Trump budget seeks $1.5T in defense spending alongside cuts in domestic programs By LISA MASCARO and KEVIN FREKING

 

President Donald Trump has proposed boosting defense spending to $1.5 trillion in his 2027 budget released Friday, the largest such request in decades, reflecting his emphasis on U.S. military investments over domestic programs.

The sizable increase for the Pentagon had been telegraphed by the Republican president even before the the U.S.-led war against Iran. The president’s plan would also reduce spending on non-defense programs by 10% by shifting some responsibilities to state and local governments.

 

“President Trump is committed to rebuilding our military to secure peace through strength,” the budget said.

The president’s annual budget is considered a reflection of the administration’s values and does not carry the force of law. The massive document typically highlights an administration’s priorities, but Congress, which handles federal spending issues, is free to reject it and often does.

 This year’s White House document, prepared by Budget Director Russ Vought, is intended to provide a road map from the president to Congress as lawmakers build their own budgets and annual appropriations bills to keep the government funded. Vought spoke to House GOP lawmakers on a private call Thursday. 

 

Trump, speaking ahead of an address to the nation this week about the Iran war, signaled the military is his priority, setting up a clash ahead in Congress.

“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care,” Trump said at a private White House event Wednesday.

“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare — all these individual things,” he said. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal.”

 

Immigration enforcement, air traffic controllers and national parks

Among the budget priorities the White House called for:

-Supporting the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement and deportation operations by eliminating refugee resettlement aid programs, maintaining Immigration and Customs Enforcement funds at current year levels and drawing on last’s year’s increases for the Department of Homeland Security funds to continue opening detention facilities, including 100,000 beds for adults and 30,000 for families.

 

A 13% increase in funding for the Department of Justice, which the White House said would be focused on violent criminals.

-- A $10 billion fund within the National Park Service for beautification projects in Washington, D.C..

-- A $481 million increase in funding to enhance aviation safety and support an air traffic controller hiring surge.

With the nation running nearly $2 trillion annual deficits and the debt swelling past $39 trillion, the federal balance sheets have long been operating in the red.

About two-thirds of the nation’s estimated $7 trillion in annual spending covers the Medicare and Medicaid health care programs, as well as Social Security income, which are essentially growing — along with an aging population — on autopilot.

The rest of the annual budget has typically been more evenly split between defense and domestic accounts, nearly $1 trillion each, which is where much of the debate in Congress takes place. 

 

The GOP’s big tax breaks bill that Trump signed into law last year boosted his priorities beyond the budget process — with at least $150 billion for the Pentagon over the next several years, and $170 billion for Trump’s immigration and deportation operations at the Department of Homeland Security.

The administration is counting on its allies in the Republican-led Congress to again push the president’s priorities, particularly the Defense Department spending, through its own budget process, as it was able to do last year.

It suggests $1.1 trillion for defense would come through the regular appropriations process, which typically requires support from both parties for approval, while $350 billion would come through the budget reconciliation process that Republicans can accomplish on their own, through party-line majority votes.

 

Congress still fighting over 2026 spending

The president’s budget arrives as the House and Senate remain tangled over current-year spending and stalemated over DHS funding, with Democrats demanding changes to Trump’s immigration enforcement regime that Republicans are unwilling to accept.

Trump announced Thursday he would sign an executive order to pay all DHS workers who have gone without paychecks during the record-long partial government shutdown that has reached 49 days. The Republican leadership in Congress reached an agreement this week on a path forward to fund the department, but lawmakers are away on spring break and have not yet voted on any new legislation.

Last year, in the president’s first budget since returning to the White House, Trump sought to fulfill his promise to vastly reduce the size and scope of the federal government, reflecting the efforts of billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

As DOGE slashed through federal offices and Vought sought to claw back funds, Congress did not always agree.

 

For example, Trump sought a roughly one-fifth decrease in non-defense spending for the current budget year ending Sept. 30, but Congress kept such spending relatively flat.

Some of the programs that Trump tried to eliminate entirely, such as assisting families with their energy costs, got a slight uptick in funding. Others got flat funding, such as the Community Development Block Grants that states and local communities use to fund an array of projects intended mostly to help low-income communities through new parks, sewer systems and affordable housing.

Lawmakers have also focused on ensuring the administration spends federal dollars as directed by Congress. This year’s spending bills contained what Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, described as “hundreds upon hundreds of specific funding levels and directives” that the administration is required to follow.

