!chuds TJD

The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos's decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper's paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.

A corporate spokesperson declined to comment, citing The Washington Post Co.'s status as a privately held company.

"It's a colossal number," former Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told NPR. "The problem is, people don't know why the decision was made. We basically know the decision was made but we don't know what led to it."

Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year's presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post's roots: It has for years styled itself an "independent paper."

Few people inside the paper credit that rationale given the timing, however, just days before a neck-and-neck race between Harris and former President Donald Trump.

Former Executive Editor Marty Baron voiced that skepticism in an interview with NPR's Morning Edition on Monday.

"If this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would've been fine," Baron said. "It's a certainly reasonable decision. But this was made within a couple of weeks of the election, and there was no substantive serious deliberation with the editorial board of the paper. It was clearly made for other reasons, not for reasons of high principle."

Post reporters have revealed repeated instances of wrongdoing and allegations of illegality by Trump and his associates. The editorial page, which operates separately, has characterized Trump as a threat to the American democratic experiment. Several Post journ*lists say their relatives are among those canceling subscriptions.

The mass cancellations point "to the polarization of the times we're living in, and the energy people feel about these issues," Brauchli says. "This gave people a reason to act on this mood."

Brauchli has publicly encouraged people not to cancel their Post subscriptions in protest.

"It is a way to send a message to ownership but it shoots you in the foot if you care about the kind of in-depth, quality journ*lism like the Post produces," he said. "There aren't many organizations that can do what the Post does. The range and depth of reporting by the Post's journ*lists is among the best in the world."

Even at the rival New York Times, with a much higher circulation level, a significant protest might register in the low thousands. Earlier this year, Lewis, the Post publisher, had touted the paper's net gain of 4,000 subscribers as noteworthy.

Three of the top 10 viewed stories on the Post's website Sunday were articles written by Post staffers outraged by Bezos' decision. The top one was humor columnist Alexandra Petri's piece, headlined, "It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president." More than 174,000 people read it online.

Resignations follow Bezos' decision

The decision by Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, was first reported by NPR on Friday. In the days since, two columnists have resigned from the paper and two writers have stepped down from the editorial board.

One of those writers, Molly Roberts, warned of the possible consequences of the eleventh-hour decision to stay quiet rather than publish the editorial endorsing Harris. "Donald Trump is not yet a dictator," she wrote in a statement she posted on social media. "But the quieter we are, the closer he comes."

The other writer is David Hoffman, who accepted a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing on Thursday, the day before Bezos' decision was made public. Pulitzer judges recognized him "for a compelling and well-researched series on new technologies and the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age, and how they can be fought."

"For decades, the Washington Post's editorials have been a beacon of light, signaling hope to dissidents, political prisoners and the voiceless," David Hoffman wrote in a letter Monday explaining his decision to leave the editorial board. "When victims of repression were harassed, exiled, imprisoned and murdered, we made sure the whole world knew the truth.

"I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump," Hoffman added in his letter to Editorial Page Editor David Shipley, which was obtained by NPR. "I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice."

Hoffman says he intends to remain at the paper, saying he "refuses to give up on The Post, where I have spent 42 years." He writes of being launched on several projects, including "the expanded effort to support press freedom around the world."

Shipley held a contentious meeting on Monday with scores of opinion section staffers, who posed tough questions to the editorial page chief, including appeals for Bezos to address them.

As recently as last week, according to a person present, Shipley said he sought to talk Bezos out of his decision. Shipley added, "I failed."

Questions about Bezos' timing and motives

Former columnist Robert Kagan, an editor-at-large, explained his decision on CNN Friday night to resign from the paper.

"We are in fact bending the knee to Donald Trump because we're afraid of what he will do," Kagan said, noting that officials from Bezos' Blue Origin aerospace company met with Trump a few hours after the decision became public.

Blue Origin has a multi-billion dollar contract with NASA. During the Trump administration, Amazon sued the government after alleging it had blocked a $10 billion cloud-computing-services contract with the Pentagon over the then-president's ire about coverage in the Post, which Bezos owns personally.

Yet Bezos resolutely supported the staff's coverage during the Trump presidency (and has not interfered with reporting on his own business interests or personal life).

"In Trump's previous — and perhaps only — presidential term, at no point did Bezos flinch when it came to Trump," Brauchli says. "So there's no reason to think he is doing so on this."

Bezos brought in Lewis as publisher and chief executive at the start of the year in part, according to people with knowledge of the process, because he had worked closely with powerful conservative figures and had appealed successfully to conservative audiences.

Lewis had been editor of the Telegraph in the U.K., which is considered closely allied with the right wing of the Conservative party. He served as a top executive in London for Rupert Murdoch and became publisher and chief executive of his most prestigious title, the Wall Street Journal. After departing, he briefly became a consultant for the Conservative British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

!nooticers

The Indian national had been jailed for 14 months in 2021 in relation to three counts of child s*x abuse images.

