May 26, 2026
Ukraine
NPR - Russia issued a warning that it will continue its mass strikes on Ukraine following weekend attacks that targeted every district in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. The recent Russian attacks on Kyiv are viewed as a response to Ukrainian strikes targeting Russian oil facilities and military logistics. Negotiations to end Russia's war in Ukraine have stalled as the U.S. focuses on its conflict with Iran. The Trump administration has eased some sanctions on Russian oil exports to alleviate energy shortfalls during the war with Iran.
Middle East
Headline USA - US Central Command on Monday took credit for attacks on Iran after Iranian media reported explosions in the southern port city of Bandar Abbas on the Strait of Hormuz. In a statement to CNN, CENTCOM spokesman Timothy Hawkins framed the attack on Iran as “self-defense” even though the strikes come as the US is enforcing a blockade on the country that’s part of the same war of aggression the US and Israel launched against the Islamic Republic on February 28.
Academic journals publishing fake AI generated stories
NBC News - A network of fake academic journals masquerading as legitimate publications has published more than a hundred AI-generated papers in recent months, in some cases using the names of real professors at top universities without their knowledge.
Vasant Dhar, a very real professor of data science and AI at New York University, was one of the academics caught in the slop onslaught. In late March, one of Dhar’s colleagues reached out to him about an odd new article listed under Dhar’s name in the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (IJAIR). The paper also appeared on Dhar’s profile on Google Scholar, a service many academics use to track peers’ work.
The article’s content and style seemed different from Dhar’s previous papers — and for good reason. Dhar had not written the piece and did not know what his colleague was referencing. Upon reading the manuscript, Dhar soon concluded that the article was generated by AI and had somehow attached his name to the text.
Vasant Dhar, a very real professor of data science and AI at New York University, was one of the academics caught in the slop onslaught. In late March, one of Dhar’s colleagues reached out to him about an odd new article listed under Dhar’s name in the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (IJAIR). The paper also appeared on Dhar’s profile on Google Scholar, a service many academics use to track peers’ work.
The article’s content and style seemed different from Dhar’s previous papers — and for good reason. Dhar had not written the piece and did not know what his colleague was referencing. Upon reading the manuscript, Dhar soon concluded that the article was generated by AI and had somehow attached his name to the text.
Donald Trump
Alternet - After tearing down the White House East Wing without the legal authority to do so, President Donald Trump is now acting in a way which suggests he may have designs on the building’s iconic Ionic columns. “President Donald Trump appeared absorbed by the White House’s columns on Monday, lingering for several minutes and running his hands along the stonework,” The Daily Beast's Erkki Forster reported on Monday night. “The row of columns framing the White House’s entrance seemed to arrest the 79-year-old president’s attention as he returned from Arlington National Cemetery after delivering a boastful Memorial Day speech.”
....“Rodney Mims Cook Jr., the Trump appointee who chairs the Commission of Fine Arts, a federal arts commission, proposed replacing the Ionic columns with Corinthian columns, a more luxurious style preferred by Trump, The Washington Post first reported in March,” Forster wrote. In that Washington Post article, it was observed that “the Trump-appointed head of a federal arts commission is proposing to replace them with a more ornate style favored by President Donald Trump. Those more decorative columns, a style known as Corinthian, are considered the most luxurious in classical architecture and appear on buildings such as the U.S. Capitol and the Supreme Court. They have long been deployed on Trump’s properties, and the president has handpicked them for his planned White House ballroom, too.”
Congress
NY Times - A little more than five months ahead of the midterm elections, President Trump seems to be focused on virtually anything other than keeping Republican control of Congress.
He endorsed a MAGA challenger over Texas’s senior Republican senator, ignoring warnings that he could endanger the seat. He has boasted almost daily about his expensive and expansive new White House ballroom. He has minimized rising gas costs, waving off spiking prices at the pump as “peanuts” last week compared to what he is pursuing in Iran. And even as he engaged over the weekend in negotiations to end the Iran war that he began, Mr. Trump has made plain that he prioritizes his record abroad above domestic affordability, which he has dismissed repeatedly as a Democratic “hoax.”
For many, a new jaw-dropper came last week when Mr. Trump created a $1.8 billion fund to pay people who say they have been victims of “weaponization and lawfare,” including those who attacked the Capitol and law enforcement officers there, on Jan. 6, 2021.
Incensed Senate Republicans, many of whom lived through that day, returned home vexed by a president who appears set on pursuing his personal priorities ahead of the November midterm elections, even if doing so undermines his own party. They angrily abandoned Washington on Thursday without funding the president’s immigration crackdown or the $1 billion he wants for his ballroom.
