#Northern Lawmakers

[morganablenewsmedia]

Tax Reform Bill: Northern Senators Seek Suspension

Tax Reform Bill: Northern senators seek suspension as it passed the second reading Various Senators from the Northern part of Nigeria have sought the suspension on the controversial Tax Reform Bills which has recently passed the second reading. The move was made on Monday amidst a meeting, highlighting possible adverse effects it might have on the North. It can be recalled that the members of the…

[specialagentartemis]

Some good things happening at the local level: Land Back edition

The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians purchased back 2,000 acres of deeply historically significant land in Oregon, the site of both a massacre of Native people at the hands of the US army, and the site of a treaty signing that established a temporary truce and reservation. (Posted Jan 21, 2025)

The property was purchased directly from the previous landowner. The Nature Conservancy preserves a conservation easement on the land. The Siletz will continue to work closely with the Nature Conservancy and the BLM across the properties in the region to emphasize conservation and restoration. “To me, land back means, in its purest form, its return of lands to a tribe,” Kentta [citizen of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and the tribal council treasurer] said. “This is through purchase, and a significant amount paid out for the purchase. So for us, that is regaining of land back, but it's not a settlement or apology for things that happened in the past.”

The Tule River Tribe in California is moving forward with a plan to buy back 14,673 acres of rivers, forests, ranchland, and wetland in a conservation project partnering with The Conservation Fund, the Wildlife Conservation Board, and various California conservation organizations. It's set to move into Tule River control (or at least co-management? unclear to me) sometime this year. (Posted January 8, updated January 10, 2025)

Charmaine McDarment, chairwoman of the Tule River Tribal Council, said in a press release that the tribe appreciates help in restoring ancestral homelands. “As the climate crisis brings new pressures to address the effects of environmental mismanagement and resource degradation, the Tribe’s partnership with WCB is an important example of building relationships based in collaboration and trust. “The tribe remains committed to supporting co-stewardship efforts and fighting to ensure that disproportionate harms to Native American lands, culture, and resources are resolved in a manner that centers and honors Native American connections to ancestral lands.”

Illinois lawmakers voted to move Shabbona Lake State Park to the management of The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation.  The Illinois governor has a lot on his plate right now, but is expected to sign the bill into law. (Posted January 14, 2025)

The state House approved SB 867, which would transfer Shabbona Lake State Park to the Prairie Band Potawatomi. The bill now heads to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker for his signature.  The land transfer hinges on an agreement that the tribe continue to operate the property as a park, still open to the public. Final details will be established in a forthcoming land management agreement between the state and tribe.  Prairie Band Potawatomi Chairman Joseph “Zeke” Rupnick said the bill’s passage was a “meaningful step” toward righting a historic old wrong. The land was originally part of the tribe's 1,280-acre reservation in northern Illinois. During Chief Shab-eh-nay's visit to family in Kansas, the land was unlawfully auctioned off, violating federal requirements for Congressional approval of tribal land sales. The tribe has sought to reclaim the land for nearly two centuries.

A Wabanaki food sovereignty group secured a no-strings-attached land deal to buy 245 acres of farm and forest in Maine, to focus on local, traditional, and sustainable foods. (Posted January 19, 2025)

What sets this purchase apart is that the land transfer comes without conservation easements. These easements, which frequently accompany land returns or transfers, are often well-meaning. However, they can inhibit Indigenous stewardship by preventing practices such as prescribed burning, subdivision, or particular kinds of zoning for buildings or infrastructure.  A coalition of 12 organizations and several private donors helped secure the land for Niweskok [a nonprofit collective of Wabanaki farmers, health professionals, and educators] without easements, giving the Wabanaki nonprofit sovereignty over the property, according to Heather Rogers, Land Protection Program director for Coastal Mountain Land Trust. Her organization has helped finance the Goose River purchase through fundraising and advocacy efforts.  “The land trusts had to approach it with humility - there are other ways to care for land that can end up with better outcomes, and I think we have all come to that realization,” Rogers said. “I think now that we've done it once, I think we would be open to doing it again that way.” 

Conservation, food sovereignty, water management - a few hundred acres here, a thousand acres there, there is movement to put lands back in tribal control, which is a human rights win as well as an ecology/conservation one.  This is mostly happening at state and even private levels, and is something to continue advocating for, pushing for, donating to, and finding out if you have any local movements advocating for this kind of thing near you and calling state-level lawmakers and representatives about.

[zvaigzdelasas]

[CNN is US Private Media]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lambasted his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Monday and accused him of adopting an “anti-Israel narrative,” revealing a deep rupture at the top of the Israeli government as the Middle East risks spiraling into a full-scale regional conflict.

Israeli media reported this week that Gallant, speaking to lawmakers in a private security briefing, had dismissed Netanyahu’s war aim of achieving “absolute victory” over Hamas as “gibberish,” branding those who say this is achievable as “heroes with war drums.”[...]

“When Gallant adopts the anti-Israel narrative, he harms the chances of reaching a hostage deal,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement. It said Gallant was obligated to pursue the twin goals of Israel’s war in Gaza: Eliminating Hamas and the release of the hostages seized by Hamas in the October 7 attacks.[...]

On Monday, the European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell told CNN he would put forward a proposal at the EU to sanction far-right Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir.

Borrell had called for sanctions against Smotrich and Ben Gvir in a post on X, days after Smotrich said it would be “moral” to starve two million Gazans until Israeli hostages are freed.[...]

In his leaked comments, Gallant also claimed he had in October proposed a pre-emptive attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon, but that Netanyahu had not supported the strike and had missed the opportunity.

“The conditions today for a Lebanon war are the opposite of what they were at the beginning of the war,” Gallant reportedly told lawmakers.[...]

Gallant joins a number of senior Israeli officials to have questioned Netanyahu’s aim of destroying Hamas. In June, top military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the idea that Israel could “make Hamas vanish” is “throwing sand in the eyes of the public.”

CNN recently reported that nearly half of Hamas’ military battalions in northern and central Gaza have rebuilt some of their fighting capabilities, despite Israel’s unrelenting [genocidal war of extermination], according to a joint analysis with the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project and the Institute for the Study of War.

Crumbling failed apartheid state [13 Aug 24]

[wingsofmud]

The canonically rapid evolution of the dragons in WoF is really interesting to me, so I added some aspects of that to my rewrite.

The rankings system is also interesting, so I made that a nation-wide thing, instead of something just for the nobility. Circle 1 and the palace are located in the upper most part of the territory, with the other circles going in a line south of it.

I shifted the Great Ice Cliff to separate the 1-3 Circle from the 4-7 Circle and the rest of Pyrrhia.

Info Below (For present day Icewings):

Lower Circle Icewings

Lower Circle/Southern Icewings are vaguely based off of polar bears. They're shorter and brawnier than upper circle ones. While they do give off that signature Icewing chill, their scales are not as frigid as their northern counterparts. Their tails are like a spiked club.

They can come in white, but often come in light browns, grays, reds, and oranges. The closer the dragon is to the Great Ice Wall, the more whites, blues, and purples show up in their scales.

Southern Icewings are also more likely to have spots and/or stripes on their scales, all to blend in better in the ranging subarctic to temperate to desert climate they live in. They are more omnivorous, and many herd caribou as an occupation.

They make up the majority of the Icewing population and the backbone of the military. They wear clothing more often, which usually consists of fur, bone, or fish scales. Better off Icewings can also obtain cloth and jewelry from passing Sandwing nomads.

While all Icewings have a reputation for being frigid, pun intended, lower circle Icewings tend to be friendlier.

.

Upper Circle Icewings

Upper Circle/Northern Icewings are inspired off of arctic wolves. They often have small, pale irises and their scales feel like ice to the touch. Their tails are like spiked whips. They mostly come in white with some light blue or purple accents on them. Some dragons like Snowfall have red accents. Spots and stripes are rarer and usually much paler when they are present. They are much less tolerant of the heat.

Northern Icewings don't usually wear much jewelry. It's seen as garish to make such obvious displays of wealth, unless you're the Queen. They usually only dress up during special occasions and celebrations, and even then that's usually reserved for the one being celebrated.

The upper circle consists of all Icewing nobility along with the richest dragons. Most work in or around the palace grounds. Most of their diet consists of fish and seals which they eat raw.

.

History

I changed the Gift of Order to the Gift of Equality. In ancient Icewing society, the caste was absolute. You were born into and died in your circle. The Gift of Equality came with a system to introduce fairness by basing what circle a dragon ended up in on their merit rather than birth.

Of course the Queen at that time did not account for the fact that Upper Circle Icewings have far more resources at their disposal to ensure their dragonets remain in the upper circles than lower circle Icewings. A few dragons manage to climb a circle once in a while, which the upper circle dragons love to use to shut up complaints from the lower circles. It is incredibly difficult to end up in the top three circles if you were not born into them.

Lynx is an outlier. So much so that her family has been investigated several times by Icewing nobles for fraudulent scoring. Considering the punishment for that is death, it is not a light accusation. Nothing was ever found. Of course her problems aren't over, especially since Icewing nobles aren't exactly known for being accepting.

Lower circle Icewings are usually disregarded when it comes to decisions like war and lawmaking by the upper circles. In fact, the upper circles dragons very rarely directly interact with the lower circle ones, often giving news to the fourth circle for them to spread it to the rest themselves. Though each circle and town is different, there is a massive culture shock between the 4th and 3rd circle. Not to mention the literal wall between them.

Lower circle Icewings are vying for independence, a movement that grew rapidly during the War of SandWing Succession. A movement Queen Snowfall is now expected to do something about now that the war is over and Darkstalker has been dealt with.

[rjzimmerman]

Biden to block oil drilling across 625 million acres of U.S. waters. (Washington Post)

Excerpt from this Washington Post story:

President Joe Biden will moveMonday to block all future oil and gas drilling across more than 625 million acres of federal waters — equivalent to nearly a quarter of the total land area of the United States, according to two people briefed on the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the announcement is not yet public.

