Sunday, April 06, 2025

We're not jerks': Flight attendants on deportation planes say disaster is 'only a matter of time'

Photo by Etienne Jong on Unsplash

McKenzie Funk
April 01, 2025

Reporting Highlights

Unexpected Role: Flight attendants were told they would fly rock bands, sports teams and sun-seekers. Then Global Crossing Airlines started expanding into federal deportation flights.

Human Struggles: Some flight attendants said they ignored orders not to interact with detainees. “I’d say ‘hola’ back,” said one flight attendant. “We’re not jerks.”

Safety Concerns: Flight attendants received training in how to evacuate passengers but said they weren’t told how to usher out detainees whose hands and legs were bound by shackles.


These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

The deportation flight was in the air over Mexico when chaos erupted in the back of the plane, the flight attendant recalled. A little girl had collapsed. She had a high fever and was taking ragged, frantic breaths.

The flight attendant, a young woman who went by the nickname Lala, said she grabbed the plane’s emergency oxygen bottle and rushed past rows of migrants chained at the wrists and ankles to reach the girl and her parents.

By then, Lala was accustomed to the hard realities of working charter flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She’d learned to obey instructions not to look the passengers in the eyes, not to greet them or ask about their well-being. But until the girl collapsed, Lala had managed to escape an emergency.

Lala worked for Global Crossing Airlines, the dominant player in the loose network of deportation contractors known as ICE Air. GlobalX, as the charter company is also called, is lately in the news. Two weeks ago, it helped the Trump administration fly hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador despite a federal court order blocking the deportations, triggering a showdown that experts fear could become a full-blown constitutional crisis.

In interviews with ProPublica, Lala and six other current and former GlobalX flight attendants provided a window into a part of the deportation process that is rarely seen and little understood. For migrants who have spent months or years trying to reach this country and live here, it is the last act, the final bit of America they may experience.

All but one of the flight attendants requested anonymity or asked that only a nickname be used, fearing retribution or black marks as they looked for new jobs in an insular industry.

Because ICE, GlobalX and other charter carriers did not respond to questions after being provided with detailed lists of this story’s findings, the flight attendants’ individual accounts are hard to verify. But their stories are consistent with one another. They are also generally consistent with what has been said about ICE Air in legalfilings, newsaccounts, academic research and publicly released copies of the ICE Air Operations Handbook.

That morning over Mexico, Lala said, the girl’s oxygen saturation level was 70% — perilously low compared with a healthy person’s 95% or higher. Her temperature was 102.3 degrees. The flight had a nurse on contract who worked alongside its security guards. But beyond giving the girl Tylenol, the nurse left the situation in Lala’s hands, she recalled.

Lala broke the rule about talking to detainees. The parents told Lala their daughter had a history of asthma. The mom, who Lala said had epilepsy, seemed on the verge of her own medical crisis.

Lala placed the oxygen mask on the girl’s face. The nurse removed her socks to keep her from further overheating. Lala counted down the minutes, praying for the girl to keep breathing.

The stories shared by ICE Air flight attendants paint a different picture of deportations from the one presented to the public, especially under President Donald Trump. On social media, the White House has depicted a military operation carried out with ruthless efficiency, using Air Force C-17s, ICE agents in tactical vests and soldiers in camo.

The reality is that 85% of the administration’s “removal” flights — 254 flights as of March 21, according to the advocacy group Witness at the Border — have been on charter planes. Military flights have now all but ceased. While there are ICE officers and hired security guards on the charters, the crew members on board are civilians, ordinary people swept up in something most didn’t knowingly sign up for.

When the flight attendants joined GlobalX, it was a startup with big plans. It sold investors and new hires alike on a vision of VIP clients, including musicians and sports teams, and luxury destinations, especially in the Caribbean. “You can’t beat the eXperience,” read a company tagline.

But as the airline grew, more and more of its planes were filled with migrants in chains. Some flight attendants were livid about it.

Last year, an anonymous GlobalX employee sent an all-caps, all-staff screed that ricocheted around the startup. “WHERE IS THE COMPANY GOING?” the email asked. “YOU SIGNED A 5 YEAR CONTRACT WITH ICE? ... WHAT HAPPENED TO THIS BECOMING A PRESTIGE CHARTER AIRLINE?”

One flight attendant said he kept waiting for the sports teams his new bosses had talked about as he flew deportation routes. “You know, the NFL charters, the NBA charters, whatever the hockey one is …” he said.

A second said his planes’ air conditioning kept breaking — an experience consistent with at least two publicly reported onboard incidents — and their lavatories kept breaking, something another flight attendant reported as well. But the planes kept flying. “They made us flush with water bottles,” he said.

But the flight attendants were most concerned about their inability to treat their passengers humanely — and to keep them safe. (In 2021, an ICE spokesperson told the publication Capital & Main that the agency “follows best practices when it comes to the security, safety and welfare of the individuals returned to their countries of origin.”)

They worried about what would happen in an emergency. Could they really get over a hundred chained passengers off the plane in time?

“They never taught us anything regarding the immigration flights,” one said. “They didn’t tell us these people were going to be shackled, wrists to fucking ankles.”

“We have never gotten a clear answer on what we do in an ICE Air evacuation,” another said. “They will not give us an answer.”

“It’s only a matter of time,” a third said, before a deportation flight ends in disaster.

Lala didn’t think she had a chance at a flight attendant job. She hadn’t, in truth, remembered applying to GlobalX until a recruiter called to say the startup was coming to her city. “But I guess I did apply through LinkedIn?” she said. She’d been working an office job — long hours, little flexibility — and was looking for something new.

The job interviews were held at a resort hotel. The room was packed with dozens of aspirants when Lala showed up. After the first round, only about 20 were asked to stay. She couldn’t believe she was one of them. After the second round came a job offer: $26 an hour plus a daily expense allowance. Soon Lala got a uniform: a blue cardigan, a white polo shirt and an eye-catching scarf in cyan and light green.

For part of her Federal Aviation Administration-mandated four-week training, her class stayed in a motel with a pool at the edge of Miami International Airport. Just across the street, on the fourth floor of a concrete-clad office building ringed by palm trees, was GlobalX’s headquarters.

“In the beginning, we were told that because it’s a charter, it’s only gonna be elites, celebrities,” Lala said. “Everybody was really excited.”

But flying was not going to be all glitz. The real reason for having flight attendants is safety. GlobalX was certified by the FAA as a Part 121 scheduled air carrier, the same as United or Delta, and it and its crew members were subject to the same strict standards.

“We’re there to evacuate you,” one recruit told ProPublica. “Yes, we make good drinks, but we evacuate you.”

