The Guardian - In another apparent affront to press freedom from the Trump administration, journalists may no longer enter the Pentagon’s press office, which has been designated as a classified space.
The defense department began rolling out new restrictions to press access in September, when the military demanded journalists pledge not to gather any information – including unclassified documents – that had not been authorized for release, or else risk revocation of their press passes.
Joel Valdez, the acting defense department press secretary, said in a social media post: “This is the most transparent war department in history. No amount of spin from the Fake News media will change that.” He claimed the redesignation was because “speechwriters from the Office of the Secretary of War” shared the facility.
After the defense department announced sweeping restrictions in October, many longtime reporters refused to agree and began turning over their press passes. The department then announced a “next generation of the Pentagon press corps” featuring 60 journalists from far-right outlets. The New York Times sued the Pentagon over those policies, which designated journalists as “security risks”, and a federal judge found in the Times’s favor in March.
June 2, 2026
Melania Trump
Alternet America - Melania Trump held a press conference in April to deny rumors that didn’t publicly exist yet. Turns out she knew something was coming. Former Brazilian model Amanda Ungaro, locked in a bitter custody battle with presidential envoy Paolo Zampolli, has revealed in a bombshell WhatsApp message that Melania met Trump through Epstein, not Zampolli.
“It was Jeffrey Epstein, as she was escort of Jeffrey Epstein,” Ungaro says on the tape. “That’s how she met Donald Trump.”...
Ungaro was 17 in 2002 when she boarded Epstein’s private jet from Paris to New York, accompanied by Epstein recruiter Jean-Luc Brunel. Zampolli is now a Special Envoy for Global Partnerships and sits on the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees. The First Lady has not updated her statement.
Meanwhile .. .
Serena Williams announced she will return to competitive tennis this month, nearly four years after she retired.
Middle East
NPR - President Trump said he secured pledges from Israel and Hezbollah to pause fighting after Iran said it would suspend peace talks with the U.S. over Israel's offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran's announcement came after Israel's military warned residents in southern Beirut to leave ahead of planned airstrikes.
Congressional ethics filings and other public records show the trips, led by the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), revolved around one-sided briefings on Middle East politics and Israeli domestic and foreign policy. Lawmakers and their staffers from both parties met Israeli officials, military contractors and civil society figures, including Benjamin Netanyahu and advocates for the annexation of the West Bank and the displacement of Palestinians from Jerusalem.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and other pro-Israel groups have sponsored such trips for years, and both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have joined. But the continued participation of Democratic lawmakers and their staff on recent trips is particularly noteworthy given how much sympathy for Israel has ebbed among Democratic voters, and the pains that some Democratic politicians have recently taken to distance themselves from the lobby group
Trump regime
NPR - The Justice Department says it will abide by a federal court order that puts funds for the Trump administration's nearly $1.8 billion anti-weaponization program on hold. The administration says the fund would compensate people who allege they were targeted by the federal government. The fund has faced bipartisan backlash and concerns that it would be used to pay people convicted for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. NPR's Elena Moore tells Up First that the issue has elicited rare Republican pushback. Even after the DOJ stated it would abide by the court order, some Senate Republicans continued to push for the White House to end the fund. Moore says it has become a distraction as Republicans focus on the upcoming midterms. |
Word
Putin has subordinated his state and his society to a war that is slowly sapping Russia’s strength, depleting the nation’s wealth and consuming the lives of its young people.” — Michael Kimmage, a historian of the Cold War and an expert on U.S.-Russian relations.
Some problems with ranked choice voting
Britannica - Con 1: Ranked-choice voting can eliminate the candidate with the most first-place votes, favor moderate candidates with only marginal support, and encourage scheming to get around these limitations. The winner in a ranked-choice election is the person who has received a majority of all votes in the final round. If the election process goes through several rounds, the candidate with the majority of votes in the first round may be eliminated. As Aaron Hamlin of the Center for Election Science explains:
Much of the time ranked-choice voting [RCV] isn’t getting any kind of majority at all. Rather, it’s contriving a majority by artificially narrowing down the candidate field. RCV knocks out candidates over each round, but sometimes it knocks out good candidates by mistake.
