Reading

If Senate Democrats oppose Trump’s budget, why are they considering providing Republicans with the needed votes to invoke cloture?

The post Senate Dems Look to Give Trump Everything He Wants After a “Fake Fight” on Spending Bill appeared first on The Intercept.

Lawyers trying to free the Columbia University activist point to a legal exception undermining the Trump administration’s argument.

The post The Legal Argument That Could Set Mahmoud Khalil Free appeared first on The Intercept.

Peter Dutton does not really believe in Medicare. He is more interested in Trump-type culture wars than the health of Australians. He matched the $8.5 billion the Australian Government pledged for Medicare, not because he cared about the health of Australians but because it was a way to neutralise government Medicare policy. He refuses to Continue reading »

Reports on the financial distress of Landbridge, the Chinese-owned company with a 99-year lease for the Port of Darwin, lack perspective and analysis. Penny Wong goes soft on China and ASPI goes unchecked. Is the Port of Darwin on the chopping block? No need to hold your breath, we’ll dispose of Victorian LNP Senator James Continue reading »

In 2024, in a context of declining R&D and productivity, the government appointed an independent expert panel to lead a “strategic examination” of Australia’s R&D system. In February the first discussion paper was released along with invitations to make submissions. Unfortunately, the discussion paper is poor, bereft of insight, a-historical, a-theoretical and a-political (in the Continue reading »

Government funding increases for Catholic and Independent schools have outstripped those for public schools since 2009 and entrenched a major resource advantage for them. New figures published by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority show Catholic and Independent schools have a much higher income per student than public schools across Australia and in nearly Continue reading »

I’ll begin with a reminder, for the Zionists in the audience, of what antisemitism is. I grew up surrounded by adults with blue numbers tattooed on their forearms. My primary school teacher relentlessly picked on the three Jewish kids in her class. My high school refused to discipline a girl who punched me in the Continue reading »

According to Reserve Bank deputy governor Andrew Hauser last week, we’ve entered a world characterised not just by volatility, complexity and uncertainty, but also by “ambiguity” – a world where “you don’t know the model”, meaning that “judgment and instinct are as important as formal analysis”. At last, someone is talking sense. Academic economists may Continue reading »

“The label Zionist is used, not in any way, accurately. When critics use that word, they actually mean Jew. They’re not really saying Zionist, they’re saying Jew because they know that they cannot say Jew, so they say Zionist or words [such as] Zeo or Zio.” –Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, October 2024 Eleven days before Continue reading »

During the recently concluded Munich Security Conference, Professor Graham Allison from Harvard University met Dr Huiyao Wang, founder and president of the Centre for China and Globalisation based in Beijing, to discuss Dr Wang’s new book (“Escaping Thucydides’s Trap: Dialogue with Graham Allison on China-US Relations”) which is grounded on and develops arguments made in Continue reading »

In a bid to boost Elon Musk’s car company, Trump did a live White House ad and threatened Tesla protesters would “go through hell.”

The post If Protesting Tesla Is Domestic Terrorism, Then What Demonstration Against Musk Isn’t appeared first on The Intercept.

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve climbed the media ladder and joined a cadre of independent pundits like Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and Tucker Carlson. And I did it with just an insatiable appetite for trolling liberals.

Of course, I’ve made a lot of enemies along the way—the socialist Democrats, the thought police, and all the blue-haired feminists who are too high on their own supply of DEI to keep a rational, emotionally uninvested, bird’s-eye, macro view of political issues like I do. They’re all just snowflakes who hate how a straight, white, cisgender guy like me can amass a huge following online by mocking their civic rights, socioeconomic grievances, and pathetic obsession with democracy.

But remember, I’m not actually committed to anything I say or do that provokes them into wokesplaining conniptions. I’m just asking questions. Or playing devil’s advocate. Or trolling for the lolz.

Trump has deployed television’s Dr. Mehmet Oz to auction off the country’s public health care system to the highest bidder.

Pro-Israel lobbyists spent a year framing campus protests as Hamas-linked. Now, their disinformation campaign has led to the detention and planned deportation of Mahmoud Khalil—despite Trump officials admitting he broke no laws.

The post The Case Against Mahmoud Khalil: How the Israel Lobby Fueled a Campus Crackdown appeared first on MintPress News.

Death at the White Hart, the first book by former Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall, has been picked up by ITV for a TV series adaptation.

Not even two months since Inauguration Day and it’s already been quite a trip. Ping-ponging between vindictive pettiness and unconstitutional overreach while using everything in his power (and much that isn’t), Donald Trump has served up a goulash of dubious orders with a slathering of venom on top. He’s been abetted in the upheaval he promised on the campaign trail by the richest man on Earth, a cabal of lickspittles, and a cabinet filled with people who appear to have answered job ads stipulating, “Only the unqualified may apply.” As it became clearer what the battles to come would be, a friend wrote me: “I feel now like we’re watching it all happen. It being that thing that can’t happen... Read more

Source: How to Resist This Fresh Hell appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Anonymous activists plaster adverts on Tube trains showing Foreign Secretary David Lammy with “war criminal” Israeli PM Netanyahu

Michael McCarthy’s The Master’s Tools opens with an evocative description of life under a new social order. ‘It’s a sunny Friday morning in 2045, and you’re running late for a meeting to deliberate over and agree on the priorities of the city.’ You ride to the meeting on a public railway network and step off […]

TO: FAM CHAT

Guys—Katie, excuse the use of “guys” for a sec here, but honestly, didn’t we always kind of think that was one notch over the woke line? Well, I did. There’s no suitable uh… alternative and… Anyway…

Okay. So. The thing of it is that a TV writer I know just wrote a memoir. And the fact checkers called because the good news is…

I made the memoir! I’m in it!

And I am described as…

Well, a few ways… network senior vice-president of content, of course. And…

In other language. Colorful language. Writerly language.

That is the complicated part, and why I’m communicating here is to kind of foreshadow to you guys, especially Katie and Thomas, because you didn’t sign up to be our kids, at least Mommy knew what she was getting into, but…

This admission of abject surrender and powerlessness from Colombia University is something I appreciate. Some actual honesty:

Two Indian storytellers give intersecting and conflicting accounts of the same Hindu myth in this dazzling animation

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

It’s only a century since US diplomats first persuaded the world that it’s wrong for countries to annex their neighbours

- by Kerry Goettlich

Read at Aeon

Dark money groups tied to conservative power broker Leonard Leo are trying to kill a rule forcing them to disclose who’s funding their judicial pressure campaigns.

Hardeep Matharu dissects what the now infamous Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky revealed about the American President’s approach – and speaks to political scientist Brian Klaas about why his ‘alternative realities’ don’t stack up against real-world complexities

If Europeans come from Venus, Peter Jukes observes, it’s only because they are aware (unlike Elon Musk) of the bleak devastation of Mars