Republicans know that their party’s fate rests with the president, according to interviews with numerous officials in recent weeks. Yet they also know there is not much any of them can do to make him help them.
MS NOW- They may not have the gavels yet, but House Democrats are laying the groundwork for a number of investigations into President Donald Trump should they win control of Congress in November. Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif. — who’s set to chair the House Oversight Committee in a Democratic majority — told MS NOW that his team is “already preparing and gearing up.”
“We’ve got a team on Epstein, we have a team on [Trump] family corruption, we have a team on DHS and ICE,” Garcia said. “Those teams are actively working on preparation, letters, research.”
Health
The Guardian - The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the Ebola outbreak is outpacing response efforts and countries neighbouring the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are at high risk from the disease.
“We are urgently scaling up operations, but at the moment the epidemic is outpacing us,” said the WHO’s director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as he urged neighbouring countries to take immediate action.
Addressing an online meeting of the African Union about the outbreak, he also announced there had been 220 suspected deaths so far in the current Ebola outbreak and that he would travel to the DRC on Tuesday with Chikwe Ihekweazu, the executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies programme.
Hartmann Report - America has 51 billionaires who made their money from our profit-driven healthcare system, the only one in the developed world. It’s not only obscene that they’re taking so much money from so many of us who have so little; it’s also killing all of us....And the reason it stays that way, according to a shocking new study, is because about half of all white people would rather inflict pain on all of us (including themselves) than allow for a system which may also benefit Black people. More
Local prosecutors preparing to stop federal agents invading election sites
MS NOW - As election officials across the country brace for the possibility of federal agents descending on polling sites in November, a nationwide coalition of Democratic district attorneys has vowed to prosecute any federal agent suspected of intimidating voters.
The announcement, first reported by Politico, comes shortly after President Donald Trump refused to rule out sending U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to election sites during the midterms. “I’d do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections,” Trump told reporters earlier this month.
The coalition includes prosecutors from Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Dallas and Northern Virginia, among other jurisdictions.
“We’re ready to go,” Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner told MS NOW’s Chris Jansing on Thursday. “In the same way that my office and the offices of these other members of this group have successfully prosecuted civilians and also prosecuted law enforcement, we will prosecute federal agents who try to interfere with elections.”
“It’s a crime in almost every jurisdiction to engage in election interference under state law,” he added, “and they better get ready for the handcuffs and the jail cell.”
Federal law prohibits voter intimidation and interference at polling sites. Many states also have statutes that criminalize voter intimidation.
in a statement.
Trump regime removes hundreds of Jan. 6 stories
Time- The Justice Department has removed hundreds of news releases related to criminal prosecutions connected to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol from its website, it confirmed, characterizing the records as “partisan propaganda.” The deletions include press releases documenting criminal charges, guilty pleas, convictions, and sentencing tied to the Jan. 6 attack, which saw supporters of President Donald Trump storm the Capitol in an effort to block the certification of his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
After a journalist noted on X last week that the Justice Department appeared to be “quietly” deleting the releases, the department’s rapid response account publicly confirmed over the weekend that they had been scrubbed from its website—but stated that there was “nothing ‘quiet’ about it.”
“We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration,” the department wrote. “We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”
The post comes days after the Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate people who allege they have been unjustly investigated and prosecuted by the government, as President Donald Trump and his Administration had repeatedly claimed Trump and his allies were during Biden’s presidency, as part of a deal to settle the President’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS.
May 25, 2026
Spending on Seniors’ Benefits Soon to Make Up Majority of Federal Budget
Headline USA - (Thérèse Boudreaux, The Center Square) - More than half of the federal budget will go toward benefits for Americans 65 years and older by 2036, and that percentage is set to only grow, a recent congressional report finds. The Joint Economic Committee’s 2026 report shows that non-interest federal spending on Social Security and Medicare payouts will climb from 45% to 52% over the next decade
“Given long-term demographic forecasts, this increase does not represent a peak, but rather a step in a continued upward trajectory,” the report notes. In recent years, the U.S. has racked up record-breaking deficits, pushing the national debt past $39 trillion. The federal government is on track to post a $2 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2026, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
More than 5 million face sewage and fuel links in Potomac River
Inside Climate News - The warning signs were years in the making. And yet, regulators failed to heed the writing on the wall, according to Dean Naujoks. An investigator with the Potomac Riverkeeper Network, Naujoks spent three years documenting what he calls a systemic failure that culminated in dual environmental catastrophes now threatening the health of the entire Potomac River system, which is already stressed.
