2025-12-01 01:31:03
In the wake of the longest government shutdown in US history, an ongoing self-inflicted tariff war, and his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, President Donald Trump’s approval rating has cratered to 36 percent, the lowest of his second term. Gallup, which conducted its latest poll between November 2 and 25, reports that disapproval of Trump’s performance climbed to 60 percent—including his ratings from Republicans and Independents, which dropped significantly.
The dismal numbers follow a Politico poll that appeared to show cracks emerging within Trump’s MAGA base.
But it isn’t just Trump’s approval ratings that are taking a heavy hit these days. The Wall Street Journal reports that stocks tied to the president and his family, including $MELANIA and $TRUMP, two “meme coins” launched just days before Trump returned to office in January, have plummeted by as much as 86 and 99 percent. It’s unclear if the staggering losses reflect Trump’s dismal approval ratings; the notoriously volatile industry is experiencing a wider rout that has lost more than $1 trillion in recent weeks. But Trump’s free-falling assets also reflect something directly related to the president’s own policies: investor shakiness over his tariff policies. From the Journal:
Trump stocks benefited from expectations that the incoming administration would usher in an era of deregulation, tax cuts and supportive crypto policies—and that assets tied directly to Trump and his family would continue to rally. With the president’s return to the White House, though, his policies on global trade have upended some of those bets now that investors are paying more attention to the performance of those companies than to his political future.
Despite months of market volatility and economic warning signs, Trump remains steadfast in his commitment to his trade war. As he declared on Truth Social on Saturday: “Tariffs have made our Country Rich, Strong, Powerful, and Safe. They have been successfully used by other Countries against us for Decades, but when it comes to Tariffs, and because of what I have set in place, WE HAVE ALL THE CARDS, and with a smart President, we always will!”
He also urged the Supreme Court, which expressed rare skepticism about the president’s sweeping tariffs, to uphold his policy. “Pray to God that our Nine Justices will show great wisdom, and do the right thing for America!” A ruling is expected by the end of this year.
2025-12-01 01:13:28
In a rare instance of bipartisan alarm, Republican-chaired committees in the House and Senate announced that they have launched inquiries into an explosive Washington Post report alleging Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given a spoken order to “kill everybody” aboard a vessel carrying suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean. The occupants included two people who had survived an initial missile strike on the vessel and were seen “clinging” to the wreckage.
“We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question,” the leaders of the House Armed Services Committee said in a joint statement on Friday.
“The Committee has directed inquiries to the [Department of Defense], and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances,” leaders in the Senate Armed Services Committee said.
The September 2 attack kicked off what has now been nearly two dozen attacks, killing at least 83 people, who the US military claims, without evidence, had been attempting to smuggle drugs into the US. The attacks, which President Trump justifies as a part of an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, have been likened to extrajudicial killings.
Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona told CNN on Sunday that Hegseth’s actions, as reported by the Post, appear to be a war crime.
“If what has been reported is accurate, I’ve got serious concerns about anybody in that chain of command stepping over a line that they should never step over,” Kelly said. “We are not Russia. We are not Iraq. We hold ourselves to a very high standard of professionalism.”
Kelly is locked in a related battle of words with Hegseth after Kelly participated in a social media video with five other Democrats seeking to remind members of the military that they can “refuse illegal orders.”
Hegseth has blasted the Post’s reporting on the missile strikes as “fabricated.”
“As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland,” he wrote on X.
2025-11-30 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
On a sunny morning two years ago, a group of state officials stood in the mountains of northwestern Colorado in front of a handful of large metal crates. With a small crowd watching them, the officials began to unlatch the crate doors one by one. Out of each came a gray wolf—arguably the nation’s most controversial endangered species.
This was a massive moment for conservation.
While gray wolves once ranged throughout much of the Lower 48, a government-backed extermination campaign wiped most of them out in the 19th and 20th centuries. By the 1940s, Colorado had lost all of its resident wolves.
