United States | News & Politics

Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20200725040621/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1286866843307737088

A Dallas zionist rabbi who publicly spread false claims about Hamas raping Israeli women on October 7 has been arrested for sexually abusing a teenage boy.

Rabbi Yizhak Meir Sabo, 43, was charged with indecency with a child, according to Dallas County jail records. Authorities arrested him on April 1 and set his bail at $100,000. The reports surfaced on March 27, prompting the Akiba Yavneh Academy to place him on administrative leave.

According to an affidavit, Sabo repeatedly pulled down a male student’s pants and touched his genitals. The abuse allegedly occurred while the student was in grades 9-12. Sabo also watched the student shower and gave him inappropriate “massages,” the report states.

Close to 100 people have requested their money back from the campaign of Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa.

Refund requests can be routine part of campaigns, either because donors decide for some reason that they want a refund or they accidentally donated over the legal limit for contributions.

The Fetterman campaign has issued more than 1,700 refund requests since 2021 from more than 1,000 donors, totaling more than $780,800, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. That includes more than 200 refunds last cycle. At least seven political action committees also received refunds. (Fetterman’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

HONG KONG, April 3 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Donald Trump’s second trade war is a battle of one against all. Reciprocal tariffs announced on Wednesday by the White House hit China with a hike of 34 percentage points, taking the fresh levies on exports from the People’s Republic up 54 percentage points in the 10 weeks since the U.S. president took office.

Nor did he sparethose who tried to surrender rather than retaliate. Some countries are worse off than others, but Washington has put all of Asia in pretty much the same tariff boat.

Japan gets a 24% levy despite its role as America’s geopolitical lynchpin in the region and massive foreign investment by giants like SoftBank (9984.T) South Korea’s many U.S. Army bases did not help it avoid a 26% hit; and neither did Taiwan’s vital role in supplying semiconductors for Silicon Valley titans, nor Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing's (2330.TW) pledge to invest in American chip production, prevent a 32% hike.

SAO PAULO, April 4 (Reuters) - Indigenous protests and poor roads have disrupted shipping of Brazil's bumper soybean crop in recent days via the river port of Miritituba in the Amazon rainforest, worrying global companies including Cargill and Bunge (BG.N) which have important operations.

Abiove, an association representing grain handlers, said on Friday road access to Miritituba has remained under partial or total blockade for two weeks, preventing the shipment of around 70,000 tons of grains per day, which corresponds to almost $30 million in product value.

Tech billionaires who cozied up to Donald Trump were some of the biggest losers - shedding billions in net worth and values of their companies - in Thursday’s stock market losses as Wall Street reacted to the president’s tariff plan.

Meta stock was down 8.96 percent, Amazon was down 8.98 percent, Google had fallen 3.92 percent, while Apple had plunged over 9 percent. White House adviser Elon Musk also felt the pain, with Tesla sliding 5.47 percent.

The losses came as Wall Street saw a historically bad day on Thursday after Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on nearly every U.S. trade partner. The Dow Jones saw a point drop that ranked in the top five worst of all time, while the NASDAQ suffered its largest one-day point drop in that market’s history. The S&P 500 also saw its biggest one-day drop since March 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paywall removed https://archive.is/FMWR0

WASHINGTON—Seeking to reassure the public after his latest tariffs sent both U.S. and international markets into free fall, President Donald Trump calmly reminded the nation Thursday that desire is the root of all suffering.

“My fellow Americans, remember that attachment to worldly things stands at the very foundation of the illusions that lead us to experience deep anguish,” said the commander-in-chief, who reportedly sat in a full lotus position on the Oval Office floor as he noted that to base one’s contentment on access to affordable food, cars, electronics, shoes, clothing, furniture, or various other imports was to make one’s existence as fickle as the stock market itself.

The US supreme court is letting the Trump administration temporarily freeze $65m in teacher-training grants that would promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in a 5-4 decision.

The decision came down on Friday afternoon, with five of the court’s conservatives – Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh – in the majority. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson all dissented.

In the unsigned opinion, the court said that the states made it clear “that they have the financial wherewithal to keep their programs running”, but the Trump administration had a strong case that it would not be able to reclaim any of the funds spent while the lower court’s order remained in place.

https://archive.ph/FCD7D

The day after the Trump administration announced a review of $9bn in federal contracts and grants with Harvard University due to what it claimed was the university’s failure to combat antisemitism on campus, the university’s president, Alan Garber, sent an email to the Harvard community titled: Our resolve.

