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Here’s a rough guide to Westerners visiting Indonesia. Bali gets chosen for its cheap packaged holidays, knock-out rural landscapes and friendly folk; relax for a fortnight, eat lots, drink more and head home. This year the island expects to welcome almost double last year’s 2.3 million. Some get disturbed by cruelty to animals, trashing of beaches, the Continue reading »

Parliamentary representatives of all stripes deserve to have the necessary staffing and means to discharge their duties to constituents. The messy legal proceedings between the sitting Federal Member for Kooyong, Dr Monique Ryan, and former chief staffer Sally Rugg, is instructive on a few levels. While it does relate to an alleged unfair expectation to Continue reading »

Water broke in the wee hours on the day of Headry’s flight back to her homeland Malaysia. She remembered clearly it was 3.40 am. The amniotic fluid flowed down, and her heart sank. “I cried and prayed that my baby could hold and not come out yet.” It was early February 2017. Her gynecologist, who Continue reading »

Over a period of decades, the US has refined and applied its own exceptional version of One Country, Two Systems. What is most curious is that this has materialised within plain sight yet it has largely remained undetected, as such. “One country, two systems” (OCTS) is most widely recognised as the regime applied to ground Continue reading »

And it’s even more dangerous than before Read this thread by Emptywheel and you’ll see what I’m talking about: WaPo’s 1800-word, 4 reporter story on the upcoming decision on whether to charge Hunter or not says it matters bc it’ll affect Biden’s campaign. Here's WaPo's front page, with the Hunter story on it. Can someone point me to where the story on the rape trial, the one in which TRUMP, not his son, is a defendant? How about the news that Trump's long-time digial media guru spent all day before Jack Smith's grand jury yesterday (on a Tuesday)? Now check out story. It's not until ¶¶10 & 11 that WaPo tells you that EVEN IF Hunter is indicted, it's not the stuff that right wing has been drooling abt non-stop for 5 years, it's a charge that Trump's campaign manager, personal lawyer, and OWN CORPORATION were convicted of. HOW FUCKING STUPID DO YOU HAVE TO BE to say that a Hunter Biden prosecution on tax charges would hurt Biden's reelection campaign, w/o mentioning Trump Org's conviction on tax charges? Trump is mentioned ~11 times.

A new bill proposes a novel way to block access to transition-related treatment — for adults too.

The post Texas GOP Opens Up a New Front in Genocidal Anti-Trans Campaign appeared first on The Intercept.

Hey, it’s Me, God. Not to toot My own horn, but I think I’ve been knocking this creation thing out of the park. I mean, I’ve really got it all laid out. You guys are gonna love what I’ve done with the place. Wait until you see the constellations. There are so many different ways to make milk. Plus, you’re never going to believe where cashews come from.

But listen, there’s just one catch: I’ve decided dogs can’t live as long as people.

I know, I know. I spent hours mulling this over and weighing My options. Look, I created man’s best friend, didn’t I? I did that. For you. Because I love you. Can’t we just leave it at that?

You’re thinking, “Jeeze, God, why do elephants and sea turtles get to live so long, but not dogs?” Sure, fair question. At one point, I considered making it so no animals could live as long as people. Ultimately, though, I decided it was a bad idea.

‘The streets of the poor quarters of great cities are, above all, a theatre and a battleground,’ reads the opening card of Helen Levitt’s In The Street. At the Barbican’s Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle, Levitt’s documentary, a loose assembly of footage from the streets of 1935 East Harlem, features alongside Alice Neel’s portraits […]

Despite reminding voters of the need to bring ID with them to the polling station, the Labour councillor forgot to do so himself, reports Catherine Avery

He’s all at sixes and sevens… The Washington Post reports: Tucker Carlson — who was fired by Fox News last week at the height of his popularity and influence in right-wing punditry — has aspirations of moving into a larger role that doesn’t limit him to a single medium, according to people familiar with his thinking. And he is willing to walk away from some of the millions that Fox is contractually obligated to pay him, if that would give him the flexibility to have a prominent voice in the 2024 election cycle. Most ambitiously, Carlson wants to moderate his own GOP candidate forum, outside of the usual strictures of the Republican National Committee debate system. The idea, which he has discussed with Donald Trump, the front-runner for the party nomination, would test his vaunted sway over conservative politics. And it would take a jab at his former employer — Fox is hosting the first official primary debate, which Trump has threatened not to attend — if he can manage to make his grandest plan happen.

