Author: sauer@technologists.com

curated news excerpts & citations

Root: Selma Was Not Just History, It Was a Warning

Opinion: Sixty-one years after “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, we are once again watching the machinery of state violence turn toward Black and Brown communities.

Sixty-one years ago, on March 7, 1965, 600 people stepped onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. They marched for the simple promise of democracy: the right to vote. What met them was not dialogue but violence — billy clubs, tear gas, mounted troopers. “Bloody Sunday” forced the nation to confront two truths: the brutality of racial discrimination and the power of coordinated Black organizing.
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WSJ: U.S. Loses 92,000 Jobs in Widespread and Unexpected Downturn

The U.S. lost 92,000 jobs in February, a sign that the job market continues to struggle across a broad range of sectors.

The hiring numbers, reported Friday by the Labor Department, fell far short of January’s gain of 126,000 jobs. They were worse than the gain of 50,000 jobs that economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected to see.

The unemployment rate ticked slightly higher to 4.4%.
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Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims: Hundreds of thousands of Americans stranded in a war zone

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Due to the intensity of combat in the Middle East, other countries not directly involved in the conflict quickly began evacuating their citizens from the region. The Italian government has facilitated the evacuation of 2,500 Italians on commercial flights. The Czech Republic sent multiple flights to evacuate people stranded in the area. Several other countries, including the United Kingdom, France, and Greece, had organized flights scheduled for Wednesday, Reuters reported.

Americans in the area are in danger of being targeted, but the State Department did not advise citizens to leave the region before the strikes began. Before the 2003 Iraq War, in contrast, the State Department advised citizens to prepare to evacuate weeks in advance and ordered a final evacuation days before fighting began.

This year, Americans in 14 countries were not advised to evacuate until three days after the Trump administration began major combat operations in Iran. By that time, much of the region’s airspace and most airports had closed.
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Miles Taylor: Five reasons Trump has left America vulnerable to a terrorist attack by Iran.

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Here are the first five reasons that came to mind last night (as I woke up stress-cycling through the foolish mistakes the Trump team has made) that could get Americans killed:

1. DHS doesn’t appear to have done any defensive planning for war.
2. Thousands of counterterrorism agents, experts, and officials have been moved to “immigration” enforcement.
3. The administration says the number-one terror threat to America is… “Antifa.”
4. The FBI has been firing agents who monitor Iranian threats.
5. The president took America to war before getting DHS funded.

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Thom Hartmann: Is Deporting a Journalist the Ultimate Form of Cancel Culture?

It probably shouldn’t surprise us. After all, intolerance and hate have always been the fuel that drives and sustains rightwing movements around the world and throughout history.

Now the hosts of one of the largest-circulation “conservative” podcasts in the country are calling for a Muslim commentator to be stripped of his citizenship and deported from America.

His sin? He called for the next president to take down the Hitler-style massive banners on the Justice and Labor Department buildings that feature Trump’s face, and the new one on the Education Department with Charlie Kirk’s face. And, of course, he’s a brown-skinned Muslim.
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Atlanta Black Star: Trump’s Department of Education Tries to Send a Message—and Ends Up Exposing the Administration Instead

It seems there’s no end to the racism underpinning the Trump administration under President Donald Trump, which regularly trumpets its efforts at remaking the federal government in the image of a Jim Crow, 1950s-era America.
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The department posted a photo from National Geographic showing a classroom full of white children from 1959 reciting the pledge of allegiance with the caption, “MAKE EDUCATION GREAT AGAIN.”

The implication and message the department is sending out with the post is clear, and it didn’t take long for social media to erupt in anger and disbelief.
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Reuters: Thousands of flights cancelled as Iran conflict upends global air travel

Business Insider: Fighting with Iran has spread to tankers at sea. Ships are coming under fire around the busy Strait of Hormuz.

