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Trump is facing multiple legal challenges and this is how he chooses who to represent him? Seated far to the left of the defendant, former President Donald J. Trump, in a Manhattan criminal courtroom on Tuesday was a lawyer who has never tried a case in court, whose phone was seized by federal agents executing a warrant last year, and who once hosted syndicated news segments bombastically defending the Trump White House. Seated to Mr. Trump’s far right was Todd Blanche, a newly hired criminal defense lawyer who also represents the lawyer at the far-left end of the table, Boris Epshteyn. In between them was Joe Tacopina, a combative presence on cable television who recently represented Mr. Trump’s future daughter-in-law, Kimberly Guilfoyle, before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The tableau, rounded out by another lawyer, Susan R. Necheles, from Mr. Trump’s arraignment on felony charges of falsifying business records, revealed more about the client than about the case at hand.
I’m not a TikTok person. I’m too old. But when I finally ventured onto that popular but much-maligned app, which traffics in short videos and hot takes, I was surprised to find many videos about the Doomsday Clock. It’s nothing like a conventional timepiece, of course. It’s meant to show how close humanity has come to nuclear Armageddon — to the proverbial “midnight.” When it comes to TikTok content providers, I wouldn’t normally think of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It’s a deeply serious organization founded in 1945 by physicists in the wake of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The clock was invented two years later by landscape artist Martyl Langsdorf as a way of graphically illustrating... Read more
Source: 90 Seconds to Midnight appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
As Israel is slammed over human rights abuses, some are decrying the UK's Rishi Sunak for deepening military ties with the apartheid state. Jessica Buxbaum reveals just how deep those ties go.
The post As UK Inks Trade Deal with Israel, Rishi Sunak’s Connections to Apartheid State Come Under Scrutiny appeared first on MintPress News.
Doctor Who has always been about monsters and the fear of turning into them, with the monsters as metaphors & symbols for recurring themes.
Is DeSantis already spent? Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I’ve been saying the smart move for DeSantis would have been to wait until 2028. Trump is still dominant and there’s just no way for anyone to get around it. It looks like some of his fans are starting to come to that realization as well: Among the 15-20 Republican mega-donors who control the purse strings in G.O.P. politics, there’s growing concern that Ron DeSantis, the great white knight from Tallahassee, might not be the one, or at least not yet.
Oracle's intimate ties to both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Israeli national security state should be cause for enormous concern, argues guest Alan Macleod.
The post Oracle, the Shadowy Tech Giant In League With the CIA and Israel, with Alan MacLeod appeared first on MintPress News.
This is a talk Chris Hedges gave on April 6 at a protest at Princeton Theological Seminary demanding the removal of hedge fund billionaire Michael Fisch as chair of the seminary's trustee board.
The post Chris Hedges: The Hypocrisy of the Christian Church appeared first on MintPress News.
Less than 24 hours after a jury found an Army sergeant guilty of shooting and killing a protester, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that he would pardon the convicted killer as soon as a request “hits my desk” This is what he did: The killer posted on Facebook that he might “kill a few people on my way to work,” got in his car, ran a red light, drove directly into a Black Lives Matter protest, and shot and killed a protester because he felt “threatened.” Both parties were openly carrying, as is legal in Texas. So when this racist consciously drove into the protest he was confronted by a man with a gun and he shot him, just as he clearly planned to do. Perry’s defense team argued that he acted in self-defense, but prosecutors contended that Perry instigated what happened. They highlighted a series of social media posts and Facebook messages in which Perry made statements that they said indicated his state of mind, such as he might “kill a few people on my way to work.
Of the open source projects that are essential to genomic surveillance, one depends on a tiny team, the other depends on a single person. What happens when one of those projects goes down?
Easter is a time for dreaming dreams and for hoping against hope. Pragmatists, even if they be religious believers, are unlikely to expend too much energy doing so. But with the state of our troubled world in Ukraine, Syria, Palestine, Yemen, Somalia, and Myanmar, it behoves us to take a breather and contemplate what peace Continue reading »
Historically, it used to be clear when one country was at war with another. Not so today. Indeed, that is one of the Department of Defence’s objections to war powers reform, where it stated in its submission to the Armed Overseas Conflict Inquiry that “the growth of grey-zone activities and offensive operations in the space Continue reading »
In another echo of early 2003, the twentieth anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie on 16 March went largely unreported. As the world’s attention was concentrated on an imminent attack on Iraq in March 2003, it is not surprising that media did not dwell too long or deeply on one young woman’s death. Unfortunately, Continue reading »
In the wake of the Aston by-election and, more importantly, last year’s federal election, the Liberal Party could easily be misled into dismissing the “teals” as a sneaky Labor/Greens front. In December last year, the Australian National University published its Australian Election Study, reporting on a survey of how 2508 people had voted at the Continue reading »
Over the past two years, there has been an increasing global interest in Central Asia, which encompasses Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. This attention can be attributed to various factors, including the president of China’s official visit to these countries in late 2022, the growing relationship between Turkey and Central Asia, as demonstrated by Continue reading »
It’s not enough for socialists to point out capitalism’s many faults — we need to explain our positive vision of the future and how it lives up to our ideals of justice. After decades on the margins of political life, the last few years have seen socialism make a comeback as a topic for serious Continue reading »
For the past decade or so, the Western media has been critical of the Chinese state, the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party. This criticism has been made in the context of a small number of issues, such as human rights in Xinjiang, political dissent in Hong Kong and Western citizens detained in China. Continue reading »
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 9, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
Assange: Ithaka, Revisited
Scott Ritter [via Naked Capitalism 4-5-2023] Important.
Strategic Political Economy
Michelle Goldberg on the rebirth of the Comstock Act: Anthony Comstock, the mutton-chopped anti-vice crusader for whom the Comstock Act is named, is back from the dead. Comstock died in 1915, and the Comstock Act, the notorious anti-obscenity law used to indict the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, ban books by D.H. Lawrence and arrest people by the thousands, turned 150 last month. Had this anniversary fallen five or 10 years ago, it barely would have been worth noting, except perhaps to marvel at how far we’d come from an era when a fanatical censor like Comstock wielded national political power. “The Comstock Act represented, in its day, the pinnacle of Victorian prudery, the high-water mark of a strict and rigid formal code,” wrote the law professors Joanna Grossman and Lawrence Friedman. Until very recently, it seemed a relic. Yet suddenly, the prurient sanctimony that George Bernard Shaw called “Comstockery” is running rampant in America. As if inspired by Comstock’s horror of “literary poison” and “evil reading,” states are outdoing one another in draconian censorship.
The law is what they say it is Remember when conservatives accused the left of having no morals, of situational ethics?Remember when conservatives pretended to believe in “a transcendant moral order“? As Archie and Edith sang in the post-1960s, “Those were the days.” Now nullification is back. Election denialism is in vogue. (Kari Lake still insists she is the rightful governor of Arizona.) Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch over the last five years “felt obliged to disclose his receipt of a fishing rod, a watercolor painting, and cowboy boots” in his financial disclosures. Justice Samuel Alito disclosed the gift of a “bronze cast of hand,” tweets Mark Joseph Stern. Yet Justice Clarence Thomas “refused to disclose trips on a billionaire’s private jet for his own personal pleasure.” The Thomas expose from Pro Publica would be beyond belief except for not being. Ruth Marcus is aghast at the ruling in Texas on Friday to strip FDA approval of a pharmaceutical abortion pill available and proven safe for over 20 years: Congratulations are in order for Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.