This man single-handedly saved big tobacco.

An NPR review of McConnell's relationship with the tobacco industry over the decades has found that McConnell repeatedly cast doubt on the health consequences of smoking, repeated industry talking points word-for-word, attacked federal regulators at the industry's request and opposed bipartisan tobacco regulations going back decades.

The industry, in turn, has provided McConnell with millions of dollars in speaking fees, personal gifts, campaign contributions and charitable donations to the McConnell Center, which is home to his personal and professional archives.

One lobbyist for R.J. Reynolds called McConnell a "special friend" to the company.

Much of the relationship between McConnell and the tobacco industry happened behind the scenes. But the disclosure of millions of once-secret tobacco industry documents — which are now readily searchable online — has opened a window into McConnell's interactions with tobacco executives and lobbyists.

Since he was first elected to the Senate in 1984, Mitch McConnell has vehemently opposed regulations of the tobacco industry — from banning in-flight smoking, to allowing the FDA to regulate the industry, to including smoking in anti-drug school lesson plans.

To be sure, Kentucky's culture and economy have been intertwined with tobacco growing for decades. McConnell has argued that his support for the industry is because it employs tens of thousands of farmers in the state. "Farming tobacco put shoes on kids' feet," McConnell said in May. "It put dinner on the table." In the 1990s, tobacco contributed more than $2 billion annually to Kentucky's economy, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal at the time.

But the importance of tobacco to Kentucky can sometimes be overstated. The Courier-Journal declared in 1998, "Despite Kentucky Lore, Tobacco Is Not King," noting that tobacco was only 3% of the overall state economy.

Regardless, the industry documents reveal the methods tobacco lobbyists used to gain favor with politicians from tobacco-growing states.

Soon after McConnell won a U.S. Senate seat, he was invited to the Tobacco Institute's boardroom to give a speech in January 1985.

The main lobbying organization for the tobacco industry at the time said it would also pay McConnell $2,000 for his time.

He continued to give paid speeches to the industry throughout the 1980s.

The documents also reveal that McConnell and his Senate office frequently accepted gifts from tobacco industry lobbyists, a practice which was also legal at the time.

The gifts included tickets to NFL and NBA games, a production of Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment, a Ringo Starr concert, "top-quality brandy," and what McConnell called a "beautiful ham."

McConnell often ended his thank you notes to tobacco lobbyists with an offer:

"Please feel free to call on me whenever I may be of assistance to you."

Throughout this time, the industry also provided McConnell with major campaign contributions.

When McConnell has sought re-election, tobacco company employees and PACs have typically donated to McConnell more than to any other member of Congress, according to data from the Center For Responsive Politics

On top of campaign contributions, the industry also made major donations for the McConnell Center based at the University of Louisville. The center offers scholarships to college students, hosts lectures and holds McConnell's private archives.

For years, McConnell and the university fought to keep the identities of the donors to the center secret. But, in 2004, a lawsuit by the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper forced the university to disclose who gave checks.

The disclosure revealed major contributions from tobacco companies: $200,000 from Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., $450,000 from Philip Morris, $500,000 from the RJR Nabisco Foundation, $14,000 from the Tobacco Institute, and $125,000 from U.S. Tobacco.

One of the most striking episodes revealed in the tobacco industry documents came in October 1998, a midterm election year.

"[S]en. mcconnell just called me requesting 200,000 [dollars] soft," R.J. Reynolds lobbyist Tommy Payne emailed a colleague, referring to soft money contributions that were not limited by federal law.

After his colleague agreed to send more contributions, Payne followed up in an email, "[A]re you feeling a choking sensation?"

The email is even more notable for its timing.

Just a few months earlier, McConnell helped defeat major tobacco legislation championed by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. McConnell's role in that debate led to intense scrutiny of his relationship to the industry.

The McCain bill would have ratified and strengthened the proposed settlement between the tobacco industry and attorneys general from most of the states. It would have also allowed FDA regulation of nicotine and penalized companies that failed to reduce teen smoking.

The tobacco industry launched a massive $40 million ad campaign to defeat the bill. McConnell, who had repeatedly clashed with McCain over campaign finance legislation, helped lead the opposition.

Fifty-seven senators ended up voting for the bill — three short of breaking the filibuster.

But in the days after the vote, a story emerged.

