Politics

Jamelle Bouie almost never misses. In this video that’s just shy of 10 minutes long, he chastises American political & cultural pundits for their lack of moral seriousness w/r/t their focus on “wokeness” instead of the real harms being done by the authoritarian Trump regime.

• This comparative analysis of 65 quantitative studies reveals that nonviolent revolutions generally lead to more positive institutional outcomes than violent revolutions across domains like democracy, security forces, foreign relations, ethnicity, culture, and well-being.
• Nonviolent resistance movements are more likely to facilitate transitions from autocracy to democracy, improve democratic qualities like civil liberties, transform security forces and judicial systems in rights-respecting directions, and enhance well-being measures such as life expectancy.

An anti-war politician who tried to challenge Vladimir Putin at the last Russian presidential election says he has fled the country after Moscow declared him a "foreign agent" last month.

Boris Nadezhdin posted a video standing in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Officials relied on AI to identify potential fraud, Kennedy said. “We used AI, advanced analytics, and other cutting-edge tools to identify suspicious activity and potential fraud.”

These tariffs have been introduced under Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act, which covers trade discrimination rather than national emergencies (the mechanism used for the previous tariffs which the Supreme Court struck down recently).

The Free Republic of Liberland doesn't look like much from the boat.

This is pretty much as loopy as you think it will be.

FWIW a few musings on the Clacton by-election. I'm no expert, I just know what I've read, which is probably less than what you have, but here we go.

First point: Farage hates being an MP. He knew he was going to hate it and tried to avoid it. As an MEP he had a platform for grandstanding and no pressing responsibilities. As an MP he doesn't, he's just another backbench MP in charge of a handful of backbench MPs and he is expected to serve his constituency, which is a bit of a drag for a jet-setting idle gobshite. The one time before 2024 there was a real risk he might become an MP he stood down his troops and told them to vote Tory. In 2024 several factors made it put up or shut up time so he had to stand for election and he had to win and become an MP, much to his undisguised disgust - "Do I want to spend every Friday for the next five years in Clacton?"

"A little different"

Tirana (Albania) (AFP) – Violent clashes erupted between police and demonstrators outside Albania's parliament on Thursday, as protests sparked by a resort development linked to US President Donald Trump's family threatened to escalate.

Protests began in late May against the planned construction of a luxury hotel linked to Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner in a nature reserve in Zvernec, on Albania's southwestern coast.

For the second time this week, crowds gathered outside parliament to confront lawmakers and block entry to the building.

Lines of riot police pushed them back, leading to clashes and arrests, according to AFP journalists at the scene.

Police used tear gas, pepper spray and water cannon to break up the crowd, and some protesters tried to push through lines of officers.

Nine officers were injured by objects thrown by protesters, police said, but did not confirm arrest numbers.

Local media reported that as many as 20 had been detained.

People were also seen smashing the windows of an empty police car in a nearby street as the crowd was pushed away from area.

On Tuesday, six people were arrested when demonstrators threw eggs at lawmakers' cars.

The violence is a marked contrast to the overwhelmingly peaceful daily gatherings that have drawn thousands to the streets since the movement began.

The planned resort was first unveiled in 2024, but the latest wave of protests began after barbed-wire fencing and bulldozers appeared on beaches in late May.

Opposition to the project has become a flashpoint for anger over perceived corruption, with protesters calling for Prime Minister Edi Rama to step down over what they describe as a lack of transparency.

The ruling last week cleared the way for the Trump administration to cancel TPS for Haitians and Syrians. Experts say deporting Haitian TPS recipients will have a catastrophic impact on the nationwide healthcare workforce crisis — a workforce that is hugely dependent on immigrant labor.

The pain will be felt across hospitals and emergency rooms, which already operate under persistent staffing shortfalls, but it's the long-term care sector, including senior care facilities and home care, that will suffer the greatest disruptions, said Steffie Woolhandler, a distinguished professor of health policy at City University of New York at Hunter College and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School.

"It's going to be a disaster in the Boston area, where a lot of our nursing home and home care aides are Haitian," Woolhandler told NPR. But beyond that, she added, "If the United States becomes inhospitable to noncitizens, which I think Trump is doing, we're going to have a lot of problems staffing our entire healthcare system."

