Mass deportation plans

Trump’s mass deportation plans hit riskier phase with legal immigrants, court fights

The new strategy, especially involving immigrants with green cards or American spouses, poses political test.

By Myah Ward

President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda has reached a turning point in recent days, as the administration expands the group of immigrants it has targeted for removal, quarrels with judges and wades into increasingly risky political territory.

Trump spent his first weeks in office emphasizing a mass deportation campaign aimed at criminals who are in the country illegally.

But late last week, immigration agents arrested a Lebanese doctor on a legal visa, despite a court order temporarily blocking her immediate removal. That followed the detention of German tourists, a former Columbia University graduate student with a green card and multiple immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens or have long lived in the United States.

And even as the administration targeted a group of Venezuelans this weekend who officials said are affiliated with the Tren de Aragua gang, they used an archaic, war-time law to round them up and then seemingly ignored a judge’s order to halt deportation flights.

The striking shift has captured the public’s attention and is likely to define Trump’s strategy in the months ahead as he looks to convey progress on his lagging promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. But the expanded list of targets — especially immigrants married to U.S. citizens — carries political risks on an issue that has long been a strength for the president.

“Public opinion varies dramatically depending on the kind of illegal immigrant you’re talking about,” said GOP pollster Whit Ayres, adding that some undocumented immigrants, including those who came to the country as children, tend to garner much more public sympathy in surveys than others.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll last month found overwhelming support for deporting undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crimes, with a solid majority of Americans also backing the removal of those who have been accused of committing nonviolent offenses. But there’s a downturn in support when Americans are asked about deporting immigrants who have only broken immigration laws, those who have lived in the United States for more than a decade, and immigrants who arrived as children or are parents of children who are U.S. citizens.

“We can all get behind deporting violent criminals,” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO. “But there’s a lot of moderate Republicans that are concerned that they may be jumping the shark, as they say — they may be going a little too far on some of these things.”

Trump tested the political limits of hardline immigration enforcement during his first term with his family separation policy that proved to be widely unpopular with voters. Democrats warned voters that his promised mass deportations effort in a second term would result in similarly unpopular measures — a message that failed to break through during the campaign.

Trump hasn’t crossed a red line like family separation yet, but it’s still early, said Barrett Marson, a GOP strategist in Arizona. Republicans are crediting Trump for a historic drop in border crossings and the arrests of criminals, and the question is whether moderates will give him a pass for collateral damage — and whether that matters politically to a president who only has one term left to serve.

“Trump couldn’t have been clearer that he wanted to deport everyone who was here illegally, whether they are a gardener, a gang member or a stay-at-home mother,” Marson said. “And since he isn’t running again … what does he care if he’s at 49 percent, 46 percent, or 40 percent?”

A woman from Peru was detained by ICE last month traveling back from her honeymoon in Puerto Rico with her husband, who voted for Trump. USA Today found that a number of other immigrants who have long resided in the country and are married to U.S. citizens were also swept up in the Trump administration’s increased enforcement efforts.

In another case, a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University’s medical school, Rasha Alawieh, was deported from the United States late last week. She had a valid visa and a court order temporarily blocking her removal, but the Trump administration deported her anyway, claiming officials hadn’t received formal notification of the order before she was put on an Air France flight bound for Paris Friday night. Federal authorities said Monday that they deported the Lebanese doctor after finding “sympathetic photos and videos of prominent Hezbollah figures” in her phone.

And a story about German tourists has also grabbed headlines in Germany and the U.S., as a man and a woman who say they tried to enter the U.S. legally were sent to a crowded detention facility and eventually deported, in a case that took weeks to resolve.

There will likely be other cases that raise public opposition to the effort as the administration looks for ways to remove more immigrants. Trump has struggled to immediately deport immigrants in the large numbers he promised on the campaign trail because of constraints on resources — including detention capacity and a bogged down immigration court system.

As a result, he has looked for other ways to project action.

His administration has touted the arrests of people charged with or convicted of crimes, but others with no criminal record, U.S. citizen spouses and children, and people with valid deportation protections have been swept up in his increased enforcement. It has sparked fear in immigrant communities across the country, as lawyers are increasingly warning immigrants, even green card holders, to avoid travel.

“When you take a look at all of this, it’s like death by 1,000 cuts, and it will soon snowball into more and worse, and it will catch up to him electorally. There will be backlash,” said Beatriz Lopez, co-executive director of the Immigration Hub, an immigration advocacy group. “And the more that there are these high-profile cases, the more that it will hit the average American.”

Trump’s policies have also pushed the legal limits this month. The White House touted the removal of more than 100 Venezuelan nationals they say were members of the Tren de Aragua gang under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, ignoring a judge’s order to turn the planes around. Administration officials celebrated the weekend deportations to El Salvador, as President Nayib Bukele posted grim video on X of scenes of soldiers leading tattooed men off an airplane, forcing them to bend toward the ground as they were frog-marched to waiting buses and had their heads shaved by hooded prison guards.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday reiterated that the administration “acted within the confines of the law,” and said the Department of Homeland Security was sure about the identities of the alleged gang members they deported to El Salvador, as questions emerge about how the administration is making these determinations and lawyers for some deportees say their clients had no gang affiliation and no final orders of removal from a U.S. immigration judge.

“Countless lives will be saved because of this action,” Leavitt said. “The president is proud to deliver on that promise.”

Kill more than 400 Palestinians.....

Israeli strikes across Gaza kill more than 400 Palestinians and shatter ceasefire with Hamas

By WAFAA SHURAFA, JOSEF FEDERMAN and SAMY MAGDY

Israel launched airstrikes across the Gaza Strip early Tuesday, killing at least 400 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to local health officials. The surprise bombardment, the deadliest in Gaza since the start of the 17-month war, shattered a ceasefire in place since January.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the strikes after Hamas refused Israeli demands to change the ceasefire agreement. Officials said the operation was open-ended and was expected to expand. The White House said it had been consulted and voiced support for Israel's actions.

The Israeli military ordered people to evacuate eastern Gaza, including much of the northern town of Beit Hanoun and other communities further south, and head toward the center of the territory, indicating that Israel could soon launch renewed ground operations.

“Israel will, from now on, act against Hamas with increasing military strength,” Netanyahu’s office said.

The attack during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan could signal the full resumption of a war that has already killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and caused widespread destruction across Gaza. It also raised concerns about the fate of the roughly two dozen Israeli hostages held by Hamas who are believed to still be alive.

The renewal of the campaign against Hamas, which is supported by Iran, came as the U.S. and Israel stepped up attacks this week across the region. The U.S. launched deadly strikes against Iran-allied rebels in Yemen, while Israel has targeted Iran-backed militants in Lebanon and Syria.

A senior Hamas official said Netanyahu’s decision to return to war amounts to a “death sentence” for the remaining hostages. Izzat al-Risheq accused Netanyahu of launching the strikes to try and save his far-right governing coalition and called on mediators to “reveal facts” on who broke the truce. Hamas said at least four senior officials were killed in Tuesday's strikes.

There were no reports of any attacks by Hamas several hours after the bombardment, indicating it still hoped to restore the truce.

The strikes came as Netanyahu comes under mounting domestic pressure, with mass protests planned over his handling of the hostage crisis and his decision to fire the head of Israel's internal security agency. His latest testimony in a long-running corruption trial was canceled after the strikes.

The strikes appeared to give Netanyahu a political boost, with a far-right party that had bolted the government over the ceasefire announcing Tuesday that it was rejoining.

The main group representing families of the captives accused the government of backing out of the ceasefire, saying it “chose to give up on the hostages.”

“We are shocked, angry and terrified by the deliberate dismantling of the process to return our loved ones from the terrible captivity of Hamas,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said in a statement.

Wounded stream into Gaza hospitals

A strike on a home in the southern city of Rafah killed 17 members of one family, according to the European Hospital, which received the bodies. The dead included five children, their parents, and another father and his three children.

In the southern city of Khan Younis, Associated Press reporters saw explosions and plumes of smoke. Ambulances brought wounded people to Nasser Hospital, where patients lay on the floor, some screaming. A young girl cried as her bloody arm was bandaged.

Many Palestinians said they had expected a return to all-out war when talks over the second phase of the ceasefire did not begin as scheduled in early February. The second phase was broadly outlined in the original agreement, but the details had been expected to be hammered out in those talks.

Israel instead embraced an alternative proposal and cut off all shipments of food, fuel and other aid to the territory's 2 million Palestinians to try to pressure Hamas to accept it.

“Nobody wants to fight,” Palestinian resident Nidal Alzaanin told the AP by phone from Gaza City. "Everyone is still suffering from the previous months,” he said.

