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Mohammad Nazeer Paktyawal served with U.S. forces in Afghanistan and legally evacuated the country, then died within a day of being taken into ICE custody, according to his family

An Afghan man who fought with U.S. forces and was legally evacuated to the U.S. after the fall of Kabul died this week within a day of being arrested by federal immigration officers in Texas, according to his family.

The reported death would be at least the 24th in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody this fiscal year, which began in October. The administration is on track for the deadliest year in ICE detention in more than two decades.

Mohammad Nazeer Paktyawal, 41, was preparing to drive his kids to school in the Dallas area on Friday when agents in unmarked vehicles allegedly surrounded him and arrested him in front of his children.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/56876786

“For the first time since 2011, there are no British actors nominated,” O’Brien said, adding: “But at least they arrest the pedophiles over there.”

The crowd didn’t seem to know how to react to the joke, with shock seeming to ripple across the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. However, applause then broke out.

https://archive.is/ycOsn

Right-wing media personality has criticized president’s war with Iran as ‘absolutely disgusting and evil’

Right-wing media commentator Tucker Carlson claims Donald Trump’s Department of Justice could be building a criminal case against him.

In a clip shared Saturday evening on X, Carlson said the CIA is “preparing some kind of criminal referral” against him to the Justice Department “on the basis of a supposed crime.” The former Fox News host claimed investigators had read his text messages and that the supposed probe relates to “talking to people in Iran before the war.”

“The crime under consideration, apparently, would be the foreign agent act or something like that, acting as an agent of a foreign power,” he said.

Carlson may be referring to the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires that “certain agents of foreign principals who are engaged in political activities or other activities specified under the statute” make regular disclosures about their work, according to the Justice Department.

A seven-page document, mailed by an elusive figure, has set off a court battle over the estate of Tony Hsieh, the former chief executive of Zappos.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/35268

Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly poised to be paid $10bn by investors as part of a deal to create a US-controlled version of TikTok.

The $10bn, considered by the US government as a sort of transaction fee, will be paid by the administration-friendly investors who took control of TikTok’s US operations from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, according to reporting that first appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

The investors in the popular social media app include software company Oracle; MGX, an investment firm based in the United Arab Emirates; and private equity business Silver Lake. These entities, along with other backers, paid $2.5bn to the US treasury when the deal closed in January and are set to make further payments in the unusual arrangement until the total hits $10bn.

Trump has previously said that the US will get a “tremendous fee-plus – I call it a fee-plus – just for making the deal and I don’t want to throw that out the window”. The president signed an executive order in September approving the deal, amid bipartisan concerns that TikTok’s Chinese ownership posed a national security threat given the platform’s popularity among Americans.

“It’s owned by Americans, and very sophisticated Americans,” Trump said at the signing of the order. “This is going to be American operated all the way.”

A government taking a transactional fee for a deal between private businesses is exceptionally rare and the $10bn amount appears much larger than the roughly 1% slice that investment bankers take in such circumstances. JD Vance has said the US version of TikTok is valued at about $14bn, meaning the fee taken by the government is closer to 70% of the deal.

Buffalo’s Arakan Rohingya community was rattled after a disabled man’s death. “Our worry comes from future incidents that may happen,” one resident said.

To be clear:

• he was blind
• he only spoke Rohingya
• he was originally arrested because he got lost, and the cops beat him up for not complying with orders he could not understand
• they gave him to ICE, which dumped him in the freezing cold without adequate clothes, outside a closed café, far from home

An offshore wind project targeted by the Trump administration has begun sending power to New England’s electric grid, the developer said Friday.

The Danish company Orsted said Revolution Wind is now generating power and will scale up in the weeks ahead until it is fully operational. Orsted is building Revolution Wind with Global Infrastructure Partners’ Skyborn Renewables to provide electricity for Rhode Island and Connecticut, enough to power more than 350,000 homes and businesses.

Revolution Wind was one of five major East Coast offshore wind projects the Trump administration halted construction on days before Christmas, citing national security concerns. Developers and states sued, and federal judges allowed all five to resume construction, essentially concluding that the government did not show that the national security risk was so imminent that construction must halt.

Trump is asserting executive authority to demand the controversial resumption of offshore oil drilling along California’s coastline as gas prices soar amid the ongoing war with Iran.

On Friday, Trump signed an executive order giving the Department of Energy the ability to use a Cold War-era law known as the Defense Production Act to accelerate oil and gas development.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright quickly responded with an order directing Sable Offshore Corp. to restore operations of the Santa Ynez Unit, which includes offshore oil rigs in federal waters and a network of pipelines that run along the Santa Barbara County coast and inland.

Gov. Gavin Newsom blasted the action as “an attempt to illegally restart a pipeline whose operators are facing criminal charges and prohibited by multiple court orders from restarting.”

Wyoming’s Republican-dominated legislature passed a six-week abortion ban this week, prompting a new lawsuit and some lawmakers to call it “an insult to voters and our institution”.

Mark Gordon, Wyoming’s governor, signed the bill while simultaneously warning of its constitutional hurdles, noting that prior abortion bans were struck down by the state’s all Republican-appointed supreme court this January. Almost immediately, an identical set of plaintiffs filed suit against the new bill.

This bill effectively makes abortion illegal after six weeks of pregnancy, a time when many women have not yet learned that they are pregnant. Any person violating the law would face a felony punishable by prison sentence of up to five years.