In a 6-3 ruling, the court's conservative majority rejected a challenge by Democratic Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, ruling that Trump had the power to fire "subordinates who exercise the President's power."

The decision is expected to have wide-ranging implications, with Trump having aggressively sought to expand executive powers as he works to transform the US government and put political allies in key positions.

Trump hailed the verdict in a social media post, saying it expanded presidential power "at a time when it is most needed."

"It is such an Honor to be the sitting President who won this Historic and Unprecedented Ruling, one of the most important ever given with respect to Presidential Powers," he said.

Slaughter was dismissed without cause and lower courts upheld her claim that the move violated rules Congress put in place to protect the members of dozens of independent government agencies.

But in Monday's decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court's majority cited writings by James Madison -- a framer of the US constitution who became president -- and other Supreme Court rulings that empowered the president on personnel decisions.

"Independent agencies are not 'independent' in the sense that they are free of the President and thus responsive 'only to the people of the United States,'" Roberts wrote in a decision that frequently cited earlier rulings.

In a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the majority opinion had upended the separation of powers.

"Today, the majority replaces 90 years of proven, workable practice with a half-baked theory of executive power that is simultaneously all encompassing yet also subject to necessary but undefined exceptions," Justice Sotomayor wrote.

"The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow."

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren slammed the opinion, saying "Donald Trump has fired Democratic appointees and seized control of formerly independent agencies so they serve him and his billionaire friends instead of the American public."

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Party’s old guard abandons ‘blue no matter what’ banner to push for a more formal break with progressive wing

Good luck with that /s

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday overturned a 91-year-old precedent that has prevented presidents from removing members of independent agencies at will. The decision represents a significant win for the Trump administration and a major expansion of the president's control over parts of the government once seen as a check on his powers.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court found that President Trump's March 2025 firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause was lawful.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/48714434

A group of conservatives visited the Oval Office on Friday and announced they want to remove a key safeguard for religious freedom in America ― the separation of church and state.

But of course, the main takeaway on social media was how Donald Trump appeared to fall asleep during the meeting.

Members of the Religious Liberty Commission, an organization made up almost entirely of conservative Christians, showed up at the White House to suggest that there should be “bridges” between religion and politics rather than “a wall of separation,” as Thomas Jefferson once wrote.

A group of conservatives? More like a group of nut-jobs. What's the difference between this group an d jihadis? Asking for a friend.

When people talk about foreign influence operations, Russia is usually the first country that comes to mind. We picture troll factories, aggressive TV shows or conspiracy theories spreading on social media.

But a study published this June by Viginum, France’s national agency for countering foreign digital interference, describes a very different approach. At its centre is not loud propaganda, but an entire network of news portals that look like ordinary media outlets and focus mainly on how successful, innovative and essential to the world China supposedly is.

According to Viginum, the network consisted of 13 websites operated by China’s state broadcaster CGTN, or China Global Television Network. The portals published articles in English, French, Spanish and Vietnamese, presenting themselves as independent media outlets. In reality, they were part of a coordinated influence operation, which French authorities named Fawn Mianju.

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One of the best-known portals in the network was called Actu Méridien. It was a French-language website that looked just like an ordinary news outlet. The same network also included the Spanish-language Amigo News, English-language sites and Vietnamese-language publications.

The content of these sites did not focus on criticising the West. Quite the opposite. Readers were told about China’s achievements in aviation and artificial intelligence, Beijing’s leading role in the Global South, and how European countries could benefit from closer cooperation with China. One article, for example, attacked a programme by the French TV channel France 2 that covered the situation of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

This is exactly what sets Chinese influence operations apart from Russia’s. While Russian propaganda is often dominated by conflict, threat perception and confrontation, China’s goal is to build a positive image of itself. Freedom House describes this as a long-term strategy aimed at “telling China’s story well”. At its core is the image of China as a successful, trustworthy and indispensable partner.

Freedom House notes that in France, Chinese state media has for years tried to influence public opinion not only through its own channels, but also through partnerships, paid content and social media influencers. These have included both Facebook influencers and traditional media outlets that have published paid supplements from Chinese state media.

