Vice President Kamala Harris accepted an invitation from CNN to debate Donald Trump for a second time on October 23. Now the ball is in the former president’s court.
I will gladly accept a second presidential debate on October 23.
After getting trounced by Harris in their first debateearlier this month, Trump initially ruled out a second face-off. “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” he posted on Truth Social two days after the candidates faced off on ABC. But by that Friday, he seemed more open to the idea. “Maybe if I got in the right mood, I don’t know,” he told reporters during a news conference in California.
Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement that “Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate.”
Trump’s performance in the last debate was largely characterized by a series of malicious and incoherent lies. As my colleague David Corn wrote:
He tossed out—often in a hard-to-follow jumble of words that probably could only be deciphered by his true devotees—one debunked lie after another. Undocumented immigrants are stealing and eating people’s pets in Ohio. (“I see people on television talking about it,” he said as way of confirmation.) And undocumented migrants are violently taking over apartment complexes in Colorado. Doctors in Democratic states are executing babies after they are born. Crime is down throughout the world but increasing in the United States. Everyone—Democrats, Republicans, and all legal scholars—wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. Harris and the Democrats are scheming to confiscate all guns. Joe Biden has pocketed money from Ukraine and China. Harris is a “Marxist” and hates Jews, Arabs, and Israel. He has had no connection to Project 2025. Nancy Pelosi was responsible for the violence on January 6. Top professors at the Wharton School have praised his tariffs plan (which many economists have said will lead to inflation and unemployment). The economy when he was president was the best ever.
Trump, apparently, saw this as a win. “In the World of Boxing or UFC, when a Fighter gets beaten or knocked out, they get up and scream, ‘I DEMAND A REMATCH, I DEMAND A REMATCH!’ Well, it’s no different with a Debate. She was beaten badly last night. Every Poll has us WINNING,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Whether or not Harris and Trump face each other again, their running mates Tim Walz and JD Vance will take part in a debate on October 1, hosted by CBS News.
Donald Trump will be campaigning in North Carolina today—without Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor by his side. The Trump campaign has remained mum about Robinson, a top Trump ally, since CNN reported on Thursday that Robinson had made a series of “inflammatory comments” on a pornographic message board more than a decade ago, including referring to himself as a “black NAZI!” and praisingMein Kampf as a “good read.”
This wasn’t Robinson’s first scandal. Last October, Jewish Insider reported that Robinson had made antisemitic comments on social media going back a decade, including sharing a quote about racial pride that has been attributed to Adolf Hitler.
Trump endorsed Robinson in March despite these remarks, even referring to the candidate, who has denied that systemic racism exists, as “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
Trump won North Carolina in 2020 with his narrowest margin of victory. Politicoreports that the Harris campaign sees the scandal as an opening to appeal to voters in the state. “Trump made Mark Robinson,” advisers wrote in a memo, “and he will have to answer for him.”
On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign released a new ad highlighting Trump’s past praise of Robinson, and Robinson’s comments on abortion. The ad includes a clip where Robinson says, “abortion in this country is about killing a child because you aren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”
In a video on Thursday, Robinson denied writing the posts revealed by CNN. “You know my words, you know my character, and you know I have been completely transparent in this race and before.”
Drive through rural Minnesota in high summer and you’ll take in a view that dominates nearly the entire US Midwest: an emerald sea of ripening corn and soybeans. But on a small operation called Salvatierra, 40 minutes south of Minneapolis, Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin is trying something different. When he bought the land in 2020, this 18-acre patch had been devoted for decades to the region’s most prevalent crops. The soil was so depleted, Haslett-Marroquin says, he thought of it as a “corn and soybean desert.” Soon after, he applied 13 tons of compost, sowed a mix of prairie grasses and rye, and planted 8,200 hazelnut saplings.
While he won’t reap a nut harvest until 2025, the farmer and Guatemalan immigrant doesn’t have to wait to make money from the land. He also runs flocks of chickens in narrow grassy paddocks between the rows of the fledging trees, where they hunt for insects and also munch on feed made from organic corn and soybeans, which they transform into manure that fertilizes the trees and forage.
Salvatierra is the latest addition to Tree-Range Farms, a cooperative network of 19 poultry farms cofounded in 2022 by Haslett-Marroquin. Chickens evolved from birds known as junglefowl in the forests of South Asia, he notes, and the co-op’s goal is to conjure that jungle-like habitat. Chickens crave shade and fear open spaces; trees shelter them from weather and hide them from predators. In 2021, Haslett-Marroquin’s nonprofit, Regenerative Agriculture Alliance, purchased a poultry slaughterhouse just south of the Minnesota border in Stacyville, Iowa, where farms in the Tree-Range network process their birds. You can find the meat in natural-food stores from the Twin Cities area to northern Iowa.
By combining food-bearing trees and shrubs with poultry production, Haslett-Marroquin and his peers are practicing what is known as agroforestry—an ancient practice that intertwines annual and perennial agriculture. Other forms include alley cropping, in which annual crops including grains, legumes, and vegetables grow between rows of food-bearing trees, and silvopasture, which features cattle munching grass between the rows.
“With just a couple feet of soil standing between prosperity and desolation, civilizations that plow through their soil vanish.”
Agroforestry was largely abandoned in the United States after the nation’s westward expansion in the 19th century. In the 2022 Agricultural Census, just 1.7 percent of US farmers reported integrating trees into crop and livestock operations. But it’s widely practiced across the globe, particularly in Southeast Asia and Central and South America. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 43 percent of all agricultural land globally includes agroforestry features.
Bringing trees to the region now known as the Corn Belt, known for its industrial-scale agriculture and largely devoid of perennial crops, might seem like the height of folly. On closer inspection, however, agroforestry systems like Haslett-Marroquin’s might be a crucial strategy for both preserving and revitalizing one of the globe’s most important farming regions. And while the corn-soybean duopoly that holds sway in the US heartland produces mainly feed for livestock and ethanol, agroforestry can deliver a broader variety of nutrient-dense foods, like nuts and fruit, even as it diversifies farmer income away from the volatile global livestock-feed market. In recognition of this potential, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), in late 2022, launched a $60 million grant program to help farmers adopt such practices.
For decades, Midwestern farmers have devoted tens of millions of acres to just two crops, leaving the ground largely unprotected from wind and rain between harvest and planting. As a result, the loamy trove of topsoil that settlers found there has been pillaged. Using satellite imagery, a team of University of Massachusetts researchers has calculated that a third of the land in the present-day Corn Belt has completely lost its layer of carbon-rich soil. And what’s left is washing away at least 25 times faster than it naturally replenishes. As prime topsoil vanishes, farmers become more dependent on fertilizers derived from fossil fuel.
Not surprisingly, given those applications, the Corn Belt is also in the midst of a burgeoning water-pollution crisis, as agrichemicals and manure from crowded livestock confinements leach away from farm fields and into streams and aquifers. In other words, our breadbasket is a basket case. As University of Washington geomorphologist David Montgomery noted in his magisterial 2007 book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, “With just a couple feet of soil standing between prosperity and desolation, civilizations that plow through their soil vanish.”
These practices remain rare, in part because they are marginalized by federal farm policies that reward maximizing the production of corn and soybeans.
Breaking up the corn and soybean rotation with trees—and freeing some farm animals from vast indoor facilities to roam between rows, where their manure can be taken up by crops—could go a long way to addressing these crises, experts say. Trees actually have a much longer and more robust history in the Midwestern landscape than do annual crops. Think of the Midwestern countryside before US settlers arrived, and you might picture lush grasses and flowers swaying in the wind. That vision is largely accurate, but it’s incomplete. Amid the tall-grass prairies and wetlands, oak trees once dotted landscapes from the shores of Lake Michigan through swathes of present-day Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, clear down to the Mexican border. These trees didn’t clump together in dense forests with closed canopies but rather in what ecologists call savannas—patches of grassland interspersed with oaks. Within these oak savannas, which were interlaced with prairies, tree crowns covered between 10 percent and 30 percent of the ground. They were essentially a transition between the tight deciduous forests of the East and the fully open grasslands further west.
And in the region where Haslett-Marroquin farms—part of the so-called Driftless Area, which was never glaciated—trees proliferated even more intensely. In pre-settlement times, according to a 2014 analysis coauthored by Iowa State University ecologist Lisa Schulte Moore, closed-canopy forests of oaks, sugar maples, and other species covered 15.3 percent of the area, and woodlands (low-density forests) took up another 8.6 percent. Prairies—the ecosystem we readily imagine—composed just 6.9 percent. Oak savannas made up the rest.
In the Driftless and in the rest of the Midwest, Native Americans played an active role in managing savannas, prairies, and forests, where they harvested nutrient-dense acorns for food and other uses. Everything began to change in the mid-19th century, when settlers evicted or killed most of the original inhabitants, drained wetlands, razed trees for lumber, and ripped into the land with plows. In place of staggering biodiversity, an agricultural empire of row crops arose, tended with the tools of modern engineering and industry: genetically modified seeds, insect- and weed-killing chemicals, synthetic and mined fertilizers, and massive tractors and combines. Oak savannas, meanwhile, have been vanishing from the landscape. Today, they occupy a mere 0.02 percent of their historic Midwestern range.
For most of the past century, any push to return trees to the Corn Belt centered on ecosystem services, not food production. Planting trees along streams and rivers—creating what’s known as riparian buffers—helps filter agrichemical runoff and improve water quality. Then there are “wind breaks,” stands of trees strategically placed to shelter crops from wind.
But these practices remain rare, in part because they are marginalized by federal farm policies that reward maximizing the production of corn and soybeans, with subsidized crop insurance and price supports, and disincentivize planting alternative crops.
Trees could play a much bigger role and, once established, could more than pay their way by delivering cash crops. A 2018 paper by University of Illinois researchers found that black walnut trees placed in rows between fields of corn and soybeans (alley cropping) would deliver more profits to landowners than field-crop-only farming on nearly a quarter of the Corn Belt’s land.
Haslett-Marroquin and his fellow poultry farmers aren’t the only ones hoping to reimagine agriculture in the Corn Belt by reinstating the role of trees. The Savanna Institute, founded in 2013 by a group of farmers and academic researchers at a gathering in Illinois, promotes agroforestry in the region. Its funders include the USDA and other government agencies, environmental foundations, and business interests including Patagonia and the family behind Clif Bar. In addition to operating demonstration farms in Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, run in partnership with landowners, the Institute trains and places apprentices on farms that mix trees with crops or livestock. At the 250-acre Hawkeye Buffalo & Cattle Ranch in northeast Iowa, for example, the McFarland family sells grass-fed beef and bison meat from animals raised on restored oak savanna. The other “apprenticeship” farms are smaller operations.
Fred Iutzi, the institute’s director of agroforestry innovation, says an arboreal revival throughout the region would make it more resilient to climate change. Tree canopies buffer soil from the impact of heavy rain, and their roots plunge deep beneath the soil surface and fan out laterally, further holding soil in place. They suck up nutrients all year long, keeping excess fertilizer and manure from leaching away and polluting water. Trees shield crops and soil from the wind. And they both build carbon in the soil as their leaves drop and decompose and store it in their roots, trunks, and branches. Altogether, Iutzi says, an acre of land under agroforestry can sequester five metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, versus about one ton for an acre of corn or soybeans under optimal conditions, which include reducing tillage and planting off-season cover crops.
“There’s a ton of momentum; there’s a historic amount of resources and opportunities for folks to get into it.”
While practices like alley cropping and silvopasture are eligible for support from USDA conservation programs, they haven’t been widely adopted. A recent study co-authored by Trent Ford, the Illinois state climatologist, found that between 2017 and 2023, the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program doled out just $900,000 to support agroforestry practices in the Corn Belt, a sliver of its overall budget.
