2025-10-09 04:05:40
In the 1970s, when researchers asked children to draw a scientist, 99 percent of them drew a man. As this experiment was repeated over 50 years, the number of women drawn increased, and within the past decade, more than half of girls will draw a woman when asked what a scientist looks like.
Today, Google search results tend to agree with these children’s drawings. Type in an occupation, and you’ll be met by a wall of stock photos that tell a story of gender parity across many professions. But despite the apparent gender equality, the results capture other elements of societal expectations of women. A close observer might notice that many of the women depicted seem rather young—and the men tend to appear older.
It’s no secret that women are encouraged—by advertisers, popular media, and well-meaning comments of “you don’t look your age”—to appear youthful. Aging is often depicted as a negative for women, while older men are regarded as wiser and more experienced. Most women have encountered this personally, but data on the phenomenon has been scarce.
To find exactly how widespread this bias is, a team of Berkeley researchers surveyed images and text across some of the most well-trafficked places on the internet, such as ChatGPT, IMDb, Google, and Wikipedia and found that women are regularly depicted as younger than men—and devalued because of it.
This in itself didn’t surprise Solène Delecourt, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and a co-author of the study published in Nature on Wednesday, but “the effects we see are much, much broader, and potentially carry effects in the labor market for women at a scale that was maybe more than I even expected,” she said.
The researchers analyzed over half a million images from Google search, in which women consistently appeared younger than men. This serves as a measure of cultural bias because “it’s basically trying to give you content that you’re most likely to click on,” added co-author Douglas Guilbeault, who is now an associate professor at Stanford. “That has a way of being prone to bias, because it ends up just amplifying whatever most people click on.”
Across the internet, women are most commonly shown in their 20s, while men are usually shown in their 40s and 50s. And it’s not just that women in the images look younger. Often, they are younger. On IMDb and Wikipedia, the researchers were able collect information about the actual ages of people in the photos, and this trend persisted.
“If you have biased data going in, you will in all likelihood replicate the bias. And we see this again and again.”
This reflects hiring biases in the entertainment industry, Guilbeault noted, but these are also the most visited pages. For the people looking up Hollywood profiles on IMDb, “the influence and attention is biased towards older men.”
In both online images and text, the researchers found similar, skewed depictions of men and women in thousands of occupations and other categories. But in census data, across most of the fields examined, there were no age differences among men and women. In the few professions where an age gap existed, the women were older, on average, than the men. But the online images presented an inverted picture.
“The pattern we see in the data just does not match reality,” Delecourt said. “The average woman in the US, and actually in the world, has a higher life expectancy. The average woman is older, so what we see in…online images and text and videos is wrong.”
This age-gap myth also affects how people view women in the workplace. As a part of the study, the researchers asked participants to find photos of people working in different professions. When the participants selected photos of women, they assumed that people with that job were generally younger and had less experience.
By influencing people’s perceptions, this pervasive imagery can have real-world consequences in hiring decisions. And the online age gaps were most extreme for higher-status and higher-earning positions, potentially contributing to the gender pay gap, which is more pronounced among people with post-graduate and professional degrees.
Online data is also used to train AI, which perpetuates biases. In the case of age and gender, the researchers found that ChatGPT assumed women were younger and less experienced and rated resumes from older men the best—a concerning fact as more and more companies use AI in hiring, from screening resumes to conducting and recording interviews.
“Computer-driven decisions have this veneer of objectivity,” said Hilke Schellmann, a professor at NYU and author of the book The Algorithm who was not involved in the study. “The problem lies in that we as humans often think the results of models seem objective, thematically correct, but in reality, if you have biased data going in, you will in all likelihood replicate the bias. And we see this again and again.”
The large AI models “require consuming all of the internet’s data,” Guilbeault told me. “When you start dealing with data at that scale of human culture, it’s inevitable that it’s going to just be fraught with biases and stereotypes and mythologies and illusions, and so it’s really problematic.”
And the stereotypes can become more deeply rooted as AI develops. “The model learns from the previous model, and if the bias is baked in, we have a lot of evidence that it may amplify the bias,” Schellmann said. There aren’t guardrails built into the models, and there’s very little oversight, she added.
