As House Speaker Mike Johnson eyes a vote next week on a to-be-announced health care package, a growing number of House Republicans are revolting against leadership by trying to force a vote on extending the expiring Affordable Care Act enhanced subsidies.

Nearly a dozen Republicans -- many from swing districts -- have signed onto dueling bipartisan discharge petitions to extend and reform the subsidies in the hopes of bypassing leadership and triggering a vote on the House floor.

This move comes as the subsidies are set to expire at the end of the month, which will prompt health premiums for more than 20 million Americans to soar.

Growing number of House Republicans sign on to effort to force vote on ACA subsidies -- defying Speaker Johnson

Nearly a dozen Republicans have signed on to dueling measures.

^{Lauren Peller (ABC News)}

Defeat complicates the picture for Republicans across the US as they seek to redraw districts in an increasingly messy battle

The Indiana legislature’s rejection of a new map that would have added two Republican seats in Congress marked one of the biggest political defeats for Donald Trump so far in his second term and significantly damaged the Republican effort to reconfigure congressional districts ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

The defeat showed that Trump’s political might is not unlimited. For months, the president waged an aggressive effort to twist the arms of Indiana lawmakers into supporting a new congressional map, sending JD Vance to meet in person with lawmakers. Trump allies also set up outside groups to pressure state lawmakers.

Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, which has close ties to the Trump administration, issued a dramatic threat this week ahead of the vote: if the new map wasn’t passed, Indiana would lose federal funding. “Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame,” the group posted on X. The state’s Republican lieutenant governor said in a since-deleted X post that Trump administration officials made the same threat.

Indiana’s rejection of new voting map shows Trump’s might is not unlimited

^{Sam Levine (The Guardian)}

https://time.com/7339513/ai-fei-fei-li-virtual-worlds/

The national soccer team made it to the knockout stages of the Arab Cup for the first time, uniting fans from Gaza to the West Bank to Cairo to Arab cities in Israel.

archive.ph/8DQK4

Dec. 12, 2025

In Gaza, nearly 50 men, teenagers and boys made their way through a stormy night and muddy, flooded streets to a makeshift cafe in a tent on the outskirts of Khan Younis, where a technician worked frantically to get the game’s livestream playing on a big TV powered by solar panels and batteries, and the cafe’s owner fed cardboard boxes and paper scraps into a fire to make hot drinks and heat the room.

Ismail Nasser al-Din, 20, sat dripping wet, clutching a Palestinian flag. He said he had lost his brother, a cousin and a friend in the war. “I hope our team will win,” he said. “We need any reason to laugh, enjoy and get some relief.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/world/middleeast/palestine-soccer-saudi-arabia-arab-cup.html

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/40248576

The national soccer team made it to the knockout stages of the Arab Cup for the first time, uniting fans from Gaza to the West Bank to Cairo to Arab cities in Israel.

archive.ph/8DQK4

Dec. 12, 2025

In Gaza, nearly 50 men, teenagers and boys made their way through a stormy night and muddy, flooded streets to a makeshift cafe in a tent on the outskirts of Khan Younis, where a technician worked frantically to get the game’s livestream playing on a big TV powered by solar panels and batteries, and the cafe’s owner fed cardboard boxes and paper scraps into a fire to make hot drinks and heat the room.

Ismail Nasser al-Din, 20, sat dripping wet, clutching a Palestinian flag. He said he had lost his brother, a cousin and a friend in the war. “I hope our team will win,” he said. “We need any reason to laugh, enjoy and get some relief.”

Peter Link

2025-12-13 00:08:28

For 2 Hours, a Soccer Match Offers Palestinians a Rarity: Joy

The national soccer team made it to the knockout stages of the Arab Cup for the first time, uniting fans from Gaza to the West Bank to Cairo to Arab cities in Israel.

archive.ph/8DQK4

Dec. 12, 2025

In Gaza, nearly 50 men, teenagers and boys made their way through a stormy night and muddy, flooded streets to a makeshift cafe in a tent on the outskirts of Khan Younis, where a technician worked frantically to get the game’s livestream playing on a big TV powered by solar panels and batteries, and the cafe’s owner fed cardboard boxes and paper scraps into a fire to make hot drinks and heat the room.

Ismail Nasser al-Din, 20, sat dripping wet, clutching a Palestinian flag. He said he had lost his brother, a cousin and a friend in the war. “I hope our team will win,” he said. “We need any reason to laugh, enjoy and get some relief.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/world/middleeast/palestine-soccer-saudi-arabia-arab-cup.html

https://time.com/7339513/ai-fei-fei-li-virtual-worlds/

Khaled Hroub
9 December 2025 09:16 GMT

In a time of deep Palestinian anguish, the national football team's successive victories in the Arab Cup, currently taking place in Qatar, have ignited a rare and precious sense of unity.

This joy begins in the rain-soaked tents of displaced families in Gaza, stretches to refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, and ripples across Palestinian communities worldwide.

From Rafah comes Ihab Abu Jazar, the team's coach, whose family home was destroyed and whose mother was moved to a tent in the Mawasi area. He becomes, suddenly, a beacon of hope.

For a fleeting moment, his squad delivers triumph on the green pitch, qualifying for the next round and dedicating the victory first to Gaza and then to Palestinians everywhere.

Behind the Fida'i, the team's nickname meaning fighter, a collective spirit emerges. It transcends sport, reflecting a profound yearning among Palestinians to reclaim an unfragmented identity, free from the suffocating grip of political division and despair.

At the Arab Cup, Palestinian football is uniting what politics has divided

Amid genocide and despair, the Palestinian team's victories have offered the people a rare moment of triumph and defiance, as national identity transcends political fragmentation

^{Middle East Eye}

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/40247167

Khaled Hroub
9 December 2025 09:16 GMT

In a time of deep Palestinian anguish, the national football team's successive victories in the Arab Cup, currently taking place in Qatar, have ignited a rare and precious sense of unity.

This joy begins in the rain-soaked tents of displaced families in Gaza, stretches to refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, and ripples across Palestinian communities worldwide.

From Rafah comes Ihab Abu Jazar, the team's coach, whose family home was destroyed and whose mother was moved to a tent in the Mawasi area. He becomes, suddenly, a beacon of hope.

For a fleeting moment, his squad delivers triumph on the green pitch, qualifying for the next round and dedicating the victory first to Gaza and then to Palestinians everywhere.

Behind the Fida'i, the team's nickname meaning fighter, a collective spirit emerges. It transcends sport, reflecting a profound yearning among Palestinians to reclaim an unfragmented identity, free from the suffocating grip of political division and despair.

Peter Link

2025-12-12 23:39:10

At the Arab Cup, Palestinian football is uniting what politics has divided

Khaled Hroub
9 December 2025 09:16 GMT

In a time of deep Palestinian anguish, the national football team's successive victories in the Arab Cup, currently taking place in Qatar, have ignited a rare and precious sense of unity.

This joy begins in the rain-soaked tents of displaced families in Gaza, stretches to refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, and ripples across Palestinian communities worldwide.

From Rafah comes Ihab Abu Jazar, the team's coach, whose family home was destroyed and whose mother was moved to a tent in the Mawasi area. He becomes, suddenly, a beacon of hope.

For a fleeting moment, his squad delivers triumph on the green pitch, qualifying for the next round and dedicating the victory first to Gaza and then to Palestinians everywhere.

