Retailers Ration Eggs as Prices Jump 18 Percent Since Trump Inauguration

Trump promised on the campaign trail that consumer prices will “come down fast” but has since reneged on that pledge.

By Chris Walker , 

Truthout

PublishedFebruary 18, 2025

Cartons of eggs are displayed at a grocery store with a warning that limits will be placed on purchases as bird flu continues to affect the egg industry on February 10, 2025, in New York City.

Spencer Platt / Getty Images


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Multiple national grocery retailers are imposing limits on how many cartons of eggs consumers can purchase amid a shortage of the product and rising grocery prices across the U.S.

As of Monday morning, the average price for a dozen eggs was around $7.74 — an increase of about 18 percent since President Donald Trump took office. According to a report from NBC News, many national chains, including Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Costco, and others, have started restricting how many eggs each shopper can buy in a single visit.

Other grocery store costs have also gone up. The cost of wheat has increased by about 11.8 percent since Trump was inaugurated, while the cost of cheese has gone up 1.59 percent.

Many have used the “price of eggs” analogy to define Trump’s focus on consumer prices (or lack thereof) since he started his second term in office, due to his multiple promises during the 2024 presidential campaign to tackle rising costs. Since becoming president again, however, his focus has been on other issues, barely taking any action to address prices at all.

In August, Trump pledged that “prices will come down” if he became president again, and “come down fast.” In September, he made a similar promise: “Groceries, cars, everything. We’re going to get the prices down,” Trump said.

But in December, after he won the election, Trump changed his tune entirely, reneging on the promises he made and de-emphasising controlling rising costs as a priority for him.

“It’s hard to bring things down once [prices go] up. You know, it’s very hard,” Trump said in a post-election interview.

Just this past week, Trump also denied that he could do anything about rising grocery prices, specifically on eggs, blaming the previous administration and the presence of bird flu in the U.S. for growing costs.

Prices were at an “all-time high” before he became president, Trump said over the weekend. “This was caused by Biden,” Trump added, stating he had “four years of virtually no inflation” during his first term.

Those comments from Trump are false or highly misleading — egg prices reached “all-time high” status after he took office. Biden also didn’t cause the price hike, but the bird flu did play a huge role in it, as farmers across the country have had to slaughter millions of hens who have either had the virus or were likely infected with it.

Trump was likely aware that bird flu was going around during the campaign, as reports about it were appearing in the fall, but it didn’t stop him from making promises to lower prices in spite of it. In other words, his promise to lower grocery store costs invites greater scrutiny as he (or at least his campaign) was likely aware of the situation relating to bird flu unfolding.

Trump has only seemingly taken one direct executive action to address consumer costs, issuing an order on his first day in office. However, that order is very ambiguous, and merely tells the heads of executive departments to pursue actions that could possibly lower costs — examining possible deregulations that likely won’t have enormous cost savings, for example. There are no deadlines within that order to take such actions and the only requirement is for progress reports to be given to Trump every 30 days.

Instead, Trump has issued myriad executive orders focusing on topics most Americans disagree with him on and are focused on restricting the human rights of marginalized communities — such as, orders attacking transgender people in the U.S., attempting to re-write the birthright citizenship standard within the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico in government documents to be the “Gulf of America” — but none which address the issue of tackling rising consumer prices.

Trump’s proposed and imposed tariffs on other countries’ products being imported to the U.S. will also have detrimental consequences on costs, most economists agree. Again, Trump campaigned that the tariffs would not hurt consumers — however, he has also since walked back that promise, admitting earlier this month that shoppers will experience “pain” because of them.

“We never want to raise prices. Our model is everyday low prices. But there probably will be cases where prices will go up for consumers,” Walmart CFO David Rainey said last fall, responding to Trump’s tariffs plan.

I’m 1 of More Than 600 People on CA’s Death Row. Newsom Must End Death Penalty.

Twenty-three states have abolished the death penalty. California should join them in ending state-sponsored executions.

By Timothy James Young , 

Truthout

February 18, 2025

Graphic by Rikki Li (Prism), featuring artwork by the Free Tim Young campaign.

Rikki Li (Prism)

Iwas arrested on Easter Sunday in 1999 while driving through the small town of Lemoore, California. I was held in a local county jail for seven years while fighting my case. In 2006, l was convicted of murders I did not commit, then was promptly hauled off to San Quentin’s notorious death row. Though I have never been a stranger to societal injustices, there’s something about being Black and having 12 non-Black jurors come back with a racially tinged verdict of “GUILTY” that just does something to you. At that moment, my fight to abolish the death penalty began.

My 25-year fight has encompassed publishing stories about capital punishment, sharing my story with the public and working toward my own freedom. After repeated bouts of disappointment and defeat, I sat and I sulked. I wondered if the death penalty’s inequitable pendulum would ever swing back toward the arc of abolition.

As we ended 2024, I felt a shift. On December 23, President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life without a possibility of parole. On December 31, North Carolina’s governor at the time, Roy Cooper, commuted the death sentences of 15 of the 136 people facing execution in his state.

But I’ve come to understand that criminal legal system reforms can shift as easily as wind. President Donald Trump has already signed a sweeping execution order that directs the attorney general to “take all necessary and lawful action” to ensure that states have enough lethal injection drugs to carry out executions.

This month, President Trump’s newly installed attorney general, Pamela Bondi, released memos to the Justice Department to lift the moratorium on federal executions, instruct federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in certain cases, and assist local prosecutors in pursuing death sentences under state law against the 37 individuals who received commutations under Biden. Bondi then ordered the transfer of a federal prisoner to Oklahoma to be executed.


Trump Issues Executive Order Restoring Federal Death Penalty
Trump falsely claimed that restoring the federal death penalty was necessary in order to deter violent crimes. By Chris Walker , Truthout  January 21, 2025

In this uncertain time, when political opinions on the death penalty are split, my hope is that my home state of California — which has the largest death row population in the United States — can show the rest of the country what is possible by fully abolishing its death penalty.

There’s been some progress. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a moratorium on executions in the state. It was the most hopeful I had been since the guilty verdict had been handed down in my wrongful conviction. It felt like public support, political will and the pulse of the nation were finally aligning toward a long overdue reckoning.

I was so caught up in the belief that justice was on the horizon that I went out on a limb and predicted that the death penalty was on the verge of extinction. But that was far from the truth. In California, confusing law changes and public misinformation have muddied progress.

Last year, for example, I moved to a new prison as the state phased out San Quentin’s death row. It was the result of Proposition 66, which passed in 2016 and allowed for death row prisoners to be relocated across the state. Many Californians mistook the dismantling of death row as the end of the death penalty — but Prop 66 actually streamlines and guts the appellate process with the aim of speeding up executions.

