WBUR TODAY: Out in the cold October 28, 2025

 

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

☁️ Cloudy and cool, with a high of 52. Good Morning Boston, We're officially four weeks (and counting) into the federal government shutdown, and it could claim another victim as the weather turns colder: heating assistance. excerpt:  Warming worries: Usually by now, states like Massachusetts would have received an influx of money from the federal government to disburse to families in need of help with their heating bills. It's called the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (or LIHEAP). And starting Nov. 1, those families would be able to use that assistance to get their electric, gas or fuel oil bill paid for, in whole or in part. But WBUR's Miriam Wasser reports that the money from the feds hasn't shown up — and that could leave many people in the cold. This assistance delay is "unprecedented," Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, told Miriam. And the potential consequences are dire. "You'll have people die," Wolfe said. "People won't turn on their furnace. They'll be afraid of the bill." Why this matters (especially in Massachusetts): Nearly a quarter of homes here are heated with fuel oil. That means paying hundreds of dollars up front to fill the fuel tank at least once a season. And while state law forbids utility companies from shutting off gas or electric service during the winter months, no such moratorium exists for people who rely on fuel oil. If they can't pay, they can't get heat. Who gets assistance: Households making up to 60% of the state median income — or roughly $99,000 for a family of four — are eligible for LIHEAP. Last year, more than 159,000 low-income households got assistance through the program in Massachusetts. More than half of the recipients were senior citizens. And 10% had a child under 5 in the home.  POSTED IN ITS ENTIRETY HERE:   WBUR TODAY

 

Dispatches of alarm and hope, on politics and society, democracy and justice. Because silence is not an option. We may read and write alone, but we drive change together.

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A Lawless President's Contempt

The crisis facing our democracy is escalating. How long will the courts and the people stand for it?

Steven Beschloss Mar 17

In the courtroom where he was convicted of 34 felony counts last May. (Photo by Justin Lane via Getty Images

So 77 million Americans voted for a vengeful convicted felon who’s pursued a life of crime and promised he’d exploit the presidency for retribution. No one should be surprised that this sociopath, provided near-total immunity by the U.S. Supreme Court if elected again, is now acting in an utterly lawless manner.

The crisis to our constitutional democracy and the rule of law is escalating. The evidence is mounting, as the Trump regime defies court orders meant to check its power. Two deportation cases in the last few days underscore their belief that they can flagrantly flout the law. The question is how and if they will be held accountable.

On Friday, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act. This 1798 law, only intended to be used during wartime, was last employed during WWII to justify the mass internment of Japanese-Americans as well as Germans and Italians. Trump ordered the deportation of alleged members of a Venezuelan gang, proclaiming they were “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions” against the U.S.

Despite U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s ruling to halt the deportation before further argument—indeed, to provide them due process—a reported 238 of the Venezuelans were put on an airplane headed for El Salvador. The judge also ordered that the deportation flights return to America.

But not only was this ignored—a Justice Department official later claiming they were not obliged to return because the planes were “outside of U.S. airspace”—El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, working with the Trump regime, mocked the order. He posted on X, “Oopsie…Too late,” along with a laughing emoji and a video of the deported men in shackles being removed from the planes. Attorney General Pam Bondi—without evidence—was quick to call all the deported men “terrorists.”

Soon they were being taken to a notorious prison where prisoners reportedly sleep without sheets or mattresses and can only eat with their hands. Secretary of State Marco Rubio made clear that all this is fine with him. “Thank you for your assistance and friendship, President Bukele,” he posted on X.

I asked leading pro-democracy lawyer Marc Elias where this case goes now. “The next step is to see if judges start holding the administration officials in contempt,” he told me. Elias succinctly summarized the stakes in his latest article for his newsletter, Democracy Docket:

Our system of government rests on the expectation that those in power will faithfully uphold and execute the law. That is the oath the president takes, and it is a core value underpinning government service. Once that principle is abandoned, democracy and the rule of law are doomed.

