Browsed by
Category: Politics

What the Ben & Jerry’s decision reveals about Israel

What the Ben & Jerry’s decision reveals about Israel

Yasmeen Serhan writes: No company does progressive politics quite like Ben & Jerry’s. The Vermont-based ice-cream maker has a reputation for corporate activism, owing to its support for a wide array of left-wing causes, including marriage equality, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter. But when the company announced this week that it will no longer sell its products in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, it faced an outcome that every ice-cream maker fears most: a meltdown. The matter of Israel’s…

Read More Read More

Suddenly, (some) Republicans are all in on the vaccine

Suddenly, (some) Republicans are all in on the vaccine

Susan Glasser writes: Since the end of the Trump Presidency, Republicans have been ratcheting up the doom-and-gloom quotient in their rhetoric. By this spring, they settled on a narrative of permanent crisis—to be blamed on President Biden, of course. There was the Biden Border Crisis. The Crime Crisis. The Inflation Crisis and its corollary, the High-Gas-Price Crisis. The Critical-Race-Theory Crisis. Even, this week, the Ben & Jerry’s-Is-Mean-to-Israel Crisis. America under Biden, to hear them tell it, has become a hellscape…

Read More Read More

Biden’s obsession with scoring a bipartisan deal suddenly looks quite doable

Biden’s obsession with scoring a bipartisan deal suddenly looks quite doable

Politico reports: President Joe Biden may finally be nearing the bipartisan win he’s long yearned for but that some in his party say is politically unnecessary and may ultimately prove fleeting. Despite a failed vote on Wednesday to advance the roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal, White House negotiators have been working aggressively to settle disagreements with GOP senators. The White House supported Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s move to force that vote, viewing it as necessary for kicking negotiations…

Read More Read More

Personal threats, election lies and punishing new laws rattle election officials, raising fears of a mass exodus

Personal threats, election lies and punishing new laws rattle election officials, raising fears of a mass exodus

CNN reports: Maribeth Witzel-Behl had run elections in Madison, Wisconsin, for 15 years when the 2020 election arrived, bringing challenges like no other: a global pandemic, a crushing workload, lawsuits and a recount. Then the threats started. Wisconsin rules require the initials of the municipal clerk to appear on absentee ballots, but during a recount last November, people noticed her initials and seized on them as a sign that some kind of mischief must have occurred. An online discussion thread…

Read More Read More

Facebook and YouTube’s vaccine misinformation problem is simpler than it seems

Facebook and YouTube’s vaccine misinformation problem is simpler than it seems

Will Oremus writes: On Friday, President Biden said Facebook is “killing people” by spreading misinformation about the coronavirus vaccines. On Monday, he changed his tune. “Facebook isn’t killing people,” he amended, instead blaming a handful of disinformation merchants who use the platform. Whether Facebook is or isn’t killing people depends on your definitions. What’s clear, regardless, is that Facebook, YouTube, and other social media platforms have played a major role in the anti-vaccine movement. And they continue to do so,…

Read More Read More

China’s prisons and detention camps now have the capacity to lock up one million Muslims

China’s prisons and detention camps now have the capacity to lock up one million Muslims

BuzzFeed News reports: For the first time, BuzzFeed News can reveal the full capacity of China’s previously secret network of prisons and detention camps in Xinjiang: enough space to detain more than 1 million people. BuzzFeed News calculated the floor areas of 347 compounds bearing the hallmarks of prisons and internment camps in the region and compared them to China’s own prison and detention construction standards, which lay out how much space is needed for each person detained or imprisoned….

Read More Read More

India’s true pandemic death toll likely to be well over 3 million, new study finds

India’s true pandemic death toll likely to be well over 3 million, new study finds

The New York Times reports: The number of people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic in India so far is likely to exceed three million — nearly 10 times the official Covid-19 death toll — making it one of the worst human tragedies in the nation’s history, according to a new study. In a comprehensive examination of the true toll of the pandemic in the sprawling nation of 1.4 billion, the Center for Global Development, a Washington research institute,…

Read More Read More

Tucker Carlson’s white oppression delusion

Tucker Carlson’s white oppression delusion

Lawrence B. Glickman writes: In the conservative world, the idea that white people in the United States are under siege has become doctrine. In recent weeks, three prominent figures have each offered their own versions of this tenet. In June, Brian Kilmeade, one of the hosts of Fox & Friends, claimed that activists were “trying to take down white culture.” Also in June, Tucker Carlson, speaking on his nightly show with an ANTI-WHITE MANIA graphic in the background, implied that…

