2026-03-31 01:24:27
“One woman became so sick from eating the food that she began vomiting blood.”
“My kids are terrified; we are all depressed.”
“I always ask my children for forgiveness for making them suffer through all of this.”
Though the number of families inside Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas has dropped dramatically in recent months, for dozens of children still inside, such brutal conditions remain. Now, at the risk of their stories fading to the background of the Trump administration’s cascading crises, Ms. Rachel, the beloved children’s educator, is calling on the public to fight for their release.
“We have to hold on to hope for families who are locked in Dilley and keep going,” Ms. Rachel, whose real name is Rachel Griffin Accurso, told Mother Jones. “I do believe the public outcries and the people who have come together and worked on this long before I have are making a huge difference.”
“I do believe the public outcries and the people who have come together and worked on this long before I have are making a huge difference.”
It’s difficult to overstate Accurso’s influence, both among young children and their parents, many of whom see her as today’s Mister Rogers. Dilley is the new focus of Accurso’s social media presence, where in recent weeks, she has highlighted the story of Deiver Henao Jimenez, a 9-year-old boy who has been detained with his family, asylum-seekers from Colombia, since early March after a routine immigration appointment in New Mexico.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Deiver told Accurso in a Zoom call she posted to Instagram. He repeatedly described how much he wanted to “go to the spelling bee.”
“It was devastating to hear him talk about just wanting to attend his spelling bee,” Accurso said. “I never thought I’d be on a call with a 9-year-old who was begging me for help to get out of a prison-like detention center. It was devastating and surreal.”
In a surprise move days later, Deiver and his family were released. So, too, was Gael, a 5-year-old nonverbal boy whom Accurso met over video and similarly spotlighted on her Instagram.
“When we started talking about Dilley, Deiver and his mom held each other and started crying…They are an amazing family, and I’m honored to know them.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about what led to their releases. But coming within days of being featured on Accurso’s Instagram, which has over 5 million followers, it’s hard not to connect what had happened with the power of her advocacy.
“I FaceTimed Deiver on Friday, and I saw a smile that was not present in Dilley,” Accurso said after the boy’s release. “He had just come home from his first day back at school with a huge card the school community had made for him. They missed him so much.”
Accurso reflected on the intensity of the experience of their conversation. “When we started talking about Dilley,” she recalled, “Deiver and his mom held each other and started crying. We know that trauma can have lasting effects on children in immigration centers. They worry and care so much for other families still at Dilley. They are an amazing family, and I’m honored to know them.”
The attention on ICE is a new political focus for Accurso, but it is not the only one. Over the past year, she has used her platform over the past year to call attention to the war in Gaza, where UNICEF reports 64,000 children have either been killed or seriously injured. Some parents have viewed such outspoken advocacy as inappropriate for a children’s educator; last year, the group StopAntisemitism wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding an investigation into whether Accurso had ties to Hamas. But Accurso sees her advocacy as a natural, if not crucial, extension of the same message she imbues her educational videos on YouTube and Netflix: All children deserve to be seen for their humanity.
I asked Accurso about the disconnect she sees between critics of ICE’s detention of children and those who support such a policy.
“I think it’s really important to think of each child in this position as we think of our own children if we are parents, or a child we love, or even ourselves as a child,” she said. “Christianity and the other religions call us to practice the Golden Rule and love our neighbors as ourselves. That means to really put yourself in their shoes and imagine what they are experiencing.”
“I’ve worked with kids across so many communities, and they have beautiful differences, but they are also so similar,” Accurso continued. “They want to play, they want to learn, they care about each other. It devastates me, thinking about them watching us and seeing us not have compassion for each other. We have to do better for kids.”
2026-03-31 01:01:29
Second Lady Usha Vance is normal and relatable, actually.
Or, at least she said as much on Sunday in an NBC interview promoting her new podcast show Storytime with the Second Lady, where she brings on a guest to read a children’s book.
“It’s a podcast that really is just for children,” Usha Vance explained. “We will have someone come in—a special reader, we’re calling them—read a fun book, have a very short little conversation about things related to the book, maybe about their career.”