So far, no government official has explicitly told a judge they will not comply with an order. No judge has yet taken the extraordinary step of holding a government official or Department of Justice lawyer in contempt.

That might change if Judge Boasberg refuses to tolerate the administration’s defiance of the law. As Elias writes, “With each passing week, the administration grows more disdainful of the courts, and judges are becoming angrier.”

Another deportation case over the weekend confirms this. Far from Trump’s once-upon-a-time, oft-repeated lie that he was only focused on deporting criminals, a Lebanese doctor, kidney transplant specialist and Brown University professor with a legal visa was detained and subsequently deported back to Lebanon.

Despite a federal judge’s order to give the court 48 hours’ notice, Dr. Rasha Alawieh was put on a flight to Paris. She is a medical professional in an area facing a shortage, whose credentials include several American medical fellowships and a residency at Yale. Yesterday, Judge Leo Sorokin filed a second order suggesting U.S. Customs and Border protection had disobeyed his previous order and demanded that the agency respond to his “serious allegations.”

This was inevitable. Let’s return for a moment to the wise and tragically prescient words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissenting opinion after the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority voted to provide the president near-total immunity from prosecution. “The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding, she wrote last July. “This new official-acts immunity now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation.”

Donald Trump has now pointed that loaded weapon straight at us. Our democracy is teetering on the edge of survival. As the full damage of the immunity ruling becomes painfully clearer—as does the culpability of Chief Justice John Roberts who penned the decision—it’s worth remembering that Justice Sotomayor and others understood what they had done. Let’s return one more time to Sotomayor’s searing indictment, which offers consolation only insofar as the truth was both knowable and avoidable:

Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for ‘bold and unhesitating action’ by the President…the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more. Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.

But let’s not end here. Let’s take a lesson from a growing number of citizens in Eastern Europe who are refusing to remain silent amid corruption and authoritarian rule.

Over the weekend, more than 100,000 people in a student-led demonstration filled the streets in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, to protest against the corruption and incompetence of Serbia’s pro-Putin, autocratic president, Aleksandar Vučić. Meanwhile, some 50,000 demonstrators took to the streets in Hungary’s capital, Budapest, to protest against the 15-year rule of Hungary’s authoritarian ruler, Viktor Orbán, and support rising opposition figure, Péter Magyar.

Talking about the corruption of Orbán’s government, Magyar said, “They look down on and exploit the Hungarian people, stun and divide them, and turn them against each other. In the meantime, they laugh arrogantly in our faces.”

Sound familiar?

“Those who cheat on their own nation should end up in the dustbin of history,” Magyar told the determined crowd standing in the rain. “Our time has come.”

And what time is it in America? I’m hearing from more and more people who are joining the Tesla protests against Elon Musk and his so-called DOGE cuts around the country. That included more than 80 demonstrations on Saturday at Tesla dealerships around the country, part of a “Tesla Takedown” movement that urges owners and investors to “sell your Teslas, dump your stock, join the picket lines.” One of my good friends, who used to love his Tesla car, sold it last week because he couldn’t stand being connected in any way to Musk.

The opposition is making a difference: The electric vehicle company’s stock has fallen by half since mid-December and about 30 percent in the last month since the demonstrations began. If the downward spiral continues, Musk may eventually decide he’s had enough of the public’s rejection.

As the hostility of this regime toward the law intensifies, I expect more Americans will be taking to the streets. Ultimately, that may be the difference between the survival of our democracy or the prosperity of an authoritarian, oligarchic regime that treats the American people with nothing but contempt.

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DEMAND PROGRESS: Sign the petition: Justice Sotomayor fears for our democracy, threat of presidential power to kill political opponents

 

The right-wing justices on the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. president has “absolute immunity” for all “official acts.” That means former president Donald Trump may not face any accountability for his role in January 6.¹

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, "In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law." She said she feared for our democracy and warned that this ruling could even allow the president to kill political opponents with impunity.²

Two of the justices issuing this dangerous ruling, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, have clear conflicts of interest in this case but still refused to recuse themselves — one of the biggest examples of ethical violations in the Court’s history. We need a SCOTUS ethics act NOW to put an end to this blatant corruption.

