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Category: Politics

Biden met with historians who warned him about threats to democracy

Biden met with historians who warned him about threats to democracy

Insider reports: President Joe Biden privately met with a group of historians at the White House last week who warned him about ongoing threats to democracy, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. Sources familiar with the August 4 meeting, which was said to have lasted nearly two hours, told the outlet the experts described the current moment as among the most dangerous to democracy in modern history. The people in the meeting were said to have included the Princeton University history…

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Influencers are whitewashing Syria’s regime, with help from sponsors

Influencers are whitewashing Syria’s regime, with help from sponsors

Sophie Fullerton writes: Last November, around the same time the Irish travel vlogger Janet Newenham was filming videos of her strolls through Damascus and Aleppo, five members of a family, including three children, were killed in a Russian airstrike in northwest Syria. But none of Newenham’s 170,000 YouTube subscribers would have learned that from her upbeat dispatches — in her videos, Syria is not a country at war. After a scorched-earth war — supported by Iranian forces, sectarian militias and…

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Why the Trump search warrant is nothing like Hillary’s emails

Why the Trump search warrant is nothing like Hillary’s emails

Politico reports: The Justice Department official who oversaw the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified records says there’s simply no comparing the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence to the case against the former secretary of State. “People sling these cases around to suit their political agenda but every case has to stand on its own circumstances,” said David Laufman, who led the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section until 2018 and is now a partner at the firm Wiggin and…

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An informer told the FBI what docs Trump was hiding, and where

An informer told the FBI what docs Trump was hiding, and where

William M Arkin reports: The raid on Mar-a-Lago was based largely on information from an FBI confidential human source, one who was able to identify what classified documents former President Trump was still hiding and even the location of those documents, two senior government officials told Newsweek. The officials, who have direct knowledge of the FBI’s deliberations and were granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters, said the raid of Donald Trump’s Florida residence was deliberately timed to occur…

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Ukraine’s long-awaited southern counteroffensive begins with a bang in Crimea

Ukraine’s long-awaited southern counteroffensive begins with a bang in Crimea

Politico reports: Blasts that rocked a Russian military airfield in forcibly annexed Crimea signal the start of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south and a critical new phase of the war that could shape its ultimate outcome, two Ukrainian officials told POLITICO. The series of explosions Tuesday sent huge fireballs and mushroom clouds of black smoke into the sky, scattering terrified Russian vacationers who were seen in videos shared on social media scrambling for safety on a beach and fleeing by…

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Europe on course to suffer worst drought in 500 years

Europe on course to suffer worst drought in 500 years

The Daily Mail reports: Germany’s most-important river is running dry as Europe suffers through a drought that is on course to become its worst in 500 years, with terrifying wildfires burning once again in France. Water levels in the Rhine – which carries 80 per cent of all goods transported by water in Germany, from its industrial heartlands to Dutch ports – are now so low that it could become impassable to barges later this week, threatening vital supplies of…

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Carbon-reduction plans rely on technology that doesn’t exist

Carbon-reduction plans rely on technology that doesn’t exist

Naomi Oreskes writes: At last year’s Glasgow COP26 meetings on the climate crisis, U.S. envoy and former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry stated that solutions to the climate crisis will involve “technologies that we don’t yet have” but are supposedly on the way. Kerry’s optimism comes directly from scientists. You can read about these beliefs in the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Integrated Assessment Models, created by researchers. These models present pathways to carbon reductions that may…

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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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