On the docket: Hope Hicks, Trump’s favorite staffer, takes the stand

Hope Hicks spent more time with former president Donald Trump than perhaps anyone else, from the launch of his political career through the end of his time in the White House.

On Friday, Hicks took the witness stand to testify against her former boss.

Hicks, a former campaign and White House spokeswoman who was constantly by Trump’s side and one of his most trusted advisers until he left office, appeared at his trial under subpoena, and was clearly unhappy about being compelled to testify. After being asked to speak more clearly into the microphone, she said she was “really nervous” to be there. Later, as Trump’s lawyer began cross-examining her, Hicks burst into tears, and Judge Juan Merchan granted a recess to allow her to compose herself. She was spotted clutching a tissue.

Hicks testified to prosecutors that Trump told her in 2018, when the story about adult film star Stormy Daniels’ alleged affair became public, that his fixer and attorney Michael Cohen had paid to keep the story quiet “from the kindness of his own heart” and didn’t tell anyone it had happened. She said she didn’t believe him, because that would be “out of character for Michael”, whom she knew as the “kind of person who seeks credit”, not “an especially charitable or selfless person”. That testimony undercuts Trump’s chances of distancing himself from Cohen’s hush-money payment. Prosecutors need to prove Trump falsified business records to repay Cohen for that payment.

At the end of prosecutors’ questions, Hicks told them that Trump’s attitude in 2018 when the Daniels news broke “was it was better to be dealing with it now and that it would have been bad to have that story come out before the election”. That helps prosecutors, who are seeking to show that Trump conspired to bury accusations of marital infidelities to help win the election – the underlying crime that lets them elevate their charges of falsifying business records against him to felonies.

She also testified about the panic that set in within the campaign in early October 2016 when the Access Hollywood recording emerged of Trump bragging about groping women. “It was a damaging development,” she said. “This was a crisis.”

But she then undercut prosecutors’ theory of the case – and helped her former boss with testimony that, while it made Trump look like a huge jerk, could actually help him avoid conviction. Trump’s lawyers argue that Trump was simply worried about how his wife, Melania, would feel about extramarital affars – and Hicks gave them some significant ammo on that front.

Hicks testified that on the day that the Wall Street Journal planned to publish the story that the National Enquirer had bought then buried about former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s claim of an extended affair with Trump, he was concerned about how Melania would react and tried to keep the news from her. “He wanted me to make sure that the newspapers were [not] delivered to their residence that morning,” Hicks said.

Melania Trump, who has not attended any of her husband’s criminal trial, was pregnant and delivered their son Barron during the period that McDougal claims the affair occurred. Trump’s son Eric is the only member of his immediate family to join the former president in the courtroom.

During cross-examination, Trump attorney Emil Bove took a gentle approach with Hicks, who seemed not to want to hurt her boss. Bove got Hicks to agree with his statement that Cohen sometimes “went rogue” without discussing things with the campaign.

In other news

Before the jury was brought in on Friday morning, Merchan corrected Trump’s false claim made yesterday outside the courtroom that the judge’s gag order against him prevents the former president from testifying in the trial (it just blocks him from talking about witnesses and the jury outside the courtroom). ​​“It came to my attention that there may be a misunderstanding [about] the order restricting extrajudicial statements and how it impacts Mr Trump’s right to testify at trial,” he said. “I want to stress, Mr Trump, that you have an absolute right to testify at trial … The order prohibiting extrajudicial statements does not prevent you from testifying in any way.”

After the trial day concluded, Merchan ruled with Trump’s attorneys and said that if the former president takes the stand to testify, prosecutors aren’t allowed to bring up the fact that Merchan had held him in contempt for violating his gag order, saying it would be “prejudicial”.

Donald Trump’s former communications director Hope Hicks provided testimony on Friday that could be helpful both to prosecutors and the former president’s defense, revealing the fallout inside the Trump campaign in the wake of the damaging Access Hollywood tape on which Trump bragged about sexual assault.

Here are the key takeaways from day 11 of People of New York v Donald J Trump:

Berlin’s government is offering to give away a villa once owned by Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, hoping to end a decades-long debate on whether to repurpose or bulldoze a sprawling disused site in the countryside north of the German capital.

“I offer to anyone who would like to take over the site, to take it over as a gift from the state of Berlin,” Berlin’s finance minister, Stefan Evers, told the state parliament, the German Press Agency reported.

Berlin has repeatedly tried to hand off the site to federal authorities or the state of Brandenburg, where the villa lies, rather than continue to pay for maintenance and security at the complex, which has become overgrown and fallen into disrepair.

Evers renewed that offer on Thursday, calling for proposals that reflected the site’s history. He didn’t say if proposals from private individuals would also be considered.

“If we fail again, as in the past decades, then Berlin has no other option but to carry out the demolition that we have already prepared for,” Evers said.

Goebbels, one of Hitler’s closest allies, had the luxury villa built in 1939 on a wooded site overlooking the Bogensee lake near the town of Wandlitz, about 40km (25 miles) north of Berlin.

A retreat from Berlin, where he lived with his wife and six children, Goebbels used the villa and an earlier house on the site to entertain Nazi leaders, artists and actors – and reputedly as a love-nest for secret affairs.

After the war, the 17-hectare (42-acre) site was used briefly as a hospital, then taken over by the youth wing of the East German Communist party, which constructed a training centre, including several large accommodation blocks.

