MOTHER JONES – Politics | Politics & Government

Every few months, you likely notice something: people on Instagram calling for a general strike. The posts will appear suddenly, evincing urgency but sparse in details. Their provenance is usually obscure. But the message is always clear. To resist Trump’s authoritarian agenda, Americans need to unite in a national economic blackout. The cyclical nature of the posts can be frustrating, but the impulse is born from a hopeful place. General strikes have a rich history in the United States. A wave of citywide strikes in the 1940s proved so threatening to the prevailing order that Congress passed the Taft–Hartley Act, banning unions from striking in solidarity with workers at other companies. For the past few decades, the general strike has seemed more like the fanciful hope of the anarchist bookstore poster than a real possibility. Online, much the same has happened. Modern-day social media calls for mass strikes have rarely… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

During his address to God at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Rep. Jonathan Jackson, a democrat from Illinois, called on President Donald Trump to be “invested in the elevation of suffering” of people in this country, including “the families preparing to bury their loved ones in Minneapolis.”  Rep. Jackson, son of civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson, asked God to “remind” the president “that he has the power to turn mourning into dancing or to reduce the country into a cosmic elegy of chaos and suffering” as Trump stood just feet away, his eyes fluttering open and shut during the prayer.  The representative’s prayer provided an uninterrupted moment in a crowded room to call attention to the ongoing and violent federal immigration operation in Minneapolis, which, as Jackson noted, included agents fatally shooting two US citizens: Renée Good and Alex Pretti.  Both men were on stage for the… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

On Monday, in a dramatic escalation of his administration’s attempt to interfere in the midterm elections, President Trump called on Republicans “to take over the voting in at least 15 places.”  Trump’s efforts “to nationalize the voting,” as he put it, will be difficult to pull off, since states have control over the administration of elections under the Constitution. But there is one place he could succeed: Fulton County, Georgia, where the FBI just seized more than 650 boxes of ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in an unprecedented raid on January 28. That’s because, in the aftermath of the president’s lies about the 2020 election, Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a sweeping rewrite of the state’s voting laws that gave the state election board (which now has a Trump-aligned MAGA majority) the extraordinary power to take over up to four county election boards that it views as… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is developing a generative artificial intelligence tool to find patterns across data reported to a national vaccine monitoring database and to generate hypotheses on the negative effects of vaccines, according to an inventory released last week of all use cases the agency had for AI in 2025. The tool has not yet been deployed, according to the HHS document, and an AI inventory report from the previous year shows that it has been in development since late 2023. But experts worry that the predictions it generates could be used by HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to further his anti-vaccine agenda. A long-standing vaccine critic, Kennedy has upended the childhood vaccination schedule in his year in office, removing several shots from a list of recommended immunizations for all children, including those for Covid-19, influenza, hepatitis… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

It’s been a half-century since Thomas Grace was knocked off his feet by an Ohio National Guardsman’s bullet, but he still braces for a flashback whenever people “under the color of uniform” concoct dubious claims to justify deadly force against other Americans. Last month it happened again. He watched as videos from Minneapolis showed agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement shoot, first Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, and, less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Veterans Administration nurse. And then he saw officials from the Trump administration scramble to avoid accountability and shift blame to the victims. “Sometimes I feel like I’m able to shake this kind of thing off,” Grace told me when I gave him a call last week. But those attacks, he said, were “just so violent and unprovoked” that “it definitely had an impact on me.” The basic facts of… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.