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Biden needs to stand up to Netanyahu

Biden needs to stand up to Netanyahu

Jonathan Martin writes: Biden aides have clearly absorbed the blowback they got from even friendly Democratic lawmakers for making no mention of Palestinian suffering in official statements they issued marking 100 days since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Indeed, it’s hard to overstate how contemptuous even staunchly pro-Israel Democratic lawmakers have become of Netanyahu. One House Democrat told me of a dinner last month with about eight other colleagues, a cross-section of the caucus ideologically and generationally. “It…

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Police in Dearborn, Michigan, put on alert after WSJ opinion piece

Police in Dearborn, Michigan, put on alert after WSJ opinion piece

Reuters reports: President Joe Biden on Sunday denounced anti-Arab rhetoric in response to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece targeting Dearborn, Michigan, that the mayor called “bigoted” and “Islamophobic.” The WSJ published the piece on Friday headlined as “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital,”, suggesting the city’s residents, including religious leaders and politicians, supported Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and extremism. The column drew outrage from Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, as well as several U.S. lawmakers and rights advocates from the…

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What has happened to the rule of law in India?

What has happened to the rule of law in India?

Vaibhav Vats writes: On December 11, India’s supreme court upheld ending the constitutional privileges of the Indian-controlled province of Kashmir, a disputed region claimed by both India and Pakistan. The decision was a sobering example of the Indian judiciary’s creeping servility in the era of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Just as India’s vibrant, secular democracy is transforming into an authoritarian, ethnonationalist state, the supreme court, once vaunted for its fierce independence, is failing to stand up for the rule of…

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‘We are dying slowly:’ Palestinians are eating grass and drinking polluted water as famine looms across Gaza

‘We are dying slowly:’ Palestinians are eating grass and drinking polluted water as famine looms across Gaza

CNN reports: Hanadi Gamal Saed El Jamara, 38, says sleep is all that can distract her children from the aching hunger gnawing at their bellies. These days, the mother-of-seven finds herself begging for food on the mud-caked streets of Rafah, in southern Gaza. She tries to feed her kids at least once a day, she says, while tending to her husband, a cancer and diabetes patient. “They are weak now, they always have diarrhea, their faces are yellow,” El Jamara,…

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Over 800 officials in U.S. and Europe sign letter protesting Israel policies

Over 800 officials in U.S. and Europe sign letter protesting Israel policies

The New York Times reports: More than 800 officials in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union released a public letter of dissent on Friday against their governments’ support of Israel in its war in Gaza. The letter is the first instance of officials in allied nations across the Atlantic coming together to openly criticize their governments over the war, say current and former officials who are organizing or supporting the effort. The officials say that it…

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Domicide, the mass destruction of homes, should be identified as a crime against humanity

Domicide, the mass destruction of homes, should be identified as a crime against humanity

Balakrishnan Rajagopal writes: We all understand that killing can be a murder, a war crime, a crime against humanity or an act of genocide, depending on the gravity and intention of the act. The same should apply for the destruction of homes. In Gaza, we are witnessing destruction that is overwhelming in terms of its scale and impact, and far worse than what we saw in Dresden and Rotterdam during World War II, where about 25,000 homes were destroyed in…

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How Broadway helped Irgun’s Zionist terrorists in their war against British rule

How Broadway helped Irgun’s Zionist terrorists in their war against British rule

In a letter to the New York Times published on December 2, 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and 26 other leading American Jews wrote: Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the…

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The polling ‘disaster’ that’s starting to terrify Team Trump

The polling ‘disaster’ that’s starting to terrify Team Trump

Rolling Stone reports: In the middle of last year, several of Donald Trump’s closest advisers, including some of his 2024 campaign’s senior staff, started noticing an ominous trend in independent polling and in internal Republican survey data: A significant share of swing voters in key states — even some Republicans — say they would not want to vote for a freshly-convicted criminal. The trend spooked them enough that, in recent months, some of these officials and political allies have directly…

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‘I will be a first minister for all’: Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill marks historic moment for north of Ireland

‘I will be a first minister for all’: Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill marks historic moment for north of Ireland

The Observer reports: The chamber’s ornate ceiling remained blue, red and gold, and Portland stone still held up the Stormont edifice, but the beaming Sinn Féin faces declared this was a historic moment for Irish nationalism. Michelle O’Neill became Northern Ireland’s first nationalist first minister in a day of symbolism and pomp that restored devolved government and etched an epitaph on the tomb of what was once a unionist state. The union endured – Northern Ireland remains part of the…

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Synchronization is one of the fundamental phenomena of nature

Synchronization is one of the fundamental phenomena of nature

Any oscillator — a pendulum, a spring, a firefly, a human heart cell — wants to match up with its neighbors. Mathematicians recently showed that synchronization is inevitable in expander graphs, a type of network found in many areas of science. https://t.co/SM4cUWupJf pic.twitter.com/rINEz3lTuf — Quanta Magazine (@QuantaMagazine) February 3, 2024 Leila Sloman writes: Six years ago, Afonso Bandeira and Shuyang Ling were attempting to come up with a better way to discern clusters in enormous data sets when they stumbled…

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A 6-year-old in Gaza City was calling to be rescued. Did anyone find her?

A 6-year-old in Gaza City was calling to be rescued. Did anyone find her?

A 6-year-old in Gaza City was calling to be rescued. Did anyone find her? https://t.co/2FqcBPnT8I — Joe Catron (@jncatron) February 2, 2024 The Washington Post reports: The Hamada family was trying to get to safety. An order from the Israeli military had gone out earlier on Monday, ordering them to evacuate their neighborhood in Gaza City. Bashar, 44, and his wife Anam, 43, piled their children and their young niece, Hind, into the car. They would never reach their destination….

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U.S. retaliatory airstrikes on targets in Iraq and Syria will not be the last

U.S. retaliatory airstrikes on targets in Iraq and Syria will not be the last

Julian Borger writes: US retaliation, when it came, was broad and deep, and telegraphed five days in advance. The White House, the Pentagon and state department had spent the best part of a week talking about the response to Sunday’s drone attack on a US base in northern Jordan, which killed three Americans and wounded more than 30. They warned that retaliation against the suspects, primary among those the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia, would be “multi-tiered” and continue over many…

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A Palestinian posted a message on Oct. 7. Then came the death threats

A Palestinian posted a message on Oct. 7. Then came the death threats

The Washington Post reports: Dalal Abu Amneh insists she didn’t mean to take sides with her Facebook message on Oct. 7: “The only victor is God.” The Palestinian citizen of northern Israel — a neuroscientist and a folk singer renowned in the Arab world — was starting a silent retreat at a Christian monastery in Jerusalem when word of the Hamas massacre began to spread. She immediately checked in on Jewish friends in southern Israel, she said. At the request…

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Trump allies plan to gut climate research if he is reelected

Trump allies plan to gut climate research if he is reelected

Climatewire reports: Former President Donald Trump’s second term could begin with a clear direction on climate policy: Trash it. Dozens of conservative organizations have banded together to provide Trump a road map — known as Project 2025 — if he prevails in November. It outlines a series of steps that the former president could take to reverse the climate actions taken by the Biden administration. Trump has already said that boosting fossil fuels would be one of his top priorities….

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