Author: sauer@technologists.com

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RNS: Trump administration released FBI records on MLK Jr. despite his family’s opposition

The Trump administration has released records of the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., despite opposition from the slain Nobel laureate’s family and the civil rights group that he led until his 1968 assassination.

The release involves more than 240,000 pages of records that had been under a court-imposed seal since 1977, when the FBI first gathered the records and turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.

King’s family, including his two living children, Martin III and Bernice, were given advance notice of the release and had their own teams reviewing the records ahead of the public disclosure.

In a lengthy statement released Monday, the two living King children called their father’s case a “captivating public curiosity for decades.” But the pair emphasized the personal nature of the matter and urged that “these files must be viewed within their full historical context.”
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Bulwark: Andry Is Free. Trump’s Barbarous Immigration Regime Is Just Getting Started.

Andry is alive. And for now he is freed from a horrid detention center in El Salvador. Thank God.

This morning his mother is awaiting his arrival, supposedly today or tomorrow. They spoke by phone on Sunday for the first time in more than four months, according to his attorney. I cannot imagine her relief.

For 125 days Andry and hundreds of other men were held in a torture prison where they got a “beating for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner.” They had been kidnapped by our government and left in that hellhole to rot with no due process, no access to legal counsel, no phone call home. They were completely stripped of their humanity. In many cases their only crime was existing in Stephen Miller’s America while being Venezuelan. For some, their sin was having the wrong tattoo.

On Friday, these men were released, at long last, in what was described by the participating governments as a “prisoner exchange” between El Salvador and Venezuela. In reality this was a hostage swap between the United States and the Nicolás Maduro regime. A hostage swap in which the Americans were the villains, using a tactic previously deployed by despots like Putin, who imprisoned an American athlete for minor cannabis crimes in order to extract concessions from the earnest West.

It’s remarkable that our administration’s actions were so depraved that they somehow made Maduro seem like the good guy. We gave him a domestic public relations victory, so he can crow about the humanitarian aid he brought to Venezuelans who had been tortured by the capitalist American devil.
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Caleb Ecarma: Musk’s Neuralink falsified federal forms, claims to qualify for racial diversity program

The company, owned by the world’s wealthiest man, says it is a “small disadvantaged business”

On April 24, Elon Musk’s $9 billion neurotechnology company falsely self-certified as a “small disadvantaged business” (SDB) on a federal filing, a designation that qualifies the company for preferential treatment as part of a racial and ethnic diversity initiative.

The SDB designation can also only be legally claimed by companies owned by “economically disadvantaged individuals.”

Neuralink, which is developing implantable brain-computer interfaces, registered with the government as an SDB while Musk leveraged his position at the White House to cut federal funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

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Mindy Belz: Afghans go home

Protection anywhere for those forced to flee a Taliban takeover is in doubt

Afghans who escaped the fall of Kabul in 2021 aboard U.S. evacuation flights appear likely to be forcibly sent back to Afghanistan this weekend from a military facility in the United Arab Emirates.

On Wednesday officials at the Emirates Humanitarian City (EHC) outside Abu Dhabi confiscated passports for 32 Afghans who remain there. They include Afghans who worked for the U.S. military plus women and children. Since their arrivals almost four years ago, Emirati officials prohibited them from leaving the sprawling facility, once home to more than 5,000 Afghan exiles who boarded U.S. flights from Kabul and other cities as part of a chaotic airlift that began in August 2021.

At one time State Department officers and humanitarian organizations had representatives to ensure their well-being pending approval for onward travel to the United States or other countries. But the Department of Homeland Security never showed up to adjudicate their cases, as promised, and U.S. diplomats pulled out long ago. The last NGO representatives from CARE left earlier this week.
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Daily Kos: Trump’s DOJ wants Breonna Taylor’s killer to get off easy

NY Times: Justice Dept. Asks for 1-Day Sentence for Ex-Officer Convicted in Breonna Taylor Raid

The administration asked the judge in the case to sentence the former officer to essentially the brief time he had served when he was first charged, and three years of supervised release.
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He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison, and a judge will consider the government’s request at a sentencing scheduled for next week.
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John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020)

