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Category: Politics

Russia blocks UN nuclear treaty agreement over Zaporizhzhia clause

Russia blocks UN nuclear treaty agreement over Zaporizhzhia clause

The Guardian reports: Russia has blocked an agreement at the United Nations that was aimed at bolstering the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) because Moscow objected to a clause about control over the Zaporizhzhia power plant in Ukraine. The failure to agree to a joint statement after four weeks of debate and negotiation among 151 countries at the UN in New York is the latest blow to hopes of maintaining an arms control regime and keeping a lid on a rekindled…

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Probing the mystery of Japan’s light Covid toll

Probing the mystery of Japan’s light Covid toll

Neil Seeman writes: In light of Japan’s decision last week to waive pre-departure COVID-19 tests for vaccinated inbound travelers, it is worthwhile to consider that its strong performance over the first two years of the pandemic may have had less to do with policy than with culture. In a study published this summer in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Dr. Fahad Razak and colleagues at the University of Toronto examined COVID-19 outcomes in Canada, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the…

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The redacted affidavit shows Trump’s actions posed a clear risk to our national security

The redacted affidavit shows Trump’s actions posed a clear risk to our national security

Andrew Weissmann writes: Trump knows the answers to the most important unanswered questions: What material did Mr. Trump take from the White House, why did he take it, what had he done with it and what was he planning to do with it? There is nothing that prevented Mr. Trump for over a year from publicly answering those questions; he surely has not remained silent because the answers are exculpatory. Above all, the newly released redacted affidavit (and an accompanying…

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Inside Trump’s public bravado and private resistance over Mar-a-Lago documents

Inside Trump’s public bravado and private resistance over Mar-a-Lago documents

CNN reports: Not long after the National Archives acknowledged in February that it had retrieved 15 boxes of presidential records from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, Trump began fielding calls from Tom Fitton, a prominent conservative activist. Fitton, the longtime head of the legal activist group Judicial Watch, had a simple message for Trump — it was a mistake to give the records to the Archives, and his team should never have let the Archives “strong-arm” him…

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A strong Ukraine is the best solution to Europe’s Russia problem

A strong Ukraine is the best solution to Europe’s Russia problem

Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s Minister of Defense, writes: August 24 was Ukrainian Independence Day. For the first time in three decades since Ukraine regained its independence, there was a real danger this year that the holiday would not take place at all. Exactly six months earlier on February 24, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the country with the aim of crushing Ukrainian statehood and extinguishing the Ukrainian nation. The genocidal war unleashed by Vladimir Putin in early 2022 is unparalleled…

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A Putin critic fell from a building in Washington. Was it really a suicide?

A Putin critic fell from a building in Washington. Was it really a suicide?

Michael Schaffer writes: The mysterious death last week of a prominent critic of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in Washington’s West End neighborhood is drawing fury from some of the Kremlin’s best-known global detractors — but scant notice in Washington, where police say they don’t suspect foul play was behind Dan Rapoport’s fall from a luxury apartment building on the night of Aug. 14. “I think the circumstances of his death are extremely suspicious,” says Bill Browder, the formerly Moscow-based…

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California’s gas car ban will change how everyone drives

California’s gas car ban will change how everyone drives

Vox reports: California, the state that buys the most cars and trucks in the United States, will ban the sale of fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2035. This represents the largest government move against gasoline and diesel to date, with the potential to ripple throughout the country and the global auto industry. The California Air Resources Board, which regulates pollution in the state, voted unanimously on Thursday to approve a proposal that will require 100 percent of all cars sold in…

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Has the fight against antisemitism lost its way?

Has the fight against antisemitism lost its way?

