July 10, 2026
Houses
Newsweek
- Maine has the nation’s
highest vacancy rate at 20.6 percent, with 154,717 vacant homes, followed by
Vermont with 19.4 percent (65,626 homes) and Alaska with 17.6 percent (57,958
homes).
Health
Newsweek
- A coalition of 25 states and
Washington, D.C., is suing the Trump administration over new Medicaid work
requirements they say could cause eligible low-income Americans to lose health
coverage and unlawfully limit protections for vulnerable recipients.
The legal challenge targets an
interim final rule released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
(CMS) in June that would require many adults with Medicaid expansion coverage
to prove they are working, studying, volunteering or completing other approved
activities for at least 80 hours a month in order to keep their health
insurance.
The lawsuit highlights a familiar
fault line in American politics: the tension between expanding access to
government benefits and imposing conditions on their use.
Climate change
Independent
- Most of America’s Lower 48
states is bracing for an "unusually large, strong and long-lasting"
heat dome, which the National Weather Service warns will drive temperatures to
"significant and dangerous" levels.
The severe heatwave is set to
begin this weekend and persist for at least a week, with some regions
experiencing its effects through the end of the month, according to
meteorologists.
Temperatures are forecast to soar
15 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit (8 to 14 degrees Celsius) above normal across many
areas, including during nighttime hours. Elevated nighttime temperatures pose a
particular threat to human health and complicate efforts to manage an already
active wildfire season.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist
with University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, described the
impending event as "pretty remarkable." He added, "This is going
to be a long duration, widespread and high-intensity heat event that’s going to
affect millions of people for over a week."
Ukraine
Alternet - Trump has openly expressed his admiration of
Russian President Vladimir Putin on many occasions. When he returned to office,
Trump initiated a sharp break from the policies of his predecessor Joe Biden.
The U.S. now sends less military aid to Ukraine, although U.S.-made arms
continue to flow to the country thanks to European funding. A promised US$400
million military aid package has not yet been released.
Trump
famously chastised Zelenskyy in a 2025 Oval Office meeting and has pressured
the Ukrainian president to give up land to satisfy Putin’s territorial desire
for all of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Yet
Washington continues to provide Ukraine with intelligence, which is used by
Kyiv for targeting its middle- and long-range drone strikes inside Russia.
Washington also still enforces significant sanctions against Russia, including
Moscow’s oil exports, although it has granted specific waivers of late.
To
understand what Ukrainians make of all this, we asked them a direct question
about Trump: Is he a friend or an enemy of their country, or a bit of both?
The
results showed that only 17% of Ukrainians surveyed consider Trump a friend.
More than double that consider him an enemy of Ukraine. Almost a quarter say
he’s a bit of both, with a similar percentage responding “don’t know.”
Middle East
NPR - After two days of intense strikes, fighting between the U.S. and Iran appears to have paused. The U.S. says it hit 170 targets in Iran. Iran says it targeted U.S. military bases in the Gulf. The fighting coincided with a weeklong funeral for former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and four of his family members killed on the first day of the conflict. |
ICE
Thom
Hartmann - Tuesday morning in Houston, Lorenzo
Salgado Araujo did what he’d done nearly every morning for 35 years. He woke at
5 a.m., kissed his wife goodbye, loaded his van, and drove off to pick up his
construction crew in Magnolia Park, the neighborhood that’s anchored Houston’s
Mexican American community for a century.
He’d raised three sons in that city; they became a teacher
and two engineers. He had no criminal record, and he was partway through the
legal process of getting a work permit, biometrics and fingerprints already
done.
By 7 a.m. he was lying face down on Canal Street with a
bullet in his abdomen, crying out for help in Spanish while a federal agent
knelt over him talking on the phone. He died at Ben Taub Hospital, the same
hospital where two of his sons were born. The Harris County medical examiner
has ruled the manner of his death a “homicide.”
ICE says he rammed their vehicle and “weaponized” his van to
run down an officer, who fired in self-defense. His family says he almost
certainly thought the unmarked cars tailing him were thieves after his work
tools, because the men following him wore no insignia identifying them as law
enforcement.
