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View More Newsfrom the truth-and-fiction-and-ai dept This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Last month, my colleagues and I published an investigation into a Texas oil refinery startup, America First Refining, that had secretly gotten investment from Donald Trump Jr. We discovered a saga involving the Trump administration’s tariff policy, sanctioned Russian oil and an Indian billionaire family’s private zoo. At the center of the story was the CEO of the refinery company, Texas businessman John Calce. We’d spent weeks examining Calce — pulling old lawsuits, property records, corporate registry filings — and had pieced together a portrait of what appeared…
In the days before the much-ballyhooed celebrations of America’s 250th anniversary, Gallup dropped what passes for a bombshell from its polling operation. “American Pride Falls to 25-Year Record Low,” reads the headline on Megan Brenan’s summary of recent polling, which asked a representative group of Americans the following question: “How proud are you to be an American—extremely proud, very proud, moderately proud, only a little proud, or not at all proud?” In a column I wrote last week about the apparent decline of American patriotism, I noted that much of the press coverage focused on the low rates of pride…
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A review of Love and Terror: The Helter-Skelter History of the Manson Murders by Claudia Verhoeven; 384 pages; Verso (May 2026)Although the True Crime genre of publishing and documentary television is replete with accounts of murderous spouses, serial killers, Mafia wars, and financial scams, rarely do the subjects transcend the headline immediacy of police procedurals to deliver the long-term import of critical analysis. The Victorian predator Jack the Ripper and the Depression-era exploits of Bonnie and Clyde are two such exceptions; a third is the countercultural carnage wrought by the Manson family. As such, Claudia Verhoeven’s new book Love and Terror: The Helter-Skelter History…
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In brief Strategy has started selling Bitcoin to fund dividends on its preferred stock, a shift from its long-standing “never sell” stance that has…
This post is part 2 in a series about automated content moderation. Read the first post here. When whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked a set…
A group of crypto and Web3 firms that includes OKX, MetaMask, Matter Labs and Genlayer have formed the “Internet Court” to reach dispute resolutions…
United States prosecutors have charged a man serving a federal prison sentence over the alleged removal and laundering of about $290,000 in crypto assets…
U.S. aid to Israel is one of the most contentious foreign policy issues in America. The last three years of wars in the Middle…
Expecting any level of ideological consistency from partisan political actors is a fool’s errand; even so, the amount of sheer hypocrisy generated by the…
Bitcoin (BTC) is heading for its worst weekly performance since November 2022, down around 15% week-to-date as of Friday.BTC/USD weekly chart Source: TradingViewBTC was…
The Australian government has spent the last decade introducing steep tax hikes to curb smoking, and, as a result, the country has the most…
Cardano is getting attention again, but not the kind holders usually want.ADA fell to around $0.16 on Thursday, down nearly 30% over the past…
Some of the largest US banks are reportedly planning to launch a tokenized deposit network in the first half of 2027 in response to…
from the none-of-this-makes-sense dept Full disclosure: this post is going to pose way more questions than answers. That’s because the story of the Tomb…
From Students Engaged in Advancing Texas v. Paxton, decided yesterday by the Fifth Circuit (Judges Jerry Smith and Andrew Oldham): The Texas Legislature enacted…