United States | News & Politics

For years, AIPAC played a key role in U.S. politics as a campaign financing powerhouse, but now aspiring candidates are distancing themselves from the group. What lies ahead for the Lobby as the Gaza genocide has made Israel a political liability?

Reagan-appointed federal judge Mark Wolf has resigned from the bench in Massachusetts, and his explanation is blunt: he can no longer bear the ethical constraints that prevent judges from speaking out publicly while Trump dismantles the rule of law.

Adelita Grijalva will be the 218th vote to release the Epstein files.

The firings and gutting of Teen Vogue come amid a hard right pivot by media companies under Trump.

The fired members of the Federal Housing Finance Agency's internal watchdog were looking into complaints that Director Bill Pulte and his team improperly pulled records of Democratic officials.

The gutting of these rules coincides with a huge increase in hospitalizations and deaths from foodborne illnesses.

The new directive reinforces past US policies that wrongly targeted immigrants using xenophobic “illness” claims.

"It seems to me like we are looking at a labor market with near-zero labor force growth and near-zero real wage growth," wrote economist Dean Baker. "This means that real labor income in the economy is essentially flat."

Nearly a dozen congressional Democrats agree (*politically/metaphorically, of course).

In the wake of the Chicago South Shore raid—which reportedly saw masked U.S. agents rappelling down from a Black Hawk helicopter, bursting into a 130-unit building, kicking down doors, zip-tying and holding American citizens at gunpoint, and the detention of 37 Venezuelan nationals—a law school classmate asked me: Why isn’t every one of these raids—where officers trash property and terrorize residents—a potential Bivens case?

The answer, chilling, at least to me, is: Because my team and I spent decades at the Department of Justice making sure that such lawsuits would be dismissed, typically without trial, and often even without discovery.

For half a century, Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents has been hailed as the primary safeguard against unconstitutional actions by federal officers. Bivens permitted victims of these actions to seek money damages from individual federal officers directly under the Constitution. These actions are often analogized to the far more common “Section 1983” claims available against state and local officials under the Civil Rights Act of 1871. But accountability under Bivens is far more constrained than many lawyers might assume. Certainly, if you ask the general public whether they think there is a way to file a civil suit and receive compensation—whether from individual officers or the United States more broadly—for constitutional violations such as excessive or deadly force by federal actors, the general belief is: of course. Yet constitutional violations hardly ever result in the payment of damages. The reality is the behemoth that was Bivens now no longer serves victims of constitutional harms, the federal workforce as a whole, individual officers in particular, or society at large. Those in the United States must look somewhere else for recompense, deterrence, settled litigation expectations, and institutional and jurisprudential order.

Here’s why.

...

The question before the Court is not whether the work program violated labor laws, but whether GEO can claim the federal government’s immunity from certain lawsuits and avoid further litigation while that claim is unresolved.

Colorado coal plants are likely to face DOE orders to keep running past planned closure dates, even as the costs of keeping an old Michigan plant open pile up.

These are older power plants slated for retirement. They kick out a fair bit of local pollution, which means this is going to kill a lot of people in the immediate future, not to mention the long-term reduction in the planet's capacity to support human life.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/30101651

In a message obtained by Congress, the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein wrote that Donald J. Trump spent hours at his house with one of Mr. Epstein’s victims.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38876977

[A video about Cuba, hosted on the PeerTube server CuddlyTube, from the news/video collective Belly Of The Beast]

A new campaign by the Los Angeles-based #US Hands Off Cuba Committee is demanding that Cubans be allowed to compete in the 2028 #Olympics in Los Angeles.

The US Embassy in Havana, under #MarcoRubio’s State Department, has refused to issue visas for numerous Cuban athletes and coaches, which has stopped them from competing in pre-Olympic qualifying events. The policy punishes #athletes for political reasons and violates the Olympic Charter, which prohibits discrimination of any kind.

Activists across the US are calling on the International Olympic Committee to force Washington to issue visas so Cuban athletes can compete, and to uphold the Olympic spirit of inclusion, fair play, and global friendship.

[In English, Duration - 2:17]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38876300

🗓 Nov 15 ⏰ 2PM ET 📍White House 👉 Endorse at http://bit.ly/vzla1115

The people oppose Trump & the Pentagon’s expanding aggression in the Caribbean! Join us to say money for people’s needs, not for a war on Venezuela!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38874829

https://archive.ph/2025.07.25-161813/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/business/mamdani-globalize-intafada-business-leaders.html

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/6982

Leaked emails show Epstein working on a wire transfer to Ehud Barak's top aide, Yoni Koren, who regularly stayed at his mansion.

From Drop Site News via This RSS Feed.

I do not doubt that caving now might well be the optimal political move.

And this is one reason—one of many—why I am not a politician.

Because if caving is the right thing to do now, it was the right thing to do 41 days ago and Democratic senators should have been willing to stand up and look their constituents in the eye and say, “I don’t think we will get anything in a shutdown that exceeds in value the pain we will inflict.” Some did this, and that actually took courage.

But if caving was not the right thing to do then, it is no more so the right thing to do now. Because nothing has changed except that reasonably anticipatable pain is now realized pain. It took exactly no imagination to fathom that this would happen.