Hello, readers – happy Thursday! Today, we’ll be talking about Trump’s showdown with Ramaphosa, U.S. deportations, more dispatches from the Middle East, some disappointing climate crisis news, the Qatari plane, abandoned investigations, and new bacteria on the Chinese space station.

Here’s some good news: Elon Musk, who spent about $300 million in the last election cycle, said he will take a step back from political donations in the coming years. Also, the first-ever vaccine for gonorrhea (or, as they say across the pond, gonorrhoea) is rolling out in England.

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“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” – Helen Keller

Another Oval Office Ambush

Last week, we wrote that South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s visit to the White House was going to be yet another Zelenskyy-style ambush. Guess what – we got it right! Yesterday, Ramaphosa touched down in Washington, and his televised meeting with Trump turned into a presidential clash over Trump’s allegations that South Africa is committing genocide against white South Africans known as Afrikaners.

Trump even came to the meeting with receipts – paper receipts. In arguing that Ramaphosa’s government was committing genocide against Afrikaners, Trump pulled out a stack of papers that apparently showed the alleged “genocide.” At one point, the president even called up his inner podcaster, asking staff to dim the lights in the Oval Office to play a video clip for everyone in the room to watch.

“We have dead White people, dead White farmers, mostly,” Trump claimed, despite the wealth of evidence showing the opposite. Ramaphosa acknowledged that while there is “criminality in our country... people who do get killed through criminal activity are not only white people, the majority of them are black people.”

Flying A Plane In The Face Of The Law

The White House is violating court orders in its quest to continue deporting immigrants. On Tuesday, immigration lawyers told the press that multiple immigrants from Myanmar, Vietnam, and a few other countries were being sent by the Trump administration to South Sudan. The move is in direct violation of a court order barring the White House from deporting people to third-party countries unless they’re given basic due process.

Yesterday, the Trump administration confirmed the deportations, revealing that it had sent a group of eight men from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, South Sudan, and Vietnam on a flight out of Texas, though Trump officials declined to confirm the flight’s destination. “I don't see how anybody could say that these individuals had a meaningful opportunity to object” to their deportation to Africa, said a federal judge in Massachusetts. He added that the deportees were put on the flight less than a day after the Trump administration told them they would be sent to South Sudan.

While the Trump administration is casually breaking the rules of the country’s legal system, the quote “never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence” might just apply here. Yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem revealed that she doesn't understand what habeas corpus – an individual’s right to challenge their government detention in court – means. Noem described it instead as “a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their rights.”

The IDF Learns It Can’t Shoot Everyone

• Israel isn’t making any friends on the world stage. Yesterday, Israeli soldiers fired shots at a delegation of international diplomats in the occupied West Bank – Kaja Kallas, the E.U.’s top diplomat, called the incident “unacceptable.” The IDF justified its decision to fire live ammunition at the representatives from China, the E.U., and the U.K. by claiming that they’d strayed from the IDF’s “approved route” and “entered an area where they were not authorized to be.” The Israeli military added that it “regrets the inconvenience caused.”

• While diplomats were ducking under Israeli fire, something else took a dive yesterday. Oil prices declined at the end of a rollercoaster Wednesday – in the morning, prices rose on the news that Israeli officials were finalizing plans to strike Iranian nuclear facilities sometime soon, but they soon dropped after the U.S. government published data showing that domestic oil stockpiles were rising. An Israeli strike on Iran would “not only put Iranian supply at risk, but also in large parts of the broader region,” said one analyst. The country is the third-largest oil exporter in OPEC, sending out 1.5 million barrels per day – if tensions escalate, its exports could dip by up to 500,000 barrels, disrupting supply chains across the globe.

Burning Up Our Forests & Futures

• According to new satellite analysis, the world’s tropical forests disappeared at a record pace last year, with roughly 26,000 square miles (67,000 square kilometers) of forests disappearing in 2024 – enough to cover the entire Republic of Ireland in trees. The report states that most of the deforestation was caused by wildfires, with human land clearances coming in second. 

• This marks the first year on record that we’ve lost more forests to fires than purposeful chopping sprees, which is concerning, to say the least. One professor who works at the center that produces the data described the moment as a “tipping point” which could lead to the “savannisation” of the planet’s rainforests, referring to a phenomenon which sees old-growth forests burn down and permanently turn into savannahs.

