Politics

New York University said it would deny a diploma to a student who used a graduation speech to condemn Israel’s attacks on Palestinians and what he described as U.S. “complicity in this genocide.”

Logan Rozos's speech on Wednesday for graduating students of NYU’s Gallatin School sparked waves of condemnation from pro-Israel groups, who demanded that the university take aggressive disciplinary action against him.

In a statement, NYU spokesperson John Beckman apologized for the speech and accused the student of misusing his platform “to express his personal and one-sided political views.”

Days after President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term, the acting head of the Environmental Protection Agency sent an email to the entire workforce with details about the agency’s plans to close diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and included a plea for help.

“Employees are requested to please notify” the EPA or the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources agency, “of any other agency office, sub-unit, personnel position description, contract, or program focusing exclusively on DEI,” the email from then-acting Administrator James Payne said.

No employees in the agency, then more than 15,000 people strong, responded to that plea, ProPublica learned via a public records request.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/38099622

Food rations that could supply 3.5 million people for a month are mouldering in warehouses around the world because of U.S. aid cuts and risk becoming unusable, according to five people familiar with the situation.

The food stocks have been stuck inside four U.S. government warehouses since the Trump administration's decision in January to cut global aid programmes, according to three people who previously worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development and two sources from other aid organisations.

Some stocks that are due to expire as early as July are likely to be destroyed, either by incineration, using them as animal feed or disposing of them in other ways, two of the sources said.

The warehouses, which are run by USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), contain between 60,000 to 66,000 metric tonnes of food, sourced from American farmers and manufacturers, the five people said.

An undated inventory list for the warehouses - which are located in Djibouti, South Africa, Dubai and Houston - stated that they contained more than 66,000 tonnes of commodities, including high-energy biscuits, vegetable oil and fortified grains.

Gov. Greg Abbott has signed into law a slate of fresh corporate protections, including provisions making it harder for shareholders to file lawsuits against publicly traded companies, like the one in Delaware that blocked a massive pay package for Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk, spurring him to move his companies to Texas.

The Republican governor said the measures would “attract businesses, attract job creators, and will ensure that Texans are going to have plentiful job opportunities to earn a great paycheck for decades to come.”

Under the new litigation law, shareholders could only bring so-called derivative claims that allege wrongdoing by executives if they hold a 3% stake in the company. The law also insulates all corporate directors and officers from most shareholder claims brought in the state’s new business courts, unless it can be proven that they committed fraud or knowingly broke the law. The changes would also shield executive’s emails, texts and other communications from shareholder inspection in most cases.

US military commanders will be told to identify troops in their units who are transgender or have gender dysphoria, then send them to get medical checks in order to force them out of the service.

A senior defense official on Thursday laid out what could be a complicated and lengthy new process aimed at fulfilling Donald Trump’s directive to remove transgender service members from the US military despite years of service alongside all the other two million US troops.

The board oversees virtually every aspect of state elections, large and small, from setting rules dictating what makes ballots valid or invalid to monitoring compliance with campaign finance laws. In the Supreme Court race, it consistently worked to block Griffin’s challenges.

When Josh Stein won a four-year term last fall, a Republican supermajority in the state legislature passed a law, then overrode his predecessor’s veto, to transfer this power to the state auditor. It was an unusual step. No other state has elections overseen by the state auditor.

Stein sued to block the law and, initially, a lower court sided with him. But in April, the state’s Court of Appeals, which has a Republican majority, issued a three-sentence decision overturning the lower court’s ruling without hearing oral arguments.

"We are in communication with the Secret Service and Director Curran. Primary jurisdiction is with SS [Secret Service] on these matters and we, the FBI, will provide all necessary support."

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said on X: "Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey just called for the assassination of Trump."

She said her department and the Secret Service would investigate the matter.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino posted on X, accusing Comey of "a plea to bad actors/terrorists to assassinate the POTUS' while traveling internationally", referring to Trump's current tour of the Middle East.

In a curious twist during his confirmation process, Kash Patel failed to disclose significant personal financial information until after the Senate hearing in January on his nomination to become FBI director. Consequently, one peculiar item listed on his financial disclosure form received no attention during that hearing: Patel’s work as a consultant for the embassy of Qatar. On this document, Patel did not specify what he did for Qatar or how much he was paid.

Even now—nearly three months after he took the helm of the nation’s top law enforcement agency—the details of Patel’s Qatari connection remain a mystery.

Patel is just one of several top Trump administration aides who have had financial ties to this Arab monarchy.

• Susan Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, worked for a lobbying firm that represented Qatar.
• Attorney General Pam Bondi lobbied for the Qataris.
• Mike Huckabee, now US Ambassador to Israel, was paid $50,000 to visit Qatar in 2018.
• Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, also has pocketed money from Qatar.
• In 2023, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund bought the Park Lane Hotel from Witkoff’s company in a $623 million deal.
• The Trump Organization itself recently struck a deal to develop a luxury golf resort in Qatar. And now Qatar is considering handing as a gift to Trump a jumbo airliner worth about $400 million for Trump to use as Air Force One. The plan reportedly is for the 747 to be transferred to Trump’s presidential library foundation after he leaves office, where it could come under his personal control.

