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Lidia Martinez, a retired educator who lives in San Antonio, was shocked last week when officers came to her house at 6 a.m. and informed her that they were searching her residence because she had filed a complaint about residents in her area getting their mail-in ballots.

Martinez says she's spent decades volunteering with the League of United Latin American Citizens to help seniors in the Latino community register themselves to vote.

The officers at her house asked to see the voter registration cards that she had collected. After informing them that she didn't have them at her house, they proceeded to search the property and left with her laptop, her phone and some documents.

Texas Attorney General defended the raid as part of an election integrity investigation.

Reporting on court proceedings is not politics. Please restrict comments to the news aspects of this story in this community; we're all aware he's primarily running to stay out of prison, but that is not this story. /soapbox

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[...]last spring, pro-Palestinian activists, running under the Shut It Down party, won control over the student government. They immediately moved to withhold funding for all activities, until the university committed to divest from companies that profit from Israel’s war in Gaza.

University regents, though, have consistently said that divestment is off the table. And as students returned to school, the campus seemed to be at a virtual standstill.

When campaigning for student government, the Shut It Down party did not keep its intentions a secret. Its platform “ran with one single point: to halt the operations of the University of Michigan Central Student Government,” Alifa Chowdhury, the president of the party, wrote in a statement to The Times. Other members of the group declined to comment.

In the March election, in which less than 20 percent of students turned out to vote, Shut It Down won the presidency and vice presidency, and secured 22 of 45 seats in the assembly.

After the election, the new leaders of the student government passed a resolution, calling for the university’s regents to divest. In May, Ms. Chowdhury issued a statement condemning the university’s decision to call in police to break up the protest encampments.

see also this Detroit News article, which notes:

The new 2024-25 president of UM Central Student Government has since vetoed the summer budget, shutting down funding to student groups. She is expected to take the same action next month when a fall budget is considered. Students are expected to become more aware of this development as classes begin Monday on the Ann Arbor campus and most student organizations restart their activities.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18999354

GOP lawmakers have made the state hostile for trans youth. These teens and their parents vow to ‘assert themselves’

Some parents have stockpiled medications in hidden locations. Some have stopped socializing with neighbors. Some have made plans to flee the state.

In Missouri, transgender youth and their families are grappling with an onslaught of attacks on their rights. Last year, Republican lawmakers outlawed critical healthcare treatments for trans youth and banned many trans athletes from school sports. Local school districts worked to censor LGBTQ+ books and prohibit trans children from using bathroomsthat match their gender identity.

And the state’s attorney general has become a national leader in anti-trans policy, seeking to gain access to trans kids’ medical records, fighting to restrict trans adults’ healthcare and attacking trans adults who use public locker rooms.

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The Department of Justice (DOJ) has claimed RealPage's software algorithm meant rival landlords were sharing what would otherwise be private information, allegedly allowing them to illegally co-ordinate and raise rents. "Everybody knows the rent is too damn high and we allege this is one of the reasons why," Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference announcing the lawsuit. RealPage did not immediately comment but it has previously called similar claims false and misleading. The Texas-based company, which is owned by private equity firm Thoma Bravo, has found itself in the spotlight in recent years, after an investigation from ProPublica drew attention to its practices. The company has already been the target of lawsuits filed by renters and prosecutors in Arizona and the District of Columbia earlier this year. With housing affordability a hot-button issue in the US, criticism of rent-setting algorithms has also become a staple of speeches from Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential campaign. In the complaint, the DOJ and eight states claim RealPage had access to information about millions of apartments across the country. "RealPage allows landlords to manipulate, distort, and subvert market forces," the DOJ alleged in the complaint. It took aim at a RealPage offering that recommends rents to its property owner customers, suggesting that many agree to "auto accept" the proposals from RealPage. It claimed the firm dominated the market for commercial revenue management software, citing the firm's own estimates that it controlled about 80% of the market. RealPage in June said it served a much smaller fraction of the rental market than has been claimed and that landlords, not RealPage, set prices. The lawsuit marks a first for the federal government as it seeks to address the rising use of pricing algorithms across the economy. Officials said they were also looking at such practices in the meat industry and elsewhere. "Modern-day wrongdoers cannot hid behind software algorithms and artificial intelligence to violate the law," said assistant attorney general Jonathan Kanter, who leads up the department's anti-monopoly unit.

