Now I know what they do at faculty meetings on the humanities/social sciences side of campus » « They never learn

Infinite Thread XXXIX

It’s almost spring-like outside — the skies are clear, we’ve got cool breezes on a comfortable day, the plants are coming back… I know it can’t last but I’ll make the most of it. I’ve opened windows to let birdsong in and to drive the cat crazy.

Let the pleasant conversations flow!

Previous Thread

Now I know what they do at faculty meetings on the humanities/social sciences side of campus » « They never learn

Comments

  1. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Asher Elbein (Journalist):

    Employees at Scientific American were told today that the magazine has been sold to LabX Media Group, the outfit that runs Discover Magazine and IFLScience. And that means—of course!—editorial layoffs.

    The media mass extinction rolls ever onward.

    Jeremy Barr (Guardian):

    a memo sent to staffers: “As part of that transition, LabX has evaluated the organizational structure it believes is necessary to support the business going forward. Unfortunately, this means that not all current employees will be transitioning to the new company.”

    * PZ, last year – Do not trust IFLScience

  2. Reginald Selkirk says

    US’s climate.gov site, taken down by Trump, relaunched by nonprofit

    …
    Climate.gov was essentially gone, and the team that deleted implied that it happened because climate research somehow failed to uphold what the administration was calling “gold standard science.”

    But the people who put together climate.gov didn’t go away. While the government didn’t hesitate to delete inconvenient climate information, dedicated volunteers outside the government managed to preserve copies of much of the material, which the federal government is prohibited from copyrighting. The volunteers and former climate.gov admins got together and launched climate.us. On Tuesday, the team announced that it had completed the project to restore everything lost when climate.gov shut down…

  3. Reginald Selkirk says

    Why did the pastor cross the road?

    Pastor arrested for second-degree battery, allegedly ran across highway to beat victim
    (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA)

    A controversial pastor was arrested Tuesday after allegedly attacking a person who lives across from his church.

    Mark Anthony “Tony” Spell, the pastor of Life Tabernacle Church along Hooper Road, was arrested and booked into East Baton Rouge Parish Prison for second-degree battery on Tuesday.
    WBRZ spoke with the Sherwins, who live across the street. They said Spell ran across the four-lane highway and started attacking their son.

    Video from the Sherwins’ home security system showed Spell and their son punching one another off the shoulder of the highway. Footage appears to show the pastor throwing the victim to the ground, getting on top of him and continuing to hit him. The victim was taken to a hospital and treated for his injuries.

    Woody Jenkins, the editor of Central City News, posted that the alleged beating was sparked by the victim making threats against the pastor and his family. Jenkins said the threats had been reported to the Central Police Department, and no action had been taken.

    However, WBRZ reached out to Central Police Chief Roger Corcoran, who said no reports had been made to them.

    “Woody Jenkins is a coward that hides behind a keyboard,” Corcoran said.

    The Sherwins say Tuesday’s arrest is tied to the recent end of a years-long legal battle that began when Spell was holding church services through the Coronavirus pandemic.

    “This is Pastor Spell lashing out, like he always does, when he doesn’t get his way,” the Sherwins said.

    Spell sued the couple in 2023, adding them to a lawsuit he filed against former Governor John Bel Edwards, Corcoran and East Baton Rouge Sheriff Sid Gautreaux following statewide COVID mandates.

    The suit, which was dismissed in 2024, was thrown out for the second time recently. It centered around Spell’s interactions with the Central Police Department.

    Spell was issued six misdemeanor summonses by Central Police officers in 2020 when he continued holding church services while COVID cases across the state were rising. In the same year, he was arrested for aggravated assault for allegedly trying to hit a protester outside of Life Tabernacle Church with the church’s bus…

  4. says

    ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: Musk wants you to forget his deadly DOGE legacy

    Chris Hayes looks at how Elon Musk’s assault on USAID became one of DOGE’s most devastating legacies—and why Musk is now trying to rewrite the record.

    Video is 9:19 minutes

    ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: ‘He’s scared’: Ro Khanna fires back at Musk’s threats amid USAID feud

    Rep. Ro Khanna is calling for accountability over Musk’s USAID cuts, which one study projects could lead to 14 million deaths by 2030. After Musk lashed out, Khanna tells Chris Hayes: “I’m not going to be intimidated by this guy. I’m less concerned about me. I’m more concerned that the world’s richest person possibly sentenced the poorest people in the world to their death.”

    Video is 7:22 minutes

  5. says

    For the convenience of readers, here are a few links back to the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread:

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2026/03/30/infinite-thread-xxxix/comment-page-6/#comment-2304421
    “Trump also said, “[…] You have Omar, who married her brother […]”
    Which is a racist lie.

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2026/03/30/infinite-thread-xxxix/comment-page-6/#comment-2304414
    France records hottest day ever as 40 people drown across country (chilling themselves by swimming in unsupervised waters).

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2026/03/30/infinite-thread-xxxix/comment-page-6/#comment-2304408
    The national crisis on the National Mall continued into another week, with the president of the United States insisting Monday that knife-wielding terrorists had attacked the newly installed lining of the Reflecting Pool, which was just renovated at a cost of more than $16 million.

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2026/03/30/infinite-thread-xxxix/comment-page-6/#comment-2304406
    Senate votes to direct Trump to withdraw troops from Iran conflict; four Republicans break ranks

    https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2026/03/30/infinite-thread-xxxix/comment-page-6/#comment-2304398
    South Korea to accept all North Korean POWs from Ukraine at their request

  6. says

    […] The resolution “directs the President to remove U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities against Iran unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or a congressional authorization for use of military force against Iran.”

    In recent months, the Senate voted on war powers resolutions nine other times, and in each of those instances, Democratic proponents picked up some GOP support, but not enough to succeed. This week, the 10th time was the charm.

    White House officials quickly downplayed the significance of the developments, emphasizing the fact that the nonbinding resolution won’t go to the president’s desk and has no force of law. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean that the votes were irrelevant.

    Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, noted in a statement, “This marks the first time since the enactment of the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that both chambers of Congress have approved a concurrent resolution directing a sitting president to end a military conflict.”

    In other words, Congress made history, taking a step that rebuked Trump in a sharp and unsubtle way. A New York Times report added that the measure underscored the GOP’s impatience “about continuing to defer to the president, who has never sought approval from Congress for the war.”

    Not surprisingly, the president again turned to his social media platform to whine about Congress daring to act like a coequal branch of government.

    “So, I have Iran on the ‘ropes,’ ready to go down for the fall, willing to give us practically anything, and for the first time in decades, respecting the hell out of the United States and its President, ME, and the U.S. Senate decides to have a poorly timed and meaningless War Powers Act Vote, telling the Number One Sponser [sic] of Terror in the World that the United States doesn’t like what I am doing to them, and I must stop, and by so doing has provided aid and comfort the Enemy,” Trump wrote. “Four Republican Losers voted with the Dumocrats, and Iran asked my people, ‘what does that all mean?’ These Senators have just made my job more difficult, but I will get it done, one way or the other, because I always get it done!”

    Much of this was gibberish wholly detached from reality, though it’s the larger context that matters more: If we were looking for fresh evidence of Trump’s loosening grip on Capitol Hill, we’ve found some, whether the measure has the force of law or not.

    Link

  7. Reginald Selkirk says

    Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base

    The Army, Navy, and Air Force are once again requiring basic trainees to get vaccinated against influenza after the virus quickly swept through an Air Force base in Texas, sickening at least 222 recruits and hospitalizing four.

    The outbreak flared just two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth abandoned a decades-long requirement for flu shots…
    But in April, Hegseth claimed that flu shot requirements were “not rational” and said removing the requirement was “restoring freedom” to military members…

    Who could have predicted?

  8. Reginald Selkirk says

    Boffin claims Microsoft’s supposed quantum leap does not compute due to ‘basic Python errors’

    Prestigious journal Nature has published a peer-reviewed critique of Microsoft’s claims to have made quantum computing breakthroughs – and the scientist who wrote the paper has essentially said Redmond got it wrong.

    Microsoft made its claims of a quantum breakthrough in February 2025 when it revealed tech called Majorana and predicted “this breakthrough will allow us to create a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years.”
    …
    Dr Henry Legg, a lecturer at the University of St Andrews…
    “I demonstrate that Microsoft’s tune-up software is flawed and that coding errors resulted in incorrect statements to peer reviewers,” said Legg. “Raw data, which was omitted from the original paper, also appears to indicate Microsoft’s devices contain considerable disorder and are not compatible with the existence of a topological gap. In other words, the prerequisites for Microsoft’s claims do not appear to be met, but this was obscured because this data did not appear in the original publication.”
    …
    “There were two pretty basic Python programming errors that hid these alternative regions,” Legg explained. “Their plotting software was hardcoded with a filter (zbp_cluster_numbers=[1]) that forced it to display only the single largest region, concealing other successful results from their phase maps. Changing this to zbp_cluster_numbers=[1,2] shows already a second region.”

    Legg added: “The TGP software transformed the data by simply reversing a Python array (x[::-1]) based on its index position, ignoring the actual physical bias voltages.” …

  9. Reginald Selkirk says

    Elon Musk denies Tesla’s Autopilot caused crash that killed grandmother

    A few days after a Tesla plowed through a Texas home and killed a grandmother, the family sued the carmaker, alleging that the Model 3’s automated assist mode was defective.

    In a complaint filed this week in Harris County District Court, Jennifer Barbour, the daughter of 76-year-old Martha Avila, and Barbour’s husband Justin confirmed they were seeking more than $1 million in damages following their sudden and tragic loss.

    After the crash, the driver, Michael Butler, who is also a named defendant in the lawsuit, told police that the automated driver-assist feature was engaged when he lost control of the car. Cops told Ars on Monday that they’re still investigating whether the feature was in use and confirmed that Butler was not intoxicated and has been cooperating with police.

    Tesla disputes that its “Full Self Driving” feature is to blame for the crash. A doorbell camera video shared by The New York Times showed the car slamming into the house at a high speed, which Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed in a post on X is a sign that the technology didn’t cause the crash…

  10. says

    The U.S.’ global standing deteriorates as Trump loses international respect

    “Two years ago, Trump said improving U.S. ‘respect all over the world’ was his top priority. There’s new evidence that he’s failing spectacularly.”

    At a White House Cabinet meeting last summer, Donald Trump boasted about one of his favorite subjects. “We’re respected all over the world — like never before, probably,” the president said at the outset. A few days earlier, pointing to evidence that only exists in his imagination, he added, “Our nation now is the most respected nation anywhere in the world, by far.”

    It wasn’t true at the time, and it’s even worse now. Axios reported:

    The U.S. is losing standing abroad as President Trump’s foreign policy fuels doubts about whether America can still be counted on, according to new polling.

    The Pew Research Center findings capture how Trump’s second-term approach is reshaping America’s image, with allies and partners increasingly viewing Washington as unreliable, self-interested and less committed to global cooperation.

    Going through the details of the Pew Research Center report, there is effectively no good news for those hoping to see the United States maintain a leadership role in international affairs.

    Views of Trump are especially brutal. While Barack Obama and, to a lesser extent, Joe Biden, enjoyed fairly broad support on the global stage, the latest findings showed 76% of people across 36 countries have no confidence in the incumbent Republican president. In fact, Trump’s standing is even worse than international confidence in Russia’s Vladimir Putin. [!]

    But complicating matters are the broader effects: The more people around the world turn against Trump, the more they hold the U.S. in low regard. [I snipped details.]

    There might very well be some who will suggest results like these are irrelevant. After all, Trump has prioritized an “America First” attitude, so perhaps his followers will argue that his lack of international backing shouldn’t matter.

    The problem with this defense is that the president has invested an enormous amount of time and energy making the opposite argument.

    […] this has long been foundational to the Republican’s worldview: The United States was an international laughingstock for decades, Trump has long argued, but thanks to how awesome his awesomeness is, he singlehandedly restored the nation’s global stature. […]

    Even in his strange farewell address in early 2021, delivered on the final full day of his first term, Trump found it necessary, one last time, to tell Americans, “The world respects us again.” The Republican added, in an apparent message for his Democratic successor, “Please don’t lose that respect.”

    None of this made any sense. […] Nearly six years later, Pew is showing us slipping to similar depths anew.

    It reinforces the fact that Trump is failing, not by some random metric, but by one of the standards he personally elevated above all others.

  12. Reginald Selkirk says

    Commanding general of the US Army in European and African theater is unexpectedly stepping down

    <

    blockquote>
    The U.S. Army’s commanding general of forces in Europe and Africa is stepping down after roughly a year and a half at the coveted post, Fox News has confirmed.

    Gen. Christopher Donahue — who also leads NATO’s Allied Land Command — will relinquish his command on July 2, according to a statement from the Army. Donahue’s deputy, Maj. Gen. Christopher Norrie, will take over his duties after July 2.

    Donahue submitted his retirement papers at the request of War Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has sought to shrink the number of generals and prioritize adding new GIs. He is the latest military leader of more than two dozen to leave or retire early under Hegseth’s leadership…

  13. Reginald Selkirk says

    Wild New Study Claims We Can Nudge Hurricanes Away From Land

    …
    “Meanwhile, dynamical systems theory tells us the jet stream that steers all these extremes is unstable in predictable ways,” Huang said. “We wanted to ask seriously whether that instability could be exploited: a small nudge at the right time and place, amplified by the atmosphere’s own dynamics, redirecting a harmful trajectory before it causes catastrophic impact.” …

  16. Reginald Selkirk says

    Man arrested for alleged hate crime, terroristic threats against State Sen. Lea Webb

    A Binghamton-area contractor was arrested Tuesday afternoon on hate crime charges after he called for State Senator Lea Webb to be “hung from a tree” on social media.

    James Crosby, 49, made the comments on a Facebook post from WBNG 12 News promoting a story from the TV station about a Juneteenth event where Webb, who is Black, was a speaker…

    “I’d be proud to hang her from a tree,” Crosby wrote.
    …
    On June 22, Crosby posted an apology on Facebook in which he acknowledged making a comment about Webb but said he had “not intended to be racist in any way.” …

    Of course, just a run of the mill non-racist lynching.

  17. Reginald Selkirk says

    Judge permanently blocks Trump EO requiring proof of citizenship to vote

    A federal judge on Wednesday permanently blocked the Trump administration from enforcing an executive order signed last year that required proof of citizenship to register to vote and demanded mail-in ballots be received by Election Day.

    Judge Denise Casper ruled that the president lacks the authority to oversee elections and rejected the Trump administration’s unsupported claims of “widespread illegal voting, discrimination, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error.” …

  18. Reginald Selkirk says

    Leader of secretive South Korean church arrested in election influence investigation

    The leader of a secretive South Korean church was arrested Wednesday as authorities widened an investigation into allegations that he illegally recruited thousands of followers into the conservative People Power Party to influence elections.

    The Shincheonji Church has denied the accusations against Lee Man-hee, 95, a self-proclaimed messenger of Jesus who founded the congregation in the 1980s. The church says it has about 200,000 followers…

  22. Reginald Selkirk says

    MAGA Congresswoman Denies Using AI to Write Bill: ‘Love Claude but Grok Is Way More Savage’

    Rep. Anna Paulina Luna…

    Yes, it’s going to be batshit insane.

    , a Florida Republican, defended her staff on Wednesday after a screenshot of legislative text went viral for including the words “Claude responded.” The natural assumption online was that the bill was written using AI, but Luna denied it. Kind of.

    The text in question turned out to be a bill summary for the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, and it seems pretty clear that Anthropic’s Claude was used, with everything just copied and pasted from the chatbot:…

    “Yeah my staff used AI to correct a draft text and didn’t edit,” tweeted Luna. “Not a shocker. Most staff use it. I have told them to make sure they are double checking and more thorough. What dork planted this story? Btw love Claude but Grok is way more savage.”

    But that tweet was deleted. Seemingly, because Luna had admitted that AI was used to write the actual text of the bill.

    Luna then sent another tweet with different wording: “Yeah my staff used AI to spell/grammar check the amendment SUMMARY, not the actual amendment text itself…

  23. birgerjohansson says

    Reginald Selkirk @ 13
    I am more interested in preventing the jet streams to get stuck, resulting in devastating ‘heat domes’ while other regions get torrential rain.

  24. says

    Good news, as posted by Associated Press:

    A federal judge on Wednesday permanently barred President Donald Trump’s administration from implementing most of his first executive order on elections, part of which sought to require people to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote. The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston effectively converts a preliminary injunction she issued a year ago, in which she temporarily blocked many of Trump’s efforts to overhaul elections, into a permanent ban.

    More good news, as posted by Associated Press:

    A judge on Tuesday barred the federal government from making arrests at immigration courts, ordering an end to a practice that took hold shortly after President Donald Trump took office last year.

  25. says

    NBC News:

    France again shattered records for its hottest day ever Wednesday, with more brutal temperatures as a deadly heat wave scorches much of western Europe. … Red alerts were also in place in Britain, Germany, Austria and Switzerland as the extreme early summer heat forced school closures, travel disruption and alarm about climate change across a region ill-equipped for such blistering conditions.

  26. says

    Postmaster general confirms plan to block ballots in states that balk at Trump’s demands

    “That it’s even possible the U.S. Postal Service would refuse to deliver ballots unless states comply with unnecessary demands is breathtaking.”

    The Trump administration’s highly aggressive efforts to obtain state voter rolls has, at least so far, failed spectacularly, losing in 9 out of 9 court fights.

    But as such federal efforts continue, there’s apparently a new twist on the broader gambit. The New York Times reported two weeks ago on a proposed rule, published in the Federal Register, that would allow the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that fail to turn over voter rolls to the Trump administration.

    As bizarre as this might sound, states apparently would compile lists of mail voters under the plan, with the expectation that USPS employees would use the lists to screen ballots for eligibility. Voters in the states that failed to meet the White House’s demands would be out of luck.

    “Screening mail ballots for voter eligibility,” the Times added, “would amount to an unprecedented, and potentially unconstitutional, involvement of the federal government in the administration of elections.”

    This week, ahead of Postmaster General David Steiner’s scheduled appearance before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, all 47 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus signed on to a joint letter calling on the Postal Service to abandon these plans, making the case that the proposed changes would “fundamentally upend” the role of the USPS, transforming it “into a federal election administration agency — with frightening authorities to disenfranchise Americans.”

    […] The postmaster general, a Donald Trump appointee, confirmed in his testimony that under Trump-imposed regulations, the U.S. Postal Service will not mail ballots if a state has not handed over its voting rolls. [Social media post, with video]

    MS NOW reported ahead of the Senate hearing that Trump’s radical executive order that serves as the basis of the proposed Postal Service rules change is already facing legal challenges from states and voting rights groups.

    Time will tell what becomes of the fight, but that it’s even possible the U.S. Postal Service would refuse to deliver ballots unless states comply with Trump’s unnecessary demands is breathtaking.

