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Minneapolis, MN – On December 8, despite subzero temperatures and snow, 300 people gathered at Mayday Plaza for a rally in solidarity with the Somali and Afghan communities in Minneapolis. The event was organized by the Free Palestine Coalition, with a wide range of grass roots organizations participating in the event.

The event was organized in response to the racist rhetoric that has been directed at the Somali community from the Trump administration. While ICE has been active in Minnesota since at least June of this year, the Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to direct ICE agents to also focus on detaining members of the Somali community. The Twin Cities has the largest concentration of Somalis in the United States.

“It’s been an incredibly emotionally taxing time,” said Malika Dahir, one of the event organizers. “We are a small community in a large landscape of the United States and in Minnesota quietly living our lives, and now we’re on a national stage getting national exposure being identified and targeted based on how you look. I’m also getting reports from our community members of people who just look Somali, whether they’re Ethiopian or Kenyan – getting picked up and targeted.”

The event happened less than 12 hours after a mosque in Prior Lake caught fire, although the cause of the fire is still under investigation.

Montana Hirsch, an organizer with the MN Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC) stated, “We did have a recent win – Jacob Frey made an executive order last week that said ICE cannot use public parking lots or ramps to stage raids! This is not Frey doing this out of the goodness of his own heart. This was won after MIRAC and other immigrant rights groups and all of us fought for this. We sat in Frey’s office, got thousands of petition signatures and demanded this! This is a win that only happened because we fought for it!”

Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Minnesota branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said, “We have heard multiple – and it’s been reported by local channels as well – of incidents of sexual assault, incidents of police brutality that has been committed by ICE through this operation. We are learning of family separation of children, of U.S. lawful residents. We believe this is the tactic of the ICE operation.”

Protesters expressed commitment to continue to protest if these attacks continue.

#MinneapolisMN #MN #ImmigrantRights #Somali #ICE #Afghan #Trump #MIRAC

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Ultranationalist Israeli politicians, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, wore golden noose-shaped lapel pins to a meeting on Monday in order to show their “commitment” to advancing a widely condemned bill to mandate the death penalty for “terrorists” who kill Israelis. The pins resemble the yellow ribbon pins that Israeli leaders have worn throughout their genocide to to…

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A leaked memo by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi directs the Justice Department and FBI to compile a list of groups that may be labeled “domestic terrorism” organizations based on political views related to immigration, gender and U.S. policy. The memo was obtained by independent investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein, who joins us to discuss how it expands on President Donald Trump’s NSPM-7…

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Democrats on the congressional Joint Economic Committee released a report Thursday detailing how much more the average American family in every US state is having to spend monthly to cover the rising costs of food, shelter, energy, and other necessities under the leadership of President Donald Trump. The panel released its report on the same day the Trump administration was supposed to…

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Sarah, a 44-year-old single mother in Maryland, was down to the last $20 on her EBT card as of Monday, wondering how she would feed herself and her two preteen boys as the government shutdown dragged on. She’d been out of work since May, after the Trump administration made sweeping cuts to federal contracts and eliminated her job in public health.

She had been rationing her Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits for over a month, unsure of when, if ever, the deposit would hit her account again. “It’s been awful,” said Sarah, who asked to be identified by her first name only because she fears speaking out could hurt her job search. But the Maryland mom said she was willing to sacrifice if it meant millions of Americans could afford their health insurance.

“The pitch they made, it made sense,” Sarah told The Intercept. “Everyone knew it was going to be painful, but it was important … and they just wasted it all.”

On Sunday, a group of eight Democratic senators, including Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., cut a deal with Republican leadership to end the government shutdown. They did it without forcing Republicans to agree to any of the major concessions Democrats said they were fighting to secure, which included a reversal of Medicaid cuts and an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies. The deal is slated for a vote in the House on Wednesday evening, and it looks likely to pass.

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Key Senate Dem Says Party Caved on Shutdown to Make a Symbolic Point About the GOP](https://theintercept.com/2025/11/10/democrats-republicans-government-shutdown-aca-deal/)

While Senate Republican leadership agreed to hold a vote on the subsidies, the legislation is more than likely dead in the water, especially since Democrats forfeited their main piece of leverage. As a result, tens of millions of Americans are projected to see their premiums skyrocket, and an estimated 7.8 million low-income Americans will outright lose their insurance through Medicaid.

