United States | News & Politics

A website dedicated to leaking personal information about Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents was reportedly subject to a cyberattack that its founder believes may have originated in Russia.

Dominick Skinner, a Netherlands-based immigration activist, told The Daily Beast that his website, ICE List, came under cyberattack Tuesday evening after the publication reported Skinner planned to release personal information, obtained through a whistleblower, about thousands of employees. Current Time 0:00 / Duration 1:13 The Independent Personal data of 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol agents leaked online 0

The attack, known as a Direct Denial of Service, is when a perpetrator seeks to disrupt access to a network or service by flooding it with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload the system.

Skinner told The Daily Beast that a massive number of IPs began accessing the website, and a large amount of the traffic appeared to come from Russia – leading the founder to speculate the attack originated there.

“The IPs would be run through proxies before hitting our servers, meaning it’s just impossible to track the source,” Skinner told the publication. “An attack lasting this long is sophisticated, though.”

The attack, Skinner said, occurred as he prepared to publicly identify the names of immigration law enforcement officers that were obtained in a dataset from the whistleblower.

The ICE List founder had previously told The Daily Beast that a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower provided a dataset of approximately 4,500 immigration personnel after the shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis.

Some of the information in the dataset included names, email addresses, phone numbers, job titles, and other background information. Skinner said he planned to make a “majority” of the names public but would provide exceptions for those working in childcare or serving as nurses.

DHS has criticized Skinner’s website calling it “disgusting doxxing of our officers” that puts “their lives and their families in serious danger.”

Homeland Security Spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin has said law enforcement are facing a 1,300 percent increase in assaults and an 8,000 percent increase in death threats against them.

“Their families are being threatened. We will not back down. Anyone who doxxes our officers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” McLaughlin has warned.

ICE List is hosted in the Netherlands, so it cannot be taken down by the U.S. government.

Skinner said whoever is attacking the website “doesn’t want others to access the site.”

“But it just makes us more determined, because it is clear some people out there do not want the names of ICE and Border Patrol agents made public,” Skinner told The Daily Beast. “Given their behavior lately, and how they are increasingly viewed negatively by the public, that’s no surprise.”

The ICE List founder said he and his team have Direct Denial of Service protections in place, but that attacks of this kind are difficult to prevent and likely to happen again.

The New York Times (11/4/25) explains that Zohran Mamdani won the mayor’s race by “delicately disarming” New York City’s “all-powerful establishment.”

Much as they did back in 2018, when New Yorkers stunned the political establishment by electing a little-known former bartender named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress, the corporate political press covered the most thrilling Democratic victories of 2025 as if they were largely inexplicable, semi-miraculous flukes. While breathlessly covering the tweets, styles, preferred lipstick brands and personal qualities of individual politicians, establishment media outlets mostly ignored the organizing efforts led by ordinary people that put representatives like Ocasio-Cortez in positions of power.

In the view of these publications, recently sworn-in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wasn’t a movement candidate who emerged after years of working on other insurgent campaigns and organizing with groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which I am a member, but a slick young upstart whose campaign was “built from nothing in a matter of months” (New York Times, 6/29/25).

After the general election, the New York Times (11/4/25) wrote that while Mamdani had won the primary by uniting “a new coalition of Brooklyn gentrifiers and Queens cabbies,” he triumphed in the general by running an “improbable backroom campaign” that “wooed, charmed and delicately disarmed some of the most powerful people in America.” This framing, by New York politics reporter Nicholas Fandos, suggested that Mamdani—undeniably a “megawatt talent”—had blandished his way into the mayoralty virtually singlehandedly.

NBC News (11/4/25) wrote of his “meteoric rise” from a “virtually unknown state assemblyman who barely registered in polling” to the mayor of America’s largest city without substantially analyzing how that came about.

‘Building civic architecture’

Dissent (11/25/25) traced DSA’s electoral strategy to former FAIR analyst Seth Ackerman‘s call for a “party surrogate” (Jacobin, 11/8/16).

This framing obscures both the crucial role that ordinary people played in these campaigns, and the potential they have to organize and win even political changes the rich and powerful bitterly oppose. And it misses the real story of Mamdani’s win: the unprecedented army of volunteers, young people and first-time voters who propelled him to victory. That story was mostly covered by left-wing outlets like Dissent (11/25/25) and Jacobin (7/15/25), which put out sharp analyses of how campaigns like Mamdani’s were structured and organized, and how they were able to succeed against such long odds.

Grassroots formations that provided crucial support to Mamdani’s campaign, such as DSA and DRUM Beats, which organizes working-class Indo-Caribbean and South Asian communities, are membership-based organizations. They differ in structure and strengths from the top-down, consultant-driven campaign model corporate political outlets see as the norm.

