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Lame: On Space Nazis, Swindlers, Poseurs and Liars
Apologies to those who just can't or won't hear more of it, but the foul mad child-king is running notably rampant, and the historic record beckons. The bilge somehow keeps surging, from a weekend deluge of deranged AI slop, slurs, rants, boasts to this week's "sick fantasy" of nobly working "long and hard" (sic) in the rubble of 9/11 to choosing to "celebrate" GOP "achievements" (double sic) at a tacky mid-term crap-a-palooza nearly dead in the brackish water. Have mercy.
Unsurprisingly, Labor Day prompted an attack on "Communists and Dumocrats" from a failed real-estate nepo-baby who never worked a day in his soft tawdry life and only ripped off those who did; got famous for sneeringly telling people on TV they were fired; and morphed into "the most anti-union president in history." All weekend he spewed a blizzard of puerile, insane AI posts, each more bonkers than the last. Some: He nuked earth from space, threatened takeovers of multiple countries, declared "the moon is ours," attacked Iran, Canada, and "third-rate loser Debbie Dingbat," bragged about his billions, posed as Hulk Hogan, Green Lantern, a bemedalled general, a dark overlord with robot bodyguards snarling, "THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN,” posted new Space Force uniforms "inspired" by Nazis, and renamed New Mexico New America grotesquely "dancing" to YMCA.
On Tuesday, before First Responders and a steel beam from the ruins of the Twin Towers, he gave an obscene mess of a speech; unlike every living president, he's skipping 9/11 ceremonies at Ground Zero because they wouldn't let him speak and it conflicts with a golf tournament. Halting reading from a piece of paper, he mourned a day “etched forever into the memories of Americans" before launching into bullshit. He praised his war with Iran - "Nobody thought it could go so well" - and bragged, "We’ve punished them greatly." He told a story about former Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, whose wife "would always be screaming at him" to take their son to school, so on 9/11 he unhappily did, thus surviving the attacks that killed almost 700 of the company's employees: "He got to see it, but they all died...Now it's bigger, stronger, better than ever."
Then he got to the important part of the 9/11 story: Himself. He was building nearby, he "had a lot of construction workers," he took 100, maybe 200 of them to Ground Zero the next day, "and we worked long and hard." Huh. Except there is no evidence or record of that happening, which there'd have to be in a massive recovery effort supervised by city officials; also, his nephew says he was building Trump Tower five miles away, he ran a real-estate office that contracted out construction, and the only people he had access to were secretaries and accountants. There is, though, a record of him calling a radio show rom his safe miles away to giddily boast he now had the tallest building in Manhattan, from which he could "see" thousands of jubilant Muslims dancing in the streets - an infamous lie from what was, and remains, a racist, rancid pile of subhuman crap.
There is also video of him, young, brash and creepy, arriving near Ground Zero a few days later with a German television crew. When they asked what he thought of the human tragedy, the 3,000 dead, the day's terror and loss and grief, he said, "I hope we attack fast." Also fast, it was reported years later: His taking of $150,000 from a post-9/11 recovery grant program meant to help small businesses near the site of the attack. That was then; now, he's whining that Welles Crowther, a young equities trader remembered as “the man in the red bandana” who saved multiple people before dying in the towers' collapse, has "become more famous than me. I don't like it." He also added the shiny new lie that on 9/11 two firefighters “lifted me up and started running with me” to save him from an imaginary collapsing building. We assume they had tears in their eyes.
Trump's hideous lies about 9/11 especially infuriated Dean Blundell - "A Canadian Dog Did More Than He Did" - who cited what thousands in Canada gave freely with no camera crews in sight: Their lives, homes, help when needed. In retrospect, the only worse douchebag in the horrifying saga of 9/11 is Rudy Giuliani, who hid vast evidence of the hazardous air around Ground Zero while telling residents it was safe. Jon Stewart, who long fought for First Responders' rights: "They didn't recognize the air everyone was breathing (was) toxic until October of 2001. So to be fair, they only buried that information for 25 years." Those lies came out thanks to this week's release of 170,000 documents by Mayor Mamdani - the (Muslim) guy Rudy didn't think should be at the 25th anniversary ceremony. Rudy also chose the Twin Towers for an emergency command center against all advice and gave firefighters radios he knew didn't work, so fuck him all the way to Four Seasons Landscaping.
His former loser mob boss, meanwhile, continues to wreak havoc. Ignoring an approval rating 40 points underwater 'cause nobody can afford food or gas, he waddled to Dallas Wednesday for "The Greatest RALLY of them all!”, a glitzy, pretend, ill-planned Nazi confab with a daunting $25,000 entry fee he's defiantly, desperately made all about himself though nobody wants it to be. "The Convention, is really ‘HOT!’”, one of his 8 words, he exclaimed. “It's totally sold out! Everybody wants to be there!" Except even with every GOP House member and a third of the Senate facing re-election and the RNC “pulling out all the stops” to fill 20,000 seats with what ultimately became free tickets on a night competing with the first regular season NFL game, video of the first night showed glaring vistas of empty seats - the fragile snowflake's worst, primal fear. LOL.
Furthering the indignity, many of the lawmakers turning down the invite offered hilarious reasons akin to, "I have to wash my hair." Some carefully, vaguely declared they had "prior commitments" or they needed to be "in my district." One was taking his daughter "on college visits," one had to go to his son's (weirdly mid-week) high school football game, one said with visible relief he was going to his son's "destination wedding." A Sean the Sheep-ish James Comer said he had "stuff already planned." Another said he was going "dove-hunting." Max Miller, credibly accused of putting a gun to his ex-wife's head and breaking his toddler daughter's collarbone, said he was staying home to "spend time with family." One anonymously declared it was "a waste of time" and he was not "going to some convention center and holding up a sign."
Asked en route to Dallas about the announced absences, Trump bristled. "Everybody wants to come," he snapped, before attacking the reporter - needless to say, a woman. "Who are you with?" he snarled to ABC News' Mary Bruce. "ABC Fake News - you are the worst," he said. "We don't have room for them all." Event organizers have promised "a clear vision for the future of our country," with "lots of Great Entertainment" and over 50 speakers a night; they will include, "Everyday Americans sharing how they have benefited from the president’s policies," which def sounds lively, also Don Jr., Press Barbie and Lying Todd Blanche. Sen. Tim Scott gave a taste of the mood with an over-the-top, "SNL cold open" speech about "dangerous, radical and frankly weird" Dems willing to "rip the heart our of our chests..They hate our culture. They hate what it means to be American."
The Carnival-Barker-In-Chief kept up the hysteria. Dems just want to cheat: "They're really good at this stuff." There have been "zero" border crossings the last 16 months; it's 600,000, but close enough. Just "pretend that i'm on the ballot," which isn't weird at all. Also, pretend he didn't say in desperation that if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate, he'll send every citizen $5,000, which is a bribe, which is way illegal. In Texas, where Talarico is leading spectacularly corrupt Ken Paxton, he urged votes for Paxton. "Some may not like the way he dresses," he noted, or the way he talks or looks, but he's "the greatest attorney genera in Texas," and maybe the galaxy? "Vote Republican and we will leave the world in our dust for generations to come," he said. "There’ll be nothing like it.” Now that's something we can believe. Hang in, speak up, this too shall (presumably) pass.
