3 Sep 2025

Time and time again, Jeffries has refused to endorse his own party’s official candidate for mayor in his own city, two months after Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York by double digits – including Jeffries’ own congressional district by eight points.

This is the same Democratic party leader who has insisted in the past that progressives should “vote BLUE (no matter who)”. But centrists? Apparently, they’re under no such obligation.

Jeffries is not alone in his brazen hypocrisy. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader who represents the state of New York and lives in the city of New York, has also refused to endorse his own party’s official candidate for mayor of New York.

the full interview transcript is here (archive)

NEW YORK (AP) — Kraft Heinz is splitting into two companies a decade after a merger of the brands created one of the biggest food manufacturers on the planet.

One of the companies, currently called Global Taste Elevation Co., will include brands such as Heinz, Philadelphia cream cheese and Kraft Mac & Cheese, Kraft Heinz said Tuesday. The other, currently called North American Grocery Co., will include slower-selling brands like Maxwell House, Oscar Mayer, Kraft Singles and Lunchables. The official names of the two companies will be released later.

Kraft Heinz said in May that it was conducting a strategic review of the company, signaling a potential split. It expects the transaction to close in the second half of 2026.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sometimes it feels like barely an hour can go by without hearing from President Donald Trump. So when he didn’t appear for one day, then two, then three, speculation started to swirl online about his health.

Not even a few glimpses of the president visiting his golf course over the weekend were enough to stanch the social media rumor mill fueled by political opponents. Trump was asked directly about it Tuesday at his first public event in a week.

“How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?” asked Fox News’ Peter Doocy. “Did you see that?”

“No,” the 79-year-old Trump responded flatly. The senators and administration officials gathered around him for the Space Command headquarters announcement shifted their weight and smiled.

The White House has said Trump was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, which means veins in the legs can’t properly carry blood back to the heart, causing it to pool in the lower legs. It’s a fairly common condition for older adults.

As far as the bruising, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it’s from “frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin,” which Trump takes regularly to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke.

The 33,000 pages included years-old court filings related to Epstein and his former girlfriend and associate Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as what appears to be bodycam footage from police searches and police interviews.

The files appear to contain information that is already public knowledge.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/35604047

Anna Betts
Tue 2 Sep 2025 16.33 EDT

Just more than four months after being arrested, detained and nearly deported by the Trump administration for his activism, Mohsen Mahdawi, the 34-year-old Palestinian student and US permanent resident, returned to Columbia University on Tuesday and vowed to continue speaking out.

“They have failed to silence me, and in fact, now I am more outspoken than before, and I will continue to work for peace and justice. I do this work not for myself alone – I do this for the future of children, whether they are Palestinians or Israelis,” he told the Guardian on Tuesday in his first interview since stepping back on to campus to begin his graduate studies.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/35600642

By MEE staff
Published date: 2 September 2025

A little over a year ago, Drin Shapiro was a student programme assistant at the University of Michigan's (UM) English Language Institute, and a student in his final year of a bachelor's degree in history.

Since then, he has faced criminal charges brought by the state's attorney general, lost his on-campus job, spent time behind bars, and, as of last month, was still being disciplined by the university despite having graduated in May.

All of this was because he took part in a student encampment against the war on Gaza on 21 May 2024. Shapiro was arrested during the police raid of the encampment and was later released on bond.

Wildfire veterans say it’s nearly unprecedented for federal agents to conduct immigration enforcement near the front lines of an active wildfire. Some fear the raid could reverberate throughout the wildland fire community, making it more difficult to fully staff the crews putting out blazes at the peak of fire season in the West.

“There’s a lot of brown bodies out there on the fire line,” said Bobbie Scopa, who had a 45-year career as a firefighter and now serves as executive secretary with Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of wildfire professionals.

“They were told they were going to cut firewood,” said Scott Polhamus, secretary of the Organization of Fire Contractors and Affiliates, a nonprofit industry group. “The people that were supposed to meet them never showed up, and eventually immigration showed up instead.”

Many contract crews rely heavily on immigrant labor.

“[Immigrants] make up a huge portion of forestry and fire, they’re an integral part of this industry,” Polhamus said.

Now, wildland fire veterans fear that the immigrants who have been protecting communities from fires could make fire camps a target for immigration officials who are trying to meet deportation quotas. And more high-profile raids on fire crews could cause many in the workforce to reconsider their profession.

When the city of Seattle contacted Fusus, one of the nation’s leading police surveillance tech companies, in 2023, a company exec did more than just send over a brochure — he offered to connect Seattle with a “peer” in Atlanta’s police department who was familiar with the company’s products.

Seattle was hoping that Fusus’s Connect system — which ties together license plate readers, public cameras, and privately owned cameras into a single surveillance platform — could help them combat retail theft. The next year, after a Seattle Police Department project manager visited Atlanta to see the system in action, Fusus sealed the deal: Seattle signed a contract for “Connect Seattle” at an estimated price tag of $1.8 million.

But what Gross-Shader and the rest of her colleagues in Seattle didn’t know — until The Intercept called with questions — was that Freeman was wearing two hats the whole time they were talking: The APD official was not only a consultant for Fusus, he was also a board member and owner of a small share of the company that could be worth millions.

An Intercept investigation, based on public documents and a City of Atlanta ethics investigation, has found that Freeman didn’t disclose his role with Fusus in conversations with at least 14 other cities during a period spanning at least two years, and at least nine of those cities went on to make or amend millions of dollars worth of contracts with Axon Fusus — the company’s name since Axon, the company behind the Taser and a major vendor of bodyworn cameras and other police surveillance systems, purchased Fusus last year.

