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Rep. Ilhan Omar to introduce first bill to block U.S. weapons for Israel since Gaza war began

Rep. Ilhan Omar to introduce first bill to block U.S. weapons for Israel since Gaza war began

HuffPost reports: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) will this week introduce legislation to disapprove of a multimillion-dollar package of bomb equipment for Israel proposed by the Biden administration, a source familiar with her plans told HuffPost ― posing the first congressional challenge to the U.S.’s policy of uninterrupted and expanding military support for Israel amid its deadly campaign in Gaza. Omar will by Wednesday file a bill known as a “resolution of disapproval” targeting a $320 million sale of gear for…

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Trump allies pre-screen loyalists for unprecedented power grab

Trump allies pre-screen loyalists for unprecedented power grab

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write: Former President Trump’s allies are pre-screening the ideologies of thousands of potential foot soldiers, as part of an unprecedented operation to centralize and expand his power at every level of the U.S. government if he wins in 2024, officials involved in the effort tell Axios. Why it matters: Hundreds of people are spending tens of millions of dollars to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents….

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How Trump’s rhetoric echoes Hitler’s

How Trump’s rhetoric echoes Hitler’s

Aaron Blake writes: Donald Trump has long toyed with the language of famous autocrats, authoritarians and fascists. Think: “enemy of the people,” “retribution” and the frequent, years-long allusions to political violence. But even by his standards, the former president is now mining darker territory — with overtones of some of the ugliest episodes in recent world history. The Washington Post this weekend summarized Trump’s Veterans Day speech in a headline thusly: “Trump calls political enemies ‘vermin,’ echoing dictators Hitler, Mussolini.” Trump not…

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Stephen Miller’s ‘America First Legal’ is more dangerous than you think

Stephen Miller’s ‘America First Legal’ is more dangerous than you think

Lisa Needham writes: You probably know Stephen Miller as an election denier, a perennial Fox News guest, and, most famously, as the Trump adviser who proposed immigration policies so brutal that his own uncle spoke out against him. These days, Miller also helms a hard-right law firm that is bent on eradicating any and all diversity efforts, everywhere from NASCAR to law schools. You can think of Miller’s “America First Legal” (AFL) firm as sort of a low-rent version of…

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Inside Trump’s plans to force ‘the largest domestic deportation operation in American history’

Inside Trump’s plans to force ‘the largest domestic deportation operation in American history’

The New York Times reports: Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled. The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways. Mr. Trump wants to revive his first-term border…

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MAGA-dominated state Republican parties plagued by infighting, money woes

MAGA-dominated state Republican parties plagued by infighting, money woes

The Washington Post reports: In Arizona, the state GOP chairman has been begging the Republican National Committee for a financial bailout. Michigan party officials have gotten into physical fights as their finances have dipped into the red. And in Georgia, the state party is in a standoff with the Republican governor and saddled with legal fees for alternate electors put forward in 2020. In each of these 2024 battlegrounds, election denial and grass-roots fervor for former president Donald Trump have…

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‘I could never dream such a nightmare’: Gaza in grip of humanitarian disaster

‘I could never dream such a nightmare’: Gaza in grip of humanitarian disaster

Jason Burke reports: UN-run shelters in Gaza are so crowded that it is impossible to count the people needing food, water, medicine and other basics, administrators say, as more fighting and bombardments continue to arrive. “It is a terrible, terrible situation. There is no room even to sleep on the floor. There is one toilet for 700 or 800 people. No bread, no stoves for cooking. We are drinking irrigation water,” one UN official at a compound in the southern…

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Trump’s plan for dictatorship

Trump’s plan for dictatorship

Jack Shafer writes: You can’t say Donald Trump didn’t warn us. Trump and his think tank loyalists are collecting the ingredients and refining the recipe for an authoritarian regime should he win the 2024 presidential election. According to a page one story in The Washington Post Monday, Trump plans on the first day of his new administration to invoke the Insurrection Act so he can dispatch the military to counter any demonstrations that might resist his policies. Why might he…

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Trump belief that 2020 election was stolen is not a defense, DOJ says

Trump belief that 2020 election was stolen is not a defense, DOJ says

The Washington Post reports: Special counsel prosecutors said Monday they plan to show at trial that Donald Trump lied repeatedly about the results of the 2020 election as part of a conspiracy to subvert the legitimate results. But they also said they don’t need to prove whether Trump believed he lost the race. Legal experts have debated the importance of Trump’s state of mind in his federal election subversion case in D.C., with some arguing that to win a conviction…

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A new Silicon Valley manifesto reveals the bleak, dangerous philosophy driving the tech industry

A new Silicon Valley manifesto reveals the bleak, dangerous philosophy driving the tech industry

Alex Wong/Unsplash By Hallam Stevens, James Cook University In 1993, Marc Andreessen was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also worked at the US-government funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications. With a colleague, the young software engineer authored the Mosaic web browser, which set the standard for cruising the information superhighway in the 1990s. Andreessen went on to cofound Netscape Communications, making a fortune in 1999 when the company was acquired by AOL for US$4.3 billion….

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Criminalizing dissent

Criminalizing dissent

Tesnim Zekeria and Rebecca Crosby write: Sixty-one activists appeared before Fulton County Court yesterday on racketeering charges related to their protest of Atlanta’s new “Public Safety Training Center,” commonly known as Cop City. The arraignment comes after the Georgia Attorney General’s Office alleged, in September, that defendants were “conspiring” to violate the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. If convicted, each “Stop Cop City” activist could face up to 20 years in prison — even those who are…

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Language is at the heart of indigenous community health

Language is at the heart of indigenous community health

Erica X Eisen writes: Roughly 250 kilometres northeast of Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory is a place called Utopia. Composed of a loose collection of sparsely populated clan sites in the inland desert, the area is the traditional homeland of the Alyawarr and Anmatyerr peoples, roughly 500 of whom still live in Utopia today. The area wasn’t settled by white colonisers until the 1920s, when a group of German pastoralists – ‘demented by the ferocity of the heat and…

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U.S. supplies Israel with bombs then grieves the devastation they cause

U.S. supplies Israel with bombs then grieves the devastation they cause

The Washington Post: As Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza escalates, the Biden administration finds itself in a precarious position: Administration officials say Israel’s counterattack against Hamas has been too severe, too costly in civilian casualties, and lacking a coherent endgame, but they are unable to exert significant influence on America’s closest ally in the Middle East to change its course. U.S. efforts to get Israel to scale back its counterattack in response to the Oct. 7 killings by Hamas that…

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