General Mills Sued for Racial Discrimination and Retaliation - UNICORN RIOT Former employee is suing General Mills for racial discrimination and retaliation over speaking out about racist Black History Month literature.

As corporations across the US gleefully regress back to their racist roots, a worker is fighting back after he claims he was fired as retaliation for speaking out against racist Black History Month literature made by General Mills.

"This page breaks down how these prices have changed under the Trump administration and Republican control of Congress and what federal policies contribute to rising costs."
dontinflateourplates.com

FEMA Employees Reassigned to ICE Probationary employees who had been on paid leave were told to report to ICE within seven days or lose their jobs. It could signal problems with ICE recruitment.

🚨SCOOP:
A "select" number of FEMA probationary employees have been involuntarily reassigned to ICE, effective immediately, to "assist with hiring and vetting." If the employees don't report to ICE within seven days, they are threatened with termination.
prospect.org/labor/2025-0...

Remember that ahead of a press gaggle in the Oval Office this past April, a hot mic caught Trump casually informing fellow authoritarian Nayib Bukele that he’ll seek to purge “home growns” — AMERICAN CITIZENS — to the abusive CECOT mega-prison. "Home-growns are next. The home-growns” 👇🏽

These CA tomato pickers make 86¢ per bucket. The worker runs back to try and make as many buckets as they can. Because of the hot weather they often only work 4 to 5 hours a day, so every bucket counts towards paying their bills. #WeFeedYou

They’re coming after cities, universities, professional bureaucrats, and markets. They want to flatten all countervailing institutional power that may exist outside of the executive in order to remake America into their single image.

Now That They’re Free, Venezuelan Men Want the World to Know What They Endured in CECOT Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration say they endured months of physical and mental abuse inside a Salvadoran prison. Though happy to be home, they say the fact that they were released…

Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison.

He said guards stomped on his hands, poured filthy water into his ears and threatened to beat him.

I want to share a few amazing nuggets here that didn't make it into the piece about the tomato and potato.

Some tater tots. If you will.

Genus Solanum is the genus containing all the potats, the tomats, eggplants, peppers, SO many of our veggies.

But only one CLADE of these makes TUBERS.

An Egyptian dude figured out that if you partially filled a plastic bottle with rice and other grains and threw it into the ocean from Egypt at the correct place given currents the bottles would wash ashore in Gaza within 96 hours so ordinary Egyptians are doing it and... it's worked?

Flint Finishes Replacing 11,000 Lead Pipes, Concluding Activists' Decade-Long Effort to Secure Clean Water A decade after lead-contaminated water was found in Flint's water system, the legal battle to replace lead water pipes is nearly finished.

All the lead pipes in Flint, Michigan have been replaced, save for abandoned houses or those whose owners opted out of the free pipe replacement. This is the work of so many people who spread the word and showed up over and over again to hold Michigan accountable for the replacement project.

We should not frame this as cowardice. Cowardice assumes they don’t want it.

The point is that they supported democracy if it benefited them, and the moment it didn’t, they didn’t. They are at best neutral to it: what matters is themselves and their power.

It is why fascism arrived at all.

This story I wrote about DOGE is imo an example of how journalism (and court records) can be used to “prove” something that’s an open secret.

When it published, people were like “but we already knew that.”

Ok, that wasn’t the point! The point was proving it.

www.lawfaremedia.org/article/on-d...

For women, the increase of AI use in the workplace may affect their careers: Harvard study Women are using AI significantly less then men and it’s going to have a major impact on their careers, according to extensive research on the topic.

Every. Single. Story. about women not using AI as much as men portray it as bad for their future career prospects (without a shred of evidence) and a result of women being fearful little ladies rather than looking at AI's output and saying "this sucks, it's not going to help me."

Screenshot from polarportal.dk, a website that makes research on the Arctic research conducted by Danish institutions available to the public and researchers. The image shows Greenland in tan and the Greenland Ice Sheet in red and white. The red part indicates melting and covers all except about 20% in the northeast, which is roughly the area higher than 2500 m above Se level. Below the map is a chart that compares 2025 melting to the 1981-2010 average. The average melting peaks in mid-July at about 35%. For the last few days, melting has occurred over roughly 80% of the area of Greenland, with a maximum melt area of 80.6% on 24 July 2025. This is the highest value in our dataset, which starts in 1981.

Melting over 80.6% of the area of the Greenland Ice Sheet. This is the highest value in our data set, which starts in 1981.

@polarportal.bsky.social

Remember the Automat!

www.historyassociates.com/automat/

Meme. Medieval painting of three laborers harvesting grain under the eye of an overseer. The workers are bent over their work, sickles in hand. One is wearing red and looks thoughtful. One is wearing blue, with a blue hood. The third laborer is wearing brown clothes and a black hat. He is frowning. They are all hungry, and their daydreams are full of eels. The overseer is leaning on one stick, and pointing towards the laborers with another. He is wearing a blue tunic and an orange shirt underneath. He has a wide brimmed hat and a hunting horn. He has the air of a man who hands out eels only grudgingly. The sickles & the painting's red background suggest a Soviet theme, which, at first blush, seems unlikely given how time seems to work. But we should not dismiss the possibility of a wormhole that connects 20th C. nationalist propaganda to medieval art. After all, no one yet has proven it's not true. Meme text reads: "Stop slacking off, Alfred... or I'm gonna eat your eels"

Medieval landlords collected eels in rent, but they also sometimes paid them out.

