Growing number of veterans face arrest while protesting ICE raids

Growing number of veterans face arrest while protesting ICE raids

The Guardian reports: US military veterans increasingly face arrest and injury amid protests over Donald Trump’s deportation campaign and his push to deploy national guard members to an ever-widening number of American cities. The Guardian has identified eight instances where military veterans have been prosecuted or sought damages after being detained by federal agents. The latest incident occurred in Broadview, outside Chicago, where 70-year old air force veteran Dana Briggs was charged with felony assault on a federal officer on…

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Originalist ‘bombshell’ article complicates case on Trump’s power to fire officials

Originalist ‘bombshell’ article complicates case on Trump’s power to fire officials

The New York Times reports: The Supreme Court will hear arguments in December about whether President Trump can fire government officials for any reason, or no reason, despite laws meant to shield them from politics. There is little question that the court will side with the president. Its conservative majority has repeatedly signaled that it plans to adopt the “unitary executive theory,” which says the original understanding of the Constitution demands letting the president remove executive branch officials as he…

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Generative AI has access to only a small slice of human knowledge

Generative AI has access to only a small slice of human knowledge

Deepak Varuvel Dennison writes: A few years back, my dad was diagnosed with a tumour on his tongue – which meant we had some choices to weigh up. My family has an interesting dynamic when it comes to medical decisions. While my older sister is a trained doctor in Western allopathic medicine, my parents are big believers in traditional remedies. Having grown up in a small town in India, I am accustomed to rituals. My dad had a ritual too….

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Trump’s militarization and fear-mongering won’t stop No Kings 2.0 from dwarfing the original

Trump’s militarization and fear-mongering won’t stop No Kings 2.0 from dwarfing the original

Adam Klasfeld writes: Donald Trump’s efforts to demonize and try to criminalize peaceful protest have grown more flailing and desperate as No Kings 2.0 approaches on Sat., Oct. 18. There’s been Trump’s absurd campaign to brand “antifa” as terrorists, even though anti-fascist activists are not a formal group and there is no such thing as a domestic terrorist organization under U.S. law. The First Amendment wouldn’t allow it, which is why Trump’s identical declaration about antifa during his first term…

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Trump is creating an omniforce of armed loyalists to establish his police state

Trump is creating an omniforce of armed loyalists to establish his police state

Don Moynihan writes: As Trump deploys a combination of ICE, National Guard troops and other paramilitary forces to multiple American cities, he is implementing a three-step plan. The plan involves different parts of the national security state, immigration enforcement, and the military: Purge – eliminating those deemed not to be aligned with Trump. Merge – combine different components into a single omniforce. Surge – impose Trump’s control over Democratic cities; instigate enough unrest to justify escalation; find examples to brutalize…

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Immigrant advocates face escalating consequences and threats from Trump

Immigrant advocates face escalating consequences and threats from Trump

Caitlin Dickerson writes: Since immigration-enforcement agents began their descent on Chicago, acting with seemingly unprecedented speed and ferocity, Evelyn Vargas and her colleagues at Organized Communities Against Deportation have been in a frenzy. They help run an emergency hotline that refers people who have been detained to immigration lawyers and directs their families to support services such as food pantries, emergency housing, and mental-health care. (On a single day last week, it took 800 calls.) And they oversee a team…

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Trump’s immigration crackdown diverts U.S. agents from drug, money and sex-crime cases

Trump’s immigration crackdown diverts U.S. agents from drug, money and sex-crime cases

The Wall Street Journal reports: A federal team in El Paso that once pursued child traffickers has been disbanded. A Kansas task force focused on stemming the flow of fentanyl has been redirected. Highway checkpoints near the southwest border—some on roads long identified as major drug-trafficking routes—have gone unstaffed. The shift reflects a broader realignment in federal law enforcement. Thousands of federal agents once tasked with investigating drug smuggling, sexual exploitation and organized crime have been redirected to immigration enforcement…

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Zohran Mamdani is a prototype for a new generation of American politicians

Zohran Mamdani is a prototype for a new generation of American politicians

Eric Lach writes: To walk through New York with Mamdani this spring and summer has been to watch a star being born, a process that is as spectacular and gaseous on earth as it is in Heaven. On the morning of the primary, in June, Mamdani crisscrossed the city as fast as his new security detail could drive him. Giddy commuters on a subway platform in Jackson Heights missed their trains just to show him their “I Voted” stickers. Aboveground,…

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Pope Leo urges news agencies to stand as bulwark against lies, manipulation and post-truths

Pope Leo urges news agencies to stand as bulwark against lies, manipulation and post-truths

The Associated Press reports: Pope Leo XIV encouraged international news agencies on Thursday to stand firm as a bulwark against the “ancient art of lying” and manipulation, as he strongly backed a free, independent and objective press. History’s first American pope called for imprisoned journalists to be released and said the work of journalists must never be considered a crime. Rather, journalism is a right and a pillar upholding “the edifice of our societies” that must be protected and defended,…

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Coral collapse signals Earth’s first climate tipping point

Coral collapse signals Earth’s first climate tipping point

Science News reports: Earth has entered a grim new climate reality. The planet has officially passed its first climate tipping point. Relentlessly rising heat in the oceans has now pushed corals around the world past their limit, causing an unprecedented die-off of global reefs and threatening the livelihoods of nearly a billion people, scientists say in a new report published October 13. Even under the most optimistic future warming scenario — one in which global warming does not exceed 1.5…

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Federal judges warn of ‘judicial crisis’ caused by Supreme Court’s mishandling of emergency orders

Federal judges warn of ‘judicial crisis’ caused by Supreme Court’s mishandling of emergency orders

The New York Times reports: More than three dozen federal judges have told The New York Times that the Supreme Court’s flurry of brief, opaque emergency orders in cases related to the Trump administration have left them confused about how to proceed in those matters and are hurting the judiciary’s image with the public. At issue are the quick-turn orders the Supreme Court has issued dictating whether Trump administration policies should be left in place while they are litigated through…

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Judge rejects ‘unprecedented’ indictment during Trump’s D.C. crackdown

Judge rejects ‘unprecedented’ indictment during Trump’s D.C. crackdown

The New York Times reports: Escalating a standoff with federal prosecutors, a judge in Washington on Thursday formally declined to accept an indictment against a man whose case he said had morphed into an “unprecedented workaround” of the normal system of justice. The highly unusual rejection came from Judge Zia M. Faruqui, a magistrate judge, who refused to accept an indictment that prosecutors secured from a local grand jury in Washington only after a federal grand jury had declined to…

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Oregon’s top military leader: National Guard troops ‘will be protecting any protesters at the ICE facility’

Oregon’s top military leader: National Guard troops ‘will be protecting any protesters at the ICE facility’

  The Oregonian reports: A nine-day-old snippet of testimony in front of Oregon lawmakers is rocketing around social media as Portland awaits word from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on President Trump’s troop deployment plans. Oregon’s top military leader offered some reassuring — or infuriating, depending on one’s political perspective — comments about the role of National Guard soldiers during a proposed federal troop deployment to Portland. Speaking before a state Senate subcommittee, Brigadier General Alan…

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We need to reinvent democracy

We need to reinvent democracy

Reporting from the Athens Democracy Forum, Serge Schmemann writes: Some 60 countries held some sort of election in 2024, noted Neha Sahgal, vice president of research at the Pew Research Center, and the bottom line was that right-wing nationalism was now mainstream. “It doesn’t matter what ‘should be’ in our mind,” she said. “This is the reality right now.” There was no sense in discussing the “defense of liberal democracy,” argued Ivan Krastev, head of the Center for Liberal Strategies…

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