The U.S. government just made a land deal with the world's first trillionaire. Not a sale. A trade. Because apparently that's how we do things now. 715 acres of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge - built by Congress in 1979 to protect one of the most biodiverse wildlife corridors left in North America - handed to SpaceX. Endangered ocelots. Aplomado falcons. Piping plovers. Land the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas has called sacred since long before there was a United States. SpaceX built a rocket launch site next door. Then came the explosions. Concrete and metal hurled six miles across refuge land. A 2024 study found that after one launch, every single monitored shorebird nest near the site suffered egg damage or loss. The Fish and Wildlife Service's response was not enforcement. It was a land swap. FOIA documents show internal planning for this transfer started as early as April 2025 - while Musk was running DOGE and threatening to fire federal workers who didn't justify their jobs to him. The agency developed what they called "the most expedited schedule possible" to get it done. Part of what's being handed over includes the Palmito Ranch Battlefield - the site of the last battle of the Civil War. A National Historic Landmark. Once transferred, SpaceX can restrict public access whenever they want. 25,000 people submitted public comments. Most opposed the deal. The government moved forward anyway. A coalition of tribal and conservation groups filed a federal lawsuit this week to stop it. Because someone has to. Why are we cutting real estate deals with a trillionaire when we could have just made him pay for it? #DemsUnited

the European mind can't also comprehend the vast selection of Ales and Lagers. This is just one shelf dedicated to local beer. I can get beer from the UK, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Ireland, Brazil, etc in the same shop.

Posted by former US Congressman @AdamKinzinger on Facebook. Beautifully written, in both form and substance: Hey everyone, happy Sunday. Are you ready for some good news? I know I am. We are told, over and over, that America has gone cold on the rest of the world. That we have decided the people on the other side of the ocean are a threat to be kept out. That the welcome mat got rolled up and put away for good. Then a soccer team from the North African nation of Algeria showed up in Lawrence, Kansas, and within a week the whole town was wearing green. For today's Good News Sunday, I want to tell you about one of the best things happening in this country right now. It is happening at a soccer tournament, and it has almost nothing to do with soccer. The World Cup is here, 48 teams playing across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Each team in the tournament picks a base camp, one town to live and train in between matches. Germany set up shop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Spain is training in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And Algeria, playing two of its games up the road at Arrowhead, picked Lawrence and made it home for the summer. What the people of Lawrence did with that is the part I can't stop thinking about. It started small, with a whole town of people who had never given Algeria much thought deciding, more or less overnight, that this was their team now. Flags went up in shop windows. Folks pulled on the green jerseys. People drove over just to catch a glimpse of the players. And then a local news crew stopped an older gentleman on a Lawrence sidewalk, standing in front of a storefront draped in a whole row of Algerian flags he had clearly just gone out of his way to find. They asked him what he actually knew about the country whose colors he was flying. He grinned, paused for a beat, and said something along the lines of: not much yet — but we want to welcome you here. There is no agenda in that man. Nothing performative. Just a neighbor, thrilled to his bones that these strangers chose his town, and perfectly at ease with the fact that he has a lot left to learn about them. The welcome only got bigger from there. The University of Kansas, the state's flagship school that calls Lawrence home, sent its marching band out to the training ground. They had spent the previous days learning Algeria's national anthem, note for note, and they played it as the players walked out for practice. Think about what that means for a moment. These men are thousands of miles from their families, living out of a hotel in the American Midwest, preparing for the biggest sporting event of their professional lives. And the first thing they hear when they step onto the grass is the sound of their own country's song, played by a hundred American college kids in red and blue who learned it just for them. Several of the players stopped walking. A few of them looked like they weren't sure what to do with themselves. Algeria did its part, too. The team opened a training session to the public and spent the afternoon out on the grass with neighborhood kids, walking them through drills, signing autographs, posing for pictures. There are children from small-town America who are going to be telling the story of the day they trained with a World Cup team for the rest of their lives. And the Algerians have spent the last week calling themselves honorary Kansans, falling hard for a corner of a state most of them could not have found on a map two months ago. But it's not just Lawrence. This is happening all over the country, in towns you would never expect. The city of Alexandria, Virginia threw a street festival with an evening of Croatian food and music, and wrapped a city bus in the team's red and white. After crowds in Spokane, Washington flocked to watch Egyptian superstar Mohamed Salah, a brand-new Egyptian restaurant in town suddenly had locals lining up for food most of them had never tasted. All told, 19 American communities that are not hosting a single match still raised their hand to take in a national team and call them neighbors for a month. There is a story we get told constantly about who we have become. That Americans have soured on outsiders. That we have decided the rest of the world is a threat. That we look at people who do not talk like us or pray like us or come from where we come from and see a problem instead of a person. And then a college town in Kansas goes and learns every note of a North African country's national anthem, just so a group of strangers feel at home for a few weeks. An old local stands in front of a row of its flags and tells them, in so many words: we don't know much about you yet, but we are awfully glad you came. That is who we actually are when nobody is telling us to be afraid. The band on the field, playing somebody else's song as if it were their own. The neighbor who knows next to nothing about you and waves you in anyway. We forget it sometimes. The good news is that it takes about one afternoon to remember. That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday. — Adam

