Four reads to carry you through lunch.
A group of Dallas leftists planned a fireworks protest outside a Texas immigration facility, and most now face 50-year terrorism sentences.
A 24-year-old Fox News producer died in Ukraine, and her parents say a star correspondent ignored the warnings.
Sheikh Tahnoon once swept the mats at a San Diego jiu-jitsu gym as "Ben," and he now runs a $1.5 trillion empire with an AI company at its center.
| The New York Times | Janet Reitman |
| Zachary Evetts, a steel plant engineer who had once volunteered for Bernie Sanders, left his rifle in his trunk on July 4, 2025, and carried only fireworks to a noise protest outside the Prairieland Detention Center, a federal immigration facility near Alvarado, Texas. The demonstration was planned on Signal by a small circle of Dallas leftists who trained under Benjamin Song, a charismatic former Marine reservist with an other-than-honorable discharge. As the group retreated, Song shot and wounded a police officer. Within weeks, 20 people were arrested. Prosecutors, citing the Trump administration's campaign against antifa, charged most of them with material support for terrorism, a law aimed at foreign terrorist backers. Most received 50-year sentences, longer than any given to January 6 rioters, and one man who never went to the protest got 30 years for moving a box of zines. |
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| Oleksandra "Sasha" Kuvshynova, a 24-year-old Ukrainian who had just started as a producer and interpreter for Fox News, died on March 14, 2022, when Russian missiles struck the car carrying her, correspondent Benjamin Hall, and cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski outside Kyiv. Hall lost a leg and part of his sight. Zakrzewski and two Ukrainian soldiers also died. Her parents have sued Fox and Hall for wrongful death. They and two former Fox security advisers say the team had been repeatedly warned to stay inside city limits and that Hall pressed ahead anyway. The advisers also describe a driven correspondent who ignored warnings not to travel to Kyiv, a pattern Hall himself partly acknowledges in his memoir. Fox calls the deaths tragic, says it prioritizes journalist safety, and argues a settlement the father signed two weeks after her death bars the claims. A judge has allowed discovery, though Fox is appealing and the odds remain long. |
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| Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan once took jiu-jitsu lessons in San Diego under the name "Ben," sweeping the mats after class while classmates assumed he was a bodyguard. Today he is a son of the UAE's founding ruler, its national security chief, and the head of an economic empire estimated at $1.5 trillion, including its largest sovereign wealth vehicle and its largest bank. He also runs G42, an AI company built from the remains of DarkMatter, a state-linked firm that carried out hacking and surveillance against dissidents, journalists, and politicians worldwide. G42 says it has no surveillance origins and operates lawfully. Microsoft has invested $1.5 billion in G42, and the Trump administration has lifted chip export limits after Tahnoon bought $2 billion in a Trump-family crypto venture, which the White House denies was connected. |
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| At 15, a Swedish boy found his mother's 1946 pocket calendar and read an entry from nine months before his birth that said, "God, what have I done!" He took it to mean he was a mistake. Half a century later, Thomas Söderqvist, now a retired professor of the history of medicine in Copenhagen, posted the scene on Facebook. Since retiring a decade ago, he has published his memoir there in short episodes, nearly 2,000 posts so far, and answers every comment. Readers have challenged how he described a former partner's illness, deflated a story he told to flatter his own courage, and helped him catch himself forgetting a childhood humiliation behind his habit of dominating seminar questions. He argues that a life is better understood as a series of fragments than a single coherent story, and that tidy narration risks producing a poorly read life. |
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