 

Traveling Along the U.S. Civil Rights Trail

 

Nine Black College Students Were Arrested in 1961 for Reading at a Segregated Public Library. Their Contributions to the Civil Rights Movement Have Long Been Overlooked

by  Kayla Randall - Digital Editor, Museums

 When nine Black college students walked into a segregated public library in Mississippi on March 27, 1961, they knew what to expect next: Staff would call the police, and they would probably be arrested if they refused to leave. According to local laws, being Black in a space designated only for the white public constituted a breach of peace. By stepping through the doors of the Jackson Municipal Library, they would be risking physical harm and verbal abuse. They might even face an angry crowd.

 But the students, from the historically Black Tougaloo College, had trained for this moment. This was a sit-in, a nonviolent direct-action protest, and they were prepared. They’d been guided by the likes of Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s first Mississippi field officer, who was known for his public investigation into the murder of Emmett Till and his fight against Jim Crow laws in the state; Ernst Borinski, a Jewish lawyer who’d fled Nazi Germany, then accepted a position teaching sociology at Tougaloo after World War II; and Tougaloo chaplain John Mangram.

 The civic-minded students wanted to effect change in Mississippi. Entering that library would boldly oppose the state’s unyielding system of segregation and highlight the disparities they experienced as Black residents.

 The Tougaloo Nine’s demonstration would etch their names in Mississippi history: Meredith Anding Jr., James Bradford (better known as Sammy), Alfred Cook, Geraldine Edwards, Janice Jackson, Joseph Jackson Jr., Albert Lassiter, Evelyn Pierce and Ethel Sawyer. Nationally, though, their story is “often overlooked” in the broader civil rights narrative, says historian Daphne Chamberlain, chief program officer at the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Mississippi and a Tougaloo College alumna.

 

At the library, most of the students found the books they were looking for and sat down to read. As expected, a librarian called the police. Despite the presence of law enforcement, the Tougaloo Nine didn’t move. Eventually, the officers told them they were under arrest.

“Why can’t I go in and read a book? It comes back to that, the simplicity of it all,” says Tony Bounds, an archivist and institutional historian at Tougaloo College. The response to this question at the time was, “Well, you have a Black library across town,” he adds. But the Tougaloo Nine had done their homework. They’d specifically requested texts that weren’t available at the Black library.

 

Following their arrest, the students were held in jail for more than 30 hours. Behind bars that night, Jackson Jr. reflected “on Emmett Till, the history of lynching connected with Mississippi,” as he told OC Weekly in 2015. “The later it got that night, I was in fear of my life.”

Black community members, particularly students at Jackson State College (now Jackson State University), a nearby historically Black public school, rallied around the Tougaloo Nine and began protesting in support of them. Although authorities had arrested the Tougaloo students without resorting to violence, the Jackson State students’ demonstrations sparked a brutal crackdown. As the young people marched, police officers armed with billy clubs, tear gas and dogs forcefully dispersed their gathering.

 When the Tougaloo Nine appeared in court on March 29, police beat a crowd of Black onlookers, including Evers, who had gathered outside the courthouse. They also attacked the group with dogs.

 

Law enforcement officers had recruited canines for policing long before 1961, but their use in Jackson represented what the author and researcher M.J. O’Brien, in his book The Tougaloo Nine: The Jackson Library Sit-In at the Crossroads of Civil War and Civil Rights, describes as “the first attacks by police dogs on nonviolent crowds during the civil rights era, two years before the more sensational attacks in Birmingham grabbed national headlines.”

The students pleaded not guilty to the breach of peace charge, but a judge found them guilty anyway. As first-time offenders, they were each fined $100 and sentenced to 30 days in jail, although the court ruled that this time would be suspended if they pledged to avoid participating in other protests. They all agreed.

 In a letter to NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, Evers wrote, “These young people exhibited the greatest amount of courage in the face of mounting tension and were reported in our local newspapers as being ‘orderly, intelligent and cooperative.’”

 

The Black community’s embrace helped keep the students afloat in the aftermath of their sit-in. While they were in jail, this assistance “was demonstrated most tangibly in the cookies, cakes, hot food and snacks that individual families, mostly Black women, brought to the jail to help support this newly forming resistance movement,” O’Brien writes.

The college’s leadership also supported the Tougaloo Nine. “After they’re released from jail, they go back to class,” Bounds says. “They’re not expelled.” All eventually went on to earn bachelor’s degrees, most from Tougaloo but some from other institutions. Their sit-in and the protests that followed had reverberated in Jackson. College students were helping the NAACP lead the fight against segregation and anti-Black discrimination in Mississippi’s capital.

