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2025-10-20 02:02:30

In a ridiculous social media post the day before he headed off to federal prison for what was supposed to be a more than seven-year sentence, disgraced ex-congressman and known fabulist George Santos wrote, “I may be leaving the stage (for now), but trust me legends never truly exit.”

Less than three months later, Santos is back, following President Donald Trump’s announcement Friday night that he was commuting Santos’ sentence for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. And less than 48 hours after that, Santos is already back in the limelight of the Sunday morning interview circuit.

He sat down with CNN’s Dana Bash on State of the Union to address questions about his commutation and his post-prison plans. Santos alternated between claiming prison humbled him and insisting his sentence was unfair.

He claimed he had “no expectations” for a pardon and that he only found out about the commutation when fellow inmates told him they saw the news announced on TV. (Joseph Murray, Santos’ lawyer, told my colleague Noah Lanard that he was in “constant communication” with lawyers at the Justice Department’s pardon office.) He told Bash that his seven-year sentence—for participating in a credit card fraud scheme to boost his campaign finances and using some of those funds for personal purchases like designer clothing and OnlyFans content—was “disproportionate,” and called for a commutation for his former staffer Sam Miele, who was sentenced to a year in prison for wire fraud for his role in Santos’ scheme.

Santos essentially admitted to Bash he would not pay $370,000 in restitution to his victims, given that Trump’s action wipes out that obligation. “If it’s required of me by the law, yes, if it’s not, then no,” he said. “I will do whatever the law requires me to do.”

Santos described his time in prison “a great equalizer” and “very sobering.” And like many formerly incarcerated celebrities, Santos said he now wants to work on prison reform that he’s free. “I told this to the President, that I’d love to be involved with prison reform, and not in a partisan way, in a real human way, in a way that we effect it, that it helps society, it helps these individuals rebuild their lives, and we have a better system with less incarcerated people.”

He apologized to his constituents, supporters, and ex-colleagues, and said that he has no plans to run for office within the next decade.

Meanwhile, some of Santos’ fellow New York Republicans have been vocal about their opposition to Santos’ commutation.

Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) wrote on X: “George Santos didn’t merely lie—he stole millions, defrauded an election, and his crimes (for which he pled guilty) warrant more than a three-month sentence. He should devote the rest of his life to demonstrating remorse and making restitution to those he wronged.” Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), an Ethics Committee member who voted for Santos’ expulsion, said Santos “has shown no remorse,” adding, “The less than three months that he spent in prison is not justice.” In a statement provided to the New York Times, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) called Santos “a convicted con artist,” adding, “That will forever be his legacy, and I disagree with the commutation.” On CNN Sunday, Malliotakis said she thought Santos’ sentence was too long but that the time he served was “not sufficient.”

Asked by Bash about LaLota’s and Garbarino’s comments, Santos replied, “They’re entitled to their opinion.” He added that he is focused on the future. “I’ve learned a great deal and a very large slice of humble pie, if not the entire pie, for the experience I had [in prison].”

“I don’t know how much more humbled I can get before people believe I’m humbled or remorseful, but I can just do the best in my actions moving forward,” he added.

But later in the interview, Santos seemed to dismiss the critiques of his commutation, pointing to former President Joe Biden’s clemency of his family members before leaving office. “Pardon me if I’m not paying too much attention to the pearl-clutching of the outrage of my critics and of the people, predominantly on the left, who are going to go out there and try to make a big deal out of something like this,” he said.

“I’m pretty confident if President Trump had pardoned Jesus Christ off the cross,” he added, “he would have had critics.”

For all his talk about humility, though, Santos is already back to hawking direct-to-camera personalized videos on Cameo for $300 a pop. (He once tried to get me to buy one.) As of press time, he last recorded one just after 9 a.m. Sunday morning—likely just before, or after, he appeared on CNN.

Correction, October 19: A previous version of this story misstated the form of clemency Santos received. His sentence has been commuted.

2025-10-19 23:52:45

Saturday’s “No Kings” protests were, as my colleagues chronicled, about as wholesome as you could imagine.

There were inflatable animals. There were American flags galore. Even the New York Police Department admitted that the 100,000 protesters were peaceful and that cops made no arrests; police in Washington, DC and Austin, Texas said the same. But that hasn’t stopped top Republicans from thoroughly melting down over its success.

