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The Republican governor of Louisiana is jumping on the Supreme Court’s evisceration of voting rights to cancel the state’s upcoming primary elections to help avert a humiliating defeat for Donald Trump at the midterms.

The high court ruled 6-3 along partisan lines on Wednesday to strike down Louisiana’s voting map, with the conservative majority finding that lawmakers had unlawfully factored in race when creating a new majority-Black district in the state.

The decision prompted a quick response from Gov. Jeff Landry, who is determined to redraw the voting maps to grab his party another seat in Congress.

It said Landry, a MAGA favorite who also serves as Trump’s envoy to Greenland, told House Republican candidates he is planning to suspend next month’s primary elections in order to give state lawmakers enough time to pass a new congressional map, according to two people with knowledge of the calls.

The primaries are currently scheduled for May 16. People familiar with the plans said that Landry’s announcement could come as early as Friday, one day before early voting was set to begin.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/46295

Dozens of Democrats in the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives helped the GOP send a key spying bill to the Senate on Wednesday, earning sharp condemnation from the diverse movement that has called for privacy reforms. The House voted 235-191 in favor of the bill released last week by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has been trying for months to get an extension of Section…

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From Truthout via This RSS Feed.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2pyxpwmdro

Meta is allowing illegal Israeli settler groups to monetise content on its platforms, whilst banning Palestinian accounts, including journalists.

Meta is allowing sanctioned Israeli settler groups to monetise content while banning Palestinian accounts, including journalists.

Al Jazeera’s @Nour_Odeh reports. pic.twitter.com/AAQKb2lHIT

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) April 29, 2026

Areport by 7amleh, the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, reports that Meta has allowed settler-affiliated accounts and “extremist media outlets” to generate revenue on its platforms. This is despite the content clearly violating its own policies, and:

publishing violent, racist, and inciting content against Palestinians, and despite many being directly linked to promoting illegal settlement expansion, as well as widespread violence and attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank.

The report found that the tech giant:

not only tolerates violent and inciting speech but actively incentivizes its production and spread”, in violation of its own monetisation and content policies.

One rule for them

Certain content is supposed to be ineligible for monetisation on Meta platforms. This includes promoting illegal outposts, justifying settler violence, mocking Palestinians, calling for forced displacement, genocidal rhetoric and celebrating the destruction in Gaza.

Beyond internal policies, Meta is subject to internationally recognised human rights obligations. These apply to business enterprises, including in situations of armed conflict and military occupation.

These obligations are articulated in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which establish that companies have an “independent responsibility” to respect human rights irrespective of a state’s conduct or failure to comply with its own international obligations.

The report added that allowing such content:

undermines Meta’s responsibilities under UN principles, international humanitarian law and international human rights law.

In contrast, the report found that Palestinian voices:

remain structurally excluded from monetization tools solely because they are based in Palestine, regardless of the quality or legality of their content.

Of course, this produces a system where Meta is not only suppressing Palestinian economic and journalistic participation online, but actively incentivises the very actors contributing to the human rights violations against them.

The report added:

These findings reflect a governance model in which monetization decisions are shaped by political power and geography rather than by harm, legality, or policy compliance. By monetizing content linked to settlement illegal expansion, state violence, and incitement, Meta risks contributing to and benefiting from conduct that violates international humanitarian and human rights law.

Meta: complicit in genocide

Previously, Meta whistleblowers revealed that Israel was leading a global “censorship campaign” which targeted pro-Palestinian speech. But now, it appears that the company is helping to put money directly in the pockets of violent settlers.

They are all complicit in the genocide. https://t.co/xdFeia1CpB

— Maawèh ® (@Maaweh_mR) April 29, 2026

Additionally, the New Humanitarian reported that both Google and Meta have run over 100,000 advertisements for businesses that the UN says are facilitating illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Illegal Zionist settlers do not need any more help, whether that is promotional content or financial. But as long as Western governments, companies and tech giants continue enabling their war crimes, they will not stop.

The rules of social media sites should be the same for everyone. As if Israel’s system of apartheid was not bad enough, Meta is making that system digital.

Feature image via Al Jazeera English/YouTube

By HG

From Canary via This RSS Feed.

Idaho Capital Sun

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Six Idahoans have filed a class action lawsuit against the state over what amounts to the most extreme anti-trans bathroom ban in the country.

HB 752, signed into law last month, extends to restrooms both in public and private buildings, as well as single and multi-occupancy bathrooms. Trans people could face criminal penalties, including years in prison, for entering a restroom that differs from their sex assigned at birth.

The rule applies to government-owned buildings as well as private businesses that are open to the public, such as libraries, rest stops, airports, malls, gas stations, restaurants, entertainment venues, hospitals, and more.

Left unchallenged, HB 752 would go into effect on July 1st. But the ACLU, Lambda Legal, and several law firms are requesting an injunction for what’s been characterized as a brazenly unconstitutional and animus-driven bill.

Nearly half of all states have anti-trans bathroom restrictions, but Idaho’s are particularly pernicious. “What makes Idaho’s law really unique is its criminal punishments, which are incredibly severe, as well as the fact that it reaches so far into public life in Idaho by covering government-owned buildings and places of public accommodation,” said Barbara Schwabauer, senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project.

