U.S. News

In the words of Rep. Jeff Leach, a Republican from Plano, the goal is to “provide the full support and resources of the state government … to come alongside of these thousands of women and their families who might find themselves with unexpected, unplanned pregnancies.”

But an investigation by ProPublica and CBS News found that the system that funnels a growing pot of state money to anti-abortion nonprofits has few safeguards and is riddled with waste.

A former Florida police officer who relocated to Moscow is one of the key figures behind it.

Dozens of bogus stories aimed at influencing US voters and sowing distrust ahead of November’s election. Some have been roundly ignored but others have been shared by influencers and members of the US Congress.

For example, one of these stories was published on a website called The Houston Post – one of dozens of sites with American-sounding names which are in reality run from Moscow - and alleged that the FBI illegally wiretapped Donald Trump’s Florida resort.

The far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is ungovernable and should be known as “Moscow Marjorie”, said a former Republican colleague in the US House, accusing Greene of “getting her talking points from the Kremlin” when opposing new federal aid for Ukraine.

“My experience with Marjorie is people have talked to her about not filing articles of impeachment on President Biden before he was sworn into office, not filing articles of impeachment that were groundless based on other individuals in the Biden administration,” Ken Buck, a Colorado rightwinger who left Congress last month, told CNN.

Pompeo, who served in the Trump administration, said in a letter with John Walters, the CEO and president of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, that protecting Ukraine is connected to issues at home, making the argument as some Republicans, including Johnson, have previously insisted the U.S. must secure the border before sending more aid to Kyiv.

None of our challenges at home will be made better by abandoning our allies at this time of great need, when they are staring down enemies of the free world,” they wrote.

Pompeo has called to support Ukraine before, but the April 1 letter from the conservative Hudson Institute amounts to more pressure on Johnson as Congress returns to work this week to work on a number of pressing issues.

Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/13024669

In an ongoing campaign that seeks to influence congressional and other political debates to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment, Kremlin-linked political strategists and trolls have written thousands of fabricated news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions, according to a trove of internal Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.

One of the political strategists, for instance, instructed a troll farm employee working for his firm to write a comment of “no more than 200 characters in the name of a resident of a suburb of a major city.” The strategist suggested that this fictitious American “doesn’t support the military aid that the U.S. is giving Ukraine and considers that the money should be spent defending America’s borders and not Ukraine’s. He sees that Biden’s policies are leading the U.S. toward collapse.”

The documents — numbering more than 100 and dating between May 2022 and August 2023 — were provided to The Post to expose Kremlin propaganda operations aimed at undermining support for Ukraine in the United States, as well as their scale and methods. The files are part of a series of leaks that have allowed a rare glimpse into Moscow’s parallel efforts to weaken support for Ukraine in France and Germany, as well as destabilize Ukraine itself.

Conservative domination – maintained by gerrymandered districts, disenfranchised voters and an increasing sense of political despair – insulates Tennessee Republicans from political consequences for unpopular decisions. Challenged in public by increasing activism on the left and apocalyptic rhetoric on the right, Tennessee Republicans stopped just chipping away at democratic norms and began hammering full-on like coalminers on Rocky Top.

Republicans are increasingly targeting municipal government. In the wake of the fatal police beating of Tyre Nichols in 2023, Memphis and other communities created police oversight boards with the power to investigate and punish misconduct. Last week, Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, signed legislation blocking those boards and any local ordinance that limits the ability of a law enforcement agency to take all necessary steps “to prevent and detect crime and apprehend criminal offenders”.

Meet Richard Grenell, vocal tribune of Trump’s America First credo on the international stage and the man hotly tipped to become secretary of state if the presumed Republican nominee beats Joe Biden in November’s presidential election.

A senior executive in the rightwing Newsmax cable channel, Grenell, 57, has crafted a persona as the archetypal Trump man, keen and ever-ready to troll liberals, allies and foreign statesmen in public forums and social media.

Grenell – who served as a rambunctious ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term – has carved a niche as the articulator-in-chief of a Maga approach to global affairs that appears to echo his political master’s voice.

Seasoned analysts fear his hyperactivity is already unsettling US diplomats even while Trump is out of office.

In recent months, for example, he has pitched up in Guatemala, where he tried to stymie US state department pleas for a peaceful transition of power by backing rightwing efforts to block the inauguration of the liberal president-elect, Bernardo Arévalo, on supposed electoral fraud grounds about a poll previously declared “free and fair” by international observers.

An investigation examining hundreds of leaked IRS forms offers a glimpse into the often-hidden challenges the U.S. tax agency faces in tackling the favorite new global investment vehicles of the ultrawealthy. That review and interviews with more than a dozen former tax officials show an agency struggling with not only a shortage of experienced agents, but also with an entire regime of federal rules — some of those created by the IRS itself — that have enabled investors seeking secrecy to run circles around the agency.

Accountants and lawyers who prepare these investors’ tax returns have eagerly exploited weak rules and years of lax enforcement to heap layers of secrecy between their rich clients and the IRS agents attempting to audit them.

Russian propaganda pushed by the Kremlin has "infected" part of the Republican base, a senior GOP congressman has said, as indications grow that a vital U.S. military package for Ukraine will come up for a vote with U.S. lawmakers this month.

"I think Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it's infected a good chunk of my party's base," House Foreign Affairs Committee chair and Texas Republican, Michael McCaul, told Puck News.

A new tranche of military, economic and humanitarian aid for Ukraine, worth around $60 billion, has been ensnared in Congress for months by infighting, causing deep concerns in Kyiv as Russian forces inch westward and gain territory while Ukrainian forces contend with shortages along the frontlines.

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How dare voters not want to pay 75 basis points on every purchase for decades to fund private enterprise!

Democrat Marilyn Lands won a special election for an Alabama state House seat, flipping a Republican-held seat by campaigning on abortion rights in the deep-red state that bans abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest. Lands won 62 percent of the nearly 6,000 votes cast, while her challenger, Republican Teddy Powell, won 37.5 percent, according to the unofficial election night results from the Alabama Secretary of State.

While Alabama is reliably red—and the state legislature remains majority Republican—Lands’ district, the state’s 10th District, has been a battleground: Trump won it by only one percentage point in 2020, the Washington Post reported, while he won the state by more than 35 percentage points. Voters told the 19th earlier this month that they were going to vote for Lands because of her stance on abortion and reproductive rights.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14006087

Israel announces largest West Bank land seizure since 1993 during Blinken visit

The campaign’s primary focus for the new law has been on improving dancers’ working conditions especially around expanded safety regulations. Strip clubs in Washington will now be required to hire full-time security guards, add keypad locks to dressing room doors, and conduct sexual harassment training for all employees.

Echoing earlier state legislation passed to protect hotel workers, the new law will also require clubs to install panic buttons anywhere a worker may be alone with a customer. It also takes a meaningful step towards legalizing alcohol sales in strip clubs by doing away with a Liquor and Cannabis Board rule that forbids ​“lewd conduct” from taking place in establishments that serve alcohol.

if this happens, i believe this would be the first nuclear plant to be recommissioned in the US after previously shutting down

An update to this post https://beehaw.org/post/6717143