Gaza's Health Ministry said at least 404 people were killed in the strikes and more than 560 were wounded after earlier saying that 413 were dead and 660 wounded. Rescuers were still searching the rubble for dead and wounded as the strikes continued.

Zaher al-Waheidi, head of the records department in the ministry, said at least 263 of those killed were women or children 18 and under. He described it as the deadliest day in Gaza since the start of the war.

The war has killed over 48,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, and displaced an estimated 90% of Gaza’s population. The Health Ministry doesn’t differentiate between civilians and militants, but says over half of the dead have been women and children.

The war erupted when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages. Most have been released in ceasefires or other deals, with Israeli forces rescuing only eight and recovering dozens of bodies.

Israel responded with one of the most destructive military offensives in recent memory.

The ceasefire brought some relief to Gaza and allowed hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians to return to what remained of their homes.

US backs Israel and blames Hamas

The White House sought to blame Hamas for the renewed fighting. National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes said the militant group "could have released hostages to extend the ceasefire but instead chose refusal and war.”

An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the unfolding operation, said Israel was striking Hamas' military, leaders and infrastructure and planned to expand the operation beyond air attacks. The official accused Hamas of attempting to rebuild and plan new attacks. Hamas militants and security forces quickly returned to the streets in recent weeks after the ceasefire went into effect.

Talks on a second phase of the ceasefire had stalled

The strikes came two months after a ceasefire was reached to pause the war. Over six weeks, Hamas released 25 Israeli hostages and the bodies of eight more in exchange for more than 1,700 Palestinian prisoners as agreed in the first phase.

But since that phase ended two weeks ago, the sides have not been able to agree on a way forward with a second phase that was meant to free the 24 living hostages still in captivity and bring about an end to the war. Israel says Hamas also holds the remains of 35 captives.

Hamas has demanded an end to the war and full withdrawal of Israeli troops in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages. Israel says it will not end the war until it destroys Hamas' governing and military capabilities and frees all hostages — two goals that could be incompatible.

Now Israel has demanded Hamas to release half of the remaining hostages in return for a promise to negotiate a lasting truce. Hamas instead wants to follow the original ceasefire deal reached by the two sides.

Though Israeli forces have killed dozens of Palestinians who the military says approached its troops or entered unauthorized areas since the ceasefire began, the deal has largely held. Egypt, Qatar and the United States have been trying to mediate the next steps.

A full resumption of the war would allow Netanyahu to avoid the tough trade-offs called for in the second phase of the agreement and the thorny question of who would govern Gaza.

It would also shore up his coalition, which depends on far-right lawmakers who want to depopulate Gaza and rebuild Jewish settlements there. That was already in motion with the return of far-right Itamar Ben-Gvir and his party to Netanyahu’s government Tuesday.

Netanyahu faces mounting criticism

The released hostages, some of whom were emaciated, have repeatedly implored the government to press ahead with the ceasefire to return all remaining captives. Tens of thousands of Israelis have taken part in mass protests calling for a ceasefire and return of all hostages.

Mass demonstrations are planned later Tuesday and Wednesday following Netanyahu's announcement this week that he wants to fire the head of Israel's Shin Bet internal security agency. Critics have lambasted the move as an attempt by Netanyahu to divert blame for his government's failures in the Oct. 7 attack and handling of the war.

Funding cuts....

Trump funding cuts worry researchers at most active West Coast volcano

By Sam Hill

When Mount St. Helens in Washington erupted nearly 45 years ago, it killed 57 people, destroyed hundreds of homes, spread ash to at least 10 other states and blasted a wide, horseshoe-shaped crater out of the volcano’s north side. Widely considered the most disastrous volcanic eruption in U.S. history, the event drastically altered the surrounding landscape.

As the region slowly recovered, Mount St. Helens became a tourist destination. But the volcano is still active.

“St. Helens is by far the most active volcano in the Cascades and presents the highest likelihood of the next future eruption in our region,” Pacific Northwest Seismic Network Director Harold Tobin told SFGATE.

The network, a collaborative research partnership among the University of Washington, University of Oregon and U.S. Geological Survey, operates around 20 seismometers in the area and records around a dozen small earthquakes in the vicinity of the volcano each week. Unfortunately, efforts to monitor that seismic activity have been hindered by a spending freeze across the Department of the Interior. 

Similar to what’s happened with the National Parks Service, spending limits on government credit cards held by USGS employees have dropped to $1. This has eliminated overnight research trips and plans for larger-scale research projects, including the maintenance and upgrade of seismic stations on the mountain.

“It’s only been a short time, and our network is still functioning fully, but over time, that will interfere with maintenance and improvements, and we will see things start to degrade,” Tobin said. “I’m concerned that, over some time, our ability to monitor for earthquake hazards that may lead to an eruption will just not be as good as it should be.”

Network partners at the universities can pick up the slack for a time, he said, but not indefinitely.

The network receives funding from many sources, but most of it comes from annual contracts with the USGS through its Volcano Hazards Program. The current federal funding contract for the University of Washington expires at the end of March, and Tobin isn’t confident that a renewal will be in place immediately. This would force the network to deprioritize repairing seismometers and other research endeavors near the volcanoes in the Cascades.

Along with a potential backslide in volcano monitoring, the monument is also facing problems when it comes to recreation and tourism.

The popular Johnston Ridge Observatory that looks over Mount St. Helens’ gaping crater has been closed since 2023 after a landslide took out a bridge on the windy road leading there. State officials have reported that it won’t be repaired until 2027.

While there are other ways to enter the monument, those areas will be less maintained and sparsely staffed this summer after cuts to the U.S. Forest Service, according to the Mount St. Helens Institute, a nonprofit organization that works with the monument. At least 15 forest service employees from the surrounding Gifford Pinchot National Forest were fired by executive order, according to reports.

“With the decreased number of staff, the forest service just can’t meet the demand that will be put on it by public visitation,” Mount St. Helens Institute Co-Executive Director Alyssa Hoyt told SFGATE.

The institute published a blog post last week alerting visitors to the impacts they may see with cuts to federal agencies. Visitors will have less access to expert information, it states, and trails in the area will be maintained less than in years prior. Wildfire prevention efforts may be slowed.

Hoyt couldn’t identify the exact number of forest service employees active at monument facilities, because it is in flux right now, she said. But she confirmed that significantly fewer people than usual are on staff.

Officials at Gifford Pinchot National Forest did not respond to inquiries from SFGATE about fired employees.

Beyond the current wave of funding cuts, Hoyt is fearful of what an understaffed season could mean for the future of monument funding. “There’s likely to be an effect of ‘well, the forest service is ineffective at carrying out its mission because of these cuts,’ and there may be less funding going forward because they are not getting the job done,” she said.

The earthquake activity around Mount St. Helens has been at a normal, safe level since a four-year period of minor eruptions ended in 2008. Volcanoes usually have a period of increased earthquake activity for weeks leading up to an eruption event.

“We’re pretty confident that we would see signs of developing unrest before eruption. Unlike earthquakes, volcanoes tend to give you some warning that they’re doing something,” Harold said. “We’ll continue to prioritize public safety, of course. Even in the face of fiscal challenges, we’re going to do everything we can to monitor these volcanoes. But if the current [federal funding] trend continues, that will all begin to degrade.”

The Mount St. Helens Institute is reevaluating its programming, looking at what programs or events may need to be removed from the 2025 docket in preparation for its own funding gap. About 10% of funding for the institute comes from federal agreements.

The institute is finding ways to work around budget and staffing woes, though, and during these difficult times, Hoyt says she’s looking to the recovering landscape for inspiration.

“When Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, it created one of the most devastated landscapes that we’ve seen. This smoking moonscape … it was lifeless,” Hoyt said. “But this story of resilience, how life has returned and nature has overcome over the last 45 years is a story of hope for me that I love to share with everyone who visits the mountain.”

LDN 1235

There is no sea on Earth large enough to contain the Shark nebula. This predator apparition poses us no danger as it is composed only of interstellar gas and dust. Dark dust like that featured here is somewhat like cigarette smoke and created in the cool atmospheres of giant stars. After expelling gas and gravitationally recondensing, massive stars may carve intricate structures into their birth cloud using their high energy light and fast stellar winds as sculpting tools. The heat they generate evaporates the murky molecular cloud as well as causing ambient hydrogen gas to disperse and glow red. During disintegration, we humans can enjoy imagining these great clouds as common icons, like we do for water clouds on Earth. Including smaller dust nebulae such as Van den Bergh 149 & 150, the Shark nebula, sometimes cataloged as LDN 1235, spans about 15 light years and lies about 650 light years away toward the constellation of the King of Aethiopia (Cepheus).