Lala’s class practiced water landings in the pool at the nearby Pan Am Flight Academy. They practiced door drills — yelling out commands, shoving open heavy exit doors — in a replica Airbus A320 cabin. They learned CPR and how to put out fires. They took written and physical tests, and if they didn’t score at least 90%, they had to retake them.

They were reminded, over and over, that their job was a vocation, one with a professional code: No matter who the passengers were, flight attendants were in charge of the cabin, responsible for safety in the air.

Lala’s official “airman” certificate arrived from the FAA a few weeks after training was done. She was cleared to fly, ready to see the world.

But what she would see wasn’t what she signed up for. The company was growing beyond glamorous charters. GlobalX was moving into the deportation business.

Her bosses delivered the news casually, she recalled: “It was like, ‘Oh yeah, we got a government contract.’”

The new graduates were offered a single posting: Harlingen, Texas. Deportation flights were five days a week, sometimes late into the night. Lala went to Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia and, for refueling, Panama.

A standard flight had more than a dozen private security guards — contractors working for the firm Akima — along with a single ICE officer, two nurses, and a hundred or more detainees. (Akima did not respond to a request for comment.) The guards were in charge of delivering food and water to the detainees and taking them to the lavatories. This left the flight attendants, whose presence was required by the FAA, with little to do.

“Arm and disarm doors, that was our duty,” Lala said.

The flights had their own set of rules, which the crew members said they learned from a company policy manual or from chief flight attendants. Don’t talk to the detainees. Don’t feed them. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t walk down the aisles without a guard escorting you. Don’t sit in aisle seats, where detainees could get close to you. Don’t wear your company-issued scarf because of “safety concerns that a detainee might grab it and use it against us,” Lala said.

“You don’t do nothing,” said a member of another GlobalX class. “Just sit down in your seats and be quiet.” If a detainee looked at him, he was supposed to look out the window.

A rare public statement from the company about life aboard ICE Air came in a 2023 earnings call with GlobalX founder and then-CEO Ed Wegel, when he discussed the company’s work for federal agencies like ICE. GlobalX employees “essentially don’t do much on the airplane,” Wegel said. “Our flight attendants are there in case of an emergency. The passengers are monitored by guards that are placed on board the airplane by one of those agencies.”

Fielding a question about how GlobalX ensures passengers are treated humanely, Wegel continued: “There have been threats made to our crew members, and they’re especially trained to deal with those. But we haven’t seen any mistreatment at all.”

Flight attendants said they had little to do but sit in their jumpseats after delivering the preflight safety briefing in English to the mostly Spanish-speaking passengers. Above 10,000 feet, the two in the rear usually moved to passenger rows near the cockpit, then sat again. Some did crosswords. Others took photos out the window. On a deportation to Guatemala, one saw his first erupting volcano.

Lala had been scared before her first deportation flight, worried that violence might break out. But fear soon gave way to discomfort at how detainees were treated. “Not being able to serve them, not being able to look at them, I didn’t think that was right,” she said.

Some flight attendants, drawn to the profession because they liked taking care of people, couldn’t help but break protocol with passengers. “If they said ‘hola’ or something,” one said, “I’d say ‘hola’ back. We’re not jerks.”

Another recalled taking a planeload of children and their escorts on a domestic transfer from the southern border to an airport in New York. He tried to slip snacks to the kids. “Even the chaperones were like, ‘Don’t give them any food,’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Where is your humanity?’” (A second flight attendant said that children on a New York flight were fed by their escorts.)

While flight attendants were allowed to interact with the guards, the dynamic was uncomfortable. It came down to a question of who was in charge — and which agency, ICE or the FAA, ultimately held sway. (The FAA declined to comment on this story and directed questions to ICE.)

The guards often asked flight attendants to heat up the food they brought from home. They asked for drinks, for ice. “They treated us like we were their maids,” said Akilah Sisk, a former flight attendant from Texas.

“In their eyes, the detainees are not the passengers,” another flight attendant said. “The passengers are the guards. And we’re there for the guards.”

Some guards thumbed their noses at the FAA safety rules that flight attendants were supposed to enforce while airborne, multiple flight attendants recalled. “One reported me because I asked him to sit down in the last 10 minutes,” Sisk said. “But you’re still on a freaking plane. You gotta listen to our words.”

Flight attendants said that if they told guards to fasten seatbelts during takeoff or stow carry-ons under a seat, they risked getting reported to their bosses at GlobalX, who they said wanted to keep ICE happy. The guards would complain to the in-flight supervisor, Sisk said, and eventually it would get back to the flight attendant.

“We’d get an email from somebody in management: ‘Why are you guys causing problems?’” another flight attendant recalled. “They were more worried about losing the contract than about anything else.”

Nothing bothered flight attendants more than the fact that most of their passengers were in chains. What would happen if a flight had to be evacuated?

Most of the migrants crowding the back seats of ICE Air’s planes have not been, historically, convicted criminals. ICE makes restraints mandatory nonetheless. “Detainees transported by ICE Air aircraft will be fully restrained by the use of handcuffs, waist chains, and leg irons,“ reads an unredacted version of the 2015 ICE Air Operations Handbook, which was obtained by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy group.

The handbook allows for other equipment “in special circumstances, i.e., spit masks, mittens, leg braces, cargo straps, humane restraint blanket, etc.” Multiple lawsuits on behalf of African asylum-seekers concern the use of one such item, known as the Wrap, a cross between a straight jacket and a sleeping bag. A flight attendant said detainees restrained in the device are strapped upright in their seats or, if less compliant, lengthwise across a row of seats. Getting “burritoed, I call it,” the person said.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties investigated the asylum-seekers’ complaints and found ICE lacked “sufficient policies” on the Wrap, but how the immigration agency addressed the finding is not publicly known. ICE responded to one lawsuit by saying detainees were not abused; it said another should be dismissed, in part because it was filed in the wrong place. The cases are pending.

Use of the Wrap continues. A video from Seattle’s Boeing Field taken in February shows officers and guards carrying a wrapped migrant into the cabin of a deportation plane.

Neither the ICE Air handbook, nor FAA regulations, nor flight attendant training in Miami explained how to empty a plane full of people whose movements were, by design, so severely hampered. Shackled detainees didn’t even qualify as “able-bodied” enough to sit in exit rows.

To flight attendants, the restraints seemed at odds with the FAA’s “90-second rule,” a decades-old manufacturing standard that says an aircraft must be built for full evacuation in 90 seconds even with half the exits blocked.

Lala and others said no one told them how to evacuate passengers in chains. “Honestly, I don’t know what we would do,” she said.

The flight attendants are not alone in voicing concerns.

In an interview with ProPublica, Bobby Laurie, an airline safety expert and former flight attendant, called the arrangement on ICE Air flights “disturbing.”

