United States | News & Politics

Dec. 17, 2025
By Louise Halverson

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota — On December 14, 2025, some 100 letter carriers and their supporters gathered here as the temperature hovered at 4° F to demand “ICE Off Postal Property!” Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents had been using post office parking lots as staging areas for raids in nearby neighborhoods, disrupting postal workers as they tried to carry out their duties.

At a rally at Lake Street Station, Chris Pennock, vice president of National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) Branch 9, told the local NBC News affiliate: “At the Powderhorn post office, they arrested somebody right in the middle of when we’re bringing back our mail. Vans with tinted windows and body armor and guns. We shouldn’t have to work in that environment.”

A new article on Susie Wiles, White House Chief of Staff, in Vanity Fair reveals her candid thoughts over the past year on a range of major issues facing the Trump administration and the personalities involved.

Wiles repeatedly met with the filmmaker and author Chris Whipple from January, and gave her commentary on the events in which she was either a key player or central observer at the White House.

But after its publication, Wiles hit out on X, calling it a "disingenuously framed hit piece," that "significant context was disregarded," and "much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story."

https://archive.ph/Obwjc

https://archive.ph/DF3eh

Dec. 14, 2025

Today, billionaires are still flooding politics with their money and still reaping the benefits, but they won’t stop yapping about it.

Elon Musk bragged about his support for President Trump, to whose campaign and allied groups he donated more than $250 million. He loudly attempted to buy votes in Pennsylvania. Then he leveraged it all into a cruel and chaotic effort to dismantle federal agencies. Marc Andreessen’s tech-heavy venture capital firm publicly pledged $100 million to target lawmakers who attempt to regulate artificial intelligence; Mr. Andreessen then mocked the pope for suggesting some ethical guardrails around the technology. Bill Ackman announced that he and his pals were prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Zohran Mamdani, and urged Mr. Trump to call in the National Guard if that effort failed and Mr. Mamdani’s mayoralty met his worst expectations.

An FBI investigation into an alleged terror plot in Southern California bears the familiar hallmarks of the bureau’s long-running use of informants and undercover agents to advance plots that might not otherwise have materialized, court documents show.

The limited details available suggest an investigation that leaned heavily on a paid informant and at least one undercover FBI agent, according to an affidavit filed in federal court. The informant and the undercover agent were involved in nearly every stage of the case, including discussions of operational security and transporting members of the group to the site in the Mojave Desert where federal agents ultimately made the arrests.

“The question that immediately popped into my mind was that: There’s a reference to a confidential human source, but there’s no indication of how that source came to be,” said Brad Crowder, an activist and union organizer who was convicted in a case of alleged violent protest plans that involved a confidential informant. “It’s not totally out of the realm of possibilities that this idea was planted or floated by whoever this confidential human source might be.”

Kash Patel, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, is once again facing criticism for rushing to social media to tout his agency’s work on tracking down a person of interest in a shooting prematurely.

After a shooter killed two and injured nine at Brown University on Saturday, Patel, a lawyer and rightwing commentator before his job in the administration, posted on X that his agency had helped detain a “person of interest in a hotel room” in Coventry, Rhode Island, acting off a lead from the Providence police.

But the person of interest was later released from custody hours later, and the shooter is still at large.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/43734020

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A Chinese man who left his country after filming at sites of alleged human rights violations against Uyghurs now faces the risk of removal from the United States, according to his lawyer and mother.

Guan Heng, 38, underwent an immigration hearing in New York on Monday after being detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in August, his mother said in an interview.

The case could see him taken out of the United States and potentially landing back in China eventually.

“I’m really, really worried that things will be very bad for him if he is made to return,” Guan’s mother, Luo Yun, told AFP in Chinese.

“If he has a chance to remain in the United States, he’ll at least be safe,” she said. “I’m incredibly anxious and upset.”

On Monday, the session ended with a next hearing date set for January, said Guan’s lawyer Chen Chuangchuang. ...

The gains would largely be made in 10 Southern states with GOP-controlled legislatures, a new report finds.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/43715515

Officials ordered immediate evacuations in three south Seattle suburbs Monday after a levee failed following a week of heavy rains.

The evacuation order from King County in Washington state covered homes and businesses east of the Green River in parts of Kent, Auburn and Tukwila.

The National Weather Service, meanwhile, issued a flash flood warning covering nearly 47,000 people.

The total number of people killed in the antisemitic Bondi Beach massacre was still not known when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the opportunity to blame Australia’s mere recognition of a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu and his cheerleaders, meanwhile, have once again chosen the despicable path of weaponizing antisemitism to ensure and legitimize Palestinian suffering.

