Stephen Prager, Common Dreams

President Donald Trump ran on promises to cut energy prices “in half” within his first year in office. But according to a report released Wednesday, he’s done the exact opposite, and it’s expected to get much worse as oil prices soar from his war with Iran.

Electricity prices increased more than twice as fast as overall inflation in 2025, according to a fact sheet by the Groundwork Collaborative.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, electricity costs increased by nearly 7% last year, compared with an overall consumer price index increase of 2.7%.

In January, a report by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, found that Americans spent an extra $2,120 in 2025 due to inflation across the economy. Electricity cost the average family an additional $123.

Groundwork’s report attributed these price increases to Trump’s aggressive tariffs, which the group said have raised the costs of building and maintaining electric grids—costs that energy companies pass directly to consumers.

It also noted the Trump administration’s support for the swift build-out of artificial intelligence data centers, which have dramatically increased energy demand in places where they’ve been constructed.

Costs for consumers connected to America’s largest power grid, PJM, for example, increased by a collective $9.4 billion last year—more than a 180% increase. Meanwhile, Bloomberg found that in areas near data centers, wholesale electricity costs had jumped by as much as 267% over the past five years.

That pinch is being felt by consumers, 66% of whom said their electricity bills increased over the past year, compared with just 5% who said they decreased, according to a poll earlier this month from Data for Progress.

Groundwork found that “rising energy prices hit working families the hardest,” with those earning under $50,000 spending nearly 7% of their annual income on energy, compared with just 1.2% for those earning above $150,000, according to a 2025 report from the Bank of America Institute.

Rising costs have been a growing source of anger among voters who elected Trump to bring them down, but now give him just a 29% approval rating on the economy, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday.

It’s a historic low that Trump hit for the first time this month as gas prices in the US have soared to an average of $3.98 per gallon as a result of oil price hikes caused by Trump’s war with Iran, which resulted in Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global shipping route.

Groundwork noted that the pain of the war goes far beyond the pump: The price of residential heating oil is already up 35% since the war began. Meanwhile, rising diesel costs for trucks and disruptions to the global shipment of fertilizer are expected to jack up food prices.

Short of ending the war altogether, the group pointed out that Trump has options to reduce energy costs by tapping into increasingly cheap and abundant wind and solar energy.

Instead, however, the president has delayed hundreds of solar projects by introducing new review requirements that have slowed construction and backed lawsuits to gut efficiency standards.

Earlier this month, at the Trump administration’s urging, a federal judge sided with 15 red states to strike down Biden administration energy standards, which were estimated to reduce costs by more than $950 per year for families living in federally funded housing.

While Trump has taken actions aimed at curbing the global fuel shock, including tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and pausing the federal gas tax, a poll from Groundwork and Data for Progress this week found that more than half of Americans, 52%, would prefer to simply see the war end rather than these emergency measures.

An environmental organization is suing to stop the Trump administration from illegally convening a meeting that could allow oil and gas companies to drive an extremely endangered whale species to extinction.

On Wednesday, the Center for Biological Diversity filed an emergency lawsuit against Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in a federal district court in Washington, DC, seeking to block him from convening the Endangered Species Committee, more commonly known as the “Extinction Committee,” on March 31.

This committee is sometimes referred to as the “God Squad” because its members have the power to grant exemptions to the Endangered Species Act that can result in the extinction of imperiled species.

Led by the interior secretary, it has seven total members who can vote to override regulations. Five of them are senior executive officials: the secretaries of agriculture and the Army, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, and the administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Each affected state also receives a delegate to the committee, but they collectively receive just one vote. Five votes of seven are needed to grant an exemption.

In the federal register, Burgum announced earlier this week that the committee would meet at the end of the month “regarding an Endangered Species Act exemption for Gulf of America oil and gas activities,” referring to the Gulf of Mexico by the name preferred by President Donald Trump.

The Center for Biological Diversity said Burgum was seeking to override a requirement for oil and gas companies in the Gulf of Mexico to drive boats at safe speeds in order to protect the nearly extinct Rice’s whale from strikes.

These whales, named after the cetologist Dale Rice, who first recognized them as distinct from other whales in 1965, were not formally recognized as a new species until 2021.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, only about 51 Rice’s whales remain after BP’s catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, which devastated their population.

Last May, NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service issued a biological opinion concluding that their continued existence—as well as that of other whale and sea turtle species—was under threat from boat strikes, since Rice’s whales spend most of their time in the top 15 meters of water, which often puts them on a collision course with oil vessels.

The agency issued guidance requiring oil industry ships to travel at slower speeds in the eastern Gulf, saying that if they were followed, lethal collisions would be “extremely unlikely to occur” and that the species would be protected.

The Extinction Committee could override this rule, but it has only been convened three times in its history, and not since 1991, when then-President George H.W. Bush used it to open up timber harvests in the Pacific Northwest that endangered the habitats of spotted owls, which were considered threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The Extinction Committee is invoked so rarely because the circumstances for its use, as outlined in law, are extremely narrow: It can only be convened within 90 days of a biological opinion by the US Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service concluding that a federal action is likely to jeopardize a species. They must also determine that there is no “reasonable and prudent alternative” to the action the government plans to take.

In its lawsuit, the Center for Biological Diversity says that neither of these criteria has been reached, since the Fisheries Service issued its opinion 10 months ago and already established a reasonable alternative: slowing down the boats.

“Slowing boat speeds is not just reasonable, it’s easy, and it’s the absolute minimum the oil and gas industry can do to save Rice’s whales from extinction,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity.

The group said Burgum is also flouting other requirements of the law, including that the meeting be presided over by an administrative judge and have a formal hearing with public comment. No judge has been appointed by Burgum, and the meeting is only scheduled to be livestreamed on YouTube, with no forum for public input.

