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Category: Politics

DHS claim that ICE recruits are getting adequate training ‘is a lie,’ says whistleblower

DHS claim that ICE recruits are getting adequate training ‘is a lie,’ says whistleblower

  The Los Angeles Times reports: Earlier this month, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons testified to Congress that while the agency had reduced the number of training days to 42 from 75, “We went from five days a week to six days a week. Five days a week was five eight-hour days and we’ve gone to six 12-hour days.” But the documents appear to contradict Lyons’ testimony. “The schedules reflected on these documents indicate that current ICE recruits receive nearly…

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Jailed for ‘standing up’: DHS assault victim Aliya Rahman arrested at State of the Union address

Jailed for ‘standing up’: DHS assault victim Aliya Rahman arrested at State of the Union address

  We speak with Minneapolis resident Aliya Rahman, who attended Tuesday’s State of the Union address as a guest of Congressmember Ilhan Omar. Rahman was removed from the chamber Tuesday and spent several hours in jail following what she describes as an aggressive arrest by Capitol Police — all for silently challenging Trump during the speech. “There are only two things you can do at the State of the Union, and they are sit down and stand up,” says Rahman….

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Hegseth’s ‘incoherent’ Anthropic ultimatum confounds AI policymakers

Hegseth’s ‘incoherent’ Anthropic ultimatum confounds AI policymakers

Politico reports: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ultimatum to the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is sparking shock and confusion among lawyers and AI policymakers, who accuse the Pentagon of making contradictory threats as it pressures the company to lift restrictions on the use of its powerful AI model. Hegseth met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Tuesday to deliver a warning — give the military unfettered access to its Claude AI model by Friday evening or else have the government label…

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Calls for the U.S. to be included in a probe into foreign interference in UK politics

Calls for the U.S. to be included in a probe into foreign interference in UK politics

The Guardian reports: The hosting of Tommy Robinson by the Trump administration has been condemned by British MPs amid calls for the US to be included in a probe into foreign interference in UK politics. The far-right activist, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is being feted in the US, where he met figures including a political appointee at the Department of State in Washington DC and a congressman. The visit has prompted questions about how Robinson – a former…

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Americans are leaving the U.S. in record numbers

Americans are leaving the U.S. in record numbers

The Wall Street Journal reports: In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration? Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus—negative net migration—as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving…

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Trump DOJ’s own goals could stymie its efforts to undermine midterms

Trump DOJ’s own goals could stymie its efforts to undermine midterms

Democracy Docket reports: Among other steps that President Donald Trump will take to undermine a fair election this fall, he’ll likely use the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to bring a flood of litigation aiming to challenge Democratic wins and shape the rules in the GOP’s favor. But election law experts say those efforts may stumble over the administration’s many legal missteps: the likely weakness of the claims themselves, the lack of experienced and competent voting lawyers in DOJ’s ranks,…

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The Epstein scandal suggests that everything awful we’ve ever believed is true

The Epstein scandal suggests that everything awful we’ve ever believed is true

Joshua Rothman writes: It was odd, for many reasons, to be a journalist in 2016 and 2017, just after the election of Donald Trump. Part of the oddness was that seemingly every story had to include him. If a reporter travelled somewhere to gather material on something apparently unrelated—a natural disaster, a sporting event, a scientific discovery—it felt important to explore whether the people who lived there had voted for Trump, and why. Writing about individuals, one found it crucial…

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ICE and CPB are acquiring a vast cache of weapons from private contractors

ICE and CPB are acquiring a vast cache of weapons from private contractors

Greg Sargent writes: The “forever wars” abroad and the global war on terror after the September 11 attacks left behind a long trail of failure, disillusionment, and death—but they also funneled huge sums of taxpayer money to companies that supplied the equipment that made all that destruction possible. That resulted in windfalls for GOP-connected companies, and fueled a massive public-private bureaucracy that grew harder to rein in as it metastasized to monstrous proportions. Something like this is happening again in…

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A White House staffer appears to run a massive anonymous pro-Trump X account

