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Category: Politics

The Israeli public has embraced the Smotrich doctrine

The Israeli public has embraced the Smotrich doctrine

+972 Magazine reports: Six years ago, Bezalel Smotrich, then a young Knesset member in his first term, published his “Decisive Plan” — a kind of “endgame” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to the far-right lawmaker, who now serves as Israel’s finance minister and the government’s West Bank overlord, the inherent contradiction between Jewish and Palestinian national aspirations does not allow for any kind of compromise, reconciliation, or partition. Instead of maintaining the illusion that a political agreement is possible, he…

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More than 500 U.S. officials call on Biden ‘to urgently demand a cease-fire’ in Gaza

More than 500 U.S. officials call on Biden ‘to urgently demand a cease-fire’ in Gaza

The New York Times reports: More than 500 political appointees and staff members representing some 40 government agencies sent a letter to President Biden on Tuesday protesting his support of Israel in its war in Gaza. The letter, part of growing internal dissent over the administration’s support of the war, calls on the president to seek an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and to push Israel to allow humanitarian aid into the territory. It is the latest of several…

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Fani Willis: Georgia trial involving Trump might not conclude until early 2025

Fani Willis: Georgia trial involving Trump might not conclude until early 2025

The Washington Post reports: The Atlanta-area prosecutor leading the criminal racketeering case against former president Donald Trump and 14 allies alleging they broke the law when they sought to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss said Tuesday that she anticipated the trial to conclude by early 2025, with proceedings probably underway during the final stretch of the 2024 presidential election. In an interview at The Washington Post Live’s Global Women’s Summit, Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) said the…

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After the ex-wife of a Trump Organization insider talked to prosecutors, she lost her children and her home

After the ex-wife of a Trump Organization insider talked to prosecutors, she lost her children and her home

Joan Walsh writes: Enjoying an outdoor lunch with a friend on a gorgeous day in April, I noticed a woman across the restaurant’s patio lugging around three suitcases and an adorable puppy. She was trying, and failing, to charge her phone at an outlet and was growing increasingly upset. In sweatpants, her frosted blond hair piled on top of her head, she looked like an Upper West Side mom having an extremely rough day. I apologized to my friend for…

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Trump’s Truth Social has lost $73 million since its launch, faces potential shutdown

Trump’s Truth Social has lost $73 million since its launch, faces potential shutdown

CNBC News reports: Truth Social, the brain child of former President Donald Trump, is hemorrhaging cash. The alternative social media platform has lost $73 million in the less than two years since it launched, according to a new filing from Digital World Acquisition Corporation, or DWAC, the special purpose acquisition company aiming to take Trump Media and Technology Group, or TMTG, public. In its first fiscal year ending Dec. 2022, TMTG, Truth Social’s parent company, lost over $50 million on…

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The U.S. appears nakedly unprincipled as it opposes Russia while giving free rein to Israel

The U.S. appears nakedly unprincipled as it opposes Russia while giving free rein to Israel

Stephen Wertheim writes: Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, President Biden has presented himself as a statesman humbled and enlightened by his own country’s missteps after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “While you feel that rage,” he advised Israelis, “don’t be consumed by it.” Mr. Biden meant to offer more than therapy. White House officials soon revealed they were deeply concerned by Israeli plans to invade the Gaza Strip. They feared the operation would fail to root out…

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Rep. Ilhan Omar to introduce first bill to block U.S. weapons for Israel since Gaza war began

Rep. Ilhan Omar to introduce first bill to block U.S. weapons for Israel since Gaza war began

HuffPost reports: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) will this week introduce legislation to disapprove of a multimillion-dollar package of bomb equipment for Israel proposed by the Biden administration, a source familiar with her plans told HuffPost ― posing the first congressional challenge to the U.S.’s policy of uninterrupted and expanding military support for Israel amid its deadly campaign in Gaza. Omar will by Wednesday file a bill known as a “resolution of disapproval” targeting a $320 million sale of gear for…

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Trump allies pre-screen loyalists for unprecedented power grab

Trump allies pre-screen loyalists for unprecedented power grab

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write: Former President Trump’s allies are pre-screening the ideologies of thousands of potential foot soldiers, as part of an unprecedented operation to centralize and expand his power at every level of the U.S. government if he wins in 2024, officials involved in the effort tell Axios. Why it matters: Hundreds of people are spending tens of millions of dollars to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents….

