United States | News & Politics

BEIJING (AP) — China said Tuesday it would “fight to the end” and take countermeasures against the United States to safeguard its own interests after President Donald Trump threatened an additional 50% tariff on Chinese imports.

The Commerce Ministry said the U.S.‘s imposition of “so-called ‘reciprocal tariffs’” on China is “completely groundless and is a typical unilateral bullying practice.”

China, the world’s second-largest economy, has taken retaliatory tariffs and the ministry hinted in its latest statement that more may be coming.

Donald Trump has threatened to impose an additional 50% tariff on imports from China on Wednesday unless the country rescinds its retaliatory tariffs on the United States by Tuesday.

The news comes on the third day of catastrophic market falls around the globe since Trump announced his trade war last Wednesday with tariffs on the US’s trading partners.

As part of that move the White House announced it would impose a 34% tariff on Chinese imports. In response, Beijing announced a 34% tariff on US imports.

At least 21 people are reported to have died after a series of deadly storms across the southern and midwest US, with severe rains, flooding rivers and tornadoes leading to several evacuations in the region.

Some cities ordered people to leave their homes as floodwaters rose. And rescue crews have been spotted using inflatable boats to check on residents in Kentucky and Tennessee.

The Tennessee health department has confirmed 10 deaths in the state relating to the severe weather, including tornadoes and flooding. Though severe weather was diminishing in some areas, floodwater and debris hazards remain.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4537243

People have been sad about driving animals into oblivion for nearly as long as we have been eradicating them. And in recent centuries humans have tried to address the problem.

Since the nineteen-eighties, various attempts have been made to see if it might be possible, somehow, to reverse the process. In theory, at least, the technological know-how that helped us extirpate so much wildlife could be deployed to bring back a few of our victims. Humans who are pursuing this goal are essentially asking for something that nature has never provided: a do-over.

Ben Lamm is a forty-three-year-old serial entrepreneur who has already had five “exits”—acquisitions of startups by other companies. He lives in Dallas; his estimated net worth is $3.7 billion. Lamm is dyslexic, and when he was younger he found reading difficult. He tended toward graphic novels and video games, but over time he taught himself, he says, to “read for concepts.” Among the interesting figures he has run across is George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

Church has endorsed using gene therapy to improve human resistance to radiation, thus facilitating interplanetary travel; he has also written about the possibility of cloning Neanderthals back into existence.

In 2020, Lamm and Church agreed to create a for-profit company, called Colossal Biosciences, whose showcase product would be the deëxtinction of animals.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27890752

Summary

The National Park Service removed Harriet Tubman’s image and quote from its “Underground Railroad” webpage, along with references to slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act.

The revision now emphasizes “American ideals of liberty” and downplays historical realities.

Historians and scholars condemned the move as a distortion of history and erasure of Tubman’s legacy.

The change aligns with broader Trump administration efforts to eliminate DEI content across federal sites, which critics say suppresses discussions of race, identity, and historical truth.

Three weeks ago, 238 Venezuelan migrants were flown from Texas to a maximum security prison in El Salvador.

That country's president offered to take them and the Trump administration used a law not invoked since World War II to send them -- claiming they are all terrorists and violent gang members.

The government has released very little information about the men. But through internal government documents, we have obtained a list of their identities and found that an overwhelming majority have no apparent criminal convictions or even criminal charges.

President Trump has posted a video on social media showing a US airstrike in Yemen killing dozens of people who he claims are “Houthis gathered for instructions on an attack.” Trump also bizarrely suggested that Ansar Allah has been sinking US ships in its Red Sea attacks, writing “They will never sink our ships again!”

There is no public information about any US ships having been sunk by Houthi attacks. As of this writing there is also no evidence supporting the president’s claim that the people killed in the airstrike were combatants; there are photos online of unarmed Yemeni tribesmen standing in the exact formation seen in the video Trump posted for normal civilian gatherings.

Within hours of Trump’s posting, the WikiLeaks Twitter account tweeted the following:

“On this day in 2010: Collateral Murder. WikiLeaks released a secret US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.”

The curtain shrieked as it was yanked open to reveal a 67-year-old man tied to a chair. His arms were pulled uncomfortably behind his back. The red bull’s-eye target on his chest rose and fell as he desperately attempted to still his breathing.

The man, Brad Sigmon, smiled at his attorney, Bo King, seated in the front row before guards placed a black bag over his head. King said Sigmon appeared to be trying his best to put on a brave face for those who had come to bear witness.

That was the kind of person Sigmon had become after his decades on death row, the kind who fretted over other people’s comfort at his own execution. Sigmon had agonized over the fact that his loved ones would have to see him die like this, gunned down, mere feet away from them.

He had been faced with an impossible choice, if you can call it that. Die by lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad? Firing squad, he concluded, seemed the most humane. Now, he found himself strapped down, waiting for those three rifles pointed at his beating heart to fire.

I am a blue-blood Afrikaner, at least in terms of ancestry: both my grandfathers were young Boer soldiers in the Anglo-Boer war and I am directly related to the president of the old Transvaal Republic, Paul Kruger. I am a descendant of Dutch, French and German settlers who were brought to the southern tip of Africa in the 17th century. Unlike other colonial societies in Africa, my ancestors never left.

They occupied the whole country, displacing and oppressing the Indigenous inhabitants. Eventually, their concept of white supremacy developed into a formal state policy, apartheid. The UN classified this as a crime against humanity. Miraculously, my country has been a thriving democracy and open society ever since the formal end of apartheid in 1994.

Imagine my bewilderment when Donald Trump and his “first buddy”, South African-born Elon Musk, declared that we Afrikaners are a threatened species; that our black compatriots are engaged in a “genocide”; that we are victims of oppression and discrimination and as such offered special refugee status in the United States – at the very point in time that thousands of migrants to that country are being repelled or deported. The US state department is even preparing “refugee centres” in Pretoria to house these “victims”.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4529128

Secretarial Memo would make logging dominant on over a hundred million acres, taking next step towards dismantling Forest Service

Today, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins issued a Secretarial Memo to expedite logging on over a hundred million acres of Forest Service lands.

The “emergency” memo follows President Trump’s reckless Executive Order “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production” and misguided attempts in Congress to solve the wildfire crisis with the reckless logging bill “Fix Our Forests Act”.

100 million acres is about the size of Rhode Island.