News

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28038058

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has launched a campaign calling on the University of New Hampshire and Harvard to withdraw their hirings of former President Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan and former White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk. CAIR said in a statement the two men “spent four years acting as shadow presidents and executing foreign policy disaster after foreign policy disaster, from the botched U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan to President Biden’s embrace of dictators he once pledged to ostracize to the horrific genocide in Gaza.”

Men wearing street clothes identifying themselves as “the police” whisked away an international graduate student at Tufts University in Massachusetts after she co-authored an op-ed critical of Israel.

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen in the U.S. on a student visa, was detained on Tuesday in Somerville by two men wearing street clothes and masks. In a video posted on social media by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Ozturk is seen walking down a sidewalk when she is stopped by a man wearing a hat and hoodie. After saying, “Hi, ma’am,” the man – who did not appear to flash a badge of any kind – seizes her phone as a second man approaches. Those two men eventually handcuff her as others, wearing masks, stand guard.

At one point, one of the men can be heard saying, “We’re the police,” but he did not identify an agency or department.

“You don’t look like it,” a bystander can be heard saying. “Why are you hiding your faces? Why are you hiding your faces?”

One bystander told The Boston Globe that Ozturk informed the men, “I’m a student.” The paper said the bystander spoke on condition of anonymity “for fear of retaliation from the government.”

“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her,” Ozturk’s attorney Mahsa Khanbabai told The New York Times. “No charges have been filed against Rumeysa to date that we are aware of.”

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The Navy plans to send a second warship to patrol the waters off the U.S. by the end of this week after a destroyer was deployed on Saturday as part of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration and the border, a U.S. official confirmed to Military.com on Wednesday.

The official, who was given anonymity to discuss military plans, told Military.com that a second destroyer will deploy from the West Coast, joining the USS Gravely, which left a naval base in Virginia over the weekend headed for the waters around the U.S.-Mexico border.

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Ahead of his confirmation hearing Thursday to become assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Keith Bass is facing tough questions from a prominent Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Bass, a retired Navy commander and substance abuse counselor who previously led the Central Intelligence Agency's Office of Medical Services and the White House Medical Unit, was nominated Dec. 22 to manage the Defense Department's $61 billion health system, which serves 9.5 million beneficiaries, including 1.3 million active-duty troops.

According to an article in SpyTalk cited by Warren, Bass allegedly was fired as head of the CIA medical office following his mishandling of the investigation into Havana syndrome, also known as anomalous health incidents, that affected more than 330 U.S. State Department, intelligence and defense officials as a result of exposure to painful, piercing noise from an unknown source.

The article also pointed to Bass' alleged mishandling of the COVID-19 response at the agency, "afflicting its rank and file."

This week on CounterSpin: In early February, when Rep. Maxwell Frost tweeted that he and Rep. Maxine Waters were denied access to the Department of Education, Elon Musk responded on the platform he owns: “What is this ‘Department of Education’ you keep talking about? I just checked and it doesn’t exist.” That, we understand, was the shadow president skating where the puck’s gonna be, as they say—because a month later, we learned that indeed newly appointed Education Secretary Linda McMahon is tasked not with running but with erasing the department.

Elite media have talked about the political machinations, how this was expected, how it fits with Trump/Musk’s grand schemes. When it comes to what will happen to the under-resourced schools, and the students with disabilities for whom the DoE supported access and recourse for discrimination? Media seem happy with McMahon’s handwaving about how that stuff might be better off in a different agency.

The impacts of policy on people with disabilities are overwhelmingly an afterthought for corporate media, even though it’s a large community, and one anyone can join at any moment. We talked, on March 5, with journalist and historian David Perry about the threats McMahon and MAGA pose to people—including students—with disabilities.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare statement Tuesday criticizing attacks by President Trump and his allies on federal judges. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” he said. Roberts’s statement came after Trump called for the impeachment of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ordered the Trump administration to stop using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants. On Saturday, the administration ignored Boasberg’s order to turn around three deportation flights bound for El Salvador. We speak with The Nation's justice correspondent Elie Mystal on the Trump-led breakdown of constitutional order. “There's not a coming constitutional crisis,” says Mystal. “We are in a constitutional crisis right now.”

