News From Around the Web
#1 California Farmers to Destroy 420,000 Peach Trees Following Del Monte Bankruptcy - Susana Guerrero for SFGate, Hey, Dave!, FlPaintedPony, Terri, Dale Woodward, and Hedgie on X
Central California farmers are expected to gain up to $9 million in federal aid to help remove 420,000 clingstone peach trees following the closure of Del Monte Foods’ canneries earlier this year. Del Monte permanently closed its Modesto and Hughson canneries in April after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last July. The factory closures left hundreds of workers without a job while also leaving farmers in dire straits as they navigated what to do with their crops. In March, the Sacramento Bee reported that many Central California farmers had their 20-year contracts to grow peaches with Del Monte canceled while facing a $550 million loss in revenue...
#2 Chicago Pol Says Walgreens Should Be Charged With ‘First-Degree Corporate Abandonment’ Over Closure Over Theft - Louis Casiano for Fox News, Tim Young/TJM17, Brutusale, Justice/Betsy Ross, Lazarus Antichrist, and Chicago Tribune Opinion on X
A Chicago alderman, incensed by the upcoming closure of a Walgreens store amid safety concerns, stated that the corporate retailer should be charged with "first-degree corporate abandonment." Ald. William Hall, along with several community members, held a news conference Monday to voice their anger over the company's decision to close the location in Chicago’s 6th Ward in the Chatham neighborhood. "Walgreens should be charged with first-degree corporate abandonment," Hall said. "It should be a crime, the way they're treating our elders. It should be a crime, the way they're treating our families."
#3 Justice Department Faces Lawyer Staffing Crisis, Causing Delays - ABAJOURNAL, Citizens for Ethics, Joe Bishop-Henchman, MeidasTouch, pat barrett, and Fernando Oliver, Esq. on X
Lawyers at the U.S. Department of Justice have had to repeatedly ask for delays in a variety of cases, inadvertently revealing that the department faces a massive staffing crisis. There were an estimated 10,000 attorneys working across the DOJ before President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025. By September 2025, that number appears to have been nearly cut in half, according to a story by the New Republic. The Justice Connection, an advocacy group that tracks DOJ departures, estimates that around 5,500 people (not all of them attorneys) have left the department—either by quitting, transfer, accepting the Trump administration’s buyout or being fired. The appellate section alone reportedly has lost over 40% of its attorneys since February 2025, according to the New Republic. “Just a fraction” of the open positions at the DOJ have been filled, causing a backlog of cases, according to the story...
#4 Vance Says Fraud Task Force Found 186,000 Dead People Collecting SNAP Benefits - Haris Alic for Washington Examiner, Rob Beto Aragon, An Read, Secretary Brooke Rollins/GATEWAY XCHANGE, CONSTITUTIONAL PATRIOT, and Nick Sortor on X
Vice President JD Vance told a crowd at a rally in Iowa on Tuesday that his fraud task force found 186,000 dead individuals collecting benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Vance traveled to Des Moines to appear at an event for Rep. Zach Nunn (R-IA), a vulnerable member of the House GOP majority. During his remarks, Vance talked about the fraud task force that President Donald Trump asked him to lead. “People have asked me, ‘Is that a hard job?'” Vance told the audience. “And I say, ‘Well, let me think. Finding fraud in the federal government, it’s kind of like fishing in a barrel with dynamite.'” Vance said he is “shocked every single day by the things” the task force has uncovered... FBI Director Kash Patel accused the FBI of lying to obtain surveillance warrants to illegally spy on President Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign and subsequent first term. Trump has long accused his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, and former President Barack Obama of being ringleaders in an alleged spying conspiracy against his campaign, an allegation both have denied. Patel detailed the years-long federal investigation into the alleged surveillance on the latest episode of "Hang Out with Sean Hannity." "It took me two years of my life to prove the following: that a political party in the United States of America in the 21st century would go overseas and hire some bogus intelligence asset to manufacture fraudulent, fake, unverified information, funnel that to not just the intelligence community, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation," he said... President Trump said Tuesday he has paused Project Freedom — a U.S. effort announced over the weekend to guide commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz — to see if the United States can strike a deal with Iran. The president announced the about-face in a Truth Social post, writing that the project is on hold "for a short period of time" because the U.S. and Iran have made "Great Progress…toward a Complete and Final Agreement." He said he made the decision at the request of Pakistan, which has helped mediate negotiations between the U.S. and Iran... President Donald Trump is urging Jewish Americans to observe a national Sabbath from sundown May 15 to nightfall May 16 as part of Jewish American Heritage Month and the nation’s 250th anniversary, JNS reported, citing his official proclamation. Trump said in the proclamation, as reported by JNS, that the observance should be a time for “rest, reflection, and gratitude” while recognizing both Jewish contributions and the country’s founding. The call is tied to a broader “Rededicate 250” initiative connected to the upcoming semiquincentennial, with Trump encouraging Americans of all backgrounds to participate, according to JNS’s account of the proclamation... The city of Asheville is considering allocating an additional $19.2 million for the repair of single-family homes damaged by Hurricane Helene in late 2024. Asheville City Council has control over how to spend a $225 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, known as a Community Development Block Grant for Disaster Recovery, or CDBG-DR grant. The city received the grant after Hurricane Helene caused hundreds of millions of dollars to homes, businesses and infrastructure in the city. Elma King, the city’s CDBG-DR program manager, laid out a funding plan during a Tuesday Housing and Community Development Committee meeting. The committee is responsible for offering recommendations to Asheville City Council. This policy conversation comes three weeks after BPR News published a two-part series on the dearth of funding for the program in Asheville and the more than 100 people who stand to be turned away from the program if the funding allocations don’t change...