The action underscores how Biden is racing to cement his legacy on climate change and conservation in his last weeks in office. President-elect Donald Trump, who has describedhis energy policy as “drill, baby, drill,” is likely to work with congressional Republicans to challenge the decision.

Biden will issue two memorandums that prohibit future federal oil and gas leasing across large swaths of the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska, the two people said. The oil and gas industry has long prized the eastern Gulf of Mexico in particular, viewing the area as a key part of its offshore production plans.

The move could have the biggest impact in the Gulf of Mexico, which accounts for about 14 percent of the country’s crude oil production, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Industry operations there focus on a small sliver of federal waters off Louisiana’s coast.

The decision would have little effect on a stretch of the Atlantic from North Carolina to Florida, where no drilling is underway.There is weak industry interest in the region, and lawmakers from both parties have raised concerns about possible oil spills devastating local beaches and tourism.

In fact, Trump imposed a 10-year moratorium on offshore oil exploration off the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina when courting voters there during his 2020 campaign. “This protects your beautiful gulf and your beautiful ocean, and it will for a long time to come,” Trump said as he announced the election-year reversal during an appearance at a lighthouse in Florida.

The Northern Bering Sea, off the coast of western Alaska, is home to migrating marine mammals including bowhead and beluga whales, walruses and ice seals, which are hunted by many Alaska Natives. In 2016, President Barack Obama issued an executive order that prohibited oil and gas exploration across more than 112,000 square miles of marine habitat in the Northern Bering Sea and called for tribal comanagement of the protected area.

Biden plans to invoke the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which gives the president broad powers to withdraw federal waters from future leasing. A federal judge ruled in 2019 that such withdrawals cannot be undone without an act of Congress.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), the new chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, suggested that he would seek to overturn the decision using the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to nullify an executive action within 60 days of enactment with a simple majority vote.

The expected move is “yet another attempt by the Biden administration to undercut the incoming Trump administration and ignore the will of the American people — who decisively voted to reverse this war on American energy,” Lee said in an emailed statement, adding, “Senate Republicans will push back using every tool at our disposal.”

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Week - June 20, 2023

🐕 - Meet Sheep Farm's Newest Employee: Collie Hired After Ejection from Car!

1. Border Collie ejected from car during Sunday crash found on sheep farm, herding sheep

Tilly, the 2-year-old Border Collie who was ejected from a car Sunday during a crash, has been found. He was found on a sheep farm, where he had apparently taken up the role of sheep herder. 

According to Tilly's owner, he has lost some weight since Sunday's crash and is now drinking lots of water but is otherwise healthy.

2. After 17-Year Absence, White Rhinos Return to the Democratic Republic of the Congo

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) recently welcomed the reintroduction of 16 southern white rhinoceroses to Garamba National Park, according to officials. The last wild northern white rhino was poached there in 2006.

The white rhinos were transported to Garamba, which lies in the northeastern part of the country, from a South African private reserve. In the late 19th century, the southern white rhino subspecies was believed to be extinct due to poaching until a population of fewer than 100 was discovered in South Africa in 1895, according to WWF.

3. UK to wipe women’s historic convictions for homosexuality

Women with convictions for some same-sex activity in the United Kingdom can apply for a pardon for the first time, the Home Office has announced.

The Home Office is widening its scheme to wipe historic convictions for homosexual activity more than a decade after the government allowed applications for same-sex activity offences to be disregarded.

It means anyone can apply for a pardon if they have been convicted or cautioned for any same-sex activity offences that have been repealed or abolished.

4. Study shows human tendency to help others is universal

A new study on the human capacity for cooperation suggests that, deep down, people of diverse cultures are more similar than you might expect. The study, published in Scientific Reports, shows that from the towns of England, Italy, Poland, and Russia to the villages of rural Ecuador, Ghana, Laos, and Aboriginal Australia, at the micro scale of our daily interaction, people everywhere tend to help others when needed.

5. In a First, Wind and Solar Generated More Power Than Coal in U.S.

Wind and solar generated more electricity than coal through May, an E&E News review of federal data shows, marking the first time renewables have outpaced the former king of American power over a five-month period.

The milestone illustrates the ongoing transformation of the U.S. power sector as the nation races to install cleaner forms of energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.

6. Iceland becomes latest country to ban conversion therapy

Lawmakers in Iceland on June 9 approved a bill that will ban so-called conversion therapy in the country.

Media reports note 53 members of the Icelandic Parliament voted for the measure, while three MPs abstained. Hanna Katrín Friðriksson, an MP who is a member of the Liberal Reform Party, introduced the bill.

7. The temple feeding 100,000 people a day

Amritsar, the north Indian city known for its Golden Temple and delicious cuisine, is also renowned for its spirit of generosity and selfless service. The city, founded by a Sikh guru, embodies the Sikh tradition of seva, performing voluntary acts of service without expecting anything in return.

This spirit of giving extends beyond the temple walls, as the Sikh community has shown immense compassion during crises, such as delivering oxygen cylinders during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the heart of Amritsar's generosity is the Golden Temple's langar, the world's largest free communal kitchen, serving 100,000 people daily without discrimination. Despite a history marred by tragic events, Amritsar continues to radiate kindness, love, and generosity.

----

That's it for this week :)

This newsletter will always be free. If you liked this post you can support me with a small kofi donation:

BUY ME A COFFEE ❤️

Also don’t forget to reblog.

[robertreich]

From Robber Barons to Bezos: Is History Repeating Itself?

Ultra-wealthy elites…Political corruption…Vast inequality…

These problems aren’t new — in the late 1800s they dominated the country during America’s first Gilded Age.

We overcame these abuses back then, and we can do it again.

Mark Twain coined the moniker “The Gilded Age” in his 1873 novel to describe the era in American history characterized by corruption and inequality that was masked by a thin layer of prosperity for a select few.

The end of the 19th century and start of the 20th marked a time of great invention — bustling railroads, telephones, motion pictures, electricity, automobiles — which changed American life forever.

But it was also an era of giant monopolies — oil, railroad, steel, finance — run by a small group of men who had grown rich beyond anything America had ever seen.

They were known as “robber barons” because they ran competitors out of business, exploited workers, charged customers exorbitant prices, and lived like royalty as a result.

Money consumed politics. Robber barons and their lackeys donated bundles of cash to any lawmaker willing to do bidding on their behalf. And when lobbying wasn’t enough, the powerful turned to bribery — resulting in some of the most infamous political scandals in American history.

The gap between the rich and poor in America reached astronomical levels. Large numbers of Americans lived in squalor.

Anti-immigrant sentiment raged, leading to the enactment of racist laws to restrict immigration. And voter suppression, largely aimed at Black men who had recently won the right to vote, was rampant.

The era was also marked by dangerous working conditions. Children often as young as 10, but sometimes younger, worked brutal hours in sweatshops. Workers trying to organize labor unions were attacked and killed.

It seemed as if American capitalism was out of control, and American democracy couldn’t do anything about it because it was bought and paid for by the rich.

But Americans were fed up, and they demanded reform. Many took to the streets in protest.

Investigative journalists, often called “muckrakers” then, helped amplify their cries by exposing what was occurring throughout the country.

And a new generation of political leaders rose to end the abuses.

Politicians like Teddy Roosevelt, who warned that, “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” could destroy American democracy.

After becoming president in 1901, Roosevelt used the Sherman Antitrust Act to break up dozens of powerful corporations, including the giant Northern Securities Company which had come to dominate railroad transportation through a series of mergers.

Seeking to limit the vast fortunes that were creating a new American aristocracy, Congress enacted a progressive income tax through the 16th Amendment, as well as two wealth taxes.

The first wealth tax, in 1916, was the estate tax — a tax on the wealth someone accumulated during their lifetime, paid by the heirs who inherited it. The second tax on wealth, enacted in 1922, was a capital gains tax — a tax on the increased value of assets, paid when those assets were sold.

The reformers of the Gilded Age also stopped corporations from directly giving money to politicians or political candidates.

And then Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin — you may have heard of him — continued the work through his New Deal programs — creating Social Security, unemployment insurance, a 40-hour workweek, and requiring that employers bargain in good faith with labor unions.

But following the death of FDR and the end of World War II, when America was building the largest middle class the world had ever seen — we seemed to forget about the abuses of the Gilded Age.

Now, more than a century later, America has entered a second Gilded Age.

It is also a time of extraordinary invention.

And a time when monopolies are taking over vast swathes of the economy, so we must renew antitrust enforcement to bust up powerful companies.

Now, another generation of robber barons is accumulating unprecedented money and power. So once again, we must tax these exorbitant fortunes.  

Wealthy individuals and big corporations are once again paying off lawmakers, sending them billions to conduct their political campaigns, even giving luxurious gifts to Supreme Court justices. So we need to protect our democracy from Big Money, just as we did before.

Voter suppression runs rampant in the states as during the first Gilded Age, making it harder for people of color to participate in what’s left of our democracy. So it’s once again critical to defend and expand voting rights.

Working people are once again being exploited and abused, child labor is returning, unions are busted, the poor are again living in unhealthy conditions, homelessness is on the rise, and the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else is nearly as large as in the first Gilded Age. So once again we need to protect the rights of workers to organize, invest in social safety nets, and revive guardrails to protect against the abuses of great wealth and power.

The question now is the same as it was at the start of the 20th century: Will we fight for an economy and a democracy that works for all rather than the few?

We’ve done it before. We can — and must — do it again.

[darkmaga-returns]

The former vice president of Pfizer has blown the whistle in an explosive testimony to warn the public that Covid “vaccines” were “designed intentionally to harm the people who received them.”

Dr. Mike Yeadon testified that the Covid mRNA shots are “masquerading as vaccines.”

