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Biden needs to stop Netanyahu from sabotaging talks to resume the Iran nuclear deal

Biden needs to stop Netanyahu from sabotaging talks to resume the Iran nuclear deal

Fred Kaplan writes: White House press secretary Jen Psaki has denied U.S. involvement in the [latest] attack [on Iran’s nuclear-fuel center at Natanz]. But since the United States and Israel jointly crafted Stuxnet, the 2010 covert program that sabotaged uranium enrichment at Natanz through highly sophisticated cyber attacks (a program that U.S. officials still don’t discuss openly a decade later), it’s not deeply paranoid for Iranian officials to assume that Washington was in on the plot. This isn’t the first…

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The U.S. media is touting Israel’s Covid recovery. But occupied Palestinians are left out

The U.S. media is touting Israel’s Covid recovery. But occupied Palestinians are left out

Yara M Asi writes: The US media has widely lauded Israel’s vaccine success – as a country in a “post-pandemic future” of concerts and indoor dining; as a country that could teach the United States a few lessons in pandemic management; as a country that, despite being in the midst of a contentious election, leaned on its robust universal public health system to vaccinate as many people as possible. However, many of these vaccine success stories mention the issue of…

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Bad news for journalists: The public doesn’t share our values. But there’s hope

Bad news for journalists: The public doesn’t share our values. But there’s hope

Margaret Sullivan writes: Ask almost any group of journalists to name the core values of their profession, and they’ll probably deliver a list like this: Oversight. We’re the watchdogs keeping an eye on government officials and other powerful people and institutions. Transparency. We believe it’s best to put information out in the open, not keep it hidden. Factuality. It’s crucial to provide as much accurate information as possible to get to the truth. Spotlighting wrongdoing. We think society’s problems are…

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We are living in a climate emergency, and we’re going to say so

We are living in a climate emergency, and we’re going to say so

Mark Fischetti writes: An emergency is a serious situation that requires immediate action. When someone calls 911 because they can’t breathe, that’s an emergency. When someone stumbles on the sidewalk because their chest is pounding and their lips are turning blue, that’s an emergency. Both people require help right away. Multiply those individuals by millions of people who have similar symptoms, and it constitutes the biggest global health emergency in a century: the COVID-19 pandemic. Now consider the following scenarios:…

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Amazon lives off America’s failure

Amazon lives off America’s failure

Sarah Jones writes: Bill Bodani liked his old job. He cleaned slag out at the Sparrows Point steel mill in Maryland, cleared the flues and the broken brick out of the blast furnace. He loved it despite the asbestosis it gave him, writes Alec MacGillis in his new book, Fulfillment. “I enjoyed the people,” Bodani told MacGillis. “They made it enjoyable. The Black, the white. It was a family thing. I don’t care if you knew them for five minutes,…

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Taliban boycotts key peace talks after U.S. pull-out delay

Taliban boycotts key peace talks after U.S. pull-out delay

The Daily Beast reports: Hours after the Biden administration announced that the remaining 3,500 American troops will return from Afghanistan by the twentieth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, a Taliban spokesperson announced a refusal to join U.S.-facilitated peace talks between the Islamic group and the Afghan government. “Until all foreign forces completely withdraw from our homeland, the Islamic Emirate will not participate in any conference that shall make decisions about Afghanistan,” Mohammed Naeem, a spokesperson for the Taliban’s political…

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Republicans are making four key mistakes

Republicans are making four key mistakes

David Frum writes: It’s not only Georgia. In every state where Republicans control a chamber of the legislature, bills to restrict voting are advancing fast. Arizona and Texas Republicans have acted especially aggressively to choke off unwanted voters in time for 2022. Arizona Republicans propose to reduce the number of days for early voting. They want to purge voter rolls of people who missed the previous election. They want to cut off mail-in balloting five days before Election Day. And…

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First GMO mosquitoes to be released in the Florida Keys

First GMO mosquitoes to be released in the Florida Keys

By Taylor White This spring, the biotechnology company Oxitec plans to release genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in the Florida Keys. Oxitec says its technology will combat dengue fever, a potentially life-threatening disease, and other mosquito-borne viruses — such as Zika — mainly transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. While there have been more than 7,300 dengue cases reported in the United States between 2010 and 2020, a majority are contracted in Asia and the Caribbean, according to the U.S. Centers…

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The nature you see in documentaries is beautiful and false

The nature you see in documentaries is beautiful and false

Emma Marris writes: It’s late afternoon, late pandemic, and I’m watching a new nature documentary in bed, after taking the daintiest of hits from a weed pen. The show is called A Perfect Planet, and it is narrated by Sir David Attenborough. I am looking at the red eye of a flamingo, a molten lake surrounding a tiny black pupil. Now I am looking at drone footage of a massive colony of flamingos, the classic sweeping overhead shot, what my…

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How radio astronomy reveals the universe

How radio astronomy reveals the universe

Emily Levesque writes: If you ask an astronomer to choose the single most exciting picture in all of astronomy, many of us will point to a familiar orange ring. At a glance it may not look like much — a fuzzy glowing doughnut, bulging slightly at the bottom and, as of last month, streaked with curving lines — but in reality this unassuming circle is humanity’s first glimpse of a black hole, with the colors chosen not to mimic realism,…

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The jewels of America’s landscape should be returned to America’s original peoples

The jewels of America’s landscape should be returned to America’s original peoples

David Treuer writes: In 1851, members of a California state militia called the Mariposa Battalion became the first white men to lay eyes on Yosemite Valley. The group was largely made up of miners. They had been scouring the western slopes of the Sierra when they happened upon the granite valley that Native peoples had long referred to as “the place of a gaping mouth.” Lafayette Bunnell, a physician attached to the militia, found himself awestruck. “None but those who…

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The Biden White House media doctrine: Less can be more

The Biden White House media doctrine: Less can be more

Politico reports: Three months in, Joe Biden’s White House has settled on a firm press strategy: First, do no self-harm. The president is not doing cable news interviews. Tweets from his account are limited and, when they come, unimaginably conventional. The public comments are largely scripted. Biden has opted for fewer sit down interviews with mainstream outlets and reporters. He’s had just one major press conference — though another is coming — and prefers remarks straight to camera for the…

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How to stop the minority-rule doom loop

How to stop the minority-rule doom loop

Adam Jentleson writes: President Joe Biden came into office facing four “converging crises”: COVID-19, climate change, racial justice, and the economy. But after a few weeks of fast action on a pandemic relief plan, a fifth crisis will determine the fate of the rest of his administration, and perhaps that of American democracy itself: the minority-rule doom loop, by which predominantly white conservatives gain more and more power, even as they represent fewer Americans. The doom loop consists of four…

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Hawley hauls in $3M after attempt to block election results

Hawley hauls in $3M after attempt to block election results

Politico reports: Sen. Josh Hawley raised more than $3 million during the first three months of the year, underscoring how the Missouri Republican converted his high-profile opposition to the certification of the 2020 election into big fundraising support. The freshman senator drew widespread attention for leading the Jan. 6 effort to block the acceptance of the Electoral College results, a controversial stand that liberals and some Republicans claim undermined faith in the political system. But he won plaudits from loyalists…

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