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The Dark Lord Peter Dutton’s Coalition has today launched their plan to keep the Australian budget in the black, by suing their way to prosperity. ”Australians don’t need to be afraid of any Government that I lead,” said the Dark... Read More ›

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) pierced the Fox News bubble on Monday, pushing back on host Sean Hannity’s claims about President Joe Biden, mocking House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and ripping Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) over his treatment of migrants. Hannity tried to defend DeSantis, who has been shipping migrants around the country in what critics have ripped as a political stunt done to raise his profile as a 2024 presidential candidate. But Newsom wasn’t having it. “Why do you use people as pawns?” Newsom asked. “What faith tradition teaches you to treat human beings like this ― to belittle them, to demean them?” Hannity suggested a TV debate ― moderated by himself, of course ― between Newsom and DeSantis. “I’m all in, count on it,” Newsom said. “You would do a two-hour debate with Ron DeSantis?” Hannity said. “Make it three,” Newsom said. “Do it with one-day notice with no notes, I look forward to that.

I think we can almost certainly count on shenanigans from her. She’s obviously MAGA and it’s very bad luck that the case wound up back under her. Charlie Savage at the NY Times breaks down the possibilities: Last year, Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, briefly disrupted the documents investigation by issuing rulings favorable to him when he challenged the F.B.I.’s search of his Florida club and estate, Mar-a-Lago, before a conservative appeals court ruled that she never had legal authority to intervene. It remains to be seen how she will handle her second turn in the spotlight. The scope of her role before the trial also is unclear: She is not presiding over Mr. Trump’s initial hearing on Tuesday, and could refer some pretrial motions to a magistrate judge who works under her. But here is a closer look at how her decisions as the judge presiding over the trial — like on what can be included and excluded — could affect the case. Slowing the Calendar Mr. Trump has long pursued a strategy of trying to delay legal proceedings against him to run out the clock.

A battle of ideas is being fought in Australia. And the front line is the drive to war and the demonisation of China. There is a battle but it is a one-sided affair. Ranged against those who seek a sane and rational world are powerful voices. The government, of whatever persuasion pays think tanks handsomely Continue reading »

In 1795, in his Treatise on Perpetual Peace, philosopher Immanuel Kant advocated rationality about peace by repudiating any plans for military domination, by respect for non-violence and by aiming to abolish standing armies. In 2023, Australia signed up to an AUKUS alliance with the UK and US to acquire nuclear submarines in preparation for a Continue reading »

Misunderstanding China has a long and distinguished history. Much of that misunderstanding has been generated by western media going right back to the Qing dynasty. The Australian ‘Times’ correspondent of the era George Ernest Morrison was unable to speak Chinese and so depended on Sir Edmund Backhouse as a source of primary information. Sir Edmund Continue reading »

Ten years ago Anthony King and Ivor Crewe published their book – The Blunders of Our Governments. They ranged over the Millennium Dome; the 20 billion pounds wasted on a failed scheme to upgrade London’s Underground; punishing tens of thousands of single mothers into poverty; massive IT disaster’s such as the Blair Governments NHS scheme; Continue reading »

Now is the time for the Nation State to reassert its control over multinational entities. Multinationals advance an agenda that is self-serving. These agendas may be separate from, and at times, above, a nation’s law. Financial gain is at its heart. Arthur Andersen, a former large international consultancy that collapsed in 2002, “struggled to balance Continue reading »

The effects of the climate crisis intrude with increasing regularity into our lives and yet we do not act. We are as paralysed as past civilisations were when facing catastrophic destruction. Princeton, N.J. — As I write this, the sun is a hazy reddish orange orb. The sky is an inky yellowish gray. The air Continue reading »

The other day I stumbled across a 2014 opinion piece in The Guardian titled “It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war” by Seumas Milne, who the following year would go on to become the Labour Party’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications under Jeremy Corbyn. I bring this up because the Continue reading »

by Norman Solomon, opinion contributor: TheHill.com Donald Trump and Daniel Hale have each been indicted on charges of violating the Espionage Act, but the similarity ends there. While the former president prepares for arraignment in a Miami federal courtroom this afternoon, Hale — a U.S. Air Force veteran and drone whistleblower — continues to serve a 45-month prison sentence.

We’re not so different from an error-prone chatbot.

The post Why We Hallucinate Supernatural Explanations appeared first on Nautilus.

And right in the middle of all that was this: What???

If you follow college football, you probably heard that Glenn “Shemy” Schembechler was recently forced to resign from his post as assistant director of football recruiting at University of Michigan shortly after he was hired.  This occurred after news emerged that he had liked  numerous racist tweets.  Glenn is the son of “legendary” Bo Schembechler, […]

Tom Nichols on how to deal with the threats: I made a joke on Twitter the other day that I thought deserved a better reception than it got. I was reading about Kari Lake bleating about how other Americans, if they wanted to “get” to Donald Trump, would have to “go through me” as well as “through 75 million Americans just like me … most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.” I said that Lake’s political career was like the origin story of Jonathan Matthias. I made that joke because I’m a nerd and I’m old. Matthias is the bad guy from the classic 1971 Charlton Heston movie The Omega Man,a postapocalyptic thriller in which almost everyone in the world is wiped out by a germ-warfare disaster. Heston has an antidote; the other survivors end up as light-sensitive ghouls that can go out only at night. Matthias (played by the legendary character actor Anthony Zerbe) was, before the plague, a blustery celebrity television newscaster, and he later uses his charisma to organize his fellow sorta-vampires into a cult built around hating Heston and all modern technology.

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In conjunction with the release of an undercover investigation on the factory farm, the group DxE mounted an “open rescue” of birds from a slaughterhouse.

The post Dangerous Pathogens and Cruelty Law Violations at Perdue Subsidiary, Animal Rights Report Alleges appeared first on The Intercept.

The algorithm used for the cash relief program is broken, a Human Rights Watch report found.

The post Algorithm Used in Jordanian World Bank Aid Program Stiffs the Poorest appeared first on The Intercept.

Mary Davenport (centre right), a former apprentice forced to drop out due to financial struggles, is speaking up about rock-bottom pay

David Tennant on viewing the Doctor Who 60th-anniversary special event as a "victory lap" and seeing Ncuti Gatwa in action as the new Doctor.

Get busy fighting or brace for democracy dying “A Red Alert for Voting Rights” is the Zoom call scheduled tomorrow by Carolina Forward. The topic is North Carolina politics. But the red alert is broader than that. Twitter followers of former Ohio state Democratic Party chair, David Pepper (“Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual for Every American“), know he’s been leaning hard into Ohio Republicans’ attempt to thwart a citizen initiative to secure abortion rights in the state constitution. The GOP-dominated legislature has scheduled an August special election to pass a constitutional amendment that would make it harder for citizens to pass their “Right to Reproductive Freedom” amendment in November.

Trump’s body man Walt Nauta is just the latest in a long line of lackeys.

The post Trump Is a Predator Who Feeds on Lackeys appeared first on The Intercept.