Furthermore, candidates or voters may engage in schemes to tilt favor to one candidate or another, something that’s not at all far-fetched in the age of social media. For example, Hans von Spakovsky and J. Adams of the Heritage Foundation speculate:
If enough Ross Perot voters [1992 U.S. presidential election] had listed George H. W. Bush as their second choice over Bill Clinton in 1992, Bush might have won that presidential election instead of Clinton. Since Perot came in third in the race, his votes with Bush as the second choice would have counted for Bush in the second round of vote tabulation.
RCV provides “voters with an incentive to tactically game the system and falsify their preferences for candidates,” so their “real” choice survives to the next round and can win in the end.
Con 2: Ranked-choice voting disenfranchises voters, limiting their choices and “exhausting” their ballots. Although voters are able, and perhaps encouraged, to rank all candidates on their ballots, they do not always do so. Some voters may only support one or two candidates and find ranking candidates with whom they disagree strongly distasteful or even immoral.
When the candidates on a voter’s ballot have been eliminated by the ranked-choice process, that ballot is “exhausted,” and that voter is effectively disenfranchised.
A study of more than 600,000 ballots from four local elections found that the rate of ballot exhaustion ranged from 9.6 percent to 27.1 percent. This amounted to, according to the authors of the study, “a substantial number of votes being discarded in each election.”
Any voting system that tosses out votes and voters, or that reassigns a voter’s vote to a candidate the voter objects to for the creation of a fake majority, is wholly undemocratic.
Con 3: Ranked-choice voting complicates voting, delays results, and is more vulnerable to corruption. In 2016 California Gov. Jerry Brown, Jr., vetoed a bill to expand ranked-choice voting in his state, calling it “overly complicated and confusing”; it “deprives voters of genuinely informed choice.”
...Moreover, ranked voting delays results. If no candidate wins a majority, the subsequent rounds of tabulation have to wait until all valid ballots have been counted. In Alaska, which uses ranked-choice voting for all elections, the second and later rounds of counting cannot even begin until 15 days after the election because the state continues to count absentee ballots.
Finally, whenever additional rounds of tabulation are added to an election, the risk of election fraud is compounded, especially if the election is a national one. “Under a national popular vote, RCV faces enormous technical hurdles,” writes the Center for Election Science. “The nature of RCV tabulation requires that all the ballot data be centralized for tabulation. This creates both security and logistical concerns.…You’d [also] have to deal with holdout states still using our choose-one [candidate] method.…But you can’t add RCV and regular choose-one ballots together. It just doesn’t work.”
Co-ops
The News Coop - Farmer-owned businesses Arla Foods and DMK Group have completed their merger to form Europe’s largest dairy co-op.
The merged entity, which will take the Arla name, unites approximately 11,200 farmers and 28,800 colleagues. It says it has local roots in seven countries, a global reach, a combined milk pool of 19.4 billion kg annually, and a pro forma revenue of €20bn a year.
Arla warns that the move comes “at a time when stable access to nutritious food can no longer be taken for granted across Europe”, giving the new co-op “a shared responsibility to help strengthen resilient and trusted food production, ensuring operational stability and a strong economic foundation for our farmers for the long term.”
Congress
The Hill - Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and other GOP senators see a path for passing the stalled budget reconciliation package funding immigration enforcement operations through Congress after the Trump administration on Monday backed down from a proposal to establish a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund for MAGA allies.
Thune on Monday called on the White House to abandon the proposal to establish what some GOP critics have called a “slush fund.” Shortly after, the Justice Department announced it would abide by a federal court decision temporarily blocking the administration from setting up the fund pending further litigation.
The result is that Republican leaders in both chambers now feel confident they can pass the $72 billion budget reconciliation package as long as it remains narrowly focused on funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol through 2029.
The package will not include funding for security upgrades to President Trump’s proposed 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom, which had also generated strong pushback from several Senate Republicans.