But more money is on the way. In 2022, as part of its $3.1 billion Partnership for Climate Smart Commodities program, the USDA announced a $60-million five-year effort to expand agroforestry production and markets in the central and eastern regions of the United States, plus Hawaii. Managed by The Nature Conversancy in partnership with the Savanna Institute and other groups, the project’s goal is 30,000 new acres of agroforestry by 2026, says TNC’s Audrey Epp Schmidt, who leads the project. So far, 35 projects have been selected for funding, eight in the Corn Belt.
For now, an agroforestry renaissance remains at a nascent phase, Epp Schmidt says, “but there’s a ton of momentum, there’s a historic amount of resources and opportunities for folks to get into it.” What the movement needs, she says, is a farmer-to-farmer network: “That’s really when this is going to take off—when farmers see the success of their neighbor’s [agroforestry] operations.”
Even so, the Corn Belt will be a tough nut to crack, says Silvia Secchi, a natural resource economist at the University of Iowa. Such expenditures, while important, will struggle to overcome the formidable inertia of corn and soybeans. The proximate reason is the subsidies that keep the region’s farmers afloat even as their soil washes away. But ultimately, she says, farmers in the region “strive to be as simple as possible and as mechanized as possible”—a mindset that favors focusing on two cash crops instead of a more complex, labor-intensive approach, like agroforestry.
Yet Iutzi remains hopeful. In the 1920s, he says, the idea of a federal farm policy centered on soil conservation seemed beyond the realm of possibility. Then came the Dust Bowl, a severe soil-erosion crisis that triggered New Deal legislation that, for a time, tempered overproduction of farm commodities and held soil in place.
It’s impossible to say precisely what type of event would force policymakers and farmers to drastically change course in the Corn Belt. But as the region’s vast corn and soybean operations continue hemorrhaging soil and fouling water and climate change proceeds apace, they may find themselves looking for new directions sooner than later. Iutzi thinks projects like Tree Range Farms could show the way forward. “History is just absolutely peppered with this pattern of big disruptions of one kind or another being the catalyst for big change,” he says. “And it’s ideas that are really well honed, when the time comes, that really surge.”
Kamala Harris‘ campaign is highlighting the preventable deaths of two women who would be alive if not for Georgia’s abortion ban. This week reporting from ProPublica proved out the warning that abortion bans could be deadly, by bringing forward the names and faces of two Georgia women, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, who died in 2022 but would be alive today if not for the state’s ban.
“Amber’s mom shared with me that the word over and over again in her mind is ‘preventable,'” Harris said Thursday evening at a Michigan campaign forum hosted by Oprah Winfrey. Thurman’s mother and two sisters were in the audience. “This story is a story that is sadly not the only story of what has been happening since these bans have taken place.”
“There is a word: preventable. And there is another word: predictable.”
Amber Thurman and Candi Miller both died after medication-induced abortions failed to expel all the fetal tissue, resulting in fatal infections, ProPublica reported. They were among the first women to die from what could be called a modern back-alley abortion: abortions that have been pushed underground and exiled from the safety of expert medical supervision.
In the days since ProPublica broke the news of these preventable deaths, anti-abortion activists have sought to blame the women. “Abortion killed Amber Thurman,” anti-abortion activist Lila Rose posted on X, shifting blame from the ban to the procedure and, implicitly, Thurman herself. The stories are complicated for advocates fighting to keep abortion medication on the market, as their stories highlight the rare times in which medication abortions require emergency follow-up care. (Such episodes are at the center of a current lawsuit to take one of the drugs, mifepristone, off the market.) But from the beginning to the end of their tragic stories, it’s clear that both women died for one reason: Georgia’s strict abortion ban.
It’s a story the Harris campaign is continuing to tell, with a Friday rally in Atlanta, where she delivered a warning: “If [Trump] is elected again, I am certain, he will sign a national abortion ban.” And with it, more people will die. “There is a word, preventable, and there is another word, predictable,” Harris said. “And the reality is, for every story we hear of the suffering under Trump abortion bans, there are so many of the stories we’re not hearing.”
On the debate stage last week, Trump would not rule out signing a national abortion ban. And his allies who crafted Project 2025 have laid out how to ban abortion, including those conducted with medication, nationwide. It’s a message her campaign has sounded from the start, as it leans on the health crisis caused by the overturning of Roe to motivate voters. But it’s also the sad truth.
The two women’s stories are eerily reminiscent of ones from over 50 years ago, when women died either from obtaining illegal abortions from doctors or others ill equipped to perform them, or from torturous attempts to induce one at home. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe two years ago, physicians, historians, and politicians warned that women would die. We now know that it took less than two months before at least one did.
“I fear that their situations are not unique,” Dr. Daniel Grossman, the director of a research group on reproductive health at the University of California, San Francisco, posted on X. “I think it’s very likely that other women and pregnant people have died due to their care being denied or delayed or due to being too scared to seek care—all because of the bans on abortion.” As evidence, Grossman cited a new study in which patients and providers reported on the near-death scenarios they have encountered under post-Roe abortion bans, cases very similar to those of Thurman and Miller. In 86 narratives, the report describes patients whose pregnancies, miscarriages, and post-abortion complications threatened their life. And yet doctors refused to treat them.
Soon after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Georgia instituted a six-week ban. Like other draconian laws that popped up around the country that summer, its language was medically vague but legally punitive. Doctors and hospitals were left to guess what procedures were actually prohibited and when exactly exceptions for the life of the mother kicked in. If a prosecutor and jury second-guessed their decision, possible prison sentences loomed over their decisions. Almost immediately, in Thurman’s case, doctors chose a path that led to her death.
Hospitals’ refusal to treat women suffering complications jeopardize women from all walks of life.
Thurman was a healthy 28-year-old single mother of a six-year-old when she learned she was pregnant with twins. Thurman wanted a surgical abortion, but as ProPublicareported, Georgia’s six-week ban had just taken effect. Thurman drove to North Carolina for the procedure, but after traffic caused her to miss her appointment, she was offered a medication abortion instead. As happens in rare instances, not all of the fetal tissue was expelled, leading to sepsis. If Thurman were in North Carolina, she could have returned to the clinic and received a dilation and curettage, a common procedure that would have saved her life. But she was stuck in Georgia. Again, the state failed her. When Thurman was admitted to an ER in Georgia, it was clear that she needed a D&C to clear away the tissue that was poisoning her. But the hospital delayed surgery for 20 hours. By then, it was too late. A statewide maternal mortality review committee, which operates on a two-year lag and is only now examining post-Roe cases, deemed her death preventable.
In the fall of 2022, Candi Miller discovered she was pregnant. Because the 41-year-old mother of three had diabetes, hypertension, and lupus, doctors warned that another pregnancy might kill her. But Georgia’s abortion ban made no exceptions for people whose chronic conditions made pregnancy a deadly proposition. Abandoned by her state, Miller ordered abortion pills online and took them at home. As with Thurman, her body did not expel all the tissue, spawning an infection. She suffered for days until her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her three year old daughter by her side.
She hadn’t sought out a doctor, her family said, “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.” Tragically, as Thurman’s death suggests, it’s not clear that it would have helped if she had.
“It is exactly like what it was before it was made, open, available and legal,” says Leslie Reagan, a historian at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the author of the book When Abortion Was a Crime. Reagan recalls reading coroner reports of women just like Miller, only decades earlier, who died because they were afraid of being arrested or prosecuted if they went to the hospital.
If Roe were still in place, Miller could have sought a surgical abortion or taken the pills under supervision of a doctor, who could have intervened when she needed further care. But that’s not how it works in Georgia anymore. Again, the same panel, which finally reviewed her case last month, immediately deemed her death preventable. ProPublica reported that the panel is reviewing additional deaths involving abortions after the ban was passed.
History seems to be repeating itself. Both Thurman and Miller were Black, and both died of sepsis.
When doctors and historians warned that people would die from post-Dobbs abortion bans, they weren’t being hyperbolic, they were looking at the facts. In one study, economists found that maternal death rates for nonwhite women plummeted after states began legalizing the procedure in the late 1960s and early 1970s, leading up to Roe in January 1973. Legal abortion reduced non-white abortion-related mortality by 30-60 percent.
“These are two black women,” says Reagan, noting that before Roe, Black women were far more likely to die trying to obtain an abortion. “This just, again, accentuates and replicates the past. And you know, frankly, the people passing these laws do not care about that.”
Further, deaths due to abortion-related infection were the most common fatal complication. “Over 1960 to 1980, legal abortion has been suggested as a major contributor to the decline in maternal deaths, primarily from abortion-related sepsis,” according to the report. In an account quoted in the study, an obstetrician from the period recalls that “complications of illegal abortion were so common that a septic ward was set aside for the infections. Surgery for hemorrhage was a common night duty.”
But for all the historical echoes, there are key differences. Rather than an abortion from an unqualified doctor or an attempt to induce an abortion by harming themselves, both Thurman and Miller took safe medication greenlit by the Food and Drug Administration. Both had the rare occurrence of failure to expel all fetal tissue, resulting in the need for medical attention.
While it’s clear that poor women and women of color will bear the brunt of the new wave of abortion-related fatalities, hospitals’ refusal to treat women suffering complications from abortion and miscarriage jeopardize women from all walks of life. Just ask Amanda Zurawski, a white woman from Texas who faced the imminent loss of her pregnancy but was told to go home and wait for the onset of sepsis. She ended up fighting for her life in the ICU. Indeed, it appears that under today’s abortion bans, doctors and hospitals are forcing women into septic shock and, in some cases, even delaying care once sepsis has already arrived.
Poor women and women of color will bear the brunt of new abortion-related fatalities.
This is not an accident. In fact, the lawsuit against mifepristone launched by the hard right Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom was premised on the idea that doctors should be able to refuse to treat patients in the exact position as Thurman and Miller. Their lawyers argued that the doctors’ personal opposition to abortion meant they should never have to save a woman’s life if she was suffering complications from taking mifepristone, even if the fetus was not living. As the group’s attorney, Erin Hawley, said during oral arguments before the Supreme Court, an anti-abortion doctor’s conscience is harmed by “completing an elective abortion,” meaning “removing an embryo, a fetus, whether or not they’re alive, as well as placental tissue.”
It was a shocking courtroom moment, but also a revealing one. The Alliance Defending Freedom doesn’t just represent doctors—it has also been instrumental in crafting and defending state abortion bans. They are not only willing to let women die, but it is in keeping with their beliefs. The lawmakers who wrote laws like Georgia’s—and refused to amend them despite warnings—seem similarly inclined to allow preventable deaths. Louisiana is about to limit access to misoprostol, a drug that is part of the medication abortion regimen but is also a life-saving anti-hemorrhage drug used in postpartum care, by categorizing it as a controlled substance. Again, people could die.
Just as the pre-Roe era saw unnecessary death, so now are we. And it’s easy to see, from the vague yet strict laws to the fear instilled in both doctors and patients, that it’s all by design.
In Atlanta, Harris presented a stark choice. She would restore Roe, he would usher in more bans. “He brags about overturning Roe v Wade,” Harris said of Trump on Friday. “He says he is proud. Proud that women are dying?”
This February, President Joe Biden was eating an ice cream cone with Late Night host Seth Meyers in Manhattan when a reporter asked about the chances of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. “Well,” Biden replied, prompting breaking news posts, “I hope, by the end of the weekend.” The president then assured the public: “We’re close.”
Nearly seven months later, no ceasefire is in sight. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that multiple US officials told the paper that there is little chance of a ceasefire.
The report continued a horrific week for Biden’s foreign policy record in the Middle East. Each of the past five days has brought its own grim news about the vanishing chances of peace in the region:
Monday: Israel formally expanded its war aims to include the return of residents evacuated out of the north. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the “possibility for an agreement is running out” with Hezbollah. Gallant explained, “Therefore, the only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes will be via military action.” It suggested a much heightened potential for a wider war between Lebanon and Israel.
Tuesday: Israel began detonating explosive-rigged pagers and walkie-talkies in an attack that targeted members of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed political and militant group. Axios reported that US officials were not warned of the operation. The indiscriminate approach killed dozens—including at least two children—and injured thousands. In doing so, Israel greatly increased the odds of a regional war (that the United States does not want to be dragged into).
