Mother Jones

Last Wednesday night, President Donald Trump inserted himself into a Utah GOP primary by endorsing incumbent Rep. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) for Congress. “Celeste has a strong Record of Success, and resounding support from her Community,” he wrote on Truth Social. “SHE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN!”

Maloy’s opponent, however, former state legislator Phil Lyman, has his own MAGA cred. In 2020, Trump pardoned him for an old conviction for illegally riding an ATV on public lands. And in this mostly rural district full of Sagebrush Rebellion supporters, the pardon might be more of a selling point.

“He absolutely could win,” says Bryan Schott, founder of the online news site Utah Political Watch who has been closely tracking the under-the-radar race. “He is a true iconoclast. His supporters are very passionate.”

Back in May 2014, Lyman, then a San Juan County commissioner, organized a protest against the Bureau of Land Management for banning motorized vehicles in Utah’s Recapture Canyon. The canyon had been closed since 2007 to protect prehistoric archeological sites, but just weeks before the protest, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy had led an armed standoff with the BLM after it attempted to impound his cows that were illegally grazing on federal land. The standoff set off a wave of anti-government activism across the West, including in Utah.

During their protest, Lyman and others, including Bundy’s son Ryan, illegally rode ATVs through the fragile canyon, a brazen move that got Lyman prosecuted for riding off-road vehicles on closed roads. A federal jury convicted him of two misdemeanors. He was sentenced to 10 days in jail and three years of probation, and ordered to pay nearly $96,000 in restitution.

The prosecution turned an unrepentant Lyman into something of a local folk hero for facing off with the federal government, which owns 64 percent of the land in Utah. Utah Republicans of all stripes, including then-Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox, tripped over each other to show their support for him. Gov. Gary Herbert even tried to use $100,000 in state tax money to pay for Lyman’s appeal.

When that failed, Republican politicians pledged thousands of dollars of their own money to pay Lyman’s legal fees. “We are proud to support one of our own,” Cox said, after adding $1,000 to a pile of cash collected by lawmakers at a meeting in the state capitol. “Commissioner Lyman is one of the finest individuals I know.”

“We are proud to support one of our own.”

Lyman lost his appeal, but in 2020, after urging from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), Trump pardoned him, suggesting he’d been a victim of selective prosecution. “Mr. Lyman is known to be a man of integrity and character,” White House officials wrote.

In 2018, his notoriety propelled him into the state legislature, where he was a member of the Yellowcake Caucus, a group of conservative legislators from rural counties known for uranium mining. During the extreme drought in 2022, when many state Republicans were taking steps to keep Great Salt Lake from drying up, Lyman organized a meeting at the state Capitol to expose what the caucus considered the real culprit behind the lake’s plight. “Trees are the enemy,” said one of the witnesses, suggesting that trees sucked up too much water. Lyman had been lobbying legislators to devote money to tree-thinning projects rather than forcing alfalfa farmers to conserve.

Then, in 2024, Lyman launched an upstart campaign to run against incumbent Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, who only a few years earlier had been chipping in for Lyman’s legal defense. During the campaign, he took aim at Cox’s signature initiatives: Disagree Better, a program he’d created as head of the National Governors Association to urge people to dial back exactly the sort of polarizing rhetoric Lyman specializes in. It won Cox plaudits nationally, but in Utah, Lyman found “Disagree Better” a rich source of campaign punchlines. At an event I attended in 2024:

Lyman told the crowd that basically, Cox’s initiative is predicated on a lie. The notion that “you either agree with me, or you disagree with me on my terms. And that’s what’s happening right now in this in this state and this election with Governor Cox.” In fact, the whole effort was “a leftist, Marxist tactic to get people to drop their opinions. It’s manipulation to silence them.” He insisted that the whole enterprise might work if people on the other side would tell the truth, “Then maybe,” he said, “we could disagree better.”

Lyman ultimately lost the GOP primary but ran as a write-in candidate in the November general election, which he also lost. Undeterred, he filed challenges and lawsuits against various state officials, trying to prove that Cox had stolen the election. He had some familiarity with this strategy, having been active in the “election integrity” movement kicked off by Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Lyman even appeared at events with My Pillow guy Mike Lindell that promoted fraudulent election conspiracy theories.

