u/CosmicLars

Reporting by Jason Koebler for 404Media.co:

> A police officer speeds 70 MPH down a two-lane highway running over a bridge in the Florida Keys. He passes a dump truck in a no-passing zone, then immediately does it again, crossing over a double-yellow line to pass another truck. He passes a third vehicle, nearly causing a head-on collision with a white pickup truck that veers away from him in the oncoming traffic. The cop keeps driving, and sees the SUV he’s been in pursuit of. He flicks his sirens and lights on and pulls it over.

> The cop, Lamar Roman, wasn’t trying to pull over a suspected criminal. He was tracking and chasing a woman that he met and harassed on the set of the AppleTV+ show Bad Monkey, which he had worked a security detail shift on a few weeks prior to pulling her over. After meeting the woman, catcalling her and harassing her for her full name and Instagram details, the cop illegally looked up her vehicle information on DAVID, a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database for law enforcement. He then put her license plate details on a surveillance “hotlist,” meaning he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.

> Roman told investigators that he saw the woman as a “shiny thing” and knew that using surveillance tools to track her was illegal, according to police records. He told investigators that “I knew that when I put [her into DAVID], I’m like ‘fuck’ and that’s why I stopped right after and nothing else.” But that wasn’t the end of it; he investigated the woman then used a powerful license plate tracking database to find her location and chase her down. In doing so, he also “almost cause[d] a head on collision while passing as a white truck traveling northbound had to veer off the roadway to avoid a collision.”

> The shocking and egregious incident highlights the fact that police around the country have abused their access to surveillance tools for their own personal stalking projects, and shows how different law enforcement databases and surveillance tools can be tied together to investigate and follow anyone.

> The cop, Lamar Roman, was caught and arrested in March, local news outlets reported. 404 Media has obtained video from Roman’s police cruiser and court records associated with the case that show how Roman met, harassed, investigated, and stalked the woman, who was not suspected of committing any crime, had nothing to do with Roman, and had no idea she was being tracked using a series of police surveillance software, hardware, and government databases.

Full Story with Video of Incident via 404Media.co

Alternatively: Archive.Is Link.

> Trump administration officials reportedly believed that the Israeli government intended to assassinate Iran’s top negotiators—including the country’s foreign minister—during peace talks with the US in an effort to sabotage diplomatic progress.

> The New York Times reported Thursday that "American concerns about the targeting of two particular Iranian officials—Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Parliament—spiked during delicate ceasefire negotiations that began in April.” In response, the US “went so far as to ask other countries in the region to warn Iran about the possibility Israel could target the two officials,” according to the Times, which cited unnamed current and former American officials.

> The US and Israel have killed dozens of top Iranian officials since launching their illegal joint war in late February. But the allied countries reportedly removed Araghchi and Ghalibaf from their target list in late March, opening the possibility of high-level negotiations to end the war.

> But Israel remained bent on targeting the negotiators, according to the Times, whose reporting was later corroborated by The Washington Post.

> The Times detailed one dramatic incident in April, when Ghalibaf was planning to travel to Pakistan’s capital to meet with US Vice President JD Vance:

• Pakistani fighter jets escorted the Iranian airplanes carrying a delegation of more than 70 Iranians from the border of Iran to Islamabad and back again when the session was over.

• But on the way back to Tehran, an Israeli security threat emerged.

• Iran’s security forces notified the plane carrying Mr. Ghalibaf back to Tehran that they had picked up intelligence that Israel planned to attack the plane and that two Israeli fighter jets had entered Iran’s airspace from its western border near Iraq, the two officials said.

• Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser for Mr. Ghalibaf, who accompanied him to Islamabad, confirmed this account on his social media page. The plane made an emergency landing in the city of Mashhad, Iran’s closest airport to the Pakistani border, and the Iranian delegation traveled some eight hours by land back to Tehran, Mr. Mohammadi and the two officials said.

...

> Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote in response to the new reporting that “Israel is a state that, on paper, is a US partner, but in reality is so extreme in its obsession to undermine US diplomacy that it even tries to assassinate those the US engages with in crucial negotiations.”

> "I can’t recall a government as terrified of peace as the one running Israel,” Parsi added.

Full Story: CommonDreams | NYT | WaPo

An interesting essay & review of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn. Review is written by Emmitt Rensin.

Excerpt:

> History feels inevitable in retrospect, but it would be difficult to convince an ambitious liberal activist in 1982 that by the year 2026, the United States would not have any kind of social healthcare program, that the diminished welfare state was significantly more precarious than a generation prior, that Roe v. Wade (1973) had been overturned, that the 1965 Voting Rights Act had been rendered largely moot, that the environment continued to degrade at pace, that the poverty rate remained stubbornly trapped above 10 percent. While they might be heartened to learn of some marginal and mainly technological improvements in quality of life, they might be less heartened to discover that the most significant technological innovations of the past generation were the creation of a digital surveillance apparatus unimaginable to the FBI agents of 1975 and the replacement of CIA operatives tasked with in-person assassinations with unmanned drones capable of carrying out civilian massacres via remote control. The age of reasonable and ordinary politics had proved so effective that the liberals had joined the reactionaries in their enthusiasm for spying, lawfare, and ideological policework and had voted, via their representatives in the allegedly liberal party, to support bombing campaigns, dissident liquidations, and outright invasions of El Salvador, Libya, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Grenada, Libya again, Bolivia, Iran, Panama, the Philippines, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan again, Yemen, Iraq for a third time, Pakistan, Somalia again, Iraq for a fourth time, Syria, Yemen again, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia again, Afghanistan again, Somalia again, Yemen again, Venezuela, Ecuador, Gaza, and Iran (again).

> Perhaps ordinary politics will succeed tomorrow. But it could not undo these crimes; it could not retroactively prevent them. The failure to act sooner—to act urgently, preemptively—is a perfectly mainstream grievance in American political life so long as the perpetrators of preemptive violence are the Pentagon or the police. It is only the Left that is accused of irrational impatience. It is helpful, once again, to resolve the abstract into the particular. One must imagine a sensible and centrist columnist, bloody hands clawing desperately through the rubble of his recently bombed-out DC town house in search of his child, buried below. One must imagine him desperate, carrying that child—still alive, thank God, but both legs reduced to shredded, bleeding stumps—through the smoky streets, desperate to reach an emergency room. You must imagine him dodging several additional air strikes, slipping past the ground forces deployed to sweep up any men between the ages of 16 and 55 found out in the streets, and finally reaching a field hospital where his child’s life can be saved. You must imagine him finally sitting down, catching his breath, and composing a newsletter about how the counterproductive thing would be for anybody to try to avenge this crime, about how people need to accept that this is just how things are, how dissidents in whatever country bombed his house should moderate some of their social positions, then wait a decade or two for the right electoral opportunity.

> The Weather Underground was ineffective. What isn’t? To say they failed is to say that what they did was as effective as anything, that it was roughly equivalent to all other forms of political change, that a better world is not possible. Perhaps it isn’t. The world is violent and futile; progress, when it comes, comes neither from revolution nor from ordinary politics but from the boards eroding themselves, the slow, inevitable transformation of all things in the face of technology and contingency. Near the end of his book, Ayers Dohrn notes how, “once it became clear that violent revolution hadn’t succeeded in overthrowing the system, most of the members of the revolutionary undergrounds rededicated their lives to a slower, more incremental sort of progress.” It is difficult to blame them, or to find fault with that decision. They are all past 80 now. They are very likely to die while the United States, unmovable by any tactic at all, tries to dig its way out of a bloody and futile war in the Persian Gulf. Again.

