curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Paul Krugman:
Who has the power in a trading world?
On Friday Donald Trump threatened to cut off all trade with nations with which the United States runs a trade deficit. His demand, oddly, was directed at the Federal Reserve: He would impose trade embargoes unless the Fed cuts interest rates. I won’t even try to untangle his logic, if there is any, because today’s primer isn’t about Trump. It is, instead, about how to think about a world in which governments — even the government of the United States, which created the rules-based trading system that prevailed until recently — increasingly use threats to cut off international trade as a tool of coercion.
… “weaponized interdependence,” a term coined in 2019 by the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman. Farrell and Newman focused mainly on national governments’ efforts to exploit their control of international networks, such as America’s use of the dollar’s central role in the international monetary system to impose sanctions on nations it considers hostile. At this point, however, weaponized interdependence is everywhere: Iran attempting to force the United States to call off its war by closing the Strait of Hormuz, China threatening the West with a cutoff of rare earths, the Trump administration using the threat of tariffs to pressure Canada to remove cultural protections for French — or become the 51st state?
Dean Baker @ National Memo:
Liberated? Despite Trump Tariffs, Steady Trade Deficit Jumped In July
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Lawrence Winnerman @ Blue Amp Media:
Russia Has 1,000 Ships With No CountryAnd nobody can legally stop them. Worse, nobody seems willing to try.
Putin built himself a fleet of a thousand ghost ships that no court on earth can touch. They earn him more than the entire West has sent Ukraine since the tanks rolled in, and a lot of them keep parking on top of the undersea cables that carry your money across the ocean.
…Ninety-nine percent of international data moves through fiber-optic cables lying on the ocean floor. Not satellites. Cables, roughly the diameter of a garden hose in deep water, carrying the internet, interbank settlement, and military traffic between continents.
On Christmas Day 2024, a tanker called the Eagle S, flying the flag of the Cook Islands, “accidentally” dragged its anchor about 90 kilometers across the floor of the Gulf of Finland. It severed the EstLink 2 power cable between Finland and Estonia and 4 data cables along with it. Repairs took 7 months. …
(Lawrence Winnerman @ Blue Amp Media more…)
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Mitch Jackson:
This Labor Day You Paid $4.15 a Gallon. He Made $1.4 BillionThis Labor Day you paid $4.15 a gallon so the man in the Oval Office could pull $1.4 billion from crypto and sell Wall Street his next move for $100 grand a month, milliseconds before you ever see it. He’s playing you for a sucker but here’s the deal, the one thing that scares him is sitting on your ballot in November.
(Mitch Jackson more…)
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Allison Gill:
USPS Whistleblower Report Makes it into Court Papers
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Sabot Media:
Nineteen Days Before the Deadline, Autistici/Inventati Is Shutting Down
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Zeteo:
25 Years Since 9/11: 13 Numbers That Tell the Story
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Heather Delaney Reese:
Hate will never make America great
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Ruth Ann Crystal MD:
Dr. Ruth Report, 9/6/26…
Michael Hoerger estimates 1 in 95 Americans have COVID, with very high rates in parts of the South and West. Much of Texas wastewater reflects 1 in 20 people being infectious with COVID.
(Ruth Ann Crystal MD more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Week Fifteen in 250 to 250
Last week was the fifteenth week of videos from the 250 to 250 Project that we’re producing to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Our hope was for the videos to emphasize the agency of Americans—mostly everyday Americans—to change the country. Each falls into a category that defines what it means to be an American, including community, democracy, innovation, mobility, civil rights, education, conservation, and creativity.
Every week, I try to say something new about the week’s videos, but in a way, each week’s production has been the same: a wonderful combination of my own favorite historical events and ones new to me, with narrators who fit their topics perfectly and are themselves part of America’s story. The generous participation of so many people in this project has made it significantly bigger than the sum of its parts, and this week is no exception.
You can follow the project at the sites listed below, or under “videos” at my own YouTube page: Heather Cox Richardson. Or just wait until I send out the week’s roundup.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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 31: Pierre Damas Bel
- 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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