United States | News & Politics

The voter ID requirements are designed to be impossible for a lot of Citizens to meet, in particular it is very common for married women to have a different name on their birth certificate from their current name.

The color photo requiement also means you can't prove citizenship using a recently-issued passport

The funeral for 56-year-old Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a disabled Rohingya refugee from Burma who was found dead after he was abandoned by Border Patrol agents miles away from his home, was held yesterday in Buffalo, New York. Local reporter J. Dale Shoemaker, who first reported on Shah Alam’s disappearance for the Buffalo news organization Investigative Post, explains what we know about the case.

Trump has no power to “decree” that voters must present ID or to end mail-in balloting. But that doesn’t mean he can’t at least try both. Under the Insurrection Act or some other dusty statute, he can declare a state of emergency. Then he can decide that said state permits, nay requires, him to take extraordinary measures. On October 5, say, that might mean outlawing early voting. By October 13, it might mean no mail-in voting. By October 29, a reminder that all voters must present ID to vote. And by Sunday, November 1, two days before the election—an announcement that all these “reasonable” measures have alas failed, and he is now forced, against his will, to postpone the election.

Palestinians are spoken about, not spoken with. Their political representatives are excluded, and their rights are deferred indefinitely. This is not a peace plan. It is a blueprint for deepening apartheid and legitimizing dispossession. This Plan is not a break from the past but its continuation. It extends a century-long pattern of colonial governance, economic coercion, and political exclusion.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Forty-one percent of Americans now say they sympathize more with the Palestinians in the Middle East situation, while 36% sympathize more with the Israelis. The five-percentage-point difference is not statistically significant, but it contrasts with a clear lead for the Israelis only a year ago (46% vs. 33%) and larger leads over the prior 24 years.

From 2001 to 2025, Israelis consistently held double-digit leads in Americans’ Middle East sympathies, with the gap averaging 43 points between 2001 and 2018. However, public opinion began narrowing in 2019, several years before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza. The cumulative effect of gradual changes in U.S. attitudes since then has led to the Israelis no longer being viewed more sympathetically.

https://archive.ph/7TgyB

If the federal agents who arrested Columbia student Elaina Aghayeva passed themselves off as local police, city officials need to put a stop to that practice.

Impersonating local police is the one thing that ICE and the Border Patrol had not been doing — they were impersonating utility workers, kidnapping and murdering people, but never ever impersonating local police.

Archived copies of the article:

• web.archive.org
• archive.today — has a history of modifying archived pages

Anthropic has argued that it was asking for reasonable assurances that its model would not be used for surveillance of Americans or in autonomous weapons, such as drone operations, that did not involve human oversight. [...] If the firm fails to agree by 5:01 p.m. on Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Trump administration would invoke the Defense Production Act, compelling the use of its model by the military and labeling the company a supply chain risk, according to a senior Pentagon official. That step would put Anthropic’s government contracts at risk.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43637976

The Cameron County District Attorney Luis V. Saenz told the Texas Tribune that the jury found no probable cause to move forward in criminal charges against the ICE agent. Attorneys for Martinez's mother, Rachel Reyes, called the jury's move "devastating" and questioned what information they were given about the March 2025 shooting.

"We do not know what video evidence they were shown, if any," Reyes' attorneys said Thursday. "We do not know if they were shown any statement from eyewitness Joshua Orta, who was clear in a thorough firsthand statement that Ruben's car was moving slowly and did not hit anyone."

Orta, 25, died Saturday in a single-car crash in San Antonio

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260227131137/https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/no-charges-ice-agent-killed-183132327.html

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51510897

Archived

As steam rises from the stove, Ma Ruilin hand-pulls fresh noodles for the lunch service at the Chinese restaurant he runs in New York.

Most of his former cadres inside China’s ruling Communist Party wouldn’t understand why he left his comfortable life as a government official to work in a kitchen on the other side of the world, he says.

But after a creeping sense of disillusionment with Beijing’s policies, the 50-year-old made the choice to risk everything – including his own family – and flee to the United States. Now, he’s stepping forward to become a rare whistleblower on the Chinese system, exposing closely guarded secrets about how China spies on its citizens at home and abroad – including in the US.

“The system has always been evil,” he said. “If you don’t leave, you’ll keep doing evil there.”

[...]

In more than three hours of interviews[...], Ma revealed his role in designing and implementing programs that suppressed China’s religious minorities – and detailed the expansion in scope and scale of China’s United Front Work Department (UFWD), a shadowy branch of the Communist Party where he worked.

[...]

Ma’s decision to speak out against the system he escaped provides important evidence from an insider during a broader crackdown by American law enforcement against “transnational repression” – the intimidation tactics Beijing is accused of deploying against its own diaspora.

“This is a campaign by the Chinese government to silence dissent on US soil,” Roman Rozhavsky, Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division [said]. “It’s been very aggressive and widespread.”

Rozhavsky said “hundreds” of Chinese operatives are working inside the US – a “gross breach of US sovereignty” – and many more working are remotely from China.

[...]

Since its inception, the “united front” has been both a political philosophy and a branch of the Communist Party – which Mao and Xi have described as one of China’s “magic weapons” to strengthen the CCP. The department is heavily entwined with the public and state security apparatus, creating “‘one chessboard,’ all together, one whole,” Ma said.

