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To beat Trump, Nikki Haley is trying to speak to all sides of a fractured GOP

To beat Trump, Nikki Haley is trying to speak to all sides of a fractured GOP

The New York Times reports: To beat former President Donald J. Trump in the coming months, Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations, must stitch together a coalition of Republicans: Mr. Trump’s most faithful supporters, voters who like his policies but who have grown weary of him personally, and the smaller but still vocal contingent who abhor him entirely. It’s a challenge that will test what political strategists and those who have observed Ms. Haley’s ascent from her…

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Republicans across the South are on a crusade against LGBTQ+ rights

Republicans across the South are on a crusade against LGBTQ+ rights

The Guardian reports: For five months this year, homosexuality was prohibited in a Tennessee college town. In June, the city council of Murfreesboro enacted an ordinance outlawing “indecent exposure, public indecency, lewd behavior, nudity or sexual conduct”. The rule did not explicitly mention homosexuality, but LGBTQ+ people in the town quickly realized that the ordinance references 21-72 of the city code, which categorizes homosexuality as an act of indecent sexual conduct. The ordinance was essentially a covert ban on LGBTQ+…

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At Meta, millions of underage users were an ‘open secret,’ states say

At Meta, millions of underage users were an ‘open secret,’ states say

The New York Times reports: Meta has received more than 1.1 million reports of users under the age of 13 on its Instagram platform since early 2019 yet it “disabled only a fraction” of those accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint against the company brought by the attorneys general of 33 states. Instead, the social media giant “routinely continued to collect” children’s personal information, like their locations and email addresses, without parental permission, in violation of a federal…

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Gaza civilians, bombed by Israel, are being killed at a rate unprecedented in the 21st century

Gaza civilians, bombed by Israel, are being killed at a rate unprecedented in the 21st century

The New York Times reports: Israel has cast the deaths of civilians in the Gaza Strip as a regrettable but unavoidable part of modern conflict, pointing to the heavy human toll from military campaigns the United States itself once waged in Iraq and Syria. But a review of past conflicts and interviews with casualty and weapons experts suggest that Israel’s assault is different. While wartime death tolls will never be exact, experts say that even a conservative reading of the…

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While the world has abandoned Gaza, its doctors have done the opposite. They are our heroes

While the world has abandoned Gaza, its doctors have done the opposite. They are our heroes

Ghada Ageel writes: In the movie Any Given Sunday, Al Pacino plays a highly strung football coach. In a key scene, he gives a speech about how “life is a game of inches” and how when “you add up all those inches that’s gonna make the difference between livin’ and dyin’”. For Pacino, the rousing words are a figure of speech. For the people of Gaza – particularly its doctors, nurses and medical staff – these words are a matter…

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The polls keep getting worse for Biden

The polls keep getting worse for Biden

Politico reports: President Joe Biden’s poll numbers keep getting worse. November started with New York Times/Siena College polls showing Trump ahead in four of the six swing states, but more indicators of Biden’s electoral peril soon followed. The president’s standing in head-to-head matchups with Trump is falling: Among the latest surveys this month from 13 separate pollsters, Biden’s position is worse than their previous polls in all but two of them. And while polls suggest most of the movement comes…

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The secret megadonor behind the MAGA movement’s Washington ‘nerve center’

The secret megadonor behind the MAGA movement’s Washington ‘nerve center’

The Daily Beast reports: In a few short years, the Conservative Partnership Institute has become known in Washington as the “nerve center” of the MAGA movement—an outsized power player in Congress and a hotbed of election denialism. What hasn’t been known, however, is who exactly has underwritten the group’s rise and rapid expansion, as the conservative nonprofit buys up prime real estate on Capitol Hill and turns pricey row houses into outposts for the House Freedom Caucus—until now. It turns…

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The unbearable hubris of Elon Musk and the billionaire tech bros

The unbearable hubris of Elon Musk and the billionaire tech bros

Douglas Rushkoff writes: Even their downfalls are spectacular. Like a latter-day Icarus flying too close to the sun, disgraced crypto-god Sam Bankman-Fried crashed and burned this month, recasting Michael Lewis’s exuberant biography of the convicted fraudster – Going Infinite – into the story of a supervillain. Even his potential sentence of up to 115 years in prison seems more suitable for a larger-than-life comic book character – the Joker being carted off to Arkham Asylum – than a nerdy, crooked…

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In the gut’s ‘second brain,’ key agents of health emerge

In the gut’s ‘second brain,’ key agents of health emerge

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: From the moment you swallow a bite of food to the moment it exits your body, the gut is toiling to process this strange outside material. It has to break chunks down into small bits. It must distinguish healthy nutrients from toxins or pathogens and absorb only what is beneficial. And it does all this while moving the partially processed food one way through different factories of digestion — mouth, esophagus, stomach, through the intestines and out….

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Supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way is approaching the cosmic speed limit, dragging space-time along with it

Supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way is approaching the cosmic speed limit, dragging space-time along with it

Live Science reports: The supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy isn’t just spinning — it’s doing so at almost maximum speed, dragging anything near it along for the ride. Physicists calculated the rotational speed of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), by using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to view the X-rays and radio waves emanating from outflows of material. The spin speed of a black hole is defined as “a” and given…

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‘You made me do it’

‘You made me do it’

Jacqueline Rose writes: In response​ to the destruction of Gaza, it seems to be becoming almost impossible to lament more than one people at a time. When I signed Artists for Palestine’s statement last month, I looked for mention of the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli Jews on 7 October, and then decided to settle for the unambiguous condemnation of ‘every act of violence against civilians and every infringement of international law whoever perpetrates them’. At Independent Jewish Voices,…

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Senior IDF officer dismissed pre-October 7 intel on Hamas invasion as ‘fantasy’

Senior IDF officer dismissed pre-October 7 intel on Hamas invasion as ‘fantasy’

The Times of Israel reports: Soldiers in the IDF’s prestigious 8200 signal intelligence unit reportedly warned senior officers before the October 7 atrocities that Hamas was preparing a highly organized and meticulously planned mass invasion of Israel but were told their concerns were “fantasies.” A senior and experienced non-commissioned officer as well as a junior officer in 8200 alerted senior IDF officers well in advance that a major operation was being planned by Hamas, but their warnings went unheeded, according…

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David Cameron warns Israel over Gaza civilian casualties

David Cameron warns Israel over Gaza civilian casualties

  BBC News reports: Lord Cameron has warned Israel that it will never be secure unless there is “long-term safety, security and stability” for the Palestinian people. In his first full interview as foreign secretary, he welcomed Friday’s pause in the fighting to get hostages out of Gaza and humanitarian aid in. But he told the BBC that civilian casualties in Gaza were too high. He also said that Israeli forces must abide by international humanitarian law. Lord Cameron urged…

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Growing numbers of Chinese migrants are crossing the southern border

Growing numbers of Chinese migrants are crossing the southern border

The New York Times reports: The surge of migrants entering the United States across the southern border increasingly includes people from a surprising place: China. Despite the distances involved and the difficulties of the journey, more than 24,000 Chinese citizens have been apprehended crossing into the United States from Mexico in the past year. That is more than in the preceding 10 years combined, according to government data. They typically fly into Ecuador, where they do not need a visa….

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