  27. Reginald Selkirk says

    Ex-chief of staff to former NYC Mayor Eric Adams charged with taking bribes

    A former chief of staff to ex-New York Mayor Eric Adams was arrested Wednesday in a federal bribery case about a lucrative migrant shelter contract, the latest sign that prosecutors continue to scrutinize Adams’ inner circle months after the scandal-bruised Democrat left office.

    The charges against Frank Carone are the latest in a string of corruption allegations leveled at the former mayor — who was himself indicted on bribery and other charges that were later dismissed — and key aides. Separately, federal authorities searched the homes of current and former New York Police Department leaders Wednesday in connection with a different bribery investigation…

  28. says

    Washington Post link

    “EXCLUSIVE: Internal memo orders staff not to reveal deaths in national parks

    “The Interior Department’s guidance instructs parks staff not to confirm deaths, the severity of injuries or other details.”

    On Friday, a 17-year-old girl drowned in Sequoia National Park after slipping into a river. On Saturday, a 23-year-old man died after falling over a waterfall in Yosemite. The same weekend, a body was found in the desert at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, while a motorcycle accident killed one person in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

    But recent internal guidance prohibits park staff or other Interior Department employees from directly notifying the public about the deaths. The department, which oversees the National Park Service, had not issued any statements on this weekend’s deaths on the department website or social media as of Wednesday afternoon.

    The memo, issued in December and reviewed by The Washington Post, states that Interior employees, including park staff and others who communicate with the media, are no longer permitted to confirm deaths or details about severe injuries, a restriction that current and former rangers say breaks with the department’s previous disclosure policy.

    An average of about 350 people die in national parks each year, or about 7 per week, according to Park Service data. That represents a small fraction of the more than 300 million people who visit each year, with park advocates and staff emphasizing parks are generally safe.

    “The guidance was developed to create a more consistent approach to incident communications across the Department and is not intended to conceal fatalities or delay information,” Interior press secretary Aubrie Spady said in an email.
    “We continue to provide public safety information, statements, news releases, and incident updates as appropriate, while respecting investigative processes, privacy considerations, next-of-kin notifications, and, in some cases, requests from family members not to release identifying information,” she added.

    Seven current and former National Park Service staffers, however, said the policy marks a shift from the agency’s long-standing approach to release as much information as possible. The current agency employees spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

    While the overall number of deaths remain small compared to overall attendance, they said, public disclosure helps keep visitors safe by informing them about the risks they may encounter while on public lands. […]

    Previously, the Park Service would often issue press releases on its website within 24 to 48 hours of the deaths, although deaths in remote or backcountry areas could sometimes take 72 hours, the staffers said.

    But days after this weekend’s four deadly incidents, the agency has not issued such statements. The Park Service confirmed to SFGate, which was first to report the possible death of a man falling over the waterfall at Yosemite, that an incident occurred there, but the department did not post a statement publicly. Interior has similarly not issued a statement on the death in Sequoia National Park, which several local media outlets reported on. […]

    More at the link.

  29. JM says

    USA Today: The new Air Force One from Qatar is destined for Trump’s library

    Trump called the new plane a “flying White House at a level of luxury that nobody’s ever seen before.” The donated plane, worth $400 million, sparked ethics concerns, but Trump said in 2025 he would be a “stupid person” to reject the plane.
    It also won’t be a “flying White House” for long. The plane is only slated to be Air Force One, the designation for whatever plane the president flies in, until 2028, when Boeing’s two new presidential 747s are expected to be complete. After that, the Qatari plane will go to Trump’s future presidential library. Where will it be?

    I don’t actually mind him taking it after the new planes are ready but if he tries to grab it before then he should be blocked, the next president has dibs on using it. This plane is so associated with Trump that getting rid of it is probably for the best. He wants to put it in the lobby of his presidential library, which would be ridiculous but that has never stopped Trump. It should come with a large display explaining how much money Trump wasted on it. A billion dollars was spend upgrading a plane that is planned to be used for less then 2 years.

  30. johnson catman says

    re JM@29:

    A billion dollars was spend upgrading a plane that is planned to be used for less then 2 years.

    It wasn’t his money, so he doesn’t care. But WE should because it was OUR money.

  33. StevoR says

    Huh. That’s gotta be the worst spelling of misunderstood I’ve accidentally managed in a while. Sigh. Sorry folks.

    We’ve had an algal bloom wipe out much of our marine coastal environment in the last year or so.

    Now I fear we might face silent empty skies soon too with the H5 Bird flu arriving on SA shores. I wonder about the impact on bird pollinated plants as well.

    A surfer who spotted the first bird in South Australia to test positive for H5N1 avian influenza says the giant petrel looked fatigued and distressed before it was retrieved by wildlife rescuers.

    Ben Wood told 891 ABC Adelaide a southern giant petrel landed where the waves were breaking during a bodyboarding competition at Knights Beach, in the Fleurieu Peninsula, on June 14.

    ..(snip)…

    ..Since three H5 cases were confirmed in Australia, several veterinary clinics in South Australia have posted to social media that they would not accept sick wild birds while others advised people to call ahead.

    SA Chief Public Health Officer Professor Nicola Spurrier said it was possible for humans to catch bird flu but the risk to the human population is low.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-25/bird-flu-case-landed-among-bodyboarders-on-sa-beach/106839858

  34. Reginald Selkirk says

    Nation-state actors cracked critical Australian infrastructure to ‘cripple it at a time of their choosing’

    Australia’s Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has established dedicated teams to counter nation-state attacks on critical infrastructure, the org’s director general Mike Burgess revealed yesterday.

    “We discovered nation-state hackers had compromised the network of an Australian critical infrastructure provider,” Burgess said yesterday in remarks accompanying the release of ASIO’s annual threat assessment, a task it performs in its role as Australia’s equivalent to the FBI and MI5.

    “ASIO assessed the hackers were preparing for sabotage. They weren’t planting ‘digital dynamite’ as such; they were mapping out the network and maintaining access so they could cripple it at a time of their choosing.”

    “In this case, a state-sponsored group didn’t just achieve access to the Australian critical infrastructure provider, it successfully acquired credentials – login details and passwords – for active users of the networks, including the IT professionals guarding it,” he added.

    Burgess said ASIO “identified, tracked and attributed the hack, and worked with the victim company and our security partners to remediate the compromise – work which is ongoing.”

    “The scale of this activity – led by one nation-state in particular – is difficult to overstate,” he added, before saying Australia is not alone in facing such attacks. “We struggle to find a single country in our region that has not been compromised by this state’s cyber apparatus.”
    …

    No, they don’t name the nation-state.

  35. Reginald Selkirk says

    NASA Rover Detects Potential Signatures of Ancient Microbial Life On Mars

    NASA’s Perseverance rover has detected complex organic carbon in ancient Martian mudstones. The measurements were taken by the rover’s Sherloc instrument and the organic carbon that was identified was from the Bright Angel outcrop, “a dried-up river that carried water into the planet’s Jezero crater billions of years ago,” notes The Guardian. From the report:

    The form of carbon detected, known as macromolecular carbon or MMC, can originate from living organisms. Geological processes can also produce the material, meaning its detection does not amount to proof of past Martian life…

  36. Reginald Selkirk says

    Venezuela earthquakes kill at least 164, as rescuers search collapsed buildings

    Back-to-back earthquakes have killed at least 164 people in Venezuela, acting President Delcy Rodríguez says

    In the capital Caracas, rescuers are searching through the rubble and people have been heard calling for help

    Earlier, Rodríguez said the most affected state is La Guaira, north of Caracas, where “dozens” of buildings have collapsed. It’s one of Venezuela’s smallest states, but economically important

    The quakes, with magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5, hit a minute apart. The second was the strongest to hit Venezuela since 1900 – you can see a “shake-map” here

    The US Geological Survey says thousands of people could have been killed in total – we take a look at their estimates here
    …

  38. Reginald Selkirk says

    New Study Shows That Tall Vehicle Hoods Cause Hundreds More Deaths Per Year

    joshuark shares a report from Car and Driver:

    A new study conducted by the New York Times shows that the increase in vehicle hood height seen over the last two and a half decades, mainly due to the rise in popularity of large SUVs and trucks, has resulted in several thousand deaths that otherwise may not have happened. The study shows that while automakers and regulators have focused on occupant safety, they have turned a blind eye to pedestrian safety, which has fallen since around 2009…

  39. Reginald Selkirk says

    New Hampshire has highest share of adults who identify as atheists

    New Hampshire has the highest share of adults who identify as atheists in the U.S., at about 11%, according to a Pew Research Center study.

    Nearly half of adults in the Granite State (48%) identify as religiously unaffiliated, a group that includes atheists, agnostics, and people who describe their religion as “nothing in particular.”

    In the U.S. overall, 5% of adults identify as atheists, meaning New Hampshire’s share is more than twice the national average. About 29% of U.S. adults identify as religiously unaffiliated.

    However, regionally, the West has the highest share of adults who identify as atheists among the four major U.S. regions – Northeast, Midwest, South, and West – according to the data…

  40. says

    ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: Mamdani reacts after stunning primary wins in New York

    “I think what you’ve seen from New Yorkers … is an exhaustion with status quo politics and a desire for something that actually responds to the needs that they have in their own districts,” says Mayor Zohran Mamdani on his slate of endorsed candidates sweeping their primaries.

    Video is 10:47 minutes

    ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: Trump’s voter suppression push torpedoes major housing bill

    “A president who is concerned about persuading voters would sign the bipartisan housing bill—but he chose not to do that because he doesn’t want to win, he wants to cheat,” says Chris Hayes on Trump derailing the bipartisan housing bill to push his anti-voter legislation.

    Video is 8:42 minutes

  41. Reginald Selkirk says

    ‘An intentional slight to God’: Todd Friel claims design of Obama Presidential Center is ‘atheistic, anti-Christian’

    “His new presidential center, I think, can be described as atheistic, anti-Christian, Marxist, and just another effort from Barack Obama to do what he’s been endeavoring to do now since he was nominated president, and that is to fundamentally change America,” said Friel.

    Pointing to Obama’s personal involvement with the center’s design, Friel believes the building is a “tangible symbol” of Obama’s “utterly destructive worldviews” and an “intentional slight to God.”
    …

  42. says

    BREAKING NEWS: Updated 4 minutes ago

    Supreme Court allows Trump to remove protections from thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants

    “The Trump administration has sought to terminate temporary protected status for immigrants fleeing war, natural disasters or other catastrophes. Some may now be deported.”

    The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the Trump administration to remove legal protections from thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants in the United States, meaning they could be subject to deportation.

    The court, on a 6-3 vote on ideological lines, ruled in favor of the administration, which asked to continue with its plan to strip Temporary Protected Status from about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.

    Writing for the majority, conservative Justice Samuel Alito said that judges overstepped their authority in second-guessing the administration’s decision. The court also rejected a claim that the decision to remove protections for Haitians was discriminatory.

    The law in question “expressly restricts” courts from reviewing determinations made by the Department of Homeland Security on whether to terminate or extend TPS protections, he wrote.

    As for the claims of discrimination against Haitians, Alito said none of the statements cited by plaintiffs — including President Donald Trump baselessly accusing them of eating people’s pets and calling the country a “shithole” — were “overtly racial” and “insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people.” [Not “overtly racial”!? JFC!]

    Last year, the Supreme Court in two separate decisions allowed the Trump administration to revoke the same kind of legal status from 600,000 Venezuelans in the U.S. The Trump administration argued in court papers that those actions set a precedent that lower courts should have applied to the Haitian and Syrian immigrants, too.

    Solicitor General D. John Sauer, arguing for the government, wrote that former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decisions on revoking TPS designations are not reviewable in court.

    [I snipped a legal description of the TPS program]

    Noem concluded that Haiti and Syria no longer met any of the conditions for legal status, saying conditions in both countries have improved. [bullshit]

    The State Department currently tells Americans not to travel to either country, with both included on its “do not travel” list. [!]

    […] As for Syria, the department says that “no part of Syria is safe from violence.”

    Without protected status, affected people are subject to deportation via the normal legal process. But they can seek other avenues for remaining in the U.S. by, for example, claiming asylum.

    In the Haiti case, a group of TPS holders alleged that Noem’s decision was not, as she claimed, based on a serious assessment that Haiti is now safe for people to return. [True]

    A Washington-based judge concluded in February that Noem had failed to follow the correct procedures in terminating TPS for Haiti and said there was evidence the decision was based on “anti-black and anti-Haitian animus.”

    The judge pointed, among other things, to an X post from December in which Noem, referring to immigrants in general, said: “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE,” as well as Trump’s 2018 statement that Haiti is a “shithole country.”

    Even while the case has been pending at the Supreme Court, the plaintiffs have alleged that further evidence has come to light, saying in a court filing that the government “relied on a knowingly false statement” that Noem had consulted with the State Department, when in fact she had not.

    […] The Trump administration has also withdrawn TPS status from people from other countries, including Afghanistan and Cameroon. As of March 2025, about 1.3 million people from 17 countries had TPS, according to the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant advocacy group.

    In a separate move taken as part of Trump’s hard-line immigration policy, which was also allowed to go into effect by the Supreme Court last year, the administration terminated a Biden-era program that allowed more than 500,000 immigrants from four other countries — Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — to remain in the U.S. while their claims were adjudicated.

  43. says

    Followup to comment 6.

    Under pressure from Trump on war powers, Republicans fold and try to appease White House

    “Some GOP lawmakers were willing to show a little independence when the stakes were low, but they lost their nerve when it really mattered.”

    Related video at the link.

    On Tuesday, Congress did something it had never done before: It approved a war powers resolution that rebuked Donald Trump and called on the president to end the war in Iran.

    It was a largely symbolic move — the measure had no formal force of law — but as Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, noted in a statement, “This marks the first time since the enactment of the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that both chambers of Congress have approved a concurrent resolution directing a sitting president to end a military conflict.” [True]

    […] Not only did the president complain via social media about the “Republican Losers [who] voted with the Dumocrats,” but when he met with GOP senators behind closed doors on Wednesday afternoon, he continued to complain about the vote.

    MS NOW reported that Trump specifically went after Pennsylvania Sen. Dave McCormick for having missed the vote, despite the fact that his absence wouldn’t have changed the outcome, and that the senator missed the vote because he was with Trump at a rally in his home state at the time.

    Hours after Senate Republicans heard from the president, they took fresh steps to try to appease him. MS NOW’s Jack Fitzpatrick reported:

    A procedural vote on an Iran war powers resolution failed at about 11 p.m. on Wednesday, as two Republicans changed their position after yesterday’s confrontation with Trump. […]

    GOP leaders specifically held the vote, knowing it would fail, in order to make Trump feel better. [!]

    With this in mind, shortly before midnight, the president published a new item on his platform, celebrating the move. “Wow!” he wrote. “The Senate just changed its vote on Iran from 50-48 against, to 50-47 for. … This vote puts Iran on notice!”

    That wasn’t quite right. The Senate didn’t change its vote, so much as it held two separate votes on related but distinct resolutions.

    The measure on Tuesday afternoon, which has not been negated or undone, was historically significant, but it lacked any real practical meaning. The resolution simply expressed the sentiment of Congress. It didn’t even advance to the White House for a presidential signature or veto.

    The second vote, held on Wednesday night, actually had teeth. This war powers resolution, championed by Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, would have explicitly directed Trump to “remove the United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against Iran” unless authorized by Congress. While four GOP senators were willing to support Tuesday’s nonbinding measure, zero Republicans broke ranks on the second such vote.

    In other words, some GOP lawmakers were willing to show a little independence when the stakes were low, but when pressed to take a more meaningful step, they lost their nerve and folded — hours after Trump read them the riot act and demanded that they fall in line.

  44. says

    Republican Senators Try to Patch Things Up With the President

    Even by our fully debased standard of grading […] Trump on a curve, yesterday was a rolling catastrophe of astonishing political blunders. […] Trump didn’t own the libs yesterday. The only person he owned was himself. And yet, Senate Republicans remain submissive, even after showing small flashes of fight.

    Voters of both parties are worried and stressed about housing costs and affordability, so any sane politician would seize the opportunity for a photo op of his support for a bipartisan housing bill. Instead, Trump, who lives in a gilded penthouse and private golf club when he’s not in residence rent-free at the White House, which he is needlessly renovating with taxpayer money, unexpectedly cancelled a scheduled signing ceremony (via Truth Social, of course), saying he would not sign the bill unless Senate Republicans passed the SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill. Wow, this guy really knows how to negotiate, doesn’t he? As any viewer of Schoolhouse Rock knows, the housing bill will become law without his signature, and then he will have missed the opportunity to show everyone how much he cares. Instead, he hands Democrats an opportunity to show voters how much he only cares about his delusions and conspiracy theories, and not about addressing their struggles to afford housing. [Accurate]

    Headlines about Trump’s lunch with Senate Republicans yesterday were dominated by the shouting matches, especially with Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, triggered by the tensions he has stoked with his own party, stemming from his SAVE America Act demands, his anger over the passage of the Iran war powers resolution, and other matters. While such a confrontation seemed to mark a new era in Trump-GOP relations, definitively declaring a turning point was perhaps premature. Late last night the Senate, with Cassidy switching his position, voted against another war powers resolution in a procedural vote GOP leadership brought to the floor for the sole purpose of assuaging Trump after his blow-up with Cassidy earlier in the day. According to the Washington Post, Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and John Barrasso (R-WY) successfully pressed Cassidy to change his vote.

    JFC, the lengths they go to in order to pacify baby Trump.

  45. says

    […] While Trump fabricated his story about the vandalism of the reflecting pool, which he has portrayed as a great affront to himself and the country’s heritage, he claimed during the same meeting not to have seen actual photographic proof that an American Tomahawk missile struck an elementary school in Minab, Iran, at the outset of the war, killing 175 people. Although the proof of the U.S. strike has been reported in major news outlets, Trump nonetheless claimed to have not seen these reports, saying, “I have to wait for it to be complete,” adding later, “I don’t think it was us.”

    Link

  46. says

    Nope, I did not watch Trump’s speech. Here is a summary:

    Trump gave a campaign style speech on the National Mall last night to kick off his Great American State Fair, which many states have declined to participate in. He announced several weeks ago that he would be speaking at the launch after numerous musical acts backed out of performing at his overtly partisan event. Last night he repeated some of his usual grievances and lies, and then boasted that the country is in a “golden age,” claiming, “There’s never been an age like this.”

    Link

    Here is a description of the speech from MS NOW.

    Here is an excerpt posted by NBC News:

    “Tonight, as we stand at the edge of our 250th year, I am thrilled to declare that America is back,” Trump said in a speech on the National Mall. “As you know very well, a short time ago we were a dead country. We were dead. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’re respected by everybody. Nobody’s laughing at us anymore.”

    Well worth ignoring.

  48. johnson catman says

    re Lynna@46:

    As you know very well, a short time ago we were a dead country. We were dead. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’re respected by everybody. Nobody’s laughing at us anymore.