These groups also spent years planting the seeds of victory by organizing people who had long been overlooked, ignored or shut out of conventional politics to participate in local elections. In other words, Mamdani’s campaign was the opposite of the Times‘ characterization as being “built from nothing in a matter of months.”

As Chris Maisano explained in Dissent, “people on the ground have been quietly building civic infrastructure” in neighborhoods Mamdani won. The mobilization of these communities “transformed the electorate and helped Mamdani offset Cuomo’s strength in neighborhoods that shifted sharply to the former governor in the general election.”

Establishment media’s obsession with portraying democratic socialism as divisive and/or fatally alienating to voters blinded it to what was truly radical about Mamdani’s campaign: It empowered ordinary people to lead, changing individual lives and history. What most scares the establishment isn’t socialism; it’s people-powered democracy.

Discouraging mass political participation is not new—in a 2019 Politico article (4/25/19) headlined “Politics Is Not the Answer,” Matthew Continetti suggested that “we might begin to see ourselves, and all of our virtues and our vices, more clearly” if we would only lower our expectations “of what politics can achieve”—but it’s newly salient in the run-up to the 2026 midterms.

‘Too much emphasis’ on ‘far-left positions’

“The folks who are most to blame about Trump are the ones who pushed Democrats to take indefensible positions,” billionaire-backed Adam Jentleson told the New York Times (9/17/25).

One function of the corporate political press is to funnel popular energy and outrage into what its backers see as the proper channels: lawsuits, think tanks and voting for establishment-backed candidates. This is reflected in how these outlets are covering contemporary opposition to Donald Trump.

The New York Times (9/17/25) wrote about a new Democratic think tank, the Searchlight Institute, that attributes the party’s recent losses to “too much emphasis on issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights…at the expense, some argue, of appealing to voters in battleground states.”

Paraphrasing the think tank’s founder, Adam Jentleson, the paper’s Reid J. Epstein noted that

organizations focused on climate change, gun control and LGBTQ rights have all managed to get Democratic presidential hopefuls on the record taking far-left positions to the detriment of their general election performance.

The Times quoted operatives who disagreed with Jentleson, but didn’t bother to analyze his essential claims: Were those positions really “far left” and alienating to the party’s base? What evidence is there that candidates who took certain positions on climate change and/or LGBTQ rights underperformed in general elections as a result of those positions?

To the Times, the needs and preferences of the party’s “liberal base” are inscrutable and beside the point; what matters is the guidance of self-appointed experts like Jentleson, whose think tank is “subsidized by a roster of billionaire donors,” including prominent hedge fund managers and real estate investors.

‘A lot of compromise’

David Brooks’ advice (New York Times, 4/17/25) for defeating Trump is all too normal: Universities have to stop being “shrouded in a stifling progressivism that tells half the country: Your voices don’t matter.”

In a New York Times column (4/17/25) calling for a “national civic uprising” against Trump, David Brooks argued that the mass rallies Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders led in 2025 were “ineffective” because they were “partisan,” and made opposition to Trump “seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.”

Yet one day earlier, the Times (4/16/25) reported that the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez rallies had “drawn enormous crowds” and were “energizing a beaten-down Democratic Party.” And according to a Sanders adviser, the paper noted, “21% of those who signed up to attend Mr. Sanders’ events reported that they were independents, and 8% said they were Republicans.”

Organizing mass rallies that expose thousands of listeners in conservative areas to critiques, not just of Trump, but of oligarchy in general, seems like an effective means of diluting right-wing power and demonstrating that leading Democrats and their allies care about Americans throughout the country, not just in blue states. But to those in corporate media, the point of politics is not to inspire regular people to organize and win broadly popular demands, but to “build power” and “do good things” by, as the New York Times’ Ezra Klein suggested in a recent interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick (9/29/25), engaging in “a lot of compromise and a lot of working with people who we have very, very deep disagreements with.”

Klein is far from the only Democrat who believes we should take “an approach to politics that we think will expand our coalition such that we are not always within two points of losing to Donald Trump or the people around him.” But to Klein, that means penning paeans to hatemongers like the late Charlie Kirk (New York Times, 9/11/25), not standing up to plutocrats.

‘A better story’

Despite evidence that mass issue-based organizing campaigns can and do politicize people, bring them into effective coalitions and achieve significant victories, corporate media outlets and establishment leaders remain laser-focused on encouraging the rank and file to elect centrists rather than build mass movements.

As CBS News (12/16/25) recently reported, former President Barack Obama—still one of the Democratic Party’s most popular figures—is urging Democrats to “focus on winning the midterms and developing ‘a better story’ to tell voters, rather than on ‘nerdy’ internal disagreements.” The man once touted as the nation’s “organizer in chief” has long since abandoned encouraging Americans to organize, fight for and win life-changing policies; he is advising them to focus on winning the midterms by burnishing their brand.