> It is strange to revisit the Weather Underground now, at least for me, a decade past my own dalliance with revolutionary politics. I spent years in and around what passed for radical and socialist organizations in the early 21st-century United States, most notably the (pre–snaps-not-claps) Democratic Socialists of America. I mean that I used to believe a better world was possible. Reading Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, what struck me most was what utter pussies we all were. We never did anything that would put the president and the director of the FBI in fits or provoked them into dedicating the full force of federal law enforcement into disrupting our activities, assassinating our leaders, or breaking up our meetings by force. I suppose that we were more committed to the Left’s own version of slow boring—the endless work of education, organizing, labor solidarity—work that has proved precisely as effective as its liberal cousin, not that any of that spared us from the same dismissive criticism: we were ineffective, counterproductive, getting in the way of the sensible Democratic agenda just around the corner, just dorm room–bull sesh idiots for finding the state of the world appalling, for believing that something must be done. It is difficult to take the idea that the Weather Underground just went too far seriously when a far less radical era of the American Left met precisely the same ridicule and bullshit moral panic.

Full Essay via LA Review of Books

-> Download the 188 Page Report Here

The Palestinian Feminist Collective, a group of Palestinian and Arab feminist researchers and organizers, shared the report with TheIntercept early. Intercept reporter Natasha Lennard with excerpted coverage below. You can read the full article here, download the full extensive report here, and support the Palestinian Feminist Collective here. Share this everywhere, print it, archive it.

> Sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians in detention is both a systematic and a decades-old practice — a well understood dynamic that is being put in the spotlight this week in a new report from the Palestinian Feminist Collective, a group of Palestinian and Arab feminist researchers and organizers.

> The extensive 188-page report, parts of which were shared with The Intercept in advance of publication, situates recent, high-profile news stories detailing the rape and sexual assault of Palestinians in Israeli detention as part of “a wider system of sexualized and gendered violence spanning detention, warfare, surveillance, reproductive destruction, family separation, domicide, and the desecration of Palestinian bodies” over decades.

> The report, “A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians,” brings together witness and survivor testimonies; news coverage; academic research; United Nations reports; and findings from human rights groups, like the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, and Israel-based B’Tselem; along with declassified Israeli archival material. (The Israeli government, military, and prison system did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

...

> “‘A Predatory State’ documents how sexual torture is a technology of Israeli rule: a means of terrorizing Palestinians and advancing a project of destruction,” Erakat told The Intercept. “Accountability must go beyond a handful of soldiers to reach and tear down the legal, military and political structures that command and then protect these crimes.”

• Download the 188 Page Report Here

• Full TheIntercept Article

• Palestinian Feminist Collective.

Great investigative reporting by Daniel Johnson and Austin Campbell for The Intercept today. Excerpts below for discussion prompting, but the entire piece is worth a read.

> Twenty-three-year-old Sarah Roque had been in the Army for just over four years when a man fatally shot her in the head.

> Roque wasn’t in a war zone, and the killer wasn’t an enemy combatant. It was Wooster Rancy, a fellow soldier stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, who had gone to Walmart for trash bags on the last day Roque was seen alive in October 2024. The Army found her body in a dumpster behind the barracks.

> "Even now, I still can’t believe it,” her mother, Ana Roque, told The Intercept. “That murderers could exist in one of the supposedly safest places in the country.”

> A first-of-its-kind analysis by The Intercept found that in the Army, women are more likely to be killed by their fellow service members than by enemy combatants, in a reversal of the threat soldiers are trained to face. Between 2011 and August 2025, at least 41 women died by homicide in the Army — more than half of them at the hands of other service members or veterans. Using Defense Department manpower data to calculate per capita death rates, The Intercept found that active-duty Army women face a higher risk of homicide than male soldiers, the opposite of national and global trends.

> In many cases, women in the Army are killed by current or former romantic partners. Over 70 percent of victims had an intimate relationship with the perpetrator at one point, and the rate of homicides among women soldiers from intimate partner violence is at least three times higher than the national average. In others, like Roque’s case, it’s unclear how male soldiers chose their victims.

> “There was no connection between Sarah and Rancy. They never spoke, never texted, and their paths never crossed,” said Ana Roque. Given that Rancy was convicted of murder in February, Roque added, “I can’t complain about the prosecutors, they did their job. But my grievance is that they didn’t push to uncover the truth behind why he did it.’”

