2025-11-10 01:15:25
In anti-abortion Republicans’ latest attack on abortion pills, Florida’s attorney general is suing Planned Parenthood for allegedly misrepresenting the safety of the drugs—despite the fact that more than 100 scientific studies have shown they are safe and effective.
The 37-page lawsuit, announced by Attorney General James Uthmeier’s office on Thursday and filed in Florida’s First Judicial Circuit Court, alleges that Planned Parenthood “sells profitable abortions to vulnerable women by lying to them about abortion pills being safer than Tylenol.” Experts routinely make the comparison that use of the abortion pills—which include mifepristone, which blocks the pregnancy hormone progesterone, and misoprostol, which expels the pregnancy—are safer than Tylenol or even full-term pregnancy. Research shows that serious complications from medication abortion occur in less than half a percent of cases.
The Florida lawsuit claims that all abortions “violate the Hippocratic Oath and deny the inalienable rights of all human beings.”
But Uthmeier’s lawsuit paints a far more dire picture. It’s riddled with familiar anti-abortion arguments and misinformation. For example, it cites openly anti-abortion sources, including the anti-abortion group Live Action, as well as a non-peer reviewed report from the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center that claimed to show higher rates of complication from the pills, but that experts say has a flawed methodology, as I have previously written. The Florida lawsuit also claims that all abortions “violate the Hippocratic Oath and deny the inalienable rights of all human beings.” Uthmeier is suing under the state’s deceptive marketing and racketeering laws, and is seeking more than $350 million in damages, attorneys’ fees, the dissolution of Planned Parenthood in Florida, and the revocation of its state licenses.
Spokespeople for Planned Parenthood did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday, but in a statement provided to the Associated Press, Susan Baker Manning, general counsel for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said: “Anti-abortion lawmakers and officials are relentless in their effort to end access to all abortion care, and to stop patients from getting accurate medical information. We will continue to be just as relentless in our effort to defend access to this safe, effective care. See you in court.” Alexandra Mandado, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Florida, told the Tampa Bay Times the lawsuit is “a politically motivated attack” and an “attempt to erode access to all abortion care.”
Abortion is banned in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy, but telehealth abortion providers have continued prescribing and mailing abortion pills into Florida and other states with bans. More than 70 percent of reproductive age women in the state believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, including a majority of Republicans, KFF, the group formerly known as Kaiser Family Foundation, found last year. After the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in June 2022, use of abortion pills drastically increased nationwide, and they now account for more than 60 percent of all abortions. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) permits use of mifepristone to end a pregnancy through ten weeks’ gestation, but abortion advocates say it is safe and effective later as well; the World Health Organization says, for example, that it can be used anytime in the first trimester.
But as the pills’ popularity has increased, so have the coordinated attacks, as I wrote back in September:
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary announced that HHS would conduct a new review of mifepristone, after hinting they would do so back in May, as I reported at the time. In their announcement, which reportedly came as a response to a letter Republican attorneys general wrote to Kennedy and Makary back in July, the officials cited a report produced by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a right-wing organization that was on the advisory board of Project 2025, which claims to have unearthed a higher-than-previously-reported rate of complications from the pills.
[…]
As my colleague Madison Pauly and I reported back in January, anti-abortion groups sent letters to the Department of Justice and FDA requesting they roll back access to medication abortion by enforcing the 19th-century anti-obscenity Comstock Act, restoring the seven-week gestational limit, and rescinding the Biden-era telehealth regulation. Project 2025, the lengthy playbook for Trump’s second term, also recommended the DOJ enforce the dormant Comstock Act to ban the mailing of abortion pills, though President Donald Trump claimed last year that it was “very unlikely” the FDA would roll back access or that the DOJ would enforce Comstock.
In 2022, an anti-abortion group calling itself the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine sued in Texas, challenging the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone as well as the agency’s later moves to expand access. The Supreme Court rejected the suit last year, saying the anti-abortion medical providers didn’t have standing to bring it. But attorneys general in at least six red states, including Texas and Florida, have since intervened in a bid to revive the case. Other suits are trying to curtail access by claiming mifepristone could contaminate drinking water.
