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In a perhaps unprecedented dark time for America and the world, let us take solace in our indomitable Dear Stable Genius, who remains unwaveringly focused on taking care of shiny business: Gold social security cards like Elvis, a $400 million, lopsided shed/ballroom with gaudy columns but no main entrance, and of course gold toilets - which all keeps him so busy he hardly has time to threaten Iran with war crimes. What a time to be alive, barely.
In actual good news, No Kings Day 3.0 drew between 8 and 12 million people, thus hovering tantalizingly close to the 3.5% of a nation's populace historically required to overthrow an authoritarian regime. So good work, patriots. The over 3,000 protests, aka per Mike Johnson "Hate America rallies," ranged from Alaska's Utqiaġvik, the country's northernmost city (7 people) to Ele'ele, Kaua'i, the westernmost, from over 100,000 in New York City to nine stalwarts on Maine's Monhegan Island. Thousands of Trump's neighbors in Palm Beach turned out, ending with a twilight march to Mar-A-Lago, or as close as they could get.
Their signs were brutal: "Elect A Rapist, Expect To Get Fucked. How Many Deaths For the Epstein War? Worst President Since Trump. Criminals Belong Behind Bars, Free Balls for Members of Congress Who Lost Them, Trump Rapes Kids, Impeach Pedolf Shitler, Putin's Bitch, The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived. According to The Borowitz Report, Trump, furious about the large protests, argued they'd be much smaller if you subtract all Elon Musk's kids there because they hate him: "People are saying their number (was) much higher than 400, thousands, maybe millions. You take away Elon’s kids and almost no one was there."
There were also "half-dozens to dozens of Americans" at One King co unter-protests, reports The Fucking News, who put the number at "many-ish...Organizers say there were barely any organizers," with attendees ranging from "a tiny number of young people to a die-hard faction of dying people." In Palm Beach, one man carried a heavy sign that read, "Deport the white liberals"; masked to protect himself "against the vindictive left," he said he left soon after he was "attacked" by a woman who denied touching him; her comrades said the guy just dropped his sign "because he was too weak to carry it."
Their small numbers did face competition from "the incredible shrinking CPAC," also meeting that day in Grapevine, Texas with a turnout of "barely thousands." Once a MAGA "center of political gravity," this year's event drew neither Trumps nor presidential candidates. One possible ick factor: MC was (still) CPAC chair Matt Schlapp, who in 2024 settled a pricey sexual misconduct lawsuit from a guy working on Hershel Walker’s (LOL) Senate campaign, who charged Schlapp groped him. The event did boast Todd Chrisley, a reality TV star doing 12 years in prison for massive fraud till Trump pardoned him. Here’s his welcome.
There was also a big contingent of South Korean “stop the steal” activists and supporters of former president Yoon Suk Yeol, impeached last year and now serving life in prison for insurrection. Still, the whole thing was a bit of a slog. Organizers tried to jazz up session subjects - a panel titled "Fraud" became “Ilhan Omar ‘Family’ Values"; Mercedes Schlapp beseeched factions not to "divide from within," which is how you divide; and when Schlapp asked them, the clueless CPAC "crowdette" mistakenly, hilariously cheered the prospect of impeachment proceedings by what could be a newly-Democratic-controlled House. SAD!
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Poor deplorable MAGA. Maybe they're disheartened by Trump's well-deserved plunging approval rating, now at barely 33%. Maybe it's because their regime is such a half-assed shitshow and their people are such self-serving, hypocritical dickwads. As in: Amidst a government shutdown that's seen TSA agents (starting salary $34,454) compelled to work without pay as Congress takes a two-week recess (pay over $170,000) on the taxpayers' dime, TMZ urged readers to send in photos of vacationing pols, and here comes Lindsey Graham at Disney World, “The Most Magical Place On Earth," gaily twirling a Little Mermaid bubble wand yet. America and Megyn Kelly: WTF.
Or maybe it's because Commander-In-Chief Private Bonespurs started another forever quagmire without legal or political justification, and it turns out wars in the Middle East are hard and complex and above his pay grade - like health care! - to solve, and now with no good options he's spewing up only staggering incoherence for strategy, like hailing "great progress" in imaginary "serious discussions" while pivoting to rabidly threatening to "conclude our lovely 'stay’ in Iran" by "obliterating" their civilian infrastructure, electricity, energy and drinking water, which is a war crime. But talks are going “unbelievably well."

