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Some random cuteness to cap a good week: Some other good news for DC: Since China first sent giant pandas to the National Zoo following the normalizing of ties with the U.S. in 1972, the iconic bears have been a sign of friendship between the two nations. But the number of giant pandas at U.S. zoos has dwindled as tensions between Washington and Beijing rose in recent years. D.C.’s last three pandas — Tian Tian, Mei Xiang, and their cub, Xiao Qi Ji — returned to China in November per the terms of the zoo’s loan agreement with the Chinese government. A return was uncertain. Now, the many new bears China has pledged to send to the U.S. in recent months are a promising sign for “panda diplomacy.” Diplomatic goodwill was on full display during the National Zoo announcement, where Chinese ambassador Xie Feng dubbed the duo “our new envoys of friendship.” 🼠Meet the pandas: Bao Li is a 2-year-old male and the son of Bao Bao, the female panda born at the zoo in 2013, and the grandson of Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, the two pandas who left the zoo last year.
A senior USAID adviser said he was pressured to resign days after the agency censored his presentation.
The post He Made a PowerPoint on Mothers Starving in Gaza. Then He Lost His Government Job. appeared first on The Intercept.
One of DC’s most important conveyors of conventional wisdom, John Harris of Politico, says something unexpected: Yes, it’s obviously true that a 34-count felony conviction would be enough to demolish the career of any normal politician. Yes, it’s obviously true that former president Donald Trump is not a normal politician. His most devoted partisans will only become more so following Thursday’s guilty verdict. Just as they did after the Access Hollywood tape, the impeachments, the Jan. 6 riot and other examples too abundant to recount or, for many people, even to recall. But these two obvious truths tend to obscure another one. Trump simply cannot beat President Joe Biden relying solely on the votes of people who think his legal travails are a politically motivated scam, and who cheer Trump not in spite of his transgressions but because of them. Or, more specifically, because they thrill to the outrage and indignation Trump inspires among his adversaries. There are plenty of such people — enough to power this generation’s most important political movement — but still not enough to win the election.
An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar … and mull over survival.
The post The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt? appeared first on Nautilus.
An accident of lighting uncovers Jewish, European, and Islamic origins.
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For those of you who don’t want to sit through 45 minutes of this lunatic rambling, here are some morning-after highlights. Many people testify in their own defense. A normal man running for president at the same time he is being tried for 34 felonies would almost certainly want to do it in order to prove his innocence. No, that’s not required in a court of law but you’d think someone in his situation would have felt it necessary to do that if nothing else to appear fearless and strong. But he knows his people and they apparently prefer a sniveling whiner.
Surprisingly? The right wingers are having themselves a good old-fashioned cry today. Or, more accurately, a full-blown tantrum. It’s just astonishing. This is my favorite take on that by Philip Bump. He asks Republicans a question I wish everyone would ask: “I’m running because far too often, we have two standards of justice — one for the rich and powerful and connected, and another for everyone else,” Bragg said in a video announcing his bid. “We must follow the facts wherever they lead, regardless of how influential the person under investigation is.” In the years since, the idea that there are two standards of justice has been embraced by Bragg’s most prominent target: former president Trump. In Trump’s formulation, the issue isn’t that people in positions of influence are getting away with crimes. Instead, it’s that he — and theoretical others on the right — are being unfairly targeted by an out-of-control criminal justice system. It’s an argument that holds enormous sway with Trump’s base of support and the broader right-wing media bubble that surrounds it.
Israeli forces’ slaughters of Gazans, journalists, doctors, humanitarian aid workers are described by military spokespersons and by Prime minister Netanyahu as tragic mistakes. In retrospect, killings appear an intention conducted by an alleged accident, in which well rehearsed explanations are part of a familiar two faced process of speaking with double tongues. There are evil Continue reading »
Pro-Israel forces in Washington are trying to derail Karim Khan’s request for Israeli and Hamas arrest warrants. U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham was bursting with contempt for the International Criminal Court (ICC) when he grilled U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a May 21 congressional hearing. Wagging his finger, he warned that, if the ICC gets Continue reading »
The stunning conviction in New York of Donald Trump on 34 felony counts is more likely to encourage his legion of supporters than otherwise. Throughout the course of his trial, he well prepared them to accommodate the gift of such an outcome in further propelling the outrageousness of his gift for mendacious hoopla to new Continue reading »
The question has been asked many times, but it has rarely led to constructive public debates: is Australia a racist country? Depending on how we interpret the recent comments by ABC veteran journalist Laura Tingle, she seems to have expressed a view that is hardly controversial but widely shared in Australia. Not only have various Continue reading »
Is Australia’s new industrial policy a way forward to a competitive, innovative, and sustainable future in which the benefits of new technologies such as renewable energy and artificial intelligence are widely shared throughout society? Or a reversion to past failed attempts to protect local industry, pick winners at taxpayers’ expense, lag in innovation and productivity Continue reading »
ABC TV’s Landline programme has declared that “Australia’s dairy industry is licking its lips at the prospect of increased demand from Indonesia.” The cow cockies’ cliched hopes are based on the applauded pledge by Indonesia’s incoming president and former general Prabowo Subianto to give 83 million school kids free feeds and milk. The salivators are Continue reading »
According to the Australian Government’s Future Gas Strategy, gas is “critical” to the nation’s economy. In view of this, many Australians might be surprised to learn that a large amount of the country’s gas reserves are essentially being given away for free. Australia has ten facilities that export gas as liquified natural gas (LNG). Six Continue reading »
‘My dad is gone… where will I go?’ Nine-year-old Omar Hamad just lived through the worst day of his life, when his father was burned alive in Israel’s attack on a tent camp in Rafah. Dozens of Palestinians in Gaza were killed that day, and dozens more lost loved ones. Watch Omar speak to Al Continue reading »
This is the opening move in a protectionist regime the U.S. president will extend significantly to prove his bona fides as a Sinophobe. I love the photograph The New York Times ran atop Jim Tankersley’s May 18 story analysing the inadvisable raft of tariffs on Chinese imports President Biden authorised four days earlier. There is the old coot signing Continue reading »
The former US President was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to adult actress Stormy Daniels
Sad! Julia Davis at the Daily Beast follows the Russian media. They’re even more distraught than the Republicans: Russian state-controlled media apparatus closely followed legal troubles of the former U.S. President Donald J. Trump, spicing up most of their coverage with pro-Trump clips from Fox News and Tucker Carlson. Russian propagandists were openly hoping for a hung jury and were visibly disappointed when Trump became a convicted felon on all 34 charges he was facing. On Friday morning, Dmitry Kulikov, host of Solovyov Live, the self-described “most patriotic channel” in Russia, said on-air, “They wronged our Donald Trump!” Malek Dudakov, a political scientist who specializes in America, said that the hope for a miracle—meaning a hung jury—was extinguished. He said, with Russia’s affectionate middle name usage, “The miracle did not happen. Our Donald Fredovych was found guilty on all 34 counts.” For that, Dudakov blamed the judge and the jury and baselessly claimed that all of them were prejudiced against Trump.
“It’s hard to see this wildly disproportionate response as anything other than an attempt to chill speech on this issue.”
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