Music: Jimmy Dludlu — ‘Masseve’
The wrecking-ball caucus: How the far right brought Washington to its knees
The New York Times reports: When it comes to his view of the United States government, Representative Bob Good, a right-wing Republican who represents a Virginia district that was once the domain of Thomas Jefferson, doesn’t mince words. “Most of what Congress does is not good for the American people,” Mr. Good declared in an interview off the House floor as the chamber descended into chaos last week. “Most of what we do as a Congress is totally unjustified.” Though…
Clarence Thomas’ latest pay-to-play scandal finally connects all the dots
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern write: ProPublica released a new report on Friday detailing Justice Clarence Thomas’ close relationship with the Koch brothers with previously undisclosed and extraordinarily damning new details. According to ProPublica, the justice developed a friendship with the Kochs as they were funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into right-wing causes, many of which ended up before the Supreme Court. The brothers then used Thomas to raise money for their sprawling network, inviting him to speak…
Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks
The Washington Post reports: Academics, universities and government agencies are overhauling or ending research programs designed to counter the spread of online misinformation amid a legal campaign from conservative politicians and activists who accuse them of colluding with tech companies to censor right-wing views. The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans in Congress and state government — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political falsehoods but also the quality of…
Lawrence Wright on why domestic terrorism is America’s ‘present enemy’
Democracy in Exile reports: Twenty-two years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the biggest threat to the United States is not al-Qaeda or another foreign terrorist group, but domestic terrorism, says writer and journalist Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. “The present enemy, as far as the United States is concerned, is domestic terrorism,” Wright tells Democracy in Exile in an extensive interview. “And what has happened is that the domestic terrorists are…
Russian TV teases launch of Tucker Carlson show
BBC News reports: Russian TV news channel Rossiya 24 has aired a trailer for a weekend show featuring former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson. The state-run broadcaster did not make clear whether it will feature original content or be a translation of his regular English-language videos on X. Carlson abruptly left Fox News in April where his populist conservative takes were renowned. Rossiya 24 has not yet said when the show will air. The advert, first shared earlier this month,…
Two hooded gunmen, a silver getaway car and a slain Sikh leader
The New York Times reports: Interviews with three witnesses to the killing and descriptions of the security footage showing the moments leading up to the shooting provide details about the gunmen whom Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada has branded as “agents” of the Indian government. The gunmen were dressed in black, with hoods over their heads and black medical masks covering their faces, and one of them dropped a blue medical glove that was later recovered by the police,…
Why sewage may hold the key to tracking diseases far beyond COVID-19
Betsy Ladyzhets writes: The future of disease tracking is going down the drain — literally. Flushed with success over detecting coronavirus in wastewater, and even specific variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, researchers are now eyeing our collective poop to monitor a wide variety of health threats. Before the pandemic, wastewater surveillance was a smaller field, primarily focused on testing for drugs or mapping microbial ecosystems. But these researchers were tracking specific health threats in specific places —…
Music: Jimmy Dludlu — ‘Ha Deva’
The Biden administration’s next big climate decision
Bill McKibben writes: Earlier this year, the Biden Administration approved the Willow Project, a huge oil-drilling complex to be built in Alaska on thawing permafrost that may need to be mechanically refrozen before it can be drilled. Not surprisingly, Willow drew opposition—more than five million people, many of them young, signed petitions against the plan, and a million sent letters to the White House—which, the Times noted last month, could become “a wild card factor in next year’s presidential race.”…
The ludicrous agony of Rupert Murdoch
Michelle Goldberg writes: It’s nice to know that Fox News, which has so deranged America while making Rupert Murdoch ungodly sums of money, has in the end made Murdoch miserable, at least if the journalist Michael Wolff is to be believed. But the consolation is a small one. Murdoch’s unhappiness and befuddlement is the throughline of Wolff’s amusingly vicious and very well-timed book, “The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty,” which is to hit shelves next…
Clarence Thomas secretly participated in Koch network donor events
ProPublica reports: On Jan. 25, 2018, dozens of private jets descended on Palm Springs International Airport. Some of the richest people in the country were arriving for the annual winter donor summit of the Koch network, the political organization founded by libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch. A long weekend of strategizing, relaxation in the California sun and high-dollar fundraising lay ahead. Just after 6 p.m., a Gulfstream G200 jet touched down on the tarmac. One of the Koch network’s…
If a government shutdown hits next week, here’s what would happen
The Washington Post reports: Millions of federal employees and active military service members will stop receiving paychecks — but many will be forced to report to work anyway. Some national parks may close, museums could shutter, and airports nationwide might see new disruptions and delays. And the most pivotal federal aid programs — including those assisting the victims of the deadly wildfires in Maui — could struggle to provide urgently needed support. In only eight days, the U.S. government is…
Senator Robert Menendez accused of brazen bribery plot, taking cash and gold
The New York Times reports: Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the powerful Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was charged on Friday with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes — including gold bars — to wield influence abroad and at home, aiding the government of Egypt and businessmen in New Jersey. The three-count federal indictment, which also charges the senator’s wife and three New Jersey businessmen, accuses him of using his official position in a wide…
Luddites saw the problem of AI coming from two centuries away
Gabriela Riccardi writes: To cast someone as a Luddite today is to do so with bemusement, to suggest they’re small-minded, a bit quaint, or fearful of technology. A Luddite cold-shoulders not only new tech, but of all the progress and potential it hastens forward. That’s where journalist Brian Merchant would object. His new book, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, surfaces the forgotten story of the original Luddites—and why it should be recalled today….
Americas’ first cowboys were enslaved Africans, ancient cow DNA suggests
Science reports: Think “cowboy,” and you might picture John Wayne riding herd across the U.S. West. But the first cowboys lived in Mexico and the Caribbean, and most of them were Black. That’s the conclusion of a recent analysis of DNA from 400-year-old cow bones excavated on the island of Hispaniola and at sites in Mexico. The work, published in Scientific Reports, also provides evidence that African cattle made it to the Americas at least a century earlier than historians…