Yep: House and Senate Republicans on Friday ripped Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint U.S. Attorney David Weiss as the special counsel in the ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden. Republicans accused Weiss of signing off on a “sweetheart deal” with the president’s son and suggested that he was appointed as special counsel to inhibit congressional investigations into the Bidens and to avoid testifying before Congress. “This action by Biden’s DOJ cannot be used to obstruct congressional investigations or whitewash the Biden family corruption,” Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said in a tweet. “If Weiss negotiated the sweetheart deal that couldn’t get approved, how can he be trusted as a Special Counsel? House Republicans will continue to pursue the facts for the American people.” Rep.
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You knew it would happen: “FBI is now killing all online critics of Biden,” Ali Alexander, organizer of “Stop the Steal” protests that fueled the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, announced on his Telegram account on Wednesday. “This is all by design.” This alarming claim was prompted by the death of Craig Deleeuw Robertson, 75, in an FBI raid on his Provo, Utah residence early that morning. According to a criminal complaint from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Robertson was to be charged with interstate threats, impeding federal law enforcement officers by threat, and making threats against the president — all on the social media platforms Truth Social and Facebook. But Robertson was reportedly armed when agents showed up on his doorstep with arrest and search warrants, according to law enforcement sources who spoke to the Associated Press, and was killed by gunfire. “The FBI is reviewing an agent-involved shooting which occurred around 6:15 a.m. on Wednesday,” the agency said in a statement shared with Rolling Stone, noting that the subject of their warrants was deceased.
Agricultural intensification is killing European birds. Europeans are killing Australia’s native rodents. Getting rid of invasive species and reintroducing native species can re-establish natural ecosystems. Agricultural intensification is killing birds Among terrestrial vertebrates, birds contain the most species. Unfortunately, there is strong evidence that in many places around the world species have been lost and Continue reading »
Few nation-states have been shaped by their underlying physical geography and location in the world quite as much as Australia. Since notional foreign policy independence was uneasily embraced during the second world war, Australia’s policymaking elites have had trouble deciding whether it was a curse or a blessing to be in possession of an entire Continue reading »
West Africa is emerging as a highly unstable region and massive over-population is at the heart of the problem. Until 1960 Niger was part of French West Africa and is now the largest country in the region. Named for the Niger River which rises in the Loma Mountains in Sierra Leone, it eventually reaches the Continue reading »
In an era of mis and disinformation and downright propaganda, John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations has gained exceptional traction in Australia and internationally as a forum for fact-based analysis, commentary and reportage. The site has attracted impactful contributions from our most knowledgeable and experienced public and corporate administrators, executives, implementers, and governance and policy specialists Continue reading »
When we hear the term “abuse” in relation to the Catholic Church, we immediately think of crimes of a sexual nature committed against children by the clergy. But there is another form of abuse taking place in the Church and it’s just as real. It’s called emotional abuse, and is most evident in the attitude Continue reading »
During the crush at the evacuation of Kabul airport in 2021, a little girl became separated from her mother and was inconsolable and could not be moved. Fred left her for a moment, during which CS gas caused a stampede of marines. When he looked for the girl, she had disappeared. Fred Smith has already Continue reading »
If we learn anything from history it should be that the many efforts to destabilise countries by the USA have had very limited success. Taiwan is no different, it is being misread, misinterpreted and consequently, the “international community” are being misled. Having failed to recruit Taiwan’s neighbours to a proxy war against China, this leaves Continue reading »
To be here in Hiroshima, invited to perform at one of numerous peace concerts commemorating the destruction of the dropping on this city of the first atomic bomb, 6th August 1945, is somewhat special, though of course tinged with sadness that humanity could descend to such barbarism. A bright clear day 78 years ago, 8.15am, Continue reading »
Big business wants you to think that reforming corporate taxes is a boring and complicated subject, but it’s actually simple and exciting.
The post A U.N. Plan to Stop Corporate Tax Abuse appeared first on The Intercept.
On this day in 1977, the National Front attempted to organise a national demonstration through Lewisham, a multi-racial area of southeast London. Against a backdrop of deep economic crisis, its aim was to intimidate the local black community and provoke conflict. A year before, in a local council election, the far right had secured almost […]
JV Last: The other day on Threads, Bulwark contributor and all-around great writer Nicholas Grossman asked the following question: What he’s getting at is one of the political and ideological asymmetries we talk about here often: One side of our political divide routinely castigates itself for being in a bubble. One side expends a lot of energy trying to figure out how to appeal to people who don’t vote for them. One side talks a lot about persuasion and understanding the people across from them. Not coincidentally, that side is the same side that can no longer wield executive power nationally without winning a sizable popular majority. The other side does not seem to worry about the media bubble it lives in. This side does not expend much energy trying to understand the 51 percent of the country which votes against it. Systems engineering is one of those disciplines that, once you start looking at it, shapes your perception of everything around you.