Deaths Mount

Storm Deaths Mount, Exacerbated By DOGE and Trump’s Climate Chaos

At least 35 people have died in a devastating combination of tornadoes, wildfires, and floods.

Henry Carnell

On Friday and Saturday, a mega-storm system hit the Midwestern and southern United States with a devastating combination of tornadoes, wildfires, high-speed winds, flooding, dust storms, and blizzard-like conditions.

Winds in Texas and New Mexico approached 100 miles per hour. Eighteen-wheeler trucks were knocked over. Dozens or hundreds of houses were leveled from Texas to Indiana. There are still more than 300,000 power outages affecting over 170 million households, per USA Today‘s grid tracker. At least 35 people have been reported dead as of Sunday in Kansas, Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri.

Meteorologists predict the storm complex—now focused on more central areas of the country—will move towards the east coast. Seven states from Florida to Ohio are under a tornado watch.

The storms come just weeks after the Trump administration cut the jobs of hundreds of federal weather forecasters. The New York Times reported last week that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is responsible for tornado warnings and other weather forecasts, is set to cut 20 percent of its workforce. Meteorologists and scientists warned earlier this month that eviscerating weather agencies would risk public safety.

“It’s going to affect safety. It’s going to affect the economy,” warned former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad in an interview with the Associated Press, pointing out that the country was “getting into prime tornado time.”

As the devastated areas begin to rebuild, they will also have less help. At the directive of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency also cut 200 positions barely a week ago and is making preparations to cut more.

More events like this, with consequences exacerbated by those cuts, may be on the horizon. Research shows that climate change creates storm conditions favorable for tornadoes, and that the timing and locations of tornadoes is shifting to become less predictable. The administration, of course, is cracking down on research that includes the word “climate”—and, for that matter, “resilience.”

Tragedy and Tyranny

The Tragedy—and Tyranny—of Donald Trump’s War on “Woke”

“It really does alter our ability as a collective society to be able to identify and discuss reality.”

Kate Yoder

In his first hours back in the White House in January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” Yet it was immediately clear he was in fact imposing rules on language, ordering the government to recognize only two genders and shut down any diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. In one executive order, he redefined “energy” to exclude solar and wind power.

Within days, not just “diversity” but also “clean energy” and “climate change” began vanishing from federal websites. Other institutions and organizations started scrubbing their websites. Scientists who receive federal funding were told to end any activities that contradicted Trump’s executive orders. Government employees—at least the ones who hadn’t been fired—began finding ways to take their climate work underground, worried that even acknowledging the existence of global warming could put their jobs at risk.

The Trump administration’s crackdown on words tied to progressive causes reflects the rise of what’s been called the “woke right,” a reactionary movement with its own language rules in opposition to “woke” terms that have become more prevalent in recent years. Since Trump took office, federal agencies have deleted climate change information from more than 200 government websites, according to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a network that tracks these changes. These shifts in language lay the groundwork for how people understand what’s real and true, widening the deepening divide between how Republicans and Democrats understand the world.

“I think that all powerful individuals and all powerful entities are in some sense trying to bend reality to favor them, to play for their own interests,” said Norma Mendoza-Denton, an anthropology professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, who coedited a book about Trump’s use of language. “So it’s not unique, but definitely the scope at which it’s happening, the way it’s happening, the speed of it right now is unprecedented.”

Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, says that government sites are one of the few sources the public trusts for authoritative, reliable information, which is why removing facts about climate change from them is such a problem. 

“It really does alter our ability as a collective society to be able to identify and discuss reality,” Gehrke said. “If we only are dealing with the information that we’re receiving via social media, we’re literally operating in different realities.” 

Institutions that fail to follow Trump’s executive orders have already faced consequences. After Trump rechristened the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America,” for instance, The Associated Press stood by the original, centuries-old name in its coverage—and its reporters lost access to the White House as a result. The effects of these language mandates have reverberated across society, with university researchers, nonprofits, and business executives searching for MAGA-friendly phrases to stay out of the administration’s crosshairs. The solar industry is no longer talking about climate change, for instance, but “American energy dominance,” echoing Trump’s platform.

The new language rules are expected to limit what many scientists are permitted to research. “It’s going to make it really hard to do the climate justice work,” said Amanda Fencl, director of climate science at the Union of Concerned Scientists, referring to the field that studies how a warming planet affects people unequally.

The National Science Foundation, which accounts for about a quarter of federal support to universities, has been flagging studies that might violate Trump’s executive orders on gender and diversity initiatives based on a search for words such as “female,” “institutional,” “biases,” “marginalized,” and “trauma.” “I do think that deleting information and repressing and silencing scientists, it just has a chilling effect,” Fencl said. “It’s really demoralizing.”

During Trump’s first term, references to climate change disappeared from federal environmental websites, with the use of the term declining by roughly 38 percent between 2016 and 2020, only to reappear under the Biden administration. Trump’s second term appears to be taking a much more aggressive stance on wiping out words used by left-leaning organizations, scientists, and the broader public, likely with more to come. Last summer, a leaked video from Project 2025—a policy agenda organized by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank—revealed a former Trump official declaring that political appointees would have to “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”

Some government employees are finding ways to continue their climate work, despite the hostile atmosphere. The Atlantic reported in February that one team of federal workers at an unnamed agency had sealed itself off in a technology-free room to conduct meetings related to climate change, with employees using encrypted Signal messages instead of email. “All I have ever wanted to do was help the American people become more resilient to climate change,” an anonymous source at the agency reportedly said. “Now I am being treated like a criminal.”

The last time Trump was in office, federal employees replaced many references to “climate change” with softer phrases like “sustainability” and “resilience.” Now many of those vague, previously safe terms are disappearing from websites too, leaving fewer and fewer options for raising concerns about the environment. “You really cannot address a problem that you can’t identify,” Gehrke said. A study in the journal Ecological Economics in 2022 examined euphemisms for climate change used under the previous Trump administration and argued that the avoidance of clear language could undermine efforts to raise awareness for taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

Yet using more palatable synonyms could also be viewed as a way for scientists and government employees to continue doing important work. For example, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency rebranded its “Climate Resilience” site to “Future Conditions” in January, it stripped references to climate change from its main landing page while leaving them in subpages. “To me, that reads as trying to fly under the radar,” Gehrke said.

Of course, the reality of the changing climate won’t disappear, even if the phrase itself goes into hiding. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, who last year signed a bill deleting most mentions of climate change from Florida state law, is still dealing with the consequences of a warming planet, continuing to approve funding for coastal communities to adapt to flooding and protect themselves against hurricanes. He just calls it “strengthening and fortifying Florida” without any mention of climate change.

“You can ban a word if you want,” Mendoza-Denton said, “but the concept still needs to be talked about.”

I would say it is insane, but insane is normal now.........

The Absurdity of Trump’s Autopen Meltdown

Walk me through the logic: Presidents can trade pardons for bribes…but only if they sign by hand?

Pema Levy

President Donald Trump has a new hobbyhorse: That his predecessor, President Joe Biden, didn’t legally grant pardons to people Trump wants to harass because the pardons were signed with an autopen, a device for replicating a signature, rather than by hand.

“The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” he ranted on Truth Social just after midnight on Monday. “In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”

This argument is hilarious.

Trump and his MAGA allies have embraced a lawless approach to the presidency. Trump’s executive orders, actions, and legal filings all point to an understanding of the president as far more powerful than previously understood, with king-like powers over the entire executive branch. The president, they argue, is unbound by rules over firing officials or the civil service, by criminal laws, by the legal interpretations of other agencies (including the Justice Department), by Congress’ power of the purse, and it would seem—in multiple cases—unbound by court orders. But in Trump’s midnight rage-posting, he has identified some signature requirement as the one rule presidents must abide by.

The logic is absurd. Last summer, the Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for acts within their core powers, including the pardon power. Now, a president can literally trade a pardon for a bribe. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent, “Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune.” According to Trump’s new rubric, she omitted the golden rule that the pardon had to be signed by hand. Then, feel free to bribe away.

According to Trump, he can appoint the world’s richest man to dismantle federal agencies, halt payments, cancel contracts, and enrich himself—all outside the purview of Congress. It’s an extraordinary assertion of executive branch power—the power to delegate, in effect, all the executive’s power, and then Congress’ to boot. But what he cannot delegate is the signing of his signature to an autopen?

Usually the Trump administration is all about automation. They are reportedly using artificial intelligence to scan the social media posts of visa-holders and flag for deportation anyone it judges has made pro-Hamas or pro-terrorist comments. This dragnet is certain to ensnare people who merely criticized Israel’s tactics against Gaza or the United States’ support of that war—and that indeed may be the entire point. In other words, they are outsourcing a crackdown on free speech to AI.

