United States | News & Politics

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's 2024 diary has revealed regular close contact with Republican senators in the US and former British prime minister Tony Blair.

The diary, which was published this week at the request of the non-profit group Hatzlaha, showed that Netanyahu held seven meetings and nine phone calls with Republican Senator Lindsay Graham.

The diary, much of which was redacted on national security grounds, also reveals that Blair and Netanyahu met seven times.

On 29 October 2024, the Israeli prime minister spoke with UAE President Mohammed Bin Zayed, a call that was unreported at the time.

Federal prosecutors have filed a new indictment in response to a July 4 noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, during which a police officer was shot.

There are numerous problems with the indictment, but perhaps the most glaring is its inclusion of charges against a Dallas artist who wasn’t even at the protest. Daniel “Des” Sanchez is accused of transporting a box that contained “Antifa materials” after the incident, supposedly to conceal evidence against his wife, Maricela Rueda, who was there.

But the boxed materials aren’t Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, or whatever MAGA officials claim “Antifa” uses to wage its imaginary war on America. As prosecutors laid out in the July criminal complaint that led to the indictment, they were zines and pamphlets. Some contain controversial ideas — one was titled “Insurrectionary Anarchy” — but they’re fully constitutionally protected free speech. The case demonstrates the administration’s intensifying efforts to criminalize left-wing activists after Donald Trump announced in September that he was designating “Antifa” as a “major terrorist organization” — a legal designation that doesn’t exist for domestic groups — following the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Ridership jumped, people cut back on driving and, over the summer, the city extended the program another year.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20251122084007/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/climate/iowa-city-free-buses.html

Im going to put two links at the end as I like wgn and abcs coverage the most. The gist is that yesterday night after what is sorta the kickoff to the holiday season in chicago there were two shooting. So the kickoff is the tree lighting ceremony and start of the chris kringle market in daley plaza and started at 6pm. The first one took place near the chicago theater so basically over one block and up two blocks just before 10pm. The second took place about an hour later and was about the same level on dearborn so just a block over and really less than two blocks up from the daily center. Ugh the news was so annoying as it mixed in an unsubstantiated social media post from an alderman and very little about the shooters who seemed to have gotten away despite a fair amount of arrests. Unfortunately this is the kind of violence that chicago has and theoretically is what trump tries to fix with ice even though it has little to do with immigration and much to do with people having a minimum level of dignified existence.

https://wgntv.com/news/chicagocrime/1-killed-1-injured-in-overnight-shooting-in-loop/

https://abc7chicago.com/post/chicago-shooting-7-teens-man-injured-person-killed-loop-shootings-state-street-dearborn-monroe-police-say/18191436/

Trump’s bizarre war on offshore wind is getting worse — and it’s screwing workers and anyone who uses electricity. In the past year, Trump’s policies have resulted in the loss of more than half of the planned power set to come from offshore wind, according to a new report by the Energy Industries Council released last week. People all across the country are facing relentlessly skyrocketing energy prices, with average electricity bills in July up 9.5 percent from just one year ago. Rising energy costs were a key issue influencing voters in elections this month and are expected to again play an outsized role in the crucial 2026 midterms.

Trump has never been shy about his deep-seated hatred of offshore wind, calling it “pathetic” and “cheap” in his recent address to the United Nations and even claiming that the noise from windmills causes cancer (it doesn’t). On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order halting new offshore wind leasing and directing the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a review to consider terminating or amending existing leases. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill includes a bevy of billions in bonuses to the fossil fuel industry, while gutting tax breaks and incentives for wind and solar.

Archive: http://archive.today/HEcdu

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/42274957

Lawmakers critical of President Donald Trump’s approach to ending the Russia-Ukraine war said Saturday they spoke with Secretary of State Marco Rubio who told them that the peace plan Trump is pushing Kyiv to accept is a “wish list” of the Russians and not the actual proposal offering Washington’s positions.

A State Department spokesperson denied their account, calling it “blatantly false.”

