2026-04-26 09:59:40
President Donald Trump and the first lady were rushed from the stage after gunfire erupted at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night—unleashing a chaotic scene at the annual gathering of journalists at the Washington Hilton in DC.
Wolf Blitzer, the CNN anchor, was outside the main ballroom when he said he heard powerful gunfire ring out, coming from a gunman just a few feet away. “The next thing I knew, was a police officer jumped on me and threw me on the ground and laid on top of me,” he said. “It was a very frightening moment.” Video from inside the event showed armed Secret Service agents racing to the stage to quickly escort the president away as stunned guests ducked under tables.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, President Trump posted on Truth Social that “the shooter has been apprehended,” and encouraged the event to “go on.” But soon after, the president was whisked back to the White House for a hastily convened press conference. In that appearance, the president confirmed that “a man charged a security checkpoint armed with multiple weapons,” but was quickly subdued by law enforcement. “The man has been captured,” he said.
Meanwhile, Trump posted an image of a man lying face-down on the carpeted floor of the venue surrounded by agents to Truth Social. Earlier, the New York Times reported that the gunman had been stopped near a security perimeter, though it remained unclear whether the shooter fired shots within or outside that perimeter. Amidst the shooting, a Secret Service agent was shot and hit on a protective vest, and was taken to the hospital, according to multiple news reports. The president later said the officer was “doing great.”
Trump took the opportunity to blame the security at the famed hotel. “This is why we have to have…what we’re planning at the White House,” he said, referring to plans for his controversial new ballroom to be built in place of the East Wing. “We need the ballroom,” he said. “They wanted the ballroom for 150 years.”
The Hilton ballroom was filled with journalists and top Trump administration officials, including the vice president and Cabinet members, for the event that is sometimes dubbed “nerd prom.” The dinner typically celebrates the role of the independent press and gently roasts the president.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
2026-04-26 05:08:00
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Some Texas oil wells gush hundreds of barrels of oil a day. But many are like the wells on Jackie Chesnutt’s ranch in West Texas that only trickle out a couple barrels a month.
Chesnutt, a retired engineer, claims the five wells operating on her ranch are out of compliance with state rules and should be shut down. The company, CORE Petro, says that it’s struggling to break even, let alone pay to plug the wells. But it says that all its wells are in compliance.
There are thousands of oil and gas wells around Texas like these: low-producing wells leased by companies operating on a shoestring. About two-thirds of the active oil wells in Texas, or 99,000 wells, produce less than 10 barrels of oil a day, according to the state regulator. To remain active, oil wells in Texas must produce at least five barrels for three consecutive months or at least one barrel for 12 consecutive months.
Companies will often maintain a minimal amount of oil production instead of plugging a well, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Landowners like Chesnutt argue that this pattern can lead to pollution and burdensome equipment on their land.
Oil industry analysts and environmental advocates say they have heard claims that companies report the bare minimum of oil production to avoid plugging wells. “The wells on the lease are all producing,” said Railroad Commission spokesperson Bryce Dubee.
Advocates of reforming the oil and gas industry say that stricter rules are needed to ensure companies plug wells in a timely manner and assume the costs so that it does not fall to the state.
In a 2022 report on Texas’ orphan well problem, the nonprofit organization Commission Shift wrote companies should not be able to “indefinitely ‘produce’ a teaspoon of crude or a cubic foot of gas simply to avoid paying for decommissioning.”
Texas has more than 159,000 inactive wells. If the operator of an inactive well goes out of business, the unplugged well eventually becomes an orphan. Texas is facing a record-high backlog of more than 11,000 orphan wells.
“We’re not financially able to plug a bunch of oil wells. That’s not why we’re in this business.”
Chesnutt is the rare landowner who is fighting back against this broken system. The 69-year-old and her now-deceased husband bought the 375-acre property outside San Angelo in 1998. After retiring from a career working at a pharmaceutical company in San Angelo, she now tends goats and sheep on the ranch.
Her complaints to the Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas, have gone nowhere, she said. She has resorted to shutting off power to CORE Petro’s wells because she says they are out of compliance with state production rules. CORE Petro responds that it’s Chesnutt who is breaking the law by shutting off power and, without electricity, they have no way to produce oil at the wells.
“We’re between a rock and hard place,” said Cassie Ohlhausen, who runs CORE Petro with her husband, Kent. “We’re not financially able to plug a bunch of oil wells. That’s not why we’re in this business. We’re in this business to produce oil wells.”