The Intercept spoke with four SNAP recipients who said they’re furious that Democrats squandered the sacrifice they made for the last month to ensure access to health care for millions of Americans — just as voters rewarded the party for finally fighting back against Republicans with major electoral victories last week.

“We sacrificed and we would continue to sacrifice because we understood what the stakes were. People’s health care was at stake,” said Delight Worthyn, 67, a SNAP recipient with lupus living in New Haven, Connecticut. “And that they would cave for nothing after we have all gone through. … I only feel betrayed.”

Though the Supreme Court has paused a federal judge’s order that the Trump administration pay full SNAP benefits for the month of November, some recipients have started receiving full or partial benefits. The SNAP funding available varies by state.

“Don’t talk about me and my food insecurity to justify kicking people like me off of my health care.”

Sasha Slansky, 33, a full-time master’s student at Queens College at the City University of New York who works a series of odd jobs to pay her bills, said it’s “insulting” for Democrats to use SNAP recipients as a justification for caving to Republicans and President Donald Trump**.** In his floor speech, Durbin invoked SNAP recipients as one of the reasons he was agreeing to Republicans’ shutdown deal.

“Don’t talk about me and my food insecurity to justify kicking people like me off of my health care,” said Slansky, noting that Democrats seem not to have taken into account the overlap between SNAP recipients and people who receive Medicaid and their insurance through the Affordable Care Act. “It’s insane, and it’s insulting, and it’s also just so wildly out of touch.”

Nearly 30 million of the 38.3 million people who received SNAP in 2022 were enrolled in Medicaid. The number of SNAP recipients has since risen to 42 million people, as of this year.

“I’m also on Medicaid,” Slansky said. “And as Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani and many, many Democrats have made clear, this has the potential to kick [millions] of Americans off of Medicaid, which likely includes me.”

Natalie, a delivery driver living in Lynnwood, Washington, said she managed to spend only half of her SNAP benefits for the month, stretching meals that would normally last her two days to three or four. She received her benefits for the first time since October on Tuesday, but she said it doesn’t erase the hardship of the last month.

Though the Supreme Court has paused a federal judge’s order that the Trump administration pay full SNAP benefits for the month of November, some recipients have started receiving full or partial benefits. The SNAP funding available varies by state.

“It felt like we were making a small sacrifice, skipping [meals], because we felt like we were doing something to help save people, and that we were doing something good for the country, and to have our only leverage just handed over,” said Natalie, who asked to be identified by her first name because she’s transgender and wanted to avoid transphobic harassment. “It feels like it wasn’t for anything.”

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Related

The President Is Perfectly Fine If You Starve](https://theintercept.com/2025/11/07/government-shutdown-snap-trump-hunger/)

Natalie said she wishes that Democrats had built off of their electoral victories in New York, Virginia, New Jersey, and California earlier this month to pressure Republicans, instead of immediately disarming when they had the upper hand.

“The MAGA Republicans were on the ropes. They were getting the blame. Why didn’t they keep using that and pushing the narrative, the truth, on social media and traditional news that Republicans are doing this to people?” said Natalie. “That was a really strong message, and it was one that people were willing to sacrifice for.”

The post SNAP Recipients Crushed by Democrats Caving on Shutdown: “They Just Wasted It All” appeared first on The Intercept.

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Nigel Farage gave a chilling speech to City of London bigwigs on Monday 3 November, in which he laid out his and Reform’s ‘vision’ for Britain. It should strike fear into the hearts of ordinary people, no matter where they live or what ethnicity they are.

Another day, another horrendous Farage speech

The speech started with Farage harking back to his stockbroker days when, he reckons, you only got to work in the City moving money around and betting on stock prices if you were ‘good enough’.

The fact that the City and its fellow financial centres around the world caused the 2008 financial crash and the ‘Great Recession’ that followed it was conveniently airbrushed out – as were reports that Farage himself was reportedly a pretty awful stockbroker who managed to bust at least one company, Farage Futures.