Behind the Fida'i, the team's nickname meaning fighter, a collective spirit emerges. It transcends sport, reflecting a profound yearning among Palestinians to reclaim an unfragmented identity, free from the suffocating grip of political division and despair.

At the Arab Cup, Palestinian football is uniting what politics has divided

Amid genocide and despair, the Palestinian team's victories have offered the people a rare moment of triumph and defiance, as national identity transcends political fragmentation

^{Middle East Eye}

Tentando a tutti i costi di mantenere questo ritmo di postaggio che ho forse ripreso, seppur con mia grande difficoltà, perché ehhh gli spiriti malevoli che mi assalgono… L’argomento assurdo di oggi è l’assurdità (per l’appunto) di quegli smartphone provenienti dalla lontanissima Repubblica Popolare Democratica di Corea, che il SigniorChièIlBoss ha potuto avere in mano […]

octospacc.altervista.org/2025/…

https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/is-there-enough-data-center-capacity-for-ai

https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/is-there-enough-data-center-capacity-for-ai

The Department of Justice is seeking to obtain voting materials from the 2020 presidential election in Fulton County, Georgia — the same county where President Donald Trump was criminally charged in connection with a scheme to overturn the state’s election results.

DOJ’s Civil Rights Division sued the Fulton County clerk of courts Friday, asking for the county to provide “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files” from the 2020 presidential election.

The lawsuit, which comes after Republicans on Georgia’s election board subpoenaed Fulton County for the same records earlier this year, marks a significant heightening of Trump’s ongoing falsely held belief that voting in Georgia during the 2020 election was illegitimate.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/12/trump-2020-election-georgia-lawsuit-00689593

Last month, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings, who found the government violated the agreement, ordered the release of more than 600 immigrants on bond, which the appeals court paused. Roughly 450 remain in custody, attorneys say.

In the 2-1 opinion, the appeals court said Cummings overstepped his authority on the blanket release of the detainees without assessing each case individually. The consent decree “carefully maps out what the district judge can or cannot order” to balance enforcement and public safety, according to the opinion. But the ruling also said the Trump administration wrongly categorized all immigrant arrestees as subject to mandatory detention.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys said they were disheartened by the ruling but glad the court upheld the extension of the agreement, which among other things requires ICE to show documentation for each arrest it makes. Federal judges elsewhere including in Colorado have also ruled to limit warrantless arrests.

Court blocks release of hundreds of immigrants arrested in crackdown near Chicago

A federal appeals court blocked the immediate release of hundreds of immigrants detained during a Chicago area immigration crackdown in a split decision Thursday that also allowed the extension of a consent decree outlining how federal immigration ag…

^{PBS News}

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/1314…

In 1994, Marxist political economist Chen Qiren taught a specialised course on global economic development to young doctoral students in the Department of International Politics at Fudan University.1 China was still in the early phase of Reform and Opening-Up and the recent decline of the Cold War had ushered in an era of heightened triumphalism in the United States. This political hubris was accompanied by the global expansion of neoliberal economic policies. At such a crucial conjuncture, the question of where the world economy was headed also induced an epochal confusion about China’s own path of economic development. By contrast, the US, steeped in a triumphalist mood, exuded unparalleled intellectual confidence. Western economists, such as Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, and Joseph Schumpeter, quickly became the focus of intense study among Chinese intellectuals and students.

In the historical context of the late twentieth century, the slogan of ‘looking to the West’ expressed the Chinese people’s genuine aspiration for modern technologies and material progress, peace and stability, and better living standards. It also reflected the bold resolve of the early Reform and Opening-Up era – a pragmatic and unconventional willingness to explore all practical and theoretical possibilities in the quest for modernisation. Amid the turbulent tides of the times, what lay ahead was not a well-trodden path mapped out by predecessors, but an open doorway shrouded in darkness. We could dimly perceive figures ahead holding torches and beckoning us forward but had no inkling whether the space separating us from them contained chasms or avenues, pitfalls or smooth paths, a sea of blood or a green pasture. How to move forward and what would be encountered along the way were matters that required self-reflection.

In this era of profound and uncertain changes, the teleological questions of why and for whom we develop were just as critical as the directional and strategic questions of how and where to develop. It was Chen Qiren’s relentless inquiry into these two teleological questions that led him, amid the great transformations of the early Reform and Opening-Up, to argue that the ‘works on development economics’ available in bookstores were, by their nature, ‘not the kind of the textbooks I was looking for’. Chen pointed out that when applied to the unique challenges faced by ‘nationally independent states’, Western development economics suffered from a ‘methodological deficiency’. This universal knowledge only studied ‘quantitative and functional relationships in economic relations without addressing the relations of production’. It failed to distinguish between different relations of production in ‘history and in real life,’ nor did it grasp how concrete, complex relations of production constrain abstract economic laws.2

The realisation that knowledge of development originating in the advanced Western countries cannot be adapted to the practices of developing countries is not a novel insight that appeared out of thin air but the outcome of a long historical process in which the Third World sought autonomous development. On 10 April 1974, in his speech to a special session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Deng Xiaoping emphasised the Third World’s common task of ‘opposing colonialism, neo-colonialism and great-power hegemonism, developing the national economies, and building their respective countries’. The purpose of such development was to change ‘the present extremely unequal international economic relations’.3 The political independence won by the former colonies and semi-colonies in the aftermath of the World Anti-Fascist War fundamentally transformed the existing international political order which had taken shape alongside the emergence of the world market. At the level of international law, empires as political entities had formally exited the historical stage. Yet the global economic structure, relations of production, and attendant cultural, legal, and social orders formed during imperialist expansion persisted despite the formal exit of empires. On the contrary, imperialism, as an epistemological framework, remained deeply entrenched in the existing structure of the world market whose foundation lies in how ‘big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other’ and ‘merged all local markets into one world market’.4

This imperialist epistemology emphasises the importance of hegemony in sustaining order, balance, and stability. Derived from European historical experience, this model of imperial order seeks to maintain peace through unipolar hegemonic monopoly or hegemonic alliances with balance-of-power mechanisms, and manages other countries and regions via various forms of interventionism.5 This model has failed to bring peace to the world. On the contrary, the old hegemonic order has proliferated the Hobbesian trap of mutual fear between nations – destructive cycles of trade competition experienced in European history have been projected on to the entire world.

Interconnected but highly uneven economic development formed the material foundation of the old order. Fuelled by a sense of panic over finite resources, the old order’s epistemology regards monopolising limited resources as a fundamental imperative for survival. Such resources include not only the natural endowments but also the foundational conditions affecting agricultural production, such as soil fertility and climatic environment. The core of the old order’s conception of land and wealth was to possess as many of these naturally finite resources as possible. Within this framework, it was assumed that one could not alter the fundamental limitation of natural resources. Consequently, the acquisition of wealth was viewed as an absolute zero-sum game: one party’s gain necessarily entailed another’s loss. All political-economic discourse under the old order correspondingly revolved around the rationalisation of unequal distribution. In other words, this hegemony-centric conception of order can be understood as a philosophy rooted in finitude and inequality.

