Cuba has been under a U.S. trade embargo since the Eisenhower administration, although it was President John F. Kennedy who implemented a comprehensive embargo on all trade with Cuba. And while every subsequent administration has tried since to cause pain and suffering to the Cuban people for its support of a revolutionary government, it is [...]
Israel disciplines its supporters who still fantasize about a liberal Jewish State; the government invests directly into settler violence; and how the threat of a boycott killed an annexation bill.
We continue to follow the impact of the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on scientific research in the United States with an update from climate scientist Peter Kalmus, who says he has been forced to resign from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) after 15 years at his “dream job.” In an immense loss to the government’s capacity to monitor and assess atmospheric conditions, the JPL has lost about 30% of its staff since President Trump took office for the second time, says Kalmus, who warns that the dismantling of federally funded scientific infrastructure comes as rising global temperatures put the Earth in “extreme danger.” “We’re on this escalator towards warmer and warmer and warmer temperatures, and world leaders are not doing anything about it.”
We’re joined by ocean policy expert David Helvarg to discuss the Trump administration’s dismantling of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, the “cutting-edge eyes [and] ears” of the ocean. The program’s closure, proposed in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook for Trump’s second administration, involves the decommissioning of a vast network of ocean floor sensors that collect data on marine ecosystems, ocean currents and global climate data, protecting the world’s oceans and providing critical information about extreme weather. In their place is the increasingly unregulated expansion of resource extraction driven by the fossil fuel industry, “essentially developing the ocean for offshore oil drilling and mining — basically, as a gas station and a garbage dump.”
Helvarg, the author of Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp, also discusses “the world’s other forest crisis”: the loss of over half of kelp forests to warming ocean temperatures, throwing coastal ecosystems deeply out of balance. “We have an ocean,” adds Helvarg. “It’s full of life. It’s at risk. And we need to better understand the other 71% of our blue marble planet to protect it — and not to let a few individuals and corporations destroy it.”
After the downing of an Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz, the United States and Iran have begun trading missile and drone strikes in the most serious escalation of hostilities since the April ceasefire agreement. President Trump posted on social media Wednesday morning that Iran has taken “too long to negotiate a deal” and would now have to “pay the price!!!” For more, we speak to Mohammad Eslami at Tehran University, who says Trump’s “lies and broken promises” have shattered Iranians’ trust in a diplomatic solution. “Every night, there are lots of peoples chanting all around the street against Trump. And also, … unfortunately, many of them are chanting against negotiation with Donald Trump,” he says. “Right now they are asking the Iranian [forces] to retaliate.”