Perhaps the tide is starting to turn.

The chief executive of the campaign group Stonewall, Ruth Hunt, has resigned after a growing protest by leading gay and lesbian supporters against her stance on promoting transgender rights.

Two of the charity’s former ambassadors and donors revealed this weekend they had withdrawn their support in protest because “Ruth Hunt called it wrong and Stonewall is no longer a worthy champion of our rights”.

Maureen Chadwick, creator of hit television programmes including Bad Girls, Footballers’ Wives and Waterloo Road, said that she and her partner, Kath Gotts, quit after Stonewall embraced what they called “the ‘trans’ cause”.

They were big donors until Stonewall went all trans all the time.

This weekend she said they had no idea “how completely the militant ‘trans’ agenda would overwhelm Stonewall with its confusion of sex and gender and its blindness to all the complex rights issues resulting from that.

“Many other longstanding supporters of Stonewall, including transsexuals, share our concerns and dismay that the very organisation we helped to fund and turn into the ‘go to’ LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] authority, advising political parties and corporates, is now telling schoolchildren that a bearded man with a penis can be a lesbian and any girls and boys deviating from 1950s gender norms are in the wrong body.”

Stonewall however says it’s not changing a thing.

Figures who have played a significant role in the 30-year history of Stonewall said they had stepped away in dismay.

One said: “We want people to be nice to trans people, just as we want people to be nice to [gay people], but that is not the argument. The argument is not whether people can be trans or are trans; the argument is what happens when you shift identity in opposition to biology.”

And impose your idea of yourself on everyone else.

The Manafort sentencing memo has been made public.

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort committed crimes that cut to “the heart of the criminal justice system” and over the years deceived everyone from bookkeepers and banks to federal prosecutors and “members of the executive branch of the United States government,” according to a sentencing memo filed Saturday by special counsel Robert Mueller’s office.

The memo, in one of two criminal cases Manafort faces, does not take a position on how much prison time he should serve or whether the punishment should run at the same time or after a separate sentence he will soon receive in a Virginia prosecution. But it does depict Manafort as a longtime and unrepentant criminal who committed “bold” crimes, including under the spotlight of his role as campaign chairman and later while on bail, and who does not deserve any leniency.

“For over a decade, Manafort repeatedly and brazenly violated the law,” prosecutors wrote. “His crimes continued up through the time he was first indicted in October 2017 and remarkably went unabated even after indictment.”

Citing Manafort’s lies to the FBI, several government agencies and his own lawyer, prosecutors said that “upon release from jail, Manafort presents a grave risk of recidivism.”

Makes ya proud to be a Namurikn, doesn’t it.

Of course they have.

Even before Democrats finish drafting bills to create a single-payer health care system, the health care and insurance industries have assembled a small army of lobbyists to kill “Medicare for all,” an idea that is mocked publicly but is being greeted privately with increasing seriousness.

How could we possibly want universal health insurance instead of the thrillingly frightening risk of losing insurance along with a job or never being able to get it in the first place because your job doesn’t provide it or because you’ve been unemployed for too long or because there’s an R in the month?

The lobbyists’ message is simple: The Affordable Care Act is working reasonably well and should be improved, not repealed by Republicans or replaced by Democrats with a big new public program. More than 155 million Americans have employer-sponsored health coverage. They like it, by and large, and should be allowed to keep it.

“Reasonably well” is good enough for the peasants who have the bad taste not to be rich, is that the idea? Just plain “well” is too much to ask?

The Democrats’ proposals could radically change the way health care providers do business and could drastically shrink the role and the revenues of insurers, depending on how a single-payer system is devised.

Well, you know, shrinking the role (and $$$) of insurers would not be a bad thing, given that they are useless unless your goal is to extract profit from brokering health care. They don’t provide health care or help people find the best health care, they simply sell insurance for health care, adding a step that adds nothing of value. If people were automatically insured as of right there would be no need for insurers and nothing of value would be lost.

The hospital federation and two powerful lobbies, America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, created a coalition last June to pre-empt what they saw as an alarming groundswell of interest in proposals to expand the federal role in health care.

In a daily fusillade of digital advertising, videos and Twitter posts, the coalition, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, says that Medicare for all will require tax increases and give politicians and bureaucrats control of medical decisions now made by doctors and patients — arguments that echo those made to stop Medicare in the 1960s, Mrs. Clinton’s health plan in 1993 and the Affordable Care Act a decade ago.

Blah blah blah, but what it will really do is eliminate the vast superstructure that withdraws money from the system because it can. Nobody needs a vast superstructure that withdraws money from the system because it can.

When members of Congress unveiled legislation to let people age 50 to 64 buy into Medicare, the coalition conflated it with proposals to put all Americans into Medicare.

“This is a slippery slope to government-run health care for every American,” said David Merritt, an executive vice president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a lobby for insurers.

Oh no, a slippery slope to guaranteed health care for everyone! The horror!

Ah, this is charming: male sports writer tells women it will be inspiring if trans women do completely take over women’s sport. He does it with plenty of contempt, too.

They’re coming! Over the horizon, they’re coming! They’re coming for your medals and your trophies and your endorsement contracts. They’re coming, with their giant bulging muscles and enormous flapping penises, to ruin everything pure and good. Nothing will ever be the same again. Nothing means anything any more. For the trans people – and let’s call them what they are, men in sports bras – are coming. And all is lost.

Great first para; lets us know where we are.

This is the apocalyptic scenario currently facing women’s sport. At least, if you ask certain people. Still, a certain feverish hysteria has long characterised the debate over transgender, intersex and DSD (differences in sex development) athletes in sport, sharpened to a point by recent events.

“A certain feverish hysteria” – wink wink nudge nudge elbow elbow. Women, am I right?

[T]he first thing to say is probably: like, chill out a bit. For most of the arguments against allowing trans women to compete in female athletic competition rest on a scenario that borders on the fantastical. Are we really suggesting there are hordes of male athletes who will suddenly declare themselves female simply to game the system?

He never explains why it has to be “hordes” before we’re allowed to think and say it’s a bad thing. Hey it was just one woman who had her leg broken by Hannah Mouncey; that’s  no big deal so chill, laydeez.

Then he explains why Navratilova is wrong, after giving a cursory acknowledgement of her accomplishments.

But on this one, she’s sadly misguided. You know what? Sport isn’t fair. Never has been. Genetics isn’t fair. Basketball players are blessed with height. Gymnasts are blessed with compact, flexible bodies. Fulham players are blessed with a preternatural ability to give the ball away on the halfway line. Economics isn’t fair. Geography isn’t fair. Privilege isn’t fair. What we call the level playing field is in fact a cosy myth, a homespun feel-good tale that hoodwinks us into chasing our dreams.

Therefore, abruptly change the rules so that women are forced to compete against men, so that the playing field will be vertiginously less level than it was when women and men played on separate teams.

But let’s follow this argument all the way through. Let’s say the floodgates do open. Let’s say transgender athletes pour into women’s sport, and let’s say, despite the flimsy and poorly-understood relationship between testosterone and elite performance, they dominate everything they touch. They sweep up Grand Slam tennis titles and cycling world championships. They monopolise the Olympics. They fill our football and cricket and netball teams. Why would that be bad? Really? Imagine the power of a trans child or teenager seeing a trans athlete on the top step of the Olympic podium. In a way, it would be inspiring.

Says the man, about his imagined utopia in which women never again get to the Olympic podium.

Another consignment of evil:

The Trump administration took aim at Planned Parenthood Friday, issuing a rule barring groups that provide abortions or abortion referrals from participating in the $286 million federal family planning program — a move expected to redirect tens of millions of dollars from the women’s health provider to faith-based groups.

What do we not want religious zealots doing? Anything to do with planning pregnancy.

The change means federally funded family planning clinics can no longer refer a patient for abortion and must maintain a “clear physical and financial separation” between services funded by the government and any organization that provides abortions or abortion referrals. Groups receiving money under the Title X program, which serves an estimated 4 million low-income women, were already prohibited from performing abortions with those funds.

Gotta punish women for being women; gotta make sure women can’t plan their own lives; gotta make women the helpless playthings of chance and rape.

