Climate Cabinet supports candidates in state and city races as the federal government ignores the climate crisis

With a president who has called climate change a “hoax”, refused to send a delegation to international climate talks, and packed the federal government with former fossil fuel industry employees, this can feel like a dark moment for climate action in the US. But shifting one’s focus to local and state law makes for a very different outlook.

Analysts have estimated that 75% of the commitments that the US made at the Paris climate agreement – which Donald Trump pulled the nation out of as soon as he took office – can be reached entirely without federal support.

Bombs were placed near both Republican and Democratic party HQs in Washington DC the night before US Capitol attack

US authorities have made an arrest in connection with pipe bombs that were planted outside the headquarters of both the Democratic and Republican parties in Washington DC on the eve of 6 January 2021, according to reports on Thursday morning.

Explosive devices were placed at night and then, on the afternoon of 6 January, the US Capitol attack occurred, when a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters stormed Congress in an effort to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election.

Any Lucia López Belloza, 19, was detained at Boston airport while on the way to see family in Austin for a surprise trip

Any Lucia López Belloza had not seen her parents and two little sisters since starting her first semester at Babson College, near Boston in August. A family friend gave her plane tickets so she could fly home to Austin and surprise them for Thanksgiving.

The 19-year-old business student was already at the boarding gate at Boston airport when she was told there was an “error” with her boarding pass; when she reached customer service, she was handcuffed and arrested by what she believed were two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

Touted as a cure for everything from wrinkles to autism, the treatment has been hyped by Robert F Kennedy Jr and various celebrities. Experts say it needs to be regulated

• Warning: this article contains distressing content

It was the kind of cold, damp morning that makes it hard to get out of bed, much less get a child out the door. The sun had not even risen when five-year-old Thomas Cooper and his mother, Annie Cooper, arrived for an appointment on 31 January at the Oxford Center in Troy, a northern suburb of Detroit, Michigan.

Thomas was an exuberant child with a button nose and pinchable cheeks – a little kid who loved running fast, playing Minecraft and watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, according to a GoFundMe set up by his family. He had just received money in a special red envelope for lunar new year, and he planned to spend it later that day with his little brother. But first, he was going to receive hyperbaric oxygen therapy for his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and sleep apnea.

NYT accuses Pentagon of infringing on the constitutional rights of its journalists

A new Emerson College Polling/Inside California Politics survey takes a look into the crowded race for California governorship, in which more than 95 candidates have so far submitted paperwork indicating their intention to run.

The poll found that Republican Chad Bianco, Republican Steve Hilton, Democrat Eric Swalwell (12%) and Democrat Katie Porter are currently leading the June 2026 primary. Of those polled, 13% said they were voting for Bianco, 12% for Hilton, 12% for Swalwell and 11% for Porter. In all, 31% of voters are undecided.

President orders pause on asylum claims and extra scrutiny of migrants from 19 countries after Washington shooting

Donald Trump is seizing on the shooting of two national guard members, allegedly by an Afghan man, to press his immigration crackdown still farther. In the aftermath of the attack, which left guard member Sarah Beckstrom dead and colleague Andrew Wolfe in critical condition, Trump directed US Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause all pending asylum applications.

USCIS followed up that announcement with more seismic shifts to immigration policy. This is how the White House is reshaping the process for requesting asylum, green cards and citizenship.

Pentagon’s Law of War manual clearly prohibits attack, but justification for whole campaign also faces tough questions

Graphic depictions of two survivors being killed by a second US military strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug ferrying boat have provoked outrage where previously there was none – or at least relatively little.

A firestorm of controversy has greeted a recent Washington Post report which suggested that a deadly attack on a vessel carrying 11 people in the Caribbean was followed with a second assault after the initial strike failed to kill everybody onboard.

Co-founders’ acquisition of Venture Global shares before key permit granted draws scrutiny as pair deny wrongdoing

Two fossil-fuel billionaires with close ties to Donald Trump bought millions of shares in the company they co-founded just days after a meeting with senior White House officials, who then issued a key regulatory permit that helped expand the company’s fortunes in Europe.

Robert Pender, an energy lawyer, and Michael Sabel, a former investment banker, are the founders and co-chairs of Venture Global, a Virginia-based company that develops and operates liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals.

Study reveals US earmarked billions to stockpile critical minerals for military use, including precision-guided weaponry and AI-driven warfare

The accelerating global arms race is hindering climate action as critical minerals that are key to a sustainable future are being diverted to make the latest military hardware, according to a report

The study from the Transition Security Project – a joint US and UK venture – reveals how the Pentagon is stockpiling huge stores of critical minerals that are needed for a range of climate technologies including solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and battery storage.

Once home to gold and prospectors, the Nevada desert is now the site of a new kind of expansion: tech datacenters

Driving down the interstate through the dry Nevada desert, there are few signs that a vast expanse of new construction is hiding behind the sagebrush-covered hills. But, just beyond a massive power plant and transmission towers that march up into the dusty brown mountains, lies one of the world’s biggest buildouts of data centers – miles of new concrete buildings that house millions of computer servers.

This business park, called the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, has a sprawling landmass greater than the city of Denver. It is home to the largest data center in the US, built by the company Switch, and tech giants like Google and Microsoft have also bought land here and are constructing enormous facilities. A separate Apple data center complex is just down the road. Tesla’s gigafactory, which builds electric vehicle batteries, is a resident too.

Vinay Prasad memo said at least 10 children had died from Covid vaccination – but offered scant evidence for claim

America’s top vaccines official promised, in a long and argumentative memo to staff on Friday, to revamp vaccine regulation after claiming that at least 10 children died from Covid vaccination – but he offered no evidence for that allegation and scant details on the new approach.

The top-down changes, without input from outside advisers or publication of data, worries experts who fear vaccines such as the flu shot may quickly disappear and that public trust will take a major hit.

Calls for disenfranchisement rest on a single assumption: that women’s citizenship is partial and conditional

Sexism can be very modern and tech savvy. Misogyny is an ever-evolving idiom, and men and women alike have found particularly of-the-moment ways to operate within the genre. Think of the apps that take images of women and remove their clothes, or the AI bots that men and boys can use to generate pornography or depictions of graphic violence against women and girls for the crime of going to the same school as they do or running for office. Think of the influencers of the so-called “womanosphere” who tell their female audiences that women who seek out friendship or equality with men are morons or cows, all through the gleam of a TikTok filter. Sexism may be the world’s oldest prejudice and its first unjust hierarchy, but it is continually innovating, adapting to new technologies and the most recent rhetorical needs of male supremacy.

But some of the forms of misogyny that have been bubbling up in American political discourse lately can seem a bit retro. I don’t just mean the tradwives, who dress alternately like June Cleaver or like Ma Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie – evoking bygone eras, or at least the ways those eras are depicted on television. And I don’t just mean the pro-natalists, either, who don weird bonnets and propose national breeding medals for prolific mothers. Since last month’s massive election victories for Democrats, some on the right have looked to revive a form of sexism that has been out of fashion for more than one hundred years: the idea that women should not have a right to vote.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist