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Category: Politics

Trump’s obfuscation on the climate crisis

Trump’s obfuscation on the climate crisis

Following Donald Trump’s interview with Piers Morgan on Wednesday where he talked about the weather changing “both ways,” noted that “it used to be called global warming,” then “climate change,” and now “it’s actually called extreme weather,” Eugene Robinson wrote: “it’s breathtaking that anyone could pack so much ignorance into so few words.” Robinson is doing what so many others do: treat Trump’s statements on the climate crisis as though they merely reflect his ignorance on the issue. The remedy…

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Watching Elizabeth Warren come alive

Watching Elizabeth Warren come alive

Dahlia Lithwick writes: The photos were all over the internet on election night of 2016. They went viral in the bad way, and they all looked something like this: Women, standing in a crowd of other women, hands over their mouths, tears on their cheeks, as they realized that Hillary Clinton had lost to Donald Trump, the man who bragged about treating women like garbage. Those photos had come immediately on the heels of the other photos, also inescapable, taken…

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Barr is lying about Mueller’s evidence

Barr is lying about Mueller’s evidence

William Saletan writes: The final report on the Russia investigation, submitted on March 22 by special counsel Robert Mueller, documents multiple attempts by President Donald Trump to obstruct justice. So why hasn’t Trump been indicted? Because one man stands in the way: Attorney General William Barr. Two days after receiving Mueller’s 448-page report, Barr declared Mueller’s evidence insufficient. Since then, Barr has offered no detailed analysis to support his conclusions. Instead, in hearings and interviews, the attorney general has based…

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YouTube’s new policy on hate speech risks increasing ignorance about fascism

YouTube’s new policy on hate speech risks increasing ignorance about fascism

The Guardian reports: YouTube has blocked some British history teachers from its service for uploading archive material related to Adolf Hitler, saying they are breaching new guidelines banning the promotion of hate speech. The video-sharing website announced on Wednesday that it would remove material glorifying the Nazis from its platform in an attempt to stop people being radicalised. In the process however, it also deleted videos uploaded to help educate future generations about the risks of fascism. Scott Allsop, who…

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Russian disinformation on YouTube draws ads, lacks warning labels, say researchers

Russian disinformation on YouTube draws ads, lacks warning labels, say researchers

Reuters reports: Fourteen Russia-backed YouTube channels spreading disinformation have been generating billions of views and millions of dollars in advertising revenue, according to researchers, and had not been labeled as state-sponsored, contrary to the world’s most popular streaming service’s policy. The channels, including news outlets NTV and Russia-24, carried false reports ranging from a U.S. politician covering up a human organ harvesting ring to the economic collapse of Scandinavian countries. Despite such content, viewers have flocked to the channels and…

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Pelosi tells senior Democrats she wants to see Trump ‘in prison’

Pelosi tells senior Democrats she wants to see Trump ‘in prison’

Politico reports: Speaker Nancy Pelosi told senior Democrats that she’d like to see President Donald Trump “in prison” as she clashed with House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler in a meeting on Tuesday night over whether to launch impeachment proceedings. Pelosi met with Nadler (D-N.Y.) and several other top Democrats who are aggressively pursuing investigations against the president, according to multiple sources. Nadler and other committee leaders have been embroiled in a behind-the-scenes turf battle for weeks over ownership of the…

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How Trump could be prosecuted after the White House

How Trump could be prosecuted after the White House

Renato Mariotti writes: With Congress enmeshed in a fraught debate over whether to impeach President Donald Trump, Robert Mueller’s brief and dramatic news conference provided a sharp reminder that impeachment is not the only option for addressing the president’s alleged misdeeds. The outlines of a potential civilian prosecution of a former president Trump are already emerging. While there are reports of tax dodges, illegal campaign contributions, and improper foreign contributions to his inaugural committee—among other things—investigations into those claims are…

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No-deal Brexit cannot happen without parliamentary consent, says Speaker

