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Kit Klarenburg delves into the brutality meted out during the tenure of former President Jair Bolsonar by Brazil's infamous Rural Indigenous Guard—an undercover, lethal elite police force clandestinely established by the CIA.

The post Bolsonaro’s Butchery: CIA Fingerprints Are All Over Brazil’s Indigenous Genocide appeared first on MintPress News.

If it’s about news coverage, Biden’s buried Donald Trump’s multiple indictments and ongoing court cases have one upside for Republicans: keeping President Joe Biden off the front pages. I’m skimming the news for Biden and not finding much. The inferno on Maui offers Biden a chance at some column inches and camera time, but not until next week: President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Maui on Monday in the aftermath of the Hawaii wildfires, White House press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announced on Wednesday. On Aug. 21, they will meet with first responders, survivors and government officials, she said. “In Maui, the President and First Lady will be welcomed by state and local leaders to see firsthand the impacts of the wildfires and the devastating loss of life and land that has occurred on the island, as well as discuss the next steps in the recovery effort,” Jean-Pierre said. Biden today celebrates the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act. But most of the coverage seems to be at The Guardian. NPR places Biden coverage far down the list of this morning’s stories.

On 24 May 2023, Open Rights Group (ORG) held an online roundtable to discuss proposals for the Online Safety Bill that ORG argues will amount to prior restraint. The Bill proposes that content deemed illegal under the legislation should be prevented from appearing on the platform, thus controlling expression and a form of censorship. Participants […]

Here's a listen to Big Finish's Colin Baker-starring 60th anniversary audio adventure, Doctor Who – Once and Future: Two's Company.

Jeffrey Yang’s latest book is Line and Light, a title that rhymes in a way with the title of his second collection, Vanishing-Line. Line and Light, his fourth full-length work, is sprawling, vast, like a city of poetry. It’s composed of five sections, all of them serial in form or spirit. The first and most ambitious, “Langkasuka,” spans sixty-three sections and a third of the book. It grows out of visits the poet took a decade ago to Kuala Lumpur, and takes its name from an ancient, creative utopia of a kingdom—one that disappeared, possibly because of self-induced catastrophe. No one knows. But the possibilities haunt the poem, and the poem’s poetics are all about haunting: about history and the pulse of the living individual, about the relationship between memory and the present, memory and the enduring song. Yang begins his poem with this couplet which, I think, beautifully stands in for the poetics he’s worked out of his entire career:

I open my eyes to forget
I close my eyes to remember

Smith paints a portrait. Willis, a landscape. Special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County DA Fani Willis issued complementary indictments in the Republican conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Dahlia Lithwick summarizes: There’s one other notable contrast between the two stories that will be unspooled regarding the very similar events that took place after Donald Trump learned he’d lost the election and decided he would win it through organized crime. Smith chose to tell the story of an abstraction, crimes against democracy and the peaceful transfer of power. Willis is telling a concrete and detailed story of crimes against voters and election workers; Black voters in particular, female Black election workers in specific. In effect, Trump is on trial in D.C. for trying to break democracy and, in Fulton County, Georgia, for trying to set aside Black votes. The two stories are deeply connected, but they are also two very distinct acts of violence against elections. Smith reminds us what the country nearly lost, and Willis recalls what Black voters have almost never won.

The Pentagon claims “no correlation” between U.S. training and coups, but research suggests the opposite could be true.

The post Niger Junta Appoints U.S.-Trained Military Officers to Key Jobs appeared first on The Intercept.

China’s slow drift from a Western-centric economic system is being coupled with a whole new approach to foreign policy - ‘wolf diplomacy’ in the West and a gentler, kinder approach in the Global South.

The post China’s Diplomatic Evolution: A Potential Ally for Palestinians’ Quest for Justice appeared first on MintPress News.

MORON #1: Great wig. It must be so cool not to have to do your hair.

ME: I’ve worn a wig since my hair fell out. I got tired of people gawking at me and my bald-ass head like I was some escapee from Area 51. It’s especially fun to wear this wig during the summer months. With this wig atop my head and all that heat trapped up under there, Dante could throw a seventh-ring soiree on my scalp. So hot.

MORON #2: Your legs are so smooth. What? You don’t even have to shave them because the chemo made your hair fall out. I’m so jealous.

ME: It’s glamorous as fuck. Cancer has changed every aspect of my life, and now I don’t even have to do the everyday things that once made me feel human. Gone are the days when I felt the deep satisfaction of that first good spring shave after letting the hair on my gams go wild all winter. Nope. Tossed that razor right out the window.

If a new 'Hijab and Chastity Bill' succeeds with no condemnation from voices abroad, the international community will be culpable, writes Parisa Hashempour

Tearing down ideas is central to scientific practice, but when it bleeds into the interpersonal, science loses its humanity

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

You’re not depressed but you’re not happy – you’re languishing. Give yourself a boost with these evidence-backed strategies

- by Frank Martela

Read at Psyche

Billionaire real estate interests and conservative megadonors with ties to Supreme Court justices want the high court to end rent stabilization.

Pneumatic tube systems, Flexowriters, Addressographs: Take a look back at the office technology Federal Reserve banks have adopted over 100 years.

Student housing has never been known for its quality but, in recent years, the system has been pushed to breaking point

There have been growing concerns among regulators about the potential misuse of sustainability-linked loans

Kim Nyamushonongora and Oscar Spencer 99.9% of UK businesses are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), employing 61% of the UK population. Yet, we know so much more about large businesses, how they function and particularly how they finance themselves. SMEs have been referred to as the backbone of economies around the world. Therefore, SME’s access … Continue reading A quick dive into SME finance →

The proposals set out by Labour MP Chris Bryant to clean-up Parliament should be adopted by his party's leader for its next manifesto, writes Peter Oborne

A few weeks ago I read Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston by Ernest Callenbach (1975) for the first time. It is worth doing so if you are one of the few who have not because it very neat to see how ideas around ecological sustainability were conceived back then. In what follows, I will […]

Yesterday (August 15, 2023), the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest – Wage Price Index, Australia – for the June-quarter 2023, which shows that the aggregate wage index rose by 0.8 per cent over the quarter (steady) and 3.6 per cent over the 12 months. This represented a slowdown over the 12 months on…