Yeadon is a British retired pharmacologist.

After he left the pharmaceutical industry, Yeadon started raising concerns about mRNA “vaccines” during the pandemic.

Until 2011, he served as the chief scientist and vice president of the allergy and respiratory research division of the drug company Pfizer.

He is also the co-founder and former CEO of the biotechnology company Ziarco.

Dr. Yeadon issued his whistleblowing statement in a video testimony for the Northern Island Parliament.

However, rather than rely on lawmakers and government officials to convey his message to the public, Yeadon has just released his entire video statement online.

At the opening of his statement, Yeadon declares:

[yourreddancer]

Heather Cox Richardson

January 7, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jan 8

Today, President Joe Biden signed proclamations that create the Chuckwalla National Monument and the Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, protecting 848,000 acres (about 3,430 square kilometers) of land in southern California’s Eastern Coachella Valley. Under the 1906 Antiquities Act, the president can designate national monuments to protect areas of “scientific, cultural, ecological, and historic importance.”

Yesterday, Biden protected the East Coast, the West Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea—an area that makes up about 625 million acres or 2.5 million square kilometers—from oil and natural gas drilling. While there is currently little interest among oil companies in drilling in those areas, the new designation will protect them into the future. Noting that nearly 40% of Americans live in coastal communities, Biden said the minimal fossil fuel potential was not worth the risks that drilling would bring to the fishing and tourist industries and to environmental and public health.

The White House noted that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have “conserved more lands and waters”—more than 670 million acres of them—and have “deployed more clean energy, and made more progress in cutting climate pollution and advancing environmental justice than any previous administration.” At the same time, oil and gas production is at an all-time high, demonstrating that land protection and energy production can coexist.

While oil executives blasted Biden’s proclamation protecting the coastal waters, Democratic lawmakers on the newly protected coasts cheered his action, recognizing that oil spills devastate the tourism and fishing on which their constituents depend: the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, killed 11 people, closed 32,000 square miles (82,880 square kilometers) of the Gulf of Mexico to fishing, and has cost more than $65 billion in compensation alone.

Biden protected the oceans under the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which enables presidents to withdraw federal waters from future oil and gas leasing and development but does not say that future presidents can revoke that protection to put those waters back into development, meaning that Trump—who similarly protected coastal waters when he was president—will have a hard time overturning Biden’s action.

Nonetheless, Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called Biden’s decision “disgraceful” and claimed it was “designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices. Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”

Journalist Wes Siler, who writes about the outdoors, environment, and the law, notes that there is a major effort underway among Republicans to privatize public lands to benefit oil and gas industries, as well as other extractive industries, just as Project 2025 outlined. Melinda Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, told Bloomberg Law in November: “Project 2025 is a ‘wish list’ for the oil and gas and mining industries and private developers. It promotes opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.”

In September, Siler wrote in Outside that politicians in Utah have designed a lawsuit to put in front of the Supreme Court. It argues that all the land in Utah currently in the hands of the Bureau of Land Management—18.5 million acres—should be transferred to the control of the state of Utah.

Those eager to get their hands on the land use the words “unappropriated lands” from the 1862 Homestead Act to claim that the federal government is holding the land “without any designated purpose.”

But, as Siler notes, in 2023, BLM-managed land supported 783,000 jobs and produced $201 billion in economic output, and in Utah alone the use of BLM land created more than 36,000 jobs and $6.7 billion in economic output as more than 15 million people visited the state’s public lands. Utah realized hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on that activity, and while it’s true that states cannot tax federal government lands—as lawmakers say—the government pays the state in lieu of taxes: $128.7 million in 2021.

Transferring that land to the state would sacrifice these funds, and because the state constitution requires the state both to balance its budget and to realize profits from state land, that transfer would facilitate the land’s sale to private interests.

Twelve states have now joined Utah’s lawsuit, arguing that federal control of “unappropriated” land within states impinges on state sovereignty, and they are asking the Supreme Court to take up the case as part of its original jurisdiction. As Siler noted in a May article in Outside, Chief Justice John Roberts has expressed an eagerness to revisit the legality of the Antiquities Act the presidents use to protect land—as Biden did today—suggesting he would be willing to side with the states against the federal government. Project 2025 also calls for Congress to repeal the Antiquities Act.

In Wes Siler’s Newsletter yesterday, Siler noted that the new rules package adopted for the 119th Congress makes it easier to transfer public lands to state control. The rules strip away the need to justify the cost of such a transfer and to offset it with budget cuts or increased revenue elsewhere.

In a press conference today, Trump said he would rescind Biden’s policies and “put it back on day one,” and complained that the 625 million acres Biden protected feels “like the whole ocean,” although the Pacific Ocean alone is almost 38 billion acres more than Biden protected.

Also today, Trump announced that a developer from Dubai, DAMAC Properties, will invest at least $20 billion in the U.S. to create new data centers that support artificial intelligence and cloud services. Trump claimed that the company’s chief executive officer, Hussain Sajwani, is investing in the U.S. “because of the fact that he was very inspired by the election,” but DAMAC has been connected to Trump for a while.

Sajwani attended Trump’s first inauguration, and a company tied to chair and current board member of DAMAC Farooq Arjomand paid $600,000 to the key witness for the House Republicans seeking to dig up dirt on President Biden. That man was Alexander Smirnov, who in December 2024 pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI when he claimed Biden had taken bribes from the Ukrainian company Burisma.

Data centers are notoriously high users of energy. They consume 10 to 50 times as much energy per floor space as does a typical commercial office building, which might have something to do with why Trump’s team is so eager to increase American energy production even as it is already at an all-time high. Trump has promised companies that invest a billion or more dollars in the U.S. that they will get expedited approvals and permits, including those covering environmental concerns.

But if the larger story of this moment is the plunder of our public resources for private interests, Trump’s press conference in general seemed to have a different theme. It was what CNN perhaps euphemistically called “wide ranging,” as he abandoned his “America First” isolationism to suggest using force against China as well as U.S. allies Denmark, Panama, Mexico, and Canada, which would destabilize the globe by rejecting the central principle of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that countries must respect each other’s sovereignty. He wildly suggested that the Iran-backed Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah was part of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and that his people were part of the negotiations for the return of the Israeli hostages.

Trump’s performance was reminiscent of his off-the-wall press conferences during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, which tanked his popularity enough to get his team to stop him from doing them. Trump might have chosen to speak today to keep attention away from the arrival of the casket carrying former president Jimmy Carter to Washington, D.C., where it was transported by horse-drawn caisson to the Capitol, where Carter will lie in state in the Rotunda until his Thursday funeral at Washington National Cathedral. The snow and frigid weather were not enough to keep mourners away, and Trump has already expressed frustration that Carter’s death will mean that flags will be at half-staff for his own inauguration.

But he also might have been trying to demonstrate that the transition from Biden’s administration to his own is taking his time and energy in order to add heft to the argument his lawyers made yesterday. They demanded that Attorney General Merrick Garland prevent the public release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report about his investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election because making Trump respond to the media frenzy the report will stir up would take his attention away from the presidential transition.

Trump managed to defang most of the legal cases against him by being elected president, but he apparently still fears the release of Smith’s report. Today, Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed to the bench and who dismissed the charges against Trump in his retention of classified documents, issued an order preventing the Department of Justice from releasing the report. Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe noted that the order “has no legal basis and ought to be reversed quickly—but these days nobody can be confident that law will matter.”

The presidential immunity on which Trump apparently is relying has also failed to protect him from being sentenced in the election interference case in which a Manhattan jury found him guilty of 34 felonies. In Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained that Trump wants to stop the sentencing process because it triggers a thirty-day period for Trump to appeal. “Once the appeal is concluded,” she explains, “the conviction is final.” Trump was apparently hoping to hold off that process and buy four years to come up with a way out of a permanent designation as a felon.

It didn’t work. Today, appeals court judge Ellen Gesmer rejected his attempt to stop the sentencing. It will go forward on Friday as planned.

[yoonmetogether]

Not In the Cards Prologue

pairing: dirty cop!hoseok x mob boss!seokjin (rest of the story will feature bodyguard!yoongi x CEO!fem reader) genre: mafia summary: a tragic love affair sets the stage and unfolds the story yet to come. warnings: angst!!!!!, hurt/comfort, smut (not explicit), family drama, troubled childhoods, parental loss, trauma, su!c!dal thoughts, mentions of violence and murder (blood/guns), panic attacks, drug addiction/rehab, everyone is going through it, alcohol, weed smoking, age gap, borderline stockholm syndrome (whoops!) wc: 6.7k 😀 this is a loaded chapter, so i apologize ahead of time if it comes out like an info dump lol also reminder, Angel is reader's pseudonym minors pls dni, nsfw

teaser l prologue l ch.1 play nice I prelude. strangers 1/2 l ch. ii I

“Hey, agent Jung, are you busy?”

Hoseok peers up from his laptop to the rookie poking his head into his office.

“What’s up?” Taking it as permission to enter, the rookie looks behind him at the hallway before stepping in and shutting the door, fidgeting nervously with a manila folder in his hand.

“Um, I have something,” he murmurs quietly, and Hoseok’s fingers freeze above the keyboard. Glancing back up, the rookie stares at the ground as he stays in place in front of the door. Hoseok sighs and sits back in his chair, stretching his hands cramped from hours of typing up reports. This can’t be good.

"Don’t just stand there, bring it over."

“Right,” the rookie squeaks, rapidly shuffling forward and holding out the folder with a slight bow. Hoseok winces at the intimidation the rookie clearly feels from him and he lowkey hates how he’s grown a reputation of being a hard ass.

Nevertheless, he accepts the folder and silently prays it isn’t what he thinks it is but once he opens it and sees the face of the man already tattooed in his mind, he has to hold back a series of curses. His jaw ticks as he leans forward to flip over the many sheets of paper holding information to the case of the alleged son of the Crow don, filled with leads and scrappy evidence gathered over years of investigations that he once was a part of as a rookie himself.

