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Category: Politics

The $30 billion woman: Megadonor Miriam Adelson leaps back into politics

The $30 billion woman: Megadonor Miriam Adelson leaps back into politics

Politico reports: Republican megadonor Miriam Adelson — the widow of casino mogul and longtime GOP kingmaker Sheldon Adelson — is staging a return to politics, positioning herself to be a force in the 2022 midterms and beyond. Adelson, who with her husband formed the Republican Party’s most powerful donor couple for the last decade, quietly held meetings in her Las Vegas home with a select group of GOP leaders and potential 2024 presidential candidates in the last few days. It…

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UK’s Brexit losses more than 178 times bigger than trade deal gains

UK’s Brexit losses more than 178 times bigger than trade deal gains

The Independent reports: All of Boris Johnson’s new post-Brexit trade deals put together will have an economic benefit of just £3 to £7 per person over the next 15 years, according to the government’s own figures. The tiny economic boost – amounting to just 0.01 to 0.02 per cent of GDP, and less than 50p per person a year – is dwarfed by the economic hit from leaving the EU, which the government estimates at 4 per cent of GDP…

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What collective narcissism does to society

What collective narcissism does to society

Scott Barry Kaufman writes: In 2005, the psychologist Agnieszka Golec de Zavala was researching extremist groups, trying to understand what leads people to commit acts of terrorist violence. She began to notice something that looked a lot like what the 20th-century scholars Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm had referred to as “group narcissism”: Golec de Zavala defined it to me as “a belief that the exaggerated greatness of one’s group is not sufficiently recognized by others,” in which that thirst…

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Landmark agreements at COP26 put nails in coal’s coffin

Landmark agreements at COP26 put nails in coal’s coffin

Tina Gerhardt writes: Global emissions from fossil fuels have now rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. So it’s particularly significant that on Wednesday, at the UN climate conference COP26 in Glasgow, at least 25 countries agreed to end public subsidies for overseas oil and gas development and extraction starting at the end of 2022. China, Japan and South Korea, all heavily involved in funding fossil fuels abroad, have all signed on. In addition, more than 23 countries have committed to ending coal…

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Demonstrators around the world demand action on climate crisis

Demonstrators around the world demand action on climate crisis

The Guardian reports: People on almost every continent were gathering for marches and rallies on Saturday to mark a Global Day for Climate Justice, halfway through the Glasgow climate change summit. Activists in the Philippines, eight hours ahead of the UK, had already finished their rally as protesters gathered in Scotland. There were also rallies in South Korea, Indonesia, the Netherlands and France. The Belgian arm of Extinction Rebellion occupied a street in Brussels. The Scottish morning saw heavy rain,…

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U.S. federal appeals court freezes Biden’s vaccine rule for companies

U.S. federal appeals court freezes Biden’s vaccine rule for companies

Reuters reports: A U.S. federal appeals court issued a stay Saturday freezing the Biden administration’s efforts to require workers at U.S. companies with at least 100 employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 or be tested weekly, citing “grave statutory and constitutional” issues with the rule. The ruling from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit comes after numerous Republican-led states filed legal challenges against the new rule, which is set to take effect on Jan 4. In a…

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Sinema’s raking in cash from MLMs. They want to kill her party’s labor bill

Sinema’s raking in cash from MLMs. They want to kill her party’s labor bill

Politico reports: They’ve been derided as spruced up pyramid schemes: Companies that incentivize their own customers to become salespeople for products. Now, these so-called multilevel marketing businesses are flexing their political muscle. And they’re turning to one lawmaker in particular to protect their agenda: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. The political action committee associated with Alticor, the parent entity of the health, home and beauty company Amway, gave $2,500 to the Arizona Democrat in late June, as did the PAC for Isagenix,…

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The dark secrets behind big oil’s climate pledges

The dark secrets behind big oil’s climate pledges

The Guardian reports: JPMorgan Chase won glowing headlines last year when the global investment bank unveiled a commitment to counter the climate crisis. The press amplified JPMorgan’s message – sometimes in JPMorgan’s own words. Fortune published a commentary article trumpeting the bank’s plans to “tackle climate change”. Six paragraphs into the piece, the writers noted they worked for the investment firm. (They were actually its top executives.) The bank waited months to detail its plans. In May, it finally outlined…