“It’s a game-changing moment, certainly within Mississippi, which at one point in time had the highest lynching rate in the 20th century,” Bounds says.

 For the students, simply reading in the Jackson library “was an act of defiance,” Bounds says. “It was an open act. Jackson had never seen anything like it.”

 

The Tougaloo Nine have only recently had their collective story told in detail, most notably in O’Brien’s book, which was released in the fall of 2025.

“It’s a project that is long overdue, but he had been working on it for several years,” says Chamberlain, who was one of the book’s early reviewers. Through interviews and deep research, O’Brien wove together the events of March 27, 1961, and beyond. He was able to talk to all but one of the nine students, as Pierce died before O’Brien started working on the book.

The author places the Tougaloo Nine’s actions in the context of state and local history. “Such a direct assault on segregation had never been tried before in Mississippi’s capital city,” O’Brien writes. He provides insights on the day of the sit-in, down to the weather.

 That morning was cold with rain on the way.

“Lassiter remembered specifically deciding to wear a trench coat to keep off the chill and the rain, yes, but also ‘to provide an extra layer of protection’ against whatever beatings might come,” O’Brien writes. According to O’Brien, Edwards later recalled, “I was very concerned that I dress well and that I dressed warm. That I was comfortable. That I was well protected.”

 As the students approached the building, the significance of their protest dawned on them. Janice Jackson remembered walking into the municipal library as a “surreal” experience. “It was like I was there doing what I was supposed to do, but I felt like I was lifted out of my body or something,” she added, per O’Brien’s book.

The Tougaloo Nine were determined, though, and they continued in their mission.

 Evers had helped the students plan the read-in. He was “an energetic man who was committed to bringing about integration in public facilities,” Jackson Jr. told OC Weekly. The protest was executed exactly as planned: The Tougaloo Nine aimed to get arrested only for breach of peace. As soon as they were placed under arrest, they got up and followed officers’ instructions to avoid charges of resisting detainment.

 

The students’ time at Tougaloo primed them all to become leaders in their own ways. After graduating, four of the nine went on to become educators. Lassiter served three decades in the Air Force. Anding pursued careers in both the military and education, enlisting in the Air Force before teaching at universities.

A tenth student who was part of the demonstration but has long been excluded from the story is Jerry Keahey. A graduating senior at the time, he was the photographer behind a frequently distributed group picture of the nine ahead of their read-in. “That’s a really important role because he was able to document by way of camera what was going on at the time,” Chamberlain says. Keahey also helped the students travel to the library that day. Driving in two separate cars, Mangram and Keahey dropped the students off near their destination.

 Tougaloo is a small private school with a big history. Known as “the oasis,” it was founded in 1869 by the American Missionary Association, a Christian abolitionist organization. For the past 15 years, its enrollment has hovered around 600 to 900 students; that number would have been even smaller in the 1960s.

 The college is located “off the beaten path,” Bounds says, yet it has welcomed such distinguished visitors as Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael.

 

“You cannot detach Mississippi’s civil rights movement from Tougaloo,” Bounds notes. “Those are two synonymous terms.”

The school fostered an environment in which the Tougaloo Nine could grow into activists. Previous protests also laid the foundation for these students. One of the earliest library sit-ins took place in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1939, when a group of Black men visited a public facility that was open only to white community members. As the men picked up books and began reading, library staff called the police, who arrested them and escorted them out of the building.

 In 1960, the year before the Tougaloo Nine’s protest, four Black men participated in one of the most well-known sit-ins of the era—at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. This protest inspired an array of similar demonstrations across the American South.

 “You had sit-ins, you had read-ins, you had church-ins,” Bounds says. “On the coast, you had wade-ins, because the beaches were segregated.”

 

In an email, Kevin Strait, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, says, “By targeting public spaces like lunch counters and libraries, participants directly confronted the daily practice of racial exclusion and helped spark the public awareness and pressure that made desegregation possible.” The Tougaloo Nine’s action was “a powerful statement about access—and who gets to learn, gather and belong in our shared public spaces,” he adds.

Making the public library the focus of the their demonstration put a spotlight on the uneven distribution of educational resources to segregated public schools. Often, Black students received “secondhand books that are years old,” Chamberlain says. Despite 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, which deemed segregation in American public schools unconstitutional, “states like Mississippi were rolling out desegregation as slow as they possibly could,” she notes.

