curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Dylan Baddour @ Inside Climate News: Why an Activist From Texas Crossed the World to Confront Asia’s Biggest Petrochemical Company
For the retired shrimper, the 8,000-mile trip to Formosa Plastics’ annual shareholder meeting in Taipei was part of a strategy of being relentless.
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“He was threatened with guns,” Lin’s translator said, describing threats that came from one of those other companies. “He said, ‘If you want to shoot me, just shoot.’”
Lin was never shot. But later construction of industrial shipping infrastructure offshore affected water currents here, Lin said, so the ocean began lapping mud into the clear lagoon where he used to farm. After so many generations, most of the fishermen along this coastline are gone.
Wilson could relate to that, too. Born in 1948, she remembers watching the timeless way of life in her Texas fishing village dwindle to practically nothing as marine life faded from the water while petrochemical industries moved in with higher-paying jobs. For refusing to bow to the new order, Wilson felt shunned at home.
(Dylan Baddour @ Inside Climate News more…)
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Kyle Stock, Olivia Rudgard @ Bloomberg: How One Startup Is Trying to Coax Rain From Clouds
The technology is needed on a drier planet
As the American West deals with the aftermath an exceptionally dry winter, there’s growing demand for technologies that aim to boost rainfall.
(Kyle Stock, Olivia Rudgard @ Bloomberg more…)
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Sophie McBain @ Guardian: ‘Have you ever been around someone you just know is evil?’ Melinda French Gates on meeting Jeffrey Epstein, giving away billions, and her post-divorce peace
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The billionaire financier Warren Buffett, a close friend of the Gateses, once said that Bill is “smart as hell, obviously”, but French Gates is “smarter”. She is warm and personable and yet it strikes me, as we talk about the roll back of women’s rights in the US, billionaires behaving badly and her ex-husband’s involvement with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, that she must have a core of steel.
(Sophie McBain @ Guardian more…)
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Brian Allen: The Deal Trump Is Selling You Is the Deal Trump Already Killed
Jonathan Karl identified the core contradiction on live television: the Iran nuclear promise at the center of the emerging agreement is word-for-word the promise Obama already secured, and that Trump tore up in 2018.
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Dustin Volz, Julian E. Barnes, Ana Swanson @ NY Times: Trump Administration Reignites Its Feud With Anthropic Over Latest A.I. Models
The feud between Anthropic and the Trump administration escalated again on Saturday after the government took the unusual step a day earlier of demanding that the artificial intelligence company cut off foreign access to its latest models, as top officials suggested the dispute was unlikely to resolve quickly.
Late on Friday, Anthropic disclosed in a blog post that it had disabled access for all customers to its most advanced A.I. systems, known as Fable 5 and Mythos 5, after receiving a directive from the administration to suspend access to any foreign national. The move shocked former U.S. officials and cybersecurity experts, many of whom questioned the validity of the action and noted that it diverged from the hands-off approach to policing the booming A.I. industry that President Trump had endorsed earlier this month.
Sophia Cai, Cheyenne Haslett @ Politico: Inside the whirlwind 24 hours that led the White House to slap export controls on Anthropic
The Trump administration’s decision to impose sweeping export controls on Anthropic followed a frantic 24-hour effort by senior officials to convince the company to voluntarily pull a newly released artificial intelligence model that officials believed posed security risks, according to two administration officials and a senior White House official, who like others in this story were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the episode.
(Sophia Cai, Cheyenne Haslett @ Politico more…)
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Aaron Rupar, Thor Benson: Trump’s systemic attack on whistleblowers
“The cost to democracy is a loss of accountability and oversight.”
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Heather Delaney Reese: Donald Trump is making a mockery of the United States
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Elizabeth Williamson, Julia Jacobs @ NY Times: At the Kennedy Center, a Name Change Shrouded in Uncertainty
President Trump’s name was removed from the arts institution’s facade overnight on Saturday. Many questions remain, including whether or not it stays off.
(Elizabeth Williamson, Julia Jacobs @ NY Times more…)Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 13, 2026
Before noon on Saturday, June 13, Charles M. Floca, whom Trump installed at the head of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, certified to the court that “the Center and its Board have complied with the Court’s order.” …
What they did not do was take down the tarp workers installed last night around the scaffolding they erected yesterday, hiding the portico wall. …
…Tomorrow night, the fighters will enter the ring from the Oval Office. The fight will be carried live on Paramount Plus, for a fee of $8.99 and up.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)Marisa Kabas: The night the letters came down
Gil Duran: Wannabe Dictator Gets Scraped Off a Wall
Chris Geidner: The Kennedy Center is a reminder that we can win, it will be messy, and Trump will be petty
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Marcy Wheeler: Floundering: Two Lines of Testimony about Georgia Fort
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But the filings so far suggest they’ve got something else: One or more agents who repeatedly attested to false claims about Georgia Fort.Remember: by the time DOJ got this indictment, Harmeet Dhillon had already adopted two false claims: the AI slop targeting Nekima Levy Armstrong, and CBS’ false claim that the entire Eighth Circuit had found probable cause to charge Lemon and Fort.
That’s what we saw publicly. Behind the scenes, snowballing evidence suggests, the team was adopting the same license to lie, including to the grand jury.
(Marcy Wheeler more…)
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Brian Cheung, Maya Huter @ NBC: We tore open the Trump phone — it was nearly the same as a Taiwanese device using Chinese parts
A scanner, a microscope and an old-fashioned teardown of Trump Mobile’s T1 phone showed that it was almost identical to the HTC U24 Pro.
(Brian Cheung, Maya Huter @ NBC more…)
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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