There have also been myriad efforts to limit and penalize access at the state level. Last year, Louisiana became the first state to classify mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled substances, a move that one doctor predicted would also impact non-abortion-related care, including postpartum hemorrhages and IUD insertions. This month, Texas enacted a radical bill that allows allows private citizens to sue anyone who “manufactures, distributes, mails, transports, delivers, prescribes, or provides” abortion pills to Texans for at least $100,000. Officials in Texas and Louisiana have sought to punish doctors in New York and California who mailed abortion pills into their states under shield laws.
2025-11-09 23:42:52
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) keeps teasing a potential presidential run…again, and again, and again.
It began in earnest last month, when, in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Newsom admitted he would “be lying” if he claimed he did not plan to consider a 2028 run after next year’s midterms. He continued to fuel speculation this weekend, when, on Saturday—fresh off California’s redistricting win—he headed to Texas, where the redistricting battle began. As he spoke, the crowd reportedly chanted “2028,” and Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) introduced Newsom by saying: “I’m here today because he is a future president of the United States of America.”
When Newsom took the stage, he exhorted the crowd to “stand up.”
“Let’s stand up to those that have been humiliated, those that feel bullied, those that are afraid and scared,” he said. “Let’s stand up for those that have given up, and let’s give them hope. Let’s stand up for the rule of law. Let’s stand up for a system of checks and balances, and let’s stand up for our democracy, for all of us.”
And on Sunday, in a sit-down interview with Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union, Newsom said he would wait until after the midterms to make a decision. He previewed a potential campaign based on affordability—a winning message for Democrats.
“We have to democratize this economy if we are going to save democracy. You can’t have ten percent of people own two-thirds of the wealth in this country…those were fundamental issues that were obviously present in this election on Tuesday.”
“Donald Trump said he would make us wealthier and healthier,” he added. “We’re poorer and sicker.”
And if all that isn’t enough of an indication that Newsom seems to be soft-launching a stronger presence on the national stage, consider that he’s also releasing a memoir in February.
If he does decide to run, Newsom would likely emerge as a strong candidate in what could be a crowded field. His favorability rating has been on the rise this year as he has directly taken on Trump with trolling on social media. As he explained in an interview with NBC News last month: “I put a mirror up to [Trump’s] madness.”
2025-11-09 21:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As Kristen Moreland waited for the livestream to buffer, her thoughts drifted to the years she’d devoted to defending Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the northeastern sweep of Alaska where the mountains give way to the coastal plain. On screen, the chatter of aides stilled as men in dark suits gathered behind a lectern. Then, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced plans to open the area, roughly the size of South Carolina, to drilling.
It marked another round in the decades-long tug-of-war over developing one of the country’s largest remaining protected areas—an effort that came to a head during President Donald Trump’s first term and ground to a halt when President Joe Biden took office. Burgum also restored seven oil and gas leases that a state-funded corporation had bid on during the final days of the first Trump administration, and that his successor later revoked.
Moreland, a Gwich’in leader and executive director of the tribal committee dedicated to protecting the Nation’s sacred coastal plain, sat stunned as the YouTube stream continued. The place she grew up—where generations have lived on the tundra alongside the caribou, weaving their history into the land—had been reduced to a line item on someone’s balance sheet. When Burgum said opening the refuge would benefit northern communities, “it felt like a slap in the face,” she said.
Big banks and insurers have refused to finance or underwrite projects in the refuge, citing environmental risks. Oil majors have also steered clear.
“They’ve never reached out to us to listen to how this would affect our livelihood,” she said. Moreland fears development will drive the herd that the Gwich’in rely on out of range and contaminate rivers in a region where hunting and fishing are a matter of survival. For her, it felt like erasure. “It’s another disrespectful action from decision-makers,” she said. “It ignores our voice as Gwich’in and violates our rights as Indigenous people.”
