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Category: Politics

A trio of wealthy Russians made an enemy of Putin. Now they’re all dead

A trio of wealthy Russians made an enemy of Putin. Now they’re all dead

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Nikolai Glushkov, a Russian émigré, lived alone in a weather-beaten row house in South London with an aging dog and a cat named Braveheart. It was the waning days of March, and he was readying himself for something big. The onetime finance director of Russia’s flagship airline, he was preparing for a trial in a London court. He told friends it would prove his innocence of longstanding financial charges by Russian authorities and expose Aeroflot…

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Russian whistleblower assassinated after uncovering $200 billion dirty-money scandal

Russian whistleblower assassinated after uncovering $200 billion dirty-money scandal

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The Daily Beast reports: A crusading Russian official traveled to Estonia in the summer of 2006 to warn the authorities that an unprecedented money-laundering scheme had been established in the tiny Baltic financial sector. The scam he had uncovered would go on to become the biggest dirty-money operation in history: the $200 billion Danske Bank scandal. Three months after Andrei Kozlov, the first deputy chairman of the Russian Central Bank, tried to raise the alarm, he was dead. Crooked beneficiaries…

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Bolsonaro has made grim threats to the Amazon and its people

Bolsonaro has made grim threats to the Amazon and its people

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Climate Change News reports: No more Paris Agreement. No more ministry of environment. A paved highway cutting through the Amazon. Not only that. Indigenous territories opened to mining. Relaxed environmental law enforcement and licensing. International NGOs, such as Greenpeace and WWF, banned from the country. A strong alliance with the beef lobby. In a nutshell, this is what Jair Bolsonaro, who is sailing towards Brazil’s presidency after taking a near-majority in a first round vote on Sunday, has promised for…

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Limiting global warming to 1.5°C will require deep emissions cuts

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C will require deep emissions cuts

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Climate Central reports: The Paris Climate Change Agreement set a goal of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C (2.7°F).” In that agreement, world leaders asked the IPCC, the preeminent climate science body, “to provide a Special Report in 2018 on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways.” After being formally…

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The Trump administration has entered Stage 5 climate denial

The Trump administration has entered Stage 5 climate denial

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Dana Nuccitelli writes: Several years ago, I wrote about the five stages of climate denial: In 2013 @dana1981 wrote about the 5 stages of #climatechange denial. Stage 1: Deny the Problem ExistsStage 2: Deny We're the CauseStage 3: Deny It's a ProblemStage 4: Deny We can Solve ItStage 5: It's too Late Look where the Trump Administration is.https://t.co/FRQGZ8gQ4r — Michael Brown (@MJIBrown) September 28, 2018 To date, the Trump administration has pinballed between Stages 1, 2, and 3, calling climate…

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Taylor Swift’s Instagram post has caused a massive spike in voter registration

Taylor Swift’s Instagram post has caused a massive spike in voter registration

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BuzzFeed reports: Since Taylor Swift flexed her star power Sunday with an Instagram post that encouraged her 112 million followers to register to vote, Vote.org has experienced an unprecedented flood of new voter registrations nationwide. “We are up to 65,000 registrations in a single 24-hour period since T. Swift’s post,” said Kamari Guthrie, director of communications for Vote.org. For context, 190,178 new voters were registered nationwide in the entire month of September, while 56,669 were registered in August. In Swift’s…

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The Mueller investigation is bigger than Rod Rosenstein

The Mueller investigation is bigger than Rod Rosenstein

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Asha Rangappa writes: Only a little over two weeks ago, in the wake of reports about remarks the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had made about the president’s fitness for office and an offer to secretly tape conversations with him, his job appeared to be on the line — along with the fate of the Russia investigation led by the special counsel Robert Mueller. On Monday, President Trump said he has no plans to fire him, and many Americans may…

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Deported parents may lose their children to adoption

Deported parents may lose their children to adoption

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The Associated Press reports: As the deportees were led off the plane onto the steamy San Salvador tarmac, an anguished Araceli Ramos Bonilla burst into tears, her face contorted with pain: “They want to steal my daughter!” It had been 10 weeks since Ramos had last held her 2-year-old, Alexa. Ten weeks since she was arrested crossing the border into Texas and U.S. immigration authorities seized her daughter and told her she would never see the girl again. What followed…

