United States | News & Politics

The state created “Texas Partnership” charter schools to turn around struggling public campuses, but an Observer investigation has uncovered numerous academic and financial issues.

Jake Johnson May 06, 2025

"Pro-democracy campaigners late Monday announced a nationwide "No Kings" day of defiance on June 14—the same day U.S. President Donald Trump plans to hold a birthday military parade more befitting a dictator than an elected head of state.

More than 100 "No Kings" events have already been registered across the U.S., with many more expected in the weeks ahead of the day of action. "

Twitch streamer Hasan Piker announced on Sunday that he was detained and questioned by CBP for approximately two hours at an airport after returning home from an international flight. He explains that a federal agent knew a lot about him and questioned him about his views on Trump and Israel/Palestine. Hasan says he thinks he was detained so the Trump administration could send a message to other content creators like him.

The first group of white South Africans granted refugee status by Donald Trump’s administration has arrived in the US, stirring controversy in South Africa as the US president declared the Afrikaners victims of a “genocide”.

The Afrikaners, a minority descended from mainly Dutch colonists, were met at Dulles international airport outside Washington DC by US deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, and deputy secretary of homeland security, Troy Edgar, with many given US flags to wave.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29553959

The White House is unveiling an aggressive drug pricing strategy targeting pharmaceutical companies, promising to dramatically cut prescription drug costs for American consumers.

Donald Trump condemned the current pricing system as a “redistribution” that has allowed drugmakers to exploit US patients and signed an executive order that he says will lead to matching lower drug prices abroad.

“We are subsidizing others’ healthcare, where they paid a small fraction of what we pay,” the president said in a press conference on Monday, flanked by health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and centers for Medicare and Medicaid services administrator Mehmet Oz.

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Donald Trump hailed a “total reset” in relations between China and the US after the countries agreed a 90-day pause to the deepening trade war that has threatened to upend the global economy, with tariffs to be lowered by 115 percentage points.

“They’ve agreed to open up China,” the US president claimed at a press conference at the White House on Monday morning, having spent months escalating tensions with Beijing by ratcheting up tariffs on the country’s exports.

After talks in Geneva, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said both sides had shown “great respect” in the negotiations. “The consensus from both delegations this weekend was neither side wants a decoupling,” he said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing cities and counties to ban homeless encampments as he continues to press on a core voter concern.

“The time for inaction is over,” Newsom said in a statement. “There are no more excuses.”

Newsom’s release of a model ordinance prohibiting encampments builds on years of efforts to make cities and counties move people off the streets and into shelter. He’s also taking advantage of a political and legal landscape that increasingly favors clearing the tents that have proliferated in parks and on sidewalks across the state.

He embraced the Supreme Court’s 2024 reversal of a lower-court ruling that barred clearing encampments in the absence of sufficient shelter alternatives. His proposal comes amid rising voter support for tougher tactics, reflected by a recent proposal from San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan to arrest people who repeatedly refuse offers of shelter.

The proposed order attempts a balanced approach, with a memo from Newsom emphasizing the need to connect people to services and denouncing “inhumane” policies that “prohibit individuals from sleeping outside anywhere in the jurisdiction without offering adequate indoor shelter, effectively banishing homeless individuals from the jurisdiction’s borders.”

But it speaks to how the issue has vexed Democrats for decades. Six years after Newsom devoted his State of the State speech to California’s homelessness crisis, it continues to be a political hazard for elected officials across the state — and the governor has signaled he is losing patience.

He has doled out billions of dollars to help local governments clear encampments. He has also increasingly demanded cities and counties move more aggressively on the issue or risk losing out on state aid. Last week he excoriated a Central Valley city that refused to allocate a single dollar that would have unlocked state funding.

“Local leaders asked for resources — we delivered the largest state investment in history,” Newsom said in a statement. “They asked for legal clarity — the courts delivered.”

With weather catastrophes becoming more common in the United States these days, communities have counted on two facts.

‘To think the prime age for playing with dolls is 11 is almost impressively wrong,’ John Oliver noted on his Sunday night HBO program

Republicans try to use the Budget Reconciliation bill to stop states from regulating AI entirely for 10 years.