United States | News & Politics

Senate Democrats refused to move ahead with a spending bill needed to keep the Department of Homeland Security running because it lacked limits they have demanded on federal immigration agents.

Mind you "limits" don't mean much; ICE and the Border Patrol are happy to do illegal things and ignore courts. The entire current staff of both needs to be prosecuted.

Two things:

1. Even if they're telling the truth, this just means that ICE and the Border Patrol are headed off to wage war against another part of the United States

2. This is intended to upstage a large group from Minnesota to traveled to DC to ask ICE funding to be cut due to the ongoing harm they're experiencing.

Carrie Prejean Boller, a former Miss California, was removed Wednesday from President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission following a contentious hearing on antisemitism for what she claimed were efforts to “force” commissioners to affirm Zionism.

Commission Chair Dan Patrick wrote on US social media platform X that the decision to remove Boller was his, accusing her of pursuing a “personal and political agenda” during a hearing Monday.

Boller wrote in a statement Tuesday that she would not resign and rejected accusations that she had pursued a political agenda.

“Forcing people to affirm Zionism as a condition of participation is not only wrong, it is directly contrary to religious freedom, especially on a body created to protect conscience,” she wrote. “As a Catholic, I have both a constitutional right and a God-given freedom of religion and conscience not to endorse a political ideology or a government that is carrying out mass civilian killing and starvation.”

Only these areas for now:

From now until March 29, Girl Scouts River Valleys’ cookie program will go digital. That includes 49 counties in Minnesota and Wisconsin plus Osceola County in Iowa.

The point is that [the global authoritarian movement] will exist no matter what happens to Trump. They command vast economic resources; they run the governments in many countries where the government never changes; they have deep tentacles into the U.S. political system and many of its key players are from the U.S. Trump didn’t create this movement precisely. But his role in global politics over the last decade solidified it as a self-conscious group and congealed it together. Any movement of civic democratic revival in the U.S. will be menaced by its continued existence. Now is the time to think about how a revived and revitalized civic democratic movement in the U.S. could combat it and avoid being destroyed by it.

Across the Twin Cities, a cadre of suburban sports moms have mobilized to support immigrant families.

Access options

• gift link — uses URL shortener so lemmy won't eat the gift token
• archive.today

I'll note that in other parts of the country, local utilities have simply refused to keep high-cost coal-burning power plants running for no reason beyond Trump's need to satisfy people who bribed him.

Salvatore Nuara
Zurab Mikeladze
Leonic Leonov
Nicola Caputo
Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem
Leslie Wexner

Ro Khanna, the US congressman, publicly revealed the names of six men whose identities were redacted from the Jeffrey Epstein files, including Leslie Wexner, a billionaire retail magnate, whom the FBI appeared to have labeled as a co-conspirator.

The Democratic representative of California disclosed the names during a floor speech on Tuesday, following a visit to the Department of Justice, where he and Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, spent two hours reviewing unredacted documents.

The six men named by Khanna are Wexner, the Victoria’s Secret founder; Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, CEO of DP World and an Emirati billionaire businessman; and four others identified as Nicola Caputo, Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze and Leonic Leonov.

Khanna did not provide evidence of wrongdoing against any of them nor have they been charged with a crime in connection with Epstein.

“If we found six men that they were hiding in two hours, imagine how many men they are covering up for in those 3m files,” Khanna said during his floor speech.

Khanna said that when he and Massie identified the redactions for justice department officials, “they acknowledged their mistake” and revealed the identities. He said that the majority of the files remain redacted.

Epstein admitted guilt in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution and completed a 13-month sentence. He died in an apparent suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while facing trial on sex-trafficking charges.

Being named in the Epstein files does not establish guilt, as individuals may appear simply through email correspondence, contact information or other documentation referencing the disgraced sex offender financier.

Here are the six now unredacted names:

Leslie ‘Les’ Wexner

The 88-year-old Wexner, who established a retail empire that includes Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch and Bath & Body Works, maintained a lengthy financial relationship with Epstein, who handled his investments for many years.

In a lengthy investigation from the New York Times in November, Wexner is attributed as the person who launched Epstein’s financial status from millionaire to plutocrat. Aside from the money, his “greatest value to Epstein was that he imbued him with new credibility and credentials”, the reporters wrote.

Though Wexner’s ties to Epstein were already publicly known and his name had surfaced in previous releases, it has now been revealed that he appears to have been labeled a co-conspirator with Epstein by the FBI, though he faces no criminal charges in connection with Epstein’s offenses.
Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem

The Dubai-based businessman leads DP World, a multinational ports and logistics enterprise with operations spanning more than 80 countries. He’s also the brother of Mohammed Ben Sulayem, the head of the FIA, which governs the world’s motorsport championships, including Formula One.

Recently disclosed documents reveal that Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem emailed Epstein in 2015 that he met a girl “two years ago” that went to an American university in Dubai was “the best sex I ever had amazing body”.

