curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Anup Roy, Shruti Srivastava @ Bloomberg: Extreme Heat Is Already Stifling Economic Growth in India
Too hot to work
…
“My productivity is down 40%,” Iraqi says, his brow glistening with sweat. “Workers can’t survive in this heat without proper hydration and cooling.”
It’s a scene playing out across India as summers become increasingly unlivable. Heat and humidity have been rising for years, and on any given day last month, the vast majority, sometimes all, of the world’s 50 hottest cities were in India. The impact is showing up across the economy, from operating costs to inflation and power demand.
In April, the federal government issued a heat advisory directing businesses to reschedule working hours, provide hydration breaks and rest areas, and slow the pace of work. Schools, most of which don’t have air conditioning, closed for summer vacations weeks earlier than usual in several states or revised timetables and shifted classes online.
(Anup Roy, Shruti Srivastava @ Bloomberg more…)
-
James Eagle: Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil assets have hit a record high
Ukraine’s drone campaign is becoming an economic war inside Russia. Bloomberg’s chart shows at least 30 hits on Russian oil facilities in May, the highest monthly count since the full-scale invasion began.
The target choice is not random. Oil funds the Russian state, supplies the military and gives Moscow pressure in energy markets. Striking refineries, pipelines, ports and tankers forces Russia to defend a vast industrial system far from the front.
(James Eagle more…)
-
Prof. Lawrence O. Gostin: I’ve spent my career fighting ebola. Trump’s policy response could be catastrophic.
Right now the United States is choosing to stand on the sidelines, rather than take on a leadership role in confronting the ebola crisis. Instead of taking active measures informed by sound public health data, our government is banning travelers, including health and humanitarian workers returning from affected countries, while stranding vulnerable US citizens on foreign shores. This comes after the administration has systematically de-funded the very organizations created to respond to such a crisis, and waged a broader war against scientific expertise in general and the public health community in particular.
The result is an ineffective response to an outbreak that threatens to spin out of control. I know because we’ve been here before. After the 2014 ebola outbreak in West Africa—the largest in history—I served as senior advisor to the United Nations Secretary General’s post-ebola commission. At the time, we proposed “a bold new agenda for global health preparedness” in order “to effectively prevent, detect, and respond to future global health emergencies.
…There is a better way. The United States’ response to the 2014 outbreak was the gold standard for exactly this sort of crisis. Back then, the US sent in the military and public health service, and surged resources to West Africa, the epicenter of the crisis. These actions alone almost certainly prevented hundreds of thousands of ebola infections, and untold numbers of fatalities. …
(Prof. Lawrence O. Gostin more…)
-
Jason Easley: Trump Has Lied Dozens Of Times About A Deal With Iran That Isn’t Even A Deal
Trump has claimed at least 40 times that the US was close to a deal with Iran, but what is being negotiated isn’t the final deal, but the terms for negotiations of a final deal.
Dean Blundell: Trump’s Alleged “Very Strong MOU” With Iran Is the Art of the $300 Billion Surrender
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Donald Trump starts a fight he can’t finish, declares victory before the deal exists, and then quietly agrees to terms so lopsided you’d think they were written by the other side.
(Dean Blundell more…)
-
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 12, 2026
Today was the deadline set by Judge Christopher R. Cooper of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for Donald Trump’s name to come off the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, more commonly known as the Kennedy Center.
In his ruling of May 29, Cooper noted that “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” and Congress stipulated that “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas” of the Kennedy Center.
As soon as he took office in early 2025, Trump replaced trustees on the Kennedy Center board and appointed himself a trustee as well. …
Late this afternoon, the board of the Kennedy Center filed an emergency appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court, asking for a stay in the order to remove Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center. It was, perhaps, hasty work. …
For the first time, the board alleged that “The Bylaws of The Trump Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Foundation state, unequivocally,” that the board must strip all funding from the Kennedy Center unless Trump’s name stays on it. Dye notes: “If the bylaws were amended, they were amended since Judge Cooper issued his order—prob[ably] yesterday. This is the Board choking off funds and saying ‘you have to let us break the law, or we’ll lose all the funds.’”
