Browsed by
Category: Politics

William Barr is ‘the closest thing we have to Dick Cheney’

William Barr is ‘the closest thing we have to Dick Cheney’

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: Not long before Attorney General William P. Barr released the special counsel’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, he strategized with Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, about one of his next moves: investigating the investigators. Over a dinner of steak, potatoes and carrots in a wood-paneled conference room off Mr. Barr’s Justice Department office, the two discussed their shared suspicions that the officials who initially investigated the…

Read More Read More

China faces showdown in Hong Kong as mass protests roar back

China faces showdown in Hong Kong as mass protests roar back

Comments 0 Comment

Bloomberg reports: China has spent much of the past five years tightening its grip over Hong Kong with little challenge. Now, hundreds of thousands in the city are fighting back. Hong Kong is bracing for a potentially historic showdown over extradition legislation that could for the first time subject residents to face justice in Chinese courts, further eroding the city’s autonomy. Opponents on Sunday staged one of the largest protests since the former British colony’s return to China: Organizers said…

Read More Read More

The secret to slowing Guatemalan migration

The secret to slowing Guatemalan migration

Comments 0 Comment

Nicholas Kristof writes: To stop the flow of migrants, Trump has called for a wall at the Mexico border that would cost billions of dollars, has separated children from parents for months, has cut off aid to Central America and, most recently, threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico. The result? The torrent keeps getting bigger, with twice as many migrants seized at the border in each of the last few months as a year earlier. Trump’s strategy so far seems…

Read More Read More

Company part-owned by Jared Kushner got $90m from unknown offshore investors since 2017

Company part-owned by Jared Kushner got $90m from unknown offshore investors since 2017

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: A real estate company part-owned by Jared Kushner has received $90m in foreign funding from an opaque offshore vehicle since he entered the White House as a senior adviser to his father-in-law Donald Trump. Investment has flowed from overseas to the company, Cadre, while Kushner works as an international envoy for the US, according to corporate filings and interviews. The money came through a vehicle run by Goldman Sachs in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven that…

Read More Read More

‘Hell on Earth’ scenario predicted if climate crisis doesn’t trigger immediate drastic action

‘Hell on Earth’ scenario predicted if climate crisis doesn’t trigger immediate drastic action

Comments 0 Comment

Al Jazeera reports: A climate change paper grabbed headlines this week with its terrifying prediction of what the world will be in 30 years’ time – absent drastic and immediate change to human societies. “World of outright chaos,” “Climate apocalypse,” “We’re all gonna die,” the media banners blared. The sobering headlines and equally disconcerting stories beneath described a “scenario analysis” by an Australian think-tank, Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration. The paper portrayed what the year 2050 will look like…

Read More Read More

America’s political mood currently the ‘most liberal ever recorded’

America’s political mood currently the ‘most liberal ever recorded’

Comments 0 Comment

Eric Levitz writes: The American public is in the mood for “big government.” According to the distinguished political scientist James Stimson’s “Public Policy Mood estimate” — a widely respected tool for measuring shifts in ideological opinion across time — the U.S. electorate is more sympathetic to left-wing economic policy today than at anytime in the past 68 years (which is as far back as Stimson’s data goes). Tracking ideological change across decades is inherently difficult, since some policy questions fall…

Read More Read More

Troubling-to-outright-damning episodes lost in the noise around the Mueller report’s release

Troubling-to-outright-damning episodes lost in the noise around the Mueller report’s release

Comments 0 Comment

Quinta Jurecic writes: After two years of silence, the special counsel Robert Mueller recently made his first public remarks — to complain, it seemed, that no one had read his report. “We chose those words carefully,” Mr. Mueller said, “and the work speaks for itself.” But at a dense 440-plus pages, if the report speaks for itself, it takes a great deal of time and focus to listen to what it has to say. Mr. Mueller tells a complicated story…

Read More Read More

In a world full of wars, why are so many of them ignored?

In a world full of wars, why are so many of them ignored?

