Music: Nine Horses — ‘Atom and Cell’
Trump 2.0: This time the stakes for climate are even higher
Michael Gerrard writes: The November 5 election was the worst-case outcome for climate regulation. The return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office and Republican control of the Senate and the House of Representatives will halt federal progress and lead to a reversal of most of the climate initiatives undertaken by the Biden administration. Such a rollback occurred after Trump first won election in 2016, but this time the stakes are even higher. Trump has promised to halt spending under…
Trump’s Pentagon pick Hegseth wrote of U.S. military taking sides in ‘civil war’
The Guardian reports: Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, has written in a book that he could imagine a scenario in which the US armed forces would be used violently in American domestic politics. Hegseth, a former elite soldier turned rightwing Fox television personality, is Trump’s choice to lead the Pentagon which controls the gigantic American military – by far the largest armed force in the world. In one of his five published books he wrote that in…
Trump won less than 50 percent. Why is everyone calling it a landslide?
Michael Schaffer writes: Is it newsworthy that Donald Trump’s share of the 2024 presidential vote has fallen below 50 percent? You wouldn’t think it’s a big deal based on the relatively few headlines triggered by the milestone, which passed quietly last weekend as California and other states continued their glacially slow vote counts. And maybe that’s as it should be. After all, Trump’s 49.9 percent (for now) is still more than Kamala Harris’ 48.3 percent. When the counting is done,…
Republicans put Marjorie Taylor Greene in charge of new ‘DOGE’ subcommittee
HuffPost reports: House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) announced Thursday that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) will chair a new subcommittee named after an internet meme from the early 2010s. President-elect Donald Trump tapped entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head an advisory panel called the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, that’s tasked with identifying trillions in government waste. Not wanting to be left out, Republicans on Capitol Hill this week created a caucus (an informal group…
Gallant: IDF ‘securing aid distribution’ is a ‘euphemism’ for military rule in Gaza
The Times of Israel reports: Ousted defense minister Yoav Gallant said Wednesday that Israel’s taking security responsibility for the distribution of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip would set it down the path of military governance in the enclave at an unacceptable cost to the lives of soldiers. “The discussion about ‘distributing food to residents of Gaza by private companies with IDF security’ is a euphemism for the start of a military government,” Gallant wrote on X. “The price will…
Here’s why turning to AI to train future AIs may be a bad idea
Science News reports: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and other AI tools whip up impressive sentences and paragraphs from as little as a simple line of text prompt. To generate those words, the underlying large language models were trained on reams of text written by humans and scraped from the internet. But now, as generative AI tools flood the internet with a large amount of synthetic content, that content is being used to train future generations of those AIs. If this continues…
In the quantum world, even points of view are uncertain
Anil Ananthaswamy writes: Imagine standing on a railway platform watching a trolley go past. A girl on the trolley drops a bright red ball. To her, the ball falls straight down. But from the platform, you see the ball traverse an arc before hitting the trolley floor. The two of you observe the same event, but from different reference frames: one anchored to the trolley and the other to the platform. The idea of reference frames has a storied history…
Music: Nine Horses — ‘Wonderful World’
Accused war criminal status will be hard stigma for Netanyahu to shrug off
Julian Borger writes: The arrest warrants issued by the international criminal court (ICC) represent an earthquake on the world’s legal landscape: the first time a western ally from a modern democracy has been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity by a global judicial body. Inside Israel, the warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, will not have an immediate impact. In the short term they are likely to rally support around the prime minister…
Several of Trump’s Cabinet picks — and Trump himself — have been accused of sexual misconduct
The Associated Press reports: While Matt Gaetz has withdrawn from the nomination process for attorney general, President-elect Donald Trump has picked several other people for his Cabinet and key staff positions who have been accused of some form of sexual misconduct. Trump himself has long been accused of abusing or mistreating women and once was caught bragging about grabbing women by the genitals. He was found liable by a New York City jury for sexual abuse and defamation and eventually…
Linda McMahon, Trump’s Education pick, was sued for allegedly enabling sexual abuse of children
CNN reports: A recent lawsuit alleges Linda McMahon, who President-elect Donald Trump tapped to lead the Department of Education, knowingly enabled the sexual exploitation of children by a World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) employee as early as the 1980s — allegations she denies. McMahon is the former CEO of the WWE, which she co-founded with her husband, Vince. As head of the WWE, Linda McMahon oversaw its transformation from a wrestling entertainment company into a publicly traded media empire. She stepped…
Trump picks Pam Bondi for AG, having previously been accused of bribing her when she was Florida AG
NBC News reports: President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that his new pick for attorney general is Pam Bondi. Bondi previously served as Florida’s attorney general. The announcement came just hours after former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., withdrew from consideration. “For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans — Not anymore,” Trump said in a post to Truth Social. “Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and…
Why Trump dumped Gaetz
Marc A. Caputo reports: Donald Trump giveth. And he taketh away. Eight days after making the snap decision to nominate Matt Gaetz to be the nation’s next attorney general, Trump phoned him Thursday morning to tell him he wouldn’t get confirmed, according to a source briefed on the conversation. The president-elect explained that Republican senators were too troubled by the sex scandals and investigations surrounding Gaetz and that the constant and salacious distractions had doomed him. “You don’t have the…
RFK Jr. compared Trump to Hitler and praised descriptions of his supporters as ‘Nazis’
CNN reports: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services, has a long history of scathing critiques against Trump, labeling him a “threat to democracy,” a “bully,” and, as recently as July, a “terrible president.” But Kennedy’s harshest attacks date back to Trump’s rise in 2016, when on his radio show “Ring of Fire,” Kennedy applauded descriptions of Trump’s base as “belligerent idiots” and suggestions that some were “outright Nazis” and “spineless fellow…
The technology the Trump administration might use to hack your phone
Ronan Farrow writes: In September, the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) signed a two-million-dollar contract with Paragon, an Israeli firm whose spyware product Graphite focusses on breaching encrypted-messaging applications such as Telegram and Signal. Wired first reported that the technology was acquired by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—an agency within D.H.S. that will soon be involved in executing the Trump Administration’s promises of mass deportations and crackdowns on border crossings. A source at Paragon told me that the deal followed…