Politics

In case you’re wondering how the Senate was able to vote on this during a government shutdown, it’s because the Congressional Review Act remains a legislative function during a funding lapse.

“I’ll tell you right, as God as my witness, if we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison,” Bannon told the crowd Wednesday at an awards event hosted by the Conservative Partnership Academy. This group offers training and certifications to aspiring right-wing ideologues working in politics and government.

An immigration enforcement officer who shot a US citizen in Chicago last month bragged about the incident in texts afterwards, according to court documents filed in federal court on Wednesday. It’s just one of the latest examples of how, contrary to the Trump administration’s own narrative, the agents helping the supposedly terrified residents of American cities are posing a danger to residents themselves.

More than 2,000 flights in the US are cancelled or delayed on Friday after airlines were told to cut traffic during the government shutdown

The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to enforce a policy blocking transgender and nonbinary people from choosing passport sex markers that align with their gender identity.

Some called for him to step down. Roberts, who holds a PhD in history and spearheaded the rightwing manifesto Project 2025, has moved the foundation into more of a Trumpian stance since he joined in 2021.

Several House Republicans have reportedly heard from the Department of Justice (DOJ) that the unreleased Jeffrey Epstein documents are especially compromising for President Donald Trump.

As reported by the Washington Post on Thursday, new data from corporate outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that employers in October announced 153,000 job cuts, which marked the highest number of layoffs in that month since October 2003.

A pharmaceutical executive collapsed in the Oval Office Thursday as members of the Trump administration were announcing a new deal for weight-loss medications.

After the “sticks” were deployed, a “carrot” was offered. Penn became one of just nine schools nationally to be offered a special “compact” with the federal government, which would give the feds broad control over the school and its speech in return for preferential access to federal funds. Penn declined to sign the deal. (Making the whole surreal situation stranger was the fact that one of Penn’s own wealthy boosters apparently helped the Trump administration write the compact.)

For low-income people and their families, it’s been a hard, complicated week. On November 1, more than 40 million users of SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, did not receive their monthly payments after the Trump administration refused to pay full benefits through emergency funding during the ongoing government shutdown. It would be better, the administration has decided, to weaponize hunger against Democrats, blaming the government shutdown, than to feed people.

The Washington D.C. National Guard will be deployed to the nation’s capital through the end of February, according to formal orders reviewed by The Associated Press.

Airports in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are among 40 of the busiest across the U.S. where flights will be cut starting Friday due to the government shutdown, according to a list distributed to the airlines and obtained by The Associated Press.

Customs and Border Patrol agent Gregory Lairmore told the jury the snack “exploded all over him” and he “could smell the onions and mustard” on his uniform.

A Spanish-language immersion daycare in a leafy residential neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago was raided by federal immigration agents on Wednesday and a teacher was taken away, panicking school administrators and parents of infants, toddlers and pre-kindergarten children at the center, a staff worker at the daycare told Reuters.

Under the new rules, California will move forward with a redrawing of electoral districts only after GOP-led states do so first. Its changes would remain in force until elections in 2030.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is leading the charge to defend Miami Dade College in higher court from allegations it violated the state’s Sunshine Law, raising the stakes in a case involving Donald Trump’s presidential library that could have sweeping implications for the future of government transparency.

“White House press briefings engage the American people on important issues affecting their daily lives — in recent months, war, the economy, and healthcare, and in recent years, a global pandemic,” U.S. District Judge Amir Ali wrote in issuing a preliminary injunction on Tuesday. “The exclusion of deaf Americans from that programming, in addition to likely violating the Rehabilitation Act, is clear and present harm that the court cannot meaningfully remedy after the fact.”

We reviewed federal prosecutions and local arrests, internal protest summaries by the Portland Police Bureau, sworn testimony from local and federal officials as well as more than 700 video clips containing hours of footage posted to social media by protesters, counterprotesters and others. We focused on the three months before Sept. 5, when Trump made his first remarks about sending troops to Portland.

In short order, the Trump administration has hollowed out the CFPB — the primary regulator with jurisdiction over increasingly ubiquitous financial technology companies and the only one looking out for consumers in the rapidly expanding crypto marketplace. Lawsuits have been dropped, settlements have been renegotiated in favor of companies and a proposed consumer-friendly crypto regulation was killed outright.

Trump and his Republican allies have been especially focused on immigration, crime and conservative cultural issues.

Early voting has ended in New York City, and the initial numbers show the highest early voting turnout for a non-presidential election in the city.

Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced late financier and sex offender, had accounts at Goldman Sachs (GS.N, HSBC (HSBA.L), and other banks, new court filings show.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned Tuesday that if the federal government shutdown continues another week it could lead to “mass chaos” and could force him to close some of the national airspace to air traffic, a drastic move that could upend American aviation.

