Political News

Authorities say former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s regime hired Tren de Aragua to kidnap a dissident who had taken refuge in Chile. The suspected mastermind, Diosdado Cabello, remains powerful in the new U.S.-backed government in Caracas. By Sebastian Rotella for ProPublica When Rafael Enrique Gámez Salas crossed the Mexican border in late 2024, U.S.

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A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | Musk would rather sue than hear about how many kids he’s killed…

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A Federal Trade Commission proposed policy statement criticizes a Colorado AI anti-discrimination effort. By Robbie Sequeira for Stateline The Trump administration is continuing its pushback against state artificial intelligence laws that it views as ideologically biased, proposing a new Federal Trade Commission policy. The proposed policy statement, which is open for public…

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As someone who watches too much soccer and knows Erling Haaland as perhaps the world’s most formidable striker playing today, seeing friends and acquaintances show me viral videos of the player as an onion has been quite funny. 

@mw10.03

Every household has some Halaand onions. My garlic has become a spirit. Strange garlic heads. Halaand. Halaand Song. Haaland. World Cup Meme King Tournament.

♬ 原声 – mw10.03

Despite my distaste for his club team (Manchester City is effectively owned by the United Arab Emirates, in large part to launder its image amid human rights violations), I do find Haaland very fun, especially in a sports industry where unrefined celebrity is rare. I particularly like this one:

Ok, I'm a fan of Haaland now after that smack he gives the 2nd kid

— Razzball (@razzball.bsky.social) 2026-07-06T21:28:15.170Z

Over the past month’s FIFA Men’s World Cup matches, fans have called the Norwegian striker various versions of “babygirl” and “princess.” The names largely come from the sharp contrast between his gigantic frame and endearing personality both on-camera and online. Haaland posts selfies with his “twin”—a low-res image of the animated character Shrek—on his Snapchat, and has a large designer bag collection—Chanel, Hermès, Louis Vuitton, etc. He is tailor-made for internet fandom.

But a lot of the most viral content is AI-generated, gets endlessly reshared, and is often uncannily accurate—including one where Haaland appears to get scared by his own reflection while eating.

I'm seriously going to die laughing at Haaland. pic.twitter.com/1Wfcbz2qza

— Crazy Moments (@Crazymoments01) June 29, 2026

We’re now at the point where news organizations and AI experts are fact-checking viral Haaland posts.

It’s unfortunate because I have enjoyed much of the internet’s newfound love affair with the player: comparisons to Dragon Ball Z villain Majin Buu, or the Heated Rivalry-inspired, if imaginary, shipping of Haaland and former teammate Jude Bellingham that has spiraled into yaoi lore fan-fiction.

bellingham vs haaland… heated rivalry https://t.co/7qQ8wtONDu pic.twitter.com/oo0Uf2CsFN

— currently clowning for BP3 (@sauritgaurs) July 6, 2026

The guy is showing many people how the sport, and the culture inseparable from it, can be fun. He effortlessly creates content on his own and inspires fans to run with it. We’ve got the memes and the fan fiction, so why do we need AI?

Computer, I beg you, please show me the true creativity and passion of the internet.

The Austin Democrat’s haul is a record for a U.S. Senate candidate in the second quarter of an election year and is nearly three times what Beto O’Rourke raised in the same period in 2018. By Kayla Guo for The Texas Tribune State Rep. James Talarico, the Democratic U.S. Senate nominee, raised a staggering $30 million from April through June, his campaign announced Wednesday — more…

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The Conversation is a weekly dive into the most popular stories on Daily Kos and what it tells us about the national political environment. Some weeks are about broad strokes—big policy, momentous decisions, world-shaping events. Then there are weeks like this one, where it’s death by a thousand paper cuts: all the little acts of President Donald Trump’s vanity, incompetence…

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The New York Times said that at least four of its journalists received subpoenas on Friday from the Justice Department following their report on concerns over insufficient security on the new, Qatari-donated Air Force One. 

The Times said that federal agents went to some of the reporters’ homes to deliver their subpoenas—an act of intimidation that David McRaw, the paper’s top newsroom lawyer, called “an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country.”

