United States | News & Politics

Indiana’s Republican-led Senate decisively rejected a redrawn congressional map Thursday that would have favored their party, defying months of pressure from President Donald Trump and delivering a stark setback to the White House ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

The vote was overwhelmingly against the proposed redistricting, with more Republicans opposing than supporting the measure, signaling the limits of Trump’s influence even in one of the country’s most conservative states.

President Donald Trump has announced a pardon for former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters, currently serving a nine-year jail sentence for her part in the plot to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.

However, Trump’s clemency gesture carries no weight, as Peters, 70, was convicted on state charges, not federal charges.

An investigation by ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education reveals how the U.S. government ignored due process to gin up its attack on the University of California.

The 911 operator couldn’t send an ambulance because it was already responding to another call from ICE’s Stewart Detention Center.

Exclusive: Congress members seek answers after Guardian revealed data to be shared for immigration enforcement

Solar power accounts for two-thirds of the new projects waiting to connect to the state’s power grid. Utah Republicans’ hard turn against solar mirrors President Donald Trump’s hostile approach to the industry.

December 11, 2025

SEIU Local 26 and UNITE HERE Local 17 organized the protest, joined by airport workers wearing Airport Workers United hats and community supporters. Additional co-sponsors included Jewish Community Action, Minnesota Unitarian Universalist Social Justice Alliance, the interfaith group ISAIAH, SEIU MN State Council, Indivisible Twin Cities, Women’s March Minnesota, Minnesota AFL-CIO, Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, and 50501: Minnesota.

The crowd marched from the terminal to the offices of Signature Aviation — a private aviation terminal used by some private charter planes for deportation flights.

Geof Paquette, lead internal organizer for UNITE HERE Local 17, opened a short rally, saying, “The labor movement is proud to be here today with members of our community to fight for immigrant rights.” He noted that both his union and SEIU Local 26 are largely composed of immigrant workers who “make the airport run” and generate millions in profits for airline companies. Food-service workers in the terminal, he added, recently voted to strike ahead of the busiest travel days of the year; their action prompted the Metropolitan Airports Commission to grant the largest pay increases ever won at the airport.

December 3, 2025

On a chilly evening in mid-November, about 135 people gathered along a highway in Boone, North Carolina, a small Appalachian college town not known as a hotbed of leftist protest. They held signs reading “Nazis were just following orders too” and “Time to melt the ICE,” and chanted profane rebukes at Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rumored to be in the area. “They came here thinking they wouldn’t be bothered,” one Appalachian State University student told The Appalachian at the impromptu rally. “Boone is a small, southern, white, mountain town. We need to let them know they’ll be bothered anywhere they go.” In a region often stereotyped as silently conservative, this flash of defiance was a startling sign that the battle line

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/47161025

Archived

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Within China, this technology helped identify and punish almost 900,000 officials last year alone, nearly five times more than in 2012, according to state numbers. Beijing says it is cracking down on corruption, but critics charge that such technology is used in China and elsewhere to stifle dissent and exact retribution on perceived enemies.

Outside China, the same technology is being used to threaten wayward officials, along with dissidents and alleged criminals, under what authorities call Operations “Fox Hunt” and “Sky Net.” The U.S. has criticized these overseas operations as a “threat” and an “affront to national sovereignty.” More than 14,000 people, including some 3,000 officials, have been brought back to China from more than 120 countries through coercion, arrests and pressure on relatives, according to state information.

“They’re actively pursuing those people who fled China. … as a way to demonstrate power, to show there’s no way you can escape,” said Yaqiu Wang, a fellow at the University of Chicago. “The chilling effect is enormously effective.”

[...]

Li [the Chinese dissident now living in the U.S.] drew ire because as a former official, he knew well and exposed the inner workings of local politics, including naming names. While in the U.S., he also started what he called the Chinese Tyrannical Officials Whistleblower Center.

“China places enormous emphasis on the political discipline of even former officials and (Communist) Party members,” said Jeremy Daum, Senior Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. “So when one becomes a vocal critic of the country’s leadership, it doesn’t go over well.”

At a pro-democracy gathering in California in 2020, Li said, he was tailed and questioned by a stranger who knew his identity. That November, an activist secretly working for Beijing asked Li to a meeting and added him to a dissident group chat monitored by China’s police, a 2025 FBI indictment later revealed. In June, an FBI letter identified Li as the possible victim of a crime involving an unregistered Chinese agent.

[...]

Li’s future in the U.S. is unclear. The Trump administration has paused all asylum applications. If he doesn’t return, he could face trial in absentia; if convicted and deported, he could face life in prison.

“Electronic surveillance is the arteries for China to project power into the world ... each step that every one of your relatives takes is being monitored and analyzed with big data,” Li said. “It’s absolutely terrifying.”

[...]

Beijing tapped phones, seized assets and installed cameras outside the homes of friends and family. Some detained were denied surgery or other medical care, even those recovering from heart disease, cancer, and other illnesses. Li’s aunt was released from a hospital in a vegetative state with bruises on her head and all over her body. Even the Li family grave was dug up.

