United States | News & Politics

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27192542

By Syma Mohammed Published date: 14 March 2025 19:58 GMT

"Columbia University leadership made a series of concessions to the Trump administration on Thursday following an extraordinary letter that listed nine demands it expected the university to make if it did not want its federal funding to be pulled.

On Thursday, the university announced it was expelling, suspending and revoking the degrees of 22 students following last year’s Hamilton Hall protest, fulfilling one of the nine demands issued in a letter from the Trump administration to Columbia."

It is an astonishing thing to watch a single man hamstring the United States economy. It is also astonishing to watch Republican senators try to convince the American people that a falling stock market and contracting economy is a good thing. “Our economy has been on a sugar high for a long time. It’s been distorted by excess government spending,” Montana Senator Tim Sheehy told Fox News Channel host Larry Kudlow today. “What we're seeing here from this administration and what you're gonna see from this Congress is re-disciplining to ensure that our economy is based on private investment and free-market growth, not public sector spending.”

In fact, until a brief spike in spending during the coronavirus crisis, government expenditure in the United States as a percentage of gross domestic product has held relatively steady around 20% since the 1950s.

Today, Trump met with Secretary-General Mark Rutte of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) who was eager to get Trump to reiterate U.S. support for NATO. Trump told Rutte that the United States needs control of Denmark’s autonomous territory of Greenland “for international security, not just security—international—we have a lot of our favorite players cruising around the coast, and we have to be careful.” Asked about whether the U.S. would annex Greenland, he answered: “I think that will happen.”

The Trump administration has not accused the activist of any criminal behavior but has said he is aligned with Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls Gaza and is designated as a terrorist organization by the US. It has invoked an obscure legal provision to try to deport him.

One of his lawyers, Donna Lieberman, told CNN on Friday in a TV interview: “This is a targeted, retaliatory and extreme attack on the right of free expression” and said Khalil was being detained “for having ideas.”

“They’re not claiming he did anything illegal they just don’t like what he has said,” she added, warning: “It’s an attempt to bully students, faculty and the rest of us … this move to quell free speech is absolutely terrifying.”

The lawyers said in their filing that his treatment by federal authorities from Saturday, when he was first arrested, to Monday reminded Khalil of when he left Syria shortly after the forced disappearance of his friends there during a period of arbitrary detention in 2013.

Passengers on an American Airlines flight were evacuated on to the tarmac of an airport in Colorado as a fire broke out on the plane, sending smoke billowing into the air.

Footage of the evacuation showed passengers huddled on the wing of the Boeing airliner, some holding bags, with flames burning near the bottom of the plane.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said passengers used inflatable slides to reach the ground safely at the Denver International Airport. The agency said that it would investigate the cause of the incident.

There were no reports of serious injuries, although the airport later confirmed 12 people were taken to hospital for minor injuries.

This Bluesky message was ten minutes old as of the time of this post.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27175736

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Yesterday, the West Virginia House of Delegates approved an amendment from Del. J.B. Akers (R) to allow a child’s “treating health care provider” to examine a child’s genitals without the consent of their parents.

The amendment was actually an improvement over a previous version of the bill, which, state Democrats argued, would have allowed teachers to perform the genital examinations.

Akers’ amendment was the Republican response to one proposed by Del. Kayla Young (D), which would have banned child and adult genital examinations altogether.

“It’s unconscionable that Republicans would support legislation that authorizes intrusive visual inspections of minors without parental approval,” Young said. “West Virginians should be alarmed and disgusted by this invasion of privacy.”

It also says that all intersex people are “either male or female” but does not give a basis for assigning a sex to them.

U.S. President Donald Trump's special envoy on hostages, Adam Boehler, has been moved from dealing with the Israeli captives held by Hamas, according to senior sources in Washington. There has been no official announcement yet, and the decision could be reversed at the last moment.

