curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Hans Christensen: Quadruple Number of Icebergs Risky for Ships
A huge increase in the number of drifting icebergs is a major concern for ships around Greenland. Rising temperature leads to release of more icebergs that drift south along the coast.
The number of icebergs in the Arctic has quadrupled since the early 2000s. A recent study, published in Nature by researchers including some from the Technical University of Denmark DTU Space, reports that the melting of major glaciers in Northeast Greenland and the Russian Arctic is resulting in a greater number of icebergs entering the ocean. Glaciers are calving many more icebergs into the ocean. They then move with the prevailing ocean currents, generally southbound towards the Atlantic. Drifting icebergs pose increasing risk to shipping around Greenland, calling for intensified monitoring and alertness, say the researchers.
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Icebergs can carry a surprising quantity of rocks and sediments from land and move them several hundred kilometers into the ocean. When the icebergs melt, the stones sink to the seabed, affecting life nearly 2,500 meters beneath the ocean’s surface. The solid surfaces on a generally soft seabed provide a foundation for sponges, sea anemones, and various other organisms to thrive.
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Alice Embree: The Elephant in the Room
You can’t make this up. Governor Abbott brought an elephant on to the floor of the Texas Republican convention in Houston on June 13th. The four-ton African elephant named Paige stopped to take a leak on the floor.
(Alice Embree more…)
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Jennifer Rubin: How voting to promote the Epstein cover-up architect could play out.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 15, 2026
President Donald J. Trump’s remaking of Washington, D.C., to reflect his personalized approach to power rather than the American people and their government has become a little too on-the-nose over the past week.
… as Kinnia Cheuk of Politico reported today, the renovations Trump said would cost $1.5 million appear from federal contracting records to have cost almost $16 million, and the pool is now fouled with green algae.
,,,The alleged compliance of the board of the Kennedy Center with a court order requiring it to remove Trump’s name from the center illustrates yet another of Trump’s hallmarks: cheating the system. …
Their conclusion seems to have been that the court ordered them only to take down Trump’s name; it did not order them to show that his name was down, or to keep Kennedy’s name visible. Currently, the Kennedy Center portico facade is covered with a giant tarp through which workers have created passageways to make the center’s doors accessible while keeping the portico covered.
…Both system-cheating and spectacle were on display in last night’s Ultimate Fighting Championship matches on the South Lawn of the White House. …
…We are about to see if Trump’s focus on cheating the system for his own ends and distracting from his actions with spectacle will work over something as huge as the Iran war and Americans’ constitutional rights.
…It appears that Trump badly wanted to sign an agreement with Iran yesterday on his birthday before taking off today for Europe to attend the G7, an informal forum made up of leading industrialized democracies—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and including the European Union (EU). Rumors about what was included in negotiations swirled all weekend.
While Trump is boasting that the agreement is a triumph, no one has yet seen any terms, and the agreement that is scheduled to be signed in Geneva, Switzerland, on Friday appears to be a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for a 60-day ceasefire for continued negotiations, not a final agreement.
Zack Stanton of MS NOW notes the ways in which Trump’s version of the MOU and what Iranian officials say about it are quite different. Trump says the Strait of Hormuz will be “permanently toll-free” while Iranian officials say they will regulate the strait along with Oman.
Trump is trying to cover over the release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets by saying “no money will exchange hands.” But this morning, Vice President J.D. Vance told CBS that in addition to that $24 billion, Iran will also have access to $300 billion in funds for reconstruction.
Discussion of Iran’s nuclear ambitions will be put off for later.
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But Trump will try to sell this as a win.After their recent reporting that the Trump administration went into panic mode to cover up the Epstein files last summer, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in the New York Times today that the Trump administration came much closer to trying to get rid of the writ of habeas corpus than was previously known. That right prevents the government from locking people up arbitrarily; authorities must charge a prisoner with a crime and take the case into the legal system. The Constitution spells out: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
Last spring, when the Supreme Court said undocumented immigrants had the right to challenge their deportations, according to Swan and Haberman, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller proposed simply suspending the writ of habeas corpus and throwing them out.
Warned away from the idea because of the outcry it would spark, the administration found a way to cheat the system: it changed longstanding policy concerning immigrants who had been in the U.S. for a long time. In the past, those caught on the border could be detained without a hearing, while those who had been here for a long time could request to be released on bond. The administration simply treated those who had been here for years as if they had just arrived, throwing them into detention without a bond hearing.
Judges have ruled against this new interpretation, but having found a way to cheat the system, the administration is simply ignoring them. …
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)Brian Allen: Israel Won’t Budge. Trump Has a Deal. And Nobody Agrees What the Deal Says.
Jason Easley: Trump Refuses To Release The Text Of The Iran Deal And Brief Congress Because It Doesn’t Exist
Brian Allen: A U.S. senator has said out loud what the administration refuses to: America is worse off on every metric Trump promised the war would fix.
Joyce Vance: The Question Inside Trump’s White House Wasn’t Whether They Could Suspend Rights—It Was Whether They Could Get Away With It
Heather Delaney Reese: At 10:15 this morning, an official White House social media account picked a fight with the weather. Responding to a Weather Channel forecast …
Borowitz: Trump Turns Eighty But Claims He Has Brain of Four-year-old
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James Eagle: ChatGPT still leads the AI platform usage race
(James Eagle more…)Ed Zitron: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, With Spending Hitting $34 Billion
Jason Koebler @ 404 Media: It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search
“We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently.”
Ed Zitron: AI’s Brokenomics
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Brian Allen: Newsom says federal agents are knocking on doors not because they found a crime, but because they are trying to find one.
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Joseph Cox @ 404 Media: FCC Wants to Kill Burner Phones By Forcing Telecoms to Get All Customers’ IDs
The FCC wants to legally force telecoms to collect new and renewing customers’ government issued identity number and physical address, impacting everyone from the privacy-conscious to domestic abuse survivors.
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Alyssa Lukpat, Sabrina Siddiqui @ WSJ: RFK Jr. Orders American Exposed to Hantavirus to Stay Quarantined Against Medical Advice
Health secretary says cruise passenger Angela Perryman has to stay isolated in Nebraska despite CDC report advising otherwise
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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