Music: Snarky Puppy ft. Susana Baca and Charlie Hunter — ‘Molino Molero’
This is how democracy dies
Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa write: Citizens in stable democracies are supposed to be satisfied with the democratic process. Individual politicians or administrations may be unpopular. But if the public lacks commitment to democratic principles, or loses faith in democratic institutions, demagogues and opportunists may brush these aside. That’s why we were concerned when, four years ago, we found that support for democracy in the United States, as well as many other countries around the world, was nearing dangerous…
One year inside Trump’s monumental Facebook campaign
The Guardian reports: As the Democratic candidates for president spent 2019 battling each other in early voting states, Donald Trump’s re-election campaign built a sophisticated social media machine to communicate with conservative voters, grow its email list and fine-tune its messaging. Over the course of 2019, the Trump campaign spent nearly $20m on more than 218,000 different Facebook ads, a new Guardian analysis shows. Among the ads were some of the images and videos that made front-page news for their…
Trump’s digital advantage is freaking out Democratic strategists
Thomas B. Edsall writes: In a blog post published in November, a year before the 2020 election, Brian Burch, the president of CatholicVote.org, a socially conservative advocacy group, announced that in Wisconsin alone his organization had identified 199,241 Catholics “who’ve been to church at least 3 times in the last 90 days.” Nearly half of these religiously observant parishioners, Burch wrote, “91,373 mass-attending Catholics — are not even registered to vote!” CatholicVote.org is looking for potential Trump voters within this…
Moderate Democrats in Iowa insist they’ll support the nominee whoever wins
BuzzFeed reports: Moderate Iowa Democrats, including those who support Joe Biden’s bid for president, say they would definitely vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders if he wins the party’s nomination, even as the Democratic Party establishment becomes increasingly concerned about the chances of a Sanders win. “I would vote for my dead cat over Trump,” said Sandy Stanley, 71, at a Biden campaign stop in Muscatine, Iowa. Stanley said she doesn’t like Sanders but wouldn’t hesitate to vote for him if…
The real goal of Trump’s Middle East plan isn’t peace
Robert Malley and Aaron David Miller write: The Trump administration’s long-awaited and ill-named peace plan has many objectives, but making peace isn’t among them. Neither is jump-starting negotiations, or nudging the parties toward compromise, or even enshrining implicit, private understandings in the hope Israelis and Palestinians might eventually publicly espouse them—each one of which, as we know from successful and unsuccessful experience, has been featured as the goal of past American plans. The motives behind a document conceived without any…
The resurgence of ISIS
CNN reports: ISIS has begun reasserting itself in Iraq and Syria under a new leader assessed to be an Iraqi operative who was a driving force behind the terror group’s genocide against the Yazidi people, according to a report submitted to the UN Security Council which was made public on Wednesday. The wide-ranging report, compiled by the UN Monitoring Team that tracks the global jihadi terror threat, refers to the group by its alternate name stating the “Islamic State in…
A universal law may govern all living beings
Michel Loreau writes: The diversity of life is awe-inspiring. However, while biologists tend to focus on the multitude of species and how they live, what unites them may at times be more interesting than what sets them apart. In the era of “big data” and its deluge of information, this diversity can now begin to be perceived as a whole, discerning universal properties common to all creatures large and small. It was already known that there exist simple mathematical laws…
Music: Ibrahim Maalouf — ‘Movement I’
Trump unveils Middle East apartheid ‘peace plan’
The New York Times reports: President Trump unveiled his long-awaited Middle East peace plan with a flourish on Tuesday, outlining a proposal that would give Israel most of what it has sought over decades of conflict while creating what he called a Palestinian state with limited sovereignty. Mr. Trump’s plan would guarantee that Israel would control a unified Jerusalem as its capital and not require it to uproot any of the settlements in the West Bank that have provoked Palestinian…
Where once there was fury, Palestinian issue now stirs up apathy
Martin Chulov reports: For much of the last 70 years the cause of Palestine stirred the Arab street. From Yemen to Morocco and all points in between, laments were sung in song and enshrined in poetry as the decades mounted without a Palestinian state. Regional statesmen built careers by standing by a people without a land. Wars were fought and lost in their name. After the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, that slowly began to change and by the time…
Bolton concerned about Trump’s sympathies with autocratic rulers
The New York Times reports: John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, privately told Attorney General William P. Barr last year that he had concerns that President Trump was effectively granting personal favors to the autocratic leaders of Turkey and China, according to an unpublished manuscript by Mr. Bolton. Mr. Barr responded by pointing to a pair of Justice Department investigations of companies in those countries and said he was worried that Mr. Trump had created the appearance that…
U.S. Supreme Court lets Trump’s racist immigration policy take effect
Reuters reports: The U.S. Supreme Court gave the go-ahead on Monday for one of President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies, allowing his administration to implement a rule denying legal permanent residency to certain immigrants deemed likely to require government assistance in the future. The justices, on a 5-4 vote, granted the administration’s request to lift a lower court’s injunction that had blocked the so-called public charge policy while litigation over its legality continues. The rule has been criticized by immigrant…
Amazon employees defy ban on speaking out on company’s role in climate crisis
The Washington Post reports: More than 350 Amazon employees violated the e-commerce giant’s communications policy Sunday, in an unprecedented public display of support for colleagues who were warned they could be fired for speaking out to criticize the company’s climate practices. Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of workers concerned about the company’s business with the oil and gas industry as well as its carbon footprint, published quotes from 357 workers in a post on Medium. The comments, all…
Syrian and Russian mercenaries fighting in Libya
Frederic Wehrey writes: At a mud-caked intersection this month, some hundred-and-fifty feet from the front line, a lanky militia fighter approached and then abruptly turned around when he saw me, a Westerner. I’ve been covering Libya’s conflicts for years and noticed some minor but distinctive details about his appearance: a do-rag tied around his head, an olive green tactical vest, and perhaps a certain military bearing. The Libyan commander I was with confirmed it, with a chuckle: “That’s not a…
Stone tools reveal epic trek of nomadic Neanderthals
Neanderthal hunting grounds in southern Siberia — the Charysh River valley, with Chagyrskaya Cave in the centre of the photo. Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Author provided By Kseniya Kolobova, Russian Academy of Sciences; Maciej T. Krajcarz, Polish Academy of Sciences, and Richard ‘Bert’ Roberts, University of Wollongong Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) fossils were first discovered in western Europe in the mid nineteenth century. That was just the first in a…