Stephen Prager, Common Dreams

The union for US Department of Education workers has raised alarm about a top department official’s display of a flag with Christian nationalist associations that was flown during the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol building.

The flag was spotted outside the Washington, DC, office of Murray Bessette, the principal deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development, according to a report on Monday from USA Today. However, it’s not clear how long it’s been displayed there.

The stark white banner, emblazoned with a pine tree and the phrase “An Appeal to Heaven”—a reference to John Locke’s “Second Treatise on Government”—was first used during the American Revolution and flown by six schooner privateers known as “Washington’s Cruisers” for naval operations and supply capture missions.

The flag was flown sporadically throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, most prominently in New England. But it remained relatively obscure until recently.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained in November, it has undergone a revival among proponents of Christian nationalism over the past decade Its affiliation with Christian supremacist politicians largely began in 2013 after being reintroduced as a symbol of supremacy by Dutch Sheets, a highly influential leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, today’s most powerful Christian supremacist movement.

The NAR is an anti-democratic Christian supremacist movement that seeks to control all areas of national life, from the halls of Congress to one’s living room, compelling all Americans to align their lives with NAR’s worldview. According to NAR leaders, those who oppose them are not just wrong but under the control of the demonic, and are even possibly demonic entities themselves.

Sheets, a prominent supporter of President Donald Trump, helped to mobilize thousands of Christian followers to the Capitol leading up to the January 6 riot, where supporters of the president sought to violently overturn the electoral victory of his opponent, former President Joe Biden. The pastor referred to the recognition of Biden’s election as “an evil attempt to overthrow the government of the United States of America.”

The “Appeal to Heaven” flag was spotted on multiple occasions at the Capitol on that day and at other “Stop the Steal” events protesting Trump’s 2020 election loss. It has continued to cause controversy in the years since.

In 2023, the right-wing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was seen flying the flag outside his New Jersey beach house. Alito blamed his wife for the flag flying outside their property just weeks before a documentarian published a secret recording of him expressing his desire to return the country to “a place of godliness,” and agreeing with radical right-wing groups who he said refuse to “negotiate with the left.”

The flag has also been displayed by several Republicans in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has expressed many Christian nationalist viewpoints, including a distaste for the idea that the Constitution requires the separation of church and state.

Its appearance outside Bessette’s office is not the first time a government agency has displayed the flag during the second Trump presidency. In June, the Small Business Administration also displayed it during a ceremony, though only for about a day, according to Wired.

Rachel Gittleman, the president of the union for Education Department workers nationwide, said in a statement that the agency “has no place for symbols that were carried by insurrectionists.”

“Since January, hardworking public servants at the US Department of Education have been subjected to threats, harassment, and sustained demoralization,” she added. “Now, they are being asked to work in an environment where a senior leader is prominently displaying an offensive flag—one that, regardless of its origins in the American Revolution, has come to represent intolerance, hatred, and extremism.”

The use of a flag with Christian nationalist affiliations is especially noteworthy at the Education Department, which has been at the center of Trump’s push to “bring back religion in America” and promote “Judeo‑Christian principles.”

Trump has endorsed state-level policies requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in classrooms, which he called a “major step in the revival of religion.” In September, he also said that he would soon roll out a policy to provide “total protection” for prayer in public schools, which has long been considered unconstitutional when sponsored by school or state officials.

As student debt exacerbates the financial struggles of millions of Americans, the Trump administration has taken a major step toward killing the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program.

On Tuesday, the Department of Education announced that it had reached a settlement with the state of Missouri to end the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) program, which allowed more than 7 million mostly low-income Americans to reduce their federal student loan payments.

Rather than setting monthly payments based on income, the SAVE program bases them on how much borrowers earn and the size of their families, which is referred to as an income-driven repayment option, or IDR. SAVE cut most enrollees’ monthly loan payments in half and left 4.5 million of them, mostly those earning between 150–225% of the federal poverty level, paying $0 per month.

In March 2024, a coalition of 11 states led by Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach sued in federal court to stop the SAVE plan. The next month, a similar lawsuit was filed by another coalition of seven states led by Missouri’s former attorney general, Andrew Bailey.

In February, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the states, blocking 8 million borrowers from accessing lower payments under the program. Now, President Donald Trump’s administration, which aggressively opposes student loan forgiveness, has agreed to settle the lawsuit, effectively killing SAVE.

“For four years, the Biden administration sought to unlawfully shift student loan debt onto American taxpayers, many of whom either never took out a loan to finance their postsecondary education or never even went to college themselves, simply for a political win to prop up a failing administration,” said Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent. “The Trump administration is righting this wrong and bringing an end to this deceptive scheme. The law is clear: if you take out a loan, you must pay it back.”

The settlement also includes a provision requiring that, for the next 10 years, the Department of Education notify the state of Missouri at least 30 days in advance before instituting broad-based student debt relief.

As the Debt Collective, a membership-based debtors’ union, explained in a post on social media: “30 days is enough notice that Missouri will find standing to sue for relief before it even happens. So not only is Trump gutting the SAVE plan, they’re essentially putting a moratorium on cancellation for the next 10 years with this agreement.”

“What Republicans admit is that the executive administration does have authority to cancel federally held student debt,” the group added. “They just want to make it so that it will be administratively and practically impossible to deliver it because of this technicality. It’s stealing in advance.”

SAVE was already slated to end in 2028 following July’s passage of Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which replaced it with a pair of less generous income-based repayment plans that require many debtors to pay hundreds more per month. The deadline to switch to one of the new plans will now move up, though the administration has not yet clarified when borrowers will have to switch.

The Debt Collective predicted that the end of SAVE “means many more debtors will likely be forced to default on their loans,” which the group added “is bad for millions of families and our economy.”

According to an analysis of federal student loan data from the American Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, more than 12 million borrowers in the US are already in default or otherwise behind on their student loan payments.

Since their introduction, former President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness policies have been chipped away at bit by bit through litigation. In 2023, the conservative US Supreme Court struck down the administration’s plans to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt for millions of Americans, ruling that the plan exceeded the administration’s executive authority. A year later, it halted SAVE as well while it considered the merits of the Missouri lawsuit.

The group Protect Borrowers, which supports student loan forgiveness, argues that SAVE is “not a novel use of executive power,” noting that Congress gave the Education Department the authority to create IDRs in 1993 and that several other programs have been created since.

“This settlement is pure capitulation—it goes much further than the suit or the 8th Circuit order requires,” said Persis Yu, the group’s deputy executive director and managing counsel. “The real story here is the unrelenting, right-wing push to jack up costs on working people with student debt.”

A September survey by Data For Progress found that student loans make it more difficult for many borrowers to keep up with other bills amid a growing cost-of-living crisis: 42% of respondents said their debt payments had a negative impact on their ability to pay for food or housing. More than a third, 37%, said it had a negative impact on their ability to cover healthcare costs for themselves or their dependents, while the majority, 52%, said it had a negative impact on their ability to save for retirement.

“While millions of student loan borrowers struggle amidst the worsening affordability crisis as the rising costs of groceries, utilities, and healthcare continue to bury families in debt,” Yu said, “billionaire Education Secretary Linda McMahon chose to strike a backroom deal with a right-wing state attorney general and strip borrowers of the most affordable repayment plan that would help millions to stay on track with their loans while keeping a roof over their head.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, considered by some to be the frontrunner to be the next Democratic presidential nominee, said during a panel on Wednesday that he wants his party to be a “big tent” that welcomes large numbers of people into the fold. But he’s “adamantly against” one of the most popular proposals Democrats have to offer: a wealth tax.

