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2026-06-04 19:30:00

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

The Trump administration plans to dismantle a $368 million deep-sea observation system that has for more than a decade provided crucial data on ocean systems and climate change.

In a notice, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that it had “initiated descoping of the Ocean Observatories Initiative” (OOI), a vast ocean observation network comprising more than 900 instruments that collect data on ocean health, including current patterns, climate variability, and marine biodiversity.

The notice, issued on May 21, came just days after Trump fired all members of the independent board that oversees the NSF. A statement by NSF head of media affairs, Mike England, said the program was not being cancelled entirely and described the plans as a “descope,” or reduction of elements, though it was not clear what data collection capacity would be left.

The notice described plans to remove “all in-water infrastructure” from observation sites off the coasts of North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, as well as from the Irminger Sea, a marginal sea between Greenland and Iceland.

Some scientists expressed dismay at the plan, while Democratic lawmakers said they would fight it, including Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who called it a “shortsighted move” that would “end up costing American taxpayers more not less,” the New York Times reported.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, said on X: “Fossil fuel is heating our oceans by the zettajoule, so Trump’s corrupt fossil fuel stooges want to turn off the monitors.”

Following the announcement, the OOI’s principal investigator, Jim Edson, said the NSF’s plan involves a phased recovery and infrastructure removal process expected to take place over the next 15 months. “As infrastructure is recovered from each array, the associated real-time data streams and observing capabilities at those locations will come to an end,” Edson said.

The move will bring to an end more than a decade of continuous ocean monitoring after the system first became operational in June 2016.

Describing the network as having “delivered the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems,” Edson added: “We are profoundly grateful for the extraordinary efforts of the scientists, engineers, operators, educators, students and partners who made this facility possible and who continue to advance its legacy through the use of its data.”

The dismantling of the OOI marks another step in the Trump administration’s rollback of science and climate initiatives. It also follows Trump’s push to expand deep-sea mining and loosen fishing regulations, a policy that has alarmed ocean scientists and climate experts.

Hilary Palevsky, a professor focusing on marine biogeochemistry and oceanography at Boston College, pointed to the significance of the data that will be lost, particularly given the sophisticated engineering required to deploy and maintain the instruments.

“One of the real powers of this OOI and a lot of the collection of autonomous data is that scientists like me don’t have to have the expertise or the resources to be able to deploy this kind of infrastructure ourselves,” Palevsky said. “Being able to have instruments, both actually out in the atmosphere floating in the surface ocean, as well as surviving through the really deep mixing and waves in the subsurface.”

She said: “Over the more than 10 years that these things have been deployed, they’ve just gotten better and better at it. And so the data return has also gotten better and better over time…the scientific community was really just getting to the point of being able to capitalize on the data that had been collected so far…I’m really disappointed for the continuation of this important data set.”

Palevsky also warned that rebuilding such a network in the future would be difficult, saying: “If we want to put [the instruments] back out again, we need people who know how to do it and the team that knows how to do it is being dismantled along with the infrastructure program itself.

“We’re potentially at risk of having a gap in our ability to regain the expertise to do things that we had sort of just figured out how to pull off.”

For Palevsky and her students, OOI data has helped shed light on biological production in the ocean and its role in carbon sequestration—the process by which carbon dioxide is captured and stored—as well as deep-ocean processes, marine ecosystems and fisheries.

Data from the OOI has also contributed to research on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a critical system of Atlantic Ocean currents that studies suggest may be more vulnerable to collapse than previously thought, with potentially severe consequences for the global climate.

“One of the important processes in the AMOC is what we call convection, this really deep mixing of surface waters into the deep ocean that happens in winter, basically driven by the surface ocean getting really cold because the atmosphere gets super cold in winter and big, windy storms blow across the surface ocean,” Palevsky said.

“We have gained some really important insights into both how that happens in the Irminger Sea in particular, and how the drivers of that process vary from year to year from the observations that have been gained at this site,” she added.

For scientists like Palevsky, the consequences of dismantling the OOI extend far beyond ocean researchers, particularly as climate change intensifies extreme weather events around the world.

