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On June 24, the Pajaro Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees will consider placing a school facilities bond measure on the November ballot that would provide $192 million for repairs and upgrades at the district’s 35 schools.

The measure, if passed, would not increase tax rates for residents within district boundaries. Instead, it would replace Measure J, which voters approved in 2002 and which expires in 2030. That would maintain the current tax rate of $120 per $100,000 of assessed valuation.

That was part of a report to the trustees by Dale Scott, whose eponymous company conducted a $15,000 survey of 410 voters from May 26 to June 1 to gauge support for the bond.

The survey tested two versions of potential ballot language for a November 2026 bond measure. One version emphasized updating career-training classrooms and received 58% support, with an additional 9% of respondents leaning yes. The other focused on replacing deteriorating portable classrooms and received 57% support, with 8% leaning yes.

Survey respondents expressed strong support for public education generally, with 80% agreeing that Pajaro Valley’s public schools are the community’s most important asset. Another 80% agreed that quality schools increase property values.

“Is there any other issue that 80% of your voters agree upon?” Scott asked the board.

Among the projects tested, voters responded most favorably to proposals to update career-training and college-preparation facilities, improve accessibility for people with disabilities, modernize science and career-technical education classrooms, and repair aging infrastructure such as roofs, plumbing, electrical systems and heating and cooling equipment.

The most persuasive taxpayer protections included assurances that bond funds could only be spent on local projects, could not be taken by the state or federal government, would be subject to public disclosure requirements and independent oversight, and could not be used for administrator salaries or pensions.

The district is considering placing the measure on the Nov. 3, 2026, ballot. According to the presentation, the school board is scheduled to consider action June 24, ahead of the county’s Aug. 7 filing deadline.

The proposal drew criticism from the two people who addressed the board.

Pajaro Valley Federation of Teachers President Brandon Diniz said the union would support a bond measure that instead funded teacher salaries.

“So you’re still not seeing a tax increase, but now you’re getting to fund the people who do the work and not the schools that we’re going to be closing,” he said. “If we oppose this bond measure, you won’t get it passed. That’s just the facts, and the power that lies in the hands of the people. And right now, from where I’m standing, we would oppose this and we would work to tank this bond measure and let people put more of their tax dollars back in their pocket.”

Renaissance High School teacher Chris Webb agreed and pointed to a recent similar measure in the San Jose Unified School District that failed.

“If you keep attacking your bread-and-butter people, you’re kind of shooting yourselves in the foot,” he said.

Instead, the district should ask the people who work in the schools what they need.

“We need to do better,” he said. “We need a culture change that’s from the bottom up.”

Trustee Gabe Medina questioned why relatively few survey respondents came from his trustee area, which includes portions of Monterey County.

Scott said participation from each trustee area was proportional to the number of registered voters living there.

But Medina questioned that, saying his community should have had more representation.

“We’re disenfranchising voters who should have a say, because if we do approve this, they’re going to be impacted by this,” he said.

“…If I get them out there to sway this vote, I could tank this.”

Trustee Misty Navarro said that, as a taxpayer in the district, five of the seven measures on her property tax statement are from PVUSD.

“I don’t know that another one is going to pass,” she said. “I think that it’s a little too close, in my personal opinion, to Measure M, and we haven’t actually showed our taxpayers what we’re doing with Measure M yet.”

Members of the Watsonville Community Band deliver a few tunes for Don Spence in front of his Watsonville home Wednesday evening. Spence, 93, is their oldest musician and is recuperating from medical procedures. A clarinetist in the band, he marched his final parade last year at age 92. The band had just wrapped up their marching practice for the upcoming 4th of July parade. (contributed)

All honor is due to whoever decided that the opening of Barack Obama’s presidential center in Chicago should come right before Donald Trump’s planned July 4 gala on the National Mall. The two events will serve as perfect touchstones for the bigger argument that our country’s 250th anniversary is prompting—the argument over American national identity.

The forty-fourth president delivered an emotional speech at the Obama Presidential Center’s opening ceremony on Thursday. It offered a blistering indictment of the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president, all without mentioning the words “Donald Trump,” while offering his own ambitious rendering of the American story.

Yet in so doing, the speech also sent an implicit message to Democrats: Defeating Trumpism, MAGA, and the right-wing nationalist vision of America that animates them requires something more than small-bore politics and slogans about “affordability.” It requires a bigger and better story, a positive and aspirational vision, a full-throated declaration of what we liberals think the United States is—and should be—instead.

Obama has long been a spokesperson for the idea of creedal nationalism, which holds that American identity is defined by our founding ideals, versus a nationalism rooted in heritage or ethnicity or race. And so, Obama declared that the “story of America at its best” rests on “shared values that make democracy possible.” They include:

a belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and that no one is above the law or beneath its protection, a belief in checks and balances in our government … a belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution.