In October, progressive economists Emmanuel Saez and Robert Reich joined forces with one of California’s most powerful unions, the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) United Healthcare Workers West, to propose that California put the nation’s first-ever wealth tax on the ballot in November 2026.

They described the measure as an “emergency billionaires tax” aimed at recouping the tens of billions of dollars that will be stripped from California’s 15 million Medicaid recipients over the next five years, after Republicans enacted historic cuts to the program in July with President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which dramatically reduced taxes for the wealthiest Americans.

Among those beneficiaries were the approximately 200 billionaires living in California, whose average annual income, Saez pointed out, has risen by 7.5% per year, compared with 1.5% for median-income residents.

Under the proposal, they would pay a one-time 5% tax on their total net worth, which is estimated to raise $100 billion. The vast majority of the funds, about 90%, would be used to restore Medicaid funding, while the rest would go towards funding K-12 education, which the GOP has also slashed.

The proposal in California has strong support from unions and healthcare groups. But Newsom has called it “bad policy” and “another attempt to grab money for special purposes.”

Meanwhile, several of his longtime consultants, including Dan Newman and Brian Brokaw, have launched a campaign alongside “business and tech leaders” to kill the measure, which they’ve dubbed “Stop the Squeeze.” They’ve issued familiar warnings that pinching the wealthy too hard will drive them from the state, along with the critical tax base they provide.

At Wednesday’s New York Times DealBook Summit, Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Newsom about his opposition to the wealth tax idea, comparing it to a proposal by recent New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who pledged to increase the income taxes of New Yorkers who earn more than $1 million per year by 2% in order to fund his city-wide free buses, universal childcare, and city-owned grocery store programs.

Mamdani’s proposal was met with a litany of similar warnings from Big Apple bigwigs who threatened to flee the city and others around the country who said they’d never move in.

But as Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein explained in October for the American Prospect: “The evidence for this is thin: mostly memes shared by tech and finance people... Research shows that the truth of the matter is closer to the opposite. Wealthy individuals and their income move at lower rates than other income brackets, even in response to an increase of personal income tax.” Many of those who sulked about Mamdani’s victory have notably begun making amends with the incoming mayor.

Moreover, the comparison between Mamdani’s plan and the one proposed in California is faulty to begin with. As Harold Meyerson explained, also for the Prospect: “It is a one-time-only tax, to be levied exclusively on billionaires’ current (i.e., 2025) net worth. Even if they move to Tasmania, they will still be liable for 5% of this year’s net worth.”

“Crucially, the tax won’t crimp the fortunes of any billionaire who moves into the state next year or any later year, as it only applies to the billionaires living in the state this year,” he added. “Therefore... the horrific specter of billionaire flight can’t be levied against the California proposal.”

Nevertheless, Sorkin framed Newsom as being in an existential battle of ideas with Mamdani, asking how the two could both represent the Democratic Party when they are so “diametrically opposed.”

“Well, I want to be a big-tent party,” Newsom replied. “It’s about addition, not subtraction.”

Pushed on the question of whether there should be a “unifying theory of the case,” Newsom responded that “we all want to be protected, we all want to be respected, we all want to be connected to something bigger than ourselves. We have fundamental values that I think define our party, about social justice, economic justice.”

“We have pre-distribution Democrats, and we have re-distribution Democrats,” he continued. “Therein lies the dialectic and therein lies the debate.”

Polling is scarce so far on the likelihood of such a measure passing in California. But nationally, polls suggest that the vast majority of Democrats fall on the “re-distribution” side of Newsom’s “dialectic.” In fact, the majority of all Americans do, regardless of party affiliation.

Last year, Inequality.org examined 55 national and state polls about a number of different taxation policies and found:

A billionaire income tax garnered the most support across party identification. On average, two out of three (67%) of Americans supported the tax including 84% of Democrats, 64% of Independents, and 51% of Republicans.

In national polls, a wealth tax had similarly high levels of support. More than three out of five Americans supported the tax including 78% of Democrats, 62% of Independents, and 51% of Republicans.

That sentiment only seems to have grown since the return of President Donald Trump. An Economist/YouGov poll released in early November found that 72% of Americans said that taxes on billionaires should be raised—including 95% of Democrats, 75% of independents, and 48% of Republicans. Across the board, just 15% said they should not be raised.

Support remains high when the proposal is more specific as well. On the eve of Mamdani’s election, despitre months of fearmongering, 64% of New Yorkers said they backed his proposal, including a slight plurality of self-identified conservatives, according to a Siena College poll.

Many observers were perplexed by how Newsom proposes to maintain a “big tent” while opposing policies supported by most of the people inside it.

“A wealth tax is a big tent policy unless the only people you care about are billionaires,” wrote Jonathan Cohn, the political director for Progressive Mass, a grassroots organization in Massachusetts, on social media.

“Gavin Newsom—estimated net worth between $20 and $30 million—says he’s opposed to a billionaire wealth tax. Color me shocked,” wrote the Columbia University lecturer Anthony Zenkus. “Democrats holding him up as a potential savior for 2028 is a clear example of not reading the room.”

Six former employees of the US Environmental Protection Agency filed a First Amendment challenge in court on Wednesday to their firing earlier this year for criticizing the Trump administration’s environmental policies.

The employees were among 160 who were fired shortly after signing a “declaration of dissent” in June against EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, whom they said was “recklessly undermining” the agency’s mission and “ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters.”

In their claim before the US Merit Systems Protection Board, which adjudicates appeals from fired federal workers, the six employees argued that they were illegally fired for exercising their First Amendment right to free speech and that those firings were carried out in retaliation for their political affiliation.

The fired workers also argued that they arbitrarily received harsher treatment than many other employees who signed the letter, who were suspended without pay for two weeks.

According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), one of the groups defending the employees, many of them had lengthy, distinguished careers of federal service.

One of them, John Darling, was a senior research biologist who spent over two decades helping the EPA curb the damage to endangered aquatic species.

Another, Tom Luben, is an expert in environmental epidemiology who worked at the EPA for over 18 years investigating how air pollution can cause pregnancy complications, and has received 14 National Honor Awards for his contributions over the years.

A third, Missy Haniewicz, served for a decade and was working on hazardous waste cleanup projects at more than 20 sites across Utah at the time she was fired.

PEER provided an example of one of the termination notices the fired employees received. Both the names of the employee and the official who sent the notice were redacted, along with other identifying information.

The termination notice states that the individual was fired for “conduct unbecoming of a federal employee.” Although the document notes the employee’s “[years] of federal service, most recent distinguished performance rating, awards, and... lack of disciplinary history,” it says all of that was outweighed by the “serious nature of your misconduct.”

“The agency is not required to tolerate actions from its employees that undermine the agency’s decisions, interfere with the agency’s operations and mission, and the efficient fulfillment of the agency’s responsibilities to the public,” the notice adds. “As an EPA employee, you are required to maintain proper discipline and refrain from conduct that can adversely affect morale in the workplace, foster disharmony, and ultimately impede the efficiency of the agency.”

The legal team defending the employee and their colleagues argues that this is untrue. They argue that these employees’ terminations violate the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which says employees are “protected against arbitrary action, personal favoritism, or coercion for partisan political purposes.” It also protects whistleblowers who publicize information they reasonably believe to be a violation of law, abuse of authority, or danger to public health and safety.

