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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.

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.”

2026-04-25 00:00:37

When Nazir Khan picked up the phone on Wednesday, he was a bit delirious. Hours earlier, he’d had his first bites of food after a twelve-day hunger strike.

Alongside two other Minneapolis community organizers, Khan refused food for nearly two weeks in order to draw attention to a persistent, overlooked problem: a trash incinerator that just won’t die. 

Located in a predominantly-Black neighborhood, the Hennepin County Energy Recovery (HERC) incinerator is one of only about 73 municipal trash incinerators left in the United States, down from a peak of nearly 200 in the 1990s. Hennepin County officials have said they plan to close the HERC incinerator between 2028 and 2040—but advocates want a clearer timeline and a more concrete plan. 

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, living near a trash incinerator comes with a bevy of health consequences: increased risk of cancer, birth defects, and lung disease among them. People from the area surrounding HERC have higher rates of asthma-related emergency room visits than people elsewhere in the state, and in 2022, Sierra Club researchers estimated that particulate-matter emissions from HERC are responsible for 1-2 early deaths per year. 

The HERC is still operational, and no firm closure date has been set. But, Khan said, people are paying more attention to the incinerator than ever before. 

Mother Jones spoke with Khan about his hunger strike, the connection between the HERC fight and the broader Minneapolis activist landscape, and the long road to communities people can breathe in. 

How did you end up trying to take down a trash incinerator?

I came to Minneapolis 11 years ago as a labor organizer. Then, I got sucked into the environmental justice movement with Standing Rock, and got more involved with the fight around the Enbridge pipeline in Minnesota, Line Three. 

People had been trying to organize around the HERC for decades. In the early 2010s they were trying to increase the amount of trash that was burned there to its full capacity, which would have been 1200-something tons. At the time, it was burning a thousand tons per day. They succeeded in blocking that. 

There are very few new incinerators in the United States, but across the Global South, they’re spreading. My father is from India — one of the places that’s very important to us is near a giant incinerator in Delhi, India. 

At the Minnesota Environmental Justice Table, we were trying to bring a sort of labor mentality to the environmental justice movement, which can often be focused on emergency-response- type fights. We wanted to be more strategic and forward-thinking. And then a whistleblower got in touch with us, six years ago. He had a lot of really concerning information about the state of the facility. He showed us pictures of ash violations, of worker injuries, really severe worker injuries. 

Coming from a labor background, I can see how that would get your attention. 

We’ve tried reaching out to the workers there. We’ve made many overtures, but to no avail so far. But to be concise about it, the HERC is blocking the way to zero waste. Detroit shut its incinerator down in 2019–since then, the recycling rates have doubled. 

It seems like the assumption is that trash generation is just going to continue to exponentially increase, and the only solution is to use incinerators to deal with that. But that doesn’t address the root cause of the problem, which is, no, trash generation should not be exponentially increasing.

So how does the HERC influence the community around it? 

On the one side of the facility in North Minneapolis, there’s one of the most economically marginalized, majority Black and Brown zip codes in the state, and it has the highest asthma rate in the state. And then on the other side is this quickly-gentrifying, Williamsburg Brooklyn type community. 

Before the gentrification started, like 10 years ago, the HERC didn’t have odor control technology. It would stink, and people who lived in North Minneapolis would talk about the smell. Even with the odor control tech, there are hundreds of garbage trucks going through there every day. The garbage trucks don’t seem to go through the nice part of town. 

How long did the hunger strike last? How did you protect your health? 

We did it for twelve days. We had a medical team looking after us, doing checks in the morning and evening. We’d have people sleeping over at the house just to make sure we’re okay. We got wheeled around in wheelchairs to conserve energy. We all live pretty close to [HERC], but one of us…lives within sight of it. 

We were really in some pretty intense discussion the last few days about extending it. It felt like we were making a lot of progress on the one hand, but on the other hand, the commissioners who represent Minneapolis…it’s like they were giving us the silent treatment. 

Finally, yesterday morning, we heard from a state legislator and got the promise of a meeting. 

So, what did you gain from the hunger strike? 

The demands were really two things: one, we want a date for them to shut down the facility. Two, we want a just transition process, in which the community is at the table for what comes next. And so this hunger strike, I think, has been very effective in terms of clarifying to the public that it’s not closing without an actual additional vote. People are paying attention. The overall political apparatus – they are now at the table with us in a different way. 

