United States | News & Politics

Ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to the White House, Human Rights Watch has urged the US to cut off military support to Israel.

"If President Trump wants to break with the Biden administration's complicity in the Israeli government's atrocities in Gaza, he should immediately suspend arms transfers to Israel," said Bruno Stagno, HRW’s chief advocacy officer.

"Trump said the hostilities in Gaza were ‘not our war’ but 'their war,' but unless the US ends its military support, Gaza will also be Trump’s war."

Warmongering senator Tom Cotton made an interesting comment during the confirmation hearings for Tulsi Gabbard the other day which acknowledged the mostly unspoken truth that the US government cares less about whether the nations it partners with are free and democratic than how well they serve US interests.

“In a fallen world, we have to take our friends where we find them,” Cotton said. “No question, stable democracies make the most stable friends, but what matters in the end is less whether a country is democratic or non-democratic, and more whether the country is pro-American or anti-American.”

“I’ll confess that those views may be somewhat unconventional, but look at where conventional thinking has got us,” Cotton added.

During a panel discussion on Friday’s Real Time, Maher brought up China’s advancements in AI, noting the China startup DeepSeek has emerged as a major rival to US companies recently. The comedian compared the race between the United States and China on the technology front to the space race between the US and Russia.

Maher declared China is “the new Islam” in that people are too hesitant to criticize out of fear for how they’ll be perceived.

“China’s like the new Islam. We can’t be honest about them because they’re not white,” he said. “And China, okay, I’m sorry, kids, they do some bad things, China. And we should just recognize that.”

Hey everyone. I was the Director of Video Production for the Gravel Institute until it folded back in 2022.

Several Gravel Institute colleagues and I have been hard at work developing a new series of videos with Jacobin Magazine, and our first new video has released today, featuring OG Gravel presenter and brilliant historian Matt Karp.

Things are pretty terrible in America (and the world at large), but they don’t have to be.

@usa Mexican president reveals U.S. concession Trump failed to mention as tariffs paused

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-mexico-guns/

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo issued a "read-out" of her call with U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday — but her list of what the two leaders agreed to is different from his in one major respect: guns.

Washington Post staff writer Meryl Kornfield pointed out on X that in Sheinbaum's list of things the U.S. had committed to do is stop the flow of guns into Mexico.

I don't underestimate our Dear Leader's ability to do it badly, but isn't a sovereign wealth fund typically a good idea?

Warmongering senator Tom Cotton made an interesting comment during the confirmation hearings for Tulsi Gabbard the other day which acknowledged the mostly unspoken truth that the US government cares less about whether the nations it partners with are free and democratic than how well they serve US interests.

“In a fallen world, we have to take our friends where we find them,” Cotton said. “No question, stable democracies make the most stable friends, but what matters in the end is less whether a country is democratic or non-democratic, and more whether the country is pro-American or anti-American.”

“I’ll confess that those views may be somewhat unconventional, but look at where conventional thinking has got us,” Cotton added. Far from being unconventional, the senator from Arkansas is simply stating out loud the standard foreign policy orthodoxy which all Beltway swamp monsters share but tend to keep between themselves.

Trump has continued to push for Jordan and Egypt to take in Palestinians in facilitation of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and is adamant that both nations will eventually accede to his demands. The president told the press on Thursday that despite Jordan and Egypt’s rejection of Trump’s plans, “They will do it. They will do it. They’re gonna do it, okay? We do a lot for them, and they’re gonna do it.”

Biden destroying Gaza and then Trump working to ethnically cleanse it is such a classic case of the jab-cross combo that Democrats and Republicans employ to advance the agendas of the empire. They don’t just do evil things, they set up the other party to inflict new evils.

Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (TX-35) issued the below statement on reports of Elon Musk and his associates gaining access to the Treasury’s federal payment system.

"Donald Trump has given unprecedented power over the federal government to an unelected, unaccountable billionaire. Elon Musk's treasury raid jeopardizes Americans' sensitive information, tax returns, and Medicare and Social Security.

"Progressives will fight this in the courts, on the House floor, and with every tool at our disposal until Elon Musk is out of our government and no longer putting taxpayers, the sick, and the elderly at risk."

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and unelected adviser to President Donald Trump, is asserting control over much of the federal bureaucracy and sensitive government computer systems despite lacking clear authority.

The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department was pushed out after refusing to hand Musk’s team the keys to the government’s entire payment system and the $6 trillion in payments the system processes annually, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and Medicare benefits. Musk and his team have also seized control at the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, key institutions that function as the central nervous system of the U.S. government.

“In any other situation, this would be called state capture, and people around the world would be condemning it,” says Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, who writes in a new blog post that Elon Musk is staging a coup.

“We talk about America’s system of government,” New York Times columnist Ezra Klein said after Trump’s inauguration, “as if it is a solid thing, bound by the constitution and institutions the way a belt cinches around the waist. But it’s really just a pile of norms in a trenchcoat. Knock the norms down and everything changes.” Trump’s very purpose is to knock them down, but in some ways, he is only accelerating a process that had already started.

Take Trump’s order to construct a migrant detention centre in Guantánamo Bay – a space that has for years operated outside international law despite outcries and appeals for closure. Hundreds of prisoners were kept there under military law, often following rendition, disappearance and torture at CIA black sites. Trump’s proposal to detain tens of thousands of migrants there is an outrageous move, but it is not an aberration. He is building, literally, on what came before him. Long before the second Bush administration used the facility to hold and abuse nearly 800 Muslim men and boys as part of its ‘war on terror’. Last year, the Biden administration awarded a private contractor over $160m (£130m) to run the facility.

The same goes for Trump’s withdrawal from international organisations such as the World Health Organization and his imperial adventurism when it comes to foreign policy. The US has a long record, under much more gentlemanly presidents, of breaking international law, insulting international institutions and embarking on unilateral campaigns licensed by its superpower status. Over two decades ago, Congress passed a law authorising “all means necessary and appropriate” to “free US or allied personnel detained by or on behalf of the International Criminal Court”.

The danger comes from assuming that Trumpism comes out of nowhere. In fact, it comes from many sources, but one of them is his predecessors’ creation of a political system in which serial breaches are seen as acceptable because they are done by the right people. Well, to millions of people, Trump is the right person.

I was about to post this in other communities that deal more directly with this, but this needs to be heard by America at large.

If you've ever wanted to watch a genuinely educational, profound, personal and touching video on YouTube, this is the one.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/25563634

Kavitha Chekuru
Feb 03, 2025

from #DropSiteNews
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"Three students from Columbia University filed a lawsuit on Monday morning against the school administration for their suspensions related to their pro-Palestine activism on campus. Among the claims in the complaint, the students state that the university violated its own policies during the disciplinary process, that the university targeted the students for their views, and that it violated New York’s landlord tenant laws when it evicted the students from university housing."

Reuters: CDC orders pullback of new scientific papers involving its researchers, source says:

The withdrawal order, first reported by the Inside Medicine Substack, goes beyond an initial directive on Jan. 21 that federal health agencies pause their own public communications to allow for a review of those materials by Trump appointees.

Inside Medicine published a list of specific words targeted for removal in the communications review, including gender, transgender, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) and nonbinary. The federal official said that such a list went out from CDC to its divisions.

The Friday withdrawal order involves all manuscripts written or co-written by CDC scientists. If CDC scientists are co-authors on a paper that originated outside of the agency, they are asked to take their names off the paper, the official said.

The engineers are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. None have responded to requests for comment from WIRED. Representatives from OPM, GSA, and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.