ICE Thugs Murder Woman In Minneapolis.  Who ya gonna believe–Kristi Noem or your lying eyes?:

A hospital record obtained by The Associated Press identified the woman as 37-year-old Renae Macklin-Good, though business records spelled her name as Renee Nicole Macklin Good. Calls and messages to the woman’s family were not immediately returned.

In social media accounts, Macklin Good described herself as a “Poet and writer and wife and mom” who was from Colorado and currently “experiencing Minneapolis,” and displayed a pride flag emoji. A profile picture shows her smiling and holding a young child against her cheek.

What the videos show: Videos taken by bystanders with different vantage points and posted to social media show an officer approaching an SUV stopped across the middle of the road, demanding the driver open the door and grabbing the handle. The Honda Pilot begins to pull forward and a different ICE officer standing in front of the vehicle pulls his weapon and immediately fires at least two shots into the vehicle at close range, jumping back as the vehicle moves toward him. It was not clear from the videos if the vehicle made contact with the officer. The SUV then sped into two cars parked on a curb nearby before crashing to a stop. Witnesses screamed obscenities, expressing shock at what they’d seen.

What officials have said: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the officer shot the woman in self-defense after she “attempted to run them over and rammed them with her vehicle,” which Noem described as an “act of domestic terrorism.” President Trump took to social media to criticize the woman. But Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey blasted Noem’s characterization as “garbage” and called on the federal agents to leave. The city’s police chief, Brian O’Hara, briefly described the shooting to reporters but gave no indication that the driver was trying to harm anyone. Commissioner Bob Jacobson of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety said state authorities would investigate the shooting with federal authorities.

Left unanswered is why ICE targeted this vehicle in the first place.  As to Noem’s claims that the driver was trying to run down the ICE thug, it is a lie. See for yourself.

Undeterred, ICE Agents Wreak Havoc At School After Committing Murder:

Minneapolis Public Schools on Wednesday canceled classes district-wide for the remainder of the week “due to safety concerns,” following the killing of a woman Wednesday by an ICE agent. The district said it was acting “out of an abundance of caution.”

The move came after officials at Roosevelt High School said armed U.S. Border Patrol officers came on school property during dismissal Wednesday and began tackling people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders. 

“The guy, I’m telling him like, ‘Please step off the school grounds,’ and this dude comes up and bumps into me and then tells me that I pushed him, and he’s trying to push me, and he knocked me down,” a school official, who spoke to MPR News on condition of anonymity said.

“They don’t care. They’re just animals,” the official added. “I’ve never seen people behave like this.”

The school leader said armed officers with apparent Border Patrol insignia on their uniforms arrived at a street near the school in several SUV vehicles during dismissal on Wednesday afternoon. They broke out the window of a vehicle.

“There’s a car that got hit. I don’t know how it got hit. They broke out the window,” the school official said. “Then different Neighborhood Watch, people, everybody, people, the staff in the school came out. And then they started coming on the property of the school and pushing people and tackling people and shooting pepper spray and pepper balls. And they handcuffed two of our employees.”

Video shared with MPR News show armed, masked officers with apparent Border Patrol insignia on their uniforms dragging a person on a sidewalk outside of the high school and tussling with another person as bystanders blow whistles and shout.

Call them what they are: Nazi storm troopers.

CBS Tries To Out-Fox Fox:

CBS News demonstrated its coziness with the Trump administration on Tuesday night’s broadcast of the “CBS Evening News,” in which anchor Tony Dokoupil praised Secretary of State Marco Rubio and regurgitated right-wing propaganda about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Discussing Rubio’s role in the abduction of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and the administration’s widely criticized rhetoric about taking over Greenland, Dokoupil joked about AI-generated memes referencing Rubio.

“Marco Rubio, we salute you,” Dokoupil concluded. “You’re the ultimate Florida man.”

‘Flaming Debris’ From Musk’s Rockets Imperiled Air Space:

When SpaceX CEO Elon Musk chose a remote Texas outpost on the Gulf Coast to develop his company’s ambitious Starship, he put the 400-foot rocket on a collision course with the commercial airline industry.

Each time SpaceX did a test run of Starship and its booster, dubbed Super Heavy, the megarocket’s flight path would take it soaring over busy Caribbean airspace before it reached the relative safety of the open Atlantic Ocean. The company planned as many as five such launches a year as it perfected the craft, a version of which is supposed to one day land on the moon.

The FAA, which also oversees commercial space launches, predicted the impact to the national airspace would be “minor or minimal,” akin to a weather event, the agency’s 2022 approval shows. No airport would need to close and no airplane would be denied access for “an extended period of time.”

But the reality has been far different. Last year, three of Starship’s five launches exploded at unexpected points on their flight paths, twice raining flaming debris over congested commercial airways and disrupting flights. And while no aircraft collided with rocket parts, pilots were forced to scramble for safety.

A ProPublica investigation, based on agency documents, interviews with pilots and passengers, air traffic control recordings and photos and videos of the events, found that by authorizing SpaceX to test its experimental rocket over busy airspace, the FAA accepted the inherent risk that the rocket might put airplane passengers in danger.

And once the rocket failed spectacularly and that risk became real, neither the FAA nor Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy sought to revoke or suspend Starship’s license to launch, a move that is permitted when “necessary to protect the public health and safety.” Instead, the FAA allowed SpaceX to test even more prototypes over the same airspace, adding stress to the already-taxed air traffic control system each time it launched.

Delaware Proposes Plan To Eliminate Carbon Emissions By 2050:

Recommendations include strategies to reduce emissions from vehicles, industrial activities and electricity production — the source of the state’s top climate emissions.

The plan calls for increased bus and train ridership while improving access to electric vehicles and charging stations. Though lawmakers repealed a mandate that would have required manufacturers to produce a set number of electric vehicles, DNREC wants to expand programs that incentivize the optional sale of electric vehicles.

However, Love emphasized the state “can’t EV our way out of transportation emission.”

“A lot of work needs to be done as well to reduce the amount that we drive vehicles, by good land use choices, mass transit and making it easier for people to walk, bike and roll to their destinations,” she said.

Among the recommendations outlined in the plan, DNREC has proposed decarbonization efforts at industrial facilities, while stressing the importance of preparing for potential clean hydrogen programs.

The Clean Action Plan also calls for increased solar capacity, the advancement of offshore wind and the modernization of transmission infrastructure.

The proposal provides additional steps to protect residents from extreme heat, such as installing heat reflective roofs on homes, and the building of structures with elevated foundations in flood zones.

Good proposals. After all, Trump’s war against the climate can’t continue forever.  Can it?

Takeaway From Spotlight Delaware’s Legislative Summit–Mimi Minor-Brown Is Still Useless:

Last year, lawmakers introduced a bill that would have created new income tax brackets for the state’s highest earners, which ultimately failed to see a vote on the floor.

Creating new tax brackets for the state’s highest earners is something Meyer had pushed for early in 2025 prior to his inauguration, and something he still supported at Wednesday’s Legislative Summit.

“It’s ridiculous in this state that people making $65,000 a year are paying the same tax rate as people making $6.5 million a year,” Meyer said during a fireside chat with Spotlight Delaware Editor-in-Chief Jacob Owens. 

But in a separate panel discussion, leaders in Delaware’s statehouse discussed those same tax reforms, expressing some hesitation about passing them without further insight into their possible impacts. One of those leaders, Delaware House Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown (D-Delaware City), questioned the previous proposal because of the nominal tax breaks for Delawareans making less than $60,000.

The bill would have shifted more of the state’s personal income tax burden to higher earners while cutting taxes on the lowest earners. But the proposal failed to move forward, in part because the average savings to the lowest earners was between $15 and $52 a year.

Still, Minor-Brown agreed that those making more $60,000 should not pay the same as the state’s top earners, but said she would want to have experts weigh in on proposals. 

“Until we have something on the table that makes sense, we’re going to have to wait,” Minor-Brown said. 

What ‘makes sense’, and what ‘makes sense to Mimi Minor-Brown’, are two separate and distinct entities.

What do you want to talk about?

Politicians–Support Data Centers At Your Own Peril:

From Archibald, Pennsylvania, to Page, Arizona, tech firms are seeking to plunk down data centers in locations that sometimes are not zoned for such heavy industrial uses, within communities that had not planned for them. These supersized data centers can usurp more energy than entire cities and drain local water supplies.

Anger over the perceived trampling of communities by Silicon Valley has entered the national political conversation and could affect voters of all political persuasions in this year’s midterm elections.

The grassroots blowback comes from deep red states as much as from left-wing groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America, which have helped draw hundreds of residents to hearings in Arizona, Indiana and Maryland.

Even Energy Secretary Chris Wright warned data center developers that they are losing control of the narrative. “In rural America right now, where data centers are being built, everyone’s already angry because their electricity prices have risen a lot,” he told energy executives assembled in Washington for the North American Gas Forum last month. “‘I don’t want them in my state’ is a common viewpoint.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) last month called for a moratorium on data center construction, warning the tech firms are draining scarce energy and water reserves and pushing the cost onto everyday Americans in pursuit of AI technologies that threaten to displace millions from the workforce.