After German reunification in 1990, ownership of the site returned to the state of Berlin. However, the city found no use for it. The site has since become an attraction for day trippers who can pick their way through the overgrown grounds and peer through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the villa.

Goebbels moved back to Berlin in the final phase of the second world war. He and his wife killed themselves and their children with cyanide capsules in Hitler’s bunker as Soviet troops closed in.

The family’s opulent home on an island in Berlin was sold at auction in 2011.

Using a gas stove increases nitrogen dioxide exposure to levels that exceed public health recommendations, a new study shows. The report, published Friday in Science Advances, found that people of color and low-income residents in the US were disproportionately affected.

Indoor gas and propane appliances raise average concentrations of the harmful pollutant, also known as NO₂, to 75% of the World Health Organization’s standard for indoor and outdoor exposure.

That means even if a person avoids exposure to nitrogen dioxide from traffic exhaust, power plants, or other sources, by cooking with a gas stove they will have already breathed in three-quarters of what is considered a safe limit.

“When you’re using a gas stove, you are burning fossil fuel directly in the home,” said Yannai Kashtan, lead author of the study and a PhD candidate at Stanford University. “Ventilation does help but it’s an imperfect solution and ultimately the best way is to reduce pollution at the source.”

Nitrogen dioxide irritates the airways and can exacerbate respiratory illnesses such as asthma. The Stanford study estimates that chronic stove-based nitrogen dioxide exposure is linked to at least 50,000 cases of pediatric asthma in the United States each year. The research, which measured NO₂ in more than 100 homes before, during, and after gas stove use, found that pollution migrates to bedrooms within an hour of the stove turning on, and stays above dangerous levels for hours after use.

“It’s moving throughout our whole home much faster than we expected,” said Rob Jackson, professor of Earth system science at Stanford and co-author of the study. “You have to think about the effects of this not just in one cooking event, but multiple times a day, for lunch and dinner, across weeks and months.”

Roughly 38% of households in the US use gas stoves, according to the Energy Information Administration, but not all of them are exposed to NO₂ equally. The study suggests that size of the home is an important factor, with people living in residences less than 800 sq ft showing chronic exposure four times the rate of people living in homes with 3,000 sq ft.

“Older homes are more likely to be smaller, and more often have gas stoves which reflects the nature of our housing stock,” said Jon Samet, professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health, who was not involved in the study. “It’s good to see this work focusing attention on indoor air, particularly in our homes, because that’s where we spend most of our time.”

The results also highlight the unequal racial and socioeconomic burden of exposure. The study found that American Indians and Alaska Natives are exposed to 60% more NO₂ from gas and propane stoves than the national average. Black and Latino or Hispanic households breathe in 20% more NO₂ from their stoves.

People in households making less than $10,000 a year are breathing NO₂ at rates more than twice that of people in households making over $150,000.

“People in poorer communities are more at risk because their outdoor air is bad and and in many ways their indoor air is worse,” said Jackson. Low-income communities and communities of color are more likely to live near highways, ports, industrial sites and other polluting zones.

While this study looked at stovetop pollution from cooking, which is a relatively short period of exposure, some people who struggle to afford utility bills rely on stoves and ovens for heat during colder months.

“There’s an underlying assumption that people are only using their stove or oven to cook and to prepare meals,” said Diana Hernandez, sociologist at Columbia University who was not involved in the Stanford study. A recent survey conducted by Hernandez and her team found that over 20% of New Yorkers used stoves or ovens to heat their homes.

“That’s a less efficient and much more toxic way of providing heat, and more costly,” Hernandez said. “You’re talking about heating an entire home, or apartment, probably for hours on end, with a device and appliance that wasn’t meant for that.”

Gas stoves also emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and cities across the US are adopting building electrification measures that would phase out gas stoves in new homes.

Dorris Bishop, a resident of River Terrace neighborhood in Washington DC, said she recently joined a waitlist to trade her gas stove in for an electric appliance after a local advocacy group tested her home for NO₂ and found elevated levels.

“I’m hopeful that this report will push for all of the new homes to put electric stoves in,” she said.

The protesters who seized Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall on Tuesday swiftly unfurled a banner down the front of the storied building with just one word: intifada.

Other students among the pro-Palestinian demonstrators in the heart of the New York campus were sceptical about invoking the Arabic call for an uprising because it has been so widely used by pro-Israeli groups to discredit their cause as support for terrorism and therefore antisemitic.

Those students’ fears were swiftly realised when the White House described the use of intifada as “hate speech”. Supporters of Israel at Columbia said it represented a threat to Jewish lives on campus because it amounted to a glorification of the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign during the second intifada against the Israeli occupation two decades ago.

Eric Adams, New York’s mayor, accused the students who hung the banner of being antisemites as he sent in the police to haul them out of Hamilton Hall and dismantle a tent camp erected to demand the university sell its investments in Israel and to show support for the Palestinians as the war in Gaza grinds on.

Columbia’s administration said it called in the police to stop the protest that began on the campus last month, and then spread to other universities, in part to protect the safety of Jewish students threatened by antisemitic actions.

But pro-Palestinian students accuse Columbia of using concerns about safety as cover to shut them down under pressure from politicians and pro-Israel groups with a long history of wielding claims of antisemitism to curb legitimate protest against Israel.

It’s hard to deny that there have been antisemitic incidents on the campus, including the targeting of students, probably Jewish, called “Nazi bitches” and told to “go back to Poland”.

One female Jewish student described a masked pro-Palestinian demonstrator confronting her as she walked across campus one evening. She said he got extremely close and menacingly demanded to know if she was a Zionist. After that, she stopped wearing a Star of David necklace.

