grimpy, grimpy@lemmy.myserv.one

“As a sixth-generation Iowa farmer, Tanner Faaborg is all too aware that agricultural traditions are hard to shake. So when he set in motion plans to change his family’s farm from a livestock operation housing more than 8,000 pigs each year to one that grows lion’s mane and oyster mushrooms, he knew some of his peers might laugh at him. He just did not necessarily expect his brother to be chief among them.

“Nurses at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Tacoma [WA] say that since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, they’ve seen many more ICE detainees come to the hospital as patients — always accompanied by two ICE agents acting as guards.

“Over a dozen young Americans as well as a coalition of environmental and public health groups on Wednesday filed a pair of legal challenges against President Donald Trump’s administration for repealing the “endangerment finding” that enabled federal policies aimed at combating the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.

A 2-month-old baby, Juan Nicolás, who became gravely ill while detained at ICE’s South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, has been deported to Mexico along with his parents and 16-month-old sibling. That’s according to Texas Congressmember Joaquin Castro, who had demanded the baby’s release after news he had been rushed to the hospital on Monday. Baby Juan had reportedly been detained at Dilley for about a month. Univision reporter Lidia Terrazas had spoken to Juan’s mom, who told her the baby had suffered a health episode, choking on his own vomit. When he was taken to Dilley’s medical area, guards were told there was no doctor available inside the facility at that time.

“Amid a severe economic crisis that is pushing the country to the brink of humanitarian disaster, Cuba is trying to accelerate its energy transition in the hope of freeing itself from its dependence on fossil fuels.

“Put simply, the loudmouths of the far right are competing in an attention economy. Saying something shocking wins attention, but to keep it they have to say something more shocking still. There is a ratchet effect, which ensures the conversation becomes ever more extreme. Note the latest effusion from the white supremacist US influencer Nick Fuentes. Holocaust denial worked for him for a while, but his audience demands more. This week, he provided it by directing his fire at women, whom he castigated for encouraging sympathy for the poor and minorities. “

“AMY GOODMAN: What do you make of…the acting ICE Director Todd Lyons declaring, “We’re only getting started”?

“Congressional Republicans are attempting to commandeer the midterm election cycle and increase voting margins in President Trump’s favor by putting a finger on the scale of our elections and pushing nonsensical, anti-democratic laws to stop voters from casting a ballot,” said Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert. “This overreaching, un-American bill tacks on unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles to vote, all of which would harm voters across the political spectrum.”

“”I have three struggles,” she said. “I am a woman, I am Indigenous and I am on the democratic left. I am working against all of history for the vindication of our historic cause.” She spoke of the need for a “plurinational” state that recognised the rights of self-governance among diverse groups. (Something similar has been implemented, with complications and backlash, into the constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador.)

“The US government must provide detainees at a California immigration detention center with adequate medical care, access to attorneys, and “temperature-appropriate clothing and blankets”, a federal judge has ruled. The order came on Tuesday in response to a lawsuit filed by seven people detained at the California City detention facility in November, alleging they had been denied essential medications, sufficient food and sanitary housing conditions.

“The [American Medical Association (AMA)] will help conduct a review on the safety and effectiveness of respiratory vaccines as federal health agencies and advisers end vaccine recommendations based on no new information.

“With the death toll from President Donald Trump’s boat bombings of alleged drug traffickers now at 130 after a Monday strike, a pair of progressive congresswomen on Tuesday called for ending the Monroe Doctrine and establishing a “New Good Neighbor” policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean.

“Senate Democrats have reportedly begun tentative negotiations with the White House just days before funding for the Homeland Security Department is set to expire at midnight on Friday, threatening another partial government shutdown. Joaquin Castro, a Democratic congressmember from Texas, visited the family immigration detention center in Dilley where 5-year-old Liam Ramos was held. Kids have been “traumatized by the experience,” says Castro.” “

“Scott Boyd is walking through deep mud near the mouth of the Stillaguamish River, on Puget Sound about 30 miles north of Seattle.

“The Super Bowl half-time show is inherently about compromise. But as he kicked off the Benito Bowl, somehow, Benito’s biggest compromise seemed to be the amount of words bleeped out of his verse.

“The tax law that congressional Republicans and US President Donald Trump enacted last summer has proved to be a massive boon for Amazon, slashing the corporate behemoth’s 2025 tax bill even as its profits surged and it moved ahead with mass layoffs that have cost 30,000 workers their jobs since October.

“Hundreds of Seattle-area students walked out of school Thursday and gathered at Seattle City Hall downtown to protest the tactics of federal immigration enforcement officers across the country…

“In Congress, where a fight over funding for CBP and ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, is playing out, [Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan] Omar has stood with other progressives in recent votes. The bill signed by Trump on Tuesday only funds DHS through the middle of the month, though Republicans gave ICE an extra $75 billion in last year’s budget package.”

“The top ten metropolitan areas, including Seattle’s, generate an astonishing 90 percent of the US GDP, and 88 percent of its employment. The modern economy would collapse without them. Without this kind of economic power, you don’t have an Idaho, or a Wyoming, or a Montana. You don’t have a billionaire class. Yet cities are now under violent attack from the GOP, the party that represents the ruling class, because they’re too blue, because they have policies that are supposed to protect the rights of immigrants, and so on. Yet ICE has only one mission: make the lives of city people miserable. This is the paradox of all American paradoxes and it has seemingly backfired.

“Teachers slipping to work under cover of darkness. The windows of a school building papered over to stop onlookers from peering in. Classrooms more than half-empty in an eerie echo of the pandemic five years ago.