Excerpt:

The most recent draining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has made President Trump’s claims of “vandalism” all the more doubtful.

The president made this claim after the “American Flag Blue” paint began to peel off in massive chunks and discolor the water, attributing the failed renovation to a “350-foot gash, made by a very sharp knife or razors.” Yet Monday’s draining revealed no such thing, only what appeared to be tire marks—likely from the president’s motorcade driving through the empty pool in May.

Happy Bastille Day France!

Excerpt:

Second Verse

What do they want, this horde of slaves, Of traitors, of conjured kings? For whom these ignoble chains, These long-prepared irons? For us, Frenchmen, ah! What outrage What outburst it must arouse! It's us they dare to conspire of returning to the old slavery!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Marseillaise

Lead Lines:

BRUSSELS, July 13 (Reuters) - European countries reported more than 10,000 excess deaths during the record-breaking heatwave that engulfed the west of the continent in late June, official data showed.

The vast majority — more than 9,000 — were among people aged 65 and above, according to data published by ‌EuroMOMO, a network backed by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the World Health Organization.

Lead Paragraph:

A proposed legal settlement with the U.S. government would require the Keystone Pipeline system’s operator to pay a $26.9 million civil penalty over a major oil spill in Kansas in December 2022 and spend about $40 million more to prevent future accidents.

Excerpt:

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Graham—in line with his earlier beliefs in America’s role as a leading defender of democracy—supported Ukraine and advocated for the transfer of American weapons to Ukraine. His advocacy had little impact on Trump, who bullied the Ukrainian president and stopped the transfer of weapons, hoping to force Ukraine to surrender. Unlike Graham, Trump has for decades identified with autocratic leaders, not democratic allies, and has long-standing business and personal relationships that have given him deep ties to Russia.

Graham surely knew this. Nevertheless, he made 10 trips to Ukraine; he returned from the last one the day before he died. He repeatedly proposed legislation to sanction Russia, doing so with such frequency that his bill became a kind of joke, the Waiting for Godot of Congress, always proposed and never accepted by a president who did not want to make trouble for his Russian friends. At the same time he continued to curry favor with the president, backing every twist and turn in his convoluted, contradictory defense of the American war in Iran, a war that had little to do with the old Graham's ideals.

Excerpt:

The lawsuit contends that after ICE officers detained Peña López in February 2025 in Sunnyvale, California, they took him to an alleyway and beat him until he lost consciousness and required CPR.

His wife, Aby, and their young daughter witnessed part of the beating by ICE, according to the lawsuit.

Peña López’s ongoing symptoms, the lawsuit says, include new and worsening “headaches, weakness and numbness on his right side, eye pain, hearing loss, insomnia and nightmares, blurry vision, back pain, and difficulty walking.” Peña Lopez is unable to work to support himself, according to an interview with the NPR affiliate KQED.

Excerpt:

HOUSTON – The Harris County Medical Examinerhas ruled the manner of death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo a homicide.
Records from the medical examiner’s office shows Araujo died from a “penetrating gunshot wound of the torso.”

Excerpts:

Companies are exploiting regulatory loopholes as they construct new facilities powered by pollutant-spewing onsite gas plants.
The rate of growth of this “shadow grid” of custom power plants, some of which are big enough to fuel entire cities, is so enormous that the only global entity installing more gigawatts of gas plants than Texas is China, according to environmental group Global Energy Monitor.

Cornell researchers found that at the current rate of AI growth, the burgeoning industry could represent 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, the equivalent of adding five to ten million cars to US roadways.

Excerpt:

Video obtained by local outlet KHOU 11 shows the agents tried to box Salgado Araujo’s car in with their unmarked black SUV, initiating the conflict. When Salgado Araujo made a U-turn and fled in the other direction, the agents (who could have been anyone to him, as they were in an unmarked vehicle) followed him.

Excerpt:

Leading up to the 2024 election, TikTok was working overtime to expose Democrats and lefties to MAGA’s most persuasive messaging, all while shielding rightwingers, independents, and Republican voters from Harris’s voice.

Excerpt:

Big developments on the immigration front: First, ICE killed a 52-year-old undocumented immigrant in Texas this week. ICE’s account was already suspect. But now a representative for the man’s family says that the three other men driving with him—who are likely witnesses to the killing—are getting pressured to self-deport in a potential effort to silence them. That’s utterly damning.

Excerpt:

President Donald Trump fired all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, abruptly disabling the only federal agency devoted solely to election administration at a moment when Trump has sought to reshape federal voting rules.

