The second successful day of rescue operations to free a Thai soccer team trapped in a cave for two weeks ended on Monday. Eight boys have been rescued thus far, leaving four and the team’s coach in the cave.

A day before the rescue operation began, PayPal founder Elon Musk tweeted that he was building a “tiny, kid-sized submarine.”

Engineers from three of Musk’s companies—SpaceX, Tesla, and Boring Company—were planning on traveling to Thailand to assist with “location tracking, water pumping, or battery power,” but their trip was cancelled when rescue operations began on Sunday.

The impulse to help is good, but what Musk and his engineers can actually do in this situation is unclear. “With all due respect to Mr. Musk, I am not sure that he or his engineers have a real good handle on exactly what they’re dealing with in this particular situation,” Anmar Mirza of the National Speleological Society’s National Cave Rescue Commission told Slate. “The teams working are already doing as much pumping as can feasibly be done in there. They have enough pumping power.” Other experts have cast doubt on the submarine’s ability to withstand water pressure or “survive being swept or banged against the rough surface of the cave system.”

It’s hard to imagine that the Thai government would risk the lives of these boys on a prototype submarine that had been invented days earlier. Though its mission is risky, it has placed its trust in expert divers and so far it has been successful. For now it’s hard not to see the mini-submarine as anything more than a publicity stunt.

Daily Beast writer Jay Michaelson is worried about the outsized power Donald Trump’s advisor Leonard Leo will have on the Supreme Court pick and the broader American judiciary. This is a worthy topic for discussion, since Leo is in fact drawing up the shortlist for Supreme Court nominations and has been a key player in The Federalist Society, an organization which is the gatekeeper for Republican court nominations. 

Unfortunately, Michaelson presents Leo’s actions through the prism of anti-Catholicism. Leo, we’re told,  is a “Catholic fundamentalist” who “belongs to the secretive, extremely conservative Knights of Malta, a Catholic order founded in the 12th century that functions as a quasi-independent sovereign nation with its own diplomatic corps (separate from the Vatican), United Nations status, and a tremendous amount of money and land.” 

Tom Carter, a former associated of Leo’s, is quoted as saying, “Leonard is very good at staying in the shadows.” Leo, we’re informed, likes to go to mass every day. 

Michaelson does include a proviso which both spells out and tries to ward off the conspiracy theories being evoked by his article. “To be sure, none of this is to repeat the odious claims of anti-Catholicism of papist conspiracies and dual loyalty,” Michaelson writes. 

But the weight Michaelson gives to Leo’s Catholicism does, despite this disclaimer, replicates the anti-Catholic conspiracy theories of yore. It also significantly distorts the story of the conservative take-over of the courts.

American courts have been moving to the right since the 1970s, but that’s because of broad political push by the Republican Party, not just a small cabal of Catholics. To be sure, conservative Catholics are a part of that Republican coalition, but a much smaller part than white evangelical Protestants. The Federalist Society is a secular organization which includes people of many religious faiths, as well as agnostics and atheists. The main impulse of The Federalist Society is economic conservatism, which has little or nothing to do with Catholic teaching. 

Many devout Catholics, including liberals and leftists, try to go to church everyday. Leo’s attempt to pack the court with rightists deserves criticism, but overemphasizing his Catholicism ignores the fact that he’s simply the spearhead of a larger social movement, of which conservative Catholics are a minority. 

On Sunday, The New York Times revealed that the Trump administration conducted extensive hard-ball diplomacy to stop an effort by Ecuador to secure a World Health Organization resolution promoting breast feeding.

“Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes,” The Times reported. “Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.”

The American push against the resolution targeted Ecuador for punishment. As The Times notes, “The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.” An Ecuadorian official told the newspaper, “We were shocked because we didn’t understand how such a small matter like breast-feeding could provoke such a dramatic response.”

The resolution did eventually pass, thanks to support from the Russian government.

The use of American military and economic might to protect corporate interests has ample precedence of course. Indeed, Huffington Post reporter Zach Carter specifically cites the Clinton and Obama administrations as precursors:

Carter is right to place the current story in a broader context of American trade policy. Still, even with that context, the Trump administration’s action are extreme. According to The Times, “The intensity of the administration’s opposition to the breast-feeding resolution stunned public health officials and foreign diplomats, who described it as a marked contrast to the Obama administration, which largely supported W.H.O.’s longstanding policy of encouraging breast-feeding.”

As a candidate, Trump boasted about his record as a builder and promised he’d bring about “the biggest and boldest infrastructure investment in American history,” with $1 trillion in spending on “gleaming new roads, bridges, highways, railways and waterways.” This infrastructure pitch was one of the pillars of Trump’s claim to be a different sort of president, a non-ideological dealmaker who could work with both parties.

The hope that Trump would be an infrastructure president has turned out to be a fantasy, for reasons Michael Grunwald explains in a deep-dive investigation in Politico into the stalled efforts to fund the much-needed Gateway tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan.

Gateway has faltered for two reasons. One is Trump’s temperament: When he couldn’t make a deal with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to get Democratic support for funding for the Mexican border wall in exchange for Gateway, Trump adopted a vindictive approach to deny Democrats a win. He went from an enthusiastic supporter of Gateway to being intent on sabotaging it.