Politically, there’s not a whole lot of distance between Lyman’s views and those of his much better-funded opponent, Celeste Maloy, particularly when it comes to federal control of public lands—a hot-button issue in the district. In fact, while Lyman protested in Recapture Canyon with the Bundys in 2014, Maloy is actually related to them. She’s Cliven Bundy’s niece by marriage and cousin of the far-right militant Ammon Bundy, Cliven’s son who staged an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016.

Maloy’s ties to Utah don’t run particularly deep. She grew up in a small town in Nevada but did attend college and law school in Utah. She was first elected in a special election in 2023 to fill the remaining term of retiring Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), for whom she’d worked as an attorney. Stewart backed her campaign, but even then, Maloy barely made it through the three-way primary.

A challenger unsuccessfully sued to get her off the primary ballot, arguing that she was ineligible to run because her voter registration in Utah was inactive before she filed as a candidate, and she hadn’t voted in the state in 2020 or 2022. As a Hill staffer, she’d been living in Virginia, but Maloy had claimed her sister’s address in Cedar City as her permanent residence. She ultimately prevailed and remained on the ballot. But even cousin Ammon endorsed someone else in the race.

When Maloy ran for her first full term in 2024, Trump backed her, as did most of the Utah congressional delegation—except Sen. Mike Lee, who supported one of her opponents. Even with the support of the state’s Republican establishment, she won the GOP primary by just 176 votes—less than one percent and hardly a sign of a deep well of support. This year, she’s had an 8-1 fundraising advantage over Lyman. Yet Maloy barely bested him at the GOP nominating convention in April.

Utah candidates have two paths for getting on a primary ballot. They can collect petition signatures or win enough delegate votes at a state nominating convention. Lyman has been wildly popular with convention delegates, who tend to be more MAGA than other Republicans. When he ran for governor in 2024, convention delegates overwhelmingly voted for him over Cox, whom they booed.

Lyman ultimately lost that primary—but by less than 9 points, which was far closer than anyone expected him to get. (Democrats are such a nonfactor in Utah that the winner of the GOP primary generally wins in November, a problem that prompts many Democrats to register as Republicans so they can influence the process—even a little.) This year, Maloy beat Lyman at the convention, but by a razor-thin margin: 50.9 to 49.09 percent. Both of them advanced to the June 23rd primary.

The 3rd district congressional race may be surprisingly close because the district is new, redrawn this year in response to a court order ending partisan gerrymandering. Maloy had previously represented the 2nd district but switched to run in the new 3rd after redistricting. The 3rd district includes a lot more counties that Lyman won handily in his statewide race against Cox. According to Schott’s math, 60 percent of registered Republicans in the district have never seen Maloy on a ballot, even though this will be her fifth election in three years. If Lyman wins the congressional primary, says Schott, “it’s because people know him.”

There’s little polling in the race. Prediction markets suggest Maloy will crush Lyman. Yet the ultimate results will rest on turnout, and Lyman is “a partisan warrior. She’s a technocrat,” Schott says. “Partisan warriors inspire people to vote.”

Maloy hasn’t made much effort to counter Lyman’s base by reaching out to more moderate voters—and there are some. In this rural, red Utah district, tourism has become a growth industry since President Clinton created the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument 30 years ago over objections from many local officials, who to this day would prefer to see it turned into a coal mine.

Blake Spalding is one of the two founding executive chefs of the award-winning Hell’s Backbone Grill & Farm in Boulder, Utah, and co-owner of Boulder Mountain Lodge next door. Located inside the monument, the operation is one of the largest private employers in Garfield County, which is in Maloy’s district. Spalding says Maloy has never been there. She’s voting for Lyman.

“It’s not like I love Phil Lyman,” she explained. “And he has definitely never eaten in my restaurant.” As a longtime public lands advocate, Spalding is well aware that both Lyman and Maloy are hostile to federal protections for Grand Staircase. But she believes “it’s better not to vote for Trump- endorsed candidates, and Trump endorsed Celeste.”

That said, she’ll be voting for a Democrat in November. “I’m gonna vote for whoever is going to do the best job for the hummingbirds.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Peak Energy announced last week that it has entered a new partnership with General Motors to manufacture sodium-ion batteries for energy storage systems.

The deal marks a pivotal moment for Peak, a startup founded three years ago, and an opportunity for GM to branch out into a battery technology that is largely limited to China.