Critics, including 15 governors and the American Medical Association, decried the change as a “gag rule” that would undermine the physician-patient relationship and threatened legal action to block it from taking effect. They have also described it as an indirect way to defund Planned Parenthood, which has long been a target of antiabortion activists as the nation’s largest provider of reproductive care services.

Women must never ever be free.

The Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit research center that supports abortion rights, said it expects lawsuits seeking to stop the law’s implementation before it even goes into effect. Senior policy manager Kinsey Hasstedt accused the administration of seeking to “subvert this long-standing and critical program to appease social conservatives and further their ideological agenda.”

The rule takes effect 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register. But clinics will have 120 days to comply with the requirement that family planning and abortion services [be] kept financially separated and a year to comply with the physical separation requirement.

The rule, which was announced in May, was modeled after requirements adopted under President Ronald Reagan but never enforced.

We’re racing backward! Go us!

Adam Schiff addresses his Republican colleagues:

The president has just declared a national emergency to subvert the will of Congress and appropriate billions of dollars for a border wall that Congress has explicitly refused to fund. Whether you support the border wall or oppose it, you should be deeply troubled by the president’s intent to obtain it through a plainly unconstitutional abuse of power.

To my Republican colleagues: When the president attacked the independence of the Justice Department by intervening in a case in which he is implicated, you did not speak out. When he attacked the press as the enemy of the people, you again were silent. When he targeted the judiciary, labeling judges and decisions he didn’t like as illegitimate, we heard not a word. And now he comes for Congress, the first branch of government, seeking to strip it of its greatest power, that of the purse.

Many of you have acknowledged your deep misgivings about the president in quiet conversations over the past two years. You have bemoaned his lack of decency, character and integrity. You have deplored his fundamental inability to tell the truth. But for reasons that are all too easy to comprehend, you have chosen to keep your misgivings and your rising alarm private.

Knock it off, he says in nicer words than that.

If Trump pardons Manafort…

New York state prosecutors have put together a criminal case against Paul Manafort that they could file quickly if the former chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign receives a presidential pardon.

New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is ready to file an array of tax and other charges against Manafort, according to two people familiar with the matter, something seen as an insurance policy should the president exercise his power to free the former aide. Skirting laws that protect defendants from being charged twice for the same offense has been one of Vance’s challenges.

…

Prosecutors in Vance’s office began investigating Manafort in 2017, months before Mueller charged him with conspiracy, failure to file reports of foreign bank accounts and failure to register as an agent of a foreign country, activities stemming from his earlier work for Ukraine. Mueller’s team followed up with more charges of bank fraud, filing false tax returns and failure to file reports of foreign bank accounts in early 2018.

I wonder if they talk to each other about this. I wonder if the New York people urge the Mueller people to omit some charges in case of pardon, so that they won’t bump up against double jeopardy. I wonder if that’s seen as legitimate or sleazy.

Much of the evidence against Manafort has emerged through Mueller’s prosecutions. But Vance’s office can’t cut and paste Mueller’s charges into a state indictment. It must avoid New York’s double jeopardy law, which provides protections for defendants even stronger than those guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.

Former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman anticipated this concern last year when he urged Albany lawmakers to tweak the state’s robust double jeopardy protections to allow local prosecutors to charge individuals convicted of federal crimes but pardoned by the president. The state legislature didn’t follow through on his request.

It seems extremely difficult to make good law based on the criminality of one president.

Manafort’s legal team would almost certainly challenge the state’s efforts, invoking constitutional protections. New York’s double jeopardy provisions have frustrated state authorities in the past, said John Moscow, who prosecuted global bank fraud and money laundering cases under Vance’s predecessor Robert Morgenthau.

“My suggestion is to change the double jeopardy statute in New York to permit prosecutions with this kind of conduct in mind,” said Moscow, who is now at Lewis Baach LLC and isn’t involved in the matter. “As interpreted, the statute is too broad and needs to be rethought.”

If only we could convict Manafort for what he did to Ukraine.

Another event stamped CANCELED.

