The ‘red wave’ washout: How skewed polls fed a distorted election narrative

The ‘red wave’ washout: How skewed polls fed a distorted election narrative

The New York Times reports: Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, had consistently won re-election by healthy margins in her three decades representing Washington State. This year seemed no different: By midsummer, polls showed her cruising to victory over a Republican newcomer, Tiffany Smiley, by as much as 20 percentage points. So when a survey in late September by the Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group showed Ms. Murray clinging to a lead of just two points, it seemed like an aberration. But in…

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The Webb Telescope is just getting started

The Webb Telescope is just getting started

The New York Times reports: So far it’s been eye candy from heaven: The black vastness of space teeming with enigmatic, unfathomably distant blobs of light. Ghostly portraits of Neptune, Jupiter and other neighbors we thought we knew already. Nebulas and galaxies made visible by the penetrating infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope, named for James Webb, the NASA administrator during the buildup to the Apollo moon landings, is a joint project of NASA, the European…

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Brazil’s Lula picks Amazon defender for environment minister

Brazil’s Lula picks Amazon defender for environment minister

The Associated Press reports: Brazil´s President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced Thursday that Amazon activist Marina Silva will be the country´s next minister of environment. The announcement indicates the new administration will prioritize cracking down on illegal deforestation even if it means running afoul of powerful agribusiness interests. Both attended the recent U.N. climate conference in Egypt, where Lula promised cheering crowds “zero deforestation” in the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest and a key to fighting climate change, by…

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From climate exhortation to climate execution

From climate exhortation to climate execution

Bill McKibben writes: There are about a hundred and forty million homes in the United States. Two-thirds, or about eighty-five million, of them are detached single-family houses; the rest are apartment units or trailer homes. That’s what American prosperity looks like: since the end of the Second World War, our extraordinary wealth has been devoted, above all, to the project of building bigger houses farther apart from one another. The great majority of them are heated with natural gas or…

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Zelenskyy’s secret call to McConnell puts squeeze on oligarchs

Zelenskyy’s secret call to McConnell puts squeeze on oligarchs

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports: The day before Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy swept into the United States and delivered an impassioned speech to Congress, he made a quiet phone call to one of the country’s most powerful Republicans: Mitch McConnell. Among his urgent requests: convince the Senate minority leader to help turn over the seized fortunes of Russian oligarchs — including the proceeds of their yachts, planes and mansions — to help rebuild the Ukraine president’s devastated country. Two days later,…

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Putin, unaccustomed to losing, is increasingly isolated as war falters

Putin, unaccustomed to losing, is increasingly isolated as war falters

The Washington Post reports: When Vladimir Putin visited Minsk last week to discuss deepening cooperation, a sarcastic joke by his host, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, seemed to ring all too true. “The two of us are co-aggressors, the most harmful and toxic people on this planet. We have only one dispute: Who is the bigger one? That’s all,” Lukashenko said. As Putin approaches New Year’s Eve, the 23d anniversary of his appointment in 1999 as acting Russian president, he appears…

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Hacked Russian files reveal propaganda agreement with China

Hacked Russian files reveal propaganda agreement with China

The Intercept reports: Russian officials pushed the lies first. Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, a Russian defense ministry spokesperson resuscitated debunked claims about a U.S.-funded bioweapons program in the region, accusing Ukrainian labs of experimenting with bat coronaviruses in an attempt to spark “the covert spread of deadliest pathogens.” Disinformation is an old Russian government tactic. But this time Russia had help. Within days, Chinese officials and media outlets had picked up the lies and were amplifying and expanding on…

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The IRS really, really should have audited Trump

The IRS really, really should have audited Trump

Noah Bookbinder writes: Six years after Donald Trump should have disclosed his tax returns to the public, they have finally been released. This took advocacy, congressional action, and litigation that went to the Supreme Court—all to obtain basic financial transparency from a president. But the House Ways and Means Committee’s report on its investigation, released last week in conjunction with the committee’s vote to disclose Trump’s tax returns, revealed new information that may be as astonishing as anything in the…

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What’s gone at Twitter? A data center, janitors, some toilet paper

What’s gone at Twitter? A data center, janitors, some toilet paper

The New York Times reports: Elon Musk’s orders were clear: Close the data center. Early on Christmas Eve, members of the billionaire’s staff flew to Sacramento — the site of one of Twitter’s three main computing storage facilities — to disconnect servers that had kept the social network running smoothly. Some employees were worried that losing those servers could cause problems, but saving money was the priority, according to two people who were familiar with the move but not authorized…

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A local paper suggested Santos was a ‘fabulist’ before the election, but no one paid attention

A local paper suggested Santos was a ‘fabulist’ before the election, but no one paid attention

The Washington Post reports: Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate. The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later. The story noted…

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George Santos’ massive campaign loans may not be legal

George Santos’ massive campaign loans may not be legal

The Daily Beast reports: Even as Rep.-elect George Santos (R-NY) embarks on his apology tour, admitting he lied to voters for years about some of the most fundamental facts of his life, there’s been one mystery that Santos has been less than clear about: where his purported millions came from. The Daily Beast now has at least part of the answer—the identities of four Santos corporate clients. And while this new revelation might put Santos in even more hot water,…

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Trump and MAGA misfits turn on ‘Trump’s bitch’ Sean Hannity

Trump and MAGA misfits turn on ‘Trump’s bitch’ Sean Hannity

The Daily Beast reports: Sean Hannity, once the most important mouthpiece for Donald Trump, seems to be increasingly on the MAGAworld outs. And a new revelation that Hannity doesn’t buy the Big Lie isn’t helping. In a just-released deposition surrounding Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit, the Fox News star said he’d never believed—not “for one second”—baseless election fraud claims stemming from the 2020 election. That stance, directly at odds with many of his primetime segments and the beliefs of many…

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Inside the Ukrainian counteroffensive that shocked Putin and reshaped the war

Inside the Ukrainian counteroffensive that shocked Putin and reshaped the war

The Washington Post reports: After weeks of fighting for scraps of territory on the war’s bloodiest front, Oleh, a 21-year-old Ukrainian company commander, was summoned suddenly last August, along with thousands of other soldiers, to an obscure rendezvous point in the Kharkiv region. At his last position, relentless Russian artillery fire had stalked his men’s every step. But here, in a patch of villages, farmland and streams in Ukraine’s northeast, the quiet was deeply alarming. “The silence bothered me the…

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Sudden Russian Death Syndrome

Sudden Russian Death Syndrome

Elaine Godfrey writes: Here is a list of people you should not currently want to be: a Russian sausage tycoon, a Russian gas-industry executive, the editor in chief of a Russian tabloid, a Russian shipyard director, the head of a Russian ski resort, a Russian aviation official, or a Russian rail magnate. Anyone answering to such a description probably ought not stand near open windows, in almost any country, on almost every continent. Over the weekend, Pavel Antov, the aforementioned…

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