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Trump tax documents show possible indications of fraud

Trump tax documents show possible indications of fraud

ProPublica reports: Documents obtained by ProPublica show stark differences in how Donald Trump’s businesses reported some expenses, profits and occupancy figures for two Manhattan buildings, giving a lender different figures than they provided to New York City tax authorities. The discrepancies made the buildings appear more profitable to the lender — and less profitable to the officials who set the buildings’ property tax. For instance, Trump told the lender that he took in twice as much rent from one building…

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Trump tried to use meeting with bereaved parents as ‘a stunt’; they said they’d been ambushed

Trump tried to use meeting with bereaved parents as ‘a stunt’; they said they’d been ambushed

CNN reports: The grieving parents of a British teenager say they are “extremely angry” and feel they have been “taken advantage of” after a highly choreographed White House encounter with US President Donald Trump — where he presented them with an unexpected offer to meet the woman involved in the crash that killed their son. The family says that Trump surprised them with the “bombshell” news that Anne Sacoolas, the wife of a US diplomat stationed in the UK, was…

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Scientists endorse mass civil disobedience to force climate action

Scientists endorse mass civil disobedience to force climate action

Reuters reports: Almost 400 scientists [now 1,140] have endorsed a civil disobedience campaign aimed at forcing governments to take rapid action to tackle climate change, warning that failure could inflict “incalculable human suffering.” In a joint declaration, climate scientists, physicists, biologists, engineers and others from at least 20 countries broke with the caution traditionally associated with academia to side with peaceful protesters courting arrest from Amsterdam to Melbourne. Wearing white laboratory coats to symbolize their research credentials, a group of…

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Trump wants to erase protections in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, a storehouse of carbon

Trump wants to erase protections in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, a storehouse of carbon

Inside Climate News reports: The Trump Administration wants to allow logging in previously off-limit areas of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the U.S. Forest Service announced Tuesday, a move that could turn one of the nation’s largest carbon sinks into a source of new climate-changing emissions. The old-growth temperate rainforest contains trees that are centuries old and play a crucial role in storing carbon. In a state that is synonymous with oil production, the Tongass National Forest represents the potential for…

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What an embodied history of trees can teach us about life

What an embodied history of trees can teach us about life

Dalia Nassar and Margaret M Barbour write: Place yourself on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, near the Franz Josef Glacier. Officially, this forest is a temperate podocarp-hardwood rainforest, but these dry words belie the rich diversity of plant life around, encompassing every imaginable shade of green, brown and grey. They also do an injustice to the experience of standing dwarfed by the soaring trunks of the 400-year-old rimu trees draped in moss, with their beautifully…

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Trump has disgraced America and the soldiers who serve this country

Trump has disgraced America and the soldiers who serve this country

David Ignatius writes: At a gathering last Saturday night of military and intelligence veterans, one topic shrouded the room: President Trump’s decision to abandon Kurdish fighters in Syria who had fought and died to help America destroy the Islamic State. “It’s a dagger to the heart to walk away from people who shed blood for us,” one former top CIA official who attended the black-tie dinner told me later. A retired four-star general who was there said the same thing:…

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Russians take over military bases that Americans abandoned

Russians take over military bases that Americans abandoned

The New York Times reports: Russia said on Tuesday that its military units were patrolling territory in northern Syria vacated by the Americans following the withdrawal ordered by President Trump, underscoring the sudden loss of United States influence in the eight-year-old Syria war. The Americans had until Monday maintained two military bases in the area, and Russia’s announcement signaled that Moscow, the Syrian government’s most important ally, was moving to fill a security void left by the withdrawal of both…

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Trump’s impeachment barricade has collapsed

Trump’s impeachment barricade has collapsed

Politico reports: Donald Trump’s impeachment blockade has collapsed. The president’s former top Russia adviser, Fiona Hill — the first White House official to cooperate in Democrats’ investigation of the Ukraine scandal — has detailed for lawmakers a trail of alleged corruption that extends from Kiev to the West Wing. In dramatic testimony on Monday, she roped in some of Trump’s top advisers as witnesses to the unfolding controversy. And on Tuesday, a senior State Department official, George Kent, appeared on…

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The world needs a massive carbon tax in just 10 years to limit climate change, IMF says

The world needs a massive carbon tax in just 10 years to limit climate change, IMF says

The Washington Post reports: A global agreement to make fossil fuel burning more expensive is urgent and the most efficient way of fighting climate change, an International Monetary Fund study found on Thursday. The group found that a global tax of $75 per ton by the year 2030 could limit the planet’s warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), or roughly double what it is now. That would greatly increase the price of fossil-fuel-based energy — especially from the…

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After Poland, no democracy is safe

After Poland, no democracy is safe

Yascha Mounk writes: Democracy was on the ballot yesterday in Poland. It suffered a stinging defeat that will have consequences far beyond the country’s borders. For decades, political scientists regarded Poland as the great success story of the transition from communism to democracy. In no other large country in Central or Eastern Europe had democratic institutions taken such a deep hold, was there such a raucous press, and had civil society flourished to such a remarkable extent. According to a…

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How Elizabeth Warren found her voice

How Elizabeth Warren found her voice

The Washington Post reports: Elizabeth Warren hadn’t stepped foot on the University of Houston Law Center campus in nearly 15 years, not since she’d left her first full-time teaching job there. But on a mid-September morning in 1997, Warren, by then a celebrated professor at Harvard Law School, returned to memorialize a man who had played a small but not insignificant role in her teaching career. The five years Warren spent in this sprawling Texas city were among the most…

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Humans, the outlier primates, xenophobic one minute, tolerant the next

Humans, the outlier primates, xenophobic one minute, tolerant the next

By Christian Jarrett Whether they are proposing to build a wall or to exit an international coalition, populist politicians like to pitch themselves as keeping ‘outsiders’ at bay, and it clearly strikes a chord with their home crowd. To understand this phenomenon, evolutionary and social psychologists have offered a simple explanation. Humans, we’re told, have a deep-rooted inclination to mistrust ‘the other’ – people who do not belong to our community or ingroup. Classic work published in 1970 by the…

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Trump helped Erdogan, Putin, Assad, Iran, and ISIS

Trump helped Erdogan, Putin, Assad, Iran, and ISIS

Mitch Prothero reports: Syrian President Bashar Assad — backed by his Russian patrons — moved on Monday to exploit the collapse of the US military presence in northeastern Syria by driving troops into the previously autonomous region managed by a Kurdish-dominated militia that had been under American protection for five years. The unlikely sequence of events began earlier this month after President Donald Trump ended US opposition to a Turkish offensive into Syria during a phone call with Turkish President…

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Kurds targeted in Turkish attack include thousands of female fighters who battled ISIS

Kurds targeted in Turkish attack include thousands of female fighters who battled ISIS

By Haidar Khezri, University of Central Florida Kurdish fighters under attack by Turkey have described President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria as a “stab in the back.” Since bombing began on Oct. 9, Turkish military operations against the Syrian Democratic Forces in northern Syria, Washington’s staunchest and most effective allies in the war against the Islamic State, has killed at least 11 civilians and an unconfirmed number of Kurdish fighters, with estimates ranging from dozens…

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