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For Immediate Release
June, 11 2021, 10:53am EDT
Contact:
Ellen Montgomery, Public Lands Campaign Director, 720-583-4024, lmontgomery@
Taran Volckhausen, Communications Associate, 720-212-9955, tvolckhausen@
AG Dept. To 'Repeal or Replace' Rollback of Tongass National Forest Protections
The USDA's reconsideration of Trump-era Alaska Roadless Rule is good news for America's "Climate Forest."
DENVER
The Biden administration announced Friday that the Department of Agriculture has reviewed and is proposing to "repeal or replace" the Trump administration's rollback of protections for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. In October, the Trump administration stripped "Roadless Rule" safeguards from 9.2 million acres in the Tongass. The Roadless Rule, established in 2001, is intended to help keep wild spaces in our national forest system wild.
The largest forest in the U.S. Forest Service system, the Tongass provides critical habitat for wildlife and plays a significant role in absorbing and storing carbon, serving as a natural tool to help stop climate change.
Environment America Public Lands Campaign Director Ellen Montgomery issued the following statement:
"We applaud this first step in what we hope will be a swift process to restore full Roadless Rule protections to the Tongass National Forest. The Trump administration's rollbacks were an attack on the Tongass, which is a priceless treasure and a beacon of nature. Many trees in the Tongass are older than United States, and we must keep them standing tall because the forest serves as a vital bulwark against climate change. It also provides an irreplaceable home for our wildlife. This majestic wild space, which is home to species from the Prince of Wales flying squirrels and Sitka black-tailed deer to any of the thousands of migratory birds, would be forever changed for the worse if roads and logging equipment were allowed to disrupt it. "
With Environment America, you protect the places that all of us love and promote core environmental values, such as clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and clean energy to power our lives. We're a national network of 29 state environmental groups with members and supporters in every state. Together, we focus on timely, targeted action that wins tangible improvements in the quality of our environment and our lives.
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Calling Attacks on Platner ‘Politics as Usual’, Mainers Say They Have Back of Working-Class Champion
“We’re going to win on Tuesday, and we’re going to win in November, and we’re going to take power back for the people in this country," said the US Senate candidate from Maine.
Jun 08, 2026
At Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner's final town hall ahead of Tuesday's primary election in Maine, the combat veteran and oyster farmer received a warm welcome from roughly 400 attendees who appeared eager to focus on the candidate's policy platform and issues affecting working Mainers rather than numerous attacks that have been launched against him in recent months.
Platner walked into a meeting room at an Elks Lodge in Portland, Maine's largest city, to a standing ovation and said, as he had at a rally on Friday with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in Bar Harbor, that Mainers have shown they "have my back."
“We’re going to win on Tuesday, and we’re going to win in November, and we’re going to take power back for the people in this country," he told the crowd.
After speaking for close to an hour about issues including economic inequality, his goal of being "a voice that says no to war" in the US Senate, and his push for Medicare for All, Platner opened the floor for questions that focused on repealing Citizens United, his plan to pass a billionaire wealth tax, and the lawmakers and Senate committees the political newcomer has begun building relationships with as he aims to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
He named Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) as a lawmaker he has little in common with ideologically but with whom he shares a goal of ending "forever wars," and listed Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as some of the other senators he hopes to work with closely.
One woman stood up to note that some in the national corporate media have appeared certain in recent days that they "know" the voters of Maine and that they are likely to turn against Platner following news stories about his past marital struggles, former relationships, comments he made online years ago, and a tattoo he got while in the Marines.
"What do people not understand about Mainers?" the voter asked.
Platner answered that he's had conversations about economic inequality with people across the state—including at more than 80 town halls—and said that those focused on the controversies don't understand "how clear-eyed" and "how frustrated" Maine voters are with the political status quo.
“I think a lot of folks at the national level misunderstand,” he said at one point. “The reason they keep getting everything wrong is they think this is a race about me, but it isn’t. This is a race about us. This is a race about the future of politics in Maine."
One voter, Kurt Fedora of Buxton, told The Associated Press that he views the controversies that the national media has focused on in recent months as a smear campaign.
"They’re really reaching far to try to pin something on him. And it’s politics as usual,” Fedora told the outlet.