"Sen. Mitch McConnell stood up at a closed-door meeting of Republican senators to deliver good news," The Wall Street Journal reported. "The tobacco industry would mount a television ad campaign to support those who voted to knock off the bill."

"That to me is the most egregious incident that I have seen about the appearance of corruption since I have been a member of the United States Senate," McCain later said of McConnell's comments, which he witnessed.

"What I should have done is stand up and say this is an outrage for you to say this kind of thing," McCain said. "But I was so astonished that any member of the Senate would say such a thing, I was temporarily at a loss for words."

When the Senate considered bills to ban in-flight smoking, McConnell stood in opposition, saying that "there is no solid, incontrovertible evidence" that secondhand smoke was a health hazard.

In 1993, he also opposed banning smoking in federal buildings, saying the government was singling out cigarette smoke among other "so-called carcinogens" in the workplace, such as "spray cleaners." The records suggest his 1993 statement was actually entirely drafted by the Tobacco Institute

When new tobacco regulations were proposed in Congress in 1990, a Philip Morris lobbyist wrote that he had asked McConnell and another senator "to intervene" with the George H.W. Bush White House on behalf of the industry

When the Department of Justice accused tobacco companies of decades-long fraud and racketeering for knowingly misleading the public, McConnell worked with the industry to try to discredit and defund the lawsuit

In 1999, McConnell introduced the Litigation Fairness Act to protect companies from government lawsuits. He said publicly that the legislation was "not about tobacco." But internal documents show that the legislation was drafted with the help of tobacco company attorneys and was a part of a Philip Morris lobbying plan. to attack the Justice Department's lawsuit. The records show that McConnell's office even asked industry lobbyists to outline a congressional hearing for them.

Source: NPR

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/17/730496066/tobaccos-special-friend-what-internal-documents-say-about-mitch-mcconnell

Admit it, you've thought about it at the very least

Resistance is mounting across the United States against the increasing use of surveillance tech company Flock Safety's cameras, with a growing number of cities canceling contracts as the artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers are quietly being installed in thousands of locations nationwide.

State and local police departments first used the Atlanta-based company's automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems for standard law enforcement purposes, but they are now being employed for a much broader range of uses, including immigration-related searches and other actions supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Trump administration's deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.

“We have cameras that are used for everything from illegal dumping to drug houses to hotels that are just big problems,” Flock Safety engineer Kevin Cox told prospective customers during a demonstration of the company's Condor Camera, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Times.

“There are endless, endless uses for what we can do with these things," Cox added.

Those uses include spying on constitutionally protected protest activity and enforcing abortion bans by tracking pregnant people's travel across states—even ones in which the medical procedure is legal.

The ACLU—which recently launched a "Get the Flock Out" campaign to "fight creepy ALPR cameras"—says there are currently between 80,000 and 100,000 Flock devices installed nationwide that conduct more than 20 billion scans per month. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use the cameras, and some of them keep their locations a secret.

Automatic license plate readers track our every move and funnel our personal information into enormous databases that police can access to spy on us without a warrant.Surveillance company Flock Safety is the largest provider of these cameras — it's time we get all of them out of our communities.

[image or embed]
— ACLU (@aclu.org) June 28, 2026 at 11:15 AM

"Flock's ALPR cameras aren't like your normal traffic cameras," the ACLU explained. "This surveillance technology records and tracks every car that comes into view, and then an AI algorithm catalogs the make, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and even scratches. This personal information is then uploaded into a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search—with few regulations or oversight on how they use what they find."

The backlash against creeping state surveillance has even transcended the partisan divide.

“I think our country is in a kind of uniquely anti-surveillance environment right now, which is to say that, in a time where it seems there is nothing that is not partisan, opposition to government surveillance is nonpartisan," ACLU privacy and surveillance attorney Chad Marlow told The Washington Times on Thursday.

There is growing action—both legal and otherwise—to end the use of ALPRs across the country.

According to the public information project Ban Flock Cameras, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of those cancellations occurring in the first five months of 2026 alone.

Even Amazon-owned Ring announced earlier this year that it would stop doing business with Flock Safety.

Susie O'Hara, a member of Santa Cruz, California's nominally nonpartisan City Council, told WBUR earlier this year that she grew increasingly concerned about local use of eight Flock cameras last year after learning that police were sharing data gleaned from the cameras with the company's national network without city officials' knowledge, a violation of state laws banning the practice.

