United States | News & Politics

a map of potential targets may be coming into focus and includes the swing states Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona. Voting experts, government officials and others have identified a host of conditions that could make those places ripe for meddling from the Trump administration or its allies.

A WSJ investigation tracked the U.S. citizens caught in the crosshairs of an aggressive government campaign to detain and demonize dissenters

This post uses a gift link with a view count limit. If it runs out, there is a second one and somewhat unreliable archived copy which has the text but not the visuals.

Many Americans can use their library card to generate additional gift links

Mr. Trump has also not abandoned his heavily restrictionist approach to immigration. Officials are still moving ahead with a number of policies aimed at upending pathways for legal immigration and arresting some refugees lawfully admitted to the United States. The administration has also continued to deport immigrants to countries where they are not from, including in a secret arrangement with Cameroon this year.

They're still planning on filling up all those warehouses they're converting into concentration camps. Just on doing the rounding up a bit more quietly.

While TikTok operates in the United States under new ownership, Apple has deployed technical restrictions to block iOS users in the United States from downloading other apps made by the video platform’s Chinese parent organization ByteDance.

ByteDance owns a vast array of different apps spanning social media, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and other sectors. The leading one is Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which has over 1 billion monthly active users. While most of those users reside in China, iPhone owners around the world have traditionally been able to download these apps from anywhere without using a VPN, as long as they have a valid App Store account registered in China.

That’s not true anymore. Starting in late January, iPhone users in the US with Chinese App Store accounts began reporting that they were encountering new obstacles when they tried to download apps developed by ByteDance. WIRED has confirmed that even with a valid Chinese App Store account, downloading or updating a ByteDance-owned Chinese app is blocked on Apple devices located in the United States.

Instead, a pop-up window appears that says, “This app is unavailable in the country or region you’re in.” The restriction appears to apply only to ByteDance-owned apps and not those developed by other Chinese companies.

Apple and ByteDance declined to comment. TikTok USDS Joint Venture (the new entity controlling TikTok’s US operations) didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

The timing and technical specifics suggest the restriction is related to the deal TikTok agreed to in January to divest Chinese ownership of its US operations. The agreement was the result of the so-called TikTok ban law passed by Congress in 2024, which also barred companies like Apple and Google from distributing other apps majority-owned by ByteDance. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act states that no company can “distribute, maintain, or update” any app majority-controlled by ByteDance “within the land or maritime borders of the United States.”

The law was primarily aimed at TikTok, which has more than 100 million users in the US and had been the subject of years of debate in Washington over whether its Chinese ownership posed a national security risk. But ByteDance also has dozens of other apps that at some point were also removed from Apple’s and Google’s app stores in the US. Now it seems like the scope of impact has reached even more apps that are not technically designed for US audiences, such as Douyin, the AI chatbot Doubao, and the fiction reading platform Fanqie Novel.

WIRED collected dozens of user reports on Chinese social media from people either living in or traveling to the US who said they had been blocked from downloading or updating popular ByteDance-owned apps. These apps are also not available on the Google Play Store, but it’s less of a concern for Android users as their devices have fewer restrictions on downloading apps from non-Google sources.

Traditionally, the primary way Apple enforced geographic restrictions on iPhone apps was according to the country where a user registered their Apple ID. To have an Apple account registered in, say, China, a person would typically need to have a phone number, payment method, and billing address in China. But once their account was registered, they could download apps designed for the Chinese market regardless of where they traveled.

In recent years, however, Apple has been developing more sophisticated mechanisms to identify where an App Store user is physically located. In 2023, the tech outlet 9to5Mac reported that Apple devices had created a new system called “countryd” to precisely determine a person’s location based on “data such as current GPS location, country code from the Wi-Fi router, and information obtained from the SIM card.”

Observers theorized that the new system was created in response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, which went into effect in 2024 and required Apple to begin allowing people in the EU to download apps from third-party app marketplaces. Apple complied with the EU regulation, but it restricted the accessibility of alternative app stores only to people physically in the territory of the EU.

Mr. Schwartz had not been shy about sharing the strategy behind his clemency campaign with other inmates, so they knew he had paid multiple people to try to get the job done, according to two people familiar with conversations at Otisville.

video opens with the graves being dug.

The strike killed at least 175 people, according to health officials and Iranian state media.

According to the department, the determination was made because the sale serves U.S. national security interests. The waiver enables the rapid transfer of defense articles and services to Israel.

The department said the proposed sale supports broader U.S. foreign policy objectives in the Middle East. It stated that Israel remains an important strategic partner in the region.

*Good for the arms business

https://archive.ph/o917R

The move comes as President Trump is ratcheting up his rhetorical assault on Cuba’s leadership.

