Category: 2025

curated citations to news sources

Rebecca Solnit: Epstein Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg: The Trump Protection Machine and the Epidemic of Violence Against Women

On July 2, the jury delivered a guilty verdict on some of the charges against music mogul Sean Combs for his decades of horrific sexual abuse of women with the help of his extensive staff and deep pockets. He’s also accused in many civil suits of sexual abuse of adults and minors. It seems like everyone promptly forgot about Combs when the facts about financier Jeffrey Epstein’s decades of horrific sexual abuse of at least a hundred girls and women, with the help of his extensive staff, deep pockets, banks, and elite connections – including to Donald Trump – became the next front-page ruckus.

In June, movie producer Harvey Weinstein was found guilty in a New York retrial for some of his decades of horrific sexual abuse of women, with the help of his extensive staff, top lawyers, the film industry, some ex-Mossad agents, and of course his deep pockets. In February a federal appeals court upheld the conviction of rapper R. Kelly’s 30-year prison sentence for racketeering and sex trafficking, last year his other 20-year sentence was also upheld, for producing child pornography and enticement of children for sex. Of course his deep pockets and extensive assistance had also been factors in how he too was able to abuse girls for so long.

One of the reasons the epidemic of violence against women is so unacknowledged is because cases like these are talked about individually, and often treated as though they are shocking aberrations rather than part of a pervasive pattern that operates at all levels of society.
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NY Times: There’s a Name for What Trump Is Doing. Juan Crow.

In its merciless pursuit of people without papers — most of them Latino — and its demonization of asylum seekers, refugees, holders of temporary protected status, Muslims and Palestinian rights activists, the Trump administration is accelerating toward a new, modern nadir of Juan Crow, just downstream of Jim and Jane.

When a sitting U.S. senator refers to New York immigrants as “inner-city rats,” when a Florida governor waxes rapturously about the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention center, when a presidential administration takes two months to dismantle decades of civil rights law, we must admit that these are acts in a feature presentation of neo-Confederate revanchism targeting brown and Black people. The targeting of the undocumented has a name, after all, based in ugly history and shameful tradition: Juan Crow.

The phrase was popularized by the journalist Roberto Lovato to describe the “matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems” that isolate and control undocumented immigrants. The domestic policies of the Trump administration have taken this legacy to a more dangerous place.
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Isaac Saul: Starvation in Gaza.

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What writers in the Middle East are saying.

• Gazan writers report that suffering runs rampant amid ongoing food shortages.
• Some writers in Israel worry that the government has no strategy to end the war or avert a humanitarian disaster.

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[Isaac Saul] My Take
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• The exaggerated claims of starvation that have persisted since the war began have now become reality.
• Regardless of the justifications, this starvation has been directly caused by Israel’s blockade.
• I am heartbroken to see a country that I love reduced to such acts of inhumanity.

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Politico: Trump’s lawsuit against Wall Street Journal now has a judge — and it’s not Aileen Cannon

President Donald Trump’s bid to take down the Wall Street Journal over its coverage of his connection to Jeffrey Epstein has landed in the courtroom of Darrin Gayles, who is likely experiencing deja vu.

That’s because Gayles, a 2014 appointee of Barack Obama, had another brush with a litigious Trump in 2023, when the then-former president sought to punish his onetime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen.

Trump sued Cohen in April 2023 seeking a $500 million payout for claims that Cohen violated his attorney-client relationship with Trump and enriched himself off their relationship. Six months later, Trump abandoned the lawsuit, just before Cohen’s lawyers were set to question him under oath.
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But as with the Cohen case, there’s an open question of whether Trump’s new lawsuit is more of a political stunt than a serious attempt to litigate the issue. If Trump pursues the case, he would open himself up to answering questions under oath about his connection to the disgraced financier who killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
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Howard Yu: TSMC posted a $440 million loss at its Arizona factory.

American engineers called it “rigid, brutal, prison-like.” Taiwanese managers complained about “lack of dedication and obedience.”

TSMC’s CEO Morris Chang saw this coming.

“A very expensive exercise in futility,” he called America’s chip push.

Taiwan doesn’t just make chips. It breathes them. Three decades of alignment created something money can’t buy.

In Arizona, Americans clock out after shifts. In Taiwan, engineers sleep in the fab.

In Arizona, decisions need consensus. In Taiwan, orders flow down.

In Arizona, it’s a job. In Taiwan, it’s national service.

Chang knew this at 55 when he started TSMC. The playbook worked because a nation aligned behind it:
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ProPublica: The Drying Planet

As the planet gets hotter and its reservoirs shrink and its glaciers melt, people have increasingly drilled into a largely ungoverned, invisible cache of fresh water: the vast, hidden pools found deep underground.
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The researchers were surprised to find that the loss of water on the continents has grown so dramatically that it has become one of the largest causes of global sea level rise. Moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans.
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Gil Duran: ‘Tech Billionaires Accused of…Working to Implement Corporate Dictatorship’

“In a world increasingly ruled by tech companies, some of the industry’s most powerful figures appear to be quietly drafting blueprints for the near future. There’s just one catch: it may or may not be a democratic one.”

Joe Wilkins at Futurism, a publication focused on science and technology, did an interesting analysis of my work in a piece headlined “Tech Billionaires Accused of Quietly Working to Implement Corporate Dictatorship.”
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Waging Nonviolence: A new youth-led lawsuit is challenging Trump’s fossil fuel orders

This summer, kids are taking the climate crisis to the courts. The 22 plaintiffs of Lighthiser v. Trump, a lawsuit filed in May, range from 7 to 25 years old. They are challenging three of President Donald Trump’s most controversial executive orders to “unleash” fossil fuels and revoke renewable energy initiatives. The orders roll back critical investments in sustainable technologies and climate science, declare a “National Energy Emergency” to increase fossil fuel use, and prop up the coal, oil and gas industries through deregulation.

The case will hinge on the youth’s constitutional rights — a pivotal angle in recent environmental suits. When hearings begin in September in the U.S. District Court of Montana, the Lighthiser plaintiffs will argue that the three executive orders violate their Fifth Amendment rights to life and liberty. Additionally, they allege the president exceeded his authority by attempting to override laws like the Clean Air Act. As the case unfolds, it will have sweeping implications for the legal resistance to the Trump administration, and for the climate movement at large.
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Ken Klippenstein: Troops Question Los Angeles Deployment

An inside look at the ill-fated mission in soldiers’ own words

Thousands of troops, National Guard and active duty Marines are being withdrawn from Los Angeles, the ill-fated mission quietly ending, the objective so confused that even the Defense Department’s official news service is publishing stories about soldiers questioning the point.

I’ve also been talking to those soldiers, and they affirm that so much of the Trump-Hegseth show of force was little more than an unnecessary and politically-motivated publicity stunt. So much so that I’m told that the Pentagon has ordered the California Guard to preserve all records related to the deployment, just in case the military is sued.

“Turns out there could be reasonably foreseeable litigation regarding the mobilization in the future,” one Guard source tells me, adding wryly: “Shocked.”
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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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