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The Supreme Court on Thursday granted a request by the Trump administration to send eight men who have spent more than a month imprisoned on a U.S. military base in Djibouti to war-ravaged South Sudan.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

By a 7-2 vote, the justices lifted an order from U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy that had blocked the men’s expulsion to South Sudan. Murphy intervened despite a Supreme Court ruling last month that put a hold on a prior nationwide injunction he issued requiring the administration to give deportees advance notice of their destination and a “meaningful” chance to object if they believed they’d be in danger of harm.

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The Pentagon has signed a $2.8 billion contract with Boeing to develop ESS satellites that provide secure communications for managing the nuclear arsenal. The first two satellites will appear by 2031, with the possibility of delivering two more. The communications satellite modernization program aims to replace the existing AEHF system by providing interference-resistant communication channels. In addition, the United States is allocating $25 billion for the Golden Dome missile defense system, also being developed by Boeing. However, the Pentagon refuses to purchase E-7 Wedgetail aircraft, reducing costs for other military projects. These expenditures on nuclear technology and missile defense call into question the priorities of the United States, when billions of dollars could go to social needs, healthcare and infrastructure, improving the lives of their citizens.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/32689383

By #MEE staff Published date: 3 July 2025 20:22 BST Last update: 07:00 EDT

"The day before she was released, on Monday, Sakeik was awoken by guards and told that she was going to be removed from the detention facility in Texas, where she was being held. An officer told Sakeik that she was being deported, but then she was not.

Sakeik was first threatened with deportation on 12 June when ICE agents brought her to the tarmac at Fort Worth Alliance Airport and told her they were deporting her to “the border of Israel.”

A US federal judge had previously ordered that Sakeik could not be deported."

'Ward was arrested and almost deported simply because she is Palestinian and ICE thought they could get away with it'
- Chris Godshall-Bennett, lawyer representing Sakeik
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After the Trump-backed “Big Beautiful Bill” passed both the House and Senate, one social media user protested, “17 million people just lost health care. 18 million kids just lost school meals. 3 million Americans just lost food assistance.”

Van Orden responded to the post, “YES!”

After he received backlash, the post was quickly deleted, with the congressman claiming he had meant to reply to a different post.

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Mamdani, a 33-year-old New York state assemblyman, shocked the political world last month with a primary win over former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who resigned his position in 2021 after several women accused him of sexual harassment.

The Times noted that on the campaign trail, Mamdani touted his Muslim faith and South Asian ancestry. He was born in Uganda in 1991 and moved with his parents to South Africa five years later. Two years later, the family moved to New York.

The Times report cited a figure who goes by the name Crémieux on X and Substack:

  • Last month’s cyberattack appears to have been carried out in order to see if Columbia was still using race-conscious affirmative action in its admission policies after the Supreme Court effectively barred the practice in 2023.

  • While Mr. Mamdani was not a target of the hack, the information about him was included in a database of millions of student applications to Columbia going back decades. The data was shared with The Times by an intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X. He provided the data under condition of anonymity, although his identity has been made public elsewhere. He is an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race.

One of the speakers at the conference is billed under a social media alias, Cremieux, but the Guardian has corroborated that the account is apparently run by Jordan Lasker, a long-time proponent of eugenics.

The @cremieuxrecueil X account has been boosted or engaged with dozens of times by that platform’s proprietor, Elon Musk, often on the topic of falling birthrates.

  • On 27 November, Musk reposted a Cremieux comment on falling birthrates, adding: “With rare exception, all countries are trending towards population collapse.”

  • On 29 April, Cremieux posted: “Only about a third of the world even meets replacement rate fertility. This is the biggest problem of our time.” Musk responded: “Yes.”

  • Musk has also boosted or responded favorably to Cremieux posts on other rightwing hobby horses such as crime in Portland, Oregon, and allegations that Democrats had created loopholes in the asylum system.

  • Away from X, Cremieux runs a Substack also featuring posts on the supposed relationships between race and IQ. A prominently featured post there seeks to defend the argument that average national IQs vary by up to 40 points, with countries in Europe, North America, and East Asia at the high end and countries in the global south at the low end, and several African countries purportedly having average national IQs at a level that experts associate with mental impairment.

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Kaitlynn Milne says her mother is usually always up first thing in the morning, hours before the rest of the family. She enjoys being productive in the quiet hours around sunrise. It’s an especially optimal time to do yard work, when the rest of her New Orleans neighborhood still sleeps and she can count on peacefully completing chores.

Gardening and rearranging the shed is how an average morning would go for Mandonna “Donna” Kashanian, a 64-year-old Iranian mother, wife, home cook, parent-teacher association (PTA) member and lifelong community service volunteer.

