United States | News & Politics

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32443864

Hong Kong national security police have taken away the parents of wanted US-based activist Frances Hui Wing-ting for questioning, the Post has learned, after Washington imposed a new round of sanctions on local officials for what it called "transnational repression".

A source said that Hui's mother and father were escorted to two police stations in Sha Tin on Thursday.

Hui, who left the city in 2020 and is now based in the United States, is among 19 activists with HKcopy million bounties on their heads for allegedly violating the Beijing-imposed national security law in Hong Kong.

[...]

In 2022, Hui was granted political asylum in the US. She now serves as a policy and advocacy coordinator at the Washington-based Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, which is considered "anti-China" by city authorities.

[...]

Whatever happened to "states rights"?

And now Reuters reports that DOGE is snooping on government employees and using AI to find DISLOYALS. And Wired says they’re planning to give a third-party company access to everybody’s IRS data, after firing the people who really DO look for tax fraud, all day long. Meanwhile, they answer to no one, not even the putative acting administrator Amy Gleason, who recently said in a group chat she has no involvement with what the DOGE teams are doing, and has nothing to do with the layoffs. 

For a bunch of people who feel entitled to access to the tiniest government-known details about anyone, DOGE itself sure is mighty shy about who they are and what they are up to. By design! DOGE is so secretive that finding out anything is like trying to figure out what’s going on at a construction site by sorting through its garbage. And the teams are using Signal to circumvent records and transparency requirements about what they’re up to, while at the same time the government is ignoring journalists’ Freedom of Information Act requests, even after a judge ruled that DOGE is covered by FOIA.

Shared from: https://lemmy.world/post/27943693

Paywall? https://archive.is/KnfV7

"Vela added that European officials have been quietly sharpening their knives and preparing "brutal countermeasures" against Trump, but are in no rush to implement them because they don't want to give Trump a scapegoat to blame for a deteriorating American economy."

https://archive.ph/kfDxK

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20533605

Chevron has been ordered to pay $744.6 million to a Louisiana parish government to help restore coastal wetlands the company destroyed.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20534437

Thorn forest once blanketed the Rio Grande Valley. Restoring even a little of it could help the region cope with the impacts of climate change

Tom Emmer made the vulgar flub in front of a roomful of GOP donors at the RNCC annual dinner