Part of the reason we stopped is, we’re at the point when negotiations are about to begin. It’s hard to negotiate if you don’t have any food in you. 

Lately, of course, Minneapolis has been in the news for ICE violence, and also for the city’s ability to come together and push back against ICE. From an organizing perspective, are these things connected? 

Our response to ICE was this moral kind of line-setting – we put our foot down and put a line in the road and said, you’re not passing this. This is Minneapolis saying to the world that there are some things that are not going to be acceptable. You’re not going to assassinate someone in the street for protecting somebody else. We’re not going to let that happen.

And to tie it into the HERC, you’re not going to poison a majority-Black community and get away with it anymore. We’re done. We’re putting a line in the road. We’re not going to allow anyone else to be sacrificed and murdered by this facility. And the commissioners and everyone need to understand that our resolve is set, that we’re not going anywhere. 

2026-04-24 22:10:44

On July 4, 2020, Guo Wengui stood next to Steve Bannon on a bobbing boat in New York Harbor, with the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop, to announce the launch of the “New Federal State of China.”

Guo—a supposed billionaire Chinese dissident who claimed to know secrets of corruption among China’s leaders—had amassed a large, ardent following among that country’s diaspora.

The new organization was wildly ambitious. Guo and Bannon called it a “government-in-waiting,” prepared to step in and run China following what they claimed was the imminent collapse of ruling Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. At the same time, Guo was also seeking investments in GTV, an online streaming site he claimed would compete with companies like Amazon and TikTok, make investors rich, and air reporting that would fulfill his oft-stated goal: “Take down CCP.”

On the boat, Guo joined Bannon in reading a declaration of principles, told the former Donald Trump aide he loved him, and kissed him. Then Guo bit his own index finger and signed the declaration with his blood.

That was, in retrospect, one of many signs of how weird 2020 got. But it was also a high point for the “whistleblower movement” Guo and Bannon touted. Nearly six years later, federal prosecutors are asking Judge Analisa Torres to sentence Guo to more than 30 years in prison for overseeing one of “this nation’s worst and most rampant frauds.” (In an order dated April 23, Torres delayed Guo’s sentencing, previously scheduled for Monday, until June 29.)

In 2024, a jury convicted Guo of stealing hundreds of millions from his followers. The New Federal State of China, the harbor ceremony, the nonprofits, and the media companies were all part of an elaborate con Guo used to “lock in” those supporters before hitting them up for investments, prosecutors said a sentencing memo last week.

Guo, who has been jailed as a perceived flight risk since his March 2023 arrest, continues to deny guilt. His lawyers argue, in their own sentencing memo, that his conviction was the result of the Chinese government’s “relentless and overwhelmingly powerful targeting of him.” The memo also suggests, without evidence, that Guo’s support for Trump, in particular his role in the publication of explicit pictures of Hunter Biden prior to the 2020 election, contributed to his prosecution.

Guo has created a fashion line, secretly funded a pro-Trump social media company, starred in his own music videos, and once bought a $67 million apartment with a reference from Tony Blair. Last year, he publicly vouched for his former cell-block mate, Sean “Diddy” Combs, as “a very kind, sensitive, genius person.” He bankrolled bogus claims that covid is a Chinese bioweapon and clandestinely wired money to Trump backers trying to overturn the 2020 election results. While promoting himself as the world’s leading anti-China dissident, Guo has faced allegations, which he denies, that he has actually worked as a Chinese spy. In 2019, he faced an FBI counterintelligence probe. (In a ruling in a lawsuit two years later, a judge wrote: “The evidence at trial does not permit the Court to decide whether Guo is, in fact, a dissident or a double agent.”)

But behind the flamboyance and international intrigue was a straightforward scam. In China, Guo became rich through real estate development. He fled the country in late 2014 to avoid arrest there in a corruption scandal, and Chinese authorities ultimately seized most of his assets. Prosecutors argue that when he began launching anti-CCP organizations from the United States in 2018, his intention was to rebuild his wealth by fleecing his fans.

Shortly after his funds were seized, Guo, with Bannon’s help, launched a nonprofit, the Rule of Law Foundation, to cultivate donors in the Chinese diaspora community. Guo claimed he was putting $100 million of his own funds into the group, but never did. He instead relied on money from his followers, who prosecutors said ultimately put up $36 million.