Sign the petition: Tell Congress to pass a SCOTUS ethics act to root out corruption on the Court. Hold the right-wing justices on the Court accountable!

ADD YOUR NAME

Thomas shouldn’t be ruling on January 6 cases because his wife, Ginni Thomas, attended the January 6 Stop the Steal rally and pleaded with senior White House staff to help Trump overturn the election in the days leading up to the insurrection.³

Alito shouldn’t rule on January 6 cases because a Stop the Steal style flag was flying over his house. The flag flew as the Court considered whether or not to take on a critical election case in the days after the Capitol riots, just before President Biden was sworn in.⁴

Scandal after scandal has rocked the Supreme Court. Every single right-wing justice has been implicated in at least one striking ethical violation. Congress hasn’t taken the action necessary to stop corruption and preserve the fairness and independence of SCOTUS. Now, the Court may let Trump off the hook and hand the American presidency a shocking, dangerous level of power.

Add your name: Congress has sat on the sidelines long enough. Hold the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court accountable!

Thanks for taking action,

Joey and the team at Demand Progress

DONATE

Sources:

1. Reuters, “US Supreme Court rules Trump has broad immunity from prosecution,” July 1, 2024.
2. Business Insider, “Sotomayor says the president can now 'assassinate a political rival' without facing prosecution,” July 1, 2024.
3. The New Yorker, “Legal Scholars Are Shocked By Ginni Thomas’s 'Stop the Steal' Texts,” March 25, 2022.
4. The New York Times, “At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display,” May 16, 2024.

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Bill McKibben | A Very Hot Year

23 February 20 Plaudits for RSN I believe very strongly in what you are doing. I am a retired high school teacher of 85 years young on a public library computer making a donation. I regret I cannot do more. Thank for what you do. Your work is essential and so much more forthright than much of the so-called "democratic/republican/independent factual media". Clarence, RSN / Reader-Supporter Sure, I'll make a donation! Update My Monthly Donation If you would prefer to send a check: Reader Supported News PO Box 2043 Citrus Hts, CA 95611

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22 February 20

It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News

PRESSING HARD TO GET TODAY INTO THE WIN COLUMN - Who out there can take a moment and make a contribution? Really trying to avoid losing a day. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

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Bill McKibben | A Very Hot Year

Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books
McKibben writes: "This year began with huge bushfires in southeastern Australia that drove one community after another into temporary exile, killed an estimated billion animals, and turned Canberra's air into the dirtiest on the planet."
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Justice Sonia Sotomayor. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Justice Sotomayor Warns the Supreme Court Is Doing Special Favors for the Trump Administration
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "The Supreme Court voted along party-lines Friday evening to allow a Trump administration rule restricting low-income immigrants' ability to enter the US to take full effect. All four of the Court's Democratic appointees dissented, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing a sharply worded dissenting opinion accusing her Court of 'putting a thumb on the scale in favor of' the Trump administration."
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Nevada voters at a caucus site. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Nevada Democratic Party Moves to Muzzle Nevada Caucus Workers
Reed Albergotti, Isaac Stanley-Becker and James Pace-Cornsilk, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The Democratic Party of Nevada wants to avoid the kind of embarrassments that plagued the Iowa caucuses. One way it hopes to accomplish that goal: Non-disclosure agreements that prohibit election volunteers from saying anything that might harm the party's reputation."

The Democratic Party of Nevada is asking volunteers to sign nondisparagement agreements.

As election volunteers stream into party headquarters near the Las Vegas Strip to pick up their election materials, including iPads that have been programmed to tally the caucus results, they’re being asked to sign a lengthy legal document prohibiting them from saying anything that might “impair or otherwise adversely affect the goodwill or reputation” of the party, according to the document viewed by The Washington Post. The agreement also prevents volunteers from speaking to the press and requires them to report any run-ins with reporters to higher ups, threatening legal action for any lack of compliance.

