The glaciers are seen as the floes melt due to global climate change in Antarctica on February 07, 2022. Turkish scientists, within the scope of the 6th National Antarctic Science Expedition, monitored the global climate change and followed the glaciers that provide the heat balance of the world and decrease every year. (Photo by Sebnem Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“This of course reflects Trump administration policy, which counters any focus on climate at international meetings,” said a US researcher and former diplomat.
The Trump administration is under fire over its efforts to have any mention of the climate crisis removed from a scientific report, published this week, aimed at informing nations that are party to a global treaty designed to protect the Antarctic.
Details of the “diplomatic tensions” surrounding the report, which took place during a meeting in May with delegates from around the world focused on the Antarctic Treaty, were detailed by Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) correspondent Jano Gibson.
The report reveals that France took issue with the US’s suggestion not to use broad terms such as “climate change” and instead refer to “specific” environmental changes.
“France … expressed it had strong concern about the gradual disappearance of references to climate change in the work of the Committee [for Environmental Protection],” the report states.
“France emphasized that climate change was a reality affecting all countries, regardless of borders.
Claire Christian, executive director of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, told ABC that there’s zero controversy within the scientific community that a changing climate due to global warming is having deep impacts on the Antarctic region.
“The evidence is clear: the Antarctic region is undergoing rapid climate change, and this is already having significant effects on planetary systems,” Christian said. “If we don’t reduce our carbon emissions rapidly, these effects will only become more severe and unpredictable.”
While a France warned that “refusing to even name climate change” would set “a dangerous precedent,” Evan Bloom, a former US diplomat and Antarctic researcher involved in international negotiations on the topic said the position taken by the US at the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting was very much in keeping with the behavior and policies of President Donald Trump.
The US position, said Bloom, “shows how out of step the US is with most of the rest of the world on climate change. Yet, this of course reflects Trump administration policy, which counters any focus on climate at international meetings.”
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says Sundown Syndrome is a dead givaway and he wishes someone would Lock Him Up
A huge crowd of American expats gathers for the No Kings Movement protest on March 28, 2026 in Place de la Bastille, in Paris, France, displaying signs that label federal agents rather than protesters as “domestic terrorists.” (Photo by Owen Franken Corbis//Getty Images)
National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, which President Donald Trump issued last year, explicitly targets left-wing protesters and beliefs.
Federal prosecutors in Minnesota have struggled to come up with charges that stick as they’ve indicted dozens of people this year for protesting President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, and observers suggested Tuesday’s indictments of 15 organizers would likely fail to convince any court. But with a US attorney explicitly citing Trump’s memo threatening to crack down on left-wing protesters, advocates warned the charges were a “major escalation” against First Amendment rights.
US Attorney Daniel Rosen, who was appointed by Trump for the District of Minnesota last year, noted in his announcement of the indictments that Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) last September and that “Joint Task Force Vanguard,” an investigative group set up “to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation,” had worked on the case.
NSPM-7, as Common Dreams reported last year, was issued weeks after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and focuses exclusively on left-wing and “anti-fascist” activities, mandating a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
Around the same time, Trump issued an executive order asserting that “antifa,” or the anti-fascist movement, had been designated as a “domestic terrorist organization,” despite the fact that there is no centralized antifa group and that the president does not have the authority to make such a designation.
The president’s directives underpinned the indictment of 15 organizers, including at least one professor and several union leaders and members, who had led direct actions and protests against federal agents during Operation Metro Surge, a crackdown by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies in Minnesota earlier this year.
Rosen said the defendants were members of two Minneapolis-based groups—Direct Action Minnesota and Black Cat Workers Collective—that were associated with “antifa” and were “violently opposed to the enforcement of federal law in our state.”
🚨 Feds point to NSPM-7 as basis for charging 15 anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota, alleging ties to "Antifa".
U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen: "Last year, President Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which directed the Department of Justice to prioritize… pic.twitter.com/s3uCKCi09V
Twelve of the defendants were arrested on Tuesday, while one had already been in custody on other charges and two had not yet been detained.
The charges include conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, interstate stalking, assault on a federal officer, and destruction of government property.
