“T‑Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T‑Mobile ONE plan.” That was the promise. The Un-contract. The whole reason millions of customers picked the magenta team over Verizon and AT&T in the first place. Now T-Mobile is retiring legacy 3G and 4G-era plans — Magenta, ONE, Simple Choice — and automatically moving customers onto “modern” 5G plans at higher monthly costs. Billing changes hit mid-July for the current wave. The company that swore it would never surprise you with a rate hike just sent the notification.

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that removal protections for members of the Federal Trade Commission are unconstitutional and overturned a 90-year-old decision that allowed Congress to shield members of certain independent agencies from being fired by the president at will.

The decision from the high court expands the president's power over many independent boards and commissions, which Congress had insulated from political pressure by saying their members could only be removed by the president for cause.

Incredible scenes on the pitch right now as Paraguay celebrate one of the biggest shocks in recent times.

Germany are out of the World Cup in the round of 32.

“T‑Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T‑Mobile ONE plan.” That was the promise. The Un-contract. The whole reason millions of customers picked the magenta team over Verizon and AT&T in the first place. Now T-Mobile is retiring legacy 3G and 4G-era plans — Magenta, ONE, Simple Choice — and automatically moving customers onto “modern” 5G plans at higher monthly costs. Billing changes hit mid-July for the current wave. The company that swore it would never surprise you with a rate hike just sent the notification.

Democrats in the US House of Representatives quickly fired back on Monday after President Donald Trump called pending affordable housing legislation a "big yawn" compared to the attack on voting rights that he wants Republicans to pass.

Trump last Wednesday canceled a planned signing ceremony for the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act and demanded that Congress, which is narrowly controlled by Republicans, pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE America, Act.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Monday sent Trump the bipartisan housing bill—which will become law with no action by the president after 10 days.

Asked by reporters whether he'll sign the housing legislation, Trump replied: "It hasn't been sent to me yet. It's coming, I understand, and then I'll make a de—Here's what I would like to say... It's a yawn. Some people say it's wonderful. To me, compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn."

Sharing a clip of the president's remarks on social media, House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) declared, "He truly doesn't give a damn about you."

Other Democrats delivered similar responses. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (Wash.) said that "Trump does not care about lowering housing prices," while Rep. Becca Balint (Vt.) wrote of his comments, "Donald Trump literally does not care about your cost of living, part one million."

Democratic Colorado Congresswoman Brittany Pettersen said: "A yawn? Try telling that to the families who can't afford rent, can't afford to buy gas or groceries, and are one paycheck away from losing everything. Believe him when he tells you who he is."

Rep. Christian D. Menefee, a Texas Democrat, charged that "Trump cares more about rigging elections than Americans affording homes."

The Democratic National Committee's (DNC) rapid response director, Kendall Witmer, said in a statement that "Donald Trump continues to mock what everyday Americans are experiencing. Time and again, Trump has had the chance to lower costs for working families, but without fail, he has chosen to prioritize his own interests and those of his wealthy friends."

"As Americans struggle to put a roof over their heads and afford basic necessities," Witmer added, "Trump continues to double down on his disastrous policies and self-serving agenda—and Americans are fed up."

Trump's comments came just over four months away from the November midterm elections, in which Democrats aim to regain control of both chambers of Congress.

In the lead-up to the midterms, Trump has ramped up pressure on Republicans in Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would force Americans to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote, and photo identification at the ballot box. Critics have warned that the former requirement could disenfranchise millions of Americans who may not have access to documents such as a birth certificate or passport with their current name.

Johnson said Sunday on Fox News that "we're going to try to pass it again, and this time we’re going to try to put it on a reconciliation bill," which "prevents the necessity of 60 votes in the Senate."

The speaker on Monday also sent a message to his GOP colleagues who might block unrelated legislation in a bid to pressure senators to pass the SAVE America Act: "Whomever is thinking that stopping the work of House Republicans to make Americans safer right now and to bring down the cost of living—impeding that progress just because stubborn Senate Democrats won't do the job of the American people is self-defeating. It doesn't make any sense."

