On Friday afternoon, New York County Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron expanded his gag order in the Trump Organization fraud case. He made clear again that, in essence, he would not stand for any more of Trump’s or his lawyers’ attempts at intimidation via social media or verbal diarrhea: “The threat of, and actual, violence resulting from heated political rhetoric is well-documented,” Engoron wrote. “Since the commencement of this bench trial, my chambers have been inundated with hundreds of harassing and threatening phone calls, voicemails, emails, letters, and packages. The First Amendment right of defendants and their attorneys to comment on my staff is far and away outweighed by the need to protect them from threats and physical harm.” On Oct. 3, 2023, Engoron imposed a gag order narrowly barring Trump from making statements about his staff after he smeared the judge’s law clerk on Truth Social. The order did not prevent Trump from making any statements about the judge or New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the lawsuit threatening the former president’s business empire.
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Plus, California cracks down on driverless cars, Big Oil faces a trial in Hawaii, and killings drop nationwide.
A Bigger We keeps winning The last four minutes of this Giridharadas dialogue mentioned on Friday is worth four of your minutes. The left must stop playing defense. We’re winning fights that matter. We are endeavoring to do a really cool thing in this country, which is to build a country made of the world, a country made of all the other countries…. We are trying to build a country where every kind of person from every last village on this planet can come here and realize more of their potential than they would have wherever they came from. We don’t live up to it a lot, but it is an awesome pursuit. Tell the story of what we’re fighting for.
Some fans hate "The Timeless Child" idea in Doctor Who, but it's an idea that did the BBC show a huge favour by making it timeless now, too.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: SAG-AFTRA, Echo, Superman and Lois, Rick and Morty, Gen V, Invincible, Doctor Who, Two and a Half Men & more!
And why is he running for president We’re less than a week in to @repdeanphillips campaign, and it’s clearly one of the best-run campaigns in America. And by “best-run” I mean you take three-dozen coked-up rabid monkeys, coat them in motor oil, tape knives to their paws, and set them loose in a Cracker Barrel on a… — Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) November 3, 2023 This is what Wilson’s talking about: MANCHESTER, New Hampshire—Dean Phillips, the newly minted 2024 primary challenger to President Joe Biden, made a lofty promise to hold 119 town halls in New Hampshire in 13 weeks. But if the other 118 town halls are anything like the first, the Minnesota congressman—and New Hampshire voters—may be in for a painful ride. By the end of Phillips’ three-hour event in Manchester on Wednesday night, two voters had been thrown out after a tense exchange with the candidate over Israel, one voter stormed out when trying to defend the person who had been thrown out, and the candidate’s team was preparing to scrub the recording of the event from the internet.
It’s all over but the shooting, as the saying goes.
Avdiivka is being encircled in record time. The US is transferring its attention to Israel and Palestine. The Russians now have the largest armaments industry in the world for the stuff that matters, and North Korea and Iran are supplying them massively (though Iran may be about to be distracted.)
Back in March 2022 Ukraine could have negotiated peace terms. My guess is that the next negotiations will be surrender terms.
It was always clear, and I have said so consistently from the start, that Russia was going to win. Ukraine cannot win a war of attrition with Russia, especially when Russia has air superiority and far more artillery and artillery shells.
The West has been unable to ramp up weapon production, mainly due to the arms industry being a very small oligopoly who are interested in earning more per unit and maintaining bottlenecks.
A different kind of soother for a Friday afternoon This is what we call a happy thought in these troubled times: Whenever I look at the latest polls and start to freak out about Donald Trump winning the presidency again, I calm myself by remembering that the guy is very likely going to be an at-least-once convicted felon by next November. While that won’t bother his fans, I still think it will bother enough swing voters that he will lose, and maybe spectacularly. That scenario got a little more likely Thursday when the California judge overseeing a misconduct trial against Trump attorney and coup-plotter John Eastman made a “preliminary finding” of culpability on Eastman’s part for his attempts to halt the certification of the 2020 election results. What’s the upshot? No, Eastman isn’t guilty of anything just yet. But he is now closer to being disbarred, and that could make it more likely that he flips.
We’re at the phase of the Israel–Palestine war when people start worrying about how they will look when this is over.
The post Inside the Biden White House, Doubts About Gaza War Are Beginning to Creep In appeared first on The Intercept.
The Iraq War protests didn’t stop that war. But they stopped others.
The post The Gaza Protests Can Save Lives — Maybe Even Your Own appeared first on The Intercept.
DeSantis: I know Donald Trump and a lot of his people have been focusing on things like footwear. I’ll tell you this. If Donald Trump can summon the balls to show up to the debate. I’ll wear a boot on my head. pic.twitter.com/CF11I4JtOT — Acyn (@Acyn) November 3, 2023 I’ll be so glad when I don’t have to see or read about this guy anymore: Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis on Thursday contributed to the seemingly never-ending discourse about whether or not he wears lifts in his boots by outlining a bizarre scenario in which he would wear a boot on his head at next week’s GOP primary debate. During an interview on Newsmax, the Florida governor—who has denied wearing any sort of height-boosting footwear—first responded to the chatter by saying that “this is no time for foot fetishes” because “we’ve got serious problems as a country.” He went on to mention how Donald Trump has weighed in on the topic. On Tuesday, the former president’s campaign declared “#BOOTGATE” to be the “KISS OF DEATH” for DeSantis.
An intimate and complex understanding of China is now one of the most important prerequisites for understanding and furthering our national interests. For the two nations of China and Australia, to allow tensions and misunderstandings to provoke a decoupling in the knowledge production sphere –whether it be in the sciences, the social sciences or the Continue reading »
In Asian media this week: Support for war erodes trust in Global North. Plus: Australians proxy-Americans in Asia; Xi-Biden summit might reassure region; ‘Don’t you feel shame’ at voting No? Chinese military ‘relentless’ on Taiwan; Memories of time US, China fought together. Sonia Gandhi has written a powerful condemnation of the Israel-Gaza war, deploring the Continue reading »