It’s not the administration’s only use of AI. According to multiple reports, AI is being deployed across the federal government to reduce the workforce and transform federal agencies into an AI-run bureaucracy. So not only has Trump outsourced his job to Musk, but Musk is now outsourcing his—and most other federal employees’—to a chatbot. Whether a job exists or a deportation is ordered or your data remains private will now depend on an algorithm and the few DOGE employees who utilize it.

But outsource to an autopen? That’s a bridge too far.

Trump, of course, isn’t preoccupied just with the autopen but with what he claims it means: That Biden was too senile to govern, and the automatic signature is proof that someone else was calling the shots. It is obviously proof of no such thing. Conversely, signing by hand is no indication that Trump has read all of the dozens of executive orders he has issued since January 20. (We’ve all claimed to have read the fine print, haven’t we?) But Trump, in his zeal to delegate vast authority to Musk and AI, obviously is authorizing things he doesn’t know about or cannot foresee—like the time his administration fired the team working to stop a bird flu pandemic and then scrambled to hire them all back.

There are practical concerns with the no-autopen rule. What if a president is away from his desk when a pardon must be issued in order to avert, say, a wrongful execution? What if he injures his hands and cannot sign? Does he lose the pardon power? The pardon power has been set out by the Supreme Court as one of the president’s “core powers” that cannot be proscribed—yet somehow, according to Trump’s logic, this power can be entirely undone by use of an autopen?

To Trump’s credit, it doesn’t appear that he came up with this legal strategy. Instead, it seems to have emerged from the Heritage Foundation in an attempt to poke legal holes in Biden’s executive actions. Trump, according to remarks on Sunday, is so desirous to prosecute people Biden pardoned in the waning days of his administration—like former Rep. Liz Cheney, who co-led the January 6 Committee—that he intends to ask the courts to throw out Biden’s pardons on the strength of his autopen argument. “It’s not my decision; that’ll be up to a court,” he said. “But I would say that they’re null and void.”

Perhaps Trump is imagining that Chief Justice John Roberts, the author of the decision granting presidential immunity, will finally draw a line on executive authority. Do what you want, Roberts might decree, but you have to sign the document by hand.

Even for this Supreme Court, that level of absurdity is certainly too much.

Alien Enemies Act

The US Used the Alien Enemies Act to Detain Their Families. Now, They Are Watching History Repeat.

The statute justified the imprisonment in World War II of thousands like Heidi Gurcke Donald. She is horrified as Trump invokes it for mass deportation.

Isabela Dias

Heidi Gurcke Donald does not remember much about the Crystal City family internment camp in South Texas. She was barely three at the time. But Donald can picture certain moments. There were the floodlights, atop the barbed-wire fence, shining through the curtains her mother had sewn for the bedroom windows; the nursery school singing game in which she and her younger sister played Sleeping Beauty in the middle of a circle as the other kids stood tall and held their hands together in the air to form a hedge; the icicle her German-born father snapped from the edge of the roof on a frigid winter and offered on a cracked plate.

The Gurcke family was among the first group of German nationals and Latin Americans of German origin deported from Costa Rica to arrive in Texas in February 1943. They had been rounded up and shipped away as part of a secretive transnational State Department program known as Special War Problems. The hope was to trade “enemy aliens”’ in exchange for American hostages. Through the initiative, the US government orchestrated the uprooting of more than 6,000 Germans, Italians, and Japanese—connected through citizenship or ancestry to the Axis countries—residing in Latin America and sent them to domestic internment camps across the United States. 

As Donald would later document in her memoir, We Were Not the Enemy: Remembering the United States’ Latin-American Civilian Internment Program of World War II, the Gurckes became “one of many caught in the far-flung net cast by US authorities seeking the enemy.” After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt’s proclamations authorized broad detentions premised on promoting hemispheric security. “They swept up all of us,” Donald said in an oral history interview conducted by the Texas Historical Commission in 2009 “with none of us being serious threats of any sort.”

Now, Donald, and descendants of those interned during World War II, are watching as the same law that authorized the imprisonments then is used again by President Donald Trump—this time without the United States at war and with the goal of speeding up mass deportation.

On March 14, President Donald Trump quietly signed a presidential proclamation invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The 18th-century statute gives the president extraordinary powers to summarily detain and remove noncitizens from a foreign country during a “declared war” or while under an “invasion or predatory incursion.” Last used during World War II, the law served as the legal rationale behind the forced relocation and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, as well as people of German and Italian descent.

As we previously reported, the Trump administration has long spoken of using the ancient wartime statute to justify hasty deportations, arguing migrants are leading an “invasion” of the United States. The executive order states that alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua—which the administration previously designated as a foreign terrorist organization—are “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions” in coordination with or “at the direction” of the regime of Nicolás Maduro and therefore operating as a de facto government.

In a lawsuit filed on March 15 challenging the executive order as unlawful, the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward argue the Alien Enemies Act—which has only been used three times before, always in times of war—can’t be deployed against citizens of a country, in this instance Venezuela, that isn’t engaging in “warlike actions” against the United States. As a result of the proclamation, the class action complaint states, “countless Venezuelans are at imminent risk of deportation without any hearing or meaningful review, regardless of their ties to the United States or the availability of claims for relief from and defenses to removal.”

By invoking the centuries-old statute during peacetime, the organizations further claim, the president is trying to supercharge mass deportations while sidestepping the judicial process. “The Trump administration’s intent to use a wartime authority for immigration enforcement is as unprecedented as it is lawless,” Lee Gelernt, lead counsel and deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement. “It may be the administration’s most extreme measure yet, and that is saying a lot.” 

US District Judge James Boasberg in Washington, DC, issued a temporary restraining order stopping the removal of Venezuelans based on the proclamation and instructed that deportation planes should be turned around. The Trump administration reportedly ignored the court order, deporting 137 Venezuelans to El Salvador—to be held in a notorious prison—under the wartime authority. (The administration said flights had already departed the United States.) “The White House welcomes that fight,” one official told Axios. “This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we’re going to win.” On appeal, the Department of Justice argued the federal judge’s decision violated the president’s inherent authority to remove those determined to be national security threats. 

As Katherine Yon Ebright, a counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program explained, the US government has previously used the Alien Enemies Act to target noncitizens deemed “dangerous” solely based on their identity. In reaction to the Trump administration’s proclamation, she lamented that former internees and family members have “to watch their country fail to learn from the mistakes of its past.” 

“I think my mother would have been completely terrified by this,” Donald says. “It’s what happened to us, only on steroids.”

In the 1920s, Donald’s father, Werner Gurcke, and her uncle Karl Oskar chose to relocate from Hamburg to Costa Rica. Werner married US citizen Starr Pait in 1936, and they settled in the capital San José, where Donald and her sister Ingrid were born. Werner set up a thriving enterprise as a middleman for imported goods. But by 1941, amidst growing concern of the Axis powers establishing a foothold in the region, the British and US governments blacklisted Werner and Karl. “I’m still an American,” Starr wrote in a letter to a friend at the time “and have written to the Government stating our innocence of any conspiring against it.”  

Both men were jailed in July 1942 despite no evidence of their sympathy for or association with the Nazi regime. Later, an independent investigation would show that Werner was considered one of the “most dangerous German nationals” in the country partly because he had been treasurer of the local German Club. “People were just picked up because the neighbor down the street thought they were bad guys or somebody had heard what they thought was the sound of secret meetings late at night as they were passing by,” Donald says. “They were German and therefore they must be enemies.”

That December in 1942, the police took Starr and the girls to the German club, where they were holding the wives and children of those detained. The family was then made to board an overcrowded ship to the United States. Passengers had their passports confiscated and, without documents, were charged with illegal entry upon docking in California. After undergoing interrogation, they were handed identification numbers and put on a train to Crystal City, where a Popeye tribute served as a marker of the small desert town’s status as “spinach center of the world.” They entered the vast camp, once a migrant labor site, on February 12, 1943.

In a photo taken not long after the family’s arrival, a white-blonde Donald sits by her father. She’s not looking at the camera, instead eyeing her sister, both sick from whooping cough. The mug shot of the “Gurcke family criminals,” as Donald calls it, mirrors a similar photo she has seen of an interned Japanese Peruvian family. “The same exhaustion in the parents’ eyes and the same wariness in the children’s faces,” she says.

