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Category: Politics

Frau Martha-Ann Alito: ‘You come after me, I’m going to give it back to you’

Frau Martha-Ann Alito: ‘You come after me, I’m going to give it back to you’

The Daily Beast reports: Justice Samuel Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, once again unwitting made herself the internet’s Main Character on Tuesday after an undercover reporter released a secretly recorded conversation in which she nastily complained about her neighbor’s Pride flag and bizarrely declared “I’m German.” “Look at me. I’m German, from Germany. My heritage is German,” she told a documentary maker who was posing as a conservative activist. “You come after me, I’m going to give it back to you. And…

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U.S. presses Hamas to accept deal that Netanyahu calls a ‘total lie’ as Hamas welcomes UNSC resolution

U.S. presses Hamas to accept deal that Netanyahu calls a ‘total lie’ as Hamas welcomes UNSC resolution

Reuters reports: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday urged Arab leaders to pressure Hamas to accept a ceasefire proposal outlined ten days ago by U.S. President Joe Biden to end the eight month-long war in Gaza. Blinken is on his eighth visit to the region since Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, triggering the bloodiest episode in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The trip comes as Washington seeks to increase pressure on Hamas to agree to a ceasefire…

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Ben Gvir says Gantz’s departure an opportunity to ‘stop the humanitarian policy’ in Gaza

Ben Gvir says Gantz’s departure an opportunity to ‘stop the humanitarian policy’ in Gaza

The Times of Israel reports: National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir calls last night’s departure from the coalition by National Unity chief Benny Gantz “a very big opportunity,” arguing that in recent months the former war cabinet minister’s centrist party had “put a spoke in the wheels of the war machine.” Gantz, alongside Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was one of three voting members of the decision-making war cabinet. Speaking to reporters ahead of his far-right…

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How the UAE subverts democracy far beyond its borders

How the UAE subverts democracy far beyond its borders

Rhys Davies and Matthew Hedges write: “With democracy on the ballot, we have to remember these first principles: Democracy means the rule of the people—not the rule of monarchs or the moneyed.” That was President Joe Biden’s appeal to American voters on the eve of midterm elections in the United States in 2022, a message he is carrying into his crucial re-election campaign and presumptive rematch with Donald Trump this fall. Yet one of America’s closest partners in the Middle…

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Justices Sotomayor and Kagan must retire now

Justices Sotomayor and Kagan must retire now

Ian Millhiser writes: Let’s not beat around the bush. It is more likely than not that Donald Trump will return to the White House next year. Right now, polling averages show Trump with a slight popular vote lead over incumbent President Joe Biden. And, even if Biden overcomes this small deficit, the Electoral College system effectively makes Trump votes count more than Biden votes. Although there may be signs that the Republican Party’s advantage in the Electoral College is fading, that advantage was…

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Wall Street titans shake off qualms and embrace Trump

Wall Street titans shake off qualms and embrace Trump

Politico reports: Wall Street executives spent three years doing everything they could to distance themselves from former President Donald Trump. Now they’re busy coming up with reasons to vote for the guy. Many high-dollar donors at banks, hedge funds and other financial firms had turned their backs on Trump as he spun unfounded claims that the 2020 election had been stolen and savaged the judicial system with attacks. Today, they’re setting aside those concerns, looking past qualms about his personality…

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Outrage over ‘massacre’ in Gaza as Israel rescued four hostages

Outrage over ‘massacre’ in Gaza as Israel rescued four hostages

The Guardian reports: Israeli attacks in central Gaza killed scores of Palestinians, many of them civilians, amid a special forces operation to free four hostages held there, a death toll that has caused international outrage. At least 274 Palestinians were killed and 698 wounded in Israeli strikes on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, Gaza’s health ministry said on Sunday. The Israeli military said its forces had come under heavy fire during the daytime operation. The EU’s top diplomat,…

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With Gantz resignation, Netanyahu loses centrist partner at pivotal moment in the war. Will anything change?

With Gantz resignation, Netanyahu loses centrist partner at pivotal moment in the war. Will anything change?