Trump’s personal grudge fused with the ideological commitments of Republican policy wonks and lawmakers who were loath to spend money on a public project, especially in Democratic states.

Trump might want to be a builder, Grunwald notes, “But inside his administration and much of his party, there’s a genuine belief that the federal government should pay less for public works, especially urban transit projects for Democratic cities in Democratic states.” Those with ties to Trump dating from his pre-political days, Grunwald observes, believe “he truly wants to be a bipartisan builder but that Republican ideologues in Congress and his administration have maneuvered him into a narrow conservative lane.”

As an example of the Trump administration’s preference for private funding solutions, Grunwald points out that “The heads of Trump’s short-lived infrastructure advisory council, his fellow New York developers Richard LeFrak and Steven Roth, once startled Gateway’s backers in a meeting by suggesting New York and New Jersey finance the project by selling off one of the area’s airports.”

A vengeful president who heads a hyper-partisan party ideologically opposed to government spending is unlikely to rebuild America’s infrastructure.

Today is the court-ordered deadline for the government to stop breaking up migrant families and to ensure that separated parents are able to contact their children. According to CNN, the Justice Department has told a federal judge that the administration has met those requirements, but may request an extension this afternoon of two other deadlines. The government has until July 10 to reunite children under 5 with their parents, and July 26 to reunite children over 5.

Alex Azar, the secretary of Health and Human Services, says that about 3,000 children—100 of which are under the age of 5—are still in federal custody. To speed up the reunification process, the department has begun using DNA testing and recruiting volunteers to review case records. “Records linking children to their parents have disappeared, and in some cases have been destroyed, according to two officials of the Department of Homeland Security, leaving the authorities struggling to identify connections between family members,” The New York Times reported.

The stories of some reunited families have become national news. Angelica Gonzalez-Garcia and her eight-year-old daughter hugged at Boston’s Logan Airport on Thursday, 55 days since being separated at a detention center in Arizona. “Forgive me for leaving you all alone,” said Gonzalez-Garcia, crying. “Forgive me, my daughter. Forgive me.” Many families, however, remain separated. The six-year-old girl heard wailing on a famous audiotape released by ProPublica last month is still 1,000 miles away from her mother, who speaks to her daughter in twice-weekly phone calls.

White supremacists have long used Amazon Marketplace for third-party sellers to make money. Back in 2015, for instance, the Southern Poverty Law Center found a number of racist products for sale, including music, clothing, and toys. In December of last year, the Anti-Defamation League reported that white supremacist groups were using Amazon’s Associates program to fundraise.

Amazon has moved to block these attempts to use its platform; its policies prohibit “products that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual or religious intolerance or promote organizations with such views.” But a new report from the Action Center on Race & the Economy and the Partnership for Working Families has found that white supremacist paraphernalia is still being sold on Amazon. According to The Washington Post, “shoppers can purchase Amazon.com merchandise displaying symbols of white supremacy, such as a swastika necklace, a baby onesie with a burning cross, and a child’s backpack featuring a neo-Nazi meme.” Dozens of e-books from the neo-Nazi publishing house Counter-Currents were also being sold.

“It’s clear that Amazon is bringing in money by propping up these hate organizations and allowing them to spread these messages in a moment of rising white nationalism and violence,” the Partnership for Working Families’s Mariah Montgomery told the Post. Large tech platforms, most notably Twitter and Facebook, have been dealing with this problem for years. The efforts to remove Nazis and white supremacists from social media platforms have largely been inadequate. Amazon’s problem is of a smaller scale, but it’s still very important. As with Twitter and Facebook, more investment in monitoring the products for sale is necessary. That requires hiring monitors, something that these tech companies are not always eager to do.

Ever since Scott Pruitt announced his resignation as head of the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday—in fact, ever since he became embroiled in scandal—the press has scrutinized the agency’s number-two official, former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler. Would Wheeler, as the acting administrator, be any different than Pruitt when it comes to running the EPA?

A Politico report on Friday hints at an answer. Pruitt’s “top advisers” have been suppressing a scientific report warning that “most Americans inhale enough formaldehyde vapor in the course of daily life to put them at risk of developing leukemia and other ailments.” The story does not directly implicate Wheeler in the study’s suppression, but notes that he “has a history” with the chemical. “He was staff director for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2004, when his boss, then-Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), sought to delay an earlier iteration of the formaldehyde assessment.”

Under Pruitt’s reign, the EPA was known for trying to prevent the release of scientific studies on the harmful effects of pollutants. Earlier this year, Pruitt’s aides tried to block publication of a study showing contaminated groundwater across the country was more toxic than the government realized. Pruitt also instituted an EPA-wide policy in April that effectively prevents the agency from using research showing that pollution is bad for your health.

Pruitt may be gone, but the aides who attempted to suppress these studies remain. Those aides include Wheeler, who was confirmed as deputy administrator in mid-April and will be acting administrator for months (and could become the new chief, if Trump nominates him). It’s already been reported that Wheeler has many of the same policy deregulatory priorities as Pruitt. It remains to be seen whether he’ll continue his former boss’ policy of keeping inconvenient scientific evidence in the dark.