    And up is down, black is white, etc. The Orange Turd is so piteously stupid and oblivious to reality, and the whole damn republican party is to blame for allowing it to continue.

  49. Reginald Selkirk says

    U.S. Supreme Court backs Monsanto in its fight against liability from popular weed killer

    The Supreme Court agreed to shield Monsanto from liability over its popular weed killer Roundup, dealing a victory to the company’s new owner as it struggles to resolve thousands of costly lawsuits from people who claim the key ingredient caused their cancers.

    The central issue in the case, filed by Missouri resident John Durnell, is who decides what should appear on a pesticide or insecticide label—and whether a federal law overrides state claims.

    The Justice wrote in a 7-2 opinion written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, or FIFRA expressly preempts state law and Monsanto’s failure to warn consumers about the dangers of glyphosate…

  50. Reginald Selkirk says

    Trump Admin Wants to Make Brake Pedals Optional in Autonomous Vehicles

    On Thursday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposed updating the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards to eliminate the mandate for manual brake pedals in cars designed to be fully self-driving.

    “If we want America to lead the way, we have to reimagine our regulatory framework,” NHTSA administrator Jonathan Morrison said in a press release. “That’s why under Secretary Sean Duffy’s AV Framework, NHTSA is tearing down pointless barriers to innovative designs while strengthening the fundamental safety requirements that matter and holding AV developers accountable for safe performance.” …

    Braking isn’t a ‘fundamental safety requirement’?

  52. johnson catman says

    re Reginald Selkirk@50: I had to look to verify that wasn’t an Onion article. This administration has gone way above and beyond stupid.

  53. Reginald Selkirk says

    Trains suspended as heatwave causes rails to buckle

    West Midlands Railway services between Coventry and Leamington Spa are currently suspended after a rail buckled in Leamington in the extreme temperatures.

    Trains visiting the station are also being delayed or cancelled due to the defective track – with trains travelling towards London running at a reduced speed.

    The disruption is expected to last until the end of Friday, affecting Chiltern Railways routes between London, Stourbridge, Birmingham, Stratford-upon-Avon and Banbury.

    CrossCountry and West Midlands Railway (WMR) routes via Nuneaton and Worcester are also affected…

  55. whheydt says

    Re; birgerjohansson @ #54…
    I figured that was the reference when I saw your text.

  56. Reginald Selkirk says

    DuckDuckGo, Unable to Resist the Pull of AI, Mistakenly Claims Trump Died of Rabies

    President Donald Trump has passed away after succumbing to a rabies infection given to him by Vice President J.D. Vance, who also died of rabies. That news comes to us via the AI-generated search results provided by privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo.

    How exactly DuckDuckGo’s search results came to this conclusion is a bit convoluted, but a familiar enough concept at this juncture for anyone exposed to AI-powered search…

  57. johnson catman says

    re Reginald Selkirk@56: Unfortunately, if that actually happened, we would be saddled with Mike Johnson as president. The line of succession doesn’t get any better after that:
    Vice President
    Speaker of the House
    President Pro Tempore of the Senate
    Secretary of State
    Secretary of the Treasury
    Secretary of Defense
    Attorney General
    Secretary of the Interior
    Secretary of Agriculture
    Secretary of Commerce
    Secretary of Labor
    Secretary of Health and Human Services
    Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
    Secretary of Transportation
    Secretary of Energy
    Secretary of Education
    Secretary of Veterans Affairs
    Secretary of Homeland Security

  58. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    The Register – Gizmodo readers hit with ClickFix malware prompts

    Gizmodo confirmed a compromise on Saturday after readers reported ClickFix malware prompts appearing on article pages. Users posted screenshots of fake CAPTCHA windows appearing on Gizmodo’s site. The attack aims to fool users into running malicious code via their terminals.
    […]
    Gizmodo said the attacks were being displayed only “briefly,” and the timeline of user reports, which span just a few hours, suggests that was indeed the case.

    “We identified and resolved a security incident on our site earlier today,” the outlet said. “A compromised account was exploited to inject a malicious script, briefly exposing users to scam content. The site was taken offline immediately, the script removed, and the account secured. […] The Register confirmed that the website is no longer serving ClickFix prompts as of Monday.

    The page apparently said: “To verify your request, follow the instructions below. Use the keyboard in this order.” They were unexplained keyboard shortcuts to bring up a terminal, paste whatever the site had put in your clipboard, and hit enter.

  61. birgerjohansson says

    johnson catman @ 57

    Mike Johnson trying to be president, and trying to dominate the supreme court and the congressmen including the senators would be a sight to behold. He has the charisma and possibly the intellect of a tree stump. The GOP congressmen would instantly pursue their own agendas, not the agenda of the government.

  62. Reginald Selkirk says

    Every Homo naledi we know of is female, and the implications are fascinating

    All the Homo naledi skeletons in Rising Star Cave are female, and that probably didn’t happen by accident.

    In 2013, a team of anthropologists led by Lee Berger unearthed the remains of more than 20 small-bodied hominins (ancient relatives of humans), all 335,000 to 236,000 years old, from the Rising Star Cave System in South Africa. Excavations at Rising Star have sparked debate about whether these little hominins had all ended up in the caves by tragic accident, or whether they’d been carefully placed there by other members of their enigmatic species, dubbed Homo naledi.

    Now there’s a plot twist that may speak to how the remains got there: All of the hominins in Rising Star are female, at least according to the proteins in their dental enamel.
    …
    All of the samples contained a protein called amelogenin-X, or AMELX, which is encoded in the DNA of the X-chromosome. But not a single sample contained the male version, AMELY, which is encoded on the Y-chromosome…

  64. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Lynna @42 quoting NBC:

    Alito said none of the statements cited by plaintiffs—including President Donald Trump baselessly accusing them of eating people’s pets and calling the country a “shithole”—were “overtly racial” […] [Not “overtly racial”!? JFC!]

    Galling context for this…

    Rando 1:

    Samuel Alito’s dad was born in Calabria, Italy in 1914, which was a completely failed state shithole at the time. You either spent your life farming dirt or got killed at 16 working for an Ndrangheta underboss. Now his son spends all day panicking about uncivilized Haitians.

    If you were a woman you spent your entire day wearing a black veil and crying hysterically on a dirt road because your son or second cousin or whatever was murdered in a gang feud. It was not a good situation.

    Chris Hayes (MSNOW):

    I’m deep into book research on basically this very topic and hard to overstate how brutal and violent Sicily was during this period. I’ve been working my way through a section of an 1876 report on the conditions of Sicily, specifically a section on the children as young as seven who worked 10-12 hours a day in the sulfur mines and it is a HARROWING read.

    At one point the author says, basically, “the men and boys sleep in the same common hay heap and we won’t even go into what happens to the boys because it’s too repellent to even think about it but you can imagine.”

    Kevin Kruse (Historian):

    when the Klan was ranting about unassimilable immigrants in the 1920s, they were very much talking about Italians whom they attacked as Catholic pawns of the pope, as a “criminal race” whose members were all tied to the mafia, and as a non-white threat to white women.

    […] Did his father get naturalized and become a citizen, or did his son just get the gift he now wants to deny to others?

    Rando 2: “His father became a U.S. citizen. [NYT article]”

    Justice Alito […] is the court’s only first-generation American. […] His father came as an infant with the justice’s grandmother in 1914 […] Since 1790, minors have been automatically naturalized when their parents are naturalized. Justice Alito’s father, Samuel A. Alito Sr., was 10 years old when his father was naturalized.

     
    Wikipedia – 1891 New Orleans lynchings

    the murders of 11 Italian Americans, immigrants in New Orleans, by a mob for their alleged role in the murder of police chief David Hennessy after some of them had been acquitted at trial. It was the largest single mass lynching in American history.[*]
    […]
    Believing the jury had been fixed by organized crime, a mob broke into the jail […] The mob outside the jail numbered in the thousands and included some of the city’s most prominent citizens. […] Italy cut off diplomatic relations with the United States, sparking rumors of war. Increased anti-Italian sentiment led to calls for restrictions on immigration. The word “Mafia” entered the American lexicon
    […]
    Most anti-Italianism in the United States was directed at Southern Italians […] The US Bureau of Immigration reinforced this distinction, following the Italian practice of classifying Northern and Southern Italians as two different races. However, even though on a legal level both Northern and Southern Italians were considered to be white, between 1890 and 1910, Sicilian-Americans made up less than 4 percent of the white male population, yet were roughly 40 percent of the white victims of Southern lynch mobs.

    * The author who made that claim measured largest “lynching” by the number of illegally killed people, each personally identified for an alleged offense. Distinct from massacres or judicial executions.

  65. JM says

    AP News: Vance, an admirer of Richard Nixon, says Watergate would be ‘a 12-hour news story’ today

    Vice President JD Vance on Thursday said the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon would have been a blip in today’s news cycle, and he drew parallels between Nixon and President Donald Trump — arguing that both were targeted by “deep state” forces.

    One of those didn’t think it through moments, Vance directly compared what brought Nixon down to what didn’t bring Trump down. He was trying to say something about it not bringing Nixon down in today’s news cycle but seems to have missed the point that it is because today’s Republicans are less honorable and law abiding.
    I wish one of the reports there had the guts to ask if by “deep state” he meant the same shadowy conspiracy Hillary Clinton said was working against her?

    Vance described his admiration for Nixon during a conversation at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California. Widely expected to be a presidential contender in 2028, Vance spoke at the library while promoting his new book, “Communion.”

    I do like how Vance is trying to be somewhat obscure about his intentions to run but nobody believes it for a moment. Even the most credulous of reports just assume he is running the way he is promoting his new book about his religious conversion the year before he would have to start campaigning.

  66. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    A crass retort from the White House.
    Ted Lieu (Rep D-CA):

    Steven Cheung (WH Comms Dir): Ted Lewd is a [dum—ss]. He probably spent hours laughing to himself, thinking that peddling this lie would be funny. Sadly for Ted, there’s no special new drug to cure being a [b—ch].

    CSPAN: Ted Lieu suggests Trump cancelled Housing bill because he got a special new drug for a terminal illness [Video clip]

    Thank you […] for amplifying my remarks! I see you didn’t answer the question I asked. Was trump the mystery patient who received the special experimental drug by Eli Lilly under the law designed for people with terminal illnesses?

     
    HuffPo – Transportation secretary Sean Duffy defends saying ‘libt—d’ in front of daughter with down syndrome—and just, wow

    at the Great American State Fair. Duffy was warming up the crowd for President Donald Trump when he decided to attack the multitude of musical acts who had declined to perform […] he said it while standing next to his youngest daughter, Valentina, who has Down syndrome.

  67. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Aaron Rupar:

    Tom Emmer: “Minnesotans are so afraid that you’re gonna call us a racist, you’re gonna call us an Islamophobe. […] You know what? […] I’m done being even the least bit careful. […] [Somalis] don’t assimilate. And if they don’t assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from.” [Video clip]

    GottaLaff: “You know what? I’m done denying that I’m a racist.”

    Rando 1: “The applause bothers me the most.”

    Ilhan Omar (Rep D-MN): “I assimilated all the way to Congress and this idiot still tells me to go back where I came from.”

    Marisa Kabas: “And this isn’t just some random evil racist congressman. He’s the majority whip, the third most powerful member of the house! this *is* the party.”

    Rando 2: “White Republican men don’t assimilate to the US.”

    Phil Plait: “I grew up watching TV shows and movies where revealing someone’s gutter racism led to their immediate downfall. That needs to be the cultural norm again.”

    MinnPost – The Republican’s comments from a decade ago contrast with more recent statements

    Tom Emmer said Somalis are “some of the fastest-assimilating populations” during a 2015 town hall meeting […] according to audio aired during an episode of This American Life. The congressman likened the Somali experience to that of German, Polish and Chinese immigrants. That same year, Emmer founded the Congressional Somalia Caucus […]

    [In December 2025], the House Majority Whip falsely accused Somalis of committing 80% of the crimes in the Twin Cities and Minnesota during an appearance on Fox Business. The appearance came as the Trump administration ramped up immigration enforcement against Twin Cities Somalis.

    Rando 3: “He is what immigrants should strive and assimilate to be. JESUS FUKING CHRIST.”

  68. birgerjohansson says

    【CSA Military Song】I Wish I Was in Dixie (Japanese Version)【NEUTRINO AI KIRITAN】

    The Japanese dug up a background painting with black slaves in a cotton field, which is an apt comment.
    I assume GOP rallies still have plenty of people sporting the ‘southern cross’.
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=mxw8xg1lpp4

  69. birgerjohansson says

    There was apparently a German-American civil war officer who was a communist (even if the word had not yet bern invented) named Willoch. He broke with Carl Marx for not being radical enough.

  74. Reginald Selkirk says

    Engineer accused of insider trading tied to Microsoft’s reboot of Three Mile Island nuclear plant

    A former Constellation Energy engineer has been accused of making $1.4 million from insider trading ahead of the company’s announcement that it would restart a reactor at Three Mile Island to supply power to Microsoft.

    The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and federal prosecutors allege in their lawsuits that Casey Muggleston purchased share options based on knowledge officially deemed material non-public information (MNPI).
    …
    According to a filing in the US District Court for the District of Delaware, Muggleston knew he was barred from trading on MNPI or buying options in Constellation stock.

    The criminal indictment claims that in May 2024, he became aware of the plan for the company to restart the Three Mile Island reactor through his work as a nuclear engineer at Constellation.

    He “exploited that MNPI in violation of the duties of trust and confidence owed to the energy company and its shareholders,” the filing alleges, through a series “call options” on company shares between June and September for a total of around $66,595….

  75. JM says

    CBS News: Judge orders DOJ to either unredact more Epstein files or explain why they must stay blacked out

    A judge on Thursday ordered the Justice Department to either release unredacted versions of several files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein or explain why it can’t do so, following a lawsuit accusing Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche of improperly redacting documents.

    The judge is essential ordering the Trump administration to comply with the details of Epstein release act. One of the big issues is that the government is required to provide a list of what was redacted and why, which the government has not done. It’s very hard to question the government on why something was redacted or not released when you have no information.

    Thursday’s court ruling was spurred by a lawsuit filed in April by independent journalist and legal commentator Katie Phang over the redactions, which she argues are a “brazen, shocking, and ongoing violation” of the federal law mandating the release of the Epstein files. She asked a judge to order the release of several unredacted files.

    Phang works for the MeidasTouch group so they are going overboard supporting her. It is an important case but expect several more rounds of appeals before it actually goes anyplace.

  78. says

    Sky Captain @67, thanks for posting that roundup of racist comments from Republicans, and for the responses from the public. It’s horrifying to see the stupidity, cruelty and racism aimed at Somalis, but is it great to see Ilhan Omar and others responding so accurately:

    Ilhan Omar (Rep D-MN): “I assimilated all the way to Congress and this idiot still tells me to go back where I came from.”

    In a way, your post (comment 64) about Tom Emmer’s racist approach reminds me of the racism directed at Southern Italians, history that Justice Alito ignored.

  79. says

    Stephen Miller memo exposes plan to punish Americans with disabilities

    According to Bloomberg Law, Stephen Miller was behind a DOJ memo that lets states institutionalize Americans with disabilities instead of funding the community care that allows them to remain home—undoing decades of reform and precedent.

    Video is 7:47 minutes

    Trump DHS chief grips stress ball as hearing turns tense

    Markwayne Mullin—now serving as Trump’s DHS secretary—had to appear before Congress clutching a stress ball to apparently keep his anger in check as he clashed with Democratic members and the Republican committee chairman.

    Video is 8:42 minutes

  80. says

    Steve Benen summarized several recent court decisions:

    * The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority makes the wrong call, Part I: “The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority sided with the Trump administration over Haitians and Syrians on Thursday in a ruling on the administration’s attempt to end humanitarian safeguards under the Temporary Protected Status program. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion curbed the power of courts to review government decisions to terminate protections under the TPS program.” [Source: MS NOW, see comment 42]

    * The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority makes the wrong call, Part II: “A divided Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in a case about the federal government’s power to turn away asylum seekers if they’re still on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border. The case hinged on the interpretation of federal law that says a person can apply for asylum if they are ‘physically present in the United States” or if the person “arrives in the United States.’” [Source: MS NOW]

    * The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority makes the wrong call, Part III: “The Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority struck down a Hawaii gun law on Thursday, ruling 6-3 that the state can’t make concealed-carry permit holders get property owners’ permission before bringing guns onto private property open to the public. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion deeming the law unconstitutional.” [Source: MS NOW]

    * This ruling, unlike the others, did not fall along ideological lines: “The Supreme Court sided with the maker of Roundup weedkiller Thursday in a ruling expected to block thousands of lawsuits alleging it failed to warn people the product could cause cancer.” [Source: Associated Press, see Reginald @49]

    * A district court makes the right call: “A federal judge has blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting, at least temporarily hobbling one of several attempts to limit mail-in ballots in the midterm elections in November.” [Source: MS NOW]

  81. says

    Trump’s ‘Great American State Fair’ is a flop

    […] Trump’s “Great American State Fair” is underway on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and it looks more like the ill-fated Fyre Festival than a celebration fit for the United States’ 250th birthday.

    Thursday was the first full day of the two-week-long fair, and rather than a crowded, lively scene, it was sparsely attended and wrought with problems related to the food and attractions.

    […] America 250 project […] per its website:

    A world-class exposition and modern-day World’s Fair celebrating the people, traditions, innovations, and spirit that make America the greatest nation on Earth. Featuring more than 150 exhibits from all 56 states and territories, businesses, innovators, and civic organizations, the Great American State Fair will showcase the very best of America through state pavilions, industry displays, family-friendly attractions, movie screenings, musical performances, military ensembles, spectacular flyovers, daily cultural programming, and an iconic Ferris wheel on the National Mall.

    [photo of Ferris wheel]

    Instead, what the few fair-goers got were half-hearted booths, food stalls that frequently lost power, and an unusable Ferris wheel. Altogether, it looked nothing like the lively state fairs Americans know and love.

    Multiple attendees said that a tent with food stalls—reportedly lacking the fried delights one expects to find at a state fair—kept losing power. One vendor’s ice-cream stash even reportedly melted, a major bummer on a scorching-hot day in the nation’s capital.

    Speaking of power issues, the giant Ferris wheel briefly lost power, rendering the one fun thing at the fair unusable for a chunk of the day. [metaphors for the incompetent Trump administration]

    As for the “150 exhibits from all 56 states and territories,” here’s what fair-goers got: a number of unmanned booths with random furniture, since many states declined to participate. Maine’s booth appears to have featured nothing more than two armchairs. [photo]

    Even states that did participate had lackluster displays. Who’s excited to go look at 5-gallon buckets of grain, or how about a table with two bottles of rum you can’t drink? [boring]

    On X, Boston Globe reporter Sam Brodey made a thread of highlights from the booths, and if those were the best things he saw … my God.

