Independent News

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/53710351

The memo describes how DISA’s Command, Control, Communications, and Computers Enterprise Directorate, known as J6, was hobbled by DOGE cuts to such an extent that it was unable to obtain necessary software. This unit is responsible for maintaining secure channels that keep the Pentagon connected to military assets around the world, including nuclear capabilities.

Kyra Wilson, grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, told rally participants that First Nations people are “always having to wait for government to make a decision on how much our lives matter.”

She said that part of the problem is that funding and resources for First Nations emergency management fall under the control of federal and provincial governments.

The government’s decision to grant Chinese tourists and investors a 14-day visa-free entry is being presented as a pragmatic economic move meant to revive tourism, attract investments, and keep the Philippines competitive as Chinese outbound travel rebounds.

On paper, the policy targets immediate, specific and short-term benefits: easier entry, more arrivals and economic stimulus. In practice, however, it cannot be separated from the wider and far more volatile context of relations between the Philippines and China, most notably the unresolved and increasingly tense dispute in the West Philippine Sea, lingering public mistrust, and the still-unsettled issues surrounding Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGOs). A visa policy does not exist in a vacuum; it communicates intentions as much as it grants privileges.

Wednesday night (Day 44) an ICE agent shot another person in Minneapolis, injuring him after attempting to arrest him. Immediately after the incident neighbors and community members turned up in the street to confront ICE and halt their work. Agents left behind equipment and a vehicle that protesters quickly ran through. More on that below.

The following morning, Trump took to Truth Social to threaten invoking the Insurrection Act to quell protests in the state, which would allow for the deployment of military in Minnesota. On Friday he walked this back somewhat.

Increasingly, arts boards are weighing up artistic purpose against perceived organisational risk. This is often putting them at odds with those tasked with executing these decisions. We saw this last year, when Creative Australia backflipped in their appointment of the Venice Biennale artistic team artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino.

Rather than repealing civil rights statutes outright, the administration has focused on disabling the mechanisms that make those laws work.

Drawing on over two decades of teaching and writing about civil rights and my experience directing a GW Law project on inclusive democracy, I believe this pattern reflects not isolated administrative actions but a cumulative retreat from the federal government’s role as an enforcer of civil rights law.

ProPublica, in a 2023 story, reexamined the incident, the legal presumptions, the background of the men and Stingley’s father’s relentless legal campaign to bring the men into court. The three men previously had defended their actions as justified and necessary to deal with an emergency as they held Stingley while waiting for police to arrive.

Ozanne, who was appointed in 2022 to review the case, recommended the agreement after the two men and the Stingley family engaged in an extensive restorative justice process, in which they sat face to face, under the supervision of a retired judge, and shared their thoughts and feelings. Ozanne said in the letter that the process “appears to have been healing for all involved.”

From the bench, Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Laura Crivello said she found the agreement to be fair and just and commended the work of all the parties to come to a resolution.

“Maybe this is the spark that makes other people see similarities in each other and not differences,” she said. “Maybe this is the spark that makes them think about restorative justice and how do we come together. And maybe this is part of the spark that decreases the violence in our community and leads us to finding the paths to have those circles to sit down and have the dialogue and to have that conversation. So maybe there’s some good that comes out of it.”

Our team of researchers has spent decades studying the oceans and climate. In a new study, we analyzed how different types of climate interventions could affect marine ecosystems, for good or bad, and where more research is needed to understand the risks before anyone tries them on a large scale. We found that some strategies carry fewer risks than others, though none is free of consequences.

For 38 days now, the Department of Homeland Security has been occupying the Twin Cities to terrorize our immigrant neighbors. This Monday (January 5th,) they deployed 2000 more ICE agents to dramatically increase the number of abductions. This is an unprecedented escalation. No other city has yet experienced an ICE occupation at this scale.

A 10-minute review by Reuters tallied 102 attempts by users to edit photos of people into revealing outfits. In at least 21 cases, Grok fully complied, creating dental-floss-style or translucent bikinis.

The first of the conversations took place on July 6, 2001 — three weeks after a summit between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin in Slovenia. Putin called to congratulate Bush on his birthday, as well as on the recent U.S. Independence Day. Bush replied that he was “honored” to receive the call, noting that Putin was the first head of state to wish him a happy birthday that year, and suggested that the Russian president call him “George.”

To study how meth and the immune system interact and regulate dopamine levels, we measured the electrical and chemical activity of dopamine neurons in mouse brain specimens treated with either meth or an immune molecule called TNF-α. This molecule is known to induce inflammation in the body.

We found that meth and TNF‑α converge in a part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area, a key reward hub that produces dopamine. In this area of the mouse brain, TNF‑α increased dopamine levels and neuronal activity in similar ways as meth.

A $19.5m support package has been approved by the federal and Victorian governments for those directly affected by the bushfires.

The Harcourt fire is not yet fully contained.

There are 10 “major fires” in Victoria with 32 active firegrounds and 15 current emergency warnings in place across the state.

More than 300 structures have burned during the Victorian bushfires, after the worst conditions since the black summer bushfires.

Those looking to travel to the fireground as “tourists” have been asked to stay away out of concerns for their safety and that of others.

The Iranian Nobel peace prize winner Shirin Ebadi warned on Friday that security forces could be preparing to commit a “massacre under the cover of a sweeping communications blackout”, and said she had already received reports of hundreds of people being treated for eye injuries at a single Tehran hospital.

