U.S. News

Once upon a time, in the snowy mountains of remote south-west Montana, there was a thing called “five-dollar day”.

Even then, $5 bought something rare: a full day of skiing. The deal was tempting enough to inspire my friends and me to drive 44 miles (70km) from Bozeman along a narrow, winding highway – toward what would emerge as one of the most expansive and epic ski locales in the US: Big Sky Resort.

If you want to ski the same slopes this weekend, it would cost you $285 (though prices change regularly because of the resort’s “dynamic pricing” model). Prices at other resorts across the US have similar astronomical prices. A ski pass in Vail, Colorado, this weekend would set you back $338 and one in Park City, Utah, $333.

This, of course, does not include transportation, equipment rentals, lodging, lessons, parking and on-mountain meals and beverages.

All this is to say that, in the last decades, skiing in most of the Rockies has fractured into vastly different worlds. To understand how that evolved, you have to look not just at prices – but also at skiing culture.

I took my last ski vacation with friends in college in 1999. We stayed at a hostel and were able to afford the trip on student-newspaper wages. I can't imagine how much the same trip would cost today ... likely not a lot of college kids doing such trips now.

On January 30, educators and children from the Twin Cities demonstrated in front of the governor’s mansion in St. Paul, Minn., led by rank-and-file members of Minneapolis Federation of Educators (MFE) Local 59, to demand that Gov. Tim Walz enact a statewide eviction moratorium. On the same day, a press conference was held in front of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority (MPHA) building in downtown Minneapolis, calling on the agency to pause evictions proceedings while ICE activity continues across the state.

Activists say that the federal deployment of masked, armed federal agents to the state has made the eviction moratorium urgent. While ICE officials have announced a drawback of ICE activity in Minnesota, some argue that the economic damage has already been done, and that many will be scrambling to keep up with rent payments in the coming months.

Executive Towers boasts a gym, a swimming pool and heated underground parking. Built in 1963 by the country’s top contructor of luxury apartments, its excellent access to Ohio’s downtown Toledo and the neighborhoods beyond made it an attractive place to live.

It was for all of these reasons and more that Kwiona Sprott moved into Executive Towers with her teenage son last July, paying $851 a month.

“I was excited to move here because they said they had a gym, a swimming pool, laundry, a vending machine room; it’s less than a mile from my job and the school my son plays football for,” she says.

But today, it’s fallen far from grace. The balconies across its 12 stories are rusted orange, as is much of the side of the entryway facade. Its parking lot is a sea of ice and crushed snow days after a major snowstorm.

Inside, it’s worse.

“The US government must provide detainees at a California immigration detention center with adequate medical care, access to attorneys, and “temperature-appropriate clothing and blankets”, a federal judge has ruled. The order came on Tuesday in response to a lawsuit filed by seven people detained at the California City detention facility in November, alleging they had been denied essential medications, sufficient food and sanitary housing conditions.

“Residents at the facility had previously described the center as a “torture chamber” and “hell on earth”

“”Most of the people held in California City have no criminal record whatsoever, and yet the government treats them worse than the highest-security criminals,” said Cody Harris, a partner at Keker, Van Nest & Peters, the law firm representing the plaintiffs alongside the Prison Law Office and the ACLU National Prison Project.”

Nothing to see here, folks.

Gallup, the public opinion polling agency, will stop tracking presidential approval ratings after almost nine decades, a spokesperson confirmed.

As Donald Trump continues to closely scrutinize polling of his popularity, and publicly lambast media companies that report on unfavorable numbers, Gallup insisted its decision was “solely based on Gallup’s research goals and priorities”.

The company said on Wednesday that it would stop measuring the favorability rating of individual political figures, which “reflects an evolution in how Gallup focuses its public research and thought leadership”, after 88 years.

“Our commitment is to long-term, methodologically sound research on issues and conditions that shape people’s lives,” a spokesperson for the agency told multiple media outlets. “That work will continue through the Gallup Poll Social Series, the Gallup Quarterly Business Review, the World Poll, and our portfolio of US and global research.”

“Senate Democrats have reportedly begun tentative negotiations with the White House just days before funding for the Homeland Security Department is set to expire at midnight on Friday, threatening another partial government shutdown. Joaquin Castro, a Democratic congressmember from Texas, visited the family immigration detention center in Dilley where 5-year-old Liam Ramos was held. Kids have been “traumatized by the experience,” says Castro.” “

Even I print whistles now. It’s the first thing I do each morning after dropping kids at school, and the very last before bed. Usually, I squeeze in a hundred more after dinner.

I print whistles because reality still matters; whistles get neighbors to come running, make sure enough people are recording, so when the regime pretends there’s only one camera angle of Renee Good’s death, we know the truth.

I also make whistles because it’s easy. You can literally do it in your sleep. I’ve made over 12,000 whistles since January 15th with three printers and almost zero optimization. I’ll harvest 300 of them tomorrow morning, 300 in the late afternoon, and another 100 in the evening before I do it all again.

Archive: http://archive.today/d51vy

“The Super Bowl half-time show is inherently about compromise. But as he kicked off the Benito Bowl, somehow, Benito’s biggest compromise seemed to be the amount of words bleeped out of his verse.

“Benito delivered on his music’s promise of displaying the reality of Puerto Rican life: in a stunning performance of El Apagón, Benito runs the light-blue flag of Puerto Rican independence across the field, as performers on power lines evoke the frequent blackouts on the island as a result of its decaying energy infrastructure. This somber reminder shifts quickly to the jubilant call-and-response of Café Con Ron as Benito is joined by Los Pleneros de la Cresta.