Sep 10, 2026
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Trump Commerce Secretary Once Said Data Centers ‘Suck Water,’ Now Scoffs That Such Concerns Are Just ‘Propaganda’
President Donald Trump's commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, told a brazen lie on Wednesday while trying to defend the administration's support for rapid data center expansion amid growing public backlash from voters concerned about their extreme electricity and water use.
Asked on CNBC's "SquawkBox" about how politicians in both parties were responding to voter outrage, Lutnick laughed the concerns off.
"One of my favorite things is when people talk about data centers using water," Lutnick chuckled. "The number one product in America that uses water is cattle."
"I mean, data centers don't use water," Lutnick continued. "This is propaganda by our adversaries to try to slow us down."
Lutnick is correct that beef cattle production—which uses about 6 trillion gallons per year, according to the US Department of Agriculture—involves much greater amounts of water consumption than data centers.
But the contention that data centers "don't use water" is egregiously false. A report out Tuesday from the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit water policy research organization, found that data centers in the US directly use anywhere from 270 to 3.9 million gallons of water per day.
About 74% of that water, which is withdrawn from local sources near the data center, is consumed rather than returned to the same watershed, the report found.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that in 2023, US data centers directly consumed about 17 billion gallons of water. Since then, data center capacity in the US has more than doubled, according to the commercial real estate firm CBRE.
Water directly consumed by data centers also only represents a fraction of their overall demand. Most of the water being used is not directly pumped into the centers to cool servers, but is used for the power generation that supplies the centers.
A report out last month from the corporate sustainability organization Ceres found that across the seven US states that host about half of all US data centers—Virginia, Texas, California, Illinois, Georgia, Ohio, and Arizona—the facilities depend on 3.4 trillion gallons of freshwater for electricity generation per year.
Lutnick's comparison of national water use between data centers and cattle farming also overlooks that the effects are often concentrated heavily in the areas where data centers are located.
In Newton County, Georgia, for instance, families told The New York Times that shortly after Meta broke ground on a $750 million data center project in 2018, their taps began to run dry, and water rates soared. According to Meta's environmental data, the center withdrew about 146 megaliters, or 38.6 million gallons, of water in 2024.
In Fayette County, Georgia, residents complained of low water pressure only to find that a QTS data center had covertly used about 29 million gallons of water without paying for it, far exceeding the amount agreed upon during the planning process. The company was ultimately required to pay back nearly $150,000.
In New Carlisle, Indiana, about a dozen residents reported that their wells had gone dry during the construction of Amazon Web Services' massive data center campus. One resident told the Indy Star that she'd gone 18 months without running water and had to bathe using bottled water from the store.
Lutnick's claim doesn't just contradict the facts, but his own statements from just over a year ago on Fox News, as MeidasTouch senior digital editor Acyn Torabi noted.
Attempting to promote data centers as a vehicle for job growth, the secretary emphasized that "these AI things suck water" and that they will "need a plumber."
The Trump administration has made the rapid expansion of data centers central to its "AI Action Plan." But Trump and his team have struggled to sell the vision to voters, including in their own party.
A national survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center last month found that 61% of voters oppose the construction of new data centers in their area. That included 69% of Democrats, but also 54% of Republicans, and 53% of independents.
Critics described Lutnick's dismissive remarks about voters' concerns as a sign of how out of touch the administration was with the public on this issue and how much their data center PR push is failing.
Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) said it showed that "our government is being run by morons."
Sep 02, 2026
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Trump Official Denies Stealing Venezuela's Oil One Hour After Boasting Country is 'Forced to Work' With US
US Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Sunday denied that the Trump administration was stealing Venezuela's oil just one hour after boasting that the country is being "forced to work" with the United States.
During a Sunday morning interview on ABC News, Wright was asked why he trusted interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez, given that she was previously the vice president of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was abducted by the American military earlier this year and brought to the US to face narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, and weapons charges.
"We have a lot of leverage over Venezuela," Wright explained. "We control the sale of oil outside of their country. So right now, they are forced to work in partnership with us, and they are working in partnership with us."
RADDATZ: You attacked the Maduro regime as a "socialist dictatorship." Delcy Rodriguez was the VP of that regime. Why do you trust her?
CHRIS WRIGHT: We have a lot of leverage over Venezuela. We control the sale of oil outside of their country. Right now they are forced to work… pic.twitter.com/FV5eUhsRed
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 6, 2026
Shortly after, during an interview on Fox News, Wright grew indignant at the suggestion that the US was forcing Venezuela to give up its oil through threats of military force and other coercive measures.
"This is a home run!" Wright said of the Trump administration's arrangements with the Venezuelan government. "These senators saying we're stealing their oil at gunpoint, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the more oil that's produced in Venezuela, including with the deal with the US government, the more royalties and tax revenues go to the Venezuelan government and the Venezuelan people."
Chris Wright on Venezuela: "These senators saying we're stealing their oil at gunpoint -- nothing could be further from the truth" pic.twitter.com/idsdl025q9
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 6, 2026
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who was supportive of the US abducting Maduro, last week criticized the Trump administration for cutting a deal with what she said was still a corrupt and oppressive government in Caracas.
"The wealth of our land does not belong to an illegitimate regime," Machado said in a video posted on social media, "it belongs to the Venezuelan people."
In an analysis published last week, economist Paul Krugman accused the Trump administration of concocting a "plot to steal Venezuela's oil," which he described as equal parts "vile and deeply stupid."
The deal is vile, Krugman said, because it validates " everything the Latin American left has ever said about US imperialism" in the region.
And it is simultaneously stupid, he argued, because the investments required to improve Venezuela's oil infrastructure will be so great that its benefits are unlikely to materialize in the near future, if at all.
"Venezuelan oil currently sells for around $70 a barrel on world markets," Krugman wrote. "But as I said, getting that oil out will require huge investments in infrastructure. Nor does Venezuela oil come gushing out when you drill a well: As one expert put it, 'it comes out of the ground with the consistency of cold peanut butter.'"
Sep 06, 2026
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Sanders Sets Briefing on 'Extraordinary Dangers' Posed by Breakneck AI Development
US Sen. Bernie Sanders is set to convene a bipartisan hearing next week focusing on the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, a move that comes amid more warnings from experts about the potentially existential threats posed by unregulated AI development.
Axios reported Wednesday that Sanders (I-Vt.) will hold the September 16 hearing on what he called the "extraordinary dangers" posed by AI as a growing chorus of scientists and technology insiders warns that the race toward ever-more-powerful systems—which will likely one day surpass and then far exceed human brainpower—could ultimately threaten humanity's survival.
The briefing is set to feature three experts: Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist often called the “godfather of AI;" Max Tegmark, an MIT physicist and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute; and Ajeya Cotra, an AI safety researcher who recently helped investigate OpenAI's agents autonomously hacking the open-source software platform Hugging Face.
