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In the letter, Kent wrote about what he saw as a “misinformation campaign” by high-ranking Israeli officials and the news media, which he said had undermined Trump’s “America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran”.

“As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives,” he wrote.

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For a year, the Trump Justice Department has been on an odd mission: to assist a mysterious former FBI informant with ties to Russian intelligence who ended up in prison for passing disinformation about Joe Biden to the bureau. His crime deeply affected American politics. The false claim he slipped to the FBI—that Biden and his son Hunter each were paid a $5 million bribe by a Ukrainian energy company—became the main evidence in the House Republicans’ reckless and ill-fated impeachment drive against the 46th president.

For pushing this phony tale, Alexander Smirnov, who pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI, was sentenced a year ago to six years of incarceration. (The punishment also covered failing to pay taxes on more than $2 million in income.) But for some strange reason, Trump’s DOJ has been helping him to get out of prison. On March 4, in a move that has drawn no media attention, the department quietly filed an unusual brief—submitted by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—supporting Smirnov’s attempt to throw out his sentence and withdraw his guilty plea.

This was not the first time the Trump Justice Department sided with Smirnov in his ongoing legal battle. It has forged a curious alliance with this convicted Russia-connected fabricator whose lies were embraced by Trump, MAGA Republicans, and right-wing media and cited as smoking-gun evidence for Biden’s impeachment.

The Trump administration likes to promote its immigration enforcement agenda through numbers, with ambitious goals to deport 1 million people, report zero releases at the U.S.-Mexico border and arrest thousands of alleged gang members.

For all the boasting, the administration has been releasing less reliable, carefully vetted data than its predecessors on a signature policy that has become one of the most contentious of Trump’s second term.

The gap in information and a loss of figures from an office that has tracked immigration data back to the 1800s have left researchers, advocates, lawyers and journalists without important statistics to hold the Republican administration to account.

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Nobelle Borines
Published 2026:03:15T22:05Z
The future of America's agricultural workforce has become an urgent economic issue as President Donald Trump's immigration policies collide with farms' long-standing dependency on migrant labour. Across the United States, farmers say it is increasingly difficult to find enough people to harvest crops and maintain food production. In response, many agricultural businesses have turned to the H-2A visa programme, which permits US employers to hire foreign workers for seasonal agricultural jobs.

Farmers Find New Solution to Labour Shortage

For decades, US agriculture has relied on immigrant labour. Government estimates suggest roughly 40% of the nation's two million farmworkers lack legal immigration status, meaning enforcement actions can quickly disrupt the workforce when arrests or deportations increase. As immigration raids intensify in some regions, farmers report losing experienced workers who have spent years performing physically demanding jobs in the fields.
For decades, US agriculture has relied on immigrant labour. Government estimates suggest roughly 40% of the nation's two million farmworkers lack legal immigration status, meaning enforcement actions can quickly disrupt the workforce when arrests or deportations increase. As immigration raids intensify in some regions, farmers report losing experienced workers who have spent years performing physically demanding jobs in the fields.
To fill the gap, farmers have already started relying on the H-2A visa programme during harvest time. The programme has expanded significantly in recent years and now accounts for a sizeable portion of the farm labour force.
While it sounds like an easy solution, the visa system is still widely viewed as complicated and expensive for growers to use. With the programme, employers are still required to provide housing, transportation and other benefits to workers they sponsor.
Despite these challenges, farmers increasingly see the programme as one of the only reliable ways to maintain their operations. It is said that American workers rarely apply for the physically demanding, low-paid jobs required in agriculture, particularly during peak harvest seasons. Without enough labour, crops can spoil in the fields, costing farmers significant losses and potentially pushing food prices higher.
At the same time, immigration policy debates in Washington have added uncertainty to the system. Trump has promoted stricter immigration enforcement and mass deportations while also acknowledging the need for labour in agriculture. His administration has pointed to the H-2A visa programme as a legal way for farmers to hire foreign workers while discouraging unauthorised immigration.
[…]

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Donald Trump made clear that his personal grudge with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky hasn’t abated during a phone interview with NBC News.

Speaking with Meet the Press anchor Kristen Welker on Saturday, the president knocked Zelensky for offering assistance to the U.S. and Middle Eastern countries, the latter of which the Ukrainian president said on Friday were seeking his aid in sharing drone detection technology.

