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Month: April 2019

Spare me your thoughts and prayers. The U.S. has betrayed its Jews

Spare me your thoughts and prayers. The U.S. has betrayed its Jews

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Jane Eisner writes: The United States Constitution, and the government sworn to uphold it, is not protecting its citizens. It did not protect Lori Gilbert Kaye, the 60-year-old woman with a kind smile and a generous disposition, who was murdered by an anti-Semitic terrorist as she prayed in synagogue yesterday, the final day of Passover. It did not protect the others who were injured in this horrific hate crime, including the rabbi who bravely continued to teach and implored his…

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Ignore the Poway Synagogue shooter’s manifesto: Pay attention to 8chan’s /pol/ board

Ignore the Poway Synagogue shooter’s manifesto: Pay attention to 8chan’s /pol/ board

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Robert Evans writes: On April 27, 2019, at around 11:30 a.m. local time, a young man with a semi-automatic rifle walked into the Chabad of Poway Synagogue in Poway, California. He opened fire, killing one worshipper and wounding three others. In the hours since the shooting, a manifesto, believed to be written by the shooter, began circulating online. Evidence has also surfaced that, like the Christchurch Mosque shooter, this killer began his rampage with a post on 8chan’s /pol/ board….

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If Trump weren’t president, he would already be indicted

If Trump weren’t president, he would already be indicted

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  Mimi Rocah and Renato Mariotti write: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report is 448 pages long, full of shocking conduct and detail that has prompted non-stop discussion since it was released last week. But one thing seems indisputable from our perspective as former federal prosecutors looking at the evidence laid out by the report: If Donald Trump were not now president he would have been indicted on multiple counts of obstruction of justice. And that case would be as strong,…

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The war in Syria is now an economic one

The war in Syria is now an economic one

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Bloomberg reports: The impact on Damascus, where the war ended a year ago with the defeat of the fighters in towns around it, is staggering. The city usually throbs with life in the spring, carts overflowing with fresh green almonds, Damascenes smoking shisha in outdoor cafes and families enjoying picnics. It felt lifeless on a visit this month. Vendors in the city’s old bazaar complain of miserable sales. Pubs that bustled with diners were largely empty. Increased power cuts have…

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The gray race for the White House

The gray race for the White House

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Edward-Isaac Dovere writes: “Joe Biden. He understands what’s happening today.” The newspaper ad ran a few weeks before the 1972 Senate election in Delaware, when the upstart 29-year-old was challenging a 63-year-old incumbent. The ad, which appeared in The News Journal, Delaware’s major newspaper, happened to run under a column that described Biden’s newly combative strategy in the closing days of the race. Biden’s approach then, according to the columnist, was “in effect, ‘Dear old dad may have been right…

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Donald Trump’s role in the latest synagogue shooting

Donald Trump’s role in the latest synagogue shooting

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While Jews were shot for being Jewish by an armed white man this weekend, @realDonaldTrump — who has emboldened white nationalists and incited white nationalist violence — spoke at the @NRA convention to advocate for more guns for more white men. He is to blame. https://t.co/hUyqLXaKuh — Sophie Ellman-Golan (@EgSophie) April 27, 2019 NBC reports: Multiple law enforcement sources confirm to NBC News that the suspect in the Poway synagogue shooting is 19-year-old John T. Earnest. According to a manifesto,…

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Mueller report exposes ‘Miners for Trump’ as a Russian troll effort

Mueller report exposes ‘Miners for Trump’ as a Russian troll effort

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Joe Romm writes: In October 2016, Pennsylvania social media accounts promoted “Miners for Trump” rallies around the state with a picture of a gritty coal miner. The rallies coincided with a series of presidential campaign rallies by then-candidate Donald Trump. It turns out the social media promotions were not created by U.S. coal miners, however. Instead, they were the work of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian troll farm, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s recently released report on…

