Mysuru: Union Home Minister Amit Shah will campaign in the Varuna constituency on Tuesday, where the battle is between Congress strongman, Siddaramaiah and senior BJP leader and state minister V. Somanna.
The constituency is witnessing a tight contest, and campaigning has turned bitter. Violent incidents have also been reported. What seemed to be a cake-walk for Siddaramaiah has changed now, and with Shah campaigning the fight could be cut-throat.
Amit Shah is addressing a public rally in the Hosakote village of the constituency. Former Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa, MP and veteran leader V. Srinivasparasad, who is a prominent Dalit leader in the region, are participating in the programme.
The Home Minister wants to send a strong signal to the voters that fielding of Somanna against Siddaramaiah was a serious and calculated move of the party. The programme will also put an end to the rumours in the political circles that Somanna is being made a sacrificial goat by the party.
However, souces said that the BJP had planned to confine Siddaramaiah to Varuna constituency and plans to not allow him to take up statewide tours and campaign for Congress.
Siddaramaiah is considered to be the leader of oppressed classes and he often takes on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Amit Shah and RSS chief. BJP has been strategizing for his downfall in the state politics for a long time.
However, the contest for him this time is proving to be a cliffhanger as the Lingayat community comprises the largest group of voters in the constituency. By roping in veteran Dalit leader Srinivasprasad, the BJP wants to consolidate the equally biggest chunk of votes of SC/ST and OBCs in the seat.
It was rumoured that Yediyurappa and Somanna had locked horns and there would be division of Lingayat votes. However, Amit Shah is ensuring Yediyurappa is present and pledges his support for Somanna. In fact, Yediyurappa had already stated that he would ensure the defeat of Siddaramaiah.
Siddaramaiah, who stated he would not even bother to visit the constituency and his victory is ensured, had to rush and conduct day-long campaigning recently. The BJP and Congress workers are in confrontation mode and the situation is volatile as polling day is getting closer. Siddaramaiah is vying for the post of Chief Minister if the Congress is voted to power. BJP has promised a big role for Somanna if he defeats Siddaramaiah.
“Our approach reflects our years of working on this issue, and it’s so much broader. It’s so much more comprehensive,” Collins said in a joint interview with Shaheen, the moderate Mainer’s longtime partner on bills ranging from broadband expansion to post-Jan. 6 reform. Shaheen observed that “our proposal is better than theirs” before taking a more diplomatic tack: “It’s more comprehensive. That’s a better way to say it.”
The disparate duos are fighting for the approval of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Senate health committee’s chair, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), both of whom have avoided a firm stance while assembling other pieces of a large drug-pricing measure that could get a vote as soon as this month.
Assessing the outlook in his typically quotable style, Kennedy said that while Warnock and Shaheen are vying for Schumer’s support, “one’s probably biting on his right ear, and one is probably biting on his left ear.”
It’s not just Democrats angling for Schumer’s attention. Insulin is important enough to Collins that she’s spoken privately about the issue with Schumer, an intriguing detente after the New Yorker spearheaded 2020’s Democratic spend-a-thon to try to beat the Maine Republican — which caused an icy few months between the two senators.
“Both Jeanne and I were asked to come talk to him, and we’ve both done that,” Collins said. “I’m always hesitant to characterize Sen. Schumer. But he seemed receptive.”
But Warnock has held his own meetings with the Democratic leader. The recently reelected Georgian saw his approach to insulin price caps adopted for Medicare patients last year in Democrats’ party-line passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, and he’s betting his juice will extend beyond his successful reelection bid.
Asked if Schumer committed to moving his bill forward, Warnock said: “I have assurances that my bill to cap the cost of insulin, which is a bipartisan bill introduced by me and Sen. Kennedy, will be a part of any health care package that moves forward.”
The Warnock-Kennedy effort would offer people with private insurance the IRA’s price cap of a $35 copay for a 30-day supply for a 30-day supply of one of each insulin dosage form — a policy President Joe Biden advocated in his State of the Union Address this year. It also directs the Department of Health and Human Services to set up a program in which the uninsured would have access to the same $35 rate through “qualified entities,” a term that likely refers to federally qualified health centers.
Democrats pushed to include a $35 cap in the commercial insurance market in their party-line measure but were forced to strip out the provision after the Senate’s nonpartisan rules referee decided that it didn’t qualify for budget rules which evaded the 60-vote threshold. Seven Republicans supported the price cap in that vote, demonstrating the possibility of a deal under the current divided government.
In contrast, the Collins-Shaheen bill would limit monthly cost-sharing for at least one insulin type and dosage to $35 or 25 percent of the list price, whichever is lower. It would also require pharmacy benefit managers to pass through 100 percent of insulin rebates and discounts from manufacturers to insurance plans.
Furthermore, it largely limits insurers from imposing prior authorization and medical management on insulin products and seeks to speed up new competition to further reduce costs.
“We’re not just looking at: How do we address out-of-pocket costs? But also: How do we encourage more competition?” said Shaheen, who has a granddaughter with Type 1 diabetes.
