Texas Tribune – by Emma Platoff

Following through on a months-old promise, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Tuesday to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, leading a seven-state coalition against an Obama-era immigration measure that protects hundreds of thousands of immigrants nationwide from deportation, including more than 120,000 in Texas.

Paxton first threatened in June 2017 to sue over the program if President Donald Trump’s administration had not ended it by September. After federal court rulings blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to end the program, Paxton wrote in January that he would consider filing suit if DACA still stood in June.   Continue reading “Texas and 6 other states sue to end DACA”

Courthouse News – by Nick Cahill

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (CN) – Driving into a dead end, a mentally disabled man opened his car door and raised his hands in surrender. He was met with a kick to the face and ferocious baton beating that culminated with two California highway patrolmen high-fiving in celebration, all captured on film.

The street-level punishment of a young man with schizophrenia by uniformed officers went unnoticed by news outlets, compared to the worldwide attention given to the similar beating in similar circumstances of Rodney King in Los Angeles X years ago and the recent killing of Stephon Clark in Sacramento more recently.   Continue reading “California Police Beating Ducks Attention With Settlement Just Shy of $1 Million”

Mint Press News – by Whitney Webb

COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA — The state of South Carolina will become the first state in the nation to legislate a definition of anti-Semitism that considers certain criticisms of the Israeli government to be hate speech. The language, which was inserted into the state’s recently passed $8 billion budget, offers a much more vague definition of anti-Semitism that some suggest specifically targets the presence of the global boycott, divestment and sanctions, or BDS, movement on state college campuses. The law requires that all state institutions, including state universities, apply the revised definition when deciding whether an act violates anti-discrimination policies.   Continue reading “South Carolina’s New Hate Speech Law Outlaws Criticism of the Israeli Occupation”

Reason – by Christian Britschgi

The insanely broad “assault weapons” definition used by the small town of Deerfield, Illinois, to prohibit common peashooters has now migrated to the entire state of Oregon.

This week activists in support of Initiative 43 received a draft ballot title from the state’s attorney general, which describes the initiative as criminalizing the “possession or transfer of ‘assault weapons’ (defined) or ‘large capacity magazines’ (defined), with exceptions.”   Continue reading “Insanely Broad Definition of ‘Assault Weapon’ Moves From Illinois Village to Oregon Ballot Initiative”

Fox 31 Denver

ARVADA, Colo. — An Arvada woman said she’s facing a $500 fine from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol after she saved a free apple she received from an airline on her way home from Paris.

Crystal Tadlock said toward the end of her flight, attendants passed out apples in plastic bags.   Continue reading “Arvada woman trying to stomach $500 fine for free airline snack, files complaint with customs”

RT

Fewer than 10 percent of Norwegians are still using paper currency or coins, which could completely disappear in a decade, according to the local authorities.

Jon Nicolaisen, the deputy governor of Norway’s central bank, has said Norwegian society has become cashless, and that this is very much a present reality rather than a future dream.   Continue reading “Scandinavians are done with cash”

RT

Tehran has been ordered by a US court to pay more than $6 billion to victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, despite the fact that most of the plane hijackers were Saudi nationals, and no direct link was ever found to Iran.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in New York found Iran, the country’s central bank, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps liable for the deaths of more than 1,000 people in the September 11 attacks. As a consequence, District Judge George Daniels ordered Iran and its entities to pay over $6 billion in compensation to the victims’ families.   Continue reading “US judge orders Iran to pay billions to families of 9/11 victims”

Mail.com

TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — The caravan of Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States sought the world’s attention as scores of migrants traveled through Mexico on a journey to escape their violent homelands.

Now that the group has arrived at the border, the next steps in their journey will unfold mostly out of public view. The caravan first drew attention in the U.S. when President Donald Trump promised that his administration would seek to turn the families away. The rest of the asylum-seeking process will happen slowly and secretively in immigration courts.  Continue reading “Next steps for caravan will unfold mostly out of public view”

Mail.com

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — An official autopsy released Tuesday says an unarmed black man was shot seven times, not eight as concluded by an independent doctor hired by the man’s family. A pathologist retained by the Sacramento County coroner says that’s a crucial distinction because it shows the pathologist hired by the family of 22-year-old Stephon Clark mistook an exit wound for an eighth entry wound, creating an impression that police first shot Clark from the side or back.  Continue reading “Autopsy by coroner sheds light on Sacramento police killing”

Jerusalem Post

At a panel discussion over the weekend marking 25 years since the release of Schindler’s List, director Steven Spielberg said that every public high school in the United States should be required to teach the Holocaust.

“It’s not a prerequisite to graduate high school, as it should be,” Spielberg said during the panel discussion held after a special screening of his 1993 film at the Tribeca Film Festival. “It should be part of the social science, social studies curriculum in every public high school in this country.”t a panel discussion over the weekend marking 25 years since the release of Schindler’s List, director Steven Spielberg said that every public high school in the United States should be required to teach the Holocaust.   Continue reading “Steven Spielberg urges mandatory Holocaust education”

Scoop – by Michael Collins

In March, 2004 Susan Lindauer was arrested for allegedly acting as an “unregistered agent” for prewar Iraq. She challenged the government’s assertion and sought the right to prove at Trial that she’d been a United States intelligence asset covering Iraq and Libya from the early 1990’s through 2003 (see articles).

In an unprecedented judicial ploy that lasted five years, federal prosecutors blocked Ms. Lindauer’s rights to trial or any other sort of evidentiary hearings that would test her story. For 11 months, she was confined at Carswell federal prison on a Texas military base and at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, without a conviction or plea bargain.  Continue reading “Susan Lindauer: Secret Charges and The Patriot Act”

Natural News – by Isabelle Z

Do you look at your smartphone in bed? Do you work night shift? Do you live in the city? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you need to know that a new study has found that exposure to artificial lighting at night can raise a person’s risk of developing prostate or breast cancer.

The study, which was carried out by Spanish researchers, looked at people’s exposure to outdoor artificial light from streetlights using satellite imagery from the International Space Station along with their exposure to indoor artificial light as self-reported in questionnaires. They studied more than 4,000 people with and without breast and prostate cancer from 11 regions in Spain from 2008 to 2013, examining the blue light spectrum data for each person’s longest residence.   Continue reading “City lights now proven to sharply increase the risk of cancer due to “blue light” wavelengths from common LEDs”

Science Blog

Stanford researchers have developed a water-based battery that could provide a cheap way to store wind or solar energy generated when the sun is shining and wind is blowing so it can be fed back into the electric grid and be redistributed when demand is high.

The prototype manganese-hydrogen battery, reported April 30 in Nature Energy, stands just three inches tall and generates a mere 20 milliwatt hours of electricity, which is on par with the energy levels of LED flashlights that hang on a key ring. Despite the prototype’s diminutive output, the researchers are confident they can scale up this table-top technology to an industrial-grade system that could charge and recharge up to 10,000 times, creating a grid-scale battery with a useful lifespan well in excess of a decade.  Continue reading “Water-Based Battery Stores Solar And Wind Energy”

Common Dreams – by Jake Johnson

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hit the U.S. media circuit on Tuesday to regurgitate claims he laid out in his “bizarre” speech accusing Iran of violating the nuclear accord, journalists and non-proliferation advocates worked to call attention to the fact that there is only one nation in the Middle East that already possesses nuclear weapons but refuses to acknowledge them: Israel.   Continue reading “As Trump and Netanyahu Joins Forces to Torpedo Iran Deal, Here’s a ‘Typically Ignored’ Fact: Israel Has Nuclear Weapons”