The Department of Veterans Affairs headquarters in Washington DC on 13 February. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

The Department of Veterans Affairs has imposed new guidelines on VA hospitals nationwide that remove language that explicitly prohibited doctors from discriminating against patients based on their political beliefs or marital status.

Cuts to state-funded preschool and child care programs concerned child care advocates, who worry that it will erase recent progress. (Getty Images)

Another member of Gov. Mike Braun’s administration pinned policy changes on former state leaders growing a child care and preschool subsidy program beyond its means. 

A worker installs a solar panel on a roof. (Getty Images)

WASHINGTON —  Clean energy manufacturers and advocates say they’re perplexed how the repeal of tax credits in President Donald Trump’s “one big beautiful bill” will keep their domestic production lines humming across the United States, particularly in states that elected him to the Oval Office.

I fear our mistakes far more than the strategy of our enemies. —Thucydides (470–400 b.c.), Pericles’ Funeral Oration

It wasn’t all at once (although sometimes the last three months seem that way). Authoritarianism never is. It happens drip by drip, crisis by crisis, until people forget what normal even felt like.

The contested land of Palestine had been largely populated by Muslim peoples from the 7th century until the mid-twentieth century.  In 1947, the year that the United Nations recommended the partition of Palestine into two states, only 1/3 of the land’s inhabitants were of Jewish background.

Janine Jackson interviewed independent journalist Katya Schwenk about Boeing’s non-prosecution deal for the June 6, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Update: On June 6, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to allow DOGE personnel to access sensitive Social Security Administration systems that hold personally identifiable information on millions of Americans, while the litigation about their access (AFSCME, AFL-CIO, et al. v. Social Security Administration) proceeds.

Elon Musk and DOGE have done irreparable damage to a social safety net already under stress. (Graphic by Truthdig. Images sourced via AP Photo and Adobe Stock.)

The founders of our nation well understood the importance of universal quality public education. The first law mandating public schools paid for with taxpayer dollars was passed in Massachusetts in 1647: to this day, that state is notable for its historic emphasis on education.[lxix]

As Thomas Jefferson, who founded America’s first tuition-free public college (the University of Virginia), noted in a letter to Colonel Charles Yancey on January 6, 1816:

News 6/6/25

Loretta Young, President of NAACP WV State Chapter, at a rally in downtown Lewisburg, WV Lyn MacCorkle

British author and poet George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”

While confronting the monstrosity of the so-called “big beautiful bill” that recently passed the House of Representatives, one might imagine Orwell hollering at us from the past, “Did I call it or what?”

Israeli tanks opened fire last Sunday on a crowd of thousands of starving Palestinians at an aid distribution center in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. The victims had gathered in hopes of finding food for themselves and their families, following a nearly three-month total Israeli blockade of the territory. At least 31 people were killed; one Palestinian was also killed by Israeli fire the same day at another distribution site in central Gaza.

When Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was fighting for climate justice in her home country and the world stage, the New York Times gave her top billing. She co-authored an op-ed (8/19/21), and was the subject of a long interview (10/30/20).

_{Photo: On Wednesday, May 28, Palestinians travelled long distances to the aid distribution point controlled by the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Relief Foundation’ in the southern Gaza Strip (Abdallah F.s. Alattar/Anadolu via Getty Images).}

It’s been a week since the Israeli government launched a widely condemned aid scheme, circumventing the UN to take control over the distribution of aid across Gaza. In the days since, Israeli forces have opened fire multiple times on starving Palestinians queuing for aid, massacring over 100 people.

The new book Empire of AI by longtime technology reporter Karen Hao unveils the accruing political and economic power of AI companies — especially Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Her reporting uncovered the exploitation of workers in Kenya, attempts to take massive amounts of freshwater from communities in Chile, along with numerous accounts of the technology’s detrimental impact on the environment. “This is an extraordinary type of AI development that is causing a lot of social, labor and environmental harms,” says Hao.

Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike in Jabaliya refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, on May 27, 2025. (Photo by Mahmoud Zaki/Xinhua via Getty Images)

DEIR AL-BALAH, GAZA STRIP—The genocide in Gaza is fast approaching 20 months since it began. My family and I have been displaced from our home in the Jabaliya refugee camp several times, but this is the first time we were forced to leave the north and flee south to Deir al-Balah, from where I am writing to you.

The Supreme Court building. (Graphic by Truthdig. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Megha Vemuri at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last year. Photograph: Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

E-ZPass readers and license plate-scanning cameras are seen on Park Row in February 2025 in New York City. Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty Images

Opposition by former high officials in Israeli’s military and national security establishment and Israeli allies – France, England, and Germany – to the aimless killing of civilian families in Gaza is increasing. The mainstream, U.S. media has no excuse to cease its incomplete and biased reporting on the horrific genocidal mass slaughter in Gaza. Former  Deputy Minister of Economy Yair Golan called out Netanyahu for “engaging in baby killing as a hobby.”

Trump opened Memorial Day in the most disgusting way possible, not by praising our fallen heroes but by attacking Democrats. He wrote on his Nazi-infested social media site on Monday morning:

“Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds…”

Sorry for reposting this but I just heard former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels implying that the Biden economic record has been poor for the economy. The material below indicates that under Republican rule in Indiana for over a decade the economic circumstances (and education, good paying jobs etc.) have worsened for Hoosier workers and their families..

Harry Targ (a relevant repost from December 24, 2021)

This column was originally published by TheStatehouseFile.com

By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
May 19, 2025

Here’s a serious question.