An alternative epistemology believes in human agency. Cooperation and mutual assistance among people can not only maximise the utility of limited resources, but also transform the world into a space more suitable for harmonious coexistence between humanity and nature over a long historical process. This transformation encompasses two dimensions. The first is the material dimension: advancements in agricultural technology, the invention and discovery of new energy sources, and the exploration and innovations in engineering and science, all of which underpin the essential foundations of human survival and development. The second is at the level of social organisation: a spiritual quest – corresponding to material progress – to continuously explore organisational forms that are more inclusive and effective, better adapted to the survival of large-scale communities, better able to ensure the universal benefits of material progress, guarantee the harmonious coexistence of humanity and nature, and liberate humanity from the shackles of resource finitude and the trap of unequal development.

These contrasting epistemologies give rise to two fundamentally different approaches to understanding the international order. The hegemony-centred conception of order, premised on finite resources, sees competition as its foundational principle, treats order as a political resource amenable to monopolisation, and regards great powers as the sole leaders of the international order, with the aim of expanding their own material and political monopolies, all based on preserving the unequal status quo. This perspective is plainly evident in Western anxiety surrounding challenges to the US-led ‘rules-based order’.

The alternative conception of order finds concrete expression in the practice of resistance against the great-power monopolies. This resistance also comprises two dimensions. Politically, the independence movements of former colonial and semi-colonial nations after the World Anti-Fascist War constituted resistance to great-power monopolies. Economically, modernisation through delinking from dependency served as the material bedrock for securing political independence. Neither of these practical dimensions can be adequately theorised by a hegemony-centric epistemology. In fact, dissatisfaction with Western modernisation theories was closely intertwined with frustration at the economic and political monopolies of the great powers. The United Nations platform became an important platform for the vast number of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to express this dissatisfaction and attempt to change this monopolistic structure.

At the same UNGA session where Deng Xiaoping delivered his speech, the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order was adopted. The declaration stressed that the new order ‘shall be founded on justice, sovereign equality, mutual interdependence, common interests and cooperation among all nations’, with the objectives of ‘rectifying inequalities and existing injustices, enabling the elimination of the widening gap between developed and developing countries,’ while ensuring that equality and peaceful development are bequeathed to future generations. To attain these objectives, the declaration stipulated that countries shall have the right to integrate and develop their resources through nationalisation to guarantee benefits for their own people; formerly colonial and semi-colonial countries may claim compensation from their former colonial powers; the activities of transnational corporations must be regulated to ensure they contribute to the economic development of host nations; and the international monetary system should facilitate the development of developing countries.6

The emergence of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) was the outcome of the sustained struggle for sovereignty by former colonial and semi-colonial nations. These struggles took place largely beyond the United Nations framework, manifesting in localised anti-colonial and anti-hegemonic armed resistance, alongside regional initiatives of trade cooperation and mutual assistance. At the international level, the contradictions between the United States and the Soviet Union – and the competing models of international order they embodied – constituted the basic geopolitical precondition for these struggles. The contradictions between the US and the USSR included not only an arms race but also a competition to expand their respective international influence.

During the early Cold War, ‘trade wars’ took the form of the US establishing trade alliances while imposing embargoes and containment measures against the USSR. In 1949, the US enacted the Export Control Act which mandated an embargo on all products that might contribute to the USSR’s military and economic development. From 1949 to 1994, through the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) – an informal, secretive international alliance – the US enforced embargoes and trade restrictions against the USSR and the entire socialist bloc. Under the pretext of ‘the countering of communist economic penetration’, the US passed the 1962 Trade Expansion Actwhich severely restricted imports of ‘products of any country or area dominated or controlled by international communism’.7

The trade wars of this era garnered broad support from US political and business elites. It safeguarded the economic and technological superiority of the Western states while undermining the hopes of developing countries to achieve economic autonomy through diversified trade circulation. In containing the USSR and its efforts to forge international trade relations, the US and its allies further ensnared developing nations in unequal, dependent relationships. The trade war waged by the Trump administration today has revived almost the same script as that of the Cold War era.

Under these pressures, politically independent nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America began to demand genuine freedom to trade at the United Nations. At the plenary sessions of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964, Che Guevara stressed that ‘the right of all peoples to unrestricted freedom of trade’ must be established, and that all signatory countries should ‘refrain from restraining trade in any manner, direct or indirect’.8 The UNCTAD was formally established with the mission of advancing ‘trade liberalisation’.9 Its primary target of contention was the United States, which was then pursuing a trade war. The first Secretary-General of UNCTAD was Raúl Prebisch of Argentina, who emphasised that the body’s mission should be ‘to promote international trade… particularly trade between countries at different stages of development, between developing countries and between countries with different systems of economic and social organisation’.10 This stance stood in sharp contrast to the US-led embargo against the socialist bloc at the time.

The attempt to establish a New International Economic Order was just one in a series of historical efforts by Asian, African, and Latin American nations to pursue genuine development. In the resolutions adopted at the 1955 Bandung Conference, diverse attempts at order-building with profound implications for international law could already be seen. The resolutions reached among Asian and African countries on political, economic, cultural, and educational matters embody the basic spirit of mutual assistance and cooperation. Through solidarity movements, fragmented Asian and African nations united to resist pressure from major powers and strengthen their internal economic resilience. Through cooperation and exchange, they aimed to deepen understanding among their peoples and achieve decolonisation and liberation on cultural and educational fronts. The final communiqué of Bandung Conference, with its call for ‘fuller economic, cultural, and political cooperation’, asserted that true decolonisation and independence could only be achieved through solidarity and mutual assistance. With regard to economic cooperation, the communiqué explicitly stated that ‘proposals with regard to economic cooperation within the participating countries do not preclude either the desirability or the need for cooperation with countries outside the region, including the investment of foreign capital’.11 It is evident that from at least the Bandung Conference onwards, the dual orientation of South-South cooperation and North-South dialogue had already taken shape, conceived as complementary rather than mutually exclusive.

This understanding is rooted in a clear recognition of the basic developmental conditions of Asian and African nations. After gaining formal independence, former colonial and semi-colonial countries could not acquire substantive capacity for decolonised development overnight. Over the long history of colonial globalisation, colonial powers spent centuries constructing a relatively complete global colonial economic circuit centred on themselves. The circuit was primarily built on a land-based colonial economic model before the eighteenth century. The occupation of colonial territories and the transformation of production fundamentally altered the natural landscapes, ecologies, and even demographic structures of the colonies. Africa and the Americas, transformed by the colonial economy, formed the basic framework of the international division of labour that exists today. Originally diverse local economic communities were converted into components with ‘comparative advantages’, organised under colonial metropolises to form parts of the world system. These components each served distinct roles: the Caribbean as a centre of sugar production; South America and Central Africa as suppliers of minerals; Southeast Asia and Oceania as producers of rubber and fertilisers; West and East Africa as exporters of cocoa and coffee; and Asia and Africa as reservoirs of labour. During this long process of colonial economic globalisation, earlier small-scale regional or local economic circuits were entirely dismantled. Moreover, the ecological foundations that once sustained these economic circuits were severely damaged by large-scale plantations, the slave trade, and resource extraction.

Another foundation underpinning this globalisation was oceanic shipping. As the scale of the colonial land economy continued to expand, trade between different colonial settlements and between colonial powers and other major economies worldwide – including China – further impacted the land-based fiscal models of colonial nations. From the eighteenth century onwards, early mercantilist thinking, grounded in land-based finance and focused on the export of labour products in exchange for precious metals, was gradually supplanted by a new mercantilism that placed greater emphasis on economic exchange and the flow of imports and exports. In contrast to the earlier view that wealth was created through land-based production, the new theory stressed that trade itself could generate wealth. As the scale of trade flows expanded, the speed of wealth accumulation among the emerging commercial bourgeoisie in the core nations accelerated. This large-scale, rapid accumulation of capital provided the essential primitive capital for Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Such accumulation did not arise out of nothing; it was built upon the fundamental structure of the international division of labour established by the colonial land-based economy. At this juncture, a corporate global system began to take form, with industrialised metropolises as headquarters and colonies and semi-colonies as its departments.