The unusual move to muzzle election workers has already caused at least three volunteers who spoke to The Post to quit in protest.

“I think it’s shady,” said Ziad Doumani, a retired firefighter and student who lives in Henderson, Nev., and volunteered to run one of the caucuses. While Doumani himself has not been asked to sign the NDA — so far, it has been reserved for “site leaders” who have shown up to pick up the materials — he said the lack of transparency is disturbing. “Why can’t we talk about it? Why are they being so secretive?”

According to one of the volunteers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution, state party officials refused to allow a site leader to walk out with his election materials unless he signed the NDA. At first, after the site leader complained, he was told by a staff member that signing the NDA was optional. But when the site leader said he did not intend to sign the document, a Democratic supervisor prohibited the person from picking up the materials he needed to conduct the caucus.

Molly Forgey, spokeswoman for the Nevada Democrats, said the NDAs are voluntary and said it was “standard practice to request staff and volunteers to sign an NDA because they are privy to strategic information.” Forgey declined to say why the agreement also included a nondisparagement clause.

A Democratic official with another state party, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue, said it was not standard practice to ask volunteers to sign nondisclosure agreements.

Another site leader who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of upsetting the Nevada Democratic Party signed the NDA on Thursday but had not read it and was not given a copy by the party.

The six-page document shared with The Post by another election volunteer requires them to stay mum about their election activities.

The Nevada caucuses have come under intense scrutiny after the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses turned into a debacle when a mobile app developed by a company called Shadow failed to properly tally the results. Nevada had planned to use a mobile app developed by the same company but scrapped that plan after the Iowa mishap.

In the weeks that followed, the Nevada Democratic Party, which is responsible for the caucuses here, has been scrambling to come up with a technological solution to a complicated process.

Nevada held early voting, and the caucus workers will have to incorporate those early votes with the in-person votes on Saturday.

The Democratic Party here had hoped to use technology to make that process less tedious. It’s in the process of distributing iPads equipped with software from Cisco Systems. Volunteers will use a Google Forms web app programmed to calculate the caucus math, including how many delegates should be awarded to each candidate.

Several caucus volunteers said the idea that some information should be kept secret is not unreasonable. Kevin Standlee, a volunteer in Reno, said he thinks the Democrats should keep secret hotline telephone numbers, for instance. Hotline phone numbers in Iowa were abused by pranksters after they were made public during the caucus, jamming the lines and preventing election results from being transmitted. He does not think an NDA is appropriate, however.

“I’m not planning on signing unless it’s made an absolute condition of continuing to chair my precinct,” he said in an email.

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A security contractor frisks a detainee ahead of a deportation flight to Honduras. (photo: Getty Images)

Deporting Immigrants to Their Death Is Unconscionable
Belen Fernandez, Jacobin
Fernandez writes: "When the United States sends Salvadoran immigrants back to their home country, it's sending them back to the very violence they were trying to flee - and that the United States itself helped create."

EXCERPTS:

Lest anyone feel too sorry for the Salvadoran security forces, recall that these very forces have for over thirty years done more than their fair share to sustain the violent landscape in El Salvador — from the US-backed right-wing slaughter of the civil war (1980–1992) up to the present era. Consider, for example, Human Rights Watch (HRW)’s recent reminder that “Salvadoran security forces have…committed extrajudicial executions, sexual assaults, enforced disappearances, and torture” — all within a context of essentially institutionalized impunity.

The reminder incidentally appears — speaking of Salvadoran migration to the United States — in a report titled “Deported to Danger: United States Deportation Policies Expose Salvadorans to Death and Abuse,” which shows how, for many deportees (among other sectors of Salvadoran society), the country is still a place of “unchecked violence.”

The paper draws on 138 cases, between 2013 and 2019, of Salvadorans killed following their expulsion from the United States, as well as more than seventy cases in which deportees were disappeared, sexually assaulted, tortured, or otherwise harmed by gangs, security forces, or other actors. But given El Salvador’s position as one of the homicide capitals of the world — where crimes frequently go unreported — the problem is undoubtedly more vast.