Speaking with RadioTimes.co, a spokesperson for Doctor Who confirmed that Series 14 is currently "unaffected" by the WGA writers' strike.

April saw a flurry of activity in European cities rapidly advancing their own boycott procedures against Israel, with Barcelona, Liège, and Oslo all chilling their relations with Israel's apartheid government.

The post How European Cities are Breathing New Life into the BDS Movement appeared first on MintPress News.

Latest updates as Byline Times reports on the rollout of mandatory voter ID in England

Karim Khan vowed to turn around his office’s losing record. But if his case against Putin backfires, it could hurt the court’s already-battered reputation.

The post The Polarizing Prosecutor Trying to Nail Putin for War Crimes appeared first on The Intercept.

Is it open season again so soon? “Road rage incidents are on the rise nationally and right here in San Diego, according to the California Highway Patrol,” reports NBC 7 San Diego: “Somebody who is driving aggressively is driving in and out of traffic, slamming on brakes, making unsafe lane changes, following too closely, that type of stuff,” CHP Sgt. Brian Pennings said. “It escalates into offending or upsetting another driver.” Offending someone else isn’t always intentional, but once it happens, road rage is a common response. This can and has escalated into the road rager threatening gun violence. In recent months, the San Diego City Attorney has secured five road-rage-related gun violence restraining orders for alleged road rage drivers. These civil orders stop someone from buying, possessing or using a gun and can stay in effect for up to five years. Sgt. Pennings has seen his share of road rage incidents, including one that turned deadly for a driver at a stop light. “He looked over and there was a driver of the vehicle who was a female,” Pennings remembered. “She looked over at him, smiled, and he smiled back.

Other people aren’t hell, Lauren Berlant writes, just bothersome, ‘which is to say that they have to be dealt with’. Why is it so hard to live with other people? And why do we seek to ease the friction of intimacy and collective life even as we are driven towards encounters that create friction? 

By piecing together the details of Lourenço da Silva de Mendonça’s campaign, José Lingna Nafafé shows that abolitionism began not with William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, but with a transnational African movement a century earlier. In order to make this case, he has to reconstruct the complex and intertwined worlds of Angola, Brazil and Southern Europe in the 17th century.

Fans make no pretence of balance or reason. They are drunk on irrationality and obstinacy, hurling themselves after the fortunes of their chosen team, band, TV show or celebrity. A fan may feel aggrieved at the unfairness of the world (as embodied in a referee, critic or prize panel), but the last thing they aspire to be is fair. A fan is someone with a dog in the fight.

Positioned higgledy-piggledy in London streets, a battery of defunct cannons threatens to destroy ordinary people’s homes and livelihoods, day-to-day infrastructure and basic amenities, art and nature, new things and old things. You would be hard pressed to find a better metaphor for the current political regime and the national climate it has produced.

Donatello was driven to devise original solutions by the success of the older Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose mastery of linear perspective in relief sculpture could never be surpassed. But there can be little doubt that Donatello also came increasingly to relish angular collisions of form, rough finishes, ragged edges and natural disorder to a degree never previously found in sculpture.

There was something perverse about Israel’s choice of Asunción as a destination for dispossessed Palestinians. Alfredo Stroessner had been running Paraguay as a military dictatorship for fifteen years when the transfers began. It was also where Nazi war criminals – Josef Mengele is the most famous – had gone to hide. More interesting for Palestinians is the under-reported legacy of indigenous resistance in the country.