curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Nick Turse @ Intercept:
New Pentagon Report Claims U.S. Killed No Civilians in Boat Strikes
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Shockingly, the Pentagon’s review of its 2025 attacks found that no civilians were killed in the Trump administration’s campaign of boat strikes, according to the officials, despite the fact that the U.S. killed more than 120 civilians last year in attacks that experts call extrajudicial killings or outright murder. The Trump administration has asserted repeatedly and without evidence that the boat strike victims, who now number more than 220, were “narcoterrorists.” In a classified briefing last fall, a high-ranking officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff said that some of the people killed in the initial September 2, 2025, attack may have been the victims of human trafficking, according to an Intercept investigation.
“They have absolutely no credibility,” the second official told The Intercept about the boat strike claims, adding that the report was “sickening.”
(Nick Turse @ Intercept more…)
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Jay Kuo:
A Floating NightmareWith so many billions appropriated, why aren’t our aircraft carriers in decent enough condition for sailors to not want to throw themselves overboard?
(Jay Kuo more…)
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Finya Swai @ Hill:
New ICE controversy as officer filmed pointing gun at woman in Virginia
“You almost ran us over,” the officer says in the video recorded by Molina before warning her, “I will arrest you. Keep it up.”Molina denied trying to strike the officers with her car and told them she was recording the confrontation.
“I was looking down a barrel, and he could have shot me, and he could have gotten away with it,” Molina told CNN affiliate WUSA9.
The officers eventually walked away without taking her into custody, and she has not been charged, according to Molina.
(Finya Swai @ Hill more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – August 13, 2026… the Trump administration considers all those who have overstayed a visa to be criminals. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hopes to arrest 2,000 immigrants a day, sweeping in foreigners newly married to Americans, an engineer waiting for an extension of his work visa, and so on.
…Yesterday federal officials said a third immigrant detained at New Jersey’s Delaney Hall has died. They said Jose Chajon-Raxon experienced a medical emergency on July 19 and died in the hospital. As part of a new policy to stop reporting the deaths of detainees released from federal custody, DHS said Chajon-Raxon had been “released from ICE custody on July 22.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Sarah K. Burris @ AlterNet:
Former prosecutor says the DOJ lied to Epstein judge — and can prove itFormer federal prosecutor Kristy Greenberg was watching the accounting of a court hearing on Thursday over whether the Justice Department released all of the documents in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation as required by the congressional law.
The main dispute between the DOJ and the judge concerned handwritten notes and whether those notes were also released with the documentation. According to the assistant U.S. attorney, the attorney general decided that all of the handwritten notes were “duplicative,” meaning the DOJ felt that they already appeared elsewhere in the released documents.
The judge challenged the DOJ on that detail, asking why the DOJ should be believed that the handwritten notes were nothing more than duplicates. The DOJ explained that courts usually just trust what they say. Frequently, when federal agents interview people, they fill out a form called a “302.” The agent can handwrite the information from a witness or someone reporting a crime. Those notes can then be entered into computer files etc. So the DOJ is saying that these notes are already typed out, so the handwritten information wasn’t necessary.
Greenberg pointed out that she knows with absolute certainty that DOJ’s statement “isn’t true.”
(Sarah K. Burris @ AlterNet more…)
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Bennito L. Kelty @ RawStory:
‘Unthinkable’ offer in Trump DOJ case floors ex-prosecutor: ‘Are you on crack?’A former prosecutor was stunned that lawyers for an Indian billionaire offered the Justice Department a $10 billion investment in exchange for dropping criminal fraud charges.
During an episode of Illegal News, ex-DOJ prosecutor Andrew Weissmann added that it was “unthinkable” that defense lawyers for Gautam Adani would put the offer in writing and said the case “stinks to high heaven.”
(Bennito L. Kelty @ RawStory more…)
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Joyce Vance:
Judge Sullivan Has Had Enough
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Flagg Eagleton @ Dunning-Kruger Times:
Jack Smith Charged in Palm Beach Superior Court for the Illegal Mar-a-Lago Raid
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Gregory Svirnovskiy @ Politico:
Trump-aligned board votes to put his name on the Kennedy Center — againThe board also approved a plan to shut the center down for two years.
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Marcus Weisgerber @ WSJ:
Trump Orders Navy to Restore Older Tech on Aircraft Carriers, Costing BillionsThe Navy spent years fighting the president’s push to go back to steam catapults
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Mitch Jackson:
What to say when someone tells you the election was stolen.Thirty-one.
That is the number a law professor named Justin Levitt landed on after years of hunting for the thing you keep hearing about at family dinners. Levitt teaches at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, and he went looking for voter impersonation and fraud, the specific crimes where a person walks into a polling place and pretends to be somebody else, because that is the crime nearly every voter ID law in this country claims to stop. He tracked every credible allegation he was able to find from 2000 through 2014, across general elections, primaries, special elections, and city races. In general and primary elections alone, more than a billion ballots were cast in that window. He found 31 incidents.Thirty-one out of a billion.
That works out to roughly one incident for every 32 million ballots. You have better odds of being struck by lightning.
(Mitch Jackson more…)
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Gil Duran:
She Saw Tech Fascism Coming 25 Years Ago
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Sarah Rankin, Claudia Lauer @ AP:
Flock announces changes amid backlash over its license plate reader network
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Ben Elgin @ Bloomberg:
Why Cleaner Jet Fuel Is Taking Off in Europe Faster Than in the USOne airline group in Europe is buying more green fuel than all US carriers combined.
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The growth has largely been driven by mandates in the EU and UK, which kicked in last year and require 2% of jet fuel to be SAF. That obligation steps up to 3.6% this year in the UK.
(Ben Elgin @ Bloomberg more…)
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Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, Noel Sims @ Popular Information:
McConnell, out sick for two months, voted against medical leave 23 times since 1985
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Paul Krugman:
Why Isn’t the Price of Oil Even Higher?…
A large part of the answer is that oil prices actually are higher — if you look at the right numbers.
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Priyanka Shankar @ Al Jazeera:
Ebola outbreak caused by new ‘animal transmission’: What that means
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
- August 1: Edwin Lopez-Cornejo
- July 19: Jose Chajon-Raxon
- July 14: Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran
- July 13: Joan Sebastian Guerrero
- July 7: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo
- 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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