Retirees open up about their finances and how they spend their time.

Jonathan Bennett wants a “Mean Girls” reunion. Bennett, along with his “Mean Girls” co-stars Lindsay Lohan and Lacey Chabert, is leading his own Christmas special this year and suggested the idea of the trio reuniting on a holiday film. “I think what’s so special about the similarities between ‘Mean Girls’ and Christmas movies is they both have a through line — and […]

David Ayer has responded to public criticism for his support of James Gunn‘s upcoming film “Superman” and his cinematic expansion of the collective DC Universe. A few days prior to the release of the “Superman” trailer, Ayer addressed the ongoing campaign among his fans to promote and release his cut of the 2016 feature “Suicide Squad.” He asked fans to […]

Justin Baldoni has been dropped by WME. The decision to part ways with the “It Ends with Us” director and star came from the agency Saturday after Blake Lively filed a sexual harassment and retaliation complaint against him Friday night, sources have confirmed. Baldoni was informed of the decision Saturday, sources said. WME also reps […]

Aziza “Z” Barnes, a poet and writer for the FX drama “Snowfall” and Netflix’s “Teenage Bounty Hunters” has died. They were 32. Their family confirmed via a rep that Barnes died of suicide on Dec. 15. No further details were released. “With heavy hearts, we regret to inform you of the passing of an undeniable […]

Donald Trump has appointed British producer Mark Burnett, who launched the president-elect to international fame with “The Apprentice,” as a special envoy to the United Kingdom. “It is my great honor to appoint Mark Burnett as the Special Envoy to the United Kingdom,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his personal social media platform. “With a […]

Last month, Missourians voted to add the right to abortion until viability into their state constitution—making their state one of ten to enshrine abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

But simply having the constitutional right to abortion does not alone change anything on the ground: The courts must enforce this right by affirming that anti-abortion laws violate states’ newly amended constitutions. A ruling this week by a Missouri judge shows just how fraught it is to depend on the courts for abortion access—even after the people, by popular vote, demand it.

Within 24 hours of the November election where Missouri voters passed the state’s abortion-rights amendment, Planned Parenthood sued to ask the courts to enforce this change. On Friday, a state judge weighed in for the first time: She temporarily blocked the state’s near-total abortion ban. But she left in place several anti-abortion laws that will continue to prevent abortion providers from serving patients.

In a partial preliminary injunction issued on Friday, Jackson County Judge Jerri Zhang temporarily allowed the state’s licensure law to remain in place, giving the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services the power to withhold licenses from abortion clinics if their hallways, rooms, and doors don’t meet the architectural requirements of ambulatory surgical centers. The hallway width requirement is a classic example of what’s known as a TRAP law, standing for “targeted regulation of abortion providers.” Back when the United States still had a national right to abortion, passing TRAP laws that were near-impossible to comply with was the strategy of choice for the anti-abortion movement in its quest to shut down clinics. Missouri’s TRAP laws were so effective at achieving this goal that in the years before Roe was overturned, just one abortion clinic in the state was still in operation—providing only around 100 abortions per year at a Planned Parenthood facility in St. Louis.

“While Planned Parenthood stands ready to start providing abortions in Missouri again as soon as the Court permits, the abortion restrictions remaining in effect—including Missouri’s medically unnecessary and discriminatory clinic licensing requirement—make this impossible,” Planned Parenthood Great Plains said in a statement after Zhang’s ruling. “The vast majority of Planned Parenthood health centers cannot comply with the medically irrelevant size requirements for hallways, rooms, and doors.”

In her order, Zhang said she was allowing the licensure law to remain in place while the lawsuit continues because it involves rules for facilities rather than “the right of individuals seeking care”—without addressing the reality that the facility rules were designed to undercut the right to abortion. Either Zhang has been duped, or she’s playing along: “The Court finds there may be a compelling governmental interest in licensing abortion facilities in this manner,” she wrote in her order.

Now, no Missouri abortion clinics have a license. To get one, they’ll have to apply to some of the same state officials who fought this year’s abortion rights ballot initiative tooth and nail, earning rebukes from the court system. Their track record runs deep: Back in 2019, the state health department did its utmost to close the St. Louis Planned Parenthood clinic, declining to renew its license and imposing shifting requirements that providers likened to harassment, my former colleague Marisa Endicott reported.

Ultimately, the clinic was only able to keep its doors open thanks to court orders and an administrative hearing officer. “The licensure requirement also leaves Planned Parenthood facilities at the whim of anti-abortion officials in Missouri, who can continue to weaponize the licensure process to limit abortion access, as they have done for decades,” Planned Parenthood Great Plains said in its Friday statement.

There is a silver lining to the ruling: Doctors in hospitals who need to perform emergency abortions will no longer be operating under the threat of state punishment.

“Hospital-based providers across the state are able to provide more care today than they could yesterday now that the fear of criminal prosecution has been removed,” said ACLU of Missouri litigation director Gillian Wilcox in a statement on Saturday. Zhang also granted the preliminary injunction blocking other TRAP laws: a 72-hour waiting period for abortions, a requirement that patients take abortion medication in the presence of a doctor, and a rule stating that abortion providers have admitting privileges at a hospital within 15 minutes’ drive of a clinic, among others.

