Category: 2026

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Janna Brancolini @ DailyBeast: White House’s Situation Room Meltdown Over Epstein Exposed

Donald Trump’s top advisers needed to convince the president’s supporters he cared—even though he clearly didn’t.

Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan @ NY Times: Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files

On July 17, 2025, at around 6 o’clock in the evening, President Trump’s top officials filed into the White House Situation Room — the secure bunker where classified and high-stakes national security matters are discussed and decided. This was where President Barack Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president’s national security team, watched the raid that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.

Now, however, Trump’s most senior advisers had gathered — without him — to figure out how to gain some measure of control over a very different kind of crisis threatening to engulf the presidency: the Epstein files.

Ten days earlier, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. had jointly released a memo that bluntly stated that their review had found no “client list” of powerful men for whom the notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein had allegedly procured underage girls and young women. Intended to put to rest years of speculation and end the pressure campaign to release the voluminous material in the department’s possession, the memo instead had the opposite effect, setting off a backlash that was notably loud among the MAGA base.

And it was about to get worse: The Wall Street Journal was preparing a damaging article about Trump’s relationship with Epstein. The president’s desperate attempts to kill the story had failed. His team now had to get everyone onto the same page about how to counter the growing swarm of attention. They needed a gesture of transparency to appease an increasingly angry base, but also a way to convey the message that the president was sympathetic to his supporters’ concerns. Which itself was a problem, because he clearly wasn’t.

Jason Easley: Democrats Have All The Info They Need To End Trump And Vance With A Real Epstein Investigation

Jennifer Rubin: The President Is Bonkers

What we can do about it

… now is precisely the time to demand a robust debate in public, in Congress, and on the midterm campaign trail about the gravity of leaving a patently unfit, raving lunatic in the Oval Office. In light of the grave danger Trump poses, pro-democracy forces must educate the public, compel legacy media to cover his breakdown as vigorously and consistently as they did Joe Biden’s health after his 2024 debate, and pressure Republicans to remove or at least restrain him.
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Sing Yee Ong, Ishika Mookerjee, Todd Woody @ Bloomberg: How Singapore Uses District Cooling to Beat the Heat

Its part of a S$100 billion climate adaptation plan.

Singapore is one of the biggest per capita users of air conditioning in Asia. But the government is keen to kick the habit in favor of more efficient solutions including district cooling.

In today’s newsletter we venture deep underneath the island city to see the decades-old technology that’s winning new attention as a way to cool down entire neighborhoods. Plus, a new United Nations assessment of ocean health.

Deep underneath Singapore’s northeastern district of Punggol, a five-kilometer network of metal pipes roars as it pumps chilled water to cool offices and classrooms overhead.
(Sing Yee Ong, Ishika Mookerjee, Todd Woody @ Bloomberg more…)

Katelyn Jetelina @ Your Local Epidemiologist: Screwworm is here, World Cup starting, things heating up (literally), and more

Dissent in Bloom: Unmasking the Nursing Home Executives Behind Ohio’s Medicaid Caregiver Crackdown

HB-795: Vivek Ramaswamy took their money. Disabled Ohioans will pay.

Right now, several government officials in Ohio are pushing to end the use of Medicaid waivers that allow disabled children and adults to stay at home with their caregivers.
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Gautam Naik, Olivia Raimonde @ Bloomberg: Wall Street Seeks Catastrophe Modelers and Weather Analysts

With risk comes opportunity. At least that’s the case for some of the biggest firms on Wall Street, who are searching for experts to help build out their insurance-linked securities desks.

Today’s newsletter goes into the recruiting process and why it pays to be able to model natural disasters. Plus, New York just got a huge influx of clean power, but it still needs more.

