Music: Helge Lien Trio — ‘Krystall Revisited’
Kamala Harris inspires young voters (and older voters too)
BREAKING: According to new CBS polling, Kamala Harris has opened up a 62-37 lead on Donald Trump among young voters. The Democratic Party is inspired and ready to defeat Donald Trump. — Kamala’s Wins (@harris_wins) July 23, 2024 NPR reports: In the hours after President Biden announced he would be stepping off the ticket and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, Gen Z voters sprang into action online. From coconut tree and “brat”-coded memes to official endorsements of Harris from youth-focused…
Trump’s mass deportation plan echoes concentration camp history
Andrea Pitzer writes: The Republican National Convention hit rock bottom on its third day in Milwaukee, Wis., on July 17, with a sea of signs calling for “Mass Deportation Now.” If former president Donald Trump is elected for a second term, he and his advisers promise to remove from the U.S., via forced expulsions and deportation camps, as many as 20 million people—a number larger than the country’s current estimated population of undocumented residents. Put into effect, this scheme would devolve quickly into a vast 21st-century…
Major labor unions urge Biden to halt military aid to Israel
The Hill reports: A group of major labor unions pushed President Biden in a letter Tuesday to stop military aid to Israel as it continues to wage its war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. “We believe that immediately cutting US military aid to the Israeli government is necessary to bring about a peaceful resolution to this conflict,” the letter reads. Signatories include the United Auto Workers (UAW), the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), the International Union of Painters and…
Netanyahu’s visit to the U.S. could be crucial to a ceasefire deal. But does he actually want one?
CNN reports: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu landed in Washington on Monday to far less fanfare than he would have expected just a day earlier. His highly-anticipated visit – chock-full of meetings with top US officials and a prized address to Congress – will now undoubtedly be overshadowed by US President Joe Biden’s stunning decision to drop out of the presidential race. But as detailed ceasefire negotiations aimed at turning a framework agreement into a final deal stretch into their…
China challenges West on Gaza by offering Palestinians a new platform
Middle East Eye reports: As 14 Palestinian leaders lined up for a photograph in Beijing on Tuesday, they each made sure to shake hands afterwards with one man: Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Tuesday’s Palestinian unity talks, where an agreement for a post-war Gaza framework was signed, were an opportunity for China to provide a rival platform to Israel and its western allies on the future of Palestine and the Middle East. “China’s major goal is to gain consent and…
WHO ‘extremely worried’ about possible Gaza polio outbreak
BBC News reports: The World Health Organization is “extremely worried” about the possibility of an outbreak of the highly infectious polio virus in Gaza after traces were found in wastewater. Dr Ayadil Saparbekov, head of the WHO’s team in the Palestinian territories, told reporters a risk assessment was being implemented and that in the meantime health workers were providing protection advice to Gaza’s 2.3 million population. But, he added, it would be “very difficult” for people to follow it, given…
Why did Homo sapiens outlast all other human species?
Mindy Weisberger writes: Modern humans (Homo sapiens) are the sole surviving representatives of the human family tree, but we’re the last sentence in an evolutionary story that began approximately 6 million years ago and spawned at least 18 species known collectively as hominins. There were at least nine Homo species — including H. sapiens — distributed around Africa, Europe and Asia by about 300,000 years ago, according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. One by one, all except H. sapiens disappeared. Neanderthals and a Homo group known as the Denisovans lived…
Music: Helge Lien Trio — ‘Adam’ ft. Tore Brunborg
The prosecutor versus the felon
CNN reports: Kamala Harris has spent much more of her life as a prosecutor than as a senator or vice president – and that is exactly how she is now going to run against Donald Trump. In sessions that were quietly underway at the Naval Observatory even before Joe Biden’s disastrous debate, Harris and her inner circle had already landed on the plan to look past whoever Trump picked as his running mate and focus almost exclusively on the former…
Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden is not antidemocratic
Richard L Hasen writes: With news of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, some Republicans are claiming he cannot be removed from the presidential ballot in November and that in any case it is undemocratic to do so. The first claim is legally unsupported and the second one is ludicrous. I fully expect the Democrats’ legitimate nominees for president and vice president to be listed on the ballot in November. Let’s start with the legal issue. The premise…
A GOP campaign that had been optimized to beat Joe Biden must now be reinvented
Tim Alberta writes: Republicans I spoke with today, some of them still hungover from celebrating what felt to many like a victory-night celebration in Milwaukee, registered shock at the news of Biden’s departure. Party officials had left town believing the race was all but over. Now they were confronting the reality of reimagining a campaign—one that had been optimized, in every way, to defeat Biden—against a new and unknown challenger. “So, we are forced to spend time and money on…
Biden was finally convinced he couldn’t win
Politico reports: Early Saturday, Biden told senior aides it was “full steam ahead” for the campaign. But by later that evening, he had changed his mind following a long discussion with his two closest aides. Steve Ricchetti, who’s been with Biden since his days in the Senate, drove to see the president at his house on the Delaware shore on Friday. Mike Donilon arrived on Saturday. The two men, both of whom had been by Biden’s side during key decisions…
Project 2025 poses far-reaching threats to science
Scientific American reports: Project 2025, the sweeping right-wing blueprint for a new kind of U.S. presidency, would sabotage science-based policies that address climate change, the environment, abortion, health care access, technology and education. It would impose religious and conservative ideology on the federal civil service to such an extent that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has, dubiously, tried to distance himself from the plan. But in 2022 Trump said the Heritage Foundation—the think tank that authored Project 2025—would “lay the…
RFK Jr explores opportunities for serving Trump
The Washington Post reports: Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. held talks this month with former president Donald Trump about endorsing his campaign and taking a job in a second Trump administration, overseeing a portfolio of health and medical issues, according to four people familiar with the matter. The discussions, which began hours after the attempted assassination of Trump at a rally on July 13, did not result in an agreement amid concerns in Trump’s orbit about the complications…
The people who feed America are going hungry
Grist reports: Standing knee-deep in an emerald expanse, a row of trees offering respite from the sweltering heat, Rosa Morales diligently relocates chipilín, a Central American legume, from one bed of soil to another. The 34-year-old has been coming to the Campesinos’ Garden run by the Farmworker Association of Florida in Apopka for the last six months, taking home a bit of produce each time she visits. The small plot that hugs a soccer field and community center is an…