U.S. News

After news exploded across social media and beyond that Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist who would become New York’s first Muslim mayor if elected, was on track to win the city’s Democratic primary on Tuesday night, reactions from supporters poured in to offer their well-wishes and thoughts.

While it could still be several days before the final result is known, Mamdani nabbed more than 43.5% of the vote with 93% of the votes counted while his biggest competitor, Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor and previous favorite, was at 36.4%

Mamdani declared victory late on Tuesday, telling supporters “I will be your Democratic nominee for the mayor of New York City.”

What's most striking about this piece is the art. These are people overjoyed. We had people pouring into the streets the night Biden won all over the place, but it was more ... festive relief.

For a general election. This is round one of a ranked-choice primary.

Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist who ran a grassroots campaign that inspired younger voters through a relentless focus on making New York City more affordable, was set to win the Democratic primary for mayor Tuesday, toppling former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and nine other candidates in a political earthquake that will reverberate throughout the country.

With 93% of scanners reporting, Mamdani, a state assemblymember from Queens, garnered 44% of ballots to Cuomo’s 36% in the first round of counting in the ranked-choice vote, all but guaranteeing a major upset of the Democratic Party establishment in the nation’s most populous city.

Without a majority of votes, the contest will technically be decided by the ranked-choice tally on July 1. But Cuomo, apparently anticipating the outcome, conceded the primary race, telling his supporters at a somber rally that he’d called Mamdani to congratulate him on his victory.

Mamdani declared victory just after midnight, taking to the stage at his Long Island City watch party as a raucous crowd of supporters chanted his name.

Time to get together and get some dumb Dems voted out of their seats!

When asked how much she pays for childcare, Leah Freeman chuckles and says she isn’t sure. “It’s like C$93 (about $67) every two weeks or something. I barely see it leaving my bank account,” she said.

To most parents in the US, where the average cost of childcare is $1,000 per month and can reach more than $2,000 a month in some states, the idea of paying so little sounds impossible. But it’s happening – north of the US border in Quebec, Canada, where Freeman’s three-year-old daughter, Grace, attends a subsidized early childhood education center (centres de la petite enfance, known by its acronym CPE), for C$9.35, or less than $7 a day.

As soon as she found out that she was pregnant, Freeman, a social worker, placed her daughter on a handful of waiting lists through a government website. Now she can drop her daughter off for up to 10 hours a day, between 6am and 6pm, five days a week, all year round. In addition to childcare, Grace sees a speech therapist at the CPE. A daily menu of the home-cooked meals and snacks is posted at the building’s entrance every morning; meals are on a monthly rotation with seasonal changes and locally sourced produce when available.

The irony being this system was created because of U.S. research into the benefits of early-childhood education.

On Monday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican appointees — with no reasoning — issued an order allowing the Trump administration to provide no notice to people it is deporting to a country with which the person has no connection and where the person could face great danger.

Justice Sonia Sotamayor, writing for herself and Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, issued a damning dissent.

“In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution. In this case, the Government took the opposite approach,“ Sotomayor wrote, noting people who were wrongly deported to third countries — even in violation of the district court’s injunction in the case before the justices, Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D. “Rather than allowing our lower court colleagues to manage this high-stakes litigation with the care and attention it plainly requires, this Court now intervenes to grant the Government emergency relief from an order it has repeatedly defied. I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion.“

The Supreme Court’s order in D.V.D. is technically issued on the emergency, or shadow, docket as a stay of the district court’s injunction as the litigation proceeds. As such, it is not to be taken as a decision on the merits of the lawsuit — although the “likelihood” of success is supposed to be the key factor in granting a stay.

In practice, however, Monday’s order means the administration can send anyone who is deportable — meaning there is an order of removal in place as to them — anywhere that the government decides it wants to sent them, regardless of the dangers that a person might face if sent there and without any right to challenge that decision.

The US supreme court cleared the way on Monday for Donald Trump’s administration to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their own without offering them a chance to show harms they could face, handing him another victory in his aggressive pursuit of mass deportations.

The justices lifted a judicial order that required the government to give migrants set for deportation to so-called “third countries” a “meaningful opportunity” to tell officials they are at risk of torture at their new destination, while a legal challenge plays out.