The subpoenas order the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury on Wednesday but, according to the Times, do not clearly indicate what they are expected to testify on. The newspaper also said the subpoenas were issued by Jay Clayton, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York and Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence.

On Wednesday, four New York Times reporters wrote that security concerns led Trump to use the old old Air Force One jet that same day to leave the NATO summit in Turkey, following a recommendation from the Secret Service. The reporters cited “people briefed on the plans” who called the move a precautionary measure due to antagonistic relations with Iran. 

When Trump presented the new $400 million jet from Qatar last month, he boasted that it “is considered the world’s most luxurious plane” and was “built at a level that will probably never be seen again.” In addition to questions over the propriety of accepting a donation from a foreign government, the “luxurious plane” required the Air Force to beef up the jet’s security. In fact, the Air Force has reportedly been working on upgrading security since September, likely at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. 

The subpoenas represent yet another significant attack on press freedom by the Trump administration. The Times said that before its Wednesday story was published, a senior FBI official asked the newsroom not to release it due to an issue of national security but did not offer further explanation.

“When the government claims it needs to investigate journalists to protect national security, it really means its own reputational security,” Seth Stern, the chief of advocacy of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit that supports journalists with digitally-secure communication tools, said in a Saturday statement. “The administration’s embarrassment that it reportedly charged taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars to retrofit a flying bribe that still isn’t secure enough for hostile times does not supersede the need for a free and independent press.”

When Lorenzo Salgado Araujo arrived at a Houston hospital after being shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Tuesday, he was admitted as a John Doe. The federal agents may not have known his name when they set out to the predominantly Latino East End neighborhood to apprehend immigrants that day, but they were extremely aware of who Salgado was as they stripped him of any form…

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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | GOP desperately insists Mitch McConnell is alive and well…

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This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For a few weeks each summer, the Sebasticook River in Benton, Maine, is paved with flashing silver scales, so thick it seems you could almost walk across. The alewives have returned for their annual migration.

On a mid-May weekend, Benton held its annual Alewife Festival on the riverbank. With the tunes of a local steel drum band in the background, families made fish-themed crafts, sampled smoked alewives, and watched the migration in progress. Below Benton Falls Dam, fishermen hauled alewives into their boats one full net at a time.

Looking at this scene, it’s hard to believe that 35 years ago, fewer than 800 alewives were making this trip upriver. Last year, they numbered 9 million.

The story of Maine’s alewives is a conservation success decades in the making—and unmatched on the rest of the Atlantic coast.

Like Benton, several Maine towns hold spring festivals or 5K runs to celebrate the alewives’ return. In the coastal town of Penobscot, it’s the biggest event of the year, according to Bailey Bowden, who heads the local alewife committee.

Bowden, age 60, is a ninth-generation resident of Penobscot, population 1,100. He first learned about alewives from older relatives when he was around five years old. There’s something special about this fish, he said.

“It’s pretty impressive to see a brook full of fish, thousands and thousands of these fish that you can just reach down into the water and catch them with your hands,” said Bowden, who sports a dark ponytail and a gray beard under his Alewife Harvesters of Maine cap.

The alewife, or river herring, doesn’t sound like a source of such enthusiasm. The name supposedly comes from the fish’s rotund silver bellies, an unflattering comparison to female tavernkeepers. 

The species lives mostly in the Atlantic Ocean, from Newfoundland to South Carolina, but in early summer the adults migrate as far as 100 miles inland to spawn in ponds and lakes. 

“This is a right that towns have had forever…It was a pretty big slap in the face to lose the right to harvest this fish.”

Alewives aren’t considered a game fish, though some people do catch and smoke them. But they are a linchpin for Maine’s river ecosystems—one that basically disappeared from many of those rivers for decades.

They act as a “biological conveyor belt” of nutrients between the ocean and inland waters, said Rustin Taylor, the executive director of the Alewife Harvesters of Maine. Seals, otters, bald eagles, ospreys, pollock, trout, and other carnivores eat alewives. The fish fed generations of Native communities and colonial and industrial American towns. The Passamaquoddy tribe’s name for the species, siqonomeq, translates to “the fish that feeds all.”