 The books that the Tougaloo Nine picked up in the Jackson library, while obscure and selected for strategic reasons, symbolized freedom. Bradford chose Introduction to Parasitology, while Cook picked Bergey’s Manual of Systematic Bacteriology—a text that “would become central to his later profession but n

Following the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, “one of the definitions of freedom became access to education,” Chamberlain says. “As an enslaved person, you could not be learned, you could not know how to read. It was to keep people powerless and of course ignorant to the world around them, and to also keep them subservient in this status that they were born into.”

It took another three years for the goals of the Tougaloo Nine’s sit-in to be enshrined in federal law. The students—and the broader civil rights movement—lost a leader along the way.

 

In June 1963, 37-year-old Evers was murdered, shot in the back in his own driveway. Byron De La Beckwith, a known white supremacist, was convicted of the killing three decades later, in 1994. Evers had been working tirelessly right until the end: Two weeks before his death, he shepherded another Jackson sit-in that became national news. Several Tougaloo students sat at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter, where they were harassed and attacked by a hostile crowd.

The struggle for desegregation continued, and in July 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed segregation of public facilities and race-based discrimination in the U.S.

 Later, in the 1980s, some members of the Tougaloo Nine received notices that the City of Jackson had absolved them of their breach of peace violations. But they still faced difficult realities: “Some complained that the misdemeanor continued to show up on their formal criminal record for years to come,” O’Brien writes.

 Today, four of the Tougaloo Nine are still living: Jackson Jr., Edwards, Sawyer and Lassiter. Edwards wrote about her life in the 2011 book Back to Mississippi. Members also gathered periodically for anniversary celebrations of their sit-in.

In 2017, the state dedicated a historical marker outside the Jackson Municipal Library to the students and their groundbreaking action. The group’s surviving members and their families were also honored at a local baseball game in 2022.

 Back in 1961, the Jackson library’s sea of books represented everything that the Tougaloo Nine were trying to achieve. Chamberlain says, “Just by being able to pick up a book and having access to that knowledge, it opened a world of opportunity for those nine young people.”

ow was a convenient foil,” according to O’Brien.

 

 

---

 

Former Alex Jones employee says: 'It was nonsense, it was lies' by Dave Davies

 

Alex Jones, founder of the media company Infowars, had made a fortune promoting conspiracy theories online. He's insisted that the Sept. 11 attacks were an inside job and claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, staged by the government to justify seizing the firearms of American citizens.

Josh Owens spent four years in his 20s as a video editor and field producer for Jones and his media company. "In Jones' world, it was all about making things look cinematic," Owens says. "We would go out there, we would shoot videos and almost like Vice News — like, we were in the weeds, we were showing what was really going on. ... But it was nonsense, it was lies."

At one point, Owens was dispatched to El Paso, Texas, because a conservative website had alleged that ISIS had established a training base just across the border in Juarez, Mexico. Finding no evidence of ISIS, Owens says the Infowars team dressed a reporter up to look like an ISIS operative and filmed him crossing "the border" while holding a prop of a severed head. Except it wasn't actually the border.

 

"We just happened to find a little stream that looked like it could be the Rio Grande," Owens says. "We said we were on the border. The reporter I was with simulated the beheading, walked across, and that's what we posted."

Owens says the video of the fake ISIS agent garnered a million views overnight. Infowars did not respond to a request for comment.

Though he was troubled by work, Owens says he stayed because the pay was good and Jones was an engaging force. He says a turning point came when he was seated next to a Muslim woman with a young girl on a flight home from a different reporting trip. 

 

"I remember sitting there watching her, and it sounds so cheesy, but it was just this moment of like ... these people didn't do anything. There's no reason for suspicion; it's just racism," he says. "It's not like after that I changed everything and all of a sudden became a good person or started to do the right thing. But it did start to make me look at things a little bit differently."

Owens left Infowars in 2017. He has since appeared in the HBO documentary The Truth vs. Alex Jones and provided a deposition in the successful defamation case the parents of Sandy Hook children brought against Jones. Owens' new memoir is The Madness of Believing: A Memoir from Inside Alex Jones' Conspiracy Machine.

How Jack Smith connected the dots between GOP lawmakers, Trump aides in 2020 election probe by Hailey Fuchs and Kyle Cheney

 

Former special counsel Jack Smith’s office sought to map a vast web of contacts between President Donald Trump’s most vocal Republican allies in Congress and key players in his bid to subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to newly released records of the Smith-led investigation.