While I’m no longer at San Quentin, my death sentence is alive and well. More than 600 people incarcerated in California prisons are still at risk of execution.

I have witnessed some small slivers of hope. In April 2024, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen moved to change the sentences of more than a dozen prisoners from death into life behind bars with no chance of parole. Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price also announced that her office was ordered by a federal judge to review 35 death penalty convictions, following the disclosure of prosecutorial misconduct in jury selection. Some cases have moved toward commutations or reduced sentences, according to a November article in The New Yorker.

But we cannot rely on small measures to tackle this massive injustice. Those two examples, as well as the commutations granted by President Biden and North Carolina’s former governor, amount to less than 100 people spared state-sponsored execution. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, around 2,250 prisoners currently face execution in the United States.

Twenty-three states have abolished the death penalty. It would be a momentous achievement if Governor Newsom, a leader in the Democratic Party with potential presidential aspirations, made California next.

I’ll continue to find reasons to hope, like I’ve done for the past 25 years. Last year, a consortium of nationally renowned civil rights organizations, legal organizations and a law firm filed a first-of-its-kind extraordinary writ petition in the Supreme Court of California, challenging the state’s death penalty statute as racially discriminatory and unconstitutional under the equal protection guarantees of the California constitution.

“We urge the Court to address this longstanding injustice and ensure that Black and Brown people are no longer sentenced disproportionately to death,” Lisa Romo, a senior deputy state public defender, said at the time.

I am living that longstanding injustice. My hope is that Newsom will go beyond the moratorium he ordered in 2019, and stand on the same set of unwavering principles as other Democratic leaders who have had the courage to end the death penalty.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Timothy James Young
Timothy James Young is a poet, writer, editor, abolitionist and wrongfully convicted man, who has been incarcerated in California since 1999. His work has previously been featured in Scalawag Magazine, Prism, Filter Mag, Solitary Watch, and elsewhere. He is also currently studying at Southwestern College. He is also the Solitary Gardener at UC Santa Cruz, a contributor to the EXPOSED Project, a collaborator and exhibited artist at the San José Museum of Art, a collaborator with Reasonable Doubt(s), a participant and client in Making an Exoneree, and a fellow at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences. He has also edited two anthologies of poetry and non-fiction, including Measurements of Growth, published in coordination with the Solitary Gardens project. Learn more about Tim and his work at www.timothyjamesyoung.com or on Instagram: @freetimyoung.

Solar has taken off in red states. Trump’s funding freeze is causing panic

On his first day, the president paused billions of dollars in funding for clean energy projects initiated by Biden

Stephen Starr 

in Columbus, Indiana

Mon 17 Feb 2025 
THE GUARDIAN


Mike Mullett strains to see through sheets of misty rain while driving through working-class neighborhoods of Columbus, a quaint town in southern Indiana.

He’s trying to find the senior center, multi-family homes and rent-assisted properties – more than 530 in total – that he and many other locals hope will receive $4.42m in federal funding for solar electricity projects.

But now that money is at risk.

On 20 January, Donald Trump paused billions of dollars of federal grant funding for clean energy and other projects around the country initiated by the Biden administration’s Green New Deal.

“We’ve been slavishly working on a plan since April 2023 that would provide solar energy to hundreds of households in two low- and moderate-income Columbus neighborhoods,” says Mullett. The project was expected to be rolled out in April, with previously approved funding thought to have been made available by 14 February.

“Unless the Trump administration makes a 180-degree turn on funding, that expectation will obviously not be met.”

Record-breaking growth in renewable energy in US threatened by Trump

The funding is part of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s $7bn Solar for All program, which is meant to help low-income families save money on electricity costs. About $117m was set for solar projects and initiatives in Indiana.

Communities across Indiana, a solidly Republican midwestern state, were set to benefit more than most from the Biden administration’s ambitious clean energy push in what was an ultimately failed effort to win votes in Rust belt states whose voters have abandoned Democratic party politicians in recent decades.

By August 2024, $7.8bn in private investment for a host of clean energy projects including solar and battery production had come to Indiana, spurred in part by the promise of federal grants and local tax-abatement schemes.

But Trump has followed through on his election campaign promise to roll back clean energy initiatives, referring to Biden’s efforts as the “Green New Scam”.


Leading Republicans have backed his move, despite the potential economic risks to states where the president is popular.

“The executive branch of government in our system has the right to evaluate how executive branch agencies are operating,” the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, said on 5 February.

On 10 February, a federal judge issued an order for the Trump administration to unfreeze its funding hold.

Indiana isn’t alone in its drive for solar energy.

Solar projects ranging from utility scale to single housing efforts have proved hugely popular in red states. Texas has the second-highest number of installed solar power units, after California, enough to power more than 4.5m homes. Florida follows close behind.

A quarter of a trillion dollars – 80% of the total funding for green energy manufacturing and other initiatives – was to go to projects in Republican-leaning congressional districts across the US.

At 3.4% of its total, Indiana, where Trump won by almost 19 points in November’s presidential election, produces more state electricity from solar than Democrat-leaning states such as Illinois, Washington and New Hampshire, according to one industry organization.


“The $130m in total Solar for All funding awarded for Indiana would transform Indiana’s solar market by allowing more than 10,000 families in low-income communities around the state to directly benefit from the electric bill savings and resilience afforded by local solar,” says Zach Schalk, the Indiana program director at Solar United Neighbors Action, a non-profit that has helped invest $7.1m in solar initiatives in the state.

“It’s really a non-partisan issue if you look at the survey polling across the US. We’ve had elected officials of both parties [in Indiana] sign letters of support. We know that this is a popular program.”

But some question the importance of federal dollars in fueling solar’s growth at the utility scale, and more broadly its ability to meet the enormous demand for electricity.

“I’ve had a number of the solar [utility] companies in and in many instances they are saying that [the tax rebates and other federal funding] are nice, but the industry has matured quite a bit [to the extent] that they still have enough [profit] margin without it,” says Indiana Republican representative Ed Soliday, who has backed laws supporting solar initiatives in the state.

“What’s shaking out is that commercial solar is advancing far more than the rooftop equivalent. You can’t run a manufacturing plant on rooftop solar panels.”

Emails sent to the Indiana Republican party and a state senator representing Columbus asking if party members believed the funding pause could risk solar electricity projects and disrupt business developments were not responded to.

In Columbus, Trump’s move has been demoralizing for Mullett and others who have made a huge effort to secure funding that would see solar electricity infrastructure installed at 320 community households, 204 multi-family households and seven single-family project households.

