Four years to the day that Donald Trump incited a violent attack on the US Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results, Congress certified his Electoral College victory as the 47th president of the United States.

As required of her role presiding over the Senate, Vice President Kamala Harris oversaw the ceremony, which marked her own defeat. In doing so—and in a process rife with irony—Harris was addressed as “Madam President,” referring to her role as president of the Senate, as the electoral results of each state were announced. The final tally: 312 to 226.

In a video posted to X Monday morning, Harris drew an implicit contrast to Trump’s approach to his election loss: “This duty is a sacred obligation—one I will uphold guided by love of country, loyalty to our Constitution, and unwavering faith in the American people.”

Some Republicans appeared less high-minded, instead peddling revisionist history and suggestions that the label of “insurrection” to describe Jan. 6 was overblown. In an especially absurd example, Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) falsely claimed in a post on X that the insurrectionists were made up of “thousands of peaceful grandmothers” who took “a self-guided, albeit unauthorized, tour of the U.S. Capitol building.” Adding to the misinformation was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.,) who told a reporter: “January 6th was not an insurrection. I’m completely sick and tired and fed up of the Democrats’ narrative, the media narrative, and it’s a total lie.”

As my colleague Mark Follman has chronicled, January 6, 2021, was indeed a heavily armed insurrection that saw 140 police officers injured, the deaths of four participants, and five police officers who had been at the Capitol. More than 1,200 people have been charged for their actions on Jan. 6, according to the Department of Justice—and Trump has promised to pardon them.

Democrats on Monday went to great lengths to emphasize that they were doing what Trump and his allies did not: accepting an election loss and facilitating a peaceful transition of power. They also reminded Americans of what actually happened on Jan. 6.

“Today, Congress will do its constitutional duty once again to certify the election results—a great contrast from Republicans who sought to deny the election 4 years ago,” Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) wrote on X Monday morning.

Several Democratic members of Congress also shared photos of their destroyed offices and damage sustained to the Capitol four years ago. “The horrific videos and images from the January 6th insurrection against our Capitol reaffirm as much as ever: The power of the people must always matter more than the people in power,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) wrote, alongside photos of broken glass and overturned furniture.

4 years ago.

The horrific videos and images from the January 6th insurrection against our Capitol reaffirm as much as ever: The power of the people must always matter more than the people in power. pic.twitter.com/awY7Md49NI

— Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) January 6, 2025

Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.) shared a photo of what he said was Capitol Police barricading his office doors and windows “to protect my staff and I from the violent mob that was just outside my window.”

In an op-ed published in the Washington Post on Sunday, President Biden warned of the importance of preserving the facts of the “assault” of January 6 for the history books: “An unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite—even erase—the history of that day. To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes. To dismiss concerns about it as some kind of partisan obsession. To explain it away as a protest that just got out of hand. This is not what happened…We cannot allow the truth to be lost.”

Biden also called for “remembering Jan. 6, 2021, every year. To remember it as a day when our democracy was put to the test and prevailed. To remember that democracy—even in America—is never guaranteed.”

Of course, such warnings to remember what happened on January 6 were absent from Trump’s communications. Early Monday morning, he wrote on Truth Social: “CONGRESS CERTIFIES OUR GREAT ELECTION VICTORY TODAY — A BIG MOMENT IN HISTORY. MAGA!”

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

Joe Biden has banned offshore drilling across an immense area of coastal waters, weeks before Donald Trump takes office pledging to massively increase fossil fuel production.

The US president’s ban encompasses the entire Atlantic coast and eastern Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Pacific coast off California, Oregon, and Washington, and a section of the Bering Sea off Alaska.

A White House statement said the declaration protected more than 625 million acres of waters. Trump said he would “unban it immediately” as soon as he re-enters the White House on January 20, although it is unclear whether he will be able to do this easily.

“As the climate crisis continues to threaten communities across the country and we are transitioning to a clean energy economy, now is the time to protect these coasts for our children and grandchildren,” Biden said in a statement.

“In balancing the many uses and benefits of America’s ocean, it is clear to me that the relatively minimal fossil fuel potential in the areas I am withdrawing do not justify the environmental, public health, and economic risks that would come from new leasing and drilling,” he added.

Scientists are clear that oil and gas production must be radically cut to avoid disastrous climate impacts. The ban does not have an end date and could be legally—and politically—tricky for Trump to overturn.

“Americans on both sides of the aisle support protecting our oceans from Big Oil giveaways.”

Biden is taking the action under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953, which gives the federal government authority over the exploitation of offshore resources. A total of eight presidents have withdrawn territory from drilling under the act, including Trump himself—who barred oil and gas extraction off the coasts of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.

However, the law does not expressly provide for presidents to unilaterally reverse a drilling ban without going through Congress.

Despite this, Trump vowed to undo Biden’s move, with the president-elect’s spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, calling it “a disgraceful decision” and saying the incoming administration would “drill, baby, drill.”

In an interview with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday, Trump said the rule would be overturned on his first day. “I will unban it immediately,” he said. “I have the right to unban it.”

Environmental groups, on the other hand, welcomed the decision. “This is an epic ocean victory!” said Joseph Gordon, climate and energy director at the conservation nonprofit Oceana. “Our treasured coastal communities are now safeguarded for future generations.”

“Americans on both sides of the aisle support protecting our oceans from Big Oil giveaways,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action. “President Biden’s bold action today underscores that we cannot afford the continued expansion of oil and gas production if we are to meet our climate targets and avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.”

The White House said: “With today’s withdrawals, President Biden has now conserved more than 670 million acres of US lands, waters, and ocean—more than any president in history.”

The move is the latest in a string of last-minute climate policy actions by the Biden administration before Trump’s return to the White House.

In mid-December, the outgoing administration issued an ambitious new climate target under the landmark Paris accord, committing the US to reducing economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by between 61 percent and 66 percent below 2005 levels by 2035, on the path to achieving net zero by 2050. Trump is expected to ignore this target and remove the US from the Paris climate deal.

Biden is also expected to announce two new national monuments—protected lands designated at the discretion of the president—in California before he leaves office. When last in office, Trump shrank the size of two previously established national monuments in Utah.

The outgoing Biden administration has styled itself as as historic leader in environmental policy, passing sweeping legislation to bolster clean energy output and electric vehicle uptake, although the president has also overseen a record boom in oil and gas production and handed out drilling leases at a higher rate even than Trump.

Climate advocates have urged Biden to declare a climate emergency and reverse the growing export of gas from US-based shipping terminals before Trump’s new term.

Agence France-Presse contributed reporting

The morning of December 16, Hamid Ali prepared to tell the story of his wife’s death. 

It was a Monday, and over the following 48 hours, I watched Ali—a lean man with glasses and a short beard—crisscross Washington DC, in search of accountability for his spouse, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, a peace activist and American citizen killed by an Israeli soldier in the occupied West Bank.

Ali spoke with politicians, government officials, and the media. Each time, he calmly explained Eygi’s life. Each time, he asked for the United States to do more to investigate her death. I witnessed this ritual nearly a dozen times. Often, as he began to speak of Eygi, he anxiously clutched a green woven scarf from her closet. 

“I like the idea of her literally being around me,” he told me, “keeping me warm.”

It had been 101 days since Eygi’s death. On September 6, she joined Palestinian protesters in the West Bank town of Beita, where Israeli settlers had spent decades attempting to seize land. Five weeks before Eygi’s arrival, the International Court of Justice had declared the settlers’ advances—backed by the Israeli Defense Forces—a violation of international humanitarian law. But, as in Gaza, strong words from international bodies have largely failed to deter Israeli violence in the West Bank.

Eygi, a recent college graduate from Washington, came to serve as a witness and document the protests. In 2024, Israeli settlers carried out at least 1,400 attacks on Palestinians or their property in the occupied West Bank, the highest number on record since documentation began two decades ago.

On Eygi’s third day, Palestinian protesters began to walk toward an Israeli settlement. The IDF responded with tear gas and live ammunition. The protest initially dispersed. But about twenty minutes later, after the maelstrom seemed to have ended, a soldier from hundreds of meters away shot Eygi in the head. She was killed at 26 years old. The IDF said she was hit “indirectly.” A witness on the scene told Mother Jones she believed the shot was “intentional.”

The Israeli military police say they are currently investigating the shooting. And the United States called Eygi’s death a “tragedy.” But the Biden administration has stopped short of its own investigation of Eygi’s death. “We expect [Israel’s] process to be thorough, transparent, and to be as robust as it can be,” State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said in mid-September. 

Ali—along with Eygi’s older sister, Ozden Bennett, and her father, Mehmet Suat Eygi—had come to DC to push for more. The most important part of the visit would be a meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. (Getting on Blinken’s schedule had delayed the trip. The meeting was originally planned for six weeks earlier, but the State Department canceled. Eygi’s family later found out that Blinken was speaking at a conference on artificial intelligence that day.)

The trip, now falling only 35 days before Biden left the White House, would be the last chance to ask Blinken the question on Ali’s mind: Did the United States care that an Israeli soldier killed his wife?

The first day, I sat with Ali and the Eygi family over breakfast in the lobby of their hotel. Their schedule was packed: a spreadsheet texted to the family detailed press conferences, meetings, TV appearances, and an end-of-day vigil. The nitty-gritty of the day grounded Ali. The details calmed his nerves. He asked what type of room they would meet with the Secretary of State Blinken in, what order they should sit in, and which portions of the prepared talking points he would speak on.

Their lawyer, Brad Parker of the Center for Constitutional Rights, ran through the minutiae. In the background, Ozden’s husband, Steve Bennett, entertained his two young children. Christmas music played over the speakers.

“The deference that [Blinken] is giving to the Israelis to create the narrative, create the inquiry,” Parker said, was the “top line point. No Israeli investigation means anything to us. Because it’s not impartial, it’s not independent.” 

Parker and the family went over specific bits of information they might wrangle out of the State Department: the name of the IDF unit that killed Eygi, the name of that unit’s commander, a timeline of Israel’s investigation. Ali turned to his sister-in-law.

“Ozden, do you want to be frustrated?” he asked.

She said yes. And like that she was assigned to articulate the family’s anger with the State Department’s inaction.

For Ali, those sorts of feelings were “harder to access”; anger had been difficult. This, he had learned, was common. The Eygis are not the first American family forced to put on suits and ask the US government to investigate the killing of a loved one by the Israeli army. Before the Eygis came the family of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist killed by an Israeli soldier in the West Bank in 2022; before Abu Akleh, there was Rachel Corrie.

Corrie, a young, American protective presence activist like Ayşenur, was run over by an Israeli army bulldozer in 2003. Over decades, her parents and sister have asked unsuccessfully for an independent investigation.

“The bottom line here is: The US has a criminal justice mechanism which, in principle, may have jurisdiction over offenses that were committed in connection with the killing of this American.”

Within days of Eygi’s death, the Corries reached out to Ali. In Eygi’s family, the Corries saw a reflection of what they had endured.

“I know how badly I and Cindy and our family wanted to talk to somebody that had been in the same situation,” Craig Corrie told me. “There wasn’t anybody to talk to.”

Ali reflected on that conversation when he thought about his own emotional impasse. “I actually remember Sarah Corrie, Rachel Corrie’s sister, talking about this,” he said. “For like two, three years, [she] couldn’t really feel anger.” It helped him feel less strange to hear this. “That was affirming,” he said. “I felt weird about not being angry enough. I think…loss and grief have taken the place of that anger.” 

Ali told me he also wasn’t sure who exactly to be angry with. There were so many people to blame. “It’s such a cloud of things that’s contributed to this,” he said. Decades of history built toward that moment in Beita on September 6, and the list of those at whom he might direct his anger was long: the US government, for failing to sanction Israel; the IDF, for its reportedly trigger-happy West Bank rules of engagement; the soldier who shot his wife; the people who trained that soldier; the settlers, whose expansion in Beita she had come to stand against. “There’s so many people,” Ali said. “I’d have to be angry at everybody, and that seems unsustainable.” 

