im tired, but awake. 🍉🇺🇦🍉

I’m an anti-racist. I hate fascism and all its ilk. I’ll stick around here until the rich moron tanks the whole thing I guess.

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

She was kidnapped first.

She suffered the longest.

And when another captive woman went into labor inside that house with no doctor, no hospital, and no help coming…

Michelle Knight delivered the baby herself.

With her bare hands.

But when the world learned about the horrors inside Ariel Castro’s house in Cleveland, her name was barely mentioned.

In August 2002, 21-year-old Michelle Knight was walking to a social services appointment when Castro offered her a ride.

Instead, he kidnapped her.

Locked her in a room.

Chained her up.

When she vanished, almost nobody looked for her.

Michelle came from poverty. She struggled with housing instability and a custody battle over her son.

Authorities quietly assumed she had simply “disappeared on her own.”

No major searches.

No national coverage.

No constant headlines.

Her case went cold almost immediately.

Then, in 2003, Castro kidnapped 16-year-old Amanda Berry.

The response was massive.

TV coverage.

FBI involvement.

Vigils.

Billboards.

The entire city knew Amanda’s name.

In 2004, he kidnapped 14-year-old Gina DeJesus.

Again, the community rallied around the search.

But inside the same house, Michelle had already been trapped for years.

She endured horrific abuse.

She became pregnant multiple times and lost every pregnancy due to Castro’s violence.

He repeatedly told her nobody was coming for her.

Then came Christmas Day, 2006.

Amanda Berry went into labor inside the house.

Castro threatened Michelle’s life if the baby died — then left.

Amanda was terrified.

Michelle had no medical equipment.

No training in childbirth.

But she stepped in anyway.

The baby girl wasn’t breathing when she was born.

Michelle performed CPR until the infant finally cried.

Inside one of the darkest places imaginable, a forgotten woman saved two lives.

In May 2013, Amanda escaped and called 911.

Police rescued all three women and Amanda’s six-year-old daughter.

The reunions flooded national television.

Amanda and Gina were embraced by the world.

Michelle walked out of the same house into a very different reality.

Even after surviving 11 years of captivity, she was often treated like an afterthought.

Later, she spoke openly about it.

Not with bitterness.

With honesty.

She wrote a memoir called Finding Me and explained the deeper pain of realizing the world had quietly decided she wasn’t important enough to search for.

Eventually, she legally changed her name to Lily Rose Lee.

A name she chose for herself.

A life reclaimed on her own terms.

Today, Lily Rose Lee advocates for missing people who are ignored because of poverty, addiction, unstable lives, or social status.

Her message is simple:

Every missing person deserves to be searched for.

Not just the ones society finds easier to care about.

Ariel Castro died in prison.

But Lily Rose Lee survived.

And the woman who once saved a baby in captivity now spends her life making sure nobody else is forgotten the way she was.

[Peter Prime 🇪🇺🇨🇦🇬🇱🇩🇰🇺🇦 @ThePeterPrime]

@RadioFreeTom Just as a note: these are aircraft that don't exist. They're Reaper/Predator UAV drones, with "AI slop" VTOL blades depicted. A Reaper/Predator has a 66-foot wingspan, weighs up to 10,500 pounds, and requires a 100 foot runway for takeoff.

Fucking Trump Fantasy Bullshit.

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

Erin Brockovich has launched a website and has begun tracking all data centers in America and logging resident complaints

In just 1 week it’s already logged 1,690 resident complaints

For this who don’t remember

Erin Brockovich was the paralegal responsible for winning out a case against PG&E, Hinckley in California, because their wastewater runoff was seeping into rural areas and creating a lot of health issues for, for the surrounding neighborhoods

That case brought in a $333 million settlement that went to the families affected by the situation because a lot of them either had staggering medical bills due to their tap water was no longer safe

So why is this important, well residents all over America are reporting their tap water and river water is being heavily polluted by data centers

Her map of data centers is new, she just launched it

The website features an interactive US map showing operational, under-construction, and proposed AI data centers, overlaid with community-reported complaints