But after examining the indictment, David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, found just one “documented, charged violence by any defendant in the actual indictment against any ICE agent’s person”: A defendant, William Morgan, “approached one of the agents and knocked the agent’s notes out of his hand.”
Bier listed the rest of the overt acts included in the 94-page indictment, which he described as a “cobbled together series of basically unrelated incidents or comments, nearly all of it not criminal with a few minor crimes, effectively all nonviolent acts of civil disobedience.”
The other acts include “attending meetings,” “posting on Facebook and social media about resistance to ICE,” “posting flyers advertising direct actions,” “conducting after-action reviews,” “forming human blockades” at a building used for ICE operations in Minneapolis, and impeding ICE vehicles with sandbags, debris, and vehicles to block roads.
You can read the indictment below. It is a cobbled together series of basically unrelated incidents or comments, nearly all of it not criminal with a few minor crimes, effectively all nonviolent acts of civil disobedience.
At the press conference Tuesday, evidence presented by Rosen included a Facebook post in which one defendant, Cameron Kennedy, said, “We need to become ungovernable.”
Organizers expressed that they were “highly critical of nonviolent peaceful protest,” said Rosen.
“Oh,” said Bier in response on social media.
"Here you will see a social media post that says 'we need to become ungovernable.'" Oh. https://t.co/iQ2DBipBYl
Journalist Ryan Grim of Drop Site News also pointed to a section of the indictment that accuses Isaac Auman Sant of engaging in conduct that “caused, attempted to cause, or would be reasonably expected to cause substantial emotional distress to a person.”
“Actual federal charges in Minnesota for hurting ICE agents’ feelings,” Grim said.
The defendants appeared in the US District Court for the District of Minnesota on Tuesday, where Judge John Docherty said the defendants were being released for the time being and that the conditions for a detention hearing had not been met.
A defendant named Erik Davis, a religious studies professor at Macalester College, told Docherty that according to the indictment, he was being “indicted for holding meetings.”
While the charges were denounced as outrageous by a number of observers, an attorney for one of the defendants, Bruce Nestor, told Democracy Now! that the conspiracy charge “is really an attempt to broaden the net of federal law enforcement and to expand the ability of the federal government to target our movement and to foster repression.”
Federal prosecutors have charged 15 Minnesotans for conspiracy to impede or injure immigration officers in Minneapolis earlier this year during President Trump’s so-called Operation Metro Surge. The indictment has linked the defendants to anti-fascist or "antifa" groups. Trump… pic.twitter.com/5eAI1WmUrI
Adam Federman of Type Investigations said the administration’s strategy for cracking down on those who oppose its political agenda appears to be: “Define a loose coalition of activists opposed to the government’s immigration policies as Antifa, make the case that Antifa is a terrorist organization, and then prosecute them on conspiracy charges. We’re going to see a lot more of this.”
The indictment was announced weeks after federal prosecutors dropped all charges against four protesters who had been accused of interfering with ICE agents at a detention center in the Chicago area.
In March, the Trump administration won its first legal victory in its effort to criminalize groups that organize against its agenda when a federal jury convicted eight people of domestic terrorism because they wore all black to a protest outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, where one of the protesters shot and wounded a police officer.
“Prairieland was exhibit A,” said Federman on Tuesday. “My guess is that we will get to the end of the alphabet before this administration runs its course.”
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) noted that the federal officers who fatally shot two Minneapolis protesters, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, in January have not been criminally charged.
“While the killers of Renée Good and Alex Pretti walk free, the DOJ is busy bringing bogus charges against protesters,” said Omar. “The administration thinks intimidation will make us back down. They keep learning the same lesson: Minnesotans don’t scare easily. We organize for our rights.”
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Protesters and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents face off in Minneapolis following the January 13, 2026 fatal shooting of Renee Good. (Photo by Elizabeth Flores/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
“The federal government sent hordes of masked, armed agents to grab people off the street, whisk them away in shackles, and abuse those who sought to bear witness,” Human Rights Watch said of the deadly blitz.
Human Rights Watch on Thursday published a scathing report detailing how President Donald Trump “caused a human rights crisis” in Minnesota by ordering the deadly federal invasion of the Twin Cities in service of the administration’s mass deportation agenda.