Hinton—who quit Google in 2023 so he could speak more freely about AI's dangers—has estimated that there is a 10–20% chance AI could cause human extinction within three decades. He has warned of the great difficulty of controlling increasingly intelligent machines that will likely one day achieve superintelligence and ultimately be beyond the ability of humans to control. Hinton has repeatedly argued that relying on profit-driven corporations to self-regulate AI development is a dangerous mistake.
Tegmark has also spent years sounding the alarm. In 2023, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter signed by more than 30,000 researchers, technologists, and others calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
Cotra wrote in a 2022 analysis that unchecked artificial intelligence development would likely lead to a “full-blown AI takeover.” The following year, she said she believed there was roughly a 50% chance AI would be making most important economic and societal decisions by around 2040, while warning that continued scaling of existing techniques could produce misaligned systems and a machine takeover.
Experts say the recent headline-grabbing rogue AI hacks underscore the problem of alignment. As AI advances to the point where it will likely outsmart humans one day, the challenge of ensuring that advanced systems reliably pursue goals that match what humans actually want becomes increasingly difficult—and dangerous.
Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) recently introduced legislation that would ban the creation of AI systems capable of surpassing human cognition and pause advanced AI development until a federal regulatory framework is established.
"In the interest of humanity... pause AI development," the senator urged tech titans last month. "It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control."
Sep 09, 2026
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Anthropic Researcher Quits, Citing Internal Fears That AI 'Could Kill Us All' This Decade
An artificial intelligence researcher at Anthropic publicly quit his position on Tuesday, warning that major AI companies care too much about winning the technological race and not enough about guarding against out-of-control "superhuman systems" that workers in the industry legitimately fear "could kill us all by the end of the decade."
Jacob Coxon, who previously worked at industry giant OpenAI before moving to Anthropic earlier this year, told the Wall Street Journal in an exclusive interview that he was leaving the company, as the newspaper reported, because "he doesn’t want to participate in an industrywide rush to build AI systems that can improve themselves, worried such systems could spiral out of control and destroy humanity."
According to the WSJ:
Coxon said he left OpenAI earlier this year to join Anthropic because it is known for its model-safety efforts. But even though he found Anthropic’s safety efforts to be earnest, he now believes no company can responsibly develop AI that can outperform humans in a range of tasks, sometimes called artificial general intelligence, absent government intervention or a coordinated industry slowdown.
Recent hacks by models from OpenAI and Anthropic, some operating in collaborative swarms of agents, have illustrated how AI systems can adopt nefarious goals and try to conceal them from humans. Once the systems begin to improve on their own, Coxon said, he fears they could advance enough to refuse commands.
"I resigned from Anthropic today," Coxon announced on social media Tuesday night. "I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."
In a 6-point thread that followed, Coxon elaborated on his reasoning in detail:
- Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.
- The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers couch their press statements to sound sensible—but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.
- A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?” At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first—they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.
- Accepting this race and entering the “endgame” is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack. Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that no better trajectories exist.
- I am optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between US labs more viable. I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities.
- If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL [Reinforcement Learning] run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because “it’s happening anyway”—or take this moment to call for different conditions?
Coxon's reference to the Hugging Face incident pertains to recent revelations about a so-called breakout event at OpenAI, which operates the ChatGPT protocol. In June, the company acknowledged that a "significant security incident" took place when AI agents within the company autonomously breached internal systems, using subterfuge to hide their actions from human operators. Since then, the incident's scope has shocked AI experts, and similar events have also been exposed.
While US President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have taken a hands-off approach to AI regulations, the industry has been pouring huge amounts of money into lobbying efforts and campaign spending to keep lawmakers from enacting stronger restrictions and oversight of the technology.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) have been leading a relatively lonely fight in Washington, DC for more aggressive federal guardrails, including saying last week they would soon introduce joint legislation that would ban artificial superintelligence and temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulatory structure was put in place by Congress.
Coxon's public resignation was met with applause from many, while other industry insiders backed his concerns.
"The caution is simple," said one commenter with the handle Jabbar Digital, described as a tester of AI tools and a software developer, in a lengthy post on Coxon's warning. "Capability is compounding. Coordination is not. If the people closest to the work are increasingly uneasy about the speed and the lack of external constraints, dismissing them as doomers is no longer a serious response. Neither is treating every capability jump as automatically good. The useful middle path is to take the technical progress seriously and take the internal dissent seriously. Both can be true at the same time."
Evan Hubinger, the alignment science lead at Anthropic, chimed in on his personal social media account to say: "Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to."
While bolstering Coxon's worries, Hubinger said, "To be clear, as we say in [Anthropic's] latest Risk Report, I think the risk from present models is low. What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement, as we have said is happening faster than we thought."
Running for US Senate in Michigan, Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed also weighed in on Coxon's decision to quit so loudly and publicly.
"Most tech geeks don’t resign from their roles because…the tech they’re building could end humanity," said El-Sayed. "How we change the incentives leading AI labs down this path and protect against these existential risks are defining political questions of our time."
Sep 09, 2026
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'Absolutely Bonkers' and 'Unacceptable': Trump Posts Map Showing US Takeovers of Other Nations
US President Donald Trump has spent his second term threatening takeovers of various other countries, from Canada and Cuba to Greenland, and on Monday he shared on social media a map that fueled fresh fears of his imperialist "Donroe Doctrine."
The map on Trump's Truth Social platform shows the US flag over not only the United States but also Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, and multiple countries in Central America and the Caribbean.
The post was swiftly condemned across platforms, with Congressman Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) declaring that "this is unacceptable."
Journalist Stephen Robinson wrote on X that "another world leader posting something like this would have to apologize before their immediate removal."
Amy McGrath, a retired Marine fighter pilot and former Democratic US Senate candidate from Kentucky, wondered, "What would we do and say if the Chinese president posted a map of China taking over the Western Pacific?"
Carl Bildt, co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations and former prime minister of Sweden, similarly said: "What would happen if Xi Jinping posted a map where [China] has taken over all of East Asia, and [President Vladimir] Putin one of [Russia] having absorbed all of Western Europe? It would have been seen as either insane or dangerous—or both."
While some critics called Trump "absolutely bonkers" and "f*cking insane," Dr. Brian Goldman, a Canadian emergency physician who's also an author and broadcaster, asserted: "That's not insanity. That's intention."
Democratic strategist Michelle Kinney agreed, saying: "As always, he is telling us what the plan is. We must take it seriously."
Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, suggested that "the reason why Republicans attack education is so that people don't recognize the history that repeats itself."
Without directly mentioning Trump or his map, Mexican President Sheinbaum said in Spanish on Monday, "We reaffirm that Mexico is neither nor will be a colony or protectorate of any foreign country. Proudly we are a free, independent, and sovereign nation."
While Trump is a prolific poster, the map followed a series of posts from Sunday—including other maps and images produced with artificial intelligence—that led progressive influencer Harry Sisson to conclude that the president was "having a mental health episode online" and call for his removal from office.
