Music: Arve Henriksen — ‘Shelter From The Storm’
Twitter troll arrested for election interference related to disinformation campaign
NBC News reports: The notorious Twitter troll and alt-right figure Douglass Mackey, known better by his alter ego, Ricky Vaughn, was arrested on Wednesday on federal charges of election interference stemming from an alleged voter disinformation campaign during the 2016 election. Mackey is charged with conspiring with others “to disseminate misinformation designed to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote,” according to the newly unsealed criminal complaint. The charges are a potentially tectonic shift in how the federal government…
Homeland Security bulletin warns Americans about violence by grievance-fueled domestic extremists
The Washington Post reports: The Department of Homeland Security issued a warning Wednesday to alert the public about a growing risk of attacks by “ideologically-motivated violent extremists” agitated about President Biden’s inauguration and “perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.” DHS periodically issues such advisories through its National Terrorism Advisory System, but the warnings have typically been generated by elevated concerns about attacks by foreign governments or radical groups, not domestic extremists. In a statement, the department said the purpose of…
The GOP’s answer to its post-Trump blues: More Trump
Politico reports: For a moment, it looked like Donald Trump might be losing his iron grip on the GOP. In the wake of the deadly Capitol riot, 10 House Republicans joined Democrats in their vote to impeach him. Several other Republicans openly suggested at least censuring the president. Not anymore. Local and state Republican parties are censuring Republicans for disloyalty in states across the country. The lawmakers who broke with him are weathering a storm of criticism from Trump-adoring constituents…
Climate crisis: World is at its hottest for at least 12,000 years, research finds
The Guardian reports: The planet is hotter now than it has been for at least 12,000 years, a period spanning the entire development of human civilisation, according to research. Analysis of ocean surface temperatures shows human-driven climate change has put the world in “uncharted territory”, the scientists say. The planet may even be at its warmest for 125,000 years, although data on that far back is less certain. The research, published in the journal Nature, reached these conclusions by solving…
Biden freezes U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia, UAE
The Wall Street Journal reports: The Biden administration has imposed a temporary freeze on U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as it reviews billions of dollars in weapons transactions approved by former President Donald Trump, according to U.S. officials. The review, the officials said, includes the sale of precision-guided munitions to Riyadh, as well as top-line F-35 fighters to Abu Dhabi, a deal that Washington approved as part of the Abraham Accords, in which the…
The man who wants to take down Bashar Al Assad
Nate Berg writes: Wolfgang Kaleck, a 60-year-old human rights lawyer with large blue eyes and a wave of sandy brown hair, smiles a lot for someone who has spent his life litigating some of the world’s worst atrocities. “The stories you hear you won’t forget,” he says, sitting at a long table in his office in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. “But at the same time you learn about these cruel facts of the world, you learn about the light side, which…
The unified cosmic vision of Alexander von Humboldt
Algis Valiunas writes: The presiding scientific genius of the Romantic age, when science had not yet been dispersed into specialties that rarely connect with one another, Alexander von Humboldt wanted to know everything, and came closer than any of his contemporaries to doing so. Except for Aristotle, no scientist before or since this German polymath can boast an intellect as universal in reach as his and as influential for the salient work of his time. His neglect today is unfortunate…
Music: Nils Petter Molvaer — ‘Kakonita’
The political-reform movement scores its biggest win yet
Russell Berman writes: Lisa Murkowski did not waste time, and she did not mince words. Just two days after former President Donald Trump provoked an insurrectionist mob to storm the Capitol on January 6, Alaska’s senior senator told her local newspaper: “I want him to resign. I want him out.” Murkowski was the first GOP senator to demand Trump’s exit after the deadly riot. The speed and bluntness with which she spoke out against the former president surprised her allies,…
The day we let Covid-19 spin out of control
Daniel P. Oran and Eric J. Topol write: Jan. 24 marks the one-year anniversary of a momentous but largely unnoticed event in the history of the Covid-19 pandemic: the first published report of an individual infected with the novel coronavirus who never developed symptoms. This early confirmation of asymptomatic infection should have set off alarm bells and profoundly altered our response to the gathering storm. But it did not. One year later we are still paying the price for this…
Roger Stone used Oath Keepers as security on the eve of the Capitol riot
Vice News reports: On the eve of the riot at the U.S. Capitol, Roger Stone walked out on stage before hundreds of cheering Trump supporters in Washington, D.C., flashed his signature Nixon Victory pose, and then danced to the Deplorable Choir’s girlpop anthem “Roger Stone Did Nothing Wrong.” But several members of his posse stayed backstage, their faces covered, wearing military tactical gear. They were members of Oath Keepers, a far-right militia steeped in anti-government conspiracies. And on that night,…
Oregon Republican Party falsely calls U.S. Capitol riot a ‘false flag’ meant to ‘discredit President Trump’
The Washington Post reports: Three weeks after hundreds of people stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent rampage that left one police officer and four rioters dead and led to more than 100 arrests of the pro-Trump rioters, the House delivered an article of impeachment to the Senate, charging the former president with inciting the mob. In Oregon, the state Republican Party isn’t just backing former president Donald Trump — its official position falsely claims that the entire episode was…
How the KGB hooked Donald Trump
Craig Unger writes: There are boundaries in America’s political discourse—or at least there were until Donald Trump’s presidency. There were still taboos: One simply didn’t say that the president of the United States is a Russian asset. And yet according to Bob Woodward’s Rage, no less than former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, a Republican, had “deep suspicions” that Putin “had something” on Trump, seeing “no other explanation for his Behavior.” And Coats wasn’t the first highly placed intelligence…
Giuliani wasn’t just a Trump partisan but a shrewd marketer of vitamins, gold, lawsuit says
The Washington Post reports: As he outlined how “pervasive voter fraud” had turned the United States into “Venezuela or China or the old Soviet Union,” Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, paused his video podcast to offer his audience an incredible deal. For just $596, an online fraud-protection company that Giuliani called “the only folks to trust that I know of” was selling four years of online defense from home-stealing “cyber thieves.” “Use code ‘Rudy’ — that’s me —…
Trump’s pardon of Bannon could raise risk for three co-defendants
Benjamin Weiser reports: Of all the pardons former President Donald Trump granted in the hours before he left office, perhaps none was as galling to his critics, government watchdog groups and even some of his allies as the pardon of his former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon. Mr. Bannon, 67, had been charged with conspiring to swindle donors to a private fund to build a wall along the Mexican border, siphoning off more than $1 million for personal and other…