The Bharatiya Janata Party-run municipal corporation has organised a two-day anti-encroachment drive in the area. Days after north Delhi’s Jahangirpuri was struck by communal violence, bulldozers arrived in the area at around 9 am on Wednesday (April 20) morning and began demolishing properties. The area saw heightened security, Indian Express reported, with 12 companies (around 1,250 jawans) of the CRPF deployed in and around the area. However, the Supreme Court later in the morning ordered status quo on the demolition drive. Chief Justice of India N.V. Ramana said the matter should be listed for hearing tomorrow (Thursday), and until the court comes to a decision, status quo should be maintained. The court was hearing a plea filed by senior advocate Dushyant Dave. “Something serious requires your immediate intervention. This is about a completely unconstitutional and illegal demolition which has been ordered in Jahangirpuri area, where riots took place last week. No notice has been served. There is a provision for appeal under the Municipal Corporation Act. We have filed a provisional application(before SC). It was supposed to start at 2 PM but they started the demolition today morning at 9 AM knowing that we will mention,” Dave had said before the bench. However, the drive continued in Jahangirpuri despite the Supreme Court’s order.

Benny Johnson yelled at staff who say they weren’t paid on time

It was Halloween in Orlando, and we had piled into a car to make a short trip from the Hilton to an after-party down the road, to wind up the first night of the latest edition of a gathering called the National Conservatism Conference. For at least many of the young people, the actual business of conference going seemed to be beside the point, a gesture at how we used to conduct politics back before life in America spun out of control. There were jokes, or maybe they were serious questions, about whether one of the guys tagging along with us was a fed. I surreptitiously made a few searches of the name he’d given me and was surprised when I couldn’t find a single plausible hit—though that could have been because he was a hyper-secret crypto type; there were some of those floating around. Not that anyone cared. These were people who were used to guarding their words. “Don’t fuck me here,” a dark-haired woman named Amanda Milius said to me—as she somewhat imperiously dealt with a guy at the door who was skeptical about letting a reporter into the party—“and say we’re all in here sacrificing kids to Moloch. We’re just the last normal people, hanging out at the end of the world.” I had met Milius outside the Hilton when I asked for a cigarette, and she began to chaperone me around, telling people who eyed my press pass that I was there to profile her as an up-and-coming female director who, she said, had attracted more Amazon streams than any woman ever with her first documentary, a counternarrative about Russiagate. “Annie Leibovitz is still scheduling the photo shoot,” she kept saying. In this world, almost every word is layered in so much irony that you can never be sure what to take seriously or not, perhaps a semiconscious defense mechanism for people convinced that almost everyone is out to get them. “Oh, fuck,” she said as we walked into a small ballroom where the party was already underway. The room was pitifully quiet, lit in strip-club red, and the sparse crowd was almost entirely male, with a cash bar off in the corner that seemed unable to produce drinks fast enough to buoy the mood. “We have a thing we say,” she said. “ ‘This is what the people at The Washington Post think we’re doing.’ Well, this is exactly what the people at The Washington Post think we’re doing.”

In the 2012 Hollywood hit “Zero Dark Thirty,” a red-haired Central Intelligence Agency analyst played by Jessica Chastain travels to a secret CIA prison and watches a colleague waterboard a screaming Al Qaeda suspect, then lock him in a box a little bigger than a mini-fridge, to make him talk. In 2002, red-haired CIA analyst Alfreda Scheuer, then known by her maiden name Bikowsky, traveled to a secret CIA prison to watch the torture of Al Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded and locked in a “dog box,” Senate investigators reported. The Central Intelligence Agency had granted the filmmakers unprecedented access to agency officials, and outlets from NBC News to The New Yorker reported that Chastain’s character was patterned partially on Scheuer, citing her position but omitting her name because the agency said her work was classified. For two decades Scheuer was a central figure in some of the major controversies of America’s war on Islamist extremist groups, including secret detention centers and brutal interrogations. CIA operatives normally operate in a dark, shadowy world, but Scheuer’s experiences found the spotlight. Scheuer retired from her most recent role as deputy chief of Homeland and Strategic Threats late in 2021 and agreed to talk to Reuters this year. It’s the first interview she’s ever done, she said, and she decided to speak to make clear she was not forced out of the agency but left on her own terms. By policy, the CIA doesn’t discuss individual employees or confirm whether they worked at the agency. Over several calls that lasted two and half hours, Scheuer said she couldn’t discuss individual cases because they were classified. But in a broad sense, she said waterboarding cited in government reports was not torture, insisted such techniques can work and said any criticism of her was largely the result of her taking risks to combat terrorism. “I got bloodied,” she said, alluding to criticism of her agency in government and media reports, “and kept coming back to try again and again to do something. I'm proud that I wasn't on the sidelines. I didn't bury my head in the sand.” The New Yorker once dubbed Scheuer, again citing her position but omitting her name, as the “Queen of Torture,” writing that “she gleefully participated in torture sessions.” Now out of the CIA, Scheuer’s career has taken a turn: She is a “life coach,” running a business called YBeU Beauty, focusing on helping women “look good, feel good, and do good.” It is a world removed from her prior life, with the website featuring photos of her, thoughtful and confident.

