Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

The House must move on Trump impeachment articles now

The House must move on Trump impeachment articles now

Laurence Tribe writes: The White House’s blanket stonewalling of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump isn’t just deeply troubling or further indirect evidence of the president’s underlying abuse of public power for private gain. It signals another clear ground for his impeachment: obstruction of Congress. Article III of the Nixon articles of impeachment provides the closest precedent to what Trump did here: He directed the State Department to prevent Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union,…

Read More Read More

The 20 fossil fuel companies behind a third of all carbon emissions

The 20 fossil fuel companies behind a third of all carbon emissions

The Guardian reports: The Guardian today reveals the 20 fossil fuel companies whose relentless exploitation of the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves can be directly linked to more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era. New data from world-renowned researchers reveals how this cohort of state-owned and multinational firms are driving the climate emergency that threatens the future of humanity, and details how they have continued to expand their operations despite being aware of the…

Read More Read More

What Hunter Biden did was legal — and that’s the problem

What Hunter Biden did was legal — and that’s the problem

Peter Schweizer writes: In 2016, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $264 million as part of a settlement with the federal government. The reason? An Asian subsidiary of the company had hired the children of Chinese government officials in the hopes of currying favor with their powerful parents — a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Had the same thing happened with a foreign company and an American politician’s family, however, no violation would have occurred — because no equivalent…

Read More Read More

The chemistry at the heart of the Universe

The chemistry at the heart of the Universe

Caleb A. Scharf writes: It’s a relatively little-known fact outside of astrophysics that the key to the first stars in the universe, and the earliest structures condensing out of the primordial murk, was chemistry. Specifically, the key was the formation of molecular hydrogen or H2. A pair of atoms bonded together and capable of rotating and vibrating. A few years ago I wrote about some of the details in this column. In brief, without the formation of molecular hydrogen it’s…

Read More Read More

Top secret Russian intelligence unit, actively fighting the West, seeks to destabilize Europe, security officials say

Top secret Russian intelligence unit, actively fighting the West, seeks to destabilize Europe, security officials say

The New York Times reports: First came a destabilization campaign in Moldova, followed by the poisoning of an arms dealer in Bulgaria and then a thwarted coup in Montenegro. Last year, there was an attempt to assassinate a former Russian spy in Britain using a nerve agent. Though the operations bore the fingerprints of Russia’s intelligence services, the authorities initially saw them as isolated, unconnected attacks. Western security officials have now concluded that these operations, and potentially many others, are…

Read More Read More

Trump’s Ukraine call was ‘crazy’ and ‘frightening,’ White House official told whistle-blower

Trump’s Ukraine call was ‘crazy’ and ‘frightening,’ White House official told whistle-blower

The New York Times reports: A White House official who listened to President Trump’s July phone call with Ukraine’s leader described it as “crazy,” “frightening,” and “completely lacking in substance related to national security,” according to a memo written by the whistle-blower at the center of the Ukraine scandal, a C.I.A. officer who spoke to the White House official. The White House official was “visibly shaken by what had transpired,” the C.I.A. officer wrote in his memo, one day after…

Read More Read More

White House blocks Sondland testimony, obstructing impeachment inquiry

White House blocks Sondland testimony, obstructing impeachment inquiry

The New York Times reports: The White House all but declared war on the House impeachment inquiry on Tuesday, intervening for the first time to block the testimony of a key witness as President Trump signaled his administration would try to starve investigators of more witnesses and documents. The decision to block Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, from speaking with investigators for three House committees came just hours before he was to appear on…

Read More Read More

Russia opens digital interference front in Libya

Russia opens digital interference front in Libya

Nathaniel Greenberg writes: In February 2015, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi presided over a potentially momentous shift in the history of Arab news media. On the sidelines of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s official visit to Cairo, the country’s oldest state-run newspaper Al-Ahram signed a “memorandum of understanding” with the Director General of the Russian-backed media group Rossiya Segodyna, or Russia Today. While attention focused on Russian investments in Egypt’s Zohr gas complex, Russian construction of an industrial zone near the…

Read More Read More

What the Bureau of Land Management shake-up could mean for public lands and their climate impact

What the Bureau of Land Management shake-up could mean for public lands and their climate impact

InsideClimate News reports: The changes underway at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management might not seem like much: A few hundred employees are being relocated from offices near the White House and dispersed throughout the West, while agency leaders move in next door to energy companies in newly leased headquarters in Grand Junction, Colorado. But along with the appointment of a self-described Sagebrush Rebel as acting director, the shuffling of staff could help position conservatives to accomplish substantial political goals:…

Read More Read More

‘Another Trump gift to Putin’: Reactions to administration considering pulling out of the Open Skies Treaty

‘Another Trump gift to Putin’: Reactions to administration considering pulling out of the Open Skies Treaty

Business Insider reports: The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee has expressed alarm with the possibility that the US will pull out of a vital treaty with European allies and Russia. Rep. Eliot Engel of New York on Monday sent a letter to the US national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, in which he said he was “deeply concerned” by reports that the White House was considering withdrawing from the Open Skies Treaty. “I request your personal engagement on this…

Read More Read More

Trump’s America shines bright for Europe’s radical New Right

Trump’s America shines bright for Europe’s radical New Right

By Sylvia Taschka, Wayne State University Donald Trump might not be as popular in Europe as Barack Obama was, but for many groups on the far-right of Europe’s political spectrum, he has become a heroic figure. “With Trump, the pride of a whole population has awoken … Their hope is captured in one sentence ‘Make America Great Again,’” said Martin Sellner, the leader of Austria’s Identitarian Movement, one of these far-right groups, in a German magazine in 2016. “The ‘Trump…

Read More Read More

Trump ‘has no spine’ and got ‘rolled’ by Erdogan, says National Security Council official

Trump ‘has no spine’ and got ‘rolled’ by Erdogan, says National Security Council official

Newsweek reports: Donald Trump got “rolled” by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a National Security Council source with direct knowledge of the discussions told Newsweek. In a scheduled phone call on Sunday afternoon between President Trump and President Erdogan, Trump said he would withdraw U.S. forces from northern Syria. The phone call was scheduled after Turkey announced it was planning to invade Syria, and hours after Erdogan reinforced his army units at the Syrian-Turkish border and issued his strongest threat…

Read More Read More

Latest betrayal of Kurds risks undermining defeat of ISIS

Latest betrayal of Kurds risks undermining defeat of ISIS

Martin Chulov writes: In early 2015, as Islamic State trampled over armies of the Middle East and menaced the west, the US turned to the Kurds for help. It was a familiar call, having been repeated over the decades whenever Washington needed a friend in the region. The outcome has been similar too. Four years on, the people who helped safeguard the global order have been abandoned by the US on the eve of a Turkish push into Kurdish lands…

Read More Read More

Unless we act now, ISIS will rise again

Unless we act now, ISIS will rise again

Last month, an open letter from national security professionals to Western governments warned [PDF]: ISIS may have been defeated on the battlefield; but thousands of Western fighters and their families remain in detention in Syria and Iraq. We do not expect terrorists to attract much sympathy. But the majority of detainees are not terrorists; they are children. At the largest detention camp, al-Hol in northeastern Syria, around two-thirds of the approximately 70,000 detainees are under the age of twelve. The…

Read More Read More