”Share a Disney quote that sums up how you’re feeling right now!”

That’s what Disney posted on Threads the other day, and people immediately replied with lines from Star Wars, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and even Mary Poppins. The throughline between all the quotes: they were pretty pointedly anti-fascist and clearly aimed at the current administration

Vid

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41811574

Best quote:

"If Hitler came back to see this group of mixed race young gay men chanting his name he would immediately kill himself a second time,”

Midwives have been told about the benefits of “close relative marriage” in training documents that minimise the risks to couples’ children.

The documents claim “85 to 90 per cent of cousin couples do not have affected children” and warn staff that “close relative marriage is often stigmatised in England”, adding claims that “the associated genetic risks have been exaggerated”.

The Pentagon has ordered 1,500 US troops based in Alaska to prepare to deploy to Minnesota as a precautionary measure in case the administration decides to send them, a US official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The unit of the 11th Airborne Division is a cold-weather unit nicknamed “The Arctic Angels.”

Just a reminder that levying war is against the United States like this is the one thing the Constitution actually defines as a crime: Treason.

Don't.

President Trump’s power over the Federal Reserve will be front and center at the Supreme Court next week.

The justices on Wednesday will hear arguments on whether Trump can fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook over accusations of mortgage fraud.

Looming over it all is the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chair, which came into public view last weekend.

In his second term, Trump has looked to reshape independent agencies that have long enjoyed protections that prevent the president from firing those who lead them on a whim.

Trump argues it infringes on his constitutional authority to oversee the executive branch, part of an expansive view of presidential power known as the unitary executive theory.

“Once Trump controls a majority of the Fed, he can use the Fed’s vast powers to enrich himself personally – to reward his billionaire friends and to punish his enemies,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a critic of Powell’s who has defended him against Trump’s firing threats, told reporters. “That has been his strategy across the government.”

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 prevents the president from firing the central bank’s governors except “for cause.” The law does not, however, explicitly define what “cause” means.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/world/p/1677169/eu-readies-eur93bn-tariffs-in-retaliation-to-trumps-greenland-threat

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EU readies €93bn tariffs in retaliation for Trump’s Greenland threat

Europe could also threaten to restrict US companies’ market access in run-up to crunch talks at Davos

Danish warships off Nuuk. A a rupture in the western military alliance over Greenland would pose an existential threat to Europe’s security  © Getty Images

EU capitals are considering hitting the US with €93bn worth of tariffs or restricting American companies from the bloc’s market in response to Donald Trump’s threats to Nato allies opposed to his campaign to takeover Greenland. The move marks the most serious crisis in transatlantic relations for decades.

The retaliation measures are being drawn up to give European leaders leverage in pivotal meetings with the US president at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, officials involved in the preparations said. 

They are bidding to find a compromise that would avoid a deep rupture in the western military alliance, which would pose an existential threat to Europe’s security.

The tariff list was prepared last year but suspended until February 6 to avoid a full-blown trade war. Its reactivation was discussed on Sunday by the EU’s 27 ambassadors, along with the so-called anti-coercion instrument (ACI) that can limit the access of American companies to the internal market, as the bloc wrestled over how to respond to the US president’s threat with punitive tariffs.

Trump, who has demanded permission from Denmark to take control of Greenland, on Saturday evening vowed to impose 10 per cent tariffs by February 1 on goods from the UK, Norway and six EU countries that sent troops to the Arctic island for a military exercise this week.

“There are clear retaliation instruments at hand if this continues . . . [Trump’s] using pure mafioso methods,” said a European diplomat briefed on the discussion. “At the same time we want to publicly call for calm and give him an opportunity to climb down the ladder.”

“The messaging is . . . carrot and stick,” they added.

France has called for the bloc to hit back with the ACI, which has never been used since its adoption in 2023. The tool includes investment restrictions and can throttle exports of services such as those provided by US Big Tech companies in the EU.

