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Alan Macleod uncovers how a shadowy pressure group linked to Israel is attempting to silence artists advocating for Palestinian liberation on Spotify.

The post Shadowy, Israel-Linked Group Attempts to Censor Pro-Palestine Spotify Artists appeared first on MintPress News.

When it comes to campaigning, Democrats are conservatives Self-identified independent voters are not, not really, argues Alex Shephard at The New Republic. They are leaners, 49 percent of Americans per a recent Gallup poll. They lean toward one of the major parties or the other. They just eschew the branding. It’s not a new argument, but it’s fashionable. “By far the dominant U.S. party isn’t Democrats or Republicans,” wrote Mike Allen of Axios. “It’s: ‘I’ll shop around, thank you.’” Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz told TNR, “There’s a reluctance to openly identify oneself as a partisan and to say, come right out and say, ‘I think of myself as a Republican or a Democrat.’” Shephard explains: Self-described independents and leaners do have one thing in common. “Even among people who identify with a political party … the trend is in their disdain for the other party,” said Matt Grossmann, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, or IPPSR, and professor of political science at Michigan State University.

That’s what a friend wrote to me when he sent me the story attached to that picture.

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“plans for high-value-target killings by Prince’s mercenaries” Someone on Twitter in mid-May claimed that Erik Prince of Blackwater infamy had been indicted for arms trafficking in (of all places) Austria. I never saw any other mention of it until this morning. So, for those suffering a little Trump fatigue, apparently “the Elon Musk of the privatization of war” was indicted “with four other individuals in Austria on April 20 for exporting war materials without a license back in 2014 and 2015,” writes Ann Marlowe at The Bulwark: The indictment accuses Prince of using an aircraft-customizing company in which he then held a controlling interest, the Wiener Neustadt-based Airborne Technologies, to retrofit two American cropdusters that were then to be shipped illegally overseas. The charges overlap 2021 United Nations allegations that Prince had in 2019 violated the U.N. arms embargo on Libya in an aborted operation called Project Opus, financed by the United Arab Emirates to the tune of $80 million in support of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, head of one of the two perpetually contesting governments in Libya.

Renters in the capital are encountering controversial practices as the housing crisis worsens, writes our Chief Reporter

The costs awarded in the Cadwalladr libel case suggest journalists reporting in the public interest are vulnerable to legal harassment

When we discovered our local public school wasn’t kidding about their state-mandated vaccination requirements, we saw no other choice but to pull our boys out, sell off our assets, and hit the road in a one-bedroom RV with plenty of room for our seven children.

Where others might have seen a life isolated from the rest of the world, existing on the fringes of society, we saw the chance to give our children an exciting, nurturing, and conveniently extremely monetizable upbringing. So we funneled $100k into an RV, a fancy vlogging camera, and twelve iPads to do the parenting part for us. Only the best for our darlings Figaro, Willoughby, Kayden-Jaymes, Jayden, Limestone, and twins Scooter and Spruce.

Our van has a bedroom with a queen-sized bed that’s only for Mom and Dad. But our kids have plenty of room in their bunk beds that double as storage and triple as their desks when they do “math.” Once, Willoughby told us that he likes to pretend he’s a vampire at night because it feels like sleeping in a coffin. We laughed nervously and hoped BetterHelp wouldn’t pull their sponsorship since we were already live on Instagram.

Leading barrister and dozens of organisations raise serious concerns about the “chilling effect” of the Government’s latest attempt to restrict the right to protest

The very limited authority of the UK press industry’s tame watchdog is under assault from its members, vividly exposing the contradictions in its make-up, writes Brian Cathcart

Some of the earliest known photographs of Athens, Jerusalem, Rome and more illuminate life on the Mediterranean in the 1840s

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

Trauma is usually fear-based, but refugees are also burdened by witnessing moral violations and their own ethical dilemmas

- by Angela Nickerson & Philippa Specker

Read at Psyche

This radical movement makes space for people with mental health and other challenges to study (and celebrate) themselves

- by Satsuki Ayaya & Junko Kitanaka

Read at Aeon

South Africa has gone to the polls in an election in which the vast majority of the nation’s citizens were not able to vote, to return a Government dedicated openly and unashamedly to the principle of racial discrimination. This was how Tribune reported on South Africa’s 1948 election, which saw Daniel Malan’s National Party elected […]

In winter, the canal in Ottawa was the world's frozen ice rink. But not this year.

Yeah, you could say I'm really on activated charcoal (bad cook).