The researchers studied age and gender because those were two categories they could confidently measure across the internet—but they are far from the only ways online data and AI models are biased. Other research has found that AI image generators often produce racist and sexist stereotypes, which more people will likely encounter as AI images and text pervade search results and the wider online landscape.
“People are increasingly relying on the internet and these algorithms to learn about their social world, to filter information, to give them images and videos and content that then they use to inform their views of who people are and how the world works,” Guilbeault said. “These popular algorithms used by millions and millions of people every day are entrenching these biases.”
2025-10-09 03:49:00
Federal officers are firing so much tear gas at protesters outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, that some nearby community members who aren’t even protesting are struggling to breathe when they leave their homes to run errands.
That’s according to a lawsuit filed this week by journalists and demonstrators who accuse the Department of Homeland Security of using “extreme brutality” to “intimidate and silence” them while they protest or report on protests outside the facility, about 12 miles west of downtown Chicago.
“Snipers with guns loaded with pepper balls, paintballs, and rubber bullets are stationed on the roof of the Broadview ICE facility with their weapons trained on the press and civilians,” the lawsuit states. “Federal agents have tackled and slammed people to the ground; they have lobbed flash grenades and tear gas canisters indiscriminately into the crowd.”
It continues: “No legitimate purpose exists for this brutality or for these arrests. The officers are not physically threatened. No government property is threatened.”
Broadview’s ICE facility is the main processing center for immigrants who are arrested throughout the Chicago area, and protests sprang up over the summer amid reports that it was holding people for longer than allowed in cramped and uncomfortable conditions; some protesters tried to block federal vehicles from driving out of the facility with detained immigrants.
In September, after the Trump administration expanded immigration enforcement in the Chicago area with “Operation Midway Blitz”—an operation that has since led to hundreds of arrests and a militarized overnight raid of an entire apartment building, terrorizing residents—protests intensified. The lawsuit is filled with examples of people who injured by federal officers outside the Broadview facility. Here are a few from last month:
Federal officers “are acting to intimidate and silence the press and civilians engaged in protected First Amendment activities,” the plaintiffs argue in the suit. Their attorneys are also seeking a temporary restraining order against officers.
On October 2, Illinois State Police used concrete barriers to demarcate a “First Amendment zone” outside the facility, asking protesters to remain inside the area to avoid violence from officers. Many protesters ignored the zone and protested on the other side of the facility. The next day, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was visiting, commended officers for their “professionalism” and urged them to “hammer” protesters.
“We’re not taking this anymore,” she said. “The president’s sick of it. I’m sick of it. And we’re going to give you guys all the authority that you need to go out there and arrest these individuals who are advocating for violence against you.”
In Broadview, federal immigration officers have also harmed individuals who came to the ICE facility for business, according to the lawsuit:
“The relentless deployment of tear gas, pepper spray, and mace at the ICE facility is endangering nearby village residents, harming police officers, harming firefighters and American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights,” Mayor Katrina Thompson said in September.
The tear gas has a 200- to 700-foot radius when it’s deployed, but wind carries it farther, the mayor said. The lawsuit cites several Broadview residents who have struggled to breathe because of the noxious fumes, including Jose Juan Alvarado and his wife, who were “sickened and reduced to tears” when they went to the grocery store.
Dimeko Harden, who lives a block from the ICE facility, has been unable to retrieve mail or “engage in normal activities without experiencing pain and difficulty breathing,” the lawsuit adds. “She has been forced to keep her teenage son at home, because he suffers from asthma.”
On Monday, Thompson announced an order limiting protests at the facility from 9 am to 6 pm, citing the “escalation of violence by ICE” and the effect on residents. “People have to go to work, they have to get their children ready for school, our businesses have to serve their customers, and our residents with developmental disabilities, who have sensory issues, have suffered emotional meltdowns because of the chaotic environment when protests get disruptive,” she said.