But, in the fall of 2020, Colorado voters did something unprecedented: They passed a ballot measure to reintroduce gray wolves to the state. This wasn’t just about having wolves on the landscape to admire, but about restoring the ecosystems that we’ve broken and the biodiversity we’ve lost. As apex predators, wolves help keep an entire ecosystem in balance, in part by limiting populations of deer and elk that can damage vegetation, spread disease, and cause car accidents.
“This was not ever going to be easy.”
In the winter of 2023, state officials released 10 gray wolves flown in from Oregon onto public land in northwestern Colorado. And in January of this year, they introduced another 15 that were brought in from Canada. Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW)—the state wildlife agency leading the reintroduction program—plans to release 30 to 50 wolves over three to five years to establish a permanent breeding population that can eventually survive without intervention.
“Today, history was made in Colorado,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said following the release. “For the first time since the 1940s, the howl of wolves will officially return to western Colorado.”
Fast forward to today, and that program seems, at least on the surface, like a mess.
Ten of the transplanted wolves are already dead, as is one of their offspring. And now, the state is struggling to find new wolves to ship to Colorado for the next phase of reintroduction. Meanwhile, the program has cost millions of dollars more than expected.
The takeaway is not that releasing wolves in Colorado was, or is now, a bad idea. Rather, the challenges facing this first-of-its-kind reintroduction just show how extraordinarily difficult it is to restore top predators to a landscape dominated by humans. That’s true in the Western US and everywhere—especially when the animal in question has been vilified for generations.
One harsh reality is that a lot of wolves die naturally, such as from disease, killing each other over territory, and other predators, said Joanna Lambert, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Of Colorado’s new population, one of the released wolves was killed by another wolf, whereas two were likely killed by mountain lions, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
The changes that humans have made to the landscape only make it harder for these animals to survive. One of the animals, a male found dead in May, was likely killed by a car, state officials said. Another died after stepping into a coyote foothold trap. Two other wolves, meanwhile, were killed, ironically, by officials. Officials from CPW shot and killed one wolf—the offspring of a released individual—in Colorado, and the US Department of Agriculture killed another that traveled into Wyoming, after linking the wolves to livestock attacks. (An obscure USDA division called Wildlife Services kills hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of wild animals a year that it deems dangerous to humans or industry, as my colleague Kenny Torella has reported.)
Yet, another wolf was killed after trekking into Wyoming, a state where it’s largely legal to kill them. Colorado Parks and Wildlife has, to its credit, tried hard to stop wolves from harming farm animals. The agency has hired livestock patrols called “range riders,” for example, to protect herds. But these solutions are imperfect, especially when the landscape is blanketed in ranchland. Wolves still kill sheep and cattle.
This same conflict—or the perception of it—is what has complicated other attempts to bring back predators, such as jaguars in Arizona and grizzly bears in Washington. And wolves are arguably even more contentious. “This was not ever going to be easy,” Lambert, who’s also the science adviser to the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project, an advocacy organization focused on returning wolves to Colorado, said of the reintroduction program.
There’s another problem: Colorado doesn’t have access to more wolves.
The state is planning to release another 10 to 15 animals early next year. And initially, those wolves were going to come from Canada. But in October, the Trump administration told CPW that it can only import wolves from certain regions of the United States. Brian Nesvik, director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal agency that oversees endangered species, said that a federal regulation governing Colorado’s gray wolf population doesn’t explicitly allow CPW to source wolves from Canada. (Environmental legal groups disagree with his claim).
So Colorado turned to Washington state for wolves instead.
But that didn’t work either. Earlier this month, Washington state wildlife officials voted against exporting some of their wolves to Colorado. Washington has more than 200 gray wolves, but the most recent count showed a population decline. That’s one reason why officials were hesitant to support a plan that would further shrink the state’s wolf numbers, especially because there’s a chance they may die in Colorado.
Some other states home to gray wolves, such as Montana and Wyoming, have previously said they won’t give Colorado any of their animals for reasons that are not entirely clear. Nonetheless, Colorado is still preparing to release wolves this winter as it looks for alternative sources, according to CPW spokesperson Luke Perkins.
Ultimately, Lambert said, it’s going to take years to be able to say with any kind of certainty whether or not the reintroduction program was successful. “This is a long game,” she said.