Montpelier, the estate of James Madison, has gone from being the toast of the museum world to being, well, just plain toast. In March, the Montpelier Foundation board reneged on a June 2021 restructuring that gave descendants of the enslaved there “structural parity” on its board — a reversal criticized by Montpelier staff who had spent decades partnering with the descendant community in excavating the estate’s history of enslavement. A much-lauded promise to share power equally with the descendants of the enslaved has devolved into the erasure of key staff responsible for uncovering the history of enslavement at the estate of “The Father of the Constitution.” “They wanted to yank the narrative of Montpelier away from slavery, despite all of their protestations to the contrary,” said board member James French, chair of the Montpelier Descendants Committee . “And they wanted to create a false history that sees slavery and the constitution as unrelated opposites when in fact, freedom and slavery occupied the same place in Montpelier like no other place in the country.”

Democrats see Rep. Abigail Spanberger's district as competitive but winnable in a tough midterm fight. She thinks addressing GOP attacks on crime head on is key to keeping it. And Spanberger — who described the “defund” slogan as voters’ top issue in her own 2020 race — is one of many Democrats who worry those hits could prompt even more drastic political casualties than their unexpected losses two years ago. “I thought that was a terrible idea,” the Virginia Democrat said of the “defund” slogan, which she said obfuscated the meaning of police reform and confused voters. She and other Democrats are bracing for the GOP onslaught, unwilling to let Republican attacks go unanswered this year. Instead, they’re preemptively correcting the record. Spanberger, who spent years in law enforcement herself, offered a model on how to do that in a recent half-day tour that demonstrated her support for the Culpeper Police Department — speaking to over a dozen officers as they showed off drones and their K-9 unit, followed by a ride-along.

The Tennessee Republican Party voted Tuesday to remove former State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus and two other people from the August primary ballot in the state's 5th Congressional District. The vote marked the culmination of months of effort by both GOP legislators and activists to boot Ortagus because she had only recently moved to the state. She was endorsed by former President Donald Trump. The state GOP’s executive committee has the authority to disqualify candidates from the primary ballot for failing to adhere to the party’s bylaws, which require a candidate to have voted in three of the last four GOP primaries, as well as to actively participate in the state or local Republican parties. The committee voted to remove Ortagus and fellow candidates Robby Starbuck and Baxter Lee, whose candidacies were also challenged, state GOP Chairman Scott Golden said. "I voted for Trump. I supported him," state Sen. Frank Niceley, the Republican who spearheaded the legislation, said in an interview last month. "I’ll vote for Trump as long as he lives. But I don’t want him coming out here to tell me who to vote for." In the earlier interview, Niceley, who is supporting former state House Speaker Beth Harwell in the primary and recently came under fire after he invoked Adolf Hitler in a state Senate floor speech about homelessness, suggested that only Jewish members of Trump’s family cared about Ortagus’ candidacy because of her Jewish faith. "I don’t think Trump cares one way or the other," he said. "I think Jared Kushner — he’s Jewish, she’s Jewish — I think Jared will be upset. Ivanka will be upset. I don’t think Trump cares."

In an extremely weird set of remarks, even for him, the Texas lawmaker opined at a live recording of his podcast, Verdict With Ted Cruz: “I think there are people who are misguided, trying to drive, you know, Disney stepping in, saying, you know, in every episode now they’re gonna have, you know, Mickey and Pluto going at it. Like, really? It’s just like, come on guys, these are kids, and you know, you could always shift to Cinemax if you want that. Like, why do you have—it used to be, look, I’m a dad. You used to be able to put your kids on the Disney Channel and be like, alright, something innocuous will happen.”