"This man is unwell. 25th Amendment NOW," Sisson said, cataloging posts on a range of topics, from Trump's recent renaming of Lake Ontario amid tough trade talks with Canada, to the suggestion that New Mexico should be dubbed "New America."
The latter was ripped by several Democratic officials, including New Mexico's governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, who responded that her state's name "isn't up for debate—it's been ours since before the United States existed."
"What is up for debate? Who's showing up for working families," she continued. "While the president tries to distract Americans from his disastrous war in Iran, gas prices keep soaring. Americans are also spending more at the grocery store, losing access to healthcare and wondering if they'll ever be able to afford a home. Under Democratic leadership here in New Mexico, we're providing families with free childcare and college, protecting access to healthcare, and investing in housing. While the White House wastes time coloring on maps, Nuevo México is busy doing the work."
In addition to waging an illegal war on Iran, Trump this term has invaded Venezuela to abduct President Nicolás Maduro and take control of the country's oil reserves, become the US commander-in-chief to bomb the most countries, and killed over 225 people by blowing up boats allegedly smuggling drugs through international waters. He's also threatened to seize the Panama Canal and possibly attack nations including Colombia and Mexico.
As Iran has responded to Trump's war by restricting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the president has teased declaring the key waterway a US territory and naming it after himself. He's also dubbed the Gulf of Mexico "the Gulf of America" and fought to put his name on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.
With the US midterm elections less than two months away, some Democrats in Congress have stepped up their critiques of Trump's foreign policy—including a delegation of progressive congressional lawmakers and candidates who headed to Uruguay last month for the third Pan-American Congress.
Shortly after that gathering, delegation member Congressman Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.) stressed that "progressives reject the violent, imperialistic Donroe Doctrine, and believe in a foreign policy rooted in cooperation, diplomacy, and sovereign equality."
Sep 07, 2026
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Report Details 500+ Yemeni Civilian Casualties From 2023-25 US Airstrikes
"The so-called 'War on Terror' never ended in Yemen," said Costs of War Project director Stephanie Savell. "This report will allow people to hold the US government accountable for the deaths and destruction it has caused."
Sep 10, 2026
A report released Thursday examines the more than 500 Yemeni civilians its authors said were killed or wounded by US airstrikes in the Middle East nation during a recent 17-month period amid the open-ended so-called "War on Terror" that has left nearly one million people dead in around half a dozen nations over the past 25 years.
The report—authored by the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights and published by the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs—documents 46 US airstrikes that took place between December 2023 and May 2025 that caused at least 576 civilian casualties, including 213 deaths and 363 injuries. Among the casualties were at least 50 children and 25 women.
"The so-called 'War on Terror' never ended in Yemen," Costs of War Project director Stephanie Savell contended.
"It's important that we continue to account for the civilian lives lost, harmed, and disrupted in Yemen and other US war zones," she added. "This report will allow people to hold the US government accountable for the deaths and destruction it has caused in Yemen in support of the Israeli government's wars since 2023."
The overwhelming majority of the casualties covered by the publication occurred during President Donald Trump’s 2025 "Operation Rough Rider" campaign. Mwatana estimates that the operation killed 208 civilians and wounded 341, while the Pentagon has acknowledged a smaller toll of 153 killed and 243 wounded.
Seven of the 46 strikes took place between December of 2023 and January of 2025 during former President Joe Biden's "Operation Prosperity Guardian," a military campaign that came amid Houthi rebel attacks on shipping lanes in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait during Israel's genocidal war on Gaza.
Among the deadliest attacks covered by the report was the April 2025 bombardment of Ras Isa oil port ordered by Trump, in which US strikes killed scores of people and wounded more than 150 others. Human Rights Watch called the bombing an “apparent war crime,” saying the destruction of the civilian oil facility also threatened vital fuel supplies in a country already devastated by years of war and humanitarian crisis.
The campaign also included the April 28 bombing of a detention center in Saada while jailed African migrants were sleeping. Amnesty International has called for a war crimes investigation into that attack, in which scores of migrants were killed.
Mwatana researchers conducted site visits and 59 interviews with survivors, relatives, eyewitnesses, first responders, and other sources for the new report.
"The first strike hit while we were in deep sleep. I could not believe what I saw—30 of my fellow detainees died; their bodies were charred, and the smell of burned flesh filled the air," one 25-year-old Ethiopian survivor of the Saada attack recounted. "The place was crowded with bodies, while others were screaming and calling for help and rescue... we could do nothing for them."
In addition to physical harm, survivors described the deep psychological trauma suffered by victims. One mother said her 8-year-old son Taha "saw his father after he was hit by shrapnel—how he was bleeding, and how his intestines were coming out."
"His father was screaming: ‘Run… leave me and run before the American aircraft strikes again and finishes me off,'" she continued. "Taha still cannot sleep; when he does, he wakes up terrified. Whenever he hears thunder or any loud noise, he runs in fear, his whole body trembling."
Overall, US strikes covered by the report "hit civilian structures such as homes, shops, farms, residential neighborhoods, and infrastructure," the publication notes, adding that airstrikes "also caused severe damage to infrastructure and critical facilities, compounding the humanitarian suffering of local populations by striking essential service facilities, particularly in rural areas that already face acute shortages of clean water, electricity, and health services."
"Given Yemen’s economic deterioration and the catastrophic humanitarian situation produced by the armed conflict that has been ongoing since September 2014, it is likely that the US strikes expanded the cycle of poverty in Yemen by increasing unemployment and multiplying the number of households that lost breadwinners and sources of income," the report adds.
Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis have died during the civil war that began in 2014, with international experts attributing more than 150,000 Yemeni deaths to a US-backed, Saudi-led bombing campaign and blockade. According to the UK-based casualty monitor Airwars, an estimated 445-643 Yemeni civilians have been killed by US forces during the George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations.
The Costs of War Project says that in the first two decades following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, "between 363,939 and 387,072 civilians were killed by multiple warring parties in post-9/11 war zones, including 12,690 civilians in Yemen."
Mwatana for Human Rights chair Radhya Al-Mutawakel said Thursday that "the losses caused by US airstrikes against civilians cannot be regarded as temporary harm that ends when military operations cease. Civilians who have lost loved ones, homes, or sources of income continue to bear the consequences of these attacks, amid economic and humanitarian conditions that do not provide them with even the minimum capacity to recover.”
"Protecting civilians is not limited to avoiding killing or injuring them; it also includes respecting civilian objects and livelihoods," Al-Mutawakel added. "The United States must assume its legal and moral responsibility to recognize the civilian victims of its military operations in Yemen, provide them with redress and reparation, and hold accountable those responsible for the violations inflicted upon them.”
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Chaos Unleashed by Trump's Iran War Escalates as Houthis Seize Key Port City in Yemen
The increased fighting is putting even more pressure on global energy markets, with the price of Brent crude topping $107 per barrel during Thursday trading.
Sep 10, 2026
Houthi fighters on Thursday took control of a key port city on the west coast of Yemen, putting them in a stronger position to disrupt commercial shipping—and to potentially send oil prices rocketing even higher.
