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Category: Politics

Harris campaign, DNC, announce unprecedented down-ballot spending as GOP faces huge financial gap

Harris campaign, DNC, announce unprecedented down-ballot spending as GOP faces huge financial gap

Politico reports: Kamala Harris’ campaign and the Democratic National Committee said Tuesday they are sending nearly $25 million to support down-ballot Democrats — an earlier investment and far more money than the top of the ticket has sent in past election years. The funding in part reflects the Harris operation’s ability to spread money around after record fundraising over the past six weeks. But it is also a recognition of the importance of this year’s down-ballot races — which overlap…

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Safety threats undermine the freedom of science

Safety threats undermine the freedom of science

An editorial in Science says: An accommodating and supportive environment is essential to conducting scientific research. Yet, in almost every country, researchers can experience harassment, threats, prosecution, or even violence for opinions they express or for their work in relation to high-profile issues. Although many international and regional reports on this issue are patchy in terms of comprehensiveness and representation, they reveal clear and worrying trends—namely, that researchers working in politically charged fields such as public health, climate, and sexual…

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‘This is also America’s war’: Why the U.S. isn’t stopping Israel’s Gaza onslaught

‘This is also America’s war’: Why the U.S. isn’t stopping Israel’s Gaza onslaught

Meron Rapoport interviews Daniel Levy: In the wake of Hamas’ October 7 massacres, U.S. President Joe Biden traveled to Israel for a solidarity visit. But a few days before he arrived, as the war effort intensified, he issued a blunt warning: “I made it clear to the Israelis I think it’s a big mistake for them to think they’re going to occupy Gaza and maintain Gaza,” he told reporters. Since then, Biden has reiterated that Israel must prevent a humanitarian crisis…

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UK suspends 30 arms export licences to Israel after review

UK suspends 30 arms export licences to Israel after review

The Guardian reports: The UK has moved to immediately suspend 30 arms export licences to Israel after a review by the new Labour government found a “clear risk” that UK arms may be used in serious violation of humanitarian law relating to the treatment of Palestinian detainees and the supply of aid to Gaza. The suspension will cover components for military aircraft including fighter aircraft, helicopters and drones. The Foreign Office said the two-month review had raised concerns about the…

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Hersh is gone, sacrificed on the altar of Israel’s ‘total victory’

Hersh is gone, sacrificed on the altar of Israel’s ‘total victory’

Orly Noy writes: It has been 11 months since death arrived on our doorstep — first as an unwanted guest and now, it seems, as a permanent squatter who refuses to leave. Its presence is so intimate yet ethereal. The number of Palestinians that Israel has killed in its Holocaust in Gaza makes it difficult to digest the depth of the horror. How many images of dead Palestinian children can a person see before they all morph into one intangible…

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I’m a college president and I hope my campus is even more political this year

I’m a college president and I hope my campus is even more political this year

Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, writes: Last year was a tough one on college campuses, so over the summer a lot of people asked me if I was hoping things would be less political this fall. Actually, I’m hoping they will be more political. That’s not to say that I yearn for entrenched conflict or to once again hear chants telling me that I “can’t hide from genocide,” much less anything that might devolve into antisemitic or…

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Former GOP officials sound the alarm over Trump’s embrace of Hungarian PM, Viktor Orbán

Former GOP officials sound the alarm over Trump’s embrace of Hungarian PM, Viktor Orbán

Politico reports: The Conservative Partnership Institute, a nerve center for incubating policies for a second Trump administration, co-sponsored a discussion in October 2022 about how to bring “peace in Ukraine” featuring Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter Szijjarto. Audience members included conservative policy and national security officials and GOP strategists, according to a person familiar with the meeting. Once seated, they were given pamphlets pushing unabashedly pro-Russia talking points. “Russia has the will, strength, and patience to continue war,” warned the document,…

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2020 election deniers ordered to pay $1 million in Pennsylvania voting machine dispute

2020 election deniers ordered to pay $1 million in Pennsylvania voting machine dispute

CNN reports: A Pennsylvania judge has determined that three 2020 election deniers must pay nearly $1 million in fees as the result of a years-long legal dispute with state officials over voting equipment used during the last presidential race, according to recent court filings. Recommendations from the judge, who was appointed to serve as a special master overseeing the case, attach a dollar figure to sanctions previously imposed by the state’s Supreme Court against two Republican county commissioners and their…