June 1, 2026
Middle East
NBC NEWS - Iran suspended talks with the United States to protest Israel’s expanding offensive in Lebanon, according to government-aligned media. The U.S. military and Iran exchanged strikes over the weekend and into Monday — the latest outburst of violence amid an ostensible ceasefire agreed to in early April.The government did not comment officially, although official statements are often transmitted through the media. U.S. officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
1440 - Israel has seized control of Beaufort, a medieval castle in Lebanon, several miles from the Israeli border. The capture marks the farthest Israeli soldiers have ventured into the country since their 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon ended in 2000. The news comes as Israel and Lebanon continue negotiations to end the weekslong hostilities. Lebanon agreed in 2024 to disarm Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group based largely in southern Lebanon. However, violence broke out again between Hezbollah and Israel in March, with Hezbollah launching rockets in response to Israeli attacks on Iran. Israel has since carried out airstrikes and invaded southern Lebanon, killing more than 3,300 people and displacing more than 1.2 million, according to the latest estimates. (See background on the conflict here.) The war between Israel and Hezbollah could have implications for the US war with Iran; Iran has said any peace deal with the US must also end the war in Lebanon.
NPR -The war in Lebanon, where Israel is fighting the militant group Hezbollah, could undermine efforts to end the war in Iran, NPR's Greg Myre tells Up First. Israeli forces captured a 900-year-old hilltop castle in southern Lebanon over the weekend as part of Israel's deepest push into the country in decades. Israel says Hezbollah was using the area to fire on nearby northern Israel. Iran has issued almost daily statements supporting Hezbollah and says peace efforts must address wars in both Iran and Lebanon, Myre says. But Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said he wants Israeli forces to keep going in Lebanon.
The Hill - President Trump’s serious consideration of a peace deal with Iran that would open the Strait of Hormuz but also ease sanctions on Iran, a longtime U.S. adversary, is pitting Republican against Republican in a messy debate that will take over the Senate this week. Defense hawks led by Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) have panned the emerging deal with Iran, which Trump has yet to sign off on.
At the same time, several Republican senators who are deeply skeptical about the Trump administration’s handling of the conflict and who have complained about the lack of a clear endgame are eager to end hostilities and restore the flow of oil, fertilizer and other goods through the Strait of Hormuz as quickly as possible.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said today that its aerospace force had targeted the source of what it called a U.S. attack on a telecommunications tower. The IRGC said that if American attacks continued, its response would be “completely different” and Washington would be responsible for the consequences.
Meanwhile, a U.S. official said yesterday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had spoken with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun as part of ongoing diplomatic negotiations.
Climate change
Independent - Wildfires caused more financial damage in 2025 than in any other year, with catastrophic fires in the US, South Korea and Europe killing about 90 people and forcing roughly 300,000 to evacuate, a new study found. Wildfires accounted for 38 per cent of all insured natural hazard losses globally in 2025 – more than hurricanes, earthquakes and floods combined – even as the total area burned was the second lowest since records began in 2002 and 16 per cent below the long-term average. Researchers say the pattern reflects a shift in how wildfires cause harm: there are fewer fires overall but they are hitting populated areas with greater intensity and speed than before.
“2025 shows that a 'quiet' fire year globally can still be devastating," Dr Matthew Jones of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, who led the study, said. "We are seeing a growing disconnect between total area burned and real-world impacts, with risk increasingly determined by fire location, intensity and exposure."
Polls
2026 Senate Ratings:
Crystal Ball:
Republicans: 51
Democrats: 46
Tossup: 3
Inside Elections:
Republicans: 52
Democrats: 45
Tossup: 3
Cook Political Report:
Republicans: 50
Democrats: 47
Tossup: 3
Republicans: 51
Democrats: 46
Tossup: 3
Inside Elections:
Republicans: 52
Democrats: 45
Tossup: 3
Cook Political Report:
Republicans: 50
Democrats: 47
Tossup: 3Artificial Intelligence
NY Times - Science-fiction authors have long fantasized about wars where machines aim the weapons and pull the triggers. In “Project Maven,” the Bloomberg News tech and national security reporter Katrina Manson claims the era of “killer robots” is here. The fusion of artificial intelligence and modern warfare raises, as she puts it, “the biggest moral and practical question there is: who — or what — gets to decide to take a human life? And who bears that cost?”
