U.S. News

Um ... What. The. Actual. Fuck?

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested Friday at an ICE Detention Center where he was protesting its opening, a federal prosecutor said.

Retired supreme court Justice David H Souter, the ascetic bachelor and New Hampshire Republican who became a darling of liberals during his nearly 20 years on the bench, has died. He was 85.

From the original NYT essay:

The California Values Act, signed by former Gov. Jerry Brown, went into effect on Jan. 1, 2018, to protect immigrant families. Since then, the policy has been challenged on numerous occasions by President Donald Trump, with the administration threatening to pull federal funding from the state.

Kari Lake, a special adviser to the body that oversees the government-funded VoA, announced on X that One America News (OAN), which was sued by voting machine companies for promoting claims of election fraud, will provide “newsfeed and video service”.

Whether or not events transpired as police say, this is objectively funny. Trash panda sucking the glass dick.

The Republican candidate for a state supreme court race in North Carolina has conceded the election after more than six months of contesting the results.

Maine's been doing pretty good lately. Don't know why Mills didn't sign it though. link to the bill

Less than a day after the Trump administration filed a lawsuit aiming to stop Hawaiʻi from taking oil companies to court for their role in the climate crisis, the state last week became the 10th in the country to do just that.

In a case that could have major implications for the American public school system, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether religious charter schools, which are taxpayer-funded, are constitutional.

The South Texas home of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket company is now an official city with a galactic name: Starbase.

archive.is link

Apparently, this hits small online purchases from Temu and the like with 145%.

I'm leaving the original hed, but the story does nothing to back it up. It dances around the thesis but never ends up there. It's not like people wholesale stopped doing journalism, and they have some very talented staff.

Mohsen Mahdawi has walked out of immigration detention after a federal judge in Vermont ordered his release. The Palestinian green-card holder and student at Columbia University had been detained and ordered deported by the Trump administration on 14 April despite not being charged with a crime.

The Trump administration aims to make fossil fuels cheap—so cheap they wouldn’t be worth extracting. “‘Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of a myth,” one oil executive has said.

A Belgian agency ruled that the government’s sharing of Americans’ financial information with the IRS [Internal Revenue Service, the United States federal government, which is responsible for collecting U.S. federal taxes] under a US law violates European data protection laws.

In the early-morning twilight on a cool Friday in April, a half dozen people gathered in a small parking lot in the San Diego neighborhood of City Heights. It was quiet, before the working-class neighborhood had come to life with the bustle of traffic, commuters, and the sounds of children walking to school.

When the state’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the nation’s most successful youth climate suit, it sparked a Republican backlash that could lead to fundamental changes in Montana’s courts and environmental laws.

archived (Wayback Machine)

archived (Wayback Machine)

From the those-who-don't-learn-from-history dept.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can delegate immigration enforcement duties to state and local police under a law enacted in 1996 and known as 287(g), after a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Chairman John Moolenaar of the House Select Committee on China sent a letter to JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon and Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan demanding the banks withdraw from their role in the upcoming Hong Kong initial public offering (IPO) of Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL). The Department of Defense has designated CATL as a “Chinese military company” under Section 1260H of the National Defense Authorization Act.

FBI Director Kash Patel on Friday said federal agents arrested a Wisconsin judge on obstruction charges in a message Patel posted on X and later deleted. In the post, which Reuters saw before it was deleted, Patel said there was evidence of the judge "obstructing an immigration arrest operation last week."

On Saturday morning, downtown residents awoke to a grisly murder scene. A dozen trees had been massacred in the dark of night. The damage was widespread and indiscriminate. A grove of majestic Ficus microcarpa that had cooled a busy bus stop for decades were all sawed cleanly in half. A row of Chinese elms that created a canopy for street vendors were lopped off parallel to the street, draping a gruesome pattern of leafy right triangles along the sidewalk. Entire blocks of shade had been eliminated overnight. It was, literally, a tree emergency.

I attempted to create an archive link, but it returned a 503 error.

During a press conference after the signatures were submitted to the Salt Lake County clerk, John Arthur, a sixth grade teacher in Salt Lake City and a member of the Utah Education Association, shared that the coalition had collected over 320,000 signatures in support of the referendum.

Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate who has been in immigration detention in Louisiana for more than a month, was barred from attending the birth of his firstborn child Monday, after immigration officials denied him permission to attend the birth in person, according to emails reviewed by CNN.

GUANGZHOU, China — From blenders to bicycles, it could get tough for Americans to buy made-in-China products soon.

While Western forestry experts accept some wildfire as redemption for the landscape, they’ve also learned that out-of-control megafires can do more harm than good. Now a new study puts a spotlight on the small, cartoon-cute creatures ready to serve as a stalwart defense against raging, 100,000-acre firestorms: the humble, hardworking beaver.

The Pa. laboratory that certifies all of the country’s NIOSH-approved respirators is on the chopping block. HHS is stonewalling employees who raise questions.

