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Mother Jones •

Montana Republicans say no to prosecuting parents for trans care

Five days after President Donald Trump declared “gender ideology” to be “one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse,” Montana’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives killed a bill that would have enshrined much the same idea into state law by criminalizing parents and medical providers.

Montana Senate Bill 164 would have made it a felony for any adult to help transgender children under 16 to gain access to gender-affirming medical care—including hormones, puberty blockers, and surg...
Mother Jones •

While fallen soldiers returned home, Trump hit the golf course

President Trump’s absence at the dignified transfer of four US servicemen who died during a training exercise in Lithuania is being noticed. While thousands gathered in Lithuania—including the Lithuanian president—to send the soldiers off, our commander in chief was busy (as he has been for over a quarter of his second presidency) playing in his Saudi-backed golf tournament at Mar-a-Lago.

This is not the first time that Trump has missed a dignified transfer—he only attended four out of 96 durin...
Mother Jones •

"We're going to do whatever it takes to keep her safe"

On Susan’s birthday five years ago, her 10-year-old slid a note under her door. Today, she can recite it from memory: “Hey Mom, I wanted to ask, when you talk about me in the future, if you could use he/him or they/them pronouns because she/her pronouns make me really uncomfortable.” Then, “Happy Birthday.”


Susan, the mother of two kids in Connecticut, remembers letting out a deep breath. She had been deeply worried about Kai, her youngest, who had been severely depressed and struggling with...
Mother Jones •

Storm deaths mount, exacerbated by DOGE and Trump cuts

On Friday and Saturday, a mega-storm system hit the Midwestern and southern United States with a devastating combination of tornadoes, wildfires, high-speed winds, flooding, dust storms, and blizzard-like conditions.

Winds in Texas and New Mexico approached 100 miles per hour. Eighteen-wheeler trucks were knocked over. Dozens or hundreds of houses were leveled from Texas to Indiana. There are still more than 300,000 power outages affecting over 170 million households, per USA Today‘s grid track...
Mother Jones •

Tesla's hometown has a message for Elon Musk

Across the nation, citizens have been protesting unelected budget-cut overlord Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency”—in part at Tesla auto dealerships, where, this weekend, Musk’s former neighbors in Palo Alto took a stand.

The Bay Area city was home to Musk and his electric vehicle empire for more than a decade. Both have since relocated to Texas, where Musk can draw even bigger paychecks, create his own SpaceX company town, and launch rockets over the Gulf-that-shall-not-be-...
Mother Jones •

Democrats are furious with Chuck Schumer

In the wake of votes by a handful of key Democrats, led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, to pass a GOP-led continuing resolution funding federal operations through the end of September, fissures have expanded within the Democratic Party on how best to counter Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s ongoing assault on government agencies.

The resolution, which cuts non-defense spending by $13 billion and increases defense spending by approximately $6 billion, includes—among other steep cuts—a 57 pe...
Mother Jones •

Department of Veterans Affairs ends trans and intersex care directives

On Monday, citing Donald Trump’s “Defending Women” executive order, the federal Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it would “phase out treatment for gender dysphoria” by discontinuing hormone replacement therapy for patients not already in treatment.

The agency provides health care and benefits for about nine million veterans, tens of thousands of whom—by the VA’s estimate—identify as trans. Its press release says that the agency’s LGBTQ+ veteran care coordinators, who run its LGBTQ...
Mother Jones •

"The opposite of efficiency": DOGE's credit card crackdown is making research slower, harder, and worse

An employee at one government-run national research lab spent half a day this week cancelling orders for equipment—time that, as a technician, he could have spent running experiments.

That worker is one of many whose “PCard,” or purchasing card, will be revoked at the end of the month—part of an internal order by the Department of Energy to reduce the number of such cardholders across the system by two-thirds. Effectively an official credit or debit card, PCards are used by the national laborat...
News Is Out •

5 things a trans scientist wants you to know about AI

Transgender people were no strangers to the heyday of the internet experimenting with AI text to image generation during primarily 2022 and 2023. Trans writers shared about the potential promise of the technology for producing affirming portraits. The same models, however, researchers found also produced stereotypes and over-sexualization of their depictions of transgender people. Since then, AI use has exploded—as have examples of how it fails the LGBTQ+ community. Generative AI has repeatedly...
Mother Jones •

Meet the Mayor of GreenSky

Ketan Joshi did not mean to become the manager of all things climate on Bluesky, the fast-growing social media platform that’s trying to compete directly with Twitter.

The 39-year-old Australian expat who now lives in Oslo, Norway has spent his career writing about green energy as a communications specialist for renewable energy companies and author of Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil-Free Future, but found it especially hard to share climate information on platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Tho...
Mother Jones •

One week in, the Los Angeles fires are still spreading

It has been a week since Los Angeles’ devastating wildfires began, driven by powerful winds that have made the blazes highly difficult to fight.

More than 40,000 acres have already burned, with at least 24 deaths; by comparison, the entirety of Washington, DC, is 43,000 acres. More than 12,300 structures have been destroyed, and at least 90,000 people are without power. Disinformation is skyrocketing as influencers peddle questionable products, right-wing commentators blame the devastation on ‘...
Mother Jones •

New wildfires are breaking out in Los Angeles

It’s been two weeks since the outbreak of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires that have burned more than 40,000 acres and killed at least 28 people.