    Meanwhile, the pièce de résistance of the fair—a replica of the obstructively large arch Trump wants to build—looked like it was purchased off Temu [photo] […] Sad is an understatement.

    The pitifulness of the street fair is just the latest way Trump has bungled what could have otherwise been an awesome celebration of the country’s 250th anniversary.

    Given how Trump has politicized the event, multiple (stale) musical acts pulled out of a planned concert because they said they were duped into thinking it was a bipartisan affair when it was instead an event tied to Trump. Without the musical talent onboard, Trump instead turned the first night of the event into a Trump rally, which was also sparsely attended, to spew his tired, racist, and xenophobic bile.

    Trump appears to comprehend that this street fair is a mess. At one point in his blathering speech, he begged people to come to the event.

    “Please show up,” he said. “Because if we have two empty seats, you know what’s going to happen: The fake news is going to say he didn’t fill out the arena.” […]

  82. says

    Followup to comment 80.

    […] Justice Alito says none of the balls-out-racist shit Trump said about Haitians was racist, so he can go ahead and throw them out of the country because he’s not racist. (NBC News) Some bullshit Supreme Court decision about Hawaii and guns. (Gift link New York Times) Supreme Court says Trump can do whatever he wants on immigration, as was already obvious. (AP) Supreme Court gives Bayer (Previously Monsanto) Get Out Of Billions In Roundup Cancer Damages Free card. (AP) Oh Clarence Thomas was Monsanto’s in-house counsel? What a scamp. (EE News)

    Trump’s DOJ is now going straight to Reed O’Connor, unopposed by any party, and getting decisions within hours, so everything’s wonderful. (Talking Points Memo)

    This other judge says the USPS can’t refuse to deliver our mail ballots based on Trump’s illegal executive order, but she’s an Obama judge with a foreign name so I’m not sure if it counts. (Democracy Docket) […]

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/wilding-tabs-fri-june-26-2026

    Embedded links to additional sources are available at the main link.

  83. says

    https://bsky.app/profile/monarchdiaries.bsky.social/post/3mons3xjuu22z

    Mechanism and updated prediction for the epic fail of Lincoln Memorial Bioreactor’s polyurea coating! First chemistry, then physics

    It was sprayed in big sections. In addition to pool edges, failure will concentrate at the OVERLAP SEAMS between sections because they likely barely bonded at all.

    Background: a month ago I predicted the scum pond they’ve made will delaminate in ~5 years. That turned out to be ~5 years too optimistic, and here’s why (I think).

    […] Polyurea only bonds chemically to polyurea in a short “recoat window.” Fresh polyurea has leftover reactive groups that covalently weld to the next coat, but only for a few hours. Rhino Pipeliner 5000 has a max recoat of ~4 hours. After that the surface goes inert.

    This is in addition to likely surface prep issues with the concrete, suggested by “pinholing” NPS staff flagged during the application process.

    Watching them work, here’s what they did: spray a section, let it sit for hours to days, then spray the next one feathering over the cured edge. This lands FAR outside the 4-hour application overlap window (worse in hot humid weather). The seams never got a chemical weld in the first place.

    An out-of-window lap isn’t really bonded. It rests on weak secondary forces, about a tenth of a real bond, unless cured edge sanded, solvent-wiped, and primed first (lol no it wasn’t).

    In the field this recoating peels off by hand, a super weak seam

    Now the physics! The membrane shrinks ~1–3% as it cures, but is bonded to the concrete and can’t which locks in tension. The sprayed sections are like a tiled surface with stress piling into thin bands at the edges, where the seams are. Here’s a quickie figure [Illustration]

    Simulating for this polymer: interestingly the bond-breaking edge stress maxes out once a section is bigger than a few mm, so every seam sees peak stress no matter how big the section. With the seams as the pre-weakened laps the highest stress lands exactly where the bond is weakest. [Graph]

    Tile size then sets how bad it gets. Once a seam lets go, the freed strip contracts ~2% of however far it detaches: 0.5 m of detachment moves the edge ~1 cm, several meters moves it tens of cm. Small tiles can only twitch; 10–50 m sections store big movement that releases at the seam.

    Right way to do this: small panels with control joints, recoating in-window, or abrading and priming every lap. This job did the opposite. […]

  85. says

    […] President Dementia Sharts forced NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte to sit there and keep a straight face for 11 SOLID MINUTES as he blabbered and blubbered and babbled and jangled keys around in his brain about imaginary Reflecting Pool vandalism. […]

    It was, um, well … well, it sure was something!

    Here, via Aaron Rupar, is the full 11:55 clip. After that, some shorter excerpts: [videos are available at the link]

    “They have a gash on that beautiful pool. It’s a reflecting one!”

    There are a lot of lines in that 11 minutes, but we think that’s our favorite, on top of the lies about Obama and Biden spending hundreds of millions of imaginary dollars trying to fix the Reflecting Pool.

    They sure do tell Grandpa a lot of stories up there in that White House.

    “They’re sick people. I think they’re in big trouble!”

    “Here’s the bottom line,” Trump said, before he ranted for seven more minutes.

    “You know, grass has a life just like people have a life.” […]

    Factcheck, nobody did anything to the Reflecting Pool. There is no slit, there is no gash. […]

    Donald Trump is just a shitty businessman and a shitty contractor aaaaaaand he’s a grifter. Put it all together! What do you get?

    You get the green, chunky algae piece of shit Reflecting Pool that looks like an above-ground swimming pool in the backyard of a foreclosed house in the suburbs. […]

    Trump ended the long rant above, and the entire press availability, like this:

    “But the 350-foot gash in the side, it’s a terrible thing. Ready? I’m gonna end on this. I’m so proud of Washignton DC, it’s become one of the hottest cities in the world, but what is the hottest thing in the world is the United States of America, we have the hottest city, you know that, you were talking about that two years ago we were laughed at, we were a joke, we were a dead country, now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world, thank you very much everybody!”

    […]

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/please-do-not-cuss-in-front-of-the

    Trump on one of the alleged reflecting pool vandals:

    “He’s a member or a big payer to ActBlue. He’s a big Hillary supporter, a big supporter of sleepy Joe Biden. This is a very political thing.”

  86. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/texas-republicans-just-got-even-weirder

    […] the Texas State Board of Education has proposed some new curriculum “standards” specifically designed to create a whole generation of Christian, right-wing Republican […] clones.

    Much of the new curriculum was created by a panel of nine advisors, only one of whom was actually a teacher in the state’s public school system, and at least three far-right conservative activists. It also includes one David Barton, the “amateur historian” who writes many of the fact-averse historical accounts that Christian Nationalists keep trying to foist upon children. […] here are some of the more batshit “standards” they came up with.

    – Requiring children, starting at age six and continuing on through high school, to read from the Bible (specifically Protestant versions of the Bible […]).

    – Describing Japanese internment camps as one of the “changes” that occurred during WWII. Originally, the advisory board had recommended this be described as one of the “contributions” to the war effort. I suppose this means they were going to claim that the Japanese-Americans graciously interned themselves?

    – Before revisions, the advisory board had left Martin Luther King Jr. entirely out of the section on Civil Rights.

    – Referring to the “Tulsa Race Massacre” as the “Tulsa Race Riot.”

    – Removing standards that defined segregation as “keeping people apart based on the color of their skin.” […] They also removed anything suggesting that slavery in America was race-based […]

    – Eliminating standards requiring that students consider “the perspectives of groups whose voices are less represented in traditional historical accounts.” Because sure, it’s definitely just a coincidence that we hear from white men more than anyone else.

    – Literally no mention of any women in 3rd and 4th grade history classes.

    – Teaching students about the mythical “Black Robe Regiment” — an entirely mythical group of pastors who aided in the American Revolution and inspired the Declaration of Independence. This is a thing Christian Nationalists literally just came up with this century and now want taught to children as fact.

    – Basically teaching students that “Western Civilization” is all there is and just straight up ignoring contributions outside of the United States and Europe.

    I could go on, and I hate that I could go on. And the really scary thing about it is that, because Texas is the second-most populous state, textbook companies often take their nonsense into consideration when deciding what to include. [!]

    “We just want our students to love our country,” one Republican lady said at a GOP prayer session outside of Monday’s hearing on the new curriculum, somehow forgetting to add, “even if we have to lie to them in order to accomplish that.”

    Perhaps they should consider that the problem is theirs, that they are the ones who can’t “love” America while also acknowledging that our government and its people have done some truly horrible things […]

    But the Board of Education isn’t the only entity out there trying to brainwash the children — the Republican Party itself is getting in on the action as well. The new GOP platform includes some bizarrely anti-LGBTQ+ nonsense, largely aimed at preventing kids from finding out that trans people exist and preventing anyone under the age of 26 from accessing any form of gender-affirming care.

    Behold:

    Gender Identity Ideology in Schools: The official position of the Texas schools shall be that there are only two genders: biological male and biological female, which are immutable and cannot be changed. We support the total prohibition of so-called social transitioning. We oppose transgender normalizing curriculum, library materials, and pronoun use. We support the passage of legislation that prohibits any course of instruction, unit of study, library materials, instructional materials, or any other curricular or extracurricular offering that adopts, supports, or promotes gender fluidity or transgender ideology in Texas government schools. We support the passage of legislation prohibiting school staff from engaging in sexualized drag activities, crossdressing, or transgenderism. We hold that biological men should compete only against other biological men and that biological women should compete only against other biological women in all school athletics.

    And

    Homosexuality: Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice. We believe there should be no granting of special legal entitlements or creation of special status for homosexual behavior, regardless of state of origin, and we oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction, or belief in traditional values. No one should be granted special legal status based on their LGBTQ+ identification.

    Gender Identity: We oppose all efforts to validate transgender identity. We believe gender modification and any form of gender affirming care for minors does not constitute medical care and is, in fact, child abuse. Further, there shall be no attempt to engage in so-called “gender affirming” medical or mental health intervention for persons between the ages of 18 and 26, including:
    a) Intervening in any way to prevent natural progression of puberty.
    b) Administering or providing opposite sex hormones.
    c) Performing any surgery on healthy body parts of that person.
    d) Assigning name and/or pronoun changes.

    Any agency, individual, or other entity promoting, performing, or facilitating gender-transitioning or gender-modification of a minor child shall be criminally prosecuted for child abuse and exposed to civil actions, enjoying no immunity regardless of profession, relation, or standing.

    In addition, there is a wholly confusing section on “religious freedom for businesses” in the party platform that you will not be shocked to learn is the freedom to only say things the Texas Republican Party wants businesses to say. […]:

    Religious Freedom for Business: We support the removal of laws and regulations that are used to force business owners and employees to violate their conscience, sincerely held beliefs, or core values. Properly defining public accommodation as understood in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires that we:

    a) Prohibit any change to the legal definition by any federal, state, or local law to expand government control to restrict any 1st Amendment rights.

    b) Proscribe any law that requires any private business or individual to create or provide a custom product or service, any kind of expressive work, enter into a contract, or be coerced into any speech that is not their own.

    c) Prohibit businesses from professing, espousing, or adopting any views on sex, sexuality, gender, or gender identity, other than to guarantee that views and positions on these matters are not used as a basis for denial of access to available public accommodations.

    d) Pass legislation to ensure that no business or school can be required to provide accommodation for individuals whose religion requires them to interrupt regular business/schedules to pray multiple times per day.

    […] Granted, this is just their special wishlist, but given the fact that they’re a strong enough majority to do pretty much anything they like … it’s not just pie-in-the-sky dreaming.

    […]The fact is, people just are who they are and no amount of repression and sheltering is going to make a gay person straight or a trans person cis. That’s just not how it works. They can scream all they want about “social contagion,” that doesn’t make it true.

    The irony is, these people are doing the exact things that will make these kids “hate America,” as they like to put it. People get a lot more pissed off when they find out that they’ve been lied to than they do if they’ve been told the truth all along, even if that truth is sometimes unpleasant. […]

  87. says

    Trump scrambles to exaggerate pitiful crowd size at Great American State Fair event

    Related video at the link.

    Ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday, the White House organized something it described as the Great American State Fair, which would help kick off the festivities in the nation’s capital. Even before Wednesday’s launch, however, the event started to unravel.

    Not only did musical acts withdraw from the gathering, but roughly a fifth of the nation’s states decided not to send official delegations or spend public money on participating in the fair.

    When the gathering got underway on Wednesday night, things managed to get even worse. Not only did Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy mock the musicians who chose not to perform — the former Fox News host labeled the artists “libtards,” an offensive term […]— but he was soon followed by Donald Trump, who delivered a campaign-style speech and made much of the gathering a celebration of himself, not the country.

    In case that weren’t quite enough, turnout for the event was — how do I put this gently — underwhelming.

    An NBC News report noted, “Roughly half of those in Wednesday’s crowd of more than 1,000 wore Trump’s slogans or likeness on their clothes. For them, America’s 250th birthday was secondary to an opportunity to see the president.” The Washington Post ran a related report that noted, in reference to attendees, “The crowd thinly covered an area about the length of the National Museum of American History, smaller than some summer outdoor movie screenings.” [LOL]

    The New Republic added, “Dozens of attendees Wednesday were seen flocking toward the exits in the middle of Trump’s address, which was meant to kick-start the two-week event.”

    […] On Thursday afternoon, the day after the poorly attended event, the president wrote on his social media platform:

    The Crowd was incredible last night, packed to the brim — At least 45,000 people were there, with a huge Television and online audience. I wish we were able to have an even larger area, which we will be able to do on July 4th when I’ll be speaking again. The airplane flyovers and music were fantastic. Everybody stayed right until the end of my Speech because they loved hearing about a truly successful America. [Scoff]

    Five hours later, either trying to convince the public or himself, he published a follow-up item, which read in part, “Last night’s Rally was packed — 45,000 people.” [eyebrows raised, more scoffing]

    An NBC News report described the president’s claim as “false,” adding that the actual total was “nowhere near 45,000 people.”

    The fact that Trump appears to have lied about a crowd size is pitiful but predictable. He has, after all, been doing this since literally the first day of his first term.

    […] it’s also worth appreciating the fact that the incumbent president is doing something inherently difficult: screwing up simple ceremonial duties.

    We’re talking about a feel-good semiquincentennial celebration that should, at least in theory, easily bring Americans together. It’s a straightforward exercise that’s proving too difficult for Trump.

    Trump can’t throw a party or organize a Great American State Fair event even when he has taxpayer money to fund it. Yep, he fucked up again.

  88. birgerjohansson says

    Paul Avery (known from among other things the 1978 Superman film) and his wife Sheila Avery have died from smoke inhalation after a fire.

  89. birgerjohansson says

    “Ukraine Raises Flag Over Kinburn Spit” ( a narrow peninsula adjacent to Crimea).

    It has become impossible for the Russians to move supplies along the narrow spit to the outposts because of drone attacks, so they have simply walked away. The place overlooks the estuary of the river that continues up to Kiev, and the route to an important harbor.
    .
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=5wNJEl5Io4o

  90. says

    Ousted Stars and Stripes ombudsman files key lawsuit against Hegseth’s Pentagon

    “Jacqueline Smith’s lawyer said the case is in response to ‘the government’s retaliation against her over the exercise of clearly definable First Amendment rights.’

    Under the direction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon has tried more than once to impose restrictions on the free press, and so far, those efforts have failed in court. There’s one news outlet, however, where the Defense Department has had more success.

    Two months ago, the Pentagon fired Jacqueline Smith, the ombudsman for Stars and Stripes, a legendary newspaper that covers the U.S. armed forces. Though the outlet has traditionally operated independently, it’s partly funded by the Defense Department, which made it possible for the Pentagon to oust Smith.

    As has been the case with many recent Defense Department firings, Smith was given no reason for her dismissal.

    Two months later, however, she decided to fight back in court. The Washington Post reported:

    Jacqueline Smith, the ombudsman for military newspaper Stars and Stripes who was fired in April by the Pentagon, sued the agency on Thursday, alleging that her dismissal was retaliatory and violated her First Amendment rights.

    In a complaint filed Thursday in federal court in Washington, Smith said that she was fired 10 days after writing an April 8 opinion column criticizing Pentagon officials for canceling syndicated comics in the paper. Her three-year term as ombudsman — a congressionally mandated role — was not set to expire until December 2026, the lawsuit said.

    “I’m charging that my First Amendment rights were violated for speaking out in the columns that I’ve written since Jan. 15, which were critical of what I saw as the Pentagon’s attempts to control the editorial content of Stars and Stripes,” Smith told the Post.

    […] As part of the litigation, Smith and her lawyer are seeking an injunction to restore the former ombudsman to her position.

    […] it’s important to emphasize for context that the role of ombudsman at Stars and Stripes was created by Congress for a reason: The person in this job is specifically tasked with ensuring the newspaper’s editorial independence.

    Hegseth’s Pentagon fired her anyway, not because Smith failed to do her job, but because she did her job in ways the Republican administration found inconvenient.

    As many service members and veterans likely know, Stars and Stripes is a military newspaper with a generations-old pedigree. It has long described itself as the “U.S. military’s independent news source.”

    The word “independent” was — and remains — key. As it covers the military, Stars and Stripes has long enjoyed the same kind of editorial freedom that civilian newspapers have, even if that means publishing reports the Pentagon doesn’t always like.

    To ensure it publishes only news reports in line with the administration’s preferred messages, Trump appointees at the DOD announced in January that they would commandeer the newspaper. [!] […]

    The Washington Post reported soon after that those seeking open positions at Stars and Stripes were asked how they would advance Trump’s “policy priorities” in the role.

    In March, the newspaper’s ombudsman spoke out against the moves, explaining that the administration’s actions were to “the detriment of the troops who rely on the newspaper for complete coverage and continued accurate coverage that is not propaganda.”

    Since propaganda is apparently the goal, Smith was ousted a month later.

    “I knew it was risky to speak out, but my responsibility to Stripes and the First Amendment was paramount,” Smith told The New York Times after her firing in April. The troops, she added, “deserve to have the unfiltered news, not what the Defense Department wants them to hear.” […]

  91. Reginald Selkirk says

    @ 82

    AP) Supreme Court gives Bayer (Previously Monsanto) Get Out Of Billions In Roundup Cancer Damages Free card.

    This one is not like the others. The current lawsuit was about whether the states or federal government have precedence in requiring labeling or some such; but an underlying issue is that, despite some jury verdicts, there is no scientific consensus that RoundUp cause cancer or other harm.

  92. says

    ‘I run the protection program’: Johnson vows to shield Trump and his allies from scrutiny

    “The Republican House speaker abandoned all subtlety, promising to protect the White House from oversight if the GOP holds on to its majority.”

    […] After Donald Trump returned to the White House, the GOP-led Congress continued to show very little interest in legislating, but this time, lawmakers also abandoned their oversight responsibilities to an almost cartoonish degree, pretending not to notice any of the incumbent president’s many abuses and scandals.