“Part of flight attendant training is locating those passengers who can help you in an evacuation,” Laurie told ProPublica. That would have to be the guards. “But if they have to help you,” who is helping the detainees, Laurie wondered.

According to formal ICE Air incident reports reviewed by Capital & Main, the deportation network had at least six accidents requiring evacuations between 2014 and 2019. In at least two cases, both on a carrier called World Atlantic, the evacuations were led not by flight attendants but by untrained guards. Both took longer than 90 seconds, though not by much: two-and-a-half minutes for the first, “less than 2 minutes” for the next. But in a third case, it took seven minutes for 115 shackled detainees to escape a smoke-filled jet.

In one of the World Atlantic incidents, part of the landing gear broke, a wing caught fire and the smell of burning rubber seeped in, according to investigative records obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. In an email to ICE Air officials, an agency employee aboard the plane later wrote that flight attendants made no emergency announcements for passengers. The flight attendants simply got themselves out.

The ICE officer, guards and nurse were “confused on what to do and in which direction to exit during distress,” the officer wrote. He said that other than the flight crew, “no one has received any training on emergency evacuation situations.”

The University of Washington’s collection does not include findings or recommendations from ICE based on what happened, and ICE did not say what they were when asked by ProPublica. The National Transportation Safety Board said that after the accident, World Atlantic launched a campaign to reinspect landing gear, gave employees and contractors further training, and revised its procedures for inspections. The airline did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

Other reports obtained by the University of Washington mention fuel spills, loss of cabin air pressure and a “large altercation” on ICE Air after 2019 but no more evacuations, at least as of June 2022. More recent incidents that have been mentioned in the press include an engine fire last summer on World Atlantic and a failed GlobalX air conditioning unit that sent 11 detainees to the hospital with “heat-related injuries.”

The rare guidance some flight attendants said they received on carrying out ICE Air evacuations came during briefings from pilots. What they heard, they said, was chilling and went against their training.

“Just get up and leave,” one recalled a GlobalX pilot telling him. “That’s it. … Save your life first.”

He understood the instructions to mean that evacuating detainees was not a priority, or even the flight attendants’ responsibility. The detainees were in other people’s hands, or in no one’s.

When asked if they got similar guidance from pilots, three flight attendants said they did not, and one did not answer. Two more, like the first, said pilots gave them instructions that they took to mean they shouldn’t help detainees after opening the exit doors.

“That was the normal briefing,” said a flight attendant from Lala’s class. “‘If a fire occurs in the cabin, if we land on water, don’t check on the immigrants. Just make sure that you and the guards and the people that work for the government get off.’”

“It was as if the detainees’ lives were worthless,” said the other.

The day the girl collapsed on Lala’s flight, the pilot turned the plane around and they crossed back into the United States.

The flight landed in Arizona. Paramedics rushed on board and connected the girl to their own oxygen bottle. They began shuttling her off the plane. Her parents tried to join. But the guards stopped the father.

Shocked, Lala approached the ICE officer in charge. “This is not OK!” she yelled. The mom had seizures. The family needed to stay together.

But the officer said it was impossible. Only one parent could go to the hospital. The other, as Lala understood it, “was going to get deported.”

Most of the flight attendants who spoke with ProPublica are now gone from GlobalX. Some left because they found other jobs. Some left even though they hadn’t. Some left because the charter company, as it focused more and more on deportations, shut down the hub in their city.

Lala eventually left because of the little girl and her family, because she couldn’t do the deportation flights anymore. Her GlobalX uniform hung in her closet for a time, a reminder of her career as a flight attendant. Recently, she said, she threw it away.

She never learned whether the little girl lived or died. Lala just watched her mom follow her off the plane, then watched the dad return to his seat.

“I cried after that,” she said. She bought her own ticket home.






'A slap in the face': Trump cuts hit small farms as he showers billions on big farms




A local farmer walks along his citrus fields which are ready to harvest in Bakersfield, Central Valley of California, U.S., March 8, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
April 04, 2025

Anna Pesek saw a federal program supporting local food purchases as much more than a boost to her Iowa pork and poultry farm.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture grant program that allowed schools and food banks to buy fresh products from small farms helped her forge new business relationships. It allowed her to spend more with local feed mills and butchers, and was starting to build a stronger supply chain of local foods

But now that the Trump administration has yanked the funding, she worries that rural economic boost might end too.

“With the razor-thin margins on both sides, those partnerships are just really hard, if not impossible, to sustain,” she said.

The co-owner of Over the Moon Farm, Pesek said her operation was never entirely reliant on the local food programs; it represented about 10% of her business. While she knew the federal money wouldn’t last forever, she was planning on the funding lasting through 2028 — but then the Trump administration last month nixed more than $1 billion for local food programs.

The federally funded Local Food Purchase Assistance and the Local Food for Schools programs, both begun during the pandemic, focused on small, local farms in aims of building stronger domestic food supply chains. Grants allowed schools and food banks to buy meat, dairy and produce from small farms — including many healthy products that are often too expensive for those institutions.

USDA’s local food programs specifically aided some of the nation’s most disadvantaged farmers and ranchers, including newcomers, small farmers and those who have faced racial discrimination.

The local food programs were initially funded by 2021’s American Rescue Plan Act but were later expanded by the Biden administration. The Trump administration, though, has cut the funding that went to thousands of small farms, saying that it’s instead “prioritizing stable, proven solutions that deliver lasting impact.”

Pesek noted that the federal government has subsidized commodity agriculture like corn and soybeans for more than a century.

“It’s not a novel idea, right? This is how the relationship between the federal government and farmers has looked,” she said. “And so all this program did was allocate some of the funds to go to different kinds of farmers versus just commodity farmers.”

Just after cutting the local food programs, USDA announced it was expediting $10 billion in direct payments to commodity farmers through the Emergency Commodity Assistance Program, which helps farmers offset high input prices and low sale prices for crops. The White House is reportedly considering billions more in farm subsidies as President Donald Trump escalates global trade wars.

Andy Ollove, food access program director at Fresh Approach, a California nonprofit that works on building a healthier and more resilient food system, said the government’s long-standing farm subsidies flow to some of the nation’s biggest operators. Conversely, the local food programs benefited small farmers and communities directly.

“The economic multiplier to this program just seems way more impactful than the traditional subsidy model of the USDA that the administration is continuing to invest in,” he said. “It’s just a giveaway.”

Fresh Approach has helped administer the food bank program in California. While implementation delays mean farmers won’t lose access to the program as quickly as in other states, he expects elimination of the program to put small farmers out of business across the country.

