Browsed by
Category: Politics

The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act is bigger and more far-reaching than you think

The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act is bigger and more far-reaching than you think

Anthropocene reports: Landmark climate legislation passed in the United States in 2022 could nearly halve the U.S. economy’s overall emissions compared to 2005 levels by 2035, according to a new analysis. But on its own, it still won’t be sufficient to meet the country’s pledges under the Paris Agreement. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is possibly the most significant piece of U.S. climate legislation yet. Its provisions include tax credits for clean energy, energy storage, and carbon capture; measures to…

Read More Read More

Vermont floods show limits of America’s efforts to adapt to climate change

Vermont floods show limits of America’s efforts to adapt to climate change

The New York Times reports: This week’s flooding in Vermont, in which heavy rainfall caused destruction even miles from any river, is evidence of an especially dangerous climate threat: Catastrophic flooding can increasingly happen anywhere, with almost no warning. And the United States, experts warn, is nowhere close to ready for that threat. The idea that anywhere it can rain, it can flood, is not new. But rising temperatures make the problem worse: They allow the air to hold more…

Read More Read More

Joe Manchin to headline No Labels event amid third-party presidential speculation

Joe Manchin to headline No Labels event amid third-party presidential speculation

The Messenger reports: West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin will headline a town hall in New Hampshire next week hosted by No Labels, stoking speculation around the Democrat’s presidential ambitions and the group’s effort to mount a third-party bid in 2024. According to a No Labels spokesperson, Manchin will be joined by former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, a Republican, on Monday, July 17 as part of the group’s “Common Sense” town hall series. The event — held in New Hampshire, an…

Read More Read More

House Democrats demand probe of Comer’s indicted ‘missing’ Biden informant

House Democrats demand probe of Comer’s indicted ‘missing’ Biden informant

The Daily Beast reports: Democrats on the House Oversight Committee called for an investigation on Wednesday into whether the committee’s Republicans relied on falsehoods and misinformation provided by Gal Luft, a supposed “whistleblower” in the Biden family probe who has been charged with being an unregistered foreign agent for China and lying to investigators. In a letter to House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D0MAD) and Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) brought up the laundry list…

Read More Read More

Ukraine needs NATO — and NATO needs Ukraine, too

Ukraine needs NATO — and NATO needs Ukraine, too

Garry Kasparov writes: Last week, an opinion article in Foreign Affairs argued for locking Ukraine out of NATO. The authors, Justin Logan and Joshua Shifrinson of the Cato Institute, offered five claims to support their arguments. But as is typical of the genre, their article is long on opinion and short on facts. Because articles like this are so useful in Kremlin propagandists’ disinformation campaigns, it is worth refuting Logan and Shifrinson’s five claims one by one. Claim 1: Russia…

Read More Read More

Tax prep firms shared private taxpayer data with Google and Meta for years, congressional probe finds

Tax prep firms shared private taxpayer data with Google and Meta for years, congressional probe finds

CNN reports: Some of America’s largest tax-prep companies have spent years sharing Americans’ sensitive financial data with tech titans including Meta and Google in a potential violation of federal law — data that in some cases was misused for targeted advertising, according to a seven-month congressional investigation. The report highlights what legal experts described to CNN as a “five-alarm fire” for taxpayer privacy that could lead to government and private lawsuits, criminal penalties or perhaps even a “mortal blow” for…

Read More Read More

Trump lawyers seek indefinite postponement of documents trial

Trump lawyers seek indefinite postponement of documents trial

The New York Times reports: Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump asked a federal judge on Monday night to indefinitely postpone his trial on charges of illegally retaining classified documents after he left office, saying that the proceeding should not begin until all “substantive motions” in the case had been presented and decided. The written filing — submitted 30 minutes before its deadline of midnight on Tuesday — presents a significant early test for Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the…

Read More Read More

Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor’s staff prodded colleges and libraries to buy her books

Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor’s staff prodded colleges and libraries to buy her books

The Associated Press reports: For colleges and libraries seeking a boldfaced name for a guest lecturer, few come bigger than Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court justice who rose from poverty in the Bronx to the nation’s highest court. She has benefited, too — from schools’ purchases of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of the books she has written over the years. Sotomayor’s staff has often prodded public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children’s books, works that…

