Protests spread across Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini

Protests spread across Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini

Joyce Karam tweeted on September 16: Today, a 22-yr-old woman died in #Iran after being beaten on head by the regime’s “morality police” for not “properly” wearing her Hijab. Her name was Masha Amini. Her crime was showing some hair. Let that sink in… pic.twitter.com/y7KpmJ7Z1X — Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) September 16, 2022 The Guardian reports: Iran has sent police to the streets in a scramble to end protests that have spread to at least 15 cities, as rights groups and…

Read More Read More

DeSantis’ immigration stunt echoes nation’s antisemitic legacy

DeSantis’ immigration stunt echoes nation’s antisemitic legacy

Ja’han Jones writes: Ken Burns’ latest documentary series for PBS, chronicling our country’s posture toward Jews fleeing the Holocaust, is chock-full of comparisons to present-day America. To be clear, “The U.S. and the Holocaust” was conceived with modern-day parallels in mind. Burns told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Monday that it’s important to reckon with that past, because “in this story are the seeds of what’s going on now.” But even that doesn’t fully brace viewers for the language Americans used…

Read More Read More

How Judge Cannon broke with conservatives in Trump documents case

How Judge Cannon broke with conservatives in Trump documents case

Politico reports: When Donald Trump flooded the federal bench with judicial appointments, a leading critique was that they were Federalist Society clones who favored muscular executive power and rejected what some perceive as meddling by the courts in executive branch affairs. Judge Aileen Cannon’s recent orders in the fight over the classified records the former president is accused of keeping at Mar-a-Lago have turned that perception on its ear. A 41-year-old former federal prosecutor and Trump nominee, Cannon issued a…

Read More Read More

How did the patriarchy start – and will evolution get rid of it?

How did the patriarchy start – and will evolution get rid of it?

Many hunter gatherers have a long history of egalitarianism. DevonJenkin Photography/Shutterstock By Ruth Mace, UCL READER QUESTION: Many people assume the patriarchy has always been there, but surely this isn’t the case? How did it really originate? Matt, 48, London. The patriarchy, having been somewhat in retreat in parts of the world, is back in our faces . In Afghanistan, the Taliban once again prowl the streets more concerned with keeping women at home and in strict dress code than…

Read More Read More

Special master to Trump’s lawyers: ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it’

Special master to Trump’s lawyers: ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it’

Politico reports: The senior federal judge tasked with reviewing the materials seized by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate sharply questioned the former president’s attorneys Tuesday during their first hearing in his courtroom. Judge Raymond Dearie repeatedly challenged Trump’s lawyers for refusing to back up the former president’s claim that he declassified the highly sensitive national security-related records discovered in his residence. “My view of it is: you can’t have your cake and eat it,” said Dearie, the “special…

Read More Read More

These male politicians are pushing for women who receive abortions to be punished with prison time

These male politicians are pushing for women who receive abortions to be punished with prison time

CNN reports: A businessman turned state representative from rural Oil City, Louisiana, and a Baptist pastor banded together earlier this year on a radical mission. They were adamant that a woman who receives an abortion should receive the same criminal consequences as one who drowns her baby. Under a bill they promoted, pregnant people could face murder charges even if they were raped or doctors determined the procedure was needed to save their own life. Doctors who attempted to help…

Read More Read More

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice says America needs another bloody revolution

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice says America needs another bloody revolution

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports: Former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman told a group of Republicans this month that a revolution against government officials over the 2020 election has become necessary but said people have become too comfortable to water the “tree of liberty” with blood. “For the first time in my life I am beginning to wonder if America’s best days are behind us,” Gableman said Sept. 9 at a dinner hosted by the Republican Party of Outagamie County,…

Read More Read More

Erdoğan to Putin: Return Crimea to ‘rightful owners’

Erdoğan to Putin: Return Crimea to ‘rightful owners’

