Browsed by
Category: Politics

Conservative activists want library books approved by the supreme conservative they call God

Conservative activists want library books approved by the supreme conservative they call God

NBC News reports: For months, a group of conservative Christians have inundated the staff and board of a public library in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, with complaints about books they didn’t want to see on the shelves. Their list of more than 400 titles predominantly focuses on young adult books with LGBTQ characters, scenes describing sexual activity or invoking the occult. The only problem: None of the books are in the library’s collection. Still, the activists in this town of 2,500…

Read More Read More

White House launches new war on secrecy

White House launches new war on secrecy

Politico reports: The government keeps way too many secrets, the Biden administration asserts. The sprawling spy community — made up of 18 separate intelligence agencies — sees it quite differently. But despite differing worldviews, the White House is quietly gearing up to try to pierce the veil, according to eight government officials and secrecy experts and internal documents. And it is enlisting a leading advocate for greater government transparency in the effort. The National Security Council initiated a review this…

Read More Read More

What’s the dispute between Imran Khan and the Pakistan government about?

What’s the dispute between Imran Khan and the Pakistan government about?

By Samina Yasmeen, The University of Western Australia Tensions between former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan and the current coalition government are coming to a head. Khan made a speech in the northern city of Rawalpindi near Islamabad on Sunday, August 21, seeking a return to office after losing a no-confidence vote in April and being ousted as prime minister. Just hours beforehand, Pakistan’s electronic media regulator prohibited Khan’s rallies from being broadcast live on all satellite TV channels. As…

Read More Read More

Dark money: $1.6 billion donation to Leonard A. Leo’s group bolsters conservatives

Dark money: $1.6 billion donation to Leonard A. Leo’s group bolsters conservatives

The Lever reports: An elderly, ultra-secretive Chicago businessman has given the largest known donation to a political advocacy group in U.S. history — worth $1.6 billion — and the recipient is one of the prime architects of conservatives’ efforts to reshape the American judicial system, including the Supreme Court. Through a series of opaque transactions over the past two years, Barre Seid, a 90-year-old manufacturing magnate, gave the massive sum to a nonprofit run by Leonard Leo, who co-chairs the…

Read More Read More

Gang of eight wants to see Trump Mar-a-Lago search documents

Gang of eight wants to see Trump Mar-a-Lago search documents

Politico reports: The group of congressional leaders charged with reviewing the most sensitive intelligence information has asked the Biden administration for access to the documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s private residence in Florida, according to two people with direct knowledge of the request. The inquiry from the so-called “Gang of 8” comes as lawmakers from both parties seek to learn more about the unprecedented investigation into the former president. And it suggests that Congress is unwilling to be…

Read More Read More

Mike Pence owes the nation an explanation

Mike Pence owes the nation an explanation

George Thomas writes: On January 6, 2021, from a parking garage under the Capitol Visitor Center, then–Vice President Mike Pence ordered the military to defend the Capitol against a violent insurrection. According to a taped deposition of General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pence “issued very explicit, very direct, unambiguous orders” to him and Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller: “Get the military down here. Get the Guard here. Put down this situation.” This is a…

Read More Read More

In the Kremlin-controlled news media, the war is about Western plans to subjugate Russians

In the Kremlin-controlled news media, the war is about Western plans to subjugate Russians

The New York Times reports: “Vesti Nedeli,” the flagship weekly roundup of Kremlin-controlled television news, recently portrayed a long history of predatory Western powers coming to grief when they invaded Russia: Sweden in the 18th century, France in the 19th, Germany in the 20th. Enemies now seek to reverse those losses, said Dmitry Kiselyov, the show’s host, blaming the West for the war that Russia instigated in Ukraine. The goal to finish off Russia is “centuries old and unchanging,” he…

Read More Read More

There is a huge divide among Democrats over how hard to campaign for democracy

There is a huge divide among Democrats over how hard to campaign for democracy

David Siders writes: One Sunday afternoon in November, several of President Jimmy Carter’s former aides and advisers met on Zoom for a private call. Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of State, made an appearance, along with Dick Gephardt, the former House Democratic leader. Les Francis, a former deputy White House chief of staff in the Carter administration, was watching the waiting room for late arrivals while, from his log house in the foothills outside of Denver, Gary Hart, the former…