“New Mexico is creating the conditions for better outcomes in health, learning, and well-being,” said Neal Halfon, professor of pediatrics, public health and public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Trump administration says it will restart the national food aid program known as SNAP using money from a Department of Agriculture contingency fund but will only pay out half the amount participants would normally receive.

The Bureau of Land Management made the announcement in a letter sent to tribal leaders last Thursday, saying the agency will conduct an environmental assessment of the proposal to put the federal parcels back on the board for future leasing. A public comment period will follow.

The government is accused of denying detainees proper access to food, water and medical care and coercing them to sign documents they don’t understand. Without that knowledge, and without private communication with lawyers, they have unknowingly relinquished their rights and faced deportation, the lawsuit alleges.

Human-rights attorneys in Chicago say they cannot account for more than 3,000 people arrested during a federal immigration crackdown known as “Operation Midway Blitz,” raising concerns about due process, transparency, and possible coerced departures.

As the Trump administration continued its illegal freeze on food assistance, the US Department of Agriculture sent a warning to grocery stores not to provide discounts to the more than 42 million Americans affected.

Steven Palmer, who had worked at the bureau since 1998, was fired as head of the FBI’s critical incident response group which is responsible for handling major security threats as well as overseeing the agency’s fleet of jets. He was the third head of the unit to be dismissed since Patel became the second Trump administration’s FBI director in February.

“Based on the trial testimony, this Court finds no credible evidence that during the approximately two months before the President’s federalization order, protests grew out of control or involved more than isolated and sporadic instances of violent conduct that resulted in no serious injuries to federal personnel,” she wrote.

The plan, outlined in a public notice posted Thursday, is the latest step in an unprecedented Trump administration initiative to pool confidential data from varied sources that it claims will help identify noncitizens on voter rolls, tighten immigration enforcement and expose public benefit fraud.

But today, amid the 32-day-and-counting government shutdown, those funds weren’t there for the vast majority of recipients. (Governors in Virginia and Vermont pledged to use state funds to keep the program going for their respective residents, though both said brief delays were probable as they worked out technological challenges.)

Three men have been killed in a US strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has said.

President Donald Trump’s razing of the White House’s East Wing to build a ballroom has put some news organizations following the story in an awkward position, with corporate owners among the contributors to the project — and their reporters covering it vigorously.

The head of the Food and Drug Administration’s drug center abruptly resigned Sunday after federal officials began reviewing “serious concerns about his personal conduct,” according to a government spokesperson.

A pledge form from Trump’s team has been circulating to seek donations for the ballroom and gave donors the option of withholding their identities, according to the outlet, which obtained a copy of the form.

U.S. District Judge Sara L. Ellis said she was stunned to see Donald Trump’s most notorious immigration enforcer boast about how he was looking forward to nightly check-ins in her courtroom—hours before government lawyers argued that the very same check-ins would be “extraordinarily disruptive.”

And for decades, the Environmental Protection Agency tracked those emissions not by monitoring the air but by relying on a kind of honor system. Companies were allowed to estimate their chemical pollution using methods that even the EPA conceded were often unreliable.

This is the entire article since it’s an update:

A project of this scale had never been attempted before Klamath’s dams came down, and even with an abundance of hope and extensive modeling, there was uncertainty about how the river would rebound.

The Defense Department is stripping away job protections from its civilian employees and directing managers to “act with speed and conviction” to fire employees performing “unsuccessfully.”

But 10 months into his second administration, the president is commanding officials to resume nuclear weapons testing, which would end the U.S’s 33-year moratorium and invite a global arms race in a volatile political moment.

New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, has declared a state of emergency to raise $65m to help food banks as federal funding for the national food stamps program is set to expire on Saturday due to the government shutdown.

After urging Illinoisans last month to record concerning actions by federal agents, Gov. JB Pritzker signed an executive order Thursday creating a commission to review documentation submitted by the public.

The Justice Department has stripped references to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack from court papers and punished two federal prosecutors who filed the document seeking prison time at sentencing Thursday for an armed rioter arrested near former President Barack Obama’s home.

President Donald Trump directed the world’s largest aircraft carrier into the Caribbean Sea on Friday in a major escalation.

But now, a little-known algorithmic process called “differential privacy,” created to keep census data from being used to identify individual respondents, has become the right’s latest focus. WIRED spoke to six experts about the GOP’s ongoing effort to falsely allege that a system created to protect people’s privacy has made the data from the 2020 census inaccurate.

Bisognano notes that even if Prop. 50 passes, Democrats could still end up six to 10 seats behind Republicans in a redistricting arms race, as Missouri and North Carolina already have enacted new gerrymandered maps, following Texas. Other Republican states, including Ohio, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, and Nebraska, could go next. That would make it much harder for Democrats to take back the House.

A network of medical clinics that serves low-income residents in Maine said it will shut down its primary care operations on Friday because of Trump administration cuts to abortion providers.