As Common Dreams noted Sunday, The New York Times' reporting last week on allegations that Platner was physically aggressive in past relationships—which he denied—has not appeared to make a dent in his campaign's fundraising. As he rallied with Khanna the day after the report came out, the campaign announced it had raised over $200,000 that day—"more money than on any day" since Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign in April.
Similarly, when earlier stories broke about his tattoo and Reddit posts, Platner only widened his lead over Mills in primary polls.
One attendee named Paul told Common Dreams that at the Sunday town hall, Platner had "described a system that needs to be changed," and that the same system "is out to destroy him in any way they can" by publishing stories like one that focused on Platner's text messages with women early in his marriage.
"There was no way I could care less about that," he said. "I always like to say, it's between him and his wife."
Another supporter, Claudia, added that ahead of Tuesday's primary election, she is "looking at the bigger picture."
"This country is in a really dangerous state. I mean, it's terrifying every day," she told Common Dreams. "You want more Susan Collins? I don't think so."
"I really appreciated the fact that he knows that he needs to have people with whom he has a relationship in Washington and with whom he can work," she added, turning her attention to the substance of Platner's remarks. "I feel like he's done a really good job of not only appreciating what so many of the issues are, but how he can engage with people down there [in DC]."
Platner emphasized that the Democratic Party has tried to unseat Collins numerous times since she took office in 1997, most recently with moderate state lawmaker Sara Gideon in 2020. Mills spoke affectionately about Collins last September, a month before she jumped into the race, saying she appreciates "everything she is doing" during President Donald Trump's second term.
Collins has long cast herself as a "moderate" and a defender of women's rights in particular, despite the fact that she has voted to confirm more than a dozen anti-choice judges in Trump's second administration alone.
“We are going to beat someone that the establishment of the Democratic Party has failed to unseat for 30 years,” Platner said. “We are going to beat someone who, for years, has tried to trick us all into thinking that she’s a moderate.”
While focusing their attention on Platner's policy platform, some in the crowd at the town hall suggested they were eager to rally for the candidate partially because of the recent attacks on his character. One attendee, Laurie Hudson, passed around a card she had made that read, "We are your Graham-ily and we've got your back," asking others in the audience to sign. She presented it to Platner after his opening remarks.
Platner urged attendees to get involved not only in his campaign's get-out-the-vote efforts in the final days of the primary campaign—by "going out into our communities and having hard conversations"—but in a larger movement powered by the working class, aimed at beating back Trump's agenda and the corporations and dark money groups that helped pave his way to the White House by pouring billions of dollars into elections.
"Throughout history, the only thing that's ever beaten fascism is a broad-based working-class coalition," said Platner. "This is a race about building power the old-fashioned way, from the ground up... Join a labor union, go help out at the local food pantry, go help out at a food bank, but you've got to do something. Because the moment we're in right now, it's going to require all of us.
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Human Rights Watch Calls Out 'Troubling Conditions' in Trump Health Aid Agreements With Africa
“After the sudden and devastating pullback from US assistance in 2025, governments are now being pressured to accept agreements with contingencies that jeopardize human rights."
Jun 08, 2026
The Trump administration is requiring African nations to agree to a series of "troubling conditions" to restore lifesaving health aid, according to a Human Rights Watch report on Monday.
The administration's abrupt shuttering of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) last year shut off billions of dollars and caused havoc across Africa's healthcare system, resulting in what public health models project could be hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.
But under what has been dubbed the “America First” Global Health Strategy, the administration has negotiated secretive agreements with dozens of these countries to restore some of the funding. Most of them have been kept under lock and key by the US.
Those that have been made public have come with terms that Human Rights Watch said "raise concerns that health aid is being inappropriately leveraged to extract terms beneficial to the US in negotiations around natural resources and access to sensitive health data from recipient countries."
In March, a draft memorandum of understanding with the government of Zambia was revealed to have conditioned $1 billion for HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and other disease prevention for millions of people, on the country's acceptance of a separate bilateral treaty that would have given US companies greater access to the country's minerals.
A leaked State Department memo, prepared for Secretary Marco Rubio, put the exploitative terms plainly: “We will only secure our priorities by demonstrating willingness to publicly take support away from Zambia on a massive scale.”
After the details of that agreement were met with backlash, the text of agreements with several other countries—Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Uganda—were suddenly removed from the State Department’s Freedom of Information Act Library.
