US politics

US politics

Aguilar's dismissal came after months of escalating tension between his office and the Police Accountability Board on the one side, and the City Council, Berkeley Police Department leadership and other city administrative agencies on the other. Most recently, in December, Aguilar sued BPD Chief Jen Louis in an attempt to get records related to a complaint against the police. This week, a judge denied Aguilar's petition, saying Aguilar had not had the authority to file it in the first place.

She said she has been assuring European leaders at the conference that she has absolute certainty Democrats will take control of the House of Representatives despite her many concerns about the elections. Pelosi said she is alarmed by the involvement of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in a FBI raid on a polling station in Fulton County, Georgia to retrieve 2020 ballots.

Vermont's Democratic Socialist senator and Florida's right-wing governor want to slam the brakes on the hundreds of resource-intensive new facilities springing up across the country to power the artificial intelligence industry. And both point to profits, not the public good, as the real factor motivating the boom. In many ways, the convergence was inevitable. Public wariness about the data-center industry is growing, and politicians could no longer ignore the outcry. Public skepticism of AI is also ubiquitous.

When running for re-election as Florida Attorney General, Pam Bondi touted her efforts to prosecute sex traffickers. "Florida ranks third nationally in calls for help in human trafficking, where young women and children are enslaved and abused. I knew we needed all hands on deck," she said in a 2016 ad that's now gone viral for all of the wrong reasons. "I'll fight to put human trafficking monsters where they belong," she continued. "Behind bars."

According to the motion for grand jury transcripts that Lemon and Georgia Fort (the other journalist charged in the case) filed yesterday, also on Tuesday, their attorneys had a video meeting with whoever plans to prosecute this case, at which DOJ opposed the bid to get transcripts. On February 10, 2026, counsel for Mr. Lemon and Ms. Fort met and conferred by video with government counsel and advised of their intent to file this joint motion. The government, through counsel, indicated they oppose this motion.

In an eyewitness video analyzed frame by frame by The New York Times, Alex Pretti raises one hand and holds a phone in the other. Federal agents tackle him, and one appears to find and remove a gun holstered on his hip. Then, an agent shoots - and a second follows. They appear to fire nine more shots as Pretti lies on the ground.

All I said to people who say, you have this tension, we didn't have any attention. All I said is, if you want to be a legislator and pass bills, it's important to have the votes to do it. It doesn't help to go online and criticize the people that you want to have because they're not as progressive as you are. She's been a star, eloquent, forceful, and the rest. And she gets along very well with Hakeem Jeffries. They have a New York connection, but I'm so glad she's here.

One of the most dramatic cases involves Larry Bushart, a retired police officer in Lexington, Tenn, according to NPR. A self-described progressive and "keyboard warrior," he posted memes that mocked Republican officials' mourning over Kirk. He was arrested by local police at the request of Sheriff Nick Weems of Perry County, Tenn. Prosecutors later dropped the charges, and Bushart is now suing, represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

It is important for us to recognize the unprecedented nature of what ICE was doing in Minneapolis, St Paul, the way that federal agents, ICE agents were being deployed, without any clear guidelines, training, pulling people out of their homes, using five-year-olds to try to bait their parents, all the stuff that we saw, teargassing crowds simply who were standing there, not breaking any laws, he added.

Since Donald Trump's first term, Stephen Miller has risen into an architect and enforcer of some of the president's most controversial policies. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the senior aide's rise, and how he's become one of the most powerful figures in the Trump administration.

Millions nationwide have begun the process of filing their yearly taxes - including many immigrants without a permanent immigration status. But since President Donald Trump's return to the White House, his administration has sought access to IRS data - including taxpayers' addresses - to further its immigration crackdown and locate undocumented immigrants. And last April, ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, secured a data-sharing agreement with the IRS, alarming many taxpayers who use ITINs to file.

The government's ability to deal with drones that pose a threat on American soil has been questioned this week after the use of a laser designed to shoot down drones near the border in Texas led to the abrupt closure of the airspace over El Paso, sources familiar with the situation told The Associated Press. The details of exactly what happened before the Federal Aviation Administration shut down the busy airport in the Mexican border city on Wednesday aren't entirely clear,

Let's get to the really important news out of the White House is that there is a baby boom going on there. Usha Vance, pregnant. Karoline Leavitt, pregnant, and Stephen Miller's wife, they're all about to have children. You know, they love babies over there at the conservative side of America. I don't understand it, but they think we need more babies. I always think we'd need less. Definitely less

Recently, the culprit has often been the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security is putting out white-nationalist dog whistles on X. President Trump posted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The subtext of every egregious shitpost from the administration is the same: These people are in charge now, and the old rules don't matter. A great deal of what I find myself scrolling past exudes a threatening, almost anarchical aura.

Denmark's prime minister and Greenland's premier met with United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio and agreed that talks would be pursued on the running of Greenland, the semi-autonomous Danish territory that President Donald Trump has threatened to take over. Rubio held a 15-minute meeting with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland's Premier Jens-Frederik Nielsen on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Friday.

The United States military said on Friday that it had struck another vessel suspected of trafficking drugs in the Caribbean, killing three people. The US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) posted an 11-second clip on social media platform X that showed a boat wading through waters before being hit by what the military called "a lethal kinetic strike" and exploding. The vessel "was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations," the statement from SOUTHCOM said.

I believe that in the absence of a unanimous agreement, [the Interior Department] should renew the existing agreements for five years, and then we should start all over. We should scrap the entire process and invent a new one.

Residents of East Harlem's El Barrio have waited 80+ years for the Second Avenue Subway. The Trump administration could force them to wait even longer as it withholds federal funding for regional infrastructure projects over an alleged naming issue, no less. It's outrageous, it's unfair, and the MTA backed by Governor Hochul won't stand for it. We're at a pivotal moment for the project sixth months after awarding our largest-ever tunneling contract back in August.

President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government's legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet." - The New York Times A new ruling from the Trump administration says that when the sun disappears at night, we don't know where it goes. All remaining top scientists have been taken from their positions and tasked with getting to the bottom of this.

It brings up mixed emotions to represent the U.S. right now,

A source told the Times that the idea had come from deputy director Dan Bongino, a cop-turned-right-wing-podcast-yapper, whose justification for the decision was as follows: "Bongino said, You can have the best female agent take down the biggest case in our history, but if on the Ring door-camera video she's out of shape or overweight, that's going to be the story. He was worried about whether or not they'd look good on a doorbell camera. He said it's the way these times are."