Let’s be blunt: It’s a defining fact of this moment that Trump and his movement simply do not accept any of those things. And it’s important that Obama used this moment to say so. Obama also lionized “the peaceful transfer of power” and called for a reaffirmation of “character, honesty, integrity” and “a sense of duty and honor” in public life. Guess who he was talking about?

But creedal nationalism was the main event here. To reinforce the idea, Obama also declared that these values are embodied in the Declaration of Independence, which provided the “framework that allows each generation to make our union more perfect.” Implicitly targeting Trump, Obama said that when we give up on these ideals:

we open the door to the most ruthless, or the most careless, or the most fearful among us, who see some groups as more equal than others, and see government as nothing more than a way to divvy up the spoils and punish enemies, and keep those who are different in their place. I do not believe that is the story of America that prevails in the end.

Emphasis mine. That’s as close as I’ve seen any leading Democrat come to stating outright that Trump and MAGA fundamentally do not accept the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality. This is where liberals should go in the battle over our 250th anniversary.

Indeed, in delivering these lines, Obama likely had in mind not just Trump but also recent claims from JD Vance. The vice president—a self-imagined MAGA philosopher-king—has declared that “America is not just an idea.” Citing his own ancestors’ burial on a “mountainside in Eastern Kentucky,” Vance suggests that the “source of America’s greatness” is the “ancestral” bond Americans feel with the “homeland.” Vance mocks the “creedal nation” by insisting that its logic leads to an unacceptable conclusion: that all foreigners, everywhere, might instantly have a claim to U.S. citizenship merely by mouthing agreement with our founding ideals.

Few if any prominent Democrats or liberals believe anything like that last bit. The idea, rather, is that immigrants do have a claim to becoming Americans—they are “Americans in waiting”—provided they clear certain civic hurdles, including adherence to the nation’s founding ideals. Their rates of admission, and the conditions that shape their arrival and assimilation, are agreed upon democratically by our elected representatives in Congress and subject to revision over time. But yes, in the liberal vision, the idea that immigrants do have a conditional claim to belonging is fundamental to American identity.

Vance’s big claim, by contrast, is that fealty to our founding ideals cannot be the basis for American national identity. Blood and hereditary attachment to the soil are, to him, essential ingredients.

True, Vance takes care to praise immigrants and is married to a daughter of them. But he has also mocked immigrant Zohran Mamdani for mildly criticizing the United States, insisting Mamdani should be thankful for his admission here and thus self-censor. As Jamelle Bouie notes, put all this together, and Vance’s vision of citizenship involves “tiers of belonging,” in which those with long ancestry—“heritage Americans”—hold a superior position in an imagined national hierarchy.

Or, as Obama put it, that vision sees “some groups as more equal than others.” In this sense, Obama’s speech is a rebuttal to this sort of Vance-MAGA nationalism. Along these lines, Obama also gave a shout-out to the people in Minneapolis, who:

braved frigid temperatures, risked their own safety, standing shoulder to shoulder to look out for their neighbors, and sometimes look out for strangers, because they knew that was the right thing to do.

Among the “strangers,” of course, are all the immigrants—undocumented and legal—who were targeted by Trump for forced mass removals.

In this understanding, the “strangers” do not become Americans simply via support for the nation’s ideals. But they may well be on the road to becoming Americans, via a social process. Crucially, the ties Obama describes here are not purely cerebral or only rooted in “an idea,” as Vance puts it. These are moral, ethical, communitarian, and even cultural ties that develop over time. And this process is molded by majorities deciding—again, democratically—how to shape their political life together and who can share in it.

In a recent column, Ross Douthat, a skillful interpreter of Vance, tries to offer a more measured critique of “creedal” nationalism than Vance does. Douthat suggests certain cultural and ethical habits are necessary for it to be sufficiently binding. But liberals don’t disagree with this. Many expressly see a role for all sorts of institutions—religious, civic, community-oriented—in creating the social conditions that enable pluralist democracies grouped around shared ideals to hold together. The new Liberal Currents Reconstruction Papers, for instance, suggest rebuilding such institutions to reinforce democratic cohesion.

Obama’s speech too makes this point. He says the American experiment relies on a sense of the “common good,” of “common humanity,” of social “trust,” and of “mutual respect,” and hails the role of community in helping create such conditions.

Meanwhile, it’s often argued that “the left” has foregone patriotism and positive nationalism—see Michael Kazin, Noah Smith, and Yoni Appelbaum—and that this is a political dead end. My strong hunch is that Obama probably agrees with some version of this. His liberalism is essentially that of Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, a canonical call for a positive patriotism that depicts our country as flawed but progressing toward realizing its ideals. Obama declares as much with his paean to each generation making our “union more perfect.”