Three episodes were released on YouTube Monday morning, with the first show featuring Vance reading The Tale of Peter Rabbit solo and the next two featuring former racing driver Danica Patrick and author and Paralympian Brent Poppen.
“[We] then invite children to pick up books on their own. It’s sort of just an advertisement for reading,” Vance continued.
The second lady’s launch comes as her husband and other officials in the Trump administration terrorize and inflict brutal violence on children and families around the world—the remainder of the discussion hammered home an awkward whitewashing attempt.
Vance’s young children helped make the podcast set, including building a Lego cherry blossom tree and even has a Costco membership! But when NBC News’ Kate Snow asked her simple questions about her politics and thoughts on the Trump administration, the second lady largely shied away from answering. While Vance doesn’t agree with her husband on every issue, she is “not involved in this in any professional sense,” so she can have “open-minded” and “very productive” conversations with him when his work becomes “important personally.”
As much as she tries to present the contrary, she is a person with influence within the Trump administration.
“I do feel very comfortable in that no one has ever asked me to engage in any kind of litmus test on anything,” Vance said when asked about her stark political shift from being registered as a Democrat until at least 2014. “What I’ve found is that I was myself in 2014. I can be myself today. And I feel very comfortable in that world.”
The second lady is comfortable in a government that’s trying to replace educators with AI robots while it detains and deports young children, reportedly kills over a hundred elementary school students by missile strike, and starves families in Cuba of basic living essentials.
It’s all normal and relatable as long as you don’t ask too many questions.
2026-03-30 23:29:48
Last week, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens penned an article that captured the rah-rah-ness of the pro-war crowd and was breathtaking in its short-sighted triumphalism. Headlined “The War Is Going Better Than You Think,” Stephens called for “perspective on the panic over the war in the Middle East” and scolded critics who depict the Iran war as “an unprovoked and unnecessary attack on Iran, launched at Israel’s behest” that is “already a foreign-policy fiasco that has put the global economy at risk without any clear objective or endgame.” Not so, he cried.
His evidence? Comparisons to the past. In 1991, during Operation Desert Storm against Saddam Hussein, the US-led forces lost 75 aircraft. So far not a single piloted plane has been shot down over Iran. At the start of the invasion of Iraq 12 years later, President George W. Bush tried but failed to mount a strike to decapitate Saddam’s regime. This time around, Donald Trump killed Iran’s supreme leader and many high-ranking officials in the initial bombing. And in 2012, when Barack Obama was president, the price of Brent crude oil hit $123 a barrel ($175 in 2026 dollars). So the price of $108 a barrel this past week shouldn’t be such a bother.
Stephens presents a couple of other markers to suggest this war is proceeding just fine, while acknowledging the Trump administration’s “failures in planning, particularly its unwillingness to make a stronger public case for war and get more allies on our side before the campaign began”—which are hardly quibbles. Overall, his advice is to buck up and not be Debbie Downers: “If past generations could see how well this war has gone compared with the ones they were compelled to fight at a frightening cost, they would marvel at their posterity’s comparative good fortune. They would marvel, too, at our inability to appreciate the advantages we now possess.”
Looking at the number of bombs dropped or Iranian leaders killed or the fluctuation in the price of oil is not the best way to evaluate this war—especially in these first weeks of the conflict.
Stephens is grasping at tactical straws. Perhaps the US military is putting its hundreds of billions to effective use in terms of the prosecution of the war, though we probably won’t know for certain until there are after-action reports and investigations (if there are any). We do already know that a missile strike that was attributed to US military forces hit a girls’ school and killed about 175 Iranian civilians, most of them students. But looking at the number of bombs dropped or Iranian leaders killed or the fluctuation in the price of oil is not the best way to evaluate this war—especially in these first weeks of the conflict.
Wars are often not easy to judge because the chaos, conflict, and disruption they trigger will yield consequences that last for years, if not decades. It’s easy to gawk at Pentagon videos of Tomahawks raining “death and destruction from above,” as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth calls it, and hail the war machine. Much tougher is perceiving the ripples. We have no idea where all this violence will lead. It’s theoretically possible we might end up with a less threatening regime in Tehran and more stability in the Middle East, though that does seem close to magical thinking. However, cheerleading the early stats and proclaiming they bode well for the long run seems purposefully naive.