When Mitesh Parikh, a headhunter at UK recruiter Selby Jennings, started looking for an ILS modeler for a large US hedge fund this year, the pool of qualified candidates was disconcertingly small.
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It took a couple of months before Parikh was able to find the right candidate for his US hedge-fund client, whose identity he declined to disclose. The standard compensation package for such hires tends to be around $400,000 to $670,000, he said.
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Fred Wellman: D-Day and another failure by Hegseth

On the 82nd Anniversary of that fateful day the SecDef forgot the why of it all
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A day that should talk about the sacrifice of the brave veterans and the civilians caught in the crossfire was instead turned into a pathetic anti-immigrant political hit job against our allies by the man who likes to pretend he is a warrior while acting like a petulant child.

“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain and Italy and Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.”

He said this in front of twenty-nine of the last remaining veterans of that day including 107-year old Navy veteran Art Rose. Rose read a letter he had written to his parents on June 11, 1944.

“Rose expressed his fear of the unknown before the invasion, the letter ended with a positive message. Reading from the letter, Rose said: “What a country we are. I will always be grateful to my commander for taking me along [to battle]. Don’t worry about me. I am well, whole and happy. Love, Art.”

Mary Geddry: The Old Poison in New Bottles

D-Day was a rebuke to fascism, not an invitation for Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, and Donald Trump to recycle the politics of fear, grievance, and exclusion.

Olivia Ralph @ DailyBeast: Trump, 79, Honors D-Day Heroes by Praising Himself

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Dean Obeidallah: Todd Blanche should not be confirmed as Attorney General. He should be disbarred.

Donald Trump is nominating his personal lawyer and current Acting Attorney Todd Blanche to be his Attorney General. Here’s the reality: Todd Blanche should NOT be getting confirmed as Attorney General. He should be getting disbarred! In fact, he should be investigated for potential crimes. That is not just my view but also Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa) who told me point blank about Blanche, “He should be disbarred, and disbarred is not enough.”

We’ve never seen an AG as openly corrupt as Todd Blanche whose only focus is serving Trump. In a nutshell, Blanche is the architect of the largest cover up of sex crimes in US history in connection with Jeffrey Epstein’s child rape and sex trafficking ring. He is the reason Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell is in a cushy Club Fed. Blanche is why Trump is getting immunity from IRS audits which will mean he does for not pay in the area of $100 million in taxes to the United States. And he’s also why we are seeing the criminal prosecution of Trump’s political critics from James Comey to Tish James and more.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 5, 2026

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had good news for the American people when he gave his twenty-ninth Fireside Chat on June 5, 1944. The day before, June 4, Rome had fallen to Allied troops. “The first of the Axis capitals is now in our hands,” Roosevelt said.
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On the morning of June 6, 1944, five naval assault divisions stormed the beaches of Normandy. Seven thousand ships and landing craft operated by more than 195,000 naval personnel from 8 countries brought almost 133,000 troops to beaches given the code names UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)

Thom Hartmann: Trump’s Masked Goons are a Criminal’s Dream

America spent two centuries learning that law enforcement should show its face. Now we’re watching the consequences of ignoring that lesson…

Jennifer Rubin: Standing up to bullies in New Jersey, Russia, and at CBS News

When under siege from authoritarian aggressors, democratic forces are forced to engage in an unending series of skirmishes testing their will and values. We recently saw this play out in three very different settings. …

Adrian Carrasquillo @ Bulwark: How Delaney Hall Became Ground Zero in Trump’s Deportation Wars

This rundown detention center on an industrial strip in New Jersey is representative of what’s happening across the country.
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James Eagle: Wind and solar are passing coal in more power grids

Energy transition debates often get stuck in forecasts. This chart marks countries where wind and solar have already overtaken coal in electricity generation. It gives readers a concrete before-and-after, not another distant target.

That changes the argument. In places such as the UK and the US, the clean-power crossover is no longer just a target or campaign line; it is part of the historical record. Coal still matters globally, but the direction of travel is visible.

Observed transitions are harder to dismiss than promises. They shape investment, grid planning and political expectations. A national crossover does not mean the grid is easy to run, or that coal has disappeared elsewhere, but it moves part of the debate from aspiration to fact.