And despite the program’s challenges, there’s at least one reason to suspect it’s working: puppies.
Over the summer, CPW shared footage from a trail camera of three wolf puppies stumbling over their giant paws, itching, and play-biting each other. CPW says there are now four litters in Colorado, a sign that the predators are settling in and making a home for themselves.
“This reproduction is really key,” Eric Odell, wolf conservation program manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, said in a public meeting in July. “Despite some things that you may hear, not all aspects of wolf management have been a failure. We’re working towards success.”
2025-11-30 02:42:50
On Thursday, President Donald Trump once again found it acceptable to use the r-word, directing it towards Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, in a Truth Social post which also attacked Somali immigrants in the state.
“The seriously [r-tarded] Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both,” Trump posted.
For Republican Indiana State Senator Michael Bohacek, Trump’s most recent use of this anti-disability slur was “the final straw” in his decision not to support Indiana redistricting in support of Republicans winning more seats. On Friday, Rep. Bohacek posted the following on Facebook:
Many of you have asked my position on redistricting. I have been an unapologetic advocate for people with intellectual disabilities since the birth of my second daughter. Those of you that don’t know me or my family might not know that my daughter has Down Syndrome. This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences. I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.
In a Facebook comment, Bohacek’s wife, Melissa, said she supported her husband, writing, “for families like ours, hearing the same mocking, derogatory language from our president isn’t abstract. He didn’t almost say or do something hurtful, he did.”
According to the Indy Star, the Indiana State House of Representatives is set to meet on December 1 to discuss a redistricting map, and the Indiana State Senate is supposed to vote on the map on December 8.
As I’ve previously outlined, Trump has a long history of making ableist statements and holding deeply harmful ideas about disability. In October 2024, at a dinner for Republican donors, Trump referred to then-Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris the r-word. He also has a pattern of referring to people he doesn’t like as “intellectually disabled” in a negative way, underlining his ableist views.
The National Down Syndrome Society also condemned Trump’s latest use of the r-word, writing that “as the language used by our leaders carries significant weight in shaping actions and societal attitudes toward individuals with disabilities, we are dismayed and disheartened that President Trump used this harmful term in a recent social media post.”
2025-11-30 01:48:38
On November 29, 1975, Republican President Gerald Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act into law, which later became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). IDEA requires that disabled students have access to public education, discourages segregating disabled kids from their peers, and that qualifying students have access to individualized education plans, more commonly known as IEPs. IDEA does not apply to education in private schools.
“Before our disabled elders secured our rights under the law, disabled kids were locked out of systems and out of their potential,” Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-Ca.), who is blind, told me in a statement.
Many disability advocates are concerned about the state of education for disabled kids. Continued attempts to dismantle the Department of Education by President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, as well as attempts to fire their staff, put the oversight that disabled kids’ needs are met at risk. Such oversight includes putting districts on notice for funding if they overpenalize Black disabled students, for instance. Then, there is the longstanding issue that IDEA has never been fully funded, meaning that the federal government is not funding IEPs to 40 percent.
“Congress must protect and fully fund the IDEA to ensure future generations of disabled children have the supports and services they need to thrive in school,” Simon continued. “Our civil rights are not up for negotiations.”
This is not to say that all students’ needs are adequately met under the IDEA. Jordyn Zimmerman, a nonspeaking autistic person, told me that she did not have access to effective communication via iPad until she was 18.
“When I finally gained access to effective communication, required under IDEA and also the ADA, there was a realization that I could learn, and I was slowly included in the school community, until I graduated at the age of 21,” Zimmerman said, who is the board chair of CommunicationFIRST. “So that really highlights, both the flaws, but also the power in when the spirit is fulfilled with intentionality.”
Zimmerman is also very concerned about attacks on the Department of Education. “Without a strong Department of Education, states can redirect money away from students with disabilities, so that high-quality education will only exist for some,” Zimmerman said. “Students also won’t get the funding for the therapies, assistive technology, and specially-designed instruction that students need, and families depend on.”
“I will fight that with everything that I have, because IEPs are protection for these kids.”