Punchbowl reported on Monday that GOP leadership has also expressed interest in creating a $4 billion grant program that would incentivize states to enact parts of the bill. Some Republican state lawmakers have already pursued copycat legislation.

As elected Republicans attack voting rights at the national level, the US Supreme Court—whose right-wing supermajority has often rubber-stamped Trump's agenda—delivered a surprise victory for voting rights on Monday: Two conservatives joined the three liberal justices in rejecting the Republican National Committee's (RNC) challenge to states counting mailed ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but received afterward.

"The DNC is proud to have stood with the state of Mississippi to defeat the RNC's latest attack on Americans’ voting rights," said the Democrats' chair, Ken Martin. "Trump and Republicans are attacking our elections and trying to rig the system in their favor because they know the American people are ready to reject their chaos and corruption this November."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

https://xcancel.com/IbsiNow/status/2071291805438558607

When you kick out French imperialists, and then roll out the red carpet for the Zionist entity.

Massive Troaré L. Thomas Sankara must be spinning in his grave right now.

Hi, I'm curious what ferments and pickles people know/do.

I regularly make kimchi, as vegan kimchi is a bit hard to come by. I tend to add a bit of msg to help fill out the flavour btw so 100% recommend that if you are making it.

Recently I discovered szechuan lactofermented pickles: https://blog.themalamarket.com/sichuans-naturally-fermented-pickles-pao-cai/ (ok site, got sloppified in 2025). They're a tasty way to use the excess hard veggies from the garden, and certain stems of greens ferment ok.

Oh yeah, I've also tried making soymilk yoghurt but it always ends up tasting a bit tofuy. I wonder if anyone has a vegan yoghurt that works?

I want to get more stuff going, and branch out into pickles and fermented sauces. So I'm keen to know what other people to :)

Inside this warehouse, with its violently red windows, is where I tell my weekly quiz to an audience of all-comers. (That said, this isn’t about the quiz so I won’t be giving information on that here.)

With these windows glowing red like that, standing back on the other side of the fence and letting the chain link and barbed wire into the frame, it almost looks like something redacted is being contained here.

Thanks for seeing my work!

Snip:

A Hezbollah resistance fighter killed a platoon commander belonging to the 12th Battalion of the Israeli military’s elite Golani Brigade overnight, Tel Aviv confirmed in a statement on 28 June.

Captain David Hazut and other soldiers from the elite brigade entered a building in the village of Deir Siryan – located within the so-called “security zone” which Israel has been trying to clear of resistance fighters for several weeks.

As they entered the building at around 2:00 AM on Sunday, a resistance fighter attacked the occupation forces, killing Hazut and lightly wounding another soldier, according to a probe by the Israeli army.

VAMOS PARAGUAY

It's like Microsoft is advertising for Linux at this point, lol.

"KB5094126 patched 208 security vulnerabilities on June 9, but the update has triggered Recycle Bin display glitches, BitLocker lockouts on enterprise hardware, OneDrive failures, and system freezes, with the first fix not expected until July 14."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/48803542

"We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?" - Walter Rodney

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/67045337

Brennan, Vic, and Aabria plead their case to a jury of their peers.

. According to analysis by the Guardian, two-thirds of planned datacentres in the US are in drought-stricken areas. The larger centres need up to 5m gallons of water a day for cooling, equivalent to the average usage of 50,000 people. It is unclear what the plan is and whose needs will take priority between AI, agriculture and everyone else.

“People are reporting bill spikes,” [Erin]Brockovich says, reading an email from someone who says their monthly water bill went from $22 (£17) to more than $350 (£265). The threat of these centres is about more than money – it feels existential. “How will the water use disrupt the balance of nature? People are asking: “What will happen to us?”