In January, a 60-year-old sewer pipe known as the Potomac Interceptor, running along the Maryland shoreline of the Potomac, collapsed near the Clara Barton Parkway corridor in Montgomery County, releasing an estimated 243 million gallons of raw sewage into the river over approximately three weeks.
But even before that spill, another crisis had already begun to unfold elsewhere in the watershed. At Joint Base Andrews in Prince George’s County, a fuel system failure on Dec. 11 led to thousands of gallons of jet fuel entering the headwaters of Piscataway Creek, a tributary that feeds directly into the Potomac. The leak continued for months before state regulators were notified.
Stretching more than 400 miles, the Potomac River is a source of drinking water for more than 5 million people in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. In April, American Rivers, a conservation nonprofit, named it the most endangered river in the country, citing both the sewage spill and the rapid expansion of data centers.
Piscataway Creek, an 18.6-mile tributary of the Potomac, begins at the edge of Joint Base Andrews and slips back into the Potomac at Fort Washington Park. Its name derives from the indigenous Piscataway people, who’ve stewarded these waters for thousands of years and maintain a living relationship with the creek and the river to this day.
Health
NY Times - The American Psychiatric Association gathered just 10 days after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a set of policies to encourage doctors to deprescribe, or assist patients in stopping, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants.
A current of anxiety ran through the meeting, held here this week. Many physicians in the crowd said they worried that Mr. Kennedy’s statements would prompt people to refuse medications, or to quit them and relapse. The plenary session erupted in applause when Dr. Marketa Wills, the organization’s chief executive, declared, “We will never support governmental interference in the practice of medicine.”
“We are standing tall for evidence-based care,” she continued. “We are standing tall against stigma, oversimplification, and anything that would move patients further away from the care that they need.” MORE
Epstein files
Daily Beast - Rep. Thomas Massie has claimed that Melania Trump “knows” Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t running his child sex abuse ring alone. Massie, 55, appeared on Meet the Press Sunday, and confirmed that he planned to personally reveal more names from the Epstein files after a lack of clear action from the acting attorney general.
“Todd Blanche is violating the law. There’s still millions of files they haven’t released,” he said.
“We know from talking to the victims’ lawyers that their own 302 forms haven’t been released. We know the files have been over-redacted....
The Republican, who lost his House primary last week, added: “I don’t think it’s possible to get to convictions with Todd Blanche at the top and with the FBI director, Kash Patel, at the top, because they have effectively both perjured themselves by saying there’s nobody else in the files.” He then claimed of Donald Trump’s wife: “Even Melania doesn’t believe that. The first lady knows that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t act alone.”
El Nino
New York Times - El Niño is the name given to powerful shifts in Pacific Ocean winds and water temperatures that can drastically transform global weather patterns. Over the centuries these natural patterns have sparked epic droughts and heat waves, and have intensified epidemics. Some academics even claim to see the fingerprints of El Niño on political and economic crises in ancient Egypt, or on the downfall of the Moche civilization in present-day Peru, more than 1,000 years ago. And in 1877 and 1878, a famine fueled by El Niño killed millions of people across the tropics, hardening inequities that, as one research paper put it, “would later be characterized as the ‘first world’ and ‘third world.’”
Right now, the world is entering a new El Niño phase. Researchers are warning it could be one of the strongest on record and are invoking this history as an admonition that natural forces, when they reach their highest magnitude, can lead to profound volatility and hardship. In general, El Niño makes for wetter conditions in some parts of the Americas while suppressing the Atlantic hurricane season. The phenomenon raises the risk of dryness in South and Southeast Asia, Australia, and southern Africa.
Donald Trump
Alternet America - Donald Trump is scheduled to undergo his third medical checkup at Walter Reed in 13 months on Tuesday. This is two more than presidents tend to need in a year if everything is fine.
The Washington Post reported Monday that independent physicians have been asking the White House to explain a number of things that are hard to miss: persistent bruises on the president’s hands, visibly swollen legs, and occasional public sleepiness. The White House says he’s in excellent health. This is also what they said last October, before quietly admitting that the visit involved a CT scan to rule out cardiovascular concerns.
Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who was Dick Cheney’s cardiologist, told the Post that the White House’s bruise explanation — too much aspirin, too much hand-shaking — doesn’t hold up.