Anyway, his true passion is turning every crass, stupid thing he or Elvis can think of fake gold like the Oval bordello and even Social Security cards, and slathering his repulsive name on structures, coins, currency, and building trashy, illegal monuments to himself like an obscene, unapproved, un-permitted, $400 million ballroom twice the size of the White House, because, "They’ve always wanted a ballroom," except now it's suddenly, "essentially a shed for what goes under it," a massive military complex, presumably a bunker where, as merciful history would have it, he'll finally free us of him, "and we're doing it very well."
He's so ballroom-enraptured that on Air Force One he just pulled out a swath of drawings to show reporters, explaining, "I thought I’d do this now because it’s easier. I’m so busy...fighting wars and other things." Quick mindless pivot to "hand-carved, beautiful, Corinthian columns" - "Corinthian wut" - he's also reportedly re-imagining for the White House facade, a change deemed "at odds with universally held historic preservation standards." Same, experts say of "barely scrutinized" ballroom plans, "riddled with design flaws" - disproportionate, pillars block windows, grand staircase to nowhere. WH lackey on "the best builder in the world": "The American people can rest well knowing this project is in his hands.” We feel better already.

And then there's his new gold toilet, mounted on a 10-foot throne near the Lincoln Memorial. The new masterwork of Secret Handshake (Best Friends Forever), it celebrates the renovation of the White House Lincoln Bedroom bathroom, all in gold, and "what this President has actually accomplished." The toilet's plaque reads, “In a time of unprecedented division, escalating conflict, and economic turmoil, President Trump focused on what truly mattered: remodeling the Lincoln Bathroom....This, his crowning achievement, is a bold reminder that (he) isn’t just a businessman, he’s taking care of business. It stands as a tribute to an unwavering visionary who looked down, saw a problem, and painted it gold.”

A month after President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced what they celebrated as the "single largest deregulatory action in US history," a coalition of over 160 civil rights, environmental, faith, health, and labor groups came together Tuesday to call for the EPA chief's ouster.
Zeldin was confirmed by Senate Republicans and a trio of Democrats just over a week after Trump returned to power in January 2025. The "Game Over Zeldin" coalition, led by the Climate Action Campaign (CAC) and Moms Clean Air Force, argued in an open letter that no other EPA administrator "in history—Democratic or Republican—has so brazenly betrayed the agency's core mission" to "protect human health and the environment."
"Zeldin has dismantled protections that keep our kids, families, and climate safe, and our air and water clean," the letter notes. "He slashed vital funding, gutted agency staff, and has rigged the system to put corporate polluters first, at the expense of our health. Zeldin's EPA has rejected science and health data—and is refusing to count the value of human lives and health—in order to erode commonsense public health safeguards. He has decimated environmental justice programs and hard-fought progress—entirely eliminating the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights."
Dominique Browning, director and co-founder of Moms Clean Air Force, pointed out in a Tuesday statement that "in just the past few months, he has supported the Trump administration in using taxpayer money to prop up the coal industry; he has made it easier for polluters to spew mercury—a potent neurotoxin that damages the developing brains of babies—into our air and waterways; and he has rolled back the endangerment finding in an attempt to sabotage EPA's ability to cut climate pollution."
The 2009 endangerment finding underpins all federal climate policy. David Arkush of the watchdog Public Citizen—which is also part of the diverse coalition behind the new letter—warned at the time that if allowed to stand, the repeal "will hamstring the government's ability to combat the most terrible environmental threat in human history, harming Americans and the world for decades to come."
Young Americans and a coalition of environmental and public health organizations swiftly filed a pair of lawsuits over the rollback. Another group of 24 states, joined by various US cities and counties, sued last week. The most recent filing is expected to be consolidated with the first coalition's case, according to The New York Times, "making for one of the largest legal challenges to date against the Trump administration's unraveling of federal climate policy."
The new letter stresses the consequences of that unraveling, stating that "because of Zeldin's directives, we will suffer more health-damaging air pollution and be exposed to more toxic chemicals in our homes, in our food, in our products, and in our water. Zeldin's rollbacks will lead to more carbon dioxide and methane pollution that will contribute to worsening climate disasters."
"Families across the country, whether rural or urban, are already struggling with the consequences of Zeldin's actions," the letter adds. "The damage he is doing will span generations. Zeldin is deepening environmental injustices and will leave a terrible legacy for our children and grandchildren."