March 6, 2026

https://archive.ph/4CqUN

The U.S. attorney in South Florida has ordered a broad-ranging inquiry into Cuba’s leaders and Communist Party officials for drug, immigration, economic and violent crimes with a goal of bringing fast indictments, according to three people with knowledge of his actions.

The move comes as President Trump is ratcheting up his rhetorical assault on Cuba’s leadership, and has gone so far as to recently suggest that he might attack the island nation 90 miles off the Florida coast after he is finished with the Iran war.

Bringing criminal cases against Cuban leaders could provide a legal and political pretext for such action, just as the Justice Department’s indictment against Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, was used to justify his capture and extradition.

If the administration does in fact seek charges against Cuba’s leaders to facilitate a snatch-and-grab operation inside Cuba like that against Mr. Maduro, it would be an extraordinary use of the criminal justice system to advance the White House’s geopolitical agenda.

...The administration’s removals to date have included stripping information about climate change, slavery, the civil rights movement, and the mistreatment of Native Americans from national park sites, according to court filings from the National Parks Conservation Association. NPCA sued the Interior Department this month over its decision to remove content from park sites.

The organization said in the suit that the content removals “erase the history of countless people and communities from public spaces” and “limit the availability of scientific information relevant to ensuring the long-term preservation of the parks themselves."

"...we can’t talk about times in American history where people in power hurt other people. We can’t talk about times in American history where people’s civil rights were violated..."

...In at least one report, a park service employee suggested the administration review a sign and possibly change it even though they acknowledged changes could run afoul of legal requirements.

“Text addresses slavery as the primary cause of the American Civil War,” the report from a staff member at Stones River National Battlefield in Tennessee said. “This is both historically correct and legislatively mandated but we ask for further review to confirm it is aligned with SO 3431.”...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The sound of the school nurse’s office door opening. Light reflecting off a stained-glass window. Tearful outbursts and fear of getting on the school bus.

For many survivors of clergy abuse, memories like these linger for decades.

A report released this week by the Rhode Island attorney general detailed decades of abuse inside the state’s Catholic Diocese of Providence, identifying 75 clergy members who sexually abused more than 300 children since 1950. The investigation drew on thousands of church records and years of interviews with victims and witnesses. Officials said the true number of victims is likely much higher.

Joel Swanson March 5, 2026

Too many Jewish organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and American Jewish Committee (AJC) have suggested that this is the time to get behind the war effort and not to ask questions. But to say that Americans should not ask questions about the relationship between Israel and the United States because it might raise antisemitic conspiracy theories means handing over the tools of democratic accountability. That is too high a price.

And yet. The questions are not being asked only by sober foreign policy analysts. They are being asked, in far cruder form, by people who have never needed a pretext to believe that Jewish power secretly governs American foreign policy. In the days since the strikes, social media has been awash in the language of “puppet masters”, “dual loyalties” and insinuations that Jewish money bought American blood. The phrase “Israel first” – often wielded as an insinuation that US politicians are controlled by Jews – has surged across platforms. Far-right influencers have recycled rat imagery in ways that consciously echo Nazi propaganda.

March 6, 2026

The moment 19-year-old Emely Agustin spotted the group of masked immigration agents tackling a woman facedown on the pavement, her heart dropped.

She saw the woman’s red jacket.

“Oh my fucking God. That’s my mom!” she screamed.

It was the morning of 5 November in Cottage Grove, in central Oregon, and masked officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had dragged Juanita Avila out of her van. The agents pinned her down as she cried out for her daughter, who started filming. Juanita, a 47-year-old legal permanent resident, had her green card in her pocket, but officers handcuffed and detained her.

Tensions are rising between US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio over the US’s approach to the war on Iran, three former US officials and a senior regional official familiar with the matter told Middle East Eye.

Rubio and Hegseth were described as “at each other's throats” over the question of whether the US should deploy troops to Iran at Israel’s request, the sources told MEE.

Hegseth is supportive of the position, while Rubio is deeply wary of entangling the US in a long war, the sources told MEE.

The US has mainly confined its operations to air strikes and standoff strikes using cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, but CNN reported this week that the CIA has begun training and arming Kurdish fighters to operate in Iran.

One Gulf official told MEE that US officials have discussed sending special operations teams into Iran to target senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officials and people familiar with Iran's nuclear programme.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43916300

The executive order, issued in December, prevented the Council on American-Islamic Relations from receiving government benefits.

A federal judge on Wednesday blocked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' order to classify a prominent Muslim civil rights group as a terrorist organization, calling the Republican's action "a political statement at the expense of others’ constitutional rights."

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction against the governor's actions related to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR.

DeSantis issued an executive order on Dec. 8 calling CAIR a "terrorist organization," which prevented the organization from "receiving any contract, employment, funds or other benefit or privilege."

"The First Amendment bars the Governor from continuing the troubling trend of using an executive office to make a political statement at the expense of others' constitutional rights," Walker wrote.