Browsed by
Category: Politics

Trump makes — and loses — overnight bid to block January 6 investigators

Trump makes — and loses — overnight bid to block January 6 investigators

Politico reports: If you blinked you missed it. Former President Donald Trump filed an emergency request to a federal judge late Monday night to prevent the National Archives from sending sensitive records to Jan. 6 committee investigators by Friday. And just after midnight, Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected it, contending the request itself was legally defective and “premature.” The unusual exchange, which happened in a span of two hours, comes as Chutkan is already considering an earlier request by Trump to…

Read More Read More

COP26: Fossil fuel industry has largest delegation at climate summit

COP26: Fossil fuel industry has largest delegation at climate summit

BBC News reports: There are more delegates at COP26 associated with the fossil fuel industry than from any single country, analysis shared with the BBC shows. Campaigners led by Global Witness assessed the participant list published by the UN at the start of this meeting. They found that 503 people with links to fossil fuel interests had been accredited for the climate summit. These delegates are said to lobby for oil and gas industries, and campaigners say they should be…

Read More Read More

If the super-rich want to live for ever our planet is truly doomed

If the super-rich want to live for ever our planet is truly doomed

John Harris writes: Welcome to the era of immortalists: scientists, dreamers and – crucially – billionaires, who want us to think of age as a curable disease, and our final end as something that could be indefinitely postponed. According to one estimate, the revenues of the global anti-ageing industry will increase from about $200bn today to $420bn by 2030. One sure sign of its rosy prospects is the involvement of high-profile people in the US who have made vast fortunes…

Read More Read More

To steer China’s future, Xi is rewriting its past

To steer China’s future, Xi is rewriting its past

The New York Times reports: The glowing image of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, greets visitors to museum exhibitions celebrating the country’s decades of growth. Communist Party biographers have worshipfully chronicled his rise, though he has given no hint of retiring. The party’s newest official history devotes over a quarter of its 531 pages to his nine years in power. No Chinese leader in recent times has been more fixated than Mr. Xi on history and his place in it,…

Read More Read More

An idea about safety that keeps putting us in danger

An idea about safety that keeps putting us in danger

Tim Requarth writes: Remember March of 2020, before masks? Back then, as we became aware that the coronavirus was circulating around the country at an alarming clip, packed up our offices, and pulled our kids out of in-person school, the nation’s top experts urged us not to bother covering our nose and mouths. Among the complex reasons for the hesitation was a simple one: distrust of the public. “I worry that if people put on masks, then they’ll think, OK,…

Read More Read More

The partisan gap in Covid’s death toll is growing faster

The partisan gap in Covid’s death toll is growing faster

David Leonhardt writes: The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point. In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened. Some conservative writers…

Read More Read More

Running out of time at the UN climate conference

Running out of time at the UN climate conference

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: For those inclined to see them, there were plenty of bad omens last week as the latest round of international climate negotiations—COP26—got under way in Glasgow. A storm that lashed England with eighty-mile-per-hour winds disrupted train service from London to Scotland, leaving many delegates scrambling to find a way to get to the meeting. Just as the conclave began, Glasgow’s garbage workers went on strike, and rubbish piled up in the streets. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in…

Read More Read More

Voices from across America on what the climate crisis stole

Voices from across America on what the climate crisis stole

The Guardian reports: The jubilation of the Paris climate agreement, where delegates from around the world triumphantly declared the climate crisis would finally be tamed, will have felt very hollow to many in the US in the six years since. Following the landmark 2015 deal to curb dangerous global heating, the US has experienced four of its five hottest years ever recorded. A drought of a severity unprecedented in modern civilization has tightened its grip upon the American west, parching…

Read More Read More

Young women are leading climate protests while old men run global talks

Young women are leading climate protests while old men run global talks

The New York Times reports: The week began with more than 130 presidents and prime ministers posing for a group photo in a century-old Baroque museum crafted from red sandstone. Fewer than 10 were women. Their median age, as their host at the climate summit, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, reminded them, was over 60. The week ended with boisterous protests of thousands on the streets of Glasgow. A march on Friday was led by young climate activists, some barely…

Read More Read More

Foreman says military jury was disgusted by CIA torture

Foreman says military jury was disgusted by CIA torture

The New York Times reports: A Navy captain who as head of a jury in a war-crimes court wrote a damning letter calling the C.I.A.’s torture of a terrorist “a stain on the moral fiber of America” said his views are typical of senior members of the U.S. military. Capt. Scott B. Curtis, the jury foreman, said it is just that he had the opportunity to express his thoughts in a letter proposing clemency for the prisoner Majid Khan, a…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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,…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More