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For Immediate Release
November, 15 2022, 10:04am EDT
Contact:
Kelley Dennings, KDennings@biologicaldiversity.org
8 Billion People on Earth Crowding Out Imperiled Animals, Plants
Global Population Passes 8 Billion As Species Face Mass Extinction
TUSCON, Ariz.
The world population hit 8 billion people today, accelerating the global extinction crisis for animals and plants imperiled by population growth’s effects on habitat, water, air, and other natural resources.
“It’s impossible to ignore how our growing population and the consumption of high-wealth countries has increased pressure on the natural world that sustains us,” said Kelley Dennings, population and sustainability campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’re in the middle of the planet’s sixth mass wildlife extinction, and it’s driven by human activity. Advancing reproductive rights, gender equity, and education is important for people and helps the planet too.”
In the past 50 years, global human population has doubled and wildlife populations have dropped by 70%. We are currently on track to lose 1 million species to extinction in the coming decades, a loss of intrinsic value that also affects human health and livelihoods. Meanwhile 257 million people around the world face an unmet need for modern contraception and are not fully empowered with the education and healthcare they need to ensure their reproductive freedom.
“Humanity’s fate and the fate of the planet are intertwined. We need to ensure a safe, healthy and habitable planet for all species, including our own,” said Dennings. “Until all people are empowered with access to reproductive healthcare and can make the choice about when or if to have children, we will struggle to create a world where all life on Earth can thrive.”
The Center just released a report on 10 U.S. species that are threatened by our increasingly crowded planet. Species like the Florida panther, monarch butterfly and Carolina madtom are rapidly losing habitat as the human population expands, while others are seeing their habitat dangerously altered by pollution, drought, logging and fragmentation.
The Center’s Population and Sustainability program advocates for a range of ethical, common-sense solutions like universal access to family planning and reproductive health services as well as education, opportunity and equal rights for women, girls, and gender-diverse people.
At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.
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'Families Shouldn’t Pay the Price' for Monopolies: Mamdani Pushes Regulators to Reject Western Union Merger
The proposed deal "would represent a direct wealth transfer—one that would further strain the already challenging economic circumstances facing New York City’s immigrant communities," said the city's mayor.
May 14, 2026
With the Trump administration refusing to take substantive antitrust action—reaching a recent deal with a meat company accused of price fixing and settling a Biden-era lawsuit that accused Live Nation of monopolizing live entertainment—New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is using his influential position to urge the blocking of a corporate merger that he says would harm working families across the city.
Mamdani wrote to the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) late last month, outlets are reporting this week, urging the state financial regulator to block Western Union's $500 million merger with International Money Express, or Intermex.
With 4.5 million users, Intermex has a small fraction of Western Union's customer base of 150 million people who use wire transfer services. But Mamdani wrote that over the past decade the smaller company has "nearly tripled its share of remittances sent from the United States"—transfers of money that immigrants send back to their families in their home countries.
"In the US-to-Ecuador and US-to-Nicaragua corridors, Intermex’s market shares are 34% and 36%, respectively," wrote the mayor, showing that it is "winning customers away from Western Union, the historic market leader."
With immigrants increasingly using remittances to secure financial stability in case they are swept up in the Trump administration's mass deportation operation, "remittances are a crucial lifeline for New Yorkers and their communities abroad," wrote Mamdani.
On social media Thursday, Mamdani added that "families shouldn’t pay the price for corporate monopolies."
He told DFS that maintaining competition between providers of the service keeps prices for families "more competitive, encourages compliance with relevant consumer protection and disclosure requirements, and incentivizes reliability."
"The proposed merger would change that. By eliminating competition between Western Union and Intermex, the deal could lead to
higher fees (including those the businesses may fail to disclose), disadvantageous rates, worse terms, poorer service, and other impacts to these communities," wrote Mamdani, who has centered his agenda as mayor on making New York City more affordable for working families. "In short, it would represent a direct wealth transfer—one that would further strain the already challenging economic circumstances facing New York City’s immigrant communities."
The mayor noted that immigrants' access to affordable remittance services are already under threat, after the Republican Party's One Big Beautiful Bill Act imposed a 1% excise tax on cash remittance transactions.
"Now, this merger threatens to impose a new private tax on these same remittances, in the form of higher, supracompetitive prices that will flow directly to Western Union’s corporate coffers," said Mamdani.
Responding to the mayor's call for the merger to be blocked, Western Union claimed in a statement to DFS this week that the companies, should they be permitted to merge, would still provide "accessible and affordable" remittance services.
The mayor cited several US Supreme Court rulings that have found corporate mergers that would substantially lessen competition to be illegal and said that despite legal precedent, "the Trump administration has declined to challenge the merger on antitrust grounds."
"But that is not where the story ends," wrote Mamdani. "Instead, the deal still requires a series of money transmitter license approvals, including from the New York State Department of Financial Services."
"The conditions for disapproval are clearly met here," the mayor continued. "The transaction is manifestly against the public
interest, as it would lead to higher fees and worse rates for hard-working, disproportionately immigrant families, across New York City and the state—all to inflate Western Union’s balance sheet."
Semafor and The New York Times suggested that the influence of former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan may have pushed the mayor to lobby DFS to reject the merger. Khan is an outside adviser to Mamdani and served as co-chair of his transition team.
While working in the Biden administration, Khan blocked and challenged major corporate mergers including Kroger's attempt to acquire Albertsons, Meta's bid to buy virtual reality app company Within, and JetBlue's proposed merger with Spirit Airlines.