Paris and Berlin are coordinating a joint response, with their respective finance ministers due to meet in Berlin on Monday before travelling to Brussels for a gathering with their European counterparts, a French ministry aide said. “The issue will also have to be broached with all G7 partners under France’s presidency,” the person added. 

While many other EU member states have voiced support for exploring how the ACI could be deployed against the US, a majority called for dialogue with Trump before issuing direct threats of retaliation, diplomats briefed on the discussions told the FT.

“We need to get the temperature down,” said a second EU diplomat.

In a step towards retaliation, the biggest parties in the European parliament this weekend said they would delay a planned vote on measures that would have reduced EU tariffs on US goods as part of a trade agreement struck last year.

Trump, who will be at the Swiss forum on Wednesday and Thursday, is set to hold private talks with European leaders including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, in addition to participating in a wider discussion among western countries supporting Ukraine.

“We want to co-operate, and it is not we who are seeking conflict,” said Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister.

National security advisers from western countries will meet in Davos on Monday afternoon. The talks were initially set to focus on Ukraine and ongoing peace talks to end Russia’s invasion of the country, but have been overhauled to give time to discuss the crisis over Greenland, two officials briefed on the preparations said.

The Swiss foreign ministry, which is hosting the gathering, said it “will not comment on participants or topics”.

Trump’s threats “certainly warrant the ACI as it would be textbook coercion”, said a third European official. 

“But we need to use the time to February 1st to see if Trump is interested in an off-ramp,” they said, adding that much would depend on the outcome of the talks in Davos.

European officials said that they hoped their retaliation threats would increase bipartisan pressure in the US against Trump’s actions and result in him retreating from his tariff pledge. 

“It is already a situation that no longer allows compromises, because we cannot hand over Greenland,” said a fourth European official. “The reasonable Americans also know that he has just opened Pandora’s Box.”

But on Sunday US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent said that Europe was too weak to guarantee Greenland’s security, and refused to back down on the US demand to take control of the strategically important island.

“The president believes enhanced security is not possible without Greenland being part of the US,” he told NBC News.

Additional reporting by Barbara Moens, Alice Hancock, Andy Bounds and Laura Dubois in Brussels, Sarah White in Paris, Laura Pitel in Berlin and Richard Milne in Oslo.

Epstein invited her to come sit down next to him. “He explained that he was a philanthropist, known by so many people, a very generous man, and had sent so many young people to university, often the kids of women he’d been at school with. I completely believed him.”

Oh says Epstein told her she need a bachelor of fine arts degree to make it in the art world and was offering her a scholarship to New York’s School of Visual Arts “with no strings attached”. But, Oh said: “He attached a lot of strings to that scholarship. When I wouldn’t do all that he wanted he took it away.”

Other similar stories aired last week via victim interviews with Democrats on the House judiciary committee. It also comes as a new, perhaps voluminous tranche of Epstein-related documents is expected to be released by the justice department in the coming days.

“Mr Epstein repeatedly lured young women into his network by promising to help them gain admission into colleges and universities,” said the Maryland Democrat congressman Jamie Raskin in letters sent to Columbia University and New York University asking for more information on this aspect of the scandal.

Best quote:

"If Hitler came back to see this group of mixed race young gay men chanting his name he would immediately kill himself a second time,”

Canada’s federal government is facing fresh scrutiny over its handling of air passenger rights after internal records suggested ministers and senior officials delayed and undermined a plan that would have shifted the cost of processing passenger complaints from taxpayers to airlines.

The proposal, developed by the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) following a 2023 directive from Parliament, would have required carriers to pay a fixed fee for each eligible complaint resolved, effectively funding a national reporting and redress system for disgruntled travelers.

Instead, nearly 100,000 passengers remain stuck in a growing backlog and taxpayers continue to shoulder an annual bill of about 30 million Canadian dollars for a system critics say is buckling under its own weight.