At bottom, Obama’s liberalism echoes Abraham Lincoln’s “electric cord” speech, delivered in 1858. In it, Lincoln declares that the immigrants of the day have no ties of heritage or blood to the founding generation. But once they reflect on the Declaration’s promise of equality, it allows them to claim such a bond:

That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

In Lincoln’s speech, dedication to the proposition that all people are created equal is a substitute for ties of heritage and blood. So it is for Obama, and for him here’s the key: It’s no less strong for being so.

These bonds are not merely intellectual: They are deeply, powerfully rooted in “moral sentiment,” in a sense of common humanity and the mutual goodwill that arises from sharing a common political project. Obama’s speech tells us: If you’re looking for a rebuttal to Vance-MAGA nationalism, well, those ideas are a good place to start.

Muslim delegates and attendees hoping to participate in the state Republican convention were shunned and rejected by members as they espoused themes of party unity ahead of the November election. By Renzo Downey for The Texas Tribune HOUSTON — To some extent, Mohamed Hussein knew he was preparing to enter the lion’s den. But he made the decision to attend the Republican Party…

Source

A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Trump wants his face on new currency most Americans can’t even afford…

Source

Fusion startups have raised $7.1 billion to date, with the majority of it going to a handful of companies. 

Former President Barack Obama said  the U.S. is worse off because of current President Trump’s war with Iran. 

“We’ve now fought a war, spent billions and billions of dollars, you know, put enormous strain on our military,” Obama said in an interview with NBC’s Craig Melvin.

“A lot of people have died. And it feels like we’re back where we were before we started the war, except maybe a little bit worse off,” Obama continued. “I am very happy to see a ceasefire. And I’m hopeful that it holds.” 

The interview was conducted before the public opening of the Obama Presidential Center on Thursday, and aired Friday morning on the Today show. Obama pointed out that under the 2015 JCPOA agreement his administration negotiated with Iran, “Iran had agreed not to develop nuclear weapons.”

“This administration, or a prior version of this administration, pulled out of it, which caused then Iran to develop more nuclear capacity,” Obama said, referring to Trump’s decision to withdraw from that deal in 2018, despite the agreement also involving the European Union, Russia, China, the U.K., France, and Germany. International observers also said that Iran was complying with the JCPOA at the time.

Obama faced criticism from the right and his own party over the nuclear agreement, but it had the support of the international community, and it didn’t leave the U.S. in a worse position. Trump’s memorandum of understanding with Iran is under fire from virtually everyone, including Democrats, Trump’s MAGA base, Republicans in Congress, and Israeli officials, who are calling it a “surrender” and “total capitulation.” 

In his speech at the opening of his library Thursday, Obama emphasized principles in the Constitution that Trump has flouted throughout his time in the Oval Office, and praised protesters in Minnesota who rallied against the Trump administration’s brutal immigration effort in the state, saying, “these are the values and traditions I believe in.” What values does Trump believe in, except for acting in his own self-interest? 

The Pajaro Valley Unified School District board of trustees approved hiring a consultant for bond facilities support who had a previous violation for bidding fraud. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local file)

WATSONVILLE >> Pajaro Valley Unified School District hired a consultant last year to advise on its bond facilities projects who had previously faced an administrative order for bidding fraud while consulting school districts.

Terry Bradley was hired by PVUSD in June 2025 at roughly $400 an hour, but died the following month. His business partner Bill McGuire was hired as part of the same $200,000 contract, reported by Santa Cruz Local last week, and continued advising the district after Bradley’s death.

In 2010, Bradley started a business providing financial consulting for school districts in California after retiring as superintendent of Clovis Unified School District. In 2016, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleged he had committed bidding fraud while consulting school districts on hiring a bond advisor.

It was the first time the SEC had taken enforcement action on the municipal advisor antifraud rules in the Dodd-Frank Act, a 2010 law that is in part meant to protect local municipalities from predatory practices.

The SEC found that Bradley was being paid as an advisor by Keygent LLC, a municipal bonds advisor, and helped them win contracts by secretly providing confidential information belonging to five of his own clients, including draft interview questions and competitors’ proposals.

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Bradley worked on the requests for proposals, or RFPs, for his school district clients. RFPs are a formal invitation for companies to submit proposals and bid on specific contracts. In at least one case, Bradley incorporated a change to an RFP that made a Keygent competitor look worse.

The SEC found Bradley violated rules that prohibits fraud, deception or manipulation while working on behalf of a municipal entity.

Bradley settled with the SEC and paid $50,000 without admitting or denying wrongdoing. He was also barred from serving as a municipal bonds adviser. He continued working as a school business consultant until his death last year.

McGuire, the other consultant hired by PVUSD, told Santa Cruz Local last week that Bradley was “a renowned school facilities expert.” McGuire said Bradley’s expertise and role in the PVUSD contract was lease-leaseback agreements and RFPs. 

