Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America. Please take a moment to click the ❤️ and restack this post. The oligarchs’ platforms are trying to keep stories like the ones below from hitting your feeds, and this helps us break through.
The U.S. military has killed 227 civilians in boat strikes over the past year, and the campaign just resumed after a two-month pause. Tarrant County, Texas, voted to cut 92 polling locations ahead of the midterms despite weeks of public outcry. A federal judge ruled that AI-generated child sexual abuse material is protected by the First Amendment. And a former San Diego sheriff’s deputy who pleaded guilty to assaulting 16 women on duty landed a gig counseling cops as a chaplain for a Christian law enforcement group.
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One year ago today, Adm. Frank Bradley of Joint Special Operations Command watched a live video of a speedboat carrying 11 people through the Caribbean Sea, and ordered SEAL Team 6 to blow it up. Two survivors climbed onto a piece of the capsized hull and floated for 45 minutes before Bradley ordered a second missile strike to kill them, too.
According to The Intercept, the U.S. has conducted more than 65 strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean since then, killing over 227 people. The most recent on August 25 killed four people.
A defense official who has watched the campaign unfold called it “a year of murders,” adding that the administration has “normalized murder.”
Of the 227 killed, only 26 have been identified. They include a bus driver, a mototaxi driver, fishermen, and a futsal player. Some may have been hired to crew a boat without knowing what was on board, and one rear admiral admitted in a classified briefing that some of the people on the first boat may have been victims of human trafficking.
A bipartisan 2026 defense policy bill is now withholding 25 percent of travel funds from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office until he provides Congress with reports and unedited video of the strikes. Meanwhile, Trump has been posting doctored highlight reels of the attacks on social media.
Sponsored Kalshi poll: Which party will win the U.S. House
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Tarrant County went blue in 2020, and its Republican commissioners have spent the years since making sure that does not happen again.
Officials in Tarrant County, Texas voted on Tuesday to cut 92 polling locations ahead of the November midterms. The third most populous county in Texas will now have 224 voting sites, down from 316 in the 2022 midterms.
The Commissioners’ Court approved the plan along party lines after a previous vote in August collapsed when residents erupted during public comment. The room had to be cleared multiple times, and former state Rep. Lon Burnam was arrested for grabbing a microphone.
Tarrant County is 31 percent Hispanic, 19 percent Black, and one of the fastest-growing areas in the state. The same Republican majority redrew the county’s precinct map last year in an unusual mid-decade redistricting that packed most Black and Latino voters into a single district and turned a 2-2 partisan split on the court into 3-1 in favor of Republicans.
The county judge who cast the deciding vote said voters would still have 54 more polling places than the law requires, which is like your boss cutting your salary and reminding you it is still above minimum wage.
If you’re having a good day, you may want to skip this one.
A federal judge in Wisconsin has dismissed charges against a 42-year-old man who used an AI model called Stable Diffusion to create thousands of realistic images of children being sexually abused. Judge John Z. Lee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled that the images are protected speech under the First Amendment.
Steven Anderegg was arrested in 2024 after the Department of Justice said he had used AI to generate thousands of images of naked children engaged in sexual acts with adults, and even sent some to a 15-year-old boy. At the time, the DOJ’s top deputy said the case should send “a clear message” that AI-generated child sexual abuse material is illegal.
The ruling rested on two Supreme Court precedents: a 1969 decision that established a right to possess obscene material in the privacy of one’s home, and a 2002 decision that said child sexual abuse imagery is only illegal if it depicts a real child.
Lee acknowledged in his opinion that the legal framework has not kept pace with the technology. He wrote that AI models can now generate images of child abuse that are “virtually indistinguishable” from images depicting real children, and that the 2002 Supreme Court decision was made at a time when current image-generation technology was “likely unimaginable.”
The ruling means that nothing will change until Congress passes a new law or the Supreme Court revisits the question. So never.
The Bible has a lot to say about second chances, but it tends to assume the first chance did not involve a $10 million settlement.
A former San Diego County sheriff’s deputy who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting women while on duty has been hired as a chaplain by a nonprofit that provides faith-based counseling to police officers. Richard “Ricky” Fischer admitted to crimes against 16 women, including women who had called law enforcement for help or to report a crime.
Fischer pleaded guilty in 2019 to four felony counts of assault and battery by an officer under color of authority, two misdemeanor counts of assault by an officer, and one misdemeanor count of false imprisonment. More than 20 women accused him of abuses ranging from stalking and groping to forcing a domestic violence victim to perform oral sex on him during a call for help.
The Christian Law Enforcement Fellowship’s president, retired SDPD Captain Jerry Hara, said Fischer is attending seminary school and is “a changed man.” When asked how Fischer’s victims might feel about the appointment, Hara claimed they would prefer officers to be counseled by someone who could steer them away from criminal behavior.
The fellowship later reversed course when the story went national, and said it had cut ties with Fischer. God works in mysterious ways, but this one could have used a little more explaining.
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Republicans Are Fleeing From Trump’s Midterm Convention. The majority of more than 70 Republican candidates and party members surveyed by Politico do not plan to attend the first-ever GOP midterm convention, which kicks off September 9 in Dallas. At least 45 cited scheduling conflicts including fundraisers, weddings and college tours that were all conveniently scheduled before the convention was announced in June. One anonymous House Republican called the event a “waste of time,” and said the planning has been a “mess.” The convention, dubbed “Trump-a-palooza,” charges House members a minimum of $25,000 to attend, while better packages cost closer to $100,000.
Judge Refuses to Toss $425 Million Privacy Verdict Against Google. A federal judge once again denied Google’s bid to overturn a jury verdict that requires the company to pay $425 million for collecting data from users who opted out of tracking. The class action, which involves some 100 million smartphone users, focuses on Google’s Analytics for Firebase tool, which continued collecting data even after users turned off a “Web & App Activity” setting. U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg said Google’s argument that collecting anonymized data was not highly offensive conduct failed. “Google can poke holes in all that evidence, but the decision to credit it or not is the province of the jury,” Seeborg wrote.
** Missouri Voters Oust Third Official Over AI Data Center Approval.** Independence, Missouri, voters have recalled City Councilman John Perkins by more than two-to-one after he cast a vote in support of a multibillion-dollar AI data center project and related tax incentives. Perkins is the third Independence official to lose office over the project as two other council members were voted out in April. In the nearby city of Festus, voters ousted half the city council after a similar $6 billion data center was approved, and text records later showed officials privately mocking opponents as “uneducated” people who needed to be “herded.”
** California Passes Ban on Electroshock Gloves for Law Enforcement.** On Monday, the California legislature passed a bill to ban law enforcement from using wearable electroshock gloves through 2030, sending it to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. The bill is a direct response to the Trump administration spending $20 million to outfit ICE agents with gloves that deliver electric shocks to people resisting arrest. Assemblywoman LaShae Sharp-Collins, who introduced the bill, said her biggest concern was that the gloves would end up “in the hands of our least trained and most lawless law enforcement.”