“Burgum’s Extinction Committee is immoral, illegal, and unnecessary,” Suckling said. “There’s no emergency, no legal basis to convene the committee, and no legal way to approve the extinction of Rice’s whales. This sham is nothing more than Burgum posturing for Trump and saving the fossil fuel industry a few dollars by allowing its boats to drive faster and more recklessly.”

If Rice’s whales were to go extinct, they could be the first ever large whale species to be driven out of existence by human activity in recorded history. Earthjustice says that the rollback of boat speed restrictions and other activities by the Trump administration—including the approval of the first BP oil field in the Gulf since the 2010 spill—are putting other species at risk too.

The scheduled March 31 meeting, said the group, “could kick off a months-long process to decide whether to give special treatment to the oil industry by allowing offshore drilling to go forward even if it would lead to the extinction of Gulf species.”

“The marine species in the Gulf are our natural heritage. There’s no imaginable justification to sacrifice them,” said Steve Mashuda, Earthjustice’s managing attorney for oceans. “It’s beyond reckless even to consider greenlighting the extinction of sea turtles, fish, whales, rays, and corals to further pad the oil industry’s pockets at the public’s expense. Giving carte blanche to industry also takes us further away from renewable energy that is cleaner, cheaper, more reliable, and more efficient than ever before.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren took President Donald Trump to task on Friday for making life “more expensive” with his war in Iran.

“It’s costing American taxpayers $1 billion a day to fund this war,” the Massachusetts Democrat said in a video posted to her social media accounts. “That is $11,500 every single second!”

This is, of course, not an exact amount. The figure is based on a preliminary estimate provided by Pentagon officials to Congress last week, estimating that the war would cost about $1 billion per day.

And so far, the war has actually been even more expensive than Warren initially claimed.

On Tuesday, according to the New York Times, the Pentagon gave a more comprehensive briefing, telling Congress that just the first six days of the war had exceeded $11.3 billion in cost, which puts the price tag at about $1.88 billion per day. That’s nearly $21,800 per second.

The Times noted that this was a low-end estimate and that the pricetag did not include many other costs, including those associated with the buildup of military hardware in the region before the war.

Using just these conservative estimates, a live ticker shows that as of Friday afternoon, the estimated cost of the war that began on February 28 is already fast approaching $19 billion, less than two weeks later.

“If we took the money that Donald Trump is demanding to fund the war with Iran and used that money here at home, instead, we could help cover healthcare costs for millions more Americans all across this country,” Warren said.

Indeed, an analysis published last week by the Institute for Policy Studies’ National Priorities Project (NPP), based on the $1 billion-per-day figure, found that on an annual basis, the cost of the war is “higher than the appropriated budget of any federal agency except the Pentagon itself.”

If all that money were spent domestically, it found, it would be enough to cover the daily costs of federal nutrition assistance for more than 40 million Americans, as well as daily Medicaid costs for the roughly 16 million people expected to lose health coverage due to the Republican budget package that Trump signed into law last year.

As Warren pointed out, calculations of military spending do not even take into account the sharp hikes in gas prices Americans are facing as a result of the war, which has led Iran to retaliate by closing one of the world’s largest oil shipment routes, the Strait of Hormuz.

According to the American Automobile Association’s (AAA) gas price tracker, US gas prices have leaped to $3.63 per gallon on average as of Friday, up from $2.94 a month ago.

“We haven’t seen gas prices jump this much since Russia invaded Ukraine,” Warren said. “Some cities in Indiana and Ohio have already seen a jump of over 50 cents a gallon. In Texas and Virginia, prices are up by more than 65 cents.”

Citing an image of a Chevron station in Los Angeles posted by a user on TikTok, Warren said: “California is seeing gas prices above $8.” According to AAA, the average cost of gas in the state is $5.42.

Despite rising anger from voters—more than 7 in 10 of whom said in a recent Quinnipiac poll that they fear higher oil and gas costs as a result of the war—Trump has said carrying out his objectives in Iran “is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit.”

In a post to Truth Social on Thursday, the president framed higher prices as a positive: “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” he wrote.

While this may be true for Americans who own oil and gas companies, most do not. For the average American, higher gas prices can raise the cost of transportation sometimes by thousands of dollars per year, cutting into spending on food, rent, medicine, and other essentials.

“For someone who campaigned on lowering costs on day one, Donald Trump is constantly raising the bar for how expensive he can make it to live in this country,” Warren said.

Referencing Republican opposition to extending Affordable Care Act subsidies that lowered healthcare premiums for more than 20 million Americans, Warren implored viewers to “never forget that Donald Trump said we just can’t afford to lower health care costs this year.”

“These are about choices,” she said, “and Donald Trump is making the wrong ones.”

President Donald Trump said the US Navy chose to sink an Iranian frigate, killing more than 100 sailors last week, because it was “more fun” than capturing the vessel, even though the ship posed no threat.

Though death tolls vary, Iran’s state media organization, the Islamic Republic News Organization, reported on Sunday that 104 crew members were killed in the attack and that 32 others were injured when a US submarine torpedoed the Iranian warship IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean on March 4 as it departed from the Milan Peace 2026 naval drills hosted in India.

The Dena was more than 2,000 miles away from the Persian Gulf when it was attacked, far from the hostilities unleashed last weekend when the US and Israel launched a war against Iran. Contradicting US claims, Iranian and Indian officials have said it was not armed.

In what political commentator Adam Schwarz described as “the most blasé admission of a war crime by a US president in history,” Trump on Monday casually recounted the US Navy’s decision to attack the ship before a gathering of Republicans at a Congressional Institute event, a GOP-aligned nonprofit retreat organizer. He suggested that the Navy blew the boat up not to neutralize a threat, but purely for its own sake.