The endurance of Trump, who won more votes than Kamala Harris in 2024 but has never won the consistent support of a majority of Americans, revealed to many that they cannot trust US political leaders to protect the rights and interests of ordinary people. Campaigns like Mamdani’s in New York, and recently elected Mayor Katie Wilson’s in Seattle, have shown people around the world that they have the power to win the policies and elect the leaders they want, without top-down instruction or management from—and despite interference by—elites.

To pundits and corporate media outlets, this is a dangerous lesson: If everyday people realize they don’t need overpaid consultants or self-declared experts to win real change, how long can the status quo be maintained by its beneficiaries?

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7326565

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/19428

The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans were just released, along with a new food pyramid that heavily promotes meat and dairy—and reflects the authors’ ties to industrial animal agriculture.

While the new guidelines emphasize fruits and vegetables, as do previous editions, they directly contradict the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) recommendations by encouraging nearly double the consumption of protein from red meat and full-fat dairy while also touting more extreme—and unscientific—nutrition trends, like cooking with beef tallow.

Most of the meat consumed in the U.S. comes from conventional industrial farms, where it accumulates toxins from pesticide-intensive feed and antibiotics and wreaks environmental havoc. Only a small percentage is raised in more limited, agroecological systems that strive to reduce harm to the environment.

Any uptick in meat and dairy consumption is likely to be conventional, and if consumers increased their intake by 25 percent, the impact on human health and ecosystems would be dramatic.

The meat- and dairy-heavy guidelines will exacerbate a problem that quite literally stinks. Conventional U.S. beef and dairy production annually generate well over 40 million metric tons of manure—a source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

The animals’ digestive process (their burps as they chew their cud) release even more methane; a single cow produces up to 264 pounds of methane per year. At the same time, sprawling industrial feedlots and dairies gobble up land, polluting waterways and destroying wildlife habitat.

The animal agriculture industry hopes Americans won’t notice, and so far, that seems to be the case. Efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions have historically focused on carbon and largely ignored methane.

“Efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions have historically focused on carbon and largely ignored methane.”

Animal agriculture is by far the single-largest source of agricultural methane emissions. Manure and enteric fermentation (digestion) contributed an estimated 36.7 percent of total U.S. anthropogenic methane emissions in 2023, according to a 2025 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report that the Trump administration tried to bury.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that we must cut methane emissions by at least a third by 2030 to meet the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Yet the opposite is happening in our country. U.S.-based methane and nitrous oxide emissions from manure management increased 66 percent and 25 percent, respectively, from 1990 to 2023. These disturbing increases came despite the decrease in greenhouse gases from other sources such as coal mining, landfills, and vehicles.

A new progress report from the U.N. Environment Programme also found that the U.S. is seriously off track to meet its Global Methane Pledge (which the U.S. helped launch in 2021).

To tackle this urgent problem, it’s critical to accurately measure the near-term effects of this short-lived super pollutant. Measured on a 20-year time frame, methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. But most estimates, including the EPA’s, use a weaker 100-year time frame to measure global warming potential, which shows methane as 28 times more potent.

The industrial animal agriculture industry is trying to dilute and distort the data even more through heavy greenwashing. For example, it’s aggressively lobbying for a new metric that measures changes in greenhouse gas emissions compared to emissions in any chosen baseline year. That means a livestock operation would be considered “climate neutral” if it continued polluting at the same rate as the baseline year, even if that baseline showed sky-high methane emissions.

“The animal agriculture industry is trying to dilute and distort the data even more through heavy greenwashing.”

Under this ridiculously permissive metric, industrial operations with huge methane footprints would falsely appear to be “carbon neutral” as long as they continue business as usual, but a small farmer in the Global South would look like a big polluter if they increased their herd from 15 to 20 cattle.

Another industry-favorite false solution is biogas conversion, which is the practice of capturing manure methane from dairy cows and turning it into fuel via anaerobic digestion. This has incentivized companies to produce massive quantities of liquid manure to convert to gas.

In addition to prompting the creation of more manure, biogas production endangers frontline workers and neighboring communities. It’s also been shown to increase nitrous oxide pollution and deemed unlikely to ever achieve carbon-neutral energy at scale.

The industry claims that it can handle its manure problem through waste management tactics such as covering the manure to trap emissions and using manure as fertilizer.

But waste management facilities are hazardous and difficult to manage, posing frequent risk of accidental breach and leakage. When manure lagoons flood, they damage surrounding communities, spilling millions of gallons of fecal waste containing contaminants like pathogenic bacteria, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, insecticides, and pharmaceuticals.

And using manure as fertilizer increases the likelihood of runoff and water contamination down the line. Manure is already a primary source of water pollution from nutrient discharge. Animal agriculture manure runoff leaches nitrogen and phosphorous into surface and groundwater, depleting oxygen levels in water bodies and creating “dead zones” that kill aquatic life and can cause toxic algal blooms that are harmful to humans as well.