There is also another threat coming down the line. While the legal battle continues over which Missouri anti-abortion laws can coexist with the new abortion-rights amendment, state legislators are weighing their own ballot initiatives for the next election cycle. That includes a proposal to ask voters to re-impose a blanket abortion ban, and another that would shift “fetal viability,” generally understood as the time when a fetus could survive outside the pregnant person’s body, from around 24 weeks gestation to the 6-week mark of pregnancy—when embryos measure around the size of a pea and have almost no organs.

Jeff Fowler has directed all three “Sonic the Hedgehog” films, but his association with the video game franchise pre-dates the spikey haired speedster’s big screen debut. Like any self-respecting child of the 1990’s, he grew up playing “Sonic.” “I loved his attitude and that swagger that he had,” Fowler says. “It was impossible not to […]

“Daughter of Ruins” author and longtime “Extra” senior supervising producer Yvette Manessis Corporon has been dreaming of her Greek-historical-and-mythology-laced novels being adapted for television since her debut title “When The Cypress Whispers” was released in 2014. Now, 10 years later, the author with Greek ancestry is more hopeful than ever for a chance to break […]

The Writers Guild of America has blacklisted Village Roadshow, prohibiting its members from working with the company after it refused to pay a number of its writers, Variety has confirmed. “It has come to the Guild’s attention that over the last few months Village Roadshow hasn’t paid writers on numerous projects,” read a statement released […]

The Supreme Court agreed last week to hear a case that could pave the way for states to kick Planned Parenthood clinics and affiliated doctors out of their Medicaid programs. The case threatens the ability of the nation’s largest family planning organization to provide their low-income patients with birth control, cancer screenings, and STI testing and treatment—services that have nothing to do with abortion.

Back in June, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the religious-right legal group behind the fall of Roe v. Wade, legal attacks on the abortion pill, and some of the most important anti-LGBTQ laws and Supreme Court cases of recent memory, filed the request that the nine justices hear this case.

They asked on behalf of their client, the South Carolina health department. That is part of a pattern: ADF has increasingly represented state governments in efforts to defend abortion bans and anti-trans laws. My colleague Pema Levy reported earlier this year that this work has raised ethical questions about how a religious organization that brings in over $100 million annually from mostly undisclosed donors can represent the public in court while also advancing a religious agenda.

The case, known as Kerr v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, dates back to the summer of 2018, when South Carolina Republican Gov. Henry McMaster ordered his state’s health department to declare any doctors or clinics who provided abortion “unqualified” to offer other family planning services. McMaster’s order didn’t have anything to do with the doctors’ resumes or the quality of their healthcare. Instead it was calculated to punish Planned Parenthood financially by making it ineligible to receive Medicaid reimbursements for the non-abortion services that, contrary to popular misconception, make up the vast majority of its work. Medicaid, which provides health coverage for people who are low-income, already does not cover abortion—a prohibition that has been federal law for decades. But “the payment of taxpayer funds to abortion clinics, for any purpose, results in the subsidy of abortion and the denial of the right to life,” McMaster reasoned in his executive order.

Politically, the executive order was a way for McMaster to “take an anti-abortion stand,” per the resulting headlines. But practically, it hurt South Carolinian women on Medicaid who relied on their local Planned Parenthood clinic for everyday reproductive healthcare.

South Carolina wasn’t the only state to attack Planned Parenthood in this way. Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, and Texas all tried to impose similar restrictions, according to Jane Perkins, litigation director for the National Health Law Program. Texas was one of the few to succeed, and as I wrote in October, the attacks on Planned Parenthood there forced many reproductive health clinics to close, cut hours, charge patients new fees, or ration IUDs and birth control implants. Ultimately, they could only serve half as many patients. The teen birth rate rose an estimated 3.4 percent. 

In response to the restrictions, Planned Parenthood patients and state affiliates have filed a series of lawsuits, arguing that they violate a federal Medicaid provision dating back to 1967 that guarantees patients the “free choice” to see any “qualified” provider who agrees to take Medicaid. The whole point of that provision was to stop states from restricting patient options, which Congress worried would be a step toward socialized medicine.

Federal appeals courts have mostly agreed with this argument. At least four of them have decided that states that exclude Planned Parenthood from Medicaid are violating the “free choice” provision, and that abortion clinics and their affiliates “are qualified providers, and what the state’s doing here is essentially a policy or politically motivated activity to ban Planned Parenthood,” Perkins says. But a couple of courts, including the far-right Fifth Circuit, have thrown out the lawsuits on technical grounds, ruling that states have the power to decide if providers are “qualified,” and that individuals can’t sue over their decisions.

That’s the question the Supreme Court has now agreed to review in Kerr. If the court sides with South Carolina, “it would certainly pull the door open” for more states to kick Planned Parenthood out of their Medicaid programs, Perkins says. Such a ruling could have consequences beyond reproductive healthcare—giving states greater power to pick and choose which doctors can see Medicaid patients.

