Music: Shai Maestro Trio — ‘Maya’s Song’
The U.S. has helped nurture a new generation of Mideast dictators
Evan Hill writes: On Oct. 2, prominent Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi walked into his country’s consulate in Istanbul and never walked out again. The government adviser turned critic, who entered self-exile last year and lived outside D.C., was there to finalize paperwork for his upcoming marriage to his Turkish fiancée. Once inside, according to Turkish authorities, a Saudi team lying in wait killed him and took his body away. Khashoggi’s disappearance and possible killing is a fork in the road…
Casino boss Sheldon Adelson has never been more powerful
Justin Elliot reports: Late on a Thursday evening in February 2017, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland for his first visit with President Donald Trump. A few hours earlier, the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s Boeing 737, which is so large it can seat 149 people, touched down at Reagan National Airport after a flight from Las Vegas. Adelson dined that night at the White House with Trump, Jared Kushner and Secretary of…
A trio of wealthy Russians made an enemy of Putin. Now they’re all dead
The Wall Street Journal reports: Nikolai Glushkov, a Russian émigré, lived alone in a weather-beaten row house in South London with an aging dog and a cat named Braveheart. It was the waning days of March, and he was readying himself for something big. The onetime finance director of Russia’s flagship airline, he was preparing for a trial in a London court. He told friends it would prove his innocence of longstanding financial charges by Russian authorities and expose Aeroflot…
Russian whistleblower assassinated after uncovering $200 billion dirty-money scandal
The Daily Beast reports: A crusading Russian official traveled to Estonia in the summer of 2006 to warn the authorities that an unprecedented money-laundering scheme had been established in the tiny Baltic financial sector. The scam he had uncovered would go on to become the biggest dirty-money operation in history: the $200 billion Danske Bank scandal. Three months after Andrei Kozlov, the first deputy chairman of the Russian Central Bank, tried to raise the alarm, he was dead. Crooked beneficiaries…
Bolsonaro has made grim threats to the Amazon and its people
Climate Change News reports: No more Paris Agreement. No more ministry of environment. A paved highway cutting through the Amazon. Not only that. Indigenous territories opened to mining. Relaxed environmental law enforcement and licensing. International NGOs, such as Greenpeace and WWF, banned from the country. A strong alliance with the beef lobby. In a nutshell, this is what Jair Bolsonaro, who is sailing towards Brazil’s presidency after taking a near-majority in a first round vote on Sunday, has promised for…
Music: Shai Maestro Trio — ‘Gal’
Limiting global warming to 1.5°C will require deep emissions cuts
Climate Central reports: The Paris Climate Change Agreement set a goal of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C (2.7°F).” In that agreement, world leaders asked the IPCC, the preeminent climate science body, “to provide a Special Report in 2018 on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways.” After being formally…
World to install over one trillion watts of clean energy by 2023
Bloomberg reports: The world could install more than a trillion watts of renewable power over the next five years, more than the entire current generation capacity of the European Union. The International Energy Agency’s latest annual report on renewables forecasts as much as an extra 1.3 terawatts of clean energy will be installed by 2023 under one scenario. Even in its more conservative central forecast, the agency predicts that global renewable energy capacity will grow by 1 terawatt, driven by…
The Trump administration has entered Stage 5 climate denial
Dana Nuccitelli writes: Several years ago, I wrote about the five stages of climate denial: In 2013 @dana1981 wrote about the 5 stages of #climatechange denial. Stage 1: Deny the Problem ExistsStage 2: Deny We're the CauseStage 3: Deny It's a ProblemStage 4: Deny We can Solve ItStage 5: It's too Late Look where the Trump Administration is.https://t.co/FRQGZ8gQ4r — Michael Brown (@MJIBrown) September 28, 2018 To date, the Trump administration has pinballed between Stages 1, 2, and 3, calling climate…
Taylor Swift’s Instagram post has caused a massive spike in voter registration
BuzzFeed reports: Since Taylor Swift flexed her star power Sunday with an Instagram post that encouraged her 112 million followers to register to vote, Vote.org has experienced an unprecedented flood of new voter registrations nationwide. “We are up to 65,000 registrations in a single 24-hour period since T. Swift’s post,” said Kamari Guthrie, director of communications for Vote.org. For context, 190,178 new voters were registered nationwide in the entire month of September, while 56,669 were registered in August. In Swift’s…
The Mueller investigation is bigger than Rod Rosenstein
Asha Rangappa writes: Only a little over two weeks ago, in the wake of reports about remarks the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had made about the president’s fitness for office and an offer to secretly tape conversations with him, his job appeared to be on the line — along with the fate of the Russia investigation led by the special counsel Robert Mueller. On Monday, President Trump said he has no plans to fire him, and many Americans may…
Deported parents may lose their children to adoption
The Associated Press reports: As the deportees were led off the plane onto the steamy San Salvador tarmac, an anguished Araceli Ramos Bonilla burst into tears, her face contorted with pain: “They want to steal my daughter!” It had been 10 weeks since Ramos had last held her 2-year-old, Alexa. Ten weeks since she was arrested crossing the border into Texas and U.S. immigration authorities seized her daughter and told her she would never see the girl again. What followed…
Frans de Waal: Primatology shows that the typical alpha male isn’t a bully
To tackle the climate crisis, human civilization must transform faster than ever before
The New York Times reports: A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.” The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders,…
The conflict over Kavanaugh’s nomination centered not on tribalism, but on a lack of justice
Peter Beinart writes: When it comes to Brett Kavanaugh, there are three camps. The first believes it’s a travesty that he was confirmed. The second believes it’s a travesty that he was smeared. The third believes it’s a travesty that the process was so divisive. David Brooks is in the third camp. The Kavanaugh hearings, he wrote on Friday, constituted an “American nadir.” You often hear such phrases from people who think the biggest problem with the Kavanaugh battle is…