Schumer is not tipping his hand on a sensitive issue that will alienate some of his members no matter what he does given his close relationships with both Shaheen and Warnock. Schumer spokesperson Alex Nguyen said: “Prescription drug reform and insulin pricing remains a top priority for leader Schumer. He’s committed to getting a $35 insulin bill passed, and the details are still being worked out.”
The legislative push to again tackle insulin legislation comes despite recent commitments from Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi to lower the list price of some insulin products this year or next — a decision policy experts say is a response to political headwinds, generic competition and bigger Medicaid rebates set to kick in in 2024.
Sanders, who introduced his own insulin pricing bill in March to cap the list price of the drug at $20 per vial, is dragging the CEOs of the three major insulin manufacturers before his committee this month. That hearing comes after the committee is slated to act on a drug pricing package this week, which focuses on pharmacy benefit manager practices and generics competition, indicating that tough choices on which insulin legislative approach to take are being deferred.
“Advocates for lower insulin prices would rightly point out that most of these, aside from Senator Sanders’ bill, focus largely on what insurers charge patients and not what drug companies are paid,” said Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “If you only cap the copayment, then there is a possibility that manufacturers could raise prices.
The Senate health committee’s May 10 hearing on insulin affordability — which will also include the CEOs of the three major PBMs — is likely to signal whether there is enough Republican support for additional insulin legislation.
“Obviously, a dramatic change with regard to insulin is already underway, and we’ll see how that plays out,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said. “Whether there’s different additional legislation needed, that’s something we’ll have to evaluate.”
Sanders predicted a future effort to bring the various insulin bills together, a path to which Warnock appears agreeable.
“In my view, we’re all on the same team here, we’re trying to get across with insulin,” Warnock said. “There is more than one approach here.”
But Shaheen and Collins said their legislation is so sweeping compared with the Warnock-Kennedy bill that the two approaches would be nearly impossible to reconcile; Collins described their effort as “so much more comprehensive a bill that it’s difficult to compare.”
From his vantage point, the twangy Louisianan thinks the four senators — and the majority leader — can put aside the sparring and cut a deal.
“It seems to me the short way home is to let all four of us come together with Sen. Schumer and work something out in one bill,” Kennedy said. “But having said that, the real issue is how to pay for it. If we can pay for it, I can sell it on my side.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“This administration has been asleep at the wheel on border security, and it has had a tremendous, negative impact on New York City,” Lawler said in a statement to POLITICO. “I would be more than happy to work in a bipartisan way with the mayor to force President Biden to secure our borders and reform the immigration system.”
Since spring 2022, more than 57,000 migrants — largely from Latin America — arrived in New York after crossing the southern border. Some were sent from conservative states like Texas, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott chartered as many as eight buses a day to carry migrants to Manhattan. Others arrived on their own.
The influx has strained the resources of one of the biggest cities in the world.
Services tied to housing, feeding, educating and providing health care to the newcomers are projected to cost $2.9 billion next year alone, an amount that exceeds the New York City Fire Department’s entire operating budget. So far, Adams has mostly failed to get the White House to respond to his pleas for additional funds, easing of work requirements and better coordination at the border to resettle asylum seekers around the U.S.
Adams’ new rhetoric, which drew praise from the conservative editorial page of the New York Post and mirrored remarks by Fox News contributor Sean Duffy, was even more eyebrow-raising given the moderate Democrat is a national surrogate for Biden.
The mayor’s comments came just days before the president announced his reelection bid and at a time when Republicans are gearing up to use voter discontent around immigration in their fight for the White House, the Senate and a larger majority in the House.
This is the second time in less than a year that Adams’ message on a highly contentious political issue has overlapped with Republican talking points. In 2022, he joined GOP calls for reforms to New York’s bail laws and only changed his tune as the midterms neared and it became clear his party would take a beating over crime at the ballot box.
Though Adams’ words on immigration could now hurt fellow Democrats running for national office, particularly in New York’s swing congressional districts where Lawler is facing a competitive race, Adams may be thinking more about protecting his own reelection bid in 2025.
One mayoral adviser, granted anonymity to discuss the administration’s internal mood, noted most New Yorkers would rather see investments in schools, libraries and other city services than billions more spent to help the newcomers. Indeed, a February poll by Quinnipiac University found that 63 percent of voters — including 53 percent of Democrats — don’t think New York City can accommodate the sanctuary-seekers.
Spokespeople for Adams strongly rejected criticism that he’s parroting Republican talking points, saying he’s done more to care for tens of thousands of migrants than any other Democrat in the country.
“To personally show his support for asylum seekers, Mayor Adams has organized haircuts for migrants, book donations for kids, and clothing drives, as well as slept besides migrants at a humanitarian relief center while spending hours hearing their personal stories,” mayoral press secretary Fabien Levy said in a statement.
“Anyone falsely accusing Mayor Adams of using Republican rhetoric should stop criticizing the one person doing more than anyone else in this city for migrants and start pushing for more aid from Washington, DC and Albany,” Levy said.
