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Category: Politics

America never knew what it was doing in Afghanistan

America never knew what it was doing in Afghanistan

Wesley Morgan writes: The senior U.S. officer in the Pech, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Ryan, surprised me when I interviewed him about his battalion’s mission. Forty-one years old but with less gray in his short haircut than some of his company commanders, Ryan was a West Point graduate from Pearl River, New York, and he had been in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq since the first months after September 11, as an officer in the night-raiding 75th Ranger Regiment. I…

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Biden needs to stop Netanyahu from sabotaging talks to resume the Iran nuclear deal

Biden needs to stop Netanyahu from sabotaging talks to resume the Iran nuclear deal

Fred Kaplan writes: White House press secretary Jen Psaki has denied U.S. involvement in the [latest] attack [on Iran’s nuclear-fuel center at Natanz]. But since the United States and Israel jointly crafted Stuxnet, the 2010 covert program that sabotaged uranium enrichment at Natanz through highly sophisticated cyber attacks (a program that U.S. officials still don’t discuss openly a decade later), it’s not deeply paranoid for Iranian officials to assume that Washington was in on the plot. This isn’t the first…

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The U.S. media is touting Israel’s Covid recovery. But occupied Palestinians are left out

The U.S. media is touting Israel’s Covid recovery. But occupied Palestinians are left out

Yara M Asi writes: The US media has widely lauded Israel’s vaccine success – as a country in a “post-pandemic future” of concerts and indoor dining; as a country that could teach the United States a few lessons in pandemic management; as a country that, despite being in the midst of a contentious election, leaned on its robust universal public health system to vaccinate as many people as possible. However, many of these vaccine success stories mention the issue of…

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Amazon lives off America’s failure

Amazon lives off America’s failure

Sarah Jones writes: Bill Bodani liked his old job. He cleaned slag out at the Sparrows Point steel mill in Maryland, cleared the flues and the broken brick out of the blast furnace. He loved it despite the asbestosis it gave him, writes Alec MacGillis in his new book, Fulfillment. “I enjoyed the people,” Bodani told MacGillis. “They made it enjoyable. The Black, the white. It was a family thing. I don’t care if you knew them for five minutes,…

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Taliban boycotts key peace talks after U.S. pull-out delay

Taliban boycotts key peace talks after U.S. pull-out delay

The Daily Beast reports: Hours after the Biden administration announced that the remaining 3,500 American troops will return from Afghanistan by the twentieth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, a Taliban spokesperson announced a refusal to join U.S.-facilitated peace talks between the Islamic group and the Afghan government. “Until all foreign forces completely withdraw from our homeland, the Islamic Emirate will not participate in any conference that shall make decisions about Afghanistan,” Mohammed Naeem, a spokesperson for the Taliban’s political…

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Republicans are making four key mistakes

Republicans are making four key mistakes

David Frum writes: It’s not only Georgia. In every state where Republicans control a chamber of the legislature, bills to restrict voting are advancing fast. Arizona and Texas Republicans have acted especially aggressively to choke off unwanted voters in time for 2022. Arizona Republicans propose to reduce the number of days for early voting. They want to purge voter rolls of people who missed the previous election. They want to cut off mail-in balloting five days before Election Day. And…

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The jewels of America’s landscape should be returned to America’s original peoples

The jewels of America’s landscape should be returned to America’s original peoples

David Treuer writes: In 1851, members of a California state militia called the Mariposa Battalion became the first white men to lay eyes on Yosemite Valley. The group was largely made up of miners. They had been scouring the western slopes of the Sierra when they happened upon the granite valley that Native peoples had long referred to as “the place of a gaping mouth.” Lafayette Bunnell, a physician attached to the militia, found himself awestruck. “None but those who…

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The Biden White House media doctrine: Less can be more

