After a five-year pause in student loan collections, the Trump administration has begun ruthless collection efforts while simultaneously preparing massive budget cuts to higher education programs.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/05/07/yddc-m07.html
On May 6, Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed HB 41. It changes the filing deadline for new parties from August 1 to July 1. Also it says that if a new party petition is found not to have enough valid signatures, the party that circulated it can’t just supplement the original petition. Instead it must start all over with a new petition.
Maryland is the second state this year to have made ballot access more difficult for minor parties. The first was New Jersey. Both states have Democratic majorities in both houses of the legislature, and Democratic governors.
Ari Paul (FAIR.org, 4/25/25): “Going after public broadcasters is…part of the neo-fascist playbook authoritarian leaders around the world are using to clamp down on dissent and keep the public in the dark.”
The death of former 1960s radical turned right-wing provocateur David Horowitz brought to mind the time he called me “stupid” (Michigan Daily, 9/8/03) because he disliked a column (Michigan Daily, 9/2/03) I wrote about neoconservatism.
I was reminded of that again just days later when Matt Taibbi (Racket News, 5/4/25), a journalist who left Occupy Wall Street populism for ruling class sycophancy, attacked my recent article, “Cuts to PBS, NPR Part of Authoritarian Playbook” (FAIR.org, 4/25/25). In his response, titled, “No, State Media and Democracy Don’t…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://fair.org/home/taibbi-cites-government-attacks-on-media-to-defend-government-attacks-on-media/
On May 5, U.S. District Court Judge Richard E. Myers II, a Trump appointee and a member of the Federalist Society, issued an order in Griffin v North Carolina State Board of Elections, e.d., 5:24cv-731. The ruling says North Carolina cannot refuse to count the votes of voters who voted in November 2024 election, and who had been told at the time that they had fulfilled all steps taken to have their votes count. The order is stayed for seven days in case the losing side wishes to appeal to the Fourth Circuit.
This lawsuit stems from the very close race for Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. The vote shows that the Democratic nominee won…
Trump’s plan is designed to safeguard the profits of the US entertainment conglomerates and monopolize cultural production.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/05/05/eare-m05.html
On the morning of April 23, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies executed search warrants at multiple homes in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and Canton Township, Michigan. The raids reportedly targeted a number of student organizers who were connected to Gaza protests at the University of Michigan.
According to the group Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), agents seized the students’ electronics and a number of personal items. Four individuals were detained, but eventually released.
TAHRIR Coalition, a student-led movement calling for divestment from Israel, said that officers initially refused to present warrants at the Ypsilanti raid. They were unable to confirm whether ICE was present at the raid.
The post FBI And Police Raid Homes Of Palestine…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://popularresistance.org/fbi-and-police-raid-homes-of-palestine-activists-in-michigan/
Roku, owner of one of the most popular connected TV operating systems in the country, walks a fine line when it comes to advertising. Roku’s OS lives on low-priced smart TVs, streaming sticks, and projectors. To make up the losses from cheaply priced hardware, Roku is dependent on selling advertisements throughout its OS, including screensavers and its home screen.
That business model has pushed Roku to experiment with new ways of showing ads that test users’ tolerance. The company claims that it doesn’t want ads on its platform to be considered intrusive, but there are reasons to be skeptical about Roku’s pledge.
Non-“interruptive” ads
In an interview with The Verge this week, Jordan Rost, Roku’s head of ad marketing,…
Folks, Greetings from the Burgh, where I am getting back in the swing of things after struggling with stomach issues. Donate to help us pay the healthcare premium.United Auto Workers Reform Caucus to Disband In 2021, Scott Houldieson led the effort to help found Unite for All Workers (UAWD), a reform caucus within the UAW. Now, Houldieson is leading efforts to disband the reform caucus in a vote this weekend. The move to disband the UAW’s reform caucus comes as Shawn Fain forms a “Unity Caucus” to bring together various factions of the union. Houldieson is proposing that the reform caucus funds be steered into the Unity Caucus. Union members are protesting the move, though. Last week, Payday broke a story about…
Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a 32-year-old Venezuelan immigrant and father, legally in the United States, has apparently been disappeared to El Salvador after making a wrong turn on the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Detroit to Ontario, Canada.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/04/23/ulhi-a23.html
After obliterating the federal office on long COVID and clawing back billions in COVID funding from state health departments, the Trump administration has now entirely erased the online hub for federal COVID-19 resources. In its place now stands a site promoting the unproven idea that the pandemic virus SARS-CoV-2 was generated in and leaked from a lab in China, sparking the global health crisis.
