Music: Avishai Cohen Trio — ‘Shifting Sands’
‘A sea change’: Biden reverses decades of Chinese trade policy
Politico reports: After decades of U.S. efforts to engage China with the prospect of greater development through trade, the era of cooperation is coming to a screeching halt. The White House and Congress are quietly reshaping the American economic relationship with the world’s second-largest economic power, enacting a strategy to limit China’s technological development that breaks with decades of federal policy and represents the most aggressive American action yet to curtail Beijing’s economic and military rise. The new federal rules,…
Democrats, feeling new strength, plan to go on offense on voting rights
The New York Times reports: For the last two years, Democrats in battleground states have played defense against Republican efforts to curtail voting access and amplify doubts about the legitimacy of the nation’s elections. Now it is Democrats, who retained all but one of the governor’s offices they hold and won control of state legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota, who are ready to go on offense in 2023. They are putting forward a long list of proposals that include creating…
George Santos admits to lying about college and work history
The New York Times reports: Representative-elect George Santos admitted on Monday to misleading voters about his professional experience and educational history, confirming some of the key findings of a New York Times investigation that found he likely misrepresented his background to voters. Mr. Santos, a Republican who was elected in November to represent parts of northern Long Island and northeast Queens, ended a week of near silence, giving interviews to two conservative-owned media outlets, The New York Post and WABC-AM…
Elon Musk claims he’s not worried about the FTC, but he should be
Mike Masnick writes: Soon after Elon took over Twitter and fired everyone, we wondered (somewhat jokingly) if there was anyone left at the company who was aware of the FTC’s consent decree with the company, signed originally in 2011, but which runs for 30 years, and which was updated back in May of 2022. These documents have some fairly strict requirements for the company around protecting the privacy of its users, and also limiting employees access to certain data. A…
Putin wants fealty, and he’s found it in Africa
The New York Times reports: In early March, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entered its third week, a Russian diplomat nearly 3,000 miles away in the Central African Republic paid an unusual visit to the head of this country’s top court. His message was blunt: The country’s pro-Kremlin president must remain in office, indefinitely. To do this, the diplomat, Yevgeny Migunov, the second secretary at the Russian Embassy, argued that the court should abolish the constitutional restriction limiting a president…
How citizen spies foiled Putin’s grand plan for one Ukrainian city
The New York Times reports: On a foggy morning a few months ago, Valentyn Dmytrovych Yermolenko, an aging Ukrainian fisherman with a bad back and horrible knees, puttered down a narrow channel off the Dnipro River, his inflatable dinghy cutting through the mist. His city, Kherson, had been taken over by the Russian Army, and on the floor of his boat, concealed under a fishing net in a black plastic tub, Mr. Yermolenko had hidden three disassembled automatic rifles. As…
Can geoengineering fix the climate? Hundreds of scientists say not so fast
The Guardian reports: As global heating escalates, the US government has set out a plan to further study the controversial and seemingly sci-fi notion of deflecting the sun’s rays before they hit Earth. But a growing group of scientists denounces any steps towards what is known as solar geoengineering. The White House has set into motion a five-year outline for research into “climate interventions”. Those include methods such as sending a phalanx of planes to spray reflective particles into the…
Music: Hvalfugl — ‘Stilhed før Stormen’
Putin, isolated and distrustful, leans on handful of hardline advisers
The Wall Street Journal reports: Russian troops were losing the battle for Lyman, a small city in eastern Ukraine, in late September when a call came in for the commanding officer on the front line, over an encrypted line from Moscow. It was Vladimir Putin, ordering them not to retreat. The president seemed to have limited understanding of the reality of the situation, according to current and former U.S. and European officials and a former senior Russian intelligence officer briefed…
Tucker Carlson’s rage at Zelensky caps a year of getting things wrong
Greg Sargent writes: After Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a rousing speech to U.S. lawmakers this week, Tucker Carlson unleashed a diatribe that put schoolyard sadists everywhere to shame. “No one’s ever addressed the United States Congress in a sweatshirt before,” he seethed, slamming Zelensky as a “strip club” manager whose presence was “humiliating” to “the greatest country on Earth.” Carlson’s attack on the Ukrainian president, whose olive green garb was meant to dramatize his country’s wartime plight, has sparked outrage because…
Inside the monumental, stop-start effort to arm Ukraine
The Washington Post reports: Virtually every day, a line of 18-wheel trucks loaded with weapons or ammunition pulls up to a sprawling warehouse here nestled near an asphalt runway stretching nearly two miles. Drawn from U.S. military depots around the country, the lethal cargo is unloaded onto pallets that will be packed aboard cargo planes bound for Europe, the next stop on its journey to the front lines in Ukraine. The constant tempo has evolved from choppy beginnings into precision…
Leaked notes from Chinese health officials estimate 250 million Covid-19 infections in December
CNN reports: Almost 250 million people in China may have caught Covid-19 in the first 20 days of December, according to an internal estimate from the nation’s top health officials, Bloomberg News and the Financial Times reported Friday. If correct, the estimate – which CNN cannot independently confirm – would account for roughly 18% of China’s 1.4 billion people and represent the largest Covid-19 outbreak to date globally. The figures cited were presented during an internal meeting of China’s National…
Covid-19’s spread in China might tell us how deadly Omicron really is
The Wall Street Journal reports: Covid-19’s rapid spread in China has prompted reports of crowded hospitals and inundated crematoria. It could also help answer whether Omicron is truly a milder version of the virus. Iterations of the Omicron variant are spreading rapidly in China after officials relaxed zero-Covid controls in place for most of the pandemic. Pharmacies say they are out of fever medications and hospitals are strained, employees have said. Chinese officials have reported a modest rise in Covid-19…
Twitter brings Elon Musk’s genius reputation crashing down to earth
The Washington Post reports: Elon Musk was speechless. The Twitter CEO was on a live audio chat Tuesday night with software engineers when one user started quizzing him about the internal workings of the company’s systems. Musk, who hours earlier said he would keep control of Twitter’s software systems even though he plans to relinquish the CEO role, said the company’s code needed a complete rewrite. One of the participants asked what he meant — pushing for him to explain…
How the birthplace of Christianity in Mesopotamia endures
Rasha Al Aqeedi writes: In 2008, the Iraqi government declared the day of Christmas, Dec. 25, a public holiday. Despite being one of the few Muslim-majority states to acknowledge Christmas, the decision was, in many ways, overdue. Iraq is home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, one that played a key role in shaping the country’s rich diversity and endured some of the most gruesome persecution at the hands of various rulers and actors. For the…