The party has expanded the strategy in recent years, with calls for “stronger measures to implement” United Front work to “enhance the capacity” of the operation, China’s state news agency Xinhua reports. Ma said staffing “basically doubled” since 2019.

“The United Front Work Department has been expanding continuously,” Ma said. “When these Party departments expand, it becomes a contracting, tightening society.”

[...]

People connected to the UFWD have been accused of harassing and intimidating activists and critics, largely from groups China defines as the “Five Poisons” – advocates for independence or greater freedom for Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and followers of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong.

[...]

Lin Hai, a Chinese national who lives in New York and works as an Uber driver, said he was beaten and injured by pro-China protesters while attending a rally in 2019 to support a visit by Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s President at the time.

“I was shocked,” Lin Hai said. “Because I never expected to be threatened or beaten on American soil.’ [You can see a video in the linked article.]

[...]

Anti-CCP protesters also had violent confrontations with pro-Beijing groups near the 2023 APEC summit in San Francisco, which was attended by Xi.

The UFWD has tentacles across some student organizations along with community groups in the US known as “hometown associations.” China says that these groups help people with everyday tasks like applying for drivers’ licences. But the FBI’s Rozhavsky says they are also being used as recruitment grounds for “people who are willing to engage in transnational repression.”

[...]

More than 2,000 organizations connected to the United Front system have been identified in four democratic countries – the US, Britain, Canada, and Germany – according to a recent report by The Jamestown Foundation, a DC-based think tank. Nearly half of those groups are based in the US.

[...]

Starting in 2018, Ma said Xinjiang officials were also sent on visits to Rwanda to study “a real genocide,” referencing the 1994 massacres that killed hundreds of thousands. He said the trips were designed to reduce their guilt when they saw how “benevolent” the Party is in comparison – but also to give them new ideas.

“It teaches you how to use even more brutal methods to torment people,” he said.

[...]

Since coming to power, Xi has intensified efforts to assimilate ethnic minorities, and rolled out a nationwide campaign to “sinicize” religion – ensuring it aligns with Communist Party leadership and values.

“It’s never been as severe as it is under Xi: so systematic, so intense,” Ma said.

“Based on my understanding, privately no one likes him,” he said, referring to his former CCP colleagues in Gansu. “But on the surface, everyone has to praise him.”

[...]

“The longer I stayed within that system, the more I felt a sense of guilt,” he said. “I always wanted to escape that kind of cage-like life.”

When he arrived in the US in February 2024 with his wife and two children, the next challenge was adjusting to a lower standard of living compared to the privileged existence they had left behind.

“My wife was a university professor, and I was within the CCP system and on an upward trajectory,” he said. “So, I lived a worry-free life.”

[...]

“China’s Muslim community is living in a very bleak world, a hopeless era,” he said. “I want to stand up in this era and give others some hope.”

[...]

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7770562

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/30741

In order to continue to exploit Black prisoner labor and profit from it, Thomas E. Kilby, the governor of Alabama, ordered the construction of the Kilby prison and even named it after himself.

When prisoners rebel and demand to be treated as human beings, we are not just fighting inhumane living conditions and shitty food. We are striking a blow at the state, which maintains the situation of slavery and super-exploitation—by which each of us are robbed of the fruits of our labor every day.

Work strikes or "shutdowns," as we like to call them down here in Alabama, are also geared toward consciousness-raising of prisoners as an oppressed class; and by refusing to work for free (which is slavery), we are asserting our power as workers and as human beings, thereby challenging the view that prisoner labor is free and exploitable.

The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution made slavery and involuntary servitude illegal unless one has been duly convicted of a crime and ratified by Congress on December 6, 1865, which merely removed the ownership of slaves from the province of the individual citizen to that of the state, which then became the sole owner of other human beings (or slaves).

Alabama was the last state in the South to end convict leasing in 1928. Before ending convict leasing, the state hired out prisoner labor to the lumber yards, mines, and cotton mills. In 1883, about 10 percent of Alabama's total revenue came from convict leasing. In 1898, almost 73 percent. In 1922-1926, net profits from leasing and state-run mines exceeded $3 million.

In order to continue to exploit Black prisoner labor and profit from it, Thomas E. Kilby, the governor of Alabama, ordered the construction of the Kilby prison and even named it after himself. This new prison was to be the most advanced prison in the South, with the exception of the federal prison in Atlanta, styled as an industrial prison.

It was intended to house prisoners from the lumber yards, mines, and cotton mills, which would all eventually be moved inside the prison itself. The prisoners manufactured cotton to make shirts that would then be sold on the market.

Just as slaves in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries challenged their dehumanization and exploitation via work stoppages and slowdowns, letting the crops rot in the fields, so too do prisoners in this day and time. Alabama has a long history of shutting shit down! In the 1970s, we had Inmates for Action (IFA), which organized a number of work stoppages to demand an improvement to their conditions.

We see work strikes as a weapon to be used to hit 'em where it hurts. There are many different strategies and tactics that prison rebels use, and work stoppages are just one of them. We organize around the knowledge that prison is slavery and super-exploitation of our labor power. Work stoppages are often violent due to the arena and conditions that prisoners are forced to maneuver in.

Read more via Scalawag: "We Are Striking a Blow at the State:" The Alabama Prisoners Work Strike.

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State of the Union affirms national security state's greatest show on Earth

When even Foreign Policy can't follow the War Plot you know you really really fucked up.