2025-11-16 02:04:04
President Donald Trump, who ran in 2024 on the promise to bring down prices “on day one,” has finally admitted that his tariffs do the opposite.
On Friday, the Trump administration announced that it would exempt a broad array of groceries—including staples like beef, coffee, and bananas—from the tariffs the president proudly implemented in April. While Trump, of course, did not concede outright that his tariffs have helped stoke sticker shock, the tariff reversal is a clear bid to ease the high prices currently plaguing American consumers.
More than half of Americans said food costs were a “major source of stress.”
The Trump administration appears to be scrambling for an affirmative economic message in the wake of the GOP’s recent stinging electoral losses. Earlier this month, Republican candidates were defeated in not only the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, but also in a string of local races. Meanwhile, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani surged to victory in the New York City mayoral race on an affordability agenda.
On November 5, the day after the elections, Trump discussed affordability on Fox News, claiming that it was a “new word” being pushed by Democrats. While he insisted his administration has brought prices “way down,” he also said that Republicans don’t talk enough about affordability. That evening, he rehashed his argument on Truth Social: “AFFORDABILITY is a Republican Stronghold. Hopefully, Republicans will use this irrefutable fact!”
While inflation has come down from its Biden-era 2022 peak, federal data from September shows that grocery prices have risen since the start of Trump’s presidency, with costs climbing at the quickest annual pace since 2022. (October’s data has not been released, with the Trump administration saying its publication is unlikely after the government shutdown impaired collecting statistics.) In an August poll by AP-NORC, more than half of Americans said that grocery costs were a “major source of stress” in their lives.
Despite warnings from most economists and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Trump has repeatedly claimed that his tariffs do not raise prices. But if tariffs had no impact on consumer prices, then Trump would not now find the need to roll them back.
“We just did a little bit of a rollback on some foods, like coffee as an example, where the prices of coffee were a little bit high. Now they’ll be on the low side in a very short period of time,” Trump admitted to reporters on Friday. (Over the last year, coffee prices increased 19 percent. Much of the US’s coffee comes from Brazil, which Trump slapped with a 50 percent tariff citing, among other reasons, an ongoing court case against former President Jair Bolsonaro over his attempted coup.)
An October CNN poll found that less than a third of Americans believe Trump has lived up to his affordability promises. More than 60 percent said he’s made this country’s economic conditions worse.
2025-11-16 00:57:22
For months, President Donald Trump begged America to forget about Jeffrey Epstein. But this week a House committee released a trove of the late sex offender’s emails, and Trump’s name was all over them. Now, he’s suddenly once again very interested in figuring out who enabled or even partook in Epstein’s prolific sexual abuse of underage women—as long as the only people being investigated for crimes are Democrats.
“It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out.”
On Friday, Trump directed the Department of Justice, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to “investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them.” Bondi quickly hopped on the case, announcing on X that she had assigned a prosecutor to “pursue this with urgency and integrity.”
Trump, a friend of Epstein for many years, has strenuously denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. But his Friday directive reversed the Trump administration’s previous stance that there was nothing left to see in the Epstein case: In July, Bondi’s DOJ and the FBI released a memo claiming it had exhausted all of the evidence in the government’s possession and determined that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” That move was itself a stunning reversal, angering many of Trump’s supporters who believed he would fulfill his campaign promise to release all files from the government’s Epstein investigation. After the July announcement, Trump blasted his supporters who felt betrayed as “stupid” and “foolish” for still believing in the “Jeffrey Epstein hoax.”
A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers emerged to push for the full Epstein files. Following the long-awaited swearing in of Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva on Wednesday, a Democrat whose support was needed to advance the release, the House will soon vote on a bill that could compel the DOJ to release what it has.
The emails made public on Wednesday by the House showed that Epstein once referred to Trump as “the dog that hasn’t barked” and alleged that Trump had once spent “hours” at his house with a sex trafficking victim.
But Trump would rather that you not pay attention to any of that. Instead, he ordered the government’s law enforcement apparatus to target former president Bill Clinton and his treasury secretary Larry Summers, who were also mentioned in Wednesday’s document release, along with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a major Democratic donor. It has been widely speculated that his administration could cite the newly-launched investigation in a coming battle with Congress to forestall making any further information public.