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To tackle the climate crisis, human civilization must transform faster than ever before

To tackle the climate crisis, human civilization must transform faster than ever before

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The New York Times reports: A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.” The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders,…

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The conflict over Kavanaugh’s nomination centered not on tribalism, but on a lack of justice

The conflict over Kavanaugh’s nomination centered not on tribalism, but on a lack of justice

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Peter Beinart writes: When it comes to Brett Kavanaugh, there are three camps. The first believes it’s a travesty that he was confirmed. The second believes it’s a travesty that he was smeared. The third believes it’s a travesty that the process was so divisive. David Brooks is in the third camp. The Kavanaugh hearings, he wrote on Friday, constituted an “American nadir.” You often hear such phrases from people who think the biggest problem with the Kavanaugh battle is…

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Brazil’s Bolsonaro-led far right wins a victory far more sweeping and dangerous than anyone predicted

Brazil’s Bolsonaro-led far right wins a victory far more sweeping and dangerous than anyone predicted

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Glenn Greenwald writes: For the past thirty years, Congressman Jair Bolsonaro was a fringe extremist in Brazilian politics, known mostly for outlandish, deliberately inflammatory quotes in which he paid homage to the most notorious torturers of the 1964-1985 military regime, constantly heralded the 1964 coup as a “defense of democracy,” told a female socialist colleague in Congress that she was too ugly to “deserve” his rape, announced that he’d rather learn that his son died in a car accident than…

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Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance spreads fear worldwide, but we won’t be silenced

Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance spreads fear worldwide, but we won’t be silenced

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Manal al-Sharif writes: The disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, the prominent Saudi journalist and Washington Post contributor, has reverberated among journalists, activists and critics of authoritarianism all over the world. My first encounter with his writings was in 2011, year one of the Arab Spring, in Al-Hayat, the Saudi newspaper that we both wrote for. In his columns, he called for seizing the moment and pushed for reforms within Saudi Arabia. For his courageous views, he was banned from writing and…

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Second Skripal poisoning suspect identified as Dr. Alexander Mishkin

Second Skripal poisoning suspect identified as Dr. Alexander Mishkin

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Bellingcat Investigation Team reports: In the preceding report from the current investigation into the two suspects in the Skripals poisoning case, Bellingcat and its reporting partner the Insider disclosed the identity of one of the two suspects. The person travelling under the alias of Ruslan Boshirov was identified as GRU’s Col. Anatoliy Chepiga, recipient of Russia’s highest state award. Bellingcat can now report that it has conclusively identified the second suspect, who travelled to Salisbury under the alias Alexander Petrov….

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Beto O’Rourke: Is this the man to take down Trump?

Beto O’Rourke: Is this the man to take down Trump?

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Ed Pilkington reports: On a balmy night in Austin, against the backdrop of the glittering high-rises of the city’s booming downtown, Beto O’Rourke is laying out his audacious plan to change the face of Texas, and America. In front of him, packed into an open-air park, a largely young crowd of 40,000 is thrumming with scarcely contained glee. Even in the liberal bubble of Austin they have never experienced anything like this: a Democrat seriously in the running for a…

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Kavanaugh’s first vote could be in Trump executive power fight

Kavanaugh’s first vote could be in Trump executive power fight

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Politico reports: Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s first vote as a member of the Supreme Court could come as soon as Tuesday or Wednesday on a Trump administration request testing how much power courts should wield over top executive branch officials. The administration has already made one unsuccessful run at the high court on the issue: It asked Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last week to step in to block depositions of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Justice Department civil rights chief John…

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The price of speaking out against a powerful man

The price of speaking out against a powerful man

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Tanya Selvaratnam writes: Early in our relationship, he told me that he could tap my phone and have me followed. I knew he had the power to do this. His power was a thread that ran throughout our relationship. We met in July 2016 at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. I had been involved in the arts and social justice causes for more than 20 years, but producing election-related videos in 2016 was my first step into electoral politics….

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