There are other historical comparisons to keep in mind. The first Gulf War, in which President George H.W. Bush led a coalition that booted Saddam’s military out of Kuwait after he invaded his neighbor was considered a military success. Yet as part of that operation, Bush deployed troops to Saudi Arabia to protect the kingdom. That move—infidels on Saudi territory—infuriated Islamic fundamentalists, and it caused one of them to declare a fatwa against the United States. His name was Osama bin Laden.
Bush the Younger’s invasion of Iraq went so well that within six weeks he flew out to an aircraft carrier and declared victory beneath a banner that declared “Mission Accomplished.” The conflict was far from over. It spurred the rise of a civil war within Iraq and an insurgency that destabilized the region. In the fighting and violence that followed, thousands of American troops and about 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed.
In Afghanistan, George W. Bush launched an attack against the Taliban regime on October 7, 2001. About a month later, Kabul fell. The following month, Kandahar, the spiritual home for the Taliban, toppled. A pro-American interim government was put in place. In May 2003, then–Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld proclaimed that combat operations in Afghanistan were “all but concluded.” The war went on for another two decades, cost about $2 trillion, and did not yield success.
No one can say how Trump’s war in Iran will end up. But we already see worrisome consequences.
In March 2011, President Barack Obama mounted military attacks by a NATO-led coalition in Libya. The initial aim was admirable: to prevent Moammar Qaddafi’s forces from waging a massacre in Benghazi. Seven months later, Qaddafi’s regime collapsed. Civil war ensued, resulting in what some have described as a failed state, which has led to instability in North Africa and the rise of extremist groups. In 2016, Obama said, the “worst mistake” of his presidency was “probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya.”
In all these instances, everything went well at first. Yet…It’s better if bombs land where they are supposed to and US planes are not blown out of the skies. The general competence of a military can be judged. But that’s a far cry from determining whether a war is working out.
No one can say how Trump’s war in Iran will end up. But we already see worrisome consequences. The conflict has led to Israeli attacks on Lebanon. The Ukrainian war is receiving less attention. (This week Russia, as it prepares a spring offensive, launched one of the four-year-old war’s largest bombardments, hurling 1,000 drones and 34 missiles at Ukraine.) Kim Jong Un has declared that Trump’s war against Iran justifies the expansion of North Korea’s nuclear weapons arsenal. (He has long been more of a nuclear threat than Tehran’s mullahs.) And counterterrorism experts fear a rise in terrorism aimed at American targets.
Meanwhile, the world and the global economy is at the mercy of Trump’s chaos, as each day brings contradictory statements and signs about his intentions and plans (if he has any) on how to end this war. The dislocation caused by the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz—an easily foreseen development that Trump did not foresee—extends far beyond the uptick in the price of crude (which Stephens pooh-poohs). One-third of the world’s helium passes through the Strait. Helium is a critical ingredient in semiconductors—which are in just about everything—and it’s necessary for MRI machines. Cut off the flow of helium, and what won’t be made, what won’t happen, and what harm will be done?
If you let loose the dogs of war, they can run in many different directions. Clearly, Trump is ad hoc-ing this war as it proceeds—which is not reassuring. It’s tough enough to prosecute a war with a plan; leading a war without one is folly. For sure, the US military can be rather successful in killing and annihilating. That might look like winning to some. History tells us otherwise.
2026-03-30 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Thousands of years ago, beasts of burden helped make humanity what it is today. When farmers first started putting down roots, they’d plant and tend their crops by hand. With the power of oxen, they could drag plows across their fields before sowing, which boosted soil fertility and eliminated weeds. Today, that job has been made even easier by giant machines that rake the landscape.
Millennia of tilling, though, have come at a cost. While plowing releases nutrients in the short term, it degrades soil fertility in the long term, requiring farmers to load their fields with synthetic fertilizers. (The burst of microbial activity after roiling the ground also chews through accumulated carbon, returning it to the atmosphere as planet-warming greenhouse gas.) In addition, all this cultivation destroys the natural subterranean structures that hold onto water, meaning less is delivered to crops.
