Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

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Olivia Waite @oliviawaite.com · 23h

Surgeon Generals’ Warning: Secretary Kennedy has rejected science, misled the public and compromised the health of Americans. The nation deserves a health and human services secretary who is committed to scientific integrity and can restore morale and trust in our public health agencies.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/07/surgeons-general-rfk-jr-robert-kennedy/

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Philip Bump @pbump.com · 3h

I use archival images for my posts so that I don't have to 1) pay for good ones or 2) steal them or 3) use shitty AI ones, which means I do a lot of searches in the National Archives index for things like "FBI" which sometimes yield unusable but awesome images like this. Check out the hat!

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Sarah Taber @sarahtaber.bsky.social · 3h

Important farm labor update: Trump DOL is now planning to massively expand the H2A program.

Their logic? "Gee, all the farm workers are gone now. It's causing a food crisis. We just HAVE to run a crash-expansion of our slavery-prone H2A program."

prospect.org/politics/tru...

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Rainesford Stauffer @rainesford.bsky.social · 4h

If you're a student or early career journalist or writer in the region, please pitch! Would love to help support your work. There's info in the pitch guide & pitching via the form is the best way to go. (If you let me know you've pitched, I can flag it to the team. Happy to brainstorm ideas, too!)

Rainesford Stauffer @rainesford.bsky.social · 13d

Student + early career journalists in Appalachia (or young folks who want to write): pitch 100 Days! Looking for stories w/ angles on young people, related to education & what's happening on campuses, politics, life & identity, & more. Rates start at $150 for opinion, $200-$400 for reporting.

100 Days in Appalachia's Call for Pitches

100 Days in Appalachia began as an experimental pop-up publication, designed to candidly narrate the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency from within the heart of a region dubbed “Trump Country...

www.100daysinappalachia.com

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Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com · 4h

So the people causing the shutdown are getting paid. The people keeping the country running don’t.

And Speaker Mike Johnson won’t let the House come back to work. So basically they’re on a paid vacation while Americans miss paychecks.

Did I get that right?

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Antti Gronow @anttigronow.bsky.social · 5h

Pure evil.

"A study published in The Lancet journal in June said the U.S. funding cuts could result in more than 14 million deaths, including more than 4.5 million children under age 5, by 2030."

Nathan Kalmoe (he/him) @nathankalmoe.bsky.social · 6h

apnews.com/article/myan...

Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said “no one has died" because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program.

apnews.com

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David Dayen @ddayen.bsky.social · 4h

So this is funny.
The administration just issued a rule slashing foreign agricultural worker wages. And to justify it, in a public filing, Trump's Labor Department alleges that Trump's immigration enforcement has devastated the Ag workforce and caused a "risk of supply shock-induced food shortages."

Trump Labor Department Says His Immigration Raids Are Causing a Food Crisis

In a filing in the Federal Register, the Labor Department argues there are “immediate dangers to the American food supply” due to a lack of migrant agricultural workers.

prospect.org

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s. eek smith 👻 @sesmith.lol · 4h

YIKES

Dave Jorgenson @davejorgenson.bsky.social · 4h

The Post laid off seemingly the remaining of their liberal-leaning staff members on Opinion last Thursday, when some of them were observing Yom Kippur.

from @oliverdarcy.bsky.social for Status
status.news/p/washington-post-opinion-cuts-adam-oneal

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 4h

i think it is cool that a government run by fanatical bigots is on track to plunge the economy into a mountain and cause a food crisis

David Dayen @ddayen.bsky.social · 4h

So this is funny.
The administration just issued a rule slashing foreign agricultural worker wages. And to justify it, in a public filing, Trump's Labor Department alleges that Trump's immigration enforcement has devastated the Ag workforce and caused a "risk of supply shock-induced food shortages."

Trump Labor Department Says His Immigration Raids Are Causing a Food Crisis

In a filing in the Federal Register, the Labor Department argues there are “immediate dangers to the American food supply” due to a lack of migrant agricultural workers.

prospect.org

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s. eek smith 👻 @sesmith.lol · 4h

'The modeling results also indicated that the warehouses expose about 90 percent of the city’s population to a cancer risk above 1 in 1 million and residents living closest to the warehouses can be exposed to risk levels as high as 1 in 5,000.'

Breast cancer, dizziness, headaches: El Paso residents ask if a warehouse's toxic emissions are to blame

After a Grist investigation revealing exposure to the carcinogen ethylene oxide, El Paso residents confront troubling questions about their health.

grist.org

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Haydon is reading The Uncertain Center, Arthur C McGill @haydonmp.bsky.social · 5h

Add it to the tally.

Seems like we’re getting up to 20+ grand jury no true bills just from what I’ve seen. Absolutely remarkable.

Seth Stern @sethstern.bsky.social · 14h

A federal grand jury declined to indict two people charged with assaulting law enforcement agents outside a suburban Chicago ICE facility, an attorney for one of the defendants said, Megan Crepeau and @benjaminpenn.bsky.social report

news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/...

Grand Jury Declines to Indict Two Chicago-Area ICE Protesters

A federal grand jury declined to indict two people charged with assaulting law enforcement agents outside a suburban Chicago ICE facility, an attorney for one of the defendants said.

news.bloomberglaw.com

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Joe Dunman @joedunman.bsky.social · 4h

What is this note? (Ironically from an ethics article in the KY bar magazine.) “AI commentary” from where? Why would you consult such a thing? And why doubt its wrongness? You checked the case yourself, you know it’s wrong!