Some states have launched their own local food programs, but nothing on the scale of the federal investment. That’s left advocates for small farmers, local foods and food banks pushing for reinstatement of the federal program or getting it included in the next round of farm bill negotiations, when Congress outlines a five- or six-year spending plan for the nation’s food policy and agriculture sector.

Ollove expects philanthropists will fund parts of California’s program after federal money is depleted. But it won’t have the same reach.

“I do feel confident that these types of programs will continue in California … sporadically and piecemeal,” he said. “But not in the way that we’re administering it, in a way that I think is changing a lot of things and improving the food system.”

A mixed response from states

The noncompetitive USDA local food grants allowed many new farmers to break into markets. And the aid for food hubs, which link small producers to larger markets, helped farmers distribute products to schools and food banks.

In Wisconsin, for example, more than half of the nearly 300 farmers who benefited from the food bank program were early career farmers, according to state officials.

In Illinois, the state prioritized funds toward socially disadvantaged farmers, such as those who have faced racial or ethnic prejudice.

“Attacking this program was really an attack on Illinois’ most vulnerable, whether it’s a socially disadvantaged farmer or the food recipient,” said Kristi Jones, deputy director of the Illinois Department of Agriculture.

Her department administered the federal food bank program, which helped beginning farmers get their businesses off the ground.

“A lot of these farmers, they’re living their dreams,” she said. “They are living their goals because of this program.”

Illinois had been planning on nearly $15 million from the next round of funding for the food bank program. Jones said farmers already had begun planning and spending on seeds and equipment.

“You just don’t put something on the ground and have the product the next day,” she said. “ … So that uncertainty was incredibly challenging for farmers who already deal with enough uncertainty.”

Democratic leaders have bashed the Trump administration’s decision: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, for example, called it “a slap in the face to Illinois farmers and the communities they feed.”

But conservative leaders in other states have downplayed the cuts.

In Texas, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller characterized USDA’s decision as “a reassessment.”

He said the state was not dependent on the federal funds and would continue its Farm to School and Farm to Food Bank programs, which encourage the local purchase of Texas agricultural products.

“There’s always room for refinement, and we may see a revised version of the policy down the road that is even better for agriculture producers,” he said in a statement last month.

Texas funds programs to help distribute excess food to schools, food banks and charities. But it does not have a grant program like USDA’s to help those organizations purchase local food, said Marshall Webb, spokesperson for the state agriculture department.

Iowa’s agriculture department recently started its own local food program.

The Choose Iowa program has made about $300,000 available to support local food purchases — though the state lost out on about $11.3 million because of the federal cuts.

Don McDowell, spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Agriculture & Land Stewardship, said the agency would continue to ask lawmakers to expand funding for the Choose Iowa program.

“Programs designed to forge relationships between Iowa farmers, food hubs, food banks and schools are important to our farmers and communities,” he said.

Iowa Farmers Union President Aaron Heley Lehman said his organization, which represents family farmers and ranchers, would like to see the state step in to fill the void.

“But we don’t anticipate that that’s going to be an easy thing for the state of Iowa to do,” he said. “So not only is it local farmers that are feeling like they’ve had the rug pulled out from underneath them, but the state of Iowa has, too.”
Creating a new food system

In Southern California, Dickinson Family Farms has worked to gather produce from dozens of small farms across the region, allowing even the smallest operators without distribution capabilities to sell to local food banks.

Democrats and Republicans take on soda, but they’re using different tactics

Andrew Dickinson, who owns the farm with his father, said the federal local food program also helped reduce food waste. Farmers were able to get fair market prices for vegetables with cosmetic damage or fruits deemed too small or large for grocery store shelves.

Dickinson said the federal program has provided a reliable marketplace for small operators that otherwise depend on more inconsistent sales streams like farmers markets.

“It will create a vacuum,” he said.

About 60 miles east of Los Angeles, sixth-generation farmer Anna Knight said the federal funds were much more than a handout to farmers. To her, they were about creating a new kind of food system.

She said supporting local producers creates more supply chain resilience — something many people didn’t appreciate until the pandemic.

“We don’t want to go back to that world,” she said. “When we invest in our local food system, we’re really investing on onshoring our food production system, on making new food systems local and increasing their resiliency in moments of crisis.”

Old Grove Orange, her California farm, has been supplying citrus to some local school systems for years. But she said the federal funds were the “single biggest changemaker” for pushing schools to buy local for the first time.

To her, that’s key in promoting lifelong healthy eating: Local produce like her freshly picked oranges pack more of a nutritional punch and just taste better than produce that takes weeks to ship from abroad.

“When you are giving a child a delicious piece of fruit, you are really cultivating their palate for life,” she said. “You are setting this expectation of what a fruit is supposed to taste like, and you are sparking this love for fruits and vegetables for the rest of their life.”

Knight said the nation doesn’t have to choose between big and small farms. But small farms are vanishing all around her.

“This is a ticking bomb,” she said. “The clock is running out if we don’t really find a way to help make these small, medium-sized farms sustainable.”

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.
'There will be blood': JPMorgan hikes odds of Trump-triggered recession to 60%


Jessica Corbett
April 05, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Alarm over U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs continues to grow, with stocks plummeting and JPMorgan warning that "the risk of recession in the global economy this year is raised to 60%, up from 40%."

After China announced new 34% tariffs on all American goods beginning next week, The Associated Press reported Friday that "the S&P 500 was down 4.8% in afternoon trading, after earlier dropping more than 5%, following its worst day since Covid wrecked the global economy in 2020. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 1,719 points, or 4.3%, as of 1:08 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 4.9% lower."

Noting the state of Wall Street this week, Groundwork Collaborative executive director Lindsay Owens declared in a Friday statement that "Trump has officially brought the economy to its knees."

"The president single-handedly wiped out Americans' retirement savings overnight and subjected businesses to intense whiplash with his increasingly erratic and chaotic policies that continue to drive consumer and business uncertainty," she said. "To call this an economic downturn is an understatement; Trump is marching us straight into a depression."

Political and economic observers have been publicly wondering for weeks if Trump is intentionally crashing the economy. Further fueling those fears, he ramped up his trade war on Wednesday by announcing a minimum 10% tariff for imports, with higher levies for dozens of countries. Although he claimed those steeper duties are "reciprocal," his math "horrified" economists and has been called "crazy."

Responding in a Thursday note titled, There Will Be Blood, head of global economic research Bruce Kasman and other experts at JPMorgan wrote that "if sustained, this year's ~22%-point tariff increase would be the largest U.S. tax hike since 1968."

"The effect of this tax hike is likely to be magnified—through retaliation, a slide in U.S. business sentiment, and supply chain disruptions," states the note, which came before China's announcement.