The US solicitor general argued that lower courts overstepped their authority, saying this power should be curtailed.

Meanwhile, the New Jersey solicitor general - arguing on behalf of a group of states - said siding with Trump would create a patchwork system of citizenship.

This would create "chaos on the ground", argued the lawyer, Jeremy Feigenbaum.

It is not clear when the court will issue its decision. If it agrees with Trump, then he could continue his wide-ranging use of executive orders to make good on campaign promises without having to wait for congressional approval - with limited checks by the courts.

Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media the same day that President Donald Trump unveiled bruising new tariffs that caused the stock market to plummet, according to records obtained Wednesday by ProPublica.

Trump Media, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, fell 13% in the following days, before rebounding.

The disclosure forms do not include the specific amount of stocks sold or their worth but instead provide a rough range. The documents do not say exactly what time she sold the shares or at what price. The company’s stock price closed on April 2 at $18.76 and opened the next morning, after the press conference, at $17.92 before falling more in the days ahead. In addition to selling between $1 million and $5 million worth of Trump Media shares, Bondi’s disclosure form shows she also sold between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of warrants in Trump Media, which typically give a holder the right to purchase the shares.

Sean Duffy, the Trump administration’s transportation secretary, has made a startling admission that he switched flights for his wife this week to help her avoid flying out of beleaguered Newark Liberty, one of the busiest airports in the New York area.

Duffy’s disclosure on Monday runs counter to his repeated assurances to the American public that it is safe to fly from Newark, despite a spate of dramatic outages affecting the airport’s radar systems. On Sunday, the transportation secretary went on NBC News’s Meet the Press and insisted Newark was safe.

“It is,” he protested. “I fly out of Newark all the time, my family flies out of Newark.”

Hours later, speaking to the conservative radio host David Webb on SiriusXM, he told a different story. “My wife was flying out of Newark tomorrow, I switched her flight to LaGuardia,” he said in comments first reported by Gizmodo.

The “ATSC Transition” is championed by the National Association of Broadcasters, who want to effectively privatize the public airwaves, allowing broadcasters to encrypt over-the-air programming, meaning that you will only be able to receive those encrypted shows if you buy a new TV with built-in DRM keys. It’s a tax on American TV viewers, forcing you to buy a new TV so you can continue to access a public resource you already own.

• The FBI Director

Before becoming FBI director, Kash Patel appeared eight separate times on a podcast hosted by far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters, who promotes Holocaust denial. Peters posted a photo of himself holding Hitler's Mein Kampf with the message "visionary leadership." In recent days, he attacked the founder of Barstool Sports, Dave Portnoy, with antisemitic vitriol.

• The White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security

Paul Ingrassia, currently serving as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, has ties to multiple figures widely known for promoting antisemitism.

• The communications director for the White House Office of Management and Budget

Before joining the Trump administration as the communications director for the White House Office of Management and Budget, Rachel Cauley served on the board of the Patriot Freedom Project. The nonprofit group was founded in direct response to the arrest of Hale-Cusanelli on Jan. 6 charges.

• An official at the Department of Justice

Trump appointed conservative activist Ed Martin to multiple Department of Justice roles, after his nomination for U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, failed. Martin's ties to Hale-Cusanelli played a key role in the collapse of his nomination to that role.

She told staff that, in nearly two weeks, ICE investigators had visited 1,500 residences of unaccompanied minors. Agents had uncovered a handful of instances of what she said were cases of sex and labor trafficking. Salazar did not provide details but said identifying even one case of abuse is significant.

“Those are my marching orders,” Salazar told staffers. “While I will never do something outside the law for anybody or anything, and while we are operating within the law, we will expect all of you to do so and be supportive of that.”

Salazar said she expected an increase in the number of children taken from their sponsors and placed back into federal custody, which in the past has been rare.

Since Salazar took charge, ORR has instituted a raft of strict vetting rules for sponsors of immigrant children that the agency argues are needed to ensure sponsors are properly screened. Those include no longer accepting foreign passports or IDs as forms of identification unless people have legal authorization to be in the U.S. The resettlement agency also expanded DNA checks of relatives and increased income requirements, including making sponsors submit recent pay stubs or tax returns. (The IRS recently announced that it would share tax information with ICE to facilitate deportations.)

A judge in the US state of Wisconsin has been charged for allegedly helping a Mexican man evade immigration officials through a back door during an arrest attempt.

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested in April. Now a federal grand jury has approved the two charges against her, which could see the judge face a prison term.

It marks a further escalation of Donald Trump's sweeping crackdown on immigration, and has provoked an outcry from Democrats, who accuse the Trump administration of attacking the judicial system.

A federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled on Tuesday that the United States can use the Alien Enemies Act to fast-track the deportation of accused Venezuelan gang members, in what appears to be the first court ruling that backs the Trump administration’s interpretation of the 1798 law.

Haines, appointed by Trump during his first term, ruled that the administration must give potential deportees at least 21 days' notice and the opportunity to challenge their removals, to avoid the possibility that people who are not gang members "may be errantly removed from this country."