Kyle Shideler, expert witness

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The federal government’s first-ever domestic terrorism convictions linked to “Antifa” came thanks to an “expert” witness who has never spent a day in government or academia, as non-public court transcripts I obtained show. He instead cut his teeth at various pro-Israel advocacy groups.

Shortly after Hamas' October 7 attacks, he said in a social media post: "I would like every protesting communist scumbag to go to Gaza so the IDF can turn them into pink mist…"

His name is Kyle Shideler, and he is the worst of the worst kind of Washington expert. What he lacks in perspective and real world grounding he makes up in ideological fanaticism and deskwork. Before his current position at the right-wing fever dream factory called the Center for Security Policy, he spent years parroting Israel’s national security worldview: the “counterterrorism” mindset of pre-crime paranoia, in which threats lurk everywhere and the preemptive “security” crackdown they supposedly demand becomes its own form of oppression.

This paranoia was on full display at the trial of the Prairieland Eight

Last July 4, the eight protested Donald Trump’s immigration war by targeting the Prairieland Detention Center, an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas. Seven of the eight gathered at the detention camp for a “noise demonstration” and began vandalizing cars and the facility walls, spray-painting graffiti and setting off what the government describes as commercial-grade fireworks to show support for the people locked inside. When local police arrived, one of the seven, 32-year-old Benjamin Hanil Song, shot Alvarado Police Lieutenant Thomas Gross in the neck. Gross survived.

Police later recovered 11 firearms, body armor, and tactical gear. The government charged Song with attempted murder. But the rest of the defendants were swept up not so much for what they did, but for what the government said they collectively were: a “North Texas Antifa cell.” One of the targets, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, wasn’t even present that night. He was convicted of concealing documents — for moving a box of political zines. He was sentenced to 30 years.

The eight were sentenced to a combined 450 years in federal prison:

• Savanna Batten — 50 years
• Zachary Evetts — 50 years
• Autumn Hill — 50 years
• Meagan Morris — 50 years
• Maricela Rueda — 70 years
• Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada — 30 years
• Benjamin Hanil Song — 100 years
• Elizabeth Soto — 50 years

As my attorney, a career public defender, told me, these are longer sentences than her clients have gotten for murder.

Laws were clearly broken; but the sentences turned on what the defendants said and believed, which the prosecution cast as proof of Antifa membership — a case that rested largely on one man: Shideler.

His job on the stand was to convince the jury of two things: that Antifa is a real, organized terrorist enterprise, and that these eight belonged to it. That task was complicated by the fact that the defendants had never actually called themselves Antifa.

When he was pressed on this point and asked during cross-examination why, if they were Antifa, had they never used the term, Shideler replied: “Clandestine organizations very rarely do that.”

Welcome to the paranoid mindset of counterterrorism, where everything is a network, every network is a threat, and the absence of evidence is just evidence the network has good operational security. Silence isn’t innocence; it’s tradecraft. No leader means a decentralized cell. No membership list means superb security hygiene. It’s a worldview that can never be wrong, because every fact and its opposite confirm it.

Shideler was baptized into this worldview on the job. By his own account on the stand, he “lived over my parents’ garage for a little while” after college, took a job as a news director at a radio station “for a short period,” and did “some blogging and writing” before being recruited by Stand With Us, the Los Angeles pro-Israel group, where he was responsible for “managing their database of extremist groups and individuals.” From there he went to the Endowment for Middle East Truth, a foreign-policy nonprofit that bills itself as operating “from an unabashedly pro-America and pro-Israel stance,” where he studied Islamic movements “with a particular emphasis on the Muslim Brotherhood.”

In 2014 he was hired at the Center for Security Policy, the Frank Gaffney–founded think tank best known for promoting the Iraq War and claiming “Sharia law” is the leading domestic threat to the United States. He left for a stint at the Middle East Forum — a Philadelphia outfit whose stated mission is to “protect Western civilization from the threat of Islamism” — then returned to the Center in 2020, where he now directs Homeland Security and Counterterrorism research, which as far as I can tell means tracking left-wing Americans.

