Browsed by
Category: Politics

Global dismay as Supreme Court ruling leaves Biden’s climate policy in tatters

Global dismay as Supreme Court ruling leaves Biden’s climate policy in tatters

The Guardian reports: Joe Biden’s election triggered a global surge in optimism that the climate crisis would, finally, be decisively confronted. But the US supreme court’s decision last week to curtail America’s ability to cut planet-heating emissions has proved the latest blow to a faltering effort by Biden on climate that is now in danger of becoming largely moribund. The supreme court’s ruling that the US government could not use its existing powers to phase out coal-fired power generation without…

Read More Read More

Zero-emissions natural gas may be possible

Zero-emissions natural gas may be possible

Mark Harris writes: The fossil fuel industry has long touted natural gas as a “bridge fuel”—abundant and reliable, cleaner than coal, and an essential stop-gap while the world transitions to renewable power. Now it is suggesting that gas can be a zero emissions power source all by itself. Start-up NET Power has developed technology that differs from traditional power stations. It burns natural gas with oxygen instead of air and drives a turbine with high pressure carbon dioxide instead of…

Read More Read More

Shadow 2024 race: Newsom vs. DeSantis

Shadow 2024 race: Newsom vs. DeSantis

Politico reports: Forget Donald Trump versus Joe Biden. The biggest prelude to 2024 might just be the escalating back-and-forth between Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis. The governors for California and Florida have hurled insults about each other’s leadership and policies during most of the Covid-19 pandemic. But now Newsom has ratcheted up the conflict by taking almost daily pot-shots at his Republican foils such as DeSantis and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Most recently, Newsom dropped more than $100,000 on…

Read More Read More

Putin’s war of choice was never about NATO

Putin’s war of choice was never about NATO

Natalia Antonova writes: As NATO met in Madrid last week, conspiracy theories about its role in Ukraine spread fast in Russian media. More respected theorists such as John Mearsheimer, meanwhile, still reiterate their claim that in making war, Russia was merely reacting to the West. Similar arguments have been put forth by other prominent thinkers, including Noam Chomsky. There’s just one problem with this theory. At an event in June, leaning back casually in his chair, Russian President Vladimir Putin…

Read More Read More

Russian nationalism never went away

Russian nationalism never went away

Joy Neumeyer writes: On 19 November 1990, Boris Yeltsin gave a speech in Kiev to announce that, after more than 300 years of rule by the Russian tsars and the Soviet ‘totalitarian regime’ in Moscow, Ukraine was free at last. Russia, he said, did not want any special role in dictating Ukraine’s future, nor did it aim to be at the centre of any future empire. Five months earlier, in June 1990, inspired by independence movements in the Baltics and…

Read More Read More

Russia orders Jewish Agency to stop all operations in country

Russia orders Jewish Agency to stop all operations in country

The Jerusalem Post reports: The order comes amid growing tension between Israel and Russia over Jerusalem’s stance on the war in Ukraine and its policy of standing with Kyiv and its embattled leader, Volodymyr Zelensky. On Monday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry called strikes on Syria that have been blamed on Israel unacceptable, and it demanded an unconditional cessation of the attacks. An order forcing the Jewish Agency to stop its work in Russia is dramatic and could directly undermine the ability…

Read More Read More

Christian nationalists are excited about what comes next

Christian nationalists are excited about what comes next

Katherine Stewart writes: The shape of the Christian nationalist movement in the post-Roe future is coming into view, and it should terrify anyone concerned for the future of constitutional democracy. The Supreme Court’s decision to rescind the reproductive rights that American women have enjoyed over the past half-century will not lead America’s homegrown religious authoritarians to retire from the culture wars and enjoy a sweet moment of triumph. On the contrary, movement leaders are already preparing for a new and…

Read More Read More

The Supreme Court is poised to cut the heart out of majority rule

The Supreme Court is poised to cut the heart out of majority rule

Laurence H. Tribe and Dennis Aftergut write: The Supreme Court’s extremist justices are aiming their next dagger at the heart of the entire democratic enterprise: voters’ right to pick leaders of their choice. On Thursday, the court announced that it will hear Moore vs. Harper, a North Carolina case involving gerrymandered congressional district maps drawn by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature. Those maps would probably give Republicans control of 11 of 14 congressional districts in the state. North Carolina’s Supreme Court…

