Browsed by
Category: Politics

Syrian Kurds burn with anger at Trump’s betrayal

Syrian Kurds burn with anger at Trump’s betrayal

The Guardian reports: Waiting at a roadside depot, Hussein Rammo, a stooped elderly Kurd, his eyes wet with tears, had the look of a broken man. “Betrayal leaves the bitterest taste,” he said, his voice at a whisper as he discussed Donald Trump’s decision to abandon Syria’s Kurds. “I am 63 years old and I have never seen anything like this. Before there was regime oppression and now we are getting betrayal. This is worse.” Shells fired by Turkish forces…

Read More Read More

Abandoning Kurds could cost Trump support from evangelical Christians

Abandoning Kurds could cost Trump support from evangelical Christians

The Guardian reports: Evangelical Christian voters have been among Donald Trump’s most enthusiastic and reliable supporters. Trump’s recent rejection of asylum seekers and cuts to domestic food assistance programs have not stopped followers of Christ from flocking to the president. A great schism, however, may finally be at hand. In drips that have become a gush, evangelical leaders this week have sharply criticized Trump’s decision to stand down US forces in northern Syria, warning that Turkey’s invasion of the region…

Read More Read More

Giuliani’s Ukrainian Trump team: In search of influence, dirt and money

Giuliani’s Ukrainian Trump team: In search of influence, dirt and money

The New York Times reports: When Rudolph W. Giuliani set out to dredge up damaging information on President Trump’s rivals in Ukraine, he turned to a native of the former Soviet republic with whom he already had a lucrative business relationship. Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American businessman with a trail of debts and lawsuits, had known Mr. Giuliani casually for years through Republican political circles. Last year, their relationship deepened when a company he helped found retained Mr. Giuliani — associates…

Read More Read More

In its relentless pursuit of power, Silicon Valley is fueling the climate crisis

In its relentless pursuit of power, Silicon Valley is fueling the climate crisis

Rebecca Solnit writes: The climate crimes of big tech are legion. This summer the Amazon burned. Why? In part because of the policies of the new anti-environmental, anti-human-rights president, Jair Bolsonaro. How did Bolsonaro rise to prominence and then the presidency? YouTube, and certain of its algorithms that push people toward more extreme content, played a large part. As the New York Times reported in August, not long ago Bolsonaro was “a marginal figure in national politics – but a…

Read More Read More

Google made large contributions to climate-change deniers

Google made large contributions to climate-change deniers

The Guardian reports: Google has made “substantial” contributions to some of the most notorious climate deniers in Washington despite its insistence that it supports political action on the climate crisis. Among hundreds of groups the company has listed on its website as beneficiaries of its political giving are more than a dozen organisations that have campaigned against climate legislation, questioned the need for action, or actively sought to roll back Obama-era environmental protections. The list includes the Competitive Enterprise Institute…

Read More Read More

Turkish president threatens to send 3.6 million Syrian refugees to Europe

Turkish president threatens to send 3.6 million Syrian refugees to Europe

The Guardian reports: The Turkish president has threatened to “open the gates” for Syrian refugees in his country to migrate to Europe if the continent’s leaders label Turkey’s military campaign in north-eastern Syria an “occupation”. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan warned European Union states he would “open the gates and send 3.6 million refugees your way” during a combative speech at a meeting of lawmakers from his Justice and Development (AK) party on Thursday afternoon. He rebuked critics of the operation in…

Read More Read More

Arrest of Giuliani’s Ukraine associates shows how much Trump has already corrupted U.S. elections

Arrest of Giuliani’s Ukraine associates shows how much Trump has already corrupted U.S. elections

Richard L. Hasen writes: The news of Thursday’s indictments of two associates of Rudy Giuliani’s, who according to their lawyer (and former Trump lawyer) John Dowd, assisted Giuliani “in connection with his representation of President Trump” shows that foreign interference in American elections is a feature and not a bug of the Trump campaign and presidency. And the connections to the emerging Ukraine scandal show that the corruption runs deep in this administration. The tale told in Thursday’s unsealed indictment…

Read More Read More

The House can arrest Giuliani

The House can arrest Giuliani

Josh Chafetz writes: Refusal to comply with a duly authorized subpoena from Congress constitutes contempt of Congress. Contempt of Congress is a crime, and there is a mechanism for referring such cases to federal prosecutors. The problem, of course, is that federal prosecutors answer to the attorney general and, through him, to the White House, and they refuse to prosecute contempts committed by executive officials. In recent decades, congressional houses have sought a court order requiring executive officials to comply…

