U.S. News

Remember how everyone was grousing that Harris wasn't tough enough about Israel's genocide? Well, you reap what you sow. Trump's fine with full extermination, and how anyone didn't see this coming is ... um, interesting.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-musk-gsa-terminate-office-leases-f8faac5e2038722f705587c8dd21ab26

Last week, regional managers for the General Services Administration, or GSA, received a message from the agency’s Washington headquarters to begin terminating leases on all of the roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide, according to an email shared with The Associated Press by a GSA employee.

The order seems to contradict Trump’s own return-to-office mandate for federal employees, adding confusion to what was already a scramble by the GSA to find workspace, internet connections and office building security credentials for employees who had been working remotely for years.

But it may reflect the Trump administration’s belief that it won’t need as many offices due to its efforts to fire employees or encourage them to resign.

At least four cases of measles, including two involving school-aged children, have been reported in Texas in less than two weeks, putting state health agencies on alert.

For some communities, this is the first case of measles in more than 20 years.

Laura Anton, spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said the agency sent out an alert to health providers statewide once measles were confirmed to be found in two adult residents in Harris County last week.

The alert stated that both individuals reside in the same household and were unvaccinated against measles. These were the first confirmed cases of measles reported in Texas since 2023, when two were reported.

Union members are building protections against threats from the Trump administration’s recent authorization of raids targeting places such as schools. In January, members of Saint Paul Federation of Educators (SPFE) Local 28 organized an Immigration Defense Committee to take action and stand in solidarity with the immigrant community in St. Paul, Minn. They are planning know-your-rights trainings and emergency resources for teachers and families.

According to a union spokesperson, SPFE has been educating members on the agenda of another Trump administration, including its threats against immigrants and working people. In a slew of executive orders during the first week back in office, the administration overturned a 13-year-old policy banning immigration enforcement from interfering in essential services at schools, hospitals, and churches.

fwiw

The DreamEscape Library was born a little over a year ago, when the KHSA student government advisers challenged teens to come up with a service project that would positively change their community. The kids mulled over several options, then zeroed in on one that felt perfect.

“We all grew up without a library,” said Akeem Mack, now a KHSA senior. “That had an effect on a lot of kids. Teachers assigned a book, and people wouldn’t read it, because people didn’t like to read.”

The library got started with a $1,000 seed grant from the Philly Service Award, which works with the nonprofit Herb It Forward Foundation and Drexel University to encourage students to improve Philadelphia. There was no money for staff or space, but the students vowed to be the librarians themselves and to start, they pushed a single cart of books around.

“There’s a lot of areas in Philly where they give out free books,” said Angie Medina, a senior. “We used any type of resources that came into our hands.”

The first few volumes came from teachers’ classroom collections. The students gathered more slowly but surely — general fiction, graphic novels, fantasy, romance. Every book had to be stamped by hand, entered into the electronic catalog, and reinforced with tape.

“We started off with our small little genres that we recommended, then we involved a catalog and a website,” said Christian Toro, a sophomore.

Amid a national rise in book bans in school libraries and new laws in some red states that threaten criminal penalties against librarians, a growing number of blue states are taking the opposite approach.

New Jersey joined at least five other states — California, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington — that have passed legislation within the past two years that aims to preserve access to reading materials that deal with racial and sexual themes, including those about the LGBTQ+ community.

Conservative groups have led the effort to ban materials to shield children from what they deem as harmful content. In the 2023-24 school year, there were 10,000 instances of book bans across the U.S. — nearly three times as many as the year before, according to a recent report by PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for literary freedom.

crosspost

Refuse to assist federal authorities: Withhold information about undocumented immigrants from federal agencies Decline to honor immigration detainer requests Deny the use of state detention facilities for federal immigration purposes

Utilize the anti-commandeering doctrine: Prevent state resources from being used for federal immigration enforcement Maintain "sanctuary" jurisdiction policies

Restrict National Guard involvement: Governors can refuse to allow state National Guard units to participate in civilian policing activities Challenge attempts to "federalize" National Guard troops for domestic operations

Legal challenges: Sue to prevent military policing in their jurisdictions Seek injunctions under the Posse Comitatus Act if attempts are made to use military for domestic law enforcement

Strengthen state constitutional protections: Interpret state constitutions to offer stronger protections against unreasonable searches and seizures Implement policies that reduce interactions between immigrants and law enforcement

Provide resources to U.S.-born citizens: Support children of undocumented immigrants who are U.S. citizens by birth---

Carlos Mariani Rosa, the executive director of Minnesota Education Equity Partnership (MNEEP), described a “broad fear” from school administrators. Mariani Rosa is also the board chair of Academias la Paz, the recently merged charter school district of Academia Cesar Chavez and El Colegio High School, which have both seen packed meetings of concerned families in recent weeks.

“It’s not just undocumented people that are afraid,” he said. “[People with] lots of different immigrant statuses are expressing fear.”

MNEEP hosted a webinar drawing more than 100 participants in December to help school administrators navigate immigration law during a second Trump administration. The organization also put together a toolkit to clarify what ICE can and can’t do at schools, and how school officials can develop policies to best protect their students from immigration enforcement. Some Minnesota districts and charter schools have created policies to govern any interactions with ICE.

On the same day that a white supremacy aligned university club encouraged students to report their classmates to ICE, hundreds of Arizona State University Sun Devils responded by marching in support of their undocumented classmates.

Crowds of students waving Mexican flags and posters with supportive messages, including “Education not deportation” and “Stand with ASU Dreamers,” surrounded a small gathering of College Republicans United at Hayden Library as they held up their own signs with information on how to tip off immigration officials about classmates suspected of being in the country illegally.

Loud shouts of “Down with deportation!”” and “No hate, no fear, everyone is welcome here!” resounded throughout the campus.

Reyna Montoya, the founder and CEO of Aliento, a local organization that serves DACA and other undocumented youth, criticized the event as a bid to instill fear in students without legal status who are simply trying to get an education, and called on protestors to respond with activism.

“They wanted to intimidate students,” she shouted through a bullhorn as march attendees took a short break. “They wanted to ensure that they don’t get their degrees, and the best way to fight back is with love, with compassion — and by getting an education!”

It turns out Good Day Fort Collins is just one in a network of AI-generated newsletters operating in 355 cities and towns across the U.S. Not only do these hundreds of newsletters share the same exact seven testimonials, they also share the same branding, the same copy on their about pages, and the same stated mission: “to make local news more accessible and highlight extraordinary people in our community.”

You wouldn’t know any of that as a subscriber. Separate website domains and distinct newsletter names make it difficult to connect the dots. There is Good Day Rock Springs, Daily Bentonville, Today in Virginia Beach, and Pittsburgh Morning News, to name just a few. Nothing in the newsletter copy discloses that they are part of a national network or that the article curation and summary blurbs are generated using large language models (LLMs).

The newsletters do all name the same founder and editor: Matthew Henderson.

Henderson is a serial internet startup founder and software engineer whose past companies include the on-demand blog-writing service Scribble and the journalist email database Press Hunt. Good Daily is currently a one-man operation, Henderson says. Though AI use is not disclosed to Good Daily subscribers, in an interview Henderson didn’t shy away from the fact that each newsletter is produced using near full automation.

“Our goal is to use automation and technology everywhere we possibly can without sacrificing product quality for our readers,” he told me in an email, explaining that he built the back-end technology that outputs the hundreds of newsletter editions every day

Something something cost of eggs.

Yo, what? Another east coast crash.

If you've spent any time in Jackson or Josephine counties, the notion of Grants Pass being a small town is amusing. Still, this is apparently where the fight over human dignity is going to be fought.