“Federal employees have the right to speak out on matters of public concern in their personal capacities, even when they do so in dissent,” says Joanna Citron Day, general counsel for PEER. “EPA is not only undermining the First Amendment’s free speech protections by trying to silence its own workforce, it is also placing US citizens in peril by removing experienced employees who are tasked with carrying out EPA’s critical mission.”

The second Trump administration has laid off approximately 300,000 federal civil servants over the past year, with some of them being carried out in apparent retaliation for dissent.

On Tuesday—after being briefly reinstated—14 employees at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) were placed back on administrative leave for signing an open letter of dissent in August, warning that cuts to the agency were putting it at risk of similar failures to those after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

And weeks after over a thousand anonymous Department of Health and Human Services employees called for the resignation of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in September, accusing him of “placing the health of all Americans at risk,” more than a thousand employees across the department were culled in what was dubbed a “Friday Night Massacre.”

Eden Brown Gaines, whose law firm is also defending the employees, said, “If America is to remain on the course of democracy and honor the principles of its Constitution, we must allow its judicial system to restore employment for those unjustly fired and our collective faith in our country.”

“Truth is not a fireable offense,” PEER said in a statement.

The Trump administration is pushing for the US Supreme Court to shield the manufacturer of Roundup from thousands of state lawsuits alleging that its widely used herbicide product causes cancer.

On Monday, US Solicitor General D. John Sauer recommended that the high court agree to hear a challenge to a Missouri jury’s verdict in 2023 that awarded $1.25 million to a man named John Durnell, who claimed that the product caused him to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Bayer, the agribusiness giant that purchased the manufacturer of Roundup, the agribusiness giant Monsanto, in 2018, immediately challenged the verdict.

In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, as “probably carcinogenic to humans” based on “limited evidence.”

That evidence became less limited in 2019, when a prominent meta-analysis by a team of environmental health researchers found that people exposed to glyphosate at the highest levels had a 41% higher risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma than those who weren’t.

There are nearly 4,500 Roundup claims currently pending in federal court, and at least 24 cases have gone to trial since October 2023. They make up just a fraction of the more than 170,000 claims filed.

According to Bloomberg, Bayer has already been forced to pay out more than $10 billion in verdicts and settlements over the product, which has caused a massive drain on the company’s stock price.

In what it said was an effort to “manage litigation risk and not because of any safety concerns,” Bayer removed glyphosate-based herbicides from the residential market in 2023, switching to formulas that “rely on alternative active ingredients.”

That didn’t stop the lawsuits from coming. Durnell’s victory was the first successful case brought against Bayer outside California, the only state that labels the product as carcinogenic. That in Missouri opened the floodgates in other states, and plaintiffs subsequently won sizable payouts in Georgia and Pennsylvania.

But now the Trump administration is trying to help the company skirt further accountability. Sauer, who is tasked with arguing for the government in nearly every Supreme Court case, filed a 24-page brief stating that there is a lack of clarity on whether states have the authority to determine whether Bayer and Monsanto violated the law by failing to warn customers about potential cancer risks from Roundup.

Bayer argues that these cases are preempted by the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), which forbids states from enacting labeling requirements more stringent than those recommended by the federal government.

Sauer agreed with Bayer, stating in the brief that the US Environmental Protection Agency “has repeatedly determined that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic in humans, and the agency has repeatedly approved Roundup labels that did not contain cancer warnings.”

In 2016 and again in 2020, the EPA indeed classified glyphosate as “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans” following agency assessments. However, in 2022, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals voided this assessment, finding that the agency applied “inconsistent reasoning” in its review of the science.

Among the justifications for the ruling were that the EPA relied heavily on unpublished, non-peer-reviewed studies submitted to regulators by Monsanto and other companies that manufacture glyphosate. The agency also largely disregarded findings from animal studies included by the IARC, which showed a strong link between glyphosate and cancer.

“The World Health Organization has recognized glyphosate as a probable carcinogen while the EPA continues to twist itself into pretzels to come to the opposite conclusion,” Lori Ann Burd, a staff attorney and director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s environmental health program, told Common Dreams.

Notably, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. built his national profile campaigning against the dangers of pesticides and railing against regulatory capture by big business.

Kennedy served as an attorney for Dewayne Johnson, the first plaintiff to win damages against Monsanto in 2018, where a jury determined that Roundup had contributed to his cancer.

“If my life were a Superman comic, Monsanto would be my Lex Luthor,” Kennedy said in a 2020 Facebook post. “I’ve seen this company as the enemy of every admirable American value.”

During Kennedy’s 2024 presidential run, he pledged to “ban the worst agricultural chemicals already banned in other countries.”

But after he was sworn in as President Donald Trump’s HHS Secretary, he began to sing a different tune. As Investigate Midwest noted, his “Make America Healthy Again” commission’s introductory report made no mention of glyphosate.

Meanwhile, he reassured the pesticide industry that it had nothing to worry about: “There’s a million farmers who rely on glyphosate. 100% of corn in this country relies on glyphosate. We are not going to do anything to jeopardize that business model,” he said during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.

The Trump EPA has deregulated toxic chemicals across the board over the past year. It rolled back protections against per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), often referred to as “forever chemicals,” in drinking water, which have many documented health risks. It has also declined to ban the widely used insecticide chlorpyrifos, which has been linked to neurodevelopmental disorders in children.

Elizabeth Kucinich, the former director of policy at the Center for Food Safety, described the US Department of Justice’s effort to shield Bayer as another “betrayal of MAHA health promises.” Her husband, the two-time Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, worked as the campaign manager for RFK Jr.'s 2024 presidential bid.

“This is regulatory capture, not public protection,” she said. “This action shields chemical manufacturers from accountability by elevating a captured federal regulatory process over the lived harm of real people. That is anti-life, and it is exactly what millions of MAHA voters believed they were voting against.”

Food & Water Watch staff attorney Dani Replogle said the DOJ filing “encourages the Supreme Court to slam judiciary doors in the faces of cancer patients across the country.”

“No political posturing can undo the clear message this brief sends to sick Americans harmed by toxic pesticides,” she continued. “Trump has Bayer’s back, not theirs.”

As President Donald Trump attempts to claim the mantle of “affordability” and boasts that grocery prices are “way down,” a new report tracking the price of several Thanksgiving staples showed they have increased by 10% over the last year, more than three times the rate of inflation.

On social media, the president recently trumpeted that “2025 Thanksgiving dinner under Trump is 25% lower than 2024 Thanksgiving dinner under [President Joe] Biden, according to Walmart.” Claiming that grocery prices are down this year, he added: “AFFORDABILITY is a Republican Stronghold. Hopefully, Republicans will use this irrefutable fact!”

Trump was technically correct that Walmart had reduced the cost of its Thanksgiving dinner by about 25%. What he neglected to mention, however, was that it had also considerably reduced the meal’s size, down from 29 individual items to 22.

The most recent Consumer Price Index (CPI) data published in September by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, meanwhile, shows that at-home grocery prices have actually risen by 2.7%. That, not the spin coming from the White House, is what voters appear to be absorbing as Thanksgiving approaches.

In a poll conducted last week by Data for Progress, 53% said they felt it would be harder to afford a typical Thanksgiving meal than last year, while just 13% said it would be easier. Meanwhile, over a third said they were compensating for rising costs by buying fewer items.

That survey was done in collaboration with the Groundwork Collaborative, the Century Foundation, and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which published a report on Friday showing the skyrocketing cost of several holiday staples over the past year, in large part due to Trump’s aggressive tariff regime.

