Latest news with #Democracy
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
League of Women Voters of Martin County wins big at State Convention
MARTIN COUNTY — On June 7 at The League of Women Voters State Convention in Orlando, the Martin County League received two distinguished awards. The first was for their work on Fostering Civic Dialogue. They went from a small league to a medium league now boasting over 130 members. Over the past two years the League of Martin County has brought together Martin County citizens for their dynamic and inclusive initiative; Imagine Democracy. Imagine Democracy brings neighbors together to learn, listen, and practice the civic skills of empathy, understanding and engagement. With a deep desire to get people talking to each other to share and value their different perspectives, the League enlisted one of their esteemed members, Bliss Browne, creator of Imagine Chicago. Bliss has led trainings like these to bring opposing sides together around the world. The final award of the evening, The President's Award of Excellence, also went home with Martin County. Debbie Chandler, Co-president of League Florida called the Martin County League 'A shining example of what is possible when vision meets commitment, and when members believe that democracy is worth rebuilding.' The League of Women Voters a nonpartisan political organization encouraging informed and active participation in government, working to increase understanding of major policy issues, and advocating for legislative changes and policies for the public good. Martin County League meetings are open to the public and nonmembers are welcome to subscribe to our monthly newsletter. Learn more at This article originally appeared on Treasure Coast Newspapers: League of Women Voters honors Martin County for civic engagement Solve the daily Crossword
CNN
15 hours ago
- Politics
- CNN
Civility in Crisis: Running for Office Shouldn't Require a Flak Jacket - Smerconish on CNN - Podcast on CNN Podcasts
Civility in Crisis: Running for Office Shouldn't Require a Flak Jacket Smerconish on CNN 42 mins CNN's Michael Smerconish says, Democracy should not be a contact sport and public service shouldn't require kevlar. If we want good people to step forward, we have to make sure they can serve without fearing for their lives. Plus, the rise in Political Violence with Robert Pape Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago, Trump ups redistricting war with call for new census with David Wasserman, Senior Editor and Elections Analyst for the Cook Political Report. And Operation Trojan Horse and Trump urging SCOTUS to allow ICE Patrols in California with Gregory Bovino Chief Border Patrol Agent.
Russia Today
3 days ago
- Politics
- Russia Today
‘Democracy' is the new colonialism
A ballot floats through the air like a mechanical butterfly, delicate in descent, but once it touches ground, everything freezes. The jungle goes mute. The city forgets its language. A ritual begins: one created not in oracle chambers but in air-conditioned think tanks with sliding doors and corporate logos. Democracy arrives as gospel, prepackaged and barcode-approved, dropped from drones or delivered via diplomatic pouch. It conquers like a parasite: nesting in the heart, feeding on belief, and killing the host with false promises. It persuades, it seduces, it infects. Men in suits descend like missionaries, their scriptures printed on glossy paper, their symbols cleaned for export. They bring PowerPoints and gender training modules instead of muskets. They come bearing good news: sovereignty is obsolete, local gods are outdated, and every village will be updated with Wi-Fi and murals of unveiled women raising fists beneath UN slogans. The savannah no longer trembles under the boots of British redcoats. It shudders under the impact of slogans. 'Civic engagement' is murmured like a spell. 