It looks like Taylor Swift isn't the only one speaking up about politics ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. Following Swift’s lead, the Barefoot Contessa just got overtly political for the first time. At an event to promote her new cookbook, Ina Garten said she would happily serve President Donald Trump at a dinner party — with a subpoena. (Though some might call it a grade-A roast.)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/foodnews/ina-garten-revealed-what-she-would-serve-trump-for-dinner-and-it%e2%80%99s-a-grade-a-roast/ar-BBOYcUt?ocid=sf

basically called for advertisers to leave FOX News

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. -- Army researchers have developed for the first time an analytic model to show how groups of people influence individual behavior.

Technically speaking, this had never been done before: No one had taken the computational information from a collective model (numerical solutions of, say, thousands of equations) and used it to exactly determine an individual's behavior (reduced to one equation). Scientists from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory report their findings ("Fractional Dynamics of Individuals in Complex Networks" in the October edition of Frontiers in Physics.

This discovery was the product of ongoing research to model how an individual adapts to group behavior. ARL's program in network science seeks to determine collective group behavior emerging from the dynamic behavior of individuals. In the past, the collaborative work of Drs. Bruce West a senior scientist at the Army Research Office, and Malgorzata Turalska, a post-doctoral researcher at ARL, focused on constructing and interpreting the output of large-scale computer models of complex dynamic networks from which collective properties--such as swarming, collective intelligence and decision making--could be determined.

https://www.army.mil/article/212747/army_scientists_develop_computational_model_to_predict_human_behavior?fbclid=IwAR2-4q_LoA93ltzt0BOjLf1XoT3-Nl5AgTY7wi5oCkWICe_DD9OiM3mEPbc

Washington (AFP) - The murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has sent a chill through exiled dissidents, with many revealing discreet government attempts to lure them to their embassies as an apparent "trap" to return them to the kingdom.

Khashoggi, a critic of powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, in what sources close to the government have said was likely an authorised rendition that went wrong.

Saudi exiles in three different countries have recounted what appeared to be official attempts to bait them into the kingdom's diplomatic missions, exposing them to potentially the same fate as Khashoggi.

Omar Abdulaziz, a 27-year-old Saudi activist exiled in Canada, said he was approached earlier this year by Saudi officials who urged him to visit their embassy with them to collect a new passport.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/saudi-dissidents-fear-long-arm-state-khashoggi-murder-114854780.html

Strangely, over a century, America's two major political parties gradually reversed identities, like the magnetic poles of Planet Earth switching direction.

When the Republican Party was formed in 1856, it was fiercely liberal, opposing the expansion of slavery, calling for more spending on public education, seeking more open immigration and the like. Compassionate Abraham Lincoln suited the new party's progressive agenda.

In that era, Democrats were conservatives, partly dominated by the slave-holding South. Those old-style Democrats generally opposed any government action to create jobs or help underdogs.

Through the latter half of the 19th century, the pattern of Republicans as liberals, Democrats as conservatives, generally held true. In 1888, the GOP elected President Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) on a liberal platform seeking more social services.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/article/How-Democrats-and-Republicans-switched-beliefs-9226115.php