Today, lobster boats use alewives as a favorite and affordable bait, said Taylor, 47, who spent 12 years as part of a lobstering crew. “Maine fishermen are very lucky to have that resource,” said Taylor, whose home in Somesville, near Acadia National Park, overlooks the local alewife run, which he helps to steward. 

Part of the alewives’ charm is that “they swim up right into the heart of your town,” said 32-year-old Anne Zegers, the sea-run fisheries monitoring coordinator for Manomet Conservation Sciences, and a coordinator of the Gulf of Maine River Herring Network.

Alewife festivals, Zegers said, are a chance to celebrate alewives’ role in local ecosystems and economies and to talk about conservation. Plus, their migration coincides with returning warm weather, which after a long Maine winter is reason enough to hold a party, she said.

Taylor recalls seeing alewives in childhood, “before they disappeared in Somesville” during his teenage years. “I remember being mesmerized,” he said.

But even then, he was only seeing a remnant of the tens of millions of fish that once made the annual trip up Maine’s rivers. 

Beginning in the 1700s, dams created a series of aquatic roadblocks. Alewives can wriggle their way through shallows and rocky water, but they can’t make the giant leaps required to cross significant gaps. Instead, they get trapped downstream as easy pickings for predators, Zegers said.

As far back as colonial Maine, some dams were built with chutes or other methods to allow migration, but not all were well designed or maintained. It wasn’t enough to sustain the fish’s population. Dams downstream of Benton, for instance, decimated the town’s alewife harvest by the 1840s.

Even some modern dams had the same issues. In the town of Phippsburg, a fish channel from the 1980s sat more than 2 feet above the water at low tide, blocking migration for more than half of every day, said Troy Wallace, the town’s alewife committee chair. 

Overharvesting also hit alewife populations. In the 1950s, at the height of fisheries activity, Maine’s town harvests and offshore commercial fishing contributed to a nationwide catch that averaged about 170 million pounds per year, according to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC).

Alewife populations spiraled downward. Several rivers that had once supported millions of fish dwindled to fewer than a thousand.

“It takes a village to help the fish.”

Some communities took a hands-on approach to try to keep their alewife runs going. Bowden remembers scooping buckets of fish and depositing them upstream of Penobscot’s dams as a teenager.

Maine progressively placed more limits on commercial harvests from the 1960s through the 1990s, hoping to counter the downward trend. More and more harvests closed or became infrequent.

At their lowest in 1994, Maine’s town harvests caught only 150,000 pounds of alewives, down from more than 3 million at their peak.

In 2012, the ASMFC instituted a moratorium on all commercial alewife fishing on the Atlantic coast until states could demonstrate sustainable management plans. Local harvests also had to prove their sustainability before they could resume.

“This is a right that towns have had forever,” Bowden said. “It was a pretty big slap in the face to lose the right to harvest this fish.”

Since the 1990s, dam removals and fish channel construction have gradually reopened sections of the state’s rivers to migration.

“Some of those dam removals have led to incredible restorations of alewife migrations much faster than anticipated,” Taylor said.

Ecologically speaking, dam removal is the best method for reviving alewife migration. Taylor described removal of two dams on Maine’s Penobscot River as “probably one of the premier success stories of our time” for fish conservation. The effort started in 1999 and was completed in 2016.

When removal isn’t an option, bypasses are the go-to solutions.

In Benton, engineers built the fish equivalent of an elevator on the local hydroelectric dam in 2006. A large bucket dips into the downstream side of the river and attracts alewives with an artificial current. Every five minutes, the bucket closes and lifts to meet a chute at the top of the dam, where the fish are dumped out to continue upstream.

During the Alewife Festival in May, attendees got to observe buckets of alewives being lifted past the once-impenetrable barrier.

Towns with smaller dams can often get by with less-sophisticated solutions. In Penobscot, the fishway is a series of rocky pools that gradually change the elevation. Phippsburg replaced its inefficient 1980s channel with a similar rock-pool solution in 2025, said Wallace, a 54-year-old father of two who has been on his town’s alewife committee for 14 years. 

