Music: Dhafer Youssef — ‘SharQ Suite: Funky SharQ’
‘Offensive’: Georgia prosecutor excoriates Jordan for probe into Trump charges
Politico reports: The Georgia district attorney at the heart of former President Donald Trump’s latest indictment on Thursday rebuked House Republicans’ investigation into her office, accusing them of blatantly trying to obstruct a criminal proceeding. Fulton County DA Fani Willis on Thursday sent a fiery letter to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, responding to his decision to launch an investigation into the Georgia office just hours before Trump appeared in court late last month on charges related to interfering in…
13 presidential libraries issue rare joint warning about U.S. democracy
The Associated Press reports: Concern for U.S. democracy amid deep national polarization has prompted the entities supporting 13 presidential libraries dating back to Herbert Hoover to call for a recommitment to the country’s bedrock principles, including the rule of law and respecting a diversity of beliefs. The statement released Thursday, the first time the libraries have joined to make such a public declaration, said Americans have a strong interest in supporting democratic movements and human rights around the world because…
Mike Huckabee rebuked for threatening violence if Trump fails to be reelected
HuffPost reports: Right-wing commentator Mike Huckabee is coming under heavy criticism after warning of “bullets” in future elections should Donald Trump lose in 2024 due to his mounting legal woes. Over the weekend, Huckabee accused President Joe Biden of trying to “destroy Trump” via legal actions in the courthouse rather than at the ballot box via an election. “Here’s the problem: If these tactics end up working to keep Trump from winning or even running in 2024, it is going…
Musk secretly shut down Starlink to foil a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian ships, new biography reveals
CNN reports: Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.” As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes. Musk’s decision, which left Ukrainian officials begging him to…
‘A revolution is already happening’: Thousands of Syrians join protests calling for fall of Assad regime
inews reports: Anti-regime protests that are spreading across Syria could be the spark of another revolution, opposition activists have said, 12 years after similar demonstrations turned into a full-scale civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Videos on social media have shown hundreds of people gathering in the main square of Suwayda, waving flags of the Druze minority and chanting “long live Syria, and down with Bashar al-Assad”. Others shout: “Step down Bashar, we want to live in…
The ‘liquid imperialism’ that engulfed Syria
Yassin al-Haj Saleh writes: Syria is a country of only 71,498 square miles in area, with a population of less than 24 million, and yet two global superpowers (the United States and the Russian Federation) and three of the largest regional powers (Iran, Turkey and Israel) are present on its territory. Israel has occupied the Syrian Golan Heights since 1967, and carries out almost nonstop incursions into Syrian air space today. In centuries past, prior to the heyday of European…
Antarctica warming much faster than models predicted in ‘deeply concerning’ sign for sea levels
The Guardian reports: Antarctica is likely warming at almost twice the rate of the rest of the world and faster than climate change models are predicting, with potentially far-reaching implications for global sea level rise, according to a scientific study. Scientists analysed 78 Antarctic ice cores to recreate temperatures going back 1,000 years and found the warming across the continent was outside what could be expected from natural swings. In West Antarctica, a region considered particularly vulnerable to warming with…
Music: Dhafer Youssef — ‘SharQ Suite: SharQ Serenade’ ft. Ambrose Akinmusire
Lawsuit filed to remove Trump from ballot in Colorado under 14th Amendment
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington: Having disqualified himself from public office by violating Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, Donald Trump must be removed from the ballot, according to a lawsuit filed today by six Republican and unaffiliated Colorado voters including former state, federal and local officials, represented by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the firms Tierney Lawrence Stiles LLC, KBN Law, LLC and Olson Grimsley Kawanabe Hinchcliff & Murray LLC. Section 3 of the…
Alabama is quickly discovering the dangers of defying the Supreme Court
Mark Joseph Stern writes: Alabama Republicans’ brash defiance of the Supreme Court hit a wall on Tuesday when a federal district court declared that the state’s new congressional maps discriminate against Black citizens in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The decision was entirely predictable given that GOP lawmakers have openly refused to draw districts that comply with the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against them. But the opinion is still remarkable for its caustic and exasperated criticism of the state’s…
Why Republicans could impeach a liberal State Supreme Court justice before she’s heard a case
The New York Times reports: Wisconsin Democrats are aghast at what they view as another attempt by Republicans to reject the outcome of an election they lost. Many now privately concede that impeaching Justice Protasiewicz is a foregone conclusion. “They’re deliberately trying to overturn the will of the people,” said Sarah Godlewski, the Democratic secretary of state. “We have to understand the risk this is posing. It’s a potential reality that would put Wisconsin’s democracy in jeopardy.” The Democratic Party…
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse files ethics complaint over Justice Samuel Alito interview
NBC News reports: Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is demanding that Chief Justice John Roberts take action over an unusual interview conservative Justice Samuel Alito gave in which he questioned whether Congress has the power to impose ethics rules on the Supreme Court. Whitehouse’s complaint, submitted Monday, focuses on a July 28 interview published by The Wall Street Journal, conducted in part by conservative lawyer David Rivkin, in the wake of recent news articles raising questions about Supreme Court ethics. “No…
How Trump still taps into America’s cultural animus
Scott Nelson and Bradley Klein write: When Trump first won the presidency in 2016, legacy media outlets, including the New York Times, wrung their hands in anguish for having missed the story of profound public anxiety about the future. They raced to diners and truck stops across the Midwest in an effort to find out what “ordinary Americans” — those who rejected the Roosevelt coalition and bicoastal liberalism — were thinking and feeling. The stories that resulted painted a picture…
The truth about Elon Musk and anti-Semitism
Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria write: Elon Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” is threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for billions of dollars because the group has publicly criticized his management of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. In a public meltdown over X’s declining financial condition, Musk accused the ADL, an organization founded in 1913 “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” of being “the biggest…
It’s reassuring to think humans are evolution’s ultimate destination – but research shows we may be an accident
The Cambrian explosion, about 530 million years ago, was when most of the major groups of animals first appear in the fossil record. canbedone/Shutterstock By Matthew Wills, University of Bath and Marcello Ruta, University of Lincoln Depending upon how you do the counting, there are around 9 million species on Earth, from the simplest single-celled organisms to humans. It’s reassuring to imagine that complex bodies and brains like ours are the inevitable consequence of evolution, as if evolution had a…