This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When it comes to adapting to the consequences of climate change, the federal government has relied heavily on one flagship program: Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities. Administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), BRIC has doled out $4.5 billion in grants to help states and cities prepare for future disasters. Wildfire retrofits in Washington State, safe rooms in Oklahoma, and sewer systems in Detroit have all benefitted from the program.

Despite bipartisan support for the effort, the Trump Administration issued a memo announcing its intent to shut down BRIC in April. Then, in December, a federal judge ordered FEMA to restore the program’s funding and “promptly take all steps necessary to reverse” the termination. The agency had two months to appeal.

Though that deadline passed last week, the Trump administration is still holding out. Two FEMA officials told Grist that the agency has taken no apparent steps to revive BRIC in compliance with the December court order. As a result, state and local governments across the country are holding critical projects in limbo as they await a resolution. 

One of the unmistakable throughlines of the second Trump administration is how it’s overhauling policies that directly affect African Americans, most notably by targeting programs and initiatives that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. 

For journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, it’s an attempt to take the country back to an era before the civil rights movement. “A lot of folks are saying, you know, that this administration is rolling back the ’60s, but I’m like, he—this administration’s actually going back further than that.” 

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The administration is also removing references to Black history from the nation’s museums, parks, and schools. When history itself is being erased at the highest levels, who’s left to tell us where we’ve been and where we’re headed? 

This week on Reveal, as part of Black History Month, we’re bringing you conversations from our sister podcast, More To The Story, with three prominent Black writers who are fighting to tell a more inclusive American story.

On Thursday just before noon, bundled up couples and small groups of people wandered through the President’s House on Independence Hall, some snapping photos and others inquiring what was happening as four National Park employees worked in tandem, behind a barricade, to reattach panel after panel of the President’s House slavery exhibits. They worked in the cold, lifting the massive glass squares up onto the brick wall and then screwing them into place. Philadelphia’s mayor Cherelle L. Parker approached, admiring the exhibit for a moment before shaking hands with the workers and thanking them. 

“I want you to know I’m grateful,” Parker said. “It’s our honor,” one of the employees responded. 

They continued to work until at least 16 panels of the memorial were reinstalled. The exhibits had been removed on a Thursday afternoon nearly a month before, in accordance with Trump’s 2025 “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order to rid “public monuments, memorials, statues, markers or similar properties” of content that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” But after the city sued, US District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe issued an injunction ordering the government to “restore the President’s House Site to its physical status as of January 21, 2026.” That order was overruled on Friday, just one hour before the deadline Rufe had set for the exhibit’s reinstallation. Now, the National Park Service must maintain the status quo—leaving 16 of 34 panels up—while the federal government appeals the initial injunction.

For a community that fought to restore history, the initial order to restore the President’s House exhibit had been cause for celebration. “We need to understand what we’ve done here. This is actually a moment in time; your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, are going to be talking about this for years and decades to come,” said Michael Coard, attorney and founding member of Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), a broad-based Black-led coalition of activists, on Thursday as the the National Park Service initially started to restore panels. “This here, right now, what we’ve done is people power.” As Coard spoke, he stood in front of a wall engraved with the names of the nine people enslaved by Washington. At the bottom of his podium rested the 1863 image “Scourged Back,” which was marked for removal from Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park last year.  

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that most of President Donald Trump’s world-wide tariffs are illegal, dealing a setback to one of the president’s top priorities. Since his second month in office, Trump has set about to impose drastic, varying, and haphazard tariffs on countries across the globe. Trump claimed that most of these tariffs were authorized under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. But in a 6-3 decision, the justices ruled that IEEPA did not give the president power to impose tariffs. Trump will now have to turn to other, more limited statutes to impose his unilateral tariffs.

Although the outcome is a clear loss for Trump, the court is likely doing him a favor.

