United States | News & Politics

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/40367365

In 2017, at the height of the #MeToo movement, six actresses told the Los Angeles Times that a prominent Hollywood director was sexually violent toward them.

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They were talking about Brett Ratner, who on Thursday will stand next to Melania Trump to celebrate the premiere of Melania, his eponymous documentary about the First Lady.

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Thursday’s event is the culmination of a yearlong re-integration into directing for Ratner, who directed the Rush Hour franchise and produced Horrible Bosses, among many other credits.

His return is thanks in large part to President Trump—who, according to reporting from Semafor, personally pressured Paramount head and close ally Larry Ellison to revive Rush Hour 4—and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is reportedly friendly with the director and brought him as a guest to the United Nations. (Ratner emigrated to Israel in 2023.)

With Trump and Netanyahu’s support, Ratner is now set to direct another documentary—this one on the Abraham Accords, a diplomatic agreement from Trump’s first term involving normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab countries.

If for the crisis last time around the trip-wire mechanism was the adjustable-rate mortgage, this time it’s looking like a reassessment crisis ran into a climate one. The experience for the homeowner, materially, is much the same. You sign on to a $2,000 mortgage for a $250,000 home — expensive but affordable — and your first year or two is great. Reassessments take place on a three-to-five-year schedule, so at some point you hit your first road bump. Your annual property tax bill went from $1,500 to $3,500, moving your monthly cost from $125 to $300. That’s one more big trip to the grocery store for three, per month. Throw in a nearby natural disaster and another $1,500 annually on home insurance . . . you get the point. If you can’t afford your monthly mortgage times 1.5, you’re probably in big trouble.

Anyway, the event Minaj attended was a thingie for Donald Trump’s scammy, grifty “Trump Accounts” for kids. She is reportedly ~~bribing~~ pledging somewhere between $150,000 and $300,000 to fund them for the children of her fans, not that we imagine there are so many of those left. 

Speaking of fans, she went onstage and said she’s Trump’s “number one fan”:

“And the hate with what people have to say, it does not affect me, at all,” Minaj said in her speech. “It actually motivates me to support him more. And it’s gonna motivate all of us to support him more. We’re not going to let them get away with bullying him. The smear campaigns, it’s not going to work. He has a lot of force behind him, and God is protecting him. Amen?”

That’s right, Nicki Minaj — who back when she had a moral compass seemed genuinely distraught by Trump’s evil immigration policies — is going to protect Trump from bullying. Yeah OK. 

(Is this a good place to mention that lots of people think Minaj is only doing this because she wants pardons for her sex-offender husband and brother, who was convicted of child rape and sentenced in 2020? Trump sure does love child rapists! Of course, as Arwa Mahdawi notes in The Guardian, Trump can’t pardon state convictions, but as we’ve seen with Tina Peters, he’s sure willing to try to bully states into doing it.)

After the event, Trinidadian immigrant Minaj revealed that Trump had given her one of his tacky golden grifty million-dollar green cards, for free, which she says is giving her US citizenship . . .

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42372948

If you’re in the US, find your local action here: https://nationalshutdown.org/actions

This article uses the word 'wilding' which is not in widespread use.

Trump got into politics when there were a series of rapes in Central Park in New York City. The police, under pressure to find the culprits, coerced a group of young black men into false confessions, in which the police described "wilding" where the falsely accused supposedly ran around raping and killing white women. Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for them to be executed, and the Central Park 5 spent many years in prison before eventually being exonerated when DNA analysis became possible.

So "wilding" is is a reference to wanton rape and attempted murder, to Trump's racist smearing of the innocent, and to the perfidy of police.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/TcFjz

The most recent person to die on New York City streets amid historic low temperatures refused offers for help from a concerned Queens supermarket manager who spotted him on a bench outside the store the night before he died. When the manager returned to work the next morning, he was upset to find the man’s lifeless body sitting on the same bench.

“I go up to him and say, ‘Good morning, good morning,’” said 28-year-old Luis Polanco, who manages the Key Foods on Francis Lewis Blvd. near 35th Ave. in Flushing. “He never responds.”

The 47-year-old victim was found dead about 6 a.m. Tuesday, cops said. His name was not immediately released pending family notification.

He is the 10th person to die on the streets citywide since sub-freezing temps arrived Saturday. Polanco said the victim walked into his store with a bloody nose the night before he died.