Wednesday: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that his kingdom will not normalize relations with Israel without the “establishment of a Palestinian state.” The announcement appeared to kill off any chance of success for a years-long (and widely criticized) effort by the Biden administration to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, while largely sidestepping the concerns of Palestinians. That effort had begun under the Trump administration in the much touted Abraham Accords that the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had helped broker.
Thursday: A Wall Street Journal story headlined “US Officials Concede Gaza Cease-Fire Out of Reach for Biden,” cited senior US officials who have concluded that a ceasefire deal is unlikely during Biden’s presidency. “No deal is imminent,” one said. “I’m not sure it ever gets done.”
Friday: Israel killed at least 12 people in an airstrike in Beirut targeting senior Hezbollah commanders. As Gallant made clear earlier in the week in reference to Lebanon, “we are at the start of a new phase in the war” and the “center of gravity is moving north.”
Initially, one of the few bright spots of Biden’s approach was that no regional war had broken out. The recent Israeli assaults in Lebanon, along with Gallant’s comments about a “new phase” of the war, suggest that may soon change. For Netanyahu, who is widely believed to favor a second Donald Trump presidency, a new phase of conflict that makes a Biden-Harris administration look ineffectual just as some Americans begin voting may carry additional rewards.
This string of havoc was all, sadly, predictable. In response to the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, Biden embraced what was labeled a “bear hug” approach to his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In keeping with a decades-old personal approach for managing relations with Israel, he made sure there was “no daylight” between him and the Israeli Prime Minister in public. Biden thought it would allow him to shape the direction of the war in private.
Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.
Biden’s faith in a no daylight approach had been repeatedly disproven prior to October 7 but he stuck with it anyway. That decision reflected an effectively limitless commitment to supporting Israel. As I reported in December on the roots of Biden’s flawed response to the war, his Israel record was unusual:
Biden has long gone further than many of his fellow Democrats in defense of Israel. As a senator, he backed moving the American embassy to Jerusalem decades before Donald Trump made that a reality, boasted about attending more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other senator, and savaged an effort by George H.W. Bush to push Israel toward negotiating with Palestinians. As vice president, he undercut Barack Obama’s efforts to push Israel toward peace. As president prior to October 7, he continued policies implemented by Trump that sidelined Palestinians.
The death toll in Gaza stood at around 20,000 when that story came out. It is now double that, and the full death toll may prove far higher. Nearly 100,000 people have been injured. Israeli hostages remain in captivity in large part due to Netanyahu’s repeated efforts to derail ceasefire negotiations.
What has not changed is Biden’s almost complete unwillingness to use the United States’ extensive leverage over Israel. Aside from some 2,000-pound bombs, his administration has ensured that arms keep flowing. That decision has been made despite substantial evidence that doing so violates US laws that prevent weapons from being sent to foreign units implicated in major human rights violations. Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.
In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden was buoyed by victories in the “blue wall” states of the Upper Midwest, and a few narrow wins in the South and Southwest. But it was easy to forget that he also picked up another electoral vote in a state where Democrats had been shut out since 2008—Nebraska, a reliably red state that has apportioned its electors by congressional district since 1992. The second district, which includes much of Omaha, is an electoral-college curiosity that was offset by Trump’s victory in the second congressional district of Maine—a reliably blue state that also splits its electoral votes.
This year is different. Thanks to reapportionment following the 2020 census, winning Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would only get Kamala Harris to 269 electoral votes—an Electoral College tie—and not 270. And because an Electoral College deadlock would be broken by a House of Representative roll-call in which each state delegation gets one vote, an Electoral College tie is effectively an Electoral College loss for Democrats. A win in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, or North Carolina would still put Harris over the top, but the easiest path to 270 is simply to hold onto what Nebraskans refer to as “the blue dot.” Which is why this time, Republicans aren’t satisfied with Nebraska and Maine canceling each other out; they are currently trying to change the rules at the last minute to take Omaha’s vote for themselves.
Trump supporters, and his campaign itself, have been talking about changing Nebraska’s rules for a while. Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk held a rally in the second district earlier this year to try to pressure the legislature to make a change, and Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita said at the Republican National Convention that he believed the state might still take action. Republican Gov. Jim Pillen has signaled his openness to calling a special session if Republicans in the unicameral legislature can prove they have the votes. But this largely theoretical exercise took on a more concrete tone this week, after NBC News reported South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham had traveled to Nebraska on behalf of the Trump campaign to lobby Republican lawmakers on the matter. And according to the Washington Post, Trump himself spoke with a Republican state senator by phone during the meeting to make his case directly.
This might seem a little late in the game to make such a major change to the Electoral College, but that’s the point: This is only happening because it’s so late in the game that Maine, because of its own state laws, can no longer change its own rules in response. It’s hard to come up with any justification for the Electoral College in the year 2024, but the Nebraska gambit makes a mockery of an already broken and deeply undemocratic system.
It’s hardly a done deal. Pillen has said he won’t call a special session unless legislators demonstrate they have a filibuster-proof majority, and as Nebraska Democrats have pointed out, they don’t have the votes right now. According to the Nebraska Examiner, there’s at least one key holdout with a conflicting professional interest—Republican state Sen. Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who is reportedly considering running for mayor of Omaha next year. He might want to avoid being known in Omaha as the guy who made Omaha irrelevant. In one of the world’s least reassuring statements, a spokesperson told the Examiner Thursday that McDonnell was opposed to any change “as of today.”
Whether Nebraska changes the rules or not, though, Graham’s gambit, and the pressure from the Trump campaign, offers an ominous glimpse of a future that looks a lot like the recent past. One of the dominant storylines following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election was the pressure campaign he and his allies mounted on individual Republican officeholders all the way up until January 6. Trump, for instance, invited Michigan Republican lawmakers to the White House and called Republicans in Wayne County to try to pressure them to oppose the certification of Detroit’s election results. He asked Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in a phone call to “find” a few thousand votes that would put him over the top. Graham, as it happens, also talked to Raffensperger after the election, in a conversation that the election official considered part of a pressure campaign. (Graham denied any ill intention and was investigated but not charged by the Fulton County District Attorney’s office as part of its probe of 2020 election interference.) I don’t think I need to get into how Trump pressured Mike Pence.
This is what November and December will look like if Trump loses at the ballot box: a drumbeat of urgent phone calls with Republicans lawmakers and officeholders in which the Republican candidate tries to cajole them into enabling his desired outcome, whether through legal or extra-legal means. If he doesn’t have the votes on Election Day, he will simply try to “find” them—in legislatures, on boards of supervisors, and in judges’ chambers.
Then again, if Trump does get his way in Lincoln, it just might mean he never has to do any of that.
After 50 days, Gaza European Hospital, one of the few trauma centers serving the Gaza strip, reopened, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The hospital has been a vital part of the crumbling medical infrastructure in the region. It reopened earlier this month.
In August, I told the story of two medical students who worked at Gaza European Hospital before it was shuttered and forcibly evacuated on July 1st. The medical center remained closed amid bombardment in the area for over a month. Each student told me harrowing stories of their time suddenly propelled to the job of full-time doctors amid the devastation of the medical system in Gaza.
Now, the students are back to work. Hasan Ali Abu Ghalyoon, a dental student I interviewed via WhatsApp in August, returned to European Hospital on September 9th. He said things are different there now.
Before the July evacuation, he slept at the hospital. Now, he commutes back and forth from his family’s tent in Deir al-Balah, a trip that takes him three or four hours a day. It is only about a seven-mile journey. But in Gaza, it can be treacherous.
Normally, he takes a hospital-provided bus to work. Last Friday, though, “I was a little late for the bus and I was forced to go by car,” he said. On his journey, he passed a destroyed World Health Organization warehouse, a torched mosque, and innumerable teetering husks of buildings and dust-covered tents. “I took three cars on my way to get from my tent to the hospital and I walked through many destroyed streets on foot.”
In some areas of eastern Gaza, there are no cars at all. The trip, he said, cost him 25 shekels, or about eight dollars, thanks to the lack of fuel entering Gaza. Before the war, transportation wouldn’t cost a thing.
Nermeen Ziyad Abo Mostafa, another student volunteer, hears the zanana—Gazan slang for the incessant buzzing of drones overhead—on her way to the hospital. “It was not easy to reopen it, because all the hospital’s property was stolen,” she said. The hospital is still not fully equipped, she explained, but medical teams are doing their best to work with what they have.
Once the students arrive, they see “mostly burns and fractures,” Abu Ghalyoon said. Every day, there are patients requiring skin grafts.
Another change: there are now fewer international delegations than before. The flow of international medics into the Gaza strip has slowed to a trickle. The Israeli military has hit international aid workers like those from World Central Kitchen, after a vehicle from the group was bombed in April, and UN workers, like those from the World Food Program, whose vehicles were struck in August. Supply shortages are ongoing. As Abu Ghalyoon put it: “There is a very, very severe shortage of all medicines. The medical equipment is old and sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.”
On September 12th, the World Health Organization released a report estimating that over 22,500 people in Gaza have suffered “life-changing injuries” since Israel’s offensive in Gaza began. Most of these injuries—about 13,000 to 17,000—are what the WHO report calls “severe limb injuries,” and at least 3,000 are amputations.
“The huge surge in rehabilitation needs occurs in parallel with the ongoing decimation of the health system,” said Dr. Richard Peeperkorn, WHO Representative in the occupied Palestinian territory. “Patients can’t get the care they need. Acute rehabilitation services are severely disrupted and specialized care for complex injuries is not available, placing patients’ lives at risk. Immediate and long-term support is urgently needed to address the enormous rehabilitation needs.”
Public resources in Springfield, Ohio, were strained long before former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets derailed the presidential debate. Now, after days of vile disinformation from Senator JD Vance and other prominent Republicans, dozens of bomb threats, an immigration town hall that attracted thousands, and the possibility of a Trump visit to town, local and state services have been stretched to their limits. Even as officials hope the major waves of national attention are behind them, they’re preparing for more of the same.
On Thursday, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue announced that he has signed an emergency proclamation granting himself the power to bypass the usual contract procurement and bidding procedures, letting him quickly enter into agreements with vendors related to “public safety concerns.” The proclamation—which originated with Rue’s office, not the city council—will remain in place until further notice, according to the Springfield News-Sun. Flanked by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and regional and state officials, Rue told reporters that the emergency powers were a precaution that would also allow the city to recoup security costs from the state. “It is not an indication of immediate danger, but allows us to efficiently and effectively protect our public safety,” he said.
Dozens of buildings across Springfield—including schools, businesses, and city hall—have been targeted by bomb threats over the past week. Although every threat has turned out to be false, each has required significant time and resources—including federal bomb-detection dogs—to investigate. DeWine has deployed three dozen state police officers to conduct daily sweeps of every school building in the district; those officers will remain on hand, he says, until school officials call them off.
If Trump cancels his visit, “it would convey a significant message of peace to the city of Springfield concerning immigration.”
The national storm bearing down on the small western Ohio city has disrupted almost every aspect of daily life. Threats of violence have forced college classes online and city buildings to close. An annual cultural diversity festival was canceled. And while DeWine started off the news conference by focusing on how to address some of the impacts associated with the recent influx of 15,000 Haitian immigrants to the community—for example, adding another mobile health clinic and allocating millions of state dollars to increase the availability of vaccinations and primary medical care—it quickly devolved into a discussion about bomb threats and Trump.
Springfield’s mayor, who is a Republican, has been speaking outfor months about how the surge in immigrants has strained schools, hospitals, and city resources. But on Thursday, Rue honed in on the toll that national attention has taken on the city’s public safety system. For example, later that day, former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was planning to hold an immigration town hall that ultimately attracted thousands of would-be attendees, forcing the city to close off the street. Rue reiterated his hope that Trump, who has announced he will travel to Springfield in “the next two weeks,” will reconsider. “A visit from the former president will undoubtedly place additional demands on our safety infrastructure,” Rue said. “Should he choose to change his plans, it would convey a significant message of peace to the city of Springfield concerning immigration.”