As the fight over development in the Arctic continues, federal officials are racing to fulfill Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda. Though the government is shut down and many employees are not getting paid, officials continue approving permits for extractive industries. In a wood-paneled Beltway office, Burgum framed his “sweeping package of actions” as a declaration that “Alaska is open for business.”
To that end, the administration also signed permits for the controversial 211-mile Ambler Road to mineral deposits, including one owned by Trilogy Metals—which the Trump administration now holds a 10 percent stake in—and authorized a land exchange that will allow for construction of a road through Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, at the tip of the Alaskan Peninsula. “I told the president it’s like Christmas every morning,” Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy said. “I wake up, I go to look at what’s under the proverbial Christmas tree to see what’s happening.”
That October 23 announcement may not end up being the gift the governor is hoping for.
The fight over drilling in the refuge began almost as soon as President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the site, once called Arctic National Wildlife Range, in 1960. The most recent volley began in 2017, when Trump signed a tax bill requiring two oil and gas lease sales there within seven years. When the first sale was held in 2021, the state corporation Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, or AIDEA, was the only major bidder. It hoped to keep drilling prospects in the region alive, despite weak industry interest. The sale ultimately generated less than $12 million—a fraction of the nearly $2 billion projected by the Tax Act for the last decade.
The Biden administration later found the leasing program’s environmental review inadequate. It conducted a new analysis, then canceled the leases in 2023, citing “fundamental legal deficiencies” and its failure to “properly quantify” greenhouse gas emissions. The second mandated sale, in early 2025, received no bidders. Compounding the challenge, major banks and insurers have refused to finance or underwrite projects in the refuge, citing environmental risks. Oil majors have also steered clear: In 2022, Chevron and the company that took over BP’s leases on private land within the refuge paid $10 million to walk away from them. That same year, ExxonMobil told shareholders it has “no plans for exploration or development” there.
“It’s hugely problematic for the state to issue bonds with no viable plan for repayment. That’s not a good investment decision.”
Still, this spring Trump issued an executive order calling for the reinstatement of AIDEA’s leases, and a federal court ruled that their cancellation was handled improperly. The state-funded investment firm remains the sole holder of leases in the refuge.
The problem is AIDEA doesn’t have the capital or technical expertise to build out these areas on its own. It has authorized spending nearly $54 million to develop them and move permitting for Ambler Road forward. That includes hiring consultants for seismic testing to map oil and gas deposits. But first it must get permission from the US Fish and Wildlife Service to harass polar bears, something that has sparked viral protests in the past. AIDEA authorized another $50 million for Ambler following Burgum’s announcement.
Ultimately, the state corporation is spending public money on infrastructure that private firms would normally fund while sidestepping oversight, said Suzanne Bostrom, a senior staff attorney at Trustees for Alaska. The watchdog legal organization accused AIDEA of having redirected money toward refuge leases and Ambler from accounts within its Arctic Infrastructure Development Fund, and later its Revolving Fund, to avoid the need for legislative approval. Randy Ruaro, AIDEA’s executive director, wrote in an email that it was not legally required to seek authorization.
All of that aside, AIDEA’s track record is pretty grim. Financial records suggest the corporation lost at least $38 million on its last oil and gas venture, the Mustang field on the North Slope west of the refuge. After oil prices fell in 2020, the corporation foreclosed on the project. The state provided another $22 million in a 2023 bailout before AIDEA sold the field for an undisclosed sum.
Bostrom says AIDEA has “no actual plan for seeing a return” on its spending in the refuge. In fact, the people of Alaska often lose money in its deals; one analysis found that almost half of the agency’s investments have been written off as worthless. The economists who crunched those numbers found the state would have come out about $11 billion ahead if that money had been put to work elsewhere.
As to the “energy emergency” that Trump declared, Kaufmann said, “I want what he’s smoking.”
In an email, Ruaro called the analysis a “hit piece” and said the corporation has recorded its best financial performance in six decades over the past two years. He said that analysis “failed to account for the billions of dollars generated in economic benefits” by the Red Dog Mine, which produces lead and zinc in northwest Alaska. The corporation poured $160 million—about one-third of the project’s startup costs—into infrastructure to support the operation.