Trump’s about-face on releasing the full Epstein files has infuriated Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R-Ga.), once a staunch ally of the president. Their public feud escalated on Friday, with Trump calling Greene a “ranting lunatic” on Truth Social and announcing he would be “withdrawing his support and endorsement,” suggesting he would back a primary challenger to her if the “right person runs.”
Greene issued a lengthy response on X, claiming that it was their split over the Epstein files that “sent [Trump] over the edge.”
“It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out,” she wrote.
2025-11-15 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
It can carry life-threatening diseases. It’s difficult to find and hard to kill. And it’s obsessed with human blood.
Aedes aegypti is a species of mosquito that people like Tim Moore, district manager of a mosquito control district on the Western Slope of Colorado, really don’t want to see. “Boy, they are locked into humans,” Moore said. “That’s their blood meal.”
This mosquito species is native to tropical and subtropical climates, but as climate change pushes up temperatures and warps precipitation patterns, Aedes aegypti—which can spread Zika, dengue, chikungunya and other potentially deadly viruses—is on the move.
It’s popping up all over the Mountain West, where conditions have historically been far too harsh for it to survive. In the last decade, towns in New Mexico and Utah have begun catching Aedes aegypti in their traps year after year, and just this summer, one was found for the first time in Idaho.
Now, an old residential neighborhood in Grand Junction, Colorado, has emerged as one of the latest frontiers for this troublesome mosquito.
The city, with a population of about 70,000, is the largest in Colorado west of the Continental Divide. In 2019, the local mosquito control district spotted one wayward Aedes aegypti in a trap. It was odd, but the mosquitoes had already been found in Moab, Utah, about 100 miles to the southwest. Moore, the district manager, figured they’d caught a hitchhiker and that the harsh Colorado climate would quickly eliminate the species. “I concluded it was a one-off, and we don’t have to worry too much about this,” Moore said.
But then, a few years later, it happened again. They found two more of the invasive mosquito species in traps in 2023. “Coincidence is not a word you use much in science,” said Hannah Livesay, biologist at the Grand River Mosquito Control District, which is based in Grand Junction.
The team bought different traps and adjusted their techniques to hunt for the mosquito. Scientific literature and mosquito researchers told them the effort was bound to be pointless. It was unlikely the mosquito would make it through the winter.
Then, the results started coming in. In 2024, the first year of the Aedes aegypti surveillance program, the district caught 796 adults and found 446 eggs.
These mosquitoes weren’t just surviving in Colorado—they were thriving.
Mosquitoes are often called the most dangerous creatures on the planet for their ability to spread life-threatening diseases to humans. Of those, malaria, carried by female Anopheles mosquitoes, has long been one of the most devastating.
However, as climate change allows Aedes aegypti to move northward, survive at higher elevations and stay active for longer into the fall, the dengue virus is fast emerging as one of the most dangerous of the world’s diseases transmitted by mosquitoes and ticks, researchers say.
Between 2000 and 2024, dengue cases reported to the World Health Organization increased more than twentyfold, as climate change, urbanization and global travel and trade pushed the mosquito vector for the disease into new areas. Climate change has also lengthened the season during which the insect can breed and thrive in areas where it’s endemic. About half the world’s population is now at risk of dengue, according to the WHO, and between 100 and 400 million infections occur each year.
The virus is often mild or asymptomatic, but for some people, it can become severe, so painful that it’s nicknamed “breakbone fever.” It can even be deadly. More than 2,500 dengue-related deaths have been reported globally in 2025, with outbreaks in Brazil, India, Australia and other countries. In the US, dengue is most common in Florida, where the Aedes aegypti mosquito has thrived for centuries in the subtropical and tropical climates.
In Colorado, state medical entomologist Chris Roundy said that while the mosquito is in Grand Junction, the state’s public health officials are not too worried about disease spread—yet. “The presence of those mosquitoes does not mean that dengue is going to be there,” Roundy said.
For the mosquitoes to spread disease, they need to feed on a human who is already sick: Someone who traveled to Florida, contracted dengue and then returned to Grand Junction while they’re still infected, for example.