White House AI czar David Sacks replied on X: “He would block new data centers even if states want them & they generate their own power.”

But advocates say residents’ concerns are legitimate.

“This data center expansion affects so many issues,” said MitchJones, managing director of policy and litigation at Food and Water Watch. The group this month organized a letter signed by several large, national advocacy groups demanding a moratorium.

“It takes up farmland in rural communities. It takes up dwindling water sources in communities that need cleaner drinking water. And it is driving up electricity prices for everyone,” he said. “It is drawing together people from disparate backgrounds who might not agree on other political issues. They are saying this is taking place without any forethought to communities and we must stop it.”

You may have missed it, but we now have our Hitler.  A deranged madman bent on taking over countries aided by a supplicant press and fellow criminals running the government. And destroying anybody who doesn’t belong to the male Aryan race.  Not to mention courts dominated by the madman’s chosen minions.  The Republican Party is no longer a political party, but an amplifier for fascism.  All funded by billionaires and trillionaires.

This has, for the most part, been normalized.  It simply can’t become the new normal.  If it isn’t already.

Trump Threatens, Let’s See, Greenland, Mexico, Colombia, Cuba.  Oh, and the new ‘leader’ of Venezuela.  Perfectly normal.

About that Venezuelan Oil…there’s more than one reason why oil companies aren’t racing to satisfy Trump’s petro-lust:

“We’re going to have our very large U.S. oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said during a press conference Saturday.

The capture of Maduro and Trump’s comments comes at a time when even a country like Venezuela — with one of the biggest oil resources in the world — isn’t a sure bet for attracting major oil companies.

Not all crude oil is the same — some oil is physically lighter and easier for refineries to process. Venezuela’s oil is heavy and dense, and requires special refineries. Burning any type of oil contributes to climate change, but Venezuela’s oil is “among the dirtiest oils in the world to produce when it comes to global warming,” says Paasha Mahdavi, associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In an email, ConocoPhillips spokesperson Dennis Nuss wrote, “ConocoPhillips is monitoring developments in Venezuela and their potential implications for global energy supply and stability. It would be premature to speculate on any future business activities or investments.”

ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment.

Still, this isn’t the best time to add to the global oil supply, Monaldi says. There’s currently a worldwide glut of oil. Also, because Venezuela’s oil is particularly bad for the climate, that makes it less attractive for European oil companies with climate goals, Monaldi says.

Some increase in Venezuela’s oil production could happen fairly quickly with more financial support and improved management, according to an analysis by Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy.

But Mahdavi says the Trump administration’s plans to jumpstart the industry will be difficult. He notes that it took nearly two decades to revitalize Iraq’s oil industry after the U.S. invasion, though corruption and mismanagement remain pervasive.

And ultimately, notes Kepes, if it’s unclear who is in charge in Venezuela, oil companies will have concerns about the long-term viability of their contracts. “No one’s going to start investing on the ground in a place where there’s no legal contract and viable permission to operate or if there’s concerns about political stability and violence,” he says.

Here’s Why Chris Coons’ Lamentations About ‘Process’ Are Worthless:

HuffPost spoke with Columbia University professor Elizabeth Saunders about what to expect next for U.S. policy on Venezuela and the dire implications of Trump running what she calls a “personalist” foreign policy, as global affairs takes up what she calls a surprising level of his second presidency.

“It’s bad that he didn’t brief Congress, but I think that it’s a bit of a red herring in terms of focusing on the big picture here, which is the utterly chaotic ― and not just poorly planned, but not-planned ― aftermath and the incompetence at every level of this administration with the fate of millions of Venezuelans in the balance. They will suffer for these events.

If they had gotten a briefing ahead of time, it still wouldn’t have made it OK. It still wouldn’t have solved the problem that they had no idea what they were going to do on the day after. It’s better they brief because processes matter, but it’s not a cure-all. I often think of congressional criticism of process questions, like the War Powers Act or repealing the AUMF as things that are like flypaper. They’re a place you can stick your angst … it’s a safe thing to do, complaining about process. It obscures the real issues.

It’s not that process isn’t important, but in this case … Congress is out. So let’s talk about how there’s no White House or national security process, because there used to be one ― and Trump broke it. It’s not that this operation would have gone well if there had been a great process, but it might not have ever happened at all, because in the first term, the advisers did constrain him from his worse impulses. Now he’s in a permissive environment where there’s nothing to stop his whims when he wakes up in the morning from being translated into policy that affects millions around the world. No amount of congressional briefing is going to fix that without serious action.”

