What happened
Lawyers at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts yesterday ordered President Donald Trump’s name stripped from the building by June 12 and “immediately” removed from marketing materials, staff signatures and other documents. The order follows a federal judge’s ruling last week that Trump had unlawfully appended his name to the storied arts institution, designated by Congress as a living memorial to the assassinated 35th president.

Who said what
The Trump-picked board “acted beyond its authority” when it added his name to the institution, the Kennedy Center general counsel’s office said in its memo. “Expunging Trump’s name throughout the center would be the most tangible setback” in his quest to “take over” the venue, The Washington Post said, and the memo was the “first indication that the Kennedy Center plans to comply with the judge’s order.” Trump was “incensed” by last week’s ruling, The New York Times said, and Kennedy Center leaders had quickly “indicated that they planned to appeal.”

What next?
The general counsel’s memo said the center was “considering its options” regarding the judge’s temporary halting of plans to shut the arts venue down for two years for renovations and “will provide further guidance shortly.” 

What happened
President Donald Trump yesterday said his administration was pouring more than $700 million into reviving the struggling coal industry. The funds will reopen one coal-fired plant, extend the life of 13 others, subsidize coal mining and export operations and build the first two new coal-burning plants since 2013. Trump said he was invoking the 1950 Defense Production Act to intercede in the market. The money for the new coal-fired plants was allocated by Congress for clean energy technologies.

Who said what
This is the “latest in a series of extraordinary efforts” Trump has taken to “improve the fortunes of coal, the most polluting of the fossil fuels” and one of his “favored” industries, The New York Times said. Energy experts “quickly attacked the subsidies as irrational” because “burning coal is one of the least economic methods of producing power,” The Washington Post said. The half-dozen coal plants Trump has kept open through emergency orders have cost “ratepayers tens of millions of dollars.” He has concurrently “clamped down on renewable energy,” The Associated Press, blocking wind and solar projects and “ending clean energy tax credits.”

What next?
Analysts said Trump’s investments “could run into trouble if a future president cracked down on the coal sector,” the Times said.

“When a river is alive, it has a sound,” said Angela Ortigara, a senior adviser at WWF Netherlands. “You hear it trickling down the rocks. You see vegetation around it. It’s this flow of life.” 

And “across Europe, that sound is now beginning to return,” said CNN. The environmental coalition Dam Removal Europe has calculated that a record-breaking 603 dams were removed across the continent last year as countries embarked on a “broader reassessment of how rivers function in an era of climate extremes.”

The removals allow waterways to “resume their natural course,” and they are part of a “global trend to restore rivers to help wildlife thrive,” said The Guardian. The damming of rivers “disrupts ecosystems, hinders the transport of sediments” and is believed to have contributed to a 75% fall in Europe’s freshwater migratory fish population over the past 56 years.

Not everyone is on board, though. Some farming groups and policymakers have criticized the wide-scale dismantling of dams and water barriers, raising concerns about potential impacts on land use and rural livelihoods. The presence of dams could slow the spread of invasive species, while barrier removals may allow new threats to travel from one part of a river to another, according to a study published last year.

But with “careful preparation, monitoring and long-term management, these risks can be minimized,” said Ellen Dolan, a biologist at Queen’s University Belfast and the lead author of the riverine barrier removal study, to The Guardian.