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Category: Politics

How Big Oil used Facebook to push Joe Manchin to kill Build Back Better

How Big Oil used Facebook to push Joe Manchin to kill Build Back Better

Vice News reports: Last August, during the hottest summer in U.S. history, the Senate began debating the country’s most ambitious plan ever to fight the climate crisis: President Biden’s sweeping Build Back Better bill. The next day, Big Oil swung into action against it. The industry knew exactly who to target: the voters of Sen. Joe Manchin, the all-powerful Democrat who infamously refused to support Build Back Better, and this week, declared the plan “dead.” America’s top oil industry group,…

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One year later: The Texas freeze revealed a fragile energy system and inspired lasting misinformation

One year later: The Texas freeze revealed a fragile energy system and inspired lasting misinformation

Inside Climate News reports: Texas is recovering from this week’s winter storm, nearly a year after a much more severe set of storms led to a devastating failure of the electricity system and about 250 deaths. The February 2021 storms showed the fragility of the grid at a time when climate change is contributing to an increase in extreme weather. But the most enduring legacy of the 2021 blackouts may be the spread of a falsehood: the idea that the…

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Dismal Russian record in occupied eastern Ukraine serves as warning

Dismal Russian record in occupied eastern Ukraine serves as warning

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk regions were once the engines of the country’s economy and dominated its politics. They produced its richest man, billionaire industrialist Rinat Akhmetov, as well as former President Viktor Yanukovych, ousted by the street protests that triggered the Russian invasion in 2014. Since then, however, the two areas—now nominally independent “people’s republics” inside the larger regions of Luhansk and Donetsk—have turned into impoverished, depopulated enclaves that increasingly rely…

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Why ‘trust us’ is often reason enough not to trust the government

Why ‘trust us’ is often reason enough not to trust the government

Charlie Savage writes: The dramatic national security stories recounted in two official news briefings on Thursday centered on very different subjects, but they featured the same indignant pushback to questioning reporters: just trust us, unless you are more inclined to believe America’s enemies. Pressed for evidence supporting an official narrative about how children had died during a commando raid in Syria — specifically, that an ISIS leader’s bomb, not American forces, had killed them — the White House press secretary,…

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Trump’s ‘circular firing squad’ threatens GOP midterm gains

Trump’s ‘circular firing squad’ threatens GOP midterm gains

Politico reports: Nine months before the midterm elections, nearly everything is falling the Republican Party’s way, from President Joe Biden’s dismal approval ratings to rising gas prices and a seemingly never-ending pandemic. Yet as the Republican National Committee concluded its winter meeting here on Friday, it was censuring two of its own, Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), and decrying the House’s Jan. 6 select committee for what Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chair, called the “persecution of ordinary…

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GOP dubs January 6 attack ‘legitimate political discourse’

GOP dubs January 6 attack ‘legitimate political discourse’

The New York Times reports: The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse,” and rebuked two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Donald J. Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it. The Republican National Committee’s voice vote to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at…

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Cyberattack on News Corp, believed linked to China, targeted emails of journalists, others

Cyberattack on News Corp, believed linked to China, targeted emails of journalists, others

The Wall Street Journal reports: News Corp was the target of a hack that accessed emails and documents of journalists and other employees, an incursion the company’s cybersecurity consultant said was likely meant to gather intelligence to benefit China’s interests. The attack, discovered on Jan. 20, affected a number of publications and business units including The Wall Street Journal and its parent Dow Jones; the New York Post; the company’s U.K. news operation; and News Corp headquarters, according to an…

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The reason Putin would risk war

The reason Putin would risk war

Anne Applebaum writes: There are questions about troop numbers, questions about diplomacy. There are questions about the Ukrainian military, its weapons, and its soldiers. There are questions about Germany and France: How will they react? There are questions about America, and how it has come to be a central player in a conflict not of its making. But of all the questions that repeatedly arise about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the one that gets the least satisfactory answers…

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U.S. exposes what it sees as Russian effort to fabricate pretext for invasion of Ukraine

U.S. exposes what it sees as Russian effort to fabricate pretext for invasion of Ukraine

