United States | News & Politics

The Times visited a village where the United States and Ecuador said they destroyed an armed group’s training camp. Residents said it was actually a dairy farm.

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Homeland Security needs to be abolished, the only part of it that is valuable is FEMA, everything else is worse than useless.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The Trump administration will pay $1 billion to a French company to walk away from two U.S. offshore wind leases as the administration ramps up its campaign against offshore wind and other renewable energy.

TotalEnergies has agreed to what’s essentially a refund of its leases for projects off the coasts of North Carolina and New York, and will invest the money in fossil fuel projects instead, the Department of Interior announced Monday.

President Donald Trump’s administration has tried to halt offshore wind construction, but federal judges repeatedly overturned those orders.

The Interior Department hailed the “innovative agreement” with the French energy giant and said, “the American people will no longer pay for ideological subsidies that benefited only the unreliable and costly offshore wind industry.″

Environmental groups denounced the deal as an alternate way to block wind projects, with one group calling it a “billion-dollar bribe” to kill clean energy.

This moment requires solidarity.

As we hold our breath with every new development abroad and at home, our hearts break. Our hearts break for the loss of life. Our hearts break for the fear felt by Jewish and Arab-American communities. And our hearts break again when we consider how this may fuel more of both antisemitism and anti-Arab racism.

...

Right now, the Trump administration is using antisemitism as a smokescreen to target protesters, particularly immigrants who are people of color, and most particularly those who are Palestinian or Arab. We reject the assertion that this is how we fight antisemitism. We reject the assertion that one of our communities must be harmed to ensure the safety of another. Not only does doing so bring no lasting safety to Jews and Arabs, it invites more danger by weakening all our rights in a democracy under attack—the opposite of how we attain safety for everyone.

The administration’s willful disregard for the rule of law extends far beyond executive powers. Students are being arrested and detained for First Amendment-protected speech advocating for Palestinian human rights, teachers are worried about lesson plans that include the history of slavery, and libraries are being forced to remove LGBTQ+ books while transgender Americans in entire states are being stripped of their documentation.

Prince Mohammed bin Salman sees a “historic opportunity” to remake the region, according to people briefed by U.S. officials on the conversations.

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Oklahoma senator, confirmed in 54-45 vote, replaces Kristi Noem to lead president’s immigration crackdown

Info about the war is being censored — with the help of private companies

[a video about Cuba from the news collective Belly Of The Beast]

“Cuba has always loomed large in the U.S. imagination,” says Mikael Wolfe, director of Stanford University’s Cuba Observatory. For decades, U.S. policy toward Cuba has been shaped by sanctions, pressure and political narratives that rarely face serious scrutiny. Wolfe explains how those narratives were built, why they persist and who pays the price.

We ask him why, if coercive measures haven’t worked for more than half a century, does Washington keep doubling down?

NEW YORK (AP) — An Air Canada jet carrying more than 70 passengers collided with a fire truck while landing at New York’s LaGuardia Airport late Sunday, killing the pilot and copilot and injuring several others, officials said.

The impact severed the cockpit, and hurled a flight attendant — still secured to her seat — far from the site of the crash, her daughter told a Canadian TV station. The flight attendant survived.

The fire truck was crossing the tarmac just before midnight after being given permission to check on another plane reporting an odor onboard. Before the collision, an air traffic controller can be heard on airport communications frantically telling the fire truck to stop.

A US lobbying firm closely connected to the Trump administration has been handed a $2m contract to represent Khalifa Haftar, a Libyan warlord and de facto leader of large swaths of the country who faces multiple allegations of human rights abuses.

Lobbying disclosure agreements reported by the Washington Post revealed that Ballard Partners, which is staffed by former Trump administration officials, has agreed to advance the interests of Haftar, general commander of his self-styled Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF), and his son Sadddam, chief of staff of the ground forces.

Haftar and his forces face allegations of human rights abuses, which are reportedly perpetrated in the detention centres they run.