Read More Read More

After string of Supreme Court setbacks, Democrats wonder whether Biden White House is capable of urgency moment demands

After string of Supreme Court setbacks, Democrats wonder whether Biden White House is capable of urgency moment demands

CNN reports: Debra Messing was fed up. The former “Will & Grace” star was among dozens of celebrity Democratic supporters and activists who joined a call with White House aides last Monday to discuss the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. The mood was fatalistic, according to three people on the call, which was also co-organized by the advocacy group Build Back Better Together. Messing said she’d gotten Joe Biden elected and wanted to know why she was being asked…

Read More Read More

Women’s rights have suffered a grim setback. But history is still on our side

Women’s rights have suffered a grim setback. But history is still on our side

Rebecca Solnit writes: As it happened, I was in Edinburgh the day Roe v Wade was overturned, and the next day I caught a train back to London and did what I usually do when I get anywhere near King’s Cross station. I took the short walk to the old St Pancras churchyard to visit the tombstone of the great feminist ancestor Mary Wollstonecraft, author of that first great feminist manifesto A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. To be…

Read More Read More

Bill McKibben: ‘Clean Air Act can’t really be used to protect clean air now

Bill McKibben: ‘Clean Air Act can’t really be used to protect clean air now

  After a bitter 50-year fight over climate change policy, the Supreme Court delivered another win to the right wing on Thursday. In a 6-3 ruling, the Court decided that the Environmental Protection Agency does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions for existing power plants. “The Clean Air Act can’t really be used to protect clean air now,” says leading environmentalist, Bill McKibben. He says fossil fuel tycoons have successfully lobbied against decades of progress and shifting…

Read More Read More

Alexander Vindman: ‘How we treat refugees is one of the greatest tests of our American experiment.’

Alexander Vindman: ‘How we treat refugees is one of the greatest tests of our American experiment.’

“Today, America is faced with yet another opportunity to live up to its creed,” says Alexander Vindman. “How we treat refugees is one of the greatest tests of our American experiment.” https://t.co/1IdskgEiqH pic.twitter.com/4RWW6fo5TP — New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) July 4, 2022

Google allowed a sanctioned Russian advertising company to harvest user data for months

Google allowed a sanctioned Russian advertising company to harvest user data for months

By Craig Silverman, ProPublica, July 1, 2022 The day after Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner sent a letter to Google warning it to be on alert for “exploitation of your platform by Russia and Russian-linked entities,” and calling on the company to audit its advertising business’s compliance with economic sanctions. But as recently as June 23, Google was sharing potentially sensitive user data with a sanctioned Russian ad tech company owned by Russia’s largest…

Read More Read More

Fox and other rightwing networks confront billion-dollar lawsuits over election fraud claims

Fox and other rightwing networks confront billion-dollar lawsuits over election fraud claims

The Guardian reports: In the months following the 2020 US presidential election, rightwing TV news in America was a wild west, an apparently lawless free-for-all where conspiracy theories about voting machines, ballot-stuffed suitcases and dead Venezuelan leaders were repeated to viewers around the clock. There seemed to be little consequence for peddling the most outrageous ideas on primetime. But now, unfortunately for Fox News, One America News Network (OAN), and Newsmax, it turns out that this brave, new world wasn’t…

Read More Read More

How the Russian media spread false claims about Nazis in Ukraine

How the Russian media spread false claims about Nazis in Ukraine

The New York Times reports: In the months since President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia called the invasion of Ukraine a “denazification” mission, the lie that the government and culture of Ukraine are filled with dangerous “Nazis” has become a central theme of Kremlin propaganda about the war. A data set of nearly eight million articles about Ukraine collected from more than 8,000 Russian websites since 2014 shows that references to Nazism were relatively flat for eight years and then…

Read More Read More

Most Russians are unaware of the horrendous war crimes being committed by Putin’s forces in Ukraine

Most Russians are unaware of the horrendous war crimes being committed by Putin’s forces in Ukraine

Vladimir Kara-Murza writes: At the hearing in early June — the one that extended my arrest through mid-August — the court honored the prosecution’s request to ban any spectators, including journalists and diplomats, from the room. It was a scene reminiscent of the dissident trials of the Soviet era. Even if the outcome is predetermined, the last thing the Kremlin needs is to have the uncomfortable truth about its bloody war in Ukraine publicly voiced in a courtroom in downtown…

Read More Read More