“Most of us are retirees and volunteers,” he says. “I would say [we’ve spent] 20 hours a week at a minimum; sometimes there were weeks when we were doing 40 to 60 hours a week.”

He says that if the federal funding is lost, private funding that has been committed to help pay for the project would be gone too.

“If the pending litigation in federal district courts must run its course all the way to the US supreme court, the delay in the rollout of the [funding] would certainly be measured in months, perhaps extending even into 2026,” he says.

According to one study, Indiana residents have seen the seventh-highest electricity rate increase in the country. Nearly 83% of its electricity generation is sourced by natural gas or coal plants.

Still, the time and effort Mullet and other community members have invested in the project means they aren’t about to give up. He says the work will continue even as the funding remains in flux.

“Doing this in a way that low-income households can become involved, it’s literally a 50-year-old dream of mine,” he says.

AMERIKA

'Ludicrous': Red states claim they had zero abortions in new 'culture of fear'

REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders speaks inside Capital One arena on the inauguration day of Donald Trump's second Presidential term, in Washington, U.S. January 20, 2025.

Sarah Varney, 

KFF Health News

February 13, 2025


In Arkansas, state health officials announced a stunning statistic for 2023: The total number of abortions in the state, where some 1.5 million women live, was zero.

In South Dakota, too, official records show zero abortions that year.

And in Idaho, home to abortion battles that have recently made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the official number of recorded abortions was just five.

In nearly a dozen states with total or near-total abortion bans, government officials claimed that zero or very few abortions occurred in 2023, the first full year after the Supreme Court eliminated federal abortion rights.

Those statistics, the most recent available and published in government records, have been celebrated by anti-abortion activists. Medical professionals say such accounts are not only untrue but fundamentally dishonest.

“To say there are no abortions going on in South Dakota is ludicrous,” said Amy Kelley, an OB-GYN in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, citing female patients who have come to her hospital after taking abortion pills or to have medical procedures meant to prevent death or end nonviable pregnancies. “I can think of five off the top of my head that I dealt with,” she said, “and I have 15 partners.”

For some data scientists, these statistics also suggest a troubling trend: the potential politicization of vital statistics.

“It’s so clinically dishonest,” said Ushma Upadhyay, a public health scientist at the University of California-San Francisco, who co-chairs WeCount, an academic research effort that has kept a tally of the number of abortions nationwide since April 2022.

The zeroing out is statistically unlikely, Upadhyay said, and also runs counter to the reality that pregnancy “comes with many risks and in many cases emergency abortion care will be needed.”

“We know they are sometimes necessary to save the pregnant person’s life,” she said, “so I do hope there are abortions occurring in South Dakota.”

State officials reported a sharp decline in the official number of abortions after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
Arkansas reported zero abortions in 2023, compared with 1,621 in 2022.
Texas reported 60 in 2023, after reporting 50,783 abortions in the state in 2021.
Idaho reported five in 2023 compared with 1,553 in 2021.
South Dakota, which had severely restricted abortions years ahead of the Dobbs ruling, reported zero in 2023 compared with 192 abortions in 2021.

Anti-abortion politicians and activists have cited these statistics to bolster their claims that their decades-long crusade to end abortion is a success.

“Undoubtedly, many Arkansas pregnant mothers were spared from the lifelong regrets and physical complications abortion can cause and babies are alive today in Arkansas,” Rose Mimms, executive director of Arkansas Right to Life, said in a press statement. “That’s a win-win for them and our state.”

A spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Health, Ashley Whitlow, said in an email that the department “is not able to track abortions that take place out of the state or outside of a healthcare facility.” State officials, she said, collect data from “in-state providers and facilities for the Induced Abortion data reports as required by Arkansas law.”

WeCount’s tallies of observed telehealth abortions do not appear in the official state numbers. For instance, from April to June 2024 it counted an average of 240 telehealth abortions a month in Arkansas.

Groups that oppose abortion rights acknowledge that state surveillance reports do not tell the full story of abortion care occurring in their states. Mimms, of Arkansas Right to Life, said she would not expect abortions to be reported in the state, since the procedure is illegal except to prevent a patient’s death.

“Women are still seeking out abortions in Arkansas, whether it’s illegally or going out of state for illegal abortion,” Mimms told KFF Health News. “We’re not naive.”

The South Dakota Department of Health “compiles information it receives from health care organizations around the state and reports it accordingly,” Tia Kafka, its marketing and outreach director, said in an email responding to questions about the statistics. Kafka declined to comment on specific questions about abortions being performed in the state or characterizations that South Dakota’s report is flawed.

Kim Floren, who serves as director of the Justice Empowerment Network, which provides funds and practical support to help South Dakota patients receive abortion care, expressed disbelief in the state’s official figures.

“In 2023, we served over 500 patients,” she said. “Most of them were from South Dakota.”

“For better or worse, government data is the official record,” said Ishan Mehta, director for media and democracy at Common Cause, the nonpartisan public interest group. “You are not just reporting data. You are feeding into an ecosystem that is going to have much larger ramifications.”

When there is a mismatch in the data reported by state governments and credible researchers, including WeCount and the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group that supports abortion rights, state researchers need to dig deeper, Mehta said.

“This is going to create a historical record for archivists and researchers and people who are going to look at the decades-long trend and try to understand how big public policy changes affected maternal health care,” Mehta said. And now, the recordkeepers “don’t seem to be fully thinking through the ramifications of their actions.”

A Culture of Fear

Abortion rights supporters agree that there has been a steep drop in the number of abortions in every state that enacted laws criminalizing abortion. In states with total bans, 63 clinics have stopped providing abortions. And doctors and medical providers face criminal charges for providing or assisting in abortion care in at least a dozen states.

Practitioners find themselves working in a culture of confusion and fear, which could contribute to a hesitancy to report abortions — despite some state efforts to make clear when abortion is allowed.

For instance, South Dakota Department of Health Secretary Melissa Magstadt released a video to clarify when an abortion is legal under the state’s strict ban.

The procedure is legal in South Dakota only when a pregnant woman is facing death. Magstadt said doctors should use “reasonable medical judgment” and “document their thought process.”

Any doctor convicted of performing an unlawful abortion faces up to two years in prison.

In the place of reliable statistics, academic researchers at WeCount use symbols like dashes to indicate they can’t accurately capture the reality on the ground.

“We try to make an effort to make clear that it’s not zero. That’s the approach these departments of health should take,” said WeCount’s Upadhyay, adding that health departments “should acknowledge that abortions are happening in their states but they can’t count them because they have created a culture of fear, a fear of lawsuits, having licenses revoked.”

“Maybe that’s what they should say,” she said, “instead of putting a zero in their reports.”