After making the exaggerated boast that Iran’s navy is “gone” following aggressive US bombing, Trump said at first he “got a little upset” with the military brass who ordered the sinking of the Dena, which he said they described as a “top-of-the-line” vessel.

Trump said he asked: “Why don’t we just capture the ship? We could have used it. Why did we sink them?”

He said that an unspecified official told him, “It’s more fun to sink them.”

As the crowd laughed, Trump went on, chuckling himself: “They like sinking them better. They say it’s safer to sink them. I guess it’s probably true.”

Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Saeed Khatibzadeh, described the ship as operating in a purely “ceremonial” role and said it was “unloaded” and “unarmed” at the time of the attack last week.

Rahul Bedi, an independent defense analyst in India, told the Associated Press that while the ship may have used some limited non-offensive ammunition during naval exercises, drill protocol requires “the participating platforms to be unarmed.”

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has claimed the vessel was a “predator ship,” while the US Indo-Pacific Command has said claims that the ship was unarmed are “false.” However, it has provided no evidence that it posed a threat at the time of the attack.

The attack itself was likely legal under the rules of naval warfare, even if the ship was unarmed, though its ethical and tactical justification has been called into question.

“A military ship might be a lawful target,” Phyllis Bennis, the co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ New Internationalism Project told Common Dreams. “But firing on any ship—any people, anywhere—for ‘fun’ represents the kind of immoral depravity that this White House is infamous for.”

Bennis added that “failing to do everything possible to rescue those aboard is certainly a war crime,” as the Second Geneva Convention requires militaries to take all possible measures to search for and collect the shipwrecked, wounded, and sick.

The Dena’s 32 survivors, as well as dozens of dead bodies, had to be pulled from the water by a Sri Lankan joint rescue operation following a distress call. The survivors were quickly rushed to a local hospital in Galle City.

Hegseth has previously come under fire for reportedly ordering a second strike on shipwrecked sailors who survived the bombing of an alleged drug trafficking boat in the Caribbean.

Many have described that attack on September 2 as an exceptionally blatant war crime in a broadly illegal campaign that has extrajudicially killed at least 156 people.

In carrying out its war against Iran, Hegseth has emphasized that the US would not abide by what he called “stupid rules of engagement.”

Thousands of civilian targets, including schools, hospitals, and residential areas, have reportedly been attacked by US and Israeli strikes, according to the Iranian Red Crescent.

As of Monday, Iranian Deputy Health Minister Ali Jafarian said at least 1,255 people have been killed, including 200 children and 11 healthcare workers.

Though it may have still technically been legal, journalist Mark Ames, the co-host of the geopolitics podcast Radio War Nerd, argued that attacking a ship that posed no threat shows that Trump is “cowardly scum” who “gets his kicks killing those who can’t fight back.”

“The ship was unarmed. That’s why Trump and Hegseth chose to murder them,” Ames wrote on social media. “Tormenting those who can’t fight back is its own sadistic pleasure.”

Bennis added that even if attacking the ship itself was lawful in a vacuum, it took place before a backdrop of brazen “illegality.”

“This entire shocking episode represents a clear US violation of what the Nuremberg trials identified as the ‘supreme international crime’: the crime of aggression,” she said. “The US had no legal right to go to war against Iran. The [United Nations] Security Council had not authorized the use of force, and there was no ‘armed attack’ from Iran against the US that required immediate self-defense.

“Without either of those, the UN Charter is very clear that no country may attack another country,” she continued. “To do so, as the Nuremberg judges found, constitutes the crime of aggression—the ultimate crime.”

NOTE: This piece has been updated following publication to include additional comments.

A consumer watchdog group is calling on the federal agency that regulates prediction markets to investigate what it says are a series of “highly suspicious bets” placed on President Donald Trump’s war with Iran.

In a letter sent on Thursday to Michael Selig, the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a representative for the group Public Citizen pointed out that users have been able to make off with six-figure winnings from betting on political outcomes using platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, which “advertise that you can bet on almost anything, anywhere.”

“While bets on the future of the Iranian regime had been sporadic and imprecise for months before the invasion, several very substantial bets were placed in the last-minute moments prior to the February 28 attack,” wrote Public Citizen’s government affairs lobbyist Craig Holman.

“For most of the year, bets of [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] being removed from power were long shots and low-balled guesses,” Holman said. “In just the few hours before public announcement of the February 28 attacks, the odds and amount of the bets changed radically, rising from small bets at less than 25% to a few very large bets at over 50%. In the end, a few anonymous bettors hit the nail on its head and became very wealthy.”

Holman pointed to a report from NPR that an anonymous account with the username “Magamyman” made more than $553,000 placing bets on Polymarket just before the Iranian leader was killed by an Israeli strike Saturday.

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reported findings from the crypto analytics firm Bubblemaps, which identified “six suspected insiders” who had won a $1.2 million profit on a US strike through Polymarket. As the Journal wrote:

These users’ bets were among half a billion placed on Polymarket alone regarding the precise timing of US strikes on Iran.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said “it’s insane this is legal” and that “people around Trump are profiting off war and death.” He added that he was “introducing legislation ASAP to ban this.”

Holman asked Selig to identify the users who placed the highly lucrative bets and who, within the Trump and Netanyahu administrations, may have been privy to insider knowledge about the strikes.

The Trump family is deeply intertwined with the world of prediction markets. The president’s media company, earlier this year, partnered with Crypto.com to launch its own prediction platform called “Truth Predict.” Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to both Polymarket and Kalshi.

The president’s CFTC chair, Selig—who has appointed the CEOs of prediction market platforms as advisers—has sought to shield betting markets from regulatory scrutiny, describing his goal as ushering in “the Golden Age of American financial markets.”