Sharon Chen, Akshat Rathi, Hayley Warren, Neil Jerome Morales, Stephen Stapczynski @ Bloomberg: How the Iran War Is Boosting Clean Energy in Asia and Europe

The conflict is Asia’s “Ukraine moment”
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Qasim Rashid, Esq.: Why Did Dr. King Say White Moderates Are Worse Than The KKK?

On April 12, 1963—Good Friday—the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and jailed in Birmingham, Alabama.

His “crime” was organizing peaceful, nonviolent protests, marches, and sit-ins against the brutality of legalized segregation. He was not throwing bricks. He was not inciting violence. He was doing precisely what every civics textbook tells us citizens we are supposed to do: peacefully assemble and demand that the government live up to its own stated values.

For that, Dr. King was locked in a cell.

He was finally bailed out eight days later—on April 20th—by the United Auto Workers, who posted $160,000 bail. In those eight days, confined to a Birmingham jail cell, Dr. King wrote one of the most important documents in American history.

Every person committed to justice should read it in full. But today, I want to focus on the passage that cuts most deeply—because it was not written about the Klan. It was written about the people who, while claiming to be on Dr. King’s side, were his greatest stumbling block.

Dr. King wrote:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a more convenient season. Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Read those words again. Slowly. Because Dr. King was not describing the enemy. He was describing the ally who refuses to act like one. He was describing the person who agrees with the goal but objects to the urgency. Who believes in justice in theory but demands cowardly patience in practice. Who is more committed to maintaining the comfort of the powerful than to delivering the rights of the powerless.
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Julia Conley @ Common Dreams: ‘Absolutely Crazy’: Horror as Trump Moves to Dismantle Crucial Ocean Monitoring System

“Blinding the public to climate change won’t make it go away. It will only accelerate its profound consequences.”

In what a number of scientists suggested was the Trump administration’s latest effort to stop tracking the changing climate in hopes of convincing the public that the climate emergency isn’t happening, the National Science Foundation announced Monday that it was dismantling a crucial deep-ocean monitoring system that for years has helped researchers understand the impacts of the crisis on the world’s oceans.

The NSF said it plans to send ships this month to remove more than 900 instruments, part of a project called the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The project collects data on temperatures, currents, and the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide off the coasts of Oregon, Alaska, Washington, and North Carolina, as well as in the Irminger Sea between Iceland and Greenland.
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Merlyn Thomas, Alex Murray, Matt Murphy @ BBC:
Iran attacks damage 20 US military sites since start of war, satellite images show

Iran has damaged 20 US military sites since the start of the war, satellite images and videos analysed by BBC Verify show, suggesting the attacks are more extensive than publicly acknowledged.

Iran has targeted key facilities across eight countries in the Middle East since the end of February, causing millions of dollars of damage to state-of the-art air defence systems, refuelling aircraft and radars.

Tehran has targeted both US bases and shared military facilities in retaliation to the US-Israeli strikes across Iran and Lebanon over the past three months. …

Will Neal @ Daily Beast: Trump’s War Story Blown Up by Jaw-Dropping New Evidence

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 1, 2026

… Iran and its role in the president’s deteriorating mental condition are going to take center stage.
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His base demands that he look strong and accomplish what, after the initial strikes failed, he claimed to have started the war for: to make sure Iran doesn’t have the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. He also needs to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—which was open before he began the strikes—and get oil flowing again from that region of the Middle East. Prices in the U.S. are rising, and the looming threat of oil reserves running out adds even more pressure to consumer prices.
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… Permitting Iran to control the strait is not just about oil; it’s about the principle of freedom of the seas set out after World War II. Global trade depends on that concept. The exchange of money is also a problem for Trump. He has spent much of his political life attacking the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., the U.S., and the European Union negotiated with Iran during the Obama administration, claiming that former president Obama “gave” Iran $1.7 billion. In fact, the JCPOA simply permitted the release of Iranian assets frozen overseas by sanctions, but much of Trump’s base believes that Obama showed weakness by buying an agreement.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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