It would also be in line with the conservative justices’ recent tendency to declare that courts should defer to state decision-making on whether to restrict healthcare for women or trans people. That’s essentially what happened in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which allowed states to ban abortion. The same outcome appears likely in a current case, United States v. Skrmetti, where the justices seem poised to green-light state bans on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans minors. 

Perkins is worried about Kerr. “I sort of went through a hair-stand-on-end,” she says. Just two years ago, the Supreme Court took a case on a similar question, and reaffirmed the framework courts use to decide when individuals can sue over Medicaid provisions. That case is similar to this one, though it involved nursing homes rather than abortion providers.  “To come along not two years later and take a case on…enforcement of Medicaid provisions, it’s startling,” she says. “But I understand that this is a politically charged subject matter.”

Another factor that makes it different this time: It’s the Alliance Defending Freedom asking. “This is really different,” Perkins says. “This is a nonprofit organization that, my understanding is, has a religious mission. So here’s the question: What about the establishment clause [requiring separation of church and state] of the Constitution?”

“So where’s my German friends?” Donald Trump asked a fawning Mar-a-Lago crowd on Election Day, before flashing a grin and a thumbs up for a photo with a group of young men.

The German friends in question: Fabrice Ambrosini, a former politician forced to resign after a video surfaced of him doing a Hitler salute; Leonard Jäger, a far-right influencer who has promoted the Reichsbürger movement, an extremist group behind a failed coup attempt in 2022; and Phillipp-Anders Rau, a candidate for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s far-right party.

Giddy with excitement, shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump, they cheered “fight, fight, fight,” echoing Trump’s post assassination-attempt rallying cry, before repeating it in German—“kämpft, kämpft, kämpft”—fists pumping. 

“Let’s hope Donald Trump creates the renewal for his country that we in the AfD are planning for our country,” Rau wrote on Instagram after. 

Inspired by his tough-guy bravado and promises to expel immigrants from the US, the German far-right has projected onto Trump a “fantasy of ethnonational power” they seek to replicate, says Mabel Berezin, director of Cornell University’s Institute for European Studies. 

To them, he’s not just a kindred spirit—he could also be a harbinger. A mere 10 hours after he cemented his return to the White House, the German government dramatically collapsed over a budget dispute, opening up the German far-right’s best chance at seizing power since World War II. With support from about 1 in 5 Germans, the AfD has become the country’s second most popular party ahead of new elections in February.

And on Friday it received backing from one of Trump’s top allies. Elon Musk called the AfD Germany’s savior in a Tweet seen by more than 33 million people, sparking another round of far-right digital fist-pumping. The AfD instantly plastered Musk’s face on an ad and its co-leader recorded a video message profusely thanking him.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1869986946031988780

“History has shown that developments that start in America eventually spill over across the Atlantic and ultimately influence our lives as well,” reads a translated post from Journalistenwatch, an influential far-right blog. “And we also know that in the USA, thanks to the triumphant success of Donald Trump, the pendulum has finally swung in the other direction and freedom for everyone has finally risen from the ashes.”

At the core of this transnational love affair—more so than their admiration for Russia, their demonization of the LGBTQ+ community, and their romanticized nostalgia for the past—is a single racist idea: that dark-skinned immigrants pose an existential threat and must be sent back to their home countries, a political concept known as remigration, which has become the global far-right’s cause célèbre over the last decade.

The AfD’s central pledge is to counteract the so-called Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that claims white Europeans or Americans are the victims of a plot by non-white immigrants to “replace” them and poison their societies. It was the inspiration for shooters to take up arms and target Muslim victims in Christchurch, Jews in Pittsburgh, Black people in Buffalo, and gay people in Bratislava.

“It’s the thing that brings together the far-right in multiple countries,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Mother Jones. 

If Great Replacement is the myth, remigration is its manual, taking the conspiracy theory’s white supremacy at face value and proposing the mass deportations Trump has championed. In fact, Trump used the term in a September post on Truth Social promoting his candidacy, writing, “[We will] return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration). I will save our cities and towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and all across America.”

A viral dance hit among the party’s younger supporters, played at an AfD election party, features lyrics like “remigration is happening, put the turbines up real high” and the chorus “we’re deporting all of them!”

The term was popularized by Europe’s Identitarian movement (whose American offshoot, Identity Evropa, helped plan the 2017 Charlottesville riots) and its Austrian leader Martin Sellner (who was investigated for corresponding with the Christchurch shooter). 

The AfD found itself in hot water last January when German journalists at Correctiv uncovered a clandestine conference with Sellner as keynote speaker. There, he pitched a remigration plan to senior party members that would deport millions of Germans, including citizens with non-German backgrounds and the “non-assimilated,” sparking nationwide protests and a debate about banning the party. Sellner has since been banned from entering Germany.

Since then, the party has been cagey about what exactly it means by remigration, with some AfD officials describing it simply as deporting asylum-seekers who’ve broken the law. Still others are more clear about their intentions to carry out widespread deportations, a taboo and unconstitutional idea that for many Germans is reminiscent of the not-so-distant history of the Holocaust.

