curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’

Deuce Davis:
A Juneteenth Journey Through America’s Original Sin

…
These nine films are a journey into the way cinema depicts America’s original sin, and watching them in sequence has made this Juneteenth all the more meaningful. As Frederick Douglass once asked what the Fourth of July meant to the slave other than hypocrisy, it is crucial to remember that America is as notable to history for its contributions to the perpetuation of ethnonationalist authoritarianism as it is for the possibility of multicultural democracy. The movies have spent a century telling us which of those two we are. The truth is that we have always been both, and the lie each film tells is just another way of choosing which one to look at.

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 19, 2026

(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’

James Eagle: African life expectancy has risen sharply

A chart like this is worth pausing over because it pushes against the easiest story about Africa. The long-run picture is not only crisis. It is millions of lives extended year by year.

The upward movement reflects vaccination, malaria control, lower child mortality, better food security, urbanisation, basic medicine and public-health systems reaching more people than before. Some countries still lag badly, but the direction is unmistakable.

Life expectancy is an average, not a guarantee of good lives. War, poverty and weak healthcare still matter enormously. The point is not to soften reality. It is to remember that African development has also produced one of the great human gains of the modern era.
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’

C.J. Atkins @ People’s World: After over 100 days of war, U.S.-Iran deal restores status quo

Workers in the U.S. and around the world paid the price for a war that, by its own ceasefire terms, ends up restoring much of what existed before the first bombs fell, leaving many questioning why the war against was even launched in the first place.

Not everything is like it was in the pre-war world, though. Costs are up, incomes are down, and some of the biggest weapons, energy, and finance corporations are far richer than when the war started.

The United States and Iran announced a framework agreement this week to end more than 100 days of war, with President Donald Trump declaring on social media that the “Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete” and ordering the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the lifting of the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports. Negotiations over details continue, but a formal signing is set for June 19 in Geneva.
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’

Jonathan Larsen: The vice president’s fraud task force is living up to its name; it’s a task force committing fraud against providers for dying people

Vice Pres. JD Vance and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Director Mehmet Oz are shutting down healthy hospices before they or their residents are ready to die, the Washington Post reports.

Their fraud task force was formed in March to perpetuate the fraud of their false claims of rampant fraud that they used to justify federal interventions in unwelcoming communities. Already, the fraud task force is living up to its name, by being a fraud, and closing law-abiding hospices not even accused of fraud.

Oz — who shares his name with a fictional land led by another Oz who’s a fraud — has said the task force has touched almost no legitimate providers of hospice services. In related news, the Post claims to have “identified at least 43 legitimate hospice agencies that were suspended” from participating in Medicare or Medicaid.

One law firm reported submitting more than 40 appeals, with none addressed by CMS in the legally mandated 15 days. (In fairness, 15 is even less than almost no. Four have had funding restored.)

It’s not clear whether Oz gave those 40 hospices something instead of a review, like an honorary degree of doctor of thinkology.

(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’

Hans Christensen: Quadruple Number of Icebergs Risky for Ships

A huge increase in the number of drifting icebergs is a major concern for ships around Greenland. Rising temperature leads to release of more icebergs that drift south along the coast.

The number of icebergs in the Arctic has quadrupled since the early 2000s. A recent study, published in Nature by researchers including some from the Technical University of Denmark DTU Space, reports that the melting of major glaciers in Northeast Greenland and the Russian Arctic is resulting in a greater number of icebergs entering the ocean. Glaciers are calving many more icebergs into the ocean. They then move with the prevailing ocean currents, generally southbound towards the Atlantic. Drifting icebergs pose increasing risk to shipping around Greenland, calling for intensified monitoring and alertness, say the researchers.
…

Icebergs can carry a surprising quantity of rocks and sediments from land and move them several hundred kilometers into the ocean. When the icebergs melt, the stones sink to the seabed, affecting life nearly 2,500 meters beneath the ocean’s surface. The solid surfaces on a generally soft seabed provide a foundation for sponges, sea anemones, and various other organisms to thrive.

(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’

Allison Gill: Happy Obama Appreciation Day

A personal tribute to an inspirational leader
…
Obama won the 2008 election in a landslide, and after nearly a year of applying to every job available at the San Diego VA Health System, I was finally offered a job as an entry level GS-5 clerk. Miraculously, I took the executive oath of office on the same day Obama took his oath. It was also my birthday: January 20th, 2009. I raised my right hand, Obama tattoo on full display, and repeated the words:

I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

So this June 14th, we celebrate Flag Day and Barack Obama Appreciation Day. And nothing else.

Thank you, President Obama, for being an inspiration.

~AG
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’

Dylan Baddour @ Inside Climate News: Why an Activist From Texas Crossed the World to Confront Asia’s Biggest Petrochemical Company

For the retired shrimper, the 8,000-mile trip to Formosa Plastics’ annual shareholder meeting in Taipei was part of a strategy of being relentless.
…

“He was threatened with guns,” Lin’s translator said, describing threats that came from one of those other companies. “He said, ‘If you want to shoot me, just shoot.’”

Lin was never shot. But later construction of industrial shipping infrastructure offshore affected water currents here, Lin said, so the ocean began lapping mud into the clear lagoon where he used to farm. After so many generations, most of the fishermen along this coastline are gone.

Wilson could relate to that, too. Born in 1948, she remembers watching the timeless way of life in her Texas fishing village dwindle to practically nothing as marine life faded from the water while petrochemical industries moved in with higher-paying jobs. For refusing to bow to the new order, Wilson felt shunned at home.
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’

Anup Roy, Shruti Srivastava @ Bloomberg: Extreme Heat Is Already Stifling Economic Growth in India

Too hot to work
…
“My productivity is down 40%,” Iraqi says, his brow glistening with sweat. “Workers can’t survive in this heat without proper hydration and cooling.”

It’s a scene playing out across India as summers become increasingly unlivable. Heat and humidity have been rising for years, and on any given day last month, the vast majority, sometimes all, of the world’s 50 hottest cities were in India. The impact is showing up across the economy, from operating costs to inflation and power demand.

In April, the federal government issued a heat advisory directing businesses to reschedule working hours, provide hydration breaks and rest areas, and slow the pace of work. Schools, most of which don’t have air conditioning, closed for summer vacations weeks earlier than usual in several states or revised timetables and shifted classes online.
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’

Nick Turse @ Intercept: Top Pentagon Official Admits Boat Strike May Have Killed Victims of Human Trafficking

If this boat was running drugs, why was it loaded with so many people?

Nine months into the Trump administration’s deadly campaign against so-called drug boats, there is a pattern to the strikes. And a glaring anomaly.

The U.S. military has conducted more than 60 attacks, resulting in over 200 extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. In almost all the strikes, between one and four people lost their lives. In only one strike did the death toll of a single boat reach double digits: the first attack on September 2, 2025.

Since then, experts, lawmakers, and even military officials behind the scenes have been asking a simple but haunting question: Why was that boat packed with 11 people?

“Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs?” said a government source who attended a classified briefing where the large crew on the first boat attacked was discussed. “It’s a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out.”

One top military officer provided a plausible explanation, behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, The Intercept has learned. His admission raises even more questions about a strike that a high-ranking Pentagon official called a criminal attack on civilians and resulted in a firestorm in Congress last year.

In the briefing, the high-ranking officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff stated that some of the people killed by the U.S. military may have been the victims of human trafficking.

Shan Li @ WSJ: India Says U.S. Strike on Tanker in Iran Blockade Killed Three Nationals

(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’

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.
(more…)