Yet that question has barely been mulled by the officers managing the new weapons or the politicians funding them. It’s a familiar syndrome in military history: New weapons technologies are perfected and rushed into the arsenal before their implications — for the future of not only war but humanity — are thought through.
The awful have tried it before
Hartmann Report - The misogynists, racists, and fascists are taking over Washington, D.C. this summer, and the parallel to the massive Klan rally of August 1925, staged under another Republican president who declined to denounce it is the script.
On that August day a hundred and one summers ago, somewhere between thirty- and forty-thousand Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue twenty-two abreast and fourteen rows deep, ending at the base of the Washington Monument. President Calvin Coolidge refused to condemn them.
Their version of America was defined entirely by exclusion: not Black Americans, not Catholics, not Jews, not immigrants, not organized labor, not anyone outside their narrow tribal vision of who counted. That night they burned crosses in Arlington while the band played “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “America.” A century later, the same Mall is being prepared for the same kind of show, and the artists scheduled to perform are figuring it out and getting out as fast as they can.
Donald Trump
Time - Interior Secretary Doug Burgum would not commit to removing President Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center on Sunday, despite a judge’s order requiring it to be done within two weeks. “I’m not sure if that’s going to be appealed or not, but I think, you know, there’s controversy on both sides of this about that ruling,” Burgum said on CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” when asked if the name would be removed.
David Frum, The Atlantic - Trump’s effort to rebrand the semi-quincentennial as the Day of Trump left no time, budget, or effort available for the true purpose of the anniversary. As his own self-celebration has fizzled, a void has opened between the scheduled roster of events and the true purpose and meaning of the solemnity of July 4, 2026. This powerful date will go unmarked by any act of memory worthy of the nation.
The Hill - The country’s upcoming semiquincentennial celebration has fallen subject to partisan tensions as President Trump appears set to headline the start of the multi-week festival later this month. Trump said in a Truth Social post on Saturday that he wants to hold a rally in Washington, D.C., to mark the country’s 250th birthday instead of a planned concert, after more than a half dozen musical acts pulled out of the “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall.
NYC Mayor’s ‘Engagement’ Office Sparks Controversy
Congressional Insider - New York City’s new “Office of Mass Engagement” is set to burn through more than $5 million in taxpayer-funded salaries, raising alarms that City Hall is quietly building a permanent campaign machine on the public dime.
More than $5.1 million in salary funds is earmarked for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Office of Mass Engagement in the 2027 executive budget. Staffing is reported to jump from 14 to 40 positions, with 26 new hires averaging about $125,000 each.
Critics say the office functions as a taxpayer-funded propaganda or pressure operation; supporters frame it as civic participation infrastructure. Both left and right see the fight as another example of political elites using public money to strengthen their own power instead of fixing everyday problems.
Homelessness
Guardian - California recorded one of the largest declines in homelessness in the US over the past year, according to a report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The state’s unhoused population fell to 181,934 in 2025, a decrease of almost 3% compared with the previous year, placing California among the five states with the biggest reductions since 2024. Significant drops were recorded in Illinois (44%), Hawaii (41%), Florida (11%) and New York (8%).
James Comey case
The Guardian - The lead prosecutor in the former FBI director James Comey’s case over a controversial social media post has withdrawn from the case, according to a court filing. The justice department filed notice with the court on Friday evening that Matthew Petracca, a prosecutor from the US attorney’s office for the eastern district of North Carolina, had been replaced by the assistant US attorney Timothy Severo. The documents did not include any explanation for the change.
What was Comey accused of? Comey, who was indicted in North Carolina in April, faces up to 10 years in prison for a photo of seashells arranged to read “86 47.” Prosecutors allege the post constituted a threat against Donald Trump, the 47th US president. Comey denies the allegation
Immigration
The Guardian - Representative Maxine Dexter has a lot of questions. Why were all of the pregnant, unaccompanied minors in the US rounded up and sent to San Benito, a tiny town on the Texas border with Mexico? Are they given appropriate medical care, given their high-risk conditions and Texas’s abortion ban? And most importantly: where are the girls – and their infants – now?
