FirstCircle

Congressional Republicans are reportedly trying to insert anti-abortion language into government funding legislation as the shutdown continues, with the GOP and President Donald Trump digging in against a clean extension of Affordable Care Act tax credits as insurance premiums surge.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, sounded the alarm on Saturday about what he characterized as the latest Republican sneak attack on reproductive rights.

Wyden said Saturday—which marked day 39 of the shutdown—that “Republicans are spinning a tale that the government is funding abortion.”

“It’s not,” Wyden continued. “What Republicans are talking about putting on the table amounts to nothing short of a backdoor national abortion ban. Under this plan, Republicans could weaponize federal funding for any organization that does anything related to women’s reproductive healthcare. They could also weaponize the tax code by revoking non-profit status for these organizations.”

“The possibilities are endless, but the results are the same: a complete and total restriction on abortion, courtesy of Republicans,” the senator added. “Trump said he’d leave abortion care up to the states. Well, this latest scheme makes it crystal clear: A de facto nationwide abortion ban has been his plan all along.”

Trade deals many had hoped would quickly emerge after President Donald Trump slapped tariffs on some of the United States’ biggest agricultural customers haven’t come. A farm bailout is no sure thing on Capitol Hill. And farmers — many of whom voted for Trump — say time is running out.

“It just seems like things have stalled all summer long,” said Brian Warpup, who grows corn and soybeans on his 3,900-acre farm in northeastern Indiana. “We’re always hopeful that those negotiations are moving forward, but yet with harvest here, patience may be running thin.”

Across the US, farmers describe increasingly dire circumstances stemming from a confluence of factors — trade wars, Trump’s immigration crackdown, inflation and high interest rates.

Though the challenges vary in different parts of the country, farmers in some cases, particularly on the West Coast, are struggling to find labor to pick their harvest. Others, especially in the Midwest, said they can’t sell what they’ve produced. And many are scrambling to find storage.

“This is not your ordinary farm crisis. We call it ‘farmageddon,’ and it’s really a tough time,”

With cancellations surging, many subscribers reported technical issues. On Reddit’s r/Fauxmoi, one post read, “The page to cancel your Hulu/Disney+ subscription keeps crashing.”

Another added, “Already cancelled my Disney subscription,” while others said they faced looping logins and stalled forms. These firsthand accounts suggest Disney’s systems struggled under the unusual traffic volume.

Russia attacked the government district of Kyiv with 805 Iranian-designed drones, killing at least five people; the U.S. military attacked a vessel in the Caribbean Sea that it claimed was trafficking drugs from Venezuela, killing eleven people onboard; and a team of Navy SEALs was reported to have shot and killed at least two unarmed North Korean fishermen six years ago, and tossed their bodies into the sea.

The Trump Administration unofficially renamed the U.S. Department of Defense the Department of War; and the Chinese Communist Party celebrated the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War by releasing eighty thousand pigeons at a military parade. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point rehung a painting of a Confederate Civil War general in its library, the state of Kentucky was reported to continue to marry an average of twenty children a year, and South Carolina’s senate was reported to be planning to pass a bill equating abortion with homicide and making providing information via telephone about how to obtain an abortion a felony. In Beijing, Russian president Vladimir Putin was caught on a hot mic telling Chinese president Xi Jinping that some people can achieve immortality; and in Washington, D.C., U.S. president Donald Trump denied rumors that he was dead.

The Iranian government paved a parking lot over the mass grave of thousands of people executed during the Iranian Revolution; the White House was reported to be considering banning Iranian diplomats from shopping at Costco without the express permission of the Department of State; the Justice Department was reported to be considering banning transgender citizens from owning guns; and per a new law in the state of Tennessee, kindergarteners will now be taught to identify the muzzle, barrel, and trigger of a gun. The Coast Guard announced that it seized forty thousand pounds of cocaine in the past month, it was reported that cocaine levels in Nantucket sewage were 50 percent above the national average, a nurse in Kentucky revived a drunk raccoon using CPR, and a highly toxic contaminated site in New Jersey caught fire and burned for days. In Japan, an online scammer conned an octogenarian woman out of thousands of dollars by pretending to be an astronaut who needed money for oxygen, and teenage girls in Sweden were reportedly using encrypted messaging sites to advertise their services as hitwomen. “Young kids,” said a Stockholm prosecutor, “are thirsty for blood.”

A vascular surgeon in the United Kingdom was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison for possessing extreme pornography and for having his own legs amputated and then fraudulently claiming to insurers that it was due to a “mysterious illness”; a lawyer in Indiana named Mark Zuckerberg sued Meta for repeatedly falsely flagging his account as fake; and four hikers in the woods of upstate New York called rangers to rescue them from a “debilitating psychedelic mushroom high.” In Oregon, a pilot who while off duty ate psychedelic mushrooms and then tried to cut off a commercial airliner’s engines mid-flight pled guilty to endangerment charges and was sentenced to probation and fifty days in jail, and a man who stole an excavator to break open an ATM was sentenced to over four years in prison. A woman in California was charged with multiple felonies after registering her dog to vote in the 2021 gubernatorial recall election, thousands of bees entered a honey shop in British Columbia, a swarm of jellyfish clogged the filters of a French nuclear power plant for the second time in a month, and a study found that people who used their phones on the toilet reported a higher rate of hemorrhoids.