While the cost of a 15-lb. frozen turkey has remained roughly steady, the report notes that this is a bit of a mirage.

“Typically, retailers use frozen turkeys as a loss leader, discounting them to get customers in the door to purchase the rest of their Thanksgiving meal, so it’s no surprise that frozen turkey prices are steady,” it explains. “However, wholesale prices for frozen turkeys have soared 75% over the past year, according to research from Purdue University, and fresh turkey prices are up 36% and likely to continue rising.”

The report attributes these sharp increases to a perfect storm of Trump policies. Tariffs have driven up the cost of feed and avian flu,“ which has worsened as a result of mass firings at the US Department of Agriculture, ”has further thinned an already shrinking flock, now at its lowest level in four decades, squeezing American farmers and consumers alike.“

Those who prefer pork or beef to turkey will not be so lucky: The price of an 8-lb. smoked bone-in spiral ham has jumped from $7.69 last year up to $11.48, a nearly 50% increase, while beef roasts are up 20%.

But many agree that the sides are what truly make a Thanksgiving meal great, and that’s where Americans’ pocketbooks will take the most significant hits.

The cost of sweet onions, an essential ingredient in stuffing, has spiked by 56% since last year. Ocean Spray jellied cranberry sauce and Seneca Foods’ creamed corn have each jumped by over 20%. And elbow macaroni from De Cecco and the Sargento cheese to put on top have each increased by double digits.

Pie fillings like pecans, apples, and the refrigerated crusts they’re served in have also all lept several times the rate of inflation. And even storing leftovers will be more costly, with heavy-duty aluminum foil from Reynolds up 40%.

The report chalks this up to Trump’s 50% tariffs on imported steel, which affect around 4 in 5 canned goods. Canned fruits and vegetables have increased by 5% over the past year, faster than the overall rate of inflation. These price hikes, meanwhile, have given companies cover to raise the prices of goods made with domestic steel, too.

Making Thanksgiving dinner with fresh fruit and vegetables may skirt some of the hikes, but tariffs on fertilizer and herbicides have also driven prices up by about 2.5%.

Tariffs on aluminum, meanwhile, have caused Reynolds’ CEO to increase the prices not just of foil, but also of other products to help absorb the cost.

The report by Groundwork, the Century Foundation, and AFT is not the only one to examine the cost of Thanksgiving foods, which are often used as a shorthand for the state of inflation.

While estimates vary based on methodology—for instance, the American Farm Bureau notes that the loss leader pricing of turkey is enough to reduce the price of a Thanksgiving meal on the whole from last year—reports across the board have found that the prices for most Thanksgiving staples are rising in tandem with food prices more broadly.

“This Thanksgiving, the main course is inflation as Trump’s policies force families to carve up their shrinking budgets,” said Lindsay Owens, Groundwork’s executive director.

Rising food prices are just the tip of the iceberg for a mounting affordability crisis: Data shows similar hikes to housing and energy costs. Meanwhile, the cost of health insurance premiums is expected to more than double next year for over 20 million Americans and increase across the board after Republicans voted not to renew a tax credit for the Affordable Care Act.

“This administration’s policies made the cost of living higher than the year before,” said AFT president Randi Weingarten. “We must do everything we can to make it easier, not harder, for working Americans to afford groceries, housing, and healthcare.”

Late at night on Sept. 30, over 300 federal agents stormed an apartment building in one of Chicago’s lowest-income neighborhoods. After descending from Black Hawk helicopters, they broke down residents’ doors, destroyed furniture and belongings, deployed flash-bang grenades, and dragged sleeping people—some naked—out into the cold evening. Dozens of people, including children and American citizens, were held in zip ties and detained for hours.

As part of the highly publicized raid at the South Shore complex, which was filmed and edited into a miniature action film by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), at least 37 Venezuelan residents of the apartment complex were taken into custody.

On Thursday, an investigation by ProPublica revealed that the raid, heralded by the Trump administration as a counterterrorism victory, has resulted in zero charges against the people who were detained.

In the wake of public backlash to the militarized raid’s extraordinary, indiscriminate brutality, the assistant secretary for public affairs at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin, claimed that the operation “successfully resulted in the arrest of two confirmed Tren de Aragua members,” describing the cartel as “a terrorist organization.” She added that “One of these members was a positive match on the terror screening watchlist.”

She added that others who were detained had their own rap sheets, including “domestic battery, family violence, battery against a public safety official, aggravated unlawful use of a firearm, retail theft, soliciting prostitution, possession of a controlled substance,” while another “had an active warrant and was listed as armed and dangerous [with] weapons offenses.”

Stephen Miller, a senior advisor to President Donald Trump and an architect of his “mass deportation” policy, said that the building was “filled with TdA terrorists” and that the raid had “saved God knows how many lives.”

But ProPublica‘s report called many of the government’s claims into question. The government has not released the names of the 37 Venezuelans detained in the raid, but reporters identified the names of 21 of them and interviewed 12.

The report found that, contrary to the government’s claims of their rampant criminality, federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against a single person who was arrested. They have also not provided any evidence that two of the men arrested were part of the Tren de Aragua gang.

The names of the two supposed gang members have not been made public, but ProPublica managed to track down one of them—24-year-old Ludwing Jeanpier Parra Pérez—using another government press release that described him as a “confirmed member” of the terrorist cartel.

While the release also described him as a “criminal illegal alien,” the only criminal charges ever filed against him—for drug possession and driving without a license after a traffic stop last year—were dropped. No other charges against him, related to gang activity or anything else, have been filed.

“I don’t have anything to do with that,” Parra told ProPublica from the Indiana jail where he’s detained along with 17 others nabbed in the raid. “I’m very worried. I don’t know why they are saying that. I came here to find a better future for me and my family.”

ProPublica said its reporters have also observed eight immigration court hearings for the detained individuals, many of whom have asked to be deported back to Venezuela. In not a single one of the hearings has a government attorney mentioned any pending criminal charges against them while arguing for their deportation, nor have they alleged that any of them have affiliations with Tren de Aragua.

Judges have instead ordered them deported or granted voluntary departure, which the outlet noted is “a sign that they are not seen as a serious threat and can apply for return to the United States.”

Mark Rotert, a former federal prosecutor and defense attorney in Chicago, told ProPublica that if these detainees actually had the long criminal histories the government claimed they do, they would likely pursue charges.

“Do they really believe they have people who are members of a violent organized crime gang?” he said. “If they believe they have people who fit that criteria, I would be very surprised if they were satisfied with only deporting them.”

As far as other crimes, ProPublica found that 18 of the 21 detainees they identified had no criminal charges against them. Meanwhile, the other three, who were charged with offenses “ranging from drug possession to battery,” have all had their charges dropped.

Among those rounded up at the South Shore apartment who spoke to ProPublica were a man with a steady job at a taco restaurant who has a daughter in elementary school, and a construction worker and former Venezuelan army paratrooper who is raising four children.

The investigation’s findings are in line with how the Trump administration has attempted to sell its militaristic Operation Midway Blitz and other prongs of its mass deportation crusade to the public.

While the White House has persistently claimed to be targeting “the worst of the worst” criminals, the latest immigration data shows that around 72% of current detainees have no criminal convictions. Previous data from the libertarian Cato Institute has shown that 93% of ICE book-ins were for non-criminals and nonviolent offenders.

Michael D. Baker, an immigration and criminal defense lawyer based in Chicago, described it as laughable that a “300-agent raid” was being “called a terrorist victory” even while it had “zero criminal charges.”