Dexter, a Democratic congresswoman from Oregon and a former critical care physician – one of the few doctors now serving in Congress – detailed these questions in an 8 May letter to refugee and health officials after visiting the San Benito facility and, she said, being blocked from speaking with any of the children. She still hasn’t gotten answers.
In the US, the treatment of immigration detainees has raised concern over rights violations, overcrowding and a lack of medical care – situations that are not transparent even to members of Congress. Senator Andy Kim, a Democrat from New Jersey, says he was sprayed with pepper balls on Monday outside the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Delaney Hall facility, where detainees have spent days on a hunger strike over poor conditions. Health inspectors with the state of New Jersey were denied full access to the facility on Thursday, Mikie Sherrill, the state’s governor, said.
Detainees across the US have said they don’t have safe, nutritious food or adequate medical care, while outbreaks of infectious diseases have plagued facilities, which are often converted warehouses, storefronts or churches that were never meant to house people and frequently lack ventilation.
.... Unaccompanied minors, who are kept through the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), are “uniquely vulnerable”, Rosalind Rogers, a psychologist specializing in the mental health of immigrants and refugees, said at a recent event with Duke University on the health vulnerabilities of children and families in immigration facilities. “They face detention without the support, nurturing, and protection of a caregiver.”
For the unaccompanied children at the San Benito facility, there is the added stress and confusion of being pregnant and alone. The facility has housed pregnant children as young as 13; about half of the pregnancies are the result of rape.
Following reporting from the Guardian and others, Dexter notified the facility in San Benito that she would visit in late April. When she arrived, she was blocked from speaking with or even seeing any children throughout her entire visit, she said.
Congress
NBC News - Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said today that Democrats would try to kill President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, forcing Republicans to vote to preserve the compensation money. “This week, Senate Democrats will launch a coordinated effort to kill the slush fund before one cent goes out the door,” Schumer said in a letter. It’s unlikely that Democrats will be able to stop the fund in the Senate. They can, however, force Republicans to record their votes, offering a line of attack for Democrats in the upcoming midterms. Additionally, Sens. Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin introduced a “Drain the Slush Fund Act,” which they said would “prevent taxpayer dollars” from being paid to Trump and his allies, including former Jan. 6 defendants.
The rattled generation
Axios - By most objective measures, it's an extraordinary time to be alive. Americans are wealthier, safer and longer-lived than at any earlier point in history. U.S. total wealth has soared. Violent crime sank to a 20-year low and is still falling. Life expectancy just hit 79 years — the highest in American history. The country produces more energy than ever after four straight record years.
And yet: University of Michigan consumer sentiment just hit its lowest reading in a half-century. Gallup finds most people think things will only get worse. Trust in every major institution — government, media, organized religion, higher education, science — is at or near record lows, both Gallup and the Edelman Trust Barometer find.
May 31, 2026
Graham Platner
Politico - Graham Platner exchanged sexually explicit texts with multiple women while married to his wife, Amy Gertner, his campaign confirmed to POLITICO on Saturday, the latest scandal he has faced since launching his Maine Senate campaign last year. In a statement, Gertner slammed a former friend for spreading “malicious gossip” in the wake of a Wall Street Journal report that she had informed her husband’s campaign of the texts in late August.
More than 10,000 lawyers have left the Trump regime
Independent, UK- The Trump administration has seen a mass exodus of more than 10,000 government lawyers, with roughly one in five attorneys who worked in the federal workforce at the end of 2024 no longer working for the administration by March 2026, a new analysis from the New York Times found.
Across multiple departments, President Donald Trump pushed lawyers out of government work as he sought to reduce the number of federal employees, get rid of entire agencies and pressure attorneys to swiftly implement his agenda regardless of constitutionality.
The Department of Education, which Trump is seeking to close permanently, lost more than 50 percent of its lawyers who were employed before Trump was inaugurated, according to the analysis. The Justice Department, which the president has used to go after his political opponents, has seen a 21 percent decrease in its attorney count.