“I took over that role of helping the district implement the RFPs for the architect for the current lease-leaseback agreements that are out,” McGuire said.

When asked about Bradley’s SEC violation, McGuire called the question “character assassination” and noted that the settlement did not include an admission of guilt. “The answer was to pay the fine and eliminate any issues for him in his career,” McGuire said.

PVUSD Superintendent Heather Contreras, who brought the contract to the board for approval, did not respond to interview requests.

Alejandro Chavez, the district spokesperson, said he did not know anything about Bradley or his history. 

“I honestly, I don’t know who he is or anything about the person, so I’ll look into that, and I’ll check in to find out what’s happening,” Chavez said on Wednesday.

“The Superintendent was aware of historical concerns involving individuals unrelated to Mr. McGuire in prior districts, but at no point was she presented with evidence demonstrating any wrongdoing by Mr. McGuire,” Chavez wrote in an emailed statement on Thursday in response to a request for comment about hiring Bradley.

Mads Realmuto, a district parent and active participant in board meetings, was surprised to learn about Bradley’s SEC violation in a phone call with Santa Cruz Local last week.

“I think the board needs to be willing to ask harder questions before decisions are made, not after,” Realmuto said.

The $200,000 contract was approved following a 90-second presentation by Contreras on June 25, 2025. The five board trustees present voted in favor without questions or discussion.

This is the second in a multi-part series on PVUSD’s finances. Part one was published last week. Sign up for Santa Cruz Local’s free newsletter to know when the next part is published.

We want to speak with you.

Are you a current or former employee of PVUSD in the business, facilities or superintendent offices?

You can reach us:

• By phone and on the secure messaging app Signal at (831) 291-3456.
• Email reporter Nik Altenberg at nik@santacruzlocal.org or nikaltenberg@proton.me.
• Secure, anonymous tips can be shared on Hush Line.

Our previous reporting on PVUSD:

• Why is PVUSD paying a consultant $200,000 for advising amid budget troubles? — June 12, 2026
• ‘You’re not able to just close your door and teach’: PVUSD employees get layoff notices — March 25, 2026
• Mental health clinicians at PVUSD speak out: cuts will be ‘devastating’ for students — Feb. 20, 2026

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The post PVUSD hired a bond facilities consultant last year with prior violation for bidding fraud appeared first on Santa Cruz Local.

Just as last week was ending, the US government forced Anthropic to pull its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns after Amazon researchers allegedly found a way to bypass Fable 5’s guardrails.  Cybersecurity researchers have since signed an open letter calling the move dangerous, and Anthropic itself noted the same jailbreaks exist in other models. So is […]

A newly disclosed BootROM exploit affecting Apple's A12 and A13 chips gives researchers a way to break the secure boot chain on millions of iPhones and other Apple devices. The exploit, dubbed “usbliter8” by security researchers at Paradigm Shift, targets a flaw in the SecureROM code found on the iPhone XS, XR, 11, and 11 Pro models, plus other devices powered by Apple's A12 and A13 processors. Because the vulnerability resides in immutable BootROM code burned into silicon during manufacturing, it cannot be patched. The researchers traced the issue to the Synopsys DesignWare USB controller used by Apple. A flaw in how the hardware handles certain USB setup packets allows attackers to corrupt memory during Device Firmware Update (DFU) mode, and ultimately gain control of SecureROM itself. That might sound like an unremarkable minor moment in boot process, but SecureROM sits at the very bottom of Apple's chain of trust. If an attacker can compromise it, they can interfere with everything that comes afterward. For ordinary iPhone owners, there is little reason to panic. Exploitation requires physical access to a device and the ability to place it into DFU mode, which means this isn’t the sort of bug criminals are likely to weaponize in phishing campaigns or drive-by attacks. For security researchers, however, BootROM vulnerabilities are the gift that keeps on giving. Unlike software flaws that disappear after the next patch Tuesday, these bugs remain exploitable for the lifetime of the hardware. Paradigm’s proof-of-concept demonstrates the ability to run unsigned code during the boot process, load custom iBoot images without signature checks, and modify DFU behavior. The exploit also marks compromised devices with the traditional "PWND" - a string familiar to anyone who spent time around the jailbreaking community over the last decade. Not every generation of iPhone has the flaw. According to the researchers, Apple's A11 chips dodge the issue thanks to a different USB implementation, while A14 and later hardware appears to have fixed the conditions that make the exploit possible in the first place. “While newer generations have addressed the underlying issue, affected A12 and A13 devices will carry it for the remainder of their lifetime,” said Paradigm researchers. “For those who have followed the history of iPhone exploitation and jailbreaking, this research is a reminder that the BootROM still occasionally has a surprise left to give. The team said it disclosed the findings to Apple before publication and coordinated the release of the research with the company. Apple did not respond to The Register’s request for comment. The exploit doesn’t directly compromise Apple's Secure Enclave Processor, which remains responsible for protecting passcodes, encryption keys, and other sensitive data. Still, gaining control of SecureROM is about as close as researchers can get to the keys to the kingdom without crossing that final boundary. There's no fix, but a remedy is simple, if somewhat expensive: buy a new iPhone. ®

