Music: Vinicius Cantuária — ‘Amor Brasileiro’
Climate change is our World War III. It needs a bold response
Joseph Stiglitz writes: Advocates of the Green New Deal say there is great urgency in dealing with climate change and highlight the scale and scope of what is required to combat it. They are right. They use the term “New Deal” to evoke the massive response by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the United States government to the Great Depression. An even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II. Critics ask, “Can we afford it?” and…
My green manufacturing plan for America
Elizabeth Warren writes: While much of the debate around the Green New Deal has focused on the path to aggressive reductions in domestic greenhouse gas emissions, the science is clear: even if we reduce America’s emissions so that they are net-zero by 2030, we will still fall far short of the reduction in global emissions needed to avert a climate crisis. To satisfy this global need, we need rapid innovation on par with the space race along with widespread domestic…
China wants us to forget the horrors of Tiananmen as it rewrites its history
Louisa Lim and Ilaria Maria Sala write: Remembering the deaths of 4 June 1989 is no neutral task. It is a civic duty, a burden and an act of resistance in countering a state-level lie that risks spreading far beyond China’s borders. On that day the Communist party sent tanks to clear protesters from Tiananmen Square in the centre of Beijing, killing hundreds of people, maybe more than a thousand. In the intervening years, China has systematically erased the evidence…
When China massacred its own people
Nicholas Kristof writes: Thirty years ago in the spring of 1989, as the world’s most populous country teetered on the edge of freedom, I received a late-night phone call in my apartment in Beijing: The Chinese Army was invading its own capital. Students and workers had made roads impassable by setting up barricades to block the army, so I jumped on my bicycle and pedaled furiously toward the gunfire. I reached Tiananmen Square shortly before the army, and then I…
The State Department has been funding trolls. I’m one of their targets
Jason Rezaian writes: Even after spending a year and a half in prison in Tehran, I knew that if I wanted to go on writing about Iran, I would be a target for plenty of public attacks despite the abuse I had suffered at the hands of the Islamic Republic. And so it has been. But I never imagined the U.S. State Department would be funding my attackers. Last week, several astute Iran watchers drew attention to a series of…
GOP lawmakers warn White House they’ll try to block Trump’s Mexico tariffs
The Washington Post reports: Republican senators warned Trump administration officials Tuesday they were prepared to block the president’s effort to impose tariffs on Mexican imports, promising what would be GOP lawmakers’ most brazen defiance of the president since he took office. During a closed-door lunch, at least a half-dozen senators spoke in opposition to the tariffs, while no one spoke in support, according to multiple people present who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting. Senators…
The GOP is stumbling blind into the age of diversity
David Brooks writes: For much of the 20th century, young and old people voted pretty similarly. The defining gaps in our recent politics have been the gender gap (women preferring Democrats) and the education gap. But now the generation gap is back, with a vengeance. This is most immediately evident in the way Democrats are sorting themselves in their early primary preferences. A Democratic voter’s race, sex or education level doesn’t predict which candidate he or she is leaning toward,…
Music: Balanço — ‘Metti Una Sera A Cena’ (Jazzanova Remix)
Boris Johnson hasn’t been as positive about Donald Trump as the latter imagines
Robert Mackey writes: Washington and Westminster politics seemed to merge on Monday, as Donald Trump arrived in London for a state visit — tweeting insults from Air Force One at the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan — just as Boris Johnson, described by the American president as “a friend of mine,” officially launched his campaign to become the country’s new prime minister. Before his trip, Trump had warm words for Johnson in an interview with The Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid….
Trump’s defiance of the rule of law
Paul Rosenzweig writes: President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that his administration is the “most transparent in history,” and that it has “cooperated totally” with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, or words to that effect. But the truth is quite the opposite. No prior administration has pushed the envelope of the law to deflect outside scrutiny to the same degree as this one. In a recent letter from the White House to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the…
Pete Buttigieg’s plan to overhaul the Supreme Court
NBC News reports: As Democrats agonize over a spate of state laws restricting abortion rights and even a potential reversal of Roe v. Wade, one 2020 presidential candidate is putting an ambitious, long-shot plan to reform the Supreme Court front-and-center of his campaign. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has talked about his plan to overhaul the high court since his first days as a candidate. In short, it calls for expanding the number of justices from nine…
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao’s unorthodox requests raise ethics questions
The New York Times reports: The email arrived in Washington before dawn. An official at the American Embassy in Beijing was urgently seeking advice from the State Department about an “ethics question.” “I am writing you because Mission China is in the midst of preparing for a visit from Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao,” the official wrote in October 2017. Ms. Chao’s office had made a series of unorthodox requests related to her first scheduled visit to China as…
Orientalism: Kushner questions whether Palestinians can govern themselves
Bloomberg reports: Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner said in an interview that the Palestinians aren’t yet able to govern themselves and declined to promise them an independent state in the White House’s long-awaited Mideast peace plan. “The hope is that they over time will become capable of governing,” Kushner said in an interview with Axios on HBO that aired on Sunday. Kushner is leading a White House effort to draft a new peace proposal for the Israelis…
The seasons after the Arab Spring
Gilbert Achcar writes: Images of popular protests that recall the revolutionary movement of 2011 have dominated news from the Arabic-speaking world for months. Uprisings began in Sudan on 19 December and in Algeria with the marches of Friday 22 February. They revived memories of the huge, peaceful demonstrations early in the Arab Spring that shook Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Syria. Commentators have been more cautious this time, asking questions rather than commenting directly, mindful of the bitter disappointment…
In ecology studies and selfless ants, E.O. Wilson finds hope for the future
Claudia Dreifus writes: No one else in biology has ever had a career quite like that of Edward O. Wilson. One of the world’s leading authorities on ants, an influential evolution theorist, and a prolific, highly honored author, E. O. Wilson—his first name comes and goes from bylines, but the middle initial is ever-present—has over several decades been at the center of scientific controversies that spilled out of the journals and into wider public awareness. Among activists in the environmental…