The Biden White House media doctrine: Less can be more

Politico reports: Three months in, Joe Biden’s White House has settled on a firm press strategy: First, do no self-harm. The president is not doing cable news interviews. Tweets from his account are limited and, when they come, unimaginably conventional. The public comments are largely scripted. Biden has opted for fewer sit down interviews with mainstream outlets and reporters. He’s had just one major press conference — though another is coming — and prefers remarks straight to camera for the…

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How to stop the minority-rule doom loop

How to stop the minority-rule doom loop

Adam Jentleson writes: President Joe Biden came into office facing four “converging crises”: COVID-19, climate change, racial justice, and the economy. But after a few weeks of fast action on a pandemic relief plan, a fifth crisis will determine the fate of the rest of his administration, and perhaps that of American democracy itself: the minority-rule doom loop, by which predominantly white conservatives gain more and more power, even as they represent fewer Americans. The doom loop consists of four…

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Hawley hauls in $3M after attempt to block election results

Hawley hauls in $3M after attempt to block election results

Politico reports: Sen. Josh Hawley raised more than $3 million during the first three months of the year, underscoring how the Missouri Republican converted his high-profile opposition to the certification of the 2020 election into big fundraising support. The freshman senator drew widespread attention for leading the Jan. 6 effort to block the acceptance of the Electoral College results, a controversial stand that liberals and some Republicans claim undermined faith in the political system. But he won plaudits from loyalists…

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Sweden’s pandemic experiment

Sweden’s pandemic experiment

Mallory Pickett writes: Sweden’s per-capita case counts and death rates have been many times higher than any of its Nordic neighbors, all of which imposed lockdowns, travel bans, and limited gatherings early on. Over all in Sweden, thirteen thousand people have died from covid-19. In Norway, which has a population that is half the size of Sweden’s, and where stricter lockdowns were enforced, about seven hundred people have died. It’s likely that some simple policy changes—especially shutting down visitations to…

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The Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens

The Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens

The Guardian reports: Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents despite being alerted to evidence of the wrongdoing. The Guardian has seen extensive internal documentation showing how Facebook handled more than 30 cases across 25 countries of politically manipulative behavior that was proactively detected by company staff. The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to…

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Making America White again

Making America White again

The Washington Post reports: While concerns about changing views on faith, gender and sexuality were often expressed by many of the former president’s most die-hard supporters, fear about America becoming less White — and less “great” — was at the root of at least some of the loyalty to him. A widely reported 2017 survey from the Atlantic and the Public Religion Research Institute provided some insight into the views of White working-class voters who backed Trump. Nearly half (48…

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Official: Chinese vaccines’ effectiveness low

Official: Chinese vaccines’ effectiveness low

The Associated Press reports: In a rare admission of the weakness of Chinese coronavirus vaccines, the country’s top disease control official says their effectiveness is low and the government is considering mixing them to get a boost. Chinese vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates,” said the director of the China Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, at a conference Saturday in the southwestern city of Chengdu. Beijing has distributed hundreds of millions of doses abroad while trying to promote…

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CEOs plan new push on voting legislation

CEOs plan new push on voting legislation

The Wall Street Journal reports: Dozens of chief executives and other senior leaders gathered on Zoom this weekend to plot what several said big businesses should do next about new voting laws under way in Texas and other states. Kenneth Chenault, the former chief executive of American Express Co. , and Kenneth Frazier, CEO of Merck & Co., urged the leaders to collectively call for greater voting access, according to several people who attended. Messrs. Chenault and Frazier cautioned businesses…

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How Trump unleashed a domestic terrorism movement — and what must be done to defeat it

How Trump unleashed a domestic terrorism movement — and what must be done to defeat it

Mother Jones reports: Even the wifi password was a signal. Attendees at President Donald Trump’s rally in Dalton, Georgia, on January 4 who wanted to log in to the Make America Great network had to enter the phrase into their devices: “SeeYouJan6!” Trump was in town that night ostensibly to boost two Republican Senate candidates, but he spent much of his speech railing about the “stolen” 2020 election—and inciting supporters to descend on the nation’s capital two days later. “They’re…

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