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Countries fueling Israel’s Gaza war may be complicit in war crimes, experts warn

Countries fueling Israel’s Gaza war may be complicit in war crimes, experts warn

The Guardian reports: Israeli tanks, jets and bulldozers bombarding Gaza and razing homes in the occupied West Bank are being fueled by a growing number of countries signed up to the genocide and Geneva conventions, new research suggests, which legal experts warn could make them complicit in serious crimes against the Palestinian people. Four tankers of American jet fuel primarily used for military aircraft have been shipped to Israel since the start of its aerial bombardment of Gaza in October….

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With six words, Michelle Obama rewires America’s conversation on race

With six words, Michelle Obama rewires America’s conversation on race

Philip Bump writes: In her speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, Michelle Obama coined one of the defining phrases of the political era: “When they go low, we go high.” Going high did not work. Donald Trump won that election. While many of his supporters expressed discomfort with his go-low approach to politics, far more embraced it. Trump, despite his pedigree as a New York billionaire, would embarrass and attack and disparage the perceived elites, and many Americans…

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How Kamala intends to bring prices down

How Kamala intends to bring prices down

Robert Reich writes: [T]he administration should be using the threat of antitrust enforcement to force corporations in concentrated industries to lower their prices. Biden’s trust-busters — Lina Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter at the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department — have been doing excellent work but they need to do more targeting and threatening. This is the direction Kamala Harris wants to go. Since the 1980s, after the federal government all but abandoned antitrust, two-thirds of all…

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U.S. investigating Americans who worked with Russian state television

U.S. investigating Americans who worked with Russian state television

The New York Times reports: The Department of Justice has begun a broad criminal investigation into Americans who have worked with Russia’s state television networks, signaling an aggressive effort to combat the Kremlin’s influence operations leading up to the presidential election in November, according to American officials briefed on the inquiry. This month, F.B.I. agents searched the homes of two prominent figures with connections to Russian state media: Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector and critic of American…

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Quadrillions of ants have created a strange and turbulent global society that shadows our own

Quadrillions of ants have created a strange and turbulent global society that shadows our own

John Whitfield writes: It is a familiar story: a small group of animals living in a wooded grassland begin, against all odds, to populate Earth. At first, they occupy a specific ecological place in the landscape, kept in check by other species. Then something changes. The animals find a way to travel to new places. They learn to cope with unpredictability. They adapt to new kinds of food and shelter. They are clever. And they are aggressive. In the new…

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First ever DNC panel on Palestinian rights: We need to ‘restore the soul of the Democratic Party’

First ever DNC panel on Palestinian rights: We need to ‘restore the soul of the Democratic Party’

  This year, the Democratic National Convention held its first-ever panel on Palestinian human rights. The panel came after persistent grassroots organizing against U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. We play excerpts, including from the Arab American Institute’s James Zogby, a former executive member of the Democratic National Committee; Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care surgeon who recently worked in Gaza; and Layla Elabed, co-chair of the Uncommitted National Movement. Later that day, during President Biden’s convention speech,…

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Former Israeli spy chief: If I was a Palestinian, I would fight against Israel’s occupation

Former Israeli spy chief: If I was a Palestinian, I would fight against Israel’s occupation

  Mehdi Hasan interviews Ami Ayalon, the former head of Israel’s Security Service, Shin Bet, and the ex-commander of the Israeli Navy, in the latest episode of ‘Mehdi Unfiltered.’ Ayalon discusses why he believes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and far right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir pose a threat to Israeli democracy, calls for an end to the occupation, and explains why he would resist Israel if he were Palestinian. As reports of Israeli torture and abuse against detained Palestinians continue…

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Abortion takes center stage

Abortion takes center stage

Helen Lewis writes: The most emotional moment of last night’s Democratic National Convention was supposed to be Joe Biden’s farewell, after his party’s power brokers made clear he could not run again. And true, his address showed a graciousness in defeat that Donald Trump could never hope to understand. But the most moving speech of the evening was only a few minutes long, and it was given by a young woman from Kentucky. Her name was Hadley Duvall, and she…

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Ex-Haley voters rally behind Harris: ‘I picked the side that had the least issues’

Ex-Haley voters rally behind Harris: ‘I picked the side that had the least issues’

The Guardian reports: After the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley dropped out of the Republican primary earlier this year, some conservatives across the US continued to vote for her in subsequent primaries, casting ballots that indicated dissent within a party that has otherwise fully embraced Donald Trump. When Haley finally announced that she would be supporting the ex-president in the upcoming election, she said that it was on him to mobilize her loyalists. “Trump would be smart to reach…

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Republicans scrambled to get Cornel West on the Arizona ballot. The left-wing academic is OK with it

Republicans scrambled to get Cornel West on the Arizona ballot. The left-wing academic is OK with it

The Associated Press reports: A group of lawyers with deep ties to the Republican Party scrambled over the weekend to rescue an effort to get independent presidential candidate Cornel West on the Arizona ballot, offering one of the clearest examples yet of the GOP’s extensive involvement in furthering the left-wing academic’s long-shot bid. As a deadline loomed to submit the needed paperwork, two well-known Republican lawyers in the state and a GOP attorney working to get West on the ballot…

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Infiltrating the far right

Infiltrating the far right

Donald Trump is promising to pardon people convicted of crimes related to the attack on the Capitol. “What the far right is hearing is ‘Violence against our political opponents is not something that should be criminalized,’ ” a former F.B.I. agent said.https://t.co/xVmdBUnWnR pic.twitter.com/La2cDDGIGP — The New Yorker (@NewYorker) August 20, 2024 David D. Kirkpatrick writes: Colton Brown, who lived with his father and stepmother in a single-story house outside Seattle, earned about fifty thousand dollars a year as an assistant…

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Remembering TV icon Phil Donahue: He brought antiwar voices to the airwaves until MSNBC fired him

Remembering TV icon Phil Donahue: He brought antiwar voices to the airwaves until MSNBC fired him

  The acclaimed television host Phil Donahue died Sunday at the age of 88. Donahue’s commitment to bringing major social and political issues to the American public spanned decades, a mission that was perhaps best encapsulated by his platforming of antiwar perspectives during the leadup to the Iraq War. He was fired in 2003 from his eponymous MSNBC talk show for doing so. In 2013, Democracy Now! spoke to Donahue about his firing. We play an excerpt from that interview…

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Harris has momentum as the convention starts but some progressives remain skeptical

Harris has momentum as the convention starts but some progressives remain skeptical

Samer Badawi writes: In June 2020, news photographer Kerem Gencer was an on-again, off-again student at Ohio State University in Columbus, the state capital. During the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that summer, Gencer remembers police officers in riot gear lining the streets and cutting a menacing presence in public spaces, especially around the Statehouse downtown. Some protesters were roughed up, he said. Some were arrested. Many politicians, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle, were sympathetic to the…

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The cost of trying to make Palestinian lives matter in the newsroom

The cost of trying to make Palestinian lives matter in the newsroom

Hoda Sherif writes: In the heart of Gaza’s ruins, local Palestinian journalists are enduring the unimaginable toll of a merciless war machine, starvation, and unwarranted daily brutality. Meanwhile, Muslim journalists and others reporting on the war from the West are faced with a different kind of impediment: the battle against blood-washing discourse. For the past 10 months, journalists across the world have voiced concerns to their employers over imbalanced, misleading, and at times, fictitious coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza….

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