A top US military official has ordered the national guards of all 50 US states, the District of Columbia and US territories to form “quick reaction forces” trained in “riot control”, including use of batons, body shields, Tasers and pepper spray, according to an internal Pentagon directive reviewed by the Guardian.

The widow of a beloved Utah fashion designer who was fatally shot during a June “No Kings” protest in Salt Lake City demanded Wednesday that someone be held accountable for her husband’s death after more than four months without any charges filed in the case.

Video of incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BStfBzUJNuQ

The White House has fired six members of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the independent federal agency that advises the president and Congress on design plans for monuments, memorials, coins and federal buildings. The seven member commission is made up of experts in architecture, art, urban and landscape design. Since its creation in 1910, the commission has reviewed plans for everything from Arlington National Cemetery to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

When oil and gas are pumped from the ground, they come up with briny fluid called “produced water,” many times saltier than the sea and laden with chemicals, including some that cause cancer. Most of this toxic water is shot back underground using what are known as injection wells.

U.S. lawmakers have tried four times since September last year to close what they called a glaring loophole: China is getting around export bans on the sale of powerful American AI chips by renting them through U.S. cloud services instead.

The U.S. is set to be in the fairly unusual position of having only a single aircraft carrier deployed and none in the waters off both Europe and the Middle East. The change is especially stark after the U.S. joined Israeli strikes on Iran in June and has engaged in some of the most intense combat operations since World War II against Yemen’s Houthi rebels in the Red Sea.

U.S. military officials involved with President Donald Trump’s expanding operations in Latin America have been asked to sign non-disclosure agreements, three U.S. officials say, a development that raises new questions about a military buildup that Venezuela fears may lead to an invasion.

The top U.S. government watchdog for consumer finance has formally scrapped a registry for caught violating consumer laws, asserting that its costs outweighed any benefit to the public, according to a government notice issued Tuesday.

A group of more than two dozen states sued the Trump administration on Tuesday, seeking to maintain funding of so-called SNAP benefits during the ongoing federal government shutdown.

The latest development puts a spotlight on Miami Dade College’s resolve not to hold a new public hearing on the controversial land deal. Dunn’s lawsuit is about whether the college provided “reasonable notice” to the public of its plans to give up the land ahead of a Sept. 23 board of trustees meeting under Florida’s Sunshine Law. The trustees announced when and where they would meet to “discuss potential real estate transactions” a week before the meeting, but gave no other details.

The New York Times reported that the proposed changes stem from the White House becoming frustrated at the pace of deportations, which now lags behind Trump’s goal of removing 1 million immigrants in his first year in office.

On Friday, the California Supreme Court ordered the University of California system to release the details of a proposed deal from the federal government that would restore research grants that were suspended by the Trump administration. The proposed deal, first issued in August, had remained confidential as a suit filed by faculty at UCLA made its way through appeals. With California’s top court now weighing in, the university administrators have released the document, still marked “draft” and “confidential attorney work product.”

Amazon has confirmed it plans to cut thousands of jobs, saying it needs to be “organised more leanly” to seize the opportunity provided by artificial intelligence (AI).

President Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked a New York state appeals court to toss out his hush money criminal conviction, saying federal law preempts state law and there was no intent to commit a crime.

U.S. immigration authorities detained British commentator Sami Hamdi, revoked his visa and said he would be deported rather than allowed to complete his speaking tour in the United States, a Homeland Security official said on Sunday.

Air traffic controllers will miss their biweekly paycheck, which would have gone out on Oct. 28, as the government shutdown continues.

Meanwhile, banks who had done business with Epstein, although not admitting wrongdoing, paid hundreds of millions in settlements to victims. Donald Trump even made releasing the Epstein investigative files part of his campaign platform, and doubled down on his promise to do so early this year.

On Monday, Alaska’s governor, Mike Dunleavy, said it could be more than 18 months before survivors could return to their homes due to the severity of the damage. Trump authorized a federal disaster declaration – which frees up crucial federal assistance – on Thursday, nearly a week after being requested by Dunleavy.

“He is prepared to answer questions about the Special Counsel’s investigation and prosecution, but requires assurance from the Department of Justice that he will not be punished for doing so,” Smith’s legal team said.

He and thousands of others have received mail here for years. They use the address for job applications, for medication, to receive benefits like food stamp cards and even to vote. And for 20 years, the U.S. Postal Service provided at least 20% of the mail room’s budget.

The new notice comes after the Trump administration said it would not tap roughly $5 billion in contingency funds to keep benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly referred to as SNAP, flowing into November. That program helps about 1 in 8 Americans buy groceries.

Trump first announced the secret, legally controversial donation on Thursday amid growing clamor about the potential financial hardship being caused by the ongoing federal shutdown on the 1.3 million active duty military troops.

