curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
James Eagle:
Hormuz traffic looks more like an escape than a reopening
There was a brief burst of departures through the Strait of Hormuz due to the June US-Iran memorandum. Outbound crossings briefly approached 60 vessels a day, while inbound traffic in the right-hand panel peaked at 20.
However, make no mistake, traffic is still vastly below what occurred before the war (look at both charts). The agreement provided an opportunity for ships to leave, rather than evidence that the Strait was back to business as usual. It was more like a prison breakout from a conflict that is still ongoing.
Now that hostilities have flared up again, traffic has also fallen again. Shipowners, crews, insurers and traders cannot schedule reliable journeys through the Strait and so must wait once again for the next lull in fighting. The reality is that lots of vessels are still trapped in the Strait and those pre-war levels we see in these charts seem unlikely to recover any time soon.
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Tamara Pearson @ Truthout:
Mexican Activists Are Fighting Climate Crises by Stopping Extractive ViolenceIndigenous activists and water defenders in Mexico are organizing to combat what they call “signs of planetary death.”
(Tamara Pearson @ Truthout more…)Maxine Joselow @ NY Times:
E.P.A. Expected to Erase Limits on Climate Pollution From Power PlantsGeneration of electricity is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases in the United States.
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Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – September 13, 2026On Saturday, September 12, Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, published a 3,800-word essay calling for AI companies to slow down their improvement of AI models.
Amodei expressed concern that AI models are themselves pushing advances faster than engineers can understand them. He noted that July’s OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, in which programs designed to hack into systems found weaknesses that permitted them to escape the “sandbox” in which designers were testing them for about a week before anyone noticed had, luckily, been relatively harmless, but warned that “in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage.” Within a year, he warned, such a swarm could take over the entire internet, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Hans Christensen:
Close election in Sweden may bring right-wing party into government
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Heather Delaney Reese:
Donald Trump can’t hide from the worldAt 11:50 this morning, the President of the United States made a special stop on his way to promote his private golf course in Doonbeg, County Clare, Ireland. For exactly 35 minutes, a rambling Donald Trump stood at the podium inside the 250-year-old Deerfield Residence in Dublin, Ireland, to speak to a room full of our Embassy personnel, Irish business leaders, and government officials. For exactly the next 35 minutes, the president read from the cheat sheets in his three-ring binder, he compared Kamala Harris to cage fighting, gave the room a lesson on how golf games are scored, complained about NATO and threatened that there would be an announcement about that soon, joked that the first lady chose to stay home because the flight was too long, before saying to a room full of Irish people, apparently thinking he was being funny, “Let me tell you, you are some of the most vicious bastards.”
(Heather Delaney Reese more…)
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AP:
Alaska drops voter misconduct cases against American Samoans who wrongly checked ‘US citizen’ box
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Idaho Learning News:
Trump’s mail voting crackdown could take effect within days — and GOP states’ own clerks say they aren’t ready
Last Days in Two Nations
Climate.us
formerly Climate.gov
Climate Solutions Explorer
Have I Been Flocked?
Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting
resources tracking the “Andes” hantavirus outbreak
Apocalypse Early Warning System
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
Mike Ludwig @ truthout: ICE Says 51 People Died in Custody Under Trump. Experts Say That’s an Undercount.
ICE Accountability Project
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, Ximena Bustillo, Jasmine Garsd @ NPR: Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump
- August 31: Pierre Damas Bel
- August 1: Edwin Lopez-Cornejo
- July 19: Jose Chajon-Raxon
- July 14: Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran
- July 13: Joan Sebastian Guerrero
- July 7: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo
- June 4: Mamuka Artmeladze
- April 16: Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt
- March 25: Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano
- March 16: Royer Perez-Jimenez
- March 14: Naseer Paktiawil
- February 25: Nurul Amin Shah Alam
April 1 – Jennifer Peltz and Jake Offenhartz @ AP: Death of a refugee left at a Buffalo doughnut shop by Border Patrol is ruled a homicide - January 24: Alex Pretti
- January 14: Heber Sanchaz Dominguez
- January 14: Victor Manuel Diaz
- January 9: Parady La
- January 7: Renée Good
- January 6: Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- January 5: Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- January 3: Geraldo Lunas Campos
- December 31, 2025: Keith Porter
Suffering Under President Obama
NACDL Criminal Case Tracker
Texas Tribune: A Walk for Peace: photos of Fort Worth monks’ journey to Washington
Walk for Peace – Dhammacetiya – The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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