“A lot of violent realities for our communities continue outside. The Super Bowl will never televise the revolution. But this year, Benito reminded so many of us of the love, the community and the absolute joy that we create together every day in spite of everything else.”

Shit. That was a really valuable resource in the newsroom.

For over half a century, the CIA’s World Factbook has been one of the most quietly useful things the federal government has ever produced. A comprehensive, regularly updated, freely available reference on every country in the world—population stats, government structures, economic data, geography, the works. It was the kind of thing that made you think, “Okay, at least some tax dollars are going toward something genuinely helpful.”

And then, this week, the CIA just… deleted it. No warning. No explanation. Every single page now redirects to a brief announcement that the Factbook has “sunset.” That’s it. That’s all you get.

Simon Willison, who first spotted the disappearance, didn’t mince words about what happened:

In a bizarre act of cultural vandalism they’ve not just removed the entire site (including the archives of previous versions) but they’ve also set every single page to be a 302 redirect to their closure announcement.

The Factbook has been released into the public domain since the start. There’s no reason not to continue to serve archived versions – a banner at the top of the page saying it’s no longer maintained would be much better than removing all of that valuable content entirely.

“Hundreds of Seattle-area students walked out of school Thursday and gathered at Seattle City Hall downtown to protest the tactics of federal immigration enforcement officers across the country…

“Thursday’s protests included walkouts in Baltimore, Austin, Dallas, and York, Pennsylvania.

““It's the threat and the fear of intimidation while you're trying to pursue your education, which to me, is really horrible,” [Amara Aalfs-Weinbaum, a senior at Lakeside Upper School,…an organizer of “ICE Out of Schools,” which led the protest] said. “Using intimidation tactics and fear and literally abducting children and pulling them into cars on their way to school is a violation of our human rights. That's something that everyone should be standing up for.””

cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/39335880

In a stunning development, the Department of Homeland Security expedited its asylum hearing for five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his family to Friday morning, meaning it's possible they could be deported as soon as today.

Ramos and his father had just returned home to their Minneapolis suburb last week after being held in a Texas detention facility. They were locked in there for 12 days, with Ramos' health deteriorating, despite DHS providing no evidence of Ramos’ father being in the country illegally or having a criminal record.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who helped bring Ramos back home from ICE detention last week, said the preschooler “was traumatized” at the facility and now faces being shipped out of the country.

cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/39332810

State election officials were left unnerved after being summoned by the FBI to a mysterious conference to discuss “preparations” for this year’s midterm elections, which President Donald Trump has recently called for Republicans to “nationalize” in violation of the Constitution.

On Tuesday, election officials in all 50 states received an email from Kellie M. Hardiman, who identified herself as an “FBI Election Executive.”

Hardiman said the officials were invited to a call on February 25 with “your election partners” at the FBI, the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the US Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), and the Election Assistance Commission (EAC).

President Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, then deleted it after an unusually strong outcry from members of his own party.

The clip, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and was posted by Mr. Trump late Thursday night. It was the latest in a pattern by Mr. Trump of promoting offensive imagery and slurs about Black Americans and others.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/35165751

Cable news people call them “prison camps” or “Trump prison camps,” but look in any dictionary: prisons are where people convicted of crimes are held. As Merriam-Webster notes, a prison is:

“[A]n institution for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes.”

But what do you call a place where people who’ve committed no criminal offense (immigration violations are civil, not criminal, infractions)? The fine dictionary people at Merriam-Webster note the proper term is “concentration camp”:

“[A] place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.”

The Oregon supreme court has ruled that a large number of criminal cases across the state must be dismissed due to a severe shortage of public defenders, a major decision that attorneys say will impact more than 1,400 pending cases.

The problem has been years in the making and has become a significant constitutional crisis, as people charged with crimes are routinely unable to fight their cases as they wait weeks, months or sometimes years for the state to appoint them lawyers. The attorney shortage – due in part to the increasing difficulty of recruiting attorneys for the low-salary, high-caseload jobs – has meant that people have had cases hanging over them for extended periods of time, impacting their housing, employment and families, advocates say.

Oregon’s highest court ruled on Thursday that dismissals are required if the state has failed to provide counsel within 60 days after arraignment for a misdemeanor and within 90 days for a felony. State data on unrepresented defendants showed that as of this week, more than 1,400 active cases fall in that category, including hundreds of people who have been waiting more than a year for an attorney.

The ruling dictates that the cases be dismissed without prejudice, meaning prosecutors can re-file charges. The court said charges can be brought again “when the state is able to provide the counsel to which a defendant is entitled”. The ruling also said dismissal isn’t required if during the 60- or 90-day period the defendant failed to appear in court for a required hearing.

On the morning of 21 January, Israeli authorities left eight Palestinian men at a West Bank checkpoint. Disoriented and cold, they were dressed in prison-issued tracksuits and carried their few belongings in plastic bags.

Hours earlier, they had been sitting with their wrists and ankles shackled on the plush leather seats of a private jet owned by the Florida property tycoon Gil Dezer, a longtime business partner of Donald Trump.

Dezer is also a Trump donor, friend of Donald Trump Jr and member of the Miami branch of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.

His sleek Gulfstream jet – which he has called “my little rocket ship” – was used to transport the men from an airport near a notorious removal centre in Arizona to Tel Aviv. The jet made three refuelling stops en route: in New Jersey, Ireland and Bulgaria.

A Guardian investigation has established the flight was part of a secretive and politically sensitive US government operation to deport Palestinians arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Israeli-occupied West Bank.