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The history behind Jack Smith’s Trump-Supreme Court gambit

The history behind Jack Smith’s Trump-Supreme Court gambit

Aaron Blake writes: The question of Donald Trump’s criminal jeopardy could be headed to the Supreme Court sooner rather than later. That’s after special counsel Jack Smith on Monday requested that the court conduct an expedited review of Trump’s claims to “absolute” immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct in office. The court quickly signaled it will consider the petition and asked Trump’s team to respond by next week. One way to read that request is that Smith felt this issue…

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A Texas case shows that abortion ban exemptions are a sham

A Texas case shows that abortion ban exemptions are a sham

Michelle Goldberg writes: Soon after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, horror stories started emerging of women denied medically urgent abortions for pregnancies gone dangerously awry. In response, the anti-abortion movement developed a sort of conspiracy theory to rationalize away the results of their policies. Abortion rights activists, they argued, were deliberately misconstruing abortion laws, leading doctors to refuse to treat women who obviously qualified for exceptions. “Abortion advocates are spreading the dangerous lie that lifesaving care…

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Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation

Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation

TechXplore reports: Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are often depicted as sentient agents poised to overshadow the human mind. But AI lacks the crucial human ability of innovation, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have found. While children and adults alike can solve problems by finding novel uses for everyday objects, AI systems often lack the ability to view tools in a new way, according to findings published in Perspectives on Psychological Science. AI language models like ChatGPT are passively…

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Biden administration doesn’t have ‘the guts and the moral courage’ to stand up to the Israeli government

Biden administration doesn’t have ‘the guts and the moral courage’ to stand up to the Israeli government

U.S. policymakers "don't have the guts and the moral courage" to stand up to the Israeli govt, says top Middle East watcher @FawazGerges. “I really have no trust in American foreign policy anymore,” he tells me. pic.twitter.com/KjvqMeglLl — Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) December 9, 2023 Fawaz Gerges is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and holder of the Emirates Professorship in Contemporary Middle East Studies.

Peter Beinart & Omer Bartov on UPenn president resignation, Gaza & the weaponization of antisemitism

Peter Beinart & Omer Bartov on UPenn president resignation, Gaza & the weaponization of antisemitism

  University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill voluntarily resigned her position Saturday after a House Education Committee hearing last Tuesday on how colleges have handled antisemitism. Magill has faced demands to resign since September, when she refused to bow to pressure to cancel the Palestine Writes Literature Festival on campus. More universities face accusations that they have failed to protect Jewish students since the October 7 Hamas incursion into southern Israel amid a broader effort to restrict pro-Palestinian speech on…

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How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today

How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today

Masha Gessen writes: There are now dozens of antisemitism commissioners throughout Germany. They have no single job description or legal framework for their work, but much of it appears to consist of publicly shaming those they see as antisemitic, often for “de-singularizing the Holocaust” or for criticizing Israel. Hardly any of these commissioners are Jewish. Indeed, the proportion of Jews among their targets is certainly higher. These have included the German-Israeli sociologist Moshe Zuckermann, who was targeted for supporting the…

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Jack Smith goes straight to Supreme Court for ruling on Trump’s claimed immunity

Jack Smith goes straight to Supreme Court for ruling on Trump’s claimed immunity

  The Daily Beast reports: Special prosecutor Jack Smith filed a bombshell motion Monday asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on the question of whether Donald Trump has absolute presidential immunity for crimes he’s accused of carrying out while in the White House. If accepted, it will be the first time the high court will weigh in on a criminal case involving the former president—specifically, whether his attempts to overturn the 2020 election were protected by presidential immunity, something…

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Oil nations’ commitment to destroying planet threatens climate summit

Oil nations’ commitment to destroying planet threatens climate summit

Rolling Stone reports: Climate activists say the 2023 UN Climate Conference is on “the verge of complete failure” after oil-producing nations secured the removal of language calling for a phase-out of fossil fuels from the summit’s draft agreement. COP28, held in Dubai and headed by Sultan al-Jaber — the CEO of the United Arab Emirates state-run energy company ADNOC — has already been criticized for overemphasizing the desires of fossil fuel economies and energy corporations rather than the need to…

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This disagreement between two climate scientists will decide our future

This disagreement between two climate scientists will decide our future

Vladi333/Shutterstock By Robert Chris, The Open University and Hugh Hunt, University of Cambridge Getting to net zero emissions by mid-century is conventionally understood as humanity’s best hope for keeping Earth’s surface temperature (already 1.2°C above its pre-industrial level) from increasing well beyond 1.5°C – potentially reaching a point at which it could cause widespread societal breakdown. At least one prominent climate scientist, however, disagrees. James Hansen of Columbia University in the US published a paper with colleagues in November which…

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The Texas abortion case blows up the abortion ban rationale

The Texas abortion case blows up the abortion ban rationale

Jennifer Rubin writes: Abortion rights activists, medical professionals and ordinary women warned the Supreme Court in advance of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision: Legislatures cannot dictate medical decisions without creating horrendous injustices and medical travesties. A recent case from Texas, which has a ban on abortions after six weeks, leaves no doubt about the merits of that argument. The Texas case undermines the rationale for abortion bans and adds to Republicans’ political liability on an issue uppermost…

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Will America abandon Ukraine?

Will America abandon Ukraine?

George Packer writes: In the summer of 1940, when Great Britain was fighting Nazi Germany alone, Winston Churchill asked to borrow a few dozen aging American destroyers to defend the English coast from imminent invasion. Churchill wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Mr. President, with great respect, I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now.” Today Ukraine is fighting Russia alone. American aid—never timely or sufficient, but enough to help…

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Republicans to meet allies of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán on ending Ukraine aid

Republicans to meet allies of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán on ending Ukraine aid

The Guardian reports: Allies of Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán will hold a closed-door meeting with Republicans in Washington to push for an end to US military support for Ukraine, the Guardian has learned. Members of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and staff from the Hungarian embassy in Washington will on Monday begin a two-day event hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank. The first day includes panel speeches about the Ukraine war as well as topics such…

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Half of Gaza’s population is starving, warns UN

Half of Gaza’s population is starving, warns UN

The Independent reports: Half of Gaza’s population is now believed to be “starving” as Israel’s attack on the besieged strip continues to escalate, a senior UN official warned. Calling for an immediate “humanitarian ceasefire”, Carl Skau, deputy executive director of the UN World Food Programme, took to X saying: “There’s not enough food. People are starving. “WFP has reached over one million people, but the situation is untenable. We need to get our supplies in [and we need] a humanitarian…

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IFJ: Almost 100 journalists killed, mostly in Gaza, and 400 imprisoned in 2023

IFJ: Almost 100 journalists killed, mostly in Gaza, and 400 imprisoned in 2023

The Guardian reports: A leading organisation representing journalists worldwide has expressed deep concern at the number of media professionals killed around the globe doing their jobs in 2023, with more journalists killed during Israel’s war with Hamas than in any other conflict in more than 30 years. In its annual count of media worker deaths, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said 94 journalists had been killed so far this year and almost 400 others had been imprisoned. The figure…

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