“Ukrainian attacks killed four people in the Russia-annexed Crimea peninsula, Kremlin-installed officials in the region said on Thursday, one day after Moscow and Kyiv traded strikes on each other’s cities. Sergei Aksyonov, the Russia-appointed head of Crimea, said Ukrainian forces had hit a non-residential part of Simferopol, the peninsula’s main administrative town, killing three people and injuring seven. Aksyonov later said on Telegram that one person had been killed and three wounded when a Ukrainian drone struck a commuter train in eastern Crimea. Ukraine did not immediately comment.” (06/04/26)
“Americans aren’t interested in reinstating a military draft, but that’s not stopping the government from ‘streamlining’ Selective Service registration — for young men’s own good, we’re told. That’s right, the government is automating draft registration, using the excuse that it’s saving registrants from the legal peril inherent in choosing to not register. The real reason, of course, is that fewer men were voluntarily registering, and the government wants to gloss over that mass rejection by potential draftees.” (06/03/26)
“Seven states are suing the Trump administration over a nearly $1 billion deal to end French energy company TotalEnergies’ offshore wind development off the East Coast, accusing the deal of being ‘unlawful.’ In March, the U.S. Department of the Interior reached a $928 million deal with TotalEnergies to halt construction of the wind farms and redirect the investment into domestic fossil fuel initiatives. … Attorneys general in seven states in the Northeast, including Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday, alleging the Trump administration illegally used nearly $1 billion in taxpayer dollars for the deal. The coalition also accuses the deal of violating the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which restricts the Interior Department’s ability to cancel offshore wind leases.” (06/03/26)
“It’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. Architecture shapes incentives; incentives shape outcomes.” (06/03/26)
“Bitcoin briefly plunged below $62,000 Thursday morning Hong Kong time, triggering more than $1.5 billion in leveraged crypto liquidations over the past 24 hours as a wave of forced selling accelerated the market’s steepest decline in months. More than 208,000 traders were liquidated across crypto markets, according to CoinGlass data, with bitcoin accounting for over $800 million of the losses and ether another $386 million. The liquidation wave coincided with continued weakness in institutional demand. Investors have pulled approximately $1 billion from U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs this week, according to SoSoValue data, extending the funds’ record streak of net outflows.” (06/03/26)
“Though he had been, by his own description, ‘shy and retiring’ as a young man, Kameny was ‘radicalized’ by the way his government had treated him. How could his homosexual orientation possibly affect his work as an astronomer or, as he one day hoped to be, an astronaut floating hundreds of miles away from Earth’s surface? On the contrary, it was the government that had wronged him. ‘I simply felt something had to be done,’ he recalled. And so, Kameny did what no gay man or woman in his position had yet done: He fought back.” (06/03/26)
“Amazon has overtaken Walmart to claim the No. 1 spot on the Fortune 500, ending the retailer’s 13-year run at the top of the annual ranking of America’s biggest companies by revenue. The latest list, based on fiscal 2025 revenue, puts Amazon in the top spot, followed by Walmart and UnitedHealth Group. The shakeup marks the first time since 2013 that Walmart has not held the No. 1 position on the Fortune 500. Amazon generated roughly $717 billion in revenue during the most recent reporting period, narrowly surpassing Walmart’s $713 billion. UnitedHealth Group rounded out the top three with $447.6 billion in revenue.” (06/03/26)
Source: The Atlantic
by Vivian Salama, Jonathan Lemire, & Nancy A Youssef
“[Trump]wanted the conflict over. But he had become irritated by comparisons between the emerging framework and the Obama-era agreement, which set restrictions and time limits on Iran’s nuclear-development program. Administration officials said Trump repeatedly complained that critics were calling his team’s draft agreement a weaker version of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which he had spent years attacking and tore up in his first term. Trump wanted a way to argue that Iran had accepted terms from him that Obama never managed to extract, aides told us. … He may be content to simply wait rather than do a deal that invites unflattering comparisons to one that already existed — and which didn’t come at the cost of 13 U.S. service members and at least 1,700 Iranian civilians, tens of billions of dollars, the depletion of U.S. munitions stockpiles, and a global energy crisis.” (06/03/26)