Often, Salvadorans are sent from the United States back to the very violent threats they were trying to get away from in the first place. There’s the case of Camila Díaz Córdova, a transgender woman slain by police in 2019 after unsuccessfully seeking asylum in the States. There’s “Angelina N.,” who fled abuse by her husband and threats from a gang member — the same gang member who raped her after she was deported and who threatened to murder her father and daughter. And there’s “Javier B.,” who fled gang recruitment in El Salvador only to be found dead shortly after his forced return.

Deportees can face lethal risks for something as simple as having tattoos — which in El Salvador can get you into trouble with both the gangs and the police, even if the marks aren’t gang-related. There’s also a threat from death squads or “extermination groups,” which, the report notes, have traditionally been “deeply rooted in the country’s security forces.” Meanwhile, deportees who have lived in the United States for a long time can be “easy and lucrative targets for extortion or abuse” and can “run afoul of the many unspoken rules Salvadorans must follow in their daily lives in order to avoid being harmed.” In a country saturated with invisible borders delineating the respective territories of rival gangs, an act as mundane as crossing the street can literally get you murdered.

As for the United States’ criminalization of migration and punitive deportations, it’s worth recalling that much of the violence Salvadorans are fleeing is the result of a former US deportation scheme in the 1990s, when gang members were sent en masse back to El Salvador. And why, pray tell, had these gangs formed in the United States? As a means of self-defense for Salvadoran communities that had left because of the civil war — another instance of US-bound Salvadoran migration fueled by violence in which the United States was hugely complicit.

HRW observes that the United States “is repeatedly violating its obligations to protect Salvadorans from return to serious risk of harm,” and that “in several key respects, US immigration law and policy violate international human rights and refugee law.” Donald Trump, of course, has bumped it all up to another level of inhumanity by working to effectively eradicate asylum options.

In light of the rampant violence in El Salvador — and the fact that many Salvadorans escape the country precisely because there is a “serious risk of harm” — it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that deported Salvadorans will often be put once again in harm’s way. And yet they are preemptively criminalized by an imperial power that valiantly defends the sacrosanctity of its own borders while violating everybody else’s.

Bukele, meanwhile, is of the opinion that “President Trump is very nice and cool, and I’m nice and cool, too.” But as the United States deports people to death in a country where it has long abetted lethal human rights abuses, it’s time to kill deportations and criminalize a system that is totally uncool.

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Michael Bloomberg. (photo: Getty Images)

Twitter Is Suspending 70 Pro-Bloomberg Accounts, Citing 'Platform Manipulation'
Suhauna Hussain and Jeff Bercovici, Los Angeles Times
Excerpt: "Michael R. Bloomberg's presidential campaign has been experimenting with novel tactics to cultivate an online following, or at least the appearance of one."

But one of the strategies — deploying a large number of Twitter accounts to push out identical messages — has backfired. On Friday, Twitter began suspending 70 accounts posting pro-Bloomberg content in a pattern that violates company rules.

“We have taken enforcement action on a group of accounts for violating our rules against platform manipulation and spam,” a Twitter spokesman said. Some of the suspensions will be permanent, while in other cases account owners will have to verify they have control of their accounts.

As part of a far-reaching social media strategy, the Bloomberg campaign has hired hundreds of temporary employees to pump out campaign messages through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These “deputy field organizers” receive $2,500 per month to promote the former New York mayor’s candidacy within their personal social circles, in addition to other, more conventional duties. They receive campaign-approved language that they can opt to post.

In posts reviewed by The Times, organizers often used identical text, images, links and hashtags. Many accounts used were created only in the last two months. Bloomberg officially entered the presidential race on Nov. 24.

