Editor’s Note: “Nihilistic violent extremism” (NVE) is a term used to bring together an array of hateful actors who, working online, try to convince people to kill themselves, produce child sexual abuse material, and other hateful actions. Bennett Clifford, a senior threat intelligence analyst at Insikt Group, argues that the term confuses more than it helps—NVE is too vague a concept and encompasses too wide a range of behavior, leading to misunderstanding, poor analysis, and potential response mistakes. – Daniel Byman
Bennett Clifford
It is past time to retire the concept of “nihilistic violent extremism” (NVE). The term was introduced in a U.S. Department of Justice court filing in 2025 and has since been adopted by the international counterterrorism community. But from its inception, it has been analytically suspect, based on a faulty definition, a contradiction in terms, a category error, and several fallacies about the nature of the modern threat actor networks to which “NVE” was intended to pertain. Defining and categorizing violent extremist threat actors is an arduous task—particularly in an era of ideologically fluid threat actors—but the concept of NVE is not doing the counterterrorism community any favors in its efforts to analyze and address ongoing threats.
In the spring of 2025, U.S. federal law enforcement filed court documents that introduced “NVE” into the lexicon of violent extremism-related terminology. The definition presented by the FBI was:
individuals who engage in criminal conduct within the United States and abroad, in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.
You can’t tell me this isn’t a ridiculous fossil fueled country. The temperature now at ~3:26pm in northern scarizona is 115 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade!
All I can hear is the Animals from 1965 singing: ‘We’ve gotta get outta this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do’
@1 Reginald Selkirk wrote about an article on “nihilistic violent extremism” (NVE).
I must posit that individuals that allegedly commit “nihilistic violent extremist” acts are not the big problem. They are ‘small fish’ encouraged and facilitated by the current administration, their cockroach followers, the xtian nationalists and warmongering hateful actors who are the REAL problem.
…
Hybrid seed companies plant fields of experimental seeds modified for specific characteristics, growing the corn each year to determine how the seed will perform. A single tassel can contain millions of grains of pollen which, even in a slight breeze, can fertilize plants a half mile away, ruining an entire field. Removing the tassel eliminates unwanted random cross-breeding. For decades, nearly all corn was detasseled by hand. Precision machines introduced in the last few years now detassel 80% of the corn. The other 20% is still done by people – mostly kids.
…
Detasseling corn was a summer job when i was a teenager. The above is mostly a personal experience article, the technical description isn’t especially good. To get the desired hybrid, the seed companies plant 6 or so rows of the “female” corn and two rows of the “male” corn. The “female” rows must all be detasseled so that they are only pollinated by the corn in the “male” rows.
Reginald Selkirksays
@5
Maybe I assumed too much of the reader. All corn is both male and female, but they are on different parts of the plant. The male flowers are the tassels, at the top of the plant. The female flowers are the ears, which grow lower along the stalk. Wikipedia: corn (Zea mays) plants
In the UK and Europe, corn may mean the predominant crop of the region, but In the USA, corn is synonymous with maize.
The producer wants to cross-breed two varieties of corn to create seed that has some of the best qualities of each variety. But Purdue agronomist Bob Nielsen notes that a corn plant left to grow on its own will pollinate itself. That’s because each plant has a tassel, which contains the male flower that disperses pollen, and the thread-like silks, which contain the female flowers that “catch” the pollen and produce a corn kernel.
The seed corn producer doesn’t want the plants to self-pollinate; he wants to ensure cross-pollination between the two varieties of corn in his field. He hires detasselers because the only way for a detasseled plant to be pollinated is by another corn plant that has a tassel.
Nielsen says designated male plants of one variety and female corn plants of a second variety are usually arranged in a pattern throughout the seed production field of about six female rows (detasseled) and two male rows (pollen providers)…
Early in the morning, my mom or dad would drive my brothers and me out to a weedy soybean field. With a hoe in hand, we’d walk the half-mile long rows removing any plants in the field that were not soybeans. Buttonweed, milkweed, sunflower, morning glory, fox tail, and cockle bur plants are common weeds in Iowa soybean fields. These weeds compete with soybean plants for valuable moisture and nutrients. If they are not removed, soybean yield can decrease, the plants go to seed resulting in a weedier field next year, and the field will look unkempt. A farmer’s tolerance for weeds varies just as much as a person’s acceptance of a messy desk. Some are okay with a few weeds, while others prefer a pristine field…
That’s about how I did it – unless I was working for my aunt. Then we didn’t get a hoe; we wore gloves and we pulled the weeds out to be sure we got the roots.
Even back then, walking beans was very regional. It was common in the area where I grew up, but if you drove through other parts of the state, you would see the taller weeds sticking up out of the soybean fields. The farmers there didn’t do the manual weeding, they just used a combination of herbicides and cultivation (plowing between the soybean rows with a disc plow).
Here’s a tip from my father: if you chop thistles off an inch below the soil level they won’t grow back.
lotharloosays
Finally some fucking good news. You all know what I mean. 🎉
US senator Lindsey Graham, a key Republican who went from a vocal critic of Donald Trump to one of his most loyal allies after Mr Trump became president, has died at age 71.
The South Carolina lawmaker passed away after a “brief and sudden illness,” his office posted on X early on Sunday.
NBC News said emergency personnel had responded to a call about a cardiac arrest at his Capitol Hill home on Saturday night.
An Indian judge has become the target of online abuse and death threats days after she sentenced 14 men to life imprisonment for lynching a man to death.
On 12 June, the additional district and sessions judge of a court in Madhya Pradesh state, Tabassum Khan, found the men guilty of offences including murder, attempt to murder, rioting and wrongful restraint.
The crime took place in 2022, when 50-year-old Nazir Ahmad was transporting cattle at night and was intercepted by a group of self-styled “gau rakshaks” (cow protectors), armed with sticks and rods. Hindus consider cows sacred and killing them is illegal in many states.
The men dragged Ahmad and his two companions out of the vehicle and brutally assaulted them on suspicion of smuggling cows. Ahmad later succumbed to his injuries while his companions survived to tell the court what happened.
In her judgement, Khan noted that the crime was a clear case of mob lynching.
But the verdict has made her the target of religious hate. In the days following the judgement, numerous videos abusing and threatening Khan, a Muslim, surfaced online. The videos implied that Khan had acted against the men because they were Hindu…
The Israeli Spy Behind PragerU’s Plan to Rewrite American Education To Indoctrinate Children
2026 07 12
Alan Macleod MintPress News
PragerU is trying to take over American schools. The right-wing, pseudo-educational group is now an official educational partner in at least ten states, and blitzes children with highly questionable messaging on race, history, and politics. Even more concerning, PragerU is led by former Israeli spy, Marissa Streit, who has stated she uses the tactics and techniques honed by IDF military intelligence on the American people. https://scheerpost.com/2026/07/12/the-israeli-spy-behind-pragerus-plan-to-rewrite-american-education-to-indoctrinate-children/
birgerjohanssonsays
At the moment, Count Binface beats Farage in national polls…
Senator Lindsey Graham died unexpectedly on Saturday, a spokeswoman for the South Carolina Republican confirmed to MS NOW. Graham had just returned from a trip to Ukraine, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
[…] In a social media post, President Donald Trump called Graham “one of the greatest people and Senators” he has ever known and “a true American Patriot.”
Trump told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he spoke to Graham on Saturday around 7 p.m. about the so-called Save America Act, the GOP’s election overhaul bill. The president said there were no signs the senator was not well. “He was like a member of the family to me. It’s very tough, actually,” Trump said.
“I think America has lost a great patriot. Israel has lost a great champion of the American-Israeli alliance,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told NBC. “And frankly, I’ve lost a beloved friend I’ve had for many decades.”
Emergency medical workers responded to a call for “cardiac arrest” at Graham’s home on Capitol Hill Saturday night, according to police scanner audio obtained by MS NOW.
[I snipped comments from other Republican politicians.]
Graham was elected to the Senate in 2002 and was seeking a fifth Senate term in November, after fending off multiple primary challengers. Chair of the Senate Budget Committee, he was a powerful figure in conservative South Carolina politics and a national GOP leader in defense policy and foreign affairs.
[…] McMaster [South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster] will appoint a temporary replacement to fill Graham’s seat until January 2027. South Carolina Republicans will have to hold a primary later this summer to choose a new candidate to replace Graham on the ballot to face Democrat Annie Andrews in November.
[I snipped more comments from Republican politicians.]
Zelenskyy, who met with Graham just on Friday, a day before he died, said on X, “We remained in constant dialogue, and I will miss our conversations. We met twice in just the past week.”
[…] He was one of the so-called “Republican revolutionaries” of 1994, a class of newly elected conservatives who swept Democrats out of power for the first time in 40 years. He eventually became a member of the House Judiciary Committee and served as one of 13 managers prosecuting President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998.
[…] In the 1980s, Graham served as a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps in the U.S. Air Force for six years and later served in the Air Force Reserve while in Congress. Graham’s military service helped inform his foreign policy views, and he remained one of the more hawkish members of the GOP when it came to international conflicts, including the war with Iran. In 2014, he was awarded a Bronze Star Medal for meritorious service.
The white supremacist group Patriot Front brazenly marched in Washington, D.C., on Independence Day. Their faces covered in white ski masks and their eyes obscured by sunglasses, the identically dressed group of men celebrated our country’s 250th anniversary by waving the pro-slavery Confederate flag, chanting about wanting to “reclaim America,” and carrying signs and banners promoting their pro-white racist ideology.
Even in an era where President Donald Trump regularly spouts racist rants from his position as the head of the U.S. government, the Patriot Front display was shocking to millions.
In a television appearance on CNN the next day, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum steadfastly refused to condemn the Patriot Front when anchor Dana Bash questioned him about the racist display.
“I think what they stand for is nothing that I could possibly agree with, but one of the foundational principles of the United States that makes democracy messy is free speech,” Burgum said.
At best, Burgum’s statement was a tepid signal at disagreement. But it was far from a full-throated repudiation of the group’s white supremacy.
Prominent conservative media figures went in an even more absurd direction.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham said the protest was “fake” [oh FFS] and “looks more like Antifa in costume.” Ingraham even added, “No one should be allowed to cover their faces.”
That position is at odds with the tactics being employed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents currently detaining and abducting immigrant families—part of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda that she supports.
Radio show host Joe Rogan has argued that the Patriot Front protesters are “feds” and not a real right-wing protest.
In reality, the Patriot Front is deeply intertwined with the bigoted sentiment that has led Trump to become the leader of the Republican Party and the most prominent conservative figure in America.
The group reportedly launched around 2015, right as the mainstream right and the Republican Party were in the full throes of a racist reaction to the election and subsequent reelection of President Barack Obama, the first Black president in American history.
Patriot Front was among the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 as part of the “Unite the Right” rally meant to reclaim white dominance in America. They were a part of the pro-Confederate, pro-Nazi crowd that Trump infamously referred to as “very fine people.”
To be sure, racism and nativism certainly didn’t pop up out of nowhere in the 2015-2017 era. In addition to the racism intertwined in U.S. history, the modern conservative movement has backed leaders like former President Ronald Reagan, who promoted anti-Black myths about “welfare queens” for years. Before Reagan, there were notorious figures like radio host Father Charles Coughlin, who laced his broadcasts with odious antisemitism.
But the mainstream right preferred to court the support of bigots while also going to great lengths to keep their noxious rhetoric off of the main stage. Republicans were happy to use coded language about welfare and “traditional families,” but full-throated bigotry was usually kept behind closed doors.
After Obama won in 2008, the mask was ripped off. Trump transitioned from the host of a fading reality TV show to a prominent political commentator by pushing the racist and false “birther” conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the United States, and therefore ineligible to be president. He launched his presidential campaign by smearing Mexican people as “rapists.”
Instead of rejecting Trump and denouncing his positions, Republicans and mainstream conservatism embraced him. […]
By the time he was running for reelection in 2020, Trump put the full backing of the American presidency behind the racist extremist group Proud Boys. In his debate with soon-to-be President Joe Biden, he told the group to “stand back and stand by.”
Now in his second term, Trump gave the group even more support. Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, part of a plan to keep Trump in office after he lost the November 2020 election to Biden. Then in January 2025, Trump pardoned him—along with hundreds of other Jan. 6 rioters. […]
Even if Trump’s presidency totally collapses, the fates of the Patriot Front, the Republican Party, and the neo-Nazi/neo-Confederate movements are linked. They are all banding together in infecting the American system of government—and that’s why they marched unimpeded in America’s capital city on the Fourth of July.
It was not the dead senator announcement we expected this morning, but Lindsey Graham, the US senator from South Carolina who went from warning in 2016 that “If [Republicans] nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it” to being one of Donald Trump’s most loyal lap dogs, died Saturday night at the age of 71 after what his office said was “a brief and sudden illness.” We doubt it was a sudden attack of conscience for his career of demanding the US bomb every adversary at every opportunity, or for his epic toadying to Trump.
NBC News reports that a top Graham staffer said there hadn’t been any signs that Graham had been feeling sick before his death. He had been scheduled to appear Sunday on NBC News’s Meet the Press, and if producers hurry they can probably cobble together an AI version of Graham from his 63 previous appearances on the show.
Graham died just a day after visiting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, where Graham told Zelenskyy that Congress was working on toughening sanctions against Russia and Zelenskyy said it would sure be nice if the US could help Ukraine defend itself from Russian missile attacks. (Being Tuff on Russia vis a vis its invasion of its neighbor Ukraine is one of the only times we can think of where Graham’s [warmongering] was warranted.)
At last week’s NATO summit, Trump agreed to allow Ukraine to build Patriot missile interceptors under license. Graham has been one of Ukraine’s more vocal supporters even as Trump has wavered between half-hearted support and willingness to let Russia win so Trump can say he gets a Nobel Peace Prize.
In a statement on Graham’s death, Zelenskyy said, “Lindsey was a true defender of freedom and of the values that make our world safer.” That was a lot nicer than in March 2025 when Graham called for Zelenskyy to resign after Trump insulted the Ukrainian president for not wearing a suit to that disastrous Oval Office meeting. At the time, Zelenskyy offered to grant Graham Ukrainian citizenship so his opinion might at least carry a little weight.
Graham’s weirdly flexible sycophancy toward Trump was a hallmark of his last years in office, what with his apparently clear-eyed 2016 assessment of the danger Trump posed, and his insistence after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Trump’s mob, which led Graham to declare — for five minutes — that he was breaking up with Trump, insisting, “All I can say is a count me out. Enough is enough.” Soon enough, enough was not enough, and he was right back insisting that Trump shouldn’t be impeached, and that his prosecution was a witch hunt.
[…] Over time, it became clear that it wasn’t so much that Trump and Vladimir Putin were blackmailing Graham to keep him in line; instead, Lindsey Graham stayed true to his most deeply held moral principle: Keeping himself in the news and doing whatever he thought would be good for Lindsey Graham.
Now Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell (probably? we are pretty sure?) are dead […]
“Survivors of Iranian attack that killed 6 U.S. troops say generals ignored warnings”
“The drone strike on Port Shuaiba in Kuwait occurred on the second day of the war. Those who were there say they fear no one will be held accountable.”
Seconds after an Iranian drone struck his unit’s operations center in Kuwait, an Army general responsible for the troops inside got up from the floor, grabbed his protective vest and helmet, and shouted an order to a soldier beside him: “Get out!”
It was March 1, barely a day into the U.S. war against Iran. The drone hit in the center of the building at Port Shuaiba, its concussive blast hurling troops into walls and igniting a deadly fire, survivors of the strike told The Washington Post.
Brig. Gen. Clint Barnes ran for the emergency exit and to a nearby protective bunker, even as dozens of men and women under his command remained behind, said the soldier ordered to flee with him.
“We shouldn’t have run out of the f—ing building,” the soldier added, his voice trembling as he recounted how, once the bunker’s steel doors were reopened, he’d tried to head back to the building to help, but Barnes told him to stay put. “I can’t just, like, watch this happen,” he recalled thinking.
At the urging of another officer who was running toward the fire, the soldier said, he went back to the operations center and began calling out through the smoke hoping to find survivors.
The general, the soldier said, did not.
Barnes’s decision-making following the drone strike is one of several episodes that have left those sent to Port Shuaiba embittered toward their leadership, according to this soldier and many others who spoke with The Post as senior military officials finalized the internal investigation of the incident.
Six soldiers with the Army’s 103rd Sustainment Command died as a result of the strike and dozens more were wounded, some seriously. The attack stands as one of the Iran war’s costliest for U.S. personnel and the Trump administration, souring many Americans on the president’s decision to start the conflict and raising questions about the precautions taken ahead of time to protect those put in harm’s way.
This account is based on interviews with 17 people, including soldiers who survived the strike and other firsthand witnesses, as well as people with knowledge of the military’s investigation. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing a fear of reprisal or to discuss details of the military’s examination of the incident.
The Port Shuaiba attack has left those most directly involved with complex feelings of guilt and betrayal, several soldiers explained.
Some said they have questioned whether they did enough to help those who died.
Soldiers who were wounded said the military’s medical system failed them.
Many expressed anger toward Barnes and the commander above him, Maj. Gen. John Hinson, alleging that both leaders ignored intelligence warnings that Port Shuaiba was a probable Iranian target. They are angry that the generals sent troops there despite internal assessments that advised against the move, in part because the facility lacked adequate defenses against drones […]
Several soldiers interviewed for this report said they doubt that the military’s investigation, which was shared with the families of the deceased last week, will hold anyone accountable for moving troops to Port Shuaiba despite known vulnerabilities, or for the lack of medical care some soldiers said they experienced after the attack. […]
As Trump publicly threatened military action, Barnes and Hinson were warned that if Iran’s leadership was eliminated, “all locations where U.S. forces might be located would be targeted, not just military bases,” one of the soldiers said.
“We’ve got to change our plan,” another soldier said he told Barnes months before the attack. “This is dangerous.”
[…] The unit also deployed to Shuaiba without their weapons, two soldiers said. “No one even had a weapon,” one of the soldiers said. “No crew-served weapons, no automatic weapons. We left all of that in the arms room at Arifjan.”
In the days before the strike, multiple soldiers reported seeing quadcopter drones at Port Shuaiba, possibly surveilling them, three soldiers told The Post.
[…] when they arrived in Germany, military medical teams “had no clue we had injured [personnel] on the flight,” said one of the soldiers.
Doctors told them that because the soldiers weren’t recorded on the flight’s manifest as medical evacuees, or listed in the military’s casualty-processing database as seriously injured, the hospital could not admit them, several soldiers said.
They did have their wounds dressed and received some treatment in the ER, but only as outpatients. They were then sent to nearby barracks to wait for a flight to the United States.
[…] After a week in Germany, the wounded troops departed for the United States. Before boarding their flight, each soldier and their belongings had to be weighed on a large scale.
“I told them ‘We have a lot of extra bags’ because we had carried the fallen’s stuff, and the wounded’s stuff,” one soldier said.
When crews weighing their luggage saw the large pile of gear, “you could see it in their faces,” the soldier continued. “Two of them started to cry.”
Grassley is one of the longest-serving elected politicians in U.S. history, having consistently held elected office since [January] 1959. At 92 years, 9 months and 25 days old, he is the oldest sitting United States senator, the longest-serving Republican in congressional history, and the sixth-longest-serving U.S. senator in history.
/Hehe, Wikipedia has markup that dynamically updates that tally.
Eric Columbus: “Chuck Grassley has been in office continuously since before Mike Pence was born.” [June 1959]
Steven Dennis (Bloomberg): “If Grassley wins reelection again, he could be the first lawmaker to serve in 9 separate decades: 50s 60s 70s 80s 90s 00s 10s 20s 30s.”
The city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, welcomed what he called “overwhelming evidence” that his ultra-low emission zone was saving lives. […] an estimated 6,400-8,000 premature deaths in 2019, falling to 3,800-5,100 in 2024. […] The Ulez was launched in 2019 in central London and widened across inner boroughs in 2021. Vehicles that fail to comply with emission standards—typically those with diesel engines from before 2015 or petrol from before 2004—have to pay a daily charge, starting from £12.50 for cars. The overwhelming majority of vehicles driving in the zone, about 97%, are now compliant.
“Voice of America’s exiled journalists find meaning in work outside the newsroom”
“At Trader Joe’s, a coffee shop, a military hospital and a real estate firm, top international broadcasters are embracing second acts they never asked for.”
Danila Galperovich loves everything about working at Trader Joe’s. Well, he used to make much more money as an international broadcaster, but by every other metric, he loves it.
Galperovich adores the customers who come into the store in Arlington, Virginia. He regales them with his knowledge of French wine and learns their stories. He cherishes his co-workers — a former CNN sound engineer, a former police computer specialist, a guy on his third self-published book. And, he says, Trader Joe’s health insurance beats anything the U.S. government provides.
When President Donald Trump took office for a second term last year, Galperovich wasn’t stocking shelves, bagging groceries or dishing out advice on cabernet sauvignon. He was working as a reporter for the Russian service of Voice of America, the U.S. government-run broadcaster tasked with bringing free, fair and impartial journalism into countries where that’s either hard to come by or a dangerous act of resistance.
[…] when Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 ordering VOA’s parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), to be scaled back to “the minimum presence and function required by law,” VOA — under Trump official Kari Lake — put full-time employees on administrative leave. Contractors like Galperovich were immediately cut without any severance, despite doing effectively the same job as the full-timers.
Galperovich, who has a heart condition that requires expensive medication, needed a job quickly.
Galperovich isn’t alone in having scrambled for work. While hundreds of VOA journalists remain on paid administrative leave, where they’ve lingered since March 2025 while litigation against the government continues, hundreds more contractors — including Galperovich — had to reinvent their careers almost overnight, often leaving journalism behind entirely.
Voice of America was started in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda, broadcasting accurate news into occupied Europe to build credibility with its audience. It became a crucial diplomatic tool during the Cold War along with sister organization Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, often the only news sources to break through the Iron Curtain […]
Ksenia Turkova knows the feeling of watching a newsroom vanish overnight better than most. A TV host and reporter in Moscow in the early 2000s, she worked at NTV — once Russia’s premier independent news channel — until it was taken over by the state-controlled gas giant Gazprom. She helped start a channel, but it was shut down overnight. And another — same result. When VOA collapsed last year, old NTV colleagues she hadn’t heard from in years reached out, telling her they couldn’t believe something like this was happening to her yet again — and in the United States this time.
She now works as a Ukrainian medical interpreter at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, helping wounded Ukrainian soldiers navigate treatment through a nonprofit called United Help Ukraine. She also teaches Russian privately and takes on occasional freelance journalism projects.
[I snipped other personal stories.]
[…] But Galperovich isn’t ready to call his 35-year career in journalism over. He still considers it the best profession in the world and says he would take a Russian-language reporting job again in a heartbeat if VOA ever came back in a recognizable way. […]
“The new Trump accounts for kids aren’t the financial boon the president claims”
Free cash aside, the much-touted “Trump accounts” are supposed to give the next generation a huge financial head start in life. But by age 18, the reality looks less like a fortune and more like a down payment on a new car.
[…] Trump has repeatedly used his characteristic hyperbole to describe the wealth-building potential of the child investment accounts created under the One Big Beautiful Bill. Parents, guardians and other authorized individuals can establish a new type of individual retirement account for their children under 18. Children born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028, are also eligible for a one-time $1,000 payment.
During an Oval Office launch event last week, Trump said that infants “who come into the world essentially with no money” will “at a very young age be very rich.” [Trump exaggerates wildly.]
The administration’s own estimate shows that by the time a child turns 18 and can start to withdraw the money, they will have about $6,000.
Except for the $1,000 government seed, this endeavor is a yawn for me.
Any parent, grandparent, auntie or uncle with extra cash to spare already has access to other investment vehicles designed to do what the Trump accounts do.
They could open a custodial investment account, which allows adults to invest in stocks, bonds and mutual funds on behalf of a minor until they reach adulthood.
Alternatively, they could utilize 529 college savings plans, which are tax-advantaged accounts specifically structured to fund qualified education expenses.
Yet, despite the clear, compounding benefits of early investing, only a small fraction of American families — disproportionately those with higher incomes — actually set up 529 plans or custodial accounts.
According to data from the Education Data Initiative, only 32 percent of families use dedicated college savings plans, primarily because 54 percent of parents are unaware these programs exist.
A lot of people have asked me for my take on the Trump account. Strip away the political hype, and here are six reasons this plan won’t create true legacy wealth for low- and middle-income families.