Case in point: On his Truth Social platform on Saturday night, President Donald Trump posted a Top Gun-style AI video of himself wearing a crown and dropping raw sewage on the protesters from a military plane. (Yes, you read that right.) One of the targets appears to be Gen Z Democratic influencer Harry Sisson. Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to questions about the video from Mother Jones on Sunday morning.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) doubled down on his prior assessment of the gatherings as “hate America” rallies. On ABC’s This Week on Sunday morning, Johnson claimed the protests included “hateful messages” and “violent rhetoric” against Trump. He also dismissed the protests—which took place in thousands of cities and towns both in the US and across the world—as a “stunt” orchestrated by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). “He’s closed the government down because he needs political cover and this was a part of it,” Johnson said. (The protests were not organized by Schumer.)

Official government social media accounts have been trolling the protest theme. The White House posted a photo of Trump and Vice President JD Vance wearing crowns, contrasted with Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) wearing sombreros. On Bluesky, Vance posted an AI video of Trump wearing a king’s crown and pulling out a sword as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) bows down to him, set to the song “Hail to the King.” The Department of Transportation, very bizarrely, posted illustrations of Schumer and Jeffries dressed as Disney princesses, alongside the caption, “No Kings!!”

As Max Madame, a protester in Oakland, Calif., told Mother Jones on Saturday of Johnson and other Republicans’ attacks: “They’re delusional. We all know that… they know they’re lying, we know they’re lying.”

2025-10-19 19:00:00

This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It has been 10 years since countries signed on to the Paris Agreement, and emissions and temperatures continue to reach new highs, fueling unprecedented weather disasters around the globe. Meanwhile, the shift to clean energy is facing powerful headwinds in the United States, where climate policies are being reversed and support for clean energy is withdrawn.

Yet, while the headlines paint a dismal picture of efforts to rein in climate change, the numbers often tell a different story. That is the assessment of data scientist Hannah Ritchie, a researcher at the University of Oxford and deputy editor of the publication Our World in Data. Analyzing the broader trends on global development, she sees a world making unheralded progress in the fight to stem warming.

Ritchie is the author of a new book Clearing the Air, which uses data to tackle common misconceptions about climate change. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, she explains why she isn’t worried about China’s coal-building spree, why she believes the impact of AI on electricity demand is largely overstated, and why the US reversal on clean energy may do little to slow global progress on climate. 

In the past few months, the US has slashed support for renewable energy. How do you think that will impact the global energy transition?

Obviously at a national level, I think the US transition will slow down. I think people’s assumption would be, of course, that it will also slow down the global transition. I’m not fully convinced of that. I think that often you get a scenario where a large, powerful country like the US leans back, it often creates room for others to lean forward.

I think you’re very much seeing this, even if you just look at China. They’re not just deploying clean energy very quickly domestically. They’re also really dominating global markets and really seeing this as an opportunity. And I think the US pulling back on this is probably giving China even more motivation to move faster.

How is China able to produce so much cheap clean energy?

 If you compare the cost of solar or batteries between China and the US, people always point to labor costs. They say the only reason China can make cheap batteries is because they have really cheap labor. I think even more important is they’ve heavily invested in automation. The number of workers per [battery produced] is about six times lower than it is in the US. 

What impact do you think the US putting tariffs on Chinese goods will have?

Often the argument for putting tariffs on is to protect domestic jobs, but it’s only protecting domestic manufacturing jobs. And when you look at jobs in clean energy, a relatively small share come from manufacturing. Most jobs in clean energy are in procurement or development or the installation or repair. They’re in other parts of the supply chain beyond manufacturing.

If you put the price up of these technologies, and the deployment slows down, that means that you have fewer jobs in other parts of the clean energy supply chain. If your sole goal is to stimulate manufacturing jobs, then of course you should put a high tariff on. But if you want to optimize clean energy jobs as a whole, tariffs actually work in a negative direction.

US automakers are now backing off from building EVs, and sales are expected to slow. What does that mean for the shift to electric cars?

I think if you look outside of the US, EVs are growing pretty quickly. The share of new sales that are electric in the US is far below most of the rest of the world. In Norway, you’re talking about 80-plus percent of new cars being electric. Over half of new sales in China are electric. And that’s a really fast evolution. In 2020, it was around 6 percent.

And I think you’re going to increasingly start to see this in other low- to middle- income countries. For many countries, they will just get cheap EVs or cheap scooters from China, and they will be independent from oil markets. 

China is building more clean energy, but it is also building more coal plants. How do you think about that?