“What are you showing me?” He grumbles, thinking he would be looking at some new report of a half-assed lead but there's nothing in here that he hasn't already seen and spent sleepless nights practically memorizing.

The rookie clears his throat and points to the second half of the folder, quickly glancing over his shoulder as if someone had suddenly appeared behind him.

“I found a copy of the warrant the CID is drafting up.”

Hoseok is glad for the countless hours he's spent training himself to pass polygraph tests, otherwise his heart would be racing out of his chest and there would be nothing but panic written all over his face. Criminal Investigative Division, the office he climbed himself out of to serve in the CIA instead, getting away from domestic law enforcement to try and keep a low profile.

The rookie, a seriously intelligent and experienced cyber tech, uses his employment to hack into the intelligence agency databases in order to keep Hoseok informed about the CID's investigation into the Crown organization that holds the northern cities by the throats, poisoning the streets with internationally traded drugs, military-grade weapons, and counterfeit goods, all for lower-hierarchy syndicates to play with in the black market and make a buck for themselves. The CID has been going after the don, Kim Dongsoo, for years, trying to take him down for hundreds of pages of blue and white-collar crimes, but thanks to generational power and sickeningly innumerous wealth, the pockets of politicians, cops, judges, and lawmakers have been lined by the don and it's hard to pin him down with any kind of conviction, since most of the evidence would have to be illegally obtained and therefore inadmissible in court. And now that the mob boss suddenly passed away, the CID turned their attention to his successor, Kim Seokjin, the face staring up at him from the manila. Or Atlas, as he’s known on the streets.

Hoseok suddenly stands up, gripping the folder in a way that crinkles the papers. He leans forward and doesn't miss the way the rookie gulps.

"Are you stupid? Bringing this here to my office when anyone could snatch this right out of your hand to have a look? Do you want to screw me over?" The rookie looks like he's shaking in his boots in response to Hoseok's menacing tone and piercing glare. Hoseok misses the time when he used to be the fun, goofy agent around the office.

(He blames it on the man who trained the sunny disposition out of him ever since he'd been forced to go down this dirty rotten path. D, the one who has a scar over his eye and shoots looks that could kill, who Hoseok had to learn to not be scared of. Now, they’re practically best buds; if there can even be such a friendship in this line of work. Sometimes the only fun Hoseok has is holding over D’s head the fact that he could arrest him at any point and lock him up for life. In return, D reminds him how he could snipe him between the eyes and in the balls from two skyscrapers away. But Hoseok knows the man is capable of far worse things - like round-housing him until he folds up like a pretzel, neatly slitting his throat to bury him in scattered locations without a trace of DNA, and even running him off the road going 200 kph, leaving without a scratch on his car or a burn on his tires. Not that he could actually do anything since Hoseok has been fucking the man they both call boss who fills their bank accounts. But he'll never find out that Hoseok gets a few more zeroes tacked on every month thanks to that same man. Well, play one game of poker and D could drain him of every last penny in the blink of an eye. Hoseok is shit at poker.)

"Sir, everyone's gone for the day," the rookie stutters and Hoseok whips his attention out of his daze to the window, finding it is indeed very dark outside, and then takes notice of the time on his laptop, indicating how fast the day had gotten away from him. He sharply exhales and drops the folder on the desk, sitting down with a plop to rub his hands over his face as exhaustion settles heavily in his bones.

"Next time, find me outside the building, or I'll have your job. Understand?"

The rookie rapidly nods, significantly paler, and Hoseok dismisses him with a wave of his hand and not a single word. Not even bothering to tell him that his offshore bank account will receive an exuberant reimbursement for his work because the rookie already knows that, and it's the only reason that he comes back to deal with Hoseok’s moody ass. He waits until his mole shuffles out and the door clicks shut to collapse in his chair, mind starting to race as he thinks of his next move.

One thing is for certain. This is his excuse to see Kim Seokjin.

Shutting off his laptop and gathering all his files into his briefcase because he's not one to stop working when the day is done, he quickly mulls over the contents of the warrant, looking for any reason the judge would have not to sign it, and drops it in the shredder with a vengeance when he finds none. He shreds the rest of the file and carries out the scraps to burn in the fireplace back home.

Once he pulls into his garage, he routinely checks his surroundings as he presses the button to lower the door, and when he's safely locked alone inside, he finds the panel he installed under the steering wheel to fish around for the early-2010s android burner that has only one contact, listed under 'astronaut.'

cabin this weekend? sent 21:22

Hours later when he's in bed, in his failed attempt to sleep before 4am, he puts the battery back in the phone and checks that he received a message just thirty minutes ago. For the first time all day, maybe even all week, all month, he feels lighter.

see u <3 received 3:36

He takes out the battery once more and puts the phone under his pillow. He lays his head down and tries to sleep but his anxious, racing mind has him slipping out of bed and packing for the overnight road trip, suitcase full of cozy sweaters and joggers. He won't be leaving until well into the evening, but he wants to be ready. He's looking forward to the 2-hour drive, but not the earful he'll be getting from his mother for canceling family plans at the last minute with vague lies about working overtime on a case. That's something he's had to get used to doing, lying to his family and friends. But he's worked through that, knowing there's no way they'll ever be able to understand all the risks he's been taking all these years. Back then, when he was a different, more honest person, he wouldn't have understood either. Now, with the access he has to multiple bank accounts which hold numbers that could support him and his family for at least nine generations to come, he tells himself it's not all for nothing. Even though he's not doing it entirely for the money. No, that's just a bonus. It's for the man he's going to drive up a mountain to see. A man who appears in the forefront of his mind any time he gets a second to close his eyes. A man he'd die for, who he hopes would do the same for him.

That's what this is all for.

Around eight that night, at a stoplight, Hoseok whips out his burner and types up a quick message to 'astronaut' that he's almost there. He smiles when he receives a grainy, irrelevant cat meme in response and drops the phone in the console as soon as the light turns green.

Driving up the steep hills, he soaks in the sight of blankets of snow that line the sides of the road and the trees. He knows this could be the last time he'll take this route that makes him look forward to the cozy fireplace waiting for him at the cabin, started by the man who makes his heart just as warm. A string tightens there when he worries it won't be long until he'll be forced to douse it.

The road is long and dark so his mind starts to wander, thinking back to how he ended up here.

He had just turned 25 when he was assigned to infiltrate the mob, acting as a hijacker of trucks and ships coming in and out of the harbor. He was sure it was a hazing thing, getting the ambitious rookie into a semi-dangerous situation to see if he had what it takes. He found out a bit too late that he should've been smarter. He slipped up and his one mistake landed him in a windowless van with zip ties around his wrists and a sack over his head that only came off once he was thrown onto a cold, concrete floor. After he adjusted his vision to the harsh bright lights, his breath was completely stolen from him when he realized he was kneeling before a man whose face belonged in a museum. He barely registered he was in a dungeon of sorts, or the suited guards packed with illegal weapons surrounding him, too busy taking in the sight of the glory that was Atlas. Behind him was a younger, doe-eyed boy who was practically the spitting image of the taller, more muscular man, and Hoseok assumed this to be his brother, what with the way he stared at him as if learning every move he made so he could one day be like him. And that was confirmed when Atlas let him throw the first few punishing punches and kicks to let Hoseok know just what he'd gotten himself into.

He held it together when he was interrogated and forced to beg for his life, seeing as he'd been made as the pig cop he was, and just as he thought he'd never see the light of day again, he and everyone around him were surprised that the mob boss did not decide to spill his blood right there on the stained floor, but gave him the option to die or become an informant, a mole, a dirty cop for his benefit instead. And of course he chose the option to live, even if it meant he would spend the rest of his breathing days in paranoia, anxiety, and fear. At least he'd be making more money than he could ever imagine.

Since he had been found out, he came up with a different story to tell his boss that didn't include being caught by the mob's successor, which ended with him being taken off of the case and sent into witness protection until further notice. And that landed him on another continent in a secluded location, where no one, not even his mother, knew he was there. So imagine his surprise when three authoritative knocks pounded on his door one day and there stood none other than Kim Seokjin. But he shouldn't have been surprised. Not when he knew that the don's son had the resources to find him. Hell, Hoseok probably had colleagues who were puppeteered by him and Jin was there to add him to more lines of strings.

And to do this, Jin set him up with Namjoon, an esteemed lawyer who doubled as a computer science engineer, producing the Crow’s digital landscape to increase their market using cryptocurrencies. Namjoon trained and tutored Jungkook, Jin's younger brother who once broke Hoseok's nose, since Jin complained he was too old for all that technology, but really it was a reason to get Jungkook off the streets for the time being. He worked with Namjoon to keep out traces of evidence in the CIA system that could lead back to Jin and the don, using his police access to wipe cameras, intimidate witnesses, and bribe judges and criminal lawyers. After a year, Jin introduced him to the man who called himself D, and they worked together to scope out other moles in the syndicate, the ones who worked against them, whether they were soldiers or associates, allies or rivals, and paid close attention to the guards employed to Jin's security team, and eventually his little brother's. He became the bad guy and even though the guilt and regret has taken years off his life, he doesn't care. Because he's doing all of this to protect Jin.

Hoseok learned that Jin was eight years his senior, but that didn't stop him from pining after him. He likes to think that it wasn’t some kind of Stockholm syndrome because Jin technically gave him an option to work for him or not (fucked up as it was) and employed him with a salary he'd never be able to spend in one lifetime. He could've killed him, but didn't. Instead, he arranged private, secret meetings that not even his personal guard knew about, under the guise for Hoseok to provide updates but more often than not, they would end up drinking and smoking and sharing stories and parts of themselves with each other. Jin does have a charm and a sense of humor, to the point that sometimes Hoseok forgets the man is who he is, responsible for the majority of the crime and corruption in the city and surrounding districts. Maybe it was all an act, a ploy, to get Hoseok trapped. And if it was, it fucking worked. Overtime, he fell. And fell hard.

