Tag: police state

Trump administration threatens crackdown on foreigners who ‘make light’ of Charlie Kirk assassination

On X, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau stated that the U.S. will respond to foreign nationals within its borders who express support for or downplay the assassination of Charlie Kirk on social media. 

Specifically, ‘praising, rationalizing, or making light of’ Kirk’s assassination on social media.’

‘In light of yesterday’s horrific assassination of a leading political figure, I want to underscore that foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country,’ Landau wrote on X. 

Landau added, ‘I have been disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action. Please feel free to bring such comments by foreigners to my attention so that the @StateDept can protect the American people.’ 

Landau responded to a comment asking how people could flag these individuals. He responded saying he will direct consular officials to monitor the comments to his post. 

Landau didn’t specify which groups fall under the term ‘foreigners,’ nor did he detail what form the response might take—such as visa denials or deportation.

Other activists and outspoken conservative commentators commented on the X post, showing receipts of people calling for their own assassinations, expressing fear.

In light of Kirk’s traumatic death, Vice President JD Vance will visit Salt Lake City, Utah, to offer condolences to the family of Charlie Kirk. The Second Lady will reportedly also join him on this trip. 

This marks a change from his original plan to travel to New York City to commemorate the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to an administration official familiar with his schedule. 

Some public officials and leaders are also cancelling their events, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who was supposed to have an event in North Carolina this weekend. 

The president also honoring Kirk this morning, bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the owner of Turning-Point USA, speaking at the Pentagon. The day for the award ceremony has not been announced yet. 

At the event, the president, sounding choked-up and solemn, said he is still shocked by the horror of his assassination, all the while highlighting his influence on the conservative political landscape.

The President has ordered all American flags to be lowered to half-staff until Sunday evening at 6pm EST in honor of Kirk.

The conservative commentator, 31, was hit by a single bullet while speaking to a crowd at the public university in Orem at lunchtime on Wednesday after speaking for about 20 minutes.

The father-of-two, known for his fierce MAGA views and combative debates with college kids across the country, collapsed immediately after being hit in the neck by a single shot from about 200 yards.

Kirk was answering a question about mass shootings seconds before he was struck. He was rushed to hospital in a critical condition, but was declared dead two-and-half hours later.

The killer is still on the loose with a major manhunt by the FBI and Utah police underway.

Speaker Mike Johnson held a moment of silence for Kirk on the chamber floor as questions circulated about whether the father of two was alive. 

Daily Mail reached out to the State Department on this story. 

A State Department Spokesperson tells Daily Mail, ‘This Administration does not believe that the United States should grant visas to persons whose presences in our country does not align with U.S. national security interests.’ 

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Isabella Cêpa Wins Landmark Free Speech Case After Brazil Sought 25-Year Sentence for “Misgendering”

Isabella Cêpa, a Brazilian feminist and outspoken women’s rights advocate, has defeated a legal campaign that once threatened her with up to 25 years in prison.

Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court issued a final, non-appealable ruling in her favor, concluding a high-profile case that began with a brief social media video and evolved into one of the most significant free speech battles in Brazil’s modern history.

After years of legal pressure and public silence from Brazilian institutions, Cêpa has not only escaped prosecution but has been granted full refugee protections in Europe.

The move marks the first time a Brazilian citizen has received asylum abroad for being persecuted over gender-critical beliefs. Her case has now become a legal precedent, one that free speech advocates say could help protect others facing similar repression.

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Cybersecurity Experts Warn EU Against Chat Control 2.0 Regulation Ahead of Key Votes

A group of more than 500 experts in cybersecurity, cryptography, and computer science from 34 countries has issued a clear warning against the European Union’s proposed Chat Control 2.0 regulation.

In a joint open letter, the signatories describe the plan as “technically infeasible” and caution that it would open the door to “unprecedented capabilities for surveillance, control, and censorship.”

We obtained a copy of the open letter for you here.

Their statement arrives just days ahead of a critical European Council meeting on September 12, with a final vote set for October 14 that will determine whether the regulation moves forward.

The proposed law would compel messaging apps, email platforms, cloud services, and even providers of end-to-end encrypted communication to scan all user content automatically. This would apply to texts, images, and videos, whether or not there is any suspicion of wrongdoing.

According to the researchers, such detection systems cannot coexist with secure communication. “On‑device detection, regardless of its technical implementation, inherently undermines the protections that end‑to‑end encryption is designed to guarantee.”

By forcing companies to monitor encrypted content, the regulation would introduce security weaknesses that could be exploited by malicious actors and hostile governments.

The scientists also emphasize the inaccuracy of the proposed approach. They argue that large-scale scanning systems produce unacceptable error rates and could generate enormous numbers of false reports.

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In Police Youth Program, Abuse Often Starts When Officers Are Alone With Teens in Cars

In May, prosecutors in Seattle charged a sheriff’s deputy with raping a 17-year-old girl. The deputy met the teenager while he was an adviser in his department’s youth mentorship program known as Explorers.

