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Here are some answers about the new social media network Bluesky that you don’t need an invite to see.

The post Is Bluesky Billionaire-Proof? appeared first on The Intercept.

The new reporting from the Sydney Morning Herald comes as Australia is pressing the U.S. to end its attempt to prosecute Assange.

The post FBI Reopens Case Around Julian Assange, Despite Australian Pressure to End Prosecution appeared first on The Intercept.

by Gary Gardner

Global food production today is cornucopian: More food, of greater diversity, is available to more people in more places than at any time in human history. At the same time, this food abundance has a dark underbelly.  Some 828 million people—nearly ten percent of the human family—are chronically hungry, and two billion people lack critical micronutrients such as Vitamin A and iron. This juxtaposition of increasing abundance and chronic scarcity might suggest that ending hunger simply requires extending 20th century agricultural success to the entire human family.

The post Food: Abundant for How Long? appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Quinn Slobodian’s new book, Crack-Up Capitalism is an original and striking analysis of a weird apparent disjuncture. Libertarians and classical liberals famously claim to be opposed to state power. So why do some of them resort to it so readily? In his previous book, The Globalists, Quinn argued that globalization was poorly understood. It wasn’t […]

"If You Indict Putin, Make Sure Joe Biden Is With Him" – Alfred de Zayas on Ukraine and International Law

The post Ukraine, Human Rights, and International Law, with Alfred de Zayas appeared first on MintPress News.

The UK has taken no action against the Russian oligarch and Boris Johnson associate, despite Ukraine and Canada targeting him for his alleged ties to Putin’s regime, reports Adam Bienkov

Money, candidates, and “a lot of blocking and tackling” Contacts in Florida have said for some time that the Florida Democratic Party was all but dead. And dead broke. Any leadership was coming out of Hillsborough County (Tampa), still active and well-organized under Ione Townsend. The election in February to “the worst job in state politics” of former state agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried as state chair may signal revival. Fried promptly got herself arrested along with Lauren Book, Florida’s senate minority leader, in a protest against Florida’s six-week abortion ban. So, signs of life. And a little fight. Over at The Bulwark today, consultant Steve Shale recounts, in his view, the decade of mistakes that led to Ron DeSantis. (I have not had time to check with Florida insiders for their take, so read on with that caveat.) An outside donor group in 2009 decided it would “supplement to the work of the state party” and construct a “long-term progressive infrastructure” built on the Obama organizing model.

Children in Tudor England did much the same things that children do now. They jumped, they fell, they cried. They played with dolls and flicked cherrystones at one another. John Dee, the Elizabethan astronomer and diarist, describes his son Arthur, aged about three, playing with a friend’s daughter, Mary Herbert, making ‘as it were a show of childish marriage, of calling each other husband and wife’. 

You cannot help being struck by the awesome stability of all the Bank of England’s arrangements: the paper for banknotes was manufactured at Portals’ mills in Hampshire from 1724 until the switch to polymer notes less than a decade ago. All the bills and dividends were painstakingly made out by hand in pretty much the same fashion until the advent of computers.

Because the USSR had no military presence in Africa, it relied on the work of intelligence services – the GRU and the KGB – and institutions such as the International Department to conduct a Cold War on the cheap. (The CIA-funded American Society of African Culture, by contrast, was known as ‘Uncle Moneybags’.)

The idea that an ordinary person can be elevated by riches, transformed by holidays and furs, is more plausible to many than transformation through work or taxation. In Lotto Britain, the Good Life is the life they have on Love Island, an endless parade of self-tanning and nail extensions, gym sessions and Prosecco.

Peatlands are wetlands, the argument goes, and wetlands disturb us; they’re the abject backwaters of modernity – marginal and malarial, disavowed and despoiled. We’ve ruined them and now they’ll ruin us right back.

Could pottery be art? Should a teapot pour? Lucie Rie had no truck with this. When asked about theoretical or critical questions she would answer with crisp finality: ‘I make pots. It is my profession.’

Most of the labourers have travelled from elsewhere, leaving behind their families. This is their second or third career. ‘I’m still a fisherman,’ a mechanic foreman from Newfoundland tells Katie, Kate Beaton’s avatar. ‘I’m just here.’

This is not a novel full of euphemism or implication. K Patrick has said they set out to write a ‘horny’ novel and this is what we have here – one composed of short, fragmentary (and at times disorienting) sentences.

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The story of Macmillan’s marketing and its advertising of a ‘GOLDEN TREASURY SERIES’ of volumes is not just a piece of publishing history, but part of the shift from sacred to secular culture in 19th-century Britain, aligning with Matthew Arnold’s sense that poetry was coming to replace religion.

A lot has been said about the shoddy construction practices that undoubtedly contributed to the high number of casualties, but the main issue for the families of the earthquake victims was the state’s chaotic initial response. In the aftermath of an earthquake, as with any natural disaster, the first 24 hours are crucial to saving those who are still alive. But in Antakya and elsewhere the state was nowhere to be seen.

California’s first gold rush was in 1848; its second was Hollywood. Between 1910 and 1925, film industry grosses went from $10 million to $800 million. There were jobs and spondulix galore. Hollywood was where people went to get lucky.

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 12 (Friday 02 June 2023)

Calvino’s essays are mercurial, and the pleasure of reading them derives from our intimacy with a mind that seems to be operating at one remove from the text, entirely in command of the unruly, antithetical ideas that animate it. Reality presented itself to him ‘as multiple, prickly, and as densely superimposed layers’.

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 12 (Friday 02 June 2023)

InheritanceI am of Tullamore, the sonOf a gombeen man, so I knowThe use of a good solicitor,The value of nothing said,The price of love lostOr gained. To which we addThe cost of modern...

‘Thirty years had passed since I last interviewed Sharon Henderson. In 1992 I was sent to her flat on the Wear Garth estate in Sunderland after her seven-year-old daughter, Nikki, was murdered. The following year I covered the trial of George Heron, whose confessions were ruled inadmissible on the grounds that the police interviews had been ‘oppressive’. And then, one day last year, I stumbled on this paragraph: ‘David Boyd, 54, of Chesterton Court, Stockton, Teesside, has been charged with the murder of Nikki Allan.’ And I knew I was going back to Wearside.