AI infrastructure startup Tensordyne has taped out its first commercial accelerator, with fabrication on TSMC’s 3nm process already underway. Developed in collaboration with Juniper Networks and Broadcom, Tensordyne’s systems promise higher throughput and lower power consumption than GPUs. It claims to achieve this using an unorthodox approach to mathematics that uses logarithms — which you might recall from high school arithmetic — to make matrix multiplication heavy AI workloads less computationally intensive to run. In conventional computing, addition is cheap, multiplication is expensive. Logarithms flip this on its head. Using logs, multiplication essentially becomes an additional problem. a*b becomes log(a) + log(b). The trick is converting those values to logs and back again efficiently. There are a couple of ways of dealing with this. One of the easier options would have been to use a look up table (LUT). However, Tensordyne cofounder Gilles Backhus tells El Reg that relying on LUTs would have been too large to be practical. Instead, the company uses a heuristic, specifically the Mitchell approximation, to estimate log and antilog for each value. This is still an approximation and on its own introduces too much error to be tenable. To overcome this, Backhus tells us Tensordyne has implemented a section-wise correction mechanism in hardware that delivers accuracy equivalent to that of FP16. However, it’s worth noting that Napier will also support FP8 and 4-bit block floating datatypes. In effect, Tensordyne claims to have built a chip in which the multiply accumulate (MAC) unit works without actually doing multiplication in the conventional sense. The result is a chip that delivers power efficiency significantly greater than what you’d see on modern GPUs. Or at least that’s the claim. Tensordyne says its rack systems will spit out up to 17x more tokens per watt and achieve 13x higher throughput than Nvidia’s Blackwell systems. Dissecting Napier Tensordyne’s first commercial chip, Napier, boasts many of the same specs you’d have seen from a high-end GPU just a couple years ago. The accelerator boasts a 300-watt nominal TDP, 144 GB of HBM3e spread across four stacks, 4.7 TB/s of memory bandwidth, and up to 2.1 petaFLOPS of dense FP8 performance. This makes it roughly comparable to Nvidia’s H200 accelerators announced in 2023 while using nearly 60 percent less power. Having said that, max achieved FLOPS often fall far short of peak FLOPS, so take that comparison with a grain of salt. We won’t know how Napier actually compares to Nvidia or AMD’s latest generation of GPUs until it arrives next year. Backhus tells us that Tensordyne is leaning heavily on the scalability of its accelerators rather than individual performance. Each chip features roughly a terabyte of interconnect bandwidth allowing for rack scale deployments of up to 72 accelerators per pod. The TDN72 Tensordyne's system, codenamed the TDN72, consists of eight air-cooled compute blades each with a single 10-core Intel Xeon-D host CPU and nine Napier accelerators. These chips are interconnected by a high-speed interconnect fabric topology reminiscent of the one used by Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 rack systems. Each chip connects to six proprietary fabric switch blades developed by Tensordyne’s networking partner Juniper, located at the back of the system, in an all-to-all fabric. Despite some similarities to Nvidia’s NVL72 racks, Tensordyne’s TDN72 will be much much smaller and won’t require liquid cooling, which should make it easier to deploy in older brownfield datacenters. According to Backhus, up to four 30kW TDN72 systems can be packed into an — admittedly large — 52U rack. That works out to 608 petaFLOPS in a 120kW footprint, or about 1.68x more dense FP8 compute per rack than Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72. That doesn’t take into consideration the fact that Nvidia’s kit supports NVFP4 acceleration while Napier is limited to FP4 weights. But again, don’t read too much into that comparison. Peak FLOPS are not representative of real world performance. Tensordyne’s TDN72 launches next year, and it’ll be competing against Nvidia’s next-gen Vera Rubin and Vera Rubin Ultra systems, which will no doubt be a stiffer fight, especially when software compatibility is taken into consideration. Software promises Since building its first prototype silicon a few years ago, the company has gone to great lengths to keep its software platform as simple, and easy for customers to deploy, as possible. For example, the prototype lacked the error correction found in its Napier chips, and would have required users to use quantization-aware training to adapt their models to run accurately on the hardware — not exactly feasible for those looking to run trillion-parameter models. The software has also matured such that the hardware’s compiler can convert existing models to run directly on its latest hardware, an approach we’ve seen from other chip startups like Tenstorrent. For inference, Tensordyne has developed its own proprietary serving platform, as well as a runtime environment that Backhus says will allow customers to use their preferred inference servers, such as vLLM. PyTorch support is under development. Before the chip has even shipped, the company is making some bold performance claims. Backhus expects the chips to deliver upwards of 1,000 tokens a second, and that’s without relying on multi-token prediction or other forms of speculative decoding to boost token generation. Tensordyne’s platform has certainly attracted the attention of neocloud providers like Cirrascale and BlueSky Compute, both of which have expressed interest in deploying the company’s hardware when available. But, as we’ve seen with AMD and others, software can make or break a chipmaker. With Napier slated for release in Q2 or Q3 of 2027, Tensordyne won’t have long to get things right. ®

The Trump administration will be allowed to replace an exhibit on slavery at George Washington’s home in Philadelphia, a federal appeals court panel said on Thursday.