This was inevitable: Students in a Florida school district will be reading only excerpts from William Shakespeare’s plays for class rather than the full texts under redesigned curriculum guides developed, in part, to take into consideration the state’s new laws that restrict classroom materials whose content can be deemed sexual. The changes to the Hillsborough County Public Schools’ curriculum guides were made with Florida’s new legislation limiting classroom materials that “contain pornography or obscene depictions of sexual conduct” in mind. Other reasons included revised state standards and an effort to get students to read a wide variety of books for new state exams, the school district said in an emailed statement on Tuesday. Several Shakespeare plays use suggestive puns and innuendo, and it is implied that the protagonists have had premarital sex in “Romeo and Juliet.” Shakespeare’s books will be available for checkout at media centers at schools, said the district, which covers the Tampa area. “First and foremost, we have not excluded Shakespeare from our high school curriculum.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried ordered to jail Does this make your day? Daily Beast: The luck ran out for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried on Friday, when a New York judge ordered that he be confined to jail in advance of his October trial. The former billionaire had repeatedly angered both prosecutors and the court while out on bail following his arrest in December. Most recently, he leaked documents to The New York Times about his former lover Caroline Ellison, who once ran Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund and is likely to be a witness in his trial. Prosecutors framed the leaks as a possible attempt at witness tampering, both by intimidating Ellison and influencing public perception of her in the media. An assistant U.S. attorney argued in court last month that there was “no set of conditions short of detention to ensure the safety of the community.” Judge Lewis Kaplan agreed that defendant Bankman-Fried has a right to try and repair his reputation. “But I find that there is a practical possibility [leaking documents] was intended to have [witnesses] back off.” Who else wants to play chicken with the courts?
. In den 1980er Jahren hatte die deutsche Rocklegende Udo Lindenberg eine große Anhängerschaft hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang. Besuche zeigten ihm, dass die Menschen in Ostdeutschland im Grunde genommen genauso waren wie im Westen. Er begann Erich Honecker zu bitten, ihm zu erlauben, durch das Land zu touren. Im Sonderzug nach Pankow stellt sich Udo […]
It was just a simple post that happened to have a blue police box in it - no reason to find Doctor Who meaning in Steven Moffat's IG post.
Also, workers get wage protections, the energy future approaches, and tenants build power against the corporate elite.
Plenty needs fixing As Greg Sargent tells it: Young people have delivered unmistakable political surprises lately. They have proved decidedly progressive on many big issues. They voted at outsize rates in the last three national elections. They are fueling population growth in swing-state college towns, making Republicans nervously rethink their strategy. Now, if a group of Gen Z political operatives has its way, young people might surprise us in another fashion: by getting involved in those sleepy, unglamorous, decidedly uncool contests known as state legislative races. This week, David Hogg, the 23-year-old gun-control activist driven into politics by the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., launched a political action committee called Leaders We Deserve, which is devoted to recruiting young candidates for state legislative seats — largely in red states. “That’s where the worst bills are coming from,” Hogg says. I’m forever telling friends less engaged in day-to-day organizing to stop obsessing over the presidential race.
I was recently in Stansted Airport, queueing in a low-ceilinged, quasi-temporary structure to enter the departure area for a Ryanair flight. There were two queues; the ‘priority queue’ which passengers had paid extra to join, and the ordinary one, but just one airport employee covering both, toggling stressfully between two irritated groups. Each time she […]
Today, Luton Town F.C. returns to top-flight football after a thirty-one-year stint in the wilderness that threatened the club’s existence. Luton is a remarkable place. An energetic, working-class town which owes its social and ethnic diversity, as well as its legacy of industry, to massive growth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With proud […]
Most visitors to Argentina are attracted by its famous meat and wine. Personally, I come for the Freudianism and Marxism. I grew up in north west London in a family of socialists and psychoanalysts, acutely aware of the contempt with which most of Great Britain held both of those vocations in the late 1980s. So […]
. Robbie Robertson (1943-2023) R.I.P.
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.