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The Albanese Government is set to open up Australia's skilled migrant intake, according to Dr Abul Rizvi, in his second foray into IA's top ten stories of the year. read now...

The Albanese Government is set to open up Australia's skilled migrant intake, according to Dr Abul Rizvi, in his second foray into IA's top ten stories of the year. read now...

Average life expectancy in the United States has been falling for the last couple of years in a row. That’s typically a sign of a society in decline. Don’t expect anyone in power to wake up soon though.

The post At Least This Will All Be over Sooner first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Here are the answers with discussion for this Weekend’s Quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it…

The post Video of the Day – On Demand Entertainment, 2022 appeared first on Blogtor Who.

IA was alerting Australia about the rise of White supremacists while other publications were still blindly focussed on Islam. This typically strong August piece by Tom Tanuki gained over 20,000 unique views. read now...

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Happy New Year Hippos! Dispatch from Cincinnati: Stop what you’re doing right now and look at these stinking cute pictures of Fritz, the baby brother of the celebrated Cincinnati Zoo hippopotamus Fiona, stealing the show with his toothy grin. “Fritz showing us his smile… and new teeth coming in!” the zoo tweeted this week. Fritz, who was born Aug. 3, did appear to be smiling as he propelled himself around the 70,000-gallon pool at Hippo Cove. Twitter users couldn’t get enough of Fritz’s broad smile. “I’d lay my life on the line for Fritz,” one user tweeted. “Not to be dramatic,” another user said, “but I would die for Fritz,” Fritz, who weighed 330 pounds at a recent weigh-in, is a bouncing baby boy in the most literal sense. Hippos don’t swim, exactly, but use their powerful legs to propel themselves through water. They spend a lot of time bouncing off the walls and bottoms of pools, according to a piece in The Atlantic written when Fiona was just a wee thing. And tiny she was at birth. Born six weeks prematurely on Jan.

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Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Dave Weigel’s take on the best achievements in campaigning is one of the more interesting year-end pieces I’ve read. He spends all his time on the trail and I suspect he knows what he’s talking about: Best U.S. Senate campaign: John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Did he get an assist when Donald Trump lifted Mehmet Oz to win the GOP primary? Obviously. Did a decade-plus of ad campaigns, TED Talks, and media profiles of the 6’8’’ mayor of a left-for-dead town help him? Yes, but that wasn’t luck, and he’d already run for Senate and lost before, in 2016. This year’s Fetterman campaign excelled at everything, convincing Democratic primary voters that a candidate Republicans would call “socialist” was electable, then pummeling Oz while its own candidate recovered from a stroke. The best Fetterman gimmicks — like his constant Twitter trolling of Oz, largely for his living until recently in New Jersey — probably wouldn’t work for other candidates, which was the point.

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These are all good things that John McDonnell suggests and much to be admired – but he really does look washed out, poor man… Even more importantly, even after all those years as shadow chancellor he still has no idea that money is actually always the state’s… He talks of a control on energy costs... Read more

2022 was another banner year A look back at the annual body count: From the 19 children and two teachers killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, to the five people murdered at Club Q in Colorado Springs, countless lives have been impacted by mass shootings in the United States this year. There is no official FBI definition of a mass shooting, so definitions vary from group to group. This means that there is no official number of mass shootings that occurred in 2022. However, the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as a shooting in which there are four or more people shot or killed — not including the shooter — recorded 641 mass shootings in 2022 as of Dec. 28. The online archive reported 690 mass shootings in 2021, the highest year on record. This means that 2022, with at least 641 mass shootings, had the second highest number of mass shootings in a year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Some other lists put it at the highest year on record. Either way, it’s a disgrace.

Preparation time 35-40 minutesCooking time 30-35 minutesServes 6 What to prepare:2 lbs. beef fillet7 ozs. Mushrooms7 ozs. Chicken livers2 lbs. puff pastry1 eggOilSalt, pepper (For best results for this dish, follow directions carefully).Sauté meat on all sides, in a pan, for 2 minutes. Rinse the mushrooms, and chop into thin pieces. Chop the liver finely. […]

Precisely why is complicated, but it is the case that Republicans/conservatives are always The Main Characters of the story of politics as told by political journalists. One example of this is how they all flocked to cover the annual CPAC conference year after year, documenting activities and gossip of even extremely minor characters in the conservative world. Though of course this helped to promote these people, helping to make the conservative movement a Grifter's Paradise for years.

Like we know what Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro have for lunch every day, but not, um, I dunno, there's no precise equivalent on The Left for the reasons in the paragraph above, but I don't know what David Dayen usually eats.

Too bad nobody paid attention New York is one of the few metro areas that still has a number of different big newspapers but even so it was a small local weekly that had the George Santos story long before the election. Nobody picked it up: Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate. The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later. The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters. “Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S.

Keith Hart, a renowned and influential economic anthropologist: “Western civilization represents itself as an economy these days. The TV news bombards us with the ephemeral movements of stock prices, exchange rates, and the latest unemployment figures. Elections are fought and lost on a government’s economic record. International diplomacy is mainly about trade and banking. The […]