Comments 0 Comment

Simon Tisdall writes: Cameroon, a central African state of 24 million people on the Gulf of Guinea, is rarely in the news – which is surprising, given the awful things happening there. In a warring world full of conflict, the country’s troubles barely rate a mention. That’s short-sighted. As Yemen shows, today’s local difficulties have a habit of becoming tomorrow’s international crises. Long-running tensions between Cameroon’s French and English-speaking communities came to a head last week with the arrest of…

Read More Read More

U.S. ambassador says Israel has right to annex parts of West Bank

U.S. ambassador says Israel has right to annex parts of West Bank

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: Israel has a right to annex at least some, but “unlikely all,” of the West Bank, the United States ambassador, David M. Friedman, said in an interview, opening the door to American acceptance of what would be an enormously provocative act. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to begin annexing Jewish settlements in the West Bank, a move that would violate international law and could be a fatal blow to a two-state solution to the…

Read More Read More

Doublethink is stronger than Orwell imagined

Doublethink is stronger than Orwell imagined

Comments 0 Comment

George Packer writes: No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984. The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc—doublethink, memory hole, unperson, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Thought Police, Room 101, Big Brother—they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of…

Read More Read More

White House blocked intelligence agency’s written testimony warning about ‘catastrophic’ climate change

White House blocked intelligence agency’s written testimony warning about ‘catastrophic’ climate change

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: White House officials barred a State Department intelligence agency from submitting written testimony this week to the House Intelligence Committee warning that human-caused climate change could be “possibly catastrophic.” The move came after State officials refused to excise the document’s references to federal scientific findings on climate change. The effort to edit, and ultimately suppress, the prepared testimony by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research comes as the Trump administration is debating how best…

Read More Read More

Trump is giving Americans dirty water, dirty air, and a very dirty climate

Trump is giving Americans dirty water, dirty air, and a very dirty climate

Comments 0 Comment

Michael E. Mann writes: To say that Donald Trump’s jaw-dropping display of environmental ignorance while in the United Kingdom is an embarrassment to all Americans would be an understatement. But the worst part of his ramblings about how we have “among the cleanest climates there are based on all statistics” isn’t that it sounds like the ramblings of a Fox News addict. It’s that his administration is doing everything it can to work towards the opposite: dirty water, dirty air,…

Read More Read More

Trump: ‘we are going back to the Moon’ but ‘NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon.’ Huh?

Trump: ‘we are going back to the Moon’ but ‘NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon.’ Huh?

Comments 0 Comment

May 13, 2019: Under my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars. I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 13, 2019 June 7, 2019: For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon – We did that 50 years ago….

Read More Read More

GOP lawmakers are quietly turning against the death penalty

GOP lawmakers are quietly turning against the death penalty

Comments 0 Comment

Madeleine Carlisle writes: David Welch’s wife died on Christmas Day 2016. He doesn’t remember much of what happened that next year. But in the grips of grief, he came to a fundamental realization, he told me: The death penalty is “just morally wrong.” Welch has served as a Republican in the New Hampshire state House for more than three decades. For most of that time, he had consistently voted to uphold the death penalty. But after his wife’s death, he…

Read More Read More

In secret recording, Pompeo opens up about Venezuelan opposition, says keeping it united ‘has proven devilishly difficult’

In secret recording, Pompeo opens up about Venezuelan opposition, says keeping it united ‘has proven devilishly difficult’

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered a candid assessment of Venezuela’s opposition during a closed-door meeting in New York last week, saying that the opponents of President Nicolás Maduro are highly fractious and that U.S. efforts to keep them together have been more difficult than is publicly known. “Our conundrum, which is to keep the opposition united, has proven devilishly difficult,” Pompeo said in an audio recording obtained by The Washington Post. “The moment Maduro leaves,…

Read More Read More

Justice Ginsburg says deep divisions on the way, and Supreme Court watchers look for clues

Justice Ginsburg says deep divisions on the way, and Supreme Court watchers look for clues

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg turns reporter, reporters and lawyers start searching for clues. In a purportedly just-the-facts speech Friday to the judicial conference of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York, Ginsburg gave plenty to dissect. She teased pending decisions in cases about whether the census may contain a question on citizenship, and if the court would for the first time decide that a state’s electoral maps are…

Read More Read More