I spoke last week with Cameron Dales, Peak’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, and I started by asking him how he would explain a sodium-ion battery to a 10-year-old.

“It’s the same raw material that goes into table salt. It’s an abundant element.”

A good place to start, he said, is to understand that the market-leading technology—lithium-ion batteries—gained a foothold in the 1990s because of high energy density. So it has a long track record of success.

“They pack a lot of power into a small package, which is why they’re so great for mobile applications, because you’re carrying this battery around with you in your phone, you’re carrying it around with you in your car, which is a large mobile device,” he said.

But there are downsides. Lithium-ion batteries use rare and expensive materials such as lithium and cobalt, and they are highly flammable.

Sodium-ion is a sister technology, he said. The main difference is that it uses sodium to carry the charge inside the battery, rather than lithium. “It’s the same raw material that goes into table salt,” Dales said. “It’s an abundant element.”

Also, fire risk is much lower.

The main downside is that a sodium-ion battery has lower energy density than a lithium-ion one, so an energy storage project requires a larger battery or batteries to achieve the same capacity.

But what about the cost?

Right now, sodium-ion batteries cost more than lithium-ion because the latter has economies of scale from being the dominant technology and companies have spent decades honing the manufacturing process. But companies such as Peak are confident that sodium-ion batteries will be less expensive, and eventually much less expensive, as the product moves from the fringes of the market to the mainstream.

“Sodium-ion battery technology has advanced rapidly over the past two years, moving from lab-scale validation to early commercial deployment.”

The world’s leading battery-maker, CATL of China, has invested in developing sodium-ion batteries for cars and energy storage, citing cost and safety advantages.

In the United States, Peak is one of about a dozen companies working on the technology. One of its peers, Natron Energy, abruptly closed last year when its funding dried up. It had about 100 employees and operations in California and Michigan.

Peak, which is based in Burlingame, California, in the Bay Area, has about 125 employees. It also has a cell engineering center in Broomfield, Colorado, near Denver. The company demonstrated its technology by completing a 3.1-megawatt-hour sodium-ion battery in the Denver area last year.

Peak was founded in 2023 by Landon Mossberg, the CEO, who came from the battery maker Northvolt and had prior experience at Tesla, and Dales, who previously was at the battery maker Enovix. 

Under the partnership with GM, the automaker will develop sodium-ion batteries in its Michigan battery lab, and Peak will be able to use them in its energy storage systems.

The agreement helps GM build an energy business that includes electric vehicles, charging and stationary energy storage. Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president for battery and sustainability, said in a news release that his company believes “sodium-ion will be a defining chemistry for grid-scale energy storage systems.”

GM is one of several automakers branching out into energy storage systems. One reason for this is that the companies built battery manufacturing capacity that exceeds current EV demand, so they are looking to new markets.

“The ability to store energy is so foundational to so many things we do in the world.”

Based on manufacturing capacity, sodium-ion battery market share is essentially zero in North America, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. It will still be less than 1 percent in 2030, according to the research firm’s forecast.

In China, sodium-ion’s market share is 1 percent and on track to rise to 3.4 percent by 2030.

“Sodium-ion battery technology has advanced rapidly over the past two years, moving from lab-scale validation to early commercial deployment,” said Anya Sidhu, a battery analyst for Benchmark, in an email.

Sidhu said sodium-ion batteries are emerging as a complementary technology to lithium-ion rather than a replacement.

“The partnership between GM and Peak Energy signals growing commercial confidence, particularly for stationary energy storage, where cost and supply chain resilience matter more than energy density,” she said.

Dales said the market is large and diverse enough that several, if not many, battery technologies will be major contributors. For example, analysts and battery scientists have long made the case that solid-state batteries—with a solid instead of a liquid or gel as a key component—are the future because of high energy densities.

“The ability to store energy is so foundational to so many things we do in the world,” he said. “There’s no reason why a single solution should be the thing that works best for every single application.”

This morning, Vice President JD Vance touched down in Switzerland for the first round of talks with Iran. The stated goal: extending last week’s interim mediated ceasefire and the Memorandum of Understanding signed by President Donald Trump into a more permanent peace in the 110-day US-Israeli war on Iran. But as those talks continued, Trump lost no time in taking to social media and Fox News to threaten Iran.