Designing an alewife highway comes with challenges. Downstream access is critical, since alewives don’t die after spawning, unlike salmon.

Both adults and juveniles can get trapped if a channel is poorly designed or if a drought lowers water levels, said Theo Willis, the Department of Marine Resources (DMR) sea-run fish restoration coordinator. 

Last summer’s drought in Maine led to mass die-offs of alewife spawn, Zegers said. 

About five years in advance of a fish-access project, the DMR must stock alewives in the pond or lake so the next generation will return to spawn. Willis described it as the “secret sauce” of successful alewife conservation. The state stocks more than 3 million fish annually.

Sometimes the challenges come from people, not fish. Businesses and private landowners can be resistant to modifying or removing their dams, requiring years of lobbying and negotiations. Citizens who have spent decades enjoying an artificial lake may not want to see it disappear.

“Getting people to realize that a different landscape, a flowing river landscape, is not the wrong landscape is probably one of the biggest challenges we face,” Willis said.

“We’ve gone from losing the fish completely in a lot of river systems…and now we have some of the largest populations in the globe.”

Zegers said removal has become “much more palatable to a lot of communities” as dams age and upkeep becomes more expensive.

A fish channel also requires ongoing maintenance. Every spring, people like Bowden, Taylor, and Wallace are out in the streams resetting rocks, replacing worn infrastructure, cleaning debris, clearing beaver dams, and filling cracks in concrete. 

“It takes a village to help the fish,” Taylor said.

Plus, there’s the cost, which can outstrip municipal budgets.

In Phippsburg, Wallace said the original plan to replace the fish channel in the mid-2010s would have cost more than $1 million, beyond what the 2,000-person town could afford. The rock pools installed last year instead cost about $200,000, half of which was covered by donations. Penobscot’s fishways and related projects have cost at least $6 million in grants and donations, Bowden said.

Nonprofits like the Nature Conservancy have funded some of these projects, including in Phippsburg. The state budget, federal grants and congressional discretionary spending usually cover most of the costs for major projects, according to the DMR. The 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act were windfalls for Maine’s migratory fish, with more than $60 million to fund 23 public-private projects.

The DMR still has a laundry list of dam removal and fish access projects for the near future, Willis said.

Today, Maine’s alewife population is looking better than it has in decades—and better than populations on most of the Atlantic coast.

“We’ve gone from losing the fish completely in a lot of river systems due to damming and pollution, and now we have some of the largest populations in the globe,” Taylor said.

In 2025, more than 20 million alewives were counted migrating in Maine, Zegers estimated from River Herring Network data. Benton Falls Dam, at 9 million fish, was the largest run in the state and one of a handful of sites with more than a million fish. Most runs range in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Penobscot had 169,000 alewives enter its two ponds to spawn last year, according to the River Herring Network. “It was definitely a cool thing to see these fish swimming where I watched them 30 years ago,” Bowden said.

In their wake come the eagles, seals, and other creatures searching for a meal. When alewives are running, the river downstream of Benton Falls Dam has the largest number of bald eagle sightings anywhere in New England, according to the DMR. In Penobscot, Bowden once counted 42 eagles in a half-mile area.

“Growing up, it was rare to see an eagle,” he said. “It’s just incredible how many eagles there are now.”

South of Maine, states aren’t seeing the same positive trend, and in some cases their populations are declining, according to the ASMFC. The commission still considers alewives to be significantly depleted.

Zegers said scientists aren’t sure of the cause, since other states are also pursuing dam removal and fish access. It may be because of differences in ocean fishing activity, she said, so fewer Maine alewives are caught at sea. Warmer oceans may be driving the fish north, away from their spawning grounds.

Or, it could just be that Maine’s alewife runs were bigger to begin with, so even a diminished population was still large enough to recover, she said.

With alewives on the rebound in most of Maine, the state is now expanding towns’ harvesting rights. It is one of only five states that have gotten federal approval for sustainable river herring fisheries. 