Read More Read More

The big polluters’ masterstroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and me

The big polluters’ masterstroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and me

George Monbiot writes: Let’s stop calling this the Sixth Great Extinction. Let’s start calling it what it is: the “first great extermination”. A recent essay by the environmental historian Justin McBrien argues that describing the current eradication of living systems (including human societies) as an extinction event makes this catastrophe sound like a passive accident. While we are all participants in the first great extermination, our responsibility is not evenly shared. The impacts of most of the world’s people are…

Read More Read More

After giving Turkey the green light to invade Syria, Trump now says it’s a ‘bad idea’

After giving Turkey the green light to invade Syria, Trump now says it’s a ‘bad idea’

ABC News reports: President Donald Trump on Wednesday called Turkey’s offensive in Syria “a bad idea” that the United States did not support, hours after Turkey launched a long-planned military offensive in northeastern Syria. “The United States does not endorse this attack and has made it clear to Turkey that this operation is a bad idea,” Trump said in a statement. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced via Twitter on Wednesday that the incursion has begun, with a mission to…

Read More Read More

The seeds of Trump’s abandonment of Syrian Kurds were sown by Obama

The seeds of Trump’s abandonment of Syrian Kurds were sown by Obama

Elizabeth Tsurkov writes: The looming Turkish offensive on northeastern Syria is the culmination of incoherent U.S. policy concerning the conflict in Syria, which has prioritized finding short-term fixes over attempting to address any of the dynamics driving the violence. The scope of the Turkish invasion, made possible through the withdrawal of U.S. troops from parts of the border region, remains unclear. The offensive will likely precipitate mass displacement, and if the military action extends beyond the takeover of a few…

Read More Read More

Trump’s longtime business connections in Turkey back in the spotlight

Trump’s longtime business connections in Turkey back in the spotlight

NBC News reports: Trump and his family have long had business ties in and with Turkey, the most visible example being the Trump Towers Istanbul, which licenses the Trump name. The Trump Organization describes the buildings on its website as “a landmark in the historic city of Istanbul” and it is the organization’s first and only office and residential tower in Europe, with offices, apartments and upscale shops. The Washington Post has reported that the organization was paid up to…

Read More Read More

The House must move on Trump impeachment articles now

The House must move on Trump impeachment articles now

Laurence Tribe writes: The White House’s blanket stonewalling of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump isn’t just deeply troubling or further indirect evidence of the president’s underlying abuse of public power for private gain. It signals another clear ground for his impeachment: obstruction of Congress. Article III of the Nixon articles of impeachment provides the closest precedent to what Trump did here: He directed the State Department to prevent Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union,…

Read More Read More

The 20 fossil fuel companies behind a third of all carbon emissions

The 20 fossil fuel companies behind a third of all carbon emissions

The Guardian reports: The Guardian today reveals the 20 fossil fuel companies whose relentless exploitation of the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves can be directly linked to more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era. New data from world-renowned researchers reveals how this cohort of state-owned and multinational firms are driving the climate emergency that threatens the future of humanity, and details how they have continued to expand their operations despite being aware of the…

Read More Read More

What Hunter Biden did was legal — and that’s the problem

What Hunter Biden did was legal — and that’s the problem

Peter Schweizer writes: In 2016, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $264 million as part of a settlement with the federal government. The reason? An Asian subsidiary of the company had hired the children of Chinese government officials in the hopes of currying favor with their powerful parents — a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Had the same thing happened with a foreign company and an American politician’s family, however, no violation would have occurred — because no equivalent…

Read More Read More

Top secret Russian intelligence unit, actively fighting the West, seeks to destabilize Europe, security officials say

Top secret Russian intelligence unit, actively fighting the West, seeks to destabilize Europe, security officials say

The New York Times reports: First came a destabilization campaign in Moldova, followed by the poisoning of an arms dealer in Bulgaria and then a thwarted coup in Montenegro. Last year, there was an attempt to assassinate a former Russian spy in Britain using a nerve agent. Though the operations bore the fingerprints of Russia’s intelligence services, the authorities initially saw them as isolated, unconnected attacks. Western security officials have now concluded that these operations, and potentially many others, are…

Read More Read More