“I asked if he needed help,” said Polanco. “I say, ‘You okay? You need to go somewhere? You need police?’ He said, ‘No, I’m okay.’”

When the manager left work that night, the man was sitting on a bench outside, enjoying a tub of peanut butter he had purchased at the store.

The city is ramping up efforts to clear the streets of people at night amid the coldest weather conditions in eight years.

“When the cold is this deadly, we need to meet the moment and leave no stone unturned,” Mamdani said at a City Hall press conference Tuesday

A number of those who died are suspected of being homeless, and cops are still trying to determine the identitiy of several of them.

Sub-freezing temps are expected to continue well into next week.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7489414

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/23574

About a week before Alex Pretti was fatally shot by US Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, he had another encounter with federal officers who objected to him observing an immigration raid, and his name was known to them—raising new questions about the "database" that Trump administration officials and agents on the ground have threatened dissenters with recently.

CNN reported Tuesday that Pretti, the Minneapolis nurse who was fatally shot by Border Patrol agents while acting as a legal observer and trying to help a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by one officer, was known to federal officers before his killing last weekend. About a week earlier, he had been tackled by a group of agents who broke his rib when he was protesting the detention of a community member.

The outlet reported that earlier this month, the US Department of Homeland Security sent a memo to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents deployed in the Minneapolis area that provided a form called "intel collection non-arrests," urging them to fill in personal data about protesters and people the department labeled as "agitators."

"Capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form,” the DHS guidance read.

It was not clear whether Pretti's information was gathered on one of the forms or if the Border Patrol agents last Saturday knew who he was when they fatally shot him after throwing him to the ground on a Minneapolis street.

But the news that he had had a previous encounter and that officers in Minneapolis knew his name came amid numerous reports of federal agents behaving aggressively toward nonviolent protesters, and as top officials in the Trump administration as well as officers on the ground have issued threats to demonstrators and legal observers that DHS would be collecting information about them.

After a video taken by a Maine resident went viral last week, showing a federal immigration agent telling her that she would be considered a "domestic terrorist" by the Trump administration and included in a "nice little database" for filming him, Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin denied that such a database exists.

“There is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS," McLaughlin told CNN when asked about the video taken in Maine. "We do of course monitor and investigate and refer all threats, assaults, and obstruction of our officers to the appropriate law enforcement. Obstructing and assaulting law enforcement is a felony and a federal crime.”

Her response didn't explain why the agent in the video threatened a woman who was merely filming him, an activity that is broadly protected by the First Amendment.

Despite McLaughlin's denial, President Donald Trump's own border czar, Tom Homan, told Fox News earlier this month that he aimed to "create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding, and assault, we’re going to make them famous."

🚨 BREAKING:

Tom Homan says the Trump admin is building a database of people attacking ICE and plans to broadcast their names and faces publicly.

Then he says they’ll contact employers, schools, and neighborhoods to expose them.

“We’re gonna MAKE ‘EM FAMOUS!”

That’s not law… pic.twitter.com/nrhtABt687
— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) January 16, 2026

The White House has frequently claimed that there's been a "more than 1,000% rise" in assaults against federal immigration agents, but an analysis of federal court records by Colorado Public Radio showed in September that the reports of attacks on officers appeared exaggerated, with the increase closer to 25% from the previous year.

In Pretti's first encounter with federal agents, he told the source who spoke to CNN that he had stopped his car and began blowing a whistle and shouting when he saw ICE officers chasing a family on foot.

The agents then tackled him and leaned on his back, breaking his rib.

"That day, he thought he was going to die,” said the source, who spoke anonymously with CNN out of fear of retribution.

DHS told CNN it had "no record" of the initial encounter with Pretti.

Journalist Jasper Nathaniel said the revelation about Pretti's earlier encounter showed that it is "completely urgent to identify his killers and investigate whether they had access to the database" that officials have alluded to.

— (@)

Questions about how the alleged database has been used in Minneapolis and elsewhere were raised as another viral clip taken by a legal observer in the city showed an ICE agent telling him, "You raise your voice, I will erase your voice.”

WOW! An ICE agent in Minneapolis tells an American citizen "If you raise your voice, I will erase your voice."

Stop telling me that the Trump administration isn't Fascist. They are threatening people for "raising their voice," and how exactly will ICE "erase our voice?"