Residents can submit reports with details, photos, and locations. Within days of launch, it received a surge of submissions over 1,600 in the first week, and reports of 1,800+ from 47 states shortly after

Common Resident Complaints Being Logged

- Water usage
- Raising utility bills for residents
- Noise pollution: Constant 24/7 humming from fans, generators, and cooling systems disrupting sleep, daily life, and wildlife.
- E-waste from frequent hardware upgrades, pollution including PFAS concerns

[Ben Crump @AttorneyCrump]

Krystal Clark says she is in constant pain from what she believes is toxic mold exposure inside Michigan’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility. After 16 years behind bars, she says her body is deteriorating while her cries for help continue to go unanswered. Now, lawmakers and advocates are urging Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to grant her early release before it’s too late. Human dignity should not end with incarceration!

[🦋Resist4Humanity @deejay90192]

@IsaacHayes3 We're not going back!

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Tenants just launched the first rent strike in Montana in 50 years.

Residents at Bozeman mobile home parks are withholding $50,000 dollars in protest of a major rent hike.

It's a crucial fight for the last vestige of affordable housing.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario.

a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose.

the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant.

he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests.

Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time.

GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead.

Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on.

Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for.

then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company."

GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing.

then he splits the users by income.

Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%.

18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time.

so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for.

it isn't recommending the best option for you.

it's reading the room. and the room is paying.

read this: https://t.co/O43qbhIX2b

[Dolly Parton @DollyParton]

Thank you for standing by me and showing me so much love and support over the past year. I’ve still got some healing to do, but I am on my way! See you soon. 💖 🦋

[Zephyr Teachout 🇺🇸 @ZephyrTeachout]

As the person who coined the term surveillance pricing I can tell you this bill does not ban surveillance pricing.

It makes it harder to enforce existing consumer protection laws against pricing abuses while having so many carve outs and consent exceptions that any company can just rename what they are doing.

Worse than nothing.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Indiana residents are paying $600, $700, $800 a month in electric bills.

Indiana is being hit with some of the biggest rate increases in the U.S.

Data centers are driving up costs, BlackRock just bought one of the utilities, and people are demanding regulators step in.

[LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 @LongTimeHistory]

ICE detain 2 teenage brothers— at high school bus stop.

10 carloads of agents surrounded kids—zip tied them in front of classmates.

15 and 18 year old brothers were then separated—sent to detention centers in different states.

Both were in U.S. legally with F-1 student visas.

ICE claims that their status changed because they transferred from a private to a public school.

Family says they were never alerted that the brothers fell out of status—and had no opportunity to fix the simple paperwork issue.

Israel Makoka and Max Makoka were both featured basketball stars at Hancock High in Diamondhead, Mississippi.

[LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 @LongTimeHistory]

ICE detain mother after victim of hit and run—that killed her 10 year old daughter.

Agents arrested her despite qualifying for a U Visa—as a victim of a crime who cooperates with police.

Locked up over 3 months now with 2 broken legs—denied medication prescribed after surgery.

Laura Ramirez immigrated legally from Colombia to Nashville, Tennessee—via the official CBP One mobile app for processing asylum claims.

She has been separated from her youngest daughter—who was also injured in the hit and run car crash but survived.

Now locked up 680 miles away from surviving 5 year old daughter at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, Louisiana. #DemsUnited

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Amazon just got caught running a secret price manipulation operation with Levi's, Home Depot, Walmart, and many more.

Every time you "comparison shopped" online, you were looking at prices that were already rigged.

Here's what happened:

Amazon would monitor prices on Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Chewy in real time. The second a competitor listed a product cheaper than Amazon, they'd contact the brand directly and tell them to "fix it."

And the exact emails are now PUBLIC.

Amazon sent Levi's links to two Walmart listings with the subject line "styles of concern." They basically said the prices on Walmart are too low and we have a problem.

The next day, Levi's responded: "I talked to Walmart and they have partnered with us to take Easy Khaki Classic fit back up to ladder SPP price, $29.99 immediately."

Levi's literally called Walmart and told them to raise the price. Because Amazon told Levi's to make the call.

Walmart complied. Then Amazon matched the HIGHER price.

