Maria Thompson

Heartbreaking description of the pointless, thoughtless damage being done to the Kennedy Center. It was such an important part of life in Washington, and is now being destroyed for no reason theatlantic.com/culture/2026/0…

I don't know how else to say this, so I'll just say it plainly. We are at Code Red. If this administration is not put in check soon, everything that makes America beautiful is at risk of irreversible damage. He is stealing, leasing and depleting our protected lands. He won't stop. Protecting our National Parks, U.S. national forests, and the majestic Arctic Refuge should not be a partisan issue. Once these lands are destroyed, they are gone forever. Future generations will never know or experience them. The wildlife that lives off them will not survive. One man should not hold this power over the future of all Americans. Call your Senators and ask them to protect our public lands and national forests. Make it clear you will not support the reelection of a representative who votes to mine, drill, or log on our protected lands. Code Red.

#BREAKING: Lawrence: “…deeply sickening news today that @RobertKennedyJr said two years ago, that if he were elected president, he would rip EVERY Black child…out of the arms of that child’s mother or father and take that child away to a federal government facility that he would create so that every Black child would then ‘get reparented.’ That was his Nazi name for his idea about Black children in America. That every one of them needed to be reparented by someone other than their parents, who RFK Jr would choose…”😳

They spent all week saying they wouldn’t renew Russia’s sanctions waiver, then they did exactly that late Friday evening. Go figure.

Elise Bennett of the Center for Biological Diversity writes about an Endangered Species Act exemption being granted for Gulf oil drilling: "It’s time we make it clear that our living coastlines and beautiful waters are not for sale to oil companies." theinvadingsea.com/2026/04/13/gul…

ICE acting director Todd Lyons resigned yesterday. The same day he testified before Congress requesting $8.2 billion more. Today, AP revealed thousands of his 12,000 new hires weren’t fully vetted before hitting the streets. What those hires looked like, per AP: A deputy who falsified a police report to jail an innocent woman. A man with two bankruptcies and 6 law enforcement jobs in 3 years. Someone who washed out of the police academy. DHS handed them badges before background checks cleared. 1/2

It is becoming more apparent that a main goal of the Trump administration is to destabilize Europe and NATO while supporting Russia. This is a total reversal of previous administrations. The question that needs to be asked and answered is Why.

Sean Hannity called himself “uniquely qualified” to lecture Pope Leo XIV on the Bible Thursday night. Hannity called the U.S.-born pontiff a “run-of-the-mill Trump-hating Democrat that lacks moral clarity about radical Islam.” Pope Leo XIV holds four degrees and a doctorate in canon law from the world’s most prestigious Catholic university. Hannity is a three-time college dropout who publicly quit the Catholic Church. thelettersfromleo.com/p/im-uniquely-…

There is no good explanation for this Administration to quietly lift sanctions on Russia late on a Friday night. Congress and the American people need immediate answers. We must not help Russia fund its illegal war in Ukraine and aid Iranian attacks on American troops.

@worldbelongs1 @forallcurious Here's the official NASA page on Voyager 1's current status and position. It notes that the spacecraft "closes in on one light-day later this year" (2026): science.nasa.gov/mission/voyage… You can also track it live via NASA's Eyes on the Solar System tool linked there.

In November, a NASA spacecraft that has been drifting through space since 1977 will be so far from Earth that light itself takes a full day to reach it. Send it a message on Monday morning, you won't hear back until Wednesday. It's called Voyager 1. For more than 45 years it has been gliding at 38,000 miles an hour on a straight line out of our solar system. It has not adjusted course since 1980. Every year it loses about 4 watts of power from the small chunks of plutonium that keep it warm and transmitting. It's like your phone's battery shrinking a little each year, except the spacecraft weighs as much as a small car and nobody can walk over to plug it in. The whole spacecraft runs on 69KB of computer memory. That is less than a single photo on your phone, and its signal home crawls back at 160 bits per second, slower than dial-up internet from the 1990s. A modern smartphone has roughly 175,000 times more memory than the computer that left Earth before most people alive today were born. NASA built it to last five years. The original mission ended at Saturn in 1980. Everything after that, leaving our solar system in 2012 to become the most distant object humanity has ever built, was a bonus. The plutonium core will probably run out around 2036. That gives us maybe a decade of data from a place no other machine will reach in our lifetime. Then the radio goes quiet for good. Bolted to its side is a gold-plated copper disc carrying 116 images, 90 minutes of music from around the world, natural sounds of Earth, and greetings in 55 languages. In about 40,000 years it will drift within 1.6 light-years of a small red star called Gliese 445. If anyone ever finds it, nobody we know will be alive to hear about it.

