The mafia presidency rules through threats of extortion

The mafia presidency rules through threats of extortion

Adam Serwer writes: The Sunday before the New York City mayoral race, President Donald Trump told New Yorkers he might withhold federal funding if Zohran Mamdani won. “It’s gonna be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York, because if you have a Communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there,” Trump told CBS’s 60 Minutes. Mamdani responded to Trump’s threat of extortion—vote for my preferred candidate…

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Steve Bannon warns fellow conservatives if they lose key elections, he and some of them may face jail time

Steve Bannon warns fellow conservatives if they lose key elections, he and some of them may face jail time

TNND reports: Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon warned a room full of conservatives that many of them could face jail time if Republicans lose the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election. “And I will tell you right now, as God is my witness, if we lose the midterms, if we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison – myself included. They’re not gonna stop,” Bannon said in reference to Democrats. They are getting more and more and…

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How Trump is giving even more tax breaks to corporations and the ultrarich

How Trump is giving even more tax breaks to corporations and the ultrarich

The New York Times reports: With little public scrutiny, the Trump administration is handing out hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to some of the country’s most profitable companies and wealthiest investors. The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service, through a series of new notices and proposed regulations, are giving breaks to giant private equity firms, crypto companies, foreign real estate investors, insurance providers and a variety of multinational corporations. The primary target: The administration is rapidly gutting…

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Judge permanently bars Trump from deploying National Guard to Portland in response to protests

Judge permanently bars Trump from deploying National Guard to Portland in response to protests

NBC News reports: A federal judge in Oregon on Friday issued a permanent injunction barring the Trump administration from deploying the National Guard on the streets of Portland in response to protests against the president’s immigration policies. “This Court arrives at the necessary conclusion that there was neither ‘a rebellion or danger of a rebellion’ nor was the President ‘unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States’ in Oregon when he ordered the federalization and…

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Trump’s lame duck era has begun

Trump’s lame duck era has begun

Politico reports: Hours after witnessing his party’s worst electoral drubbing in at least six years, President Donald Trump hosted Senate Republicans at the White House and demanded they ditch their chamber’s supermajority rules. “If you don’t terminate the filibuster, you’ll be in bad shape,” he told them over breakfast in the State Dining Room. It was classic Trump dominance theater, like many other occasions this year where he successfully muscled recalcitrant Republicans to confirm controversial nominees, support divisive policies and…

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‘Trump is against humanity’: World leaders denounce U.S. president at COP30 climate summit

‘Trump is against humanity’: World leaders denounce U.S. president at COP30 climate summit

Axios reports: President Trump’s views on climate change were denounced by several Latin American leaders in Belém, Brazil, on Thursday at the COP30 UN summit. The big picture: Without naming Trump, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said “extremist forces that fabricate fake news and are condemning future generations to life on a planet altered forever by global warming.” Chile and Colombia’s leaders both specifically singled out the U.S. president in their COP30 speeches. What they’re saying: Colombian President Gustavo Petro noted that Trump and high-level U.S. representatives were missing from COP30 as…

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How Zohran Mamdani made history

How Zohran Mamdani made history

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…

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ICE detention and surveillance are a bonanza for private companies getting hundreds of millions revenue

ICE detention and surveillance are a bonanza for private companies getting hundreds of millions revenue

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…

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ICE is sending a chill through the construction industry

ICE is sending a chill through the construction industry

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…

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Israeli military lawyers warned there was evidence of Gaza war crimes, former U.S. officials say

Israeli military lawyers warned there was evidence of Gaza war crimes, former U.S. officials say

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…

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How Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change

How Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change

By Dana Nuccitelli, Yale Climate Connections November 7, 2025 Joe Rogan has one of the most popular podcasts on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and a combined 50 million followers on YouTube, Spotify, and Instagram. And like nearly all of today’s most popular online shows, Rogan’s spreads climate misinformation. In an October episode of his podcast, Rogan interviewed two octogenarian fringe climate contrarians, Richard Lindzen and William Happer, who together have been spreading climate misinformation since at least 2012. For over…

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ICE is repeatedly arresting American citizens — and lying about it

ICE is repeatedly arresting American citizens — and lying about it

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…

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Pope Leo, speaking in support of immigrants, offers his strongest criticism of Trump so far

Pope Leo, speaking in support of immigrants, offers his strongest criticism of Trump so far

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…

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Sean Dunn, also known as ‘sandwich guy,’ found not guilty of assault

Sean Dunn, also known as ‘sandwich guy,’ found not guilty of assault

  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,…

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