> Research points to the military’s hypermasculine culture, which historically devalues women, as a contributing factor to high rates of violence against them. But the existing scholarship is insufficient, said Erin Siegal McIntyre, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has spent years digging into the hidden structures of militarized institutions.

...

> Analyzing over 14 years of Defense Department death data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, The Intercept’s investigation is the first to compare rates of violence against women in the Army to factors like duty location, jobs, and relationships with perpetrators. The FOIA data also reveals deaths not previously announced by the Army and the Department of Defense.

> Violence against women in the military also appears to take a mental toll. In addition to the 41 women who died by homicide, another 128 died by suicide, the majority of them lower-ranking enlisted soldiers. From 2011 to 2024, the last complete year of data, homicide and suicide rates for women in the Army were double their equivalents for women nationwide.

> The Army doesn’t make any of this public, and the Intercept’s investigation has found flaws in what data collection currently occurs: Homicide and suicide death rates are not separated by gender or calculated per capita, preventing deeper analysis and comparison.

Full Story: TheIntercept

In their investigation, the Intercept uncovered multiple unannounced homicides involving service members across the country. An insane article. Seth Harp stays vindicated.

> Noah Kulwin and Brendan James of Blowback join us to discuss their new mini-series on the history of the US-Israel relationship, how the Cold War turned into the War on Terror, and the current moment of tension over the Iran war.

> This is part one of a two-part conversation with Noah and Brendan. In part two, they reflect on the broader arc of the American century and what they have learned across six seasons of Blowback. Part two will be released on July 3rd, exclusively for paid subscribers.

Yall run, don't walk, to our Turbulence bros podcast featuring Noah & Brendan of Blowback for this tremendous episode of the infuriating ongoing genocidal relationship between the US & Israel.

Turbulence on Substack

Blowback Podcast

> A leading U.S. politician in the Trump administration says he did a “happy dance” and “sung a song or two” to celebrate Iran’s exit from the World Cup.

> Iran was knocked out of the World Cup after drawing all three of its group games, concluding in a 1-1 draw against Egypt which saw Shojae Khalilzadeh’s injury-time goal ruled out by VAR for a tight offside call.

> Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin welcomed that outcome when addressing reporters during a World Cup briefing at the government’s Special Event Coordination Center on Monday. “I’m just glad they’re done, and they’re not coming back,” Mullin said, as reported by Sports Business Journal. “I was so happy when we were able to pull their visas and said they could leave the U.S. soil, and I might’ve sung a song or two or maybe even danced a happy dance.”

> Mullin added he was “very happy they’re going back because there wasn’t a single team that we dealt with more than them.”

> The comments only add to Mullin’s ongoing rift with the Iranian team, with him having previously claimed that members of the traveling party had tried to sneak in a person with direct ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a group which has been designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization. An official for the Iran Football Federation (FFIRI) called that accusation “false, fabricated and entirely baseless.”

> “Iranians are used to the mistreatment and lies of U.S. officials, so no one in Iran is surprised by these hostile remarks,” an FFIRI official, reacting to Mullin’s new public comments, said in a statement to The Athletic.

> “These remarks once again demonstrate that U.S. officials have no commitment to international law or the principles expected of a host nation capable of organizing a global sporting event."

> "The fact that he openly celebrates Iran’s elimination says far more about him than it does about our team. It reflects a level of pettiness that cannot even tolerate the presence of a football team competing on the world’s biggest stage.

> “After our match against New Zealand, our head coach said that the United States did not want Iran to remain in this tournament because of the inhumane and unprofessional treatment our team experienced. These latest comments only reinforce that belief.”

Full Story from NewYorkTimes via Archive.Is

> CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Back-to-back powerful earthquakes slammed Venezuela on Wednesday evening, collapsing buildings in the capital of Caracas and leaving residents shaken.

