Browsed by
Category: Politics

Critics of Beijing face increasing impersonation attacks

Critics of Beijing face increasing impersonation attacks

Jemimah Steinfeld writes: Andrew Phelan was preparing his Melbourne home for the arrival of his elderly, unwell mother when the doorbell rang. Standing next to the man whom Phelan had booked to help assemble a bed were four police officers. They were carrying firearms. They barged into his house and told Phelan — a high-profile China watcher and commentator — that he was under arrest. A Chinese-Australian reporter had contacted the Victoria state police to say she’d received an email…

Read More Read More

The criminal charges against Trump aren’t actually helping him in the GOP primary race, research suggests

The criminal charges against Trump aren’t actually helping him in the GOP primary race, research suggests

Russell Berman writes: In the months since Donald Trump’s indictments started piling up, pollsters have noticed something remarkable: The dozens of criminal charges brought against the former president have seemed to boost his standing in the Republican presidential primary. Trump has widened his already commanding lead over his rivals, and in poll after poll, GOP voters have said that the charges make them more—not less—likely to vote for him again. The dynamic has turned an infamous example of Trumpian bravado—his…

Read More Read More

Bucks County power struggle could hint at shifting suburban politics for 2024

Bucks County power struggle could hint at shifting suburban politics for 2024

Politico reports: An obscure race for county commissioner underway here in a suburb outside of Philadelphia could tell us a lot about who will win the presidential election in 2024. Bucks County is one of the swingiest counties in one of the swingiest states in America. President Joe Biden won it in 2020. So did Sen. John Fetterman and Gov. Josh Shapiro two years later. But it’s represented by a Republican in Congress, perennial battlegrounder Brian Fitzpatrick, and conservatives staged…

Read More Read More

In talks with prosecutors, Hunter Biden’s lawyers vowed to put the president on the stand

In talks with prosecutors, Hunter Biden’s lawyers vowed to put the president on the stand

Politico reports: It was Halloween of 2022, and Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Chris Clark, didn’t sound happy. Just three weeks earlier, news had leaked that federal agents believed they had enough evidence to charge his client with illegally buying a gun as a drug user. The leak was “illegal,” the lawyer wrote to the U.S. attorney overseeing the probe. The prosecution, he argued, would be seen as purely political, and it might even violate the Second Amendment. Then he issued a…

Read More Read More

White House is torn over Joe Manchin’s fury at climate law he crafted

White House is torn over Joe Manchin’s fury at climate law he crafted

The Washington Post reports: The obscure federal agency that oversees the nation’s immense tangle of pipelines, power lines and transfer stations is unfamiliar to most Americans. But it has very much been on Sen. Joe Manchin III’s mind. By the end of last year, the West Virginia Democrat had become deeply displeased with how the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was helping the Biden administration advance its aggressive climate goals. Manchin, a staunch ally of fossil fuel interests, was particularly critical…

Read More Read More

Environmental activists are fleeing Elon Musk’s Twitter

Environmental activists are fleeing Elon Musk’s Twitter

Quartz reports: Scientists and environmental activists have been fleeing Twitter—now called X—after Elon Musk bought the social platform and took a wrecking ball to its innards. A study (pdf) published in a journal called Trends in Evolution and Ecology on Aug.15 showed, that out of a sample of 380,000 environmentally oriented X users, “nearly 50% became inactive” after Musk’s acquisition. This rate, the researchers found, was “much higher than a control sample.” By April 2023, only 52.5% of sampled environmental activists on X were still active. The study was conducted between Dec. 2022 and May 2023. Days after…

Read More Read More

The Constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again

The Constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again

J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe write: As students of the United States Constitution for many decades—one of us as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, the other as a professor of constitutional law, and both as constitutional advocates, scholars, and practitioners—we long ago came to the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment, the amendment ratified in 1868 that represents our nation’s second founding and a new birth of freedom, contains within it a protection against the dissolution of the…

Read More Read More

How do we fix the scandal that is American health care?

How do we fix the scandal that is American health care?

