October 2025 | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

October 2025

Sidney's Picks:

Photo credit: 

The East Wing under destruction. Victoria PickeringCreative 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)

Sidney's Picks: The Panopticon

Photo credit: 

Surveillance Capitalism. Terrence FairclothCreative 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)

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

Photo credit: 

Bill BCreative 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)

Sidney's Picks: White House Threatens Universities

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)