Al Jazeera: Huge fire at Bahrain port home to US Navy’s Fifth Fleet

NY Times: Pentagon Announces First Three U.S. Deaths in War With Iran

NewsMax: At Least 22 Killed in Pakistan as Protesters Try to Storm US Consulate

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – March 1, 2026

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After yesterday’s euphoria coming from the administration following the first strikes against Iran, today revealed that the administration had not given much thought to whether the strikes were legitimate or what would happen after them. …

Trump seems unclear about the end game of the conflict he has started.
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Apparently, U.S. officials simply hoped the Iranian people would seize the government if their leaders were killed in airstrikes. But there was a line of succession, and the country’s police state remains in place. Erin Banco of Reuters reported yesterday that before the attacks, analysts for the Central Intelligence Agency assessed that if Iran’s 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were killed, younger hard-line men could replace him.
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Times of London: Oil price surge after attack on Iran threatens global inflation spike

Intercept: Trump’s Iran Attack Was Illegal, Former U.S. Military Officials Allege

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“Not only does this violate international law in numerous respects, it clearly violates the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Resolution,” said retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandingham, who previously served as chief of international law at U.S. Central Command.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – February 28, 2026

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Trump’s objectives for going to war sound vague because they are. The event that triggered his attack is also vague—so far, there is no evidence of an imminent threat that required the attack. His prescription for what his war is trying to accomplish is also vague.

It’s a given that this sort of vaguely justified attack on another country usually reflects that the leaders in the attacking country are worried about losing power and are launching a war to try to get disaffected people to rally around the flag.
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Christina Pagel: Timeline to US attacks on Iran

Flurries of threats, then attacks, then attacks on oversight and independent evidence
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This has clearly not come out of nowhere. Trump first threatened to bomb Iran over its nuclear programme in March 2025 – just two months after his inauguration. Then there was a flurry of activity precipitated by Israel’s strikes on Iran last summer – Trump quickly joined in and claimed to have obliterated Irans’s nuclear capabilities.

There followed several months of relative quiet – most likely because the US spent the autumn ramping up its military presence and threats to Venezuela, culminating in its January attack on Venezuela. The day after the capture of Maduro, Trump threatened other countries – including Iran. This coincided with huge domestic protests in Iran. Trump actively enouraged these and promised to come to the protestors’ aid. Trump repeatedly threatened military strikes on Iran, but did not launch any in January, despite the Iranian regime killing thousands of protestors in its most brutal ever crackdown on dissent. This might have been because Trump is an unreliable supporter and doesn’t care about the Iranian people. It might also have been for the practical reason of needing time to move military firepower from Venuezelan waters to the Gulf region – which the US did steadily over January and February this year.

The US successfully forced Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear program, but last week Trump and his officials started claiming that Iran was weeks away from a bomb (which is very unlikely to be true) and increasing its threatening rhetoric. The Israelis said today that their attacks today had been coordinated with the US and planned for months, so it seems likely that the negotiations were never in earnest from the US perspective.
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Slate: The Iranians Offered a Good Deal. Here’s Why Trump Might Not Take It.

If President Donald Trump rejects the deal that Iranians offered at their talks in Geneva, it can be for only one of two reasons: Either he doesn’t want a deal—or he doesn’t want a deal that resembles President Barack Obama’s 2014 accord, which Trump tore up in 2018 after calling it “the worst deal ever.”

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, Trump said he would prefer to settle the current crisis through diplomacy, but only if Tehran’s leaders said they “will never have a nuclear weapon”—words, Trump claimed, that “we haven’t heard.”

Actually, they have spoken those words, many times, though of course it’s another matter whether we should trust them. Iran is also a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which makes the same pledge.
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Thomas Germain @ BBC: I hacked ChatGPT and Google’s AI – and it only took 20 minutes

It’s official. I can eat more hot dogs than any tech journalist on Earth. At least, that’s what ChatGPT and Google have been telling anyone who asks. I found a way to make AI tell you lies – and I’m not the only one.

Perhaps you’ve heard that AI chatbots make things up sometimes. That’s a problem. But there’s a new issue few people know about, one that could have serious consequences for your ability to find accurate information and even your safety. A growing number of people have figured out a trick to make AI tools tell you almost whatever they want. It’s so easy a child could do it.

As you read this, this ploy is manipulating what the world’s leading AIs say about topics as serious as health and personal finances. The biased information could mean people make bad decisions on just about anything – voting, which plumber you should hire, medical questions, you name it.
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Bruce Schneier: These things are not trustworthy, and yet they are going to be widely trusted.

Paul Krugman: When Extraterrestrials Attacked the Stock Market

Actually it was a Substack post, but the reaction was telling

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