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Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, May 27th

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A drawing that riffs on the latest news and happenings.
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jcb26
4 hours ago
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This cartoonist must be from California
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Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, June 24th

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A drawing that riffs on the latest news and happenings.
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jcb26
5 hours ago
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I don't have an account with the new yorker, but i hear you Taylor Swift
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Spurs Have New Jaylen Brown Trade Opening After Celtics’ Failed Giannis Push

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The San Antonio Spurs already made sense as a Jaylen Brown landing spot. The Boston Celtics’ failed run at Giannis Antetokounmpo makes the idea harder to ignore.

Boston reportedly offered Brown and two first-round picks to the Milwaukee Bucks before Antetokounmpo was instead traded to the Miami Heat. Miami’s package included Tyler Herro, Kel’el Ware, Jaime Jaquez Jr., Kasparas Jakucionis, three first-round picks, a pick swap and a second-rounder, with Bobby Portis also heading to the Heat.

That does not mean Brown is headed to San Antonio. It does mean the Celtics have now been connected to a serious offer built around their 2024 NBA Finals MVP, and that changes the way the Spurs should be viewed in the trade market.

Yahoo Sports recently surfaced the Spurs as an “ideal landing spot” for Brown through Roundtable Sports, leaning into the idea that San Antonio could be a natural buyer if Boston becomes more open to a blockbuster. The better question is not whether the Spurs should be interested. They should be. The real question is whether they can pursue Brown without damaging the young core around Victor Wembanyama.


Jaylen Brown Would Give the Spurs a Proven Wing Next to Victor Wembanyama

Brown is exactly the kind of player teams usually struggle to find: a big, athletic, two-way wing with championship experience and enough scoring gravity to carry offense for long stretches.

He averaged 28.7 points, 6.9 rebounds and 5.1 assists during the 2025-26 regular season. That production would immediately give San Antonio another top-end creator next to Wembanyama, while also easing pressure on the Spurs’ younger guards.

The basketball fit is easy to understand. Brown could defend high-level wings, attack tilted defenses, run in transition and punish teams that overload toward Wembanyama. For a Spurs team moving from promising young roster to serious Western Conference threat, that is the kind of upgrade that could shorten the timeline.

It would also answer a real roster question. San Antonio has plenty of guard talent with De’Aaron Fox, Dylan Harper and Stephon Castle in the picture, but the league’s deepest playoff teams still tend to be built around jumbo wings who can survive high-leverage matchups. Brown checks that box in a way very few available players do.


The Celtics’ Giannis Miss Is the Reason This Has New Life

Before the Giannis deal, a Brown-to-Spurs idea was mostly a clean roster-theory exercise. After the Giannis deal, it has a sharper edge.

Boston’s reported willingness to put Brown into an Antetokounmpo offer does not automatically mean the Celtics are shopping him to the entire league. But it does show that Brown is no longer impossible to imagine in a trade if the return is franchise-altering. That is the opening San Antonio has to monitor.

The Celtics could still decide that missing on Giannis makes keeping Brown more important. They could also decide the opposite: that once Brown’s name was placed into a superstar-level trade framework, it is worth seeing what the market would actually pay.

That is where the Spurs become interesting. San Antonio can offer a combination of present talent, young players and picks that many teams cannot. Wembanyama’s rookie-contract window also gives the Spurs a rare chance to absorb a massive veteran salary while their best player is still under team-friendly control.

Brown’s contract is enormous. Spotrac lists his deal as five years and $285.39 million, with a $53.14 million cap hit for 2025-26 and an average annual salary above $57 million. That makes any Spurs pursuit complicated, but not impossible.


Spurs Must Decide How Aggressive the Wembanyama Window Should Get

The hardest part for San Antonio is the price.

Boston is not moving Brown for spare parts, especially after missing on Antetokounmpo. A real Spurs offer would almost certainly require painful outgoing value, whether that means established salary, premium young talent, draft capital or some combination of all three.

That is where San Antonio’s front office has to draw a line. Wembanyama gives the Spurs a reason to think big. He also gives them a reason not to panic. The Spurs do not need to overpay for the first star who becomes even semi-available.

Fox, Harper and Castle also complicate the decision. That is a lot of young or prime-age talent already pointed toward the same window. A Brown trade would need to clarify the roster, not simply make it more expensive.

Still, this is why the Brown rumor fits the moment. San Antonio is no longer just a rebuilding team collecting assets. The Spurs have a franchise player, a rising national profile and enough flexibility to ask whether the next move should be incremental or aggressive.

Brown may never become truly available. The Celtics may use the Giannis miss as motivation to recommit to him. But if Boston does take calls, the Spurs belong near the front of the conversation.

For San Antonio, the appeal is obvious: Brown would give Wembanyama a Finals-tested co-star in his prime.