– Some people flat-out hate the name: In discussing the accounts’ launch, Trump claimed, “They said it would sell better if your name is on it.” [I snipped examples]
– Many people said they would open the account just to get the $1,000 but then not make any additional contributions. “We signed our two kids (6 and 4) up when we did our taxes,” another user on r/daddit wrote. “It’s hard to turn down a free investment of any amount for your kids … but my main hesitation now is that I got an email saying that in order to finish setting up the accounts I will need to install the ‘Trump Accounts App’ on my phone … I already don’t trust the administration and I’m very skeptical about installing any app on my phone that has the name Trump on it.” In the case of these accounts, you sign up by going through TrumpAccounts.gov, through your IRS online account under the “Forms” tab or by filling out IRS Form 4547, which, again, is all about Trump — the 45th and 47th president.
– A limited one-time payment isn’t enough. You cannot save money you do not have.
For low- to middle-income families who cannot afford to add even a single dollar to the initial $1,000 seed, the account is projected to grow to about $6,000 by age 18, depending on market performance. That’s a helpful cushion, but it’s a far cry from Trump’s proclamations that kids will get rich. If you’re a family living paycheck to paycheck, finding an extra $400 a month to lock away is a fantasy. […] By relying on families to invest up to $5,000 annually to see meaningful growth, Trump accounts do not solve the fundamental problem of poverty. [!]
– Financial aid bite
At age 18, the account hands control over to the child and morphs into a traditional IRA. This could make a huge difference when filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). Unless there is a rule change, pulling money out of the account to pay for tuition is treated as student income, which the FAFSA penalizes heavily. This can slash financial aid eligibility by up to 50 percent of the withdrawn amount. Parent-held assets such as a 529 plan are only assessed at a maximum rate of 5.64 percent.
– An 18-year-old gets total control of the cash.
– The money is trapped for years: Lower-income families tend to experience a lot of financial emergencies. Expensive auto repairs, surprise medical bills and rent hikes can create a sudden gaping hole in a family’s budget.
The cash in the account is untouchable until the kid hits 18, and, even then, tapping it before age 59½ for anything outside of some exceptions — qualified higher education or medical expenses or first-home purchases — triggers a painful 10 percent IRS penalty on top of standard income taxes. [!] Working families can’t afford to lock away their thin margin of safety in a financial vault they can’t access when a crisis hits.
Sure, take the free money, but don’t expect great riches from setting up this account.
“An O.M.B. Plan to Defund Science—and Anything Trump Doesn’t Like”
“Under a new proposal, Administration officials could deny government grants to any group or project on the ground that it didn’t fit the President’s agenda.” By Elizabeth Kolbert
The list of tactics the Trump White House has used against its perceived enemies is nasty and brutish but certainly not short. It includes indicting them (James Comey, John Bolton), investigating them (Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Gavin Newsom), threatening to investigate them (Chris Christie, Bruce Springsteen), and threatening to prosecute them (top election officials in all fifty states). The Administration has dispatched troops to cities the President doesn’t care for (Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland); sued universities that ticked him off (Harvard, U.C.L.A.); and withheld billions of dollars’ worth of funding from groups and projects that it deems “woke” or wasteful or not in line with Donald Trump’s priorities, whatever those at the moment happen to be.
Recently, the White House announced plans to codify its campaign of retribution. The proposal, which would dramatically increase the President’s power over how federal funds are given out, would hand Trump a “new cudgel” to “advance his partisan agenda and punish political rivals,” a letter signed by all the Democrats in the Senate charged. “The stakes could not be higher” is how the legal website Lexology put it.
The proposal in question comes, not surprisingly, out of the Office of Management and Budget, headed by Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025. Titled, innocuously enough, “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance,” it would replace the current guidance for signing off on government grants, which generally leaves the task to civil servants and peer-review panels. Instead, the final say would go to political appointees. All discretionary awards from the federal government would have to be assessed by senior Administration officials, who could deny them on the ground that they didn’t fit the President’s agenda. Grants could also be terminated at any time for the same reason. [Yes, that is really bad.]
The rules would affect hundreds of billions of dollars in funding disbursed by agencies ranging from the National Endowment for the Arts to the Transportation Department, […] local dance performances to massive infrastructure projects. As Elizabeth Ginexi, a former program director at the National Institutes of Health, noted in a recent Substack post, “Federal grants are not peripheral to how states and communities function. They represent, on average, 36 cents of every dollar a state spends.” […]
The O.M.B.’s stated rationale for the new rules is to “improve transparency, accountability and oversight for Federal awards.” But no one—and this includes Trump appointees—seems to be buying it. Trump’s nominee to be the O.M.B.’s deputy director, Hal Duncan, noted at his confirmation hearing last month that the proposal would enable the Administration to prevent federal money from supporting “divisive D.E.I. ideologies.” […]
Research organizations have been particularly outspoken in their opposition to the O.M.B. proposal. “This latest move is a brazen power grab by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to buck the will of Congress and the American people and will make future discoveries less likely,” Sudip Parikh, the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, wrote recently. Among the proposed rules’ many provisions is one that would prohibit federal money from being used to support collaborations between researchers in the United States and their colleagues in many other countries. [!!] “By this guidance, America would not be allowed to be included in the International Space Station,” Colette Delawalla, who founded and heads the group Stand Up for Science, said in an interview. “The same goes for every type of weather monitoring and pandemic monitoring.” [!]
[I snipped text describing how the White House found other ways to undermine science prior to this latest effort.]
The O.M.B. is aiming to finalize the new regulations by October 1st. (This is the case even though the office has already received more than ninety thousand comments on them and, under the law, is supposed to respond to all significant points before they can take effect.) It’s no accident that Vought wants the proposal enacted before the midterms; this would allow the Administration to continue to terrorize grant recipients even if Democrats gain control of Congress and start to exercise real oversight. As the late Donella Meadows, a professor at Dartmouth and the author of “Thinking in Systems,” once observed, “Power over the rules is real power.”
As tick populations aggressively advance in Canada, more Nova Scotians are looking for ways to protect their backyards — and they are turning to a loud, quirky bird for help.
Guinea fowl, which are large, speckled birds related to chickens and turkeys, are known for their voracious appetite for insects and are increasingly being deployed as natural exterminators…
Sen. Mitch McConnell released a statement on his health on Sunday along with a photo of himself and his wife, Elaine Chao, after questions swirled about his condition. McConnell said he was “briefly unconscious” after he took a fall last month and he had been dealing with a “mild case of pneumonia.”
The Republican said his medical team has not cleared him to return to the Senate floor to vote, but he assured that he has been working with his staff and Senate colleagues. Senate GOP leaders said earlier this week that they spoke with McConnell over the phone.
So apparently still alive but in so weak he can’t go back to the Senate. His story is a little thin but I will buy that he is alive and determined to hold onto his seat in the Senate until it’s clawed from his cold dead fingers.
Guinness World Records [said on Jul 6]: “We can confirm that Guinness World Records has received an application for this title, and it is currently being reviewed […] At this stage, we are not able to confirm whether the record has been achieved. We will only be able to do so once the evidence has been submitted and fully reviewed by our Records team.
[…]
it is unclear how many fireworks were actually launched […] Guinness records are not automatically awarded based on an organizer’s estimate. Record attempts typically undergo an independent verification process, which can include documentation reviews and confirmation that all record requirements were met. Certification can take days or weeks.
[…]
Another distinction is that Freedom 250 referred to “pyrotechnic effects,” while Guinness measures the number of fireworks successfully detonated during a public display. Without official verification, it remains unclear whether the organizer’s figure corresponds directly to the Guinness record category.
what is an official from Guinness World Records doing in one of the most repressive countries on Earth certifying records for an autocrat? […] in the last few years, a big chunk of Guinness World Records’ income now comes from helping companies and other clients invent and break new records to get publicity. […] For a full-service event, they reportedly charge anywhere from $12,000 to over $500,000. […] Authoritarians love getting Guinness World Records. […] They reinforce a cult of personality and confer a sense of legitimacy on a global stage.
I can imagine Trump’s people stiffing Guinness, or failing to submit proof. He would just assert he got the record regardless.
microraptorsays
birgerjohansson @30: A lot of people online are claiming that the newspaper seen in McConnell’s photo in that article appears to be an AI-generated image. And as I said in the other thread, Mitch is looking far healthier in that picture than he’s looked in years. Very suspicious until an independent source can actually see him directly instead of relying on press releases from a thoroughly dishonest group.
whheydtsays
Re: microraptor @ #32…
What struck me about the picture is the shirt he’s wearing. That’s not a style of upper garment I’ve ever seen in a hospital.
whheydtsays
Re: whheydt @ #33…
More on the clip of McConnell…. I don’t any sign of an IV. Pretty much the very first thing that happens when you’re admitted is that they start an IV, even if there is no immediate need for it. That IV stays (it may be re-done periodically) until they’re ready to discharge you.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
microraptor @32:
people online are claiming that the newspaper seen in McConnell’s photo in that article appears to be an AI-generated image.
a photo of himself in […] a hospital bed beside his wife, Elaine Chao […] McConnell appears to be sitting on incontinence pads and to have a bruised left hand. He is holding Sunday’s print edition of The Washington Post.
StevoRsays
Israelis will head to the polls on the last Tuesday in October for an election that will serve as a referendum on the legacy of the country’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Current polling suggests Mr Netanyahu could be in trouble, with data in recent weeks showing support for his Likud party slipping to a point where it is not guaranteed to be the largest in the Israeli parliament.
The October 27 polling date is the last possible moment for an election to be held, after the Knesset’s four-year term expires this coming Friday.
Actor Sam Neill, who starred in My Brilliant Career and Jurassic Park, has died aged 78.
A post made to his social media account on Monday afternoon said he had died in Sydney “surrounded by his family”.
“The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free,” the statement, posted to Instagram, said.
Neill first rose to fame in the 1977 film Sleeping Dogs, before going on to star in My Brilliant Career, Jurassic Park, The Piano, The Dish and Possession among other films.
Sam Neill 1947-2026
Fifty years as an actor and never a hint of scandal or nastiness. He seems to have been a genuinely nice person. BTW he had beat cancer, only for some other (not disclosed) disease to take him.
birgerjohanssonsays
The recently deceased actor Sam Neill on a video where he is greeting Sweden 2022 , as Sweden has made it a tradition to watch the 1989 version of ‘Ivanhoe’ (where SN had a major role) ever New Year
“Scientists decipher how a psychedelic substance is created, then engineer a plant to produce several at once”
Obviously, society wants people to consume less psychedelics, not more but this can be a gateway to producing therapeutic psychedelics in edible plants, so the substances could be consumed in carefully regulated doses.
Brown University chemists have provided direct evidence that upends the textbook explanation of how triple chemical bonds work in heavy elements.
In a study published in Science, the researchers show evidence that when atomic nuclei are sufficiently heavy, the principles described in Einstein’s theory of relativity change the structure of triple bonds — blurring the lines between the two separate types of bonds involved in textbook triple bonding. Using a technique called photoelectron spectroscopy, the Brown team showed bonds created by carbon and the heavy element bismuth have the telltale signature of relativistic bonds…
…
A British Overseas Territory of around 40,000 inhabitants, Gibraltar has a border control for those entering and leaving.
That means that during the morning and afternoon rush hours, when around 15,000 Spaniards who work in the territory cross the frontier, there can be long, time-consuming queues.
…
But from 15 July, it is scheduled to see a new development – the removal of the border, allowing freedom of movement between Spain and Gibraltar.
This is part of a carefully negotiated agreement between the European Union and the UK following the latter’s exit from the bloc. Sharing a land border with the EU meant that Gibraltar posed a particular challenge in the post-Brexit era…
A New Jersey man says his t-shirt nearly got him kicked off a United Airlines flight.
Sam Saadeh, of Linden, was on a flight traveling from Atlanta to Newark Liberty International Airport on June 4 while wearing a t-shirt that said, “Bombing kids is not self defense.”
Saadeh, who is of Palestinian descent, said the t-shirt holds a deeper meaning and advocates for children.
…
Saadeh told CBS News New York he was “very confused” when a supervisor pulled him off the plane just after boarding.
“He was like, ‘Hey, the flight attendant finds your shirt offensive,’ and I was like, ‘Why?'” Saadeh said. “He goes, ‘Here are the choices. Either you change your shirt or you can’t get on this flight.'”
Both upset and humiliated, Saadeh says he opted to change, but claims he couldn’t get specific answers, even when he landed in Newark, where he spoke to airline personnel.
“She kept saying, like, ‘You could see how the shirt is offensive.’ I was like, ‘I can’t see how the shirt is offensive,'” Saadeh said. “She was like, ‘It’s 2026.’ I was like, ‘I know what year it is.'”
He added, ” ‘Do you think kids shouldn’t be bombed, or kids should be bombed? Like, what are you offended by?'”
…
birgerjohanssonsays
Two podcasters discuss the issues where Trump has alienated his own followers.
“It hardly seems like a coincidence that the president has meltdowns when reporters raise concerns about secrecy surrounding his health.”
The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman appeared on MS NOW’s “The Weekend” on Saturday morning, and when host Jonathan Capehart asked the reporter about President Donald Trump’s “mental acuity,” she offered an interesting answer.
“His health is like a black box inside that administration much more than almost any other issue,” Haberman replied. “And if there is an area of failure in the reporting for us, it was this, and trying to ― not mental, per se, but just his health, how he is, why he has gone to [Walter Reed Medical Center] several times and they have released less and less information.”
I have a hunch the president was watching. Shortly after the MS NOW interview, Trump published a 210-word rant to his social media platform, which included, among other things, a veiled threat directed at Haberman, whose name the president continues to deliberately misspell. The missive read in part:
Maggot Hagerman has covered me incorrectly for ten years. Her book is a joke! 90% of it is Fake News. She has made a living off her bad reporting, and will pay the price when our Multi Billion Dollar Lawsuit against The Failing New York Times gets to Court, which should not be that long.
Trump proceeded to accuse Haberman of participating in a secret plot to undermine him politically, before boasting once again about having “just finished a perfect physical at Walter Reed,” where he “requested another Cognitive Test, the only President to do so, three times, and I aced them all — Got every question right.” [Reeks of desperation.]
He concluded, “Few people in Washington, D.C., could do so, including Maggot and her flunky associate, Jonathan Swan. I would be willing to bet they couldn’t get 50% of the questions right.” (He was referring to exams used to identify dementia, mental deterioration and neurodegenerative diseases.)
A few hours later, Trump published an even longer, 448-word follow-up, in which he argued that he feels entitled to positive news coverage by virtue of his narrow 2024 victory, before he condemned “Maggot Hagerman” as “one of the most unattractive people in the News ‘Business.’”
The president wrote that he would prefer journalists at major news organizations to tell the public, “Gee, he won, he did a great job!” and “Congratulations, we wish you Great Success for our Country!” Following some election conspiracy theories and assorted whining about various media outlets (including my employer, MS NOW), he concluded that he would also like reporters to say, “TRUMP IS THE BEST POLITICAL ATHLETE OF ALL TIME! CONGRATULATIONS, MR. PRESIDENT. YOU HAVE BEATEN US FOR 10 YEARS, AND WE ARE NOT GOING TO WASTE OUR TIME FIGHTING YOU ANY LONGER. WE CAN’T WIN. DO A GREAT JOB, SIR, RUNNING OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
There’s obviously no point in trying to fact-check every hysterical falsehood in these online tirades, but I am struck by what appears to have triggered Trump in the first place.
Last fall, after The New York Times ran an article about the president’s faltering stamina, he threw quite a tantrum, which concluded with the Republican saying the reporter who wrote the article “is ugly, both inside and out.” It was one of several examples of Trump targeting women in media with misogyny and disrespect.
Nine months later, after Haberman told MS NOW’s audience about the president’s health resembling “a black box,” Trump had another meltdown. […]
Just 18 months into Trump II, the president [demanded] that grand jury subpoenas be served immediately upon the nation’s leading newspaper for reporting that his beloved new Qatari-gifted Air Force One doesn’t haven the same defensive capabilities as the older models.
In a striking move to intimidate and coerce a free press, FBI agents were at the homes of New York Times reporters with the grand jury subpoenas Friday night, only a day after newspaper’s second big scoop of the week on the airplane’s deficiencies. But as stark as it was an overreach of government power, it was also a fit of personal pique from a thin-skinned president who pushed hard to rush the aircraft into service even if meant reduced capabilities.
One of the ironies of the story is that initial reports were that FBI Director Kash Patel was summoned to the White House Friday because of irritation that he was planning to use a government plane that day yet again to fly to go see his country music singer girlfriend perform, this time in Chicago. Subsequent reporting from the NYT itself revealed that the White House put the screws to Patel in that meeting to investigate the leaks that produced the NYT’s scoops:
Mr. Patel scuttled a planned trip to Chicago and spent roughly eight hours at the White House on Friday, running the investigation from there rather than F.B.I. headquarters [!] — a major departure from historical practice. Mr. Patel also briefed senior administration officials on the investigation, two people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions.
Of course, both versions of why Patel was summoned to the White House can be true — and given Trump’s way of doing business they plausibly are both true. The eager-to-please Patel — under the gun for his travels to the point that Republican senators are becoming irritated — was an easy mark for Trump to strong-arm into launching a leak investigation and targeting his nemesis, the NYT.
The speed of the subpoenas to the NYT was breathtaking and undermined DOJ claims that the leakers were the target, not the NYT. The earliest the investigation could have started was Wednesday, after the first NYT story on Trump taking the old Air Force One back from the NATO summit in Turkey, before transferring to the new one in the U.K. (pictured above) for the transatlantic flight home. The subpoenas call for the reporters — Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt — to appear before a grand jury in Manhattan this Wednesday.
To ramp up an investigation up that quickly and begin serving subpoenas stretches the bounds of the space-time continuum under which the Justice Department has historically operated in almost any circumstance. It was especially striking given long-standing DOJ policies, since dispensed with under Trump II, that made seeking evidence from journalists an investigative avenue of last resort.
While there are no substantial legal impediments to the feds subpoenaing journalists, coercing testimony from reporters was typically treated gingerly, researched thoroughly, came after other investigative techniques proved fruitless, and was made at the highest levels of the DOJ, not the White House. The abbreviated time frame between the first NYT story and Friday’s subpoenas suggests the Trump DOJ is starting the investigation by coercing reporters to testify.
The contrast isn’t just a stark sign of how much has changed or pearl-clutching over norms. The facts give away the game: The NYT is a Trump target here. It is not merely incidental to the leak investigation.
At a minimum, targeting the NYT gives Trump a chance to take some of the political heat off by flexing his executive powers and avoiding the appearance of being on the defensive over having undermined national security and the continuity of government by using an inferior aircraft. […]
I don’t know how to say it any more clearly: The president of the United States is ordering investigations, being run from the White House, of the nation’s leading newspaper in order to intimidate it into ceasing to publish stories that are personally and politically embarrassing to him.
This is all of the worst fears of a Trump II presidency coming home to roost.
Down a dirt road in northwest Oklahoma, only a few hundred yards from where the city of Enid draws its drinking water, a company injects the toxic byproduct of oil production deep underground.
That close proximity violates a state rule meant to protect public groundwater supplies from oil field wastewater, which can be saltier than the sea and laden with toxic metals. Injection operations are banned within a half-mile of public water wells unless regulators hold a hearing to ensure that such activity will not pollute the water.
But in 2018, without a hearing, state regulators approved this injection well, an apparatus that applies pressure to dispose of wastewater down a steel tube. And in the years since, the well, named the Flying Monkey, has repeatedly failed structural integrity tests, signaling a potential leak.
The Frontier and ProPublica mapped every injection well in the state to determine how close they are to public water wells. We identified at least 114 injection wells in communities across Oklahoma — including the Flying Monkey and two others in Enid — that are located within a half-mile of a public water supply well. More than 300,000 Oklahomans live in communities that rely on these water wells, according to our analysis.
The city of Enid has complained to the state about the threat to its water. In Oklahoma and beyond, toxic oil field fluid has spread underground and threatened municipal supplies. Midland, Texas, is still cleaning up groundwater polluted by a leaking injection well more than two decades ago. [!]
But Enid officials are powerless under state law to pass their own rules governing these wells. And so they are appealing to the same Oklahoma agency that had approved the Flying Monkey to now revoke the permit that allows the well to inject wastewater. The city is also asking the state to impose stronger protections against pollution from injection, as more oil and gas companies seek permission to drill wells that dispose of their wastewater nearby. It’s a rare example of pushback against one of Oklahoma’s most powerful industries.
[…] The agency has repeatedly declined to punish oil and gas companies for causing widespread pollution […]
Enid’s case will be heard in the agency’s administrative law court later this year. […]
Ben Ezzell, a former Enid city commissioner, said he hopes the state recognizes that the community is asking for “reasonable” protections against catastrophic long-term damage to its water supplies.
“It’s ultimately all one big aquifer,” he said. “You can’t just pee in part of the pool. If any of the aquifer is tainted, all of the aquifer will be tainted.” [!]
[…] in the heart of downtown, a large art deco building gestures at one of Enid’s other vital, long-standing industries: It was once the office for Continental Resources, now the world’s largest private oil company.
Although Continental outgrew Enid more than a decade ago, pumpjacks pulling up oil still seesaw up and down near town. Oil production inevitably means wastewater. And dozens of injection wells west of Enid blast the industry’s byproduct underground in the same area where many of the city’s water wells are located.
The nation’s bedrock water protection law — the Safe Drinking Water Act — singles out oil and gas injection of wastewater as a particularly urgent threat to drinking water. And it requires oil states to draft specific regulations to protect public water wells.
Oklahoma, however, has not always followed its own rules. In 2018, a small company called Hinkle Oil & Gas applied for a permit for an injection well — the Flying Monkey — less than a quarter-mile from two of the city’s water wells […]
the company had checked a box attesting that the injection well was not within a half-mile of a public water supply well — the distance that, under state rules, should have triggered a hearing to evaluate the Flying Monkey’s pollution threat. “This was demonstrably false,” [!\ Enid’s lawyers wrote in a September 2025 court filing.
The commission approved Hinkle’s application for the well without a hearing, giving the company the green light to inject more than 800,000 gallons of wastewater into the earth each day. [!] […]
Later in 2018, Hinkle transferred the well to another small company, which applied for a new permit to convert the Flying Monkey to a commercial well to dispose of the wastewater produced by other oil companies, too. [!] By approving the permit, the city contends, regulators allowed the company to violate another state rule meant to protect public water wells from commercial disposal sites. […] The company has since filed for bankruptcy.
[…] In the last five years, the state has shut down the Flying Monkey repeatedly — for months at a time — for failing mechanical tests required by the state that evaluate the well’s structural integrity. […]
In the court filing last fall, Enid’s lawyers described this pattern of violations as “a significant compliance red flag, especially given the well’s immediate proximity to Enid’s public supply well.” The city wants the state to terminate the Flying Monkey’s permit. After a period of inactivity last year, the well began injecting wastewater again last summer, only to be shut down again this March. State records indicate that the Flying Monkey’s operator, BCE-Mach III Midstream Holdings, repaired the tubing leak in April, and the well’s status is listed as active […]
[…] Close by the Flying Monkey, another wastewater injection well — Estill #8 —sits roughly a quarter-mile from three of Enid’s water wells.
In its application, submitted in August 2012, an affiliate of the U.S. Energy Development Corp. acknowledged the proposed injection well’s proximity to the city’s water supply but subsequently urged state regulators to approve an emergency order to allow the well to begin injecting wastewater immediately. Waiting for the required hearing, the company wrote, would result in “irreparable financial harm” because any delay would deprive it of a way to get rid of the wastewater generated by its nearby oil wells. In general, oil companies want their wastewater disposal sites to be as close as possible to their producing wells to reduce the cost of transporting the fluid. The commission approved the emergency order on a temporary basis while it considered whether to issue a permanent permit, and the well began injecting wastewater in November 2012.
In February of the following year, the company returned to the commission to renew its request to continue injecting without a standard hearing. The commission approved the second request in March and two weeks later authorized the well’s official permit without a hearing. […]
The well has been operating ever since [!], injecting more than 12 million gallons of wastewater into the earth last year. […] [Illustration showing location of injection wells.]