As of last year, 25 Maine municipalities have been granted the ability to commercially harvest alewives, according to Maine DMR data. 

In 2024, 2.5 million pounds of alewives were commercially harvested in Maine, all through local catches. Most former fisheries off the coast, which were historically the largest harvesters, remain closed, according to the DMR.

While harvesting alewives may seem contradictory to conservation, Taylor said they actually work in tandem. Harvesters’ knowledge of their rivers makes them the “canary in the coal mine” when something’s amiss in the migration, he said.

They also are active in cleanup and maintenance of their local fish channels, since that improves their future catch. 

“There needs to be an incentive to have this stewardship take place, and either that comes from the profit of an alewife harvest or it’s going to have to come out of local taxes,” Bowden said. 

Today, the Maine DMR and ASMFC maintain more control over harvests than in the 1950s. Towns manage their own harvests, but the state sets limits on when, where, and how much they can catch to make sure enough fish are reaching spawning grounds.

“We have seen enough abuses of over-harvests that the awareness is strong enough now that that’s not going to work out well.”

A town must track populations for 10 years to show at least 235 fish per acre in its spawning pool before getting approval to harvest. The DMR also studies scale samples to estimate the age, size, and gender ratio at each run.

Six municipalities are actively collecting data to reach that 10-year benchmark, including Phippsburg.

Wallace said Phippsburg’s run has been unpredictable. The town saw peak migrations of 50,000 to 60,000 fish each year in 2018 and 2019, followed by three years where fewer than 10,000 were counted. “We just never had what [the DMR] wanted to see for a fishery,” Wallace said.

Bowden, who is Penobscot’s contracted harvester, believes requiring a decade of data is too much, and that towns should be allowed incremental quotas as they continue to track populations. “Counting fish for 10 years is a drag, for sure,” he said.

When he first started working on restoring his local harvest, Bowden only needed five years of data. As the state gradually increased that threshold, he felt like the goalposts kept moving even though Penobscot’s run had reached healthy numbers. “The whole point was I want to catch a fish. That was where this all started. It was just ridiculous government red tape that I couldn’t, because the fish were there,” he said.

Taylor said some towns lost interest in their alewife work when the requirements changed.

Penobscot was allowed a small pilot harvest program in advance of the 10-year threshold, but last year was the town’s first full commercial harvest in more than 50 years. 

“It was a great feeling knowing that we were finally able to reclaim our rights to the fishery,” Bowden said.

Even as Maine’s alewife population trends upward, Zegers said their future is complex. 

The fish still contend with declining numbers in other states, plus threats like fishing on the open ocean and climate change–driven droughts. This summer, Zegers said several towns have reported lower-than-usual migration numbers. It will take time to figure out why.

There are “so many things to keep you up at night,” she said.

Meanwhile, Taylor said he feels reasonably optimistic. Since many harvesters grew up during the days when alewives had all but disappeared from their hometown rivers, he thinks this generation is likely to avoid the errors of the past.

“We have seen enough abuses of over-harvests that the awareness is strong enough now that that’s not going to work out well,” Taylor said.

Community awareness seems to be heading in the same direction, he said. After all, what other fish inspires so many parties in its honor? “Maybe people take care of things once it’s been lost and regained a little bit,” he said.

With Graham Platner bowing out of the race for U.S. Senate in Maine following allegations that he raped his former partner, the scramble to replace him is well underway—and the field of possible alternatives is starting to get considerably crowded.

Since the allegations that essentially ended Platner’s campaign came out, on Monday, the Maine Democratic Party has been constructing a plan to select another candidate. The party has landed on hosting a nominating convention, which will include 500 delegates elected proportionally by county committees and a preexisting 100-person state committee. Together, those 600 delegates will decide which of the many potential Platner replacements will face Republican Senator Susan Collins in November. They have until July 27 to officially nominate Platner’s opponent. (The convention has not yet been scheduled.) Meanwhile, Platner still has business to attend to—he has until Monday at 5 p.m. to officially withdraw his name from the ballot.