Earlier abortion bans, including the US’s first proposed ban on abortion pills, were previously tossed out by the Wyoming supreme court – which cited Wyoming’s constitutional guarantee that adults can make their own healthcare decisions. Democratic representative Mike Yin views this now annual cycle of abortion bans as “both an insult to voters and our institution”, and doesn’t think the new bill holds much water.

The cryptocurrency industry has a new line of attack against candidates who have voted for consumer protections on digital coins: calling them corrupt.

In at least two Illinois congressional primaries, candidates vying for the progressive vote are being accused by a crypto political action committee of corruption. Fairshake PAC is trying to smear one candidate backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as a corporate tool and another candidate who successfully fought a federal indictment as a tax cheat.

The industry has thrown at least $3.3 million into negative attacks on the campaigns in the 2nd and 7th Congressional Districts thus far, according to an analysis from a Chicago political consultant. That spending represents only a fraction of the PAC’s war chest for the remainder of the primary season.

“Ironically, we’re in a very anti-corruption moment, and you know that is true because one of the most corrupt actors in the country is trying to appropriate an anti-corruption argument,” said Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project, a crypto industry critic. “The threat is that the cynical deployment of an anti-corruption politics undermines the potential for success of a genuine anti-corruption politics.”

The operation on Friday evening was the second sea rescue of the day for Italian NGO Organisation Emergency.

Colombia will ask the United States to lift the sanctions that still weigh on Venezuela in order to facilitate the resumption of bilateral trade and allow companies from both countries to resume economic operations without financial restrictions.

The government believes these measures remain one of the main obstacles to fully normalizing trade relations with the neighboring country.

The request comes at a time when Bogotá and Caracas are seeking to expand their economic cooperation, especially in strategic sectors such as energy and petrochemicals, and after the surprise suspension of the meeting that the presidents of the two countries were supposed to hold last Friday.

Federal Judge James Boasberg quashed two grand jury subpoenas on Friday afternoon that are part of the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, finding ample evidence that the subpoenas were intended to harass or coerce Powell into lowering interest rates, with no evidence pointing toward wrongdoing.

“A mountain of evidence suggests that the dominant purpose is to harass Powell to pressure him to lower rates,” wrote Boasberg, a district court judge in Washington, DC, referencing many, many social media posts and statements urging Powell to lower interest rates and then demeaning him when he did not. “Against such extensive and persuasive evidence of improper motive, the Government counters with only a tenuous assertion of a legitimate purpose.” Even when invited to submit more evidence, Boasberg noted, prosecutors declined.

US attorney Jeanine Pirro immediately announced in a press conference that she would appeal the decision. Pirro, a longtime Trump toady, called Boasberg’s opinion a dangerous precedent. She insisted that the reasons for investigating Powell—that the Fed’s renovation project is far over-budget and that there may be discrepancies in testimony Powell gave about it to Congress last year—are legitimate grounds for an investigation. Now, she warned, judges would feel empowered to block DOJ’s grand jury investigations.

But Boasberg’s straight-talk opinion was a long time coming. The obvious result of a Justice Department co-opted by a corrupt president was always going to be a department that judges cannot trust. Boasberg’s decision rubs the shine off the Justice Department, exposing it for what it has become.

The yearslong battle over TikTok’s ownership has concluded in a $10 billion windfall for the Trump administration. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that investors in the recently completed deal to create a US-controlled TikTok will pay the government the exorbitant sum for its role in helping broker the transaction. The fee is about 70 percent of the new US TikTok’s $14 billion valuation.

Finalized in January, the TikTok deal concludes a saga that began in 2019, when US politicians began raising alarms about the Chinese-owned app’s potential threat to national security. In 2024, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill that required TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app or face a ban.

But Trump—despite being the first president to attempt such a ban—made “saving TikTok” one of his focal points in his second term, recognizing the app’s appeal with young voters. Trump’s solution? Transfer ownership of TikTok’s US operations to an American investor group led by one of his billionaire allies, Larry Ellison.

Donald Trump’s policies are likely to drive soaring rates of lung disease and premature death, according to a wide-ranging new study by pulmonary specialists and public health experts.

The analysis, published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, examines policies adopted during Trump’s second term across 10 areas, including healthcare access, environmental regulation, workplace protections and vaccine uptake.

The moves are likely to increase lung disease incidences, worsen existing illness and undermine care for patients already suffering, threatening children and adults’ pulmonary health, the researchers say. Taken together, they amount to “an attack on Americans’ lungs” that could mean millions “die needlessly in the years ahead”, warned Adam Gaffney, a pulmonary physician and professor at Harvard Medical School who led the report.

Among the most immediate concerns highlighted in the report are healthcare cuts included in Trump’s second-term tax and spending package. Known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), it slashed over $1tn from health programs, marking the largest federal healthcare rollbacks in American history.

Donald Trump said on Saturday that the United States may carry out more strikes on Iran’s vital Kharg Island oil export hub “just for fun”, rejecting the prospect of a swift peace deal with Tehran.

“The terms aren’t good enough yet,” the US president told NBC News. The Iranian regime wants to make an agreement, he claimed.

After days of conflicting messaging from the White House on how much longer it will continue to wage war on Iran, Trump alleged that US strikes had “totally demolished” most of Kharg Island, and told the network that its military may hit site “a few more times just for fun”.

Freedom of speech now no longer applies to the press? Thomas Paine's writins of Common Sense might beg tp differ.

A man and a woman were charged with murder in what the authorities described as a “targeted incident” against Masood Masjoody, who had gone missing weeks ago in British Columbia.