United States | News & Politics

Im going to put two links at the end as I like wgn and abcs coverage the most. The gist is that yesterday night after what is sorta the kickoff to the holiday season in chicago there were two shooting. So the kickoff is the tree lighting ceremony and start of the chris kringle market in daley plaza and started at 6pm. The first one took place near the chicago theater so basically over one block and up two blocks just before 10pm. The second took place about an hour later and was about the same level on dearborn so just a block over and really less than two blocks up from the daily center. Ugh the news was so annoying as it mixed in an unsubstantiated social media post from an alderman and very little about the shooters who seemed to have gotten away despite a fair amount of arrests. Unfortunately this is the kind of violence that chicago has and theoretically is what trump tries to fix with ice even though it has little to do with immigration and much to do with people having a minimum level of dignified existence.

https://wgntv.com/news/chicagocrime/1-killed-1-injured-in-overnight-shooting-in-loop/

https://abc7chicago.com/post/chicago-shooting-7-teens-man-injured-person-killed-loop-shootings-state-street-dearborn-monroe-police-say/18191436/

Trump’s bizarre war on offshore wind is getting worse — and it’s screwing workers and anyone who uses electricity. In the past year, Trump’s policies have resulted in the loss of more than half of the planned power set to come from offshore wind, according to a new report by the Energy Industries Council released last week. People all across the country are facing relentlessly skyrocketing energy prices, with average electricity bills in July up 9.5 percent from just one year ago. Rising energy costs were a key issue influencing voters in elections this month and are expected to again play an outsized role in the crucial 2026 midterms.

Trump has never been shy about his deep-seated hatred of offshore wind, calling it “pathetic” and “cheap” in his recent address to the United Nations and even claiming that the noise from windmills causes cancer (it doesn’t). On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order halting new offshore wind leasing and directing the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a review to consider terminating or amending existing leases. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill includes a bevy of billions in bonuses to the fossil fuel industry, while gutting tax breaks and incentives for wind and solar.

Archive: http://archive.today/HEcdu

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/42274957

Lawmakers critical of President Donald Trump’s approach to ending the Russia-Ukraine war said Saturday they spoke with Secretary of State Marco Rubio who told them that the peace plan Trump is pushing Kyiv to accept is a “wish list” of the Russians and not the actual proposal offering Washington’s positions.

A State Department spokesperson denied their account, calling it “blatantly false.”

Rubio himself then took the extraordinary step of suggesting online that the senators were mistaken, even though they said he was their source for the information. The secretary of state doubled down on the assertion that Washington was responsible for a proposal that had surprised many from the beginning for being so favorable to Moscow.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39334574

https://jmail.world/

Last week, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released 20,000 documents from the estate of registered sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. They included thousands of emails sent between Epstein and high-profile people like Epstein confidant Ghislaine Maxwell, political strategist Steve Bannon, journalist Michael Wolff, and former US treasury secretary Larry Summers, as well as revealing text messages. Many of them allude or directly refer to president Donald Trump.

Now, you can browse all those emails just like you would on your own Gmail account.

Jmail is a website that looks very much like Gmail, except that there is a little hat hanging on the logo and that the profile picture in the top right corner is a grinning Epstein. (Click on it and it says “Hi Jeffrey!”) The inbox lets you click through thousands of emails, formatted to look exactly like a regular message would in your inbox. In the sidebar, you can sort by Inbox, Starred, and Sent. In Gmail, a lower sidebar section reads Labels and separates emails by category. In Jmail, it is a list of people who corresponded with Epstein.

The site was created by serial prankster Riley Walz and Luke Igel, cofounder of an AI video editing tool called Kino AI. Igel tells WIRED that he brought the idea to Walz—something Walz confirms—and then the two of them put the website together with Cursor in a single night. Walz revealed Jmail in an X post, writing, “We cloned Gmail, except you're logged in as Epstein and can see his emails.”

