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Category: Law/Crime

Democrats will force Senate vote on Israel’s human rights practices

Democrats will force Senate vote on Israel’s human rights practices

The New York Times reports: Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, on Thursday plans to introduce a resolution that would order the Trump administration to provide Congress with a detailed accounting of Israel’s human rights practices in the West Bank, laying the groundwork to force a vote on the matter in coming weeks. The measure, the latest bid by Democrats in Congress to challenge the policies and actions of Israel’s government, invokes a provision of the Foreign Assistance Act…

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U.S. intervened in criminal probe of the ‘most effective ATM machine from Venezuela to the external world’

U.S. intervened in criminal probe of the ‘most effective ATM machine from Venezuela to the external world’

The Washington Post reports: Senior U.S. officials intervened in an international criminal investigation into a Venezuelan businessman who was enlisted by the Trump administration to help assert control over Venezuela’s government and oil industries, according to two people familiar with the matter. The officials lobbied to resolve the case in Switzerland in a way that would avoid criminal charges and end travel restrictions against the Britain-based businessman, Alejandro Betancourt, and they have not acted on a Swiss arrest warrant against…

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Meta’s $18 billion child-safety deal hinges on age-verification tech that doesn’t work well

Meta’s $18 billion child-safety deal hinges on age-verification tech that doesn’t work well

TechCrunch reports: Meta reached an $18 billion settlement on Wednesday over a lawsuit brought by 29 U.S. states concerning children’s safety. The settlement is historic in scale as Meta agrees with a group of 52 attorneys general to implement sweeping changes to how minors use Instagram and Facebook. The settlement “gives the AGs what they want, which is the political story that they’ve extracted a huge amount of benefit for the public from this settlement, including the platform changes,” Jessica…

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U.S. issues sanctions against UK-based direct action group Palestine Action

U.S. issues sanctions against UK-based direct action group Palestine Action

The Guardian reports: The US ⁠has ​issued sanctions against ⁠the UK-based direct action organisation Palestine ⁠Action, describing it as a “transnational terror group”. The US Department of the Treasury labelled Palestine Action a specially designated global terrorist on Wednesday, which allows the US to freeze the assets of foreign individuals and entities. Palestine Action became the first direct action group to be proscribed under the UK’s Terrorism Act in July last year, placing it alongside the likes of Islamic State…

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Judge issues setback to Trump administration plans to restrict mail-in ballots

Judge issues setback to Trump administration plans to restrict mail-in ballots

The Washington Post reports: A federal judge in Massachusetts on Tuesday issued a setback to the Trump administration’s plans to issue sweeping new restrictions on mail-in balloting for November’s crucial midterm elections. The ruling is not the final word in a complex and rapidly escalating legal fight over the president’s executive order that would bar the U.S. Postal Service from sending mail-in ballots to voters not on lists of citizens created by federal agencies. A separate case challenging the order…

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Engineering lawlessness: Under Israel’s watch, Palestinian gangs are sowing chaos in the West Bank

Engineering lawlessness: Under Israel’s watch, Palestinian gangs are sowing chaos in the West Bank

Sami Sawalmeh reports: When I arrived in the central West Bank town of Qarawat Bani Hassan for a reporting trip on July 31, residents were dealing with the immediate aftermath of an explosion outside a local businessman’s property. An extortion ring operating from Jaljulia, a Palestinian town inside Israel, had detonated the device after demanding money from him, according to prominent figures from the town who preferred not to be named. (A video from the blast site, seen by +972,…

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Washington Post ordered to reinstate opinion writer fired over Charlie Kirk posts

Washington Post ordered to reinstate opinion writer fired over Charlie Kirk posts

The Guardian reports: An independent arbitrator has ordered the Washington Post to rehire the high-profile opinion columnist Karen Attiah, abruptly fired by the news organization last September over comments she made on social media about Charlie Kirk, the then recently slain conservative activist. On Monday, an arbitrator ruled that the Post had violated her rights as a union-protected employee and ordered the newspaper to reinstate her and compensate her for lost wages. “This decision confirms what we’ve said from the…

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Technofascism: This Palantir billionaire’s passion project is criminalizing homelessness

Technofascism: This Palantir billionaire’s passion project is criminalizing homelessness