Politico reports: Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that Russian President Vladimir Putin must return all land that Russia has occupied, including Crimea. The Black Sea peninsula should be returned to its “rightful owners,” Erdoğan told PBS NewsHour on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, in comments likely to provoke ire in Moscow. Asked whether Russia should be allowed to keep Crimea in a negotiated end to the war, Erdoğan said, “These are our descendants…

Read More Read More

Climate change threatens up to 100% of trees in Australian cities, and most urban species worldwide

Climate change threatens up to 100% of trees in Australian cities, and most urban species worldwide

Photo: Jaana Dielenberg, Author provided By Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez, Western Sydney University; Jaana Dielenberg, Charles Darwin University; Jonathan Lenoir, Université de Picardie Jules Verne (UPJV); Mark G Tjoelker, Western Sydney University, and Rachael Gallagher, Western Sydney University To anyone who has stepped off a hot pavement into a shady park, it will come as little surprise that trees (and shrubs) have a big cooling effect on cities. Our study published today in Nature Climate Change found climate change will put 90-100%…

Read More Read More

On Earth, ants outnumber humans by about 2.5 million to one

On Earth, ants outnumber humans by about 2.5 million to one

The Washington Post reports: It’s the ants’ world, and we’re just visiting. A new estimate for the total number of ants burrowing and buzzing on Earth comes to a whopping total of nearly 20 quadrillion individuals. That staggering sum — 20,000,000,000,000,000, or 20,000 trillion — reveals ants’ astonishing ubiquity even as scientists grow concerned a possible mass die off of insects could upend ecosystems. In a paper released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group…

Read More Read More

Vikings may not have been blonde, or Scandinavian

Vikings may not have been blonde, or Scandinavian

Live Science reports: Those ferocious seafaring warriors that explored, raided and traded across Europe from the late eighth to the early 11th centuries, known as the Vikings, are typically thought of as blonde Scandinavians. But Vikings may have a more diverse history: They carried genes from Southern Europe and Asia, a new study suggests. “We didn’t know genetically what they actually looked like until now,” senior author Eske Willerslev, a fellow of St. John’s College of the University of Cambridge,…

Read More Read More

Putin’s new Ukraine problem: Even the war’s biggest supporters are growing dissatisfied

Putin’s new Ukraine problem: Even the war’s biggest supporters are growing dissatisfied

NBC News reports: Russian President Vladimir Putin has a problem. For more than two decades now, Putin’s expanding grip on power has been predicated on his portrayed strength and justified as essential to Russia’s existence. Over time, as the political opposition and the independent media were gradually whittled away, Kremlin propagandists fostered a sense of inevitability underpinning his continued stewardship. “Russian society, just as the Russian army, is decaying and falling apart because of corruption.” From the start, Putin’s invasion…

Read More Read More

Ken Burns: ‘We’re in perhaps the most difficult crisis in the history of America’

Ken Burns: ‘We’re in perhaps the most difficult crisis in the history of America’

David Smith writes: Over six hours, [Ken Burns’ new docuseries, The US and the Holocaust] examines America’s flawed response to the Nazis’ persecution and mass murder of Jews, asking what could have been done differently to halt the genocide. Voice actors include Liam Neeson, Matthew Rhys, Paul Giamatti, Meryl Streep, Werner Herzog, Joe Morton and Hope Davis. It may be Burns’s most didactic film yet as it ends provocatively with images of Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine African…

Read More Read More

Massachusetts seeks human trafficking probe targeting Florida Gov. DeSantis over asylum seekers

Massachusetts seeks human trafficking probe targeting Florida Gov. DeSantis over asylum seekers

Judd Legum reports: Popular Information has obtained documentary evidence that migrants from Venezuela were provided with false information to convince them to board flights chartered by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R). The documents suggest that the flights were not just a callous political stunt but potentially a crime. Last Wednesday, two planes landed in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and dropped off about 50 migrants from Venezuela. DeSantis quickly took credit. The migrants were used as political pawns in the hopes of…

Read More Read More