Silverseren

A federal judge in Austin has granted pro-Palestinian student groups at several Texas universities standing to pursue a sweeping lawsuit against their institutions' presidents and board members for alleged viewpoint discrimination and for First Amendment violations.

U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman found that the plaintiffs have "sufficiently pled injury" regarding university policies that comply with Gov. Greg Abbott's executive order in March limiting antisemitic speech and with university leaders' actions limiting pro-Palestinian speech.

"The Court finds that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim ... that the GA-44-compliant university policies impose impermissible viewpoint discrimination that chills speech in violation of the First Amendment," Pitman said in an order Monday, referring to Abbott's executive order charging public colleges to enforce free speech policies against pro-Palestinian student organizations and adopt a definition of antisemitism, which the judge said limits legal anti-Israel speech.

The letter (published in its entirety below) represents perhaps the most forceful statement of condemnation—and largest commitment to cultural boycott—ever made by the global literary community with regard to the Israeli cultural sector.

The letter has been signed by multiple winners of, and finalists for, almost every major literary award in the world—from the Booker to the Pulitzer, the National Book Award to the Women’s Prize for Fiction—and closes with a call to action for all in the book world.

The United States imposed sanctions on October 30 against almost 400 entities and individuals in more than a dozen countries that Washington says have been supplying Russia with advanced technology used in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The sanctions and other restrictions were announced simultaneously in statements released by the U.S. Treasury, State, and Commerce departments. The Treasury Department imposed sanctions on 274 targets, while the State Department designated more than 120 and the Commerce Department added 40 companies and research institutions to a trade restriction list.

Elon Musk worked illegally on a student visa and faced concerns he would be “deported” when he started life in the United States, a bombshell report revealed Saturday.

The billionaire South African-born immigrant also admitted in an email that he “had no legal right to stay in the country” when he ditched his studies and founded a company which he later sold for more than $300 million, The Washington Post reported. His brother was also here illegally, committing what one expert called “fraud upon entry.”

The revelation comes after Musk, the Tesla, X, SpaceX and Starlink CEO went all-in on supporting Donald Trump and repeatedly accused Democrats of trying to flood the country with immigrants who cross the border illegally, a conspiracy theory which has become mainstream in the Republican party. Bloomberg called him “X’s biggest promote of anti-immigrant conspiracies.”

On Friday, the Washington Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, announced that the paper would no longer make endorsements for president—after its journalists had already drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. The decision was made by Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner.

Over a period of several weeks, a Post staffer told me, two Post board members, Charles Lane and Stephen W. Stromberg, had worked on drafts of a Harris endorsement. (Neither was contacted for this article.) “Normally we’d have had a meeting, review a draft, make suggestions, do editing,” the staffer told me. Editorial writers started to feel angsty a few weeks ago, per the staffer; the process stalled. Around a week ago, editorial page editor David Shipley told the editorial board that the endorsement was on track, adding that “this is obviously something our owner has an interest in.”

“We thought we were dickering over language—not over whether there would be an endorsement,” the Post staffer said. So journalists at the Post, in both the news and opinion departments, were stunned Friday after Shipley told the editorial board at a meeting that it would not take a position after all. This represents the first time the Post has sat out a presidential endorsement since 1988.

"Black Insurrectionist,” the anonymous social media persona behind some of the most widely circulated conspiracy theories about the 2024 election, can be traced to a man from upstate New York.

He’s also white.

With a profile photo of a Black soldier and the tagline “I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS,” the account on the platform X amassed more than 300,000 followers while posting dubious claims about Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Some were amplified by former President Donald Trump, his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, and their Republican allies in Congress. The most salacious claims have come in the closing weeks of the campaign.

When the University of Michigan governing board this year asked the state’s attorney general to bring charges against campus Gaza protesters, they tapped a political ally with whom some board members have extensive personal, financial or political connections, a Guardian investigation finds.

Frustrated by local prosecutors’ unwillingness to crack down on most of the students arrested at the height of the pro-Palestinian encampments last spring, the regents executed a highly unusual move in recruiting the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, because she was more likely to file charges, three people with direct knowledge of the decision tell the Guardian.

The revelations raise new questions about potential conflicts of interest. Six of eight regents contributed more than $33,000 combined to Nessel’s campaigns, her office hired a regent’s law firm to handle major state cases, the same regent co-chaired her 2018 campaign, and she has personal relationships with some regents.

The Kamala Harris campaign kicked out a prominent Muslim Democrat from the vice president’s rally in Royal Oak on Monday, further driving a wedge between the Democratic Party and Arab and Muslim Americans.

Ahmed Ghanim, a Democrat, says he accepted an invitation to the event and was seated in the Royal Oak Music Theatre when a campaign organizer ordered him to leave.

“She took me to the door, and she closed it, and I found two police officers waiting there, and she said, ‘You have to leave right now,’” Ghanim tells Metro Times. “I asked why she was kicking me out. She wouldn’t answer. I was very calmly asking why I was being kicked out.”

Tim Ballard, the anti-trafficking activist whose wildly exaggerated missions abroad were the basis of the hit 2023 film Sound of Freedom, is facing a new legal action from six women who last year sued him for sexual exploitation — leading Ballard to sue them for defamation earlier this month.

The latest complaint is the first federal suit targeting Ballard; it comes from accusers Celeste Borys, Mary Hall, Sasha Hightower, Krista Kacey, Kira Lynch, and Bree Righter. The filing names Ballard associates Matthew Cooper and Michael Porenta, as well as Ballard’s former organization, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), as defendants.

The women once again lay out a narrative of being recruited by Ballard and OUR to take part in rescue missions of trafficked individuals, only to then be “groomed” to become physically intimate with the married Ballard as part of what he called a “couples ruse,” intended to fool traffickers into believing they were romantically involved. They claim they were coerced into “performing sex, labor, and services for [Ballard’s] personal benefit and the benefit of OUR,” and sometimes endured violent sexual assault, or had sex with Ballard while Cooper was present, always with the assurance that it was “necessary to rescue children.” The plaintiffs further claim that Ballard and his associates laundered money in order to hire sex workers while on missions abroad, and that “OUR actively participated in the solicitation, recruitment, and exploitation” of female operatives.

The Kremlin could not have asked for better publicity at a better time when Ben Swann, a self-described independent journalist who promotes conspiracy theories, released a 12-part video series he promised would reveal dark truths about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Swann’s flashy documentary-style videos were filled with innuendo, attacks on Zelenskyy’s character and commentary from guests sympathetic to Russia in its two-year war with Ukraine.

The series, titled “Zelenskyy Unmasked,” launched in April as Congress was debating increasing military assistance to Ukraine, and it quickly caught the attention of conservative social media influencers who hyped the project to their millions of followers.

Among those who promoted the series was Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son.

Brian Comer, a 64-year-old white man, was accused of illegally hunting geese at a golf course on the day Trump amplified racist lies about Haitian immigrants in the city.

With the Biden administration essentially pausing work on ceasefire negotiations to end the war in Gaza, Israel’s fresh assaults on Hezbollah in Lebanon this week are adding another layer of complication, making prospects for a near-term deal all the more difficult – if not impossible – at least while the bombs are falling.

In recent days, senior US officials had largely stopped making a vigorous push on the ceasefire negotiations, sources told CNN, having determined there is currently no political will on either side – Hamas or Israel’s – to end the conflict.

Even as President Joe Biden and top aides refuse to abandon the effort entirely, a senior Democrat close to the White House summed up the sentiment among some officials involved in those deliberations this way: “We can’t want this more than they want it.”