Boston-based US district judge Brian Murphy had issued the order on 18 April.

The court’s three liberal justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – dissented from the decision.

They're not even pretending anymore.

Intimidation certainly seems to be going swimmingly.

Increasing immigrant arrests in California have begun to gut-punch the economy and wallets of immigrant families and beyond. In some cases, immigrants with legal status and even US citizens have been swept into Donald Trump’s dragnet.

The 2004 fantasy film A Day Without a Mexican – chronicling what would happen to California if Mexican immigrants disappeared – is fast becoming a reality, weeks without Mexicans and many other immigrants. The implications are stark for many, both economically and personally.

“We are now seeing a very significant shift toward enforcement at labor sites where people are working,’ said Andrew Selee, president of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “Not a focus on people with criminal records, but a focus on people who are deeply integrated in the American economy.”

On the plus side, Sept. 1 implementation is out the window -- you can't regulate that fast. I'm not sure what the endgame is here, but even a blind squirrel, usw.

Gov. Greg Abbott on Sunday vetoed a contentious state ban on THC products, keeping the Texas hemp industry alive while spiking a top priority of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

Senate Bill 3 would have banned consumable hemp products that contained any THC, including delta-8 and delta-9.

Abbott, who had remained quiet about the issue throughout the legislative session, rejected the measure just minutes before the veto deadline amid immense political pressure from both sides of the aisle, including from hardline conservatives typically supportive of Patrick’s priorities.

Minutes later, Abbott indicated on social media that he planned to call a special session. Though he did not officially declare a special session nor announce the topics to be covered, legislation to address consumable hemp products could land on the agenda.

Abbott’s veto puts him directly at odds with Patrick, the powerful head of the Senate, who had called the THC ban among his “top five” bills during his 17 years in the Legislature and threatened in February to force a special session if he did not get his way.

Patrick excoriated the veto on social media Sunday, saying Abbott’s “late-night veto” would leave law enforcement and families whose loved ones have been harmed by high-potency products “feeling abandoned.”

Meanwhile, Paxton was too stoned to comment.

The Trump administration has terminated 639 employees at Voice of America and its parent organization in the latest round of sweeping cuts that have reduced the international broadcasting service to a fraction of its former size.

The mass terminations announced Friday rounds out the Trump-led elimination of 1,400 positions since March and represents the near-complete dismantling of an organization founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda, whose first broadcast declared: “We bring you voices from America.”

Just 250 employees now remain across the entire parent group the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), who operated what was America’s primary tool for projecting democratic values globally.

“For decades, American taxpayers have been forced to bankroll an agency that’s been riddled with dysfunction, bias and waste. That ends now,” said Kari Lake, Trump’s senior advisor to USAGM, in Friday’s termination announcement.

How the fuck did I miss that Kari Lake somehow wheedled her way in?

Just before the 2019 holiday season, musician Isaac Zones got an email, forwarded from a friend. It asked, “Do you and your neighbors want to save money on your energy bills, reduce carbon emissions and survive the next power outage?”

His answer was, well, yeah.

“Basically, I read it as like free solar for everybody on my block,” Zones said. Zones lives on an East Oakland street lined with century-old single-family Victorians, mid-century, boxy apartment buildings and everything in between.

The initiative, headed by researchers at UC Berkeley, invited entire neighborhoods to apply for major upgrades: energy- and water-efficient appliances, insulation and solar panels, along with a shared back-up battery and microgrid to protect the street from power blackouts. All for free.

In return, the researchers would get to test out a theory: would retrofitting buildings together, all at once, save money by buying in bulk? Would it save time for a contractor to walk from one job across the street to another? Would people even want to sign up?

In 2019, Peffer and her colleagues at UC Berkeley got a $5 million grant from the state of California to test out a new, block-scale approach.

And Isaac Zones was ready to sign his block up as the guinea pig.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. has approved the world's only twice-a-year shot to prevent HIV, maker Gilead Sciences announced Wednesday. It's the first step in an anticipated global rollout that could protect millions – although it's unclear how many in the U.S. and abroad will get access to the powerful new option.