Emails from January 2023 circulated among Smith’s deputies show how top GOP lawmakers communicated directly with individuals later identified by Smith as Trump’s co-conspirators in his election interference plot, including attorneys Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.

 

Those contacts became the Smith office’s justification for pursuing subpoenas of phone logs for more than a dozen Republican officials. That includes former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — who were previously known to be of interest to Smith’s investigators — as well as then-Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York, who is now Trump’s head of the EPA and is among other lawmakers not previously known to be under Smith’s microscope.

A spokesperson for Zeldin did not immediately provide a response to a request for comment.

These Republicans and others are featured in the materials released Tuesday by Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, who has been leading a probe into Smith’s work. The Iowa Republican made the documents public to help support the party’s widely held position that Smith was politically motivated in his pursuit of criminal charges against Trump during the Biden administration — for efforts to overturn the election and his mishandling of classified documents.

“They were not aiming low. They were trying to take out everyone on the other side,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), whose data Smith’s office sought to obtain via subpoena, said Tuesday.

Cruz delivered the remarks while presiding over a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing comparing Smith’s investigations into Trump to the Watergate scandal that took down former President Richard Nixon and led to new rules cracking down on government corruption.

 

But the newly public documents also offer a more expansive picture of who Smith’s team believed might have had information that could bolster their probe into the campaign to undermine the 2020 election results that culminated in a deadly riot.

The special counsel’s office found that Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) had communicated with Trump’s then-chief of staff Mark Meadows and then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who is now director of the CIA. A spokesperson for Ratcliffe did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Zeldin corresponded with Meadows and Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who was a close Trump ally in the effort. Cruz had calls with Meadows, Eastman and Ratcliffe and was one of several senators who received a call from Giuliani on Jan. 6.

 

Those contacts explain Smith’s interest in obtaining subpoenas for the phone logs for a dozen current and former Republican members of Congress, which his team said would be used to “establish logical evidentiary inferences regarding Trump and his surrogates’ actions and intent.”

The list of potential subpoena targets also includes Arizona Republican Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar. Spokespeople for Biggs, Gosar and Perry did not immediately return a request for comment.

According to the documents, Smith’s team methodically reviewed information provided in a report produced by the Democratic-led House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks, suggesting a nexus between the two parallel inquiries.

New documents released by Grassley Tuesday also revealed the scale and scope of Smith’s scrutiny of Kash Patel, a longtime Trump ally who now serves as FBI director. Patel was previously established to have been a target of the special counsel’s investigation, but it was not known that Smith sought to obtain Patel’s phone and text message logs spanning two years.

A FBI spokesperson pointed to a comment FBI spokesman Ben Williamson previously gave to Reuters, in which he said, “The FBI under prior leadership was weaponized in ways the American people are only now beginning to fully grasp.”

 

The materials also provide new details about the backchanneling between former Vice President Mike Pence and Smith’s team regarding Pence’s grand jury testimony, and the efforts investigators took to screen out privileged information before they accessed devices they seized from targets of their probe.

At the Judiciary subcommittee hearing Tuesday, Democrats continued to defend Smith’s work and urged Republicans to schedule a public hearing with the former special counsel.

“Apparently when the Trump DOJ does it, it’s nothing new; when Jack Smith does it, it’s a modern Watergate,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights. “With Patel, it’s obvious why Jack Smith was looking at him.”

 

Grassley has said Smith will receive an invitation to address the full Judiciary panel in the coming months, following testimony the attorney gave to the House Judiciary Committee late last year.

A spokesperson for Smith declined to comment.

 

The Future of E-books in School Libraries by Shannon Maughan

 

School libraries face shrinking budgets and a shifting vendor landscape for digital materials

 

The trajectory of e-book usage in K–12 schools is well-known. Demand was ramping up in the mid- to late 2010s, then took off when Covid lockdowns necessitated a pivot to remote and hybrid learning. After the pandemic, gains continued but at a much lower rate, as educational technologies and publishers’ e-book business models continued to evolve.

Now that federal relief funding through the American Rescue Plan Act has ended and grants from the government’s embattled Institute of Museum and Library Services are far from certain, school library budgets are tighter than ever. And with the recent announcement that Follett Content has partnered with Sora, OverDrive’s student reading app, to deliver digital content to schools, the e-book distribution landscape has become more consolidated. With schools facing limited funds, higher prices, and fewer vendors to choose from, how are they procuring digital book access for their students?