Mixed Mandates for Abortion Data

For decades, dozens of states have required abortion providers to collect detailed demographic information on the women who have abortions, including race, age, city, and county — and, in some cases, marital status and the reason for ending the pregnancy.

Researchers who compile data on abortion say there can be sound public health reasons for monitoring the statistics surrounding medical care, namely to evaluate the impact of policy changes. That has become particularly important in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which ended the federal right to an abortion and opened the door to laws in Republican-led states restricting and sometimes outlawing abortion care.

Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a Guttmacher data scientist, said data collection has been used by abortion opponents to overburden clinics with paperwork and force patients to answer intrusive questions. “It’s part of a pretty long history of those tools being used to stigmatize abortion,” he said.

In South Dakota, clinic staff members were required to report the weight of the contents of the uterus, including the woman’s blood, a requirement that had no medical purpose and had the effect of exaggerating the weight of pregnancy tissue, said Floren, who worked at a clinic that provided abortion care before the state’s ban.

“If it was a procedural abortion, you had to weigh everything that came out and write that down on the report,” Floren said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not mandate abortion reporting, and some Democratic-led states, including California, do not require clinics or health care providers to collect data. Each year, the CDC requests abortion data from the central health agencies for every state, the District of Columbia, and New York City, and these states and jurisdictions voluntarily report aggregated data for inclusion in the CDC’s annual “Abortion Surveillance” report.

In states that mandate public abortion tracking, hospitals, clinics, and physicians report the number of abortions to state health departments in what are typically called “induced termination of pregnancy” reports, or ITOPs.

Before Dobbs, such reports recorded procedural and medication abortions. But following the elimination of federal abortion rights, clinics shuttered in states with criminal abortion bans. More patients began accessing abortion medication through online organizations, including Aid Access, that do not fall under mandatory state reporting laws.

At least six states have enacted what are called “shield laws” to protect providers who send pills to patients in states with abortion bans. That includes New York, where Linda Prine, a family physician employed by Aid Access, prescribes and sends abortion pills to patients across the country.

Asked about states reporting zero or very few abortions in 2023, Prine said she was certain those statistics were wrong. Texas, for example, reported 50,783 abortions in the state in 2021. Now the state reports on average five a month. WeCount reported an average of 2,800 telehealth abortions a month in Texas from April to June 2024.

“In 2023, Aid Access absolutely mailed pills to all three states in question — South Dakota, Arkansas, and Texas,” Prine said.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit in January against a New York-based physician, Maggie Carpenter, co-founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, for prescribing abortion pills to a Texas patient in violation of Texas’ near-total abortion ban. It’s the first legal challenge to New York’s shield law and threatens to derail access to medication abortion.

Still, some state officials in states with abortion bans have sought to choke off the supply of medication that induces abortion. In May, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin wrote cease and desist letters to Aid Access in the Netherlands and Choices Women’s Medical Center in New York City, stating that “abortion pills may not legally be shipped to Arkansas” and accusing the medical organizations of potentially “false, deceptive, and unconscionable trade practices” that carry up to $10,000 per violation.

Good-government groups like Common Cause say that the dangers of officials relying on misleading statistics are myriad, including a disintegration of public trust as well as ill-informed legislation.

These concerns have been heightened by misinformation surrounding health care, including an entrenched and vocal anti-vaccine movement and the objections of some conservative politicians to mandates related to covid-19, including masks, physical distancing, and school and business closures.

“If the state is not going to put in a little more than the bare minimum to just find out if their data is accurate or not,” Mehta said, “we are in a very dangerous place.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license

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'Republican Abortion Bans Kill Women': Maternal Sepsis Rates Soar in Texas

"It is kind of mind-blowing that even before the bans researchers barely looked into complications of pregnancy loss in hospitals," said one expert.

Abortion rights demonstrators march near the Texas State Capitol in Austin on June 25, 2022.
(Photo: Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Feb 20, 2025

COMMON DREAMS

"This is exactly what we predicted would happen and exactly what we were afraid would happen."

That's what Dr. Lorie Harper, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Austin, said after reviewing the data behind a ProPublica analysis published Thursday revealing that, since Texas banned abortion in 2021, the rate of sepsis soared by more than 50% for women hospitalized in the state when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester.

In the years immediately preceding Texas' abortion ban, the rate of sepsis—a life-threatening condition caused by infection—for women hospitalized in the second trimester of pregnancy held relatively steady around 3%. Since the ban, the sepsis rate for such women has shot up to nearly 5%.


"After the state banned abortion, dozens more pregnant and postpartum women died in Texas hospitals than had in pre-pandemic years, which ProPublica used as a baseline to avoid Covid-19-related distortions," states the report by Lizzie Presser, Andrea Suozzo, Sophie Chou, and Kavitha Surana.



The analysis notes that "the standard of care for miscarrying patients in the second trimester is to offer to empty the uterus," which can lower the risk of infection and, by extension, sepsis. However, some hospitals don't allow doctors to perform the potentially lifesaving procedure until after a fetal heartbeat stops, or until they find a life-threatening complication.

That's because under Texas' misnomered "Heartbeat Law," pregnant people who have abortions cannot be penalized, but anyone who performs or aids in the procurement of the procedure faces as many as 99 years in prison, up to a $100,00 fine, and the possible loss of their professional license.

Texas empowers private individuals to sue anyone who "knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion" after the sixth week of pregnancy, a period before which many people even know they are pregnant. Plaintiffs who win in court are entitled to a reward of $10,000 plus costs and attorneys' fees.

Although the law contains an exception for "a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy," the authors of the ProPublica analysis noted that "the definition of what constitutes an emergency has been subject to confusion and debate."

In short, healthcare providers fear running afoul of the ambiguous law. This has resulted in deadly and life-threatening delays in care.

As the report highlights:
Forced to wait 40 hours as her dying fetus pressed against her cervix, Josseli Barnica risked a dangerous infection. Doctors didn't induce labor until her fetus no longer had a heartbeat.

Physicians waited, too, as Nevaeh Crain's organs failed. Before rushing the pregnant teenager to the operating room, they ran an extra test to confirm her fetus had expired.

Both women had hoped to carry their pregnancies to term, both suffered miscarriages, and both died.

"It's black and white in the law, but it's very vague when you're in the moment," Dr. Tony Ogburn, an OB-GYN in San Antonio, told ProPublica.

Republican lawmakers who helped write Texas' law have recently said they're open to revisions aimed at protecting pregnant peoples' lives in light of the harms reported by ProPublica and others. Last month, Republican Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said that "I do think we need to clarify any language so that doctors are not in fear of being penalized if they think the life of the mother is at risk."

