Music: Arooj Aftab — ‘Mohabbat’
Secret Israeli propaganda campaign targets U.S. Congress and public using fake accounts with AI content
The New York Times reports: Israel organized and paid for an influence campaign last year targeting U.S. lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging, as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the war with Gaza, according to officials involved in the effort and documents related to the operation. The covert campaign was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a government body that connects Jews around the world with the State of Israel, four Israeli officials…
‘America kills a person and then attends their funeral’
Sky News has followed the treatment of a Palestinian woman who was evacuated from Gaza to the US after an Israeli tank shell hit her home. Ahed Bseiso’s leg was badly injured and had to be amputated by her uncle, who is a surgeon. Video of the amputation went viral on social media. Ahed’s treatment in the US was arranged by the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, which has extracted about 100 injured children from Gaza since the conflict began.
Former Meta engineer sues company saying he was fired over handling of Gaza content
Reuters reports: A former Meta engineer on Tuesday accused the company of bias in its handling of content related to the war in Gaza, claiming in a lawsuit that Meta fired him for trying to help fix bugs causing the suppression of Palestinian Instagram posts. Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian-American engineer who had been on Meta’s machine learning team since 2021, sued the social media giant in a California state court for discrimination, wrongful termination and other wrongdoing over his February…
What Donald Trump’s criminal trial reveals about a potential second Trump administration
By Andrea Bernstein This story was originally published by ProPublica. There’s a tape that both the defense and the prosecution played in summations in former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial. In it, you can hear the chaos of Trump’s office at Trump Tower in September of 2016: Trump seems to be having multiple conversations almost simultaneously. He talks to an unidentified person on the phone. He discusses polls with Michael Cohen, his executive vice-president at the time. Trump and Cohen…
Biden’s new immigration policy is an affront to survivors of the Holocaust
Judd Legum writes: The political impetus for Biden’s new policy is clear. Immigration is one of the top issues for voters, and is top of mind for many independents who will play a critical role in the upcoming presidential election. Moreover, polls consistently show voters prefer Trump’s hardline approach toward immigration policy. Unilaterally imposing severe restrictions on asylum seekers appears to be an effort to diffuse the issue politically. But the political realities do not obviate the human and moral…
Christian supremacists in the New Apostolic Reformation pose ‘greatest threat to American democracy you’ve never heard of’
HuffPost reports: A growing Christian supremacist movement that labels its perceived enemies as “demonic” and enjoys close ties to major Republican figures is “the greatest threat to American democracy you’ve never heard of,” according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC, a civil rights organization that monitors extremist groups, released its “Year In Hate And Extremism 2023” report on Tuesday. A significant portion of the report, which tracked burgeoning anti-democratic and neo-fascist movements and actors…
The most downloaded U.S. news app has Chinese roots and ‘writes fiction’ using AI
Reuters reports: Last Christmas Eve, NewsBreak, opens new tab, a free app with roots in China that is the most downloaded news app in the United States, published an alarming piece about a small town shooting. It was headlined “Christmas Day Tragedy Strikes Bridgeton, New Jersey Amid Rising Gun Violence in Small Towns.” The problem was, no such shooting took place. The Bridgeton, New Jersey police department posted a statement on Facebook on December 27 dismissing the article – produced…
Music: Arooj Aftab — ‘Raat Ki Rani’
Biden’s cynical border gambit
The ACLU: The White House released today a fact sheet announcing details on an impending executive action from the Biden administration that will severely restrict people’s legal right to seek asylum. Among the measures announced, the administration will effectively shut off asylum for the overwhelming majority of people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border once the average number of border encounters reaches 2,500 between ports of entry, reopening only once the daily number declines to 1,500, according to several reports. “We…
Columbia Law Review editors refused to censor an article on the Nakba. Board of directors then took down the site
The Intercept reports: Last November, the Harvard Law Review made the unprecedented decision to kill a fully edited essay prior to publication. The author, human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah, was to be the first Palestinian legal scholar published in the prestigious journal. As The Intercept reported at the time, Eghbariah’s essay — an argument for establishing “Nakba,” the expulsion, dispossession, and oppression of Palestinians, as a formal legal concept that widens its scope — faced extraordinary editorial scrutiny and eventual…
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse: Alito’s MAGA battle flags
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Courts Subcommittee, delivers the 32nd in a series of speeches titled “The Scheme,” exposing the machinations by right-wing donor interests to capture the Supreme Court and achieve through the Court what they cannot through the elected branches of government. Whitehouse discusses the ethics violations related to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s MAGA battle flags that flew at two of his homes, and Chief Justice Roberts’s refusal to take action as…
The ‘hierarchy of racism’ in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party
Shaista Aziz writes: I spent six years serving as a councillor in my home city of Oxford, where I was born and raised. I was a council cabinet member for close to three years before I resigned from the Labour party, over what I saw as a horrifying endorsement by Keir Starmer of the collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza, in a now infamous LBC interview. I and another British Muslim, the Oxonian councillor Dr Amar Latif, were the first…
Narendra Modi loses aura of invincibility as predicted landslide fails to materialise for India’s strongman
Hannah Ellis-Petersen writes: India’s elections may return Narendra Modi to power for a third term but Tuesday’s results did not have the flavour of victory for the strongman prime minister. Indeed, as the early counts of the votes began to roll in, it was clear this was going to be one of the most humbling moments for Modi and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) in over a decade. The BJP went into this election, which began way back in April,…
Human culture is changing too fast for evolution to catch up – here’s how it may affect you
frank60/Shutterstock By Jose Yong, Northumbria University, Newcastle Research is showing that many of our contemporary problems, such as the rising prevalence of mental health issues, are emerging from rapid technological advancement and modernisation. A theory that can help explain why we respond poorly to modern conditions, despite the choices, safety and other benefits they bring, is evolutionary mismatch. Mismatch happens when an evolved adaptation, either physical or psychological, becomes misaligned with the environment. Take moths and some species of nocturnal…
This is what a Neanderthal conversation would have sounded like
Steven Mithen writes: We can only truly understand other people by knowing something about their language. Without that, we remain largely excluded from their lives – unable to fully grasp their concepts, emotions or how they perceive the world. This applies to people of the past as well as those of the present. The languages of some prehistoric humans (such as Bronze Age farmers) can be reconstructed, to a limited extent, by comparing languages that are spoken today. But what…