United States | News & Politics

The court’s conservative majority said it upheld the landmark law, but the liberals in their dissent accused them of gutting it. In the case, the justices ruled that a Louisiana voting map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

ICE has signed contracts worth more than $60 million with Peter Thiel's Palantir to build something called ImmigrationOS and a targeting app called ELITE, which stands for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement.

ELITE pulls data from the IRS, the Social Security Administration, DMV records, Medicaid files, utility bills, license-plate readers, and commercial data brokers (which typically include social media posts and often even emails when they come from "free" email providers), then populates a map with dossiers and assigns a "confidence score" to each person's current address. If you update your address to get medical care, for example, that updates your score. Or post something on social media.

Stephen Miller, the architect of this dystopian enforcement regime, reportedly holds a six-figure financial stake in Palantir, which, as far as I can tell, nobody in Congress has yet demanded answers about.

Meanwhile, ICE has been buying and using Skydio drones for protest monitoring, Customs and Border Protection has been flying MQ-9 Predator drones (the same platform that killed people in Yemen and Pakistan) over anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles, and the FAA quietly issued a nationwide notice in January creating 3,000-foot no-fly zones around every DHS and ICE vehicle, so that citizens and journalists can't film federal immigration operations from the air.

That last piece is the the most alarming tell of all: you don't close the sky above an enforcement agency unless you're planning to do things there you don't want photographed

The ruling from the New York-based Second Circuit Court of Appeals is the first in the nation to reject the Trump administration's position that nearly all undocumented immigrants must be detained.

Images of the new passport were shared with The Bulwark on condition that it not publish them. According to the source, a government official who provided The Bulwark with color photographs of the redesign, the State Department is planning a “limited run” of 25,000 Trump-emblazoned passports. As of now, according to the source, the new design is still awaiting approval.

They are explicitly building more "national defense" facilities under the ballroom. With speculation that the planned AI powered mass survelience system will be routed through there because of the connection to the residence of the president limits the oversight and regulation typically afforded for data from spying on citizens.

With it out of the way, Louisiana's governor moved to cancel an in-progress election and take representation away from blacks

US lawmakers push to grant American soldiers serving in the Israeli army the same legal protections as US troops, in a move without precedent for any other foreign army. The bill would place some 20,000 dual citizens fighting for Israel on a legal par with Americans serving the US.

Details of the Israel first carve out was reported in Military.com. The legislation passing through Congress would, for the first time in American history, treat service in a foreign army as legally equivalent to service in the US armed forces — but only where that foreign army is Israeli occupation army.

Under H.R. 8445, an American returning from a tour with the IDF could demand their old job back from a US employer, halt a foreclosure on a US home, and benefit from interest-rate caps on US debt on the basis of foreign military service

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/shit/p/1067759/number-go-up-charts-tell-the-story-of-oligarchy-in-overdrive-since-2020-the-net-worths-o

Musk’s fortune could pay the average salary for every public school teacher in the US for three years. Or fund USAID for 24 years.

Big, Beautiful Buildings

Top tech companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Tesla) are pouring billions into AI data centers, capital expenditures that dwarf many major scientific initiatives and infrastructure projects of the past. What bubble?

Big Tech capital expenditures on AI last year equaled 11 Manhattan Projects.

Power Grab

According to the International Energy Agency, data center energy use will nearly quadruple during this decade. By 2030, it will require the equivalent of 54 nuclear reactors to provide this much power. Consider: The US has only 94.

By 2030, data centers will consume as much energy as 41 million US homes.

Capitol Gains

AI firms are also amassing a different type of power—lobbying expenditures by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia are up more than tenfold since 2023. Collectively, Big Tech has become the second-biggest industry lobby in DC after Big Pharma.

Meta spent more on lobbying in 2025 than America’s three largest oil and gas companies combined.

Source: MotherJones.

A proposed copper mine in northern Minnesota has become a battleground for politicians and environmentalists — and a pressing reason to explore the waterways.

Proposal for a one-time 5% tax on billionaires in the state is opposed by Silicon Valley tech titans and Gavin Newsom

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/shit/p/1071396/us-to-issue-passports-featuring-trumps-picture-to-commemorate-americas-250th-anniversary