As the so-called Operation Midway Blitz continues, protesters elsewhere have also been met with harsh tactics. Last week, when federal agents approached a Hispanic grocery store in Chicago, people started yelling at them and recording with their phones. According to the lawsuit, ICE officers called one protester a “faggot” and, after someone blocked their SUV, fired tear gas into the crowd without warning. Children at a nearby elementary school had to move inside for recess.
2025-10-09 03:30:20
“Should I start looking for work in Canada?” a friend in the Midwest, who is not easily flustered, texted me the week that late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended, and I could see why. Sure, it was just a TV network suspending a comedian, and it was also before the president declared that the military would use “full force” in “war-ravaged” Portland, Oregon. But to a lot of people who aren’t otherwise following the crazy, this one hit home. The most basic American freedom, the first one enumerated in the Constitution, the right to say whatever the hell we please, including and especially about the powerful, was no longer reliable—for a celebrity employed by one of the world’s biggest media corporations, and thus for any of us.
This was different from the other moments of self-censorship we’ve seen lately, most recently when the Washington Post summarily fired columnist Karen Attiah, apparently for saying less-than-reverential things about white men. The Post justified this by claiming Attiah’s comments “potentially endanger the physical safety of our staff”; so did Disney, which let it be known that Kimmel just needed to turn “down the temperature” because people were getting death threats. (When a mob threatens violence, it’s the recipient who needs to turn it down.)
Kimmel did end up back in his job, and he celebrated in the most decent possible way. That’s good news, because the episode seems to have reminded Disney executives that President Donald Trump and MAGA are not nearly as popular as they think.
But what remains is that sinking feeling that bullying works—far better than anyone could have expected. All Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr had to do was growl that it’d be a shame if something happened to the license of stations airing Kimmel. Never mind that Carr doesn’t have the legal power to do anything about those licenses on that basis. The mere hint was enough.
Was this authoritarianism? Not exactly, if by authoritarianism, we mean coercion by the state. This was something squishier: The state just leveraged fear and self-interest to get what it wanted (and then lied about it—just a joke! Haha). No outright coercion required. Call it anticipatory obedience…or maybe just the soft tyranny of like-mindedness. As Gore Vidal once put it, “They don’t have to conspire because they all think alike.” Not that every CEO is MAGA—not by a long stretch—but you could tell how relieved many of them were when Trump took a meat ax to anything smelling of “woke.”
Thus we got David Ellison, the new owner of Paramount and CBS News, paying $150 million for the anti-woke newsletter startup the Free Press and hiring its founder, Bari Weiss—who has zero experience in television—as editor-in-chief (and, in case anyone missed the point, having her report directly to him, rather than to, say, the president of the news division or CBS itself).
Mother Jones has substantially more paid subscribers than Bari Weiss’ Free Press, so perhaps someone should put us in charge of a TV network.
Ellison—unlike his father and business partner, Larry Ellison—is not a Trump acolyte (nor, for the record, is Weiss), but he is certainly signaling that what was wrong with CBS was that it was somehow too far left. Weeks before hiring Weiss, Ellison also installed Kenneth Weinstein, the former head of the conservative Hudson Institute, as CBS News’ ombudsman. Weiss’ first hire as deputy editor was Adam Rubenstein, who edited the infamous Sen. Tom Cotton New York Times op-ed that argued that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act and unleash the military on Black Lives Matter protesters. (For the record, I think the paroxysm of recrimination against Rubenstein at the time was out of proportion to the flaws in the op-ed, but also, after five years, the backlash against overheated moments of 2020 has pretty much run its course.)
Ellison called the Free Press “one of the most dynamic news organizations in the country, one that resonates with audiences of all ages and perspectives…Their dedication to independent and fearless reporting has won the devotion of some 1.5 million readers—more than 170,000 of whom are now paid subscribers.” (Mother Jones has more than 220,000 paid subscribers and a total audience of about 10 million, plus an editor-in-chief who has decades of reporting and editing experience and a shelf full of awards and would do a killer job running a network news division. But we were not for sale, so I guess Ellison had to settle.)