[…] In this arid part of Oklahoma, where surface water is scarce, Enid has become a vital source of drinking water for a dozen smaller, more rural communities as well as Vance Air Force Base. Even after the recent completion of a 70-mile, $400 million pipeline to bring water from Kaw Lake, Enid will continue to rely heavily on its groundwater wells.
“In the 21st century, water is going to be the new gold,” Frank Baker, an Enid city commissioner, said in an interview.
[…] The issue hasn’t previously been covered in the media. The City Council hasn’t discussed it in public meetings. And few follow the obscure quasi-judicial system of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission.
[…] Enid is asking regulators to impose a ban on oil and gas wastewater injection within a half-mile of its water wells, with no possibility of exceptions. It also wants the state to require additional testing, pollution monitoring and mechanical safety measures for wells within 1 mile of an Enid water well, according to its application to state regulators. […]
Pollution from high-pressure wastewater injection can radiate much farther than a mile [!]. Oil companies have acknowledged that their injection wells can impact one another’s operations that were 3 miles apart […] The Frontier and ProPublica identified more than 400 wastewater injection wells across Oklahoma that are within 1 mile of a public water supply well.
Regulations for this issue vary widely among oil states. Colorado and Ohio set a minimum buffer of 1,000 feet between injection wells and public water supplies. Many states do not have fixed setbacks, instead relying on belowground geological evaluations to ensure that injected fluid does not contaminate aquifers.
[…] Five companies have formally opposed the city’s request for stronger rules to protect its groundwater. Those include Flying Monkey owner BCE-Mach III Midstream Holdings, Estill #8 owner U.S. Energy Development Corp. and two others — D&B Operating and Royalty Energy Development LLC — that have pending applications for new injection wells near Enid. […]
Matthew Allen, an attorney representing U.S. Energy Development Corp., argued in a May procedural hearing that the city’s proposed changes would “significantly increase the regulatory burden” and costs to companies. He also said that the administrative court was the incorrect venue for the city to pursue such a significant change. […]
Kaylee Davis-Maddy, Enid’s attorney, emphasized during the hearing that the city was not trying to establish a statewide rule. Rather, she said, Enid wants the rules to apply within a geographic boundary to protect its freshwater.
[…] Enid has to bring its appeal to the state agency in large part due to a 2015 law that forbids cities and counties from establishing their own regulations on oil and gas operations.
That matters because even if the administrative law judge sides with Enid, such a decision must be approved by the regulatory agency’s three elected commissioners. Right now, two of them are former state legislators who in the past have opposed efforts by Oklahoma municipalities to restrict oil and gas operations. [The system is rigged in favor of oil and gas operations.]
[…] All three commissioners were elected with significant financial support from the oil and gas industry. […]
At the time the preemption law passed, several local governments were considering restrictions on hydraulic fracturing amid a wave of earthquakes caused by oil and gas injection. […]
The state Supreme Court upheld the law in its 2022 decision nullifying a requirement by the city of Norman, about 20 miles south of Oklahoma City, that oil and gas companies maintain extra liability insurance.
“Municipalities no longer possess a broad police power to regulate oil and gas,” the court wrote in its unanimous decision.
More at the link, including embedded links to additional sources.
birgerjohanssonsays
An animal sanctuary where if you look out from the bathroom in the morning you see a peacock staring down at you.
“We Rescued a Peacock… Now He Runs the Place”
Trump proceeded to accuse Haberman of participating in a secret plot to undermine him politically, before boasting once again about having “just finished a perfect physical at Walter Reed,” where he “requested another Cognitive Test, the only President to do so, three times, and I aced them all — Got every question right.” [Reeks of desperation.]
He concluded, “Few people in Washington, D.C., could do so, including Maggot and her flunky associate, Jonathan Swan. I would be willing to bet they couldn’t get 50% of the questions right.” (He was referring to exams used to identify dementia, mental deterioration and neurodegenerative diseases.)
I would be willing to bet that a random 12 year-old could pass with flying colors. He is so deluded that it is a difficult test.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
birgerjohansson @43:
producing therapeutic psychedelics in edible plants, so the substances could be consumed in carefully regulated doses.
For a while, I had some pretty jimsonweeds growing nearby… until I googled em.
All Datura plants contain tropane alkaloids such as scopolamine and atropine, primarily in their seeds and flowers, as well as the roots of certain species […] A given plant’s toxicity depends on its age, where it is growing, and the local weather conditions. These variations make Datura exceptionally hazardous as a drug. […] the traditional mnemonic: “Blind as a bat, mad as a hatter, red as a beet, hot as a hare, dry as a bone, the bowel and bladder lose their tone, and the heart runs alone” […] In some parts of Europe and India, Datura has been a popular poison for suicide and murder. […] Datura intoxication typically produces the effects of anticholinergic delirium (usually involving a complete or relative inability to differentiate reality from fantasy) […] The overwhelming majority of those who describe their use of Datura find their experiences extremely unpleasant—both mentally and often physically.
To be fair Datura are exceptionally uncooperative for use in herbal medicine or recreation. Hopefully the engineered plants do their chemistry reliably outside a lab.
johnson catman @54: “I would be willing to bet that a random 12 year-old could pass with flying colors. He [Trump] is so deluded that it is a difficult test.”
Yep. Even considering the usual trumpian levels of delusion and/or ignorance, it is hard to believe that Trump thinks that test is difficult … and that other people couldn’t pass it
And, of course, Trump continues to repeat his nonsense about the test. His fits of braggadocio remind us that he stupid, that his brain doesn’t work properly, and that he will raise the flag of his ignorance as if it were a virtue at every opportunity.
“Trump announced a spectacularly radical scheme that, among other things, legitimizes the idea of charging fees for passage through the Strait of Hormuz.”
About a month ago, Donald Trump spoke at some length with The New York Times about the war in Iran and the tentative deal his administration had reached with officials in Tehran. At the time, the American president boasted that the agreement would ensure that the Strait of Hormuz was “permanently toll-free,” before turning his attention to the next round of diplomatic talks.
In fact, the Republican went on to tell the Times that if the next round of negotiations fell through, he was prepared to either renew the U.S. military offensive in Iran or make the United States “the guardian of the Middle East” in return for 20% of the region’s revenues.
It was a bizarre comment. What’s more, it was unclear whether he had just shared a passing thought or was articulating an actual policy idea. The Times report added at the time, “Mr. Trump’s assertion that the United States would, if necessary, become a paid police force for the Middle East would be a striking, if very Trumpian, departure. The president would, in effect, be turning American protection of the region — and the U.S. nuclear umbrella — into a mercenary force, there in return for profit. The arrangement would essentially reject the post-World War II American tradition, in which the United States used its power to assure global peace and prosperity.”
A month later, the U.S.-Iran deal has effectively collapsed; Trump has declared the ceasefire “over”; both countries have renewed their military strikes; and the American president, who had said basically nothing about his “guardian” idea since mentioning it to the Times on June 14, has rediscovered the threat — and made it worse. [video]
“We’re going to keep the strait, and we’ll probably run it,” Trump told Fox News on Monday morning. “We’ll become ‘the guardian of the strait.’ Maybe we’ll call it ‘the guardian angel of the strait.’ And we should be reimbursed for that. When we do that, we’re going to be reimbursed. … We can’t be expected to do that for nothing. … We’re going to get paid for guarding it.”
Nearly two hours later, the president elaborated on this in writing, publishing his latest weird statement to his social media platform, which read in its entirety:
The Hormuz Strait is OPEN, and will remain OPEN, with or without Iran. We are reinstating the THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE, so named because it is only stopping Iran’s ships or customers from entering or leaving. All other countries will have fair and open use of the Strait. The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World. The process and formation will begin immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Last month, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio said of the Strait of Hormuz, “It’s an international waterway. … No country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway. That’s existing international law.”
His boss, however, just announced plans to position the U.S. as a mercenary force: Our military will apparently guard the Strait of Hormuz and, for our troubles, we intend to charge tolls that the Trump administration recently characterized as illegal and impermissible.
Again, it’s difficult to say with confidence whether the president’s declarations are just random words spouted by a man who often peddles nonsense that he doesn’t mean. In fact, it’s entirely plausible that in the hours and days that follow, Trump will simply pretend that he never said or wrote what we’ve already seen and heard.
But for now, Trump has just announced a spectacularly radical scheme that, among other things, legitimizes the idea of charging fees for passage through the Strait of Hormuz — which is a development that probably didn’t go unnoticed in Tehran.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Trump promised America First non-intervention. Also, he wants dominance over the the western hemisphere. And Gaza. And Hormuz. Just abandoned doctrinal justification altogether for the Iran war.
By now, Donald Trump has probably grown accustomed to legal setbacks in court, though his case against the IRS has started to backfire in ways the president didn’t see coming. The Associated Press reported:
A federal judge said Monday that President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns was filed for an “improper purpose” as she referred attorneys for disciplinary actions.
The ruling from U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams amounts to a stinging rebuke of the Republican president’s lawsuit, characterizing it as an exercise in self-dealing in which he sued an entity that is effectively under his control.
The basic details of Trump’s IRS lawsuit are likely familiar: During his first term, a contractor leaked his tax returns, and six years later, the president has filed suit against the tax agency, saying he’s entitled to $10 billion in taxpayer funds.
In May, he voluntarily withdrew his own litigation, and soon afterward, the administration unveiled his reward for having done so: a compensation fund worth $1.766 billion, which was quickly condemned by members of both parties as a “slush fund” that would be used to benefit the White House’s political allies.
That bipartisan pushback appears to have forced the president to back off his plans for the fund. And at that point, the case appeared to have run its course: Trump filed a rather preposterous $10 billion lawsuit against his own administration; he then abandoned that case before it could be fully adjudicated; and that was that.
Except, it wasn’t quite that simple, and one of the underlying legal problems persisted: The federal judge in the case, responding to a request filed by 35 former federal judges calling on her to reopen the case, raised serious concerns in late May, ordering Trump and his lawyers to address allegations that he committed fraud on the court.
In a four-page order, Williams said she intended to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve the dubious case was “premised on deception.” (This same judge, as recently as late April, expressed skepticism about the propriety of the case, since it appeared the president was, for all intents and purposes, both the plaintiff and the defendant.)
More than a month later, she apparently did not like what she discovered, concluding that Trump and his lawyers acted “in bad faith” and filed a civil suit “for an improper purpose.”
“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” Williams wrote. [Yep. The judge is correct. Well said.]
The judge also prohibited the parties from even referring to it as a “settlement.” [LOL]
Just as notably, as CNBC reported, Williams “referred Trump’s lawyer in the lawsuit, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar for consideration on whether Brito should be disciplined in light of the findings in the new order.” The judge also “ordered that a copy of her ruling be mailed to the State Bar of New York, of which Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is a member, as well as to the District of Columbia Bar, of which Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward is a member.”
The developments come just two days before Blanche, Trump’s choice to serve as attorney general, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a confirmation hearing.
A spokesperson for [Trump’s] legal team said in a written statement, “The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people. President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”
The statement made no effort to address allegations of professional misconduct or the fact that Trump’s lawyers just received a brutal smackdown in court.
“It’s not a real convention,” a Republican consultant conceded. “It’s just this grifter free-for-all.”
When delegates to the major party nominating conventions gather every four years, they don’t have a whole lot to do. Before the modern primary system, these conventions were often raucous and contentious gatherings where real work was done choosing candidates for national office. But in recent decades, they have been commonly panned as “infomercials” and devoid of important work.
That said, it’d be an exaggeration to say these quadrennial conventions are completely pointless affairs. If nothing else, nominating conventions feature delegates from across the country who, if nothing else, approve a party platform and formally nominate candidates to lead the national ticket.
Republicans’ plans for a midterm convention, however, are a very different story.
The Republican National Committee recently announced plans for a national convention, to be held in Dallas on Sept. 9-10, reviving a practice Democrats abandoned decades ago. The move comes with significant risks: One of the underlying points of a national convention is nationalizing an election cycle — and given how very unpopular the incumbent Republican president is, the party should be going out of its way to localize the midterms.
Despite common sense, the RNC appears to be eager to lean into the risk, with party chairman Joe Gruters telling Fox News two weeks ago that the gathering in Dallas will be a “Trumpapalooza,” designed to motivate his followers. [“Trumpapalooza” … OMFG]
[…] there’s another element to the story that’s starting to come into focus. Politico reported:
An invitation from the Denton County Republican Party outside of Dallas offers attendees at the GOP’s midterm convention a chance to be “honorary delegates” for a cool $20,000.
And in California, a $250,000 “golden VIP member” ticket to the convention buys four floor badges, four hotel rooms, hotel transfers, gifts – and concierge services for the weekend.
A related HuffPost report noted that the Texas GOP is charging $20,000 for an “honorary delegate” credential, which includes a two-night hotel stay and a “Texas Shirt and Cowboy Hat.”
The Politico report […] added that the Republican National Committee has encouraged state parties to use the midterm convention as a “fundraiser” for their own candidates.
It’s a plan that opens the door to an obvious line of criticism: This isn’t a major-party convention; it’s a fundraising grift masquerading as a pep rally. No work will be done, and nothing of substance will be accomplished. The party is throwing a two-day soiree for itself and encouraging people to pony up thousands of dollars for the privilege of hanging out with GOP officials and candidates.
HuffPost spoke with a Republican consultant who conceded, “It’s not a real convention. … It’s just this grifter free-for-all.”
A coalition of 12 states filed an antitrust lawsuit on Monday to block the merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros., defying the Department of Justice, which approved the deal last month.
The coalition, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, alleges that the $111 billion transaction violates the Clayton Act by lessening competition in three distinct markets: wide-release theatrical distribution, “top-grossing” theatrical distribution, and basic cable licensing.
“The unlawful merger of these two entertainment behemoths would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ultimately, audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the U.S.,” Bonta said in a statement on Monday…
Wide-legged pants? Trendy. Falling on your face while wearing said pants? Trending.
Technically, the Zara pants at the centre of a new internet phenomenon are called “flowy wide leg pants,” which cost $45.90, are made of polyester, and boast an elastic waistband and front pockets.
But on social media, they’re better known as “lethal trousers,” or “deadly trousers” or the “Zara death pants” because people keep tripping on them and hurting themselves…
Cyclosporiasis, an explosive-diarrhea-causing illness, is sickening people in 31 states, although the exact number of cases is likely underestimated. Surveillance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not as robust as it once was, and some people don’t get medical attention when they have a diarrheal illness.
The exact source of the current cyclosporiasis outbreaks is unknown, but the parasite (known as Cyclospora cayetanensis) that causes the illness has historically been found on certain fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs, and is most seen in the summer months.
According to Dr. Michael Cappello, a professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) at the Yale School of Public Health, “you typically see the parasite in people who have ingested various fruits and vegetables. … Typically, they have been contaminated with human sewage or waste is sort of the generally accepted route of transmission.”
…
The produce that’s making people ill this summer hasn’t been identified, but certain fruits and veggies have been the cause of outbreaks in the past.
“The one that we are most familiar with is raspberries, but there have also been outbreaks going back in the last decade or two that were traced to basil, cilantro, lettuce and especially some of the lettuce mixes that have been produced that come prepackaged,” Cappello explained.
Horney added that parsley, snow peas and green onions have also been the source of the infection in the past…
another 60-day clock to use the military in the region without congressional approval.
[…]
Trump had previously notified lawmakers in May that the war launched in February had “terminated,” […] The ceasefire that went into effect in early April at that time had been indefinitely extended. The White House had argued that the move stopped the war powers clock.
Opponents of the war on Capitol Hill, however, contended that […] the U.S. Navy was still engaging in a blockade meant to force Tehran’s hand, even if major combat operations had halted.
johnson catmansays
re CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain@65: Meet the new war, same as the old war.
President Donald Trump plans to use newly declassified intelligence in a primetime speech Thursday night to revive his long-running claim that a foreign nation interfered in the 2020 election, according to MS NOW.
In 2010, archaeologist David Stuart and colleagues ran into a painted chamber at Xultun, a Maya relic in modern-day Guatemala. Then the team noticed that the many mathematical and astronomical formulas appeared to be attributed to someone—an individual whose name has now been identified.
In a paper published today in Antiquity, the research team reports the first-ever known Maya mathematician-astronomer, Saktahnwaax (“White-Chested Fox”), who likely lived around 800 CE. According to the paper, an inscription on the chamber’s wall read “so says Saktahnwaax,” which suggests that either the person themselves or someone else “signed” the work, attributing the formulas to Saktahnwaax. In addition to the purported scientist’s name, the team also shared a never-before-seen formula demonstrating the Maya’s “unique and elegant” understanding of time and astronomy, Stuart, of the University of Texas in Austin, told Gizmodo…
A dozen state attorneys general sued Monday to block Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, citing the harm the megamerger could pose to competition in Hollywood.
The deal would consolidate two powerhouse movie studios, several popular streaming services and the national news networks CBS and CNN into a single company under the purview of the billionaire Trump-aligned Ellison family. […]
John Rich is taking on a prestigious role within President Donald Trump’s administration. On Monday, the country star took to social media to announce his latest endeavor. ‘President Trump has afforded me the great honor to serve in his administration as the ‘Special Envoy for American Landowners,’ he wrote on X.
Nordone has worked as an optician and at various state agencies, including the South Carolina Commission for the Blind and the Department of Employment and Workforce. She lives in Lexington, is a graduate of the College of Charleston and has a master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling.
“The hapless defense secretary cares a great deal about beards, but he’s far less concerned about service members and safety standards.”
Related video at the link.
Over the past year and a half, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly talked about his obsessive interest in “lethality.” But looking at his record rather than his rhetoric reveals a man who can’t shake his preoccupation with priorities that have nothing to do with restoring a “warriors’ ethos.”
Take his interest in facial hair, for example.
The former Fox News host faced ridicule last year after delivering his infamous “beardo” speech, but Hegseth has continued to express concern about service members whose beards do not meet his grooming standards. To that end, Stars and Stripes reported the military is cracking down on facial hair, with the Navy abandoning waivers to sailors who suffer from skin conditions caused by shaving.
This includes pseudofolliculitis barbae, a condition that can cause painful inflammation after shaving. The Stars and Stripes report noted that the condition “disproportionately affects Black men,” and given Hegseth’s broader record on matters related to race, it’s hardly unreasonable to think the Pentagon should answer questions about possible racial motivations behind the policy.
[…] The Washington Post reported:
The Pentagon said Friday that the military has lifted the suspensions of all helicopter pilots involved in a July 4 beach flyover in South Carolina that triggered scrutiny […]
Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesman, indicated in a social media post that the pilots, members of the South Carolina National Guard, were no longer grounded “effective immediately.”
By way of social media, Hegseth assured various conservatives that he’d “fix this,” referring to the investigation. Hours later, his spokesperson published a post of his own, writing, in an apparent message to the suspended crew members, “Carry on Patriots.”
Local videos from the South Carolina event showed Apache helicopters flying at surprisingly low altitudes, and after they landed, officers were immediately notified of their suspensions, pending an investigation into possible safety violations. […]
[I snipped details of past incidents, including one involving Kid Rock]
Hegseth nevertheless took it upon himself to reverse the suspension and scrap the investigation.
The New York Times noted the moves represented […] “another indication of his [Hegseth’s] contempt for legal guardrails in the military.” […]
The message to service members couldn’t be clearer: Those who engage in politically motivated stunts don’t have to worry too much about military safety standards, just so long as they’re clean-shaven.
Speaking in May at a conference in Washington, DC, Gregg Roman, executive director of the American right-wing Middle East Forum (MEF), took stock of the work his organisation has been doing over the past year in support of efforts aimed at the eventual overthrow of the current Iranian regime.
“[US military operation Epic Fury] was the doctrine we advocated in practice. For the first time in 10 years, we saw it live. 39 days of fire,” he said to a room of 150 donors and pro-war policy makers, which included the Israeli ambassador to the US, Yechial Leiter. The conference appeared to serve as an opportunity to seek funding for additional MEF initiatives directed at challenging Iran’s current government.
…(Snip)…
.. The project, dubbed the “Iranian Civil Society Vulnerability Assessment”, was to gather information from Farsi-language open-source intelligence and social networks and build a “comprehensive heat map that provides actionable information on key pressure points” in ten of Iran’s most ethnically diverse provinces. The proposal identified INSS’s top Iran expert, Raz Zimmt, as the intended project lead.
The leaked documents do not explain how any resulting research would have been operationalised, nor do they establish that it was subsequently used in military planning or intelligence operations.
From one of my fb friends and actually written by her :
Where are the tornado warning sirens? The USA is rocketing towards becoming the authoritarian hellscape from which it has spent almost a century pretending to be the refuge. Citizens are being shot in the street. People in a book club are being sentenced to decades in prison for wrongthink. Trump is trying to push through electoral changes that mean this regime will “not lose an election for 100 years.” And it’s all being done in the name of fighting imaginary totalitarian communist leftists. Why isn’t there more outrage?
Donald Trump whined to his audience that a “communist menace” was destroying America from within at his July 4th speech on stolen Lakota land. The land had been granted officially to the Great Sioux Nation “in perpetuity” by the US government in1868. In the 1870s, gold was found. Perpetuity turned out to be short-lived. The right to redistribute wealth belongs not to Zohran Mamdani taxing billionaires’ condos. It belongs to any white man who can take what lies under someone’s feet. Preferably someone non-White.
Trump promised to “exile” communists. “Communism,” he asserted “is the exact opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil.” It’s a “cancer,” he declared. It must be “cut out fast.” Of course, Democratic Socialist Muslim mayors are a “cancer” if one is a tycoon with billions in property to defend from a mite of taxation. Apparently, no plutocrat needs a servant class that can afford to live within two hours of its workplaces.
Trump’s unsubtle code marked true America as White and Western. The enemy, “the communist party,” he contrasted “is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work.” … (Snip – there’s a lot more there.)…
Israel is in talks with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) over new restrictions on prison visits to Palestinian detainees, the organisation has told The New Arab, after Israeli authorities introduced sweeping new rules that rights groups warn will shield abuses from independent scrutiny.
The measures, introduced last week by Israel Prison Service (IPS) Commissioner Kobi Yaakobi, sharply limit how and when ICRC delegates can visit Palestinian detainees despite an Israeli High Court ruling that the blanket suspension of visits imposed after October 2023 was unlawful.
The policy, adopted without consultation with Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, comes amid mounting international criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian prisoners. Rights groups have documented allegations of torture, starvation, medical neglect and sexual abuse inside Israeli detention facilities, while humanitarian organisations have repeatedly called for independent monitoring to resume.
The territory Israel has occupied in southern Lebanon since 2 March includes several Christian villages. Additional Christian villages within the security zone declared by Israel have been eradicated through deliberate demolitions. Since the war began, these surviving Christian villages have been under siege. They have endured Israeli shelling, airstrikes, displacement, and infrastructure damage, yet most have remained inhabited despite numerous Israeli evacuation orders.
Many residents chose to stay in their villages to protect their homes, churches, and farmland, despite harsh conditions. They are barred from leaving to seek treatment or obtain essential supplies without prior approval from “the Mechanism Committee,” the supervisory body established after the war ended in 2024. Essentially, they must obtain authorisation from the Israeli army before they can do anything.
…(Snip)…
..when the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed a few days ago that some Christian villages in Lebanon had asked to be annexed by Israel, it came as a huge shock to all the Lebanese and especially to the inhabitants of these Christian villages, who expressed outrage.
In his statement, Netanyahu said: “There are Christian villages in Lebanon, some of which have actually asked to be annexed to Israel because we are protecting them from Hezbollah fanatics who want to kill them, and we are doing the same for Christians everywhere.” He added that not only Christians but also Druze, Sunni Muslims, and some Shiites seek his protection.
Netanyahu’s declarations are being viewed in Lebanon as false and provocative. Not only has Hezbollah never attacked any Christian village, but after Netanyahu’s remarks, several Christian villages issued statements refuting his claims and insisting that their future lies solely with the Lebanese state. They dismissed his comments as untrue.
Israel’s refusal to renew a key water supply agreement with Jordan reflects a growing “weaponisation” of water in the region, experts have told The New Arab, after Israeli officials linked future supplies to warmer diplomatic relations with Amman.
The warning comes after Israeli media reported that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has refused to extend a 2021 agreement supplying Jordan with an additional 50 million cubic metres (MCM) of water annually, amid tensions over Jordan’s criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza and its opposition to Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli media also reported that the UAE was seeking to broker a trilateral summit in Abu Dhabi involving Israel, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates in an attempt to resolve the dispute.