There is growing support in some quarters for factory farming “efficiency” as a way to reduce emissions, but it’s a false solution. Industrial animal agriculture is responsible for the vast majority of deforestation, air and water pollution, toxic pesticide use, and other threats to our climate, environmental health, and biodiversity. It’s hard to believe that the very thing that caused the problem will be its solution.

Moreover, the efficiency theory fails to take into account the reality of corporate control of the food system and its sway over policy, which results in lack of regulation and increasing expansion and consolidation.

The Trump administration, for instance, has worked hard to end pollution research and oversight. Last April, it blocked the release of the EPA’s annual report estimating the sources of U.S. greenhouse gas pollution across every sector. It put “under review” Agriculture Department web pages that had collected and reported critical data about agricultural sources of carbon emissions.

In September, the EPA proposed a rule to remove manure management from the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, authorized by Congress under the Clean Air Act to require big polluters to report their annual emissions.

Furthermore, Congress—since 2009—has consistently prevented the EPA from monitoring greenhouse gas emissions data from animal agriculture operations.

And the problem will only get worse with the administration’s “Plan to Fortify the American Beef Industry,” which reads like a wish list for meat lobbyists. It outlines how to increase demand for beef through federal food programs like school meals and SNAP while decreasing environmental and wildlife protections around cattle grazing, safety inspections of meat processing plants, and protections under the Clean Water Act.

But the framework is there to change course, if Congress stands up to the livestock industry and stops blocking the implementation of data collection. Congress should also thwart September’s proposed EPA rule, which would create more barriers to data collection and erase animal agriculture as a source of emissions.

“The framework is there to change course, if Congress stands up to the livestock industry and stops blocking the implementation of data collection.”

Erasing, hiding, and manipulating manure emissions data doesn’t make the resulting climate and public health problems go away. And the Trump administration’s boosting of the American livestock industry via the Dietary Guidelines will only exacerbate those very problems.

To truly address manure pollution and ensure accountability, we need to move away from the system that’s causing it in the first place. The 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recommended prioritizing plant proteins over animal proteins to achieve the healthiest diet, which also has immense climate benefits: Compared to tofu, beef produces more than 31 times as many greenhouse gases per kilogram.

It also suggests making plain drinking water the primary beverage, while the new guidelines push whole milk. Dairy milk produces about 315 times as many greenhouse gases as tap water.

We can consider supporting a just food transition that puts the planet and human rights first. That means ending our heavy reliance on industrial animal agriculture and embracing more plant-rich diets—a solution that must involve policy for meaningful systemic change, and one that can be supported by individual consumer choices as well.

The post Op-ed: The New Food Pyramid Is a Climate Disaster appeared first on Civil Eats.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7342706

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/19954

The Trump administration, which has claimed its illegal boat bombing spree in international waters and assault on Venezuela were motivated by a deep desire to combat the drug overdose crisis in the US, moved late Tuesday to eliminate up to $2 billion worth of federal grants supporting mental health and addiction services across the country.

Organizations that provide street-level support to people experiencing mental health crises, homelessness, and addiction said they were notified of the cuts overnight in the form of emailed grant termination letters.

NPR first reported the cuts by the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which is overseen by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The estimated $2 billion in cuts represents roughly a quarter of SAMHSA's budget.

Ryan Hampton, founder of the nonprofit Mobilize Recovery, told NPR that his group is out $500,000 because of the Trump administration's move, which could impact thousands of organizations nationwide.

"Waking up to nearly $2 billion in grant cancellations means front-line providers are forced to cease overdose prevention, naloxone distribution, and peer recovery services immediately, leaving our communities defenseless against a raging crisis," Hampton said. "This cruelty will be measured in lives lost, as recovery centers shutter and the safety net we built is slashed overnight. We are witnessing the dismantling of our recovery infrastructure in real-time, and the administration will have blood on its hands for every preventable death that follows."

Jonathan Cohn of The Bulwark reported that impacted organizations "had applied for these grants, had them approved, and were operating with the funds—and then, on Tuesday night, received notices that those grants had been terminated."

"The affected programs include ones that provide services like housing and peer support for people who are in recovery, as well as ones that train substance abuse professionals," Cohn observed.

Yngvild Olsen, a national adviser at Manatt Health and former director of SAMHA’s Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, told Cohn that the cuts mean "tens of thousands of people" will "lose access to services" and many providers will "lose access to their training and technical assistance resources."

"These organizations are going to have to lay off staff," Olsen warned. "They don't have high margins and other sources of funding that they can necessarily turn to. I heard from one grantee that said she doesn't know how she's going to pay staff and bills.”

News outlets that reviewed the grant termination emails sent out late Tuesday reported that the administration characterized the funding as out of step with its priorities, even as the White House claims it is waging a righteous war on the drug overdose crisis.