After The Times inquired about this pattern, Twitter determined it ran afoul of its “Platform Manipulation and Spam Policy.” Laid out in September 2019 in response to the activities of Russian-sponsored troll networks in the 2016 presidential election, the policy prohibits practices such as artificially boosting engagement on tweets and using deliberately misleading profile information.

By sponsoring hundreds of new accounts that post copy-pasted content, Twitter said the campaign violated its rules against “creating multiple accounts to post duplicative content,” “posting identical or substantially similar Tweets or hashtags from multiple accounts you operate” and “coordinating with or compensating others to engage in artificial engagement or amplification, even if the people involved use only one account.”

The suspensions may sweep up accounts belonging to unpaid Bloomberg supporters or campaign volunteers. While the Bloomberg’s campaign’s practice of paying Twitter users was a factor in the suspensions, a company spokesman said accounts behaving in substantially the same manner will receive the same treatment, regardless of who controls them.

In a statement, Sabrina Singh, a spokesperson for the Bloomberg campaign, said: “We ask that all of our deputy field organizers identify themselves as working on behalf of the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign on their social media accounts. Through Outvote [a voter-engagement app], content is shared by staffers and volunteers to their network of friends and family and was not intended to mislead anyone.”

Facebook’s response to the Bloomberg campaign’s novel social strategy has also been evolving. The social network views the campaign’s activity as falling under its rules for branded content, not the rules against “coordinated inauthentic behavior” devised largely in response to Russian election meddling.

Facebook’s rules for branded content “require disclosure of paid partnerships anytime there has been an exchange of value between a creator or publisher and a business partner.” In 2018, the company began to require more detailed disclosure for political ads to discourage state-sponsored influence operations.

The software tool created for buying political ads on Facebook did not allow for branded content campaigns by influencers. Earlier this month, after the Bloomberg campaign bypassed the tool entirely to mount a large-scale paid influencer campaign, Facebook lifted that ban.

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According to leaked European Union documents, the EU could soon be creating a network of national police facial recognition databases. (photo: Yotam Hadar/The Intercept)

Leaked Reports Show EU Police Are Planning a Pan-European Network of Facial Recognition Databases
Zach Campbell and Chris Jones, The Intercept
Excerpt: "According to leaked internal European Union documents, the EU could soon be creating a network of national police facial recognition databases."
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Fireflies in a cedar forest in Tamba, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. (photo: Nori Yuasa/Getty Images)

Why the Lights Are Going Out for Fireflies
Michael Marshall, Guardian UK
Marshall writes: "At dusk, graduate student Sara Lewis was sitting on her back porch in North Carolina with her dog. 'We were supposed to be mowing our grass, but we never did, so we had long grass in our yard,' she recalls. 'Suddenly this cloud of sparks rose up out of the grass and started flying around me.'"

Fireflies face a dim future because of habitat loss and light pollution. How can conservationists help?

Each spark was a firefly: a beetle that glows in the dark. Hundreds of fireflies had gathered in Lewis’s back yard and were soaring around her. “It was this incredible spectacle,” says Lewis, “and I just sort of gasped.” Then she became fascinated. “I started wondering what the heck was going on here, what were these bugs doing, what were they talking about?” She has spent much of the past three decades studying fireflies.

In recent years Lewis’s work has taken on a new urgency. All around the world, the lights of fireflies are going out. The dazzling beetles are disappearing from long-established habitats. Often it is not clear why, but it seems likely that light pollution and the destruction of habitats are crucial factors. Biologists are racing to understand what is happening to fireflies so we can save them before their lights fade permanently.

There have been fireflies since the dinosaur era, says evolutionary geneticist Sarah Lower, an assistant professor of biology at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. “The estimates we have currently are that fireflies are over 100m years old,” she says. Early in their history, they split into two groups, one of which spread throughout the Americas while the other colonised Europe and Asia.

Fireflies all belong to a family of beetles called Lampyridae. In Europe they are often called glow-worms, while American fireflies with flashing lights are known as lightning bugs. All these terms are misleading, says Lower. “They are not flies. They are not bugs. They are not worms. They are beetles.”