Last month, facing what he called “an onslaught of state-led litigation,” Selig made the legally questionable assertion that Congress had given his agency the exclusive authority to regulate these platforms, not as tightly controlled gambling hubs but as commodities markets, which have much looser rules.

The Iran war is not the first time that mystery users have walked away with massive hauls after placing fortuitously timed bets on Trump’s military operations. In January, a user won $436,000 on a bet that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would be ousted by the end of the month, which they’d placed just hours before Trump’s operation to remove him from power.

“Allowing prediction market platforms to bet on virtually anything, any time, is a recipe for disaster,” Holman said. “The American people should not have to wonder whether government officials are exploiting their access to classified information to make a quick buck. The CFTC must act swiftly to regulate platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket in order to protect the public.”

This story was published in partnership with Common Dreams. Read the original story here.

Not a single refugee who isn’t a white South African has been legally resettled in the United States since October, according to the State Department’s most recent arrivals report.

The report, published last month, shows that from the start of October 2025 and the end of January 2026, just 1,651 people were admitted under the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), which allows those fearing persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group to apply for refuge in the United States.

Aside from just three, every single one of them was from South Africa.

Three Afghan refugees were also reported to have been settled in Colorado in November. But since then, their admission has been indefinitely suspended, and those who have entered may be at risk of deportation.

During that same period a year earlier—the final months of the Biden administration—a total of 37,596 refugees arrived in the US, with the greatest numbers coming from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.

The Trump administration dramatically curbed refugee admissions during its first year in power. On his first day back in office last January, President Donald Trump suspended USRAP processing, leaving around 600,000 people in the pipeline suddenly stranded, including roughly 10,000 who’d already booked flights.

Around 130,000 of those refugees had already been through the State Department’s meticulous and taxing vetting process, and were instead “left to languish in refugee camps around the world after being given the promise of safety and a new life in America,” as a group of Democrats in Congress put it.

The next month, however, Trump carved out an exception to the suspension exclusively for white South Africans, who he has falsely claimed face a “genocide,” and severe “discrimination” from land redistribution policies intended to correct extreme apartheid-era inequalities.

After previously discussing a cap of 40,000 refugee admissions for the fiscal year 2026---already a reduction by over two-thirds from the Biden administration---Trump announced on September 30 that he would lower admissions to just 7,500, a historic low.

He announced the change without consultation with Congress, which is required under the 1980 Refugee Act, leading Democrats to accuse him of acting in “open defiance of the law.”

But in late February, Reuters reported on an internal State Department document showing that the administration was planning to welcome as many as 4,500 white South Africans to the US per month and detailed plans to install trailers on US Embassy property in the country to expedite more immigrant approvals.

All the while, refugees fleeing war, government oppression, and genocide in countries including Syria, Sudan, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and others have been locked out or face threats of arrest by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under a new policy requiring them to be reinspected to determine their ability for “assimilation.”

Many critics have pointed out the dramatic gulf in treatment between white immigrants from South Africa and members of other, largely nonwhite groups of immigrants, whom it has undertaken extreme measures to remove from the country with expediency.

Last month, a Rohingya refugee, who fled genocide in Myanmar and legally entered the US as a refugee, was found dead on the streets of Buffalo, New York, after being detained and then left outdoors in the freezing cold by immigration agents.

The policy was revealed as part of a case in which a federal judge halted a DHS effort to detain thousands of refugees in Minnesota who did not seek green cards after their first year of residency in the United States.

“While the Trump administration is trying to convert warehouses at home into massive prisons to jail and deport immigrants swept up in its racist crackdown, it is also working to build trailers in Pretoria so it can rapidly increase the number of white South Africans,” wrote Ja’han Jones in an opinion piece for MS NOW.

Likening it to the 1924 Immigration Act, which created strict ethnic quotas for entry into the US, Jones said: “It’s the kind of immigration policy the Ku Klux Klan dreamed of. Literally. This kind of quota system mirrors the kind of policies that white supremacist groups, including the Klan, pushed for 100 years ago.”

The progressive candidate Graham Platner has a commanding lead in the Democratic primary for Maine’s US Senate seat over the state’s centrist Gov. Janet Mills. Come November, he’s also much more likely than Mills to defeat the Republican incumbent, Sen. Susan Collins.

The University of New Hampshire’s Pine Tree State Poll, released Tuesday morning, showed that Platner has built momentum since October. Five months ago, 58% of likely Democratic voters said the 41-year-old oyster farmer was their first choice to be the state’s next senator, compared with 24% who preferred the governor.

Now, with the June primary less than four months away, undecided voters have broken hard in Platner’s favor: 64% said he’s their first choice, while Mills has only jumped up to 26%.

It’s perhaps an unsurprising result, as Democratic voters overwhelmingly support the kind of economically populist anti-oligarchy politics that Platner—a proponent of Medicare for All and a federal billionaires’ tax, with backing from labor unions and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—has unapologetically championed.

But Tuesday’s poll suggests his message is not only resonating with Democrats. Where a race between Mills and Collins has the Democrat leading by a single point, within the margin of error, Platner would be expected to win the general election comfortably with 49% of the vote to just 38% for Collins.

The steady shift toward Platner comes as affordability issues have become increasingly salient to Maine voters. A full 35% of voters said that either the cost of living or housing was the most important problem facing Maine.

As President Donald Trump suffers historic unpopularity amid a flailing economy, the most marked shift has been concern about the cost of living. Where just 4% of Mainers said it was their No. 1 issue in March 2025, that number has shot up to 20% this month.

Collins’ popularity has been in a dramatic freefall in the era of Trump 2.0, to the point where a late January Morning Consult poll showed her to be the second-least popular US senator, behind only the former longtime GOP leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

While Democratic Party insiders have long argued that voters prefer a safer, moderate candidate when ousting a hated incumbent, observers say Platner’s success over the candidate backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and much of the party establishment is redefining what it means to be “electable” in a swing state.