According to Reuters, the Houthis seized the city of Mocha from Saudi-backed forces before moving toward the Hanish Islands, located to the northeast.
Reuters further reported that Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps provided the Houthi fighters with weapons and guidance ahead of their successful assault.
The Houthis' seizure of more territory along the Red Sea gives the militant group a greater ability to launch attacks on vessels trying to transport oil through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
Petroleum exporters in the region have had to rely more heavily on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait ever since Iran shut down shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for President Donald Trump's illegal war of choice, which he launched in February without authorization from Congress.
Restricting shipments through both straits would put even greater pressure on global oil markets, which have already been under strain since the start of the Iran War.
A Thursday report from Bloomberg noted that Saudi Arabia, whose ships have been targets of Houthi attacks, revealed that its oil output has dropped to 6.24 million barrels per a day, its lowest level of oil production since 1990.
The price of Brent crude topped $107 during Thursday trading, a 6% increase from the day before. Data released Thursday by the American Automobile Association showed that the average price of gas in the US has reached $4.28 per gallon while the average price of diesel has reached a record high of $5.98 per gallon.
Fawaz Gerges, professor at the London School of Economics, said in an interview with The New York Times that the Houthis, despite receiving assistance from Iran, have their own distinct goals and see Trump's illegal war as a "golden opportunity" to make advances against Yemen's Saudi-backed government.
Additionally, said Gerges, "Iran directly and indirectly benefits from what the Houthis have been doing," since "all-out war could have major implications for the global energy supply."
Brett Erickson, managing partner at Obsidian Risk Advisors, wrote in a social media post that Iran and the Houthis have all the incentive in the world to keep the pressure on global petroleum shipping.
"Brent Crude just spiked over $107 per barrel," Erickson wrote. "Just a mere month ago, it was trading at $85. That’s a 25.9% increase in a month. And with no off-ramp for Trump until at least the midterms are over, we’re looking at a long period of elevated oil prices now."
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Warning AI 'Could Mean the Demise of Humanity,' El-Sayed Backs Development Pause
"Enough is enough. We need to make sure that the pace of development isn't outpacing the pace of risk."
Sep 10, 2026
Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan on Wednesday called for a pause in advanced artificial intelligence development, warning that the technology is progressing faster than governments and researchers can establish meaningful safeguards against potentially catastrophic consequences.
"You might have woken up like me to this tweet from a guy you probably never heard of until today. His name is Jacob Coxon," El-Sayed said in a video posted to social media. "Up until yesterday, he worked for an AI lab called Anthropic, one of the leading-edge AI research organizations in the world. He quit yesterday. He quit because he's worried that the technology that he was building could end humanity."
"That's something we should be paying attention to," the 41-year-old epidemiologist stressed.
Coxon said on social media that neither OpenAI—whose rogue machine agents recently hacked outside systems on multiple reported occasions—nor Anthropic "is acting responsibly" as they race against competitors at home and abroad to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), an advanced AI that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge of any subject as well as or better than a typical human.
"They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," he emphasized. "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt."
El-Sayed said that the AI Under Democracy plan his campaign released in July—which called for a new federal regulatory agency akin to the Food and Drug Administration to oversee development of artificial intelligence technology—doesn't go far enough. Instead, he is now backing a pause in AI development, as urged by US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) last month.
Earlier this month, Sanders and Congressman Greg Casar (D-Texas) introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, with the Vermont senator arguing that "the future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a handful of Big Tech oligarchs."
Many of those oligarchs and other AI pioneers also believe their products could one day wipe out humanity, but are rushing to build them anyway so that their competitors don't reap the rewards of being the first to achieve AGI.
Sanders is also reportedly preparing to convene a bipartisan Senate hearing next week on the dangers of AI, with special guests set to include Geoffrey Hinton, who quit Google in 2023 so he could sound the alarm on what he estimates is a 10–20% chance that AI could cause human extinction within three decades.
"Enough is enough," El-Sayed said Wednesday. "We need to make sure that the pace of development isn't outpacing the pace of risk. We cannot, in a race against China or a race for these corporations to be the dominant AI manufacturer, inadvertently create products that slip human control, that could fall into the wrong hands, that could mean the demise of humanity."
"That is a risk none of us ought to be able to bear, and it certainly shouldn't sit with the richest, most powerful corporations in the world on incentives that are driven by their greed rather than our well-being," he added. "So the time for action is now."
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'Massive Loss for Trump': US Supreme Court Tosses Missouri GOP Map, Again
"The Missouri Supreme Court should throw the secretary of state in jail if this extremist continues to defy the law and multiple court orders," said US House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Sep 10, 2026
Democracy defenders in Missouri and across the United States celebrated on Thursday after the US Supreme Court delivered its second blow to President Donald Trump's gerrymandering quest in as many days, tossing out the state GOP's desired congressional map.
The order had no noted dissents, despite the court's right-wing supermajority, which includes three Trump appointees. Among them is Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who had rejected the GOP's emergency effort to uphold the map on Tuesday evening, as US District Judge Stephen Clark, another appointee of the president, said that Missouri can't revert to its old map for the November midterms.
The high court's new order appears to allow the state to use the old map for the upcoming elections, in which Trump's Republican Party is trying to hold on to its narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress amid widespread voter dissatisfaction with an affordability crisis fueled by the president's tariff regime and illegal war on Iran.
On the heels of the Texas GOP's map-rigging effort last year, Missouri Republicans targeted the 5th Congressional District—currently held by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D), who has joined hundreds of thousands of state voters in opposing the new political lines.
Cleaver called Thursday's decision "a win for justice. A win for democracy. A win for the people of Missouri."
"It is my hope that state officials will start following court orders and end this shameful attempt to break Missouri law and silence Missouri voters," he said.
Opposition to the map has been spearheaded by the nonpartisan coalition People Not Politicians Missouri, whose executive director, Richard von Glahn, declared Thursday that "the law is the law, the Missouri Constitution is clear, as was the Missouri Supreme Court."
"Over 305,000 Missouri voters—Republicans, Democrats, and Independents—took action to block this political power grab last fall. People, not politicians, will have the final say when they vote NO on Proposition A this November," he continued, referring to a veto referendum on the GOP's map.
Von Glahn also took aim at Missouri's Republican secretary of state, Denny Hoskins, who faces a contempt hearing at the state's top court, saying that he "has shown that he cannot effectively do the job he was elected to do—administer elections."
"First he refused to certify a referendum the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously said he had no legal basis to block," Von Glahn explained. "Then, even after that court barred the 2025 map outright, he told local election officials to use it anyway, leaving election clerks scrambling with early voting two weeks away. That isn't leadership, it's chaos of his own making, and it's why he's now facing a contempt hearing in front of the very court whose order he chose to defy."
"Missourians don't need a secretary of state who manufactures confusion; they need one who follows the law," he added. "Denny Hoskins has had every chance to do that and chose not to. The courts have settled this, now it's up to Missouri voters to finish the job and vote NO on Proposition A."