This November, the AfD in the state of Bavaria passed a “resolution for remigration,” calling for the creation of new ways “to more easily revoke German citizenship that has already been granted” and “comprehensive remigration in the millions over the next 10 years.” The party has started using plane imagery in official posters and advertisements, like one papered all over the city of Erfurt showing a bright blue sky and a jet airliner above the words: “Summer, Sun, Remigration.” 

A viral dance hit among the party’s younger supporters, played at an AfD election party, features lyrics like “remigration is happening, put the turbines up real high” and the chorus “we’re deporting all of them!” over AI-generated images of dancing flight attendants and downtrodden Black and Brown men pushing luggage through an airport. 

“Within the AfD there’s people who say the quiet part out loud,” says Jakob Guhl, a researcher of the far-right at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank. “There might even be some people who don’t think there is a quiet part.”

One of those people is certainly Björn Höcke, head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia, where the party won a landmark victory this fall, toppling a nearly eight-decade postwar norm. A German court ruled Höcke could legally be described as a “fascist,” and he’s been convicted twice of using banned Nazi slogans.

“If Björn Höcke becomes Bundeskanzler,” Guhl says, using the German word for chancellor, “I think then really the aim is to make Germany more ethnically homogenous and revoke people’s citizenship in some way and then force them to leave.” In August, Höcke weighed in on a government proposal to regulate knives, writing on Telegram that the real problem was “the attitude of people who have a foreign background and despise our way of life and are prepared to use lethal force.”

He added, “We are confronted with mass immigration that can lead to a collapse in civilization. People from foreign cultures, whose lives are shaped by different values ​​than ours and who are not prepared to assimilate, are permanently changing our social life simply through their numbers.”

“The implication of the AfD’s messaging is, these aren’t real Germans,” Beirich says. “They don’t belong here. They’re the ones causing crime, taking your jobs. This all sounds very much like Trump.”

This ideology spreads easily across a digital ecosystem of alternative media and social media apps. Central to the ecosystem is Telegram, known for its nearly non-existent content moderation and ability to create broadcast-style channels of unlimited size, which has become the app of choice for neo-Nazis, extremists, and conspiracy theorists. 

In the two-month window surrounding the US presidential election, 449 far-right German Telegram channels mentioned Trump in more than 10,000 messages—that’s about 5 percent of the total messages these channels sent during that time. 

There, users have breathlessly followed Trump’s cabinet picks and shared clips from American influencers, including Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. They’ve borrowed American complaints of a “censorship industrial complex” and amplified unfounded allegations of election fraud. 

Watching what resonates in America, Germans then deploy their network of far-right podcasters, media personalities, influencers, and politicians to echo similar claims and conspiracy theories.

“The implication of the AfD’s messaging is, these aren’t real Germans. They don’t belong here. They’re the ones causing crime, taking your jobs. This all sounds very much like Trump.”

For example, Stefan Magnet, founder of the Austrian far-right news broadcaster AUF1, wrote in October without any evidence to his nearly 75,000 Telegram followers about a “globalist world of lies” in which German government ministers “are preparing to censor Elon Musk’s news service ‘X’ in Europe. Above all: If Trump wins, they will shut down the platform or brutally censor it.” 

“Some of these debates are certainly being repackaged and refought with very different narratives and angles and in the German context as well,” Guhl says. “So you definitely see certain things that first pop off in the US seem to be working quite well there and that are then being adopted in Germany as well.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a vote of confidence in mid-December, officially triggering a snap election on February 23, only the fourth ever in the country’s modern history. The Christian Democrats, former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s old party and the current opposition, are expected to come to power and invite other parties to form a coalition government. 

Thus far, the Christian Democrats have promised to uphold a “firewall” against far-right parties like the AfD, forbidding them from joining a coalition. While that firewall is likely to hold in 2025, there’s already been collaboration between the Christian Democrats and the AfD in local government; and the more votes the AfD receives, the greater its ability to steer Germany rightward.

Take this statement from the center-left Scholz in August, after the AfD spent all summer hammering him on immigration: “We will have to do everything we can to ensure that those who cannot and are not allowed to stay in Germany are repatriated and deported.”

It marked a departure for a longtime supporter of Germany’s migration policies and a recognition that the AfD’s messaging—and, to some degree, Trump’s—was resonating with voters. 

“Trump says he’s going to deport millions. He’s going to have huge raids.
That is something that brings joy to the hearts of people like those in the AfD and other far-right parties,” Beirich says.

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

As global temperatures rise from the burning of fossil fuels, researchers and policymakers have proposed solutions like installing renewable energy, replacing gasoline-powered cars with electric ones, and developing technology to suck carbon out of the air. But these policies often address climate change in isolation—without regard for other pressing issues like a decline in biodiversity, the contamination of freshwater sources, and the pollution of agricultural soils. 

