News

I know mods only want links to News sources, but you can actually watch Tana herself say it on her podcast. Imo this is news because Tana says it's not just her who was offered money, but most influencers. Here's a link to part of the clip: https://youtu.be/gYlvJzrE2wc?si=24V9OkBueTESka2d

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20455372

September 16, 2024

The group that successfully sued Harvard to end affirmative action in university admissions last year is now threatening to investigate whether schools are complying with the new rules and to file lawsuits if it believes that they are not.

The group, Students for Fair Admissions, has focused on three universities — Princeton, Yale and Duke — where there were notable declines in Asian American enrollment this year compared with the last year, which the group said defied expectations.

On Tuesday, Students for Fair Admissions sent letters to the schools questioning whether they were complying with the rules laid out by the Supreme Court. Princeton, Duke and Yale also saw minor differences in Black and Hispanic enrollment in the first class of students admitted since the court struck down race-conscious admissions.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20455638

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20455628

September 18, 2024

WASHINGTON (AP) — A longtime CIA officer who drugged, photographed and sexually assaulted more than two dozen women in postings around the world was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison Wednesday after an emotional hearing in which victims described being deceived by a man who appeared kind, educated and part of an agency “that is supposed to protect the world from evil.”

Brian Jeffrey Raymond, with a graying beard and orange prison jumpsuit, sat dejectedly as he heard his punishment for one of the most egregious misconduct cases in the CIA’s history. It was chronicled in his own library of more than 500 images that showed him in some cases straddling and groping his nude, unconscious victims.

“It’s safe to say he’s a sexual predator,” U.S. Senior Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said in imposing the full sentence prosecutors had requested. “You are going to have a period of time to think about this.”

More than half of all Americans, including a quarter of Democrats, support the mass deportation of immigrants who are living in the country illegally, a new poll found.

The Scripps News/Ipsos survey’s findings come as former President Trump and his allies have intensely focused on immigration in the 2024 election cycle.

About 54 percent of respondents — 86 percent of Republicans, 58 percent of independents and 25 percent of Democrats — said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support a wide-scale effort to deport millions of immigrants, and 59 percent said they are closely following the “immigration situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.”

That is fucking terrifying.

More than 100 Republican former national security and foreign policy officials on Wednesday endorsed Kamala Harris for president in a joint letter, calling Donald Trump “unfit to serve” another term in the White House.

Former officials from the presidential administrations of Republicans Ronald Reagan, George H W Bush, George W Bush and Donald Trump, as well as Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama voiced their support for Harris, the Democratic nominee for president in this November’s election. They were joined by some former GOP members of Congress.

The letter said: “We believe that the president of the United States must be a principled, serious, and steady leader.”

It went on: “We expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues, but we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as president and Donald Trump does not. We therefore support her election to be president.”

Cross-posted from https://lemmy.world/post/19924712

Trump-backed election officials in Georgia are rewriting the rules of how to certify elections in a way that would let Stop the Steal activists obstruct the results — and now, Georgia's Republican Secretary of State is getting involved to try to put a stop to it, New York Times reporter Nick Corasaniti told MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday.

Brad Raffensperger, a dedicated conservative, has frequently clashed with former President Donald Trump over his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen. Trump's phone call demanding Raffensperger "find" extra votes for him is also a focus of multiple criminal cases against the former president.

"The State Election Board in Georgia, which has recently seen a 3-2 majority, right-wing majority take over the board, is passing new rules that are concerning, not just Democrats, but Republicans and election officials, and everyone from the county level to the state level in Georgia that could possibly disrupt the post-election period. We're talking about the certification, the counting of votes, the tallying of votes, and the sending off of electors to the Electoral College," (Corasaniti) said.

During President Donald Trump’s administration, they said, their managers at the Environmental Protection Agency began pressuring them to make new chemicals they were vetting seem safer than they really were. They were encouraged to delete evidence of chemicals’ harms, including cancer, miscarriage and neurological problems, from their reports — and in some cases, they said, their managers deleted the information themselves.

One month after The Washington Post revealed that the Egyptian government may have illegally given Donald Trump $10 million in 2017, Democrats have announced they will be investigating the allegations.

Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, led by ranking member Representative Jamie Raskin, announced in a press release Tuesday that they will be “demanding answers” from the Republican presidential nominee not only over the possible bribe from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi, but also over evidence that the Justice Department, led at the time by Attorney General William Barr, covered it up.

Former President Donald Trump has said he would cancel all unspent funds from President Joe Biden's signature climate law if he wins the presidential election on Nov. 5.

But the vast majority of grants will be spent by the time a new president takes office in January, and targeting what remains would be a massive legal challenge, according to Biden administration officials.

The Biden administration has awarded $90 billion in grants to climate, clean energy, and other projects so far under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which amounts to 70% of the law’s roughly $120 billion in total climate-focused grant money and over 80% of what the law made available before 2025, according to administration officials.