The cost is the only reason this is not simple.

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This article was originally published on HEAVY

The post Spurs Have New Jaylen Brown Trade Opening After Celtics’ Failed Giannis Push appeared first on HEAVY.



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jcb26
2 days ago
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Brown’s contract is enormous. Spotrac lists his deal as five years and $285.39 million, with a $53.14 million cap hit for 2025-26 and an average annual salary above $57 million. That makes any Spurs pursuit complicated, but not impossible.

Spurs need to look elsewhere.

This is madness.. Fox needs to go period from the Spurs!!
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Iran says it is closing Strait of Hormuz over Israeli attacks on Lebanon

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The Iranian armed forces announced Saturday they will close the Strait of Hormuz — just three days after it reopened — alleging America's failure to rein in Israeli attacks on Lebanon violates the new ceasefire deal.

Why it matters: This is the first big crisis between the U.S. and Iran since signing a memorandum of understanding to end the war earlier this week.


  • It takes place as President Trump's envoys are already in Switzerland ahead of a potential first round of nuclear negotiations planned for Sunday.
  • The Iranian delegation headed by speaker of parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and foreign minister Abbas Araghchi is expected to arrive in Switzerland on Saturday.

State of play: A senior U.S. defense official said the U.S. military is still not seeing any Iranian military movements on the ground that reflect a potential "closing" of the strait.

  • "Safe passage through the international waterway remained intact today as 55 merchant ships transited, moving large amounts of cargo and more than 17 million barrels of oil to global markets," U.S. CENTCOM said Saturday.
  • Prior to the war, about 130 ships transited the strait each day, per the Congressional Research Service.

What they're saying: Shortly before Araghchi announced he is traveling to Switzerland, the Khatam al-Anbiya central headquarters of the Iranian armed forces announced it was closing the Strait of Hormuz.

  • "In light of the United States' clear bad faith and breach of its commitment to implement the first clause of the memorandum of understanding for ending the war, and in response to the continuous and ongoing violations of the ceasefire by the Zionist regime in southern Lebanon, it is hereby announced that the Strait of Hormuz will be closed to maritime traffic."
  • The Iranian military said this is "the first step" in responding to alleged violations of the ceasefire. "Should the aggression continue, further measures have been planned and will be implemented to compel the enemy to abide by and carry out its obligations."
  • Shortly after that, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps navy said the strait "is closed to all vessels" and warned ships not to approach.


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jcb26
5 days ago
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Why does it feel that Iran is playing us and they control everything ? Why Dosen’t Trump end this ?
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ICE Reports 19th Death of 2026: Georgian National Mamuka Artmeladze Dies at Winn Correctional

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Mamuka Artmeladze, a 43-year-old man from the Republic of Georgia, died in ICE custody at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, on June 4, 2026. Artmeladze is the 19th person to die in ICE custody in 2026 and the second person to die at Winn after Alejandro Cabrera Clemente died in the same facility on April 11. Artmeladze is the first person to die in ICE custody in 37 days, the longest streak without a reported tragedy after ICE’s deadly start to 2026. I first learned about this latest detention death from Andrew Free.

ICE’s press release does not say much about what happened to Mamuka. He was reportedly found “unresponsive” by detention facility staff, who administered emergency medical care and transported him to a nearby medical facility. He died less than an hour after he was initially found. As reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN has found, this version of events is far from complete and does not take into account the litany of ways that DHS’s systematic indifference towards immigrants’ lives in detention mirrors the president’s and his proxies’ dehumanizing language and translates into understaffing and negligence at facilities across the country. As I’ve written about before, this administration’s abdication of moral responsibility extends not only to immigrants, but to citizens, as well, and exacerbates a longer history of politicians in the US and around the world treating immigrant lives as expendable.

Edit on June 7, 2026 at 10:11 PM. I forgot to include one of the most important pieces of new information related to this tragedy. A DHS Inspector General’s report published last week based on an unannounced visit to Winn Correctional found many issues with the facility, from unsafe conditions, unsanitary food storage, lack of required documentation regarding use-of-force, and other concerns. We don’t know for sure if there was a direct causal relationship between this observed issues and the recent death, but these findings do reflect the growing mountain of evidence that ICE and its contractors seem unable to follow the rules despite billions upon billions of dollars from Congress.

This Substack newsletter is a source of fact and truth in an information ecosystem saturated with spin and propaganda. If you don’t yet support this work with a paid subscription, I am asking you to please do so today. This newsletter has become a pillar of my portfolio of research, which means that its sustainability depends on the generosity of people like you who believe in it. Learn more about how to support this work below. A few dollars a year goes a long way. Thank you.

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Who was Mamuka and why was he in ICE custody in the first place?

Using publicly available data through the Deportation Data Project, we learn several things that are essential to how we understand the real-life consequences of anti-immigrant propaganda and how we conceptualize the preventability of this latest death.

