Sean's News Network

From School to Battlefield to Grave: How Russian Cossacks drive young people to war - bellingcat The All-Russian Cossack Society turns school clubs into pipelines for state-sponsored militarisation and recruitment for war in Ukraine. Bellingcat shows how they shape an alternative mobilisation for...

Bellingcat has been experimenting with story formats, trying to get away from drawing coloured boxes around important things. Our latest is below:
www.bellingcat.com/news/2025/12...

NYC Is on the Cusp of a Casinopocalypse A state board recommended to approve three casino licenses—two in Queens, one in the Bronx.

"As for whether we should be taxing billionaires to generate this revenue, instead of taxing the casinos owned by the billionaires once they have taken the money from poorer New Yorkers, well, answering that question wasn't the board's job."

KICC r/brutalism

Will this make you reconsider voting for his judicial nominees? He's selecting those who will allow more terrible actions to be taken against these key part of our community.

Opinion | My Somali Role Models in Minnesota

Somali-Americans are neighbors, mentors, and friends who have helped build Minnesota.

Trump’s attacks are hateful and untrue.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/o...

Before: Israel’s Plan to Back Gaza Militias Proves a Risky Gamble After: Israel Backed Gazans to Oppose Hamas. For One, It Ended Violently.

Change in Headline

Frank O. Gehry
We lost an architectural giant yesterday. Known for sculptural icons like the Bilbao Museum, he was shaped early by the art world. I always admired his “decompositionalist” phase: Aerospace Museum, Loyola Law school, Schnabel Residence, simple forms arranged into bold complexity.

dred scott, in their minds, established the united states as a place of tiered citizenship and permanent inequality among americans. it was a ruling that said, in effect, that all men *were not* created equal and would *never* be treated as such.

i think to understand the meaning of the birthright citizenship clause to the framers of the 14th amendment, you have to understand significance of dred scott to the civil war republican party. dred scott wasn't just a bad ruling, it was understood as a rejection of the declaration itself.

what follows immediately after the birthright clause? the privileges and immunities and due process clauses? and what follows them? the equal protection clause. all of this is explicitly to say, "the declaration is the constitutional law of the land"

the birthright clause was not just written to wipe dred scott off of the books, it was written to repudiate the *idea* behind dred scott, you might say the larger *ideological project* of dred scott. and the whole of section 1 of the 14th amendment is a constitutional statement of political equality

Trump supporters climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol

Kash Patel: "When you attack our nation's capitol, you attack the very being of our way of life — We will always refute it & combat it"

Unless you’re J6 insurrectionist who attacks the capitol — then you receive a pardon & get called a patriot…

Do we have to read this again? Wait a minute it says a lot of things in here about coordination with allies and mutual relationships and that we don't own everything in this space but according to the NSS, whatevs.

people died for birthright citizenship. i get that it’s more fun to be a pundit when your team has the white house and you get to brag to friends about visiting the oval office; but what i’m wondering is if maybe that’s actually not a good reason to throw away something we fought a civil war to win?

there's a reason why it covers citizenship and the rights of citizenship and apportionment and disqualification and confederate debts - those were basically all of the big sticking points that they settled all at once!

another thing about the 14th amendment that is not really discussed enough is its nature as partisan-coalitional compromise, it was truly the For The People Act of its time, an omnibus "this is where the congressional caucuses have been squabbling about" writ in burnished constitutional steel

Mamdani: Oftentimes when we win elections, we tell people to go home and just trust us. But the message really has to be that we want you to come along with us… That’s something we’ve been looking to share with New Yorkers: We want to not only win with New Yorkers, but also govern with New Yorkers.

While the outcome should be clear from the plain text of the Constitution, the central project of this court and Administration, together, is to nullify the reconstruction amendments

One judge actually said the public interest in releasing the grand jury files would ONLY be to show what a sham the DOJ request was.

The real action is in the DOJ files (where is that photo, Attorney General?), and the distraction is the grand jury materials.

Judge grants DOJ request to unseal Epstein grand jury records The judge's order will further expand the already voluminous amount of Epstein-related documents expected to be made public in coming weeks.

Remember that TWO federal judges refused to release Epstein grand jury materials because there was so little there not already public it was of no value.
www.politico.com/news/2025/12...

As California Limits Water Use, People in Prison Face Punishment for Showering Incarcerated Californians are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis — and the state’s water restrictions.

Incarcerated Californians are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis — and the state’s water restrictions.
buff.ly/p3MNKmQ

Donald Trump: US president named inaugural Fifa Peace Prize winner US President Donald Trump receives the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize before the draw for the 2026 Fifa World Cup.

It’s weird that news organizations like the BBC are covering this as if it’s a real thing with a real process behind it—and not clearly some nakedly invented “participation trophy” by a corrupt organization to curry favor with a corrupt and easily manipulated man-child. www.bbc.com/sport/footba...

Hi Sam,

Netflix, which rarely carries a single movie from before 1980, wants you to know how thrilled they are to acquire that classic piece of franchise IP, Casablanca

The length of time is unbelievably damning

Recap: No “fog of war” no split-second decisions. No threat, no weapons. No radio nor “backup”. Effectively no more boat.

For most of an hour the most powerful military in the world just sat there and had time to chew on it. Not a single thing they’ve said was true based on what Bradley now admits.

Exclusive: Survivors clinging to capsized boat didn’t radio for backup, admiral overseeing double-tap strike tells lawmakers | CNN Politics The two men killed as they floated holding onto their capsized boat in a secondary strike against a suspected drug vessel in early September did not appear to have radio or other communications device...

The facts were obvious so they tried to claim the two survivors radioed for help. Then Bradley admitted this wasn’t true at all.

The initial hit on the vessel, believed to be carrying cocaine,, killed nine people immediately and split the boat in half, capsizing it and sending a massive smoke plume into the sky, the sources who viewed the video as part of the briefings said. Part of the surveillance video was a zoomed-in, higher-definition view of the two survivors clinging to a still-floating, capsized portion, they said.

For a little under an hour - 41 minutes, according to a separate US official — Bradley and the rest of the US military command center discussed what to do as they watched the men struggle to overturn what was left of their boat, the sources said.

No evidence of drugs has been seen but what has been said definitively is the “initial hit … killed nine people immediately and split the boat in half, capsizing it”, after which the two survivors were signaling for help from the smoking wreckage for 41 minutes while Bradley debated executing them.

Trump wants to be known as a peacemaker while frequently threatening war The president talks frequently of his desire for more peace. He also likes talking like a warmonger.

Trump brands himself around peace while threatening war.

The "Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace" and his FIFA peace prize arrived as Trump issues new threats and his "Department of War" touts its lethal strikes.

"Orwellian is about the nicest term I can come up with,” @coons.senate.gov told me.

The GOP is on a runaway train toward a cliff of failure bc of a lack of a plan to replace the ACA, leaving millions w/o health care.

"Republicans will likely pay a huge political price for such a course, dwarfing the drubbing they just took last month."
🧾 open.substack.com/pub/aaronrup...

NEW: www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...