Music: Arve Henriksen — ‘Groundswell’
Trump floats the idea of executing Joint Chiefs chairman Milley
Brian Klaas writes: Late Friday night, the former president of the United States—and a leading candidate to be the next president—insinuated that America’s top general deserves to be put to death. That extraordinary sentence would be unthinkable in any other rich democracy. But Donald Trump, on his social-media network, Truth Social, wrote that Mark Milley’s phone call to reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “an act so egregious that, in…
How America’s war devastated Afghanistan’s environment
Lynzy Billing writes: Birds dip between low branches that hang over glittering brooks along the drive from Jalalabad heading south toward the Achin district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. Then, the landscape changes, as lush fields give way to barren land. Up ahead, Achin is located among a rise of rocky mountains that line the border with Pakistan, a region pounded by American bombs since the beginning of the war. Laborers line the roadside, dusted with the white talc they have…
Giant fracking is threatening America’s fragile aquifers
The New York Times reports: Along a parched stretch of La Salle County, Texas, workers last year dug some 700 feet deep into the ground, seeking freshwater. Millions of gallons of it. The water wouldn’t supply homes or irrigate farms. It was being used by the petroleum giant BP to frack for fossil fuels. The water would be mixed with sand and toxic chemicals and pumped right back underground — forcing oil and gas from the bedrock. It was a…
China is all about sovereignty. So why not Ukraine’s?
Michael Schuman writes: By Beijing’s reckoning, the U.S.-led global order is in turmoil, and a Washington in decline has no answers to the world’s mounting problems. Fortunately for the future of humanity, however, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping does. He would like to replace Washington’s “rules-based” world order with a framework of his own—one whose most sacred principle is national sovereignty, or the right of states to govern themselves, free from outside interference. In the world Xi envisions, nations will…
Bob Menendez, Al Franken, and the presumption of innocence
Judd Legum writes: “Bob Menendez has been a dedicated public servant and is always fighting hard for the people of New Jersey. He has a right to due process and a fair trial.” That was the response of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to the indictment of Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) on Friday. Federal prosecutors accused Menendez and his wife, Nadine, of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for using his official position to benefit…
Biden is presiding over a labor renaissance
Noah Berlatsky writes: President Joe Biden announced last week that he will join striking United Auto Workers (UAW) workers on the picket line in Michigan on Tuesday. This will likely be the first time a president has ever walked a picket line. Biden is branding himself as a labor president. And his actions are not just symbolic. We are currently in the middle of an era of labor action and labor power unlike anything we have seen in decades. This…
After summer’s extreme weather, more Americans see climate change as a culprit, AP-NORC poll shows
The Associated Press reports: Kathleen Maxwell has lived in Phoenix for more than 20 years, but this summer was the first time she felt fear, as daily high temperatures soared to 110 degrees or hotter and kept it up for a record-shattering 31 consecutive days. “It’s always been really hot here, but nothing like this past summer,” said Maxwell, 50, who last week opened her windows for the first time since March and walked her dog outdoors for the first…
Music: Jimmy Dludlu — ‘Peaceful Moment’ ft. Melanie Scholtz
Yes, there was global warming in prehistoric times. But nothing in millions of years compares with what we see today
Michael E. Mann writes: “The climate is always changing!” So goes a popular refrain from climate deniers who continue to claim that there’s nothing special about this particular moment. There is no climate crisis, they say, because the Earth has survived dramatic warming before. Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy recently exemplified misconceptions about our planet’s climate past. When he asserted that “carbon dioxide as a percentage of the atmosphere is still at a relative low through human history,” he didn’t…
As Trump prosecutions move forward, threats and concerns increase
The New York Times reports: At the federal courthouse in Washington, a woman called the chambers of the judge assigned to the election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump and said that if Mr. Trump were not re-elected next year, “we are coming to kill you.” At the Federal Bureau of Investigation, agents have reported concerns about harassment and threats being directed at their families amid intensifying anger among Trump supporters about what they consider to be the…
North Carolina Republicans just passed a massive power grab to seize control of elections
Mother Jones reports: North Carolina Republicans on Friday passed a major power grab, stripping the state’s Democratic governor of the authority to appoint a majority of members to state and county election boards and giving the heavily gerrymandered GOP legislature far more influence over how elections are run and certified in the battleground state. In North Carolina, the governor dictates the political makeup of the state and county election boards, which are each composed of five members. Under Democratic Gov….
A monopoly-busting Amazon lawsuit might be Biden’s boldest move yet to tame tech
Politico reports: A long-awaited antitrust case against Amazon’s massive online retail operations is expected to be filed in federal court as soon as Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. The Federal Trade Commission has been preparing a complaint since at least the start of this year targeting an array of Amazon’s business practices. The exact details of the lawsuit are not known, and changes to the final complaint are possible until it’s officially submitted. But personnel…
Derna’s man-made disaster and the tragedy of Libya’s fate
Emadeddin Badi writes: Where the echoes of helpless cries linger amid the ruins of Derna in eastern Libya, its citizens are living a nightmare brought about by the callousness of successive rulers and the unbridled cruelty of military elites. Two dams, remnants of a bygone era under Moammar Gadhafi’s rule, had stood for decades as neglected sentries, guarding a coastal city deliberately left vulnerable to climate-induced changes. As the dams eventually broke under the weight of Mediterranean Storm Daniel’s heavy…
Saudi Arabia sentences schoolgirl to 18 years over tweets, says rights group
Middle East Eye reports: Saudi Arabia has sentenced a secondary schoolgirl to 18 years in jail and a travel ban for posting tweets in support of political prisoners, according to a rights group. On Friday, ALQST rights group, which documents human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, revealed that the Saudi Specialised Criminal Court handed out the sentence in August to 18-year-old Manal al-Gafiri, who was only 17 at the time of her arrest. The Saudi judiciary, under the de facto…
A new human species? Mystery surrounds 300,000-year-old fossil
Nature reports: A fossilized jawbone discovered in a cave in eastern China bears a curious mix of ancient and modern features, according to a detailed analysis that compares it with dozens of other human specimens. The finding, published in the Journal of Human Evolution, indicates that the 300,000-year-old bone could have belonged to an as-yet undescribed species of archaic human. Scientists excavating a cave called Hualongdong, located in Anhui province in eastern China, have unearthed remains of 16 individuals that…