The News You Need on Thursday, March 26th, 2026.
The news you need today from Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser.
Meta Failed to Protect Kids from their Highly Predatory Practices
Instagram, YouTube found liable in lawsuit alleging they were designed to addict kids
LA Times
Scott: In Santa Fe, NM and Los Angeles, CA the same claims, the same evidence, the same results. In particular, both juries found Zuckerberg’s protestations of innocence to be untruthful, found that his companies did not actually enforce their policies against pornography and child endangerment, and that youth actually suffered injury as a result. These are the first two of a wave of new litigations challenging social media on their highly predatory practices, particularly surrounding youth.
Charles: The verdicts will come as no surprise to anyone who remembers the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, which featured tech bros who had turned on their former employers and did everything they could to keep their young children off the web. According to one study American kids aged 8 to 18 spend an average of 7.5 hours per day on their screens. In a memorable review of the documentary John Naughton wrote “the business model of social media is not really a mutant version of capitalism: it’s just capitalism doing its thing – finding and exploiting resources from which profit can be extracted. Having looted, plundered and denuded the natural world, it has now turned to extracting and exploiting what’s inside our heads. And the great mystery is why we continue to allow it to do so.”
Last month Fortune reported that YouTube cofounder Steve Chen said it might be better to limit children to videos longer than fifteen minutes. And in 2024, Mr. Evil himself, Peter Thiel, drew “audible gasps from the audience” at the Aspen Ideas Festival when he said he limited each of his two young children to just an hour and a half of screen time a week.
Theft, Greed and Revenge: The Only Things That Matter Here
Trump appeared to have business motive for keeping classified documents, Jack Smith finds
MS NOW
Charles: MS Now reported that a January 2023 “progress memo” from Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s office revealed that “Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests — establishing a motive for retaining them.”
“Congressman Jamie Raskin wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi “Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them” and “that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests.”
The White House responded with its standard non-denial denial, wrapped in a tissue of lies: “It’s pathetic that Democrats with zero credibility like Jamie Raskin are still clinging to deranged Jack Smith and his lies in 2026,” a White House spokesperson said. “President Trump did nothing wrong, which is why he easily defeated the Biden DOJ’s unprecedented lawfare campaign against him and then won nearly 80 million votes in a landslide election victory.”
Scott: Corrupt motive for a criminal act. The special counsel’s office found that Donald Trump held on to documents so secret that only six people could legally review them — and the team believed his reason for doing so was financial gain. Rep Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has the scoop. This is one of the things that Judge Aileen Cannon has been struggling to keep bottled up.
Chuck Schumer: This Is Trump’s Plan to ‘Guarantee the Midterms’
New York Times
Charles: Love him or hate him, Chuck Schumer turns out to be a far better journalist than most of the reporters who cover Capitol Hill. Nearly all the coverage of Trump’s heinous “Save America Act” has focused on its requirement to produce a passport or a birth certificate to prove your citizenship in order to register to vote. Schumer’s op-ed in The New York Times reveals its other provisions are hugely worse than that:
Sold as a voter ID law, something far more insidious lies beneath: a system for purging eligible voters from the electorate — voters who are disproportionately likely to vote against Republicans. In the bill, voter ID comes into play only at the very end of a process designed to systematically disenfranchise Americans.
This purge would begin with the Department of Homeland Security. Under the SAVE Act, every state would be required to turn over its voter rolls to the department — an extraordinary federal intrusion into the state administration of elections. It would hand Washington control over voter eligibility, something Democratic- and Republican-led states have long resisted.
The next step would involve running the voter rolls through an algorithm that would ostensibly root out noncitizens — a program overhauled by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has already proved dangerously unreliable. In a trial run of the program in Boone County, Mo., more than half of the voters flagged as ineligible were, in fact, eligible American citizens. County clerks in Texas also found many examples of wrongly identified voters. Citizens were removed from the voter rolls anyway.
This is not about stopping widespread voter fraud, which is a myth pushed by Republicans in the first place. Rather, it’s about giving the Department of Homeland Security power to choose who can vote. Don’t forget that Kristi Noem, the disgraced former secretary of the department, said that it was working proactively to make sure “we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this” country.