“If you’re taking too much aspirin, one would likely take less aspirin,” he said. The bruises also appear on both hands, and Trump does not, as far as anyone can tell, shake hands with his left.
The White House response has been to publish what it calls a Wall of Shame, naming reporters and social media users who have noted that the president sometimes disappears from public view. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has alleged that Trump has the highest testosterone Mehmet Oz has ever seen in a 70-year-old, which is exactly the kind of medical opinion you’d expect from Mehmet Oz.
Biking risks
Live Long Newsletter - One UK study found that cycling to work carries a 41% lower risk of all-cause mortality compared to driving or taking transit. A Copenhagen study estimated that cyclists gain up to 14 months of life expectancy from cycling, while the risk of injury costs five days—a 20-to-1 net gain. In the U.S., though, accidents ranked third among leading causes of death in 2023, accounting for 7.2%. Bicycle deaths are up 37% in the past decade, rising as more people take up cycling, and as more cities add bike lanes.
Move to ban non-native born citizens from governmenet
Deep State Tribunal - A sweeping constitutional fight over who can write our laws is erupting after Rep. Nancy Mace moved to bar naturalized citizens from Congress and other powerful federal posts. Rep. Nancy Mace proposes a constitutional amendment restricting top federal offices to the native-born. Supporters cite existing “natural born” limits for the presidency as precedent. Democrats Raja Krishnamoorthi and Pramila Jayapal denounce the plan as anti-immigrant. The amendment route confirms the measure would require broad political consensus to pass.
Tech free classrooms
NBC News - Parents around the country are pressuring schools to cut back on screen time in class, presenting a tough question: What does that look like in 2026? I recently visited a rural district in North Carolina that experimented with going tech-free for two days a week. Several eighth graders told me they liked that it got them talking to classmates more, and they had fewer headaches from staring at screens. I also exclusively obtained survey results on how the trial went. While there were some big benefits and a lot of support from teachers, the survey revealed practical limits and hiccups that come with a big disruption like this.
Fake ICE
NBC News- In January of last year, a group of armed assailants entered a house shared by immigrants in North Carolina. A hooded man kicked down a bedroom door shouting “ICE! ICE!” one immigrant recalled. “I raised my hands, and he asked, ‘Where’s the money?’ That’s when I realized it was a robbery. It wasn’t ICE,” the Mexican immigrant, who didn’t share his name, said.
The incident is part of a growing trend of people impersonating immigration agents. Although neither the federal government nor local authorities publish specific records on such crimes, an analysis by Noticias Telemundo, based on court records, police reports and news articles, suggests that the number has increased over the past year.
The investigation documented at least 31 impersonation cases in 2025 alone. Recorded incidents appear to be growing more violent, and include intimidation, robbery and sexual assault, as well as so-called “immigration operations” carried out by armed vigilantes. MORE
The incident is part of a growing trend of people impersonating immigration agents. Although neither the federal government nor local authorities publish specific records on such crimes, an analysis by Noticias Telemundo, based on court records, police reports and news articles, suggests that the number has increased over the past year.
The investigation documented at least 31 impersonation cases in 2025 alone. Recorded incidents appear to be growing more violent, and include intimidation, robbery and sexual assault, as well as so-called “immigration operations” carried out by armed vigilantes. MORE
The Pope on Artificial Intelligence
NPR - Pope Leo XIV addressed the rise of artificial intelligence today in his first encyclical, a major teaching addressed to the world's 1.4 billion Catholics. Leo's “Magnificent Humanity” urges Catholics to engage in shaping AI ethics instead of leaving it in the hands ofl of wealthy tech elites. Pope Leo is concerned that Silicon Valley is pushing the idea of a hybrid human-machine world, says Claire Giangrave, Vatican correspondent for NPR's partner organization Religion News Service. Giangrave says the pope sees AI as a new Industrial Revolution and believes the Catholic Church can help guide society toward a more human and humane future. The pope describes a new face of colonialism, where people's data and information are exploited. He calls it "one of the most urgent moral challenges of our time" and argues that governments and international organizations must step up to place laws and regulations around AI use. While some AI companies resist any regulation of AI development, others in Silicon Valley are actively seeking guidance from religious traditions as they navigate new and unexpected technological advancements, Giangrave says.
