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Post by mhbruin on Jan 18, 2024 9:51:32 GMT -8
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Slut-Shaming 101
Trump attorney Alina Habba faced repeated objections while questioning writer E. Jean Carroll in the defamation trial against former President Donald Trump.
After a rough start in her cross-examination of Carroll on Thursday, Habba continued to face problems throughout the morning court session.
As Habba tried to introduce evidence, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan shot her down.
The Trump attorney attempted to question Carroll about her income — but attorneys for the plaintiff quickly objected.
ALSO READ: A handy guide for translating Republican-speak into plain English
"Ms. Habba, this is Evidence 101," Kaplan cautioned Habba, according to Inner City Press.
Carroll's attorneys would go on to have the next ten objections sustained as Habba struggled to ask questions.
"Did you not hear me?" Kaplan asked Habba after she continued talking over one sustained objection.
At one point, Habba launched into what Courthouse News reporter Josh Russell called the "slut-shaming portion of the defense questions," reading sexually explicit tweets that had been sent by Carroll.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 18, 2024 9:54:00 GMT -8
Hard Labor for Watching SoapsRare footage obtained by BBC Korean shows North Korea publicly sentencing two teenage boys to 12 years of hard labour for watching K-dramas. The footage, which appears to have been filmed in 2022, shows two 16-year-old boys handcuffed in front of hundreds of students at an outdoor stadium. It also shows uniformed officers reprimanding the boys for not "deeply reflecting on their mistakes". South Korean entertainment, including TV, is banned in the North. Despite that, some are prepared to risk severe punishment to access K-dramas, which have a huge global audience. Footage such as this is rare, because North Korea forbids photos, videos and other evidence of life in the country from being leaked to the outside world. North Korea: Rare footage shows teens sentenced to hard labour over K-drama
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 18, 2024 9:55:27 GMT -8
The Pakistan Strikes Back
Pakistan has hit Iran with what it described as “highly coordinated” military strikes, a little more than 24 hours after Iranian air raids in Balochistan, further raising tensions between the neighbours and sparking fears of a broader conflict.
On Thursday morning, according to a statement from its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Pakistan conducted what it called an “intelligence-based operation” against hideouts of armed groups in the Sistan-Baluchestan province of Iran.
Iranian state television said at least nine people were killed in the attacks. Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the senior-most Pakistani diplomat in Tehran to “offer explanations” for the attacks.
Iran Keeps Expanding the War
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 18, 2024 9:57:08 GMT -8
It's Still the Eoncomy, Stupid
One of their latest Vibes surveys conducted by Harris Polls finds that, contrary to popular belief, Americans are feeling pretty bullish about their personal finances. Indeed, 63% rated their current financial outlook as good, with 19% calling it "very good."
Additionally, they feel optimistic about their future finances, with 66% saying 2024 will be better than 2023 and 85% betting they can improve their personal financial situation this year.
These results may seem impossibly rosy to anyone who has been following voters' views of the economy over the past couple of years. But for one thing, consumer sentiment is actually a lagging indicator as an economy starts to hum again.
I Would Guess Most of the Pessimists are Republican
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 18, 2024 10:00:20 GMT -8
‘I’ve been raped, I can help you, I can protect you’: Lawsuit alleges Trump attorney empathized with sexual harassment victim and ‘pressured’ her into signing an ‘illegal NDA’A former employee at a Donald Trump-owned golf club in New Jersey is suing the entity that owns the Trump National Golf Club, alleging she was sexually harassed by a manager, coerced into sex by him, and made to sign an “illegal NDA” by Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba. Alice Bianco, who worked as a server at the club, claims food and beverage manager Pavel Melichar repeatedly sexually harassed her throughout 2021 — eventually forcing a kiss and then coercing her to have quid pro quo sex to keep her job. Melichar’s reputation with female employees at the club soon became an established and known problem, the lawsuit claims. Complaints were raised with higher-ups, and various allegations were detailed in a letter written by one of Bianco’s co-workers that, according to the filing, was delivered to “a member of Donald Trump’s personal staff.” Bianco hired an employment attorney after being contacted by human resources. But another lawyer contacted her soon after that, according to the 13-page lawsuit — part of a broader 74-page court filing inclusive of motions and exhibits — obtained by Law&Crime.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 18, 2024 10:02:04 GMT -8
"The Most Trusted Name in News" Isn't
The graphic shows that when asked how trustworthy do you rate the news reported by the following media organisations, most Labour and Conservative voters tend to vote the same way. The biggest negative votes were from Labour voters for The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Express, The Telegraph and GB News. The biggest negative votes from Conservative voters were for The Guardian, Private Eye, The Mirror and The New European. No surprises here.
More interesting, though again not surprising, were the news organisations who were trusted almost equally by Conservative and Labour voters: the FT, the BBC, Reuters, the Economist, Sky, Channel 5, Times Radio, LBC, the Metro and The Spectator.
