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Manfredi's "art war" consists of setting works of art on fire to protest cuts to Italy's arts budget. He's pledged to incinerate two or three pieces of art each week from a museum collection housing about 1,000 exhibits.

The budgets of state-run museums, archaeological sites and libraries are among the hardest hit.

"We want the institutions in Italy and around the world to understand that the culture is very important," he says. "And it's not possible when there is an economic problem in the world, [that] the first that the government destroys is the art."

One of the company’s most compelling arguments for its quest to spread GMOs is that Monsanto products are the solution to world hunger

The company’s defenders claim that opposing GMOs is a luxury of Western privilege that denies developing countries vital resources to feed impoverished communities

According to Food Sovereignty Ghana, seven African countries held anti-Monsanto rallies on Saturday

Back in 1647, Christmas was banned in the kingdoms of England (which at the time included Wales), Scotland and Ireland and it didn’t work out very well. Following a total ban on everything festive, from decorations to gatherings, rebellions broke out across the country. While some activity took the form of hanging holly in defiance, other action was far more radical and went on to have historical consequences.

The protestant reformation had restructured churches across the British Isles, and holy days, Christmas included, were abolished. The usual festivities during the 12 days of Christmas (December 25 to January 5) were deemed unacceptable.

Christmas Day, however, didn’t pass quietly. People across England, Scotland and Ireland flouted the rules.

The US Postal Service has temporarily removed some mailboxes in several major cities across the country,

"It's part of our normal procedures to keep our employees and customers safe during times of protest or when large crowds are gathered near postal facilities, on postal routes, or by mailboxes

At least 14 post offices in the nation's capital will be temporarily closed as well on Inauguration Day.

"The past week has been marked by an extraordinary escalation of unlawful force deliberately targeting reporters," the ACLU says in Wednesday's filing.

"We are facing a full-scale assault on the First Amendment freedom of the press," Brian Hauss, staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in a statement. "We will not let these official abuses go unanswered. This is the first of many lawsuits the ACLU intends to file across the country. Law enforcement officers who target journalists will be held accountable."

Reporters have been arrested by police from Florida to Nevada; pelted by police rubber bullets fired by police from Washington, D.C. to California; and attacked by protesters from Arizona to Pennsylvania. In one of the highest-profile examples, a CNN crew was briefly taken into custody on Friday by Minnesota State Police on live TV.

The ice cream maker has called on Americans to "dismantle white supremacy" and "grapple with the sins of our past" as nationwide protests against racial injustice stretch into their eighth day.

Ben & Jerry's describes the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of a white police officer as the result of "inhumane police brutality that is perpetuated by a culture of white supremacy."

"What happened to George Floyd was not the result of a bad apple; it was the predictable consequence of a racist and prejudiced system and culture that has treated Black bodies as the enemy from the beginning," said the brand, which is owned by Unilever (UL).

For decades it was a symbol of freedom on Chinese controlled soil: every June 4, come rain or shine, tens of thousands of people would descend on Victoria Park in Hong Kong to commemorate the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Authorities in mainland China have always done their best to erase all memory of the massacre: Censoring news reports, scrubbing all mentions from the internet, arresting and chasing into exile the organizers of the protests, and keeping the relatives of those who died under tight surveillance.

In 2020, despite the lack of an organized vigil, thousands of Hongkongers went to the park anyway in defiance of the authorities. But last year, the government put more than 3,000 riot police on standby to prevent unauthorized gatherings -- and the park remained in darkness for the first time in more than three decades.

In a preregistered large-sample controlled experiment, I randomly assigned participants to receive information about the endorsement of Joe Biden by the scientific journal Nature during the COVID-19 pandemic. The endorsement message caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters. This distrust lowered the demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature, as evidenced by substantially reduced requests for Nature articles on vaccine efficacy when offered. The endorsement also reduced Trump supporters’ trust in scientists in general. The estimated effects on Biden supporters’ trust in Nature and scientists were positive, small and mostly statistically insignificant. I found little evidence that the endorsement changed views about Biden and Trump.

These results suggest that political endorsement by scientific journals can undermine and polarize public confidence in the endorsing journals and the scientific community.

... scientists don’t have any special expertise on questions of values and policy. “Sticking to the science” keeps scientists speaking on issues precisely where they ought to be trusted by the public.

was in response to President Trump’s decision on Friday to bar several news organizations from a White House briefing, including The Times.

