UnderpantsWeevil

Officials in at least two states outside of Texas — Florida and Oklahoma — have announced plans to establish Turning Point USA clubs on their high school campuses. Oklahoma’s Ryan Walters, the far-right activist who resigned as the state’s education chief, previously said that students would initiate the clubs and that Turning Point USA would provide them with organizational support. Walters and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have also threatened to intervene if school leaders refuse to acknowledge the youth clubs, including by going after schools’ accreditation.

On Monday, men arrived in a boat at a beach in northeast Mexico and installed some signs signaling land that the U.S. Department of Defense considered restricted.

Mexico's Foreign Affairs Ministry said late Monday that the country's navy had removed the signs, which appeared to be on Mexican territory. "The origin of the signs and their placement on national territory were unclear," the ministry said in a statement.

At 16 and 17 years old, Sam and Ben for the past two months have made it their mission to follow, investigate and capture federal immigration activity across the Chicago area. It’s an undertaking the brothers say happened naturally after growing up in a household where social justice and civic duty were as much a part of their homeschool curriculum as math and science.

The successor presidencies of Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden decried the power grabs Cheney pursued but mostly pocketed his gains for their own purposes. (In his case for unrestricted bombing in the Caribbean and Pacific, Gaiser cited Obama’s own marginalization of Congress to bomb Libya in 2011.) Trump now walks a red carpet of lawlessness, plutocracy and bloodshed woven by Cheney. An uncharismatic Nixon functionary—someone who might never have risen to power had Texas Senator John Tower not drunk himself out of a Pentagon appointment that instead went to Cheney—decisively shaped the destruction of constitutional governance in twenty-first-century America.

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Cheney understood the catastrophe of 9/11 as an opportunity to accomplish and cement long-standing objectives. In the early days after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cheney’s Pentagon commissioned a study on the future course of American power from Paul Wolfowitz, an adviser who would later enjoy great influence in the Bush administration. The draft document prioritized the active prevention of a peer competitor to US power from emerging. The objective of US grand strategy would be to preserve military, economic and geopolitical preeminence indefinitely. As he would when he became vice president, Cheney relied on a corps of neoconservative intellectuals he cultivated to supply the pertinent rationales. For Cheney, the virtues of dominance were self-evident. After 9/11, they drove him to favor invading not only Afghanistan, but the unconnected country of Iraq, whose regime was an outlier in the world America bestrode. A document contained in an energy task force Cheney convened before 9/11, and that he went to extraordinary lengths to keep secret, detailed “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.“

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In the months after 9/11, these Cheneyite lawyers, wielding their boss’ influence, created in the shadows an architecture of repression. Addington wrote a draft directive permitting the National Security Agency, in defiance of the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, to establish a warrantless digital dragnet of phone and internet metadata generated by the communications of practically every American. Flanigan, aided by Yoo, wrote the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force that made the world into a battlefield at the direction of the president. They further permitted, encouraged, and protected the CIA in launching a regimen of torture-as-geopolitical-revenge, masquerading as intelligence gathering, as well as a network of secret prisons to detain the agency’s alleged-terrorist captives indefinitely. They declared that battlefield captives could be held as “unlawful enemy combatants,” deserving none of the protections of the Geneva Convention, and corralled them, without charge, into the military base at Guantánamo Bay until an end of hostilities that might never arrive. With the exception of CIA torture and much of the wholesale domestic acquisition of Americans’ metadata, these authorities and practices, in one form or another, persist to this day.

Cheney did all of this because his deepest conviction was that the presidency was an elected monarchy. Misconstruing an argument of Alexander Hamilton’s from Federalist 70, Cheney pursued what became known as the Unitary Executive Theory. It was predicated on the idea of an unencumbered presidency empowered to control every aspect of the executive branch, regardless of any affected office or agency’s intended independence from political decisions. Cheney had understood the post-Watergate reforms from Nixon’s criminal presidency as a congressional usurpation, and he intended to roll them all back. Excluding Congress from wresting any transparency from his secret Energy Task Force was, to Cheney, part of the point. After 9/11, Yoo contended that during wartime – a circumstance conceivably permanent in a War on Terror – presidential authority is all but plenary. He likes his argument a lot less now that Trump uses it to murder fishermen in the Caribbean, but, like his Bush administration colleagues, takes no responsibility for authoring the authoritarian usurpations of power that he now bemoans.