“It was genuinely frightening. Looking back, I don’t think he would have physically attacked me but I was very afraid in that moment and I am still afraid to come on to campus alone,” she said.

Gil Zussman, a professor of electrical engineering and member of Columbia’s antisemitism taskforce, said other students had had similar experiences of being threatened or verbally attacked.

“Several times I met Jewish girls sitting on the stairs and crying. They are being targeted personally. When people are calling a Jewish girl, with family murdered in the Holocaust, a Nazi, this is really, really bad,” he said.

Nonetheless, instances of threatening behaviour directed at individuals appear to have been relatively isolated and more likely to occur at parallel protests by non-students outside the campus.

The wider issue for Zussman and other pro-Israel activists is the more complex area of anti-Zionism that they claim creates an “unsafe” and “threatening” climate for Jews at Columbia.

The day before the police shut down the protests, pro-Palestinian students led marches around the heart of the campus chanting “Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel will fall” and “We don’t want no two state, we will take all of it”. Others led with a variation on the popular but contentious “river to the sea” slogan: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.” One protester cried: “Fuck Israel, Israel’s a bitch.”

Zussman, who was part of a small group of Israel supporters gathered next to a wall overlooking the camp the day before the police arrested the protesters, argued that the denunciations of Zionism, as opposed to opposition to the war in Gaza or protests in support of an end to occupation, left many Jewish students feeling threatened on campus.

“I’ve seen relatively large crowds of more than 100 people saying Zionists are not wanted here. This has really veered away from free speech and into something you will never see in a college campus towards any other minority group. When they shout ‘no Zionists here’ then they are targeting us personally,” said Zussman, who is Israeli and Jewish.

“Even if you are unhappy about the policies of Mexico, if somebody would be shouting ‘we don’t want Mexicans here’ the university would act very quickly.”

Zussman said he had also seen students carrying signs glorifying Hamas rocket attacks.

“It’s like, we will kill you because you are Israeli or Jewish,” he said.

The university suspended one of the protest leaders, Khymani James, after video emerged of him saying in January that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists”.

James also said that Zionists, white supremacists and Nazis “are all the same people” because their existence is “antithetical to peace”.

“I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die,” he said.

James apologised for his comments after they were made public and said they were “wrong”.

“Every member of our community deserves to feel safe without qualification,” he wrote.

After James’s remarks were made public, university officials wrote to Columbia students denouncing antisemitism as threatening safety.

“Chants, signs, taunts and social media posts from our own students that mock and threaten to ‘kill’ Jewish people are totally unacceptable, and Columbia students who are involved in such incidents will be held accountable,” the letter said.

James’s comments were widely condemned by pro-Palestinian groups, which said they did not represent the views of the movement. But pro-Israel activists and politicians have painted the student protesters at large as rooted in support for Hamas, terrorism and the destruction of Israel.

That message was reinforced in parts of the media. The CNN presenter Dana Bash drew widespread scorn for likening the situation on US campuses to antisemitism in 1930s Europe.

“The fear among Jews in this country is palpable right now,” she said.

Bash also dismissed the motives of pro-Palestinian calls for a ceasefire in Gaza by claiming there was a ceasefire before the Hamas attack on 7 October notwithstanding continued Israeli aggression in the occupied territories, including the shooting of hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank and the army’s complicity in Jewish settler violence against Palestinians. Armed groups also fired hundreds of rockets from Gaza into Israel earlier in the year.

Nadia Abu El-Haj, a professor of anthropology and co-director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia, told the New York Review of Books that she did not doubt there had been antisemitic incidents on campus alongside abuse of Muslim and other students. But El-Haj said that the “rhetoric of safety”, specifically that of Jewish students, has been used to drive a “crackdown” against pro-Palestinian activists.

One of the student protesters, Jamil Mohamad, who was born in Jordan to an exiled Palestinian family, acknowledged that some Jewish students are genuinely fearful. But he said that was in part because pro-Israel groups push the claim that opposition to Zionism amounts to support for Hamas and a call to attack Jews.

Mohamad attributes charges of antisemitism to students who do not like hearing legitimate differences of opinion such as accusations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

“There is a distinction between being unsafe and feeling uncomfortable. It’s very notable to see the discourse around this issue because the right in this country that’s been talking about woke culture, and how young people are snowflakes, are suddenly adopting this narrative around safety, which is really a narrative around comfort,” he said.

“People do not have a right to feel comfortable in their ideas. This is a university. This is a place to challenge people’s ideas. Discomfort is not the same thing as danger.”

Mohamad said that the “narrative of antisemitism” was being used to silence opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza and decades of occupation. He is not alone in accusing Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, of seeking to appease Republican politicians who described the university as a “a hotbed of antisemitism and hatred” since protests surged in the wake of the 7 October Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza.

“The university is catering to external political pressure, and also probably pressure from donors who are threatening to pull money out of the university because of the widespread protests against Israel on campus. Shafik very much adopted this line before Congress about antisemitism on campus without any nuance or qualification,” he said.

Ahead of Shafik’s testimony to Congress, Jewish members of the Columbia faculty wrote to her denouncing what they called “the weaponization of antisemitism” for political ends.

For their part, pro-Palestinian students say the university has shown little interest in their safety even as they have been the target of doxing by hardline pro-Israel groups, had their careers threatened by powerful financiers and been subject to threats of violence. So far, the only major act of violence during the nationwide protests has been an attack by supporters of Israel on a Palestine solidarity camp at UCLA.

