Important Takeaways:
- A major group estimates tens of thousands of demonstrators will show up next week, including those bused in from nearby battleground states.
- Protest groups readying for the event say tens of thousands of people will descend on Chicago for the event to coronate Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee after President Joe Biden abandoned his re-election bid.
- Pro-Palestinian groups say they’re expecting the same level of engagement from their members as if Biden were the nominee next week. They have already added “Killer Kamala” to “Genocide Joe” in protests
- Law enforcement officials in Chicago say that after a year and a half of planning, both the convention and the city will be safe regardless of what unfolds.
- “At this time, the FBI is not aware of any specific and articulable threats related to the DNC,” the FBI statement said. “We will continue to evaluate and share intelligence received from domestic and international partners related to the DNC just as we would for any large-scale event within the Chicago area.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Suburban New York officials looking to stop violent protesters from obscuring their identities have banned wearing masks in public except for health or religious reasons.
- The county’s Republican-controlled Legislature approved the ban on face coverings on Aug. 5. Legislator Howard Kopel said lawmakers were responding to “antisemitic incidents, often perpetrated by those in masks” since the Oct. 7 start of the Israel-Hamas war.
- The law makes it a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine for anyone in Nassau to wear a face covering to hide their identity in public. It exempts people who wear masks “for health, safety, religious or cultural purposes, or for the peaceful celebration of a holiday or similar religious or cultural event for which masks or facial coverings are customarily worn.”
- Blakeman said that while mask-wearing campus protesters were the impetus for the ban, he sees the new law as a tool to fight everyday crime as well.
- Nassau County acted after New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, said in June that she was considering a ban on face masks in the New York City subway system. She did not follow up with a plan.
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Important Takeaways:
- Columbia University President Minouche Shafik has resigned from her position, four months after the institution was rocked by campus protests over the war in Gaza.
- Dr Shafik’s resignation comes only a year after she took the position at the private Ivy League university in New York City, and just a few weeks before the autumn semester is due to begin.
- In April, Dr Shafik authorized New York Police Department officers to swarm the campus, a controversial decision that led to the arrests of about 100 students who were occupying a university building.
- The episode marked the first time that mass arrests had been made on Columbia’s campus since Vietnam War protests more than five decades ago.
- Her resignation comes after three Columbia University deans also resigned last week, after text messages showed the group used “antisemitic tropes”, according to a statement by Dr Shafik, while discussing Jewish students.
- US college campuses have been a flashpoint for Gaza war protests since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, and Israel’s subsequent incursion into the Gaza Strip.
- The presidents of Harvard and UPenn ultimately resigned amid backlash over their handling of campus protests and congressional testimony, including their refusal to say that calling for the deaths of Jews could violate university policy.
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Important Takeaways:
- The White House is warning that the United States assesses Iran could launch a retaliatory attack on Israel as early as “this week,” and that the U.S. has to be prepared for an attack that could be “significant.”
- S. officials said the public announcements are intended to send a message to Iran that American military capabilities could be used against an Iranian attack.
- One U.S. official indicated the deployment of the USS Georgia — and the 154 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles aboard — also sends a strong message of significant offensive capability.
- On Monday, the State Department said it would continue its diplomatic push to encourage Iran to scale down any retaliation.
- A joint statement issued by the mediators last week urging both sides to return to the table was designed not only to pressure the parties involved but as a message to Iran that an agreement was in the offing and meant to persuade the country against military action that could scuttle a deal, according to an official.
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Important Takeaways:
- Kishida’s resignation opens the door to a chaotic era
- The prime minister’s decision not to seek another term may set up Japan’s most exciting race for a leader in years.
- Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party will elect its new leader late next month, and in recent weeks, the momentum in Tokyo had been swinging one way: That the unpopular but famously stubborn Kishida would run, and win, as potential successors demurred and bided their time for a better opportunity.
- That momentum suddenly ran out Wednesday when the prime minister announced he wouldn’t seek another term as LDP head, effectively tendering his resignation and throwing the race for Japan’s next leader into chaos.
- Parallels are there to be drawn with Joe Biden, the US president with whom he deepened the bilateral alliance.
- This time, all bets are off — at least right now. Up against a weak opposition, the LDP almost always wins national elections.
- But potential challengers should take a tip from Kishida, known to be a voracious reader. One of the prime minister’s favorite books is reportedly Crime & Punishment. Dostoyevsky writes that “power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up… one has only to dare.”
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Important Takeaways:
- The informational pamphlet that will be sent to Arizona voters this fall will call fetuses “unborn human beings” in the description of a citizen initiative that would restore Roe-era abortion protections.
- Abortion rights advocates say the language is biased and meant to confuse and scare voters.
- The GOP-controlled legislative council wrote the description, which uses the term “unborn human being” in the first sentence.