Meanwhile, Rue and DeWine pointed to signs that life in Springfield is returning to normal. The stream of bomb threats has become a trickle. Children are returning to school in greater numbers each day. In not-so-subtle terms, DeWine told reporters that what Springfield needs most in its quest for normalcy is for the national media to go away.
“We will return, in the not too distant future, to a point where you all are going to be writing and talking about, reporting on the nightly news about something else,” DeWine said. “And as soon as that happens, I think you’re going to see the temperature go down.”
Less than two months before the election, the Trump-aligned majority on the Georgia State Election Board passed a new set of eleventh-hour rule changes on Friday that could plunge the vote counting process into chaos and give Republicans yet another pretext not to certify the results if Kamala Harris wins the state.
During a highly contentious meeting, the state board voted 3-2 to require county election boards to hand count ballots cast on Election Day and then compare the results to the totals tallied by electronic voting machines to reconcile any discrepancies. While hand counts are commonly used in post-election audits to ensure accurate results, counting all votes by hand is significantly more burdensome, time-consuming, and error-prone than using standard voting machines. The rules were passed by three Republican appointees who Trump praised as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory” during a rally in Atlanta in August.
“We’re so far off the deep end of sanity here,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s lone Democratic member, who voted against the rule changes, told me. “It’s a terrible, terrible idea to do this sort of thing with no notice, no training.”
Given the short time period for counties to certify the election—the deadline is the Monday after Election Day—voting rights activists worry that the new hand counting mandate, combined with rules adopted last month requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into the vote totals and access “all election-related documentation,” will be weaponized by Republicans to oppose election certification. “After changing election certification rules in ways that give new power to local election officials to refuse to certify results, the MAGA board is now changing rules in ways that seem meant to create a fail point in our system,” says Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the voting rights group Fair Fight.
The new rules put the state board directly at odds with election officials, Republicans and Democrats alike. A lawyer for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who defended the results of the 2020 election, said they were likely illegal and poorly timed, noting that the new requirements will not go into effect until October 14 at the earliest, after absentee ballots have been mailed to voters on October 7 and just as in-person early voting starts on October 15.
“We’re so far off the deep end of sanity here,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s lone Democratic member, told me. “It’s a terrible, terrible idea to do this sort of thing with no notice, no training.”
“It is far too late in the election process for counties to implement new rules and procedures, and many poll workers have already completed their required training,” Charlene McGowan, the general counsel for Raffensperger, wrote to the board before Friday’s meeting. The new voting hand counting rules “would disrupt existing chain of custody protocols under the law and needlessly introduce the risk of error, lost ballots, or fraud,” she added.
The office of Georgia Republican Attorney General Chris Carr sent a letter to the board Friday morning informing them that several of the proposed rules, including the hand count of ballots, “very likely exceed the Board’s statutory authority” and “appear to conflict with the statutes governing the conduct of elections.” (At least two other rules approved by the board on Friday, including one that significantly expands the areas where partisan poll watchers can observe the vote counting, also likely violate state laws, the attorney general said.)
“The overwhelming number of election officials I’ve heard from are opposed to this,” said John Fervier, the GOP chair of the board, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. “It’s too close to the election. It’s too late to train a lot of poll workers. There’s a lack of resources in many counties to effectuate this rule.” Most importantly, he said, “this is not supported at all in statute.”
All five election officials who spoke during the public comment section of the meeting spoke against the new rules. “The only people who support this are activists who think that the 2020 election was stolen,” says Tindall Ghazal. “Election workers don’t want it. Election supervisors don’t want it. You don’t change the rules this dramatically, this close to the election.”
The board did, however, vote 4-1 to table another proposal to count ballots by hand during early voting, which one of the pro-Trump members, Janelle King, said could lead to privacy concerns ahead of the election. (King also criticized Raffensperger for “unethical” behavior for recording the call where Trump demanded he “find 11,780 votes” to overturn’s Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, but did not reprimand Trump for pressuring the secretary of state to overturn the election.)
The push for hand counts has become a rallying cry of election deniers who falsely blame electronic voting machines for Trump’s defeat. One of the biggest backers of this conspiracy theory is MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
Ironically, under the guise of protecting election integrity, hand counts actually lead to less accurate results due to human error. Numerous studies show that hand counts produce double the error rate of machine scanners. When Republicans in Nye County, Nevada, attempted to hand count ballots in 2022, they reported an error rate of 25 percent on the first day before the courts shut the effort down.
“It’s a rule looking for a problem that doesn’t exist,” says Travis Doss, executive director of the Augusta-Richmond County Board of Elections. Doss is president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, a bipartisan group of more than 500 election workers from across the state. The group asked the board last month not to pass any more rule changes before the election because it was “gravely concerned that dramatic changes at this stage will disrupt the preparation and training processes already in motion for poll workers, absentee voting, advance voting and Election Day preparation.” It specifically opposed the hand counting requitement because of “the rule’s potential to delay results; set fatigued employees up for failure; and undermine the very confidence the rule’s author claims to seek.”
There’s good reason to worry that delays or errors caused by a hand count of ballots would then be cited by Republicans as a reason not to certify the election if a Democrat wins. That occurred in 2022, when the election board in rural Cochise County, Arizona, attempted to hand count all ballots, were told by a court it was illegal, then refused to certify the results after Democrats narrowly won close state races. The two Republican board members who led the scheme were subsequently indicted by the state’s attorney general for obstructing the vote counting process.
That kind of controversy over the vote counting process is exactly what Trump and his allies seem to be agitating for, which is why they’ve worked so hard to stack local and state election boards with MAGA election deniers in places like Georgia. The new rules are “throwing things off kilter to the point where it could create chaos when that’s the last thing we need,” Doss says. (The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has also repeatedly warned states not to implement voting changes close to an election.)
Tindall Ghazal predicts that any effort to refuse to certify the election will fail, because courts and state officials will force rogue counties to approve the results, but she worries how Trump could weaponize any delay or dispute in the vote counting process, which are now far more likely to occur because of the new rules passed by his allies on the state election board.
“It leads to public uncertainty and public distrust, because it gets messy,” she says. “And that’s the real goal. To throw enough sand in the eyes of the public to make them think maybe something went wrong.”
Drive through rural Minnesota in high summer and you’ll take in a view that dominates nearly the entire US Midwest: an emerald sea of ripening corn and soybeans. But on a small operation called Salvatierra, 40 minutes south of Minneapolis, Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin is trying something different. When he bought the land in 2020, this 18-acre patch had been devoted for decades to the region’s most prevalent crops. The soil was so depleted, Haslett-Marroquin says, he thought of it as a “corn and soybean desert.” Soon after, he applied 13 tons of compost, sowed a mix of prairie grasses and rye, and planted 8,200 hazelnut saplings.
While he won’t reap a nut harvest until 2025, the farmer and Guatemalan immigrant doesn’t have to wait to make money from the land. He also runs flocks of chickens in narrow grassy paddocks between the rows of the fledging trees, where they hunt for insects and also munch on feed made from organic corn and soybeans, which they transform into manure that fertilizes the trees and forage.
Salvatierra is the latest addition to Tree-Range Farms, a cooperative network of 19 poultry farms cofounded in 2022 by Haslett-Marroquin. Chickens evolved from birds known as junglefowl in the forests of South Asia, he notes, and the co-op’s goal is to conjure that jungle-like habitat. Chickens crave shade and fear open spaces; trees shelter them from weather and hide them from predators. In 2021, Haslett-Marroquin’s nonprofit, Regenerative Agriculture Alliance, purchased a poultry slaughterhouse just south of the Minnesota border in Stacyville, Iowa, where farms in the Tree-Range network process their birds. You can find the meat in natural-food stores from the Twin Cities area to northern Iowa.
By combining food-bearing trees and shrubs with poultry production, Haslett-Marroquin and his peers are practicing what is known as agroforestry—an ancient practice that intertwines annual and perennial agriculture. Other forms include alley cropping, in which annual crops including grains, legumes, and vegetables grow between rows of food-bearing trees, and silvopasture, which features cattle munching grass between the rows.
“With just a couple feet of soil standing between prosperity and desolation, civilizations that plow through their soil vanish.”
Agroforestry was largely abandoned in the United States after the nation’s westward expansion in the 19th century. In the 2022 Agricultural Census, just 1.7 percent of US farmers reported integrating trees into crop and livestock operations. But it’s widely practiced across the globe, particularly in Southeast Asia and Central and South America. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 43 percent of all agricultural land globally includes agroforestry features.
Bringing trees to the region now known as the Corn Belt, known for its industrial-scale agriculture and largely devoid of perennial crops, might seem like the height of folly. On closer inspection, however, agroforestry systems like Haslett-Marroquin’s might be a crucial strategy for both preserving and revitalizing one of the globe’s most important farming regions. And while the corn-soybean duopoly that holds sway in the US heartland produces mainly feed for livestock and ethanol, agroforestry can deliver a broader variety of nutrient-dense foods, like nuts and fruit, even as it diversifies farmer income away from the volatile global livestock-feed market. In recognition of this potential, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), in late 2022, launched a $60 million grant program to help farmers adopt such practices.
For decades, Midwestern farmers have devoted tens of millions of acres to just two crops, leaving the ground largely unprotected from wind and rain between harvest and planting. As a result, the loamy trove of topsoil that settlers found there has been pillaged. Using satellite imagery, a team of University of Massachusetts researchers has calculated that a third of the land in the present-day Corn Belt has completely lost its layer of carbon-rich soil. And what’s left is washing away at least 25 times faster than it naturally replenishes. As prime topsoil vanishes, farmers become more dependent on fertilizers derived from fossil fuel.
Not surprisingly, given those applications, the Corn Belt is also in the midst of a burgeoning water-pollution crisis, as agrichemicals and manure from crowded livestock confinements leach away from farm fields and into streams and aquifers. In other words, our breadbasket is a basket case. As University of Washington geomorphologist David Montgomery noted in his magisterial 2007 book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, “With just a couple feet of soil standing between prosperity and desolation, civilizations that plow through their soil vanish.”
These practices remain rare, in part because they are marginalized by federal farm policies that reward maximizing the production of corn and soybeans.
Breaking up the corn and soybean rotation with trees—and freeing some farm animals from vast indoor facilities to roam between rows, where their manure can be taken up by crops—could go a long way to addressing these crises, experts say. Trees actually have a much longer and more robust history in the Midwestern landscape than do annual crops. Think of the Midwestern countryside before US settlers arrived, and you might picture lush grasses and flowers swaying in the wind. That vision is largely accurate, but it’s incomplete. Amid the tall-grass prairies and wetlands, oak trees once dotted landscapes from the shores of Lake Michigan through swathes of present-day Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, clear down to the Mexican border. These trees didn’t clump together in dense forests with closed canopies but rather in what ecologists call savannas—patches of grassland interspersed with oaks. Within these oak savannas, which were interlaced with prairies, tree crowns covered between 10 percent and 30 percent of the ground. They were essentially a transition between the tight deciduous forests of the East and the fully open grasslands further west.
And in the region where Haslett-Marroquin farms—part of the so-called Driftless Area, which was never glaciated—trees proliferated even more intensely. In pre-settlement times, according to a 2014 analysis coauthored by Iowa State University ecologist Lisa Schulte Moore, closed-canopy forests of oaks, sugar maples, and other species covered 15.3 percent of the area, and woodlands (low-density forests) took up another 8.6 percent. Prairies—the ecosystem we readily imagine—composed just 6.9 percent. Oak savannas made up the rest.
