curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
![Mel West sits down to write on June 17 in his home office in Columbia, which he does every morning as a part of his routine. “I urge everyone as they are getting older to write their memoirs,” West said. “So many people don’t know their family history.” [I still receive handwritten mail from Mel.]](https://kewus.net/yesterday/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Mel-at-desk.jpg "Mel West sits down to write on June 17 in his home office in Columbia, which he does every morning as a part of his routine. “I urge everyone as they are getting older to write their memoirs,” West said. “So many people don’t know their family history.” [I still receive handwritten mail from Mel.]")
Emily Early @ Columbia Missourian:
“Compassion. That is the key. Compassion is love in action”
…
For more than a century, [Mel West] has been figuring out humanitarian ways to serve his fellow man. …
West is probably best known for Mobility Worldwide, a nonprofit organization that builds carts for those in developing countries who need a way to get around. …
…
“If you want to follow Jesus,” he said, “you go with your antennae out looking for human need.”
In the last 102 years, West said he has seen considerable human achievement and advancement, but the most important changes during his lifetime have been the empowerment of women and the change in attitude toward the treatment of animals.
“The world is getting better every day,” he said.
“I pledged allegiance every morning in grade school to the flag. And then, we ended up with liberty and justice for all. I beg that a word be added to that: with liberty, justice, and compassion for all,” he said.
(Emily Early @ Columbia Missourian more…)
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Thom Hartmann: The Voting-Machine Report They’re Hiding Until November
The pattern is becoming impossible to miss: the hidden report, the voter-roll purges, the gerrymanders, and Postal Service changes targeting mail ballots in Democratic states…
Somewhere inside the White House right now there’s a federal intelligence report sitting in a drawer, and Trump’s lickspittles who put it there are betting you won’t see it before you vote in November.
(Thom Hartmann more…)Daniel Hunter @ Waging Nonviolence: Trump’s repression of dissent is backfiring
In response to the Trump administration’s attempts to quell dissent and tilt the playing field, people are not shrinking in fear, but getting more bold in their resistance.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 24, 2026
Today, strategic studies scholar Phillips P. O’Brien gave a comprehensive review of the events and outcomes of Trump’s war on Iran. In his Phillips’s Newsletter, O’Brien noted that “the USA is now negotiating without much, if any, leverage. That really is extraordinary. The Trump administration has put itself in a position where it cannot go back to the use of military force, cannot put much if any real pressure on Iran, and therefore will have to concede most of the main points to the Iranians.”
“Personally,” he adds, “I have never seen the US in such a position of weakness.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
Ben Werschkul @ Yahoo! Finance: Oman, the longtime US ally on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz, is talking with Iran about imposing tolls
Iran is, bit by bit, moving toward eventually charging tolls in the Strait of Hormuz, with a notable step forward this week.
In an unusual joint statement from Iran and Oman, the two nations said they met to emphasize “their sovereignty and sovereign rights over their territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz,” and that the conversation also touched on “services that will be provided in this regard and the costs associated with them in accordance with international standards.”
(Ben Werschkul @ Yahoo! Finance more…)Brian Beutler: Opponents Of The JCPOA Unlocked A Hellish Future
They made a gamble with a rickety but salvageable global order—and lost.
Borowitz: Vance Furious After ChatGPT Keeps Recommending Obama’s Nuclear Deal
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Jason Weisberger @ Boing Boing:
Whiskey Pete discovers viruses do not respect vaccine freedom speechesPete Hegseth gave the flu virus a stirring lecture about freedom, and the flu virus responded by infecting hundreds of recruits at Lackland Air Force Base.
…The funniest and most horrible part is that the military already knew this. A certain General George Washington ordered the Continental Army to be mass-inoculated against smallpox in 1777. This was not some new woke epidemiology cooked up in a DEI lab by Dr. Fauci’s pronouns. Armies inoculate and vaccinate people because armies are made of people packed together in places where disease can wreck readiness faster than an enemy. Hegseth decided to turn 250 years of military medicine into a Fox News monologue, and the flu decided to answer in kind.
(Jason Weisberger @ Boing Boing more…)Lena H. Sun @ Washington Post: CDC’s chief blocked a covid vaccine study. Now it’s in a top medical journal.
Mary Kekatos @ ABC: What to know about COVID-19 study that was finally published after being blocked by CDC
Lizzy Lawrence @ Stat: Eli Lilly gave extraordinary obesity drug access to a 79-year-old patient. Who was it?
Sources point to a single instance in which experimental therapy retatrutide was provided for ‘compassionate use’
…STAT does not know who the patient is. But given the patient demographics and the unusual nature of the application, STAT asked the White House whether the patient was President Trump, who turned 80 a week ago, is overweight, and has expressed interest in obesity drugs.
Jason Sattler: We Could Still Save Millions of the Kids Musk Condemned to Death
Katelyn Jetelina and David Higgins, MD, MPH @ Your Local Epidemiologist:
Can we eliminate cervical cancer?
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Joseph Cox @ 404 Media: The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI
Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. Across the industry Accenture is seeing “soaring token spend,” according to the audio.
The news highlights a major shift in the tech industry and other companies that use AI: the wave of uninhibited AI growth is over. Some AI providers like GitHub are now charging customers per token rather than a flat subscription fee, leading some companies to burn through their tokens. Uber recently capped employees’ use of AI tools like Claude Code and Cursor; that came after Uber told employees to use AI as much as possible and Uber’s CTO said the company had blown its entire AI budget in four months. And Accenture itself reportedly started requiring senior staff to start using AI or risk losing out on promotions.
It also undercuts the narrative that superpowered engineers generating mountains of code are behind the AI boom. In many cases it is non-technical staff burning through tokens for non-specialized tasks.
(Joseph Cox @ 404 Media more…)
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Marin Scotten @ HEATED: The gas industry is sneaking into kids’ science classes
The Switch Energy Alliance markets its free classroom materials as “objective.” But they are backed by the fossil fuel industry, a HEATED investigation shows.
(Marin Scotten @ HEATED more…)Olivia Rudgard, Akshat Rathi, Alastair Marsh @ Bloomberg: Modern Homes Leave Londoners Struggling to Cope With Extreme Heat
The British capital is baking as a heat wave sweeps through Europe.
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Mary Geddry:
Gravity Still WorksCompetence gets purged, Trump drones through crisis, Musk falls back below trillionaire mythology, and Iran writes Trump’s war as an American defeat.
… Today’s governing theme is gravity: the kind that pulls rockets, trillionaire fantasies, imperial war stories, and over-promoted television men back down to earth.
We begin at the Pentagon, where competence continues to have a very rough season. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has forced out Gen. C.D. Donahue, the top U.S. Army officer in Europe and Africa, because apparently the one thing this administration cannot tolerate is a decorated military commander with actual field experience.
(Mary Geddry more…)
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Deuce Davis: The Center Was Always Going to Move
(Deuce Davis more…)Jennifer Rubin: America’s Best Kept Secret: Progressiveness Is Popular
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Mitch Jackson: The DOJ Just Gave Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche the Power to Pick Your Prison, and Nobody Was Supposed to Notice
(Mitch Jackson more…)
Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting
resources tracking the “Andes” hantavirus outbreak
Apocalypse Early Warning System
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
Mike Ludwig @ truthout: ICE Says 51 People Died in Custody Under Trump. Experts Say That’s an Undercount.
ICE Accountability Project
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, Ximena Bustillo, Jasmine Garsd @ NPR: Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump
- June 4: Mamuka Artmeladze
- 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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