Boehler's removal follows Israel's campaign against the backchannel talks he held with the heads of Hamas in Doha, aimed at securing the release of American hostages. After they were revealed – according to American sources by Israelis – they were suspended.

Israel was at first ignorant of the talks and later opposed to them. To explain his attempt born of the stalemate in negotiations, Boehler gave interviews to Israeli media outlets and further enraged American officials after he described the Hamas officials as nice people and had to apologize.

Amid a growing number of legal and legislative efforts to hold Big Oil companies accountable for their role in the climate crisis, a coalition of nonprofit groups are calling on Congressional Democrats to “proactively and affirmatively reject” potential efforts aimed at shielding the fossil fuel industry from legal liability.

In a letter to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, 195 groups including Earthjustice, Sunrise Movement, and the American Association of Justice, pointed to past efforts from the fossil fuel industry to secure a liability waiver from Congress, as well as statements from President Trump, as reason to anticipate a new push to immunize polluters.

Reminder: There is no legitimate debate. These people are not interested in safety or science or womens sports, they're interested in maintaining a simplistic gender binary against reality.

Right-wing media spent years demanding that President Donald Trump ban transgender women from competing in women’s sports. He complied. But rather than declare victory, conservative outlets immediately demanded even stricter measures, expanding their campaign to include intersex athletes and calling for invasive genetic testing. Their goal isn't fairness; it's perpetual outrage and ideological policing of women's bodies.

After Trump signed an executive order to ban trans women from women’s sports, right-wing media figures quickly pivoted to a months-old controversy centered around Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, a cisgender Algerian athlete who was falsely accused of being transgender last summer. Khelif was disqualified from the 2023 Women’s World Boxing Championships, even though she was assigned female at birth. Despite this, conservative media have revisited Khelif’s case as justification for excluding intersex women, labelling the boxer as “male” in order to claim Trump's ban isn't strict enough, and once again moving the goalposts in their ongoing obsession over who counts as a woman in 2025.

[...]

By March 6, City Journal began explicitly including intersex athletes in its push for expanded bans, advocating for chromosomal tests to exclude women with differences in sex development. Its writer asserted that “in rare cases, though more commonly in developing countries, doctors may misidentify a male newborn’s sex due to female-like or ambiguous genitalia caused by a developmental condition. … Just this summer, a loophole of this kind allowed two male athletes, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting, to compete as women and win gold medals in boxing at the 2024 Paris Olympics.” If evidence exists for this claim about private and personal details of Khelif and Lin’s bodies, it is entirely absent from the article (seriously, go take a look). According to BBC, the International Olympic Committee has stated that “Lin and Khelif were ‘born and raised as women.’”

[...]

his new phase targets intersex women — individuals with differences in sex development who've been recognized as female their entire lives — who it asserts are simply “male.” Under policies championed by conservative figures, women with conditions like androgen insensitivity syndrome — who have XY chromosomes but develop female anatomy — could be excluded entirely from women's sports. Many women with AIS only learn about their genetic makeup during puberty when menstruation doesn't begin.

Similarly, women with 5-alpha reductase deficiency or Swyer syndrome — conditions resulting in the presence of XY chromosomes but female-typical sex characteristics — would also face disqualification under strict chromosomal definitions. These conditions occur in roughly 1 in 100 people. Although rare, women born with XY chromosomes have given birth in the past.

History demonstrates the harm of such restrictive policies. Olympic medalist Caster Semenya endured invasive scrutiny and discrimination over her naturally occurring testosterone levels, exemplifying the potential consequences of implementing genetic testing requirements. Conservative media continue to advocate for mandatory genetic testing, despite evidence that it could unfairly exclude cisgender and intersex women alike.

[...]

Right-wing media's escalating demands following Trump's anti-trans executive orders represent an ongoing pattern. As Media Matters previously reported, conservative figures consistently deemed even Trump's most extreme anti-trans policies insufficient. Their end goal isn't fairness; it's continuous outrage, exclusion, and control.

