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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 2 years

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Joe Biden will sign legislation protecting access to abortion care into law if Democrats win control of Congress in midterm elections this fall.

In remarks to a Democratic National Committee event on 18 October, the President announced plans to sign a bill to codify Roe v. Wade protections on the 50th anniversary of the US Supreme Court decision – what he intends to be his first act of 2023.

In June, the nation’s high court struck down precedents established by Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey that affirmed the constitutional right to abortion care.

Following the latest ruling, more than a dozen states have outlawed most abortions or severely restricted access to care, leading to the closures of dozens of clinics. Patients and providers across the US have warned of devastating consequences to losing access to legal abortion, while Democratic officials have made abortion rights central to their midterm campaigns as Republicans mull national abortion restrictions.

“If Republicans get their way with a national ban, it won’t matter where you live in America,” Mr. Biden said on Tuesday. “The only sure way to stop these extremist laws that have put in jeopardy women’s health and rights is for Congress to pass a law.”

Democrats would need to pick up several seats in the currently evenly split US Senate for abortion protections to prevail.

Mr. Biden also said he will veto any anti-abortion legislation passed by a Republican-controlled Congress.

The Democratic-led House of Representatives passed the Women’s Health Protection Act earlier this year, though Senate Republicans have repeatedly obstructed its introduction in that chamber. That bill would codify the right to abortion care as affirmed by Roe v. Wade.

House Democrats were only joined by three Republicans to pass the Ensuring Access to Abortion Act, which would protect the right of abortion patients who live in states that have outlawed or severely restricted care to travel to other states without risking prosecution or legal action in their home states.

The bill also would protect providers and others who help patients travelling out of state for their care.

Legislation would also shield interstate shipments of US Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs used for medication abortion, the most common form of abortion care, accounting for more than half of all abortions in the US.

In a briefing with reporters on Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called Republican-led abortion restrictions “disturbing” and “very dangerous.”

“It’s backwards, again, it’s dangerous and it’s severe, in stark contrast to the President and the commitment that he has to leave these decisions between a woman and her doctor,” she said.

This fall, voters in several states will determine whether their state constitutions include explicit protections for abortion care, while elections for control of state legislatures, governors’ offices and secretaries of state will also determine the fates of abortion access across the US.

In his remarks on Tuesday, President Biden pointed to Kansas voters shooting down a recent anti-abortion ballot measure in that state, signalling the electoral consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision in midterm elections.

“One of the most extraordinary parts of [the Dobbs decision] was when the majority wrote, ‘women are not without electoral or political power.’ Let me tell you something – the Court and extreme Republicans who have spent decades trying to overturn Roe are about to find out,” he said.

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sophiamcdougall · 16 days

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God this shouldn't be so refreshing to see.

#the independent

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gleesonarchive · 2 months

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Part 1/2 • NEW • Domhnall Gleeson was photographed for The Independent!

📷 Freddie Miller (10.02.2024)

#domhnall gleeson #2024 #interview #the independent #photoshoot #portrait #freddie miller

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hldailyupdate · 6 months

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The Unlikely Lads: How Pete Doherty, Louis Tomlinson and Noel Gallagher teamed up for rising star Andrew Cushin

Not much can unite an Oasis brother, a One Directioner, and an erstwhile Babyshambler – but Andrew Cushin has done just that. Mark Beaumont speaks to the singer and his A-list backers about what they see in this Geordie ‘destined for great things’

Maybe once in a generation, the stars align: barriers crumble and the pop lamb lies down with the indie rock jackal. Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave. Miley Cyrus and The Flaming Lips. And now, Louis Tomlinson and Pete (now Peter) Doherty: united not on record, but to co-release the debut album by 23-year-old Andrew Cushin, a little-known Newcastle troubadour with a gift for mesmerising superstars – from all walks, evidently.

There’s no other explanation for a story that reads like A Star is Bornmeets Pygmalion, with a dash of The Karate Kid – on a hefty fried breakfast – thrown in. One whiff of Cushin’s early live footage and Noel Gallagher was producing his songs. A glimpse of him playing on Soccer AM and Tomlinson swept him away around the world on tour. Brief exposure to his onstage performance and Doherty was clamouring to release his debut album alongside Tomlinson, in what has become a hands-across-the-cultural-ocean collaboration. Forget “right place, right time”, Cushin is the right place and his time is clearly now.