But his language around the issue — saying the migrant crisis has “destroyed” the city, directly blaming Biden for the situation and saying it has prevented New York’s economic comeback — is still jarring to many members of his party.
“It’s extremely disappointing and dangerous to hear anyone feed into anti-immigrant rhetoric, particularly the highest-ranking elected city official of one of the most diverse cities that is fueled by the contributions of the immigrant community,” said Rep. Delia Ramirez, a first-term Democrat from Illinois who says her progressive stance is key to stemming GOP gains in the Latino community.
“At the federal level, we need to utilize executive authority to ensure cities like Chicago and New York have the support they need to continue providing shelter with maximal flexibility,” she said.
Added Florida state Rep. Anna Eskamani, a leading critic of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ immigration policies: “We should tone down the rhetoric and focus on solutions.”
Both Republican and Democratic strategists say Adams’ decision to amplify the right’s messaging around immigration could be a gift to the GOP.
“I think echoing Republican attacks when Biden is going to need every single resource from Democrats to back him up is not what good Democrats do,” said Bill Neidhardt, a progressive political consultant.
Republican strategist Bob Heckman said it’s surprising that other Democratic mayors of places like Chicago, D.C. and Denver, which have also faced an influx of migrants, aren’t speaking out like Adams.
“If you are the mayor of a city who’s receiving the huge influx of migrants that are pouring across the southern border, it’s hard not to talk like that,” Heckman said. “The administration needs to get serious about it. They can’t just ignore it and run on, ‘We can’t let Donald Trump get reelected.’”
A spokesperson for Biden declined to respond directly to Adams’ criticism but pointed to the president’s announcement in January about new border enforcement actions when he said “extreme Republicans” have always tried to use immigration to score political points but don’t help solve the problem.
One of those so-called extreme Republicans, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas who has advocated for conservative immigration measures, wasn’t quite ready to embrace the New York mayor.
“Eric Adams is right to blame the Biden Administration for the border crisis, but this is the same guy who campaigned on his city’s sanctuary status and extended childcare, colleague classes and other taxpayer-funded programs to illegal migrants,” Roy said in a statement.
“Texas has been bearing the brunt of this crisis for over two years — now New York is getting a taste of their own medicine.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Eva Green has hailed her victory over what she described as a group of men who tried to use her as a scapegoat, after winning a bruising legal battle over the collapse of a sci-fi film.
The actor had sued White Lantern Films and SMC Speciality finance for a $1m (£802,000) fee that she said she was owed. However, she faced a counter-claim alleging she pulled out of the making of A Patriot, which collapsed in 2019, and breached her contract.
In a judgment on Friday, Mr Justice Michael Green ruled in her favour, saying she was entitled to the fee and dismissed the counter-claim.
Her victory follows a case in which Green gave evidence, saying it was “humiliating” that private Whatsapp messages she had sent were revealed in court.
Those messages included her comments about being “obliged to take [the producer’s] shitty peasant crew members from Hampshire” after the location was switched from Ireland. They also included her description of the production as a “B-shitty-movie” and the executive producer, Jake Seal, as “pure vomit”, a “devious sociopath” and “evil”.
Reacting to the judgment, Green said she had been “forced to stand up to a small group of men, funded by deep financial resources, who tried to use me as a scapegoat to cover up their own mistakes”.
“I am proud that I stood up against their bullyboy tactics,” she added.
“A few people in the press were only too delighted to reprint these lies without proper reporting. There are few things the media enjoys more than tearing a woman to pieces. It felt like being set upon by hounds; I found myself misrepresented, quoted out of context, and my desire to make the best possible film was made to look like female hysteria. It was cruel and it was untrue.”
During her evidence, Green denied the allegations that she was not prepared to go ahead with the project, saying: “In the 20 years that I have been making films, I have never broken a contract or even missed one day of shooting.”
In the 71-page judgment, released by email, Mr Justice Green concluded: “In particular, I find that Ms Green did not renounce her obligations under the artist agreement; nor did she commit any repudiatory breaches of it.”
He described Green as “in some senses a frustrating and unsatisfactory witness”, adding: “But for such a perfectionist in her art, she was surprisingly underprepared for her evidence.
“I understand the torment it must have been for her to have all her private texts and WhatsApp messages revealed in open court and scrutinised for what they disclosed about her true state of mind and intentions in relation to the film. She said it was ‘humiliating’ but some of her explanations for the language she used and the feelings she expressed – such as they were down to her ‘Frenchness’ – were not credible or adequate.”
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Nevertheless, the judge said he believed allowances needed to be made for “the heightened emotions that were clearly present” when some of the messages were written and as these were assumed to be personal correspondence between friends.
While he added that he had to be cautious about accepting her spin on her words, the broad thrust of her evidence was “credible and fitted with her general commitment to the film”.
“I take account of her evident emotional and forthright personality in explaining her more extreme comments about Mr Seal, whom she clearly detested even though she only met him once,” he said.