The highly organised structure underpinning this corporate global system evolved over the long history of imperialist globalisation. By the mid-twentieth century – during the decolonisation movements of Asia, Africa, and Latin America – the newly independent states were confronted with a tightly organised colonial apparatus of military, bureaucracy, and education, together with a highly developed economic and financial system. In the face of such hegemonic power, the only way out for nations seeking independence was to unite to form larger communities. They needed to build self-sufficient domestic communities as swiftly as possible through regional circulation, international aid from friendly nations, and forms of engagement that did not completely decouple from the former metropoles – all to enable the shift from formal equality to substantive equity. This entailed reducing their high dependence on industrialised Global North nations – the former colonisers – across economic, cultural, and governance spheres.

The national liberation movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America were also movements of regional solidarity. The international order, institutions, and legal principles envisaged in this process placed the empowerment and development of states at the centre. This empowerment operates at two levels: First, organisational empowerment at the domestic level. Many underdeveloped countries faced significant constraints in natural resources, fiscal capacity, and human capital, which severely limited their nation-building efforts. At this stage, modern political parties and relevant organisations were crucial for mobilising scarce social resources. Second, cooperative empowerment at the international level. Imperialism and hegemony, as systemic forms of oppression, could not be overcome through blind decoupling or by the isolated efforts of any single nation – collective struggle and mutual cooperation among underdeveloped countries was therefore critical. Such cooperation and mutual assistance were premised on non-interference in internal affairs and the voluntary and autonomous participation by all nations. Supporting ‘oppressed peoples and other developing countries in their just struggles to win and safeguard their independence and develop their economies’ is explicitly recognised in China’s constitution, Mao Zedong identified non-interference and mutual assistance as the hallmarks of ‘true internationalism’.12 This principle of non-interference in international order comes from both China’s own historical experience and the collective historical experience of the Global South.

Whether referring to today’s Global South, the former Third World, or the earlier Tricontinental, these terms all encapsulate oppressed people’s dissatisfaction with the hegemonic order and their aspiration to end dependence and achieve modernisation through solidarity and mutual assistance. In contrast to the hegemon-centred perspective, the Global South affirms the agency of the governed and the oppressed. The Global South does not represent a ‘subaltern’ viewpoint, in the sense of late twentieth-century Western post-colonial academia, rather it represents the historical and theoretical significance of the concrete practices of resistance, struggle, and exploration. Within this long historical continuity, China’s relentless exploration for a path to modernisation, as part of this diverse practice and as a form of resistance to the hegemonic order, thereby acquires true theoretical universality. The aim of such anti-hegemonic practice is to construct an order free from hegemony.

A philosophy of practice is the only way to understand the Global South. This means that when the goal is to establish a non-hegemonic order, all attempts become transitional steps toward that future. It is precisely through conscious engagement in this transition that the Global South can truly assert its agency. In the movement towards a Global South order, all the subjects united by this historical process, in turn, imbue the Global South with meaning. This is the significance of discussing the Global South today, and the fundamental purpose of such discussions is to dismantle the structure that produces the challenges facing the Global South.

Notes

1 Editor’s note: Chen Qiren (1924–2017) was a Marxist political economist from Xinhui, Guangdong Province, who taught at Fudan University and made major contributions to the study of imperialism and colonial political economy. He authored 25 monographs and over 150 articles, and led a National Social Science Fund project on Marxist international political economy. In 2012, he received the Shanghai Academic Contribution Award in Philosophy and Social Sciences.

2 Chen Qiren, Research on World Economic Development (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2002), 298.

3 Deng Xiaoping, ‘Speech at the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly’, People’s Daily, 11 April 1974.

4 Friedrich Engels, The Principles of Communism, vol. 1, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 81–97.

5 See A. F. Pollard, ‘The Balance of Power’, Journal of the British Institute of International Affairs 2, no. 2 (1923): 51–64.

6 United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 3201 (S-VI), Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, A/RES/3201(S-VI) (1 May 1974).

7 Michael Mastanduno, Economic Containment, CoCom and the Politics of East-West Trade (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 63.

8 Ernesto Che Guevara, ‘On Development’, 25 March 1964.

9 UNCTAD, Proceedings, I: 26, 27, 32, 41.

10 UNCTAD, Proceedings, I: 15.

11 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, ‘Final Communiqué of the Asia-Africa Conference’ (24 April 1955).

12 The State Council, ‘Constitution of the People’s Republic of China’, The People’s Republic of China; Central Committee of the Communist Party of China Literature Research Office, Chronology of Mao Zedong (1949-1976) Vol. 5 (Beijing: Central Party Literature Press, 2013), 212.

Yin Zhiguang (殷之光) is a professor and doctoral supervisor in the Department of International Politics at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University. He is also the chief expert for a research project on modernisation in developing countries by the National Social Science Fund of China. His research focuses on South-South cooperation and decolonisation movements in the Third World. He has authored and co-authored many books, including Politics of Art: The Creation Society and the Practice of Theoretical Struggle in Revolutionary China (Brill, 2014) and A New World: China’s Practice and Origins of Afro-Asian Solidarity (Contemporary World Press, 2022), and has published more than 60 papers in Chinese and English journals.

---

From | Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research via This RSS Feed.

https://thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng-2025-2-world-without-hegemony-global-south/

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/1318…

US President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order aimed at preventing state-level regulation of the burgeoning artificial intelligence industry, a gift to tech corporations that bankrolled his inauguration and are currently funding his White House ballroom project.

Trump's order instructs the US Justice Department to establish an AI Litigation Task Force with a single mandate: sue states that enact AI laws that the administration deems "onerous and excessive." The order also threatens to withhold federal funding from states that implement AI regulations.

Public Citizen, a watchdog group that has tracked increasingly aggressive AI influence-peddling in Congress and the administration, said Trump's order "grants his greedy Big Tech buddies’ Christmas wish."

"This reward to Big Tech is a disgraceful invitation to reckless behavior by the world’s largest corporations and a complete override of the federalist principles that Trump and MAGA claim to venerate," said Robert Weissman, Public Citizen's co-president. "Everyone should understand why this is happening: During and since the last election cycle, Big Tech has spent at least $1.1 billion on campaign contributions and lobby expenditures. Big Tech corporations poured money into Trump’s inaugural committee and to pay for his garish White House ballroom. A major Big Tech and AI investor is serving as Trump’s 'AI czar' and driving administration policy."

"While Trump has ensured the federal government is doing almost nothing to address the harms that AI is already causing, states are moving forward with sensible AI regulation," Weissman added. "These include efforts to address political deepfakes, nonconsensual intimate deepfakes, algorithmic pricing manipulation, consumer protection measures, excessive data center electricity and water demand, and much more. Big Tech is whining about these modest measures, but there is zero evidence that these rules are impeding innovation; in fact, they are directing innovation in more positive directions."

Jenna Sherman, a campaign director focused on tech and gender at Ultraviolet Action, said Trump's order "only has one group of winners: his wealthy donors in the tech sector."

"Every other person loses from this wildly unpopular move. And not just in theory, as stripping away state AI regulations puts many—namely, women and children—at risk of real harm," said Sherman. "These harms of AI—which the Trump and the tech sector are clearly happy to ignore—are already here: non-consensual deepfake porn sexualizing women and girls, children being led to suicidal ideation by AI chatbots, and AI-powered scams and crimes targeting older Americans, especially women, to name but a few."

The US Chamber of Commerce and other corporate lobbying organizations representing tech giants such as Microsoft and Google celebrated the order, predictably characterizing it as a win for "small businesses."

The leaders of California and other states that have proposed and finalized AI regulations were defiant in the face of Trump's threats of legal action and funding cuts."

"President Trump and Davis Sacks aren’t making policy—they’re running a con," said California Gov. Gavin Newsom, referring to the scandal-plagued White House AI czar. "Every day, they push the limits to see how far they can take it. California is working on behalf of Americans by building the strongest innovation economy in the nation while implementing commonsense safeguards and leading the way forward."

Trump signed the order after the Republican-controlled Congress repeatedly rejected efforts to tuck a ban on state AI regulations into broader legislation.

"After months of failed lobbying and two defeats in Congress, Big Tech has finally received the return on its ample investment in Donald Trump," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement Thursday. "With this executive order, Trump is delivering exactly what his billionaire benefactors demanded—all at the expense of our kids, our communities, our workers, and our planet."

"A broad, bipartisan coalition in Congress has rejected the AI moratorium again and again," he added, "and I intend to keep that streak going. I will use every tool available to challenge this indefensible and irresponsible power grab. We will defeat it again."

---

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/1319…

Ayman Hareez Muhammad Adib

A few months ago, during a conversation regarding global and local politics, my Maoist friend was surprised to hear me say that Hadi Awang, the current president of the controversial Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), had expressed support for Iran’s struggle against Israel. His shock was due to the widespread chronic online assumption that the president was a Shia-hating Salafi. This, however, is far from reality. A quick internet search would reveal that Hadi Awang has many times, through speeches and written statements, affirmed that the Shia, although considered outside the creed of Ahlul Sunnah wal Jama’ah, are still within the fold of Islam. He even stated in a video once that Shias are welcome to join PAS as members, provided they understood that the usul of the party’s constitution remains as the Quran, followed by the Sunnah, ijma’, and qiyas, thereby reiterating that the party adopts Shafi’i jurisprudence, in line with the historically normative practice of the Malays.

​

Besides affirming the Muslimhood of the Shia, Hadi Awang has for a long time shown great support for the Islamic Republic of Iran. In his regularly published column Minda Presiden, which is available on the party’s news site, he has, on several occasions, highlighted the necessity of unity within the ummah. He considers it essential in the struggle against US imperialism, the great enemy of Islam in our time. He has even gone a step beyond to speak positively about the republic’s state ideology: the Guardianship of the Jurist (wilayah al-faqih). He likens it to the party’s own governance model known as the Leadership of the Scholars (kepimpinan ulama), which was first conceptualised by PAS’s youth leaders in 1982, some years after the Iranian Revolution. It is no secret that the Iranian Revolution had reinvigorated Islamic politics in Malaysia, as it did in the rest of the world. As recently as this year, PAS’s youth wing held a protest near the US embassy in response to Israeli missile attacks on Iranian civilians.

​

So how is it that my friend seems to have a drastically different expectation of Hadi Awang’s attitude towards sectarianism, given that Shia-Sunni unity has been and continues to be a no-brainer to party leadership? This has to do with the party’s recent track record of appealing to racist ethnonationalist sentiment in their political messaging, reinforcing the status quo of Malay supremacy and contributing to the polarisation between Malays and non-Malays. This behaviour, however, contradicts a public statement made by Hadi Awang himself in 1985 that the party had no intentions of defending Malay special rights as they deemed it an un-Islamic concept. Yet the party’s attitude today reflects none of that. They have even been silent on the plight of the Rohingyas since 2020, despite being among the Islamic groups that popularised the issue before that, simply because the general Malay population today views Rohingya refugees negatively. This contradictory trajectory may seem peculiar at first glance, but it becomes clear once understood within the context of how Malay(si) and neocolonialism have historically shaped Islam and Malayness.

​

Contrary to mainstream narratives, the people of Malaya (including Singapore), Sabah, and Sarawak have never achieved true independence from British colonialism. Malaya, specifically, retained its colonial mode of governance in a new form, whereby the role of the reactionary government was passed on from the white man to the Malay ruling class and its collaborators. A legacy of British rule over the Malay states is the complete reconfiguration of religious knowledge, authority, and identity, an approach they developed after their experiences in India, Afghanistan, and Africa. Through agreements such as the Pangkor Treaty of 1874 and the Pahang Treaty of 1888, they assigned the Malay kings, who received personal stipends and state allowances from the British, as the sole heads of Islam in each king’s respective territory. Consequently, religious authority became centralised in colonial intermediaries, with the structural backing of salaried civil servants who served as religious officials.

​

The formation of this colonial hierarchy allowed the British to wield power over the material dimensions of Malay life without inciting religio-political backlash. This was achieved by bureaucratising Malay religious practice, which, before colonialism, was effectively decentralised and often community-based. People who once sought guidance in Islamic matters from pondok scholars, local teachers, and itinerant people of knowledge who wielded influence were now forced to seek guidance solely from the colonially subjugated Malay kings and their underlings. This made the British successful in distancing Islam from grassroots actors, protecting colonial administration from accusations of directly intervening in Islamic issues. This created an illusion of religious freedom for the Malay people under colonialism, an illusion that would begin to shatter in the early 1900s, when the Malay kings were weaponised to suppress the political movement of Kaum Muda, a group of anti-colonial Islamic reformists inspired by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh.

​

Despite claims of impartial governance in matters of religion, there was no actual separation between religious affairs and state interest. Instead, the British had attempted to conceal their subordination of religion to colonial rule by making puppets out of the Malay rulers. They put up the facade that they did not meddle in the Islamic practices of the Malay people, when it was clear that only some forms of Islam were allowed, while others were not. It is no coincidence that the former included the traditionalist, feudalist, and generally apolitical Kaum Tua, while the latter included the politically-conscious Kaum Muda. Kaum Muda faced many obstacles to the propagation of their movement, from the banning of their books to the prohibition on their members teaching and preaching in certain Malay states. The kings even went so far as to legally enforce fatwas issued by Kaum Tua scholars, thereby reifying Kaum Tua’s Islam as the status quo.

​

Such an image of control over religious practice is not alien to the Malay people today. Apart from enshrining the special status of the Malays and codifying inequality between ethnicities, the Federal Constitution has, since so-called independence, retained the colonial approach of placing Islam under the power of the Malay kings. In 1969, the very same kings under the Conference of Rulers decided that it was necessary to establish an official religious body. The purported purpose of this move was to create a mechanism to ensure the development and progress of Muslims in Malaysia. However, throughout the period of growing tensions between PAS and the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) in their race towards winning the Malay Muslim vote in the electoral realm, the move would soon reveal its obvious politicised function.

