Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
A federal judge has released a purported Epstein suicide note, and it reads like a Truth Social post. The Trump DOJ gets to keep six hundred boxes of Georgia’s 2020 ballots. ICE agents boarded a Disney cruise ship and arrested workers in front of vacationing families. And babies are dying from a condition that a single, inexpensive shot has prevented since 1961.
AlterNet America is the people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. Corporate networks are cheerleading the war in Iran, and the FCC chair is openly threatening broadcast licenses of outlets that don’t toe the line. The Washington Post and the LA Times are being swallowed by oligarchs. Sixty Minutes is being dismantled from the inside. Independent journalism has never been more essential than it is right now. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please become one today. It is how we stay standing when everything else is being bought or broken.
Now, let’s get into it.
Epstein’s Purported Suicide Note Is Out, And It Reads Like a Trump Post
A federal judge has released a purported suicide note from Jeffrey Epstein, and the internet immediately noticed something. The spelling errors. The capitalizations. The multiple exclamation points. The aggrieved insistence that investigators found NOTHING.
If you have spent any time reading Truth Social posts, you may have experienced a brief and deeply unsettling sense of recognition.
The unverified and undated document was placed on the court docket in the case of a former cellmate of the late convicted sex offender who said he had found the note. The cellmate is Nicholas Tartaglione, a former police officer convicted of quadruple murder. The note was tucked inside Tartaglione’s book.
The note, which is not signed, reads in part: “They investigated me for month – found NOTHING!!! It is a treat to be able to chose ones time to say goodbye. NO FUN – NOT WORTH IT!!”
No court or investigative agency has vouched for its authenticity. The Justice Department told the judge it had “no knowledge” of whether the note was legitimate. Tartaglione claimed he had revived Epstein during an unsuccessful suicide attempt in July 2019, weeks before Epstein was found dead in his cell.
At this point, the only thing everyone agrees on is that Jeffrey Epstein is dead.
The Trump DOJ Will Be Keeping Georgia’s Ballots
The Trump administration’s six-year obsession with Fulton County’s ballots has now outlasted the statute of limitations on the crimes it claims to be investigating.
A federal judge in Georgia has denied a motion by Fulton County officials to return ballots from the 2020 election that were taken by the FBI in a court-authorized search earlier this year.
U.S. District Judge Jean-Paul Boulee said attorneys representing Fulton County did not establish enough evidence to prove that the FBI affidavit was deficient in a way that showed “callous disregard” for the county’s rights.
The judge did acknowledge that “the seizure in this case was certainly not perfect,” and described the events as “unprecedented.” But he concluded that this was not quite enough to give the ballots back.
Three guesses who appointed him.
Fulton County raised the concern in court filings that this case would provide a blueprint for the Trump administration to seize ballots in the midst of the 2026 midterms. Boulee’s ruling left the door open to a different outcome if ballots were seized during an active election, which means the question of whether this can happen again in November has not actually been answered.
Fulton County can appeal the ruling to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It intends to. So the boxes sit in federal custody while the investigation continues, six years after the election, after multiple previous investigations concluded fraud did not exist.
Disney Cruise Ends With ICE Loading the Staff Into a Van
Dharmi Mehta had just finished a five-day Disney cruise and was waiting to clear customs at the B Street Pier in San Diego when she noticed that federal agents were loading members of the ship’s crew into an unmarked white van. They were still in their uniforms.
She immediately recognized one of the crew members. “One of the employees in restraints was a head server who had been serving me and my family for the duration of my trip,” she said. “We got to know him fairly well — he was actually serving us 45 minutes to an hour before he was in restraints.”
Ten crewmembers from the Disney Magic were taken into custody during the incident. Two days later, federal agents returned to the B Street Cruise Terminal, detaining four crewmembers from Holland America’s MV Zandaam.
The Port of San Diego confirmed its local harbor police had no involvement and did not receive any calls for service related to either incident. Disney has not commented. CBP has not commented. The cruise lines have not commented. The only people talking are the passengers who watched their waitstaff get loaded into vans.
It is worth noting that Disney recently announced it is doubling the number of cruise ships making stops in San Diego. The most magical place on earth, now with twice the federal immigration enforcement.
Babies Are Dying Because Their Parents Refused a Shot That Isn’t a Vaccine
Across the country, families are declining a single, inexpensive injection given at birth to newborns to prevent catastrophic internal bleeding.
The vitamin K shot is not a vaccine, but has been swept up in the same post-pandemic tide that has led to drops in key childhood vaccines. This is the MAHA movement’s legacy showing up in delivery rooms.
A national study of more than 5 million births found that the rate of U.S. babies not receiving vitamin K topped 5% in 2024, up 77% from 2017. Some hospitals have seen refusal rates more than double. One hospital hit 20%. Nobody knows exactly how many babies have died because the CDC has never made vitamin K deficiency bleeding a reportable condition.
Four babies were rushed to a Nashville children’s hospital after suddenly falling ill months apart. Doctors learned the parents had declined vitamin K shots for each of them, between 6 and 15 weeks old. ProPublica reviewed autopsies from Minnesota and Arizona where coroners listed vitamin K deficiency as a cause of death.
One father, whose baby died, was asked why he refused. “I figured the hospital was already pissy with me because we didn’t vaccinate at all. They lost out on all the money from that.” The vitamin K shot costs a few dollars. The conspiracy cost his child’s life.
No Billionaire Tells Us What to Write
Most publications have someone at the top of the org chart who gets to decide what kind of stories are worth telling, and what kind of stories are worth leaving alone. Often that person has a net worth, a portfolio, or a social circle that creates certain gravitational pulls. These pulls are rarely announced. They just shape what gets covered, and how, over time.
We don’t have that problem because we don’t have that person. Our subscribers are the whole business. That means our only obligation is to the people reading, so we can cover the water meter in Social Circle, the generals whose promotions got quietly blocked, and the president posting himself as Christ without calculating how any of it lands with billionaires.
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Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tonight.
POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Louisiana governor faces recall petition after canceling elections. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry suspended his state’s congressional primary elections to buy time for the legislature to draw a new map after the Supreme Court struck down the old one for racial gerrymandering. Two Baton Rouge residents responded by filing a recall petition. They have 180 days to collect 500,000 signatures, which in Louisiana is apparently the price of wanting your elections back.
A Library Dedicated Solely to the Epstein Files Is Opening in New York. A nonprofit called the Institute for Primary Facts has opened a physical library in a Tribeca gallery containing all 3.5 million pages of the Epstein files — printed out and available for the public to browse — and named it the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, a choice that requires no further editorializing from anyone.
Connecticut Moves to Curb ICE Powers With New Law. Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont is set to sign a new law that would allow federal immigration agents to be sued for civil rights violations and criminally prosecuted in state courts for unjustifiably using deadly force, and would also ban ICE agents from wearing masks or facial coverings while on duty. The administration that put “law and order” in its platform will now find out what happens when a state decides to hold it to that.
Scientists Discover a Way to Silence the Gene That Keeps Cholesterol High. Researchers have developed a DNA-based therapy that silences the gene responsible for keeping bad cholesterol high, cutting LDL levels by nearly 50% in animal trials without any statins involved. The treatment is still years away from human use and has only been tested in mice, but the underlying science is the same pathway that the most expensive injectable cholesterol drugs already use, just considerably cheaper to produce.