Donald didn’t learn the full story of her family’s ordeal and the impact it had on her parents until adulthood. Her father didn’t talk about it when she was growing up. Having lost his business and determined to provide for his family, Werner became a workaholic and a chain smoker, passing away from lung cancer in his early sixties. “It consumed him,” she says. Eventually, Donald decided to ask her octogenarian mother, who couldn’t recount what they had gone through without crying. “It was the most terrible experience in her life, and I hadn’t even been aware of it.”

Like Donald, Conrad Caspari had to puzzle together the events that led to his German-born father, Fritz, being sent to the Tuna Canyon Detention Station, in the Los Angeles area, in September 1942. He studied a 120-page FBI case file obtained through public records request and other documents found in his parents’ basement. Caspari learned how flimsy the evidence the US government had against Fritz, who opposed Hitler’s totalitarian rule, was: One of the allegations accused him of sharing intelligence about high-power transmission lines with German authorities; in reality, his father had been followed by agents who mistook his harmonica for a mirror to send a Morse code message.

“The charges were essentially the result of a lot of hysteria,” Caspari says. His father would be acquitted and released in January 1943. But, not without losing his teaching job in the United States. “People’s livelihoods were taken from them without any good reason.”

Caspari, a director on the board of the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition, fears the Alien Enemies Act can be similarly weaponized again, unless repealed. “When you allow the rule of law to disappear for one group of people in the country,” he says “it will soon disappear for everybody, and then we lose everything which we believe the United States should stand for.”

The grandson of a Tuna Canyon detainee, Colorado-based researcher Russell Endo has looked into the files of 500 Japanese arrested in Southern California in the 1940s and found no indication of subversive acts or allegiance to imperial Japan. “The people were completely innocent,” he says. “But they were swept up because of the abuse of the Alien Enemies Act.”

Endo, who grew up in the vicinity of the former detention camp, sees another parallel between the wartime period and the current moment: the impulse for the mass arrests had to do with public pressure for the federal government to respond forcefully to the attack on Pearl Harbor, all in the name of safety and national security. “If that argument sounds familiar today,” Endo says “it’s because history is repeating itself.”

After the Gurckes were released from Crystal City in May 1944, they moved to Starr’s family beach house in Santa Cruz, California. A government review later found no evidence that Werner engaged in pro-Nazi activity. Still, he remained at risk of repatriation because of the illegal entry charge until 1948, when the US government granted him suspension of deportation. Four years later, Werner became an American citizen. 

Donald still lives near the beach house. “Maybe that’s how I’m affected,” she says. “I’ve stayed very close to the first safe place that I knew.” 

In 2002, Donald, her sister Ingrid, and their husbands returned to the site of the Crystal City camp for the first time to join a former internees’ reunion. The siblings sat by what used to be the swimming pool, one of the only remaining features of the original place. Realizing that, unlike their parents, they both could freely walk away, they were overcome with emotion. 

Donald co-founded the German American Internee Coalition to preserve this lesser-known history. Over the years, many families have contacted the organization looking for information about the unknown fate of their relatives, even decades later. One case stuck with her: an 80-year-old woman who had been just a child when her father was taken away and the family never heard from him again. Although the group couldn’t help her, they have offered leads to others.

“It’s dying just like we are,” Donald says. “We’re going to be a memory fairly soon and we haven’t done all we wanted to do, which was to prevent something like what’s happening today from happening again to another group of people.” She adds: “I know to some extent what these people that are now being targeted for pickup and sending off are going to go through not because I remember it, but because I feel it.”

Nazi marchs on to destroy america...

‘How gratifying’: Cheers in China as Trump dismantles Voice of America

By Nectar Gan

One nationalist influencer called it “truly gratifying.” Another said he was laughing his head off. And a state-media editorial hailed the demise of what it called the “lie factory.”

For years, the Chinese government and its propaganda apparatus have relentlessly attacked VOA and RFA for their critical coverage of China, particularly on human rights and religious freedom.

Chinese nationalists and state media could hardly contain their schadenfreude after President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday to dismantle Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Asia (RFA) and other US government-funded media organizations that broadcast to authoritarian regimes.

And now, the Trump administration is silencing the very institutions that Beijing has long sought to undermine – at a time when China is spending lavishly to expand the global footprint of its own state media.

In an editorial Monday, the Global Times, a pugnacious Communist Party-run newspaper, denounced VOA as a “lie factory” with an “appalling track record” on China reporting.

From its coverage of alleged human rights abuses in the far western Xinjiang region to reporting on South China Sea disputes, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the coronavirus pandemic and the Chinese economy, “almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it,” the editorial claimed.

“As more Americans begin to break through their information cocoons and see a real world and a multidimensional China, the demonizing narratives propagated by VOA will ultimately become a laughingstock of the times,” it added.

VOA’s China coverage stretches back decades. During the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy protests, its Chinese-language radio broadcasts became a critical source of uncensored information for the Chinese people. (VOA discontinued its Chinese radio broadcasts in 2011 but its Chinese language website remained online as of Monday.)

RFA, founded in 1996, broadcasts to China in English, Chinese, Uyghur and Tibetan-language services, catering to ethnic minorities whose freedoms the Chinese government has long been accused of suppressing.

RFA CEO Bay Fang called the US grant cutoff “a reward to dictators and despots, including the Chinese Communist Party, who would like nothing better than to have their influence go unchecked in the information space.”

On Chinese social media, nationalist influencers celebrated the demise of VOA, which has placed all 1,300 staff on administrative leave, and of RFA, which said it may cease operations following the termination of federal grants.

“Voice of America has been paralyzed! And so has Radio Free Asia, which is just as malicious toward China. How truly gratifying!” wrote Hu Xijin, a former editor-in-chief of the Global Times and prominent nationalist commentator.

“Almost all Chinese people know the Voice of America, as it is a symbolic tool of US ideological infiltration into China,” Hu wrote in a post on microblogging site Weibo, where he has nearly 25 million followers. “(I) believe that Chinese people are more than happy to see America’s anti-China ideological stronghold crumble from within, scattering like a flock of startled birds.”

Another nationalist commentator accused VOA and RFA of being “notorious propaganda machines for color revolutions,” referring to protests of the 2000s that toppled governments in the former Soviet Union and the Balkans.

“I’m laughing my head off!” they said.

Others cheered Trump, who during his first term in office was nicknamed “Chuan Jianguo,” or “Trump, the (Chinese) nation builder” by the Chinese internet, in a mocking suggestion that the US president’s isolationist foreign policy and divisive domestic agenda was helping Beijing to overtake Washington on the global stage.

“Thank you, Comrade Chuan Jianguo and Elon Musk, please take care and stay safe,” a Weibo user said on Monday.

Musk, the billionaire adviser to Trump who has been spearheading sweeping cuts to the US government, has used his social media platform X to call for VOA to be shut down.

“This news marks the end of an era,” said another comment on Weibo on Sunday.

The White House defended Trump’s executive order in a statement Saturday, claiming it “will ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.”

But as the US-funded stations dial down, China is busy amplifying its own messages to the world.

Under leader Xi Jinping, China has drastically expanded the reach and influence of its state media outlets as part of its push to gain “discourse power” in a world it sees as unfairly dominated by the Western narrative.

In 2018, Beijing announced the creation of a giant media conglomerate by merging three existing state-run networks aimed at overseas audiences to better combine resources. Its name? Voice of China.

Inflicting serious economic damage

Trump’s tariffs are inflicting serious economic damage and reigniting inflation, OECD says

By David Goldman

President Donald Trump’s tariff policies are slowing economic growth in the United States and around the world while sending prices higher again, creating a toxic stew for the global economy that could grow even worse if tensions escalate, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said Monday.

The quarterly report is the first sweeping attempt by global economists to document and forecast the damage from Trump’s policies to the economies of America and its trading partners. The OECD report shows what US markets have been signaling for several weeks as they’ve rapidly tumbled into correction territory: Trump’s tariffs could choke the global economy and reignite inflation at a precarious time.

Massive new import taxes on a variety of goods from a range of countries imposed by the Trump administration have been met with instant retaliation from some of America’s biggest trading partners. Threats of new tariffs and Trump’s on-again, off-again levies have led to growing uncertainty for businesses around the world, preventing them from making investments that can drive economic growth, the OECD said. Meanwhile, fears of rebounding inflation from tariffs have dragged down consumer sentiment and spending, cutting off fuel for the US and global economies.

“If the announced trade policy actions persist, as assumed in the projections, the new bilateral tariff rates will raise revenues for the governments imposing them but will be a drag on global activity, incomes and regular tax revenues,” the OECD said. “They also add to trade costs, raising the price of covered imported final goods for consumers and intermediate inputs for businesses.”