​

The competition between PAS and UMNO is central to the unfolding of Islamic politics in Malaysia. UMNO, towards the end of the colonial era, had played the role of the primary collaborator of the British under the leadership of liberal right-wing nationalist Tunku Abdul Rahman. PAS, on the other hand, was established by a group of Malay Islamic scholars after the anti-colonial Islamist party Hizbul Muslimin was outlawed alongside other anti-colonial leftist organisations during the Malayan Emergency. In the years leading up to what was called ‘independence’, many PAS members initially held overlapping memberships, simultaneously belonging to UMNO. However, the Islamic party revised its constitution to no longer permit dual membership, thereby completely demarcating itself from UMNO in preparation for the 1955 federal elections.

​

In the early days of the federation, PAS was critical of UMNO leadership. They disagreed with Tunku’s blatant and unapologetic embrace of a decadent Western lifestyle, which took the form of enjoyment in sports cars, racehorses, dancing, and drinking. They felt it was unbefitting of a man who claimed to protect the rights and interests of the Malay people. This disagreement would later sharpen during the 1980s, when PAS, under the leadership of Yusof Rawa, adopted a fully confrontational stance against UMNO and its ruling coalition, Barisan Nasional. This period marked the most salient conflict between the two parties, as both PAS and UMNO articulated competing visions of what Islamic governance should look like in the modern age.

​

Mahathir Mohamad, both the president of UMNO and the Prime Minister of Malaysia at the time, envisioned a form of Islam compatible with modernity. He placed significant emphasis on the profit-driven material development of the nation, insisting on the need to emulate the economic models of Japan and South Korea under his Look East Policy, promoting a neoliberal agenda of aggressive privatisation under the guise of uplifting the financial position of the Malays, and strongly opposing forms of Islam that he deemed were either too radical or too traditional. This was vehemently challenged by PAS, who saw it as the pursuit of a secular materialistic society that contradicted the principles of the sharia. As such, they began explicitly calling for jihad against the UMNO government, openly declaring the ruling class as disbelievers and hypocrites who were only nominally Muslim while failing to uphold Islamic law.

​

The UMNO government wasted no time in initiating extensive media and propaganda campaigns to paint PAS as a group of extremists. Despite this, the Islamists continued in their struggle because they believed in the possible victory of an Islamic movement as demonstrated by the Iranian Revolution. As a result, many PAS leaders were detained for making public inflammatory speeches against the ruling government. This culminated in the Memali Incident of 1985, in which the government deployed 576 security and armed forces personnel, armed with armoured vehicles, to surround a village of Malay rice farmers and rubber smallholders in the northern state of Kedah. They aimed to detain Ustaz Ibrahim Libya, who had been articulating and disseminating a revolutionary form of Islam to the rural peasants. He had called on the people to inculcate in themselves the spirit of martyrdom that was seen in Iran and Pakistan, where Muslims were prepared to die in the cause of Allah.

​

The outcome of the Memali Incident was the martyrdom of Ustaz Ibrahim Libya and 14 of the villagers. Many of the remaining villagers were detained and later released. To this day, the government labels those who died at Memali as criminals, but the Islamists refute this and insist that they were martyrs. Whatever the case, this became grounds for the state to justify clamping down on “deviant teachings,” as it was already dealing with the troublesome revolutionary forces of the communist guerrillas, who were still waging an anti-colonial struggle in the jungles. The government found an excuse to suppress Islamic ideologies that encouraged political dissent. Hence, despite the initial recognition of Ja’fari and Zaydi Shi’ism as valid teachings in a 1984 national fatwa, all teachings other than Ahlul Sunnah wal Jama’ah were officially deemed intolerable in 1996. Accordingly, this paved the way for the outlawing of their propagation under state laws.

​

The following year, 1997, Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia (JAKIM) was officially established and legally empowered to enforce these laws. This led to raid after raid on Shia communities during their communal affairs, such as majaalis. Their hauzahs, which used to exist in parts of the country prominently, are seen no more, for they are no longer legally allowed to operate, forcing a whole sect of Muslims to practise their faith underground. Additionally, Islamic studies in the public school syllabus began including lessons on the Shias, feeding generations of students with propagandised misrepresentations of Shia doctrine. Even on the internet, one will find many state-accredited preachers who warn the general public about the deviance of the Shia. Continuing the British model of religious containment to preserve neocolonial interest, the government made the Shias targets of the state apparatus and what was essentially a state-sponsored hate campaign.

​

There is evidently so much hostility and aggression towards the Shia, among other sects that are also persecuted for not being Sunni, all the while the bravest groups who have been tirelessly supporting the Palestinian resistance have been Shia, whether it be Hezbollah, Ansarallah, or even the Islamic Republic of Iran. Unsurprisingly, when the International Union of Muslim Scholars declared it an obligation for Muslim nations to provide military support to the Resistance, the Religious Affairs Department of the Prime Minister’s office released a statement saying that it would need to hold a meeting to discuss first the implications of the fatwa on Malaysia’s diplomatic ties, a meeting of which no further public update can be found anywhere. This, yet again, exposes the Malaysian government’s distaste for an Islam that is packaged in revolutionary language.

​

With the recent Trump visit during the ASEAN Summit, which saw the signing of a grossly imbalanced trade deal that subordinates Malaysian sovereignty to imperialist interests, and the Malaysian government’s support for Trump’s 20-point plan, which includes the disarmament of the resistance forces, the neocolonial character of the Malaysian government has never been clearer. Moreover, the voices of zealous state supporters who defend Anwar Ibrahim’s actions as skilful diplomacy continue to pollute social media, leading some of them even to make disgusting and traitorous remarks against Palestinians who rightfully express their disappointment at him. Some may consider this a mask-off moment, as their beloved Anwar Ibrahim himself has, ironically, been honoured as the 10th most influential Muslim in the world. Still, it is perfectly consistent with the actions of those who have no sense of solidarity with the Muslim migrants and refugees already in our land, who continue to cheer for the persecution and mistreatment of the Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Rohingyas in our country.

​

In the final analysis, the Malaysian neocolony, by instrumentalising Malay supremacy, has moulded Islamic politics and discourse through the same divide-and-conquer tactic used by its British colonial predecessors to breed divisions, both among the Malaysian people and among the Muslims themselves. Thus, part of what is desperately needed in building a solid anti-imperialist movement in Malaysia today is a return to Islamic unity. This unity should be understood beyond the narrow racialised association of Muslims with Malays. Islam encompasses a diversity of people around the world, including those within our borders, whether by ethnicity, national origin, or even simply by sect. Only by transcending these superficial differences can we unify our actions and contribute to a mass movement alongside the non-Muslim population to uphold justice for all people. As Imam Ali (pbuh) once said, the people are of two kinds: your brother in religion or your equal in creation.

Ayman Hareez Muhammad Adib is a student and a writer

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From Vox Ummah via This RSS Feed.

It’s been 50 years since Godfrey Wade arrived to the United States from Jamaica at the age of 15 with his mother, moving to New York with a green card that granted him permanent residency.

The Black man enlisted in the U.S. Army a few years later, spending eight years in the service, where he was primarily stationed in Germany before he received an honorable discharge. He then began a civilian life in Georgia while raising a family, working as a fashion designer, master tailor, tennis coach and chef over the years while staying out of trouble.

That is, until September, when he was pulled over in Conyers, Georgia, for failing to use a turn signal, which was when police discovered he was driving without a license and arrested him.

. . . He has been incarcerated in overcrowded ICE detention centers since the arrest, a three-month ordeal where he was forced to sleep on a makeshift bed on the ground for the first 12 days, according to 11 Alive News.