HRW called Operation Metro Surge, launched by Trump last December, “an unprecedented deployment of thousands of federal immigration agents and officers to the state of Minnesota,” including members of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
“The Trump administration claimed that Operation Metro Surge was designed to keep Americans safe and often stated that it was targeting noncitizens with violent criminal histories,” the report states. “But the operation itself caused significant harm, and nearly two out of three immigrants arrested by ICE during Operation Metro Surge had no prior US criminal history whatsoever.”
At least three people have been killed in connection with the operation. ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renée Good, a 37-year-old US citizen, in Minneapolis on January 7. A week later, 36-year-old Nicaraguan detainee Victor Manuel Díaz, who was arrested during the operation, became the third person to die at the notorious East Montana concentration camp in Texas. On January 24, CBP officer Raymundo Gutierrez and Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa shot and killed nurse Alex Pretti, 37, also in Minneapolis.
“Federal agents shot a third Minneapolis resident and pulled guns on dozens more,” the report continues. “Agents also violently smashed car windows without justification, physically threw people to the ground who were not resisting arrest, and deployed chemical irritants and flash-bang grenades on dozens of occasions, sometimes at close range and without warning, resulting in injuries, including to journalists.”
Furthermore, federal agents “unlawfully arrested and detained hundreds; engaged in racial profiling, harassment, and surveillance; and terrorized Minnesotans, chilling their rights to freedom of expression and assembly, and impacting their rights to education and health, among others,” HRW said, adding that “residents faced further abuses when they collectively acted to protest, prevent, and stop these violations of their rights.”
The HRW report calls for an immediate end to abusive federal enforcement operations in Minnesota; independent investigations into alleged unlawful killings, racial profiling, arbitrary arrests, excessive force, and other rights violations; and full accountability for officials responsible.
“The federal government sent hordes of masked, armed agents to grab people off the street, whisk them away in shackles, and abuse those who sought to bear witness,” Reagan Williams, HRW’s crisis and conflict researcher, said in a statement. “Minnesotans mobilized to protest, to document abuse, and to provide critical aid to one another. National-level action is needed to ensure accountability, end ongoing abuses, remedy the harm, and prevent another crisis of this scale.”
“Operation Metro Surge put the violent and abusive practices of these agencies on full display,” Williams added. “We have clear proof of how they operate when impunity prevails, and we need to urgently chart a new way forward through accountability and structural reforms that put an end to these abuses.”
dizzy: Josh Simons was the MP for Makerfield who gave it up so that Andy Burnham could contest it. Makerfield was considered a safe [ed: Labour] seat and awarded to Simmons as payback for his work as director, following Morgan McSweeney, of the Labour Together group. Labour Together – since rebranded as ThinkLabour – employed dishonest and evil tactics to have Keir Starmer installed as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister. Having been handed the seat of Makersfield, Andy Burnham is able to contest the leadership of the Labour Party. The cynical might regard it as a convenient stitch-up [ed: stitched-up, manipulated part of a larger plan]. I expect no meaningful change.
Revealed: APCO legal letter warned Simons to cease making “misleading statements” about PR firm’s “incredibly useful” dossier on journalists investigating Labour Together.
By Peter Geoghegan and Khadija Sharife
Josh Simons has had a good couple of weeks. The former Cabinet Office minister – forced to resign over his role in hiring a PR firm to investigate journalists critical of Labour Together – is now being praised for standing aside as Makerfield MP to clear the path for Andy Burnham.
Simons is reportedly “across everything” in Burnham’s campaign and is hotly tipped for a top role in any future administration led by the Greater Manchester Mayor. There’s even talk of a seat in the House of Lords.
But not everyone is so enamoured with Simons.
Democracy for Sale can report that days after Simons resigned from the Cabinet Office – following revelations in this newsletter – he received a legal letter on behalf of the PR firm he had paid more than £30,000 to investigate journalists reporting on Labour Together’s undeclared political donations.
In the lawyer’s letter, reported here for the first time and reproduced below, APCO Worldwide privately accused Simons of making “misleading statements” about his role in the scandal and of changing his story in ways that were “wrong in numerous important respects” – and even of suggesting APCO could do more work for Labour Together.
…
APCO did not just dispute Simons’ February 11 statement. His version of events, it said, had “evolved” in the two weeks before his resignation – in ways that were “inconsistent with the facts”.
