What happened
Federal immigration agents seized Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) phone, computers, notebooks and passport during this week’s unusual pre-election raid, and the Justice Department sent out more than a dozen subpoenas, including to her family members, multiple news organizations reported yesterday. The Trump administration’s “multipronged” investigation is “aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her,” The Wall Street Journal said, citing U.S. officials and other sources. 

Who said what
The investigation is “focused at least in part on how Omar obtained her citizenship after she arrived in the U.S. from Somalia decades ago,” the Journal said. It centers on “whether Omar or her father changed her age on her citizenship application to show she was 17 years old rather than 18.” The unsubstantiated allegation that she was 18 and “therefore ineligible to earn citizenship” automatically when her father was naturalized in 2000 “gained traction on conservative social media through a viral video posted in 2019,” The Washington Post said. 

What next?
The case has “already raised concerns about Justice Department integrity and politicization,” CNN said. Due to constraints imposed by the federal magistrate judge who eventually approved the search warrant for Omar’s house, “any criminal investigation that would rely on her own records may be slowed down substantially.”

What happened
Turkish police yesterday raided the headquarters of Halk TV, one of the country’s last major broadcasters critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Eleven people were taken into custody. Turkish authorities also installed a “trustee manager” to “oversee the popular news channel” as they investigate alleged corruption, said The Associated Press. 

Who said what
Halk is Turkey’s “most widely watched pro-opposition news” and the “fifth major pro-opposition news outlet” to have its leadership replaced by a “government overseer,” said The New York Times. “Today is a dark day for Turkey,” Halk owner Cafer Mahiroglu, who lives abroad, said in a video statement. “The public’s right to information is being seized for political reasons.” Ozgur Ozel, leader of the opposition New Party, said on social media that “raiding a television channel at dawn and appointing a trustee is an act only dictators would commit.”

What next?
Erdogan’s term is scheduled to end in 2028, the Times said, but he might “seek another five-year mandate” if he calls early elections “sometime next year.” His “main challenger,” Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, “has been behind bars for more than a year” on corruption charges “critics also see as a politically motivated move,” the AP said. “Halk TV has reported extensively” on Imamoglu’s case.

Ghost forests are the “watery remains of a once verdant woodland,” and they’re spreading nationwide, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. When seawater “advances and overtakes the fresh water that deciduous trees rely upon,” it “poisons living trees, leaving a haunted forest of dead and dying timber.”

Between 1985 and 2021, 58,998 acres of North Carolina forest were “converted to marsh, ghost forest and shrub,” said a study published in the journal PLOS One. Conversion into ghost forests has “sped up even more than overall forest loss,” growing by 18,683 acres between 2010 and 2021 — “2.5 times faster than between 1985 and 2010,” North Carolina State University said in a release about the study.

The problem is not just limited to North Carolina. Between 2012 and 2023, scientists tracked more than 260 million dead trees across the U.S. Great Lakes and coastlines, according to a preprint study in bioRxiv. The tree die-off was concentrated in “high-elevation inland wetlands and low-lying forests prone to inundation.”

The biggest contributor to ghost forest expansion is the rise in sea levels due to climate change. Global mean sea levels are “rising at about 4.1 millimeters per year, and saltwater intrusion is expected to affect nearly 77% of the world’s coastlines by 2100,” said New Scientist. The encroaching saltwater puts more coastal forests at risk, and there are likely to be long-term climate implications, as “tree mortality and decomposition releases carbon into the atmosphere,” said Michelle Sims, of the World Resources Institute.