Friday, January 10, 2025
■ Today's Top News
"Banning TikTok in this way sets a dangerous precedent that could pave the way to future government interventions against online speech," said one advocate.
By Eloise Goldsmith
To the chagrin of First Amendment defenders and content creators, the Supreme Court on Friday appeared poised to uphold a law passed by Congress last year that would shut down the widely popular social media app TikTok in the U.S. unless its owner, the Chinese company ByteDance, sells it.
The de facto ban on TikTok was tucked into a $95 billion legislative package for aid to Ukraine and Israel that was passed by the Senate in April 2024. A standalone version of the legislation cleared the House with bipartisan support a month earlier. It is set to go into effect on January 19, barring a sale by ByteDance or intervention by the Supreme Court.
The law was justified on national security grounds, which were fueled by fears that national security laws in China could compel ByteDance to give the Chinese government access to data on TikTok users.
Nina Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy, wrote Thursday: "The U.S. government stood up to TikTok before they stood up to[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, or the health insurance lobby, or Big Pharma, or Big Oil—no. TikTok. Completely out of touch with the American people. Both parties."
During oral arguments, "justices across the ideological spectrum asked tough questions of both sides, [but] the overall tone and thrust appeared to suggest greater skepticism toward the arguments by lawyers for TikTok and its users that the First Amendment barred Congress from enacting the law," according to Friday reporting from The New York Times.
However, the Times also noted that "several justices were skeptical about a major part of the government's justification for the law: the risk that China might 'covertly' make TikTok manipulate the content shown to Americans or collect user data to achieve its geopolitical aims."
Ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court's hearing on TikTok's appeal of the ban, three bipartisan lawmakers were among the First Amendment advocates who filed amicus briefs in support of the app in late December. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) asked the court to grant TikTok an emergency injunction to block the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
The ACLU, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), and the Freedom of the Press Foundation were among several civil liberties groups that also filed an amicus brief in late December, arguing that the government has not presented sufficient evidence that the app, which is used by 170 million Americans, causes "ongoing or imminent harm."
In a statement released Friday, the Free Press policy counsel Yanni Chen said that "as with repressive laws from oppressive regimes around the world, the real toll of the ban will be on everyday people... TikTok users, many of whom use the platform to organize communities and express views that legacy media often ignore."
"Banning TikTok in this way sets a dangerous precedent that could pave the way to future government interventions against online speech," she added.
"This bill is political grandstanding at its worst," said one lawmaker.
By Julia Conley
With the U.S. Senate poised to vote on the Laken Riley Act on Friday, immigrant rights advocates are warning that—despite claims from proponents that the bill is aimed at protecting American communities from violent crime—supporters of the legislation are actually advancing a dangerous "Trojan horse" and securing a power grab for xenophobic right-wing authorities.
The bill is named after Laken Riley, a Georgia woman who was killed last February while she was jogging. Jose Antonio Ibarra, an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela, was convicted of her murder in November, and the case was a focal point of President-elect Donald Trump's campaign last year.
But as Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of immigrant rights group America's Voice, said Thursday, the bill "is filled with unrelated and sweeping measures that won't improve public safety."
Central provisions in the legislation, which passed in the House on Tuesday with the support of 37 Democrats along with the entire Republican caucus, would require immigration officers to detain undocumented immigrants who are accused of theft, including shoplifting—an apparent response to the fact that Ibarra was cited for shoplifting in Georgia but was not detained before he killed Riley.
Critics have expressed outrage over the provision, with Cárdenas saying it would trample "important due process principles—greenlighting detention and deportation for those accused, rather than convicted of low-level crimes."
"It's no surprise Republicans are continuing to exploit a horrific act of violence and portray immigrants as dangerous threats to America, despite the reality that immigrants have a lower crime rate than the native-born," said Cárdenas. "And it also should be no surprise to any close observers of right-wing politics that the bill being pushed this week doesn't seek to improve public safety or even focus on public safety threats."
At Arizona Republic, editor Elvia Díaz advised readers, "Don't be fooled by soundbites."
"Republicans and now Democrats, too, want you to believe the Laken Riley Act is about deporting shoplifters," she wrote. "It's a power grab by states to dismantle federal authority over immigration enforcement."
In a column at MSNBC on Wednesday, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote that Republicans pushing the bill are asking the question: "Who runs the U.S. immigration system?"
The answer, backed up by numerous courts, has been the federal government, but the bill would give broad new authorities to state officials, such as attorneys general, to file legal challenges in order to have specific immigrants detained and to force the State Department to block visas from countries that won't accept immigrants who are deported.