'Open society' is etched into blackboards where elders once traced cosmologies. The thunder of artillery has been replaced by keynote addresses. A revolution is rehearsed before it is broadcast. The new coup comes dressed for television. The old king disappears, replaced by a consensus candidate with a Yale degree and NATO approval. A constitution is unveiled like a luxury car: shiny, expensive, foreign. No one reads it. It reads them. The people applaud. Their applause is scheduled. The tyrant's head is displayed: pixelated and streaming. Laugh tracks rise. Purple ink stains the skin like a holy mark, as if casting a vote could cleanse the past and summon salvation. A sacred document lies open, its pages humming with subclauses and subversion. Article 1: Surrender to the algorithm. Article 2: Sterilize the folk soul. Article 3: Criminalize memory. The priests of procedure nod. They light candles made from recycled narratives. They chant slogans curated by Silicon Valley. The TED talk tone becomes the new church service – blessed by click-through rates. Buzzwords are incanted: 'resilience,' 'visibility,' 'empowerment.' Words hollowed out and worn like medals. The empire has remodeled. It is clad in linen. It carries clipboards. Its armies are task forces. Its tanks are now lettered agencies: USAID, UNHCR, OSCE. Smiles replace bayonets, and seminars replace firing squads. Democracy arrives on a private jet with an Instagram account. Its viceroys order oat-milk lattes while planning cultural transformations. A rainbow banner flies over every blasted zone. Baghdad bleeds beneath the missiles. Tripoli hums with foreign NGOs. Kiev hosts parades that mock its soil. Sacred ruins get rebranded. Temple stones are reused for embassy courtyards. The rituals change. The domination remains. In a village, a woman sings an ancestral tune. A man offers a prayer in a dialect that has no Unicode. A stone is lifted to rebuild a shrine. These things cannot be allowed. A survey is conducted. A briefing is written. A donor threatens. The local minister corrects course. An election is held. The outcome is known. It always is. This is what they call consent. This is what they mean by freedom. Uniformity parades as universality. Diversity becomes deletion. Identity is redesigned by foreign interns. Language becomes emoji. The dead are archived. Museums replace tombs. Grandfathers are described in footnotes written by their enemies. Tears fall in exhibition halls where relics of resistance are sanitized. The conquerors mourn – always in public, always with cameras. Their grief is a spectacle. Their mercy is management. The liberal preacher wears a smile that has been photoshopped. He gives interviews about 'trauma' and 'tolerance.' He never wields a sword; he commissions reports. His gospel: guilt without end. His miracle: the regeneration of conflict. His sacraments are embargoes and media campaigns. He baptizes children in ideology. He breathes in incense made from treaties and sanctions. He sings a hymn with verses about gender fluidity and carbon offset credits. His voice, thin and sweet, drowns entire cultures in its syrup. Yet across the map, the earth remembers. Forests speak in rustling defiance. Mountains echo with chants unscripted. The Danube shivers beneath steel bridges. The Volga murmurs secrets to the steppe. Across Eurasia, across Africa, across the zones marked 'developing,' something stirs. Trump does not rise as emperor; he crashes through the screen like a malfunction, an interruption in the broadcast. Serbia remembers its ruins. Iran cradles its martyrs. Russia bares its teeth. Hungary builds walls – not out of fear but out of fidelity to her own. Multipolarity emerges, not like a plan but like a rite remembered. It does not wait for validation. It speaks in a hundred dialects, none requiring translation. It holds torches, not flashlights. It charts no global roadmap. It builds thresholds. It invokes gods buried under glass towers. It honors spirits banned from textbooks. In each land, new mythologies are forged from the ruins of development. The ballot box is abandoned, its promise of mechanical salvation discarded. In its place stands the stone of ancestral law, stained with sacrifice and inscribed with the unspoken codes of blood, land, and loyalty. So let the ballots fall, let the slogans swirl like ash in the wind. Let the consultants keep writing. None of it halts the return. The sacred pulses again in veins unmapped by Western metrics. Democracy, once garlanded as deliverance, strips down and stands revealed: an agent of extraction, a theater of consent. Multipolarity does not debate it. Multipolarity replaces it – with stone, with flame, with song. The world moves again, towards the myth reborn.