Nicholas Kristof writes: It’s not just that life expectancy in Mississippi (71.9) now appears to be a hair shorter than in Bangladesh (72.4). Nor that an infant is some 70 percent more likely to die in the United States than in other wealthy countries. Nor even that for the first time in probably a century, the likelihood that an American child will live to the age of 20 has dropped. All that is tragic and infuriating, but to me the…

Read More Read More

The GOP might be over its war on ‘woke’

The GOP might be over its war on ‘woke’

HuffPost reports: Jill Connell is sick of hearing the word “woke.” The 66-year-old from Kansas is an undecided Republican voter with a host of concerns about the country, and she knows for sure what doesn’t top that list. “To me, wokeness is, ‘Hey, I woke up this morning,’” Connell said, employing the most literal definition of a word the right uses to describe what it sees as left-wing ideas and political correctness. “I call it goofy — it’s ridiculous. I’m…

Read More Read More

They integrated Little Rock’s schools. Now they’re slamming restrictions on AP African American Studies

They integrated Little Rock’s schools. Now they’re slamming restrictions on AP African American Studies

NBC News reports: Several surviving members of the Little Rock Nine, a group of students who in 1957 integrated Little Rock Central High School under threats of violence from white segregationists, are denouncing the Arkansas Department of Education’s restrictions on an Advanced Placement African American Studies course. The state is not barring students from taking the class but has cautioned that the coursework may not count toward the state’s high school graduation requirements. The Arkansas Department of Education has argued…

Read More Read More

American democracy is cracking. These forces help explain why

American democracy is cracking. These forces help explain why

Dan Balz and Clara Ence Morse write: In a country where the search for common ground is increasingly elusive, many Americans can agree on this: They believe the political system is broken and that it fails to represent them. They aren’t wrong. Faced with big and challenging problems — climate, immigration, inequality, guns, debt and deficits — government and politicians seem incapable of achieving consensus. On each of those issues, the public is split, often bitterly. But on each, there…

Read More Read More

Threats, slurs and menace: Far-right websites target Fulton County grand jurors

Threats, slurs and menace: Far-right websites target Fulton County grand jurors

NPR reports: Before many people had a chance to fully read through the Fulton County, Ga., indictment against former President Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants, malicious online actors had already done their work. On a far-right website, where the QAnon conspiracy theory originated, an anonymous user on Tuesday shared a list of the 23 grand jurors with their supposed full names, ages and addresses. Amid a torrent of other posts speculating on the race and religion of the jurors, and…

Read More Read More

Kenneth Chesebro, alleged architect of fake electors’ plot, followed Alex Jones around Capitol grounds on January 6th

Kenneth Chesebro, alleged architect of fake electors’ plot, followed Alex Jones around Capitol grounds on January 6th

CNN reports: When conspiracy theorist Alex Jones marched his way to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, riling up his legion of supporters, an unassuming middle-aged man in a red “Trump 2020” hat conspicuously tagged along. Videos and photographs reviewed by CNN show the man dutifully recording Jones with his phone as the bombastic media personality ascended to the restricted area of the Capitol grounds where mobs of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters eventually broke in. While the man’s actions…

Read More Read More

U.S. intelligence says Ukraine will fail to meet offensive’s key goal

U.S. intelligence says Ukraine will fail to meet offensive’s key goal

The Washington Post reports: The U.S. intelligence community assesses that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will fail to reach the key southeastern city of Melitopol, people familiar with the classified forecast told The Washington Post, a finding that, should it prove correct, would mean Kyiv won’t fulfill its principal objective of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea in this year’s push. The grim assessment is based on Russia’s brutal proficiency in defending occupied territory through a phalanx of minefields and trenches, and is…

Read More Read More

Biden to sign strategic partnership deal with Vietnam in latest bid to counter China in the region

Biden to sign strategic partnership deal with Vietnam in latest bid to counter China in the region

Politico reports: President Joe Biden will chalk up a fresh victory in his campaign to boost U.S. influence in the Indo-Pacific by sealing a deal with Vietnam next month aimed to draw Hanoi closer to Washington at a time of rising tensions with Beijing. Biden will sign a strategic partnership agreement with Vietnam during a state visit to the Southeast Asian country in mid-September, according to three people with knowledge of the deal’s planning. They were granted anonymity because they…

Read More Read More

The cases against Trump aren’t criminalizing politics. He and his allies are politicizing crime

The cases against Trump aren’t criminalizing politics. He and his allies are politicizing crime

Quinta Jurecic writes: Following each new indictment of Donald Trump, the former president and his allies have wasted no time in attacking the case. Their complaints have gravitated toward one idea in particular: the notion that prosecutors have charged Trump for engaging in the normal work of politics. The latest indictment, in Fulton County, Georgia, is “an example of this criminalization of politics,” commented Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—who’d made a similar comment last month about Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment…

Read More Read More