However, it is uncertain how or when the law might be amended. Meanwhile, deaths attributed to abortion bans have also been reported—and reportedly covered up—in other states.

"It is kind of mind-blowing," perinatal epidemiologist Alison Gemmill told ProPublica, "that even before the bans researchers barely looked into complications of pregnancy loss in hospitals."

'Intimidate and humiliate': MLK family fears what Trump will do with 'secret' FBI records

Dr. Martin Luther King with Coretta Scott-King in 1965 

(Wikimedia Commons)

Alex Henderson

February 15, 2025

ALTERNET

Three days into his second term, President Donald Trump ordered the release and declassification of FBI files on three historic figures who were assassinated during the 1960s: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., President John F. Kennedy, and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (D-Massachusetts). A member of Trump's administration is related to two of the three: anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is JFK's nephew and the son of RFK Sr.

According to Axios reporters Marc Caputo and Russell Contreras, MLK's family "is concerned that" Trump's order "could revive the FBI's attempts to discredit him."

Caputo and Contreras, in an article published on February 15, report, "The family requested a sneak preview of the records prior to their release. Trump declined, a White House official said, but not out of animus toward the family. Why it matters: The brewing controversy pits Trump's determination to release documents the government has kept secret for more than a half-century against the family's lingering pain over how J. Edgar Hoover's FBI spied on King and tried to intimidate and humiliate him."

The Axios reporters add, "Last month, Trump ordered the release of all records the U.S. government still holds."

Caputo and Contreras note that although the FBI "released documents about King's private life previously," the "new disclosure could include more documents detailing alleged embarrassing interactions in hotel rooms, private homes and even King's house."

A friend of the King family, quoted anonymously, told Axios, "We know J. Edgar Hoover tried to destroy Dr. King's legacy, and the family doesn't want that effort to prevail."

Another source voiced the family's "deep concerns," telling Axios, "They know the right wing wants to smear Dr. King, and one way to do it is by putting these smears in the public under the guise of transparency. If there are assassination records, release those. But smears are not assassination records."

In a January 24 post on Instagram, members of the King family wrote, "The assassination of our father is a deeply personal family loss that we have endured over the last 56 years. We hope to be provided the opportunity to review the files as a family prior to its public release."

Read the full Axios article at this link.

'Un-Christian': Student 'nearly ruined' by evangelical education sounds alarm on public school trend

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Naomi LaChance

February 13, 2025

ALTERNET

The religious right is pushing Christianity into schools, and that can have serious repercussions -- journalist Josiah Hesse knows firsthand. In a piece at the Guardian published Wednesday, Hesse writes that “Trump’s promise to ‘bring back prayer to our schools,’ shut down the Department of Education and embrace ‘school choice’ fulfills an evangelical wishlist I’d heard about throughout my childhood.”

He attended Christian schools growing up. “The longer I stayed at the school,” he writes of the evangelical school he attended junior year, “the deeper I fell into a malaise of depression and self-harm. In addition to the stress of bullies, I had trouble getting my mind around the logic of these classes, and knew that if I didn’t understand it, and believe it, eternal torture awaited me.”

Besides, “the apocalypse was at hand, so who had time for algebra?”

He switched to public school for his senior year, where his credits didn’t transfer because the Christian school was not accredited by the government.

“Twenty-five years later,” Hesse writes, “Donald Trump and the Christian nationalist movement that put him in the White House (twice) are seeking to transform public education into something similar to what I was reared on, where science, history and even economics are taught through an evangelical conservative lens, while prayer and Bible reading are foundations of the curriculum.”

“These efforts test the boundaries of the constitution’s establishment clause, reversing a century of civil rights victories in public schools, and have the potential to fundamentally alter the way American children learn – and what they learn about,” he writes.

He explains that the indoctrination comes in two ways: putting Christian rhetoric into public schools, and using tax dollars to contribute to private religious schools through vouchers that cover tuition. A 2022 Supreme Court ruling allowed private religious schools to receive government funding.

Hesse points out that the top education official in Oklahoma, for example, has mandated that those teaching grades 5-12 incorporate the Bible into their classes. Louisiana passed a law that classrooms must display the Ten Commandments, although a judge blocked it. Back in 2012, Florida considered a constitutional amendment that would allow the state to fund religious schools, which is worth noting because it was supported by Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general.

“Attempting to indoctrinate public school students into Christianity is not only unconstitutional and un-American, it’s deeply un-Christian,” Democratic Texas state representative James Talarico, a former public school teacher, told the Guardian. He has been fighting an optional new curriculum that would teach Bible stories in elementary schools. What’s more, the Texas voucher system can fund homeschool students. “So we taxpayers will be funding homeschool programs that teach students the earth is flat,” he said.

“Talarico views Texas’s efforts to create a voucher program for private Christian schools as not only bad for Jewish, Muslim and LGBTQ+ students, but also as stealing from the poor to serve the rich,” Hesse writes. A low-income student would not be able to afford $20,000 tuition with an $8,000 voucher, but a wealthy one could.

As for Hesse, he was able to get his GED. “Colleges and universities, I was told, were even worse than public schools in their liberal indoctrination, so I drifted through a decade of low-wage jobs in factories, restaurants and construction sites, as my fellow students who’d graduated from public school, then college, ascended the socioeconomic ladder.” Eventually, he began teaching himself, leading to a career in journalism.

“I have often felt a deep sorrow for students enduring the bubble of private Christian education – particularly the poor and queer ones. Now it seems that compassion must extend to those in public schools as well,” he writes.

White House names Scientology mega-donor to Kennedy Center board

Tony Ortega
Feb 14, 2025

 Underground Bunker 

[Trish makes all-American art!]

After announcing Wednesday that he would be the new chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center, President Donald Trump yesterday added the names of several other members to the Center’s Board of Trustees.

The list included second lady Usha Vance; Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles and her mother, Cheri Summerall; deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino; Allison Lutnick, the wife of the prospective Commerce Secretary; as well as Mindy Levine and Dana Blumberg, wives of the president of the New York Yankees and owner of the New England Patriots, as well as several others.

But the name that made us do a double-take was billionaire Trish Duggan, Scientology’s wealthiest donor.

We were just telling you on Tuesday about Trish being a director of the America First Policy Institute, a dark-money organization that Politico and the New York Times said had quietly become more important than the Heritage Foundation for helping to plan the strategy of the second Trump administration.

The AFPI’s tax records suggested that Duggan is tight with three of Trump’s cabinet picks (Linda McMahon at Education, Brooke Rollins at Agriculture, and Pam Bondi at Justice), and her selection to the Kennedy board only emphasizes just how close she is with the president after becoming, at $5 million, one of the biggest individual funders to his 2024 campaign.

