Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to give officers gloves that deliver painful electric shocks is facing criticism from Democratic elected officials and civil rights advocates, who call it unnecessary and cruel.

The agent, Adam Saracco, was charged with misdemeanor after the altercation at a gas station near Chicago last year during the Trump administration’s crackdown there.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is leaving her role at the end of the month to spend more time with family, President Trump said Wednesday.

She will continue to be an outside adviser, he added.

"Our wonderful White House Press Secretary, and one of my most trusted aides, Karoline Leavitt, will be departing her role at the end of the month so she can spend more time with her beautiful young children and family, a decision I totally understand and respect!," Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Leavitt, 28, was the youngest ever White House press secretary. She recently returned from parental leave after the birth of her second child in May.

"The truth is since returning to the White House after the birth of my daughter, I have felt in my heart that I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary — and that is why I have ultimately made the bittersweet decision to depart the White House and embark on a new chapter in my life," she said on social media.

Leavitt's departure comes as the president, and his party, are struggling with voters who disapprove of his handling of the economy and high prices amid the Iran war.

In his post, Trump said Leavitt would still be an "influential voice" for the GOP.

Leavitt first started working for Trump in his first administration in 2020 and left shortly before his term ended. She later made an unsuccessful run for Congress in her home state of New Hampshire. Later, she went on to work for Trump's super PAC before working for Trump's 2024 campaign.

It's not yet clear who will replace her; several Cabinet secretaries filled in for Leavitt while she was on parental leave.

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by Mango

Pixiv・Danbooru

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The move to close coho fishing comes just days after the Alaska Department of Fish and Game issued its own coho closure, citing drastically reduced numbers at the Kuskokwim River sonar.

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Ex-KGB officer and Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov revealing KGB's subversive tactics against western society as a whole

https://youtu.be/CRqiJSEj5UY?t=4030

@politicalvideos

#politics #sociology #psychology #warfare #marxism

Pick-ups and large SUVs are contributing to a rise in fatal pedestrian collisions according to a national coalition of road safety groups.

A new study has found that Medicare for All would save over 100,000 lives in the U.S. per year while also reducing Americans’ health care spending by more than $1 trillion annually. Yale University and University of Maryland researchers have estimated that the universal single payer health care system introduced in the Medicare for All Act would prevent 114,000 deaths per year.

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It’s hard to wrap your mind around the abusiveness of the imperial status quo, partly because it’s all we’ve ever known, and partly because it’s too big to perceive all at once.

The statistics don’t show you the true human impact. The personal anecdotes just show you small snapshots of individuals suffering in their own lives. A working single mother crying in her car in a TikTok video because the endless toil necessary for survival is all-consuming and overwhelming. A news report about child labor in DRC cobalt mines. An Instagram reel about a father in Gaza carrying plastic bags he’s been told contain the remains of his daughter.

Individually, such stories are heartbreaking and enraging. But they are not merely personal anecdotes from separate individuals. These stories are unfolding all around the world, every moment of every day, affecting the lives of billions of human beings in different ways and to varying degrees.

If we could see it all, it would radicalize everyone against the empire instantaneously.

But we cannot see it all. We simply can’t take in all the suffering that is happening in all the ways it is being inflicted upon innocent people all around the world.

The most powerful weapon our rulers have is the fact that homo sapiens are incapable of perceiving everything all at once. If everybody could perceive all the consequences of the decisions being made by powerful people on a deep experiential level, most of humanity would rise up to overthrow the established order, and there’d be hardly anyone willing to defend it.

The only thing keeping the heads of the oligarchs and empire managers attached to their necks is the limitations of human perception.

Which of course is why they work so hard to maintain the present limitations of human perception. All the propaganda, internet censorship, AI shenanigans, algorithm manipulation and government secrecy we see from the capitalist empire is there to keep us from seeing too much, because unadulterated truth tends to have a radicalizing effect on the mind.

That’s why they’re scrambling to roll out police drones, AI mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems while doing everything they can to slow down our access to information and insight: it’s a race to get us fully locked down in a capitalist dystopia policed by militarized robots before humanity’s unprecedented ability to share inconvenient facts and ideas lets us see enough to awaken a revolutionary zeitgeist in our collective consciousness.

So in that sense there really is a kind of worldwide struggle between light and darkness — not in a religious sense, but in the sense that there is a direct ongoing conflict between the agenda to see and to know versus the agenda to keep things hidden. Humanity’s higher impulses are trying to bring things into the light of awareness, while those representing our lower nature are trying to keep things obscured in the darkness of ignorance and confusion.

I don’t know which side will win in the end. I just know it makes sense for every well-intentioned person to spend as much the time and energy as they can muster trying help make the abuses of the empire as visible as possible for everybody.

_____________________

Caitlin’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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The proportions are odd, the legs look much smaller than i imagined them.

Also gotta fix the tearout, I'm thinking of just taking like an inch off the overall length when I round the tip, which will remove the tearout in the process

I also don't have a fucking clue how I'm gonna clamp them for the glue-up. I'm considering gluing one at a time and using rubber bands. i dunno, let me know if you've got a better idea

What a bunch of drama queens

https://archive.is/e8IA5

Annabelle Loma has spoken with her husband only a few times since he attempted to jump overboard from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln during his current deployment.