Parents venting on social media is mostly harmless — but some reveal too much

Twelve Tribes followers take pains to present an innocuous front to outsiders. They attract new members with a folksy peace-and-love, all-are-welcome message, but underneath that hollow promise of …

Since its existence was revealed by the New York Times in 2017, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which was funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, has been the subject of fervent curiosity from UFO disclosure advocates, government transparency activists, and journalists alike. The now formally defunct program was studying UFO-related phenomena, according to a landmark 2020 investigation by Popular Mechanics; the DIA’s public explanations on just what that involved have ranged over the years from unsatisfying to obfuscatory. Namely, the agency has insisted in recent years that AATIP was not looking at UFO-related phenomena, which former employees working on the program say is simply not true. Now, a new tranche of documents released by the DIA to Motherboard based on a FOIA request filed four years ago shows, in detail, the exotic and occasionally downright weird research priorities of the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program (AAWSAP), an at-times overlapping program whose existence has been known about for several years. Some of these documents were also released several weeks ago to John Greenewald at the Black Vault; others have been circulating on Reddit for the past several weeks, indicating that the DIA has recently released a backlog of very old FOIA requests. The Sun also published some details about some of the documents, which it also obtained via FOIA, earlier this month. (AATIP and AAWSAP appear to have been, in practice, almost interchangeable; a DIA spokesperson previously told Greenewald, “[AATIP] was the name of the overall program. [AAWSAP] was the name of the contract that DIA awarded for the production of technical reports under AATIP.”) The nearly 1,600 pages of documents released to Motherboard are a mix of scientific research, contracts, presentations, briefings, and memos related to the program; there are also many documents written for or by former Senator Harry Reid, who was responsible for the creation of the program, that detail meetings about AATIP or AAWSAP, argue for or against certain research or contracts, and the like. In many cases, documents prepared for the DIA about the theoretical applications of certain technologies were prepared by a person or entity whose name is redacted. Motherboard is publishing the full scope of what we received for transparency and to aid researchers and other journalists. Those documents are available here.

In November 2021 the U.S. Attorney in Georgia filed a case against 24 growers and labor contractors for abusing workers in the H-2A temporary contract labor program. The complaint included two deaths, rape, kidnapping, threatening workers with guns, and growers selling workers to each other as though they were property/slaves. While shocking, these abuses are just the latest, and commonplace. For decades the H-2A [guestworker –Eds] program has abused workers recruited from other countries and pitted them against workers in the U.S. in a vicious system to keep worker wages low and grower profits high. A pioneering report by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2013 called the program “Close to Slavery.” The Georgia case shows plainly that this was no exaggeration. In 2007, when Santiago Rafael Cruz was sent by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee to fight corruption in the H-2A recruitment system in Mexico, he was tortured and murdered in his office, undoubtedly by the recruiters. His murderers were never caught. In 2018 Honesto Silva, an H-2A worker, died in a Washington State field as he labored in extreme temperatures and forest fire smoke. When his co-workers protested, they were deported—a fate that awaits all H-2A workers who assert their rights. In a nationwide rash of Covid deaths among “guest” workers, two workers died at the Gebbers Farm in eastern Washington last year.

Dean Baquet’s departure as executive editor of the New York Times has been one of the worst-kept secrets in media. Baquet turned sixty-five in September—“the traditional age when executive editors at the Times step down,” the paper notes in its own coverage—and, ever since, he has been notably open about his impending exit. He’s joked with colleagues about his advancing age, and sat down in February for an interview with The New Yorker, which described him, menacingly, as being “at the twilight of his career.” The only drama around Baquet’s departure has centered on who will replace him, in arguably the most important job in the American press, and what that says about how the newspaper and its leadership view the state journalism in the US. Recent decisions by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to fill their own open executive-editor positions with people from outside their organizations (and outside a succession of white men) stirred the notion that the Times, too, might opt for a new approach. While the anointment of a new Times editor is always approached with high ceremony by media reporters, this time the move has been watched even more widely. The residue of the Trump years, and fears that the former president will return for another campaign, have put the Times in the bull’s-eye of the journalistic debates over objectivity and both-sides coverage, which have led many legacy news operations to wonder whether traditional approaches to journalism apply at a time of high concern for the fate of American democracy. In picking Joe Kahn, the Times’ managing editor, to replace Baquet, the newspaper is signaling that it has no plans to rethink its approach. Baquet and A.G. Sulzberger, the Times’ publisher, have consistently dismissed the idea that journalistic norms of objectivity should be tossed out. The view of the Times leadership is that journalism is more threatened by a lack of trust, which only deepens when readers sense that the paper has its thumb on the partisan scale.

An independent autopsy by nationally known pathologists Werner Spitz and Michael Baden is expected to add gravity to any civil cases that might be filed following the shooting death of Patrick Lyoya. Spitz, a 95-year-old professor of pathology, and Baden, an 87-year-old physician, could play key roles in legal proceedings, while the Michigan State Police also investigate the death. The pathologists' findings were released Tuesday. The conclusion: Lyoya, a 26-year-old Black refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was shot in the back of the head with a large caliber bullet and died within seconds of the gunshot. The case is significant, because, like the George Floyd death in Minneapolis, the Lyoya's death was captured on video. It also is one of the latest deaths in which a Black person is killed by a white police officer. An initial autopsy was conducted by Kent County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Stephen Cohle, who announced his report would be completed as soon as the toxicology and tissue test results are in, but not publicly released until the Michigan State Police investigation was concluded.