In a telephone interview with local media from the Stewart Detention Center in Stewart County, Georgia, Wade said there are only two working urinals for an entire pod of 80 people.

“We don’t have any bunk space,” he told the news station. “We’re given what we call boats, and those are placed on the floor with a two-inch mat.”

“There’s sewage water flowing on the ground,” he said.

11 Alive News also reported that it had obtained records of the Office of Detention Oversight, a unit within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that oversees the federal detention centers, which revealed 12 deficiencies within the Stewart Detention Center related to health and safety, food service, phone access, use of force, and more.

“The agency also noted violations of the required 12-to-1 detainee-to-toilet ratio,” 11 Alive News reported, adding that the private for-profit company that runs the detention center, CoreCivic, has ignored various inquires by reporters seeking comment.

But the Trump administration has repeatedly demonstrated it believes it is above the law and the Constitution.

‘I Shed My Blood for This Country’: U.S. Army Veteran Born In Jamaica, Living In U.S. for 50 Years, Jailed ...

^{Carlos Miller (atlantablackstar)}

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/1329…

President Donald Trump has shattered the limits of executive authority by ordering the summary executions of individuals he deems members of designated terrorist organizations. He has also tested the bounds of his presidential powers by creating a secret list of domestic terrorist organizations, established under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7.

Are Americans that the federal government deems to be members of domestic terrorist organizations subject to extrajudicial killings like those it claims are members of designated terrorist organizations? The White House, Justice Department, and Department of War have, for more than a month, failed to answer this question.

Lawmakers and other government officials tell The Intercept that the pregnant silence by the Trump administration has become especially worrisome as the death toll mounts from attacks on alleged members of “designated terrorist organizations” in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, and as Trump himself makes ever more unhinged threats to imprison or execute his political adversaries.

In early September, The Intercept revealed that elite Special Operators killed the shipwrecked victims of a September 2 attack on a suspected drug smuggling boat. They have since struck more than 20 other vessels. The administration insists the attacks are permitted because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations” it refuses to name. Experts and lawmakers say these killings are outright murders — and that Trump could conceivably use similar lethal force inside the United States.

“The Trump Administration is trying to justify blowing small boats out of the water by arbitrarily calling them ‘designated terrorist organizations’ — a label not grounded in U.S. statute nor international law, but in solely what Trump says,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., told The Intercept. “If Trump is using this justification to use military force on any individuals he chooses — without verified evidence or legal authorization — what’s stopping him from designating anyone within our own borders in a similar fashion and conducting lethal, militarized attacks against them? This illegal and dangerous misuse of lethal force should worry all Americans, and it can’t be accepted as normal.”

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For almost a quarter century, the United States has been killing people — including American citizens, on occasion — around the world with drone strikes. Beginning as post-9/11 counterterrorism operations, these targeted killings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and other nations relied on a flimsy legal rationale that consistently eroded respect for international law. Details of these operations were kept secret from the American people, and civilian casualties were ignored, denied, and covered up. The recent attacks on alleged drug boats lack even the rickety legal rationale of the drone wars, sparking fear that there is little to stop the U.S. government from taking the unprecedented step of military action against those it deems terrorists within the nation’s borders.

The military has carried out 22 known attacks in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 87 civilians. Last week, footage of the September 2 double-tap strike shown to select members of Congress ignited a firestorm. Trump announced, on camera, that he had “no problem” with releasing the video of the attack. This week, he ever saying it, in another example of his increasingly unbalanced behavior.

“The public deserves to know how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of civilians as lawful and why it believes it can hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards to people committing these crimes,” said Jeffrey Stein, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, on Tuesday, as the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit for the immediate release of a classified Justice Department’s opinion and other documents related to the attacks on boats. “The Trump administration must stop these illegal and immoral strikes, and officials who have carried them out must be held accountable.”

Since October, The Intercept has been asking if the White House would rule out conducting summary executions of members of the list “of any such groups or entities” designated as “domestic terrorist organization[s]” under NSPM-7, without a response. Similar questions posed to the Justice and War departments have also been repeatedly ignored, despite both departments offering replies to myriad other queries. The Justice Department responded with a statement that did not answer the question. “Political violence has no place in this country, and this Department of Justice will investigate, identify, and root out any individual or violent extremist group attempting to commit or promote this heinous activity,” a spokesperson told The Intercept.

“The Trump administration should answer all questions about the terrorist lists,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told The Intercept. “The American people have a right to answers about who is on them and what that means for all of us.”

Rebecca Ingber, a former State Department lawyer, notes that while the designated terrorist organization label as a targeting authority is “entirely manufactured,” the administration is relying on it to summarily execute people in the boat strikes, making their application of the terrorist label on the domestic front especially concerning. “Many of us have warned that there seems to be no legal limiting principle to the Administration’s claims of authority to use force and to kill people,” Ingber, now a law professor at Cardozo Law School in New York, told The Intercept. “This is one of the many reasons it is so important that Congress push back on the President’s claim that he can simply label transporting drugs an armed attack on the United States and then claim the authority to summarily execute people on that basis.”

[

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“Trump Has Appointed Himself Judge, Jury, and Executioner”](theintercept.com/2025/12/12/ve…)

Last month, members of Congress spoke up against Trump’s increasingly authoritarian measures when a group of Democratic lawmakers posted a video on social media in which they reminded military personnel that they are required to disobey illegal orders. This led to a Trump tirade that made the White House’s failure to dismiss the possibility of summary executions of Americans even more worrisome.

“This is really bad,” the president wrote on Truth Social, “and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???” A follow-up post read: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Trump also reposted a comment that said: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”

“What’s most telling is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law,” the six lawmakers — Sens. Elissa Slotkin, Mark Kelly, and Reps. Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan — all of them former members of the armed forces or the intelligence community — replied in a joint statement. “Every American must unite and condemn the President’s calls for our murder and political violence.” Trump later claimed he did not call for the lawmakers’ executions.

For decades, Trump has called for violence against — including executions of — those he dislikes, including a group of Black and Latino boys were wrongly accused ofremoved a white woman jogger in New York’s Central Park in 1989; immigrants at the southern border, those who carry out hate crimes and mass shootings; demonstrators protesting the death of George Floyd; the chief suspect in the fatal shooting of a Trump supporter in Portland, Oregon; former chair of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley; and former Rep. Liz Cheney. In August, Trump also called for “,” explaining: “If somebody kills somebody in the capital, Washington, we’re going to be seeking the death penalty.”

[

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Lethal Illusion: Understanding the Death Penalty Apparatus](theintercept.com/2025/12/05/ma…)

In January, immediately after being sworn in, Trump also signed an order to expand the death penalty, and Attorney General Pam Bondi has spent the year carrying out orders to put more Americans to death. Eleven states have executed since January, according to the Death Penalty Information Center — the highest annual total in more than a decade.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers failed to answer questions about Trump’s history of threatening to kill people and his recent unhinged behavior.

As Trump lobs threats at political foes and his administration seeks to put convicted and supposed criminals to death at home and abroad, NSPM-7 directs hundreds of thousands of federal officials to target U.S. progressive groups and their donors as well as political activists who profess undefined anti-American, antifascist, or anti-Christian sentiments. The memorandum harkens back to past government enemies lists and efforts that led to massive overreach and illegal acts of repression to stifle dissent. That includes the House Un-American Activities Committee, which began in the 1940s, the FBI’s secret Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, which began in the 1950s, and the Patriot Act, enacted in the wake of 9/11, which led to abuses of Black, brown, and Muslim communities, along with racial, social, environmental, animal rights, and other social justice activists and groups.