The film company has been approached for comment.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
You don’t have to look very far to find the essence of life, says Vandana Shiva. But in a society caught up in a blur of technological advances, bio-hacks and attempts to improve ourselves and the natural world, she fears we are hellbent on destroying it.
“Everything comes from the seed, but we have forgotten that the seed isn’t a machine,” says Shiva. “We think we can engineer life, we can change the carefully organised DNA of a living organism, and there will be no wider impact. But this is a dangerous illusion.”
For almost five decades, Shiva has been deeply engaged in the fight for environmental justice in India. Regarded as one of the world’s most formidable environmentalists, she has worked to save forests, shut down polluting mines, exposed the dangers of pesticides, spurred on the global campaign for organic farming, championed ecofeminism and gone up against powerful giant chemical corporations.
Her battle to protect the world’s seeds in their natural form – rather than genetically altered and commercially controlled versions – continues to be her life’s work.
Shiva’s anti-globalisation philosophy and pilgrimages across India have often been compared to Mahatma Gandhi. Yet while Gandhi became synonymous with the spinning wheel as a symbol of self-reliance, Shiva’s emblem is the seed.
Shiva speaking at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg 21 years ago. Photograph: Marco Longari/AFP/Getty
Now 70, Shiva – who is divorced and chose not to have children – has spent her life refusing to conform to the patriarchal norms so often imposed on women in India, particularly in the 1950s. She has published more than 20 books and when she is not travelling the world for workshops or speaking tours, she spends her time between her office in Delhi and her organic farm in the foothills of the Himalayas.
She credits her spirit of resistance to her parents, who were “feminists at a higher level than I’ve ever known – long before we even knew the word ‘feminism’”. After 1947, when India gained independence, her father left the military for a job in the forests of the mountainous state of Uttarakhand, where Shiva was born and brought up always to believe she was equal to men. “The forests were my identity and from an early age the laws of nature captivated me,” she says.
She was about six when she stumbled on a book of quotes by Albert Einstein buried in a small, musty library in a forest lodge. She was transfixed, determined against all odds to be a physicist. Though science was not taught at her rural convent school, Shiva’s parents encouraged her curiosity and found ways for her to learn. By the time she was in her 20s, she was completing her PhD in quantum physics at a Canadian university.
Yet as logging, dams and development wreaked ecological devastation on Uttarakhand’s forests and local peasant women rose up to fight it – a movement known as Chipko – Shiva realised, on returning to India, that her heart lay not with quantum physics but with a different, nagging question. “I couldn’t understand why were we told that new technology brings progress, but everywhere I looked, local people were getting poorer and landscapes were being devastated as soon as this development or new technology came in,” she says.
‘We have forgotten that the seed isn’t a machine.’ Shiva at her Delhi office in 2007. Photograph: Manan Vatsyayana/ AFP/Getty
In 1982, in her mother’s cow shed in the mountain town of Dehradun, Shiva set up her research foundation, exploring the crossover between science, technology and ecology. She began to document the “green revolution” that swept rural India from the late 1960s, where in a bid to drive up crop yields and avert famine, the government had pushed farmers to introduce technology, mechanisation and agrochemicals.
It instilled in her a lifelong opposition to industrial interference in agriculture. Though the green revolution is acknowledged to have prevented widespread starvation and introduced some necessary modernisation into rural communities, it was also the beginning of a continuing system of monoculture in India, where farmers were pushed to abandon native varieties and instead plant a few high-yielding wheat and rice crops in quick-turnaround cycles, burning the stubble in their fields in between.
It also created a reliance on subsidised fertilisers and chemicals that, though costly and environmentally disastrous, lasts to this day. Soil in fertile states such as Punjab, once known as the breadbasket of India, has been stripped of its rich minerals, with watercourses running dry, rivers polluted with chemical run-off and farmers in a perpetual state of deep crisis and anger.
Shiva’s suspicions about the chemical industry worsened further when, in the early 1990s, she was privy to some of the first multilateral discussions around agricultural biotechnology and plans by chemical companies to alter crop genes for commercial purposes.
“There was a race on by companies to develop and patent these GM crops, but no one was stopping to ask: what will be the impact on the environment? How will they impact on diversity? What will this cost the farmers? They only wanted to win the race and control all the world’s seeds. To me, it all seemed so wrong,” says Shiva.
In 1991, five years before the first genetically modified (GM) crops had been planted, she founded Navdanya, meaning “nine seeds”, an initiative to save India’s native seeds and spread their use among farmers. Eight years later, she took the chemical monolith Monsanto, the world’s largest producer of seeds, to the supreme court for bringing its GM cotton into India without permission.
Monsanto became notorious in the 1960s for producing the herbicide Agent Orange for the US military during the Vietnam war, and subsequently led the development of GM crops in the 1990s. It moved quickly to penetrate the international market with its privatised seeds, particularly in developing, predominantly agricultural countries.
The company, which was bought in 2018 by the German pharmaceutical and biotech company Bayer, became embroiled in legal action. In 2020 it announced a $11bn (£8.7bn) payout to settle claims of links between its herbicide and cancer on behalf of almost 100,000 people but denied any wrongdoing. In 2016, dozens of civil society groups staged a “people’s tribunal” in The Hague, finding Monsanto guilty of human rights violations and developing an unsustainable system of farming.