The only department to gain lawyers was the Department of Homeland Security, which required more litigation due to the spike in immigration cases as a result of Trump’s mass deportation plan.
Immigration
CBS News - More than 6,300 children have been detained by ICE during President Trump's 2nd term. 97% have no criminal records.
Congressional Insider - The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lawyers to ramp up fraud cases against immigration attorneys over allegedly false asylum filings. The crackdown relies on a document-fraud law that covers anyone who knowingly prepares or files falsified immigration benefit applications, with civil fines and possible criminal referrals.
The Trump administration frames the move as a response to “millions” of illegal immigrants committing asylum fraud, but has not provided detailed data or procedures. Critics, including former asylum officers, say fraud exists but is far less widespread than officials claim, warning that aggressive enforcement could chill legitimate claims and representation.
Headline USA - Since Florida launched its immigration enforcement effort, Operation Tidal Wave, in February, nearly 25,000 arrests have been made statewide.“Florida will continue to use every available resource to identify dangerous individuals, support federal immigration enforcement and keep our citizens safe,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said. “No state has moved faster or done more to combat illegal immigration than Florida, and we will continue to lead the charge in protecting our communities.”
Operation Tidal Wave was launched as Florida leads the country with the most 287(g) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agreements of any state, The Center Square reported. The program is named after a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996 and authorizes ICE to delegate to state and local law enforcement officers the authority to perform specified immigration functions under its supervision.
The Trump administration expanded the program to include three models: the Jail Enforcement Model (JEM), Task Force Model (TFM) and Warrant Service Officer (WSO) model, The Center Square reported. Florida is the only state to have all of its sheriffs participating in 287(g), with most participating in the TFM and or all three models. Nearly 200 police departments, 12 state agencies and 15 state universities and colleges, as well as county commissioner detention facilities and correctional facilities, are participating in 287(g).
Trump appointed federal judge cuts mail-in voting
Independence Journal - A Trump-appointed judge just let the White House move ahead with a sweeping mail-in voting overhaul that critics say hands Washington new control over who even gets a ballot. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., refused to block President Trump’s executive order tightening rules for voting by mail, allowing it to move forward while lawsuits continue.
The order directs federal agencies to build lists of “eligible” voters for every state and tells the United States Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on those lists. Civil-rights and voting groups argue the order is unconstitutional, violates state control over elections, and risks stripping lawful voters of easy access to the ballot.
The ruling highlights a deeper struggle over who really runs American elections: states and local communities, or an increasingly powerful federal executive branch.
NPR
NPR - NPR has laid off 10 journalists, including some veteran reporters, in an attempt to save money and reorganize the newsroom. It also is buying out at least 18 news staffers who voluntarily accepted offers to depart, according to three people with direct knowledge... The network intends to leave eight empty positions unfilled.
NPR Editor-in-Chief Thomas Evans expressed regret in a note to staff....He said the total reductions amounted to 4% of NPR's content division, which includes the newsroom and podcasts, and pledged that the network would maintain high standards. No staff members of news programs or podcasts were affected.
The moves are part of NPR's effort to grapple with the economic consequences of Congress' vote last summer to eliminate federal subsidies for public media. While NPR relied directly on federal funds for about 1% of its budget, the cuts deeply hurt public radio stations that pay for the radio giant's programs like Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
....NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher and Evans announced the cuts last week, describing them as targeted and necessary to save $8 million when the network expects a drop of $15 million in member station fees. Waves of layoffs have hit public radio and television stations across the U.S., along with PBS, since Congress clawed back the funding.
Yet in the past year, donors have stepped up to support public radio stations and NPR itself. NPR lodged two of the largest philanthropic contributions in its history this spring. A $33 million gift, contributed anonymously, partly went to help NPR cover $8 million in previously announced emergency relief to stations, the network says.
ICE
The Guardian - The first lawsuit relating to the largest immigration detention facility in the US was filed early on Saturday against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), accusing the agency of “dire” conditions that severely violate the human and constitutional rights of those locked up at the camp in Texas.