“The goal is to have the most access for our kids,” says Amanda Kordeliski, director of libraries and instructional technology for Norman Public Schools in Oklahoma, and president of AASL. Achieving that aim looks different in different states and school districts. Among the basics, school library vendors are vetted at the state level for their privacy compliance, and school librarians want e-books that align with academic standards and easily integrate with their existing digital library and learning management systems and available electronic devices to assure ease of use for educators and students.

 

In Texas, school boards must now approve library materials proposed for purchase. According to Becky Calzada, district library coordinator for Leander Independent School District (LISD) in central Texas, “A challenge this year has been the implementation of Texas Senate Bill 13, requiring that all new books get approved, so that’s another layer.”

Major distributors of e-books to K–12 school libraries include Sora and Mackin, as well as educational publishers ABDO and Capstone, and larger library database providers EBSCO, Gale, and ProQuest, which also host e-books within their products. Other players include such publishers as Lerner, ReferencePoint Press, and Rosen, and digital reading platforms like Epic, which are primarily consumer focused but also offer educational market products. Many school districts use more than one e-book vendor, and pricing structures and business models among those companies vary. But the librarians we spoke with agree that the post-Covid e-book marketplace has generally become more restrictive and more expensive.

 

Decisions, decisions

Kordeliski’s district has maintained an OverDrive account for each school level—elementary, middle, and high school—for more than a decade. “It was really easy to grow the collection initially, because we were able to purchase one copy per one user,” she says. “But most everything has moved to a lending model, where you only get access to an e-book title for a year, or for 26 checkouts. That makes it difficult for smaller districts or rural schools to be able to maintain a robust collection, because they have to repurchase everything almost every year. And that’s inaccessible for a good chunk of the schools in the country, because they just don’t have the e-book budget to be able to do that right now.”

Calzada notes that LISD has been using OverDrive as its primary e-book vendor—it also purchases from Mackin and Capstone—for close to 17 years. When it was first considering OverDrive as a portal, that conversation was rooted in devices, she says. “Was it device agnostic? We also had to think about accessibility in terms of internet access. One of the positives for OverDrive is that when a student downloads an e-book on their device, they can take it home and they don’t need additional internet access for it.”

 

But Calzada realizes that Sora may not be the best fit for everyone, which is worrying for some schools and librarians that had previously relied on Follett Content for e-books. “I have heard a lot of chatter among not just librarians within our institution but beyond, asking, Well, what do I do now?” she says. “There are budget impacts when you shift. When you think about OverDrive, in our case, as an institution, we have roughly 42,000 students across 45 schools feeding into this, and district-level support, too. Whereas if you’re a small, maybe rural library with 500 kids total, the cost impacts are huge.”

In Connecticut’s Colchester Public Schools district, instructional technology coordinator Barbara Johnson recalls her purchase practices from the early days of e-books. “If I were buying, say, the winner of our state’s Nutmeg Award, I would buy a hardcover of that book, three or four paperback copies, and one e-book. That way I could, on a very tight budget, have that book available in many different formats to reach all of my readers.”

But as things shifted after the pandemic, new licensing models became a challenge. “The price of an e-book was sometimes unattainable—just a two-year license for an e-book could be upwards of $75–$100—whereas I could buy a hard copy of a novel for $25 or $30,” Johnson says. “It no longer made sense.”

For the roughly 2,000 students in her district, most recently she has ordered e-books from ABDO, Capstone, Follett, and Mackin. In addition, many teachers in her schools use free teacher classroom accounts offered by reading platform Epic. “We’re buying a little bit here and a little bit there to make a more comprehensive platform, instead of putting all of our eggs in one basket.”

Kristen Luettchau, school library media specialist at Morristown High School in New Jersey, had used Follett as one of her sources for e-books, but when she learned of the Follett-Sora partnership, she began investigating other vendors. “Sora is an option, but the cost is a concern for us,” she says. “Realistically, I don’t think I’m going to be able to use it as our primary vendor, because our district is no longer paying for one of our databases, so that’s going to be an extra $8,000. Between that and the cost of the databases going up usually about 5% each year, it doesn’t leave a lot available for e-books.”

 

In the meantime, Luettchau has been proactive this school year in finding a mix of strategies to get the most for her e-book budget. “I’m working with the young adult librarian at our local public library to coordinate her e-book purchases and to encourage the students to utilize those free resources as well,” she says. “We worked for several weeks in the fall on getting students to sign up for a library card and understand how to download the Libby app and access the e-books and audiobooks directly from the public library.”