That minor amusement aside, Farage claimed this morning that the stock market is over-regulated – again leaving out that the ‘light touch’ regulation of the Blair-Brown governments and the Tories that preceded them had played a huge role in the crash – and should be allowed to do its thing with minimal safeguards in place.

Scapegoating

It wouldn’t, of course, be a Farage speech without an attack on refugees.

Farage managed, with a straight face, to say both that UK GDP has only risen because of immigration and that migration has “made the average Briton poorer”. He had no shame about quoting a supposed £200bn cost of benefits for refugees given permanent leave to remain – a made-up figure that even the far-right Daily Mail and the ‘think-tank’ that came up with it withdrew because it was so dodgy.

This, along with ‘poor productivity’, is magically somehow the fault of immigrants, not of exploitative employers – no, they need to be protected as we’ll shortly see – and crap wages, which are somehow too high as well as being too low.

But Farage is more than just racist – he has his sights set on all ordinary people and he admits that he is targeting poor people because he wants to protect the poor ol’ rich folk. And not just rich folk generally, but foreign rich folk particularly.

Laced with irony

Ironically for the hate-inciter in chief, old Nige thinks it’s just awful that foreign billionaires may have to pay tax under changes to ‘non-domicile’ rules under which they could live in the UK but not pay tax on the massive wealth they keep outside the UK, so he promised to reverse all that sharpish, along with huge tax cuts so the native-born filthy rich don’t feel like they’re missing out.

Meanwhile, Farage has the British people he claims to want to protect squarely in his crosshairs. Employment rights to protect Brits at work? They get in the way of the thrusting wealth creators so they’ll be out of the window. Minimum wage – already grossly inadequate but at least some level of defence against exploitation? Nope, that’s also a bar to business freedom, so into the shredder it goes.

Energy prices we’re all forced to pay are too high, not because of privatisation and corporate greed gouging customers to fatten the shareholders Farage loves – he made explicitly clear he wants more private industry running everything – but for ‘ideological reasons’.

Bankers

Bankers didn’t cause the crash – no, they’re the greatest asset Britain has – and we don’t need diversity in the finance industry, nothing wrong with the good ol’ boy, old-school-tie network Farage worked in during the 1980s. Nor do we need those pesky ‘EU’ directives against money laundering – “proliferating” Turkish barbers and hand car washes are Britain’s real problem, along with the apparently pointless push to save the environment.

More banking ‘innovation’ is what’s needed, ‘cryptocurrencies’ are the solution to our ills – Can anyone say ‘Trumpcoin’? – and we should be drilling for more oil and gas everywhere we can. And Farage admits he’ll be slashing the public sector and looking at public sector pensions as an opportunity to ‘save’, presumably with a Reeves-like pension grab for his mates in the finance sector.

The benefits bill isn’t too high because greedy employers aren’t paying decent wages and the inequality of our society is making so many people physically and mentally ill, but because doctors are exaggerating people’s ‘mild anxiety’ and a Farage government would soon put a stop to all that nonsense of medical experts deciding who’s too sick to work, but by political appointees. Not too different from the Tories or Starmer in that regard, are you, Nige mate?

Farage must be stopped

Some lowlights of Farage’s billionaire-nosing speech are below, but if you’re short of time here’s the unsurprising summary: if you’re sick, disabled, poor, have mental health issues, care for a sick family member, have children but aren’t part of a couple that both works, have more melanin in your skin, or generally think human rights are important at work and in society as a whole, Farage and his fascist cronies are poison.

It’s easy to say ‘be very afraid’, but fear won’t stop the fascists. Instead, organise, communicate, and work together to defeat them.

https://www.thecanary.co/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/farage-be-afraid.mp4

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

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Last week, the Trump administration modified a page of the White House website detailing the history of the building to include alleged Democratic administration scandals — as criticism is mounting against President Donald Trump’s destruction of the East Wing to make way for a grandiose, $300 million ballroom. The web page includes a “Major Events Timeline,” which details the renovations…

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Just over nine months after President Donald Trump returned to office and pardoned his supporters who stormed the US Capitol, one of the Republican’s top aides suggested that federal law enforcement may arrest Democrats standing up to the White House’s anti-migrant agenda, including Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Asked about the administration’s willingness and federal authority to arrest the…

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