Chesnutt’s growing frustration has spilled over into confrontations with CORE Petro and commission staff. The Railroad Commission alleges that Chesnutt physically assaulted staff members and endangered them with aggressive driving. The agency has instructed her to put all communications in writing to avoid future incidents. The owners of CORE Petro say she has threatened them with a gun. Chesnutt disputes these claims.
The Railroad Commission declined to answer numerous questions about the oil lease on Chesnutt’s ranch. Instead, commission staff provided a letter sent to Chesnutt that described altercations with staff members. The Railroad Commission has not issued any fines to CORE Petro.
Chesnutt’s ranch is one small window into the vast problem of Texas’ aging oil assets. Existing financial mechanisms are not enough to retire the thousands of low-producing oil wells littered across the Texas countryside. The problem eventually falls to the state or becomes a thorn in the side of landowners like Chesnutt.
Persimmon Creek Ranch lays where the desert scrubland of the Trans Pecos region meets the rocky woodlands of the Texas Hill Country. The ranch, about 200 miles northwest of Austin, gets its name from the native persimmons she collects to make preserves.
“One of the biggest things we have focused on out here since we’ve bought the place is water, water, water,” she said. Chesnutt, now widowed, relies on a windmill-operated well to provide water for her residence and animals.
Chesnutt’s home office displays professional mementos, including her diploma from the University of Texas, Austin, where she was an early female graduate of the engineering program. She now applies an engineer’s attention to detail to investigating the drilling operations on her property.
Chesnutt holds 50 percent of the mineral rights on the property, meaning she receives a share of profits from the wells. This has amounted to only a few hundred dollars in royalties every couple months in recent years. This money is hardly worth the trouble the wells have caused, she said. She riffled through documents on a sunny fall afternoon, her dog Einstein asleep at her side.
While the lease was operated by a previous company, Amor Petroleum, Well #10 had been shut down for lack of production. That left only four producing wells.
Then CORE Petro took over the lease in 2021. Chesnutt says that is when the problems started.
Once a well is inactive, the operator has 12 months to plug it or obtain an extension. The clock started ticking for CORE Petrol to get Well #10 producing again. CORE Petro reported a small amount of production at the well to bring it back to active status.
Chesnutt said that the company caused numerous spills in their attempts to get oil flowing.
“They made a big mess of it,” she said, showing photos of spills of oil and produced water, a hazardous byproduct of drilling. Chesnutt fears the spills could contaminate her groundwater and has paid to get her water tested multiple times.
“We have worked our asses off to make this place wonderful and beautiful,” she said. “I refuse to accept that the next person is going to have this happen to them.”
The Railroad Commission issued CORE Petro multiple violations for unpermitted disposal of oil and gas waste, or spills, at the lease. But each time, the violation was later resolved without the company paying fines.
“RRC records indicate four pollution violations for this lease,” Railroad Commission spokesperson Dubee said. “In each instance the operator was notified and upon reinspection all violations have been fixed on the lease indicating compliance.”
CORE’s Ohlhausen said that some amount of spillage is to be expected and that the company always cleaned up the spills.
But Chesnutt’s frustrations only grew.
“What has really blown my mind about this is that we have to follow one set of rules in industry,” Chesnutt told Inside Climate News. ”But the oil companies, they allow them to just come out here and do whatever the hell they want.”
By her account, only one of the wells on her property has produced oil in years. But CORE Petro reports ongoing production at all the active wells. The Railroad Commission requires well testing to prove wells are producing oil. CORE Petro’s most recent well testing, in 2025, shows each well producing less than one barrel a day.
Chesnutt claimed the company is falsifying production numbers to keep the wells operating. The company denies this claim. “The operators can fill in any information they want and nobody checks them,” she said. “It’s unacceptable. I’m really sad that the Permian Basin and all these areas are like this.”
Operators submit monthly reports to the Railroad Commission of how much oil is produced and how much is stored at each lease. While the state rules require every well to be actively producing oil, production reports are only required for the entire lease, not individual wells. Inside Climate News found inconsistencies between public records of oil production and inspections at the lease.
On July 2, 2025, a truck picked up oil from the ranch and recorded the level of oil in the tank afterward, according to a commission inspection report. A Railroad Commission inspector visited the site on Sept. 16. He noted that the amount of oil in the tank hadn’t changed since July 2.
