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| Via Annie |
May 11, 2026
Polls
Washington Post - Republicans are eight seats closer to keeping control of the House since President Donald Trump pushed state lawmakers to redraw congressional maps, steepening the Democrats’ climb toward reclaiming any hold on federal power in November.
Democrats are still exploring whether any long-shot legal moves could save their redistricting attempt in Virginia after the state’s high court on Friday overturned last month’s referendum to approve it. Democrats and their allies are still challenging new maps in Florida and Missouri. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) insisted Friday his party will still win the chamber.
But Democrats were confronting the reality that Trump succeeded in tilting the playing field to the GOP’s advantage. Eric Holder, a former attorney general leading the Democrats’ redistricting drive, said Republicans were trying “to steal the 2026 midterm election.”
Just two weeks ago, Democrats had fought to a draw, with Virginia’s referendum adding four new left-leaning seats and some Republicans questioning whether the arms race was worth it. Then last week, Florida Republicans adopted a redrawn map hoping to turn four more districts red, and the Supreme Court opened the door for Republicans to do the same in several other Southern states.
“The critics of the White House spiked the football a little too early,” said Alex Pfeiffer, a Republican operative and former senior official in the Trump White House. “The map is more favorable to us now.”
Climate
Newsweek - Emergency services are coordinating as over 300 earthquakes have rattled Southern California in a fast-moving swarm over the last 24 hours. The seismic activity has ranged from micro-quakes up to a magnitude of 4.7, according to data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The rapid clustering has put emergency crews on alert as scientists assess whether the shaking represents routine background activity or the early stages of a larger event. No injuries or damage have been reported, and no tsunami warnings have been issued.
The epicenter of the swarm, Brawley, is a small Imperial Valley city of roughly 26,000 people, located about 15 miles north of the U.S.–Mexico border and 30 miles from the Salton Sea. It sits in one of the most seismically active zones in the state, near the Brawley Seismic Zone and the southern end of the San Andreas Fault—a region known for frequent earthquake swarms.
The USGS’s real-time monitoring system detected the small quakes across a concentrated area of Southern California over the past two days.
Most were minor, but the rapid clustering prompted the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) and local agencies to activate enhanced monitoring protocols.
Eva Xiao, Financial Times - Over the past month, firefighters in Georgia and Florida have battled hundreds of fires that have spread across both states, which are not typically considered hotspots. The severe and protracted drought, which scientists say will probably worsen as global temperatures rise, is driving the exceptionally high fire activity this year.
So far, about 1.9mn acres (700,000 hectares) nationwide have been razed by early May, according to the latest data from the National Interagency Fire Center. That is nearly 80 per cent more than the 10-year average and the most acres burned year to date since 2017, involving more than 25,000 fires. More US wildfire activity is occurring in places far from what is normally thought of as fire country, such as Maine and Massachusetts in the north-east, as global warming intensifies.
“We’re going to have to be able to tackle multiple threats at once,” said Kim Cobb, professor at Brown University, listing coastal flooding, hurricanes and other climate disasters that locales will face. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting . . . because it’s going to be happening all at once
But after about 26 years of exceptionally high heat and drought, hundreds of million of these trees in lands stretching from New Mexico and Colorado to the southern Sierra Nevada of California have died. And in many places, something even more startling is happening: The trees aren’t coming back.
Ecologists warn that in just 25 years, more than 70 percent of the Southwestern needle leaf evergreen forests, which include ponderosa pines, may be replaced by grass in what might qualify as the first significant post-climate change landscape in America.
One of the biggest consequences is the loss of shade. Without the forest canopy overhead, snow can evaporate quickly instead of trickling into rivers, streams and aquifers. In the mountainous parts of the West, where roughly 70 percent of freshwater runoff originates as snowpack, that’s a huge deal, a sign of a catastrophic feedback loop beginning to form.
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Lands that are no longer covered by snow also absorb more heat from the sun, drying them out and leaving them more vulnerable to large wildfires. Those fires in turn put more carbon into the atmosphere, warming the climate even more. In 50 or so years, by some estimates, snow could virtually disappear from the West, making life there exceedingly difficult.
