curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Mike Ludwig @ truthout: ICE Says 51 People Died in Custody Under Trump. Experts Say That’s an Undercount.
Immigrants are jailed in unsanitary, overcrowded jails and camps as part of Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Mamuka Artmeladze, a 43-year-old Georgian national, was found dead on June 4, 2026, in federal immigration custody. Though his name did not appear in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) online death records by the time this article was published, Artmeladze was reported as the 50th person to die in ICE custody since President Donald Trump returned to office. One of two recent deaths at a notorious immigration prison in Louisiana, Artmeladze’s death is one of the latest signs that the president’s mass deportation campaign has predictably created a human rights crisis inside a sprawling system of immigration jails and camps.
At least 51 people have died while in ICE custody since Trump began his second term, federal records show. …
(Mike Ludwig @ truthout more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 23, 2026
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The Reflecting Pool is not the only thing that’s falling apart.This morning, Trump announced that “Iran has fully and completely agreed to highest level Nuclear inspections long in the future (Infinity!!!)…. If they did not agree to this, there would be no further negotiations!” Iran disagreed, saying it had made “no new commitments” on nuclear inspections although it would continue to work with the IAEA, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency, as it has for years under a system less stringent than the one that operated under the JCPOA.
…William Kristol of The Bulwark noted today that a “sense of impending mortality seems to be making our president even more unhinged than ever.” But, Kristol noted, there are “young men with a lean and hungry look in positions of authority and power in the executive branch who are committed to making his dream of power without limits a reality.”
…Today, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor sentenced eight of the Prairieland protesters to between thirty and one hundred years in prison.
In contrast, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes were sentenced to 22 years and 18 years in prison, respectively, for their roles in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that was intended to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and make Donald Trump president. When he took office in 2025, Trump pardoned Tarrio and commuted Rhodes’s sentence to time served, releasing both men from prison.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
Ken Klippenstein: Minnesota “Antifa” Terrorists Charged
Federal prosecutor can’t explain why or who Antifa is
Last week’s federal indictment of 15 anti-ICE protestors in Minnesota as alleged “Antifa” members — and thus domestic terrorists — is a masterclass in how the FBI is now practicing “pre-crime,” arresting normal citizens before they commit a crime, or without regard to whether they’ve committed a crime at all.
It is one of the first cases where national security presidential memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) has been explicitly referenced by the Justice Department as directing arrests, a new practice that began this month. U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen said that the directive established Joint Task Force Vanguard to “prioritize politically motivated violence,” which to the Trump administration of course means its opponents. …
(Ken Klippenstein more…)Alissa Azar: Blueprint for Repression
Eight defendants in the federal Prairieland case were sentenced today to prison terms ranging from 30 to 100 years, marking one of the most severe punishments imposed on anti-fascist and anti-ICE activists in recent memory and signaling a dramatic escalation in the federal government’s campaign to recast political dissent as terrorism.
Joseph Cox @ 404 Media: Madison Square Garden Made Dossier on Activists Who Opposed Facial Recognition
The document, titled “Facial Recognition Activists.docx,” includes specific activists’ comments about MSG’s facial recognition program and tweets criticizing it
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Mitch Jackson: There Is a Government Website That Names Reporters as Media Offenders. Most Americans Have No Idea.
Right now, on an official United States government website funded by taxpayers, there is a page that names specific American news agencies and journalists, and brands them as media offenders.
Not a campaign site. Not a political action committee. The White House. Whitehouse.gov. The building your taxes pay for.
Most Americans have no idea this page exists. That changes today, because once you see it, you will not unsee it.
Go look. The address is whitehouse.gov/mediabias. The banner reads “Media Offenders.” The tagline reads “Misleading. Biased. Exposed.”
Then keep reading, because the damage runs deeper than one ugly webpage.
(Mitch Jackson more…)Lawrence Winnerman @ Blue Amp Media: They Banned the One AI Lab That Told the Truth
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Jennifer Rubin: MAGA pols and dark money groups have no business defining who is ‘pro-Israel’
Rightwing Christian Evangelists, including those who have yearned for a 21st century Crusader and Islamophobe like Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon, have argued that criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is effectively “anti-Israel” — or worse, if you are said to be holding Israel to a higher/double standard than other nations, “anti-Semitic.” This has fed MAGA partisan claptrap that, since only the Republican Party extends unconditional support for Netanyahu’s coalition government, no matter how reprehensible their conduct, it is the only “pro-Israel” American political party.