“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump wrote on his platform Truth Social Sunday morning. “Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”

Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP

( TS: Jun 21 2026, 9:30 AM ET )​​​‍​​‌‍​​‌‍​​​​​​​‌‍​​​​​​​​‌‍​​​​​​​​​‌‍… pic.twitter.com/4FYtEyoF8s

— Commentary Donald J. Trump Truth Social Posts On X (@TrumpTruthOnX) June 21, 2026

Lebanon’s civil defense reported that Israeli strikes had killed at least 16 people on Saturday morning, and the country’s health ministry said at least 47 people were killed on Friday. In response, Iran once again closed the Strait of Hormuz shipping pathway, which before the war carried a fifth of the world’s oil and gas, saying the US violated its deal to end the war by allowing Israel to continue to bomb Lebanon.

Meanwhile, in the Bürgenstock resort near Lake Lucerne where the talks are being held, Vance said that “great progress” was being made, without being explicit about the steps that had been taken. He noted that the gathering would “allow us to sit together as teams for the first time in history,” with the goal of turning “over a new leaf to transform our relationship with the people of Iran, and to extend an outstretched hand.” 

Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a lead negotiator, said Iran’s military is prepared to react to Trump’s verbal aggression. “They better be careful with their statements; our armed forces are ready to respond in a different way,” he wrote on X. Iranian officials reportedly walked out of Sunday’s talks, protesting Trump’s threats.

A Washington Post report today reveals the devastating human toll of the war. “Months after the war began with a wave of US and Israeli airstrikes on February 28, the scale of civilian casualties and destruction in Iran remains difficult to measure,” Post reporters Dylan Moriarty and N. Kirkpatrick wrote. 

In a single airstrike, 100 buildings were damaged in one civilian neighborhood in Tehran. Almost a third of the city has been hit by US and Israeli missiles. One report on civilian harm puts the death toll from late February to mid-April at 1,701 civilians, including 307 children. Across both Iran and Lebanon, over 7,000 people have been killed since mid-February, according to official casualty figures. 

In a Sunday morning phone interview with Fox News, Trump expressed some willingness to continue the carnage. “You close it, and you won’t have a country,” he warned. Fox News reporter Trey Yingst said the president told him that he told Iranian officials. “You won’t even make it back to your fucking country,” if they did not open the essential transportation lanes for oil in the Strait of Hormuz.

"You close it and you won't have a country." President Trump said he told Iranian officials about the Strait of Hormuz. "You won't even make it back to your fu*king country."

"We may take over the Strait, if we have to," Trump said. "If they don't make a deal, we'll collect… pic.twitter.com/cErvdjCJmK

— Trey Yingst (@TreyYingst) June 21, 2026

Trump has repeatedly referred to himself as the “Guardian Angel” of this particular body of water. “We may take over the Strait, if we have to,” Trump told Yingst.

Hawks like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are pushing in that same direction. Graham reportedly spent over four hours with the President on Friday, outlining a plan to “take the Strait of Hormuz over by force” even as the clock starts on a 60-day negotiating period. On Face the Nation Sunday, Graham told host Margaret Brennan, “If Iran contests control of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we will obliterate them.” He added, “Let’s try a diplomatic solution. I think it’s going to fail. What happens next?” 

In many countries around the world, it’s Father’s Day, a time to celebrate the contributions of dads. But aside from the inevitable barbeques and dad jokes, what does fatherhood actually look like in June 2026? 

A new report, “State Of The World’s Fathers 2026” from the nonprofit research group Equimundo takes a snapshot of the life of fathers worldwide, and its findings do not suggest that the social role of the father as secondary parent has changed as much as many dads themselves would like. Researchers have found that globally, fathers want to be involved in parenting their children—but economic insecurity and cultural backlash often find them sliding back to the more uninvolved and traditional role of breadwinner.

Its findings paint a picture of parenthood all over the world defined by precarity and sacrifice—regardless of the parent’s gender. But the 5,000 fathers interviewed—in countries as diverse as Brazil, Canada, and Croatia—seem stuck between a rock and a hard place: retrograde cultural values (and a healthy dose of manosphere YouTube influencers) teach men that their greatest value in society and in a family unit lies in being a provider. But economically supporting a family is now more difficult than ever. 