Not only does ICE not allege any criminal history in the press release, ICE doesn’t actually allege any immigration violations. ICE typically includes a paragraph or more of immigration and criminal history in their death announcements. In this press release, Mamuka is described as having been paroled into the United States in September 2022, then taken into custody by ICE in February 2026 after he was found to have “no lawful status to remain in the United States.” It’s not unlawful to be paroled into the country and, as we’ve seen time and again under this administration, “not having a lawful status to remain” has been used to detain an enormous number of people who have, in fact, never broken the law. This could include people who are currently actively pursuing humanitarian protection, including through the asylum process, or people who have temporary protections that have been terminated on a case-by-case basis without any apparent justification other than to crank up deportation numbers. Simply not having lawful status to remain—i.e., not positively having an immigrant or non-immigrant status—is not the same as having broken any laws, criminal or civil. Just ask Mahmoud Khalil. This is one of the most convoluted and contested aspects of immigration law.

Most people in detention centers like Delaney Hall have no criminal history, but Mamuka’s case paints an even starker contrast between rhetoric and reality as someone who would, under normal circumstances, never be detained at taxpayer expense in ICE custody. ICE’s own data confirms that he has no criminal history—but there’s more. Using the new field on “apprehension type” (see my previous explanation) we can see that Mamuka was actually never the target of an ICE arrest in the first place; he is listed as being arrested through the controversial “collateral arrest” method that basically means snatching up anyone who happens to be in the vicinity of a targeted arrest. Thomas Homan has said many times that he doesn’t care whether someone is a collateral arrest or not, but this more expansive view of ICE’s arrest powers raises questions for legal scholars who doubt the legality of many of these arrests. And besides, Americans who are increasingly frustrated with the deportation-mania of this administration are likely to find collateral arrests even less legitimate than targeted arrests.1

Mamuka spent 119 days in detention, about four months, but under normal circumstances, he should have been released. He was arrested on February 5 in Alabama, where he was detained for five days, then moved to Winn where he spent another 114 days before dying in custody. Unless something changed between the middle of March and early June, he did not have a final removal order so ICE couldn’t move him—instead, Mamuka had a case pending before an immigration judge this entire time, and may have still been waiting on a final hearing when he passed. He was classified as the lowest risk level in detention, he had no mandatory detention flag, he was not a known terrorist or a suspected gang member (problematic as those categories are), and he never had a prior detainer, so it’s unlikely that he ever had a run-in with police. All of these factors, combined with the nature of his arrest, support a straightforward conclusion that he should not have been in detention in the first place. Using the national ICE detention average daily rate of $150, the US taxpayer spent $17,850 detaining this single person without any evidence that it served the interests of public safety or national security.

Mamuka Detained Under “ICE Wall” Enforcement Program of Dubious Value

So how was Mamuka arrested in the first place? His arrest took place under an ICE operation called ICE Wall FY26, a joint operation between ICE and state law enforcement agencies across the US South and Midwest to target truck drivers. Mamuka’s press release refers to this when it includes the language “during an operation targeting commercial vehicle drivers who posed public safety risks.” ICE’s complete lack of evidence that Mamuka represented such a “public safety risk” betrays the political and nativist motivation behind this enforcement program that can be traced back to President Trump’s April 2025 executive order titled “Enforcing Commonsense Rules of the Road for America’s Truck Drivers.” Naturally, I believe in keeping our roadways safe. But as is so common, using the category of “immigrant” as a proxy for “dangerous” is a way of overlooking statistically serious risks and concentrating limited resources on ethnic and racial minorities.

The enforcement data shows how indiscriminate the dragnet is. Of the more than 1,350 arrests tagged to “ICE Wall”, roughly seven in ten were of people with no criminal record, the same classification ICE gave Mamuka. Here’s my understanding of how it works. As Clark Kauffman is doing a great job of reporting, state troopers deputized under ICE’s 287(g) program stop trucks that bypass a weigh station and route the drivers to federal officers waiting on site, a process that picks up whoever is behind the wheel. The nationalities swept up bear this out, with Indian, Uzbek, and Russian drivers near the top and Georgians like Mamuka also well represented, a profile that tracks the immigrant long-haul workforce. Those arrests are now drawing federal lawsuits from work-authorized drivers and asylum seekers who say they were detained without due process.

Q. Is ICE Hiding Detention Deaths? A. It Certainly Wants To.

I know many people have expressed concerns that the lack of announcements of ICE deaths means that the agency is hiding deaths rather than reporting. I find that generally unlikely, simply because most detained deaths at this point leak to the public through family and media before they make it into official record. But that’s not to say that ICE is committed to transparency. The same day Mamuka died, acting ICE director David Venturella signed an internal memo ending the agency’s requirement to report and review deaths that occur within 30 days of a person’s release from custody, a safeguard the Biden administration created in 2021 precisely so ICE could not dodge accountability by discharging critically ill detainees just before they died.