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The most interesting part of the story, however, is the role played by artificial intelligence. According to Viginum’s investigation, since late 2025 CGTN published nearly 3,000 articles, more than 2,300 of which were quickly adapted and republished on other websites in the network. This often happened less than an hour after the original story appeared.

The articles were not copied word for word. The texts were edited, shortened, adapted for different target audiences and rewritten so that they appeared to be original content. Investigators found that the texts showed unusually little natural variation in sentence length and punctuation. This is one of the signs associated with automatically generated or AI-assisted content.

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One mistake led back to CGTN

The strongest evidence linking the network to China’s state broadcaster came from an unexpected place. The administrator of one portal, Actu Méridien, left behind a login trail that led Viginum investigators to a senior project manager at CGTN Digital.

In addition, investigators found a hidden webpage on Actu Méridien’s server that had been built to resemble CGTN’s official website.

An anonymous Viginum analyst told Le Monde that the portal’s technical setup pointed to “a well-resourced actor”. The website was not running on a single server, but used a distributed architecture, professional SEO tools and several different infrastructure components.

Still, it did not become successful propaganda

Perhaps the most surprising part is that, despite the scale of the effort, the operation was not particularly successful. The network was supported by Facebook and Threads accounts, and advertising campaigns were shown to users in as many as 89 countries. Yet individual articles usually received no more than around 15,000 views.

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Influence operations no longer have to look like propaganda.

There is no need for loud voices, militant slogans or obvious fake news. A website that resembles an ordinary news portal is enough. An article about China’s green transition or technological success is enough. And so is artificial intelligence that can adapt the same message for dozens of different target audiences within minutes.

The question is no longer only whether a news story is true or false. The question is who is telling stories about the world, what kinds of stories are being told, and whether the reader even notices that the “news” in front of them was not produced in an independent newsroom, but far away in Beijing.

Web Archive link

Washington (United States) (AFP) – President Donald Trump on Friday unveiled a rendering of a new limited-edition US passport to mark the country's 250th anniversary of independence -- featuring his stern-faced likeness.

"The U.S.A.'s New Passport, which says, 'Welcome, but be good!'" Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform featuring the passport mock-up.

The image features a glowering Trump leaning on his desk and his signature, with the text of the Declaration of Independence in the background. It appears to be based on a portrait taken by White House photographer Daniel Torok.

The opposite page shows a painting depicting the declaration's signing in 1776, with the words "United States of America 250."

The White House posted the same passport rendering, with the words "PATRIOT PASSPORT."

The State Department -- which had previously announced that a commemorative passport with "custom artwork" would be available from July 6 -- did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In April, a department official said the Trump-themed passports would only be available at in-person appointments in Washington "for as long as there is availability."

Trump has aggressively put his personal stamp on government institutions, with banners of the president flying outside several government buildings, and the Treasury Department saying his signature will soon appear on the one-dollar bill.

Trump also added his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts -- until a court ruled that it should be removed.

He will be the first sitting US president featured in Americans' travel documents.

Scientists, educators, farmers and the broader public now have a new website for climate information in the United States. The site, Climate.us, launched this week and fills a void left when a government-run climate information website was shut down last year by the Trump administration.

The new site was created by former employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — the government's lead scientific agency for climate, weather and ocean monitoring — who worked on Climate.gov until they were laid off last year as part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cutbacks.

Climate.gov had long been a trusted source for official government climate data. Nearly 1 million visitors came to the site each month, according to 2021 numbers.

Most of the data remains technically accessible on government servers, but it is difficult to find, according to Rebecca Lindsey, a former program director for Climate.gov who now heads the Climate.us project. In August 2025, she and two other former NOAA employees who helped run the government site began to re-create it.

This and other proposals for Trump's order have been blocked by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani. The judge found that the order exceeds Trump's authority under the Constitution, which gives power to state legislatures and Congress, not the president, to set federal election rules. The judge also found that USPS has no legal authority to regulate who can vote by mail and how, an issue that Senator Peters pressed Steiner on.

Well, I think it's clear that there's nowhere in the Constitution, there's no federal law that the Postal Service is authorized to create these types of voter databases, ballot verification systems or mandatory standards. It just simply doesn't exist.