“The fatal part of this poll for Mills isn’t even the massive lead Platner has,” said Drop Site News co-founder Ryan Grim. “It’s that he is 10 points more electable against Collins, which is the real priority for Maine voters who don’t want her in office anymore.”

New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells said: “This is a small-sample poll, and there’s a long way to go. But if something like this comes to pass—Platner stomping Mills in the primary, then cruising to a double-digit win in the general election—it wouldn’t just be a Senate-seat victory but a narrative earthquake.”

A group of 31 Democratic senators has launched an investigation into a new Trump administration policy that they say allows the Environmental Protection Agency to “disregard” the health impacts of air pollution when passing regulations.

Plans for the policy were first reported on last month by the New York Times, which revealed that the EPA was planning to stop tallying the financial value of health benefits caused by limiting fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone when regulating polluting industries and instead focus exclusively on the costs these regulations pose to industry.

On December 11, the Times reported that the policy change was being justified based on the claim that the exact benefits of curbing these emissions were “uncertain.”

“Historically, the EPA’s analytical practices often provided the public with false precision and confidence regarding the monetized impacts of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone,” said an email written by an EPA supervisor to his employees on December 11. “To rectify this error, the EPA is no longer monetizing benefits from PM2.5 and ozone.”

The group of senators, led by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), rebuked this idea in a letter sent Thursday to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.

“EPA’s new policy is irrational. Even where health benefits are ‘uncertain,’ what is certain is that they are not zero,” they said. “It will lead to perverse outcomes in which EPA will reject actions that would impose relatively minor costs on polluting industries while resulting in massive benefits to public health—including in saved lives.”

“It is contrary to Congress’s intent and directive as spelled out in the Clean Air Act. It is legally flawed,” they continued. “The only beneficiaries will be polluting industries, many of which are among President [Donald] Trump’s largest donors.”

Research published in 2023 in the journal Science found that between 1999 and 2020, PM2.5 pollution from coal-fired power plants killed roughly 460,000 people in the United States, making it more than twice as deadly as other kinds of fine particulate emissions.

While this is a staggering loss of life, the senators pointed out that the EPA has also been able to put a dollar value on the loss by noting quantifiable results of increased illness and death—heightened healthcare costs, missed school days, and lost labor productivity, among others.

Pointing to EPA estimates from 2024, they said that by disregarding human health effects, the agency risks costing Americans “between $22 and $46 billion in avoided morbidities and premature deaths in the year 2032.”

Comparatively, they said, “the total compliance cost to industry, meanwhile, [would] be $590 million—between one and two one-hundredths of the estimated health benefit value.”

They said the plan ran counter to the Clean Air Act’s directive to “protect and enhance the quality of the Nation’s air resources so as to promote the public health and welfare,” and to statements made by Zeldin during his confirmation hearing, where he said “the end state of all the conversations that we might have, any regulations that might get passed, any laws that might get passed by Congress” is to “have the cleanest, healthiest air, [and] drinking water.”

The senators requested all documents related to the decision, including any information about cost-benefit modeling and communications with industry representatives.

“That EPA may no longer monetize health benefits when setting new clean air standards does not mean that those health benefits don’t exist,” the senators said. “It just means that [EPA] will ignore them and reject safer standards, in favor of protecting corporate interests.”

Democratic voters overwhelmingly want a leader who will fight the superrich and corporate America, and they believe Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is the person to do it, according to a poll released this week.

While Democrats are often portrayed as squabbling and directionless, the poll conducted last month by the New Republic with Embold Research demonstrated a remarkable unity among the more than 2,400 Democratic voters it surveyed.

This was true with respect to policy: More than 9 in 10 want to raise taxes on corporations and on the wealthiest Americans, while more than three-quarters want to break up tech monopolies and believe the government should conduct stronger oversight of business.

But it was also reflected in sentiments that a more confrontational governing philosophy should prevail and general agreement that the party in its current form is not doing enough to take on its enemies.

Three-quarters said they wanted Democrats to “be more aggressive in calling out Republicans,” while nearly 7 in 10 said it was appropriate to describe their party as “weak.”

This appears to have translated to support for a more muscular view of government. Where the label once helped to sink Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) two runs for president, nearly three-quarters of Democrats now say they are either unconcerned with the label of “socialist” or view it as an asset.

Meanwhile, 46% said they want to see a “progressive” at the top of the Democratic ticket in 2028, higher than the number who said they wanted a “liberal” or a “moderate.”

It’s an environment that appears to be fertile ground for Ocasio-Cortez, who pitched her vision for a “working-class-centered politics” at this week’s Munich summit in what many suspected was a soft-launch of her presidential candidacy in 2028.

With 85% favorability, Bronx congresswoman had the highest approval rating of any Democratic figure in the country among the voters surveyed.

It’s a higher mark than either of the figures who head-to-head polls have shown to be presumptive favorites for the nomination: Former Vice President Kamala Harris and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Early polls show AOC lagging considerably behind these top two. However, there are signs in the New Republic’s poll that may give her supporters cause for hope.

While Harris is also well-liked, 66% of Democrats surveyed said they believe she’s “had her shot” at the presidency and should not run again after losing to President Donald Trump in 2024.

Newsom does not have a similar electoral history holding him back and is riding high from the passage of Proposition 50, which will allow Democrats to add potentially five more US House seats this November.

But his policy approach may prove an ill fit at a time when Democrats overwhelmingly say their party is “too timid” about taxing the rich and corporations and taking on tech oligarchs.