Daniel Hanley, a senior legal analyst at the anti-monopoly group Open Markets Institute applauded Mamdani's decision to wade into the debate over Western Union's proposed merger.
"State and local officials can supplement law enforcement," said Hanley, "while the federal government abdicates its fiduciary responsibilities."
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As Trump Slashes Food Aid, Sanders and Omar Lead Bill to ‘End Child Hunger in the United States’
"It is outrageous that, while the billionaire class has never had it so good, one in five children will go hungry in America this year," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
May 14, 2026
As federal food aid cuts enacted by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans wreak havoc across the US, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ilhan Omar on Wednesday led the reintroduction of legislation that would make free school meals available to every student in the country—regardless of family income.
The Universal School Meals Program Act of 2026 would offer free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack to every student—including during the summer months—without forcing parents to fill out burdensome applications proving their income level.
The legislation would also reimburse schools for unpaid school meal debt, ending "the harassment of parents and students," according to a fact sheet released by Sanders' (I-Vt.) office. Supporters say the bill, if enacted, would "end child hunger in the United States."
“It is outrageous that, while the billionaire class has never had it so good, one in five children will go hungry in America this year,” the Vermont senator said in a statement Wednesday. “The United States is the richest country in the history of the world. Nobody should be going hungry. And what we learned during the pandemic is that a universal approach to school meals works and helps kids do better in school. States across the country continue to prove this every day. It is time for Congress to reinstate universal school meals at the national level to finally ensure no student goes hungry."
Omar (D-Minn.), a leading congressional champion of universal free school meals, said that "no child should have to sit in a classroom hungry or worried about where their next meal will come from."
"As a former nutrition educator and someone who experienced hunger firsthand, this fight is deeply personal to me," said Omar. "I have always believed you must feed kids’ bellies before you can feed their brains. That is why I am proud to partner again with Bernie Sanders to introduce the Universal School Meals Program Act, which would provide free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks to students year-round. Universal school meals are not a luxury—they are a necessity.”
The updated legislation, which is backed by more than 100 lawmakers in the House and Senate, comes as Trump and the GOP's unprecedented cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) take hold nationwide, sending food bank demand surging as tens of thousands of families lose benefits. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has estimated that the SNAP cuts enacted as part of the 2025 Trump-GOP budget law would slash nutrition benefits for around a million children.
The School Nutrition Association said following passage of the Trump-GOP budget package that the law's SNAP cuts would mean that "fewer children are automatically eligible for free school meals as families lose SNAP and Medicaid benefits."
"As this bill is implemented and families lose access to food assistance through SNAP benefits, their children will also lose automatic eligibility for school meals, making access to nutrition more difficult or out of reach completely," SNA warned last summer. "Meanwhile, schools facing staff shortages and budget constraints will struggle to manage increased paperwork and application processing requirements."
Trump and Republicans are also pursuing additional food aid cuts by moving to slash funding for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) in the coming fiscal year. A recent CBPP analysis found that congressional Republicans' proposed WIC cuts would strip "fruit and vegetable benefits from nearly 5.4 million toddlers, preschoolers, and pregnant and postpartum WIC participants."
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'Rotting Fish Around Our Necks': Harris Operative Gives Inside View of Gaza's Impact on 2024 Loss
Democratic insider Rob Flaherty revealed what he told the DNC for its still-unreleased autopsy of the 2024 election.
May 14, 2026
With the Democratic National Committee rejecting demands to release its autopsy of the 2024 presidential election, one Democratic Party insider has gone public with his own take on what went wrong.
In a lengthy analysis published by The Bulwark on Thursday, Rob Flaherty, former deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris' 2024 presidential campaign, revealed what he told DNC officials when they interviewed him for their post-election report.
Flaherty identified multiple problems with the Democrats' 2024 effort, one of them being President Joe Biden's support for Israel's assault on Gaza that has killed at least 72,000 Palestinians.
While Flaherty didn't say Gaza single-handedly cost Harris the election, he said it cast a dark shadow over the entire campaign.
"For many voters watching the horrific, painful footage out of Gaza, it became a moral question—one we didn’t have a good answer for," Flaherty said. "In ways that may not be reflected in a poll, it meaningfully reduced enthusiasm."
The Democratic insider then quoted another campaign official who told him that Biden's Gaza policy was "a giant, rotting fish around our necks" throughout the entire election.
Flaherty put the blame for this squarely on Biden, whom he said "misread the nation’s support for Israel as an endless, fixed object, and missed how much the ongoing visuals were seeping into the public consciousness."
He also predicted that Israeli brutality in the Gaza assault would permanently change the Democratic Party's stance toward Israel, even among traditionally pro-Israel Democrats.
"Senators who would never have considered it in years past are now signing on to the [Sen. Bernie] Sanders (I-Vt.) resolution to block offensive military aid to Israel," Flaherty noted. "Rahm Emanuel of all people is raising doubts about funding the Iron Dome. But we were seeing this emerge on the ground during the campaign. My hot take is that the eventual Democratic nominee in 2028 will support conditions on aid to Israel in one way or another."
While Gaza certainly cost Democrats in 2024, Flaherty argued an even bigger issue was the party's economic message, as voters simply did not believe that Harris would deliver meaningful change from the status quo overseen by Biden.
"In a country fervently pissed off at the status quo and with Biden’s numbers being what they were," he contended, "anyone from the Biden administration would have lost."
In contrast, Flaherty said, "Trump’s message was much clearer: 'The economy feels bad and Harris says it’s good,'" which he noted was "tough to argue with."
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