When the public librarian had extra funds in the fall, Luettchau says, “we talked about which titles we might want purchased as audiobooks or e-books to supplement print copies of the book students are getting in school from the English department.” This collaboration, she adds, “has alleviated a lot of the pressure on me to be purchasing the most current e-books.”

For nonfiction, Luettchau has mostly been purchasing titles through ABDO and ReferencePoint. “If you purchase a set amount of the e-book licenses, and I’ve been getting the multi-user e-book licenses, they’ll give you the print copies for free,” she says. “And it’s not a subscription, so we have these e-books forever.”

Another tack for managing e-book costs involves joining forces with other libraries to build strength in numbers and negotiate better pricing. Once such venture is the Connecticut Library Consortium, which “attempts to create a complete marketplace of discount contracts for all of the things that libraries need to buy,” according to Ellen Paul, the organization’s executive director. “We have had a great relationship with Follett, and we’re deeply appreciative that they have been providing our school libraries with a discount on e-books.” She says it remains to be seen whether CLC members will retain that discount now that Follett has partnered with OverDrive. “That’s where our concern comes in. We don’t currently have a discount with OverDrive, and we’ve never been able to have a conversation with them about that.”

Paul acknowledges that library e-book lending has been in the news of late due to libraries’ frustration over costs and contract terms. But she believes that relief is on the horizon, in the form of legislation designed to level the playing field. “Connecticut passed a first-in-the-nation e-book reform law last June, which governs contracts that public, school, and academic libraries enter into with e-book publishers and aggregators,” she says. “We didn’t necessarily want to go down the legislative route, but we were forced to because it’s been 20-plus years of e-book lending, and terms, conditions, and pricing get worse every year. Without good-faith negotiation, I think that legislation is not only appropriate but necessary.”

Librarians are holding out hope for a solution that bridges the gap between e-book access and pricing. The answer lies in figuring out “how we can balance the rights of readers and the rights of authors and publishers too,” Calzada says.

Kordeliski adds, “It’s so important for libraries to have e-book and audiobook access for all of our learners. To have that be uniform and equitable across the country would be my personal dream.”

In a perfect world, Johnson envisions that every school, and every learner, has access to a well-staffed, well-funded library, and that publishers understand that school libraries are in a unique position to reach an unlimited number of readers. “We’re checking out to students and their families, and we are their central location,” she says. “I have transportation delivering these students to my door and taking them home every single day. School libraries have a captive audience and create such a bang for the buck.”

Trump administration to pay energy firm $1 billion to stop East Coast wind farms by Sydney Carruth

 The Interior Department said it is reimbursing the French energy company to ditch leases for its offshore wind projects and instead invest in U.S. fossil fuel efforts.

 

The Trump administration announced Monday that it will pay a French energy company $1 billion to forfeit its plans to build two offshore wind farms off the East Coast, syphoning the investment into fossil fuel projects.

The deal will reimburse the company, TotalEnergies, nearly $928 million for its leases to build the wind farms off New York and North Carolina. TotalEnergies will then invest the money in a liquefied natural gas facility in Texas, oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and shale gas production, according to a news release from the Interior Department.   

The agreement falls in line with President Donald Trump’s energy agenda, which prioritizes the burning of fossil fuels to generate electricity over clean, renewable energy projects. It’s also a personal move for the president, who has been an enemy of offshore wind projects since he lost his bid to stop one that was visible from one of his Scotland golf courses in 2015. 

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the settlement during an energy conference in Houston, saying the administration is “allowing” TotalEnergies to “redirect those dollars that have been paid into the Treasury to affordable, reliable and secure oil and natural gas production in the U.S.” 

The leases were granted under the Biden administration.

The Interior Department and the Justice Department did not return MS NOW’s request for comment on the deal or how the payment to TotalEnergies will be financed.

“Considering that the development of offshore wind projects is not in the country’s interest, we have decided to renounce offshore wind development in the United States, in exchange for the reimbursement of the lease fees,” Patrick Pouyanné, chief executive of TotalEnergies, said in a news release Monday.  

 

Pouyanné added, “These investments will contribute to supplying Europe with much-needed LNG from the U.S. and provide gas for U.S. data center development.” 

The Trump administration has clawed back funding and slashed federal grant programs and tax incentives for Biden-era clean energy projects. Without the Biden administration’s offshore wind incentives, companies such as TotalEnergies are facing higher input costs for wind farm construction projects. 