The New York Times reports: The United States has acquired intelligence about a Russian plan to fabricate a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine using a faked video that would build on recent disinformation campaigns, according to senior administration officials and others briefed on the material. The plan — which the United States hopes to spoil by making public — involves staging and filming a fabricated attack by the Ukrainian military either on Russian territory or against Russian-speaking people in…

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Biden officials mount last-minute push for electric Postal Service trucks

Biden officials mount last-minute push for electric Postal Service trucks

Bloomberg reports: Biden administration officials are pushing the U.S. Postal Service to buy more electric vehicles instead of spending billions on gas-powered models as it replaces its aging fleet. The efforts, mounted by the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, follow separate warnings by activists that the Postal Service’s plan to buy mostly conventional delivery trucks downplayed the potential climate benefits of a shift to electric, non-emitting alternatives. The Postal Service’s plan “represents a crucial…

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Jeff Zucker’s legacy is defined by his promotion of Donald Trump

Jeff Zucker’s legacy is defined by his promotion of Donald Trump

Margaret Sullivan writes: Many questions still swirl around Wednesday’s startling announcement that, after nine years, Jeff Zucker’s reign as CNN president was over. Was his ouster really all about his failure to disclose to his corporate bosses a consensual relationship with another top network executive? How much of a factor was the continuing mess over former host Chris Cuomo’s firing in December? To what extent were the network’s flagging ratings part of the calculation? It will all eventually be revealed…

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A Jewish teacher criticized Israel. She was fired

A Jewish teacher criticized Israel. She was fired

The New York Times reports: Last summer, Jessie Sander had been on the job at a Jewish school in Westchester County for less than a month when a meeting with her boss took an unexpected turn. Was she comfortable working at a Zionist institution? he asked. Her boss, Rabbi David E. Levy of Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, N.Y., had come across a recent blog post she had written that renounced Zionism and sharply criticized Israel, Ms. Sander, 26, said…

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Europe is ready to pay the cost of Russia sanctions

Europe is ready to pay the cost of Russia sanctions

Nathalie Tocci writes: Too much is being made of divisions in the West over how to respond to Russian aggression against Ukraine. The truth is that there is a broad consensus in the transatlantic alliance about how to proceed if Moscow were to invade its neighbor. The biggest differences aren’t about strategy — they’re about who will have to pay the price of carrying out that strategy. To be sure, disagreements do exist. Recent weeks have lain bare divergences over…

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FBI Director Wray says scale of Chinese spying in the U.S. ‘blew me away’

FBI Director Wray says scale of Chinese spying in the U.S. ‘blew me away’

NBC News reports: Chinese spying in the U.S. has become so widespread that the FBI is launching an average of two counterintelligence investigations a day to counter the onslaught, FBI Director Christopher Wray said in an interview. Wray has become the U.S. government’s most outspoken critic of the Chinese government’s spying. In an exclusive NBC News interview, he said the sheer scale of Chinese efforts to steal U.S. technology shocked him when he became FBI director in 2017. “This one…

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Trump’s words, and deeds, reveal the depths of his drive to retain power

Trump’s words, and deeds, reveal the depths of his drive to retain power

Shane Goldmacher writes: The events of Jan. 6 played out so publicly and so brutally — the instigating speech by Mr. Trump, the flag-waving march to the Capitol, the violent clashes with the police, the defiling of the seat of democracy — and have since been so extensively re-examined that at times it can seem as if there were little more to be discovered about what led up to that day. Then, The New York Times reported this week that…

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The great Amazon land grab – how Brazil’s government is turning public land private, clearing the way for deforestation

The great Amazon land grab – how Brazil’s government is turning public land private, clearing the way for deforestation

A satellite captured large and small deforestation patches in Amazonas State in 2015. The forest loss has escalated since then. USGS/NASA Landsat data/Orbital Horizon/Gallo Images/Getty Images By Gabriel Cardoso Carrero, University of Florida; Cynthia S. Simmons, University of Florida, and Robert T. Walker, University of Florida Imagine that several state legislators decide that Yellowstone National Park is too big. Also imagine that, working with federal politicians, they change the law to downsize the park by a million acres, which they…

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