In his resignation letter to Keir Starmer on February 28, Simons said he “did not know” that the Sunday Times’s Harry Yorke and Henry Dyer of the Guardian had been targeted by APCO, and that once he saw the “reprehensible material” about Pogrund “I took immediate action and removed it.”
APCO flatly rejected this. “No such indication was given to APCO. You did not raise a complaint or objection to the work product delivered. On the contrary, you described it as ‘incredibly useful’ and stated a desire to continue to work with APCO. Your statement ‘What happened subsequently was wrong’ in your resignation letter is inconsistent with your statements to APCO and actions at the time.”
US Education Secretary Linda McMahon speaks alongside Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner on May 5, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“By moving special education from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, the administration is taking us back to a dark period in American history.”
The Trump administration accelerated its assault on the US Education Department on Tuesday by announcing that the agency’s work defending civil rights and students with disabilities will be placed under the authority of other federal departments, a move that teachers, Democratic lawmakers, and advocacy organizations condemned as illegal and disastrous for vulnerable children.
Linda McMahon, the billionaire education secretary who has enthusiastically advanced the destruction of her own agency, announced the transfer of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services—which oversees the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)—to the US Department of Health and Human Services, headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Additionally, the Justice Department will oversee the work of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, McMahon said, claiming the changes would “break down the bureaucratic barriers and strengthen the coordination of resources to improve programs that serve infants, toddlers, children, and adults.”
Critics argued the moves would do the opposite, scattering crucial programs across departments that lack the expertise and resources to fulfill the education offices’ mandates, ultimately depriving children and their families of support.
“Moving IDEA out of the Department of Education is not an administrative adjustment—it is an attack on the educational and civil rights foundation of the law,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association. “It would drag us backward by treating disability as a medical issue instead of an educational right and by unraveling decades of progress. The Department of Education is the only federal agency with the expertise, infrastructure, and specialists needed to protect students’ rights and ensure they receive the services they are guaranteed.”
“Relocating the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice as part of this scheme would further erode federal oversight and endanger disability-rights enforcement nationwide,” Pringle added.
The Arc of the United States, a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, said that “moving special education to HHS and civil rights enforcement to DOJ would split apart the offices responsible for making disability rights real in schools, leaving families chasing answers across the federal government instead of getting accountability from one education agency.”
“Moving IDEA oversight into HHS pushes students with disabilities toward a medical model, where disability is treated as a diagnosis to manage instead of a natural part of human life,” said Katy Neas, the group’s CEO. “When that mindset drives education decisions, students are more likely to be segregated, underestimated, or treated as separate from the school community.”
“It’s an outrageous betrayal that undoes decades of hard-won progress for students.”
The changes that McMahon announced Tuesday are part of the Trump administration’s effort to completely dismantle the Education Department, which cannot be legally abolished without congressional approval. The Washington Post noted that the newly targeted offices were among the last Education Department segments to “outsource major functions,” underscoring that the administration’s assault “has advanced far more than most observers predicted would be possible.”
In addition to displacing agency functions, the Trump administration has gutted the Education Department’s staff, firing nearly half of its workers in what opponents say is an obvious effort to decimate public education.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said the transfer of critical functions out of the Education Department is unlawful, “usurping the power of the purse while the Republican majority stands idly by, forfeiting their authority as a co-equal branch of government.” DeLauro pointed to language in a 2026 appropriations measure enacted earlier this year that prohibits the Education Department from transferring responsibilities to other federal agencies without congressional approval.
“This is a disgraceful violation of the law,” DeLauro said Tuesday. “By moving special education from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, the administration is taking us back to a dark period in American history. One where individuals with disabilities were viewed not as whole persons deserving of an education, but as medical patients whose education is not a priority.”
The top Democratic appropriator in the Senate, Patty Murray of Washington, warned that “the Trump administration is abandoning kids with disabilities and its most basic legal responsibility to protect the rights of every student in the classroom.”
“Instead of helping kids get a great education, this administration is spending its time, energy, and taxpayer resources fixated on where employees sit and illegally trying to shutter the Department of Education,” said Murray. “It’s an outrageous betrayal that undoes decades of hard-won progress for students.”