Judge Stephanie Haines, of the U.S. District for the Western District of Pennsylvania, ruled that President Donald Trump has authority to declare the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization and deport its members under the Alien Enemies Act, but she criticized the administration's practice of deporting people sometimes "within a matter of hours."

The two officials—Paul Perkins, an associate deputy attorney general, and Brian Nieves, a deputy chief of staff and senior policy counsel—were seeking access to the U.S. Copyright Office but were denied entry at around 9 a.m., sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity told The New York Times.

Despite Trump’s appointment of Blanche as acting librarian of Congress, library staff have reportedly been recognizing Robert Newlen as their interim replacement instead, according to The Times’ sources. Newlen was principal deputy librarian and Hayden’s second-in-command.

Staff seem to be waiting for direction from Congress, with Newlen additionally sending an email to employees saying he did not recognize Blanche’s appointment as valid, according to Politico.

The Qatari Defense Ministry is talking to the White House about transferring the luxury-configured Boeing jet to the Pentagon, which would oversee its retrofitting into a makeshift Air Force One. But a private contractor would have to rip it apart to turn the jet into a flying White House for the president with secure communications and classified upgrades, according to former Air Force officials and lawmakers, an expensive and complicated prospect that could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

“This isn’t really a gift,” said Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, which oversees executive airlift. “You’d basically have to tear the plane down to the studs and rebuild it to meet all the survivability, security and communications requirements of Air Force One. It’s a massive undertaking — and an unfunded one at that.”

For too long, healthcare has been dictated by insurance companies and hospital corporations. Healthcare decisions need to be made by physicians and advanced practice clinicians (APC), not by administration looking at what a patient is costing them. We are striking to have a voice in our working conditions to ensure we can provide the best care for our patients.

After the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Ras Baraka, was arrested Friday for protesting outside of a new immigration detention facility, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official is threatening to arrest three more elected officials who were present.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Baraka, who is running for governor, on Friday after he and three Democratic members of Congress from New Jersey—Rep. Robert Menendez, Rep. LaMonica McIver, and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman—sought to enter the facility, called Delaney Hall. The officials said they were conducting an “oversight visit” at the detention center, alleging that city officials and fire inspectors had previously been denied entry. Federal law states that members and employees of Congress have the right to enter ICE facilities for oversight visits and that they do not have to provide advanced notice in order to do so. Videos from the scene show Menendez, McIver and Watson Coleman asking guards to let them in and seemingly being denied.

The Trump administration has accused the current South African government of pushing racist, anti-white policies through affirmative action laws and a recently passed land expropriation law that Trump claims allows for the wrongful seizure of Afrikaners’ land.

Chrispin Phiri, a spokesperson for South Africa’s Foreign Ministry, called the administration’s allegations “unfounded” in a statement released last week, saying they “do not meet the threshold of persecution required under domestic and international refugee law.”

In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it “briefly slowed aircraft in and out of the airport while we ensured redundancies were working as designed.

“Operations have returned to normal.’’

That came after Duffy announced plans to reduce the number of flights arriving and departing from Newark for the “next several weeks” and would meet with the airport’s major carriers to discuss the issues. Flight reductions, he said, would target the hours when international flights arrive.

Duffy said he wanted to raise the mandatory retirement age for air traffic controllers from 56 to 61, to help offset a shortage of about 3,000 air traffic controllers. After the first Newark failure, on 28 April, the union representing air traffic controllers said several members were placed on trauma leave.

“While we cannot quickly replace them due to this highly specialized profession, we continue to train controllers who will eventually be assigned to this busy airspace,” the FAA said earlier in May.

House Republicans late Sunday unveiled legislation that analysts said would rip Medicaid coverage from millions of low-income Americans—including children and people with disabilities—to help fund tax breaks that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

The bill text released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee is a section of the sprawling budget reconciliation package that Republicans are hoping to complete as soon as Memorial Day.

The legislation includes major changes to Medicaid that, if enacted, would kick millions from the program, including work requirements for some enrollees and new payment mandates for adults living above 100% of the federal poverty level—which, for a single individual, is $15,650 in annual income for 2025.

Editor's Note: This is a plan, but they're trying to hide it. If it was a normal bill release, I wouldn't post this.

The broad wording of the proposal would prevent states from enforcing both existing and proposed laws designed to protect citizens from AI systems. For example, California's recent law requiring health care providers to disclose when they use generative AI to communicate with patients would potentially become unenforceable. New York's 2021 law mandating bias audits for AI tools used in hiring decisions would also be affected, 404 Media notes. The measure would also halt legislation set to take effect in 2026 in California that requires AI developers to publicly document the data used to train their models.

This week, President Donald Trump will head to the Middle East for the first foreign trip of his second term. While he is there, he will reportedly manufacture a new conflict of interest for himself by accepting a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet as a gift from the Qatari royal family.

Trump will use the plane as the new Air Force One until just before the end of his term, at which point the plane’s ownership will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, according to ABC, which first reported the news, citing sources familiar with the proposed arrangement. ABC reports that the gift of the plane—which is reportedly so opulent that it’s known as “the flying palace”—will be announced this week, when Trump visits Qatar.