MOTHER JONES – Politics | Politics & Government

This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Across the globe, human activities are changing the way our planet smells. In Egypt, increasing temperatures are shrinking yields of aromatic jasmine flowers; in France, extreme drought has reduced the production of fragrant, night-blooming tuberose, a major ingredient in many perfumes; in Italy, climatic extremes are altering the characteristic floral, citrusy scent of bergamot.  But anthropogenic factors are also reshaping environmental smellscapes, a word coined in the 1980s to describe the totality of scents in a given geographic area, in ways that are far more subtle—and potentially much more harmful. While humans largely rely on sight and sound in our interactions with each other and with the world around us, many other creatures rely on smells. Ants, for example, require scents for colony cohesion; turkey vultures let scent guide them to far-away carrion; and male moths use scent to find females hundreds of meters away. “Scent is very important because it mediates so many interactions within an ecosystem,” says James Blande, a chemical ecologist at the University of Eastern Finland.  A growing number of scientists are documenting how humans are changing the chemical signals of plants and animals. These scent-based interactions are crucial for the maintenance of ecosystem services that directly benefit humans, from the bees and moths that pollinate crops to the flies and dung beetles that recycle the nutrients from dead and decomposing matter. Intact channels of scent communication are likely also important for the preservation of biodiversity. For example, many rare orchid species use scent to attract the co-evolved pollinators they need in order to reproduce, and scent helps guide monarch butterflies to the single type of plant on which they lay their eggs. But just as we are discovering how important these chemical communication channels are to the fabric of the natural world—and the many benefits we reap from it—we are also learning how drastically they can be disrupted by our activities, including climate change and air pollution. Now, scientists are working to document human-induced changes in smellscapes across the planet—to understand how these changes affect communication between different organisms, and to try to figure out which systems are capable of adaptation and which may be at risk of failure. Historically, researchers in the field of sensory pollution have been largely focused on noise and light, says Jeff Riffell, a sensory biologist at the University of Washington. Odor pollution, on the other hand, “is really hard to… [TheTopNews] Read More.

On Friday night, the AI giant Anthropic said that the US government had ordered it to suspend foreign nationals, including employees, from all use of its most advanced products.  To comply with the Friday directive, the company announced that it disabled access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the latest models of Claude, for all customers.  Anthropic stated that the government cited national security concerns but did not provide further details. The company says its newest technology has enhanced software engineering and visual understanding compared to previous iterations. But Anthropic has also acknowledged potential concerns, releasing a preview model in April to just a few industry partners to test for capabilities to use it to create hacking tools. Claude Fable 5 is the first publicly available version of the Mythos model, and the company said it has established “guardrails” such as blocking answers to questions on cybersecurity, biology, and chemistry. The Trump administration barred all federal agencies from using Anthropic products in February. That same day, Trump called Anthropic “a radical left, woke company” amid his feud over it being unwilling to permit the military to use its technology. At the time, CEO Dario Amodei said that the US government’s demands—namely, mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons—would allow it to violate the company’s safeguard policies. As my colleagues Anna Merlan and Abby Vesoulis pointed out in March, the US military previously used Anthropic’s Claude for “intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios” to prepare for its initial strikes on Iran.  Anthropic has positioned itself as the ethical AI company, a significant contributor to its rapid ascent to the top of the industry especially as the public has increasingly disapproved of AI development. The company filed for an initial public offering earlier this month, and SpaceX’s success so far since it entered the stock market on Friday—which made founder Elon Musk a trillionaire—could be an encouraging sign for it and its major competitor OpenAI. Meanwhile, other countries, like China and the United Arab Emirates, are pushing for “sovereign AI,” or in other words, expanding their own AI infrastructure to overcome reliance on nations who have their own data privacy and safeguard rules.  So despite the Trump administration’s attacks on Anthropic, developers are still raising funds and building at a frantic pace. [TheTopNews] Read More.