ABC News
4 days ago
- Politics
- ABC News
Barrie Cassidy's plan to save democracy one classroom at a time
Barrie Cassidy has been a familiar and trusted voice in Australian Journalism and broadcasting for decades. He dedicated most of his working life to covering politics in this country, holding those in power in Canberra to account. Over a celebrated journalistic career he's had a front row seat to report on Australian democracy, when it's struggled, when it's been taken advantage of and when it's worked well. Now Barrie is continuing his advocacy for Australian democracy, but in a different way. As part of his role as Chair of the Board at Old Parliament House he is involved in a new education initiative targeting students in regional and remote communities in the Northern Territory and Queensland, called Democracy in a Box. Reporter: Sinead Mangan with Barrie Cassidy, Chair of the Board at Old Parliament House and former ABC political reporter
Daily Mirror
01-08-2025
- Automotive
- Daily Mirror
Furious learner driver forced to travel 50 miles just to take his test
Until the backlog is dealt with, learner drivers must not only prepare for the practicalities of the road, but also the laborious logistical ordeal of booking a driving test A learner driver is having to make a 100-mile round trip just to sit his practical driving test, facing immense inconvenience and extra costs along the way. Learner drivers in Bristol are facing an ever-growing challenge in securing driving test appointments, with many forced to travel significant distances for their examinations due to a severe shortage of local availability. According to recent accounts, attempts to book tests at either of Bristol's two test centres have proven futile for months on end, despite extensive and repeated attempts using the official booking system. It comes after UK drivers were warned over 'avoiding' road instead of having to follow new rule. Local Democracy Reporter Alex Seabrook wrote for Bristol Live: "The hardest part of learning to drive this year has not been clutch control nor navigating through the minefield of city centre construction work. There are two test centres in Bristol and I simply cannot book a test in either one despite many desperate months of trying." The problem is not unique to Bristol — across the much of the UK, a long-standing backlog, originally sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic, has left thousands unable to find test slots locally. According to figures from May 2025 obtained by AA Driving School via the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), 81 per cent of test centres nationwide — a whopping 258 locations — had waiting times of 24 weeks, the system's maximum, and some days saw zero test appointments available across the whole of the UK. Emma Bush, managing director of AA Driving School, said: "With the vast majority of driving test centres now showing waits at the maximum the system will allow, the situation cannot get much worse." For Bristol's learner drivers, this shortage means that even neighbouring test centres have no slots available. Alex explained that after months of trying, the only option was to book a test in Hereford, approximately 50 miles from Bristol, highlighting the extraordinary lengths learners must go to just to secure a test date. Underlying the booking crisis is a flourishing black market for test appointments, according to Alex. Scalpers, using automated bots and the personal details of learner drivers, book up large swathes of appointments when new slots open — typically at 6am each Monday — and resell them at double or triple the original price. Alex said: "As soon as I had passed my theory test in March I began trying to book a practical test, and I have not stopped since then. First you have to pass the most complicated Captcha test I've ever come across, to check you're a human and not a bot. They make me doubt I am in fact human. Then you have to wait about a minute while the website buffers, and finally you can choose which centre you would like to book a test in and when. "Except the next stage, 99 per cent of the time, is a message saying there are sadly no available tests that meet your requirements. I tried booking in centres near Bristol — Newport, Weston-super-Mare, Monmouth, Cardiff and Barry — and got the same message. Eventually, after about a month, I finally booked a test 50 miles away in Hereford.' Alex sent a freedom of information request that showed one test doesn't go ahead every day in both Kingswood and Avonmouth, "likely because scalpers can't resell all their tests". Over the course of a year, in Avonmouth 344 tests didn't happen because the examinee didn't show up, with a further 439 in Kingswood. Alex added: 'I would much rather not have to travel so far for my test, as well as drive on unfamiliar roads. During most lessons now my instructor takes me to Kingswood, so that I can practise driving on the roads near the test centre there, which feels pointless, as I cannot change my test to Bristol.' In July 2025, the DVSA's annual report was released. Chief executive of the government body opened the report with a statement, saying: "Despite providing 1.96 million car driving tests this year we are not on track to meet our business plan target of reducing car practical test waiting times to seven weeks or less by December 2025. We recognise the impact this has on learner drivers across the country and on driving instructors and their businesses. "We continue to progress this work, continually reviewing the impact of action taken and looking for further opportunities to improve the situation. We recognise that there are no quick fixes and that we need to re-balance supply and demand for tests alongside tackling the systematic abuse of the test booking system." So instead of booking his driving test in Bristol, Alex ended up booking a hotel in Hereford, a fact he described as "frankly absurd". For now at least, Bristol-based learner drivers must not only prepare for the practicalities of the road, but also the laborious logistical ordeal of booking a test — sometimes involving an unwanted 100-mile round trip and hotel stay.
