Gift article: "Military might under Trump is all power and no purpose, all tactics and no strategy, all violence and no vision, all means and no ends. Having ditched any larger claims (building democracy, fighting tyranny, advancing freedom), it is its own justification."

Gift article: “When Washington was approached about it,” Turco noted, “he said that we literally fought a war against monarchy, and only monarchs put their faces on coins.”

'"Voting-rights advocates have a theory. “It’s a pretext for the next authoritarian escalation,” Alexandra Chandler, who oversees the elections team at the advocacy group Protect Democracy, told us.'

"Casualties: If you would stop reporting on them, we wouldn’t be having these problems! At least fix the headlines, substituting positive takes like “More Comrades Now Available to Greet Warrior Pete Hegseth When He Arrives in Valhalla” [...]"

"Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded an antivaccine group & once likened the immunization of children to a holocaust, is transforming a government that long championed the lifesaving benefits of shots into one that spreads doubts about their safety here & abroad."

"The bottom line is that the war Trump started has no good ending. And every day it goes on seems to delay a better future for the Iranian people. This is a tragedy that only Khamenei and Trump, together, could engineer."

"Public health officials have postponed tens of thousands of surgeries, and cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy have seen their treatments disrupted by power outages and a lack of refrigerated medicine."

"An international study in 2025 found about half of all AI-generated summaries had at least one significant sourcing or accuracy issue – with some tools, such as Google’s popular Gemini interface, that rose to 76%."

Gift article: "The science-fiction fantasy has always been that robots would liberate humankind, but now that future is almost here and it seems people are only going to be liberated from their paying jobs. Then what?"

Gift article: "The basic premise of Trumpism is that the people of the United States are not the collected citizens of the United States, naturalized and natural born, but a particular caste and class of Americans, defined by race, religion and nationality and united by their devotion to Trump."

"Europeans might have tolerated the invective and even the trade damage had it not been for the real threat that Trump now poses to their security."

Gift article: "A rookie immigration officer fresh out of the Trump administration’s abbreviated basic training program made critical errors in paperwork that became the government’s justification for detaining a California man for days in December, federal court records show."

Gift article: "This time, the danger isn’t financial engineering. It’s that our financial system has attached itself to the vulnerabilities of our physical world — power grids, water, land, supply chains — and created hazards that markets have no framework to analyze."

"It would have been more accurate to have written, “We are currently clean on OPSEC, except that I’m sending this information to the editor of The Atlantic.” To honestly believe that this information was not secret would require Hegseth to achieve Olympian levels of self-deception."

Gift article: "Human pressures on nature are eroding the necessities it gives us, such as clean water, food, health, livelihoods and protection from storms and fire. But there is hope, and the authors emphasized the ability to chart a new course." #Climate

Gift article: "The possibility of obtaining U.S. citizenship with his service was never on his mind, because he believed the green card he got as a child was just as ironclad, Mr. Park said."

Gift: “We see a pattern of celebrating enslavers while reducing teaching about slavery in the United States and limiting diversity, equity, and inclusion,” said Timothy Wellbeck [...]. “Caesar Rodney has components of character not worth celebrating despite his contributions to America’s founding.”

Gift article: "For many years, as they fought off the brutal dictatorship ruling over them, Iranians have worried that their struggle might lead to civil war and chaos. That scenario now seems closer than ever."

Gift article: 'Rachel’s father still couldn’t believe it had come to this. “I’m heartbroken because I believe in this country in an almost religious way,” Doug told me. But as a country, he said, “we fucked up.”'

Gift article: “Courage is contagious,” Oppenheimer said. “Everybody is waiting for somebody else to do something, but we have to be the ones.”

Gift article: "Critics of modern imperialism often did not carry the day. Their logic, however, could prove potent today, as no other president in modern history has so brazenly showcased the connection between lawlessness abroad and lawlessness at home, as has Mr. Trump."

"In a state where changing one’s legal sex marker has now been rendered impossible, Ellis’s story shows that even just changing one’s name can be enough for a transgender person in Kansas to be identified, targeted, and forced to surrender their legal documents."

Gift article:"[...] the accelerating losses make sense given society’s focus on economic growth, which often comes at a cost to the natural world, said Peter P. Marra, an ornithologist and dean at Georgetown University who specializes in bird populations and was not involved with the new research.“

"Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms."

Gift article: "The supply-chain-risk designation issued by Hegseth late Friday was an extraordinary escalation, ranking a leading American AI company alongside the likes of Chinese and Russian firms seen as a danger to the United States."

