Reuters
Several hundred faculty members at Harvard University on Sunday signed a petition asking school administrators to not bend to political pressure to fire the school's president over her Congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.
A concisely worded petition was signed by at least 570 professors and was delivered Sunday evening to the 13-member Harvard Corporation, which has the power to fire university president Claudine Gay. More professors indicated they also wanted to sign, according to a co-author of the petition.
Pressure has hiked on Gay over the weekend, after University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned on Saturday.
Gay, Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee last week about a rise in antisemitism on college campuses following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October.
The trio declined to give a definitive "yes" or "no" answer to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik's question of whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools' codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment, saying they had to balance it against free speech protections.
Deutsche Welle
The Israeli government has been clear. The militant group Hamas will be "eliminated," many senior members of government, including the country's prime minister, have all said.
On certain Israeli television channels, slogans such as "together we will win" appear regularly. But is it really possible to completely eliminate Hamas and "win" in a situation like this?
The short answer, as experts have repeatedly said, is no.
Israel has been bombing the Gaza Strip, home to more than two million Palestinians, since the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, which is classified as a terrorist organization by Germany, the European Union, the US and others. Israel has also launched a ground offensive into the Gaza Strip and is blocking the delivery of food, water and power into the enclave.
Despite this, most analysts say that it won't be possible to get rid of Hamas altogether, the main reason being that Hamas is more than just a militant organization.
Deutsche Welle
A Texas woman who was blocked from having a potentially life-saving abortion was forced to leave the state to have the emergency procedure, her lawyers said on Monday.
Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two, had sought permission for the abortion after finding out her fetus had a rare genetic condition meaning it will likely die before birth or shortly afterwards.
Doctors said the pregnancy — which is 20 weeks in — also posed a risk to Cox's own life.
"Due to the ongoing deterioration of Ms. Cox's health condition, and in light of the administrative stay entered by the Court on December 8 and the Attorney General's ongoing threats to enforce Texas's abortion bans against the Plaintiffs in this case, Ms. Cox is now forced to seek medical care outside of Texas," her lawyers said in a court filing.
The lawyers did not say where she had gone.
The fetus has a condition known as trisomy 18 — affecting around 1 in 2,500 diagnosed pregnancies — which leads to very high chances of miscarriage or stillbirth, and those that survive pregnancy usually do not live very long.
Al Jazeeera
When parliamentary and presidential elections were announced in Libya for December 2021, prominent political activist Hanan al-Faidy, 46, immediately registered her candidacy for parliament in Benghazi.
With only six weeks between the announcement and the elections themselves, she hoped to be a part of what she dreamed would be a seismic change for war-torn Libyan society which could bring an end to the fighting and divisions.
But, almost as quickly, she was forced to withdraw on November 20 – just a few weeks before the December 24 election date – following a highly toxic online campaign against her.
“I became the subject of a vicious cyberattack that wrecked my life,” she told Al Jazeera. “I was insulted and defamed, in addition to rumours spreading about my assassination. This distressed my family immensely. All I wanted was to put an end to my children’s suffering, so I quit the race.”
Al Jazeera
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that failing to maintain support for Ukraine would play into the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin as questions loom over the future of assistance from the United States.
Speaking on Monday to soldiers at the National Defense University during a trip to Washington, DC, Zelenskyy said Ukraine would continue its fight to expel Russian forces from the country.
“We won’t give up. We know what to do, and you can count on Ukraine. And we hope just as much to be able to count on you,” Zelenskyy said.
“Let me be frank with you, friends. If there’s anyone inspired by unresolved issues on Capitol Hill, it’s just Putin and his sick clique,” he added.
The Guardian, UK
Heather Mills’s vegan food business, VBites, has collapsed into administration after failing to secure fresh funding amid rising cost pressures.
The entrepreneur and former model, who founded the company in 1993, said the collapse was “extremely distressing” and had been forced upon her by a “combination of corporate greed and poor management, the cost of living crisis, price rises in the global ingredients and utilities markets, and the current state of the manufacturing economy in Britain”.
The former wife of Sir Paul McCartney added: “Brexit has been an utter disaster for the supply and maintenance of the sector and the government doubtless has a lot to answer for.
“So do the opportunistic utility companies and their broker networks, that through an array of nefarious practices now under investigation have hiked up prices so that companies simply cannot afford to operate.”