Those funds were raised in part through an international network of clubs, which Guo followers called “farms.” These well-organized groups also worked to amplify claims Guo made in lengthy daily video broadcasts, with followers translating his remarks into various languages. At times the farms also carried out his directives to attack Guo critics or other Chinese dissidents he quarreled with, somtimes via aggressive in-person protests at their homes.

In 2020, as I have reported, Guo took new steps to monetize his network of political supporters. GTV was the first in a series of “investment opportunities” that Guo offered his backers. After a Securities and Exchange Commission probe curtailed his sale of GTV stock, Guo launched a scheme in which his fans “loaned” money to organizations tied to him in exchange for the chance to buy more stock. He followed that with a “club” in which fans paid tens of thousands of dollars for the chance, again, to invest in Guo companies at a discount, and then with cryptocurrency offerings and other financial vehicles.

Guo promoted these schemes in videos in he which told supporters their funds would help defeat the CCP and guaranteed that investors would not lose money.

In fact, prosecutors say, “thousands” of investors, nearly all of them ethic Chinese fans of Guo’s anti-CCP politics, lost their shirts. The companies that Guo touted barely existed. And Guo moved money put up by his fans into bank accounts her controlled, then used the funds on luxury homes, an $832,000 Lamborghini, a $3.5 million Ferrari, a $4.4 million Bugatti, a $2 million yacht, and upkeep on a separate $30 million yacht—the same one Bannon was living on when federal agents arrested him in 2020 for an unrelated fraud scheme. (Trump pardoned Bannon before he faced trial.)

Guo’s schemes appeared to have benefited from his claims to have close ties to Trump advisers. His organizations paid or employed various MAGA figures, including Rudy Giuliani, Michael Flynn, and current White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Peter Navarro, between stints as a trade adviser to Trump, served as the New Federal’s State’s “Ambassador-at-Large.”

Bannon, who court records indicate was paid millions of dollars by Guo for consulting services, regularly promoted Guo’s companies in broadcasts watched by Guo fans, and privately advised Guo on how to pitch investors on the ventures that prosecutors later said were scams. In a court filing prior to Guo’s trial, prosecutors called Bannon a co-conspirator in Guo’s fraud scheme. But Bannon has not been charged with a crime in connection with Guo’s ventures. And while the gist of what Guo was up to was hard to miss by 2021, prosecutors have not presented evidence that Bannon knew the details of Guo’s fraud.

Bannon has had relatively little to say about Guo over the last few years, but has at times defended his former patron, arguing prosecutors targeted Guo due to his anti-CCP statements.

Some of Guo’s victims, too, continue to support him, taking up his argument that the government, by freezing his assets, caused their losses.

But according to prosecutors, 225 victims have provided impact statements to the government. Prosecutors quote extensively from those statements in their sentencing memo, though the filiings are sealed and the victims unnamed. Several victims also testified during Guo’s 2024 trial.

“[M]y family and I were defrauded of around $500,000, most of which came from selling our home,” one victim wrote. “Now, this entire amount has been lost. This has pushed us from a stable middle-class life to living on borrowed money.”

 “This case destroyed everything I had—my family’s savings, our ability to support each other, and even our emotional connection,” another victim said. “I involved my mother and brother, thinking I was helping them, only to see all of us dragged into financial ruin.”

Another person wrote that the fraud “stripped away” much of the savings their mother had worked to pass on to her family and “exacerbated her health conditions, robbing her of peace in her final years.”

Many of the victims reported experiencing anxiety and depression as a result of the fraud. A half-dozen of the victims quoted by prosecutors said they thought about suicide.

“My entire moral compass, built around truth, compassion, and community, was manipulated and shattered,” one victim wrote. “I had trusted blindly. When the truth became undeniable, I was overwhelmed with shame, guilt, and despair. I struggled with recurring suicidal thoughts. I lost my will to live, to hope, to believe in anything again.”

These victims are Chinese immigrants, in the US and around the world, who Guo claimed to champion. They are people who Bannon likes to call the “laobaixing,” a Chinese term for “ordinary folks.”

Prosecutors call what Guo did “affinity fraud,” a scheme where a con artist uses apparent membership in a particular community to win trust and supposed investments, often to finance a Ponzi or pyramid scheme.

Federal prosecutors and some of Guo’s victims argued that this particular scam, by targeting Chinese immigrants who wanted to believe Guo’s claims that their savings would help “take down CCP,” hurt not only their finances but their political movement.

