‘On Tuesday, the US government put eight men — only one a South Sudanese citizen — on a deportation flight to South Sudan, an unstable country in East Africa that is on the verge of civil war, with minimal notice and no chance to speak with a lawyer. Their exact location is now unclear.
A court order from April, issued by the same federal judge, Brian Murphy, blocked the Tr*mp administration from deporting immigrants to countries not their own without due process because of the possibility they could face violence or death there.…’ Cameron Peters via Vox
‘Joe Biden lost it before he even won the presidency.
This is the most notable revelation in Original Sin, a new book-length exposé of the Biden White House by Axios’ Alex Thompson and CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Thompson and Tapper mostly fill in the details of a story we already knew: Biden’s cognition declined sharply over his final two years in office, and his core advisers schemed to disguise this reality from donors, Democratic officials, and the public.
But the authors also vindicate those who believed that Biden was already in rough shape before he ever won the presidency. Their book suggests that the former president’s cognitive decline began after the tragic death of his son Beau from brain cancer in 2015. By December 2019, Biden was having difficulty remembering the name of his top adviser Mike Donilon, whom he’d worked with for 38 years, and conducting coherent conversations with voters over Zoom.
Original Sin is a sad book, made all the sadder by this week’s news that Biden has metastatic prostate cancer. It is also an infuriating read that illuminates the selfishness and self-delusions that led an unwell octogenarian to run for a second presidential term — and a team of sycophantic advisers to conceal his condition from the public (and possibly, even from himself).…’ Eric Levitz via Vox
‘An increasingly authoritarian United States might see the return of violent revolutionaries like the 1970s Weather Underground, warns Jukka Savolainen, a professor of sociology at Wayne State University. This was a group of young, well-educated, upper-middle-class Americans who bombed government buildings to protest the Vietnam War…
Most people will seek change through peaceful activism, but Savolainen warns that “societies that exile their intellectuals risk turning them into revolutionaries.”…’ Ellsworth Toohey via Boing Boing
‘UnitedHealth, the health insurer whose CEO was allegedly assassinated outside a hotel in New York City, secretly paid nursing homes not to transfer seriously ill patients to hospitals. The Guardian reports that the cost-cutting plan “saved the company millions” at the cost of patients’ health.…’ Rob Beschizza via Boing Boing
