News

Three months after Missouri voters enshrined reproductive rights in the state constitution, abortion remains unavailable as the state’s main provider fights legal hurdles to resume offering the procedure.

At the same time, opponents of abortion in the state Legislature, stung by the passage of Amendment 3 in November, have filed a raft of bills aimed at thwarting implementation of the measure or undercutting its goals while they try to find a unified strategy to prevent the return of abortion services.

This week, state lawmakers held a hearing on a conservative-backed plan to put a new amendment on the ballot that would block most abortions. If passed by the General Assembly, the measure could go to voters as soon as this year.

Summary

IRS employees who accepted the Trump administration's buyout offer have been told they must continue working until May 15 because their roles are deemed "essential."

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) had offered eight months of severance for voluntary resignations but warned of future downsizing for those who stayed.

Uncertainty now surrounds the offer’s implementation, sparking frustration among employees.

The National Treasury Employees Union criticized the move, arguing it proves IRS workers are vital, especially during tax season, and that federal job cuts risk harming public services.

Summary

Trump announced a new task force led by Attorney General Pam Bondi to combat “anti-Christian bias,” ordering federal agencies to halt alleged discrimination against Christians and prosecute related violence.

Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump highlighted pardoned anti-abortion activist Paulette Harlow as an example of faith-based persecution.

His administration is expected to push for public funding of religious schools.

Trump has already advanced conservative social policies, including banning the legal recognition of transgender individuals by the federal government.

On Jan. 10, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 123-page report on the 1921 racial massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which claimed several hundred lives and left the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in smoldering ruins. The department’s investigation determined that the attack was “so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence.” While it conceded that “no avenue of prosecution now exists for these crimes,” the department hailed the findings as the “federal government’s first thorough reckoning with this devastating event,” which “officially acknowledges, illuminates, and preserves for history the horrible ordeals of the massacre’s victims.”

“Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about the race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa,” said Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, in announcing the report. “This report breaks that silence through a rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report reflects our commitment to the pursuit of justice and truth, even in the face of insurmountable obstacles.”

Only two weeks later, the department took a strikingly different action regarding the historical record of a violent riot: It removed from its website the searchable database of all cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol that were prosecuted by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

Summary

Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered the DOJ to investigate private companies for DEI programs, potentially pursuing criminal charges.

Citing the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action, she argues DEI initiatives violate anti-discrimination laws. The directive targets large corporations, nonprofits, and universities, with reports due by March 1.

Legal experts warn this move likely violates First Amendment protections, as courts have upheld employers’ rights to promote diversity.

Civil rights groups are expected to challenge the policy, setting up a major legal battle for the administration.

An unprecedented number of people in the U.S. were infected with bird flu this past year. In this country, a lot of science focused on the virus in dairy cows and in poultry. But researchers say something ominous is happening in wild animals and not just birds. NPR's Gabrielle Emanuel reports

...

EMANUEL: Now, this virus, H5N1, it's been around for decades. It originated in East Asia, infecting poultry and sometimes people. And it did periodically jump over into wild birds. But the virus killed them quickly before they could migrate, so the virus never took off globally. Then about five years ago, the virus changed. Erik Karlsson is the director of the Cambodian National Influenza Center.

ERIK KARLSSON: This new virus seems to be a bit more like dead bird flying, right?

EMANUEL: So a bird gets infected and will likely die eventually, but first...

KARLSSON: They seem to be able to still migrate further, and they contact another group of birds. They fly a little bit further, and that eventually gets all the way across the world.

EMANUEL: It's almost like a relay race. And that's what Michelle Wille has been mapping. She's at the Centre for Pathogen Genomics at the University of Melbourne. She says infected wild birds carried the virus to North America a few years ago, and then South America.

MICHELLE WILLE: So then in South America, it traveled the 6,000-kilometer spine in about six months, OK? So this is a virus. It's not assisted by airplanes. This is a virus that's traveling by mass mortality after mass mortality, after mass mortality, after mass mortality.

EMANUEL: Now, she says, the virus is racing around Antarctica. The problem globally is nobody knows how many wild animals the virus has killed.

WILLE: No one's counting. We have no idea. So it's been like a catastrophe. It is a global catastrophe.

EMANUEL: It's a catastrophe for the animal species and for the ecosystems they're part of. But on top of that, this matters for human health. People can get bird flu. But right now, the virus doesn't spread easily from one person to another. That could change. The estimates are millions of birds have been infected and tens of thousands of marine mammals. And each animal the virus infects, that's another chance for it to evolve.

[Bolding added]

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250206125502/https://www.npr.org/2025/02/05/nx-s1-5285457/bird-flu-is-taking-a-massive-toll-on-wild-animals-researchers-find

Summary

Jeff Bezos’s Earth Fund has ended its funding for the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), a major climate certification group, raising concerns that billionaires are shifting away from climate action under Trump.

While Earth Fund claims the $18M grant expired as planned, critics argue political pressure influenced the decision.

Trump’s administration has cut climate mentions from federal sites and slashed green funding, prompting corporations to retreat from climate commitments.

Experts fear this signals a broader decline in green investment as Trump aggressively rolls back environmental initiatives.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez rejected the settlement at a hearing in Houston, saying the families were asking him to also divide up the assets of Infowars' parent company Free Speech Systems, despite the fact that the company had been dismissed from bankruptcy last year.

