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Category: Politics

Israel and Gaza keep up their precarious dance

Israel and Gaza keep up their precarious dance

Neri Zilber reports: One week before the latest round of fighting over the weekend between Israel and the Gaza-based militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a senior Israeli security official had some prescient words. Unlike Hamas, which is the bigger and stronger group that actually rules Gaza, the PIJ “was an outlier … with no governing responsibility, which would require special treatment” if it chose to escalate, he told me. That “special treatment” came in the form of a three-day…

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What the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago could mean for Trump

What the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago could mean for Trump

Isaac Chotiner writes: On Monday, F.B.I. agents searched the Florida home of former President Donald Trump, possibly commencing a new phase in the legal scrutiny that he has faced since leaving office. According to the Times, the search concerned classified material that Trump removed from the White House and took to Mar-a-Lago. What remains unclear is whether they found any information related to attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election. To understand…

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China’s Taiwan aggression has backfired in Tokyo

China’s Taiwan aggression has backfired in Tokyo

William Sposato writes: China’s four days of military exercises encircling Taiwan in response to a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week has clear ramifications for Japan. The show of military muscle just 70 miles from Japanese territory and the firing of ballistic missiles into waters controlled by Japan were clearly meant as a warning that the country risks being dragged into any future conflict in the region. While China’s motives in indirectly targeting Japan are not known,…

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Bolsonaro is justifiably afraid of going to prison

Bolsonaro is justifiably afraid of going to prison

Vanessa Barbara writes: “I’m letting the scoundrels know,” President Jair Bolsonaro told supporters last year, “I’ll never be imprisoned!” He was shouting. But then, Mr. Bolsonaro tends to become animated when talking about the prospect of prison. “By God above,” he declared to an audience of businesspeople in May, “I’ll never be arrested.” As he spends “more than half” of his time dealing with lawsuits, he surely feels well armed against arrest. But there’s desperation in his defiance. The fate…

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How Sen. Kyrsten Sinema serves Wall Street

How Sen. Kyrsten Sinema serves Wall Street

CNBC reports: Long before Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., held up a massive spending bill that promised to create jobs, invest in clean energy and tax the rich — delivering on some of President Joe Biden’s and the Democratic party’s top campaign promises — those working at Wall Street investment firms had donated millions to the freshman senator’s campaign. One of her main objections was the bill’s so-called carried interest tax provision — which would have closed an arcane loophole in…

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Five U.S. states will decide if the 2024 election can be stolen

Five U.S. states will decide if the 2024 election can be stolen

Bloomberg reports: Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden failed, but his loyalists have never stopped trying to turn the US election system into one that would return him to the White House in 2024—fairly or otherwise. In the last two years, Republicans have sought to remove state officials who wouldn’t manufacture votes and falsely declare him the winner. They changed the way elections are run in response to his conspiracy theories. Most importantly, they’ve…

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Maps in four states were ruled illegal gerrymanders — but they’ll still be used in November

Maps in four states were ruled illegal gerrymanders — but they’ll still be used in November

The New York Times reports: Since January, judges in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Ohio have found that Republican legislators illegally drew those states’ congressional maps along racial or partisan lines, or that a trial very likely would conclude that they did. In years past, judges who have reached similar findings have ordered new maps, or had an expert draw them, to ensure that coming elections were fair. But a shift in election law philosophy at the Supreme Court, combined with…

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Steve Bannon wants to destroy U.S. society as we know it

Steve Bannon wants to destroy U.S. society as we know it

Benjamin R. Teitelbaum writes: Late in the evening on Oct. 31, 2020, just days before the U.S. presidential election, Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, sat with a group of associates in his posh Washington, D.C. townhouse. Violence beckoned for the nation, he told them. Bannon claimed that, regardless of the tally, Trump was planning to declare victory shortly after polls closed on Nov. 4. They all knew that the first votes counted would be those cast…

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Experts: Senate-passed bill will yield myriad climate benefits

Experts: Senate-passed bill will yield myriad climate benefits

Yale Climate Connections reports: The U.S. Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act by a single vote on Sunday, August 7. The bill, headed to the House of Representatives within days, includes by far the largest and most consequential measures to reduce domestic climate pollution in the nation’s history, with a $386 billion clean energy investment, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Based on analyses by several energy modeling groups, it would reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by close to one-billion…

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Stop tiptoeing around Russia

Stop tiptoeing around Russia

Alexander Vindman writes: For the last three decades, the United States has bent over backward to acknowledge Russia’s security concerns and allay its anxieties. The United States has done so at the expense of relations with more willing partners in Eastern Europe—Ukraine in particular. Instead of supporting the early stirrings of Ukrainian independence in 1991, for example, Washington sought to preserve the failing Soviet Union out of misplaced fear that it might collapse into civil war. And instead of imposing…

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Podcast: Decoding Aleksandr Ionov’s influence operation with Thomas Rid and Brandon Van Grack

Podcast: Decoding Aleksandr Ionov’s influence operation with Thomas Rid and Brandon Van Grack

  Lawfare: On July 29, the Justice Department announced the indictment of Aleksandr Ionov, a Russian national and president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia. Ionov is charged with “conspiring to have U.S. citizens act as illegal agents of the Russian government”—and the Justice Department alleges that he was essentially running a years-long influence operation within the United States on behalf of the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency. The indictment is a wild ride, with a number of Americans listed…

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Fight or surrender: Taiwan’s generational divide on China’s threats

Fight or surrender: Taiwan’s generational divide on China’s threats

The New York Times reports: The San Jiao Fort cafe on Kinmen Island may well be the best place in Taiwan to watch for the threat of invasion by China. Boasting a direct view of the Chinese city of Xiamen just six miles away, it is built atop an old military bunker, festooned with camouflage netting, and serves hot and cold beverages. With Chinese warships now lingering off Taiwan’s coast and missiles falling into its seas, the divided loyalties of…

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History’s greatest obstacle to climate progress has finally fallen

History’s greatest obstacle to climate progress has finally fallen

Robinson Meyer writes: Climate change was born as a modern political issue in the United States Senate. On a hot June day in 1988, a senior NASA scientist warned a Senate committee that global warming, which was previously mooted only as a hypothesis, was not only real but was already underway. “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here,” James Hansen said. An auspicious start, and…

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Sanctions are working — whatever Putin claims

Sanctions are working — whatever Putin claims

Owen Matthews writes: Don’t believe Vladimir Putin’s hype. The Russian economy is not OK. With western sanctions jeopardising up to 40 per cent of the country’s GDP, Putin’s assurances of an economic pivot to the East are a sham. And his weaponising of gas supplies to Europe is the financial equivalent of strapping on a suicide vest. That, roughly, is the message of a major new study published last week by the Yale School of Management about the impact of…

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Red America should love green energy spending

Red America should love green energy spending

Liam Denning and Jeff Davies write: The standard political color code for renewable energy holds that green mixes with blue but clashes with red. A detailed look at local realities says otherwise. Enersection, a new company based in Houston specializing in data-driven insights on the US energy system, has presented them in compelling charts and other graphics (you can access its site here). Bloomberg Opinion partnered with co-founder Jeff Davies to take a deep dive into the energy and emissions…

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The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy

The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy

Caitlin Dickerson writes: During the year and a half in which the U.S. government separated thousands of children from their parents, the Trump administration’s explanations for what was happening were deeply confusing, and on many occasions—it was clear even then—patently untrue. I’m one of the many reporters who covered this story in real time. Despite the flurry of work that we produced to fill the void of information, we knew that the full truth about how our government had reached…

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