The “last person we need help from is Zelensky,” Trump told Welker.

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Buffalo’s Arakan Rohingya community was rattled after a disabled man’s death. “Our worry comes from future incidents that may happen,” one resident said.

To be clear:

• he was blind
• he only spoke Rohingya
• he was originally arrested because he got lost, and the cops beat him up for not complying with orders he could not understand
• they gave him to ICE, which dumped him in the freezing cold without adequate clothes, outside a closed café, far from home

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The cryptocurrency industry has a new line of attack against candidates who have voted for consumer protections on digital coins: calling them corrupt.

In at least two Illinois congressional primaries, candidates vying for the progressive vote are being accused by a crypto political action committee of corruption. Fairshake PAC is trying to smear one candidate backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as a corporate tool and another candidate who successfully fought a federal indictment as a tax cheat.

The industry has thrown at least $3.3 million into negative attacks on the campaigns in the 2nd and 7th Congressional Districts thus far, according to an analysis from a Chicago political consultant. That spending represents only a fraction of the PAC’s war chest for the remainder of the primary season.

“Ironically, we’re in a very anti-corruption moment, and you know that is true because one of the most corrupt actors in the country is trying to appropriate an anti-corruption argument,” said Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project, a crypto industry critic. “The threat is that the cynical deployment of an anti-corruption politics undermines the potential for success of a genuine anti-corruption politics.”

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Wyoming’s Republican-dominated legislature passed a six-week abortion ban this week, prompting a new lawsuit and some lawmakers to call it “an insult to voters and our institution”.

Mark Gordon, Wyoming’s governor, signed the bill while simultaneously warning of its constitutional hurdles, noting that prior abortion bans were struck down by the state’s all Republican-appointed supreme court this January. Almost immediately, an identical set of plaintiffs filed suit against the new bill.

This bill effectively makes abortion illegal after six weeks of pregnancy, a time when many women have not yet learned that they are pregnant. Any person violating the law would face a felony punishable by prison sentence of up to five years.

Earlier abortion bans, including the US’s first proposed ban on abortion pills, were previously tossed out by the Wyoming supreme court – which cited Wyoming’s constitutional guarantee that adults can make their own healthcare decisions. Democratic representative Mike Yin views this now annual cycle of abortion bans as “both an insult to voters and our institution”, and doesn’t think the new bill holds much water.

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@HubertManne@piefed.social: So I have been curious about the wealth gap between just the two richest folks because it feels to me like the differences are expanding all over even at the extremes. I did this with gemini to so take it with as much a grain of salt as you might like but its a relatively straight forward if tedius task so Im relatively confident it can do it right. Anyway I expected a long term increase over the millenia but instead I see an interesting artificat with today and the dot com bubble. Whats really scary is gates could be seen as a central figure in the bubble and tech to some degree but musk isn't exactly at the center of ai as much as the center of both corporate and government corruption but maybe someone will have another take on that. So the dot com bubble was merely corporate collapse but if this is indicative of a collapse I do believe it will be along more lines.

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previously

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Trump is asserting executive authority to demand the controversial resumption of offshore oil drilling along California’s coastline as gas prices soar amid the ongoing war with Iran.

On Friday, Trump signed an executive order giving the Department of Energy the ability to use a Cold War-era law known as the Defense Production Act to accelerate oil and gas development.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright quickly responded with an order directing Sable Offshore Corp. to restore operations of the Santa Ynez Unit, which includes offshore oil rigs in federal waters and a network of pipelines that run along the Santa Barbara County coast and inland.

Gov. Gavin Newsom blasted the action as “an attempt to illegally restart a pipeline whose operators are facing criminal charges and prohibited by multiple court orders from restarting.”

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In comments to NBC News, US presidents also deflates hope of deal with Tehran, saying ‘terms aren’t good enough’

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The State Department has slashed by about 80% the fee for Americans to formally renounce their U.S. citizenship.

After years of legal battles with several groups representing Americans wanting to give up their citizenship, the department on Friday published a final rule in the Federal Register that reduces the cost from $2,350 to $450.

The new fee, which took effect on Friday, had been promised in 2023 but had never been implemented. The cost is now the same as it was when the State Department first started charging Americans to formally renounce their citizenship in 2010.

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