Read More Read More

‘What I wanted is what they wanted,’ Trump said of the Capitol rioters

‘What I wanted is what they wanted,’ Trump said of the Capitol rioters

Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker write: Trump started the interview by pointing out his enduring and unrivaled power within the Republican Party. He explained that he didn’t intend to follow the path of former presidents, who largely bowed out of the nitty-gritty of party politics. He was proud to say he genuinely enjoys this sport he found so late in life, and believes he plays it better than anyone else. The parade of Republican politicians flocking to Mar-a-Lago all spring…

Read More Read More

‘Assaulting the United States Capitol and impeding the democratic process … will have consequences,’ says federal judge

‘Assaulting the United States Capitol and impeding the democratic process … will have consequences,’ says federal judge

Politico reports: A federal judge has handed down the first felony sentence in the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, sending a Tampa man to prison for eight months for obstructing Congress’ effort to tabulate and certify the electoral vote. The sentence Paul Hodgkins, 38, received Monday for marching onto the Senate floor with a Trump flag during the chaotic Capitol takeover was less than half of what prosecutors recommended, but U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss also declined the…

Read More Read More

Saudis behind NSO spyware attack on Jamal Khashoggi’s family, leak suggests

Saudis behind NSO spyware attack on Jamal Khashoggi’s family, leak suggests

The Guardian reports: In the wake of the brutal murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the NSO Group emphatically denied that its government clients had used its hacking malware to target the journalist or his family. “I can tell you very clear. We had nothing to do with this horrible murder,” Shalev Hulio, the chief executive of the Israeli surveillance firm, told the US TV news programme 60 Minutes in March 2019. It was six months after Khashoggi, a Washington…

Read More Read More

Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

Paul Lewis writes: Billions of people are inseparable from their phones. Their devices are within reach – and earshot – for almost every daily experience, from the most mundane to the most intimate. Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time. Such are the capabilities of Pegasus, the spyware manufactured by NSO Group,…

Read More Read More

How Ben Shapiro is using Facebook to create an empire built on outrage

How Ben Shapiro is using Facebook to create an empire built on outrage

NPR reports: In 2021, Ben Shapiro rules Facebook. The conservative podcast host and author’s personal Facebook page has more followers than The Washington Post, and he drives an engagement machine unparalleled by anything else on the world’s biggest social networking site. An NPR analysis of social media data found that over the past year, stories published by the site Shapiro founded, The Daily Wire, received more likes, shares and comments on Facebook than any other news publisher by a wide…

Read More Read More

Regulate business to tackle climate crisis, urges former Bank of England chief

Regulate business to tackle climate crisis, urges former Bank of England chief

The Guardian reports: Governments must step up their regulation of businesses to tackle the climate crisis, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney has urged, because the financial free markets will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions alone. Carney, who left the Bank of England last year before the first Covid-19 lockdown, is now one of the most influential figures working on Cop26, the vital UN climate talks to be held in Glasgow in November. He is a UN envoy…

Read More Read More

How Covid-19 has upended life in undervaccinated Arkansas

How Covid-19 has upended life in undervaccinated Arkansas

The New York Times reports: When the boat factory in this leafy Ozark Mountains city offered free coronavirus vaccinations this spring, Susan Johnson, 62, a receptionist there, declined the offer, figuring she was protected as long as she never left her house without a mask. Linda Marion, 68, a widow with chronic pulmonary disease, worried that a vaccination might actually trigger Covid-19 and kill her. Barbara Billigmeier, 74, an avid golfer who retired here from California, believed she did not…

Read More Read More

Leak uncovers global abuse of cyber-surveillance weapon

Leak uncovers global abuse of cyber-surveillance weapon

The Guardian reports: Human rights activists, journalists and lawyers across the world have been targeted by authoritarian governments using hacking software sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, according to an investigation into a massive data leak. The investigation by the Guardian and 16 other media organisations suggests widespread and continuing abuse of NSO’s hacking spyware, Pegasus, which the company insists is only intended for use against criminals and terrorists. Pegasus is a malware that infects iPhones and Android…

Read More Read More