The League of United Latin American Citizens says
photographs of the vehicles show little visible damage, which is a strange
thing for a van that supposedly rammed a law enforcement vehicle hard enough to
justify lethal force. David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute reviewed
newly surfaced footage and concluded it appears to show ICE initiating contact
with Salgado Araujo’s vehicle, not the other way around; Norm Ornstein looked
at the same evidence and called it “cold-blooded murder.”
The Guardian- Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a man killed by federal immigration agents during a traffic stop in Houston this week, was not the intended target of the “enforcement operation”, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were reportedly seeking two people from Guatemala when they attempted to stop Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the Us for 35 years.
Salgado Araujo, who was on his way to work early on Tuesday morning, was driving three other people in a white van. After the shooting, the three men were taken into custody. One of the three men has been identified by advocates as Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, the brother of the victim. It was reported that he was still in an immigration detention center.
Trump fires all Democrats on Election Assistance Commission
The
Hill - President
Trump fired the remaining Democratic members of the independent Election
Assistance Commission on Thursday, the White House confirmed to The Hill. Trump fired the remaining Democrats on the
commission, Benjamin Hovland and Thomas Hicks, while Republican Christy
McCormick resigned.
“The President, and head of the
Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be
totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and
ensuring every legal vote is counted,” said a White House official in a
statement.
“The Slaughter decision gives the
President precedence to do so,” the official said, referring to the Supreme
Court decision last month that determined the president has the authority to
remove members of the Federal Trade Commission.
“The Administration from the
start has been working across all agencies and local partners to safeguard
elections from fraud and abuse, and investing in a strong infrastructure to
sustain that mission especially in the midterm elections,” the official added.
…..It’s unclear what will happen
next with the commission, or if Trump will appoint new commissioners, which
would need to be confirmed by the Senate. Democrats were quick to slam the
firings.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck
Schumer (D-N.Y.) vowed that staffers would “fight this power grab at every
turn,” while Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said the move “should concern every
American, regardless of party.”
Additionally, the commission is in charge of “maintaining the national mail voter registration form developed in accordance with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993,” according to its website
Airline passengers trapped for seven hours
Newsworthy - Hundreds of United passengers say they
were locked in “airplane purgatory” for seven hours in Newark while storms
raged outside and regulators stayed quiet, capturing how weather and weak
oversight now trap ordinary people between the sky and a broken system.
- United Flight 661 sat on the Newark
tarmac about seven hours during severe storms and ground stops.
- Federal rules clearly limit tarmac
delays, yet the flight was canceled only after passengers spent the night
stuck on board.
- Past administrations hit airlines
with record fines, but current Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has
issued none for long tarmac delays.
- Climate change is driving more
extreme weather delays, while airlines and regulators struggle to protect
passengers caught in the middle.
TALES FROM THE ATTIC: Human relations: Beyond law and virtue
Sam Smith, 2016 - For me, discovering other cultures began as early as
ninth grade, taking one of only two anthropology courses taught in American
high schools at the time. Our teacher, Howard Platt, was a tall, bald,
bespectacled Quaker. It was a wonderful world that he laid before us. Not the
stultifying world of our parents, the monochromatic world of our neighborhood,
the boring world of 9th grade, but a world of endless options, a world in which
people got to cook, eat, shelter themselves, have sex, dance and pray in an extraordinary
variety of ways. Mr. Platt's subliminal message of cultural diversity was
simultaneously a message of freedom. You were not a prisoner of your culture;
you could always go live with the Eskimos, the Indians or the Arabs.
What we learned that year was
strikingly different from what we were learning elsewhere. The world around us,
in so many ways, was teaching us to define our place by a process of exclusion,
secured by the assumption that we were smarter, whiter, and/or faster than
someone else.
About the same time I had
become a drummer and a vigorous student of jazz and its musicians, including
Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Ella Fitzgerald and Fats Waller. Such
characters became cultural role models and helped me start my Quaker school’s
first jazz band. They were not honored by my school, parents, or other white
adults around me, but they nonetheless became covert pals who helped me enjoy
the often tough times of a teenager.
When I got to Harvard in the
1950s, I found I had been far from alone. Many of my friends, also musicians,
were big fans of black jazz and in our beat era rebellion against the
conventional found in its players alternative souls and attitudes to admire and
emulate. I still remember Miles Davis in a large auditorium playing with his
back to the audience and thinking, yeah, that’s how I feel sometimes.
And, coincidentally, to back it all up, the best book I read in college was
Martin Luther King’s Stride Towards Freedom, which was not on any course
list.