In Texas, which has the second-largest population of undocumented immigrants in the country — with more than 1.6 million of the estimated 13.7 million nationally — the local criminal justice system has become the main funnel sending undocumented immigrants into ICE custody, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of federal government data.

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• ICE’s average daily arrests have more than doubled from 85 under Biden to 176 under Trump.
• Daily arrests have jumped about 30 percentage points in the ICE regions that include Houston and Dallas.
• About 52% of ICE arrests have been of people in local jails, down from 61% during the Biden administration.
• Arrests of people who had not been convicted of a crime have increased from 42% under Biden to 59% under Trump.
• The Harris County Jail leads the country in ICE detainers — a request from immigration agents to hold a person for deportation — while jails in Dallas, Bexar and Travis counties have also been in the top 10.

However, unlike your peers who drink dairy from cows to survive, you don't have the rs4988235-A gene mutation for lactose tolerance. You can't digest milk. You are about to experience natural selection.

Mr. Paxton filed the suit against Johnson & Johnson, which sold Tylenol for decades, and Kenvue, a spinoff company that has sold the drug since 2023.

The Texas lawsuit claims that the companies knowingly withheld evidence from consumers about Tylenol’s links to autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The suit also claims that Kenvue was created to shield Johnson & Johnson from liability over Tylenol.

This lawsuit is the first by a state that seizes on Mr. Trump’s allegations that the use of acetaminophen products like Tylenol during pregnancy could cause neurodevelopmental disorders. The issue has been a longstanding concern among some followers of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, but the idea gained traction with Mr. Trump’s remarks.

While deployed in Kuwait, Rosales, a member of the Texas Army National Guard, threw a birthday party for her husband. Some of the guests allegedly brought alcohol, according to the Army, “in a nation where such substances are illegal.” She was investigated and fingerprinted by an Army investigator, but received nothing more than an administrative reprimand.

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But here’s the problem: Every branch of the military shares titling records in criminal databases with more than two dozen agencies, including the FBI, even if the case was dropped.

The fallout can be devastating because the records are retrievable for decades. Veterans can be passed over for promotions, rejected on apartment applications, and denied firearms clearance, advocates say. With the stain on their record, some struggle to get a job for years.

“Who will take my word over the plain text of the FBI’s criminal history?” Rosales, 39, asks in an affidavit in her lawsuit.

The audio used in the clip comes from Michael Jackson’s controversial 1995 song “They Don’t Care About Us.” The song includes the lyrics “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/ Kick me, kike me, don’t you black or white me.”

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The video is very short, making it clear that the choice of lyrics was the intentional focus. Viewers are obviously meant to hear the antisemitic aspects, since it’s more or less the only audio in the 13 seconds being presented. DHS didn’t respond to questions from Gizmodo on Wednesday morning.

Comments on Instagram included people who clearly understood the message of the video as antisemitic. One commenter replied, “based song choice,” which was liked by the Border Patrol account. Another commenter wrote, “if you know you know.”

Italian unions proclaimed the strike after the Global Sumud Flotilla that was trying to break Israel’s naval blockade to deliver aid to Gaza was intercepted by Israeli naval forces Wednesday night. Protests and demonstrations have sprung up all over Europe and globally since then, but they have been particularly strong in Italy.

Italy’s conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had sharply criticized the strike. She anticipated it would cause widespread disruption across the country and said it was politically motivated and targeted her right-wing government.

According to the CGIL union, 300,000 people marched through the streets of Rome alone, while the national average participation in the general strike stood at around 60%, halting all the main services in key sectors including transportation and schools.

In Florence, protesters approached the gates of the Italian national soccer team’s training center to demand its upcoming World Cup qualifier against Israel not be played because of the war in Gaza.

US merger and acquisition investment from China has totalled just $221mn so far this year, representing the slowest pace of investment since 2006, according to data from Dealogic. The total at this point last year was $3.4bn.

The figure contrasts with growing investment into mainland China and highlights the impact of geopolitics on a previously booming cross-border financial sector that for years provided a bridge for Chinese businesses into lucrative western markets.

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Chinese outbound M&A has shown signs of growth in other parts of the world, such as in Peru, where Italian utility company Enel this year sold assets to China’s Southern Power Grid International for $2.9bn in the biggest outbound deal of the year. The next three largest deals were in Singapore.

But the total of just under $12.2bn invested so far this year contrasts with the tens of billions of dollars invested annually for the decade prior to the coronavirus pandemic. In 2016, China’s full-year outbound M&A peaked at $212bn, while in 2019 it was $54bn.