Hoseok knew how dangerous Jin was but it didn't stop him from kissing him one night when it was late and they were silly and delirious from being high and sleep-deprived, because the spark had been there all along. Hoseok believes that's what had saved him in the first place. Jin took him to bed and fucked him until he saw stars.

Afterwards Jin dragged him onto the balcony where they smoked a joint together and for hours Jin pointed out constellations and planets littering the sky that they could see clearly from the cabin he's driving to now. Hoseok remembers every star Jin named, every fact about every planet and galaxy Jin gushed about, every dream Jin had of being an astronaut ever since he was a kid. He thought that because of how good he was at being lonely, he would do so well up in space. Hoseok wondered if Jin felt lonely when they were together, because he certainly didn't. Hoseok kissed him anytime he felt Jin needed a reminder - that he was there and wouldn't go anywhere unless Jin wanted him to. Down the road, Jin would tell him how his smile reminded him of the sun and make Hoseok's heart burst, because maybe there was still some good left in him after all, if someone like Jin could see it. And that was the beginning of the end.

He pulls into the snowy driveway of the cabin almost at the top of the mountain, edges of the roof lined in soft-yellow lights, smoke billowing out of the two chimneys, all signs of life hidden by thick forests of tall evergreen trees, and notices a silhouette in the window holding a steaming mug of hot chocolate, soon disappearing with a flutter of the sheer curtain once he puts the car in park. The door swings open and he chuckles when he hears his nickname "Sunny!" shouted through the windshield as he collects his things and a bag of takeout before stepping out of the car.

Strong, warm arms wait for him on the porch stairs and he wraps his free arm around the waist of the man who in another universe could be the love of his life. The embrace lasts for a little more than thirty seconds before he's tugged inside of the gloriously toasty cabin and isn't given the chance to release his lungs of cold air as his breath is stolen by a heated kiss. Jin shoves him against the door and his scarf is hastily tugged off, coat unzipped, and takeout carelessly dropped on the floor.

"Happy holidays, Sunny," Jin whispers in a warm breath of chocolate.

"You too, Jin," Hoseok whispers back, shrugging off his coat and tearing off his hat just as plush lips press again on his mouth.

He lets himself be manhandled towards creaky wooden stairs, mouths and hands never detaching from their touch-starved bodies. They pass the kitchen and Hoseok breathes in the festive smells wafting from the oven.

"You've been baking?"

"You know it," Jin mumbles, working the shirt out of Hoseok's jeans. "You don't mind waiting until later to eat, right?" Hoseok shakes his head and kisses him with a hum before Jin takes his hand and leads him upstairs, laughing when Jin clumsily trips over the steps and accidentally slams Hoseok into the railing.

It's snowing outside the floor-to-ceiling glass windows but neither of them pay attention as Hoseok, again, lets himself be tossed back onto the ridiculously soft bed and mounted by the most beautiful man he's ever seen. He lets Jin fuck him into submission, to the point that it hurts, giving him full control of his body like he belongs to him. Because he does. As the mattress rocks, headboard thumping against the wall, he stares up at Jin through his swinging bangs, noticing the background shadow of falling snow cast on the ceiling above his head, but he can only focus on the fire and fury that blacken Jin's eyes when they're together like this and Hoseok understands why he gets this way sometimes, especially when it's been so long.

But he quickly takes the reins before Jin can get carried away, flipping him onto his stomach to take him from behind, forcing Jin to let go of his resolve, of his need to be in control because Hoseok knows how exhausting it is to be in charge all of the time. Especially of a bunch of goddamn criminals. His hand that presses on the back of Jin's neck doesn't just do the job of keeping his face planted in the bedding, but covers the flying crow carrying a skull branded just below his hairline (with four rings circled around its neck, marking Jin as the fourth blood successor) because sometimes it makes him nauseous to see it, to be reminded of who they really are, outside of this safe haven. As soon as they step foot back home, they'll have to pretend like they don't even know each other, where Hoseok will go back to being a national security agent and Jin to the most powerful criminal in the city, maybe even the country. A criminal from the very empire Hoseok was tasked as a rookie to infiltrate and build a case against, but eventually turned out to become a dirty cop, working to keep the prettiest and darkest eyes he's ever looked into out of prison because he's stupid and fell in love.

Even though both of them have never admitted it to each other, after all this time, it's there.

It's there in the way that neither of them have touched anyone else ever since they first started this, despite the months that have passed between times spent in secret. In the way they think about each other every day, when Jin sends him corny dad jokes and outdated memes that brighten Hoseok's week whenever he gets the chance to check his second phone. And in the way Hoseok drives all the way up a fucking mountain on a weekend he should be with his family, hours away from home, where Jin bakes and has hot chocolate waiting for him on the counter that has since turned cold and forgotten. And they’ll be in bed for hours, so the cookies and takeout will have gone to waste too. Oh, well. Hoseok would take Jin being under him, on him, inside him over baked goods and Jin's favorite noodles any day.

After the room has become blissfully hot and steamy with passion, the two men slip into a deep sleep that they both desperately need, arms wrapped tightly around each other as if neither of them have any plans to let go. However many hours later, Hoseok stirs to his favorite pair of biceps pulling him into his favorite broad chest, lips pressing against his temple. And as they lay there in silence, Hoseok begins to feel the air change with something that settles anxiety in his gut and even somehow lowers the temperature in the room. He pushes himself further against Jin in hopes to preserve that warmth that only exists between the two of them.

Jin turns on his back and pulls Hoseok onto his chest, turning his head to stare out of the window at the cascading snow blinding the horizon and Hoseok listens to the heartbeat thundering beneath his head.

"Y'know," Jin's gentle voice disturbs the solitude and Hoseok tries to blink himself awake. "It’s just a theory, but in the right kind of spacecraft, an astronaut could get almost as close as four million miles to the sun." "Really?" Hoseok asks, eyes drooping with a brain too tired to wonder why Jin chose now to bring up one of his space-obsessed facts. They haven't looked at the sky yet, not that there would be anything to see except the snow falling. And the sun set hours ago.

"Mm. Any closer and the astronaut would get burned." His eye peeks open at that simplistic conclusion and he huffs a worn out laugh, nuzzling into Jin's chest.

"I think they'd get a little more than burned, hyung." It's quiet for a moment. "Exactly." And Jin sits up suddenly, making Hoseok realize that wasn't just a theory. It was one disguised as a metaphor.

He panics and sits up as the elder whisks himself out of bed and heads to the bathroom, dragging a hand down his face when the shower turns on not seconds after the door shuts with a bit more force than necessary. Usually Hoseok would be traipsing off to follow him, but when he hears a heavy thud reverberate through the walls, an echo of Jin's rugged fist slamming into the tile, Hoseok swallows down the anxiety-ridden nausea in his gut and goes downstairs to shower in the second bathroom instead.

Upon returning to the bedroom to change, duffle bag in hand, he finds Jin switching out the soiled sheets and comforter. He goes to help, but he's waved off, and with an ache growing under his ribs, he quietly dresses and does his best not to become overwhelmed from this ominous tension forming between them. When the bed is made, Jin disappears downstairs and a small hill of hope arises when the cabin is suddenly blasted with holiday tunes and the smells of a new savory recipe. This time, Jin does let him help, passes behind him with hands on his waist while Hoseok chops and seasons, hips bumping occasionally as Jin maneuvers around the kitchen to cook up the best meal Hoseok will have had in months. Hoseok knows he's turned up the music extra loud so neither of them will talk. And he pretends he's fine with that.

After dinner, when they clear the table and wash the dishes in quiet tandem, and Jin turns down the music so Hoseok can hear his thoughts again, the older man heads to the window seat across from the kitchen, just under the stairs. He cracks open the window and Hoseok starts to scold him for letting in the cold air from the fucking snow storm outside, but then Jin pulls out a familiar roll of paper and a lighter and Hoseok shuts his mouth. He finishes drying up a dish, puts it away, and goes over to him, mid-step when Jin finally speaks.

"Say what you came here to tell me, Seok," Jin says flatly and Hoseok sighs as he plants himself behind him, hand sitting on Jin's lap while he tries to ignore the frigid air. He presses his frown to Jin's shoulder covered in the softest cashmere.

"You say that like it's the only reason I came here."

"But it's the main reason, right?" Hoseok leans away, frown deepening, and crosses his arms as his back settles against the oak wood wall. He stares at the snow softly falling over the hills, making the night grey instead of pitch black, wishing they could just be enjoying the view and not having this dreaded conversation.

"We only ever meet here when you have news about my case." Hoseok shoots a glare to the back of Jin's head and nudges his foot into his hip. "That's not true." He waits impatiently as the older man finishes up his joint with shoulders that grow more tense as the seconds pass by in silence.

"It's cold, can you hurry up?" Hoseok urges in a terse voice, watching as Jin nods once before taking a final drag and dropping the unfinished joint out of the window, letting the snow put it out. He stopped offering Hoseok weed ever since the office started doing random drug tests. Jin pulls in the frame, sealing out the cold, and settles back against Hoseok's chest, saying nothing when the younger man hesitates to uncross his arms and wrap them around his shoulders.

"They're getting ready to ask a judge to sign the warrant," he inevitably admits, eyes shutting as a tight feeling squeezes his chest when he feels Jin's entire body tense up.

"They're really gonna arrest somebody around the holidays? Who does that?"

Hoseok lets out a small snort, heart rate relaxing as he's reminded that one of the reasons he loves Jin so much is because of his ability to make light of a situation, no matter how serious.

"Tell me I'll at least get until after New Years."

"Maybe towards the end of January."

Jin huffs dramatically, enticing Hoseok to kiss the side of his head.

