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40,000 Syrian refugees remain trapped in U.S.-created no-man’s land

40,000 Syrian refugees remain trapped in U.S.-created no-man’s land

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Rozina Ali writes: After months of negotiations, a convoy of sixty-seven aid trucks recently crossed a stretch of desert in southern Syria controlled by the Syrian government and its Iranian allies, before entering territory administered by a small, U.S.-backed rebel group. The trucks carried food, medicine, and winter coats for a fetid refugee camp known as Rukban, home to some forty thousand civilians who have been trapped in a strip of land wedged between Syria and Jordan, and cut off…

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Europe’s Jew hatred, and ours

Europe’s Jew hatred, and ours

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Bari Weiss writes: Paris. Toulouse. Malmo. Copenhagen. Brussels. Berlin. For most people, they are lovely cities where you might happily take a holiday. But for the world’s Jews, they are something else, too. They are place names of hate. Paris for us doesn’t mean just baguettes and Brie but also this year’s murder of a Holocaust survivor in her apartment in the 11th arrondissement and the 2015 siege of a kosher supermarket during which four people were killed. Toulouse is…

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Life expectancy declines in the U.S. but is increasing in most other developed nations

Life expectancy declines in the U.S. but is increasing in most other developed nations

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The Washington Post reports: Life expectancy in the United States declined again in 2017, the government said Thursday in a bleak series of reports that showed a nation still in the grip of escalating drug and suicide crises. The data continued the longest sustained decline in expected life span at birth in a century, an appalling performance not seen in the United States since 1915 through 1918. That four-year period included World War I and a flu pandemic that killed…

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‘First contact’: What a missionary’s death tells us about the perils of colonialism

‘First contact’: What a missionary’s death tells us about the perils of colonialism

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Ed Simon writes: Last week, Alabama native John Allen Chau bribed fishermen to take him to the protected Andaman archipelago in the Indian Ocean, where he wished to “establish the kingdom of Jesus on the island.” In a particularly American spin on first-contact narratives, Chau brought a football to the Sentinelese, among the last pre-Neolithic tribes on Earth protected from contact. He was ultimately killed by Sentinelese armed with bows and arrows, an end that raises profound questions about “first…

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Trump claims climate change isn’t real. My trip to the top of the world proved otherwise

Trump claims climate change isn’t real. My trip to the top of the world proved otherwise

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Eric Scigliano writes: Thirteen U.S. government agencies have just issued an alarming new report predicting that global warming, if allowed to continue unabated, will shrink the American economy by 10 percent by 2100, amid environmental impacts that are, if anything, even more dire. The White House tried to bury the report by releasing it on Friday during the holiday weekend, and President Donald Trump announced he didn’t “believe it.” But its conclusions are inescapable. One need only travel to the…

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Climate change is making it harder for forests to recover from wildfires

Climate change is making it harder for forests to recover from wildfires

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Pacific Standard reports: After consuming more than 153,000 acres, including nearly 14,000 residences, and accounting for 88 fatalities, the Camp Fire has finally been contained. But while communities can now commit fully to recovering from the catastrophic blaze, the landscape itself may have a harder time doing so. Blame climate change. A growing body of research suggests that, thanks to various environmental symptoms of climate change, America’s forests are increasingly at a disadvantage when it comes to recovering from devastating…

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How a future Trump Cabinet member gave serial sex abuser, Jeffrey Epstein, the deal of a lifetime

How a future Trump Cabinet member gave serial sex abuser, Jeffrey Epstein, the deal of a lifetime

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The Miami Herald reports: On a muggy October morning in 2007, Miami’s top federal prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, had a breakfast appointment with a former colleague, Washington, D.C., attorney Jay Lefkowitz. It was an unusual meeting for the then-38-year-old prosecutor, a rising Republican star who had served in several White House posts before being named U.S. attorney in Miami by President George W. Bush. Instead of meeting at the prosecutor’s Miami headquarters, the two men — both with professional roots in…

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Senate defies White House on Saudi support in Yemen