[...]

Li’s friend, Kong, was sentenced to over a decade in prison for allegedly taking bribes. The party claimed he had watched porn and ignored his work, which they blamed for the spread of COVID in his district. Furious, Li kept speaking out.

[...]

In February 2021, Li learned the Chinese government had asked Interpol to issue a Red Notice declaring to police worldwide that Li was a wanted man. Interpol retracted the Red Notice after Li filed a complaint.

Li began donning masks and hats in public and carrying multiple phones, wary of surveillance. He floated from safe house to safe house with Christians across the United States.

[...]

Li is now cut off from friends and family, denied legal assistance and clueless even to the details of the charges against him. So he is once again resorting to speaking out — this time on YouTube.

Li acknowledges the situation seems hopeless. But he’s pressing on.

“Why am I speaking up?” he said. “Today, it’s me. Tomorrow, it might be you.”

NVIDIA released today the NVIDIA 580.119.02 graphics drivers for NVIDIA GPUs on Linux, BSD, and Solaris systems as a new update in the latest NVIDIA 580 series.

NVIDIA 580.119.02 is here to fix a bug that caused display corruption on LG Ultragear monitors when using certain modes, a bug that caused corruption in the X-Plane video game on workstation NVIDIA GPUs, and a regression from NVIDIA 580.65.06 that caused mode timings like 1920×1080@75 to no longer be available.

This release also fixes a bug that caused the Dots Per Inch (DPI) to be incorrectly reported for some monitors, such as the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9, several problems that prevented Vulkan apps from working on the Venus VirtIO virtual GPU, and several EGL platform bugs that prevented multisample configurations from working.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted 312-112 on Wednesday night to pass the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, with 18 Republicans and 94 Democrats voting against it.

The bill, which is now bound for the Senate and which authorizes more than $900 billion, includes “critical pro-Israel provisions,” according to AIPAC.

https://archive.ph/n9ruW

A companion of Slender Man stabber Morgan Geyser who temporarily escaped from her Wisconsin group home says Geyser fled the facility out of fear that the two would no longer be able to visit each other.

For fleeing a group home in Madison where she was placed in March, the 23-year-old reportedly faces being returned to a psychiatric institution where she was sentenced after pleading guilty to repeatedly stabbing a middle school classmate in 2014 to delight the digital horror character Slender Man. The 43-year-old Mecca, meanwhile, is facing charges related to her and Geyser having been found sleeping on a sidewalk in Posen, Illinois.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7003237

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/12825

Visiting the US as a tourist could soon become significantly more onerous under a new plan being mulled by the Trump administration.

According to a Tuesday report in the New York Times, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) this week filed a new proposal that would force visitors to submit up to five years' worth of social media posts for inspection before being allowed to enter the country.

In addition to social media history, CPB says it plans to ask prospective tourists to provide them with email addresses they've used over the last decade, as well as "the names, birth dates, places of residence, and birthplaces of parents, spouses, siblings, and children."

The policy would apply even to citizens of countries that have long been US allies, including the UK, Germany, Australia, and Japan, which have long been exempt from visa requirements.

Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Times that the CBP policy would "exacerbate civil liberties harms."

Cope added that such policies have "not proven effective at finding terrorists and other bad guys" but have instead "chilled the free speech and invaded the privacy of innocent travelers, along with that of their American family, friends and colleagues."

Journalist Bethany Allen, head of China investigations at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, expressed shock that the US would take such drastic measures to scrutinize the social media posts of tourists.

"Wow," she wrote in a post on X, "even China doesn't do this."

In addition to concerns about civil liberties violations, there are also worries about what the new policy would do to the US tourism industry.

The Times noted in its report that several tourism-dependent businesses last month signed a letter opposing an administration proposal to collect a $250 "visa integrity fee," and one travel industry official told the paper that the CBP's new proposal appears to be "a significant escalation in traveler vetting."

The American tourism industry has already taken a blow during President Donald Trump's second term, even without a policy of forcing tourists to share their social media history.

A report released on Wednesday from Democrats on the Senate's Joint Economic Committee (JEC) found that US businesses that have long depended on tourism from Canada to stay afloat have been getting hit hard, as Canadian tourists stay away in protest of Trump's trade war against their country.

Overall, the report found that "the number of passenger vehicles crossing the US-Canada border declined by nearly 20% compared to the same time period in 2024, with some states seeing declines as large as 27%."

Elizabeth Guerin, owner of New Hampshire-based gift shop Fiddleheads, told the JEC that Canadians used to make up to a quarter of her custom base, but now "I can probably count the number of Canadian visitors on one hand."

Christa Bowdish, owner of the Vermont-based Old Stagecoach Inn, told the JEC that she feared a long-term loss in Canadian customers, even if Trump ended his feud with the nation tomorrow.