"I guess that means I won't have to get you a gift for your birthday." Hoseok tries to smile, but it’s tugged down with sadness.

“You know you never have to get me anything." Jin places a hand on his knee, a kiss on his elbow.

“Yeah, I do, Sunny. It gives me an excuse to see you." Hoseok's heart sinks and he tangles their legs together.

"And after tonight, who knows if we'll..." Jin's voice tapers off and Hoseok fights the urge to give into tears. He can't be weak. Not for something he's known he can't have.

“What are my charges? Since apparently they’re sticking this time.”

“Drug and weapons trafficking. They can’t get you for racketeering yet because the evidence is mostly linked to your father. But when you’re locked up, they’ll work on it.”

Jin stares at his cuticles for a few moments again, nothing but the sound of firewood crackling and snapping on the other side of the room, before he sits up abruptly again, knocking his head into Hoseok's chin.

"Fuck, what am I gonna do?!" Jin blurts, raking hands through his hair and tugging at the roots. Hoseok stays silent because he doesn't know what to tell him.

"Sol, he- he's not ready. He just got out of rehab for fucks' sake!"

A frown wrinkles Hoseok's chin.

"And Angel-" Jin continues, gulping down a breath. "She's barely spoken to me since she got engaged to that prick and I know that's the worst thing I've made her do but it wasn't my idea! It was his!"

Hoseok leans forward as he can sense the panic entering Jin's voice, paired with the shaking of his broad shoulders as he loses control of his breathing.

"This was his plan, he was never going to let them get away from all this. He knew the law was gonna come after him, he got too fucking loaded and it made him sloppy and now-" Jin sniffs and wipes his mouth with his sleeve. Hoseok hangs his head like he's not supposed to know Jin is crying.

"Now I'm taking the fucking fall. And I could give a shit about what happens to me, but Sol and Angel?!" Jin twists around and Hoseok is taken aback by the wild, frantic look on his face, eyes tinged pink with raw tears.

"They can't do this, they're not supposed to do this! I was never supposed to let Sol take my place, much less get my sister involved!" Tears are streaming down Jin's face as he reaches for Hoseok's sweater, curls his fists in the fabric to pull him forward like he's the only thing he can hang onto.

"And now they both are and it's-" Jin sobs. "It's all my fucking fault!"

There's a pain in Hoseok's chest as Jin collapses and smothers his face against it. And Hoseok lets him cry for however long he needs to, because here, in this space, is the only place safe for Jin to release the hardness that has been driven into his soul by his father ever since he was a little boy. In his tears, he grieves the childhood he lost when his mother died and left him with a father who forced the youth out of him, forbade him from being anything but stoic, taught him that showing emotions meant he was weak and lacked control.

Yet somehow, Jin had been able to keep a part of himself, however small, that lets him enjoy and appreciate the little things in life, to crack stupid jokes, to have a smile on his face in the right company even if it's a mask.

And Hoseok knows it's because of Jin's siblings. He thinks that without them, Jin wouldn't allow himself to be charming, or silly, or to make stupid jokes. He thinks that despite how he was raised, he taught himself to be for his siblings the man he wanted in his father. Especially since he ended up raising them himself from ages four and two when their mother left and he vowed to never let their father do to them what he endured all the way up to a few months ago, to the day he buried an empty casket beneath a headstone engraved with his last name. He was glad that his siblings were made to take on their mother's family name, even though his brother had been born as a fallback plan to carry on the Kim legacy if something ever happened, and his sister never existed to their father, both kept in hiding only until they were needed for the family business.

Despite what he was taught, Jin loved them. From the moment he found out about them, he made sure to raise them as if their existence wasn't surrounded by death and greed and crime and sometimes pure evil. Even though all of them grew up without a mother, he wasn't going to let either of them feel abandoned or like no one loved them. Because he was determined to maintain their childhood that had been stolen from him. He was the one who took them away to a park whenever their father yelled at and threatened their mother, just before she left. As a fourteen-year old, he would pack them in the car and drive them far enough away from home, because with the way he was aging, he passed for at least seventeen. When he got back one day, their mother told him to take care of them and after that, he never saw her again. But he kept his promise.

He made them lunches, took Sol to school, stayed home with Angel until she was old enough to go to daycare, all while pretending to be the babysitter when he dropped them off so they wouldn’t be mistaken for family. Having different last names helped him feel like he wasn’t completely lying. As soon as he picked them up and brought them home, he always had dinner ready, helped them with crafty projects and homework while he did his own, got them ready for bed, read stories and sang lullabies, and stayed up way too late worrying about how much longer his father would let him do this.

He knew he couldn't always be the best brother, but he'd be damned not to try.

When he finished high school and his father took every spare moment of his free time away to instead spend grinding down the rest of his innocence in preparation to take over for him one day, he made sure his brother and sister were left with the best nannies. And as they grew older, he sent them away to the best boarding schools in order to keep them away from the family business for as long as possible.

In disguise, he went to Sol’s baseball games and math tournaments, and Angel’s piano recitals and debates whenever he could, and if he was unable, he sent one of his guards instead to film them undercover.

Sometimes when he hated everything, hated himself, wished he’d never been born, he spent one too many nights driving back and forth across the Han river bridge, wondering if his father would call him a coward for not having the balls to throw himself over. Because every time he stood on the railing and leaned over imagining what it’d be like to drown in water that pretty, he thought of the only two people he ever truly loved. The ones he hid a picture of in his wallet, because he couldn’t take any on his phone, or even leave some around his house that’s way too big and hollow for just one person, as it would put a risk of revealing both of them to his world too soon.

So each and every time, he got down from the railing, went back to his car, and pulled out his third phone to put them on a three way call, doing his best to keep the fact that he almost permanently abandoned them hidden from his voice. He didn’t care if they playfully complained that he interrupted something in their busy, accomplished lives in school, because he needed to talk to them so they could save him. Time and time again.

But now they have to be saved, and Jin doesn't know if he can. Because he fears that once he’s arrested, they’ll both be put in the worst possible danger and he won’t be around to protect them. He’ll be breaking his promise to their mother. And out of all the sins he's committed, that would be the one thing he could never ask forgiveness for.

So in the midst of his tears and panic, he comes up with a plan to make sure nothing will happen to them in his absence. If anything does, he'd have no problem sending himself straight to the bottom of the river.

They move to the living room for more comfortable seating while Jin goes through his process of formulating plans. Hoseok listens intently, taking mental notes and sharing ideas of how to ensure the safety of Jin's siblings. It involves him, Moon, and D, a plethora of guards and weapons, that would all, without fail, protect Sol and Angel at all costs. Making plans helps Jin calm down and he eventually returns to his place against Hoseok's chest, hiccupping every now and then from crying so much.

"Promise me you'll look out for them, Sunny," Jin pleads in a quiet, nasally tone, needing reassurance for the tenth time.

"I will. We all will. Me, Moon, D..." he promises.

And then, in a deep breath and a whisper, "We love you."

There's a pause just before Jin slowly turns around with a look in his eye filled with so much emotion that Hoseok has never seen before (and will never see again). There's a glint and a sparkle there as he glances at Hoseok's mouth, something that tells him he wants to say those kind of words back but can't. Instead, he makes a joke, true to his character.

"I've had fantasies about you arresting me,” Jin says, kissing Hoseok on the corner of his mouth as he huffs a laugh. “I don’t think I’d mind going to jail if you were the one taking me there.”

Hoseok cackles as Jin wiggles his eyebrows. "You’re a sick freak, hyung."

With an agreeing grin, Jin kisses him and fucks him right there on the couch, then makes love to him on the floor in front of the fireplace on the faux fur rug, under the warmest, softest blanket. They mark their territory on each other's skin with bruises and bites that will last for weeks. When they're both sweaty and breathless, Jin falls asleep on top of him and Hoseok tries to memorize every inch of his body, like he hasn't already done so countless times before, because he just wants to make sure he never forgets what love feels like. He succumbs to exhaustion with tears pricking the corners of his eyes that he won't let fall.

When he wakes, Jin is gone. Hoseok sits up in the eerily silent, practically empty cabin. The fire is now reduced to embers and it's significantly colder in the cabin. Hoseok hates the hollow feeling he gets as he moves around collecting his things, heavy blanket wrapped around him as he looks for any trace of Jin but finds nothing. The baking ware is gone as well. But there's a carefully wrapped meal left for him in the fridge that he won't be able to stomach until later that day.

There’s a big plate of decorated cookies on the counter and his heart stops and sags when next to it he finds an old phone turned off, covered in Jin's fingerprints, an astronaut sticker plastered and worn on the back.

Taped to it is a note that reads:

If you ever need to save yourself, it’s all right here.

And Hoseok melts on the floor in a puddle of tears at the notion that Jin is willing to sacrifice himself, his freedom, his life all for him if it's one day necessary. This is something he never would have imagined, especially not since years ago when Jin once threatened him and his family for his loyalty and devotion with a gun held to his head. Now, Hoseok thinks he would leave all that behind to stay with Jin. It's stupid and irresponsible, he knows, but Hoseok hasn't found anything in anyone like what he has in Jin. And he doesn't think he ever will. But none of that matters now. Because Jin will be gone and there is nothing Hoseok can do, except pick himself up and leave like none of that meant anything.

He's gotten really good at lying.

.

.

.

part 1. coming soon!!! (for real this time)

masterlist

thanks for reading! this is the last of 2seok we'll see in this series :( they'll be mentioned throughout, but there just won't be anymore interactions. maybe at the very end who knows. i also could be lying and suddenly change my mind lol. hope you enjoyed! let me know if i missed any warnings.

xxx- claret

notes: i hope this all makes sense, like with the legal shit lol, i'm kind of making stuff up as i go bc it's imperative to the plot that both Jin and his father are no longer in charge so bear with me. That and i love the idea of hoseok being a dirty cop and having some forbidden love with mob boss jin.

taglist: @polarnightmyg @rinkud

[mariacallous]

Thailand to be first Southeast Asian country to recognise same-sex marriage

BANGKOK, June 18 (Reuters) - Thailand's Senate passed the final reading of a marriage equality law on Tuesday, paving the way for it to become the first country in Southeast Asia to recognise same-sex couples.