🚨🗣️New: Thierry Henry reacts to the Brazil, Morocco, and Netherlands press conferences, where questions in Spanish were reportedly not permitted for Hakimi, Vinícius Jr., and Frenkie de Jong: “I have covered World Cups for years, and this situation makes absolutely no sense to me. You’re telling me a World Cup co-hosted by Mexico can stop journalists from asking questions in Spanish? That’s like hosting a Formula 1 race and banning cars from using their engines. We saw it with Hakimi. We saw it with Vinícius. Now we’re hearing similar stories involving Frenkie de Jong. The players understood the questions. The journalists spoke one of the most widely spoken languages on the planet. Yet somehow the language became the problem. Gianni Infantino talks about inclusion, diversity, and bringing football to everyone. Fine. Then explain this contradiction. How can FIFA celebrate diversity in every promotional video and then create headlines because Spanish journalists are being told to switch languages at a tournament hosted by Mexico? Spanish isn’t some obscure dialect spoken by a handful of people. It’s the language of hundreds of millions across the Americas and beyond. If a journalist from Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Colombia, or anywhere else asks a question in Spanish and the player understands it, why is football creating barriers where none existed? The irony is unbelievable. FIFA keeps telling us football belongs to everyone, but this controversy has many fans asking whether some voices are more welcome than others. Maybe there’s a logistical explanation. Maybe it’s a translation issue. But perception matters. And right now the perception is terrible. Because what fans are seeing is simple: a World Cup hosted partly by a Spanish-speaking nation, players who understand Spanish, journalists who speak Spanish, and officials telling them not to use Spanish. If that’s progress, somebody needs to explain it better. Because from the outside, it looks like football’s governing body is tripping over its own message.” “FIFA wanted a celebration of diversity. Instead, they’ve handed the internet a controversy that won’t stop being discussed.”

Ossoff: Last September, the President of Kazakhstan calls Donald Trump and says he wants to grant tungsten mining rights to an American company. And the very next month, Eric and Don Jr. get a stake in the American company pursuing the mining deal. Six days later, six days after Prince Eric and Prince Don get their stake, Kazakhstan announces this company will get, “The largest known undeveloped tungsten resource in the world.” A few more weeks go by, and then the U.S. government, run by their father, sets aside 1.6 billion of your tax dollars to fund and finance their mining project. In Kazakhstan. All this while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for health care, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

RIP Marjane Satrapi, the great cartoonist and film director, best known for PERSEPOLIS. She was only 56. A great talent. She will be missed.

From 1966 to 2025 we dropped sterile flies over South America that ate screwworm and thus prevented them from spreading, but the le epic efficient cracked coders at DOGE thought this was a silly waste of the ~0 dollars it cost us.

"Late Kakistocracy" is that phase of democratic decline where the regime starts running out of ppl who will work for it, and so the folks who aren't qualified for their current positions are promoted to even larger positions for which they are even more unqualified

A bombardier beetle triggering its chemical defense mechanism, firing a boiling, high-pressure spray directly at a massive longhorn beetle trying to crush it. By internally mixing hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide, the beetle produces a near-100°C (212°F) chemical burst powerful enough to force predators to recoil. 📹Tropical insects

Trump's 2nd term differs greatly from his first in a crucial way -- It is relentlessly MONETIZING the presidency. washingtonpost.com/opinions/…