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Category: Politics

Canada’s tar sands: Destruction so vast and deep it challenges the existence of land and people

Canada’s tar sands: Destruction so vast and deep it challenges the existence of land and people

Inside Climate News reports: The first mine opened when Jean L’Hommecourt was a young girl, an open pit where an oil company had begun digging in the sandy soil for a black, viscous form of crude called bitumen. She and her family would pass the mine in their boat when they traveled up the Athabasca River, and the fumes from its processing plant would sting their eyes and burn their throats, despite the wet cloths their mother would drape over…

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Climate denial is waning on the right. What’s replacing it might be just as scary

Climate denial is waning on the right. What’s replacing it might be just as scary

The Guardian reports: Standing in front of the partial ruins of Rome’s Colosseum, Boris Johnson explained that a motive to tackle the climate crisis could be found in the fall of the Roman empire. Then, as now, he argued, the collapse of civilization hinged on the weakness of its borders. “When the Roman empire fell, it was largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration – the empire could no longer control its borders, people came in from the east and…

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How the U.S. lost ground to China in the contest for clean energy

How the U.S. lost ground to China in the contest for clean energy

The New York Times reports: Tom Perriello saw it coming but could do nothing to stop it. André Kapanga too. Despite urgent emails, phone calls and personal pleas, they watched helplessly as a company backed by the Chinese government took ownership from the Americans of one of the world’s largest cobalt mines. It was 2016, and a deal had been struck by the Arizona-based mining giant Freeport-McMoRan to sell the site, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which now…

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GOP donors back Manchin and Sinema as they reshape Biden’s agenda

GOP donors back Manchin and Sinema as they reshape Biden’s agenda

The New York Times reports: Over the summer, as he was working to scale back President Biden’s domestic agenda, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia traveled to an $18 million mansion in Dallas for a fund-raiser that attracted Republican and corporate donors who have cheered on his efforts. In September, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who along with Mr. Manchin has been a major impediment to the White House’s efforts to pass its package of social and climate policy,…

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The complicated truth about Trump 2024

The complicated truth about Trump 2024

Peter Nicholas writes: If Donald Trump tries to run for president again, one of his former campaign advisers has a plan to dissuade him. Anticipating that Trump may not know who Adlai Stevenson was or that he lost two straight presidential elections in the 1950s, this ex-adviser figures he or someone else might need to explain the man’s unhappy fate. They’ll remind Trump that if he were beaten in 2024, he would join Stevenson as one of history’s serial losers….

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As gerrymanders get worse, legal options to overturn them dwindle

As gerrymanders get worse, legal options to overturn them dwindle

The New York Times reports: Voting-rights advocates are in a North Carolina state court in Raleigh this month, arguing in three lawsuits that Republican gerrymanders of the State Legislature and the state’s 14 seats in the House of Representatives are so extreme that they violate the state Constitution. Only two years ago, some of the same lawyers were arguing that remarkably similar Republican gerrymanders of the same legislature, drawn a decade ago, violated the same clauses of the constitution. That…

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on why Democrats’ ‘talking points are not enough’

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on why Democrats’ ‘talking points are not enough’

The New York Times reports: Last year, after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the Democratic presidential nomination, a group of progressive lawmakers rallied around him to project party unity at a critical time. More than a year later, as the president seeks to pass a robust spending package of social policies that represent the bulk of his domestic agenda, many of the same leaders are looking for a return on their political investment. In an interview with The New York…

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How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

MIT Technology Review reports: In 2015, six of the 10 websites in Myanmar getting the most engagement on Facebook were from legitimate media, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-run tool. A year later, Facebook (which recently rebranded to Meta) offered global access to Instant Articles, a program publishers could use to monetize their content. One year after that rollout, legitimate publishers accounted for only two of the top 10 publishers on Facebook in Myanmar. By 2018, they accounted for…

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An international power struggle over cobalt rattles the clean energy revolution

An international power struggle over cobalt rattles the clean energy revolution

The New York Times reports from Kisanfu, Democratic Republic of Congo: Just up a red dirt road, across an expanse of tall, dew-soaked weeds, bulldozers are hollowing out a yawning new canyon that is central to the world’s urgent race against global warming. For more than a decade, the vast expanse of untouched land was controlled by an American company. Now a Chinese mining conglomerate has bought it, and is racing to retrieve its buried treasure: millions of tons of…

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There’s nothing more frightening in America today than an angry White man

There’s nothing more frightening in America today than an angry White man

John Blake writes: The Brute. The Buck. And, of course, the Thug. Those are just some of the names for a racial stereotype that has haunted the collective imagination of White America since the nation’s inception. The specter of the angry Black man has been evoked in politics and popular culture to convince White folks that a big, bad Black man is coming to get them and their daughters. I’ve seen viral videos of innocent Black men losing their lives…

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Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense was strong. It’s also a threat to the rule of law

Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense was strong. It’s also a threat to the rule of law

Eric Levitz writes: In August 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse brought an AR-15 to downtown Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the name of law and order. As protests and riots raged in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake, the 17-year-old Blue Lives Matter enthusiast felt called to serve as an amateur armed guard for a Kenosha car dealership. He ended up shooting two unarmed protesters dead and blowing off another’s right bicep — without committing a crime. Or so a Wisconsin…

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The Steele Dossier and Donald Trump’s betrayal of America

The Steele Dossier and Donald Trump’s betrayal of America

David Corn writes: Vladimir Putin must be delighted. With the recent indictment of Igor Danchenko, the primary source for former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s 2016 dossier that alleged ties between Donald Trump and Moscow, the Trump-Russia denialists have had a field day. They have blasted the media for its reporting on Steele’s memos and claimed that this further undermining of his reports demonstrates the Russia scandal was a hoax. That last point is disinformation. Certainly, the credibility of Steele’s…

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U.S. warns allies of possible Russian invasion as troops amass near Ukraine

U.S. warns allies of possible Russian invasion as troops amass near Ukraine

The New York Times reports: American intelligence officials are warning allies that there is a short window of time to prevent Russia from taking military action in Ukraine, pushing European countries to work with the United States to develop a package of economic and military measures to deter Moscow, according to American and European officials. Russia has not yet decided what it intends to do with the troops it has amassed near Ukraine, American officials said, but the buildup is…

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Federal judge faults Trump for January 6 attack

Federal judge faults Trump for January 6 attack

Politico reports: A federal judge on Friday squarely placed the blame for the Jan. 6 Capitol attack on Donald Trump, suggesting that the former president’s role in seeding lies about the 2020 election — and the effect it had on his followers — has been an underappreciated part of the entire episode. Judge Amit Mehta issued his commentary as he delivered a 14-day jail sentence to Jan. 6 rioter John Lolos — a sentence Mehta said he shortened in part…

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Amazon wages secret war on Americans’ privacy, documents show

Amazon wages secret war on Americans’ privacy, documents show

Reuters reports: In recent years, Amazon.com Inc has killed or undermined privacy protections in more than three dozen bills across 25 states, as the e-commerce giant amassed a lucrative trove of personal data on millions of American consumers. Amazon executives and staffers detail these lobbying victories in confidential documents reviewed by Reuters. In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself drafted. In California,…

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The terrifying future of the Republican Party

The terrifying future of the Republican Party

David Brooks writes: Rachel Bovard is one of the thousands of smart young Americans who flock to Washington each year to make a difference. She’s worked in the House and Senate for Republicans Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, and Mike Lee, was listed among the “Most Influential Women in Washington Under 35” by National Journal, did a stint at the Heritage Foundation, and is now policy director of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose mission is to train, equip, and unify the…

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