Samantha Phillis, an advocate with Little Lobbyists, told me that her two daughters, who are in public school, are on IEPs, one of whom is autistic and one has spinal muscular atrophy. Phillis is currently experiencing her school trying to walk back her autistic kid’s IEP, which she suspects is common for kids with disabilities who appear to have lower support needs.
“I will fight that with everything that I have, because IEPs are protection for these kids,” Phillis said.
Phillis’ daughter with spinal muscular atrophy also has a nurse with her at all times in school due to her complex health needs. The nurse receives some funding through Medicaid, so Phillis is also terrified about how Medicaid cuts will impact her daughter’s ability to attend school. “It’s one of the biggest heartbreaks I think I’ve ever experienced in my entire life is seeing how people like my daughters are affected by this administration,” Phillis told me.
There have not been recent attempts to repeal IDEA yet, though Project 2025 encourages funding to be given directly to states, but this is a concern for Nadia Hasan, a woman with cerebral palsy who credits IDEA with helping her succeed in school. “There’s just a lot more like isolation and lack of opportunity,” Hasan told me.
Marleen Salazar, a Texan with learning disabilities who is now an undergraduate student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, credits her special education teachers for helping her learn to advocate for herself.
“They were very much a very key part of building me that confidence and advocacy to make sure that I expressed what I needed and what I didn’t need,” Salazar told me. This advocacy included being able to take standardized tests in a room by herself, as well as getting extended time.
Salazar’s younger sister, who is dyslexic, now has accommodations as well. Salazar has concerns about what will happen if funding is rolled back. “The fear is if funding is cut, or the state doesn’t want to provide these resources anymore, what does that mean for her in the future?”
2025-11-29 20:30:00
This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Porcupines are easy to recognize but hard to find—so elusive, in fact, that few people have ever seen one in the wild.
Emilio Tripp, a wildlife manager and citizen of the Karuk Tribe in Northern California, might have been one of the lucky ones. On a nighttime drive with his father in the late 1990s, a ghostly silhouette flashed by the window. “That was my only time I’ve even thought I’ve seen one,” he recalled decades later. Tripp still can’t say for sure whether it was a kaschiip, the Karuk word for porcupine, but he holds on to the memory like a talisman.
The 43-year-old hasn’t seen another porcupine since. Porcupine encounters are rare among his tribe, and the few witnesses seem to fit a pattern: Almost all of them are elders, and they fondly remember an abundance of porcupines until the turn of this century. Now, each new sighting rings like an echo from the past: a carcass on the road; a midnight run-in. The tribe can’t help wondering: Where did all the porcupines go?
“It’s important for (porcupines) to be a part of our landscape. That’s part of why they’re chosen to be part of this ceremonial item.”
“Everyone’s concerned,” Tripp said. “If there were more (observations), we’d hear about it.”
The decline isn’t just in Northern California: Across the West, porcupines are vanishing. Wildlife scientists are racing to find where porcupines are still living, and why they’re disappearing. Others, including the Karuk Tribe, are already thinking ahead, charting ambitious plans to restore porcupines to their forests.
Porcupines are walking pincushions. Their permanently unkempt hairdo is actually a protective fortress of some 30,000 quills. But their body armor can be a liability, too—porcupines are known to accidentally quill themselves. “They’re big and dopey and slow,” said Tim Bean, an ecologist at California Polytechnic State University who has collared porcupines as part of his research. They waddle from tree to tree, usually at night, to snack on foliage or the nutrient-rich inner layer of bark.
But these large rodents are far from universally beloved. Their tree-gnawing habits damage lumber, and the timber industry has long regarded them as pests. Widespread poisoning and hunting campaigns took place throughout the 1900s in the US Between 1957 and 1959, Vermont alone massacred over 10,800 porcupines. Forest Service officials in California declared open season on porcupines in 1950, claiming that the species would ultimately destroy pine forests.
Though state bounty programs had ended by 1979, porcupine numbers have not rebounded. Recent surveys by researchers in British Columbia, Arizona, western Montana and Northern California show that porcupines remain scarce in those regions today. Historically, porcupine populations haven’t been well-monitored, so scientists can’t say for sure whether they are still declining or simply haven’t recovered after decades of persecution.
