Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

The pro-Trump Republicans and conservatives got one thing right about their anti-Trump former comrades: Never Trump was not fundamentally a political movement. It was a moral reflex. Will that reflex now be integrated into normal politics in the post-Trump era? If it can, it will transform American politics—and very possibly save the country from the forces of polarization, extremism, bigotry, and authoritarianism.

France has passed a new law criminalising the use of so-called "conversion therapy" to attempt to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQ people.

The law had already been overwhelmingly backed in the French upper house, the Senate, where it was passed by 305 votes to 28, with the conservative Republicans party opposing it.

United Nations experts have repeatedly condemned conversion therapy, which can use group sessions, injections, electric shocks and prayer in its attempts to alter LGBTQ people's identities.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, declared that she would not support undermining the Senate filibuster to enact new laws under any circumstances.

she believed that a unilateral Democratic move to weaken the filibuster would only foster growing political division.

“These bills help treat the symptoms of the disease, but they do not fully address the disease itself,”

A mere mention of colleagues such as Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, Republican leaders with whom Cheney once worked closely, elicits from her a kind of visceral contempt. “It makes me really sad and it makes me really angry,” Cheney told me in Laramie in a slow, measured tone. She said she has watched in disgust as so many people she once admired have stood by and not only ignored the obvious threat of Trump, but embraced him. “It makes me realize: We have too many people in our party who don’t understand our history, who don’t understand why we take the oath, who don’t understand what our obligation is,”

The colleagues she speaks of most favorably these days tend to be Democrats, many of them female. In Laramie, she singled out Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania as “serious people who do their homework and love their country.”

Cheney identifies her work on the January 6 committee—made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans—as the most important thing she’s done in her professional life.

emember Manuel in Fawlty Towers? “He’s from Barcelona” was Basil’s explanation for his apparent idiocies, which the guests (and the audience) accepted because Spanish workers were the bottom of the pile. Poor and put-upon, they took low-grade jobs in Britain to get away from political instability, poverty and rotten infrastructure.

A holiday in 2022 Spain suggests the tables have turned. The airports are efficient, the roads good and the streets clean. Nobody talks about politics, because the government is sensible and stable.

A Spanish member of our party described a trip to Britain a few weeks ago. Arriving at Heathrow, his suitcase took two and a half hours to come through. There was “garbage everywhere” in London; his trains were delayed or cancelled; when he managed to board one he had to stand for two hours. Departing from Manchester airport, it took two hours to check his suitcase in. “It didn’t feel like a developed country,” he said. Political instability, rising poverty and rotten infrastructure: Manuel would have been at home in 2022 Britain.

“I found the exhibition very beautiful,” Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, said after her personal tour of “Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author.” “As a person who knows the issue pretty well, I found many things I didn’t know.”

for Ms. Meloni and others who grew up in a post-Fascist universe that could not publicly look to the recent Italian past for heroes, Tolkien’s adventures — tales of warriors, invading armies and everyday folk defending their homelands — supplied a safe space to articulate their worldview. They dressed in character. They sang along with the extremist folk band Fellowship of the Ring at jamborees of right-wing youth called Camp Hobbit.

that esoteric subculture has followed her up to Italy’s temples of high art

Salvadoran authorities have committed "massive" human rights violations, including thousands of arbitrary detentions and violations of due process, torture, and ill-treatment, according to a new report from Amnesty International.

The report, released Thursday, found that since late March, nearly 2% of the country has been detained, with at least 18 people having died in state custody.

More than 36,000 people have been detained since

What has changed, however, is the behavior of Republican elites, who used to push back against conspiracy theories but now cheerfully embrace them whenever it seems politically expedient.

Which, I’d argue, is where voodoo economics comes in — not as an idea but as a determinant of the kind of people who became Republican politicians.

The rise of supply-side economics coincided with the rise of movement conservatism — an interlocking network of elected officials, media organizations, think tanks and lobbying firms. Because the movement’s core ideology involved reducing taxes on the rich, it was lavishly supported by billionaires and corporate interests, and this in turn meant that it offered job security to anyone who remained sufficiently loyal.

raq's new parliament elected Sunni lawmaker Mohammed al-Halbousi as speaker on Sunday, marking an important step towards establishing a new government three months after a national election.

When the session resumed Halbousi was elected for a second term as speaker, defeating Mashahadani, a former speaker of the first parliament set in 2006. Halbousi won with 200 votes, according to a statement from 329-seat parliament.

Parliament now has 30 days from the first session to elect the country's new president, who will then ask the largest bloc in parliament to form a government.

The democratic nations of the world are in a global struggle against authoritarianism

But that struggle also has domestic fronts — the need to defeat the mini-Putins now found across the Western democracies. These are the demagogues who lie with Putinesque brazenness, who shred democratic institutions with Putinesque bravado, who strut the world’s stage with Putin’s amoral schoolboy machismo while pretending to represent all that is traditional and holy.

In the United States that, of course, is Donald Trump. This moment of heightened danger and crisis makes it even clearer that the No. 1 domestic priority for all Americans who care about democracy is to make sure Trump never sees the inside of the Oval Office ever again.

Vaccinations were simply not a priority of zero-Covid policy, whose primary aim was to contain if not eliminate the virus. The health system remains ill equipped and underfunded, with a shortage of critical care facilities. There is also a chronic shortage of fever-reducing drugs such as ibuprofen, even though China is the world’s biggest producer of them.

Why was China so ill prepared? The answer lies in the nature of Xi’s increasingly autocratic rule. Zero-Covid was part of the cult of Xi. It defined everything in China, and to question it was to question him — dangerous in today’s China. It is hard to say what precisely triggered his abrupt reversal at the height of winter when the dangers of rapid spread are greatest. The economy is certainly faltering badly, but the popular conclusion in China is that the protests forced Xi’s hand. That could have profound consequences, since an emboldened population will be potentially troubling for a party whose survival relies in part on fear of challenging its rule.

“It will be financial chaos,” predicted Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, when asked about a potential brush with default. “Our fiscal problems will be meaningfully worse. … Our geopolitical standing in the world will be undermined.”

Womack and other Republicans acknowledged that the “real question” is if their own party can shore up the 218 votes needed in the House to pass a bill. With tensions simmering among the GOP’s far-right and moderate ranks — and only four votes to spare in a narrow majority — Republicans said they need to show progress if they hope to put new pressure on Democrats.

More than a decade later, some Republicans in Washington acknowledged that it may well take a more severe economic disruption just to force a resolution to the country’s fiscal standoff.“You can’t rule that out,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a conservative advocacy group, as he echoed the need for drastic action to reduce the federal debt. “Both sides are dug in. They’ve shown no signs of moving. Something has to change the landscape to incentivize the White House and Congress to move.”

Japan’s largest telecommunications company and the country’s biggest newspaper called for speedy legislation to restrain generative artificial intelligence, saying democracy and social order could collapse if AI is left unchecked.

the manifesto points to rising concern among American allies about the AI programs U.S.-based companies have been at the forefront of developing.

The Japanese companies’ manifesto, while pointing to the potential benefits of generative AI in improving productivity, took a generally skeptical view of the technology

According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2023 American Values Atlas, 55 percent of Trump supporters are Christian nationalists, as measured by their agreement with statements like “Being Christian is an important part of being truly American” and “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”

The Christian right increasingly sees American politics as zero-sum, meaning it is either going to triumph or face subjugation. As Justice Samuel Alito of the Supreme Court was recorded saying, “One side or the other is going to win.”