curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Mary Geddry:
In Nepal, a glacier collapsed, a mountain moved, and the climate crisis crossed from warning into structural failure.
… A few days ago, this newsletter argued that climate change doesn’t announce itself as a single event. It accumulates in places no one is watching, and then it fails all at once, the way Hemingway’s bankrupt man described going broke: gradually, then suddenly. We used the Rhine to make that point, and the Danube, and a wildfire outside Reno that went from nothing to uncontained in about a day and a half.
The Himalayas just offered a cleaner version of the same argument, and a far more brutal one. On Wednesday morning, Nepalese authorities initially assumed an earthquake had struck the border with Tibet. Not an unreasonable guess given this is one of the most seismically active regions on the planet. The U.S. Geological Survey’s own seismic reading indicated, instead, a 5.2-magnitude glacial collapse, not a fault rupture. A chunk of ice, thousands of feet up, let go of the mountain it had been part of for longer than anyone had been measuring it. It fell, picked up mud and rock and whatever water was already loose, and arrived in the valley below as a wave eight to ten meters high, moving with a force scientists have compared to liquid concrete.
The death toll, as of Thursday morning, stands at more than 360 dead and more than 1,400 missing.
What failed was the mountain itself, its structural integrity, built up and eroded over a timescale that has nothing to do with news cycles, finally giving way in the time it takes to read this sentence. If “Gradually, Then Suddenly” was about systems reaching their breaking point, a river too shallow to cool a reactor, an insurance market too strained to underwrite a coastline, Rasuwa district is what happens when the system is the mountain, and the villages built beneath it never had a say.
Climate change happens gradually. Structural failure happens all at once. Nepal is the second half of that sentence.
(Mary Geddry more…)
Lili Pike, Lou Del Bello, Laura Millan @ Bloomberg:
The new era of glacier catastrophes
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Evan Simon @ Floodlight:
One of East Coast’s largest data centers accused of ‘violating federal law’Thermal drone footage shows DataOne — the Microsoft-backed AI data center in Vineland — is powering its operations with dozens of unpermitted generators
(Evan Simon @ Floodlight more…)
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Hafiz Rashid @ TNR:
Education Department Seriously Posts Video Comparing Trump to HitlerWas this a mistake—or did the Department of Education post this on purpose?
On Wednesday night, the Department of Education posted a video to X comparing President Trump to Adolf Hitler, and then deleted it following massive backlash.
(Hafiz Rashid @ TNR more…)Alice Gibbs @ Newsweek:
Hitler Scene Explained as Department of Education Deletes Trump Post
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Matthew Petti @ reason:
Rubio Uses Terrorism Law To Ban Secure Email ServiceThe State Department doesn’t accuse Autistici/Inventati of doing anything more than providing “untraceable” email accounts. But that’s enough to outlaw it as a terrorist organization.
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Joyce Vance:
Revisiting: Can Federal Troops Be Stationed At The Polls In 2026?
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Ali Swenson @ AP:
RFK Jr. said a Samoa trip had nothing to do with vaccines. New documents refute thatHeather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – August 27, 2026…
Observers claim that Kennedy’s visit empowered anti-vaccine activists in Samoa. After he left, a measles epidemic killed 83 people. …The U.S. is now in the midst of its own measles outbreak, which has killed two unvaccinated people in Pennsylvania. One of them was a newborn, too young for the vaccine and thus dependent on herd immunity. Yesterday, Kennedy suggested that Democratic governor Josh Shapiro’s announcement of the deaths might “have been altogether fabricated by one of the Governor’s hopeful staffers.”
…This afternoon, Aram Roston of the Guardian reported that Trump’s war on Iran has “driven the US military into a severe financial crisis.” Roston reports that the U.S. Navy, which is bearing the brunt of the operation, is transferring money from payroll to combat operations, creating shortfalls. Officials are covering that shortfall by raiding other accounts.
…In the Washington Post, Evan Halper reported that the administration’s latest move to cancel an offshore wind project and nurture the fossil fuel industry will funnel a fortune to Australian billionaire Michael Dorrell, who donated about a million dollars to Trump’s inaugural committee.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Decoding Fox News:
Fox News and the Fear of a Powerful Black Woman
Last Days in Two Nations
Climate.us
formerly Climate.gov
Climate Solutions Explorer
Have I Been Flocked?
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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