The victim, now 24, came forward in May to report the abuse, which she alleges took place in 2017 and 2018. The assaults allegedly began after King County Sheriff’s Deputy Ricardo Arturo Cueva told her she was cute and that he liked her while they were alone on a ride-along in his police SUV. Cueva — who is 15 years her senior — later kissed the teenager while they were on a separate ride-along at night. Prosecutors contend that Cueva’s abuse escalated, according to court records, to include sexual assaults in his sheriff’s vehicle and his home. The age of consent in Washington state is typically 16, but rises to 18 if the other person is in a position of authority.

This story was published in partnership with The Guardian.

Law enforcement departments across the country have Explorer programs — overseen by Scouting America, formerly known as Boy Scouts of America — and they have a history of sexual abuse and misconduct, as The Marshall Project reported last year. Ride-alongs, in which young people accompany officers on their patrol shifts, are a key perk of the Explorers program.

They are also a gateway to abuse.

The Marshall Project examined hundreds of abuse allegations in law enforcement Explorer programs and found that about a quarter of them involved officers on ride-alongs with teens — some as young as 14 years old.

“Mr. Cueva staunchly maintains his innocence, and we intend to thoroughly investigate his case and defend him vigorously,” Cueva’s attorneys, Amy Muth and Jennifer Atwood, wrote in a statement. Cueva pleaded not guilty to the charges.

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Chicago police officer says he received racist image from fellow officers in lawsuit against city

A Chicago police officer is suing the city and several of his fellow officers, accusing them of racism and intimidation.

On March 17, Chicago police Officer Anthony Banks was allegedly cornered by a group of fellow officers inside the Chicago Police Department’s 11th District on the city’s West Side.

The alleged incident sent Banks on medical leave due to emotional distress, trauma and fear for his own safety.

“They encircled him in such a fashion that he did not feel free to leave,” Attorney Blake Horwitz said. “They all surrounded my client and start making racial comments, using [a racial slur] and also telling him to go back from where he came from, which has a double meaning.”

Banks’ attorney said the alleged incident happened after a disagreement during an investigation.

The police officers were carrying out their duties inside someone’s home, when Banks allegedly stepped in to deescalate a heated exchange between a visibly pregnant woman and another officer.

“He intervened, and said, ‘why don’t you distance yourself and give her some room?'” Horwitz said.

According to the lawsuit, two Chicago police sergeants who witnessed the confrontation intervened.

Banks was sent home and asked to fill out a report documenting the incident.

The next day, Banks “received a graphic and threatening email containing a racist image on his department-issued phone,” his attorney said.

“The image is the most racially perverse photograph of how an African American can kill himself,” Horwitz said. “It is a 1950s Mississippi-type of representation.”

The attorney said Banks went on medical leave shortly after the incident.

The officer returned to duty on July 1. He was transferred to CPD’s 6th District.

He chose to file a lawsuit to shed light on the issue of racism within the department

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UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood Revives Digital ID Plans

Newly appointed UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has opened the door to the rollout of digital ID systems in the UK, reviving a proposal she has previously supported.

Mahmood’s remarks came during a high-level meeting with allies in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, where migration and security were top of the agenda.

Speaking alongside her counterparts from the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, she laid out her position.

“Well my long-term personal political view has always been in favor of ID cards. In fact I supported the last Labour government’s introduction of ID cards. The first bill I spoke on in Parliament was the ID cards bill which the then Conservative Lib Dem coalition scrapped. So I have a long-standing position which anybody who’s familiar with my view.”

Her comments arrive just days into her tenure, following a dramatic cabinet reshuffle that has reset key departments, including the Home Office.

With illegal small boat crossings continuing to rise and more than 1,000 people arriving in a single day over the weekend, the pressure on the government to deliver results is intensifying. The total number of arrivals this year has already passed 30,000.

Mahmood emphasized that these plans are not borrowed ideas.

“This is a Labour government with Labour policy and Labour proposals,” she said. She insisted that Labour had been preparing these policy positions well in advance of taking office.

Mahmood added that digital ID is something that she has “always supported.”

Now in a position to influence policy directly, she stopped short of confirming a rollout but said it remains under discussion within government. She offered no clear answer when asked whether every UK citizen would be required to have one.

The stated goal is to reduce illegal employment and weaken incentives that draw people to cross into the UK without authorization. For privacy advocates, however, the return of digital ID proposals raises longstanding concerns about surveillance, data control, and potential misuse.

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Britain’s Descent Towards Civil War Is No Accident

Having lived in Australia for the past three years, I sense that this country is the least advanced down the road towards the multicultural dystopia confronting much of Europe.

That is not to say there is room for complacency: Australia has its own canaries in the coal mine, echoing trends observable across the Western world. Yet relative prosperity, firm immigration policies, a distinct welfare regime (mandatory health insurance, means tested pensions), a robust federal system, and above all a unique electoral framework of three-year cycles and compulsory voting all help, willy-nilly, to keep politicians on a short leash and broadly tethered to the popular will.