At the same time, AIDEA’s own consultants concluded that the mine would be built regardless, and the investment was unnecessary. “AIDEA loves to point to the Red Dog mine as a shining example of their success,” Bostrom said, but even taking those claims at face-value “doesn’t erase that AIDEA still has no viable financial plan in place to cover the cost of building the Ambler Road.”
Ultimately, any plans for the refuge and Ambler Road—which the Bureau of Land Management has said would harm Indigenous and low-income communities—raise questions about who benefits from such development. AIDEA has, for example, proposed financing the private Ambler road through Gates of the Arctic National Park with bonds repaid by tolls, a plan critics call unrealistic, given the cost could hit $2 billion. “It’s hugely problematic for the state to issue bonds with no viable plan for repayment,” Bostrom said. “That’s not a good investment decision.”
But Ruaro wrote that is only one of several options, and that he is “confident the mines…have billions of dollars in minerals needed by the nation.” He also said AIDEA now estimates the cost at $500 to $850 million, and said the road can be built in phases.
Even with prudent financial strategies, the economics of extraction remain precarious—especially as domestic oil prices dropped below $60 a barrel this summer. Given the average breakeven price of $62, new Arctic production may not be profitable—though it would extend the life of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline that carries crude from the North Slope.
The United States is already the world’s top producer, and more output won’t necessarily lower consumer fuel prices, says Boston University’s Robert K. Kaufmann, because OPEC and other nations still influence global markets. (As to the “energy emergency” that Trump declared, Kaufmann said, “I want what he’s smoking.”) Instead, the leases will bring more production online when “any rational scientist is calling for reducing carbon emissions.”
Despite the risks, some communities in the region support new oil and gas projects. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge sits within North Slope Borough, which is larger than 39 states. Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat—a nonprofit funded by the regional Alaska Native Corporation—notes that 95 percent of the borough’s tax revenue comes from the industry, funding things like schools and clinics. Fossil fuel royalties directly benefit Indigenous communities like Kaktovik, funding essential services. “When Uncle Doug [Burgum] calls, I answer,” Josiah Patkotak, the borough’s mayor, said in a statement praising the Interior secretary’s announcement.
It can be difficult to disentangle genuine local support from efforts quietly backed—or directly compensated—by the industry itself. During a legislative hearing earlier this year, state Representative Ashley Carrick said one person who testified as a community advocate was paid by AIDEA, something Ruaro confirmed to her that it routinely does. This can create the impression these projects are widely embraced.
“There’s this wide consensus that [Iñupiat] people all want the oil and gas projects. It’s not true,” said Nauri Simmonds, executive director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic. Many of those adversely impacted by drilling stay silent for fear of losing work or social standing, she said—and some who have spoken out have faced threats and violence.
Simmonds says what might be lost by developing the refuge can’t be counted in dollars. AIDEA now holds leases in a part of the refuge where the Porcupine caribou herd gathers to bear its young. The Gwich’in name for the region, where cool coastal winds protect the newborns from insects and heat, translates to “the sacred place where life begins.” Beyond its shelter, calves are 19 percent more likely to die. Scientists and Indigenous peoples fear the clamor of development will drive the herd away, severing a bond that has sustained people and animals alike for millenia. Even as climate change reshapes one of the country’s last undisturbed ecosystems, it is political forces that now endanger it most.
“One of the most wounding pieces is that this wouldn’t be something that the companies would have gone after on their own,” Simmonds said. “It is the enticements from Alaska, from the corporations, from the political landscape, that creates the appeal.”
2025-11-08 23:51:45
The knock-on effects from the government shutdown, now the longest in US history, continue apace, with the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) cuts to air traffic at 40 of the nation’s busiest airports now officially in effect.
The mandate, which kicked off on Friday with an initial 4 percent reduction, has already cancelled more than 1,700 flights this weekend alone. Though disruptions were said to be limited on Friday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned that cuts could rise to as much as 20 percent by Thanksgiving weekend, one of the busiest travel periods of the year, if the shutdown drags on.