“The Trump administration’s showcase anti-gang operation was built on spectacle, not evidence,” he said.

In response to the story, Miles Taylor, who served in the DHS from 2017-19, including as its chief of staff, during the first Trump administration, lamented on social media that the department “is no longer recognizable.”

“The department I once served is engaging in fascist shows of force,” he said, “violating the rights of Americans—only to satiate the creepy desires of an old man who wants to seem macho.”

As the US House of Representatives votes for a resolution demanding the release of files relating to the late sex criminal and financier Jeffrey Epstein, a new series of investigations is digging into an area of the disgraced financier’s life that has largely evaded scrutiny: his extensive ties with Israeli intelligence.

Epstein’s relationship with the Israeli government has long been the subject of speculation and conspiracy theorizing. But the extent of the connections has long been difficult to prove. That is, until October 2024, when the Palestinian group Handala released a tranche of more than 100,000 hacked emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who led the country from 1999 to 2001.

The emails span the years 2013-16, beginning just before Barak concluded his nearly six-year tenure as Israel’s minister of defense. Barak is known to have been one of Epstein’s closest associates, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that he visited the financier’s estates in Florida and New York more than 30 times between 2013 and 2017, years after Epstein had been convicted for soliciting a minor for prostitution.

Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent victims, who died earlier this year, alleged in her posthumous memoir that a figure, described only as “the Prime Minister,” but widely believed to be Barak, violently raped her on Epstein’s private Caribbean island when she was 18. In past court filings, Giuffre accused Barak of sexually assaulting her. Barak has categorically denied those allegations and said he was unaware of Epstein’s activities with minors during the time of their friendship.

Emails between Barak and Epstein have served as the basis for the ongoing investigative series published since late September by the independent outlet Drop Site News, which used them to unearth Epstein’s extensive role in brokering intelligence deals between Israel and other nations.

The emails reveal that between 2013 and 2016, the pair had “intimate, oftentimes daily correspondence,” during which they discussed “political and business strategy as Epstein coordinated meetings for Barak with other members of his elite circles.”

The investigation comes as President Donald Trump’s extensive ties to Epstein face renewed scrutiny in Congress. On Wednesday, just a day after Drop Site published the fourth part of its series, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a new trove of documents from Epstein’s private estate.

Among them were emails sent in 2011 from Epstein to his partner and co-conspirator Ghislane Maxwell, in which he said the then private-citizen Trump “spent hours at my house” with one of his sex trafficking victims, referring to Trump as a “dog that hasn’t barked.”

Murtaza Hussain, one of the Drop Site reporters who has dug into Epstein’s Israel connections, told Democracy Now! on Wednesday that the focus on Trump, while important, has diverted attention from other key tendrils of Epstein’s influence.

“There’s been a lot of justifiable focus on Epstein’s very grave crimes and facilitation of the crimes of others related to sex trafficking and sex abuse,” Hussain said. “But one critical aspect of the story that has not been covered is Epstein’s own relations to foreign governments, the US government, and particularly foreign intelligence agencies.”

The first report shows that Epstein was instrumental in helping Barak develop a formal security agreement between Israel and Mongolia, recruiting powerful friends like Larry Summers, who served as an economist to former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, to serve on a Presidential Advisory Board for the Central Asian nation’s economy.

Epstein helped to facilitate an agreement for Mongolia to purchase Israeli military equipment and surveillance technology from companies with which the men had financial ties.

Another report shows how Epstein helped Israel to establish a covert backchannel with the Russian government at the height of the Syrian Civil War, during which they attempted to persuade the Kremlin to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a major national security priority for Israel, which had become substantially involved in the conflict.

This process was coordinated with Israeli intelligence and resulted in Barak securing a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In one message, Barak explicitly thanked Epstein for “setting the whole thing together.”

Epstein also worked alongside Barak to sell Israeli surveillance tech, which had previously been used extensively in occupied Palestine, to the West African nation of Côte d’Ivoire.

In 2014, the pair architected a deal by which the nation’s government, led by President Alassane Ouattara, purchased technology used to listen in on phone calls and radio transmissions and monitor points of interest like cybercafes.

In the decade since, the report says, “Ouattara has tightened his grip on power, banning public demonstrations and arresting peaceful protestors,” while “his Israeli-backed police state has squashed civic organizations and silenced critics.”

On Tuesday, just before the House Oversight Committee dropped its latest batch of documents, the series’ latest report revealed that an Israeli spy, Yoni Koren, stayed at Epstein’s New York apartment for weeks at a time on three separate occasions between 2013 and 2015. Koren served as an intermediary between the American and Israeli governments, helping Barak organize meetings with top intelligence officials, including former CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Drop Site’s reporting has fueled speculation of the longstanding theory that Epstein may have worked as an agent of Mossad, Israel’s central intelligence agency. Hussain said that the evidence points to the idea that Epstein was not a formal Mossad agent, but was working as an asset to advance its most hawkish foreign policy goals.

He marveled at the fact that throughout each of these stories, “it’s not Epstein chasing Barak—it’s Barak chasing Epstein,” and that at times, “it looked like Mossad was working for Epstein instead of Epstein working for Mossad.”

In a foreword to their latest report, Hussain and co-author Ryan Grim expressed bewilderment at the lack of media attention paid to the publicly available files revealing Epstein’s role as a semi-official node in Israel’s intelligence apparatus.

While Epstein’s relationship with Trump has routinely been front-page news for many outlets, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal have not published a story focused on Epstein’s role in Israeli intelligence.

“We’re left wondering why the rest of the media, which has demonstrated no lack of excitement when it comes to the saga of Jeffrey Epstein, has all of a sudden lost its reporting capacity, in the face of reams of publicly available newsworthy documents,” the reporters asked. “A question for editors reading this newsletter: What are you doing?”

In the interview, Hussain said he and Grim “are going to continue drilling down on this and not shying away from the political implications of his activities.”

While the Republican and Democratic senators who passed this week’s emergency funding bill to reopen the government took heat for their failure to provide a solution to rising health insurance premiums, they also slipped other provisions under the radar that will likely harm Americans’ health.

As The Lever reported Tuesday, senators inserted language into the bill that would gut food safety regulations that prevent illness and death, as well as regulations on ultraprocessed foods.

The changes come “amid a lobbying blitz and a flood of campaign cash” from the food and restaurant industries, which have spent more than $13 million lobbying the White House, Congress, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this year.

Amid a surge of product recalls for bacteria like Listeria, Salmonella, and E. coli, the number of dangerous cases of foodborne illness doubled last year, according to the Public Interest Network. These illnesses annually result in around 53,000 hospitalizations and 900 deaths, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.

Nevertheless, The Lever reports that the “new funding bill blocks federal rules designed to trace sources of outbreaks, and to prevent contamination of produce.” One provision bans the use of funds to administer or enforce the FDA’s “Requirements for Additional Traceability Records for Certain Foods,” published in November 2022.

That traceability rule, The Lever notes, is “aimed to establish new record-keeping standards for companies to track their food products across the supply chain. Those records could help regulators identify the point of origin in the event of a major disease outbreak or food contamination event. The rule applied to produce, seafood, and certain dairy products, such as cheese, and exempted small businesses from the rule.”

The rule was initially proposed by the Trump administration during the COVID-19 pandemic, and enacted in 2023 by the Biden administration over aggressive opposition from industry groups. But after Trump’s return to office this year, they began a multimillion-dollar effort to lobby Congress to repeal the measure.