Kill… pic.twitter.com/h0pRcWrsc1
— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) January 27, 2026

In Maine, legal observers have reported that ICE agents have shown up at their homes to confront them about filming and monitoring immigration enforcement.

One observer, Liz Eisele McLellan, told the Portland Press Herald that one agent said to her: “This is a warning. We know you live right here.”

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7487497

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/23569

In 1843, Congress gave Samuel Morse $30,000 to try to send a telegram from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. Rather than bury the transmission wires underground, where technical issues would be hard to identify, the inventor of Morse code strung them along wooden poles and trees. When the system was completed about a year later, the first transmitted message read: “What hath God wrought?”

This was the beginning of the modern electrical grid, and although demand for electricity has increased exponentially since then, the system for distributing electricity remains remarkably similar to its initial, 19th century version, especially the utility poles. Trees have to meet stringent standards to become a utility pole, remaining free of knots, scars, swelling, or contact with the ground, but poles are still vulnerable to extreme weather — prone to electrical fires, wildfires, and frigid temperatures.

As the country grapples with skyrocketing power demand, extreme weather events now spur contentious debates about what kinds of energy work best. Conservatives blamed the California heat wave blackouts in 2020 on renewable energy, and climate advocates blamed the freeze in Texas in 2021 on the state’s reliance on natural gas, with each side claiming that its resources are more reliable. Winter Storm Fern barreled across the country this week, resurrecting concerns over the grid in Texas, where the state has added ample solar batteries, and in New England, which lost access to hydropower from Canada.

So far, power plants across the country have held up just fine, whether running on renewables or fossil fuels. But the storm revealed another vulnerability in the country’s aging power grid — the wires and poles that carry electricity from house to house.

“That last mile of the grid is extremely vulnerable,” said Costa Samaras, the director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “The equipment’s old, or the poles themselves are old, and they can break under extreme events. Those types of boring infrastructure investments are really critical to ensuring that we have reliability and resilience under extreme events.”

In most of the country, this infrastructure “is becoming one of the main drivers of electricity cost increases,” said Michelle Soloman, a manager in the electricity program at Energy Innovation, a clean energy think tank. The bill has come due on much of the grid, Soloman explained. There’s currently a transformer shortage in the United States, and the Trump administration’s tariffs has made replacing infrastructure significantly more expensive.

“When we think about how to reduce electricity costs for consumers, certainly making sure that we’re finding ways to reduce the cost of those components is really important,” Soloman said.

The biggest damage done by Winter Storm Fern was to a series of power lines owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, a federal power provider established under the New Deal in the 1930s. The storm toppled more than two dozen transmission lines that feed power to smaller utilities across Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana, and iced over some of the TVA’s other infrastructure. That left those smaller utilities without the energy they needed to keep the lights on. As of Wednesday afternoon, at least 300,000 customers in those three states still lacked power, according to the website PowerOutage.us.

Meanwhile, the TVA’s power plants made it through without disruption. The authority weatherized its main coal and gas plants after the catastrophic Winter Storm Elliott in 2022, which caused the first rolling blackouts in the TVA’s history and cost the authority $170 million. This time around, the generation plants all stayed online despite record levels of power demand.

The worst-affected utility during this week’s winter storm has been Entergy, which serves most of Louisiana along with parts of Texas and Mississippi. Winter Storm Fern knocked out power for more than 171,000 customers at its peak, and took out hundreds of pieces of infrastructure — the utility estimates that at least 30 transmission lines, 860 poles, and 60 substations went out of service.

Entergy is used to getting knocked around by extreme weather. After Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana in 2021, Entergy lost more than 30,000 poles. Its main transmission tower carrying power into New Orleans collapsed in 150-mile-per-hour winds, cutting off power deliveries to the Crescent City. Not all this damage was inevitable: Entergy’s critics pointed out that nearby Florida had spent billions to harden its grid against storms with stronger poles and underground power lines. This allowed the Sunshine State to restore power much more quickly after similar hurricanes.

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The smaller utilities that cut power during Winter Storm Fern often don’t have the resources to pursue such repairs. Power poles only get replaced every 50 years or so, and replacing a pole network can cost millions of dollars. It’s this repair work, rather than the need to serve new data centers, that explains why power prices have risen over recent years. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that the “primary driver of increased electricity-sector costs in recent years has been distribution and transmission expenditures — often devoted to refurbishment or replacement of existing infrastructure.” By far the greatest cost increase was in California, where utilities have had to spend billions of dollars to harden their grids against wildfires.

