im old and lonely but i feel cute for no reason at all right now anyways and i think that is just fine ✨

A draft emergency executive order to declare a national emergency to allow President Donald Trump to take unprecedented control over voting is being circulated by anti-voting activists who said they are in coordination with the White House.

Voting rights experts, democracy advocates, and at least one state election chief said Trump doesn’t have the authority to claim such powers — and any attempt would be blatantly unconstitutional.

The draft order — which is said to be based on a conspiracy theory that China interfered with the 2020 election — would allow Trump to unilaterally ban mail-in ballots and voting machines on the basis that they are susceptible to foreign interference.

The order comes from MAGA activists who have been coordinating with the White House. One of the advocates for the order is Peter Ticktin, the attorney for Tina Peters, the former GOP Colorado county clerk who is currently serving a nine-year state prison sentence for her role in a 2021 voting system breach, in an attempt to find voter fraud based on election conspiracies.

The Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution explicitly gives states — not the president — sole authority over elections.

archive article: https://archive.is/hsr5u

We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in: mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached. Every single time. And every single time it happens, the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that built them act shocked—shocked!—that collecting enormous databases of government IDs, facial scans, and biometric data from millions of people turns out to be a security nightmare.

Well, here we go again.

A couple weeks ago, Discord announced it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience, meaning all users would be shunted into a restricted experience unless they verified their age through biometric scanning. The internet, predictably, was not thrilled. But while many users were busy venting their frustration, a group of security researchers decided to do something more useful: they took a look under the hood at Persona, one of the companies Discord was using for verification (specifically for users in the UK).

What they found, according to The Rage, was exactly what we would predict:

Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government authorized server.

In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting – and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies.

Let me say that again: 2,456 publicly accessible files sitting on a government-authorized server, exposed to the open internet.

The death of a nearly blind refugee in Buffalo, New York, days after Border Patrol agents dropped him off at a coffee shop alone, has prompted an investigation into the circumstances of his final days and drawn sharp criticism from the mayor, who called the incident “deeply disturbing.”

Nurul Amin Shah Alam, 56, who spoke little English, had been missing since February 19, when the agents left him at the shop shortly after he was released from the Erie County jail, officials said. His body was found five days later, around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, about four miles from the coffee shop, the Buffalo Police Department said.

The Erie County Medical Examiner conducted an autopsy and determined Shah Alam’s cause of death was health‑related. Exposure and homicide have been ruled out, Buffalo city spokesperson Nick Beiling said.

It is not clear what exactly the nature of the health condition was, Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan said at a news conference Thursday. CNN has asked the medical examiner for its full report, which the mayor said he has not seen yet.

“The Border Patrol officers had no protocol of what to do with a disabled man who doesn’t speak English, who is confused and lost. And you know what they did? They dropped him at a closed coffee shop. That’s why we do not cooperate with ICE, Homeland Security and Border Patrol,” Ryan said.

Buffalo Police said its “homicide detectives are investigating the circumstances and timeframe of events leading up to his death, following his release from custody.”

Ryan said he would be releasing a timeline of the police department’s actions going back to Shah Alam’s initial arrest last year.

Shah Alam, a refugee from Myanmar, had spent much of the previous year in custody awaiting trial on criminal charges that were ultimately resolved with a misdemeanor plea deal, Erie County District Attorney Michael J. Keane told CNN in a statement Thursday.

A police report obtained by CNN affiliate WGRZ showed Shah Alam was being held on two counts of assault with intent to cause injury to an officer, a count of possession of a weapon and trespassing, among other charges, before a plea deal was reached.

He was arrested in February 2025, following what one of his children described to Reuters as a misunderstanding with police. Shah Alam had been out for a walk and was using a curtain rod as a walking stick when he got lost and wandered onto private property, his son Mohamad Faisal said. When he did not understand officers’ commands to drop the rod, Shah Alam was arrested.

Shah Alam was released from jail last week after his bond was posted on February 19, Keane said. It’s unclear who posted bond for him or what changed to lead to his release.

CNN has reached out to an attorney for Shah Alam.

As Shah Alam’s discharge from jail was being processed, deputies notified US Border Patrol, which had earlier placed him under an immigration detainer, the Erie County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.

“U.S. Border Patrol arrived at the Holding Center prior to the finalization of Mr. Shah Alam’s release from Erie County Sheriff’s Office custody,” the statement said.