Read More Read More

What foreign-policy realists get wrong about Ukraine’s counteroffensive

What foreign-policy realists get wrong about Ukraine’s counteroffensive

Lawrence Freedman writes: The Russo-Ukrainian War is all about territory. Russia wants to complete its occupation of the oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson; Ukraine seeks to liberate all occupied territories, including Crimea. This is what the game theorists call a “zero-sum game” – what one wins the others must lose. This feature of the war explains why a negotiated outcome is so difficult to achieve, why the current battles matter so much, and why those commenting on the…

Read More Read More

The forgotten sovereigns of the Colorado River

The forgotten sovereigns of the Colorado River

Rowan Moore Gerety writes: If it weren’t for the Colorado River, Albuquerque wouldn’t exist — at least, not as a city of half a million. Which is interesting, because the city itself is nowhere near the river: The Colorado and its tributaries flow on the opposite side of the Continental Divide from New Mexico’s largest city. The thing that joins the city to its water — the thing that allows Albuquerque to exist, it’s no exaggeration to say — is…

Read More Read More

Let them swim

Let them swim

Paul Hockenos writes: The mesmerizing scene along the banks of Munich’s lime-green Isar River on a recent summer afternoon made me, an out-of-towner, quiver with envy. Clusters of students, off-duty office workers, families and nude sunbathers were sprawled out on blankets with bottled beer and light meals. Every so often, a swimmer or tuber passed by, carried by the swift current. In 2000, before the climate crisis accelerated, turning summers into slogs punctuated by a slew of heat records, the…

Read More Read More

GOP-touted witness in Hunter Biden laptop probe charged by DOJ in China lobbying scandal

GOP-touted witness in Hunter Biden laptop probe charged by DOJ in China lobbying scandal

The Messenger reports: One of the witnesses trumpeted by House Republicans as a whistle-blower in the Hunter Biden laptop probe acted as an illegal foreign agent for China, federal prosecutors alleged in a criminal indictment unsealed on Monday. Gal Luft, a U.S.-Israeli citizen and co-head of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Maryland-based think tank, also stands accused of arms trafficking and sanctions violations by brokering the sale of Chinese-made weapons and Iranian oil to China, according…

Read More Read More

NATO chief says Turkey has agreed to let Sweden join alliance

NATO chief says Turkey has agreed to let Sweden join alliance

The Wall Street Journal reports: Turkey’s president gave his approval for Sweden to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the alliance’s secretary general said, paving the way for NATO to complete a notable expansion launched in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg said that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had agreed to forward Sweden’s accession to the Turkish parliament “as soon as possible.” Erdogan had blocked Sweden’s NATO bid for more than a year but told…

Read More Read More

Heat is the human rights issue of the 21st century

Heat is the human rights issue of the 21st century

Vann R. Newkirk II writes: Consider the cantaloupe. It’s a decent melon. If you, like me, are the sort who constantly mixes them up, cantaloupes are the orange ones, and honeydews are green. If you, like me, are old enough to remember vacations, you might have had them along with their cousin, watermelon, at a hotel’s breakfast buffet. Those spreads are not as bad as you remember, especially when it’s hot out; add a couple of cold bagels and a…

Read More Read More

Five days after aborted mutiny, Putin met its leaders and offered them employment and combat options

Five days after aborted mutiny, Putin met its leaders and offered them employment and combat options

Reuters reports: President Vladimir Putin has held Kremlin talks with Wagner mercenary group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin and his commanders to discuss the armed mutiny Wagner attempted to mount against the army’s top brass, Putin’s spokesman said on Monday. The meeting was first reported by French newspaper Liberation, which said Prigozhin had met Putin and the head of the National Guard, Viktor Zolotov, and SVR Foreign Intelligence boss Sergei Naryshkin. The meeting, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, was held on…

Read More Read More

Wagner fighters neared Russian nuclear base during revolt

Wagner fighters neared Russian nuclear base during revolt

Reuters reports: As rebellious Wagner forces drove north toward Moscow on June 24, a contingent of military vehicles diverted east on a highway in the direction of a fortified Russian army base that holds nuclear weapons, according to videos posted online and interviews with local residents. Once the Wagner fighters reach more rural regions, the surveillance trail goes cold – about 100 km from the nuclear base, Voronezh-45. Reuters could not confirm what happened next, and Western officials have repeatedly…

Read More Read More