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Category: Law/Crime

Israel ‘seeking Trump’s support for plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza’

Israel ‘seeking Trump’s support for plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza’

The Guardian reports: Israel’s defence minister has said his country is seeking Donald Trump’s support to approve plans to expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip in what has widely been condemned as a potential war crime. Israel Katz said there was “no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration” during a conference hosted by the Israeli news site Ynet and the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. He said the Israeli government was “organised and prepared to get them out…

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The U.S. has killed 227 civilians in boat strikes. ‘It’s been a year of murders’

The U.S. has killed 227 civilians in boat strikes. ‘It’s been a year of murders’

The Intercept reports: Top military officers from a secretive command watched a speedboat cut through the waters of the Caribbean Sea, early last September. A plane above provided live video of the vessel and the 11 men on board. In the early morning hours, Adm. Frank Bradley sought the counsel of his top legal adviser, Col. Cara Hamaguchi. Then he ordered SEAL Team 6 operators to attack the packed boat. After the vessel exploded, two helpless survivors pulled themselves onto…

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Whistle-blower says Trump officials are defying court orders on voting by mail

Whistle-blower says Trump officials are defying court orders on voting by mail

The New York Times reports: A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to implement President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans. The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the…

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Trump cannot deport students for criticizing Israel, judge rules

Trump cannot deport students for criticizing Israel, judge rules

The Associated Press reports: Citing the importance of the First Amendment, a federal judge in California says the U.S. government is unconstitutionally silencing critics of Israel’s war in Gaza and others as part of the Trump administration ‘s quest to deport noncitizens who it says disrupted college campuses while expressing their views. Judge Noël Wise, in a ruling Friday, delivered a victory for The Stanford Daily, the student newspaper at Stanford University, which has said some international students were afraid…

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Trump’s DHS is using an obscure customs law to secretly snoop on journalists, non-profits and unions: ‘It’s outrageous’

Trump’s DHS is using an obscure customs law to secretly snoop on journalists, non-profits and unions: ‘It’s outrageous’

The Guardian reports: The Trump administration has been deploying an obscure legal maneuver to try to obtain private information on journalists, non-profits and unions, raising alarm over a power the government has asserted without judicial oversight. In one instance, the government obtained six months of telephone records for Georgia Fort, a Minneapolis journalist. Fort was not notified of the request for her information, nor was she given a chance to contest the government’s effort to obtain them, her lawyers said…

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Meta has accepted, for the first time, that much of its business model is unacceptable for children

Meta has accepted, for the first time, that much of its business model is unacceptable for children

Nathaniel Lubin writes: For almost two decades, social-media companies have avoided legal consequences for the negative effects of exposure to their products. Damage to users’ mental health, the facilitation of crimes including sexual abuse—outcomes like these have been the subject of public protest, but were never successfully challenged through legal action. Then, about four years ago, prosecutors across America began to focus on companies’ business and design decisions, rather than, as they had in the past, on companies’ promotion of…

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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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