“It’s all happened very much by chance,” this Geordie Maharishi self-deprecates down the phone from an airport midway through his 36 dates supporting Tomlinson on a tour that’s taken him across the UK, Europe and America. In several weeks his album, Waiting For The Rain, will come close to breaking the Top 40, partly down to such support from big-name mentors, partly thanks to an arresting talent set to bewitch a generation. “There’s a lot of acts that gig for three or four years and then they get discovered,” he says. “We were the opposite – you’re going out on this tour, but you’ve already got these big names behind you, you’ve just got to go and learn now. It’s been like an apprenticeship in music.”

Luck, Cushin’s celebrity backers will attest, had very little to do with it. “The songs are great,” Tomlinson tells me. “They’re super honest, super real. The lyrics cut deep, some of them, and I think that’s really brave as a new songwriter.” Doherty agrees. “It was the weight of what he was singing about, that was the first thing that grabbed me,” the Libertines rocker says. “The emotional weight of his songs and also the strength of his voice.”

Hard-earned traits, it transpires. In the wake of his father’s death, a then 18-year-old Cushin began pouring his anguish and survival instinct into rock-leaning singer-songwriting of brutal honesty and stirring redemption. If “Just Like You’d Want Me To” was an open letter to his father about his determination to overcome his grief and forge on to glory, the glowering “4.5%” was a devastating portrait of the effect his dad’s alcoholism had on the family. “By 12, he’s falling down the stairs, by one he’s claiming no one cares,” Cushin sings over plaintive piano and a faded heartbeat, “each drink, it drowns your son and daughter”.

“I wrote that three days after he passed away, out of such horrible emotions of losing a parent and not being able to speak to anybody,” Cushin says of what he calls his “therapy song”. “Sometimes it is hard for me to sing because it does bring me back to that place. But at the same time I’ve played that song so many times now and it’s amazing how many people come forward and can relate to it. Anybody who goes through having a parent who’s alcoholic or a friend who’s alcoholic, they all have similar stories and feelings about things that go on. If somebody knows someone who’s an alcoholic, they’ll know what I went through and vice versa.”

Cushin set about playing his songs around the pubs of Newcastle. Within three weeks he had secured a manager with links to Noel Gallagher who, in turn, put Cushin in touch with promoters and labels after being emailed a video clip of a live show. “When I was growing up my heroes were Noel and Weller and basically everything that my dad used to listen to,” Cushin says. “So to be doing music for about three weeks and to have an email from Noel and him to help us out with promoters and that, it was an insane three or four weeks. I hadn’t even played a gig outside of Newcastle at that point.”

Gallagher produced, sang backing vocals and played guitar on Cushin’s 2020 track “Where’s My Family Gone”, a raw dissection of familial conflict and the third and final single Cushin released on Virgin before his deal collapsed and gigs dried up during the pandemic. Cushin took Gallagher’s parting advice to heart, though. “He told us to graft,” he told NME in 2020. “He just said keep your head down, work hard and write, write, write. That’s what I’ll do.”

Constructing his album during the Covid downtime, Cushin swiftly bounced back, blessed from pop’s Mount Olympus. At his first post-lockdown shows, supporting Doherty solo for three dates, he found the Libertines singer side of stage each night, increasingly enthused by his performances. “I got about two songs in and I looked to my left and he was stood at the side of the stage kinda clapping away,” Cushin recalls. Doherty, having launched his own label Strap-Originals, enquired if he was signed. “I went, ‘No, no, we’ve just been released’, he went ‘Let’s see if we can do something’. Second night it was ‘We definitely need to do something’ and by the third night, he was all for it. Within four or five weeks we had a full album deal on the table.”

As the deal progressed, Doherty took Cushin on UK tours, drinking and jamming together on the road. Although, from the sound of it, touring with the now reputedly drug-free Doherty is no longer the class-A bacchanal of old. “I wouldn’t necessarily say [the tours were] wild,” Cushin claims, “Peter is getting on a little bit now, he’s a little bit older.” Then, last October, a fateful performance on Soccer AM mesmerised another high-profile supporter of the six-stringed arts.

“I just thought Andrew came across really f***ing confident,” says Tomlinson, who messaged Cushin on Twitter after the show to offer him a support slot at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. That show turned into 36 support dates across the world. “A lot of my fans will know that I’ve always been interested in new music and people on the up and however else I can offer a bit of advice or help. And if he’s already got the songwriting prowess that he’s got at this age on his debut album, the kid’s destined for great things. He came out on the American tour and he was mostly acoustic for a lot of it and that’s a real tough gig, just you and a guitar. But his voice is f***ing huge, a really big sounding voice. He really came into his own as a singer but also as a performer.”

