curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Tulsa race massacre
The Tulsa race massacre was a two-day-long terrorist massacre perpetrated by white supremacists that took place in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, between May 31 and June 1, 1921. Mobs of white residents, some of whom had been armed and appointed as deputies by city government officials, attacked black residents and their homes and businesses. The attackers burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood—at the time, one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States, colloquially known as “Black Wall Street.” The event is considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history.
More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 black residents of Tulsa were interned, many of them for several days. The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded that 36 people died. In 2001, the Tulsa Reparations Coalition examination of events identified 39 people dead (26 black and 13 white), based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates, and other records. The commission reported estimates ranging from 39 people to around 300 people dead.
(Tulsa race massacre more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – May 31, 2026
On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, stood up against Republican Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and his supporters, who were undermining American democracy in a crusade against “communism.”
…Those who wanted to slash the government back to the form it had taken in the 1920s, when businessmen ran it, had a problem. American voters liked the business regulation, basic social safety net, and infrastructure construction of the new system. To combat that popularity, the anti–New Deal Republicans insisted that the U.S. government was sliding toward communism. …
… On February 9, 1950, during a speech to a group gathered in Wheeling, West Virginia, to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, an undistinguished senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy claimed that he had a list of 205 communists working for the State Department and that the Democrats refused to investigate these “traitors in the government.”
…On June 1, 1950, only four months after McCarthy made his infamous speech in Wheeling, Smith stood up in the Senate to make a short speech.
She began: “I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear…. I speak as a Republican, I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States senator. I speak as an American.”
Referring to Senator McCarthy, who was sitting two rows behind her, Senator Smith condemned the leaders in her party who were destroying lives with wild accusations. “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she pointed out. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic American principles. “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” Senator Smith said. “It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.”
… Four years later, the Senate condemned McCarthy. And while Senator Smith was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, McCarthy has gone down in history as a disgrace to the Senate and to the United States of America.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Max Bearak, José María León Cabrera @ NY Times: The U.S. Boat Strike Campaign Has Now Killed Over 200 People
Residents of coastal communities in Colombia and Ecuador said the airstrike campaign was making many reconsider anything involving the ocean as a livelihood.
…A wide range of legal experts say the strikes are illegal because the military is prohibited from deliberately targeting civilians, even if they are believed to have committed a crime, unless they pose an immediate threat. Experts also say there is no evidence that the strikes have had any impact on the amount of cocaine reaching the United States from South America.
(Max Bearak, José María León Cabrera @ NY Times more…)
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Zak Jason @ Business Insider: AI just hit its COVID shutdown moment
May 20, 2026 is to AI what March 11, 2020 was to the pandemic.
… March 11 was, as Wired later called it, “the moment that everything in American life changed — launching us into an uncertain future of unknown duration.”
The second time I had that feeling was this past Wednesday. If the release of ChatGPT in November 2022 was akin to the first confirmed case of COVID in the US, in the full course of history, May 20, 2026, may be AI’s “everything changed” moment.
It started with numbers so stupid big they seemed unreal. Chips giant Nvidia posted a record quarterly revenue of $81.6 billion, more than 26 times its revenue in the first quarter of 2020. The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic, which didn’t even exist in 2020, was projecting its revenue to reach $10.9 billion next quarter, more than double the quarter before — a rate of growth faster than Zoom’s in the pandemic.
(Zak Jason @ Business Insider more…)Jason Sattler: Why You Want to Be on the Side of the Students Booing AI
Robert Reich: It’s Still Capital vs. Labor
… Workers’ share of the nation’s income has now dropped to the lowest it’s been since records began in 1947. Profits’ share is the highest since 1950.
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zeteo: 11 Harrowing Video Testimonies From Westerners Tortured and Raped by Israel
“They wrenched my trousers and my underwear down and… I was vaginally raped by one of the male soldiers.”
“He came walking to me with a taser, saying that he was going to taser my genitals.”
“I was pricked with some sort of syringe.”
(zeteo more…)
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Jonathan Cohn @ Bulwark: Ebola Veterans Are Aghast at Trump’s Plan for the Outbreak
DOCTORS AROUND THE COUNTRY are baffled, disturbed, and in some cases aghast at the Trump administration’s plan for Americans who get Ebola overseas—in particular, the decision not to bring these patients back home, to one of the facilities that the federal government created precisely for this purpose.
(Jonathan Cohn @ Bulwark more…)
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Heather Delaney Reese: Donald Trump knows he’s in serious trouble
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Jason Easley: Trump Interior Secretary Doug Burgum would not say who is sponsoring Trump’s Freedom 250 organization that is being run out of the White House, who the donors are, or how the money is being used.
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Egberto Willies: Big Oil’s Solar Lie Falls Apart When Congressman Says One Word: Battery
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Ruth Ann Crystal MD: Dr. Ruth Report, 5/31/26
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Thom Hartmann: Prologue: A Crime in Plain Sight
Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: “Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told”
(Thom Hartmann more…)
Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting
resources tracking the “Andes” hantavirus outbreak
Apocalypse Early Warning System
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
ICE Accountability Project
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, Ximena Bustillo, Jasmine Garsd @ NPR: Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump
- 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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