The ruling struck down a lower court decision that said the National Park Service must restore the exhibit, which it had torn down to comply with the president’s executive order last year on “restoring truth and sanity to American history.”

In January, NPS removed the six-panel outdoor display, which documented the lives of people enslaved by Washington during the fight for independence. It was unveiled in 2010 after years of community advocacy, WHYY reported.

“It was the grand opening of the first slave memorial of its kind on federal property in the history of the U.S. We thought it would last forever. But 15 years later, the destruction came,” activist Michael Coard said to NPR.

Philadelphia quickly sued the Interior Department to restore the exhibit, and won. U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe ordered the Trump administration to put the panels back up, comparing the administration’s efforts to those taken by the totalitarian government in George Orwell’s 1984.

But now, the Trump administration will be allowed to replace the exhibit with its own version of history. The three-judge panel on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals praised the administration’s plan for a new installation, saying that it was “full of historical context.” The new exhibit will no longer center slavery or enslaved peoples’ role in the creation of the United States, and has been accused by advocates of “whitewashing.”

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker said she would fight the decision, writing, “We cannot and WILL not rest until the full story of American history – including the existence of Slavery at the President’s House here in Philadelphia – is told, for our Nation and the World to see.”

As the country celebrates Juneteenth, the commemoration of the day when the last enslaved people in America were finally emancipated, the administration is fighting to erase Black history.

When I read history, I often wonder what it must have felt like to live those events in real time, as I’m sure you do. Did it seem an ominous moment in June 1914 when Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz-Ferdinand? If I were a Briton in September 1938, would I have had an uneasy sense of foreboding watching the newsreel of Neville Chamberlain stepping off that plane from Munich?

I think such thoughts this week because I have no doubt that future historians and readers of history will surely wonder what the ever-living fuck we were all thinking when Donald Trump both started and then lost his immoral and pointless war with Iran. What we have just witnessed is almost beyond belief, and would be beyond belief if we didn’t all know going in that Trump is such an aggressively and willfully stupid human being, utterly impervious to knowledge and facts, serenely cocooned in his carapace of ignorance, surrounded by flatterers who patronize him as one does a child and who scream at Americans about his nonexistent genius, courage, and virility. They exist in a fantasyland.

But we live in the real world, and in the real world, this war was a disaster in every imaginable sense. Let’s tally up the damage:

• First of all, there was already a diplomatic agreement with Iran that was working; the International Atomic Energy Agency reported repeatedly that Iran was abiding by the Obama-era JCPOA deal. There was no need for Donald Trump to do anything.
• But of course, the deal was the handiwork of Barack Obama—the Kenyan Marxist who made a few jokes at Trump’s expense at a dinner one time; so Trump tore it to pieces.
• Almost instantly, Iran started enriching uranium at levels well above the 3.67 percent limit set by the JCPOA. And why not? Trump broke the agreement. Of course they started enriching uranium at high levels again.
• In other words: The fact that Iran once again became a nuclear threat is entirely Donald Trump’s fault.
• With respect to its capability to build a nuclear weapon, Iran’s “breakout time,” in the preferred parlance of diplomacy, went from 12 months to seven days. That is not a typo.
• So Trump discovers this one day. Maybe Benjamin Netanyahu explained it to him. We’ll learn that whole story at some future point. In any case, out of nowhere on the last day of February, with no warning, no prep, no nothing, Trump starts a war. Within hours, we bomb a school, killing around 120 children.
• From a purely military standpoint, the war goes fine. We suffer few casualties, although we do kill 3,500 or more civilians. But Iran counters by doing the thing that every expert in the world knew Iran would do if it was ever attacked: It asserts its control over the Strait of Hormuz. If you want to come through, you have to pay to play. Up go the gas prices.
• Now Trump is trapped. And he’s starting to get bored because the regime didn’t collapse in two weeks like he thought it would. He wants out. So he sends his corrupt son-in-law, in bed with the Saudis and in the middle of trying to humiliate Albania for no good reason, to sort things out.
• That brings us to this week: the outlines of a deal that looks for all the world like a complete surrender. The United States of America, for only the second time in its 237 years on this earth, has unambiguously lost a war.