Science
Democratic Conservation Alliance - Every single member of the National Science Board — the group of independent experts who advise the president and Congress on policy across the scientific spectrum — was just unceremoniously fired by Donald Trump with no warning.
Artificial Intelligence
Congressional Insider - Pennsylvania became the first state to sue an AI company for operating unlicensed chatbots that impersonated doctors and therapists, exposing vulnerable users to potentially deadly medical advice from fake professionals.
Pennsylvania filed lawsuit against Character.AI after investigators discovered chatbots falsely claiming to be licensed psychiatrists
AI bot “Emilie” offered depression diagnoses, medication suggestions, and confidentiality promises using an invalid Pennsylvania license number
Character.AI already faced multiple lawsuits linking its chatbots to teen suicides and self-harm incidents throughout 2025
Governor Shapiro’s administration seeks immediate injunction to halt what it calls illegal practice of medicine
Middle East
NBC News - President Donald Trump rejected Iran’s response to a U.S. proposal to bring an end to the war in the Middle East, calling the message “totally unacceptable” in a post on Truth Social. Trump did not offer details about Iran’s response, which Iranian state media reported was sent through Pakistani mediators. The message comes as talks between Tehran and Washington have stalled in recent weeks.
World's two most powerful men about to meet
NY Times - President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, are scheduled to meet in Beijing [this] week for a high-stakes summit that could shape the next stage of rivalry between the world’s two major powers. Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi are expected to discuss the war in Iran, trade, Taiwan and other points of contention during a two-day summit beginning on Thursday. Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi last met in October in South Korea, where they agreed to pause a bruising trade war in which the U.S. imposed triple-digit tariffs on Chinese goods and Beijing threatened to throttle the global supply of rare earths...
Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi are likely to discuss trade, including possible investment in each other’s countries. Washington has been emphasizing what analysts call the “Five B’s.” These include Chinese purchases of Boeing airplanes, U.S. beef and soybeans, as well as the creation of a board of investment and a board of trade. Those two entities would carve out areas of economic exchange between the United States and China that do not raise national security concerns.
The Chinese have been emphasizing the “Three T’s”: tariffs, technology and Taiwan, which Beijing claims is part of China’s territory. Beijing is likely to push for an extension of last year’s trade truce and the loosening of export controls on advanced semiconductors that China needs to upgrade its industrial sector. Mr. Xi, who told Mr. Trump by phone in February that his country would “never allow Taiwan to be separated from China,” is likely to push Mr. Trump to dial back U.S. support for the self-governed island.
The plan to dump Democratic voters
Alternet - On Sunday, posting from Truth Social, Donald Trump announced that Republicans would deploy an “Election Integrity Army” in every single state for the 2026 midterms. Much bigger than 2024, he promised. He did not say who would be in it. He did not say how large it would be. He did not say what it would do when it got to the polling locations. These details were apparently beside the point. The point was the army.
In 2024, the Republican National Committee recruited thousands of volunteers to serve as poll watchers across the country. They were trained to challenge voter eligibility, observe ballot counting, and report irregularities. That operation, by Trump’s own description, is now the baseline.
Trump also said in February that he will only accept the midterm results if he feels they were honest. That same month, he called for Republicans to “nationalize the voting” in 2026. The administration has since deployed ICE agents to polling locations ahead of the election.
The midterms are six months away. The army is already being built. The concession speech is not being written.
Russian dictator Joseph Stalin is often quoted (perhaps apocryphally) as saying:
“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.”
Today’s GOP version of that could be:
“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s how many people we can remove from the voting rolls that will decide the election.”
In this year’s iteration, the Trump Department of Justice has demanded that all states turn over their voting rolls, complete with names, addresses, driver’s license and social security numbers, voting history, and date of birth.
They’re also requiring states to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” that says the states will then purge from their voting rolls anybody who Republican partisans within the Trump administration — once they’ve dug into the state’s voter data — find to be a “concern”:
“You agree therefore that within forty-five (45) days of receiving that notice from the Justice Department of any issues, insufficiencies, inadequacies, deficiencies, anomalies, or concerns, your state will clean its VRL/Data by removing ineligible voters…”
Best and worst places to start a career
WalletHub - WalletHub compared more than 180 U.S. cities based on 25 key indicators of career-friendliness. The data set ranges from the availability of entry-level jobs to monthly average starting salary to housing affordability.