Gloomier outlook

The group of 38 mostly wealthy nations made new economic forecasts that are noticeably worse than its previous predictions. The OECD predicted US economic growth would slow dramatically this year and next, to 2.2% in 2025 and just 1.6% in 2026. America’s economy grew at a 2.8% rate last year. The global economy is expected to grow 3.1% this year and 3% next year, down from 3.2% growth in 2024.

Meanwhile, US inflation will pick up this year, the OECD predicted. Prices are expected to rise 2.8% in 2025, up from 2.5% last year. They’ll continue to be elevated in 2026, rising 2.6%, the OECD forecast.

Both growth and inflation forecasts are worse than in the previous quarterly report. The OECD previously expected US inflation to be just 2.1% this year, and it predicted US economic growth would be 2.4% in 2025. Global economic growth was expected to rise to 3.3% this year.

But Canada and particularly Mexico will fare significantly worse than the United States in the budding trade war. Trump has promised 25% across-the-board tariffs on America’s neighbors and two of its three biggest trading partners – a move that could plunge both economies into a recession.

The OECD believes Canada’s economic growth will be just 0.7% this year and next, far less than the prediction of 2% growth in the December report. And Mexico’s economy is expected to shrink 1.3% this year and 0.6% in 2026 – a dramatic turn from the previous report, which predicted a 1.2% expansion in 2025 and 1.6% growth next year.

However, China, another direct target of Trump’s tariff policies, will prove more insulated than Mexico and Canada, the OECD predicts. The government, for example, just announced a wide-ranging “special action plan” to promote domestic spending, to counter the economic impact of Trump’s tariffs.

Central banks will have their work cut out for them. Although many around the world have been cutting interest rates to fuel growth after the inflation crisis has subsided, the OECD believes the inflation that tariffs will reignite means central banks will have to keep rates higher for longer, causing prolonged pain for businesses and consumers.

6 light-years from Earth

Four planets found orbiting a star 6 light-years from Earth

By Ashley Strickland

After decades of searching, astronomers have uncovered some of the strongest evidence yet of exoplanets orbiting Barnard’s Star, the nearest single star system to Earth. The four planets are classified as sub-Earths because each one is about 19% to 34% the mass of Earth, according to new research.

“It’s a really exciting find — Barnard’s Star is our cosmic neighbor, and yet we know so little about it,” said lead study author Ritvik Basant, doctoral student of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, in a statement. “It’s signaling a breakthrough with the precision of these new instruments from previous generations.”

Barnard’s Star, discovered by American astronomer E.E. Barnard in 1916, is a low-mass red dwarf, one of the most common types of stars. Over the past decade, astronomers have found that many of these stars have multiple rocky planets orbiting them.

Enter MAROON-X, an instrument mounted on the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii that’s designed to search for exoplanets orbiting red dwarfs. The instrument seeks out planets by detecting the subtle wobble of stars as the gravity of orbiting planets tug on their stellar hosts, known as the radial velocity technique.

Using MAROON-X, the study team spotted the least massive exoplanet ever found, and it hopes the find will lead to the discovery of more sub-Earth exoplanets across the cosmos.

Astronomers believe smaller exoplanets may be more varied in composition than the larger exoplanets detected so far. Finding more minuscule worlds with the latest, highly sensitive instruments could open up a new way of understanding how planets form — and which ones could be habitable for life.

A study detailing the findings was published March 11 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Four tiny worlds

The planets are so small that they are more analogous to Mars, according to Basant.

“When compared to our solar system, each of the four planets are inside the distance of Mercury’s orbit,” Basant said.

The planets closely orbit Barnard’s Star, zipping around their stellar host in a matter of days, compared with the year it takes Earth to complete one orbit around the sun. The outermost planet takes less than seven days to complete one orbit, while the innermost planet has an orbital period of less than three days, Basant said.

Proximity at a price

The planets are so close to the star that their surfaces are likely too hot to be habitable. That means the foursome are also not within the habitable zone of the star, or just the right distance from the star where liquid water can stably exist on the surface of the planet.

“When Barnard’s star was young and active … the star blasted these small planets with X-UV radiation, frequent flares, and dense winds,” said Edward Guinan, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, in an email. “Because of this, these sub-Earth size planets probably don’t have atmospheres, water, and life.”

Guinan was not involved in the new study but has previously searched for planets around Barnard’s Star.

Planets of this size are largely unexplored beyond our solar system, making it a significant step forward as astronomers search for Earth-mass planets around sun-like stars, Basant said.

“A lot of what we do can be incremental, and it’s sometimes hard to see the bigger picture,” said study coauthor Jacob Bean, a professor in the University of Chicago’s department of astronomy and astrophysics. “But we found something that humanity will hopefully know forever. That sense of discovery is incredible.”

The search for nearby planets

While the Proxima Centauri system is the closest to our solar system at a distance of 4.25 light-years away, it comprises three stars circling one another, making Barnard’s Star the nearest single star system.

Now, astronomers know that planets orbit the two closest star systems to our solar system.

Barnard’s Star has served as a kind of white whale for astronomers over the decades as they have tried to find evidence of planets orbiting it, only to be disproven as false positives later, “likely due to the limited sensitivity of earlier instruments,” Basant said.

Many exoplanets have been discovered as they transit, or pass in front of, their host star, creating an observable dip in starlight suggesting the presence of a planet.

But the elusive planets orbiting Barnard’s Star do not transit, meaning they don’t pass in front of their star from the perspective of telescopes on Earth and can’t be detected with powerful space observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope.

The research team, led by Bean, captured data from Barnard’s Star over the course of 112 nights spanning a period of three years. The data showed evidence for three planets orbiting Barnard’s Star, two of which had been previously suggested as potential planets.

The researchers then combined their findings with data captured using the ESPRESSO instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile by a different team that authored an October 2024 study. The combined dataset confirmed the existence of a fourth exoplanet.

“We observed at different times of night on different days. They’re in Chile; we’re in Hawaii. Our teams didn’t coordinate with each other at all,” Basant said. “That gives us a lot of assurance that these aren’t phantoms in the data. It’s thrilling to witness the precision of next-generation spectrographs like MAROON-X and ESPRESSO. Their ability to detect sub-Earth mass planets for the first time feels like unlocking a new level in a game, filled with unknown possibilities.”

MAROON-X, which began as a temporary “visitor” instrument, is now being converted to a permanent one after its detections.

“I am very happy to see that new MAROON-X data provide an independent confirmation of the planet b and candidates c and d, and together with the ESPRESSO data, the analysis makes the detection significantly more robust,” said Jonay González Hernández, lead author of the October 2024 paper and a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain. He was not involved in the new study.

Guinan said the planets described within the study “look like a firm discovery.”

“Finally, real planets have been discovered around Barnard’s Star after several false alarms over the past (50 years),” Guinan said.

SUVs now rule the road

Small electric cars were said to be the future – but SUVs now rule the road

Navin Singh Khadka

Across the globe more and more Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) are being spotted on – and off – the roads.

This is despite predictions from the United Nations of an inevitable pivot towards smaller and more environmentally friendly vehicles because of the urgency of the climate crisis and the rising cost of living.

That pivot has not materialised: globally, 54% of the cars sold in 2024 were SUVs, including petrol, diesel, hybrids and electric makes. This is an increase of three percentage points from 2023 and five percentage points from the year before, according to GlobalData.

Of the SUVs which are now on the road – both new and older models – 95% are burning fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Manufacturers, however, say their new fleets of such cars are increasingly becoming electric, and that not all SUVs now being sold cause an increase in emissions.

SUVs are hard to miss. They are heavy and larger with spacious interiors, higher ground clearance and a high driving position with a better view of the road, although smaller versions are also on the market.

Environmental campaigners such as Greenpeace see SUVs as one of the villains of the climate crisis and argue that their manufacturing consumes significant resources given their size.

Experts also say they require larger batteries to power their electric versions, which then further increases the demand for critical minerals, putting even more pressure on the planet.

Momentum was thought to be with smaller, energy-efficient electric vehicles. But the sales of standard-sized electric vehicles (EVs) has actually decreased in major markets such as Japan and Germany, and their sales growth has slowed in India.

And in Europe, sales of SUVs have outpaced those of EVs despite indications more than half a decade ago of an opposite trend. In Europe in 2018, 3.27 million small hatchbacks – both those powered by fossil fuels and those by electricity – were sold while 2.13 million were sold in 2024, according to GlobalData.

Its sales forecast manager Sammy Chan said: "This is partly because of the SUV alternatives being offered in smaller [sizes] whose sales in Europe have now grown to nearly to 2.5 million in 2024 from 1.5 million in 2018."