“When we saw the Garber statement’s subject line, everybody thought: ‘Oh, great, Harvard’s going to stand up!” said Jane Sujen Bock, a board member of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, a group of alumni founded in 2016 amid a legal battle over affirmative action.

But the actual body of the message indicated no such thing. In the email, Garber briefly touted academic freedom while pledging to “engage” with the administration to “combat antisemitism”, which he said he had experienced directly, and listed a series of measures the university had already taken. “We still have much work to do,” he wrote. He offered no detail about what Harvard would do to protect its independence from the Trump administration.

Booker: "I confess that I have been imperfect. I confess that I've been inadequate to the moment. I've confess that the Democratic Party has made terrible mistakes that gave a lane to this demagogue. I confess we all must look in the mirror and say 'we will do better.'"

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3llrmvwhri62r

US stock markets tumbled on Thursday as investors parsed the sweeping change in global trading following Donald Trump’s announcement of a barrage of tariffs on the country’s trading partners.

All three major US stock markets closed down in their worst day since June 2020, during the Covid pandemic. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 6%, while the S&P 500 and the Dow dropped 4.8% and 3.9%, respectively. Apple and Nvidia, two of the US’s largest companies by market value, had lost a combined $470bn in value by midday.

Meanwhile, the US dollar hit a six-month low, going down at least 2.2% on Thursday morning compared with other major currencies and oil prices sank on fears of a global slowdown.

cross-posted from: https://hcommons.social/users/adachika192/statuses/114279540131463386

SEIU Launches $100,000 Ad Campaign & Holds 18 Rallies to Release Immigrant Activist (Payday Report, 2025-04-03)

"This week, SEIU launched a major six-figure ad campaign to demand the release of a Turkish national, Tufts University Ph.D. student Rumeysa Ozturk, a member of SEIU 509, who had been involved in Palestinian protests

"Such a large ad buy by a union to protest the detention by #ICE of one union member is unprecedented. Not only did #SEIU buy the ads, but they organized 18 protests nationwide demanding her release."

"As immigrants are illegally deported and detained, more and more unions are stepping up to protest these detentions."

Under the ACA, insurance plans sold through the ACA marketplace are required to cover all EHBs as defined by the benchmarks of the state in which they operate. The rule, if enacted as proposed, would remove hormone replacement therapy, gender-affirming surgery, puberty blockers, and other forms of gender-affirming medical care from the list of valid EHBs. Insurers would still be allowed, but not required, to offer coverage for such care.

As justification for the new rule, CMS and HHS pointed to Trump’s executive orders calling for gender-affirming care to be banned for trans youth and demanding an “end to Federal funding of gender ideology.” But although it parrots Trump’s false definition of “biological sex” (that people are immutably male or female based on whether they have “the biological function to produce” sperm or eggs), the proposal claims that it is not subject to the injunctions blocking them, because it “does not rely on the enjoined sections” of those executive orders. Instead, the proposal further claims that gender-affirming care “is not typically included in employer-sponsored plans, and EHB must be equal in scope to a typical employer plan” — ergo, such care cannot be classed as an EHB.

In fact, it is not uncommon for employer-provided health plans in the U.S. to cover gender-affirming care, as KFF reported this week. Although coverage is uneven across the country, a 2024 KFF survey reported that about 24% of businesses with more than 200 employees cover gender-affirming care in their insurance policies. Among the country’s largest businesses — those that employ more than 5,000 people — 50% offered coverage for gender-affirming care in their largest plan.

Although the Trump administration has largely targeted trans people 19 years old and younger in its attacks on gender-affirming care, Republicans have signaled for at least a year that they would come for adult care soon after.

As we’ve reported previously, public comment can be an effective tool for voicing dissent: even if officials do adopt the rule, it will be challenged in court (Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s comments about dismantling certain courts notwithstanding), at which point lawyers will be able to draw on public comments as part of the official record to bolster their case.

At the time of writing, the proposal had received over 5,000 comments, many of them opposing the ban on gender-affirming care. The comment period will end on April 11.

Make public comment here: https://www.regulations.gov/document/CMS-2025-0020-0011/comment