People can debate the above. I’m counting Vietnam, obviously; there’s no doubt about that one. I reckon the War of 1812 and the Korean War as stalemates. Under the Treaty of Ghent, the United States and Britain just agreed to go back to the way things were before the war, and with respect to Korea, the line was the 38th parallel pre-bellum and postbellum.

Some will say Iraq was a loss, but I rate it, too, as kind of a draw. It sure wasn’t a win of the sort Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz told us to expect. It cost many trillions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands. To a mixed result: Today, Iraq is a democracy, of a sort, but it’s a long way from being free. But I perhaps charitably call it a draw because the U.S. did achieve the core stated aim: It deposed Saddam Hussein.

Here, though, we have not achieved any of Trump’s shifting stated claims. There’s no regime change—or, to the extent that Trump has managed to change the regime, it’s even more hard-line and more powerful in the region than it was before the war!

And that’s before we and other nations fork over the infamous $300 billion, just a mind-boggling figure. Conservatives wanted Barack Obama impeached over the money he agreed to pay Iran (which was Iran’s money, frozen in U.S. banks), which was $1.7 billion. Trump is going to hand Iran 176 times that amount. And it’s going to end up being more, because the $300 billion is separate from whatever frozen assets Trump decides to unfreeze. Word around the campfire is that we are talking about another $25 billion or so.  

Some perspective on how much $325 billion is. The total U.S. foreign aid budget for 2025 was about $60 billion. More pointedly: Estimates vary, but it seems that Iran spends around $1 billion a year propping up Hezbollah. Imagine how much they’ll be able to spend when their Trumpy ship comes in!

The one slender thread on which the Trump administration is now hanging its hopes is that in the coming negotiations, it’ll get Iran to surrender its current stockpile of enriched uranium. That, admittedly, would be something that the JCPOA didn’t do. If they pull that off, even I will say good for them.

But for Iran, of course, this is a nearly inconceivable concession. What seems more likely to happen is that the two sides will agree to terms calling for Iran to dilute its highly enriched uranium under international supervision. Trump will sell this as a great victory. But this “down-blending,” as it’s called, was also in the JCPOA!

Above, I called this war immoral and pointless. The pointless part speaks for itself. It has accomplished nothing except making Iran stronger and the United States weaker. If Barack Obama or Joe Biden had done this, not only would they have been instantly impeached if the Republicans controlled the House, but the entire Democratic Party would have been discredited on foreign policy matters for a generation at least.

But the immoral part is worse. Trump started a war, killed a few thousand people, got tired of it, and surrendered to one of the most reactionary regimes on earth, which went on a gleeful killing spree of its own citizens last year. Since the commencement of these hostilities in February, Iran has executed 44 more people and detained another 6,000. That’s the regime Donald Trump just strengthened and is about to hand many billions of dollars to. “Immoral” barely scratches the surface.

This is an epic failure. It’s not quite September 1938. But that’s only because Iran’s mullahs don’t have Hitler’s global ambitions. Morally, it’s a Neville Chamberlain moment of a sort the United States has never experienced. The icing on the cake would be Trump taking to Truth Social and boasting about “peace in our time.” A man who signed a treaty at Versailles is ignorant enough of history to not even know why that phrase resonates.

Carlos Angeles, a 19-year-old graduate of Soquel High School, has been identified as one of the victims in the Watsonville car crash last Sunday evening that killed two and critically injured two others. The identity of the other person who died, a 17-year-old girl, will not be released at this time, according to the Santa Cruz County Sheriff-Coroner’s Office.

The investigation into the crash is ongoing, California Highway Patrol officer Israel Murillo said Thursday. The driver of one of the vehicles was arrested on allegations of driving under the influence on Sunday evening. He sustained major injuries from the crash and is still in police custody and in the hospital.

After the crash, Carlos’ uncle created a GoFundMe to raise money for his memorial expenses. His father, Martin Angeles, told Lookout that Carlos was supposed to start a new job the morning after the accident. Martin said he wanted to make more money than at his previous job to help his father pay for the bills, his car payment and college. He was to start a new semester at Cabrillo College.

Carlos was set on finding his own job without his father’s help, even though Martin had offered to get him a job in auto sales with him, Martin said. After months of searching, when Carlos received the notification that he had gotten a job with Frito-Lay, he immediately texted his father.

“He was just excited and full of life that he had a good-paying job and he was going to be able to go to school to become an engineer,” Martin said.

Martin said Carlos has always been a caring person. When the family moved from San Diego, Martin said, Carlos acted as the backbone of their family, supporting them as they built their life from the ground up. 

“He was the person you could depend on that would come through for you, whatever was needed. Regardless of how easy or difficult it might have been for him,” Martin said. “It was too soon for him, you know? He was such a giving young man.”

Suki Kasmi, one of Carlos’ best friends, echoed that sentiment. She said Carlos always put other people first, and that no matter someone’s upbringing, he was always willing to befriend them.