There were also the slim odds that anger would change anything. He knew it was unlikely the government would see his wife’s death as a reason to shift policy. The Corries’ quest had been arduous. Decades later, the exact same gatekeepers were in place. 

It was current Secretary of State Antony Blinken—then a national security advisor to then-Vice President Joe Biden—who was assigned in 2011 to correspond with the Corries.

He wrote them a letter telling them that he’d raised their case with the Israeli ambassador to the United States. He told them he taken steps to prevent a recurrence. “I continue to hope that in the years to come, your family will find some measure of peace,” Blinken said then. But there was little movement beyond words. When the Corries pushed for details, or a plan, nothing happened.

“Along the way…we felt that we did find allies within the State Department. Secretary Blinken was one” Cindy Corrie told me. His concern for their family seemed genuine.

But he was not able to deliver on his promises of accountability. By 2015, the Corries had stopped trying to meet with him. “We completely understand the frustration that Ayşenur’s family is feeling, because you’re on this path, and it goes on for months and months, and then years and years,” she said.

“And what we are seeing,” Craig Corrie continued, “is that the conversation continues to be circular.”

Ayşenur Eygi’s family showed me a copy of the letter Blinken sent the Corries. Thirteen years later, they had carried that same letter to Washington for their own meeting with the Secretary of State. They hoped to remind him of the promises that he had promised to work to ensure a death like Rachel Corrie’s— a death like Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi’s—did not happen again.

After breakfast, the day began, and we piled into a Toyota Highlander and headed across town to the State Department. Parker, the lawyer, ticked off the participants in the meeting on his fingers. “It’ll be Secretary Blinken; Tom Sullivan, and the Chief of Staff…”

But the car got quiet as we passed the Washington Monument.  

“It’s very surreal,” Ali said, breaking the silence. “I mean, I’ve never seen DC, so it’s kind of nice, it’s like a tour…but I’m thinking about what we’re about to go do.” 

Soon, Ali would have to face off against the Secretary of State. “When something like this happens,” he said, “the government shouldn’t be able to not be questioned about it.”

The press gathered outside the State Department building in the rain. When the family emerged from their meeting with Blinken, they were solemn. “Unfortunately, [Blinken] repeated a lot of the same things we’ve been hearing for the past twenty years,” Ali said to a gaggle of reporters. “We hoped that things would be different this time.” 

The family told the press Secretary Blinken did not promise any action and did not provide any meaningful updates on what happened that day in Beita. No unit name, no timeline—and no plans for a US-led investigation. Instead, Blinken told Eygi’s family they “should be proud” of everything she accomplished in her short life, and said he brought up rules-of-engagement changes during his recent meeting with Yoav Gallant, the ousted Israeli Minister of Defense. He said he’d been told the Israeli government was “close” to finishing its investigation, and offered to ask them about it once again—though he added that he wouldn’t put any deadline on such a request. “It felt like he was saying his hands were tied,” Ali said.

The only thing that was “really surprising,” Ali said, was “that [Blinken] would think that that was something that would be sufficient.” 

After speaking to reporters, Ali sat down with me. He told me being inches away from Blinken was surreal: “I’ve seen this guy on TV a lot over the past year.” The ornate curtains in the meeting room reminded him of his grandmother’s. And this helped the novelty of sitting next to one of the most powerful men in the country fade quickly. “It felt like…oh, this is just another person, who’s saying things that I’ve already heard before.”

There are multiple paths the US government could use to pursue accountability in cases like Eygi’s, Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal advisor and analyst with Crisis Group, told me. When a US citizen is killed abroad by a foreign soldier, the State Department can assign their case to the Office of Special Prosecutions, which handles suspected war crimes and torture. “They’re the ones who brought War Crimes Act charges against Russians who tortured a US national. They’ve been involved in bringing charges against Syrian officials for torture and war crimes against a US national,” Finucane explained. That office could also refer the case to the Federal Bureau of Investigations—or the FBI could simply investigate the case themselves.

“The bottom line here is: The US has a criminal justice mechanism which, in principle, may have jurisdiction over offenses that were committed in connection with the killing of this American,” Finucane said.

When Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in 2022, the FBI opened an investigation and interviewed eyewitnesses. This is a step farther than it seems either the Corries or the Eygis have gotten. In both of their cases, the US government has maintained that the Israelis will conduct their own investigation.

“Further fact-finding would be prudent,” Finucane said, “and I don’t think it’s adequate for the US government to simply defer to the force that killed her in the first place, particularly given their track record and general lack of accountability.” (As I previously reported, internal investigations of IDF violence against Palestinians and their supporters in the West Bank seldom lead to indictments.)

That neither Biden nor Blinken has initiated such a fact-finding mission is not a matter of complexity, but a matter of political will, say people supporting the Eygi family. “If the President of the United States were to call for an independent investigation that would happen,” explained Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), “and it is very clear to me that if the Secretary of State were to call for an independent investigation that would happen. But there appear to be no red lines in these instances where it involves the Israeli government.” 

The Eygis’ day scrambled on. After the meeting with Blinken, they were set to be interviewed by CBS. But as they were walking to the interview, they learned it had been canceled. A teenager had shot eight people at a school in Wisconsin. News shifted. Another American death.

So, the family ate lunch in a food court and then headed to more meetings. Some left them hopeful. Senators and members of Congress promised to amplify Eygi’s story. “These people are human, and they do care,” Bennett, Eygi’s sister, said. “Sometimes, being in this environment, you feel like—these are all corrupt, evil, people. But when they hear the story, they do want justice for Ayşenur. I think we’re getting better at telling it.”

“I have been forced to sideline my grief in order to scrape and beg daily, for the past three months, to plead with the Biden administration to seek justice for my wife.”

Around 5:10 PM, they got a WhatsApp message saying their efforts bore some small fruit. On September 24th, Congressman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) had sent a letter with 102 colleagues asking the United States to “independently investigate whether [Eygi’s death] was a homicide.” The letter asked for Blinken’s prompt response by October 4th. Over two months past that deadline—and less than a day after meeting with the Eygis—Blinken’s office officially replied.

A clean, procedural page-and-a-half, the letter reiterated the same thing the family spent all day hearing: that the United States will wait for Israel to investigate its own army’s killing of a US citizen. “We continue to urge the government of Israel to conduct a swift, thorough and transparent investigation,” the State Department’s spokesperson wrote. “A US citizen killed at the hands of those charged to protect is not acceptable.” It near-exactly echoed Blinken’s letter to the Corries from a decade ago: then, as now, the US “urged” Israel toward “a thorough, transparent, and credible investigation.” 

Was it a sign toward progress? “It’s a sign towards process,” Parker, the lawyer, said.  

His weary answer spoke to the years he has spent doing this work. He worked with Shireen Abu Akleh’s family, facilitating meetings with legislators; his law firm, the Center for Constitutional Rights, has represented the Corries. And here he was, calling a car to bring the Eygis to a vigil in honor of Ayşenur. “They don’t tell you the hardest part is all the logistics,” he said, jabbing at his phone to select an Uber XL.

At the vigil that evening, Palestinian Youth Movement representatives spoke passionately of an arms embargo; Rep. Rashida Tlaib invoked Eygi’s desire to be an advocate for others. Attendees lined up to light candles beneath a mural of Ayşenur Eygi and Rachel Corrie’s faces. 

One guest limped in and spent most of the vigil watching from the sidelines. It was Daniel Santiago, a teacher from Jersey City, who in August was shot by IDF forces on the same hillside as Eygi. Santiago was luckier: he was only hit in the leg. He told me he took the day off work and took a bus down to DC to be with the Eygis. 

“I wanted to see if they needed anything,” he said.

He leaned on a walking stick given to him by young activists in Beita. In frigid, damp weather like this, he said, the place the bullet tore through his leg still ached. 

As the vigil ended, the rain turned from a drizzle to a downpour. Ali wrapped his wife’s scarf around his neck. 

Over and over throughout their time in DC, Eygi’s family repeated Biden’s words: “If you harm an American, we will respond.” But reducing the discussion of Eygi’s life to her citizenship—to show uncertain legislators that her killing merited an American response—obscured her personhood. “She was also a human being,” Tlaib said, “who deserved to live.” 

That very human-ness seemed the hardest thing to prove, no matter how many anecdotes the Eygis produced. “I stood in this exact same place with the family of Shireen Abu Akleh,” Tlaib remembered. The pattern repeated. “If [the family] told a little bit more about Shireen Abu Akleh’s life, would [officials] care more? If they just share another story about Ayşenur, will [the government] care more? And yet, here we are. Twenty years later we are still waiting for justice for Rachel Corrie.”

Two days into his trip to DC, after trying over and over again to prove his wife was human, Hamid Ali began to find his anger.

“I have been forced to sideline my grief in order to scrape and beg daily, for the past three months, to plead with the Biden administration to seek justice for my wife,” he said, after another round of meetings with legislators. He told Eygi’s story—her short life, her violent death—to so many people. Each time, he received condolences, but few commitments.

“Awaiting details of an Israeli investigation with no foreseeable deadline for the past 100 days is not a response,” Ali insisted. “Continuously framing this unjust killing as an unfortunate accident to our grieving family is not a response.” The anger had arrived, and it mixed with heartache and self-doubt.

“I always hate when they ask me things like, ‘tell me about Ayşenur,’” Ali said on his final day in DC. “Because I don’t feel like I ever do a good job.” 

Any single story failed to capture who she was: he could tell them about Ayşenur the activist, who raised tens of thousands of dollars to feed people in Gaza. He could tell them about her fierce love for her family, or about her sense of humor, or about the way she’d act out imaginary reality TV cooking competitions in her kitchen. He could tell them about the time she might have spent with her seven-month-old nephew, had she lived. “It’s like, what do you really want to hear?” he asked.

He wanted them to understand that Eygi was anything but a symbol. He wanted them to know her life meant more than the terrible pattern of her death. 

It’s hard to predict where Eygi’s case will go over the next four years, Brad Parker told me in early January. “It could be there’s no change at all, and it just isn’t treated as a priority,” he said. Trump might take the case up out of sheer animosity towards Biden—or act more outwardly hostile towards hearing the Eygi family than his predecessor. 

“There’s no short path in sight,” Parker said. But he is not entirely without hope: in the 23 years since Rachel Corrie’s death, American public opinion has shifted dramatically. Half the people in this country support ending weapons shipments to Israel, according to a recent poll, and thousands have participated in protests on behalf of the Palestinian people. In Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, many young Americans cannot help but see themselves.

These changes were brought about, Parker said, “in part because the individual stories the families have been telling, measured against the systemic violations that are increasingly visible through social media, show the human impact of occupation.” 

Ali called those small changes “the ripples.” 

“[The Corries] said they didn’t know it, but all their efforts—all their work they had done to get justice for Rachel—was not for her,” Ali said. “She wouldn’t benefit by it anymore. It was for the next person. It was for Ayşenur. They just didn’t know her name yet.”

This was the end of “one chapter.” But it was also, if the experiences of the Corrie and Abu Akleh families are anything to go by, the beginning of another very long story. 

“Ayşenur is not going to benefit from the efforts we have made. I have little hope,” Ali said. “So it’s for the next person—so the next family won’t have to go through as much.”

“It doesn’t get easier,” Ali remembered Craig Corrie telling him months earlier. “You just get stronger.”

Najib Aminy contributed reporting.

In the immediate aftermath of the New Year’s truck attack that killed 14 people and injured dozens in New Orleans, President-elect Donald Trump baselessly—and, it turns out, falsely—suggested that the Biden administration’s immigration policies were to blame.

“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” Trump wrote on Truth Social just after 10:45 a.m. on New Year’s Day. (Later in the post, he added: “Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department.”)

While the attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar—who died in a shootout with police—had proclaimed his allegiance to ISIS, according to the FBI, he was, in fact, a US citizen who grew up in Texas and served in the US Army. Trump has yet to clearly correct the record. In posts the following day, he faulted authorities for failing to protect “Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself,” and he argued: “With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”

When I asked if Trump would more directly correct his original false statement, the incoming president’s communications director, Steven Cheung, said I was “too big of a moron to actually comprehend what he was posting about.” Cheung suggested that Trump was referring to the broader problem of violent criminals and “radical Islamic terrorism” crossing the border.

