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Category: History/Archeology

The Supreme Court’s conservatives just issued the worst ruling in a century

The Supreme Court’s conservatives just issued the worst ruling in a century

Richard L. Hasen writes: Wednesday’s 6–3 party-line decision in Louisiana v. Callais will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century. All six Republican-appointed justices on the court signed onto Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters, while pretending they were merely making technical tweaks to the act. This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local…

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Trump is ‘easily the worst president in U.S. history’

Trump is ‘easily the worst president in U.S. history’

Thomas B. Edsall writes: I asked Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and the author of “The Right-Wing Idea Factory: From Traditionalism to Trumpism,” which will be published in May, to assess — without regard to merit — how consequential the Trump presidency will be. On this measure he placed Trump in the Top 5 of American presidents, alongside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon…

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Why the ceasefire in Lebanon won’t stop Israel’s expansionist ambitions

Why the ceasefire in Lebanon won’t stop Israel’s expansionist ambitions

Dimi Reider writes: No other Israeli border has been as consistently restive for so long, and no outside actor has inflicted devastation on Lebanon as routinely or as dramatically as Israel: from cross-border raids in the first decades of statehood, to full-scale invasion in 1982, to the current war — the most lethal conflict in Lebanon since the devastating civil war of 1975-1990. Lebanon has also been the unwilling setting for a more definitive strain of Israeli wars — those…

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Holocaust Memorial Museum removed content on American racism after Trump returned to office

Holocaust Memorial Museum removed content on American racism after Trump returned to office

Politico reports: In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington quietly removed from its website educational resources about American racism and canceled a workshop about the “fragility of democracy.” The changes, which have not been previously reported, came as Trump cracked down on what he called “corrosive ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution, demanding a slew of alterations at the world’s largest museum network to more closely align its content with his…

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Angered by SCOTUS, Trump brands U.S. as ‘STUPID’ for allowing birthright citizenship

Angered by SCOTUS, Trump brands U.S. as ‘STUPID’ for allowing birthright citizenship

The Daily Beast reports: Donald Trump abruptly exited the Supreme Court on Wednesday after some of his own conservative justices did not appear convinced by his bid to upend birthright citizenship in America. Trump made the unprecedented decision to sit in on oral arguments, staring down the court’s nine justices as they quizzed his lawyers on one of the most consequential constitutional questions they face this year: whether all children born in the United States can continue to automatically receive…

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The underground bankers who reshape the flow of global money

The underground bankers who reshape the flow of global money

Miles Kellerman writes: The global financial system is a colossal factory containing an endless web of information assembly lines. Every time you tap your card on a payment terminal, whether it’s for a coffee on the way to work or a new vacuum cleaner, you are sending a new informational signal to that factory. Like raw material, that signal is then loaded on a conveyor belt where it is checked and modified by your bank, the seller’s bank, a payment…

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A pliant autocracy in Iran won’t solve America’s problems in the Middle East

A pliant autocracy in Iran won’t solve America’s problems in the Middle East

Fawaz A. Gerges writes: Over the past few weeks, U.S. President Donald Trump and his team have voiced contradictory objectives for the war they, together with Israel, launched against Iran. But it is clear that after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed, Trump hoped to deal with a transactional authoritarian figure. He called “what we did in Venezuela”—forcing the replacement of one autocrat, President Nicolás Maduro, with another, Delcy Rodríguez—a “perfect scenario” for Iran and insisted on being “involved with…

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Why China insists on internal unity and international harmony

Why China insists on internal unity and international harmony

Peter C Perdue writes: If you think that the People’s Republic of China is still a communist country, you are in for a shock. It is, of course, a single-party state ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. But what is the role of the CCP today? The Party celebrates billionaires, runs a capitalist economy, and depends heavily on global trade and investment. This is far from what Mao Zedong imagined when he took power in 1949. Then, the CCP claimed…

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‘A new world is being born’: Rebecca Solnit on the ‘slow revolution’ the far right cannot tolerate

