curated news excerpts & citations
Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims: Social media as state media
Silicon Valley was once viewed as a tool for liberation. Now, from blocking apps to banning groups, it is helping the White House suppress dissent.
In the past, social media platforms were viewed as engines of social change, empowering everyday citizens to band together against repressive governments. In 2009, during the Green Movement, millions of Iranian protesters relied on Twitter to coordinate gatherings and circumvent government media blackouts.
Social media, it seemed, was an effective tool that ordinary citizens could use to counteract the excesses of the powerful.
Times have changed.
(Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims more…)
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Paul Offit: RFK Jr.’s Tuskegee Experiment
Between 1932 and 1972, the United States Public Health Service, in what was called “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” knowingly withheld life-saving antibiotics from 600 African American sharecroppers in Alabama. Most died from syphilis. Purposefully withholding antibiotics so that investigators could observe the neurological outcomes of untreated syphilis was then, and remains today, a dark stain on American history.
RFK Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, will soon conduct his own Tuskegee experiment. He has chosen the resource-poor nation of Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, to do it. Guinea-Bissau is currently overwhelmed by hepatitis B virus. …
In addition to exposing children needlessly to a potentially fatal infection, RFK Jr. has manipulated the study to support his unsupportable, science-resistant beliefs about harms caused by the hepatitis B vaccine:
- The study will not be examining the efficacy of early or late vaccination, as it is clear that there is no value in delaying a hepatitis B vaccine, especially in a child whose mother is infected. …
- The study will be conducted over 5 years. Children who are infected with hepatitis B virus at birth don’t develop chronic liver disease for decades. …
- The study is single-blinded. This means that investigators will know whether children received a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine, but the parents won’t know. This allows for investigator bias, where the investigator might find vague neurodevelopmental problems in the birth-dose group but not the 6-week group.
- RFK Jr. bypassed the standard bidding process so that he could choose his own investigators. …
- It is unlikely that parents will be asked to sign a consent form outlining the real risks of being in the 6-week vaccine group. As this study is funded by the American taxpayer through money provided by the CDC, the U.S. Congress should insist on seeing the details of the study, including the consent form.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – January 29, 2026
Public outrage over the violence of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol has given Senate Democrats a powerful lever. Tonight they forced the Republican majority to split new funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) off from five other spending bills that must pass by Friday to keep the government funded. The Department of Homeland Security will be funded separately for just two weeks while the Democrats and Republicans negotiate the conditions of funding DHS.
…Meanwhile, footage circulated today of a woman in Minnesota who left her home to warm the car for her kids and got taken by federal agents. The video shows her calling someone to look after her children, who were left alone in the house.
In the last week, since federal agents shot Pretti, former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have all spoken out to condemn his killing and the violence of federal agents as well as the administration’s lies. They have warned that the nation’s core values are under assault and urged Trump officials to change course, while also calling on Americans to defend those core values.
The criticism of all the living Democratic presidents, along with his disastrous performance in Davos, Switzerland, last week and his plummeting numbers—as well as the fact the American people have not forgotten that the administration is continuing to break the law by refusing to release the Epstein files—appears to have sent Trump back to the comfort of older grievances. Today he hit not only his Big Lie but also his complaints about the inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives.
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, who has been strangely invisible now for months, resurfaced yesterday when the FBI seized ballots from the 2020 presidential election from a warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia.
The role of the DNI is to coordinate information from various intelligence agencies to make sure the president has good intelligence for making national security decisions, but Josh Dawsey, Dustin Volz, and Sadie Gurman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Gabbard has been moved off of national security intelligence to chase down Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was stolen from him, focusing on the idea that a foreign government was involved in such a theft. Two officials told the Wall Street Journal reporters that Gabbard’s report is designed to bolster executive orders about voting before the midterm elections.
…Brad Heath, who covers crime, justice, and investigations for Reuters, explained: “President Trump has filed a lawsuit against the IRS, in which he demands that the IRS, which he as president controls, pay him $10 billion.” Bluesky user Micah made the point more clearly: “the president of the united states should not be allowed to personally loot the treasury to the sum of ten billion dollars and that this is not resulting in immediate, unanimous impeachment is a dramatic indictment of what has become of our political system.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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James Eagle: Global grid investment is being driven by power and data
The US and China alone account for nearly half of total global grid investment. That concentration reflects two forces acting at once. The first is electrification, as transport, heating and industry shift away from fossil fuels. The second is data centre demand, driven by cloud computing and AI.
(James Eagle more…)
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Hans Christensen: Germany: China is Actively Disturbing Satellites
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Stephen Robinson: ‘Abolish ICE’ is imperative
It’s also better politics than you might think.
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Paul Krugman: The World Files for Economic Divorce from America
What you do when your (trading) partner is abusive
On Monday India and the European Union concluded negotiations on a breakthrough free trade agreement. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission — the EU’s executive branch — called it “the mother of all deals.” That description is somewhat over the top. Yet the agreement is in fact historic and important in ways that go beyond economics. For it shows that the world is becoming ever more estranged from an erratic, abusive United States. In other words, other countries are moving, step by step, toward an economic divorce from America.
(Paul Krugman more…)
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Miles Taylor: Why we should worry that Trump’s spy chief was spotted at an FBI raid of an election office
The incident is beyond suspicious. In fact, it’s a real-time flag of potential corruption — and the president’s ambition to rig the coming elections.
(Miles Taylor more…)Greg Palast and Thom Hartmann: The real story of the FBI raid on Fulton County, Atlanta
You are watching the theft of 2026 before your eyes
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Verge: Best gas masks
On tear gas, and what it means when the government uses it on civilians.
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Decoding Fox News: Fox News: Who’s Your Daddy Greenland?
A condensed overview of 23 hours of Fox News for the week ending 1/25/26
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Variety: Amazon Blocks Mainstream Press From Watching ‘Melania’ Documentary at Kennedy Center
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Borowitz: Nation’s Dogs Call for Noem to be Fired
ICE deaths 2026 – They deserve remembrance and justice.- 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
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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