Best vs. Worst
| Best Places to Start a Career | Worst Places to Start a Career | |
| 1. Atlanta, GA | 173. Anaheim, CA | |
| 2. Orlando, FL | 174. Jackson, MS | |
| 3. Austin, TX | 175. Shreveport, LA | |
| 4. Tampa, FL | 176. Pearl City, HI | |
| 5. Miami, FL | 177. Oxnard, CA | |
| 6. Charleston, SC | 178. Chula Vista, CA | |
| 7. Pittsburgh, PA | 179. Port St. Lucie, FL | |
| 8. Knoxville, TN | 180. Detroit, MI | |
| 9. Salt Lake City, UT | 181. Bridgeport, CT | |
| 10. Columbia, SC | 182. New York, NY |
Best vs. Worst
- Austin, Texas, has the highest monthly average starting salary (adjusted for cost of living), which is three times higher than in Juneau, Alaska, the city with the lowest.
- Columbia, Maryland, has the highest median annual household income (adjusted for cost of living), which is 3.3 times higher than in Detroit, the city with the lowest.
- Oxnard, California, has the highest workforce diversity, which is 2.3 times higher than in New Haven, Connecticut, the city with the lowest.
- Sioux Falls and Rapid City, South Dakota, have the lowest unemployment rate, which is 5.2 times lower than in Detroit, the city with the highest.
Gas prices
Bloomberg - As gasoline prices ratchet higher across the US due to the Iran war, several Midwestern states are seeing the steepest increases. That’s putting a strain on the very voters Republicans will need to try and keep control of Congress in the midterms.
- Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin have all borne the brunt of price hikes since the war began 10 weeks ago. Nationally the average is now less than 50 cents-a-gallon off the all-time high set during Joe Biden’s tenure.
- In Ohio, gasoline has surged 72%. That’s double the increase for California, long the poster child for sky-high fuel prices.
National debt sets record
Alternet - The U.S. national debt just crossed a once-unthinkable threshold on the way toward breaking the record set in the wake of World War II: It now exceeds 100 percent of America’s gross domestic product. As of March 31, our publicly held debt was $31.27 trillion, while America’s GDP in 2025 was $31.22 trillion. This puts the ratio at 100.2 percent, compared with 99.5 percent when the last fiscal year ended September 30.
That 100.2 percent figure will likely climb, because the federal government is running historically large annual deficits of nearly 6 percent of GDP, which add to the debt. The final tally will depend on Iran war spending, tariff refunds, and the strength of the economy.
Should you worry? Well, it’s not as if we’re heading into a depression. Passing the 100 percent threshold won’t suddenly cause the world to lose confidence in the dollar.
The real problem is that an increasing portion of our nation’s budget — and your tax dollars — is dedicated to paying interest on this growing debt. That’s money we don’t spend on education, healthcare, roads and bridges, social safety nets, or (if we actually needed more spending on it) national defense.
As the debt continues to grow, interest payments continue to soar. We’ll soon be paying more in interest on the federal debt each year than we spend each year on Medicare.
Donald Trump
Forward Blue - Exclusive reporting from The Bulwark unveils the latest scheme from the most corrupt President in history… he has ordered the redesign of passports to include his face.
This is the same document Americans use to travel, to prove our identity, to represent our country to the world, and now he wants to turn it into a vanity project. Your passport is supposed to represent the United States of America. Not one man’s ego.
Just a thought
Sam Smith - The conflicts involving Iran and Ukraine might inform leaders, including Trump and Putin, that war is not the best way to get things done. As Reuters points out, Russia has been fighting over Ukraine longer than the Soviets were in World War II. And Iran is still in conflict. It may be time for even dictators to put to put war lower on their to do list.
May 10, 2026
Small businesses doing bulk of hiring
Axios - Small businesses employ about half of the American private-sector workforce. So far this year, the nation's smallest businesses are doing the bulk of hiring. Through the first four months of 2026, the smallest companies — those with fewer than 20 employees — have added 236,000 jobs, according to payroll processor ADP. That accounts for a whopping 95% of the economy's net gains over that period.
