Clear It with Sidney | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

Clear It with Sidney

Sidney's Picks: Trump May Double the Price of Coffee to Help a Fascist

Photo credit: 

Steven Miller, Creative Commons. 

The Best of the Week’s News

Sidney's Picks: The Budget by the Numbers

Photo credit: 

JackCreative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News
 

  • The horrors of the Republican budget in 10 charts. (NYT)
     

  • “Free fall”: A public health crisis looms as RFKjr attacks vaccines. (TNR)
     

  • Camera catches ICE agents urinating in a California schoolyard. (NYT)
     

  • Immigration raids leave crops unharvested and California farms’ futures uncertain. (Reuters) 
     

  • Putin bombards Ukraine in one of the most intense attacks of the war after call with Trump. (WaPo)

 

Sidney's Picks: Bill Moyers Dies at 91

Photo credit: 

Gage SkidmoreCreative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News
 

  • Legendary broadcaster Bill Moyers dies at 91. (AP)
     

  • Senate Republicans consider hiking federal employees’ pension contributions—except for members of Congress and their staff. (Politico)
     

  • Emil Bove told his DOJ subordinates he was willing to defy court orders to enforce Donald Trump’s agenda, now he wants to be a federal judge. (NYT, ABC)

     

  • 68-year-old Mexican man becomes the first ICE detainee in a decade to die in transit from a jail to a detention center. (Guardian)
     

  • DOGE cuts could cost the US $10 billion in lost economic activity. (CREW)
     

  • “I feel like I’ve been lied to”: Measles outbreak shakes faith in antivax platitudes as RFK takes his anti-vaccine ideology global. (NYT, NYer)
     

  • The Republican budget could kill one of the most effective tools for bird conservation. (WaPo)

Sidney's Picks: How Black Lung Came Roaring Back to Appalachia

Photo credit: 

Miner’s Monument, Bernard SpraggCreative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News
 

  • ICE deported Pedro Luis Salazar-Cuervo to a notorious Salvadoran prison for standing next to a guy with tattoos. (Texas Trib)
     

  • How black lung came roaring back in Appalachia. (NYT)
     

  • The Senate’s budget reconciliation bill would sell off 40% of all public landand trigger a hospital apocalypse. (Wes Siler NL, Prospect)
     

  • A Christian nationalist Appeal To Heaven flew briefly above a US government agency. (Wired)
     

  • Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders get a 400% raise. (NYT)

Sidney's Picks: Can you prove you're a citizen?

Photo credit: 

Brian HerzogCreative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News
 

  • Can you prove you’re a citizen? ICE detains some U.S. citizens for months. (NYMag)
     

  • Jeffrey Epstein invested with Peter Thiel, and the disgraced financier’s estate, not his victims, are reaping the returns. (NYT)
     

  • Women who have miscarriages could be prosecuted in West Virginia. (Newsweek)
     

  • Trump puts a 22-year-old former Heritage Foundation intern in charge of key program countering hate crimes. (ProPublica)
     

  • Israel kills three journalists in attack on Gazan hospital as press freedom groups demand access to Gaza. (Middle East Eye, CPJ)

Sidney's Picks: Major MAHA Report Contains Fake Citations

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Crest ResearchCreative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News
 

  • Major MAHA child health report cited numerous imaginary papers, which suggests the whole document was AI-generated. (NOTUS, NYT)
     

  • Remembering legendary New York muckraker and Hillman Prize-winner Tom Robbins. (The City, NYT)

     

  • Elon Musk’s drug use was out of control on the campaign trail. (NYT)
     

  • Two NYPD officers, including a member of mayor Eric Adams’ security detail, are under investigation in connection to the kidnapping and torture of an Italian crypto investor. (NBC 4) 
     

  • The U.S. is storing the DNA of migrant children in a database normally used to track criminals. (Wired)

Sidney's Picks: Trump peddles myth of "White Genocide"

Photo credit: 

Jeremy Brooks, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

Sidney's Picks: Threats against US judges soar

Photo credit: 

Celebrating the Hillman Prizes in New York City this week. 

The Best of the Week’s News

  • Violent threats against judges surge online as federal jurists receive a barrage of unsolicited pizza deliveries in the name of a judge’s son who was murdered by a disgruntled litigant. (Wired, CBS)
     

  • DOGE claimed that 40% of direct deposit calls to Social Security were fraudulent but their new fraud detection system puts the real number at a fraction of 1%. (NextGov)

     

  • USDA and DOGE demand unprecedented details about food stamp recipientsfrom states. (NPR)
     

  • A brain dead pregnant woman in Georgia is being kept alive against her family’s wishes because of the state’s abortion law. (11Alive) 
     

  • Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele cracks down on the free press. (Yahoo)

Sidney's Picks: Columbia Drops Suspension of Student Journalist

Photo credit: 

Statue of John Wilkes, 18th century champion of press freedom, Geoff Henson Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News
 

  • Columbia and Barnard issued and dropped interim suspensions of student journalists who covered a pro-Palestinian protest at the Butler Library, just days after World Press Freedom Day. (Columbia Spectator, Guardian) 

     

  • Seven Salvadoran journalists from the Hillman Prize-winning outlet El Faro face criminal charges for exposing president Bukele’s pact with the Barrio 18 Revolucionarios gang. (CPJ, El Faro)
     

  • Workers at Kentucky’s BlueOval SK plant report broken bones, toxic mold, and a bat infestation. (Courier Journal)
     

  • Trump’s tariffs could erase the hard-won gains of Bangladeshi garment workers. (NYT)
     

  • With hurricane season approaching, the National Weather Service’s forecasting capabilities are even more degraded than we thought. (CNN)
     

  • ICE arrests workers involved in historic unionization struggle. (Intercept)

Sidney's Picks: Columbia Student Arrested at Citizenship Interview is Released

The Best of the Week’s News
 

  • Columbia student arrested at citizenship interview is released. (NYT)

     

  • A Mockery of Due Process: The latest on Trump’s Alien Enemies Act deportations from April’s Sidney winners. (MoJo)

     

  • Inside the Taganrog prison, where Russia tortures Ukrainians. (Guardian)
     

  • John Fetterman’s downward spiral. (NYMag)
     

  • DOGE has a college student rewriting housing regulations with AI. (Wired)
     

  • Autocracy is here. (NYer)

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