How, why Black voters in Georgia faced waves of disinformation and misinformation in US midterm polls
Monday morning, the team at A-B Partners, a Washington DC political-communications firm that works with progressive groups, gathered on Zoom. They had less than 24 hours before the Election Day polls opened for a series of contests around the country that Democrats, at least, were billing as a last chance...
US midterms: Voters back changes to the Constitution to prohibit involuntary labour and slavery
Terrancé Akins worked the entire seven years that he was incarcerated in the Hardeman Correctional Facility, a private prison contracted to imprison people in Tennessee. “You couldn’t have a job,” he says. “We cooked. We cleaned. We washed the clothes. We taught the classes. The whole operation of the facility...
Russian cyberespionage: Instead of choosing stealthy espionage or disruptive attacks they become embedded
In 2018, Russia’s hacking agency, GRU, infected more than half a million routers worldwide with malware known as VPNFilter and they similarly attempted to create a botnet of hacked firewall devices that was discovered just ahead of Russia’s Ukraine invasion in February. But Mandiant analysts argue that only now are...
America’s addiction to war: To convert war into something sacred means fashioning a deceitful myth
Complexities involving alternatives to Washington’s war-making urges are, of course, not part of the national conversation on Veterans Day. Instead, we are promised that war and this country’s warriors will somehow redeem us as a nation. The unimaginable losses to families, communities, infrastructure and culture in the lands where such...
How US exploits religion to bless violence that hides wars’ hideous destructiveness with sacred sheen
Dear Veterans, I’m a civilian who, like many Americans, has strong ties to the US Armed Forces. I never considered enlisting, but my father, uncles, cousins, and nephews did. As a child I baked cookies to send with letters to my cousin Steven who was serving in Vietnam. My family...
Jailed for not killing: How unknown genetic disorder landed mother 40 years in prison for murder of her 4 children
Around lunchtime on a warm March Day in 1999, Kathleen Folbigg went to check on her sleeping 18-month-old daughter and found her pale and unresponsive. Folbigg, alone in her house in Singleton, Australia, called an ambulance while she tried her best to resuscitate the child. “My baby’s not breathing,” she...
How Republicans aborted hopes of snatching Senate and House control from Democrats in US midterms
In the middle of an election night when Democrats were supposed to lose just about everything, CNN chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju stood at the edge of the House Republican Caucus “victory party” and reviewed the results as of midnight on the East Coast. The news ticker at the bottom...
We’re back to 20th century when people researched out of sheer curiosity, love or madness
In July this year, attended the Animal Behaviour Society conference in Costa Rica, which I found to be very LGBTQ-friendly. The organisation had planned to have its 2023 meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee. But I was one of the more than 50 per cent of society members who voted not to...
How gun violence, racism, healthcare and divisive politics are repelling foreign scientists in US universities
For the past five decades, the United States has been a top destination for international early-career researchers to do their training in a PhD or postdoctoral post. Since the 1960s, post-cold-war US diplomatic policies have aimed to attract foreign scholars, especially those in then-budding democracies. After a steady increase, numbers...
Arsenal win over Chelsea wasn’t a fluke, they’re genuine EPL contenders, pretenders no more
They keep on finding a way to win. They keep on staying top of the table. And now you have to say it – Mikel Arteta and his men are serious, the real deal. While the Gunners have beaten Spurs and Liverpool at home, they self-combusted on their previous proper...
