U.S. News

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://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.”

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.

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.

When Stephen Miller offered his first big rollout of Donald Trump’s immigration agenda during the 2024 campaign, he demonstrated great enthusiasm for the idea of giant migrant camps. He gushed about creating “vast holding facilities” built on “open land,” which would enable Trump to escalate the volume and speed of deportations to unprecedented heights. Trembling with excitement, Miller vowed: “President Trump will do whatever it takes.”

But a funny thing has happened with Miller’s authoritarian fever dreams. As plans for these new detention facilities have become public, they’re encountering opposition in some very unlikely places. Notably, that includes regions that backed Trump in 2024.

Which in turn captures something essential about this moment: The public backlash unleashed by Trump’s immigration agenda runs far deeper than revulsion at imagery of ICE violence. It’s now seemingly coalescing against the goal of mass removals as a broader ideological project.

We’re now learning that this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to retrofit around two dozen vast new facilities. In keeping with Trump-Miller’s visions, ICE vows to detain an additional 80,000 people in them. Some will reportedly hold up to 10,000 detainees apiece. In other words, the Trump-Miller threat to create a system of new detention camps is just getting underway in earnest.

To put a ghoulish twist on the oft-discussed ideal of bureaucratic “capacity,” this will allow Trump and Miller to imprison and then deport vastly more people a whole lot faster. Right now, more than 70,000 migrants are languishing in detention—a record—but the administration is running out of space. Add another 80,000 beds, and it would supercharge expulsion capacity.

Yet these detention dreams are hitting stiff opposition. ICE wants to buy a warehouse in Virginia’s Hanover County, which went for Trump by 26 points in 2024 and combines rural territory with Richmond’s northern suburbs. Residents recently turned out in force and angrily condemned the proposed sale, with local reports suggesting only a “handful” backed it. The GOP-heavy Board of Supervisors opposed the transaction. The warehouse owner canceled the sale.

cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/39242993

Virginia’s then-Governor Glenn Youngkin rushed to assist President Trump’s deportation agenda last year, ordering the state agencies under his control to join ICE’s 287(g) program, which gave them the power to make civil immigration arrests. He also pushed local sheriffs and police chiefs to join the program and help round up immigrants.

But his successor, Democrat Abigail Spanberger, put an end to the state’s partnerships with this ICE program on Wednesday, fulfilling a campaign promise to roll back collaboration.

Within hours of taking office on Jan. 17, Spanberger signed an executive order that rescinded Youngkin’s order mandating that state agencies contract with ICE, but that alone left the agreements intact. She went a step further this week by actually pulling the plug and ordering four state agencies, including the state police and the Department of Corrections, to end their 287(g) agreements, terminating their role as force multipliers for federal immigration authorities.

Teen Vogue was swallowed whole by Vogue.com this week—and the entire Teen Vogue political desk was reportedly laid off near the end of the Monday workday, effectively immediately.

Posts abound on social media about the groundbreaking impact that Teen Vogue had on its readership—and about the incredible numbers the political desk consistently brought to the publication. Simply put, their regular political coverage has been a bright spot in a churning sea of bullshit since at least 2017. Now, it appears, those days are over.

It was never about the numbers, though. It never is. You can bring insane audience engagement, break records on views, court new eyeballs to your verticals, shape the national and international conversation with accurate, empathetic, even funny coverage of the important topics that are dominating our minds these days; get new laws passed by exposing the ill-treatment of regular-ass people, etc., etc., etc.; you can win awards—Pulitzers, Murrow Awards, Emmys—champion new ways of Doing The News, including maybe even swallowing your pride and misgivings about giving up editorial control to a goddamn AI fact-checker, and on and on and on—and they will still nuke your job and your entire desk in the name of capital consolidation and kissing the fucking ring.

I'd not have thought to seek out Teen Vogue as a news source, but their political coverage was outstanding. I got the impression that it was great reporters and writers needing to collect a few bylines to get to the big leagues.

It's a loss, but that's basically every day in American journalism.

Jesus fucking Christ. There is no end to MAGA's grievances.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has launched an investigation into Nike over allegations that the sports giant discriminated against white employees and job applicants.

The federal agency is demanding that Nike turn over information related to the allegations, including the company’s “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion-related 2025 Targets and other DEI-related objectives”, it announced on Wednesday.

Nike, which described the escalation as “surprising and unusual”, insisted that it adheres to “all applicable laws” on discrimination. It comes amid a broader crackdown by Donald Trump’s administration on diversity initiatives, which he has repeatedly decried as “radical”.

“When there are compelling indications, including corporate admissions in extensive public materials, that an employer’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion-related programs may violate federal prohibitions against race discrimination or other forms of unlawful discrimination, the EEOC will take all necessary steps – including subpoena enforcement actions – to ensure the opportunity to fully and comprehensively investigate,” said EEOC chair, Andrea Lucas.

archive link

Roughly one in four Minnesota voters either participated in the January 23 day of shutdown and protest against ICE, or have a loved one who did, according to new polling data.

Of those participants, 38% percent stayed off the job, either because they did not go to work, or because their employer closed for the day of action. The data does not distinguish between those who made the choice to stay out, and those who saw their workplaces close. (Some workplaces were shuttered that day due to worker pressure.)

The poll was commissioned by the May Day Strong coalition, a network of local and national unions and community organizations, and was conducted by polling firm Blue Rose Research.