While a vaccine to prevent HIV still is needed, some experts say the shot — a drug called lenacapvir — could be the next best thing. It nearly eliminated new infections in two groundbreaking studies of people at high risk, better than daily preventive pills they can forget to take.

"This really has the possibility of ending HIV transmission," said Greg Millett, public policy director at amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research.

If FEMA is "phased out” as President Trump plans, states that don't have other resources to draw on will be scrambling to fill gaps. Given the massive costs involved in repairing or replacing infrastructure, states will be highly likely to continue to rebuild exactly what's been knocked down, according to Gaughan, rather than investing in structures built to withstand future climate effects—like roads on higher ground, or more substantial culverts, or new communities away from floodplains.

What's a local government looking for abundant, inexpensive capital supposed to do? Well, federal government assistance aimed at climate adaptation may be a thing of the past, but the municipal bond market (which includes state bonds, despite the name) remains highly attractive to investors—thanks to an apparent Congressional inclination to keep the exemption of bond interest from federal taxation in place. Record-breaking numbers of muni bonds are being issued these days. And Gaughan wants everyone to consider what state-level public finance agencies can do for local governments when it comes to adapting to the ferocious physical effects of climate change.

"Bond banks have the back of local governments as they face ongoing climate challenges," Gaughan says. "At the end of the day, we want our cities, towns, and villages to be successful," he adds. "So that's why we're so vested in trying to figure this thing out." He's implying that relying on individual towns to figure out adaptation, each on their own, won't work.

Let that headline sink in:

Arthur Jackman, an open white supremacist was just filmed throwing a Nazi salute at a No Kings protest and saying:

“Being racist is intelligence. It’s called pattern recognition. Black people commit more violent crime.”

He didn’t say this anonymously online. He said it on the street, proudly, on video.

This is not just some lone lunatic. This is a man who:

Helped storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6 Pled guilty to federal crimes Got personally pardoned by Donald Trump And is married to an active Orange County sheriff’s deputy

Guilty plea confirmed (Fox 35) Trump pardon (Orlando Sentinel) This is not “free speech.” This is Nazi ideology, under police protection.

Arthur Jackman is not a man who regrets anything. He’s a man who’s been emboldened and he’s making it clear:

Racism is not a bug, it’s his belief system Fascism is not a fringe idea, it’s his goal And he’s not alone he’s married to law enforcement

Sarah Jackman cleared by internal review (WFTV) His "Black crime stats" claim? Pure white nationalist propaganda:

Arthur said racism is “pattern recognition” because Black people commit more violent crimes.

That’s not data. That’s eugenics in a trench coat.

The Brennan Center – Debunking the myth of Black criminality Brookings – How racism warps justice NAACP – Criminal justice system racism

What Jackman pushes is the same logic that justified lynchings, stop-and-frisk, and segregation. It’s not a theory, it’s a blueprint for domestic terrorism. Orange County: your badge is stained by this silence.

This man:

Attacked the U.S. Capitol Openly worships fascism Gets legal immunity Sleeps next to a deputy sheriff every night

And your department cleared her like nothing’s wrong?

This is the direct pipeline from white supremacist hate to police protection. This is what fascism looks like in 2025. We should demand:

Sarah Jackman’s immediate suspension An independent investigation into white nationalist infiltration in OCSO Public condemnation of Arthur Jackman’s conduct Federal review of Jackman’s pardon and its consequences

This is not about political disagreement.

This is about a convicted Capitol attacker throwing a Nazi salute and calling himself a racist genius, while being protected by a cop’s badge.

You don’t get to wave the Constitution while stomping on the people it protects.

You don’t get to hide behind “free speech” while planning race war.

And if you wear a badge and sleep beside this man you’re not innocent. You’re involved.

#FireSarahJackman #JackmanIsARacist #FascistsWearBadgesNow #OrangeCountyCoversNazis #ThisIsHowItStarts

San Francisco-based Wildtype will be the first company to launch cultivated seafood in the US after securing an FDA ‘no questions’ letter regarding the safety of its cell cultured salmon.

