Russia’s state TV calls Trump their ‘agent’

Russia’s state TV calls Trump their ‘agent’

Julia Davis reports: Sometimes a picture doesn’t have to be worth a thousand words. Just a few will do. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov returned home from his visit with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office last week, Russian state media was gloating over the spectacle. TV channel Rossiya 1 aired a segment entitled “Puppet Master and ‘Agent’—How to Understand Lavrov’s Meeting With Trump.” Vesti Nedeli, a Sunday news show on the same network, pointed out that it…

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Barack Obama: Women are better leaders than men

Barack Obama: Women are better leaders than men

BBC News reports: If women ran every country in the world there would be a general improvement in living standards and outcomes, former US President Barack Obama has said. Speaking in Singapore, he said women aren’t perfect, but are “indisputably better” than men. He said most of the problems in the world came from old people, mostly men, holding onto positions of power. He also spoke about political polarisation and the use of social media to spread falsehoods. Speaking at…

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The eastern Mediterranean is dying

The eastern Mediterranean is dying

Peter Schwartzstein writes: Most of the world’s seas are in some kind of environmental trouble, but few have declined as quickly or from such precipitous heights as the Mediterranean’s eastern edge. Although it midwifed some of history’s greatest civilizations, the eastern Med has become a grubby embodiment of the current littoral states’ failures. Where the ancients sailed, many of their successors now junk industrial waste. The accomplishments of the Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans, and pharaonic Egyptians, among others, have only accentuated…

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Swiss central bank’s $800 billion could be enlisted in climate push

Swiss central bank’s $800 billion could be enlisted in climate push

Reuters reports: The Swiss central bank could be required to pull its $800 billion balance sheet out of investments in fossil fuel companies in a move by one of the world’s biggest reserve banks to tackle climate change. Swiss lawmakers are preparing a campaign that would make targeting climate change one of the policy objectives of the Swiss National Bank, alongside the traditional monetary targets of ensuring price stability and fostering economic growth. The drive will begin this month with…

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The imminent end of Britain’s social democracy

The imminent end of Britain’s social democracy

Matt Seaton writes: The immediate, clear consequence of the UK election of December 12, 2019, is that Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has succeeded where Theresa May’s failed in the last general election, in 2017—by winning an emphatic parliamentary majority that can pass the legislation necessary to facilitate Britain’s departure from the European Union. The faint irony of that two-year hiatus and the handover of party leadership from May to Johnson is that the latter’s deal is rather worse—from the Brexiteers’…

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A Labour revival must tap into the energy for change on the ground

A Labour revival must tap into the energy for change on the ground

John Harris writes: Ten days before the election, I was in the Dumbiedykes estate in Edinburgh, a high-rise scheme a few minutes’ walk from the Scottish parliament, where a shrinking working-class community is hanging on in the face of gentrification. The neighbourhood, which had a Labour MP until 2010, is the headquarters of an organisation called Edinburgh Helping Hands, whose motto is “Solidarity not charity”: its work runs from giving children in the city free bikes, through football and boxing…

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Donald Trump fears only one Democrat: Warren Sanders

Donald Trump fears only one Democrat: Warren Sanders

Robert Reich writes: There aren’t 20 Senate Republicans with enough integrity to remove the most corrupt president in American history, so we’re going to have to get rid of Trump the old-fashioned way – by electing a Democrat next 3 November. That Democrat will be Warren Sanders. Although there are differences between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, I’m putting them together for the purpose of making a simple point. These two have most of the grassroots energy in the 2020…

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The knowledge of trees

The knowledge of trees

Sue Burke writes: The U.N. Climate Change Conference in Madrid opened on Dec. 2 by calling the climate crisis a “war against nature.” But trees have always been at war, fighting for their survival. While plants may seem passive in the environment, they can sense their environments, make decisions, and respond to threats—up to a point. Every autumn holds terrible perils for plants. While many trees drop their leaves every year, the decision of precisely when to do so is…

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A new study shows an animal’s lifespan is written in the DNA. For humans, it’s 38 years

A new study shows an animal’s lifespan is written in the DNA. For humans, it’s 38 years

A genetic “clock” lets scientists estimate how long extinct creatures lived. Wooly mammoths could expect around 60 years. Australian Museum By Benjamin Mayne, CSIRO Humans have a “natural” lifespan of around 38 years, according to a new method we have developed for estimating the lifespans of different species by analysing their DNA. Extrapolating from genetic studies of species with known lifespans, we found that the extinct woolly mammoth probably lived around 60 years and bowhead whales can expect to enjoy…

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The accidental book review that made Jack Kerouac famous

The accidental book review that made Jack Kerouac famous

Ronald K.L. Collins writes: In early September 1957, Jack Kerouac achieved the dream of every writer. Around midnight he and his girlfriend, Joyce Glassman, left her brownstone apartment in New York City for a nearby newsstand at Broadway and 66th Street. They waited while the nightman cut the twine around the morning edition of the New York Times. Rifling through the paper, they found on Page 27 an expected review of Kerouac’s new book, “On the Road.” Glassman recalled that…

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Centrists say Johnson’s victory is proof Sanders or Warren can’t win. They’re wrong

Centrists say Johnson’s victory is proof Sanders or Warren can’t win. They’re wrong

Cas Mudde writes: The exit polls for the UK general election had barely been published and US pundits were already tweeting out the lessons for next year’s US presidential election. It’s almost as if their conclusions had been reached before the results were known. “Right populism will always beat left populism,” tweeted Yascha Mounk. Perhaps that’s the case, but I don’t know of many elections in which right and left populism were up against each other. And that’s leaving aside…

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Devoid of agility, charisma and credibility, Corbyn has led Labour into the abyss

Devoid of agility, charisma and credibility, Corbyn has led Labour into the abyss

Polly Toynbee writes: Given the worst choice in history, the public preferred [Boris Johnson] to his opponent. How bad did Labour have to be to let this sociopathic, narcissistic, glutton for power beat them? That’s the soul-searching question every Labour member, office-holder and MP has to ask. Labour was disastrously, catastrophically bad, an agony to behold. A coterie of Corbynites cared more about gripping power within the party than saving the country by winning the election. The national executive committee,…

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A 1970s hard-left clique led the Labour Party into a dead end

A 1970s hard-left clique led the Labour Party into a dead end

Jonathan Freedland writes: Like anyone who travelled the country and listened to voters, candidates and canvassers, I heard with my own ears the Labour voters who said they couldn’t back the party this time, not because of Brexit but because of Corbyn. Indeed, Brexit was often cited not for its own sake – little of this campaign was spent debating customs zones and trade agreements – but rather for its confirmation of their view that Corbyn was irredeemably “weak”. This…

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Richer nations accused of stalling progress on climate crisis

Richer nations accused of stalling progress on climate crisis

The Guardian reports: Poor countries have accused a handful of richer nations of holding up progress on tackling the climate crisis at UN talks in Madrid, as demonstrators and activists vented their frustration in the final hours of two weeks of negotiations. The talks dragged on to what looked set to be a late final night with no guarantee of an agreed outcome, as governments wrangled over the details of a seemingly arcane issue: carbon markets, governed by a provision…

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