Late last year, the Interior Department issued stop-work orders for five fully permitted offshore wind projects that were already underway, citing national security concerns. But the orders failed to hold up against a cascade of legal challenges, and a federal judge issued injunctions that allowed the projects to continue. 

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has sent crude oil and liquified natural gas prices soaring amid Iran’s near-total closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical oil export route in the Persian Gulf. Attacks on critical energy infrastructure across the Gulf region have threatened to deepen a looming global energy crisis.

Experts have called the war a wake-up call for the world’s reliance on fossil fuels and pointed to renewable energy as a cost-effective means of ensuring energy security, especially during times of geopolitical conflict.

 

Trump is dismantling democracy at 'unprecedented' speed, global report finds by Headshot of Frank Langfitt

 

Three major reports out this month say President Trump has done serious damage to American democracy at remarkable speed since his return to the White House.

An annual report from V-Dem, an institute at Sweden's University of Gothenburg, concluded democracy had deteriorated so much in the U.S. that it lowered the country's democracy ranking from 20th to 51st out of 179 countries.

The U.S. landed between Slovakia and Greece.

 Meanwhile, Bright Line Watch, which surveys more than 500 U.S. scholars, concluded that the U.S. system now falls nearly midway between liberal democracy and dictatorship. The newest survey comes out next week. Bright Line Watch's co-directors spoke to NPR exclusively ahead of publication.

Yet another report out Thursday from Freedom House, a Washington, D.C.-based democracy think-tank, said that among free countries, the U.S. joined Bulgaria and Italy in registering the largest declines in political rights and civil liberties last year.

 The developments in the United States are moving towards dictatorship, what the founders wanted to avoid," said Staffan Lindberg, the V-Dem Institute's founding director, who spent seven years in the U.S. "It's the most rapid decline ever in the history of the United States and one of the most rapid in the world."

V-Dem stands for Varieties of Democracy. More than 4,000 scholars contributed data to the report, which is the largest of its kind.

White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales dismissed V-Dem's analysis as "a ridiculous claim made by an irrelevant, blatantly biased organization."

She called Trump a champion for freedom and democracy and the most transparent and accessible president ever.

"His return to the White House saved the legacy media from going out of business," Wales said.

 Trump has rejected criticism that he tries to rule as an autocrat.

"A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator," Trump said to reporters in the Oval Office last August. "I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator."

Lindberg said V-Dem downgraded America's rating based on the Trump administration concentrating executive power, overstepping laws, circumventing the Republican-led Congress as well as attacks on the news media and freedom of speech. Lindberg, a political scientist, is struck by the speed with which Trump has acted.

 Under the Trump administration, democracy has been rolled back as much during just one year as it took Modi in India and Erdogan in Turkey 10 years to accomplish, and Orban in Hungary four years," said Lindberg, referring to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

All three of those leaders came to power through democratic elections, but scholars say they have since undermined checks and balances on executive power to try to ensure they remain in office.

Trump is a big fan of Orbán's and has praised him as a "strongman" and a "tough person." Orbán faces election next month — the first real challenge to his rule in a decade and a half.

 

cholars are alarmed by Trump's blitz on the U.S. system of governance, but John Carey, a co-director of Bright Line Watch, says the United States' democracy rating might have slid even further in recent months if not for the courts pushing back.

Carey says autocrats try to co-opt or pressure government institutions that serve as referees but notes that didn't work last month as the Supreme Court ruled against the president on tariffs.

"One of the things that the tariff decision suggested [is] he has not fully captured that set of referees," said Carey, a professor of political science at Dartmouth, "and that's the most important set."

Brendan Nyhan, a fellow Dartmouth professor and Bright Line co-director, adds that just because Trump has undermined democracy, doesn't mean the effects are permanent.

"There's just no question that what we're seeing is the authoritarian playbook," said Nyhan, "but there's no guarantee that Trump will be able to operate this way after the midterms, let alone a successor after 2028."

 Yana Gorokhovskaia, director for strategy and design for Freedom House, says some of Trump's policies abroad also are undermining the country's democratic standing overseas.

For instance, the State Department often used to call out election fraud in other countries, but under Trump, it has said it will only comment on foreign elections when the U.S. has a clear and compelling interest.

"What we're losing is democratic solidarity globally," Gorokhovskaia said. "We're no longer emphasizing ... a distinction between democracies and autocracies in the world."

 That doesn't mean the U.S. doesn't take sides in foreign elections. Just last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly endorsed Orbán, Hungary's autocratic leader, for a fifth term.