The Social Security Administration is considering drastic new anti-fraud measures that could disrupt benefit payments to millions of Americans, according to an internal memo first obtained by the political newsletter Popular Information. The changes would force millions of customers to file claims in person at a field office rather than over the phone. An estimated 75,000 to 85,000 elderly and disabled adults per week would be diverted to field offices. This comes even as the Trump administration slashes jobs and closes offices at the agency. Officials in the Social Security Administration who spoke with reporter Judd Legum, founder of Popular Information, have told him that there is an “effort to break the organization.”

Elon Musk’s political action committee is offering voters in Wisconsin $100 to sign a petition opposing what he calls “activist judges” ahead of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election on April 1. Two Musk-backed groups have spent over $20 million on the race to support Republican Brad Schimel over Democrat Susan Crawford. The race will decide control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

In other immigration news, The Washington Post is reporting the IRS is close to agreeing to a deal to give addresses and other personal information about suspected undocumented immigrants to the Department of Homeland Security. One former IRS official told the Post, “It is a complete betrayal of 30 years of the government telling immigrants to file their taxes.”

In other related news, DHS has shut down three internal watchdog agencies that advocated for immigrants, including the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

On 25 February 2024, US airman Aaron Bushnell self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. His words as he did so: “Free Palestine.”

On 8 March this year, people gathered in London outside the British parliament to support a man who had breached security to scale 25 meters up Big Ben, the parliament clock tower, where he perched for more than 16 hours, holding the Palestinian flag and tying a keffiyeh around the tower’s stonework.

Posting on Instagram intermittently, Daniel Day explained that his non-violent act of resistance at what he called the “so-called hub of democracy” was a call for the liberation of Palestine and an end “to state repression.”

I wake up early and I put on my clothes quietly.

It’s after dawn, and the sky is tinted a soft orange. The sun is not yet fully ablaze and there is a cool breeze. I wonder if it will stay that way, and I hope it will, because waiting in the breadline for hours with the sun overhead gives me a headache.

I put on my shoes and hear my mother telling me to hurry up, that we have a long line awaiting us.

The walk to Doha Bakery in Khan Younis takes about 10 minutes. Before the war, I would walk to university and sometimes near the sea, and I enjoyed these walks. But the walk to the breadline, to join an immense crowd of people pleading for loaves of bread – this is not the same kind of walk.

In an interview with Fox News on March 23, U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff discussed negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, expressing his optimism about Russian President Vladimir Putin's commitment to peace.

Witkoff, who brokered the now broken Jan. 15 ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, has become a leading figure in negotiations regarding Russia and Ukraine.

When asked whether he was convinced that Putin was seeking peace, he responded in the affirmative: "I feel that he wants peace," said Witkoff.

Russia has lost 904,760 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces reported on March 24.

The number includes 1,280 casualties Russian forces suffered just over the past day.

According to the report, Russia has also lost 10,420 tanks, 21,652 armored fighting vehicles, 41,726 vehicles and fuel tanks, 25,129 artillery systems, 1,338 multiple launch rocket systems, 1,117 air defense systems, 370 airplanes, 335 helicopters, 30,641 drones, 28 ships and boats, and one submarine.

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The Marine Corps is in the process of taking a family readiness program away from paid civilians and placing its responsibilities in the hands of Marines, a service spokesperson confirmed to Military.com on Thursday.

The Unit, Personal and Family Readiness Program, or UPFRP, was originally developed in 2007 to keep up with constant deployments during the Global War on Terrorism, according to a service message from 2018, and was designed to provide support for service members and their families during the deployments and other challenges that come with military life.

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Hill Air Force Base in Utah has closed one of its two day care centers, harming quality of life for some service members, civilian employees and their families following hiring freezes ordered by President Donald Trump's administration.

Earlier this month, Military.com first reported that Hill -- the service's second-largest base by population and size -- had begun warning certain families that it would likely have to close one of its child development centers, or CDCs, due to a lack of staffing exacerbated, in part, by Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk's push to trim the size of the federal workforce.