The delegates will have a wide field of candidates to choose from—so far, seven have declared their candidacy. To be eligible for nomination, candidates must garner 500 signatures, a potential barrier to entry for some of the lesser-known candidates.

Broadly speaking, the candidates who have announced their desire to run have been emphasizing their progressive and working-class credentials in an effort to hew as close as possible to the policy platform that lifted Platner to his primary victory, while distancing themselves from his scandals.

Still, there are distinctions to be made among the would-be players in this burgeoning field. Here is an early guide to who the seven candidates currently vying to take on Collins are—and where they stand on some critical policy questions.

Troy Jackson: Jackson’s name was one of the first floated after the allegations against Platner came to light. An anonymous memo circulated among some progressive strategists emphasized “his authentic working class bonafides” and said that his “anti-establishment message [contrasts] effectively against Collins as a swamp creature.” Jackson is a fifth-generation logger from Allagash and the former president of the Maine Senate.

Recently, Jackson came in third place in the state’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. In that race, he was endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders. Before running for governor, he served in the Maine state Senate from 2008 to 2014 and again from 2016 to 2024.

Jackson supports Medicare for All, has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, and says he’ll never vote in favor of taxpayer-funded aid to Israel. In recent days, he has been endorsed by Representative Ro Khanna and the Maine AFL-CIO.

Nirav Shah: Shah is another 2026 gubernatorial candidate. He garnered the highest number of votes but ultimately lost the primary to Hannah Pingree due to ranked-choice voting.

Shah is a public health official who served as director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention from 2019 to 2023 and the principal deputy director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2023 until 2025.

“The other thing that voters in Maine are clearly looking for is someone who is an outsider. I come to this race not having been part of the political establishment in Maine or indeed even in the United States,” Shah said in a CNN interview.

Before serving in Maine and at the CDC, Shah was director of the Illinois Department of Public Health. During his tenure, an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease killed 13 people. This has recently come back to haunt him: When Shah announced his bid to replace Platner, Senator Tammy Duckworth wrote in a post on X that she “strongly [opposes]” his run for Senate due to his handling of the outbreak.

Shah supports Medicare for All, says that ICE “in its current form” cannot continue, and has described Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide.

In a poll released Thursday, Shah showed the best chance of beating Collins in November, though the poll had him winning by just one point.

Shenna Bellows: Bellows came fourth in this year’s gubernatorial primary. She is currently Maine’s secretary of state. She has run for Senate before—in 2014, she went head-to-head with Susan Collins and lost in a landslide, notching only 32 percent of the vote against Collins’s 68 percent share. This was a wipeout: Collins carried every county in the state. Before entering politics, Bellows served as the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine from 2005 to 2013.

Bellows has scrubbed the policy pages of her gubernatorial campaign website, but has explained some of her policy positions in interviews during her run for governor. She proposed creating a Maine Housing Corps to increase the supply of housing in the state, and suggested that Maine “work toward universal, single payer healthcare.” In an X post announcing her run for Senate, Bellows said she supports Medicare for All.

Jordan Wood: Wood ran for the House seat in Maine’s second congressional district this year, garnering just shy of 29 percent of the vote. Wood was former Representative Katie Porter’s chief of staff and vice president of End Citizens United, a group that seeks to end the influence of money in politics.

Like most of the other candidates, Wood supports Medicare for All and believes that Israel is committing a genocide, and that any U.S. aid to the country must come with conditions. In an interview with The New Republic, Wood also emphasized his support for universal childcare, said that the Senate needs new leadership, and said that the Senate should get rid of the filibuster.

He expressed concern that the other candidates for the Senate seat haven’t yet explained their views on national policy: “I don’t have any idea what they think of future leadership. I don’t know what they think about the filibuster. You wouldn’t ask those questions at a debate for the governor’s race,” he said.

Dan Kleban: Kleban is the co-founder of Maine Beer Company in Freeport. He ran for Senate in late 2025, but dropped out of the race to support Governor Janet Mills just one month later.

