Bill McKibben writes: Though it was published at the beginning of October, Global Warming of 1.5°C, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is a document with its origins in another era, one not so distant from ours but politically an age apart. To read it makes you weep not just for our future but for our present. The report was prepared at the request of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the end…
Eric Holthaus writes: The continued growth of power-hungry Bitcoin could lock in catastrophic climate change, according to a new study. The cryptocurrency’s growth, should it follow the adoption path of other widely used technologies (like credit cards and air conditioning), would alone be enough to push the planet to 2-degree C warming, the red line value the world agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate accord. Bitcoin essentially converts electricity into cash, via incredibly complex math problems designed to eliminate…
The Guardian reports: Tim Berners-Lee has launched a global campaign to save the web from the destructive effects of abuse and discrimination, political manipulation, and other threats that plague the online world. In a talk at the opening of the Web Summit in Lisbon on Monday, the inventor of the web called on governments, companies and individuals to back a new “Contract for the Web” that aims to protect people’s rights and freedoms on the internet. The contract outlines central…
Hassan Hassan writes: Three years ago, then Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter attributed Iran’s growing dominance to its being “in the game, on the ground.” He urged its regional rivals to do the same, thus expressing a widely shared sentiment in policy circles at the time: Arab Gulf states needed to rely less on the United States and play a greater role in their neighborhood. In many ways, that is exactly what these countries have been attempting to do since…
Jonathan Chait writes: At a weekend rally, President Trump launched a riff that, even by the feverish standards of his closing campaign argument, stands out for its brutal authoritarian overtones. The president mocked Antifa demonstrators: “You see these little arms, these little arms,” he shouted, forming his fingers into tiny circles to illustrate their puny biceps. And then he invited his supporters to imagine these weaklings having to fight against Trump’s own militant cadres. “Where are the Bikers for Trump?…
CNBC reports: President Donald Trump’s move to deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border is so far shaping up to have a cost of $220 million, according to two U.S. defense officials who were not authorized to speak publicly. The initial cost estimate, a figure that could change based on the ultimate size and scope of the mission, comes as nearly 4,000 troops moved to the border Saturday as Trump has repeatedly warned of a caravan of migrants from Central America….
Adam Serwer writes: The Democrats’ defeat in 2016 ushered in a parade of pundits who argued that the party had failed because it had assumed demographics were destiny, and had relied too strongly on what they labeled “identity politics.” The truth is closer to the reverse. In Texas and other states, Republicans have sought to engineer the demographics of the electorate to be whiter and older, the better to run culture-war campaigns that scapegoat religious and ethnic minorities for the…
Jamelle Bouie writes: “Trumpism” is a politics of racial demagoguery. America in the age of Donald Trump is more permissive of explicit racism than it’s been at any point since the civil rights era. And because bigotries rarely dance alone, the president’s nativism is accompanied by anti-black racism—first seen in his “birther” crusade against Barack Obama—anti-Muslim prejudice, and anti-Semitism. These ideologies exist on a continuum, with casual prejudice on one end and virulent hatred on the other. But common to…
Andrew Sullivan writes: Whatever else it will be, Tuesday will be a relief. We will finally find out where we are in the surreal dystopia of the last two years. We will see, in a tangible way, what America now is. These years have been overwhelmed and saturated by a single figure with no political experience, who won almost 3 million fewer votes than his opponent, has had consistently lower approval numbers than any of his recent predecessors, and speaks…
The New York Times reports: The Nigerian Army, part of a military criticized for rampant human rights abuses, on Friday used the words of President Trump to justify its fatal shootings of rock-throwing protesters. Soldiers fired this Monday on a march of about 1,000 Islamic Shiite activists who had blocked traffic on the outskirts of the capital, Abuja. Videos that circulated on social media showed several protesters hurling rocks at heavily armed soldiers who then shot fleeing demonstrators in the…
The Washington Post reports: Gun-carrying civilian groups and border vigilantes have heard a call to arms in President Trump’s warnings about threats to American security posed by caravans of Central American migrants moving through Mexico. They’re packing coolers and tents, oiling rifles and tuning up aerial drones, with plans to form caravans of their own and trail American troops to the border. “We’ll observe and report, and offer aid in any way we can,” said Shannon McGauley, a bail bondsman…
Robert F Worth reports: In March 2015, Saudi Arabia unleashed a full-scale military campaign against the Houthis, who had captured most of Yemen a few months earlier. The Saudis had assembled a coalition of nine states, and they made clear that they considered the Houthis, who are allied with Iran, a mortal threat on their southern border. The war has turned much of Yemen into a wasteland and has killed at least 10,000 civilians, mostly in errant airstrikes. The real…
The New York Times reports: As Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia charmed Goldman Sachs bankers and Silicon Valley executives on an American tour this spring, some of his most trusted lieutenants were taking care of business in Washington. In a low-key ceremony two blocks from the White House, Saudi officials signed an agreement with Booz Allen Hamilton, the American consulting company, to help train the kingdom’s growing ranks of cyberfighters. The agreement would “open great horizons” by…
Vox reports: The Tallahassee shooting was the third crime in a single week that was apparently preceded by a trail of online hate. Robert Bowers, the man suspected of killing 11 people and wounding six others in a shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue last Saturday, appears to have posted threatening language about Jewish people and HIAS National Refugee Shabbat, a refugee aid group formerly known as the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, on Gab, a social network that has become a…
The New York Times reports: In the final months of the Obama administration, Walmart was under pressure from federal officials to pay nearly $1 billion and accept a guilty plea to resolve a foreign bribery investigation. Barclays faced demands that it pay nearly $7 billion to settle civil claims that it had sold toxic mortgage investments that helped fuel the 2008 financial crisis, and the Royal Bank of Scotland was ensnared in a criminal investigation over its role in the…