    Congressional Republicans have done so little oversight, The Washington Post reported last month, that the White House Counsel’s Office, expecting Democrats to reclaim a majority in at least one chamber, recently began “giving private briefings to the administration’s political appointees on how to best prepare for congressional oversight.”

    The same article added that the roughly 30-minute briefings “have included a PowerPoint presentation about how congressional oversight works and best practices for handling it.” [LOL, teaching]

    From House Speaker Mike Johnson’s perspective, the priority is to prevent this from becoming a problem for the White House in the first place. [social media post, with video]

    “If we lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats — y’all, impeachment isn’t even the real concern,” the Louisiana Republican told a conservative audience on Friday. “They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the Cabinet, his donors, friends, half of you in this room will be targeted.”

    The House speaker added, “I run the protection program. We’ll take care of you, OK?”

    In context, the GOP leader did not appear to be referring to a prepared text. In other words, Johnson was just candidly speaking his mind.

    And what was on his mind was a near future in which a possible House Republican majority spends 2027 and 2028 shielding the president, his team and their allies from the kind of scrutiny that Congress has a responsibility to do as a matter of course.

    […] he wants and expects to run a “protection program” — a phrase more commonly associated with organized crime — on behalf of the White House.

    Usually, GOP leaders are a bit more subtle about their anti-oversight posturing.

    As for the prospect of Democrats turning “every committee of Congress into an investigative body” starting next year, Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee promoted Johnson’s comments via social media alongside a message that read, “We are the Homeland Security Committee Democrats and we approve this message.”

  93. Reginald Selkirk says

    Is your name Janice? Drake would like to apologize for his song Janice STFU with a very exclusive party

    If your name is Janice and you feel personally victimized by Drake’s song Janice STFU, you’re in luck (provided you can show government-issued ID).

    Rumour has it, the Toronto-born rapper is ready to make amends with all Janices by throwing them an exclusive Janices-only apology party.

    “All my Janice’s in NY, LA, MIA, TO, HOU, look out for my invitation for Sunday,” he wrote on his Instagram story, referring to New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Toronto and Houston.
    …

  94. says

    Followup to comments 4, 64, 80 and 82.

    PBS: Stephen Miller says ‘America’s doors are closed fully to asylum seekers’ after Supreme Court rulings

    The Supreme Court voted 6-3 on Thursday to allow the Trump administration to end legal protections for migrants fleeing violence and natural disaster in Haiti and Syria, exposing hundreds of thousands more people to potential deportation.

    The Department of Homeland Security can now end temporary protected status, a program that protects a total of 1.3 million people from 17 countries.

    The Supreme Court also voted 6-3 to clear the way for the Trump administration to potentially revive an immigration policy once used to turn back migrants seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. The court overturned a lower court order blocking the practice that limited the number of people who could apply for asylum each day.

  95. Reginald Selkirk says

    Judge holds Charlie Kirk murder case prosecutors in contempt for comments about guilt

    The Utah judge in the murder case over Charlie Kirk’s killing held prosecutors in contempt of court on Friday over comments they made to media organizations about defendant Tyler Robinson’s guilt.

    Judge Tony Graf said the comments violated his restrictions on what the two sides can say about the case outside of court.
    …
    Defense attorneys had accused Deputy Utah County Attorney Christopher Ballard of trying to influence potential jurors by going on a “media tour” to talk about ballistics evidence in the case. Ballard also said prosecutors had enough evidence to show Robinson murdered Kirk…

  96. says

    Iran reasserts its authority over Strait of Hormuz

    Iran on Friday asserted its authority over the Strait of Hormuz, warning that safe passage can only be guaranteed for ships that coordinate with Tehran.

    The statement comes after President Trump accused Iran of hitting a commercial vessel sailing close to the coast of Oman with a one-way attack drone. The British military said the vessel was transiting through a United Nations-approved route.

    Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi posted on the social platform X that passage through the strait must be coordinated with Iran and that attempts to subvert Tehran could lead to “the suspension of the designated parallel route.”

    “Safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, with ambiguous arrangements, parallel routes, or decision-making outside of Iran’s considerations as the coastal state, cannot be guaranteed,” he said.

    “Any credible framework must be based on coordination with Iran and the provisions of paragraph five of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding. Otherwise, the outcome will be the suspension of the designated parallel route.”

    The memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed between the U.S. and Iran last week included a paragraph for the immediate safe passage of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, as conducted to Iran’s best ability given the presence of mines in the waterway.

    The MOU focused on preventing Iran from imposing tolls or fees on ships for safe passage for at least 60 days. The MOU also gave Iran the right to “define the future administration and maritime services” of the strait in dialogue with Oman, the other coastal country, and Persian Gulf littoral states.

    […] In response to the drone strike, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) paused a plan to evacuate 11,000 stranded seafarers.

    […] Trump on Friday said the drone attacks represented a “foolish” ceasefire violation but did not signal he was reimposing a U.S. naval blockade against Iranian ships, restarting U.S. military operations or calling off negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. […]

  97. Reginald Selkirk says

    Marine Biologists Discover 31 Potential New Species in Just 2 Weeks at Sea

    The deceptively bland name for the world’s ocean “midwaters” hides a dark, high-pressure, alien world just below the sea’s sunlit layer, starting over 13,000 feet (roughly 4,000 meters) below the surface. It’s the largest ecosystem on planet Earth—but its many denizens simply aren’t equipped for a journey up to the sea’s low-pressure regions or really anywhere near where scientists could study them up close.

    Fortunately, a team of marine scientists on the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel (R/V) Falkor (too) has come to them, discovering a potential record of 31 new species in just two weeks via a new suite of microscopes, deep-sea imagers, and onboard genetic sequencing. According to the institute, the expedition’s researchers managed the first-ever 3D imaging of the internal cellular structures of an organism at sea: documenting how a protist’s microbial architecture leverages its glass skeleton. Among the new species, the team has brought to light a new type of amphipod cousin to crabs and lobsters, an unusually fast-swimming gossamer worm, nine new species of jellyfish, and two gigantic single-celled organisms called rhizarians that can be seen with the naked eye…

  98. says

    Washington Post link

    “U.S. government will decide who gets to use latest upgrade to ChatGPT”

    The federal government will vet companies that want to access the latest technology developed by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, in a major expansion of the Trump administration’s regulation of Silicon Valley.

    OpenAI said in a Friday blog post announcing its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-5.6, or Sol, that the government would initially approve who gets access to the new release while AI companies and the administration work out a longer-term plan for regulation on the sector. The company made clear it is wary of more federal oversight.

    “We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them,” the blog post said. “We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks.” […]

  99. says

    Followup to comment 96.

    Washington Post link

    “U.S. strikes Iranian military sites after ship was hit in Strait of Hormuz”

    “U.S. forces launched airstrikes against Iranian missile and drone storage locations Friday in what Central Command called a ‘powerful response’ to ‘unwarranted aggression.’ ”

    U.S. forces launched airstrikes against Iranian missile and drone storage locations Friday in what Central Command called a “powerful response” to “unwarranted aggression” by Iran with its Thursday attack on a commercial ship exiting the Strait of Hormuz.

    […] No injuries were reported aboard the vessel, which continued its passage.

    Earlier in the day, Iran, which did not acknowledge responsibility for the ship attack, said it would not tolerate any transit undertaken without its approval.

    […] despite renewed hostilities in the strait, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a step forward Friday with a tripartite agreement among the U.S., Israel and Lebanon for Israeli withdrawal from two areas in southern Lebanon, following a fifth round of U.S.-led negotiations in Washington.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “great achievement” that will allow Israel to continue most of its Lebanon occupation, while Iran-backed Hezbollah denounced it as Lebanese capitulation.

    This is a developing story and will be updated.

  101. says

    Followup to comments 96 and 99.

    More coverage, from NBC News:

    […] A U.S. aircraft struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations as well as coastal radar sites, Central Command said in a news release.

    Iran allegedly shot at least four drones at ships traveling through the Strait on Thursday, Trump said on Truth Social Friday morning. One of those hit the upper deck of a cargo carrying ship, and the U.S. knocked down the three other drones, he said.

    The ship that was struck was the M/V Ever Lovely, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship was exiting the Strait of Hormuz along the Omani coast, according to U.S. Central Command. […]

    Arsenio Dominguez, the IMO’s Secretary General, said the vessel struck Thursday “did not transit under IMO’s evacuation framework.”

    Iran has previously warned that it cannot guarantee safety for ships that are not following a specified route close to the Iranian coastline.

    […] Ever Lovely’s owner company, Evergreen Marine, said in a statement to the Taiwanese stock exchange Friday that the ship sustained damage to its bridge windows, but no injuries were reported and the cargo onboard was safe.

    “The main engine and all navigation equipment continued to operate,” and its seaworthiness was not impacted as it departed the Strait of Hormuz, it added.

  102. says

    New Yorker link

    “The Israeli Employers Who Want to Bring Palestinian Workers Back”

    “More than a hundred thousand Palestinians worked in Israel before October 7th. Most can no longer cross the border—and many are now destitute.”

    Early on the morning of October 7, 2023, Abu Naeem, a forty-two-year-old from Ramallah, in the West Bank, finished an overnight shift at a large produce-distribution center in Israel. He showered and went to sleep in a small private room that his employer had built for him. Then he woke to sirens and distant explosions. Somewhere above him, he could hear the cracks of interceptor missiles colliding with incoming rockets. […]

    For the next six weeks, as the Israeli military bombarded and then invaded Gaza, Abu Naeem’s employer persuaded him to stay in Israel, afraid of what might happen if he crossed back to the West Bank. Israel soon barred nearly two hundred thousand Palestinian laborers from its workforce. […] Abu Naeem was able to avoid detection by Israeli authorities only because he spoke fluent Hebrew. He learned how to make himself small, invisible, and useful.

    Before October 7th, a fifth of the West Bank’s labor force was employed in Israel, earning more than double the prevailing wage at home. Palestinian workers were required to obtain permits, but a 2007 ruling by Israel’s High Court awarded them the same labor rights as Israelis. After October 7th, however, the number of Palestinian workers entering Israel each day fell from more than a hundred thousand to well under ten thousand. (Another thirty-four thousand maintain permits to work around Israeli settlements in the West Bank.) Unemployment in the West Bank surged to twenty-nine per cent. A World Bank report on the state of the Palestinian economy described what amounted to an economic collapse. [!]

    The decision to ban Palestinian workers was originally presented as an emergency measure, but as it continued, many business leaders and economists came to oppose it. According to the Times of Israel, a proposal to allow some Palestinian workers back into Israel, in late 2023, was supported by representatives from the Israeli military; from Israel’s security agency, the Shin Bet; and from cogat, the agency responsible for implementing Israeli policies in Palestinian territories. […] More than two and a half years after October 7th, the ban is still in effect, and it no longer reads as temporary.

    Abu Naeem returned to Ramallah in late November, 2023. He has never crossed back into Israel. More than two years later, I passed through Qalandia checkpoint, in northern Jerusalem, so that I could meet him on the other side. He came with Malek and Ihab, two other men who had worked in Israel. We sat at a table together […] Malek, a welder and ironworker from Al-Khalil (Hebron), held his head in his hands until someone suggested he go first.

    Malek said that in Israel he worked on industrial frames and bridges weighing several tons. He earned enough to build a house for his family. Since the ban began, though, he had gone so deep into debt that he was denied access to a loan program established by the Palestinian Ministry of Labor. He described himself as living in hiding, afraid even to travel between Al-Khalil and Ramallah, for fear of being pursued by creditors. He depended on others to support his three daughters and a baby boy. He spoke longingly of izzat al-nafs—the dignity of not having to ask for help. […]

    Hassan said that workers affected by the ban were in an abyss. He had seen families lose access to electricity and water, pull their children out of school, and go days without eating. “Not poverty,” Hassan said. “Something worse.” […]

    Adiv told me that, nowadays, wherever he goes in Israel, he sees newly arrived workers from Asia. They have limited rights, he added, and depend on staffing agencies for their housing and their work. He also said that he has been hearing about Palestinian workers being shot, sometimes fatally, while attempting to cross into Israel. “It’s a catastrophe,” he said. Those who make it to Israel increasingly hide in construction sites, warehouses, and vehicles, moving at night and avoiding checkpoints; they remain vulnerable to anyone who decides to report them. “The longer this continues, the more desperate people become,” he said.

    On the Israeli side, employers described a different kind of collapse. I met Ran Cohen, a fifty-three-year-old contractor from an Israeli settlement near Jerusalem […]

    Cohen’s workers were denied entry to Israel on October 8, 2023, and have not been able to return. He described the ban as a “death sentence” for businesses like his. Without his crew, he was forced to refund clients; he spent months at home, depressed. He did not want to hire Palestinians without permits because Israeli authorities were carrying out inspections; Israeli employers caught hiring unauthorized workers can face heavy fines, arrests, and temporary closures. “This is not a political position,” he said. “It is math.” He’d paid skilled Palestinian workers six hundred to eight hundred shekels a day; foreign workers from third-party staffing agencies cost fifteen hundred. In Cohen’s telling, the work is slower, the quality is lower, and there aren’t enough workers available; the primary beneficiaries are the agencies. Ironically, the result is that homes scarred by war—including the ongoing conflict with Iran and its proxy Hezbollah—are going unrepaired. To stay afloat, Cohen took out mortgages worth millions of shekels, and he began working temporary jobs as a construction-site manager. […]

    More the link.

  103. Reginald Selkirk says

    Massive Saharan dust clouds to approach Florida, Gulf this weekend

    It’s Saharan dust season in the Atlantic, the time of year when massive clouds of dust from Africa’s Sahara Desert are carried westward by winds, sometimes traveling thousands of miles to the United States.

    Satellite photos from Friday morning showed two dust plumes, one in the western Caribbean and one just east of the Windward Islands.

    Unhealthy air quality was observed between Cuba and Venezuela, where dust concentrations are highest.

    AccuWeather meteorologists say most of the dust is likely to stay aloft rather than fall to the ground when it arrives in the United States, which is good news for health concerns. However, the airborne dust can cause hazy conditions and sometimes colorful sunrises and sunsets.

    “Some of the dust from the first cloud could drift over South Florida this weekend and South Texas early next week,” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Dan Pydynowski said. ..

  105. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    I went to Trump’s Great American State Fair. It was bleaker than I expected.

    In preparation, the National Mall has spent weeks cluttered with half-built plywood structures […] Road closures and bus detours will choke downtown through mid-July. The fanfare conflicts with the usual dates of the locally beloved Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which has moved its iconic marketplace to the Arts and Industries Building instead. Surely, I thought, this thing ought to be worth the fuss.
    […]
    “Nobody’s laughing at us anymore,” said the man filling in for Milli Vanilli.
    […]
    I decide to check out the state exhibitions […] The main attraction turns out to be Florida, where a line snakes out the door. […] But I’m greeted by a wall of “Famous Florida Men and Women” that boasts Jimmy Buffett and Tom Petty, two famously anti-Trump celebrities, and the rest is a children’s museum-style explainer of the state’s wildlife and agriculture. The final room smells like oranges, which is the most whimsical touch I will encounter all day.
    […]
    “God forbid you die today,” is the salutation of a young man who approaches me […] “Are you absolutely sure you would go to heaven?” […] he’s […] with an evangelical Christian group […] founded by a pastor who was arrested in 2020 for refusing to close his megachurch during the Covid pandemic. The ministry will be around the District through mid-July, an effort “to shake a city, to plunder hell and populate heaven.”
    […]
    I’m halfway to the main stage when I realize the featured performer is an evangelical preacher. […] He hasn’t been introduced and there is no signage, so I ask the handful of other spectators if they know who he is. They don’t.
    […]
    I step into the food hall, where I see a single vendor: Express Hibachi, which is an unusual name for a purveyor of personal pizzas and chicken Caesar salads.
    […]
    Two men, one donning a “Stand for the Flag, Kneel for the Cross” T-shirt […] had a hard time finding the entrance; they wandered for more than an hour before they found the security line. I tell them I got lost, too.

    Anjali Dayal:

    I don’t think I’ve ever seen real photos of real things that look so much like AI slop before. Like, why does Lady Liberty have wings? And a shield? Is she charging at us with that torch? Are those eagles’ wing feathers stacked like Canadian bacon? Are they wearing codpieces? Are they plastic? [Photos]

    Rando 1: “Lady liberty’s thighs are OUT. They yassified Lady Liberty.”

    Rando 2: “Of course he gave the Statue of Liberty clone huge honkers, lol.”

    Rando 3: “Straight winged eagle detected. [Photo]”

    Rando 4: “There is no amount of money you could pay me to get on a ferris wheel at a trump-planned event.”

  106. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Aaron Rupar:

    Kim Jong Un thinks this is a bit much.

    Trump: The USA’s new passport, which says “Welcome, but be good!”

    [Photo: Scowling with fists on desk, in front of the Declaration of Independence and beside founding fathers, on a flag background]

    Commentary

    Where does it say that?

    Aren’t US passports issued to citizens so they can leave the country?

    Yup, we’re a very stupid society.

    Thinly veiled threat to those who just naturalized.

    Does… does he not know the difference between a passport and a visa?

    The assholes who would most want this passport are also the same assholes who would be least interested in visiting another country.

    Any customs agent in the world will instantly know they are dealing with a special brand of American idiot.

    This would make “sense” as like… the stamp in a FOREIGN VISITOR’S passport.

    USAToday – Trump passports explained

    the first living president featured inside a U.S. passport […] limited to approximately 25,000-30,000 copies
    […]
    The special anniversary passports featuring Trump’s image will only be available at the Washington Passport Agency for American citizens applying for a new passport or renewal—while supplies last at no additional cost—beginning in July. They will not be available at any other locations, nor will they be available online. […] While they will be the default option […] anyone can opt out and get the standard US passport edition.

    Images at the article are different: just his scowling face without the desk.

  108. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    United Auto Workers (UAW) becomes largest US labor union to divest from Israel

    The constitutional amendment is expected to divest at least $400,000 from Israel bonds. […] In 2024, the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) voted to divest its pension fund from companies linked to Israel. In 2015, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) became the first US union to formally endorse the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

  109. StevoR says

    A disgrace to my state & dangerous reichwing klown has spewed out this shit FWIW :

    Liberal senator Alex Antic has been roundly condemned for spreading “dangerous ideas about vaccination”, after suggesting the arrival of bird flu was a way for pharmaceutical companies to sell products.

    After two cases of the deadly H5N1 bird flu strain were detected in migratory seabirds along the Western Australian coast over the weekend, the South Australian senator said .. (absurd Conspiriacist lies -ed.)

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-25/alex-antic-comments-on-vaccinations-bird-flu-condemned/106842322

  110. StevoR says

    Well, this is kinda telling, also didn’t think Felon Muskrat was sucha fan of multilingualism :

    Elon Musk tweets a lot but one recent post stuck out.