As labor unions in California have pushed for a popular proposal to introduce a billionaire’s tax, Newsom has made himself the chiseled face of the resistance to this idea, joining with right-wing Silicon Valley barons in an aggressive campaign to kill it.

While polls can tell us little two years out about what voters will do in 2028, New Republic editorial director Emily Cooke said her magazine’s survey shows an unmistakable pattern.

“It’s impossible to come away from these results without concluding that economic populism is a winning message for loyal Democrats,” she wrote. “This was true across those who identify as liberals, moderates, or progressives: An unmistakable majority wants a party that will fight harder against the corporations and rich people they see as responsible for keeping them down.”

The Trump administration is expected to flood Ohio with immigration agents next week to target thousands of Haitian migrants after they are stripped of their legal status.

One of the main targets will be the town of Springfield, where President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance infamously concocted the tale that Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of white residents to stoke xenophobia during the 2024 election, which unleashed an onslaught of racist threats and intimidation upon the community.Earlier this week, the Springfield News-Sun received a message sent to staff at the Springfield City School District saying that school officials were expecting a federal immigration enforcement operation to begin in the town sometime after February 3, when Haitian residents’ temporary protected status (TPS) expires, and last at least 30 days.

Given that history and the escalating brutality with which US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has carried out its recent surges in Minnesota and Maine, Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder said he was “getting the impression that ICE is gearing up for a pogrom in Springfield, Ohio.”

“Any day now, a swarm of armed state police dressed for war could descend” on the town, wrote columnist Marilou Johanek in the Ohio Capital Journal. “The small town of Springfield in Clark County is awaiting an invasion of unaccountable thugs who conceal their faces and identities, drive in unmarked vehicles with blackened windows, stomp on the Bill of Rights, and viciously brutalize human beings based on race and accent.”

The 15,000 Haitians living in Springfield are among around 30,000 in Ohio and more than 500,000 across the US who are expected to lose TPS on Tuesday after it was abruptly revoked by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last year. The expiration could be halted by US District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes, who is expected to issue a decision on February 2.

If not, “they could potentially be arrested, detained, or put in removal proceedings unless they have already applied for some other form of relief they have in addition to TPS, or that they are applying for in addition to TPS,” explained Emily Brown, Ohio State University Moritz College of Law’s Immigration Clinic Director to the Journal.

While the Trump administration has often emphasized its supposed targeting of those in the US unlawfully, editor-in-chief David DeWitt at the Journal emphasizes that “Haitians are currently in the United States legally,” under TPS, which grants temporary legal status to those in danger from armed conflict, environmental disasters, or other extraordinary conditions in their home countries.

The Haitians living in the US are at risk of being deported back to what has been described as “the most dangerous country in the world,” in the midst of a gang war that killed over 8,100 people between January and November 2025, according to the United Nations.

“They are not here illegally,” DeWitt wrote on social media. “Trump is revoking their legal status on February 3, and then, according to reports, immediately sending ICE in to Springfield and Columbus, Ohio, to target them.”

As part of a crusade to end migration from impoverished “Third World” countries, Trump has ramped up his use of racist invective against Haiti in recent months, proudly referring to it as a “shithole country” at a rally in December after denying having described it that way back in 2018.

Viles Dorsainvil, executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, told the Journal that rumors of the coming surge have struck terror into the hearts of many in the community.

“The folks are fearful,” Dorsainvil, who came to the United States from Haiti in 2020, said. “They came here just to work and send their kids to school and be here peacefully. All of a sudden, they find themselves in another scenario where they’re not accepted… They are panicked, and the worst thing is that they can’t even plan their lives for three months down the road.”

One TPS holder, 41-year-old Pushon Jacques, told the News-Sun that the potential loss of his status “has a big impact.” He said: “I won’t be able to work, I will not be able to provide for my family. It’s a bad situation to be in.”

While the administration has emphasized “self-deportation” as a way to avoid being on the business end of an ICE jackboot, Jacques said: “The situation in Haiti—especially the political situation—has made Haiti unlivable... There is no place in Haiti that is safe right now.”

Local reports say residents are already preparing for their town to come under siege, and despite the White House’s portrayal of Haitians as loathed outsiders, many others in the community have come out to support them.

Churches are running immersive role-playing sessions to train community members on what to do if ICE agents attempt to storm their doors, and residents have constructed phone chains to alert vulnerable community members when agents are spotted.

The Springfield City Council, meanwhile, has passed a resolution urging federal agents to comply with city policies that prohibit police from wearing masks and require them to carry identification, though the city has no authority to enforce them.

“Springfield is a good place,” Jacques said. “I like the environment and the people, because Springfield has a lot of good people... I have never felt any racism, and I feel appreciated.”

Despite attacks from the leaders of his party, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, has defended his state’s Haitian community, telling the statehouse bureau, “I don’t think it’s in our interest in this country for all the Haitians who are working, who are sometimes working two jobs, supporting their family, supporting the economy, I think it’s a mistake to tell these individuals you can no longer work and have to leave the country.”

According to a spokesperson for DeWine, there has been no formal communication between federal authorities and the governor about ICE’s plans for the state. However, DeWine said, “If ICE does in fact come in, comes in with a big operation, obviously we have to work this thing through and make sure people don’t get hurt.”

The ACLU of Ohio said it will be monitoring the situation in Springfield closely for unconstitutional actions.

“This despicable surge in lawless ICE officers descending upon Springfield will ignite swells of fear within the Haitian community, terrorize our Black and Brown neighbors, and cause considerable damage to citizens and non-citizens alike,” said ACLU Ohio executive director J. Bennett Guess.

“Following the government’s senseless, brutal killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, it is clear that ICE poses a grave threat to all who call Ohio home,” he continued. “The ACLU of Ohio urges state and local elected officials to do everything in their power to protect the 30,000 Haitians living in Central Ohio. We call on the US Congress to reject a DHS budget that allows these lawless agencies to continue putting our communities in danger.”