“If it was early morning or late at night, he was there. … He walked and commuted by bus over 6 miles just for me to get my first car and drive with me, so I wouldn’t be alone,” Kasmi said. “He always had room for everybody else; his heart was very, very, very full.”

The other crash victim who died was a 17-year-old who had just finished her junior year in high school. Her mother, Anahi Puerta, posted a GoFundMe account to raise money for funeral expenses. She asked that her daughter’s name not be published.

Puerta said if she could describe her daughter in one word, it would be “sweet.” She was a good listener and was very intentional, her mother said, someone who always made sure to check up on people and not show judgment.

The last special moment she shared with her daughter was Mother’s Day, Puerta said. Her family surprised her at a restaurant, and her daughter gave her flowers and a handwritten letter.

“She would do a lot of handmade stuff as gifts, because they meant something,” Puerta said. “It would be meaningful, it would be something special about the person, and she was always very attentive and made sure people felt love.

“She’s already missed, and it leaves a huge emptiness in our family,” her mother said. “She had siblings, she had dogs that she left behind, and a lot of people that really cared about her.”

Anyone with information about the crash is asked to contact California Highway Patrol dispatch at 831-796-2160.

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The post ‘He was that person you could depend on’: Victim of fatal Highway 152 crash identified as Capitola teen Carlos Angeles appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Vice President JD Vance is taking flak from conservatives for criticizing Israeli opposition to President Trump’s deal with Iran. 

Vance was asked at a news conference Thursday about reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was angry over the deal, which gives several major concessions to Iran. Vance said that he hadn’t heard Netanyahu offer any criticism, but he had words for Israeli Cabinet ministers attacking Trump and the deal.  

“My message to them would be twofold. ​No 1: Donald J Trump is the only head of state in the entire world ‌who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this ‌moment in time,” Vance said. “If I was in the Cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left ‌in the entire world.“

Vance added that two-thirds of the weapons that Israel has “have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars.” 

“The problem for Israel is not Donald J Trump, and anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the president of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in,” Vance said. 

VIDEO: Vice president Vance in a message to to Israeli cabinet members:

“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have left

2/3 of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by… https://t.co/asCV1nwUNr pic.twitter.com/DNA42AdgNp

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) June 18, 2026

That was enough to set off the MAGA base, including Republicans in Congress.

Hard-right Representative Randy Fine, known for his bigotry against Muslims, called Vance’s comments “absolutely inappropriate and frankly disgusting” in an interview on Real America’s Voice Friday morning. 

“The state of Israel was not created by the United States, it is not funded by the United States except in some small way. It was created in the blood and sweat and tears of the Jewish people arising out of the Holocaust,” the Florida congressman said. “The United States didn’t support Israel in its formation: In fact, there were times when it put arms embargos in place, and JD Vance would be wise to go back and learn his history. I think his comments … were completely out of line.”

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade also expressed his dismay at the vice president Friday.

“If the cartels were lobbing rockets into Texas from Mexico, we would not allow that, even if Israel asked us to, and I think that I was a little surprised that the vice president was going after Israel yesterday at the podium more than he was going after Iran,” Kilmeade said. 

NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon said Thursday that “JD Vance is out there criticizing Israel making up fantasies about how it is Israel’s fault and Israel wants Iran to be failed state, and if only Israel would lay down its arms and allow Hezbollah to keep attacking it, there would be peace in the Middle East.

“It is disgusting, it is the complete Tucker Carlsonificiation of the vice president of the United States and it is utterly deplorable. The only good thing I can say about it is if this was a dry run for Vance 2028, we sure learned a lot,” Ungar-Sargon said. 

Vance also told The New York Times earlier Thursday that his response to Israeli opponents of the deal “would be: What is your exact proposal?  You’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.”

The backlash to Vance exposes that to conservatives, Israel should have a blank check regardless of U.S. interests. Vance is getting off easy compared to Democrats, who are called antisemites for anything resembling criticism of Israel, as Abby Phillip pointed out on CNN Thursday. Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and continues to kill civilians in Lebanon, trying to prevent any checks on its actions and block any hope of peace. 

Vance’s words may be self-serving to protect the Trump administration from political fallout over a protracted war with Iran, but his criticism of Israel doesn’t even go far enough, letting it off the hook for its ongoing genocide. Conservatives should realize that Israel trying to dictate U.S. foreign policy is bad for Republicans politically, and bad for America and global peace overall.

Republicans in eight states redrew their congressional maps this year to try to rig the midterm elections in their party’s favor, following President Donald Trump’s demand to use gerrymandering to bolster the GOP’s chances rather than actually persuading voters. Yet despite those efforts, Democrats are still poised to win control of the House—with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report on…

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Trump just can’t get his Iran spin straight at G7…

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