    “我的儿子正在学习普通话,” he wrote.

    “My son is currently learning Mandarin.”

    The Musks are not the only wealthy family with an interest in learning China’s official language Some of Donald Trump’s grandchildren are also learning it, as are the children of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Prince George, the eldest son of Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales, reportedly learnt some Mandarin in primary school.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-27/musk-trump-bezos-zuckerberg-children-learning-mandarin/106813224

  111. StevoR says

    This does not happen very often. Spectacular desert toocean transfromation and life out of usual utter aridity :

    In parts of central Australia, it has been one of the wettest years on record. Rains have flooded stations and communities, cut off roads and at times left people stranded. But after years of drought, the rain has brought welcome relief for many. And it is helping feed one of the outback’s biggest spectacles. Australia’s largest lake, Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, is the most full it has been in decades.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-27/simpson-desert-and-outback-transform-with-kati-thanda-lake-eyre/106813222

  113. StevoR says

    ^ Yeah. Metaphor there.

    If only people had chosen wisely.

    If only things had been different and better.

    So near yet ..yeah. For pities sake..

  114. Reginald Selkirk says

    To MAGA Evangelicals Mormons Will Always Be Heretics

    The Pentagon may have reclassified the LDS Church as not-not-Christian but the whole episode highlights the issue of Mormons in the MAGA fold.

    It’s really hard to sympathize with Senator Mike Lee, whose entire persona seems to have gravitated to online trolling of others from a most aggressively perspective. His X handle is @BasedMikeLee, so he’s not trying to hide from that reputation. But when the Pentagon released their new religious coding guidelines, he got an unexpected taste of being on the other side of the trolling.

    The Pentagon didn’t remove the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from the list in its coding updates, but it clearly doesn’t consider them Christian. Senator Lee took to X to object, leading to an incessant assault from internet trolls explaining to him that Mormons aren’t Christians, a back and forth in which he repeatedly urged them to read the Book of Mormon….

    Now, the outcry seems to have worked, as the coding will be revised after personal appeals were made by LDS legislators to Trump and Hegseth. As Senator Chris Coons of Delaware responded, “The state, let alone the Pentagon, shouldn’t be deciding who is or is not a Christian. Glad this has been revised.” And Mike Lee, in response, posted this on X: …

  119. Reginald Selkirk says

    Hit South African show gets the world talking about polygamy and cheating

    One of Netflix’s hottest and sassiest new dramas has not only South Africa but the world talking about marriage, betrayal, revenge and the contentious issue of polygamy – the practice of having more than one spouse at the same time.

    The Polygamist, a 22-episode Zulu-language series, is about the tangled love life of wealthy Johannesburg businessman Jonasi Gomora…

  120. Reginald Selkirk says

    Knesset to hold marathon discussions next week to fast-track Basic Law on Torah study

    The Knesset House Committee is scheduled to hold three marathon sessions next week to advance the coalition’s controversial proposed Basic Law to declare Torah study a foundational value of the State of Israel.

    The bill is being promoted by the ultra-Orthodox parties to shield draft evaders from sanctions and prosecution. Absent a constitution, Basic Laws in Israel have the highest legal status in the country…

    See the Bible verses and books Texas public school students will now be required to read

    The State Board of Education on Friday approved a first-of-its-kind reading list, which lays out dozens of books, Bible verses and stories that every public school student in Texas will have to read.

    The book list makes Texas the only state in the country to issue its own literature requirements, rather than leaving the choices up to teachers or districts. The board crafted the list to comply with a 2023 state law calling for “at least one” book per grade level, though the proposal passed Friday was far more expansive, requiring as many as 25 texts in some grades.

    At least a dozen of the nearly 200 titles total are Bible passages and stories, from David and Goliath in second grade to the Book of Job in tenth grade…

  121. says

    Epstein benefactor Leon Black subpoenaed mid-interview after ‘stonewalling’ Congress

    Leon Black’s voluntary interview in the House Epstein probe abruptly ended with subpoenas after he refused to answer questions about alleged NDAs with women linked to Epstein. Legal analysts Katie Phang and Joyce Vance join to discuss that and more Epstein developments.

    Video is 10:07 minutes

    ‘Deep state took down Nixon’: JD Vance rewrites Watergate

    “That’s a pretty telling confession from Vice President JD Vance,” says Jacob Soboroff on Vance complaining that the “deep state,” and not constitutional safeguards, took down Richard Nixon.

    Video is 5:52 minutes

  122. StevoR says

    An old song but it sings so very much truth and powerfully well :

    Come Home (Cardinal Pell) – Tim Minchin -Under 5 mins long.

    Pell never sued.

    Pell was convicted by a jury who heard all the evidence.

    Convicted beyond reasonable doubt.

    Pell was really guilty of many more crimes than just the ones heas convicted of

    Pell shoulda died in jail. .

  123. says

    Trump Rails Against ‘Mutilization’ and People Being ‘Hatched to Death’ in Grim Speech at Evangelical Forum

    […] Donald Trump painted a terrifying and, at points, somewhat incomprehensible vision of the world in a lengthy speech at the Evangelical Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority Conference in Washington, D.C. on Friday afternoon.

    The remarks were littered with malapropisms and hyperbolic threats […]

    Early on in the speech, which stretched to nearly an hour, Trump touted his administration’s efforts to push back on what he described as “transgender insanity” and “radical gender ideology” from the left. He then launched into his own version of the many attacks that Republicans have fired at Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico that have sought to cast his support for the LGBT community as an exaggerated and radical position.

    As Trump took on Talarico, his efforts to describe the largely non-existent GOP nightmare of children getting gender reassignment surgery stumbled through a misspoken version of the term “mutilation.”

    “We have a man running in Texas who thinks there are six genders,” Trump said, adding, “Can you believe it? Six genders? And we officially banned the chemical and surgical mutilization of our children.”

    […] “The Dumocrats, they are horrible. They want to resume the transgender mutilization of our children,” he said. “They want to restart the war on Christians and churches. And, as you saw with the communists elected in New York City recently — they’re communists, they’re not social Democrats — they want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life.”

    […] Trump repeatedly referred to all of New York’s newly installed progressives as “communists” and dubbed them “this new breed of sick people.” He also compared them to foreign terrorists.

    “These ruthless communists will attack all religions, but in particular Christianity. They always do. They’re after Christianity more than any other religion,” Trump said. “All communist countries attack religions violently. … it’s part of their deal. As you know, we recently struck Nigeria and largely ended the slaughter of great Christian populations.”

    The U.S. military operations in Nigeria targeted militants affiliated with the ISIS terrorist group. While the Trump administration has accused the group of mass killing Christians, the Nigerian government has rejected that narrative and said the militants target victims more indiscriminately. As Trump shared his version of events at the Evangelical forum, he strangely described people being “hatched” while articulating a graphic vision of the violence.

    “They have a great Christian population. They were being butchered, butchered,” said Trump. “Thousands and thousands of people were being killed; children, women, old people, just being slaughtered, hatched to death.”

    Trump also referenced Mamdani’s successful push to enact a rent freeze on certain rent-stabilized apartments in New York City. This too, he painted in exceptionally grim terms.

    “What the mayor doesn’t say is that these buildings will soon turn into ghettos and slums and that everybody will continue leaving New York. And as this spreads throughout the country, very much like an uncontrollable form of cancer, the country itself will be taken down. It’ll be third world strictly. Third world,” Trump said.

    While spinning these terrifying depictions of the country’s future, Trump also suggested it could all be avoided if Republicans win in the upcoming midterms, which he described as “very vital.”

    Along with pointing to threats from within, Trump turned to his ongoing war in Iran. He recounted the moments when he made the call to launch strikes against that country.

    “We’re gonna have to go to war,” Trump said he declared before correcting himself, “Or go to a military operation, which my people would prefer that I use as a term because war means things that they don’t like. But whether you call it war or not, it is what it is.”

    Trump blamed former President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which was called the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), for necessitating the conflict, as he has since the start. That framework had far stricter conditions and less money going to Iran than many of the various plans Trump’s administration has put forward in negotiations to end the current war. However, Trump said the deal, which he mistakenly called the “JCPOC” before later using the proper terminology, was a “disaster.”

    He framed it as something that put the world on track for massive destruction.

    “Iran would have had a nuclear weapon,” explained Trump. “And then you wouldn’t have Israel, Israel would be gone. I know you have a lot of good fans of Israel in this room. And Israel would have been gone and probably the Middle East would’ve been gone.”

    Along with defending his Iran war, Trump touted his immigration policy. He suggested this had stopped a flood of people — many of whom he claimed without evidence were violent criminals released from prisons — from entering the country.

    “They’d come up from South America and all through Mexico. They’d go all through and they go through jungles in Colombia, really tough jungles too, dangerous jungles. And women would die and women would be raped,” said Trump.

    The president went on to suggest his efforts to curb illegal immigration had led to larger drops in crime. He specifically pointed to Washington, D.C. where he has deployed the National Guard into the streets.

    “DC is now one of the safest, most beautiful cities in the country and just a little while ago … it was a killing machine,” Trump said.

    However, prior to Trump taking office last year, violent crime in the nation’s capital had reached a historic 30 year low.

    […] “The reflecting pool was so beautiful, they tried to destroy it. They cut it up with a box knife and tried to destroy it,” said Trump. “These people are sick. They ripped a scar 350 feet long through the side of the reflecting pool. These are the people we’re dealing with. These are the people that want to destroy our country.”

    Reporting and records indicate Trump has greatly exaggerated the number of people arrested in conjunction with alleged vandalism at the pool. He also has not provided promised video proof for his dramatic claims about the purported damage. The one person charged so far has said he simply picked up a floating piece of paint.

    […] “The biggest thing we have to do is we have to stop this horrible thread of cancer that’s permeating our country called communism. We have to stop it because that’s what it’s about.”

    After giving the religious crowd almost an hour of lies, fire, and brimstone, Trump offered up a solemn prayer.

    “We have to stop it,” he said of the supposedly cancerous communists, before adding, “And we ask that God will continue to bless the United States of America.”

  124. says

    Unhinged Trump Calls US Progressives Communist ‘Animals’ Who Will ‘Close Your Churches’ and ‘Kill Your People’
    https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-communism
    article also says:
    Despite Trump’s claim that the Democratic Party establishment isn’t fighting back against ascendant progressives and democratic socialists, Axios reporting from Thursday suggests centrist Democrats are, in fact, gearing up to do so—and over a dozen have endorsed the “Promise to America” manifesto, https://www.thepromisetoamerica.com/ emphasizing their support for capitalism, “fiscal discipline,” and law enforcement. Ripping the manifesto, D’Arrigo said: “’Centrism’ is just performative compromise devoid of critical thinking, policy, or ideology. It’s a political vehicle that gives permission to do nothing in service of protecting a status quo that benefits large corporate donors and special interest groups who fund both parties.”

    Our organization has always supported progressive humanist policies for their honest, decent, caring ideals. I support DSA and I condemn the corrupt DNC for their dishonest, predatory, corporate, crapitallist values.

  125. says

    Followup to comments 96 and 99.

    Iran launches retaliatory strikes on Bahrain after latest US attacks

    Iran launched a drone attack against Bahrain early Saturday, hours after the U.S. military carried out strikes on Iranian military sites.

    Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, said it was attacked by a number of Iranian drones and condemned the latest strikes as a blatant violation of its sovereignty. It accused Tehran of “destabilizing security, exporting chaos and undermining regional stability.”

    […] The attack appears to be in retaliation to the U.S. Central Command operation on Friday, which zeroed in on Iranian missile and drone storage sites and coastal radar locations. […]

    The Islamic Republic’s foreign ministry accused the U.S. on Saturday of breaching the ceasefire and said its military would “defend the country’s sovereignty, security, and national interests with all its strength,” according to Reuters.

    The United Arab Emirates released a statement on Saturday saying it “strongly condemns the Iranian aggressive attacks on Bahrain using drones.” […]

  126. says

    Followup to comments 99 and 125.

    Hezbollah rejects U.S.-brokered Israel-Lebanon security deal as ‘surrender’

    “The framework ⁠agreed on Friday provides for a phased Israeli withdrawal from some ​parts ⁠of southern Lebanon, alongside the deployment ‌of the Lebanese army.”

    Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem rejected a U.S.-brokered security agreement between Lebanon and Israel on Saturday a day after it was signed, describing it as a surrender to Israel.

    In the ⁠latest example of ongoing hostilities despite repeated ceasefires and agreements, Israel launched a drone strike in Lebanon’s south. [Of course.]

    More than a million Lebanese have been driven from their homes by a conflict that has run in parallel with the wider Iran war. ⁠Hezbollah and Iran say Washington ​pledged ⁠to end hostilities in Lebanon as part of its memorandum of understanding signed two weeks ago to end the wider war.

    The framework ⁠agreed on Friday provides for a phased Israeli withdrawal from some ​parts ⁠of southern Lebanon, alongside the deployment ‌of the Lebanese army. But Israeli forces would be permitted to remain in an expanded security zone for the time being, pending further implementation.

    In ‌a statement, Qassem called it “null and void”, ‌and accused the Lebanese government of making unilateral concessions and undermining Lebanon’s sovereignty.

    He criticised provisions linking Israel’s withdrawal to Hezbollah’s disarmament, saying they effectively legitimised Israel’s military presence and crossed “all red ⁠lines”.

    […] Lebanon’s state news agency said an Israeli drone struck Nabatieh al-Fawqa on Saturday. The area is outside the security zone shown on a map published by Israel of the territory its troops will continue to control.

    […] Qassem said the Iran-U.S. memorandum of understanding reached earlier this month, ‌which guarantees Lebanon’s territorial integrity, ​should serve as the basis ‌for ending the conflict, rather than Friday’s ​Washington agreement.

  129. Reginald Selkirk says

    A new Israeli technology used at Rambam Hospital helped free a man from dependence on painkillers

    Doctors at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa have successfully treated their first Israeli opioid addiction patient using an experimental noninvasive brain technology, easing him through withdrawal in just 20 minutes.

    H., a 40-year-old family man from northern Israel, was injured in his neck several years ago. Because of the injury, he relied on painkillers and eventually became addicted to them.
    …
    During the innovative treatment performed at Rambam, the team of specialists at the Haifa medical center intervened in the electrical activity of an area of the patient’s brain called the nucleus accumbens, the core of the brain system responsible for feelings of satisfaction, pleasure, and reward. The treatment, based on technology from the Israeli company Insightec, is similar to the one used to treat symptoms of essential tremor and Parkinsonian tremor, under MRI control.

    In this case, the treatment was carried out with the help of a new technology that performs noninvasive neuromodulation, without heating or burning tissue, and allows stimulation in the same area of the brain to increase or suppress activity…

  130. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/nobody-wants-these-goddamn-data-centers

    “Nobody Wants These Goddamn Data Centers. Trump’s Blowing $17.5 Billion On Nukes To Power Them”

    “Maybe the nuclear plants will all come online within a decade, on budget. Maybe atomic pigs will fly!”

    Americans are really, really not thrilled about the prospects of hundreds of new data centers being built so that AI can take their jobs, raise electricity rates, strain the grid, pollute the atmosphere, and suck up all the water. A recent Gallup poll found that 71 percent of Americans said they would oppose an AI data center being built near them, with just under half (48 percent) saying they would “strongly oppose” such a development. What’s more, opposition to massive data centers crosses party lines, with more than half of self-identified “conservative Republicans” opposed (compared, to be sure, to nearly three-quarters of “liberal Democrats” who also oppose building data centers).

    Support Data Centers, Lose Elections

    In Utah, hardly a bastion of wokeness, the Republican president of the state Senate, J. Stuart Adams, was turfed out of his long-held seat Tuesday thanks in large part to his support for a huge data center project. He lost the Republican primary to Stephanie Hollist, who appealed to voters angry over state and local officials who, like Adams, approved a “hyperscale” data center project called “Stratos” on 40,000 acres in Box Elder County, about 60 miles north of Salt Lake City. It’s not quite an evil James Bond-type corporation name, but close enough.

    The New York Times reports that opponents of the data center “worried about how much energy it would consume and how its water usage would affect the drought-stricken Great Salt Lake, and accused state officials of granting the project generous tax breaks [!] while ignoring the public’s concerns.” This is only the most recent election in which voters have chucked out state and local incumbents who supported new data centers.

    In Box Elder County, two Republican county commissioners who voted to approve the project also lost their primaries. Both attributed the loss to their support for Stratos. The commission also recently voted to approve a 180-day (pfft!) moratorium on new data centers in the county […]

    Fun fact: It doesn’t seem that Adams won many voters over by barraging them with ads featuring AI-slop videos, not even the one showing him wrestling a lion [LOL], or the one accusing Hollist of taking money from George Soros. […]

    Finally Some Bipartisanship!

    As more and more data centers are planned, the backlash is also building; as Grist reports, right now, the US has “more than 800 group working across 49 states to oppose some 1,500 planned data centers.” [Wow. That’s a lot.] […] A recent report from Data Center Watch found that in the past two years, US data center projects worth $64 billion have been blocked or delayed by citizen activism, and that’s just in the 28 states tracked by the project.

    […] Elon Musk’s xAI is being sued for allegedly violating the Clean Air Act by setting up unpermitted gas turbine generators in Mississippi to power the company’s data center in nearby Memphis, Tennessee. […]

    Even in regulation-averse Texas, Gov. and friend of toxic chemical plants Greg Abbott has urged the state Lege to aggressively regulate the data center industry […]

    Pause AI Data Centers Until We Figure Out What The Hell Is Going On

    At the national level, this week Rep. Frank Pallone (D-New Jersey) called for “a national AI data center moratorium until we can find a way to ensure they don’t harm our nation’s air, water, and power bills.” Pallone isn’t the first Democrat to propose such a moratorium; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) went there before him. But as the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Pallone has the most direct sway over energy legislation. […]

    Pallone said Wednesday that “Promises by the data center industry and Big Tech that these facilities will bring down costs have fallen flat,” […]

    What’s Trump Doing? Throwing $17.5 Billion At New Nuclear Plants For AI

    In response to the allegedly insatiable demand for new electricity (which like other forecasts about new tech, may be exaggerated), the Trump administration this week announced a plan to offer $17.5 billion in loans to build 10 new giant nuclear reactors. […]

    Hilariously, the Associated Press story cited with a straight face the administration’s fantasy that all 10 reactors “could begin construction by 2030 and become operational in the mid-2030s.” […]

    The AP does at least note that the only two large commercial reactors built in the US since 1990, at Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle, were “completed years late and billions of dollars over budget.” But the idea with the new loan program is to create some economy of scale by building all 10 of the new reactors using the same design as at Vogtle, Westinghouse’s giant AP1000. […]

    Out of seven proposals from utilities and energy companies, the Energy Department will pick five, each of which will have two reactors per site. The loans will cover the purchase of nuclear equipment that needs long lead times to manufacture, but won’t cover the actual plant construction, which will be paid for by investors and then by ratepayers. Unlike previous nuke plants in the US, the reactors will be jointly owned by the utilities and by Westinghouse.