O'Hara became increasingly convinced that Santa Cruz should cancel its Flock contract after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, a US citizen, in Minneapolis in January.

"I have goose hbumps on my arms thinking about the absolute chaos that was happening in Minneapolis," she said. "And just the absolute insanity of what we were seeing... It was totally clear to me that we should in no way consciously be in this system at all—just no way."

Less than a week after Good's killing, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to terminate the city's Flock contract, becoming the first municipality in California to do so.

“For us, the threat to our civil liberties was greater than any benefit we could get from the flawed product,” Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley told KQED at the time.

Chad Kemp, who represents District 32 on the nonpartisan Dane County Board of Supervisors in Wisconsin—which in April voted to stop funding two dozen cameras leased from Flock—told The Washington Times that “there’s a public safety issue here, but there is also a privacy issue."

"There are serious concerns about individuals who can be monitored without their knowledge, or if it is even constitutional or ethical to track people without a warrant," he added.

At the national level, US Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) last year launched an investigation into the use of Flock cameras to track pregnant people across state lines for abortion care and to conduct unauthorized immigration enforcement operations.

Krishnamoorthi and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) have also urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Flock Safety "for failing to implement cybersecurity protections, allowing Americans’ personal data to be exposed to hackers, criminals, and spies to steal."

Their demand came after the cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock revealed that hackers stole passwords and data from at least 35 Flock customer accounts.

In May, US Reps. Jesús "Chuy" Garcia (D-Ill.) and Scott Perry (R-Pa.) introduced a bipartisan amendment to a bill that would prohibit state and local governments receiving federal highway funds from using ALPRs for purposes other than electronic toll collection.

It's not just Flock. Axon, Vigilant Solutions—a subsidiary of Motorola Solutions—Genetec, PlateSmart, Innova Systems, Rekor, ELSAG, Perceptics, Jenoptik, and other firms market ALPRs to law enforcement agencies, private companies, and others.

"It doesn't matter which company has its creepy cameras in your neighborhood," the ACLU said, "they all have the same problems: a lack of transparency, oversight, and regulation into how they collect, store, and use our data, and how to hold public and private actors accountable if they abuse it."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

Kreuz-pfostiert von "wir🇷🇺🔥⛽iel" durch @einkorn@feddit.org in !wir_iel@feddit.org

Obligatory Monty Python sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrqW_BZu5Xk

In what some described as a "fitting metaphor" for the state of the US, a large panel fell from the stage at President Donald Trump's 250th anniversary extravaganza, nearly crushing a group of young dancers during a rehearsal.

A video of the falling piece of debris was posted to social media Thursday by the independent journalist Aaron Parnas, who wrote, "The stage is falling apart at the rehearsal for Freedom 250's July 4th celebration."

The giant panel interrupted a patriotic dance number, making a loud crash and sending bits of dust and shrapnel flying just feet behind the troupe of what appeared to be about two-dozen performers on the event's Salute to America stage, where many of the festival's biggest acts are taking place.

“We’re grateful to report that everyone is safe,” a Freedom 250 representative said. “We take the safety of our performers, crew, volunteers, and guests extremely seriously.”

He added that "additional safeguards and senior technical oversight are now in place as preparations continue.”

HuffPost deputy editor Philip Lewis said it was "literally a miracle no one was hurt."

From a scourge of algae in the reflecting pool, to the rash of headline acts bailing from their performances, to the persistent low attendance, and empty booths, the festivities—commandeered by the Trump-aligned Freedom 250 operation—has been seemingly marred by one indignity after another.

Power outages have led the supply of ice cream to become liquefied by the heat, and a faulty generator has led the giant Ferris wheel to run only intermittently.

A model of the president's planned "Arc de Trump" has been mocked as "a sad, peeling mess" by Margaret Hartmann of New York Magazine, who noted the creasing vinyl, cracking wood, and caulk oozing out the sides. The mid-festival addition of a series of improvised columns did little to stop it from being referred to as a "Temu arch."

Other buildings were haphazardly overlaid with vinyl covers designed to look like three-dimensional pieces of classical architecture.

An interim report published Thursday by Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee emphasized the festival's dual role—in addition to being a monument to Trump's ego—as yet another opportunity for his donors and allies to profit.