Stingless Bees Granted Legal Rights:

Stingless bees from the Amazon have become the first insects to be granted legal rights anywhere in the world, in a breakthrough supporters hope will be a catalyst for similar moves to protect bees elsewhere.

It means that across a broad swathe of the Peruvian Amazon, the rainforest’s long-overlooked native bees – which, unlike their cousins the European honeybees, have no sting – now have the right to exist and to flourish.

Cultivated by Indigenous peoples since pre-Columbian times, stingless bees are thought to be key rainforest pollinators, sustaining biodiversity and ecosystem health.

But they are faced with a deadly confluence of climate change, deforestation and pesticides, as well as competition from European bees, and scientists and campaigners have been racing against time to get stingless bees on international conservation red lists.

The world-first ordinances, passed in two Peruvian regions in the past few months, follow a campaign of research and advocacy spearheaded by Rosa Vásquez Espinoza, founder of Amazon Research Internacional, who has spent the past few years travelling into the Amazon to work with Indigenous people to document the bees.

Espinoza, a chemical biologist, first started researching the bees in 2020, after a colleague asked her to conduct an analysis of their honey, which was being used during the pandemic in Indigenous communities where treatments for Covid were in short supply. She was stunned by the findings.

“I was seeing hundreds of medicinal molecules, like molecules that are known to have some sort of biological medicinal property,” Espinoza recalled. “And the variety was also really wild – these molecules have been known to have antiinflammatory effects or antiviral, antibacterial, antioxidant, even anti-cancer.”

The Best Of Cli-Fi (Climate Fiction):

As climate change has reshaped our physical world, raising temperatures, swelling sea levels and supercharging disasters, it has also crept into the fictional worlds of books, movies, TV shows and games.

Under the banner of “climate fiction,” these stories reflect our collective angst about our changing planet. They tend toward dystopia and apocalypse, mourning vanished places and conjuring up terrifying new landscapes where people struggle to survive.

But some — especially in the “solarpunk” subgenre — imagine more hopeful futures where people survive the coming chaos and thrive in societies built in tune with nature.

All these tales, with their sad and happy endings, can help us understand the messy human consequences of climate change on an emotional level that goes beyond dry academic literature according to Kate Marvel, a physicist who builds computer models of the Earth’s climate.

“Climate change does not happen just in those computer models. It happens in the real world. It happens to us,” she said. “There is no hellscape future that is locked in. We can choose what the future looks like to a huge extent, and we can choose how we react.”

Peruse the list in the article for suggested reading (or watching, or playing).

The Southern Accent Headed For Extinction?  (And why can’t I think of that accent w/o recalling Hillary Clinton’s fake accent when she was First Lady of Arkansas?):

Margaret Renwick, an associate research professor at Johns Hopkins, has co-authored studies on changing accents among white and Black people in Georgia. The University of Georgia has a huge collection of old recordings and interviews from all across the South beginning in the 1960s. “Nobody had ever really looked at them with modern methods, so we dove in,” she told me. The study focused on four different “drawling vowels” that are part of what linguists call the Southern Vowel Shift—which, she discovered, is on the decline.

“The Southern Vowel Shift began in the late 19th century, after the Civil War, and the first thing that happened was that bide became bahd—so i to ah—like time to tahme,” Renwick said. You have to listen closely to hear it, but the accent treats long vowels and short vowels differently. With a long vowel (beat or bait), “you add a little uh sound before the original vowel” (buheat). But with the short vowels (bit or bet), the uh goes after the original vowel. (Can you hear it, just a little biuht?) “That’s where the drawl perception comes from,” she said, “because they kind of stretch out.” The paper found that the Southern Vowel Shift is becoming less detectable, particularly in urban areas such as Atlanta. Renwick also found that the accent has faded at different rates among Black and white Georgians. For white speakers, she told me, the peak southern accent was among “Baby Boomers born right after World War II.” For Black speakers, the accent was strongest among Gen X, and began to disappear only among Millennials and Gen Z.

55 Facts From 2025 To Blow Your Mind.  Some of those that blew my mind:

The U.S. releases 100 million sterile flies in Mexico every week.

By one calculation, spending on AI accounted for 92 percent of America’s GDP growth in the first half of 2025.

During the late 1800s, baseball players experimented with four-sided bats.

Malibu has a flock of wild parrots that may descend from pets that escaped homes during a fire in 1961. (‘Awwk, another martini’)

A hawk learned how to use crosswalk signals as a cue to ambush its prey.

In Japan, you can buy soy sauce laced with ostrich antibodies.

You just learned something today.  Cue Husker Du to sing us out: