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Fri, 18/10/2024 - 10:51
Israel announces the ‘elimination’ of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Palestinians react to the reports, Netanyahu declares the war is not over yet, PM Albanese denounces Sinwar as a terrorist and Mary Kostakidis shares an interview of Sinwar, reminding us it is important to hear what they have to say. Unicef’s James Elder talks with Christiane Continue reading »
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Fri, 18/10/2024 - 10:30
Harris handles a protester: And then there was that debate: Is she strong enough? You bet she is. And that seems to be the main complaint among those who say they’re not happy with Trump but just don’t think she has the “strength and the stamina” (remember that one?) to be president. It’s sexism, of course. But I think her toughness is obvious now. She’s making power moves. And it’s impressive.
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Fri, 18/10/2024 - 09:30

With the 2024 presidential campaign entering the homestretch, an anxious nation has once again turned to historian Allan Lichtman and his Thirteen Keys to the White House. Every four years, Lichtman predicts who will win the presidency based on whether the incumbent party has met eight of his thirteen criteria for success.

Critics, however, argue that Lichtman’s keys are subjective, opaque, and easy to retrofit for a predetermined outcome. With this in mind, we are proud to introduce the real thirteen keys—which represent rigorous, data-driven analysis and not just stuff we made up.

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Fri, 18/10/2024 - 09:00
It can’t be any clearer. As it turns out, the same gentleman who asked Trump about January 6th last night also asked Kamala Harris a question at her Univision town hall last week. He asked her about the rumors that the administration wasn’t doing anything for the hurrican victims and what they planned to do in the future. Watch them back-to-back. Something tells me Mr. González is undecided no more. pic.twitter.com/I35zz3zPY4 — Ms. M 🪷 Read Project 2025 (@MsMalarkey24) October 17, 2024 Guess what? Q: Did you receive the answer you were looking for from Trump? Undecided voter: No Q: You came here undecided to this town hall. Have you made a decision? Undecided voter: I am not going to vote for Trump Q: Did you receive the answer you were looking for from Trump? Undecided voter: No Q: You came here undecided to this town hall. Have you made a decision? Undecided voter: I am not going to vote for Trump https://t.co/LHAsYkjdkb pic.twitter.com/EeEzzrDUOx — Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 17, 2024
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Fri, 18/10/2024 - 07:30
Eric Levitz at Vox takes a look at the continuing loss of working class white voters and the analysis shows that unions haven’t turned out to be the great fix everyone thought they would be: The rightward drift of America’s working class disconcerted progressives, who generated a variety of ideas for reversing it. But one of their primary prescriptions could be summarized in a single word: unions. After all, the erosion of Democrats’ working-class support had coincided with the collapse of organized labor in the United States. There were many reasons to think the latter had caused the former. Thus, to prevent Democrats’ working-class support from diminishing further, the thinking went, the party needed to deliver for existing trade unions, whose demands Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had sometimes defied. Meanwhile, to lay the seeds for a broader realignment of working-class voters, Democrats needed to make it easier for workers to organize by reforming federal labor laws. The Biden administration appears to have embraced this analysis.
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Fri, 18/10/2024 - 06:00
Let’s just say persuasion isn’t on the menu Ed Kilgore outlines the Trump campaign strategy to “win” the election on election day. It won’t surprise you to learn that they aren’t trying to persuade people to vote for him: The Trump campaign, the Republican Party, and its super-PAC allies are devoting a lot of resources to suppressing the Democratic vote in key states. These strategies include: -Insisting on voter-roll purges to eliminate people who don’t respond quickly to official verification inquiries, whether or not they are appropriate. (In the past, overzealous purges have disqualified hundreds of thousands of eligible voters, most notably in Florida in 2000.) -Promoting ridiculously strict rules for mail ballots that don’t have anything to do with their integrity (e.g., tossing them out due to extremely minor address or date errors without the possibility of curing them). -Flooding the polling places with poll watchers trained to challenge individual ballots that might go to Kamala Harris on a variety of sketchy grounds.
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Fri, 18/10/2024 - 04:58
“Our language shouldn’t be designed to appease the oppressor.” Steve Salaita Not “war in Gaza”. A war on Gaza. Not “lives lost”. Mass killing and mutilation of civilians. Not “self-defence”. A war on children. Snipers’ bullets in children’s heads. Not “a tragic conflict”. Genocidal erasure of Gaza and its people. Not defending “Israel’s right to Continue reading »
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Fri, 18/10/2024 - 04:57
With the active support of Prince Charles, now King Charles, John Kerr planned the dismissal of Gough Whitlam in 1975. In  early spring 1975 in the New Guinea highlands, the Governor General, Sir John Kerr sidled up to Prince Charles and suggested a quiet chat. Their topic? The possible dismissal of the Prime Minister. Prince Continue reading »
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Fri, 18/10/2024 - 04:55
Despite claims to the contrary, Australia is not a well governed country. At all levels of politics, in businesses large and small, and in the wider society, governance systems right across the country have been hollowed-out. The term governance refers to how institutions that have varying degrees of power over us actually exercise that power. Continue reading »
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Fri, 18/10/2024 - 04:53
Since the dawn of neoliberal policy time, at the start of the 1980s, the idea that the population must suffer short-term pain for the sake of longer-term gain has been frequently stated by government and senior public servants. It has been put again and again and still yet again, in recent times, by Reserve Bank Continue reading »