Wildtype is the fourth cultivated-protein producer to complete a US pre-market scientific and safety consultation after UPSIDE Foods, GOOD Meat, and Mission Barns, and the third to have full approval to sell (Mission Barns is still awaiting the final go-ahead from the USDA for its cultivated fat).

It will debut its wares at the James Beard award-winning Haitian restaurant Kann in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday nights in June, then every day starting in July, before expanding into four additional restaurants.

There's not really an excerpt I can paste that covers the full extent of the grift, so I'll let it be an exercise for the reader just how bad this is.

Donald Trump has launched a mobile phone service and $499 gold smartphone, the latest monetization of his presidency by a family business empire now run by his sons.

The Trump Organization unveiled Trump Mobile on Monday with a $47.45 monthly plan – both the service name and price referencing Trump as the 47th president. The company will also sell a gold-cased “T1” smartphone in September etched with the American flag.

The venture will be headed by his sons Donald Jr and Eric Trump, who took over the company after Trump transitioned to his second presidency. The mobile service joins Trump-branded watches, sneakers and Bibles as products capitalizing on his political brand, with the Trump sons indicating that more is to come.

“We are going to be introducing an entire package of products where people can come and they can get telemedicine on their phones for one flat monthly fee, roadside assistance on their cars, unlimited texting to 100 countries around the world,” Donald Trump Jr said at the Monday morning announcement at Trump Tower in New York.

And where's this phone being put together? Guessing it's going to be exempt from tariffs, but not because of domestic production.

Doctors at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals nationwide could refuse to treat unmarried veterans and Democrats under new hospital guidelines imposed following an executive order by Donald Trump.

The new rules, obtained by the Guardian, also apply to psychologists, dentists and a host of other occupations. They have already gone into effect in at least some VA medical centers.

Medical staff are still required to treat veterans regardless of race, color, religion and sex, and all veterans remain entitled to treatment. But individual workers are now free to decline to care for patients based on personal characteristics not explicitly prohibited by federal law.

Language requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated.

Who even comes up with this shit?

Not going to provide an excerpt here, as this is a developing story.

It's nonetheless of import.

For years, the Los Angeles County jail has been known as the United States’ largest mental health institution.

An astonishing 5,901 people – nearly half of its population – struggle with mental health issues. In some parts of the jail, incarcerated individuals in quilted robes are chained to metal tables so they can’t harm themselves or others. For years, the U.S. Department of Justice has been monitoring the jail system – also the nation’s largest – to assess its mental health care.

And yet it’s making progress, particularly with a peer-to-peer program called Forensic Inpatient (FIP) Stepdown that the Monitor reported on four years ago. Since then, the nascent program has grown more than sixfold overall, spreading to the women’s jail. Incarcerated people trained as mental health assistants are helping hundreds of others with severe mental illness who are held at the same facility. The California state prison system – long under federal court orders to improve mental health care – is taking notice. Many familiar with the county program see it as a national model.

As super-contagious measles continues to spread and nears a six-year U.S. record, cases in its original epicenter of West Texas may be subsiding as hesitant residents become more concerned and willing to vaccinate, while North Dakota is a new focus with the highest rate of any state.

The reality of measles may be overcoming vaccine misinformation in some areas, despite the purge of experts from decision-making roles in the Trump administration under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The nation’s top vaccine expert resigned under pressure in March.

In West Texas, where outbreaks are concentrated, the city of Lubbock hasn’t seen a new case in 20 days, said Katherine Wells, public health director for the city. The area is east of the largest Texas outbreaks, which were centered on a Mennonite community with religious objections to vaccination.

Wells attributed the recent success to a combination of more vaccinations, public awareness campaigns and willingness to stay home when sick to avoid transmission.

In North Dakota, however, the state’s 34 cases give it the highest rate in the nation, followed by New Mexico and Texas, according to the North Dakota Public Health Association, a nonprofit health advocacy group that published an analysis of individual states’ data on Facebook. The state’s first case since 2011 was reported May 2.

The “No Kings Day” nationwide rallies against Donald Trump/for democracy on Saturday turned out millions of people.

That’s per a collective crowdsourcing effort led by Strength In Numbers, and involving many members of the independent data journalism community. We systematized reports from official sources, accounts from the media, and self-reported attendance from thousands of social media posts into a single spreadsheet. (Researchers, please take our data!)