"I can't do that," Lopez said. “That case is closed."

Courts in Connecticut and Texas, where some of the families filed their lawsuits, have ruled Jones defamed the families by making repeated false claims that the school shooting, which killed 20 students and six staff members in Newton, Connecticut, was staged as part of a government plot to take guns away from Americans.

Summary

Bill Gates met with Trump and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to advocate for continuing USAID’s foreign aid programs.

The Trump administration has frozen them amid scrutiny from Elon Musk.

Gates praised USAID as the world’s best development agency and warned its dismantling would be difficult to reverse.

While Trump and Wiles’ response was unclear, Gates noted he had not spoken with Musk, who has called USAID a "criminal organization" and pushed for deep federal workforce cuts.

Summary

The American Accountability Foundation, funded by the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, has created blacklists targeting federal workers it deems "woke" and untrustworthy.

These lists, which include many people of color in government roles tied to diversity initiatives, aim to pressure the Trump administration to fire them.

Critics, including federal unions, call the effort an intimidation tactic.

While Trump distanced himself from Project 2025, his administration has hired key figures from it.

In 2016, a 12-year-old named Taylor Cadle reported to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, in central Florida, that she had been raped by her adoptive father. The detective investigating the case didn’t believe her, and Taylor was charged with filing a false police report, a first-degree misdemeanor. As part of the terms of her probation, she was required to write an apology letter to her adoptive father. Soon after, he abused Taylor again—and this time, Taylor took photos and video of the incident on her phone. Taylor’s evidence led to her adoptive father ultimately getting sentenced to 17 years in prison.

But, as Rachel de Leon and I detailed in an investigation last fall, the fallout from the case was minimal: Sheriff Grady Judd, a charismatic, tough-on-crime influencer with more than 780,000 TikTok followers, never apologized to Taylor or acknowledged the case publicly—despite his often-repeated phrase, “If you mess up, then dress up, fess up, and fix it up.” When we published our piece, the detective investigating the case, Melissa Turnage, was still on track to become sergeant. (After the story came out, she was required to complete a weeklong online course on interrogation techniques.)

The Center for Investigative Reporting’s story, which aired on PBS NewsHour and published in Mother Jones, led commenters to flood the sheriff’s office’s TikTok and Instagram pages with comments demanding justice for Taylor. But soon after being posted, many of those comments mysteriously disappeared from view, prompting more anger.

Screenshots from TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram appear to show the sheriff’s office has been routinely filtering out comments criticizing its handling of the case. Recently deleted comments suggest that it is automatically removing comments that include the word “Taylor” from public view.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250206124703/https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2025/02/taylor-cadle-grady-judd-polk-county-sheriff-florida-rape/

Summary

Former National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member Gwynne Wilcox sued Trump and NLRB Chair Marvin Kaplan over her dismissal, calling it an "unprecedented and illegal" attack on the agency’s independence.

Wilcox argues her firing violates the National Labor Relations Act, as Trump did not cite required grounds like neglect of duty.

Her removal left the board without a quorum, effectively halting major decisions.

Legal experts and former NLRB chairs condemned the move as a political attempt to weaken labor rights and undermine the rule of law.

In a filing submitted to the agency this week, attorneys for Whole Foods Market argued the union involved with the election, held last week at a store in Philadelphia, interfered in the process by promising employees a 30% wage increase if they unionized and providing free transportation to them the day of the vote.

The company also accused The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union – which worked to unionize workers through a local chapter – of intimidating employees who supported Whole Foods. The company did not provide specific details on its allegations, which the union disputes.

Pro-union workers prevailed last week after 130 employees in the store – or about 57% of the ballots cast – voted in favor of organizing. The election results still need be certified by a regional director of the NLRB, which Whole Foods says can’t lawfully be done since the agency currently does not have a third board member in Washington. Gynne A. Wilcox, one of the agency’s board members, was fired last week by the Trump administration.

Archived at https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/04/elon-musk-government-legal-doge/

EU monitor says global temperatures were 1.75C above preindustrial levels, extending run of unprecedented highs

Climate scientists had expected this exceptional spell to subside after a warming El Niño event peaked in January 2024 and conditions shifted to an opposing, cooling La Niña phase. But the heat has lingered at record or near-record levels, prompting debate about what other factors could be driving it to the top end of expectations.

Summary

The Panama Canal Authority denied U.S. claims that American government vessels can transit the canal for free, contradicting a State Department announcement.

The dispute follows Trump’s pressure on Panama to grant concessions, citing U.S. defense of the waterway and concerns over Chinese investments.

While Panama rejected Trump’s allegations of Chinese control, it withdrew from China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Trump has hinted at possible military action to seize the canal, and further U.S.-Panama talks are scheduled amid ongoing tensions over control and access.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250206124222/https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/02/05/police-body-cam-cleveland-cuyahoga-sheriff

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250205223944/https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/2/4/live-israel-netanyahu-to-meet-trump-in-washington-gaza-ceasefire?update=3491628

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250206124546/https://www.texastribune.org/2025/02/04/texas-immigrant-legal-aid-federal-program-department-justice/