While significant progress has been made in containing the Palisades and Eaton fires, the two most destructive wildfires to ever hit LA—72 and 95 percent contained, respectively, compared to 17 and 35 percent a week ago, with far less damage since—there has been little time to celebrate the win. On January 22, two other fires around Los Angeles t...
Mother Jones •

"Pure ignorance": Veterans slam Trump's trans military ban

Donald Trump has signed an executive order targeting transgender members of the armed services.

In 2017, President Trump banned transgender Americans from the military, though with an exception for those already serving. His new order, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” goes much further—it bans all transgender service members, stating that the “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and...
Mother Jones •

“Dystopian”: Trump issues new order to stamp out trans youth healthcare

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order attempting to sharply curtail access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, up to and including 18-year-olds.

The executive order does not impose an immediate ban on gender-affirming care. Instead, it directs federal agencies to begin taking steps to end gender-affirming treatments for children. By defining “children” as individuals under the age of 19—including 18-year-olds, who exceed the age of majority—the order goes furt...
Mother Jones •

For scientists studying environmental health, Trump's diktats are a slow-moving disaster

Gabriel Filippelli opened up his email inbox on Monday to encounter some unexpected news: a notice that his $300,000 grant from the State Department was no more.

Filippelli is the Chancellor’s Professor of Earth Sciences and executive director of the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University. Previously a senior science advisor to the State Department, he has dedicated his career to understanding and improving environmental health. “I work on issues related to pollution and air q...
Mother Jones •

The hidden history of trans health care

As of Saturday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website has scrubbed all mention of LGBTQ folks. The State Department has removed the “TQ” in LGBTQ from its guidance page for LGBTQ international travelers. The White House removed pages honoring Nex Benedict and Matthew Shepard. The CDC also issued an order to rescind and rewrite unpublished research papers by their scientists that include the word “transgender.” (Not to mention curtailing information on climate and vaccines.)

The...
Mother Jones •

Can the rule of law save the IRA?

In 2022, President Biden and Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, securing over $370 billion for climate infrastructure. According to an oversight report from June 2024, only 12 percent—or $4.4 billion—of the funding had been spent. Biden rushed to “Trump-proof” another $96.7 billion in his last days of office by signing between the government and recipients.

But that preparation may have not been successful.

On day one, Trump countered with an executive order that includes halting fed...
Mother Jones •

“Beyond terrifying”: What it is like being the parent of a trans child with Trump in office

Five years ago Minna Zelch and her then-15-year-old daughter, a transgender student, were elated when the state of Ohio granted her permission to play on her high school softball team. Just weeks later, legislation banning transgender athletes from participating in school sports was introduced in the statehouse. As the only transgender athlete who fit this category, Zelch says, her daughter overnight, “became the face of trans athletes in Ohio.” Now a 20-year-old college student out of state, he...
Mother Jones •

"I am not leaving my patients": What it's like to treat trans kids under Trump

On January 28, President Donald Trump signed an executive order attempting to sharply curtail access to gender-affirming care for transgender minors and 18-year-olds. The order has been decried and challenged by the ACLU and three Democratic state attorneys general; 15 others released a statement opposing Trump’s order. But even with the legality and ethics of the order in question, some hospitals are choosing to comply in advance.

Alex T. Dworak, a family medicine physician in Omaha, Nebraska,...
Mother Jones •

The dire consequences of science without DEI

Early medical care during pregnancy can prevent complications, and lead to healthier babies and parents-to-be. In 2022, Evangeline Warren, a sociology PhD student at Ohio State University, received a “diversity supplement” grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study medical mistrust among pregnant people. Over two years, she interviewed dozens of patients across Ohio who’d expressed discomfort about going to the doctor—gathering information which, she hopes, will improve medical...
Mother Jones •

America will pay dearly for the NIH’s mindless war on wokeness and DEI

One Sunday in January, biologist Mark Peifer, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s medical school, got a call from campus police. Rising temperatures in a malfunctioning cold room at his lab had tripped an alarm. Materials he needed for his work—which has furthered the understanding and treatment of colorectal cancer—were in danger of being compromised.

He was able to get the cold room repaired that same day, and had the funding to do so, so the disruption was minimized. But now Pe...
Mother Jones •

Wildfires have engulfed Los Angeles

At least 10 people have been confirmed dead as wildfires continue to torch through Los Angeles County in the region’s most destructive fires in history. Officials warn that strong winds will persist into Thursday, further hampering ongoing firefighting efforts.

As of this writing, 180,000 people are under mandatory evacuation orders. Thousands of structures and entire neighborhoods have been destroyed. While fire officials are still investigating the causes, the fires have undeniably been fuele...
Quanta Magazine •

The Physicist Decoding the Nonbinary Nature of the Subatomic World | Quanta Magazine

Many discoveries in physics flow from theory to experiment. Albert Einstein theorized that mass bends the fabric of space-time, and then Arthur Eddington observed the effects of this bending during a solar eclipse. Likewise, Peter Higgs first proposed the existence of the Higgs boson; nearly 50 years later, the particle was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider.
Hadronization is different. It’s the process by which elementary particles called quarks and gluons join together to form protons and...
OSU Extension Service •

With focus on community, Open Campus and Juntos create opportunities

CORVALLIS, Ore. — Oregon State University Extension Service operates as a bridge from the university to the community and professional spaces. Historically, that bridge started as a way to support agriculture and natural resources, and that support continues today.

At the same time, as OSU Extension has modernized to serve the broader public, new questions have arisen:

Can Extension help community members seeking higher education or trade schools in other growing industries? How can Extension...
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