DHS can't articulate a reason that Mahmoud Khalil, arrested and supposedly had his green card revoked for being involved with pro-Palestine prostest, for why he's been arrested other than the fact he organised protests.

President Trump has ramped up efforts to deliver on a campaign promise to carry out the largest ever deportation of immigrants in U.S. history.

Parallel to those deportation plans is a crackdown on what the administration calls antisemitism on college campuses.

Both efforts came to the forefront this week when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate student, who has not been charged with any crime yet. This is likely the first high profile arrest of a legal permanent resident in connection with the pro-Palestinian protests that rippled across the nation's campuses last year. Trump has vowed that this is the first of many arrests to come as he lays a framework for increased deportations. Trump officials are standing beside his efforts and doubling down on accusations that Khalil's actions align with those of a terrorist.

One of those officials is Troy Edgar, the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who defended Khalil's arrest on Morning Edition. When NPR's Michel Martin asked him to explain what Khalil did to be arrested, aligned with terrorist activity and potentially deported, Edgar did not give a clear answer.

"I think you can see it on TV, right?" Edgar said. "We've invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he's put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity. And at this point, like I said, the Secretary of State can review his visa process at any point and revoke it."

Khalil, a Syrian national of Palestinian descent, does not have a U.S. visa of any kind. Therefore an immigration judge would be the one to decide whether or not his status is revoked, not administration officials. He does however hold a green card, making him a lawful permanent resident in the U.S.

[...]

Troy Edgar: I think what you saw there is you've got somebody that has come into the country on a visa. And as he's going through the visa process, he is coming in to basically be a student that is not going to be supporting terrorism. So, the issue is he was let into the country on this visa. He has been promoting this antisemitism activity at the university. And at this point, the State Department has revoked his visa for supporting a terrorist type organization. And we're the enforcing agencies, so we've come in to basically arrest him.

Martin: A White House official told the Free Press that there's no allegation that he broke any laws. So, again, I have to ask, what specifically constitutes terrorist activity that he was supporting? What exactly do you say he did?

Edgar: Well, like I said, when you apply for a visa, you go through the process to be able to say that you're here on a student visa, that doesn't afford you all the rights of coming in and basically going through this process, agitating and supporting Hamas. So, at this point, yeah, the Secretary of State and the State Department maintains the right to revoke the visa, and that's what they've done.

Martin: How did he support Hamas? Exactly what did he do?

Edgar: Well, I think you can see it on TV, right? This is somebody that we've invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he's put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity. And at this point, like I said, the Secretary of State can review his visa process at any point and revoke it.

Martin: He's a permanent resident. He's not a visa holder. He's a legal permanent resident. He has the green card, at least he did, until it's alleged that it was revoked.

If the allegation is that Mr. Khalil organized protests and made speeches after which other people engaged in prohibited activity, or, say, violent activity. Well, Mr. Trump gave a political speech on January 6, 2021, after which some individuals engaged in violent and illegal acts. How is this any different?

Edgar: President Trump's a citizen and the president of the United States. This is a person that came in under a visa. And again, the secretary of state at any point can take a look and evaluate that visa and decide if they want to revoke it.

Martin: He's a legal permanent resident. I have to keep insisting on that. He is a legal permanent resident.

"If I'm going down for genocide, you are too, kid."

Imagine consolidating behind this guy in 2020 only for him to be heavily responsible for your loss in 2024. No sympathy for these dipshits.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both understood the importance of being seen as the bigger change agent.

For Trump, that meant continuing to promise an antidote to the Biden-Harris years.

For Harris, there was more flexibility to define her brand of change.

She could risk looking hypocritical by making clean breaks with Biden on policies she had supported as vice president, rejecting parts of their record to forge her own agenda. She could identify new issues to run on that avoided the pitfalls of turning her back on the Biden era. Or she could rely on voters to see her gender, her genes, and her “lived experience” — a middle-class upbringing, schools outside the Ivy League, and a career as a prosecutor — as symbols of change.

