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How Qassem Suleimani became more powerful than a president

How Qassem Suleimani became more powerful than a president

The Guardian reports: Qassem Suleimani started his working life as a skinny, impoverished child construction labourer, and ended it as the most influential military commander in the Middle East. Through intellect, ruthlessness, courage and a dose of luck that finally ran out this week, he rose to become Iran’s second-most powerful man, official commander of Iran’s elite Quds forces and unofficial commander of a proliferation of proxy militias and allied politicians across the region. He was killed by US drone…

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Australia is committing climate suicide

Australia is committing climate suicide

Richard Flanagan writes: Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen. The images of the fires are a cross between “Mad Max” and “On the Beach”: thousands driven onto beaches in a dull orange haze,…

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Trump rule would exclude climate change in infrastructure planning

Trump rule would exclude climate change in infrastructure planning

The New York Times reports: Federal agencies would no longer have to take climate change into account when they assess the environmental impacts of highways, pipelines and other major infrastructure projects, according to a Trump administration plan that would weaken one of the benchmark environmental laws of the modern era. The proposed changes to the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act could sharply reduce obstacles to the Keystone XL oil pipeline and other fossil fuel projects that have been stymied when…

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How to survive the internet in 2020

How to survive the internet in 2020

Farhad Manjoo writes: The new year is here, and online, the forecast calls for several seasons of hell. Tech giants and the media have scarcely figured out all that went wrong during the last presidential election — viral misinformation, state-sponsored propaganda, bots aplenty, all of us cleaved into our own tribal reality bubbles — yet here we go again, headlong into another experiment in digitally mediated democracy. I’ll be honest with you: I’m terrified. I spend a lot of my…

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In science, we forget the place of human experience at our peril

In science, we forget the place of human experience at our peril

Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson write: The problem of time is one of the greatest puzzles of modern physics. The first bit of the conundrum is cosmological. To understand time, scientists talk about finding a ‘First Cause’ or ‘initial condition’ – a description of the Universe at the very beginning (or at ‘time equals zero’). But to determine a system’s initial condition, we need to know the total system. We need to make measurements of the positions and…

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In the 2010s, global affairs turned out far worse than the most pessimistic intelligence forecasts predicted

In the 2010s, global affairs turned out far worse than the most pessimistic intelligence forecasts predicted

Thomas Wright writes: Every four years, after the U.S. presidential election, the National Intelligence Council publishes a report looking ahead to the next two decades in global affairs. We do not have a report to mark the beginning of the 2010s, but the council’s 2012 report, “Alternative Worlds,” described two scenarios—the best plausible case and the worst plausible case. In the best-case scenario, “China and the United States cooperate on a range of issues, leading to broader global cooperation.” In…

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Australia, your country is burning – dangerous climate change is here with you now

Australia, your country is burning – dangerous climate change is here with you now

Michael Mann writes: After years studying the climate, my work has brought me to Sydney where I’m studying the linkages between climate change and extreme weather events. Prior to beginning my sabbatical stay in Sydney, I took the opportunity this holiday season to vacation in Australia with my family. We went to see the Great Barrier Reef – one of the great wonders of this planet – while we still can. Subject to the twin assaults of warming-caused bleaching and…

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Unredacted Ukraine documents reveal extent of Pentagon’s legal concerns

Unredacted Ukraine documents reveal extent of Pentagon’s legal concerns

Kate Brannen writes: “Clear direction from POTUS to continue to hold.” This is what Michael Duffey, associate director of national security programs at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), told Elaine McCusker, the acting Pentagon comptroller, in an Aug. 30 email, which has only been made available in redacted form until now. It is one of many documents the Trump administration is trying to keep from the public, despite congressional oversight efforts and court orders in Freedom of Information…

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U.S. may take preemptive action as it sees signs Iran or allies may be planning more attacks

U.S. may take preemptive action as it sees signs Iran or allies may be planning more attacks

Reuters reports: U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on Thursday there were indications Iran or forces it backs may be planning additional attacks, warning that the “game has changed” and it was possible the United States might have to take preemptive action to protect American lives. “There are some indications out there that they may be planning additional attacks, that is nothing new … we’ve seen this for two or three months now,” Esper told reporters. “If that happens then…

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The U.S. has no friends left in Iraq

The U.S. has no friends left in Iraq

Tallha Abdulrazaq writes: Tensions between the United States and Iran have reached a new high in the past few days in a manner not seen since perhaps the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Events were kicked off last Friday night by a rocket attack against a military base near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, that houses U.S. service personnel and other citizens. The attack killed an American contractor and wounded several service members, drawing the ire of the White…

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As hospitals and schools are frequently bombed in Syria, UN launches a limited inquiry

As hospitals and schools are frequently bombed in Syria, UN launches a limited inquiry

The New York Times reports: The bombs smashed into a child care center, a refugee camp and a school. They destroyed makeshift clinics and hospitals, disabling essential services for tens of thousands of people. Over the past year, attacks on buildings in northwestern Syria, which are supposed to be off limits during wartime under international law, grew so frequent that the head of the United Nations launched an inquiry to document the violations. Secretary General António Guterres’s establishment of the…

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Google exec pushed company to commit to human rights. Then Google pushed him out

Google exec pushed company to commit to human rights. Then Google pushed him out

The Washington Post reports: For years, Google tasked Ross LaJeunesse with executing its plan to protect human rights in China, after Google announced a decade ago it would stop censoring search results there to safeguard security and free speech. LaJeunesse took the mission to heart: He later devised a human rights program to formalize Google’s principles supporting free expression and privacy. He began lobbying for it internally in 2017 — around the time when the tech giant was exploring a…

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Global apathy toward the fires in Australia is a scary portent for the future

Global apathy toward the fires in Australia is a scary portent for the future

David Wallace-Wells writes: Right now, on the outskirts of a hyper modern first world megapolis, at the end of a year in which the public seemed finally to wake up to the dramatic threat from global warming, a climate disaster of unimaginable horror has been unfolding for almost two full months, and the rest of the world is hardly paying attention. The New South Wales fires have been burning since September, destroying fifteen million acres (or more than two thousand…

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U.S. taking democracy for granted, Chief Justice Roberts says

U.S. taking democracy for granted, Chief Justice Roberts says

Bloomberg reports: The U.S. has “come to take democracy for granted,” Chief Justice John Roberts said, urging his fellow judges to keep educating the public about the workings of the federal government and the Constitution. Roberts, who is slated to oversee the Senate‘s impeachment trial of President Donald Trump in the coming weeks, used his year-end report Tuesday to laud the federal judiciary’s work on civic education, while issuing a thinly veiled warning about the fragility of American democracy in…

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U.S. embassy attack revealed Trump’s weakness

U.S. embassy attack revealed Trump’s weakness

Peter Beinart writes: Over the past 18 months, Donald Trump has picked a fight with Iran that he won’t end and can’t win. That fight has had horrifying consequences for the Iranian people, led Tehran to restart its nuclear program, and now left parts of the American embassy compound in Baghdad in flames. In the days and weeks to come, Trump’s policy will likely lead either to war or to additional American humiliation, or both. The fight began in May…

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