Bankman-Fried planned to buy island state of Nauru and build apocalypse bunker

Bankman-Fried planned to buy island state of Nauru and build apocalypse bunker

The Guardian reports: The disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded the FTX exchange, had planned to purchase the small Pacific island nation of Nauru in case the world came to an end, according to a new lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed on Thursday by FTX against its 31-year-old founder and three other former executives, and seeking $1bn, included a memo created by Bankman-Fried’s younger brother Gabriel and an FTX Foundation executive. The memo detailed plans to buy Nauru. The plan…

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Tipping points: Climate collapse could happen fast

Tipping points: Climate collapse could happen fast

Lois Parshley writes: Ever since some of the earliest projections of climate change were made back in the 1970s, they have been remarkably accurate at predicting the rate at which global temperatures would rise. For decades, climate change has proceeded at roughly the expected pace, says David Armstrong McKay, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, in England. Its impacts, however, are accelerating—sometimes far faster than expected. For a while, the consequences weren’t easily seen. They certainly are today….

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Florida schools will teach how slavery brought ‘personal benefit’ to black people

Florida schools will teach how slavery brought ‘personal benefit’ to black people

The Daily Beast reports: Middle school students in Florida will soon be taught that slavery gave Black people a “personal benefit” because they “developed skills.” After the Florida Board of Education approved new standards for African American history on Wednesday, high school students will be taught an equally distorted message: that a deadly white mob attack against Black residents of Ocoee, Florida, in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” Dozens of Black residents were killed…

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Influential activist Leonard Leo helped fund media campaign lionizing Clarence Thomas

Influential activist Leonard Leo helped fund media campaign lionizing Clarence Thomas

The Washington Post reports: The 25th anniversary of Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court was approaching — a moment that would draw attention to his accomplishments on the bench but also to the misconduct claims that had nearly derailed his rise. Among the wave of retrospective accounts set to come out that year, 2016, was a star-studded HBO film dramatically recounting Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations. That spring, a flurry of opinion articles defending Thomas and railing against the…

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As RFK Jr. gets boosted by the GOP, his popularity among Democrats plummets

As RFK Jr. gets boosted by the GOP, his popularity among Democrats plummets

Aaron Blake writes: The right’s thinly veiled campaign to elevate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for its own political purposes culminated Thursday with his invitation to testify at a congressional hearing. It was a remarkable scene: a Democratic presidential candidate, who just last week suggested that the coronavirus could have been a “deliberately targeted” bioweapon to spare Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish people while attacking White and Black people disproportionately, and who has regularly espoused debunked vaccine claims, welcomed by Republicans to…

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Russia’s spies say Putin faces more coups

Russia’s spies say Putin faces more coups

Michael Weiss reports: For Russian spies and soldiers, the biggest shock from last month’s abortive coup in Russia is that Yevegeny Prigozhin didn’t succeed in overthrowing a regime that they say curries little devotion. The Insider has spoken with several sources in Russia’s special services. Prigozhin, the rogue catering magnate turned mercenary financier, they insist, faced little resistance because he enjoys widespread support within the ranks of the very institutions meant to safeguard the state and Vladimir Putin. To most…

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Iran’s hijab-industrial complex

Iran’s hijab-industrial complex

Kourosh Ziabari writes: The Iranian government is handicapped by unrelenting sanctions that do not look as though they are going away anytime soon. The country’s economic paralysis is compounded by the inadequacies of a squad of callow officials and corrupt functionaries, whose nepotism triggers frequent scandals these days. While the sanctions have almost irreversibly insulated the national economy from the outside world and rendered Iran’s banking and financial sectors irrelevant, the iron-fisted establishment has been unable to tame its top-tier…

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Oppenheimer’s tragedy — and ours

Oppenheimer’s tragedy — and ours

Robert Jay Lifton writes: In 1954, Robert Oppenheimer was subjected to what was rightly called “an extraordinary American inquisition” (Stern 1969) under the name of a security hearing. Despite having served his country so devotedly in heading the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, he was now publicly humiliated, condemned as a security risk, stripped of his security clearance, and forced to step down from his government consultancies. Those hearings were skewed and manipulated in McCarthyite fashion. But while extremely…

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‘We are damned fools’: Scientist who sounded climate alarm in 80s warns of worse to come

‘We are damned fools’: Scientist who sounded climate alarm in 80s warns of worse to come

The Guardian reports: The world is shifting towards a superheated climate not seen in the past 1m years, prior to human existence, because “we are damned fools” for not acting upon warnings over the climate crisis, according to James Hansen, the US scientist who alerted the world to the greenhouse effect in the 1980s. Hansen, whose testimony to the US Senate in 1988 is cited as the first high-profile revelation of global heating, warned in a statement with two other…

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Trump’s conspirators are facing the music, finally

Trump’s conspirators are facing the music, finally

Norman Eisen and Ryan Goodman write: We’ve reached a turning point in the effort to ensure there are consequences for those who deliberately attempt to undermine our democracy: Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, charged 16 Republican leaders in her state on Tuesday for their role as fake electors working to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The charges, coming on the heels of news that the special counsel Jack Smith has informed Donald Trump that he’s a target of…

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Michigan beats DOJ to bring first charges against Trump’s ‘false electors’

Michigan beats DOJ to bring first charges against Trump’s ‘false electors’

Shan Wu writes: Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is apparently tired of waiting on the U.S. Department of Justice to act on the ‘false electors’ scheme that occurred in December of 2020. The scheme allegedly consisted of a plan to submit fake certificates stating that former President Trump had won seven battle ground states. The plan was simple but audacious. As described by Professor Ryan Goodman, co-director of the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School,…

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Judge confirms: Trump is indeed a rapist

Judge confirms: Trump is indeed a rapist

Aaron Blake writes: After Donald Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, his legal team and his defenders lodged a frequent talking point. Despite Carroll’s claims that Trump had raped her, they noted, the jury stopped short of saying he committed that particular offense. Instead, jurors opted for a second option: sexual abuse. “This was a rape claim, this was a rape case all along, and the jury rejected that — made other findings,” his…

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Robert Kennedy Jr’s racist, antisemitic and xenophobic views go back decades, report says

Robert Kennedy Jr’s racist, antisemitic and xenophobic views go back decades, report says

The Guardian reports: Robert Kennedy Jr, a long-shot Democratic candidate for US president, has a long history of racism, antisemitism and xenophobia, and should be denied a national platform, according to a damning report [PDF] seen by the Guardian. Kennedy, who provoked anger last week when he was filmed falsely suggesting that the coronavirus could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, is due to testify at the US Capitol in Washington on Thursday. The Congressional…

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Senators propose ban on U.S. lawmakers, executive branch members owning stock in individual companies

Senators propose ban on U.S. lawmakers, executive branch members owning stock in individual companies

The Wall Street Journal reports: Two U.S. senators are set this week to introduce bipartisan legislation to bar members of the federal executive branch and lawmakers from owning stock in individual companies, as new polling shows broad public support for such a measure. The bill from Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) and Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) would permit the president, vice president, lawmakers, Capitol Hill aides and employees of the executive branch to own mutual funds and broad industry and…

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