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House GOP in open warfare over doomed spending plan

House GOP in open warfare over doomed spending plan

Politico reports: As House Republicans began ripping apart their party’s latest spending proposal on a conference call their own leaders held to promote it, the plan’s two main defenders had to hang up the phone. They had flights to catch. Reps. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), who represented centrists, and Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who negotiated for conservatives, thought they had found a deal that would at least unite the fractious GOP — even if it couldn’t pass the Senate and avert a…

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This is what taking on election deniers really looks like

This is what taking on election deniers really looks like

Greg Sargent writes: Democrats won a whole lot of elections in 2022, in no small part on their vow to strengthen and defend democracy. But if they hope to turn the issue into a sustained political winner, they have to deliver on that promise by showing voters what a pro-democracy governing agenda actually looks like. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is set to make a big move in this direction by unveiling a big change on Tuesday that will implement what’s…

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Trudeau rejects India’s denial of involvement in assassination in Canada

Trudeau rejects India’s denial of involvement in assassination in Canada

The New York Times reports: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada on Tuesday firmly rejected the Indian government’s denial of any involvement in the assassination of a Sikh dissident in Canada, calling on India to take his country’s allegations seriously. “We are not looking to provoke or escalate,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa. “We are simply laying out the facts as we understand them and we want to work with the government of India.” On Monday, the prime minister…

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The world according to Elon Musk’s grandfather

The world according to Elon Musk’s grandfather

Jill Lepore writes: This month, Elon Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League, alleging that its denunciation of X—the A.D.L. had accused the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter of amplifying antisemitism—has cost Musk’s company a fortune in advertising revenue. The Anti-Defamation League, in turn, asserted that Musk’s threat was “dangerous and deeply irresponsible.” This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to California to meet with Musk to discuss artificial intelligence, but their other much-anticipated topic was antisemitism. Netanyahu…

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Pope Pius XII knew about the Holocaust early on

Pope Pius XII knew about the Holocaust early on

Reuters reports: Wartime Pope Pius XII knew details about the Nazi attempt to exterminate Jews in the Holocaust as early as 1942, according to a letter found in the Vatican archives that conflicts with the Holy See’s official position at the time that the information it had was vague and unverified. The yellowed, typewritten letter, reproduced in Italy’s Corriere della Sera on Sunday, is highly significant because it was discovered by an in-house Vatican archivist and made public with the…

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What makes life tick? Mitochondria may keep time for cells

What makes life tick? Mitochondria may keep time for cells

Viviane Callier writes: Just as people in different places seem to operate at different rhythms, so too do different species. They age at their own rates: Some, like the fruit fly, race to adulthood so they can reproduce before their ephemeral food source disappears, while creatures like humans mature slowly over decades, in part because building a large, complex brain requires it. And at the very beginning of an embryo’s life, small tweaks in the timing of when and how…

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Bizarre blob-like animal may hint at origins of neurons

Bizarre blob-like animal may hint at origins of neurons

Live Science reports: A sea animal so simple that it looks like a blobby pancake may hold the secret to the origin of neurons. Placozoans are one of the five major branches of animals, along with bilaterians (which include everything from worms to humans), cnidarians (corals and medusas), sponges and ctenophores (comb jellies). They’re the most basic of the bunch, consisting of millimeter-long blobs of cells without organs or body parts. They move through the water using cilia — tiny…

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California Democrats consider unique approach to getting Trump off ballot

California Democrats consider unique approach to getting Trump off ballot

Politico reports: Democrats in the California Legislature are trying a novel approach to remove former President Donald Trump from the state’s March 5 primary ballot. But first they need a fellow state Democrat to get on board the long-shot effort. Nine California lawmakers wrote a letter to Attorney General Rob Bonta over the weekend, arguing that Trump isn’t eligible to be on the ballot for inciting an insurrection when a mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan….

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Trump targets Jewish Americans with antisemitic post during Rosh Hashanah

Trump targets Jewish Americans with antisemitic post during Rosh Hashanah

USA Today reports: Jewish groups criticized former President Donald Trump after he shared a post targeting “liberal Jews” following the start of Rosh Hashanah, one of the most important holidays for Jewish people around the world. Trump on Truth Social reshared a post on Sunday reading “Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed false narratives.” The post also included a list of the former president’s actions during his term in office centered…

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Trump attacked me. Then Musk did. It wasn’t an accident

Trump attacked me. Then Musk did. It wasn’t an accident

Yoel Roth writes: When I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time. Following the violence of Jan. 6, I helped make the call to ban his account from Twitter altogether. Nothing prepared me for what would happen next. Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the…

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Elon Musk likes to think he saved us from Armageddon. He’s just brought it closer

Elon Musk likes to think he saved us from Armageddon. He’s just brought it closer

Timothy Snyder writes: The Silicon Valley oligarch, perhaps the richest man in the world, extends a hand to his fellow oligarch, the man who has his finger on Russia’s nuclear button. They share a secret about the foolishness of the masses, and take action to save us all from ourselves. Thanks to the two of them, the world is saved from Armageddon. Not the precis of a favourably reviewed work of dystopian fiction but a scenario presented as though it…

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Dark money: The backstory of Alabama’s redistricting defiance

Dark money: The backstory of Alabama’s redistricting defiance

Alabama Political Reporter (APR) reports: The Alabama Legislature’s open defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Allen v. Milligan ordering the creation of a second majority-Black district baffled and infuriated the federal three-judge panel that initially ordered the state to redraw its 2021 congressional map.  APR has now identified connections between Alabama officials who led the 2023 redistricting process — which disregarded the U.S. Supreme Court’s order — with far-right power broker Leonard Leo’s dark money network, described this past week by Politico as…

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Paxton’s acquittal has nothing to do with justice — and everything with money

Paxton’s acquittal has nothing to do with justice — and everything with money

Joe Jaworski writes: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has spent his eight-year incumbency living on the political edge of scandal, was just acquitted in his historic Texas Senate impeachment trial. The Texas Senate voted largely along party lines, with only two Republican senators bravely voting to convict on virtually all sixteen articles of impeachment. The Texas Constitution requires a supermajority vote to convict on any article of impeachment, and the impeachment prosecutors came up short on each article. Kudos…

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The fight against climate change returns to the streets

The fight against climate change returns to the streets

Bill McKibben writes: Keeping movements alive is hard work—they run on volunteer energy, and they can be derailed by too much success, too much failure, too much internal strife, too many competing interests. Or they can be hindered by a pandemic, which largely brought the climate movement to a halt just months after its biggest single day, in September of 2019, when millions of people around the world, most of them young, took to the streets; in New York City,…

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