“As we reduce the amount of data that we have, the observations, as well as the science more generally to understand what’s happening in the climate system, it makes it much harder for us as a society to understand what we’re facing and what we need to do to plan for and adapt to it,” she said.

In a statement to the Guardian, the NSF head of media affairs, Mike England, said the program was not being cancelled entirely: “The NSF is not cancelling the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The decision to descope aligns with NSF’s wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.”

2026-06-04 18:00:00

When I buried my father, a man who bequeathed me his entire face but very little of his time, I turned to words from Jesmyn Ward. I didn’t feel appropriately shaken, and certainly this was a problem. By my late 20s, half my family spanning four generations were dead, each person lost to some calamity of health or circumstance, so I had learned to turn shock into productivity, action. I could not stop the bullet that killed my sister or the fire that took my uncle, but I knew where to get good card stock for an obituary.

When I picked up Ward’s 2013 memoir, Men We Reaped, I wasn’t trying to feel so much as understand. Our society is built to incentivize the ephemeral, and as a millennial at the dawn of the Instagram era, I worried about my ability to compartmentalize and move on; to turn the active, lifelong work of grieving into a concrete task to be checked off on a to-do list. I could no longer remember my grandmother’s voice, and shouldn’t that fact make me cry?

It didn’t, but reading the prologue of Men We Reaped got me close. In it, Ward lists the five young Black men in her life who died in a brutal four-year span and described how the weight of those tragedies nearly silenced her until she found an escape through her own form of productivity: her work. “My ghosts were once people,” she wrote, “and I cannot forget that.”

I suddenly didn’t feel so guilty about not crying. I recognized the work of writing and remembering as their own daily rituals of grieving, of paying homage. Recently, I spoke with Ward about her new book, On Witness and Respair, a collection of nonfiction essays spanning more than a decade. The collection takes its name from a viral essay she wrote for Vanity Fair at the start of the pandemic about losing her partner, then learning to reckon with that loss as the world began to tally its own. Our conversation touched on creative form, the process of writing, and why place—in this case, Mississippi—has become so central to her own narrative.

A lot of your writing deals with loss, including the sudden passing of your partner in 2020 and the death of your brother 20 years ­earlier. How has your grief shifted over time?

I knew from losing my brother that the first two years were basically lost. It’s just a haze. Waking up every day with the shock of someone’s absence as the first thing you encounter. After that, you move into the work of grief. For me, that’s learning how to carry the love you still feel for someone while navigating your life. It’s been six, going on seven years since my partner died, and I’m still in that phase. It’s the small things. Cooking is different, sleeping is different, laundry is different. You have to figure out how all of that will change and reconcile yourself to it. The longing doesn’t go away. You just learn how to live with it.

Your new essay collection, On Witness and Respair, contains an unusual word most of our readers would have never heard of—“respair,” meaning “fresh hope.” Where did you find that?

On Twitter, actually, in a poem by a Black poet. I looked it up and realized it meant the opposite of despair. I couldn’t use it yet when I found it because I was still in the first hot press of grief. But I wrote it down. When I wrote the Vanity Fair essay about the George Floyd protests and losing my partner, it felt like the right place. Like maybe using that word was the first step out.

The collection spans your entire writing life, including a 2008 piece about surviving Hurricane Katrina. What did it feel like to read it all at once?

Strange. I went back to the Katrina essay, which I wrote so long ago, and I was honestly surprised. I tell my students all the time that they’re always doing something right, but I don’t always apply that to myself. I struggle with confidence and self-doubt as a writer. Going back, I found these flashes of wisdom, moments of lyrical language that moved me. I was like, Oh, I was doing some stuff!

Nonfiction seems to demand something different of you than fiction. What is it?

It’s harder. With fiction, I have the whole world to work with, which is freeing. With nonfiction, the boundlessness of real life overwhelms me, so I outline obsessively. I have to know exactly where I’m going before I begin. But the rewards are unlike anything else. So many of these essays taught me something I didn’t expect—about myself, about the people I love—just because I committed to sitting inside a moment that was uncomfortable or dark. That’s where I feel most exposed. And most changed.

