U.S. News

I don't think Talarico could have beaten Cornyn, but holy hell does Paxton carry a lot of baggage. As such, this is the outcome I was hoping to see.

Texans put up with a lot of bullshit, but embezzlement, securities fraud, impeachment and adultery might be too much when running against an inspiring pastor. You couldn't set up a worse candidate when it comes to having political fodder.

I guess we'll find out whether love or hate wins in November. I'd be happy to have this transphobic bootlicker out of the public sphere. He's already been AG since before I moved here in 2015, along with Patrick and, of course, Hot Wheels.

I was used to having elections in other states, not this thing where the top three positions are the same as they were for years before Covid.

Ken Paxton, the Donald Trump-backed Texas attorney general, triumphed over incumbent John Cornyn in the Republican primary runoff for senator. His victory signals that even a scandal-plagued candidate can win over the deep red state with the support of the president.

“After a public service career lasting more than four decades and 18 consecutive campaign wins, tonight we’ve come up short in this primary runoff,” Cornyn said shortly after the race was called. “I’ve always supported the GOP ticket. I intend to do so again this general election.”

The race had wide implications for Trump’s strength heading into November’s midterm elections, where Paxton will now face James Talarico, a Democratic pastor and state legislator whose message of peace and populism has attracted much attention. If he wins, Talarico would become the first Democrat in more than 30 years to win statewide office in Texas.

Midterm elections often serve as a referendum on the sitting president and tend to help the opposing party. This year Democrats are favored to win the House of Representatives, though a supreme court decision that decimated the Voting Rights Act could allow for more Republican-leaning districts and complicate the picture. The race for Senate remains in flux, though candidates such as Talarico, Graham Platner in Maine, as well as purple states such as Ohio and Michigan, could upset the Republican lead.

The original hed on this was a bit misleading, so I rewrote it.

Workers at local newspapers owned by Hearst allege the company is trying to “destroy unions” amid claims of widespread anti-union tactics, including violating union contracts and bad-faith bargaining.

The Albany Newspaper Guild, which represents the Times Union newspaper in Albany, New York, said it had been more than 17 years since the union had a contract and there had been little progress toward reaching a new one.

Wendy Liberatore, president of the Albany Newspaper Guild and the Saratoga county reporter at the Times Union, said the lack of pay increases at the newspaper had burdened employees who struggle to afford a higher cost of living, including higher deductibles for their healthcare plan. She also said that workers were concerned about Hearst eventually outsourcing jobs to AI.

“What bothers me is the effect on our members. It really hurts our members,” she said.

Liberatore noted the issue was seen across Hearst publications across the country. “Hearst newspaper management – in Albany, Connecticut, Austin and Dallas – is doing its best to destroy unions at its papers,” she said.

What a bunch of bullshit that Gannett finally signed a contract with the Austin American-Statesman guild, then turned around and sold the paper to Hearst, which had no binding need to follow that contract. Gannett had only purchased the AAS from Cox a few years earlier.

Celebrities, politicians and New Yorkers have paid their respects to Stephen Colbert as The Late Show aired its final episode on Thursday.

The long-running chatshow, which started back in 1993, was cancelled last year by CBS, purportedly because of a financial decision. But many believed it was a result of the network’s increasing closenesss with Donald Trump, whom Colbert regularly criticised.

Last night’s episode saw the host bid an emotional farewell with the help of celebrity guests including Paul McCartney, Paul Rudd, Ryan Reynolds and Bryan Cranston.

“We love doing the show for you but what we really love is doing the show with you,” he said to the audience at home.

Truly the end of an institution. He will be missed.

The win represented a major blow to leaders of Philadelphia’s Democratic Party, who largely rallied around the other candidates and have clashed with Rabb for years. And it was something of a turnaround for Rabb, whose campaign nearly ran out of money after he said his former treasurer embezzled more than $160,000 in contributions.

“There was a moment a couple of months ago, not long ago, that I was on the precipice of withdrawing from this race,” Rabb said Tuesday night. “And there were people who showed up for me at my worst, in depths of adversity.”

Rabb, 56, focused his campaign on railing against establishment and “status quo” politicians, though all of the major candidates vying for the 3rd District seat supported progressive policies like Medicare for All and abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

His frequent criticism of Israel became a particular flashpoint as he called on his opponents to refer to the war in Gaza as a genocide, which they declined to do. The rift symbolized a larger national debate as the party wrestles with how far it should go in criticizing Israel and its allies like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel organization.