A Human Rights Watch assessment of the agreements with those five countries—as well as agreements with Rwanda and Liberia that were leaked—revealed that in order to restore a portion of the more than $800 million collectively stripped from them by the US, they'd have to agree to several coercive measures that jeopardize the reproductive and privacy rights of their citizens.
“The agreements show the US intends to condition vital health assistance for millions of people on acquiescence to troubling conditions,” said Julia Bleckner, senior health researcher at Human Rights Watch. “After the sudden and devastating pullback from US assistance in 2025, governments are now being pressured to accept agreements with contingencies that jeopardize human rights.”
All seven of the agreements require the governments to provide the US with "broad access to data and information" to monitor compliance with the Helms Amendment, which forbids the use of US foreign assistance to pay for abortion care.
The agreements with Mozambique, Rwanda, and Liberia require them to provide “any data” requested by the US to ensure compliance with the amendment, while Uganda's permits the US to conduct unannounced spot checks of health facilities and clinics.
"By making a broad package of health aid contingent on broad and potentially invasive surveillance of Helms compliance, the agreement could encourage a more restrictive regulation of abortion than national law mandates and give rise to further violations of the right to healthcare,” says the report.
The agreements also give the US permission to directly audit clinics, laboratories, and health programs to ensure compliance with the conditions. Six of them require clinics to provide access to "any data" requested by the US at a sample of facilities it chooses.
Agreements with five countries also mandate that they share biological specimens taken from patients and associated information related to novel infectious diseases, which HRW described as part of an effort to undermine a global pathogen access and sharing system being created by the World Health Organization, from which Trump has removed the US.
HRW said in a news release:
The agreements raise serious concerns about use of people’s private health data, without clear limits, uniform safeguards, or meaningful protections for patient confidentiality, including in several countries with weak or absent domestic data protection laws. The agreements contain no prohibition on this data being shared with US pharmaceutical companies without patient consent.
“Governments negotiating health assistance agreements with the United States face difficult choices,” Bleckner said. “They should be wary of terms asking them to sign away their populations’ rights and push for the inclusion of civil society representatives and multilateral global health organizations like the Global Fund in deliberations.”
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Trump Renews Call for Firing Senate Parliamentarian to Pass GOP Attack on Voting Rights
Senate Majority Leader John Thune indicated that he would not fire the parliamentarian after the president's angry tirade.
Jun 08, 2026
President Donald Trump on Monday renewed calls to fire US Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who in recent months has thwarted Republicans' efforts to include funding for his luxury ballroom and voter suppression legislation into a budget reconciliation package.
In a social media post, the president demanded Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) dismiss MacDonough, whom he described as "a nasty holdover" from former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) who "treats Republicans, and everything that they stand for, horribly!"
"She is known as a Radical Left Lunatic that caters to Democrats," Trump continued, "and has no respect for Republicans, or Republican Ideology... We have every right to change her, and should do so, IMMEDIATELY. As long as she’s there, we will never get our desperately needed, SAVE AMERICA ACT, approved, and put into full force and effect!"
Despite Trump's demands, there is little indication that Thune has any desire to fire the parliamentarian. As reported by Punchbowl News' Andrew Desiderio, the GOP Senate leader expressed appreciation for the work MacDonough has done since she took on the job in 2012.
"Parliamentarian rulings break both ways," Thune said. "You lose a few, you win a few. That's been true when the Democrats have been in the majority too. That’s a hard job. It’s a very specific skill set. And you need somebody that is going to be a fair referee."
Commenting on the president's post, Punchbowl News co-founder Jake Sherman noted that the president has much larger problems in the Senate than MacDonough, as Republicans themselves "disagree with parts of his agenda."
Sherman also hinted that Trump has caused further problems for himself in recent weeks, as his nomination of Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte to be his acting director of national intelligence has completely blown up a bipartisan plan to extend warrantless spying powers under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Trump has created headaches for Republicans by not only asking them to fund security for his ballroom, but also creating and defending a $1.8 billion slush fund aimed at paying off political allies who were supposedly victims of a "weaponized" Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden.
The Trump administration last week agreed to at least temporarily shut down the fund, which drew widespread political pushback after administration officials acknowledged it could be used to pay off rioters who stormed the US Capitol on the president's behalf on January 6, 2021.
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