… (Snip)..
Speaking to The New Arab, Oakey said Jordan was particularly vulnerable because it is “one of the most water-scarce countries in the world”, with just 61 cubic metres of renewable water available per person each year, compared with the UN water scarcity threshold of 500 cubic metres.
She said the crisis is being driven by a combination of severe network losses, rapid population growth, successive refugee influxes, heavy agricultural demand and climate change, which is reducing rainfall while increasing water demand during hotter summers.
Jordan is attempting to address the crisis through a planned 300 MCM desalination plant in Aqaba, but Oakey warned that water would increasingly become a geopolitical tool across the region.
“On a military base in West Texas, where the government has built a sprawling tent complex to hold thousands of immigrants, deprivation and dire conditions are part of the design.” By Jonathan Blitzer
[I snipped the introductory material that explains how “Rey,” a Cuban Rey, in his mid-fifties came to the U.S. in 1994; and how he was recently detained when he was trying to comply with a program called Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. ISAP is an initiative of Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE]—an alternative to detention which allows immigrants with open or unresolved legal cases to live freely while checking in with officials a few times a year. It began, in 2004, with a simple premise: the federal government cannot jail everyone it might want to deport.]
[…] A few hours later, Rey and more than a dozen other detainees were driven ten minutes east, to a facility where he would spend the next six weeks. It was down a long, barren drive, almost a mile from the main road, and sealed off behind a metal gate. Four large white tents stood in an imposing line, flanked by a few small buildings. The desolate surroundings scared some of the others, but Rey, whose pizzeria was nearby, recognized where they were—at a military base called Fort Bliss.
Last summer, the Trump Administration picked Fort Bliss to be the site of the largest immigrant-detention center in the country.ICE was ramping up arrests nationwide, and the government, in search of more space to hold people, opted to erect tents—known in government parlance as “soft-sided facilities”—at military installations and close to existing ICE jails. “The idea seemed to be: How can we do this as cheaply and brutally as possible?” Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ice official, told me. Fort Bliss’s proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border, and its considerable size, made it an obvious place to start. (It also has a loaded history: during the Second World War, fifty-six U.S. citizens and residents of Japanese, German, and Italian descent were interned on the premises as “enemy aliens.”) ICE already had a detention center nearby, on Montana Avenue. The agency called the new installation, a sprawling tent complex that could hold up to five thousand people, Camp East Montana.
[…] The contract for running Camp East Montana was worth more than a billion dollars. […] the contract went [to] a Virginia-based firm called Acquisition Logistics, which had no prior detention experience. […] the firm’s official address was a modest gray house with red shutters in the suburbs of Richmond, which belonged to the company’s founder and C.E.O., Kenneth Wagner, a seventy-eight-year-old Navy veteran.
Wagner’s sixty-page bid offered little more than a rhetorical embrace of the Administration’s immigration policies. […] [I snipped text describing other irregularities and mishaps.]
[…] The first detainees who were taken to Camp East Montana, in early August, arrived at an active construction site. They were kept awake at night by the sounds of trucks and jackhammers. During the day, plumes of dust blanketed the facility. “This place does not seem to be designed for humans to be here,” a Venezuelan father of two from Dallas told the American Civil Liberties Union in a sworn declaration.
[…] Toilets wouldn’t flush. Running water came sporadically. The detainees ate and slept next to the bathrooms; fetid water leaked into the dining area and under the beds. […] Fifteen days passed before the men were allowed to leave the tent, and then only at night. […]
The outdoor spaces hadn’t been finished. Neither had the areas for visitation. Phone booths for making calls weren’t yet set up, and tablets that detainees were given to call their lawyers didn’t work. Most of the people inside had been transferred from the South Florida Detention Facility, another tent complex, which the government proudly called Alligator Alcatraz. But, for most of August, they were effectively off the grid. ice’s detainee locator, which allows family members and lawyers to see where someone is being held, issued an error message for those who were now at Camp East Montana. This was seemingly by design, the Administration official told me. The system was generally supposed to show where a person was being held within seventy-two hours of his arrival at a new facility. Someone at ice, the official said, “went in and changed the settings and made it say, ‘Call ice for details.’ ”
[…]ICE hadn’t inspected the facility before it started sending detainees there. […]
[I snipped details of Rey’s past as a “survivor” as a protector of other refugees. I also snipped details describing how Rey’s wife had difficulty finding out where ICE has taken him.]
[…] As a former internee at Guantánamo and a onetime federal inmate, Rey had enough experience to be immediately alarmed by the chaos at Camp East Montana. There was no formal intake process for new arrivals and no orientation to explain how things worked. When the guards took Rey’s cash, he asked them for an official receipt listing the amount. They told him not to worry. “Of course I’m worried,” he said. “It’s two thousand dollars.”
[…] Without his medication, Rey often felt dizzy and weak. The guards told him to submit a formal request to see a doctor. He did so, but days passed without a response. [I snipped details describing Rey’s deteriorating health.]
[I snipped details describing the detention of Antonio Ascón Frometa; and of the detention and death of Lunas Campos. Concerning the death of Campos, “The Government Accountability Office later found that “evidence associated with the incident was missing or destroyed.” “To date, at least five other witnesses have contradicted the government’s version of events.” “Lunas Campos’s death was the second of three that occurred at the facility between December 3, 2025, and January 14, 2026.”]
[…] What would happen, Rey asked Sara [his wife], if his blood pressure dropped and he needed to be hospitalized? Would the same people who refused to give him medicine call an ambulance? “I could last a couple of weeks without medicine,” he said. “But I don’t want to die here.”
Afterward, he told the guard that he was ready to sign the papers. “In less than seventy-two hours, I was already in Mexico,” he told me. “You realize that, when they want to do something quickly, they do it.” [I snipped details describing how detainees are pressured on a daily basis to sign papers saying they want to be deported.]
[…] The Trump Administration’s mass-detention campaign is unprecedented by virtually every official metric. Today, there are more than sixty thousand people in ice jails across the country, up from thirty-nine thousand in January, 2025. Seventy per cent of them have no criminal record. At least fifty-two people have died while in custody since the start of the President’s second term, and, according to an A.P. investigation, nearly a fifth of those deaths have been suicides.
When Trump returned to office, last year, the government had a hundred and thirty-four immigrant-detention centers nationwide; it now runs two hundred and thirty-nine. At facilities across the country, there have been hunger strikes and protests over inhumane conditions, including rotten and inedible food, physical abuse by guards, and insufficient medical care. Human Rights Watch found that, in the past year, migrants at detention centers in New York and New Jersey—including Delaney Hall, in Newark, the first immigration jail to open under the current Administration—were a thousand times more likely to agree to be deported compared with an equivalent period in 2024. The Administration’s goal, Trickler-McNulty, the former ice official, told me, “is to make detention look and feel so bad that people leave.”
… NBC News/Today’s tally of state reports found more than 4,000 reported cases nationwide as of July 13, 2026, although those figures are not directly comparable to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s confirmed national surveillance count. Michigan has officially reported 2,640 cases to date. According to the CDC, there have been no deaths reported as of July 9…
President Trump called on the Senate to pass a cryptocurrency regulation bill Monday in honor of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who unexpectedly died over the weekend.
The 71-year-old senator did not serve on the two committees involved in drafting the crypto legislation and was primarily focused on foreign policy issues, such as a new Russian sanctions package and the war in Iran, before his passing.
The Clarity Act, however, is a top legislative priority for Trump and the GOP ahead of the midterm elections. It appears poised to come up for a vote on the Senate floor in the coming weeks, before Congress departs for its August recess.
There no particular connection between the bill and Graham except Graham supported everything Trump told him to support. It’s funny really because it’s so shallow and will do nothing. An emotional appeal from Trump isn’t going to move anybody in Congress and the issue is too narrow and technical for it to have popular support. I wonder who suggested this to Trump, it’s not something he would do on his own.
The researcher who exposed Grok Build uploading users’ entire repositories to cloud storage says the transfers have stopped after a server-side change. Elon Musk has separately promised that all previously uploaded user data will be deleted.
AI safety researcher Cereblab published a report on Sunday about their investigation into Grok Build, SpaceXAI’s command-line interface (CLI), and the data exchanged between the CLI and SpaceXAI’s servers.
Cereblab found that when Grok Build reads or processes a file, the contents of that file are transmitted without redaction to a Google Cloud Storage bucket used by SpaceXAI. Further, they claimed that Grok Build packages entire repos and uploads them as Git bundles, instead of just uploading the files required to answer a user’s prompt…
Officials confirm an ICE agent shot and killed a 26-year-old father in Biddeford, Maine, the second fatal shooting of a motorist by ICE in less than a week. Rep. Chellie Pingree joins to discuss the latest.
“Graham wasn’t a victim, or a mark. He wasn’t weak. He didn’t flip flop. No, he was a man who had his own project he was pursuing, and he viewed Trump as crucial to that project,” says Chris Hayes on the late Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Lettuce and salad greens have become the prime suspects in an explosive outbreak of the diarrheal parasite Cyclospora, which is surging nationwide but erupting to extraordinary heights in Michigan.
…
Based on interviews with more than 1,000 people sickened in Michigan, the latest data is pointing to leafy greens as the source, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS).
…
Separately, The Washington Post reported that state and federal officials are looking into whether Taco Bell restaurants may have been a source of food contaminated with the single-cell parasite.
According to local media sources in the Detroit area, Taco Bell restaurants put up signs reading, “We are currently unable to sell Lettuce, Cilantro, Onion, Pico de Gallo, and Guacamole due to a nationwide recall.”
It’s unclear what recall the restaurant is referring to; no nationwide recalls have been announced by Michigan or federal authorities related to cyclosporiasis cases. The Post reported that Taco Bell did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the signs or the decision to pull certain produce.
A source familiar with the investigation told the outlet that some sickened people interviewed reported having eaten at Taco Bells, while others did not, suggesting that there could be multiple sources of the contaminated food item…
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a brutal defeat for Donald J. Trump, Senator Mitch McConnell handily trounced him on a cognitive test administered to both men on Tuesday.
According to an attending neurologist who spoke on condition of anonymity, “When asked the test questions, Senator McConnell was totally unresponsive, as opposed to President Trump, who got every one wrong.”
Trump took to Truth Social to claim that the cognitive test was “rigged,” ending his rant with a perplexing, “Bamp you for your babention to this butter.”
The loss to McConnell is just Trump’s latest poor result on a cognitive exam, having been soundly thumped last week by a single-celled alga.
As this week got underway, Donald Trump announced by way of his social media platform that he would deliver “a Speech to the Nation” on Thursday night, though the president initially didn’t say a word about why or what he intended to say. Hours later, however, he spoke via phone to Newsmax and shed some light on what the public can expect to hear. [Video]
“Our elections are crooked and we’ve got to straighten them out,” Trump said, peddling familiar, tiresome nonsense. “We’ve got to have voter ID; we’ve got to have proof of citizenship; and we have got to do something about the mail-in ballots, which are just corrupt, crooked and should not be allowed.”
In other words, the president remains focused on his voter suppression proposal, which the White House has labeled the Save America Act and which congressional Republicans have already conceded they can’t pass.
[…] MS NOW, citing comments from two White House officials granted anonymity to discuss internal plans, reported on Monday afternoon that Trump plans to address newly declassified intelligence reports that the White House asserts reveal plans by foreign nations to interfere in the 2020 election.
One obviously can’t fact-check claims that have yet to be made, but if the president and his team follow through on these plans, there are a few things the public should keep in mind.
First, there is some irony to the idea that Trump, of all people, would voice concerns along these lines: In 2016, Russia launched a military intelligence operation that targeted the American presidential election for the express purpose of putting Trump in power. Confronted with overwhelming evidence of that effort, Trump falsely dismissed the evidence as a “hoax” and ultimately said he trusted Russian President Vladimir Putin more than his own country’s intelligence agencies. [All true.]
Second, if the president really wants to talk about foreign interference in the 2020 election, the White House should probably expect a few questions about that time Trump explicitly said he would welcome foreign election interference in the 2020 election. [Links to that and other sources are available at the main link.]
Third, ahead of Election Day 2020, congressional Democrats pushed a variety of measures intended to discourage foreign election interference. Republicans rejected all of those proposals.
And finally, let’s not forget that when U.S. intelligence again showed that Russia was targeting the 2020 election to help Trump stay in power, the Trump administration responded by announcing that it would no longer provide briefings to Congress about foreign interference in the 2020 election. [All true.]
In other words, if the president wants to renew a public conversation about foreign election interference six years ago, he might not like where the conversation ends up.
German police were puzzling on Tuesday over how 20 tons of Emmental cheese could go missing en route between Bavaria and its destination in France.
A transport company commissioned another firm to take care of the delivery, and a truck duly arrived at the cheesemakers in the Bavarian city of Bayreuth to collect the consignment, the police report said.
It did not arrive at its destination. The cheese is reported to be worth some €80,000 ($91,000).
“When administration officials can’t keep their story straight about dubious details, it’s a big hint that they’re probably making stuff up.”
It’s been tough to keep up with the precise number of instances in which the Reflecting Pool has been drained lately, but as this week got underway, Donald Trump used his social media platform to announce the latest in a series of such efforts.
There was one element of the president’s statement, however, that stood out for me:
We drained the beautiful “Reflecting Pool” today in order to fix the scars and damage that was done by the Vandals two weeks ago. We wanted to wait until after the July 4th Weekend. The slashes were 300 yards long, and the floor of the pool was cut and then pulled upward, with great force, by these thugs. The Parks Department had to empty the water in order to fix the water tight basin. It will be refilled and put back into service soon. These Country hating sleazebags should pay a big price for the damage done. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
There’s no point in rehashing the questions about whether these alleged “vandals” and “thugs” actually exist outside of the president’s overactive imagination. We can also put aside, for now, his highly dubious assertions about unnamed individuals somehow attacking the Reflecting Pool “with great force.”
What caught my attention was Trump’s claim that there are “slashes” in the pool’s surface that are “300 yards long.”
Though Trump recently boasted that the bottom of the pool would be impervious to damage from blades, he said a few weeks ago that unidentified criminals were responsible for a 250-foot gash. Two days later, he said it was 300 feet, and soon after, it was 350 feet.
Early last week, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told ABC News there wasn’t a single 350-foot gash but rather “multiple gashes” that added up to 350 feet.
Eight days later, however, the president decided to increase the size of the alleged gash once again: Now, evidently, we’re supposed to believe it’s 900 feet. [Oh FFS!]
NBC News reported Monday afternoon that it sent a reporter to the Reflecting Pool, who “found no evidence that matches up with Trump’s claims of a 350-foot gash, a 290-foot gash or even a 250-foot gash.”
Presumably, if there had been a 900-foot gash, the reporter would’ve noticed it, too.
During an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash last week, Burgum was asked about possible photographic evidence of an alleged gash in the Reflecting Pool. The Cabinet secretary replied, “Dana, I’m not sure why you keep questioning it.”
Maybe because the administration keeps changing its story, with details that appear to have been concocted out of whole cloth?
Trump refuses to accept that he is responsible, at least in part, for the failure of the MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) between the USA and Iran.
[…] “It [the MOU] was built to test. It was a test,” Trump replied. “We didn’t know. It didn’t, look, memorandum of understanding, when you’re dealing with sleazebags, don’t mean much. And they don’t mean much when you’re dealing with honorable people, too, because it’s memorandum of understanding. It doesn’t mean much.”
The president went on to say that Iran “didn’t honor the test,” before suggesting that he had predicted from the outset that officials in Tehran would cause the agreement to collapse through noncompliance. “I said, ‘Watch, I guarantee. Watch.’ And they never, they never followed it.”
The apparent point of the on-air comments wasn’t merely to blame Iran for the unravelling deal, it was also to convey the suggestion that Trump knew all along Iran would cause the framework to collapse.
The trouble is, very recent history proves otherwise.
It was exactly one month ago when the president published a statement to his social media platform, announcing, “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all!” About an hour later, seemingly eager to pat himself on the back, he added, “This Great Deal will bring Peace and Security to the whole Region. Many presidents have tried to make Peace with Iran, and all have failed before me. The Leaders of the Region have, for the first time, found a President who can help them achieve real Peace.” [Scoff]
In the days that followed, not only did Trump continue to celebrate his alleged triumph, but the White House invested an enormous amount of time and effort in touting the deal, all while Vice President JD Vance went on a media tour, doing his best to defend the policy on the merits.
There was nothing about this being a “test.” Not a word was uttered about the idea that the deal “doesn’t mean much.” [True]
If the president expects his post hoc rationalization of this failure to persuade anyone, he’s probably going to be disappointed.
The first hints that the Trump administration might be softening its position of refusing to cooperate with Minnesota’s investigations into the three shootings by federal agents during Operation Metro Surge emerged on June 22.
In its unusual lawsuit against DOJ and DHS in federal court in D.C. seeking to obtain evidence that the feds refused to share, the state of Minnesota asked for filing deadlines in the case to be pushed back 11 days until July 6 because state and federal law enforcement agencies had “recently reengaged in discussions about the prospect of mutual information sharing.”
Then on June 30, both sides jointly asked for another much larger extension of 45 days, until Aug. 20, “in light of ongoing discussions … about the prospect of mutual information sharing” between state and federal law enforcement.
We now know that sometime in the past two weeks the Trump administration finally relented and coughed up what state prosecutors are suggesting was the whole enchilada of evidence gathered by the feds in the shootings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis.
The evidence includes the car Good was driving when she was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. It also includes body cam footage and statements by federal agents across all three cases.
“The wonderful thing is now we have all the evidence,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a press conference in Minneapolis yesterday announcing the breakthrough: [video]
As part of the information sharing, Minnesota law enforcement reciprocated by sharing with federal law enforcement the evidence it had independently gathered in the three cases.
[…] It took a virtually unprecedented lawsuit by a state against the federal government to puncture what had effectively been a cover-up of the shootings — which given everything we know about the Trump administration would have been directed from and by the White House. […]
While this breakthrough is huge and gives state prosecutors a fighting chance to complete full investigations and make sound charging decisions, a lot has already been lost that could come back to bite any attempted prosecutions of federal agents.
There’s little indication that federal law enforcement fully investigated the three shootings so while the evidence the feds do have is critical it may be incomplete. [!] In addition, time was wasted. Leads that might have been followed if the evidence was available may be harder to follow now.
If any federal agents are eventually charged, they may use the fact of the contested investigation in their defense, raising questions about the delays, the chain of custody of the evidence, and other anomalies that wouldn’t have occurred if the feds hadn’t circled the wagons and refused to cooperate. […]
For Your Radar …
In a notable departure from recent ICE shootings, DHS said the agent in the fatal shooting of Joan Sebastian Guerrero, 26, in Maine yesterday fired after “fearing for public safety” — rather than fearing for his own life.
I’m not sure what to make of this exactly, especially given that DHS provided a separate explanation to Congress saying the driver had “weaponized his vehicle toward law enforcement. […]
Quote of the Day
“I heard agony. I heard a howl that came from your soul, that your whole life had just changed and it was never going to be the same.”—Mary Hayes, a witness to the fatal ICE shooting in Maine, who described seeing a screaming woman on her knees, next to a young girl.
ICYMI …
This story last week from Bolt is newly relevant: “Maine Lawsuit is Testing the Boundaries of Suing Federal Immigration Agents”
“E. Jean Carroll Receives $5.6 Million Payment From Trump in Civil Case”
President Trump has paid the writer E. Jean Carroll $5.6 million that was owed to her as a result of a jury’s finding that he was liable for sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s and then defaming her, federal court records show.
The money, which had been held in escrow while Mr. Trump appealed the 2023 jury award, was disbursed to Ms. Carroll last week, according to a note added to the online court docket in the case on Tuesday.
The payment came after the U.S. Supreme Court declined the president’s latest attempt to appeal the verdict, which prompted the judge overseeing the case to order that the money be released to Ms. Carroll.
Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said in a statement that she and her client were “pleased to report that she has received the damages payment the jury awarded her as a result of that verdict.” […]
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Reginald Selkirk @80: The shades-of-brown map was a cute idea, but I found it difficult to distinguish all 5 gradations. The caption’s CDC link has a better map: shades of blue (same issue) but hovering over a state gives clear case counts.
The government’s latest report on inflation, released on Tuesday, shows that food prices rose even as overall inflation slightly decreased. But even that drop in inflation appears to be temporary since President Donald Trump has chosen to renew military actions against Iran.
[…] The report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted that “four of the six major grocery store food group indexes increased in June,” and that the overall measure of food prices in the survey’s index increased 0.2% in June, mirroring the 0.2% rise in May.
Prices for goods like meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy products were up, along with costs for cereals and bakery products.
The official government data echoes a report from the group Numerator released on Monday that consumer prices for everyday goods have gone up for three months in a row.
Rising grocery prices are a reminder that one of Trump’s key promises during his 2024 presidential campaign remains unfulfilled. He repeatedly asserted that grocery prices, which spiked as the country dealt with the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, would go down on “Day 1.” [Yes, Trump is a liar … and he is incompetent.]
Republican Sen. Susan Collins on Monday called for an investigation after a Colombian immigrant legally authorized to work in the U.S. was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Collins’ home state of Maine.
“The shooting in Biddeford requires a full and impartial investigation of what happened,” Collins wrote in a post. “It is my understanding that the Biddeford police have secured the site and that the FBI is investigating.”
Collins’ dispassionate call for a probe into ICE’s latest killing—the second time ICE shot and killed someone in as many weeks—is unlikely to mollify Mainers, a majority of whom disapprove of how the immigration enforcement agency is doing its job. And she did not condemn ICE’s actions, nor did she express sympathy for the 26-year-old man whose life was snuffed out by President Donald Trump’s immigration goons.
Indeed, the latest of ICE’s killings can be tied back to Collins’ own refusal to rein in the marauding band of murderous goons.
[…] she will have to answer for why she hasn’t backed changes to ICE to prevent killings like the senseless one that occurred in Maine on Monday.
“Senator Collins voted for the Republican bill to give ICE another $70 billion to terrorize our communities with no accountability,” Nirav Shah, one of the Democrats now seeking the Senate nomination, wrote in response to Collins’ statement. “Maybe sit this one out.” […]
Surprisingly this did not make a big splash in the news today. But as of today, July 13, 2026, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast is reported to be completely cleared of Russian forces. Nevertheless, the importance of this news cannot be overstated in terms of what it means to Russia’s increasingly tenuous hold on the so-called TOTs (The Occupied Territories) in light of Ukraine’s lethal “mid-range” access and logistics denial campaign. Crimea is almost inhospitable for the Russian occupanty. Now Dnipropetrovsk is cleared of Russians.
[…] Special kudos to Ukraine’s Skelia Regiment for their accomplishment in making this final push to clear out the Russians. They did it without their regimental commander whose pre-war nick name, Skala(or “rock” for his imposing physique) the regiment still carries. The 425th Skelia Assault Regiment of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has reportedly liberated the final six settlements in Dnipropetrovsk oblast —Ternove, Zaporizke, Novoheorhiivka, Vorone, Sichneve, and Maliivka—advancing 25 kilometers into previously occupied territory. Lt. Col. Yurii “Skala” Harkavyi is currently suspended and under investigation for potential abuse and mistreatment of some of the regiment’s soldiers (reportedly 26 non-combat deaths among recruits) […]
Pilots of the 155th brigade bombed the hideout of the Russians. Aerial reconnaissance found a hidden position of the occupiers […] heavy bombers immediately sent […] FPV drones of the 155th OMBr began hunting Russians who survived the bombing. […]
The operation, which inflicted critical losses on Russia’s 120th Naval Infantry Division and 68th Army Corps, the main Russian formations in Dnipropetrovsk, marks the completion of a counteroffensive that began in late January 2026 and reclaimed over 400 square kilometers of land, reversing nearly all Russian gains made in the region since August 2025.
It also puts paid to Russia’s earlier stated intent to occupy all of Donbas and parts of Southern Ukraine, including Dnipropetrovsk, in order to establish a “buffer zone”. […]
“Trump To Show Nation Proof 2020 Election Stolen By Venezuelan Space Lasers Obama China RIGGED STOLLEN Biden Thermostat LAPTOP”
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before:
OBAMA PALLETS OF CASH ITALY SWITZERLAND SATELLITES HACK VOTING MACHINES CHINA DEEP STATE JEWISH SPACE LASERS VENEZUELA RIGGED AND STOLLEN BIDEN PUPPET THERMOSTAT!
