Yashica Dutt writes: A day before Zohran Mamdani won the general election and became the first Muslim and first South Asian mayor of New York, the city felt alive in ways it had not for a long time. New Yorkers everywhere were already calling him their mayor. At a campaign event where Mamdani had met with night-shift workers at LaGuardia Airport and traveled to Jackson Heights to serve them food, an editor of a Bangla-language newspaper presented him with an…
NOTUS reports: Business is booming for the private prison companies that operate much of President Donald Trump’s immigrant detention apparatus. Private prison giant Geo Group announced this week that it has seen its largest amount of new business ever in 2025. The company’s executives expect it to translate into $3 billion in revenue next year. Geo Group’s detention occupancy level — 26,000 people — is at an all-time high, according to its latest quarterly report. “We’ve never seen anything like…
NPR reports: As cars and trucks zoom by, Rurick Palomino points to the underside of the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge that spans the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., where his crew of about 30 workers is doing demolition work and pouring concrete as part of a $128 million federally-funded refurbishment. A Peruvian immigrant who came to the United States 25 years ago, Palomino — a U.S. citizen — built his construction firm from scratch after earning an engineering degree and learning…
Reuters reports: The U.S. gathered intelligence last year that Israel’s military lawyers warned there was evidence that could support war crimes charges against Israel for its military campaign in Gaza – operations reliant on American-supplied weapons, five former U.S. officials said. The previously unreported intelligence, described by the former officials as among the most startling shared with top U.S. policymakers during the war, pointed to doubts within the Israeli military about the legality of its tactics that contrasted sharply with…
Harry Litman writes: A recent report from ProPublica documents the detentions of some 170 American citizens by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during its anti-immigration operations. But the implications of the report go considerably further, suggesting an agency completely out of control and flouting the Fourth Amendment at every turn. The report is a harrowing demonstration of ICE overreach. It puts the lie to the declaration of the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson that “we don’t arrest U.S. citizens for immigration…
BBC News reports: Pope Leo has called for “deep reflection” on how migrants are treated in the United States, where he said many people were deeply affected by the controversial policy of mass deportation. In some of his strongest criticism to date of President Donald Trump’s administration, the first ever US-born pope also warned that the US bombing of Venezuelan ships, suspected of carrying drugs, risked increasing tensions in the region. Emerging to address a bank of TV cameras outside…
The Associated Press reports: A former Justice Department employee who threw a sandwich at a federal agent during President Donald Trump’s law enforcement surge in Washington was found not guilty of assault on Thursday in the latest legal rebuke of the federal intervention. A viral video of the sandwich tossing made Sean Charles Dunn a symbol of resistance to Trump’s deployment of federal agents to combat crime in the nation’s capital. His misdemeanor acquittal is another setback for prosecutors,…
Reuters reports: A federal agent who shot a Chicago woman multiple times after he said she struck his vehicle with her own bragged about his shooting skills in text messages with other agents, according to records presented Wednesday at a hearing in the case against the woman. U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agent Charles Exum shot U.S. citizen Marimar Martinez, who was warning others about immigration enforcement agents in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood, five times on October 4, after their…
The New York Times reports: They handcuffed her, hung her up from the ceiling and beat her senseless. They shocked her with electricity and forced her into positions that injured her back and shoulders. When she lost consciousness, they threw water on her face to wake her so the torture could resume. Elizabeth Tsurkov endured two and a half years of captivity in Iraq, held in solitary confinement by an Iran-backed militia. Ms. Tsurkov, 38, said it was a marathon…
electrek reports: Tesla shareholders have voted once again to approve an absurd, biggest-in-history pay package for Tesla’s part-time CEO, Elon Musk. In doing so, they’ve voted to relinquish any control they could have had over the company, and instead to put it deeper into the hands of its largest saboteur. Tesla’s shareholder meeting is happening today, with several consequential proposals which shareholders have been voting on in the last several weeks. In that time, Tesla has been campaigning hard and…
Time reports: Zohran Mamdani defeated a Republican, a fellow Democrat, and an army of billionaires when he emerged victorious in the New York City mayoral election on Tuesday. Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, will be the first Muslim to ever hold the position, and the youngest mayor in over a century. More than 2 million New Yorkers voted in the closely watched race, making it the largest turnout for a mayoral race in more than 50 years. With around 90%…
G. Elliott Morris writes: The headline story from this year’s elections is simple: Democrats increased their support across the country and swept all the marquee contests in key states. Democratic Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger won Virginia by ~14 points, while Mikie Sherrill kept New Jersey blue by a double-digit margin. Georgia delivered two more statewide wins for Democrats, flipping both Public Service Commission seats for the first time in recent memory, and Pennsylvania elected a new Democratic lower-court judge (while keeping…
Jamelle Bouie writes: As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump is a phenomenally effective vote-winner, capable of turning out millions of otherwise infrequent voters to deliver the White House and Congress to the Republican Party. But as president, Trump has been an albatross around the neck of his party. Consider his record as party leader. In the 2017 elections, Republicans suffered sharp defeats in the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races, with Virginia Democrats sweeping all three statewide offices and winning…
The 19th reports: As parents dropped their children inside a Spanish immersion day care in Chicago Wednesday morning, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers stormed the building to detain a child care worker, a scene that before this year would have been unheard of in the United States. Child care centers were previously protected under a “sensitive locations” directive that advised ICE to not conduct enforcement in places like schools and day cares. But President Donald Trump removed that…
By Jake Pearson This story was originally published by ProPublica For more than a decade, Silicon Valley venture capitalists have poured enormous sums of money into newfangled technology companies seeking to disrupt, and even supplant, the traditional financial system and sidestep its burdensome regulations. At the same time, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has policed that effort, going after such businesses for deceiving, overcharging or otherwise taking advantage of their customers by enacting rules, filing lawsuits and shutting down the…
The Hill reports: The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent struck by a sandwich in Washington, D.C., this summer testified Tuesday during resident Sean Dunn’s federal misdemeanor trial. CBP agent Gregory Lairmore, who was called as the government’s first witness, told jurors that the sandwich “exploded” on his chest, saying he could feel it strike even through his ballistic vest. “You could smell the onions and the mustard,” Lairmore said. Dunn doesn’t dispute that he threw the sandwich at…