| Hillman Foundation
October 24, 2025

Sidney's Picks:

Photo credit: 

The East Wing under destruction. Victoria Pickering, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

  • Corpses with burns and missing limbs wash ashore in Trinidad after US murder spree in the Caribbean. (NYT)
     

  • Trump swore he wouldn’t touch the East Wing of the White House to build his ballroom, but he razed it to the ground. (NYMag, WaPo, ABC)
     

  • The government shutdown gets dire on Nov 1. (NYMag) 
     

  • Are your meds made in a contaminated factory? The FDA won’t say. (ProPublica)
     

  • The first politically viable wealth tax may appear on the ballot in California in 2026. (Prospect)

October 20, 2025

Sidney's Picks: The Panopticon

Photo credit: 

Surveillance Capitalism. Terrence Faircloth, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

  • ICE ramps up surveillance of “antifa,” a catchall term for their critics and political opponents (WaPo)
     

  • A 17-year-old asylum-seeker and her mom were thriving in the US, but ICE deported her back to Guatemala and disaster. (NYT)
     

  • Trump considers overhaul of immigration to favor white people. (NYT)
     

  • Sec Def Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend host, criminalizes routine reporting at the Pentagon. (CNN)
     

  • Starbucks closes Capitol Hill Roastery and hundreds of other stores with no notice. (Seattle Collegian)

October 10, 2025

Sidney's Picks: Department of Ed is Killing Public Education

Photo credit: 

Bill B, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

  • “The Final Mission”: The Secretary of Education is destroying public education (ProPublica)
     

  • Children are starving to death in Myanmar because of Trump’s destruction of USAID. (AP)
     

  • How forward-thinking philanthropists and union leaders helped build the New Deal and save our democracy. (NYT)
     

  • Why does everything taste the same? Mega-distributor Sysco is taking over the restaurant industry. (More Perfect Union)
     

  • Trump is deporting people to an absolute monarchy in Africa. (MoJo)

October 3, 2025

Sidney's Picks: White House Threatens Universities

Photo credit: 

Eden, Janine, and Jim, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News
 

  • White House threatens to bankrupt nine universities unless they change programs that “punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” (CBS)
     

  • New research reveals exactly how heat kills workers. (WaPo)
     

  • On a junket to New Zealand, FBI director Kash Patel modeled law and order by presenting his hosts with illegal replica guns. (AP)
     

  • MAGAs are dragging Starbucks baristas into the culture war. (NYT)
     

  • Student journalists sue to stop Trump’s deportations of students for their political speech. (Press Freedom Fnd)

 

 

September 26, 2025

Sidney's Picks: An Oral History of DOGE

Photo credit: 

The original DOGE, Brian Bald, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News
 

September 19, 2025

Sidney's Picks: Project 2026

The Best of the Week’s News

September 12, 2025

Sidney's Picks: Feds Finally Give Masks to Firefighters

Photo credit: 

Project LM, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

 

  • After prohibiting them for years, the feds will now provide masks to firefighters battling wildfires. (NYT)
     

  • A year into the tenure of new CEO, the battle for the first union contract at Starbucks continues. (Guardian) 
     

  • Trump is colluding with Putin to send dissidents back to Russia. (Times of London)
     

  • The people who brought you Project 2025 have thoughts about the US Constitution. (NYT)

     

  • Scenes from Sudan’s forgotten humanitarian crisis. (Time)

September 5, 2025

Sidney Picks: Fourth Person Dies in NYC Custody in One Week

Photo credit: 

Thomas Hawk, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News
 

  • A Turkish immigrant became the fourth person to die in New York City custody in a week. (NYT)
     

  • Trump’s tariffs are hurting the workers who voted for him. (WaPo)
     

  • Uber and Lyft drivers can now join a union in California. (Prospect) 
     

  • Howard Lutnick’s family stands to profit off refunds if Trump’s tariffs are declared illegal. (TPM)
     

  • Trump ends defense aid to European countries that border Russia. (NYT)

August 29, 2025

Sidney's Picks: Wednesday Night Massacre at the CDC

Photo credit: 

Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

  • “People will die because of this”: Kennedy oversees Wednesday Night Massacre at the CDC and access to COVID vaccines is up in the air. (MSNBC, NYT)
     

  • How Trump’s handpicked housing regulator is generating an Enemies Listbased on mortgage documents. (Credit Slips)
     

  • A federal appeals court deems the National Labor Relations Board unconstitutional. (Prospect)
     

  • Tesla claimed it didn’t have data from a fatal crash, but a hacker exposed their lies. (WaPo)
     

  • Denmark says it caught three people linked to Donald Trump running covert ops to soften up Greenland for a US invasion, the White House says Denmark needs to “calm down” about it. (BBC)

August 22, 2025

Sidney's Picks: Feds Raid John Bolton's Home After He Criticized Trump

Photo credit: 

Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

  • Federal agents descended on the home of former National Security Adviser John Bolton after he savaged Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin and Kash Patel touts a plan to de-professionalize the FBI. (NYT) 

     

  • Judge rules that Florida must stop sending detainees to “Alligator Alcatraz” and begin dismantling the brutal detention facility. (Politico)
     

  • Eric Adams advisor Winnie Greco slipped a City reporter a bribe in a bag of potato chips. (The City)
     

  • RFKjr has eliminated federal funding for lifesaving mRNA vaccines, tapped a notorious quack to frame vaccines for causing autism, and eliminated research into the environmental causes of autism. (Prospect, NYT, Politico) 
     

  • Foundations commit $36.5 million to protect public media companies. (E&P)

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