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Category: Politics

How waste food can reduce our reliance on natural gas

How waste food can reduce our reliance on natural gas

Future Planet reports: At a large industrial facility not far south-west of Ireland’s capital Dublin, one man says old food waste and pig manure can help Europe fight climate change – and reduce its reliance on Russia for energy. Billy Costello explains that decaying organic matter releases biogas, which firms like Green Generation, the one he directs, can collect and purify to produce methane, or biomethane as it’s called when it comes from such sources. It’s an opportunity to find…

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Elon Musk’s vision for the internet is dangerous nonsense

Elon Musk’s vision for the internet is dangerous nonsense

Robert Reich writes: The Russian people know little about Putin’s war on Ukraine because Putin has blocked their access to the truth, substituting propaganda and lies. Years ago, pundits assumed the internet would open a new era of democracy, giving everyone access to the truth. But dictators like Putin and demagogues like Trump have demonstrated how naive that assumption was. At least the US responded to Trump’s lies. Trump had 88 million Twitter followers before Twitter took him off its…

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California pushing for 32-hour workweek at larger companies as part of pandemic-driven shift

California pushing for 32-hour workweek at larger companies as part of pandemic-driven shift

USA Today reports: California is trying to become the first state in the nation to make a four-day workweek a state law. The state introduced a bill that would make the official workweek 32 hours and no longer 40 hours for companies with 500 employees or more, giving higher raises and time-and-a-half pay to any worker who surpasses that cutoff. A typical workday would remain eight hours. The bill – AB 2932 – also states that 12 hours past the…

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Putin’s war shows autocracies and fossil fuels go hand in hand. Here’s how we can tackle both

Putin’s war shows autocracies and fossil fuels go hand in hand. Here’s how we can tackle both

Bill McKibben writes: At first glance, last autumn’s Glasgow climate summit looked a lot like its 25 predecessors. It had: A conference hall the size of an aircraft carrier stuffed with displays from problematic parties (the Saudis, for example, with a giant pavilion saluting their efforts at promoting a “circular carbon economy agenda”). Squadrons of delegates rushing constantly to mysterious sessions (“Showcasing achievements of TBTTP and Protected Areas Initiative of GoP”) while actual negotiations took place in a few back…

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In Russia’s war on Ukraine, historians and history are on the front lines

In Russia’s war on Ukraine, historians and history are on the front lines

RFE/RL reports: Ukrainian military intelligence reported on March 24 that Russian occupying troops in the country were confiscating books and other materials that the Russian government has deemed “extremist” — primarily books about Ukraine’s Maidan revolution, the war against Russia-backed separatists in parts of eastern Ukraine, and studies of Ukraine’s struggle for independence. “The occupiers have a whole list of names that cannot be mentioned [in the titles of books],” the service wrote, listing such figures as 17th-century Cossack leader…

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‘Trump pulling a Putin’

‘Trump pulling a Putin’

The New York Times reports: Fiona Hill vividly recalls the first time she stepped into the Oval Office to discuss the thorny subject of Ukraine with the president. It was February of 2008, the last year of George W. Bush’s administration. Hill, then the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia for the National Intelligence Council, was summoned for a strategy session on the upcoming NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania. Among the matters up for discussion was the possibility of…

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Potential payback: Before giving billions to Jared Kushner, Saudi investment fund had major doubts

Potential payback: Before giving billions to Jared Kushner, Saudi investment fund had major doubts

The New York Times reports: Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince, a close ally during the Trump administration, despite objections from the fund’s advisers about the merits of the deal. A panel that screens investments for the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund cited concerns about the proposed deal with Mr. Kushner’s newly formed private equity firm, Affinity Partners, previously undisclosed documents show. Those…

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How Joe Manchin knifed the Democrats — and bailed on saving democracy

How Joe Manchin knifed the Democrats — and bailed on saving democracy

Andy Kroll reports: “Giddy” is not a word people use to describe Jon Tester. The towering senior U.S. senator from Montana is blunt and pragmatic. In the halls of Congress, he’s one of the last surviving rural Democrats. When he’s not in Washington, D.C., Tester runs a dirt farm in Montana that’s been in his family for three generations. A dirt-farming rural Democrat knows better than to overhype. So it came as a surprise when, one day this winter, Tester…

