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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — On a recent afternoon, Giselle Garcia, a volunteer who has been helping an Afghan family resettle, drove the father to a check-in with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She warned him and his family to prepare for the worst.

The moment the father stepped into the ICE office in California’s capital city, he was arrested.

Coming just days after the shooting of two National Guard troops by an Afghan national suspect, federal authorities have carried out increased arrests of Afghans in the U.S., immigration lawyers say as Afghans both in and outside the country have come under intense scrutiny by immigration officials.

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They had fled Afghanistan under threat by the Taliban because the wife’s father had assisted the U.S. military, and they had asked for asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, Garcia said. She is not identifying him or his family for fear other members could be arrested.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is considering a Republican-led drive, backed by President Donald Trump’s administration, to overturn a quarter-century-old decision and erase limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates for Congress and president.

A day after the justices indicated they would overturn a 90-year-old decision limiting the president’s power to fire independent agency heads, the court on Tuesday is revisiting a 2001 decision that upheld a provision of federal election law that is more than 50 years old.

Democrats are calling on the court to uphold the law.

The limits stem from a desire to prevent large donors from skirting caps on individual contributions to a candidate by directing unlimited sums to the party, with the understanding that the money will be spent on behalf of the candidate.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40067142

...and now paramount is doing a hostile takeover bid for warner bros. discovery. i rather have netflix own it than paramount.

all corporations should be split into different smaller companies and then given to the workers who would collectivize them. seriously!

https://archive.is/gK5rS

The federal agency will skip the postponed October report on the Producer Price Index and instead roll those figures into November's report, which will be published Jan. 14, reported the Wall Street Journal.

Fascist invaders in Burnsville, MN followed a family home, busted down their door, and abducted 4 of them at gunpoint (including the parents of a 7 year old and the husband of a pregnant woman). All without a warrant for a home owned by a US Citizen. (12/6/25)

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6969930

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/12172

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Saturday defended the Trump administration's policy of bombing suspected drug-trafficking vessels even as new details further undermined the administration's stated justifications for the policy.

According to the Guardian, Hegseth told a gathering at the Ronald Reagan presidential library that the boat bombings, which so far have killed at least 87 people, are necessary to protect Americans from illegal drugs being shipped to the US.

"If you’re working for a designated terrorist organization and you bring drugs to this country in a boat, we will find you and we will sink you," Hegseth said. "Let there be no doubt about it."

However, leaked details about a classified briefing delivered to lawmakers last week by Adm. Frank Bradley about a September 2 boat strike cast new doubts on Hegseth's justifications.

CNN reported on Friday that Bradley told lawmakers that the boat taken out by the September 2 attack was not even headed toward the US, but was going "to link up with another, larger vessel that was bound for Suriname," a small nation in the northeast of South America.

While Bradley acknowledged that the boat was not heading toward the US, he told lawmakers that the strike on it was justified because the drugs it was carrying could have theoretically wound up in the US at some point.

Additionally, NBC News reported on Saturday that Bradley told lawmakers that Hegseth had ordered all 11 men who were on the boat targeted by the September 2 strike to be killed because "they were on an internal list of narco-terrorists who US intelligence and military officials determined could be lethally targeted."

This is relevant because the US military launched a second strike during the September 2 operation to kill two men who had survived the initial strike on their vessel, which many legal experts consider to be either a war crime or an act of murder under domestic law.

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, watched video of the September 2 double-tap attack last week, and he described the footage as “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.”

“Any American who sees the video that I saw will see its military attacking shipwrecked sailors,” Himes explained. “Now, there’s a whole set of contextual items that the admiral explained. Yes, they were carrying drugs. They were not in position to continue their mission in any way... People will someday see this video and they will see that that video shows, if you don’t have the broader context, an attack on shipwrecked sailors.”

While there has been much discussion about the legality of the September 2 double-tap strike in recent days, some critics have warned that fixating on this particular aspect of the administration's policy risks taking the focus off the illegality of the boat-bombing campaign as a whole.

Daphne Eviatar, director for security and human rights for Amnesty International USA, said on Friday that the entire boat-bombing campaign has been "illegal under both domestic and international law."

