With the second Democratic debate fresh in everyone’s mind, many are quick to point to who are the winners and losers in the political game both the candidates and moderators are insistent on playing. One helpful take from those at The Nation was how after the second nights, both Sanders and Warren were seen as the victors of both nights, as their policies were on center stage, whether they themselves were or not. 

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Perhaps to help cultivate a better public opinion around their company and to show they are taking action, Facebook has recently taken down accounts linked to those in Saudi Arabia acting as propaganda tools for the Saudi government. This is according to the Middle East Eye, who reported on the 350 accounts with around 1.4 million collective followers, that were taken down.
 

As the Democratic debate stage asked questions about immigration, the status of many immigrants continues to be in question, especially those that the Trump administration has recently tried targeting. As The Intercept reports, due to the recent crackdown by the Trump administration on certain types of immigrant cases, one immigrant, Parvez Manzoor Khan, may lose his citizenship over false information he provided when he was originally allowed into the country.   

It is not uncommon in this age of reporting for national papers like the New York Times and Washington Post to get things wrong in reporting, and even more likely that some issues will lead to more misleading reporting than others. This is the case with the intersection of climate reporting and issues of immigration because, as FAIRputs it,the two are intrinsically linked, but not so much for many national news outlets. 

New Yorker: How Climate Change Is Fueling the US Border Crisis

The public attention span is short and quick to forget the many times that history has been known to repeat itself, especially with recent history, and this time is no different. What has happened, as Truthdig reports, is the sending of American troops to Saudi Arabia to defend against aggression from Iran, a course of action that some may remember from the days of Saddam Hussein.  

U.S. Troops Are Back in Saudia Arabia—This Will End Badly

Coming back to the Democratic debates, as many news outlets will be doing over the next couple days, there arises the question of how much Democrats, especially someone like Joe Biden, want to invoke Obama’s legacy while carefully steering around any of the true negatives that came of it. This is the question asked on Democracy Now! by Cornel West and will be integral moving forward if the eventual nominee hopes to beat Trump in the general election. 

The high cost of drugs appears to be an issue important to both Democrats and Republicans considering recent bills being passed to limit the price, but what gets significantly less attention is why people are demanding those drugs in the first place. As reported by CounterPunch, the marketing strategies behind these drugs are what should be giving people cause for alarm, and the insidious ways in which these addictive drugs are pushed onto a susceptible population. 

The protests in Hong Kong have become an issue that has morphed a bit beyond the 24-hour news cycle, at least in Asia, as the crisis there continues without lasting resolutions being agreed upon. In spite of this, China has recently released, as The Real News Network reports, a white paper detailing their possible intervention into the affairs of Hong Kong and possible Taiwan, in an attempt to assert their political and military power in those regions. 


 

Efforts by the US to destabilize countries across the world hardly get any coverage, and the recent US-backed coup in Nicaragua was no different, with the fallout from that still being felt in Nicaragua. As reported by The Grayzone, a US organization, the Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights, is embroiled in a scandal involving their director, Álvaro Leiva, over stealing hundreds of thousands from the organization. 

 

Shaun King with this weeks Tweet of the Week:

The conception of race as a way to divide society is not something that gets considered all to often, and might get dismissed for distracting from issues facing certain minority communities. But this is not how The Ghion Journal reports it, where calling people black and white has no more meaning and should have no more meaning than noticing someone has brown or black hair, and only exists to prevent those without power to take it from those that do. 
 


The HEADLINES:
1. Jeffrey Epstein ‘wanted to seed human race with his DNA’ by impregnating up to 20 women at a time, report says (The Independent)2. Two Nights, Two Very Different Ways of Talking About Race (The Atlantic)

3. GOP-Controlled Senate Passes Massive 2-Year Spending Deal (HuffPost)

4. Trump imposes more tariffs on Chinese goods (BBC)

5. Revealed: Johnson ally’s firm secretly ran Facebook propaganda network (The Guardian)