Shiva says taking Monsanto to court felt like going up against a mafia and alleges that many attempts were made to threaten and pressure her into not filing the case.
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‘This industrialised globalised system of food is destroying soil, destroying water and generating greenhouse gases.’ Shiva in Barcelona in 2007, where she received the Right Livelihood award, also known as the Alternative Nobel prize. Photograph: Gustau Nacarino/Reuters
Monsanto finally got permission to bring GM cotton to India in 2002, but Shiva has kept up her fight against chemical multinationals, which Shiva refers to as the “poison cartel”. Currently more than 60% of the world’s commercial seeds are sold by just four companies, which have led the push to patent seeds, orchestrated a global monopoly of certain GM crops such as cotton and soya and sued hundreds of small-scale farmers for saving seeds from commercial crops.
“We have taken on these giants when they said ‘we’ve invented rice, we’ve invented wheat’, and we have won,” she says.
She remains adamant that GM crops have failed. But though the legacy of GM pest-resistant cotton in India is complex and has increased pesticide use, not all would agree that the issue is black and white. Indeed, her outspoken and often intransigent positions on GM organisms and globalisation have earned her many critics and powerful enemies.
She has been accused of exaggerating the dangers of GM and simplifying facts around the direct correlation between farmers’ suicides and genetically modified crops, and been called an enemy of progress for her rhetoric against globalisation, given the threats facing the world.
As the global population has ballooned to 8 billion people, and the climate crisis throws agriculture into disarray, even some prominent environmentalists have shifted their positions and have argued that GM crops can underpin food security. Countries including the UK, which had imposed strict laws around GM foods, are now pushing for more gene editing of crops and animals. Last year India approved the release of a new GM mustard seed.
Shiva is scathing of this renewed push for GM organisms, arguing that much of the gene-editing process is still “dangerously unpredictable” and calling it “ignorance” to think climate-adapted crops can only come from industrial labs.
“Farmers have already bred thousands of climate-resilient and salt-tolerant seeds; they weren’t the invention of a few big companies, no matter what patents they claim,” she says.
For Shiva, the global crisis facing agriculture will not be solved by the “poison cartel” nor a continuation of fossil fuel-guzzling, industrialised farming, but instead a return to local, small-scale farming no longer reliant on agrochemicals. “Globally, the subsidies are $400bn a year to make an unviable agriculture system work,” she says.
“This industrialised globalised system of food is destroying soil, it is destroying water and it is generating 30% of our greenhouse gases. If we want to fix this, we’ve got to shift from industrial to ecological farming.”
Nonetheless, while her crusade against the might of chemical corporations will continue, Shiva considers her most important work to be her travels through India’s villages, collecting and saving seeds – including 4,000 varieties of rice – setting up more than 100 seed banks, and helping farmers return to organic methods.
“My proudest work is listening to the seed and her creativity,” she says. “I’m proud of the fact that a lie is a lie is a lie, no matter how big the power that tells the lie. And I’m proud that I’ve never ever hesitated in speaking the truth.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman, has won his legal battle to perform a concert in Frankfurt after attempts to ban the event amid accusations of antisemitism.
Magistrates acting on behalf of the German city had instructed the venue two months ago to cancel the concert on 28 May, accusing Waters of being “one of the most widely known antisemites in the world”. Waters, who has always denied accusations of antisemitism, took legal action against the decision.
Frankfurt’s administrative court has now declared his right to go ahead with the event. While acknowledging that aspects of his show were “tasteless” and obviously lent on symbolism inspired by the Nazi regime, it cited artistic freedom among its main reasons for the decision.
The city has the right to appeal against the ruling.
City authorities in Frankfurt and elsewhere in Germany had objected to the concert on the grounds that a previous tour had featured as part of the stage show a balloon shaped like a pig depicting the Star of David and various company logos.
Part of their criticism related to the location of the concert, the Festhalle, in which, during the November pogroms of 1938, more than 3,000 Jewish men from Frankfurt and surrounding areas were rounded up, abused and later deported to concentration camps where many of them were murdered.
However, the court said that despite the Waters show making use of “symbolism manifestly based on that of the National Socialist regime” – the tastelessness of which it said was exacerbated by the choice of the Festhalle as the venue due to its historical background – the concert should be “viewed as a work of art” and that there were not sufficient grounds on which to justify banning Waters from performing. “It is not for the court to pass judgment on this,” a spokesperson told German media.
The most crucial point, according to the court, was that the musician’s performance “did not glorify or relativise the crimes of the Nazis or identify with Nazi racist ideology”, and nor was there any evidence that Waters used propaganda material in his show, the spokesperson added.
Criticism of the decision came from the International Auschwitz Committee, which called it “deplorable”. Christoph Heubner, the committee’s vice-president, said: “It’s not only Jewish survivors of German concentration and death camps who are left sad, bewildered and increasingly disillusioned.”