The justice department quietly added a provision barring the IRS from auditing Donald Trump’s tax returns on Tuesday, amending a widely criticized agreement that creates a secretive and loosely controlled $1.776bn fund to compensate allies of the president.

The addendum, signed by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, says the government is “forever barred” and “precluded” from examining the tax returns of Trump, his family, company and “related companies”. The agreement applies to anything filed before the agreement was reached. It was posted on the justice department website on Tuesday morning, a day after the department announced creation of the fund.

The inclusion only adds to mounting scrutiny of the wider agreement reached on Tuesday. The arrangement was announced after Trump said he was dropping a $10bn lawsuit against the IRS and other specious claims against the government in exchange for creating the compensation fund. IRS officials recommended fighting Trump’s lawsuit, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, but the agency decided to settle it anyway, raising further questions about improper interference.

A proposed merger of the largest utility in the country by market value, NextEra Energy, with the sixth-largest, Dominion, would create a megacompany at a time when data centers and rapid increases in electricity demand are reshaping the industry.

The proposal, announced Monday morning and contingent on state and federal regulatory approval, would result in a company that leads in nearly every aspect of the U.S. power and utility industry, including overall electricity generation, natural gas generation and renewables.

The $67 billion deal combines NextEra’s size and reach with Dominion’s positioning as the local utility for the world’s largest concentration of data centers in northern Virginia. But the results are likely bad for consumers and the environment, creating a company with enormous financial and political strength that will be difficult to effectively regulate, according to consumer advocates and analysts.

For perspective, only Exxon Mobil and Chevron would be larger based on market value among U.S.-based energy companies.

“Mergers are not about consumers; they’re about shareholders,” said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. “For the Dominion shareholders, they are selling their shares at a premium. The executives are getting massive payouts for facilitating this, assuming it all goes through, and obviously NextEra believes the transaction is going to add value to the company. Ratepayers are all an afterthought.”

Angel Lemus-Linares, a 32-year-old migrant from El Salvador seeking political asylum, recalls ICE officers shoving him into a filthy, cramped solitary confinement cell and beating him after another detained individual attacked him while in ICE custody. He remained for seven consecutive days in what’s known as “el pozo”—the hole—at the T. Don Hutto Detention Center, a notorious, privately run facility in Taylor, Texas.

“They beat me a lot,” Lemus-Linares said in a phone interview from inside Hutto. “They had left my ribs and sides all bruised.”

On three occasions from October 2023 to December 2025, he said, officers at the facility locked him in the solitary unit without giving a satisfactory reason other than that they don’t like him. He spent 24 hours a day isolated in the cell with virtually no access to medical care or even a bathroom until officers decided his punishment was over.

Lemus-Linares is one of thousands of individuals that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has locked in solitary confinement in its custody—a practice that has soared during the Trump administration’s nationwide crackdown on illegal immigration. More than 10,500 detained migrants were thrown into solitary confinement in the 14 months ending in May 2025, according to a recent report by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).

Land of the free, home of the brave. Let's lock you up and be cruel. History will not recall this as a triumph.

As the US prepares for hurricane season and a summer of record-breaking heat, experts fear the Trump administration’s cuts to climate and weather data programming could make the federal government’s weather forecasts less reliable when they are needed most.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) late last year launched a suite of artificial intelligence-powered global weather forecast models which it said would improve “speed, efficiency, and accuracy”. In March, an agency official said those models are being trained with centuries of weather data.

Artificial intelligence is a valuable tool for weather prediction, but only when it is well-trained with ample data, said Monica Medina, who served as Noaa’s principal deputy undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere from 2009 to 2012.

Under Trump, climate and weather data collection has declined, said Medina. This year, the Trump administration proposed a modest budget increase for the National Weather Service, but a 40% cut to Noaa overall.

I'm choosing to source The Guardian here, as local coverage may not make much sense. None of y'all know where Ben White is, nor is it particularly relevant. It was a good weekend to be north of the river.

Three youths are in police custody after a spree of at least 10 shootings wounded four people who appeared to be targeted randomly in Austin, Texas, according to authorities.

The suspects who were arrested in connection with the shootings also allegedly took aim at various buildings and houses while driving around the capital city in stolen cars, the Austin police chief, Lisa Davis, said Sunday. Before the suspects were jailed, city officials temporarily ordered people residing in a large southern section of Austin to shelter in place, an exceptional public safety measure that spoke to the indiscriminate nature of the spree.

