The poll, released on May 30 by Atlas Intel, found Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and former transportation secretary in the Biden administration, to be the top pick among Democrats who responded to the survey.

A total of 31.5% of self-identified Democrats who responded to the poll said they would vote for Buttigieg for president in four years, according to the poll.

Other surveys in May from firms such as Echelon Insights and McLaughlin & Associates have found Harris in first place in the hypothetical primary, making Atlas Intel’s poll stand out among the rest.

Harris is the third most popular pick among Democrats in the poll, falling behind U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

President Donald Trump’s decision to approve the foreign sale of U.S. Steel, an American manufacturing icon, came after months of sustained pressure from a group of Rust Belt Republicans.

Advocates for the deal say the lobbying effort was crucial to the president’s reversal of his campaign pledge to block the nearly $15 billion sale, which he will formalize in a speech at the company’s Pittsburgh headquarters on Friday.

“That should have been a no-brainer, frankly, and lawmakers in Trump’s corner helped him see that,” said one former Republican official, who is in favor of the deal and familiar with the discussions at the White House.

WEST MIFFLIN, Pennsylvania, May 30 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday he planned to increase tariffs on imported steel and aluminum to 50% from 25%, ratcheting up pressure on global steel producers and deepening his trade war.

"We are going to be imposing a 25% increase. We're going to bring it from 25% to 50% - the tariffs on steel into the United States of America, which will even further secure the steel industry in the United States," he said at a rally in Pennsylvania.

Skipped the valedictorian because they were Hispanic.

New lows reached every day here in the USA

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30900650

May 30, 2025 at 2:23 pm

"“Ben & Jerry’s believes in human rights and advocates for peace, and we join with those around the world who denounce the genocide in Gaza,” the board said in a statement viewed by Reuters. “We stand with all who raise their voices against genocide in Gaza – from petition-signers to street marchers to those risking arrest.”"

The climate impact of Donald Trump’s geopolitical ambitions could deepen planetary catastrophe, triggering a global military buildup that accelerates greenhouse gas emissions, a leading expert has warned.

The Pentagon – the US armed forces and Department of Defense (DoD) agencies – is the world’s largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter, accounting for at least 1% of total US emissions annually, according to analysis by Neta Crawford, co-founder of the Costs of War project at Brown University.

Over the past five decades, US military emissions have waxed and waned with its geopolitical fears and ambitions. In 2023, the Pentagon’s operations and installations generated about 48 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) – more planet-warming gases than emitted by entire countries including Finland, Guatemala and Syria that year.

Months after the collision between a U.S. Army helicopter and a passenger jet that killed 67 people in Washington, D.C., Congress and federal aviation safety regulators are still investigating what happened.

In the immediate aftermath, as the Trump administration scrambled to blame the tragedy on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, authorities took swift action against two men they accused of leaking dramatic footage of the crash to CNN, which aired videos that appeared to come from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport’s security cameras.

The charges, filed by local authorities in Virginia, came as President Donald Trump and his allies vowed to crack down on journalists and their sources.

But on Wednesday, local prosecutors in Virginia dropped charges entirely against one of the men, Jonathan Savoy, who worked at the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. The second MWAA employee, Mohamed Mbengue, indicated he would not contest the charges, according to court records, reportedly as part of a pretrial diversion agreement with prosecutors.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30492618

The U.S. Justice Department has formally moved to dismiss a criminal fraud charge against Boeing and has asked a judge to cancel an upcoming trial connected to two plane crashes that killed 346 people off the coast of Indonesia and in Ethiopia, according to court documents filed Thursday.

The deal, announced last week, will allow the American aircraft manufacturer to avoid criminal prosecution for allegedly misleading U.S. regulators about the 737 Max jetliner before the planes crashed less than five months apart in 2018 and 2019.

The “agreement in principle” will require the company to pay and invest more than $1.1 billion, including an additional $445 million for the crash victims’ families, in return for dismissing the criminal case, according to court documents. Dismissing the fraud charge will allow the manufacturer to avoid a possible criminal conviction that could have jeopardized the company’s status as a federal contractor, experts have said.

By Ana Ley
Visuals by Hilary Swift
Ana Ley and Hilary Swift drove hundreds of miles through rural New York to meet with farmworkers and their children.
May 30, 2025

"They have seen federal agents sweep away a mother and her three children from their home on a dairy in the village of Sackets Harbor, N.Y. And they have heard about the food vendor arrested by the immigration police after she hit a deer in a snowstorm and sought help from a neighbor who reported her to the authorities. Officers then took her husband from work and their daughters, 6 and 9 years old, from school."

https://archive.ph/gDm33

https://archive.ph/e0Nta

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House will fix errors in a much-anticipated federal government report spearheaded by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which decried America’s food supply, pesticides and prescription drugs.

Kennedy’s wide-ranging “Make America Healthy Again” report, released last week, cited hundreds of studies, but a closer look by the news organization NOTUS found that some of those studies did not actually exist.

Asked about the report’s problems, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the report will be updated.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30852519

from The Forward [Jewish publication from USA] Jay Michaelson May 28, 2025

"The gulf between Israel’s government and the rest of the world — including its allies, the #Trump administration, the Israeli public, and the American Jewish community — is widening into a chasm. And yet some in Jewish leadership are hiding their heads in the sand.

Critics of the Netanyahu-Smotrich regime are no longer just campus protesters, or hostile-to-Israel regimes, or antisemites like the murderer of two young Jews at an AJC event in Washington DC last week. They include former prime minister Ehud Olmert..."