Unfortunately we have had to cancel today’s Story Café and Songwriting Workshop due to be held @edcentrallib as part of @AWfest.

We hope to rearrange the Story Café event in Edinburgh on a future date. Email info@womenslibrary.org.uk to register your interest.

— Glasgow Women's Library (@womenslibrary) February 22, 2019

Had to why? Somebody has the flu? The pipes burst? All the roads and railways closed?

No.

We are committed to an inclusive
approach in working with women and do so under the terms of our own
policies. We feel that the Audacious Women’s Festival’s policy does not align with our own and so we have chosen not to run the events today.

— Glasgow Women's Library (@womenslibrary) February 22, 2019

By “an inclusive approach in working with women” they of course mean inclusive of men who say they are women, which isn’t really an inclusive approach in working with women. It isn’t inclusive of women who think women shouldn’t be forced to “include” men who call themselves women in women-only events; it isn’t inclusive of women who would like to attend a genuinely women-only event for once. It’s “inclusive” along the axis of including men, but exclusive along the axis of being women-only.

It is terrible that the women's library is cancelling events for women because of protests from biological men who want to redefine "woman" to include them. . Transwomen have exclusive events and welcome but women need to be able to call women only events that do not include men.

— maggie mellon (@maggiemellon) February 22, 2019

Every day i am seeing things like this. Why is no one prepared to back women anymore. It seems like women is a dirty word these days. Get that attitude to fuck. Are we not allowed a voice anymore? Certainly seems like it.

— Kirsty Findlay (@kirsty151283) February 22, 2019

https://twitter.com/ToFightback/status/1098923408635629568

Ironically it appears that the Audacious Women Festival doesn’t even have a policy of “exclusion” – the complaint seems to be that they didn’t word their “inclusive” policy quite absolutely enough.

In response to inaccurate claims we are transphobic, AWF provides safe single sex workshops for women, including trans women. It is not, and never has been, our policy to ask for a GRC.

— Audacious Women Fest (@AWfest) February 22, 2019

Inch resting. Seems like you sort of did imply that trans women without a GRC weren't welcome. pic.twitter.com/9ukqu5ewse

— Red (@thedreadvampy) February 22, 2019

Oh dear, not good enough – not good enough AT ALL. A man is a woman if he says she is, it’s that simple and who are you to demand that trans women be for all practical purposes indistinguishable from other women? Trans women are better than women, because they bring with them all the awesome of being male along with the magical power of saying “I am a woman.” The more manly they look the more required you are to be INCLUSIVE of them in women-only groups. Understood?

Natasha Bertrand talked to Andrew McCabe for The Atlantic. Here’s a striking bit:

Bertrand: Some question now why the public should believe your recollection of events when the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded last year that you had lacked candor when describing your interactions with the press. How would you respond to that?

McCabe: It was very hard to leave the organization that I loved, and still love to this day, under those circumstances. To spend 21 years as an FBI agent, living under the ideals of fidelity, bravery, and integrity, and then to be branded a liar the day before you were gonna retire. It was very tough. But in some ways, it’s also entirely predictable. The facts are that this president has a long and illustrious history of attacking the credibility of people who say things that he doesn’t like, and I believe strongly that that’s what’s happened here. Firing me for lack of candor was a perfect way to undermine my ability to, who knows, provide testimony against him, to tell these stories that I’ve now told in the book. I never, ever intentionally misled the FBI inspection division, the office of the inspector general, or any director of the FBI, ever. Not ever. I completely reject the findings, the conclusions, and the recommendations in that [inspector general] report. I am very familiar with investigative reports. I’ve been writing them and reading them for 21 years. That is not an investigative report. That was a pretext to reach the conclusion that was being demanded by the president of the United States.

I wondered about that at the time. Trump was jumping up and down hoping to get McCabe fired, and then McCabe was fired. So…was the inspector general report just faked? And if so, how? The word was, as I remember it, that inspectors general don’t do that; that they’re independent and incorruptible and all that. Why isn’t it an investigative report? Why didn’t anyone do anything about it? Could anyone do anything about it? How did any of this work? I want to know. I wanted to know then and I want to know now. Was Trump really able to demand and get a faked-up inspector general report so that McCabe would be fired the day before he retired? If so, how? Why didn’t they all just say no?