Elon Musk
Congressional Insider - Paris prosecutors have escalated their 15-month investigation into Elon Musk’s X platform by opening a formal criminal investigation targeting Musk, his AI company xAI, and associated corporate entities over allegations ranging from algorithm manipulation to facilitating child sexual abuse material—marking an unprecedented move to hold a major tech executive personally accountable under European law.
Gavin Newsom
Gavin Newsom - California just became the first state in America to provide free diapers to all new parents. Launching this summer. Since I became Governor, we have made preschool free, school meals free, and expanded paid family leave.
Donald Trump
Independent, UK - President Donald Trump used a government exemption to give a $6.9 million no-bid contract to his “pool guy” to repaint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to a blue color after complaining it “never looked great.” The exemption is typically reserved for urgent situations to prevent “serious injury, financial or other, to the government”, according to documents reviewed in an exclusive report by The New York Times.
But Trump used the exemption to get the company, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, to quickly begin work on the memorial as part of an array of building projects and refurbishments taking place across Washington D.C., ahead of America’s 250th birthday this year.
Schools doubled banned books in past year
The Hill - A new report shows that the number of nonfiction books banned in U.S. schools doubled in the last academic year. PEN America’s report released Thursday called “Facts & Fiction: Stories Stripped Away by Book Bans” found that 3,743 unique titles were removed from school libraries and classrooms between July 2024 and June 2025. This included 1,102 nonfiction titles.
The topics of nonfiction books removed from libraries and classrooms included those focused on activism and social movements, which amounted to 52 percent of those books banned.
“This increase should not be a surprise, given the increased crackdown on activism and free speech by the federal government over the last year,” PEN wrote in its survey. “These themes encourage young people to question authority and societal inequities, confront injustice in their communities, and participate in social changes to address disparities in the world around them. Suppressing these themes sends a message of discouragement and the need to maintain the status quo.”
The report states that “a strain of anti-intellectualism … mirrors the broader political attack on facts and knowledge and the skepticism and devaluation of, and disdain for, experts and expertise — tactics long associated with the rise of authoritarian regimes and intended to sow distrust in democratic institutions.”
Health
Religion
Axios - Fewer Americans want to become pastors, accelerating a leadership vacuum inside one of the country's oldest civic institutions.....As the pastor role becomes lower-paid, higher-risk and less trusted, the U.S. isn't just losing clergy — it's losing a key layer of local leadership, especially in rural and Black communities.
.... Enrollment in master of divinity programs at schools accredited by the Association of Theological Schools fell 14% from 2020 to 2024. Graduate-level and college-level enrollment at Catholic seminaries was down significantly in the 2024-2025 academic year, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University said. Black Protestant enrollment in master of divinity and professional M.A. programs fell 31% from 2000 to 2020.
Churches are trying to fill pulpits as older clergy retire, congregations shrink and burnout rises. More than 4 in 10 clergy surveyed in fall 2023 said they had seriously considered leaving their congregations since 2020, per Hartford Institute data reported by AP.
- The leadership crunch comes as 15,000 U.S. churches closed last year and a record 29% of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated.
Rural churches are hit first because many already share pastors, rely on part-time clergy or ask one minister to cover multiple congregations. When those churches close, towns lose informal hubs for food aid, child care, disaster relief and elder care.
Election interferance
Alternet - A new investigation by Reuters details how the Trump administration is seeking to gain federal control over elections in at least eight states, employing investigations, raids and demands for access to balloting systems and voter ID records for the campaign.
“What we’re seeing is the Trump administration, in some ways, is seeking to relitigate the 2020 election, and they’re also seeking to impose federal authority over the administration of elections,” says investigative journalist Ned Parker.
Parker also discusses the Trump administration’s campaign of retribution against the president’s perceived enemies, for which he and his colleagues at Reuters just won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. “What we found in our count of 470 targets was that it really cut across all aspects of American society,” he says.
Immigration
Alternet - Immigration lawyers representing the global elite are warning their clients to steer clear of Trump's "gold card" visa program, calling it legally dubious, financially risky, and potentially worthless, according to a report in the Washington Post.