Top members of the GOP have also spread version’s of Trump’s claim, attempting to connect Biden’s border policies to the attack. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) did so on Fox News on Thursday, saying congressional Republicans “have been ringing the alarms” about “terrorism and the wide open border, the idea that dangerous people were coming here in droves and setting up potentially terrorist cells around the country.” Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) also posted on X, linking news of the attack to border and immigration policies. A spokesperson for Crane said Sunday that his post “simply says that our open border and legal immigration system create additional vulnerabilities to Americans, so there’s nothing to correct.” Spokespeople for Greene and Johnson did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones.

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., echoed his father’s falsehoods in a New Year’s Day post on X, writing: “Biden’s parting gift to America — migrant terrorists.”

As Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on This Week Sunday: “The assailant who perpetrated the terrorist attack in New Orleans was born in the United States, raised in the United States, and served in our armed forces. It is not an issue of the border.”

“The assailant who perpetrated the terrorist attack in New Orleans was born in the United States, raised in the United States and served in our armed forces. It is not an issue of the border,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says. https://t.co/rRMUv9vl3M pic.twitter.com/CdxBxDH9S1

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 5, 2025

The GOP, however, seems largely unwilling to back down. Instead, they continue to show they’re willing to sacrifice immigrants at the altar of Trump.

Jeff Bezos and his companies have seemingly been doing everything they can to get into Donald Trump’s good graces before he returns to the Oval Office.

This includes: donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration via Amazon; dining with Trump and Elon Musk recently at Mar-a-Lago; and, of course, spiking an editorial endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris slated to run in the Washington Post, which Bezos also owns—a decision that reportedly cost the Post as many as 300,000 subscribers who canceled in the immediate aftermath.

As of this weekend, there appear to be new additions to this list. First off, the Washington Post killed a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize–winner Ann Telnaes that satirized the slate of tech and media billionaires practically prostrating themselves at Trump’s feet. The cartoon included sketches of Bezos; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Meta, which also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee; Sam Altman of OpenAI, who made a $1 million donation; Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times, who killed that paper’s endorsement of Harris; and the Walt Disney Company, owner of ABC News, which recently made the controversial decision to pay $15 million to settle a defamation suit brought by Trump.

The Washington Post’s editorial page editor, David Shipley, said in a statement provided by the paper’s spokesperson that he killed the cartoon because the Post had recently run a column on the same matter and had another scheduled for publication. “Not every editorial judgement is a reflection of a malign force…,” he said. “The only bias was against repetition.” (The paper has also run several columns criticizing the decision to kill the Harris endorsement.)

.@AnnTelnaes resigned after the Washington Post editorial page killed her cartoon. It’s worth a share.

Big Tech executives are bending the knee to Donald Trump and it’s no surprise why: Billionaires like Jeff Bezos like paying a lower tax rate than a public school teacher. pic.twitter.com/xv6e5dJVf4

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) January 4, 2025

In a Substack piece announcing that she was quitting the Post in protest of the decision, Telnaes called the episode “dangerous for a free press.”

“Owners of such press organizations are responsible for safeguarding that free press—and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press,” Telnaes wrote.

The board of directors for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists backed Telnaes up, saying in a statement: “Editorial cartooning is the tip of the spear in opinion, and the Post’s cowering further soils their once-stellar reputation for standing up and speaking truth to power. We weep for the loss of this once great newspaper.”

The Post isn’t the only Bezos media company in the news this weekend. Amazon Studios is reportedly helping bring to life a documentary focused on soon-to-be-First-Lady and conspiracy theorist Melania Trump. Fox News reports that Amazon Prime licensed the documentary, expected to be released in theaters and on streaming in the second half of this year. Filming began last month, and Melania is an executive producer, Fox reports.

Keep in mind that given the content of her eponymous memoir—not to mention the well-worn phenomenon of celebrities producing documentaries about themselves as a PR tactic (remember the 6-hour Harry and Meghan Netflix special?)—the odds of this documentary actually providing “an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look” at Melania, as Amazon claims it will, seem low. Representatives for Amazon did not respond to questions from Mother Jones, including about the extent of any involvement from Bezos and whether Melania will have any control over the film’s editing.

This is a great time to remember, as our CEO Monika Bauerlein put it: Billionaire-owned newsrooms are not our only option.

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

Explosions roared through the canyons lining the Klamath River earlier this year, signaling a new chapter for the region that hugs the Oregon-California border.

In October, the removal of four hydroelectric dams built on the river was completed—the largest project of its kind in US history.

The blast of the final dam was just the beginning. The work to restore the river, which winds 263 miles from the volcanic Cascade mountain range in Oregon to the Pacific coast in northern California, is now under way. Already it’s been among the most hopeful environmental stories of past years.

“It has been more successful than we ever imagined,” said Ren Brownell, the spokesperson for the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, a nonprofit created to oversee and implement the removal, adding: “There’s an incredible amount of joy.”

The Klamath River was once an ecological powerhouse—the third-largest salmon-producing river in the American west. Its basin covered more than 9.4 million acres and its network of wetlands was the largest in the region. The ecosystem was home to millions of migrating birds. Tribes including the Hoopa, Karuk, Klamath, Modoc, and Yurok thrived in this bountiful and beautiful watershed for thousands of years, with the river providing both sustenance and ritual.

Over the last hundred years, these landscapes have been drastically altered.

After the first dam began operating in 1918—one of four that would eventually be forged in the lower Klamath to provide hydroelectric power to communities nearby—the course of the river was changed. The dams obstructed the migration of salmon and other native species, which help carry nutrients into the systems from the ocean, to cascading effects.

They also held on to huge stores of sediment that would otherwise have flowed downriver, and created shallow reservoirs that quickly heated when the weather warmed. Increased water temperatures in the river allowed toxic algal blooms to thrive.

In recent decades, the climate crisis has turned up the dial, deepening droughts and fueling a rise in catastrophic fire as the region grows ever hotter. The impacts only increased as more water was diverted to support the farming and ranching in the region, and more habitat was altered by mining and logging.

Twenty-eight types of salmon and steelhead trout, seen as indicator species that represent the health of the ecosystems they live in, have been listed as threatened or endangered.

As the Klamath ecosystem deteriorated, there was growing recognition that removing the dams would be a crucial first step in helping the region recover and build resilience in a warming world.

“We essentially performed a quadruple bypass on the river this last year—we knew there would be short-term impacts.”

But, faced with a strong resistance to change in local communities tucked around the reservoirs and a long history of difficult battles over water in the parched landscapes in the west, dam removal seemed all but impossible. The land for the dams was taken from tribes during the throes of colonization and development and more recently supported energy corporations that had shareholders to answer to.

Then, in 2002, disaster struck. Algae flourished in the shallow warming waters that year, exacerbated by the dams and decisions from the US Bureau of Reclamation to divert vital flows to farms, leaving little for fish. The event killed 70,000 salmon and thousands of other species, resulting in one of the worst die-offs ever to occur in the US.

The layers of fish floating belly-up sent an important signal of the horrors that could continue into the future if the dams remained. Forming a coalition, tribes up and down the Klamath launched a fierce campaign to educate the public, inform the shareholders of the companies that owned and operated the dams, and petition their boards. They protested and attended public hearings, and engaged with state and federal officials.

It took decades of advocacy to convince PacifiCorp, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, to let go of the aging infrastructure straddling the Oregon-California border. But in the mid-aughts, assured by shifts in public opinion and incentivized by the steep costs to relicense the dams, the company agreed it was time to see them go.

In November 2020, nearly 20 years after the die-off, an agreement was forged between a long list of stakeholders that included tribal and state governments and federal agencies. The Klamath River Renewal Corporation was created to oversee and implement the removal.

The organization had to help bring residents near the reservoirs onboard, navigate dozens of species-management plans, and model how outdoor-recreation enthusiasts could continue to enjoy the river. Ranchers and fishers, environmentalists and farmers, and locals and visitors all had connections to the basin, and were eager to weigh in. “It has been a tremendous rollercoaster,” said Brownell. “Having the river’s health in your hands is an incredible burden to carry.”

Brownell, who grew up along the riverbanks, was standing in the canyon as the blast of the first dam released flows and the river that had been held over the last hundred years found its way back to itself. “I got to watch the water come down through the canyon and reconnect with the river below. I watched the river re-establish itself there forevermore,” she said. It was the most exciting moment of the year.

There were moments of trauma along the way. Over the 100 years the dams were standing, they had held back 15 million cubic yards of sediment. When the dams were removed, the heavy dead organic matter had to run downriver, soaking up oxygen in the water. Extensive modeling had predicted a severe impact on aquatic life, but no one knew how bad it would get or how long it would take for the river to regain its health. Some models predicted the suffocating conditions could linger for up to a month.

“I was braced and prepared but it was still tremendously hard,” said Brownell, recalling how the water, rid of oxygen, looked like oil as it cascaded through its banks.

“It is a new era for us—there are good things to come.”

“You can easily compare a river’s health to an individual’s health,” she said. “Often when someone is sick, they are going to get worse before they get better. We essentially performed a quadruple bypass on the river this last year—we knew there would be short-term impacts.

“The whole time everyone was so excited because it felt like the start of something. I just felt sick,” she said.

Leaf Hillman, a Karuk tribal ceremonial leader who has dedicated decades to seeing this project come to fruition, helped keep hopes high with assurances that these were signs of healing. “For me it was beautiful,” he said, recalling how he felt even when the rushing waters became clouded by silt. “I could envision what it was going to look like—a restored river.”

In the end, the river lacked oxygen for only two 24-hour periods, a far shorter time than scientists had feared.

As 2025 begins, so does the real work. “It is a new era for us—there are good things to come,” Hillman said.

He is looking forward to the work ahead, especially the work to ensure fish can reach “pristine habitat” in tributaries above the Upper Klamath Lake.

With 400 miles of habitat for salmon and other native species restored, and 2,200 acres made available after spending a century submerged, stakeholders are envisioning a future for these lands and those who rely on them. Already, native seeds have been strewn along the banks and in the areas once vibrant with vegetation.

There have already been strong signs of their success.

In late November, threatened coho salmon were seen in the upper Klamath River basin for the first time in more than 60 years, according to the California department of fish and wildlife. Other animals are benefiting, too, including north-western pond turtles, freshwater mussels, beavers and river otters.

Strong winter rains have also helped the rebound. “The river is doing what rivers do—redistributing sediments,” Hillman said, calling the gift of wet weather the “icing on the cake.”

“We have a lot more work to do,” he added, “but it’s a good omen.”

The roughly 2,800 acres of land sacred to the Shasta Indian Nation that had been drowned and buried under a reservoir created by one of the dams has been returned to them. The Kikacéki and Kutarawaxu bands who once called the area home were decimated by colonists in the 1800s, after the lure of gold, mining, logging and ranching drew throngs of people to the region. The small tribe that remained was then pushed from their homes through eminent domain to make way for construction of the dams to begin.

The Guardian was unable to speak to representatives of Shasta Indian Nation on record, but they have recounted the painful history endured by their ancestors and what the next chapter means to them.

“Today is a turning point in the history of the Shasta people,” Janice Crowe, the Shasta Indian Nation chair, told AZCentral. “Now we can return home, return to culture, return to ceremony and begin to weave a new story for the next generation of Shasta, who will get to call our ancestral lands home once again.”

With successes, though, there may still be setbacks. The water is still turbid as the river continues to cleanse itself of sediment. There’s a lot of data to wade through and challenges to overcome. The effects of the climate crisis will continue to unfold.

In the farther parts of the river, Klamath tribal leaders are still waiting to see the salmon that were lost to their homelands more than 100 years ago. Dams still stand in the northern stretches of the river.

But for advocates, the dams’ removal on its own serves as a strong reminder that change is possible.

