Did Biden put his foot in his mouth yet again, or was it just an apostrophe?

Did Biden put his foot in his mouth yet again, or was it just an apostrophe?

CNN reports: President Joe Biden on Tuesday tried to clean up comments he made earlier that sparked immediate backlash from many who interpreted them as referring to supporters of former President Donald Trump as “garbage.” Speaking during a Voto Latino get out-the-vote call, Biden — in reaction to Trump’s offensive rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday — said, “And just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico ‘a floating island of garbage.’ Well, let me…

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Over a third of trees globally face threat of extinction

Over a third of trees globally face threat of extinction

BBC News reports: Scientists assessing dangers posed to the world’s trees have revealed that more than a third of species are facing extinction in the wild. The number of threatened trees now outweighs all threatened birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians put together, according to the latest update to the official extinction red list. The news was released in Cali, Colombia, where world leaders are meeting at the UN biodiversity summit, COP 16, to assess progress on a landmark rescue plan…

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Protesters angry over Kamala Harris’s support for Israel should not forget what they stand to lose

Protesters angry over Kamala Harris’s support for Israel should not forget what they stand to lose

Gal Beckerman writes: Trump has made it clear how he views dissent. He has mused about throwing protesters in jail. He wants to revive the 1792 Insurrection Act so he can sic the military on those who might object to his policies. His defense secretary Mike Esper said that Trump proposed shooting demonstrators in the legs during the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd. This avowed, even gleeful, willingness to violently suppress any dissent from what Trump calls the “enemy within” is the main…

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Black people recognize what is happening to Palestinians

Black people recognize what is happening to Palestinians

Vann R. Newkirk II writes: In April 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois stepped onto the stage of the ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat in Midtown Manhattan. His beard was grizzled and he was still working out how to lecture through new dentures. In a word, he was old. During his long life, he’d witnessed the dawn of Jim Crow and the glow of the first atom bombs; the slaughter of the Comanche and the rivalry between the Soviet Union…

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The doctor who saw children shot in the head in Gaza—and tried to tell the world

The doctor who saw children shot in the head in Gaza—and tried to tell the world

Sophie Hurwitz writes: Dr. Feroze Sidhwa has volunteered as a trauma surgeon in Ukraine, Haiti, Burkina Faso, and Ghana. But when he went to Gaza in March and April of this year, it changed him. Sidhwa had never seen so much horror in his life. “There’s nothing like Gaza right now,” he said. “Almost 100 percent of Gaza’s population is homeless and displaced…does that sound like a place where people are going to survive?” With international journalists banned from Gaza…

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Trump’s Puerto Rico fallout is ‘spreading like wildfire’ in Pennsylvania

Trump’s Puerto Rico fallout is ‘spreading like wildfire’ in Pennsylvania

Politico reports: Donald Trump has a serious Puerto Rico problem — in Pennsylvania. Many Puerto Rican voters in the state are furious about racist and demeaning comments delivered at a Trump rally. Some say their dismay is giving Kamala Harris a new opening to win over the state’s Latino voters, particularly nearly half a million Pennsylvanians of Puerto Rican descent. Evidence of the backlash was immediate on Monday: A nonpartisan Puerto Rican group drafted a letter urging its members to…

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Judge Michael Luttig: If Republicans are unwilling to put America before their party now, they never will

Judge Michael Luttig: If Republicans are unwilling to put America before their party now, they never will

J. Michael Luttig writes: We Americans live in faith with our Constitution and with the past generations of Americans who swore to protect it and fought to defend it. One week from today, we will decide whether Donald Trump is fit to be president of the United States again. He is not. When we entrusted our Constitution and our democracy with him before, he betrayed us. Campaigning for the presidency again, he now promises to exact vengeance against his fellow…

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How Elon Musk, an erstwhile ‘free speech absolutist,’ became Trump’s chief propagandist

How Elon Musk, an erstwhile ‘free speech absolutist,’ became Trump’s chief propagandist

The Washington Post reports: The top political accounts on X have seen their audiences crumble in the months before the election, a signal of the platform’s diminishing influence and usefulness to political discourse under billionaire owner Elon Musk, a Washington Post analysis found. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have struggled to win the attention they once enjoyed on the platform formerly known as Twitter, according to The Post’s review of months of data for the 100 top-tweeting congressional…

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Without chaos theory social science will never understand the world

Without chaos theory social science will never understand the world

Brian Klaas writes: On 30 October 1926, Henry and Mabel Stimson stepped off a steam train in Kyoto, Japan and set in motion an unbroken chain of events that, two decades later, led to the deaths of 140,000 people in a city more than 300 km away. The American couple began their short holiday in Japan’s former imperial capital by walking from the railway yard to their room at the nearby Miyako Hotel. It was autumn. The maples had turned…

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‘Today we are all Puerto Ricans’

‘Today we are all Puerto Ricans’

  Rolling Stone reports: Ana Navarro and Sunny Hostin did not hold back when discussing the racist jokes made during Donald Trump‘s rally in New York City on Sunday. During Monday’s episode of The View, the two Latina hosts slammed Tony Hinchcliffe’s jokes as he opened for Trump with a horrid comedy set. During Sunday’s rally, Hinchcliffe made headlines for describing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” saying that Latinos “love making babies,” and joked that Black people…

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Trump is psychologically preparing Americans for an assault on the electoral system

Trump is psychologically preparing Americans for an assault on the electoral system

Anne Applebaum writes: In the final week of this election season, the Republican Party is running two different campaigns. One of them is an ugly and angry but conventional political enterprise. Donald Trump and other Republicans make speeches; party operatives seek to get out the vote; money is spent in swing states; television and radio advertisements proliferate. The people running that campaign are focused on winning the election. Last night, in New York City’s Madison Square Garden, we caught a…

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LGBTQ+ voters in these 4 states could swing the 2024 presidential election

LGBTQ+ voters in these 4 states could swing the 2024 presidential election

LGBTQ+ voters lean heavily Democratic, and they tend to turn out in high numbers. Dani VG via Getty Images By Dorian Rhea Debussy, The Ohio State University Victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election may come down to LGBTQ+ voters. Polling data shows that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are running in a near-dead heat in four states – Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. And as a scholar of LGBTQ+ politics, I suspect that LGBTQ+ voters could play an…

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Over 200,000 subscribers flee Washington Post after Bezos blocks Harris endorsement

Over 200,000 subscribers flee Washington Post after Bezos blocks Harris endorsement

NPR reports: The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president. More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure…

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Israeli parliament votes to ban UNRWA from Israel within 90 days

Israeli parliament votes to ban UNRWA from Israel within 90 days

The Guardian reports: Israel’s parliament has voted to ban the UN relief and works agency (Unrwa) from the country within 90 days, in defiance of US and other international pressure to maintain the largest provider of humanitarian assistance to the country’s Palestinian population. In a 92-10 vote late on Monday, the Knesset banned the agency, which operates in Israel according to a 1967 treaty, from conducting “any activity” or providing any service inside Israel, including the areas of annexed East…

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