We refuse to stay silent while Lee Zeldin treats our lives like a line item to be deleted. The EPA is for the people, not polluters. His time is up; Lee Zeldin must go. #GameOverZeldin www.gameoverzeldin.com
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— Physicians for Social Responsibility - National (@psr.org) March 24, 2026 at 12:12 PM
CAC director Margie Alt declared Tuesday that "the wreckage of Lee Zeldin's EPA will be measured in lives lost, jobs destroyed, the costs of illnesses that could have been prevented, and communities devastated. We will be paying the price for decades to come."
"Zeldin ignored science as well as the legal and moral precedent," she said. "Instead, he looked at the numbers and made a choice: He decided that corporate bottom lines matter more than our lives. He decided you and your family are expendable. After a year on the job, it is clear that Zeldin is either unable or unwilling to uphold his oath of office or the EPA's fundamental mission. So let us be clear: Our lives are not expendable. Our health is not expendable. Our climate is not expendable. Lee Zeldin must go."
Other organizations that signed on to the letter include Beyond Plastics, Cherokee Concerned Citizens, Clean Air Council, Clean Water Action, Climate Hawks Vote, Earthjustice, Environmental Working Group, Environmental Protection Network, GreenLatinos, Indivisible Action Coalition, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Service Employees International Union, Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and more.
"Administrator Zeldin's established pattern of placing polluter profits above the health and safety of people across the country cannot stand," said UCS president and CEO Gretchen Goldman. "The science establishing harm to human health and the environment from global warming emissions is undeniable. The unprecedented, climate-fueled heatwave a large swath of the United States has been experiencing is only the latest example."
"The public deserves an EPA administrator who will face the challenge of the climate crisis and fossil fuel and toxics pollution head on with proven policy solutions," she argued, "not actively serve as an agent of destruction beholden to the whims of oil, gas, and chemical industry executives and an authoritarian, anti-science US president."
The richest 0.1% of people on Earth are hiding more than $2.8 trillion in offshore accounts to avoid taxes. That money alone is more wealth than is owned by the entire bottom half of humanity, more than 4.1 billion people.
These findings were published in a report released Thursday by Oxfam International on the 10th anniversary of the 2016 Panama Papers, which provided an unprecedented look at how the world's most powerful capitalists, financiers, political leaders, celebrities, and criminals exploited offshore tax havens to stash their money.
"Ten years on, the superrich are still sequestering oceans of wealth in offshore vaults,” said Christian Hallum, Oxfam International’s tax lead.
The percentage of untaxed wealth in offshore accounts has dropped in the past 10 years, in large part due to global reforms like the adoption of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Automatic Exchange of Information framework (AEOI), which allows revenue authorities around the world to easily share information and crack down on cheats.
However, many nations in the Global South are excluded from this system, even though they need the tax revenue the most.
Oxfam found that a staggering $3.5 trillion, more than 3.2% of the global gross domestic product, still remains in untaxed accounts. That's more than the entire GDP of France and is more than twice the combined wealth of the world's 44 poorest nations.
And while the percentage of untaxed wealth is shrinking, that doesn't mean inequality has shrunk.
On the contrary, the December 2025 "World Inequality Report" found that the richest 0.001% of humanity—fewer than 60,000 multimillionaires and billionaires—now have three times as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population combined.
Inequality has surged around the world in part due to taxation policies and pandemic recovery packages that overwhelmingly favor the rich. The most glaring was adopted in the world's financial hub, the United States, last year.
The megabudget passed by Republicans and signed into law by President Donald Trump handed a $1 trillion tax cut to America's wealthiest 1% while slashing more than $1 trillion in spending from Medicaid, food assistance, and other safety net programs. It has been described by some economists as the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history.
While the global top 0.1% holds about 80% of untaxed offshore wealth, an even smaller group of uber-wealthy individuals does most of the cheating. The world's richest 0.01%, who hold at least $50 million apiece, control about half of all money in global tax shelters—$1.7 trillion.
According to the Tax Justice Network's Corporate Tax Haven Index, Caribbean islands under UK ownership, including the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, and Bermuda, are among the worst offenders. Other notable tax havens include Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, and the Netherlands.
A February Oxfam report on Elon Musk, who is well on his way to becoming the world's first trillionaire, found that his company, Tesla—which managed to pay zero dollars on its $2.3 billion income in 2024—has not published a country-by-country report on its taxes and that it has subsidiaries in many countries considered to be tax havens.
Big Pharma companies, including AbbVie and Merck, also used tax shelters to lower their total tax expense in 2025 by more than $1 billion, according to a report released earlier this month by the Financial Accountability & Corporate Transparency Coalition.
"This isn’t just about clever accounting—it’s about power and impunity," Hallum said. "When millionaires and billionaires stash trillions of dollars in offshore tax havens, they place themselves above the obligations that bind the rest of society."
