Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
The FBI director snorkeled over 900 entombed sailors at Pearl Harbor. The DOJ says Yale Medical School broke civil rights law by admitting too many Black students. ICE has detained the former Republican mayor of a Kansas town because he voted for Trump without being a citizen. And the EPA is letting coal plants dump mercury and arsenic into your drinking water so that ChatGPT can write your nephew’s cover letters faster.
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Now, let’s get into it.
Kash Patel Snorkeled Over 900 Entombed Sailors and Called It Work
When Kash Patel visited Hawaii last summer, the FBI wanted everyone to know he was absolutely not on vacation, issuing press releases about his very serious walking tour of the Honolulu field office and his very serious meetings with local law enforcement.
What the FBI neglected to mention was that days later, Patel slipped back to the islands and went snorkeling at Pearl Harbor. Specifically, he strapped on a mask and paddled around above the USS Arizona, the sunken battleship that has served as the underwater grave of more than 900 sailors and Marines since Japan put it there in 1941.
The outing has been described by government officials in internal emails as a “VIP snorkel.”
The USS Arizona is a military cemetery. Families of the sailors and Marines interred inside it are not permitted to snorkel there. Former FBI directors have visited Pearl Harbor on official business, but none are known to have gone snorkeling at the memorial.
This is not the first time Patel has treated government resources as a personal amenity. He has reportedly used FBI jets for date nights, and earlier this year was filmed throwing back drinks in the U.S. men’s hockey team’s locker room at the Milan Olympics.
At some point the FBI might want a director who is harder to find on a jumbotron.
DOJ Investigates Yale for Admitting Too Many Non-White Doctors
The Trump Justice Department has a new target: Yale Medical School, which it is accusing of discriminating against white and Asian applicants by admitting too many Black and Hispanic ones.
The investigation, which took a year and produced no actual victims, concluded that Yale defied the Supreme Court’s 2023 affirmative action ban by continuing to weigh race in admissions. Yale said it was confident in its process.
This is part of a broader administration campaign against medical schools that have tried to diversify the physician workforce. The specific numbers, per the DOJ: Black and Hispanic applicants had slightly lower median MCAT scores than white and Asian applicants in the classes of 2023, 2024 and 2025.
Yale’s response was that its admissions process is holistic and that test scores are an imperfect measure of a person’s potential as a physician. The DOJ called this a cover story, which is what you do when you have already decided what you’re going to find before you start looking.
It is worth noting that the DOJ did not announce any investigation into the well-documented underrepresentation of rural Americans in medical schools, or the legacy admissions practices that have been quietly favoring the children of donors for decades. But those aren’t the gaps that animate Trump’s Civil Rights Division.
A Man Who Voted for Trump Is Being Deported for Voting for Trump
Joe Ceballos has lived in the United States for 51 years, served two terms as mayor of Coldwater, Kansas, and made one mistake: he voted for Donald Trump.
Ceballos, 55, was detained Wednesday after reporting to an ICE office in Wichita. He was born in Mexico, brought to the United States by his family when he was 4, and is a legal permanent resident.
His detention came less than a month after he pleaded guilty in April to three misdemeanor counts of disorderly election conduct for voting as a noncitizen. Kansas outlets reported that Ceballos has said he believed his green card allowed him to vote and described the mistake as honest, not intentional.
Here is the part that tends to make people set down their coffee: Ceballos said last year he voted for Kobach and Trump because he always voted Republican like his friends did. The attorney general who charged him is Kris Kobach.
The administration has made eliminating illegal voting its signature justification for a sweeping immigration crackdown. The most prominent illegal voter they have found so far voted for them. We will await the press conference.
The EPA Decided Your Drinking Water Is Less Important Than ChatGPT
Good news for coal plants, bad news for your tap water: the EPA has decided that the energy demands of artificial intelligence outweigh the requirement that corporations not poison rivers.
The EPA moved Thursday to roll back limits that require coal-fired power plants to prevent the release of toxic heavy metals into streams and rivers. Officials claimed the three-year-old rule is unduly costly for the energy industry at a time when energy demand is spiking.
It is the latest step that Trump’s administration has taken to pull back regulations on coal mining and empower fossil fuels as a primary energy source to feed the rapid growth of artificial intelligence data centers.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said that AI’s “power demand cannot be met under the overly restrictive policies of past administrations.” The overly restrictive policy in question is: don’t put mercury and arsenic in rivers.
The EPA had estimated in 2024 that its rule would reduce pollutant discharges by 660 to 672 million pounds per year, provide $3.2 billion in public health benefits each year, and especially benefit low-income communities and communities of color that are disproportionately impacted by pollution.
It had projected that electricity bills for the average household would increase by less than $3.50 per year. That is also roughly the cost of a bottle of water, which is what you will be buying instead.
Billionaires Don’t Fund This. You Do.
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:
A growing number of Trump supporters are experiencing voter’s remorse. A new poll finds that roughly one-third of Trump voters who identify as moderates or African Americans say they would vote differently if the election were held again, with independents, young people, and college-educated voters also expressing regret. Tucker Carlson, once among Trump’s most devoted supporters, says he will be “tormented” by his backing of the president “for a long time” and is “sorry for misleading people,” which is the political equivalent of a Yelp review that starts with “great at first.”
Trump Media Reports Q1 Sales of $871,000 and $405.9 Million Net Loss. Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, reported first quarter sales of $871,200 and a net loss of $405.9 million, with the stock down 35% year to date. For context, a median American household earns more than that in about fifteen years, which is roughly how long it would take Truth Social to earn it at this rate.
Supreme Court Allows Abortion Pill Access by Mail to Continue. The Supreme Court on Thursday extended a freeze on new restrictions for the abortion pill mifepristone, preserving the ability to obtain it via telehealth prescription and mail delivery while the underlying legal fight continues. Alito and Thomas dissented, with Thomas arguing that mailing mifepristone violates the Comstock Act, a nineteenth-century law written to stop people from sending pornography through the post office, which is doing a lot of work in 2026.
Releasing balloons into the air would be prohibited under Connecticut bill. Connecticut’s Senate passed a bill banning the intentional release of helium balloons, dropping the legally permitted count from ten to zero, and requiring retailers to attach weights to any balloons they sell. Ribbons attached to balloons can entangle wildlife, while deflated plastic fragments get stuck in animals’ digestive systems. Four Republicans voted against the bill, which means the state has four legislators who looked at a sea turtle choking and decided the turtle had it coming.