In the Driftless and in the rest of the Midwest, Native Americans played an active role in managing savannas, prairies, and forests, where they harvested nutrient-dense acorns for food and other uses. Everything began to change in the mid-19th century, when settlers evicted or killed most of the original inhabitants, drained wetlands, razed trees for lumber, and ripped into the land with plows. In place of staggering biodiversity, an agricultural empire of row crops arose, tended with the tools of modern engineering and industry: genetically modified seeds, insect- and weed-killing chemicals, synthetic and mined fertilizers, and massive tractors and combines. Oak savannas, meanwhile, have been vanishing from the landscape. Today, they occupy a mere 0.02 percent of their historic Midwestern range.
For most of the past century, any push to return trees to the Corn Belt centered on ecosystem services, not food production. Planting trees along streams and rivers—creating what’s known as riparian buffers—helps filter agrichemical runoff and improve water quality. Then there are “wind breaks,” stands of trees strategically placed to shelter crops from wind.
But these practices remain rare, in part because they are marginalized by federal farm policies that reward maximizing the production of corn and soybeans, with subsidized crop insurance and price supports, and disincentivize planting alternative crops.
Trees could play a much bigger role and, once established, could more than pay their way by delivering cash crops. A 2018 paper by University of Illinois researchers found that black walnut trees placed in rows between fields of corn and soybeans (alley cropping) would deliver more profits to landowners than field-crop-only farming on nearly a quarter of the Corn Belt’s land.
Haslett-Marroquin and his fellow poultry farmers aren’t the only ones hoping to reimagine agriculture in the Corn Belt by reinstating the role of trees. The Savanna Institute, founded in 2013 by a group of farmers and academic researchers at a gathering in Illinois, promotes agroforestry in the region. Its funders include the USDA and other government agencies, environmental foundations, and business interests including Patagonia and the family behind Clif Bar. In addition to operating demonstration farms in Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, run in partnership with landowners, the Institute trains and places apprentices on farms that mix trees with crops or livestock. At the 250-acre Hawkeye Buffalo & Cattle Ranch in northeast Iowa, for example, the McFarland family sells grass-fed beef and bison meat from animals raised on restored oak savanna. The other “apprenticeship” farms are smaller operations.
Fred Iutzi, the institute’s director of agroforestry innovation, says an arboreal revival throughout the region would make it more resilient to climate change. Tree canopies buffer soil from the impact of heavy rain, and their roots plunge deep beneath the soil surface and fan out laterally, further holding soil in place. They suck up nutrients all year long, keeping excess fertilizer and manure from leaching away and polluting water. Trees shield crops and soil from the wind. And they both build carbon in the soil as their leaves drop and decompose and store it in their roots, trunks, and branches. Altogether, Iutzi says, an acre of land under agroforestry can sequester five metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, versus about one ton for an acre of corn or soybeans under optimal conditions, which include reducing tillage and planting off-season cover crops.
“There’s a ton of momentum; there’s a historic amount of resources and opportunities for folks to get into it.”
While practices like alley cropping and silvopasture are eligible for support from USDA conservation programs, they haven’t been widely adopted. A recent study co-authored by Trent Ford, the Illinois state climatologist, found that between 2017 and 2023, the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program doled out just $900,000 to support agroforestry practices in the Corn Belt, a sliver of its overall budget.
But more money is on the way. In 2022, as part of its $3.1 billion Partnership for Climate Smart Commodities program, the USDA announced a $60-million five-year effort to expand agroforestry production and markets in the central and eastern regions of the United States, plus Hawaii. Managed by The Nature Conversancy in partnership with the Savanna Institute and other groups, the project’s goal is 30,000 new acres of agroforestry by 2026, says TNC’s Audrey Epp Schmidt, who leads the project. So far, 35 projects have been selected for funding, eight in the Corn Belt.
For now, an agroforestry renaissance remains at a nascent phase, Epp Schmidt says, “but there’s a ton of momentum, there’s a historic amount of resources and opportunities for folks to get into it.” What the movement needs, she says, is a farmer-to-farmer network: “That’s really when this is going to take off—when farmers see the success of their neighbor’s [agroforestry] operations.”
Even so, the Corn Belt will be a tough nut to crack, says Silvia Secchi, a natural resource economist at the University of Iowa. Such expenditures, while important, will struggle to overcome the formidable inertia of corn and soybeans. The proximate reason is the subsidies that keep the region’s farmers afloat even as their soil washes away. But ultimately, she says, farmers in the region “strive to be as simple as possible and as mechanized as possible”—a mindset that favors focusing on two cash crops instead of a more complex, labor-intensive approach, like agroforestry.
Yet Iutzi remains hopeful. In the 1920s, he says, the idea of a federal farm policy centered on soil conservation seemed beyond the realm of possibility. Then came the Dust Bowl, a severe soil-erosion crisis that triggered New Deal legislation that, for a time, tempered overproduction of farm commodities and held soil in place.
It’s impossible to say precisely what type of event would force policymakers and farmers to drastically change course in the Corn Belt. But as the region’s vast corn and soybean operations continue hemorrhaging soil and fouling water and climate change proceeds apace, they may find themselves looking for new directions sooner than later. Iutzi thinks projects like Tree Range Farms could show the way forward. “History is just absolutely peppered with this pattern of big disruptions of one kind or another being the catalyst for big change,” he says. “And it’s ideas that are really well honed, when the time comes, that really surge.”
Kamala Harris‘ campaign is highlighting the preventable deaths of two women who would be alive if not for Georgia’s abortion ban. This week reporting from ProPublica proved out the warning that abortion bans could be deadly, by bringing forward the names and faces of two Georgia women, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, who died in 2022 but would be alive today if not for the state’s ban.
“Amber’s mom shared with me that the word over and over again in her mind is ‘preventable,'” Harris said Thursday evening at a Michigan campaign forum hosted by Oprah Winfrey. Thurman’s mother and two sisters were in the audience. “This story is a story that is sadly not the only story of what has been happening since these bans have taken place.”
“There is a word: preventable. And there is another word: predictable.”
Amber Thurman and Candi Miller both died after medication-induced abortions failed to expel all the fetal tissue, resulting in fatal infections, ProPublica reported. They were among the first women to die from what could be called a modern back-alley abortion: abortions that have been pushed underground and exiled from the safety of expert medical supervision.
In the days since ProPublica broke the news of these preventable deaths, anti-abortion activists have sought to blame the women. “Abortion killed Amber Thurman,” anti-abortion activist Lila Rose posted on X, shifting blame from the ban to the procedure and, implicitly, Thurman herself. The stories are complicated for advocates fighting to keep abortion medication on the market, as their stories highlight the rare times in which medication abortions require emergency follow-up care. (Such episodes are at the center of a current lawsuit to take one of the drugs, mifepristone, off the market.) But from the beginning to the end of their tragic stories, it’s clear that both women died for one reason: Georgia’s strict abortion ban.
It’s a story the Harris campaign is continuing to tell, with a Friday rally in Atlanta, where she delivered a warning: “If [Trump] is elected again, I am certain, he will sign a national abortion ban.” And with it, more people will die. “There is a word, preventable, and there is another word, predictable,” Harris said. “And the reality is, for every story we hear of the suffering under Trump abortion bans, there are so many of the stories we’re not hearing.”
On the debate stage last week, Trump would not rule out signing a national abortion ban. And his allies who crafted Project 2025 have laid out how to ban abortion, including those conducted with medication, nationwide. It’s a message her campaign has sounded from the start, as it leans on the health crisis caused by the overturning of Roe to motivate voters. But it’s also the sad truth.
The two women’s stories are eerily reminiscent of ones from over 50 years ago, when women died either from obtaining illegal abortions from doctors or others ill equipped to perform them, or from torturous attempts to induce one at home. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe two years ago, physicians, historians, and politicians warned that women would die. We now know that it took less than two months before at least one did.
“I fear that their situations are not unique,” Dr. Daniel Grossman, the director of a research group on reproductive health at the University of California, San Francisco, posted on X. “I think it’s very likely that other women and pregnant people have died due to their care being denied or delayed or due to being too scared to seek care—all because of the bans on abortion.” As evidence, Grossman cited a new study in which patients and providers reported on the near-death scenarios they have encountered under post-Roe abortion bans, cases very similar to those of Thurman and Miller. In 86 narratives, the report describes patients whose pregnancies, miscarriages, and post-abortion complications threatened their life. And yet doctors refused to treat them.
Soon after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Georgia instituted a six-week ban. Like other draconian laws that popped up around the country that summer, its language was medically vague but legally punitive. Doctors and hospitals were left to guess what procedures were actually prohibited and when exactly exceptions for the life of the mother kicked in. If a prosecutor and jury second-guessed their decision, possible prison sentences loomed over their decisions. Almost immediately, in Thurman’s case, doctors chose a path that led to her death.
Hospitals’ refusal to treat women suffering complications jeopardize women from all walks of life.
Thurman was a healthy 28-year-old single mother of a six-year-old when she learned she was pregnant with twins. Thurman wanted a surgical abortion, but as ProPublicareported, Georgia’s six-week ban had just taken effect. Thurman drove to North Carolina for the procedure, but after traffic caused her to miss her appointment, she was offered a medication abortion instead. As happens in rare instances, not all of the fetal tissue was expelled, leading to sepsis. If Thurman were in North Carolina, she could have returned to the clinic and received a dilation and curettage, a common procedure that would have saved her life. But she was stuck in Georgia. Again, the state failed her. When Thurman was admitted to an ER in Georgia, it was clear that she needed a D&C to clear away the tissue that was poisoning her. But the hospital delayed surgery for 20 hours. By then, it was too late. A statewide maternal mortality review committee, which operates on a two-year lag and is only now examining post-Roe cases, deemed her death preventable.
In the fall of 2022, Candi Miller discovered she was pregnant. Because the 41-year-old mother of three had diabetes, hypertension, and lupus, doctors warned that another pregnancy might kill her. But Georgia’s abortion ban made no exceptions for people whose chronic conditions made pregnancy a deadly proposition. Abandoned by her state, Miller ordered abortion pills online and took them at home. As with Thurman, her body did not expel all the tissue, spawning an infection. She suffered for days until her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her three year old daughter by her side.
She hadn’t sought out a doctor, her family said, “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.” Tragically, as Thurman’s death suggests, it’s not clear that it would have helped if she had.
“It is exactly like what it was before it was made, open, available and legal,” says Leslie Reagan, a historian at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the author of the book When Abortion Was a Crime. Reagan recalls reading coroner reports of women just like Miller, only decades earlier, who died because they were afraid of being arrested or prosecuted if they went to the hospital.
If Roe were still in place, Miller could have sought a surgical abortion or taken the pills under supervision of a doctor, who could have intervened when she needed further care. But that’s not how it works in Georgia anymore. Again, the same panel, which finally reviewed her case last month, immediately deemed her death preventable. ProPublica reported that the panel is reviewing additional deaths involving abortions after the ban was passed.
History seems to be repeating itself. Both Thurman and Miller were Black, and both died of sepsis.
When doctors and historians warned that people would die from post-Dobbs abortion bans, they weren’t being hyperbolic, they were looking at the facts. In one study, economists found that maternal death rates for nonwhite women plummeted after states began legalizing the procedure in the late 1960s and early 1970s, leading up to Roe in January 1973. Legal abortion reduced non-white abortion-related mortality by 30-60 percent.
“These are two black women,” says Reagan, noting that before Roe, Black women were far more likely to die trying to obtain an abortion. “This just, again, accentuates and replicates the past. And you know, frankly, the people passing these laws do not care about that.”
Further, deaths due to abortion-related infection were the most common fatal complication. “Over 1960 to 1980, legal abortion has been suggested as a major contributor to the decline in maternal deaths, primarily from abortion-related sepsis,” according to the report. In an account quoted in the study, an obstetrician from the period recalls that “complications of illegal abortion were so common that a septic ward was set aside for the infections. Surgery for hemorrhage was a common night duty.”
But for all the historical echoes, there are key differences. Rather than an abortion from an unqualified doctor or an attempt to induce an abortion by harming themselves, both Thurman and Miller took safe medication greenlit by the Food and Drug Administration. Both had the rare occurrence of failure to expel all fetal tissue, resulting in the need for medical attention.