Where was I? The Trump crew, it sometimes seems, can barely believe its luck at how well their “nice little network you got there” shakedowns have worked, and how quickly. But they’re certainly running with it, and why not? They don’t have the capacity to police all the people (or even all the comedians, all the law firms, all the universities) all the time. Much easier to simply hint that there are some things that might get you into trouble and leave everyone guessing—and self-censoring. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says she regularly hears from broadcasters who wonder what they are “allowed” to report on.
Soft censorship is when we don’t know which station isn’t airing a story, which TV writer is not crafting a joke, because it’s just not worth the aggravation.
Network television is the perfect target for Trump. He knows it matters because it made him rich and famous, and also because TV news still carries information to a lot of people who aren’t news junkies. And just as important, the networks are sitting ducks. Their business model is imploding as viewers and advertisers migrate to digital platforms. The people running these companies are not laying a foundation for the long term (let alone standing up for freedom of the press or democracy). They’re looking for an exit, a strategy to consolidate and unload. Nexstar plus Tegna, Paramount/CBS plus TikTok, CNN, and Warner Bros.—deals, deals, deals, all to put more media power in fewer hands.
From the vantage point of the dealmakers, the Trump administration looks like a business opportunity. They’re not going to slow down consolidation to protect media diversity—they’ll just ask for a vig and some light censorship. Surely, caving now won’t mean that the next demand will follow, and then the next one after that. Surely, there is nothing to be learned from the stories of media moguls like Mikhail Lesin, who founded Russia Today and was one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s favorites until he wasn’t, and then he died under mysterious circumstances in a DC hotel room littered with minibar bottles.
But the men and women in the corner offices aren’t the only ones who get to decide things. In the military, they say the enemy has a vote—an army’s best-laid plans are only as good as the other side’s moves. In business, consumers get a vote. They exercised that vote with Disney, and with Tesla, and they might exercise it again with CBS, or Paramount, or whatever they’ve got in mind for New TikTok. Consumer boycotts by themselves will not stop authoritarianism, but they provide a powerful counterpoint to squishy self-censorship.
And there’s another thing you can do with your dollars, beyond withholding them from those who insult your values: Choose to spend them where you think they’re better invested. Corporate media has been on a trajectory to consolidation and self-censorship for decades—Mother Jones was founded nearly 50 years ago because of this, and we are still here because hundreds of thousands of independent-minded readers have kept us going. You can’t get to us by intimidating our corporate parent or shareholders, because there aren’t any. Our work exists because you believe in it.
And guess what? While an annual subscription to the Free Press’ newsletters and podcasts will run you about $80, over here, $19.95 will get you a daily newsletter and a gorgeous print magazine and two weekly podcasts and the knowledge that you’re keeping truly independent and fearless reporting—dare I say the free press—alive. Can’t afford that either? No worries: We know the world needs truthful reporting at a time when so much of it is hidden behind a paywall, and so we make all of our journalism available for free on our website and any social channel of your choosing. Read, listen, and watch—and donate when you can. Thank you.
2025-10-09 01:27:44
Eswatini, the landlocked nation formerly known as Swaziland, is Africa’s last remaining absolute monarchy. It is the kind of place where King Mswati III—who took the throne as an 18-year-old four decades ago—can warn in a speech, as he did in 2023, that nobody should “complain if mercenaries kill” political activists. When one of the country’s leading human rights lawyers was murdered only hours later, the king’s representatives suggested there was no connection. No one was punished.
In other words, Eswatini is just the kind of country—small, untroubled by democracy, and presumably eager to avoid a superpower’s wrath—with which the Trump administration has been eager to do business.
In May, officials from the US and Eswatini signed a deal that allows the Trump administration to deport people from all over the world to the African nation. A copy of the arrangement I reviewed shows that the United States has agreed to pay Eswatini $5.1 million to take in up to 160 so-called “third-country nationals”—immigrants who came to the US with no ties to the country to which they are being deported.
A practice that would have been unthinkable under past administrations is becoming normalized: sending ICE detainees, without due process, to far-flung prisons.
