Britain’s Brexit odyssey is far from over

Britain’s Brexit odyssey is far from over

Anand Menon writes: Dawn, 24 June 2016. College Green. That small patch of grass opposite the Palace of Westminster. A flag-waving group of men – Nigel Farage and co – celebrates raucously. An ashen-faced Jeremy Corbyn arrives to tell the prime minister that article 50 should be triggered immediately. A senior FT reporter runs past, gasping that “the PM’s resigned and it’s only the third story on our website”. And so, the post-referendum odyssey began. In the sun, on the…

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Frontline youth fighting for climate justice

Frontline youth fighting for climate justice

  Black and Brown youth speak for themselves to tell their stories as a part of an intergenerational movement for liberation from all extractive systems and industries. This 7 minute video showcases the beauty and joy of young people who come from a long legacy of intergenerational leadership, grounded in community. They are fighting against the culprits of climate change and climate destruction in their own communities, and winning! Frontline youth are also an integral part of the creative and…

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How much of Harvard’s $40 billion endowment is invested in fossil fuels?

How much of Harvard’s $40 billion endowment is invested in fossil fuels?

Devi Lockwood writes: Figuring out exactly how much of Harvard’s endowment is invested in oil, gas and coal companies is a near-impossible task. Harvard is required to disclose only direct investments in which the university owns shares of a specific company. Harvard says its direct investments amounted to $394 million as of May 2019, or roughly 1 percent of the endowment total. Divest Harvard, a student group, determined that of that approximate amount, $5.6 million was invested in companies that…

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Were Neanderthals more than cousins to Homo sapiens?

Were Neanderthals more than cousins to Homo sapiens?

By Josie Glausiusz Around 200,000 years ago, in what is now northern Israel, a small band of tech-savvy humans dragged home and dismembered a bounty of wildlife. Using exquisitely pointed flint spearheads and blades, they hunted and butchered myriad prey, including gazelles, deer, and now-extinct aurochs, the ancestors of modern cattle. In the cool, humid climate of the coastal plain, these early Homo sapiens foraged for acorns in nearby forests of oak, olive, and pistachio. They ate the saline leaves…

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This is how democracy dies

This is how democracy dies

Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa write: Citizens in stable democracies are supposed to be satisfied with the democratic process. Individual politicians or administrations may be unpopular. But if the public lacks commitment to democratic principles, or loses faith in democratic institutions, demagogues and opportunists may brush these aside. That’s why we were concerned when, four years ago, we found that support for democracy in the United States, as well as many other countries around the world, was nearing dangerous…

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One year inside Trump’s monumental Facebook campaign

One year inside Trump’s monumental Facebook campaign

The Guardian reports: As the Democratic candidates for president spent 2019 battling each other in early voting states, Donald Trump’s re-election campaign built a sophisticated social media machine to communicate with conservative voters, grow its email list and fine-tune its messaging. Over the course of 2019, the Trump campaign spent nearly $20m on more than 218,000 different Facebook ads, a new Guardian analysis shows. Among the ads were some of the images and videos that made front-page news for their…

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Trump’s digital advantage is freaking out Democratic strategists

Trump’s digital advantage is freaking out Democratic strategists

Thomas B. Edsall writes: In a blog post published in November, a year before the 2020 election, Brian Burch, the president of CatholicVote.org, a socially conservative advocacy group, announced that in Wisconsin alone his organization had identified 199,241 Catholics “who’ve been to church at least 3 times in the last 90 days.” Nearly half of these religiously observant parishioners, Burch wrote, “91,373 mass-attending Catholics — are not even registered to vote!” CatholicVote.org is looking for potential Trump voters within this…

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Moderate Democrats in Iowa insist they’ll support the nominee whoever wins

Moderate Democrats in Iowa insist they’ll support the nominee whoever wins

BuzzFeed reports: Moderate Iowa Democrats, including those who support Joe Biden’s bid for president, say they would definitely vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders if he wins the party’s nomination, even as the Democratic Party establishment becomes increasingly concerned about the chances of a Sanders win. “I would vote for my dead cat over Trump,” said Sandy Stanley, 71, at a Biden campaign stop in Muscatine, Iowa. Stanley said she doesn’t like Sanders but wouldn’t hesitate to vote for him if…

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The real goal of Trump’s Middle East plan isn’t peace

The real goal of Trump’s Middle East plan isn’t peace

Robert Malley and Aaron David Miller write: The Trump administration’s long-awaited and ill-named peace plan has many objectives, but making peace isn’t among them. Neither is jump-starting negotiations, or nudging the parties toward compromise, or even enshrining implicit, private understandings in the hope Israelis and Palestinians might eventually publicly espouse them—each one of which, as we know from successful and unsuccessful experience, has been featured as the goal of past American plans. The motives behind a document conceived without any…

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The resurgence of ISIS

The resurgence of ISIS

CNN reports: ISIS has begun reasserting itself in Iraq and Syria under a new leader assessed to be an Iraqi operative who was a driving force behind the terror group’s genocide against the Yazidi people, according to a report submitted to the UN Security Council which was made public on Wednesday. The wide-ranging report, compiled by the UN Monitoring Team that tracks the global jihadi terror threat, refers to the group by its alternate name stating the “Islamic State in…

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A universal law may govern all living beings

A universal law may govern all living beings

Michel Loreau writes: The diversity of life is awe-inspiring. However, while biologists tend to focus on the multitude of species and how they live, what unites them may at times be more interesting than what sets them apart. In the era of “big data” and its deluge of information, this diversity can now begin to be perceived as a whole, discerning universal properties common to all creatures large and small. It was already known that there exist simple mathematical laws…

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Trump unveils Middle East apartheid ‘peace plan’

Trump unveils Middle East apartheid ‘peace plan’

The New York Times reports: President Trump unveiled his long-awaited Middle East peace plan with a flourish on Tuesday, outlining a proposal that would give Israel most of what it has sought over decades of conflict while creating what he called a Palestinian state with limited sovereignty. Mr. Trump’s plan would guarantee that Israel would control a unified Jerusalem as its capital and not require it to uproot any of the settlements in the West Bank that have provoked Palestinian…

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Where once there was fury, Palestinian issue now stirs up apathy

Where once there was fury, Palestinian issue now stirs up apathy

Martin Chulov reports: For much of the last 70 years the cause of Palestine stirred the Arab street. From Yemen to Morocco and all points in between, laments were sung in song and enshrined in poetry as the decades mounted without a Palestinian state. Regional statesmen built careers by standing by a people without a land. Wars were fought and lost in their name. After the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, that slowly began to change and by the time…

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Bolton concerned about Trump’s sympathies with autocratic rulers

Bolton concerned about Trump’s sympathies with autocratic rulers

The New York Times reports: John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, privately told Attorney General William P. Barr last year that he had concerns that President Trump was effectively granting personal favors to the autocratic leaders of Turkey and China, according to an unpublished manuscript by Mr. Bolton. Mr. Barr responded by pointing to a pair of Justice Department investigations of companies in those countries and said he was worried that Mr. Trump had created the appearance that…

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