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Hundreds of thousands of professionals are fleeing Putin’s Russia

Hundreds of thousands of professionals are fleeing Putin’s Russia

The Wall Street Journal reports: Hundreds of thousands of professional workers, many of them young, have left Russia since its invasion of Ukraine, accelerating an exodus of business talent and further threatening an economy targeted by Western sanctions. Those leaving the country include tech workers, scientists, bankers and doctors, according to surveys, economists and interviews with emigrants. They are departing for countries including Georgia, Armenia and Turkey. More are expected to follow. A mid-March survey by OK Russians, a nonprofit…

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Americans need to cure what ails our democracy, getting rid of our incipient Russification

Americans need to cure what ails our democracy, getting rid of our incipient Russification

George Packer writes: Ukraine’s survival requires the sustained support of its most important ally, the United States. Time will not be on Ukraine’s side. If the war drags on for months, it will grow murkier to Americans watching at a distance; its moral clarity will start to blur. Ukrainians’ justifiable rage at all things Russian will produce images that foreigners will find less easy to love than the picture of a string quintet performing in the ruins of a Kharkiv…

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Daily on-the-ground evidence makes it more straightforward to indict Vladimir Putin with war crimes

Daily on-the-ground evidence makes it more straightforward to indict Vladimir Putin with war crimes

The Guardian reports: No war crimes case is easy, but the task of indicting Vladimir Putin at the International Criminal Court (ICC) appears to be straightforward. There are two key elements necessary to charge a commander-in-chief with war crimes. First are the crimes themselves. Second, the chain-of-command to the top. In the case of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, both seem clear. The horrors of Bucha and a slew of towns north of Kyiv are gruesome and widespread. They are also, crucially,…

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War in Ukraine is testing some American evangelicals’ support for Putin as a leader of conservative values

War in Ukraine is testing some American evangelicals’ support for Putin as a leader of conservative values

Vladimir Putin lights a candle as he attends an Orthodox Church service in 2011. AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, pool By Melani McAlister, George Washington University In February 2022, evangelical leader Franklin Graham called on his followers to pray for Vladimir Putin. His tweet acknowledged that it might seem a “strange request” given that Russia was clearly about to invade Ukraine. But Graham asked that believers “pray that God would work in his heart so that war could be avoided at all…

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The Democratic Party has rarely, if ever, been on such shaky ground with young voters

The Democratic Party has rarely, if ever, been on such shaky ground with young voters

Politico reports: Democratic senators had two charts waiting at their chairs when they arrived at a caucus luncheon in February. They showed youth participation in national elections since the 1980s, with two impossible-to-miss spikes: 2018 and 2020, when huge turnout among 18- to 30-year-olds propelled Democrats into power in Washington. Those graphs led off pollster John Della Volpe’s myth-busting tour on young people and politics across the top levels of the Democratic Party. Young people do vote, he told the…

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Spurred by Putin, Russians turn on one another over the war on Ukraine

Spurred by Putin, Russians turn on one another over the war on Ukraine

The New York Times reports: Marina Dubrova, an English teacher on the Russian island of Sakhalin in the Pacific, showed an uplifting YouTube video to her eighth-grade class last month in which children, in Russian and Ukrainian, sing about a “world without war.” After she played it, a group of girls stayed behind during recess and quizzed her on her views. “Ukraine is a separate country, a separate one,” Ms. Dubrova, 57, told them. “No longer,” one of the girls…

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Are the sanctions against Russia working or not?

Are the sanctions against Russia working or not?

Kevin T. Dugan writes: Six weeks after the U.S. and the G7 countries weaponized the global financial system to impose their harshest-ever sanctions on Russia, the fissures are becoming apparent. The ruble strengthened to its prewar value against the dollar by Thursday, a sign that the capital controls set by the country’s central bank were working. As the currency continued its rise on Friday, the Central Bank of Russia surprised the world by cutting its interest rates 3 percentage points…

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