A little over a year ago, Drin Shapiro was a student programme assistant at the University of Michigan's (UM) English Language Institute, and a student in his final year of a bachelor's degree in history. Since then, he has faced criminal charges brought by the state's attorney general, lost his on-campus job, spent time behind bars, and, as of last month, was still being disciplined by the university despite having graduated in May.

All of this was because he took part in a student encampment against the war on Gaza on 21 May 2024. Shapiro was arrested during the police raid of the encampment and was later released on bond. Attorney general Dana Nessel, a vocal supporter of Israel, charged Shapiro in September 2024, but ultimately dropped the criminal charges in May 2025 because she said it was no longer a good use of time and resources.

But while Shapiro was out on bond, the university famously hired - and later fired - private investigators to track his movements, as well as other students rounded up during the anti-war protests.

A judge has ruled the Trump administration’s use of national guard troops during southern California immigration enforcement protests is illegal.

Judge Charles Breyer ruled Tuesday that Donald Trump’s administration violated federal law by sending troops to accompany federal agents on immigration raids. The judge did not require the remaining troops withdrawn, however.

California sued, saying the troops sent to Los Angeles over the summer were violating a law that prohibits military enforcement of domestic laws. Lawyers for the Republican administration have argued the Posse Comitatus Act doesn’t apply because the troops were protecting federal officers not enforcing laws.

At Saturday’s event, attended by a few hundred — with perhaps as many protesters waving signs and shouting beyond a fence line — Feucht led a band in Christian rock songs, interspersed with speeches about saving Seattle.

Outside the rally — which was sparsely attended compared with the large park space that had been fenced off for it — protesters blew airhorns and kazoos and chanted through bullhorns that the rally’s conservative Christian message was not welcome in Seattle.

Some waved pride flags and carried signs saying “conversion therapy for transphobes,” “protect trans youth” and “Jesus taught love, not hate.”

A couple also held up signs at the rear of the concert crowd accusing Feucht of profiteering off his rallies. Whistleblowers who used to work for his ministries have publicly accused him of mismanaging finances and hiding how he has spent millions of dollars, according to Christianity Today.

The US Ministry of Defence signed a contract with General Dynamics Mission Systems for $10 million for maintenance and modernization of the combat control system of ballistic missiles "Trident II" on strategic nuclear submarines of the SSBN type. These boats are on combat duty in the US Navy and the UK.

Work under the contract will last until the end of September 2025 and will be conducted in Massachusetts. This will directly affect the schedule of operation and combat duty of British submarines.

One of the British SSBNs will be forced to undergo maintenance in the United States, which will temporarily reduce the number of submarines available for crew training. Most likely, the combat duty of British submarines will be organized according to the scheme: one on patrol, the second on repairs in the States, and the third on exercises at the home base.

This approach has a downside: such a load could seriously reduce the operational readiness of the British submarine fleet and weaken NATO's nuclear deterrence. This could pose a significant challenge to the defense of the North Atlantic Alliance.

The United States hopes to use machine learning to create and distribute propaganda overseas in a bid to “influence foreign target audiences” and “suppress dissenting arguments,” according to a U.S. Special Operations Command document reviewed by The Intercept.

The document, a sort of special operations wishlist of near-future military technology, reveals new details about a broad variety of capabilities that SOCOM hopes to purchase within the next five to seven years, including state-of-the-art cameras, sensors, directed energy weapons, and other gadgets to help operators find and kill their quarry. Among the tech it wants to procure is machine-learning software that can be used for information warfare.

To bolster its “Advanced Technology Augmentations to Military Information Support Operations” — also known as MISO — SOCOM is looking for a contractor that can “Provide a capability leveraging agentic Al or multi‐LLM agent systems with specialized roles to increase the scale of influence operations.”

A US judge on Sunday ordered an emergency halt to a plan by the Trump administration to deport a group of nearly 700 unaccompanied Guatemalan children back to their home country after immigrant advocates lawyers called the plan “illegal”.

Attorneys for 10 Guatemalan minors, ages 10 to 17, said in court papers filed late on Saturday that there were reports that planes were set to take off within hours for the Central American country.

But a federal judge in Washington said those children couldn’t be deported for at least 14 days, and after a hastily scheduled hearing on Sunday, she enforced that they needed to be taken off the planes and back to the Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities while the legal process plays out.

August 31, 2025 ~4:20pm

The Trump administration has enacted a sweeping suspension of approvals of almost all types of visitor visas for Palestinian passport holders, according to American officials.

The new policy goes beyond the restrictions announced by U.S. officials recently on visitor visas for Palestinians from Gaza. Last week, the State Department also said it would not issue visas to Palestinian officials to attend the annual U.N. General Assembly in New York next month.

Rudy Giuliani is recovering from a fractured vertebra and other injuries following a car crash in New Hampshire, a spokesperson for the former New York City mayor said Sunday.

Giuliani’s vehicle was struck from behind while traveling on a highway Saturday evening, according to a statement posted on X by Michael Ragusa, Giuliani’s head of security. “He sustained injuries but is in good spirits and recovering tremendously,” Ragusa said, adding: “This was not a targeted attack.”

Giuliani, 81, was taken to a nearby trauma center and was being treated for injuries including “a fractured thoracic vertebrae, multiple lacerations and contusions, as well as injuries to his left arm and lower leg,” according to Ragusa.