The National Restaurant Association spent nearly $2.5 million to lobby lawmakers to eliminate the rule, while the International Foodservice Distributors Association spent more than $600,000. In August, the Trump FDA proposed a rule to delay the traceability standards until 2028.

As The Lever explains: “The line inserted on page 154 of the new funding package contains identical language as the federal rule and would enshrine it into law.”

Two groups that have lobbied aggressively for deregulation of food tracking, the National Restaurant Association and the National Grocers Association, donated more than $750,000 to both parties’ congressional candidates and more than $145,000 to the two parties’ congressional election committees in the last election.

And they gave a combined $17,000 to three of the seven Democrats who joined Republicans in backing the bill—Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

“The next time you go to a restaurant and then uncontrollably vomit and diarrhea in your pants, you should send a note of thanks to the Republican and Democratic senators who helped their campaign donors slip this language into their legislation to reopen the government,” wrote The Lever‘s founder, David Sirota, on social media.

The traceability rule is one of several regulations the bill, which is expected to come up for a vote in the House on Wednesday, would gut. It also requires that none of the bill’s funds go toward enforcing a 2015 FDA rule requiring stricter inspections of wine grapes, hops, almonds, and certain other crops.

It also axes funds for the FDA to establish new regulations to limit the public’s high intake of sodium, which is commonly found in highly processed foods. The effort to gut these regulations notably flies in the face of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s so-called “Make America Healthy” initiative.

Kennedy’s “MAHA” report, released in May, explicitly called for guidelines “that emphasize unprocessed foods while strictly limiting high-fat, high-sugar, and high-sodium processed items.”

“The most MAGA thing ever is embracing the so-called MAHA movement and then quietly gutting food safety regulations and research into ultra-processed foods,” said Neal Kwatra, the founder of the New York-based progressive group Metropolitan Public Strategies. “Just previously unseen levels of gaslighting on politics vs. actual policy.”

But Democrats allowed the measure to pass, too. For this, Melanie D’Arrigo, the executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, blamed the overwhelming power of corporate money.

“As long as corporations and billionaires are legally allowed to pay off politicians, we will never have a government that works for us,” she said.

After his resounding election victory on Tuesday night, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s most prominent billionaire antagonist immediately pivoted to kiss the ring of the man he has spent the last more than half-year portraying as an existential threat to the city and the country.

Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman poured over $1.75 million into the mayor’s race with a laser focus on stopping Mamdani, whom he often ambushed with several-thousand-word screeds on his X account, which boasts nearly 2 million followers. He accused Mamdani—a staunch critic of Israel—of “amplifying hate” against Jewish New Yorkers, while suggesting that his followers (which happened to include many Jewish New Yorkers) were “terror supporters.”

Meanwhile, the billionaire suggested that the democratic socialist Mamdani’s “affordability” centered agenda, which includes increasing taxes on corporations and the city’s wealthiest residents to fund universal childcare, free buses, and a rent freeze for stabilized units, would make the city “much more dangerous and economically unviable,” in part by causing an exodus of billionaires like himself.

In turn, Mamdani often invoked Ackman’s name on the campaign trail, using him as the poster boy for the cossetted New York elite that was almost uniformly arrayed against his candidacy. In one exchange, Mamdani joked that Ackman was “spending more money against me than I would even tax him.”

After Mamdani’s convincing victory Tuesday night, fueled in large part by his dominant performance among the city’s working-class voters, Ackman surprisingly did not respond with “the longest tweet in the history of tweets” to lament the result as some predicted. Instead, he came to the mayor-elect hat in hand.

“Congrats on the win,” he told Mamdani on X. “Now you have a big responsibility. If I can help NYC, just let me know what I can do.”

Many were quick to point out Ackman’s near-immediate 180-degree turn from prophecizing doom to offering his help to the incoming mayor.

“This guy went from acting like Mamdani was going to import ISIS to extending a friendly handshake… in like six hours,” noted one social media user.

But Mamdani graciously accepted the billionaire’s congratulations when asked about them on Wednesday’s “Good Morning America.”

“I appreciated his words,” Mamdani said. “I think what I find is that there is a needed commitment from leaders of the city to speak and work with anyone who is committed to lowering the cost of living in the city—and that’s something that I will fulfill.”

As Bloomberg and Forbes noted, Ackman was just one of many on Wall Street and from the broader finance world who came to kiss the ring.

Ralph Schlosstein, a co-founder of the investment fund BlackRock, Inc., pledged to work with Mamdani despite their different politics: “I do care deeply about the city, and I’m not going anywhere, whoever the mayor is. I’m going to do whatever I can to help him be successful,” he said.

Another former BlackRock executive, Mark Kronfeld, said: “Is it a dystopian, post-apocalyptic environment because Mamdani has won? No.”

Crypto billionaire Mike Novogratz even credited Mamdani with “tapping into a message that’s real: that we’ve got a tale of two cities in the Dickensian sense,” and asked if the incoming mayor could “address the affordability issue in creative ways without driving business out.”

But while Mamdani has left the door open to business, he has made it clear that he will not allow them to commandeer his work at City Hall.

After his victory, he called on his base of largely small-dollar donors to resume their financial support for him in order to fund “a transition that can meet the moment of preparing for January 1.”

He announced that this historic all-female transition team will include at least one renowned titan of economic populism, the trust-busting former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, as well as other progressive city administrators with backgrounds in expanding the social safety net and public housing.

“I’m excited for the fact that it will be funded by the very people who brought us to this point,” Mamdani said, “the working people who have been lost behind by the politics of the city.”

Republican Party officials are now using their “connections” to the Trump administration to threaten journalists into dropping critical coverage.

That’s what Doug Bock Clark, a reporter for ProPublica, recently discovered as he worked on a feature-length story on the rise of Paul Newby, the Republican chief justice of North Carolina’s Supreme Court, who has become one of the most quietly influential jurists in the nation.

The piece published Thursday examines how Newby, a born-again Christian who was elected to the bench in 2004, believes he was called by God to exact what he calls “biblical justice.”

Over the past two decades, Clark wrote that Newby has “turned his perch atop North Carolina’s Supreme Court into an instrument of political power” and “driven changes that have reverberated well beyond the borders of his state.”

Newby’s most significant contribution has been the landmark decision that legalized partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina, a state that had long had some of the strongest laws in the country against partisan redistricting.

The change led the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to draw up wildly slanted maps that netted the GOP an additional six seats in the US House of Representatives in 2024, handing the party a national trifecta at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, which has allowed him to wield extraordinary power almost totally free of oversight from Congress.

It’s just one of the ways, Clark said, that “Newby has provided a blueprint for conservatives to seize most of the nation’s state supreme courts, which have increasingly become the final word on abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights and voting rights.”

The report drew from more than 70 interviews with those who know Newby professionally and personally. But he was unable to get in contact with Newby himself.

“I reached out to Newby multiple times during the course of my reporting and was even escorted out of a judicial conference while trying to interview him,” Clark wrote on social media. “The court’s communications director and media team also didn’t respond to detailed questions.”

When Clark attempted to contact Newby’s daughter for comment, he instead received an ominous message from that aforementioned communications director, Matt Mercer.

Mercer ranted that ProPublica was waging a “jihad” against “NC Republicans,” which would “not be met with dignifying any comments whatsoever.”

He continued: “I’m sure you’re aware of our connections with the Trump administration, and I’m sure they would be interested in this matter. I would strongly suggest dropping this story.”

