Il governo Meloni ha trasferito 43 milioni di euro dal fondo destinato alle vittime di mafia, estorsione e usura all’organizzazione delle Olimpiadi invernali di Milano-Cortina 2026. La norma è contenuta nel decreto Sport appena pubblicato. I fondi serviranno a finanziare sicurezza, ordine pubblico e logistica dell’evento.

https://www.editorialedomani.it/politica/italia/antimafia-fasulla-milioni-fondo-vittime-clan-mafia-giochi-milano-cortina-cka7y80u

"The Democratic Party’s organizational abandonment of rural counties is a dramatic recent trend. Before 2016, fewer than 10 percent of rural Texas counties lacked Democratic Party chairs, barely higher than in urban areas. But following Donald Trump’s initial presidential victory, Democrats let their rural organizing infrastructure collapse. By contrast, Republicans maintain chairs in every single county in Texas and do not have a corresponding vacancy problem in cities.

Across the United States, only 4 percent of rural counties lack Republican chairs. In other words, Democratic vacancies in rural counties are six times higher than Republican vacancies — and growing. Democrats, intimidated by the red tide washing over rural America and stumped on how to appeal to rural voters, are simply throwing in the towel."

"Democrats’ strategic retreat carries real electoral consequences. Willbanks and Shepherd’s analysis found that counties without Democratic chairs experienced up to 8 percentage-point drops in voter turnout, up to 10 percentage-point declines in campaign contact, and up to 8 percentage-point decreases in Democratic vote share for statewide races. Statewide races, of course, include races for federal representatives. By ditching rural voters, the Democrats are actively undermining their own legislative power on a national level."

"The party’s attitude of defeat also underestimates its own potential. Erica Etelson and Anthony Flaccavento, cofounders of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, argued in the Nation that Democrats actually have a decent shot of performing well when they do run in red rural districts, provided they run relatable and attractive campaigns. Of fifty candidates they interviewed in 2022, “all significantly overperformed the partisan lean of their district or state.”

The highest performers were those candidates whose messaging focused on economic concerns alongside specific local issues — not standard national-level Democrat rhetoric with its emphasis on blue team versus red team dynamics. Given the systematic economic underdevelopment and exploitation of rural America and the profound strain on rural infrastructure, there are plenty of rural issues that lend themselves well to progressive economic messaging that steers clear of culture-war issues and national partisan mudslinging.

The New Deal garnered support in rural areas by combining tangible local improvements — immediate relief, good jobs, and improved infrastructure — with an inspiring vision of national renewal. Where the New Deal offered an expansive vision of American possibility, today’s Democratic messaging has contracted into a defensive posture centered almost entirely on opposing Donald Trump at the expense of an independent and inspiring policy agenda. This focus reinforces one of rural voters’ deepest grievances: that their local concerns are invisible to politicians consumed with the dramas of Washington and other distant power centers."

"The Democrats and the broad left can’t afford to abandon rural America. What is needed is a year-round presence in rural communities, systematic development of local candidates who understand rural concerns, and policy agendas that address the economic realities facing small towns — from health care access to agricultural policy to broadband infrastructure. Most important, progressive politics needs to articulate a vision of shared prosperity that includes rural America rather than treating these communities as obstacles to progress."

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/democrats-rural-america-elections-trump/

Dyson is a right-wing piece of shit, but this is pretty cool

https://www.yankodesign.com/2025/07/08/giant-wheels-and-robots-help-dyson-farm-strawberries-in-the-uk/

At the same time, it is important to be clear about what Mamdani’s victory does and does not suggest about progressive politics more broadly, particularly outside Democratic strongholds like New York City. First, Mamdani’s victory in no way suggests that progressives everywhere can campaign as far left as possible on divisive social issues and still break through to working-class voters. On the contrary, Mamdani’s own strategy reflects an awareness of these limits: he took care to distance himself from earlier positions, like “defund the police,” that might have diverted attention away from his core economic message.

It is impressive that Mamdani prevailed despite a barrage of attacks against him, but this hardly means that he would have been similarly effective in a purple or red district. Indeed, Mamdani overcame pushback against some of his more controversial stances in large part because the electorate he faced was quite progressive, and therefore comparatively forgiving. The Democratic primary electorate in New York City contains an unusually high share of college-educated voters, as much as 55 percent. These voters, who are substantially more progressive on social and cultural issues than noncollege graduates, make up only about 35% of general election voters in key swing states. It’s hard to imagine Mamdani overcoming the same attacks in that kind of electoral setting.

To build the national coalitions we need to stop Trumpism and deliver meaningful gains to working people, progressives still have to grapple with how to win back the many working-class voters of all backgrounds they have lost over the past decades. There is no shortcut to this struggle.

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/zohran-mamdani-national-lessons-progressive-democrats/

The Left’s best response to the birth rate crisis has two components, both of which position us advantageously against conservative alternatives while advancing our broader political project. The first component is that we must insist on a multifactorial explanation for fertility decline. Contra the Right’s simplification of the issue, many different factors converge to produce declining birth rates. Some need to be staunchly defended, and some desperately need to be fixed. That should be our line.

While we don’t know to what extent, it’s clear that birth rate decline owes partly to hard-won expanded freedoms and measures of social progress that should not be rolled back. These positive factors include expanded access to birth control and abortion, which reduces unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, and women’s integration into the public sphere, which has broken the system of spousal financial dependency in developed democracies and given women sources of self-worth beyond motherhood. Even if these changes have depressed birth rates, they are still defensible on principle and beneficial to society as a whole.

However, other major contributing factors clearly include social problems that the Left wants to fix anyway. Chief among these is the economic dimension. Poverty, precarity, economic inequality, and exploitation are already intolerable to us, because they artificially limit the life prospects of most people on Earth today. The inability to have desired children is yet another of the many profoundly painful and unfair externalities of this particular issue.

https://jacobin.com/2025/07/birth-rate-fertility-economics-conservatism/

From the first sentence to the last, the hearing was a farce. It ended with a vote of 14-2 in favor of the proposal, supported by all Jewish members of the committee — including those from opposition parties — and opposed only by two lone Palestinian MKs. The hearing was closed by committee chair Ofir Katz, of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, who called Odeh a “routine supporter of terror” and declared that he “should rot in prison.” The proposal will now pass to a vote of the whole Knesset, requiring a supermajority of 90 MKs out of 120 to finalize Odeh’s expulsion.

The intended function of the “Impeachment Law,” which passed in 2016, was clear from the outset: giving Jewish lawmakers the power to expel Arab lawmakers.

Under the law, the only reason a sitting MK can be impeached is if their actions constitute “incitement to racism” or “support for armed struggle against the State of Israel.” In other words, lawmakers who are thieves, rapists, pimps, witness tamperers or just plain corrupt, have nothing to worry about. Nor do those who call for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank or the genocide of those in Gaza; certainly, that cannot be considered “incitement to violence.”

Rather than protecting minority rights from the tyranny of the majority, an expanded panel of Israel’s High Court unanimously rejected petitions against the law in 2018, opting to empower Jewish parliamentarians — famously wise, fair, and judicious when it comes to their Arab counterparts — to remove those elected to represent over 20 percent of the country’s population.

https://www.972mag.com/ayman-odeh-knesset-palestinian-voters/