Fiber optic cables, of all things, have now exposed just how badly tilling messes with a farm’s ability to retain moisture. Using a technology known as distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), scientists analyzed how seismic waves disturbed the cable as they rippled through harrowed fields, compared to adjacent undisturbed plots. This created subtly distinct signals, showing that plowing obliterates the “capillaries” that carry water like tiny interconnected reservoirs.
“It’s kind of counterintuitive, right You’d think that breaking up the ground surface would allow more water to get down into it.”
The findings point to a serious problem with modern agriculture, to be sure, but also to solutions. “Regenerative farming practices based on principles of no-till—combined with cover crops and a diversity of crops—can basically lead to less agrochemical reliance, better soil organic matter contents, comparable yields, [and] lower diesel use,” said David Montgomery, a geomorphologist at the University of Washington and coauthor of a new paper describing the research.
DAS exploits the extreme sensitivity of fiber optic cables, which transmit information as pulses of light. If there’s a disturbance along the path—an earthquake or even someone walking overhead—a tiny bit of light bounces back to the source. With a device called an interrogator, researchers can send pulses along a length of cable and analyze what returns. Because they know the speed of light, they can differentiate a disturbance a mile down the line from one just a few hundred feet away, as the former will take just a tiny bit longer to return. Whereas a traditional seismometer takes readings at a single point, a DAS system turns miles upon miles of fiber optic cable into one continuous sensor.
Luckily enough for these researchers, Harper Adams University in the United Kingdom has run a 20-year outdoor lab where researchers have treated adjacent fields with different levels of tilling. Whereas using DAS to monitor for earthquakes relies on the planet’s deep seismic rumblings, in these fields the researchers laid cable at the surface and listened for what was happening above ground: human activities like cars, but also rain and wind hitting the cable. Basically, it was messier, seismically speaking, than Earth’s more consistent vibrations, but still informative. “A lot of noise for somebody is a signal for others,” said Marine Denolle, an earth scientist at the University of Washington and senior author of the new paper.
In the end, it was all about speed, aka seismic velocity. If a car drove by, it sent waves across the road, then into the fields. “If the soil has water, the wave will take longer to come to us than if the soil is dry,” Denolle said.
Let’s leave the farm for a second and head to the beach to explain that. Where the ocean laps at the shore, the wet sand is so hard that you can run along it without sinking in and breaking your ankle. The nearby dry sand, on the other hand, is so loose that you might have a hard time trudging through it. “The only difference is the way these capillary forces glue the material together when there’s a sufficient amount of water,” Denolle said. “We do notice that action of stiffening and loosening of the soil, just due to that change.”
Or think of undisturbed soils as a sponge, loaded with lots of pores for water to fill—leave one out on the counter and it hardens and contracts, only to soften and expand when you soak it once more. So on the experimental farm, the tilled soils might have looked like they’d better absorb water, what with their looseness, but the opposite is true.
“It’s kind of counterintuitive, right?” Montgomery said. “You’d think that breaking up the ground surface would allow more water to get down into it. But if you plow it often enough, hard enough, you kind of pulverize it. And it’s all those little worm holes and the bug holes and the root holes that allow water to get down into the soil.”
Why, then, would farmers keep plowing their fields for thousands of years? “Well, farmers don’t like weeds, and so a really good way to get weeds off your field is to plow it,” Montgomery said. “That can provide nutrients to a crop, so you get a little burst of fertility with tillage. But if you do it too often for too long, you wear out the batteries of the soil, in effect.”
That’s why modern farmers add heaps of expensive synthetic fertilizers. Not only do these inputs take a whole lot of energy to produce, contributing to global warming, but they also run off of the land, poisoning waterways. (Nitrogen fertilizer is geopolitically perilous as well: Almost a third of it passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran effectively closed after being attacked by Israel and the United States.) And because water doesn’t soak into tilled soils as well, much of it evaporates before reaching roots.
