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Category: Politics

Biden administration divided over Israel’s escalation against Hezbollah

Biden administration divided over Israel’s escalation against Hezbollah

The Washington Post reports: The Biden administration is divided over Israel’s military escalation against Hezbollah with some senior officials viewing it as a reckless bombardment likely to produce more deadly cycles of violence and others seeing it as a potentially effective means of degrading the Lebanese militant group and forcing it to back down. Senior officials are publicly calling for de-escalation as the administration tries to find a diplomatic off-ramp to the metastasizing Middle East conflict. In the past two…

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In Israel’s prisons, skin diseases are a method of punishment

In Israel’s prisons, skin diseases are a method of punishment

+972 Magazine reports: Pale and frail, with an unkempt beard and a prosthetic eye, his emaciated body testifies to the neglect and torture he experienced inside Israeli prison. “Stay away,” he shouts at the eager crowd surrounding him upon his release. “I don’t know what disease I’m carrying — I have a rash and can’t risk shaking hands.” But his parents, overcome with emotion, move forward to embrace him. He shrinks away, fearfully insisting that he should remain untouched. Mo’ath…

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Trump’s sexual assault accusers tell their stories in chilling new ads

Trump’s sexual assault accusers tell their stories in chilling new ads

People reports: George Conway, the ex-husband of former Donald Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, is helping bring attention to the sexual assault claims against the former president as he seeks a second term in the White House. On Wednesday, Sept. 25, the attorney’s political action committee launched ads featuring two of the Republican presidential nominee’s sexual assault accusers. The first ad centers around former PEOPLE reporter Natasha Stoynoff, who claims she was assaulted by Trump during a December 2005 trip to…

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D’Esposito scandal sparks ‘migraine’ for Republicans hoping to keep House

D’Esposito scandal sparks ‘migraine’ for Republicans hoping to keep House

ABC News reports: Monday’s bombshell report alleging infidelity and possible violations of House ethics rules by Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, R-N.Y., is rattling his reelection bid in a key Long Island district. But it’s not just New York’s 4th Congressional District that’s at stake. D’Esposito, a former police detective, allegedly hired his longtime fiancée’s daughter and his mistress to work in his district office, jobs that received taxpayer-funded salaries, The New York Times reported Monday. The first-term lawmaker was already facing…

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Secret Service agent accused of sexually assaulting Harris aide

Secret Service agent accused of sexually assaulting Harris aide

RealClear Politics reports: A Secret Service agent has been accused of sexually assaulting a staffer who works for Vice President Kamala Harris, according to four sources in the Secret Service community. The incident in question took place sometime over the last week during a trip devoted to providing advance security work and planning for a Harris campaign event in Wisconsin that ultimately did not take place. Several Harris staffers and Secret Service agents were in Green Bay to provide advance…

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Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, two government bodies concluded. Blinken rejected their findings

Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, two government bodies concluded. Blinken rejected their findings

By Brett Murphy This story was originally published by ProPublica The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza. The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments…

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Haitian group in Springfield, Ohio, files citizen criminal charges against Trump and Vance

Haitian group in Springfield, Ohio, files citizen criminal charges against Trump and Vance

The Associated Press reports: The leader of a nonprofit representing the Haitian community invoked a private-citizen right to file charges Tuesday against former President Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, over the chaos and threats experienced by Springfield, Ohio, since Trump first spread false claims about legal immigrants there during a presidential debate. The Haitian Bridge Alliance made the move after inaction by the local prosecutor, said their attorney, Subodh Chandra of the Cleveland-based Chandra Law Firm. Charges…

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Trump tries to hypnotize women into submission

Trump tries to hypnotize women into submission

Jonathan Chait writes: Donald Trump has always been wildly sexist. Generally, his sexism takes the form of reducing women to their looks, either praising their sex appeal or denigrating them as ugly. In private, of course, Trump behaves like a sex pest. But his new campaign riff to women voters is something altogether more disturbing. He sounds like a domestic abuser. The Trump pitch begins with a winking acknowledgment that he is losing among female voters. (He calls his deficit…

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Hundreds of pregnant women prosecuted the year after Roe v. Wade fell

