Source: spiked
by Tim Black
“‘Death to the dictator.’ Iranian protesters have chanted this in the direction of Ayatollah Khamenei for years now. On Saturday morning, a US-Israeli airstrike finally made good on their call to arms, killing the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic alongside several family members in a compound in the heart of Tehran. It is a truly momentous event, an inflection point in modern history. We can and must debate the wisdom and morality of this act of US-led ‘regime change’ – historical precedents don’t bode well. But we should be in no doubt as to the wretched, wicked nature of the regime the US seeks to topple.” (03/02/26)
https://archive.is/9j0es
Source: Bluegrass Institute
by Gavin Herrington
“Kentucky has one of the highest rates in the nation of children with an incarcerated parent. Those are not statistics. Those are kids saying goodnight to pictures and running to mailboxes, hoping.” (03/02/26)
https://www.bluegrassinstitute.org/mom-went-to-jail-kentucky-can-do-better/
Source: Orange County Register
“Anthropic PBC’s artificial intelligence chatbot Claude and related consumer-facing applications went down early Monday, with the startup saying it has been grappling with ‘unprecedented demand’ for its services over the past week. Nearly 2,000 users had reported Claude AI service disruptions at the outage’s peak around 6:40 a.m. New York time, according to service-monitoring website Downdetector. Anthropic said in a statement by WhatsApp that ‘consumer-facing surfaces’ such as claude.ai and the company’s apps were offline. Businesses that have integrated Claude’s AI models into their own systems were unaffected.” (03/02/26)
https://www.ocregister.com/2026/03/02/anthropics-chatbot-claude-goes-down-amid-unprecedented-demand/
Source: USA Today
by Rex Huppke
President Donald Trump has dragged America into a war of his choosing, attacking Iran with little public support, zero congressional approval and virtually no public justification. The path forward is unclear, and our self-absorbed leader is already speaking about the loss of American lives with the nonchalance one expects from a small man never held accountable for the consequences of his actions. Announcing the deaths of four U.S. service members following the attack launched Feb. 28, Trump said in a video posted to social media: ‘And sadly, there will likely be more before it ends, that’s the way it is. Likely be more.’ … He might as well have added a ‘Ho-hum,’ such is his apparent concern for the women and men he has now put in danger for … what?” (03/02/26)
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/03/02/iran-war-trump-american-deaths/88880536007/
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“The US-Israeli war on Iran rages on. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed. Iran has been hammering US military bases in the region with missiles and drones, and oil prices are already beginning to rise as the IRGC cuts off the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for the attacks. US soldiers have already begun to die. US Central Command reports that three American service members were killed in combat, with five seriously wounded — and it should here be noted that ‘seriously wounded’ can mean permanently brain damaged, comatose, or otherwise rendered severely handicapped for the rest of their lives. … I have said it before and I will say it again: every single American soldier who dies in this war was killed by Trump and Netanyahu.” (03/02/26)
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/03/02/us-calls-iranian-retaliatory-strikes-unprovoked-and-other-notes/
Source: Engadget
“X is rolling out a built-in ‘Paid Partnership’ label that creators can apply to sponsored posts, replacing the hashtag workarounds they’ve had to rely on until now. The feature, announced by the platform’s head of product Nikita Bier, adds a toggle that places a disclosure label directly below a post’s content. It can also be applied retroactively. The label is meant to help creators comply with years-old FTC regulations requiring clear disclosure of sponsored content.” (03/02/26)
https://www.engadget.com/social-media/x-adds-paid-partnership-labels-so-users-can-more-easily-identify-ads-183528227.html
Source: The Hill
“Robby Soave gives his radar on the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, as the U.S. and Israel have carried out strikes on the country.” (03/02/26)
https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/5758454-rising-march-2-2026/
Source: Popular Information
by Judd Legum
“MBS’s influence with Trump has grown as the Saudi government has invested billions in projects that personally enrich Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Despite the glaring conflicts-of-interest, Trump installed Kushner as a top negotiator with Iranian officials. Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff participated in a mediation session with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva on Thursday, billed as a last-ditch effort to avoid war. The Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) is the largest investor in Jared Kushner’s private equity fund, Affinity Partners.” (03/02/26)
https://popular.info/p/the-money-behind-the-new-iran-war
Source: The Intercept
by Nick Turse
“An Intercept analysis finds that every single Board of Peace member state has been rebuked for human rights violations.” (03/02/26)
https://theintercept.com/2026/03/02/trump-board-peace-human-right-abuses/
Source: CounterPunch
by Dean Baker
“I often get that question. I can’t say I have a very good answer. Going back to the last bubbles, it would be difficult to identify any events in the world that precipitated the collapse of either the 90s tech bubble or the housing bubble in the 00s. Both times the economy seemed to be moving along at healthy clip just prior to the collapse. There had been warnings in both cases. … But these warnings came well before the crashes. There is no obvious event that caused the stock market to turn in March of 2000 or the housing bubble to peak in the summer of 2006.” (03/02/26)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/03/02/when-does-the-ai-bubble-burst/