Biden and his loyalists took the first option off the table.

He would say publicly that Harris should do what she must to win. But privately, including in conversations with her, he repeated an admonition: let there be no daylight between us. “No daylight” was the phrase he had used as a vice presidential candidate in 2008 to bind Republican nominee John McCain to an unpopular president, George W. Bush.

Almost everywhere she went, Harris walked among former Biden aides who sought to defend his presidency. Her campaign was run by a former White House deputy chief of staff — whom she had just empowered to box out her own confidants — and a phalanx of department heads who had served Biden until the previous month.

[...]

When Harris sat down with Walz and CNN’s Dana Bash the last week of August, the segment produced a little bit of news: Harris said she would name a Republican to serve in her Cabinet. She also said that she no longer supported a ban on fracking. Her 2019 call to end the practice threatened to hurt her in Pennsylvania, even though she had adopted Biden’s no-ban policy as his vice presidential candidate in 2020. But the first portion of the one-on-two interview — the part more viewers were likely to watch — featured Harris reciting a laundry list of Biden’s policies.

Sitting next to Walz in a chair that seemed to place her below him and heaping praise on Biden’s record, Harris did not look like a candidate seeking the highest office in the land. The whole scene reinforced the criticism that the vice president was either incapable, or afraid, of answering tough questions on her own.

For the rest of the campaign, her team required that she be provided a chair that met certain specifications: “Leg height no less than 15 inches; floor to top of seat height no less than 18.9 inches; arms on chairs may not be very high, arms must fall at a natural height; chairs must be firm.”

No matter how firm her chair, the question facing Harris was whether she could build a sturdy platform.

Her rallies and convention speech had not answered the question of why she was running for president — or how her vision for the country would deliver for voters — other than having been next in line. She was running out of major moments to explain a vision to a broad audience. Her September 10 debate with Trump would offer another opportunity — perhaps a last chance before voters cast early ballots — to establish that key part of her narrative.

But the day of the debate Biden called to give Harris an unusual kind of pep talk — and another reminder about the loyalty he demanded. No longer able to defend his own record, he expected Harris to protect his legacy.

Whether she won or lost the election, he thought, she would only harm him by publicly distancing herself from him — especially during a debate that would be watched by millions of Americans. To the extent that she wanted to forge her own path, Biden had no interest in giving her room to do so. He needed just three words to convey how much all of that mattered to him.

“No daylight, kid,” Biden said.

Spotify has removed an Andrew Tate podcast after complaints from staff and users.

The “degree course” by the misogynist influencer titled “pimping hoes” was deemed to be in breach of the company’s rules and removed.

Spotify declined to comment. However, it is understood several podcasts have been removed from the service this week, including the “pimping hoes” course.

Content targeting an individual or group for harassment or abuse is also barred. Tate content remains available on Spotify including a “PhD course” on “how to get girls fast and easy”.

cross-posted from: https://hcommons.social/users/adachika192/statuses/114154269169593852

Miami Beach mayor proposes ending O Cinema’s lease over showing Oscar winner ‘No Other Land,’ calling it antisemitic - WSVN 7News (2025-03-12)

https://wsvn.com/entertainment/miami-beach-mayor-proposes-ending-o-cinemas-lease-over-showing-oscar-winner-no-other-land-calling-it-antisemitic/
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“Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner is taking issue with the documentary, demanding late last week that it not be shown in the theater, which leases its space from the city.”

“In a resolution put forth by the mayor, the city states its ‘desire to identify a new tenant/grantee to operate the movie theater located on the Premises that more accurately reflects the City’s values.’”

“Meiner plans to host a virtual town hall next Tuesday to discuss the matter. He hopes to put the resolution up for a vote on Wednesday.”

#NoOtherLand #FakeAntisemitism
@[email protected] @[email protected] @israel