A clutch of legal organizations is suing via a class-action complaint, listing four detainees as plaintiffs for themselves and on behalf of all those currently held as civil detainees at Camp East Montana or who will be held there in the future.
The facility is a sprawling tent camp in the desert on El Paso’s Fort Bliss military base, where the federal government has confined immigrants since last August, when it swiftly erected the tents.
The complaint alleges that conditions at the camp are “dangerous and abusive” as well as “squalid” for those detained, with injustices including, according to the lawsuit:
“[a]bhorrent medical and mental health care”;“inappropriate use of force”;“indiscriminate use of solitary confinement”;“terrible, rotten, spoiled and inadequate” food;“outbreaks of disease”;“unsanitary living conditions”;“sexual harassment by guards”.
The Guardian reached out to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent agency of ICE, and to ICE for comment. Late Saturday, a DHS spokesperson replied with a lengthy statement denying all accusations that proper medical care and food had been withheld from detainees, disputing there had been a spike in deaths in ICE custody, and asserting “claims that there are ‘inhumane’ conditions at Camp East Montana are categorically false. No detainees are being beaten or abused.”
Middle East
MS NOW -Whether the United States and Iran agree on a supposedly impending ceasefire and begin negotiations, Trump has already lost, argues Michael A. Cohen. None of the administration’s prewar goals have been achieved, whether that’s stopping a nuclear weapons program, the existence of which lacked evidence; damaging its conventional military and missile capabilities; or changing the regime. More embarrassing is that one of the key U.S. objectives — reopening the Strait of Hormuz — is “only necessary because of the war itself,” he writes. Read more.
Meteor Explodes Over Massachusetts
People - A meteor has rocked the northeastern United States. The fireball was detected over northeastern Massachusetts and southeastern New Hampshire at around 2:06 p.m. local time on Saturday, May 30, according to CBS News, ABC News and Reuters. The meteor crashed through the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 75,000 mph, creating a blast equivalent to 300 tons of TNT, the outlets reported, citing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
NASA Space Alerts wrote on X, “Eyewitnesses in New England and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES-19 satellite reported a bright fireball on Saturday … accompanied by a loud noise. The meteor appears to have fragmented at an altitude of 40 miles over northeast MA and southeast NH. The energy released at breakup is estimated to be equivalent to about 300 tons of TNT, which accounts for the loud noise."
Satellite lightning data indicates that the meteor entered the atmosphere over the South Shore near Boston before spreading to multiple locations, stretching as far as Rhode Island, according to CBS News.
The Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security received several residents accounts of the fireball with “an audible boom and ground tremors,” per ABC News. The Watertown Police also shared on Facebook that they received “numerous reports from residents of hearing a loud boom sound” over the eastern part of Massachusetts.
Golf vs. graves
Occupy Democrats - Graves are exhumed and the bodies moved to make way for a $1.5 billion Trump Organization golf course in Vietnam — and the locals are furious.
“It’s painful. I’m outraged by the compensation price," said Hoang Do, who was paid just $2,660 for removing the remains of his son and parents from their final resting place.
The Financial Times reports that a sacred gravesite in the the Hung Yen province of Vietnam is being demolished, and the bodies inside moved, so that the Trump Organization can erect yet another hideous golf course. Eric Trump has boasted that it will be "the envy of all of Asia and of the entire world." ...
The Vietnamese government is supporting the demolition and body removal because they know that rubber-stamping Trump's business endeavors is the quickest way to ingratiate them with the White House....
Vietnam finds itself in a particularly difficult position because Trump previously threatened to place a 46% tariff on exports from the export-reliant nation. They know that he is a deeply vindictive man. They've assessed the risks and decided that harming their own people in one region is better than having Trump destroy their entire national economy.
And the locals aren't even being given a fair price for their heartbreak. Reuters reported last year that some individuals are being paid just $12 for 10 square feet of land. The course is expected to gobble up roughly four square miles, displacing over 4,000 households.
....Not only are graves being disturbed, but fertile farmland is being snatched up, leaving locals without a way to feed their families.
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