Jan 20, 2026 at 09:25 AM EST

Members of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America have been cultivating ties with officials of the Chinese Communist Party and agreeing to take pro-China positions, according to extensive minutes of internal meetings seen by Newsweek.

The minutes of the DSA meetings show participants discussing contacts with officials from China’s ruling party in the name of "anti-imperialism," with some members saying the organization should avoid topics that are sensitive for Beijing, such as China's threats to invade Taiwan, its security crackdown in Hong Kong and abuses of the Uyghur Muslim minority. They also discuss visits to China. Chinese officials did not take part in the meetings themselves but met with members in China and encouraged the DSA to set up exchanges, according to the minutes.

"China wants to interface with the DSA," one New York-based political activist told a meeting on October 8 last year of the China Working Group of the DSA's International Committee, which helps set policy and advises leaders. "If we develop a killer two-week itinerary, hire locals, and develop further connections with the CPC [Communist Party of China], then we're golden," says the person, whose name is redacted.

The DSA International Committee and Mamdani’s New York City Hall did not respond to requests for comment. Mamdani was not recorded as being present at any of the meetings minuted. Although Mamdani has been a longstanding member of the Democratic Socialists, he has distanced himself from elements of the group’s national platform. He has also not made extensive public comments on China.
Getty Images. Newsweek/Illustration

Mamdani’s victory in the mayoral election last year highlighted the rise of the Democratic Socialists as a political force and particularly in New York, where China has long sought to influence the leadership of a city with one of the largest Chinese populations outside China. It has used lobbying and campaign donations from dozens of local groups linked to the Chinese Communist Party, on which Newsweek has reported extensively.

While the minutes of the DSA meetings do not indicate any wrongdoing, they do raise new questions over the extent of Chinese influence within the group and more broadly in the United States. They are also an indicator of how China’s Communist Party seeks to build ties with influential political groupings in the United States. The DSA’s website describes the group’s New York chapter as “Zohran’s political home” and says his victory would not have been possible without it.

The DSA member who gave Newsweek access to the materials on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation said they were uncomfortable with the Communist Party links and what they said were efforts to avoid discussing controversial issues.

"The materials document a sustained pattern of ideological alignment, narrative filtering, and network overlap consistent with influence conducted at the discursive and organizational level," said the person, who is a member of the International Committee. “We value democracy and openness, and this directly contradicts that.”

Asked about contacts between the DSA, Mamdani's administration and the Chinese Communist Party, Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., told Newsweek: "Local exchanges and cooperation are the important component of China-U.S. relations, serving as the foundation, vitality, and source of strength for the relations between the two countries."

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The dozens of internal documents go back to 2021. They include a detailed slideshow of an August 2025 visit to Guizhou and a trip by members to the Xinjiang region, apparently in 2023. The minutes show members of the China Working Group, led by Anlin Wang, discussing strategy and debating with members of like-minded groups such as Code Pink and the Britain-based Friends of Socialist China. Wang did not respond to a request for comment via the International Committee.

"Anti-imperialism should be at the forefront of everything we do in DSA," says one member at a meeting in May 2021.

In a meeting in June 2023, Wang comments: “I think one thing we would like to see is robust internationalism / anti-imperialism."

Also in June 2023, members praise what they say is a Code Pink tactic of avoiding discussion of politically sensitive Communist Party policies.

On June 12, 2023, the minutes show that Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans briefed the Democratic Socialists on her organization's "China Is Not Our Enemy" (CINOE) campaign and advised the group: "Stay out of the weeds. Focus on points that are easier to sell.” One of those is poverty alleviation programs in China, with the minutes showing the DSA group planning events to communicate that in the United States. Code Pink did not respond to a request for comment.

At a later meeting in June 2023 to discuss Code Pink's advice, a person says: "I like Jodie. They stick to the CINOE message and don't get stuck in the weeds. They don't get caught up in One China or Xinjiang or Hong Kong. It's good rhetorically. Makes me wonder if we should stay farther out of the weeds as well." The person's name was redacted by the source.

The minutes also show some members thought that reports of abuse of Uyghurs by the Communist Party in China's far-western Xinjiang region had been exaggerated and were part of a "propaganda campaign" by U.S. media.

"There are real problems with the Chinese government," one person said in a 2021 meeting, "but we are not going to stop what the Chinese are doing as DSA. We have to confront the propaganda campaign by U.S. media and even the left. For instance, one million Uyghurs being brutalized in Xinjiang is an exaggeration. It's not a genocide or Holocaust."

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The documents include a slideshow from members’ trips to China. A photograph of a Uyghur woman is accompanied by the written comment: "Our visit to Xinjiang was very revealing! A young woman we met in the Bazaar spoke near-perfect English. She told us she learned it in a training school." What China refers to as vocational training schools have been described by United Nations human rights experts as a network of detention and brutalization camps.

An image of a mechanical harvester in cotton fields in Xinjiang is accompanied by the comment in parentheses: "No slaves!!" A note with a picture of the Id Kah Mosque in the southern Xinjiang city of Kashgar says: "worshippers…come and go freely."

The minutes also show that during the August 2025 trip, to China's southwestern Guizhou province, DSA members and other U.S. left-wing group members were hosted by officials at the Communist Party School there. The Guizhou foreign affairs department helped manage the trip. The Party officials encouraged them to set up "official exchanges."

Photographs show members attending Party School seminars, and officials explained Guizhou's poverty alleviation scheme to the visitors including a development concept known as "Social Pairing" that matches eastern parts of China to the Uyghur west. According to Chinese officials, the policy "prioritizes safeguarding and improving people's well-being." Critics say it is a mechanism for surveillance and control.

The Guizhou Party School acknowledged receipt of an email from Newsweek seeking comment but did not reply further.

Members also discuss building ties with the Shanghai-based website China Academy and an affiliated outlet called Wave Media. Both have ties to a network of pro-Communist Party media.

But the minutes show that not everyone agreed on the approach to China.

One member—whose name was redacted—tried to push back against the consensus, voicing concern about the group not debating the rights of Chinese people: "Saying we can't talk about their rights until we defeat American imperialism doesn't work for me," the person says.

But that person was contradicted and described as unkind. "In the future let's try to have conversation that encourages debate," another person tells them. The objector apologized.

The person who shared the minutes said: "This isn't what I signed up for and I imagine it's not what a majority of members signed up for. There's no way you can be a part of the organization and promote the things they're doing.”

https://archive.is/xcbz9

Vance’s position is that even if they’re doing things by the book, they’re nonetheless here illegitimately. Period.

It's all about skin color, not immigration status.

Archived copies of the article
* web.archive.org
* ghostarchive.org
* archive.today

Trump’s ICE Goons Detained a 5-Year-Old. Then JD Vance Made It Worse.

Much of the media is treating the vice president’s Minneapolis visit as an attempt to lower the temperature. If anything, he raised it.

^{The New Republic}

Title.

I've been trying to find a copy that I can run on Steam Deck with no luck lately. Anyone have any good places to check?

Many thanks!

Seven House Democrats voted in favor of a $64.4 billion bill to advance a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending measure that includes about $10 billion for ICE. The votes came during a markup of the DHS appropriations bill, with Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky casting the lone Republican vote against the funding, which passed 220-207 and will fund ICE and FEMA through September 30.

The seven Democrats who voted alongside the majority of Republicans to push forward the bill are Representatives

• Tom Suozzi (New York),
• Henry Cuellar (Texas),
• Don Davis (North Carolina),
• Laura Gillen (New York),
• Jared Golden (Maine),
• Vicente Gonzalez (Texas),
• Marie Glusenkamp Perez (Washington).

Democrats Who Voted for ICE Funding Face Fury, Primary Calls—’No Excuse’

Seven Democrats are facing criticism after voting to advance funding for ICE ahead of the 2026 elections.

^{Mandy Taheri (Newsweek)}

With Zohran Mamdani’s ascent to Gracie Mansion, a democratic socialist is now chief executive for the largest municipal bureaucracy in the United States, meaning that he oversees the daily activities of roughly 300,000 employees. Most of these employees are what the political scientist Michael Lipsky called “street-level bureaucrats”: the teachers, firefighters, cops, bus drivers, and others whose jobs put them into direct and regular contact with civilians. But they also include the urban planners, economists, analysts, and administrators who operate behind the scenes and at the higher echelons of city government: the people who help write the city’s budget, study traffic patterns, and run grant and incentive programs.

It is this latter category of civil servants that will be tasked with turning the cumbersome machinery of city government in the direction indicated by Mamdani and his political appointees. Implementing a sewer socialist agenda in New York City will be, to a great extent, an enormously complicated technical exercise, carried out by a small army of trained technicians.

The Left Needs Bureaucrats - Dissent Magazine

After MAGA, the left will need to be ready with a theory of how to rebuild the federal administrative state—not as it was before Trump, but as something better.

^{Dissent Magazine}

The United States and China have both signed off on TikTok’s long-awaited divestment deal, clearing a major hurdle for the popular social media app’s future in the U.S., a White House official confirmed to Scripps News.

The approvals pave the way for the sale of TikTok’s American operations to close ahead of a Jan. 22 government deadline, bringing an end to several years of political, legal and national security uncertainty surrounding the platform used by roughly 170 million Americans.

The agreement restructures TikTok’s U.S. business into a new joint venture, majority owned by a group of Trump-backed investors, including American tech giant Oracle, private equity fund Silver Lake, and the United Arab Emirates firm MGX. It limits the ownership stake of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, and adding new safeguards around data and governance.

US and China sign off on TikTok divestment deal, clearing path for American spinoff

The U.S. and China have both signed off on TikTok’s long-awaited divestment deal, clearing way for the popular social media app’s future in the U.S., a White House official confirmed to Scripps News.

^{Maura Barrett (News Channel 5 Nashville (WTVF))}

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has abruptly halted the termination of hundreds of disaster workers because of the massive winter storm.

In an email Thursday obtained by CNN, staff were told FEMA would stop dismissing workers whose contracts are expiring. Sources told CNN the looming winter storm was a major factor in the pause.

Roughly 300 disaster workers have been let go this month, with only a handful receiving contract extensions.

