Browsed by
Category: Politics

Abortion bans have delayed emergency medical care. In Georgia, experts say this mother’s death was preventable

Abortion bans have delayed emergency medical care. In Georgia, experts say this mother’s death was preventable

By Kavitha Surana This story was originally published by ProPublica In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat. She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C. But just…

Read More Read More

A secretive group recruited far-right candidates in key U.S. House races. It could help Democrats

A secretive group recruited far-right candidates in key U.S. House races. It could help Democrats

The Associated Press reports: Joe Wiederien was an unlikely candidate to challenge a Republican congressman in one of the nation’s most competitive House districts. A fervent supporter of former President Donald Trump, Wiederien was registered as a Republican until months earlier. A debilitating stroke had left him unable to drive. He had never run for office. For a time, he couldn’t vote because of a felony conviction. But he arrived last month at the Iowa Capitol with well over the…

Read More Read More

‘Netanyahu wants open-ended war’: Palestinian journalist & fmr. Israeli negotiator on Gaza ceasefire

‘Netanyahu wants open-ended war’: Palestinian journalist & fmr. Israeli negotiator on Gaza ceasefire

  As Israeli forces launch repeated attacks on civilian areas in Gaza, expand their deadly incursion into the West Bank and threaten retaliation for strikes by Hezbollah and Houthis, we discuss ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas with Palestinian writer Amjad Iraqi and former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy. Despite apparent divisions among Israeli leadership over the terms of an acceptable deal — if such a deal even exists — all of the Israeli proposals are “united by an assumption…

Read More Read More

Trump’s Iowa lead shrinks significantly, an indication he may be in trouble nationally

Trump’s Iowa lead shrinks significantly, an indication he may be in trouble nationally

Des Moines Register reports: Kamala Harris has significantly narrowed the presidential race in Iowa, cutting Donald Trump’s lead to 4 percentage points in a dramatic turnaround from Joe Biden’s double-digit deficit. A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows that Trump leads Vice President Harris 47% to 43% among likely Iowa voters — a far slimmer margin than the 18-point lead the former Republican president enjoyed over Democratic President Biden in late spring. Before Biden ended his reelection campaign, a…

Read More Read More

The damage that Trump’s racist rhetoric is inflicting on Springfield, Ohio

The damage that Trump’s racist rhetoric is inflicting on Springfield, Ohio

Politico reports: In this city thrust unwillingly into the white hot center of Donald Trump’s immigration wars, conspiratorial fervor lept from internet memes into the humdrum tasks of everyday life. Just since Tuesday, bomb threats shuttered city hall, closed a middle school and forced the evacuation of two elementary schools. Even the city’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles and the Ohio License Bureau closed Thursday. As its own senator and the former president trafficked baseless claims that immigrants in this blue-collar…

Read More Read More

How Chief Justice Roberts shaped Trump’s Supreme Court winning streak

How Chief Justice Roberts shaped Trump’s Supreme Court winning streak

The New York Times reports: Last February, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. sent his eight Supreme Court colleagues a confidential memo that radiated frustration and certainty. Former President Donald J. Trump, seeking to retake the White House, had made a bold, last-ditch appeal to the justices. He wanted them to block his fast-approaching criminal trial on charges of attempting to overturn the 2020 election, arguing that he was protected by presidential immunity. Whatever move the court made could have…

Read More Read More

The organizers are Jewish. The cause is Palestinian. This college won’t be hosting

The organizers are Jewish. The cause is Palestinian. This college won’t be hosting

Masha Gessen writes: On the surface, this is a small story: A college canceled an event planned by a magazine. But it seems to be a story about something bigger: fear. Rather, it’s a story about many fears — including the fear of antisemitism, the fear of being accused of antisemitism, and the fear of controversy generally — and how they can combine to turn an institution designed to facilitate open discussion into something that makes open discussion impossible. The…

Read More Read More

The assault on Gaza hasn’t put an end to Israel’s constitutional crisis

The assault on Gaza hasn’t put an end to Israel’s constitutional crisis

Gershom Gorenberg writes: When Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, the most bitter political conflict in the country’s history suddenly seemed to be on hold—as if an unseen finger had pushed a pause button with everyone’s mouths still open in a shout. “Judicial reform is not on the agenda,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared at a press conference on October 28, referring to his government’s program to eviscerate the supreme court and give the executive unconstrained power. Major protest organizations…