"This is long-lasting damage to a relationship and emotional damage takes time to heal," she said. "While people aren’t visiting Vermont, they’ll be finding new places to visit, making new memories, building new family traditions, and we will not recapture all of that."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7003277

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/12816

The world's leading genocide prevention group this week accused former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of "outright genocide denial" for comments last week attributing young Americans' opposition to Israel's US-backed genocide in Gaza on social media.

Speaking last week at the Israel Hayom Summit in New York, Clinton asserted that young people's support for Palestine stems from the fact that they are "getting their information from social media, particularly TikTok," adding that many younger Jewish Americans “don’t know the history and don’t understand" the Israel-Palestine issue.

On Monday, the Philadelphia-based Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security—named for Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer and Holocaust survivor who coined the term genocide—published a statement arguing that "Secretary Clinton’s framing is not at all an accurate reflection of why Americans are growing more critical of Israel."

"Young Americans of all political stripes have not fallen prey to propaganda, though that is always a legitimate concern," the institute said. "Rather, they have consumed two years of videos depicting Israel’s genocide against Palestinians that have been uploaded by Palestinian journalists, ordinary people trying to survive in Gaza, [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers, and ordinary Israelis themselves."

"There has been no convincing refutation of the sheer amount of raw evidence of genocide coming out of Palestine," the institute contended. "Young people in the US are not stupid or gullible. They simply reject genocide—something the secretary might consider doing as well."

Wow: Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention (named for Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin, who coined term "genocide") calls Clinton's remarks "genocide denial.""Young people in the US are not stupid or gullible. They simply reject genocide – something the Secretary might consider doing as well."

[image or embed]
— Prem Thakker ツ (@premthakker.bsky.social) December 9, 2025 at 11:15 AM

LIGP continued:

Secretary Clinton appears not to be bothered by the reality of genocidal violence—in fact, she did not mention anything about it. Her concern is, rather, in her words, “the narrative”—the fact that these crimes are no longer hidden and are now being livestreamed and documented in real time, making it harder for her and others to control it. TikTok cannot be blamed for the fact that many members of Gen Z understand that Israel is committing genocide, since so many other people, including those who never look at TikTok, also hold that view. Apart from the Lemkin Institute, the vast majority of large, mainstream human rights organizations, the [United Nations], and many scholars as well as international legal bodies have denounced Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide. Many carefully researched reports by international organizations have established that Israel’s crimes meet the international legal threshold for genocide. We encourage the former secretary to read them.

"The Lemkin Institute continues to support students and young people worldwide for having the courage to stand up for their convictions, to speak truth to power, and to fight against the scourge of genocide in Palestine and elsewhere," LIGP added. "Secretary Clinton’s remarks are not only inaccurate—they are also a shameful example of the lengths to which people complicit in genocide will go to to deny its existence."

The institute's rebuke of Clinton's comments came as the International Court of Justice in The Hague adjudicates a genocide case against Israel filed by South Africa and supported by around two dozen nations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—who ordered the "complete siege" of Gaza that fueled famine and disease—are also wanted by the International Criminal Court, also located in the The Hague, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder and forced starvation.

Lemkin's denunciation also comes amid a tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, a truce Israeli forces have broken more than 500 times, according to officials in the Palestinian exclave. Israeli officials say Palestinian resistance fighters have violated the ceasefire more than 30 times.

Since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, Israel's annihilation and siege of Gaza have left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and around 2 million more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened. Israeli military data suggests that of the the more than 70,000 Palestinian deaths, over 8 in 10 were civilians.

Through it all, the United States has backed Israel with more than $21 billion worth of weaponry and diplomatic support including repeatedly vetoing United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolutions.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7004390

On a sweltering afternoon this past July, Miccosukee youth and cultural workers gathered at Panther Camp, the family grounds down the road from the fenced-off training airport where Florida officials had just erected the notorious migrant-detention facility that has been nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz. The action, coordinated in partnership with the collective Unidos Immokalee, was intentionally communal: hydration and medic teams were on standby, volunteers helped with safety and de-escalation, and young organisers distributed sunblock, insect repellent and art supplies for sign-making.

The organisers gathered on the shoulder of the Tamiami Trail, a thin, paved road that cuts through Big Cypress National Preserve, within view of Alligator Alcatraz, around 57 miles west of the Miami Beach Convention Center. On that day and in collective actions since, Miccosukee and Seminole artists, culture-bearers and youth organisers are using ceremony, performance and archiving to confront what they describe as a new chapter of colonial violence unfolding on ancestral lands.

“When we heard about the detention centre, people didn’t believe it could be real,” Kendal Osceola, a 26-year-old member of the Miccosukee Tribe who joined the tribe’s new archives department in autumn, tells The Art Newspaper. “The [site of Alligator Alcatraz] was always open—you could drive in, some of us swam in the man-made lakes. Suddenly there were trucks, fences. The land that protected us is being dug up for something backwards. Documenting how our community is standing up—elders and youth together—is now part of our responsibility.”

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