Toz Soto, a fish biologist and manager of the Karuk Tribe fisheries program, said with a laugh that he was skeptical right up until the moment they blasted through the concrete. But, by convincing the public that removing the dams made sense, “not just as a social justice issue for tribal health but also from an economic standpoint,” he said, the wheels of change started to turn.

As the work continues, Soto is looking upon it with a smile.

“There were moments, and those are behind me,” he said. He’s hopeful for the future, and excited to start the reintroduction of spring-run chinook salmon that otherwise would never have had a chance. Water conditions will continue to improve with time, and they are already far better than they were a year ago.

“It is quite impressive,” he added. “I am so programmed going up there to look at a funky, nasty reservoir. Now it’s just like—wow. It’s a river again.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It was made possible through a partnership between Grist and WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago region.

It takes approximately 700,000 megawatt hours of electricity to power Chicago’s more than 400 municipal buildings every year. As of January 1, every single one of them—including 98 fire stations, two international airports, and two of the largest water treatment plants on the planet—is running on renewable energy, thanks largely to Illinois’ newest and largest solar farm.

The move is projected to cut the carbon footprint of the country’s third-largest city by approximately 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year—the equivalent of taking 62,000 cars off the road, according to the city.

Local decarbonization efforts like Chicago’s are taking on increasing significance as President-elect Donald Trump promises to reduce federal support for climate action. With the outgoing Biden administration doubling down on an international pledge to get the US to net-zero emissions by 2050, cities, states, and private-sector players across the country will have to pick up the slack.

Chicago is one of several US cities that are taking advantage of their bulk-buying power to spur new carbon-free energy development.  “It’s a plan that gets the city to take action on climate and also leverages our buying power to generate new opportunities for Chicagoans and the state,” said Angela Tovar, Chicago’s chief sustainability officer. “There’s opportunities everywhere.”

Chicago’s switch to renewable energy has been almost a decade in the making. The goal of sourcing the city’s power purely from carbon-free sources was first established by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2017. His successor, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, struck a 2022 deal with Constellation, an electricity supplier, to purchase the city’s energy from the developer Swift Current Energy beginning in 2025. 

Swift Current began construction on the 3,800-acre, 593-megawatt solar farm in central Illinois as part of the same five-year, $422 million agreement. Straddling two counties, the Double Black Diamond Solar project is now the largest solar installation east of the Mississippi River. It can produce enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes, according to Swift Current’s vice president of origination, Caroline Mann. 

Chicago alone has agreed to purchase approximately half the installation’s total output, which will cover about 70 percent of its municipal buildings’ electricity needs. City officials plan to cover the remaining 30 percent through the purchase of renewable energy credits. 

“That’s really a feature and not a bug of our plan,” said Deputy Chief Sustainability Officer Jared Policicchio. He added that he hopes the city’s demand for 100 percent renewable energy will encourage additional clean energy development locally, albeit on a much smaller scale, which will create new sources of power that the city can then purchase directly, in lieu of credits. “Our goal over the next several years is that we reach a point where we’re not buying renewable energy credits.” 

More than 700 other US cities and towns have signed similar purchasing agreements since 2015, according to a 2022 study from the World Resources Institute. Only one city, Houston, has a larger renewable energy deal than Chicago, according to Matthew Popkin, the cities and communities US program manager at Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit whose research focuses on decarbonization. However, he added, no other contract has added as much new renewable power to the grid as Chicago’s.

“Part of Chicago’s goal was what’s called ‘additionality’: bringing new resources into the market and onto the grid here,” said Popkin. 

Chicago also secured a $400,000 annual commitment from Constellation and Swift Current for clean energy workforce training, including training via Chicago Women in Trades, a nonprofit aiming to increase the number of women in union construction and manufacturing jobs. 

The economic benefits extend past the city’s limits: According to Swift Current, approximately $100 million in new tax revenue is projected to flow into Sangamon County and Morgan County, which are home to the Double Black Diamond Solar site, over the project’s operational life. 

“Cities and other local governments just don’t appreciate their ability to not just support their residents but also shape markets,” said Popkin. “Chicago is demonstrating directly how cities can lead by example, implement ambitious goals amidst evolving state and federal policy changes, and leverage their purchasing power to support a more equitable renewable energy future.”

Alex Dane, the World Resource Institute’s senior manager for clean energy innovation and partnerships in the US energy program, said many cities have set two renewable energy goals: one for municipal operations and a second goal for the community at large. Even though the latter is “a little bit harder to get to, and the timeline is a little bit further out,” said Dane, the community-side goals begin to seem less lofty once a city has decarbonized the assets it directly controls.

Indeed, Chicago’s new milestone is the first step in a broader goal to source the energy for all buildings in the city from renewables by 2035. That would make it the largest city in the country to do so, according to the Sierra Club.

Dane said it will be increasingly important for cities, towns, and states to drive their own efforts to reduce emissions, build greener economies, and meet local climate goals. He said moves like Chicago’s prove that they are capable, no matter what’s on the horizon at the federal level. 

“That is an imperative thing to know, that state, city, county action is a durable pathway, even under the next administration, and [it] needs to happen,” said Dane. “The juice is definitely still worth the squeeze.”

Axios reported on Friday that Apple CEO Tim Cook will donate $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration, the latest tech company figure to do so. These donations—which aren’t covered by campaign finance law and can be unlimited—signal a clear willingness to work with the Trump administration and a desire to curry favor with the once and future president. 

The tech sector is particularly eager to suck up.

In December, Meta and Amazon donated $1 million to the inauguration committee, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman said he planned to do the same. Uber and its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi have both donated $1 million apiece (even as the company’s chief legal officer Tony West is vice president Kamala Harris’ brother-in-law). The donations to Trump’s inauguaral committee total about $150 million so far, a record-breaking sum, with more expected to flow in. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos also dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump just before Christmas, joined by Elon Musk.

It’s common, of course, for companies to make donations to inaugural committees to signal that they intend to work with the new administration; President Biden’s inaugural committee ultimately raised $62 million, including from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Pfizer, and Bank of America. Amazon donated $267,000—a significantly lower sum than they’re now giving Trump— while Google gave $337,000. (Google has not announced any donations to Trump’s second inauguration.) 

The tech sector is particularly eager to suck up to Trump now, as they seek policies favorable to artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. (Crypto companies have donated especially lavishly to the inaugural committee; the largest single donation comes from Ripple, which announced a $5 million contribution in XRP, its own crypto token.) Parts of the sector are also clearly hoping to avoid backlash from people like Andrew Ferguson, Trump’s pick to chair the Federal Trade Commission, who has said he will use his perch to fight “censorship” of conservative viewpoints from Big Tech and, of course, go after “wokeness.” Trump and many others in his incoming administration are unusually obsessed with tech companies, seeing them as architects of conservative suppression, and have made clear that balancing the scales is one of their first priorities. 

“Big Tech should be accountable for years of censorship and deplatforming,” tweeted venture capitalist David Sacks on Twitter, in a reply to Elon Musk and far-right figure Laura Loomer. “It’s got to stop.” Trump has announced that Sacks will serve as an AI and cryptocurrency “czar” in his new administration, and also lead a council of science and tech advisers. 

The money flowing into Trump’s various coffers also isn’t limited to donations from the tech sector. The New York Times reported Saturday that post-election donations to Trump-affiliated entities—benefitting the inauguration, his eventual presidential library, and the Make America Great Again Inc. super-PAC—have totaled $200 million. 

“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump posted on TruthSocial, shortly after the dinner with Bezos. For once, what he’s saying appears to be completely true.

In 2015, hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and repression were trying to reach safe havens in Europe. From his home in Norway, Tommy Olsen decided to travel to Greece, a major gateway for migrants and refugees. He joined hundreds of volunteers helping the new arrivals and later created an NGO, the Aegean Boat Report, which monitors the plight of asylum seekers in Europe.

Today, Olsen is a wanted man in Greece, caught up in a crackdown on refugees and people trying to defend their right to asylum.

“I didn’t know what I walked into,” Olsen says.

Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, has condemned Greece’s harsh migration policies and the way its government is targeting activists like Olsen. But she says Europe as a whole is also to blame.

“The whole notion of migration is a dirty word now,” she says. “The whole notion of refugees is a dirty word now.”

This week on Reveal, reporters Dinah Rothenberg and Viola Funk from the Berlin podcast studio ACB Stories take us to Greece, where refugees and human rights defenders face legal and sometimes physical attacks from authorities trying to seal the country’s borders.

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

Joe Biden has banned offshore drilling across an immense area of coastal waters, weeks before Donald Trump takes office pledging to massively increase fossil fuel production.

The US president’s ban encompasses the entire Atlantic coast and eastern Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Pacific coast off California, Oregon, and Washington, and a section of the Bering Sea off Alaska.

A White House statement said the declaration protected more than 625 million acres of waters. Trump said he would “unban it immediately” as soon as he re-enters the White House on January 20, although it is unclear whether he will be able to do this easily.

“As the climate crisis continues to threaten communities across the country and we are transitioning to a clean energy economy, now is the time to protect these coasts for our children and grandchildren,” Biden said in a statement.

“In balancing the many uses and benefits of America’s ocean, it is clear to me that the relatively minimal fossil fuel potential in the areas I am withdrawing do not justify the environmental, public health, and economic risks that would come from new leasing and drilling,” he added.

Scientists are clear that oil and gas production must be radically cut to avoid disastrous climate impacts. The ban does not have an end date and could be legally—and politically—tricky for Trump to overturn.

“Americans on both sides of the aisle support protecting our oceans from Big Oil giveaways.”

Biden is taking the action under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953, which gives the federal government authority over the exploitation of offshore resources. A total of eight presidents have withdrawn territory from drilling under the act, including Trump himself—who barred oil and gas extraction off the coasts of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.

However, the law does not expressly provide for presidents to unilaterally reverse a drilling ban without going through Congress.

Despite this, Trump vowed to undo Biden’s move, with the president-elect’s spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, calling it “a disgraceful decision” and saying the incoming administration would “drill, baby, drill.”

In an interview with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday, Trump said the rule would be overturned on his first day. “I will unban it immediately,” he said. “I have the right to unban it.”

Environmental groups, on the other hand, welcomed the decision. “This is an epic ocean victory!” said Joseph Gordon, climate and energy director at the conservation nonprofit Oceana. “Our treasured coastal communities are now safeguarded for future generations.”

“Americans on both sides of the aisle support protecting our oceans from Big Oil giveaways,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action. “President Biden’s bold action today underscores that we cannot afford the continued expansion of oil and gas production if we are to meet our climate targets and avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.”

The White House said: “With today’s withdrawals, President Biden has now conserved more than 670 million acres of US lands, waters, and ocean—more than any president in history.”

The move is the latest in a string of last-minute climate policy actions by the Biden administration before Trump’s return to the White House.

In mid-December, the outgoing administration issued an ambitious new climate target under the landmark Paris accord, committing the US to reducing economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by between 61 percent and 66 percent below 2005 levels by 2035, on the path to achieving net zero by 2050. Trump is expected to ignore this target and remove the US from the Paris climate deal.

Biden is also expected to announce two new national monuments—protected lands designated at the discretion of the president—in California before he leaves office. When last in office, Trump shrank the size of two previously established national monuments in Utah.

The outgoing Biden administration has styled itself as as historic leader in environmental policy, passing sweeping legislation to bolster clean energy output and electric vehicle uptake, although the president has also overseen a record boom in oil and gas production and handed out drilling leases at a higher rate even than Trump.

Climate advocates have urged Biden to declare a climate emergency and reverse the growing export of gas from US-based shipping terminals before Trump’s new term.

Agence France-Presse contributed reporting

The morning of December 16, Hamid Ali prepared to tell the story of his wife’s death. 

It was a Monday, and over the following 48 hours, I watched Ali—a lean man with glasses and a short beard—crisscross Washington DC, in search of accountability for his spouse, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, a peace activist and American citizen killed by an Israeli soldier in the occupied West Bank.

