Day: December 21, 2019

Thousands of people have been arrested, and at least 23 people have been killed in the last 10 days, as police tried to quash widespread protests over a new citizenship law in India.

Protests erupted throughout the country following passage of the Citizen Amendment Bill (CAB) on December 11 by India’s parliament. The bill clears a path to citizenship for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians who came to India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.

It does not do the same for Muslim immigrants, however, which has caused its critics to call it a discriminatory threat to democracy that …

Days after being impeached by the House of Representatives, President Donald Trump seemed to echo and endorse Russian President Vladimir Putin’s take on the impeachment process on Twitter.

In his annual marathon press conference Thursday in Moscow, Putin argued Trump was impeached for “far-fetched” reasons. “It’s simply a continuation of internal political struggle,” Putin said. Echoing a Republican talking point, the Russian president continued, “The party that lost the [2016] election, the Democratic Party, is trying to achieve results by other means.”

Democrats, Putin claimed — again, as Republicans did during impeachment proceedings Wednesday — have always wanted …

In signing a military spending bill Friday, President Donald Trump achieved a long-held goal of his administration: expanding the military to include a newly created Space Force.

The 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) increases total military spending by about $20 billion, or 2.8 percent. It increases troop pay by 3.1 percent, includes $658.4 billion for Defense Department and Department of Energy national security programs, and also puts $71.5 billion towards ongoing foreign wars. But perhaps the most attention grabbing provision of the bill was creation of the Space Force.

After pushback from top military brass over the last two …

During a of the movie discussion podcast Blank Check with Griffin and David, the hosts revisited Jonathan Demme’s 1984 film Swing Shift.

Considered by many (including me) to be one of the great lost classics of American movie history, Swing Shift was originally conceived as a dramedy about American women working in a factory while American men went away to fight World War II. Built around Goldie Hawn, then one of the biggest stars in the world, and the up-and-coming Christine Lahti, a bootleg of the original director’s cut has floated around Hollywood for years, accompanied by whispers …

“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

President Ronald Reagan uttered those words in his 1981 inaugural address to the country. He was referring specifically to the government’s role in helping bring the US out of an economic crisis. But since then, it’s become a kind of blanket truism in Republican circles. The government is a perennial boogeyman, and the main policy objective on the right has been to reduce the role of government in public life.

But there’s a problem: Many who accept this dogma are the very people who need the government the …

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It’s fun to vote on the U-S-M-C-A

• With bipartisan support, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement passed in the House on Thursday, replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement by a massive bipartisan margin. [Washington Post / Erica Werner]
• The deal includes tougher requirements for manufacturing cars, trucks, and their parts in North America; gives the US access to the Canadian dairy market; extends

…

Paul Davis literally helped build Amazon.com from scratch. Now he says it’s time to tear it apart.

Davis, a computer programmer who was Jeff Bezos’ second hire in 1994 before the shopping site even launched, told Recode on Friday that the company should be forced to separate the Amazon Marketplace, which allows outside merchants to sell goods to Amazon customers, from the company’s core retail business that stocks and sells products itself.

His reasoning? He’s troubled by reports of Amazon squeezing and exploiting the merchants who stock its digital shelves in ways that benefit Amazon, the company, above all else. …