ENDNOTES
1 No. 2011-SC-0442-DG, 2013 Ky. Unpub. LEXIS 57, 2013 WL 5436257, at
4 (Ky. Sep. 26, 2013). I note that there is Al commentary that the Supreme Court in the case of Clark v. Burden, 917 S.W.2d 574, 577 (Ky. 1996) held:
"A settlement agreement, like any contract, is binding if there is a meeting of the minds as to all essential terms, even if the agreement is not reduced to writing." However, when I read the Clark case, I did not find this phrase in the body of the opinion, so, either I'm right and AI is hallucinating or vice-ver-sa. In any event, I am relying on the Court's comments in the unpublished opinion because I agree with it and this is an ethics opinion and not a legal opinion.

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Will Bunch @willbunch.bsky.social · 6h

“I HATE THOSE MASKED BASTARDS” is the greatest clickbait book title ever (it’s not about what you think, although the history is highly relevant)

dan sinker @dansinker.com · 1d

Yooooooooooooooooo.

Gonna do a book.

Journalist, podcast creator, and Punk Planet founder Dan Sinker's I HATE THOSE MASKED BASTARDS!: Terror, Truth, and the Editor Who Took on the Klan, a narrative account of crusading journalist George Dale, who faced off against a powerful, ascendant Klan movement in 1920s Indiana, and who serves as a model of journalistic integrity and defiance in the face of fascism, to Eric Kerl and Katy O'Donnell at Haymarket, at auction, by David Patterson at Stuart Krichevsky Agency (NA).

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dan sinker @dansinker.com · 4h

It's not even clickbait, I truly do hate them.

Will Bunch @willbunch.bsky.social · 6h

“I HATE THOSE MASKED BASTARDS” is the greatest clickbait book title ever (it’s not about what you think, although the history is highly relevant)

dan sinker @dansinker.com · 1d

Yooooooooooooooooo.

Gonna do a book.

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platinumretriever @platinumretriever.bsky.social · 12h

big fan of silly costumes as a protest tactic

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Brian Goldstone @brian-goldstone.bsky.social · 4h

As a subscriber to @nybooks.com for more than a decade, it was pretty surreal to open the mail this morning and see this review of There Is No Place for Us in print.

A print copy of The New York Review of Books opened to "The Homeless We Don’t See" by Jay Neugeboren, a review of the book There Is No Place for Us.

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Nate Schenkkan @nateschenkkan.bsky.social · 4h

Everyone interested in democracy should get familiar with the details of the DSA

Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 4h

Last week, a Dutch court ordered Meta to let Facebook and Instagram users set a chronological feed by default, a first test of the EU’s Digital Services Act in civil court.
Tech Policy Press spoke with Bits of Freedom’s Rejo Zenger on the ruling’s significance.

What a Dutch Court Ruling Against Meta Signals for Private DSA Enforcement | TechPolicy.Press

Tech Policy Press spoke with Rejo Zenger, Policy and Advocacy Lead at Bits of Freedom, to better understand the significance of the ruling.

www.techpolicy.press

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Cris @crisvector.com · 4h

Chat GPT

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Yonah Freemark @yonahfreemark.com · 4h

The result: the US, already far behind other countries on EV adoption, will stick to gas cars even longer. People will be punished because of increased pollution. And households will be punished by higher transportation costs. 🤷

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Yonah Freemark @yonahfreemark.com · 4h

Electric cars can be huge money savers—in addition to helping reduce transportation’s environmental impact.

Unfortunately, House GOP killed tax incentives for EVs. And the Trump admin put tariffs on foreign EVs & eliminated mileage requirements for automakers, dissuading them from making more EVs.

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 5h

we charge our hyundai ioniq 5 around once every two to three weeks at a muncipal charger and i’d say it runs about $9 for 250 miles of range.

How Much It Costs to Drive an E.V. and a Gas Car in Every State

www.nytimes.com

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Charles Ornstein @charlesornstein.bsky.social · 4h

ProPublica analyzed dozens of hours of audio and video footage of speaking events for Linda McMahon’s appointees, as well as their writings, and found that a recurring theme is the desire to enable more families to leave public schools. @megomatz.bsky.social @jsmithrichards.bsky.social

These Activists Want to Dismantle Public Schools. Now They Run the Education Department.

Under Trump, the Department of Education has been bringing in activists hostile to public schools. It could mean a new era of private and religious schools boosted by tax dollars — and the end of publ...

www.propublica.org

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Brent Cebul @brentcebul.bsky.social · 4h

And another beauty just arrived! Congrats @m-r-glass.bsky.social!

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John Peters @johnthejack.bsky.social · 6h

There are some good stories about those calls.
Both (£)
www.thetimes.com/article/1663...

And indeed this year:
www.thetimes.com/article/7e8e...

Nobel winner had no idea: he was off-grid in the Rockies

Fred Ramsdell shares the medicine prize with Mary Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi for their work on the immune system

www.thetimes.com

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Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 8h

If you have an inkling you might win a Nobel prize, do you feel some urge to ensure you’re in a really noteworthy inaccessible place when it’s announced so you’ve got a good story about getting the news. ‘So, it was as our submersible rose from the Mariana Trench when my phone started pinging…’

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Paul Kelleher 🎃 @paulkelleher.net · 4h

This was 1988.

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