On Saturday morning, Kennedy Center officials confirmed that they had removed all signs with President Trump’s name from the building after a federal judge declared the previous day that the signs were unlawful. The officials also stated that they updated their website “to remove all reference to the institution as the ‘Trump Kennedy Center.’” To justify his takeover of the Kennedy Center, Trump has repeatedly stated that the cultural center was no longer “going to be woke.” On Friday, another federal judge ordered that the Trump administration must restore exhibits and placards on subjects like climate change, slavery, and civil rights that it had taken down following a March 2025 executive order that deemed them “ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” In a preliminary injunction, US District Judge Angel Kelley ruled in favor of scientists, historians, and park conservationists and rangers, stating that the removal established a “dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.” Kelley gave the Trump administration a reinstallation deadline of 21 days, by the 250th anniversary of the US. The US Department of the Interior said in a statement that “the ruling is from a liberal activist judge” and would evaluate options to appeal the decision while they “celebrate UFC Freedom 250.” Both orders act as a massive blow to President Trump’s censorship campaign to take control over federal historical sites and cultural institutions. As my colleague Dan Friedman reported in February, the Trump administration’s efforts were shrouded in secrecy—the Interior Department has so far refused to disclose the number of signs and exhibits they are targeting as “non-conformant” with the president and signs were taken down without notice. And as my colleague Jeffrey Kelly also wrote in February, local residents and government officials of targeted areas have been fighting back against this censorship through protests and even makeshift signs to replace the ones that’d been removed, because despite the administration’s best efforts, “nothing can change what happened at these places, and who it happened to.” [TheTopNews] Read More.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche gave a press conference on Thursday to tell reporters about 300,000 supposedly “missing” immigrant children. These were unaccompanied minors who’d crossed the border alone during the Biden administration, before being apprehended by the government and then quickly released to sponsors—typically adult relatives. Mullin and Blanche claimed the Biden administration lost track of these children, and that many ended up with adults who purported to be family but were actually criminals who abused them. “Kids now have been paying for it,” Mullin said. “They have been getting raped over and over and over again because the previous administration chose not to enforce our nation’s laws and protect the most vulnerable.” The claim that 300,000 unaccompanied minors went missing has already been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked. Still, over the past year, the Trump administration has used this misleading narrative as justification to go out and find these kids. Officials have gotten back in touch with nearly 150,000, whether calling or visiting their homes or encountering them in the community. Hundreds have been re-detained. Their sponsors must then be re-vetted before the kids can be released. “It is not right that I have to stay here for so long when I have someone to take care of me who knows me and loves me.” The administration says it’s doing this for the good of the children. “We are going to rescue as many kids as we possibly can,” Mullin said. And it’s true that there have been some horrific cases: The press conference was pegged to the indictment of three people who allegedly lied about their identities to gain custody of minors; a fourth man was sentenced for raping a girl in his care. But lawyers around the country who work with unaccompanied children paint a remarkably different picture. They tell me that abuse by fake sponsors is relatively rare, and that most sponsors really are who they say they are: family members. The Trump administration, by and large, isn’t saving kids—it’s separating them from loved ones and putting them in detention for months on end. Unaccompanied minors taken into custody at the end of the Biden administration were held by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) for about 37 days on average. Under the Trump administration, the average is about six months, and many children have been detained more than… [TheTopNews] Read More.

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Last year, Marie Tai needed a better way to keep her condo cool. Her window air-conditioning units were borderline ineffective, even running at full blast. Summers have been getting more intense in Tai’s Boston neighborhood because of a rapidly warming climate, and she had just adopted a 16-year-old cat named Mittens, who was still recovering from being hit by a car. Tai had already been considering a heat pump, an all-electric appliance that heats and cools spaces and lets homeowners ditch polluting fossil fuels. But three contractors had quoted her prices ranging from about $28,000 to $40,000. Tai, who heads finance and administration at Harvard University’s Project Zero, thought those estimates seemed excessive for her 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom place. So she had hit pause on the project. “Even though homeowners often save significantly over time, the first quotes can bring real sticker shock.” But with Mittens’ well-being front of mind, Tai renewed her heat pump search last spring. Through Facebook, she found an opportunity to participate in a program that aggregates demand, organized by Laminar Collective, a local startup that does research on the tech and coordinates installations. These heat pump group-buy initiatives let installers purchase equipment in bulk and spend less time chasing leads, accruing savings that they can pass on to customers. Tai, tantalized by Laminar’s menu of low prices for a heat-pump setup, decided to give it a shot. After a representative from the startup visited her home to check what heat pump size and configuration would fit her needs, Tai signed up for a ductless minisplit system for $20,000—thousands less than even her lowest initial quote. She then also took advantage of an additional $8,500 state rebate and eight-year financing with zero percent interest. The new equipment has been life-changing, Tai said. She no longer has to buy fuel oil for heating in the winter, and the heat pump is so efficient that last year she saved roughly $1,300 on her energy bills. In contrast to the old, noisy window ACs, the new system’s wall-mounted, air-filtering indoor units ​“are so quiet,” she said. Her allergy symptoms have improved. And Mittens is comfortable and doing well, she noted. ​“I couldn’t be happier.” Group-buy initiatives smooth out demand by allowing for planned installations when business naturally slumps. Like Tai, homeowners in communities across the US are signing up for an unusual way of buying heat pumps: together. Companies, nonprofits, and local governments are increasingly offering programs that coordinate consumer demand to secure… [TheTopNews] Read More.