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Many Indians have bristled at a perceived double standard on extrajudicial killings amid Canada’s investigation into the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

The post Indian Nationalists Cite Inspiration for Foreign Assassinations: U.S. “Targeted Killing” Spree appeared first on The Intercept.

Oh great I’ve argued that he is more likely to take votes from Trump than Biden. But it appears that at this point in the cycle anyway, I’m wrong. He does take more from Biden. Dan Pfeiffer writes about it in his newsletter today: Politico also reports that American Values 2024, a Super PAC supporting Kennedy Jr., has commissioned polling and is preparing for an independent bid. While multiple polls demonstrated that the No Labels and West candidacies could hurt Biden, the initial speculation was that Kennedy would hurt Trump more. On its face, Kennedy Jr. has been running as MAGA’s favorite Democrat. He is a regular on Fox News and other MAGA media outlets, where he mostly attacks Biden, spouts anti-vax conspiracy theories, and toes the Trump line on Russia. If West pulls disaffected liberals from Biden, and the No Labels ticket is a place for Republicans and independents that disapprove of Biden, shouldn’t RFK Jr. take votes from Trump? What the Polls Say Most of the polling shows Kennedy Jr. getting  10% and 20% of the vote against Biden in the primary.

David A. Freedman‘s Statistical Models: Theory and Practice (2009) is a marvellous book. It should be mandatory reading for every serious social scientist — including economists and econometricians — who don’t want to succumb to ad hoc assumptions and unsupported statistical conclusions! In the social and behavioral sciences, far-reaching claims are often made for the superiority […]

It's an embarrassing gaffe for the supposed party of security.

Here's the trailer/overview for Doctor Who - Once and Future: Time Lord Immemorial, starring Christopher Eccleston and the late David Warner.

Did Lincoln lose his soul or save a nation? And you don’t need to win over 100 percent of the people on the other side or on any side. In a democracy, what you need is a majority. — NPR’s Steve Inskeep to Anand Giridharadas at The.Ink Aggressive gerrymandering by GOP-led legislatures means in many places it takes much more than a simple majority to win power. Otherwise, Inskeep is correct. What Democrats must do in such places is shave the other side’s vote margins. That’s doable. Non-Democrats are not monolithic, nor are Trump supporters, as John Russell of The Holler found in Erie, Pennnsylvania. Democrats campaigning conservatively by avoiding all contact with such voters won’t cut it. Nor will giving potential allies the side-eye when they move in our direction. The left is too liberal with sticks and way too stingy with carrots. Inskeep (“Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America“) makes a case for political frenemies in conversation with Giridharadas: I don’t know if you’ve read Frank Foer’s new book on the Biden presidency.

Every graduate student in the humanities should be required to take a course in the English Bible.

For 18 years, I’ve been writing articles for TomDispatch on the never-ending story of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility. And here’s my ultimate takeaway (for the moment): 21 years after that grim offshore prison of injustice was set up in Cuba in response to the 9/11 attacks and the capture of figures supposedly linked to them, and despite the expressed desire of three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden — to close it, the endgame remains devastatingly elusive. At times due to a failure of will, at times due to a failure of the system itself or the sheer complexity of the logistics involved, and at times due to acts of Congress or the courts, efforts... Read more

Source: Closing Guantánamo? appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

A defender of war crimes, like Gilad Erdan, must not be allowed to serve two roles: an apologist for the mistreatment of women in Palestine and a freedom fighter for women anywhere else.

The post Ambassador of Israeli Crimes: How Gilad Erdan Become a Defender of Women’s Rights in Iran appeared first on MintPress News.

 ‘Medieval people’, Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm write, were ‘more keenly aware of simultaneous and contending temporalities than we are, and more skilled at entertaining a wider range of temporal possibilities’. Fifteen centuries of waiting for the end made time an existential problem: how to describe it, how to measure it, how to use it? 

Under British Columbia’s decriminalisation pilot, launched in January this year and due to run until 2026, anyone found with under 2.5 grams of opioids, cocaine, methamphetamines or MDMA won’t be prosecuted. But selling drugs is still a crime. 

We are to condemn or approve, and that makes sense, but is that all that is ethically required of us? In fact, I do condemn without qualification the violence committed by Hamas. This was a terrifying and revolting massacre. That was my primary reaction, and it endures. But there are other reactions as well.

Lauren Bacall was young, but she looked and sounded ancient in her wisdom – and she seemed to be teaching Humphrey Bogart how to relax. They fell in love, which was surely real, but it was the show business formula too. 

St Jude’sThe clinked latch woke meinside the tower. Past midnight,and outside, voices … the stretchof headlights across the rafters,a dozen rooks asleep in a braceof echoes. Hollow,...

Only when a dictatorship actually attacked the Church and distanced itself from Christianity did it alienate the papacy, but even the actions of Hitler’s Germany in this direction were insufficient to bestir Pius XII. The pope’s main concern was always to preserve the interests of the Church as an institution: its property, its assets, its prerogatives.

Most young people in Nigeria regard military rule as an aberration and find it hard to understand why it appears to be popular in other West African states. But in the quarter-century since we swapped khaki for agbada, the percentage of Nigerians living in extreme poverty has only grown, while half the population is under eighteen.

If le Carré saw that the secret services on both sides of the Cold War had a shared interest in keeping hostilities simmering, Mick Herron gets similar mileage from the idea of the enemy within: not in the sense of a mole working for a foreign power, or the way Margaret Thatcher thought of the miners, but of conflicts between ambitious actors struggling for supremacy at one government agency or another.

What Republicans did and what it really means A lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill have no use for Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and the seven others from the Republican caucus whose votes the other day sank Kevin McCarthy’s speakership. MAGA reactionaries lobbing grenades at Democrats is one thing. Lobbing them into the Republican caucus is quite another. As predicted, Republicans are trying to pin McCarthy’s ouster on Democrats. Reality check: It was Gaetz’s resolution. His alone. For reasons including his initiating an impeachment inquiry against President Biden and his reversal on condemning Donald Trump for precipitating a violent insurrection, Democrats saw no benefit in bailing out McCarthy. Now comes the aftermath. Giving McCarthy the boot is not a good look either for Republicans or for the U.S.A. as a whole. After a quick review of the week’s events and Donald Trump’s “burn-the-house-down” antics at his New York trial, Peter Baker (take with a grain of salt) writes that the foundations of our democracy appear shaky both to scholars and average Americans. Also, foreign adversaries are watching closely: Robert M.