While it’s clear that poor women and women of color will bear the brunt of the new wave of abortion-related fatalities, hospitals’ refusal to treat women suffering complications from abortion and miscarriage jeopardize women from all walks of life. Just ask Amanda Zurawski, a white woman from Texas who faced the imminent loss of her pregnancy but was told to go home and wait for the onset of sepsis. She ended up fighting for her life in the ICU. Indeed, it appears that under today’s abortion bans, doctors and hospitals are forcing women into septic shock and, in some cases, even delaying care once sepsis has already arrived.
Poor women and women of color will bear the brunt of new abortion-related fatalities.
This is not an accident. In fact, the lawsuit against mifepristone launched by the hard right Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom was premised on the idea that doctors should be able to refuse to treat patients in the exact position as Thurman and Miller. Their lawyers argued that the doctors’ personal opposition to abortion meant they should never have to save a woman’s life if she was suffering complications from taking mifepristone, even if the fetus was not living. As the group’s attorney, Erin Hawley, said during oral arguments before the Supreme Court, an anti-abortion doctor’s conscience is harmed by “completing an elective abortion,” meaning “removing an embryo, a fetus, whether or not they’re alive, as well as placental tissue.”
It was a shocking courtroom moment, but also a revealing one. The Alliance Defending Freedom doesn’t just represent doctors—it has also been instrumental in crafting and defending state abortion bans. They are not only willing to let women die, but it is in keeping with their beliefs. The lawmakers who wrote laws like Georgia’s—and refused to amend them despite warnings—seem similarly inclined to allow preventable deaths. Louisiana is about to limit access to misoprostol, a drug that is part of the medication abortion regimen but is also a life-saving anti-hemorrhage drug used in postpartum care, by categorizing it as a controlled substance. Again, people could die.
Just as the pre-Roe era saw unnecessary death, so now are we. And it’s easy to see, from the vague yet strict laws to the fear instilled in both doctors and patients, that it’s all by design.
In Atlanta, Harris presented a stark choice. She would restore Roe, he would usher in more bans. “He brags about overturning Roe v Wade,” Harris said of Trump on Friday. “He says he is proud. Proud that women are dying?”
This February, President Joe Biden was eating an ice cream cone with Late Night host Seth Meyers in Manhattan when a reporter asked about the chances of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. “Well,” Biden replied, prompting breaking news posts, “I hope, by the end of the weekend.” The president then assured the public: “We’re close.”
Nearly seven months later, no ceasefire is in sight. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that multiple US officials told the paper that there is little chance of a ceasefire.
The report continued a horrific week for Biden’s foreign policy record in the Middle East. Each of the past five days has brought its own grim news about the vanishing chances of peace in the region:
Monday: Israel formally expanded its war aims to include the return of residents evacuated out of the north. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the “possibility for an agreement is running out” with Hezbollah. Gallant explained, “Therefore, the only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes will be via military action.” It suggested a much heightened potential for a wider war between Lebanon and Israel.
Tuesday: Israel began detonating explosive-rigged pagers and walkie-talkies in an attack that targeted members of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed political and militant group. Axios reported that US officials were not warned of the operation. The indiscriminate approach killed dozens—including at least two children—and injured thousands. In doing so, Israel greatly increased the odds of a regional war (that the United States does not want to be dragged into).
Wednesday: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that his kingdom will not normalize relations with Israel without the “establishment of a Palestinian state.” The announcement appeared to kill off any chance of success for a years-long (and widely criticized) effort by the Biden administration to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, while largely sidestepping the concerns of Palestinians. That effort had begun under the Trump administration in the much touted Abraham Accords that the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had helped broker.
Thursday: A Wall Street Journal story headlined “US Officials Concede Gaza Cease-Fire Out of Reach for Biden,” cited senior US officials who have concluded that a ceasefire deal is unlikely during Biden’s presidency. “No deal is imminent,” one said. “I’m not sure it ever gets done.”
Friday: Israel killed at least 12 people in an airstrike in Beirut targeting senior Hezbollah commanders. As Gallant made clear earlier in the week in reference to Lebanon, “we are at the start of a new phase in the war” and the “center of gravity is moving north.”
Initially, one of the few bright spots of Biden’s approach was that no regional war had broken out. The recent Israeli assaults in Lebanon, along with Gallant’s comments about a “new phase” of the war, suggest that may soon change. For Netanyahu, who is widely believed to favor a second Donald Trump presidency, a new phase of conflict that makes a Biden-Harris administration look ineffectual just as some Americans begin voting may carry additional rewards.
This string of havoc was all, sadly, predictable. In response to the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, Biden embraced what was labeled a “bear hug” approach to his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In keeping with a decades-old personal approach for managing relations with Israel, he made sure there was “no daylight” between him and the Israeli Prime Minister in public. Biden thought it would allow him to shape the direction of the war in private.
Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.
Biden’s faith in a no daylight approach had been repeatedly disproven prior to October 7 but he stuck with it anyway. That decision reflected an effectively limitless commitment to supporting Israel. As I reported in December on the roots of Biden’s flawed response to the war, his Israel record was unusual:
Biden has long gone further than many of his fellow Democrats in defense of Israel. As a senator, he backed moving the American embassy to Jerusalem decades before Donald Trump made that a reality, boasted about attending more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other senator, and savaged an effort by George H.W. Bush to push Israel toward negotiating with Palestinians. As vice president, he undercut Barack Obama’s efforts to push Israel toward peace. As president prior to October 7, he continued policies implemented by Trump that sidelined Palestinians.
The death toll in Gaza stood at around 20,000 when that story came out. It is now double that, and the full death toll may prove far higher. Nearly 100,000 people have been injured. Israeli hostages remain in captivity in large part due to Netanyahu’s repeated efforts to derail ceasefire negotiations.
What has not changed is Biden’s almost complete unwillingness to use the United States’ extensive leverage over Israel. Aside from some 2,000-pound bombs, his administration has ensured that arms keep flowing. That decision has been made despite substantial evidence that doing so violates US laws that prevent weapons from being sent to foreign units implicated in major human rights violations. Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.
In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden was buoyed by victories in the “blue wall” states of the Upper Midwest, and a few narrow wins in the South and Southwest. But it was easy to forget that he also picked up another electoral vote in a state where Democrats had been shut out since 2008—Nebraska, a reliably red state that has apportioned its electors by congressional district since 1992. The second district, which includes much of Omaha, is an electoral-college curiosity that was offset by Trump’s victory in the second congressional district of Maine—a reliably blue state that also splits its electoral votes.
This year is different. Thanks to reapportionment following the 2020 census, winning Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would only get Kamala Harris to 269 electoral votes—an Electoral College tie—and not 270. And because an Electoral College deadlock would be broken by a House of Representative roll-call in which each state delegation gets one vote, an Electoral College tie is effectively an Electoral College loss for Democrats. A win in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, or North Carolina would still put Harris over the top, but the easiest path to 270 is simply to hold onto what Nebraskans refer to as “the blue dot.” Which is why this time, Republicans aren’t satisfied with Nebraska and Maine canceling each other out; they are currently trying to change the rules at the last minute to take Omaha’s vote for themselves.
Trump supporters, and his campaign itself, have been talking about changing Nebraska’s rules for a while. Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk held a rally in the second district earlier this year to try to pressure the legislature to make a change, and Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita said at the Republican National Convention that he believed the state might still take action. Republican Gov. Jim Pillen has signaled his openness to calling a special session if Republicans in the unicameral legislature can prove they have the votes. But this largely theoretical exercise took on a more concrete tone this week, after NBC News reported South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham had traveled to Nebraska on behalf of the Trump campaign to lobby Republican lawmakers on the matter. And according to the Washington Post, Trump himself spoke with a Republican state senator by phone during the meeting to make his case directly.
This might seem a little late in the game to make such a major change to the Electoral College, but that’s the point: This is only happening because it’s so late in the game that Maine, because of its own state laws, can no longer change its own rules in response. It’s hard to come up with any justification for the Electoral College in the year 2024, but the Nebraska gambit makes a mockery of an already broken and deeply undemocratic system.
It’s hardly a done deal. Pillen has said he won’t call a special session unless legislators demonstrate they have a filibuster-proof majority, and as Nebraska Democrats have pointed out, they don’t have the votes right now. According to the Nebraska Examiner, there’s at least one key holdout with a conflicting professional interest—Republican state Sen. Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who is reportedly considering running for mayor of Omaha next year. He might want to avoid being known in Omaha as the guy who made Omaha irrelevant. In one of the world’s least reassuring statements, a spokesperson told the Examiner Thursday that McDonnell was opposed to any change “as of today.”
Whether Nebraska changes the rules or not, though, Graham’s gambit, and the pressure from the Trump campaign, offers an ominous glimpse of a future that looks a lot like the recent past. One of the dominant storylines following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election was the pressure campaign he and his allies mounted on individual Republican officeholders all the way up until January 6. Trump, for instance, invited Michigan Republican lawmakers to the White House and called Republicans in Wayne County to try to pressure them to oppose the certification of Detroit’s election results. He asked Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in a phone call to “find” a few thousand votes that would put him over the top. Graham, as it happens, also talked to Raffensperger after the election, in a conversation that the election official considered part of a pressure campaign. (Graham denied any ill intention and was investigated but not charged by the Fulton County District Attorney’s office as part of its probe of 2020 election interference.) I don’t think I need to get into how Trump pressured Mike Pence.
This is what November and December will look like if Trump loses at the ballot box: a drumbeat of urgent phone calls with Republicans lawmakers and officeholders in which the Republican candidate tries to cajole them into enabling his desired outcome, whether through legal or extra-legal means. If he doesn’t have the votes on Election Day, he will simply try to “find” them—in legislatures, on boards of supervisors, and in judges’ chambers.
Then again, if Trump does get his way in Lincoln, it just might mean he never has to do any of that.
After 50 days, Gaza European Hospital, one of the few trauma centers serving the Gaza strip, reopened, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The hospital has been a vital part of the crumbling medical infrastructure in the region. It reopened earlier this month.
In August, I told the story of two medical students who worked at Gaza European Hospital before it was shuttered and forcibly evacuated on July 1st. The medical center remained closed amid bombardment in the area for over a month. Each student told me harrowing stories of their time suddenly propelled to the job of full-time doctors amid the devastation of the medical system in Gaza.
Now, the students are back to work. Hasan Ali Abu Ghalyoon, a dental student I interviewed via WhatsApp in August, returned to European Hospital on September 9th. He said things are different there now.
Before the July evacuation, he slept at the hospital. Now, he commutes back and forth from his family’s tent in Deir al-Balah, a trip that takes him three or four hours a day. It is only about a seven-mile journey. But in Gaza, it can be treacherous.
Normally, he takes a hospital-provided bus to work. Last Friday, though, “I was a little late for the bus and I was forced to go by car,” he said. On his journey, he passed a destroyed World Health Organization warehouse, a torched mosque, and innumerable teetering husks of buildings and dust-covered tents. “I took three cars on my way to get from my tent to the hospital and I walked through many destroyed streets on foot.”
In some areas of eastern Gaza, there are no cars at all. The trip, he said, cost him 25 shekels, or about eight dollars, thanks to the lack of fuel entering Gaza. Before the war, transportation wouldn’t cost a thing.
Nermeen Ziyad Abo Mostafa, another student volunteer, hears the zanana—Gazan slang for the incessant buzzing of drones overhead—on her way to the hospital. “It was not easy to reopen it, because all the hospital’s property was stolen,” she said. The hospital is still not fully equipped, she explained, but medical teams are doing their best to work with what they have.
Once the students arrive, they see “mostly burns and fractures,” Abu Ghalyoon said. Every day, there are patients requiring skin grafts.