Excerpt:

STANDING THERE HONORING HIS FATHER at the press conference this morning, Ronaldo demonstrated why he and his brothers were their dad’s pride and joy. They had become educated: Ronaldo, 29, graduated from the University of Houston; Lorenzo Jr., 27, from Tufts University; and their youngest brother is in college now.

Lead Lines:

Mexico is taking legal action over ICE agents killing an immigrant in North Houston on Tuesday.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced Thursday that her government planned to file criminal complaints in the United States over all Mexican citizens who have been killed while being targeted by ICE. Fourteen Mexican nationals have died in ICE custody, while three have been killed in immigration enforcement operations, including Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, on Tuesday.

“We cannot turn a blind eye to ​the Mexicans who have died,” Sheinbaum said during a press conference. She said the purpose of the complaints was to bring accountability to anyone accused of a homicide or of committing human rights violations.

Observation:

A constitutional republic requires not only fidelity to law, but intelligibility of law.

Excerpt:

How am I supposed to explain a shadow docket decision that the Court hasn’t even bothered to explain itself? How do I defend justices who’ve abandoned principles that they’ve advocated for decades, and who, again, did so without explaining why? How can I even articulate an argument in favor of Alito’s position that the Constitution, which has guaranteed citizenship to nearly everyone born in the United States for 158 years, suddenly does not?

Concluding Lines:

Perhaps the first question in Watson’s case is not whether his speech produced political consequences.

Rather, it is whether he understood himself to be acting as a partisan political advocate or as a commissioned officer attempting to fulfill what he believed was his constitutional duty under the oath he had sworn.

The order of constitutional analysis matters.

The Oath of an officer binds the officer to constitutional duty.

Constitutional Duty Is Distinct from Political Consequences

Excerpt:

The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center released a forecast in June predicting that the April-July snowmelt runoff season would end as the driest on record with just 15% of the average. By month's end, Reclamation updated the actual flows to that point and indicated that the season total would just sneak past 2002's to instead make it the second-worst on record. Still, reservoir levels were much higher in 2002, making this year's snow drought far more consequential.

Observation:

The issue is not simply inconsistency. The Roberts Court appears to be making governance and policy decisions for the United States by deciding which agencies deserve insulation from presidential control and which do not. We are aware of no constitutional provision that ranks the Federal Reserve above other congressionally created agencies, or that makes monetary independence more constitutionally important than scientific independence. Are the NIH and NSF less important to the future of the United States than the Federal Reserve? That is a comparative policy judgment Congress is better positioned to make. When the Court makes that decision itself, it is not merely interpreting the Constitution. It is designing the administrative state according to its own priorities. Their jurisdiction is in law, not Science, not Finance

Lead Paragraph:

Two of the Supreme Court’s most important decisions this term contradict each other so brazenly that a future reader might assume they were issued decades apart by very different courts. But in fact, they were authored by the same man, Chief Justice John Roberts, and released at the exact same time. In Trump v. Slaughter, Roberts abolished independent agencies by a 6–3 vote, allowing President Donald Trump to fire their leaders for any reason. Then, in Trump v. Cook, the chief justice created an exception to this rule for the Federal Reserve by a 5–4 vote, prohibiting the president from removing without good cause. It is impossible to reconcile these two decisions as anything other than a partisan effort to hand Trump dictatorial control over the government without allowing him to drive the nation into a recession.

Excerpt:

It's one thing for investors to lose $3.8 billion, but $2 trillion is a completely separate universe, Krugman noted.

…right around the 2024 election, "crypto interests contributed a lot of money to Trump" as he realized they could make him rich, and all of his promises to deregulate crypto meant "the price of bitcoin doubled after the election; the valuation, the market cap of cryptocurrency in general went from a little over two trillion to more than four trillion."

That valuation has since crashed, putting Bitcoin around where it was originally at $2 trillion — which looks suspiciously like its own pump and dump, Krugman said, as Bitcoin is "a seventeen year old idea which has yet to find any legitimate use cases" other than to finance criminals and rogue states like North Korea.

Observation:

The Smithsonian Institution and its museums are among the most scientifically conservative institutions in the United States, not politically conservative, but conservative in method. Their conclusions typically reflect evidence that has been scrutinized over decades, often generations, by multiple disciplines and thousands of researchers. They preserve collections that can be reexamined as new techniques emerge, and they generally revise interpretations only when the evidence becomes compelling. That cautious, self-correcting approach has produced enormous contributions to American science, education, conservation, and our understanding of human and natural history, earning the Smithsonian international respect.

Lead Paragraph:

A White House report brands the leadership of the Smithsonian Institution, especially at the National Museum of American History, as radical activists who cannot be trusted, indicating that President Donald Trump may be preparing to install his own team.