Further, out of twenty anthropology
majors at Harvard, five of us had been students of Howard Platt, who knew how
to welcome his students to cultural diversity in a way that today whole towns
and institutions – from police departments to universities – have yet to
discover. It was not a moral, legal or political discovery, but simply a better
way to live and think about others.
After college I moved back to
my birthplace of Washington, DC, where blacks would be in the majority for
fifty years and many lived close to whites. This is something that is generally
ignored in talking about ethnic relations. The proximity of cultures makes a
large difference simply because, while a community may be segregated, its
people are not strangers… Another advantage of cultural proximity is that it
damages clichés. It may even break formal cultural rules.
Washington’s black madam, Odessa
Madre, was a classic example. At her peak in the 1940s, Madre was earning
about $100,000 a year, and had at least six bawdy houses, bookmaking
operations, and a headquarters known as the Club Madre. Among its performers
were Moms Mabley, Count Basie and Nat King Cole.
By 1980, Madre had
been picked up 30 times on 57 charges over a 48 year span, seven of them spent
in a federal prison.
Madre grew up in a mixed
neighborhood of blacks and Irish, the latter heavily populating the DC police
force and, in the end, often looking out for their childhood friend.
"Negroes and Irishmen got along real well," Madre told the Washington
Post’s Courtland Milloy. "They would fight amongst themselves, but we
wouldn't fight each other. If somebody outside Cowtown came to fight the Irish,
the Negroes would chunk bricks at them. We were like a big happy family."
Writes Milloy: "Thus began a long and prosperous relationship with members
of the Metropolitan Police Department.”
Once, while in the offices of
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where I was handling the media
for director Marion Barry, the national SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael came
from out of town and announced that we whites were no longer welcomed in the
civil rights movement. But only a couple of years later I found myself working
with blacks and whites to form a third party on behalf of DC statehood just as
some years earlier a similar coalition – even including black and white middle
class homeowners - had joined in a successful fight against freeways.
The longer you lived in DC the
more you realized that nothing about its black community was simple. Some 15%
were Catholic matched only by New Orleans. Blacks included some of the
wealthiest and some of the poorest residents, including folks whose great
great grandparents had lived there as free blacks and some who had only
recently arrived from further South.
There were also numerous
variations in the white community. Those who hated blacks had mostly peacefully
moved to the suburbs in large numbers. During the decade of the 1950s the
percentage of whites declined by a third. By 1980 in the nation’s capital
just 28% were non-latino whites. During this same period the number of blacks
had doubled. Today, whites are back in the majority.
A 2011 study reported by the
Washington Post found that blacks and whites both understood how class could
surpass ethnicity. And there was the story of a white guy driving past a black Washington
Post reporter mowing his lawn on upper 16th Street. “What do you get
for a lawn?” the white guy yelled out of his car. Replied the black guy, “I get
to sleep with the lady of the house.”
Washington – save for the 1968
riots – managed somehow to handle it all better than many other places are
doing today….. And the city, for all its other changes, has had,
over a half century, nothing but black mayors.
This complex story was one
strong reason I lived in Washington so long and so well. As an independent
minded guy, I was complex too and found the city a good place to be your own
thing. Further, complexity is an extremely useful foe of clichés.
My gut rule for dealing with
others became twofold: respect and humor. And the payback for me in DC was
friendship and learning lots of new things. Ethnic fairness wasn’t just
the law and the right thing to do, it was pleasant, interesting and fun.
Such factors have gotten lost
in our obsession with procedures and rules as the solutions for all our
problems. Law and documents only carry you so far. And in the best
communities you’ll find them hardly mentioned because there are no legal
contracts that provide for a happy living.
This is why for decades I
argued for getting police out of their cars into neighborhoods, schools that
introduce students to cultural variety as well as mathematical values, a
government that made it easier for us all to get along, as well as media and
institutions that addressed multi-culturalism not just for its problems but for
its vigorous assets.