As curator of his own The Away From Home indie rock festival in Italy, where he headlined alongside acts such as Blossoms and The Cribs this August, Tomlinson confesses to having been One Direction’s secret guitar rock fanatic. “It’s what I grew up listening to,” he says. “There was this really good indie bar in Doncaster where I grew up. It was 10 quid all you could drink. It lasted about 18 months and then the council banned it, but it was f***ing incredible. So that’s where I got into all that indie guitar music and stuff like that. To be honest, I kinda dumbed that down a little bit when I was in the band, obviously, because it was a very different thing, One Direction. So I think as I’ve gone out on my own it’s been about re-finding my roots and guitar music is something that has had a massive influence on my life.”

To this end, Tomlinson hopes to convert his more pop-inclined fans to the ways of the distortion pedal, bed hair and fourth-day jeans. “What’s fascinating to me is watching my fanbase watching [guitar bands], listening to this music and taking a real passion like I do. That makes me really proud.” And also, from a talent show phenomenon who’d otherwise have wanted to become a teacher or sports coach, a touch of popstar payback.

‘If I’m feeling down or if I’m in a bad way my therapy is the guitar’

Tomlinson’s 78 Productions teaming up with Doherty’s Strap-Originals label, then, isn’t quite the clash of cultural opposites it first appears. “Look at some of the great labels,” Doherty argues. “Look at The Sex Pistols with Malcolm McLaren getting together with Richard Branson. Over the years, labels’ main aim was to be a springboard for their artists to get as many people to hear the music they believe in. Whatever that takes – if that means having a major label take you up the alley for five minutes I will do that for my artists any day of the week.”

“Obviously I was a massive Libertines fan growing up,” says Tomlinson of his grungier counterpart. “It’s an honour to me. I really look up to [Doherty] as a songwriter, as a poet, as a creative in general. And I also know that he’s got Andrew’s best interests at heart, which is not something you can always say in these kinds of joint ventures.” The pair haven’t yet met to thrash out the details over a power fry-up, though. “There’s not been a lot of back and forth,” says Tomlinson, “We’re both busy guys. I’d love to sit down and have a chat with him, definitely. That sounds like the kind of business meeting I’d want to turn up to.”

It’s something of a fairytale ending for Cushin, and his Dave Eringa-produced album that is so fraught with struggle. Alongside celebratory Britpopian terrace anthems like “Wor Flags” and orchestral pop uplifts like “Dream for a Moment”, grimy soul rocker “Let Me Give It To You” tackles drug abuse, while the fatalistic “The End” envisions Cushin’s own funeral, complete with child choir singing: “It’s the end of everything and I didn’t mean a thing.” And, on “You’ll Be Free”, he confronts the sometimes-fatal consequences of men being expected to bottle up their pain.

“Suicide is something I hold very, very close to my chest, unfortunately,” Cushin says of the song. “I’ve lost the most important people in my life to suicide. Everybody coming through with their support for different organisations has been amazing but, for me, I can’t go and talk to someone. If I’m feeling down or if I’m in a bad way my therapy is the guitar.”

There’s something deeply heartening, then, about seeing Cushin so enthusiastically grasp the A-list opportunities flung in his path. “We were over the moon when both Louis and Peter both came together,” he says. “It’s such a dream thing for me to be in the middle, releasing a record through these two unbelievable artists. We’ve already done so much so quickly and we’re in a massive whirlwind of people just pushing and pushing.” Cushin may be the celebrity-coveted Bored Ape NFT of singer-songwriters, but his value is set to rocket.

#louis tomlinson #louis update #the independent #article #october 2023

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i-am-aprl · 14 days

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#palestine #gaza #free palestine #israel #jerusalem #i stand with palestine #فلسطين #free gaza #israel is a terrorist state #israeli war crimes #the independent

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hosseinis · 9 months

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And I said, "I don't think Trent's living the life he wants to live, and I think he got bullied as a kid, and so he hit the library because he wasn't getting picked to be on the sports team, and he donned the glasses and the intellect, and that became his suit of armor." - james lance

#trent crimm #ted lasso #tedlassoedit #tedlassogif #tedependent #this came to me in a fuckin FEVER at work and i had to do it #james lance is working on levels some of us can only dream of #i love u trent crimm. everyone does.#my edits #the independent #i like your glasses

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chalamet-chalamet · 10 months

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“It’d be too much for me. I bless my lucky stars I didn’t have to deal with that [fame] at his age.”