Even when utilities do invest in grid resilience, some storms can still break through. More than 30,000 customers of the North East Mississippi Electric Power Association lost power during the peak of the outage brought on by Winter Storm Fern, and the utility had only restored power to 5,000 customers as of Tuesday morning. The electric co-op spends about $2 million a year to remove trees and other vegetation around its power lines, according to a spokesperson, but the storm outpaced those efforts.

“When large trees — some more than 30 feet tall — fall due to extreme ice loading, there is limited ability to prevent damage entirely,” said spokesperson Sarah Brooke Bishop. “We continually evaluate opportunities to strengthen and improve system resilience, but events of this magnitude will still result in significant impacts.”

Changing the material of the poles could help mitigate damage. A standard wood pole is pressure-treated to protect against fungi, humidity, and insects — but in extreme conditions, there’s only so much you can do to prevent wood from rotting. The first fiberglass composite poles were installed in Hawaii in the 1960s, to withstand high humidity and wind speeds. Composite poles installed in Mexico and Grand Bahama have survived hurricane force winds intact, and are an increasingly appealing choice for utility companies, looking to protect customers from the vagaries of extreme weather.

The upfront costs of installing these fiberglass poles are substantial though. Composite poles cost roughly $5,000 before installation costs — compared to roughly $1,000 for a wooden pole — but they require less upkeep and are cheaper in the long run.  Repurposing old wind turbine blades could lower the cost, although the wind industry’s expansion under the Trump administration looks uncertain.

The fastest and easiest way to improve reliability, Solomon said, would be by incentivizing local battery storage. “By strategically placing batteries at certain spots on the grid where you might otherwise need to do an upgrade,” she explained, utilities could avoid some of the long-standing outages brought on by downed power lines. Homeowners could be compensated for purchasing their own batteries and allowing some of that energy to flow back to the grid in times of crisis.

Ultimately, there’s no way around the fact that “our distribution system requires generation reinvestment,” Samaras said. Burying lines underground, building smarter controls to identify problems underground, and creating a strong network of distributed energy resources will all be required to deal with the growing threat of extreme weather.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The winter storm exposed the grid’s real weakness: Lots of old poles on Jan 28, 2026.

From Grist via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7486326

The most recent person to die on New York City streets amid historic low temperatures refused offers for help from a concerned Queens supermarket manager who spotted him on a bench outside the store the night before he died. When the manager returned to work the next morning, he was upset to find the man’s lifeless body sitting on the same bench.

“I go up to him and say, ‘Good morning, good morning,’” said 28-year-old Luis Polanco, who manages the Key Foods on Francis Lewis Blvd. near 35th Ave. in Flushing. “He never responds.”

The 47-year-old victim was found dead about 6 a.m. Tuesday, cops said. His name was not immediately released pending family notification.

He is the 10th person to die on the streets citywide since sub-freezing temps arrived Saturday. Polanco said the victim walked into his store with a bloody nose the night before he died.

“I asked if he needed help,” said Polanco. “I say, ‘You okay? You need to go somewhere? You need police?’ He said, ‘No, I’m okay.’”

When the manager left work that night, the man was sitting on a bench outside, enjoying a tub of peanut butter he had purchased at the store.

The city is ramping up efforts to clear the streets of people at night amid the coldest weather conditions in eight years.

“When the cold is this deadly, we need to meet the moment and leave no stone unturned,” Mamdani said at a City Hall press conference Tuesday

A number of those who died are suspected of being homeless, and cops are still trying to determine the identitiy of several of them.

Sub-freezing temps are expected to continue well into next week.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7485198

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/23464

Hundreds of protesters rallied outside the office of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in St. Paul on Tuesday to demand that state officials take action to bring the federal agents who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti to justice.

"We are demanding that they bring charges against the killer officers," said Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for Minnesota, which organized the protest. "We want the identity of the officers. We know the federal government is not investigating. They are lying to the American people. They are denying us justice. It is time for the state to do their job."

The crowd then broke out into a raucous chant: "Do your job! Do your job!"