In July, the first five of such men arrived in Eswatini, where they were sent to a maximum-security prison and detained in the country without any clear legal basis. Last weekend, the Trump administration sent 10 more people to the Eswatini prison. None of the 15 men sent to the nation are from Eswatini. But they are now under the authority of its king.
The situation is a “legal black hole,” according to Tin Thanh Nguyen, a North Carolina–based attorney who is representing five men from Vietnam and Laos now imprisoned in the African country. As he explained in a statement Monday: “I cannot call [my clients]. I cannot email them. I cannot communicate through local counsel because the Eswatini government blocks all attorney access.”
The arrangement with Eswatini, which has a population of 1.1 million, is similar to the deal that allowed the United States to send more than 200 Venezuelans to an infamous prison in El Salvador earlier this year. The Venezuelans sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT)—most of whom had no criminal history—were released in July as part of a prisoner swap following sustained international outrage. (As we reported, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeted many Venezuelans because of tattoos that the agency falsely claimed were evidence of gang membership.)
Although the CECOT disappearances led to international outrage, the Trump administration’s efforts to offload people to a prison in Eswatini, along with similar arrangements with South Sudan and other African nations, have attracted much less attention.
A practice that would have been unthinkable under past administrations is becoming normalized: sending ICE detainees, without due process, to far-flung prisons in countries with notorious human rights records.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, warned in a statement last month: “If you come to our country illegally, you could end up in CECOT or a country you didn’t even know existed.” Eswatini’s US Embassy also did not respond to a request for comment.
The legal pathway for third-country deportations became far easier over the summer.
In May, the Trump administration tried to summarily remove a small group of third-country nationals to South Sudan, despite a preliminary injunction from a federal judge in Massachusetts that clearly blocked the move. At an emergency hearing, Judge Brian Murphy found that DHS’s conduct was “unquestionably violative” of his preliminary injunction. He ordered the men not to be handed over to South Sudan.
In late June, the Supreme Court removed the protections Murphy put in place—effectively rewarding the Trump administration for flagrantly disobeying court orders. Justice Sonia Sotomayor excoriated the move in a dissent joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.
“Apparently,” Sotomayor wrote, “the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in farflung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers.” (At another point, Sotomayor compared the administration’s legal nitpicking in the case to an “arsonist who calls 911 to report firefighters for violating a local noise ordinance.”)
DHS quickly took advantage of the power granted it by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.
In July, the department followed through on the South Sudan removals and announced the first five deportations to Eswatini. In a series of social media posts, DHS claimed the men were so “uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back.” The posts said the men sent to Eswatini—who were from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam, and Yemen—had been convicted in the United States of serious criminal offenses, including murder and rape.
The severity of the crimes obscures the legal stakes of the case. All of the men DHS sent to Eswatini had served their sentences and been ordered deported. The question was (and is) not whether they can be deported, but whether the Trump administration has the authority to send people anywhere it wants, without due process, and imprison them in countries where the detainees have never broken any law.
Trina Realmuto, one of the lead lawyers in the case before Murphy, stressed that all of the class members she is representing have rights regardless of their criminal histories.
“But make no mistake,” said Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, “this is going to happen to people without criminal convictions.”
DHS did not name the people it sent to Eswatini but did share their photos. Through those photos, family members and friends in the United States learned that the men had been sent to a small kingdom on the other side of the world. It would be about two weeks before they were able to speak with them.
Nguyen, the North Carolina immigration lawyer, and two other American lawyers who took the cases of the men in Eswatini began working with Sibusiso Nhlabatsi, who is well known in Eswatini for his work as a human rights lawyer.
Nhlabatsi was also a colleague and close friend of Thulani Maseko, the activist and lawyer who was killed in 2023 while watching television at home with his wife and two young children. No one has been held accountable for his friend’s murder, and Nhlabatsi said he fears for his own “safety every day” due to his work. “It’s a risk that you have to take,” he told me. “Unfortunately, sometimes you have to pay the highest price.”
“It’s a monarchy. Nobody wants to be the person who does the wrong thing or does the thing they’re not supposed to do. But nobody really knows what they’re supposed to be doing.”