A Virginia couple, Charles and Judith Voorhees, filed an emergency motion in federal court on Thursday, seeking to halt the project, alleging that it violates multiple federal preservation and planning laws.

Bluesky link to video of woman. Make sure to watch the Wheeling, IL video in the comments:

A new regulation will allow U.S. border authorities to require non-citizens to be photographed at airports, seaports, land crossings and any other point of departure, expanding on an earlier pilot program.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group to deploy to U.S. Southern Command to “bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a social media post.

The Trump administration on Thursday finalized plans to open the coastal plain of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to potential oil and gas drilling, renewing a long-simmering debate over whether to drill in one of the nation’s environmental jewels.

Donald Trump is finishing what the British started. Despite promises that the White House would be unaffected by the addition of a $230 million ballroom, the historic East Wing has in fact been demolished. The images of the site are so jarring that the Treasury Department has reportedly ordered its employees to stop taking photos of it.

The Department of Justice is preparing to send federal election observers to California and New Jersey next month, targeting two Democratic states holding off-year elections following requests from state Republican parties.

Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWQRuRIxMBI

The pace of the strikes has quickened in recent days from one every few weeks when they first began to three this week, killing a total of at least 43 people since September. Two of the most recent strikes were carried out in the eastern Pacific Ocean, expanding the area where the military has launched attacks and shifting to where much of the cocaine from the world’s largest producers is smuggled.

Millions of college students could face significant new obstacles paying for graduate school after federal loan limits were signed into law this summer as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

When Texas chose a company to roll out the state’s $1 billion private school voucher program, it passed over more established vendors in favor of a four-year-old tech startup that said it could do it for almost half the cost.

Today, a spokesperson for Oversight Democrats released the following statement on their investigation into the Department of Homeland Security after reports that at least 170 U.S. citizens have been unlawfully detained by the agency.

Two federal judges admitted in response to an inquiry by U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley that members of their staff used artificial intelligence to help prepare recent court orders that Grassley called “error-ridden.”

The new Pentagon press corps will include the Gateway Pundit, the National Pulse, Human Events, podcaster Tim Pool, the Just the News website founded by journalist John Solomon, Frontlines by Turning Point USA and LindellTV, run by “MyPillow” CEO Mike Lindell.

In a two-sentence order on Wednesday, the Atlanta-based Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals granted a motion by federal government lawyers requesting that the appellate court pause proceedings in a case that halted a lower court decision shuttering operations at the controversial facility.

U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, a McAllen Republican bracing for a tough reelection battle next year, has signed onto a letter with 12 others in her party that pushes House Speaker Mike Johnson to deal with looming cost increases for people insured through the Affordable Care Act.

“The story about US attorney Lindsey Halligan’s use of Signal is deeply troubling. That she used the app apparently to discuss government business with a reporter, and configured her messages to disappear after eight hours, raises serious concerns that she is actively violating the Federal Records Act and the justice department’s own records-retention rules,” said Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, a non-profit that frequently files lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain federal records. The group submitted a public records request for Halligan’s Signal messages on Thursday.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said that Donald Trump told him late Wednesday evening that he was cancelling plans for a “federal deployment” to the city.

Instead of sharing the names of the medications coming from the errant foreign factories, the FDA routinely blacked them out, keeping the information secret from the public. That decision prevented doctors, pharmacists and patients from knowing whether the drugs they counted on were tainted by manufacturing failures — and potentially ineffective or unsafe.

The term sounds nonthreatening enough. But in the military, “titling” isn’t about taking ownership of a car or property. It’s what happens when a service member’s name is simply listed as the “subject” in a military criminal investigative report. “Titling does not mean an individual has been arrested, charged, or convicted of a crime,” a legal assistance document on the Army’s website explains.

Changpeng Zhao, founder of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, has been pardoned by US President Donald Trump.

Sam O’Hara’s federal lawsuit says the ominous orchestral music of “The Imperial March” is the soundtrack for his peaceful protests against President Donald Trump’s deployment of Guard members in Washington, D.C. Millions of TikTok users have viewed O’Hara’s videos of his interactions with troops, according to the suit, filed by American Civil Liberties Union attorneys.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed a lawsuit against House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Tuesday following a continuous refusal by Johnson to seat Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva., D-Ariz.

On Tuesday, the White House told Reuters it intended to send plans to the National Capital Planning Commission, an agency that typically approves and monitors construction on federal buildings. Demolition began earlier this week, with reporters taking video of a backhoe ripping out chunks of the White House’s exterior.

Melania accused Wolff of making “false, defamatory, and lewd statements” in a letter from her attorney Alejandro Brito, saying he had made “extremely salacious” allegations that have reached tens of millions of people worldwide. The letter from Brito demanded that he retract statements including that Epstein had claimed Melania first slept with Trump on the late pedophile’s private jet—or face being sued for at least $1 billion.