But in the intervening months, CORE reported producing 10 barrels in July and another 15 barrels in August. The company was reporting production on paper but the volume of the tank did not rise, according to the RRC inspection.
The Railroad Commission declined to answer questions about this and it does not appear the agency has investigated the discrepancy. Cassie Ohlhausen said that the company uses an auxiliary tank to collect the oil. Once it is full, the oil is transported to the tank battery, a large metal tank that stores oil. She said this could explain why the tank battery did not rise even though oil was being produced.
“The reporting of production is accurate and is done by a third party who tracks our oil sales and inputs those numbers into the RRC system,” Ohlhausen said.
Inside Climate News observed an auxiliary tank at only one well. Any oil produced at the other wells would have to flow directly into the tank battery.
Commission documents reveal other inconsistencies. On February 7, 2025, the Railroad Commission issued a violation to CORE Petro that said Well #9 was an “inactive unplugged well.” However, the next time the inspector visited the site, the well was determined to be compliant. The Railroad Commission declined to respond to questions about this.
Property owners have little recourse other than reporting the problems to the Railroad Commission. Chesnutt feels the Railroad Commission is ignoring her complaints about CORE Petro.
“Not one single acknowledgement that [the wells] should be plugged,” she said of her interactions with the state agency. “I’ve had resistance on even cleaning up the spills.”
Meanwhile, Chesnutt’s behavior has alarmed Railroad Commission staff. An attorney for the agency sent a letter to Chesnutt on Oct. 31, 2024. The letter states that she “verbally threatened and physically assaulted Commission staff” and “engaged in reckless and aggressive driving,” threatening the safety of commission staff. The letter also says that she told commission staff of her “intent to commit several violent crimes” against CORE Petro’s employees.
Chesnutt disputes the commission’s characterizations. “I don’t know, because I’ve never assaulted anyone,” she said.
The Tom Green County Sheriff’s Office has responded to calls from Chesnutt, Kent Ohlhausen and the Railroad Commission about incidents at the ranch, according to call sheets. The Railroad Commission requested the sheriff’s office be on “standby” when visiting Chesnutt’s property.
Commission inspectors have also noted in inspection reports that Chesnutt is turning off power to wells on her property. Chesnutt maintains that the wells pose a fire hazard and she is within her rights to turn them off. State rules require electricity be disconnected at inactive wells. Electrical lines for oil wells were blamed for starting devastating wildfires in the Texas Panhandle in 2024.
In response to the regulator’s claims of her “reckless driving,” Chesnutt said that last October she saw a Railroad Commission truck on the road leading to her ranch. She was driving in the opposite direction, so she did a U-turn and flashed her headlights to get the driver’s attention. She asked him to pull over and asked if he was headed to her property, because she was waiting for an inspector.
CORE’s Ohlhausen said that Chesnutt has threatened their staff multiple times.
“All the wells produce at some point or another until she goes and turns them off,” she said.
“We can’t afford a lawsuit, but we have every right to call the sheriff and the justice of the peace and have her stand down on turning our oil wells off,” she said.
CORE Petro specializes in operating aging, low-producing wells, Ohlhauser explains, noting that her husband Kent is called “the Oil Well Undertaker” because he works with “end of life wells.”
“We’re the ones that end up with what they call the stripper wells that have already been stripped of all their oil,” she said. “They’re just producing a bit of oil every day to keep somebody alive.”
Kent Ohlhausen owns several other oil companies. Many of the leases he operates meet the bare minimum requirement of one barrel of oil production a month for 12 consecutive months. For example, the Olhausen Oil Company’s Ohlhausen, West Texas lease reported one barrel of oil production for each month from April 2023 to April 2024. The same company’s Barker C.P. lease reported one barrel of oil production every month December 2023 to January 2025.
2026-04-26 02:14:24
The US Department of Justice announced Friday that it plans to revive the firing squad as a method of killing in federal capital cases. In a 52-page memo, the department expanded the ways it can apply the death penalty to include using a group of executioners to simultaneously shoot at a condemned person. Taking action to strengthen the federal death penalty, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote, “is our highest duty as public servants.”
Only five states currently allow executions by firing squad. The execution of Mikal Mahdi in South Carolina last year was only the fifth such killing since 1976; his lawyers later said the bullets mostly missed Mahdi’s heart, leaving him to die in a manner that violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Jim Craig, a lawyer with the MacArthur Justice Center, has represented men and women on death row in the Deep South since 1986. I spoke with Craig about the dangers of executions carried out with guns, the 40 years he’s spent witnessing how governments condemn people to die, and what people should know about his clients.
