United States | News & Politics

Ka (Jessica) Burbank and Ryan Grim
Jul 08, 2025

More Perfect Union 📺 The Most Corrupt Corporation in the World Is Taking Over Our Food Supply

In honor of this glorious holiday weekend, to pay my respects to the innermost heart of this great nation, it’s about cars, or more exactly, driving.

The US supreme court has cleared the way for Donald Trump’s administration to resume plans for mass firings of federal workers that critics warn could threaten critical government services.

Extending a winning streak for the US president, the justices on Tuesday lifted a lower court order that had frozen sweeping federal layoffs known as “reductions in force” while litigation in the case proceeds.

The decision could result in hundreds of thousands of job losses at the departments of agriculture, commerce, health and human services, state, treasury, veterans affairs and other agencies.

Opinion - Zeynep Tufekci
July 9, 2025

[as usual, independent thinking from #ZeynepTufekci ]

"What Kelly didn’t mention, but which has since become well known, is that the Weather Service employee whose job it was to make sure those warnings got traction — Paul Yura, the long-serving meteorologist in charge of “warning coordination” — had recently taken an unplanned early retirement amid cuts pushed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. He was not replaced.

To a Washington bean counter, his loss might have looked like one tiny but welcome subtraction in a giant spreadsheet, but not in a region so prone to these perilous events that it’s known as Flash Flood Alley. Hundreds of kids at summer camps slept in cabins along the river. The plan was for folks at the upstream camps to send word to the downstream camps if floodwaters got scary. But if even the highest official in the county wasn’t on high alert, how were the camp counselors supposed to understand the danger — or, in an area without reliable cellphone coverage, to act on it?"

https://archive.ph/lh7ET

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/32874523

Israeli Prime Minister and architect of the genocide in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu, will be meeting with Trump at the White House. This is the third time since Trump’s inauguration that they have met to conspire in creating "a New Middle East."

Their vision is to eradicate the Palestinian people, land, and all those who stand with the Palestinian cause to create a region subservient to US-Israeli domination.

The American people do not want another endless war in the Middle East. Our tax dollars should be funding people's needs at home, not death, destruction and genocide around the world.

An internal government assessment shows USAID officials raised “critical concerns” last month about a key aid group’s ability to protect Palestinians and to deliver them food – just days before the State Department announced $30 million in funding for the organization.

A scathing 14-page document obtained by CNN outlines a litany of problems with a funding application submitted by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US-backed group established to provide aid following an 11-week Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. The United Nations human rights office says that hundreds of Palestinians have since been killed around private aid sites, including those operated by GHF.

The assessment flags a range of concerns, from an overall plan missing “even basic details” to a proposal to potentially distribute powdered baby formula in an area that lacks clean water to prepare it.

A USAID official came to a clear conclusion in the report: “I do not concur with moving forward with GHF given operational and reputational risks and lack of oversight.”

https://archive.ph/0kLeU

A new study of defense department spending previewed exclusively to the Guardian shows that most of the Pentagon’s discretionary spending from 2020-2024 has gone to outside military contractors, providing a $2.4tn boon in public funds to private firms in what was described as a “continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing”.

The report from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Costs of War program at Brown University said that the Trump administration’s new Pentagon budget will push annual US military spending past the $1tn mark.

That will deliver a projected windfall of more than half a trillion dollars that will be shared among top arms firms like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon as well as a growing military tech sector with close allies in the administration like Vice-President JD Vance, the report said.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/32902482

The United States only has about 25% of the Patriot missile interceptors it needs for all of the Pentagon’s military plans after burning through stockpiles in the Middle East in recent months, an alarming depletion that led to the Trump administration freezing the latest transfer of munitions to Ukraine.

The stockpile of the Patriot missiles has fallen so low that it raised concern inside the Pentagon that it could jeopardize potential US military operations, and deputy defense secretary, Stephen Feinberg, authorized the transfer to be halted while they reviewed where weapons were being sent.

Donald Trump appeared to reverse at least part of that decision on Monday when he told reporters in advance of a dinner at the White House with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would “send some more weapons” to Ukraine, although he did not disclose whether that would include Patriot systems.

Rescue crews continued on Tuesday to comb through parts of the Texas Hill Country devastated by catastrophic flash flooding over the Fourth of July weekend, but with more than 100 dead and hope fading for survivors, efforts have increasingly turned to search and recovery.

As of Tuesday morning, the death toll across the six affected counties surpassed 100. Most of the deaths were in Kerr county, where officials said 87 bodies had so far been recovered, including 56 adults and 30 children. Identification was pending for 19 adults and seven children with one additional person still unidentified, county sheriff Larry Leitha told a news conference.