Oh, you have heard that one before? Well it may be time to get ready to hear it again, because Donald Trump is going to address the nation on Thursday night […] and here is what he is going to tell us: [social media post from Aaron Rupar]
[…] from Trump’s perspective, one of the worst things about January 6, 2021, the day of the terrorist attack he incited against the United States, was the glimmer of joy and goodness that shone through as Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were declared the winners in their races. People forget that was happening at the same time.
Not only had Trump lost his race in Georgia, and not only was his coup to overthrow the government to keep him in office not working, but that was the day Georgia started turning the tide to become a purple State. Now it’s rapidly becoming just a plain old blue state.
This is why Traitor Tulsi Gabbard was in Fulton County with Krimesolver Kash’s FBI, raiding the election office. To find the 11,780 votes everybody else (Republicans even!) refused to manufacture for Trump when he was demanding Georgia help him steal the election. Make no mistake: Tulsi’s former job, and now the job of […] Bill Pulte, the degenerate Trump just installed to take Tulsi’s place at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), is to manufacture and/or pretend to find “evidence” of “fraud” in the two 2020 Georgia Senate races and elsewhere. Something, literally anything, to overturn reality and help them steal the midterms, which are shaping up to be mighty embarrassing for them.
MS NOW is reporting that Trump’s White House task force on how to steal elections and get away with it this time is going to start releasing super-secret classified documents that show, well, nothing, but they’re going to yell real loud and say otherwise. Fox News will probably also yell real loud and say otherwise, having learned nothing from all those billions it had to pay out for its election lies last time. This will work on their base that already believes any voting conducted by people who aren’t white supremacist MAGA is inherently illegal […]
Trump’s mini-me Pulte will be right at the center of it. […]
Will the revelations include any lies told by kidnapped Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, perhaps in exchange for his freedom, about how Venezuela DEFINATIVAMENTE rigged the 2020 election with Italian Jewish Space Lasers made of thermostats and pizza? [social media post about that rumor]
But whatever Trump announces, we can be sure it’ll be some lying traitor bullshit, that he’s trying to rewrite the history of his humiliating, […] losses and use that to somehow steal the midterms. […] any journalist who is tempted to view this as legitimate should read all the links in this post, as they were written by Wonkette professionals who have been covering the electoral fraud hallucinations that emanate from Donald Trump […] for years.
Here are some! [The list of articles and the embedded links are available at the main link.]
Some version of all this is why Trump is going to “address the nation” on Thursday night, like a real president who isn’t loathed by the majority of the population. […]
Before you let this stress you out, though remember what buffoons these people are, and remember how comically every one of these plays backfires in their dumbass faces.
Just mock the shit out of them instead. We sure will.
Reginald Selkirksays
@93 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain
Thanks, that map is improved in some ways, but it could be still better.
1) Hovering over a state doesn’t give a clear singular number, it gives a range. Michigan, for example, is “501 to 900.” New York is “161 to 300.”
Michigan, the hardest-hit state, reported a total of 3,309 cyclosporiasis cases in the outbreak as of Tuesday, with 44 individuals hospitalized—an increase of nearly 700 cases since Monday, when the state reported 2,640 illnesses.
…
Ohio has reported 434 cases since July 1, CNN reported, including 28 hospitalizations, while New York has reported 470 cases as of Friday, CBS News reported…
…
Geologists working with the crew of the Research Vessel (R/V) Shinsei Maru have uncovered an unusually potent deposit of actual elemental gold deeply interlaced within pyrite, commonly known as “fool’s gold,” in record-breaking concentrations as high as 1.9% by weight. Yes, that’s right—they found actual gold within fool’s gold, the latter of which is famous for resembling the precious metal despite having little intrinsic value. The bona fide gold was found locked within the crystalline structure of these pyrite deposits along the volcanic caldera roughly 2,300 feet (700 meters) below sea level…
xAI has installed 59 natural gas turbines for its Colossus 2 data center project in Tennessee without securing federal clean air permits […] about double what xAI has publicly acknowledged. […] The company previously said it was running 27 unpermitted turbines […] and has argued the permits are not required. At least 57 of the 59 turbines are located in Mississippi, just over the state line from Tennessee where the data center is located.
The xAI turbines are among scores of off-grid power plants for data centers proposed or under construction around the country. Local authorities often fast-track approvals in just weeks or months, without the years of environmental studies and public hearings typically required for such power generation projects that connect to the grid
[…]
records show the company has also installed two other unpermitted turbines for the project on a different site. Reuters could not determine the location.
An unfathomable clean air act violation. I worked in this exact field for years, including in oil and gas, and I still can’t get over how wanton and obvious this crime is. Just stunning. [Screenshot: The article’s bar graph of emissions FAR beyond permit thresholds]
the largest single source of emissions in mississippi. And it’s located right in the middle of a suburb.
[…]
A minor quibble here is that there *are* cross state line regulations regarding [National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS)], but are enforced primarily through, you guessed it… major source permitting.
It’s worth stopping & noticing that Nazi fan boy Elon Musk is deliberately gassing black people. Literally gassing them. That’s actually happening. That’s a real thing. The richest man in the world doesn’t care about cheap energy, but gassing black people is something he’s interested in.
Historically genocide most often takes place under the guise of “nature taking its course”. We think about open pits and firing squads, but it’s more often about letting people die of flu or starvation or “unavoidable environmental conditions”.
hyperscale data centers can’t set up shop in New York for up to a year now that Governor Kathy Hochul (D) has signed the nation’s first statewide moratorium. But a bill passed by the state legislature that could restrict even more developments still awaits her signature.
[…] the governor’s office says will give the state time to come up with the regulations needed to protect residents from rising energy prices and environmental impact. […] the [power consumption] threshold is meant to prevent disruption to smaller data centers used by institutions like hospitals.
For the second time in the past decade, two Utah national monuments have had their protections dramatically reduced by the Trump administration.
Flanked by Utah’s full delegation, the governor and the state’s Speaker of the House, President Donald Trump signed two proclamations to shrink Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by around 90%, and Bears Ears National Monument by 91%.
The president framed it as a win for local control.
…
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called the change “right-sizing,” saying the intention of monuments is to manage the smallest area possible to protect antiquities.
“This does not remove the other protections that already exist in those areas, just making the monuments more manageable so that we have the resources necessary to continue to protect these antiquities,” Cox said.
The orders aren’t a surprise. Trump reduced the monuments’ boundaries during his first term in 2017. At that time, he halved Grand Staircase’s size and cut Bears Ears’ by 83%. Both monuments were then restored in 2021 by former President Joe Biden.
Conservation groups immediately condemned Trump’s latest move as unlawful and have vowed to take legal action against it.
The change could have real impacts on everything from native plants and wildlife to dark skies, said Jackie Grant, who directs Grand Staircase Escalante Partners. She’s especially concerned about the monument’s wilderness study areas, which are undeveloped…
What happened to our sunny, hot and humid Tuesday? And, why is the sky yellow? It’s just another case of Mother Nature keeping us New Englanders on our toes, as a large plume of smoke from Canadian wildfires unexpectedly poured into the Boston area on Tuesday.
As morning turned to afternoon, the skies morphed from a milky white to an ominous brown/yellow.
Currently there are more than 800 wildfires across Canada, including a growing cluster just north of the U.S. border near Minnesota.
The winds at upper levels of the atmosphere aligned nearly perfectly to carry the smoke plume more than 1,000 miles, first through southern Canada and then taking a right hand turn directly into New England. ..
Chipotle Mexican Grill is set to open its first restaurant in Mexico this week, testing its appeal in the country that inspired its menu.
The chain, which has more than 4,100 outlets worldwide, said on Monday that the move is a “significant milestone” for the firm – known for its customisable burritos, tacos and bowls…
Amateur astronomer Joël Lapointe stumbled upon what he thought looked like a suspicious pit in Quebec’s Côte-Nord region while he was wandering with his Google Maps cursor in 2024.
He was simply trying to plan his camping vacation when he spotted something unexpected on his screen — what researchers recently confirmed is a previously unidentified, 390-million-year-old meteor crater.
“It was quite an exciting discovery,” said Gordon Osinski, a planetary geology professor at Western University, who was among the four-person team that confirmed the crater by travelling to the site in 2025.
…
Following Lapointe’s discovery which made headlines across the province in 2024, Osinski and Jérôme Gattacceca, a geologist at the European Centre for Research and Teaching in Environmental Geosciences, set out for the crater.
Over five days, the team gathered photos and samples to bring back to labs in both France and Ontario, for study.
…
The terrain was rugged and overgrown, he said. And the float plane bringing them in had to leave the team 50 metres offshore — forcing them to wade to land with their gear, said Osinski with a laugh.
…
On the trip, the team found big cliffs of what Osinski said is impact melt rock – created from the temperature and pressure of an impact…
Another goal of the expedition was to identify shatter cones — traces left in the rock by shock waves that are found exclusively in impact craters or at nuclear bomb test sites, as explained by Jérôme Gattacceca in an interview with Radio-Canada.
The geologist found them on the second day of the group’s mission…
President Trump is spending taxpayer funds worth thousands of dollars to make and hang more large banners with his face on them all over federal buildings in Washington, D.C.
Democratic Senator Adam Schiff shared newly discovered federal contracts with MeidasTouch News that show government agencies putting their own budgets toward “America First” banners, which include ones of the president’s face.
Commentary:
[…] According to records that the California senator shared with the public, the existing banners have already cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars, with more on the way. The Federal Aviation Administration apparently spent roughly $114,000 for its Trump banner. [!]
Some observers may see such sums as relatively modest, given the overall size of the federal budget, but that’s not really the point. Federal law prohibits the use of taxpayer money for political propaganda, which makes the banners glorifying the incumbent president tough to defend on their face (so to speak).
“The Trump administration is spending hundreds of thousands of your tax dollars to glorify and pay tribute to a sitting U.S. President and his political agenda,” Schiff said in a statement. “Not only is this a terrible waste of Americans’ hard-earned money, it is clearly against the law. Congress has long outlawed spending tax dollars on propaganda and self-aggrandizement and an eight-story high Donald Trump head certainly qualifies as propaganda.”
[…] These banners don’t signal Trump’s strength, they reflect his desperation.
A failing president wants to convey authority, so he and his team scramble to impose symbols like these on the public square. They appear intended to convey questions Trump seems reluctant to ask out loud: “Don’t I appear imposing? Isn’t it clear how powerful I am? Shouldn’t my opponents feel an overwhelming sense of fear?”
The answer to the questions, however, is no. In fact, members of Team Trump have it backward: By trying too hard, their posturing delivers the opposite of the intended message. The banners don’t show a commanding figure, they show a flailing politician struggling to convey confidence.
World Cup semi-final #1. Ain’t sports wonderfully unpredictable? Before this, Spain looked good, but France looked unbeatable. Spain 2 France 0, with Spain dominating throughout. I don’t think France had a shot on goal, and Spain had two. All Spanish players were brilliant, but for me, Olmo and Cucurella stood out.
If England beat Argentina tomorrow (I reckon it’s about 50-50), the final will be edge-of-seat-nailbiting-pants-pissing time. I’m too old for this shit (I was 11 when England won). Go England!
Identical twins share nearly every gene, so differences in health are often related to outside factors. By focusing on twins where only one sibling had MS, the researchers stripped away much genetic noise.
Detailed DNA tracking of gut samples revealed 51 microbial candidates whose numbers diverged between affected and unaffected siblings.
Two species of bacteria kept resurfacing with the highest odds ratios, putting them at the top of the watch list…
A Pentagon watchdog report found that in the roughly two years since it was built, an ammunition plant in Mesquite, Texas, has not produced any parts for 155mm artillery rounds, hindering the Army’s goal to help backfill stocks of ammunition provided to Ukraine after Russia invaded in 2022.
In a report released Monday, the Defense Department inspector general found that as of March 2026, the plant had not produced any metal projectile parts that met the specifications laid out in the contract and the “the Army’s expenditure of $469 million to establish the Mesquite facility could have been used to address other Army or [Department of Defense] priorities.”
It opened March 2024, since then it has produced nothing instead of the 30,000 parts a month it was supposed to produce. The company operating the facility is General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, another branch of the military industrial behemoth General Dynamics.
The gap, the report concluded, occurred because Army officials “accepted the risk” with the contractor’s plan to procure equipment which had not been tested. According to a timeline in the report, the Army contracting office requested the plant stop work in Aug. 2025 while the government evaluated if it could meet its obligations and work to resolve the production issues.
The problem is partially the Army’s fault. It looks like they agreed to a plan where the contractor bought untested equipment and it didn’t work out. Why it’s taken so long to evaluate and fix the problem is it’s own issue.
BATON ROUGE, La. (Louisiana First) — A protective order states that Central pastor Tony Spell is to stay 50 yards from his neighbor’s home after he was arrested on a battery charge in June.
According to the document filed in the 19th Judicial District Court, the only exception to the order is to check the mailbox.
Spell, 48, allegedly left a person with several injuries after a beating, including a possible broken orbital bone around his eye. According to Spell, he was protecting his family after the individual allegedly threatened harm and death.
“You’re not going to rape my grandchildren, and me live with the cloud over my head that if I leave, my children and wife are unprotected. I have a duty and an obligation to do what I did,” Spell said in a press conference after his arrest.
Central Police Department Police Chief Roger Corcoran stated that Spell’s allegations that the police department failed to investigate complaints regarding neighbors were untrue.
Want to guess whether he has evidence of those alleged threats? My guess is no.
…
The list of stars who have abandoned their relationship with the Church of Scientology includes Laura Prepon, Leah Remini, Jason Beghe, and Danny Masterson’s ex-wife, Bijou Phillips…
[Highway Patrol said, “]an encounter between HSI and ICE agents occurred in the parking lot of a local gas station/convenience store,” […] four people ran off and one was hit by a tractor-trailer […] The immigration status of the victim is unclear, as is the reason immigration agents were involved. […] [Highway Patrol] referred questions about the encounter to ICE. Neither ICE nor [DHS] immediately confirmed that the incident had taken place or responded
[…]
This is the third person to have died in an incident involving ICE since July 7. At least three other people have been hit by cars and killed while fleeing immigration authorities since August 2025.
Rachel Maddow explains the New York Times’ reporting about Donald Trump’s new Qatari plane missing some key defensive security features, and Trump’s apoplexy over the idea that the Times report was bolstered by sources leaking information. Renowned First Amendment attorney Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. joins Rachel to discuss Trump’s demand that the New York Times reveal its sources.
Rachel Maddow notes that Donald Trump’s news cycle seems to be stuck in a loop with the same basic headlines repeating, but with each cycle Trump becomes more desperate to achieve his ends, and more reckless in his efforts as his opposition gets stronger and wiser to his schemes.
Video is 9:14 minutes
birgerjohanssonsays
In Range TV: The Schofield Gun of Pancho Villa’s Assassin
On personnel matters, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hasn’t exactly earned the benefit of the doubt. Last year, for example, the beleaguered Pentagon chief replaced so many women in military leadership roles that The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols noted, At this point, women have been cleared out of all of the military’s top jobs. … Some observers might see a pattern here. Discerning this pattern does not exactly require Columbo-level sleuthing.”
In the months that followed, the pattern persisted. In fact, just last month, the former Fox News host personally blocked the promotions of nine Navy officers, in a move that disproportionately targeted women and minority officers.
This week, it happened yet again. The New York Times reported that a Navy promotion board made up of senior admirals chose 22 officers. Hegseth took issue with some of them. From the article:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently blocked the promotions of seven senior Navy officers, five of whom are women or people of color, to two-star admiral rank, current and former defense officials said.
The highly unusual move means that for the first time in more than a decade, no female active-duty naval officers are likely to be promoted to admiral this year, officials said.
[…] among those Hegseth removed from the list was Rear Adm. Amy Bauernschmidt, the first woman to command a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
This comes up every time Hegseth intervenes in promotion lists, but it’s worth emphasizing that under existing Pentagon policy, the defense secretary is only supposed to block officers for moral, mental, physical or professional failings. Hegseth keeps disregarding the policy.
Indeed, among the most striking elements of the secretary’s tactics is his apparent indifference. After months of controversy and congressional pushback, Hegseth must realize his actions are under the microscope. It stands to reason that he also recognizes that every time he blocks promotions for women or minority officers, it will generate a new round of questions about his apparent hostility to diversity in military leadership.
And yet Hegseth keeps doing it anyway, seemingly confident that he can do as he pleases because the White House agrees.
A separate recent Times report noted that the secretary’s approach “has made it harder for Black and female officers to get promoted to senior ranks, even when their records are exemplary.” If recent history is any guide, this pattern won’t end anytime soon.
Kenya’s High Court has dismissed a bid by a Rastafarian group seeking to legalise the use of cannabis for religious purposes.
The Rastafarian community had argued that the ban on smoking cannabis infringed on their rights to freedom of religion and belief guaranteed under the constitution.
In a landmark judgement, Justice Bahati Mwamuye said the community had failed to prove drug laws violated their constitutional rights, but acknowledged the need for a broader national debate on cannabis…
birgerjohanssonsays
(I like to include some feel-good tidbits along with the horror)
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Donkeys can be tremendiously affectionate.
“On Tuesday, the administration took steps to back off ICE vehicle stops. On Wednesday, the president personally rejected the change.”
Related video at the link.
After months of controversy surrounding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its tactics, things took a brutal turn for the worse this week in Maine, where an ICE officer fatally shot Johan Sebastián Guerrero, a Colombian man authorized to work in the U.S. who was also father of a 3-year-old girl. The developments came just a week after a different ICE officer fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during a traffic stop in Houston.
The deadly violence in Maine has led to a series of local protests. The political backlash has also been directed against Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican facing a tough re-election fight, who recently voted to approve tens of billions in additional funds for ICE with no strings attached.
The day after the shooting, the GOP incumbent said she had urged Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to “cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.” Soon after, Collins appeared to get her way: The New York Times reported that the Trump administration ordered ICE officers “to halt most vehicle stops while carrying out operations across the country.”
[…] Just as important was how long the new policy would remain in place.
The answer, evidently, was less than a day. On Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump published an unexpected statement to his social media platform that read, in part:
[W]e must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands. The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch.
Right off the bat, the idea that ICE traffic stops are one of the administration’s “most important and effective Crime Fighting tools” is highly dubious, and if the White House has evidence to support the claim, it has kept the proof well hidden.
[…] it’s not just “radical” leftists who have supported swift changes to ICE enforcement tactics.
But just as jarring is that Trump is now contradicting his own administration, raising questions about who is whispering in the president’s ear, and why in the current executive branch the right hand too often doesn’t seem to know what the even-further-to-the-right hand is doing. [!!]
“New reporting suggests the cost of the conflict could be more than triple the most recent estimate from the Trump administration.”
For the first two months of the war with Iran, the White House faced plenty of questions about just how much the conflict was costing American taxpayers. Trump administration officials insisted they didn’t want to talk about the price tag and refused to offer even vague answers.
In late April, however, the Pentagon shifted gears. Jules Hurst III, the Defense Department’s chief financial officer, told lawmakers that the military offensive had, as of April 30, cost the United States “about $25 billion.” Two weeks later, that same official offered a revised total, telling lawmakers that the price tag for the conflict was “closer to $29 billion.”
It was tempting to be pleased with any kind of budget figure from the administration, especially after months of silence and stonewalling, but a different kind of problem soon emerged: Many Democrats said the cost estimates were suspiciously and unrealistically low.
There’s fresh reason to believe that their skepticism was warranted. NBC News reported:
The cost of the war with Iran could be more than triple the most recent estimate of roughly $30 billion, according to three U.S. officials and three people familiar with the internal cost estimates.
The Defense Department’s internal overall cost estimate is $80 billion to $100 billion when the costs of repairing damaged U.S. bases, replacing destroyed aircraft and fully replenishing expended American weaponry are factored in, according to the sources.
The report […] was published just hours after the Pentagon’s acting comptroller, Jay Hurst, said at a Senate confirmation hearing that he didn’t have an updated cost estimate for the conflict.
The comments were not well received. Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said Hurst should have the latest data.
“I’m unpersuaded by your professions of ignorance about the cost of the war,” the senator said, adding, “I think it’s very frustrating to the American people that we can’t get a straight answer on what this war is costing, not to mention what it’s costing and has cost the American people at the gas pump and in other costs.”
What’s more, there’s no reason to assume that NBC News’ report will be the final word on the subject. Not only is the war ongoing, but as MS NOW reported a few weeks ago, the long-term price tag further complicates matters.
Linda Bilmes, a public finance expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told MS NOW that the Pentagon’s estimates left out veterans’ healthcare and disability benefits entirely.
“The amount of disability benefits — just disability benefits — that we owe to veterans from the Iraq, Afghanistan, Gulf and Vietnam wars was $7.3 trillion. That doesn’t count healthcare,” Bilmes said. “So these things are really expensive. We expect that at least half of those who are serving now and who are continued to be deployed will qualify automatically for benefits.”
Bilmes added in her MS NOW interview that no full accounting of the war’s cost can ignore its ripple effects on American consumers — particularly through rising oil prices.
President Donald Trump is making up an election in Iraq that never happened.
Speaking to reporters in the White House Tuesday, Trump made the bizarre reference while introducing new Iraqi Prime Minister Ali Faleh Kadhim al-Zaidi, who was making his first visit to Washington.
“We have a fantastic champion, a new champion, and he won the election very soundly, very conclusively—and he wasn’t favored,” Trump said. “But by the time they got to know him, he ended up winning.” [video]
The most recent election in Iraq was in November 2025, when then-Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani’s party won the most seats and al-Zaidi was not a candidate.
Al-Zaidi did not become prime minister until April of this year, when the Coordination Framework—a coalition of parties associated with the Shiite branch of Islam—selected him. He was a compromise selection and did not face an election—and certainly not one that he won “soundly” and “conclusively.”
Ironically, he was selected after the Trump administration voiced opposition to former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who they claimed was too close to Iran.
Trump’s reference to an imaginary election comes less than a week after he confused Iran with the “Islamic Republic of Japan”—a nonexistent country distinct from the Islamic Republic of Iran, which Trump has been bombing for months.
During a NATO summit in Turkey that same day, Trump referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin,” […] [video]
[…] Trump is a serial liar and fabulist who makes up tall tales, like the falsehood that he has ended at least eight wars.
But there have also been consistent, unanswered questions about Trump’s mental health and concerns that he’s experiencing cognitive decline. […]
“Is It Illegal To Try To Influence An Election By Giving People A Million Dollars? Elon Musk Is About To Find Out!”
Last year, Elon Musk spent over $20 million on a Wisconsin state Supreme Court election, in hopes of getting conservative Brad Schimel on the bench — as he believed Schimel was the key to ratfucking the state’s elections in favor of Republicans. Musk was on a bit of a power trip after more or less buying the 2024 presidential election for Donald Trump (in part by buying Twitter and turning it into a MAGA propaganda outlet) and figured that comparatively, Wisconsin would be small cheesy potatoes.
He even went so far as to give out $1 million checks to a few people for voting in the Wisconsin election until he found out that that was pretty illegal, and subsequently claimed he was giving them out to people who signed a petition saying they would oppose “activist judges.” [….]
He felt very intensely about the election, crying that “This Wisconsin Supreme Court race might decide the future of America and Western Civilization!”
Alas, it didn’t work out for him. Liberal candidate Susan Crawford ended up beating Schimel’s ass by 10 points, and the defeat stung enough that Musk hasn’t really tried to influence any elections since, at least not to that degree and with that amount of money. […]
Since then, Wisconsin’s highest court has done all kinds of good stuff that Musk would not be happy about — including striking down the state’s 1849 ban on abortion, blocking a conservative activist from obtaining voting records to see if people who were ineligible to vote due to someone having guardianship over them were secretly voting somehow, and accepting two appeals that will likely lead to the state’s very-gerrymandered-in-favor-of-Republicans congressional map getting redrawn in a way that is much more fair. The latter, of course, was part of what Musk was afraid of.
You know who else wasn’t very happy about Musk’s attempts to buy a Wisconsin election? The Wisconsin Elections Commission, which on Tuesday found in a 5-1 bipartisan decision that what Musk did most likely violated the state’s election laws by offering the $1 million sweepstakes and by paying out $100 to people who signed his petition against “activist judges.” Whoops! Who knew bribery was illegal?
