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A majority of GOP nominees — 299 in all — deny the 2020 election results

A majority of GOP nominees — 299 in all — deny the 2020 election results

The Washington Post reports: A majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices — 299 in all — have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election, according to a Washington Post analysis. Candidates who have challenged or refused to accept Joe Biden’s victory are running in every region of the country and in nearly every state. Republican voters in four states nominated election deniers in all federal and…

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The capitalist transformations of the countryside

The capitalist transformations of the countryside

Sven Beckert and Ulbe Bosma write: Sometimes, what is most common is most remarkable. For those of us living in a city or suburb, a typical day starts with rising from (cotton) sheets, hopping under the shower for a quick wash with (palm oil-based) soaps, dressing in (cotton) shirts and pants, drinking a hot beverage (coffee or tea) and then eating a (sugary) cereal or jam, perhaps followed by a (soy-fed) processed meat sandwich, wrapped in (fossil-fuel-based) plastic. What describes…

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Putin is losing the war in all four Ukrainian regions he claims to have ‘annexed’

Putin is losing the war in all four Ukrainian regions he claims to have ‘annexed’

Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: To hear pro-Russian military analysts tell it, in the last 72 hours Ukraine has managed to simultaneously recapture about 1,000 square kilometers of terrain in the northeast of the country and 2,200 square kilometers in the south. Although it is difficult to independently confirm these figures, the very fact that they’re coming from cheerleaders of Vladimir Putin’s war highlights just how disastrously things have gone for the Russian president in a month that has…

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In Ukraine, Europeans will have to put their money where their mouth is

In Ukraine, Europeans will have to put their money where their mouth is

Jeremy Shapiro writes: Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas enthusiastically joined the general outrage when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. He took to Twitter immediately to condemn the attack as “the greatest breach of peace in Europe in nearly 80 years”. He went on a trip to Germany and the Polish-Ukrainian border in March to visit US troops and observe the humanitarian operations there. On his return, the Republican senator implored President Joe Biden to “get them the damn weapons”,…

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Fox News has become a platform for Russian propaganda

Fox News has become a platform for Russian propaganda

William Saletan writes: For seven months, Russia has waged a vicious war of aggression in Ukraine, killing thousands of civilians. To make matters worse, in the past two weeks, Vladimir Putin has illegally annexed parts of Ukraine and has once again threatened to use nuclear weapons. A principled American conservative TV network might advocate a muscular response to this behavior. At a minimum, it would tell the truth. But Fox News is unconstrained by such principles. In primetime hours, it…

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Trump says GSA packed top-secret documents. These emails suggest otherwise

Trump says GSA packed top-secret documents. These emails suggest otherwise

Bloomberg reports: Former President Donald Trump publicly said that one reason that the FBI found boxes of classified documents improperly stored at his Florida estate was that federal workers had packed up the White House after his 2020 defeat. But documents obtained by Bloomberg News under a Freedom of Information Act request suggest a different story. More than 100 pages of emails and shipping lists between White House and transition staff and the US General Services Administration describe the minutiae…

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Talk of ‘civil war,’ ignited by FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, is flaring online

Talk of ‘civil war,’ ignited by FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, is flaring online

The New York Times reports: Soon after the F.B.I. searched Donald J. Trump’s home in Florida for classified documents, online researchers zeroed in on a worrying trend. Posts on Twitter that mentioned “civil war” had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours as Mr. Trump’s supporters blasted the action as a provocation. Similar spikes followed, including on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Parler, Gab and Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform. Mentions of the phrase more than doubled on…

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Pakistan’s ‘End of Days’ 2022 monsoon season

Pakistan’s ‘End of Days’ 2022 monsoon season

  “Terrible devastation.” With those two words, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif summed-up the 2022 monsoon season in Pakistan, home to one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable societies … and one having made only scant contributions to the mounting carbon dioxide emissions at the heart of human-caused climate change. On top of historically damaging flooding in 2010, this year brought a far worse monsoon season to the country, which has the most glaciers (7,253) of any country outside of the…

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What does sustainable living look like? Maybe like Uruguay

What does sustainable living look like? Maybe like Uruguay

Noah Gallagher Shannon writes: Let’s say you live in the typical American household. It doesn’t exist, not in any sense except in a data set, but it’s easy enough to imagine. Maybe it’s your aunt’s, or your neighbor’s, or a bit like your own. Since more than half of us live outside big cities, it’s probably in a middle-class suburb, like Fox Lake, north of Chicago. You picked it because it’s affordable and not a terrible commute to your job….

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We mustn’t be cowed by the bluster of a bully who knows he’s losing

We mustn’t be cowed by the bluster of a bully who knows he’s losing

Mikhail Khodorkovsky writes: When declaring the annexation of Ukraine’s Luhansk, Donetsk, and parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin showed characteristic contempt for the truth. The announcement followed sham referenda reflecting Putin’s brand of democracy — where voting takes place at gunpoint and the outcome is predetermined. Delivered amid deranged bombast regarding the “satanic” West, this was Putin’s latest attempt to regain the initiative and deflect attention from the fact that he’s losing his…

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Russia’s elites are starting to admit the possibility of defeat

Russia’s elites are starting to admit the possibility of defeat

Tatiana Stanovaya writes: When Vladimir Putin launched his war against Ukraine back in February, many believed a Rubicon had been crossed after which the Russian president’s relationship with his elites would never be the same. It was then that Putin began to be seen as a desperate leader, no longer capable of normal interaction with the outside world. Nonetheless, the feelings of despondency and doom that prevailed among the elites didn’t stop them from continuing to demonstrate loyalty to the…

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Ukraine hammers Russian forces into retreat on east and south fronts

Ukraine hammers Russian forces into retreat on east and south fronts

The Washington Post reports: Ukrainian troops on Tuesday accelerated their military advances on two fronts, pushing Russian forces into retreat in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions to the east and Kherson region to the south. The gains showed Kyiv continuing to recapture occupied territory on the same day that President Vladimir Putin and his rubber-stamp parliament sought to formalize their increasingly far-fetched annexation claims of four Ukrainian regions. “The Ukrainian armed forces commanders in the south and east are throwing…

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Woman, Life, Liberty: A slogan one hundred years in the making

Woman, Life, Liberty: A slogan one hundred years in the making

Nahid Siamdoust writes: Of all the videos to surface from the Iran protests following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on Sept. 16th, one in particular has caught the public imagination. In this short clip, we see a large gathering of people around a bonfire when a young woman dressed all in white enters the circle energetically, whirls toward the fire almost joyously and halts in a dramatic pose before throwing her headscarf to the flames. The crowd cheers ecstatically….

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In Trump White House, classified records were routinely mishandled, aides say

In Trump White House, classified records were routinely mishandled, aides say

The Washington Post reports: Aides who had worked in Donald Trump’s White House were not surprised this summer when the FBI found highly classified material in boxes at Mar-a-Lago, mixed with news clippings and other items. They’d seen such haphazard collections before. During his four years in office, Trump never strictly followed the rules and customs for handling sensitive government documents, according to 14 officials from his administration, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss what…

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