curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Merlyn Thomas, Alex Murray, Matt Murphy @ BBC:
Iran attacks damage 20 US military sites since start of war, satellite images show
Iran has damaged 20 US military sites since the start of the war, satellite images and videos analysed by BBC Verify show, suggesting the attacks are more extensive than publicly acknowledged.
Iran has targeted key facilities across eight countries in the Middle East since the end of February, causing millions of dollars of damage to state-of the-art air defence systems, refuelling aircraft and radars.
Tehran has targeted both US bases and shared military facilities in retaliation to the US-Israeli strikes across Iran and Lebanon over the past three months. …
Will Neal @ Daily Beast: Trump’s War Story Blown Up by Jaw-Dropping New Evidence
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 1, 2026
… Iran and its role in the president’s deteriorating mental condition are going to take center stage.
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His base demands that he look strong and accomplish what, after the initial strikes failed, he claimed to have started the war for: to make sure Iran doesn’t have the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. He also needs to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—which was open before he began the strikes—and get oil flowing again from that region of the Middle East. Prices in the U.S. are rising, and the looming threat of oil reserves running out adds even more pressure to consumer prices.
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… Permitting Iran to control the strait is not just about oil; it’s about the principle of freedom of the seas set out after World War II. Global trade depends on that concept. The exchange of money is also a problem for Trump. He has spent much of his political life attacking the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., the U.S., and the European Union negotiated with Iran during the Obama administration, claiming that former president Obama “gave” Iran $1.7 billion. In fact, the JCPOA simply permitted the release of Iranian assets frozen overseas by sanctions, but much of Trump’s base believes that Obama showed weakness by buying an agreement.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Jennifer Rubin: ‘Paradise’ Lost
… Stephen Miller, last week insisted, “The American people understand the hell that we inherited and the extraordinary paradise that President Trump is building.” To paraphrase Mary McCarthy (not Dorothy Parker, to whom the quote is frequently misattributed), every word he speaks is a lie, including “and” and “the.”
“The American people” overwhelmingly disapprove of Trump’s performance because they know they are not getting “paradise,” let alone “extraordinary paradise.” (Is there such a thing as mediocre paradise?) …
(Jennifer Rubin more…)People’s World: National Guard ‘summer surge’ to strengthen military occupation of D.C.
Gil Duran: The Sovereign Individual: Thiel, Argentina, and the Network State
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Hans Christensen: Beyond GDP as the Measure of Prosperity
Counting What Counts: The Urgent Need for a New Compass
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Farrah Tomazin @ Daily Beast: Melania Named in Bombshell New Epstein Claims
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Rebecca Solnit:
It Makes You Sick: The Attacks on Health, Healthcare, and Care… “love thy neighbor” is a profound thing to live by, a demanding instruction, but a trivial trio of words to toss out casually.
A nurse said something to me a few weeks ago that rearranged my reality a bit along those lines. He said that in some poor communities of color, there’s a real question about whether a young person’s asthma should be put on their medical chart even while they’re being treated for it. That’s because for a lot of poor kids, the military is a way out of that poverty, and the asthma diagnosis could shut it off to them – and of course more poor kids live in places where air pollution results in asthma. Although we were in New Mexico and he was from Connecticut, something about how he said it, the fierce passion, the moral rigor, made me see my own state, California, in a new light, or to feel viscerally what I had long known cerebrally.
I suddenly felt in a new way how the land and the people aren’t separate, and how too many people on too many parts of that land are being sickened by breathing in industrial pollution, particularly in port cities like West Oakland and Long Beach, agricultural smog, dust, pesticides and other forms of pollution all through the Central, San Joaquin, and Imperial Valleys and the fossil fuel pollution wherever there’s fracking, other forms of extraction, refineries, and heavy traffic, especially diesel-truck traffic, and in almost every part of the state at one point or another, wildfire smoke. …
(Rebecca Solnit more…)Alan Levinovitz @ Wired: There might finally be a way forward for long Covid treatment—if only you were allowed to talk about it.
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James Eagle: AI’s new bottleneck is memory
SK Hynix and Micron are not household AI names, but they sit inside the part of the boom that now matters most: capacity. If Nvidia’s chips are the engines, high-bandwidth memory is the fuel line. Without enough of it, expensive AI processors cannot run efficiently.
Bloomberg’s chart shows investors waking up to that bottleneck. The money is no longer flowing only to model builders and cloud platforms; it is spreading to the suppliers that determine how fast the AI buildout can actually happen.
You do not need to own the stocks for this to matter. If memory stays tight, AI gets more expensive to deploy, the winners change, and companies promising cheap intelligence face a harder margin story. Memory is still cyclical, so today’s bottleneck can become tomorrow’s glut.
(James Eagle more…)
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Christina Pagel: Last two weeks of Trump: science gutted, enemies attacked, and Cuba in the crosshairs
(Christina Pagel 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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