After years of living in other places for school and work, you’ve made a deliberate choice to settle in Mississippi, where you grew up. Why?

It keeps me honest. If I weren’t rooted here, it would be easy to navel-gaze, to become shallow. But I also wrestle with it. It’s hard to live as a Black progressive in a place where people may be cordial to your face but fundamentally don’t believe you’re fully human. That double consciousness is real. I have no illusions about Mississippi. But this place—the people, the community, the language—it’s what inspires me. The way I describe rain, because I’m from southern Mississippi, is completely different from how someone in California would. This place informs the way I use language.

You’ve talked about wanting to root your children in the way you were rooted. What does that mean to you?

My editor tells me most people don’t grow up where their family has lived for generations—where your people stretch back into the 1800s. That felt rare and important to me. I wanted my kids to have that, even knowing they’ll probably leave one day, the way I did. Maybe they return, maybe they don’t. But I wanted them to have something to leave from.

How has motherhood shaped how you think about legacy?

My oldest says she hates reading, which feels like a personal attack. My 9-year-old loves it. My 3-year-old—jury’s still out. They’re not flat, they’re not foils; they’re little complicated people. I’m not the perfect mother. I know I’m going to do harm, right? But I do think that because writing requires empathy and also fosters empathy, it goes hand in hand with the kind of parenting that I try to do. When I think about legacy, I hope that when my kids are grown—especially when I’m no longer here—they can look at the work and understand what was underneath it. That the storytelling, the empathy, all of it was an attempt to make the world a little easier for them to move through. Especially in the nonfiction and the writing that’s about them or around them, I hope they’re able to see beyond the surface and understand the intent behind the work.

2026-06-04 07:08:51

While most California races were called by the morning after Election Day, a handful of key holdouts remain. “This is normal,” Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber, who was on the ballot herself, emphasized in a press release. “I would call on all Californians to be patient.”

That’s a hard ask, at least for Richard Pan, a Democrat who is running third in one of the state’s tightest races: the Sixth Congressional District.

In California’s open primary system, the top two finishers in a given race advance to a general election runoff regardless of party affiliation. The Sixth leans blue, but if Democratic votes are split among a large pool of contenders, Democratic candidates could be iced out.

That’s how things were looking in the Sixth as of mid-afternoon Wednesday. With 48 percent of votes counted, Rep. Kevin Kiley—the Third District Republican incumbent who recently renounced his party to run as an independent in the Sixth—was ahead with more than a quarter of the vote. In second place was Republican Michael Stansfield, whose bid isn’t serious. (He doesn’t even have a campaign website.) Running a close third—just one percentage point behind Stansfield—is Pan, the outspoken pediatrician, pro-vaccine warrior, and former state senator I profiled for Mother Jones in April.

If this trend holds, Pan, who is perhaps best known for having authored some of the country’s toughest state vaccine laws, would be headed straight back to the clinic.

Stansfield’s success as the only Republican on the ballot highlights the unintended consequences of Prop 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting plan that voters approved last November. After the state congressional map was redrawn to help more Democrats win seats, the new Sixth remains blue, but less so than before, as it has absorbed conservative regions carved from other districts.

The close race seems to have surprised Stansfield, a 50 year-old tech worker who received no donations and did essentially no campaigning. He only ran, he told US News, to send a message to the religious right about peace in the Middle East. “I wasn’t necessarily going after it to win,” Stansfield said.

And he might not. Many of the remaining votes are from northern Sacramento and the adjoining suburbs, a region that so far has favored Pan. And votes counted later may have a different skew. In California, early ballot returns were up among Republican voters for this cycle, and lagged for Democrats relative to previous years.

“I think [Pan is] going to eke it out,” Sacrament0-based Democratic strategist Steven Maviglio told the New York Times. “But it’s going to be close.”