The bill, the culmination of more than two decades of effort by activists, was supported by an overwhelming majority of lawmakers in the upper house.

The law, which needs royal approval, will come into force 120 days after it is published in the royal gazette, meaning the first same sex weddings could take place later this year.

"Today we celebrate another significant milestone in the journey of our Equal Marriage Bill," Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin said in a post on X.

"We will continue our fight for social rights for all people regardless of their status."

LGBT advocates called the move a "monumental step forward," as Thailand would be the first nation in Southeast Asia to enact marriage equality legislation and the third in Asia, after Nepal and Taiwan.

"We are very proud to make history," said Plaifah Kyoka Shodladd, member of a parliamentary committee on same-sex marriage.

"Today love triumphed prejudice ... after fighting for more than 20 years, today we can say that this country has marriage equality."

Lawmakers and activists were seen celebrating in Thailand's parliament, waving rainbow flags and smiling, with some raising their fists in solidarity with the LGBT community.

In Thailand's northern Chiang Mai province, human rights activist Matcha Phornin, her wife Veerawan Wanna and their adopted daughter were glued to their television screen as they watched the senate proceedings.

"We have support from the parliament, from the senators who passed this law. That means we are protected by law," said Matcha, after they cheered and hugged each other when the bill passed.

"And she will be legally adopted after this," Matcha said, referring to their daughter.

Thailand, one of Asia's most popular tourist destinations, is already known for its vibrant LGBT culture and tolerance.

At the start of June, thousands of revellers and activists paraded through the streets of Bangkok and were joined by Prime Minister Srettha, who wore a rainbow shirt to celebrate Pride Month.

"This would underscore Thailand's leadership in the region in promoting human rights and gender equality," the Civil Society Commission of marriage equality, activists and LGBTQI couples said in a statement.

[urbanism-and-transit]

Minnesota has been a hot spot for Urbanism and Public Transport progress for the better part of the last couple of years.

I-35 is being removed and is now in the process of designing what the new stretch would look like, and if you want to read more on how and why they did this, I will drop their mission statement below

Olson Memorial Highway has been granted the funds to convert into a Boulevard

Lastly to take more about Minneapolis proper, a report done by Fortune in 2023 showcased that the removal of single house zone restrictions and building more mixed used housing that had a percentage carved out for lower income people, was the main reason Minneapolis was about to cool off inflation and basically stop the nation wide rental spike from hitting the cities.

To add on, HF 4009 is a bill that will shore up multifamily zoning and make sure towns and cities use the ground when they are available.

Minnesota is also taking a huge step, with a new law introduced last year to ban parking minimums state wide. Parking minimums are one of the main reasons single family homes take up so much space, and the large, dead parking lots that every shopping center has

And for the final thing, and the most important in my view, the Northern Lights Rail last year had funding allocated from the state for the project and are now waiting for the release of federal funds to complete the last 80% of the funding

Even though Minnesota is seen as a more quiet state where nothing really major happens, it goes to show that when the a group of passionate people gather and want to make a change, and are able to convince a state body to throw their weight around to get the grants for it, the sky's the limit on what can be done for communities

-Wamter

[misfitwashere]

From the Robber Barons to Elon Musk: Will History Repeat Itself?

Preparing for the Trump Regime, Part 1. 

ROBERT REICH

JAN 3

Friends,

Ultra-wealthy elites. Political corruption. Corporate monopolies. Anti-immigrant nativism. Vast inequality. 

These problems aren’t new. In the late 1800s, they dominated the country during America’s first Gilded Age. We overcame these abuses then, and we can do so again. 

Mark Twain coined the moniker “The Gilded Age” in his 1873 novel to describe the era in American history characterized by corruption and inequality that was masked by a thin layer of prosperity for a select few.

The end of the 19th century and start of the 20th marked a time of great invention — bustling railroads, telephones, motion pictures, electricity, automobiles — that changed American life forever.

But it was also an era of giant monopolies — oil, railroad, steel, finance — run by a small group of men who had grown rich beyond anything America had ever seen.

They were known as “robber barons” because they ran competitors out of business, exploited workers, charged customers exorbitant prices, and lived like royalty as a result.

Money consumed politics. Robber barons and their lackeys donated bundles of cash to any lawmaker willing to do bidding on their behalf. When lobbying wasn’t enough, the powerful moneyed interests turned to bribery — resulting in some of the most infamous political scandals in American history.

The gap between rich and poor in America reached record levels. Large numbers of Americans lived in squalor.

Anti-immigrant sentiment raged, leading to the enactment of racist laws to restrict immigration. It was also a time of voter suppression, largely aimed at Black men who had recently won the right to vote.

The era was also marked by dangerous working conditions. Children often as young as 10, but sometimes younger, worked brutal hours in sweatshops. Workers trying to organize labor unions were attacked and killed.

It seemed as if American capitalism was out of control, and American democracy couldn’t do anything about it because it was bought and paid for by the rich.

But America reached a tipping point. The nation was fed up. The public demanded reform. Many took to the streets in protest. Investigative journalists, often called “muckrakers” then, helped amplify their cries by exposing what was occurring throughout the country.

A new generation of political leaders rose to end the abuses.

Teddy Roosevelt warned that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” could destroy American democracy.

After becoming president in 1901, Roosevelt used the Sherman Antitrust Actto break up dozens of powerful corporations, including the giant Northern Securities Company, which had come to dominate railroad transportation through a series of mergers.

Seeking to limit the vast fortunes that were creating a new American aristocracy, Congress enacted a progressive income tax through the 16th Amendment, as well as two wealth taxes.

The first wealth tax, in 1916, was the estate tax — on the wealth someone accumulated during their lifetime, paid by the heirs who inherited it. The second tax on wealth, enacted in 1922, was a capital gains tax — on the increased value of assets, paid when those assets were sold.

The reformers of the Gilded Age also stopped corporations from giving money directly to politicians or political candidates.

Then Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin (you may have heard of him) continued the work through his New Deal programs, creating Social Security,unemployment insurance, and a 40-hour workweek and requiring that employers bargain in good faith with labor unions.

But following the death of FDR and the end of World War II, and after America had built the largest middle class the world had ever seen, we seemed to forget about the abuses of the Gilded Age. 

The reforms that followed the first Gilded Age withered.

Starting with Reagan, taxes on the wealthy were lowered. Campaign finance laws were weakened. Social safety nets became frayed. Corporations stopped bargaining in good faith with labor unions.

Now, more than a century later, America has entered a second Gilded Age.

Monopolies are once again taking over vast swaths of the economy. So we must strengthen antitrust enforcement to bust up powerful companies.

Now another generation of robber barons, exemplified by Elon Musk, is accumulating unprecedented money and power. So, once again, we must tax these exorbitant fortunes.

Wealthy individuals and big corporations are once again paying off lawmakers, sending them billions to conduct their political campaigns, even giving luxurious gifts to Supreme Court justices. So we must protect our democracy from Big Money, just as we did before.

As it was during the first Gilded Age, voter suppression is too often making it harder for people of color to participate in our democracy. So it’s once again critical to defend and expand voting rights.

Working people are once again being exploited and abused, child labor is returning, unions are being busted, the poor are again living in unhealthy conditions, homelessness is on the rise, and the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else is nearly as large as in the first Gilded Age. 

So once again we need to protect the rights of workers to organize, invest in social safety nets, and revive guardrails to protect against the abuses of great wealth and power.

Seeking these goals may seem quixotic right now, just weeks before Trump and his regime take power with a bilious bunch of billionaires. 

But if history is any guide, they will mark the last gasp of America’s second Gilded Age. We will reach the tipping point where Americans demand restraints on robber-baron greed. 

The challenge is the same as it was at the start of the 20th century: To fight for an economy and a democracy that works for all rather than the few. 

I realize how frightening and depressing the future may look right now. But we have succeeded before, when we fought against the abuses of the first Gilded Age. We can — and must — do so again now, in America’s second Gilded Age. 

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Tim Campbell

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 7, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jan 08, 2025

Today, President Joe Biden signed proclamations that create the Chuckwalla National Monument and the Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, protecting 848,000 acres (about 3,430 square kilometers) of land in southern California’s Eastern Coachella Valley. Under the 1906 Antiquities Act, the president can designate national monuments to protect areas of “scientific, cultural, ecological, and historic importance.”

Yesterday, Biden protected the East Coast, the West Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea—an area that makes up about 625 million acres or 2.5 million square kilometers—from oil and natural gas drilling. While there is currently little interest among oil companies in drilling in those areas, the new designation will protect them into the future. Noting that nearly 40% of Americans live in coastal communities, Biden said the minimal fossil fuel potential was not worth the risks that drilling would bring to the fishing and tourist industries and to environmental and public health.

The White House noted that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have “conserved more lands and waters”—more than 670 million acres of them—and have “deployed more clean energy, and made more progress in cutting climate pollution and advancing environmental justice than any previous administration.” At the same time, oil and gas production is at an all-time high, demonstrating that land protection and energy production can coexist.

While oil executives blasted Biden’s proclamation protecting the coastal waters, Democratic lawmakers on the newly protected coasts cheered his action, recognizing that oil spills devastate the tourism and fishing on which their constituents depend: the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, killed 11 people, closed 32,000 square miles (82,880 square kilometers) of the Gulf of Mexico to fishing, and has cost more than $65 billion in compensation alone.

Biden protected the oceans under the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which enables presidents to withdraw federal waters from future oil and gas leasing and development but does not say that future presidents can revoke that protection to put those waters back into development, meaning that Trump—who similarly protected coastal waters when he was president—will have a hard time overturning Biden’s action.