At the heart of the uproar is a letter sent by then-transport minister Anita Anand, who assumed the portfolio after the initial design of the cost-recovery plan. In that letter, Anand asked the CTA to delay any decision on imposing the airline fee until she had been formally consulted, arguing that she had not been adequately brought into the loop on the details of the proposal. The agency had previously briefed her predecessor, Pablo Rodriguez, during the plan’s development, but Anand insisted that was not sufficient.

“Notification to the previous minister is insufficient,” Anand wrote, according to excerpts reported by Canadian outlets. She requested that the CTA “refrain from implementing any decision on the fee” until she could review and provide input, effectively putting the brakes on a process that had been advancing in line with Parliament’s instructions. For a regulator already struggling with skyrocketing complaint volumes, the pause added further delay to a reform intended to stabilize its resources and clear the queue.

Additional emails from senior Transport Canada officials amplified the pushback. Officials raised concerns about the potential impact of the 790 dollar fee and its uniform application across all eligible complaints. Industry stakeholders had already warned that such a structure could be punitive and might encourage what airline executives described as frivolous or opportunistic claims. As these concerns filtered through the department, the CTA found itself navigating not only external lobbying but also internal pressure that appeared to conflict with its statutory duty to implement Parliament’s will.

RUSSELS — A landmark transatlantic trade deal will not be approved by EU lawmakers after U.S. President Donald Trump hit European countries with new tariffs as part of his efforts to wrest control of Greenland from Denmark.

In a statement online, Manfred Weber, the president of the European People's Party (EPP), said that the escalating U.S.-Europe tensions meant the Parliament would not vote in favor of the pact, which sets U.S. tariffs on imports from the EU at 15 percent in exchange for the bloc not applying levies on American exports.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear Monsanto's argument that federal pesticide law should shield it and parent company Bayer from tens of thousands of state lawsuits over Roundup since the Environmental Protection Agency has not required a cancer warning label. The case could determine whether federal rules preempt state failure-to-warn claims without deciding whether glyphosate causes cancer.

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In the long history of direct and indirect US interventions in Latin America – historians have counted at least 70 – the current president Donald Trump has accomplished something unprecedented. For the first time, the United States launched a military attack against a South American state, Venezuela.

In the past, invasions had targeted the US's immediate neighborhood: Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean; the most recent of which was in Panama in 1989, marked by the abduction of the ruling general, Manuel Noriega. A few troops had also been sent in the 19th century to more distant countries, mainly to protect US citizens.

This time, with the January 3 abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, "a threshold has been crossed, and the consequences are unpredictable," said Jorge Heine, former Chilean minister and diplomat, in Responsible Statecraft, a publication of the Quincy Institute, a think tank based in Washington. According to him, the official justification for the operation – that Venezuela was exporting large quantities of fentanyl to the US – was reminiscent of the pretext of "the non-existent weapons of mass destruction" during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The history of US interventions in Latin America in the 20th century unfolded in four major acts: First, the "Big Stick" ideology of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), characterized by an indiscriminate use of power, then the "Good Neighbor policy" of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945), marked by spectacular withdrawals. Then came the Cold War, punctuated by coups orchestrated in the shadows and direct interventions. In the late 1980s, the US shifted its attention away from the continent and toward other areas. But it is now returning to Venezuela in force.

"The Secret Service came to my door today because of a tweet. No threats. No violence. Just words. That’s where we are now," she wrote on X in a thread about the ordeal.

She was asked about the comments she made online, and she made it clear, "I want to see their trials."

For many, the celebration of New Year’s Eve is a grand occasion marked by fireworks, music, and festivities. However, in Serbia, there is a unique and deeply rooted tradition of celebrating Orthodox New Year, also known as Serbian New Year, which takes place on January 13th in the Gregorian calendar, corresponding to January 1st on the Julian calendar. This observance is an important cultural and religious event for Serbs, steeped in history, religion, and national pride.

Establishment Democrats are rejecting an increasingly popular position by refusing to take a bold stance that happens to be good politics.