In a Substack post announcing his candidacy on Wednesday, Kleban emphasized his status as a political outsider but didn’t share any policy proposals. “I’ve spent years talking to Mainers over a beer in our taproom and throughout the community. We’re all sick and tired of a system that’s been rigged by corporate interests, and we’ve had enough meddling from Washington establishment insiders and New York City consultants trying to dictate who represents us,” he wrote.

Paige Loud: Loud is a social worker who, like Wood, ran for the House seat in the second district. She received 10 percent of the vote. Loud has a progressive platform that emphasizes health care and food security. She supports Medicare for All, raising and tying the minimum wage to inflation, and eliminating the Social Security income cap. She has called for an end to the genocide in Gaza and for a block on all U.S. weapons transfers to Israel.

David Costello: Costello ran in the Democratic primary for Senate and received 8 percent of the vote (Platner received 72 percent).

Costello shared a list of his policy priorities with The New Republic. They include Medicare for All, universal childcare, an elimination of the payroll tax cap, judicial and legislative term limits, and a ban on gerrymandering (among other proposals).

He’s also called for an “end to presidential wars of choice and holding allies and foes accountable for war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and other human rights violations.”

In an email, Costello emphasized his experience in government, having served as an aide to Maine’s secretary of state, the mayor of Baltimore, and the governor of Maryland.

Sam Bankman-Fried was once called the “crypto king.” But in November 2022, his company, FTX, imploded within a matter of days. All around the world, customers of the cryptocurrency exchange were suddenly cut off from their money. 

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“I tried to withdraw an amount, you know, and it would spin and say, your, your withdrawal is pending,” says Tareq Morad, an investor from Canada. “I remember myself doing that around 7, 8 o’clock at night, checking back, going to look: Okay, did it go through? Did it go through? No. No. No.”

Meanwhile, inside the company, employees were panicking. “All that we were told was there’s been a run on the bank and, somehow, money is missing and we don’t know who to trust,” remembers Caroline Papadopoulos, part of FTX’s accounting leadership at the time. 

This week on Reveal, through prison interviews with Bankman-Fried, his parents, FTX insiders, and customers, we take you through the frantic week of FTX’s collapse and the controversial and less well-known bankruptcy that followed. At a cost of nearly $1 billion, it has become one of the most expensive in history. 

Read the FTX bankruptcy estate’s on-the-record statement to Reveal. 

This is an update of a show that originally aired in September 2025.

From the start, critics of President Donald Trump’s memorandum of understanding with Iran—the one that led to the current broken ceasefire—noted that it gave Iran de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz. Not only had Trump failed in all of his stated objectives—regime change, ending Iran’s nuclear program, and ending its support for terrorist groups—but he also promised Iran hundreds of…

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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Trump’s spite finally finds worthy target: The GOP Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch. Hegseth ramps up discrimination in the Navy His plot to resegregate the military is going swimmingly. Admitted killer wins GOP governor’s nomination in Colorado…

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Support my Patreon for early access and exclusives. Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, or at my website. Related | GOP desperately insists Mitch McConnell is alive and well…

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Here’s some quality, politically adjacent gossip to boost your spirits: Kristi Noem and Bryon Noem are reportedly heading for divorce. According to the Daily Mail, Kristi Noem’s mother confirmed that her daughter, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security, had begun divorce proceedings. “It has been difficult, but we knew this was coming, that they were going to get…

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The Trump administration is planning on building a fleet of government-owned planes specifically to perform 24-7, short-notice deportations as part of its all-out effort to make Trump’s delusions of one million deportations per year a reality.

The Department of Homeland Security is currently looking for a private company to operate a fleet of at least nine large jets both at home and abroad, providing the DHS with pilots, nurses, and security, Bloomberg reports. In addition to last-minute deportations, the planes will also carry the upper echelon of the administration’s staff on diplomatic trips.

Although the government has yet to disclose how much its 24-7 fleet would cost, it spent about $140 million on six Boeing deportation jets last year. And the Federal Aviation Administration has recently noted that multiple jets from Avelo—an aircraft company that has already worked closely with DHS—are now owned by DHS.