Trump himself voted by mail in Florida in March, and the president has said he issued this order to stop illegal voting by non-U.S. citizens in federal elections, which many reviews have shown to be incredibly rare. The Trump administration is now expected to appeal the new ruling against the order.

Black, the former Apollo Global Management CEO, has faced questions over his past ties to Epstein for years, with scrutiny intensifying after the justice department released millions of records related to Epstein late last year and earlier this year. In 2021, Black stepped down as chairman and chief executive of Apollo Global Management.

According to a report commissioned by Apollo several years ago, Epstein provided financial services to Black between 2012 and 2017. After Epstein pleaded guilty to Florida state prostitution charges in 2008, including procuring a minor, Black became Epstein’s largest client, paying him a total of roughly $170m in fees, according to an investigation by the Senate finance committee. Black has described his work for Epstein as tax and estate-planning services.

According to a copy of Black’s prepared remarks to Congress that was viewed by the Guardian, Black wrote that he is appearing “to set the record straight about my relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and, in particular, why I paid him the money I did”.

Geneva (AFP) – The United Nations on Friday demanded independent investigations into dozens of deaths in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody since last year -- and swift action to prevent more people from dying.

At least 52 deaths have been reported in ICE holding facilities since the start of 2025, when US President Donald Trump returned to office and launched a crackdown on immigrants, the UN human rights office said.

During the first five months of the year, 18 people died in ICE detention, with another death reported in June, the office said, while 33 deaths were registered in 2025.

That compares to 11 in 2024, the UN rights office said.

"I call for prompt, independent, impartial and effective investigations into all deaths in ICE custody," UN rights chief Volker Turk said in a statement, which also called for "prompt action to prevent further loss of life".

Turk said the lack of transparency and clarity surrounding the circumstances of the deaths undermines accountability.

"Those responsible for violations of the law must be held to account, and the rights of the victims' families to truth, justice and reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence must be upheld," he said.

Trump has made combating illegal immigration a top priority of his second term, with authorities rounding up thousands of people and expanding detention centres.

A joint report by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights said Thursday that the rate of people dying in ICE custody has reached its highest level in over a decade amid Trump's crackdown.

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A NewsGuard analysis found that in the five days since she posted the video, Loomer’s X account received 751,000 likes, comments, and reposts - compared to an average of 1.05 million likes, comments, and reposts during the previous three five-day periods. That represents a 28 percent drop in engagement.

It’s possible that the sudden drop reflected abandonment by a disgruntled base that Loomer has built over the years; as of June 23, she had 1.9 million followers on X. However, disaffected fans would not be expected to remain silent about her dramatic about-face and would therefore be expected to have more engagement with her account, not less. A more likely explanation for the rapid decline in engagement is that her previous engagement numbers were artificially pumped up by Russian bots, which could have been directed to abandon her after she turned against Russia.

The Pentagon says military boot camps are once again requiring flu vaccinations for all recruits

Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/pete-hegseth-pentagon-washington-joaquin-castro-flu-b3002553.html

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

Donald Trump had a team of recruiters roaming Trump Tower searching for women for him to have sex with, according to an explosive FBI interview buried in the Epstein files.

In a 2021 interview, a woman told agents she was approached in the 1990s as she sat in the public atrium at the base of the Fifth Avenue skyscraper in New York City.

Two men asked her if she wanted to meet Trump, the report stated, adding, “The man winked and said [Trump] could do whatever she liked.

“The man told her that if she did not want to meet Trump right then, she could go to a party. The man told her that she could bring a friend if the friend looked like her, but she could not bring a guy.

“The invitation was in or around 1990/1991 and the invitation had Jeffrey Epstein’s address on it.”

Speaking to CNN this week, Garcia said that the prison’s warden told the committee staff during the visit on Tuesday that Maxwell, “of the 600-plus women that are there, she is the only convicted sex offender at that facility, and he could not answer and does not know why she was actually moved there”.

Garcia also said that the staff were not granted access to Maxwell during the visit.

“Uniformly, by the way, all the staff came back with the same conclusion, which is that this is a park-like campus, and Ghislaine Maxwell should not be there,” he added.