Dems get renewed hope of ending GOP senator’s near-30-year career

Maine Democrats on Saturday overwhelmingly nominated Troy Jackson, a former state Senate president and logger by trade, as their party’s nominee to challenge longtime Republican incumbent Susan Collins in November’s high-stakes US Senate election.“Well, thank you, Maine,” Jackson, 58, said after securing the votes of 566 of 571 delegates during Saturday’s special Democratic convention at Cross Insurance Center in Bangor. “Today we turn the page, today this becomes a general election campaign, and today we win the work of defeating Susan Collins in November.”“For nearly 30 years, Collins has told Maine that she is ‘concerned’,” Jackson said, referring to the 73-year-old incumbent’s go-to word when President Donald Trump and Republicans attack rights and justice. “She was concerned while she rubber-stamped Trump’s Medicaid cuts and gutted our healthcare.”“She’s concerned when she cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy,” he continued. “Concerned when she confirmed justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. And really tragically, she was concerned when she gave [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] billions to terrorize our neighbors and murder people in the streets with no accountability.”“But concern does not lower the costs of groceries or gas,” Jackson said. “Concern does not keep our monitoring wards of rural hospitals like down in Lincoln County open. Concern does not restore all the rights that she’s taken away. Maine does not need another six years of concern. We need someone with courage. We need a fighter, and we need a senator who remembers exactly who sent them to Washington.”“So if you’ve ever been ignored, underestimated, pushed around, or told that you have to wait your turn while the rich cut the line, I’m asking you to stand with us in this campaign,” he continued. “If you believe in your heart that healthcare is a right, stand with us. And if you believe that workers deserve power, stand with us. And if you believe our freedoms are worth defending, stand with us.”“And if you believe that Maine deserves a senator who will fight like hell for working-class people, well, stand with us,” Jackson added. “We have a party to unite, we have a movement to build, and we have a senator to defeat.”Jackson’s improbably rapid rise followed former Democratic nominee Graham Platner’s withdrawal from the race earlier this month amid allegations of sexual assault and abusive behavior. Supporters of Platner’s progressive platform warned at the time that they would not back a replacement candidate who did not share the same pro-worker, anti-war agenda.While Collins spokeswoman Blake Kernen called Jackson a “low-energy version” of Platner, Maine Democrats decided the fifth-generation lumberjack fit the bill.“The working class has been left behind and forgotten about,” Shelly Mountain, a former Aroostook County Democratic Committee chairwoman and Jackson delegate at the convention, told NBC News. “He is definitely working class and always—has always—been a champion for the working class.”Progressive politicians, advocacy groups, and labor organizations cheered Jackson’s nomination, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) saying that “he’s ready to fight for working people and flip this seat.”International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) president Brian Bryant said Saturday that “Troy Jackson knows firsthand what it means to work hard for a living and fight for a better future for working families.”“Throughout his career, he has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with union members and working people, never backing down from a challenge when workers’ rights were on the line,” he added. “He represents the strength of a people-powered movement focused on fairness, opportunity, and economic justice. Troy has our full support as he heads to the general election.”

Draymond Green faces major Warriors decision after LeBron James miss

Draymond Green created financial flexibility for the Warriors to chase LeBron James. Now that James is headed to Philadelphia, Green must decide whether Golden State still represents his best option.

New York City will test even the best — just ask the three newest Baseball Hall of Famers

Carlos Beltrán is uniquely qualified to talk about the challenge of playing in the biggest market in baseball. 

‘Trump was entranced’: Staggering security lapses traced back to Trump’s vanity deadline

President Donald Trump's insistence that a Qatari-donated jumbo jet be ready to serve as a temporary Air Force One in time for the nation's 250th birthday led to the omission of several key security features found on the current presidential fleet, a New York Times investigation revealed Friday.Trump demanded the retrofitted 747-8 be ready by July 4, compressing what would normally be a multi-year security overhaul into just eight months, according to the Times. Trump personally signed off on the plane's features and security measures, according to people familiar with his role who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity.“President Trump was entranced,” the Times’ report reads, referencing the president’s deep and personal involvement in the project, which the outlet found he gave “final approval on features and security measures that would be included.”Missing from the retrofitted jet: a lower-level exit door used for high-risk situations, a second auxiliary power unit and the infrared countermeasure system designed to detect and jam incoming missiles, according to public Air Force records and photographs reviewed by the Times.Frank Kendall, who oversaw the Air Force One modernization program as both Pentagon acquisition chief and Air Force secretary under President Joe Biden, said the omissions carry real risk."People need to be aware it has a lot of shortfalls compared to Air Force One; they do add a measure of risk," Kendall said.The Pentagon has also worked to obscure the project's true cost – including from Congress – by drawing funds from a classified nuclear modernization budget known as Sentinel, the Times found. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) accused the administration of using the maneuver to dodge oversight."They have declared this work to be a national security secret that cannot be divulged even to appropriators," Murphy said. "That is absolutely unacceptable."White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the aircraft, calling it "fully mission-ready and safe for presidential travel today."

Alabama NIL exec arrested in human trafficking ring

The director of content for the University of Alabama's official NIL entity has been arrested as part of a human trafficking operation.

