Category: 2026

curated news excerpts & citations

Robert Sherman @ NewsNation: War in Iran marks one month as Yemeni Houthis join the fighting

The U.S. and Iran have each submitted cease-fire terms as Saturday marks the start of the fifth week of fighting in the war in Iran.

Overnight, at least 15 U.S. service members were wounded following an Iranian missile attack at a base in Saudi Arabia, according to the Associated Press.

President Donald Trump has announced he is extending his self-imposed deadline for Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran publicly rejected the U.S.’s 15-point peace plan, sending a counterproposal that calls for Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, an end to hostilities and a stop to attacks on government officials.
…

Meanwhile, missile attacks from Yemen are now targeting Israel.
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

Jill Lawrence @ Bulwark: DOGE Targeting Nuclear Safety Brings Back Memories of Three Mile Island

I WAS ASKED A FEW YEARS AGO to name the biggest story I’d ever covered as a journalist. “You’d think Three Mile Island would have been the major story of my career, but history has just kept happening,” I replied.

Yet even after the deadlocked 2000 election, the inauguration of the first black U.S. president, the rise of Donald Trump, and so many other huge stories, that nuclear power plant accident on March 28, 1979, is still in the running for number one. And as I periodically rediscover, it still has the power to haunt.

That’s what happened last week, when ProPublica published an article by Avi Asher-Schapiro headlined “DOGE Goes Nuclear: How Trump Invited Silicon Valley Into America’s Nuclear Power Regulator.” The gist: Young, unqualified, and deeply unserious DOGEbros are “forcing a ‘move fast and break things’ Silicon Valley ethos on one of the country’s most important regulators.”

“The safety culture is under threat,” Allison Macfarlane, a former chair of that regulator, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told ProPublica. That was admirably restrained. This is a chilling investigatory account of corruption, cronyism, and lack of care.
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

Qasim Rashid, Esq.: 13 Rules to Protect Yourself While Protesting At No Kings

This week the “No Kings” Protest is projected to be one of the largest protests in American history. The right to protest is enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Americans have exercised this right throughout our nation’s history to protest government overreach, tyranny, and injustice. Today, that right is once again being tested.

Across the country, working people are mobilizing to protest ICE raids, mass arrests, and the targeting of immigrants, Muslims, Indigenous, and Black and brown communities. Meanwhile, the Trump regime has made clear it does not respect the right to peaceful protest.

That reality means preparation matters. Whether you are protesting this week, next week, or supporting loved ones who are, the goal is the same: protect yourself, protect each other, and remain rooted in principle. Below are key rules I urge you to read, share, and keep with you as we continue to show up for our communities.
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

Robert Reich: Trump’s Graft, Insider’s Grift

Margaret Ryan, the top enforcement official at the Securities and Exchange Commission — the agency tasked with investigating insider trading and other illegal activities in financial markets — abruptly resigned last week, after just six months on the job.

Reportedly, Ryan wanted to be more aggressive in pursuing charges of fraud and other misconduct, including against Trump’s inner circle. But the SEC’s chairman, Paul Atkins, and other Republican appointees to the commission wouldn’t let her.

When Trump appointed Atkins chair of the SEC, he was co-chair of the Token Alliance, a cryptocurrency advocacy group, and he owned $6 million worth of holdings in crypto-related businesses.

During Atkins’s time at the SEC, the commission has dropped or settled numerous lawsuits with cryptocurrency companies and adopted a lax regulatory approach to fraud.

It’s also avoided politically sensitive cases — such as, let me hazard a guess, insider trading by Trump’s family and cronies.

Why do I mention insider trading by Trump’s family and cronies?
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

Jennifer Rubin: There is no smooth ‘off-ramp’

The notion that Donald Trump could depart from the highway to forever-war simply by spotting the next exit is misleading at best, dangerously naïve at worst. It is not as if Trump is speeding along the 405 freeway on the Westside of Los Angeles, deciding if he should take the Wilshire Blvd. off-ramp or wait for Santa Monica Blvd. The current situation is more akin to going over Niagara Falls in a barrel he chose to get into. The “exit” was there before Trump got in. Put differently, we need to stop using a metaphor that implies Trump is still in control of the war’s timeline. He’s not.