A White House staffer appears to run a massive anonymous pro-Trump X account

Wired reports: Hours after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, the Trump administration was already working to shape the narrative. Official White House accounts flooded social media with clips of burning flags and clashes between locals and federal immigration agents, casting protestors—not the killing—as the story. Among the accounts amplifying that message was Johnny MAGA, a pro-Trump X account with nearly 300,000 followers. “They’re burning the American flag right now in Minneapolis,” the anonymous account claimed,…

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DHS assault victim Aliya Rahman arrested at State of the Union address

DHS assault victim Aliya Rahman arrested at State of the Union address

  We speak with Minneapolis resident Aliya Rahman, who attended Tuesday’s State of the Union address as a guest of Congressmember Ilhan Omar. Rahman was removed from the chamber Tuesday and spent several hours in jail following what she describes as an aggressive arrest by Capitol Police — all for silently challenging Trump during the speech. “There are only two things you can do at the State of the Union, and they are sit down and stand up,” says Rahman….

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Federal judge rejects government’s request to search Washington Post reporter’s devices

Federal judge rejects government’s request to search Washington Post reporter’s devices

Politico reports: A federal judge rejected the Department of Justice’s demand to continue its search of a Washington Post reporter’s phone and other electronic devices for information that might help an FBI investigation into the leaking of classified information. U.S. Magistrate Judge William Porter declined in his Thursday ruling to require the DOJ to return equipment seized from the home of reporter Hannah Natanson in January, saying the court would review her devices for any material relevant to the government’s…

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DOJ withheld and removed files relating to allegations that Trump sexually abused a minor

DOJ withheld and removed files relating to allegations that Trump sexually abused a minor

NPR reports: The Justice Department has withheld some Epstein files related to allegations that President Trump sexually abused a minor, an NPR investigation finds. It also removed some documents from the public database where accusations against Jeffrey Epstein also mention Trump. Some files have not been made public despite a law mandating their release. These include what appear to be more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, as well as notes from conversations with a woman who accused Trump of…

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The State of the Union for small business is dismal

The State of the Union for small business is dismal

Matthew A. Winkler writes: Donald Trump’s State of the Union is unlike any of the President’s preceding him because America isn’t working the way it used to. Small businesses, which have fewer than 500 employees and account for almost half of private sector payrolls, are suffering record bankruptcies and “still waiting for noticeable economic growth” as US gross domestic product continues to climb, the Republican-leaning National Federation of Independent Business reported last month. The agricultural economy is sliding, with barely…

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A New York congressional candidate feared by the tech oligarchs

A New York congressional candidate feared by the tech oligarchs

Michelle Goldberg writes: If I were a voter in New York’s 12th Congressional District, a recent attack ad against the candidate Alex Bores might make me think twice about considering him. Bores, a 35-year-old member of the New York Assembly, is a reliably progressive candidate in the coming Democratic primary to succeed the liberal stalwart Jerry Nadler, who is retiring. But the spot, paid for by a political action committee called Think Big, points out something seemingly sinister in Bores’s…

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Massive investment in AI has contributed nothing to economic growth last year, Goldman Sachs has calculated

Massive investment in AI has contributed nothing to economic growth last year, Goldman Sachs has calculated

The Washington Post reports: A new economic indicator has captivated Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington. Technology companies’ massive spending on artificial intelligence accounted for half or more of U.S. growth last year, some economists calculated, effectively propping up an otherwise anemic economy. To President Donald Trump and his advisers, the figures showed that AI is helping spark an economic renaissance that must not be impeded by regulation. To some critics, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), the data revealed…

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Elon Musk’s destruction of USAID has left massive death and destruction in its wake

Elon Musk’s destruction of USAID has left massive death and destruction in its wake

Bill McKay writes: This decade has seen the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives in violent conflicts: in the Tigray War in Ethiopia, in civil war in Myanmar, in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and most recently in the RSF massacres in the Sudanese city of Al-Fashir, to name just a few. Yet the largest act of mass murder of this decade, and of this century so far, was not…

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