Several Wall Street firms on Thursday warned of a U.S. recession, with some making it their base case, after... Trump announced major levies on goods imported from countries around the world. Other economists, including those at JPMorgan, said the hit could be big, though they are taking a wait-and-see approach before revising their projections. The announcement rocked global financial markets, and the S&P 500 suffered its worst day since 2020. Trump, speaking on Air Force One on Thursday afternoon, said he was open to reducing tariffs if trading partners were able to offer something "phenomenal."

"We are not making immediate changes to our forecasts and want to see the initial implementation and negotiation process that takes hold," the JPMorgan note says. "However, we view the full implementation of announced policies as a substantial macroeconomic shock not currently incorporated in our forecasts. We thus emphasize that these policies, if sustained, would likely push the U.S. and possibly global economy into recession this year."

The team also pointed out that the United States is in potential danger no matter how other countries are ultimately impacted, calling a "scenario where rest of world muddles through a U.S. recession possible but less likely than global downturn."

As Common Dreams reported last week, in anticipation of Trump's tariff announcement, Goldman Sachs published a research note projecting that the odds of a recession in the next year are 35%, up from 20%.

Other financial industry research firms that have recently warned of a possible recession include Barclays, BofA Global Research, Deutsche Bank, RBC Capital Markets, and UBS Global Wealth Management, according toReuters.

"This is a game-changer, not only for the U.S. economy, but for the global economy. Many countries will likely end up in a recession," Olu Sonola, head of U.S. economic research at Fitch Ratings, said in a late Wednesday note about the levies. "You can throw most forecasts out the door, if this tariff rate stays on for an extended period of time."

Experts have made similar comments to the press in the wake of the president's Rose Garden remarks on Wednesday. Time on Friday shared some from Brian Bethune, a Boston College economics professor:

"[Consumers] are not even going to the grocery store and paying more for vegetables because there's none available from Mexico, or going to Whole Foods, for example, and finding the big sections of fresh fruit are being shut down. They haven't really felt the full impact [yet], and they're already saying something isn't right," Bethune says. However, while some economists... are more cautious in their discussion about a possible recession, Bethune says it's "inevitable." The question, he says, is just how long until it happens and for how long will it occur? He sees Trump's admission of there being " some pain" on the horizon as only proof of the inevitability.

"At least they [the Trump administration] are not pretending that it's not disruptive, but they're basically soft-selling it, reflecting their ignorance about the way business operates," Bethune claims.


Also on Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the latest U.S. jobs data. Although the unemployment rate rose from 4.1% to 4.2% in March, the economy added 228,000 jobs, which was better than expected.

However, economists warn of what lies ahead. As University of Michigan economics professor Betsey Stevenson put it, "Today's jobs report is like looking at your vacation photos after you had a horrible car crash on the way home."

'Buckle in': Expert warns of 'classic inflationary spiral' as Trump move forebodes 'disaster scenario'

President Donald Trump announcing tariff plans outside the White House on April 2, 2025, Photo via White House / Flickr.
April 04, 2025
ALTERNET

Global economic analyst Rana Foroohar said Friday the markets have never seen anything like the Trump administration's recent policy actions, warning of a "classic inflationary spiral" and a "disaster scenario."

"Trade war is overshadowing everything," she said during an appearance on CNN Friday morning. "The markets have never seen anything like the policy actions that we have just seen."

"We have a tumbling dollar. We have a tumbling market. At the same time, we could see a sharp uptick in inflation," Foroohar said.

Foroohar, who is an associated editor at the Financial Times, noted that people are going out and buying cars because they think the price will increase dramatically in the next few days, weeks, and months. "That's a classic inflationary spiral. Now, that would mean that even with a weakening economy, the Fed might have to raise rates that would just put things into a complete tailspin," she said.

The analyst further warned that this potential situation could make President Donald Trump try to fire Jay Powell, the Fed chair.

"If that happened, and you saw a sense that the entire central banking system was being compromised... Buckle in, because that's when investors see this is the U.S acting like an emerging market," she said.

"And the world is in a complete full blown economic crisis."

On Wednesday President Trump disrupted the global trading system on by introducing a sweeping set of global tariffs. He argued that the United States is experiencing a serious economic crisis due to trade imbalances with various countries around the world. But some economic experts disagree.

Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute, told the New York Times in a report published Thursday that declaring the current trade deficit a national emergency is “beyond a stretch" and that "these numbers are just made up."

Watch this video here or at this link.

The Great Gatsby at 100: The Jazz Age novel that helps explain Trump’s America

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

The Conversation
April 01, 2025

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a top contender for the title of Great American Novel, turns 100 on April 10.

A century later, it is invoked to help make sense of a world that still confuses “material enterprise with moral achievement” – as critic Sarah Churchwell wrote in the foreword to Gatsby’s centennial edition.

A Meta insider’s memoir takes its title, Careless People, from Fitzgerald’s novel. The same phrase circulated on social media and in The New York Times during Donald Trump’s first presidency, referring to his administration’s downplaying of COVID-19.

In 2018, The Atlantic compared Trump to Tom Buchanan, one of Fitzgerald’s “careless people”, describing “an eerie symmetry […] as if the villain of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel had been brought to life in a louder, gaudier guise for the 21st century”. More recently, others have compared Trump to Gatsby himself.

The Great Gatsby tells the tale of a lovesick man striving for social acceptance, believing personal reinvention and riches can help to rewrite the past. It is a story of longing: not just for lost love, but for an unattainable ideal.

The centenary couldn’t be more timely for this literary masterpiece, preoccupied by the same things we are: immense affluence, privilege, the limits of social mobility and the hidden underbelly of the American Dream. The Great Gatsby, while a relative literary failure in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, is enduringly popular today, with at least 25 million copies sold to date, numerous film and stage adaptations (and literary riffs), and a staple position on school and university reading lists.

“What we think about Gatsby illuminates what we think about money, race, romance and history,” wrote The New York Times’ A.O. Scott recently. “How we imagine him has a lot to do with how we see ourselves.”

The Great Gatsby is set against the backdrop of Roaring Twenties America: an era Fitzgerald famously dubbed the Jazz Age.

Fuelled by the infectious rhythms of jazz, driven by the economic forces of market prosperity and mass consumerism, and heady on the alcoholic vapours and illicit thrills associated with Prohibition-era nightlife, the 1920s were a decade where American fortunes were made and lost.

It was also, as Fitzgerald’s novel outlines, a period where individual ambition burned as fiercely as desire

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Picryl

The plot follows the enigmatic Jay Gatsby, a spotlight-eschewing, self-made millionaire whose seemingly breezy approach to life masks a singular obsession: the rekindling of a lost romance with a beautiful woman from his past.