    As ProPublica reported earlier this year, there are many, many reasons to be skeptical of the Trump administration’s rush to build lots […], especially given the cavalier attitude of some of the DOGE lackwits who have been chopping away at regulations that are supposed to keep nuclear energy safe. Some of the top people installed by Trump at the Energy Department have virtually no experience with nuclear energy; instead, they’re close to big-money tech bros who want to move fast and break atoms. […]

    However, it’s also worth noting this counterpoint from Heatmap News founder and editor Robinson Meyer. He writes that if the new nuke loans actually work out as proposed — a huge “if” since we’re talking about the Trump administration — this isn’t an entirely crazy way to build up new nuclear energy. In other countries like France and China, using a common plant design has increased safety and kept costs down. And the two European countries with the lowest-carbon grids, France and Sweden, rely on nuclear for much of their energy.

    Of course, nukes are far from the only way to green a grid and meet new energy demand for data centers. Clean energy ubernerd David Roberts has been beating the drum for meeting all that demand through building greater flexibility and efficiency into the power grid, so we make better use of the power generation and storage we already have, and by requiring data centers to shift their operations to make more efficient use of the energy they consume. He makes a powerful case that we can “meet this massive load growth without abandoning our decarbonization goals.”

    Robinson also points out one of those Unintended Consequences that Trump, Wright, and company may not have noticed, so please don’t shout about it too much:

    I hesitate to praise the project’s climate bonafides at the risk of discouraging the Trump administration, but it is worth noting that if this project were to succeed, it would be one of the largest state-assisted build-outs of zero-carbon electricity in recent American history. But it would still take some time to arrive: These reactors aren’t forecast to come online til 2035.

    Beyond that, he notes that the new loan program undercuts all the ballyhooed tech-bro excitement around “small modular reactors” that were supposed to revolutionize the nuclear industry by allegedly making it possible for data centers to simply truck in reactors producing a few hundred megawatts to power their operations. Instead, the Energy Department program pushes massive investment in the AP1000, a huge reactor that can power cities (or a few data centers that each have the power demand of a city). In a sense, it’s the big, proven reactor design that’s being made modular and sort-of mass-produced. […]

  131. says

    Wildfires rage across the Southwest as officials warn of ‘extremely critical’ conditions

    “Low humidity and high winds have fueled the largest fire in the region, the Cottonwood Fire in Utah. The state has restricted firework displays over the holidays.”

    Dangerous fire conditions in the Southwest are threatening to worsen blazes in Utah, Nevada and New Mexico […]

    The National Weather Service warned Saturday that gusty winds and dry air have created an “extremely critical risk” of fire weather — the agency’s highest threat level — across the Great Basin and Four Corners regions. […]

    The Cottonwood Fire in Beaver County, Utah, now stretches more than 92,000 acres and remains zero percent contained after five days. […]

    Alyssa Mason, a spokesperson for the fire’s emergency management team, said there is no estimate yet for when the fire will be contained. Vegetation in the area has been drying since March, following record high temperatures and record low snowpack over the winter […]

    Several smaller fires in Utah have also prompted evacuations, road closures or power shutoffs. […]
    With the fires spread out across the state, emergency response teams could use more personnel, said state forester Jamie Barnes. […]

    The National Weather Service Salt Lake City office issued a “particularly dangerous situation” red flag warning on Thursday, a designation reserved for exceptionally rare, life-threatening weather events and a first for the city. Wind gusts up to 50 miles per hour are expected Saturday.

    Utah Gov. Spencer Cox has restricted fireworks statewide through July 5, limiting Fourth of July displays to select areas. […]

    In Sandoval County, New Mexico, the McCauley Springs Fire has burned since Wednesday and remains zero percent contained at 722 acres. The Jemez Ranger District of Santa Fe National Forest, where the fire is active, has been temporarily closed to campers and visitors. A YMCA summer camp was evacuated Wednesday.

    In Lincoln County, Nevada, The Grapevine Fire is zero percent contained and spans roughly 26,000 acres, forcing the temporary closure of Beaver Dam State Park on Thursday. The nearby Kane Springs Fire is approximately half contained at around 17,000 acres.

    Arizona’s Pocket Fire, burning north of Sedona for more than a week, shows no sign of letting up. […]

    Unless conditions improve significantly, Arizona Public Service said it would begin temporarily cutting power in high fire-risk areas around Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon as early as 10 a.m. local time Saturday. Roughly 8,000 customers would be affected.

  132. Reginald Selkirk says

    The BBC shuts down its longwave radio service.

    The oldest service in the BBC’s portfolio has sent its last broadcast. Keeping the longwave signals flowing has become increasingly expensive, and very few rely on the tech now that streaming is widely available, and VHF radio and satellites have largely replaced longwave.

    On June 27th the BBC will stop broadcasting Radio 4 Long Wave. It blames the cost of maintaining out-of-date technology. Droitwich uses two metre-high ceramic and metal valves, which are no longer made. Almost no one in Britain will notice. But it is the first nick in what the broadcaster hopes will eventually be a slashing of expensive radio and TV transmissions. – The Economist

  133. Reginald Selkirk says

    Judge puts 2nd Dan Sullivan back on ballot in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race

    A Superior Court judge says the Alaska Division of Elections was wrong to disqualify Petersburg retiree Dan Sullivan as a challenger to U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan.

    Judge Thomas Matthews said the decision to drop the candidate “was based upon a new, previously unstated, ‘good-faith’ criteria” that’s not in the Constitution or state law.

    “In addition, the (Division of Elections) Director’s assertion that Mr. Sullivan seeks to confuse or misguide voters is not supported by a preponderance of evidence,” the judge wrote in a 32-page decision issued Friday night. “Instead, the Division accepted at face-value the assertions of the complaint, and disregarded Mr. Sullivan’s assertions.”

    The case is expected to be quickly appealed to the Alaska Supreme Court. The Division of Elections has said it has to begin printing ballots on Tuesday at noon.

    Petersburg Sullivan, a retired teacher, shares a first and last name with Alaska’s incumbent senator, Dan S. Sullivan. The challenger, whose middle initial is J., said he filed to run because he’s dissatisfied with the incumbent…

  134. Reginald Selkirk says

    5 million have dropped ACA insurance after Trump and the GOP let prices skyrocket

    Far more people than previously known have dropped Affordable Care Act health insurance for 2026, according to data released Friday.

    Five million fewer people are currently enrolled in ACA marketplace plans compared to the record high reached last year. More than 1 million fewer people picked a plan for 2026, and then 4 million more either disenrolled or failed to pay their premiums and therefore dropped coverage.

    Prices in the market skyrocketed after President Trump and Republicans in Congress failed to extend extra financial help for enrollees last year. The Department of Health and Human Services published a report about the data on its website Friday.

    The report says 19.2 million people are currently enrolled in ACA insurance now.

    At its high, 24.2 million people were in the ACA marketplace in 2025, according to government figures. …

  135. says

    my update to @124: I visited the promise to america site. FIRST, I must admit I am VERY biased against the dnc.
    Their first policy statement is “we are capitalist, not socialist”. That is an obvious intent to exclude and denigrate many democratic congress members and a huge segment of the public (including me). I find the rest of the wording to be mealy-mouthed, generic, moldy apple pie, pseudo patriotic claptrap. They never mention anything about being honest or showing care for, or working to help, the populace, etc. My gag reflex was triggered just trying to read it all.

    However, sticking to factual observation, here is what I found. It is essentially anonymous with only a vague E-mail address at the bottom. In firefox the browser tab identifies it as “PTA” (silly, I always hear pta stands for parent teacher association).
    This site is so open and cares about freedom so much, it did this:
    Firefox blocked the site and warned ‘THIS SITE TRIES TO FINGERPRINT YOU’ https://m.stripe.network.
    Ublock Origin malware blocker said it ‘BLOCKED 15 POTENTIAL MALWARE LINKS ON THIS PAGE’
    So much tracking and malware was blocked by my browser it wouldn’t even let the site show a ‘submit’ button on the ‘sign the promise’ form page.

  136. says

    Just a note, probably nothing anyone here can remedy. There is something troubling going on with wordpress and cloudflare. When ever I refresh this page I get a ‘cloudflare gateway timed out’ screen and it takes multiple tries to reach here.

  138. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    RawStory – Mockery abounds as bad weather cancels Vanilla Ice’s fair performance

    “Due to inclement weather in the area, the Freedom 250 Great American State Fair and FIFA World Cup 2026 Fan Zone will be closed for the rest of the day—Friday, June 26[“]

    A commenter posted photos from the Ferris wheel of the near-vacant field.
    Rando: “I’m glad you got out of there without being trampled by the crowd!”

    RawStory – Confederate flag display at Great American State Fair

    “I stopped by the North Carolina booth […] The state decided not to participate because of the high costs so the booth is sponsored by private orgs,” […] His video panned around the room, showing multiple Confederate flags on television screens mounted to the display’s walls. […] One of the booth sponsors, Mt. Olive Pickle Company, said it was ending its participation at the event.

  139. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Steven Dennis (Bloomberg): “Large chunks of the [National Mall] are now effectively an armed encampment surrounded by tall fencing. In some areas, crowds are herded through security lines to get to features that used to be easily accessible in previous years.”

    Amanda Moore (Journalist):

    “Loitering is not permitted in this area. Please proceed to a designated location. Thank you for your cooperation,” a surveillance machine tells a small cluster of National Guard members as they patrol the fenced off Reflecting Pool in the rain. [Video]

    Commentary

    Gentlemen, you can’t reflect here! This is the Reflecting Pool!

    Please stop enjoying the thing Trump promised would be beautiful.

    “No loitering in the park” is a concept that only makes sense in America and a surveillance machine accidentally telling it to a military force is just the icing on the cake.

    We are defending a symbol by destroying what that symbol represents.

    They’re bringing in hundreds more National Guard troops to have a record level for the 4th of July time, which means the chances of this but even dumber are high and will increase with each passing day.

    galling in context of the pardons for the rioters who broke into the fucking capitol.

  141. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Amanda Moore (Journalist):

    I read the articles and watched the videos, but genuinely nothing prepared me for this. This is unbelievable. My perspective comes from years of working live events across the country. I’ve worked county fairs that were 1,000x better than the Great American State Fair. It’s really bad.
    [Photos]
    The columns on this fake building are something to behold. When they designed this, they didn’t take into account that the ground is not 100% flat. That’s the problem here. [The alcove is] screen printed or something. It looks like horse shit.

    Amanda Moore: “They know it looks like shit bc they made an effort to hide it sometimes. […] For some of these, they [faked the fake] columns […] just screen printed and flat. [Video and Photos]”

    ^ Fake buildings cap the ends of each line of booths.
    https://www.rawstory.com/media-library/image.jpg?id=67052645&width=2000

    Commentary

    In Trump US, buildings hold up pillars.

    I briefly worked for a company that did that sort of thing for trade shows etc. The reason the columns don’t reach the ground is they’re all cut identically which suits conference center floors which are perfectly flat just like the outside world isn’t.

    Careful, that’s load-bearing kindling.
    https://bsky.app/profile/numb.comfortab.ly/post/3mpcpnac6xs2a

    The orange trash can ties everything together.
    Garbage cans that are red, white, or blue exist.

    Someone put finishing nails into it after the veneer was already glued on. [Photo]

    I saw these going up and it felt so surreal because they are right in front of all our national buildings that are actual real works of art. They put up straw versions of marble to cover up the marble!

    Trompe l’oeil requires skill. All Trump l’oeil requires is hiring someone’s brother-in-law to finish your work.

    I was there this week. It was sad. Across the street from this empty lot, the city set up a huge screen showing the World Cup, and hundreds of people were watching and having a good time. The contrast was something. [Photo: Ground shot of sparse visitors]

    The ballroom is gonna look like a lego set with half the pieces missing.

  142. Militant Agnostic says

    From Reginald Selkirk’s link at 137

    In 2022, Business Insider reported that Musk exposed himself to a flight attendant on his jet, rubbed her leg, and offered to buy her a horse if she would give him a hand job. (Note that many men do not have to offer to exchange horses for hand jobs, because there are women in the world willing to have sex with them for free, due to their winning personalities. Musk, lacking such an asset, must resort to equine bribery.) Tesla ended up paying the woman $250,000 to keep quiet about the incident.

    Giving a random person a fucking horse is unlikely to make their life better. You can’t keep a horse in your back yard and let it graze on your lawn – they need more food than that.

  143. StevoR says

    Scott Manley here on NASA’s Project Hail Mary – Last Minute, High Risk, High Reward Rescue Mission for the Neil Gehrels Swift Gamma-Ray Observatory. Under 15 mins long. Set to be launched on 30th June if all goes well.

    See also via : https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2025/10/01/nasa-awards-30-million-to-katalyst-space-technologies-to-rescue-500-million-satellite/95080/

    Up in the quiet darkness of low Earth orbit, a satellite known as the “Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory” is fighting a losing battle. Launched in 2004 to chase down the universe’s most violent fireworks – gamma-ray bursts – Swift has faithfully delivered two decades of science.

    But now, with its orbit eroding under the subtle drag of Earth’s upper atmosphere, the spacecraft may not survive until its intended twilight. So, NASA has turned to a bold new approach: rescuing a satellite that was never built to be rescued.

    However, something has to be done, according to people overseeing the project. Swift is described as “a $500 million space telescope” which is currently at risk of uncontrolled deorbit by late 2026, so the $30 million NASA is spending to rescue it not only seems reasonable, it’s also forward-thinking because new technologies and techniques may emerge for saving other defunct satellites that float around the Earth as debris could either be fixed or disposed of safely.

    As well as this NASA page too : https://science.nasa.gov/missions/swift/swift-boost-mission/partners-nasa-ready-for-june-launch-of-swift-boost-mission/

    A mission to raise the orbit of NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is poised for launch no earlier than Tuesday, June 30, 6:23 a.m. EDT (10:23 p.m. UTC+12), from Kwajalein Atoll, part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific Ocean.

    A robotic servicing satellite called LINK, built by Katalyst Space, will blast into orbit on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket. LINK will rendezvous with, grapple, and slowly raise Swift’s altitude over several months, preventing it from re-entering Earth’s atmosphere later this year.

    Source : https://science.nasa.gov/missions/swift/swift-boost-mission/partners-nasa-ready-for-june-launch-of-swift-boost-mission/

  144. StevoR says

    @142. Militant Agnostic : “You can’t keep a horse in your back yard and let it graze on your lawn – they need more food than that.”

    From what I gather horses eat money!

  145. StevoR says

    Researchers have long thought that early humans didn’t live in tropical rainforests, as these places haven’t yielded human fossils and are teeming with dangerous life, including venomous animals, poisonous plants and parasites that would deter early populations.

    But that perspective has been changing over the past few decades. Sulawesi’s ancient rock art is one of several clues that modern humans may have lived in tropical rainforests for hundreds of thousands of years. That would mean modern humans could have been living in these hot, wet regions since soon after the emergence of our species in Africa around 300,000 years ago.

    Understanding how, when and where modern humans inhabited rainforests — and how that shaped our evolution — “may give us an insight into something about what it means to be uniquely human,” Patrick Roberts, an archaeologist and anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and author of the book “Jungle: How Tropical Forests Shaped World History” (Penguin, 2022), told Live Science.

    Source : https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/human-evolution/early-homo-sapiens-may-have-lived-in-rainforests-new-clues-suggest-and-it-could-overturn-our-understanding-of-human-

    Might to click close on a box saying you can’t rad this article to, er, read that article!

  146. Reginald Selkirk says

    It’s a ghost town at Trump’s great state fair as Melania gets an unusual honor

    …
    Meanwhile, one of the attractions attracting attention was a cow named Melania, which Future Farmers of America student Piper Stolipher showcased at the event on Friday.

    When asked about the unusual name, Stolipher told The Washington Post that she and her classmates came up with it while brainstorming patriotic themes connected to the nation’s upcoming 250th anniversary celebration.

    “We thought Melania would be a good idea because it’s the first lady’s name, and the hair colors kind of match,” Stolipher, 15, said. “And it just fit.” …

  151. says

    Swamp. Vomit. Mountain Dew. These are just a few of the comparisons Washingtonians and tourists have drawn to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which filled with algae last week after President Donald Trump’s multimillion-dollar renovation project went awry.

    “It smells worse than it looks. That’s just… it’s not what Trump promised,” said Joe Cribbs, a pedestrian walking near the Reflecting Pool.

    Algae blooms in the Reflecting Pool are not new — the water feature has been turning similar shades of green since its opening in the early 1920s — but experts say the Trump administration’s renovation likely worsened the problem.

    Dr. Peter May, an algae expert and ecologist at the University of Maryland, specifically pointed to three mistakes made by the administration during the overhaul: the color, the water and the season.

    Trump inherited a Reflecting Pool last renovated by President Barack Obama in 2012, during which a light concrete material was used to line the base of the fountain. This allowed the fountain to reflect light and heat away from the water [!] May said. But once Trump directed the National Park Service to paint the pool a dark “American flag blue” — the highlight of his Washington makeover to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary — the temperature of the water rose.

    “It absorbs more light, more heat, and extra heat is a benefit for algae growth,” May said, adding that this algal bloom will likely not be the last one we see this summer.

    That is due in part to the water the park service filled the pool with, the same that comes from any sink in the city. May said the city’s tap water is high in both phosphorus and nitrogen, nutrients that are perfectly safe for people to drink, but also fuel algae growth. Add to that the summer heat — the renovation is set to be finished for America’s semiquincentennial on the Fourth of July — and the monument has quickly become an ideal incubator for the fast-growing flora.

    May said those elements, along with the pool’s shallow depth, makes it “a perfect system for creating an algae bloom,” but that does not mean it needs to stay that way. He said that a natural solution, like the installation of a subsurface wetland near the pool, could filter out the algae-boosting nutrients from the city’s tap water with ease, and for a fraction of what the administration has spent on the renovation so far. [Sounds like a good idea.]

    Dr. Rosalina Stancheva Christova, a professor of aquatic ecology at George Mason University, echoed May’s sentiments in an interview with NPR, citing “shallow, stagnant water, strong sunlight and no shade” for the algae growth.

    […] This week, rows of tall security cameras were erected along the north and south walks of the water feature, increasing the surveillance around the pool ahead of America 250.

    The cameras arrive in the wake of accusations levied by the president that vandals have sabotaged his Reflecting Pool project. Trump alleged that individuals took to the new blue coating with knives, which he said led to the paint coming apart.