We’ve written for years about Trish and her former husband Bob Duggan, who became billionaires after an investment in a pharmaceutical firm exploded in value thanks to a promising new cancer drug. They split up in 2017, but Trish has continued to be the number one donor in Scientology, called “Patron of Legend” by the church’s leader, David Miscavige. To give you a sense of the kind of money she’s still forking over, we recently found tax records that showed she had given $18.6 million to the IAS, Scientology’s membership organization, in only a single year, 2022.

Trish has a museum dedicated to herself in St. Petersburg, Florida, which shows off her glass art. And now that she’s on the Kennedy board, she no doubt will have some great suggestions for the legendary performing arts center in Washington DC.

Here are some Scientologist performers who might show up on the schedule:

Mark Isham (trumpet) and Stanley Clarke (bass) are legitimately celebrated jazz musicians who happen to be longtime Scientologists, and who have both seemed to step up their involvement in church events in recent years.

Stanley’s already scheduled to play at the Kennedy Center this May, and Mark’s film music has been performed there in the past.

Beck Hansen announced his departure from Scientology in 2019, but his longtime bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen is still in. And what is it about bass players? Billy Sheehan is still quite outspoken about his involvement in the church.

With Scientologist singer Emily Armstrong now fronting the band, could it be time for a Linkin Park jam at the Kennedy Center? And wouldn’t David Miscavige be thrilled to see Trish rehabilitate one of his personal favorites, Broadway singer and convicted child molester James Barbour, with a triumphant appearance at the DC venue?

As for actors, the usual gang — Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Elisabeth Moss, Vonni Ribisi, Erika Christensen, Juliette Lewis — aren’t really known for performing on stage, but perhaps Trish could get them cast in something.

Well, the mind reels. But once again, the main takeaway for us is that we haven’t seen a White House with such friendly connections to Scientology since Bill Clinton was being hustled by Travolta and Cruise in the mid-1990s.

We’re really interested to see what David Miscavige does to try and take advantage of this fertile field that seems to lie before him.


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Author details link between 'Christian nationalism' and MAGA’s 'smashing of the administrative state'

President Donald Trump on June 20, 2020 (Wikimedia Commons)

Alex Henderson

February 18, 2025

ALTERNET

Journalist/author Katherine Stewart has a long history of in-depth reporting on the Religious Right — and not in a favorable way.

2012's "The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children" and 2022's "The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism," both characterized the Religious Right movement as antithetical to religious freedom in the United States. And in her new book, "Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy," Stewart emphasizes that Christian nationalists and billionaire oligarchs have formed a deeply authoritarian alliance.

Stewart discussed that alliance during an interview with Salon's Amanda Marcotte, published in Q&A form on February 18.

READ MORE:'Time to think of Plan B': Musk ripped after forcing out Social Security chief

When Marcotte asked Stewart how "MAGA tech bros like Elon Musk" and the Christian Right "fit together," the journalist/author responded, "The New Right and Christian nationalists are a power couple of American authoritarianism. Both want to smash the institutions that safeguard our democracy. They've said it in different ways. The smashing of the 'administrative state' is more of a New Right concept. The Christian nationalist movement is more focused on rejecting pluralism and equality. But both are committed to this anti-democratic project."

Stewart continued, "On the Christian Right, they would say our democratic system is not godly. On the New Right, they would say it simply doesn't work, that it's outlived its purpose. They want to smash it up and create something new, and that's an autocracy."

In 2025, the term "New Right" has a very different meaning than it did during Ronald Reagan's presidency.

Back in the early 1980s, "New Right" was used to describe the conservative movement being championed by President Reagan and his allies. But these days, the term "New Right" is used to describe President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement — which, in many respects, is a major departure from traditional old-school Reagan/Barry Goldwater/John McCain conservatism. And many Never Trumpers who were considered "The New Right" back in the 1980s are now scathing critics of Trump and MAGA.

When Stewart speaks of the New Right, she is referring to MAGA — not the conservatives of 40 or 45 years ago.

Stewart told Marcotte, "The Christian nationalist side has been an authoritarian movement for quite some time. They refer to Donald Trump like a biblical ruler. They compare him (to) King Cyrus or King David, an imperfect ruler God chose to enact his will. Here's the thing about kings: they're not part of a democracy. They're the law onto themselves. Christian nationalists have persuaded themselves they're facing a demonic other, defined as anyone who doesn't believe as they do. They also believe God's hand is on Trump's shoulder. If anybody opposes him, they're going against God."

Amanda Marcotte's interview with Katherine Stewart for Salon is available at this link.



'Not just blood that they’re after': Expert says Christian Nationalists 'want a show'

Photo by David Todd McCarty on Unsplash

Naomi LaChance

February 20, 2025

ALTERNET




President Donald Trump was able to be elected president a second time partly by mobilizing his base of Christian nationalists. This anti-Democratic group has an “us vs. them” mentality, believing that America is on the verge of an apocalypse and that they are being persecuted. In her new book, "Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy," journalist Katherine Stewart investigates this voter base. Salon published an interview with her Tuesday.

This subculture, Stewart argues, believes America should move past democracy. “They believe the U.S. is not founded on principles, but on a specific religious and cultural heritage,” she said. “They argue America is on the brink of an apocalypse, owing to the rise of equality and what they call ‘wokeness.’ They argue democracy, as a system, isn't sufficient to meet the ‘challenges’ of feminism and equality. They believe the democratic rules no longer apply, because we're facing this absolute apocalypse of equality. They want an authoritarian leader who puts himself above the law, who's going to seize the reins of power and scrap the rule of law in favor of the iron fist.”

One of the three major tenants of this mindset is the belief that the country is nearing an apocalypse.

“This is what authoritarian leaders do,” she explained. “Christian nationalism is not just an ideology. It's also not just a political movement. It's a mindset… First is ‘us versus them’ or ‘pure versus the impure,’ or those who properly ‘belong’ in the country, and those who do not. Second, there's a sense of persecution. They claim white conservative Christians are being persecuted more than any other group in society. Third is the sense that we're facing an apocalypse. They share this view with the new right. It's always, ‘If we don't win this election, we're gonna go under the control of the Illuminati and the devil's gonna be controlling us for hundreds of years. So it's any means necessary to ‘save’ us from this terrible fate.”

“Those three ideas,” she continued, “clear the way for the acceptance of an authoritarian leader, someone who doesn't respect the rules, who will punish their enemies, and who will suspend the rule of law. If you look at what's happening in our politics today, you can see it playing out before our eyes. In the first weeks of the Trump presidency, we're seeing a version of Project 2025. They've been telling us for a long time they're going to smash the institutions that safeguard our democracy. That's what they're doing.”