What is really striking though, is what happens if you compare these British figures with those of Democrat and Republican voters when asked which US news organisations they most trust. Suddenly the gap widens spectacularly, whichever news outlet they are asked about, whether TV news, magazines or newspapers. A few are trusted by Democrats and Republicans alike: Business Insider, the National Review and, astonishingly, the New York Post.
But, by and large, the gap is enormous when it comes to PBS, the BBC, AP, all the US TV news networks, the New York Times and the Washington Post, highbrow weekly magazines like the New Yorker and the Atlantic, and, less surprisingly, MSNBC, Fox News and CNN.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 18, 2024 10:05:11 GMT -8
Unfortunately, You Can't Read My Brilliant New Summaries on Paper
Until recently there has been no scientific answer to this urgent question, but a soon-to-be published, groundbreaking study from neuroscientists at Columbia University’s Teachers College has come down decisively on the matter: for “deeper reading” there is a clear advantage to reading a text on paper, rather than on a screen, where “shallow reading was observed”.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 18, 2024 10:07:56 GMT -8
We Had Our Daughters Through IVF
The fight to ensure continued access to fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization is a personal one for Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who had her two children through IVF. She has known for years that if Roe v. Wade fell, anti-choice groups would come for IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies next.
Duckworth, along with Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), introduced the Access to Family Building Act on Thursday, legislation that would create protections for Americans ahead of that fight. The bill seeks to create a statutory right to IVF and other fertility treatments to ensure that anyone can access such care without reprisal from their home state. The statutory right also extends to physicians providing fertility care to patients. (Scroll below to read the proposed legislation in full.)
Under the proposed law, patients are legally able to keep all of their genetic materials used during fertility care. The Department of Justice would be able to pursue civil action against any state that attempted to restrict access to IVF and other fertility treatments.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 18, 2024 10:09:31 GMT -8
Keeping Our Schools Safe. Not From Guns. From Furries.
A Republican legislator in Oklahoma who once said that transgender people have “a mental illness” introduced a bill this week that would allow animal services to remove students who identify as furries from school.
The bill, which was pre-filed ahead of Oklahoma’s legislative session, would bar students who “purport to be an imaginary animal or animal species, or who engage in anthropomorphic behavior commonly referred to as furries,” from school activities.
The legislation, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Justin Humphrey, may seem farcical. But the idea that schools accommodate students who identify as animals has its roots in a long-standing — and repeatedly debunked — conservative myth.
Republican legislators and candidates have for years claimed that schools are putting litter boxes in classrooms for students who identify as cats or furries. At least 20 GOP politicians peddled these claims in 2022, and used them as a way to sound the alarm over protections and accommodations for LGBTQ+ students, NBC News reported.
“What’s most provocative about this hoax is how it turns to two key wedge issues for conservatives: educational accommodations and gender nonconformity,” Joan Donovan, a researcher on media and politics at Harvard University, told the outlet at the time.
In reality, there is no evidence of schools making litter boxes available for students who identify as animals. NBC News found one school, in the same Colorado district as Columbine High School, that has kept cat litter on campus for emergency use in the event of a shooting lockdown.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 18, 2024 10:12:24 GMT -8
Russia Can't Go On Like This ForeverThe stash of liquid assets in Russia's national wealth fund has fallen over 44% since Moscow invaded Ukraine, according to a Bloomberg report of Russian finance ministry data on Wednesday. The amount of assets that can be easily liquidated under Russia's National Wellbeing Fund fell from 8.9 trillion rubles, or $100.4 billion, to 5 trillion rubles in the two years from January 2022 — the month before the invasion — to December 2023, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the national wealth fund's total holdings tumbled 12% over the same period. The massive slump in the national wealth fund's liquid assets came as its holdings in Russian companies and in infrastructure bonds surged by 2 trillion rubles, per Bloomberg calculations. This suggests the state is using its liquid reserves to support the economy. Russia's finance ministry also used around 3 trillion rubles from the fund to cover its budget deficit in 2023 after it doubled defense spending in the same period. Russia could be running out of time and money soon as it keeps funding the war in Ukraine, which is soon heading into its third year. Russia has burned through almost half of the liquid reserves in its national wealth fund as it bleeds money amid the war in Ukraine
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 18, 2024 10:14:02 GMT -8
If You Remember to Take Your Vitamins Today, You Won't Forget Things Tommorrow.
Taking a daily multivitamin may protect against memory loss in older adults, according to a trio of studies that included more than 5,000 participants.
Taken together, the three studies found that compared to a placebo, taking a daily multivitamin slowed cognitive aging by about two years, said Dr. Chirag Vyas, an instructor in investigation at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The research was part of the COSMOS trial, a much larger clinical trial that explored whether a daily multivitamin (in this case, Centrum Silver), a cocoa extract supplement or both could be protective against heart disease and cancer.
Results from the third and final study were published Thursday in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. In it, 573 adults ages 60 and up took either a multivitamin or a placebo every day for two years. Researchers evaluated their cognitive function in person and with a series of tests at the beginning and the end of the study. The two earlier studies, which also compared a daily multivitamin to a placebo, used either phone- or web-based tests to measure cognitive function.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 18, 2024 10:14:40 GMT -8
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