Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

October 2025

October 24, 2025

Sidney's Picks:

Photo credit:

The East Wing under destruction. Victoria Pickering, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

Corpses with burns and missing limbs wash ashore in Trinidad after US murder spree in the Caribbean. (NYT)
Trump swore he wouldn’t touch the East Wing of the White House to build his ballroom, but he razed it to the ground. (NYMag, WaPo, ABC)
The government shutdown gets dire on Nov 1. (NYMag)
Are your meds made in a contaminated factory? The FDA won’t say. (ProPublica)
The first politically viable wealth tax may appear on the ballot in California in 2026. (Prospect)

October 20, 2025

Sidney's Picks: The Panopticon

Photo credit:

Surveillance Capitalism. Terrence Faircloth, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

ICE ramps up surveillance of “antifa,” a catchall term for their critics and political opponents (WaPo)
A 17-year-old asylum-seeker and her mom were thriving in the US, but ICE deported her back to Guatemala and disaster. (NYT)
Trump considers overhaul of immigration to favor white people. (NYT)
Sec Def Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend host, criminalizes routine reporting at the Pentagon. (CNN)
Starbucks closes Capitol Hill Roastery and hundreds of other stores with no notice. (Seattle Collegian)

October 10, 2025

Sidney's Picks: Department of Ed is Killing Public Education

Photo credit:

Bill B, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

“The Final Mission”: The Secretary of Education is destroying public education (ProPublica)
Children are starving to death in Myanmar because of Trump’s destruction of USAID. (AP)
How forward-thinking philanthropists and union leaders helped build the New Deal and save our democracy. (NYT)
Why does everything taste the same? Mega-distributor Sysco is taking over the restaurant industry. (More Perfect Union)
Trump is deporting people to an absolute monarchy in Africa. (MoJo)

October 3, 2025

Sidney's Picks: White House Threatens Universities

Photo credit:

Eden, Janine, and Jim, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

White House threatens to bankrupt nine universities unless they change programs that “punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” (CBS)
New research reveals exactly how heat kills workers. (WaPo)
On a junket to New Zealand, FBI director Kash Patel modeled law and order by presenting his hosts with illegal replica guns. (AP)
MAGAs are dragging Starbucks baristas into the culture war. (NYT)
Student journalists sue to stop Trump’s deportations of students for their political speech. (Press Freedom Fnd)