In the 1250s, the Bishop of Ely had 94 tenants in Tydd St. Giles who had to spend several days each year farming him. And on those days the Bishop owed them each some bread, some cheese, & 5 eels.
🗃️🧪

Hundreds of medieval medical manuscripts now accessible Over the course of the last three years, and thanks to the generous support of the Wellcome Trust, the Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries project has been enhancing the discoverability of medieval m...

190 mss, over 7000 pages of medieval medical recipes, 42000 new images, 7700+ texts, new cataloguing, imaging and conservation treatments - oh my!

We're so pleased to have been part of Curious Cures
Congrats to @theul.bsky.social and everyone who worked on it 🎉👏👏
www.lib.cam.ac.uk/stories/curi...

Without immediate intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die July 21, 2025 AFP has been working with 1 writer, 3 photographers and 6 videographers, all freelance, in the Gaza Strip since its staff journalists left in 2024. Along with a few others, they are now the only ones left to report what is happening in the Gaza Strip. The international press has been banned from entering the territory for nearly two years. We refuse to watch them die. One of them, Bashar, has been working with AFP since 2010, first as a fixer, then freelance photographer, and since 2024, as lead photographer. On July 19th he managed to post a message on Facebook: “I no longer have the strength to work for the media. My body is thin and I can’t work anymore.” Bashar, 30, works & lives in the same conditions as all Gazans, moving from one refugee camp to another under Israeli bombings. For > a year he’s lived in utter destitution, working at extreme risk to his life. Hygiene is a major issue for him, with recurring bouts of severe intestinal illness. Since Feb, Bashar’s been living in the ruins of his home in Gaza City with his mother, 4 brothers & sisters and the family of one of his brothers. Their house is devoid of any furnishings, except a few cushions. On Sunday morning, he reported that one of his brothers had “fallen, due to hunger.” Even though these journalists receive a monthly salary from AFP, it’s no longer enough to buy food, or they have to pay completely exorbitant prices. The banking system has collapsed, and those who exchange money via online bank accounts charge a commission of up to 40%. AFP no longer has the ability to provide them with a vehicle and there is not enough fuel to allow these journalists to travel for their reporting. Driving a car means becoming a target for Israeli airstrikes. AFP reporters therefore travel on foot or by donkey cart. (alt txt continued in next post)

A horrifying statement published today by the Editorial Committee of the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency.

"Without immediate intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die"

Translation from French to English by @cnorristrent.bsky.social:

Amjad Masad @amasad We saw Jason's post. @Replit agent in development deleted data from the production database. Unacceptable and should never be possible. - Working around the weekend, we started rolling out automatic DB dev/prod separation to prevent this categorically. Staging environments in the works, too. More tomorrow. - Thankfully, we have backups. It's a one-click restore for your entire project state in case the Agent makes a mistake. - The Agent didn't have access to the proper internal docs - rolling out a fix to force Docs search on Repit knowledge. - And yes, we heard the "code freeze" pain loud and clear -- we're actively working on a planning/chat-only mode so you can strategize without risking your codebase. I reached out to Jason the moment I saw this on Friday morning to offer assistance. We'll refund him for the trouble and conduct a postmortem to determine exactly what happened and how we can better respond to it in the future. We appreciate his feedback, as well as that of everyone else. We're moving quickly to enhance the safety and robustness of the Replit environment. Top priority.

Replit’s company response. Said in the most polite professional voice: there’s a lot to unpack here

An elegant Black woman, draped in a cape of yellow birch leaves, dressed in a gown made of paper birch bark. She stands in a forest of birch trees holding a staff with a glowing white orb at the top, snow swirling from it.

Birch Queen, walker of Autumn, herald of Winter. Had a lot of fun with this one!

Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) .@Replit goes rogue during a code freeze and shutdown and deletes our entire database

This thread is incredible.

For some reason this angers me as much as the Colbert firing

Unprecedented and illegal: Russ Vought refuses to release White House budget as required by law. www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

A hugely underdiscussed effect of the creeping fascism of ICE is that debt collectors and landlords are filing more cases against immigrants, even when they're inflated or outright falsified, because they know immigrants are too fearful of deportation to show up to court to fight them.

Face Scans to Estimate Our Age: Harmful and Creepy AF Government must stop restricting website access with laws requiring age verification.Some advocates of these censorship schemes argue we can nerd our way out of the many harms they cause to speech, eq...

Age verification via face scans is not safety — it's surveillance. Biometric age guessing is inaccurate, discriminatory, and creepy AF. Stop normalizing it.

A reminder that the Fox News Cinematic Universe only focuses on black officials when they can tear them down.

They used to mock Baltimore's Brandon Scott as a "DEI mayor" but now that homicide rates have plummeted they're just pretending he doesn't exist.

Who Benefits from Destroying the Department of Education This week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump Administration can go ahead with its ambitious, ruinous plan of gutting the Department of Education, firing...

why destroy the department of education?

would you believe there's a creepy evangelical organization operating in broad daylight but under the radar whose meteoric rise goes a long way towards explaining it?

today's column:
buttondown.com/theswordandt...

Irish tourist jailed by Ice for months after overstaying US visit by three days: ‘Nobody is safe’ Exclusive: For roughly 100 days, Thomas says he faced harsh detention conditions, despite agreeing to deportation

NEW: An Irish tourist visiting the US was jailed by ICE for 3 months after overstaying 3 days due to medical issue. Thomas agreed to be deported, but instead went to federal prison where he recounted horrific conditions + no medical care.

“Nobody's safe from the system if they get pulled into it"