Together, these trends drive up costs and will only accelerate as climate change exacerbates droughts. Researchers elsewhere in the world might also use DAS to better understand soil conditions on local farms. “I thought it was a neat application on the very small scale, but just showing how DAS can be used to solve these types of problems,” said Jonathan Ajo-Franklin, an applied geophysicist at Rice University, who studies the technology. (Ajo-Franklin wasn’t involved in the paper, but its lead author is a postdoc in his department.)
That solution, Montgomery said, is embracing regenerative agriculture to prioritize soil health, which means reducing physical and chemical disturbances. If a farmer is struggling with weeds, for instance, they can let loose livestock after a harvest, clearing the field for the next crop to get a head start. Or they might add cover crops, which further choke out weeds. Even if, say, an urban farm has to do some tilling, it can return carbon to the ground with compost.
Increasing crop diversity, too, will both recharge the soil (legumes, for example, “fix” their own nitrogen and add it to the earth for other plants to use as fertilizer) and make a field friendlier to beneficial microbes, which help lock carbon in the ground and keep it out of the atmosphere. “There’s all kinds of other reasons we would want to adopt those same suite of practices,” Montgomery said, “from reducing our reliance on agrochemical inputs, increasing on-farm biodiversity, reducing off-farm pollution, building soil organic matter, creating more profitable farms.”
2026-03-30 01:28:40
On Saturday, millions of people around the country took part in more than 3,000 No Kings protests opposing the presidency of Donald Trump, whose approval ratings have plummeted to 36 percent, a record low since his return to the White House.
Saturday’s rallies were the third major No Kings protest, with organizers saying that 8 million people took part. That estimate has not been independently verified. But to put this weekend’s anti-Trump protests in perspective: about 300,000 people attended the April 2009 Tea Party protests against the Obama administration that were heralded as a seismic political event.
My Mother Jones colleagues were on the ground yesterday covering the action around the country:
Given the immense outpouring, what could these demonstrations mean for future organizing?
According to Payday Report, an outlet that covers labor and union news, Indivisible, one of the lead organizers of the No Kings protests, is backing the May Day Strong coalition, which is calling for “No Work, No School, No Shopping” on May 1.
Leah Greenberg, the co-founder of Indivisible, said, “On May 1, Indivisibles will be joining people across the country with a clear message: we demand a government that invests in our communities, not one that enriches billionaires, fuels endless war, or deploys masked agents to intimidate our neighbors.”
2026-03-30 01:12:59
On Sunday, Pope Leo said that God refuses the prayers of leaders who have “hands full of blood,” in what appeared to be a direct rebuke to many Trump administration officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who have invoked religious rhetoric to justify their war with Iran.
“This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,” Leo said to thousands of people attending his Palm Sunday mass at St. Peter’s Square. “He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”
The pope has made repeated calls for an immediate ceasefire in Iran and, last Monday, said military airstrikes should be banned.
“Thousands of innocent people have been killed, and many others have been forced to abandon their homes,” Leo said earlier this month. “I renew my prayerful closeness to all those who have lost their loved ones in the attacks that have struck schools, hospitals, and residential areas.”
While the pope’s remarks have not identified anyone specific, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been at the forefront of mingling his Christian faith with his prosecution of the Iran war. On Wednesday, Hegseth prayed at the Pentagon in front of military and civilian workers for US troops to deliver “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
“We ask these things in bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ,” he continued.
Hegseth has been open about his support for a Christian crusade. As my colleague Kiera Butler pointed out when Donald Trump nominated him for secretary of defense in November 2024, Hegseth published a book in 2020 titled American Crusade, which discussed the destruction of Muslim holy sites to reclaim them for Christianity.
Kiera also highlighted Hegseth’s tattoos, including a Jerusalem cross on his chest, which Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, told her is a reference to the Christian crusades. According to Taylor, another Hegseth tattoo of the words “Deus Vult”—Latin for “God wills it”—signifies that “God mandated Crusaders’ violence.”
During his tenure, Hegseth has explicitly injected religion into the Pentagon. According to the Washington Post, he hosts monthly evangelical worship services every month at the Pentagon and has invited clergy members from his Christian denomination to preach at these events.