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Russian hackers were ‘in a position’ to alter Florida voter rolls, Rubio confirms

Russian hackers were ‘in a position’ to alter Florida voter rolls, Rubio confirms

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The New York Times reports: It was the day before the 2016 presidential election, and at the Volusia County elections office, near Florida’s Space Coast, workers were so busy that they had fallen behind on their correspondence. Lisa Lewis, the supervisor of elections, stumbled on an important email sent to her and three others in the office, by then a week old, that appeared to be from VR Systems, the vendor that sells electronic voter list equipment to nearly every…

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U.S.-led coalition killed 1,600 civilians in Raqqa ‘death trap’

U.S.-led coalition killed 1,600 civilians in Raqqa ‘death trap’

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Amnesty International reports: The US-led military Coalition must end almost two years of denial about the massive civilian death toll and destruction it unleashed in the Syrian city of Raqqa, Amnesty International and Airwars said today as they launched a new data project on the offensive to oust the armed group calling itself “Islamic State” (IS). The interactive website, Rhetoric versus Reality: How the ‘most precise air campaign in history’ left Raqqa the most destroyed city in modern times, is…

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Indigenous Waorani win landmark legal case against Ecuador government

Indigenous Waorani win landmark legal case against Ecuador government

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Al Jazeera reports: The indigenous Waorani community in Ecuador won a landmark lawsuit on Friday against three government bodies for conducting a faulty consultation process with the community before putting their territory up for sale in an international oil auction. The ruling immediately suspends any possibility of selling the community’s land for oil exploration. It also sets an important precedent for other communities in Ecuador’s southern Amazon rainforest, trying to keep oil extraction out of their territories. “Today, the courts…

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Mystery of the universe’s expansion rate widens with new Hubble data

Mystery of the universe’s expansion rate widens with new Hubble data

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NASA reports: Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope say they have crossed an important threshold in revealing a discrepancy between the two key techniques for measuring the universe’s expansion rate. The recent study strengthens the case that new theories may be needed to explain the forces that have shaped the cosmos. A brief recap: The universe is getting bigger every second. The space between galaxies is stretching, like dough rising in the oven. But how fast is the universe expanding?…

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The uncanny power of Greta Thunberg’s climate-change rhetoric

The uncanny power of Greta Thunberg’s climate-change rhetoric

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Sam Knight writes: Thunberg—along with her younger sister—has been given a diagnosis of autism and A.D.H.D. In interviews, she sometimes ascribes her unusual focus, and her absolute intolerance of adult bullshit on the subject of climate change, to her neurological condition. “I see the world a bit different, from another perspective,” she told my colleague Masha Gessen. In 2015, the year Thunberg turned twelve, she gave up flying. She travelled to London by train, which took two days. Her voice,…

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In Northern Ireland, the New IRA is gaining a foothold with younger generations

In Northern Ireland, the New IRA is gaining a foothold with younger generations

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Siobhán Fenton writes: The murder of 29-year-old journalist Lyra McKee by the New IRA while she was observing a riot in Derry last week has left Northern Ireland distraught that such violence could still occur in the post-Troubles era. An unnerving question is being asked with increasing urgency – why would anyone from the post-ceasefire generation, with no memory of the Troubles, actively seek to re-enact or return to the conflict? The Good Friday Agreement, signed 21 years ago in…

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Anita Hill deserves a real apology. Why couldn’t Joe Biden offer one?

Anita Hill deserves a real apology. Why couldn’t Joe Biden offer one?

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Moira Donegan writes: Joe Biden’s long-awaited presidential announcement finally came on Thursday, in the form of a policy-free video in which the former vice-president castigated Donald Trump for his racism and offered peans to an imagined noble American past (presumably, the past of 2008-16, when Biden served under Barack Obama) instead of a vision for the future. “America’s coming back like we used to be,” Biden said of his run. “Ethical, straight, tell ’em the truth. Supporting our allies, all…

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