“We see that more fathers, and even more mothers, are reverting to traditional norms about fathers as providers and mothers as carers. This is driven both by financial pressures and systems that do not support equal parenting, and by the anti-equality backlash that is spreading around the world.” 

“We see that more fathers, and even more mothers, are reverting to traditional norms about fathers as providers and mothers as carers,” the Equimundo researchers wrote. “This is driven both by financial pressures and systems that do not support equal parenting, and by the anti-equality backlash that is spreading around the world.” 

In general, the modern dads surveyed said they are more involved in the care work of raising a child than their own fathers were—but they are still far less involved in parenting than mothers. One reason, researchers found, is a lack of infrastructure to explicitly support fathers. Very few countries mandate paid paternal leave, for instance, while many more legally require paid maternal leave. Thanks to the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, employers must provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for the parents of newborns—but the average American father only takes 10 days off, since the US is one of the few countries where there is no requirement for employers to pay for parental leave. Mothers working full-time earn approximately 63 to 74 cents for every dollar paid to fathers, which incentivizes fathers to deprioritize spending time on the grueling tasks of raising a family. As Equimundo researchers note, “Because, in general, men still earn more than women, if leave is not adequately paid, families can often not afford for the man to take leave.” 

That’s not to say that there aren’t some solutions: universal pre-K, universal parental leave, and even the greater provision of parenting resources explicitly geared toward fathers, like parenting classes and support groups. Fewer than half of the fathers Equimundo surveyed even knew such resources exist. And this lack of support can lead to hidden consequences beyond the economic realm —as New York Magazine recently reported, up to one in ten new fathers experiences depression after the birth of their child, but such challenges are rarely taken seriously. 

At a January 2026 March for Life speech, Vice President JD Vance told Americans “you will find great meaning if you dedicate yourself to the creation and sustenance of human life.” Elon Musk, the noted father of at least fourteen, has also urged Americans to “have more children.” But this ascendant pronatalist movement often fails to account for the actual economic constraints parents face. The United States, in particular, boasts some of the highest parental distress levels, the priciest childcare, and the weakest paid leave laws of any peer nation.

In that context, all parents are forced to make daily sacrifices: in the Equimundo survey, nearly a quarter of all fathers worldwide reported overall poor well-being. Over a quarter had refinanced their homes to pay for childcare expenses, and three-quarters took on overtime work to do so. Nearly half took on second or third jobs to make ends meet. Nonetheless, the fathers surveyed consistently said they wanted to spend more time with their families. 

In the US, even under a purportedly family-focused administration, raising a child—becoming a parent—is now harder than ever. A Surgeon General’s report in 2024 classed parental stress, in a country with only a bare-bones safety net, as a public health crisis. Other researchers have joined them in that claim—and have gone even farther. 

“We find ourselves running out of adjectives to convey this level of stress,” the Equimundo researchers wrote. “We’ve called it a crisis, which it is. We’ve called out the indifference of policy makers, workplaces and others, which is still the case. Now we’re tempted to call it the willful neglect and destruction of our humanity.” 

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The oceanic phenomenon known as El Niño, which increases temperatures worldwide, has officially begun, according to US weather forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Meteorologists have warned that this could be the strongest El Niño this century. It is expected to drive extreme weather events around the world, including both severe droughts and heavy rainfall, likely leading to major disruptions in agricultural production and food security. 

El Niño is part of a cyclical, naturally occurring weather pattern that redistributes warm air, surface water temperatures, and moisture across the tropical Pacific Ocean. During El Niño, trade winds that typically blow east-to-west from the Americas to southeast Asia slow down or sometimes reverse. Normally, these winds push warm water along the equator—but during El Niño conditions, that warm water shifts back east. Although El Niño does not follow a specific timeline, it typically occurs every two to seven years. 

Certain policies may ensure there’s “enough food,” but “that’s not going to take care of the people whose livelihoods depend on” agriculture.

Beginning in the summer, El Niño typically peaks around December or the following January. (The pattern was named El Niño—Spanish for little boy—by fishermen in South America who noticed warmer waters around Christmas time, and associated it with the birth of Jesus Christ.) That means the most significant impacts of the cyclical weather phenomenon may not be felt until months from now.