FEMA pauses termination of disaster workers ahead of winter storm

FEMA has paused layoffs of disaster workers, citing the massive winter storm, amid an agency overhaul that has already cut thousands of jobs.

^{Scripps News Group (News Channel 5 Nashville (WTVF))}

Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist who leads the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said a person’s right to refuse a vaccine outweighed concerns about illness or death from infectious diseases.

This approach means a lot of dead and paralyzed kids. You can eliminate a lot of infectious disease if everybody who can gets vaccinated. You can't when 10% of the population refuses.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/health/milhoan-vaccines-optional-polio.html?unlocked_article_code=1.GlA.GSVy.gbKoG9oTOXe_

https://apnews.com/article/renee-fleming-kennedy-center-cancellations-9ed539d9e42c47d700196e72beb5ca26

As of today, the US is no longer a member of the World Health Organization—and it leaves the United Nations health agency with hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid bills, according to reporting by Stat News.

US officially out of WHO, leaving hundreds of millions of dollars unpaid

US did not pay $278 million in 2024–2025 dues and millions more in promised funds.

^{Beth Mole (Ars Technica)}

Khaled Al-Batsh, coordinator of the national and Islamic forces in Gaza and a member of the political bureau of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said the formation of the national committee to manage Gaza is “an urgent step and a bridge forward.”

Al-Batsh told reporters on Thursday that Palestinian factions “will not stop at simply supporting the national committee. We will monitor its work and performance, and provide help and guidance where needed,” according to the Palestinian Sama News Agency.

He added that Palestinian factions have no comment for now on US President Donald Trump’s peace council, but stressed that “what matters is that the committee performs its role professionally. The factions will not obstruct its work or place obstacles in its way.”

The Palestinian leader also called for national unity to end the political division and lay the foundation for a comprehensive national stage that restores the political system based on partnership rather than exclusion.

He urged the national committee to return to Gaza, start its work, and begin implementing plans for recovery, community relief, and ultimately the reconstruction of the territory.

Al-Batsh described Israeli threats to hinder the committee’s work as “a display of the bullying exercised by Netanyahu’s government in full view of the world.”

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/?p=832985

Can you guess when I turned Anubis back on?

• Grey line (left-hand; y-axis) tracks page views
• Blue line (right-hand; y-axis) tracks unique users

You can even see the spike in traffic that brought down the site hard enough that I got my butt in gear to tune Anubis and turn it back on.

Based on the numbers here, there is a thirteen-fold decrease in activity (or a ~92% drop in traffic), all identified by Anubis as bots and blocked.

Selective adjustments were made to the nginx config and anubis bot policy to allow certain bits of traffic through (for unimpeded federation, etc.), but otherwise the site is now quite stable, on a small potato server. 🥔

Default bot policy does let search engine crawlers though (I think), so that is win-win.

Thank you so much @cadey@pony.social, my next stop is your GitHub Sponsors page.

More than 230,000 women and girls in Gaza, including nearly 15,000 pregnant women, are facing limited access to reproductive health services because of Israeli military operations, despite a ceasefire deal, the UN said Thursday, Anadolu reports.

Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric cited the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), which warned that “there is an increased risk of gender-based violence, child marriage, and exploitation of women and girls.”

He added that damage to health facilities, safe spaces and clinics, combined with displacement and flooding, has “sharply limited access to psychosocial support and medical care.”

UN humanitarian partners have reached more than 13,000 households since Sunday, he said, adding that they distributed “hundreds of tents” along with mattresses, blankets, warm clothes, cooking utensils and solar lights.

Capacity and funding constraints mean support currently reaches only about 40% of Gaza’s 970 displacement sites, he said.

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza that began after an attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and lasted two years, has killed more than 71,000 Palestinians and wounded over 171,000, most of them women and children, and destroyed about 90% of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.

Since a ceasefire took effect Oct. 10, Israeli attacks have killed 483 Palestinians and wounded 1,287, while Israel has sharply restricted the entry of food, shelter materials and medical supplies into Gaza, where 2.4 million Palestinians live in dire conditions.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/?p=832944

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2223…

Kurdish authorities have warned of a major ISIS resurgence since the start of Damascus’s assault against the SDF in the north

The US is considering a “complete withdrawal” from Syria, officials told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on 22 January, coinciding with Damascus’s assault against Kurdish forces in the country’s north.

“The head-spinning events of the last week have led the Pentagon to question the viability of the American military’s mission in Syria after the SDF’s defeat,” the US officials went on to say.

“If the SDF fully disbands, the US officials see no reason for the American military to stay in Syria. One factor is the difficulties posed by working with [Syrian President] Sharaa’s army. The force is riddled with jihadist sympathizers, including soldiers with ties to Al-Qaeda and ISIS and others who have been involved in alleged war crimes against the Kurds and Druze,” the sources added.

Around 1,000 US forces are scattered in bases across northern Syria. Last year, the US army began reducing its presence in the country, withdrawing from five out of eight major bases.

From thecradle.co via This RSS Feed.

US mulls 'full withdrawal' from Syria after SDF defeat: Report

^thecradle.co