Born James Gatz, Fitzgerald’s charismatic protagonist reinvents himself in the hope of winning back the love of his life, wealthy socialite Daisy Buchanan. Taken at face value, Gatsby’s world is one of incredible luxury and dazzling excess – lavish parties, fast cars and ostentatious attire – all designed to lure Daisy back into his arms.

But as we begin to scratch beneath the surface, the glittering facade Gatsby has constructed gives way to something far more fragile and tragic: an impossible fantasy driven by jealously, obsession and self-deception.

As the reader comes to appreciate, Gatsby’s accumulated gains may grant him partial access to the world of old money, but he will never truly be accepted by America’s elite. No matter how hard he might try, he cannot surmount the barriers of class and entitlement.

Ultimately, Gatsby’s misguided belief that he can somehow crowbar his way into the upper echelons of high society while simultaneously turning back the hands of time leads to his downfall. In Fitzgerald’s words, he ends up paying “a high price for living too long with a single dream”

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is still invoked to help make sense of a world that often confuses ‘material enterprise with moral achievement’.  Nickolas Muray/Picryl

F. Scott Fitzgerald, literary celebrity

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24 1896. The son of middle-class Catholic parents, he spent much of his youth living in upstate New York. In 1913, he enrolled at Princeton University, where he formed a lasting friendship with future literary critic Edmund Wilson.

More absorbed in literary and dramatic endeavours than his studies, Fitzgerald’s grades suffered and he dropped out in 1917 – though not before falling deeply in love with Ginevra King, an heiress who would leave an indelible imprint on his writing. She would inspire many of his fictional female characters, including Daisy Buchanan.

Fitzgerald first encountered King during a winter vacation in St. Paul in January 1915. The debutante daughter of a wealthy Chicago stockbroker, she quickly became the object of Fitzgerald’s intense devotion (much to the disapproval of her family, who thought him beneath her)

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F. Scott Fitzgerald in uniform.Picryl

In the wake of his heartbreak after the relationship broke down, Fitzgerald enlisted in the United States Army, earning a commission as a second lieutenant. During his military service, he met Zelda Sayre, the woman he would eventually marry. Meanwhile, he began work on his first novel, This Side of Paradise.

Released in 1920, Fitzgerald’s formally adventurous debut was a critical success and cultural sensation, capturing the restless energy and shifting moral landscape of a cohort coming of age in the wake of World War I.

The novel’s transparently autobiographical narrative centres on Amory Blaine, a young Midwesterner whose intellectual and romantic adventures at Princeton – especially a doomed affair with the beautiful, elusive Isabelle Borgé – struck a chord with readers. It turned Fitzgerald into a media celebrity and unofficial spokesman for his generation.


F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
.Alfred Cheney Johnston/Picryl

Two years later, Fitzgerald published The Beautiful and Damned. It details the disintegration of a wealthy, aimless couple – Anthony and Gloria Patch – whose hedonistic lifestyle and misplaced belief in their own brilliance leads to ruin.

Fitzgerald’s tonally pessimistic second novel was again shaped by his own experiences, drawing heavily on his tempestuous marriage to Zelda, who was exhibiting symptoms of profound mental instability.

However, in stark contrast to This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned sold well, but received a lukewarm reception from reviewers. Some found its characters unappealing and its plot depressing.

By then, the Fitzgeralds had grown accustomed to the finer things in life. Which meant they needed money. Lots of it. To keep up with their lavish spending, Fitzgerald started to churn out short stories for popular magazines at a rapid pace. While this move provided him with a degree of financial security, some critics and contemporaries questioned whether he was squandering his literary gifts. Ernest Hemingway, for one, was “shocked” by his friend’s willingness to pander to commercial tastes and imperatives.
‘I want to write something new’

That said, while he was generating copy for mass-market publication, Fitzgerald was also hard at work on The Great Gatsby. In July 1922, he declared:
I want to write something new – something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned.



Determined to prove his worth as an artist, Fitzgerald, who wanted “to write a novel better than any ever written in America”, began to play with “form and emotion”. As his ideas for the new novel – which at one point bore the working title Trimalchio – took shape, Fitzgerald set up shop in Great Neck, Long Island. This location became the inspiration for East and West Egg, the fictionalised island communities that are the novel’s primary setting.

Fitzgerald, clearly not lacking in confidence, set his sights high for his third novel, taking inspiration from James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Departing from conventional realism, Fitzgerald experimented with modernist techniques, layering his narrative with symbolic depth, synesthetic imagery, fragmented storytelling and complex characterisation.

The result was a work both lyrical and impressionistic. Here’s a vivid, illustrative excerpt:
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. […] The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.


Fitzgerald’s Midwestern narrator, Nick Carraway, is describing one of Gatsby’s legendary West Egg parties. He is renting the house next to Gatsby’s mansion, “a colossal affair by any standard”, with “a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden”.

At first, Nick is fascinated by his enigmatic neighbour, drawn in by the sheer force of Gatsby’s optimism and his unrelenting faith in the transformative power of love and the trappings of wealth. But as the novel progresses, events lead Nick to reevaluate. He describes his charming friend as possessing “one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life”.

He continues, outlining attributes essential to a good confidence man:
It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.


When he isn’t with Gatsby, Nick is often with his cousin Daisy and her husband, Tom, the embodiment of American aristocracy and snobbery. They are, in Nick’s damning estimation, “careless” and “rotten” people.

An unreconstructed white supremacist prone to casual displays of extreme prejudice and physical violence, the adulterous Tom – who wouldn’t be out of place in the more dismal real-world and online recesses of today – is, in particular, deeply suspicious of Gatsby, regarding him as an interloper with dubious intentions.

The Atlantic wrote that Tom, “the Yale man, the football star, the spender of old money, the scion of what he calls the Nordic race – embodies the peak of social status in his century”. And that “Trump – the former Playboy-cover subject, the billionaire celebrity, the most powerful man in America – does the same for his”.
And their shared personality traits are the product of their shared relationship to power – the casual unreflective certainty that comes from inheritance, and enables its holders to wield its blunt force as both a weapon and a shield.


Tom’s “little investigation” into Gatsby’s background and finances reveals they are not what they seem. This leads to unintended, disastrous consequences.

Nick, our disillusioned observer, doesn’t quite know what to make of it all. We take leave of him at the end of the novel, on “the beach and sprawled out on the sand”, reminiscing about “Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock”.
‘A flying leap into the future’

Fitzgerald knew he had achieved something special with The Great Gatsby. His peers did too. T.S. Eliot considered it “the first step” forward “American fiction has taken since Henry James”. Edith Wharton concurred, calling it “a flying leap into the future.”