‘A new world is being born’: Rebecca Solnit on the ‘slow revolution’ the far right cannot tolerate

Zoe Williams writes: When I speak to Rebecca Solnit, she is beaming, and I can’t immediately figure out why. Her new book, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, blasts in with a pragmatic positivity, it’s true. She writes with a “pull yourself together, don’t even think about despair” tone. But that’s not why she’s smiling – it’s because Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor just got arrested. “Why is the UK doing these things the US should be…

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World’s earliest known dog identified at ancient hunter-gatherer site

World’s earliest known dog identified at ancient hunter-gatherer site

Science reports: In the summer of 2004, Douglas Baird was leading excavations at a remote hunter-gatherer site called Pınarbaşı in central Turkey when his team found something unusual: three puppies placed in a pit directly above a human burial. The bones were too small to tell whether they belonged to wolves or dogs. Their proximity to the human suggested the latter, but the remains—dated to about 15,800 years ago—were nearly 5000 years older than any confirmed dog. “Our minds were…

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Iran’s conventional navy is largely gone. The threat to the Strait of Hormuz is not

Iran’s conventional navy is largely gone. The threat to the Strait of Hormuz is not

RFE/RL reports: The United States and Israel have largely destroyed Iran’s conventional naval fleet in a massive bombing campaign since February 28. But Tehran’s threat to the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important shipping routes, has not diminished. Iran has effectively closed the narrow waterway, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies flow, by using asymmetric warfare tactics. Besides Iran’s conventional navy, the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the elite branch of the country’s…

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Trump’s secret police

Trump’s secret police

Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf write: Since the Pendleton Act of 1883, the U.S. federal government has rested on a simple promise: professionalism, merit-based recruitment, independent oversight. Over time, U.S. federal law enforcement became a global reference point—effective, technically sophisticated, built to serve the law rather than a leader. And it traveled. For decades, officers from across the world sought training through U.S. programs such as the FBI’s National Academy and the Justice Department’s ICITAP. Now that model is collapsing…

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Will China save Western civilization?

Will China save Western civilization?

Chang Che writes: In November, 2024, on the day of the U.S. Presidential election, Tim Whitmarsh landed in Beijing, jet-lagged and disoriented. It was the middle of the academic term at the University of Cambridge, where Whitmarsh holds the Regius Professorship in Greek. He had been flown business class halfway around the world and put up at a five-star hotel for what he had been told would be the first World Conference of Classics. What followed, he later wrote, was…

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Putin resurrected and exported a fascist ideology to the West

Putin resurrected and exported a fascist ideology to the West

Zaza Bibilashvili and Tom G. Palmer in conversation at The Unpopulist: Zaza Bibilashvili: Over the last decades we’ve witnessed the rise of authoritarianism and a worldwide crisis of liberal democracy. What caused such developments and what should be done to reverse the trend? Tom G. Palmer: Most prognoses focus on demographics, technological changes, economic structures, and so on, which gives an air of inevitability to trends. I think that there are such contributing factors, notably the rise of media fragmentation…

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Why, for the West, it will always be ‘five minutes to midnight’ for the two-state solution

Why, for the West, it will always be ‘five minutes to midnight’ for the two-state solution

Michael Lynk writes: In 1982, Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, spoke to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C., about research that he and other social scientists in Israel were conducting into the political implications of the rapidly expanding Israeli settler population in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). That year, there were 22,000 settlers living in the occupied West Bank, with another 76,000 settlers in East Jerusalem and 6,500 in the Gaza Strip. According to an Anthony…

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Iran’s Islamic Republic is designed for survival

Iran’s Islamic Republic is designed for survival

Ali Hashem writes: The latest Israeli and U.S. war on Iran began with airstrikes on the home and offices of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The premise seemed to be that Khamenei’s sudden elimination would pose a dire threat to the current ruling system. The goal would be to achieve what happened in Libya after Muammar al-Qaddafi or in Syria after Bashar al-Assad, where regimes collapsed as soon as their leaders were no longer in power. In those systems, the state’s…

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