US news

Yassin said a coalition of lawyers was preparing a civil lawsuit alleging violations of the volunteers’ constitutional rights. Supporters chanted, “Trump, escucha, ¡estamos en la lucha!” (in English, “Trump, listen, we’re in the fight!”). Passing cars honked and federal officers watched from behind glass doors.

“We’re gonna continue to fight back, we’re gonna continue to organize, we’re not gonna stop,” said Lainy Yompian, a VC Defensa leader.

Attorney Carrie McNamara of the American Civil Liberties Union chapter in Florida called Brown’s settlement deal “a hard-won vindication” that sends a message to the state’s officials that they cannot punish speech they dislike.

“The first amendment does not disappear when someone accepts a government job,” McNamara said, alluding to the part of the US constitution which grants the right to free speech.

Brown’s former supervisor at the agency, habitat and species conservation director Melissa Tucker, had claimed that Brown’s post generated hundreds of formal complaints and caused significant disruption. Discovery in the case later revealed that the agency only received about 50 complaints.

US district judge Mark Walker imposed sanctions against Tucker recently for exaggerating the amount and then not correcting the record.

Fortunately for all of us, an unlikely and unruly coalition has emerged to resist the AI takeover by taking aim at the industry’s core infrastructure. In 2025, about 48 datacenter projects worth an estimated $156bn were blocked or stalled by local opposition. By all measures, 2026 is shaping up to be an even bigger year for the AI resistance.

From rural North Carolina to suburban Virginia to the foothills and farmlands of New Mexico and Oregon, ordinary people are coming together across partisan divides to say no to a status quo that allows tech lobbyists to ram through datacenter deals at a breathtaking clip, often behind a veil of secrecy enforced by NDAs. In deep red Indiana, more than 10 counties have enacted moratoriums or temporary bans on new AI datacenters; the Seminole Nation in Oklahoma recently passed a moratorium for their territory; and across New Jersey, project after project has been cancelled due to local fury about the raw deals on offer.

US workers overwhelmingly support pro-worker policies on artificial intelligence (AI) and view labor unions as the most reliable protectors of workers from the effects of AI, according to a new poll released by the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US.

More than nine out of 10 workers surveyed expressed support for policies on artificial intelligence that labor unions may fight for, including 95% supporting a requirement that a human be the final decision maker on any issues affecting individual workers and their employment.

Speaking on Monday after a meeting with Landry, who is also governor of Louisiana, and the US ambassador to Denmark, Kenneth Howery, the Greenlandic prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, also criticised the doctor’s presence.

He said: “If you want to learn about health conditions in Greenland, you have to contact Greenland through the right channels,” he said.

Griffin’s presence in Greenland appears to be the latest US attempt to intervene in the island’s healthcare system after Trump said in February that a hospital ship was “on its way” – an offer refused by Nuuk. The ship never arrived.

Nearly 4,000 people have lodged objections to the project being approved, with this pushback leading to contentious public meetings that Lee Perry, the Box Elder county commissioner, said have left him feeling “physically sick” amid alleged death threats and false accusations.

O’Leary has claimed in social media posts that most of the protesters don’t live locally and have been paid to object to the project. “There are professional protesters that are paid by somebody, I don’t know who,” O’Leary said in a video posted to X last week. “They’re being bused in.”

Opponents of the project have rejected this accusation. On Monday, a group calling itself the Box Elder Accountability Referendum filed an application for a referendum to reverse the commissioners’ approval of Stratos. If the group is able to collect 5,422 signatures from registered voters in the county in the next 45 days, the project approval will go to a vote in November.

“Instead of speaking with us, Kevin O’Leary went on social media saying we were out-of-state, paid protesters, and we don’t want people from out-of-state making decisions for us,” said Brenna Williams, lead sponsor of the referendum push.

“The only thing he’s right about is that we don’t want him, an out-of-state billionaire, making decisions for us.”

The US Senate will not pass the $70bn legislation ahead of a 1 June deadline set by the US president, Republican senators told reporters on Thursday, as lawmakers leave Washington for the Memorial Day recess.

It comes amid backlash from members of Trump’s own party against an attempt to latch funding for his ballroom project on to the immigration bill.

The plan prompted intense anxiety among congressional Republicans, who feared diverting taxpayer dollars toward Trump’s “East Wing modernization project” amid mounting cost of living concerns across the US would risk alienating voters ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Some Senate Republicans have also expressed concerns about a plan, announced on Monday, to create a secretive $1.776bn fund – which critics have argued is essentially a slush fund – to compensate Trump allies as part of an agreement in which the president and his sons dropped a $10bn long-shot lawsuit against the US Internal Revenue Service.

Democratic state representatives in Minnesota staged an overnight sit-in in their house chamber on Thursday after the Republican speaker failed to put a gun violence prevention bill up for a vote.

Samantha Sencer-Mura, a Democratic representative from Minneapolis, first announced the plan on Wednesday from the floor of the state’s house of representatives, giving the speaker, Lisa Demuth, a candidate for governor, 24 hours to give the bill a vote before the sit-in would start.

The sit-in began around 9pm local time. Lawmakers intend to stay until the house comes back in session, which is set for Saturday at noon.

The Minnesota senate, controlled by Democrats, narrowly passed the gun violence prevention omnibus earlier this month. The house, where there is a 67-67 vote tie and a Republican speaker in charge, has so far not taken up the bill.

The push for new gun laws came after a school shooting at Annunciation Catholic church last August, where two students were killed and others injured during a school-wide mass. Minnesota also saw the killings of state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the shootings of state lawmaker John Hoffman and his wife, last summer.

Democrats tore into government’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein abuse scandal on Tuesday – revealing new details of the scale of his international sex-trafficking ring, and warning Donald Trump not to grant a presidential pardon to the late sex offender’s sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell.

Several survivors of Epstein’s abuse also gave tearful testimony at a congressional field hearing in Florida of their experiences as teenagers in his orbit. Some spoke of being retraumatized after they were “outed” by the justice department’s failure to redact their names from the so-called Epstein files.

Democratic members of the US House oversight committee said they held Tuesday’s event in Palm Beach, where the president lives, and where Epstein had a residence, because it was “the scene of the crime”.

“We’re here because so much of this investigation brings us back to this location,” the California Democrat Robert Garcia, ranking member of the oversight committee, told a press conference after the hearing.

“We know that the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, the horrible things that happened to so many women and girls, totaling 1,200 could have been stopped and halted.”

Garcia began the hearing by unveiling a new report called The Price of Non-Prosecution that he said revealed how Epstein was able to build a substantial and lucrative international sex-trafficking ring following his infamous “sweetheart deal” with Florida prosecutors in 2008.

By the time “Operation Metro Surge” hit Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota, residents were primed to fight back. From houses and stores, in cars and on bicycles, people of every age, race and political stripe dogged ICE wherever it went. The protesters wore inflatable animal costumes, flak jackets and parkas heavy enough to brave weather so cold it froze the ink in reporters’ pens. They withstood teargas, police batons and arrests. And when agents fatally shot two US citizens in January, cellphone videographers were there to record the killings – and disseminate the images around the world on social media.

Public opinion swung decisively against Trump, the then homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, and “commander at large” Greg Bovino. The government was forced to retreat.