Yuanjun Tang, 67, a naturalized citizen of the United States and resident of Queens, New York, was charged by criminal complaint with acting and conspiring to act in the United States as an unregistered agent of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and making materially false statements to the FBI. Tang was arrested today in Flushing, Queens, and will be presented this afternoon.

[...]

Between at least in or about 2018 and in or about June 2023, Tang acted in the United States as an agent of the PRC by completing tasks at the direction of the PRC’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), which is the PRC’s principal civilian intelligence agency. The MSS is responsible for, among other things, the PRC’s foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, espionage and political security functions.

what in the world...?

Federal prosecutors investigating Mayor Eric Adams of New York and his 2021 campaign have served a new round of grand jury subpoenas in their long-running corruption inquiry, issuing them to Mr. Adams himself, to City Hall and to his election committee, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.

The three subpoenas were served in July and seek an extensive range of materials, including text messages, other communications and documents, two of the people said.

The subpoenas contain similar language and seek information in a number of areas, including travel by the mayor, his aides and others, as well as fund-raising. They appear likely to sweep in information related to some aides to the mayor and people who worked both in City Hall and on Mr. Adams's 2021 campaign, the people said.

The new subpoenas came nearly nine months after the corruption investigation first entered public view, meaningfully altering the city's political landscape. Since then, the mayor has become a political target, with sagging approval ratings and at least three challengers in the 2025 Democratic primary.

The discounts, agreed to after months of negotiations with drug manufacturers, range between 38% and 79% on the medication’s list price, which is the cost of medication before discounts or rebates are applied — not the price people actually pay for prescriptions.

Medicare spent $50 billion covering the drugs last year and taxpayers are expected to save $6 billion on the new prices, which do not go into effect until 2026. Older adults could save as much as $1.5 billion in total on their medications in out-of-pocket costs. Administration officials released few details about how they arrived at those calculations.

The newly negotiated prices will impact the price of drugs used by millions of older Americans to help manage diabetes, blood cancers and prevent heart failure or blood clots. The drugs include the blood thinners Xarelto and Eliquis and diabetes drugs Jardiance and Januvia.

A US Army analyst has pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to sell military secrets to China, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has said.

Sgt Korbein Schultz was arrested in March after an investigation by the FBI and US Army counterintelligence alleged that he was paid $42,000 (£33,000) in exchange for dozens of sensitive security records.

The criminal conspiracy began in June 2022 and continued up until his arrest, officials said.

He is scheduled for sentencing in January.

Sgt Schultz, who held a security clearance to access top secret information, conspired to collect data with someone whom he believed to be living in Hong Kong, according to court documents.

The purported Hong Kong resident asked Sgt Schultz to collect sensitive data related to missile defence and mobile artillery systems, according to court records.

Sgt Schultz also collected data on US fighter aircraft, military tactics, and the US military's defence strategy for Taiwan, based on what it learned from Russia's war in Ukraine.

A United States court ruled on July 24 that the Fourth Amendment right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution protects travelers from “nonroutine searches” of their cellphones at the border.

There is a “substantial risk that allowing warrantless searches of incoming travelers’ electronic devices will unduly burden, chill, or otherwise infringe upon their First Amendment activities,” Judge Nina Morrison also acknowledged.

Archived version

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced last Sunday an initiative to invite Texas doctors to consider relocating to her neighboring state of New Mexico, in response to Texas’s “draconian abortion ban.”

The governor launched a direct appeal to Texas health care providers, running a full-page ad in five major Texas newspapers last Sunday. The ads contained an “open letter” to “Texas healthcare providers” telling them that they are welcome in New Mexico to practice medicine without restrictions.

“I know that legal restrictions on healthcare in Texas have created a heavy burden for medical practitioners –– especially those of you now barred by law from providing the full spectrum of reproductive healthcare. It must be distressing that a draconian abortion ban has restricted your right to practice and turned it into a political weapon,” Lujan Grisham wrote in the open letter.

“I certainly respect those of you who remain committed to caring for patients in Texas, but I also invite those of you who can no longer tolerate these restrictions to consider practicing next door in New Mexico,” she added.

Lujan Grisham said her state was “taking steps” to make sure New Mexico does not follow in Texas’s footsteps in passing restrictive abortion laws.

“You have my word: I will never interfere with the fundamental right of health workers to care for their patients in New Mexico,” she wrote at the end of the letter. “Whether you are a nurse, a resident, a physician assistant, or a doctor, we cordially and enthusiastically invite you to the Land of Enchantment, where you are free to care for your patients.”