California's cracked chemical tank
NPR - Approximately 50,000 residents in Garden Grove, Calif., remained under evacuation orders yesterday as emergency response teams worked to manage a potentially explosive situation at the GKN Aerospace manufacturing plant. Late Saturday, firefighters found a potential crack in a tank at the facility. Orange County Fire Division Chief Craig Covey says a crack in the tank could be a good outcome. While not ideal, it would be better if the chemicals leaked out slowly rather than exploding. This tank contains around 7,000 gallons of methyl methacrylate, a highly toxic and flammable chemical used to make resins and plastics. Emergency responders say the incident started on Thursday when chemicals in a tank at the facility began exceeding safe temperature limits. Authorities evacuated residents to protect them from the risk of a large explosion and the harmful fumes it could produce. Since the fire department cannot predict the direction in which the fumes might move, they had to clear a wide area around the plant.
Just a reminder
The leaders of the United States and Iran have regularly lied or misled their people so that which is being said now about a possible agreement should be taken with reserve.
May 24, 2026
Polls
Interactive Polls - 2028 National Democratic Primary
Kamala Harris: 34% (=)
Gavin Newsom: 12% (-8)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: 11% (+4)
Pete Buttigieg: 10%
@Rasmussen_Poll
NATIONAL POLL by Wall Street Journal
Pres. Trump
Approve: 41% [-4]
Disapprove: 57% [+3]
——
Generic Ballot
DEM: 48% [+1]
GOP: 40% [-3]
DEM: 48% [+1]
GOP: 40% [-3]Climate change
Newsweek - The Old Farmer’s Almanac is warning that gardeners should prepare for a hotter, drier-than-normal summer in 2026, with shifting weather patterns likely to put added strain on plants, soil, and water supplies across large parts of the United States. The long-range outlook suggests that above-average temperatures will dominate much of the country, while rainfall is expected to be uneven and, in many regions, below normal—creating the kind of dry conditions that can quickly stress gardens.
Throughout the week, NPR and the NPR Network have brought you stories of cities, states, and neighborhoods coming together to reduce climate emissions and make their communities more resilient.
KUER’s David Condos in Utah took us to communities across his state, which have joined to build renewable energy.
Montana Public Radio’s Ellis Juhlin told us about tribes coming together to fulfill their climate action plans.
NPR’s Lauren Frayer brought us face-to-face with a charismatic mammal that’s helping British communities be more resilient to climate change.
And I spoke with host Ayesha Roscoe on The Sunday Story about city-level solutions, and climate solutions on the neighborhood-level.
Cryosphere Capsules - Central Asia’s glaciers experienced their most severe mass loss year on record in 2025, with nearly 2% of the region’s total glacier volume disappearing. About two-thirds of large glaciers in the region (around 4,000 in total) experienced their worst year of ice loss since measurements began. This extreme melt was driven mainly by unusually warm spring and summer conditions, an early start to the melting season, and less snowfall than usual. With snow disappearing earlier in the year, darker ice surfaces were exposed for longer periods, causing more sunlight to be absorbed and speeding up further melting in a feedback loop. Long-term records and reconstructions going back to the 1950s show that 2025 was far outside the range of normal year-to-year variability and falls within a broader trend of increasing glacier loss across the region.
Health
Axios - A looming ban on an additive used in many New York pizza and bagel shops may soon force thousands of businesses to change ingredients.
- A bill passed by state lawmakers and awaiting signing by Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) would bar potassium bromate, an oxidizing agent used to make bromated flour, AP reports.
- The chemical, which reduces rest time for dough and helps ensure a stronger, chewier product, is a suspected carcinogen that's already banned in much of the world.
"This is an earth-shaking event for New York pizza," said pizza historian Scott Wiener, who estimates that 80% of pizza and bagel joints rely on the flour. "That ingredient is part of the identity of the slice."
Artificial intelligence
Irish Times - After decades of dismissing liberal arts and humanities studies as useless and insisting that the mastery of science, engineering, maths and tech (STEM) is essential to future success, the tech world is coming around to the idea that learning about human nature could be a valuable asset in the coming artificial intelligence (AI) revolution.
As it turns out, tech jobs may be drying up after years of students rushing to computer science. Who needs to code? AI does that for you.
What AI can’t do – yet – is the stuff that makes us human: empathy, emotion, psychology, critical thinking. “What a piece of work is man,” Hamlet said, describing an intricate and infinite creature.
“I think AI is a false mirror,” said Drew Lichtenberg, the dramaturge, or literary adviser, at the Shakespeare Theatre Company and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. “It reflects back answers to black-or-white questions, but it does little to help explain the human experience the way art or philosophy can.”
Daniela Amodei, a founder of Anthropic, told ABC News that “the things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important”. She said that at Anthropic the company was looking to hire people who were “compassionate and curious” about other people.
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