Browsed by
Category: Politics

Three grand juries refuse to charge woman with felony assault of FBI agent in D.C.

Three grand juries refuse to charge woman with felony assault of FBI agent in D.C.

The New York Times reports: Federal prosecutors on Monday reduced the charges against a woman accused last month of assaulting an F.B.I. agent during a protest against immigration officials in Washington, refiling her case as a misdemeanor after they were unable to persuade three grand juries over a month to indict her with a felony. It is highly unusual for prosecutors to fail even once — let alone three times — to obtain an indictment from a grand jury given…

Read More Read More

DOGE uploaded live copy of Social Security database to ‘vulnerable’ cloud server, whistleblower reveals

DOGE uploaded live copy of Social Security database to ‘vulnerable’ cloud server, whistleblower reveals

TechCrunch reports: A top Social Security Administration official turned whistleblower says members of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uploaded hundreds of millions of Social Security records to a vulnerable cloud server, putting the personal information of most Americans at risk of compromise. Charles Borges, the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer, said in a newly released whistleblower complaint published Tuesday that other top agency officials signed off on a decision in June to upload “a live copy…

Read More Read More

Joining ICE to bring the war home

Joining ICE to bring the war home

Video of the arrest of Amanda Trebach, a member of the immigrant rights’ group Unión del Barrio and an ICU nurse, who was monitoring ICE operations in the Los Angeles, begs many questions not the least of which is this: who is ICE recruiting?   “Yanis Varoufuckice” recently attended a Department of Homeland Security job fair at the Dulles Expo Center in Chantilly, Virginia where they spent two days talking to people looking for jobs with ICE: One of the…

Read More Read More

A march to dictatorship

A march to dictatorship

William Kristol writes: In only seven months, we’ve seen a remarkably sustained if somewhat chaotic series of abuses and usurpations in pursuit of the object of despotism. It’s a purposeful project, not an inadvertent one. All societies obviously have authoritarian elements. Every democracy is susceptible to the claim of a demagogue who insists, “I alone can fix it.” Every polity is susceptible to bigotry. Every public is susceptible to the lure of false promises and the fear of invented threats….

Read More Read More

This is what American fascism looks like

This is what American fascism looks like

Garrett Graff writes: The United States, just months before its 250th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism. In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here. The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed. I think many Americans wrongly believe…

Read More Read More

The forgotten history of Hitler’s establishment enablers

The forgotten history of Hitler’s establishment enablers

Adam Gopnik writes: Hitler is so fully imagined a subject—so obsessively present on our televisions and in our bookstores—that to reimagine him seems pointless. As with the Hollywood fascination with Charles Manson, speculative curiosity gives retrospective glamour to evil. Hitler created a world in which women were transported with their children for days in closed train cars and then had to watch those children die alongside them, naked, gasping for breath in a gas chamber. To ask whether the man…

Read More Read More

How Israelis turned atrocity denial into an art

How Israelis turned atrocity denial into an art

Ron Dudai writes: A decade ago, in the final days of the weekly joint Palestinian–Jewish protests against Israel’s construction of the separation wall in the West Bank village of Al-Ma’asara, one of our pre-demonstration rituals was a speech by Mahmoud, a local community leader. Phone in hand, he would declare: “We will not have another Nakba, because now we have this. We have a smartphone. We have Facebook. They will try to drive us away again, but everyone will see…

Read More Read More

Trump’s stunning power grab on elections

Trump’s stunning power grab on elections

Barton Gellman writes: At first glance, President Trump’s Truth Social post alleging voting fraud did not look especially alarming — not, anyway, by this president’s singular standards. Mr. Trump’s long-debunked lies about stolen elections are no less malignant in 2025 than they were in 2020 and 2021, during his concerted effort to overturn his loss at the polls. Still, by now, persistent repetition has diminished the power of those lies to shock. And yet something quite shocking did emerge from…

Read More Read More

Supreme Court could give immigration agents broad power to indiscriminately stop and question Latinos

Supreme Court could give immigration agents broad power to indiscriminately stop and question Latinos