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For Netanyahu, keeping the IDF in Gaza is more important than getting the hostages out

For Netanyahu, keeping the IDF in Gaza is more important than getting the hostages out

David Horovitz writes: Israel will have to battle Hamas for a long, long time to come, the security chiefs have argued. But time is running out for the hostages. And while the IDF has heavily degraded Hamas’s capabilities, the fact is that only eight hostages have been extricated alive from Gaza during almost 11 months of war. The weeklong truce last November, by contrast, saw the release of 105. Bringing home the maximal number of living hostages — from captors…

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I’m still hoping to vote for Kamala Harris

I’m still hoping to vote for Kamala Harris

Benjamin Moser writes: You’ll often hear that foreign policy is not a priority of Americans. That may be true of some foreign policy issues, but what most people on every side of this issue understand is that Israel-Palestine is not really foreign policy. We all know that this war is made in America: On Monday, Israel received its 500th shipment of bombs from the United States. We know how many billions of dollars in aid we send Israel, without the slightest restriction. We have…

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Columbia cuts due process for student protesters after Congress demands harsher punishment

Columbia cuts due process for student protesters after Congress demands harsher punishment

The Intercept reports: In early August, Columbia University told Congress that most of the students arrested in the past year for protesting against Israel’s war on Gaza would be allowed to return to campus for the fall. Then a congressional inquiry applied pressure. Last week, the Republican chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which has been conducting an inquiry into Columbia’s handling of the protests since this spring, published a letter blasting the school for not…

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GOP network supports some of Trump’s ‘favorite candidates’: Cornel West and Jill Stein

GOP network supports some of Trump’s ‘favorite candidates’: Cornel West and Jill Stein

The Associated Press reports: Italo Medelius was leading a volunteer drive to put Cornel West on North Carolina’s presidential ballot last spring when he received an unexpected call from a man named Paul who said he wanted to help. Though Medelius, co-chairman of West’s “Justice for All Party,” welcomed the assistance, the offer would complicate his life, provoking threats and drawing him into a state election board investigation of the motivations, backgrounds and suspect tactics of his new allies. His…

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Trump is making new, sketchy foreign business deals

Trump is making new, sketchy foreign business deals

Casey Michel writes: When Donald Trump launched his first presidential campaign nearly a decade ago, there was a deluge of concerns about his foreign financial entanglements. And rightfully so. Given the financial overlap between Trump, his family, his company, and a constellation of kleptocratic regimes, especially Russia, Trump presented an unprecedented opportunity for foreign regimes to directly access the White House and tilt American policy in the process. Now, with Trump running for the presidency once more, those concerns have hardly disappeared. If anything,…

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German far right set for first major electoral victory since World War II

German far right set for first major electoral victory since World War II

Politico reports: Germany’s far right looks to have claimed its biggest electoral success since World War II, winning a regional vote in the country’s East on Sunday, according to an initial projection. Triumph for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), in a region that was under communist control during the Cold War, is a huge blow for Germany’s political center — not least for the three parties in the coalition of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which appear to have suffered significant…

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Trump contorts himself on abortion in search of political gain

Trump contorts himself on abortion in search of political gain

Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman write: At the age of 53, in a 1999 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Donald J. Trump described himself as “very pro-choice.” In 2011, without any explanation about the change, he informed a packed room at a conservative conference that he was now “pro-life.” In 2016, as a Republican candidate for president, he told the MSNBC host Chris Matthews that he had become so ardently opposed to abortion rights that he would even support…

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Trump calls the press the ‘enemy of the people’ and minutes later a man storms the rally’s media section

Trump calls the press the ‘enemy of the people’ and minutes later a man storms the rally’s media section

Vanity Fair reports: A man attending a campaign rally for Donald Trump on Friday stormed the media section, attempting to climb up the side of the enclosed area, before being tasered by law enforcement on the scene, according to a video posted to social media by a reporter for CBS News. Less than ten minutes before, the former president called journalists the “enemy of the people.” Trump claimed that the New York Times is losing “reader after reader,” which brings…

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