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The Russia-linked mercenaries worked with Mali’s longtime U.S.-backed military to kill and loot with impunity, according to a new Human Rights Watch report.

The post Wagner Group Disappeared and Executed Civilians in Mali appeared first on The Intercept.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Especially Donald Trump Trump remains broadly unpopular with the public: 63% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of the former president, while 35% view him favorably. A year ago, Trump’s rating stood at 60% unfavorable. In the new survey, 66% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents have a very or mostly favorable opinion of Trump, while 32% have a very or mostly unfavorable view of him. The share of Republicans who view Trump favorably has declined by 9 percentage points from last July, when 75% viewed him favorably and 24% viewed him unfavorably. Democrats and Democratic leaners continue to express overwhelmingly negative opinions of Trump. About nine-in-ten Democrats (91%) view Trump unfavorably, including 78% who have a very unfavorable view. Just 8% have a favorable impression. Views of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris The public’s views of four other political leaders included in the survey, including President Joe Biden, also continue to be more unfavorable than favorable. Six-in-ten Americans hold a very or mostly unfavorable opinion of Biden, while 39% view him favorably.

Former Australian Prime Minister (yep, really) Tony Abbott has called upon Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to do the right thing, in light of Australia retaining the Ashes via a draw, and knight the English cricket team. ”I know a win... Read More ›

Florida Republicans knew that Democrats in the state who applied to vote by mail during the pandemic were new to the practice so they decided to force them to re-apply. Normally, once you apply they automatically send you a ballot for four years. Now it’s just two: Florida Democrats say they’re spending and organizing to chase down people who vote by mail after election officials across the state canceled all standing mail ballot requests this year. The mass cancellations were to comply with a 2021 election law that added new restrictions to mail-in voting. The legislation — which was celebrated by Gov. Ron DeSantis and slammed by voting rights advocates as discriminatory — cut the duration of mail-in ballot requests in half from four years to two. It also required that existing requests for mail ballots be canceled at the end of 2022, forcing election workers to cancel millions of requests and start their lists of vote-by-mail voters from scratch. In practice, that means that voters who requested mail-in ballots in 2021 or 2022 will have to make such requests again to vote in local races and the 2024 primary and general elections.

I’m just going to leave this here. It says so much more than he knows: That man has the most popular political podcast in the country.

I was looking at this picture of people (mostly tourists, it appears) fleeing massive fires in Rhodes, feeling despair about the future of the world when I was struck by an even more despairing thought. Almost certainly, a lot of the people in the picture are climate denialists. And even more certainly, they will mostly […]

Ron Brownstein on the defiant red border states: A pregnant teenager writhing in pain as she suffered a miscarriage while trapped in the barbed wire that Texas has strung along miles of the state’s southern border. A 4-year-old girl collapsing from heat exhaustion after Texas National Guard members pushed her away from the wire as she tried to cross it with her family. Texas state troopers receiving orders from their superiors to deny water to migrants in triple-digit heat. Officers on another occasion ordering troopers to drive back into the Rio Grande a group of migrants, including children and babies, that they found huddling alongside a fence by the river. These are all incidents that a medic in the Texas Department of Public Safety says he witnessed during recent patrols, according to an explosive email published this week by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News. “I believe we have stepped over a line into the in humane [sic],” the medic, Nicholas Wingate, wrote in the email.

The coming week will see an enormous festival of US alliances with and in Australia, with the biggest “Talisman Sabre” exercise ever, and a visit to Australia by the US Secretaries of State and Defence for the annual “AUSMIN” talks. All of this has been made more glamorous by the arrival of a new US Continue reading »

The fast rise in global warming manifested by current extreme weather events betray a dangerous underestimation of the Earth’s liveable climate, while governments ignore climate science, claim to set limits on domestic emissions but allow major export of fossil fuels and emissions worldwide on a scale threatening life on Earth. With current policies there appear Continue reading »

Any activity trying to create an inherent ‘goodness’ about engaging in warfare is in no way an admirable activity. Creating game-play interactives of real-life devastation of civilians that invite children to ‘compete’ is reprehensible. Doing so with no realistic acknowledgement of the human cost is utterly, deeply contemptible.  Andrew Fraser’s very noteworthy article recently in Continue reading »

Peter Dutton incessantly declaims about the cost of living crisis, blaming the government. But what would he do instead? First, we need to remember that the Albanese Government inherited the cost of living crisis. Indeed, like Dutton does now, Labor similarly complained about the cost of living crisis when they were in Opposition. The difference Continue reading »