"Giving states a veto power over thousands of decisions made every day by federal law enforcement officers and leaders will complicate immigration issues in every community and threaten to set off international incidents which could hurt U.S. interests around the globe," wrote Reichlin-Melnick.
The visa provision could impact countries such as China and India, which have "historically not cooperated fully with the United States on deportations," and where more than 1.8 million immigrant and short-term visas were issued to nationals in 2023.
"Because the United States is so intertwined with these countries, administrations of both parties have been unwilling to threaten blanket visa bans as a punishment for not accepting deportees," wrote Reichlin-Melnick. "Yet should the Laken Riley Act become law, that decision may no longer be in the hands of our nation's top diplomats and law enforcement officers; it could be in the hands of a single federal district court judge in Texas or Louisiana."
He continued:
What could this look like in practice? Imagine a person from China living in Texas on an H-1B visa who commits an offense that leads to a deportation order. If China does not accept the deportation, [Texas Attorney General] Ken Paxton could go to court seeking to force the federal government to ban all visas from China (or maybe just all H-1B visas) without having to worry about taking the blame for the economic or diplomatic fallout to the United States.
"What happened to Laken Riley was a terrible tragedy, and the perpetrator has been sentenced to life in prison for his heinous acts," wrote Reichlin-Melnick on Wednesday. "But just as Willie Horton's bad acts decades ago were not a justification for supercharging a system of mass incarceration, the heinous acts of Jose Ibarra should not be an excuse to flip our system of constitutional governance on its head and empower individual states and federal judges to run immigration law."
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who opposed the bill this week, said he has heard from "a lot of people who say they support this bill, but who don't seem to know what it really does."
"For example, if this bill is signed into law, a 12-year-old kid brought here by a parent could be LOCKED IN ICE DETENTION if they are accused—not even convicted, simple accused—of stealing a candy bar," McGovern said in a post on X, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement..
Kylie Cheung of Jezebel pointed out that while Republicans have held the Laken Riley Act up as essential legislation to protect women from violence, "these lawmakers don't care about women's safety or high rates of femicide perpetrated by people with citizenship—they've cut all actual resources for victims. They just want to gut basic civil liberties."
Immigration attorney Ben Winograd of the Immigrant & Refugee Appellate Center offered a hypothetical scenario under the bill: "Imagine a man who is a U.S. citizen marries a woman who entered the country illegally. He abuses her constantly, and after learning that she intends to leave him, he calls the police and (falsely) claims that she stole some of his property."
"If the police arrest the woman, she would be subject to mandatory detention while in removal proceedings—even if the police determined that the accusation was bogus," said Winograd. "The Laken Riley Act would allow any person with a grudge against an undocumented immigrant to make them subject to indefinite mandatory detention simply by leveling a false accusation of theft."
All the Senate Republicans are sponsoring the bill, which was cleared for a vote on Thursday, with Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) and Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) joining them. In order to overcome a filibuster the GOP needs just six more Democrats to support the legislation.
Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), one of nine senators who opposed advancing the bill on Thursday, said he is in favor of "bipartisan action to fix our broken immigration system."
"I stand ready to work across the aisle to get it done," he said. "Let's start from a foundation grounded in our Constitution."
Corporate lobbyists and big-time fundraisers are among the Democratic National Committee members set to decide on the organization's leadership in the coming weeks.
By Jake Johnson
With the Democratic National Committee set to vote on its next chair in just over three weeks, a progressive magazine on Friday published in full a previously secret list of the DNC members who will decide on the next leader of the party organization in the wake of the disastrous November election.
The American Prospect's Micah Sifry reported that he obtained the closely guarded list from a "trusted source with long experience with the national party."
"This person thinks it's absurd that the party's roster of voting members is secret," Sifry wrote. "Indeed, since there is no official public list, each of the candidates running for chair and other positions has undoubtedly had to create their own tallies from scratch—making it very likely our list comes from a candidate's whip operation."
Based on the DNC's public statements, it was known that the DNC has 448 active members who will decide on key leadership posts in the coming weeks. But the identities of the individuals were, until Friday, kept under wraps.
Michael Kapp, a DNC member from California, told the Prospect that the committee's leadership "holds tightly to the list to prevent any organizing beyond their control."
"Knowing who has actual voting power over the DNC's governance may give grassroots activists around the country who care about the party's future some greater capacity to focus their efforts on the people who actually pull the levers."
