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Category: Politics

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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ICE, Iran quietly worked together on deporting Iranians to Iran, emails show

ICE, Iran quietly worked together on deporting Iranians to Iran, emails show

CBS News reports: U.S. immigration officials worked with Iran to deport Iranians in late 2025 and early 2026, newly released emails show, revealing a working relationship between the U.S. and Iranian governments despite tensions mounting between them. Hundreds of emails exchanged between U.S. immigration officials, which were obtained by the National Iranian American Council and made public Tuesday, offer the most transparent play-by-play yet of how the two countries worked together to arrange for more than 100 Iranians to be…

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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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Trump threatens law suit against think tank over report he doesn’t like

Trump threatens law suit against think tank over report he doesn’t like

The New York Times reports: President Trump has opened a new front in his campaign to intimidate political foes, threatening a prominent liberal think tank with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit over a report concluding that his deployment of the National Guard to cities across the country has had little effect on reducing violent crime. The threats against the think tank, the Center for American Progress, were Mr. Trump’s latest effort to use the legal system to punish critics for…

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Democrat Aisha Wahab wins Swalwell’s House seat, overcoming millions in AIPAC spending

Democrat Aisha Wahab wins Swalwell’s House seat, overcoming millions in AIPAC spending

CNN reports: Democratic state Sen. Aisha Wahab will win the special election runoff to finish former Rep. Eric Swalwell’s term in California’s 14th District, CNN’s Decision Desk projects. In recent weeks, the Bay Area race to replace the former congressman, who resigned amid sexual assault allegations, became another test of Democratic divides over Israel. Super PACs aligned with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee poured millions of dollars into ads attacking the progressive and bolstering her opponent, Democrat Melissa Hernandez,…

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By purchasing Israeli weapons, foreign states sustain the infrastructure it needs to wage its next war

By purchasing Israeli weapons, foreign states sustain the infrastructure it needs to wage its next war

+972 reports: In recent years, more and more governments have begun to recognize that words alone will not hold Israel accountable for its crimes against Palestinians. One of the clearest responses to this realization has been a growing push to restrict military trade with Israel — a demand that has also been a central slogan of pro-Palestine protests around the world. Images of bombs bearing U.S. serial numbers, German-made tank engines, and European-manufactured components recovered from the sites of massacres…

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Record corporate spending on the 2026 midterms driven by crypto, AI and betting firms

Record corporate spending on the 2026 midterms driven by crypto, AI and betting firms

Reuters reports: A handful of billionaires and companies are driving corporate spending in U.S. midterm elections this year, and they aren’t the usual power brokers who have sat atop the political food chain in Washington in previous decades. Crypto companies, artificial intelligence firms and online betting have emerged as the biggest industries shaping the 2026 midterm races, driving a record amount of business spending on congressional contests, according to campaign finance watchdogs and interviews with more than a dozen political…

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Author of The Nerd Reich, Gil Durán, on tech fascism, Peter Thiel, and the war on democracy

Author of The Nerd Reich, Gil Durán, on tech fascism, Peter Thiel, and the war on democracy

  A new book by longtime Bay Area journalist Gil Durán investigates “tech fascism” and its mounting influence on U.S. politics. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy follows the rise of Vice President JD Vance, the former venture capitalist whose “outsider” campaign for Senate was bankrolled by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel. Durán traces the ideological lineage of the current Trump administration back from Vance to Thiel and the far-right-wing monarchist…

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How Silicon Valley’s AI accelerationists swept aside safety concerns

How Silicon Valley’s AI accelerationists swept aside safety concerns

Chang Che writes: In January 2025, a new regime of Silicon Valley’s AI maximalists took charge of AI policy whose ethos can be summed up by a Bay Area party slogan: “Accelerate or die.” Established federal guardrails were cast off, and a global consensus was scrapped. The February 2025 AI safety summit in Paris was renamed the “AI Action Summit.” In a speech there, Vice-President J.D. Vance warned against “excessive regulation” of the AI industry and criticized those who partnered…

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Americans are backing progressives because they want candidates who will fight for the working class

Americans are backing progressives because they want candidates who will fight for the working class

Robert Reich writes: Most discussions about the Democratic party in this election cycle focus on the remarkable rise of progressive Democrats, such as the Florida state representative Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist who scored an upset win in the Democratic US Senate primary on Tuesday. But an equally big story is the remarkable decline of corporate Democrats. Some Democrats worry about this. My old friend James Carville compares the current wave of progressive primary wins to progressive campaigns in 2016…

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Trump’s unrequited love for Kim Jong Un will lead to more heartache

Trump’s unrequited love for Kim Jong Un will lead to more heartache

The Associated Press reports: North Korea said Wednesday that a U.S. decision to scale back military exercises with South Korea does not change what it sees as the provocative nature of the drills, dampening hopes for a resumption of diplomacy between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump. The powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made the comments Wednesday night in her country’s first reaction to Trump’s moves to drastically cut back the…

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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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GOP warns AI CEOs that data centers are as popular as spent nuclear waste

GOP warns AI CEOs that data centers are as popular as spent nuclear waste

Axios reports: The Senate GOP campaign arm, in a private memo to top AI companies, warns that toxic views of U.S. data centers are killing the party’s chances of holding a vital seat in Ohio. In the memo, obtained by Axios, the National Republican Senatorial Committee says Democrats have made data centers a “centerpiece” of their campaign to defeat Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) — and that it’s working. “If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will…

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Under Trump, the U.S. has ‘completely ceded the AI-governance agenda to China’

Under Trump, the U.S. has ‘completely ceded the AI-governance agenda to China’

Chang Che writes: So many people had signed up for China’s premier artificial-intelligence expo in mid-July — over 200,000 by some estimates — that the ticketing system had crashed. A mob of frustrated AI enthusiasts had formed outside as a result. “How could they do this to us?” one woman cried. “Report the venue! Dial 12345!” a man hollered, evoking the Chinese equivalent of 311. A decade ago, people around the world traveled to Silicon Valley to glimpse the future….

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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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