curated news excerpts & citations
Priyanka Shankar
@ Al Jazeera:
What’s Iran’s 14-point proposal to end the war? And will Trump accept it?
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The new proposal calls for guarantees against future attacks, a withdrawal of US forces from around Iran, the release of frozen Iranian assets worth billions of dollars and the lifting of sanctions, war reparations, ending all hostilities, including in Lebanon, and “a new mechanism for the Strait of Hormuz”.
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Tehran also wants its right to uranium enrichment guaranteed as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), but Trump has made the nuclear issue a “red line”. Iran wants decades of sanctions, which have devastated its economy, to be lifted as part of any deal. The navigation through the strait and demands for war reparations are other sticking points in the talks.
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Musgrave said on the two biggest issues – enrichment of uranium and transferring its highly enriched uranium – the US and Iran remain “far apart”.
“President Trump has been unyielding that Iran must surrender its nuclear capability,” he said.
Kenneth Katzman, a senior fellow at New York-based nonprofit Soufan Center, said Iran’s mistrust of Trump remains a bigger obstacle.
Jaroslav Lukiv, Bernd Debusmann Jr @ BBC: Iran says US has responded to its latest peace proposal
Daniel Dale @ CNN: Fact check: Trump denied he made this remark about Iran. He made it on camera one day earlier
… a reporter reminded Trump that he had said the previous night that the US might be better off not making a deal with Iran.
Mary Geddry: Schrödinger’s War Comes Due
Trump’s Iran conflict is somehow over, ongoing, not responsible, and wildly expensive, while the bill shows up in polling, prices, supply chains, the Pentagon, and everyone’s grocery cart.
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Rebecca Solnit: “This is how the attack on one petro-state (ours) on another (Iran’s) may be turning out to be very bad for petroleum, because the only thing history loves more than a surprise party is irony.”
The biggest news is always the climate news, and sometimes it’s so big it seems to be incomprehensible, or so terrible it makes people want to shut their eyes to it, and that’s part of how it gets shoved to the side. …
There might be good news about the very bad news. If the most important crisis of our lifetimes is the climate crisis, the most important new inflection point for that catastrophe is the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz for the last several weeks. Its most direct impact is dire: the loss of oil and gas as the fuel on which much of the world runs and as the raw material for fertilizers, plastic, and other stuff made from fossil fuel. But when a resource is no longer available or affordable for too long, people can and do change patterns of usage and turn to other resources.
…It’s important to say that this blockade is first of all a bad thing and people are suffering, and when the impact of a spring planting without the necessary fertilizer starts to show up as a reduced harvest, they are likely to suffer more in the form of hunger and even starvation.
…p.s. Pretty much every time I talk about renewables, someone pops up to note that the materials from which they’re made, especially the ingredients for batteries, involves extraction in ways that suggest it is therefore a bad thing. It does involve mined materials, and all mining should be done with respect for local people, sacred places, and nature, and if you think extraction is bad, fossil-fuel extraction dwarves the scale of all other extraction and devastates all those things along with bringing on climate chaos. …
First the amount of mined material required for renewables is estimated to be about 1/400th that of fossil fuel while we are still building out the infrastructure. Secondly these materials, unlike fossil fuel, do not get burned up and therefore do not need to be constantly replaced because they’re not fuel, they’re infrastructure; much of the stuff is durable and recyclable so there will be a point at which much less extraction is needed because we recycle what we’ve got. Thirdly there’s impressive research going on to find less impactful and more available battery materials. Fourthly a lot of the objections are about lithium and cobalt, and it turns out lithium (which is not a rare earth element) is extremely common and widely distributed and Australia is currently the largest supplier and cobalt is not actually used in a lot of car batteries any more. A no-extraction human society is not an option at this juncture in history; a transition away from the monstrous extraction of fossil fuel is our best option for the earth, the sky, and all life on earth.
(Rebecca Solnit more…)Johanna Hansel, Carla Samon Ros, Wyatt Myskow @ Inside Climate News: How the Rush to Mine the Metal of the Future Echoes America’s Colonial Past
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Hans Christensen: Tuna Returning to Danish Waters After 50 Years
Just a few years ago, most tuna species worldwide were threatened. Thanks to conservation efforts, many populations have now recovered, including in Øresund between Denmark and Sweden.
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Chris Freeland @ Internet Archive: On World Press Freedom Day, a Call to Keep the News Preserved
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – May 3, 2026
Late on Friday night, President Donald J. Trump took to social media. At 11:03 he posted an AI-generated image of himself, alongside Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, all shirtless, along with an unidentifiable woman in a bikini, appearing to be relaxing in a swimming pool. But the “swimming pool” was the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Then, at 11:04, Trump posted …
Then, at 11:13, Trump posted …
Then, at 11:15, he posted …
Then, at 11:22, he posted …
Then, at 11:26, he posted …
Then, at 11:32, he posted …
Then, at 11:37, he posted …
Then, at 11:40, he posted …
Then, at 11:41, he posted …
Then, at 11:45, he posted …It was some 43 minutes.
The president appeared to have been triggered by graffiti that appeared in the reflecting pool Friday morning: “86 47” spray-painted across it in a message that was about 15 feet by 30 feet.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)Devlin Barrett @ NY Times: Blanche Says Others Who Post ‘86 47’ Message Won’t Be Charged Like Comey
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Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, appeared later on the show and said there was only one thing that distinguished Mr. Comey’s case from other examples of people using the phrase: “the fact that James Comey is a political opponent of the president; it’s the fact that the president has called on him for prosecution; it’s the fact that Todd Blanche wants to keep his job.”
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Ruth Ann Crystal MD: Dr. Ruth Report 5/3/26
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Onion: Farmer Buys Guardian Dog To Protect Livestock From RFK Jr.
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Thom Hartmann: Neoliberalism comes to America
Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: “The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and How to Restore Its Greatness”
(Thom Hartmann more…)
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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