Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Is Putin Arming Iran With Missiles That Can Sink American Warships?
The Financial Times dropped a bombshell overnight. Russia’s been secretly helping Iran build supersonic cruise missiles. An FT investigations team uncovered a multiyear covert program codenamed C430L, and they call it one of the “most significant known transfers of strategic military technology from Moscow to Tehran.” Some of Russia’s most experienced missile specialists are working on it. The goal is a ramjet engine that pushes a cruise missile past several times the speed of sound. Experts say it’s meant for anti-ship missiles. In plain English, weapons built to kill American sailors on American aircraft carriers. Western intelligence already caught Moscow feeding Iran satellite imagery to find our troops. Trump keeps praising Putin, and Putin keeps arming the people shooting at us. What’s up with that?
Why Is Robert Kennedy Junior Citing Studies That Don’t Exist?
A federal judge just caught Robert F. Kennedy Junior’s health department making things up. Judge Christopher Cooper ruled Tuesday that Health and Human Services justified sweeping changes to federal teen pregnancy programs with scientific studies that don’t exist. Cooper wrote that the paperwork cites studies that don’t exist or don’t say what the government claims, calling it “a hallmark of AI-generated citations.” Of seven articles cited, two were completely made up and three weren’t in the journals listed. He blocked the policy. They’d cut tens of millions in grants and wanted the rest steered into abstinence. Two Minnesota counties, Washington state, and Planned Parenthood sued in July. This isn’t the first time. Kennedy’s MAHA report got caught with invented citations too. This is the man running America’s health and he’s building policy on fiction.
Did an Ankle Monitor Kill a 20-Year-Old College Student?
Pierre Damas Bel was 20. He came here in 2024 to join his parents, who’d fled Haiti. He graduated Springfield High with honors and played varsity soccer. Last month he started at Wright State studying neuroscience, because he wanted to be a doctor. Then the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status for more than 350,000 Haitians. ICE ordered Haitians across southwest Ohio to report in and strapped GPS monitors on them. Bel got his July 29th. He wrote online that he’d come here to study, not to hurt anyone, and that he felt a shame he never imagined. Classmates teased him. He begged ICE twice to take it off. Monday morning he called his father, said he wasn’t okay, and took his own life on Interstate 70. His father says his son “felt like he was treated like an animal.” Even Governor Mike DeWine called it a tragedy and the federal operation misguided. A kid who wanted to be a doctor is dead because this government decided he was a threat.
ICE Is Holding a Dying 76-Year-Old Man. Why?
Loreto Javar is 76 and he has stage four prostate cancer. He’s a legal permanent resident, 31 years in this country, a retired hotel worker in Fife, Washington. On June 23rd he went to his citizenship interview and ICE arrested him on the spot. He’s been locked in the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma ever since. He’s missed two cancer appointments, and he’ll miss a third because his hearing got pushed back another month. His daughter says his meals come late, which throws off the two oral medications keeping him alive. ICE says he failed to disclose a 1970s conviction in the Philippines when he applied for his visa in 1995. He told them he served three years and was paroled. He’s renewed his green card over and over without a problem, most recently in December. His daughter Daisy says “he’s been following all the rules, paying his taxes, everything.” ICE is reaching back half a century to justify letting an old man die in a cell.
Trump Cut Down the Trees Planted to Mourn a Murdered President
Forty weeping willows lined the terraces of the Kennedy Center. They weren’t decoration. Landscape architect Dan Kiley put them in the original 1965 plan, mournful trees for a country grieving a president shot down in Dallas. Now they’re stumps. The video went viral this week, though the cutting happened in October. The Kennedy Center says the willows were decaying and came out for safety, and that they’re replaced regularly. But the same judge who caught Kennedy’s fake studies noted that preservation officials called those willows “key contributors” to the building’s historic character. Trump took over that board last year and had the gold columns painted white. He also cleared historic trees at a Potomac golf course before he had permission. He’s erasing a memorial one tree at a time.
MapQuest Told Trump No, and America Made It Number One
Remember MapQuest? The site you printed directions from in 1996? Last week Trump signed an order renaming Lake Ontario Lake America in the middle of his trade fight with Canada. Google Maps rolled over that weekend. Apple got calls from the President himself and made the change late Monday. MapQuest posted four words. “We’re not changing it.” The app shot to number one free app in the whole Apple store, ahead of ChatGPT. Half a million downloads, and usage running 50 times normal. Only 14% of Americans wanted it renamed anyway. Turns out you just can’t order a country to forget the name of a lake - just for revenge...
And that’s the way it is, Today Wednesday, September 2, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