But the members of this group have been “colossally misinformed.”

“Many of these supporters don't recognize that American democracy might be destroyed. Some don't care. They think it's more important to put a strong man in power to demolish the supposedly dangerous radical left. But whether they don't care or don't know, it's because they've been colossally misinformed. That's how they rationalize their choices at the ballot box. And I would have to say this is not just about Trump. Authoritarianism loves a misinformed public. The anti-democratic movement has funded this massive propaganda campaign that has led us to where we are today,” she said.

Here is an excerpt from the book, published by Rolling Stone:

“Power has not softened the base of this movement. It’s not just blood that they’re after; they want a show. This is the thing that Trump surely understands best. Policy simply doesn’t matter. You can kill off grandma through vaccine denial, take away health insurance, bust unions, drive up inflation, and reward your billionaire friends with policies that benefit their bloated bottom lines. None of that matters as long as you give the people the pleasure of a good performance, where they can project their frustrations and resentments on the targets they have been trained to hate.”

‘It’s about control’: Why Trump renamed Denali to Mount McKinley

Photo by John Feng on Unsplash

Taylar Dawn Stagner,

 Grist

February 19, 2025

There is a game children play called “King of the Mountain.” The rules vary, but generally, kids race to the top of a mound and push or wrestle until only one child stands and is declared the king. Displacing other children on the mound is the only way to win, and the game often rewards particularly vicious players — those who will bite, punch, and scratch to get to the top of the hill and win the title.

It’s a game the Trump administration is also keen on playing. But in this version, physical violence is replaced by aggressive tariffs, hostile dealings with foreign officials, and fraudulent business practices. It’s also involved petty actions, changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico and punishing those who refuse to adhere to the order, and renaming Mount Denali, in Alaska, to Mount McKinley; a change nobody — not even Republicans in Alaska — wanted.

Denali is a Koyukon Athabaskan word that means “the high one” — the tallest mountain in North America — and has been referred to as Denali until 1896, when it was rechristened Mount McKinley by gold prospectors in honor of then-Republican presidential candidate William McKinley: a man who never visited the region. In 1975, Alaska legislators began petitioning the federal government to change the name back to Denali, and in 2015, the Obama administration did just that.

“All of our land places had Koyukuk and Athabaskan names and identification markers before settler contact,” said Sonia Vent, a Koyukuk Athabascan elder in southeast Alaska.

Settler naming conventions, especially for mountains, often celebrate the accomplishments of a single president, explorer, or mountaineer, reinforcing the idea that the country was built by great individual men.

Settlers rarely name mountains after women, but they often name them after breasts. The Teton Mountain range in Wyoming, for example, is French for “breasts.” There are also multiple hills named “Molly’s Nipple” in Utah and a Nippletop Mountain in New York. Many geographic sites still bear derogatory terms for Indigenous women despite federal initiatives aimed at removing them.

This feminization of the landscape reflects a history of gender-based violence, an idea captured by author Susan Schrepfer in her book Nature’s Altars. “Nature was assumed to be feminine, but control over it was masculine,” wrote Schrepfer. “Rather than identifying a site embedded in time and place these designations celebrated taking possession as a manly act.”

In the early 1900s, domination of women and the environment was reflected in the acquisition of Native land and our erasure from the landscape. State and federal governments created a system of parks and reserves that professed to protect wildlife and landscapes, but also kicked tribes off the land with the assumption that settlers knew of better ways to steward the land.

“Mountains came to emulate in vertical space the social values of hierarchy and authority,” Schrepfer wrote.

President Donald Trump has been graphic in his characterization of this dominance, saying “drill, baby drill” on the campaign trail and when he took office asserting that the United States needs to enter an era of “energy dominance.” Even the term “natural resource,” equates mountains, plains, and bodies of water as resources for settler consumption.

“The idea is that Indigenous peoples are supposed to just go away,” said Niiokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, an Ojibwe geographer at the University of Victoria. “Renaming is saying, ‘Now that we’ve conquered you, we can remake this space into something that’s more beneficial to us.’”

Stripping an Indigenous place name and imposing a new one on maps, atlases, and our phones’ navigational systems is an act of colonial dominance. “It’s about control,” Smiles said.

It’s also about justice. Last year, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians achieved their goal of restoring the original name of Clingman’s Dome, on the Tennessee-North Carolina border. The name is now Kuwahi meaning “mulberry place” in Tsalagi, the Cherokee language. And two years ago, in Colorado, Mt. Evans, a 14,000 ft peak overlooking Denver, was renamed Mt. Blue Sky after my tribe, the Arapaho, who are known as the Blue Sky People. The mountain was previously named for John Evans, Colorado’s territorial governor in the mid-1800’s. However, recent reappraisals of the man’s legacy — including his responsibility for the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre which led to the deaths of 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho people — hastened the change.

Many places have multiple Indigenous names, depending on whom you ask, but that complexity is difficult to capture on a map, where nuance is lost. The nation’s first national monument, Devil’s Tower, in northwest Wyoming, has as many as 20 different names such as “Bear’s Tipi,” “Tree Rock,” and “Bear Lodge.”

“Our officialdom doesn’t really tolerate that,” said Tom Thompson, a professor at the University of Alaska who studies Tlingit and anthropology. “It depends on the capacity of the language to incorporate things like direction, action, relationality. A lot of other Native American languages are very good at that or have that capacity.”

In southeast Alaska alone, there are more than 3,500 documented Alaskan Native place names. Mt St. Elias is near Icy Bay, and the Tlingit name for the mountain is just that, Was’eitushaa ”meaning mountain at the head of Icy Bay.”

Elder Sonia Vent said care of the earth is baked into Indigenous languages instead of elements of domination she sees in settler’s names. “To live a substance lifestyle you need that deep, deep love for the land. For all the animals and the plants and minerals around you,” she said.

When the United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, Native language speakers outnumbered those who spoke English. But English-only policies in boarding schools forbid the speaking of Native languages, so even though there are 20 Alaskan Native languages, nearly all are either endangered or extinct. Sea levels are rising, typhoons rip through communities, and increased erosion are driving people away from the coasts and changing traditional relationships with land.


In Glacier Bay National Park, also in southeastern Alaska, “Sitakaday Narrows” is an incorrect interpretation of the Tlingit word Sít’ Eeti Geeyí, which means ‘bay taking the place of the glacier.’

“That’s one of those names that doesn’t work well in English, said Thompson. But due to climate change the glacier is slowly receding. The bay is now, literally, taking the place of the glacier. “Agglutinative and polysynthetic describe most Alaskan Native languages, which just means they can accommodate lots of informational bits and terms as prefixes and suffixes,” he said.

