United States | News & Politics

The Trump administration asked the US supreme court late on Tuesday to halt an order allowing people to challenge their deportations from the US to South Sudan, an appeal that came hours after the federal judge overseeing the case suggested the Trump administration was “manufacturing” chaos and said he hoped that “reason can get the better of rhetoric”.

Judge Brian Murphy found the White House violated a court order with a deportation flight bound for the chaotic African nation carrying people from other countries who the Trump administration said had been convicted of crimes in the US. Murphy said those people must get a real chance to raise any fears that being sent there could put them in danger.

“From the course of conduct, it is hard to come to any conclusion other than that defendants [the Trump administration] invite a lack of clarity as a means of evasion,” the Boston-based Murphy wrote in his 17-page order.

The freeze is a further escalation from current screening measures, which have primarily targeted students who participated in pro-Palestinian campus protests.

Since March, consular officers have been required to conduct mandatory social media reviews looking for evidence of support for “terrorist activity or a terrorist organization” which could be as broad as showing support for the Palestinian cause, according to a cable obtained by the Guardian at the time. That directive required officers to take screenshots of “potentially derogatory” content for permanent records, even if posts were later deleted.

The new expansion would apply social media vetting to all student visa applicants, not just those flagged for activism. Under the screening process, consular officers would examine applicants’ posts, shares, and comments across platforms such as Instagram, X, and TikTok for content they deem to be threatening to national security, which has since been tied in to the Trump administration’s stance on combating antisemitism.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30373689

Indian Removal Act (1830)

Fri May 28, 1830

The Indian Removal Act, signed into law on this day in 1830, provided the legal authority for the president to force indigenous peoples west of the Mississippi River, leading to the "Trail of Tears", which killed more than 10,000.

The law is an example of the systematic genocide brought against indigenous peoples by the U.S. government because it discriminated against them in such a way as to effectively guarantee the death of vast numbers of their population. The Act was signed into law by Andrew Jackson and was strongly enforced by his and his successors' administrations.

The enforcement of the Indian Removal Act directly led to the "Trail of Tears", which killed over 10,000 indigenous peoples. Although some tribes left peacefully, others fought back, leading to the Second Seminole War of 1835.

• Date: 1830-05-28
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, www.britannica.com.
• Tags: #Indigenous.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

The Missouri Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered a judge in Kansas City to lift an injunction that had blocked restrictions on abortion, a decision that upends access to the procedure six months after voters enshrined reproductive rights into the state Constitution.

The two-page order imposes a “de facto abortion ban” in the state, according to the leaders of the state’s two Planned Parenthood affiliates. Abortion appointments at the Planned Parenthood clinics Kansas City and Columbia were cancelled in the wake of Tuesday’s decision.

BOSTON (AP) — Harvard University will relinquish 175-year-old photographs believed to be the earliest taken of enslaved people to a South Carolina museum devoted to African American history as part of a settlement with one of the subjects’ descendants.

The photos of the subjects identified by Tamara Lanier as her great-great-great-grandfather Renty, whom she calls “Papa Renty,” and his daughter Delia will be transferred from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to the International African American Museum in South Carolina, the state where they were enslaved in 1850 when the photos were taken, a lawyer for Lanier said Wednesday.

The settlement marks the end of a 15-year battle between Lanier and the nation’s most elite university to release the 19th-century “daguerreotypes,” a precursor to modern-day photographs. Lanier’s attorney Joshua Koskoff told The Associated Press that the resolution is an “unprecedented” victory for descendants of those enslaved in the U.S. and praised his client’s yearslong determination in pursuing justice for her ancestors.

Another SpaceX Starship prototype broke up over the Indian Ocean on Tuesday, capping the latest bumpy test flight for the rocket central to billionaire Elon Musk’s dream of colonising Mars.

The biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built lifted off at 6.36pm local time from the company’s facility near a southern Texas village that earlier this month voted to become a city also named Starbase.

The first signs of trouble emerged when the first-stage Super Heavy booster blew up instead of executing its planned splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

A live feed then showed the upper-stage spaceship failing to open its doors to deploy a payload of Starlink satellite “simulators”.

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The Weather & Climate Livestream

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