A “cause of great concern” for survivors and their families was what he called an “encroachment of antisemitism from various directions” in society.
Heubner said the court’s declaration – that to hold the concert in the Festhalle was not an offence to the dignity of the Jewish men rounded up there – was “a renewed attack on the dignity of these people and the memories of their families”.
Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said he was “baffled” by the court’s decision “that a display of symbols based on National Socialism should have no legal consequences”.
In Germany, there are strict rules banning displays of Nazi memorabilia and symbols such as the swastika.
Waters has repeatedly denied accusations of antisemitism and claimed his disdain is towards Israel, not Judaism, accusing Israel of “abusing the term antisemitism to intimidate people like me into silence”.
He defended his use of the pig symbol, saying it “represents Israel and its policies and is legitimately subject to any and all forms of non-violent protest”. He said the balloon also featured other symbols of organisations he was against, such as the crucifix and the logos of Mercedes, McDonald’s and Shell Oil.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
In Washington, the 77-year-old Brazilian leader issued a call to battle: The left needed to build its own transnational network, Lula said, to fight for its political values and take on crises like economic deprivation and climate change.
Far-right leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro in the Americas had sought each other out and found fellow travelers in European hardliners like France’s Marine Le Pen and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. No comparable club has existed on the left. In Lula’s view it was time for that to change.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Lula wanted to mobilize left-leaning forces against “an international network of right-wing people and movements” that is seeking to “take over democratic countries.”
“He really was appealing to us, asking the Progressive Caucus to build something that can counter that,” Jayapal recalled.
An initial step may come later this year, with a possible trip to Brazil by congressional progressives. Rep. Ro Khanna of California, a leading House liberal who also met with Lula, said the Brazilian president urged lawmakers three times to visit.
Khanna said he had asked his staff to explore other international forums where U.S. progressives should make their presence felt.
Lula’s exhortation represents an overdue challenge for the U.S. left. For all the influence they have exercised on domestic policy, left-wing Democrats have not yet managed to articulate a distinctive transnational agenda.
That has been a missed opportunity.
It is not that progressives do not care about the rest of the world. They just tend to engage it as a scattered array of flashpoints and pet causes, without telling a more universal story about the struggles of the 21st Century.
In Washington, many progressives have embraced President Joe Biden’s chosen narrative about a grand contest between democracy and autocracy, while lamenting the gulf between Biden’s rhetoric and his tolerance of strategically useful tyrannies like Saudi Arabia. Yet they have made only fitful attempts to lay out an overarching left-wing agenda that starts with change in the United States and extends across the larger world.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has made the most developed effort, calling in 2018 for an “international progressive front” against oligarchs, despots, and multinational corporations. But his chief role these days is chairing the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — a powerful post focused on the U.S. economy.
Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sanders, said there was a “growing sensibility on the left” about engaging more consistently with partners in other countries, “not only in South America but in the Global South.” The moment appears right, he argued, for progressives to make their case for a transnational politics anchored in traditionally left-wing economic ideas.
But U.S. progressives do not currently have a rich network of relationships abroad to draw on.
“It’s an area where the left in particular needs to do a much, much better job,” Duss said.
It is easy to overstate the global influence of the U.S. right. Trump-linked provocateurs like Steve Bannon can barge into other countries, declare the dawn of a new age of ultra-right nationalism and generate anxious coverage in the mainstream press. But it has been harder for these forces to win power and govern. Trump’s endorsements in foreign elections have not amounted to much.
Earlier this year, my colleague Zoya Sheftalovich reported that panic about Bannon-style meddling had receded in Europe: Věra Jourová, the vice president of the European Commission, recalled a sense of fear after 2016 that a character like Bannon might help ignite a continental movement. “It didn’t happen,” Jourová said.
Still, there has been political value for extreme conservatives in thinking of themselves in global terms. It has helped them identify trends and cultural attitudes that have driven elections across national boundaries — anger about the Syrian refugee crisis, fear of China, resentment toward big tech — and sharpen a common vocabulary for discussing them.
On an intangible level, it has given a once-marginalized group of ideologues a certain esprit de corps that can translate into what Americans call swagger.
Lula, who previously served as Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010, may be uniquely positioned among foreign leaders to summon the U.S. left to the barricades.
Even before his return to power, Lula occupied a special place in the imagination of U.S. progressives: a populist crusader in one of the world’s largest democracies, a defender of the Amazon, an outspoken American leftist through the era of George W. Bush. His imprisonment in 2018, the result of a questionable corruption prosecution, made him a political martyr.
There is an aesthetic component to his appeal to progressives that helps obscure other inconvenient realities, like his equivocal view of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine.
Consider the images from Lula’s last candidacy, showing a roaring leftist fighter campaigning through destitute neighborhoods and greeting ecstatic crowds from an open-top car. These are scenes unknown to U.S. voters in our time. To many progressives, they look like the best version of politics.
Lula’s imprisonment strengthened his long-distance relationship with left-leaning lawmakers in Washington, who took up his cause. Sanders led the effort, repeatedly calling for Lula’s release during his own presidential campaign. Upon his release, the Brazilian politician singled out Sanders for thanks.