• As those burning rainforests release their stored carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, warming the planet even further, climate scientists have even more bad news. This week, researchers published a new study claiming that even keeping global warming within the 1.5° Celsius limit set by the Paris Climate Agreement might not be enough to prevent a massive meltdown of the planet’s polar ice caps. The Paris limit could still lead to a sea level rise of over an inch per year within a few decades.

More Mixed Nuts

• China says Trump's "Golden Dome" missile defense plan increases risk of "space becoming a battlefield" (CBS) 

• Canada discusses joining US Golden Dome missile defence programme (BBC)

• Italy tightens rules for Italian descendants to become citizens (BBC)

• Russia accused of trying to disrupt aid to Ukraine by hacking border crossings (Guardian)

• Keir Starmer announces U-turn on winter fuel payment cuts (BBC)

• Japan's agriculture minister resigns after his remark about not having to buy rice (NPR)

An Ethical (And Security) Conundrum In Plane Sight

• The Department of Defense confirmed yesterday that it has officially accepted a luxury jet to use as Air Force One from Qatar “in accordance with all federal rules and regulations,” according to a spokesperson. An Air Force spokesperson told ABC News that it will award a contract to modify the Qatari jet, noting that “details related to the contract are classified.”

• Worth about $400 million, the plane has been called a “flying palace.” News that Trump was considering accepting a plane from a foreign government broke before his planned visit to Qatar last week. The idea of Qatar providing the plane used as Air Force One garnered criticism from both sides of the aisle.

Dodging The DOJ

• The Justice Department announced yesterday that it will drop lawsuits against police departments in Minneapolis, MN, and Louisville, KY. “Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division's failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees,” Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in the announcement. The DOJ is also retracting its findings of constitutional violations.

• The Biden administration opened around a dozen “pattern or practice” investigations into police departments around the country over allegations of unconstitutional policing. “The DOJ under Biden found police were wantonly assaulting people and that it wasn't a problem of 'bad apples' but of avoidable, department-wide failures,” said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the deputy project director on policing at the ACLU. “By turning its back on police abuse, Trump's DOJ is putting communities at risk.”

More Nuts In America

• Senate unexpectedly passes the No Tax on Tips Act in a unanimous vote (NBC)

• Vance says Chief Justice "wrong" that judiciary should check executive branch powers (Axios)

• Wealthy gain, low-income people lose from GOP megabill, analysis finds (Politico)

• Columbia University: President booed with 'Free Mahmoud' chants (BBC)

Space Bacteria? What Could Go Wrong?

• Humanity has discovered a never-before-seen lifeform in space! Unfortunately, though, the story isn’t as cool as it sounds. According to a paper recently published in the Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, Chinese researchers have discovered a new type of bacteria that’s never been detected on Earth, with special mutations that make it particularly well-adapted to life aboard China's Tiangong space station, where it was first discovered.

• The bacteria, Niallia tiangongensis, were discovered as part of a wider research project by Chinese astronauts, who swabbed many surfaces throughout the Tiangong space station to search for new, space-adapted bacteria. Niallia tiangongensis was cultivated from a swab of the station’s cockpit controls, and its special mutations that have helped it thrive in the zero-gravity environment, including the ability to form a protective biofilm and self-repair in response to radiation damage. It’s unclear whether the bacteria are a new species that developed over time in the space station, or if they’re a terrestrial hitchhiker that’s bested other bacteria thanks to unique biological functions.

More Loose Nuts

• OpenAI is buying iPhone designer Jony Ive's AI devices startup for $6.4 billion (CNBC)

• Plants produce more nectar when they ‘hear’ bees buzzing, scientists find (Guardian)

• The pursuit of better drugs through orbital space crystals (The Verge)

• How AI weather model by Microsoft produces faster, more accurate forecasts (WaPo, $)

• Tush push remains legal, ban on pushing ball carriers fails (NBC)

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Team Thoughts

Kayli - I know the new bacteria on the space station isn’t going to cause a real-life Alien, but…is it going to cause a real-life Alien?

Marcus - Forming a protective biofilm sounds kind of cozy. Is that weird?

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