President Trump's proposed budget sets the stage for the killing of tens of thousands of wild horses and burros or selling them to “kill buyers” for slaughter. Congress stopped this last year, and we are urging lawmakers once again to protect these amazing animals. humaneaction.org/blog/2026/04/p…

@RepPeteStauber The vast majority of Minnesotans opposed this. You sold out your constituents for a foreign mining company. The BWCA is one of the most pristine ecosystems in the country. Hope that lobby money is good. Future generations, including your own children, bear the consequences.

As loved ones mourn Dr. Cerina Wanzer Fairfax, many are reflecting on the life she built: a dentist, entrepreneur, mother and advocate whose identity reached far beyond her husband’s political career. Read more #OnTheGrio thegrio.com/2026/04/17/dr-…

This doofus sold out Minnesota to a foreign polluter to rip up the forest and mine 2 miles from this. Don’t ever forget it. South Kawishiwi River, near Ely Minnesota

Trump’s latest move is a direct attack on America’s public lands — shutting down offices and gutting protections across 193 million acres. This cannot stand. Congress must stop this illegal destruction of our forests today. #VoteYesForVirginiaLive actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-c…

The type of mining that will go next to the Boundary Waters has a near 100% water contamination rate. You have to chose between mining or the ecosystem of Northern Minnesota, literally can't have both. People choosing a mine that will ship everything to China will be responsible.

On this day 56 years ago, three men fell from the sky in a freezing, half-dead spacecraft and landed in the Pacific Ocean. They had been given almost no chance of coming home alive. Six days earlier, astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise launched on Apollo 13, heading for the Moon. Two days into the flight, 200,000 miles from Earth, an oxygen tank exploded and tore a hole in the side of their ship. Within minutes, they were losing oxygen, losing power, and losing heat. There was no plan for this. No one had trained for it. The Moon landing was abandoned. The only question now was whether three men could survive long enough to get home. Their main ship was dying, so they climbed into a smaller attached craft that was only designed to land on the Moon. It was built for two people for two days. They had to make it last four days for three. The temperature inside dropped to 3 degrees Celsius. Water droplets covered every surface. They rationed drinking water to six ounces per man per day, less than a single cup. Jim Lovell lost 14 pounds in four days. Then the air started going bad. The filters that clean carbon dioxide from the air were running out. Without new ones, the crew would suffocate. The spare filters from the main ship were the wrong shape. Square filters. Round slots. Engineers on the ground grabbed the same materials the astronauts had on board, plastic bags, cardboard, duct tape, and a sock, and built a makeshift adapter on a desk. Then they talked the crew through building an identical one while floating in zero gravity, 200,000 miles away. It worked. To get home, they had to swing around the far side of the Moon and fire their engine at the exact right second. Too steep and they would burn up entering Earth’s atmosphere. Too shallow and they would bounce off it and drift into space forever. The entire world stopped. Over 40 million people watched on television. The Pope led prayers from the Vatican. On April 17, 1970, the spacecraft hit the atmosphere. For four minutes, all radio contact went silent. The heat of re-entry surrounds a spacecraft in a layer of superheated gas that blocks all signals. Controllers on the ground called out. Nothing. The silence stretched past the expected time. One minute late. Still nothing. At one minute and 28 seconds past the deadline, a voice broke through. The parachutes opened. The capsule hit the water. All three men were alive. They never reached the Moon. But the mission became the greatest rescue in the history of space travel. It proved that the most dangerous moment in any journey is not the one you prepare for. It is the one nobody saw coming. Jim Lovell never flew in space again. He never walked on the Moon. Years later, when asked if he considered himself unlucky, he said: “I think of the crew of Apollo 1, who died in a fire before they ever left the ground. I think of the crews who never got to fly at all. No, I regard Apollo 13 as a triumph.”

A grieving widow gets slammed with an $80,000 medical bill after her husband dies from cancer. His chemo treatments, scans, and the entire plan had been pre-approved by the insurance company before he even started. But once he passes away, the insurer does a retroactive review and suddenly denies the whole claim as “not medically necessary.” Now the wife is left holding the massive bill. A social worker calls the insurance rep and calmly presses them: nothing about the patient, diagnosis, or treatment changed, the only thing that changed was the cost once the patient was gone. He demands the exact clinical policy and rationale for the reversal, pointing out that this feels a lot more like a financial decision than a medical one. Who believes legislation needs to be passed to make it illegal for insurance companies to deny claims after they’ve already been approved and treatment is done?

RIP. One of the nation's most beautiful wilderness areas.