The last big protests cost $150 million in NYPD overtime — with tens of millions more in lawsuit settlements.
The post How Much Money Did the NYPD Waste Quashing Student Protests? We Tallied It Up. appeared first on The Intercept.
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Ruth Ben-Ghiat, expert on authoritarianism, succinctly analyses what statement and I think it’s right on: This as yet another loyalty performance for an audience of One, who is addressed as though he is still the head of state. We are also dwelling in the “upside-down world” of authoritarianism, as I call it. “Accountability” means stopping investigations into abuse of power, and “a threat to our entire system” = a threat to Republican plans to convert America to an autocracy under Trump’s lead. That’s the most telling phrase. This is what it’s all about. The “you can believe me or you can believe your eyes” and “I know you are but what am I” and the rest of these crude descriptions of the intensely frustrating inversion of reality in which these people live is all in service of authoritarianism. Trump isn’t an intellectual or an academic and neither are most of his followers. They are authoritarians who are simply following their own instincts. It’s not uncommon among our species.
Former Australian Prime Minister turned book salesman, Scott Morrison, has stunned attendees at the MET Gala by turning up dressed as a lump of coal. ”When on the World stage I do like to make a splash,” said the former... Read More ›
As you hear all about Trump’s encounter with Stormy Daniels, get a load of this: Former Trump aide John McEntee promised a ban on pornography was coming in the United States in a recent interview with Daily Wire host Michael Knowles. McEntee had a senior position in the Trump White House and is a key contributor to the infamous Project 2025, a collection of policy proposals to transition the United States to Christian nationalist authoritarianism in the first 180 days of Trump’s second term. “You bring up the elephant in the room,” McEntee told Knowles, “which is a stain on not only society but the entire dating culture as well, which is pornography. Whenever America bans that, which will be happening at some point, everyone will be much better off.” The Project 2025 plan specifically lists a ban on pornography stating, “[Pornography] is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” “The minute that goes away, this country will flourish,” McEntee told Knowles.
“Nothing Australia does – with or without AUKUS – will make any difference to the collective capacity to either deter or defeat China in the next decade, which is the time frame that counts. That means the only prudent choice for Australia’s military strategy is to prepare to defend ourselves from major powers such as Continue reading »
Heralded as the largest this century, the pro-Palestinian student demonstrations in the US and globally are putting into stark relief the systemic failure of Western media and Governments to accurately and responsibly report on the Gaza conflict. As they did during the Vietnam war years, it is students who have refused to accept the way Continue reading »
Australia is one of six western countries that are complicit in the ‘genocidal erasure’ of the Palestinian people by continuing to supply Israel with arms, according to Dr Ghassan Abu-Sitta, a British-Palestinian surgeon and newly elected rector of Glasgow University. Israel’s relentless bombing campaign has systematically destroyed all of Gaza’s 11 universities plus more than 400 Continue reading »
Over the last few years, I have wondered about what drives the relentless Western animosity towards China. It seems a very logical question to ask if one wants to understand the world today. But you will be hard pressed to find this explained in commentary provided by the Western media. What one gets is screaming daily headlines, Continue reading »
Ill health, perhaps especially mental ill health, is generally seen as a personal issue, requiring diagnosis and treatment. But at the population level, mental health problems have a profound message for our societies and their futures. We need to pay it more heed. A new international review has concluded that rates of emotional problems such Continue reading »
Australia once thought of itself as a country of opportunity and innovation – economically and socially. Like most countries self-beliefs, the thought was not always matched by reality. Indeed, it would arguably be better to see Australia as a land of lost opportunities with many of those losses being biggest and most damaging in recent Continue reading »
It’s not often that you find someone writing about open source software and not bothering to make mention of the licences being used. But that’s precisely what Albert Zhang of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a lobby group for big tech and foreign agencies, has done. In an article titled China’s use of foreign open-source software, and how Continue reading »
Catherine Russell, the head of UNICEF, said this week that of the 600,000 children in Rafah, southern Gaza, all of them are either injured, or sick, or malnourished. Much of the Gaza population has been forced south to Rafah by the Israeli military, which had promised them it was a safe zone. She added, “Over 200 days of war Continue reading »
There’s a lot of talk about what should be done to fix education in America, like increasing federal funding, decreasing class sizes, increasing teacher salaries, and investing in better teacher preparation. These are all nice ideas, but they’re totally abstract and conceptual. They’re not things any modern country could actually do.1
If we really want to fix American schools, we need more Learning Outcomes. Learning Outcomes are the things that captivate children. Learning Outcomes help children to identify, comprehend, and synthesize their dreams.
When I was a child, my teacher took us into the woods in the fall and let us collect leaves. She showed us how the leaves caught the sunlight and magically transformed it into energy. Then she explained how the season’s waning light resulted in chlorophyll breakdown, which caused an explosion of pigments that created the kaleidoscope of patterns and colors we held in our hands. It was like stepping inside a story where the leaves were characters who lived in a fantastical forest.
I wonder if that actually penetrates the minds of the average Fox viewers. And then there’s this: Apparently, she is demanding that Mike Johnson commit to her personally that he won’t ever fund Ukraine again, that he defunds the DOJ and never again passes a bill without majority GOP support. I’m sure he agreed since none of that’s relevant until after the election at which point they’ll vote for leadership again anyway. But sure, let’s put them in charge of the House again.
Here we go As Donald Trump’s criminal trial continues in Manhattan, it appears we will hear today from the adult-film actress at the heart of the hush-money payments allegedly covered up by Trump and his convicted “fixer’ Michael Cohen: Stormy Daniels (Stephanie Clifford) . What made the payments criminal, prosecutors allege, was disguising repayments to Cohen as legal fees. The scheme was intended to influence the 2016 presidential election. Forget the sex. Check out those titillating invoices at the Trump hush money trial, Politico reported. The Associated Press noted on Monday that the prosecution presented the jury with documents from the Trump Organization and testimony from former controller, Jeffrey McConney, who heard about payments to Cohen from Trump CFO Allen Weisselberg. But he was unaware of what they were for: A bank statement displayed in court showed Cohen paying $130,000 to Davidson, Daniels’ lawyer, on Oct. 27, 2016, out of an account for an entity Cohen created for the purpose. Weisselberg’s handwritten notes about reimbursing Cohen were stapled to the bank statement in the company’s files, McConney said.
Much was made of newly elected Conservative Mayor Ben Houchen not being able to find a blue rosette - but outside the Westminster bubble associations with party brands are often an obstacle to get work done