So far, Nhlabatsi’s efforts to represent the people sent to Eswatini from the United States have been thwarted by the kingdom. For the first time in his career, Nhlabatsi said prison officials have repeatedly denied him the chance to meet with his clients at the prison.
In response, Nhlabatsi filed suit to try to force the courts in Eswatini to allow him access to the men deported from the United States. But what has happened since has been Kafkaesque.
After taking the government to court, Nhlabatsi said a legal adviser for the country’s prison system told him that he would be able to meet his clients. But when he returned to the Matsapha Correctional Complex, which houses the maximum-security prison where the men are being held, Nhlabatsi said he was “pushed from pillar to post” and made to wait hours. Finally, Nhlabatsi said the head of the prison told him that he would not be able to meet with his clients after all. The reason was absurd: The prison director claimed the men were refusing to see him.
A close friend of Roberto Mosquera, the Cuban national sent to Eswatini in July, said Mosquera told her during a brief call that he never refused to meet with Nhlabatsi. She said officials in Eswatini “just blatantly lie and say that Mr. Mosquera refuses counsel.”
Mia Unger, an immigration attorney at the Legal Aid Society in New York, represented a man sent to Eswatini named Orville Etoria. “He requested to speak with us numerous times, and he wasn’t allowed,” Unger said. “They didn’t allow him to call us.”
Etoria’s story is particularly galling because there appears to be no basis for DHS’s claim that Jamaica, his home country, refused to take him back. Unger said Etoria, who was convicted of murder nearly three decades ago and released from prison in 2021, was asked by ICE to obtain a Jamaican passport at a check-in earlier this year. He got the passport, went to another ICE check-in in June, and was taken into custody. “There was never any question of whether he was able to go to Jamaica,” Unger said. As a result, it should have been illegal to send him to Eswatini. (US law makes it clear that people can be deported to third countries only when it is “impracticable, inadvisable, or impossible” to send them to countries to which they have close ties.)
After Etoria arrived in Eswatini, Jamaica’s government immediately made clear that it had not refused to take him back. And in September, after being imprisoned for two months at Matsapha, Etoria returned to the Caribbean island. (A Mexican national sent to South Sudan was also repatriated after the Mexican government facilitated his return.)
Alma David, an immigration attorney with Novo Legal, is representing Mosquera and Kassim Saleh Wasil, a Yemeni national in Eswatini. She told me the head of the Matsapha prison said via WhatsApp that the only way to have an unmonitored conversation with her clients would be for her or another attorney to come in person. She noted that Nhlabatsi had tried and been repeatedly turned away. In response, David said the prison chief told her that Nhlabatsi needed to go to the US Embassy to get permission to meet with his clients.
It is unclear what the actual policies are. “It’s a monarchy,” David explained. “Nobody wants to be the person who does the wrong thing or does the thing they’re not supposed to do. But nobody really knows what they’re supposed to be doing.”
“All of these people had served their sentences,” she stressed of the men sent to Eswatini. “They were living in the community and were not considered a danger to anybody until one day, they were picked up and sent to Eswatini.”
When we first spoke late last month, Nhlabatsi said he would soon be in court to secure an order allowing him to meet with the men sent from the United States. Last Friday, he said the court ordered him to have access. But it came with a major caveat: The government immediately appealed the judgment.
It means that Nhlabatsi is likely months away from being able to meet with his clients—if he is able to do so at all. The goal appears to be to try to stonewall until the men are removed from Eswatini, at which point their claims would become moot.
Nhlabatsi said the case has become big news in his country. Many residents have not been happy to learn that their government is holding people convicted of serious crimes in the United States. In contrast to the propaganda video El Salvador released after Venezuelans arrived at CECOT, Eswatini’s government seems to have tried to draw as little attention as possible to what it’s doing on behalf of the United States. (Nhlabatsi said he does not believe that the men are being physically abused while in custody but added that being in prison is bad enough.)