The third step would be to leave purged voters in the dark about what has happened. Under the SAVE Act, if you are purged from voter rolls by the federal government, you may not know that this has occurred until you show up to vote. The bill imposes no requirement that voters be notified if they are purged. Imagine this happening hundreds of thousands of times across the country on Election Day. It would be pandemonium.
Last, the bill would impose voter ID requirements — not as a safeguard against fraud, but as another barrier to voting. For those who had been wrongfully purged from voter rolls, the SAVE Act would make registering again a bureaucratic nightmare. No longer would a driver’s license or another state-sanctioned identification suffice. They would instead have to produce a passport (which only about half of Americans have) or a birth certificate (which many cannot easily access). For a married woman who changed her surname, and whose married name doesn’t match the one on her birth certificate, even a birth certificate may not be enough. Some 20 million American citizens lack the required documents to prove citizenship under the SAVE Act.
The Guardians of Rapa Nui beneath the Milky Way
Scott: The volcanic mo’ai (meaning statue) of Ahu Tongariki stand guard over Rapa Nui (Isla de Pascua, Easter Island), a Polynesian island (annexed by Chile in 1888) located more than three thousands kilometers off the coast of South America in the Pacific Ocean.
From the Hubble Space Telescope
Charles: The giant nebula NGC 2014 and its neighbor NGC 2020 are part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, approximately 163 000 light-years away.
In MAGA world, you get paid for committing crimes
The DOJ has reached an agreement with ex-Trump adviser Michael Flynn to pay him roughly $1.2 million to settle claims that he was politically prosecuted, sources say
ABC News
Scott: In MAGA world, you get paid for committing crimes. Michael Flynn illegally took money from the Turkish government while he, a retired head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was advising Trump’s campaign and serving as his National Security Advisor. He got caught. Trump is now forcing his DOJ to pay Flynn $1.2 mn for having prosecuted this crime.
The Perfect Marriage
The Beat featuring Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A.
ACLU
The ACLU pairs itself with Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA, as Cecillia Wang, legal director of the civil liberties organization, prepares to argue in favor of constitutionally guaranteed birth right citizenship next week before the Supreme Court.
Iran war: Trump: Iranians ‘necessarily want a deal’
Frankfurter Allgemeine
Scott: Every day, Trump proclaims that Iranian leaders are desperately clamoring for a deal. Every day, Iranians say they are not and have had no communications with Trump. At this point, nothing is clearer but that Trump is the man desperate for a deal. His war of choice is not going well. He entered into the war not appreciating that the Iranians would respond by spreading the harm throughout the region and the world, most importantly, by closing the Strait of Hormuz. His options at this point are either launching a costly and bloody ground war in Iran to open the strait, or walking away and appearing to all the world as a loser. Hence he is desperate for a settlement, while the Iranians enjoy watching him dangle.
Military briefing: how a US assault on Kharg Island could unfold
Financial Times
Scott: US troops approach Kharg Island, flying low on tilt-rotor aircraft and helicopters. Upon landing, they fan out over the vital oil export hub, all under Iranian fire. The troops stick close to the island’s oil infrastructure for cover, confronting the Iranian regime with an extraordinary dilemma: destroy the oil facilities to get at them? Or hold back, allowing Washington to take control of the country’s economic backbone? Such a scenario could play out in the coming weeks as the US weighs whether to take Kharg Island, where 90% of the Islamic republic’s oil is loaded on to tankers. The Financial Times gives a detailed description of US plans to seize Kharg Island, and warns—it will be a bloodbath.
Israeli former PM calls on ICC to halt West Bank ‘Jewish terrorists’ after prosecutions stop
The Guardian
Scott: Israel has not prosecuted its citizens for killing Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank since the start of this decade, a Guardian analysis of legal data and public records show, creating impunity for a campaign of violence. Attacks have spurred former prime minister Ehud Olmert to call for an intervention by the international criminal court (ICC), to “save the Palestinians and us [Israelis]” from state-backed settler violence, carried out with the complicity and sometimes participation of the police and military.
Your Moment of Online Zen
A Garden Nook at Bellevue
Édouard Manet
Edited by Imogen Sayers.