Browsed by
Category: Politics

‘Project 2025’: A plan to dismantle U.S. climate policy for next Republican president

‘Project 2025’: A plan to dismantle U.S. climate policy for next Republican president

The Guardian reports: An alliance of rightwing groups has crafted an extensive presidential proposal to bolster the planet-heating oil and gas industry and hamstring the energy transition, it has emerged. Against a backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22m endeavor, Project 2025, was convened by the notorious rightwing, climate-denying thinktank the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch. Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first…

Read More Read More

NATO planes watched as three civilian ships ran Russia’s naval blockade of Ukraine

NATO planes watched as three civilian ships ran Russia’s naval blockade of Ukraine

Forbes reports: A trio of civilian cargo ships—one each from Israel and Greece plus one with Turkish-Georgian registration—ran the Russian blockade in the Black Sea on Sunday and anchored at one of Ukraine’s grain ports on the Danube Delta. Twenty-two days after Moscow canceled a deal with Kyiv—which had allowed Ukraine safely to export tens of millions of tons of grain—and then threatened to halt maritime traffic to Ukrainian ports, the world has called the Russians’ bluff. “Reports of three…

Read More Read More

Inside the Wagner Group’s armed uprising

Inside the Wagner Group’s armed uprising

Joshua Yaffa writes: On May 20th, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, stood in the center of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, and recorded a video. The city once housed seventy thousand people but was now, after months of relentless shelling, nearly abandoned. Whole blocks were in ruins, charred skeletons of concrete and steel. Smoke hung over the smoldering remains like an early-morning fog. Prigozhin wore combat fatigues and waved a Russian flag. “Today, at twelve noon, Bakhmut was…

Read More Read More

Twitter threatens legal action against nonprofit that tracks hate speech

Twitter threatens legal action against nonprofit that tracks hate speech

The New York Times reports: Elon Musk has over the last year threatened legal action against tech competitors, employees and people who use Twitter, which he owns. Now he is also taking aim at an organization that studies hate speech and misinformation on social media. X Corp., the parent company of the social media company, sent a letter on July 20 to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that conducts research on social media, accusing the organization of…

Read More Read More

Georgia judge skewers Trump’s bid to derail potential charges

Georgia judge skewers Trump’s bid to derail potential charges

Politico reports: A state judge in Georgia has rejected Donald Trump’s bid to derail his potential prosecution for attempting to subvert the 2020 election results. In a nine-page ruling, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney said it’s simply too soon for Trump or his allies to seek to prohibit Georgia prosecutors from continuing to investigate him — in large part because he hasn’t been indicted yet. “[W]hile being the subject (or even target) of a highly publicized criminal investigation…

Read More Read More

Former business partner says Hunter Biden sold ‘illusion’ of access to Joe Biden, source says

Former business partner says Hunter Biden sold ‘illusion’ of access to Joe Biden, source says

CNN reports: Devon Archer told the House Oversight Committee on Monday that his former business partner, Hunter Biden, was selling the “illusion” of access to his father, according to a source familiar with the closed-door interview, the latest development in the Republican-led congressional investigations into the president’s son. The source also reiterated that Archer provided no evidence connecting President Joe Biden to any of his son’s foreign business dealings. Rep. Dan Goldman, a Democrat on the panel who sat through…

Read More Read More

Trump’s ‘Save America’ PAC has spent more than $40 million on legal costs this year for himself, others

Trump’s ‘Save America’ PAC has spent more than $40 million on legal costs this year for himself, others

The Washington Post reports: Former president Donald Trump’s political group spent more than $40 million on legal costs in the first half of 2023 to defend Trump, his advisers and others, according to people familiar with the matter, financing legal work that has drawn scrutiny from prosecutors about potential conflicts of interest between Trump and witnesses. Save America, the former president’s PAC, is expected to disclose about $40.2 million in legal spending in a filing expected Monday, said the people…

Read More Read More

Trump calls for conditioning Ukraine aid on congressional Biden probes

Trump calls for conditioning Ukraine aid on congressional Biden probes

The Washington Post reports: Former president Donald Trump called on congressional Republicans to withhold military support for Ukraine until the Biden administration cooperates with their investigations into the president and his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings. The demand, delivered at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, echoed Trump’s conduct at issue during his first impeachment, when Trump withheld aid from Ukraine while pressuring the country’s president to announce an investigation of Biden. “Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional…

