curated news excerpts & citations
Rebecca Solnit:
“This May Well Be the Most Consequential Case in the History of Humanity”
… the International Court of Justice just handed down an epochal ruling that “obligates States to regulate businesses on the harm caused by their emissions regardless of where the harm takes place. Significantly, the Court found that the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is fundamental for all other human rights, and that intergenerational equity should guide the interpretation of all climate obligations.”
Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate, said of the decision: “I choose my words carefully when I say that this may well be the most consequential case in the history of humanity.” Christiana Figueres, who presided over the negotiations that created that Paris Climate Treaty declared, with jubilation, on her podcast Outrage and Optimism: “this is without a doubt, the most far-reaching, the most comprehensive and the most consequential legal opinion we’ve ever had.”
How this decision came into being might be one of the all-time great David and Goliath stories. …
(Rebecca Solnit more…)
Petra Sorge, Natasha White, David Fickling @ Bloomberg: A Hunt to Track Down Dubious Chinese Carbon Credits
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Peter C. Mancall @ Conversation: Beyond Disney: A 1616 portrait of Pocahontas shows how English colonizers saw Indigenous Americans
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Seeing Pocahontas poised on a chair, wearing an elegant hat and holding a quill pen, the English had assumed that Native Americans would embrace the colonizers’ ways. March 1622 proved them wrong.
(Peter C. Mancall @ Conversation more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – May 25, 2026
Last Friday, just before the long holiday weekend, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard resigned, effective as of June 30, citing her husband’s recent cancer diagnosis as the factor that forced her decision. A source told Jonathan Landay and Erin Blanco of Reuters that President Donald J. Trump had forced her out. …
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Gabbard ran into trouble with Trump by June 2025, when she released a video warning of “nuclear holocaust” because “political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.” They were bringing the world “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” she said. She released the video days before Trump launched his first attack on Iran, and a former intelligence officer told Nick Schifrin of PBS that Trump considered the video an attempt to try to convince him not to launch the strikes.
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Whatever else might be going on, Trump is under pressure to find a way out of Iran. Not only are prices skyrocketing owing to the rising cost of oil after Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz in response to attacks from the U.S. and Israel, but the clock has run out on any authorization he could have claimed for his military adventure in Iran, and Congress seems ready to force his hand.
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The House and Senate will come back on June 2, and Trump clearly would like to have an agreement with Iran in place before they do.
…Meanwhile, on Meet the Press Sunday, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who last week lost the primary for reelection to his seat after Trump backed his opponent and Trump supporters threw a gobsmacking $35 million at the contest, reopened fire from a different direction. Massie has been key to demanding the release of the Epstein files, and the administration continues to ignore the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the Department of Justice to release all the files no later than December 19, 2025.
When host Kristen Welker, noting that Massie had named names from the files in the past, asked, “Can we expect you to name more names in the coming weeks and months?” Massie answered: “Yes.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
Leigh Kimmins @ Daily Beast: Marco Rubio Brutally Undercuts Trump’s Nonsensical Boast on an Iran Deal
… The secretary of state took a much more cautious approach than Trump, telling reporters, “I wouldn’t read too much into it.”
Dean Blundell: US Officials Told Iran That Trump’s Truth Social Lie About a Deal is Just “Political Theatre For an American Audience” and “Not to Worry About It.”
While simultaneously claiming victory and threatening to wipe out Iran, US officials told Iranian officials to disregard Trump’s social media posts as “political domestic theatre.”
Doina Chiacu, Humeyra Pamuk @ Reuters: Trump links Abraham Accords to any Iran deal
AFP: US hits Iran with new strikes, despite talks to end war
James Horncastle @ Conversation: Trump’s ‘largely negotiated’ truce with Iran exposes a deeper crisis in U.S. strategic thinking
… The confusion likely stems from one of Trump’s fixations: that the U.S. is winning the conflict, an assertion that’s at odds with the actual evidence.
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Tom Schaller: The triple toll of Trump’s terrible tariffs
Ultimately, American workers and consumers suffer three different ways.
- Lost taxes paid
- Lost exports and jobs
- Longer-term economic losses
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James Eagle: America’s 1970s inflation nightmare is back in view
(James Eagle more…)
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Jennifer Rubin: Especially Now, Americans Should Reflect on Memorial Day
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Some serious commemoration to honor of our war dead would serve as a timely reminder that:- War should be a last resort; never undertaken lightly;
- Executive power has grown in dangerous and unconstitutional ways; and
- We have the power to correct the unconstitutional inflation of executive power that can easily result in disasters like the Iran War.
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Marisa Kabas: Kat Abughazaleh shows us how to fight fascists
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Steve Vladeck: A Tale of Two High-Profile Immigration Cases
Developments on Friday in the cases of Mahmoud Khalil and Kilmar Abrego Garcia underscore both the role courts can play in checking immigration abuses and the limits those courts can often confront.
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Matthew Gault @ 404 Media: An Incomplete List of Successful Anti-Data Center Legislation
No one wants to live next to a noisy computer warehouse and communities across the country are successfully fighting them.
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Jack Hopkins: America Is Quietly Dismantling the System Designed to Stop the Next Pandemic
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Ruth Ann Crystal MD: Dr. Ruth Report, 5/24/26
(Ruth Ann Crystal MD more…)
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Borowitz: Trump Honors Those Who Helped Others Avoid Service at Tomb of the Unknown Podiatrist
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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