"Every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives," President Donald Trump claimed, without evidence, during an October press conference. "So when you think of it that way, what we're doing is actually an act of kindness."

US Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a statement Wednesday that, in light of the massive grant cuts to mental health and addiction-related grants, "this administration’s claims about taking on the opioid crisis couldn’t be more hollow."

“So much for Make America Healthy Again and saving Americans from addiction and suicide," said Murray. "This decision is going to mean real people in Washington state and every part of the country do not get the care and treatment they are counting on—and that could save their life. Republicans must join me in demanding these cuts be reversed.”

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

Clipped from ongoing Status Coup livestream in Minneapolis. Same reporter was hit in the head by something from ICE earlier tonight.

And by involved, they mean to say thst preliminary reports are that a federal officer shot somebody

Star Tribune coverage — uses a URL shortener to keep lemmy from removing the gift link marker

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7333635

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/19724

The movement against ICE has continued to surge in Minneapolis and across the United States in the wake of the killing of Renee Good.

On January 13, a coalition of faith leaders, union presidents, business owners, and community figures in Minneapolis called on “every worker in Minnesota to refuse to show up to work” and “every single Minnesotan to not spend a dime” on Friday, January 23, to demand an end to the “violence and horror” that ICE has unleashed on the community and the agency’s complete removal from the state.

“We are going to leverage our economic power, our labor, our prayer for one another,” said JaNaé Bates, co-executive director of Isaiah MN, an interfaith and multiracial community organizing network.

“We are not going to shop, we are not going to work, we are not going to school on Friday, January 23.” 

Dozens of labor unions, faith groups, businesses, and community organizations across the state are backing the call, with many more joining by the hour. Bates added, “Some people they call that a strike. For many of us, we say this is our right to refusal until something changes.”

Instead of participating in the economy, the organizers are calling on people to use the day to be conscious of the community. Faith groups will be fasting and praying. And at 2pm in downtown Minneapolis, organizers hope millions will gather for a mass march.

“Now is the time,” said the minister. “If you ever wondered for yourself: ‘When is the time that we do something different? When is the time that we stand up and say that this has to change? That this needs to end?’ The time is now.”

Violence in Minnesota backed by Nazi rhetoric in Washington

Speakers at the press conference expressed outrage at the ICE killing of Renee Good, whose “whistle blowing was returned by bullets”. They also described the escalating violence by ICE agents against the community in recent days. According to videos on circulating on social media from Minneapolis, ICE is raiding homes, separating families, dragging employees from their workplaces, pepper spraying people, assaulting high school students and staff, shooting activists with flashbangs, and more.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has continued to defend the ICE operations with far-right rhetoric. US Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino recently called Minnesotans who oppose ICE “weak-minded”, echoing Nazi-era language about removed and social cleansing. During a press conference on January 12, US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had the line “One of ours, all of yours” on her podium. A shocking moment given that the slogan is directly linked to Nazi collective-punishment doctrine. The line comes from an atrocity known as the Lidice Massacre. After one Nazi soldier was killed in a Czech village, the Nazis massacred 170 men and boys of that village, deported 200 women, and killed 82 children in gas chambers.

On the morning of January 13, in a post on his Truth Social platform, US President Trump again claimed that there are thousands of violent criminals in Minnesota that ICE is removing.

Responding to Trump, Bates declared that Minnesotans do want to remove the criminals: “Those thousands of people committing crimes in the state are the ICE officers! Who have been ramming their cars into our people, who have been stealing our people, kidnapping folks, who have been beating folks up and dropping them off in random locations.”

“The beauty about Minnesotans is that we have stood up for each other. We have come together,” she said. The minister was flanked by business owners, faith leaders, and community figures who echoed the demand for ICE to leave Minnesota and any other state in which it is operating.

Faith-labor unity: “Prayer is not a passive activity. It is one that is of action.”

James Earl Johnson, pastor at Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Saint Paul, said that January 23 will be a day to reflect on the truth and the call from God to love our neighbors.

“We will pray for the power we have as people of faith to stop this madness, and for ICE to leave Minnesota and any other state where their actions are abusing the children of God.”

Pastor Brian, of Zion Baptist Church, described the ICE presence in Minneapolis as “spiritual warfare”.

“Darkness can’t drive out darkness, right? Only light can break darkness. And we choose to be light today. We choose to speak peace and not hate. We choose unity and not division. And so we will collectively come together on the 23rd.”

JaNaé Bates underlined the duty of faith leaders and congregations in this moment to use fasting and prayer to mobilize the community against the militarized federal forces in the twin cities.

“Prayer is not a passive activity. It is one that is of action. It is one about transformation. It is one where we get to transform ourselves and this world.”

She also highlighted that faith communities are not in this fight alone, listing dozens of unions, businesses, and inter-faith organizations that have already joined the “Day of Truth and Freedom”.