The Commission sent out a letter to Musk and the Wisconsin residents who initially filed the complaint against him stating:
Having considered Rachel Maes v. Elon Musk (EL 25-37) and Benjamin Ehler v. Elon Musk (EL 25-45), the Wisconsin Elections Commission finds probable cause that Elon Musk violated Wis. Stat. § 12.11(1m)(a)2. by making a social media post that offered one million dollars to individuals who voted in the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court Election in order to induce them to vote in that election. The Commission hereby refers the complaint to the District Attorney of Brown County.
[…] The thing is, it’s not just illegal to bribe people to vote for a particular candidate, it’s also illegal to bribe people to vote or not vote at all. Technically it’s also illegal on a federal level, but I think we can be relatively certain that the current Department of Justice has no interest in pursuing charges against Musk for any reason.[ …]
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday announced a new effort to annually screen service members’ testosterone levels and offer testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), framing it as a way to keep troops on the “leading edge of lethality.”
I assumed this was some humor site when I first read the headline but no.
“While we invest heavily in our weapon systems, platforms and gear, our most decisive tactical advantage will always be the individual warfighter,” Hegseth said. “We have a sacred duty to maintain that advantage, which is why we must constantly look for new ways to optimize your performance, your resilience and your long-term health.”
There is a lot to unpack there, Hegseth has fit a lot of garbage in a small space. “sacred duty” is not something the US military has. Individual soldiers are not always the most important tactical contributor and since machine guns have generally been secondary to something else. He talks like the money spent on this will come close to what is spent on weapon systems.
At the end he implies a soldier’s military performance is more important then their health but that has always been true of the DOD, can’t blame that one on Hegseth.
birgerjohanssonsays
Jesse Dollemore: “Accusations Against Lindsey Graham Revealed”
.
While we only have one person’s testimony (so far) it follows the usual script of hypocrasy and bigotry so closely I give it something like 99% credibiliy. The part of him wearing red lingerie while paying a college student for sex may or may not be an embellishment, I don’t know how much Republicans are into weird fetishes. Maybe that part has an 80% probability.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Krebs on Security:
Microsoft today released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, almost triple the number of vulnerabilities the software giant fixed in its record-smashing Patch Tuesday release last month. Microsoft attributed the burgeoning patch counts to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence. Nearly 60 of the bugs quashed in July’s Patch Tuesday earned a “critical” severity rating, meaning miscreants or malware could use them to seize remote control over a Windows device with little or no help from the user. Microsoft also addressed three zero-day flaws, including two that are already being exploited in the wild…
What was supposed to be the start of Premier Tim Houston’s speaking tour to chambers of commerce across Nova Scotia ended up with him requiring a police escort.
Houston was in Wolfville, N.S., on Wednesday where he was addressing the Annapolis Valley Chamber of Commerce at Acadia University about his vision for the province’s economy.
When Houston first arrived at the university, about 50 peaceful protesters were standing outside, mostly looking to draw attention to concerns about the potential closure of five libraries in the Annapolis Valley.
However, throughout Houston’s speech, the crowd outside grew louder with an increasing number of people protesting about a variety of issues.
At one point, people climbed on top of it, halting the vehicle. Houston remained inside for several minutes until police ultimately escorted him out of the car and back into the building. Protesters also smashed the windshield.
Houston left the campus in a marked RCMP vehicle.
…
Dr. Erica Schwartz faced questions from senators on vaccines and running agencies independently during her confirmation hearing to be the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Wednesday.
Ranking Member Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asked Schwartz if she would remove a webpage updated last November on the CDC’s website on autism and vaccines. The webpage states that a link between the two has been ignored despite many studies finding no such link.
Schwartz said she accepted there is “overwhelming evidence” vaccines don’t cause autism, but did not commit to removing the webpage.
…
Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., asked Schwartz if she would stop the CDC from promoting the flu vaccine during a bad flu season if asked to do so by Kennedy. Schwartz dodged the question, saying she didn’t speak in hypotheticals…
…More than two years after Cameroon became the first country to incorporate the RTS,S malaria vaccine into its routine immunization program, health workers say it is reducing severe illness.
But they worry that too few children return for the fourth and final shot, or booster dose, that the World Health Organization says is essential to prolong immunity, as it is given months after the other doses.
…
In a malaria vaccine pilot program across 158 districts in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, coverage, or the share of children eligible for each dose, reached about 80% for the first shot, given at around six months of age. But it dropped to 46% for the fourth dose, administered between 22 and 24 months, according to a study published last year in the peer-reviewed Malaria Journal.
…
However, some have cautioned against attributing the decline solely to the vaccine.
“Isolating the specific impact of malaria interventions requires modeling, and we do not yet have a model to quantify the vaccine’s sole contribution,” said Dr. Bomba Amougou, head of prevention at the National Malaria Control Program. “Therefore, it is accurate to say that the vaccine has contributed to the reduction in cases and deaths, rather than being the exclusive cause.”
The WHO recommended the RTS,S vaccine for wider use in 2021 after the pilot studies in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi found it reduced deaths among eligible children by 13%. In separate clinical trials in several African countries, both RTS,S and the newer R21 vaccine reduced clinical malaria cases by more than 50% during the first year after three doses.
Over 52 million doses have since reached 25 high-risk African countries with support from Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. However, the organization has said the rollout faces a “stark constraint” after sweeping foreign aid cuts by the Trump administration and others. Gavi says it is guaranteeing the supply of vaccines to cover up to 70% of eligible children in the lowest-income countries…
Locally owned feminist hot sauce brand, Female Rage, is slinging hot sauce and hot dogs on Thursday* night at Garden District to raise money for DC Abortion Fund. The event is the latest in a long string of creative and collaborative local fundraisers for DCAF, including the annual My Body, My Festival music event and recurring Punk Rock Karaoke at the Black Cat. But Thursday ’s event might be the spiciest yet…
* That’s July 16!
Pierce R. Butlersays
Lynna @ # 123 & JM @ # 133 – Obviously, the lady admirals-to-be failed their testosterone-level tests!
When will Hegseth announce the excess-melanin test standards, and how will he protect us against the adequate-testosterone gays?
“State Rep. James Talarico said the state attorney general owns 11 homes. According to public documents, that’s accurate”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s long list of scandals has caused unease among some Senate Republicans. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, for example, said in May that Paxton “could reasonably be indicted for a felony.” Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina added, “To call Paxton ethically challenged is to call Jeffrey Dahmer suffering from an eating disorder.”
Complicating matters for the Texan is that his list of controversies continues to grow. Last week, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported that Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live “while voting in six elections in the past two years.” (A spokesperson for the Republican called the story “a baseless, lie-filled tabloid story” but offered nothing of substance to challenge its accuracy.)
This might not seem especially notable, were it not for the fact that Paxton, just months earlier, reminded Texans that under state law, “you must register to vote using the address where you reside.”
This dovetailed with related questions about why the state attorney general and his now-estranged wife declared three separate homes as their primary residence in mortgage documents, a practice his party has, in other situations, characterized as an outrageous abuse.[good point]
Stepping back, however, the reporting sparked a related question: Just how many homes does Paxton own?
His 2026 opponent, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, recently sat down with MS NOW’s Jen Psaki and offered an answer: “Since taking office, Ken Paxton has now become a multimillionaire, while our pay has remained stagnant for years, for decades. He now owns 11 homes, while most Texans can’t afford one,” he said.
Talarico has said this before — as Texans probably know, it’s become a standard line in his stump speech — but it got me wondering: Is that correct?
According to publicly available documents, including financial disclosure filings, the answer is yes. Paxton, either in his personal capacity or through the trust that oversees his assets, owns five homes in Texas, three in Florida, two in Utah and one in Oklahoma. (Those same publicly available materials also point to a lot in Hawaii, although there does not appear to be any structure on the property.)
The Wall Street Journal similarly reported last fall, “The Paxtons now own at least 11 residential properties around the U.S. with an assessed value of $7.5 million.”
To date, Paxton has not made any public effort to contest Talarico’s talking point.
[…] the circumstances brought to mind a related story from the recent past.
By mid-August 2008, the Great Recession was starting to take a brutal toll on the economy. In that month alone, the U.S. job market hemorrhaged 286,000 jobs, and with just 10 weeks remaining before Election Day, Americans’ focus turned to the ongoing economic crisis.
It was against this backdrop that a Politico reporter asked then-Sen. John McCain, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, how many homes he owned.
“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain said.
Then-Sen. Barack Obama, his Democratic rival, wasted little time seizing on the quote. Literally the same day that McCain made the comment, the Obama campaign launched a campaign ad hammering the Republican’s uncertainty over this basic fact, driving home the argument that McCain couldn’t relate to the hardships of regular people because he couldn’t even keep track of his vast collection of properties.
The name of the ad was “Seven,” a reference to the seven different homes McCain and his wife owned in locations across the country.
Roughly 18 years later, a similar story is unfolding in one of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races.
birgerjohanssonsays
Argentina will meet Spain at football world cup after victory over England.
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Primordial life, engineering
“The president is getting the guidance he wants from John Solomon, who’s inclined to tell him what he wants to hear.”
The real question is: Why is Trump so vulnerable to being “steered” by conspiracy mongering doofuses?
In late May, a conservative media figure named John Solomon acknowledged that he was poised for a brief career change: Instead of publishing reports favored by the Trump White House, Solomon was being vetted for a short-term job in the Trump White House.
For those familiar with his work, this was not an encouraging development: Solomon is perhaps best known for trying to undermine the validity of the Trump-Russia scandal.
Nevertheless, the vetting apparently worked out well, and Solomon joined Donald Trump’s operation soon after. Whether he’s serving the president well is another matter entirely.
Ahead of the primetime address on Thursday, in which Trump is expected to peddle a new round of election conspiracy theories, The Washington Post reported:
Trump is making the prime-time announcement at the urging of advisers including Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence, and John Solomon, a former conservative journalist who temporarily joined the White House to help review government records for release. Solomon has long questioned investigations surrounding Trump and has pushed for the release of FBI investigatory files related to alleged election interference.
Solomon’s role in steering the president in these conspiratorial directions is problematic on its face, but just as notable is that even some in the White House aren’t impressed.
MS NOW spoke this week with an administration official familiar with deliberations over the intelligence community’s material. Referring specifically to Pulte and Solomon, the official told MS NOW, “It’s that network [of people] that is the real f–––ing problem. They try to put bits and pieces together and then make these conclusions. Everything I have seen, it’s not what’s there.”
The same official said, in reference to claims from Pulte and Solomon, “The intelligence just doesn’t say what you want it to say. I’m sorry.”
The trouble, of course, is that the president is apparently inclined to believe what Pulte and Solomon have to say, whether they’re right or not. […]
Pierce @140: “Obviously, the lady admirals-to-be failed their testosterone-level tests!”
LOL.
In other “Was Department” news, as reported by the New York Times:
The United States attacked new Iranian military sites on Wednesday in the fifth consecutive day of strikes between the two countries, with neither side showing a willingness to back down as the war entered a new phase focused on the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. strikes, which the Pentagon said targeted Iran’s ability to threaten vessels in the strait, followed Iranian attacks on American military facilities in the region.
Nearly half of House Democrats voted to cut off aid to Israel Wednesday, underscoring a seismic shift in political support for the longtime U.S. ally.
The amendment to a State Department spending bill would have eliminated $3.3 billion in funding, and thanks to strong Republican support for the Jewish state, it failed 314-104 . But the vote served as a moment of reckoning for House Democrats who have had to confront years of voter outrage about Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza…
The chief engineer at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has been killed by a Ukrainian drone near the station, Russian authorities have said.
Alexei Likhachev, the head of Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom said in a statement that a Ukrainian drone had struck a service car between the plant’s site and the town of Enerhodar, killing the engineer, Alexander Yakovlev, and the driver on Wednesday…
France’s National Assembly gave final approval Wednesday to a bill allowing adults with incurable illnesses to receive lethal medication, the culmination of years of debate over end-of-life care.
But the 291-241 vote in the lower house of parliament doesn’t mean the bill immediately becomes law. There will be a review to determine if it complies with the French Constitution…
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed Mykhailo Fedorov as defence minister as part of his latest government reshuffle, Fedorov confirmed on Wednesday.
…
Fedorov then listed what he considers his team’s main achievements and failures during his six-month tenure.
Fedorov included the shutdown of Starlink systems for Russian forces, the campaign against Russian logistics in occupied Crimea, and “an unpopular but extremely important” military reform initiative.
…
Fedorov is expected to be replaced by Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko.
General Klymenko led the National Police from 2019 until 2023 and was appointed interior minister following the death of his predecessor, Denys Monastyrsky.
Ukrainian parliament should support his nomination…
Ukraine’s current strategy seems to be working well. Seems an odd time for a switch.
Who knew that making a deal with President Donald Trump would turn out poorly?
Everyone. Everyone knew this.
Well, except for the fanciest lawyers at the fanciest firms, who are now finding out that it was perhaps a less-than-optimal idea to bend the knee to Trump as the wheels come off.
Yes, these master dealmakers somehow thought that giving Trump tens of millions of dollars in “services” would somehow stave off his attacks—because Trump always honors his word, right?
Since this is the Trump administration, things have fallen apart in the most idiotic, craven way—thanks to the fact that Trump surrounds himself with corrupt cronies.
Last year, the American Bar Association sued the administration over Trump’s issuance of executive orders threatening to sanction big law firms who had committed the terrible misdeed of hiring or representing people Trump doesn’t like. [Trump’s actions violated the First Amendment.]
The administration tried to make it go away, but in April, a federal judge ruled that the lawsuit could move forward.
The ABA’s discovery requests, which the Trump administration has mightily tried to ignore, include requests for internal communications between former White House strategist Steve Bannon and Boris Epshteyn, one of Trump’s personal attorneys.
Epshteyn allegedly had a role in connecting two of the firms that buckled—Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom—to work with the Commerce Department on trade negotiations, a totally normal thing for the government to have external law firms do for free.
Bannon went on his podcast to chest-beat that Trump was doing exactly what everyone pretended he was NOT doing.
“Let me repeat this: There’s major law firms in Washington, D.C. What we are trying to do is put you out of business and bankrupt you,” he said. [!]
To stave this off, the administration tried its usual argument, claiming that it somehow violates the separation of powers not only for it to be held to any rule of law but even for it to have to reveal anything.
But once it became obvious that the administration couldn’t easily brush this aside, the Justice Department decided that the best thing to do was to attack the very people who cut the deals.
Wait, what?
Yes, since the administration does not want to give up any information on Bannon or Epshteyn’s roles, they’ve gone on the offensive and subpoenaed nine law firms that cut deals with Trump, along with the four firms that didn’t and who keep beating him in court.
It’s also demanding that the heads of those firms sit for depositions.
Wait, why?
The logic seems to be that leaning on the law firms is the same sort of pressure being brought to bear on Epshteyn, demanding they provide all communications with Epshteyn and anything about the corrupt bargain with Trump.
Again—wait, why?
Nobody really knows! Some lawyers representing those firms think it might be that the DOJ believes that leaning on the firms will cause them to lean on the ABA, which will then drop its lawsuit.
The problem that the administration doesn’t quite seem to have fully thought through is that there’s no world where all of these firms come forward with this information and it somehow reflects well on Trump or his lackeys. Nor is there a world where all of this discovery would somehow remain sealed forever.
But the Trump administration isn’t really interested in long-term solutions, now is it? It’s just one Rube Goldberg contraption after another, forever trying to prop up and obscure the last mistake.
… Now, Ukraine is increasingly transforming its drone boats into drone motherships. These vessels can set attack drones loose on enemy defenders or launch interceptors for a new kind of coastal air defense. The approach allows Ukraine to strike or defend from farther away, from less predictable directions, and with cheaper systems than traditional weaponry….
The emergence of drone motherships marks a distinct shift in how the drone war is being fought. Small drones make precision attacks cheap and widely available, but they still face limits in range, endurance, resistance to enemy jamming, and operator exposure.
By turning boats, aircraft, and vehicles into mobile launch platforms, Ukrainian forces can push smaller systems much deeper into the battlespace in unexpected ways.
…
Conflict analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based think tank, said in October that Russian forces had been using motherships since at least August 2025 to target Ukrainian logistics routes and positions in the near rear. They said the systems were based on variants of Russia’s fixed-wing Orlan and Molniya drones.
…
While motherships began as fixed-wing drones carrying FPVs into battle, they have since expanded to all types of drones, including ground and naval systems.
…
Motherships are not limited to uncrewed systems. Ukraine is also using crewed aircraft as launch platforms for smaller drones.
…
“It moves us away from the tactic where the interceptor launches from the ground,” he told Business Insider. “Instead, we can use some kind of carrier that can stay in the air longer and even fly closer to the target, reducing the distance the interceptor itself has to cover.” …
President Donald Trump was skewered on social media Tuesday after posting an AI image showing him talking to world leaders in front of a map indicating that the United States annexed Canada, Venezuela and Greenland.
The image, which Trump had used before to troll the territories, appeared on Trump’s Truth Social account Tuesday afternoon…
Demented narcissistic fuckwit.
The one similar idea I might go along with is renaming the Strait of Hormuz for him.
On fb & shared by oneof my friends there referring to E Jean Carroll :
Fun fact : The President of the goddamn United States paid nearly 6 million in damages today to a woman he raped. Once upon a time, this would have been the only news you heard.
Jeff Timmer.
Once it would have meant that President resigned in disgrace or was impeached too.
“Senate Democrats Act Like An Opposition Party, Block $1 Trillion Defense Bill”
Democrats in the Senate yesterday protested Donald Trump’s ongoing war against Iran by blocking the annual Defense Department funding bill from moving forward. The vote came days after Trump notified Congress that his phony cease-fire with Iran had somehow not held together and that the US was once again bombing Iran for peace.
Most years, the defense bill, formally called the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), is fairly easy to pass […]
But this year’s NDAA faced some atypical obstacles. For starters, it would throw far more money at the military than usual, with a price tag of $1.14 trillion, the first time a Pentagon funding bill has crossed the trillion-dollar threshold. It’s a bit short of the $1.5 trillion Trump asked for, but a fuckton more than last year’s $900 billion. (That said, Republicans did come along and add another $150 billion in war cash in last summer’s Big Ugly Bill.) A number of Democrats also opposed funding the Pentagon without placing limits on Trump’s deployments of National Guard and active-duty troops to cities.
But the real sticking point was Trump’s pointless war on Iran […]
“The NDAA cannot become a permission slip for that recklessness that we see occurring in Iran,” [Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said.]
[…] “Donald Trump does not get to drag the American people deeper into a war he cannot explain and does not know how to end — and then demand that Congress look the other way.”
Hell yes, more of that, please. The NDAA failed to get the 60 votes it needed to advance to debate, on a largely party-line vote of 50 to 46.
Putting the kibosh on the NDAA was also one of the most concrete actions Democrats could take […] more than 10 votes on war powers resolutions aimed at forcing Trump to stop his war [did not succeed].
[…] Wonkette fave Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois), who piloted a helicopter in our previous Forever War in Iraq and now serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that hell no she won’t support the largest-ever defense bill if it’s simply going to be a slush fund “for Donald Trump to continue his illegal and disastrous war that Americans do not want.”
[…] Quite a few Republicans don’t like the stupid war either, but they’re afraid of angering Dear Leader.
Instead, Republicans in Congress will try to cram through their third reconciliation bill this year so they can get something passed without needing Democratic votes in the Senate. It wouldn’t be the full NDAA or anything like it, but it would give the Pentagon an additional $67 billion, as well as providing $20 billion to pay off farmers fucked over by Trump’s tariffs. It would also squeeze in some elements of Trump’s beloved voter-suppression bill, the SAVE America Act, as long as they can be dressed up as “budget” items to conform with the limits of the reconciliation process. […]
“Wildfire Smoke Spreads Across the Northeast as Temperatures Spike”
“A heat dome is responsible for miserably high temperatures, and it’s also helping to push smoke from wildfires to the east.”
New York City on Wednesday night smelled of smoke and the sky turned a faint orange as air polluted by wildfires from Canada and the Great Lakes slipped across the Northeast, prompting alerts about poor air quality.
The haze is expected to continue through the night, and even to worsen in some places, as the same heat dome that is pushing temperatures close to 100 degrees across much of eastern Canada and the United States traps the smoke from faraway wildfires close to the ground.
In New York, city officials warned of “the possibility of deteriorating air quality” throughout the day Wednesday, but noted that even the most severe forecasts did not approach the levels seen in 2023, when the Canadian wildfire smoke sent the city’s air quality index surging to dangerous levels. Still, they said, echoing the warnings of officials across the region, people with health conditions that make them sensitive to polluted air should take caution. […]
More at the link, including maps and photos.
birgerjohanssonsays
16 July 1969 is when Apollo 11 started on its journey to the moon.
I recall the countdown.
birgerjohanssonsays
Trump just endorsed the My Pillow guy for governor of Minnesota!
whheydtsays
Re; birgerjohansson @ #1`59…
I got a paid day off work for the landing. Only good thing Richard Nixon ever did for me.
Nixon was not a conservationist at heart, and the tapes prove it. But the laws he signed reshaped the relationship between Americans and their environment more than anything since the New Deal.
Militant Agnosticsays
The bigger question is not “Can NATO exist without the Unite States?”, the bigger question is “How long before NATO cuts out the weakest link in the chain?”
The Trump administration said Wednesday it will impose an additional 25% tariff on many Brazilian goods, escalating a trade fight it says is rooted in Brazil’s treatment of U.S. companies…
China’s first national framework for emotionally interactive AI took effect today, July 15, 2026, triggering the simultaneous shutdown of personalized AI companion features on ByteDance’s Doubao and Alibaba’s Qwen — two of the country’s most widely used AI applications, as South China Morning Post first reported. The event is more than a compliance deadline: it reveals that no platform anywhere in the world has yet built AI companion architecture that can pass a regulator’s addiction-safety test, because the features that make a companion feel personal are the same ones that make it impossible to regulate.
…
The regulation at the center of today’s shutdowns is the Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services, co-issued on April 10, 2026, by the Cyberspace Administration of China and four partner agencies: the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration for Market Regulation. It entered a three-month grace period before taking legal effect today.
Reading the rule quickly, it might appear that Beijing just turned off AI agents. It did not. The measures draw a precise line between the agent that keeps you company and the one that does your work. Customer service bots, knowledge Q&A systems, workplace productivity assistants, and educational tools all remain explicitly permitted — provided they avoid sustained emotional engagement. What the law targets is the narrower category of AI services designed to simulate “the personality traits, thinking patterns, and communication styles of natural persons” to provide “continuous emotional interaction.”
Platforms falling within scope must implement anti-addiction systems, issue mandatory notifications to users who engage for more than two consecutive hours reminding them they are interacting with a machine, and offer instant-exit mechanisms. They must also detect signs of unhealthy emotional dependence in real time. For users under 14, parental or guardian consent is required for any anthropomorphic AI interaction. Virtual intimate relationships — virtual partners, virtual family members — are prohibited entirely for anyone under 18. A tiered security assessment and algorithm-filing requirement applies to any service that launches new anthropomorphic features, or reaches one million registered users or 100,000 monthly active users.
The law also prohibits seven categories of content, including material that encourages self-harm or suicide, content that induces emotional dependence or addiction in ways that damage real-world relationships, and emotional manipulation designed to steer users into unreasonable decisions…
Protests have been taking place in several Ukrainian cities against President Volodymyr Zelensky’s surprise dismissal of popular Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.
A crowd of people – mostly young – gathered in Kyiv, holding up signs reading “Hands off Fedorov” and “Stop sabotaging victory!” and chanting “Shame!”.
Zelensky has not yet explained his decision, which is causing significant upset among commentators and the military as well as parts of civil society.
Fedorov, 35, was appointed only in January but has been credited with energising the ministry, heading a drive against corruption and using data to analyse and try to improve performance on the front line.
MPs were due to vote on Thursday on the proposed replacement as defence minister, Ihor Klymenko, who currently heads the interior ministry…
Scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign have uncovered evidence that could reshape how researchers think about both the brain and artificial intelligence. Their findings suggest that decision making begins much earlier in the brain than traditional theories propose, offering fresh ideas for designing future AI systems that are more capable and far more energy efficient.