NOAA’s most recent calculations show a high likelihood of a “very strong” El Niño, meaning average surface temperatures in the Pacific jump by more than 2 degrees C. (Some experts are calling this year’s a “super” El Niño, although some agencies, like the World Meteorological Organization, reject this language.)  

Because it impacts a “diverse set of geographies,” said Weston Anderson, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland, “there is no one set of impacts.” El Niño can contribute to severe droughts in one part of the world and heavy rainfall in others—both of which can disrupt growing seasons in key breadbaskets of the world. 

But the ways in which this year’s El Niño will interact with the effects of global warming—and what that means for food security—is something scientists are still actively observing and untangling. “That question is still really important open science,” said Jennifer Burney, a professor at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability whose work focuses on climate and food security. 

History can give us some examples. In 1877, one of the strongest El Niños ever recorded was associated with historic droughts across Asia, as well as in parts of Brazil and northern Africa. These droughts, “along with colonial policies, contributed to famines in many regions which were really devastating,” said Deepti Singh, an associate professor at Washington State University who co-authored a study on this period of global famine. 

The fatalities associated with these famines, upward of 50 million people, said Singh, “are humbling to think about.”

The last El Niño occurred in 2023 and 2024. It was one of the five strongest El Niños ever recorded, according to the World Meteorological Organization, and is considered to have contributed to the historic temperatures in 2024, making it the hottest year on record. 

The exact way that this El Niño will unfurl is yet unknown.

That year came with devastating consequences for growers, especially in arid regions where agricultural producers primarily rely on rainfall to irrigate their crops. Droughts driven by El Niño across southern Africa contributed to increased food insecurity and malnutrition in several countries. 

Burney noted that in some vulnerable regions, local governments may have adaptive strategies in place to grow key crops earlier in the growing season or to increase imports during El Niño years, which can help offset food insecurity. But even in those cases, local farmers who depend on growing and selling crops to support themselves and their families may still experience economic setbacks. In other words, certain policies may ensure there’s “enough food,” but “that’s not going to take care of the people whose livelihoods depend on” agriculture, Burney said. 

This year, El Niño conditions are expected to impact a number of growing areas—another setback for agricultural producers who have faced higher input costs stemming from the Iran war. Although the United States and Iran are potentially set to unveil an agreement to reopen the all-important Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil flows, farmers worldwide have already been impacted by fertilizer shortages and price hikes since the passage closed this spring. 

Weather variability fueled by El Niño will add to growers’ woes. India, where the majority of the world’s rice comes from, is projected to have a weaker monsoon season, which could reduce yields. Drier, hotter conditions could lead to diminished maize production in southern Africa. The southern US states, from California all the way to the eastern seaboard, will experience a wetter year than normal, which could lead to flooding and upend crop production. 

But the exact way that this El Niño will unfurl is yet unknown. As El Niño interacts with the additional warming and moisture currently in our atmosphere caused by climate change, “there is likely to be a change in which regions are likely to be affected” by extreme weather, said Singh. Still, she added, we can expect “the severity, extent, and likelihood” of extreme weather events like droughts “to be higher” in today’s warmer climate.

President Donald Trump is blaming “Vandalism” by “Radical Left Lunatics” for some of the struggles of his beloved Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool remodeling project.

“Just like three days ago, they destroyed the grass outside of the Pool, they’ve also done everything possible to hurt the inside surface that was just installed,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Friday night. “Law Enforcement is actively investigating this situation.”

Just six minutes later, he posted an image of what appears to be a green-haired protester wearing a shirt with the words “TEAM ALGAE,” presumably as evidence of said vandalism.

This appears to be the president’s "proof" that vandals are sabotaging the Refelecting Pool.

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) 2026-06-20T03:00:18.373Z

Although Trump announced the renovation in April—which he initially said would take one week and cost just $2 million—the Reflecting Pool is still not “American flag blue,” as fighting the algae has proved to be a larger task than the administration can handle.

As the Washington Post noted that month, major projects on the National Mall not only typically require congressional authorization, but are subjected to federal reviews. That doesn’t appear to have happened with Trump’s pool makeover.