In the space of 24 hours, Trump went from threatening to knock out Iran’s power plants to insisting that the U.S. was engaged in “constructive” talks with Iran. He therefore put the “destroy the power plants” on hold for 5 days. While Trump may have simply lied (as is his way) about talks to excuse delaying an ill-conceived major escalation, his latest announcement underscores just how frantic he is to get out of this debacle.

However, Trump cannot simply “leave” now that he is sick of the collapsing polls, public ridicule, rotten press coverage, absurdly high oil prices, aggrieved allies, and whiny MAGA isolationists. …
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

James Eagle: When an oil chokepoint stops the world

War has a way of cutting through economic narratives.

For months, markets have been telling a comfortable story. Energy shocks were behind us. Supply chains had adapted. Prices had settled. But that story only holds in peacetime, or something close to it.

The escalation in the Middle East changes the frame entirely. The sudden halt in traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is not a market adjustment, it is a wartime constraint. When a critical artery for global oil and gas effectively shuts, the system does not bend, it snaps.

curated news excerpts & citations

Benjamin Katz @ WSJ: Flights Are Still Taking Off as Missiles Rain Down in the Middle East

Dozens of flights have arrived in and departed Dubai within minutes of strikes, a WSJ analysis found

Minutes before an Iranian drone smashed into a fuel tank, sending a fiery explosion into the skies above Dubai International Airport, the wheels of an Emirates passenger plane en route to Beijing had just lifted from the runway.

The blast in the early hours of Monday morning forced two planes on approach to quickly divert and take up holding patterns. Twelve other flights had taken off in the 30 minutes before the attack. By midday, the airport was back up and running.
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

Yaroslav Trofimov @ WSJ: Iran Believes It’s Winning—and Wants a Steep Price to End the War

DUBAI—Three weeks into the war, the Iranian regime is signaling that it believes it is winning and has the power to impose a settlement on Washington that entrenches Tehran’s dominance of Middle East energy resources for decades to come.

This attitude may prove to be a dangerous misreading of President Trump’s determination, or of Israel’s capacity to inflict strategic blows on the Islamic Republic’s surviving leadership and military capabilities.

Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have given mixed signals on how long the war would go on, as they try to talk markets down and keep Tehran guessing. Netanyahu said Thursday that the war would end “a lot faster than people think.” Trump said this week the U.S. would wrap up the conflict in the “near future” even as the Pentagon dispatched thousands of additional Marines to the Middle East.

The problem is, Iran also has a say in when the guns fall silent—and, for now, it seems to think time works to its benefit.
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

Heather Delaney Reese: The president can’t keep his lies straight

…
But the Pearl Harbor comment, as disgraceful as it was, wasn’t even the most dangerous thing Trump said in those 27 minutes. It was just the most offensive. The most dangerous part was when he exposed his own lie about the war.

Last night, on Truth Social, Trump posted that the United States “knew nothing” about Israel’s strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field, part of the largest natural gas field in the world. …

That was last night. Today, with Takaichi sitting beside him and the cameras rolling, a reporter asked Trump directly whether he had spoken with Prime Minister Netanyahu about the Israeli strikes. Trump didn’t hesitate.

“Yeah, I did. I did. I told him, ‘Don’t do that.’ …

He knew. He spoke to Netanyahu. He described a coordinated relationship. And then he tripped over his own words trying to hold together a story that had already collapsed, because he’d told us a completely different version twelve hours earlier. So either he lied last night to distance himself from the fallout after Iran retaliated by bombing Qatar’s largest gas facility. Or he lied today to look like he’s in control. Or both. …

And buried inside that same exchange was something just as revealing. When asked about the economic damage the war is causing, Trump said, “I thought it would be worse, much worse.” Someone warned him. …
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

Katelyn Jetelina @ Your Local Epidemiologist: Covid-19 six years later

Six years ago today, I put my baby in a camping carrier, strapped her on, opened my laptop on my dining room table, and started typing as fast as I could. I couldn’t believe how little communication existed that was timely, understandable, and actionable, with the humility and honesty the public deserved. So I tried to fill that gap, bringing my fellow faculty, staff, and students along for the Covid-19 journey in real time, signing every email the same way: Love, Your Local Epidemiologist. I told my husband I would only have to do this for six weeks. Surely someone would fill this gap… The rest is a blur (with many lessons learned along the way.)
…
Covid-19 is no longer the third leading cause of death. In fact, it now carries roughly the same severity as the flu. While flu is nothing to brush off, this virus not being a top killer is genuine relief.