Closer to the Edge: Go Make Good Trouble

When Silence Becomes Surrender, Raise Your Voice or Get Out of the Way

John Lewis was not some relic of civil rights past, ossified in marble and forgotten in schoolbooks. He was a living, breathing, fire-blooded example of what happens when the human spine refuses to bend — even when batons come down hard enough to fracture it. At twenty-five, he stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge knowing the weight of what waited on the other side: troopers in riot gear, clubs raised, gas canisters at the ready. They didn’t disappoint. They cracked his skull, spilled his blood, and thought that might silence him. But Lewis didn’t just get up — he kept marching. He wore his scars like credentials, proof that the struggle for justice isn’t a metaphor, it’s a street fight waged with discipline, dignity, and defiance. And if he were here today, he’d be the first one through the police line, smiling like a man who’s been here before.
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He would tell us that Good Trouble is a muscle — it only works if you use it. He’d tell us that July 17th is not a date to commemorate passively, but a test to see if we’ve remembered how to fight. Every protest today is a question aimed at the American conscience: do we still have one? Every chant, every sign, every drumbeat in the street is a challenge to the cowards in power who bet that fear would keep us home. If you’re tired, good — tired means you’ve been paying attention. But the only cure for that exhaustion is movement. Rest if you must, but never quit the march.

Because while Trump and his regime sharpen their knives on the bones of the vulnerable, they hope we stay polite. They hope we stay online, arguing about etiquette while they redraw the borders of power in their image. They hope that the threat of violence, of arrest, of surveillance is enough to keep the masses meek. But they forget that the skull they cracked in 1965 did not break the spirit behind it. John Lewis stood back up, bruised but defiant, and he’s daring us now to do the same.

If you think one march doesn’t matter, remember that every revolution begins with people deciding that today is the day they won’t just take it anymore. Today is that day. July 17th. If you’re not already in the streets, get there. If you’re not holding a sign, make one. If your voice hasn’t gone hoarse yet, you’re not shouting loud enough. History isn’t asking politely — it’s banging on the door, demanding to know where the hell you are.
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Radley Balko: The police militarization debate is over

Quaint disputes about the proper role of police and military have been superseded by a more urgent threat: Donald Trump is creating his own, personal paramilitary force
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There has long been an important and consequential discussion about the proper, constitutional role of police, the proper, constitutional role of the military, and the ramifications of blurring the lines between the two. …

In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it.
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Christina Pagel: America’s retreat from science has far-reaching implications for global research and innovation

The immediate impact on US science and global health is devastating, but the implications for global science go further and we need to protect it.

Since January 2025 the US government has terminated or frozen hundreds of grants across the health, the climate, the environment, and NASA. Thousands of researchers have been dismissed and entire research programmes disrupted including climate change, vaccine development, social-media misinformation studies.

Universities are under sustained attack. Elite universities have had the most federal funding cut, are threatened with investigations over student Gaza protests, and are being asked to give up independence in hiring and curriculum decisions. Visa approvals for new international students and staff have slowed or been revoked outright.

International collaboration has been devastated. For instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been ordered to stop working with the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has halted grant funding involving foreign partners, and threatened the prestigious international Fulbright scholarship.

The attacks on US science have been devastating for those working in science or considering science careers in the US. But the rest of the world is poorer for it as well.
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Rebecca Solnit: Please Shout Fire. This Theater Is Burning

The United States is being destroyed from within, and mainstream journalism isn’t making that clear. When I was a kid, there was a popular phrase–“what if they had a war and no one came?” What if we were in a war and no one noticed? Obviously all the people under direct attack have noticed, along with all the scientists and federal employees who’ve been fired, the foreign students afraid to come back, the medical professionals who understand what’s happening to public health, the economists who see the wrecking ball swinging, the university administrators whose institutions are under attack. I think most of us feel it and see it and know it. But too many of the powerful voices in this country are downplaying the crisis we’re in, and that tamps down the reactions that could save us.
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Two things under attack are the rule of law and the separation of powers, but the impact is largely downplayed. This year we’ve all heard a lot about the three co-equal branches of government. But Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who, after the Big Brutal Bill (BBB) passed, literally handed his gavel to Trump in a horrifying gesture of surrender, is clearly and openly taking orders from him. Johnson is not interested in defending Congress’s powers, and so important powers Congress has, namely the power of the purse, the power to control the allocation and flow of federal funds, have been surrendered.
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John Pavlovitz: Call It What It Is: A Death Camp

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It is not a prison.

Prisons are for those who, through due process and the rigors of our legal system, are found to have committed crimes for which they face accountability.

This is a human kennel; a sweltering dumping ground for fathers, sons, husbands, and best friends, who have been stolen from their homes, workplaces, churches, and graduation ceremonies, for no other reason than to satisfy the irrational bloodlust of ignorant white people who spend their Sundays cosplaying followers of Jesus.
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