MicroWave

The rightwing media ecosystem spins up narratives to serve their agendas after tragic events, regardless of accuracy

Tina Smith, a Minnesota senator confronted Mike Lee, a Utah senator, on Monday to tell him directly that his social media posts fueled ongoing misinformation about a shooting that killed her friend.

Lee’s posts, which advanced conspiracies that a Minnesota assassin was a “Marxist” and blamed the state’s governor for Melissa Hortman’s death, were among many threads of false or speculative claims swirling online after the killings.

Smith told Lee his posts were “brutal and cruel,” according to CNN. “He should think about the implications of what he’s saying and doing. It just further fuels this hatred and misinformation,” she said. She wanted him to hear from her directly how painful it was to see his words after the brutality her state endured. Lee didn’t say much, according to Smith, and seemed surprised to be confronted.

The NAACP filed an intent to sue Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI on Tuesday over concerns about air pollution generated by a supercomputer located near predominantly Black communities.

The xAI data center began operating gas turbines last year, emitting air pollution, without first applying for a permit under an exemption that allowed them to do so for 364 days.

The permit application now being considered by the Shelby County Health Department calls for the use of 15 turbines, though the Southern Environmental Law Center says there are as many as 35 turbines located at the sprawling facility.

The Trump Organization has launched Trump Mobile and plans to release the T1, a smartphone that it says is "made in USA" at the same time that the iPhone 17 will launch. The problem is, the phone was made in China.

Marking ten years after the launch of Donald Trump's original presidential campaign, the Trump Organization has decided to launch its own mobile phone network. Dubbed Trump Mobile, it is a network that is being promoted as an All-American service," and heavily leaning on the Trump brand.

While the launch of a new mobile phone network will certainly draw an audience of Trump followers, it feels more like a cash-in on the Trump brand rather than a real attempt to take on the U.S. mobile market.

Securitization allows banks to repackage and resell debt, famously explained by actress Margot Robbie in a bubble bath in the film “The Big Short.”

The European Union wants to breathe new life into a financial practice most commonly associated with causing the 2008 financial crisis as it tries to jump-start banks’ lending to the economy.

On Tuesday, the European Commission will publish a package of legislation aiming to revive the industry of “securitization,” after strict postcrisis laws almost stamped out the use of the practice in the bloc.

Securitization is the practice where banks repackage and resell debt, famously explained by actress Margot Robbie in a bubble bath in the film "The Big Short." The engineering allows banks to move some assets off their balance sheets, giving them more space to extend new loans.

Americans are feeling a hangover from their tariff-fueled buying frenzy early in the spring.

Retail sales fell by 0.9% in May from the prior month, the Commerce Department said Tuesday, down sharply from April’s downwardly revised 0.1% decline. That was the steepest monthly decline since January and worse than the 0.7% decrease economists projected in a poll by data firm FactSet.

The figures are adjusted for seasonal swings but not inflation.

A sheriff's deputy in Colorado briefly pulled over Caroline Dias Goncalves before immigration agents detained her. Now county officials are conducting a review.

Questions are surfacing about the immigration detention of a 19-year-old college student from Utah after a traffic stop in Colorado this month.

Caroline Dias Goncalves, a student at the University of Utah, was driving on Interstate 70 outside Loma on June 5 when a Mesa County sheriff's deputy pulled her over. The stop lasted less than 20 minutes, and "Dias Goncalves was released from the traffic stop with a warning," the sheriff’s office said in a news release Monday.

Then, shortly after she exited the highway, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stopped her, arrested her and took her to an immigration detention center.

Dias Goncalves is one of nearly 2.5 million Dreamers living in the United States. The word “Dreamer” refers to undocumented young immigrants brought to the United States as children.

Nayib Bukele has come to be known as the face fighting against gang violence and justice. However, a new ProPublica investigation reveals that image may be misleading.

The bombshell investigation comes from ProPublica, which gathered information from a long-running U.S. investigation of MS-13 as an effort to dismantle the gang's leadership and later expanded to focus on whether the Bukele government cut a secret deal with the gang in the early years of his presidency.

