John Heasly

First #monarch of the year! (And it appears to be female!)

‘They control everything’: How the Dallas Stars monopolized Texas youth hockey Ice is power in the lucrative world of youth hockey. In North Texas, the Dallas Stars hold almost all of it.

Unlike the NFL, NBA and MLB, a few NHL teams are intimately involved in running the youth levels of their sport.

In Dallas, the Stars spent decades turning youth hockey into a vehicle for profit, bullying families in the process.

New investigative reporting:

www.usatoday.com/story/news/i...

@brianboyer.net

I’m only seeing 25.

Gallup has new polling on immigration. Topline findings:
-Americans hate Trump's immigration policy (35% approve, 62% disapprove)
-Share who say immigration is a "good thing" for the country just hit an all-time high (79%)

news.gallup.com/poll/692522/...

But did they use ChatGPT to vibe code the new feature?!

YouTube video by Axios Axios’ Sara Fischer in conversation with Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince

I will be brief. If you care about the quality of news we get, this clip is the most disturbing and important 20 minutes I have for you. If you have only 5 minutes to watch then do that. Via @michaelsocolow.bsky.social

Did you watch the clip? Now go to this link. www.cnbc.com/2025/07/01/c...

Despite DOGE, Pentagon escapes Donald Trump's budget cuts unscathed The defense budget request is the biggest in U.S. history.

The defense budget request is the biggest in U.S. history.

Pardoned Jan. 6 Rioter Who Threatened Police Joins Justice Dept.

“A former F.B.I. agent who was charged with encouraging the mob…to kill police officers” on Jan. 6 “has been named as an adviser to the Justice Department task force that President Trump established to seek retribution against his political enemies.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/u...

If you are a journo covering the GOP budget and want to talk to people with medically complex kids who count on Medicaid to stay alive and in their communities, I have a trenchcoat of sources for you from all over the country, just drop me a line!

sesmith at realsesmith dot com

Tempe weighs changing rules for holding events, raising 1st Amendment concerns Opponents of Tempe's proposed changes for permits point to the city's crackdown on volunteers who feed homeless people in the parks.

In @azcentral.com today talking about the free speech implications of making it harder to feed the hungry www.azcentral.com/story/news/l...

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legalrestraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

I find myself thinking about historian Robert Paxton’s 2004 definition of fascism far too often than I’d like these days. Note that these sentences were written back when Donald Trump was a NYC playboy libertine who donated to Democrats.

'Atrocious:' lawyers, family and friends of detainees describe ICE detention Lawyers, family and friends of ICE detainees in Burlington, Massachusetts describe "horrible" conditions including insufficient food and clean drinking water, and no soap, showers, or beds.

"I'm sleeping on the bathroom floor. It smells like piss. It smells like poop,'"

"18 women there in a small room, with one toilet, and there’s a camera over the toilet."

An ICE gulag in ... Burlington, Massachusetts. cc @warren.senate.gov

Where has our country's humanity gone?

USC Law Students Hotline

Re-upping this:

The Trump administration has quietly dismantled the DHS office that oversees programs that aim to spot and prevent exactly the sort of domestic terror attacks that have been booming recently.

Apparently/luckily downdetector.com doesn’t!

New figures from CBO about how Americans at different income levels are affected by the GOP's Big Beautiful Bill.
Topline finding: Richest decile gets about 2% richer. Poorest decile gets about 4% poorer.
www.cbo.gov/publication/...

Ardem Patapoutian's story is not just the American dream, it is the dream of American science. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1986 at age 18 after fleeing war-torn Lebanon. He spent a year writing for an Armenian newspaper and delivering Domino's at night to become eligible for the University of California, where he earned his undergraduate degree and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience. He started a lab at Scripps Research in San Diego with a grant from the National Institutes of Health, discovered the way humans sense touch, and in 2021 won the Nobel Prize. But with the Trump administration slashing spending on science, Dr. Patapoutian's federal grant to develop new approaches to treating pain has been frozen. In late February, he posted on Bluesky that such cuts would damage biomedical research and prompt an exodus of talent from the United States. Within hours, he had an email from China, offering to move his lab to "any city, any university I want," he said, with a guarantee of funding for the next 20 years.

Man comes to the US from Lebanon. Starts out delivering pizzas, becomes a Nobel winning neuroscientist. Trump freezes his funding, he gets an email from China offering to move his lab “any city, any university I want" with guaranteed funding for 20 years.

What are we doing?

open chart, keep scrolling down

www.gelliottmorris.com/p/republican...

website views of PhD programmes up in Netherlands. canada, sweden etc

website views from outside the US down massively in the US, up elsewhere

America is in danger of experiencing an academic brain drain 
economist.com/science-and-...

From a bean-counter perspective, to do it right, building a resource is pretty much like adding (a fractional) headcount.

Happy Mt. St. Helens Day to all who celebrate!

news.google.com/newspapers?n...

🙄

Was whomever wrote it somewhere along the org chart chain?

USA TODAY's White House, Congress & Campaigns editor @dsamuelsohn.bsky.social will be part of @yahoonews.com's Reddit AMA for Donald Trump's first 100 days in office.

Tune in at 12 p.m. ET today, Apr 29, to ask him questions: www.reddit.com/r/politics/c...

Exclusive: DOJ memo offers blueprint to Tren de Aragua deportation plan Trump administration officials directed police to circumvent courts and pursue gang members into their homes without a warrant, a new document shows.

#SCOOP

We got the AG memo that’s the blueprint for law enforcement around the country to scoop up suspected Tren de Aragua members and deport them.

Without due process.
With no appeals.

It’s pretty wild:

www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...

I'm landing in El Salvador in about an hour.

I'm not "accompanying" the Senator, per se. I'm there to fairly and impartially report on his mission, as a member of the @usatoday.com team.

It's unclear as of yet what access the Senator and his team will have to Mr. Abrego Garcia.

We shall see.

Could be … or could be tomorrow 🤷‍♂️

I dunno. What’s Tango?