The Greater Manchester Mayor wants the UK to adopt a new codified constitution, proportional representation and an overhauled House of Lords
Reading
The government can afford it, can’t it? And a tad more discipline, just maybe? Associated Press this morning from the West Bank: Video appears to show the Israeli army shot 3 Palestinians, killing 1, without provocation Washington Post this morning from the West Bank: Settlers killed a Palestinian teen. Israeli forces didn’t stop it. Associated Press Dec. 18: In Israel’s killing of 3 hostages, some see the same excessive force directed at Palestinians Associated Press Dec. 15: Israeli military opens probe after videos show Israeli forces killing 2 Palestinians at close range The response to the horrific Hamas terrorist murders is to turn Israel into a pariah state?
The emptiness of words, and our shared resignation to meaning manipulation, is no small matter.
Inflation peaked back in June 2022, only three months after the Fed started hiking interest rates. At that time, the Fed’s policy rate had risen just 75 basis points, and no one knew how much higher it might go. In fact, we have no evidence that monetary policy had any significant effect on the course taken by prices – […]
The speculation will suck up the political oxygen and only serves to benefit the Prime Minister, writes Jonathan Lis
Jane Hirshfield’s New and Selected is such a generous bounty—first of all it is essentially a new book of poems, a departure from older work into a new territory. So, allow me to dive right in, explaining why I am so excited about this book bringing together Hirshfield’s new and earlier poems.
Take for instance her poem, “Today, When I Could Do Nothing,” which is so of this, our moment in time, and yet it also continues some of the other poems in her earlier book Ledger, where Hirshfield explored the idea of a civic poem that takes lyric as its medium of discourse. Here, as in Ledger, the lyric detachment we have grown to love over the decades of faithfully reading Hirshfield’s work attains a new dimension: this is a kind of detachment that is so charged with the communal presence one finds so necessary in this moment of crisis. It feels like a departure, a new tone, a new register, in Hirshfield’s work, which is exciting to observe as one considers this volume’s gathering of her writing over the decades.
MAGA’s vision for America What sort of America do you want? That question will not appear on fall ballots but will be there nonetheless alongside whether we continue the American experiment in democracy. Gover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, famously hoped to return conditions in these United States to those of the late-Gilded Age McKinley administration (1897 – 1901). Upton Sinclair savaged conditions in the American meatpacking industry in “The Jungle” a few short years after McKinley. Today’s second Gilded Age MAGA Republicans are onboard. Indiana state Rep. Joanna King (R) this week introduced a bill that would exempt children at least 14 years of age and who have completed the eighth grade from attending school to work (with parental permission) on a farm during school hours. King is treading a wider path blazed last March by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas (BuzzFeed): Under the new law, children under 16 no longer have to get permission from the state’s Division of Labor to get a job, nor will they need to have their age verified or submit things like their work schedule for a permit.
Karam Bales takes a close look at Andrew Bridgen's recent resignation from the Reclaim Party and the high-profile attendees at his 'Parliamentary meeting' of anti-vax campaigners.
Wow. First off, all of us executives are flattered to see so many, many thousands of people here supporting our product. The flowers, the chanting, the giant banners with our faces on them—it’s all really something.
But things have gotten a little intense here. Let’s maybe slow it down a bit, huh? Put away the torches? Let Elon Musk out of that cage? Just talk a few things through?
Thank you. Well, this is super embarrassing, but “revolutionizing the industry” was just one of the many nonsense things we said to sell you electric rollerblades. We never intended for RadBoots, the value-driven way to blade, to create mobs of crazed sporting goods enthusiasts hell-bent on fundamentally shifting the way people get around.
Yes, I know: “Fundamentally shifting the way people get around” was a thing we said a lot in the ad campaign. But we were going for more of a “the new iPhone has a different camera” type of shift. Not a “these electric rollerblades will alter society” type of shift.
The Shadow Minister for Democracy also hits out at voter ID – but it is still unclear if Labour will scrap it
- by Aeon Video
As Israel intensifies its attacks in Lebanon, the prospect of the “great war” looms.
The post Israel Is Banking on U.S. Support for a Wider War Against the Axis of Resistance appeared first on The Intercept.
- by Michael G Titelbaum
As we embark on a New Year, my thoughts on politics in Cymru have been with one eye reflecting on the past while the other is firmly focussed on the future. From the early struggles for democracy in Merthyr and Newport in the 1830s to the collective action of South Wales miners in almost every […]
The condition for loss by the Resistance is clear: Palestinians are ethnically cleansed further, ideally (from the Israeli point of view,) out of Palestine entirely.
How does the resistance win? It’s unlikely to be marching thru Tel Aviv, although I don’t think that’s necessarily impossible given how small Israel is and how incompetent its military at everything but aerial bombardment.
Collapse of the Settler Project: Israel currently has about a quarter million internal refugees. The settlements near the Lebanese border have been evacuated. People say Hezbollah is doing nothing or little, but in fact they’ve cause the Israelis serious problems. Without settlers, Israel cannot complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, plus a lot of the economy is based on settler expansion.
The Federal Open Market Committee makes important decisions regarding U.S. monetary policy and comprises leaders from around the Federal Reserve System.
To defend its controversial corporate consolidation plan, the grocery giant highlighted ties to local growers — including one that hired an alleged human trafficking kingpin.
After dismantling a New York Times front page feature alleging “a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7” by Hamas, The Grayzone is demanding answers of the paper for its journalistic malpractice. The following was submitted to New York Times editors and lead author, Jeffrey Gettleman. The Grayzone has identified serious issues with the credibility of key sources quoted in the New York Times’ December 28 story, “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7.” Authored […]
The post Screams without proof: questions for NYT about shoddy ‘Hamas mass rape’ report first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post Screams without proof: questions for NYT about shoddy ‘Hamas mass rape’ report appeared first on The Grayzone.
"They don’t particularly like being answerable to the media and they like even less the scrutiny that comes with public office."
For the time being I will continue my Wednesday format where I cover some things that crossed my mind in the last week but which I don’t provide detailed analysis. The items can be totally orthogonal. The latest inflation data for Australia continues to affirm the transitory narrative – dropping significantly over the last month.…
Get a load of the latest “policy” proposals on immigration coming from Stephen Miller and the extreme white nationalists: AS HE CAMPAIGNS on a pledge to lead an unprecedented crackdown on legal and illegal immigration, former President Donald Trump has vowed to invoke an 18th-century wartime law to help fuel his massive deportation operations. According to three people familiar with the policy deliberations, Trump, his advisers, and allies have been developing legally dubious justifications and theories to give Trump what he would ostensibly need to wield the archaic law as a weapon against the undocumented if he’s elected president again. If Trump were to try to invoke the Alien Enemies Act for this purpose, it would almost certainly provoke court challenges, since the law is meant to target the actions of foreign governments and regimes during wartime, not alleged criminals, gangs, or non-state actors.