We check that little box on our driver’s license and feel good about ourselves. It’s a generous, selfless act—or so we’ve been told. One organ donor can save eight lives. The phrase is practically a bumper sticker at this point, landing exactly the way it was designed to: emotionally, efficiently, and without a single mention of what actually happens to the person doing the donating. As it turns out, that omission is not accidental. No indeed. In 1968, a committee at Harvard Medical School did something that should have generated considerably more public outrage than it did. They redefined comatose patients on ventilators as dead. Not dying. Not in a state of profound neurological injury. Dead. The motivation, as Dr. Heidi Klessig—board-certified anesthesiologist, pain management specialist, and one of the most credentialed voices on this issue—has documented extensively, was straightforward: a comatose patient on a ventilator has a beating heart and functioning lungs, which means their organs are in excellent condition for harvesting. In other words, the redefinition was engineered to make living people available for organ harvest. Calling them dead solved a very convenient problem...
#5 The Diagnosis That Was Designed to Kill Us - Tracy Beanz and Michelle Edwards for The HighWire, UncoverDC Zeri Teri/illuminatibot, Rojas, Express Explained, and Castello on X
#6 Howard Lutnick Faces Congressional Showdown After Epstein Files Revealed Island Visit - Erik Ortiz for NBC News, Rep. James Walkinshaw, Flushing Tenants Alliance, HEADLINE NEWS/ABC News Lilburne & Friends, and panDora on X
Over the years, the households of New York financier Jeffrey Epstein and billionaire businessman Howard Lutnick, now the U.S. commerce secretary, overlapped in seemingly conventional ways, like the need for a good painter. Another time, Epstein received the résumé for Lutnick’s nanny. They were, after all, next-door neighbors for more than a decade in an elite Upper East Side enclave of Manhattan. But their lives also intersected in far more influential or personal ways, such as when, in 2012, Lutnick, his wife, and their four young children sailed on a yacht to have lunch with Epstein on his private Caribbean island. Or seven months later, when an aide to then-Prince Andrew wanted Epstein’s opinion about Lutnick, then the CEO of the Wall Street brokerage and investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald...
#7 Kash Patel Accuses FBI of Lying to Obtain Warrants Used to Illegally Spy on Trump’s 2016 Presidential Campaign - Nora Moriarty for Fox News, Orwell's Student, CJWARNER, Sean Hannity, Donnie Cope, and Michael Caputo/John Reese - Person of Interest/JKash MAGA Queen on X
#8 Trump Pauses U.S. Mission to Guide Ships Through Strait of Hormuz to See if Iran Deal Can Be Struck - Joe Walsh for CBS News, The National Desk, KaKaty, Rektober/IMnotGOD 我 不 是 神, The Eagle Eye, and Olivia/*Walter Bloomberg on X
#9 Trump Urges 'National Sabbath' Observance for Jewish Americans Ahead of US 250th - NEWSMAX, ReadB4Censred, John T B Elijah, D.R. Couric, Frank Pavone, and Sanda Lam on X
#10 Asheville to Consider Shifting $19M in HUD Funds to Helene Home Repair Program - Laura Hackett and Gerard Albert III for Blue Ridge Public Radio, Matt Van Swol (community note), Not a Useful Idiot, and David James on X
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