“NSPM-7 is a greater infringement on freedoms than the Patriot Act.”

“Trump’s NSPM-7 represses freedom of speech and association. Investigating any organization with anti-capitalism or anti-American views is anti-American. NSPM-7 is a greater infringement on freedoms than the Patriot Act,” said Khanna. “We’re seeing the greatest erosion of civil liberties and human rights in our modern history.”

NSPM-7 directs Bondi to compile a list “of any such groups or entities” to be designated as “domestic terrorist organization[s]” and Bondi has ordered the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” according to a Justice Department memo disclosed by reporter Ken Klippenstein on Saturday. The department also shared the December 4 memo, “Implementing National Security Presidential Memorandum-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” with The Intercept.

The Justice Department memo notes that under Section 3 of NSPM-7, “the FBI, in coordination with its partners on the [Joint Terrorism Task Forces], and consistent with applicable law, shall compile a list of groups or entities engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism” and “provide that list to the Deputy Attorney General.” (The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces are located in each of the FBI’s 56 field offices and specifically “support President Trump’s executive orders,” according to a top FBI official.)

The Justice Department memorandum offers a fictitious apocalyptic vision of urban America which the Trump administration has previously employed to justify its military occupations, including “mass rioting and destruction in our cities, violent efforts to shut down immigration enforcement, [and] targeting of public officials or other political actors.” While Trump has even falsely claimed, for example, that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have engaged in hand-to-hand combat with U.S. troops on the streets of Washington, D.C., state attorneys general have repeatedly and successfully argued that troop deployments in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon, were illegal because Trump administration claims of rampant civil unrest were found to be overblown or fictional.

The December 4 Justice Department memo also claims that “certain Antifa-aligned extremists” profess “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment” and “a willingness to use violence against law-abiding citizenry to serve those beliefs.” Over the last decade, Republicans have frequently blamed antifa for violence and used it as an omnibus term for left-wing activists, as if it were an organization with members and a command structure.

In September, Trump signed an executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terror organization,” despite the fact that it is essentially a decentralized, leftist ideology — a collection of related ideas and political concepts much like feminism or environmentalism.

Last month, the State Department designated four European groups — Antifa Ost, based in Germany; Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front, a mostly Italian group; and Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense, both Greek organizations — as “foreign terrorist organizations” because of their alleged threats and attacks against political and economic institutions in Europe. The State Department announced that the FTO designation specifically supports NSPM-7. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control also designated the groups as “specially designated nationals.”

Michael Glasheen, a longtime FBI agent serving as operations director of the bureau’s national security branch, was flummoxed by questions about antifa while testifying on Thursday before the House Committee on Homeland Security. He said antifa was the “” facing the United States, but could not answer basic details about the movement, including its size or where it is headquartered. The FBI, Glasheen said, has conducted more than 1,700 domestic terrorism investigations this year, including “approximately 70 antifa investigations,” and logged a 171 percent increase in arrests. He also drew attention to a “concerning uptick in the radicalization of our nation’s young people,” specifically “those who may be motivated to commit violence and other criminal acts to further social or political objectives stemming from domestic influences.”

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Last month, a federal grand jury in Fort Worth, Texas, indicted nine alleged “North Texas Antifa Cell operatives” — one of them a former Marine Corps reservist — on multiple charges, including attempted murder, stemming from a shooting during a July 4 protest at the ICE Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado in which a local police officer was injured. The Justice Department claims that the North Texas Antifa Cell is “part of a larger militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups primarily ascribing to an ideology that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and the system of law.”

The December 4 Justice Department memo states that within 60 days, the FBI “shall disseminate an intelligence bulletin on Antifa and Antifa-aligned anarchist violent extremist groups,” including their “organizations’ structures, funding sources, and tactics so that law enforcement partners can effectively investigate and policy makers can effectively understand the nature and gravity of the threat posed by these extremist groups.”

The memo calls for bounties and a network of informants.

The memo also calls for bounties and a network of informants. The “FBI shall establish a cash reward system for information that leads to the successful identification and arrest of individuals in the leadership of domestic terrorist organizations,” reads the document, noting that the bureau also aims to “establish cooperators to provide information and eventually testify against other members and leadership of domestic terrorist organizations.”

Neither NSPM-7 nor the December 4 memo mentions summary executions, and both speak explicitly in terms of “prosecution” and “arrest” of members of domestic terrorist organizations. Attacks on members of designated terrorist organizations are justified by another document — a classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — that claims that narcotics on supposed drug boats are lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are in armed conflict with the United States. Attached to that secret memo is a similarly secret list of designated terrorist organizations.

The December 4 memorandum directs Justice Department prosecutors to focus on specific federal crimes highlighted in NSPM-7 and flags more than 25 federal charges including crimes that may be capital offenses under specific, aggravating circumstances, such as killing or attempting to kill a federal officer and murder for hire.

It’s notable that the alleged members of designated terrorist organizations summarily killed in boat strikes would never, if tried in court, receive the death penalty.

“The administration is creating new categories of organizations outside of the law, creating immense uncertainty about who and what they intend to target and how,” Faiza Patel, the senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, told The Intercept, drawing attention to the administration’s invented term: designated terrorist organizations. “But drug trafficking is not war, and these actions are patently illegal in the absence of Congressional authorization,” she added. “At the same time, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 is aimed at ‘domestic terrorist organizations’ — another term that has no basis in U.S. law. It is designed to ramp up law enforcement scrutiny of groups espousing a broad swath of First Amendment-protected beliefs from anti-Christianity to anti-Americanism. NSPM-7 does not in any way, shape, or form authorize military strikes and using it for that would be plainly unlawful.”

The post White House Refuses to Rule Out Summary Executions of People on Its Secret Domestic Terrorist List appeared first on The Intercept.

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From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration diverted more than $35 million in taxpayer funds — an amount far greater than previously known — as part of a brazen agenda last year to defeat two ballot amendments he staunchly opposed, a Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.

Much of the state money was intended to assist needy Floridians, including children. Instead, it paid for political consultants, lawyers and thousands of advertisements that helped DeSantis and his supporters win at the ballot box.

The ads purchased with the diverted money blanketed TV, social media and radio stations in the weeks before the election. They defended Florida’s six-week abortion ban and made exaggerated claims about the dangers of marijuana without mentioning that both were the subject of ballot amendments last fall.

Along the way, the governor’s administration bent state spending laws and obscured millions in government spending, records and interviews show.

Last year's winner joins the protest wave following the decision to include Israel in the 2026 event. Five countries will also boycott Eurovision 2026.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/dw.com/en/eu…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

Eurovision winner Nemo returns trophy as Israel participates

^{Louis Oelofse (Deutsche Welle)}

Neurodivergent individuals – particularly autistic people and those with ADHD – are overrepresented within prison populations, according to research

Archived version: archive.is/20251212121921/inde…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

Half of people arrested in London could have undiagnosed ADHD, study finds

^{Rebecca Whittaker (The Independent)}

Australian accident investigators have released dramatic images showing a skydiver's parachute entangled on an airplane's tail, leaving him dangling at 15,000 feet.

https://apnews.com/article/australia-parachute-entangled-ff6a37bbeb8af80718114a9b379b7b49