“While loudly proclaiming his goal to defeat the CCP, he actually served their interests by discrediting the very cause he claimed to support,” one victim wrote. “By betraying us—the true believers in ending the CCP’s tyranny—he has tarnished the fight against the CCP itself.”

Update, April 24: This story has been updated with a rescheduled sentencing date for Guo.

If you or someone you care about may be at risk of suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

2026-04-24 19:00:00

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

Republican lawmakers are attempting to shield big oil from having to pay for its contributions to the climate crisis, alarming environmental advocates.

New House and Senate bills led by Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) would give oil and gas companies broad legal immunity from policies and lawsuits aimed at holding the industry accountable for damages caused by its emissions.

Dubbed the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026, the proposal would protect the sector from liability. It is similar to a 2005 law that has largely blocked lawsuits against the firearms industry over gun violence.

The Republicans’ proposal is designed to stop a surge of climate accountability measures launched by states and municipalities—which Hageman’s office called “leftist legal crusades punishing lawful activity,” in a statement. In recent years, more than 70 state and local governments have sued oil companies for allegedly deceiving the public about the dangers of their products. Meanwhile, New York and Vermont have also passed climate “superfund” laws requiring major polluters to pay for damages from past emissions, with other states considering similar policies.

If passed, the new federal legislation would dismiss pending climate accountability lawsuits, void all climate superfund laws and block similar future efforts. The proposals attempt to undermine the very foundations of climate accountability measures, said Delta Merner, lead scientist at the science hub for climate litigation at the science advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists.

Hageman, for instance, in a statement said her bill would “affirm” that the federal government had exclusive authority and jurisdiction over the regulation of greenhouse gases, but legal experts dispute that, Merner noted. The language attempts “to take away the ability for local harms to be decided at the local and state level,” Merner said.

Cruz’s bill, meanwhile, attempts to discredit climate attribution studies—scientific analyses quantifying how much the climate crisis altered the likelihood or intensity of specific extreme weather events—on which some climate legal claims are based. “To try to legislate that science away is something that’s really alarming,” said Merner.

This year, the top US oil lobby, the American Petroleum Institute (API), said blocking “abusive” climate lawsuits was a top priority. Months earlier, 16 Republican state attorneys general asked the justice department for a “liability shield” for oil companies. And last year, both the API and energy giant ConocoPhillips also pressed Congress on draft legislation to limit climate liability.

“Immunity is clearly something the industry has been after,” said Cassidy DiPaola of the pro-climate superfund group Make Polluters Pay. “We’re in a period where there’s a Republican trifecta that will basically bow down to the industry, and I think they view this moment as one of their biggest opportunities to get it.”

Industry groups have praised the federal proposal. In a joint statement, Mike Sommers, the API CEO, and Chet Thompson, the CEO of the influential fuel lobby group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, thanked Hageman and Cruz for the legislation, saying: “Congress should act decisively to reaffirm federal authority over national energy policy and end this activist-driven state overreach.”

Asked about advocates’ concerns about the new policy proposal, API referred the Guardian to its previous statement.

The bills’ introduction came as red states are also proposing to block climate lawsuits and superfund acts. Last week, Tennessee passed a measure blocking big oil accountability efforts, and Utah greenlit a similar law earlier this month. Other states are considering similar policies, but none of them are as straightforward about their goals as the federal proposals, said DiPaola.

“It’s honestly shocking how direct the federal lawmakers are being with with their wording,” she said. “We kind of anticipated it being a little bit more discreet, but they’re not hiding the ball whatsoever. They’re saying it out front: ‘You can’t hold us accountable.’”

The industry and its allies have made a variety of other attempts to thwart climate accountability efforts, including challenging superfund laws in court and attempting to have litigation thrown out. “In some ways, this federal bill feels like a capstone [of the] multi-layered strategy that we’ve been watching unfold, where the fossil fuel industry is attacking climate accountability on several fronts at once,” said Merner.

The industry has seen mixed results. Some climate litigation, for instance, has been thrown out. But last week, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit from the Trump administration that aimed to pre-emptively block Hawaii from suing big oil. “The industry knows it’s vulnerable,” said Merner. “They are not totally confident they can win cases on their merits.”