The specious reasoning that you cannot criticize Israel’s current government and still be “pro-Israel” would be debunked under ordinary circumstances. But now the Republicans are in a fix: Donald Trump, humiliated by his widely panned deal, has not only agreed to a deal infinitely weaker than the JCPOA, but has also railed at the Netanyahu government in terms no Democrat administration would ever have dared utter. Surely, Trump and his Republican flunkies shouldn’t be able to retain the pretense that they are “pro-Israel”? Here is where it gets interesting.
Under unceasing criticism for its lousy Iran deal, Trump went from saying U.S. Jews should get their “heads examined” and were “disloyal” if they did not back him to denouncing Netanyahu as “crazy” in persisting with attacks on Lebanon while peace talks continued. Trump, who routinely excoriated former President Barack Obama for criticizing Netanyahu, effectively told Netanyahu to shut up and do what he is told.
At the G-7, Trump went even further …
(Jennifer Rubin more…)
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Qasim Rashid, Esq.: The Racist To Riches Pipeline
A woman walks into a public store, tells two Muslim customers they are not welcome in “a Christian country,” gets fired, goes viral—and within 24 hours raises over $100,000 in online donations.
No legal fees. No medical bills. No emergency. Just the financial reward for telling two Muslim women they do not belong.
If you needed a single image to illustrate how white supremacy functions as an economic system in America—not just a moral failure, not just a social pathology, but a monetized, crowd-funded, algorithmically amplified revenue stream—this is it. Because sadly this is not a random exception or anecdote. …
Anthony M, Public Historian: New York City Race Riots
(Anthony M, Public Historian more…)
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Thom Hartmann: 168 Dead Children. One Secret Report. And Elon Musk’s AI.
The Pentagon investigation is finished. Congress still hasn’t seen it. The families of Minab deserve answers—and so do we…
…A medical clinic that opened on the same complex barely a year before the strike was left untouched, while the school full of children was hit.
Either our targeting was precise enough to spare a brand-new clinic but careless enough to level a decade-old school, or the school was struck on purpose. The children, after all, were the kids of members of Iran’s military. Both answers are damning, along with the double-tap evidence, and there’s exactly one document that would tell us which is true.
That document exists. The Pentagon finished its investigation last month, and members of Congress still haven’t been allowed to see it. So a bipartisan group of senators has resorted to the only leverage they have left, moving to freeze 75 percent of Hegseth’s travel budget through the defense authorization bill until he hands over the unredacted civilian-harm investigations, Minab among them.
The same provision demands the unedited video of the boat strikes off Venezuela that have killed more than 200 people, which Trump and Whiskey Pete are also refusing to release. You don’t bury a report that clears you.
We’ve seen this reflex before, from the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad in 1991, where American smart bombs killed more than 400 civilians the Pentagon insisted were a military target, to the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz in 2015, where the official story changed three times before a US commander finally admitted the decision had been entirely American. Not to mention My Lai in Vietnam. Deny, deflect, and bury, every single time.
There’s a reason, however, that this particular cover-up may be more frantic than the ones that came before it, and it carries a name we’ve all heard way too many times: the machine helping choose our targets in Iran was Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot.
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Mitch Jackson: Elon Musk Said “Zero People Have Died.” Researchers Have Already Estimated 332,000 Deaths.
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John Timmer @ arsTECHNICA: US’s climate.gov site, taken down by Trump, relaunched by nonprofit
Climate.us has now restored everything taken down by the government.
Mitch Jackson: Trump Is Gutting Environmental Law and Silencing Your Voice
Trump erased the rules that forced the government to study the damage and listen to you before breaking ground near your home, and the people living closest to the pollution lost their protection first.
(Mitch Jackson more…)
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Adam Kovac @ Scientific American: Why is the paint peeling off the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool? An investigation
Poor preparation and a failure to properly apply the coating may be just a few of the reasons why the Reflecting Pool’s new paint job appears to be peeling off
(Adam Kovac @ Scientific American more…)Michele Hornish: Let’s Go, Algae: Small Things Making Trouble
The algae will never give up. Neither will we
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Joyce Vance: 101 Former Judges Ask the New York Bar to Investigate Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche
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
- 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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