The New York Times reports: Russia’s crackdowns on free speech used to garner global headlines. Now they are noticed less and less. One reason is the sheer scale: On each of the 530 days of the war for which we have near-complete data, an average of 13 cases were heard in court involving people opposing the war — and that’s just under the discreditation law. The indignities of the crackdown, and the long arm of the Russia law, is being…
Politico reports: Groups aligned with the conservative legal movement and its financial architect, Leonard Leo, are working to promote a publicly funded Christian school in Oklahoma, hoping to create a test case to change the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. At issue is the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma’s push to create the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would be the nation’s first religious school entirely funded by taxpayers. The…
The Washington Post reports: The commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration had an urgent message last winter for his colleagues, brandishing data that life expectancy in the United States had fallen again — the biggest two-year decline in a century. Robert Califf’s warning, summarized by three people with knowledge of the conversations, boiled down to this: Americans’ life expectancy is going the wrong way. We’re the top health officials in the country. If we don’t fix this, who will?…
Hafiz Rashid writes: As 2023 comes to a close, grim numbers in Gaza are piling up, where Israel’s bombardment and invasion have thus far killed more than 20,000 people, including 8,200 children and 6,200 women. Those dire statistics lay alongside the grievous outcome of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, in which 1,139 people were killed—including 36 children—and nearly 250 Israelis were taken hostage by Hamas, again, including about 30 children. But beyond the dismal casualty statistics, we’re ending…
Haaretz reports: The Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality on Thursday summoned Yael Ayalon, the principal of the city’s Ironi Yud Daled High School, to a hearing before suspension, after she posted a Haaretz article criticizing the lack of Israeli media coverage of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza on her Facebook page about a week ago. Following Ayalon’s Facebook post, a group of students opened a protest strike on Wednesday which escalated into a physical altercation, during which the head of the school’s…
CNN reports: Two days before the January 6 insurrection, the Trump campaign’s plan to use fake electors to block President-elect Joe Biden from taking office faced a potentially crippling hiccup: The fake elector certificates from two critical battleground states were stuck in the mail. So, Trump campaign operatives scrambled to fly copies of the phony certificates from Michigan and Wisconsin to the nation’s capital, relying on a haphazard chain of couriers, as well as help from two Republicans in Congress,…
The New York Times reports: One of the Republicans in Michigan who acted as a fake elector for Donald J. Trump expressed deep regret about his participation, according to a recording of his interview with the state attorney general’s office that was obtained by The New York Times. The elector, James Renner, is thus far the only Trump elector who has reached an agreement with the office of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, which brought criminal charges in July against…
USA Today reports: The young man is seen running with the crowd of Trump supporters toward the U.S. Capitol early in the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021. He wears a thigh-length dark blue coat, his face almost fully covered with a mask. The bill of an off-white baseball cap pokes out of the hood of his gray sweatshirt. At 2:35 p.m. and 20 seconds, a security camera inside the Capitol captures the man as he steps across the threshold of…
PsyPost reports: Researchers have discovered a significant link between musical synchronization and social connectedness. Analyzing the behavior of university students engaged in impromptu music-making, the study found that individuals who synchronized their musical rhythms felt a stronger sense of connection with their peers, highlighting music’s unique role in fostering social cohesion. The findings have been published in Psychology of Music. Previous studies have indicated that music can establish and maintain social bonds, but the mechanics of how this happens were…
Henkjan Honing writes: In 2009, my research group found that newborns possess the ability to discern a regular pulse— the beat—in music. It’s a skill that might seem trivial to most of us but that’s fundamental to the creation and appreciation of music. The discovery sparked a profound curiosity in me, leading to an exploration of the biological underpinnings of our innate capacity for music, commonly referred to as “musicality.” In a nutshell, the experiment involved playing drum rhythms, occasionally…
The Guardian reports: The Israeli military expanded its ground offensive in the Gaza Strip to the densely populated urban refugee camps in the central part of the territory as the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was reported to have refused requests from security officials to make plans for control of Gaza after the war with Hamas ends. Over the last few days, three requests to the prime minister’s office were conveyed on behalf of the directors of the Mossad, the Shin…
James Bamford writes: It was a scene reminiscent of the Red Scare days, of grainy black-and-white television images of political witch hunts by the old House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). But rather than hunting for disloyal communist sympathizers, committee members at early December’s hearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce were instead hunting for university presidents disloyal to Israel. “Are you now, or have you ever been, an anti-Zionist?” quipped New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg. “You…
CNN reports: The Israeli government and Intel confirmed plans to build a $25 billion chipmaking factory in the south of the country, an investment Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described as the biggest in Israel’s history. The American tech giant already employs 11,700 people in Israel and has invested more than $50 billion in the country over the last 50 years. Intel now wants to expand its existing chipmaking factory at Kiryat Gat — about 16 miles northeast of Gaza…
Sky News reports: Subhi Shaledeh and his extended family had around 500 acres of prime grazing land in the Occupied West Bank, in the village of Janoub. They owned olive trees and hundreds of sheep. The land had been in the family for decades. But overnight they lost their livelihood and their and land. Subhi says on 9 October, two days after the 7 October attack by Hamas, settlers from an Israeli outpost, which is classed as illegal under both…