A warning from Europe: The worst is yet to come

A warning from Europe: The worst is yet to come

Comments 0 Comment

Anne Applebaum writes: On december 31, 1999, we threw a party. It was the end of one millennium and the start of a new one; people very much wanted to celebrate, preferably somewhere exotic. Our party fulfilled that criterion. We held it at Chobielin, the manor house in northwest Poland that my husband and his parents had purchased a decade earlier, when it was a mildewed ruin. We had restored the house, very slowly. It was not exactly finished in…

Read More Read More

Series of suspicious financial transactions followed the infamous Trump Tower meeting

Series of suspicious financial transactions followed the infamous Trump Tower meeting

Comments 0 Comment

BuzzFeed reports: The June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower has become one of the most famous gatherings in American political history: a flashpoint for allegations of collusion, the subject of shifting explanations by the president and his son, countless hair-on-fire tweets, and boundless speculation by the press. But secret documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News reveal a previously undisclosed aspect of the meeting: a complex web of financial transactions among some of the planners and participants who moved money from Russia…

Read More Read More

America’s courts can’t ignore the world

America’s courts can’t ignore the world

Comments 0 Comment

Justice Stephen Breyer writes: It is often said that the world is becoming more international in nature. What does this mean for those of us who live in such a world? When I hear words such as globalization, interdependence, and multinational, I sometimes feel like Stendhal’s hero Fabrice del Dongo at the beginning of The Charterhouse of Parma. He is a soldier at the Battle of Waterloo. He is lost in the fog of war. He hears bullets whizzing past….

Read More Read More

EU approves controversial Copyright Directive, including internet ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

EU approves controversial Copyright Directive, including internet ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

Comments 0 Comment

The Verge reports: The European Parliament has voted in favor of the Copyright Directive, a controversial piece of legislation intended to update online copyright laws for the internet age. The directive was originally rejected by MEPs in July following criticism of two key provisions: Articles 11 and 13, dubbed the “link tax” and “upload filter” by critics. However, in parliament this morning, an updated version of the directive was approved, along with amended versions of Articles 11 and 13. The…

Read More Read More

Seeking human generosity’s origins in an ape’s gift to another ape

Seeking human generosity’s origins in an ape’s gift to another ape

Comments 0 Comment

Carl Zimmer writes: How generous is an ape? It’s a hard question for scientists to tackle, but the answer could tell us a lot about ourselves. People in every culture can be generous, whether they’re loaning a cellphone to an office mate or sharing an antelope haunch with a hungry family. While it’s easy to dwell on our capacity for war and violence, scientists see our generosity as a remarkable feature of our species. “One of the things that stands…

Read More Read More

They defied Trump on climate change. Now, it’s their moment of truth

They defied Trump on climate change. Now, it’s their moment of truth

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: Hours after President Trump announced last year that the United States would exit the Paris climate deal, a broad group of governors, mayors and business executives declared that they would uphold the agreement anyway and continue tackling global warming on their own. It was a striking move for a coalition of local leaders: Making a case to the rest of the world that they, and not the president, spoke for the nation on climate policy….

Read More Read More

The real cost of the 2008 financial crisis

The real cost of the 2008 financial crisis

Comments 0 Comment

John Cassidy writes: September 15th marks the tenth anniversary of the demise of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, which presaged the biggest financial crisis and deepest economic recession since the nineteen-thirties. After Lehman filed for bankruptcy, and great swaths of the markets froze, it looked as if many other major financial institutions would also collapse. On September 18, 2008, Hank Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, went to Capitol Hill and…

Read More Read More

Trump’s long history of lying about 9/11 and exploiting it for personal gain

Trump’s long history of lying about 9/11 and exploiting it for personal gain

Comments 0 Comment

Paul Waldman writes: On Tuesday, President Trump traveled to Shanksville, Pa., where Flight 93 was brought down on Sept. 11, 2001, by a group of passengers who gave their lives to save others. Given how he has acted at other events that were supposed to be removed from politics, it was a surprise that Trump didn’t take the occasion to offer extended remarks on the magnificence of his 2016 victory or the unfairness of the Russia investigation. Still, it’s worth…