“Timothée’s got a kind of... like the clothes he wears... he’s got just a very infectious wildness to him, which is really nice, with everyone, you know, fearful and being so correct.”

-Mark Rylance, The Independent-July 1, 2023

#timothee chalamet #timothée chalamet #mark rylance #bones and all #the independent

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pinktwingirl · 6 months

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Wait I thought Loki season 2 is getting good reviews everywhere, could you cite some examples?

I really can’t stand what they did with Loki in season 1 and it still feels the same..

Here are a couple of examples that I found. Basically, the general complaints are that the show isn’t focused around Loki, it’s filled with way too much exposition about the multiverse and timelines, and Loki is boring and completely unrecognizable from his previous appearances… which, again… did y’all watch S1??? This isn’t new. Also a decent number of reviewers are clowning on the show for basically becoming a McDonald’s commercial (and rightfully so)

#loki #loki series #loki series negativity #loki season 2 #marvel #mcu #disney plus #mcu criticism #the independent #mashable #ign #indiewire #giant freakin robot #loki series review #review

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garbage-goblin-ghost · 8 months

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Waking up, gasping, absolute epiphany: Trans Trent Crimm.

He’s talking to to Colin and said “-and that’s when I had to come out a second time” and we know he has a daughter. Transmasc Trent Crimm.

#ted lasso #trent crimm #the independent #trans masc #trans man #trans Trent

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nezreblogz · 11 days

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 9 months

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youtube

An ad launched by Progress Action Fund launched, showing an elderly Republican congressman interrupting a couple in the bedroom, has now been banned on X, formerly known as Twitter.

According to the Progress Action Fund, which aims to defeat Republicans in red states, the platform “has censored” its account as well as the ad, called “Keep Republicans Out Of Your Bedroom.” In addition, the platform has “placed a ‘Search Ban’ and a ‘Search Suggestion Ban’ on the account.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, the account did not show up on the social media platform, yet the ad could still be seen on X through retweets from other accounts.

The Progress Action Fund said it contacted the platform’s legal department and “appealed the decision, which was denied.”

Joe Jacobson, Founder and Executive Director of Progress Action Fund, took a stab at X’s owner: “Elon Musk loves free speech, but only when it’s convenient for him and his far-right political agenda.”

“Political speech is protected under law and Musk’s competitors clearly agree that our ad should not be censored,” he continued. “When releasing ads in the future, we’ll be taking them to other platforms, which many others are already doing given Elon Musk’s frantic and poor leadership at Twitter.”

The Independent has reached out to X for comment.

The ad features a scene in which a woman asks a man if he has a condom. He reaches for the condom in a bedside table drawer, and another suit-covered arm appears, reaching for it as well.

“Sorry, you can’t use those,” says an older man, clad in a black suit and red tie, while standing beside the bed. When the woman asks who he is, he replies: “I’m your Republican congressman. Now that we’re in charge, we’re banning birth control.”

The ad urges voters to “vote no” on 8 August, in reference to State Issue 1, which would require proposed amendments to Ohio’s constitution “receive the approval of at least 60% of eligible voters voting on the proposed amendment,” rather than a simple majority.

Since acquiring Twitter, Mr. Musk, a self declared “free speech absolutist”, has touted free speech as a pillar of the platform. As part of this shift during the takeover, he reinstated Donald Trump’s account after a two-year ban, which was “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” after the January 6 Capitol riot. He also reinstated at least 11 accounts belonging to prominent far-right and anti-trans influencers.

On 23 November, the platform announced it “is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.”

As recently as April, the platform claimed to strive to “promote and protect the public conversation. We believe Twitter users have the right to express their opinions and ideas without fear of censorship.”

In May, he wrote: “I am adamant about defending free speech, even if it means losing money.”

#us politics #news #YouTube #the independent #2023 #Progress Action Fund #elon musk #twitter #x #political ads #videos #Keep Republicans Out Of Your Bedroom #Joe Jacobson #republicans #conservatives #contraception bans #contraceptive bans #ohio #State Issue 1

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