Why is it so easy for Trump to do all this and get away with it? I still don’t understand it, two years in.

Huh. I’ve wondered before why Claire Lehmann is a thing, and now I wonder that little bit more.

To those who have their panties in a twist because I made comments about wealth inequality: just because I don’t share your hatred of the rich doesn’t mean I hate the poor. I grew up poor & have zero guilt. So you can keep tweeting mean things at me while I grow my business 😉

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) February 21, 2019

Aw, it was a setup.

“Tucker Carlson Tonight” is a binary production. Here’s how it breaks down: The host, Tucker Carlson, either welcomes a guest with whom he agrees, in which case the segment is a facile lovefest, or he welcomes a guest with whom he disagrees, in which case the segment is a gutter-scraping slugfest.

A chat with Dutch historian Rutger Bregman was supposed to fall in the former basket, a nice, easy segment in which the host and guest find common ground on the hypocrisy of the world’s elites. In a display of common-sense advocacy, Bregman had appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos and hammered all the rich people there for avoiding taxes.

So Carlson or Fox or both were confused enough to invite Bregman on as a friendly.

In a careful effort over the past two years-plus, Carlson has attempted to cast himself as the anti-elite elite, a guy who understands the hypocrisy of the ruling class because he was born into comfort in La Jolla, Calif., and Georgetown — followed, eventually, by a well-paid career on cable news.

The anti-elite guy who lives in Trump’s pocket.

But the interview didn’t go the way Carlson expected, and Fox didn’t air it. Bregman, however, did.

Bregman, you see, was brought in as a friendly voice, a fellow who would presumably play along with the host. That very status gave Bregman enough space to turn the whole conversation into a referendum on Carlson’s own hypocrisy. “The vast majority of Americans, for years and years now, according to the polls, including Fox News viewers and including Republicans, are in favor of higher taxes on the rich. . . . It’s all really mainstream but no one’s saying that at Davos just as no one’s saying that at Fox News,” Bregman said in the discussion. Folks at Davos and at Fox News, he alleged, had been “bought by the billionaire class.”

…

After some more back-and-forth, Bregman showed that he’d really, really studied the programming values of “Tucker Carlson Tonight”: “I think the issue really is one of corruption and of people being bribed and not talking about the real issues. What the Murdochs really want you to do to is scapegoat immigrants instead of talking about tax avoidance,” he said.

As Bregman continued showing a command of Fox News’s pro-elite advocacy, Carlson blew up. He called Bregman a “moron” and couldn’t figure out how this fellow had even viewed the network’s programming. “Fox doesn’t even play where you are,” said Carlson. “Well, have you heard of the Internet?” replied Bregman. “I can watch things whatever I want.”

By this point, Bregman, thousands of miles away, was sitting where Carlson usually sits — in complete command of the interview, setting the pace, putting his interlocutor on the defensive. The host was verily gasping for air. The most telling words of the interview came when Carlson said, “Wait — but, but can I just say?” That was just shortly after Bregman said Carlson was a “millionaire funded by billionaires.”

Someone had to blow the whistle on Carlson’s high-wire attempts to portray himself as a hero of the regular guy, even as he enjoys the fat paycheck of a Fox News host. So scandalized was Carlson about the situation that he could resort only to nastiness, which he commonly deploys, and profanity, which rarely makes it onto Fox News’s air. “Why don’t you go fuck yourself, you tiny brain.”

It’s coz he’s an elitist, yeah?

It’s not just for university students.

A 15-year-old boy convicted of sexually assaulting a girl in a classroom has been allowed to stay at the same school as his victim.

The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was found guilty of two counts of sexual assault and put on the sex offenders register.

The victim said: “I have to just keep my head down, pretend he’s not there, otherwise it makes me panic.”

Is she making a fuss about nothing?

The victim told BBC Inside Out East : “It was known that boy was very ‘hands on’ with girls.

“He started making comments about me, touching my legs and putting his hands on me.

