Music: Benjamin Jephta Quintet — ‘Be Strong’
Kash Patel as FBI director would lead to a constitutional crisis greater than Watergate
The New York Times reports: Several Republican lawmakers fell in line on Sunday behind President-elect Donald J. Trump’s plan to choose Kash Patel to lead the F.B.I., defending the incoming president’s right to install a loyalist who has vowed to use the position to exact revenge on Mr. Trump’s adversaries. Mr. Trump’s announcement on Saturday that he intends to replace Christopher A. Wray, the current F.B.I. director, who still has three years left on his 10-year term, with Mr. Patel…
Recess appointments could put Trump at odds with conservatives on the Supreme Court
The Associated Press reports: [In 2014, when the justices unanimously ruled that Democratic President Barack Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were illegal, Justice Antonin] Scalia, an icon of the right, applied his originalist approach to the Constitution to conclude that there was little doubt what the framers were trying to do. The whole point of the constitutional provision on recess appointments, adopted in 1787 in the era of horse and buggy, was that the Senate could…
In Syria, history is being made on the ground
Robin Yassin-Kassab writes: The rebels advanced out of the narrow strip of Idlib in which they and millions of Syrians from around the country had been crammed for over four years. ‘The rebels’ here means a military alliance under the umbrella of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – the greatly moderated and better organised reincarnation of Jabhat al-Nusra. It’s still an authoritarian Islamist militia, but it’s not at all ‘like ISIS’ as the uninformed are saying. It broke definitively from the ISIS…
How Joe Biden made a mess of Ukraine
Phillips Payson O’Brien writes: Joe Biden filled his administration with geniuses: Rhodes scholars; Ivy League graduates; people with extensive global experience; a national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, whom the president has described as a “once-in-a-generation intellect.” The president himself has been immersed in foreign policy for half a century. Yet despite all of those impressive résumés, the Biden administration has badly mishandled the war in Ukraine, not only hampering a beleaguered ally’s ability to fend off a Russian invasion but…
Democracy activist Garry Kasparov warns Trump’s next term could see America’s first true oligarchs
HuffPost reports: Elon Musk, rocket and electric car company chief, sometime Internet troll and more recently Donald Trump’s point man for cutting alleged waste from the federal government, may be on the cusp of becoming something else: the country’s first real oligarch. That’s according to democracy activist and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, chairman of the New York-based Renew Democracy Initiative. Kasparov should know. As a celebrity chess prodigy in the 1980s, he tried to use his fame to…
Emboldened ‘manosphere’ accelerates threats and demeaning language toward women after election
The Associated Press reports: In the days after the presidential election, Sadie Perez began carrying pepper spray with her around campus. Her mom also ordered her and her sister a self-defense kit that included keychain spikes, a hidden knife key and a personal alarm. It’s a response to an emboldened fringe of right-wing “manosphere” influencers who have seized on Republican Donald Trump’s presidential win to justify and amplify misogynistic derision and threats online. Many have appropriated a 1960s abortion rights…
Fossilized footprints reveal 2 extinct hominin species living side by side 1.5 million years ago
Excavating the new trackway site, with footprints from hominins, birds and other animals visible in foreground. Neil Roach By Anna K. Behrensmeyer, Smithsonian Institution; Kevin Hatala, Chatham University, and Purity Kiura, National Museums of Kenya Human footprints stir the imagination. They invite you to follow, to guess what someone was doing and where they were going. Fossilized footprints preserved in rock do the same – they record instants in the lives of many different extinct organisms, back to the earliest…
Music: Abdullah Ibrahim — ‘Water From An Ancient Well’
Pete Hegseth’s mother to her son: ‘You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth’
The New York Times published an email sent by Penelope Hegseth to her son (who has been nominated to become Donald Trump’s defense secretary) in 2018 as he was in the middle of divorcing his wife, Samantha: Son, I have tried to keep quiet about your character and behavior, but after listening to the way you made Samantha feel today, I cannot stay silent. And as a woman and your mother I feel I must speak out.. You are an…
Syrian rebels breach city of Aleppo, in biggest advance in years
The New York Times reports: Syrian rebels breached the major city of Aleppo on Friday, according to the fighters and a war monitor, reigniting the country’s long-running civil war with an intensity not seen in years. The rebels, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, took control of “more than half of Aleppo” within hours on Friday without resistance from Syrian government forces, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group based in Britain. Independent Syrian media shared images…
Will Joe Biden’s legacy not only be another Trump term but also another pandemic?
Zeynep Tufekci writes: Almost five years after Covid blew into our lives, the main thing standing between us and the next global pandemic is luck. And with the advent of flu season, that luck may well be running out. The H5N1 avian flu, having mutated its way across species, is raging out of control among the nation’s cattle, infecting roughly a third of the dairy herds in California alone. Farmworkers have so far avoided tragedy, as the virus has not…
Why Charles Kushner, Trump’s pick for U.S. ambassador to France, is so controversial
The Associated Press reports: President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday he intends to nominate real estate developer Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, to serve as ambassador to France. Trump made the announcement in a Truth Social post, calling Charles Kushner “a tremendous business leader, philanthropist, & dealmaker.” Kushner is the founder of Kushner Companies, a real estate firm. Jared Kushner is a former White House senior adviser to Trump who is married to Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka. The…
Trump signed the law to require presidential ethics pledges. Now he is exempting himself from it
The Independent reports: A bipartisan bill to boost transparency and make sure incoming presidents stick to an ethics plan was so uncontroversial that it passed the Senate by a voice vote in 2020. Donald Trump then signed it into law. But now, after blowing past deadlines to adhere to the law after winning the White House a second time, Trump appears to have excluded himself from those same ethical guidelines. Trump missed two months of deadlines before finally signing off…
Journalists flock to Bluesky as X becomes increasingly ‘toxic’
NBC News reports: When Ashton Pittman, an award-winning news editor and reporter, first joined the app Bluesky, he said, he was the only Mississippi journalist he knew to be using it. Until about five weeks ago, he said, that was the case. But now, Pittman said, there are at least 15 Mississippi journalists on Bluesky as it becomes a preferred platform for reporters, writers, activists and other groups who have become increasingly alienated by X. Pittman’s outlet, the Mississippi Free…
New powder that captures carbon could be ‘quantum leap’ for industry
The Guardian reports: An innocuous yellow powder, created in a lab, could be a new way to combat the climate crisis by absorbing carbon from the air. Just half a pound of the stuff may remove as much carbon dioxide as a tree can, according to early tests. Once the carbon is absorbed by the powder, it can be released into safe storage or be used in industrial processes, like carbonizing drinks. “This really addresses a major problem in the…