To understand a place, one must understand language and vice versa: to understand language, one must get to know the landscape in the same way one would get acquainted with another person. “It’s about connection,” said Angela Gonzalez, an Athabaskan writer in southeast Alaska. “It’s not just the name. Go out on the land and have tea as a way to connect with the land.” She adds that spending time with rivers, mountains, and plains and learning their original names brings you closer to them, like any other friend.

Last month Mt. Egmont, in Aotearoa New Zealand, regained its original name: Mount Taranaki from the Māori word for “mountain peak.” The name Egmont, applied by Captain James Cook in honor of his friend John Perceval Earl of Egmont, has been an intense subject of debate since the 1980s. Perceval was a leader in the British Royal Navy, but died before he learned the mountain was named after him. With the name change came something else: Mount Taranaki was also granted personhood, ensuring legal protections for the mountain, its ecosystem, and its traditional relationship with Māori tribes.

Mount Taranaki, and its legal protections are in stark contrast with how the United States regards Indigenous lands and peoples. “Today Taranaki, our maunga [mountain], our maunga tupuna [ancestral mountain], is released from the shackles,” said Debbie garewa-Packer, leader of the Māori Party, last month. “The shackles of injustice, of ignorance.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/indigenous/its-about-control-why-trump-renamed-denali-to-mount-mckinley/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

An unexpected anomaly was found in the Pacific Ocean – and it could be a global time marker

Photo by Dylan Sauerwein on Unsplash

The Conversation

February 19, 2025

Earth must have experienced something exceptional 10 million years ago. Our study of rock samples from the floor of the Pacific Ocean has found a strange increase in the radioactive isotope beryllium-10 during that time.

This finding, now published in Nature Communications, opens new pathways for geologists to date past events gleaned from deep within the oceans.

But the cause of the beryllium-10 anomaly remains unknown. Could it have been major shifts in global ocean currents, a dying star, or an interstellar collision?
Extremely slow rocks deep in the ocean

I am on a hunt for stardust on Earth. Previously, I’ve sifted through snow in Antarctica. This time, it was the depths of the ocean.

At a depth of about 5,000 metres, the abyssal zone of the Pacific Ocean has never seen light, yet something does still grow there.

Ferromanganese crusts – metallic underwater rocks – grow from minerals dissolved in the water slowly coming together and solidifying over extremely long time scales, as little as a few millimetres in a million years. (Stalactites and stalagmites in caves grow in a similar way, but thousands of times faster.)

This makes ferromanganese crusts ideal archives for capturing stardust over millions of years.

The age of these crusts can be determined by radiometric dating using the radioactive isotope beryllium-10. This isotope is continuously produced in the upper atmosphere when highly energetic cosmic rays strike air molecules. The strikes break apart the main components of our air – nitrogen and oxygen – into smaller fragments.

Both stardust and beryllium-10 eventually find their way into Earth’s oceans where they become incorporated into the growing ferromanganese crust.

Ferromanganese crust sample VA13/2-237KD analysed in this work. The anomaly was discovered in this crust at a depth of about 30mm – representing 10 million years.

Dominik Koll

One of the largest ferromanganese crusts was recovered in 1976 from the Central Pacific. Stored for decades at the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources in Hanover, Germany, a 3.7kg section of it became the subject of my analysis.

Much like tree rings reveal a tree’s age, ferromanganese crusts record their growth in layers over millions of years. Beryllium-10 undergoes radioactive decay really slowly, meaning it gradually breaks down over millions of years as it sits in the rocks.

As beryllium-10 decays over time, its concentration decreases in deeper, older sediment layers. Because the rate of decay is steady, we can use radioactive isotopes as natural stopwatches to discern the age and history of rocks – this is called radioactive dating.
A puzzling anomaly

After extensive chemical processing, my colleagues and I used accelerator mass spectrometry – an ultra-sensitive analytical technique for longer-lived radioactive isotopes – to measure beryllium-10 concentrations in the crust.

This time, my research took me from Canberra, Australia to Dresden, Germany, where the setup at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf was optimised for beryllium-10 measurements.

The results showed that the crust had grown only 3.5 centimetres over the past 10 million years and was more than 20 million years old.

However, before I could return to my search for stardust, I encountered an anomaly.

Initially, as I searched back in time, the beryllium-10 concentration declined as expected, following its natural decay pattern – until about 10 million years ago. At that point, the expected decrease halted before resuming its normal pattern around 12 million years ago.

This was puzzling: radioactive decay follows strict laws, meaning something must have introduced extra beryllium-10 into the crust at that time.

Scepticism is crucial in science. To rule out errors, I repeated the chemical preparation and measurements multiple times – yet the anomaly persisted. The analysis of different crusts from locations nearly 3,000km away gave the same result, a beryllium-10 anomaly around 10 million years ago. This confirmed that the anomaly was a real event rather than a local irregularity.

Ocean currents or exploding stars?

What could have happened on Earth to cause this anomaly 10 million years ago? We’re not sure, but there are a few options.

Last year, an international study revealed that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current – the main driver of global ocean circulation – intensified around 12 million years ago, influencing Antarctic ocean current patterns.

Could this beryllium-10 anomaly in the Pacific mark the beginning of the modern global ocean circulation? If ocean currents were responsible, beryllium-10 would be distributed unevenly on Earth with some samples even showing a lack of beryllium-10. New samples from all major oceans and both hemispheres would allow us to answer this question.

Another possibility emerged early last year. Astrophysicists demonstrated that a collision with a dense interstellar cloud could compress the heliosphere – the Sun’s protective shield against cosmic radiation – back to the orbit of Mercury. Without this barrier, Earth would be exposed to an increased cosmic ray flux, leading to an elevated global beryllium-10 production rate.

A near-Earth supernova explosion could also cause an increased cosmic ray flux leading to a beryllium-10 anomaly. Future research will explore these possibilities.

The discovery of such an anomaly is a windfall for geological dating. Various archives are used to investigate Earth’s climate, habitability and environmental conditions over different timescales.

To compare ice cores with sediments, ferromanganese crusts, speleothems (stalagmites and stalactites) and others, their timescales need to be synchronous. Independent time markers, such as Miyake events or the Laschamp excursion, are invaluable for aligning records thousands of years old. Now, we may have a corresponding time marker for millions of years.

Meanwhile, my search for stardust continues, but now keeping an eye out for new 10-million-year-old samples to further pin down the beryllium-10 anomaly. Stay tuned.

Dominik Koll, Honorary Lecturer, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.