Leila V.

[Democratic Wins Media @DemocraticWins]

NEWS: Governor Wes Moore, along with Baltimore’s Mayor Brandon Scott, have overseen an over 40% decrease in homicides in Maryland putting the state on pace for its lowest homicide rate in over 40 years. That’s huge.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Let's walk through what actually happened here, in order.

DOGE cut the USAID program specifically designed to prevent screwworm from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. DOGE cut USDA's animal disease control and prevention funding. That funding had supported more than 180 outbreak investigations in 22 countries and capacity-building in more than 160 laboratories. The screwworm monitoring and response program that watched the border for exactly this parasite - cut.

Then screwworm showed up in Texas cattle. Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared a disaster for Zavala and Uvalde counties this week.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins went on CNBC this morning and blamed the Biden administration, 17 months out of office.

Her specific words: "obviously not much had been done to push back."

The program that was supposed to push back existed. DOGE eliminated it in March 2025. Rollins has been Agriculture Secretary since February 13, 2025. The cuts happened on her watch.

Beef prices are already high. Ranchers in south Texas are now dealing with a flesh-eating parasite that was eradicated in this country in the 1960s - eradicated, specifically, using the sterile fly program her department defunded.

The flies existed. The program existed. The budget existed.

Until it didn't.

[Oscar the Grouch @OscarTheGrouch]

Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams stopped by to ruin my day! 😒

[one dozen rats at a keyboard @PanasonicDX4500]

I know it’s become pretty cliche and cringey to talk about at this point but if you’re under like 25 I cannot stress enough how one time Obama wore a tan suit and people spent a week arguing over whether or not it was demeaning to the Oval Office and they were serious about it.

[Heather Long @byHeatherLong]

JUST IN: US inflation jumped to 4.2% (y/y) in May —>the highest in 3 years and up from 2.4% in February before the war in Iran.

Higher gas and energy prices drove 60% of the gain. Shelter and food (especially restaurants) also contributed. The monthly increase was 0.5%.

Core inflation (excluding food and energy) was 2.9% —>highest since September

[Covie @covie_93]

A FIFA referee has spent more time in federal custody for being Somali than anybody on epstein's list who raped kids.

[Dilan Esper @dilanesper]

A reminder that the USAID shutdown was a gross violation of the Constitution, and was permitted by the Supreme Court on the shadow docket for no valid reason at all (literally almost no serious scholars think POTUS can shut down a program funded by Congress).

[skumm🧊 @skumWgmi]

🚨 do you understand what just happened to Nintendo..

France just fined them $40 million for something Nintendo pretended wasn't happening for years..

Joy-con drift. The defect that destroyed childhoods and gaslighted an entire generation of gamers.

Hers's what they actually did:

→ Million of players reported their sticks moving on their own
→ Nintendo's official response? "Try recalibrating"
→ No recall. No acknowledgment. No fix
→ They quietly repaired units out of warranty but only if you complained loud enough
→ French regulators found they deliberately withheld information from customers about a know defect
→ $40 million fine for hiding what they knew

Nintendo sold 140 million switches.

Joy-con drift affected an estimated 25-40% of them.

Do the math on how many people were gaslit into buying replacements for a problem Nintendo already knew existed.

$40 million sounds like a punishment.

For a company worth $50 billion, it's a rounding error.

France fined them. The rest of the world let them get away with it.

Reshare so people remember this isn't a bug. It was a choice.

[Olivia of Troye @OliviaTroye]

As someone who has worked on national security vetting, the Trump Admin barring Somali referee Omar Artan entry to the US for the World Cup leads to more questions than answers.
Omar was vetted, approved, and issued a visa.
Then he landed in the United States and was suddenly deemed a national security threat.
So which is it?
Either the system failed, or someone changed the rules after the fact.
That's not how serious national security decisions should be made.
The public deserves to know what changed.

[⚡︎ @_sorrengailll]

Wait, so we were told to take shorter showers, turn off the tap while brushing our teeth, and conserve water at every opportunity… but data centers can show up and use millions of gallons like it’s nothing?