Accountancies have bolted on non-accounting services in the same way pharmacists dispensers bolted on front-of-house sales of cosmetics and liquorice. Like tinkers of old they knocked on the doors of organisations: ‘Any jobs we can do for you?’ Craftsman: Definition. One proficient in a craft or trade. (One who knows how to fix their stuff Continue reading »

Some politicians have decided to do what is better for them and their re-election and position rather than what’s good for Australia. They think the smart thing to do is trash the whole idea of the Voice. Ego, power, position and privilege have nothing to do with the Voice. It has to do with Australian Continue reading »

Two years ago a group of us gathered beneath the pandanus and fig trees in pouring rain near Main Beach, Byron Bay NSW. We had come together to commemorate Julian Assange’s 50th birthday. As we discussed the latest developments in Julian’s situation up to that point in time, we didn’t think we would have to Continue reading »

Since the Lowy Institute’s first Being Chinese in Australia: Public Opinion in Chinese Communities survey was published in 2021, Australia’s relations with China have undergone significant upheaval. The COVID-19 pandemic, the rupture in Australia–China relations, the election of a Labor government and the turbulence in both countries accompanying their re-openings after their COVID-19 lockdowns has placed Chinese Continue reading »

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 23, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

 

COVID

First major survey of doctors with Long Covid reveals debilitating impact on health, life and work

They’ll never stop trying Of course: Three of Donald Trump’s rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are pushing for cuts to Social Security benefits that would only affect younger Americans, as the party’s leaders grapple with the explosive politics of the retirement program. In comments on Sunday as well as in interviews earlier this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Social Security will need to be revamped — but not for people who are near or in retirement. Former vice president Mike Pence and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley have taken similar positions since launching their presidential campaigns. From the earliest days of his 2016 run, Trump has vowed not to touch either Social Security or Medicare — a break from GOP orthodoxy that has shifted the party’s views — and has more recently hammered DeSantis for wanting to cut the program. It’s in the DNA of the Republican Party to end the safety net. It just is. Trump may have temporarily taken it off the table but it will be right back on the minute he leaves the scene. I have never believed for a minute that this was a permanent change of ideology.

Meadows was in the thick of everything in Trump’s last year in office from the COVID mess to the Big Lie and he’s been MIA in the media since it was over. He wrote his book, which was full of some colorful details that made Trump angry and he provided a lot of emails to the January 6th Committee before clamming up. But nobody knows to what extent he’s been cooperating with the Special Counsel, not even Trump. According to reports Trumpworld is very nervous about that. According to the Washington Post, the Special Counsel is interested in him but it doesn’t sound to me as if he’s cooperating: Mark Meadows joked about the baseless claim that large numbers of votes were fraudulently cast in the names of dead people in the days before the then-White House chief of staff participated in a phone call in which then-President Trump alleged there were close to 5,000dead voters in Georgia and urged Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the 2020 election there.

Draw your own conclusions Anne Applebaum responds (h/t Laffy) to the Russian missile attack overnight on the Ukrainian port city of Odessa: “I believed Russia would not destroy historic Odesa, because of the city’s significance to the Russian empire. But I was wrong – now it seems they know they will never control it again, so they are happy to see it burn.” “Russian missiles badly damaged a historic Orthodox cathedral in the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa, sparking outrage and prompting President Zelensky to vow retaliation,” CNN reports: Odesa is a key cultural center, and has long links with Russia. It was founded under Catherine the Great and was once Russia’s second most important port. Euromaidan Press: During the night of 23 July, Russia launched five types of missiles at the south-Ukrainian port city of Odesa, destroying port infrastructure, residential buildings, and the largest Orthodox Church in the city, Operative Command South said.

In this Doctor Who multimedia event update, Doom's (Sooz Kempner) Day is already off to a rough start, and there are still 19 hours to go.

Why small is still beautiful Tripp Narup ran for and lost a state senate seat in red, red Iowa. As a Democrat. Because the last time he’d voted in Iowa’s 9th district there was no one for him to vote for. Narup tells Salon’s Kirk Swearingen that only 17% of voters are registered Democrats in that southwest Iowa district. He tells Salon: After losing spectacularly for the Senate, I have now started a PAC to raise money to support (as yet undetermined) candidates to run for four [state] House seats and one open Senate seat. The plan is to raise $2,000 per candidate as an enticement to get someone to step up and run. Any additional money will be used to run ads pointing out the many sins of our current state senators representatives. Now this may strike you as small potatoes (these are farming districts, after all), but my whole campaign cost less than $6,000 and I paid for a third of it. “Big campaign money” around here is $10,000 or so. (In farm terms, that’s about 7 cows.) Compared to big-city politics, this is quaint and kind of endearing.