The newly revealed list includes more than 70 "at large" members who were all "whisked into their current positions on the DNC roster by [outgoing chair] Jaime Harrison in 2021," Sifry wrote.
"According to DNC bylaws, at-large members must be voted in by the rest of the membership, but the current class was put forward by Harrison as a single slate that was voted on up-or-down as a bloc," Sifry added. "The hacks definitely stand out among Harrison's handpicked cohort. Those include top fundraisers Kristin Bertolina Faust and Alicia Rockmore of California, Carol Pensky of Florida, and Deborah Simon of Indiana, as well as David Huynh of New York, whose main claim to fame appears to be his work as a consultant to now-jailed cryptocurrency hustler Sam Bankman-Fried when he appeared to be the Next Big Funder of the Democrats in 2021-2022."
The list also includes several lobbyists—such as Scott Brennan, a DNC member from Iowa who works for a lobbying firm with clients such as JPMorgan Chase and PhRMA—as well as union leaders, including American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten.
The DNC membership list was revealed as the organization prepares to vote on key leadership posts, including the committee's chair and vice chair positions.
Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler, Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chair Ken Martin, and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley are among the contenders for the chairmanship.
James Zogby, a longtime DNC member and outspoken progressive, is running for a vice chair post with the goal of improving "accountability and transparency" at the committee and curbing the influence of dark money—something the DNC has repeatedly refused to address.
Sifry acknowledged Friday that "making the DNC's membership roster public may have little overall effect on the direction of the organization."
"It is, after all, highly dependent on big money and exquisitely attuned to the political needs of the party’s leading officials in Congress," he noted. "According to OpenSecrets, the top contributors to the DNC in the 2023-2024 cycle, after House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries' campaign organization, were Bain Capital ($2.9 million), Google parent company Alphabet ($2.6M), Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins ($2.5M), community media conglomerate Newsweb Corp. ($2.5M), Jeffrey Katzenberg’' holding company WndrCo ($2.5M), Microsoft ($2.4M), Reid Hoffman’s VC firm Greylock Partners ($2.4M), real estate developer McArthurGlen Group ($2.2M), and hedge fund Lone Pine Capital ($2.2M)."
However, Sifry added, "knowing who has actual voting power over the DNC's governance may give grassroots activists around the country who care about the party's future some greater capacity to focus their efforts on the people who actually pull the levers."
"What they do with that potential," he wrote, "is up to them."
"The villains of this escalating tragedy are also clear, with wealthy nations, the duplicitous fossil fuel industry, and spineless policymakers topping the list," said one climate scientist.
By Jessica Corbett
As catastrophic fires ravaged Southern California on Friday, U.S. government scientists confirmed that—as anticipated—2024 was the hottest year on record and the country endured 27 weather and climate disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) found that after 15 straight months of new records from June 2023 through August 2024, global temperatures last year were 2.3°F (1.28°C) above the agency's 20th-century baseline from 1951-1980 and about 2.65°F (1.47°C) higher than the mid-19th century average from 1850-1900.
"Between record-breaking temperatures and wildfires currently threatening our centers and workforce in California, it has never been more important to understand our changing planet."
"Once again, the temperature record has been shattered—2024 was the hottest year since recordkeeping began in 1880," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a statement. "Between record-breaking temperatures and wildfires currently threatening our centers and workforce in California, it has never been more important to understand our changing planet."
Other experts, at NASA and beyond, also responded to the findings by emphasizing that the climate emergency was created by humanity extracting and burning fossil fuels—and continuing to do so, despite scientists' warnings and initiatives including the 2015 Paris agreement, which was intended to limit global temperature rise this century to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
"To put that in perspective, temperatures during the warm periods on Earth three million years ago—when sea levels were dozens of feet higher than today—were only around 3°C warmer than preindustrial levels," explained Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "We are halfway to Pliocene-level warmth in just 150 years."
"Not every year is going to break records, but the long-term trend is clear," said Schmidt, acknowledging natural fluctuations such as El Niño and La Niña. "We're already seeing the impact in extreme rainfall, heatwaves, and increased flood risk, which are going to keep getting worse as long as emissions continue."
NASA noted that independent analyses from Berkeley Earth, Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service, the United Kingdom's Met Office, and the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also concluded that "global surface temperatures for 2024 were the highest since modern record-keeping began," though some of the figures differ slightly due their to various methodologies and models.