Ali spoke with politicians, government officials, and the media. Each time, he calmly explained Eygi’s life. Each time, he asked for the United States to do more to investigate her death. I witnessed this ritual nearly a dozen times. Often, as he began to speak of Eygi, he anxiously clutched a green woven scarf from her closet. 

“I like the idea of her literally being around me,” he told me, “keeping me warm.”

It had been 101 days since Eygi’s death. On September 6th, she joined Palestinian protesters in the West Bank town of Beita, where Israeli settlers had spent decades attempting to seize land. Five weeks before Eygi’s arrival, the International Court of Justice had declared the settlers’ advances—backed by the Israeli Defense Forces—a violation of international humanitarian law. But, as in Gaza, strong words from international bodies have largely failed to deter Israeli violence in the West Bank.

Eygi, a recent college graduate from Washington, came to serve as a witness and document the protests. In 2024, Israeli settlers carried out at least 1,400 attacks on Palestinians or their property in the occupied West Bank, the highest number on record since documentation began two decades ago.

On Eygi’s third day, Palestinian protesters began to walk toward an Israeli settlement. The IDF responded with tear gas and live ammunition. The protest initially dispersed. But about twenty minutes later, after the maelstrom seemed to have ended, a soldier from hundreds of meters away shot Eygi in the head. She was killed at 26 years old. The IDF said she was hit “indirectly.” A witness on the scene told Mother Jones she believed the shot was “intentional.”

The Israeli military police say they are currently investigating the shooting. And the United States called Eygi’s death a “tragedy.” But the Biden administration has stopped short of its own investigation of Eygi’s death. “We expect [Israel’s] process to be thorough, transparent, and to be as robust as it can be,” State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said in mid-September. 

Ali—along with Eygi’s older sister, Ozden Bennett, and her father, Mehmet Suat Eygi—had come to DC to push for more. The most important part of the visit would be a meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. (Getting on Blinken’s schedule had delayed the trip. The meeting was originally planned for six weeks earlier, but the State Department canceled. Eygi’s family later found out that Blinken was speaking at a conference on artificial intelligence that day.)

The trip, now falling only 35 days before Biden left the White House, would be the last chance to ask Blinken the question on Ali’s mind: Did the United States care that an Israeli soldier killed his wife?

The first day, I sat with Ali and the Eygi family over breakfast in the lobby of their hotel. Their schedule was packed: a spreadsheet texted to the family detailed press conferences, meetings, TV appearances, and an end-of-day vigil. The nitty-gritty of the day grounded Ali. The details calmed his nerves. He asked what type of room they would meet with the Secretary of State Blinken in, what order they should sit in, and which portions of the prepared talking points he would speak on.

Their lawyer, Brad Parker of the Center for Constitutional Rights, ran through the minutiae. In the background, Ozden’s husband, Steve Bennett, entertained his two young children. Christmas music played over the speakers.

“The deference that [Blinken] is giving to the Israelis to create the narrative, create the inquiry,” Parker said, was the “top line point. No Israeli investigation means anything to us. Because it’s not impartial, it’s not independent.” 

Parker and the family went over specific bits of information they might wrangle out of the State Department: the name of the IDF unit that killed Eygi, the name of that unit’s commander, a timeline of Israel’s investigation. Ali turned to his sister-in-law.

“Ozden, do you want to be frustrated?” he asked.

She said yes. And like that she was assigned to articulate the family’s anger with the State Department’s inaction.

For Ali, those sorts of feelings were “harder to access”; anger had been difficult. This, he had learned, was common. The Eygis are not the first American family forced to put on suits and ask the US government to investigate the killing of a loved one by the Israeli army. Before the Eygis came the family of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist killed by an Israeli soldier in the West Bank in 2022; before Abu Akleh, there was Rachel Corrie.

Corrie, a young, American protective presence activist like Ayşenur, was run over by an Israeli army bulldozer in 2003. Over decades, her parents and sister have asked unsuccessfully for an independent investigation.

“The bottom line here is: The US has a criminal justice mechanism which, in principle, may have jurisdiction over offenses that were committed in connection with the killing of this American,”

Within days of Eygi’s death, the Corries reached out to Ali. In Eygi’s family, the Corries saw a reflection of what they had endured.

“I know how badly I and Cindy and our family wanted to talk to somebody that had been in the same situation,” Craig Corrie told me. “There wasn’t anybody to talk to.”

Ali reflected on that conversation when he thought about his own emotional impasse. “I actually remember Sarah Corrie, Rachel Corrie’s sister, talking about this,” he said. “For like two, three years, [she] couldn’t really feel anger.” It helped him feel less strange to hear this. “That was affirming,” he said. “I felt weird about not being angry enough. I think…loss and grief have taken the place of that anger.” 

Ali told me he also wasn’t sure who exactly to be angry with. There were so many people to blame. “It’s such a cloud of things that’s contributed to this,” he said. Decades of history built towards that moment in Beita on September 6th, and the list of those at whom he might direct his anger was long: the US government, for failing to sanction Israel; the IDF, for its reportedly trigger-happy West Bank rules of engagement; the soldier who shot his wife; the people who trained that soldier; the settlers, whose expansion in Beita she had come to stand against. “There’s so many people,” Ali said. “I’d have to be angry at everybody, and that seems unsustainable.” 

There were also the slim odds that anger would change anything. He knew it was unlikely the government would see his wife’s death as a reason to shift policy. The Corries’ quest had been arduous. Decades later, the exact same gatekeepers were in place. 

It was current Secretary of State Antony Blinken—then a national security advisor to then-Vice President Joe Biden—who was assigned in 2011 to correspond with the Corries.

He wrote them a letter telling them that he’d raised their case with the Israeli ambassador to the United States. He told them he taken steps to prevent a recurrence. “I continue to hope that in the years to come, your family will find some measure of peace,” Blinken said then. But there was little movement beyond words. When the Corries pushed for details, or a plan, nothing happened.

“Along the way…we felt that we did find allies within the State Department. Secretary Blinken was one” Cindy Corrie told me. His concern for their family seemed genuine.

But he was not able to deliver on his promises of accountability. By 2015, the Corries had stopped trying to meet with him. “We completely understand the frustration that Ayşenur’s family is feeling, because you’re on this path, and it goes on for months and months, and then years and years,” she said.

“And what we are seeing,” Craig Corrie continued, “is that the conversation continues to be circular.”

Ayşenur Eygi’s family showed me a copy of the letter Blinken sent the Corries. Thirteen years later, they had carried that same letter to Washington for their own meeting with the Secretary of State. They hoped to remind him of the promises that he had promised to work to ensure a death like Rachel Corrie’s— a death like Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi’s—did not happen again.

After breakfast, the day began, and we piled into a Toyota Highlander and headed across town to the State Department. Parker, the lawyer, ticked off the participants in the meeting on his fingers. “It’ll be Secretary Blinken; Tom Sullivan, and the Chief of Staff…”

But the car got quiet as we passed the Washington Monument.  

“It’s very surreal,” Ali said, breaking the silence. “I mean, I’ve never seen DC, so it’s kind of nice, it’s like a tour…but I’m thinking about what we’re about to go do.” 

Soon, Ali would have to face off against the Secretary of State. “When something like this happens,” he said, “the government shouldn’t be able to not be questioned about it.”

The press gathered outside the State Department building in the rain. When the family emerged from their meeting with Blinken, they were solemn. “Unfortunately, [Blinken] repeated a lot of the same things we’ve been hearing for the past twenty years,” Ali said to a gaggle of reporters. “We hoped that things would be different this time.” 

The family told the press Secretary Blinken did not promise any action and did not provide any meaningful updates on what happened that day in Beita. No unit name, no timeline—and no plans for a US-led investigation. Instead, Blinken told Eygi’s family they “should be proud” of everything she accomplished in her short life, and said he brought up rules-of-engagement changes during his recent meeting with Yoav Gallant, the ousted Israeli Minister of Defense. He said he’d been told the Israeli government was “close” to finishing its investigation, and offered to ask them about it once again—though he added that he wouldn’t put any deadline on such a request. “It felt like he was saying his hands were tied,” Ali said.

The only thing that was “really surprising,” Ali said, was “that [Blinken] would think that that was something that would be sufficient.” 

After speaking to reporters, Ali sat down with me. He told me being inches away from Blinken was surreal: “I’ve seen this guy on TV a lot over the past year.” The ornate curtains in the meeting room reminded him of his grandmother’s. And this helped the novelty of sitting next to one of the most powerful men in the country fade quickly. “It felt like…oh, this is just another person, who’s saying things that I’ve already heard before.”

There are multiple paths the US government could use to pursue accountability in cases like Eygi’s, Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal advisor and analyst with Crisis Group, told me. When a US citizen is killed abroad by a foreign soldier, the State Department can assign their case to the Office of Special Prosecutions, which handles suspected war crimes and torture. “They’re the ones who brought War Crimes Act charges against Russians who tortured a US national. They’ve been involved in bringing charges against Syrian officials for torture and war crimes against a US national,” Finucane explained. That office could also refer the case to the Federal Bureau of Investigations—or the FBI could simply investigate the case themselves.

“The bottom line here is: The US has a criminal justice mechanism which, in principle, may have jurisdiction over offenses that were committed in connection with the killing of this American,” Finucane said.

When Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in 2022, the FBI opened an investigation and interviewed eyewitnesses. This is a step farther than it seems either the Corries or the Eygis have gotten. In both of their cases, the US government has maintained that the Israelis will conduct their own investigation.

“Further fact-finding would be prudent,” Finucane said, “and I don’t think it’s adequate for the US government to simply defer to the force that killed her in the first place, particularly given their track record and general lack of accountability.” (As I previously reported, internal investigations of IDF violence against Palestinians and their supporters in the West Bank seldom lead to indictments.)

That neither Biden nor Blinken has initiated such a fact-finding mission is not a matter of complexity, but a matter of political will, say people supporting the Eygi family. “If the President of the United States were to call for an independent investigation that would happen,” explained Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), “and it is very clear to me that if the Secretary of State were to call for an independent investigation that would happen. But there appear to be no red lines in these instances where it involves the Israeli government.” 

The Eygis’ day scrambled on. After the meeting with Blinken, they were set to be interviewed by CBS. But as they were walking to the interview, they learned it had been canceled. A teenager had shot eight people at a school in Wisconsin. News shifted. Another American death.

So, the family ate lunch in a food court and then headed to more meetings. Some left them hopeful. Senators and members of Congress promised to amplify Eygi’s story. “These people are human, and they do care,” Bennett, Eygi’s sister, said. “Sometimes, being in this environment, you feel like—these are all corrupt, evil, people. But when they hear the story, they do want justice for Ayşenur. I think we’re getting better at telling it.”

“I have been forced to sideline my grief in order to scrape and beg daily, for the past three months, to plead with the Biden administration to seek justice for my wife.”

Around 5:10 PM, they got a WhatsApp message saying their efforts bore some small fruit. On September 24th, Congressman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) had sent a letter with 102 colleagues asking the United States to “independently investigate whether [Eygi’s death] was a homicide.” The letter asked for Blinken’s prompt response by October 4th. Over two months past that deadline—and less than a day after meeting with the Eygis—Blinken’s office officially replied.

A clean, procedural page-and-a-half, the letter reiterated the same thing the family spent all day hearing: that the United States will wait for Israel to investigate its own army’s killing of a US citizen. “We continue to urge the government of Israel to conduct a swift, thorough and transparent investigation,” the State Department’s spokesperson wrote. “A US citizen killed at the hands of those charged to protect is not acceptable.” It near-exactly echoed Blinken’s letter to the Corries from a decade ago: then, as now, the US “urged” Israel towards “a thorough, transparent, and credible investigation.” 

Was it a sign towards progress? “It’s a sign towards process,” Parker, the lawyer, said.  

His weary answer spoke to the years he has spent doing this work. He worked with Shireen Abu Akleh’s family, facilitating meetings with legislators; his law firm, the Center for Constitutional Rights, has represented the Corries. And here he was, calling a car to bring the Eygis to a vigil in honor of Ayşenur. “They don’t tell you the hardest part is all the logistics,” he said, jabbing at his phone to select an Uber XL.