Kell Olson, counsel for Lambda Legal, also issued a scathing condemnation of the policy. “This law leaves transgender people in the impossible and exhausting position of trying to determine what is allowed on a daily basis almost anywhere in their public lives,” Olson said. “HB 752 applies even to single-user restrooms that are designated by sex, revealing that its purpose is not safety or privacy, but to subject transgender people to the humiliation that comes with a state-mandated disavowal of their identity.”

The complaint argues HB 752 violates the Fourteenth Amendment, and should be struck down for its vagueness; that it constitutes sex discrimination; that it violates the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses; and that the law is unconstitutional because the state has “no legitimate interest, let alone a compelling or important one” in functionally forcibly outing a trans person any time they use a public restroom.

Statehouse testimonies from lawmakers characterized transgender people as criminal and violent. Meanwhile, in those same hearings, those same legislators openly fantasized about physically brutalizing transgender women, as seen in the complaint excerpt below—evidence that the bill is motivated by animus.

CAPTION: Excerpt from the complaint.

Moreover, the law is rife with “exceptions” carved out to make it as unobtrusive as possible for cisgender people. It undermines the rhetorical red herring that contends lawmakers simply wanted to reinforce barriers between men and women in bathrooms, and that it didn’t exceptionalize trans people.

Some of the law’s exceptions “have nothing to do with restrooms at all,” Schwabauer pointed out. “If you are an athletic trainer or a coach, you can go into the restroom of the opposite sex, and talk to your team during a team event.”

Of course, we know from experience that these discriminatory policies harm cisgender people, too. Those who are presumed to be trans often face violence due to the anti-trans bathroom panic.

Meanwhile, multiple law enforcement groups begged lawmakers not to pass the bill due to the burdensome and litigious risks thrust upon those called in to be the literal bathroom police. “Officers responding to a complaint would be placed in the difficult position of determining an individual’s biological sex in order to enforce the statute,” a letter from Idaho Fraternal Order of Police addressed to lawmakers reads. However, “there is no clear or reasonable way for officers to make that determination without engaging in questioning or investigative actions that could be viewed as invasive and inappropriate.” The law’s vagueness creates an “unenforceable standard.”

Plaintiffs emphasized the impacts are dire. One plaintiff, Diego Fable—a transgender man who has called Idaho home for a decade—said this would likely cause him to have to flee the state.

“Do I risk my personal safety and privacy by complying with the law and using the women’s restroom? Since I look like a man, using the women’s restroom would only invite suspicion, questions, harassment, and potentially violence,” Fable said. “Or, do I avoid going out altogether?”

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It's still stuck

Graham Platner, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for the US Senate in Maine, delivered a preview of his general election pitch to voters on Thursday hours after his top primary rival, Maine Gov. Janet Mills, suspended her campaign.

Speaking to supporters in Augusta, Platner characterized his Senate bid as part of a broader effort to restore power to working-class Americans who for decades have been beaten down by big money interests.

"The race has never really been about me or any one person," said Platner. "It's about a movement of working Mainers who are fed up with being robbed by billionaires and the politicians who own them. We are now taking back our power."

Platner vowed to defeat incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), but he said the ultimate goal is to "start tearing down the system that, for too long, has forgotten and written off the people who make Maine and this country what it is."

Platner was joined by several Maine Democrats who were on hand to endorse his Senate bid.

Maine state Sen. Mike Tipping (D-08) said Platner must be elected to the US Senate because Collins "betrayed the people she was elected to serve."

Tipping warned that defeating Collins won't be easy because "we're about to see an ungodly amount of money spent in Maine, hundreds of millions of dollars more than ever before, and we're going to be flooded with ads."

Rather than being intimidated by the flood of corporate cash in the race, Tipping said that "we should get angrier every time we see, during the nightly news, or during a baseball game, or in the middle of a YouTube video, one of those ads, because we should remember that they were paid for by selling out Maine people."

Maine state Rep. Nina Milliken (D-16) said that Platner is "the type of leader that we don't see often enough," in part because "he understands that the path forward isn't about dropping to our knees for powerful people."

"At a moment when our democracy is under considerable strain," continued Milliken, "we need leaders who are willing to be clear about what's at stake. The answer to rising authoritarianism is not moderate half-measures or Band-Aids on severed limbs. It's building a movement that actually delivers for the people, one that's grounded in fairness, dignity, and economic justice."

While powerful national Democrats had backed Mills' candidacy in the primary, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) endorsed Platner shortly after the Maine governor suspended her campaign.

“After years of allowing Trump’s abuses of power, Senator Collins has never been more vulnerable,” they said, “and we will work with the presumptive Democratic nominee Graham Platner to defeat her.”

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

The moniker, a reference to “Donbas” and “Donald,” was described by four people familiar with the negotiations, who all spoke about it on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding them.

When a Ukrainian negotiator first mentioned the term, partly in jest, it was as part of an attempt to convince the Trump administration to push back more against Russia’s territorial demands, according to three of the people familiar with the talks. President Vladimir V. Putin has vowed to keep fighting until Russian forces reach a key administrative boundary on the edge of the Donbas, the industrial region in eastern Ukraine where the Kremlin first started waging war in 2014.

That a name evocative of Disneyland has been applied to a depopulated, decimated swath of Ukrainian coal-and-steel country could appear jarring as Europe’s deadliest fighting since World War II continues to rage. But it also reflects a global reality in which governments appeal to Mr. Trump’s vanity in order to get American might on their side.

Dozens of countries met this week to discuss how to end the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, a goal that the Trump administration doesn’t share.

cross-posted from: https://leminal.space/post/34862275