Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America. Please take a moment to click the ❤️ and restack this post. The oligarchs’ platforms are trying to keep stories like the ones below from hitting your feeds, and this helps us break through.
An 8.5-foot golden statue of a naked Donald Trump has been erected inside the European Parliament. The Postal Service has deployed nearly 1,000 armed guards from a private security firm with a record of human rights complaints. ICE looked through tens of millions of voter records looking for noncitizens. And one of the last surviving chestnut tree groves in the country may be cleared to make room for a data center.
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It’s the only Trump-branded gold object that’s actually worth something.
Danish artist Jens Galschiøt has installed an 8.5-foot-tall statue of a nude Trump inside one of the buildings of the European Parliament. The sculpture, titled The Orange Plague, is gilded in 23-karat gold leaf and shows an overweight Trump sitting on the back of a much smaller, clothed man while holding a golf club and the scales of justice.
The statue is also known as “The King of Injustice.” The text inscribed on the base reads, in part, “I am sitting on the back of a man. He is sinking under my burden. I will do anything to help him. Except stepping down from his back.”
Galschiøt said the work is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, in which a vain ruler parades naked through the streets because no one is willing to tell him he’s nude. Galschiøt said in a statement that “Trump represents one of the greatest threats to the rule-based world order, democratic values, and our common effort to solving the climate crisis.”
The statue was previously exhibited at the COP30 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Brazil last year. It’s scheduled to remain in the Parliament until Thursday, which is longer than most of Trump’s cabinet appointments.
It takes them nine days to deliver a flat-rate box, but the armed guards showed up overnight.
Nearly 1,000 armed guards from a multinational private security firm have been deployed to at least 55 USPS facilities across the country ahead of Election Day. No one from the Postal Service will be supervising them.
The guards were hired through Prosegur, a multinational private security company with a record of alleged human rights violations. The Ethics Council of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund announced it would withdraw its investment in Prosegur’s Brazilian subsidiary in 2024 after it reportedly prevented indigenous communities from accessing food and medical care.
The guards are now assigned to facilities in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Indianapolis, Phoenix, San Diego, and Tampa. One postal contractor told Raw Story that she was alarmed they were mostly concentrated in deeply Democratic and swing states.
Frank Albergo, executive director of the Postal Police Officers Association, said that control of the guards will rest entirely with Prosegur. Post offices will “basically have private contractors in and around ballots without any federal control,” which Albergo called “crazy.”
Trump signed an executive order in March directing states to compile lists of eligible voters and ordering the Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to those that complied. The Supreme Court voted 6-3 in August to lift a lower court injunction blocking the order, but a federal judge ruled in September that the restrictions could not be implemented before the midterms.
If you have ever bought a hoodie from Zumiez, you are now one degree of separation from a federal immigration investigation.
DHS ordered immigration agents off their normal assignments in late August and told them to search state voter registration databases for suspected noncitizen voters. The program was called the “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” and the agents were given less than two hours of training before they began.
Training materials told agents to check state voter registration portals for their targets. In some instances, agents were told to pose as the individual voters in an effort to obtain access to their records, which could break state laws that restrict those portals to people looking for their own information.
Homeland Security Investigations separately investigated hundreds of voter registration organizations over the past year. Internal documents obtained by Democracy Forward show that HSI considered infiltrating those groups with undercover agents to build cases for prosecution, though there is no indication the agency followed through.
HSI concentrated heavily on battleground states, investigating at least 82 organizations in Pennsylvania alone. It even looked at Zumiez, a national clothing retailer that has partnered with groups such as Voto Latino and Rock the Vote.
The trees that survived a continent-wide extinction event are about to lose to a zoning board.
A grove of some 200 American chestnut trees in Mason County, West Virginia could be cleared as soon as November 1 to make way for a data center. The trees were planted in the 1970s from wild survivors of the chestnut blight that killed an estimated four billion trees over a century.
Developers claim the nursery is not part of their land, but have not produced property maps to support their claim. The public only learned about the project from a conservation newsletter instead of a permit notice or project disclosure.
No one conducted a public environmental review before the project moved forward. There’s also no evidence anyone considered whether or not the trees could be saved by moving them or redesigning the site.
Conservationists have warned that the trees contain genetic material vital for restoration programs across the state. The American Chestnut Foundation has called on state officials to stop the clearing and require the developers to consult with the West Virginia Division of Forestry before proceeding.
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** New Poll Shows Record 66% of Americans Support Medicare for All.** A new KFF poll finds 66% of Americans support Medicare for All, the highest level of support ever measured for a single-payer health care system. This is up from 64% in August, and the number has been steadily climbing during Trump’s second term as health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs keep rising. Black Americans, women under 50, and voters under 30 were most supportive of the measure, with each group backing the proposal by more than 70%. The results show “people are sick of a broken healthcare system,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, author of the Medicare for All Act.
** Susan Collins Crashes and Burns in First Senate Debate After Bragging About Road Salt. **Susan Collins had one of the worst debate performances of the midterms Tuesday night, when she tried to defend her record by pointing to her success in getting road salt removed from Trump’s tariff list. Democratic challenger Troy Jackson responded that people can’t eat road salt, and that the Iran war has driven gas prices so high that many people can’t afford to drive at all. Since Trump took office, the average household in the state has paid $3,900 more for goods and services. Collins has voted to continue the war five times.
Army Corps of Engineers Completes $25 Million Mississippi River Habitat Restoration. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has completed a $25 million restoration of McGregor Lake, a 200-acre backwater lake on the Mississippi River near Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. The Corps began construction in 2020 and over the next six years, dredged 500,000 cubic yards of sand from the river to create seven islands and stabilize more than a mile of eroding shoreline. The dredging also created 35 acres of overwintering habitat for fish, and excess sediment was spread on the new islands to help vegetation take root.
The 2026 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards Finalists Are Here. The Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards have announced their 2026 finalists after receiving over 10,000 submissions from photographers in 112 countries. The contest, established in 2015 to foster empathy toward wildlife through humor, partners with the Born Free Foundation to fund conservation work. The winners will be announced in London on December 8, and the public can vote for the People’s Choice Award on the contest’s website. The pictures are too good to describe, so click the link and see for yourself.