- Arizona for Abortion Access, the campaign backing the initiative, sued to change the language to “fetus,” arguing it was a more impartial term.
- The Maricopa County Superior Court sided with the campaign, but the state Supreme Court — the same court that allowed Arizona’s 1864 near-total abortion ban to take effect earlier this year — said the language met impartiality standards and reversed the lower court’s ruling Wednesday.
- The Arizona Abortion Access Act would allow abortion access up to fetal viability, about 24 weeks of pregnancy.
- “This decision is beyond disgraceful … But no matter what type of dirty tricks they try to pull to slow down our momentum, we know Arizonans will show up and vote for their freedoms this November,” Reproductive Freedom for All Arizona director Athena Salman said in a statement.
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Important Takeaways:
- A Los Angeles federal district Tuesday ordered the University of California, Los Angeles, to stop allowing and assisting antisemitic agitators to ban Jews from large parts of UCLA’s campus.
- On Tuesday, a federal district court in California sided with the Jewish students, saying, “In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.”
- The court’s injunction is the 1st in the nation against a university for allowing an antisemitic encampment
- “To enter the Jew Exclusion Zone, a person had to make a statement pledging their allegiance to the activists’ views and have someone within the encampment ‘vouch’ for the individual’s fidelity to the activists’ cause,” the lawsuit said.
- The lawsuit claimed that “UCLA’s administration knew about the activists’ extreme actions, including the exclusion of Jews.”
- “But, in a remarkable display of cowardice, appeasement, and illegality, the administration did nothing to stop it.”
- “UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion,” Judge Mark C. Scarsi said in the court order.
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Important Takeaways:
- Concerning potential symptom of flagging faith in the peaceful democratic process emerges as a poll suggests that a significant section of the public thinks that violence can be justified if politicians continue to overlook concerns around immigration.
- A survey conducted by the British polling firm WeThink has painted a bleak picture for the future of the polity as an apparent breakdown in the trust of institutions to address the demands of the public has seemingly coincided with increasing willingness to back violent alternatives.
- The poll, which surveyed 1,278 people between August 7th and 8th, during the height of the recent anti-mass migration riots that broke out across the UK, found that 39 percent of respondents agreed with the statement: “When it comes to the refugee problem, violence is sometimes the only means that citizens have to get the attention of British politicians.”
- So far, the riots, sparked by the mass stabbing at a children’s dance party by an alleged second-generation Rwandan migrant in Southport last month, have involved a tiny fraction of the UK population yet have seen over 1,000 people arrested. Police chiefs have warned that hundreds more will face arrest in the coming days. The unrest has seen people clash with police, ethnic groups clash, the looting stores, and setting fires, including one at a reported migrant hotel in Rotherham, a town that gained notoriety for its central position in the child rape scandals of recent decades.
- Reform UK leader Nigel Farage accused the prime minister of “completely” failing to understand the mood of the nation about the “societal breakdown” caused by decades of mass migration policies from both the Labor and Conservative parties.
- “The protests are awful, they’re disgraceful, they’re shocking. But unfortunately, when people are shut up, when they’re not allowed to debate publicly, and when there aren’t rational means of objection, you get irrational ones… Every brick began in Westminster.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Walgreens announces closure of nearly 700 branches nationwide. Inflation costs force the company to shutter underperforming locations.
- This move affects thousands of employees and millions of customers. Will other major retailers follow suit in this economic climate?
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Important Takeaways:
- The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) condemned the Houthi terrorist organization of Yemen on Tuesday for raiding its office in the national capital, Sana’a, stealing critical documents, and taking employees hostage.
- High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk demanded the freedom of his employees and uninterrupted access to Yemeni civilians in a statement on Tuesday revealing a previously unreported Houthi raid on U.N. officials on August 3. The Houthis, whose Iran-backed terrorist organization is formally known as “Ansarallah,” have for years brutalized human rights workers within their reach. More recently, in June, the Houthis launched an abduction spree in which they raided the homes of U.N. and non-governmental organization workers and took them hostage, severely disrupting humanitarian efforts.
- The OHCHR affirmed that the United Nations had been one of several targets of the June raids, in which the Houthis abducted 13 U.N. staffers, six of them affiliated with the Human Rights Office.
- “They are all being held incommunicado.”
- On August 3, Houthi leaders reportedly expanded the repression by raiding the OHCHR office in Sana’a and stealing critical information. That office had stopped operating after the raids in June.
- “Ansar Allah de facto authorities sent a ‘delegation’ to the premises of the UN Human Rights Office in Sana’a that forced national staff to hand over belongings, including documents, furniture and vehicles, in addition to the office’s keys. They are still in control of the premises,” the U.N. body confirmed on Tuesday.
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