A spokesperson for CBP said the agents later determined Shah Alam had entered the United States as a refugee on December 24, 2024, and “was not amenable to removal.”

“Border Patrol agents offered him a courtesy ride, which he chose to accept to a coffee shop, determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address, rather than be released directly from the Border Patrol station,” the statement said. “He showed no signs of distress, mobility issues or disabilities requiring special assistance.”

Upon learning that Shah Alam was ineligible for removal, Border Patrol agents, using a translator program, attempted to communicate with him, according to a federal law enforcement official who said that Shah Alam asked to be taken to the location where he was eventually left. He was offered an opportunity to make a phone call but declined, the official said.

Ryan, the mayor, criticized the series of events by Border Patrol, saying there were ways they could have contacted someone to help Shah Alam. After it was clear he could not be removed from the country, agents did not take him back to the holding center, he said. There, they could have obtained phone numbers for his son or lawyer, who were both active visitors, according to Ryan.

That is bad policing, but that is also bad human beings. That is an inhumane thing to do,” he said.

Palantir Technologies has a permanent desk at the U.S.-led Civil Military Coordination Center (CMCC) headquarters in southern Israel, three sources from the diplomatic community inside the CMCC told Drop Site News. According to the sources, the artificial intelligence data analytics giant is providing the technological architecture for tracking the delivery and distribution of aid to Gaza.

The presence of Palantir and other corporations—along with recent changes banning non-profits unwilling to give data to Israeli authorities—is creating a situation in which the delivery of aid is taking a backseat to the pursuit of profit, investment, and the training of AI products, experts say.

A photo appearing to show Donald Trump’s commerce secretary Howard Lutnick with Jeffrey Epstein has been found in a downloaded cache of the Epstein Files—and apparently deleted from the official version.

The picture seems to show the pedophile walking ahead of the financier on Little St. James island, where it was already known Lutnick had visited for a picnic with his wife and “his children and his nannies.”

The picture was located by “jmail,” a site run by two tech workers who have created a searchable version of Epstein’s Gmail inbox by downloading all of the latest releases.

Paywall bypass

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/64461862

Unavailable at source.

Lots of cheddar and cream cheese. Tomatoes & lots of chives go on after broiling the cheese on the eggo until it just starts to burn. I season with liberal amounts of Tony C's and MSG.

https://www.lecanardenchaine.fr/politique/50876-une-insoumise-chez-les-poutinistes

Staff at a for-profit Pennsylvania immigrant prison serially falsified detention records about a man who died in 2023, according to a federal death review obtained exclusively by The Intercept earlier this month.

Despite these findings, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to punish the facility’s politically connected operator, GEO Group. Instead, records show the agency gave GEO even more money to run the facility after the man died: $4 million in additional funds, just three months after the death review was completed. After an April 2024 visit at the facility, ICE’s acting director called GEO a “valued partner.”

Serial Falsification of Safety Checks Frankline Okpu died in solitary confinement at GEO Group’s Moshannon Valley ICE Processing Center in Clearfield County on December 6, 2023. According to the detainee death report, two days before his death, staff sent the 37-year-old Cameroonian father of three to solitary confinement following an altercation with a guard in which he allegedly swallowed an unknown substance they believed to contain “k2,” a synthetic form of cannabis, “mixed with a tranquilizer.”

A physician who treated Okpu upon his placement in segregation instructed facility staff to take him to the emergency department. According to GEO, Okpu refused informed consent for this course of treatment; the doctor ordered GEO to house him in the facility’s infirmary for observation. GEO staff claim Okpu refused this course of treatment, too. The provider ordered prison staff to conduct 15-minute visual checks to ensure his safety.

But records show that did not always happen before Okpu died, according to ICE’s death review.

Surveillance footage revealed 94 of 219 required visual inspections (42 percent) did not occur as ordered. In 23 instances, GEO staff recorded checks that never occurred at all. In another 33, staff logged visual inspections without looking in the cell window to personally observe Okpu. And in 38 logged events, the checks staff claimed to perform every 15 minutes occurred outside that required timeframe.

Federal prosecutors have previously indicted GEO staff for falsifying visual inspection logs during the period preceding an incarcerated person’s death in custody.

The Intercept sought comment and posed a series of detailed questions to ICE and GEO. An ICE spokesperson said the agency was unable to provide a response by deadline, citing “the blizzard in the Northeast.” GEO Group did not respond.

Helicopters are for C-UAS