Read More Read More

The Democrat who could lead Trump’s impeachment isn’t sure it’s warranted

The Democrat who could lead Trump’s impeachment isn’t sure it’s warranted

Comments 0 Comment

Russell Berman writes: [T]here is likely no Democrat currently serving in Congress who has talked more about impeachment or developed a more fully formed opinion about its intended purpose than Jerry Nadler. He first articulated his view under vastly different circumstances, and in defense of a Democratic president. But over the course of 20 years, it hasn’t changed much. Born in Brooklyn and educated at Columbia and Fordham, Nadler won his first election to the House in 1992, after a…

Read More Read More

China has placed hundreds of thousands of Muslims in cultural extermination camps

China has placed hundreds of thousands of Muslims in cultural extermination camps

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: On the edge of a desert in far western China, an imposing building sits behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Large red characters on the facade urge people to learn Chinese, study law and acquire job skills. Guards make clear that visitors are not welcome. Inside, hundreds of ethnic Uighur Muslims spend their days in a high-pressure indoctrination program, where they are forced to listen to lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party…

Read More Read More

Woodward is truth’s gold standard

Woodward is truth’s gold standard

Comments 0 Comment

Jill Abramson writes: It’s hard to imagine a more disturbing portrait of a president than the one Bob Woodward painted of Richard Nixon in his final days: paranoid, poisoned by power, pounding the carpet and talking to the portraits on the walls. But the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency, as recounted by Woodward in his new book, “Fear,” are strikingly similar and in some ways even more gut-wrenching. Then, as now, the country faced a crisis of leadership caused…

Read More Read More

Trump is destroying America’s system for resettling refugees

Trump is destroying America’s system for resettling refugees

Comments 0 Comment

The Atlantic reports: A young girl hangs from a chair, swinging her legs and watching a fidget spinner spiral around her small finger. A couple huddles together, sifting through paperwork. A woman quietly speaks into her cellphone. A new life in America begins with quotidian routine here in this waiting room. But the placid, ordinary moment at the International Rescue Committee’s office in Baltimore is vanishing in some areas of the country: Deep cuts by the Trump administration in the…

Read More Read More

Germany’s Nazi past is still present

Germany’s Nazi past is still present

Comments 0 Comment

Jason Stanley writes: Much of the world seemed surprised by the riots that erupted in Germany late last month, when thousands of neo-Nazis and Nazi sympathizers took to the streets of Chemnitz, chasing down immigrants, with police almost powerless to stop them. Meanwhile, support for Germany’s new far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD), has continued to grow; in a poll taken after the riots in Chemnitz, AfD overtook the German Social Democrats to become the second…

Read More Read More

U.S. to close PLO office in Washington, citing lack of progress on peace process with Israel

U.S. to close PLO office in Washington, citing lack of progress on peace process with Israel

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration has ordered the closure of the Palestine Liberation Organization office in Washington because the PLO “has not taken steps to advance the start of direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel,” the State Department said Monday. The decision follows an extended period of estrangement between the Palestinian Authority government on the West Bank and the administration, which has already canceled most U.S. aid to Palestinians and recognized Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. Those moves…

Read More Read More

Remembering 1968

Remembering 1968

Comments 0 Comment

Jackson Lears writes: The religious dimension of American radicalism was what separated it from the student uprisings in Paris and other European cities during the spring of 1968. American radicals lacked the anticlerical animus of Europeans; priests, rabbis, and ministers enlisted in the front ranks of the civil rights and antiwar movements. King’s decision to bear witness against the war was central to legitimating resistance to it, while provoking government counterattacks as well as denunciations from both liberals and conservatives….

Read More Read More