WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed California to use a new voter-approved congressional map that is favorable to Democrats in this year’s elections, rejecting a last-ditch plea from state Republicans and the Trump administration.

No justices dissented from the brief order denying the appeal without explanation, which is common on the court’s emergency docket.

A newborn baby died from a listeria infection likely linked to the child’s mother drinking raw milk during pregnancy, health officials said.

New Mexico officials this week warned people to avoid consuming unpasteurized dairy products following the death. Interest in and sales of raw milk have been rising in recent years, fueled by social media and growing support from the Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again movement.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42664868

The Palestinian journalist has spent years documenting life in Gaza under Israeli occupation and, recently, amid Israel’s genocide. Her series with Al Jazeera’s AJ+ has won numerous awards, including a Peabody Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and even an Emmy. At the same time, pro-Israel voices have sought to silence Owda, including in a campaign in 2024 to pressure her Emmy nomination to be withdrawn.

In her Instagram video, Owda said that the ban was “expected” due to pressure from high-powered figures to censor Palestinian voices from TikTok.

She overlaid a video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks at the UN General Assembly in September, in which he named TikTok as a “number one” priority of Israel.

She also shared a video with the company’s U.S. CEO, Adam Presser, saying that the company made a change to designate critically labelling someone as a “Zionist” as hate speech. “Over the course of 2024, we tripled the amount of accounts that we were banning for hateful activity,” Presser bragged at a conference last year.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42656659

https://archive.ph/vQFs1

Michelle Goldberg
Feb. 3, 2026

Judge Ana Reyes did not have to go far to discover Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s animus toward Haitians. She just had to read her social media feed. “I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches and entitlement junkies,” Noem wrote on X in December. She added, “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

Reyes, a Federal District Court judge in Washington, cited Noem’s post at the very beginning of a blistering opinion issued Monday night preventing the administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, at least for now. That status was due to expire on Tuesday, rendering more than 350,000 Haitians who are now legally living and working in America undocumented overnight.

PARIS (AP) — French prosecutors raided the offices of Elon Musk’s social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into a range of alleged offences, including spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes.

The investigation was opened in January last year by the prosecutors’ cybercrime unit, the Paris prosecutors’ office said in a statement. It’s looking into alleged “complicity” in possessing and spreading pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group, among other charges.

Prosecutors also asked Elon Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino to attend “voluntary interviews” on April 20. Employees of X have also been summoned that same week to be heard as witnesses, the statement said. Yaccarino was CEO from May 2023 until July 2025.

Multiple AI-generated photos falsely claiming to show New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a child and his mother, filmmaker Mira Nair, with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and his confidant Ghislaine Maxwell, along with other high-profile public figures, were shared widely on social media Monday.

The images originated on an X account labeled as parody after a huge tranche of new Epstein files was released by the Justice Department on Friday. They are clearly watermarked as AI and other elements they contain do not add up.

Here’s a closer look at the facts.

CLAIM: Images show Mamdani as a child and his mother with Jeffrey Epstein and other public figures linked to the disgraced financier.

THE FACTS: The images were created with artificial intelligence. They all contain a digital watermark identifying them as such and first appeared on a parody X account that says it creates “high quality AI videos and memes.”

Jon Queally
Feb 02, 2026

Progressive critics of Senate Minority Chuck Schumer had fresh reasons to speak out Sunday after the powerful New York Democrat said that “one of many of [his] jobs” in the US Senate was to fight for ongoing taxpayer-funded military and financial assistance to the Israeli government, a position that has been the focus of growing protest among rank-and-file party members and the public at large in the face of Israel’s brutal genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza.

“I have many jobs as [Senate] leader... and one is to fight for aid to Israel — all the aid that Israel needs,” Schumer said at a gathering of Jewish leaders and community members in New York on Sunday.