2026-06-04 06:11:37

The FIFA Men’s World Cup starts next week—and some players still don’t know whether they’ll be able to travel to their matches.

On Wednesday, Switzerland’s main goalscorer, Breel Embolo, applied for a visa at the US embassy in the country’s capital after US officials blocked him from boarding a flight with his teammates to their World Cup training camp in San Diego the day before.

The Swiss soccer federation stated that the US has been reviewing Embolo’s criminal conviction after a 2018 altercation in Basel, Switzerland. The verdict was finalized in April.

“The embassy’s inquiries focused specifically on whether any physical violence had been involved. This was not the case,” the Swiss soccer body said in a statement. According to Swiss outlets, Embolo was sentenced to a fine of roughly $165,000, conditional on two years of probation, for making multiple threats during an argument.

Meanwhile, the men’s national team of South Africa, a frequent target of the Trump administration over “white genocide” claims, had to delay their Saturday flight from Johannesburg to Mexico City because at least 20 people in their traveling group—mainly players—were still trying to get the US embassy in that country to process their visas.

On Sunday, Gayton McKenzie, South Africa’s sports, arts and culture minister, announced that all of the national team players had received their visas to travel to the US, but that an assistant coach, team doctor, the head of security, and one team analyst were still waiting. McKenzie criticized the situation earlier that day, calling it “embarrassing & grossly unfair towards the players & coaching staff.” 

“Action must be taken against those responsible for this mess,” he continued. “We are being made to look like fools.”

News24, a South African news platform, reported that the team arrived on Tuesday morning but that the assistant coach and head of security arrived late after their visas were finally approved. On Monday, McKenzie notably apologized for his criticisms, posting on X that “the fault is entirely on our side,” and that US embassy workers in South Africa were “only too helpful” and “even worked on a Sunday for the first time ever.” McKenzie did not elaborate on what mistakes South Africa made. 

The Trump administration has a record of denying international athletes visas, including members of an Ethiopian delegation to the World Athletics Cross Country Championships, whose 44-year medal streak was broken by a mass visa denial in January. Multiple Cuban sports delegations have also been locked out of sports competitions since 2025 by the US’ refusal to grant them visas—including Olympic qualification events. And according to Television Jamaica, Javontae Smith, a shotput and discus thrower from Munro College in Jamaica, was denied a US nonimmigrant visa last month to compete in the Penn Relays in Philadelphia.

Iran’s national team is set to leave for Mexico on Saturday. The team’s initial three matches will take place in the US, but the country’s soccer federation won FIFA approval in May to move its training base from Tuscon, Arizona, to Tijuana, Mexico, due to security concerns amid the US and Israel’s ongoing war in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. 

According to Al Jazeera, the federation has not yet said whether the players had received all necessary visas for both Mexico and the US, though Mehdi Taj, Iran’s football federation chief, said on Monday that they expected to receive visas for Mexico on Tuesday or Wednesday “and then a US visa will be issued quickly.”  

The delays have created unprecedented uncertainty for many national team players and sparked outrage among their fans, who now have to worry about whether they can even get to the tournament—let alone whether their team will play well in it.

2026-06-04 00:34:36

This story was originally published by Popular Information, the author’s substack publication. Subscribe here.

Jared Kushner’s efforts to negotiate an end to the Iran War are not going well. But he is only moonlighting as one of the Trump administration’s top diplomats. Kushner is also having problems at his day job as the founder of Affinity Partners, a private equity fund bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments.

Along with his wife Ivanka Trump, the daughter of President Trump, Kushner is developing a multibillion-dollar resort on Sazan Island in Albania and nearby coastline. In an interview with the David Senra podcast published Sunday, Ivanka Trump described the project dreamily:

It’s an unbelievable, beautiful, 1,400-hectare private island in the middle of the Mediterranean. We were on a friend’s boat and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island, we went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated, and it stayed with us ever since. And over the course of many years, we developed the opportunity to help realize its potential and transform it, but with a lot of restraint and care because the land is so beautiful that, really, the architecture has to be fully integrated into it, almost rise from it.