I don’t actually care how many coal plants China builds. I care how much coal China burns. And it is possible to build more coal plants that burn less coal and have coal plants that are running less often. And that’s the general trend that we’re starting to see in China. 

In the US or in the UK, we use gas plants to fill in when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. China is basically trying to do the same, but with coal instead of gas. Which means that it is either retrofitting existing plants to be able to do that—ramping up and down when you need to fill in the gaps—or it is building new plants with that capability. 

Is the proliferation of AI and the electricity it demands going to be a lifeline for fossil power?

Potentially in the short term. It’s obviously very hard to predict these trends, but when I look at projections, I don’t see it as a dramatically different challenge from any of the other electrification challenges that we have.

If you look at projections of the growth in electricity demand by 2030 [from data centers], it’s actually lower than the increase from air conditioning or EVs or industry. I think in people’s heads they often think about AI as much, much bigger than that.

I think the key challenge is not necessarily about total electricity demand. [AI] is moving extremely quickly, and it just takes time to build [new power plants], unfortunately, which means that you just go for what is available, which often is a gas plant that’s not running at full capacity. And the other challenge is that data centers are very highly geographically concentrated, which means that there is a lot of local pressure on the grid. 

A lot of tech companies are looking at nuclear plants to power data centers. Do you see risks there?

Burning fossil fuels, through air pollution, kills millions of people every single year. And you compare that to the biggest nuclear disasters we’ve had. No one died in Three Mile Island. No one died directly from Fukushima, even though a tsunami hit the nuclear power plant. And the estimates for Chernobyl vary, but they’re maybe in the low thousands. You’re talking about thousands of deaths over decades, relative to millions of deaths from fossil fuels every single year.

I think for me the safety component is just not an obvious deal breaker. The key challenge is, one, cost and, two, construction time. And I think they’re very much interlinked. Often these very large time overruns inevitably lead to extremely high costs. And the reality is that in a country like the US or many countries across Europe, it now is pretty expensive to build a nuclear plant.

In the event that warming does reach unmanageable levels, some scientists say we should be looking into solar geoengineering to cool the planet. Others say that we shouldn’t even be researching the technology because knowing more about it would tempt its use. What’s your view?

I think the challenge is that we currently have insufficient information on the potential impacts of solar geoengineering. I think my main point on this is that I don’t think the odds are that low that over the next 50 years a country, or even a small group of countries, decides on their own that they’re going to do this. They have had a really large heat wave that has killed a lot of people, and they don’t want to see any more warming.

You can do this relatively cheaply. It will be accessible to many countries across the world to do this on their own. And if we are in that scenario, I would really like us to understand what we might be dealing with, what the consequences might be. 

There’s a debate among people who work on climate change as to whether we should be thinking about individual action or focusing solely on systemic change. How do you think about that?

In general, I think these debates create a false dichotomy. To me, neither extreme makes any sense. I think it’s wrong to say that as individuals we can fix this, and if we all just do our little part, it’ll be solved, because that’s obviously not true. At the same time, I don’t like this narrative that this is purely a systemic problem, and it’s completely on a few companies and governments to solve this. 

Take the transition to electric cars. You can say that this is a systemic problem. In order for us to make this transition, governments need to make sure there is a large charging network everywhere. Companies need to make sure that electric cars have a really good range and are affordable for people, and there needs to be finance behind that. And I think they should be doing that. But they’re never going to do that if, as individuals, we vow to never give up a gasoline or petrol car.

So yes, governments and financial institutions and companies need to take action and make this change at a systemic level. But you also need individuals who are willing to play their part, whether that’s in their purchasing decisions, or whether that’s in support of governments that want to take those actions. 

Do you consider yourself an optimist on climate?

My work is generally quite positive, and I’m relatively optimistic, and I think some people take that the wrong way. I don’t want people to walk away thinking that [solving climate change is] easy or it’s inevitable. We still have a ton of work to do. I often try to present opportunities or visions of what we can build, but by no means is that transition inevitable. We have to actually work to make it happen.

2025-10-19 06:24:27

The first protester I noticed as I approached the No Kings rally Saturday was dressed as a giant yellow duck. All around, demonstrators were converging on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC—one wore a Lincoln-style stovepipe hat and carried a sign that read, “Protect Constitutional Rights” and “I America.”

Animal costumes have become an ever-present symbol of the anti-Trump movement—a way to mock the administration’s assertions that protests are overrun with dangerous radicals. In DC, the duck was joined by a smattering of other fauna: a chicken here, a few dinosaurs there. But what struck me most about the event—which House Speaker Mike Johnson predicted would be a “hate America rally”—was how earnestly patriotic the demonstrators were.