The first New York Times opinion piece to be published in the massacre’s wake came from Israel apologist Bret Stephens, with a column titled “Bondi Beach is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like.” Stephens wrote that the shooting constitutes the “real-world consequences” of “literalists” responding to chants like “globalize the intifada,” “resistance is justified,” and “by any means necessary.”

The point is obvious: to make sure that Palestinians remain eternally in stateless subjugation and to give Israel a free hand to violate their rights — including by committing a genocide like the one unfolding in Gaza today.

It’s all done in the name of fighting antisemitism by conflating the worst kinds of violent anti-Jewish bigotry, like what we saw in Bondi Beach, with any criticisms of Israel and its actions. To so much as say Palestinians ought to have basic human rights, in this view, becomes a deadly attack on Jewish safety.

Rather than be critical or perhaps stay silent, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, welcomed the pardon and engaged in shameful pandering, apparently to maintain Mr. Cuellar’s party loyalty. Most disturbingly, Mr. Jeffries did so by attacking the legitimacy of the criminal case against Mr. Cuellar, publicly dismissing the indictment against him as “very thin.”

Rural departments have long relied on cheap software solutions to keep their operations running. But fire chiefs report sharp price increases as investors have entered the market.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A JetBlue flight from the small Caribbean nation of Curaçao halted its ascent to avoid colliding with a U.S. Air Force refueling tanker on Friday, and the pilot blamed the military plane for crossing his path.

“We almost had a midair collision up here,” the JetBlue pilot said, according to a recording of his conversation with air traffic control. “They passed directly in our flight path. ... They don’t have their transponder turned on, it’s outrageous.”

The incident involved JetBlue Flight 1112 from Curaçao, which is just off the coast of Venezuela, en route to New York City’s JFK airport. It comes as the U.S. military has stepped up its drug interdiction activities in the Caribbean and is also seeking to increase pressure on Venezuela’s government.

. . . The henchman is Eric Geressy, a former military officer who served with Hegseth in Iraq in the mid-2000s and now works as a senior advisor to our ever-tanked Secretary of Defense. The two men are reportedly good friends, and Hegseth recently awarded Geressy with a Distinguished Service Cross for his actions during an ambush in Iraq in 2007, which is the sort of favor a SecDef can do for his warrior buddies.

Earlier this fall, the reporter, Dan Friedman, discovered that Geressy’s email address was linked to a Goodreads page for someone named Eric J. (Geressy’s middle name is Joseph.) And what a page it was! Apparently, Eric J had two major interests: accounts from soldiers about their experiences in military service and war, and “Asian wife sharing.”

. . . The Pentagon, as is standard in the Trump era, responded with a snarly statement accusing Mother Jones of hitting “a new low with this shoddy hit piece.” But in addition to a worn-out list of clichéd insults, the Pentagon has Jack Posobiec.

Posobiec has been many things in his less-than-illustrious career. Nazi troll. Conspiracy theorist. Urine sample handler. Now we can add “mouthpiece for Pete Hegseth” to the list.

Technically, he’s not supposed to be. As a reporter for wingnut “news” site Human Events, Posobiec is a member of the Pentagon press corps, which thanks to restrictions that caused all legitimate news organizations to pull their reporters off the beat, is now made up of mostly right-wing bootlickers who act more as Hegseth’s publicists than journalists.

The day after Friedman first contacted the Pentagon, Posobiec emailed him to ask if perhaps it was he who has a “creepy fetish for Asian women.” There were also other questions that mirrored the ones Friedman had sent the Pentagon about Geressy. What’s more, the deadline Posobiec gave for needing a response was the exact same time, to the minute, of the deadline Friedman had given the Pentagon. It was all part of a story about Friedman that Posobiec claimed to be writing.

. . . The funny thing is, if they had left it alone, the story would have gotten lost in the noise. With all the evil shit Hegseth and this administration get up to hourly, a guy reading cuck porn is not going to stand out, even if it might genuinely put national security at risk.

But as is typical of this crowd, they never have a backup plan in case their usual default to chest-thumping, empty threats doesn’t work. In this case, Posobiec went quiet, Geressy never responded, Friedman published his story, and it is getting more attention than it otherwise would have.

Osman said armed ICE agents went to East African restaurants in the neighborhood Tuesday, closed the doors and demanded people's IDs. They found only U.S. citizens and made no arrests, Osman said.

In short, they're harassing people based on what kind of cuisine they have a hankering for