McKenzie Wilson, director of external affairs and message strategy at the firm, explained that researchers surveyed 1,940 Minnesotans who voted in 2024. The polling data can be viewed here.

I don't think this falls fully under opinion, given the sourcing, but as the writer is a Post emigre, it's not completely unbiased. Still, it's neither politics nor humanities and cultures, so absent a journalism community that nobody asked for, I'm placing this here.

I am, of course, myself, a biased opinion. I changed the front page in 2003 on a visit for the night, and my goal was to work there, having been told over drinks with the assistant manager for news, Ed, at a conference eight months prior that I was "Post material, but [I] need to get the immature shit out of my system first."

After we finished our beers, I piled into a car with Ed and the other two Post staffers in attendance to go from our hotel to dinner. A bottle of wine was ordered, we were free to get whatever we wanted, and everything went on the company credit card.

I was literally wined and dined by The Washington Post at 23. And got to hear them bitch about Bob Woodward being on too long of a leash by that time.

So yes, this is personal. But it appears I avoided an eventual death spiral by choosing alternative death spirals.

We’re witnessing a murder.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special. The Post has survived for nearly 150 years, evolving from a hometown family newspaper into an indispensable national institution, and a pillar of the democratic system. But if Bezos and Lewis continue down their present path, it may not survive much longer.

Over recent years, they’ve repeatedly cut the newsroom—killing its Sunday magazine, reducing the staff by several hundred, nearly halving the Metro desk—without acknowledging the poor business decisions that led to this moment or providing a clear vision for the future. This morning, executive editor Matt Murray and HR chief Wayne Connell told the newsroom staff in an early-morning virtual meeting that it was closing the Sports department and Books section, ending its signature podcast, and dramatically gutting the International and Metro departments, in addition to staggering cuts across all teams. Post leadership—which did not even have the courage to address their staff in person—then left everyone to wait for an email letting them know whether or not they had a job. (Lewis, who has already earned a reputation for showing up late to work when he showed up at all, did not join the Zoom.)

The Post may yet rise, but this will be their enduring legacy.

[...]at most universities, grad students play a crucial role within the research system: They perform the frontline work of science. Faculty members get federal grants, which are used to pay for doctoral students, who in turn serve as laboratory staff. Professors’ feeling of worth and productivity may be a function of how many doctoral students they advise—because that helps determine how many studies they can carry out, how many papers they can publish, and what sorts of new grants they can win to keep the process going. This endless competition is a major feature of the modern university—whether it’s an elite private school (such as Princeton or Duke), a public flagship (such as the University of Michigan or UC Berkeley), or a land-grant institution (such as Texas A&M or Virginia Tech).

A school like Amherst, though, which has no doctoral programs whatsoever, is free of the rat race of research productivity and expenditure. As these colleges like to point out, that’s good for undergrads, because faculty must focus on education. The lack of doctoral research programs also makes the schools more resilient to bullying from Washington. In 2025, the Trump administration made a point of suspending hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants to Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, and other schools. It also threatened to impose a tighter limit on what are called “indirect costs”—the portion of each grant that covers all the broader costs of running a large enterprise for research. With so much funding endangered all at once, targeted universities had little choice but to negotiate—which is to say, to accede to some portion of the Trump administration’s demands.

At Amherst, this level of pressure simply couldn’t be applied. In 2024, the college took in around $3 million from all of its federal research grants put together. (For comparison: Washington University in St. Louis, where I teach, received $731 million that year from the National Institutes of Health alone.) Christopher Durr, an associate professor of chemistry, told me that his research is “designed to be done mostly in-house,” by which he means without external funding, and with the help of undergraduates. He studies biodegradable plastics in a lab that is mostly funded by the college itself, and he gets no research money at all from the federal government. Settling into an Eames-style chair in his office, I asked him what indirect-cost rate Amherst applies to its grants, and he said he didn’t know—an innocence that would be unheard of at a research university.

The research that can be done at a small liberal-arts college, with its more modest labs and equipment, is necessarily constrained. Even with Amherst’s generosity, Durr said “there’s a limit” to how far he can push his research. In truth, the most important scientific and medical discoveries aren’t likely to be made at a place like Amherst or Smith, the nearby women’s college, which tend to pay their own students to work on faculty research. But this need not be a limitation for undergraduates. The conditions that produce landmark discoveries are not necessarily the same ones that produce a serious education.

The Trump administration has turned to an unusual weapon in its attempt to resurrect coal mining – a cartoon lump of coal, complete with giant eyes and yellow mining garb, called “Coalie”.

The administration’s new mascot, kitted out with a helmet, boots and gloves, was introduced in a seemingly artificial intelligence-generated picture posted online by Doug Burgum, Donald Trump’s interior secretary. “Mine, Baby, Mine!” Burgum wrote on X, adding that Coalie will act as a “spokesperson” for Trump’s “American Energy Dominance Agenda”.

Climate activists criticized the latest attempt by the administration to boost the image of the dirtiest fossil fuel despite its impacts on the planet and public health, with one critic describing it as “one of the most heinous ways to produce energy that our world has ever seen.”

Coalie, whose large eyes and grin appears to invoke a Japanese style of cuteness used in toys and animated characters, is to be an ambassador for the office of surface mining reclamation and enforcement (OSMRE), the US government agency responsible for regulating coalmines.

Best cartoon mascot since Joe Camel.