As of midnight on Sunday, June 15, we have data from about 40% of No Kings Day events held yesterday, accounting for over 2.6m attendees. According to our back-of-the-envelope math, that puts total attendance somewhere in the 4-6 million people range. That means roughly 1.2-1.8% of the U.S. population attended a No Kings Day event somewhere in the country yesterday. Organizers say 5m turned out, but don’t release public event-by-event numbers.

Two law enforcement officials told CNN the suspect is 57-year-old Vance Boelter. Officials found a “manifesto” identifying “many lawmakers and other officials” in his vehicle, police said. A law enforcement official told CNN Boelter works for a security company.

Local news stations identified the victims as state senator John Hoffman and state representative Melissa Hortman. Both are members of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party. There is little information on the suspect at this time.

Kennedy named microbiologist Robert Malone to the reconstituted advisory committee. Malone contributed to research that eventually would pave the way for the development of mRNA vaccines. He claims—falsely, experts say—to be the creator of the RNA technology at the heart of prominent COVID-19 vaccines. During the pandemic he became a leading voice against that technology, a star on right-wing media platforms who spread false claims alleging, for one example, that mRNA COVID vaccine maker Moderna had admitted that its vaccines can insert DNA into genomes and cause cancer. According to Factcheck.org, the claim led to social media posts saying the shots could cause “turbo cancer.”

Another appointee, Vicky Pebsworth, a registered nurse and PhD, is a board member of the anti-vaccine advocacy organization National Vaccine Information Center, described in the Washington Post as “the oldest anti-vaccine advocacy group” in the United States. The group has advocated for expanded exemptions from school vaccine requirements; has made anti-influenza vaccine advertisements; and, according to a 2019 Post report, was at the “forefront of a movement that has led some parents to forgo or delay immunizing their children against vaccine-preventable diseases.” Pebsworth’s bio on the center’s website claims that her son was injured by vaccines he received when he was 15 months old.

Kennedy also appointed Martin Kulldorf, an epidemiologist, who claims he was fired from a position at Harvard for his opposition to COVID measures like lockdowns and vaccination requirements. He is one of the authors of a controversial manifesto, published in the fall of 2020, which called for sequestering the elderly and immunocompromised from COVID, a strategy the authors called “focused protection,” while opening society for other demographic groups. Critics said this would allow the virus to spread widely without the protection that vaccines would be able to offer.

On a glimmering May morning, Tom Briggs pilots a 45ft aluminium barge through the waters of Casco Bay for one of the final days of the annual kelp harvest. Motoring past Clapboard Island, he points to a floating wooden platform where mussels have been seeded alongside ribbons of edible seaweed.

“This is our most productive mussel site,” says Briggs, the farm manager for Bangs Island Mussels, a Portland sea farm that grows, harvests and sells hundreds of thousands of pounds of shellfish and seaweed each year. “When we come here, we get the biggest, fastest-growing mussels with the thickest shells and the best quality. To my mind, unscientifically, it’s because of the kelp.”

A growing body of science supports Briggs’s intuition. The Gulf of Maine is uniquely vulnerable to ocean acidification, which can impede shell development in mussels, clams, oysters and lobster, threatening an industry that employs hundreds of people and generates $85m to $100m (£63m to £74m) annually.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is the main driver of declining ocean pH, increasing the acidity of the world’s oceans by more than 40% since the preindustrial era and by more than 15% since 1985. Add carbon runoff from growing coastal communities, regular inflows of colder, more acidic water from Canada, and intense thermal stress – the Gulf of Maine is warming three times faster than the global average – and you’re left with a delicate marine ecosystem and key economic resource under threat.

Enter kelp. The streams of glistening, brownish-green seaweed that Bangs Island seeds on lines under frigid November skies and harvests in late spring are a natural answer to ocean acidification because they devour carbon dioxide. Sensors placed near kelp lines in Casco Bay over the past decade have shown that growing seaweed changes water chemistry enough to lower the levels of carbon dioxide in the immediate vicinity, nourishing nearby molluscs.