Jared, a Jewish student at Columbia, did not want his last name used because his family was threatened after he publicly supported the Palestinian cause. He said he has been the target of antisemitism by pro-Israel activists who question his Jewishness because of his support for the Palestinians, and he is not alone. Some Jewish supporters of the pro-Palestinian protests report being called “kapos” – collaborators in Nazi concentration camp prisoners – by other Jewish students.

“Most of the students recognise that there is a divide between calling for a free Palestine and the government of Israel, and Israel does not represent the Jewish people. But there are Jewish students who are steeped in fear of anything Palestinian,” said Jared.

Part of the dispute hangs on the intent of slogans. Some pro-Israel groups have long given the most extreme interpretation to political demands, such as claiming that calls for a ceasefire in Gaza are antisemitic because they deny Israel the right to defend itself.

The Anti-Defamation League’s chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, declared in 2022 that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”, a claim that has been widely picked up by US politicians.

Pro-Israel activists on campus also say student demands to divest from Israel are antisemitic because they “single out” the Jewish state. In recent years, pro-Israeli organisations have successfully pushed through laws in several states penalising support for the non-violent Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement on similar grounds.

Two slogans in particular draw accusations that they amount to calls for violence against Jews and therefore make Jewish students feel threatened by those who chant them.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is frequently denounced as a call to eradicate Israel and even its Jewish population. The demand for an intifada is widely seen as invoking the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign against Israel of the early 2000s.

Some Palestinian activists say that one is a call for equal rights for Palestinians in a single state and the other for a popular uprising to achieve that. They note that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, used a similar phrase to “the river to the sea” in January when he said that his country “must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River”.

Even so, Norman Finkelstein, the Jewish American political scientist who is a strong critic of Israel, advised the protesters to reconsider the use of slogans that can be used against them. Finkelstein went to Columbia to praise the students for raising public consciousness about the Palestinian cause but he advised them “to adjust to the new political reality that there are large numbers of people, probably a majority, who are potentially receptive to your message”.

“One has to exercise at a moment like this, if for no other reason than for the people of Gaza, one has to exercise maximum responsibility. Maximum responsibility to get out of one’s navel, to crawl out of one’s ego, and to always keep in mind one particular question: what are we trying to accomplish at this particular moment?” he said.

Once Finkelstein has finished speaking, a protester took the microphone and led a chant of “from the river to the sea”.

Mohamad said that while he respected Finkelstein, “this is not a top-down movement”.

“We cannot dictate slogans from the top down. We can’t tell people you can say this, you can’t say that,” he said.

Mohamad said that, in any case, he doubted whether abandoning chants such as “from the river to the sea” would make very much difference.

“It has been a slogan in the pro-Palestine movement for many years. Telling people not to use the slogan at this stage because it’s ambiguous – and, yes, there is some ambiguity to it – goes along with this rightwing weaponisation of antisemitism because there are bad faith forces. They do not want to interpret any slogan for Palestinian liberation in a good light. They want to paint us all as antisemites and as Jew-haters,” he said.

Jared, the Jewish student, said he thought Finkelstein had a point about the language but that critics were really only interested in objecting to slogans as a means of distracting from the scale of killing in Gaza.

“We could be better in the slogans that we choose to use. I agree that maybe we should be focusing on protesting against genocide. But the focus on the language of protesters here is meant to take the focus off the genocide going on in Gaza,” he said.

The result, though, is that a movement to press for an end to Israel’s war on Gaza in which more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them children and women, has now found itself overshadowed by its loudest voices.

After the police raid on Columbia and other New York campuses, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for operations, Kaz Daughtry, posted video of what he called a “proud moment” as officers took down a Palestinian flag at City College, tossed it aside and raised the US flag.

To some pro-Palestinian activists the incident seemed to resemble the actions of a conquering army marking its victory over a defeated enemy, and provided further evidence that the police action was not about campus safety but in support of Israel at the behest of politicians allied with the Jewish state.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives took up the cause when it passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act requiring the US education department to use the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism in enforcing anti-discrimination laws. The American Civil Liberties Union described the law as “an effort to stifle criticism of Israel”.

Some Jewish activists have warned that, by playing into tropes about powerful Jews manipulating power, the perception that freedom of speech is being curtailed and protesters arrested at the behest of powerful pro-Israel interests risks fuelling antisemitism.

Jared saw another danger too.

“If you protest against the genocide, and then a lot of people come out and say, that’s offensive to Jewish people, people will associate Jewish people with committing a genocide, and that makes us infinitely less safe,” he said.

“Jewish people aren’t committing a genocide. Israel is and Israel does not represent all of the Jewish people. And by using the Jewish people to shield Israel from any criticism will lead to an unbelievable amount of antisemitism.”

Once upon a time, an unkempt front lawn could have landed you in trouble with the neighbours. But now, councils are telling UK households to put away their lawnmower for No Mow May.

The one-month celebration of unmown gardens and parks was started in 2019 by the nature charity Plantlife, which encourages people to let grass and wildflowers grow and identify any interesting plants that spring up from the lawn.

The charity says 40 local councils have signed up to leave some of their verges and parks to grow. This not only provides space for rare wildflowers but also gives habitat and food to birds and invertebrates.

