curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Sing Yee Ong, Ishika Mookerjee, Todd Woody @ Bloomberg: How Singapore Uses District Cooling to Beat the Heat
Its part of a S$100 billion climate adaptation plan.
Singapore is one of the biggest per capita users of air conditioning in Asia. But the government is keen to kick the habit in favor of more efficient solutions including district cooling.
In today’s newsletter we venture deep underneath the island city to see the decades-old technology that’s winning new attention as a way to cool down entire neighborhoods. Plus, a new United Nations assessment of ocean health.
Deep underneath Singapore’s northeastern district of Punggol, a five-kilometer network of metal pipes roars as it pumps chilled water to cool offices and classrooms overhead.
(Sing Yee Ong, Ishika Mookerjee, Todd Woody @ Bloomberg more…)
Katelyn Jetelina @ Your Local Epidemiologist: Screwworm is here, World Cup starting, things heating up (literally), and more
Dissent in Bloom: Unmasking the Nursing Home Executives Behind Ohio’s Medicaid Caregiver Crackdown
HB-795: Vivek Ramaswamy took their money. Disabled Ohioans will pay.
Right now, several government officials in Ohio are pushing to end the use of Medicaid waivers that allow disabled children and adults to stay at home with their caregivers.
(Dissent in Bloom more…)
-
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 9, 2026
Yesterday afternoon, President Donald J. Trump officially nominated acting attorney general Todd Blanche to become the attorney general of the United States.
…Blanche put his name to the second half of that deal that seems to be being eclipsed by the slush fund: an agreement between Trump and the Department of Justice promising to drop any pending claims against Trump, his oldest sons, or the Trump Organization for past illegalities in tax returns, and promising not to conduct audits of Trump’s tax returns.
In the 1920s, gangster Al Capone kept his hands clean of direct evidence of the crimes he committed. The federal government finally took him down by convicting him of federal income tax evasion.
Trump’s nomination of Blanche directly challenges Republican senators to collude with him to flout the will of rank-and-file Republicans and break the law. In November 2025 the Senate voted unanimously to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This law required the Department of Justice to release all the files compiled by the FBI in its investigation of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein no later than December 19, 2025.
The Department of Justice has ignored that law. …
…There may well be an effort to downplay the Blanche confirmation process, but make no mistake: it is a very big deal indeed.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
-
Jennifer Rubin: ‘Extensive experience’
After nominations of thoroughly unqualified, incompetent, and ethically unfit characters such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one might have thought it impossible to come up with any appointment for a senior executive post who is even less fit to serve. But last week, Donald Trump rose to the challenge to tap someone so manifestly unsuited for a spot that even Republicans were taken aback.
Trump picked for acting director of national intelligence current Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, the mastermind behind Trump’s vindictive, spurious inquests into Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) for alleged mortgage fraud. His sole qualification appears to be his eagerness to weaponize the legal system against Trump’s enemies. And if that were not disqualifying for the head of the intelligence community — whose credibility and objectivity are essential to protecting our national security — then his absence of statutorily required national security experience surely should be enough to make him an entirely illegitimate choice.
Very few jobs have statutorily mandated job experience. However, in creating the DNI post, Congress declared, “There is a Director of National Intelligence who shall be appointed by the President…. Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.” No one argues that Pulte has any such expertise (“a high level of specialized skill, knowledge, or judgment in a particular field, acquired through extensive training, study, and hands-on experience”) in national security, let alone “extensive” (“having wide or considerable extent”) expertise.
(Jennifer Rubin more…)
-
Michele Hornish: “Say that number again?”
Conversations with people doing impossible things
…
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign manager, Maya Handa, once said: “The only way you do impossible things is by continuing to try to do impossible things.”
(Michele Hornish more…)
-
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: A Free Press on the Chopping Block & Ebola as Political Theater
…
“There is no more essential ingredient than a free, strong, and independent press to our continued success in what the Founding Fathers called our ‘noble experiment’ in self-government.”40th U.S. President Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) with a written message on the Observance of National Newspaper Week, October 6, 1983
Read those words without attribution and you might think they came from a left-wing editorial board or a lawyer with the ACLU. When you see Ronald Reagan’s name attached, your brain does a little double-take because we’ve watched the political party he led and the political movement he built devolve into something that treats the press as a target rather than an institution worth defending. That gap between what he wrote then and where things stand now shows you how quickly our leaders will abandon principles the moment they become inconvenient to maintaining power. But the word that Reagan chose to characterize the role a free press plays in our democracy deserves attention: it’s an “ingredient,” something that gets mixed in as part of an overall recipe. Take it out and the meal may look the same, but the final dish could have an entirely different flavor.
(Kareem Abdul-Jabbar more…)Jonathan Larsen: Trump’s Freedom 250 Trucks Falsely Claim Muhammad Ali Disavowed Islam
The global icon converted to Islam in 1964 and remained Muslim for the rest of his life
-
Judd Legum: Trump administration looking to transfer billions in Iranian assets to Kushner clients
The Iran War is more than 100 days old — and there is no resolution in sight. Although Trump has claimed for weeks that a deal is imminent, the fighting has intensified.
One of the primary sticking points in the peace negotiations is the status of $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets. In a June 5 interview on CNN, Mohsen Rezaei, a top military adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, said the money was “a test of trust that Iran wants to have with Trump – this is a test that America must pass.” Rezaei described the $24 billion as “our own money, not America’s money.”
According to reports, Iran is seeking the immediate release of $12 billion as part of an interim deal that could set the stage for a long-term agreement. Bloomberg reports that the negotiations, which are co-led by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, have “bogged down“ over the issue.
(Judd Legum more…)
-
Paul Krugman: Money and Machismo are Undermining America
Fragile MAGA egos are rejecting the future, from energy to drones
Drones have rapidly transformed modern war. The U.S. military, the most sophisticated, best supplied force in history, has been humiliated by Iran, largely thanks to Iran’s effective use of inexpensive drones to menace shipping, energy production, and even U.S. bases. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s growing superiority in drone warfare is increasingly giving it the upper hand over Russia. Remember, not so long ago the American far right celebrated Putin’s macho posturing and his supposed military invincibility.
Given this radical turn of events, shouldn’t the United States be eager to make a drone deal with Ukraine, benefiting from its technology and expertise?
Apparently not. The Hill reports that Donald Trump has been dragging his feet on such a deal, quoting U.S. military analysts who say that they don’t understand the delay and that they are “mystified.” But I assume that they’re being disingenuous and prefer to avoid saying the obvious. In fact, Trump’s unwillingness to make a deal that would clearly benefit America’s national interest is no mystery at all.
I’ll get to the obvious in a moment. First, let me take a slight detour into something that seems unrelated but in fact helps explain drone aversion: this administration’s hostility to renewable energy and its desperate, doomed and wasteful effort to revive the coal industry.
(Paul Krugman more…)
-
Harry Litman @ TNR: Can Trump Really Tear Down the Statue of Liberty? His Lawyers Say Yes.
An administration lawyer made this shocking and cynical argument in court last week. That’s the position of an emperor, not a president.
(Harry Litman @ TNR more…)
-
Rook T. Winchester: Swindle – Patrick’s Plan for a Concentration Camp in Appleton, MN
That is actually his name. Patrick Swindle, CEO of CoreCivic, one of the largest private prison companies in America. Right now his company has its eye on a small town in western Minnesota that CoreCivic already gutted once and apparently decided wasn’t gutted enough.
(Rook T. Winchester more…)
-
Borowitz: Barron Trump’s Energy Drink Fails Product Test
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
Leave a Reply