American flags were everywhere, carried by people of all races and ages. A few flew upside-down, symbolizing—Alito-style—a nation in distress. Most were waved proudly. Signs declared protesters’ allegiance to the country, the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law.

Robin, a DC resident whose flag-adorned sign included the full text of the First Amendment, said she wanted to make clear that “just because we’re liberals doesn’t mean we hate America.”

There were other flags, too: A lot of Pride flags; some Palestinian, Mexican, and Ukrainian flags; an Irish flag. There were a ton of DC flags—they’ve popped up everywhere in the city since Trump’s militarized takeover.

But those were all out numbered, by far, by American flags. The protest organizers made sure of that. Many marchers had clearly brought their own from home, but volunteers were on hand to pass out flags to anyone who wanted one. “I’m trying to protect democracy in this country,” said Neshama, one of those volunteers. “We need to show that the people at the rally are pro-America.”

I talked to a trio of older protesters sitting on a wall, together holding an American flag as marchers streamed endlessly past. They didn’t want to give their names or have their photo taken; they said they were afraid of being doxxed. “I support democracy and our country,” one of them told me. “It’s not about ideology.” He said that growing up, he’d never imagined that all three branches of government would be “supporting autocracy.”

A woman chimed in; she wanted to share what another member of the group had said to her earlier: “I’ve never bought an American flag before, and this is what it’s come to.” We all laughed, and one of them added that “it was important to show that we love America, too.”

On my way out, I walked past the Department of Labor, which has been draped since this summer with an enormous image of Donald Trump’s face. In front, a party was going on. Icona Pop’s “I love it” blared as protesters danced with a stegosaurus, a unicorn, and a revolutionary in a tricorne hat.

When the music paused, a voice came over the loudspeaker. “We are all American,” he said. “It’s our constitutional right to be here.”

2025-10-19 05:22:13

On Saturday, countless people gathered at “No Kings” protests in thousands of cities and towns across the United States and the world. Their focus was on President Donald Trump and his administration’s increasing turn towards authoritarianism.

In the lead up to the protests, top Republicans had tried to portray demonstrators as a mix of left-wing extremists, paid agitators, and Hamas supporters. House Speaker Mike Johnson called it the “Hate America Rally.”

The absurdity of these claims became even more obvious on Saturday. Protesters frequently flew the American flag, or dressed as the Statue of Liberty and Revolutionary War era Americans. Others wore inflatable animal costumes that made a mockery of the administration’s sinister claims about its critics. Below are photos from events from Wisconsin to Paris.

2025-10-19 03:45:47

A joyous, mocking menagerie of frogs, axolotls, and at least one giant pink hippo made its way down Seventh Avenue in Manhattan on Saturday, alongside thousands of others, in a defiant protest that formed part of the nationwide “No Kings” rallies.

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With limited visibility inside hot inflatable suits, the marchers’ steps were sometimes ginger. Amphibious, reptilian, and fantastical alike were repeatedly stopped by fellow protesters, photographers, and journalists like me—making progress slow and a bit hapless, adding to the general air of absurd exuberance.

“Solidarity with Portland!” said Denise Cohen, a 59-year-old dog groomer and podcaster from upstate New York who was peering out from inside a unicorn costume, alongside her husband Marty (in a dinosaur outfit.) “I wanted frogs, but nobody had frogs,” she said, referencing the original protesters who donned the inflatables in Portland in recent months.

“I tried to get a Portland frog outfit and they were sold out until November,” said Oscar Hernandez, 58, from Weehawken, New Jersey, dressed in a giant pink rhino costume and shuffling (or perhaps dancing—hard to tell) down the street. “You know, this is fun! This is, this is America. This is not a hate America rally,” he said, referring to how Trump and his team have been representing the mass gatherings.

Rather than wearing an inflatable, financial analyst Christopher Hardwick, 46, appeared in hastily constructed drag, clutching a McDonald’s coffee, and adorned with black and yellow accessories “to make it look a little Proud Boy-y.” His goal was to reclaim the word “antifa” from the Trump administration. “I’m a big antifa girl now!”

Keith Whitmer, 70, wanted to do the same. “I really don’t want the right-wing Republican Party to take antifa—the word antifa—and make it mean something bad, because it’s actually what we’ve been doing since the 1940s.”