Category: 2026

curated news excerpts & citations

Juliet Jeske @ Decoding Fox News:
The Department of Justice is Scrubbing its Website of Documents Related to January 6th Crimes

Thanks to a tip by Aaron Parnas I learned that the DOJ had purged its website of documents related to crimes involving the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The Trump administration is trying to re-write history again. These documents regarding the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol should not be hidden from the public.

On January 6, 2021 Trump supporters were trying to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power. According to witness testimony Donald J. Trump sat in the White House dining room and watched the massive melee unfold on Fox News.

[May 23 “Page not found”:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/court-sentences-two-oath-keepers-leaders-18-years-prison-seditious-conspiracy-and-other]

[May 8 Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260508010430/https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/court-sentences-two-oath-keepers-leaders-18-years-prison-seditious-conspiracy-and-other]

Eric Tucker @ AP: Trump’s Justice Department scrubs its website of news releases about Jan. 6 defedants

C.J. Ciaramella @ reason: A Florida Detention Center Was the Harshest in the Country. Then ICE Stopped Tracking Details on Use of Force.

Brian Allen: Inside the New Immigration Shockwave: What Trump’s Reported Green Card Policy Shift Could Mean for Millions

María Teresita Armstrong-Matta @ RawStory: Trump’s plan to ban voting machines collapses due to lack of evidence

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Radley Balko: You can’t hide your lying ICE: The shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis

A Minneapolis prosecutor charges an ICE agent, exposing how DHS shamelessly lied after its officers shot an immigrant, tear gassed two kids, and put a bullet in the wall of a child’s bedroom.

This week Hennepin County Prosecutor Mary Moriarty announced that she has filed criminal charges against Christian Castro, the ICE agent who blindly fired into the closed front door of a home, wounding a Venezuelan immigrant named Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. The shooting took place in Minneapolis, two days after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good. After the Sosa-Celis incident, the DHS propaganda machine run by then-chief spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin went to work. Overnight, headlines around the country declared that Sosa-Celis and two other men had ambushed and beat two ICE officers nearly to death, giving them no choice but to use lethal force to defend themselves.

It was all a lie.

Let’s start with a summary of the DHS account of the incident, which is still posted on the agency’s website: …

So let’s count the lies this administration told about this incident: …

Bennito L. Kelty @ RawStory: Trump DOJ’s conduct during anti-ICE protest case shocks experts: ‘Completely staggering’

Rev. Jane Field, Executive Director, Maine Council of Churches: How Maine’s Clergy Fought Back Against ICE—And Won

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curated news excerpts & citations

James Eagle: The AI productivity boom may already be fading

The seductive story is that AI is about to lift America into another productivity boom. The harder lesson from this chart is that productivity booms do not simply arrive. They diffuse, disappoint, accelerate and fade. Computers and the internet both raised output per hour, but only after businesses reorganised around them. Then the gains slowed.
…
The missing half of the story is decline. Oil shocks, financial crises and weak investment can all crush productivity growth, while even successful technologies eventually become ordinary. AI may yet deliver a genuine boom. But history warns that the question is not only how fast productivity rises, but how long the rise can survive.

Tobias Mann @ Register: AI is getting expensive, but relief is on the way – just not for you

New hardware promises greater efficiency, user experiences, and most importantly larger margins

Bradley Olson @ WSJ: SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI’s Sprint to Go Public Defines the AI Boom’s Big Day

Silicon Valley’s hottest startups are competing fiercely as big tech companies contend with fickle investors and hard choices

Samantha Cole @ 404 Media: How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart

After five teen girls were targeted by AI-generated child sexual abuse material, Radnor Township High School in Pennsylvania has become a case study in how schools and police around the country grapple with how to response to deepfake crimes involving children.
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Lloyd Doggett, Michael Shank @ Guardian:
The Iran war reminds us: we’ll never be energy-independent with fossil fuels

Energy security comes from using local, renewable resources to power, heat and cool communities, as Ukraine is doing

Donald Trump’s unjustified war on Iran and the resulting global fuel crisis is a continuing reminder that true energy security and independence will continue to elude us so long as we remain dependent on fossil fuels.

Whether it’s wars over oil and gas resource access or attacks on fossil fuel power plants and energy grids, this reliance on finite resources only worsens a country’s threat profile. News this month of Russia’s deadly attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Russian drones swarming Ukrainian power stations and Kyiv running out of time to prepare for another winter of attacks on its energy grid illustrates this urgency.

No country will be energy-secure or independent as long as its fuel supply remains finite and fossilized and its power plants and energy grids centralized and fossil fuel-dependent. Those are sitting ducks, targets very vulnerable to attack by adversaries.

James Eagle: Solar is winning the growth race, but gas is still in it

Marisa Kabas: Hating AI is good, actually

Emily Biuso, Akshat Rathi, Olivia Rudgard @ Bloomberg: How Cities From Tokyo to Nairobi Are Becoming Flood-Proof

The business of adaptation—investing in climate resilience—is projected to be a $1.3 trillion market
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Ed Zitron: AI Is Too Expensive

AI is, as it stands, not economically viable for anybody involved other than the construction firms, NVIDIA, and the surrounding hardware companies benefitting from the irrational exuberance of a data center buildout that doesn’t appear to be happening at the speed we believed.