Both retailers ended up charging more. The customer paid extra. Nobody competed.

Same playbook with Hanes:

Amazon sent them links showing Target and Walmart prices were lower. Hanes confirmed they "reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased."

Target increased the prices. Walmart increased the prices. Amazon kept their margins.

But it gets even worse...

Amazon told Allergan (the company that makes eye drops) that their product was "suppressed" on Amazon because it was cheaper on another site.

Allergan responded: "Walmart got their price back up to $16.99." Amazon then unsuppressed the listing.

They did this with pet treats on Chewy. Furniture on Home Depot. Products across dozens of categories spanning YEARS.

The mechanism is simple but terrifying:

If you're a brand and you sell cheaper on Walmart than on Amazon, Amazon suppresses your product, removes you from the Buy Box, buries you in search results, and effectively makes you invisible to 300 million customers.

Brands can't afford that. So they call Walmart and Target and say "raise your prices or we'll lose our Amazon listings."

Walmart and Target comply because they need the brand's products.

Amazon captures 40 cents of every dollar spent online in America. That gives them the leverage to set prices across THE ENTIRE internet. Not just their own platform.

So turns out, you were never comparison shopping.

You were looking at a coordinated price floor set by Amazon through backroom phone calls between brands and their competitors.

"Amazon is working to make your life more unaffordable."

3 separate antitrust trials are now scheduled for 2027. The FTC has its own case. 18 states plus the DOJ are piling on.

This is literally happening during the WORST affordability crisis in a generation. Groceries up 25% since 2020. Housing unaffordable. Wages flat.

And the largest ecommerce company on Earth has been secretly coordinating with brands to make sure you can't find a cheaper price ANYWHERE.

"Competition" in retail is just a fantasy.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

BREAKING: Maryland is about to become the first state in the nation to ban the use of surveillance data and dynamic pricing at grocery stores.

The Maryland House has just passed the Protection from Predatory Pricing Act.

Governor Wes Moore plans to sign the bill.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani is fulfilling his campaign promise to open 5 city-run grocery stores across NYC.

@NYCMayor told us the stores will:
- Offer staple goods at a reduced price, subsidized by the city.
- Contract a private vendor to run the stores who will be required to pay workers union wages.

La Marqueta in East Harlem, first opened as a public market by Mayor LaGuardia in 1936, will house one of the stores.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Read more: https://t.co/zbSjEH84g8.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

The Trump administration admitted that its probes into New York Medicare fraud were based on faulty findings.

Dr Oz, administrator for Medicare & Medicaid Services, claimed that New York’s Medicaid programs provided 5 million people, or ¾ of enrollees, with personal care services. Oz urged New York to “come clean about its Medicaid program.”

In reality, personal care services comprise 6-7%, and the Trump administration misunderstood how New York applied its billing practices.

[Warren Gunnels @GunnelsWarren]

The Walton family worth $538 billion forces Walmart workers to work part time paying them wages so low they must rely on food stamps and Medicaid to survive subsidized by your taxes reshaping the entire workforce & making the Walton family the biggest welfare queen in America.

[LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 @LongTimeHistory]

Brian Morales, a U.S. citizen, was deported to Mexico after a traffic stop on his way to work in Texas.

Born in Denver, Colorado, he has a birth certificate and a social security number, but he had not obtained a U.S. ID.

He claims he was threatened with imprisonment if he did not sign his departure papers.

His family questions the legality of the deportation and alleges it may have been a case of racism.

Link to full story:
https://t.co/EbG6rotNjZ

By — Lidia Terrazas @LidiaTerrazas
N+ UNIVISION @nmasunivision

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Starbucks announced it will expand tipping to make it easier for customers to tip baristas across the US. The company is also adding bonuses in stores that meet certain goals.

Except for union baristas.

The coffee giant won't extend these benefits to its unionized stores, as it continues engaging in some of the most egregious and rampant union busting in modern US history.

@SBWorkersUnited says baristas will largely have to rely on customers and management’s discretion for the extra compensation announced Thursday. The union also says it will continue to fight for a contract addressing pay, hours and store staffing.