Experts: Pro-Trump officials could face ‘severe’ punishments if they refuse to certify election

Experts: Pro-Trump officials could face ‘severe’ punishments if they refuse to certify election

Salon reports: Pro-Trump local election officials may try to slow down the certification of election results in November based on unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud – but legal experts say those efforts alone won’t secure the White House for the former president. Instead, legal experts say they’re more concerned about the role of state legislatures and the Trump-friendly Supreme Court coming to Trump’s aid as he sows the kind of discord and doubt in the nation’s electoral processes that…

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Ukraine’s Kursk offensive is a turning point in the war

Ukraine’s Kursk offensive is a turning point in the war

Carl Bildt writes: As Ukrainian forces expand their area of control in Russia’s Kursk region in the second week of their incursion, it’s clear that they will eventually have to go home. After all, the principle of territorial integrity is at the very core of Ukraine’s fight and the firm international reaction to Russia’s attempt to change Europe’s borders through conquest. But that’s not the issue for today, and I will leave it to the experts to assess the military…

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Kamala Harris wants to stop Wall Street’s homebuying spree

Kamala Harris wants to stop Wall Street’s homebuying spree

Quartz reports: Vice President Kamala Harris unveiled plans to tackle the rise in Wall Street homeownership as part of a slate of economic proposals announced Friday. The Democratic presidential nominee is targeting investors that buy up and mark up homes in bulk, a growing trend that’s making the housing and rental market more expensive for Americans, the Harris campaign said. Within her first 100 days in office, Harris said she would call on Congress to pass the “Stop Predatory Investing…

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How Trump would use the military against riots, crime and migrants

How Trump would use the military against riots, crime and migrants

The New York Times reports: During the turbulent summer of 2020, President Donald J. Trump raged at his military and legal advisers, calling them “losers” for objecting to his idea of using federal troops to suppress outbreaks of violence during the nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd. It wasn’t the only time Mr. Trump was talked out of using the military for domestic law enforcement — a practice that would carry profound implications for civil liberties and…

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Kamala Harris knows how to get under Donald’s skin

Kamala Harris knows how to get under Donald’s skin

Mary L Trump writes: Americans have known for a while that my uncle has the thinnest skin on the planet. We now know that Vice President Kamala Harris is all the way under it because Donald keeps admitting it. “I’m very angry at her,” Donald said Thursday. “I think I’m entitled to personal attacks. I don’t have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible…

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Inside the turbulent, secret world of the American Patriots Three Percent militia

Inside the turbulent, secret world of the American Patriots Three Percent militia

ProPublica reports: Last February, some 20 men and their wives gathered for dinner at an upscale restaurant in Spokane, Washington, for their annual Valentine’s Day celebration. The men weren’t just friends; they did community service work together. They had been featured on local television, in khakis and baseball caps, delivering 1,200 pounds of food to an area veterans’ center; they were gearing up for their next food drive, which they called Operation Hunger Smash. A few days after the holiday,…

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Israel feared legal trouble over U.S. advocacy efforts, leaked files suggest

Israel feared legal trouble over U.S. advocacy efforts, leaked files suggest

The Guardian reports: The Israeli government sought legal advice on a US federal law requiring the disclosure of foreign-backed lobbying campaigns, out of concern that mounting enforcement of the law could ensnare American groups working in coordination with the Israeli government, leaked documents reviewed by the Guardian suggest. Emails and legal memos originating from a hack of the Israeli justice ministry show that officials feared that the country’s advocacy efforts in the US could trigger the US law governing foreign…

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‘We were sure the Russian army would protect us’: fury after Ukrainian incursion into Kursk

‘We were sure the Russian army would protect us’: fury after Ukrainian incursion into Kursk

The Observer reports: Lyubov Antipova last spoke to her elderly parents almost two weeks ago, when she first heard rumours of a Ukrainian incursion, and begged them to leave their village in Russia’s Kursk region. The threat seemed unreal – Russian soil had not seen invading forces since the end of the second world war – and Russian state media initially dismissed the invasion as a one-off “attempt at infiltration”, so Antipova’s parents, who keep chickens and a pig on…

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How methane emissions are pushing the Amazon towards environmental catastrophe

How methane emissions are pushing the Amazon towards environmental catastrophe

Rob Jackson reports: Controlling methane provides our best, and perhaps only, lever for shaving peak global temperatures over the next few decades. This is because it’s cleansed from the air naturally only a decade or so after release. Therefore if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, methane’s concentration would quickly return to pre-industrial levels. Essentially, humans have released in excess of 3bn tonnes of methane into the atmosphere in the past 20 years. Quashing those emissions within…

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How Project 2025 turned into the GOP’s biggest political loser

How Project 2025 turned into the GOP’s biggest political loser

NOTUS reports: There’s a good reason Donald Trump and his campaign are so desperate to distance themselves from the classified-sounding “Project 2025”: The Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration is politically radioactive. A Democratic operative who has seen private polling on how a number of issues could move the 2024 presidential election — like health care, the economy and immigration — told NOTUS that, improbably, no issue was benefiting Democrats more than Project 2025. And, predictably, Democrats are…

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Trump raked in $300,000 for endorsing Bible, financial disclosure shows

Trump raked in $300,000 for endorsing Bible, financial disclosure shows

The New York Times reports: Donald J. Trump’s latest financial disclosure lists more than $100 million in liabilities stemming from three civil lawsuits he lost in New York that required him to obtain bonds to pay the judgments — but also profits from licensing fees at Trump-branded properties in Dubai and Oman, as well as income that he made from his post-presidential books, including a Trump-endorsed Bible. The former president also holds more than $1 million in cryptocurrency as he…

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Gaza rubble likely to conceal untold horrors to swell 40,000 death toll

Gaza rubble likely to conceal untold horrors to swell 40,000 death toll

The Guardian reports: Dalia Hawas was 24 years old when an Israeli airstrike flattened the apartment building where she lived in February, burying the young mother with her 10-month-old daughter, Mona. They are not listed among Gaza’s war dead, because their bodies were trapped too deep beneath the rubble for rescue teams to reach them. Ten months into Israel’s war on Gaza, the death toll has passed 40,000, according to health authorities there. Most of the dead are civilians and…

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B’Tselem’s executive director talks to Christiane Amanpour about abuse of Palestinian prisoners

B’Tselem’s executive director talks to Christiane Amanpour about abuse of Palestinian prisoners

"This is our conception of security: the way we keep us secure is to abuse, to kill." Investigations by CNN, the UN, and Israeli media exposed alleged abuse of Palestinians in Israeli detention centers, which the IDF and the prison service have denied. Now a new report from… pic.twitter.com/wP8JxNLfJ2 — Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) August 14, 2024

How Coca-Cola tried and failed to suppress a boycott over Gaza

How Coca-Cola tried and failed to suppress a boycott over Gaza

The Washington Post reports: When sales of Coca-Cola began to plummet in parts of the Middle East and Asia this summer in response to boycotts of corporations with alleged ties to Israel, the soda company’s franchise in Bangladesh rolled out an expensive advertising campaign featuring a television star known for his roles in South Asian soap operas and reality TV. The actor, Sharaf Ahmed Jibon, played a shopkeeper who assured customers that Coca-Cola was not an Israeli product and underscored…

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