US House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) also called out Hoskins after the Thursday decision, suggesting on social media that "the Missouri Supreme Court should throw the secretary of state in jail if this extremist continues to defy the law and multiple court orders."
"You lost," he said. "The people of Missouri have won. It's over."
The Missouri Supreme Court on Thursday found that Hoskins was in contempt of court for defying an order blocking the new map, but also that he is now in compliance because he directed the use of the 2022 districts.
This article has been updated with comment from US Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) and Adam Cochran, and with the Missouri Supreme Court's decision.
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Jimmy Kimmel Pulls Talarico Interview From Broadcast, Moves it to YouTube, Amid Trump FCC Threats
"Another day, another chilling effect on broadcast speech," said one free speech advocate, who added that "nothing about the FCC’s actions is normal—or legal."
Sep 10, 2026
Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel told viewers Wednesday night that his show was pulling an interview with Democratic Texas Senate nominee James Talarico from ABC stations amid threats from President Donald Trump's Federal Communications Commission, which press freedom groups are describing as another effort by the administration to "chill" the speech of the president's critics.
“Out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas who would have to deal with this nonsense, my interview tomorrow with James Talarico will not air on television,” the host said on Wednesday’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
He added that the interview “will be posted on YouTube instead. It will not be on TV.”
It's the second time a major US network has opted to spike a late-night interview with Talarico following FCC pressure. In February, CBS lawyers preemptively stopped Stephen Colbert from conducting an interview with the candidate over what they said were fears of retaliation from the agency, whose chair, Brendan Carr, has threatened to strip broadcast licenses from networks that give Trump unfavorable coverage.
Carr has confirmed that the FCC had opened an investigation and started an "enforcement proceeding" into ABC over whether Talarico's appearance on "The View" violated the equal-time rule, which requires that broadcast stations that host political candidates must give their opponents an equal opportunity to appear as well.
Late-night shows have long been considered exempt from this rule as “bona fide news interview” programs. But a public notice issued by the FCC Media Bureau in January stated that programs that advance “partisan” goals, including talk shows, would no longer be considered as such. Carr has said programs he considers to be “fake news” may not qualify for an exemption.
Kimmel on Wednesday emphasized the "unusual circumstances" of his network's decision to cancel the interview with Talarico.
"For the whole 20-plus years of our show, I've been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all... from Hillary Clinton, to Ted Cruz, to Donald Trump himself," he said.
Kimmel noted that when he interviewed Trump during his first presidential run in 2015, he seemed to have no issue with political candidates appearing on his show and eagerly returned for more interviews.
"For some reason, and I can't seem to figure out what that reason is, something has changed," Kimmel joked. "Now that he's president, his FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations—based on simple, traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings it would seem they don’t like."
For that reason, he said, if viewers "want to learn about a candidate for the Senate tomorrow, you will have to go to the 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' YouTube channel."
"Thank goodness we have that," Kimmel said. "Because in the America we have right now, that is the best that we can do, until November, of course."
In August, ABC parent company Disney sued the FCC on First Amendment grounds following the agency’s unusual request for its eight ABC stations to submit their broadcast renewal requests several years in advance, which it described as part of a “retaliatory campaign” against the network's negative coverage of Trump.
The complaint notes that ABC has felt compelled to alter its editorial judgment in order to avoid further retaliation, including passing on interviews with several other political candidates it felt would invite Trump's ire and choosing to air a lie-filled Trump address about supposed election fraud, which it noted it "ordinarily would not have done."
Last September, ABC briefly removed Kimmel from the air following direct threats from Carr to strip ABC stations of their broadcast licenses, which came after a critical monologue from the late-night host about Trump and Republicans in the wake of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
The complaint notes Carr’s use of explicit coercion to pressure ABC to remove Kimmel, including telling the network that it could proceed “the easy way or the hard way."
Kimmel emphasized what he said was the political nature of the pressure campaign against him and the network, which has continued even after he was reinstated. Republicans, he said, "are very nervous about the midterms and very rightly so," as they are "in serious danger of losing 'bigly.'"
"They are in danger of losing a Senate seat in Texas of all places," he said to cheers from the crowd, "where James Talarico is leading a piece of human silly putty named Ken Paxton there," according to several recent polls.
Press freedom and civil liberties organizations described Carr's threats to networks as part of an effort to chill critical speech on behalf of the president, one that is ratcheting up as the midterms approach.
Timothy Karr, the senior director of strategy and communications for Free Press, told Common Dreams that Carr's "unconstitutional crusade against a free press has a clear bias against individuals and outlets that President Trump doesn't like."
"Combine that with Trump's desperation in the face of electoral polling that shows people ready to change political course come November, and you can see the real reason driving Carr's reckless fixation with silencing opposing views," Karr said.
Karr argued that networks were unnecessarily casting aside their rights to editorial judgment out of fear of retaliation.
"For years, the FCC has been very clear that bona fide news interviews, including on late-night talk shows, are entitled to editorial discretion," Karr said. "Carr's ongoing efforts to take this discretion away are part and parcel of his campaign to transform broadcast media into full-time megaphones for Trumpist propaganda."
He said, "What's doubly worrying is that many of these broadcast networks are too eager to cave to Trump and Carr's demands when the First Amendment is clearly on their side."
Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel for the ACLU, concurred, telling Common Dreams that the FCC "abusing its rules to chill speech" is "particularly problematic before an election, when voters need more information, not less."
Bob Corn-Revere, the chief counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told Common Dreams it was “another day, another chilling effect on broadcast speech," adding that ”nothing about the FCC’s actions is normal—or legal.“
Shiva Stella, the legal director at Public Knowledge, emphasized that networks capitulating helps to cement a climate of fear.
"This is a classic chilling effect," Stella told Common Dreams. "Once the FCC threatens stations over editorial decisions, it does not need to repeat the threat every time. Broadcasters begin changing their programming to avoid retaliation."
“The FCC needs to stop using its power to bully news organizations into silencing voices it simply disagrees with,” added Tim Richardson, journalism and disinformation program director at PEN America, in a statement to Common Dreams.
“When broadcasters alter decisions because they fear government retaliation," he said, "that damage extends beyond a single program and threatens the independence of the entire press and the public’s access to information. Which, unfortunately, seems to be the intent in this case.”
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'Voter Suppression, Plain and Simple': Lawsuit Aims to Stop Trump From Sending ICE to Polling Sites
“Putting armed officers in polling places is a tactic used by dictators, but we won’t be scared out of exercising our rights."
Sep 10, 2026
Noncitizens are barred from voting in federal elections, and a coalition of rights groups suggested Thursday that President Donald Trump's plan to have armed immigration agents enter polling places isn't aimed at cracking down on unlawful immigrants at all.
"Sending armed ICE officers to polling places is not immigration enforcement—it is voter suppression, plain and simple,” said Janet Murguía, president and CEO of UnidosUS, referring to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
UnidosUS joined Common Cause, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and the city and county of Denver, Colorado in filing a lawsuit to stop the administration from authorizing ICE deployments in polling places during the 2026 elections, in which early voting will soon be underway in a number of states.
