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Stories I began my day with from sources I find trustworthy and for which I expect I will generally be too busy to offer commentary:
NOTE, Unless the site is NPR They probably require subscriptions so my link will do you little good. Therefore, I will paste a paragraph or two I think are worth your while.

Minnesota tartribune remembering-hurricane-katrina-new-orleans

I’m a member of the Minnesota House, and the loss of my leader and friend, Melissa Hortman, has weighed on me over the past months. Politics have become so divisive that we have trouble seeing through differences to our common humanity. I wonder how differently things would play out if Hurricane Katrina had hit ground in August 2025. Would businesses, universities and charities from across the country reach out with dramatic acts of kindness and camaraderie? In my case, professors at my adopted law school, William Mitchell (now Mitchell Hamline School of Law), asked if I needed a place to stay and a school administrator cried with me as he handled the paperwork to admit me. Such unhesitating empathy for a stranger seems rare these days, as we have divided into clans to determine who is worthy of our support.

New Orleans Police and volunteers use boats to rescue residents from a flooded neighborhood on the east side of New Orleans on Aug. 31, 2005. (ERIC GAY/The Associated Press)
In 2005, I was a law student and a paralegal at an immigration law firm. I remember wandering through Target buying clothing while talking on my phone, answering clients’ questions as best I could. Meanwhile, immigrant laborers flowed into Louisiana to help rebuild New Orleans. By some counts, over half of the reconstruction workforce after Katrina was undocumented immigrants. Undoubtedly, if such a workforce were needed in an emergency today, fear of arrest (or actual arrest) would stop them from coming to our aid in a time of great need. Notably, displaced Louisianans who relocated permanently to Houston have made immense economic contributions to the city in the decades since. Both of these stories are good reminders that displaced people have much to offer their new communities.

NPR: Shedding light on Japan’s WWII germ warfare program :

“The most shocking thing for me,” he recalls, “was a specimen of a whole female body with a fetus in its womb.”

Shimizu says he himself became seriously ill, after an older unit member gave him a piece of bread, and he believes that the unit carried out experiments on its own youth corps trainees.

As Japan’s defeat loomed, unit 731 members were instructed to destroy evidence — and witnesses. Unit 731 doctors called the people they experimented on “maruta,” or logs, in other words, not human.

“I did not see any of the maruta alive,” Shimizu says. “All I did was collect their bones and put them in a bag,” after they had been killed and their bodies burned.

Unit 731 is estimated to have killed around 3,000 people, while bioweapons developed by other branches of the program are believed to have killed far more.

Japan’s government has never apologized for Unit 731’s actions, and insists that it has found no evidence that the unit experimented on Chinese prisoners, even though a Tokyo court ruled in 2002 that the military had conducted such experiments and waged biological warfare.

NPR Story on Trump’s unprecedented and authoritarian takeover of Washington DC

In 1874, a wary Congress implemented a new form of governance in D.C: a three-member, presidentially appointed commission. The commission, along with Congress’ standing committees, ran the city for the next century.

Shoenfeld says the government was seen as effective only by the people who had connections to it, like white business leaders and homeowners associations.

“The committees were sort of notoriously stacked with southern segregationists, so you had quite an antipathy for people who actually lived in the city, especially as the city became increasingly Black” starting in the 1940s, she says.

1974: Home rule begins

About the author

Harry is a ferociously good natured eccentric in Duluth Minnesota who detests traitors dressed up as Uncle Sam. You can find somewhat better edited writings of his at the Duluth Reader "contributors." page. The URL is:

https://duluthreader.com/contributors/h/84/284-harry-welty