Account information for this Lucianne member

Alex Pretti wasn’t killed while “protesting.” This is a common description of what he was doing on a Minneapolis street Saturday, when a confrontation with federal immigration agents ended in his tragic shooting. But if Pretti had been a mere protester, he’d very likely be alive today. Now that we’ve seen videos of an earlier struggle with federal agents and learned more about the organized nature of the anti-ICE resistance, it’s become clear that the better word for Pretti was agitator, or perhaps even operative. A protester, as typically understood, is someone who is making a point, often as part of a gathering of other like-minded people and,

City Council Speaker Julie Menin introduced legislation Thursday to create an up to 100-foot buffer zone for protests outside synagogues and other houses of worship. The new proposed bill from the city’s first Jewish council speaker would allow the NYPD to establish a security perimeter of maximum 100 feet around religious institutions during demonstrations, to be determined on a case-by-case basis. “Jewish New Yorkers make up roughly 10 percent of our city’s population yet last year they were the victims of more than half of all reported hate crimes. That’s a reality we cannot normalize and we cannot ignore,” Menin said.

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order that would impose a tariff on any goods from countries that sell or provide oil to Cuba, a move that could further cripple an island plagued by a deepening energy crisis. The order would primarily put pressure on Mexico, a government that has acted as an oil lifeline for Cuba and has constantly voiced solidarity for the US adversary even as President Claudia Sheinbaum has sought to build a strong relationship with Trump. Trump was asked by a reporter Thursday whether he was trying to “choke off” Cuba, which he called a “failing nation.” “The word ‘choke off’ is awfully tough,” Trump said.

President Donald Trump is suing the IRS and Treasury Department for $10 billion, as he accuses the federal agencies of a failure to prevent a leak of the president’s tax information to news outlets between 2018 and 2020. The suit, filed in a Florida federal court Thursday, includes the president’s sons Eric Trump and, Donald Trump Jr. and the Trump organization as plaintiffs. The filing alleges that the leak of Trump and the Trump Organization’s confidential tax records caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump,

The 25-year-old Iranian fashion designer hoped that mass protests nearly four years ago — the ones that erupted after a young woman was arrested and died in custody for not wearing the hijab properly — would improve civil rights in the Islamic Republic. Not much changed, though. Being on those streets, she felt, may have been for nothing. But it didn’t deter her. In early January, she protested again. The sea of people across Tehran’s busy streets lifted her spirits. This time, the spark was inflation and the plummeting value of the Iranian rial — though chants soon targeted the country’s theocratic leaders.

During recent hearings on the Trump administration’s Venezuela operation, Secretary of State Marco Rubio forcefully rebutted an argument from Senator Rand Paul. Sen. Paul claimed the administration had violated the Constitution by forcefully removing an elected official from another country. Rubio quickly countered that Nicolás Maduro was not a legitimately elected leader, whose rule rests on widely acknowledged rigged elections, and noted that Maduro has also been indicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges. "I think we are in violation of both the spirit and the law of the Constitution by bombing a capital, blockading a country, and removing an elected official," Paul said.

“The Government of Cuba has taken extraordinary actions that harm and threaten the United States. The regime aligns itself with — and provides support for — numerous hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors adverse to the United States, including the Government of the Russian Federation (Russia), the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Government of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah,” the order reads. “For example, Cuba blatantly hosts dangerous adversaries of the United States, inviting them to base sophisticated military and intelligence capabilities in Cuba that directly threaten the national security of the United States.”