According to ProPublica, Bukele's allies blocked extraditions of gang leaders whom U.S. agents viewed as potential witnesses to the negotiations and persecuted Salvadoran law enforcement officials who helped the task force.

Further, the investigation suggests that the Bukele government may have diverted U.S. aid funds to the gang as part of the alleged deal to provide it with money and power in exchange for votes and reduced homicide rates. In 2021, agents drew up a request to review U.S. bank accounts held by Salvadoran political figures to look for evidence of money laundering related to the suspected diversion of U.S. funds.

Tehran “is the principal source of regional instability and terror,” declare G7 leaders in a joint statement.

The leaders of the G7 countries on Monday issued a joint statement saying Iran should not have nuclear weapons and affirming Israel's right to defend itself.

"Iran is the principal source of regional instability and terror. We have been consistently clear that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon," declared the statement, issued by the leaders of the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan, along with the EU.

They pledged to "remain vigilant to the implications for international energy markets and stand ready to coordinate, including with like-minded partners, to safeguard market stability."

Republican Sen. Mike Lee was caught fleeing from media questions about his inflammatory posts on the senseless murder of Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman.

Over the weekend, the Utah senator posted a photo of Boelter in a latex mask, adding the caption, “This is what happens... When Marxists don’t get their way.” The backlash was swift, with many pointing at the copious amount of evidence that suggests Boelter was a conservative.

Now, a journalist for NBC News has shared a video of Lee running from questions about his post, including whether or not he regrets the tweet. Instead of answering, Lee and his staffers quickly walk away from the cameras, with one staffer attempting to cover the camera with his iPad.

A federal judge ruled Monday it was illegal for the Trump administration to cancel several hundred research grants, adding that the cuts raise serious questions about racial discrimination.

U.S. District Judge William Young in Massachusetts said the administration’s process was “arbitrary and capricious” and that it did not follow long-held government rules and standards when it abruptly canceled grants deemed to focus on gender identity or diversity, equity and inclusion.

In a hearing Monday on two cases calling for the grants to be restored, the judge pushed government lawyers to offer a formal definition of DEI, questioning how grants could be canceled for that reason when some were designed to study health disparities as Congress had directed.

After 40 years on the bench, “I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” Young added. He ended Monday’s hearing saying, “Have we no shame.”

Terry Moran was effectively dismissed from the network after calling Stephen Miller and Trump ‘world-class’ haters

A journalist who lost his job at ABC News after describing top White House aide Stephen Miller as someone “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred” has said he published that remark on social media because he felt it was “true”.

“It was something that was in my heart and mind,” the network’s former senior national correspondent Terry Moran said Monday on The Bulwark political podcast. “And I would say I used very strong language deliberately.”

Moran’s comments to Bulwark host Tim Miller about standing by his remarks came a little more than a week after he wrote on X that Stephen Miller – the architect of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies – “eats his hate”.

“His hatreds are his spiritual nourishment,” Moran’s post read, in part. He added that the president “is a world-class hater. But his hatred [is] only a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification”.

The flow of migrants has dropped significantly, but thousands are still trying to cross, and smugglers are increasingly finding ways to send migrants alone through treacherous terrain.

Despite a more than 90% drop in the number of migrant apprehensions at the border since Donald Trump took office, people continue to try to reach the United States — and smugglers are taking them along more dangerous routes, according to authorities and groups assisting migrants.

In recent months, human smugglers have adopted another method to bring migrants into the country via the southern border: They are sending them alone through inhospitable terrain while guiding them remotely using cellphones, Jesus Vasavilbaso, a Border Patrol agent in Tucson, Arizona, told Noticias Telemundo.

An increasing number of people are being found by law enforcement in the desert without a "coyote," or smuggler, he said. They're dehydrated, dressed in camouflage and with pieces of carpet stuck to the soles of their shoes in an attempt to hide their tracks on the sand. The clothing is part of a crossing package that coyotes sell them, the Border Patrol agent said.