Hundreds of pregnant women prosecuted the year after Roe v. Wade fell

Rolling Stone reports: At least 210 women faced criminal charges related to pregnancy, abortion, pregnancy loss, or birth in the year after the Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion, according to a new report from the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice. In most of the cases — 121 of the 210 — the information later used against the women was obtained or disclosed in a medical setting, researchers found. The period examined — from June 2022, when the court’s…

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Project 2025 mastermind allegedly told colleagues he killed a neighbor’s barking dog with a shovel

Project 2025 mastermind allegedly told colleagues he killed a neighbor’s barking dog with a shovel

The Guardian reports: The man behind Project 2025, the rightwing policy manifesto that includes calls for a sharp increase in immigrant deportations if Donald Trump is elected, told university colleagues about two decades ago that he had killed a neighborhood dog with a shovel because it was barking and disturbing his family, according to former colleagues who spoke to the Guardian. Kevin Roberts, now the president of the Heritage Foundation, is alleged to have told colleagues and dinner guests that…

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Iran brokering talks to send advanced Russian missiles to Yemen’s Houthis, sources say

Iran brokering talks to send advanced Russian missiles to Yemen’s Houthis, sources say

Reuters reports: Iran has brokered ongoing secret talks between Russia and Yemen’s Houthi rebels to transfer anti-ship missiles to the militant group, three Western and regional sources said, a development that highlights Tehran’s deepening ties to Moscow. Seven sources said that Russia has yet to decide to transfer the Yakhont missiles – also known as P-800 Oniks – which experts said would allow the militant group to more accurately strike commercial vessels in the Red Sea and increase the threat…

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Israeli strikes kill 492 in heaviest daily toll in Lebanon since 1975-90 civil war

Israeli strikes kill 492 in heaviest daily toll in Lebanon since 1975-90 civil war

The Guardian reports: At least 492 people have been killed and 1,645 injured, Lebanon’s health ministry has said, after a wave of Israeli airstrikes on alleged Hezbollah targets that left the country with its highest daily death toll since the end of the 1975-90 civil war. Tens of thousands of people fled from south Lebanese towns and villages along the main road towards the capital, Beirut, in Israel’s most intense barrage in nearly a year of cross-border clashes, as sirens…

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Why is Netanyahu starting a cataclysmic new war?

Why is Netanyahu starting a cataclysmic new war?

Dimi Reider writes: For much of the last year, the prospect of an all-out war in the North was presented to Israelis as a pitfall to avoid. Israel, they were told, doesn’t want a second war – especially not one that could escalate to a regional one with Iran – and neither does Hezbollah. All in all, both parties would prefer a long-term accommodation or regularisation (hasdarah). Israel wants Hezbollah to stop firing and ideally move its forces further north,…

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Gaza’s suffering is unprecedented

Gaza’s suffering is unprecedented

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib writes: My brother, Mohammed, has survived nearly a year of war in Gaza while working to aid its people. He has scrambled out of the rubble of an air strike that destroyed our family home, and he has seen far too many of our relatives wounded or killed. Through it all, he has somehow remained unscathed. However, he recently fell severely ill battling a hepatitis infection. Mohammed is a deputy director of programs for one of the…

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Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel’

Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel’

Ryu Spaeth writes: It was mid-August, roughly a month and a half before his new book, The Message, was set to be published, and Ta-Nehisi Coates was in my face, on my level, his eyes wide and aflame and his hands swallowing his scalp as he clutched it in disbelief and wonder and rage. At the Gramercy Park restaurant where we’d met for breakfast, Coates, now 48, looked noticeably older than the fruit-cheeked polemicist whose visage had been everywhere nearly…

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Key Nebraska Republican rejects Trump’s push to shake up electoral map

Key Nebraska Republican rejects Trump’s push to shake up electoral map

The New York Times reports: The Nebraska state senator who Republicans hoped would help ease former President Donald J. Trump’s path to the White House by agreeing to change how the state allocates its Electoral College votes said on Monday that he would not do so, ending a brief but intense lobbying effort from allies of Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. The state legislator, Mike McDonnell, a Democrat turned Republican from Omaha, said that he would not agree…

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