Fireflies are not the only luminous insects: three other beetle families have luminescent members, as do fungus gnats. However, fireflies are the most prominent. There are approximately 2,000 species.

However, fireflies are in trouble. In 2019, the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation published a report on North American fireflies, warning that “populations appear to be in decline”. It was co-authored by Lewis, who is now professor of evolutionary and behavioural ecology at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and author of a book on fireflies, Silent Sparks: The Wondrous World of Fireflies.

The extent of the decrease is unclear because most firefly populations have not been tracked. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which monitors thousands of species, only created its Firefly Specialist Group in 2018. Fireflies are difficult to study: they are hard to find when not displaying.

“The best data we have is from the UK,” says Lewis. Citizen scientists have tracked the UK’s one firefly, the common glow-worm, Lampyris noctiluca, since the 1970s. For most species there are only anecdotes, but they all tell the same story, and biologists who study wild fireflies are convinced.

Earlier this month, Lewis and her colleagues published the first systematic review of threats to fireflies in the journal BioScience. They surveyed 49 firefly experts from around the world, asking them to rank 11 potential threats in order of importance. “These are people on the ground who have been working with fireflies and they see what’s going on,” says Lewis. According to the experts, the biggest threats to fireflies are habitat loss, pesticides and light pollution…

1. Homes destroyed

While some animals adapt to life in human environments such as cities, many fireflies need particular habitats, so are vulnerable if those habitats are destroyed.

The congregating fireflies of south-east Asia are an example. The males have flashing lights with which they attract females. They gather at night in a mangrove tree, and flash – whereupon the females fly in and choose mates. In some species the males synchronise their flashes, creating spectacular displays that tourists love.

Most such fireflies are in the genus Pteroptyx, and live only around riverbanks. After mating, the females lay their eggs in the mud of the riverbank. The larvae develop there and spend months feeding on snails, before becoming adults and returning to their display trees. “All the parts of their life-cycle depend on that habitat,” says Lewis. But humans are cutting it down and replacing it with oil palm plantations. “For that particular group of fireflies, habitat-loss is a really big thing.”

2. Too bright

The second biggest threat, according to the survey, is light pollution. This takes many forms, from bright and direct streetlights to the diffuse “skyglow” that means the sky is never truly dark. Most biodiversity studies have largely neglected light pollution, says Lewis. “But for fireflies it’s front and centre.”

In 2018, Lewis and Avalon Owens of the biology department at Tufts identified five ways in which nocturnal light pollution could affect fireflies, in a study published in Ecology and Evolution. The light can make them lose track of the time or their position. The fireflies may struggle to recognise important objects, such as their snail prey. In species where one sex is attracted to the glow of the other, artificial lights may disrupt mating. Finally, really bright lights may dazzle or even blind the fireflies.

Some species are more vulnerable to light pollution. In the eastern US, big dipper fireflies (Photinus pyralis) are thriving. They are not tied to a particular habitat and are common in New York City. “They’re in people’s back yards in Brooklyn,” says Lewis. “The adults fly in parking lots.” However, this reflects big dipper fireflies’ lifestyle. “Their courtship activity is actually just around sunset, so it’s already quite light,” says Lewis. “They don’t seem to be disturbed at all by the high light-levels in urban environments.”

This is unusual. Many fireflies display late at night, when it would naturally be very dark. “If there’s a lot of background illumination from streetlights or even skyglow, then their signals are going to be less visible,” says Lewis. These nocturnal species are most vulnerable to light pollution.

Fireflies’ eyes are particularly sensitive to certain kinds of artificial light, says Alan Stewart of the University of Sussex. His team studied the eyes of British common glow-worms, in which males are attracted to glowing females. The males’ eyes were tuned to the females’ green light, but when blue light was added, the males struggled to find the females. This means new LED streetlights, which are longer-lasting and thus environmentally beneficial, are likely to disrupt the fireflies more than old-fashioned sodium streetlights, due to their blueish light.