ICE is now doubling down on these deportations. Nguyen, the North Carolina lawyer, said ICE told a group of men in detention in the United States on Saturday that they were about to be deported to Eswatini. Nguyen said the new group of deportees includes people from Cambodia, Chad, Cuba, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Flight tracking records indicate that the plane carrying them arrived in the nation around midnight Monday. (Unlike the first five people sent to Eswatini, this group was able to make short calls after arriving in the country, according to Nguyen.)
Court records show that Mosquera, the Cuban national sent to Eswatini in July, was arrested in 1988 and later convicted of attempted first-degree murder. (ICE has incorrectly claimed that he was convicted of homicide.) He later was ordered deported, but the federal government was apparently unable to remove him to Cuba, which has often refused to accept deportees. Following additional arrests in 2008 and 2015, Mosquera was convicted of offenses including grand theft auto, assaulting a law enforcement official, and misdemeanor assault.
Mosquera’s close friend, who requested anonymity due to fear of potential retaliation by ICE, said Mosquera had “paid his dues to society” and had turned his life around by the time he was detained by ICE at a routine check-in in June. She said Mosquera, who came to the US as a boy more than 40 years ago, should never have been sent to a prison in a country where he has never committed a crime.
“I used to believe in the Constitution,” Mosquera’s friend said. “I used to believe that I lived in the greatest country in the world.” She explained that she was born in the US after her parents left Cuba in the early 1960s. “But this is not the America that I grew up in,” she continued. “This is a whole different America.”
2025-10-09 00:20:56
On Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump did something he has done many times before: He called for his perceived political enemies to be jailed.
Taking to Truth Social, Trump declared that the mayor of Chicago, Democrat Brandon Johnson, “should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers!”
“Governor Pritzker also!” Trump added.
Trump’s post comes on the heels of recent clashes between Illinois protesters and ICE officers, who have been carrying out what they call “Operation Midway Blitz,” an enforcement effort in Chicago that DHS says has led to more than 1,000 arrests. On Monday, Johnson signed an executive order prohibiting ICE from using city property in its immigration enforcement efforts.
And as I wrote on Sunday, Pritzker said this weekend that the Trump administration planned to deploy 300 National Guard troops to Illinois “against our will.” He later said the troops would be coming from Texas and called on Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) to block the deployment; Abbott, for his part, said he authorized the move. Illinois leaders and the ACLU of Illinois have opposed the move. A majority of Americans, including Republicans, don’t think the National Guard should be deployed to cities without “external threats,” according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday. On Monday, Illinois’ Attorney General, Kwame Raoul, filed a lawsuit alleging the deployment of troops is “unconstitutional and/or unlawful.” Some troops have reportedly already arrived in Illinois.
Both Pritzker and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) are threatening to withdraw from the National Governors Association if the bipartisan organization does not more forcefully condemn Trump’s National Guard deployments to American cities—including Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Portland (though a federal judge blocked the Portland deployment over the weekend). “This is precisely the federal and interstate overreach we warned against—gubernatorial authority being trampled, state sovereignty being ignored, and the constitutional balance between states being attacked,” Pritzker said in his statement criticizing the group. (The NGA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
In response to Trump’s latest post calling for him and Johnson to be jailed, Pritzker wrote on X Wednesday morning, “I will not back down.”
“What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?” the Illinois governor added.
Meanwhile, Johnson said: “This is not the first time Trump has tried to have a Black man unjustly arrested. I’m not going anywhere.” Trump has, for example, previously suggested that the Department of Justice should target former President Barack Obama.
If you think Trump’s latest threats are just bluster, consider that former FBI Director James Comey was arraigned today after being indicted last month by the DOJ—a longtime dream of Trump’s. Comey pleaded not guilty.
2025-10-08 23:31:20
Scientists once predicted meat-making machines on every kitchen counter, but so far cultured meat—grown from the cells of an animal in a lab or factory—has only been seen at a handful of high-end restaurants. There are entirely practical reasons the stuff has yet to make its debut at McDonald’s, but also bizarre, conspiratorial ones; some states have already banned it for reasons that include “global elites” and “bugs.”