Senate defies White House on Saudi support in Yemen

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Politico reports: The Senate delivered a stunning rebuke to the Trump administration on Wednesday, voting overwhelmingly to advance a measure yanking U.S. support for Saudi-backed forces at war in Yemen. The 63-37 vote, in which 14 Republicans joined every Democrat in voting to move forward on the bipartisan Saudi resolution, came hours after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis failed to sway key undecided senators with an appeal to hold off lest they upset progress of…

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Time to regulate social media

Time to regulate social media

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In an editorial, The Guardian says: When Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the US Congress this spring he insisted he was not running a media company. But it is getting easier to say why he does. Facebook, the site Mr Zuckerberg founded almost 15 years ago, hosts and produces content. It sells advertising against content. It employs thousands of moderators who help patrol the content it “surfaces”. Two months after he gave his testimony Facebook, without irony, announced plans to launch…

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Remembering Raed Fares, who believed that Syria would be saved by its people

Remembering Raed Fares, who believed that Syria would be saved by its people

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Iyad el-Baghdadi writes: On Friday, Raed Fares — a Syrian revolutionary, citizen journalist and civil society leader — was assassinated in northern Syria by masked gunmen suspected of being affiliated with al-Qaeda. He was 46 years old. Hammoud Jneed, Raed’s friend and photographer, was also killed. The news came as a gut punch to me and many activists around the world: Raed was a friend, an inspiration, and a teacher. If I am to speak about what he taught me,…

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Should evolution treat our microbes as part of us?

Should evolution treat our microbes as part of us?

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Jonathan Lambert writes: Twilight falls on the Tanzanian plain. As the sky turns a deeper purple, a solitary spotted hyena awakens. She trots along the border of her clan’s territory, marking the boundary with a sour paste from under her tail. She sniffs a passing breeze for hints of itinerant males interested in mating, giving little attention to her stomach’s rumbling over the remnants of the previous night’s hunt or the itch on her flank. The lone hyena chooses what…

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The Khashoggi killing had roots in a cutthroat Saudi family feud

The Khashoggi killing had roots in a cutthroat Saudi family feud

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David Ignatius writes: Behind the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi lies a power struggle within the Saudi royal family that helped feed the paranoia and recklessness of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Eventually, this rage in the royal court led to the death and dismemberment of a Washington Post journalist. The opening scenes of this family feud took place in January 2015 in a VIP hospital suite in Riyadh, as King Abdullah lay on his deathbed. According to a Saudi…

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Russia’s latest attack on the Ukrainians is a warning to the West

Russia’s latest attack on the Ukrainians is a warning to the West

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Anne Applebaum writes: On Saturday evening, three small Ukrainian naval vessels left the Ukrainian port of Odessa and headed for the Ukrainian port of Mariupol. Along the way, they had to pass through the Kerch Strait, a sliver of water that lies between the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula and the Russian mainland. The Ukrainian ships were well within their rights to be there — a similar group of ships went through the strait just a month ago, and a 2003 treaty…

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Manafort deal collapses: What it means for Mueller

Manafort deal collapses: What it means for Mueller

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Elie Honig writes: Special counsel Robert Mueller informed a federal judge on Monday that Paul Manafort’s cooperation deal has imploded because of Manafort’s seemingly congenital inability to tell the truth. On the surface, Manafort’s failed cooperation appears to be a setback for Mueller and a bullet dodged for President Donald Trump and administration insiders. But Mueller’s ability to see through Manafort’s lies and rip up the cooperation agreement bespeaks a deeper strength. By Monday’s court filing, Mueller effectively declared: I…

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How Donald Trump is committing a crime against humanity

How Donald Trump is committing a crime against humanity

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In all seriousness, the willful denial and obfuscation by Trump on climate change is a crime against humanity. Billions of people will bear incalculable harm for generations to come. Much, much, much worse than possibly colluding to steal an election.https://t.co/IFZzlbRwfz — Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) November 26, 2018 The New York Times reports: President Trump had a clear message Monday when asked about the core conclusion of a scientific report issued by his own administration: that climate change will batter the…

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