curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
James Eagle: China has rewired global trade
The most important geopolitical change of the past 25 years is visible in ports before it is visible in speeches. In 2000, the US was the larger goods-trading partner for much of the world. By 2025, China had taken that position across large parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe.
The chart is about goods trade, not services, investment or military power. That caveat matters. It also makes the message cleaner: the physical economy has bent towards Chinese factories and Chinese demand.
This is why decoupling is so difficult. A country can distrust Beijing, welcome US security guarantees and still rely on China as its dominant commercial counterparty. Trade creates a form of dependence that cannot be unwound by rhetoric.
The China story is too often told as a clean contest with the US. The better reading is messier: countries can fear Chinese power, rely on Chinese trade and still want American security.
(James Eagle more…)
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Laura Millan, Stefan Nicola, Coco Liu @ Bloomberg: Iran War Pollution Spread Across Thousands of Miles
Fires at oil facilities in March produced a plume the size of Italy.
Images of black plumes and reports of oil-stained rain in Tehran were seen around the world in the early days of the war, despite Iran’s internet blackout. Now, Chinese researchers have figured out exactly how bad pollution from those fires was.
Asawin Suebsaeng, Andrew Perez @ zeteo: ‘Trump Wants Good News’: The Pentagon Is Under Pressure to Sanitize Iran War Data
The president ‘rejects bad news as fake,’ one U.S. official says. ‘He’s getting what he is paying for.’
Reuters: Iran state TV says draft deal with US would reopen Hormuz shipping, end naval blockade
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State TV said the framework, which excludes military vessels and envisages Iran managing ship traffic through the strait in cooperation with Oman, was not yet finalised and that Tehran would take no steps without “tangible verification”.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – May 27, 2026
In Texas yesterday, Republican primary voters chose Trump-backed state attorney general Ken Paxton over incumbent senator John Cornyn by more than 27 points to be the Republican candidate for senator. President Donald J. Trump endorsed the scandal-ridden Paxton last week after Senate Republicans had dumped $90 million into the race to defend Cornyn. Democrats will now use their advertisements calling attention to Paxton’s many scandals against them.
As Philip Elliott of Time magazine noted, Republicans can look forward to dumping another $250 million into trying to get Paxton elected, money that they needed to flip Democratic seats elsewhere.
Trump backed Paxton because he didn’t think Cornyn was loyal enough to him, despite the fact that Cornyn voted with Trump 99.2% of the time. Trump preferred Paxton’s attacks on Democrats and his flaunting of his MAGA identity despite—or perhaps because of—Paxton’s many scandals.
…In a similar moment in the 1850s, elite enslavers who dominated the Democratic Party demanded party members line up behind their determination to spread human enslavement to the West. Although the 1820 Missouri Compromise that admitted Missouri as a slave state protected the rest of the land in the Louisiana Purchase north of Missouri’s southern border from enslavement, Democrats in 1854 forced through Congress the Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting slavery there.
Their purity test was a harbinger of a dramatic political realignment.
…Unlike anti-Nebraska candidates in 1854, Talarico and other Democratic candidates this year have the advantage of running against a party whose leader is openly corrupt. …
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… Trump once again appeared to fall asleep today at a Cabinet meeting.He did, though, threaten to “blow up” U.S. ally Oman if it doesn’t “behave” over Trump’s demands to open the Strait of Hormuz. “Oman will behave just like everybody else. Or else we’ll have to blow them up. They understand that. They’ll be fine.”
Yesterday the U.S. military struck another small boat in the eastern Pacific, bringing the number of boats struck in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean to fifty-eight. At least 194 individuals have been killed. The administration insists the boats are trafficking drugs but has produced no evidence for that accusation, and as Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported today, “military experts say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings.”
Taking these patterns, along with others, into consideration, G. Elliott Morris at Strength in Numbers assesses that although Texas voters haven’t elected a Democrat statewide in thirty-two years, the Texas Senate election is a toss-up.
In the midterm election of 1854, northerners tore through the ranks of congressmen who had voted for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. There were 142 northern seats in the House of Representatives; voters put “anti-Nebraska” congressmen in 120 of them. Anti-Nebraska coalitions elected eleven senators and swept Democrats out of state legislatures across the North. Still disorganized in 1854, by 1856, those in the new coalition opposed to the Slave Power had turned to a new political party, the Republican Party.
By 1859, that new party found a champion, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who articulated a new vision of government that worked not for a wealthy cabal, but for the American people.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Alex Skopic @ Current Affairs: Four Days in Havana, Under Siege
(Alex Skopic @ Current Affairs more…)
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Shanley Hurt: The Children in the Fine Print
Medicaid cuts were not supposed to target kids, but children are still the ones falling through the paperwork.
…According to Axios, about 1.75 million fewer children were enrolled in Medicaid this January than at the start of the Trump administration, even though the sweeping Medicaid changes passed last summer did not directly target children’s eligibility. The official federal numbers are just as cold in their little blue suit: in January 2026, Medicaid and CHIP covered 75.3 million people, including 35.9 million Medicaid child and CHIP enrollees. That child number was down by 1.5 million from January 2025 alone.
Pause there, because 1.5 million children in a year is not a rounding error, it’s a nation-state of ear infections, school physicals, speech therapy appointments, antibiotics, insulin refills, eyeglasses, and worried parents trying to do everything right in a system that keeps moving the door.
(Shanley Hurt more…)Beth Mole @ arsTECHNICA: Trump admin to block Ebola-exposed Americans from US, move them to Kenya
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Bonnie Kristian: No eminent domain for AI data centers
… in this particular project, 330 properties are in the path of the new power lines, and as many as 30 of those are subject to eminent domain. …
Now, there’s a sense in which the artificial intelligence piece of this story is a distraction. My point is not that it’s bad for Brown’s mom to lose her house because AI is bad and therefore there should be no data centers.
I’m very skeptical of many proposed uses for AI, but as I’ve argued here before, its utility costs are wholly relative to the value of its output. If AI is doing a lot of good, then probably we do want to use a lot of electricity for it, which may well mean building new data centers and power lines. And as skeptical as I am, I think the good it does is not zero, so I’m not categorically against this kind of construction.
The issue is that Georgia Power is a private company that appears to be using eminent domain to take people’s homes against their will to meet other private companies’ expansion plans.
(Bonnie Kristian more…)
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Closer to the Edge: LABOR AND HUNGER STRIKE CONTINUES AT DELANEY HALL
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Liz Dye: The case against Broadview 6 goes up in smoke
As Trump would say, they had prosecutorial misconduct LIKE NO ONE HAS EVER SEEN BEFORE.
Marcy Wheeler: More Grand Jury Shenanigans in Illinois
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Jill Lawrence @ Bulwark: An Inventory of Trump’s Second-Term Wreckage
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BBC: How Trump is transforming Washington – by adding his face everywhere
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Borowitz: Zelenskyy Offers to Lend Trump Cards
Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting
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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