Mother Jones reports: Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of the weapons-tech company Palantir, is also a major force behind the Trump administration’s policy of pushing unhoused people toward incarceration. Lonsdale, a longtime critic of “housing first” policy—which proposes that homelessness be solved by supplying those in need of housing with somewhere to live—argues that fining and arresting people for sleeping in public will push them into mental health treatment. “We’ve made it easier to civilly commit those who are mentally ill and…

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Ankle monitors leave Haitians in Ohio feeling shaken and shackled

Ankle monitors leave Haitians in Ohio feeling shaken and shackled

The New York Times reports: Before dawn on Wednesday, Jonas Julien waited in the darkness of his Springfield, Ohio, home for his ride to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office about an hour away. The 35-year-old Haitian immigrant had completed another grueling 12-hour shift at 3:30 a.m. After a quick bite and shower, he had stretched on the couch to avoid waking his wife and their 2-month-old daughter. But sleep never came. “I don’t know what awaits me, and I…

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Under Trump, protected wild horses are going to slaughter

Under Trump, protected wild horses are going to slaughter

The New York Times reports: They once had run free through the desert mountains of the West, a multicolored band of 68 wild mustangs that had never been saddled or corralled. Then the federal government rounded them up with helicopters, as it has with tens of thousands of other mustangs, in an attempt to control wild populations on public lands. The horses were held for years in a feed lot in Idaho while the government tried to find them what…

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DHS made a big claim about noncitizen voting. Now it can’t prove it

DHS made a big claim about noncitizen voting. Now it can’t prove it

The New York Times reports: A month after the Trump administration declared without evidence that thousands of noncitizens had illegally registered to vote in Nevada, officials with the Department of Homeland Security were unable to substantiate the claim. The administration claimed to have identified 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote in four states, including an exact number of 15,903 in Nevada. But during a meeting last week with state election administrators, Homeland Security officials said they had identified just 185 potential…

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DOJ appears to have hired lawyer convicted of hacking election sites to check ‘integrity’

DOJ appears to have hired lawyer convicted of hacking election sites to check ‘integrity’

Democracy Docket reports: A Florida lawyer who pleaded guilty after illegally accessing government election websites appears to have joined President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) — and taken part in a recent DOJ election monitoring operation in Minnesota. The apparent hiring of David Michael Levin would be among the most troubling example yet of the department’s Civil Rights Division bringing on lawyers — including the acting chief of the voting section — who have taken extreme steps to undermine…

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Top DHS lawyer faces bar complaint over ‘worst of the worst’ list for judges

Top DHS lawyer faces bar complaint over ‘worst of the worst’ list for judges

The Hill reports: The top lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is facing an ethics complaint with the Florida Bar after he launched a “Worst of the Worst” list for federal jurists, attacking their rulings. James Percival, the general counsel for DHS, has in recent weeks taken to social media to criticize judges who have made unfavorable rulings on the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The complaint, filed Wednesday by a group of nearly 130 former federal and state…

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Flock has a powerful new AI tool for police. WIRED got its code

Flock has a powerful new AI tool for police. WIRED got its code

Wired reports: Vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned. Drawing on a network of cameras that logs the movements of drivers in more than 6,000 communities, the tool can pick out potential witnesses by how often…

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American Stasi: DHS undercover surveillance operations had agents infiltrate protest meetings

American Stasi: DHS undercover surveillance operations had agents infiltrate protest meetings

Greg Sargent writes: It’s time to familiarize yourselves with the names “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Keyhole.” If those nefarious phrases evoke to you the U.S. government’s domestic spying on leftist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s for good reason. The terms are coinages of today’s Department of Homeland Security, and they’re associated with a massive covert surveillance effort that DHS unleashed earlier this year to track anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump’s violent paramilitary…

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Politics drove antisemitism probes against Ivy League schools, DOJ whistleblower says

Politics drove antisemitism probes against Ivy League schools, DOJ whistleblower says

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration task force charged with investigating antisemitism on Ivy League campuses pressured universities into punitive settlements despite turning up little to no evidence of systemic abuse, according to a whistleblower complaint made public Tuesday. The complaint — filed by Haley Van Erem, a former career attorney in the Justice Department’s civil rights division who said she was involuntarily detailed to work on the probes last year — alleged that the outcomes of investigations into…

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