Protesters were brought to the streets on 28 December by a deteriorating economy, but quickly began chanting anti-government slogans and demanding political reform.

“There are organizations that exist now that didn’t exist when we started and there are leaders that exist now that didn’t exist when we started, and we trained some of them. That’s the legacy that we leave behind, and certainly a legacy that Cecile stood for, which feels very present to me in this as well,” Morales Rocketto said. “As organizers like to say, you want to organize yourself out of a job. I don’t think that we solved every problem for women, but I think that we have left something that can continue to build and grow that work.”

She also recognizes how much the current cultural climate has changed — and the impact that culture has on politics. But it doesn’t mean that she thinks the nature of this work has ended.

“I would love if everyone in America felt like it was cool as shit to be a feminist — that’s what I want to happen. But even in times where it’s not sexy, we still have to organize,” Morales Rocketto said.

For many culturally and religiously diverse Australians, belonging is shaped less by formal rights than by whether public narratives allow them to move through society without suspicion, explanation or self-censorship. The real question is whether our multicultural laws can recognise harm that doesn’t arrive as an incident-harm that accumulates through policy environments and public narratives, quietly teaching some people that they will always be read with suspicion.

Kyrylo Budanov is a military man by training. A graduate of the Odesa Military Academy, he began his career in the special forces of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, and went on to become a member of Unit 2245 — an elite commando force trained by the CIA. After Russia annexed Crimea and started a war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Budanov took part in raids on the peninsula and fought in Donbas. After he was injured in combat, the CIA sent Budanov for treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland.

In 2020, President Volodymyr Zelensky appointed Budanov to lead Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, known as the Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR). Within three years, he had risen to the rank of lieutenant general. Then, on January 2, 2026, Budanov accepted a new position as Zelensky’s chief of staff — just two days before his 40th birthday.

A witness who watched the raid described seeing administrators and staff trying to get the agents away from the building to stop them from apprehending students.

The witness also said that the agents began deploying pepper spray after some students started protesting against their presence on school property.

A Roosevelt High School official confirmed to MPR News that agents wearing US Border Patrol uniforms pepper sprayed students, while also firing pepper balls at them.

When SpaceX CEO Elon Musk chose a remote Texas outpost on the Gulf Coast to develop his company’s ambitious Starship, he put the 400-foot rocket on a collision course with the commercial airline industry.

Each time SpaceX did a test run of Starship and its booster, dubbed Super Heavy, the megarocket’s flight path would take it soaring over busy Caribbean airspace before it reached the relative safety of the open Atlantic Ocean. The company planned as many as five such launches a year as it perfected the craft, a version of which is supposed to one day land on the moon.

Video of the shooting released from the scene shows part of a community rapid response unit that was blowing whistles and witnessing ICE actions on Portland Avenue. In the video, a maroon SUV is seen maneuvering in the street before two ICE agents get out of a truck and yell at the driver of the SUV to “get out of the fucking car” while one appears to attempt to open the door. As the driver of the SUV began driving away from the agents, a single agent standing nearby in the street shot three bullets into the windshield of the vehicle.

The charity Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) has described it as one of the largest unregulated squid fisheries in the world, warning that the scale of activities could destabilise an entire ecosystem.

“With so many ships constantly fishing without any form of oversight, the squid’s short, one-year life cycle simply is not being respected,” says Lt Magalí Bobinac, a marine biologist with the Argentinian coast guard.

There are no internationally agreed catch limits in the region covering squid, and distant-water fleets take advantage of this regulatory vacuum.

An investigation by ProPublica and ABC15 Arizona in June found that prosecutors in the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office have frequently pursued the death penalty but rarely secured death sentences.

In nearly 350 such cases over 20 years, just 13% ended in a death sentence. The outcomes raised questions about the office’s judgment in pursuing the death penalty, said former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, who called for a review of capital charging decisions after the news organizations shared their findings with him.

“The [Attorney General] would have the court define “deal with” as “engaging with” the state. It argues that any time the state is an alleged victim of a crime, the definition of “deal with” is satisfied. “Deal with” should be include [sic] when someone “deals with” an angry (or misbehaving) child. To stretch the definition of “deal with” to this length would lead to absurd results and give the AG much broader powers as those set forth in the state constitution and the limited number of statutes that give the AG express power to prosecute crimes[…]” – Judge Kevin Farmer

Operation Absolute Resolve was some months in the planning, as the Pentagon acknowledged in its briefing on Jan. 3. My presumption is that from the beginning of the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean and the establishment of Joint Task Force Southern Spear in the fall, military planners were developing options for the president to capture or eliminate Maduro and other key Chavista leadership, should coercive efforts at persuading a change in the Venezuelan situation fail.

I rarely add a comment to my text but I can anticipate some reactions here. I do not support the US actions in Venezuela and only share this out of interest. The Conversation has other articles on the legality and repurcussions of the US involvement in Venezuela.

After the killing of Tortuguita, thousands of people surged into the movement for which Tortuguita gave their life—the movement to stop Cop City and abolish the police. Community members gathered to weep, to support one another, and to grieve—but also to fight back. People blocked roads, lit flares, smashed windows, and torched police vehicles. Over the following months, the movement struck blows against the contractors and funders of the Atlanta Police Foundation on a daily basis. On March 5, 2023, hundreds of people raided the Cop City construction site chanting “Viva, Viva Tortuguita.” They threw fireworks, stones, and Molotov cocktails at police and wrecked the site.