“Then gradually he started putting his hands up my skirt, touching my chest and I kept telling him to stop.

“I wanted to leave but I felt like I couldn’t do anything. I felt powerless, like I was stuck.”

Now he’s been convicted on two counts, but she is still stuck.

The victim told the BBC the guilty verdict helped her to deal with the ordeal.

“It took a massive weight off my shoulders to be listened to,” she said.

“For most part I felt I was going mad. [I was] told in court I was a liar, but to be believed was a relief.”

But she said it had been incredibly hard to stay at school, knowing her convicted attacker had been allowed to continue there too.

Probably not ideal for all the other girls at that school, either.

Another citizen of Trump’s America:

A Coast Guard lieutenant and self-described white nationalist who was arrested in Maryland last week was plotting to kill a long list of prominent journalists and Democratic politicians, as well as professors, judges and what he called “leftists in general,” federal prosecutors said in a court filing on Tuesday.

A a long list of prominent journalists and Democratic politicians plus also everyone on the planet.

Prosecutors quoted a letter that he drafted to friends in 2017 and that the authorities found on his computer. In it, Lieutenant Hasson, who works as an acquisitions officer at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, wrote: “I am dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on the earth. I think a plague would be most successful but how do I acquire the needed / Spanish flu, botulism, anthrax not sure yet but will find something.”

But maybe that was just a moment of grandiosity. Apparently he’s been more focused recently.

In the last month, prosecutors said, the lieutenant used his work computer to draw up a list of prominent figures he called “traitors” and wanted to kill, including many well-known anchors and hosts on the CNN and MSNBC news networks and a number of Democratic elected officials. The list included, among others, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maxine Waters, Senator Richard Blumenthal, whom he referred to as “Sen blumen jew,” and many of the senators running for president in 2020.

He had recently performed internet searches seeking information about whether senators and Supreme Court justices receive Secret Service protection, the court filing said.

He was hoping to start a race war, to “get whitey off the couch.”

Federal investigators said in the court filing that Lieutenant Hasson had begun stockpiling weapons in 2017. When federal agents searched his cramped basement apartment in Silver Spring, Md., they said, they found a cache of 15 assault rifles, shotguns and handguns and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition that the lieutenant had amassed.

The Program on Extremism at George Washington University called attention to the court filing in Twitter posts on Wednesday. In the filing, the authorities cited writings found on the lieutenant’s computer that point to extreme racist and apocalyptic views.

Shortly after the violence incited by a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, the authorities say, Lieutenant Hasson drafted a letter to a well-known neo-Nazi expressing support for the idea of building a “white homeland” in the Pacific Northwest.

Hey! No thank you! We’re just fine here, thank you very much, and we don’t need no stinkin white homeland.

The authorities said Lieutenant Hasson had studied the 1,500-page manifesto that the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, a far-right Norwegian extremist who killed 77 people in 2011, wrote in the hope of inspiring other killers.

Following Mr. Breivik’s advice about how to start a race war that would topple liberal governments, Lieutenant Hasson planned to assassinate prominent figures. He performed internet searches for the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, among others, and for the phrase “civil war if Trump impeached,” the authorities said.

Lieutenant Hasson’s efforts appeared to intensify in January. The authorities say he searched for a section of Mr. Breivik’s manifesto that advises other mass murderers to begin a six-week cycle of steroids once all their preparations for violent acts are complete. Federal agents said they had found a locked box in his apartment containing more than 30 vials of human growth hormone.

So, possibly, he was close to putting his plan into action.

Meanwhile in India Modi is locking up his critics.

Last year, the police in Maharashtra, one of India’s largest states, said they had uncovered a vast conspiracy to topple the Indian government that involved Mr. Teltumbde and other well-known writers, academics and lawyers.

Officers raided more than a dozen of their homes, confiscating hard drives and documents. Citing a broad antiterrorism law, the police have put nine of them in jail, accusing them of helping Maoist insurgents, trying to procure grenade launchers, inciting a riot and plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

One is Anand Teltumbde, “a prominent scholar and writer on Indian social issues.”