Led by electrical and computer engineering professor Yurii Vlasov at The Grainger College of Engineering, the research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). The study points to an unexpected role for early sensory brain regions in decision making, challenging the long accepted view that decisions emerge only after information moves through a strict hierarchy of brain regions…
New navigation satellites in low-Earth orbit could provide 100 times stronger signal strength compared to GPS and other global navigation satellite systems operating from higher orbital altitudes—enabling greater location accuracy within dense cities, under thick foliage, and even inside buildings. Such signals would also likely prove more resilient to interference at a time when commercial flights, maritime shipping, and even various smartphone apps face increasingly widespread disruption from GPS jamming.
That vision may start to take shape when the first six production satellites of California-based Xona Space Systems are scheduled to launch in October 2026, with early service starting in 2027. Once the full constellation of 258 Pulsar satellites has been launched in the following years, Xona claims that customers will be able to accurately pinpoint their locations anywhere on Earth to within several centimeters…
The legislative proposal seeks to create a new section of federal law allowing the defense secretary to exempt certain “controlled unclassified information,” or CUI, from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act if the U.S. military determines the records concern national defense vulnerabilities and concludes that the harm from disclosure outweighs the public interest.
Hegseth wants the ability to further control what information the public gets about the DOD. CUI covers a lot so can’t be sure what Hegseth is targeting. It’s very possible that Hegseth is just working towards blocking everything not released by the DOD press department.
Two boats carrying more than 500 people are feared to have capsized off the coast of Myanmar in recent days, United Nations agencies have said.
According to preliminary information reported on Thursday by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), the two vessels departed from Myanmar’s Rakhine State in late June carrying mostly Rohingya passengers.
One boat, believed to have been carrying about 250 people, lost contact shortly after departure. A second boat, reportedly carrying some 280 people, is believed to have sunk off Myanmar’s Ayeyarwady coast on July 8, they said…
According to MS NOW’s exclusive reporting, Secret Service agents assigned to JD Vance’s family are “fed up” with costly, last-minute travel demands—including a helicopter trip to take his young son to a golf lesson across town. Carol Leonnig joins to discuss her reporting.
Jacob Soboroff hosts. Carol Leaning is a knowledgeable guest. The Marine Two ride to a child’s golf lesson is not the only example.
Video is 8:35 minutes
Perhaps never before has a nominee for attorney general come before the Senate with as clear of a track record already doing the job as Todd Blanche.
But it turns out that GOP senators — the only ones who can block Blanche’s confirmation — don’t need to look that far back to assess his work.
An unpredicted confluence of events Wednesday produced an extraordinary split screen, with the Justice Department continuing to operate as a rogue federal law enforcement apparatus even as Blanche spent most of the day testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Each of these developments was significant news in their own right, but the timing was remarkable and accentuated the whistling-past-the graveyard approach of GOP senators to Blanche’s confirmation:
Scheming to Avoid Senate Confirmation of U.S. Attorneys
In Washington state, Blanche immediately fired the interim U.S. attorney who had just been unanimously appointed by the federal judges there less than an hour earlier. [!]
[…] For months, there have been rumblings that the federal judges in Seattle were looking for an appointee who would be willing to file suit if fired and had gone as far as formally asking candidates about their willingness to do so. Rogoff has retained an employment law firm, and in interviews after he was fired indicated he was considering challenging his termination.
“The president gets to choose his US attorney, but only with the advice and consent of the Senate,” Rogoff told Bloomberg. “We have a situation that is untenable, not constitutional, and not legal.”
Separately, in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Blanche had previously fired a court-appointed interim U.S. attorney, he named a local attorney Theo Stamos as the new first assistant U.S. attorney, which effectively makes her the top federal prosecutor there because the U.S. attorney position remains vacant. Stamos […] has no prior federal prosecution experience.
All of this scheming is part of the Trump administration’s effort to bypass Senate confirmation of U.S. attorneys in mostly blue states [Unfortunately, that is correct!], where the Senate’s blue slip tradition gives home state senators of the opposing party an effective veto over U.S. attorney nominees. Historically, that has led to accommodations by both sides to find consensus candidates, but President Trump prizes loyalty above comity.
Running Air Force One Leak Probe Out of White House
President Trump’s freakout over the New York Times’ reports on the inadequacies of his beloved new Qatari-gifted Air Force One has inadvertently revealed the extent to which Blanche is content to let the White House run DOJ. [!]
Not only was FBI Director Kash Patel running the investigation from the White House last Friday, as previously reported, he was doing so alongside Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, [!]
[…] As part of the investigation, some officials were asked to turn over their phones to investigators on White House grounds, CNN reports. Investigators have even sought out Secret Service agents who accompanied Trump on the trip to the NATO summit in Turkey that exposed the aircraft’s lack of missile defense capabilities compared to its predecessors, per the NYT.
The NYT report mirrors CNN’s account in making the unprecedented revelation that Wiles is “personally” leading the investigation with Patel.
One of the first investigative steps — which Blanche personally approved [!], he testified at his confirmation hearing — was to subpoena four NYT reporters over two stories about the deficiencies of the aircraft. The NYT moved yesterday to quash those subpoenas in filings that remain under seal.
Blanche Direct Report and Top ‘Antifa’ Prosecutor Is a Jan. 6er
In an exclusive report, TPM’s Josh Kovensky revealed for the first time — more than five years after the fact — that an assistant U.S. attorney in a Trump 2020 baseball cap with a star-spangled face mask marched on the Capitol on Jan. 6. [!]
The Trump DOJ confirmed that Brian W. Lynch “was present but never entered the capitol, left the grounds after a brief period, and did not commit and was never accused of any violation of law.”
One photo obtained by TPM shows Lynch in what Michael Romano, who was a deputy chief in the DOJ’s since-disbanded Capitol Siege Section, says was a restricted area around the Capitol: [video]
Lynch was appointed earlier this year to co-lead Joint Task Force Vanguard, which is taking the lead at DOJ in targeting left-wing opponents of Trump in a sweeping administration-wide effort to inflate the threat of “antifa” and categorize political opposition, protest, and civil disobedience as “domestic terrorism.” […]
Lynch reports directly to Blanche.
Combined with the FBI’s apparent attempt to muddy the water in the fatal ICE shooting in Houston last week, the series of developments yesterday made the Blanche confirmation hearing seem almost surreal, with Blanche assuring senators he would continue to always do the right thing even as wrongdoing was on full display outside of the committee room. [!]
[graph showing false or misleading claims made by Donald Trump]
The networks are facing a dilemma. To be complicit with trump’s attempted coup or face a backlash from the white nationalists.
Trump wants national coverage for his “really, really big news” Thursday night but as of Thursday morning ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News, as well as cable networks such as Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, have not complied and have regularly scheduled programing according to The Daily Beast.
MS NOW first reported that the president is planning to speak about voting machine security and announce apparent declassified intelligence reports that the White House claims reveal plans by other countries to interfere in the 2020 election. […]
“Trump administration’s new rule will limit foreign students to four-year stays”
“International students and exchange visitors may struggle to finish their degrees without visa extensions under a new DHS rule.”
The Trump administration finalized a rule Thursday barring most foreign students and exchange visitors from staying in the United States longer than four years without an extension from the federal government.
The Department of Homeland Security acknowledged concerns that students might have trouble finishing their degrees. On average, students take a little over four years to obtain a bachelor’s and even longer to finish a doctorate. But the federal government said it needed a better process to stop students from overstaying their visas.
“For nearly half a century, the outdated ‘duration of status’ system has compromised national security and created an environment ripe for immigration fraud,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said. [Loads of bullshit from Mullin and the Trump administration in general.]
“DHS’ decision to end Duration of Status is a misguided and unnecessary policy shift that injects uncertainty, bureaucracy, and fear into a system that has long worked effectively,” said Fanta Aw, executive director of NAFSA: Association of International Educators. [Correct.]
Even without the regulation, many colleges have struggled recently to recruit foreign students because of other visa restrictions, including bans on visitors from certain countries. That in turn has forced some schools to eliminate programs or cut staff.
The new time restrictions will affect both F-1 students and J-1 exchange visitors. Previously, such students generally were admitted for the duration of their programs, plus a grace period, as long as they complied with visa requirements. [!]
We will be unplugging the television tonight to prevent it being infected by tRUMP LIES and DEMENTIA. Yes, I know that it is unlikely that such deadly infection could spread through electrons. But, given all the diseases being spread everywhere with no gov. agencies left to help, we don’t want to take any chances.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
shermanj @179: “re-naming cesspools and toxic waste dumps after tRUMP.”
We probably shouldn’t draw his attention to more pots of money he might defraud.
Approximately 70% of Superfund cleanup activities historically have been paid for by the potentially responsible parties (PRPs), reflecting the polluter pays principle. However, 30% of the time, the responsible party either cannot be found or is unable to pay for the cleanup. In these circumstances, taxpayers had been paying for the cleanup operations. Through the 1980s, most of the funding came from an excise tax on petroleum and chemical manufacturers. However, in 1995, Congress chose not to renew this tax and the burden of the cost was shifted to taxpayers in the general public. […] Despite its name, the program suffered from under-funding, and by 2014 Superfund NPL cleanups had decreased to only 8 sites, out of over 1,200. In November 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act reauthorized an excise tax on chemical manufacturers, for ten years starting in July 2022.
Electrical interconnects may very well be the unsung heroes of modern microchips.
These tiny wires – typically made of copper due to its high conductivity – string together the billions of transistors that drive our computers and electronic devices. But as the technology advances and additional transistors are piled on, the components must shrink to the nanoscale. And that’s when copper begins to fail.
Cornell researchers have developed a potential replacement for copper interconnects: single-crystal nanowires of niobium arsenide. This topological semimetal paradoxically becomes a better conductor the thinner it gets, boosting electronic performance.
The findings were reported July 16 in Science.
…
“Electrons that are flowing on the surface of the material travel really fast, and they do not scatter off as easily as electrons in the bulk. That’s the reason why copper is suffering, because copper only has electrons flowing in the bulk,” Cha said. “As you make them small, these electrons inside the copper wire start to see the surfaces and are constantly getting scattered off to different directions. That’s why it becomes electrically very resistive.”
…
So in order to develop these superior alternatives to copper, the researchers employed a very specific process: thermomechanical nanomolding.
…
A White House teleprompter operator is being investigated over allegedly using inside information to place bets and make nearly $100,000 on US President Donald Trump’s speeches.
Gabriel Perez, who had worked at the White House since 2016, is accused of placing bets on words the president would use during major public addresses, including the State of the Union speech.
The trades were made on Kalshi, a prediction markets platform where users can bet on real-world events. The firm confirmed it reported the activity to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which regulates the platform..
Prime Minister Mark Carney said Thursday that any money made from tolls on the Gordie Howe International Bridge won’t be split with the United States until all Canadian investment in the project is repaid.
At an event Thursday in London, Ont., Carney was asked whether the $6.4 billion of investment made by Canada would be collected before profits from the bridge would be split with the U.S. side.
“It’s not splitting the tolls of the bridge,” Carney told journalists. “It is an agreement for 15 years to split net revenues.
“Any sharing of the toll revenue won’t happen until all the debt, all of the debt, is repaid.” …
Facing mounting pressure to acknowledge that Grok can still be used to generate non-consensual sexualized images of adults and minors, xAI filed a lawsuit Tuesday, suing the first user that Elon Musk’s firm has accused of using its chatbot to create illegal content.
The complaint targets Terry Wayne Harwood, who was arrested earlier this year for possession and distribution of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), the South Carolina attorney’s office announced…
Imagine a gun manufacturer suing someone who used their product in a robbery.
the report—which came only days after the Supreme Court upheld laws banning trans women from women’s sports—takes aim at Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bars sex discrimination in schools receiving federal funds and was directly responsible for the creation of women’s sports programs in K-12 schools.
[…]
according to Yenor, the discrimination lies in giving women equality, as Title IX’s mandates of equal spending and parity in competitive opportunity meant “colleges […] cutting men’s non-revenue programs rather than adding women’s teams or controlling costs in football and men’s basketball.”
Interestingly, his entire argument essentially reverses the rhetoric that Republicans have employed when banning trans athletes. There, they argue that trans athletes should get fewer opportunities because they are more competitive and aggressive and that every trans woman who wants to compete is unfairly taking an opportunity away from a cis woman. But here, it’s now cis women who should get fewer opportunities for being less competitive and aggressive and that every cis woman who wants to compete is unfairly taking an opportunity away from a man.
[…]
Yenor proposes that Title IX should instead ‘accommodate nature’ by doing away with many competitive women’s sporting programs […] repeated references to the idea that competitive sports make women “less oriented towards motherhood” […] are present throughout the report.
Reginald Selkirksays
@187
If they are so concerned with “assisting fertility,” they could donate protective cups for amateur male athletes.
After pushing anti-trans laws to ‘protect women’s sports’, Project 2025’s Heritage Foundation now wants women’s sports gone to ‘assist fertility’
[…] every cis woman who wants to compete is unfairly taking an opportunity away from a man. […]
FFS. Sound like retrograde religious crapola to me.
StevoRsays
@159. birgerjohansson : “16 July 1969 is when Apollo 11 started on its journey to the moon.
I recall the countdown.”
15th July Aussie time – the day before in USoA time – was the New Horizons fly by of Pluto when we got our first close up look at that wonderful, dynamic, surprising little planet.
whheydtsays
Re: SteveR @ #192…
When I was a regional officer with a volunteer educational non-profit and Australia was part of my region, the rule of thumb, if one needed to ‘phone there, was “6 hours ago, tomorrow.”
StevoRsays
Thinking of which :
A groundbreaking mission that explored Pluto and distant solar system objects in unprecedented detail has awakened from its longest sleep ever — and it’s 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft went into a planned hibernation mode on August 7, 2025, and woke up on June 23 using commands stored on its main computer.
The mission’s flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed that New Horizons is in great shape and ready to transmit a stream of science data gathered during hibernation from its location in the region of icy objects known as the Kuiper Belt.
..(Snip)..
“There seems to be more paired, snowman-shaped bodies, like Arrokoth, out there than anyone expected,” Brandt wrote in an email. “Are such binaries the most common planetesimal and is this how larger planets have been built in our own and other stellar systems? These are very deep questions that New Horizons can help answer.”
..(Snip)..
Another instrument, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, has collected data that has thrown New Horizon’s team a curveball, Brandt said. The team expected dust abundance to be high within the Kuiper Belt due to the significant presence of small objects. But New Horizons has traveled beyond the known boundary of the Kuiper Belt — and it’s still in a dusty environment. …
US Vice-President JD Vance has accused some members of the Israeli government of trying to influence Americans’ opinions to prolong the Iran war.
In an interview published on Wednesday, Vance told conservative podcaster Joe Rogan that while he trusts some people within the Israeli government, there are others “who are manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely”…
Is manipulating public opinion in some other country a bad thing? (cough cough Orban)
robrosays
We may have found the vandals that damaged the Reflecting Pool: On May 7th, after the pool was painted and sealed, but not filled, Trump’s motorcade drove through the pool. There were at least 10 SUVs in the motorcade.
There will be no federal funds for bulletproof vests for cops in Santa Cruz, California, the city alleged in a lawsuit. No ambulances for paramedics in Beaverton, Oregon. And now, no money for police departments to process rape kits in Fresno, as the administration threatens to withhold federal grants for critical services from cities that won’t sign deals to work with ICE.
Cities face a hard choice: give up the federal money, sign the ICE agreements, or fight the Department of Justice in court. […] Fresno has already gone to court over other grants tied up due to the administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion. […] Los Angeles County said it is forgoing many federal grant opportunities. Miami is facing backlash from residents after city leaders signed on to ICE’s program. And other cities, from Seattle to San Diego, are launching their own court battles.
In October, the DOJ named 12 states, 18 cities, and three counties that it said “materially impede enforcement of federal immigration statutes.” In general, many of those locations refuse to share information with ICE, hold individuals for ICE, or allow agents into their jails.
A California federal judge dealt a blow to the Trump administration on July 9 when he ruled the federal government couldn’t withhold public safety grants to Oregon and California cities. Another battle is brewing over the sexual assault evidence kits. […] The same judge ruled last year that Trump couldn’t deny funding to Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles—and 30 other cities—over the lack of immigration enforcement cooperation. He did the same in 2017 during Trump’s first term.
[…]
More than 21 locales that initially received grants to test rape kits are now deemed “sanctuary jurisdictions.” […] DOJ grant administrators sent Fresno a note in June, noting that the city had not signed a certification saying it would cooperate with [DHS] and ICE or risk losing the money. […] the situation puts the city in a bind: State law prohibits sharing that type of information, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the constitutionality of the law.
[…]
“Denying a city funding to test rape kits is wrong-headed when your stated goal is taking dangerous offenders off the streets,”
Militant Agnosticsays
Denying a city funding to test rape kits is wrong-headed when your stated goal is taking dangerous offenders off the streets,
Makes perfect sense for someone who is pro-rape.
Militant Agnosticsays
The personal and professional bank accounts of lawyer Jeff Rath, one of the leaders of Alberta’s separatist movement, were temporarily frozen as part of a legal dispute over millions of dollars in trust funds that a First Nation alleges were misappropriated.
The company is launching a new data feed, known as an application programming interface (API), that gives paying customers “licensed, real-time access” to Truth Social posts from the president and other top accounts, receiving them in “milliseconds,” according to the statement.
The announcement is a bit vague, no pricing and what “real-time” means in this context is not explained. Depending on how much of an advantage this service gets in speed it could be a serious issue or just contemptible. The point however is clear, they are explicitly selling this to Wall Street as getting early access to Trump’s announcements. Since Trump often makes announcements of new tariffs, deals or government policy this way it’s all important to stock traders.
They don’t state which dynasty but if it was 4000 years ago it should be the Middle Kingdom period. The Old Kingdom was in the copper-stone age so they could not produce daggers like this.
StevoRsays
BBC has live coverage of the new British PM-to-be’s speech on taking up party leadership here – happening right now :
‘Nihilistic Violent Extremism’ Isn’t a Thing, and I’m Tired of Pretending It Is
You can’t tell me this isn’t a ridiculous fossil fueled country. The temperature now at ~3:26pm in northern scarizona is 115 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade!
All I can hear is the Animals from 1965 singing: ‘We’ve gotta get outta this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do’
Eastern front losses mapped
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=cD2XpNWjjyo
Each dot marks 10.000 soldiers killed, captured or missing.
@1 Reginald Selkirk wrote about an article on “nihilistic violent extremism” (NVE).
I must posit that individuals that allegedly commit “nihilistic violent extremist” acts are not the big problem. They are ‘small fish’ encouraged and facilitated by the current administration, their cockroach followers, the xtian nationalists and warmongering hateful actors who are the REAL problem.
Detasseling Corn – Less Fun Than it Sounds
Detasseling corn was a summer job when i was a teenager. The above is mostly a personal experience article, the technical description isn’t especially good. To get the desired hybrid, the seed companies plant 6 or so rows of the “female” corn and two rows of the “male” corn. The “female” rows must all be detasseled so that they are only pollinated by the corn in the “male” rows.
@5
Maybe I assumed too much of the reader. All corn is both male and female, but they are on different parts of the plant. The male flowers are the tassels, at the top of the plant. The female flowers are the ears, which grow lower along the stalk.
Wikipedia: corn (Zea mays) plants
In the UK and Europe, corn may mean the predominant crop of the region, but In the USA, corn is synonymous with maize.
@5
Here’s a better technical description
Busload of grubby, sweaty teens is probably detasselers
My other teen ag job: walking beans
That’s about how I did it – unless I was working for my aunt. Then we didn’t get a hoe; we wore gloves and we pulled the weeds out to be sure we got the roots.
Even back then, walking beans was very regional. It was common in the area where I grew up, but if you drove through other parts of the state, you would see the taller weeds sticking up out of the soybean fields. The farmers there didn’t do the manual weeding, they just used a combination of herbicides and cultivation (plowing between the soybean rows with a disc plow).
Here’s a tip from my father: if you chop thistles off an inch below the soil level they won’t grow back.
Finally some fucking good news. You all know what I mean. 🎉
Satan has called Lindsey Graham home.
Alan Greenspan treated worker wage raises as a threat against the economy. He was proven wrong.
.https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1EWk1gGSxP/
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-12/lindsey-graham-dies/106907306
Now w e waiut for Micth to eb confirmed rigour tortoiose..
Muslim judge in India faces death threats after convicting ‘cow vigilantes’
The Israeli Spy Behind PragerU’s Plan to Rewrite American Education To Indoctrinate Children
2026 07 12
Alan Macleod MintPress News
PragerU is trying to take over American schools. The right-wing, pseudo-educational group is now an official educational partner in at least ten states, and blitzes children with highly questionable messaging on race, history, and politics. Even more concerning, PragerU is led by former Israeli spy, Marissa Streit, who has stated she uses the tactics and techniques honed by IDF military intelligence on the American people.
https://scheerpost.com/2026/07/12/the-israeli-spy-behind-pragerus-plan-to-rewrite-american-education-to-indoctrinate-children/
At the moment, Count Binface beats Farage in national polls…
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=hvVvc27C4pU
Sen. Lindsey Graham dies at 71 after ‘brief and sudden illness’
Related video at the link.
For the convenience of readers, here are some links back to the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread.
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2026/06/28/infinite-thread-xxxx/comment-page-1/#comment-2306038
With the white nationalist group Patriot Front, what you see is not what you get
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2026/06/28/infinite-thread-xxxx/comment-page-1/#comment-2306030
Here is some good news.
James Talarico raises over $30 million in second quarter, campaign says, more than triple Ken Paxton’s sum
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2026/06/28/infinite-thread-xxxx/comment-page-1/#comment-2306026
He’s suspected of hiring a Venezuelan gang for a political killing. Trump officials still work with him. By ProPublica
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2026/06/28/infinite-thread-xxxx/comment-page-1/#comment-2306017
New York Times reporters are subpoenaed after Air Force One stories, raising press freedom concerns
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2026/06/28/infinite-thread-xxxx/comment-page-1/#comment-2306016
“An Inconvenient Moment for an Extreme Global Heat Wave,” by Bill McKibben
How Republicans paved the way for white nationalists to invade DC
https://www.wonkette.com/p/lindsey-graham-is-an-ex-parrot
Washington Post EXCLUSIVE
“Survivors of Iranian attack that killed 6 U.S. troops say generals ignored warnings”
“The drone strike on Port Shuaiba in Kuwait occurred on the second day of the war. Those who were there say they fear no one will be held accountable.”
More at the link.
Wikipedia – Chuck Grassley
/Hehe, Wikipedia has markup that dynamically updates that tally.
Eric Columbus: “Chuck Grassley has been in office continuously since before Mike Pence was born.” [June 1959]
Steven Dennis (Bloomberg): “If Grassley wins reelection again, he could be the first lawmaker to serve in 9 separate decades: 50s 60s 70s 80s 90s 00s 10s 20s 30s.”
The Guardian – Deaths linked to London air pollution have fallen 40% since 2019
Sky Captain @22, that’s good news. Glad to see that.
In other news, the Washington post reports:
Washington Post link
“The new Trump accounts for kids aren’t the financial boon the president claims”
New Yorker link
“An O.M.B. Plan to Defund Science—and Anything Trump Doesn’t Like”
“Under a new proposal, Administration officials could deny government grants to any group or project on the ground that it didn’t fit the President’s agenda.” By Elizabeth Kolbert
Guinea fowl sales spike in N.S. as homeowners look for natural tick control
CBS News: Sen. Mitch McConnell says he was “briefly unconscious,” had pneumonia in latest health update
So apparently still alive but in so weak he can’t go back to the Senate. His story is a little thin but I will buy that he is alive and determined to hold onto his seat in the Senate until it’s clawed from his cold dead fingers.
Ireland’s data centers consumed nearly as much electricity as every home in the country combined in 2025 — server farms gulped 23% of national power despite years of grid restrictions
Wai Ching Ho, ‘Daredevil’ and ‘Iron Fist’ Actress, Dies at 82
Dang! Moscow Mitch is still alive!
(Crossposted with the Lindsey Graham thread)
“Mitch McConnell reveals fall led to hospitalization after weeks of silence” | Mitch McConnell | The Guardian .https://share.google/zxf1ERhsVVjHgwPiM
Newsweek – Did Trump’s July 4 fireworks set a world record? (Jul 6)
Last Week Tonight – Turkmenistan Prez Berdimuhamedov (2019, 12:40 to 20:30)
I can imagine Trump’s people stiffing Guinness, or failing to submit proof. He would just assert he got the record regardless.
birgerjohansson @30: A lot of people online are claiming that the newspaper seen in McConnell’s photo in that article appears to be an AI-generated image. And as I said in the other thread, Mitch is looking far healthier in that picture than he’s looked in years. Very suspicious until an independent source can actually see him directly instead of relying on press releases from a thoroughly dishonest group.