The paedophile had also been handed a sexual harm prevention order, as well as being required to sign the s*x offenders register for 10 years.

However, despite this, Home Office attempts to deport him have now failed after the man won a legal challenge on human rights grounds.

Lawyers for the Indian paedophile claimed the sentence was "unduly harsh" and that it would be unfair to separate him from his two children.

It comes despite court judges having previously prevented the man from having "direct unsupervised contact" with his two children.

The man's only current contact is said to be over video call, according to legal papers.

The case is now pending further appeals by the Home Officer, it's reported by the Mail Online.

Commenting on the case, Tory MP and leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick labelled the case "madness".

The MP, who's key leadership pledge is to see the UK leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), is citing it as yet another example of a misuse of the legislation.

The paedophile, who can only be referred to as "HS" after he was granted life-long anonymity, said deportation would damage his right to "private and family life" under Article 8 of the ECHR.

As part of the appeal, judges in the upper immigration and asylum tribunal also flagged serious concerns over the handling of the case.

It follows a claim from an independent social worker, Laurence Chester, who concluded deportation would be too harsh on the man's children.

It's claimed the paedophile first came to the UK in 2002, before he went on to remain in the country illegally.

It's then claimed he married in 2010, before later winning temporary permission to stay here as a spouse.

"We find the independent social worker's failure to consider the nature of the appellant's offending... as a safeguarding issue that needed to be evaluated was an astonishing oversight," the upper court ruling said.

"Only passing references are made to the nature of the appellant's offending," it said.

The ruling had failed to acknowledge the "obvious weaknesses" in Mr Chester's report, which suffered from "startling omissions", it went on.

"By primarily relaying on the evidence of the independent social worker, the judge failed to engage with the evident shortcomings of his report," wrote upper tribunal judges Melissa Canavan and Matthew Hoffman.

"We also find that the judge failed to take into account the nature of the applicant's offending, which involved child pornography, and how this factored into the issue of contact with his children."

https://apnews.com/article/cbs-news-dokoupil-israel-coates-interview-tone-01035b94b1a824c1589555def1a52c6b

The restructuring would mark the first closure of domestic plants in the company's 87-year history and set it up for a battle with powerful unions in Germany, where VW has 300,000 employees. There are 10 plants which are part of the VW's core brand and could potentially be closed.

Electronic tabulators/paper ballots is the best way to run an election

— Polling Canada (@CanadianPolling) October 27, 2024

!transphobes !chuds Don't you wish you could hate women as much as the s

In a recent United Nations report, it was revealed that as of March 30, 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals to their transgender counter parts in 29 different sports.

The report, called 'Violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences', was made by Jordanian civil servant and UN Special Rapporteur, Reem Alsalem. It goes into detailing the disadvantages and obstacles women across the world face in sports due to their gender.

One of the aspects it focuses on is the inclusion of transgender athletes, (who are referred to as 'male athletes that identify as females' in the report) in female categories of sports.

"The replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-s*x category has resulted in an increasing number of female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against males," the report said.

The report also said that while these transgender athletes are asked to take testosterone suppresents and maintain hormone levels, "pharmaceutical testosterone suppression for genetically male athletes – irrespective of how they identify – will not eliminate the set of comparative performance advantages they have already acquired."

Further, it alleges that because these hormone drugs will flagged in drugs test, transgender athletes aren't drug tested as often and insinuated that they might be taking drugs that provide further advantages.

In another section, the report said that the mere presence of transgender athletes in female sports cause the female participants severe psychological distress.

"The knowledge of female athletes that they may be competing against males included in female sports, including males that identify as females or males with specific XY differences in s*x development, causes extreme psychological distress due to the physical disadvantage, the loss of opportunity for fair competition and of educational and economic opportunities and the violation of their privacy in locker rooms and other intimate spaces," the report said.

Further the report said, "Removing single-s*x spaces in sports may also increase the risk of sexual harassment, assault, voyeurism and physical and sexual attacks in unisex locker rooms and pottys."

Invasive s*x tests are also major problem, the report claimed, but added that in some cases it is necessary, citing the controversy of Imane Khelif, where, the report alleged, "the International Olympic Committee refused to carry out a s*x screening."

Referring to the biases that occur due to the need to support the LGBTQ+ community, the report said, "Female athletes and coaches who object to the inclusion of men in their spaces due to concerns about safety, privacy and fairness are silenced or forced to self-censor; otherwise, they risk losing sporting opportunities, scholarships78 and sponsorships."

The Special Rapporteur has categorically stated in the UN report, "To avoid the loss of a fair opportunity, males must not compete in the female categories of sport."

Leftist shares his plan if Trump wins this election. This is a whole new level of delusion… pic.twitter.com/BYYqVAL8T9

— Amala Ekpunobi (@amalaekpunobi) October 26, 2024