A new report released Tuesday by the United Nations’ expert panel on biodiversity makes the case for a different approach based on addressing the “nexus” between two or more out of five essential issue areas: climate change, biodiversity, food, human health, and water. Such an approach is not only more likely to help the world meet various UN targets on biodiversity, sustainable development, and climate mitigation; it’s also more cost-effective.

“We have to move decisions and actions beyond single-issue silos,” said Paula Harrison, a professor of land and water modeling at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and a co-chair of the report, in a statement. Other scientific reports have studied the interlinkages between two or three of these issues, but she told reporters on Tuesday that this latest report is the “most ambitious” to date.

The new report was the result of three years of work of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, an expert body that’s analogous to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which periodically assesses the state of the science on global warming.

The report centers on biodiversity—that’s the IPBES’s remit, after all—describing how the variety of life on Earth is “essential to our very existence.” But it goes out of its way to show how rapidly accelerating biodiversity loss is both contributing to and being exacerbated by other crises. Climate change, for instance, is making some habitats inhospitable to their erstwhile animal populations, while the loss of those populations can have impacts on freshwater availability and carbon storage. The five interlinking issues were selected by representatives of the 147 IPBES’s member countries.

Meanwhile, solutions that focus on just one issue may have detrimental effects on other elements. Pete Smith, a professor of soils and global change at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom, gave the example of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS, a climate solution in which crops are grown to draw CO2 out of the air and then burned to generate energy. The resulting greenhouse gas emissions are captured and stored in rock formations, with the aim of removing them from the carbon cycle permanently.

The problem, Smith said, is that to implement this process on a large scale would require vast tracts of land that might otherwise have been used to grow food crops—so BECCS can unintentionally harm food security. Devoting land to single-variety crops can also use up lots of water and jeopardize biodiversity.

“When you just focus on climate change,” he told Grist, “you might end up with some solutions that damage other elements of the nexus.”

In other scenarios, it’s not the solution itself that’s problematic; it’s the way it’s implemented. Planting trees, for example, can be done in consultation with local communities and taking into account unique ecosystem needs. Or, as Smith described, a big company seeking to generate carbon credits could evict Native peoples from their land and start a plantation of fast-growing, nonnative tree species. 

The latter situation might benefit climate change in the narrowest sense, Smith said, but “with a whole bunch of negative impacts on people, on health, on water.”

The assessment finds that, between 2001 and 2021, every one of the five issues analyzed has been damaged by factors including urbanization, war, and growing per capita consumption—except for food availability. That could be explained by a kind of decision-making the report describes as “food first,” in which more food is grown to benefit human health at the expense of biodiversity, freshwater availability, and climate change.

Decision-making built solely around climate change or conservation could be similarly counterproductive, the report says, based on an analysis of 186 future scenarios crafted from 52 scientific studies. The most promising alternative is a “nature-oriented nexus” focused on all five target areas, emphasizing “strong environmental regulation, sustainable agricultural practices, lower rates of global per capita consumption, and strong development of green technologies.”

More than 160 scientists from 57 countries contributed to the report, which was formally adopted this weekend at IPBES’s annual conference in Windhoek, Namibia. During a press conference on Tuesday, the authors said they were ending the year “on a high note for multilateralism,” in contrast to the stalemates that defined other intergovernmental negotiations in 2024, like the global plastics treaty and the climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.

In addition to the nexus report, IPBES member states also approved a report on the “transformative change” that is needed to address global crises connected to biodiversity, including climate change. Notably, that report says that “disconnection from and domination over nature and people” is at the root of toxic chemical pollution, deforestation, the burning of fossil fuels, and other causes of climate and environmental degradation.

Both reports highlight the need to address the inequitable concentration of wealth and power and the prioritization of short-term material gains in order to “prevent triggering the potentially irreversible decline and projected collapse of key ecosystem functions.” 

“Right now, our economic and financial system is not fit for purpose; it does not value nature,” Pamela McElwee, a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University and a co-chair of the nexus report, told reporters on Tuesday. 

The nexus report finds that $7 trillion a year in public subsidies and private financial incentives go toward activities that directly damage the five issue areas. Only $200 billion—less than 3 percent of that total—is spent directly on improving biodiversity.

Because the nexus report was requested directly by the governments of IPBES’s 147 member countries—among them, China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, the United States, and most of Europe—the scientists who contributed to it are hopeful that their recommendations will be adopted by policymakers. In the report, they highlight 71 cross-cutting responses to interlinked global problems, ranging from reducing plastic pollution to conserving wetland ecosystems to providing universal health coverage. 

Smith, who is a soil researcher and has also contributed to reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said working on the report has changed his own outlook. “I’ve tried to apply the nexus thinking on a couple of projects on how climate change affects the food system, and people in disadvantaged communities,” he said. “All of these things are leading me to take a broader, less siloed view than I would have done 10 years ago.”

Previous IPBES reports have shown how biodiversity is “declining faster than at any time in human history.” At the group’s next conference in 2025, it’s expected to present a new assessment of businesses’ impact and dependence on biodiversity, and IPBES plans to release its second global assessment of the state of biodiversity in 2028. 