For example, NOAA, which also released its 2024 conclusions on Friday, found that the global surface temperature was 2.32°F (1.29°C) above the 20th-century average and exceeded the 1850-1900 average by 2.63°F (1.46°C). The agency also found that the annual average for the contiguous United States was 55.5°F—3.5°F above average and the warmest in the 130-year record.
NOAA also put out findings on extreme weather events that are becoming more common and devastating due to fossil fuel-driven global heating. The agency identified 27 disasters across the country—a drought, a flooding event, a wildfire, two winter storms, five tropical cyclones, and 17 severe storms—with losses topping $1 billion each. They collectively cost $182.7 billion and killed at least 568 people.
Over a third of those deaths—219—were tied to Hurricane Helene, last year's costliest event at $78.7 billion. The Category 4 storm made landfall in Florida's Big Bend region and left a trail of destruction up to North Carolina and Tennessee. NOAA said that it "was the deadliest Atlantic hurricane since Maria (2017) and the deadliest to strike the U.S. mainland since Katrina (2005)."
The United States has faced 403 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters over the past 45 years, and 2024 had the second-highest count, after 28 events in 2023. The annual average for 1980-2024 is just nine, compared with 23 for the past five years.
(Image: NOAA)
"Last year's record-breaking heat and billion-dollar disasters are an alarming harbinger of what's to come if the nation fails to invest in a climate-resilient economy and do its part to sharply cut global heat-trapping emissions," said Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist at the Union of Concerned Scientists' (UCS) Climate and Energy Program, in a statement. "It's time for decision-makers at all levels of government and across the economy to acknowledge the staggering financial costs and human toll of burning fossil fuels and commit to building a stronger, safer economy powered by clean energy."
Cleetus also called out the fossil fuel companies that "seem intent on burning down the planet to protect their profits" and the "policymakers in their thrall." Her UCS colleague Astrid Caldas, a senior climate scientist for community resilience, similarly stressed the urgent need to act while blasting Big Oil and its allies in politics.
"As a scientist exhausted from sounding the alarm hottest year after hottest year, I'm no longer just concerned about the climate crisis and its impacts on vulnerable communities but incensed at world leaders for their grossly inadequate climate action to date," Caldas declared. "NOAA and NASA confirmed that the last 11 years have been the 11 hottest on record. Will it take another 11 years for policymakers to heed the irrefutable science and address the devastation being experienced in the United States and around the world largely due to fossil-fuel driven global warming?"
As Californians faced what experts fear will be the costliest fire disaster in U.S. history, Caldas said that "deadly and costly climate impacts, including accelerating sea-level rise and record-breaking heatwaves, droughts, storms, and wildfires, are mounting, and yet politicians stand by while heat-trapping emissions continue to rise globally. The science is indisputable: Transformative and comprehensive global climate action, including a speedy and just transition away from fossil fuels and increased investments in climate resilience, is paramount to protect people now and foster prosperity for generations to come."
"The villains of this escalating tragedy are also clear, with wealthy nations, the duplicitous fossil fuel industry, and spineless policymakers topping the list of those bearing primary responsibility for past and current global warming emissions and climate inaction," she added. "The biggest injustice is that the most vulnerable communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis have much to lose despite contributing the least to this problem."
One estimate put the damage and economic losses from the fires—which are still burning—at $135-150 billion.
By Eloise Goldsmith
"Will this be the event that finally wakes everyone up?" wondered climate scientist Peter Kalmus on Thursday, with Los Angeles in its third day of multiple fires consuming large swaths in and around the city, forcing residents to flee and leaving destruction in their wake.
Late Thursday, the Los Angeles Times, citing officials, reported that at least 10 people have been killed by the blazes and upward of 9,000 homes, businesses, and other buildings appear to have been destroyed or damages in the two largest fires, the Palisades and Eaton fires.
The fires, now in their fourth day and still largely not contained, could be "at least collectively, the costliest wildfire disaster in American history," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles told the LA Times.
AccuWeather, a weather data and news company, on Thursday estimated damage and economic losses from the fires at $135-150 billion. A JPMorgan analyst, Jimmy Bhullar, gave a smaller figure to The Wall Street Journal on Thursday. He said that losses from the fires are pegged "close to $50 billion."
AccuWeather chief meterologist Jonathan Porter said that "fast-moving, wind-driven infernos" have spawned "one of the costliest wildfire disasters in modern U.S. history."
"To put this into perspective, the total damage and economic loss from this wildfire disaster could reach nearly 4% of the annual GDP of the state of California," Porter said.