At the vigil that evening, Palestinian Youth Movement representatives spoke passionately of an arms embargo; Rep. Rashida Tlaib invoked Eygi’s desire to be an advocate for others. Attendees lined up to light candles beneath a mural of Ayşenur Eygi and Rachel Corrie’s faces. 

One guest limped in and spent most of the vigil watching from the sidelines. It was Daniel Santiago, a teacher from Jersey City, who in August was shot by IDF forces on the same hillside as Eygi. Santiago was luckier: he was only hit in the leg. He told me he took the day off work and took a bus down to DC to be with the Eygis. 

“I wanted to see if they needed anything,” he said.

He leaned on a walking stick given to him by young activists in Beita. In frigid, damp weather like this, he said, the place the bullet tore through his leg still ached. 

As the vigil ended, the rain turned from a drizzle to a downpour. Ali wrapped his wife’s scarf around his neck. 

Over and over throughout their time in DC, Eygi’s family repeated Biden’s words: “If you harm an American, we will respond.” But reducing the discussion of Eygi’s life to her citizenship—to show uncertain legislators that her killing merited an American response—obscured her personhood. “She was also a human being,” Tlaib said, “who deserved to live.” 

That very human-ness seemed the hardest thing to prove, no matter how many anecdotes the Eygis produced. “I stood in this exact same place with the family of Shireen Abu Akleh,” Tlaib remembered. The pattern repeated. “If [the family] told a little bit more about Shireen Abu Akleh’s life, would [officials] care more? If they just share another story about Ayşenur, will [the government] care more? And yet, here we are. Twenty years later we are still waiting for justice for Rachel Corrie.”

Two days into his trip to DC, after trying over and over again to prove his wife was human, Hamid Ali began to find his anger.

“I have been forced to sideline my grief in order to scrape and beg daily, for the past three months, to plead with the Biden administration to seek justice for my wife,” he said, after another round of meetings with legislators. He told Eygi’s story—her short life, her violent death—to so many people. Each time, he received condolences, but few commitments.

“Awaiting details of an Israeli investigation with no foreseeable deadline for the past 100 days is not a response,” Ali insisted. “Continuously framing this unjust killing as an unfortunate accident to our grieving family is not a response.” The anger had arrived, and it mixed with heartache and self-doubt.

“I always hate when they ask me things like, ‘tell me about Ayşenur,’” Ali said on his final day in DC. “Because I don’t feel like I ever do a good job.” 

Any single story failed to capture who she was: he could tell them about Ayşenur the activist, who raised tens of thousands of dollars to feed people in Gaza. He could tell them about her fierce love for her family, or about her sense of humor, or about the way she’d act out imaginary reality TV cooking competitions in her kitchen. He could tell them about the time she might have spent with her seven-month-old nephew, had she lived. “It’s like, what do you really want to hear?” he asked.

He wanted them to understand that Eygi was anything but a symbol. He wanted them to know her life meant more than the terrible pattern of her death. 

It’s hard to predict where Eygi’s case will go over the next four years, Brad Parker told me in early January. “It could be there’s no change at all, and it just isn’t treated as a priority,” he said. Trump might take the case up out of sheer animosity towards Biden—or act more outwardly hostile towards hearing the Eygi family than his predecessor. 

“There’s no short path in sight,” Parker said. But he is not entirely without hope: in the 23 years since Rachel Corrie’s death, American public opinion has shifted dramatically. Half the people in this country support ending weapons shipments to Israel, according to a recent poll, and thousands have participated in protests on behalf of the Palestinian people. In Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, many young Americans cannot help but see themselves.

These changes were brought about, Parker said, “in part because the individual stories the families have been telling, measured against the systemic violations that are increasingly visible through social media, show the human impact of occupation.” 

Ali called those small changes “the ripples.” 

“[The Corries] said they didn’t know it, but all their efforts—all their work they had done to get justice for Rachel—was not for her,” Ali said. “She wouldn’t benefit by it anymore. It was for the next person. It was for Ayşenur. They just didn’t know her name yet.”

This was the end of “one chapter.” But it was also, if the experiences of the Corrie and Abu Akleh families are anything to go by, the beginning of another very long story. 

“Ayşenur is not going to benefit from the efforts we have made. I have little hope,” Ali said. “So it’s for the next person—so the next family won’t have to go through as much.”

“It doesn’t get easier,” Ali remembered Craig Corrie telling him months earlier. “You just get stronger.”

Najib Aminy contributed reporting.

In the immediate aftermath of the New Year’s truck attack that killed 14 people and injured dozens in New Orleans, President-elect Donald Trump baselessly—and, it turns out, falsely—suggested that the Biden administration’s immigration policies were to blame.

“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” Trump wrote on Truth Social just after 10:45 a.m. on New Year’s Day. (Later in the post, he added: “Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department.”)

While the attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar—who died in a shootout with police—had proclaimed his allegiance to ISIS, according to the FBI, he was, in fact, a US citizen who grew up in Texas and served in the US Army. Trump has yet to clearly correct the record. In posts the following day, he faulted authorities for failing to protect “Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself,” and he argued: “With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”

When I asked if Trump would more directly correct his original false statement, the incoming president’s communications director, Steven Cheung, said I was “too big of a moron to actually comprehend what he was posting about.” Cheung suggested that Trump was referring to the broader problem of violent criminals and “radical Islamic terrorism” crossing the border.

Top members of the GOP have also spread version’s of Trump’s claim, attempting to connect Biden’s border policies to the attack. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) did so on Fox News on Thursday, saying congressional Republicans “have been ringing the alarms” about “terrorism and the wide open border, the idea that dangerous people were coming here in droves and setting up potentially terrorist cells around the country.” Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) also posted on X, linking news of the attack to border and immigration policies. A spokesperson for Crane said Sunday that his post “simply says that our open border and legal immigration system create additional vulnerabilities to Americans, so there’s nothing to correct.” Spokespeople for Greene and Johnson did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones.

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., echoed his father’s falsehoods in a New Year’s Day post on X, writing: “Biden’s parting gift to America — migrant terrorists.”

As Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on This Week Sunday: “The assailant who perpetrated the terrorist attack in New Orleans was born in the United States, raised in the United States, and served in our armed forces. It is not an issue of the border.”

“The assailant who perpetrated the terrorist attack in New Orleans was born in the United States, raised in the United States and served in our armed forces. It is not an issue of the border,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says. https://t.co/rRMUv9vl3M pic.twitter.com/CdxBxDH9S1

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 5, 2025

The GOP, however, seems largely unwilling to back down. Instead, they continue to show they’re willing to sacrifice immigrants at the altar of Trump.

Jeff Bezos and his companies have seemingly been doing everything they can to get into Donald Trump’s good graces before he returns to the Oval Office.

This includes: Donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration via Amazon; Dining with Trump and Elon Musk recently at Mar-a-Lago; and, of course, spiking an editorial endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris slated to run in the Washington Post, which Bezos also owns—a decision that reportedly cost the Post as many as 300,000 subscribers who canceled in the immediate aftermath.

As of this weekend, there appear to be new additions to this list. First off, the Washington Post killed a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ann Telnaes that satirized the slate of tech and media billionaires practically prostrating themselves at Trump’s feet. The cartoon included sketches of Bezos; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Meta, which also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee; Sam Altman of OpenAI, who made a $1 million donation; Patrick Soon-Shiong of the LA Times, who killed that paper’s endorsement of Harris; and the Walt Disney Company, owner of ABC News, which recently made the controversial decision to pay $15 million to settle a defamation suit brought by Trump.

The Washington Post‘s editorial page editor, David Shipley, said in a statement provided by the paper’s spokesperson that he killed the cartoon because the Post had recently run a column on the same matter and had another scheduled for publication. “Not every editorial judgement is a reflection of a malign force…,” he said. “The only bias was against repetition.” (The paper has also run several columns criticizing the decision to kill the Harris endorsement.)

.@AnnTelnaes resigned after the Washington Post editorial page killed her cartoon. It’s worth a share.

Big Tech executives are bending the knee to Donald Trump and it’s no surprise why: Billionaires like Jeff Bezos like paying a lower tax rate than a public school teacher. pic.twitter.com/xv6e5dJVf4

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) January 4, 2025

In a Substack piece announcing that she was quitting the Post in protest of the decision, Telnaes called the episode “dangerous for a free press.”

“Owners of such press organizations are responsible for safeguarding that free press—and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press,” Telnaes wrote.

The board of directors for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists backed Telnaes up, saying in a statement: “Editorial cartooning is the tip of the spear in opinion, and the Post’s cowering further soils their once-stellar reputation for standing up and speaking truth to power. We weep for the loss of this once great newspaper.”

The Post isn’t the only Bezos media company in the news this weekend. Amazon Studios is reportedly helping bring to life a documentary focused on soon-to-be-First-Lady and conspiracy theorist Melania Trump. Fox News reports that Amazon Prime licensed the documentary, expected to be released in theaters and on streaming in the second half of this year. Filming began last month, and Melania is an executive producer, Fox reports.

Keep in mind that given the content of her eponymous memoir—not to mention the well-worn phenomenon of celebrities producing documentaries about themselves as a PR tactic (remember the 6-hour Harry and Meghan Netflix special?)—the odds of this documentary actually providing “an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look” at Melania, as Amazon claims it will, seem low. Representatives for Amazon did not respond to questions from Mother Jones, including about the extent of any involvement from Bezos and whether Melania will have any control over the film’s editing.

This is a great time to remember, as our CEO Monika Bauerlein put it: Billionaire-owned newsrooms are not our only option.

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

Explosions roared through the canyons lining the Klamath River earlier this year, signaling a new chapter for the region that hugs the Oregon-California border.

In October, the removal of four hydroelectric dams built on the river was completed—the largest project of its kind in US history.

The blast of the final dam was just the beginning. The work to restore the river, which winds 263 miles from the volcanic Cascade mountain range in Oregon to the Pacific coast in northern California, is now under way. Already it’s been among the most hopeful environmental stories of past years.

“It has been more successful than we ever imagined,” said Ren Brownell, the spokesperson for the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, a nonprofit created to oversee and implement the removal, adding: “There’s an incredible amount of joy.”

The Klamath River was once an ecological powerhouse—the third-largest salmon-producing river in the American west. Its basin covered more than 9.4 million acres and its network of wetlands was the largest in the region. The ecosystem was home to millions of migrating birds. Tribes including the Hoopa, Karuk, Klamath, Modoc, and Yurok thrived in this bountiful and beautiful watershed for thousands of years, with the river providing both sustenance and ritual.

Over the last hundred years, these landscapes have been drastically altered.

After the first dam began operating in 1918—one of four that would eventually be forged in the lower Klamath to provide hydroelectric power to communities nearby—the course of the river was changed. The dams obstructed the migration of salmon and other native species, which help carry nutrients into the systems from the ocean, to cascading effects.

They also held on to huge stores of sediment that would otherwise have flowed downriver, and created shallow reservoirs that quickly heated when the weather warmed. Increased water temperatures in the river allowed toxic algal blooms to thrive.

In recent decades, the climate crisis has turned up the dial, deepening droughts and fueling a rise in catastrophic fire as the region grows ever hotter. The impacts only increased as more water was diverted to support the farming and ranching in the region, and more habitat was altered by mining and logging.

Twenty-eight types of salmon and steelhead trout, seen as indicator species that represent the health of the ecosystems they live in, have been listed as threatened or endangered.

As the Klamath ecosystem deteriorated, there was growing recognition that removing the dams would be a crucial first step in helping the region recover and build resilience in a warming world.

“We essentially performed a quadruple bypass on the river this last year—we knew there would be short-term impacts.”

But, faced with a strong resistance to change in local communities tucked around the reservoirs and a long history of difficult battles over water in the parched landscapes in the west, dam removal seemed all but impossible. The land for the dams was taken from tribes during the throes of colonization and development and more recently supported energy corporations that had shareholders to answer to.