On Wednesday, California became the first state to issue a declaration of emergency regarding the avian flu (H5N1). That same day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed the first severe case of the flu in a human on US soil and outbreaks in cow herds were detected in Southern California.

Still, the threat to humans is low according to the CDC. The agency has traced most human infections back to those handling livestock, and there’s been no reported transmission between people.

“I have dairies that are never coming back from this.”

But for cows and the dairy they produce, it’s a different story. This year was the first time the flu was detected in cows in the US, and it has ripped through many Western states’ dairy farms with startling speed. Since March, the virus has been found in cow herds of 16 states. For the last few months, infected herds have largely been concentrated in California—the state that makes up about 20 percent of the nation’s dairy industry. Last week, Texas, another one of the nation’s top dairy producing states, saw the reappearance of bird flu after two months without a detected outbreak.

In the industry hit hardest by bird flu, the poultry industry, the virus’ spread has resulted in the culling of entire flocks which has lead to higher egg prices on supermarket shelves. Will milk and butter prices soon go the same route? And how worried should you be about consuming dairy?

How exactly does bird flu affect dairy cows?

Some farmers are first identifying outbreaks in their herds through the color and density of the milk, in what they are coining “golden mastitis,” according to Milkweed, a dairy news publication. As early studies by University of Copenhagen researchers found, the virus latches onto dairy cows mammary glands, creating complications for the dairy industry beyond just the cow fatalities.

The virus is proving deadly to cows. According to Colorado State University Professor Jason Lombard, an infectious disease specialist for cattle, the case fatality rates based on a limited set of herds was zero to 15 percent. But California saw an even higher rate of up to 20 percent during a late summer heatwave in the states Central Valley. It was a warning for how the rising number of heatwaves and temps across the country could result in deadlier herd outbreaks in upcoming summers. 

For some of the cows that survived, there was a dip in their dairy production of around 25 percent according to multiple experts I spoke with. As a farmer told Bloomberg News, some of the cows aren’t returning to full production levels, an indication of longer lasting effects of the virus. It’s a finding experts are seeing in other parts of the US, too. According to Lombard, this may be due to the severity of the virus in the cow. According to reporting in Milkweed, there may also be “long-tail” bird flu impacts on a cow’s dairy production, health, and reproduction. Additional research is likely needed to understand the extent of these potential longterm effects of the virus and whether they could spell trouble ahead for recovering farms.  

A spokesperson with the California Department of Food and Agriculture told Mother Jones, “it’s too soon to know how production has been impacted.”

How is this impacting farms and farm workers?

As of today, more than half of the people who’ve contracted H5N1 are dairy farmworkers, according to the CDC. This population is particularly vulnerable because they are often the ones handling milking or milking equipment which can lead to spreading the virus. The CDC is recommending employers take steps to reduce their workers’ exposure to the virus by creating health and safety plans.

The CDC is working with organizations like the National Center for Farm Worker Health to expand testing, PPE availability, and training. According to Bethany Alcauter, a director at the organization, ensuring dairy farmworkers have access to testing is a tricky situation. The 100,000-some workforce faces barriers to accessing health care and testing, such as an inability to take paid-time off to get themselves tested if they are sick. And the system depends on the producer to decide to bring in the health department to oversee potential outbreaks within herds and staff, which doesn’t always happen because there’s no government mandate.

“It’s all recommendations and kindness—that’s what we’re running on. It’s not regulation and enforcement.”

“It’s all recommendations and kindness—that’s what we’re running on,” Alcauter says. “It’s not regulation and enforcement.” She believes the testing infrastructure could be strengthened by “recognizing that farm workers can be public-health first responders if they have the knowledge and the access to the right contacts, in the right system.”

Outside of navigating farmworker health, farmers face economic impacts when the virus spreads through their herds. “What you’re losing at the end of the day is revenue for your farm when it rolls through,” says Will Loux, vice president of economic affairs for the National Milk Producers Federation. “Depending on the financial situation of an individual farm it can certainly be devastating.” 

There are a handful of variables and factors that shape the financial losses of a dairy hit with an outbreak. Luckily, agriculture economist Charles Nicholson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and some colleagues created a calculator to estimate this financial impact of a bird flu outbreak. Based on Nicholson’s estimates for California, a typical farm of 1500 cattle will lose $120,000 annually. For context, this is about $10,000 more than the median household income of a dairy farmer. Based on those estimates, that would mean California’s farmers have collectively lost about $80 million at most due to avian flu so far. The US Department of Agriculture is providing support for farmers who are impacted by H5N1 outbreaks.

In reviewing a few herd datasets in Michigan, Phillip Durst, a dairy and cattle expert, noted that about half a year after an outbreak, herds were producing around 10 percent less than before. Not only do farmers face massive short term losses, they also struggle to return to full capacity again. And, there are high costs associated with putting resources into taking care of sick animals too. 