For comparison, Hurricane Katrina, which devastated parts of the American South including New Orleans in 2005, cost $101 billion in 2023 dollars, according to the Insurance Information Institute, citing numbers from the insurance company Aon (other sources have put the cost of Hurricane Katrina at higher).
All told, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection counts five "currently active incidents" of fires burning in Los Angeles County. The Palisades Fire, which has so far burned over 20,000 acres, is 8% contained, and the Eaton Fire, which has burned more than 13,000 acres, is 3% contained. The Kenneth Fire, which has grown to 1,000 acres, is 35% contained. Two smaller fires, the Hurst Fire and the Lidia Fire, are 37% and 75% contained, respectively.
One homeowner in the Pacific Palisades remarked that his neighborhood "looks like Berlin—or it looks like some part of World War II...Everything is burned down. It’s just terrible."
The fire are also expected to deepen California's insurance crisis. San Francisco Chronicle reporting from last summer on data from 10 of the largest insurance companies revealed that more than 100,000 Californians lost their home insurance between 2019 and 2024. Insurance companies "overwhelmingly cited" wildfire risk as the reason for rolling back coverage.
California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara on Thursday issued a one-year moratorium on homeowners insurance nonrenewals and cancellations for ZIP codes impacted by the fires.
The peer-reviewed analysis estimates that Israel's assault on Gaza killed 64,260 people between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024—a figure significantly higher than the one reported by the enclave's health ministry.
By Jake Johnson
A peer-reviewed analysis published in The Lancet on Thursday found that the official Gaza death toll reported by the enclave's Ministry of Health between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024 was likely a 41% undercount, a finding that underscores the devastation wrought by Israel's assault on the Palestinian territory and the difficulties of collecting accurate data amid relentless bombing.
During the period examined by the new study, Gaza's health ministry (MoH) reported that 37,877 people had been killed in Israeli attacks. But the Lancet analysis estimates that the death toll during that period was 64,260, with women, children, and the elderly accounting for nearly 60% of the deaths for which details were available.
That count only includes "deaths due to traumatic injury," leaving out deaths from starvation, cold, and disease.
To reach their estimate, the authors of the new study "composed three lists from successive MoH-collected hospital morgue data, an MoH online survey, and obituaries published on public social media pages" and "manually scraped information from open-source social media platforms, including specific obituary pages for Gaza shaheed, martyrs of Gaza, and The Palestinian Information Center to create our third capture-recapture list."
"These pages are widely used obituary spaces where relatives and friends inform their networks about deaths, offer condolences and prayers, and honor people known as martyrs (those killed in war)," the authors write. "The platforms span multiple social media channels, including X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram. Throughout the study period, these pages were updated periodically and consistently, providing a comprehensive source of information on casualties. Obituaries typically included names, age at death, and date and location of death, and were often accompanied by photographs and personal stories. We translated English posts into Arabic to match names across lists and excluded deaths attributed to non-traumatic injuries."
The group of authors—which includes academics from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan—said the findings "show an exceptionally high mortality rate in the Gaza Strip during the period studied" and highlight "the urgent need for interventions to prevent further loss of life and illuminate important patterns in the conduct of the war."
Establishing an accurate count of the number of people killed in Israel's 15-month assault on the Gaza Strip, which began in the wake of a deadly Hamas-led attack, has been made extremely difficult by the Israeli military's incessant bombing and destruction of the enclave's medical infrastructure. There are also tens of thousands of people believed to be missing under the ruins of Gaza homes and buildings.
The Lancet study notes that "the escalation of Israeli military ground operations and attacks on healthcare facilities severely disrupted" Gaza officials' data-collection efforts. Prior to October 7, 2023, the MoH "had achieved good accuracy in mortality documentation, with underreporting estimated at 13%," the new analysis notes, and its figures were widely considered reliable.
But since Israel launched its catastrophic response to the Hamas-led attack, U.S. lawmakers and leaders who have backed Israel's assault—including President Joe Biden—have openly cast doubt on the ministry's data. Currently, the MoH estimates that more than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023.
Last month, the U.S. Congress approved a sprawling military policy bill that included a provision barring the Pentagon from publicly citing as "authoritative" death toll figures from Gaza's health ministry. Biden signed the measure into law on December 23.
"This is an alarming erasure of the suffering of the Palestinian people, ignoring the human toll of ongoing violence," Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who voted against the legislation, told The Intercept following House passage of the measure.
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