"The consequences are as predictable as they are devastating," he continued. "We see our public hospitals and schools starved of funds, our social fabric shredded by rising inequality, and ordinary people forced to shoulder the costs of a system rigged to enrich a tiny few.”
Even a fraction of the money currently stashed away by the world's wealthiest could alleviate untold amounts of suffering.
In November, the United Nations' World Food Program estimated that extreme hunger, which currently affects more than 318 million people around the world, could be eradicated by 2030 with investments of about $93 billion per year, but that global hunger programs instead remain “slow, fragmented, and underfunded."
According to a 2021 UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report, investments of around $114 billion per year would similarly be enough to ensure that everyone on Earth has access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
Oxfam called on governments around the world to increase coordination to prevent the wealthy from hiding their riches from tax authorities. It also urged them to adopt more aggressive policies to tax the 1%'s wealth at home, including taxes on income and on extreme wealth.
As Maine's US Senate primary draws near, Democratic Gov. Janet Mills has gone negative—focusing on online posts that her rival, political newcomer Graham Platner, wrote more than a decade ago.
But with poll after poll showing Platner beating the governor by double digits—and with the gap getting larger with each attack ad Mills releases—Platner this week turned his attention away from the primary race altogether, releasing an ad focusing on Republican Sen. Susan Collins, whom the Democrats are hoping to unseat next November.
In a one-minute ad released online Tuesday evening, Platner is seen in black and white at one of the many rallies he's held across Maine since launching his campaign last August, where he's spoken in support of Medicare for All, condemned President Donald Trump's mass deportation campaign and war in Iran, and spoken out against oligarchy.
Collins, Platner tells the audience in the ad, "is the epitome of the establishment politician who serves the donors and serves herself, who is cynical and duplicitous, who's willing to say one thing and do another."
"We had to shed her from our politics. Quite frankly, we have to shed all the people like her," Platner continues as a musician plays the labor movement anthem, "Which Side Are You On?"
We need to defeat Susan Collins. That work can’t wait until June. So we plan to make clear to Mainers starting today: Susan Collins is not on our side.
Every dollar you donate to the ActBlue link in the reply will go directly behind this ad, to taking back this Senate seat. pic.twitter.com/djyuwSHfiI
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) March 31, 2026
While Platner addresses the crowd, text appears on screen:
"Collins raked in Wall Street cash before advancing Trump tax bill," it reads at one point, referring to the $2 million donation Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman gave to the senator's super political action committee (PAC) one day before she voted to advance President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which contained tax cuts for the rich as it slashed public programs like Medicaid and federal food assistance.
"Collins accepts thousands from insurers while health costs soar," the text continues, citing a Maine Beacon article about $120,000 in campaign donations from PACs associated with for-profit health insurance companies—"the same companies now raising premiums on Mainers by as much as 23% in 2026."
"Collins expresses support for Trump's war in Iran," the text reads at another point, regarding the senator's comment last month that Trump has "inherent abilities as commander-in-chief to react" to what he claimed was a threat posed by Iran when he began attacking the country along with Israel.
A poll released by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research last week showed nearly 6-in-10 Americans say the war has gone too far. Fifty-six percent of respondents to a Data for Progress survey last month said the war would benefit Israel more than the US, and this week two polls found a majority of Jewish Americans oppose the war.
"We need to defeat Susan Collins. That work can’t wait until June," said Platner on Tuesday, referring to the June 9 primary. "So we plan to make clear to Mainers starting today: Susan Collins is not on our side."
The ad was released as the latest polling from Impact Research found 66% of likely Democratic primary voters backing Platner, with just 28% supporting the governor.
That poll bolsters other recent surveys that have found Platner with a commanding lead, including at least one other that was taken after Mills launched her first negative ad against her opponent. A second ad was released days later, focusing on the same subject matter: comments Platner made on Reddit in 2013 about sexual assault survivors, which the candidate has said don't represent his current views.
"Janet Mills going negative backfired," said Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, "which doesn’t bode well for Collins either."
Police in Paris apprehended and briefly detained European Parliament Member Rima Hassan Thursday on suspicion of "apology for terrorism"—an allegation critics slammed as "judicial harassment" aimed at silencing her outspoken criticism of Israel's genocidal war on Gaza and the French government's support for it.
Hassan, who represents the leftist La France Insoumise (LFI, or France Unbowed in English) party in the European Parliament, was summoned as part of an investigation by the National Center for Combating Online Hate (PNLH), Le Parisiene first reported.