"All of them constitute murder because none of the victims, whether or not they were smuggling illegal narcotics, posed an imminent threat to life," she said. "Congress must take action now to stop the US military from murdering more people in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

Mark Fitzpatrick, proprietor of the Old Station Saloon in Eagle, Idaho, says ‘liberals’ have threatened to kill him and burn down his business over promotion to encourage support for migrant crackdown

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46930338

Archived

• Tencent, China’s largest publicly traded company, operates WeChat, a chat and social media platform with 1.3 billion users in China. As all Chinese services and companies in the country's domestic markets, Tencent's WeChat is subject to Beijing's censorship.
• To Combat this censorship, the NGO "GreatFire" has been running a project called FeeWeChat. GreatFire constantly monitors WeChat for posts that contain certain “sensitive” keywords and archives them. If the archived posts later are removed on the WeChat site by Chinese censors, they mark them accordingly as 'censored.'
• FreeWeChat has documented over 45 million posts since 2015, with more than 700,000 later censored, providing insights how China's censorship machine works.
• GreatFire has been using U.S.-based cloud hosting company Vultr for its work. Now Tencent, through its intermediary Group IB, accused FreeWeChat of trademark infringement and of promoting banned content, despite the project’s role in exposing censorship practices.
• After months of silence and failed negotiations, Vultr formally terminated FreeWeChat’s hosting in November 2025, ignoring arguments from the GreatFire NGO and letters of support from human rights groups.

[...]

In his first major guidance to the Air Force, the newly appointed Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach emphasized a need for the “recapitalization” of nuclear weapons — an apparent departure from decades of Air Force teaching that the United States maintains nuclear weapons solely for deterrence.

“We will advocate relentlessly for programs like the F-47, Collaborative Combat Aircraft as well as nuclear force recapitalization through the Sentinel program and the B-21,” Wilsbach wrote in a memo dated November 3, referring to planned upgrades to nuclear missiles and stealth bombers.

“This memo of unity and warfighting spirit reflects current Department of War and Pete Hegseth language, but that language is also inadequate because it assumes U.S. military capability is the best in the world and getting better, a dangerous and flawed assumption,” said Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and former Pentagon analyst who exposed the politicization of intelligence before the Iraq War.

Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos met with Donald Trump to try and win him over ahead of the bidding war for Warner Bros.

Many incarcerated women and trans people are forced to choose between maintaining their dignity and health — or facing penalties.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/39870058

Immigrants were moments away from pledging allegiance to the United States in Boston — the final step of the long process to becoming a U.S. citizen — when government officials pulled them out of line, according to a new report.

The scene unfolded at Boston’s Faneuil Hall on Thursday, Dec. 4, according to the report from WGBH, a National Public Radio member station.

As people who were already approved to be naturalized — having completed the lengthy U.S. citizenship process — lined up to pledge allegiance, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officials told them they could not continue due to their countries of origin, the outlet reported.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6969909

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/12189

Venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of data platform company Palantir, is calling for the return of public hangings as part of a broader push to restore what he describes as "masculine leadership" to the US.

In a statement posted on X Friday, Lonsdale said that he supported changing the so-called "three strikes" anti-crime law to ensure that anyone who is convicted of three violent crimes gets publicly executed, rather than simply sent to prison for life.

"If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law," he wrote. "We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others."

Lonsdale then added that "our society needs balance," and said that "it's time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable."

Lonsdale's views on public hangings being necessary to restore "masculine leadership" drew swift criticism.

Gil Durán, a journalist who documents the increasingly authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley in his newsletter "The Nerd Reich," argued in a Saturday post that Lonsdale's call for public hangings showed that US tech elites are "entering a more dangerous and desperate phase of radicalization."

"For months, Peter Thiel guru Curtis Yarvin has been squawking about the need for more severe measures to cement Trump's authoritarian rule," Durán explained. "Peter Thiel is ranting about the Antichrist in a global tour. And now Lonsdale—a Thiel protégé—is fantasizing about a future in which he will have the power to unleash state violence at mass scale."

Taulby Edmondson, an adjunct professor of history, religion, and culture at Virginia Tech, wrote in a post on Bluesky that the rhetoric Lonsdale uses to justify the return of public hangings has even darker intonations than calls for state-backed violence.

"A point of nuance here: 'masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable' is how lynch mobs are described, not state-sanctioned executions," he observed.

Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll argued that Lonsdale's remarks were symbolic of a kind of performative masculinity that has infected US culture.

"Immaturity masquerading as strength is the defining personal characteristic of our age," he wrote.

Tech entrepreneur Anil Dash warned Lonsdale that his call for public hangings could have unintended consequences for members of the Silicon Valley elite.