Read More Read More

Alarm in UK and US over possible Iran-Russia nuclear deal

Alarm in UK and US over possible Iran-Russia nuclear deal

The Observer reports: Britain and the US have raised fears that Russia has shared nuclear secrets with Iran in return for Tehran supplying Moscow with ballistic missiles to bomb Ukraine. During their summit in Washington DC on Friday, Keir Starmer and US president Joe Biden acknowledged that the two countries were tightening military cooperation at a time when Iran is in the process of enriching enough uranium to complete its long-held goal to build a nuclear bomb. British sources indicated…

Read More Read More

How Trump and Vance have mainstreamed neo-Nazi and white nationalist bigotry

How Trump and Vance have mainstreamed neo-Nazi and white nationalist bigotry

NBC News reports: The day after the presidential debate at which former President Donald Trump spread a false story about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, Christopher Pohlhaus, leader of the national neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, took to his Telegram channel to take credit. Pohlhaus, a Marine-turned-tattoo artist known as “Hammer” to his hundreds of followers, wrote Blood Tribe had “pushed Springfield into the public consciousness.” Members of his hate group agreed. “The president is talking about it now,”…

Read More Read More

Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants are another test for America’s Christians

Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants are another test for America’s Christians

Russell Moore writes: The accusation that Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city are abducting and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs relies not on one falsehood but on a web of them. The rhetoric evokes racist tropes about “savages” who do not conform to our civilized Western world. There’s also a religious angle: the idea that Haitian refugees are voodoo occultists who might be worshipping the devil. As an evangelical Christian who actually believes in the existence of Satan,…

Read More Read More

Haitian immigrants helped revive a struggling Ohio town. Then neo-Nazis turned up

Haitian immigrants helped revive a struggling Ohio town. Then neo-Nazis turned up

The Guardian reports: While Donald Trump made baseless, dangerous claims that immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets in front of millions of viewers at Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Johnson Salomon, a Haitian man who moved to Springfield in 2020, was watching cartoons with his kids before putting them to bed. He got a text from a friend telling him to turn on the debate. When he saw the headlines about what the former president and Republican nominee in November’s…

Read More Read More

Neo-Nazi and far right groups seize on Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric

Neo-Nazi and far right groups seize on Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric

The Guardian reports: Neo-Nazi groups and the online far right are latching on to the anti-immigration rhetoric coming from Donald Trump’s campaign for the White House in an effort to recruit new supporters and spread their extremism to broader audiences. After the Republican national convention in July, where supporters waved “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” placards, it became clear that Trump’s xenophobia has become part of the Republican establishment. Upon his return to X, formerly known as Twitter, Trump released a stream…

Read More Read More

Trump Jr. piles on with racist comments about Haitians

Trump Jr. piles on with racist comments about Haitians

The New York Times reports: Amid fallout from Donald J. Trump’s debunked claim about immigrants from Haiti stealing and eating people’s pets in a small Ohio city, the former president’s oldest son weighed in with his own aspersions on Haitians. Donald Trump Jr. suggested on Thursday that Haitian immigrants were less intelligent than people from other countries, and claimed that there was demographic evidence to back this up. He provided none. “You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic…

Read More Read More

Trump and Vance foment racial hatred and xenophobia in Ohio and across America

Trump and Vance foment racial hatred and xenophobia in Ohio and across America

Politico reports: Former President Donald Trump used increasingly harsh rhetoric Friday in describing Haitian migrants in Ohio, saying they’re “destroying their way of life” and threatened mass deportations. He made his comments as he and some of his allies, including his running mate JD Vance, have claimed that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats, dogs and geese, sparking a backlash from Democrats, including President Joe Biden. “Illegal Haitian migrants have descended upon a town of 58,000 people, destroying…

Read More Read More

Harris details rural push ahead of battleground barnstorm

Harris details rural push ahead of battleground barnstorm

Politico reports: Vice President Kamala Harris is circulating her first detailed goals for rural America in a bid to woo voters the party has been hemorrhaging support among for decades — and who will help determine the outcome of the November elections. The new document is the furthest Harris has gone in her career to outline how she would approach policy for rural communities and comes as her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, who has been tapped as a sort…

Read More Read More