The newspaper also reported that "a few grams" of a synthetic drug—possibly 3-MMC—were found on Hassan, allegations that sparked skeptical reactions.
PNLH is probing a since-deleted March 26 post on the social media site X in which Hassan referred to Kōzō Okamoto, a member of the Japanese Red Army who, along with two others, killed 26 people and wounded 80 more in the name of Palestinian liberation during a 1972 massacre at Lod Airport in Israel.
Hassan, a descendant of Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their homeland during the foundation of the modern Israeli state, was born in a refugee camp in Syria and emigrated to France as a child.
The Sorbonne-educated jurist was one of the leaders of the June 2025 Gaza Freedom Flotilla Madleen mission, along with climate campaigner Greta Thunberg and others. Hassan and others aboard the Madleen were intercepted by Israeli forces and arrested in international waters as they attempted to deliver food, children’s prosthetics, and other desperately needed supplies to Gaza’s besieged and starving people. Hassan said that she was beaten in Israeli custody.
While far-right and pro-Israel French lawmakers celebrated Hassan's detention and called for her to be stripped of parliamentary immunity, Palestine defenders condemned the arrest.
"Once again, the offense of glorifying terrorism is being used to repress a Palestinian activist known worldwide for her fight against genocide," said leftist lawyer Elsa Marcel. "While Israel bombs Iran and Lebanon and colonization accelerates in the West Bank, the French state continues to repress the voices fighting for the liberation of Palestine. Immediate release!"
LFI French National Assembly Member Gabrielle Cathala voiced her "full support for Rima Hassan" in a post on X.
"In violation of her parliamentary immunity, she is currently being held in custody for a simple tweet that had nothing to do with 'apology for terrorism,'" she wrote. "This judicial harassment must stop."
"If this is already happening, just imagine what would occur in the event of a vote on the Yadan Law," Cathala added, referring to a highly controversial bill critics say would criminalize anti-Zionism by conflating opposition to Israel with animus toward Jewish people, aligning with the dubious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism.
Soutien à ma camarade et collègue Rima Hassan, en garde à vue pour un tweet, alors que le génocide à Gaza se poursuit et que les palestinien•nes subissent désormais un apartheid par le gouvernement d’extrême droite israélien.
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— François Piquemal (@francoispiquemal.bsky.social) April 2, 2026 at 6:51 AM
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the de facto LFI leader and a former European Parliament member, said on Bluesky: "The political police have once again summoned Rima Hassan for questioning regarding a retweet from March. Parliamentary immunity, then, no longer exists in France."
"It is intolerable," he added. "The Yadan Law was not passed—yet is it already being enforced?"
Hassan was previously summoned by authorities following a December 2024 complaint over social media posts, including one in which she asserted, “If Franco-Israelis are allowed to serve in the Israeli army while enjoying the gains of dual citizenship, every Franco-Palestinian must be able to join the Palestinian armed resistance, the legitimacy of which is recognized by [United Nations] resolutions on the right to self-determination of peoples."
Since she started speaking out against the Gaza genocide, Hasan has been subjected to online bullying, including death and rape threats and doxing.
Last week, Hassan was denied entry into Canada—where she was scheduled to speak at multiple conferences in Montréal and meet with left-wing pro-Palestine members of Québec's National Assembly—following concerns from the pro-Israel groups B’nai Brith Canada and the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs. Hassan attended the conferences remotely.
“The revocation of [Hassan's] travel authorization is part of a worrying trend of restricting freedom of expression and movement of political representatives," LFI said in a statement, "as well as part of a broader pattern of censorship affecting democratic debate."
Other Palestine defenders have been targeted by the French government, including Olivia Zemor, president of the advocacy group Europalestine, who last week was hit with a 24-month suspended sentence for "apology for terrorism" due to her support for Palestinian rights.
Greenpeace International said Monday that the MY Arctic Sunrise—one of its largest and most storied vessels—will be taking part in the upcoming Global Sumud Flotilla relaunch in order "to directly challenge Israel’s ongoing blockade of aid to Gaza."
The green group said the Arctic Sunrise, an icebreaker that's been part of Greenpeace's fleet since 1995, will be "sailing alongside more than 70 vessels and over 1,000 participants" in the second Global Sumud Flotilla, which is scheduled to set sail from Barcelona on April 12, with subsequent stops in Syracuse, Italy, and Lerapetra, Greece en route to Gaza.
Greenpeace said the Arctic Sunrise "is providing operational and technical support" for the flotilla.