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The grim stakes of climate crisis for my generation are undeniable

The grim stakes of climate crisis for my generation are undeniable

Maya Ozbayoglu writes :Young people know that our generation already disproportionately feels the effects of the climate crisis. Almost all of the intense heatwaves that have hit Europe since 1950 occurred during my lifetime. It’s likely they will only get worse. Unfortunately, Poland, where I live, has clung to an energy model driven by burning fossil fuels for too long. This irreversible destruction violates our right to life, health, property and values ​​of the natural world. That is why at…

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Trump fever may be breaking

Trump fever may be breaking

Zachary B. Wolf writes: In Tuesday’s elections, Republican candidates surged in blue states, cities rejected major police reform and suburban voters showed their independence. The major takeaways? This is a more moderate and centrist country than activists on either the right or left let on, and Donald Trump fever may be breaking. The system is working. Here’s one thing everybody can be happy about: The election results, for the most part, are not being questioned. That may have a lot…

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Justice Dept. sues Texas over voting restrictions

Justice Dept. sues Texas over voting restrictions

The New York Times reports: The Justice Department on Thursday sued Texas over the state’s new voting law, arguing that the Republican-passed measure would disenfranchise Texans who do not speak English, who have disabilities, who are older or who live outside the United States. The Texas voting restrictions, signed into law in September, include measures barring election officials from sending voters unsolicited absentee ballot applications and from promoting the use of vote by mail, as well as further limiting the…

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Secret Israeli dossier provides no proof for declaring Palestinian NGOs ‘terrorists’

Secret Israeli dossier provides no proof for declaring Palestinian NGOs ‘terrorists’

+972 reports: On Oct. 22, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz designated six prominent Palestinian human rights groups as “terrorist organizations,” citing alleged links with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a left-wing Palestinian party and militant movement. Despite the severity of the declaration, which was reportedly based on intelligence gathered by the Shin Bet, Israel has failed to present any documents directly or indirectly linking the six organizations to the PFLP or to any violent activity. So…

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The ‘echo chamber’ of Syrian chemical weapons conspiracy theorists

The ‘echo chamber’ of Syrian chemical weapons conspiracy theorists

Brian Whitaker writes: Hundreds of people died — many of them in their sleep — when rockets laden with the nerve agent sarin struck Ghouta, a rebel-held area on the outskirts of the Syrian capital early one morning in August 2013. It was the deadliest chemical attack anywhere in the world since the 1980s. Considering that Ghouta was under fire from the Assad regime’s forces at the time, that the casualties were on the rebels’ side and that the regime…

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Are financiers greenwashing COP26?

Are financiers greenwashing COP26?

Quartz reports: COP26 is nominally about reducing carbon emissions, but in practice it’s largely about capital—namely moving more of it into clean energy and climate adaptation and away from fossil fuels. In the first two days of the UN’s COP26 climate summit, several rich countries promised to do this, pledging more climate finance to poorer countries: $10 billion from Japan, $7 billion from Italy, $260 million from Ireland. Scotland became the first country to officially take responsibility for “loss and…

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Why past international climate talks have proved ineffective

Why past international climate talks have proved ineffective

Bob Berwyn writes: It’s been more than 30 years since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change first warned the world that greenhouse gases were dangerously warming the global climate. Decades of United Nations climate negotiations followed, culminating in the 2015 Paris agreement. Yet, in that time, humans have pumped more carbon dioxide into the air than in the preceding 240 years. Since that first IPCC report in 1990, emissions have increased 60 percent and the average global temperature has climbed…

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The hatred of America and of American institutions is going to grow

The hatred of America and of American institutions is going to grow

Anne Applebaum writes: All around you are swirling scenes of violence—explosions in Baghdad, ISIS operatives slitting the throat of an infidel, the chaos around the U.S. Capitol on January 6. You see jarring images of blood and brutality; you hear the grating sound of screaming; you feel the rush of fear and rage. But then a calm, sympathetic man steps forward, dressed in a button-down shirt. He explains all of it. He connects the disconnected images; he makes sense of…

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