NEW YORK (AP) — New York City police are investigating two detectives who worked security at an upscale Manhattan townhouse where a man says he was kidnapped and tortured for weeks by two crypto investors who wanted to steal his Bitcoin, a city official said Thursday.

One of the detectives serves on Mayor Eric Adams’ security detail and is believed to have picked up the victim from a local airport and brought him to the townhouse, the official said. It’s not immediately clear if the other detective, who is a narcotics officer, has any connection to the incident.

The detectives have been placed on modified leave pending the outcome of the inquiry, according to the official, who was briefed on the case and spoke anonymously to The Associated Press because they are not authorized to discuss the internal investigation.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5080234

Any time a federal agency wants to develop a project in Wyoming — an oil and gas lease, a pipeline, a dam, a transmission line, a solar array — it has to go through Crystal C’Bearing first. C’Bearing is Northern Arapaho and the tribal historic preservation officer, or THPO, for the Northern Arapaho tribe, so if a new wind farm is proposed, for example, she determines if any tribal areas will be impacted by the project.

C’Bearing’s scope extends beyond her home on the Wind River Reservation, to any and all lands ceded by treaty, routes tribal members took during the removal process, burial sites, and religious places. That means she reviews projects across 16 states in addition to Wyoming, from Wisconsin to Montana, New Mexico to Arkansas, and all points in between — traditional homelands of the Northern Arapaho and other Indigenous nations, acquired by the United States as it forcefully expanded westward. Because of that range, hundreds of federal proposals and reports flood her email inbox every week, as is the case with 227 other THPOs working for their respective nations. Many have overlapping historic homelands and histories.

In January, President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency to speed the development of fossil fuel projects, mines, pipelines, and other energy-related infrastructure, cutting the amount of time federal agencies are required to notify Indigenous nations before starting a project. Now, as Trump’s proposed budget for 2026 works its way through Congress, the fund supporting the national THPO program is bracing for a 94 percent budget cut. On top of that, the Trump administration has yet to distribute THPO funds promised for 2025.

Traditionally, THPOs like C’Bearing have 30 days to review a project: 30 days to review federal reports, conduct site visits, identify artifacts or burial grounds, and collaborate with tribal members, sometimes from other tribes. According to C’Bearing, that window was already tight, but under Trump’s energy emergency, that deadline is now seven days. And as the year rolls on, C’Bearing’s budget is evaporating. If the administration doesn’t release the THPO funds already promised, she’ll be out of a job come September.

“If this is the moment that breaks the system, there’s not going to be anything there to catch the THPOs,” said Valerie Grussing, executive director of the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers

Full Article

Twenty two young Americans have filed a new lawsuit against the Trump administration over its anti-environment executive orders. By intentionally boosting oil and gas production and stymying carbon-free energy, federal officials are violating their constitutional rights to life and liberty, alleges the lawsuit, filed on Thursday.

The federal government is engaging in unlawful executive overreach by breaching congressional mandates to protect ecosystems and public health, argue the plaintiffs, who are between the ages of seven and 25 and hail from the heavily climate-impacted states of Montana, Hawaii, Oregon, California and Florida. They also say officials’ emissions-increasing and science-suppressing orders have violated the state-created danger doctrine, a legal principle meant to prevent government actors from inflicting injury upon their citizens.

“At its core, this suit is about the health of children, it’s about the right to life, it’s about the right to form families,” said Julia Olson, attorney and founder of Our Children’s Trust, the non-profit law firm that brought the suit. “We all have constitutional rights, and if we don’t use our constitution – if we walk away from it and we walk away from our youth – we will not have a democracy.”

The court’s decision blocks the tariffs Trump slapped last month on almost all U.S. trading partners and levies he imposed before that on China, Mexico and Canada.

In February, he’d invoked the law to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, saying that the illegal flow of immigrants and drugs across the U.S. border amounted to a national emergency and that the three countries needed to do more to stop it.

The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to set taxes, including tariffs. But lawmakers have gradually let presidents assume more power over tariffs — and Trump has made the most of it.

The tariffs are being challenged in at least seven lawsuits. In the ruling Wednesday, the trade court combined two of the cases — one brought by five small businesses and another by 12 U.S. states.

The ruling does leave in place other Trump tariffs, including those on foreign steel, aluminum and autos. But those levies were invoked under a different law that required a Commerce Department investigation and could not be imposed at the president’s own discretion.

The massive military parade and related festivities planned for June 14 will cost an estimated $25 to $45 million, according to the Army. This is likely a significant underestimate due to many expenses that are unaccounted for – or will be billed later, such as damages to local infrastructure caused by armored vehicles. Members of Congress are already expressing outrage at what they see as a gross misuse of funds.

The current plan, nonetheless, involves a martial spectacle reminiscent of the Soviet Union or North Korea in the heart of America’s capital, with armored vehicles rolling down Constitution Avenue. It is slated to involve more than 100 vehicles, including 28 M1A1 Abrams tanks, 28 Stryker armored personnel carriers, 28 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, four M109 Paladin self-propelled howitzers, as well as military relics like World War II-era Sherman tanks, a B-25 bomber, and a P-51 Mustang single-seat fighter plane, according to Army spokesperson Cynthia Smith. She added that the parade will also feature 34 horses, two mules, one wagon, and one dog.

Trump previously called the price tag of the parade “peanuts compared to the value of doing it.” The White House did not respond to questions about the additional costs beyond those cited by the Army.

Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., suspects the costs could be markedly higher than the current estimates. “This administration does not have a credible history of telling the truth about anything. And so, when they estimate $45 million, you know that’s a low-ball figure,” he told The Intercept. “I don’t know if it includes transporting the troops from their home stations to Washington or feeding them on that trip.”