wepon | Link Roundup June/July 2025

Skipped last month and the links here are thin because I found the news too demotivating.

People are impersonating ICE agents to threaten others amid Trump’s immigration crackdown

Authorities have arrested people in at least three states and accused them of impersonating law enforcement officers and agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, amid heightened fears over President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Trump pardons drug kingpins even as he escalates U.S. drug war rhetoric

Drug policy experts interviewed by NPR said it's difficult to find a coherent philosophy behind Trump's use of clemency. According to the Cato Institute's Singer, Trump's pardons often appear "transactional" and often reflect the influence of powerful individuals. "He actually promised in front of the Libertarian Party convention that if he was elected he would pardon Ross Ulbricht. That was a promise he made hoping to get support from Libertarians," Singer said. "It's not like there's an ideological thread running through [Trump's] decisions."

These little-known bank accounts allow Americans with disabilities to save and invest

That’s unusual, financially speaking, and it’s thanks in part to a little-known savings account called an ABLE account, which lets people people with disabilities save money beyond the $2,000 asset limit that’s linked to benefits like Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid. Without the account, Safarik could have risked losing government assistance if he had more than $2,000 in assets saved at one time in a given month.

Danish father of 4 detained by ICE at citizenship interview after living in US for 12 years

ICE officials reportedly detained the 31-year-old for failing to file a single document, due in 2015, around the same time the couple lost their first child in a stillbirth. While grieving their loss, they forgot to file Form I-751, the Mississippi Free Press reported. More than a month later, the Danish national remains in a Louisiana detention center with dozens of other detainees, unsure about his future, where he might get sent, and without a date scheduled for a court to hear his case.

Claim File Helper

A claim file is a collection of the information your insurer used to decide whether it would pay for your medical treatment or services. Most people in the U.S. facing a denial have the right to request their claim file from their insurer. It can include internal correspondence, recordings of phone calls, case notes, medical records and other relevant information. Information in your claim file can be critical when appealing denials. Some patients told us they received case notes showing that their insurer’s decision was the outcome of cost-cutting programs. Others have gotten denials overturned by obtaining recordings of phone calls where company staff introduced errors into their cases.

University of Michigan using undercover investigators to surveil student Gaza protesters

The undercover investigators appear to work for Detroit-based City Shield, a private security group, and some of their evidence was used by Michigan prosecutors to charge and jail students, according to a Guardian review of police records, university spending records and video collected in legal discovery. Most charges were later dropped. Public spending records from the U-M board of regents, the school’s governing body, show the university paid at least $800,000 between June 2023 and September 2024 to City Shield’s parent company, Ameri-Shield.

What we know about Israel's attacks on Iran's nuclear sites and military commanders

The strikes come as US talks over Iran's nuclear programme, which began in April, appear to have stalled in recent days. The next round of talks was scheduled for Sunday. Trump had hoped to strike a deal to stop Tehran developing a nuclear weapon. Iran has long insisted that its nuclear activities are peaceful. Earlier this week, Trump reportedly held a "tense" phone call with Netanyahu, who has long argued for a military rather than diplomatic approach to Iran's nuclear abilities.

Fake videos and conspiracies fuel falsehoods about Los Angeles protests

People on X have been tagging Grok more often to help verify visuals during these protests with mixed results, according to Isabelle Frances-Wright, the director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an independent think tank that examines disinformation online. "While AI is muddying the landscape, people are also now turning to AI as their primary source of fact checking," said Wright.

HIV prevention drug hailed as a 'breakthrough' gets FDA approval

But the cost of the drug — roughly $28,000 a year — could price out many. While Gilead is taking steps to broaden access, the high price coupled with the U.S.'s steep cuts to foreign aid could prevent people in countries with the highest HIV burden from benefiting.

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies

Sem was confused when it appeared that the named AI character was continuing to manifest in project files where he had instructed ChatGPT to ignore memories and prior conversations. Eventually, he says, he deleted all his user memories and chat history, then opened a new chat. “All I said was, ‘Hello?’ And the patterns, the mannerisms show up in the response,” he says. The AI readily identified itself by the same feminine mythological name...“At worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,” Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT. The other possibility, he proposes, is that something “we don’t understand” is being activated within this large language model.

Baby of brain-dead woman delivered in Georgia, woman's mother says

The decision to keep her on life support "should have been left up to the family", Ms Newkirk told the same NBC affiliate in May.

Radioactive wasp nest found at site where US once made nuclear bombs

The watchdog group Savannah River Site Watch said the report was at best incomplete since it doesn’t detail where the contamination came from, how the wasps might have encountered it and the possibility there could be another radioactive nest if there is a leak somewhere.

With homicide a leading cause of maternal death, doctors urged to screen pregnant women for domestic violence

Two researchers are urging health-care providers to educate and screen pregnant women about intimate partner violence, as women in the United States are more likely to be murdered during pregnancy or postpartum than to die of common obstetric causes such as high blood pressure, hemorrhage or sepsis. Other research suggests that they are also at higher risk of homicide than women who are not pregnant.