China saw the largest sales of nearly 11.6 million SUVs in 2024 followed by the US, India and Germany, according to GlobalData.

What is driving this SUV growth?

Industry experts say people's purchasing power has been improving in many fast-emerging economies, making SUVs the likelier choice of car.

"Manufacturers respond to consumer demand and, increasingly, drivers are attracted to dual purpose vehicles given their practicality, comfort and good view of the road," said Mike Hawes who is the chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

Automobile industry analysts also say that manufacturers are attracted to high profit margins from SUVs: they can make more money from SUVs even though they make fewer vehicles.

"It is the industry that has driven the demand through huge marketing and advertising campaigns in recent years," said Dudley Curtis, the communications manager at the European Transport Safety Council.

"SUVs offered the industry a simple way of charging more for a vehicle that does the same thing [as others]," he said.

Are SUVs an issue?

Because of the robust growth in SUVs sales, the IEA says oil consumption of these vehicles has increased by 600,000 barrels per day globally between 2022 and 2023, accounting for more than a quarter of the total annual rise in global oil demand.

"If ranked among countries, the global fleet of SUVs would be the world's fifth largest emitter of CO2, exceeding the emissions of Japan and various other major economies," said Apostolous Petropolous, an energy modeller with the IEA.

The agency says that even when compared to medium-sized cars that run on petrol and diesel, SUVs burn 20% more of such fuels as they weigh up to 300 kg more on average.

In fact, road transport is responsible for more than 12% of global carbon emissions which is the main driver of global warming. Scientists say all sectors must rapidly decarbonise if we are to avoid a climate catastrophe.

But industry representatives say in response that not all SUVs now being sold cause an increase in emissions.

"Around two in five of these [new] vehicle models are zero emission as their body type lends itself well to electrification with longer battery range that can reassure consumers concerned about charging accessibility," said Hawes, from the SMMT.

"This has led to the average CO2 emissions of new dual purpose cars more than halving since 2000, helping the segment lead the decarbonisation of UK road mobility."

Although the vast majority of new SUVs still burn fossil fuels, IEA officials have said that over 20% of SUVs sold in 2023 were fully electric, up from 2% in 2018.

As for hybrids that can run on both electricity and fossil fuels, a study in Europe by the International Council on Clean Transportation in 2022 found only around 30% of the total distance driven by plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (all types including SUVs) was in electric mode on average.

Similar results were found in other major economies such as the US and China.

Overall, the back-gear towards SUVs, some experts say, has caused a significant setback in the decarbonisation of the transport sector.

"The trend toward heavier and less efficient vehicles such as SUVs (in countries where it is happening) has largely nullified the improvements in energy consumption and emissions achieved elsewhere in the world's passenger car fleet," said the IEA.

The UK Parliament's climate change committee had a similar finding in its 2024 report on decarbonisation in the country.

Deportations to El Salvador

White House denies defying judge's order over deportations to El Salvador

James FitzGerald

The White House has denied an accusation from rights groups that it flouted due process by defying a judge's order while carrying out deportations at the weekend.

A group of 238 alleged Venezuelan gang members, plus 23 alleged members of the international MS-13 gang, were sent from the US to a prison in El Salvador. Some were removed from the country under a law not used since World War Two.

The move came despite a temporary block issued by a judge. The White House said the judge's order itself was not lawful and was issued after the group was deported.

Neither the US government nor El Salvador has identified the detainees, or provided details of their alleged criminality or gang membership.

Announcing the move on Saturday, Trump accused Tren de Aragua (TdA) of "perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States".

He invoked the Alien Enemies Act - a piece of legislation that dates to 1798, which was designed to allow non-citizens to be deported in times of war or invasion. Campaigners have questioned Trump's justification.

The act was used to process 137 of the total of 261 people who were deported, a senior administration official told CBS News, the BBC's US partner.

The basis on which the other deportees were removed from the US remains unclear, and details of the group as a whole have not been disclosed.

Several relatives of men believed to be among the group told the New York Times that their loved ones did not have gang ties.

The order to halt the deportations came from US District Judge James Boasberg on Saturday evening, who demanded a 14-day pause pending further legal arguments.

After lawyers told him that planes with deportees had already taken off, the judge reportedly gave a verbal order for the flights to turn back, although that directive did not form part of his written ruling.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied the court ruling had been broken. "The administration did not 'refuse to comply' with a court order," she said.

"The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist TdA [Tren de Aragua] aliens had already been removed from US territory."

The justice department echoed Leavitt, saying the deportees had already left before the judge's ruling - which it has appealed against.

The case raises constitutional questions since, under the US system of checks and balances, government agencies are expected to comply with a federal judge's ruling.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele confirmed the arrival of deportees. "Oopsie... Too late," he said of the judge's order, writing on social media. His team also published footage of some of the men inside one of its mega-jails.

Rights groups accused Trump of using a 227-year-old law to circumvent due process.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) questioned Trump's use of a sweeping wartime authority which allows fast-track deportations. "I think we're in very dangerous territory here in the United States with the invocation of this law," said Lee Gelernt from the organisation.

The Alien Enemies Act only allowed deportations when the US was in a declared war with that foreign government, or was being invaded, Mr Gelernt said. "A gang is not invading," he told BBC News.

The act was last used during World War Two to intern Japanese-American civilians.

Making matters worse was the fact "the administration is saying nobody can review what they're doing", Mr Gelernt added.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International USA said the deportations were "yet another example of the Trump administration's racist targeting" of Venezuelans "based on sweeping claims of gang affiliation".

Venezuela itself criticised Trump, saying he "unjustly criminalises Venezuelan migration".

The latest deportations under Trump's second term are part of the president's long-running campaign against illegal immigration.

The US president has also moved to strengthen ties with El Salvador.

The two gangs targeted with the weekend deportations were declared "foreign terrorist organisations" by Trump after returning to the White House in January.

Good luck without FEMA........

Residents survey the aftermath of deadly weekend storms across the southern U.S.

Emma Bowman

Residents in large swaths of the southern U.S. on Sunday took stock of the devastation left in the wake of tornadoes, strong winds and dust storms over the weekend.

The severe weather left at least 37 people dead, and destroyed scores of homes.

This bout of storms was forecast to clear the East Coast by Sunday night, according to the National Weather Service.

In Missouri, where 12 people died, first responders and road crews worked to clear debris, restore power to homes, and distribute recovery supplies.

Gov. Mike Kehoe's office said Sunday that hundreds of homes, schools and businesses were destroyed of severely damaged, with some burned from wildfires aggravated by high winds.

"The scale of devastation across our state is staggering," Gov. Kehoe said. "While we grieve the lives of those lost, we are also focused on action."

In Butler County, a man was killed after a tornado ripped through his home. Coroner Jim Akers told the AP that the twister left his home "unrecognizable" with "just a debris field."

Hurricane force winds in Oklahoma, fueled deadly wildfires and dust storms. Residents there spent Saturday surveying fire damage, after more than 170,000 acres burned.

By Sunday afternoon, an early assessment from local officials identified more than 400 homes damaged statewide. Four people died and 142 others were injured due to the fires and winds, officials said.

Cheryl Rabet of Stillwater lost her home in the blazes, as well as two RVs she rented out, reported KOSU's Lionel Ramos.

"We didn't have a chance to grab anything," she said, including their 16-year-old cat Momo. "We grabbed one of our cats and that was about it."

The Red Cross and other relief efforts have been providing food and other resources for shelters across parts of Oklahoma and other affected regions.

Brady Moore, Stillwater city manager, warned that it may still be unsafe for residents to return to neighborhoods in the path of destruction, while crews work to repair downed powerlines and shut off water and gas lines.

Damage assessments in the majority of Alabama counties continued on Sunday, said Gov. Kay Ivey. Three people died in the state, she said.

In Troy, Ala., where a tornado flipped an 18-wheeler truck, about 200 people took shelter at a recreation center, reported local CBS station WAKA News.

"Right as the last people got in, the storm passed over, blowing out windows in cars in the parking lot, and tearing off part of the gymnasium roof," said Dan Smith, the director of the city's parks and recreation department. "Our sports complex, including the baseball and softball park, also suffered major damage. But we're very fortunate—it could've been a lot worse."

There were no injuries.

In Texas on Sunday, fire crews were battling a 9,500-acres blaze in Fredericksburg, in central Texas. The grass fire was more than half contained as of Sunday evening, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service.

Across the state, more than 42,000 acres were burning from 36 fires on Sunday night, the service said.

The threat of fires was expected to continue into the week, with a red flag warning – signaling a high risk of wildfire conditions -- was expected to be reinstated for South Central Texas on Monday, as Texas Public Radio reported.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday that the state was granted federal assistance to help fight the fires.