Another change: there are now fewer international delegations than before. The flow of international medics into the Gaza strip has slowed to a trickle. The Israeli military has hit international aid workers like those from World Central Kitchen, after a vehicle from the group was bombed in April, and UN workers, like those from the World Food Program, whose vehicles were struck in August. Supply shortages are ongoing. As Abu Ghalyoon put it: “There is a very, very severe shortage of all medicines. The medical equipment is old and sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.”
On September 12th, the World Health Organization released a report estimating that over 22,500 people in Gaza have suffered “life-changing injuries” since Israel’s offensive in Gaza began. Most of these injuries—about 13,000 to 17,000—are what the WHO report calls “severe limb injuries,” and at least 3,000 are amputations.
“The huge surge in rehabilitation needs occurs in parallel with the ongoing decimation of the health system,” said Dr. Richard Peeperkorn, WHO Representative in the occupied Palestinian territory. “Patients can’t get the care they need. Acute rehabilitation services are severely disrupted and specialized care for complex injuries is not available, placing patients’ lives at risk. Immediate and long-term support is urgently needed to address the enormous rehabilitation needs.”
Public resources in Springfield, Ohio, were strained long before former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets derailed the presidential debate. Now, after days of vile disinformation from Senator JD Vance and other prominent Republicans, dozens of bomb threats, an immigration town hall that attracted thousands, and the possibility of a Trump visit to town, local and state services have been stretched to their limits. Even as officials hope the major waves of national attention are behind them, they’re preparing for more of the same.
On Thursday, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue announced that he has signed an emergency proclamation granting himself the power to bypass the usual contract procurement and bidding procedures, letting him quickly enter into agreements with vendors related to “public safety concerns.” The proclamation—which originated with Rue’s office, not the city council—will remain in place until further notice, according to the Springfield News-Sun. Flanked by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and regional and state officials, Rue told reporters that the emergency powers were a precaution that would also allow the city to recoup security costs from the state. “It is not an indication of immediate danger, but allows us to efficiently and effectively protect our public safety,” he said.
Dozens of buildings across Springfield—including schools, businesses, and city hall—have been targeted by bomb threats over the past week. Although every threat has turned out to be false, each has required significant time and resources—including federal bomb-detection dogs—to investigate. DeWine has deployed three dozen state police officers to conduct daily sweeps of every school building in the district; those officers will remain on hand, he says, until school officials call them off.
If Trump cancels his visit, “it would convey a significant message of peace to the city of Springfield concerning immigration.”
The national storm bearing down on the small western Ohio city has disrupted almost every aspect of daily life. Threats of violence have forced college classes online and city buildings to close. An annual cultural diversity festival was canceled. And while DeWine started off the news conference by focusing on how to address some of the impacts associated with the recent influx of 15,000 Haitian immigrants to the community—for example, adding another mobile health clinic and allocating millions of state dollars to increase the availability of vaccinations and primary medical care—it quickly devolved into a discussion about bomb threats and Trump.
Springfield’s mayor, who is a Republican, has been speaking outfor months about how the surge in immigrants has strained schools, hospitals, and city resources. But on Thursday, Rue honed in on the toll that national attention has taken on the city’s public safety system. For example, later that day, former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was planning to hold an immigration town hall that ultimately attracted thousands of would-be attendees, forcing the city to close off the street. Rue reiterated his hope that Trump, who has announced he will travel to Springfield in “the next two weeks,” will reconsider. “A visit from the former president will undoubtedly place additional demands on our safety infrastructure,” Rue said. “Should he choose to change his plans, it would convey a significant message of peace to the city of Springfield concerning immigration.”
Meanwhile, Rue and DeWine pointed to signs that life in Springfield is returning to normal. The stream of bomb threats has become a trickle. Children are returning to school in greater numbers each day. In not-so-subtle terms, DeWine told reporters that what Springfield needs most in its quest for normalcy is for the national media to go away.
“We will return, in the not too distant future, to a point where you all are going to be writing and talking about, reporting on the nightly news about something else,” DeWine said. “And as soon as that happens, I think you’re going to see the temperature go down.”
Less than two months before the election, the Trump-aligned majority on the Georgia State Election Board passed a new set of eleventh-hour rule changes on Friday that could plunge the vote counting process into chaos and give Republicans yet another pretext not to certify the results if Kamala Harris wins the state.
During a highly contentious meeting, the state board voted 3-2 to require county election boards to hand count ballots cast on Election Day and then compare the results to the totals tallied by electronic voting machines to reconcile any discrepancies. While hand counts are commonly used in post-election audits to ensure accurate results, counting all votes by hand is significantly more burdensome, time-consuming, and error-prone than using standard voting machines. The rules were passed by three Republican appointees who Trump praised as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory” during a rally in Atlanta in August.
“We’re so far off the deep end of sanity here,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s lone Democratic member, who voted against the rule changes, told me. “It’s a terrible, terrible idea to do this sort of thing with no notice, no training.”
Given the short time period for counties to certify the election—the deadline is the Monday after Election Day—voting rights activists worry that the new hand counting mandate, combined with rules adopted last month requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into the vote totals and access “all election-related documentation,” will be weaponized by Republicans to oppose election certification. “After changing election certification rules in ways that give new power to local election officials to refuse to certify results, the MAGA board is now changing rules in ways that seem meant to create a fail point in our system,” says Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the voting rights group Fair Fight.
The new rules put the state board directly at odds with election officials, Republicans and Democrats alike. A lawyer for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who defended the results of the 2020 election, said they were likely illegal and poorly timed, noting that the new requirements will not go into effect until October 14 at the earliest, after absentee ballots have been mailed to voters on October 7 and just as in-person early voting starts on October 15.
“We’re so far off the deep end of sanity here,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s lone Democratic member, told me. “It’s a terrible, terrible idea to do this sort of thing with no notice, no training.”
“It is far too late in the election process for counties to implement new rules and procedures, and many poll workers have already completed their required training,” Charlene McGowan, the general counsel for Raffensperger, wrote to the board before Friday’s meeting. The new voting hand counting rules “would disrupt existing chain of custody protocols under the law and needlessly introduce the risk of error, lost ballots, or fraud,” she added.
The office of Georgia Republican Attorney General Chris Carr sent a letter to the board Friday morning informing them that several of the proposed rules, including the hand count of ballots, “very likely exceed the Board’s statutory authority” and “appear to conflict with the statutes governing the conduct of elections.” (At least two other rules approved by the board on Friday, including one that significantly expands the areas where partisan poll watchers can observe the vote counting, also likely violate state laws, the attorney general said.)
“The overwhelming number of election officials I’ve heard from are opposed to this,” said John Fervier, the GOP chair of the board, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. “It’s too close to the election. It’s too late to train a lot of poll workers. There’s a lack of resources in many counties to effectuate this rule.” Most importantly, he said, “this is not supported at all in statute.”
All five election officials who spoke during the public comment section of the meeting spoke against the new rules. “The only people who support this are activists who think that the 2020 election was stolen,” says Tindall Ghazal. “Election workers don’t want it. Election supervisors don’t want it. You don’t change the rules this dramatically, this close to the election.”
The board did, however, vote 4-1 to table another proposal to count ballots by hand during early voting, which one of the pro-Trump members, Janelle King, said could lead to privacy concerns ahead of the election. (King also criticized Raffensperger for “unethical” behavior for recording the call where Trump demanded he “find 11,780 votes” to overturn’s Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, but did not reprimand Trump for pressuring the secretary of state to overturn the election.)
The push for hand counts has become a rallying cry of election deniers who falsely blame electronic voting machines for Trump’s defeat. One of the biggest backers of this conspiracy theory is MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
Ironically, under the guise of protecting election integrity, hand counts actually lead to less accurate results due to human error. Numerous studies show that hand counts produce double the error rate of machine scanners. When Republicans in Nye County, Nevada, attempted to hand count ballots in 2022, they reported an error rate of 25 percent on the first day before the courts shut the effort down.
“It’s a rule looking for a problem that doesn’t exist,” says Travis Doss, executive director of the Augusta-Richmond County Board of Elections. Doss is president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, a bipartisan group of more than 500 election workers from across the state. The group asked the board last month not to pass any more rule changes before the election because it was “gravely concerned that dramatic changes at this stage will disrupt the preparation and training processes already in motion for poll workers, absentee voting, advance voting and Election Day preparation.” It specifically opposed the hand counting requitement because of “the rule’s potential to delay results; set fatigued employees up for failure; and undermine the very confidence the rule’s author claims to seek.”
There’s good reason to worry that delays or errors caused by a hand count of ballots would then be cited by Republicans as a reason not to certify the election if a Democrat wins. That occurred in 2022, when the election board in rural Cochise County, Arizona, attempted to hand count all ballots, were told by a court it was illegal, then refused to certify the results after Democrats narrowly won close state races. The two Republican board members who led the scheme were subsequently indicted by the state’s attorney general for obstructing the vote counting process.
That kind of controversy over the vote counting process is exactly what Trump and his allies seem to be agitating for, which is why they’ve worked so hard to stack local and state election boards with MAGA election deniers in places like Georgia. The new rules are “throwing things off kilter to the point where it could create chaos when that’s the last thing we need,” Doss says. (The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has also repeatedly warned states not to implement voting changes close to an election.)
Tindall Ghazal predicts that any effort to refuse to certify the election will fail, because courts and state officials will force rogue counties to approve the results, but she worries how Trump could weaponize any delay or dispute in the vote counting process, which are now far more likely to occur because of the new rules passed by his allies on the state election board.
“It leads to public uncertainty and public distrust, because it gets messy,” she says. “And that’s the real goal. To throw enough sand in the eyes of the public to make them think maybe something went wrong.”
Before Bernie Moreno was the 2024 Ohio Republican candidate for Senate, he was the owner of numerous luxury car dealerships, hawking rarified brands like Aston Martin and Mercedes-Benz.
To sell pretty cars, it helps to have pretty dealerships. So in December 2007, Moreno hired the firm Welty Building Company (WBC) “for the design and construction of a Porsche dealership and a Mercedes-Benz dealership” in the Cleveland area, according to a 2014 court document.
Details of the initial contract, such as exact work orders and total costs, are not public record. But legal documents obtained from Cuyahoga County’s clerk of courts show Moreno’s company M1 Motors failed to promptly pay Welty hundreds of thousands of dollars upon completion of the work. After an arbitrator declared in July 2014 that Moreno’s company owed WBC $313,058, Moreno still didn’t pay, forcing the construction firm to file a legal claim in September 2014 seeking a court to confirm the arbitrator’s decision. As a result, the court scheduled a conference meeting to discuss. Even after that meeting was scheduled, WBC had to file a “Motion to Enforce” before Moreno finally fulfilled his financial obligations to WBC in full, including post-judgment interest, sometime after early January 2015.
Delays aren’t necessarily standard-operating procedure after arbitration rulings. But many people, either out of inability to pay or frustration with the ruling, sometimes drag their feet. Jeremy Fogel, the executive director at the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former US District Court and state court judge, said he saw similar situations play out all the time when he held the gavel. “It’s a kind of litigation behavior that, unfortunately, is not unheard of,” he says.
This saga, not previously reported, is just the latest example of past legal disputes involving Moreno. A litany of cases from Moreno’s pre-politics days of building a car dealership empire—lawsuits claiming racial, gender, and age discrimination, as well as wage withholding—have clouded Moreno’s attempt to portray himself as a self-made entrepreneur who knows what’s best for Ohio workers because he’s employed thousands of them at his dealerships. This is at least the second example from Moreno’s past in which he did not promptly comply with official legal renderings: Amid proceedings over a case in which he was ultimately found liable for withholding overtime wages from his employees in Massachusetts, Moreno shredded company documents that he and his lawyers “were required to preserve” and “knew or should have known [were] relevant.”
Welty CEO Donzell S. Taylor told Mother Jones that there’s no bad blood between his construction company and Moreno. “Issues like these are not uncommon in the construction business and this one was resolved through the proper channels,” he said in a statement. “We are proud of the work we did for Mr. Moreno and look forward to working with his team again in the future.” But evidently, Moreno was not the CEO’s first pick for the Senate seat: Federal Election Commission records show Taylor donated the election-cycle maximum of $6,600 to one of Moreno’s opponents in the GOP primary, Ohio secretary of state Frank LaRose.