— (@)

The protest, which took place outside Walz's office in the Minnesota state Capitol building, came as the governor negotiates an end to federal immigration agents' takeover of Minnesota with Trump border czar Tom Homan, who was recently dispatched to oversee the Trump administration's operation in the state following the departure of Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino.

The Trump administration appears on the back foot after the killing of Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse, over the weekend, by a gang of federal agents, which was caught on camera and heightened the already simmering national anger at Trump's deployments around the US.

Minneapolis has become the epicenter of this outrage, with more than 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents deployed as part of what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said is "the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out."

In addition to the slayings of Good and Pretti, agents have been documented engaging in relentless brutality against the people of Minnesota, including many US citizens. Cases abound of residents being subject to explicit racial profiling, being threatened and assaulted for engaging in First Amendment-protected protest and legal observation, and being detained and interrogated as part of unconstitutional "citizenship checks."

Minnesota state officials, including Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, have faced mounting pressure to pursue criminal charges against Jonathan Ross, the agent who killed Good earlier this month. But Minnesota’s public safety commissioner has said “it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible,” for a local investigation to continue “without cooperation from the federal government.”

According to Walz's office, he outlined two main goals in his closed-door meeting with Homan: He wants the administration to dramatically reduce the massive presence of agents in the state and to give state investigators a role in the investigations of Good and Pretti's deaths.

— (@)

A drawdown of agents reportedly began after a call between Walz and Trump on Monday, during which the governor said he would look for the state to work with the federal government “in a more coordinated fashion on immigration enforcement regarding violent criminals.” Trump characterized it as a “request to work together with respect to Minnesota.”

But Suleiman Adan, the deputy executive director of CAIR Minnesota, told Common Dreams that such a compromise is inadequate, calling on Walz “to use every legal and political tool at his disposal.”

"That means empowering county attorneys to open their own inquiries, collecting and preserving bystander video and witness statements, and going to court when necessary to try to compel or preserve evidence," he said. "It also means using the governor’s political leverage, public pressure, legal action, and intergovernmental channels to make non-cooperation itself a public issue, not something that happens quietly behind closed doors."

According to a report on Wednesday by NBC News, DHS itself is conducting federal inquiries into its own agents' killings of Pretti and Good, which has raised immediate concerns about impartiality, especially after top officials have jumped to preemptively exonerate the agents while labeling the victims as "domestic terrorists."

Rather than simply serve a role in a federal investigation, CAIR wants Walz to demand an independent state-level investigation run by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), which attained a restraining order to prevent federal agents from destroying evidence in Pretti's case.

"Minnesotans are asking, 'Are we safe here anymore?' and they need actionable leadership, not half-measures," Adan said.

Adan said it was unclear at this point what guarantees Walz has secured to ensure proper oversight of agents and the protection of civil rights.

“While Governor Walz has met with Border Czar Tom Homan as part of efforts to address the situation, that meeting has not yet translated into real protections for community members on the ground,” he continued. “We are concerned that any agreement that normalizes or legitimizes an expanded federal enforcement presence without binding constraints, transparent accountability, and independent oversight does not protect Minnesota residents and undermines public trust.”

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

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cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/164054

Democracy Now! speaks with Congressmember LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, who is facing up to 17 years in prison stemming from an incident last May when she and two other Democratic congressmembers sought to inspect Delaney Hall, a private prison run by the GEO Group under contract with ICE. The federal government claims McIver assaulted an immigration officer. “I’m not going to let them bully me out of doing my job. I’m just not,” says McIver, who describes conditions at the prison as dismal. “There was an entire riot at the same detention center because detainees were not getting food.”

From Democracy Now! via this RSS feed

“Masked men from ICE showed up one April morning, and it all stopped. The kids couldn’t leave their homes. Our weekly classes stopped,” said Vu, a Sid Richardson College freshman. “Week after week, I would hear word of another family who left without a word. We made [the map] a few weeks later.” The website, icemap.dev, tracks ICE-related news incidents in individual counties, as well as immigrant detention facilities with documented health and security inspection failures.

The app is named Mobile Fortify. Simply pointing a phone’s camera at their intended target and scanning the person’s face allows Mobile Fortify to pull data on an individual from multiple federal and state databases, some of which federal courts have deemed too inaccurate for arrest warrants.

After the killing of Alex Pretti, white America is realizing what Black gun owners have always known — rights are conditional.