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How Trump’s rhetoric echoes Hitler’s

How Trump’s rhetoric echoes Hitler’s

Aaron Blake writes: Donald Trump has long toyed with the language of famous autocrats, authoritarians and fascists. Think: “enemy of the people,” “retribution” and the frequent, years-long allusions to political violence. But even by his standards, the former president is now mining darker territory — with overtones of some of the ugliest episodes in recent world history. The Washington Post this weekend summarized Trump’s Veterans Day speech in a headline thusly: “Trump calls political enemies ‘vermin,’ echoing dictators Hitler, Mussolini.” Trump not…

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Stephen Miller’s ‘America First Legal’ is more dangerous than you think

Stephen Miller’s ‘America First Legal’ is more dangerous than you think

Lisa Needham writes: You probably know Stephen Miller as an election denier, a perennial Fox News guest, and, most famously, as the Trump adviser who proposed immigration policies so brutal that his own uncle spoke out against him. These days, Miller also helms a hard-right law firm that is bent on eradicating any and all diversity efforts, everywhere from NASCAR to law schools. You can think of Miller’s “America First Legal” (AFL) firm as sort of a low-rent version of…

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Inside Trump’s plans to force ‘the largest domestic deportation operation in American history’

Inside Trump’s plans to force ‘the largest domestic deportation operation in American history’

The New York Times reports: Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled. The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways. Mr. Trump wants to revive his first-term border…

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MAGA-dominated state Republican parties plagued by infighting, money woes

MAGA-dominated state Republican parties plagued by infighting, money woes

The Washington Post reports: In Arizona, the state GOP chairman has been begging the Republican National Committee for a financial bailout. Michigan party officials have gotten into physical fights as their finances have dipped into the red. And in Georgia, the state party is in a standoff with the Republican governor and saddled with legal fees for alternate electors put forward in 2020. In each of these 2024 battlegrounds, election denial and grass-roots fervor for former president Donald Trump have…

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‘I could never dream such a nightmare’: Gaza in grip of humanitarian disaster

‘I could never dream such a nightmare’: Gaza in grip of humanitarian disaster

Jason Burke reports: UN-run shelters in Gaza are so crowded that it is impossible to count the people needing food, water, medicine and other basics, administrators say, as more fighting and bombardments continue to arrive. “It is a terrible, terrible situation. There is no room even to sleep on the floor. There is one toilet for 700 or 800 people. No bread, no stoves for cooking. We are drinking irrigation water,” one UN official at a compound in the southern…

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Trump’s plan for dictatorship

Trump’s plan for dictatorship

Jack Shafer writes: You can’t say Donald Trump didn’t warn us. Trump and his think tank loyalists are collecting the ingredients and refining the recipe for an authoritarian regime should he win the 2024 presidential election. According to a page one story in The Washington Post Monday, Trump plans on the first day of his new administration to invoke the Insurrection Act so he can dispatch the military to counter any demonstrations that might resist his policies. Why might he…

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Trump belief that 2020 election was stolen is not a defense, DOJ says

Trump belief that 2020 election was stolen is not a defense, DOJ says

The Washington Post reports: Special counsel prosecutors said Monday they plan to show at trial that Donald Trump lied repeatedly about the results of the 2020 election as part of a conspiracy to subvert the legitimate results. But they also said they don’t need to prove whether Trump believed he lost the race. Legal experts have debated the importance of Trump’s state of mind in his federal election subversion case in D.C., with some arguing that to win a conviction…

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A new Silicon Valley manifesto reveals the bleak, dangerous philosophy driving the tech industry

A new Silicon Valley manifesto reveals the bleak, dangerous philosophy driving the tech industry

Alex Wong/Unsplash By Hallam Stevens, James Cook University In 1993, Marc Andreessen was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also worked at the US-government funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications. With a colleague, the young software engineer authored the Mosaic web browser, which set the standard for cruising the information superhighway in the 1990s. Andreessen went on to cofound Netscape Communications, making a fortune in 1999 when the company was acquired by AOL for US$4.3 billion….

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