Read More Read More

Ousted Republican sees party tilting toward fascism

Ousted Republican sees party tilting toward fascism

The Guardian reports: Rusty Bowers is headed for the exit. After 18 years as an Arizona lawmaker, the past four as speaker of the state’s house of representatives, he has been unceremoniously shown the door by his own Republican party. Last month he lost his bid to stay in the Arizona legislature in a primary contest in which his opponent was endorsed by Donald Trump. The rival, David Farnsworth, made an unusual pitch to voters: the 2020 presidential election had…

Read More Read More

Trump treated my family like disposable pawns and tore us apart, says daughter of convicted Jan. 6 rioter

Trump treated my family like disposable pawns and tore us apart, says daughter of convicted Jan. 6 rioter

Insider reports: For Peyton Reffitt, 18, what began as debates around the dinner table ended with her family falling apart and her father receiving the longest jail sentence yet for his involvement in the Trump-inspired Capitol riot. American family life in the age of Trump has taken on a toxic dimension, the young woman from Texas said. Peyton said her family’s disintegration started as angry shouting matches between father and children and was completed when her brother, Jackson Reffitt, then…

Read More Read More

As attacks mount in Crimea, Kremlin faces rising domestic pressures

As attacks mount in Crimea, Kremlin faces rising domestic pressures

The New York Times reports: Nearly six months into the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin still refers to its invasion as a “special military operation” while trying to maintain a sense of normalcy at home. But a series of Ukrainian attacks in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that President Vladimir V. Putin illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014, is puncturing that narrative. And as Ukrainian attacks mount in the strategically and symbolically important territory, the damage is beginning to put…

Read More Read More

Darya Dugina: Daughter of Putin ally killed in Moscow blast

Darya Dugina: Daughter of Putin ally killed in Moscow blast

BBC News reports: The daughter of a close ally of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has been killed in a suspected car bombing. Darya Dugina, 29, died after an explosion on a road outside Moscow, Russia’s investigative committee said. It is thought her father, the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who is known as “Putin’s brain”, may have been the intended target of the attack. Mr Dugin is a prominent ultra-nationalist ideologue who is believed to be close to the Russian president….

Read More Read More

Millions in East Africa face starvation due to drought

Millions in East Africa face starvation due to drought

Yahoo News reports: The World Health Organization warned on Wednesday that millions of people in East Africa face the threat of starvation. Speaking at a media briefing in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that drought, climate change, rising prices and an ongoing civil war in northern Ethiopia are all contributing to worsening food insecurity. Over 50 million people in East Africa will face acute food insecurity this year, a study from late July by the World Food Programme…

Read More Read More

China plans cloud seeding to protect grain crop from drought

China plans cloud seeding to protect grain crop from drought

The Associated Press reports: China says it will try to protect its grain harvest from record-setting drought by using chemicals to generate rain, while factories in the southwest waited Sunday to see whether they would be shut down for another week due to shortages of water to generate hydropower. The hottest, driest summer since the government began recording rainfall and temperature 61 years ago has wilted crops and left reservoirs at half their normal water level. Factories in Sichuan province…

Read More Read More

Why the Trump classified-files scandal is so dangerous

Why the Trump classified-files scandal is so dangerous

Quinta Jurecic writes: The iron law of scandals involving Donald Trump is that they will always be stupid, and there will always be more of them. Trump scandals—the Russia investigation; Trump’s first impeachment, over his efforts to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the insurrection on January 6—have something else in common: All these catastrophes result from Trump’s refusal to divorce the office of the presidency and the good of the country from his personal desires. Now Trump’s apparent squirreling away…

Read More Read More

The chaos Trump created inside the White House

The chaos Trump created inside the White House

The New York Times reports: Four days before the end of the Trump presidency, a White House aide peered into the Oval Office and was startled, if not exactly surprised, to see all of the president’s personal photos still arrayed behind the Resolute Desk as if nothing had changed — guaranteeing the final hours would be a frantic dash mirroring the prior four years. In the area known as the outer Oval Office, boxes had been brought in to pack…

Read More Read More