Signs and symptoms to watch out for

An unnamed worker is alleging that Nintendo, and a firm it uses for hiring contractors, violated their legally protected right to unionize, according to a new filing with the National Labor Relations Board.

Last year, some neighbors started a petition calling for more police enforcement on the street. OPD Chief LeRonne Armstrong recently met with neighbors over Zoom about safety concerns. And following one recent shooting, someone took matters into their own hands by installing eight surveillance cameras on four city-owned streetlight poles. The cameras had prime views of the parking areas and sidewalks. But the surveillance system has been something of a mystery: the cameras weren’t installed by the city, and officials don’t know who put them there. 

While CEOs earn multimillion-dollar salaries, most workers make significantly less than a living wage Some of the largest, most profitable companies in retail and food services are still paying most of their workers less than $15 an hour, and many still make less than $10 an hour, according to a new company wage tracker developed by the Economic Policy Institute and the Shift Project. The tracker, which covers 66 large retail and food service corporations, found: Dollar General pays 92% of workers less than $15 an hour and 22% are paid less than $10 an hour. McDonald’s pays 89% of its workers less than $15 an hour and 23% are paid less than $10 an hour. Wendy’s pays 87% of workers less than $15 an hour and 17% are paid less than $10 an hour. At Sonic, 85% of workers are paid less than $15 an hour and 22% less than $10 an hour. Similarly high percentages were found at Arby’s, Burger King, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. The report was released as many of these firms have complained about being unable to find staff. Some fast-food firms, such as In and Out Burger, pay much more, with the majority of their workers paid at least $16 an hour and just 9% below $15 an hour.

The Democratic policy world produces bad ideas and then misleads everybody about them. Over at Slow Boring, Matt Yglesias has a piece in which he argues that the Democratic policymaking system focuses too much on cultivating team players and coalition-building and not enough on crafting technically sound policy ideas. Left-of-center policy advocates rarely make criticisms of the policies that come out of major liberal organizations and, even when they do, it is very difficult for those criticisms to get a fair hearing in the media or in the halls of Congress because journalists and staffers are naturally skeptical of anyone saying that the overwhelming consensus of dozens of policy analysts across multiple major organizations is simply wrong. I speak from a place of experience on this. As Yglesias notes in his piece, I spent a couple of months last year pointing out that the Democratic child care proposal would dramatically increase child care prices for middle class families right above the subsidy cliff. At the time, I was the only one publicly saying this (unless you also count the DC city government, which published a report saying the same thing). And I got a crazy amount of backlash for doing so. Email blasts went out across the Hill telling everyone I was wrong. The Center for American Progress (CAP) ran a social media campaign claiming, not only that I was wrong, but also that the child care proposal didn’t even have subsidy cliff (it did). Child care advocates got Politico’s Eleanor Mueller to write an attack on me that lined up quotes from Rasheed Malik of CAP, Melissa Boteach of the National Women’s Law Center (formerly at CAP), an anonymous “Democratic aide,” and even Senator Patty Murray, all saying in so many words that I was way off base. All of this was bullshit. One of Yglesias’s think tank sources told him that this was a known problem with the child care plan well before I pointed it out, but that the problem had nonetheless been suppressed for political reasons.

The space science community thinks the time is ripe to study Uranus in depth — and they’re being serious. A new report compiled by planetary scientists from across the United States says that sending an interplanetary probe to study the ice giant planet should be considered the top priority for planetary exploration over the next decade. Specifically, scientists are calling on NASA to create the Uranus Orbiter and Probe, or UOP. The mission concept would send a spacecraft into orbit around Uranus, along with a probe that would plunge into the planet’s atmosphere. Scientists envision such a mission launching sometime in the early 2030s as long as engineers get started on it as soon as next year. If it works, the UOP mission could provide the most intricate details yet about this mostly unexplored world. The only spacecraft to ever visit Uranus was NASA’s Voyager 2 mission, which flew by the planet in 1986, coming within 50,700 miles of the planet’s cloud tops. Voyager 2 unlocked some intriguing secrets about Uranus, discovering new moons and rings around the planet. But Voyager 2 didn’t stay for long; it zoomed by during its exploration of the outer Solar System and kept going, eventually heading off into interstellar space.