“I hope American workers will make you US president,” Lula wrote to Sanders on Twitter.
He continued expressing gratitude in Washington this year, meeting with Sanders and thanking him and other progressives for their support. When Lula sat down with union leaders, he was effusive. “He wanted to thank the labor movement for standing with him,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.
With labor officials, too, Lula urged a transnational mobilization. He pressed them to lead a “fight about working people and about lifting up their economic aspirations, their living wages,” as well as protecting the Amazon, Weingarten said.
In his meeting with congressional progressives, Khanna said Lula described a certain form of progressive politics — focused on economic advancement for the working class and fighting climate change — as the antidote to a mood of despair that feeds authoritarian politics.
“One of the interesting insights he had was that there was a movement, not just in Brazil but around the world, of anti-politics,” Khanna said, “and that people have so lost faith in organizing and political activity, they have bought into the narrative that everything is corrupt, everything is broken and politics doesn’t matter.”
The solution, according to Lula, was a “hopeful, aspirational politics” that gives voters confidence “that you can improve people’s economic conditions,” Khanna said.
In some respects that sounds like a figure from closer to home: Joe Biden.
The U.S. president and Lula have some deep policy disagreements, most of all on Ukraine. For now, they have muted their differences to present a united front against homegrown forces of autocracy and insurrection. At the White House, each hailed the other as a champion of democracy.
When I contacted Lula’s spokesman, José Crispiniano, about his meetings in Washington, he shared a statement emphasizing Lula’s admiration for Biden: “He was impressed and satisfied with the commitment of President Biden with unions and workers.” He declined to comment on Lula’s remarks about building up the global left.
Biden and Lula are similar in another important way. They are both longtime national leaders who led left-of-center coalitions to victory in part because they were resilient against right-wing attacks that might have felled any candidate less familiar to voters.
Brazil’s finance minister, Fernando Haddad, who joined Lula in D.C., made that point to congressional progressives. “He said no one other than Lula could have won,” said Khanna. According to Haddad, only Lula was capable of overcoming the avalanche of bile and disinformation directed at his candidacy.
There is no guarantee in either country that a leftist or center-left message can succeed with another messenger.
That, too, is a warning and a challenge to progressives.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Thiruvananthapuram: A legal battle royale is in the offing as both the parties in the standoff — the prime accused in the gold smuggling case Swapna Suresh and CPI-M Kerala secretary M.V. Govindan — have decided to stick to their respective stands stand.
It all began when Govindan sent a Rs 1 crore defamation notice to Suresh, who reacted immediately by saying that she will not apologise to Govindan.
On Saturday, Govindan made it clear that he will go forward with the case as what Suresh did was not right.
What irked Govindan was her reported statement which was conveyed through Vijesh Pillai, who according to Suresh met her under guise to do a web series.
Suresh reportedly said that Pillai threatened her stating that Govindan has said he will eliminate her if she does not withdraw all the allegations levelled against Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and his family members by accepting Rs 30 crore, in which case they will help her move to Malaysia.
Hyderabad: Telangana Bharatiya Janata Party president Bandi Sanjay Kumar on Wednesday announced that he was ready to wage a legal battle on the defamation notices served on him by Telangana IT minister K T Rama Rao in connection with the leakage of Telangana State Public Service Commission question papers.
Reacting to the media reports that KTR had served a legal notice on him threatening to file a defamation case for Rs 100 crore if he did not tender a public apology, Sanjay said he won’t succumb to any such empty threats.
“There is no question of tendering any public apology. I am ready to fight legally for justice,” the BJP president said in a statement.
He demanded that KTR should owe an explanation to the people of Telangana as to how he had amassed such a huge wealth in the last nine years. “Everybody knows before the Telangana movement, KTR was washing utensils in the US. Now, he is worth hundreds of crores. Yet, he is craving for more money in the name of defamation,” he alleged.
Sanjay said if KTR’s reputation and image were worth Rs 100 crore, how much money should be paid to 30 lakh unemployed youths whose future was in jeopardy due to the leakage of question papers because of the misrule of the BRS government.
Describing KTR as a ‘self-styled intellectual’, the BJP president said the chief minister’s son was considering himself as an intellectual par excellence just because he could speak a few English words.
“He is stupid and cannot tolerate somebody questioning his failures and exposing the goofs-up in the government. He is so arrogant that he would use the police force to beat up the protestors who agitated against the government,” he said.
Sanjay lashed out at the BRS working president for using ‘derogatory’ language against Prime Minister Narendra Modi without even bothering to respect the latter’s age and stature.
He wondered why the BRS leaders and ministers were trying to brush aside the leakage of TSPSC question papers as an insignificant issue.
“I am surprised how the issues being probed by the SIT are being leaked to KTR. Initially, he said only two people were involved in the case but now, when more and more names are coming out, he has gone silent. Why haven’t the police filed a criminal case against KTR for trying to influence the probe, but are targeting us when we questioned the wrongdoings?” he asked.
