Category: 2025

curated citations to news sources

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.
…

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.
(more…)

curated citations to news sources

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:
(more…)

curated citations to news sources

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.
…

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.
(more…)

curated citations to news sources

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.”
(more…)

curated citations to news sources

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.
(more…)

curated citations to news sources

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.”
(more…)

curated citations to news sources

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.”
(more…)

curated citations to news sources

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.
(more…)

curated citations to news sources

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.

curated citations to news sources

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.
(more…)