Indeed, the sequence of events here follows a pattern characteristic of many of the presidents’ projects and policies. While the steps may occur in different orders, they end in the roughly the same place: failure, with regular people paying the price. Let’s take a look at Trump’s destruction playbook:

1. Make the thing in my image and promise perfection

After vowing to clean “Biden filth and incompetence” from the Reflecting Pool last November, he posted on Truth Social in April that although he was warned it could take years to make it “much more beautiful,” it would in fact only “take a fraction of that time, at a fraction of the cost.”

2. Declare success, despite overspending

The Trump administration said it finished the renovation on June 4 and it would fill the pool with water within days. According to a summary of the Department of Interior’s contract with Atlantic Industrial Coatings reviewed by CNN, the price ballooned up to $14.7 million, despite promises it would cost a seventh that figure.

3. Sprinkle some inside dealing

According to a Thursday report by the New York Times, a company with connections to a longtime Trump supporter was handed a no-bid contract worth $1.7 million to install a new water purification system. A larger $14.7 million-contract to put blue waterproofing material on the Reflecting Pool’s floor also had no other bidders.

4. Trouble emerges

CNN reported on Thursday that blue material on the bottom is starting to peel off. Also, the algae is back.

5. Blame the left

Ludicrous claims of sabotage? With Trump’s Friday night post, it looks like we’re at this step right now.

6. Forget it

Trump has publicly downplayed previous failed projects, dating back to his US-Mexico border wall through, most recently, his Kennedy Center takeover.

Last month, after a federal judge ruled his name be removed from the performing arts institution, Trump said he had “no interest” in continuing his remodeling project there. “Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else,” he posted, “we are going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them.”

As nature clearly outpaces efforts to clean the pool, keep your eyes peeled for this one.

On Saturday, Iran’s military announced it had closed shipping along the Strait of Hormuz, saying the US violated its deal to end the war by allowing Israel to continue to bomb Lebanon. Iran had just signed on to a preliminary agreement with the US to reopen the strait and allow for safe passage of commercial vessels for 60 days.

Lebanon’s state media and civil defense officials reported that Israeli strikes killed at least 16 people on Saturday morning, and the country’s health ministry said at least 47 people were killed on Friday. The Israel Defense Forces stated on Friday that four of its soldiers were killed in Lebanon. It also claimed its airstrikes hit 80 targets connected to the militant group Hezbollah, killing “dozens” of its members. 

This isn’t the best start. 

Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon on Friday after the fighting looked like it would break up talks between the US and Iran in Switzerland. Earlier in the day, Iranian officials declined to meet with US negotiators, citing the fighting in Lebanon. JD Vance, on who Trump and Republicans have pushed responsibility for the negotiations, also postponed a trip to Switzerland.

As I wrote on Wednesday, the first point in the US-Iran deal released this week requires Iran, the US, and all of their allies to immediately end all military operations, with the text explicitly including a close to bombing in Lebanon. But Israel did not agree to the deal, after repeatedly stating it will continue attacking southern Lebanon. Trump has recently criticized Israel for its military campaign in Lebanon, noting that it could dismantle his announced deal.

Before Israel and the United States launched their current war, roughly 20 percent of global crude oil and natural gas transited through the strait. Closing the passage has led to massive increases in petroleum prices. 

This week, the Trump administration said it would commit to finalizing an agreement to end the war in 60 days. Getting Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz again isn’t the best start. 

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Hidden underground around the world lie 110 quadrillion kilometers of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks—webs of ultrathin threads that, if connected in a single line, would stretch almost a billion times the distance between the Earth and the sun, according to new research published in Science on June 11. 

These fungal communities form intimate relationships with the roots of plants, which they provide with nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon, 1 billion tons of which the networks sequester underground annually, previous research has found. If the fungal network wasn’t storing it, that carbon would be warming the atmosphere.

But those networks have never been mapped globally until now. The new study led by Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), an organization founded to map mycorrhizal fungi networks, used a combination of literature review, soil samples from around the globe, machine learning, and laboratory testing to estimate the distribution and mass of these systems and map where they are densest. 

“This is the moment where we went from knowing that this system exists to really knowing where it is, how dense it is and where it’s been,” said Toby Kiers, executive director and co-founder of SPUN and a co-author of the study.

“You’re getting a win-win. The plants are growing better, and carbon’s being drawn down. ”

For decades, researchers have known arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi form intimate symbiotic relationships with roughly 80 percent of the globe’s plant species and are found nearly everywhere plants are. But the extent of those networks and where they are densest, such as grasslands, and where they are being lost, like in agricultural areas, hasn’t been well understood until now.