The MAGA-verse generally celebrated the news. Owning its own fleet would make it easier for the government to carry out deportations, perhaps the key tenet of the administration’s agenda. Yet the administration is still no closer to reaching its unrealistic goal of one million deportations per year.

DHS estimates that a contract would begin in summer of 2027 and continue through 2032.

Gas prices are once again climbing as President Donald Trump’s ceasefire with Iran has fallen apart. This week, the United States carried out some of its heaviest strikes since Trump launched this terrible war of choice in February. “The Islamic Republic of Iran has asked us to continue ‘talks.’ We have agreed to do so, but the United States has stated to them, in no uncertain terms…

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Senator Mitch McConnell may be in the hospital for undisclosed reasons, but apparently there’s still work to be done on his house.

TMZ reports that a man carrying carpet samples was spotted leaving McConnell’s residence in Washington, D.C., Friday.

Mitch McConnell's D.C. home getting new flooring as he remains hospitalized. pic.twitter.com/FREeemYLC1

— TMZ (@TMZ) July 10, 2026

Charlie Cotton, a Washington, D.C. producer for the tabloid website, was at the house to see if he could find any new information about McConnell’s health, which his office has been virtually silent about. He spotted the man with carpet samples and spoke to him off camera. The man said that in addition to new carpet, new tiles were being considered for the home.

Speculation and rumors about McConnell’s condition have spread since his hospitalization June 14, with unconfirmed reports stating that he is brain-dead, while his fellow Republicans claim to have had long conversations with him. Meanwhile, McConnell’s Senate office hasn’t offered any updates on his health, only saying that he is receiving “excellent care.”

Video footage from McConnell’s home taken by a neighbor on the day of McConnell’s hospitalization showed a stretcher being led away by first responders, while police had blocked off the street. The person’s feet didn’t seem to be moving, and according to the neighbor, the first responders weren’t showing any urgency.

McConnell lives at his Washington home with his wife, former Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao. Why are they replacing its flooring now, when McConnell is in the hospital? Does this indicate some kind of change in the senator’s condition? Is the family preparing to sell the home? As long as McConnell’s family and staff remain silent, news like this will only increase conspiracy theories and rumors.

President Donald Trump isn’t done transforming one of the nation’s most iconic buildings into an active construction site and expecting Americans to foot the bill.

The front doors of the White House, which face toward Lafayette Park and pedestrian traffic, are currently undergoing security improvements, as repairs are made to the iconic columns on the North Portico, CBS News reported Friday.

On Friday, tarps were spotted on the front of the White House’s North Portico, printed with images of what the structure should look like while renovations carry on underneath.

This is just the most recent renovation project the White House has undertaken without approval from Congress, which is required to approve any construction on federal land. For months, Trump has treated the White House—which belongs to all Americans, not just the president—like one of his gaudy resort properties.

Last month, Trump began construction on a helipad in the South Lawn without any official notice. At the same time, the Trump administration moved to renovate the White House’s South Portico and re-top the driveway.

The White House later demanded the contractor speed up the project’s timeline, adding $875,000 to the already $13 million price tag. The contractor’s documents showed that the company received a last-minute demand to complete construction by mid-September in anticipation of an “upcoming state visit.” The request was made just days after Trump invited Chinese President Xi Jinping to visit the White House on September 24. The North Portico project is also estimated to be completed around mid-September.

Trump claimed that Sikorsky, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin that builds Marine One helicopters, would cover the cost of a $5 million or $6 million helipad—but it seems likely that American taxpayers will pick up the tab for the rest of his construction.

That wasn’t the first time that the budget for one of the president’s renovations has exploded. Trump originally claimed that his White House ballroom project would only cost $200 million and wouldn’t touch the original building. But Trump then demolished the White House’s East Wing, and the cost of construction ballooned to $300 million, and then $400 million after he decided to tack on extra building. Last month, a bombshell report revealed that taxpayers would actually be responsible for half of a $600 million price tag.

But there’s reason to be concerned about the former slum lord’s various construction projects: just look at the president’s toxic Reflecting Pool or his crumbling venue for the Fourth of July!