Rubio himself then took the extraordinary step of suggesting online that the senators were mistaken, even though they said he was their source for the information. The secretary of state doubled down on the assertion that Washington was responsible for a proposal that had surprised many from the beginning for being so favorable to Moscow.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39334574

https://jmail.world/

Last week, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released 20,000 documents from the estate of registered sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. They included thousands of emails sent between Epstein and high-profile people like Epstein confidant Ghislaine Maxwell, political strategist Steve Bannon, journalist Michael Wolff, and former US treasury secretary Larry Summers, as well as revealing text messages. Many of them allude or directly refer to president Donald Trump.

Now, you can browse all those emails just like you would on your own Gmail account.

Jmail is a website that looks very much like Gmail, except that there is a little hat hanging on the logo and that the profile picture in the top right corner is a grinning Epstein. (Click on it and it says “Hi Jeffrey!”) The inbox lets you click through thousands of emails, formatted to look exactly like a regular message would in your inbox. In the sidebar, you can sort by Inbox, Starred, and Sent. In Gmail, a lower sidebar section reads Labels and separates emails by category. In Jmail, it is a list of people who corresponded with Epstein.

The site was created by serial prankster Riley Walz and Luke Igel, cofounder of an AI video editing tool called Kino AI. Igel tells WIRED that he brought the idea to Walz—something Walz confirms—and then the two of them put the website together with Cursor in a single night. Walz revealed Jmail in an X post, writing, “We cloned Gmail, except you're logged in as Epstein and can see his emails.”

Jmail is a much more readable way to peruse the huge cache of emails released from the Epstein estate than parsing through tens of thousands of PDFs on a Google Drive. Among its useful features is that it rejiggers Gmail’s starring feature, letting users flag emails they view as important and then ranking them based on how many people do so. By default, the inbox lists the emails in the order of recency; the community starring feature is a way to surface what people see as more important emails.

“The emails were just so hard to read,” Igel says. “It felt like so much of the shock would've come if you saw actual screenshots of the actual inbox, but what you were seeing was these really low quality, poorly scanned PDFs. You have to do a few steps of imagination to remind yourself that this is indeed a real email.”

Being able to see these emails in a more familiar, readable format makes it much easier to follow threads and back-and-forths, but also reveals weird things about Epstein’s communications. Igel says there’s a noticeable increase in typos and sporadic formatting when Epstein switches from a desktop keyboard to a touchscreen device in the early 2010s.

“You can see him getting worse at typing as the years go by, as he clearly switches to an iPad,” Igel says. “You can see all this kind of boomer behavior which is very familiar behavior of less tech-savvy people.”

While others have put in real work to make the documents more accessible to the public, the usefulness of Jmail is in its simplicity—and it was about as uncomplicated to make as it is to use.

“This only took us a few hours,” Igel says. “I think other people should do similar things where you think that just a little bit of new software can make a lot of these things that are happening in the world easier to understand. You should just do it.”

A federal judge in Washington on Friday issued an order blocking the IRS from sharing taxpayer information with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, finding the practice is "unlawful."

The court "concludes that the Plaintiffs have shown a substantial likelihood that the IRS’s adoption of the Address-Sharing Policy and the IRS’s subsequent sharing of taxpayer information with ICE were unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act," U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in a 94-page ruling.

After hours of heated testimony and debate, Sandpoint’s City Council voted to repeal the city’s rules protecting residents and visitors from discrimination.

The city was the first of 13 in Idaho to pass an ordinance barring discrimination, said Nicole Erwin, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates. Its decision Wednesday marked the first time an Idaho city has dialed back such an ordinance, she said.

The ordinance, enacted in 2011, stated that everyone could enjoy the “full benefits of citizenship” and equal opportunity “regardless of sexual orientation” or “gender identity/expression.” It defined the latter term as a “gender-related identity, appearance, expression or behavior of an individual regardless of a person’s assigned sex at birth.”