The Los Angeles Times reports: This year’s most far-reaching immigration case is likely to decide if immigration agents in Los Angeles are free to stop, question and arrest Latinos they suspect are here illegally. President Trump promised the “largest mass deportation operation” in American history, and he chose to begin aggressive street sweeps in Los Angeles in early June. The Greater Los Angeles area is “ground zero for the effects of the border crisis,” his lawyers told the Supreme Court…

Read More Read More

Maine oyster farmer’s bid to unseat Sen. Susan Collins gains national attention

Maine oyster farmer’s bid to unseat Sen. Susan Collins gains national attention

  The Guardian reports: One of Graham Platner’s high school yearbooks shows him babyfaced with a buzzcut, holding a sign proclaiming, in part: “Free Palestine.” The image is accompanied by a superlative his classmates bestowed upon him: “Most Likely To Start A Revolution.” “We’ll see!” Platner wrote on X Thursday, posting a photo of the yearbook page, in a post that’s been viewed 4.5m times. Now bearded, burly and tattooed, with a sweep of dirty blond hair above a sunburnt…

Read More Read More

Trump regime orders work halted on wind farm that is close to completion

Trump regime orders work halted on wind farm that is close to completion

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration on Friday ordered that all construction stop on Revolution Wind, a $4 billion wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island that is already mostly built. The 65-turbine project had obtained all necessary permits from the Biden administration, and nearly 70 percent of the turbines have been installed. The developers behind the project had said it was on track to produce enough electricity for more than 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and…

Read More Read More

Israel’s iron grip on the American right is slipping away

Israel’s iron grip on the American right is slipping away

Ben Lorber writes: On Oct. 12, 2017, then Congressmember Matt Gaetz spoke on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to introduce a resolution condemning the United Nations for ostensible anti-Israel bias. “I rise today to support our friend and ally, Israel,” the representative from Florida announced, claiming that the UN was trying to “rewrite history, to condemn Israel and call it an occupying power in Jerusalem.” Gaetz slammed the international body’s “antisemitism” and “attempts to punish and delegitimize…

Read More Read More

Dutch foreign minister resigns over failure to secure sanctions against Israel

Dutch foreign minister resigns over failure to secure sanctions against Israel

The Guardian reports: The Dutch foreign minister, Caspar Veldkamp, has resigned after a cabinet meeting failed to secure sanctions against Israel, weakening the Netherlands’ already fragile caretaker government. Veldkamp’s colleagues from the centrist New Social Contract (NSC) party also walked out after the cabinet debate late on Friday reached an impasse over adopting harsher measures against Israel. The discussions about taking further steps against Israel came after the Netherlands joined 20 other countries in signing a joint declaration on Thursday…

Read More Read More

After Gaza famine report, U.S. is mostly silent while Israel is defiant

After Gaza famine report, U.S. is mostly silent while Israel is defiant

The New York Times reports: A report by a panel of food security experts that found there was famine in parts of Gaza prompted outrage from many European countries, but not from the United States — Israel’s main backer — and the Trump administration. Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, echoed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel’s arguments against the report in posts on social media, saying that Hamas was to blame for any hunger in Gaza. “Tons of…

Read More Read More

Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, gives away the game

Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, gives away the game

Adam Klasfeld writes: For two days of meandering questioning in Tallahassee, Fla., Donald Trump’s former criminal defense attorney turned Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche gave convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell ample opportunity to rehabilitate herself at the expense of victims like Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre’s lawyer Sigrid McCawley, who represents hundreds of Jeffrey Epstein survivors, said that Maxwell “repeatedly and brazenly lied on the record to the government” in these transcripts. “Maxwell ruined countless young lives with impunity for too long,”…

Read More Read More

Wajahat Ali and Zev Shalev discuss the Ghislaine Maxwell transcripts

Wajahat Ali and Zev Shalev discuss the Ghislaine Maxwell transcripts

  Ghislaine Maxwell’s interview transcripts reveal a cover-up in real time, attempting to help Donald Trump distract America from his shady relationship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. I joined Zev Shalev to discuss what we learned from today’s transcripts, Maxwell’s endgame, and the financial trail and characters that corporate media are still missing when it comes to the Epstein story.