Under cross-examination, Shideler acknowledged he had authored an article on combating far-left extremism whose subtitle, a defense lawyer pointed out, was “A Roadmap for the Trump Administration.” It ran in The American Mind, a publication of the conservative Claremont Institute. He conceded his work isn’t peer-reviewed and rests on “open source research” — material one can “find on the internet” — which, he agreed, carries “both false information and true information.”

Somehow, some way, Shideler ended up being the Justice Department’s expert witness to explain “Antifa” and the grave threat it poses.

The Justice Department parroted Shideler’s view of America, announcing that the Prairieland Eight are “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 overthrow of the United States Government! It would be funny if it wasn’t so creepy.

But how did people who’d never even used the word get labeled terrorists?

They did say they were “anti-fascist,” and to Shideler that was enough. Per the court transcript:

Q: We did hear them say that they're Antifa, to the extent that they're anti-fascist, right?

SHIDELER: Yes. It would be consistent with an anarchist/anti-fascist ideology to not consider organizations. They don't think about groups and organizations, that's sort of counter to their ideology.

The membership test he described is not coordination, not dues, not a roster, not a chain of command; he conceded under oath that none of those exist. But it was enough that they’d said they were “anti-fascist,” which Shideler argued was an abbreviation of “Antifa.”

Last October, when Shideler testified for the first time before the Senate, he made the link between activism and free speech. “We are not talking about speech,” he told the subcommittee. “We are talking about manifestos describing how to overthrow the government and how to do that with violence.”

That is the argument he carried into the courtroom — that the wrong zines, wearing black, using the Signal app, and covering your face are not expressions but the operational signatures of a terror cell.

When a defense lawyer offered an analogy — the Knights of Columbus also hold secret ceremonies — Shideler agreed that doesn’t make them terrorists, “not unless they commit terrorist acts.” Pressed on whether the defendants’ encrypted chats ever discussed harming people or property, he allowed they did not, then explained the absence away: he’d “expect the discussions of that type to take place person to person,” not in a recoverable chat.

He even admitted he had reviewed exactly one “Antifa chat” in his career — this one — and that his expectations about what such groups do were “based on what the documents say should be done,” not on any direct experience.

Even the presiding judge, Trump appointee Mark Pittman, seemed to grasp the danger of treating belief as evidence. He asked Shideler whether owning a copy of Mein Kampf made him a fascist, or Das Kapital a communist. “Not unless it’s consistent with your other behavior,” Shideler answered each time. Then Pittman asked whether owning Antifa literature would make him an anti-fascist — and the government's Antifa expert volunteered that he owns "quite a bit of it myself."

The Prairieland case is likely to be the first in a series of similar prosecutions. Trump’s September 2025 executive order designating “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organization that “explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government” supplied the language. The Prairieland Eight indictment, unsealed weeks later, tracked that order almost word for word. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi said at the time of the indictment that the case marks the beginning of a broader effort to “systematically dismantle” the movement. Shideler himself says that the Justice Department sought his help in defining Antifa during the case.

The irony is that Shideler has warned about this exact tactic — building a public narrative to put political enemies behind bars — except when he was the one warning, he was accusing the other side of doing it. In a March 2023 thread on X, he argued that the prosecutions of January 6 were not really about their conduct but about how the media manufactured a narrative of the protestors and rioters as a threat to overthrow the government.

January 6, he lamented, “couldn’t be the story of a rowdy protest that got out of hand” because of the partisan dynamics at play.

So why couldn’t this be the story of another rowdy protest that got out of hand?

I’ve enclosed a copy of the non-public court transcript containing Shideler’s remarks below. I always try to publish the underlying documents so you can make up your own mind — help me continue doing so by becoming a subscriber or by contributing to my GoFundMe here.

Subscribe if you think not everyone you disagree with is a terrorist

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— Edited by William M. Arkkin

Shideler Court Transcript

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