Re: microraptor @ #32…
What struck me about the picture is the shirt he’s wearing. That’s not a style of upper garment I’ve ever seen in a hospital.
Re: whheydt @ #33…
More on the clip of McConnell…. I don’t any sign of an IV. Pretty much the very first thing that happens when you’re admitted is that they start an IV, even if there is no immediate need for it. That IV stays (it may be re-done periodically) until they’re ready to discharge you.
microraptor @32:
Daily Beast
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-13/israel-election-date-likely-to-be-in-october/106909014
Sadly, whilst in currently in trouble I wouldnt ount the genocidaire Netanyahu out yet.
Fix : … wouldn’t count out the genoicidaiure Netanyahu yet.
Vale Sam Neill. Wonderful actor and truly good human being from all I’ve heard about him :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-13/sam-neill-remembered-obituary-honorary-australian/102963260
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-13/sam-neill-dies-jurassic-park-actor/103425588
Sam Neill 1947-2026
Fifty years as an actor and never a hint of scandal or nastiness. He seems to have been a genuinely nice person. BTW he had beat cancer, only for some other (not disclosed) disease to take him.
The recently deceased actor Sam Neill on a video where he is greeting Sweden 2022 , as Sweden has made it a tradition to watch the 1989 version of ‘Ivanhoe’ (where SN had a major role) ever New Year
.https://share.google/rlmadONNAqExZXL67
Dr Ben Miles
“This Battery [allegedly] Lasts for 30 Years And China Just Put It on the Grid”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=J091Zl9kXzg
“Scientists decipher how a psychedelic substance is created, then engineer a plant to produce several at once”
Obviously, society wants people to consume less psychedelics, not more but this can be a gateway to producing therapeutic psychedelics in edible plants, so the substances could be consumed in carefully regulated doses.
.https://phys.org/news/2026-07-scientists-decipher-psychedelic-substance.html
Einstein’s relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows
New era for Gibraltar with removal of 118-year-old border controls with Spain
Wildfire raging south of Paris could have been set deliberately, says minister
N.J. man says he was almost kicked off plane after flight attendant found shirt offensive
Two podcasters discuss the issues where Trump has alienated his own followers.
“New Poll Shocks Trump, Spells Disaster For MAGA”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=HlIwF6OZBSk
Astronomers Detect Sugar in Interstellar Space for the First Time
Trump warns a reporter ‘will pay the price’ for coverage he doesn’t like
“It hardly seems like a coincidence that the president has meltdowns when reporters raise concerns about secrecy surrounding his health.”
Link
To protect its drinking water, this city has to appeal to the oil regulators that put it at risk. By ProPublica
More at the link, including embedded links to additional sources.
An animal sanctuary where if you look out from the bathroom in the morning you see a peacock staring down at you.
“We Rescued a Peacock… Now He Runs the Place”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=e5G4LCLwHvw
re Lynna@50:
I would be willing to bet that a random 12 year-old could pass with flying colors. He is so deluded that it is a difficult test.
birgerjohansson @43:
For a while, I had some pretty jimsonweeds growing nearby… until I googled em.
Wikipedia – Datura
To be fair Datura are exceptionally uncooperative for use in herbal medicine or recreation. Hopefully the engineered plants do their chemistry reliably outside a lab.
johnson catman @54: “I would be willing to bet that a random 12 year-old could pass with flying colors. He [Trump] is so deluded that it is a difficult test.”
Yep. Even considering the usual trumpian levels of delusion and/or ignorance, it is hard to believe that Trump thinks that test is difficult … and that other people couldn’t pass it
And, of course, Trump continues to repeat his nonsense about the test. His fits of braggadocio remind us that he stupid, that his brain doesn’t work properly, and that he will raise the flag of his ignorance as if it were a virtue at every opportunity.
Oh FFS!
Trump eyes radical new plan: U.S. to be ‘guardian of the Hormuz Strait,’ charge tolls
“Trump announced a spectacularly radical scheme that, among other things, legitimizes the idea of charging fees for passage through the Strait of Hormuz.”
Trump promised America First non-intervention. Also, he wants dominance over the the western hemisphere. And Gaza. And Hormuz. Just abandoned doctrinal justification altogether for the Iran war.
Judge slams Trump-IRS ‘settlement,’ refers attorney for possible disciplinary actions
Good. They needed to be smacked down.
Tickets for the Republicans’ midterm convention cost as much as $20,000
“It’s not a real convention,” a Republican consultant conceded. “It’s just this grifter free-for-all.”
States Sue to Block Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger, Defying DOJ
Zara’s ‘death pants’ are trending because people keep tripping on them
Cyclosporiasis cases in Michigan surpass 2,600, health officials say
These Fruits And Veggies Might Be The Cause Of Cyclosporiasis, The Summer’s Explosive Diarrhea Illness
Politico – Trump notifies Congress of new war against Iran
re CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain@65: Meet the new war, same as the old war.
Raw story: Mystery as Trump announces prime time address to nation
Trump is going to give a speech 9 pm Eastern time. No official word in the announcement but apparently it’s going to be something about the 2020 elections.
Trump to revive 2020 conspiracy with declassified intel in ‘speech to the nation’: report
Archaeologists Just Found the Earliest Known Named Scientist in the Ancient Americas
Coalition of states sues to stop Paramount-Warner megamerger
Fox News:
WTF?
Darline Graham Nordone, sister of Lindsey Graham, chosen to fulfill remainder of his US Senate term
Hegseth intervenes in yet another investigation, shrugs off safety standards
“The hapless defense secretary cares a great deal about beards, but he’s far less concerned about service members and safety standards.”
Related video at the link.
Kyplanet has a new almost 15 mins long video here – on
Why the Grand Tack Hypothesis is Probably Wrong.
Source : https://www.newarab.com/analysis/secret-us-israel-project-mapped-irans-civilian-pressure-points
From one of my fb friends and actually written by her :
Source : https://theshot.net.au/uncategorized/this-independence-day-free-speech-comes-with-decades-long-jail-sentences/
Source : https://www.newarab.com/news/network-torture-camps-what-israels-new-prison-rules-mean
Source : https://www.newarab.com/opinion/how-dare-you-bibi-netanyahu-speak-us-lebanese-christians
One more via The New Arab website here :
Source : https://www.newarab.com/news/israel-weaponising-water-parched-jordan-fights-supply
New Yorker link
“On a military base in West Texas, where the government has built a sprawling tent complex to hold thousands of immigrants, deprivation and dire conditions are part of the design.” By Jonathan Blitzer
Much more at the link.
Latest updated map tracking ‘explosive diarrhea’ cases in the US
The Hill: Trump urges Senate to pass crypto bill in honor of Graham
There no particular connection between the bill and Graham except Graham supported everything Trump told him to support. It’s funny really because it’s so shallow and will do nothing. An emotional appeal from Trump isn’t going to move anybody in Congress and the issue is too narrow and technical for it to have popular support. I wonder who suggested this to Trump, it’s not something he would do on his own.
Musk promises purge after Grok Build caught sending entire repos to the cloud
ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: ‘Beyond horrendous’: ICE fatally shoots 26-year-old father in Maine
Video is 8:30 minutes
ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES:‘He wasn’t a victim’: Hayes on Lindsey Graham’s bargain with Trump
Video is 9:01 minutes
Taco Bell eyed in explosive diarrheal outbreak; leafy greens suspected
Does not sound entirely conclusive at this point.
https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/mitch-mcconnell-trounces-trump-on
About that primetime address Trump plans to give:
Link
National Mac & Cheese Day 2026
20 tons of Emmental cheese goes missing between Bavaria and France
Trump keeps changing his story about the alleged ‘gash’ in the Reflecting Pool
“When administration officials can’t keep their story straight about dubious details, it’s a big hint that they’re probably making stuff up.”
Trump refuses to accept that he is responsible, at least in part, for the failure of the MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) between the USA and Iran.
Link
Video at the link.
The Federal Cover-Up of Three Minnesota Shootings Finally Unravels
New York Times link
“E. Jean Carroll Receives $5.6 Million Payment From Trump in Civil Case”
Reginald Selkirk @80: The shades-of-brown map was a cute idea, but I found it difficult to distinguish all 5 gradations. The caption’s CDC link has a better map: shades of blue (same issue) but hovering over a state gives clear case counts.
Food prices went up.
Link for text quoted in comment 94.
In other news: Susan Collins mildly concerned after ICE executes immigrant in her state
Link
https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-to-show-nation-proof-2020-election
“Trump To Show Nation Proof 2020 Election Stolen By Venezuelan Space Lasers Obama China RIGGED STOLLEN Biden Thermostat LAPTOP”
@93 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain
Thanks, that map is improved in some ways, but it could be still better.
1) Hovering over a state doesn’t give a clear singular number, it gives a range. Michigan, for example, is “501 to 900.” New York is “161 to 300.”
2) The numbers don’t seem up to date. The CDC map claims “1,645 people with cyclosporiasis acquired in the United States since May 1, 2026” whereas a recent link (#63) claims over 2600 cases in Michigan alone. And I just found this:
Michigan’s Cyclosporiasis Case Count Has Doubled Since Friday: More Than 3,300 Infections Confirmed
Scientists Found Gold in the Most Ironic Place Possible
Reuters – Pollution from Musk’s unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities
Rude Law Dog:
Neal Romanek (Journalist):
Rando: “Bond villains are more subtle than this.”
The Verge – New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium
TACO Tuesday
U.S.-Iran War Latest: Trump reverses course on 20% fee for Strait of Hormuz cargo, citing trade deals
Trump slashes Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante by 90%
Boston area sky turns yellow as wildfire smoke blocks sun; air quality could be worse on Wednesday
‘Unhealthy’ air quality expected across Minnesota as wildfire smoke spreads
Wisconsin air quality advisory issued statewide as wildfire smoke moves in
etc.
Hungary parliament votes to remove president from office
US burrito giant Chipotle opening first outlet in Mexico
He saw a pit on Google Maps. It turned out to be a 390-million-year-old meteor crater
Reporting from The New Republic:
Commentary:
Link
Cartoon: Timing is everything, by Drew Sheneman
Visiting Earth 385 Million Years Ago (recommended)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=G4U_QkMR8og
Visiting Earth 3.5 Billion Years Ago
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=jufR6BR2pgg
World Cup semi-final #1. Ain’t sports wonderfully unpredictable? Before this, Spain looked good, but France looked unbeatable. Spain 2 France 0, with Spain dominating throughout. I don’t think France had a shot on goal, and Spain had two. All Spanish players were brilliant, but for me, Olmo and Cucurella stood out.
If England beat Argentina tomorrow (I reckon it’s about 50-50), the final will be edge-of-seat-nailbiting-pants-pissing time. I’m too old for this shit (I was 11 when England won). Go England!
Scientists think they found two key bacteria that cause multiple sclerosis
Dinosaurs on Noah’s ark? A MAGA theme park clings to creationism
CBS News via Yahoo News: DoD watchdog finds 155mm artillery plant built 2 years ago has produced nothing
It opened March 2024, since then it has produced nothing instead of the 30,000 parts a month it was supposed to produce. The company operating the facility is General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, another branch of the military industrial behemoth General Dynamics.
The problem is partially the Army’s fault. It looks like they agreed to a plan where the contractor bought untested equipment and it didn’t work out. Why it’s taken so long to evaluate and fix the problem is it’s own issue.
Central pastor arrested on battery charge ordered to stay 50 yards from neighbor
Want to guess whether he has evidence of those alleged threats? My guess is no.
Inside The Dark Side Of Scientology As Hollywood Stars Abandon The Faith
(video)
Lindsey Graham Allegedly Connected To Trans Author
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=HSnVqoUsTJo
Miami Herald – 28yo man killed by truck as he fled immigration agents in St. Augustine, Florida
Texas Hispanics swung hard to Trump. A new poll shows they’re furious at his deportations.
Leopards. Faces.
RACHEL MADDOW: Trump embarrassed by another leak, freaks out on New York Times for sources
Video is 7:53 minutes
RACHEL MADDOW: Maddow: Trump caught in desperation spiral as his opposition grows
Video is 9:14 minutes
In Range TV: The Schofield Gun of Pancho Villa’s Assassin
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=WhTVGh6yxjc
The TEC Show brings some good news.
“Democrats’ Maine Senate Odds SURGE After Platner Drops Out”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=2JVcHivDybE
The 5 Smallest Airplanes Ever Built:
.https://youtube.com/shorts/cNjYuYsGAw0
Hegseth isn’t done blocking promotions for women in military leadership roles
Rastafarians in Kenya fail in bid to get cannabis legalised for religious purposes
(I like to include some feel-good tidbits along with the horror)
.
Donkeys can be tremendiously affectionate.
“Tiny Donkey Thinks He’s Actually A Dog”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=MIQKlHSD89E
WTF?
Trump demands additional ICE traffic stops, despite his own administration’s new policy
“On Tuesday, the administration took steps to back off ICE vehicle stops. On Wednesday, the president personally rejected the change.”
Related video at the link.
President Donald Trump endorses Mike Lindell for Minnesota governor
Reported price tag for war with Iran keeps climbing, discrediting Team Trump estimates
“New reporting suggests the cost of the conflict could be more than triple the most recent estimate from the Trump administration.”
Cartoon: Selling the sun by Jen Sorensen
Trump screws up another meeting with a foreign leader
“Goodbye Lindsey Graham”
Stand Up Comedy
Sammy Obeid
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=X43I3vrA8IU
https://www.wonkette.com/p/is-it-illegal-to-try-to-influence
“Is It Illegal To Try To Influence An Election By Giving People A Million Dollars? Elon Musk Is About To Find Out!”
The Hill: Hegseth announces annual testosterone screenings for service members
I assumed this was some humor site when I first read the headline but no.
There is a lot to unpack there, Hegseth has fit a lot of garbage in a small space. “sacred duty” is not something the US military has. Individual soldiers are not always the most important tactical contributor and since machine guns have generally been secondary to something else. He talks like the money spent on this will come close to what is spent on weapon systems.
At the end he implies a soldier’s military performance is more important then their health but that has always been true of the DOD, can’t blame that one on Hegseth.
Jesse Dollemore: “Accusations Against Lindsey Graham Revealed”
.
While we only have one person’s testimony (so far) it follows the usual script of hypocrasy and bigotry so closely I give it something like 99% credibiliy. The part of him wearing red lingerie while paying a college student for sex may or may not be an embellishment, I don’t know how much Republicans are into weird fetishes. Maybe that part has an 80% probability.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=83BXUmXL6oA
Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws
Protesters surround Tim Houston’s car, smash glass after speech
Dr. Erica Schwartz faces questions about vaccines at CDC director confirmation hearing
The new malaria vaccine helps in Africa but faces dosing test
Eat a Hot Dog, Fund Abortion
* That’s July 16!
Lynna @ # 123 & JM @ # 133 – Obviously, the lady admirals-to-be failed their testosterone-level tests!
When will Hegseth announce the excess-melanin test standards, and how will he protect us against the adequate-testosterone gays?
Ken Paxton’s many real estate holdings become an issue in Texas Senate race
“State Rep. James Talarico said the state attorney general owns 11 homes. According to public documents, that’s accurate”
Argentina will meet Spain at football world cup after victory over England.
.
Primordial life, engineering
Zirconium tweak unlocks stronger cast aluminum alloy with ductility boost
.https://phys.org/news/2026-07-zirconium-tweak-stronger-aluminum-alloy.html
.
RNA-only repair enzyme reveals how primordial life could have protected genomes
.https://phys.org/news/2026-07-rna-enzyme-reveals-primordial-life.html
Conservative media figure joins White House team, steers Trump in unfortunate direction
“The president is getting the guidance he wants from John Solomon, who’s inclined to tell him what he wants to hear.”
The real question is: Why is Trump so vulnerable to being “steered” by conspiracy mongering doofuses?
Pierce @140: “Obviously, the lady admirals-to-be failed their testosterone-level tests!”
LOL.
In other “Was Department” news, as reported by the New York Times:
Physical pressure could make EV batteries last twice as long and reduce environmental impact
.https://techxplore.com/news/2026-06-physical-pressure-ev-batteries-environmental.html
Everyone Knows It’s Lindsey (song parody)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qg6NWaPhIWU
In seismic shift, more than 100 House Democrats vote to end Israel aid
Ukraine-Russia war latest: Chief engineer at Europe’s biggest nuclear reactor killed in drone attack, says the Kremlin
France’s National Assembly gives final approval to assisted-dying bill after years of debate
Zelenskyy dismisses Ukraine’s popular Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov
Ukraine’s current strategy seems to be working well. Seems an odd time for a switch.
The TEC Show:
The 2026 Senate Map Southern Battleground States Based On The Newest Data.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=_55BrZi3H18
Big law firms caved to Trump. Now he’s screwing them over.
Ukraine’s war drones are catching new rides into battle
Donald Trump trolls 3 countries with AI map showing America annexing territories
Demented narcissistic fuckwit.
The one similar idea I might go along with is renaming the Strait of Hormuz for him.
Victor Davis Hanson: The World Is Becoming More Pro-American Than It Has Been in Years
Sure, Jan.
More people around the world now favour China over the US, Pew study suggests
On fb & shared by oneof my friends there referring to E Jean Carroll :
Once it would have meant that President resigned in disgrace or was impeached too.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/senate-democrats-act-like-an-opposition
“Senate Democrats Act Like An Opposition Party, Block $1 Trillion Defense Bill”
New York Times link
“Wildfire Smoke Spreads Across the Northeast as Temperatures Spike”
“A heat dome is responsible for miserably high temperatures, and it’s also helping to push smoke from wildfires to the east.”
More at the link, including maps and photos.
16 July 1969 is when Apollo 11 started on its journey to the moon.
I recall the countdown.
Trump just endorsed the My Pillow guy for governor of Minnesota!
Re; birgerjohansson @ #1`59…
I got a paid day off work for the landing. Only good thing Richard Nixon ever did for me.
whheydt @161:
Richard Nixon: The Accidental Conservation President
Professor Poutine says NATO can exist without the U.S.
The mount of money America spends on NATO is only 16% of NATO’s budget.
Russia is running out of air defence systems. They are losing the war of attrition.
“Satellite Imagery Just Confirmed Putin’s Worst Nightmare”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z2gNuTt4DhA
Trump imposes 25% tariffs on Brazilian goods
China AI Companion Law Takes Effect: Doubao and Qwen Shut Down, Millions Lose Chat Data
‘Scared s–tless’: Republicans brace for Trump’s primetime speech
Welcome to ‘Murica! We can have secret police roaming the streets murdering people, but we can’t have shit in our headlines.
@150
Protests in Ukraine’s cities against Zelensky’s removal of defence minister
Scientists discovered the brain doesn’t make decisions the way we thought
Move over, GPS: Navigation satellites in low-Earth orbit are making a comeback
CBS News: Pentagon proposes new secrecy power to withhold unclassified records from public-access laws
Hegseth wants the ability to further control what information the public gets about the DOD. CUI covers a lot so can’t be sure what Hegseth is targeting. It’s very possible that Hegseth is just working towards blocking everything not released by the DOD press department.
Stanzi Potenza offers useful suggestions for where to meet men. Not all of them are 100% legal.
.https://youtube.com/shorts/J_RSDrgfA1M
More than 500 feared dead after reports of boats capsizing off Myanmar
ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: Trump reverses ICE decision to suspend traffic stops despite two killings
Jacob Soboroff hosts this excellent coverage.
Vdeo is 8:27 minutes
Exclusive reporting: ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: Secret Service balks as Vance seeks helicopter for son’s golf lessons
Jacob Soboroff hosts. Carol Leaning is a knowledgeable guest. The Marine Two ride to a child’s golf lesson is not the only example.
Video is 8:35 minutes
What Happened Outside the Blanche Hearing Was More Important Than What Happened Inside
Cartoon:Tom the Dancing Bug: MAGA does its own scientific research
Followup to comments 67 (JM) and 86 (me).
No Major Networks are Airing Trump’s Speech Thursday Night
Washington Post link
“Trump administration’s new rule will limit foreign students to four-year stays”
“International students and exchange visitors may struggle to finish their degrees without visa extensions under a new DHS rule.”
Now, a gold coin!?!? He wants his name on everything. Let’s indulge him: let’s start re-naming cesspools and toxic waste dumps after tRUMP.
We will be unplugging the television tonight to prevent it being infected by tRUMP LIES and DEMENTIA. Yes, I know that it is unlikely that such deadly infection could spread through electrons. But, given all the diseases being spread everywhere with no gov. agencies left to help, we don’t want to take any chances.
shermanj @179: “re-naming cesspools and toxic waste dumps after tRUMP.”
We probably shouldn’t draw his attention to more pots of money he might defraud.
Wikipedia – Superfund
Too thin to fail: an alternative to copper microchip interconnects
White House teleprompter operator accused of making $100k off Trump speech bets
Canada’s PM Carney says Gordie Howe bridge tolls won’t be split with U.S. until the $6.4B of debt is repaid
CNBC’s ‘worst states to live’ list sparks backlash after red-state sweep
Fascism is bad. Deal with it.
xAI can’t deny Grok makes CSAM anymore. So it’s suing users.
Imagine a gun manufacturer suing someone who used their product in a robbery.
After pushing anti-trans laws to ‘protect women’s sports’, Project 2025’s Heritage Foundation now wants women’s sports gone to ‘assist fertility’
@187
If they are so concerned with “assisting fertility,” they could donate protective cups for amateur male athletes.
Unconventional 2026 wedding 🐍
.https://youtube.com/shorts/uM7SHHPPOKE
Unconventional 2026 wedding 🐍
.https://youtube.com/shorts/uM7SHHPPOKE
From text quoted by Sky Captain @187:
FFS. Sound like retrograde religious crapola to me.
@159. birgerjohansson : “16 July 1969 is when Apollo 11 started on its journey to the moon.
I recall the countdown.”
15th July Aussie time – the day before in USoA time – was the New Horizons fly by of Pluto when we got our first close up look at that wonderful, dynamic, surprising little planet.
Re: SteveR @ #192…
When I was a regional officer with a volunteer educational non-profit and Australia was part of my region, the rule of thumb, if one needed to ‘phone there, was “6 hours ago, tomorrow.”
Thinking of which :
Source : https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/16/science/new-horizons-hibernation-wake-up
JD Vance accuses Israel of ‘manipulating’ US public opinion to prolong Iran war
Is manipulating public opinion in some other country a bad thing? (cough cough Orban)
We may have found the vandals that damaged the Reflecting Pool: On May 7th, after the pool was painted and sealed, but not filled, Trump’s motorcade drove through the pool. There were at least 10 SUVs in the motorcade.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/trumps-motorcade-driving-across-the-lincoln-memorial-reflecting-pool-may-have-contributed-to-damage/ar-AA26o2Ro
USA Today – Cities that block ICE could lose police, rape kit funding, DOJ says
Makes perfect sense for someone who is pro-rape.
Link to CBC
MSN: Trump quietly rolls out new Truth Social grift
The announcement is a bit vague, no pricing and what “real-time” means in this context is not explained. Depending on how much of an advantage this service gets in speed it could be a serious issue or just contemptible. The point however is clear, they are explicitly selling this to Wall Street as getting early access to Trump’s announcements. Since Trump often makes announcements of new tariffs, deals or government policy this way it’s all important to stock traders.
The trolley problem has been solved.
.https://youtube.com/shorts/7oRsKqsobys
By Stanzi Potenza
Cat vs. Deer (Without Music)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=w8fxabvGV5Q
At the end you have a herd of deer literally following a cat.
Bones reveal ancient Egyptian princesses born 4,000 years ago used weapons
.https://phys.org/news/2026-07-bones-reveal-ancient-egyptian-princesses.html
They don’t state which dynasty but if it was 4000 years ago it should be the Middle Kingdom period. The Old Kingdom was in the copper-stone age so they could not produce daggers like this.
BBC has live coverage of the new British PM-to-be’s speech on taking up party leadership here – happening right now :
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/clywy2n7g4dt
Trump alleges China meddled in 2020 election and
questions voting security ahead of midtermsproposes a scapegoat for his upcoming historical midterm lossesFTFY