Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
DETROIT — Former presidents and preachers joined a parade of pop stars Friday in a singing, hip-swaying, piano-pounding farewell to Aretha Franklin, remembering the Queen of Soul as a powerful force for musical and political change and a steadfast friend.
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-au/entertainment/celebrity/a-change-is-gonna-come...
By Anthony Faiola & Marina Lopez from Boa Vista, Brazil @ WashingtonPost.com, Aug. 30. Illustrated with numerous photos by Gui Christ and graphics.
Some Brazilians are lashing out as migrants flood their hospitals and schools — and trigger concerns about crime and questions about identity in a country that has long been culturally walled off by its distinctive language and habits.
The battle over how to project the future population of the United States has profound political implications.
Op-ed by Thomas B. Edsall @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 30
The question of whether America will become a majority-minority nation — and when that might happen — is intensely disputed, of enormous political import and extraordinarily complex.
Two articles that appeared in the opinion section of The Times over the past few years made the case that misleading statistical artifacts used by the Census Bureau have increased the fear of a majority-minority America, a fear that played a crucial role in the 2016 election.
Both Richard Alba, of CUNY, in “The Myth of the White Minority,” and Herbert Gans, of Columbia, in “The Census and Right Wing Hysteria,” argued that questionable census classifications led to an undercount of America’s white majority. This anxiety over the decline of white hegemony, in turn, helped propel a segment of conservative voters to cast ballots for Donald Trump.
Not so fast, say William Frey of Brookings, Lilliana Mason of the University of Maryland and Justin Gest of George Mason University. They argue that mixed-race Americans who identify as white are not always viewed — or accepted — as white by other Americans. As Mason put it to me in an email, “people who are racially motivated to dislike immigrants” will “not be assuaged by the argument that one day immigrants will just be white people." [....]
By Aaron David Miller & Richard Solkosky @ Politico Magazine, Aug. 29
In our 65-plus years of experience working on U.S. Middle East policy, we’ve never seen anything like the Trump administration’s willingness to prostitute American interests to Saudi Arabia.
By Rebecca Morin @ Politico.com, Aug. 30
A California man was arrested Thursday for making violent threats to The Boston Globe, including threatening to shoot the newspaper's employees and calling them the "enemy of the people." It was the clearest example yet of someone using President Donald Trump's insults to target journalists.
Robert Chain of Encino, California, was charged with one count of making threatening communications in interstate commerce, according to the Department of Justice. Chain threatened Globe reporters after the newspaper called on other media organizations across the nation to rebuke Trump's rhetoric toward the media.
Chain, 86, will appear in federal court in Los Angeles Thursday afternoon and will be transferred to Boston at a later date, the DOJ said. [....]
By Alex Marshall @ NYTimes.com/Arts, Aug. 30
[....] Wednesday night, when the Duke of Sussex — as he is officially known — showed up at the Victoria Palace Theater in London with his wife, the former Meghan Markle'[....]
At one point, Harry got onstage to thank the cast and crew and briefly sang a line from the show.
“You say …,” he crooned — the opening words of “You’ll Be Back,” sung by King George III [....]
By Murray Waas @ New York Review of Books Daily, Aug. 29
[....] Aside from the unexplained, six-day delay of the White House to act on Eisenberg’s information, these new disclosures, building on my July 31 reporting for the Daily, constitute the strongest evidence to date that President Trump may have obstructed justice. Perjury and obstruction of justice cases depend largely on whether a prosecutor can demonstrate the intent and motivation of the person they want to charge. It’s not enough to prove that the person attempted to impede an ongoing criminal investigation; the statute requires a prosecutor to prove that the person did so with the corrupt intent to protect himself or someone else from prosecution. The president’s legal team has claimed that Trump did nothing wrong because he did not understand that Flynn was in criminal jeopardy when, according to the former FBI director’s testimony, he asked Comey to go easy on Flynn. The new information that Trump and others in the White House were aware that the intercepts revealed that Flynn had lied to the FBI directly contradicts those claims.
The intercepts read by Eisenberg showed not only that Flynn had misled the FBI, but that Flynn had also earlier misled Vice President Mike Pence [....]
.By Tariq Ali @ London Review of Books for Aug. 30 issue. Home page summary:
Contrary to the radical slogans of the late 1940s, India’s wasn’t a ‘fake independence’. Self-rule was achieved at a high price and it meant something, but it incorporated many colonial practices. The new masters benefited, but for the untouchables, tribals and others conditions remained the same or got worse. According to recent estimates by India’s National Crime Records Bureau, every 16 minutes a crime is committed by caste Hindus against an untouchable – or Dalit, as they prefer to be called. The figures are horrific: every month 52 Dalits are killed and six kidnapped; every week almost thirty Dalit women are raped by caste Hindus. This will be a serious underestimate
It is actually a book review of
Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India by Sujatha Gidla, Daunt, 341 pp, £14.99