Southern Poverty Law Center says it faces a criminal investigation by the Justice Department The Southern Poverty Law Center says it’s the subject of a Justice Department criminal investigation and faces possible charges over its use of paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups.

BREAKING: The Southern Poverty Law Center says it faces investigation by Justice Department over past use of paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups.

Syrian Billionaires Needed a Favor in Washington. They Invoked the Trump Name.

NYT INVESTIGATION: As the Trump administration & Congress last year moved to repeal sanctions on Syria, the Qatar-based family that most stood to benefit was privately negotiating a real-estate partnership with Jared Kushner and proposing a Trump golf course in Syria www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/u...

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Happy 4/20 everyone

I am sorry to inform you that this appears to be real

CNN put together a montage of Trump saying as far back as March 9 that his war against Iran "is going to be finished pretty quickly," then him saying that same thing over and over for the past six weeks

Wow

Happy pub day!

Red States Thought They Could Stop Abortions. They Ended Up Stopping Only the Lifesaving Ones. Abortion bans are failing.

Abortion rates in red states have not decreased, aside from medically necessary ones. Pregnancy has become much more dangerous. slate.com/news-and-pol...

What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.

“Today’s billionaires are clearly manipulating society to maximize their own profit, something else is also happening—a disassociation from the reality of cause & effect, from meaning & history…Their success is guaranteed, no matter what happens to the rest of us” www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

This Data Center is Getting a $77 Million Tax Break to Create One Job No other project in the country has gotten such a large subsidy to create so few jobs, according to watchdogs.

Rockland County, NY, gave a $77 million data center tax break to JP Morgan Chase to create exactly one job. On a dollars-per-job basis it appears to be the costliest subsidy in U.S. history, possibly even a world record

nysfocus.com/2026/04/20/d...

The insider trading suspicions looming over Trump's presidency The BBC has found a pattern of spikes in trades ahead of public announcements by the US president.

You’ve seen this before but the BBC has put it all together.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Trump Library Saga Takes Dark Turn: Where Did Millions in Funding Go? Four huge media conglomerates forked over $63 million in “settlements” earmarked for Trump’s presidential library. Democrats are trying to track that money—and the latest developments don’t inspire co...

SCOOP --> Paramount, Meta, and X are refusing to say what happened to their huge contributions to Trump's presidential library after Sen Elizabeth Warren raised questions about its fund getting dissolved. Ds say tens of millions remain unaccounted for.

Details here:
newrepublic.com/article/2092...

This Rustic Ferry Is Getting Dismantled in Queens to Become an Artificial Reef The Prudence Ferry has been abandoned for years, but will get a second life in the waters off Fire Island this summer.

I quite enjoyed this story about a disused ferry that's being cleaned up so it can have a second life as an artificial reef.

“As soon as fish find it — literally, they could be on it within a day — the growth begins.”

'A Solution, But To What Problem?' Experts Say AVs Are The Elephant In The Room, But There's Still Time To Figure Out Their Role - Streetsblog New York City Want to know more about autonomous vehicles? Join us at "The Future of Transportation" seminar held last week at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College.

Last week I joined a spicy panel asking whether/how AVs fit into NYC. Here's a summary.

Me: "It’s just too inefficient to have individuals inside a big box of a car. I don’t care how it’s operated. That’s just not how what you scale to make New York City a faster, more-efficient and safer place."

How Amazon’s AI Algorithms Raise the Prices You Pay Amazon can steer market-wide prices without ever colluding—exposing a gap in antitrust law that the FTC is now fighting to close.

1. Amazon has built powerful pricing algorithms that have learned how to steer prices upward — not just on Amazon, but across the web. I have a new piece on how these algorithms work, and how they help sustain Amazon’s monopoly.

i like when amanda reshares old stories because it can help everyone here get up to speed on important parts of foiaball lore

Thank you

Thanks, I’m feeling pretty resigned to lose them at this point…it’s supposed to go to 19F…but we’ll see!

Thank you, operation sheets is underway!

Ok well, that did not work. The sprinkler used too much water and now everything coming out of the tap is muddy because the bottom of the well got stirred up.

Blow Out, Body Double…SISTERS (my fav bc of the dogged, beleaguered Staten Island Advance reporter)…all brilliant and psychotic

Omg amazing photo. I hope that doesn’t happen to my baby trees but I know it’s a risk. That must have been a big blow for your family. I’m from Miami — that freeze happened before I was born but I grew up hearing about THE DAY IT SNOWED IN MIAMI, aka the ‘77 freeze — my mom loved to tell the story.

I feel like that’s more than I can rig up from Ace Hardware on a Sunday — plus my area has a burn ban in place until May 15

This is what I’m hoping to encase in protective ice via the sprinkler…

Freeze is coming — 48 hours below & near 32F. Trying the sprinkler method to save the leaves & very near-open blossoms on two plum saplings. Will it work? Suggestions welcome.

Carney says Canada's US ties have become a weakness Canada's close ties to the United States were once a strength but have become a weakness, Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Sunday, ​in a video message to his country in which he also ‌praised the heroism of military leaders who fought against U.S. invasion more than two centuries ago.

Carney says Canada's US ties have become a weakness reut.rs/4cmTvD2

Cheap Batteries Are Taking Over the World’s Power Grids Falling costs, rising electricity demand and the Iran War are nurturing a boom in energy storage.

The war in the Middle East has accelerated lifted demand for alternatives to volatile fossil fuels, setting 2026 up to be the year of the battery.

NBC News poll: Trump's overall job approval rating is 37%, disapproval is 63%.

On economic issues (Trump's firewall from 2016-2025) his approval is down to 32%. Disapproval is 68%.

Years ago, I wrote briefly about what it was like to be 17 years old and going to high school across the street from Central Park during the frenzy: www.usprisonculture.com/2012/08/13/s...

I think often about my grandmother, who was a Vaudeville actress, describing how masterful Anthony Hopkins was in The Remains of the Day, how, in one of the final scenes, “the light just went out of his eyes.”

Pretty frustrating that the New York Times is crediting AP with uncovering the existence of Aadam’s archive when I reported on it 15 months prior. chicagoreader.com/music/gossip...