She also said the project is “the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly want to live.”

But the reality of the massive project, which includes 10,000 hotel rooms and is located in one of Europe’s most environmentally sensitive areas, is a lot messier. In 2024, the Albanian government changed the law to allow the area, which was previously part of a protected national park, to be developed. After Trump’s election in November 2024, the Albanian government granted Atlantic Incubation Partners, an LLC linked to Kushner, “strategic investor“ status, clearing the way for permits.

Kushner’s LLC was granted that status “just weeks before the new US president’s inauguration, even without a business plan or feasibility study for the construction of a luxury resort on an uninhabited island once used by the army for shooting practice.”

On Monday, Albania’s Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime, known as SPAK, confirmed it was investigating Kushner’s project. The investigation will probe the changes to the land’s protected status and how Kushner-controlled entities obtained rights.

An investigative report by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network found that the project involved a “network of shady individuals and companies“ including “a businessman accused of links to the Italian mafia, a former judge who resigned due to the vetting process, the daughter of a lawyer accused of forgery, the company of a murdered businessman and individuals linked to one of Albania’s biggest oligarchs, Shefqet Kastrati.”

In January, 41 environmental organizations from 28 countries wrote to Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and called for “the immediate suspension of any decisions advancing the project.” The groups said the resort posed “serious risks to the biodiversity and critical habitats of the area,” including “crucial habitats for some of the world’s most endangered marine species.”

Rama, however, has continued to defend the project. “There is not a single chance it will be stopped for as long as I am here,” Rama said at a press conference Tuesday.

On Senra’s podcast, Ivanka Trump said she was “just there [in Albania] walking the lands” to “sort of be with it and experience it alongside some of the greatest living architects of our time.” She did not mention that the property has been subject to mass protests.

On April 29, government officials allowed barbed wire fencing to be constructed around the coastal portions of the resort property. This cut off miles of beach from the public. Heavy machinery was brought in to construct access roads.

The actions prompted regular protests by Albanians objecting to handing Kushner a public asset to develop into an ultra-luxury resort. Video captured private security guards dragging a protester across the ground.

After the incident, “authorities revoked the licenses of two private security firms involved in the incident, arrested one guard and stripped the local police chief of his duties.” Fifteen protesters were charged with crimes.

This week, protests expanded to Tirana, Albania’s capital, with thousands chanting “Albania is not for sale” and demanding Rama’s resignation.

In December, Kushner’s plan to build a Trump tower in Belgrade collapsed after the project became enmeshed in a criminal corruption scandal involving Serbian government officials. Prosecutors allege that government officials forged documents to remove cultural protections from the land where the tower was to be constructed.

2026-06-03 23:07:19

“The principles I hold dear are gone,” 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley said after getting fired Tuesday night for criticizing Bari Weiss’ leadership at CBS News the day before as submitting to President Donald Trump’s whims. “And so I must leave.”

In his statement, he detailed how the program’s new management repeatedly instructed him to “inject falsehoods and bias” and “include assertions that are unverified.” Though Pelley refused to do so, he said network leadership allowed politicians to pick their own interviewers—“giving politicians control” and destroying the broadcast’s integrity.

You can read Pelley’s full statement below:

As I wrote last December, CBS has previously pulled 60 Minutes segments, including one that was critical of the Trump administration deporting people from Venezuela to a maximum security prison in El Salvador. 

At the 47th News and Documentary Emmy Awards last Wednesday, Scott Pelley handed Santiago Campos, a high school senior, a $10,000 scholarship from CBS News for a submission that reflected on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns through the story of his own family. Campos condemned CBS News in his acceptance speech, stating that the network’s new editorial direction “stains the legacy of Mike Wallace, the namesake of this scholarship.”

CBS News’ downfall comes as David Ellison—son of Oracle co-founder and centi-billionaire Larry Ellison—took over Paramount, the company that owns the network. 

“God, we need young people like you right behind us.” Pelley said to Campos after his acceptance speech. “I know that Mike Wallace is looking down at you with pride at this very moment.”