Nonetheless, Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called Biden’s decision “disgraceful” and claimed it was “designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices. Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”

Journalist Wes Siler, who writes about the outdoors, environment, and the law, notes that there is a major effort underway among Republicans to privatize public lands to benefit oil and gas industries, as well as other extractive industries, just as Project 2025 outlined. Melinda Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, told Bloomberg Law in November: “Project 2025 is a ‘wish list’ for the oil and gas and mining industries and private developers. It promotes opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.”

In September, Siler wrote in Outside that politicians in Utah have designed a lawsuit to put in front of the Supreme Court. It argues that all the land in Utah currently in the hands of the Bureau of Land Management—18.5 million acres—should be transferred to the control of the state of Utah.

Those eager to get their hands on the land use the words “unappropriated lands” from the 1862 Homestead Act to claim that the federal government is holding the land “without any designated purpose.”

But, as Siler notes, in 2023, BLM-managed land supported 783,000 jobs and produced $201 billion in economic output, and in Utah alone the use of BLM land created more than 36,000 jobs and $6.7 billion in economic output as more than 15 million people visited the state’s public lands. Utah realized hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on that activity, and while it’s true that states cannot tax federal government lands—as lawmakers say—the government pays the state in lieu of taxes: $128.7 million in 2021.

Transferring that land to the state would sacrifice these funds, and because the state constitution requires the state both to balance its budget and to realize profits from state land, that transfer would facilitate the land’s sale to private interests.

Twelve states have now joined Utah’s lawsuit, arguing that federal control of “unappropriated” land within states impinges on state sovereignty, and they are asking the Supreme Court to take up the case as part of its original jurisdiction. As Siler noted in a May article in Outside, Chief Justice John Roberts has expressed an eagerness to revisit the legality of the Antiquities Act the presidents use to protect land—as Biden did today—suggesting he would be willing to side with the states against the federal government. Project 2025 also calls for Congress to repeal the Antiquities Act.

In Wes Siler’s Newsletter yesterday, Siler noted that the new rules package adopted for the 119th Congress makes it easier to transfer public lands to state control. The rules strip away the need to justify the cost of such a transfer and to offset it with budget cuts or increased revenue elsewhere.

In a press conference today, Trump said he would rescind Biden’s policies and “put it back on day one,” and complained that the 625 million acres Biden protected feels “like the whole ocean,” although the Pacific Ocean alone is almost 38 billion acres more than Biden protected.

Also today, Trump announced that a developer from Dubai, DAMAC Properties, will invest at least $20 billion in the U.S. to create new data centers that support artificial intelligence and cloud services. Trump claimed that the company’s chief executive officer, Hussain Sajwani, is investing in the U.S. “because of the fact that he was very inspired by the election,” but DAMAC has been connected to Trump for a while.

Sajwani attended Trump’s first inauguration, and a company tied to chair and current board member of DAMAC Farooq Arjomand paid $600,000 to the key witness for the House Republicans seeking to dig up dirt on President Biden. That man was Alexander Smirnov, who in December 2024 pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI when he claimed Biden had taken bribes from the Ukrainian company Burisma.

Data centers are notoriously high users of energy. They consume 10 to 50 times as much energy per floor space as does a typical commercial office building, which might have something to do with why Trump’s team is so eager to increase American energy production even as it is already at an all-time high. Trump has promised companies that invest a billion or more dollars in the U.S. that they will get expedited approvals and permits, including those covering environmental concerns.

But if the larger story of this moment is the plunder of our public resources for private interests, Trump’s press conference in general seemed to have a different theme. It was what CNN perhaps euphemistically called “wide ranging,” as he abandoned his “America First” isolationism to suggest using force against China as well as U.S. allies Denmark, Panama, Mexico, and Canada, which would destabilize the globe by rejecting the central principle of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that countries must respect each other’s sovereignty. He wildly suggested that the Iran-backed Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah was part of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and that his people were part of the negotiations for the return of the Israeli hostages.

Trump’s performance was reminiscent of his off-the-wall press conferences during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, which tanked his popularity enough to get his team to stop him from doing them. Trump might have chosen to speak today to keep attention away from the arrival of the casket carrying former president Jimmy Carter to Washington, D.C., where it was transported by horse-drawn caisson to the Capitol, where Carter will lie in state in the Rotunda until his Thursday funeral at Washington National Cathedral. The snow and frigid weather were not enough to keep mourners away, and Trump has already expressed frustration that Carter’s death will mean that flags will be at half-staff for his own inauguration.

But he also might have been trying to demonstrate that the transition from Biden’s administration to his own is taking his time and energy in order to add heft to the argument his lawyers made yesterday. They demanded that Attorney General Merrick Garland prevent the public release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report about his investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election because making Trump respond to the media frenzy the report will stir up would take his attention away from the presidential transition.

Trump managed to defang most of the legal cases against him by being elected president, but he apparently still fears the release of Smith’s report. Today, Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed to the bench and who dismissed the charges against Trump in his retention of classified documents, issued an order preventing the Department of Justice from releasing the report. Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe noted that the order “has no legal basis and ought to be reversed quickly—but these days nobody can be confident that law will matter.”

The presidential immunity on which Trump apparently is relying has also failed to protect him from being sentenced in the election interference case in which a Manhattan jury found him guilty of 34 felonies. In Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained that Trump wants to stop the sentencing process because it triggers a thirty-day period for Trump to appeal. “Once the appeal is concluded,” she explains, “the conviction is final.” Trump was apparently hoping to hold off that process and buy four years to come up with a way out of a permanent designation as a felon.

It didn’t work. Today, appeals court judge Ellen Gesmer rejected his attempt to stop the sentencing. It will go forward on Friday as planned.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[ououy]

European Parliament members ask Elon Musk's DOGE to probe USAID allocations to Cyprus

WASHINGTON (TNND) — Members of one of the European Union’s legislative bodies on Tuesday asked Elon Musk, head of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, to review allocations by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to the Republic of Cyprus for any “financial improprieties.”

Geadis Geadi and Emmanouil Fragkos, both members of the European Parliament, wrote in a letter to Musk that reports suggest USAID directed tens of millions of dollars toward initiatives aimed at shaping public opinion in favor of a plan for the reunification of Cyprus.

“Given your ongoing efforts to expose inefficiencies and corrupt practices within federal agencies, we see it as a mutual interest if your department reviews past USAID allocations to Cyprus and discloses any findings regarding potential financial improprieties or wasteful spending,” they wrote.

USAID was a key financial supporter of the proposal, known as the Annan plan, to unify Cyprus with two constituent states, according to the lawmakers. They said the agency directed funds through a U.N. program and other intermediaries to mold public opinion.

“This included the funding of NGOs, media campaigns, and academic initiatives designed to influence local perspectives, potentially crossing ethical lines regarding foreign interference in democratic processes,” the letter reads.

Sixty-five percent of Cypriots with Turkish heritage voted to approve the plan in 2004, according to The New York Times. Three-quarters of Greeks on the island reportedly rejected it.

The Guardian reported more than a decade ago that Greek Cypriots were concerned over the presence of Turkish troops on the northern half of the island. A Greek political party opposed the Annan plan, claiming a U.N. council had not provided “guarantees” on security following any reunification, according to the outlet.

[absolute-immunities]

Travis Crum, The Lawfulness of the Fifteenth Amendment, 97 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1543, 1578–80 (2022) (footnotes omitted):

Although there were irregularities in the South for the ratifications of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, Indiana presents a unique problem as a Northern State whose initial ratification [of the Fifteenth Amendment] is questionable.

Indiana’s ratification involved a series of political machinations. During the 1868 campaign, Republicans nationwide and in Indiana adopted a compromise position that advocated for black male suffrage in the South but not the North. After the Fifteenth Amendment’s passage by Congress, Democrats cried foul. State Representative John Coffroth, a leading Indiana Democrat, proposed that Democrats could delay the Fifteenth Amendment’s ratification by resigning en masse to deny the state legislature a quorum. On March 5, 1869, thirty-eight Democratic representatives and seventeen Democratic state senators did just that, plunging the state legislature into chaos. Under Indiana’s Constitution, a quorum of two-thirds of total members was required for each house.

In response, the Republican governor called for special elections to be held on April 8, 1869, to fill the seats. The Democrats promptly won back their seats and returned to Indianapolis following an agreement to help pass a budget and that a vote on the Fifteenth Amendment would not occur until the end of the session.

On May 13, 1869, the Democrats once again decided to resign en masse. This time, however, their plan failed. In the state senate, “the doors were ordered locked and the roll was called.” Although sixteen state senators had sent letters of resignation to the governor, many of them were still present in the chamber. The senate’s presiding officer ruled that, because those senators had not submitted resignation letters to the senate, they had not yet resigned. A quorum was declared and the Fifteenth Amendment passed 27–1, with eleven senators marked present but not voting. That same afternoon, Speaker of the Indiana House George Buskirk determined that the house lacked a quorum due, in part, to the resignation of twenty-seven Democratic representatives.

But the next day, Buskirk changed his mind following pressure from Indiana’s U.S. Senator, Oliver Morton. Buskirk decreed that a vote could proceed even though only fifty-seven members were present. When pressed by Coffroth to justify this ruling, Buskirk stated that Indiana’s Constitution required a quorum “for legislative business of any ordinary character” but not to ratify a constitutional amendment. In other words, the ratification process, as an act of federal lawmaking, need not follow the particularities of state law. The Indiana House then voted 54–3 to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment.

As such, Indiana’s state legislature was arguably a rump legislature when it adopted the Fifteenth Amendment. Nevertheless, Secretary Fish ignored the quorum issue and counted Indiana as a ratifying State. Indeed, unlike his discussion of New York and Georgia, Fish gave no indication that anything untoward happened in Indiana.

:')