As Clark pointed out, “He bolded and underlined ‘strongly,’ in case we missed his point.”

After the story, which made note of Mercer’s threat, was published, Mercer then doubled down on social media, urging Trump to “feed ProPublica to the USAID wood chipper,” referencing the president’s near-total stripping of funds from the foreign aid agency.

Trump has issued an executive order slashing federal funds for media organizations supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, like NPR and PBS, in response to critical coverage of his administration. But it’s not entirely clear how he would actually go about doing such a thing to ProPublica, which does not receive government dollars but instead subsists on private grants and donations.

At any rate, Mercer’s messages were widely perceived as a not-so-veiled attempt to coerce ProPublica into ceasing its inquiries.

Travis Fain, a freelance reporter who previously worked for Raleigh’s NBC News affiliate, WRAL, expressed disbelief at Mercer’s belligerence on social media: “Well, there you go,” he said. “The North Carolina Republican Party officially threatens journalists now.”

Wiley Nickel, the former Democratic US House representative for North Carolina’s 13th District, lamented that it was “not normal” for a party official to “threaten ProPublica with retaliation from Trump” for writing a profile about another GOP official.

Despite the threats, Clark says “ProPublica persisted” with the story that Mercer “warned [it] not to tell.”

“I’m always amazed when grown-ups with jobs say things like this to journalists,” said Jessica Huseman, a former ProPublica reporter. “Like, do you think that’s gonna do anything but make us more eager to publish the story?”

A pair of extreme new Trump administration rules aimed at functionally banning gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth could force even more hospitals to close down.

NPR reported Thursday that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) drafted a proposed rule that would prohibit federal Medicaid reimbursement for medical care provided to transgender patients younger than 18 and prohibit the same from the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for patients under 19.

Another proposed rule goes even further, blocking all Medicaid and Medicare funding to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to youth.

As Erin Reed, an independent journalist who reports on LGBTQ+ rights, explained, this “would effectively eliminate access to such care nationwide, except at the few private clinics able to forgo Medicaid entirely, a rarity in transgender youth medicine.”

The policies are of a piece with the Trump administration and the broader Republican Party’s efforts to eliminate transgender healthcare for youth across the country.

Bans on gender-affirming care for those under 18 have already been passed in 27 states, despite evidence that early access to treatments like puberty blockers and hormones can save lives.

As Reed pointed out, a Cornell University review of more than 51 studies shows that access to such care dramatically reduces the risk of suicide and the rates of anxiety and depression among transgender adolescents.

The new HHS rules are being prepared for public release in November and would not be finalized for several more months.

But if passed, the ramifications could extend far beyond transgender people, impacting the entire healthcare system, for which federal funding from Medicare and Medicaid is a load-bearing piece. According to a report last year from the American Hospital Association, 96% of hospitals in the US have more than half their inpatient days paid for by Medicare and Medicaid.

It is already becoming apparent what happens when even some of that funding is taken away. As a result of the massive GOP budget law passed in July, an estimated $1 trillion is expected to be cut from Medicaid over the next decade. According to an analysis released Thursday by Protect Our Care, which maintains a Hospital Crisis Watch database, more than 500 healthcare providers across the country are already at risk of shutting down due to the budget cuts.

Tyler Hack, the executive director of the Christopher Street Project, a transgender rights organization, said that the newly proposed HHS rule would be “forcing hospitals to choose between providing lifesaving care for trans people or maintaining the ability to serve patients through Medicare and Medicaid.”

“Today’s news marks a dangerous overreach by the executive branch, pitting trans people, low-income families, disabled people, and seniors against each other and making hospitals choose which vulnerable populations to serve,” Hack said. “If these rules become law, it will kill people.”

One of the co-founders of Ben & Jerry’s is asking fans to help design a new ice cream flavor to show support for the people of Palestine, after the company’s corporate owners refused.

The ice cream brand’s founders, lifelong political activists Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, have long been at odds with the company that now owns their product, Unilever/Magnum, which they say has stifled efforts to use their platform to advocate against Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its genocidal war in Gaza.

In a video posted to social media on Tuesday, Cohen—armed with a masher and a plate of watermelons, an international symbol of Palestinian solidarity—said he was taking matters into his own hands.

“A while back, Ben & Jerry’s tried to make a flavor to call for peace in Palestine, to stand for justice and dignity for everyone, like Ben & Jerry’s always has,” Cohen said. “But they weren’t allowed to. They were stopped by Unilever/Magnum, the company that owns Ben & Jerry’s. Just like when Ben & Jerry’s tried to stop selling ice cream in the occupied territories, they were blocked again by their parent company.”

“So I’m doing what they couldn’t,” he continued. “I’m making a watermelon-flavored ice cream that calls for permanent peace in Palestine and calls for repairing all the damage that was done there.”

Since October 2023, more than two years of genocidal war and siege have left at least 248,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, hundreds of thousands of others starving, and the vast majority of Gaza’s more than 2 million people forcibly displaced. As a result of Israel’s punishing bombing campaign, 92% of residential buildings have been destroyed, according to the United Nations.

Despite the ceasefire agreement signed between Israel and Hamas earlier this month, the violence in Gaza has continued. On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced new “powerful strikes” on Gaza after alleging that Hamas violated the ceasefire. Gaza officials have alleged that Israel has violated the truce 125 times.

“The scale of suffering of the Palestinian people over the last two years has been unimaginable,” Cohen said. “They deserve dignity, safety, and the same rights that every human being should have.”

Unilever purchased Ben & Jerry’s from Cohen and Greenfield in 2000, but allowed Cohen and Greenfield to remain on as brand ambassadors and members of its board, with what the pair said was a commitment that the company would give them the “independence to pursue our values.”

However, in September, Greenfield stepped down from the board of Ben & Jerry’s, alleging that Unilever had routinely used threats and intimidation to stop the pair from calling for “peace” and a “ceasefire” in Gaza.

Cohen said that he is producing his new product—a watermelon sorbet—independently from the company’s owners.

“I’m doing this to shine a light on the experience of Palestinian people and children in particular. So the world does not look the other way,” he said.

He asked viewers for suggestions to help determine what other ingredients should be included, a name for the flavor, and to create a design for the container.

Many viewers have already offered their ideas: One suggested naming the flavor “From the River to the Seed.” Others suggested using components of Palestinian desserts like pistachios and pomegranates.

“Revolutions are creative,” Cohen said. “Let’s see some of that creativity!”

In an effort to fulfill President Donald Trump’s executive order on homelessness, Utah is building a massive facility that housing advocates warn will function as an “internment camp” where the unhoused will be subject to forced labor.

Last month, Utah’s homeless services agencies came to an agreement for the state to acquire a nearly 16-acre parcel of rural land in the Northpoint area of northwest Salt Lake City to construct the first-of-its-kind facility, which is slated to have 1,300 beds.

The genesis of the project began in July, following Trump’s “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” executive order, which threatened to withhold funding from states and cities unless they criminalized homeless people camping on streets and ordered the attorney general to expand the use of involuntary civil commitment for adults experiencing homelessness.

Despite a large body of evidence showing their effectiveness at curbing crime while keeping people off the street, the order also required the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to end its support of “Housing First” policies that provide unhoused people with homes without the requirement of behavioral health treatment or sobriety.

Less than a week after Trump’s homelessness order, Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, as well as the state Senate president and House speaker—both Republicans—sent a letter to the state’s Homeless Services Board, which was created last year following a legislative push by the Cicero Insitute—a far-right think tank that has proposed aggressive measures to criminalize homelessness and which has had major influence over Trump’s crackdown on the homeless during his second term.