The groups filed the legal challenge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia several days after Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said ICE could be sent to polling sites to address "specific threats."
Earlier this year, the Department of Justice ended long-standing guidance on why federal law enforcement activity is restricted at polling places, and ICE agents conducted enforcement actions at voting sites in Texas and New York.
clMullin said in July that states could be denied federal aid if they refuse to comply with election directives from the Department of Homeland Security related to the administration's baseless claims that undocumented immigrants engage in widespread "voter fraud."
A Reuters analysis this year found that only 73 people in the last three decades have ever been convicted of illegally voting as noncitizens. The right-wing Heritage Foundation has proidentified about 100 cases of proven noncitizen voting dating back to 2000—representing around 0.0001% of total votes cast over that time.
In their lawsuit, the groups argued that Mullin's plan to deploy ICE agents to voting sites violates the nationwide prohibition against armed federal agents in polling places, which was first enacted during the Civil War out of concerns "about executive overreach, and the risk that the federal executive would use armed force to interfere in state and federal elections."
The policy also violates "the federal prohibition on arbitrary and capricious government action," said the groups.
The administration is pushing to deploy ICE to polling places as voters express widespread disapproval of numerous Republican policies, including ICE's violent crackdown in cities such as Minneapolis and Chicago, Trump's war on Iran, and tariffs that have worsened the cost-of-living crisis the president pledged to solve.
Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of Common Cause, said that Americans will not be "silenced by the administration’s continuous efforts to meddle with our elections."
“Putting armed officers in polling places is a tactic used by dictators, but we won’t be scared out of exercising our rights,” said Kase Solomón. “No American should ever have to walk past armed federal law enforcement just to cast a ballot, yet this administration has adopted a policy that allows exactly that."
The lawsuit emphasizes that with ICE having unlawfully detained more than 170 US citizens and killed at least three citizens since Trump took office, Americans "may reasonably fear interactions with ICE."
“All Americans—including Latino voters—have a constitutional right to cast their ballot without fear of interrogation, detention, or family separation," said Murguía. "This case is about protecting voters, preserving confidence in our elections, and ensuring that every eligible voter can participate free from intimidation.”
At the Democracy Project at New York University School of Law, poSoephen Richer and Gina Goldenberg cautioned that the threat of ICE agents potentially being at the polls could serve as a voter suppression tactic and "real voting deterrent" in itself.
"ICE-at-the-polls is something that American elections are well-equipped to handle," they wrote. "The highly decentralized nature of our elections, plus the massive growth of early voting, combined with a strong legal framework, would make widespread ICE interference a heavy lift for the federal government. Ironically, the real threat of ICE-at-the-polls could be in its potential voter-deterrent effect.
"It’s not too far-fetched to imagine a newly naturalized, brown-skinned American in Michigan who only casually follows political news, but hears that ICE might be at the polls," they added. "This person knows he’s in a higher-risk category for being mistakenly apprehended by ICE, and he wonders, 'Why risk it?'"
All voters, said Juan Proaño, CEO of LULAC, "should be able to cast their ballots without fear of intimidation by armed ICE officers at polling places."
“The right to vote is foundational to our democracy," he added, "and yet this administration continues in its endless attempts to weaken the very institutions it is entrusted to protect."
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'We Want Real Change': Sanders-Backed Democratic Socialist Wins Mayoral Primary in Providence
"Nearly a year ago this day, we launched a campaign centered around the simple vision that the working people who make Providence home deserve to live here."
Sep 10, 2026
David Morales, a 27-year-old democratic socialist endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, scored an upset victory on Wednesday to become the Democratic Party's nominee for mayor of Providence, Rhode Island.
As noted in a Thursday report in The Washington Post, Morales made concerns about housing affordability central to his campaign pitch, and he assailed incumbent Democratic Mayor Brett Smiley for vetoing a proposal passed by the Providence City Council to enforce a 4% annual cap on rent increases.
Morales reinforced this theme during his Wednesday night victory speech.
"Nearly a year ago this day, we launched a campaign centered around the simple vision," Morales said, "that the working people who make Providence home deserve to live here. A simple vision that our neighbors deserve a mayor who will fight for them."
"Together, we organized, day in and day out," Morales added, "sharing our vision of how we build a city all our neighbors can afford and feel safe calling home."
David Morales is 27 years old.
The youngest Latino ever elected to the Rhode Island legislature.
Tonight he beat an incumbent mayor in Providence — after that mayor vetoed rent stabilization for working families.
Bernie endorsed him. The people chose him.
Nobody can stop this… pic.twitter.com/qrP4BAwd0G
— Ezequiel Aguilar (@EzequielAguilar) September 10, 2026
Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, hailed Morales' victory as "another sign that something powerful is taking root across this country."
"Working-class candidates are rejecting an establishment politics that asks people to settle for less and instead showing what government can actually do for them," Geevarghese emphasized. "From city councils and mayor’s offices to statehouses and Congress, we are seeing candidates build support by organizing from the bottom up and focusing directly on the economic pressures facing working people."
Sanders in a Thursday social media post congratulated Morales for his win, which he said was a sign that voters are fed up with politics as usual.
"From coast to coast, Americans are clear: No more status quo politics," wrote Sanders. "We want real change."
Morales wasn't the only progressive insurgent in Providence to declare victory on Wednesday.
As reported by the Brown Daily Herald, challenger Miguel Youngs, who received endorsements from the Rhode Island Working Families Party and the Providence Teachers Union, ousted incumbent John Goncalves to become the Democratic Party's nominee to represent Ward 1 on the Providence City Council.
Similar to Morales, Youngs made capping rent increases a major theme of his campaign, attacking Goncalves for voting against the rent control proposal earlier this year.
Progressives have been upsetting the Democratic establishment in mayoral races across the US, as both New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson last year won with the backing of the Democratic Socialists of America.
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‘Serial Killer Empire’: US Kills 3 in Boat Strike, Bringing Trump Murder Count in ‘Make-Believe War’ to 230
"This is neither 'peace' nor 'strength,'" said one policy expert. "It's gruesome."
Sep 10, 2026
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke publicly for the first time Wednesday about a shift in the Pentagon's boat bombing operations, in which the US in recent days has begun interdicting suspected refueling vessels for drug boats in Ecuador's territorial waters—but he made clear that the military is also still killing people aboard boats, as it did Wednesday in the latest bombing in the Caribbean.
US Southern Command announced that Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere—the recently rebranded name of the Trump administration's expanding military operation that it says is aimed at stopping drug trafficking—had executed its latest "lethal kinetic strike" on a boat operating along known "narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean," killing three people that the US claimed were "narco-terrorists."
"Confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel's active involvement in narco-trafficking," said US Southern Command, releasing no evidence of the boat's illegal activities.
International legal experts have emphasized that the US is not in an authorized military conflict with drug cartels and that drug trafficking under international law is treated as a crime by law enforcement agencies—not as an act of force that the US can legally respond to with military action.