“We don’t have any specific motive that has been identified,” the Austin mayor, Kirk Watson, said after the arrests. “In fact, these actions appear to be random.”

Officials say a pair of boys, ages 15 and 17, are accused of firing at two fire stations, apartment buildings and homes amid a series of robberies and shootings from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning.

My phone was blowing up with emergency notifications both days.

Workers renovating one of Washington DC’s most historically symbolic sites in a project ordered by Donald Trump may be risking their safety as they race to finish on time for the US’s 250th anniversary celebrations, a union monitoring the site has warned.

Trade union scrutiny has focused on the reflecting pool on the US capital’s National Mall – scene of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream speech” – after it was drained of water and fenced off from the public to allow contractors the chance to upgrade it by 4 July.

The pool, a Washington landmark since it was dug in 1922, is currently the site of frenetic repair activity, its usual watery surface occupied instead by vehicle and work equipment. Tourists visiting the area have found their view obscured by black tarpaulin.

Leaks and algae blooms have for decades dogged the 2,000ft pool, which sits between the Lincoln and George Washington memorial monuments, turning its water green and confounding previous expensive government-commissioned repair schemes, including one commissioned by Barack Obama’s administration.

Of note:

According to the AP, marine archaeologists and National Park Service crews occasionally dive at the memorial to monitor the wreck’s condition, and other dives have been conducted to inter the remains of surviving USS Arizona crew members.

Surviving? That was 1941; it's unlikely anyone is still alive, and that notwithstanding, you don't inter survivors, you get them to hospital.

Words have meanings.

An alliance of environmental groups and immigration advocates has welcomed what looks to be the imminent closure of Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious immigration jail in the remote Florida Everglades celebrated by Donald Trump for its harsh conditions.

State officials told vendors at the facility on Tuesday to prepare for a breakdown of the tented camp beginning next month, the New York Times reported, citing its ongoing cost.

It was revealed in March that Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, spent $1.2m per day opening and operating the camp that quickly attracted headlines for the brutal treatment of detainees, and had essentially given up on a promised $608m rebate from the Trump administration.

Stephanie Hartman, director of communications for the Florida division of emergency management that runs Alligator Alcatraz for the homeland security department (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), appeared to confirm the report.

“As Governor DeSantis stated last week, the South Florida detention facility was always intended to serve as a temporary facility to support ongoing illegal immigration enforcement and detention operations,” she said Wednesday in a statement.

Trump not following through on payment? Inconceivable!

A plan to create one of the world’s largest datacenters, a gargantuan project spanning an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, has provoked a furious public backlash in Utah amid concerns over its vast energy use and impact upon the state’s stressed water supplies.

The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.

Last week, the project was approved by the county’s commissioners, despite thousands of objections lodged by Utah residents. Environmentalists have warned that Stratos could imperil the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, including a critical migratory bird habitat, which is already under severe stress.

"Recent years" really downplays the state of drought in the West.

BuzzFeed, the digital media pioneer that was once valued as high as $1.7bn amid a private equity-funded wave of interest in websites that generated massive amounts of online traffic in the 2010s, has finally changed hands for $120m.

On Monday, the company announced that a controlling stake in the company has been sold to media entrepreneur Byron Allen. Allen, who often makes large, sometimes unsolicited bids for media companies, is also an on-screen personality in addition to controlling his Allen Media Group conglomerate, which owns networks including The Weather Channel. Allen’s show, Comics Unleashed, will replace the Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS’s schedule starting later this month.

As part of the transaction, Allen will take over for the BuzzFeed founder, Jonah Peretti, as chief executive, though Peretti will stay on as president of BuzzFeed AI. BuzzFeed also owns the progressive news outlet HuffPost.

“Byron’s vision, operational experience and long-term commitment to premium content makes him exceptionally well-positioned to lead BuzzFeed and HuffPost into our next phase of growth,” Peretti said in a statement. “And personally, I’m thrilled Byron is taking over The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’s time slot, and highly confident that his relationships with talent will bring some incredible stars to the BuzzFeed platform.”

Well, that's something I'm not going to watch. I'm going to be interested to see how the ratings turn out for CBS in that time slot. I'm not saying CEOs can't be funny, but professional comedians with decades of experience are likely better at hosting comedy shows.