"Well, Joe, Mark Zuckerberg has sole control over Facebook, which directly enabled the Rohingya genocide," he wrote. "So let’s have the conversation."

And Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin noted that Lonsdale has been a major backer of the University of Austin, an unaccredited liberal arts college that has been pitched as an alternative to left-wing university education with the goal of preparing "thoughtful and ethical innovators, builders, leaders, public servants and citizens through open inquiry and civil discourse."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6960545

On July 4, President Trump signed House Resolution 1,119th Congress (HR 1), also known as the deceptively titled "One Big Beautiful Bill. Included in its provisions are significant tax law changes, increased funding for immigration control and national defense, and spending reductions affecting Medicaid and a large number of other federal programs. In fact, HR 1 would give $75 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and $45 billion to expand its detention centers, with a total of $170 billion dedicated to immigration enforcement and "border security." The increase would allow the government to detain up to 100,000 individuals at a time. At the same time, HR 1 would cut federal Medicaid spending over a decade by an estimated $911 billion and increase the number of uninsured people by 10 million. This would mean the 31% of Latinx people and 21% of Black people who utilize Medicaid would be at risk.

The administration disguised the bill as a way to give the middle-class tax relief, secure the border, and protect Medicaid from undocumented immigrants. The bill is a thin veil for the government's war on immigrants and trans people, even when undocumented immigrants are largely ineligible for Medicaid benefits and state laws vary on Medicaid coverage for transgender healthcare. It is a clear example of under-resourcing our communities' access to preventive care and treatment, which opens the door to further criminalization of particular health conditions and other negative effects on well-being.

During recent deliberations of Medicaid cuts and potential HIV/AIDS funding cuts in Louisiana, a Democratic lawmaker sought to criminalize additional sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HPV and HSV, using the state's HIV exposure law. As introduced, HB 76 would have made "intentionally" exposing another person to an "incurable sexually transmitted disease" a felony. However, neither "intentionally" nor "incurable sexually transmitted disease" was defined in the bill, which left an incredibly broad scope of criminalization possible without proof that a person specifically intended to transmit any disease or did in fact transmit an STI. Though the bill failed, it was presented as justice for survivors of sexual assault and interpersonal violence, as well as a solution to the prevalence of STIs in Louisiana.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6959948

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/11979

Heavily armed tactical teams fired crowd suppression munitions at the Arizona lawmaker and protesters, claiming she was leading “a mob.”

The post ICE Denies Pepper-Spraying Rep. Adelita Grijalva in Incident Caught on Video appeared first on The Intercept.

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6960439

As a longtime Indigenous rights attorney, Gabe Galanda has seen it again and again. Native American kids find themselves accused of minor crimes, yet they’re given no off-ramp to avoid jail, and they become trapped in the juvenile justice system until they end up as adults in a Washington prison.

“It’s rinse-repeat,” Galanda says.

That’s why Galanda, a citizen of the Round Valley Indian Tribe, and other advocates for Native Americans, say it’s important for the state to provide alternatives to jail for those arrested at a young age.

Those alternatives, called diversion programs, can be agreed upon by prosecutors in each county, and they may involve sending youth to programs like anger management or therapy.

But in Washington, white children are much more likely to be offered these additional chances than Native American or Black children. A report released this year by the Washington Center for Court Research, a state-funded court research group, finds Native American and Black youths statewide are the least likely of their peers to be offered a path out of the justice system, while white children are most likely to be offered a break. And while chances of being offered diversion drops precipitously after the first offense for all races, that’s particularly true for Native American youths, who are the least likely to be offered diversion when they have two or more offenses, the report found.

full article

from The Wire [online publication of Jewish Voice For Peace JVP in USA]

In North Carolina, Michigan, and Minnesota, local campaigns have notched divestment wins totaling more than $27 million.

Across the country, JVP chapters and our partners are organizing to demand their state and municipal fund managers divest from Israel Bonds — essentially investments in Israeli genocide and apartheid — and invest instead in the well-being of our communities.

This organizing targets the engine enabling Israel's violence against Palestinians: material support from our own institutions in the U.S. And the momentum is growing...

Also:

• Defend anti-Zionist students.
• Plug in locally.
• Join Power Half-Hour.

Sylvester Stallone, Kiss, and Gloria Gaynor are among the luminaries being celebrated at the annual Kennedy Center Honors.