What’s your reaction to the news that Trump is bringing back the federal firing squad?
This proposal by the Trump Justice Department is characterized by their attraction to brutality. It’s characterized by their affection for causing visible harm to people. You see it in their foreign policy. You see it in their policing. The firing squad is very physical and visceral in the damage that it does to the person being executed. That’s why they like it. We should not mince words about this. It has nothing to do with the Eighth Amendment. It has nothing to do with the supply of drugs, or anything else. They like it because it’s the same kind of video game brutality that they like in every other context of this administration’s barbarism.
The Department of Justice report suggests that the firing squad “does not offend the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments.” Is that true?
The pitch that is made by proponents of the firing squad is that it destroys the consciousness of the condemned person within 10 to 15 seconds. This is not the case. In the execution of Mikal Mahdi in South Carolina last year…the three shooters were positioned 15 feet away from Mr. Mahdi. There was a target pinned on him. The folks that were witnessing his execution noticed that he cried out as the bullets hit him, that he groaned two times about 45 seconds after that, and that he continued to breathe for another 80 seconds before he appeared to take a final gasp.
There were two wounds—not three—even though there were three shooters. The entry point for the bullets was downward through the liver, the pancreas, and the left lower lung lobe, before crashing into his spine and ribs.
“The men and women who are on death row in the US are basically the losers in a lottery.”
He did bleed, he did die, but an expert pathologist who studied the state’s autopsy report said that Mr. Mahdi’s ventricles were not disrupted. He was conscious for a lot longer than the state had suggested. You’re causing multiple multiple fractures of the ribs and sternum, and obviously also piercing flesh and internal organs. And that is extraordinarily painful. If it doesn’t cause an immediate lack of consciousness, which it clearly did not in Mr. Mahdi’s case, then it is torture. Mr. Mahdi was sentenced to death. He was not sentenced to be tortured.
[The firing squad] relies on human actors to perform the execution in a way that, according to them, would cause a loss of consciousness in 15 seconds, to shoot to kill in the most accurate way, so as to essentially vaporize the heart. They clearly did not vaporize Mr. Mahdi’s heart.
It comes back to my point about brutality. It’s just one of many, many provisions of the Constitution that they choose to ignore to focus on on their brutality trip.
You’ve spent decades representing people on death row. Who are those people?
The men and women who are on death row in the United States are basically the losers in a lottery. They have not committed the most cruel crimes in the United States compared to other incarcerated people, or to people who are not incarcerated, but maybe should be.
If you broaden the focus, the people who are responsible for 500,000 deaths of children because they cut funding to USAID are much more mass murderers than anybody who is on death row in the United States. But even if we’re just restricting ourselves to this 19th-century concept of “you do a bad thing on the street and we’re going to punish you,” I think it’s also true.
The death penalty is fraught with all kinds of discretionary choices by prosecutors, judges, and juries on the basis of skewed evidence, usually litigating at the trial level with attorneys who are poorly-resourced, sometimes poorly-qualified, and in many cases giving horrifically poor performances.
The clients that I’ve had over the years in Mississippi and Louisiana are there because the prosecutor in their jurisdiction decided to seek the death penalty, and the defense lawyer in their jurisdiction wasn’t able to match what the prosecution was able to put up, and because all the courts afterwards decided it was good enough. They don’t want to be called soft on crime.
The overwhelming majority of the people I’ve represented who are on death row are in the far-lower percentiles of income in the United States, overwhelmingly Black or Brown, disproportionately suffering from intellectual disabilities or mental illness. A disproportionate number are combat veterans.
These are not monsters. These are not people possessed by evil. These are people who were living under extremely precarious circumstances, some of whom committed acts of violence that caused the death of other people. And most of those folks accept that they have responsibility for that—and that the death penalty has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than vengeance and brutal retribution to make people feel better. And that’s not a good enough reason to torture people.
2026-04-25 23:02:29
Until yesterday, it looked like Maine would enshrine the country’s first state-level hyperscale data center moratorium into law. But late on Friday, Democratic Gov. Janet Mills announced she would veto the bill. Though a statement she issued claimed that she agreed a “moratorium is appropriate” in theory, Mills wrote that she would not sign the one passed by legislators in order to avoid jeopardizing a single data center being built in the town of Jay, which she said would bring 800 temporary and 100 permanent jobs to the area.