"Texas is working around the clock to provide all necessary resources to local officials fighting wildfires in Gray and Gillespie counties," he said.

Reimagine the university........

Trump’s attacks on higher ed could provide a chance to reimagine the university

Academia runs on underpaid, overworked PhD students. It doesn’t have to.

by Celia Ford

On Monday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted on X that it would terminate over 400 grants, adding up to some $250 million in funding, to Columbia University over its response to pro-Palestinian protests. The following day, the Trump administration pulled $800 million in USAID-related grants from Johns Hopkins University, academia’s biggest research and development spender.

These cuts come on top of last month’s announcement of major rollbacks to what are known as indirect costs — money the NIH gives research institutions on top of project-specific grants to cover necessary expenses like building maintenance, utilities, and administrative staff salaries. Many universities — both large and small, public and private — rely on the NIH to sustain a lot of their day-to-day operations.

Any threat to that funding poses an existential threat to higher education. Without the jobs, medical research, and technological developments made possible by these institutions, people outside of academia could miss out on breakthrough treatments for diseases like cancer, and will be more vulnerable to public health crises. As a result, the US will likely lose its technological competitiveness on a global scale, which could damage the economy in the long run.

The indirect cost cuts have been temporarily blocked by a federal judge, but the chaos still compelled many universities to preemptively tighten their belts. Some institutions are paring back on graduate programs: freezing new faculty hires and PhD student applications, accepting fewer students than usual, or even rescinding existing offer letters. The UMass Chan Medical School pulled back on all of its admissions offers for the fall 2025 term, blaming funding uncertainty for biomedical research.

Why exactly has the Trump administration seemingly declared war on academic biomedical research? In theory, depriving future researchers of places in academia could push them toward the private sector, which potentially aligns with a conservative pro-business approach. But the antipathy goes deeper than that.

Vice President JD Vance has said that “the universities are the enemy.” Attacking science and higher education, whether under the guise of reducing taxpayer waste or punishing antisemitism, was always part of this administration’s plan. But its haphazard destabilization of the scientific enterprise won’t automatically funnel would-be biomedical PhDs into pharmaceutical or biotech companies, especially when there already aren’t enough jobs in those industries now to absorb the flood of highly educated people applying for them. If turned away from grad school, it’s more likely that young scientists will take their talents to other countries, or leave the field altogether.

While the headlines have been about STEM funding, academic departments that fall far outside the NIH’s purview — like history, or comparative literature — are also being affected. That’s because research groups in STEM departments bring in the big federal grants universities depend on, while arts and humanities research largely rely on money the university pulls from endowments, tuition, and state funding. Without the NIH’s money, universities may be forced to divert funds from humanities to STEM departments, where research facilities and equipment are way more expensive.

As a result, when well-resourced STEM departments fall, they take humanities down with them. And when graduate programs downsize, universities lose the PhD students that keep research and undergraduate education afloat. And without grad student labor, the whole academic system crumbles.

Academics are terrified, and they should be. There’s only so much instability that young scholars can stomach to chase careers that the government is actively destroying. We risk losing an entire generation of future experts, and the potential harm that could cause is incalculable.

And yet, even academia’s stoutest defenders would acknowledge there were serious problems with STEM graduate education even before Trump took office again. If done intentionally, downsizing PhD training programs could be a good thing. While the way these sudden funding cuts are being carried out cause far more chaos than positive change, universities do need fewer PhD students — and to take better care of those they admit.

We have too many grad students

For most of American history, higher education was limited to the privileged few. That changed after World War II, when the GI Bill made universities dramatically more accessible. Cold War-era investments, many of them motivated by post-Sputnik competition with the Soviet Union, subsidized the growth of PhD programs in STEM fields, all aiming to advance the nation’s strategic interests in science and military readiness. And those fields kept growing.

Today, the pool of potential PhD candidates across all disciplines is much larger than it was during the Cold War. Roughly 40 percent of Americans over 25 are college graduates, and over 8.5 million of them have a doctorate or professional degree. Earning a medical, law, or business administration degree often equips students for high-earning careers (and, in many cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt).

But the academic job market is bleak for newly minted PhDs, and it has been for decades. In STEM fields, it’s not uncommon for PhD grads to spend at least five years in postdoctoral positions, earning under $60,000 annually, all with no guarantee of ever landing a faculty job. And while STEM grads who can’t find a home in academia can often turn to jobs in biopharma or engineering, humanities graduates are much more dependent on academic employment — and those jobs are increasingly scarce. In 2020, fewer than half of new humanities PhDs had a job lined up at graduation.

When much of what you’re producing can’t find a market, it’s a good sign you’re oversupplying. But while the glut of PhDs is bad for recent graduates, it is convenient for universities that use grad students as a cheap, talented, and highly motivated workforce. Because they are often defined as “trainees,” universities often get away with treating early-career academics like apprentices, rather than workers.

More grad students means more research and teaching for a fraction of the cost of hiring full-time professors to do the same. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, unionization efforts among grad students are generally met with hostility from administration and faculty, who fear stalled scientific progress and undergraduate education.)

As universities are forced to pare down on graduate admissions in light of Trump’s attacks on science and higher education, they’ll have to reckon with the consequences of losing the people who do the bulk of academia’s dirty work. With fewer junior scientists, research groups will produce less data and publish fewer papers, potentially jeopardizing the careers of young professors who rely on trainees and publications to earn tenure. Fewer graduate student instructors will also mean inflated class sizes for undergraduates.

It’s easy to dismiss cuts to PhD programs as problems confined to ivory towers. I spent six years earning a neuroscience PhD, and it’s difficult to garner sympathy for someone who voluntarily sacrificed the bulk of her twenties studying the intricacies of the orbitofrontal cortex. But the truth is that academic research lays the groundwork for virtually every innovation and advancement that comes from private corporations. Fundamental research — even that which doesn’t have any obvious market value — drives progress. When universities lose part of their academic workforce, the costs extend far beyond campus.

The question isn’t whether we need researchers — we do. It’s how we can sustainably support knowledge production while treating academic workers with the dignity they deserve.

PhD programs have no choice but to focus on quality, not quantity

“As long as I’ve been in the profession, science has run on a series of strange cultural practices that rely on uncompensated labor,” C. Brandon Ogbunu, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale, wrote in Undark last week.

Generations of researchers have accepted these conditions as part of the job, but they’re not. Exploitative systems can — and should — be dismantled and rebuilt. Not through the chaos and confusion of Trump’s cuts, but through gradual admissions reductions and strategic cuts to brand-boosting money pits (like sports).

There is an opportunity to envision a better academia — one that values, adequately trains, and fairly compensates young scholars. When researchers aren’t scrambling to make ends meet or anxious about their career prospects, they can devote more mental energy to their work. Properly supported scholars take bigger intellectual risks, and are more likely to pursue ambitious, potentially groundbreaking work. And, quite simply, all workers deserve a living wage.

Ranking systems, which are used to recruit students and establish a reputation, often include ratios of doctoral students to total students or faculty in their calculations. NIH grants also require applicants to prove they’ve trained and retained PhD students, incentivizing universities to produce more PhDs — whether those graduates have job prospects or not. One potential fix: admit fewer grad students, pay each student more, and measure success in terms of individual job placements, mentorship quality, and research impact. Long-term positions for senior scientists and lecturers can pick up the slack, and maintain institutional memory better than a transient workforce-in-training ever could.

Without these incentives, departments won’t be punished by funders for reducing graduate program admissions or for supporting students in leaving if grad school ends up being a poor fit. With fewer students to support, universities could afford to increase PhD stipends, many of which currently fall well below the cost of living, especially in humanities departments. (PhD stipends usually range between $20,000 and $45,000 per year, with many universities paying humanities and social science students thousands less than that.)

As the foreign aid community comes to terms with the fact that it needs to be ruthless about prioritizing what it can do with fewer resources, academia may need to do the same. As devastating as these cuts to higher education are, it may be the shock the system needs to make much-needed changes. Pulling the rug out from under hopeful PhD applicants was not the way to downsize academia — but we do have too many PhDs. On the other side of this chaos, if there’s anything left at all, could be a pared-down system that prioritizes quality over quantity.

The Economist published a cynical take on grad school back in 2010: “Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done,” they write. “Few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else.”

But producing specialized knowledge creators and expert researchers is a good deal for any country trying to solve big societal problems, and devaluing it risks driving smart people out of the US, where their work is under attack. While PhD programs often fail to teach students how to teach, communicate with regular people, or navigate corporate politics, they do train people to read deeply, plan challenging projects, and execute them with discipline. We need that now more than ever.