A review of official statements shows that the public account does not always align with what can be observed through open sources. Bellingcat reveals a number of instances where authorities downplayed damage and mischaracterised interceptions. Read more: www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/04...
Donating to online scammers posing as legitimate people in need is not morally neutral:
You potentially are giving money to brutal slavery and human trafficking networks:
www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2...
FYSA, the lead story is not "current GenXers brains are bad because lead", it's that lead poisoning disproportionately impacted poor and minority communities and those voters died younger.
Also AIDS killed a lot of young progressive GenXers.
The Trump administration pledged to root out “rampant” fraud in federal benefit programs like SNAP and welfare.
But the DOJ has shut down more than 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud in the first six months of this administration.
Medicaid enrollment surged during the pandemic, then tumbled during the ‘Great Unwinding’. A health economist who studies the effects of public policy on insurance coverage looks at how paperwork and particular state policies influence who is still covered.
theconversation.com/25-million-p...
There's an ambulance market (I could stop there), private equity has rolled it up, and it's now delaying deliveries, tripling the cost for cities & creating shortages across the country.
This is what happens as we shout about what podcasts politicians should go on
For men awaiting execution on Texas’ death row, Dungeons & Dragons became a lifeline — an escape from extreme isolating conditions, leading to the sort of friendships solitary confinement usually prevents.
See their D&D character sheets, maps & more:
Are you curating your news diet more intentionally these days? If topics like policing, prisons, or criminal justice reform matter to you, subscribing to one of our newsletters is the perfect way to get the most important coverage delivered straight to your inbox:
Those who need therapy often have to pay out of pocket or go without care, even if they have health insurance.
Hundreds of mental health providers told us they fled networks because insurers made their jobs impossible and their lives miserable.
(Published Aug. 2024)
San Francisco Public Works’ arborist crews respond to a badly damaged street tree on Naples Street in the Excelsior. It can’t be saved and needs to be taken down. The arborist, riding high off the ground in a bucket truck, starts at the top.
An arborist cuts the downed tree into smaller pieces.
Piece by piece, the downed tree is fed into a wood chipper and made into mulch.
Our arborist crews are still at it, working around the clock since Christmas Eve responding to the series of storms that downed trees and large limbs and branches in neighborhoods across San Francisco. Here they are today on Naples Street in the Excelsior.
The best Christmas miracle!!!
👠🪩❤️
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@jonathanlanday.bsky.social has the story at @reuters.com, where he got a confirmation: "The researchers’ assessment broadly aligns with U.S. intelligence findings, said a person familiar with the matter..."
www.reuters.com/world/europe...
The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5
And now someone has uploaded a version that wasn't filmed off a TV.
There's also the torrent link there, which is probably the fastest way to download the 60 Minutes segment on CECOT if you want to save the file locally to your computer.
NEW: We downloaded a new batch of around 11,000 Epstein documents that were briefly on the DOJ website today. They include wide-ranging references to President Trump. wapo.st/4b3ycG6
Don't forget transcripts for video and audio. These will help blind users and low-vision users, deaf and hard-of-hearing users, people with ADHD, and people with audio-processing disorders. Transcripts also benefit search engines, people in quiet spaces, and people in a hurry.
Today is a good day to pick up Micah's book. If you don't already have these skills, let me tell you they are going to be very useful in the near future.
Bob Karp, 86, is one of about a dozen seniors who volunteer at a Maryland elementary school each week.
“When I come here, I can see … that the teachers are happy to have me, the students are happy to have me, and I’m happy to be here,” said Karp.
to be clear, I'm looking at a) the Bay Area b) disaster preparedness specifically here. Teachers are great, but I don't need them so much when the Big One hits. And since the original post was wrt traffic slowdown concerns and the FD, I don't think you get to declare this a housing thread.
In normal times today would have been a jobs day. But these are not normal times and BLS won't release labor market data for JOLTS until December 9 and jobs on Dec 16. And we will never have household survey data for October, no unemployment rate for that month, not ever.
www.epi.org/blog/without...
This is a quote from the article summing up both studies in Technology Review: "A multi-university team of researchers has found that chatting with a politically biased AI model was more effective than political advertisements at nudging both Democrats and Republicans to support presidential candidates of the opposing party. The chatbots swayed opinions by citing facts and evidence, but they were not always accurate—in fact, the researchers found, the most persuasive models said the most untrue things."
Two independent studies found that AI chatbots were better at persuading voters than political ads. The most persuasive bots also lied the most. This is something that humans working in psyops have known for decades. AI is psyops at scale. www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/04/1...
A watchdog found that DoD Secretary Hegseth risked endangering troops when he shared sensitive war plans on Signal.
Not only is it crazy to put the decision to bomb other people in the hands of this dangerous guy, but he’s so incompetent he’s even putting our own people’s lives in danger.
Places like Berkeley and San Francisco need incentives for disaster workers to live *in town* because they're no good to us if they're on the wrong side of a bridge or mountain when the Big One hits. SF doesn't even want to give parking places to 911 operators on midnight shift.
And some people apparently still think that firefighters' main job risk is having to fish Lowly Worm out of his apple car. How much should you get paid for a heavily physical job that will wreck your body and vastly increase your risk of cancer?
right, because everywhere in Europe, Asia, and the USA have the same water system, same pressure, same water availability, and same expectations of firefighting outcomes
I agree that the rules should be more consistently enforced and used; it sounds like Berkeley is making a bit of a mess of it. In SF the discussion has mostly been around narrowing streets and corners rather than temporary use.
A fire department that has to handle urban high rises and steep hills and rural wildland hills like Berkeley needs some heavy engines and big tanks and the ability to pump a lot of water. The average US engine can pump twice as much as a Euro engine. None of that comes with a tight turning radius.