[Eugene @ScienceDJX]

This Island deal of Kushner’s is far worse then I ever suspected. This is a fortified military installation with its own bunker city. This is not a resort.

[Christopher Webb @cwebbonline]

Last night they tested the UFC stage lighting at the White House. Check it out.

The People’s House is looking more like a Six Flags amusement park after dark. It’s embarrassing.

[Alexander Panetta @Alex_Panetta]

Striking paper from Wharton. The big conclusion: AI must increase productivity 2.7x -- and quickly -- or tech companies risk bankruptcy with all that entails for the economy. For context: this is how a quickie 2.7x productivity boom would compare to historical precedent. Paper linked in my daily AI digest. Useful context for OpenAI reportedly talking to the US government about a bailout (ahem, I mean ownership stake).

[Americans For Tax Fairness @4TaxFairness]

Get this.

The House just passed an air safety bill.

The billionaires snuck in a provision to STOP state and local tax officials from tracking private jets.

They'll get to fly private and pay NO taxes.

This is a handout to the super wealthy—and we're going to pay for it.

[Berniegirl No More @Hedgesgurl]

Just a reminder: You may notice gas prices inching down a bit. They’re now increasing the level of ethanol they put into our gasoline from 10% to 15%. Started May 1. This is really bad for our cars and will cause damage to our car’s fuel system due to corrosion.

[Anna @AnnaDeMilanese]

Trump lässt 900 Tiefseesensoren aus dem Atlantik und Pazifik herausziehen – ein 370-Millionen-Dollar-Netzwerk das seit 2016 läuft.
Es sollte 30 Jahre laufen. Es wird nach 10 Jahren gestoppt. Was diese Sensoren messen: Meerestemperaturen. Strömungen. Salzgehalt. CO₂-Aufnahme. El-Niño-Früherkennung. AMOC – den Atlantischen Umwälzstrom der Europas Wetter reguliert. Ozeanograph Ed Dever: „Es ist ein lähmender Informationsverlust."

Project 2025 hatte das Netzwerk explizit als Quelle von „Klimaalarmismus" bezeichnet und seine Abschaltung gefordert.
Der Kongress hatte die Finanzierung zweimal gerettet.
Die NSF zog es trotzdem durch. Die Folgen werden Jahrzehnte dauern. Daten die wir nie mehr bekommen werden. 1/2
🇺🇸🇪🇺

[Citizens for Ethics @CREWcrew]

Not enough people know that the DOJ is keeping the part of Trump's IRS settlement in place that shields Trump and his family from IRS audits.

That's *extraordinarily* corrupt. Don't let it fly under the radar. https://t.co/4I2ovkLZQq

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.

He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.

In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.

For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.

He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.

He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.

[blue @bluewmist]

I'm finally reading Dune. This quote, which is in the first few pages, hits hard:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

[Alvin @Alvin1492840]

Her Amazon orders were 18% more expensive than her sisters for the exact same products.

They lived in the same city. Had Prime accounts on the same plan. Were buying the same brands. Often within hours of each other.

Yet every single time they compared receipts, her totals were higher.

A laundry detergent her sister bought for $14.99 cost her $17.49. A pair of headphones her sister got for $79 cost her $94. A printer ink cartridge her sister paid $32 for showed up in her cart at $39.

She thought maybe she was looking on the wrong day.

Then a friend who used to work in Amazon's pricing team explained the truth over dinner.

"Amazon doesn't have one price. They have millions of prices, one for every customer. The price you see is calibrated specifically for you, based on what Amazon has learned about your behavior. Your sister is paying less because Amazon has decided she'll only buy at lower prices. You've shown them you'll pay more."

She asked how that was even legal.
He smiled.

"It's not just legal. It's the entire business model. Most shoppers have no idea this is happening and Amazon would prefer to keep it that way."

Here's everything he explained over the next 30 minutes. 🧵