Your feed probably left this out. I refuse to let it stay underreported. So here are five stories that mainstream media failed to properly give the space they deserve, and that you need to hear.
ICE to Equip Every Officer With Body Cameras, Footage Release Left to Agency Discretion
ICE announced this week that every field officer will carry a body camera by the end of August, a paramilitary force with a signing bonus finally recording itself. Some people will believe this means protection. It does not. The stated purpose is accountability. The actual purpose is security, and it is feigned poorly, dressed up like a poorly organized paramilitary group of people with prepubescent dispositions playing soldier with real detainees. Release of the footage stays entirely at the agency’s own discretion. Nothing in the announcement requires ICE to show the public anything it doesn’t want shown.
Its sister agency has already proven what that discretion looks like in practice. CBP still has not released footage of its own agent fatally shooting Alex Pretti in Minneapolis back in January, months after the fact, with no timeline for when, or whether, that will change. A camera controlled entirely by the hand it is supposed to be watching is not oversight. It is theater. Danger did not go away. It just got a new badge.
Fifteen Minneapolis Protesters Indicted on Conspiracy Charges After Prosecutors Resign
Fifteen Minneapolis protesters were indicted this year on federal conspiracy charges, brought by U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, for the crime of standing in the way of a paramilitary force some of us have started calling exactly what it is. Among the fifteen was Treasure Thoreson, a special education teacher who was home in her pajamas, coffee in hand, when six agents appeared in her front yard. She told NPR an agent in a Homeland Security vest told her she was under arrest for conspiracy. “I see six more agents standing in my front yard,” she said.
This is not an isolated tactic. In Spokane, nine protesters were charged the same way earlier this year, after the acting U.S. attorney originally asked to bring the case refused to sign the indictment and resigned rather than put his name on it. His successor signed it a month later. Six of the nine took plea deals. Three went to trial and were convicted, facing up to six years in federal prison for demonstrating in the street.
In Minneapolis, six federal prosecutors in that same office had already resigned, in a separate but related collapse, after the Department of Justice refused to investigate the ICE agent who fatally shot Renee Good, an unarmed woman, and instead pressured prosecutors to scrutinize her widow and the protesters around her. None of it slowed the machine down. The indictment against Thoreson and fourteen others went forward anyway, under a different prosecutor entirely. Conscience resigned. The case did not.
New Report Finds 150+ Suspected Modern-Day Lynchings Across Seven Southern States
A new report from the civil rights organization JULIAN has catalogued more than 150 deaths across seven Southern states, Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Alabama, as modern-day lynchings and suspicious deaths, more than fifty of them Black transgender women. Founder Jill Collen Jefferson has spent years documenting a pattern of deliberate misclassification concealing bias-motivated killings, deaths ruled suicide within minutes of arrival, crime scenes left unsecured, witnesses uninterviewed for days at a time. In one case central to the report, Willie Andrew Jones Jr. was found hanging from a tree in Scott County, Mississippi, in 2018. Local authorities ruled it a suicide within forty minutes. An independent medical examiner later determined he had been lynched.
I am a white woman who has done the work to know Black people do not hang themselves from trees. Anyone who has spoken to a Black person knows that, and so can anyone, mostly white people, with basic critical thinking and primitive knowledge of our history. The report is titled “A Crimson Record,” a direct answer to Ida B. Wells’s 1895 “A Red Record,” which first catalogued American lynching more than a century ago. Nothing about the mechanism has changed since then. Only the paperwork has gotten better at hiding it. This is not lackluster reporting. It is criminally negligent misconduct.
Drone Strike Kills 37 Civilians in North Darfur, Russian Drone Wounds Ukrainian Vendor in Same Week
Exquisite was the word an American president chose for missiles during an earlier war this year, the kind of word you’d use for a wine bar or a piece of art, used instead for mass casualty weapons while he signed off on quadrupling their production for the cameras. I wrote about that word once already, in an essay called “Your Tax Dollars, Their Exquisite Bombs,” and I hoped I would not need to write about it again. This week two more weapons earned it anyway, without anyone bothering to say the word out loud this time, because by now they don’t have to.
A drone strike in North Darfur killed at least 37 civilians in a single morning, part of an escalating campaign of drone warfare against civilian areas that the United Nations has formally warned about. In Kherson, Ukraine, a Russian drone hunted a man selling vegetables from a street stall, chasing his car as he tried to flee and striking it while he hid inside. He survived, wounded in the back, legs, and arms. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted the footage himself. No trial followed either strike. No charges are expected. The current puppet of a president who popularized this framing has called war a fun game, and the theater he set in motion just keeps running new weapons through the same script, ending life on schedule, week after week.
Record Ebola Outbreak Kills Children in Congo as Health Workers Strike Over Unpaid Wages
An administration hell-bent on banning abortion and care for womb-bearing people, in the name of the sanctity of life, is watching a record Ebola outbreak kill children in the Democratic Republic of Congo and saying nothing at all. The outbreak has reached more than 3,600 confirmed cases and over 1,500 deaths, the country’s largest and fastest-growing on record. Health workers are on strike because they have not been paid, in the middle of the worst epidemic the country has ever logged. Nearly a third of the dead are children.
Politicians recite scripture at podiums and claim to protect children with animalesque voracity, but that concern ends at the border, or the birth canal, whichever comes first. Silence is not neutral. Inaction feeds the machine of our own greed and hubris, and it will be our downfall, one unfunded outbreak and one banned procedure at a time, the same administration deciding whose life counts and whose does not, provided the deciding never has to leave the country to do it.
Five stories. Five different countries and cities and agencies, and one identical mechanism running underneath every single one of them: someone with power deciding, alone and without a stated standard, who gets protection and who gets left to the paperwork. A camera nobody has to release. An indictment that outlives the prosecutors who refused to sign it. A death ruled suicide before the ambulance is cold. A drone with better aim than conscience. A budget that always finds money for the border and never for the outbreak on the other side of it. None of this made your feed this week. It should have. Now it has.
Sources
ICE body cameras and the Pretti shooting: CNBC, August 8, 2026.
Minneapolis indictment and Treasure Thoreson: NPR, August 3, 2026; The Intercept and Public Notice, June 17, 2026.
Modern-day lynching report: JULIAN, “A Crimson Record,” February 18, 2026; The Advocate, March 2, 2026; TheGrio, February 19, 2026.
North Darfur drone strike: Africa Center, Africa Media Review, August 5, 2026, citing UN OCHA.
Kherson drone strike: Associated Press via US News, August 4, 2026, citing footage from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The “exquisite” framing: Gemma Flora Ortwerth, “Your Tax Dollars, Their Exquisite Bombs,” published August 9, 2026, sourced to CSIS and Penn Wharton cost estimates.
DRC Ebola outbreak: Rio Times, Africa Intelligence Brief, August 4, 2026; UN OCHA briefing, August 7, 2026.
By Gemma Flora Ortwerth
Gemma Ortwerth 
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