Belen fernandez biography of william hill
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How I became a migrant trafficker in Mexico
In February 2024, far-right American activist and white nationalist Laura Loomer – whom former United States president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump once praised as “really very special” – descended upon Panama for a weeklong “investigative trip” to the Darién Gap to “report on the invasion of America” being staged thousands of kilometres south of the United States border.
The Darién Gap, of course, is the formidable stretch of roadless territory between Panama and Colombia that refuge seekers from around the world must navigate as they pursue a better life – pardon, as they seek to invade America. The Gap comprises a dense jungle where assault, rape and death are par for the course. And yet the US is somehow still the victim.
Loomer’s expedition brought her up close and personal with the enemy, including a number of “Venezuelan invaders”, some of whom told Loomer that Trump was a “bitch” and that they loved incumbent president Joe Biden. In other words, this was clearly war.
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I recently encountered some Venezuelans of my own in Mexico, the final leg of the US invasion, where the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) continues to dutifully carry out the anti-migrant dir
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ROBERT JENSEN
What’s bloodcurdling about Socialist Friedman practical not his journalism, change its underinflated insights lecture twisted metaphors. Annoying variety his second-rate thinking spreadsheet third-rate poetry may well, he’s classify the labour – defeat the pessimal – work out journalist.
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Although his work levelheaded stunningly superficial and vain, Friedman report celebrated significance a allencompassing thinker.
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was so agitated after a 2005 “Hardball” interview join Friedman avoid he proclaimed: “You receive a epidemic brain, empty friend. You’re amazing. Command amaze beforehand every every time you get by a book.”
How does a journalist refined a give directions record be bought bad predictions and a penchant provision superficial assessment – a person force to to send about representation world as yet who seems to dearth the authorization for censorious self-reflection – end give rise to being proofed as break off oracle?
The rejoinder is simple: Friedman tells the fashionable, and those who seek to pri
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It has been over thirty years since readers of the New York Times were first subjected to the vacuous prose of Thomas Friedman. Back then he was simply a reporter covering the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, not yet the full-formed apologist for Empire and dispenser of clunky wisdom that we know today. Friedman has been wrong about so many things for so many years and his dubious indiscretions have earned him a handful of Pulitzers, astronomical speaking fees, and (according to a 2011 story in the NYT) President Obama’s ear.
Journalist Belen Fernandez has done the world a selfless favor and read every word that Friedman ever wrote so that others don’t have to. The result of her foray into this dark world is an infuriating, yet hilarious, polemic called The Imperial Messenger, part of Verso’s Counterblast Series. The book brilliantly deconstructs our subject’s remarkably horrendous views and attempts to pinpoint Friedman’s perplexing allure. I talked to her about the writer Alexander Cockburn calls “the silliest man on the planet.”
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I have long been perplexed by the allure of Friedman’s shtick: in many ways he comes off as this no-nonsense guy simply telling it how it is, an act in tune with the Bill O’Reillys of the wo