No-deal Brexit cannot happen without parliamentary consent, says Speaker

The Guardian reports: John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, has said it is “blindingly obvious” that the new Conservative prime minister will not be able to suspend parliament to push through a no-deal Brexit. The Speaker said it would not be an option after outrage across the political spectrum when the leadership hopeful Dominic Raab suggested he might try to take that path. “That is simply not going to happen. It is just so blindingly obvious that…

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13 Democrats recorded messages about Israel. Bernie Sanders was the only one to show any courage

13 Democrats recorded messages about Israel. Bernie Sanders was the only one to show any courage

Peter Beinart writes: The mantra of Kirsten Gillibrand’s presidential campaign is “Brave Wins.” Yet in her video message to the American Jewish Committee’s Global Forum this week, the New York Senator didn’t even mention the word “Palestinian.” That was typical. The 2020 Democratic hopefuls talk a lot about having the courage not just to challenge Donald Trump but to transform America’s political and economic system. But with the exception of Bernie Sanders, the leading contenders couldn’t muster the nerve to…

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Russia’s manipulation of Twitter was vastly more extensive than previously believed

Russia’s manipulation of Twitter was vastly more extensive than previously believed

Politico reports: Russia’s infamous troll farm conducted a campaign on Twitter before the 2016 elections that was larger, more coordinated and more effective than previously known, research from cybersecurity firm Symantec out Wednesday concluded. The Internet Research Agency campaign may not only have had more sway — reaching large numbers of real users — than previously thought, it also demonstrated ample patience and might have generated income for some of the phony accounts, Symantec found. The company analyzed a massive…

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Lies pave the way for anti-abortion laws. To defeat the laws we must fight the lies

Lies pave the way for anti-abortion laws. To defeat the laws we must fight the lies

Rebecca Solnit writes: Anti-abortion laws are built on anti-abortion lies. Lies about things like who has abortions, how abortions work, how women’s bodies work and how fetuses develop. The lies pave the way for the laws. There are the old lies, like the ones suggesting that the women having abortions are careless hussies (51% of abortions are to women who were using contraception; 59% are to women who are already mothers; 75% are to poor and low-income women). Lately, there’s…

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Climate change is our World War III. It needs a bold response

Climate change is our World War III. It needs a bold response

Joseph Stiglitz writes: Advocates of the Green New Deal say there is great urgency in dealing with climate change and highlight the scale and scope of what is required to combat it. They are right. They use the term “New Deal” to evoke the massive response by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the United States government to the Great Depression. An even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II. Critics ask, “Can we afford it?” and…

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My green manufacturing plan for America

My green manufacturing plan for America

Elizabeth Warren writes: While much of the debate around the Green New Deal has focused on the path to aggressive reductions in domestic greenhouse gas emissions, the science is clear: even if we reduce America’s emissions so that they are net-zero by 2030, we will still fall far short of the reduction in global emissions needed to avert a climate crisis. To satisfy this global need, we need rapid innovation on par with the space race along with widespread domestic…

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China wants us to forget the horrors of Tiananmen as it rewrites its history

China wants us to forget the horrors of Tiananmen as it rewrites its history

Louisa Lim and Ilaria Maria Sala write: Remembering the deaths of 4 June 1989 is no neutral task. It is a civic duty, a burden and an act of resistance in countering a state-level lie that risks spreading far beyond China’s borders. On that day the Communist party sent tanks to clear protesters from Tiananmen Square in the centre of Beijing, killing hundreds of people, maybe more than a thousand. In the intervening years, China has systematically erased the evidence…

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When China massacred its own people

When China massacred its own people

Nicholas Kristof writes: Thirty years ago in the spring of 1989, as the world’s most populous country teetered on the edge of freedom, I received a late-night phone call in my apartment in Beijing: The Chinese Army was invading its own capital. Students and workers had made roads impassable by setting up barricades to block the army, so I jumped on my bicycle and pedaled furiously toward the gunfire. I reached Tiananmen Square shortly before the army, and then I…

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