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Veterans who were fired from the federal workforce in the wave of the Trump administration job cuts called their dismissals a betrayal of their service to the nation in uniform and in the civil service, according to a report from the Disabled American Veterans service organization. In video statements released Monday by the DAV, nine of the more than 80 veterans -- some of them disabled and some from the veterans community at large -- said in response to the DAV's "Protect Veterans" campaign, an effort to showcase the plight of fired veterans, that they were blindsided by their terminations, which have been directed by billionaire Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

A group of lawyers has launched a global coalition that will seek to pursue legal action against Israeli dual nationals accused of being involved in war crimes in Gaza. The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians said it’ll use domestic and international law against Israeli soldiers and others “spanning the entire Israeli military and political chain of command.”

The United Nations has condemned the Israeli killing of one its workers Wednesday. Five others were wounded, several severely, in the airstrike on a U.N. building in Deir al-Balah. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called for a full investigation. U.N. official Jorge Moreira da Silva said the U.N. compound is located in a deconflicted zone “well known by the Israeli Defense Forces.”

Jorge Moreira da Silva: “In my opinion, this was not an accident. It cannot be categorized as an accident. It is at least an incident. What is happening in Gaza is unconscionable. I’m shocked. I am shocked and devastated by this tragic news.”

Gaza’s Health Ministry says the official death toll has topped 50,000 as Israel continues to bombard and blockade the territory, but it is widely believed the actual death toll is far higher. On Sunday, Israeli forces bombed a surgical unit at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis — the largest functioning hospital in Gaza. The attack killed two people, including Ismail Barhoum, a member of Hamas’s political bureau. Hamas said he was at the hospital for treatment for injuries suffered in an earlier Israeli strike. A 16-year-old boy was also killed in the hospital attack. The American trauma surgeon Feroze Sidhwa was at Nasser Hospital at the time of the attack and said the teenager killed was his patient.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa: “You know, I’ve certainly never had a patient injured in an explosion, brought to the hospital, taken care of, doing well, ready to go home, and then blown up in his hospital bed. That’s a first. And that should be what we call in medicine a 'never event.' That’s not really supposed to happen. I just — I can’t emphasize enough, it just doesn’t matter who is in the hospital. It’s not legal to blow it up. It’s not legal to kill people in here. It’s not legal to attack people in here. It’s not ethical. It’s completely crazy.”

A federal judge on Friday blocked Immigration and Customs Enforcement from deporting Jeanette Vizguerra, a well-known immigrant rights activist and mother of four, who was detained in Denver last Monday. U.S. Judge Nina Wang’s order also prevents federal authorities from transferring Vizguerra out of Colorado and gave the government a deadline of today to demonstrate why Vizguerra should not be released.

The University of Pennsylvania is the latest school to be targeted by the Trump administration, which announced it’s suspending $175 million in federal funding to the Ivy League university as a penalty for allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports.

We speak with the Brennan Center’s Faiza Patel, who warns the Trump administration is ramping up efforts to target international students and other visitors and immigrants to the United States over pro-Palestinian speech. The State Department has reportedly launched a new effort using artificial intelligence to help identify and revoke visas for people the government deems to be supporting U.S.-designated terrorist groups, based primarily on the individuals’ social media accounts. “Foreign students are running scared,” says Patel. She also notes that while “AI-driven sounds really fancy,” the process is more likely to be a basic keyword search prone to “rudimentary mistakes.”

In more news about Columbia, a judge has transferred Mahmoud Khalil’s case to New Jersey, where it will be overseen by President Biden-appointed Judge Michael Farbiarz. U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman cleared the way for Khalil to stay in the U.S. and challenge his arrest and the Trump administration’s attempts to deport him for protesting for Palestinian rights while he was a student at Columbia. Khalil is a permanent U.S. resident. He was arrested in Manhattan but detained in New Jersey when his lawyers filed suit. He was subsequently transferred to an ICE jail in Jena, Louisiana.

The Trump administration has ramped up efforts to target free speech on college campuses and one doctoral student at Cornell University who was involved in pro-Palastinian protests on campus now finds himself targeted for deportation once again. Momodou Taal is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Africana Studies at Cornell University who is a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the Gambia. He was suspended twice last year for joining a demonstration calling on Cornell to divest from Israel and faced deportation until massive protests pressured Cornell to allow him to reenroll, thereby extending his visa. Earlier this month, Taal, along with two U.S. citizens, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s executive orders that target foreign nationals who it claims are national security threats. “I believed I was going to be a target eventually,” says Taal.