curated news excerpts & citations
Summer Said, David S. Cloud and Michael Amon @ WSJ: U.A.E. Wants to Force Hormuz Open and Is Willing to Join the Fight
Gulf state begins effort to persuade U.S. and others to open waterway by any means necessary
The United Arab Emirates is preparing to help the U.S. and other allies open the Strait of Hormuz by force, Arab officials said, a move that would make it the first Persian Gulf country to become a combatant, after being hit by Iranian attacks.
The U.A.E. is lobbying for a United Nations Security Council resolution that would authorize such action, the officials said. Emirati diplomats have urged the U.S. and military powers in Europe and Asia to form a coalition to open the strait by force, a U.A.E official said, adding that the Iranian regime thinks it is fighting for its existence and is willing to bring the global economy down with it in a chokehold on the strait.
The U.A.E. official said the country was actively reviewing how it could play a military role in securing the strait, including efforts to help clear it of mines and other support services.
The Gulf state has also said the U.S. should occupy islands in the strategic waterway including Abu Musa, which has been held by Iran for a half-century and is claimed by the U.A.E., some of the Arab officials said.
(Summer Said, David S. Cloud and Michael Amon @ WSJ more…)
NY Times: Trump Says He Halted Nuclear Threat From Iran, Despite Evidence to the Contrary
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – March 31, 2026
At 4:11 this morning, President Donald J. Trump’s social media account posted: “All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, to to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT”
While this morning, Trump appeared to wash his hands of his Iran war, there was an undertone of panic in his post, especially coming as it did just before an exclusive story by Alexander Ward and Meridith McGraw in the Wall Street Journal reporting that Trump has “told aides he is willing to end the military campaign against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed.”
Economist Paul Krugman noted this evening that this is essentially an admission of defeat, and Suzanne Maloney, vice president of the Brookings Institution think tank and an expert on Iran, called Trump’s suggestion that he is willing to leave the strait closed “unbelievably irresponsible.” Having started a war, she said, the U.S. and Israel cannot walk away from the outcome. “Energy markets are inherently global, and there is no possibility of insulating the U.S. from the economic damage that is already occurring and will become exponentially worse if the closure of the strait continues,” she told the Wall Street Journal reporters.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Walter Olson @ Dispatch: Extrajudicial Violence Risks Making the U.S. a Global Pariah
When the crimes of the Trump administration are called to account in some future reckoning, high on the list will be the ongoing boat strike campaign, which has killed at least 163 people in 47 strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, with a strike on March 25 killing four. Former Department of Homeland Security counsel Kevin Carroll wrote in these pages that the strikes, “especially [of] shipwrecked sailors hors de combat, will almost certainly be ruled unlawful homicides when eventually reviewed by courts.”
Those strikes committed the administration, as a signature foreign policy, to what is called extrajudicial violence—injury committed outside the lawful bounds of war on the one hand or law enforcement on the other, depending on how you might look at it. Which made me wonder: To what extent should the means by which the Trump administration has pursued its signature domestic policy, mass deportation, also be seen as extrajudicial violence? Among those who have already spotted the parallel is Dispatch columnist Kevin D. Williamson, who wrote, “it took only 127 days for the Trump administration to go from extrajudicial killings of non-U.S. citizens in the Caribbean to extrajudicial killings of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.”
It’s worth stopping at this point for a few caveats. Police in general, including those on a deportation mission, can lawfully use force for various authorized purposes: to detain a legitimate target of arrest, to respond proportionally to reasonable fear of imminent attack, and to respond to genuine interference or obstruction (which does not include simply being filmed). What’s more, isolated instances of excessive force will not always amount to a pattern of tolerated misconduct.
All that said, there is abundant evidence that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol have engaged in mind-boggling brutality against both noncitizens and citizens. After one target in Minneapolis was admitted to the hospital with his skull broken in eight places, ICE insisted to incredulous medical workers that he’d run into a brick wall trying to escape while handcuffed. Dozens have died in federal custody, often amid grotesque conditions, while the administration shipped 238 Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, where they predictably were subject to torture and extrajudicial violence, for which the facility was notorious.
(Walter Olson @ Dispatch more…)
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James Eagle: Why bond markets are reacting faster than policymakers
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What the chart shows is not panic, but constraint. Markets have already adjusted to a world where inflation proves harder to bring down, and policy becomes reactive rather than proactive.
(James Eagle more…)
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Hans Christensen: Ukraine’s ‘Kitchen’ Drones Beat Rheinmetall
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Your Local Epidemiologist: A new covid variant called Cicada, ticks and a new Lyme vaccine, common cold, and good news
Paul Offit: The Invulnerability Myth
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Alice Embree: The Small Things Matter
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Bloomberg: How a Wind Turbine Blessing Turned Into a Nightmare in Texas
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Rebecca Solnit: Eight Million Protestors and No Kings: The Case for Showing Up
It wasn’t just bigger than the previous #nokings. It was different. Here’s how USA Today unpacks that: “… They included not only familiar precincts in New York and Los Angeles and Austin but also communities in all 50 states and every congressional district, including rural and Republican areas.”So it was not only big but dispersed not in the sense of diluted, but distributed –deeper into non-urban areas and in every congressional district in the country (and every continent – at the urging of a friend I scrambled to try to make contact with someone who might take a picture of a No Kings moment in Antarctica; I failed but someone did it). Tennessee Indivible notes, “Pulaski, TN [a town of less than 10,000] showed out today — 100 people came together in a county where most folks said organizing would never take root.In a place with this much history, this much pressure, and this much expectation of silence, seeing that many neighbors stand up is nothing short of a breakthrough.This is what a shift looks like in a red state.”
(Rebecca Solnit more…)
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
ICE Accountability Project
ICE deaths 2026 – They deserve remembrance and justice.
- March 16: Royer Perez-Jimenez
- March 14: Naseer Paktiawil
- February 25: Nurul Amin Shah Alam
- 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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