Day of Truth and Freedom

Amid the “lies” by the Trump administration framing Renee Good as a “domestic terrorist”, leaders say truth is essential at this moment.

“The truth is … that life is sacred,” said Bates. “In no way, shape or form should we dismiss someone being killed. In no way, shape or form should we give excuses to people being harmed every day, right? That is the truth.”

The faith leader added: “We need to take a real pause, a real time to step away and say, you know what? Here is actually what is happening.”

Bates made the point that to live in fear, surrounded by violence, is not freedom.

“Freedom is not just the freedom from constraints. It is the freedom to have safety. It is the freedom to have joy. It’s the freedom to be able to thrive. That is why we are choosing this day of freedom and truth.”

Community leaders reiterated the call for every single Minnesotan who loves “this notion of truth and freedom”, to refuse to work, shop, or go to school on January 23.

Organizers asked people to spend the next ten days before the day of action talking to businesses, small and large, and ask them what their plan is for Friday, January 23, and how they are standing up to demand that ICE leave Minnesota. 

Read more: Movement against ICE grows in the US in the wake of killing of Renee Good

This thing called hope

“I am a woman of faith. And there’s this thing we talk about called hope,” Bates said, in response to a reporter asking her if she thinks the strike day will work to drive ICE out.

“I believe this is going to rock this state in the most beautiful and glorious of ways. It is going to open our eyes to what is possible,” the minister said.

“For too long we have been told nothing is possible. Bow down. Obey. And do whatever it is that somebody at the top says to do. But we know that that is a lie from the pit of hell. And let me tell y’all this, there is so much that is able to be accomplished when we come together and say no more to what is awful and yes to what is possible.”

The post “Now is the time”: Minnesota calls for general strike on January 23 to drive ICE out appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7322373

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/19289

Kevin Abourezk
ICT

Former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola could make history again. The Yup’ik woman announced Monday her plans to seek a U.S. Senate seat in her home state of Alaska.

This move, if she wins, could make her the first Alaska Native woman in the U.S. Senate.

Along with Peltola, if Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan wins her U.S. Senate race in Minnesota, both would make history as the first Native women in the U.S. Senate. Native men have only held those positions so far, including Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, Cherokee and Republican, and the late Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Northern Cheyenne.

Technically, Flanagan, White Earth, could be the first since Minnesota is three hours ahead and Alaska’s ranked-choice voting would take some time. Regardless, there would be a similar situation to Kansas Rep. Sharice Davids, Ho-Chunk, and former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, being elected as the first Native women in the U.S. House in 2018.

Peltola said she decided to run in part to confront the failure of federal lawmakers to address rising food prices that have impacted her state more than others.

“Growing up, Alaska was a place of abundance,” Peltola, Democrat, said in an Instagram post that featured photos of her fishing with her family. “Now we have scarcity. The salmon, large game and migratory birds that used to fill our freezers are harder to find so we buy more groceries with crushing prices.”

She said politicians don’t believe rural Alaskans when they express concern about paying $17 a gallon for milk.

“They’re more focused on their stock portfolios than our bank accounts,” she said. “When they actually work together on something, it’s usually to help themselves.”

Peltola will face Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, who is seeking reelection. He is currently in his second term.

Alaska’s non-partisan, ranked-choice primary is scheduled for Aug. 18. Polls show her nearly even with Sullivan, and the Democratic Party has begun eyeing the seat as a step toward retaking control of the Senate.

In Alaska, Native people are a key demographic, making up 17 percent of the state’s 740,000 population. The state is home to approximately 40 percent of Indian Country — 229 of the 575 federally recognized tribes across the country.

Peltola served in the Alaska House of Representatives from 1999 to 2009, the Bethel City Council from 2011-2013, and then as a tribal court judge and executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.

She won a special election in 2022 to succeed Republican U.S. Rep. Don Young, who died in office, and later that year won election to a full term. It made her the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress. She served on the House Committee on Natural Resources and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Her moderate views earned her endorsements from Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and the National Rifle Association.

She was defeated in her 2024 re-election bid by Republican Nick Begich, and left office in January 2025.

Peltola criticized Alaska’s current all-Republican congressional delegation for failing to challenge its own party on issues like public media and disaster relief. Her campaign priorities, she said, include saving fisheries, lowering energy prices, building affordable housing and seeking term limits for U.S. senators.

“No one from the lower 48 is coming to save us, but I know this in my bones – there’s no group of people more ready to save ourselves than Alaskans,” she said

The post Mary Peltola seeks to be first Alaska Native woman in Senate appeared first on ICT.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/45609781

Senate Republicans voted to dismiss a war powers resolution Wednesday that would have limited President Donald Trump’s ability to conduct further attacks on Venezuela after two GOP senators reversed course on supporting the legislation.

Trump put intense pressure on five Republican senators who joined with Democrats to advance the resolution last week and ultimately prevailed in heading off passage of the legislation. Two of the Republicans — Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Todd Young of Indiana — flipped under the pressure.

