Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Is Trump Ready To Bomb One Of Our Own Allies?
President Trump told Fox News on Monday he’s ready to attack Oman, a country that’s been a US ally for nearly two centuries. His words. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the s--- out of them.” Oman’s the backchannel keeping talks alive between Washington and Tehran. Monday marked 60 days since the two sides signed a memorandum of understanding, and that window closed without a deal. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has nearly stopped. Three vessels passed Sunday. Before the fighting started in February, about a 130 went through daily. Trump says he’s in no hurry. On Friday he told a Long Island crowd he’d soon declare the strait a territory of the United States. He can’t, and everyone knows it. And, you are still paying for his war every time you fill your tank.
Why Is Trump Erasing Teachers’ Loan Payments?
Politico reported Sunday that the Education Department is yanking away credits from teachers, nurses, and nonprofit workers enrolled in Public Service Loan Forgiveness. These are people who took lower pay to serve their communities on a promise. Ten years of payments and the rest gets wiped. Now the administration says Biden-era “coding errors” inflated their payment counts, so thousands of borrowers just watched years of progress vanish. Julia Barnard, the former student loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, put it plainly. “Playing games with people’s payment counts is profoundly cruel.” Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers says they’ll look at every legal option. The department won’t say how many people got hit. The government broke its promise to the people who teach your kids and staff your hospitals.
Why Do ICE’s New Shock Gloves Leave No Marks?
Homeland Security wants to spend up to $20 million on electric shock gloves for ICE agents. They’re made by Compliant Technologies of Lexington, Kentucky, and the company’s own manual says they deliver up to 380 volts through bare skin. Mother Jones dug up video of Adam Glueck, then assistant police chief in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, explaining the appeal. Everybody’s filming everything now, he said, and the glove looks better on camera. “With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.” A Georgia chief deputy recommended them for not leading to lawsuits. Read that again. The selling point isn’t safety. It’s that the pain doesn’t leave evidence. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council said proponents are openly admitting it’s harder to sue when there’s no proof. Does this sound like law enforcement to you? Or a torture chamber?
Is the Amazon About To Break?
Scientists say this El Niño is on track to be the strongest in a 150 years, and it’ll peak between October and December. That’s the end of the Amazon’s dry season, when the rivers run lowest and the undergrowth is tinder. A third of that forest is already degraded. Erika Berenguer, a forest expert at Oxford, said it best. “It’s crazy. The humid forest should not be burning.” The UN says 49 million more people will face acute hunger because of this. And it isn’t just the tropics. Europe’s Danube recently measured nine inches deep in Budapest. The Rhine is shallower than at any point since records began. Romania shut down a nuclear plant because the Danube couldn’t cool it, and Ford and Dacia paused production at Romanian factories to save power. The rivers that built modern Europe are drying up. Nobody’s coming to save us from this. We either stop burning fossil fuels or we will continue to face these consequences.
Will Justice Department Lawyers Face Contempt Over Epstein?
Senior US District Judge Emmet Sullivan spent Thursday trying to get a straight answer out of the Justice Department about why it’s still hiding Epstein records that Congress ordered released. He asked about the redactions. He asked about documents in foreign languages. The department’s lawyer told him he had nothing else to say. Sullivan wasn’t having it. “The public has a right to know what the hell is going on.” Then he spent half an hour walking those lawyers through the last time he held Justice Department prosecutors in contempt, back in the Ted Stevens case. He told them it wasn’t a threat, it was a promise. A judge shouldn’t have to beg the government to obey a law Congress passed. But that’s where we are. All while the survivors are still waiting.
The Biggest Electric Plane Ever Just Flew On Five Dollars
Some good news. On August 12, a plane called the X1 lifted off from Plattsburgh, New York, and flew for 27 minutes on nothing but batteries. It’s got a 106 foot wingspan, weighs more than 25,000 thousand pounds, and it climbed to 1,100 feet putting out over a megawatt of power. The whole flight burned about five dollars worth of electricity. Five dollars. Compare that to what a jet burns taxiing to the runway. The company’s Anders Forslund said they’ve “demonstrated electric flight at the scale of a commercial airliner.” Their next plane’s a 30-seat regional hybrid they’re aiming to fly commercially in 2031, with United and Air Canada already lined up. We can build a better world. We just have to decide we want to.
And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, August 17, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