Every AI startup loses millions or billions of dollars a year, and nobody appears to have worked out a way to stop hemorrhaging cash. Hyperscalers have invested over $800 billion in the last three years, with plans to add another $700 billion or so in 2026 and another $1 trillion in 2027, meaning that they need to make at least three trillion dollars in AI specific revenue just to break even, and $6 trillion or more for AI to be anything other than a wash. I went into detail about this (albeit at a lower, pre-2026/2027 capex number) in a premium piece last year.

Sam Newman @ O’Reilly Radar: When an Agent Deletes the Production Database

Revisiting the PocketOS Incident

Medium: Software Engineer (named Vasilios Syrakis) at Atlassian was laid off on March 12 after 8 years.

Vasilios responded with a 40-minute YouTube video showing how the company’s entire tech works, free for anyone to copy.

curated news excerpts & citations

Solomon Crenshaw Jr.: From Selma to Montgomery, Alabama marches for civil rights once again

Annie Pearl Avery, 82, sat in a wheelchair at the bottom of the church steps in Selma on Saturday. The former activist said “we dropped the ball” when it came to protecting the rights for which she and others fought.

“We stopped doing certain things that we needed to do to secure what we have,” she said. “You’ve got to watch this stuff. You’ve got to protect it, just like you’re protecting a baby. You’ve got to watch everything, because it’ll get away from you real quick.”

curated news excerpts & citations

Sherrilyn Ifill: The Critical Connection Between Brown v. Board and Voting Rights

There Is a Reason That Dr. King Gave his Famous “Give Us the Ballot” Speech on the Third Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education

“But even more, all types of conniving methods are still being used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters. The denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition. And so our most urgent request to the president of the United States and every member of Congress is to give us the right to vote.

“Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.

“Give us the ballot (Yes), and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law; we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the South (All right) and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence.

“Give us the ballot, and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.

“Give us the ballot, and we will fill our legislative halls with men of goodwill and send to the sacred halls of Congress men who will not sign a “Southern Manifesto” because of their devotion to the manifesto of justice.

“Give us the ballot, and we will place judges on the benches of the South who will do justly and love mercy, and we will place at the head of the southern states governors who will, who have felt not only the tang of the human, but the glow of the Divine.”

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Give Us The Ballot.” May 17, 1957.
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Dean Obeidallah: Dr. John Gartner: “I’m predicting that Donald Trump will kill more people than Hitler”

… Dr. John Gartner—a psychologist and founder of Duty To Warn—who for years had been raising red flags about Donald Trump’s cognitive decline. … But this is the first time he said something as blunt as, “I’m predicting that Donald Trump will kill more people than Hitler.”

Before you dismiss this as over the top, keep in mind … He has now seen Trump’s reaction to war and the joy it brings him. That is why Dr. Gartner has upped his warning. Plus it’s not just Dr. Gartner alerting us–36 leading medical experts recently signed a letter to Congress warning that Trump is mentally unfit to serve.

As Dr. Gartner explained in our discussion this week, during the Iran war we’ve seen Trump enjoy the bombing and killing of people. “Donald Trump is becoming pure, sadistic id with no brakes, with no frontal lobe,” he explained.
(Dean Obeidallah more…)

Allison Quinn, Mary Papenfuss @ Daily Beast: White House Reveals Secret New Hospital for Trump, 79

The president’s much-talked-about ballroom now inexplicably could double as a hospital.

Joseph Gedeon, Cate Brown @ Guardian: Pentagon quietly shut legally required program to prevent civilian deaths by military, watchdog finds

Jason Sattler: Why Trump can’t quit Stephen Miller

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Jennifer Rubin: Undaunted

On Saturday, a massive civil rights organizing response to the Jim Crow redistricting enabled by the MAGA Supreme Court justices — then rammed through by MAGA-controlled state legislatures — will kick off in Alabama. Who is behind this bold campaign, and what can we expect?

“All Roads Lead to the South,” focused on Selma and Montgomery (two iconic sites in civil rights history), is a coordinated effort championed by Black Voters Matter and over 200 (!) civil rights and pro-democracy organizations (including #WinWithBlack Women, National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU, Democracy Defenders Action, The Lawyers’ Committee, LULAC, The Brennan Center, SPLC, The Transformative Justice Coalition, and Fair Fight) as well as the broader No Kings Day coalition. A massive response to the re-imposition of Jim Crow, one-party rule (with Republicans racing to redrawn lines to eliminate batches of Black and Hispanic House members and dilute Black and Hispanic voting power) could not be more urgent.
(Jennifer Rubin more…)

Mark Gruenberg @ People’s World: Selma revisited: Mass voting rights march happening May 16

Maya Miller, Lisa Song @ ProPublica: At 17, He Was Tear-Gassed at Selma. At 78, He’s Watching Kids Tear-Gassed During Trump’s Deportation Campaign.

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Borowitz: Xi Humiliates Trump by Reading Aloud From Epstein Files

BEIJING—President Xi Jinping’s humiliation of Donald J. Trump peaked on Thursday when the Chinese leader used a joint appearance to read aloud from the Epstein Files.

Standing at a podium barely three feet away from his American counterpart, a stony-faced Xi recited a series of damning allegations about Trump that the DOJ’s redaction team had somehow missed.

While the assembled press listened with rapt attention, Trump appeared oblivious to Xi’s audacious effort to embarrass him.

“He’s a true friend,” Trump later said of Xi. “He said my name many, many times.”

Joyce Vance: Forgetting About Jeffrey Epstein

Jaidyn Bridgeforth @ Atlanta Black Star: ‘An Abomination’: A Congresswoman Just Tore Apart the System That Let Epstein Walk Free for Years, and What She Revealed About Who Protected Him Is Absolutely Damning

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