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In the Middle East, Russia is back

In the Middle East, Russia is back

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The Washington Post reports: Among the presidents, prime ministers, kings and princes who have visited Moscow over the past year to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin are some of the United States’ closest allies, who once might have been expected to devote their travel time to Washington. There’s a new power rising in the Middle East, and it needs to be wooed. Three decades after the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States emerged as the undisputed superpower in…

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Facebook’s very bad month just got worse

Facebook’s very bad month just got worse

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Sue Halpern reports: Who could have imagined that a creepy little app that scoured Facebook for pictures of women in bikinis might be the instrument that skewers the behemoth social network? Who, that is, besides Facebook executives and their lawyers? Until a little over a week ago, the company had successfully sequestered internal e-mails, which were obtained by the legal team of Ted Kramer, the founder of the app company Six4Three, during the discovery process in a 2015 lawsuit. At…

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‘We are in trouble.’ Global carbon emissions reached a record high in 2018

‘We are in trouble.’ Global carbon emissions reached a record high in 2018

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The Washington Post reports: Global emissions of carbon dioxide are reaching the highest levels on record, scientists projected Wednesday, in the latest evidence of the chasm between international goals for combating climate change and what countries are doing. Between 2014 and 2016, emissions remained largely flat, leading to hopes that the world was beginning to turn a corner. Those hopes appear to have been dashed. In 2017, global emissions grew 1.6 percent. The rise in 2018 is projected to be…

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With a Green New Deal, here’s what the world could look like for the next generation

With a Green New Deal, here’s what the world could look like for the next generation

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Kate Aronoff reports: What, exactly, would a Green New Deal entail? Like its 1930s counterpart, the “Green New Deal” isn’t a specific set of programs so much as an umbrella under which various policies might fit, ranging from technocratic to transformative. The sheer scale of change needed to deal effectively with climate change is massive, as the scientific consensus is making increasingly clear, requiring an economy-wide mobilization of the sort that the United States hasn’t really undertaken since World War…

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Macron’s crisis in France is a danger to all of Europe

Macron’s crisis in France is a danger to all of Europe

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Natalie Nougayrède writes: For Europe’s sake, Emmanuel Macron needs help – not our scorn or hatred. A young, reformist French president who promised a “European renaissance” finds himself struggling at the helm of a country that is fast becoming “the sick man of Europe” again. It was a telling moment last weekend when rioters disfigured the face of a statue of Marianne, the republic’s symbol, at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Just three weeks earlier, world leaders had gathered…

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Here’s how Facebook’s local news algorithm change led to the worst riots Paris has seen in 50 years

Here’s how Facebook’s local news algorithm change led to the worst riots Paris has seen in 50 years

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BuzzFeed reports: This week, protesters scaled the Arc de Triomphe, burned cars, and clashed with police in the third consecutive weekend of riots in France. More than 300 people were arrested in Paris last weekend alone, and 37,000 law enforcement officers have been deployed around the country to restore order. The “Gilets Jaunes” or “Yellow Jackets” protests have only gotten more violent since they began last month. Three people have died, hundreds more have been injured. To hear the protesters…

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Brexit legal advice warns UK could be trapped in endless negotiations

Brexit legal advice warns UK could be trapped in endless negotiations

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CNN reports: Britain could be trapped in endless negotiations with the European Union by Theresa May’s Brexit deal, the British government’s top legal adviser has warned. In the full written advice by the attorney general, which the government was forced to publish after lawmakers found it in contempt of parliament, ministers are warned that the “backstop” insurance policy relating to Northern Ireland could last “indefinitely” if relations with the EU break down. The six-page document, dated November 13, was described…

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Saudi-funded lobbyist paid for 500 rooms at Trump’s hotel after 2016 election

Saudi-funded lobbyist paid for 500 rooms at Trump’s hotel after 2016 election

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The Washington Post reports: Lobbyists representing the Saudi government reserved blocks of rooms at President Trump’s D.C. hotel within a month of Trump’s election in 2016 — paying for an estimated 500 nights at the luxury hotel in just three months, according to organizers of the trips and documents obtained by The Washington Post. At the time, these lobbyists were reserving large numbers of D.C.-area hotel rooms as part of an unorthodox campaign that offered U.S. military veterans a free…

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Inside the North Carolina Republican vote machine: cash, pills — and ballots

Inside the North Carolina Republican vote machine: cash, pills — and ballots

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BuzzFeed reports: The allegations that Republicans tampered with absentee ballots in a close North Carolina election represent the most serious federal election tampering case in years, one that allegedly stole votes from elderly black voters in the state’s rural south. Now two women intimately involved with the McCrae Dowless’s absentee ballot machine have revealed to BuzzFeed News its grim and chaotic workings, in which Dowless tracked votes on yellow paper and paid his workers, including family members, from stacks of…

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‘If the Crown Prince went in front of a jury, he would be convicted in 30 minutes,’ said Sen. Bob Corker

‘If the Crown Prince went in front of a jury, he would be convicted in 30 minutes,’ said Sen. Bob Corker

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The Washington Post reports: President Trump and senior members of his administration, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, have insisted that no single piece of evidence irrefutably links [Saudi Crown Prince] Mohammed [bin Salman] to the killing [of journalist Jamal Khashoggi]. But [after a briefing from CIA Director Gina Haspel] the senators, in effect, said that doesn’t matter, because the evidence they heard convinced them beyond the shadow of a doubt. “If the Crown…

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Mueller is laying siege to the Trump presidency

Mueller is laying siege to the Trump presidency

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Mikhaila Fogel and Benjamin Wittes write: “Today is the first day I actually thought Donald Trump might not finish his term in office,” said the legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin on CNN last Thursday. “This is the beginning of the end for Trump,” declared Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general, on MSNBC. “The deal may be among the biggest news in the nearly 18-month investigation,” wrote Barry Berke, Noah Bookbinder, and Norman Eisen in The New York Times. It happens…

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Beto O’Rourke met with Barack Obama as he ponders a 2020 presidential campaign

Beto O’Rourke met with Barack Obama as he ponders a 2020 presidential campaign

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The Washington Post reports: Beto O’Rourke, weighing whether to mount a 2020 presidential bid, met recently with Barack Obama at his post-presidency offices in Washington. The meeting, which was held on Nov. 16 at the former president’s offices in Foggy Bottom, came as former Obama aides have encouraged the Democratic House member to run, seeing him as capable of the same kind of inspirational campaign that caught fire in the 2008 presidential election. The meeting was the first sign of…

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There is no greater national security threat to the U.S. than climate change

There is no greater national security threat to the U.S. than climate change

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Michael H Fuchs writes: Imagine that US leaders were told that hundreds of nuclear weapons were set on a timer to detonate across the planet, progressively and in increasing numbers, over the coming years and decades. The lives of millions would be upended, if not made nearly impossible to survive, by transformed weather patterns and resource scarcity. Tens of millions would become migrants as regions became uninhabitable. Millions would die, more and more as time went on. If this science…

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United States ranks as 3rd worst country in the world for sexual violence against women

United States ranks as 3rd worst country in the world for sexual violence against women

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A Thomson Reuters Foundation poll of 548 experts focused on women’s issues including aid and development professionals, academics, health workers, policymakers, non-government organisation workers, journalists, and social commentators, finds: The United States ranked as the 10th most dangerous country for women, the only Western nation to appear in the top 10. The United States shot up in the rankings after tying joint third with Syria when respondents were asked which was the most dangerous country for women in terms of…

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