Andrew Doyle, the conservation officer for road verges and green spaces at Plantlife, said: “Experiencing the biodiversity benefits and cost savings a magical month of No Mow May brings in is a glorious gateway for councils to pass through en route to the more long-term wildlife-friendly grasslands green space management our wild plants and fungi – and the ecosystems that depend on them – need to thrive, benefiting the local community and climate.”

Wandsworth council in south London is leaving 20 designated sites unmown and recommending local households do the same with their gardens. Councillors have said private domestic gardens cover 716 hectares (1,770 acres) in Wandsworth, almost 20% of the borough’s total area.

Bradford council is letting 85 green spaces go unmown around the area. A Bradford council spokesperson said: “We are looking to implement ‘no mow’ on some of our sites to sustain biodiverse area and natural preservation. We all need to do what we can to create a more sustainable district for the future.”

Councillors on the Isle of Wight say its natural heritage is an important facet of the island’s Unesco status, so protecting it by doing No Mow May makes sense.

Natasha Dix, the council’s service director for waste environment and planning, said: “Encouraging biodiversity holds significant importance for our environment. The presence of wild orchids, including the declining man orchid, green-winged orchid, southern marsh orchid, northern marsh orchid and bee orchid can brighten up liberated lawns and enhance our natural spaces.

“The urgency lies in the threat to the world’s bee population. By allowing lawns to bloom, even for just a month, we actively support our local bees and contribute to the broader biodiversity structures that play a critical role in maintaining balance. I encourage everyone to participate in this meaningful endeavour. Let’s unleash the power of wildflowers.”

Warwick council is also participating. A councillor, Will Roberts, said: “Nature isn’t neat, but it’s a big part of where we live. Beneath the long grass, wildflowers and what might be viewed as ‘weeds’ lies a thriving habitat of vital species that will help us combat the negative effects of climate change, delivering multiple benefits for wildlife and people.”

Ian Dunn, the chief executive of Plantlife, said: “Support for Plantlife’s campaign is blossoming beautifully as people recognise the benefits to plants, people, pollinators and planet of mowing less and later for nature. The small act of giving the mower a month off, and then mowing less through the summer, can make a big difference at a time when we face interlinked climate and biodiversity emergencies.”

Bev Adrian, a retired career placement counselor for people with disabilities, lives in Woodlawn Terrace, a mobile home park just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota. The nearby streets are full of bustling local businesses – a Sota Boys Smoke Shop, a Pump N Munch Gas – but Woodlawn is a quiet park tucked away under maples and pines.

Adrian moved there four years ago, coincidentally right as Woodlawn’s owner was looking to sell. Woodlawn’s landlord was well liked, but for years Woodlawn’s residents had been hearing rumors about possible sales to much less friendly owners.

“People lived here in fear,” Adrian says, “because these places are just swallowed up.”

Mobile home parks, also known as trailer parks, are officially and more accurately called manufactured housing parks. Prefab homes are substantial constructions; once placed in a park, more than 80% of them are never moved.

In these parks, residents own their homes but pay rent to landlords who own the land and its infrastructure (including water and gas hookups). Over the last decade, private investors have discovered one very simple thing: owning a manufactured housing park is an incredibly lucrative thing to do. Now, throughout the country, local landlords are making way for out-of-state owners notorious for jacking up rents while letting conditions deteriorate.

But Adrian knew about a non-profit group called Roc USA that helped manufactured housing residents buy their own parks. So she set about facilitating a sale – to Woodlawn’s own people.

As private owners work to maximize profit, Roc USA is fighting for a radical oppositional model: resident-owned communities, or Rocs. According to an industry analysis from 2019, the average annual rent increase in privately owned parks is 3.9%. In recent years, according to the Washington Post, some park residents have seen their rents rise much more rapidly, even doubling or tripling. According to a 2020 Roc USA analysis, the average annual rent increase in community-owned parks is just 0.9% – or $3 a year.

For the kinds of people who traditionally live in manufactured housing communities – retirees and low-income earners – the best chance to protect their housing is to take ownership of it themselves.

In February, the Biden administration announced the details of the Preservation and Reinvestment Initiative for Community Enhancement (Price) Act, which Congress passed in 2022 and mandates the creation of a $225m grant to improve manufactured housing infrastructure nationwide. The act, which Roc USA and members of its resident-owned communities lobbied for, marks the first time the federal government has laid out a funded program to support manufactured housing.

Advocates for manufactured housing say this kind of national recognition is long overdue. Manufactured housing communities make up 7% of the country’s housing stock and more than 14% of its rural housing stock. They house 22 million people and are the single largest provider of unsubsidized affordable housing.

In 2000, the number of homes in cooperative-owned manufactured housing communities was in the hundreds. Today, there are more than 22,000 homes in Roc USA communities. Not a single Roc USA community has ever closed, reverted to private ownership, or otherwise displaced its residents.

In the winter of 2021, Adrian and Woodlawn’s residents purchased their park through a local subsidiary of Roc USA. Thanks to strong recent support from its state legislature, Minnesota has become a hotbed for cooperatives like Woodlawn. Each time a park becomes a cooperative, a tiny bit more of the country’s affordable housing is taken out of the private market. Each new cooperative proposes a radical concept: what if we stopped seeing housing as an investment? What if we simply saw housing as housing?

Who owns the parks?

Before private equity entered the market, the most notorious landlord in manufactured housing was Frank Rolfe. “There’s a huge number of poor people,” Rolfe would tell potential new landlords at his investor’s boot camp, “and there’s more poor people, like, every day.” But Rolfe’s one-man operation looks quaint compared with today’s investors.