I’d seen it and lived it long
enough to know it could happen. But the first step was to start talking about
it
July 9, 2026
Tales from the attic index
ACTIVISM
ARTS & HUMANITIES
How to keep people going to a museum
COAST GUARD
The hooligan navy in St. Louis
COPS
A Capitol Police story from a happier time
CULTURE
DC
Covering the Capital in the 1960s & 1970s
Getting started in civil rights
JOURNALISM
Covering DC in the 1960s & 1970s
Radio news in the 1950s
Learning from Texas liberals
Mark Russell, Sid Yudain and your editor
How I almost went to work for the National Enquirer
MISC
A 50th Harvard college reunion report
MUSIC
Music, my hidden college major
POLITICS
My brief moments with the Kennedy story
Eugene McCarthy: Notes on a napkin
A preface to change
CHILDHOOD
Things my father never told me
TEEN YEARS
Learning to drive a truck on a farm
Anthropology: Learning about people
The forgotten war that I remember
A 50th Harvard college reunion report
GETTING OLD
Thoughts of an old reporter
WRITING
Cost of health insurance
WalletHub - To identify where Americans are shelling out the most and least for health insurance, WalletHub analyzed average premiums in each of the 50 states, then compared it to the median household income.
To view the full report and your state’s rank
| Highest % of Income Spent | Lowest % of Income Spent | |
| 1. West Virginia (20.86%) | 41. Colorado (6.72%) | |
| 2. Vermont (19.05%) | 42. Rhode Island (6.67%) | |
| 3. Wyoming (17.16%) | 43. Hawaii (6.37%) | |
| 4. Arkansas (14.87%) | 44. California (6.32%) | |
| 5. Mississippi (14.05%) | 45. New Jersey (6.23%) | |
| 6. Alaska (13.18%) | 46. Minnesota (5.89%) | |
| 7. Louisiana (12.58%) | 47. Virginia (5.86%) | |
| 8. Tennessee (12.19%) | 48. Massachusetts (5.49%) | |
| 9. Alabama (11.85%) | 49. New Hampshire (4.77%) | |
| 10. Montana (11.27%) | 50. Maryland (4.66%) |
To view the full report and your state’s rank
Middle East
NPR - Overnight, the U.S. launched strikes on southern
Iran, targeting around 90 military sites along the coast and the vital
Strait of Hormuz, according to the U.S. Central Command. In retaliation, Iran
launched air attacks in Kuwait and Bahrain against U.S. military installations.
Kuwait's military reported intercepting missiles and drones. Countries in the
Middle East are on high alert as they brace for the possibility of further
conflict in the region.
Just wondering
Sam Smith - If Graham Platner has to drop out his race because of his sexual activity, why isn't Trunp resigning as president?
NYC's endangered high rise
The
Congressional Insider - Two support columns buckled around the
21st floor of the former Pfizer headquarters, causing floors 21–26 to sag and
leaving the high-rise at risk of a partial collapse. Officials evacuated the
tower and at least seven surrounding buildings, including a school, and set up
a collapse zone; no injuries have been reported.
The building is in the middle of one of New York City’s largest office-to-residential conversions, raising questions about whether safety is keeping up with new high-rise profit plans. The exact cause of the failure is still unknown, and local leaders admit the building continues to move, deepening public concern over oversight and enforcement.
Donald Trump
The Guardian - A
Manhattan federal court judge has ordered the release of the more than $5m Donald Trump
owes E Jean Carroll following her successful 2023 sexual abuse and defamation
trial against him. Less than an hour after the judge issued his order, Trump
filed paperwork indicating he was appealing the decision.
Trump's anti-immigrant policy may cut child care
The
Guardian - The Trump
administration may remove the temporary protected status (TPS) of
Haitians and Syrians in the US, the US supreme court ruled in late June – a
move that will worsen America’s growing caregiver shortage, experts say.
The US is now experiencing its
fastest increase in the aging population in more than a hundred years, and more
than 20% of
the US population will be 65 or older by 2030. But the population of caregivers
has not grown at the same pace, leading to staffing shortages.
Immigrants account for about one
in six workers in the US – but they comprise about 30% of caregivers in
longterm settings. The caregivers, often nurses and aides in hospitals,
facilities, and homes, come from at least 163 countries, and Haitian immigrants
are strongly represented at 7% of that workforce, according to a report from
LeadingAge, the national association of non-profit and mission driven providers
of aging services.
“Foreign-born staff are
significant contributors to care and services our members provide, and that
older adults and their families rely on,” said Lisa Sanders, vice-president of
communications and media relations at LeadingAge. “Without staff, there is no
care.”
