Texas synagogue captor grew ‘belligerent’ late in standoff, says freed rabbiA rabbi who was among four people held hostage at a Texas synagogue said Sunday that the British man who held them captive became “increasingly belligerent and threatening” toward the end of the 10-hour standoff. ….. Read More.CBC News – General World News | World News & EventsSun, January 16, 20222 days ago
The Inescapable Backdrop of Gavin Newsom’s Parole DecisionMaxwell Taylor Kennedy, one of the nine surviving children of the late Robert F. Kennedy, was at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, with a gaggle of his relatives and siblings last August when the California Board of Parole Hearings unexpectedly recommended the release of the man who assassinated his father, Sirhan Sirhan.“We were devastated,” Maxwell told me yesterday. “I was shocked, deeply dismayed, emotional.”For Maxwell and most of his siblings, the weeks that followed were both disorienting and mobilizing. Christopher Kennedy, another of the senator’s surviving sons, also used words such as “stunned, shocked, overwhelmed, disappointed, angry, depressed, agitated, active” to describe his emotions to me. “My whole life, I’d never said the words assassin or assassination or Sirhan or Ambassador Hotel [the place where his father was shot],” he said. That changed in August. “I’ve said them hundreds of times…
Medhi Hassan Offers Powerful Message of ‘Love and Support’ to Jewish Viewers: ‘We Have Your Ba…MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan offered a statement of “love and support” to the Jewish community in the wake of the Texas synagogue attack. The FBI identified 44-year-old British man Malik Faisal Akram as the gunman who held four people hostage for hours at a synagogue near Fort Worth on Saturday. Police killed Akram after the hostages — one rabbi and three congregants — were released. “This is a terrorism-related matter, in which the Jewish community was targeted, and is being investigated by the Joint Terrorism Task Force,” the FBI said in a statement on the attack. “We never lose sight of the threat extremists pose to the Jewish community and to other religious, racial, and ethnic groups.” During the attack, Akram made anti-Jewish comments and demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani-Muslim woman convicted of…
How Did We Get So ‘Cringe’?Take a tweet from the week after the Capitol riot in January 2021: “A Liberal insurrection would have looked very different. We would have escorted the original Broadway cast of Hamilton into the galleries. They would softly sing … as members of the GOP spewed their lies.” This was apparently intended as satire of a certain type of extremely online and cringe-inducing liberal smugness, but it came off as the thing itself and then produced more of the same. “I’ve literally been listening to the Hamilton soundtrack at work for days now,” wrote one woman. “This is EXACTLY what would’ve happened. ALL the theater kids everywhere,” wrote another.Then the joke became real. Last week, as part of a series of public events marking one year since the January 6 riot, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi introduced a prerecorded performance by the cast of Hamilton,…
What If Rural Oregon Was Just Idaho?Photographs by Jordan GaleIn the summer of 2015, a chimney sweep in Elgin, Oregon, redrew the map of the American West. “Imagine for a moment Idaho’s western border stretching to the Pacific Ocean,” Grant Darrow wrote in a letter to the editor of his local paper. Rural Oregon, he insisted, should break its ties with the urbanites of Portland and liberals of Salem, and join Idaho. “The political diversity in this state is becoming unpalatable,” he argued. “Rural Oregonians in general and Eastern Oregonians in particular are growing increasingly dismayed by the manner in which Oregon’s Legislature and Oregon’s urban dwellers have marginalized their values, demonized their lifestyle, villainized their resource-based livelihoods, and classified them as second-class citizens at best.”In the half decade or so since Darrow’s diatribe, a simple and outlandish idea, percolating in rural Oregon since the 1960s—what if we were just…
‘After the Verdict’ Australian Crime Series Shooting for 9Network, eOneProduction has begun in Sydney on the television drama “After the Verdict,” with Michelle Lim Davidson and Tess Haubrich joining the cast. The six-part series follows four people who have just finished jury duty on a high-profile murder trial. As they return to normal life, they begin to question their verdict and take matters into their own […] ….. Read More.VARIETY – Entertainment | Movies & TelevisionMon, January 17, 20229 hours ago