Peter Beinart writes: Over the past 18 months, America’s most prominent Jewish organizations have done something extraordinary. They have accused the world’s leading human rights organizations of promoting hatred of Jews. Last April, after Human Rights Watch issued a report accusing Israel of “the crimes of apartheid and persecution,” the American Jewish Committee claimed that the report’s arguments “sometimes border on antisemitism.” In January, after Amnesty International issued its own study alleging that Israel practiced apartheid, the Anti-Defamation League predicted…

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Putin’s vision of the future rooted in the past

Putin’s vision of the future rooted in the past

Fiona Hill and Angela Stent write: Vladimir Putin is determined to shape the future to look like his version of the past. Russia’s president invaded Ukraine not because he felt threatened by NATO expansion or by Western “provocations.” He ordered his “special military operation” because he believes that it is Russia’s divine right to rule Ukraine, to wipe out the country’s national identity, and to integrate its people into a Greater Russia. He laid out this mission in a 5,000-word…

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How fracking billionaires, Ben Shapiro, and PragerU built a climate crisis-denial empire

How fracking billionaires, Ben Shapiro, and PragerU built a climate crisis-denial empire

Vice News reports: It was the height of summer and Pastor Farris Wilks was warning that if we didn’t all stop sinning, God was going to scorch the Earth and melt the polar ice caps. “We’re going to reap what we have sown, and what we have sown has not been good,” Wilks explained in his self-assured Texas drawl. “Think of all the murder that has happened in this country… all the babies that have been murdered… sexual perversion of…

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Growing evidence against a Republican wave

Growing evidence against a Republican wave

The New York Times reports: At the beginning of this year’s midterm campaign, analysts and political operatives had every reason to expect a strong Republican showing this November. President Biden’s approval rating was in the low 40s, and the president’s party has a long history of struggling in midterm elections. But as the start of the general election campaign nears, it’s becoming increasingly hard to find any concrete signs of Republican strength. Tuesday’s strong Democratic showing in a special congressional…

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J.D. Vance appeared with podcaster who once said ‘feminists need rape’

J.D. Vance appeared with podcaster who once said ‘feminists need rape’

Mother Jones reports: J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio, is typically described as the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, a venture capitalist, and a Never Trumper who came to embrace Donald Trump. But that snapshot doesn’t do justice to Vance, a reactionary extremist who yearns to destroy what he calls the “American leadership class” and to implement an extensive and possibly illegal program to cleanse US society of liberal influence. He compares this project to the de-Nazification…

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U.S. corporate profits soar with margins at widest since 1950

U.S. corporate profits soar with margins at widest since 1950

Bloomberg reports: A measure of US profit margins has reached its widest since 1950, suggesting that the prices charged by businesses are outpacing their increased costs for production and labor. After-tax profits as a share of gross value added for non-financial corporations, a measure of aggregate profit margins, improved in the second quarter to 15.5% — the most since 1950 — from 14% in the first quarter, according to Commerce Department figures published Thursday. The data show that companies overall…

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Out of office, Trump’s ‘ready, fire, aim’ reflex compounds his legal peril

Out of office, Trump’s ‘ready, fire, aim’ reflex compounds his legal peril

The New York Times reports: On Tuesday, a Florida judge informed two lawyers representing former President Donald J. Trump, neither of them licensed in the state, that they had bungled routine paperwork to take part in a suit filed following the F.B.I.’s search this month of Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and private club. “A sample motion can be found on the Court’s website,” the judge instructed them in her order. Mr. Trump has projected his usual bravado, and raised millions…

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Trump tells his lawyers: Get ‘my’ top secret documents back

Trump tells his lawyers: Get ‘my’ top secret documents back

Rolling Stone reports: In the weeks after the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid, former President Donald Trump repeatedly made a simple-sounding but extraordinary ask: he wanted his lawyers to get “my documents” back from federal law enforcement. Trump wasn’t merely referring to the alleged trove of attorney-client material that he insists was scooped up by the feds during the raid, two people familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone. The ex-president has been demanding that his team find a way to recover…

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Canceling student debt could help close the wealth gap between white and Black Americans

Canceling student debt could help close the wealth gap between white and Black Americans

Santul Nerkar wrote in May: America’s racial wealth gap is well-documented, even if many continue to underestimate its existence. Black Americans’ net worth is, on average, less than 15 percent of white Americans’, the legacy of centuries of systemic anti-Black racism. Moreover, both political parties have failed time and again to address the inequities facing Black Americans. But what if I told you that an effective way to start closing this gap was within reach? According to the scholars I…

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