Kyiv Post reports: Last week, President Vladimir Putin made an official state visit to the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea (DPRK) – North Korea, his first for almost a quarter of a century. As part of that visit Putin and Kim Jong Un signed a so-called defense pact in the North Korean capital on June 19. The military treaty states: “In the event that any one of the two sides is put in a state of war by an armed…
Melissa DeRosa writes: Democrats mocked Republicans, feeling bullish that our 81-year-old nominee would replicate his past performance [at the State of the Union] and overcome the very low bar set for him. It was, after all, our idea to debate this early. And then, the ‘debate’ began. And within 30 seconds it was over. Biden’s pasty complexion coupled with his doddering and incoherent speech in the first answer sealed it. Blank faces with raised eyebrows darted around the table as cell phones…
Ian Millhiser writes: On Thursday, the Court handed down a 6-3 decision, on a party-line vote, that could render a simply astonishing array of federal laws unenforceable. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in dissent, “the constitutionality of hundreds of statutes may now be in peril, and dozens of agencies could be stripped of their power to enforce laws enacted by Congress.” The dispute in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy turns on whether a hedge fund manager accused of defrauding…
Politico reports: A large-scale confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah is likely to break out in the next several weeks if Jerusalem and Hamas fail to reach a cease-fire deal in Gaza, U.S. intelligence indicates. U.S. officials are trying to convince both sides to deescalate — a task that would be significantly easier with a cease-fire in place in Gaza. But that agreement is in tense negotiations and U.S. officials are not confident Israel and Hamas will agree to the deal…
Ian Millhiser writes: On a 6-3 party-line vote, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that state officials may accept “gratuities” from people who wish to reward them for their official actions, despite a federal anti-corruption statute that appears to ban such rewards. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion in Snyder v. United States for the Court’s Republican-appointed majority. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissent on behalf of the Court’s three Democratic appointees. Snyder turns on a distinction between “bribes” and “gratuities.” As…
The Associated Press reports: Israeli authorities say 68 people — 19 sick and injured children plus their companions — have been allowed out of the Gaza Strip and into Egypt in the first medical evacuation since May, when the territory’s sole travel crossing was shut down. The Israeli military body responsible for Palestinian civilian affairs, known by its acronym COGAT, said Thursday that the evacuation was carried out in coordination with officials from the United States, Egypt and the international…
Rolling Stone reports: Leonard Leo, best known as the architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, is fueling an assault on efforts to preserve the environment and the planet. His dark money network has also been funding campaigns to dismantle the Endangered Species Act (ESA) — 50 years after it was established to protect plant and animal species at risk of extinction. Since its passing, the ESA has been credited for saving 99 percent of its listed wildlife including bald…
Bill McKibben writes: Something approaching a miracle has been taking place in California this spring. Beginning in early March, for some portion of almost every day, a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower has been producing more than a hundred per cent of the state’s demand for electricity. Some afternoons, solar panels alone have produced more power than the state uses. And, at night, large utility-scale batteries that have been installed during the past few years are often the…
Ben Davis writes: Sometimes, a major electoral victory is a sign of a movement in retreat and a crumbling consensus. Take California’s gay marriage ban in 2008, at the time seen as a major defeat for gay rights advocates. But the victory of Prop 8 hid the underlying shift: the very fact that gay rights, unthinkable even a few years prior, was a polarized electoral issue showed that anti-gay rights forces were losing in the long term. The same is…
Last week, Politico reported: In late 2021, Jamaal Bowman stepped out of a tour bus into the heat in Hebron. The then-rookie New York congressman was visiting the H2 area of the ancient city in the West Bank, which remains under Israeli military occupation with barbed wire-covered checkpoints every few blocks. Bowman had been in the Middle East for just three days, but he was already seeing sights that were changing the way he understood the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That day,…
In 2020, Peter Beinart wrote: In October, Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who is seeking re-election in Georgia, released an ad called “Birds of Prey” attacking her Democratic opponent, Raphael Warnock. The title refers to a sermon Warnock gave during protests in the Gaza Strip in 2018, in which he accused the Israeli government of shooting “unarmed Palestinian sisters and brothers like birds of prey.” In a statement accompanying the ad, Loeffler called Warnock “the most anti-Israel candidate anywhere in the country.” The next month, she unveiled a…
David Harel, Tamir Pardo, Talia Sasson, Ehud Barak, Aaron Ciechanover and David Grossman writes: The leaders of the U.S. Congress have invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to address a joint meeting of the Senate and the House of Representatives on July 24. Normally, we Israelis would consider the invitation recognition of our two nations’ shared values and a welcome gesture from our closest friend and ally, to whom we are deeply and morally indebted. But Congress has made…
The Washington Post reports: President Biden and his Democratic allies have cast his reelection campaign as a battle for the country’s survival, warning that a second Donald Trump presidency would present an existential threat to American democracy. In speeches and campaign ads, Biden points to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, his incitement of an angry mob that ransacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the former president’s boasts that he will use the…
Elif Shafak writes: There is Orwell the human being. There is Orwell the novelist. There is Orwell the intellectual, the critic, the journalist, the essayist, the radical. But lately, George Orwell—who was born Eric Arthur Blair and who never fully abandoned his original name—has increasingly come to be regarded as a modern oracle, a gifted soothsayer who predicted with terrifying accuracy how fragile and fallible our political systems were, how close the shadow of authoritarianism. His body of work has…
The Guardian reports: More than half of households in Gaza have had to sell or swap their clothes to be able to buy food, the UN is to report, as a high risk of famine remains across the whole of the territory after a new round of violence in recent weeks. The latest “Special Snapshot” of Gaza from the UN’s hunger monitoring system, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), that will be published on Tuesday also says that one…
Tuesday is the culmination of the most expensive primary race in U.S. history in New York’s 16th Congressional District. Democratic Congressmember Jamaal Bowman, a former Bronx middle school principal and one of the first to call for a ceasefire in Gaza in October, is being challenged by a former corporate executive, George Latimer, who was encouraged to run by the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC. Outside spending in the race has topped $23 million, much of it from pro-Israel…