Vice President JD Vance had to break the 50-50 deadlock in the Senate on a Republican motion to dismiss the bill.

The outcome of the high-profile vote demonstrated how Trump still has command over much of the Republican conference, yet the razor-thin vote tally also showed the growing concern on Capitol Hill over the president’s aggressive foreign policy ambitions.

Democrats forced the debate after U.S. troops captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a surprise nighttime raid earlier this month

More in the article.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7329962

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/19430

The Senate is taking up a spending package passed by the House of Representatives that would cut $125 million in funding promised this year to replace toxic lead pipes.

Including three of 12 appropriations bills, this package will fund parts of the federal government, including the Environmental Protection Agency. The Senate is slated to vote on it later this week. Near the end of more than 400 pages of text, it proposes repurposing some funds previously obligated by the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the bipartisan infrastructure law.

That law, advanced by the Biden administration, promised $15 billion over five years to fund the replacement of service lines — pipes routing water into people’s homes and other buildings — that are made of or contain lead, a neurotoxin that can cause cognitive, developmental, reproductive, and cardiovascular harm.

The EPA released 2025 funding allocations in November, months late, obligating nearly $3 billion across the country. Illinois, the state with the most lead pipes in the nation, received the largest share. Another $3 billion was slated to be disbursed this year, the last for the funds.

The slashed $125 million would be repurposed for wildland fire management. Safe drinking water advocates and some lawmakers have called for the funds to be restored, calling them critical for health and safety. Because lead pipes are a public health hazard, the EPA has mandated that all states replace them within about a decade, with some extensions for states with many pipes, like Illinois.

“We are facing a water crisis, and I’m disappointed that money appropriated by the [Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act] for lead pipe replacement is being repurposed by this legislation,” Representative Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, said in a statement to Inside Climate News. “Every American deserves clean water, and we will not stop fighting until we get the lead out.”

The EPA declined to comment on pending legislation, but a spokesperson wrote in an email that the Trump EPA’s work on drinking water is “unmatched,” and said that funding from the agency will “accelerate progress in finding and removing lead pipes that deliver water to homes, schools, and businesses.”

President Donald Trump previously sought to almost completely eliminate a key funding source for drinking water, but the House rejected that proposal, and also refused to cut as much of the EPA’s budget as Trump wanted.

An earlier draft of the bill proposed cutting $250 million in lead pipe replacement funding, and House Democrats fought to protect the funds. In December, Dingell and Representative Rashida Tlaib, who is also a Democrat from Michigan, coordinated a letter to Senate leaders signed by 43 other members of Congress, arguing that the funding is critical for public health.

“Too often, our local communities do not have the resources and capacity to address this health risk without a more aggressive funding approach to this growing crisis,” the letter reads.

Julian Gonzalez, senior legislative counsel at Earthjustice, said the smaller cut is an improvement, but described it as “bittersweet.”

“It’s great that they were able to save $125 million from one version of the appropriations bill to the next, and it’s obviously really unfortunate and disappointing that there’s any clawback at all of these funds,” Gonzalez said.

The cost of replacement varies, but $125 million would pay for thousands of new lines. Any reduction in funding will have a material impact on people’s lives, Gonzalez added.

“If you just think about it as neighborhoods and families, then it becomes evident that it’s actually an enormous deal,” he said.

Mary Grant, water program director at Food & Water Watch, said communities burdened by lead pipes need “every dollar of federal support” to replace the toxic lines.

“I don’t think there is a real justification for cutting back lead service line funding,” Grant said. “At the end of the day, no matter where you live, no matter which party you vote for, everyone wants safe, lead-free water.”

There are millions of lead service lines across the country, and replacing them is an expensive job, with estimates ranging from $45 billion to $90 billion. Cuts to federal funding will likely impact cities with high numbers of pipes, like Chicago, most severely, Grant said. Officials in Illinois have already called for greater financial support from the federal government to replace its hundreds of thousands of lead-containing lines.

The EPA estimated in 2024 that there were about 9 million lead service lines nationwide, but late last year the agency revised its estimate to 4 million. Drinking water advocates have criticized the new methodology, which estimates that the vast majority of the 24 million service lines of unknown material don’t contain lead — a far greater proportion than previous estimates.

In an emailed statement, an EPA spokesperson defended the new methodology and said the critiques are “simply wrong.” The new estimate involves “significantly more robust” data than the previous numbers, the agency statement said, given that all states were required to submit inventories of their service line materials in 2024.