The list of names is glitzy and notorious, including billionaires such as Warren Buffett and Sam Zell; massive investment entities such as Blackstone and Apollo Global Management; and the NBA superfan James Goldstein, who can afford his courtside tickets thanks to a fortune amassed in part from fighting drawn-out legal battles against rent control ordinances for manufactured housing parks. As the Financial Times has reported, the parks provide a return on investment of more than 4%, “double the average US real estate investment trust return”.

Buffett, known ostensibly as a good-guy investor, has created a closed loop of exploitation in manufactured housing. One Buffett-controlled company, Clayton Homes, dominates the market: through various subsidiaries, the Seattle Times has reported, Clayton sells manufactured houses, high-interest loans on those houses, and their high-priced insurance policies. Clayton is closely intertwined with the Manufactured Housing Institute, the industry’s primary lobbying group, which has spent over $4.5m over the last two decades protecting the interests of private owners.

The residents strike back

On a recent winter morning, I drove south from Minneapolis to meet Bev Adrian at Woodlawn, the resident-owned community where she’s now president. The sun was shining on the pickup trucks, the vinyl-siding-clad homes, and the park’s communal garden beds. Adrian – small-framed, abundantly energetic – hustled me into her home, which was full of Bob Dylan posters, cookbooks, and political manifestos.

Woodlawn voted to become a cooperative in March 2020, right at the outset of the pandemic. Indoor gatherings weren’t allowed, so the residents – “ecstatic” to vote yes, says Adrian – grabbed chairs and posted up in a central patch of Woodlawn they redubbed Park Square. Through its local subsidiary, Roc USA ran its traditional playbook for Woodlawn, which means giving the residents technical assistance on how to form a cooperative and navigate the purchasing process.

Roc USA and its subsidiaries can also lend directly to cooperatives. The cost of a park varies depending on its size and location; for the last seven years, the average sale price for a ROC USA community has been $4.15m. The Roc USA loans are repaid, with often better-than-market interest rates, thanks to the organization’s savvy use of state subsidies. On average, Roc USA residents pay $417 a month to service these loans. Residents also pay a one-time fee, usually just a few hundred dollars, to join the cooperative. If they leave, they’re refunded the money.

Before Woodlawn became a cooperative, Adrian used to regularly see folks drive in and out in Escalades and other conspicuous luxury vehicles – potential buyers, she was sure. To this day, she says, she gets solicited weekly, via postcards and calls: “‘Are you the owner of the park? Are you interested in selling?’” Despite Woodlawn’s status as a cooperative, private investors haven’t given up, Adrian says: “They’re just out there.”

As a non-profit, Woodlawn is eligible for a “boatload” of state grants, Adrian says, and so Woodlawn has money and plans: to revitalize a private well for drinking water; to replace a load of sewer lines; to properly fix up the park’s rental units. “Who gets to spend millions?” Adrian says, laughing, incredulous at her good fortune. “It’s like winning the lottery.”

Adrian is part of an informal network of activist resident-owned community presidents fighting to increase the number of cooperatives in the state. That includes Natividad Seefeld, who helped turn her own community – the 88-home Park Plaza in nearby Fridley, Minnesota – into a cooperative in 2011. Since then, Seefeld has become a nationally recognized crusader for the resident-owned community model. When I visit her in Park Plaza, she peppers her monologues with phrases like “that is serious straight-up bullshit” and “I would kill a bitch”.

As the chair of the resident-led Roc Association’s policy and advocacy committee, she was instrumental in helping push through the Price Act, which will provide hundreds of millions in federal funding for manufactured housing. She’s become adept at luring high-profile politicians such as Minnesota’s US Representative Ilhan Omar and the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, to Park Plaza. She’s also testified at state capitol hearings for years; she just has to figure out scheduling ahead of time, so she can get time off her full-time job at a General Mills warehouse.

At those hearings, Seefeld regularly comes face to face with Mark Brunner, president of the Manufactured and Modular Home Association of Minnesota, the state’s main lobbying group for private owners of manufactured housing parks.

“He gets up there and he will straight-up lie,” Seefeld says. “I always want to stand up and say, ‘That makes no sense!’ I have to sit there and calm myself down,” she says with a laugh. “He just fully despises me. I don’t know why. Some people are just that way.”

Before I leave Park Plaza, I sit in on a board meeting in the community center, which doubles as Park Plaza’s storm shelter. Built a few years back to replace an inadequate bunker, it’s dotted with primary-color children’s handprints and flags representing residents from Afghanistan, Italy, and Mexico.

The first order of business is the installation of solar panels on a resident’s roof. Another family’s home desperately needs new doors. Some of the community’s trees need shots to protect them from invasive emerald ash borer beetles. Again and again, residents ask the same fundamental question: how are we going to pay for this? And again and again, they find a make-do solution.

Before we wrap up, Seefeld reports that a resident named Suad has asked Seefeld if he can form a cleanup committee. Everyone is pleasantly shocked, but also unsure how to proceed: no one has ever actually volunteered to start a committee before. They decide they’ll figure out the details later.

Seefeld recounts her conversation with Suad, doing her best to imitate the accent of his native Bosnia. Dramatically raising her hands stiffly into the air, she shouts, “I want us to be beautiful!”

A model for the country

The Democrat Matt Norris, 35, smiley and sincere, represents district 32B in the state’s house of representatives, encompassing a small chunk of central Minnesota that Norris says has more manufactured housing than any other district in the state.