“We still don’t understand (why) they’re not reproducing and filling back in.”
But anecdotal evidence from those who recall when sightings were common is enough to ring alarm bells. Similar patterns appear to be playing out across the West: Veterinarians are treating fewer quilled pets, for example, and longtime rural homeowners have noticed fewer porcupines lurking in their backyards. Hikers’ accounts note that porcupines are harder to find than ever before. Some forest ecosystems are already showing the effects of losing an entire species from the food chain: In the Sierra Nevada, an endangered member of the weasel family called the fisher is suffering from lack of the protein porcupines once provided. As a result, the fishers are scrawnier and birth smaller litters in the Sierras than they do elsewhere.
Porcupines are culturally important to the Karuk Tribe, whose members weave quills into cultural and ceremonial items, such as baskets. But these days, the tribe imports quills more often than it harvests them. That’s more than just an inconvenience: Not being able to gather quills locally constitutes a form of lost connection between tribal members and their homelands. “It’s important for (porcupines) to be a part of our landscape. That’s part of why they’re chosen to be part of this ceremonial item,” Tripp said.
Erik Beever, an ecologist at the US Geological Survey, worries that the great porcupine vanishing act points to a broader trend. Across the country, biodiversity is declining faster than scientists can track it. The porcupine might just be one example of what Beever calls “this silent erosion of animal abundance.” But no one really knows what’s going on. Beever said, “We’re wondering whether the species is either increasing or declining without anybody even knowing.”
Scientists are racing to fill this knowledge gap. Bean and his team combed through a century’s worth of public records to map porcupine distribution patterns in the Pacific Northwest. Roadkill databases, wildlife agency reports and citizen science hits revealed that porcupines are dwindling in conifer forests but popping up in nontraditional habitats, such as deserts and grasslands. Beever is now leading a similar study across the entire Western United States.
Concerned scientists have several theories about why porcupines have not returned to their former stomping grounds. Illegal marijuana farms, which are often tucked away in forests, use rodenticides that kill many animals, including porcupines, while increased protections for apex predators like mountain lions may have inadvertently increased the decline of porcupines. On top of all this, porcupines have low reproduction rates, birthing only a single offspring at a time.
“Things don’t seem to be getting better in over the course of my lifetime.”
Understanding porcupine distribution isn’t easy. Porcupines are generalists, inhabiting a wide variety of forest types, so it’s challenging for researchers to know where to look. As herbivores, porcupines aren’t that easy to bait, either. Scientists have experimented with using brine-soaked wood blocks, peanut butter and even porcupine urine to coax the cautious critters toward cameras, but with only mixed success. In 34 years of both baited and unbaited camera surveys by the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center in the Sierra Nevada, porcupines have only shown up three times.
“It’s a mystery,” said John Buckley, the center’s executive director. “We still don’t understand (why) they’re not reproducing and filling back in where there’s very little disturbance of their habitat, like Yosemite National Park.”
The Karuk tribe is eager to bring porcupines back. But first, the tribe needs to figure out where healthy populations may already exist. Years of camera trap surveys have turned up scant evidence of the creature’s presence; one area that Tripp considers a “hotspot” had photographed a single porcupine. “That’s how rare they are,” Tripp said. So Karuk biologists are considering other methods, including using trained dogs to conduct scat surveys.
Reintroducing the species would require a delicate balancing act. Porcupines are already scarce, and it’s unclear whether already-small source populations could afford to lose a few members to be reintroduced elsewhere. Still, Tripp feels like it’s time to act, since the ecosystem doesn’t appear to be healing on its own. “Things don’t seem to be getting better in over the course of my lifetime,” Tripp said.
Yet his actions betray some lingering optimism. Tripp, his wife and daughter still regularly attend basket-weaving events involving quills, doing their part to uphold the Karuk’s age-old traditions that honor the porcupine. It’s a small act of stubborn hope—that, perhaps in a few years, the tribe will be able to welcome the porcupine home.