> The U.S. Geological Survey said the first earthquake had a magnitude of 7.1 and its epicenter was west of the community of Morón, located along the country’s Caribbean coast, about 168 kilometers (104 miles) west of Caracas. The quake had a depth of 22 kilometers.

> The USGS reported an even larger 7.5-magnitude earthquake just a minute later. The second quake had a depth of 10 kilometers and its epicenter was 16 kilometers (10 miles) southwest of Morón.

> The quakes are among the strongest to strike Venezuela in more than a century.

Developing Story: APnews | CNN | TheGuardian

Reporting by Joseph Cox for 404Media.co.

> Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. Across the industry Accenture is seeing “soaring token spend,” according to the audio.

> The news highlights a major shift in the tech industry and other companies that use AI: the wave of uninhibited AI growth is over. Some AI providers like GitHub are now charging customers per token rather than a flat subscription fee, leading some companies to burn through their tokens. Uber recently capped employees’ use of AI tools like Claude Code and Cursor; that came after Uber told employees to use AI as much as possible and Uber’s CTO said the company had blown its entire AI budget in four months. And Accenture itself reportedly started requiring senior staff to start using AI or risk losing out on promotions.

> It also undercuts the narrative that superpowered engineers generating mountains of code are behind the AI boom. In many cases it is non-technical staff burning through tokens for non-specialized tasks.

> “We’re seeing from some of the data internally at least that it’s actually not our engineers that are driving the token consumption. It’s a lot of the non-engineers that are doing some of those behaviors [...] you were talking about,” Justice Kwak, Accenture’s agentic AI strategy lead, said in a recent internal meeting, according to the audio obtained by 404 Media.

Full Story: Archive.Is | 404Media

Hilarious, predictable, and bubbly. 😮

> Roughly an hour before President Trump was set to sign bipartisan housing legislation on Capitol Hill alongside the Republican leaders of both chambers, he imploded the plan in a social media post, denying his party a key affordability-focused win to promote ahead of the midterms.

> Trump wrote in the post on Wednesday that he would not sign the legislation until Congress passed the strict voter ID law he has been pushing for months, the Save America Act.

Full Story: NPR

Happy Father's Day to all the gumshoe dads out there. I lost my Dad in March after a grueling 6 months of him battling terminal brain cancer (glioblastoma). This community helped me through that time & for that, by law, you're all my Dads now. Hope your day is a good one.

Wanted to share this essay from Hassan Herzallah for Truthout. No matter the pain I feel today, it is insignificant to the pain our brothers & sisters feel in Palestine. So many fathers lost their kids and so many kids lost their fathers, AND IT CONTINUES, today. Fuck putting ceasefire in quotations. It is not a ceasefire. Israel never halted their genocide and I'm sick of normalizing the idea of a ceasefire being broken continously can still be called a ceasefire as long as we put it in quotes & make a quippy comment. It's an ongoing genocide & that's all it fucking is.

Excerpt:

> Al-Mughair refuses to accept that his son has been killed. He has no proof of his death and no information to confirm he is detained, yet no news to reassure him that his son is still alive.

> Whenever his son’s story is mentioned, al-Mughair begins to cry because he does not know how to cope with a disappearance without closure. Grief requires certainty, and waiting requires hope, yet he is suspended between the two; he cannot bury his son, see him, or stop searching for him in the news and in lists of names.

> "Every day I check the news, and when bodies are being returned, I would go to the hospital to see if I could find my son among them,” al-Mughair told me.

> A father usually imagines that he will know where his child is and be able to reach him when needed. But al-Mughair was denied even this simple knowledge. His son is one of over 11,000 people whose fate in Gaza has remained unknown since the beginning of the genocide, according to the United Nations. The occupation did not only take his son from him but also left him trapped in uncertainty. Yet al-Mughair still speaks of Khaled as a father waiting for his child’s return, not as a man whose story with his son has ended.

• Full Essay on Truthout.org.

• PBS, hours ago: Israeli strikes in Gaza kill 6, including 2 children and an Al Jazeera cameraman