The Guardian, US
Special counsel prosecutors on Monday asked the US supreme court to make an expedited decision on whether Donald Trump can be criminally prosecuted on federal charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The move amounts to an attempt by prosecutors to bypass Trump’s recent appeal to the DC circuit after the federal judge overseeing his case rejected the notion that he had immunity for acts he committed during his presidency.
The petition to the supreme court shows prosecutors were concerned that going through the appeals process – submitting briefs, scheduling oral arguments and waiting for a decision while the case remained frozen – could delay the March 2024 trial date.
The Guardian, International
Diplomats at the annual Doha Forum conference in Qatar have said they are not expecting any reopening of Gaza ceasefire talks for some weeks and say their resumption may turn on Israel being able to point to the killing or capture of some of Hamas’s key leaders as a sign that its military operation has achieved its purpose.
The US believes this can be achieved as early as Christmas, but different timeframes are circulating.
In the meantime, although there will be new diplomatic initiatives, including a further debate and vote on a ceasefire at the UN general assembly on Tuesday, the Biden administration is not going to apply any more pressure on Israel to end its campaign.
In Europe, Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief said the bloc would propose that its member state governments impose sanctions on extremist settlers in the West Bank committing acts of violence against Palestinians – a move echoed in London, where Andrew Mitchell, a Foreign Office minister, told MPs the government was considering travel bans for violent West Bank settlers.
NPR
The U.S. Supreme Court Monday declined to hear a case challenging Washington state's ban on conversion therapy of minors. In doing so, the court left standing a lower court decision that upheld the state's ban on a therapy that the American Medical Association says "is not based on medical and scientific evidence."
The Washington passed law, enacted in 2018, allows the state to revoke the licenses of therapists who try to change a minor's sexual orientation. Brian Tingley, a family counselor and advocate for conversion therapy, challenged the law in court, represented by the anti-LGBTQ Alliance Defending Freedom. He claimed that the law violates his First Amendment right to free speech.
NPR
Scientists have unearthed a largely intact skull of an immense and deadly sea creature that stalked the waters off England's coast millions of years ago.
It's not something you would have wanted to encounter on an afternoon swim.
Just the skull of the pliosaur, a marine reptile, was around six feet long, indicating how massive the sea monster would have been. It had a parietal — or third — eye and glands on its snout that may have helped it locate prey.
And when it did find prey — such as other reptiles or even fellow pliosaurs — it would chomp down with its 130 teeth in a bite far stronger than a crocodile's.
New York Time (subscription not needed)
Rudolph W. Giuliani’s lawyer told jurors on Monday that the tens of millions of dollars in damages two Georgia election workers are seeking from him in a defamation suit “will be the end of Mr. Giuliani,” likening an award of that scale to a civil death penalty.
The lawyer, Joseph Sibley IV, made the assertion in his opening statement on the first day of Mr. Giuliani’s civil trial in Federal District Court in Washington.
The judge, Beryl A. Howell, has already ruled that Mr. Giuliani defamed the two workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, and intentionally inflicted emotional distress and engaged in a conspiracy with others when he publicly accused them of election fraud related to their work counting absentee ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta for the Fulton County Board of Elections on Nov. 3, 2020.
A jury of eight will determine how much Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and a former federal prosecutor, should have to pay them for the harm he caused.
By Laura Meckler Washington Post
Brian Ray has spent the last three decades as one of the nation’s top evangelists for home schooling. As a researcher, he has published studies purporting to show that these students soar high above their peers in what he calls “institutional schools.” At home, he and his wife educated their eight children on their Oregon farm.
His influence is beyond doubt. He has testified before state legislators looking to roll back regulations. Judges cite his work in child custody cases where parents disagree about home schooling. His voice resounds frequently in the press, from niche Christian newsletters to
NPR and the
New York Times. As president of the National Home Education Research Institute, he is the go-to expert for home-school advocates looking to influence public opinion and public policy, presenting himself as a dispassionate academic seeking the truth.
But Ray’s research is nowhere near as definitive as his evangelism makes it sound. His samples are not randomly selected. Much of his research has been funded by a powerful home-schooling lobby group. When talking to legislators, reporters and the general public, he typically dispenses with essential cautions and overstates the success of the instruction he champions. Critics say his work is driven more by dogma than scholarly detachment.
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) eeff, Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.