“The devastation inflicted on Gaza has become a dangerous doctrine of impunity, now spreading to Lebanon through relentless destruction and deepening human suffering," Greenpeace Middle East and North Africa executive director Ghiwa Nakat said in a statement. "The Greenpeace ship is joining this people-led mission to demand safe, unhindered humanitarian access to Gaza and to challenge the illegal blockade that continues to devastate civilian life."
"We stand firmly against war crimes, deliberate starvation, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and ecocide," Nakat added. "This flotilla is a call to governments around the world to end their silence, protect humanitarian action, and act with urgency and principle to uphold international law, human dignity, and justice.”
Global Sumud Flotilla organizers said the spring 2026 mission will focus on specialized medical care, with more than 1,000 healthcare professionals aiming to deliver lifesaving medicines and equipment to Gaza, where 29 months of Israeli war and siege have left the Palestinian exclave's medical infrastructure in utter ruins.
Last year, dozens of boats carrying hundreds of activists from over 40 nations took part in the last Global Sumud Flotilla—sumud means “perseverance” in Arabic—as it attempted to break Israel’s naval blockade and deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid including food, medicines, and baby formula to starving Gazans amid a growing famine.
Israeli forces intercepted and seized the flotilla vessels in international waters in early October, arresting all aboard the boats and temporarily jailing them in Israel, where some including Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg said they were physically and psychologically abused by their captors.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition has made numerous attempts to break Israel’s blockade by sea, all of which ended in more or less the same way. In 2010, Israeli forces raided one of the first convoys carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza by sea. The Israeli attackers killed nine volunteers aboard the MV Mavi Marmara, including Turkish-American teenager Furkan Doğan.
Numerous experts and the entire United Nations Security Council except the United States have called the starvation of Gaza deliberately created by Israel, whose prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.
Israel—whose assault and siege of Gaza have left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead or wounded—is also facing a genocide case in the International Court of Justice filed by South Africa and formally supported by nearly 20 countries, including Spain, the mission's country of departure.
“At this time of escalating war, triggered by US and Israeli militaries and cascading into a cycle of destruction and pain across the Middle East, we are honored to answer the call to join the Sumud Flotilla," Greenpeace Spain executive director Eva Saldaña said Monday. "While world governments have lacked the courage and conviction to uphold international law and their obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza, the Sumud Flotilla has been a shining light of humanitarian solidarity and a symbol of hope in action.”
Global Sumud Flotilla leaders applauded Greenpeace's decision to participate in its spring mission.
“Greenpeace’s history of defending the seas, confronting injustice, and taking action in defense of life makes them a powerful addition to our 2026 spring mission," Global Sumud Flotilla Steering Committee member Susan Abdullah said Monday. "We sail together in the same direction, with a shared determination to help break Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza.”
"In every previous administration, including Trump's first, this woman would not have been a priority for enforcement," said one immigration expert.
A US Army staff sergeant saw his young wife taken away by immigration agents at his military base in Louisiana last week.
Matthew Blank, 23, who is set to begin training for deployment next month, was preparing to move into his home at the Fort Polk Army base with his 22-year-old wife, Annie Ramos, whom he married just weeks ago.
According to a report out Monday from The New York Times, Ramos is an undocumented Honduran immigrant who was brought to the United States as a toddler. She works as a Sunday school teacher and is months away from finishing a biochemistry degree. She has no criminal record.
Undocumented immigrants who marry US citizens become eligible for green cards and can apply for full citizenship three years after receiving them. Prior to their marriage, Blank and Ramos had already hired a lawyer to begin the process.
Ramos had also applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2020, but her application was never processed after the Trump administration halted it for new applicants.
Blank said he and his wife were following the procedures to get her legal status: "We were doing everything the right way.”
In the meantime, they were planning to begin their lives as newlyweds. On April 2, the couple headed to the base's visitor center to get Ramos registered for military spouse benefits.
They showed Ramos' birth certificate, Honduran passport, their marriage license, and Blank’s military ID. When asked whether Ramos had a visa or green card, they explained that she did not, but that they had completed the application and planned to file it within days. That's when the trouble began.
After the attendant made a "flurry of calls," they were told Ramos would be detained.
Soon enough, she was led away in shackles and taken more than an hour away to the privately owned South Louisiana Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Processing Center in Basile, where she waits with hundreds of other women who have been rounded up as part of President Donald Trump's mass deportation effort.
"She was going to move in after the Easter weekend," Blank said. "Instead, she got ripped away from me.”
The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement following initial reports of Ramos' arrest.
