North Korea confirms missile launch. It poses a threat to other countries because of Kim Jong Un's dictatorship.
North Korea has test-fired a tactical ballistic missile equipped with a “new autonomous navigation system”, Leader Kim Jong Un vowed to boost the country’s nuclear force.
Four young Germans beat The Ecke, the SPD's top candidate in elections for the European Parliament in Saxony, so badly in Dresden on May 3, that he had to be treated in the hospital for a broken cheekbone and eye socket. He had been out posting campaign posters. The shockwaves are still being felt, even as far away as Berlin.In an unusual step, Faeser called for a special meeting of state interior ministers last Tuesday evening at 6 p.m., where they discussed improving security measures for politicians.
The interior ministers didn't even have the chance to log in to their video conference when, at around 4:15 p.m., a man hit Berlin Senator for Economic Affairs Franziska Giffey (SPD) over the head with a blunt object that had been wrapped in a bag. She had been visiting a public library in Berlin's Neukölln district.
At 6:50 p.m., the ministers still hadn't logged out of their conversation when the Green Party politician Yvonne Mosler got attacked and spat upon while putting up posters in Dresden.
Is there any way of stopping all this?
There have been numerous attacks on politicians and volunteer election workers in recent days. Even the running camera of a Deutsche Welle film team that accompanied Mosler failed to deter the perpetrators. Society, it appears, has reached a new level of brutalization. Berlin politician Giffey has called it a "fair-game culture."
These are acts that are usually only in the headlines or public consciousness for a short amount of time. Taken together, though, they act like a corrosive solution: Drop by drop, act by act, they erode democratic structures. Will they corrode to the point that they threaten to collapse?
🇺🇦Thinking of all of my Ukrainian friends, volunteers I met from around the world, and the heroes on the front lines.
✈️Since 2022, I've volunteered on four humanitarian trips across Ukraine, from Przemsyl Poland then to Lviv, Kyiv and Kherson, most recently in March 2024.
I will continue to be a voice for Ukraine's strength and beauty, reminding the world of the ongoing need for support across the country. 🕊️
🌎Our collective effort can make a positive difference.
I think that Biden has an even bigger problem than the fact that he keeps giving taxpayer-funded weapons to Israel to kill Palestinian kids: it's the recognition by many people that the reason for doing so is to appease the #oligarchy actually in charge of our country. That #billionaires , not city leadership, are directing police to suppress free speech. That's not #democracy. #Gaza
#MSNBC is giving John Kasich a platform to say that Democrats are telling him that Joe Biden may not be the Democratic nominee on live TV, using something akin to "I'm not saying it is true, but many people are saying..."
If North American democracies manage to survive the upcoming election cycles, we must remove the ability for private and corporate interests to overtly or covertly influence & manipulate our information spaces.
Georgia celebrated Family Purity Day today!
Is it okay to celebrate such customs?
Georgia's prime minister joined tens of thousands of people on a march through the capital on Friday to mark the Day of Family Purity, which celebrates so-called traditional family values in the country where animosity toward sexual minorities is strong.
"The media and the general public—both in New York City and beyond—instantly believed these five black and Latino youth were guilty of the crime without giving them a fair chance of proving their innocence."
#USPolitics June 2, 1924: Congress enacts the Indian Citizenship Act. Only 100 years ago. Just a reminder that the constitutional definition of 'people' to include all humans is a very recent event, less than 160 years. It's not that long ago. My grandmother (RIP) was born in 1898. The current conservative backsliding on who gets to be 'people' under the constitution needs to be stopped. Don't vote conservative. Reform the Supreme Court. #democracy https://www.history.com/news/native-american-voting-rights-citizenship
@thepoliticalcat@qkslvrwolf yes - we gotta pay attn to Congress and VOTE this fall! I think some of us in #MA have an opportunity in September as well as November. Of course voting won’t save us on it’s own, but esp. on a local level it matters a lot.
"Disturbing deep history of how IL’s radical RW religious terrorist fringe led by outlaw West Bank settlers has, over 50 yrs, moved into the mainstream, wrecked democracy & now taken over the country.
The parallels with the US right are chilling."
-K Anderson
“In 1992, those whites scoring at the top of the authoritarianism scale split their two-party vote almost evenly between Bush and Clinton (51 to 49). In 2000 and 2004, the difference becomes statistically significant but still pretty small.
By 2012, those high-authoritarianism white voters went 68 to 32 for Romney over Obama. In both Trump elections it was 80 to 20 among those voters.
So from 50 Republican-50 Democrat to 80 Republican-20 Democrat in 24 years.“
Here’s the thing. While the NYT continues to frame #USPol (largely) as a story of competing radicalizations—Woke v MAGA—the collapse of liberal #democracy is a mostly one-sided affair.
We’re a divided nation insofar as 40 million Americans are now all in on neo-Fascism and the various resentments, violent fantasies, and coercive agendas it harbors.
Rachel #Maddow on Bradley W. Hart's superb "Star-Spangled Fascism" podcast:
"The harder thing for us to sort of sit with, as Americans, is that there have been fascistic tendencies, fascistic movements in America ... for longer than we like to admit."
There is this misconception about #democracy being an event where you go to elections every so-and-so years to determine who rules the country.
What democracy is actually about is that we all are in charge. We all are the ones that run this country. Every one of us can decide to participate in running it.
Only for the parts where decisions need to be made we need some kind of process, and we decided to use parliaments, governments and elections to handle that. [1/2]