climate” ahead of next week’s UN climate conference. Railing against a “doomsday outlook” stemming from “much of the climate community,” the author of 2021’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster claimed that there’s “too much” emphasis on “near-term emissions goals” as opposed to addressing “poverty and disease.” (The straight line between climate disasters from higher temperatures and the acceleration of both poverty and disease went unnoted.)

While Hurricane Melissa—whose ferocity was supercharged by ocean waters heated by carbon-emissions absorption, as well as increased atmospheric moisture—laid waste to much of Jamaica, Gates followed up with a CNBC interview, excusing Microsoft’s fossil-fueled AI-construction surge and reiterating that global warming “has to be considered in terms of overall human welfare.” (He didn’t touch on the many ways artificial intelligence itself has damaged human welfare.)

The billionaire does not appear to have publicly addressed the disaster in Jamaica, which extended throughout the Caribbean, with Melissa having killed dozens across Cuba, Haiti, the Bahamas, and the Dominican Republic. And his overall point, frankly, does not hold up to scrutiny.

Gates isn’t alone; climate change has slipped down the world’s priority list in the past few years—and it shows. Governments and corporations are shelving emissions goals, budgets are being redirected from climate initiatives to warfare, the media is pivoting away from climate journalism, and even activists are urging a softer, more “hopeful” tone. It all signals a vibe shift in how we talk about climate change, reframing it from the existential risk it actually poses to a less urgent, peripheral issue—even as the floodwaters reach our front doors.

Gates, whose climate nonprofit Breakthrough Energy laid off dozens of staffers earlier this year, is not incorrect to point out that “we’ve made great progress” in fostering climate solutions, and that agriculture and land use should be an especially urgent area of focus. But the person he’s targeting with his post—a government official cutting health and aid funding and redirecting it toward emissions reduction—doesn’t really exist, certainly not at this particular moment.

As the US pulls back on all foreign aid and health funds, to devastating and fatal effect across the Eastern Hemisphere, other rich nations are not filling in the gap but instead following suit, cutting back on climate, health, and development.

In the climate realm in particular, wealthier countries are trimming not just their budgets (e.g., clean-energy exports, startup financing) but even their assistance with long-term adaptation to a warming Earth—something Gates now prizes above mitigation. This despite the fact that the UN secretary-general warns that it is “inevitable” the world will overshoot the decade-old Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius—as an explicit means of preventing worst-case scenarios that will require more money and resources to address.

The world order that once notched international climate agreements isn’t just retreating from that fight; it’s pulling back from any globally minded responsibility altogether.

The inherent tension Gates posits between “quality of life” and “lowering emissions” is simply false—and it’s a favored talking point of climate denialists. The most odious exemplar of this may be the pro–fossil fuel activist Alex Epstein, whose books (which I’ve reviewed critically) frame the transition from oil and gas to renewables as an “anti-human” endeavor. These days, Epstein is deeply embedded with congressional Republicans, pushing behind the scenes for the debilitating dents in US clean-energy subsidies that have been effected through this year’s budget bills.

Setting climate action as antithetical to human flourishing is plainly false; the devastated Caribbean citizens now rebuilding from Hurricane Melissa’s destruction would not be in this predicament had carbon emissions not overheated the ocean and messed with wind cycles.

As for finances, the climate is the economy: Skyrocketing insurance and resource costs in the region, along with depleted agricultural yields, are not incidental to climate effects but a direct consequence of their fallout.

At our current level of 1.3 degrees Celsius of warming above preindustrial levels, we see the crushing effects everywhere. It will not be any easier for island nations to recover as more extreme weather comes for their homes (and ours), and as nations of means shirk their mandated responsibilities to those spewing far fewer emissions, yet taking the biggest direct impacts.

The good news is, there are many folks on the ground working independently to advance climate solutions and their own welfare at the same time. Countries like Pakistan and Rwanda have put cheap solar-panel imports to great use—even to help with growing food. In the Caribbean, some of the hospitals treating the wounded will be powered by solar panels and battery storage, insulating them from the ongoing electricity outages. The US government planes that have been monitoring Melissa’s path are flown by pilots who aren’t being paid to do so, thanks to the government shutdown. These are the types of admirable missions led by people who understand the situation at a far more intimate level than Bill Gates ever will.