Officials and military service members involved in the strikes may be liable for war crimes or murder, experts have warned. Some of the at least 230 victims of the boat bombings since last September have been identified, with family members saying they were not even involved in drug trafficking.
Historian Alexander Aviña used the term "serial killer empire" to describe the Trump administration after the latest bombing.
Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America noted that the announcement by US Southern Command Wednesday night was the first in more than a year of attacks in which the strike order was "not attributed to a person."
Isacson also pointed out that according to Customs and Border Patrol data, there is little, if any, evidence that bombing boats and killing crew members and passengers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean has done anything to stop the flow of drugs into the US.
Outside the US Embassy in Quito, Ecuador, Rubio told reporters Wednesday that as the US also begins conducting joint operations with Ecuador to interdict suspected refueling vessels in the country's territorial waters, "we have to operate according to their laws."
In those operations, people aboard the boats have been removed and handed over to Ecuadorian authorities before the US has conducted strikes.
Rubio at one point referred to the lethal boat bombings as operations that took place "earlier, last year," but also emphasized, "We still blow up ships if need be."
Brian Finucane of the International Crisis Group said the administration is continuing its campaign of "illegal killing in a make-believe war."
The latest boat bombing also came as Rubio announced that the US was designating Los Tiguerones, an Ecuadorian gang, as a foreign terrorist organization, empowering the administration to freeze the group's assets in US financial institutions.
The designation does not give the US the legal authority to carry out military strikes against Los Tiguerones or other gangs the administration has designated as terrorist groups—but a key element of Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere's expansion in Latin America has been joint military operations, including a US-Ecuadorian joint attack on a dairy farm where officials had claimed drug traffickers were operating.
The new designation "is part of [the administration's] narrative about a new 'War on Terror' against the narcos," said Finucane.
Glaeldys González Calanche, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, told The New York Times that Los Tiguerones has had diminishing power and influence in Ecuador in recent years and expressed surprise at the designation.
Ecuadorian gangs "operate at the lowest links of the chain" of drug trafficking operations in Latin America, González told the Times. “They provide services, like moving cargo from point A to point B. Ecuadorian groups are not decisive, they aren’t major players.”
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Sanders Sets Briefing on 'Extraordinary Dangers' Posed by Breakneck AI Development
The session is scheduled to feature experts, including Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who quit Google so he could warn of the potentially existential risks posed by unchecked AI advancement.
Sep 09, 2026
US Sen. Bernie Sanders is set to convene a bipartisan hearing next week focusing on the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, a move that comes amid more warnings from experts about the potentially existential threats posed by unregulated AI development.
Axios reported Wednesday that Sanders (I-Vt.) will hold the September 16 hearing on what he called the "extraordinary dangers" posed by AI as a growing chorus of scientists and technology insiders warns that the race toward ever-more-powerful systems—which will likely one day surpass and then far exceed human brainpower—could ultimately threaten humanity's survival.
The briefing is set to feature three experts: Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist often called the “godfather of AI;" Max Tegmark, an MIT physicist and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute; and Ajeya Cotra, an AI safety researcher who recently helped investigate OpenAI's agents autonomously hacking the open-source software platform Hugging Face.
Hinton—who quit Google in 2023 so he could speak more freely about AI's dangers—has estimated that there is a 10–20% chance AI could cause human extinction within three decades. He has warned of the great difficulty of controlling increasingly intelligent machines that will likely one day achieve superintelligence and ultimately be beyond the ability of humans to control. Hinton has repeatedly argued that relying on profit-driven corporations to self-regulate AI development is a dangerous mistake.
Tegmark has also spent years sounding the alarm. In 2023, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter signed by more than 30,000 researchers, technologists, and others calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
Cotra wrote in a 2022 analysis that unchecked artificial intelligence development would likely lead to a “full-blown AI takeover.” The following year, she said she believed there was roughly a 50% chance AI would be making most important economic and societal decisions by around 2040, while warning that continued scaling of existing techniques could produce misaligned systems and a machine takeover.
Experts say the recent headline-grabbing rogue AI hacks underscore the problem of alignment. As AI advances to the point where it will likely outsmart humans one day, the challenge of ensuring that advanced systems reliably pursue goals that match what humans actually want becomes increasingly difficult—and dangerous.
Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) recently introduced legislation that would ban the creation of AI systems capable of surpassing human cognition and pause advanced AI development until a federal regulatory framework is established.
"In the interest of humanity... pause AI development," the senator urged tech titans last month. "It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control."
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Following Project 2025 Playbook, Trump Officials Unveil Plan to Rig 2030 Census
“The Constitution is clear. Every person living in the United States, regardless of immigration status, must be counted in the Census,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Sep 09, 2026
The Trump administration on Wednesday formally proposed sweeping changes to the 2030 US Census that could exclude millions of people from the population count, alter congressional representation in favor of Republicans, and shift the distribution of federal resources among states.
The proposal—which was published in the Federal Register and is subject to a 30-day public comment period—redefines a person's “usual residence” as the place where they legally spend the most days during the Census count period, with tax records such as returns and W-2s used as evidence.
Most significantly, people who are not US citizens or permanent residents as of April 1, 2030, would be excluded from the apportionment count altogether, a sharp departure from the 2020 census, which counted foreign citizens living in the United States regardless of immigration status as required by the Constitution.
The proposed change is rooted in a disputed interpretation of the Constitution’s reference to the “whole number of persons” in each state, with the administration arguing that “persons” should be understood through the historical concept of “inhabitants” and membership in the political community.
Under the proposal, Census questionnaires would also be barred from asking about race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, arguing that such information is outside the Census' core constitutional purpose.
Some of the proposed changes track closely with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led plan to expand executive power and shrink the federal government.
Left-leaning legal experts asserted that the changes proposed by the Trump administration violate the 14th Amendment, which mandates congressional apportionment based on “the whole number of persons in each state,” regardless of their immigration status.
"The Constitution is clear. Every person living in the United States, regardless of immigration status, must be counted in the Census," Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James said on social media.
"We stopped the Trump administration's Census attacks in 2020, and we're exploring our legal options to fight back again," she added, referring to successful lawsuits to stop the administration's efforts to end the Census count early, add a citizenship question, and exclude undocumented immigrants from congressional apportionment.
In 2019, US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority in Department of Commerce v. New York that the Trump administration's rationale for the proposed citizenship question “seems to have been contrived."
Responding to Wednesday's announcement, William Roberts, senior vice president of rights and justice at the Center for American Progress (CAP), said in a statement that "the administration’s proposal is a flagrant assault on our democracy, designed to manipulate voting maps and dilute the political representation of diverse American communities."
"Eliminating questions on race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation strips our government of critical data needed to ensure vital resources are extended to the communities who need them most; and notably, it would also make it more difficult to enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965," he continued.
"Furthermore," Williams stressed, "excluding undocumented immigrants and noncitizens from congressional apportionment directly violates the [14th] Amendment’s mandate to count the 'whole number of persons in each state.'"
"CAP condemns this blatant attempt to weaponize the Census for political gain," he added. "Congress has final authority over the census, and the public has 30 days to write their representatives and oppose this rule."
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