Then, in 2002, disaster struck. Algae flourished in the shallow warming waters that year, exacerbated by the dams and decisions from the US Bureau of Reclamation to divert vital flows to farms, leaving little for fish. The event killed 70,000 salmon and thousands of other species, resulting in one of the worst die-offs ever to occur in the US.

The layers of fish floating belly-up sent an important signal of the horrors that could continue into the future if the dams remained. Forming a coalition, tribes up and down the Klamath launched a fierce campaign to educate the public, inform the shareholders of the companies that owned and operated the dams, and petition their boards. They protested and attended public hearings, and engaged with state and federal officials.

It took decades of advocacy to convince PacifiCorp, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, to let go of the aging infrastructure straddling the Oregon-California border. But in the mid-aughts, assured by shifts in public opinion and incentivized by the steep costs to relicense the dams, the company agreed it was time to see them go.

In November 2020, nearly 20 years after the die-off, an agreement was forged between a long list of stakeholders that included tribal and state governments and federal agencies. The Klamath River Renewal Corporation was created to oversee and implement the removal.

The organization had to help bring residents near the reservoirs onboard, navigate dozens of species-management plans, and model how outdoor-recreation enthusiasts could continue to enjoy the river. Ranchers and fishers, environmentalists and farmers, and locals and visitors all had connections to the basin, and were eager to weigh in. “It has been a tremendous rollercoaster,” said Brownell. “Having the river’s health in your hands is an incredible burden to carry.”

Brownell, who grew up along the riverbanks, was standing in the canyon as the blast of the first dam released flows and the river that had been held over the last hundred years found its way back to itself. “I got to watch the water come down through the canyon and reconnect with the river below. I watched the river re-establish itself there forevermore,” she said. It was the most exciting moment of the year.

There were moments of trauma along the way. Over the 100 years the dams were standing, they had held back 15 million cubic yards of sediment. When the dams were removed, the heavy dead organic matter had to run downriver, soaking up oxygen in the water. Extensive modeling had predicted a severe impact on aquatic life, but no one knew how bad it would get or how long it would take for the river to regain its health. Some models predicted the suffocating conditions could linger for up to a month.

“I was braced and prepared but it was still tremendously hard,” said Brownell, recalling how the water, rid of oxygen, looked like oil as it cascaded through its banks.

“It is a new era for us—there are good things to come.”

“You can easily compare a river’s health to an individual’s health,” she said. “Often when someone is sick, they are going to get worse before they get better. We essentially performed a quadruple bypass on the river this last year—we knew there would be short-term impacts.

“The whole time everyone was so excited because it felt like the start of something. I just felt sick,” she said.

Leaf Hillman, a Karuk tribal ceremonial leader who has dedicated decades to seeing this project come to fruition, helped keep hopes high with assurances that these were signs of healing. “For me it was beautiful,” he said, recalling how he felt even when the rushing waters became clouded by silt. “I could envision what it was going to look like—a restored river.”

In the end, the river lacked oxygen for only two 24-hour periods, a far shorter time than scientists had feared.

As 2025 begins, so does the real work. “It is a new era for us—there are good things to come,” Hillman said.

He is looking forward to the work ahead, especially the work to ensure fish can reach “pristine habitat” in tributaries above the Upper Klamath Lake.

With 400 miles of habitat for salmon and other native species restored, and 2,200 acres made available after spending a century submerged, stakeholders are envisioning a future for these lands and those who rely on them. Already, native seeds have been strewn along the banks and in the areas once vibrant with vegetation.

There have already been strong signs of their success.

In late November, threatened coho salmon were seen in the upper Klamath River basin for the first time in more than 60 years, according to the California department of fish and wildlife. Other animals are benefiting, too, including north-western pond turtles, freshwater mussels, beavers and river otters.

Strong winter rains have also helped the rebound. “The river is doing what rivers do—redistributing sediments,” Hillman said, calling the gift of wet weather the “icing on the cake.”

“We have a lot more work to do,” he added, “but it’s a good omen.”

The roughly 2,800 acres of land sacred to the Shasta Indian Nation that had been drowned and buried under a reservoir created by one of the dams has been returned to them. The Kikacéki and Kutarawaxu bands who once called the area home were decimated by colonists in the 1800s, after the lure of gold, mining, logging and ranching drew throngs of people to the region. The small tribe that remained was then pushed from their homes through eminent domain to make way for construction of the dams to begin.

The Guardian was unable to speak to representatives of Shasta Indian Nation on record, but they have recounted the painful history endured by their ancestors and what the next chapter means to them.

“Today is a turning point in the history of the Shasta people,” Janice Crowe, the Shasta Indian Nation chair, told AZCentral. “Now we can return home, return to culture, return to ceremony and begin to weave a new story for the next generation of Shasta, who will get to call our ancestral lands home once again.”

With successes, though, there may still be setbacks. The water is still turbid as the river continues to cleanse itself of sediment. There’s a lot of data to wade through and challenges to overcome. The effects of the climate crisis will continue to unfold.

In the farther parts of the river, Klamath tribal leaders are still waiting to see the salmon that were lost to their homelands more than 100 years ago. Dams still stand in the northern stretches of the river.

But for advocates, the dams’ removal on its own serves as a strong reminder that change is possible.

Toz Soto, a fish biologist and manager of the Karuk Tribe fisheries program, said with a laugh that he was skeptical right up until the moment they blasted through the concrete. But, by convincing the public that removing the dams made sense, “not just as a social justice issue for tribal health but also from an economic standpoint,” he said, the wheels of change started to turn.

As the work continues, Soto is looking upon it with a smile.

“There were moments, and those are behind me,” he said. He’s hopeful for the future, and excited to start the reintroduction of spring-run chinook salmon that otherwise would never have had a chance. Water conditions will continue to improve with time, and they are already far better than they were a year ago.

“It is quite impressive,” he added. “I am so programmed going up there to look at a funky, nasty reservoir. Now it’s just like—wow. It’s a river again.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It was made possible through a partnership between Grist and WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago region.

It takes approximately 700,000 megawatt hours of electricity to power Chicago’s more than 400 municipal buildings every year. As of January 1, every single one of them—including 98 fire stations, two international airports, and two of the largest water treatment plants on the planet—is running on renewable energy, thanks largely to Illinois’ newest and largest solar farm.

The move is projected to cut the carbon footprint of the country’s third-largest city by approximately 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year—the equivalent of taking 62,000 cars off the road, according to the city.

Local decarbonization efforts like Chicago’s are taking on increasing significance as President-elect Donald Trump promises to reduce federal support for climate action. With the outgoing Biden administration doubling down on an international pledge to get the US to net-zero emissions by 2050, cities, states, and private-sector players across the country will have to pick up the slack.

Chicago is one of several US cities that are taking advantage of their bulk-buying power to spur new carbon-free energy development.  “It’s a plan that gets the city to take action on climate and also leverages our buying power to generate new opportunities for Chicagoans and the state,” said Angela Tovar, Chicago’s chief sustainability officer. “There’s opportunities everywhere.”

Chicago’s switch to renewable energy has been almost a decade in the making. The goal of sourcing the city’s power purely from carbon-free sources was first established by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2017. His successor, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, struck a 2022 deal with Constellation, an electricity supplier, to purchase the city’s energy from the developer Swift Current Energy beginning in 2025. 

Swift Current began construction on the 3,800-acre, 593-megawatt solar farm in central Illinois as part of the same five-year, $422 million agreement. Straddling two counties, the Double Black Diamond Solar project is now the largest solar installation east of the Mississippi River. It can produce enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes, according to Swift Current’s vice president of origination, Caroline Mann. 

Chicago alone has agreed to purchase approximately half the installation’s total output, which will cover about 70 percent of its municipal buildings’ electricity needs. City officials plan to cover the remaining 30 percent through the purchase of renewable energy credits. 

“That’s really a feature and not a bug of our plan,” said Deputy Chief Sustainability Officer Jared Policicchio. He added that he hopes the city’s demand for 100 percent renewable energy will encourage additional clean energy development locally, albeit on a much smaller scale, which will create new sources of power that the city can then purchase directly, in lieu of credits. “Our goal over the next several years is that we reach a point where we’re not buying renewable energy credits.” 

More than 700 other US cities and towns have signed similar purchasing agreements since 2015, according to a 2022 study from the World Resources Institute. Only one city, Houston, has a larger renewable energy deal than Chicago, according to Matthew Popkin, the cities and communities US program manager at Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit whose research focuses on decarbonization. However, he added, no other contract has added as much new renewable power to the grid as Chicago’s.

“Part of Chicago’s goal was what’s called ‘additionality’: bringing new resources into the market and onto the grid here,” said Popkin. 

Chicago also secured a $400,000 annual commitment from Constellation and Swift Current for clean energy workforce training, including training via Chicago Women in Trades, a nonprofit aiming to increase the number of women in union construction and manufacturing jobs. 

The economic benefits extend past the city’s limits: According to Swift Current, approximately $100 million in new tax revenue is projected to flow into Sangamon County and Morgan County, which are home to the Double Black Diamond Solar site, over the project’s operational life. 

“Cities and other local governments just don’t appreciate their ability to not just support their residents but also shape markets,” said Popkin. “Chicago is demonstrating directly how cities can lead by example, implement ambitious goals amidst evolving state and federal policy changes, and leverage their purchasing power to support a more equitable renewable energy future.”

Alex Dane, the World Resource Institute’s senior manager for clean energy innovation and partnerships in the US energy program, said many cities have set two renewable energy goals: one for municipal operations and a second goal for the community at large. Even though the latter is “a little bit harder to get to, and the timeline is a little bit further out,” said Dane, the community-side goals begin to seem less lofty once a city has decarbonized the assets it directly controls.

Indeed, Chicago’s new milestone is the first step in a broader goal to source the energy for all buildings in the city from renewables by 2035. That would make it the largest city in the country to do so, according to the Sierra Club.

Dane said it will be increasingly important for cities, towns, and states to drive their own efforts to reduce emissions, build greener economies, and meet local climate goals. He said moves like Chicago’s prove that they are capable, no matter what’s on the horizon at the federal level. 

“That is an imperative thing to know, that state, city, county action is a durable pathway, even under the next administration, and [it] needs to happen,” said Dane. “The juice is definitely still worth the squeeze.”

In 2015, hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and repression were trying to reach safe havens in Europe. From his home in Norway, Tommy Olsen decided to travel to Greece, a major gateway for migrants and refugees. He joined hundreds of volunteers helping the new arrivals and later created an NGO, the Aegean Boat Report, which monitors the plight of asylum seekers in Europe.

Today, Olsen is a wanted man in Greece, caught up in a crackdown on refugees and people trying to defend their right to asylum.

“I didn’t know what I walked into,” Olsen says.

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Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, has condemned Greece’s harsh migration policies and the way its government is targeting activists like Olsen. But she says Europe as a whole is also to blame.

“The whole notion of migration is a dirty word now,” she says. “The whole notion of refugees is a dirty word now.”

This week on Reveal, reporters Dinah Rothenberg and Viola Funk from the Berlin podcast studio ACB Stories take us to Greece, where refugees and human rights defenders face legal and sometimes physical attacks from authorities trying to seal the country’s borders.

Axios reported on Friday that Apple CEO Tim Cook will donate $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration, the latest tech company figure to do so. These donations—which aren’t covered by campaign finance law and can be unlimited—signal a clear willingness to work with the Trump administration and a desire to curry favor with the once and future president. 

The tech sector is particularly eager to suck up.

In December, Meta and Amazon donated $1 million to the inauguration committee, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman said he planned to do the same. Uber and its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi have both donated $1 million apiece (even as the company’s chief legal officer Tony West is vice president Kamala Harris’ brother-in-law). The donations to Trump’s inauguaral committee total about $150 million so far, a record-breaking sum, with more expected to flow in. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos also dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump just before Christmas, joined by Elon Musk.