A Moreno campaign spokesperson declined to comment for this story.
For the average Ohioan whose debt is more likely tied to a modest mortgage or credit cards, Moreno’s history of delaying or withholding payment to workers and contractors may impact how they view the candidate whose campaign hinges on his image as a wealthy businessman.
Initially, Moreno’s 2014 legal dispute with WBC took place outside of court. As is increasingly common, WBC and M1 Motors entered arbitration, an alternative legal process that is typically less expensive and tends to be friendlier to large corporations.
The independent arbitrator’s decision explains WBC pursued legal action to seek its remaining balance of $271,371 (which M1 “admittedly owed”), plus prejudgment interest of $39,688. For its part, M1 claimed WBC erred in its design and construction processes to the tune of $1.13 million.
“There was, for all practical purposes, no evidence that WBC’s design was deficient in any respect.”
Moreno’s company alleged construction errors from WBC required M1 to replace portions of the roof and relocate poorly designed drains for more than $100,000, re-do $70,000 worth of decorative concrete and pavers, rebuild a $265,000 car wash, fix exposed metal trusses costing $15,000, and replace a $416,000 Porsche metal wall panel. The arbitrator concluded M1 owed WBC $313,058, minus $30,000 WBC owed M1 for minor construction flaws. The $30,000 credit made the sum M1 owed WBC on July 28 come out to $283,058.
“The testimony of M1’s principal was that he did not believe that WBC’s designer did anything wrong. M1’s expert did not offer any opinion contrary to that testimony,” the arbitrator’s ruling concluded. “There was, for all practical purposes, no evidence that WBC’s design was deficient in any respect.”
According to a motion filed by WBC, Moreno didn’t comply with the decision for more than two months. In Ohio, the deadline to appeal an arbitration decision is 30 days from the date the judgment is rendered in an arbitrator’s report. There’s no evidence Moreno’s company appealed. “Despite the arbitration award itself and numerous requests from Welty’s counsel seeking payment, Ml refused to pay Welty,” a November 7 motion said.
To discuss M1’s non-payment, the court in mid-September scheduled a conference call hearing. Two days prior to that court conference slated for October 15, M1 Motors finally paid WBC its principal debt and pre-judgment interest of $283,058, a full 77 days after the arbitration concluded in July. However, M1 did not pay interest on the principal that accrued between the date of the July arbitration ruling and the date of the belated October 13 payment, which led WBC to file its “Motion to Enforce.”
Finally, a judge settled the matter on January 2, 2015. Citing previous case law, Judge Nancy Fuerst ruled M1 had to pay WBC “post judgment statutory interest.”
“No just cause for delay,” the judge wrote to M1. “So Ordered.”
This story was originally published by WIREDand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
Over the past few years, the United States has become the go-to location for companies seeking to suck carbon dioxide out of the sky. There are a handful of demonstration-scale direct air capture (DAC) plants dotted across the globe, but the facilities planned in Louisiana and Texas are of a different scale: They aim to capture millions of tons of carbon dioxide each year, rather than the dozens of tons or less captured by existing systems.
The US has a few things going for it when it comes to DAC: It has the right kind of geological formations that can store carbon dioxide pumped underground, it has an oil and gas industry that knows a lot about drilling into that ground, and it has federal grants and subsidies for the carbon capture industry. The projects in Louisiana and Texas are supported by up to $1.05 billion in Department of Energy (DOE) funds, and the projects will be eligible for tax credits of up to $180 per ton of carbon dioxide stored.
“It’s quite clear that the United States is the leader in policy to support this nascent sector,” says Jason Hochman, executive director at the Direct Air Capture Coalition, a nonprofit that works to accelerate the deployment of DAC technology. “At the same time, it’s nowhere near where it needs to be to get on track—to the scale we need to get to net zero.”
The Heritage Foundation doesn’t just doubt the carbon removal industry—it is openly skeptical about climate change
But support for carbon storage is far from guaranteed. Project 2025, the nearly thousand-page Heritage Foundation policy blueprint for a second Trump presidency, would dramatically roll back policies that support the DAC industry and carbon capture more generally. The Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership document proposes eliminating the DOE’s Office for Clean Energy Demonstrations, which provides funds for DAC facilities and carbon capture projects, and also calls out the 45Q tax credit that supports DAC as well as carbon capture, usage, and storage—filtering and storing carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and heavy industry. (The Heritage Foundation did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)
Sucking carbon out of the sky is not uncontroversial—not least because of the oil and gas industry’s involvement in the sector—but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report says that using carbon dioxide removal to balance emissions from sectors like aviation and agriculture is unavoidable if we want to achieve net zero. Carbon dioxide removal can mean planting trees and sequestering carbon in soil, but a technology like DAC is attractive because it’s easy to measure how much carbon you’re sequestering, and stored carbon should stay locked up for a very long time, which isn’t necessarily the case with forests and soil.
As DAC technology is so new, and the facilities constructed so far are small, it’s still extremely expensive to remove carbon from the atmosphere this way. Estimated costs for extracting carbon go from hundreds of dollars per ton to in excess of $1,000—although Google just announced it is paying $100 for DAC removal credits for carbon that will be sequestered in the early 2030s. On top of that, large-scale DAC plants are likely to cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to build.
That’s why government support like the DOE Regional DAC Hubs program is so important, says Jack Andreasen at Breakthrough Energy, the Bill Gates–founded initiative to accelerate technology to reach net zero. “This gets projects built,” he says. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed in 2021 set aside $3.5 billion in federal funds to help the construction of four regional DAC hubs. This is the money that is going into the Louisiana and Texas projects.
Climeworks is one of the companies working on the Louisiana DAC hub, which is eligible for up to $550 million in federal funding. Eventually, the facility aims to capture more than 1 million tons of carbon dioxide each year and store it underground. “If you do want to build an industry, you cannot do it with demo projects. You have to put your money where your mouth is and say there are certain projects that should be eligible for a larger share of funding,” says Daniel Nathan, chief project development officer at Climeworks. When the hub starts sequestering carbon, it will be eligible to claim up to $180 for each ton of carbon stored, under tax credit 45Q, which was extended under the Inflation Reduction Act.
“You cannot start an industry with a societal good in mind unless you get governments to take an active role.”
These tax credits are important because they provide long-term support for companies actually sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. “What you have is a guaranteed revenue stream of $180 per ton for a minimum of 12 years,” says Andreasen. It’s particularly critical given that the costs of capturing and storing a ton of carbon dioxide are likely to exceed the market rate of carbon credits for a long time. Other forms of carbon removal, notably planting forests, are much cheaper than DAC, and removal offsets also compete with offsets for renewable energy, which avoid emitting new emissions. Without a top-up from the government, it’s unlikely that a market for DAC sequestration would be able to sustain itself.
Most of the DAC industry experts WIRED spoke to thought there was little political appetite to reverse the 45Q tax credit—not least because it also allows firms to claim a tax credit for using carbon dioxide to physically extract more oil from existing reservoirs. They were more worried, however, about the prospect that existing DOE funds set aside for DAC and other projects might not be allocated under a future administration.
“I do think a slowing down of the DOE is a possibility,” says Andreasen. “That just means the money takes longer to get out, and that is not great.” Katie Lebling at the World Resources Institute, a sustainability nonprofit, agrees, saying there is a risk that unallocated funds could be slowed down and stalled if a new administration looked less favorably on carbon removal.
The Heritage Foundation doesn’t just doubt the carbon removal industry—it is openly skeptical about climate change, writing in one report that observed warming could only “theoretically” be due to the burning of fossil fuels, and that “this claim cannot be demonstrated through science.” In its Project 2025 plan, the foundation says the “government should not be picking winners and losers and should not be subsidizing the private sector to bring resources to market.”
But without government support, the private sector would never develop technologies like DAC, says Jonas Meckling, an associate professor at UC Berkeley and climate fellow at Harvard Business School. The same was true of the solar industry, Meckling says. “You cannot start an industry with a societal good in mind unless you get governments to take an active role,” says Nathan of Climeworks.
While there are some question marks over the future of DOE grants for DAC, the industry appeals to legislators on both sides of the aisle. The Texas DAC hub is being built by 1PointFive, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, and both DOE projects are located in firmly red states. When it was announced that DOE DAC hubs funding would be spent in Louisiana, Senator Bill Cassidy said: “Carbon capture opens a new era of energy and manufacturing dominance for Louisiana. It is the future of job creation and economic development for our state.”
In the long run, Nathan says, the aim is for DAC to be viable on its own economic terms. In time, he says, that will mean regulation that requires industries to pay for carbon removal—a stricter version of emissions-trading schemes that already exist in places like California and the European Union. Eventually, that should lead to a place where the direct air industry no longer requires government support to remove carbon from the atmosphere at scale. “I’m looking at the fundamentals, and those aren’t driven by who’s in office,” Nathan says
Disabled people are five times more likely to experience domestic violence than non-disabled people, and make up a third of its victims, according to a new report published today by the federal Government Accountability Office. People with cognitive disabilities, such as those who are autistic, are even more likely to be abused. Disabled women are also more likely to be the target of such violence than disabled men.
The rates of abuse, drawn from Justice Department data from 2017 to 2022 underscore the necessity for domestic violence centers and their services to be accessible to disabled people—which is required by both the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, key items of federal civil rights legislation, but is not always the case. ADA enforcement, for instance, often requires disabled people to make complaints after the fact. Someone actively experiencing domestic violence may not have the capacity to do so, let alone wait for a center to make itself accessible—highlightingthe importance of government enforcement of accessibility laws for disabled people’s safety.
“The GAO report highlights a critical gap in our domestic violence services for individuals with disabilities.”
“We must guarantee that our systems are not only adequately funded but also effectively implemented, so survivors, regardless of their abilities, receive the support they need,” said Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Vir.), who released the report with Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.),in a statement to Mother Jones.
The GAO report investigated whether domestic violence programs that receive funding from the Department of Health and Human Services are accessible to disabled people; most of the domestic violence centers interviewed for the report across Maryland, Mississippi and Washington said that they served relatively few disabled survivors, and officials at nine of 12 centers weren’t certain how to identify whether a survivor had a disability. Some disability groups, according to the report, say that local centers do not work with them to better reach disabled survivors.
Disabled people may also be scared to report domestic violence if they are abused by people they rely on for caregiving, as the report notes:
One domestic violence group told us that some people with disabilities who require caregiving to live in their homes may not seek domestic violence services because they are reluctant to report the abuse they have suffered. Officials from that group said people with disabilities who require caregiving may be worried that if they seek domestic violence services from a local center, law enforcement or other authorities will be notified of the abuse and move them from their preferred living situations into institutions.
HHS is responsible for ensuring compliance with federal law at the institutions it makes grants to, but here it also falls short, investigators found. The GAO report notes that there were no accessibility-related findings from on-site visits by HHS from 2019 to 2022 across 17 states, which HHS says it’s addressing by updating its monitoring requirements “to include more specific accessibility compliance questions.”
Investigators also reached out to resource centers like the National Network to End Domestic Violence: 11 of the 16 that responded said they shared best practices for how to work with survivors with disabilities, but only two have developed technical assistance on making shelters accessible to disabled people. GAO’s site visits, the report says, “raise questions about whether the assistance provided by national resource centers and state coalitions” addresses local needs, made still more difficult by a lack of data on accessibility needs and efforts.
“The GAO report highlights a critical gap in our domestic violence services for individuals with disabilities,” Scott said. “We must invest in the collection of crucial data to understand the needs of survivors with disabilities, but also must ensure this information leads to meaningful improvements.”
The report, available in full on GAO’s website, recommends that HHS investigate how it can better support local centers in accessibility and support for disabled survivors, and implement those changes.
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