Since announcing the unprecedented plan, Duffy has insisted that such reductions are necessary to keep air travel safe, while some air traffic controllers and airport screeners go without pay. But prior to the FAA’s flight cuts, there had been little evidence to suggest that staffing shortages from the shutdown had been creating widespread disruptions, prompting some to accuse the Trump administration of weaponizing air travel as leverage aimed at getting Democrats to bend on the shutdown standoff.
That impasse is about healthcare, with Democrats refusing to vote for a spending bill that allows Obamacare subsidies to expire—a move that would cause the cost of health insurance for millions of Americans to skyrocket.
Duffy has denied the assertion that Republicans are needlessly using air travel as political leverage. Yet some Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz, have made a point of hanging blame for the flight disruptions on Democrats, accusing them of “flirting with disaster.”
The blame game comes as Republicans rejected a new offer by Democrats to end the shutdown on Friday that proposed a one-year extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies.
2025-11-08 23:06:12
President Trump’s vehement refusal to make full SNAP benefits available to the nearly 42 million Americans who rely on the food aid program scored a temporary win at the Supreme Court, after Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson temporarily allowed the federal government to continue withholding $4 billion in SNAP funding.
Friday’s late-night order came hours after the Trump administration rushed to the Supreme Court to block a lower court’s order requiring it to use emergency funds to pay out SNAP aid while the government remains shut down. In it, US District Judge John McConnell accused the government of defying a previous order to make at least partial payments and required that the government complete full payments by Friday night. McConnell pointed to Trump’s own words on social media earlier this week, which, if interpreted by their plain meaning, signaled the president’s intention to defy multiple court orders to make the SNAP benefits available to low-income families. The administration then turned to a federal appeals court to ask it to undo McConnell’s order.
Jackson’s temporary stay, then, merely gives the appeals court time to rule on that request. Critically, it did not rule on the legality of the Trump administration’s efforts to resist payments, which ramped up over the last week after SNAP lapsed on payments for the first time in its 61-year history. The lapse came as the Trump administration argued that it is barred from using emergency funding to make the payments because of the government shutdown, even though previous administrations in similar impasses have done so.
Two federal judges, both of whom admonished the administration for needlessly plunging SNAP into crisis, rejected that argument. And what quickly followed was a full-throated crusade by Trump to continue withholding funding and thereby using hungry Americans as a political weapon in a government shutdown. In the meantime, the lapse in SNAP has sparked a surge in demand nationally to food banks, with lines growing and some pantries being unable to keep up with demand.
The appeals court now has 48 hours to weigh in. Meanwhile, deep uncertainty for SNAP beneficiaries—39 percent of whom are children—continues.
2025-11-08 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Tuesday was a great day at the ballot box for the planet, with climate-friendly initiatives and candidates winning nationwide.
In races from New York to Georgia to Washington, voters backed funding renewables, reining in energy costs, and building out mass transit—and the people promising to deliver those policies. On the whole, the results suggest Americans are pushing back against President Donald Trump’s efforts to roll back climate action.
“This election was a decisive rejection of the Trump Administration’s ban on clean energy, multimillion-dollar taxpayer bailouts for expensive dirtier energy sources like coal, and other ineffective proposals that will make costs go even higher,” Sara Schreiber of the League of Conservation Voters said in a statement.
“I think yesterday was a repudiation of the idea that Americans don’t care about energy or climate and these are losing issues.”
One of the day’s biggest wins came in New York City, where Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral race in a landslide victory called just 35 minutes after polls closed. More than two million New Yorkers voted, the most in a mayoral race since 1969. Although Mamdani, who at 34 will be the city’s youngest mayor in more than a century, made affordability the predominant focus of his campaign, he garnered an endorsement from the youth-led climate organization Sunrise Movement. Many saw his campaign promises, which included calls for free mass transit and the greening of public schools, as the seeds of a populist climate movement.