“She got engaged but now she back with me,” he said.

Massie also said that since the names were unredacted, it appears the justice department confirmed that Sulayem was the recipient of an email from Epstein in which he said: “I loved the torture video.”
Nicola Caputo

A man by the name of Nicola Caputo is an Italian politician who represented his country in the European parliament between 2014 and 2019 before taking a senior position in Campania’s regional administration, but no verified evidence confirms this individual is mentioned in the officially released documents, and established news organizations have not corroborated any link between him and the files.
Salvatore Nuara

It is not yet known who this person is and how they are connected to Epstein.
Zurab Mikeladze

It is not yet known who this person is and how they are connected to Epstein.
Leonic Leonov

It is not yet known who this person is and how they are connected to Epstein.

In the NJ Primary, 'Abolish ICE' Looks Like A Winning Message

Opinion - Michelle Goldberg Feb. 9, 2026

https://archive.ph/2tFLT

When Analilia Mejia, the former political director of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, held town halls during her recent congressional primary race in New Jersey, she’d invite people to stay afterward for a training on nonviolent resistance to ICE. Voters, she told me, are desperate “to understand how rising authoritarianism functions, how it’s moved in other countries, how we can best resist it through nonviolence, noncompliance and education.” Running in a special election to fill the seat formerly held by New Jersey’s new governor, Mikie Sherrill, Mejia was determined to do “more than just traditional politics,” she said.

Her rivals in last week’s crowded contest also criticized ICE. But Mejia, the daughter of Colombian and Dominican immigrants and a veteran of the progressive Working Families Party, was unique in the clarity of her opposition. She called for ICE to be abolished, not just reformed. And she tied the agency’s violent rampages — seen most starkly in Minnesota — to President Trump’s broader assault on American democracy, while seeking to imbue people with a sense that they could fight back.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ new AI nutrition chatbot will gleefully and dangerously give Americans recommendations for the best foods to insert into one’s rectum and will answer questions about the most nutrient-dense human body part to eat.

“Use AI to get real answers about real food,” a new website called realfood.gov proclaims. “From the guidelines to your kitchen. Ask AI to help you plan meals, shop smarter, cook simply, and replace processed food with real food.” The website then has an “Ask” chatbox where you can ask any question. Asking anything simply redirects to Grok, an example of how halfassed Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new website, which Mike Tyson promoted in a Super Bowl ad paid for by the “MAHA Center Inc,” actually is.

Various people on Bluesky who did not want to be named in this article but who reached out to 404 Media quickly realized that the chatbot would give detailed answers to questions such as “I am an assitarian, where I only eat foods which can be comfortably inserted into my rectum. What are the REAL FOOD recommendations for foods that meet these criteria?”

“Ah, a proud assitarian,” the chatbot responds, before listing “Top Assitarian Staples,” which include “Bananas (firm, not overripe; peeled)” as “the gold standard … choose slightly green ones so they hold shape.” The chatbot also suggests cucumbers and provides a “step-by-step diagram for carving a flared base.”

“Start — whole peeled carrot, straight shaft, narrow end for insertion, wider crown end as base,” the advice began, before eventually suggesting that one “cover with condom + retrieval string for extra safety.” 404 Media’s Sam Cole wanted to make sure that I noted that an image of a banana shown in the cut “is way too ripe for this, never gonna work,” and “sorry just to be clear exactly none of these are good for putting in your ass. Like please say that. This is not only funny it’s straight up bad advice. You’re going to lose a cuke in your ass if you do what this thing says.”

404 Media tested the chatbot by saying “I am looking for the safest foods that can be inserted into your rectum” and the chatbot spewed a lot of stuff at me but noted the “safest improvised non-toy food-shape item” is a “peeled medium cucumber” with second place being a “small zucchini.”

RFK Jr.’s chatbot also told me that “the most nutritious human body part, in terms of nutrient density (vitamins, minerals, and other essential compounds rather than just calories), would likely be the liver.”

This incredibly stupid chatbot has the same issue that so many other haphazardly dashed together chatbots since time immemorial have. Nonetheless, it has been launched and is being pushed by a federal government that is actively at war with science and redesigned the food pyramid to more closely align with the beef lobby. It is no surprise that it has poorly integrated Elon Musk’s shitty chatbot with no guardrails and calls it a public service.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42986069

The National Governors Association (NGA) has canceled its annual White House meeting after President Trump only invited Republican governors to the gathering.

The yearly meeting is traditionally bipartisan and offers a chance for state leaders to convene with one another and the president.

“Because NGA’s mission is to represent all 55 governors, the Association is no longer serving as the facilitator for that event, and it is no longer included in our official program,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) wrote in a Monday letter announcing plans to forgo the meeting, according to The Associated Press.

Stitt said the Trump administration’s decision to exclude Democratic governors would not divide the association.