3. Chemicals and collectors

The third major threat is pesticides. This never occurs to most people, says Lewis, because they see fireflies only as displaying adults. “People don’t really think about the life cycle,” she says. Most of a firefly’s life is spent as a larva, on or under the ground, or underwater. There, they are exposed to pesticides. Firefly larvae are especially at risk because they are predators, normally hunting small snails, each of which may contain a dose of pesticide. “If people were aware of that, I think they would be a lot more hesitant to spray pesticides on their lawn,” says Lewis.

In parts of Asia, fireflies are taken from the wild in huge numbers. “They have big insect festivals and will hire local people to go out, catch a bunch of fireflies and release them at the festival,” says Lower. If the fireflies are habitat specialists, they will not survive. “That’s depleting populations in some places.” One conservation organisation estimated that over 17m were purchased in China in 2016.

Beyond these external factors, there are also risks tied to fireflies’ lifestyles. In a 2019 paper published in Biodiversity and Conservation, Lewis and her colleagues highlighted “numerous risk factors”. For instance, adults often cannot fly far – and in some species may not fly at all – so they struggle to move if their habitat is threatened. Many species also have specialised diets, so can starve if their food supply is lost.

The good news is, now we are getting a handle on what is happening to fireflies, we can do something. Some practices, such as the harvesting of fireflies, simply need to stop. Japan has achieved this. In the early 1900s, firefly shops collected the insects, packed them into bags and sent them by bicycle courier to big cities where they were released for people to enjoy. “That put a huge dent in firefly populations,” says Lewis. In the 1920s a young man named Kiichiro Minami figured out how to rear fireflies in captivity, with no scientific training. Minami started releasing the fireflies back into rivers, restoring the population. This is still happening. “Schoolchildren raise fireflies in class and release them into rivers,” says Lewis. While Japan’s fireflies have not been restored to their former glory, they are a conservation success story.

Beyond that, Lewis identifies three actions that should help every firefly species. First, she says, “if there’s a place with firefly biodiversity or abundance, try to preserve that habitat.” Not all of us can do that, but one thing anyone who lives near fireflies can do is reduce light pollution. “Turn off your lights during firefly season, or just turn off your lights in general. Have motion-detector lights that only come on when you need them.” And reduce the use of pesticides.

People can also help by reporting firefly sightings. Anyone in North America can do so by joining the organisation Firefly Watch, which has been running since 2010. There are similar “citizen science” schemes in many countries. You can also join iNaturalist, which allows you to submit photos of animals for identification.

“We just want people to go out and enjoy fireflies in their natural habitats as much as they can,” says Lewis. Stewart agrees, calling fireflies a “magical experience”.

With care, many of us may one day have fireflies sparkling in our back yards.

Lampyris Noctiluca: Britain’s only firefly

The UK has only one native firefly: the common glow-worm (Lampyris noctiluca). Lampyris is found also on mainland Europe. They are best seen in June and July evenings, when females glow green to attract males. The UK glow-worm survey website offers a wealth of information.

Common glow-worms live for two years. They hatch from eggs in late summer, grow a little by feeding on tiny snails, then hibernate through winter. They spend the next spring and summer growing, hibernate, then pupate in spring. They emerge as adults around June, mate, lay eggs and die. The long life cycle is a vulnerability, says Sussex University’s Alan Stewart: “A lot can happen in two years.”

They are partial to a mixture of woodland and grass or scrub, says conservationist John Tyler, who lives in Buckinghamshire. “The larvae feed on snails and like dense cover; the adults need open space to glow and for the males to find them.”

They are not officially endangered, because they have not been assessed by the IUCN. But there is evidence of decline. In a 2017 study in the journal Lampyrid, Tyler and his colleagues compiled data from 15 English sites and found sharp falls. “Even on nature reserves they’re declining,” he says.

Common glow-worms face many of the same threats as other fireflies, but are particularly vulnerable because adult females cannot fly. “They’re extremely bad at colonising new sites, or recolonising sites where they’ve been lost,” says Tyler.

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