Finding a post Platner candidate
Intercept
- In group chats of progressive
activists and political operatives concerned with the state of the Senate race
in Maine Wednesday morning, a link to an anonymous Google Doc was making the
rounds. It disavowed Graham Platner, the disgraced Democratic nominee whose
campaign was throttled by a rape accusation on Monday, and called to replace
him with Troy Jackson, a recent gubernatorial contender the document deemed
“the one candidate who can hold Platner’s coalition together.”
Platner suspended his Senate campaign on Wednesday evening,
and there is no clear alternative to his candidacy. His campaign’s swift
downfall has presented Democrats and his primary supporters with several bad
options: The party establishment could pick a candidate and inflame an already
frustrated base that scoffed at its efforts to anoint Gov. Janet Mills as the
nominee, or it could bend to Platner’s past demands and let him influence the
selection of his successor.
In either case, a base already exhausted by months of
Platner scandals is at risk of fracturing and failing to consolidate behind a
potential replacement — and Democrats are at risk of once again losing a key
seat they need to pick up for control of the Senate to Republican Sen. Susan
Collins.
h its exact shape and timeline remain unclear.
Tales from the attic: A 50th anniversary college reunion report
Sam Smith, 2009 - So I ended up much as I started: the kid they sent to right field because he couldn't or wouldn't play the game right.
I didn't plan it this way. I didn't want it this way. In truth, a large part of me still would like to have been one of the popular boys in the class, but things kept getting in the way-some addictive confluence of moral aggravation, periodic accident, undisciplined imagination, sporadic and unpremeditated courage randomly suppressing chronic shyness and cowardice, sloppy romanticism, episodic existentialism, recurrent hope, stultifying stubbornness, and an abiding intolerance for the dull. A child's dreams and an adult's faith pounding tide after tide on the rock of reality, thinking that maybe this time I'll float off.
Some people take it personally, as though I rebelled simply to annoy them. They make little jokes about the fact that I'm different, as if I had a moral obligation to be like them. When they see someone like me coming, they close the doors of their institutions, their imaginations, and their hearts. We are, after all, thieves who might abscond with their most precious possession: the tranquility of unexamined certainty.
So you become the charming stranger from a strange place, you tell jokes first and then change the subject when it starts to get too close to the real. Better yet, you fool them into thinking that you are one of them, even though you really blend better with those whom the urban itinerant Joe Gould once described as the "cranks and misfits and the one-lungers and might-have-beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats."
Among the illusions of my life has been that if I stuck it out long enough, time would provide the acceptance that my words and thoughts had prevented. I. F. Stone used to say that when you're young you're blamed for things you didn't do, and when you're old you get credit for them. It hasn't worked out like that, in part because just when I should have started coasting, the world around me took a nasty, greedy and dangerous turn. America began destroying itself. It was the wrong time to start fitting in. My country-without debate, consideration, or struggle-had decided it really didn't want to be America anymore.
I have tried to help keep alive the beleaguered tradition of plain speaking and truth-seeking that I understood to be at the heart of good journalism. But in a time when much of the media prefers perceptions to facts, bullet quotes to understanding, and spin over reality, such efforts are seen as eccentric at best, apostasy at worst. Truth has little to do with it anymore. It is as if we are living in a new Middle Ages, only with the myths being driven by cable TV rather than by the church.
In the melancholy that descends from time to time, in the loneliness that lies like a desert between reality and my imagination, I think about opportunities and offers that have come my way that I brazenly-wantonly, some might say-rejected. But then, as a friend once noted, if I had accepted such things, I probably would have ended up broken or fired. And a drunk as well.
As best as I can tell, my real impetus was not masochism but a truly manic, grandiose, and cockeyed optimism-the faith that I could do something on my own that would be even better than if I just did what was expected of me.
Saul Alinsky was once asked by a seminarian how he could retain his values as he made his way through the church. "That's easy," replied Alinsky. "Just decide now whether you wish to be a cardinal or a priest." It was a choice I made early.
I don't regret it; much of it's been wonderful. But I can't really justify having tried it. A lot of it doesn't make sense. I spurned the normal icons of ambition, yet was so ambitious that I sought the unattainable. I was like a bad comedian: I got the punch lines right but my timing was way off. And I gave the outward impression of a radical but, in my heart, was just a moderate of a time that has yet to arrive.
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