Yet, for all this critical acclaim, The Great Gatsby failed to resonate with the reading public – much to Fitzgerald’s dismay. By October, the book had sold less than 20,000 copies. (By comparison, This Side of Paradise had sold nearly 50,000 copies, across multiple printings.) As his biographer Arthur Mizener observed, by February 1926, “a few thousand more copies had been sold and the book was dead”. It was a blow the writer never really recovered from

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A first edition of Tender is the Night.Biblio

Fitzgerald’s personal life was tumultuous, marred by alcoholism, Zelda’s mental health issues and financial debt. This had a negative effect on his work. While he completed one more novel in 1934 – the excellent, darkly romantic Tender is the Night, arguably his best book – Fitzgerald struggled to be productive.

Following several failed suicide attempts, in 1940 he died of a heart attack, believing himself an abject failure and his career a total write-off. His most recent royalty cheque had been for $13.13. He was 44.

In the immediate aftermath of his death, writers and critics began to reassess Fitzgerald’s accomplishments. This effort was initially spearheaded by his friends, notably Edmund Wilson, who, in 1941, organised a series of tributes to be published in The New Republic.

In 1945, Viking Press released The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Dorothy Parker, which brought Fitzgerald to the attention of a new generation of readers. At the same time, the US military distributed 150,000 copies of The Great Gatsby to American servicemen during World War II as part of their Armed Services Editions.

Before long, The Great Gatsby made its way into the classroom, where it remains a staple of countless high school and university syllabuses. It continues to inspire readers, many of whom encounter it at a formative stage in their lives

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Amazon

It has been adapted for the screen on multiple occasions – with mixed results. Jack Clayton’s 1974 version, starring Robert Redford as the eponymous Gatsby, was faithful to Fitzgerald’s vision, but utterly lifeless, while Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation, a hollow exercise in audiovisual bluster, failed to do justice to the novel’s subtleties. For all their shortcomings, these films helped cement Gatsby’s place in the popular imagination.
An ‘uncannily prescient’ enduring classic

Novelist Jesmyn Ward suggests Fitzgerald’s novel is
a book that endures, generation after generation, because every time a reader returns to The Great Gatsby, we discover new revelations, new insights, new burning bits of language.

I agree – and I think Fitzgerald would have had rich material to work with, had he been alive today. Ours, lest we forget, is a world where ersatz robber barons hoard nearly all our shared available assets and resources, where racist discourse resounds, and where rampant consumerism remains unchecked.

Last year America magazine argued Gatsby himself “gives the greatest insight into why Mr. Trump is still popular”, comparing Trump’s “fraudulent real estate deals” to Gatsby’s nefarious way of making his money, and Gatsby’s huge parties to Trump’s rallies. Both, the writer argued, are nouveau riche outsiders, “hell-bent on being accepted by the Manhattan set”, and scorned by the elites. (Though Trump’s second presidency seems to be ushering in a new elite.)

Thinking aloud, perhaps it’s more accurate to say Trump is a weird combination of characters. On one hand, he resembles Gatsby: a self-mythologising social climber, nostalgic for a past that never really existed. On the other, he shares much with Tom Buchanan: unscrupulous, self-interested and protected by his wealth.

In a historical moment that mirrors his own in many ways, Fitzgerald’s essentially tragic masterwork, which ends suggesting we are all forever “borne back ceaselessly into the past”, strikes me as uncannily prescient and relevant today.

Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A deadly mosquito-borne illness is rising in the US as Trump cuts health funding



Photo by Syed Ali on Unsplash


April 04, 2025

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, issued an urgent alert about dengue fever, a painful and sometimes deadly mosquito-borne illness common in tropical and subtropical parts of the world. Some 3,500 travelers from the United States contracted dengue abroad in 2024, according to the CDC, an 84 percent increase over 2023. “This trend is expected to continue,” the agency said, noting that Florida, California, and New York, in that order, are likely to see the biggest surges this year.

On Thursday, the United Kingdom Health Security Agency put out a similar warning, noting that there were 900 cases of travel-related dengue in the U.K. in 2024, almost 300 more infections than the preceding year. The two reports relayed a similar array of statistics about dengue, its symptoms, and rising caseloads. But the U.K. Health Security Agency included a crucial piece of information that the CDC omitted: It noted why cases are breaking records. “The rise is driven by climate change, rising temperatures, and flooding,” it said.



In the past, the CDC has readily acknowledged the role climate change plays in the transmission of dengue fever — but the political conditions that influence scientific research and federal public health communications in the U.S. have undergone seismic shifts in the months since President Donald Trump took office. The new administration has purged federal agency websites of mentions of equity and climate change and sought to dismantle the scientific infrastructure that agencies like the CDC use to understand and respond to a range of health risks — including those posed by global warming.

Last week, ProPublica reported that the National Institutes of Health, or NIH — the largest source of funding for medical research in the world — will shut down all future funding opportunities for climate and health research. It remains to be seen whether ongoing grants for research at this intersection will be allowed to continue. A few days later, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his agency plans to cull 10,000 people from its workforce, including new cuts at CDC, an agency that was established in 1946 in order to prevent a different mosquito-borne illness, malaria, from spreading across the U.S.

Taken together, the suite of directives will prevent the U.S. and other nations whose scientists rely on NIH funding from preparing for and responding to dengue fever at the exact moment when climate change is causing cases of the disease to skyrocket. The abrupt subversion of the personnel and institutions tasked with responding to a threat like dengue bodes poorly for future health crises as climate change causes carriers of disease like mosquitoes, fungi, and ticks to expand their historical ranges and infiltrate new zones.

“The disease pressure in the last couple of years is very dramatic and it’s going in one direction — up,” said Scott O’Neill, founder of the World Mosquito Program, a nonprofit organization that infects mosquitoes with a naturally occurring bacteria to fight disease in 14 countries. For example, Brazil — the country that consistently registers the highest number of dengue cases — recorded a historic 10 million cases last year. The country reported 1.7 million cases in 2023.

The two types of mosquitoes that most often infect humans with dengue, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, thrive in the warm, moist conditions made more prevalent by rising atmospheric temperatures caused by fossil fuel combustion. The vast majority of annual dengue cases are asymptomatic, but about 25 percent of people infected, depending on the population, develop symptoms like fever, headache, and joint pain. A small percentage of those cases result in severe sickness, hospitalization, and even death.

The number of severe dengue infections corresponds roughly to the size of the pool of people infected every year. In 2023, when there were 6 million total dengue infections, 6,000 people died. In 2024, a year when there were more than 13 million cases registered globally, over 8,000 people died.