Weeks after President Donald Trump withdrew the US from dozens of United Nations organizations, the UN’s chief warns that the UN is at risk of an “imminent financial collapse.”

“The crisis is deepening, threatening program delivery and risking financial collapse. And the situation will deteriorate further in the near future,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres wrote in a letter to ambassadors dated January 28, according to a Friday report from Reuters.

While he did not reference the United States explicitly, Guterres called out the fact that “decisions not to honor assessed contributions that finance a significant share of the approved regular budget have now been formally announced,” which almost certainly referenced Trump’s pullout from at least 66 international treaties earlier this month, including 31 within the UN system.

With the stroke of a pen, Trump reneged on the US commitment to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which it has been part of for more than 30 years. He also took the US out of the UN International Law Commission, the UN Democracy Fund, UN Oceans, UN Women, and dozens of other global bodies, deeming them “contrary to the interests of the United States.”

As the world’s largest economy, the US was the largest source of funding for the UN, providing 22% of its regular and peacekeeping budgets as of 2025—about $820 million per year.

The largest single financial cut as a result of the US pullout was the termination of dozens of grants worth approximately $377 million for the UN Population Fund, which focuses on family planning and preventing maternal mortality and sexual violence in developing nations. The organization is estimated to have prevented 39,000 maternal deaths and 18 million unwanted pregnancies in 2024, according to an annual report.

Warning that cash could run out by July, Guterres said, “Either all member states honor their obligations to pay in full and on time–or member states must fundamentally overhaul our financial rules to prevent an imminent financial collapse.”

A watchdog group is raising concerns that President Donald Trump may have violated federal recordkeeping laws by using an auto-deleting message application to text world leaders.

On Tuesday, the group American Oversight sent a letter to White House Counsel David Warrington asking for information about whether the president is taking all the required steps to comply with the Presidential Records Act, which requires the preservation of all presidential records—including digital correspondence—during official duties. The group highlighted two posts Trump made on Truth Social last Tuesday in which appeared to reveal that he was using Signal or another similar messaging app to discuss world affairs with world leaders.

The first screenshot shows a message from French President Emmanuel Macron, who discussed plans to meet with Trump about his proposal to take over Greenland and meetings with other foreign diplomats.

The second was sent from NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who told Trump he’d use his “media engagements” in Davos to “highlight” Trump’s work in Ukraine and Gaza, and expressed an interest in “finding a way forward on Greenland.”

While some European diplomats found it troubling that any intimate communication they have with Trump could be exposed to the world on a whim, American Oversight said it also raised concerns about the preservation of records.

Trump has a long history of flouting rules surrounding the proper storage of documents. The group pointed out that during his first term, the president would often rip up notes, memos, and documents after reading them and at least twice reportedly attempted to flush them down the toilet.

More recently, he was indicted for improperly stashing away classified documents at his personal residence at Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House and showing them to people without security clearances.

The second Trump White House has already been involved in a scandal surrounding their use of deleting message apps when a journalist was accidentally invited into a private Signal chat last year, which contained the administration’s plans for an imminent strike on Yemen. The messages in that chat were reportedly set to delete after one week, before later being changed to four, which would have also violated the Presidential Records Act.

“President Trump has repeatedly made clear his contempt for laws governing presidential transparency and proper recordkeeping,” said American Oversight executive director Chioma Chukwu. “The Presidential Records Act exists to ensure transparency of presidential decisions and safeguard the historical record for the American people.”

“Given President Trump’s well-documented history of mishandling sensitive information and presidential records,” he added, “the White House must assure the public that these communications are secure and being preserved and protected in full compliance with the law.”

The group has requested that the White House counsel disclose any other messages Trump may have sent using auto-deleting apps and ensure that any messages sent through mobile messaging programs are properly preserved.

After weeks of authoritarian threats to crush protests with the military, cancel elections, conquer foreign countries, and send masked agents door-to-door to round up anyone who can’t prove their citizenship, Trump on Wednesday told an already uneasy room full of world leaders that “sometimes you need a dictator.”

The offhanded comment came in the middle of a rambling speech at the reception dinner for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, in which Trump congratulated himself on a different rambling speech he’d given earlier that day at the summit.

“We had a good speech, we got great reviews. I can’t believe it, we got good reviews on that speech,” Trump said of the widely mocked address in which he continued to demand the US take over Greenland (which he repeatedly referred to as “Iceland”) and made new tariff threats against Canada and Europe if they resist the annexation.

“Usually they say ‘he’s a horrible dictator-type person,’ I’m a dictator,” Trump continued. “But sometimes you need a dictator! But they didn’t say that in this case... It’s all based on common sense, it’s not conservative or liberal, or anything else.”

At least twice over the past month, Trump has suggested that the 2026 midterm elections should be canceled, since his party is likely to lose.

The first time he brought up the idea, on the five-year anniversary of the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, he seemed to back off the idea for fear of being called a dictator by his detractors: “I won’t say cancel the election; they should cancel the election, because the fake news would say: ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator.”

But if being called a dictator was the only thing holding him back from attempting to suspend democracy, he no longer appears to care.

As political commentator Charlotte Clymer wrote on social media, “Trump is now openly referring to himself as a dictator” in front of the whole world.

As his administration continues dragging its feet in releasing the Epstein files, President Donald Trump is pushing to keep another potentially damning set of Justice Department documents hidden from the public.

On Tuesday, Trump filed a 19-page motion requesting that the US District Court of the Southern District of Florida step in to prohibit the DOJ’s planned release of Volume II of the final report prepared by former Special Counsel Jack Smith next month. The volume relates to the president’s handling of classified documents after leaving office in 2021.