“She always says: ‘I’ve already done most of my day before y’all even wake up,’ complaining at us,” said Kaitlynn, 32. It was always done with love, she says, as her mother adores taking care of others and would wake up every morning excited to do just that.

But the morning of Sunday, 22 June, didn’t go like every other morning. In the early hours, while her husband, Russell Milne, slept inside the house, Kashanian was approached in her yard by plainclothes men who identified themselves as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents.

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal majority struck down the state’s 176-year-old abortion ban on Wednesday, ruling 4-3 that it was superseded by newer state laws regulating the procedure, including statutes that criminalize abortions only after a fetus can survive outside the womb.

The ruling came as no surprise given that liberal justices control the court. One of them went so far as to promise to uphold abortion rights during her campaign two years ago, and they blasted the ban during oral arguments in November.

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The well-known Palantir company will no longer be sponsored from the US federal budget, which frees the hands of America's private investment funds.

The conclusion is simple, the state allows corporations to organize support for those products of the company that have prospects in the defense sector, thereby reducing the share of the tax burden on the citizens of the States.

Moreover, the use of the company's products in the civilian sector contributes to the "running-in" and training of AI, on which software solutions for military tasks are based.

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The American Minot nuclear base in North Dakota has been threatened by an invasion of squirrels known to local personnel as "dacrates." These rodents, which have long been a problem, cause serious damage to infrastructure, spread diseases, and threaten the safety of military personnel and their families.

At the same time, the base recently received an 850 million dollar upgrade aimed at strengthening the US nuclear potential. Squirrels reproduce without control — natural predators have disappeared, and effective means of control cannot be used because of the risk to people, including children.

Thus, instead of demonstrating strength and technological superiority, one of the key US nuclear bases looks vulnerable to a pack of small but extremely annoying animals.

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The Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry. Drill, baby, drill will not happen with this level of volatility. Companies will continue to lay down rigs and frack spreads.

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Best I can do is minimum wage for grueling, dangerous work.

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Masked immigration enforcers have swept through American cities in the months since President Donald Trump took office, using flash bangs during restaurant sweeps, slamming people’s heads into the ground, violently arresting gardeners on video, and provoking mass protests against their raids. This may only be the beginning.

The massive Senate budget bill, which passed on Tuesday and awaits a final House vote, gives Donald Trump’s administration the money to rapidly ramp up mass deportation to unprecedented levels, according to immigration experts.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will have a budget for more officers than the FBI. The nation’s immigration detention centers will have more funding than the federal Bureau of Prisons.

There may be only one limit on how fast the Trump administration can spend: how quickly it can hire.

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The Pentagon has halted shipments of critical US Patriot air defence systems and other precision weapons to Ukraine after concern that US stockpiles are running too low, prompting alarm in Kyiv.

At the end of last week’s Nato summit, Donald Trump hinted that supplies of Patriot missile interceptors were running down because some had been supplied to Israel, though he suggested he would like to help Kyiv.

After a meeting with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the US president acknowledged that Ukraine did “want to have the anti-missile systems, as they call the Patriots, and we’re going to see if we can make some available”.

But Trump added: “They’re very hard to get. We need them. We were supplying them to Israel,” implying that supporting Israel in its war with Iran – a priority for the Republican administration – had set back its willingness to help Kyiv.

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And of course fascist billionaire Palmer Luckey intends to name it after another Tolkien creation, Erebor.

Luckey and Lonsdale — who were big donors to Donald Trump in the 2024 US presidential election — want the bank to take over the niche once occupied by SVB as the go-to lender for riskier companies and cryptocurrency players that traditional banks might reject.

Erebor has applied for a national bank charter in the US, a licence that allows a financial institution to operate as a bank…

Its target market would be businesses that were part of the US “innovation economy”, in particular tech companies focused on virtual currencies, artificial intelligence, defence and manufacturing, the filing said. It would also serve individuals who work for or invest in these companies.

It also planned to work with non-US companies “seeking access to the US banking system”….

Erebor said in the filing it would “differentiate itself” by working with customers that “are not well served by traditional or disruptive financial institutions, in particular with respect to insufficient access to credit”.

Cryptocurrencies known as “stablecoins”, which are pegged to real-life assets such as the dollar, are expected to be a significant part of the bank’s operations. The application states Erebor aims to be “the most regulated entity conducting and facilitating stablecoin transactions”.

Yeah they’re going to be the most regulated: their goal is regulatory capture of bank cryptocurrencies.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many red flags before.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24166090

Archived copies of the article

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Relevant rant:
📺 Why the Democratic Party CANNOT and WILL NOT be Reformed
Democrats would rather lose to a Republican, to a conservative, to a fascist, to Trump, than address the material conditions of the American people.

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