There is no cure for dengue. Patients in wealthier countries generally fare better than patients in developing regions with limited access to medical interventions like blood transfusions and places where waves of dengue patients overwhelm already-strained healthcare systems. Two dengue vaccines are available in some countries, but both have serious limitations in terms of efficacy and how long they confer immunity.

The NIH began taking climate change and health research seriously in 2021, and the institutes have funded dozens of studies that probe every aspect of the climate-dengue connection since. NIH-funded researchers have sought to understand how warmer temperatures shift the geographic ranges of Aedes mosquitoes, which factors predict dengue outbreaks, and how communities can protect themselves from dengue following extreme weather events.

These studies have taken place in the southeastern U.S., where dengue is becoming more prevalent, and internationally, in countries like Peru and Brazil, where dengue is a near-constant threat. The NIH has also funded studies that bring the world closer to finding medical and technological interventions: more effective vaccines and genetically engineered mosquitoes that can’t develop dengue, among other solutions.

“Disease doesn’t have national borders,” said an American vector biologist who has received funding from the NIH in the past. She asked not to have her name or affiliated academic institution mentioned in this story out of fear of reprisal from the Trump administration. “I’m worried that if we’re not studying it, we’re just going to watch it continue to happen and we won’t be prepared.”

Americans aren’t just bringing cases of dengue fever home with them from trips abroad; the disease is also spreading locally with more intensity in warmer regions of the country and its territories. Last March, Puerto Rico declared a public health emergency amid an explosion of cases on the island. By the end of 2024, Puerto Rico registered over 6,000 cases — passing the threshold at which an outbreak officially becomes an epidemic. More than half of the known infections led to hospitalization. Close to 1,000 cases have been reported there so far this year, a 113 percent increase over the same period in 2024. California and Florida reported 18 and 91 locally-acquired cases of dengue, respectively, last year. California registered its first-ever locally-acquired case of dengue in 2023.

“Dengue is already found in many places in the U.S. that have never seen this disease before,” said Renzo Guinto, a physician and head of the Planetary Health Initiative at the Duke-NUS medical school in Singapore. “To combat this emerging climate-related health threat, U.S. scientists must collaborate with others working in dengue overseas. With no resources and capacity, how can such collaboration occur?”

There are limited non-government sources of funding for climate and health research. The money that is available to American researchers is primarily offered by private foundations like the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. The grants these philanthropies offer annually pale in comparison to the $40 million Congress made available annually through the NIH for climate and health research in the two years before Trump took office. Researchers will be forced to compete for a small pool of funding in the coming years, which will likely lead to fewer studies and less innovation in the years to come. “The end result will be that much less of this work would be done — we would all tell you to the detriment of Americans long term,” said the vector biologist.

As dengue spreads with more intensity in the countries where it is already common and slips across borders into zones like North America where the disease is still comparatively rare, it’s clear countries need to expand their arsenals of disease-fighting weapons. But the U.S. appears to be leading a charge in the opposite direction, with thousands of lives at stake.

“We’re at a time when we need acceleration of innovation and solutions to very pressing global problems,” said O’Neill, whose organization receives funding from governments around the world, including the U.S. “It’s not the time to let ideology drive science rather than let science drive itself.”

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
UK Legal case reveals far-right evangelicals turning a blind eye to 'disturbing' allegations'


Alex Henderson, 
AlterNet
April 5, 2025 

Faithful pray and sing during a mass of the Ministry of the Faith church in Brasilia, Brazil September 26, 2018. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino


On Friday, April 4, British comedian/actor Russell Brand was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault by the UK Metropolitan Police. Brand, despite these charges, continues to proclaim his devotion to Christianity. And he is still bonding with the MAGA movement in the United States.


In a biting article published on April 5, Salon's Amanda Marcotte argues that the MAGA movement and far-right evangelicals are oblivious to the "disturbing" allegations Brand is facing.

"A collaboration between The Times, The Sunday Times, and Channel 4, conducted over years, produced exhaustively documented allegations of rape and other sexual abuses," Marcotte explains. "They spoke with hundreds of sources, including four accusers. They collected medical records, texts, e-mails, and internal documents from employers, all showing a pattern of alleged sexual abuse that is often frightening in its violence. The report came out in September 2023."

Marcotte continues, "Shortly thereafter, Brand was kicked off YouTube. He then swiftly joined the MAGA-affiliated Rumble network. In the next few months, he moved to the U.S. and got baptized, fully rebranding himself as a right-wing Christian influencer. This timeline doesn't seem to have given Brand's new MAGA audience a single moment's doubt that he might have ulterior motives. On the contrary, his fans encouraged the conspiracy theory that paints him as a political prisoner and the charges as 'a political prosecution,' as Charlie Kirk complained."

Brand, according to Marcotte, underscores the dangers of "MAGA Christianity" and shows "the willingness, in the era of Donald Trump, of right-wing Christians to scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel."

"Christianity emphasizes redemption, making it an attractive framework for a celebrity needing to rehab a bad image," Marcotte observes. "In theory, however, there is supposed to be repentance before redemption. But this is the era of Trumpian Christianity, so skipping the part where you say you're sorry is optional."

Marcotte adds, "After all, Trump is treated not just as a fellow Christian, but something closer to a savior figure by the Religious Right…. Being a bully is admired in the MAGA movement. In MAGA Christianity, actual repentance would be dismissed as 'woke.' No wonder it was the perfect landing spot for Russell Brand."

Read Politico's full article at this link.
SPACE/COSMOS

'We weren't stuck': Astronaut pushes back after Fox News host suggests Biden marooned them

David Edwards
March 31, 2025 
RAW STORY


Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore (Fox News/screen grab)

Astronaut Butch Wilmore pushed back after Fox News host Bill Hemmer suggested President Joe Biden's administration left him "marooned" on the International Space Station

During a Monday interview on Fox News, Hemmer spoke to Wilmore and Suni Williams about their failure to return to Earth on Boeing Starliner, leaving them in space months longer than expected.

President Donald Trump has claimed that the astronauts were "virtually abandoned" and that he had tasked Elon Musk's SpaceX with bringing them home. However, plans were in place to bring the two back on a SpaceX capsule before Trump took office.


"I just wanna put a fine point on this because, Butch, you said, we don't feel abandoned," Hemmer told Wilmore. "We don't feel stuck. We don't feel stranded. Could I use the word maroon?"

Wilmore politely disagreed with the Fox News host.

"Okay, so any of those adjectives, they're very broad in their definition," he explained. "So, okay, in certain respects, we were stuck. In certain respects, maybe we were stranded."

"But based on how they were couching this, that we were left and forgotten and all that, we were nowhere near any of that at all," the astronaut continued. "In the big scheme of things, we weren't stuck. We were planned and trained."

Watch the video below from Fox News.