Gift article: “He came to this country because he wanted to experience freedom. He didn’t have that chance … He came to this nation that was supposed to save his life — and that nation destroyed his life.”

"If passed, the bill would prevent any public school from stocking or teaching LGBTQ+ literature or books that specifically mention trans people. It would also apply to some federally-funded sex education programs, clubs and support groups."

"Although the charges were dropped that same day and his friend was released, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police handed Espinoza to ICE custody."

"[...] when I read about the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, who entered the U.S. two years later as a refugee from Myanmar, it was a terrible blow. He had managed to escape lethal danger and mistreatment in Myanmar, only to die from hatred and cruelty on the streets of my country."

Gift article: '“Censorship is not just one moment,” he says. “It’s not just some external authority coming and saying, ‘This is going to be removed.’” Documentation is a way to fight back. Because, he says, “the worst kind of censorship is the censorship we never know has happened.”'

“If policy is increasingly informal or driven by personalities, what happens to continuity when there is a change in administrations?” one European official asked me. “Obviously, the alliances will survive. But don’t underestimate the cracks that occur when those channels are broken down.”

"What a blessing, when a man’s only business was to lean forward and listen, to determine whether this was a moment to stand and clap or sit and nod. Or perhaps to laugh, as when the president joked about blowing fishing boats out of the water! A moment to chuckle, certainly."

Here's a story about his death www.investigativepost.org/2026/02/25/b...

Gift article: "[...] under Trump, kleptocracy and ideology are inextricably intertwined. And that makes it more likely that kleptocratic governance—in both domestic and foreign policy—will endure even after he leaves office."

“The sheer scale and speed at which big tech is converging its biometric, data, and AI capabilities in direct support of expanding the government’s surveillance and deportation dragnet,” Migliozzi says, “is incredibly alarming and is a nightmare for civil rights and personal privacy.”

Gift article: "The fight against the authoritarianism of unchecked and often unwanted AI is the battle of the 21st century that will be waged long after the fight against political authoritarianism in Trump’s United States and elsewhere has been won."

Gift article: "Russia’s war — a war for the return to an imperial past — has always been a war against Ukraine’s future."

The GOP may be all about the SAVE America Act, but election administrators are wary about its implications. Read about it, and more of what the DD team covered last week: www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

“If there was data that supported the administration’s position that it is only deporting the worst of the worst, the administration would publicize the data,” Opila added. “And they’re not doing that because the data doesn’t support it. We’d have something better than the memes.”

Gift article: 'Eduardo Castillo [...] told city officials it is intimidating but “not impossible” to challenge the federal government. “If you don’t at least try,” he said, “you will end up with another inhumane detention facility built in your jurisdiction and under your watch.”'

Gift article: '“There have to be real consequences if ICE breaks the law,” said Katie Brennan, an Assembly Democrat from Jersey City who is sponsoring the bill with Ravi Bhalla, a former Hoboken mayor.'

Gift article: "Why hazard imprisonment, unimaginable pain, and death when passivity and silence offer a far safer course? In an era characterized by growing authoritarianism and the dehumanization of some of society’s most vulnerable, such questions have taken on new urgency."

"[...] he offered a vision of unity based on a misty idea of inherited “Western civilization”—Dante, Shakespeare, the Sistine Chapel, the Beatles—which would fight against the real enemies: not Russia, not China, but rather migration, the “climate cult,” and other forms of modern degeneracy."

"She said Maria Antonia would wake up in the middle of the night crying, fearful she would never leave detention or alternatively that she would be separated from her mom."

Gift article: 'Fighting their case in immigration court might mean months of extra jail time. His husband’s health and mental state are more important than winning that fight, he said. “It’s good that we’ll meet after some time, but that doesn’t change that our lives (are) just destroyed" [...]'

'“I would like to go back to the US to defend myself in court and prove that I am not a member of the Tren de Aragua [gang] – but what happens if they detain me and I have to live through another nightmare?” Muñoz Pinto said.'

"Workers at the Social Security Administration have been told to share information about in-person appointments with agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, WIRED has learned."

Gift article: "Reversing the endangerment finding has been seen as the holy grail for those who deny the science of climate change. That’s because if the repeal is upheld in court, it could also prevent future administrations from restoring regulations to curb greenhouse gases." #Climate

"Under pressure from Republican state attorneys general, the agency that advises the U.S. Supreme Court and federal judges on scientific and technical matters has withdrawn the entirety of its content on climate change from a new judicial reference manual." #Climate