Music: Emil Brandqvist Trio — ‘Grand Piano’
Rep. Zoe Lofgren: Biden is on a trajectory to lose the election. He needs to step aside
NBC News reports: Another close Bay Area ally of Pelosi, longtime Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., also joined the group of detractors Friday, releasing a letter that she sent to Biden on Thursday night. In it, Lofgren mentioned her work on the House Jan. 6 Committee, warning that Trump “remains as grave a threat to the Constitutional order and rule of law that he was on January 6, 2021 when he incited insurrection.” “We must face the reality that widespread…
Democratic donors begin mobilizing to raise money for Harris if she’s the nominee
Politico reports: Allies of Vice President Kamala Harris have begun courting Democratic donors to provide financial support for her if President Joe Biden drops out of the 2024 race. One Democratic donor adviser has begun collecting pledges from female Democratic donors to support Harris, while a women’s political organization has begun speaking to its donor base in an effort to ensure an initial wave of contributions to a potential Harris campaign, according to people familiar with the efforts. These people…
Plastics pollution has become a ‘crisis,’ Biden administration acknowledges
Inside Climate News reports: Single-use plastic would be phased out of all U.S. government operations by 2035 under a new federal plastics pollution strategy unveiled Friday by President Joe Biden’s administration, which cited a “crisis” of littered oceans and poisoned air due to plastics. “The Federal government is—for the first time—formally acknowledging the severity of the plastic pollution crisis and the scale of the response that will be required to effectively confront it,” said Brenda Mallory and Ali Zaidi, the…
Israel’s settlement policies break international law, International Court of Justice finds
The Guardian reports: The top United Nations court has ruled that Israel’s settlement policies and use of natural resources in the occupied Palestinian territories violate international law. The international court of justice said “the transfer by Israel of settlers to the West Bank and Jerusalem as well as Israel’s maintenance of their presence, is contrary to article 49 of the fourth geneva convention”. The panel of 15 judges from around the world also said the use of natural resources was…
UK to resume funding to UN Palestine relief agency UNRWA
The Guardian reports: Britain will restore funding to the UN’s Palestine relief agency Unrwa, the foreign secretary has announced, in Labour’s first major departure from the previous government’s stance towards the Middle East crisis. David Lammy told MPs on Friday he had decided to unfreeze funding, which was suspended in January after Israel alleged that Unrwa staff were involved in the 7 October attack by Hamas. Catherine Colonna, a former French foreign minister, carried out a review of the allegations…
For 18 years she worked in the U.S. government. Then came the war on Gaza
For 18 years, Hala Rharrit worked in the US State Department, most recently becoming its Arabic-language spokesperson. But the Biden administration’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza forced her to resign in April, becoming the first US diplomat to quit in protest over the US’s Gaza policy. In this wide-ranging Real Talk interview, Rharrit reveals what went on behind the scenes, how her Gaza reports were received by US officials, and why she ultimately decided to resign.
How one bad CrowdStrike update crashed the world’s computers
Wired reports: Only a handful of times in history has a single piece of code managed to instantly wreck computer systems worldwide. The Slammer worm of 2003. Russia’s Ukraine-targeted NotPetya cyberattack. North Korea’s self-spreading ransomware WannaCry. But the ongoing digital catastrophe that rocked the internet and IT infrastructure around the globe over the past 12 hours appears to have been triggered not by malicious code released by hackers, but by the software designed to stop them. Two internet infrastructure disasters collided on Friday to produce…
Music: Emil Brandqvist Trio — ‘When the Light Shines Through’
Biden campaign is finally realizing: ‘It’s a when, not if’
NBC News reports: In the hours after the assassination attempt on Trump last weekend, some Democrats said — even feared — that the calls for Biden to step aside would be “frozen” as the president dealt with a national crisis. But that faded quickly. Some allies now say that the shooting, which has caused an even more intense rallying around Trump within his party, only makes it more glaringly obvious that the nagging narrative of whether Biden is on a…
Sharpton says he told Biden that staying in race could imperil his legacy
The New York Times reports: The Rev. Al Sharpton said Thursday that he had told President Biden it was time for “a serious calculation” of his standing in the presidential campaign and that remaining in the race could imperil much of Mr. Biden’s legacy as president. “I said that whatever he does, I’ll always respect what we’ve done together,” Mr. Sharpton said in a phone interview. “I was not one to push him out of the race, but he needs…
Retaliation: Biden campaign tries to punish dissent
Politico reports: Democrats in Michigan cut off a vulnerable House Democrat from a major part of campaign operations after she called last week for President Joe Biden to step down from the ticket. Officials reversed that decision Thursday, after facing questions from POLITICO. Rep. Hillary Scholten, a first-term Democrat who flipped a traditionally Republican seat in 2022, was booted last week from a coordinated effort between the Biden campaign and the state party to elect candidates up and down the…
Why tech titans are turning toward Trump
Vox reports: Former President Donald Trump used to be persona non grata in Silicon Valley. Nearly all of the dollars spent by Silicon Valley elites in 2016 went to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. In 2020, those elites spent even more to defeat Trump. The few who supported Trump that year — such as venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal and Palantir — did so knowing they were standing on a third rail, and many did not speak openly about it for fear…
The United States of Suppression
Teen Vogue reports: The backlash to progress is often swift. The response to the 2020 protests for Black lives and against police brutality — what may have been the biggest mobilization in US recorded history — was stunning. A bright spark of resistance and the expression of long-held frustration was met with suffocating state repression: arrests, beatings, prosecutions, and calls for more police funding from the highest levels of government. With the 2024 presidential election on the horizon, authoritarianism in the…
Climate crisis is making days longer, study finds
The Guardian reports: The climate crisis is causing the length of each day to get longer, analysis shows, as the mass melting of polar ice reshapes the planet. The phenomenon is a striking demonstration of how humanity’s actions are transforming the Earth, scientists said, rivalling natural processes that have existed for billions of years. The change in the length of the day is on the scale of milliseconds but this is enough to potentially disrupt internet traffic, financial transactions and…
To save life on Earth, bring back taxonomy
Robert Langellier writes: In 2009, the botanist Naomi Fraga was hunting a flower without a name near Carson City, Nev. Ms. Fraga saw that the plant was going extinct in real time as its desert valley habitat was bulldozed to make way for Walmarts and housing developments. But in order to seek legal protections for it, she had to give it a name. The diminutive yellow flower became the Carson Valley monkeyflower or, officially, Erythranthe carsonensis, allowing conservationists to petition…