Trump was indicted by a grand jury for 37 felony counts following Smith’s investigation, 31 of which involved violations of the Espionage Act, after transporting “scores of boxes” full of classified materials, including top-level military and intelligence secrets, to his home at Mar-a-Lago and showing them off to people without security clearances.

But Smith ultimately dropped the case in November 2024 after it became clear that Trump’s reelection would shield him from legal liability.

On January 7, 2025, just days before Trump reassumed office, the DOJ released Volume I of Smith’s report, which pertained to Trump’s attempts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election by spreading false claims of widespread voter fraud, which culminated in the attack on the US Capitol building by a mob of his supporters on January 6, 2021.

Though Trump’s indictment in that case was also dropped following his reelection, the report was released under DOJ rules requiring public disclosure of all investigative reports after cases conclude.

That report described Trump as having undertaken an “unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power,” a scheme in which he knowingly spread information casting doubt on the election result even after his own staff confirmed it to be false and he acknowledged his loss in private.

Unlike the election case, the classified documents case was dismissed in July 2024 by the Trump-appointed federal judge Aileen Cannon of the same district court, who ruled that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unlawful.

Cannon also issued an injunction blocking the release of the report to Congress, but only until February 24, 2026, so as not to prejudice the legal proceedings against Trump’s co-defendants, former aide Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago employee Carlos De Oliveira, who were accused of helping him illegally stash documents and hide them from investigators.

Citing her previous ruling, Trump is now asking Cannon to permanently block the report, claiming that, because of her ruling against Smith, “all acts undertaken” by him, including the creation and release of the report, are “void.”

Not only does he seek to prohibit the “current” DOJ from releasing it, but also “former and future” DOJ officials from ever releasing it, as it would result in the “public dissemination of sensitive grand jury materials, attorney-client privileged information, and other informationderived from protected discovery materials, raising significant statutory, due process, and privacy concerns for President Trump and his former co-defendants.”

Trump’s request to permanently spike the report immediately drew comparisons to the Epstein files, which remain almost entirely unreleased by the DOJ nearly a month after the deadline mandated by law, which was signed by Trump himself after being passed in November.

For over a year, efforts to halt the release of Smith’s report have fueled concerns of a cover-up and raised questions about whether Cannon has any authority to issue rulings at all, since the case has been dismissed.

In a piece for MS NOW (then MSNBC) last year, after the first report was released, legal analyst Glenn Kirschner warned that if the second one were buried in perpetuity, it could allow Trump to escape legal consequences after his term is up.

“If there is no disclosure of Volume II to members of Congress, what might a Trump-led DOJ do to the evidence?” he asked. “Might it be destroyed in an attempt to make sure Trump is never held to account for the classified documents crimes? Recall that the documents case was dismissed without prejudice, which means the case could theoretically be refiled once Trump leaves office.”

His colleague, former US Attorney Joyce Vance, noted the peculiarity of Cannon’s assertion of authority in a case that had already been dismissed.

“The strangest thing about this entire proceeding is that Judge Cannon continues to issue orders when there is no case pending in front of her,” she said. “That’s not how a court’s jurisdiction is supposed to work.”

After appearing at a closed-door deposition last month as part of an inquiry launched by Republicans, Smith is scheduled to testify publicly before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday at 10 am ET.

Smith’s lawyer, Lanny Breuer, told the Associated Press earlier this month that “Jack has been clear for months he is ready and willing to answer questions in a public hearing about his investigations into President Trump’s alleged unlawful efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his mishandling of classified documents.”

A Danish pension fund is selling off its US treasuries in the wake of President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to annex its sovereign territory, Greenland.

The fund, known as AkademikerPension, said on Tuesday that it was selling off assets worth $100 million by the end of this month.

Its investment director, Anders Schelde, insisted that the decision was due to “poor US government finances,” and had nothing to do with Trump’s bellicose threats in recent weeks, which have led several European nations to move troops to the island and conduct military exercises in preparation for a US invasion.

But, he said, Trump’s threats “didn’t make it more difficult to take the decision.”

The US president said over the weekend that he would institute tariffs on several European nations if the US did not acquire Greenland by February 1. He has previously said he would not rule out using military force to conquer the island if diplomatic means failed, and when asked about it again on Monday, replied “No comment.”

Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, responded on Monday that it would “not be pressured” and “stand firm on dialogue, on respect, and on international law.” A day later, Nielsen warned the people of Greenland to start preparing for a possible military invasion. He said, “It’s not likely there will be a military conflict, but it can’t be ruled out.”

Trump’s threats against Greenland have rattled markets in recent days, with CNBC reporting on Tuesday that bond prices have fallen along with stock prices and the value of the US dollar, as investors sell American assets that have long been considered among the safest investments.

While Denmark accounts for only a sliver, Europe collectively holds about 40% of foreign US Treasury holdings, which it could use as a choke point in the event of further escalation by Trump.

“Europeans hold roughly $10 trillion in US assets: around $6 trillion in US equities and roughly $4 trillion in Treasuries and other bonds,” said Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote. “Selling those assets would pull the rug from under US markets.”

The idea of a wider European boycott of US bonds appears to have unnerved US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who protested during remarks at the annual World Economic Forum summit in Davos that it “defies any logic” and urged European nations not to “listen to the media who are hysterical.”

George Saravelos, head of FX research at Deutsche Bank, said if Trump is intent on shredding the long-standing US military alliance with Europe, it can return the favor by backing out of its role as America’s number-one lender, which could trigger heightened inflation, dollar depreciation, and higher interest rates that make borrowing and spending more costly.

“For all its military and economic strength,” Saravelos wrote, “the US has one key weakness: It relies on others to pay its bills via large external deficits.”