“Zohran was talking about climate action in a way people could understand, and people were able to see the impacts of this climate action in their everyday lives,” Denae Ávila-Dickson, Sunrise’s communications and political manager, told New York Focus.
Dan Jasper, of the nonprofit group Project Drawdown, said Mamdani’s transit proposal “is not as sexy as something like solar. But these are the exact type of policies we’re going to need to actually address climate change, because it addresses people’s standards of living.”
Mamdani’s challenge will be assembling the coalition needed to make those policies happen. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who has also promoted a municipal green new deal agenda, may not have similar difficulty. Yesterday, Wu’s City Council allies retained their seats, giving her a fighting chance at success.
As far as statewide elections go, Georgia was a point of contention: There, electricity prices were on the ballot. Democrats won two of the five seats on the Public Service Commission, a regulatory agency that oversees utilities and has approved six rate increases in three years.
Democrats have not held a seat on the board since 2007, but clean energy consultant Peter Hubbard and anti-poverty advocate Alicia Johnson tapped voter outrage over climbing prices and notched upset victories over Republican incumbents, who had embraced fossil fuels and backed away from clean energy at a time when demand for power is rising.
“I think for a lot of folks who have felt powerless over rising utility bills, especially in a state like Georgia where they’ve gone up for the average household by more than $500 in just the last couple of years, they can finally breathe a sigh of relief knowing that potential change is coming,” said Charles Hua, founder of the utility advocacy nonprofit PowerLines.
Rising energy bills emerged as a top issue in other races, too, including the governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia. For political scientist Leah Stokes, who studies public opinion around climate change, Tuesday’s results weren’t unexpected.
“I think yesterday was a repudiation of the idea that Americans don’t care about energy or climate and these are losing issues, which is what all of these pundits have been going on and on about for about 9 months now. That’s really wrong,” Stokes said on Wednesday. “Everyday people understand that clean energy is cheap energy—they can easily make those connections.”
“‘Climate action equals affordability’ seems to be the winning message of the day.”
In New Jersey, governor-elect Mikie Sherrill vowed to declare “a state of emergency on energy costs” on her first day in office. She plans to roll out expanded generation capacity, including rooftop solar and battery storage, and “immediately develop plans for new nuclear capacity.”
In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger won the governor’s seat on a platform that included data center operators paying for their own electricity costs in a region that currently hosts over 13 percent of the world’s data center capacity. Her “Affordable Virginia” plan included calls to expand wind and solar power, promote home weatherization to ease power consumption, and streamline permitting and other requirements for expanding generation.
To the west, California voters approved Proposition 50, which will allow the state’s Democratic majority to sidestep the statewide redistricting commission and redraw congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The move was designed to give Democrats as many as five more seats in Congress in an effort to, among other things, combat further dismantling of climate and environmental policy. Governor Gavin Newsom and a slate of prominent Democrats nationwide championed the proposal as a counterbalance to Republican-led redistricting in states like Texas, where a similar effort earlier this year carved out 5 new seats for the GOP.
In a speech Tuesday night, Newsom said California voters approved the measure “to send a message to Donald Trump. No crowns, no thrones, no kings. That’s what this victory represents. [It] is a victory for the people of the state of California and the United States of America.”
Climate-friendly policies—those centering on transit, in particular—won on a local scale, too. Voters in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, which includes the city of Charlotte, handily approved a 1 percent increase in the sales tax to finance nearly $20 billion in transportation improvements. Although 40 percent of the additional revenue will be allocated to roads, some of that funding will support new bike lanes and sidewalks. Another 40 percent will go toward rail, and the remainder will be dedicated to buses and microtransit. In Ellensburg, Washington, 65 percent of voters approved a permanent 0.2 percent sales tax to fund the municipal bus system.
Across the country, one thing was clear: Wallet-friendly climate policies—and candidates presenting themselves as helping people pay their bills—won. “Climate change isn’t at the forefront of every election, but at this point, every election is a climate election,” Jasper of Project Drawdown said. “‘Climate action equals affordability’ seems to be the winning message of the day.”
Emily Jones contributed reporting.