Even strong diaries that had “tip top” biosecurity measures, or comprehensive environmental protection measures in place, are shutting down, according to Anja Raudabaugh, CEO of Western Untied Dairies, a trade organization overseeing farms across California. “I have dairies that are never coming back from this,” Raudabaugh says. “This was just so cataclysmic for them. They’re not going to be able to get over that loss in production hump.”

There is some hope around the corner. A vaccine for cows, which the USDA claims is in the works, could help stop the spread and protect remaining uninfected herds. “Until we have a vaccine that we can inoculate them with at an early age, we have no choices except to hope that herd immunity sets in soon,” Raudabaugh says.

What’s the effect on milk?

In June, the US dropped 1.5 percent in production, around 278 million pounds of milk, compared to 2023. It was one of the early potential indicators of the industry’s vulnerability to this virus. However, since then, the nation’s production rebounded to above 2023 numbers. It’s largely why consumers are not seeing the same impact on the price and availability of dairy products like they are with eggs. 

“When one state gets H5N1 there are a lot of other states that tend to pick up the slack. So in general, when you look at the national numbers, you really have to squint to kind of find where H5N1 is in the milk production”,” says Loux.

California produces around a fifth of the nation’s dairy, and since August over half of the state’s herds had an outbreak. In October, California saw a near four percent drop in milk production compared to 2023, equating to about 127 million pounds of milk.

On Thursday, the USDA released November’s data on milk production showing California with the largest decrease this year of 301 million fewer gallons of milk compared to 2023. That is more than double the decrease of last month. Still, the nation only saw a near 1 percent decrease since 2023.

How the next administration handles this virus may spell a different story for the dairy industry and the country. With Trump’s history of downplaying infectious diseases and promoting unfounded cures, and public health cabinet nominations who decry vaccine effectiveness, a human-to-human outbreak could lead to another pandemic. Likely to take over the USDA is Brooke Rollins, who, according to Politico, had less experience in agriculture than others on Trump’s shortlist (though she does have a degree in agriculture development). It’s currently unclear what her plans are for handling this virus and supporting farmers and the industry at large. Rollins did not respond to my request for an interview.

Should I be worried about getting sick from drinking milk?

Drinking pasteurized milk is safe. For more than 100 years, pasteurization has kept the public safe by killing harmful bacteria and viruses.

The CDC is warning against raw milk consumption, on the other hand, due to it potentially having high-levels of bird flu. While there’s yet to be a human case of bird flu traced to raw milk consumption, there is fear that the unpasteurized product could lead to illness. And raw milk loaded with the virus has been linked to deaths in other mammals, like cats.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the likely soon-to-be director of Health and Human Services under Trump, has a history of promoting raw milk. Earlier this month, Kennedy’s favorite raw milk brand was recalled by California after testing positive for bird flu. Kennedy’s rise to public health power comes at time when raw milk is rising in popularity on TikTok.

In response to the spread of bird flu in raw milk, the USDA announced a national strategy requiring milk samples nationwide be tested by the agency. Since officially beginning testing on Monday, 16 new bird flu outbreaks in cow herds have been identified in two states.

For now, as the nation continues to work on controlling the spread of bird flu, consider tossing your raw milk out before it does more than just spoil.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

In the final months of his presidency, Joe Biden visited Angola. He was there to tout billions in US investment in a project called the Lobito Corridor—a railway linking the country to Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo—and, in turn, land a light punch in our new cold war with China.

As I read about the visit, I had been listening repeatedly to “Red Dust” by billy woods, the idiosyncratic rapper from New York City. He may not be a household name, but woods is increasingly the face of a certain strain of hip-hop—even if he blurs his actual face in all public photos and videos.

Woods has been hailed in the Oxford American (“brilliant”), New York magazine (“a master of his craft”), and the Guardian (“the awesome mind of billy woods”), among others. As a solo artist, head of the label Backwoodz Studioz, and collaborator, woods has been working for decades. Mostly, he’s created underground, off-the-beaten-path rap. But more notoriety came in recent years—especially because of collaborations with ELUCID as Armand Hammer.

He famously grew up moving between Zimbabwe and the United States. His mother was a professor of English literature, and his father was a Marxist scholar who worked in politics. Perhaps this background is what leads his songs to hit on a dissonance that has been heavily on my mind in 2024: the difference between what the US says about the world and what the world says about itself.

As with most woods’ songs, I cannot sum up a clear meaning in “Red Dust”; it’s a menagerie. But a few lines had stuck in my head. Early on, woods raps:

Knock the plane out the sky
Spark the genocide
Let’s see who gives who a place to hide

You might be surprised (you might not!)

Woods here is referencing the 1994 killing of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, which ultimately led to the genocide of over 1 million people. (This year marked the 30th anniversary.) Upon first hearing the line, I was struck by the haunting parenthetical about who would aid who in a crisis (you might not!). When I was listening this year, I thought a lot about the “you.” It makes the listener complicit in the horror. You ask yourself: Where would I hide? Who would I hide? Would I be surprised in myself? In others?

In “Red Dust,” the speed at which woods moves from the global historical to the personal always stuns me. And this year, this particular gift struck me as an important one—it provided clarity as world events hit home. For how long, and for how many years, have (certain) Americans convinced themselves that history happens to other people? The consequences of this solipsism have been stunning.

