Music: Bugge Wesseltoft & Sidsel Endresen — ‘Out Here. In There’
Biden has ‘done more damage to the foundations of international law than Trump did’
The New York Times reports: No foreign policy issue has been more divisive for Mr. Biden than his support for Israel throughout its war in Gaza. Emma Ashford [a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan research group] said the administration’s hypocrisy was exposed by “the split-screen much of the world sees on Gaza and Ukraine — with an administration who says one conflict is an unacceptable war crime, and the other self-defense.” The Israeli military, supplied with American…
Israel’s assassination campaign has renewed Israelis confidence that they can do anything anywhere
Isaac Chotiner interviews political scientist Dahlia Scheindlin, a longtime expert on Israeli public opinion and analyst of the country’s domestic political scene: You mentioned April as a turning point. That was when the war against Hamas broadened regionally— It exactly lines up with April. I think we shouldn’t take the responsibility off of Hezbollah for its fateful decision, in the early morning hours of October 8th, to attack Israel—which basically internationalized or regionalized the conflict. But what happened in April?…
Vance shares Musk op-ed backing Germany’s far-right AfD party
The Hill reports: Vice President-elect JD Vance took to the social platform X on Thursday to share an op-ed by Elon Musk in which the tech mogul expressed support for the far-right German political party Alternative for Germany, or AfD. Quoting Musk’s English version of the opinion piece, Vance said it was an “interesting piece.” The vice president-elect emphasized that he wasn’t endorsing AfD in the upcoming German elections, as it was not his country and “we hope to have…
Trump and MAGA are desperately trying to pin New Orleans attack on the border
Rolling Stone reports: The truck attack that killed 15 and injured dozens in New Orleans’ French Quarter early Wednesday morning has cast a pall over the dawn of the new year — but it hasn’t deterred President-elect Donald Trump and his sycophants from pushing misinformation to politicize the tragedy. Trump responded to the attack on Wednesday by suggesting that Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the suspect in the mass murder who was killed by New Orleans law enforcement, was an undocumented migrant. Jabbar,…
Net neutrality rules struck down by appeals court
The New York Times reports: A federal appeals court struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s landmark net neutrality rules on Thursday, ending a nearly two-decade effort to regulate broadband internet providers as utilities. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, said the F.C.C. lacked the authority to reinstate rules that prevented broadband providers from slowing or blocking access to internet content. In its opinion, a three-judge panel pointed to a Supreme Court decision in June, known…
America, Afghanistan and the price of self-delusion
John F. Sopko writes: The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021, revealed what little American lives and money had purchased over 20 years there. It also laid bare a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner. As the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012, my staff and I have audited and investigated U.S. programs and spending to rebuild…
The little-known federal agency that’s primed to crack down on dissent
Spencer Reynolds writes: President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to implement a slate of controversial policies in his second term, including military strikes on Mexican drug cartels, restrictions on abortion pills, a new “Muslim ban,” immigration raids, and mass deportations. Any one of these moves is likely to bring tens of thousands of protesters onto the streets. Trump has made it clear he will meet opposition with force. A major player in that crackdown will be the Federal Protective Service, a little-known but powerful law-enforcement…
Music: the bird and the bee — ‘Meteor’
Timothy Snyder: ‘I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk’
The Guardian reports: Allies and aides to Donald Trump should be increasingly concerned by Elon Musk’s proximity to and influence on the US president-elect, the Yale historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder said. “Trump is a little guy, and Musk is a big guy when it actually comes to having money,” Snyder said. “And I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.” The author of bestsellers including On Tyranny (2017) and On Freedom (2024) was…
Where is Russia finding new soldiers? Wherever it can
The New York Times reports: Russia has ground through repeated waves of soldiers in Ukraine. It lost some of its most experienced troops at the very start of the invasion, then shipped off tens of thousands of convicts without seeming to care whether they survived. Now, still desperately seeking sufficient manpower to maintain pressure on Ukraine, Russia has expanded recruitment even more. Men (and women) no longer have to be convicted of a crime — under new laws, any suspects…
John Roberts absurdly suggests the Supreme Court has no ‘political bias’
Rolling Stone reports: In his first term as president, Donald Trump built a conservative 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court. Ever since, the nation’s highest court has repeatedly issued increasingly extreme, far-right decisions on topics of abortion, race, the environment, corruption, and much more. The Supreme Court has eliminated federal protections for abortion rights; limited the federal government’s ability to regulate carbon emissions, protect Americans’ drinking water, and limit ozone pollution; gutted federal agencies’ ability to implement regulations generally; opened…
Trump falsely suggested New Orleans suspect was an immigrant
The New York Times reports: On Wednesday morning, hours after a man drove a pickup truck into New Year’s Eve revelers in New Orleans, killing 10 people, President-elect Donald J. Trump falsely suggested on social media that his condemnations of undocumented immigrants had been validated. “When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out…
Pro-Palestinian activists lambasted Biden and Harris. Trump will be an even bigger dilemma
Politico reports: Pro-Palestinian groups in the U.S. are staring down a new challenge: Donald Trump and Republicans. The movement has tended to focus its efforts on who controls the White House and Democrats, whom its leaders view as more persuadable to soften support for Israel. But 15 months into the war in the Middle East, as the GOP trifecta prepares to control the White House and Congress, leaders in the movement find themselves with far less leverage — and much…
Jimmy Carter’s quiet but monumental work in global health
The New York Times reports: Jimmy Carter’s five decades of leadership in global health brought a hideous disease to the brink of elimination, helped deliver basic health and sanitation to millions of people and set a new standard for how aid agencies should engage with the countries they assist. It was quiet work and drew relatively little attention because it was focused on afflictions that plague the poorest people in the most marginalized places, but it had enormous impact. “The…
All of statistics and much of science depends on probability — but no one’s really sure what it is
David Spiegelhalter writes: Life is uncertain. None of us know what is going to happen. We know little of what has happened in the past, or is happening now outside our immediate experience. Uncertainty has been called the ‘conscious awareness of ignorance’ — be it of the weather tomorrow, the next Premier League champions, the climate in 2100 or the identity of our ancient ancestors. In daily life, we generally express uncertainty in words, saying an event “could”, “might” or…