In other words, the chances of an outbreak of dengue or another of the diseases Aedes aegypti carries in western Colorado remain pretty slim. Still, he said, “we are keeping a very close eye on [the mosquitoes] to see if they expand their area in Grand Junction, or if we start seeing them in other counties.”
On a warm and sunny October morning in Grand Junction, David Garrett, team lead for the Grand River Mosquito Control District’s Aedes aegypti program, parked his white truck on what the team calls their “epicenter street” in the old residential neighborhood of Orchard Mesa, where Aedes aegypti found a foothold in Colorado.
It was collection day.
Across the rest of Colorado, mosquito control operations aimed at preventing the spread of West Nile virus are winding down. Populations of the native Culex tarsalis mosquitoes, the primary vector for the virus, were declining rapidly in the autumn chill.
But in Grand Junction, Garrett is still in the field looking for the invasive mosquito species that seems to get active in the fall.
The traps need to be close to humans—the food source—and an inviting place for the mosquitoes to lay eggs. Unlike the mosquitoes that are native to the Western Slope, which breed in standing water like ditches and ponds, Aedes aegypti mosquitos prefer to breed in containers like potted plant saucers, watering cans, and decorative yard fixtures. The traps for them look like unassuming black plastic buckets with an oddly shaped funnel attached to their tops. The district has snuck them into corners of front yards, between bushes and along fences throughout the neighborhood.
Garrett plucks out the sticky papers that have been inside the traps for the previous week, replaces them with clean sticky papers and adds a bit of fresh water. He’ll take the samples back to the lab to count how many Aedes aegypti they snagged.
But before doing that, he pauses to peel one of the sticky papers apart and counts four invasive mosquitoes stuck to it. Their jet black bodies with reflective white markings are easy to differentiate from the dusty brown of the native desert mosquitoes.
As of mid-October, the district had caught 526 adult Aedes aegypti in 2025, all in the Orchard Mesa area.
The mosquitoes don’t lay all their eggs in one basket. They skip from container to container, laying a few eggs in each. “You don’t find one and find them all,” said Livesay, the district’s biologist. “So, it’s really difficult to track them down.”
Back in the car, control district staff wound through the neighborhood. From the passenger seat, Livesay pointed with a frustrated sigh at an old tire lying in a yard. “Tires are one of the most common places you find them,” she said.
As the climate warms, “Aedes aegypti is performing at an extraordinarily high level.”
The species’ preference for backyards and gardens makes it incredibly difficult to control, Livesay said. The district had to get permission from dozens of homeowners in the Orchard Mesa area to set up and maintain traps on private property, and only a handful of homeowners have allowed them to spray insecticides in their yards.
Public awareness of the mosquito’s presence, and the potential health risk it could pose, has been gradual; the district has passed out fliers and chatted with residents, but the campaign doesn’t appear to have quite taken root. On the day the team checked its traps, several residents said that they weren’t aware that an invasive mosquito was present in their neighborhood.
The new species is also expensive to control: It has cost the district about $15,000 this year in new traps, additional staff who must stay later into the season and different insecticides after learning that the mosquitoes had a resistance to the one they use for the native mosquitoes—permethrin.
Given how costly it is to control them, further expansion of their range on the Western Slope is Moore’s biggest concern. Right now, Aedes aegypti occupies about 100 acres of the Orchard Mesa neighborhood. He doesn’t want it to gain any more ground. “If we can’t get rid of them, or at least confine them,” Moore says, “that’s a huge game-changer for us.”
While it’s virtually impossible to know how the mosquitoes got into Colorado, experts said, the pathway could’ve been as benign as a Grand Junction resident bringing home a potted plant from out of state.
Robert Hancock, a mosquito researcher and biology professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver, said that, since the mosquito follows humans and is easily transported by the containers it breeds in, he’s not surprised when it pops up in Colorado and other high and cold locations. What does surprise him is when the mosquito can survive winters in those areas.
Hancock noted it’s recently been found to endure the winters in California, Oregon, and Utah—and now in Colorado.