Just outside Norris’s office is a framed Tupac poster, paraphrasing the rapper’s lyrics: “Even though you’re fed up, you gotta keep your head up.”

Norris has become the go-to guy for manufactured housing in Minnesota. He’s seen residents’ anger first-hand, recently and most prominently at a park called Blaine International Village in Blaine, Minneapolis, that was purchased by Havenpark Communities. Based in Utah, Havenpark is highly active in Minnesota and has become notorious locally for rent increases and deteriorating infrastructure. As one Blaine resident told me, “There was 40 years of family ownership. They raised rent $200 in 40 years. Havenpark, they’ve done $200 in four years.”

After Havenpark’s takeover, Norris held a town hall at Blaine to hear its residents’ complaints, which went beyond rent to crumbling streets and an inadequate storm shelter.

“The room was at capacity – the fire marshal would have stepped in if we had packed any more people in there,” Norris says. “And there were 100 people waiting outside on a 90-degree day because they were so furious about what was going on.”

Norris says he’s had success forcing Havenpark to address some of the basic maintenance issues, but there has been no compromise on rent.

Norris has been instrumental in passing legislation to support resident-owned communities. The state of Minnesota’s housing fund now has a revolving $10m fund that cooperatives can utilize to quickly make an offer. Furthermore, if park owners sell to their residents, they get a tax credit that makes offers from their residents more lucrative, even if a private investor offers more cash.

Mike Bullard, Roc USA’s spokesperson, says that even more than the actual loan, it’s the technical assistance – expert guidance through the process of owning a park and maintaining its infrastructure – that is crucial to a resident-owned community’s success.

Traditionally, your local municipality is responsible for things like the upkeep of roads and the sewage system. In manufactured housing communities, the owners are responsible for all of that. If a pipe bursts, they need to know how to fix it. If a tornado smashes up a playground, they need to know how to fix it.

“In the affordable housing space, everybody agrees that there’s a huge need for technical assistance,” Bullard says. “It helps guarantee success, but nobody wants to pay for it. We bake it into the model.”

Others, like Linda Shi, a professor at Cornell University’s department of city and regional planning, emphasize the strengths of the Roc USA system. Shi, who’s published research on the topic, believes that Roc USA’s practices could be expanded beyond the ownership of manufactured housing parks to other forms of housing.

Could that model work for a group of big-city tenants wanting to buy their apartment building? Or a group of small-town retirees wanting to buy their retirement community? “Why don’t people replicate this model?” Shi asks. “We’re waiting for an answer.”

The UK government’s climate action plan is unlawful, the high court has ruled, as there is not enough evidence that there are sufficient policies in place to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The energy secretary, Claire Coutinho, will now be expected to draw up a revised plan within 12 months. This must ensure that the UK achieves its legally binding carbon budgets and its pledge to cut emissions by more than two-thirds by 2030, both of which the government is off track to meet.

The environmental charities Friends of the Earth and ClientEarth took joint legal action with the Good Law Project against the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) over its decision to approve the carbon budget delivery plan (CBDP) in March 2023.

In a ruling on Friday, Mr Justice Sheldon upheld four of the five grounds of the groups’ legal challenge, stating that the decision by the former energy security and net zero secretary Grant Shapps was “simply not justified by the evidence”.

He said: “If, as I have found, the secretary of state did make his decision on the assumption that each of the proposals and policies would be delivered in full, then the secretary of state’s decision was taken on the basis of a mistaken understanding of the true factual position.”

The judge agreed with ClientEarth and Friends of the Earth that the secretary of state was given “incomplete” information about the likelihood that proposed policies would achieve their intended emissions cuts. This breached section 13 of the Climate Change Act, which requires the secretary of state to adopt plans and proposals that they consider will enable upcoming carbon budgets to be delivered.

Sheldon also agreed with the environment groups that the central assumption that all the department’s policies would achieve 100% of their intended emissions cuts was wrong. The judge said the secretary of state had acted irrationally, and on the basis of an incorrect understanding of the facts.

This comes after the Guardian revealed the government would be allowing oil and gas drilling under offshore wind turbines, a decision criticised by climate experts as “deeply irresponsible”.

The CBDP outlines how the UK will achieve targets set out in the sixth carbon budget, which runs until 2037, as part of wider efforts to reach net zero by 2050. Those emissions targets were set after a 2022 ruling that Britain had breached legislation designed to help reach the 2015 Paris agreement goal of containing temperatures within 1.5C (2.7F) of pre-industrial levels.

The Climate Change Committee’s assessment last year was that the government only had credible policies in place for less than 20% of the emissions cuts needed to meet the sixth carbon budget.

The lawyer for Friends of the Earth, Katie de Kauwe, said: “This is another embarrassing defeat for the government and its reckless and inadequate climate plans. We’ve all been badly let down by a government that’s failed, not once but twice, to deliver a climate plan that ensures both our legally binding national targets and our international commitment to cut emissions by more than two-thirds by 2030 are met.

“We urgently need a credible and lawful new action plan that puts our climate goals back on track and ensures we all benefit from a fair transition to a sustainable future. Meeting our domestic and international carbon reduction targets must be a top priority for whichever party wins the next general election.”

Ed Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, said: “This is a new low even for this clown show of a government that has totally failed on energy and climate for 14 years. Their plan has now been found unlawful twice – once might have been dismissed as carelessness, twice shows they are incapable of delivering for this country.