In the letter, the leaders agreed with the Trump administration that they “do not support ‘Housing First’ policies that lack accountability.” They directed the Board to “accelerate progress on a transformative, services-based homeless campus that prioritizes recovery, treatment, and long-term outcomes, not just emergency shelter.”

As far back as 2023, Trump has proposed using “large parcels of inexpensive land” to set up “tent cities” or camps for homeless people, coupled with a pledge to use “every tool, lever, and authority” to clear encampments from city streets. On the podcast Invisible People, which focuses on homelessness in America, Eric Tars of the National Homelessness Law Center said Utah’s new facility could be a “pilot program” for that effort around the country.

“Their end goal is not just jail,” Tars said. “They want to put up more of these Alligator Alcatraz sprung structure type facilities,” referring to the ramshackle immigration detention facility constructed in a remote part of Florida’s Everglades earlier this year, where detainees have been cut off from access to their lawyers and are widely reported to suffer from inhumane treatment.

He noted that, under a proposal drafted by the chair of Utah’s Homeless Services Board, Randy Shumway, more than 300 of the beds in the facility are slated for involuntary commitment. Other homeless people will be sent there for substance abuse treatment “as an alternative to jail” and will “receive care in a supervised environment where entry and exit are not voluntary.” Shumway referred to the facility as an “accountability center.”

“An individual would be sanctioned to go there. It would not be voluntary," Shumway said during a presentation, according to the Standard-Examiner. ”They would be there for a period of probably 90 days with the opportunity to detox in order to get mental and behavioral health care, to get substance use disorder support, to get physical health care, and to be surrounded by a community that’s helping them in healing.“

According to the proposal, the beds not slated for civil commitment will include “work-conditioned housing.” Tars said that this is “the thing that scares me the most,” because it “means forced labor.”

He noted that other anti-homeless bills recently proposed in Republican states have a “forced labor element” to them. In Louisiana, a bill punishing outdoor camping introduced earlier this year proposes requiring those convicted to serve up to two years of “hard labor.” Another bill introduced in West Virginia would have required those arrested for camping to take part in “facility upkeep” and other forms of vocational training.

Tars said that at the Utah facility, “even though theoretically you could come and go, they’re going to be actively enforcing anti-camping, anti-loitering, all these other laws... if you step foot off the campus,” which he noted is over seven miles away from downtown Salt Lake City and “in the middle of nowhere,” with “no public transportation.”

State officials have said they expect the facility to cost $75 million to construct, plus more than $30 million per year for ongoing operations. Bill Tibbitts, deputy executive director of Crossroads Urban Center, a low-income advocacy nonprofit based in Utah, has said that for a facility to treat such a large number of people adequately, the cost “will be much higher than $75 million.”

Tibbitts also warned that the construction of a homeless shelter in such close proximity to a facility for involuntary commitment would create an atmosphere of fear that would deter homeless people from seeking help.

“A 300-400-bed mental and behavioral health facility that people are not allowed to leave is not a shelter but an incarceration option,” Tibbitts wrote in an email to the Utah News Dispatch. “Having such a facility colocated with a shelter would probably lead to a sense that if you do not follow the rules in one facility, you could be moved into the other.”

Although the Trump administration has portrayed homelessness as primarily the result of addiction or mental illness, Tibbitts noted that “the majority of the people who visit a shelter are not chronically homeless—they just need a place to stay following a short-term period of financial hardship.”

“A senior citizen who had their rent increased beyond what they could afford,” he said, “is not going to want to go to a quasi-correctional facility to get help finding a place to live that they can afford.”

A legal advocacy group requested on Monday that Illinois officials open criminal investigations into the “unlawful” conduct of federal agents deployed to Chicago by President Donald Trump.

Free Speech For People, a national pro-democracy nonprofit, called on state Attorney General Kwame Raoul, Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke, and Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling to probe what it called “an escalating pattern of criminal activity by federal agents” over the past two months of Trump’s "Operation Midway Blitz," which was launched in early September, and which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says has resulted in the arrests of more than 1,500 people.

The group highlights several incidents of what they called “military-style operations” carried out across the Chicago area by agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and others.

Agents have shot at least two Chicago residents—a 38-year-old Mexican father of two, Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, and a 30-year-old anti-ICE protester and US citizen, Marimar Martinez—with DHS accusing each of ramming their car into officers. In both cases, those accounts would later be called into question by body camera and other footage.

Elsewhere, agents who rappelled from military helicopters would conduct an overnight raid on a South Shore apartment building, where they indiscriminately broke down residents’ doors, smashed furniture and belongings, and dragged dozens of them, including children, into U-Haul vans, where some were detained for hours.

The letter details cases of what appears to be overt racial profiling. It notes that Gregory Bovino, the commander of the border patrol operation in Chicago, had suggested that people were being detained based on “how they look” and seemed to hint that the white reporter he spoke to would be less likely to be arrested than others.

In one case, a Latina US citizen, 44-year-old Maria Greeley, was detained at her workplace and held with zip ties for an hour, while officers insisted her passport—which she always carries with her in case of arrest by immigration authorities—was “fake,” because she “doesn’t look like” her last name was Greeley.

Others have been attacked for protesting or attempting to document ICE raids. Outside the ICE detention facility in the suburb of Broadview, the group said officers’ conduct has been “especially brazen.”

The facility, where hundreds of detainees are held in reportedly squalid conditions, has been the flashpoint for protests across the city. Many have been met with violence from federal officers, including Pastor David Black, who was shot in the head with a pepper ball while praying outside the facility.

And after being told by Kristi Noem that she and Trump were “sick” of the way protesters were “speaking” about federal law enforcement and that there should be “consequences,” Bovino led a force that fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters and journalists in the state’s designated free speech area outside the ICE facility.

Others have been arrested simply for attempting to document and question ICE’s actions during arrest. Alderwoman Jessie Fuentes, who is Puerto Rican, was handcuffed by officers after demanding to know if officers had a warrant for a man they were attempting to detain in a hospital emergency room. In another case, officers broke through the gate of a cemetery to detain two US citizens who were filming their activity, which is protected under the First Amendment.

“These are not law-enforcement operations; they are acts of political violence,” said Courtney Hostetler, Free Speech For People’s legal director. “President Trump and his agents are using the power of the federal government to kidnap residents, terrorize communities, and attack people for exercising their First Amendment rights. State officials have both the power and the duty to act.”

Though the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution limits the ability of states to impede federal law enforcement, Ben Clements, the group’s chairman and senior legal adviser, said “federal agents do not have a license to commit crimes.”

The group noted that the police chief of Broadview, Thomas Mills, has already initiated three criminal investigations into ICE officers for making false 911 calls to his office, striking protesters with their cars, and shooting a pepper ball at CBS News Chicago reporter Asal Rezaei’s vehicle outside the facility.

“When federal officials become the perpetrators of violence and illegality, it falls to the states to defend the rule of law,” said Ben Horton, counsel at Free Speech For People. “Illinois must not wait for and, with this lawless administration, cannot rely on Washington to police itself.”

The group argued that not only should agents accused of crimes be charged, but that criminal liability extends to Trump and his senior officials who have ordered agents to detain as many people as possible.

“The brutality and illegality of these operations are a feature, not a bug,” the letter says. “They are designed to crush dissent and spread fear among President Trump’s perceived political enemies and marginalized communities.”