“She has no legal status to be in this country and was issued a final order of removal by a judge,” the statement read. “This administration is not going to ignore the rule of law.”
The statement also said that Ramos was arrested "after she attempted to enter a military base," seeming to imply she was in the process of illicit activity rather than there as a military spouse.
Ramos had been issued a deportation order in absentia in 2005, when she was 22 months old, after her family failed to show up for an immigration court hearing.
However, experts told the Times that it is very rare for people who have been issued prior deportation orders to be detained and that it's typically easy for them to adjust their paperwork.
"In every previous administration, including Trump's first, this woman would not have been a priority for enforcement," concurred Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, who wrote about the incident on social media.
While prior deportation orders can affect an undocumented person's ability to receive legal status, he said, "discretion is part of the enforcement of every law."
"She got a deportation order when she was a small child. It's quite possible that, like many people, she didn't even know about it. That's a common situation," he explained. "Immigration law has always involved choices about whether deportation makes sense or not."
Citing a YouGov/Economist poll from February, he noted that just 21% of Americans support deporting undocumented people brought to the US as kids, while just 16% support deporting those married to US citizens.
Contrary to previous administrations, which tended to target immigrants with criminal records and recent arrivals for deportation, around three-quarters of those currently in ICE detention have no criminal convictions, according to data published in February.
While there is no complete data on how long the average ICE detainee has lived in the US, the Deportation Data Project found that during the first nine months of the second Trump administration, the number of arrests away from the border increased by a factor of 4.6, suggesting that it was going after undocumented immigrants who have been in the US for longer periods of time.
According to Blank's parents, who were there as their son's young spouse was taken away, even the ICE agents who enforced the order to arrest Ramos did not appear proud of what they were doing.
“They told us that they didn’t have a choice, they said they had to take Annie,” recalled Blank's mother, who said the agents apologized.
“I begged them not to take her,” she said. “They said the higher-ups made them do it.”
Ramos told the Times that she knows no other home besides the United States.
"I grew up here like any American,” she said over the phone. “My husband and family are here.”
The facility where she is being held, run by GEO Group, a multibillion-dollar private prison company, has been the subject of dozens of complaints from current and former female detainees who have claimed they were denied basic medical treatment, hygiene supplies, and edible food.
Others have said they've faced sexual abuse and harassment and were subject to forced labor. In December, a former guard pleaded guilty in federal court to sexually abusing a Nicaraguan detainee in mid-2025.
Ramos' detention comes as thousands of US service members deploy to fight Trump's war in Iran. ICE has also been deployed to military bases to screen the family members of Marine recruits at their graduation as recently as last week.
Blank, who has previously been deployed to the Middle East and Europe, said he was "going to fight with everything I have" to secure his wife's freedom.
"She is going to move in with me. We will start a family," Blank said. "I am going to be with her and serve my country."
Their lawyer has petitioned the court to reopen her removal order, which could freeze her deportation. Until it is reopened, however, she could be deported at any moment.
They have also continued to push forward with the effort to get Ramos a green card. But the guards at Basile have refused to let them bring the completed forms inside to get Ramos' signature.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus said on social media that Blank "should be focused on training today," but "instead, he was forced into a fight against his own government to free his wife."
A GoFundMe campaign created by Blank's sister to pay for the legal fight has raised more than $20,000 since Saturday.
Rep. Don Beyer blamed the surge in gas prices on President Donald Trump's decision to wage "an illegal war against Iran with no plan or strategy."
As President Donald Trump continues threatening to commit war crimes in Iran by bombing power plants, Iran is signaling that it could put a further squeeze on global oil prices by shutting down yet another strait used for transporting petroleum outside the Middle East.
Ali Akbar Velayati, a former Iranian foreign minister and a top adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, threatened in a Sunday social media post to close down the Strait of Bab al-Mandeb, a waterway adjacent to the coast of Yemen that is under control of Iran-backed Houthi militants.
“If the White House dares to repeat its foolish mistakes," Velayati cautioned, "it will soon realize that the flow of global energy and trade can be disrupted with a single move."
As Al Jazeera noted in a Monday report, the Houthis already shut down the strait during Israel's war on Gaza, and doing so again at the same time Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz could send global energy prices to unprecedented highs.
"The strait is a vital route through which Saudi Arabia sends its oil to Asia," Al Jazeera reported. "If Bab al-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz were both shut, that would block 25%... of the world’s oil and gas supply."
Oil prices have shot up since Trump launched his illegal war with Iran more than a month ago, and on Monday the price of Brent crude oil futures was trading at $110 per barrel, while the average price for gas in the US rose to $4.12 per gallon, according to data from AAA.