The data center industry’s lobby welcomed the move. “Enacting a statewide moratorium on data centers would have discouraged investment and sent a signal that Maine is closed for business—both for data centers and economic development projects involving other industries,” said Dan Diorio, a spokesperson for the Data Center Coalition. “Critically, it would have denied local communities the opportunity to compete for investment and jobs involving data center projects they found suitable.”
Instead, Mills ordered a study on “the potential impacts of large-scale data centers in Maine.”
Environmental advocates were less thrilled. “With this veto, Governor Mills has demonstrated a shocking disconnect with the people of Maine, their elected legislators, and a large and growing national movement against the reckless explosion of this highly problematic industry,” said Mitch Jones of Food and Water Watch, a nonprofit focused on climate and corporate accountability. “Mainers and people across the country are becoming increasingly fed up with the skyrocketing electricity rates, false jobs promises, and harmful industrialization of small-town communities that hyperscale data centers bring wherever they land.”
Rather than pause their construction altogether, Mills’ statement said she will issue an executive order to establish a council studying “the potential impacts of large-scale data centers in Maine.”
But as I reported last week, data center moratoriums are gaining public support in Maine and beyond. With Mills set to compete in a hotly-contested June Senate primary against Graham Platner, who supported the moratorium, her veto decision could become a political liability. Platner currently leads Mills in the polls by double digits.
Beyond Maine, twelve states are considering legislative moratoriums on data center construction, and dozens of municipalities have already passed such laws. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced a proposal for a nationwide moratorium in March. “A year ago, nobody was entertaining a moratorium,” says Greg LeRoy of the watchdog group Good Jobs First. “Now a fourth of the states are.”
2026-04-25 15:01:00
The forest floor was nothing but patches of brown. No ferns, no brush, no flowers, and definitely no wildlife. Everything was dead except for rows of hand-planted baby trees.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.This is what reporter Nate Halverson found while mushroom foraging in the California wilderness near Lassen Peak. He would learn the area had been sprayed with the controversial weed killer glyphosate, more commonly known by its brand name, Roundup.
This week on Reveal, Halverson’s yearlong investigation reveals that the US Forest Service and timber companies are spraying glyphosate in record amounts in California’s forests in an effort to regrow timberland that’s been decimated by years of megafires.
“The wedding of the chemical industry and the Forest Service has got to be seriously and deeply looked at,” Craig Thomas, a fire restoration expert, says about the spraying. The Forest Service is “addicted to herbicide use and glyphosate, and we need to get them into rehab.”
2026-04-25 05:03:59
The Justice Department this week announced criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, alleging that the longtime civil rights watchdog had defrauded its own donors by secretly paying large sums of money to informants within various hate groups. “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” asserted Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in a statement. “The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public,” said FBI Director Kash Patel.
A number of commentators—including vocal SPLC critics from across the political spectrum—have expressed skepticism about the DOJ’s case. But for President Donald Trump and his supporters, the indictment appears to be just the beginning. At 1:13 am Friday morning, Trump wrote on Truth Social:
The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the greatest political scams in American History, has been charged with FRAUD. This is another Democrat Hoax, along with Act Blue, and many others. If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT.
It’s not clear on what legal basis the SPLC prosecution could justify overturning the election of a president who left office 15 months ago. Even so, the current president’s allies seem increasingly eager to find other disfavored organizations to target.
By Thursday afternoon, Trump megadonor Marc Andreessen was asking Grok—the AI chatbot available on Elon Musk’s X—to speculate about which “other activist pressure groups” might be involved in similar activities. He then announced to readers that “Grok has thoughts on who to look at next.”
Grok is a large language model and does not, in fact, have thoughts. But Grok did have plenty of suggestions. Among them: the Anti-Defamation League, Media Matters for America, GLAAD, and the Human Rights Campaign. Grok was careful to note that for these groups, there was “no proven SPLC-style fraud yet.” (Of course, none has been proven for SPLC itself, either.)
“Interesting thread,” Musk commented, as he promoted Andreessen’s research to his 239 million followers.
These are all large nonprofits, generally center-to-center-left in political leaning, and not particularly radical. In a separate X post Thursday evening, Andreessen elaborated on his grievances against a constellation of activist groups he didn’t identify by name.
“I sat in so many meetings for a DECADE where these groups determined who got cancelled/debanked/censored,” he said. “Wholly un-American. People need to go to jail.”
