Music: Hocus Pocus — ‘Touriste’ ft. Elodie Rama & Tribeca
Investing in renewable energy in order to increase oil production
Jesse Barron writes: Rex Tillerson stood under a 32-foot pipe organ at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, explaining how the world worked. It was May 2015, in the middle of an oil-price crash, and Exxon Mobil’s earnings had fallen 46 percent compared with the same quarter the year before. But Tillerson, then Exxon’s chief executive, told his shareholders to be confident in the future. Oil and gas furnished billions of people, including the very poor, with cheap,…
Ilhan Omar’s 9/11 comments spark more false outrage — and expose anti-Muslim bias
Qasim Rashid writes: On April 12, 1997 I received a call from my brother, Private First Class Tayyib M. Rashid, a newly minted U.S. Marine. He had called to tell us he had just graduated from boot camp. Ours is an immigrant family, and his service was a source of pride and validation for all of us. We were Americans in a new sense now. This year I filed to run for Virginia Senate — an extension of the American…
Rep. Ilhan Omar was right: Threats against Muslim Americans are rising
Mother Jones reports: In March, about a week after a gunman stormed two mosques in New Zealand, killing dozens of Muslim worshipers, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) gave a speech at the banquet of a Muslim civil rights group in California. A short snippet of that speech—in which Omar referred to the 9/11 attacks as “some people did something”—went viral Friday after it was posted online in a video. Pundits accused her of trying to downplay the 2001 tragedy at the…
Steve Bannon ‘told Italy’s populist leader: Pope Francis is the enemy’
The Observer reports: Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon advised Italy’s interior minister Matteo Salvini to attack the pope over the issue of migration, according to sources close to the Italian far right. During a meeting in Washington in April 2016, Bannon – who would within a few months take up his role as head of Trump’s presidential campaign – suggested the leader of Italy’s anti-immigration League party should start openly targeting Pope Francis, who has made the plight…
As Ecuador harbored Assange, it was subjected to threats and leaks
The New York Times reports: The secrets came directly from the phones of President Lenín Moreno of Ecuador: intimate pictures of him and his family on vacation, text messages from his wife, even a photograph of the president himself in a posh bedroom, eating a lobster in bed. The material, published last month on an anonymous website, was particularly embarrassing because Mr. Moreno was in a bruising national fight over his austerity measures. But rather than mount a defense, the…
Glaciers and Arctic ice are vanishing. Time to get radical before it’s too late
Bill McKibben writes: Forget “early warning signs” and “canaries in coalmines” – we’re now well into the middle of the climate change era, with its epic reshaping of our home planet. Monday’s news, from two separate studies, made it clear that the frozen portions of the Earth are now in violent and dramatic flux. The first, led by the veteran Greenland glaciologist Jason Box, looked across the Arctic at everything from “increased tundra biomass” to deepening thaw of the permafrost…
White House proposed releasing immigrant detainees in sanctuary cities, targeting political foes
The Washington Post reports: White House officials have tried to pressure U.S. immigration authorities to release detainees onto the streets of “sanctuary cities” to retaliate against President Trump’s political adversaries, according to Department of Homeland Security officials and email messages reviewed by The Washington Post. Trump administration officials have proposed transporting detained immigrants to sanctuary cities at least twice in the past six months — once in November, as a migrant caravan approached the U.S. southern border, and again in…
Inside the Russian effort to target Sanders supporters — and help elect Trump
The Washington Post reports: After Bernie Sanders lost his primary campaign for president against Hillary Clinton in 2016, a Twitter account called Red Louisiana News reached out to his supporters to help sway the general election. “Conscious Bernie Sanders supporters already moving towards the best candidate Trump! #Feel the Bern #Vote Trump 2016,” the account tweeted. The tweet was not actually from Louisiana, according to an analysis by Clemson University researchers. Instead, it was one of thousands of accounts identified…
Julian Assange got what he deserved
Michael Weiss writes: In the end, the man who reportedly smeared feces on the walls of his lodgings, mistreated his kitten, and variously blamed the ills of the world on feminists and bespectacled Jewish writers was pulled from the Ecuadorian embassy looking every inch like a powdered-sugar Saddam plucked straight from his spider-hole. The only camera crew to record this pivotal event belonged to Ruptly, a Berlin-based streaming online video streamer, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of RT, the…
Brexit: Language of ‘humiliation’ being used to promote colonial fictions
Regaining a sense of proportion in our universe
Music: Hocus Pocus — ‘Portrait’
The EU does not betray its members
Nick Cohen writes: Brexit is being defined by the inability of political leaders and much of the media to be honest with themselves – and indeed anyone else. The result is the greatest outbreak of political lying of my lifetime. You can compare it with Suez, but at least in 1956, Hugh Gaitskell and the Labour opposition clearly stated that Eden’s pretext for invading Egypt was false. Now government and opposition compete to see who can tell the greater lies….
I was a strong Brexiteer. Now we must swallow our pride and think again
Peter Oborne writes: It’s nearly three years since I, along with 17.4 million other Britons, voted for Brexit. Today I have to admit that the Brexit project has gone sour. Brexit has paralysed the system. It has turned Britain into a laughing stock. And it is certain to make us poorer and to lead to lower incomes and lost jobs. We Brexiteers would be wise to acknowledge all this. It’s past time we did. We need to acknowledge, too, that…
The world’s largest democratic exercise is a referendum on one man: Narendra Modi
WOW. WOW. President of the BJP vowing to cleanse the country of….Christians and Muslims? And presumably anyone else who is not Buddha (sic), Sikh or Hindu? https://t.co/6JSVdhdZ7Z — Priyamvada Gopal (@PriyamvadaGopal) April 11, 2019 Betwa Sharma writes: Nine hundred million people, just shy of the combined populations of Europe and America, will have the chance to vote as Indians line up to decide who will lead the country for the next five years. The phased polls begin on April 11…