“That’s the scary part, because it made it to the next summer in Grand Junction,” Hancock said, speaking in his Denver lab while feeding his own colony of Aedes aegypti, reared for research. (He allows the mosquitoes, which are completely free of disease, to feed on his own arm.)
As the climate warms, Hancock said, “Aedes aegypti is performing at an extraordinarily high level.”
More than half of pathogenic diseases can be aggravated by climate change, a 2022 article in the journal Nature Climate Change found.
Livesay, the biologist, suspects the newcomer mosquitoes are wiggling their way into basements and greenhouses to weather the Colorado winter, which doesn’t have as many freezing nights as it used to.
Grand Junction had only 17 days of below-freezing temperatures in 2024, the fewest on record, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Typically, the area gets more than two months’ worth of freezing weather. Winters there have, on average, warmed 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970.
“We need a cold winter for the mosquitoes to not make it through,” Livesay said. “Things are hovering just above freezing, and they’re able to last.”
This story was produced with support from the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
2025-11-15 16:01:00
Chris Mack has been locked up in Mississippi’s Rankin County Jail on and off since he was a teenager. In a lawsuit, he detailed a jailhouse assault that left him with broken ribs, a broken nose, and two black eyes. But it wasn’t just guards who attacked him. Mack said a group of inmates joined in—men in the jail’s Trusty Inmate Program, who had special privileges and wore blue jumpsuits.
“They were called the blue wave,” Mack said.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.Through more than 70 interviews with former inmates and officers, reporters from Mississippi Today and the New York Times discovered a system in which guards ordered beatings, inmates who participated were rewarded, and those trying to raise an alarm about the system for more than a decade were ignored.
This week on Reveal, on the heels of our reporting on abuses in the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department run by Sheriff Bryan Bailey, we expose a wave of violence in his county jail.
2025-11-15 08:20:32
In late April, podcasters Audrey Presby and Jeremy Fraser decided to venture out of their studio in California to head to Washington, DC. It was not the most joyous occasion: Presby and Fraser, both of whom have Down syndrome, were there to plead with House representatives not to vote to pass the sweeping health care funding cuts in President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB).
“A lot of people are going to feel terrified, petrified, scared of what’s going to happen next,” Presby said in a viral clip of the podcast. Much to the fear of the disabled and low-income people who rely on it, Congress voted to pass the OBBB in early July, which will lead to around $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over the course of the next decade.
Presby and Fraser, who are in a relationship, both receive support through home and community-based services waivers (HCBS), an amendment to the Social Security Act enacted under the Reagan administration to give qualifying disabled people on Medicaid resources to live outside institutional settings like nursing homes. States have separate programs, and the overall system is not perfect—some people have to remain on waitlists for more than a decade to get a waiver, which can feel like a golden ticket.
States making brutal decisions about how to implement overall Medicaid funding cuts—which services to reduce or eliminate—will likely look to optional programs like HCBS. But that would mean long-term costs, rather than savings: A recent report from the California Health Care Foundation found that a 10 percent cut to HCBS programs would lead to $1 billion more in Medicaid spending in the state that Fraser and Presby call home due to the greater overall costs of institutionalization.
People like Presby and Fraser, said Kristianna Moralls of the Self-Determination Institute, “are able to use these Medicaid funds for helpers who teach cooking and cleaning, money management, so they can live more independently and be part of their community.”
Reveal’s Rachel de Leon, a new mom to a baby boy with Down syndrome, relies on federal funding to pay for the critical therapy services her son receives to meet milestones like sitting up independently and crawling. She spent the day with Presby and Fraser to see how they apply their Medicaid waivers to activities that teach critical skills that extend beyond the traditional models of physical or occupational therapy.
Fraser goes surfing to help with his core strength—people with Down syndrome can have low muscle tone—which also helps his mental health. He hires a surfing coach as a very part-time member of his support staff—subsidized by Medicaid and much less expensive than a physical therapy session.
“We see better outcomes, not only for the individuals, but for the people that work with them,” Moralls said. “It brings jobs to lots of people, and it also just builds a structure that we really want. This is the America we want to live in.”
