Reading

For the foreseeable future Israel will not commit itself to allowing Palestinian statehood. It will remain in occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. And so long as the occupation continues, there will be no peace to keep. The carnage in Gaza and reactions to it have implications and risks for most countries. Australia is Continue reading »

Australian governments talk a lot about our commitment to the rule of law and human rights. However Australia’s response – at glacial speed with grossly inadequate measures – to the unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Gaza following Hamas’s brutal October 7 attacks, are putting that commitment to the test. As a nation that has provided political Continue reading »

The Search for the Palace Letters is a remarkable documentary that follows the story of Professor Jenny Hocking, the historian who took on an epic legal battle against the Australian Government and HM Queen Elizabeth II in a landmark legal battle – and won. Aired on ABC earlier this week, you can view the documentary Continue reading »

The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organisation of some note, recently released a list of companies profiting from Israel’s current campaign in Gaza, including its operations in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria between October and December 2023. The list of nasty participants is impressive and familiar. There is, for instance, the UK company Continue reading »

Since April 2023, in a civil war in Sudan, an estimated 10,000 people have been killed, six million internally displaced, over one million are refugees in neighbouring countries, 18 million people are reported by the UN to be ‘food insecure’; and where fighting has reached the borders of neighbouring countries, food aid has been suspended. Continue reading »

In a speech he made in Sydney in 2011, defending Julian Assange, John Pilger recalled how it was always impressed upon him when he was young that Australia was a brave country: that we stood up to authority, and we stood up for justice. Such national myths were at best half-truths, Pilger said, but in Continue reading »

Israel’s allies aren’t just turning a blind eye to Gaza’s killing fields. They have cheered on the bloodshed, provided diplomatic cover and supplied the arms. Israel is urging western states to rally to its side as the International Court of Justice prepares to hear this week South Africa’s case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The Continue reading »

Our analysis indicates that existing empirical work in this area is producing a misleading portrait of evidence as to the severity of racial bias in police behavior. Replicating and extending the study of police behavior in New York in Fryer (2019), we show that the consequences of ignoring the selective process that generates police data […]

As the war on Gaza grinds on, it is becoming increasingly clear that Israel has no plans to leave the beleaguered Palestinian territory and instead institute its long-held goal of recolonizing the Strip.

The post From Libya to Paraguay: Israel’s Longstanding Goal of Expelling Palestinians From Gaza Inches Closer to Reality appeared first on MintPress News.

But it might work anyway… The idea that former President Donald Trump was performing his official duties when he told his supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” and then sat in his dining room watching them storm the building and refusing to do anything to quell the riot has always seemed to be a stretch. After he lost 60 of 61 court cases in which he tried to overturn the results of the election that he continued to exhort the top officials in the Justice Department to lie and say they had evidence of fraud hardly seems like a presidential duty either. And all the calls to local officials asking them “find” enough votes to change the outcome of their election wouldn’t normally be considered the job of a president. American elections, for better or worse, are processed by state and local authorities. Nonetheless, Donald Trump’s lawyers had filed an appeal in the US District court arguing that everything he did in the post election period were part of Donald Trump’s official duties as President and therefore he should be given immunity for all of it which is ridiculous.

The text telling me Tim had died came through a few minutes before a series of meetings with students. After the feeling of sickness and dread that hit me I wondered whether to go ahead anyway, and then thought what a strange thought that was. But my stepmum told me later that when my dad […]

Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., is the first candidate to win an endorsement from Justice Democrats for the 2024 cycle.

The post Justice Democrats Endorses Chicago Progressive Among First to Call for Gaza Ceasefire appeared first on The Intercept.

The Greater Manchester Mayor wants the UK to adopt a new codified constitution, proportional representation and an overhauled House of Lords

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.