Read More Read More

Florida universities hit by brain drain as academics flee ‘toxic’ environment

Florida universities hit by brain drain as academics flee ‘toxic’ environment

The Guardian reports: With the start of the 2023-24 academic year only six weeks away, senior officials at New College of Florida (NCF) made a startling announcement in mid-July: 36 of the small honors college’s approximately 100 full-time teaching positions were vacant. The provost, Bradley Thiessen, described the number of faculty openings as “ridiculously high”, and the disclosure was the latest evidence of a brain drain afflicting colleges and universities throughout the Sunshine state. Governor Ron DeSantis opened 2023 with…

Read More Read More

No ‘Oppenheimer’ fanfare for those caught in first atomic bomb’s fallout

No ‘Oppenheimer’ fanfare for those caught in first atomic bomb’s fallout

The Washington Post reports: A strong rumble woke 13-year-old Lucy Benavidez Garwood in the darkness, shaking the three-room adobe house where she and her family lived and rattling dishes in the kitchen cupboard. Neighbors who gathered that morning agreed it must have been an earthquake. They learned the truth several weeks later when U.S. forces attacked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The atomic bombs dropped on the two cities had been developed in Tularosa’s own backyard — that pre-dawn test blast…

Read More Read More

The making of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The making of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

John Ehrenreich writes: For decades, he was a superstar environmental lawyer who demanded that Americans should accept and act on the scientific consensus that climate change is real. He specialized in cases in which corporations had hidden the environmental or health costs of their products. His legal work against corporations that dump toxic chemicals in water, waste dumps, and food saved thousands of people from disabling diseases or death. He embraced the science that revealed this and attacked the superficially exculpatory science used by the companies…

Read More Read More

Elon Musk’s unmatched power in satellite internet technology

Elon Musk’s unmatched power in satellite internet technology

The New York Times reports: On March 17, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the leader of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, dialed into a call to discuss Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Over the secure line, the two military leaders conferred on air defense systems, real-time battlefield assessments and shared intelligence on Russia’s military losses. They also talked about Elon Musk. General Zaluzhnyi raised the topic of Starlink, the satellite internet technology…

Read More Read More

Coast to coast, a corridor of coups brings turmoil across Africa

Coast to coast, a corridor of coups brings turmoil across Africa

The New York Times reports: Africa’s coup belt spans the continent: a line of six countries crossing 3,500 miles, from coast to coast, that has become the longest corridor of military rule on Earth. This past week’s military takeover in the West African nation of Niger toppled the final domino in a band across the girth of Africa, from Guinea in the west to Sudan in the east, now controlled by juntas that came to power in a coup —…

Read More Read More

U.S. hunts Chinese malware that could disrupt military operations and civilian infrastructure

U.S. hunts Chinese malware that could disrupt military operations and civilian infrastructure

The New York Times reports: The Biden administration is hunting for malicious computer code it believes China has hidden deep inside the networks controlling power grids, communications systems and water supplies that feed military bases in the United States and around the world, according to American military, intelligence and national security officials. The discovery of the malware has raised fears that Chinese hackers, probably working for the People’s Liberation Army, have inserted code designed to disrupt U.S. military operations in…

Read More Read More

As America’s political gerontocracy clings to power, who will tell them to step aside?

As America’s political gerontocracy clings to power, who will tell them to step aside?

The New York Times reports: After a series of troubling moments this week, an uncomfortable question has become unavoidable, leaving voters, strategists and even politicians themselves wondering: Just how old is too old to serve in public office? For years, like so many children of aging parents across America, politicians and their advisers in Washington tried to skirt that difficult conversation, wrapping concerns about their octogenarian leaders in a cone of silence. The omertà was enabled by the traditions of…

Read More Read More

One of GOP’s highest-profile Black lawmakers blasts DeSantis on slavery: ‘You’ve gone too far. Stop.’

One of GOP’s highest-profile Black lawmakers blasts DeSantis on slavery: ‘You’ve gone too far. Stop.’

Insider reports: Republican Rep. John James of Michigan on Friday blasted Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida over the governor’s response to criticism from key Black conservatives over the state’s new Black history education guidelines, stating that the presidential candidate had “gone too far” and needed to “stop” his defense of the changes. James — a Black freshman lawmaker who was the GOP nominee in two highly competitive Senate races in 2018 and 2020 — took to X, the social media…

Read More Read More