Sanjay reiterated the allegation that as an IT minister, KTR alone would be held responsible for the goofs-up in his departments — right from the issuance of birth and death certificates to the question paper leakage; and from the death of children by falling in sewerage canals to the mauling of children by dogs.
“He should quit his post immediately owning moral responsibility,” the BJP leader said.
At a moment when many are looking to Hochul to unite Democrats in New York, fearing disaster in 2024, the governor is having the opposite effect. Progressives from New York City, who largely control the state Legislature, feel emboldened to push a left-leaning agenda after a decade of strong-arm tactics from ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo. And Hochul, long a moderate, is struggling to advance priorities that include tough-on-crime policies and making the state more affordable.
It’s a volatile mix that’s left the governor with limited political capital and her party as splintered as it has been in years.
“I wish she would listen to the voters and not the high rollers,” state Sen. Jessica Ramos (D-Queens), a leading progressive and chair of the Senate Labor Committee, said in an interview, adding that Hochul is being influenced by corporate interests who helped her raise a state record $50 million for her election.
Hochul still has the power to shape budget negotiations in coming days and weeks since she holds the purse strings ahead of the April 1 start of the fiscal year. New York lawmakers typically wrap most major legislative proposals into the state budget each year, so winning support for her agenda will be her highest priority as discussions wrap, likely in April if a deal isn’t reached in the next few days.
Hochul has struggled all year to get traction in the Legislature. She got rolled by Democrats in the state Senate last month when they resoundingly rejected her pick, Hector LaSalle, to be the state’s top judge — a first-of-its-kind rebuke by lawmakers who deemed him too moderate for their taste.
Hochul’s trying a new tactic this month by aligning herself with former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who is pumping $5 million into ads and mailers in lawmakers’ districts to boosther priorities. While the move will certainly put pressure on lawmakers worried about how their constituents will view the messages, it’s also serving to anger fellow Democrats who think the mailers cross a line.
“What’s she’s doing is weaponizing her identity and allowing billionaires to use her to continue the same old Albany politics,” Assemblymember Ron Kim (D-Queens) said at a news conference last week referencing Hochul’s status as the first woman governor.
Hochul appears ready to dig in on her priorities, looking to beat back opposition to toughening bail laws on violent suspects and making the high-cost state more affordable by forcing new housing in the suburbs.
She also wants to show that she’s got a firm grip on her office as she looks to set the tone at the Capitol for her four-year term and takes the reins of a divided state Democratic Party after succeeding Cuomo, who resigned in 2021.
Democratic values get “clouded” when “people from the socialist side” say they represent what the party stands for, Hochul said.
“My job is to bring it together, instill confidence in voters in the Democratic Party and go forth into a whole new era,” the governor said earlier this month, when asked by POLITICO about the party’s future.
Some New York City Democrats are still calling for the resignation of state party chairman Jay Jacobs, who lost all four House seats in his Long Island backyard and is fighting with liberals by blasting them as too far left for the state as a whole.
“There is a concerted, clear and definite unrelenting effort by folks from the far left to unseat moderate, progressive incumbents,” Jacobs said in a recent interview. “And it’s all about power.”
Jacobs said that, if the Legislature keeps pushing the party further left, it will alienate moderate voters in the suburbs and upstate — which, he said, was the reason Republicans flipped four House seats on Long Island, in the Hudson Valley and upstate.
“The people who abandoned the Democratic Party, for the most part, abandoned the Democratic Party because they felt that our party has moved too far to the left,” he continued. “The more we continue to do that, the more voters in these areas we will lose.”
So far, Hochul has stood by Jacobs, but his presence continues to irk liberals. Some groups said Hochul needs to make New York a progressive capital in the nation to counter Republicans in Washington and in red states.
“The governor in the last election struggled to communicate most directly with voters, and now this is a movement in the budget to say: message received,” said Sochie Nnaemeka, the director of the labor-backed Working Families Party.
Some Democrats said it’s important that the party find common ground heading into 2024, when all 26 House seats and 213 state legislative seats will be on the ballot again.
“We have to take back the House in 2024. We need to make Leader [Hakeem] Jeffries … Speaker Jeffries, and in order to do that, we have to figure out what didn’t go so great and what did well and how we do more of that,” Sen. Jamaal Bailey, the Bronx Democratic Party chairperson, said.
The tension at the Capitol is almost palpable. And it was apparent as soon as the six-month legislative session started in January.
“In a lot of areas, the governor was a drag on the ticket. That’s just a fact. So how much does that contribute to what we’re seeing now? I don’t know. I think the people who are most aggrieved aren’t here anymore. They lost,” said Sen. James Skoufis, a Hudson Valley Democrat and part of the conference’s more moderate faction.
“But it’s clear, regardless where it comes from, there is tension between a lot of the Legislature and the governor.”
How does it end up?
“There are two paths forward,” Skoufis surmised in the wake of the LaSalle rejection. “The place proverbially blows up for session, and the other is we hit a reset button. Obviously, I hope it’s the second.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