Jmail is a much more readable way to peruse the huge cache of emails released from the Epstein estate than parsing through tens of thousands of PDFs on a Google Drive. Among its useful features is that it rejiggers Gmail’s starring feature, letting users flag emails they view as important and then ranking them based on how many people do so. By default, the inbox lists the emails in the order of recency; the community starring feature is a way to surface what people see as more important emails.

“The emails were just so hard to read,” Igel says. “It felt like so much of the shock would've come if you saw actual screenshots of the actual inbox, but what you were seeing was these really low quality, poorly scanned PDFs. You have to do a few steps of imagination to remind yourself that this is indeed a real email.”

Being able to see these emails in a more familiar, readable format makes it much easier to follow threads and back-and-forths, but also reveals weird things about Epstein’s communications. Igel says there’s a noticeable increase in typos and sporadic formatting when Epstein switches from a desktop keyboard to a touchscreen device in the early 2010s.

“You can see him getting worse at typing as the years go by, as he clearly switches to an iPad,” Igel says. “You can see all this kind of boomer behavior which is very familiar behavior of less tech-savvy people.”

While others have put in real work to make the documents more accessible to the public, the usefulness of Jmail is in its simplicity—and it was about as uncomplicated to make as it is to use.

“This only took us a few hours,” Igel says. “I think other people should do similar things where you think that just a little bit of new software can make a lot of these things that are happening in the world easier to understand. You should just do it.”

A federal judge in Washington on Friday issued an order blocking the IRS from sharing taxpayer information with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, finding the practice is "unlawful."

The court "concludes that the Plaintiffs have shown a substantial likelihood that the IRS’s adoption of the Address-Sharing Policy and the IRS’s subsequent sharing of taxpayer information with ICE were unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act," U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in a 94-page ruling.

After hours of heated testimony and debate, Sandpoint’s City Council voted to repeal the city’s rules protecting residents and visitors from discrimination.

The city was the first of 13 in Idaho to pass an ordinance barring discrimination, said Nicole Erwin, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates. Its decision Wednesday marked the first time an Idaho city has dialed back such an ordinance, she said.

The ordinance, enacted in 2011, stated that everyone could enjoy the “full benefits of citizenship” and equal opportunity “regardless of sexual orientation” or “gender identity/expression.” It defined the latter term as a “gender-related identity, appearance, expression or behavior of an individual regardless of a person’s assigned sex at birth.”

A Grays Harbor County resident died Friday after earlier testing positive for a type of bird flu never before detected in humans, state health officials reported.

The death was the second from bird flu recorded in the U.S. since 2022. It was also the first human case in the state this year — and the first in the country in at least eight months.

The University of Washington virology lab revealed this month the virus is H5N5, a variant previously reported in animals but not in humans.

The risk to the public remains low, according to state health officials. No other people have tested positive, and monitoring of those who were in close contact with the patient continues.

Bird flu rarely infects people and makes them sick. When it does, symptoms are typically mild, health officials said. Most cases in people have occurred after they exposure to sick or infected animals. No person-to-person transmission has been documented in the U.S.

The Washington resident, an older adult with underlying health conditions, was hospitalized in early November with a high fever, confusion and respiratory distress, health officials have said. They were treated at a King County hospital. Other details about the patient were not disclosed.

The patient had a mixed backyard flock of domestic poultry that was exposed to wild birds, and was likely exposed to the virus through domestic or wild birds, health officials said.

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia announced on Friday that she will resign her seat in the House of Representatives in early January, after a dramatic falling out with President Donald Trump over the Jeffrey Epstein files and other issues.

Prosecutors said Friday that Luigi Mangione’s death penalty case in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson should carry on unimpeded, urging a judge to reject a defense push to dismiss charges and rule out capital punishment over Attorney General Pam Bondi’s public statements suggesting Mangione deserves execution.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan also asked U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett to deny the defense’s bid to suppress certain evidence collected during the arrest last year, including a 9 mm handgun, a notebook in which authorities say Mangione described his intent to “wack” an insurance executive and statements he made to police.