First imagined in 19th-century science fiction, cultured meat became a reality in the early 2000s when NASA grew fish tissue in a liquid serum. The first peer-reviewed paper on the topic, in 2005, predicted that cultured meat could address consumer concerns over “nutrition-related diseases, foodborne illnesses, resource use and pollution,” and the ethical implications of raising animals for meat.
The years that followed brought a mini-boom of research boosted by powerful investors like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. But the technology was pricey and the environmental gains didn’t pan out. While early analyses predicted that emissions from meat production could be reduced by up to 96 percent, those estimates were downgraded over the years; one paper even argued the environmental impact of lab-grown beef could be greater than that of cattle.
In 2022, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene asserted that the government was “surveilling” Americans with meat grown in petri dishes
Farmers didn’t take lab-grown meat seriously until about 10 years ago, when farmed animal protein was on the outs because of its association with climate change and heart disease. “Meatless Mondays” were in their Oprah-boosted heyday, plant-based burgers like Impossible and Beyond were exploding in popularity, and the agricultural giant Tyson Foods had invested in lab-grown meat startups and launched its own plant-based products. By 2019, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) was lobbying states to pass laws limiting the use of terms like “hot dogs” and “burgers” to the marketing of farmed animal products. You’d have to say veggie “tubes” or “pucks.” (Tofurky sued, and the restrictions were deemed unconstitutional, except when the meat-related words were being used deceptively.)
The next year, Singapore became the first country to approve cultured meat for consumption. The United States followed in 2023, and two companies (including one backed by Gates) brought to market lab-grown chicken products, which are as yet too expensive for most consumers.
In the interim, right-wing trendsetters were busy spreading conspiracy theories about lab-grown meat. In 2022, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene asserted that the government was “surveilling” Americans with meat grown in petri dishes, and that the deep state would “zap” those who ate a real burger. Though widely mocked, Greene was tapping into a growing political movement that had begun the year before, with influencers going viral for promoting “real”—often raw—meat. The most famous one, Liver King, touted a meat-heavy “ancestral lifestyle” on TikTok that included eating raw organs and questionable “natural” supplements. He later admitted he was also ingesting copious amounts of steroids, but the trend stuck. Proponents, including doctors-turned-influencers, highlighted supposed benefits of animal meat—including increased testosterone and sperm count—and derided people who preferred plant-based options as “soy boys.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who brags of his “caveman”-style carnivore diet, drummed up concern about lab-grown meat when he served as chair of the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, calling it a “catastrophe-in-the-making” and, weirdly, “the death knell to Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a democracy.” Soon white supremacists were posting that Gates and other supposed shadowy “globalists” were pushing the government to replace traditional meat with stuff made from bugs. Tucker Carlson seized upon this particular bit of lunacy, devoting an episode of his show to it and declaring, “Eating insects is repulsive and un-American.” One of his guests said the push for bugs was “because they want these farmers’ land.”
This was red meat for the MAGA base. In May 2024, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the first statewide lab-meat ban. “Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” he proclaimed. Earlier this year, in the lead-up to Nebraska’s ban, a state senator warned that cultivated meat would “socially engineer” people away from farmed meat, while Gov. Jim Pillen declared it the result of “crazy far-left ideology.”
Despite such rants, the cattle industry seems less concerned now than it was a few years ago. The NCBA has reversed course and come out against the state bans, some of which have failed. Trump’s FDA recently approved a cultured salmon product from the Bezos-backed company Wildtype.
What’s behind the about-face? Politics might be part of it. Fourth-generation Nebraska rancher Dan Morgan recently told the Associated Press that banning meat alternatives seems antithetical to free-market innovation. “It sounds like a bunch of right-wing Republicans echoing a bunch of left-wing Democrats,” he quipped.
What’s more, the whole idea of lab-grown meat appears to give folks the ick: In one 2022 survey, people deemed it “equally or more healthy, but more disgusting than conventional meat products.” As long as prices are high and consumers are weirded out, conventional producers have little to worry about. As the Cattlemen’s director of government affairs put it last year, “We’re not afraid of competing with these products in the marketplace.”
