“Karmelo Anthony will serve his sentence while it appears the fundraising campaign for his family organized by his mother, Kala Hayes, has been taken down. Anthony was convicted of murder and sentenced to 35 years behind bars on Tuesday. He has since filed a notice of appeal to challenge the conviction. He said in his appeal that he cannot afford a new lawyer, WFAA reported. Those documents say, Anthony is a ‘penniless, destitute, and indigent person, too poor to employ counsel to represent me on the appeal,’ according to the outlet. The fundraiser was posted on GiveSendGo, an international crowdfunding platform, on April 15, 2025. It was less than two weeks after Anthony fatally stabbed 17-year-old Austin Metcalf during a high school track meet in Frisco, Texas. All the while, the fundraiser for Anthony and his family, titled, ‘Help Karmelo Official Fund,’ initially had a goal of generating nearly $1.4 million, and raised just shy of $634,000.” (06/11/26)
“War Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a great speech on D-Day in Normandy. He told the Europeans they were committing civilizational suicide by allowing themselves to be ‘invaded’ by unassimilable migrants. It was the kind of warning you give to a friend who you see is making a terrible mistake. ‘Sadly, today different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,’ he said in northwestern France during commemorations for the 82nd anniversary of the June 6, 1944, landings of American and other Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy to liberate Europe from Hitler’s dangerous ideology. … Naturally, he was pilloried by out-of-touch elitists on both sides of the Atlantic.” [editor’s note: When Devine refers to “out-of-touch elitists,” she means anyone who’s not batshit insane – TLK] (06/10/26)
“The Haskell Free Library and Opera House, a landmark community institution built deliberately across the Canada–US border in 1904 so neighbours could share books and performances, has opened a new Canada-only entrance. This comes after the Trump administration limited access for individuals entering from Canada, barring them from using the library’s original main entrance, situated in Vermont on the US side of the border. For more than a century, visitors from both countries moved freely through the building, crossing the international border marked by a strip of black tape on the floor. But tighter US security rules effectively closed the historic shared entrance to Canadian visitors in October 2025. The new entrance, created from a former emergency exit on the Canadian side, was a costly project funded in part through community fundraising.” (06/11/26)
“Alabama is waging a last-minute legal fight to [kill] a man with nitrogen gas on Thursday night, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to set aside a judge’s finding that the method violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Jeffery Lee, 49, is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. Thursday. However, a federal judge on Tuesday ruled that nitrogen executions are unconstitutional and blocked the state from using the method to put Lee to death. The state filed an appeal Thursday asking the Supreme Court to set aside the ruling and allow the execution. ‘If that ruling stands, it would be unprecedented in American history. Not only does it portend the first-ever permanent ban on a legislatively enacted method, but it would expand the concept of cruelty well beyond the bounds of the Eighth Amendment,’ lawyers with the Alabama attorney general’s office wrote.” (06/11/26)
“‘The Men Who Fear Women.’ That’s the title of Helen Lewis’s latest cover story for The Atlantic. It’s currently making a big splash as she travels the podcast and interview circuit (PBS, The New York Times, NPR) explaining what she calls ‘masculinism,’ a movement that apparently wants to put women back in the kitchen where they belong, having stripped them of all their political rights. … You may remember Helen Lewis from her car-crash interview with Jordan Peterson for GQ, way back in 2018. She was the one who really got up the good professor’s nose, needling and poking and making him look like a sulky teenager sitting atop a huge pile of mess in a fusty, darkened bedroom — the precise demographic Peterson arrived on the scene to rescue from its own retarded development and the scorn of polite society.” (06/11/26)
“Earlier this month, the California-based organization Consumer Watchdog uncovered an incredible scandal involving rideshare company Uber, which we covered on the most recent episode of my podcast Organized Money. The company pleaded to the California legislature last year that its insurance costs had spiked so much that the state needed to decrease required payouts on its mandated uninsured motorist coverage. ‘They literally said 45 cents out of every dollar is going to insurance,’ Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, told me. It turned out that these excessive insurance payments were going to a Hawaii-based company called Aleka that is run by Uber executives. Aleka was raising rates on Uber higher than other insurers, but that money just got transferred into a reserve bank account under Uber’s control.” (06/11/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Blind submission to authority is the result of propaganda and indoctrination, but it’s also the result of bad parenting. Raising kids who aren’t allowed to say no to you is raising adults who don’t think anyone should be allowed to oppose their rulers. That’s mainly what you’re seeing in the comments section of any viral police brutality video with people defending the cop’s actions and saying the victim should have complied with commands more perfectly. All they’re really saying is ‘Don’t disobey Daddy and you won’t get smacked!’ … Discuss the latest act of war or abuse with someone who’s been trained to reflexively obey authority and you can watch them running calculations trying to find excuses to justify why the powerful are correct in this given instance, even if you’re presenting them with brand new information.” (06/09/26)
“The handful of U.S. firms that dominate global tech and artificial intelligence has almost universal name recognition. And it’s quite widely known that they rely on semiconductors manufactured in East Asia, mainly Taiwan. But it’s safe to say that very, very few people realize that the world’s only maker of the complex lithography machines – used by Asian firms to fabricate the chips that power American tech advances – is headquartered in … Europe. (The Netherlands, to be precise.) Not knowing this little factoid is about more than industry trivia. It points to long-standing, and not entirely merited, views of the continent as an economic has-been, held back by red tape, capital constraints, and innovation inertia. In fact, the European Union is making quiet, consistent progress in undoing both limiting perceptions and policies – even as global markets are more focused on multitrillion-dollar Wall Street listings …” (06/09/26)
“‘The United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack,’ President Trump announced Tuesday of Iran’s shootdown of a US Apache attack chopper over the Strait of Hormuz. Central Command soon launched ‘proportional strikes,’ which don’t sound like enough: The prez needs to show he’s serious, or Tehran will keep trying to play him for a sucker as it has every president going back to Jimmy Carter. Consider: Trump told the press just hours before that attack, ‘We’re very close to having a very, very good, strong, powerful deal.’ A country that’s ‘very close’ to sealing a deal in good faith doesn’t escalate against its negotiating partner. This leaves us wondering which presidential advisers are leading him down this garden path to likely humiliation.” [editor’s note: The only way for Trump to show he’s “serious” is to accept the fact that he lost a war – TLK] (06/09/26)
Source: Common Dreams
by Carmen Rojas & Daniel Gould
“For too long, philanthropy has hidden behind the twin gatekeepers of fiduciary duty and perpetuity to avoid giving more when communities need it most. Last year, the Marguerite Casey Foundation provided a one-time fivefold increase in funding to meet a deepening moment of crisis. We learned this was a lifeline to many organizations facing increasing attacks and whose funders were pulling back from supporting racial and economic justice organizing. The damage we’re seeing (from cuts to essential government services and ICE raids to a corrupt federal government orchestrating the largest transfer of wealth from the poorest people to the richest in our nation) will have impacts for a generation. Philanthropy must provide resources at a scale and with a fervor that meaningfully responds to the reality of the world around us.” (06/10/26)