DHS confirmed the change and called it “common sense,” insisting the agency is “not responsible when an individual passes away weeks after leaving their custody.” It made that claim only days after announcing that no one had died in ICE custody in May, the first death-free month since November, without mentioning that it was at that very moment narrowing what counts as a reportable death. Dr. Sanjay Basu, an epidemiologist who has reviewed more than 270 ICE deaths, told the Associated Press the policy will “make the mortality statistics appear lower without any actual improvement in care,” because the weeks right after release are when neglected conditions, missed diagnoses, and interrupted medications finally take a life. Mamuka died inside custody, so for now he is still counted—but others might not get counted or investigated. (For more on this issue, read my previous post: Beyond the Official ICE Detention Death Count.)

List of ICE Detained Deaths in 2026

I compiled a list of all ICE custodial deaths from 2026 below with links to ICE announcements. (See Wikipedia list, too.)

  1. January 3, 2026. Geraldo Lunas Campos. Camp East Montana TX. Nationality: Cuba. Age: 55. ICE announcement.

  2. January 5, 2026. Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres. Joe Corley Processing Center TX. Nationality: Honduras. Age: 42. ICE announcement.

  3. January 6, 2026. Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz. Imperial Regional Detention Facility CA. Nationality: Honduras. Age: 68. ICE announcement.

  4. January 9, 2026. Parady La. Federal Detention Center Philadelphia PA. Nationality: Cambodia. Age: 46. ICE announcement.

  5. January 14, 2026. Heber Sanchaz Domínguez. Robert A. Deyton Detention Center GA. Nationality: Mexico. Age: 34. ICE announcement.

  6. January 14, 2026. Victor Manuel Diaz. Camp East Montana TX. Nationality: Nicaragua. Age: 36. ICE announcement.

  7. February 16, 2026. Lorth Sim. Miami Correctional Facility IN. Nationality: Cambodia. Age: 59. ICE announcement.

  8. February 16, 2026. Jairo Garcia-Hernandez. Larkin Community Hospital Behavioral Health Center FL. Nationality: Guatemala. Age: 27. ICE announcement.

  9. February 27, 2026. Alberto Gutierrez-Reyes. Adelanto ICE Processing Center CA. Nationality: Mexico. Age: 48. ICE announcement.

  10. March 1, 2026. Pejman Karshenas Najafabadi. Merit Health Hospital Natchez MS. Nationality: Iran. Age: 59. ICE announcement.

  11. March 3, 2026. Emmanuel Damas. Florence Correctional Center AZ. Nationality: Haiti. Age: 56. ICE announcement.

  12. March 14, 2026. Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal. Parkland Hospital Dallas TX. Nationality: Afghanistan. Age: 41. ICE announcement.

  13. March 16, 2026. Royer Perez-Jimenez. Glades County Detention Center FL. Nationality: Mexico. Age: 19. ICE announcement.

  14. March 27, 2026. Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano. Adelanto ICE Processing Center CA. Nationality: Mexico. Age: unk. ICE announcement.

  15. April 1, 2026. Tuan Van Bui. Miami Correctional Center IN. Nationality: Vietnam. Age: 55. ICE announcement.

  16. April 11, 2026. Alejandro Cabrera Clemente. Winn Correctional Center LA. Nationality: Mexico. Age: 49. ICE announcement.

  17. April 12, 2026. Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt. Federal Detention Center Miami FL. Nationality: Cuba. Age: 27. ICE announcement.

  18. April 28, 2026. Denny Adan Gonzalez. Stewart Detention Center GA. Nationality: Cuba. Age: 33. ICE announcement.

  19. June 4, 2026. Mamuka Artmeladze. Winn Correctional Center LA. Nationality: Georgia. Age: 43. ICE announcement.

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A note about the data. As I noted previously, the recent use of the “collateral arrests” field/variable raises concerns about whether we can use this field to understand long-term trends. A trusted former civil servant and legal expert has also explained deeper concerns about creating “targeted arrests” through on-the-spot paperwork of people who should realistically be considered collateral arrests, thereby undermining the distinction and effectively overcounting “targeted arrests.” I add that general precaution to emphasize that if this arrest is labelled as a collateral, it almost certainly was, while if an arrest would be labelled as a targeted arrest, it’s harder to trust that label.

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jcb26
6 days ago
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what's going on?
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When Jordan Air Balled a 3 At His Own Basketball Camp

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When Jordan Air Balled a 3 At His Own Basketball Camp

Price for entry of camp was $1500 USD

submitted by /u/MammothHistorian5652
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jcb26
6 days ago
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I just added this feed and this is the first article that came up.. So funny!
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