“The British people are paying the price for their failure in higher bills, exposed to the dictators like [Vladimir] Putin who control fossil fuel markets. Only Labour can tackle the climate crisis in a way that cuts bills for families, makes Britain energy independent, and tackles the climate crisis.”

Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, said: “Once again the government’s climate plan has been ruled unlawful. When dealing with the climate emergency, simply ‘hoping for the best’ and putting your faith in unproven technologies and vague policies is not good enough – we need concrete plans and investments and there is no time to lose. The government must now go back to the drawing board and urgently pull together a credible plan to put the UK back on track to delivering our climate commitments.”

A DESNZ spokesperson said: “The UK can be hugely proud of its record on climate change. Not only are we the first major economy to reach halfway to net zero, we have also set out more detail than any other G20 country on how we will reach our ambitious carbon budgets. The claims in this case were largely about process and the judgment contains no criticism of the detailed plans we have in place. We do not believe a court case about process represents the best way of driving progress towards our shared goal of reaching net zero.”

Keir Starmer has hailed Labour’s “seismic” win in Blackpool South in a night of local elections that provided further evidence that the party is heading for a large majority at this year’s general election.

The Labour leader called the result in the Blackpool South byelection “truly historic” after the party’s candidate, Chris Webb, won the seat with the third biggest swing from the Conservatives to Labour in postwar history.

Webb, a local and the firm favourite, won with 10,825 votes, followed by David Jones, the Conservative candidate, with a distant 3,218 votes, who finished narrowly ahead of the Reform candidate, Mark Butcher, on 3,101 votes.

Webb’s victory is the latest sign that Labour is winning again in leave-voting areas it lost to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019, with the party also gaining control of the councils in Rushmoor, Thurrock and Hartlepool. However, it was defeated in Oldham, amid signs that it has lost ground in areas with high Muslim votes as a result of the party’s stance on the war in Gaza.

Starmer said on Friday morning: “This seismic win in Blackpool South is the most important result today. This is the one contest where voters had the chance to send a message to Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives directly, and that message is an overwhelming vote for change.”

Webb’s win in Blackpool South came on the back of a 26% swing, the third largest from the Tories to Labour since the second world war and the fifth time in the last 18 months it has won a seat from the government on a swing of more than 20%.

John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, told the BBC the results were further indication of a significant Labour majority to come at the general election.

“This is now the fifth parliamentary by election in which we’ve seen swings of over 20% from Conservative to Labour,” he told Radio 4’s Today programme. “The last time we had swings with that size of a degree of regularity was the 1992-1997 parliament. Tony Blair didn’t get as many as that, and we know what happened in 1997.”

Jonathan Carr-West, the chief executive of the Local Government Information Unit, said: “Against the backdrop of a steady Conservative decline since 2019, the results so far indicate the trend will not be bucked this year.”

Pollsters said early results suggested the Tories could lose half of the council seats they contested on Thursday night, putting them on course for as many as 500 losses.

Bad results are likely to lead to another attempt by Tory rebels to oust the prime minister just months away from the general election. However, Sunak’s allies have pinned their hopes on retaining the mayoralties in the Tees Valley and West Midlands, where polls show the results are likely to be very close.

While Labour celebrated its successes in Blackpool, Thurrock and Hartlepool, the party suffered shock losses in Oldham where it surrendered control of the council. Several Labour candidates lost their contest to independents amid deep local unhappiness over Starmer’s stance on Gaza.

Carr-West said: “This is the first indication that the party’s position on Gaza may cost it votes in this election and we will be watching how this plays out in other areas. It’s a reminder of how global and local politics intertwine and that local elections are not a straight dress rehearsal for the general election.”

Many in the party believe the Labour leader has been slow to criticise Israel’s actions in the Middle East, and insensitive to the anger it has caused among British Muslims and progressive voters.

Some believe this could cost the party as many as a dozen potential victories at the general election, although with Labour making such large gains elsewhere, experts say this is unlikely to cost the party a majority.

For Sunak’s party, the loss of Blackpool South was not unexpected but may be taken as an indication of how voters in less affluent constituencies are likely to vote in the general election expected later this year.

The constituency includes some of the UK’s most deprived wards, where many would argue the government has not delivered on its promises of levelling up.

The byelection was triggered after Scott Benton stood down in March over a lobbying scandal.

It was discovered in April 2023 he had offered to table parliamentary questions, leak documents and lobby ministers on behalf of gambling companies in return for “thousands of pounds per month”.

He sat as an independent MP after being suspended from the Conservative party, and was later suspended from the House of Commons.

The Conservative candidate faced competition from Reform’s Butcher, a local businessman who runs a soup kitchen being investigated by the Charity Commission over claims it was used to promote his campaign.

Reform ran a strong campaign in which Butcher distanced himself from the wider party, insisting he was “not a politician” and taking aim at the Tories and Labour, which played well in hustings.

Reform recently overtook the Lib Dems nationally to take third place in opinion polls and has led an ambitious local election campaign, fielding 300-400 candidates for councils across England. Meanwhile, those same polls show support for Labour has stayed level since dropping back after peaking during the short-lived Liz Truss prime ministership in 2022.

“It was a cracking good night,” Gawain Towler, Reform’s spokesperson, told the Guardian. “Of course we would have liked to have done better, we always do, but this is the best we’ve ever done. We’ve shown ourselves to be an effective force and success breeds success.”

He said Butcher should be “proud” of achieving such strong results and was now an experienced campaigner with one fight behind him.

“You’re gonna be disappointed because that extra 100 votes would have made such a difference but he knows how well he’s done,” Towler said.