“When The New York Times is under attack, what do we do?” Michael Zorek, a stay-at-home father from the Upper West Side of Manhattan screamed to the crowd. “Stand up! Fight back!” The group boomed back, responding with the mantra as Mr. Zorek shouted again, listing names of news organizations from BuzzFeed to the Public Broadcasting Service.

“When you look at history, the first thing dictators do is shut down the press.”

Sean Hannity used his Fox News show on Monday night to feed wild conspiracy theories that the protests erupting around the country weren’t a spontaneous display of anger against President Donald Trump. Instead, he implied they were “bankrolled” by shadowy figures.

What is your definition of white privilege? A. I think people get tripped up by the word “privilege.” I’m talking about systematic institutionalized differences. I had a lot of people writing me emails saying, I’m not privileged. For example, this weekend I was with Martin O’Malley in front of progressive liberal activists. Responding to the “Black Lives Matter” protest at the conference, he said: “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.” And the audience, which was diverse, gasped. They actually booed him. Because institutionally, if you look at incarceration rates, if you look at the criminal justice system, black people are at a disadvantage. So the moment he said that, he took it back and apologized. And some people took offense to that. Why did Martin O’Malley have to apologize for saying white lives matter? And this woman on Twitter was genuinely hurt; her tweet to me was, “My white life matters.” And I tweeted back at her and I was like, “Of course it does.” Of course it does, but your life mattering has been a given.

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these questions tend to overlook the way IQ tests are designed. As a neuropsychologist who has administered hundreds of these measures, I can tell you that their structures reflect a deeply embedded bias toward intelligence as a function of reading skills

to murder police on Monday. The chant went "we won't stop, we can't stop, 'til killer cops, are in cell blocks," according to C-SPAN footage. But WBFF cut the audio short and told viewers that the words were in fact "we won't stop, we can't stop, so kill a cop."

Jones called out the station several times for misrepresenting her words. "The interesting part that really gets to me is, where you guys edited it and stopped — like, how could that be a mistake?" she said. "Once you play that whole thing, you would know that's not something that's being said," she added. The interviewer apologized several times, and though Jones told the station she was grateful to come on, she also said she now fears for her reputation and her safety. Near the end of the interview she began to cry. "At the end of the day, people's lives are on the line," she said. "Now, even though we're doing this, I still don't feel safe because I still feel like the message is out there." "What if a crazed-out cop or a crazed-out supporter thinks I'm trying to get cops killed?" she later said, wiping tears from her face.

as more Americans label the president a racist due to his worldview, the voters who continue to back him are becoming bolder in justifying their support, citing retaliation for being viewed as backing a racist.

as the president’s overall approval ratings remain relatively low, many of those who brought him to the dance appear to be dancing more closely than ever. And they are blaming their critics

After Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) tweeted the names of maximum Trump donors in his district — which are all public record, by the way — accusing them of “fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as invaders,” the backlash from Trump-supporting Republicans was severe.

a worthwhile—and necessary—discussion about whether anyone should read the ancient Greeks in the first place, and if so why and how.

As someone who took Hum 110 more than 20 years ago, the news from campus has made me reflect on what I learned in the course. The answers, both equally true, are that I didn’t learn very much—and that I learned everything.

I slogged through the Hum 110 readings and wrote the required papers, but I can’t say that the words of Herodotus, Sappho, or Homer really sank in.

The trouble with reactionary politics is that it is fundamentally a feeling, an impulse, a reflex. It’s not a workable program. You can see that in the word itself: it’s a reaction, an emotional response to change. Sure, it can include valuable insights into past mistakes, but it can’t undo them, without massive disruption

I mention this as a way to see more clearly why the right in Britain and America is either unraveling quickly into chaos, or about to inflict probably irreparable damage on a massive scale to their respective countries. Brexit and Trump are the history of Thatcher and Reagan repeating as dangerous farce, a confident, intelligent conservatism reduced to nihilist, mindless reactionism.

But it’s the impossible reactionary agenda that is the core problem. And the reason we have a president increasingly isolated, ever more deranged, legislatively impotent, diplomatically catastrophic, and constitutionally dangerous, is not just because he is a fucking moron requiring an adult day-care center to avoid catastrophe daily.