“The EPA’s reduced number of presumed lead service lines may also be a precursor to future efforts to justify cuts in funding for replacement of these lead pipes,” wrote Erik D. Olson, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s senior strategic director for environmental health, in December. “This is penny-wise and pound-foolish, since the health and economic benefits of removing these lead pipes are more than 14 times the costs. And it does not bode well for the tens of millions of Americans who continue to drink lead-contaminated water from these lead pipes.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline States say they need more help replacing lead pipes. Congress may cut the funding instead. on Jan 13, 2026.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7329964

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/19471

The popular crowdfunding platform GoFundMe is facing mounting pressure to remove campaigns supporting Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and killed Renee Good last week in Minneapolis, sparking nationwide outrage and protests.

One GoFundMe campaign for Ross, a 10-year ICE veteran who has received full backing from the Trump White House, has raised nearly $600,000 as of this writing. The description of the campaign, started by a user named Clyde Emmons, states, "After seeing all the media bs about a domestic terrorist getting go fund me. I feel that the officer that was 1000 percent justified in the shooting deserves to have a go fund me."

Trump administration officials have characterized Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, as a "domestic terrorist" and openly lied about the circumstances of her killing. President Donald Trump falsely claimed that Good "violently, willfully, and viciously ran over" Ross, despite video footage from multiple angles showing no such thing.

The top contributor to the GoFundMe campaign started by Emmons, who called Good a "stupod [sic] bitch who got what she deserved," is Bill Ackman, who gave $10,000. The billionaire hedge fund manager wrote on social media that he "intended to similarly support the GoFundMe for Renee Good’s family" but it was closed by the time he tried to donate.

The advocacy group UltraViolet on Monday launched a petition urging GoFundMe to remove all fundraisers supporting or claiming to support Ross, noting that the platform's policies bar fundraisers in support of individuals accused of violent crimes.

GoFundMe told The Intercept that the company is investigating Emmons' campaign.

"Renee Good was murdered by ICE in cold blood and in plain sight. There can be no equivocation on the gross abuse of force which caused her death, nor can there be any doubt as to the contemptibility of GoFundMe campaigns to support her killer,” Nicole Regalado, vice president of campaigns at UltraViolet, said in a statement. “GoFundMe claims to be committed to helping people, and yet it continues to profit from our pain."

"Until each and every campaign supporting Jonathan Ross is taken down," Regalado added, "GoFundMe will remain complicit in legitimizing ICE's campaign of terror and violence on our communities."

State and federal investigators are currently examining Good's killing, though the FBI has cut Minnesota officials out of the probe, intensifying concerns of a cover-up.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that federal investigators assigned to Good's killing are "looking into her possible connections to activist groups protesting the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement, in addition to the actions of the federal agent who killed her."

"The decision by the FBI and the Justice Department to scrutinize Ms. Good’s activities and her potential connections to local activists is in line with the White House’s strategy of deflecting blame for the shooting away from federal law enforcement and toward opponents they have described as domestic terrorists, often without providing evidence," the Times added.

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Jan. 10, 2026 https://archive.ph/T1DlL

Mounting outrage over an ICE agent’s killing of a woman in Minneapolis spilled into streets across the country on Saturday, as crowds of protesters mobilized against what they called the excesses of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

The “Ice Out for Good” campaign held demonstrations in small towns and major cities, including some that have been central targets of President Trump’s immigration crackdown. The protests came three days after an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen at the wheel of a car, during an encounter in South Minneapolis.

The number of co-sponsors has risen to 70 since this was published

Its almost like having a military occupation trying to force people to turn in their neighbors to be sent to concentration camps is bad for business

But when the 16-year-old’s case resurfaced this week in the context of a ProPublica deep dive into the widespread use of banned chokeholds by immigration agents, there was another detail that stood out as particularly galling in its sheer disregard for the idea that agents might face any kinds of consequences: The fact that the ICE agents in question allegedly sold Arnoldo Bazan’s confiscated phone for cash, potentially on the very same day that they took it from him.

Agents took photos of Levy and other observers’ license plates. Then a masked agent walked up to Judy Levy’s passenger side window.

The agent said: “‘Hello Judith. How are you today?’”

Judy Levy was shaken, but the couple followed when the federal agents’ caravan started up again. That’s when ICE vehicles turned onto Levy’s street. They almost couldn’t believe it.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A proposed billionaires’ tax in California has ignited a political uproar in Silicon Valley, with tech titans threatening to leave the state while Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom maneuvers to defeat a levy that he fears will lead to an exodus of wealth.

A technology mecca, California has more billionaires than any other state — a few hundred, by some estimates. Nearly half its personal income tax revenue, a financial backbone in the nearly $350 billion budget, comes from the top 1% of earners.

A large health care union is attempting to place a proposal before voters in November that would impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets of billionaires — including stocks, art, businesses, collectibles and intellectual property — to backfill federal funding cuts to health services for lower-income people that were signed by President Donald Trump last year.

In a state with a vast gap between rich and poor, the plan has resulted in a tangle of competing interests at a time when both Democrats and Republicans are struggling to respond to economic anxiety driven by rising costs ahead of this year’s midterm elections.