Antisemitism on the Rise: Radical House Dem Joins Mamdani in Calling for Netanyahu's Arrest

Trump's 'dumbest' reasoning set to embroil him in fresh military strike: Dem

An alarmed House Democrat said Saturday that President Donald Trump may consider sending the military into yet another country — and for the "dumbest" reason. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) delivered a scathing rebuke of a new Trump administration report that takes aim at Cuba during a Saturday segment on CNN."Two-thirds of this report is about the '60s and '70s, and all of a sudden they jump to today," Pocan said. "It's so ridiculous. It's probably the dumbest report I've read in my 14 years of being here, and whoever wrote it should be embarrassed."The Trump administration's continued blockade against fuel coming into Cuba has caused trash to pile up in the streets and power outages, CNN reported. The Trump administration carried on the blockade even as it ended a naval blockade against Iran.Pocan was tearing into a report released by the State Department earlier this week that accused Cuba of promoting left-wing extremism in the United States. The Democrat described it as "fantastical" and warned, "This report by the State Department, I think, is setting up a military action."Pocan told CNN that the U.S. campaign against Cuba is largely being pushed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and added that Rubio could be arguing for greater U.S. military involvement."We're already in a quagmire in Iran, but I think this is Marco Rubio's personal South Florida pet project," Pocan said. "He wants us to go into Cuba in a way that I don't think the American people support."

Brainless humans? Backup bodies? Inside biotech's depraved new world

Social media's magicians spent decades perfecting the art of slicing human attention into advertising revenue. Is the next step on the corporate road map farming human tissue for spare parts?The tech is there, or almost there. The ideas have percolated for decades. All it takes, it seems, is the will.The concept of individual self-ownership becomes entirely obsolete.An early pitch deck for R3 Bio, a quiet biotech startup operating out of California, laid out a vision that makes classic horror fiction look rather mild. The company’s leadership, reports suggest, engaged in internal discussions regarding the production of brainless, nonsentient human bodies designed for the explicit purpose of organ harvesting, pharmaceutical testing, and eventual commercial deployment.They christened these biological monstrosities "organ sacks."The terminology speaks volumes to the moral framework seizing imaginations in the contemporary tech executive class. When a team of researchers and engineers looks at the human form and sees an inconveniently conscious container for marketable kidneys, the line between medical innovation and factory farming disappears completely.Executives at R3 Bio floated plans to reprogram monkey cells, cultivate complete organ systems, and engineer these living biological constructs to be intentionally primitive enough to bypass federal ethical guidelines.But this isn't some sudden Silicon Valley obsession. The ambition to redesign human biology has been gathering momentum worldwide for years.They have a dreamIn October 2022, biotech investors gathered in Zurich to debate the commercial viability of synthetic biology, openly celebrating the day human biology would be fully decoupled from traditional ideas of personhood. The attendees viewed the human body as an inefficient piece of legacy software requiring a total architectural overhaul. It was only a matter of time before the idea caught on.Scientists at R3 Bio defended their research behind the usual wall of righteous PR speak, insisting their work aims to end the chronic shortage of donor organs and cure terminal illnesses. They publicly insist that full-scale human organ fabrication remains outside their current operational scope and that their public website reflects a commitment to safe, traditional cell therapy.But the problem runs deeper than what R3 Bio says it is or isn't doing today. It's what history tells us can happen when scientific ambition outruns consent, oversight, and basic human dignity.The playbook never changes. In 1951, researchers extracted cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge or consent, creating the HeLa cell line that generated billions in profit for pharmaceutical giants while her family struggled to pay medical bills. The medical establishment transformed a living human being into a self-sustaining corporate product, establishing a precedent that today's biotech firms are eager to scale up to the entire human torso. There is an enormous amount of money to be made. And where the fevered dreams of high-tech immortality are concerned, human morality has a troubling habit of turning negotiable.RELATED: Anti-aging mogul's next act? He'll harvest organs from his own clone L-R: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg/Getty Images; Aldara Zarraoa/Getty ImagesA society grounded in the belief that human life possesses inherent dignity treats the human body as an inherently sacred structure rather than a machine assembled from interchangeable parts. The secular technocracy reigning in Northern California views the human body as a collection of meat components that can be optimized, monetized, and swapped out.Death of the selfThe transition from healing the sick to manufacturing customized human vessels happened while everyone was distracted by social media algorithms. Engineers want to replace a failing heart, grow an artificial liver in a vat, construct a brainless body to house the spares, and call the whole process market efficiency. The language of human medicine was completely swallowed by the inhumane jargon of auto repair.This mechanistic worldview demands that every biological boundary be erased in the name of efficiency and infinite growth. If a brainless body exists as a legal product, the entity owning the patent exercises total property rights over a human biological shell. If a corporation can copyright the genetic sequence of a custom-grown torso, the concept of individual self-ownership becomes entirely obsolete.Tech elites frequently talk about death as a minor coding error awaiting a software upgrade. They invest billions in longevity protocols, upload schemes, and cellular rejuvenation, completely convinced that their wealth entitles them to bypass mortality itself.