It’s common, of course, for companies to make donations to inaugural committees to signal that they intend to work with the new administration; President Biden’s inaugural committee ultimately raised $62 million, including from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Pfizer, and Bank of America. Amazon donated $267,000—a significantly lower sum than they’re now giving Trump— while Google gave $337,000. (Google has not announced any donations to Trump’s second inauguration.) 

The tech sector is particularly eager to suck up to Trump now, as they seek policies favorable to artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. (Crypto companies have donated especially lavishly to the inaugural committee; the largest single donation comes from Ripple, which announced a $5 million contribution in XRP, its own crypto token.) Parts of the sector are also clearly hoping to avoid backlash from people like Andrew Ferguson, Trump’s pick to chair the Federal Trade Commission, who has said he will use his perch to fight “censorship” of conservative viewpoints from Big Tech and, of course, go after “wokeness.” Trump and many others in his incoming administration are unusually obsessed with tech companies, seeing them as architects of conservative suppression, and have made clear that balancing the scales is one of their first priorities. 

“Big Tech should be accountable for years of censorship and deplatforming,” tweeted venture capitalist David Sacks on Twitter, in a reply to Elon Musk and far-right figure Laura Loomer. “It’s got to stop.” Trump has announced that Sacks will serve as an AI and cryptocurrency “czar” in his new administration, and also lead a council of science and tech advisers. 

The money flowing into Trump’s various coffers also isn’t limited to donations from the tech sector. The New York Times reported Saturday that post-election donations to Trump-affiliated entities—benefitting the inauguration, his eventual presidential library, and the Make America Great Again Inc. super-PAC—have totaled $200 million. 

“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump posted on TruthSocial, shortly after the dinner with Bezos. For once, what he’s saying appears to be completely true.

Elon Musk has spent the last few days on X expressing his support for Reform UK, a far-right populist party founded by Brexit booster Nigel Farage. This is the second time in recent weeks Musk has used X to try to whip up support for far-right politicians outside the United States; he’s also spent a good deal of time championing Germany’s AfD party, claiming on X and in a German newspaper op-ed that the ultra-nationalist party is that country’s “only hope”—wording he also used when praising Reform. 

Musk has also promoted virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric from the UK.

In both cases, Musk’s opposition to immigration—despite being an immigrant to the United State himself—seems to play a key role in his support for the ultra-nationalist parties. Reform bills itself as offering “common sense policies on immigration, the cost of living, energy and national sovereignty.” In practice, that’s meant calling for a freeze on “non-essential” immigration, a message that seems to have resonated with some older white voters in Britain. 

Musk has also promoted virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric from the UK, reposting a British Twitter user’s complaint about a sprawling child sexual abuse scandal in which gangs of men in the north of England and the Midlands sexually exploited children for at least a decade. Sometimes referred to as the Rotherham scandal, the perpetrators were overwhelmingly British-Pakistani men who exploited white girls; Andrew Norfolk, the journalist who uncovered the scandal in 2011, told the BBC recently that the case “was a dream story for the far-right,” adding, “They had no interest in solutions, they were interested in exploiting the situation.”

“Vote Reform,” Musk’s tweet added in his repost. “It’s the only hope.” 

Farage claimed in December that Musk was in talks to make a donation to Reform after the two men and Reform’s treasurer Nick Candy met at Mar-a-Lago. (Musk could legally donate through X because the company has a UK office, but the news that he’s considering doing so has spurred calls for campaign finance reform.) Candy said in an interview that “a number of billionaires” were considering donating to the party  

Amid his warm missives about ultra-nationalist leaders, Musk also posted approvingly about English far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who has been jailed for contempt of court after repeatedly making false claims about Jamal Hijazi, a teenage Syrian refugee who was subjected to violent bullying and attacked on a school playground in West Yorkshire. Robinson was found to have libeled Hijazi in 2021 and ordered to pay him 100,000 pounds; instead, Robinson made a documentary falsely claiming Hijazi was the aggressor, and depicting himself as a martyr for free speech for discussing the case. (Robinson’s lawyer told a judge that the film was “effectively commissioned” by Infowars, which is owned by American conspiracy mega-entrepreneur Alex Jones, explaining it funded production and provided equipment.) 

“Free Tommy Robinson!” Musk wrote. He also shared Robinson’s documentary; that tweet has been viewed two million times. 

Musk is far from the only figure on the American right to recently indulge in foreign far-right politics and their attendant controversies. Chaya Raichik, the conservative activist behind Libs of TikTok, has also posted about the Rotherham scandal, as has tech billionaire and Trump backer Bill Ackman, who criticized UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and King Charles, for some reason, for not taking action. American figures posting about the scandal give the appearance of having learned about it quite recently, and seem unaware of the long history of criminal and civil investigations launched since the scandal came to light, and that dozens of men have been convicted related charges. While the UK’s Conservative party has called for a new national investigation into the case, the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council released an independent report in 2014.

Besides the UK and Germany, there are clear signs that Musk may yet involve himself in Italian politics. He’s formed a very public friendship with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has a long history in ultra-nationalist politics. Meloni has dubbed the rocket- and satellite-magnate “a genius,” but promised political leaders that she wouldn’t be influenced by him when regulating “private activity in space.”    

Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. The title was Jimmy Carter’s idea. Peace talks were nonexistent, Israel showed no sign of ending its control over the lives of millions of Palestinians, and the United States was not doing anything to stop it. Carter wanted to be provocative. He succeeded.

The well-organized backlash to Carter’s 2006 book was captured by an ad in the New York Times from the Anti-Defamation League that declared: “There’s only one honest thing about President Carter’s new book. The criticism.” Included below were denunciations from Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and DNC Chairman Howard Dean. Carter, who’d brought together Israel and Egypt at Camp David in 1978 and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, said he was being called a bigot and an antisemite for the first time in his life.

On Sunday, December 29, the 39th president of the United States died at the age of 100. Eighteen years after it was published, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid is representative of an essential part of his legacy. Carter saw where Israel was headed with its refusal to countenance Palestinian statehood, and correctly warned it would end tragically for both sides. In response, the American mainstream treated him as a crank at best and an antisemite at worst. With Palestinians now suffering the worst violence in their history, which Amnesty International recently concluded constitutes genocide, it is more important than ever to recognize the truth of Carter’s claim that peace would only come when Israel—likely under pressure from the United States—abandoned its efforts to deprive Palestinians of sovereignty in their homeland.

The heart of Carter’s argument was that Israel has faced the same choice for most of its history. In exchange for peace, it could return the land it began illegally occupying after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. That path would leave Israel with about 78 percent of what was once Palestine, while Palestinians would have control over the remaining 22 percent in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank. Alternatively, Israel could try to take everything, thereby forcing millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories to live under a system of apartheid. Carter saw that Israel was taking the second path but felt that it was not too late to pull back.

Palestine Peace Not Apartheid was a short book. Anyone, whether they know a little or a lot, could follow Carter’s argument and understand why he was appalled. If anything, Carter went too easy on Israel. Like many American liberals, he was intent to draw a distinction between Israel’s actions on its side of the so-called Green Line and what it did beyond it in the occupied territories. When Carter looked at a map of Israel and the West Bank, he saw democracy on the left and apartheid on the right. He didn’t stop to ask if one society could inflict such a plague on another without being deeply ill itself. With Israel now run by a far-right government that includes proud bigots in senior posts, it is clear the answer was no.

The reaction to Carter from the mainstream media can be divided into two main camps: critics who read the book and critics who almost certainly didn’t. The latter group asked Carter about the part they had absorbed: its title. Why use such an inflammatory word? Wasn’t it counterproductive? No, Carter said over and over in the interviews he sat for during the book tour. He believed that apartheid, with its evocation of white South Africa, was more than fair.

In some respects, the oppression faced by Palestinians was more severe in his view. “If you go to Palestine to see what’s being done to the Palestinians, their land completely taken away from them, all of their basic rights taken away from them, they have to have passes to go anywhere,” Carter said on PBS. “I would say, in many ways, it’s worse than the treatment of Black people in South Africa under apartheid. It’s worse.” (The Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem concluded in 2021 that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line live under apartheid; Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both use the term as well.)

The critics who had read the book mostly treated Carter with exasperated condescension. In the Washington Post, Jeffrey Goldberg, who served in the Israeli army and is now the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, labeled it a “cynical book” with a “bait-and-switch title” before arguing that Carter was wrong to focus so heavily on the settlements Israel was illegally building in the West Bank:

The settlement movement has been a tragedy, of course. Settlements, and the expansionist ideology they represent, have done great damage to the Zionist dream of a Jewish and democratic state; many Palestinians, and many Israelis, have died on the altar of settlement. The good news is that the people of Israel have fallen out of love with the settlers, who themselves now know that they have no future. After all, when Ariel Sharon abandoned the settlement dream—as the former prime minister did when he forcibly removed some 8,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip during Israel’s unilateral pullout in July 2005—even the most myopic among the settlement movement’s leaders came to understand that the end is near.

The prediction proved almost entirely wrong. There were about 450,000 settlers in the occupied territories at the time. Today, there are roughly 700,000, new settlements continue to be approved, and the settler movement is more powerful than ever.

In the Post’s opinion pages, Deborah Lipstadt, who was Biden’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, accused Carter of relying on “traditional antisemitic canards.” As evidence, she cited Carter saying that it was “political suicide” to have a “balanced position” on Israel and his having noted that “most of the condemnations of my book came from Jewish-American” groups. “Even if unconscious, such stereotyping from a man of his stature is noteworthy,” she added. “When David Duke spouts it, I yawn. When Jimmy Carter does, I shudder.”

The New York Times pushed back against the insinuations that Carter was an antisemite but was otherwise dismissive of what a reviewer called Carter’s “strange little book.” Nor was the condemnation limited to major newspapers. A review in Slate was headlined: “It’s Not Apartheid: Jimmy Carter’s moronic new book about Israel.”

Henry Siegman, a German-born Jew who fled the Nazis as a child before becoming the executive director of the American Jewish Congress and emerging as one of Israel’s most insightful critics, provided one of the few positive responses. Siegman wrote for The Nation that Carter was not anti-Israeli, much less antisemitic. He was just equally sympathetic to the suffering of Palestinians. That got Carter into trouble with Westerners and Israelis for whom the “Palestinian ordeal is invisible and might as well be taking place on the far side of the moon for all they know or seem to care about it.”

Carter’s response to the uproar was captured in what may have been a first in film history: A feature-length documentary about a book tour from a major Hollywood director. In Man From Plains, the late Jonathan Demme, whose previous credits included The Silence of the Lambs, followed the unusually vigorous 82-year-old—the former Navy officer swimming laps in hotel pools serves as B-roll more than once—as he promoted his new book across the country.

The documentary begins with Carter showing Demme the land his family had farmed in Georgia for the better part of two centuries. He returns to how that rootedness shaped his view of Palestine later in the film. “I own land in South Georgia that my family has had since 1833. I can just imagine how it would feel and what my physical reaction would be if a foreign people came in with a chainsaw and cut down my ancient trees,” Carter said. “This is so completely at odds with what I’ve always envisioned as the wonderful new nation of Israel—based on peace and justice and equity and human rights and democracy—that it’s almost inconceivable.”

It was clear from remarks like those and others that he approached the conflict free of the bigotry he was accused of. His highest priority was securing peace in what, as a devout Christian, he considered to be the Holy Land. With Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, he tried to prevent the tragedy he saw coming. “It is obvious that the Palestinians will be left with no territory in which to establish a viable state,” Carter wrote. “The Palestinians will have a future impossible for them or any responsible portion of the international community to accept, and Israel’s permanent status will be increasingly troubled and uncertain as deprived people fight oppression.”

In the next paragraph, Carter offered a now unsettling warning about what form that violent resistance might take. He explained that Palestinian and Lebanese militants knew the value of a captured Israeli soldier or civilian. As a result, absent an Israeli commitment to peace, militants would have an incentive to obtain hostages. Israel would then respond with overwhelming and disproportionate force. But it likely wouldn’t be enough to destroy the hostage takers, Carter warned. After the bombs stopped falling, they would emerge more popular than ever.