“Pretrial publicity, even when intense, is not itself a constitutional defect,” prosecutors wrote in a 121-page court filing, citing prior rulings from the Supreme Court and the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

As for the evidence, which Mangione’s lawyers contend was collected without a warrant and without him being read his rights, prosecutors said police officers were justified in searching the suspect’s backpack to make sure there were no dangerous items. His statements to officers, they said, were made voluntarily and before he was taken into police custody.

Rather than dismissing the case outright or barring the government from seeking the death penalty, prosecutors argued, the defense’s concerns can best be alleviated by carefully questioning prospective jurors about their knowledge of the case and ensuring Mangione’s rights are respected at trial.

Using Their Own Energy Against Them

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6815510

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/9185

Just a day after President Donald Trump suggested that six congressional Democrats should be hanged for reminding members of the US military and intelligence community of their duty not to obey illegal orders, one of those lawmakers was the target of multiple bomb threats.

A spokesperson for US Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) said Friday afternoon that his "district offices in Carnegie and Beaver County were both the targets of bomb threats this afternoon. The congressman and congressional staff are safe, and thank law enforcement for swiftly responding. Political violence and threats like this are unacceptable."

On Tuesday, the former US Navy officer had joined Democratic Reps. Jason Crow (Colo.), Maggie Goodlander (NH), and Chrissy Houlahan (Pa.), along with Sens. Mark Kelly (Ariz.) and Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), for the 90-second video.

Trump—who notably incited the deadly January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol while trying to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential contest—lashed out at the six veterans of the military and intelligence agencies on his Truth Social platform Thursday, accusing them of "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!" and reposting a call to "HANG THEM."

— (@)

Deluzio and the others have doubled down on their message that, as he says in the video, "you must refuse illegal orders."

In a joint statement responding to Trump's remarks, the six Democrats reiterated their commitment to upholding the oaths they took "to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," urged every American to "unite and condemn the president's calls for our murder and political violence," and stressed that "we will continue to lead and will not be intimidated."

Deluzio also addressed Trump's comments on CNN, denouncing his "outrageous call for political violence."

Other lawmakers, veterans, and political observers have also condemned Trump's comments—and the grassroots vet group Common Defense pointed to them on social media Friday, after Deluzio's staff confirmed the bomb threats.

"First: Common Defense unequivocally condemns political violence in all shapes, forms, and from any party. Violence has no place in our democracy. We believe in the rule of law. But we cannot ignore the cause and effect here," the organization said.

"The response to quoting the Constitution was a call for execution," the group continued. "Now, Rep. Deluzio, an Iraq War veteran, is facing actual bomb threats. When leaders normalize violence against political opponents, this or worse is the inevitable result."

"We stand with Rep. Deluzio and every patriot holding the line," Common Defense added. "We reject violence. We reject intimidation. And we will never apologize for defending the oath."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

Democratic US Congressman Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania received bomb threats at two of his offices Friday after Donald Trump accused him and five other congresspeople of seditious behavior over a video encouraging US military members to refuse illegal orders. A post from Deluzio’s spokesperson reported that the congressman and his staff are safe. Local outlet WTAE reported that at least one of Deluzio’s offices has been deemed clear of threats.

A massive cache of Flock lookups collated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) shows as many as 50 federal, state, and local agencies used Flock during protests over the last year.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20251121013626/https://www.404media.co/cops-used-flock-to-monitor-no-kings-protests-around-the-country/

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a once-loyal supporter of President Donald Trump who has become a critic, says she is resigning from Congress in January.

US House Democrats joining Republicans to denounce socialism, despite GOP's loose use of the term to attack a variety of social welfare programs.

"I feel very confident that he can do a very good job," Trump said of Mamdani after their White House meeting. "I think he is going to surprise some conservative people, actually.”