Communication has been difficult to come by, and he is now on medical hold.

Loma, who lives in San Diego, said her husband had been repeatedly overextended before he tried to jump from the carrier.

“He’s scared,” Loma said. “He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out, his 13-year career is ruined, just like that. That’s not fair, that’s not right. That’s not what he should be worrying about right now.”

Loma said she initially received a call from the ship’s ombudsman after the incident but has not heard from anyone with the Navy in recent weeks.

Lincoln’s roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines remain on a deployment that began Nov. 21. The carrier has been deployed for more than eight months while supporting U.S. military operations in the Middle East against Iran.

The deployment, which was anticipated to end in May, has been extended with no publicly announced return date. A sailor aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln observes a fueling-at-sea alongside the USNS John Lewis, June 28, 2026. (U.S. Navy)

In a separate incident aboard Lincoln, a sailor on watch saw a shipmate preparing to go overboard, and he intervened, according to the sailor’s wife, Maria Rodriguez.

Rodriguez said her husband called out to the sailor before reaching the individual and grabbing their arms, pulling them onto the deck. Her husband told her the sailor had not yet gone over the side when he got there. Three other sailors heard the commotion and came running to help.

Rodriguez’s husband told her about the incident several days after it happened.

“He said he hadn’t felt adrenaline like that in his life, and he was just so thankful he was able to get to [the sailor] in time, to stop them from going overboard,” Rodriguez said.

She did not know what happened to the sailor afterward.

Separately, Stars and Stripes reported Tuesday that sailors described an incident in which watchstanders stopped a crew member from jumping overboard. Stripes reported that the crew was informed about the incident through a shipwide announcement.

More than 200 family members attended a meeting in San Diego last week with acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao. During a separate virtual meeting later that evening, families raised concerns about sailors’ mental health, exhaustion and safety, according to recordings of the meeting reviewed by MS NOW.

Vice Adm. Joseph Cahill, commander of Naval Surface Forces, acknowledged the strain on sailors and their families during the virtual meeting.

“We hear you loud and clear [regarding] the impact this has on families, on service members and the long-term ability of us to stand, sustain our forces’ health,” Cahill said, according to MS NOW.

Cahill described deployment-resilience counselors and chaplains aboard warships, along with Human Factors Councils designed to review factors affecting sailors’ well-being and identify related risks.

The Navy has said Lincoln’s leadership is continuously assessing sailors’ psychological readiness and that the carrier has access to counselors, chaplains, medical professionals and other support services.

The Navy did not provide a precise number of sailors who have attempted to go overboard or engaged in self-harm aboard Lincoln during the current deployment. A sailor prepares an MH-60R Sea Hawk to take off from the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, June 27, 2026. (U.S. Navy)

Shelby Sanders, whose mother is serving aboard Lincoln, said connecting has been difficult over the past eight months. When her mother does manage to send a note, Sanders said, she can tell she’s struggling.

“When she can email me, she’s definitely down,” Sanders said. “I think they’ve had five weeks of non-stop combat operations or something like that, so that makes it really tough to communicate consistently or even know if we’ll be able to. It sucks.”

Sanders is preparing to begin her senior year of high school without knowing whether her mother will be home for the milestones that normally mark the year.

“I don’t know how to enjoy starting my senior year when my mom isn’t here, you know?” Sanders said. “Will she be back before homecoming? My birthday? Christmas? I have no idea, and that’s all that I think about.”

Manuel Guevara, whose son is serving aboard Lincoln, said he sounded exhausted, down and worried the last time they spoke.

“Us being out there keeps wars out of our country, but it sucks having your family away. It makes the homecoming that much sweeter, but the uncertainty of when that day will come starts to eat away at you,” Guevara said.

The Navy father said it is difficult to stay focused when he hears about problems aboard the ship and knows his son is worried about day-to-day circumstances, such as eating, doing laundry and having adequate living conditions.

“I don’t want to worry that the circumstances of this deployment will get the best of my son, and he doesn’t make it back home,” Guevara said. “That’s an unbearable burden on my heart.”

The Navy is preparing the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group to relieve Lincoln, Cao told families at the San Diego meeting. Officials have not provided a timeline, however, citing operational security.

Meanwhile, Loma is caring for the couple’s three children, and her husband remains in medical hold.

“I’m trying to keep a happy face for our three kids,” she said. “They’re little, they miss their daddy, they just want to know mommy and daddy are okay. So I can’t just worry and break down, even though I want to — every single day.”

A new study has found that Medicare for All would save over 100,000 lives in the U.S. per year while also reducing Americans’ health care spending by more than $1 trillion annually. Yale University and University of Maryland researchers have estimated that the universal single payer health care system introduced in the Medicare for All Act would prevent 114,000 deaths per year.

Pretty much the question really.

How do I compliment women I know, colleagues, friends, acquaintances, and so on, without coming off as a creep?

For instance, the other day, my coworker had a really good hairstyle, and I wanted to compliment her on it, but I just didn't know how to do so without coming off as weird or anything. The same happened with a friend, who was wearing a cute top, but again, I just avoided saying anything.

Comparing this to other men, I'm easily able to praise them on their outfits and watches and similar things.

To clarify, I do not like any of the women in question or think romantically about them. They're just friends and acquaintances, nothing more. Just people in my life.