    A top park service official reiterated Trump’s claim in a court document filed Wednesday, alleging that the blue sealant “was cut with a sharp knife or razor,” which led to the delamination of the material. The administration has not published evidence to back up these claims, yet according to Trump, there have been six arrests made in connection to the purported vandalism. […]

    “They make up a problem, they make up a solution. He promises it’s going to be $1.8 million. He promises it’s going to be good for 100 years. It balloons to over $15 million. It doesn’t even last one week,” Bob Wegner, a pedestrian visiting the Reflecting Pool, said. […]

    Link

  152. says

    3 firefighters killed, 2 injured while tackling wildfires on the Colorado-Utah border

    Three firefighters died and two were injured while tackling fires on the Colorado-Utah border, the U.S. Wildland Fire Service reported Sunday.

    […] the firefighters had been part of an interagency response to the Knowles and Gore fires on Saturday. […]

    The largest blaze, the Cottonwood Fire, was burning in rugged terrain in southwest Utah. It ballooned Saturday to more than 144 square miles (373 square kilometers) after marching through canyons and mountainsides, destroying part of a ski resort and other summer cabins along the way.

    Authorities in Beaver County began working with fire teams on Saturday to assess the extent of the damage, but no estimates were immediately available. Gov. Spencer Cox in a post on social media called it bleak, but he thanked crews for what he called “several miraculous stops and saves.”

    The cliffs and steep slopes have made the job even harder, said Alyssa Mason, a spokesperson assigned to the fire.

    “It’s hard to get dozers and other heavy equipment into that. It’s hard to get engines into that,” she said. “It doesn’t make it impossible to firefight, but it does just kind of slow things down.”

    Hundreds of firefighters have been arriving in the arid state to battle new starts as well as those that have been growing because of what forecasters called critical fire weather — dangerously low humidity levels, warm temperatures and gusty winds.

    The danger is even higher this year because of Utah’s record-low snowpack and its warmest winter on record. Much of the West is grappling with similar conditions, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

    From Alaska to Florida, crews worked Saturday to corral dozens of fires, including three dozen that were classified as large and uncontained.

    Nationally, nearly 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares) have burned since the start of the year. […]

    The conditions in Utah were critical enough for Gov. Spencer Cox to declare an emergency earlier this week and clear the way for the state to ban fireworks ahead of the July Fourth holiday. […]

    State officials said that over the past week, Utah has seen an increase in wildfire starts, with each fire showing unprecedented behavior. […]

    Colorado Gov. Jared Polis also declared an emergency on Saturday, and authorized the use of the National Guard to tackle the fires.

    Forecasters with the National Weather Service over recent days have been issuing red flag warnings for a wide swath of the West, from California to Arizona and New Mexico.

    […] Parts of northern Arizona were without power Saturday as the utility serving the area initiated a safety shut-off in hopes of lessening the wildfire risk.

    Power shutoffs have become more common in the West as wildfire risk has expanded. It is usually a last resort after utility forecasters weigh factors like sustained wind and gust speeds, available fuels and topography.

    With extreme fire conditions persisting in Utah, Rocky Mountain Power also shut off power lines serving Beaver County and other areas.

  153. StevoR says

    @136. shermanj : “There is something troubling going on with wordpress and cloudflare. When ever I refresh this page I get a ‘cloudflare gateway timed out’ screen and it takes multiple tries to reach here.”

    FWIW, that’s been happening to me a bit lately too – get a message saying timed out and thing saying problem is at hosts end here.

  155. StevoR says

    Researchers have found a new puzzle piece in Mars’ geological history that hints that the Red Planet may have once harbored life. New data from NASA’s Perseverance rover indicates that mudstones in Jezero crater contain a complex form of carbon, the chemical foundation of all known life. It’s the highest concentration of organic molecules found on Mars to date.

    Although the mere presence of carbon isn’t proof that life once evolved on Mars, the location of the discovery adds to the excitement. This “macromolecular carbon” was discovered near other potential signs of life, or biosignatures, touted by NASA with great fanfare in 2025. This geological context adds credence to the case that microbes may have once colonized the Martian surface. The results were published Wednesday (June 24) in the journal Science Advances.

    Source : https://www.livescience.com/space/mars/nasa-rover-finds-record-breaking-trove-of-complex-organic-molecules-on-mars

  156. says

    Beyond denial: How oil execs shaped a landmark climate study, by ProPublica

    It is rare that a single scientific paper shapes how people think about a challenge as daunting as climate change. But one, known as “Wedges,” published 22 years ago by researchers at Princeton University, told an irresistible story.

    It made solving climate change seem possible, even simple. It claimed that the world didn’t have to wait for innovation because it had the tools to start work immediately.

    The trick was to do a little of everything and let the effects add up. Renewable energy, nuclear power and conservation were certainly pieces of the solution puzzle. But so were a slew of steps that involved using oil, gas and coal despite the carbon dioxide emissions they would continue to produce.

    One fix that “Wedges” leaned especially hard on was carbon capture and storage, a technology that promised to grab carbon pollution from smokestacks and other sources and trap it forever underground. Do that enough, and climate change could be curtailed without upending the world as we know it.

    The paper, written by scientists Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, became a phenomenon. Former Vice President Al Gore highlighted it in his Oscar-winning climate change documentary. U.S. presidents from George W. Bush to Joe Biden incorporated ideas from it into policy. The United Nations’ panel on climate change worked it into at least three major reports over more than a decade. It was presented in classrooms at Harvard and MIT and cited more than 3,000 times in scientific papers. […] [video]

    For a generation, people learning how to address global warming were taught the ideas in the “Wedges” paper.

    What they didn’t learn was this: “Wedges” was significantly shaped by the British oil giant BP — one of the single global entities most responsible for causing climate change.

    In 1997, BP abandoned climate change denial. Instead, the company quietly launched a far-reaching effort to intertwine oil company interests and climate science, in part by using its vast resources to shape the research that major universities undertook.

    While its chief executive, John Browne, was rebranding his company as Beyond Petroleum, BP sought out researchers who were already thinking about how to address climate change without replacing fossil fuels. The company found them at Princeton University, where it set about amplifying their work by donating $15 million to start the Carbon Mitigation Initiative. The research program was framed around finding solutions to climate change while keeping fossil fuels in play, focusing heavily on carbon capture.

    The “Wedges” paper was the initiative’s first big swing. And it succeeded beyond anything its authors could have imagined.

    BP executives were deeply involved throughout the paper’s creation, according to an investigation by ProPublica and Drilled. Socolow and Pacala, the authors of “Wedges” and the new center’s co-directors, not only discussed ideas with the company but, in a departure from academic norms, passed drafts back and forth and welcomed extensive feedback.

    Like a book publisher shaping a clunky early draft into a bestseller, an executive at the company suggested the scientists punch up the language, which they did. Browne himself suggested wording that became a part of the title. […]

    “Chaps, I have had a go at rewriting the paper,” Browne’s climate adviser wrote the researchers at one point.

    Then, while the paper was being prepped for publication, BP began aggressively promoting the ideas it contained. Browne touted the framework in a speech as evidence that oil and gas had “sustainable futures” and published an endorsement of “Wedges” in an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine. BP inserted the paper’s ideas into its sustainability reports promoting greater efficiency and natural gas — which it argued offered a low-carbon alternative to coal.

    “Wedges,” whose ideas were turbocharged by the sort of high-level marketing [!] scientific papers rarely get, became a regular part of thinking about climate change in classrooms and boardrooms alike. And as that happened, BP kept pouring millions more dollars into Princeton each year, in part to explicitly advance carbon capture and storage technology and, as internal documents make clear, to get the university’s help in turning the idea into a bona fide government-backed solution. […]

    Socolow and Pacala say they were sincere in their intent to solve climate change in the best way they believed possible, at a time when it was not obvious that wind and solar would succeed the way they have today. The researchers say BP had no control over the scientific content of the paper. They rejected the view that technologies didn’t exist to start solving climate change immediately and hoped carbon capture offered, as Pacala said, a way to make fossil fuels “climate safe.”

    But “Wedges” oversold the readiness of carbon capture and storage, describing it as “already deployed” industrially. Reporting by ProPublica and Drilled has found that even today, the technology faces financial and technical hurdles and is unlikely to ever work at the scale needed to avert extreme warming.

    And the broader solution set that “Wedges” promoted, including expanding the use of natural gas, has meanwhile helped perpetuate a system in which fossil fuels remain the predominant source of energy and the emissions they cause have continued. […] ethicists say the paper may not have been seen as credible or earned its acclaim had the extent of BP’s involvement been fully disclosed.

    […] This is the story of how one of the most influential climate papers in history came to exist thanks to the support of one of the companies most responsible for causing the climate crisis — and one with a deep financial stake in how the technologies described in the paper would play out. It is part of a broader investigation by ProPublica and Drilled into how the fossil fuel industry has helped steer the global response to climate change by pouring billions of dollars into research at elite universities. Since the 1990s, oil companies have sponsored research centers, kept offices on campuses, paid the salaries of scientists and, in at least one case, held veto power over what professors and scientists could study with their money. […]

    “It’s the whole subconscious bias problem,” said Harvard historian of science and corporate influence expert Naomi Oreskes. If “continued funding relies on having this good relationship and having this alignment, you are going to be influenced by it.” […]

    More at the link.

  158. StevoR says

    A new study analyzing more than 11,000 YouTube videos and comments found that online narratives surrounding avian influenza evolved alongside major outbreak developments, including increasing reports of infections in mammals, sporadic human cases and economic consequences. While videos largely reflected scientific and public health information, audience discussions frequently transformed these events into broader debates involving institutional trust, politics, media credibility and alternative interpretations of disease risk.

    … (Snip)..

    ..According to the researchers, the synchrony between real-world outbreak developments and spikes in online activity may create conditions that encourage uncertainty, questioning and the emergence of alternative narratives. Rather than reflecting purely emotional reactions, many discussions centered on skepticism toward institutions, scientific legitimacy and official public health messaging—forms of discourse known to generate high engagement and amplification on social media platforms.

    The findings highlight YouTube’s dual role as both a source of public health information and a space where competing narratives about zoonotic disease risks rapidly emerge and spread. Researchers say that by integrating misleading claims into broader political, ideological and social debates, online platforms may shape public perceptions of health risks, weaken trust in public health authorities and complicate adherence to evidence-based guidance during outbreaks.

    Source : https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-youtube-avian-influenza.html

  159. says

    New York Times link

    “Trump Cut a Billion-Dollar Mining Deal. His Sons Stand to Profit.”

    “An agreement between the U.S. and Kazakhstan has given a group of American investors with ties to the president and the commerce secretary access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten.”

    When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Kazakhstan’s president at the St. Regis Hotel last September in New York, President Trump jumped in by phone as the men sealed a deal on a top priority for Washington.

    During the call, Mr. Trump and his team won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods.

    Ahead of the deal, the Trump administration approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources, which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan.

    It was not only Mr. Trump and Mr. Lutnick who saw an opportunity.

    Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history.

    Within weeks of the St. Regis negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president’s two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, joined with other partners to take a 20 percent stake in a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project.

    Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment company controlled by Mr. Lutnick’s family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity. Such rounds of fund-raising typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.

    The Kazakh deal was ultimately signed on Nov. 6, six days after the investment involving the Trump sons and their partners, which was not publicly disclosed at the time.

    The arrangement is hardly an outlier. One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project, according to federal filings examined by The New York Times.

    All 14 of these companies have either benefited directly from offers of financial assistance from the Trump administration, or have pending permit applications before the Commerce Department, which Mr. Lutnick oversees, The Times found. The total amount of federal funding that the Trump administration has provided or is considering providing to the companies exceeds $8.9 billion, according to public statements by the companies and federal government. [details at the link]

    […] This emboldened mixing of federal policymaking and personal business began shortly after Mr. Trump returned to office last year, when the Trump and Lutnick sons played a role in billions of dollars of cryptocurrency deals as the fathers helped set policies that supercharged the crypto industry.

    Now, the families’ ethically tangled pursuit of profits is extending to the new arms race for critical minerals. […]

    Mr. Althaus is the executive chairman of Kaz Resources and the related company that will mine the Kazakh tungsten deposit, and he remains a shareholder in another critical minerals firm he founded that secured up to $1.6 billion in Commerce Department financing this month.

    He has proved to be a savvy player, soliciting — and receiving — direct support from top-level federal officials, including Mr. Lutnick, in his efforts to secure deals.

    In a series of interviews, he said his discussions with the U.S. government about the tungsten deal started during the Biden administration and did not benefit from any political favors.

    […] The Soviet Union’s collapse interrupted its plans for new mines in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. Tungsten mining in the United States also petered out, with the last operating U.S. mine, in Utah, ceasing production about a decade ago. […]

    Since Mr. Trump returned to office, the federal government has given conditional or final approval to 60 critical minerals projects worldwide backed by $18.6 billion in federal loans, loan guarantees or other financing, according to a count in May by BMO Capital Markets, a leading bank in the sector. That is the largest amount in U.S. history, a bank executive said.

    The Pentagon and the Export-Import Bank, where Mr. Lutnick sits on the board, are among the federal agencies bankrolling the push. The moves have created a modern-day gold rush in the critical minerals industry, as start-ups seek to get a chunk of the federal largess.

    For example, Donald Trump Jr. is a partner at another investment firm that last summer took a stake in a tiny start-up mining company called Vulcan Elements. Months later, the company signed a nearly $700 million deal with the federal government to help finance the expansion of its production in North Carolina.

    […] That project will require a huge investment, which Mr. Althaus estimates will total about $650 million initially and $1.1 billion over the life of the project. According to his firm’s own calculations, the tungsten there might be worth as much as $80 billion.

    His company could not make the project happen by itself. He needed the U.S. government to cut a deal with Kazakhstan at the highest levels, and to pledge financing to make the math work. In return, the United States could get access to an estimated 12,000 metric tons of tungsten a year, about as much as is now imported annually.

    […] The Export-Import Bank and a second federal agency where Mr. Lutnick is also on the board, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, each issued letters of interest last summer to provide Mr. Althaus’s firm with tentative financing for the project. Those loans together could be worth as much as $1.6 billion.

    By the time of the St. Regis meeting, Mr. Lutnick was closing in on securing Mr. Tokayev’s agreement for the deal. That is when Mr. Trump called in.

    “President Trump, Secretary Lutnick and Secretary Rubio all personally got involved,” said Mr. Althaus, who did not attend the closed-door meeting. “President Trump did the final negotiation with President Tokayev for this deal.” […]

    This month, for example, the Trump administration committed to provide up to $1.6 billion in financial support to USA Rare Earth, the other mining company Mr. Althaus founded and in which he remains a shareholder.

    That deal gives the Commerce Department 16 million shares of the company’s stock. Cantor Fitzgerald separately earned millions of dollars in fees by helping USA Rare Earth in a series of deals since last year that ultimately raised $1.5 billion for the company. […]

    After Mr. Trump returned to the White House, Dominari Securities hired Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump as paid advisers, giving them stock now worth about $7 million, representing about 10 percent of the company’s total shares. The firm launched an explicit effort to invest in companies aligned with the president’s agenda, ranging from military drones to critical minerals.

    To carry out the Kazakh tungsten investment, Dominari relied on the sort of complex corporate maneuvering that is a hallmark of its deals. […] Using a subsidiary of Mr. Mann’s nuclear energy company, ASP Isotopes, the group of investors last summer bought a controlling amount of shares in a failing road construction firm called Skyline Builders. That might seem like an odd move, but they did so for a reason — Skyline is listed on the Nasdaq exchange. So the ASP subsidiary now controlled a publicly traded company.

    Dominari and the Trump sons joined this effort through what is known as a Special Purpose Vehicle, which took a stake in Skyline, as was first reported by The Financial Times. The Trump sons have a second small interest in the deal, through an investment they made directly in the ASP subsidiary late last year, according to Mr. Mann.

    […] n December, Mr. Mann approached Mr. Althaus with a proposal for a maneuver known as a “reverse merger,” which would replace Skyline Builders on the Nasdaq exchange with a new entity known as Kaz Resources, Mr. Althaus said. The merger, which will essentially take the mining operation public, was announced in April.

    The listing will allow investors to profit on the Kazakhstan project by trading its stock before any tungsten comes out of the ground. U.S. government backing of such projects often pushes up the stock price, making money for early-stage investors who exit at the right time.

    […] Federal filings suggest that both Cantor Fitzgerald (run by the Lutnicks) and Dominari Securities (partly owned by the Trumps) have earned fees for their work. They were both paid for their services helping executives involved in the series of transactions to raise new capital.

    Mr. Althaus said he was now focused on moving the project toward production, which he hopes will begin by 2030, though there is pressure to speed up the timeline. […]

    More at the link, including photos.

  162. birgerjohansson says

    “Capitalism is based on the constant absorbtion of economic loss by political entities, while economic gain is distributed to ‘private’ hands”.

    Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019)

    Social democracy, or the mixed economy model used by most of Europe after 1945 has arguably kept the worst dysfuntionality under control. But after the English-speaking countries infected the world with neoliberalism ca 1980 we are in a “tail wagging the dog” situation, with especially the banking system in a boom-and-bust cycle.

    Neoliberalism has turned into a pseudo-religion that may not be questioned. While capitalism is a partially self-organizing system, like all such systems it has no agency of its own. It has no ethics any more than a stone rolling down a slope.

    it has very obvious failure modes, but we are apparently supposed to discuss the regulations needed to avoid thus. The last 3 decades climate change has finally been accepted as an existential threat, but at the latest big international meeting Saudi Arabia successfully sabotaged efforts to impose regulations.
    .
    The paid (by “campaign cotributions”) proxies of the corporate entities inside governing bodies have lost the ability to watch out for their own long-term survival.

  163. Pierce R. Butler says

    The Civility-Industrial Complex:

    Dozens of organizations have cropped up promising to foster “civic discourse”, “dialogue across difference” and “viewpoint diversity”. Together, they make up a fast-growing ecosystem that has ballooned, by some estimates, into a $200m a year business … Donors have flocked to finance these initiatives, while universities looking for a fix to relentless controversy have eagerly embraced them.

    … 20 out of the 23 foundations most active in the pluralism and depolarization space also fund conservative policy networks or pro-Israel organizations. … The group mapped civil centers and discourse initiatives that were launched across more than 100 campuses, and found that 70% of them had been accused of suppressing pro-Palestine activism. The researchers argue that while presented as politically neutral, many of these initiatives offer a backdoor way for conservatives to push universities to the right.

    … The civility industry offers a wide range of products: from online webinars to months-long fellowships geared at everyone from incoming freshmen to university presidents. Today, more than 200,000 students across the country have taken “Perspectives”, an online course by the CDI [“Constructive Dialogue Institute”]. Universities like Harvard, Yale and New York University have made it a requirement for incoming students. And some universities have integrated civility efforts with their embrace of artificial intelligence: the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for instance, launched an AI-powered chatbot to help students practice their dialogue skills…

    It seems liars and fascists don’t like people calling them liars and fascists. So rude! (The above story links to a 34-page study on the “civility” movement and its funders.)