Democratic members of the US Congress Joint Economic Committee (JEC) last week released a study estimating that, thanks to Trump's war, Americans are paying 35% more to fill up their cars than they were paying a month earlier.
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), a member of the JEC, pointed to the report in a Monday social media post and said Americans were getting hit with major price shocks because "President Trump decided to wage an illegal war against Iran with no plan or strategy."
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Ranking Member of the JEC, told WMUR that Trump's Iran war took an already bad situation for American families and made it worse.
"Families are already being pushed to the brink," Hassan said. "That was true before the war started, by the cost of everything from groceries to rent to healthcare insurance premiums and prescriptions and even more. But now they're being forced to pay more at the pump."
"The 25th Amendment exists for a reason," US Rep. Yassamin Ansari said in response to the US president's threat to bomb Iran's power plants and bridges.
US President Donald Trump on Monday defended his threat to commit grave war crimes in Iran, telling reporters at the annual Easter Egg Roll at the White House—with children in the background—that bombing the country's bridges and power plants would be justified despite warnings of "catastrophic harm" to tens of millions of civilians.
Asked how it wouldn't be a war crime for the US military to launch a large-scale assault on Iran's civilian infrastructure, Trump pointed to Iranian security forces' recent killing of protesters and called Iranian leaders "animals."
"We have to stop them, and we can't let them have a nuclear weapon," the president continued. American intelligence agencies and international watchdogs have repeatedly assessed that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons.
Watch:
Reporter: How would it not be a war crime to strike Iran’s bridges and power plants?
Trump: They’re animals. pic.twitter.com/rWrj7oeTNx
— Clash Report (@clashreport) April 6, 2026
Brian Finucane, senior adviser to the US Program at the International Crisis Group, said in response to Trump's remarks that "prior crimes against the Iranian people do not excuse fresh war crimes against the Iranian people."
Trump also told reporters, absurdly, that "the time the Iranian people are most unhappy... is when those bombs stop." US-Israeli attacks, which began in late February, have killed around 2,000 people in Iran so far and destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of civilian structures, including apartment buildings, medical facilities, and universities.
Over the weekend, Trump set new deadline of Tuesday at 8 pm ET for the total reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. If Iran doesn't agree to his administration's terms, the US president said Sunday that he is "considering blowing everything up"—a threat of indiscriminate attacks that would violate international law and kill many civilians.
"The 25th Amendment exists for a reason," US Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) wrote in response to Trump's Easter-morning threat. "The president of the United States is a deranged lunatic, and a national security threat to our country and the rest of the world."
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that US military planners are "pulling out existing lists of potential targets to provide the president options if he decides to attack energy infrastructure" in Iran.
Amnesty International warned last month in response to earlier Trump threats that a major attack on Iranian energy infrastructure "would unleash catastrophic harm on millions."
“When power plants collapse, horrific consequences cascade instantly," said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty’s senior director of research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns. "Water pumping stations would stop functioning, clean water would become scarce, and preventable diseases would spread. Hospitals would lose electricity and fuel, forcing surgeries to be cancelled and life-support machines to shut down. Food production and distribution networks would collapse, deepening hunger and causing widespread food scarcity. Many businesses would also shut down with devastating economic consequences, including mass unemployment."
Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said Monday that US lawmakers must investigate Trump's "targeting and threatening of civilian sites in Iran, including by utilizing all tools at Congress’ disposal including subpoena power to secure documentary evidence and testimony from relevant officials."
"Any actions that violate US and international law regarding the conduct of war must be thoroughly investigated and appropriate accountability pursued," said Abdi. "We cannot allow such brazen disregard for civilian life to be normalized."
First Lady Melania Trump, who accompanied the president to the White House Easter Egg Roll on Monday, defended the US-Israeli assault on Iran as a war for the "future" of Iran's children.
Melania Trump: All of this is happening for their future. They will be safe in the years to come.
Trump: We are fighting for the children who are in a war zone. pic.twitter.com/2GHTqA5nWM
— Acyn (@Acyn) April 6, 2026
The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said last week that at least 216 children have been killed by US-Israeli bombing in Iran, with many of the deaths caused by a US strike on an Iranian elementary school on the first day of the war.
“Children in the region are being exposed to horrific violence, while the very systems and services meant to keep them safe are coming under attack,” said UNICEF executive director Catherine Russell. “Urgent action is needed by all parties to conflict to protect the lives of civilians and uphold the rights of children."