May 11: What Really Happened Last Week X 5 New Books for Mother's Day

I'm trying something new with this post!

Truth Demands by Abby Reyes

Hello friends!

I’m a journalist with two decades of experience. Since Trump’s second inauguration I’ve been sending you a weekly, highly curated list of top stories, bright spots, and action steps, helping you navigate the mayhem, focusing on the topics of this newsletter: caregiving, youth, climate change, human rights, mental health. I do NOT cover pseudo-events or speculation, only real events with real impact on real people.

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This week, in addition to my 5 top stories, there’s a bonus: a roundup of new books people have sent my way recently, that I think are likely to appeal to readers of this newsletter.

Here’s my criteria for this news roundup:

• Real events that have real consequences for real people now.

• I’m trying to avoid pseudo-events, purely symbolic gestures, speculation, and things where everyone for some reason needs to have a take. (Yes, we have a new pope. I don’t have a take on the new pope.)

• I am presenting impacts alongside responses and solutions.

• I want to model healthy, balanced news consumption. I don’t know that I can become the only news you read, but I can at least point the way to a better news habit. I believe this is going to be crucial to our mental health and our ability to show up for others, including our kids, in this accelerating polycrisis.

In this Issue:

1. The military resumes open discrimination

2.Everything DOGE is stealing

3.Two nuclear powers attack each other

4.A new CO2 record

5. Good News/Wild Cards

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0. ICE arrests The Mayor of New Jersey

He was not protesting, he was conducting oversight.

1. The military resumes open discrimination

Women were allowed to openly serve in the military as of WWI. The first woman general was Anna Mae Hayes in 1970.

President Harry S Truman officially racially desegregated the US military 77 years ago.

The discriminatory, and frankly ludicrous “don’t ask, don’t tell,” restriction on LGBT servicemembers was repealed only in 2011. But it did give us a gift: a new word in the lexicon for a certain kind of tolyamory.

Now the Supreme Court has blessed Trump’s war on trans people, so we’re taking a giant step backward as a nation.

The Pentagon is removing the 1,000 members of the military who openly identify as trans, and giving those who have yet to openly identify as transgender 30 days to remove themselves, according to a new directive issued on Thursday.

Related: The National Institutes of Health is requiring grantees to comply with another of Trump’s anti-trans executive orders.

2. Everything DOGE is stealing

Here is a live tracker of deaths due to termination of USAID and similar programs. Almost 200,000 dead children.

“The ‘world's richest man [is] killing the world's poorest children,’ according to Bill Gates, a previous world’s richest man.