Human rights activists say the allegations are part of a crackdown on intellectuals who criticize Mr. Modi’s record, especially his government’s treatment of religious minorities and lower castes.

Mr. Teltumbde was an obvious target, activists say. He is a well-known champion of Dalits (the group formerly known as untouchables), a prolific writer with a wide audience, and an unrelenting critic of Mr. Modi.

At a literary festival in 2017, Mr. Teltumbde called the prime minister a “narcissist par excellence” who could prove to be more dangerous than Hitler. He said Mr. Modi’s politics, which are rooted in Hindu nationalism, amounted to “fascism plus something.”

He also mentioned Modi’s role in the Gujarat riots in 2002.

The case against Mr. Teltumbde has alarmed scholars across the world. Hundreds of academics, including Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, have signed petitions calling for the United Nations to interveneand for the police’s “fabricated charges” to be withdrawn.

“I enthusiastically signed this,’’ Mr. West said in an interview last week. “Anand is my brother and comrade, and I wanted to show my support for him as well as the Dalit freedom struggle.’’

Sangeeta Kamat, a public policy professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who also signed a petition supporting Mr. Teltumbde, called him the best-known of the Indian academics under official scrutiny. She said he had made a “compelling case for how and why the present regime is anti-democratic, anti-Dalit and anti-poor.”

The struggle never ends.

BIG Supreme Court ruling, for once in a good way.

The Supreme Court struck an extraordinary blow for criminal justice reform on Wednesday, placing real limitations on policing for profitacross the country. Its unanimous decision for the first time prohibits all 50 states from imposing excessive fines, including the seizure of property, on people accused or convicted of a crime. Rarely does the court hand down a ruling of such constitutional magnitude—and seldom do all nine justices agree to restrict the power that police and prosecutors exert over individuals. The landmark decision represents a broad agreement on the Supreme Court that law enforcement’s legalized theft has gone too far.

Wednesday’s ruling in Timbs v. Indiana, authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is sharp and concise. It revolves around a single question of extraordinary importance. The Eighth Amendment guarantees that no “excessive fines” may be “imposed,” an ancient right enshrined in the Magna Carta and enthusiastically adopted by the Framers. But the Bill of Rights originally applied only to the federal government, not the states. After the Civil War, the 14^thAmendment was ratified to apply these rights to the states, which had engaged in grotesque civil rights violations to perpetuate slavery. The Supreme Court, however, slowly applied (or “incorporated”) these rights against the states one by one, not all at once. And before Timbs, it had never incorporated the Excessive Fines Clause—allowing states to exploit their residents for huge sums of cash and property.

They did so through civil asset forfeiture, a process that we would call theft in any other context. Here’s how it works: Prosecutors accuse an individual of a crime, then seize assets that have some tenuous connection to the alleged offense. The individual need not be convicted or even charged with an actual crime, and her assets are seized through a civil proceeding, which lacks the due process safeguards of a criminal trial. Law enforcement can seize money or property, including one’s home, business, or vehicle. It gets to keep the profits, creating a perverse incentive that encourages police abuses. Because the standards are so loose, people with little to no involvement in criminal activity often get caught up in civil asset forfeiture. For instance, South Carolina police tried to seize an elderly woman’s home because drug deals occurred on the property—even though she had no connection to the crimes and tried to stop them.

Now, that’s out.

In her majority opinion, Ginsburg traced the right back to the Magna Carta through the English Bill of Rights and the Virginia Declaration of Rights, all of which heavily influenced the U.S. Constitution. By the time the 14^th Amendment was ratified, 35 of the 37 states explicitly barred excessive fines. And during debate over ratification, congressmen noted that Southern states were using punitive fines to subjugate newly freed blacks. The framers of the 14^th Amendment plainly intended to incorporate the Excessive Fines Clause to rein in these “harsh inflictions … almost reenacting slavery.”

“In short,” Ginsburg wrote, surveying this evidence, “the historical and logical case for concluding that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Excessive Fines Clause is overwhelming.” She also swatted down Indiana’s fallback argument that the clause does not apply to proceedings over an individual’s property, holding that these forfeitures still qualify as “fines” that trigger constitutional scrutiny.

Good.