United States | News & Politics

Kash Patel, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, is once again facing criticism for rushing to social media to tout his agency’s work on tracking down a person of interest in a shooting prematurely.

After a shooter killed two and injured nine at Brown University on Saturday, Patel, a lawyer and rightwing commentator before his job in the administration, posted on X that his agency had helped detain a “person of interest in a hotel room” in Coventry, Rhode Island, acting off a lead from the Providence police.

But the person of interest was later released from custody hours later, and the shooter is still at large.

• Early Warnings: Trump officials were told that cutting aid to South Sudan would exacerbate a deadly cholera epidemic. They did so anyway.
• Aid Charade: Even as lifesaving programs closed in South Sudan, Rubio and other officials maintained they were still active and that no one had died. We found that wasn’t true.
• A Surging Outbreak: After the funding cuts, cases in South Sudan spiked. It’s the worst cholera epidemic in the country’s history.

https://archive.ph/DF3eh

Dec. 14, 2025

Today, billionaires are still flooding politics with their money and still reaping the benefits, but they won’t stop yapping about it.

Elon Musk bragged about his support for President Trump, to whose campaign and allied groups he donated more than $250 million. He loudly attempted to buy votes in Pennsylvania. Then he leveraged it all into a cruel and chaotic effort to dismantle federal agencies. Marc Andreessen’s tech-heavy venture capital firm publicly pledged $100 million to target lawmakers who attempt to regulate artificial intelligence; Mr. Andreessen then mocked the pope for suggesting some ethical guardrails around the technology. Bill Ackman announced that he and his pals were prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Zohran Mamdani, and urged Mr. Trump to call in the National Guard if that effort failed and Mr. Mamdani’s mayoralty met his worst expectations.

An FBI investigation into an alleged terror plot in Southern California bears the familiar hallmarks of the bureau’s long-running use of informants and undercover agents to advance plots that might not otherwise have materialized, court documents show.

The limited details available suggest an investigation that leaned heavily on a paid informant and at least one undercover FBI agent, according to an affidavit filed in federal court. The informant and the undercover agent were involved in nearly every stage of the case, including discussions of operational security and transporting members of the group to the site in the Mojave Desert where federal agents ultimately made the arrests.

“The question that immediately popped into my mind was that: There’s a reference to a confidential human source, but there’s no indication of how that source came to be,” said Brad Crowder, an activist and union organizer who was convicted in a case of alleged violent protest plans that involved a confidential informant. “It’s not totally out of the realm of possibilities that this idea was planted or floated by whoever this confidential human source might be.”

The gains would largely be made in 10 Southern states with GOP-controlled legislatures, a new report finds.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/43715515

Officials ordered immediate evacuations in three south Seattle suburbs Monday after a levee failed following a week of heavy rains.

The evacuation order from King County in Washington state covered homes and businesses east of the Green River in parts of Kent, Auburn and Tukwila.

The National Weather Service, meanwhile, issued a flash flood warning covering nearly 47,000 people.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A JetBlue flight from the small Caribbean nation of Curaçao halted its ascent to avoid colliding with a U.S. Air Force refueling tanker on Friday, and the pilot blamed the military plane for crossing his path.

“We almost had a midair collision up here,” the JetBlue pilot said, according to a recording of his conversation with air traffic control. “They passed directly in our flight path. ... They don’t have their transponder turned on, it’s outrageous.”

The incident involved JetBlue Flight 1112 from Curaçao, which is just off the coast of Venezuela, en route to New York City’s JFK airport. It comes as the U.S. military has stepped up its drug interdiction activities in the Caribbean and is also seeking to increase pressure on Venezuela’s government.

https://archive.ph/3ct6s

The total number of people killed in the antisemitic Bondi Beach massacre was still not known when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the opportunity to blame Australia’s mere recognition of a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu and his cheerleaders, meanwhile, have once again chosen the despicable path of weaponizing antisemitism to ensure and legitimize Palestinian suffering.

The first New York Times opinion piece to be published in the massacre’s wake came from Israel apologist Bret Stephens, with a column titled “Bondi Beach is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like.” Stephens wrote that the shooting constitutes the “real-world consequences” of “literalists” responding to chants like “globalize the intifada,” “resistance is justified,” and “by any means necessary.”

The point is obvious: to make sure that Palestinians remain eternally in stateless subjugation and to give Israel a free hand to violate their rights — including by committing a genocide like the one unfolding in Gaza today.

It’s all done in the name of fighting antisemitism by conflating the worst kinds of violent anti-Jewish bigotry, like what we saw in Bondi Beach, with any criticisms of Israel and its actions. To so much as say Palestinians ought to have basic human rights, in this view, becomes a deadly attack on Jewish safety.

Yes, people, including children, are being disappeared to concentration camps but the real victims are the white suburban moms privileged enough to offload their snot nosed brats to other people now being forced to take care of their spawn themselves. Those are the people we should feel bad for, surely.

Rather than be critical or perhaps stay silent, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, welcomed the pardon and engaged in shameful pandering, apparently to maintain Mr. Cuellar’s party loyalty. Most disturbingly, Mr. Jeffries did so by attacking the legitimacy of the criminal case against Mr. Cuellar, publicly dismissing the indictment against him as “very thin.”

Rural departments have long relied on cheap software solutions to keep their operations running. But fire chiefs report sharp price increases as investors have entered the market.

Osman said armed ICE agents went to East African restaurants in the neighborhood Tuesday, closed the doors and demanded people's IDs. They found only U.S. citizens and made no arrests, Osman said.

In short, they're harassing people based on what kind of cuisine they have a hankering for

Crossposted from https://kbin.melroy.org/m/nyt/_gift/_articles@sopuli.xyz/t/1373324

Today, on Black Friday, many Gen Z shoppers won’t be scouring luxury stores or big-box aisles for their gifts. Instead, they are turning to thrift stores, consignment shops and resale apps. About 86 percent of Gen Z-ers say they’re more likely to purchase a secondhand holiday gift this year than they would have been, according to a report from eBay.