The program, which Trump has promoted as a fast-track to residency for wealthy foreigners willing to invest $1 million to $2 million, has become a cautionary tale in the immigration law community. Seven immigration attorneys told the Washington Post they have either steered clients away from applying or refused to help clients who already have applied, citing fundamental legal problems with the program.
The skeptics include Michael Wildes, the immigration lawyer who represented first lady Melania Trump and her parents, and secured visas for Miss Universe contestants when Trump ran the pageant. When potential clients call about the gold card visa, Wildes has made his position clear.
"It would be unethical of me to retain them," Wildes said.
The core problem: the gold card visa has no congressional authorization and exists only through an executive order that faces ongoing litigation. That means it could be eliminated with a single presidential signature—or struck down by courts at any moment.
May 9, 2026
Artificial Intelligence
Congressional Insider - Pennsylvania became the first state to sue an AI company for operating unlicensed chatbots that impersonated doctors and therapists, exposing vulnerable users to potentially deadly medical advice from fake professionals. Pennsylvania filed lawsuit against Character.AI after investigators discovered chatbots falsely claiming to be licensed psychiatrists. AI bot “Emilie” offered depression diagnoses, medication suggestions, and confidentiality promises using an invalid Pennsylvania license number. Character.AI already faced multiple lawsuits linking its chatbots to teen suicides and self-harm incidents throughout 2025. Governor Shapiro’s administration seeks immediate injunction to halt what it calls illegal practice of medicine.
Health
Deep State Tribunal - Former CDC Director warns America is unprepared for the next disease outbreak as massive federal budget cuts and workforce reductions gut the agency’s ability to detect threats, investigate outbreaks, and coordinate responses—leaving 50 million children vulnerable and communities defenseless against emerging diseases like measles and avian flu.
CDC lost 3,400 federal workers including specialized disease detectives after 2025 workforce reductions. Vaccines for Children program serving half of American children sits at standstill awaiting guidance...$1.8 billion in cuts eliminate critical surveillance systems as measles cases surge nationwide. Over 80% of CDC funding flows to state and local health departments now facing fragmented federal support.
UFOs
1440 - The Pentagon yesterday released "never-before-seen" files on unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. The database includes FBI case files dating to the 1940s, Apollo mission footage, and roughly two dozen videos recorded between 2020 and 2026. Explore here; new files will be added on a rolling basis.
The military formally began gathering information on UFOs in 1947 after a wave of supposed flying saucer sightings. The effort ended in 1969 with no significant discoveries. Then, in 2017, media outlets reported that the Defense Department spent roughly $22M annually from late 2008 through 2011 on a secret program investigating alleged encounters between unknown objects and the military. The revelation fueled calls to declassify related documents, with former President Joe Biden signing a law compelling agencies to release UFO records, and President Donald Trump ordering yesterday's release.
The Trump administration gave no analysis of the files, saying Americans can draw their own conclusions. Experts say the files are unlikely to reveal aliens.
Polls
Pew Research - Four-in-ten U.S. adults, including half of those under 50, say they get health and wellness information from social media influencers and podcasts. In our study of nearly 7,000 wellness influencers, we found that 41% describe themselves as health care professionals, 31% are coaches and 28% are entrepreneurs.
- More in this report: Why do people turn to wellness influencers? | How much do audiences trust them? | What topics do these influencers talk about?
Spirit Airlines
New Yorker - After Spirit Airlines ceased operations, in the middle of the night on May 2nd, a series of canary-yellow airplanes sat on the tarmac at Newark Airport, arranged neatly like children’s toys at day’s end. Travellers flying in or out of the hub ogled the spectacle, a display of sudden corporate collapse. Now that the airline is officially dead, following one failed government bailout and a couple of failed mergers, seventeen thousand workers are in need of employment, and thousands of customers await refunds. Meanwhile, Spirit’s jets are being ferried, one by one, to the desert—a storage field at Goodyear Airport, in Arizona, where they await their fate. What was leased will be repossessed to recover debt in bankruptcy court. What was old will be scrapped and sold for parts. What is functional will be recouped by competitors that will benefit from the death of this icon of budget air travel, which facilitated a kind of low-grade freedom for the masses.
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