Hundreds died in this week's heat wave. But the real killer is a political & economic system that rewards predators, turns citizens into prey, & leaves governments protecting power instead of people… Hundreds of people died yesterday across Europe from the heat; they’re a symptom of a larger problem that governments around the world have failed to address — that goes far beyond simply global warming — and that the Trump regime is making far worse. Its foundation is one of the most troubling aspects of human nature called predation: while most people just want to live their lives, raise their kids, and have a comfortable old age, some small percentage of those among us have simply become, for lack of a better word, predators.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — There’s no longer any mystery about whose side the Supreme Court is on; the only mystery is why it bothers pretending otherwise. — Somebody finally proposed making California’s 250 billionaires chip in, and you should hear them scream. — Senate Democrats noticed that traditional Medicare is the only insurance in America with no limit on what it can cost you, and decided to do something about it. — A federal judge just told Trump’s Justice Department to stop hiding the files on the woman who says Trump sexually assaulted her when she was 13. — Trump’s mentor Vlad may be plotting a poke at NATO, and he’s picked the perfect moment, because the man in the Oval Office treats the alliance like a protection racket he resents paying into. — While Trump was busy feuding with Giorgia Meloni over a photo op, the woman actually positioned to end Meloni’s career was quietly building her case. — The hellscape currently broiling Europe is not weather, it’s a receipt for fifty years of lies from the fossil fuel industry. — Geeky Science Alert! The $300 ring you bought to fix your sleep may be the thing keeping you awake.

Why Americans are embracing policies they were taught to fear, while rejecting a stupid, oligarchic economic model that's failed us all (except the oligarchs)... On Tuesday night, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party got a message it would prefer to pretend it didn’t hear. In New York, Mamdani-backed progressives swept the congressional primaries, ousting two sitting Democratic congressmen and taking an open seat in a single evening. Former city comptroller Brad Lander beat Rep. Dan Goldman by more than thirty points. A 32-year-old democratic socialist named Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked off five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and state Assembly member Claire Valdez won the seat Nydia Velázquez is vacating. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (a recipient of dark money and AIPAC money) campaigned hard against all three and watched all three win anyway. As Bernie Sanders put it afterward, the message is pretty clear: Americans are sick to death of a rigged economy and of billionaires buying their elections.

The Pentagon investigation is finished. Congress still hasn’t seen it. The families of Minab deserve answers—and so do we... On the morning of February 28th, the first day of Donald Trump’s war on Iran, the children of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab were at their desks a little after ten o’clock when the missiles arrived. The name of the school means “The Good Tree.” By the time the dust settled, as many as 175 people were dead, most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve. Iran’s confirmed count came to around 155, and the list its state broadcaster released documents dozens of dead little boys, dozens of dead little girls, more than two dozen dead teachers, several dead parents, a dead school bus driver, and a dead pharmacy technician from the clinic next door. The teachers had started phoning families the instant the attacks began, begging them to come collect their children. There wasn’t enough time. Some parents reached the school only in time to claw through the rubble looking for their daughters, and according to first responders and a Reuters stringer the building was hit a second time, a so-called “double tap” (which is a war crime), with the survivors and the rescuers caught in that second blast and blown to pieces.