Navigating to COVID.gov brings up a slick site with rich content that lays out arguments and allegations supporting a lab-based origin of the pandemic and subsequent cover-up by US health officials and Democrats.
Previously, the site provided unembellished quick references to COVID-19 resources, including links to information on vaccines, testing, treatments, and long COVID….
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/04/covid-gov-now-redirects-to-site-promoting-unproven-lab-leak/
A three-judge panel warned that the “lawlessness” of the executive branch was threatening the constitutional order in the United States.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/04/18/tyrn-a18.html
Narc dot AI: American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers […] Massive Blue, the New York-based company that is selling police departments this technology, calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an “AI-powered force multiplier for public safety” that “deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels.” […] 404 Media obtained a presentation showing some of these AI characters. These include a “radicalized AI” “protest persona,” which poses as a 36-year-old…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/04/hello-fellow-kids-doing-crimes-is-tight/
A three-judge panel warned that the “lawlessness” of the executive branch was threatening the constitutional order in the United States.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/04/18/tyrn-a18.html
The History
Before dataclasses were added to Python in version 3.7 — in June of 2018 — the
__init__ special method had an important use. If you had a class
representing a data structure — for example a 2DCoordinate, with x and y
attributes — you would want to be able to construct it as 2DCoordinate(x=1,
y=2), which would require you to add an __init__ method with x and y
parameters.
The other options available at the time all had pretty bad problems:You could remove 2DCoordinate from your public API and instead expose a make_2d_coordinate function and make it non-importable, but then how would you document your return or parameter types?
You could document the x and y attributes and make the user assign…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.glyph.im/2025/04/stop-writing-init-methods.html
The Internet Archive needs your help. A coalition of major record labels has filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive—demanding $700 million for our work preserving and providing access to historical 78rpm records. These fragile, obsolete discs hold some of the earliest recordings of a vanishing American culture. But this lawsuit goes far beyond old records. It’s an attack on the Internet Archive itself. This lawsuit is an existential threat to the Internet Archive and everything we preserve—including the Wayback Machine, a cornerstone of memory and preservation on the internet. At a time when digital information is disappearing, being rewritten, or erased entirely, the tools to preserve history must be defended—not dismantled. This isn’t just…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2025/04/17/take-action-defend-the-internet-archive/
On Monday, Juan Francisco Méndez was apprehended on a street in New Bedford, Massachusetts, after immigration police smashed his car window with a pick-axe and yanked him and his wife out of the vehicle.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/04/17/pcoi-a17.html
On April 15, Allison Riggs, the winner of the North Carolina November 2024 State Supreme Court judicial race (according to official election returns), appealed to the Fourth Circuit for a stay of the U.S. District Court order that permits further judgment of thousands of the ballots. Griffin v Riggs and North Carolina State Board of Elections, 25-1397 and 25-1398.
The issue is whether the State Supreme Court violated the U.S. Constitution last week when it invalidated some overseas and miliatry absentee ballots and put others under a legal cloud.
COFOE, the Coalition for Free & Open Elections, is now 40 years old. COFOE is a loose coalition of some of the nation’s nationally-organized minor parties, plus other organizations that support tolerant ballot access. The founding meeting to bring such an organization into existence was held February 9, 1985, at 113 University Place, New York. Representatives of the Citizens, Communist, Humanist, Libertarian, New Alliance, Populist, and Socialist Party attended, along with Art Eisenberg of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
The March 16 meeting, also held in New York, created the Statement of Principles.
The May 11 meeting, also held in New York, chose the name “Coalition for Free & Open Elections.”
Back then, before the internet and e-mail,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2025/04/16/cofoe-is-now-forty-years-old/
Trump beamed as the Salvadoran dictator declared it would be “preposterous” to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the wrongly deported father of three, to the United States.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/04/15/byib-a15.html
On April 14, some overseas North Carolina voters filed their own lawsuit to save their November 2024 ballots from being invalidated. Cooley v Hirsch, e.d., 5:25cv-193. They put out that they followed all the rules when they voted last year. The rules said they didn’t need to enclose a copy of their photo ID. Yet now the State Supreme Court is ordering them all to send such copies in a short time period, or have their votes discarded.
The new case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Richard E. Myers, who already has the associated case filed by the State Board of Elections.