“[The study] helps us come to grips with how important these below ground organisms can be to everything that we see above ground,” said James Bever, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas who studies the interactions between plants and microbes like fungi in soils but was not involved in the new study. 

Justin Stewart, an evolutionary ecologist at SPUN and lead author of the study, said previous studies the team had done on biodiversity of fungi were similar to asking someone to describe the forest outside their home.  

“They could say, ‘Well, there are three tree species in it.’ That’s great. That tells me about the biodiversity,” he said. “But you don’t actually know how big the forest is, how far apart the trees are. You don’t have information on its structure.”

Mycorrhizal fungal networks are made up of hyphae, each smaller than a strand of human hair. These living pipes transport the nutrients and carbon between the plants and fungi.

Because they are so long and thin, Stewart said, they can reach deeper into soils than roots, getting nutrients deep underground that plants can’t reach, while simultaneously storing carbon where it can stay put for a long time under the right conditions. 

“You’re getting a win-win,” Stewart said. “The plants are growing better, and carbon’s being drawn down. That all depends on having dense fungal networks and soils that are active and alive.”

Quantifying these fungal networks started with a review of existing studies on mycorrhizal fungi. Those studies contained 16,000 core samples taken from ecosystems around the world to understand the length of the fungal threads in a volume of soil. Each sample was geolocated, and from there the team was able to use machine learning to create predictive maps of fungal networks globally, and identify where the model is performing well and where uncertainties show more data is needed.

Working with AMOLF, a research institute in Amsterdam, they developed a technique using a robot with a camera that recorded fungal networks growing over time in a lab, to get better estimates of their widths. From there, the team was able to calculate the network’s mass, which amounted to about five times the weight of all humans on Earth.

The study only covers living arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks, Stewart said, and doesn’t include dead fungal networks, which also help to store carbon and add to the total biomass and influence of the networks on ecosystems. Research into dead fungal networks is still being explored.

Ninety percent of fungal communities across the globe are unprotected.

The study also found where these networks are most threatened. Fungal network densities across croplands are about half of what they are in wild ecosystems. Meanwhile, wild grassland ecosystems hold about 40 percent of the world’s arbuscular mycorrhizal biomass. Yet those grasslands are among Earth’s least protected ecosystems, and they are converted into farmland at four times the rate of forests, posing a potential threat to these networks and the benefits they bring to plant life and carbon storage. 

Previous research from SPUN has found 90 percent of fungal communities across the globe are unprotected, and many ecosystems, like the deserts of the American Southwest, are understudied.

What exactly is driving mycorrhizal fungi losses, and the consequences of that decline, need to be explored next, the researchers said, which is why the SPUN team will be at this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference—COP31—to present to policymakers about the importance of the networks and the role they could play in protecting ecosystems and sequestering carbon. 

Understanding mycorrhizal fungi more deeply at the ground level is key, said Corentin Bisot, an AMOLF biophysicist and co-author of the study.

“We’re still far from completely understanding how, if you have a grassland next door, and you want to [increase] microbes and fungi there,” Bisot said. “We don’t have the toolbox for you to do it.” 

This study, Stewart said, is just the first map. And like the first maps the Spaniards drew of California—which presented the state as an island, he said, there will be new discoveries about the density of fungi networks around the globe to grow the public’s understanding of them.

The World Cup is here. 

For the first time, the tournament is happening in three countries at once: the United States, Mexico, and Canada. It’s bigger than ever, with more teams, more games, more viewers, and more money on the line.

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This special World Cup episode of Reveal looks beyond the spectacle of the beautiful game to the organization behind it: FIFA. The global soccer body stands to take in billions from the tournament, while fans face soaring ticket prices and host cities pay massive sums for transportation, security, and infrastructure.  

“Sport is this incredible glue that brings people together,” human rights advocate Mustafa Qadri tells Reveal. But he says that also makes it “highly vulnerable to cynical people coming in and exploiting it for their own gain.”  

This week, reporters Alex Shephard, Tim Murphy of Mother Jones, and Reveal producer Artis Curiskis follow the money, power, and politics behind the World Cup—and ask who gets to be part of the world’s biggest game.