Jay Inslee, a former Washington governor, has recently been raising concerns about the fossil fuel industry’s desire for a liability waiver, particularly since Hageman indicated in February that a federal proposal was in the works. “Every elected official who cares about the interests of their constituents more than those of corporate polluters should oppose this disgraceful proposal,” Inslee said in a statement.

It’s not clear whether Republicans could muster the votes to pass the legislation as it is written. But the bills could help lay the groundwork for a similar measure to be slipped into a larger piece of must-pass legislation, or via the reconciliation process when measures can pass with a simple majority rather than the 60-vote filibuster threshold. “We don’t think that the strategy is to pass this bill as a freestanding bill,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, which backs the litigation against the oil industry. “But bad things can happen at any minute, and we’ve got to be ready for it.”

The introduction of the federal legislation, Wiles said, “demystifies” oil industry allies’ objectives.

“If there was any doubt that they would try to do something this outrageous and this damaging to the justice system and to people’s rights to go to court to seek redress for harms, there’s no doubt any more,” he said.

2026-04-24 05:30:03

While testifying in support of the Department of Health and Human Services’ budget before Congress over the past week, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attacked home-and community-based services, a Medicaid-backed program that provides over seven million disabled people the support they need to remain out of institutions.

Specifically, Kennedy singled out the fact that some states allow some family caregivers to receive payment through Medicaid, a system Kennedy alleged is “rife with fraud.” Kennedy indicated that he’d like to dismantle those programs in favor of unpaid work, implicitly by women, in the home—already the predominant model for many households, and a far from sustainable one.

I spoke with Calli Ross, a parent and advocate who fought for paid caregiving for minor disabled children in her home state of Oregon, about what RFK Jr. doesn’t understand—or want to know—about these programs.

Most states allow parents of adult children with disabilities, family members of children with disabilities, and family members of the elderly to be paid for providing attendant care.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now saying all of this should be considered “natural supports” and unpaid labor. And the underlying rhetoric is that this labor should be provided by women.

Tensy is my 11-year-old little boy who was born with a genetic condition that makes him more susceptible to illness. At age one, he developed chronic lung disease. At four, he had his first cardiac arrest, going 33 minutes without oxygen to his brain. He recovered fairly well but with limited mobility. He requires 24/7 ventilator support for his lungs, uses a feeding tube, and is a wheelchair user.

In 2024, he had a second cardiac arrest caused by a seizure. This led to the loss of his smile, facial movement, and any purposeful physical movement. He is still able to communicate using an eye gaze device and experiences a full life because he is supported in his home and community.

In Oregon, like other states, a state assessment determined that to live safely at home, Tensy requires 744 hours of nursing and attendant care each month. These supports go far beyond typical parenting. They include tracheostomy care, manually resuscitating him during seizures, and full support for all activities of daily living.

Because Oregon passed the Children’s Extraordinary Needs waiver in 2023, parents of the highest-needs children are allowed to work up to 20 hours per week providing these supports, care that is clearly above and beyond typical parenting. Similar policies exist for adults with disabilities and the elderly, run by states but supplemented by federal matches. The few states that allow parents of minors to be paid are funded under the same principle.

Our program is incredibly small. Only 155 children can participate [at a time], and the waitlist is thousands long. That bill is named for my son: Tensy’s Law.

These are hours someone else could be paid to work—if the workforce existed. And by someone else, I mean anyone off the street who is 18 or older without a felony. But even that low-qualification workforce doesn’t exist. There is a well-documented national caregiver crisis. Many families are being forced to leave the workforce, rely on state aid, or institutionalize their loved ones at a much higher cost to state and federal systems.

As the baby boomer generation ages, the number of family caregivers is rapidly increasing. Without the infrastructure to support this care economy, the system as a whole will fail. We cannot expect women to leave the workforce en masse and provide the care needed for our aging and ill family members. We cannot expect families with children with disabilities to survive on GoFundMe and prayers.

Tensy is one of the 155 in children in Oregon, with a waitlist in the thousands, allowed to choose his dad as his paid caregiver for 20 hours a week. That is the cap, currently, in our state. (Even then, due to administrative delays, my son wasn’t able to benefit from having his dad as his paid caregiver until January.)

It isn’t much, but because of this help, we are able to afford a wheelchair-accessible vehicle. My husband is able to take more time from his job to provide Tensy the care he needs to thrive. As his parents, we are the most knowledgeable and most able to care for our son. But without support, we cannot keep him home. And that’s the reality everywhere.