Pauline Bock writes: As of this week, a crowdfunding campaign set up by the French far right in support of the police officer who shot and killed Nahel M, a 17-year-old from Nanterre, has now surpassed €1.4m. Around the same time that Nahel’s killer’s fund passed the €1m mark, it was reported that at least 120 young people who had been arrested in the unrest unleashed by his death had already been sent to prison. So far, this “swift, firm…
The Wall Street Journal reports: A centrist group is laying the groundwork to run an alternative candidate if the 2024 presidential race becomes a Donald Trump–Joe Biden rematch. It is called No Labels, but many political strategists have their own label for it: spoiler. History and recent polling suggest a third-party candidate has little chance of winning and could tip the election to Trump, the Republican former president who No Labels itself says is too dangerous to return to the…
David Siders writes: “Things have changed in America,” Tim Wilder, the pastor at a church in Osceola County, Fla., near Disney World, told me as we rode alone in a dark shuttle bus back from a day of meetings at the city’s convention center to a nearby hotel one night. “I believe we’re in an anti-Christian nation.” The next day, at the meeting site, Angela Mathews, a retired high school history and English teacher from Murphy, Texas, told me, “It’s…
Prem Thakker writes: Over the weekend, Ron DeSantis’s rapid response team shared a video railing against twice-impeached and twice-indicted former President Donald Trump for previous expressions of support for the LGBTQ community, proudly contrasting it with DeSantis’s outward crusade against America’s LGBTQ population. To wrap up “Pride Month,” let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it… pic.twitter.com/FT7LdW4vls — DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) June 30, 2023 The video begins by focusing on Trump’s…
David A. Bell writes: What the street barricade was to France in the 19th century, the burning car has become in the 21st: a preferred means of violent protest, and a key theatrical symbol of political defiance. In 2005, after two boys named Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré died while running from police, rioters burned close to 9,000 cars across France in unrest that ultimately led President Jacques Chirac to declare a state of emergency. This year, after an officer…
The Guardian reports: Israel has launched a major aerial and ground offensive into the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, its biggest military operation in the Palestinian territory in years, in what it described as an “extensive counter-terrorism effort”. At least eight Palestinians were killed and 50 injured, 10 seriously, in the attack that began at about 1am on Monday, and the death toll is likely to rise, according to the Palestinian health ministry. On Monday afternoon, Israeli sources suggested…
Shadi Hamid writes: On July 3, 2013, the Arab Spring ended. A military coup ousted the democratically elected government of Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian president who was a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood. Today, a decade later, the role the United States played in the events leading up to the coup, and the coup itself, is still contentious. Brotherhood supporters blame the Obama administration for its unwillingness to stop the coup or even to call it one. Coup supporters, meanwhile,…
The Observer reports: In the early 20th century, Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla dreamed of pulling limitless free electricity from the air around us. Ever ambitious, Tesla was thinking on a vast scale, effectively looking at the Earth and upper atmosphere as two ends of an enormous battery. Needless to say, his dreams were never realised, but the promise of air-derived electricity – hygroelectricity – is now capturing researchers’ imaginations again. The difference: they’re not thinking big, but very, very small….
The first email subscription service I used for this site was through Feedburner. They was acquired and then abandoned by Google, so I switched to Mailchimp. Before long, they changed their terms of service and so I switched to MailerLite. Same thing. It’s taken me a while to sign up with yet another service, but now it’s up and running — this time I’m using follow.it Over the next few days I may need to make adjustments to the configuration…
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw writes: In October 1991, I was part of the legal team that supported Anita Hill in her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in which she bravely alleged sexual harassment at the hands of now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. His confirmation by that committee, chaired by then-Democratic Sen. Joe Biden, was one of the most consequential moments in setting the future trajectory of the ideals that matter most to me — civil rights, gender equity and our…
The Washington Post reports: In a rare public speech this spring, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson talked to law school graduates about the challenges of starting a new job and about her love of musical theater. One of her favorites, she said, is the smash hit “Hamilton.” A particular song resonates: “History Has Its Eyes on You.” “Given my own experience over the past year, I think it’s pretty obvious why,” she told the crowd at Boston University School of…
The New York Times reports: The Ukrainian soldiers thought the Russians would quickly retreat from Neskuchne, a tiny village in southern Ukraine, especially after a concerted artillery barrage and a rocket strike on their headquarters. Instead, the Russians dug in, fighting for two days before giving up the village last month, leaving their dead decaying on the roadside and piles of expended ammunition around their makeshift defenses. The Russian defeat, on June 9, was Ukraine’s first win in a prolonged…
The Observer reports: Suddenly, Yevgeny Prigozhin is a phantom. Is he in Belarus or St Petersburg? In unconfirmed footage that makes him look like a Bond villain, he struts across a rooftop, shadowed by a muscled bodyguard, takes a seat in a helicopter, and vanishes into the skies of St Petersburg. For nearly a decade, Prigozhin has sown scandal in Russia, creating a troll factory empire, leading Russia’s interference into foreign elections and bankrolling the Wagner mercenary group that fought…
Radley Balko writes: In a staggering report last month, the Department of Justice documented pervasive abuse, illegal use of force, racial bias and systemic dysfunction in the Minneapolis Police Department. City police officers engaged in brutality or made racist comments, even as a department investigator rode along in a patrol car. Complaints about police abuse were often slow-walked or dismissed without investigation. And after George Floyd’s death, instead of ending the policy of racial profiling, the police just buried the…