The greatest safeguard against social fracture and disintegration in Australia, however, is not institutional design but rather watching Britain implode in real time. Many Australians, still bound by ties of kinship and tradition to the old country, see in the United Kingdom both a cautionary tale and an anti-role model: a once-settled, relatively harmonious state busily teaching the world how to dismantle itself through the enthusiastic embrace of liberal dogma.

As an observer no longer resident in Britain, I am reluctant to pontificate on the fate of my homeland. Yet it is a sight to behold: an establishment seemingly bent on self-destruction, clinging to an incontinent immigration system and an almost devotional attachment to international and human rights laws that disadvantage its own citizens. The Epping hotel protests — complete with the Home Office’s recourse to legal appeals — illustrate the point. No doubt the legal complexities are real, as David McGrogan rightly pointed out in these pages, but such manoeuvres only pour petrol on an already combustible national mood.

One is left to wonder whether Britain’s Labour Party, now so hopelessly enthralled by socially progressive ideology, will ever rediscover the ability to represent anything resembling national sentiment — or whether it will, like the Conservatives, simply perfect the art of political self-evisceration.

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Nineteen killed in Nepal in ‘Gen Z’ protest over social media ban, corruption

At least 19 people in two cities died on Monday in Nepal’s worst unrest in decades, authorities said, as police in the capital fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters trying to storm parliament in anger at a social media shutdown and corruption.

Some of the protesters, most of them young, forced their way into the parliament complex in Kathmandu by breaking through a barricade, a local official said, setting fire to an ambulance and hurling objects at lines of riot police guarding the legislature.

“The police have been firing indiscriminately,” one protester told the ANI news agency. “(They) fired bullets which missed me but hit a friend who was standing behind me. He was hit in the hand.”

More than 100 people including 28 police personnel were receiving medical treatment for their injuries, police officer Shekhar Khanal told Reuters. Protesters were ferrying the injured to hospital on motorcycles.

A government decision last week to block access to several social media platforms, including Meta Platforms’ (META.O), opens new tab Facebook, has fuelled anger among the young. About 90% of Nepal’s 30 million people use the internet.

Officials said they imposed the ban because platforms had failed to register with authorities in a crackdown on misuse, including false social media accounts used to spread hate speech and fake news, and commit fraud.

Two of the 19 people were killed when protests in the eastern city of Itahari turned violent, police said.

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Retired UK Police Superintendent Investigated for “Dead-Naming” Trans Activist Online

A retired police superintendent in the UK says she was targeted by her former force after using the name “Fred” in reference to transgender activist Freda Wallace in several social media posts, a move that triggered a police visit to her home and a potential criminal investigation.

Cathy Larkman, who served for over three decades with South Wales Police, said the visit came after she made remarks online about Wallace, including posts on platform X that read, “Fred blocked me” and “Fred, put that drink down.”

The posts were part of an ongoing public conversation around strip-searching policies, where Larkman voiced opposition to allowing transgender women to conduct searches on female detainees.

Although Larkman wasn’t home when officers came to her door, she later learned the visit was related to allegations of “malicious communications.”

The complaint was her use of Wallace’s former name, a practice often referred to as “dead-naming” by gender activists.

A social media account titled SEEN Police Official Open Public Network confirmed a complaint had been filed.

According to The Telegraph, the individual believed to have made the report is Lynsay Watson, a transgender former police officer known for encouraging law enforcement to criminally pursue people who challenge gender ideology. Watson was dismissed from Leicestershire Police in 2023 for gross misconduct.

Larkman’s situation follows a similar incident involving Father Ted writer Graham Linehan, who was arrested by armed officers at Heathrow Airport days earlier over a series of posts.

Raising concerns about what she describes as growing ideological pressure within the policing system, Larkman accused the institution of serving activist agendas instead of the public interest. “The police service keeps demonstrating that it is ideologically captured from the top down. It is failing the public,” she said.

Britain’s free speech environment is deteriorating rapidly under the weight of expansive censorship laws, regulatory overreach, and state-sanctioned content control.

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Former Trump Cabinet Member Says Marijuana Rescheduling Would Help To ‘Destroy This Country’

Ben Carson, President Donald Trump’s former secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), says a move to reschedule marijuana that the administration is actively considering would play into plots to “destroy this country.”

In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Carson reiterated his opposition to cannabis reform as Trump weighs a proposal to transfer marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

Asked why he feels his “caution” against rescheduling could lead the administration to reject the reform, Carson said that “with a lot of things, it’s just a matter of common sense.”

“It’s a matter of putting the facts on the table and then making policy decisions based on what those facts are,” he said, pointing to a study he claims found a “dramatic increase in crime” in neighborhoods with cannabis dispensaries.

“It doesn’t take a great deal of intellect to recognize that when you put these substances into communities and you make them easy to obtain, you get a much worse result,” Carson said. “Also, people say, ‘Well, you know, when I was young, I smoked marijuana. It didn’t cause me to have a lot of problems.’ Recognize that the marijuana of the 60s and 70s was much less potent than the marijuana today.”

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