Republican crimes continued to dominate the news today because, really, how could they not; as a Florida judge mulls a media request to publicly release the evidence-filled affidavit used by the government to justify the Mar-a-Lago search, Donald Trump’s longtime chief financial officer pleads guilty to tax fraud, and the Justice Department is asking the National Archives to turn over the same list of documents that the House committee investigating the Jan.

Over the last three weeks, attention has focused on the behind-the-lines attacks made by Ukraine on Russian bases, supply depots, and infrastructure. For good reasons. These attacks, made with a combination of precision weapons—including possible Ukrainian forces on the ground many kilometers inside areas Russia considered “safe”—have changed the entire tone of the war.

So I was either on vacation this past week or riding Quetzalcoatl’s incandescent ayahuasca flatus toward the infinitely dense singularity at the center of the galaxy—I forget which.

U.S. border agents in the Yuma sector have seized turbans from almost 50 Sikh asylum-seekers in recent weeks, civil rights advocates said in an alarming letter earlier this month. But volunteers with an immigrant advocacy group along the borderlands revealed the number could actually be into the hundreds, and that these religious freedom violations have also stretched into the Tucson sector. Lawmakers are now demanding answers in an Aug.

August 15 marked an anniversary that slipped by here in the United States with little notice, commemorating the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. One of the largest feats of engineering in modern history and the jewel of Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency, the building of the canal was started by the French in 1881.