Through the newly created Freedom 250 group, the report alleges, Trump has used the event to sell sponsorship packages promising VIP access, speaking roles, private receptions, and photo opportunities with the president.

It also points to federal contracts for Trump-connected event vendors, official merchandise sales through a Trump campaign vendor, and event-registration data routed through a firm founded by former Trump digital strategist Brad Parscale.

The company in charge of the State Fair's production is Event Strategies, Inc.—a firm run by a group of longtime Trump aides. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, it has received taxpayer funds through the National Park Foundation, though it remains unclear how much the company has made.

It's also unclear what, if any, oversights may have led to the dangerous stage mishap. However, the use of an opaque private charity to fund the festival appears to have enabled corner-cutting elsewhere.

According to the Democratic report, the UFC arena on the White House South Lawn “bypassed layers of [National Park Service]-mandated environmental review,” allowing the commercial fighting organization headed by Trump pal Dana White to save time and money, which led to a lawsuit last month seeking to stop the event.

Journalist Ryan Grim said that if there have indeed been safety rules flouted, the falling panel is "the kind of thing somebody can genuinely be prosecuted for if someone dies, which is not uncommon if you slap it together like this."

Many found the short video deeply resonant—a microcosm of the unprecedented elite enrichment that has taken place during the second Trump administration, subsidized by bone-deep cuts to social safety net programs that have made life more precarious for millions of people, including many children.

Political commentator J Aubrey said that it was "hard to imagine a more fitting metaphor for our rapidly decaying society."

There is, unnervingly, still plenty of time for a deadly incident to occur at the fair.

The president's Independence Day celebration is slated to culminate in the launching of 850,000 firework shells from near the reflecting pool and several other sites along the Potomac River.

The National Park Service has projected the display would cause “very unhealthy” conditions around central DC, including particulate pollution that can harm those with asthma, according to documents uncovered by The Washington Post.

Soaring temperatures have also put Washington under severe drought, turning the surrounding area into a potential tinderbox. DC Water has said it was coordinating with federal officials in the case that a forest fire breaks out.

"It only takes one small spark landing in dry vegetation under the right conditions to start a fast-moving wildfire," April Newman, a public information officer at Cal Fire, told Axios.

Trump himself, who recently turned 80 years old and is rumored to be in poor health, is also not immune to the dangers.

The president declared that on Independence Day, "when it's going to be approximately 107 degrees out... I'm going to make a really long speech."

That speech, scheduled for 9:45 pm ET, will take place on the Salute to America stage.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

The Dutch cabinet will provide €450m ($515m) to state-owned gas operator Gasunie to build a 200,000-tonne underground hydrogen storage facility in Zuidwending.

The cabinet said it would make the funds available to the HyStock project, which aims to construct four underground salt caverns to store large volumes of hydrogen alongside existing natural gas storage.

Bei der versuchten Einreise am Grenzübergang bei Laredo Ende August 2025, wurde ihm die Einreise angeblich wegen fehlender gültiger Dokumente verweigert. Die CBP habe ein Verfahren eingeleitet. Am nächsten Tag ging es in ICE-Gewahrsam. Diese Behörde habe ihn einen Monat später in einem Pflegeheim/Klinik in Harlingen untergebracht. Dort wurde er angeblich wegen Demenz, Bluthochdruck, kognitiver Beeinträchtigungen und Magengeschwüren behandelt worden. Am 24. Juni habe ein Arzt den Tod des 85jährigen festgestellt.

In den ersten fünf Monaten des Jahres seien 18 Menschen im Gewahrsam der Behörde gestorben, bezog sich Türk auf offizielle Zahlen der US-Behörde. Im Vorjahr seien es insgesamt 33 gewesen, 2024 seien 11 Menschen gestorben. Türk kritisierte den Mangel an Transparenz zu den jeweiligen Umständen. (...)

Die US-Einwanderungsbehörde wies in ihrer Erklärung zu dem aktuellen Todesfall Kritik an ihrem Vorgehen zurück. „Die ICE setzt sich dafür ein, dass alle Personen in Gewahrsam in einer sicheren und menschenwürdigen Umgebung untergebracht sind“, heißt es in dem Dokument. „Vom Moment der Ankunft an und während des gesamten Aufenthalts wird eine umfassende medizinische Versorgung gewährleistet.“

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