According to Jacob Kornbluh, who provided footage of the remarks while reporting for The Forward, Schumer told the audience that his support for Jewish security funding will only continue growing under his leadership, calling it his “baby.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42563660

“It’s not a lack of training issue, it’s a culture of violence and lawlessness issue.”

Jan. 31, 2026

According to a Saturday report in the New York Times, concern over ICE’s brutality has grown to such an extent that many Minnesota residents, including both documented immigrants and US citizens, have started wearing passports around their necks to avoid being potentially targeted.

CNN on Friday reported that ICE has been rounding up refugees living in Minnesota who were allowed to enter the US after undergoing “a rigorous, years-long vetting process,” and sending them to a facility in Texas where they are being prepared for deportation.

The complaint was filed last May with the intelligence community’s inspector general, WSJ reported in its description of a November letter to Gabbard from Bakaj. It’s understood to also implicate another federal agency and to raise potential claims of executive privilege, suggesting possible White House involvement.

Members of the House and Senate intelligence panels first learned of the complaint in November, six months after it was filed, when a copy of Bakaj’s letter was shared with them, WSJ reports. Since then, Democratic staffers have tried unsuccessfully to learn more about it, congressional aides told the newspaper.

The complaint is so highly classified that Bakaj hasn’t been able to view it himself; a spokeswoman for Gabbard’s office confirmed that the complaint involved Gabbard but dismissed it as “baseless and politically motivated.”

On Friday, I testified in front of Governor J.B. Pritzker’s “Illinois Accountability Commission,” the state government body he set up after the Trump administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz” attack on Chicago last summer and the precursor of the even larger federal occupation of Minneapolis that we’re experiencing now. The body’s goal is to both document what happened to Chicago, with an eye on future prosecutions, understand the role of various Trump officials in this federal occupation, and offer recommendations about how to fix immigration enforcement going forward.

I was called as the commission’s expert witness on the history of problems, corruption, and training within CBP and ICE — a story I’ve covered for more than a dozen years, as regular readers of this newsletter know. To prepare, I spent the last week re-reading and re-familiarizing myself with DHS scandals and waves of corruption and mismanagement — and found myself horrified anew.

[...]

As I told the commission, “US law enforcement has never experienced a scandal as big, as far-reaching, destructive, and as far-lasting as the wave of corruption and criminality that has overtaken CBP and the Border Patrol since 2005. It’s a story that too much of the public still doesn’t know and too many policymakers still don’t understand.”

From the testimony given to the hearing:

What I hope you will take away from my testimony today is that the problems, abuses, scandals, and controversies involving CBP and ICE that have been on display over the last year in far too many American cities and social media feeds — from deadly shootings and agent brutality to the routine abuse of Constitutional and civil rights and liberties — is entirely consistent with long-identified problems in CBP and ICE that have gone ignored and uncorrected both by a generation of Congress and multiple Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

These are not aberrations — these incidents are the entirely foreseeable consequence of specific funding and management decisions and how the nation has approached immigration enforcement since 9/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

In particular, CBP has been likely the deadliest and certainly the most troubled federal law enforcement agency for the better part of two decades now. Since 9/11, the culture of ICE and CBP has meant that the agencies have been what you might call a fascist-secret-police-in-waiting, troubled agencies simply waiting for an ambitious would-be authoritarian.

Video of the statement can also be seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/live/Cu7uMFfFpIk?t=1995

Jan. 31, 2026

The Times reported on Friday that the memo, which was signed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Todd Lyons, “expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.”

In the past, agents have been granted the power to carry out warrantless arrests only in situations where they believe a suspected undocumented immigrant is a “flight risk” who is unlikely to comply with obligations such as appearing at court hearings.

However, the memo declares this standard to be “unreasoned” and “incorrect,” saying that agents should feel free to carry out arrests so long as the suspect is “unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter or another clearly identifiable location once an administrative warrant is obtained.”

Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a special election for the Texas state Senate on Saturday, flipping a reliably Republican district that President Donald Trump won by 17 points in 2024.