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Exclusive: Greenstein testifies at trial of Shenstone Palestine Action protesters

https://skwawkbox.org/2023/04/12/exclusive-greenstein-testifies-at-trial-of-she…
Created
Wed, 12/04/2023 - 10:18
Prosecution attempts to pick holes in account of Jewish campaigner for Palestinian human rights and anti-arms industry activist draw groans On Tuesday, Skwawkbox attended the trial at Wolverhampton Crown Court of five Palestine Action (PA) activists charged by the state with planning to damage the Shenstone, Lichfield factory of Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Sytems, when […]

Women are dying in the name of “life”

https://digbysblog.net/2023/04/11/women-are-dying-in-the-name-of-life/
Created
Wed, 12/04/2023 - 09:00
Enraging!!!!!!:  Anya Cook did not want to push. But sitting on the toilet, legs splayed wide, she knew she didn’t have a choice. She was about to deliver her baby alone in the bathroom of a hair salon. On this Thursday afternoon in mid-December, about five months before her due date, she knew the baby would not be born alive. Cook tried to tune out the easy chatter outside, happy women with working wombs catching up with their hairdresser.At 36, she’d already experienced a long line of miscarriages, but none of the pregnancies had been more than five weeks along. Now she hadto deliver a nearly 16-week fetus — a daughter she’d planned to call Bunny. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. As soon as the fetus hit the water, blood started flowingbetween her thighs. Blood splattered on the white toilet seat and across the floor. She panicked, her hands shaking as she picked up her phone to call her husband, Derick. “Baby,” she said, “I need you to come to the bathroom.” Over the course of the day, according to medical records, Cook would lose roughly half the blood in her body.

RIP Al Jaffee

https://digbysblog.net/2023/04/11/rip-al-jaffee/
Created
Wed, 12/04/2023 - 07:30
I loved MAD Magazine so much as a kid that I think it may have been my greatest influence (for better or worse.) And I loved the Fold-in. Al Jaffee was a hero and I’m not surprised to learn that he had an incredibly interesting life: Al Jaffee, a cartoonist who folded in when the trend in magazine publishing was to fold out, thereby creating one of Mad magazine’s most recognizable and enduring features, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 102. His death, at a hospital, was caused by multi-system organ failure, his granddaughter Fani Thomson said. It was in 1964 that Mr. Jaffee created the Mad Fold-In, an illustration-with-text feature on the inside of the magazine’s back cover that seemed at first glance to deliver a straightforward message. When the page was folded in thirds, however, both illustration and text were transformed into something entirely different and unexpected, often with a liberal-leaning or authority-defying message.

He loves the poorly educated

https://digbysblog.net/2023/04/11/he-loves-the-poorly-educated/
Created
Wed, 12/04/2023 - 06:00
And they love him Ron Brownstein on Trump’s trump card: Even amid all his legal challenges, Donald Trump has a secret weapon in his drive to win the Republican presidential nomination next year: polling strongly suggests he has transformed the GOP primary electorate in a way that will make him harder to beat. Since Trump’s emergence as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016, the college-educated voters generally most skeptical of him have declined as a share of all GOP primary voters, while the voters without a college degree generally most sympathetic to him have increased, an array of public and private polls indicate. Those changes suggest Trump has set in motion what could prove a self-fulfilling prophecy: compared to when he first captured the nomination in 2016, he’s encouraged more participation in the Republican primaries by the blue-collar voters most inclined to support him and less by the white-collar voters likely to become the centerpiece of any coalition against him. “There’s no question about it,” says long-time GOP pollster Whit Ayres.