IEEPA authorizes the president to respond to “any unusual and extraordinary threat” from abroad, including through the power to “regulate… importation or exportation.” The Trump administration argued that the word “regulate” encompassed “tariff regulation,” which Solicitor General John Sauer described during oral arguments as “the quintessential, most historically-tested method of regulating imports.” But the justices disagreed, finding the words “regulate” and “importation” are not enough to give the president uninhibited tariff power.

“Based on two words separated by 16 others in Section 1702(a)(1)(B) of IEEPA—’regulate’ and ‘importation’—the President asserts the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion. “Those words cannot bear such weight.”  

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Trump administration claims its latest move to gut climate regulations and end all greenhouse gas standards for vehicles will save Americans money. But its own analysis indicates that the new rule will push up gas prices, and that the benefits of the rollback are unlikely to outweigh the costs.

On Thursday, the president and his environmental secretary, Lee Zeldin, announced the finalized repeal of the endangerment finding, a legal determination which underpins virtually all federal climate regulations. He claimed the rollback would save the US $1.3 trillion by 2055.

Late on Thursday night, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a regulatory impact analysis to back up that number. The savings will come from two places, the document says: some $1.1 trillion will stem from reduced vehicle prices, while another $200 billion will come from slashed electric vehicle purchases and lowered spending on charging infrastructure.

Awe-inspiring photos of athletes – compared to historical artworks

On January 31, federal agents fired tear gas into a crowd of civilians, clergy, and children gathered outside the ICE building in Portland, Oregon. Witnesses say, and video shows, that the demonstration was largely peaceful before the gas was deployed. In the weeks since, a federal judge moved to restrict the use of these chemical munitions at the site following reports that agents used them against demonstrators who posed no imminent threat.

Under the second Trump administration, displays of force against protesters have become increasingly common. So it’s important to know which chemicals are being deployed against those exercising their First Amendment rights—because they’re not benign.

Tear gas, the most widely deployed crowd-control weapon, can cause more harm than temporary irritation. Beyond burning eyes and skin, it has been linked to corneal ulcers and menstrual cycle disruptions, with some reports suggesting possible associations with miscarriage.

But tear gas is just one type of chemical used by federal agents for crowd control.

The English artist-photographer Robbie Cooper became semifamous in 2008 with the widespread online release of a roughly three-and-a-half-minute video titled Immersion. It still lives on the internet and is unlikely ever to go away. The short film consists of a set of sequential cuts, all similarly framed and ranging from six to fifteen seconds, of kids playing various video games. Sometimes, one sees only a single player. In others, the player is accompanied by one or more friends, who appear only to be looking on at the action; they are not “playing.” Across all the shots, the only sound is that of the game itself—together with whatever yawps and comments the humans add in the throes of their gaming.

What made the whole thing go viral (-ish; 2008 was a long time ago—the iPhone had only just come out, and Twitter, Facebook, YouTube were all still in their infancy) was the uncanny intimacy of the camera: one watched the kids playing the games through the screen at which they were looking. The intensity of their searching gazes, the strained grimaces or unsettling complacency, the lip-biting trance-field of total absorption—all this is directed at you, directly. It is shot from the point of view of the screen itself.

Many filmmakers, going back to some of the earliest experiments with the moving picture, have depicted the intensity of the gazes fixed on their own medium. One thinks of Dziga Vertov’s interwar metacinema, or even a vaudeville-steeped silent classic like D. W. Griffith’s Those Awful Hats (1909). It was something they thought about a lot, early cinematographers—the mesmeric power of their own images. And so it was a very alluring topic to explore.

But it is one thing to shoot an actor who has been told to make a face “as if” he is looking at a movie. It is another to put the camera in the movie screen itself, and then to play the movie and record the actual reaction. This is a much more recent technique. To be sure, shots of people seeing things in the world are a cinematic commonplace. But the majority of such imagery captures these reactions within the established triangle of subject, object, camera. It is much rarer for a filmmaker to close that triangle down into pure bilateral eyeline gaze: to film from the perspective of the thing being seen, where that thing is itself a moving image.

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