Many political figures and media outlets have repeated the claim, even though public documents show the crews have firefighting classifications and were assigned to key frontline roles battling the blaze.

“Everybody in the profession sees through it, but the public doesn’t and that’s concerning,” said Riva Duncan, a former wildland fire chief who served more than 30 years with the U.S. Forest Service. “It’s a lie. Everybody I’ve talked to is very upset about it. It does not just those two crews a disservice, but it does all firefighters a disservice.”

Political figures have also repeated the claim from DHS. State Rep. Jim Walsh, chair of the Washington State Republican Party, shared another user’s post on Facebook blasting the media for failing to report the truth. The crews, Walsh wrote in his own comments, were “NOT firefighters.” The post has been shared hundreds of times.

“Facts matter,” Walsh wrote. “But the Left doesn’t let facts get in the way of its ignorant sanctimony and virtue signaling.”

But the facts clearly show that the crews were firefighters. In planning documents drafted by the management team overseeing the fire and posted to a public federal database, the crew from contracting company ASI Arden Solutions, Inc., is listed as a “CR2I” crew. That’s shorthand for a Type II Initial Attack wildland firefighting crew.

“They’re just one level below a hotshot crew,” Duncan said. “[Saying they’re not firefighters] is incredibly insulting to them.”

The other crew, from contracting company Table Rock Forestry, Inc., is listed as a “CRW2,” short for a Type II wildland firefighting hand crew. That means both crews were certified under National Wildfire Coordinating Group standards as firefighters who met rigorous qualifications and held “red cards” verifying their status to fight fire.

Additionally, the documents show that both crews were assigned to active firefighting roles in the days leading up to the raid. The crews were tasked with securing the fire edge, protecting structures, constructing fire lines and addressing hazards caused by the initial suppression work.

Many wildfire veterans who have served in similar roles privately expressed anger that the crew’s status was called into question because they had been assigned to cut firewood on the day of the raid. That frustration is heightened by the widespread belief, shared by many fire professionals, that the crews were given that assignment under false pretenses to lead them into contact with federal immigration agents.

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.

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.

Public records show he is currently in ICE Custody at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma.

Muhammad Zahid Chaudhry, or “Zahid” to those who know him, is originally from Pakistan. He is married to Melissa Chaudhry, a US citizen who ran against Washington Congressman (D-9) Adam Smith last year (The Stranger endorsed Chaudhry in that race). They have two children together.

He sued for his right to remain in the country on the basis of his marriage to an American citizen and his military service qualifying him for expedited naturalization. He sustained disabling injuries in 2003 while training to go to Iraq. He uses a wheelchair and was discharged from the military for medical reasons in 2005. According to Keep Zahid Home, a website dedicated to his fight for citizenship, he won his case in immigration court in 2018. The government appealed the case. In 2019, the USCIS denied the “Earned, Qualified, Expedited Military N-400 application” he submitted in 2013, “despite the fact that he passed the English and government/Civics portion with flying colors.” US Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell wrote a joint letter endorsing his citizenship, as did other federal, state, and local elected officials.

The police surveillance company Flock has built an enormous nationwide license plate tracking system, which streams records of Americans’ comings and goings into a private national database that it makes available to police officers around the country. The system allows police to search the nationwide movement records of any vehicle that comes to their attention. That’s bad enough on its own, but the company is also now apparently analyzing our driving patterns to determine if we’re “suspicious.” That means if your police start using Flock, they could target you just because some algorithm has decided your movement patterns suggest criminality.

Flock appears to offer this capability through a larger “Investigations Manager,” which urges police departments to “Maximize your LPR data to detect patterns of suspicious activity across cities and states.” The company also offers a “Linked Vehicles” or “Convoy Search” allowing police to “uncover vehicles frequently seen together,” putting it squarely in the business of tracking people’s associations, and a “Multiple locations search,” which promises to “Uncover vehicles seen in multiple locations.” All these are variants on the same theme: using the camera network not just to investigate based on suspicion, but to generate suspicion itself.

A trash collector strike in the Boston area is entering its fifth week with no resolution in sight, leading to overflowing dumpsters, exasperated politicians and a string of lawsuits.

More than 400 garbage haulers belonging to a local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have been on strike since July 1 after failing to reach an agreement with their employer, Republic Services Inc., on demands for higher wages and better benefits. The work stoppage is affecting trash collection for residents in 14 Boston-area suburbs from Canton to Gloucester.

Apartment buildings and restaurants, places that generate greater volumes of trash, have been the most affected, with politicians warning teeming piles of garbage are rodent magnets and a public health crisis. Temperatures in downtown Boston are set to reach 97 degrees on Tuesday — which would match the city record for that date set in 1933, according to the National Weather Service — making the situation even stinkier.

Republic has said it’s offered to increase wages for the striking trash haulers by 16% immediately and by 43% over the five years of the proposed contract. The Teamsters have countered that the total value of the compensation agreement, including health insurance and other benefits, is still about $4 less per hour than what competitors Capitol Waste Services and Star Waste Systems offer their employees.

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