The Geriatric and Medical Parole Reform bill allows some incarcerated people who are older or sick to apply for early release.

Archived

Property owners and landlords in New York City can now be fined $25 or more if residents are found throwing a banana peel in the trash. As of April 1, all New Yorkers must separate organic waste — that includes food scraps, food-soiled paper (like empty pizza boxes), and leaf and yard waste — from the rest of their trash, similar to how metal, glass, paper, and plastic is set aside for recycling.

The incident occurred approximately one block from the stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla., as traffic started to build ahead of a 1 p.m. start to the game.

To explain how it was going, students shared their experiences through the Rooted Cash Podcast

Archived version

Archived version

Georgia Tech is ending its research and educational partnerships in the Chinese cities of Tianjin and Shenzhen, the US university said on Friday (Sep 6), following scrutiny from Congress over its collaboration with entities allegedly linked to China’s military.

Emily Gedeon, a spokesperson for Denver’s climate office, said there’s no foul play at work here — just enormous demand. About 17,000 people tried to get a voucher on Tuesday, she told us, more than 77 times the amount available [220 vouchers]

The shooter who opened fire inside Apalachee High school is believed to be a 14-year-old boy, a law enforcement source tells CNN.

Archived version

The Klamath River is free of four huge dams for the first time in generations. But for the Yurok tribe, the river’s restoration is only just beginning – starting with 18 billion seeds.

Archived version

Here is the Court ruling (pdf)

The purveyors of claims that COVID’s danger was overstated and could be met by exposing the maximum number of people to the deadly virus in quest of “herd immunity” have been offered a platform to air their widely debunked and refuted views at a forum sponsored by Stanford University.

Interestingly, also the only thing consultants won’t try.

Kroger Co. hiked prices on milk and eggs more than needed to account for inflation, the company’s top pricing executive testified during a court hearing on the US government’s bid to block the grocery chain’s purchase of rival Albertsons Cos.

Archived version

Reporting on court proceedings is not politics. Please restrict comments to the news aspects of this story in this community; we’re all aware he’s primarily running to stay out of prison, but that is not this story. /soapbox

archive.is link

GOP lawmakers have made the state hostile for trans youth. These teens and their parents vow to ‘assert themselves’

archive.is link

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has claimed RealPage’s software algorithm meant rival landlords were sharing what would otherwise be private information, allegedly allowing them to illegally co-ordinate and raise rents. “Everybody knows the rent is too damn high and we allege this is one of the reasons why,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference announcing the lawsuit. RealPage did not immediately comment but it has previously called similar claims false and misleading. The Texas-based company, which is owned by private equity firm Thoma Bravo, has found itself in the spotlight in recent years, after an investigation from ProPublica drew attention to its practices. The company has already been the target of lawsuits filed by renters and prosecutors in Arizona and the District of Columbia earlier this year. With housing affordability a hot-button issue in the US, criticism of rent-setting algorithms has also become a staple of speeches from Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential campaign. In the complaint, the DOJ and eight states claim RealPage had access to information about millions of apartments across the country. “RealPage allows landlords to manipulate, distort, and subvert market forces,” the DOJ alleged in the complaint. It took aim at a RealPage offering that recommends rents to its property owner customers, suggesting that many agree to “auto accept” the proposals from RealPage. It claimed the firm dominated the market for commercial revenue management software, citing the firm’s own estimates that it controlled about 80% of the market. RealPage in June said it served a much smaller fraction of the rental market than has been claimed and that landlords, not RealPage, set prices. The lawsuit marks a first for the federal government as it seeks to address the rising use of pricing algorithms across the economy. Officials said they were also looking at such practices in the meat industry and elsewhere. “Modern-day wrongdoers cannot hid behind software algorithms and artificial intelligence to violate the law,” said assistant attorney general Jonathan Kanter, who leads up the department’s anti-monopoly unit.

Yuanjun Tang, 67, a naturalized citizen of the United States and resident of Queens, New York, was charged by criminal complaint with acting and conspiring to act in the United States as an unregistered agent of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and making materially false statements to the FBI. Tang was arrested today in Flushing, Queens, and will be presented this afternoon.

what in the world…?

Federal prosecutors investigating Mayor Eric Adams of New York and his 2021 campaign have served a new round of grand jury subpoenas in their long-running corruption inquiry, issuing them to Mr. Adams himself, to City Hall and to his election committee, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.

The discounts, agreed to after months of negotiations with drug manufacturers, range between 38% and 79% on the medication’s list price, which is the cost of medication before discounts or rebates are applied — not the price people actually pay for prescriptions.

A US Army analyst has pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to sell military secrets to China, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has said.

A United States court ruled on July 24 that the Fourth Amendment right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution protects travelers from “nonroutine searches” of their cellphones at the border.

Archived version

The acknowledgment came after POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account with documents from inside Trump’s operation.

Archived version

Archived version

Archive link

A group of Deadheads plan to commemorate Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s birthday with a virtual fundraiser for Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

Archived version