Jacob Kornbluh writes: [Senior war cabinet minister Benny] Gantz’s departure will heighten U.S. and international pressure on Netanyahu. “The government is losing the protective shield that Gantz provided,” said Dan Arbell, a scholar-in-residence at the Center for Israel Studies at American University. “It will put it in a position of being greatly scrutinized for missteps and miscalculations and increase the possibility of international actions.” But it could also boost Netanyahu’s standing among his right-wing base. The government still maintains a…

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Nesrine Malik on ‘the forgotten genocide’

Nesrine Malik on ‘the forgotten genocide’

  On April 15, Nesrine Malik wrote: One year ago today, Sudan descended into war. The toll so far is catastrophic. Thousands are dead, and millions are displaced, with hunger and disease ravaging all in the absence of aid. The UN has called the situation “one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent history”, afflicting about 25 million people. The Sudanese people are suffering what has become the largest displacement crisis in the world. The war was both sudden and…

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Europe swings to the right — led by France

Europe swings to the right — led by France

Politico reports: Europe’s center of political gravity is veering to the right. Center-right and far-right parties are set to take the largest number of seats in Sunday’s European Union election in the most populous nations: Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland. France led the rightward lurch with such a crushing victory for the far-right National Rally that liberal President Emmanuel Macron dissolved France’s parliament and called an early election. Early projections suggested the National Rally would win 32 percent or…

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In thrall to Viktor Orbán and the hard right, Europe is facing its moment of truth

In thrall to Viktor Orbán and the hard right, Europe is facing its moment of truth

Simon Tisdall writes: Viktor Orbán was his usual poisonous self, spouting toxic twaddle in true Boris Johnson/Nigel Farage style. Hungary’s hard-right prime minister and Europe’s saboteur-in-chief warned supporters at a Budapest rally that, without him, their country would be overrun by millions of illegal migrants and cease to exist as a nation. The EU was to blame, he said. The commission was under the spell of his liberal nemesis, the Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros. It was secretly preparing to go…

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Israel rescues hostages from Gaza, leaving trail of death and destruction

Israel rescues hostages from Gaza, leaving trail of death and destruction

The Washington Post reports: Israel’s military staged a blistering operation to rescue four hostages from the central Gaza Strip on Saturday, leaving hundreds of Palestinians dead or wounded in its wake and marking a much-needed political victory for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is under both domestic and international pressure to wind down the nine-month-long war. The Israel Defense Forces said it retrieved Almog Meir Jan, 21; Andrey Kozlov, 27; Shlomi Ziv, 40; and Noa Argamani, who turned 26 in…

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Haaretz: ‘The countdown has begun’ for the collapse of Israel

Haaretz: ‘The countdown has begun’ for the collapse of Israel

Al Mayadeen English summarizes an editorial from Haaretz published on June 7: Recent internal events suggest that Zionism is on a path to demise, and unless leaders take swift action, the existential countdown has already started, Haaretz warned in its Friday op-ed. The newspaper mentioned the “Flag March” in occupied al-Quds, which took place earlier this week and saw Israeli settlers storming the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque and violating its sanctity, attacking Palestinians and journalists, in addition to other Israelis, describing…

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Columbia Law Review back online after student editors threatened to strike over Nakba censorship

Columbia Law Review back online after student editors threatened to strike over Nakba censorship

  The Intercept reports: After the Columbia Law Review’s board of directors responded to the publication of an article about Palestine by taking the prestigious journal completely offline, the students who run CLR voted on Wednesday to reject an offer in a letter from the directors to reinstate the website. The Columbia Law School students who run CLR were considering a proposal to append a note to the Palestine article disclaiming what the directors, in an unsigned letter to students,…

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Trump plans to claim sweeping powers to cancel federal spending

Trump plans to claim sweeping powers to cancel federal spending

The Washington Post reports: Donald Trump is vowing to wrest key spending powers from Congress if elected this November, promising to assert more control over the federal budget than any president in U.S. history. The Constitution gives control over spending to Congress, but Trump and his aides maintain that the president should have much more discretion — including the authority to cease programs altogether, even if lawmakers fund them. Depending on the response from the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump’s…

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