History

The organization's account on TikTok was created in October 2020 under the name TikTok for Biden, to support Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential election in the United States.[8] The organization was renamed Gen-Z for Change in January 2021.[9]

In early March 2022, the Presidency of Joe Biden enlisted Gen-Z for Change to help organize a briefing between senior administration officials and prominent social media influencers about the Russo-Ukrainian War.[9] The briefing was leaked to The Washington Post, which later inspired a sketch on NBC's comedy show Saturday Night Live.[10][11] Prior to that, Gen-Z for Change partnered with the White House and United States Department of Health and Human Services to combat COVID-19 misinformation and promote vaccination efforts.[12] Although the organization has regularly criticized the Biden Administration, some have worried about their close ties to each other.

Special counsel Jack Smith is seeking to force two attorneys representing former President Donald Trump to testify in the Justice Department's investigation into classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago.

Smith's prosecutors last month sought to compel Trump attorney Evan Corcoran's testimony by asking a judge to grant a crime-fraud exception, which suggests Trump and his allies may have used Corcoran's services to further a crime. Corcoran handled Trump's discussions with the DOJ after investigators sought to recover the documents and drafted a statement affirming that all classified materials had been returned after a "diligent search" — before the FBI discovered more than 100 additional classified documents during its search of Mar-a-Lago last August.

Smith is seeking to compel Corcoran's testimony about an alleged phone call he had with Trump after the government "grew suspicious" that the former president had not actually returned all of the documents, ABC News reported on Thursday.

The alleged phone call took place on June 24, 2022, the same day that prosecutors subpoenaed the Trump Organization for surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago.

But the report added that it's not clear how Smith's team learned about the call or why they are focused on it in their investigation...

Protesters blocked a key highway around the French capital and escalated strikes at refineries Friday in a new show of anger after President Emmanuel Macron pushed through a contentious pension reform without a parliamentary vote.

Macron's move sparked protests across the country on Thursday night, with more than 300 people arrested nationwide, according to the interior minister.

On Friday morning, some 200 protesters briefly blocked traffic on the ring road outside the capital.

Soumaya Gentet, 51, a CGT union member from supermarket chain Monoprix, said she was incensed and would continue to protest until the bill was revoked.

Two trains operated by BNSF derailed in Washington state and Arizona on Thursday as the rail industry and its Republican allies in Congress fight bipartisan safety legislation introduced in the wake of the toxic crash in East Palestine, Ohio.

The Associated Pressreported that the Washington derailment spilled 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel on tribal lands along Padilla Bay. State authorities said the fuel spill does not appear to have flowed toward the water—though such an assurance is cold comfort amid the disaster in eastern Ohio, where residents' concerns about the long-term impacts of the wreck on local water, soil, and air quality remain high more than a month after the crash.

In Arizona, eight BNSF train cars derailed Thursday near the state's border with California and Nevada, though it's unclear whether any spills occurred. The crash reportedly involved a train carrying corn syrup.

More than 1,000 trains derail in the United States each year, but the Norfolk Southern disaster in East Palestine has brought greater scrutiny to the industry's dangerous cost-cutting and lax safety practices—turning wrecks that would typically be consigned to local news coverage into national headlines.

With each derailment since early February, calls for substantive action in Congress to rein in the powerful industry have grown louder.

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — It’s become an ominous fixture of the mass anti-government protests roiling Israel: a coil of women in crimson robes and white caps, walking heads bowed and hands clasped. They are dressed as characters from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and the eponymous TV series.

The women, growing in numbers as the demonstrations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies intensify, say they are protesting to ward off what they believe will be a dark future if the government follows through on its plan to overhaul the judiciary.

“This display is a representation of the things that we fear,” said Moran Zer Katzenstein, founder of the women’s rights advocacy group Bonot Alternativa, or “building an alternative,” which is behind the Handmaid’s protest.

“Women are going to be the first to be harmed” under the overhaul, she added.

In a move that has sparked widespread opposition, Netanyahu’s government is pushing to weaken the Supreme Court and limit the independence of the judiciary, steps they say will restore power to elected legislators and make the courts less interventionist. Critics say the move upends Israel’s system of checks and balances and pushes it toward autocracy.

The overhaul has sent tens of thousands of people into the streets in protest each week.

Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith has subpoenaed a broad array of people at former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort as part of the investigation into Trump's mishandling of classified information.

Some of these new subpoenas are highly significant, argued former Pentagon special counsel Ryan Goodman on Thursday's edition of CNN's "OutFront," because they involve people whom Trump may never have even noticed were seeing his activity.

"There are at least two dozen witnesses," said anchor Erin Burnett. "And ... these witnesses include people that would have seen a lot, but that maybe Trump wouldn't have noticed. Restaurant servers, people like that."

"I think of it the same way," said Goodman. "They might be invisible to him. But they are the eyes and ears, and they can see things. Or they can know things might, even be somewhat rumor, but then they can at least give the investigators leads, so they can tell the investigators who is present in different conversations."

Writing in his latest book, Dershowitz argued: "The 'Get Trump' camp is making it difficult for Merrick Garland to do and to appear to be doing justice. These extremists not only don't care about the equal application of the law, but they also demand a double standard against Trump precisely because they believe that Trump is more dangerous and more evil than Hillary Clinton was. (Many anti-Clinton zealots believed the opposite.)

"The pressure on Garland to prosecute Trump, especially from the left of his party, may be irresistible. At the very least, it will subject any prosecutorial decision to the accusation that it was influenced by the 'Get Trump' zealotry."