Новости за 19.04.2024

When last we checked in on Trump’s new media company, which has the full name of Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) and trades on Nasdaq under the monogrammatic ticket symbol DJT, the shares had gone public at around $60 a share, spiked close to $80 (giving the company a $10 billion valuation), and then—to use a Wall Street cliché—“consolidated” closer to $40 a share. Now, as Trump is mounting a “napping defense” in his New York City criminal trial, shares in Trump Media have fallen to $36 $29 $25 $22 a share... Читать дальше...

On April 3, Michael Shellenberger tweeted a series of excerpts from emails by X executives dubbed, "Twitter Files Brazil", which alleged to expose crimes by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Moraes, he claimed, had pressed criminal charges against Twitter Brasil's lawyer for its refusal to turn over personal information on political enemies. Elon Musk quickly shared the tweets and they viralized and were embraced by the international far right, to the joy of former President Bolsonaro and his supporters. Читать дальше...

The fact that all of the humanity-denying, climate-destroying hi-jinx seems to be coming to a head will undoubtedly mean some misery for those of us living through this time. But in the same way that historical (or economic) determinism implies a starting point and consequences, we may be living through the seeds that spread--that this is no way to live. We all know it in our hearts, that is, those of us not in the “ruling class”. I still use that term in homage to Aaron Bushnell. More

The New York Times coverage of the Israeli carnage in Gaza, like that of other mainstream US media, is a disgrace to journalism. This assertion should not surprise anyone. US media is driven neither by facts nor morality, but by agendas, calculating and power-hungry. The humanity of 120 thousand dead and wounded Palestinians because of More

Even staunch Israeli apologists are disquieted by the Palestinian body count. Yet it takes strong forces of experience, and even stronger forces of reason, to realign one's allegiances and transgress against the tribe. So these apologists sublimate their discomfiture by lamenting, vaguely, the terrible suffering in Gaza–stopping short of blaming Israel for its own heinous acts.  More

  Let us stop to smile at the ridiculousness of The New York Times’ rightmost columnist Ross Douthat. A recent Douthat piece is titled “Can the Left Be Happy?” It accuses “the [US] left” of being intrinsically despondent, discontentedm and pessimistic. Douthat pins his argument mainly on the leftish Black author Ta-Nehesi Coates’ following pessimistic statement in The Atlantic eleven More

On 18 May the Security Council was seized of a resolution that would have granted UN membership to Palestine.Twelve members of the SC voted in favor of the resolution, while two countries – the UK and Switzerland – abstained. The US vetoed it.[1] I would have been surprised if the US had voted in favor More

I’ve always known my Arab culture is worth celebrating. I heard it in Syrian tenor Sabah Fakhri’s powerful voice reverberating in my mom’s car on the way to piano lessons and soccer practice during my youth. I smelled it in the za’atar, Aleppo pepper, allspice, and cumin permeating the air in the family kitchen. I More

The U.S. puppet in Ecuador, President Daniel Noboa, is on quite a roll. First Mexico severs diplomatic relations with Ecuador, after cops storm the Mexican embassy on April 5 to arrest former vice president Jorge Glas, taking refuge there, and in the process beat up embassy staff. Next, Nicaragua ruptures ties. One can only wonder More

World events serve as a stage of constant search for how best to construct and maintain society, which is an underlying theme of some decades ago found in the works of Herbert Marcuse, 1898–1979, German-American philosopher of prominent fame during the 1960s considered an intellectual giant of his time. Charles Reitz, widely recognized as a More

In 2004, I was a single mom raising three daughters on my own. I worked three jobs, including an overnight shift as a translator at our local hospital, to make ends meet. Every time I stood in line at the supermarket, I worried about what I would have to put back on the shelf to More

On April 17, the US Senate declined to try Alejandro Mayorkas, US Secretary of Homeland Security, on two articles of impeachment sent by the US House of Representatives. The maneuver involved a majority of the Senate “taking well” two points of order raised by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to the effect that neither More

If there’s one thing I could tell lawmakers, it would be to bring back the expanded, monthly, fully refundable Child Tax Credit. Those monthly payments of up to $300 per child cut child poverty nearly in half in just a few months. And when the credit expired in late 2021, child poverty immediately shot back up. More

It’s surprising that human infants as young as 10 months may be able to identify social rank. Research suggests that infants learn to distinguish who around them is dominant, using relative body size as a cue. Experiments by University of Oslo psychologist Lotte Thomsen indicate that infants may use the cue of body size to predict that a More

O.J. hovered over the end of my bed. His white turf shoes were inches above the Astroturf and he’d never return to earth, even if, paradoxically, he was sure to run for a touchdown, football cradled in his right arm. His eyes were hidden in the shadows of his helmet, its red buffalo turned slightly More

Haiti has descended into chaos. It’s had no president or parliament — and no elections either –for eight long years. Its unelected prime minister Ariel Henry resigned recently when gang violence at the airport in Port-au-Prince made it impossible for him to return to the country after a trip to Guyana. Haiti is the poorest country in More

Fifty anti-war activists from eight states converged on the giant nuclear weapons plant in Kansas City, Missouri Monday, April 15, Tax Day, in a protest against the ongoing production of WMD, and against plans to expand the site — which would double its current size. During the early morning demonstration, three people were handcuffed and More

It is much more acceptable in policy circles to talk about ways to make tax and transfer policy more progressive than ways to structure the market to prevent the distribution of income from being so unequal in the first place. I always harpon this failure, since it seems much easier to keep rich people from More

“The era of big government is over,” Bill Clinton announced in his 1996 State of the Union Address. “But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.” In these years a more conservative mindset took hold of the Democratic party in full force, a shift often associated with the More

I stumbled into this project in 2004, while working as a campaign field manager for a Washington State ballot initiative about nuclear cleanup. I had recently finished college and I had never heard of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation before joining the campaign. I didn’t know that Washington had produced weapons-grade plutonium for more than four More

“The revolution has always been in the hands of the very young. The young always inherit the revolution. You can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution.” -Huey P. Newton “Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo.” -John Sinclair It seems like I’m always the last person to hear the bad news these More

“Mr. Netanyahu faces a delicate calculation — how to respond to Iran in order not to look weak, while trying to avoid alienating the Biden administration and other allies already impatient with Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.” Yeah, this is virtually nothing: a random, utterly forgettable quote pulled from the New York Times — from More

I have hundreds of thousands of visual diaries archived away. I am much more of a visual dreamer than I am a visual diarist: Maybe I am mostly a lion tamer of visual captures. There is a primal scream that no known creature can hear it: The scream is engaged to a moment  when I espy More

There have been a lot of negative stories in the press lately about cultivated meat. For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. It has the potentially to dramatically reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions, pandemic risk, and the suffering we inflict on animals. Conservative states are trying to ban the More

Walking home one evening, I came to an intersection. A family and a couple were waiting for the light, the family bantering about crossing against the light. “My knees won’t let me go that fast!” the grandma warned. “Ma’am, I’m with you!” the man from the couple called out with a laugh. “My wife doesn’t More