According to a lawsuit filed yesterday by the Washington National Opera, about $17 million of the money Trump appears to be claiming from the Kennedy Center belongs to the Washington National Opera. For fifteen years, the suit says, the opera and the Kennedy Center had a contractual relationship, in which the center managed donations to the Washington National Opera for the opera’s benefit.
“By the second half of 2025, the Kennedy Center stopped performing many of its obligations under the governing affiliation agreement, including marketing, fundraising, and administrative support, as well as timely reporting on the growth of WNO’s funds,” the suit says. “Despite repeated requests from WNO, the Kennedy Center did not remedy its non-performance. Instead, it proposed that the parties end their long-standing affiliation. That affiliation came to an end in January 2026.”
And then the Kennedy Center refused to return the WNO’s money, instead using it as collateral for its own line of credit.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)Maxine Joselow @ NY Times: Judge Blocks National Parks From Removing ‘Negative’ Signs and Depictions of Slavery
-
Borowitz: Police Investigating 8647 Markings on National Mall Find Unusual Hat at Scene of Crime
(Borowitz more…)
-
Amanda Marcotte: Why MAGA cares so much about the L.A. mayoral race
-
Robert Reich: They don’t want you to know the REAL reason Social Security is in trouble
… the Social Security payroll tax applies only to earnings up to a certain cap.
…
Back in 1983, the cap was set so the Social Security payroll tax would hit 90 percent of total income in America. That 90 percent figure was built into the Greenspan Commission’s fixes. …Today, though, the Social Security payroll tax hits only about 83 percent of total income in America. It went from 90 percent to 83 percent because a steadily larger portion of the nation’s total income has gone to the top.
(Robert Reich more…)
-
Paul Krugman: Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme
Yesterday I took a short trip. I began with a ride on the local Hyperloop, which ran through a tunnel dug by Boring Company. Then I used my neural implant to summon a fully self-driving Tesla robotaxi. While enroute I read the latest news from the Mars colony.
OK, none of that actually happened, because those products don’t exist. There are no working Hyperloops. The Boring Company has not dug any commercial tunnels. Tesla has a few self-driving — though not fully self-driving — taxis in Austin and nowhere else. (Google’s Waymo driverless taxis are operational in several major hubs.) Neuralink, which is purportedly pioneering brain implants, has tested its products in a handful of patients but done no more than that. And of course there is no Mars colony: there have been no manned flights to Mars, nor the prospect of any for the foreseeable future.
Yet at various points over the past decade Elon Musk promised that each of these services would be available by 2025 if not sooner.
Granted, Musk has had some real successes. Tesla was ahead of the EV curve, and Starlink is a critically important service as well as a viable business.
But these achievements weren’t enough to make Musk the world’s richest man. His wealth has, instead, historically rested mainly on self-fulfilling faith — investors believing in Musk’s genius have piled into stocks in Musk-controlled companies, and the rising value of these companies has enhanced his reputation for genius.
We have a term for enterprises that look successful because they keep drawing in new investors and keep drawing in new investors because they look successful. They’re called Ponzi schemes. And Elon Musk is basically a human Ponzi scheme.
(Paul Krugman more…)
-
Andrew Wyrich:
FBI raids Ohio voter registration group in ‘systematic effort’ to attack elections
-
Heather Delaney Reese: You can tell who Trump fears by who he attacks
…
But the most dangerous thing he did today was aimed at a single man. On Truth Social, the president called sitting Congressman Jamie Raskin “a Loser in Life” and demanded the House “EXPEL THE BUM,” reaching for a constitutional power meant for the gravest betrayals and aiming it at a man whose only offense was holding him accountable under the law. Jamie Raskin is a former constitutional law professor who led the second impeachment while carrying the rawest grief a parent can know, just days after losing his son. He survived January 6th inside the Capitol, and he beat cancer while never missing a vote, sitting through hearings in a head covering through six rounds of chemotherapy. That is the man Trump wants gone. Because people willing to sacrifice for their principles are dangerous to those who have none. And Republicans have already introduced a resolution to expunge both of Trump’s impeachments, to strike them from the record “as if such Articles had never passed,” because they need the historical record to tell a very specific story.We have seen this sequence before. In Germany in 1933, the first people the regime moved against were not the generals or the judges. They were the elected members of parliament. …
(Heather Delaney Reese 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
Leave a Reply