2025-11-15 01:12:00
If you had never heard of the Federal Housing Finance Agency—a small niche of the government that oversees much of the mortgage industry—this might be the week that put the FHFA on your radar, all because of its director, a 37-year-old official named Bill Pulte who was this week’s Washington Main Character (Non-Epstein Division).
Over the past few days, news stories have revealed a slew of criticisms and even an agency investigation into the dubious moves he has made in recent months as he has tried to ingratiate himself with President Donald Trump, including claims that he fired more than a dozen ethics staff who questioned his actions and that he presented bad ideas to the president that have embarrassed the White House.
Pulte arrived at his job running the FHFA amid a flurry of criticisms that he is both a “nepobaby” and unqualified for the job. Pulte is an heir to a real estate and construction fortune and has no professional experience in the mortgage industry he is now tasked with supervising. Yet since taking over the FHFA this spring, he has anointed himself as something of a mortgage fraud expert, digging up old documents and using them to accuse the president’s political foes—from New York Attorney General Letitia James to California Sen. Adam Schiff and Fed governor and economist Lisa Cook—of financial crimes to his millions of Twitter followers, before referring them to the Justice Department for investigation. All of the people he’s accused of such crimes are prominent Democrats, even as journalists revealed that mortgage data points to similar errors committed by three GOP officials in Trump’s Cabinet.
Pulte’s claims made news—Trump even used the accusations against Cook to fire her from job at the Federal Reserve, a move she is now contesting before the US Supreme Court. Still, though none of Pulte’s allegations became criminal charges (Letitia James is now facing a claim unrelated to what Pulte dug up), they begged the question of how Pulte was accessing the private data behind his accusations.
During the recent government shutdown, Pulte flew down to Trump’s Palm Beach golf club to present his idea for the president’s demand: a 50-year mortgage.
This week, the Wall Street Journal revealed that an ethics team at Fannie Mae, one of the mortgage giants Pulte oversees, had begun to investigate exactly this question. They started because some of their internal staff had expressed concern that senior leaders at the FHFA were pushing them to improperly access mortgage loan paperwork. The ethics watchdog then escalated their inquiry to the internal oversight office at the FHFA, who passed it federal prosecutors.
Not long after all this, many of the people who had touched the investigation got fired, including a dozen members of the Fannie Mae watchdog team, its chief ethics officer, and the top investigative official at the FHFA who had alerted prosecutors to the ongoing inquiry. Yet Pulte claimed the Fannie layoffs were merely part of a bid to end DEI programs.
This week, the Associated Press revealed that around the same time that this probe was ramping up in October, Pulte was making other questionable moves at Fannie Mae. Emails show that he asked the company’s head of marketing, a confidant of his, to share confidential pricing information with officials at Freddie Mac, Fannie’s main competitor, in a move that could open up Fannie Mae to allegations of collusion to fix mortgage rates. When senior officials at Fannie Mae questioned the conduct, they, too, were fired.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Trump directed Pulte to think about ways to use Fannie and Freddie to ramp up housing production and address the country’s critical housing shortage. During the recent government shutdown, Pulte flew down to Trump’s Palm Beach golf club to present his idea for the president’s demand: a 50-year mortgage. Politico reported this week that Pulte went to Trump with a 3-foot-by-5-foot posterboard that discussed the idea in a few pictures and captions, and claimed if Trump did this, he would be among the “Great American Presidents.” Ten minutes later, Trump took to Truth Social to post in support of the idea, with a photo of the poster itself. Soon, the White House was flooded with calls pillorying the idea: a 50-year-mortgage could actually make the housing crisis worse, and raise costs to households in the long run.
“The thing that became clear from this latest episode—if it wasn’t already clear—is that Bill Pulte doesn’t know the first fucking thing about how the mortgage markets operate,” one person who was familiar with what happened told Politico. “After publicly humiliating the president with his moronic 50-year mortgage plan it’s safe to assume that his days are numbered.”
None of these criticisms or revelations have seemed to slow Pulte, or make him question his actions: The day after the Wall Street Journal revealed the probe looking into how Pulte is accessing private mortgage data, the FHFA director accused yet another prominent Trump critic, California Rep. Eric Swalwell, of—guess what?—mortgage fraud.