In woods, I often hear the aching sadness perched as nonchalance—the barely restrained rage—of someone who knows that tragedy in textbooks happens to real people: your neighbors, your friends, and you.

As I read about Biden’s visit to Angola, woods was stuck in my head once more. As I skimmed the usual raft of clips in the mainstream press, I could not help but notice how the past relationship between the two countries was discussed. Some articles mentioned battles between the former Soviet Union and the US in Angola and the new “rivalry” with China. But I saw almost no mention of how—rather famously—the United States helped the apartheid regime of South Africa invade Angola during the 1970s.

I wouldn’t call this elision repression of a known truth or even self-censorship. Instead, it seems as if we are choosing to let the truth slip away from laziness. Our role in Angola was simply another piece of Cold War realpolitik—one of many fights, a few more foreign deaths, masses of money and arms spent sprinkled in some far-off land—which, at the end of the day, was so common it’s a bit hard to keep track of how it all happened.

After reading about Angola, I came back to his song “Cuito Cuanavale,” about a late 1980s battle in the country.

In it, Cuba fights alongside Angola against South African forces. In his writing, woods connects that warfare to Rhodesia’s Ian Smith, China’s modern push into Africa, oil, and Robert Mugabe. The most punching line for me in the song is a sigh: “History will absolve me,” woods says, maybe referencing the famous speech by Fidel Castro, followed by a half-thought: “Probably.”

Woods is the only rapper I know who writes about that part of American history. And this year, it was impossible not to see the US in that light.

It was woods I thought about while editing our coverage of the US’ role in Israel’s war in Gaza. In particular, I thought nearly every day of these lyrics to “Soft Landing”:

A single death is a tragedy, but eggs make omelets
Statistics how he look at war casualties
Killin’ is one thing, what sticks is how casually
Nonchalant, 5 in the morning, what I grew up on

I listened to woods on a long bike ride home after seeing the film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which poetically explains America’s role in the death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of Democratic Republic of Congo. (If you’re interested, I have been following up on the film by reading The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid; it is a fantastic look at CIA meddling in the name of the Cold War.)

Put simply, this is the gift of woods. He is an obsessive, but cautious, raiser of the history many want to forget. I have continually sent around a long quote he gave in a recent interview on how random the rules of our current order can be. These few paragraphs might best explain this year—and many years to come:

Things seem like they can only be so until they’re not, you know?

My family left Zimbabwe in late 1989. In 1988—again, I was a child, but from a very political family—there was no sense in my mind that South Africa was any closer to collapsing than Israel. And within a few years apartheid rule had collapsed in South Africa. We can have a separate conversation about what came after it, but apartheid rule did indeed collapse. Majority rule came into effect, and for that to happen a lot of people died throughout the entire southern Africa region. And here we are, however many years later, and Israel is actually bigger and more powerful than it was at that time. So it just goes to show that sometimes things are not as far away as they seem, and sometimes things that seem on the verge of happening end up being far away—or they’re never going to happen. [Laughs.] Nobody knows what is under the surface.

Think of all the forces, energies, and waves of history that it took to bring about the transformation of the Republican Party into a Donald Trump cult of personality. It goes back through the Tea Party to when talk radio was dominant in the nineties. I remember going into a friend’s house, and their mom would be listening to Rush Limbaugh. He would just be droning on for hours, and I’d be like, “Is this for real?” The presentation was different from the traditional presentation of right-wing politics that I had seen up to that point. At that time Bill Clinton was president, but before that, there had been three straight terms of Republican presidencies. So all of these forces are happening, and it just takes the right person, at the right time, to light the right spark and make what previously would have seemed impossible the law of the land.

When I was a child, Somalia had a government. They might not have one again for the rest of my life.

Judy Becker’s portfolio of production design work on films like “American Hustle” and “Carol” prepared her to take on the unique challenge of shooting a period piece. “Carol” was shot in Cincinnati doubling for New York and “American Hustle” was shot in Boston and also meant to be New York, so she’s “used to looking […]

SPOILER WARNING: This story discusses plot details for “Mufasa: The Lion King,” in theaters on Dec. 20. Lin-Manuel Miranda knows his way around a Disney tune. After winning Grammys and earning Oscar nods for his “Moana” and “Encanto” songs (including “How Far I’ll Go,” “Dos Oruguitas” and, of course, the viral earworm “We Don’t Talk […]

A Disney exec has revealed why “The Acolyte” was canceled after just one season. In an interview with Vulture, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment Alan Bergman said while the House of Mouse was pleased with how “The Acolyte” performed in its single season Disney+ debut, it wasn’t enough to justify a follow-up considering the price tag. “We […]

Sean Combs, long known by rap aliases like Diddy and Puffy, is facing an avalanche of lawsuits and legal trouble. The latest in his ongoing issues includes lawsuits filed on Friday by two women, who made similar allegations of being drugged and assaulted. The first suit, filed in New York by a Jane Doe, claims […]