Saudi Arabia continues moving toward eventual official ties with Israel

Saudi Arabia continues moving toward eventual official ties with Israel

The Wall Street Journal reports: Saudi Arabia is engaging in serious talks with Israel to build business ties and create new security arrangements as the conservative Islamic kingdom senses a shift among its public in favor of establishing official ties with the majority Jewish state. Although Saudi Arabia doesn’t recognize Israel and has no diplomatic relations with its neighbor, the kingdom is expanding its secretive talks with Israeli leaders that could reshape Middle East politics and end decades of enmity…

Read More Read More

The long history of Glenn Greenwald ‘making common cause’ with the most evil regimes around the world

The long history of Glenn Greenwald ‘making common cause’ with the most evil regimes around the world

Cathy Young writes: In the months since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, maverick journalist Glenn Greenwald has emerged as one of the loudest anti-Ukraine voices in the American media, with all the usual themes: transparent gloating over Russia’s apparent war gains in Eastern Ukraine; alarmism over United States support for Ukraine leading to World War III; even the flogging of “American biolabs in Ukraine” conspiracies in his Substack newsletter and in videos. While Greenwald has made overwrought claims about the “neo-Nazi…

Read More Read More

Climate groups join for first-of-its-kind, $100 million push to mobilize midterm voters

Climate groups join for first-of-its-kind, $100 million push to mobilize midterm voters

CNN reports: In an attempt to mobilize voters around the climate crisis, six climate advocacy groups are readying for the midterms with an arsenal of $100 million — the first coordinated spending of its kind. In a difficult political year for Democrats, the climate groups are forming the new Climate Votes Project, shared first with CNN and to be announced Monday. The $100 million will pay for multiple ad campaigns, as well as an in-person field organizing to contact hard-to-reach…

Read More Read More

Biden to waive tariffs for 24 months on solar panels hit by probe

Biden to waive tariffs for 24 months on solar panels hit by probe

Reuters reports: President Joe Biden will declare a 24-month tariff exemption on Monday for solar panels from four Southeast Asian nations after an investigation froze imports and stalled projects in the United States, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The move comes amid concern about the impact of the Commerce Department’s months-long investigation into whether imports of solar panels from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are circumventing tariffs on goods made in China. Biden’s action would allay companies’ concerns…

Read More Read More

Video: Covid and the brain — a neurological health crisis

Video: Covid and the brain — a neurological health crisis

  Brain fog. Memory lapses. Difficulties focusing or sustaining attention. All these cognitive issues have plagued some who have otherwise recovered from a bout of Covid-19. In this video, Stanford neurologist Michelle Monje describes her work showing how even mild respiratory infections with the SARS-CoV-2 virus may lead to lingering problems with the brain. Monje, who has long treated and studied cancer patients with similar symptoms following chemotherapy, says that the damage isn’t necessarily caused by the virus itself. Instead,…

Read More Read More

India’s war on journalists

India’s war on journalists

Zeba Warsi writes: An unsettling, eerie silence engulfed the streets of Khajuri Khas two days after the riots. The neighborhood is a Muslim ghetto and was one of the worst hit in the anti-Muslim violence that erupted in Delhi in late February 2020. Fifty-three people were killed, a majority of them Muslims. I walked through lanes covered in ashes. The air was thick with the toxic smell of burned refrigerators and charred vehicles. Broken pieces of furniture lined the streets….

Read More Read More

Ukraine is desperate for peace, but we won’t sign up to a bogus Russian deal

Ukraine is desperate for peace, but we won’t sign up to a bogus Russian deal

Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister, writes: We Ukrainians want peace more than anyone in the world. For about 100 days, we have been fighting Russian forces on the ground, in the sky, on the sea, and in cyber and information spaces. Defence experts originally gave us little hope of success. They changed their position when we showed our ability to resist. Now we need to demonstrate the strength to hold our course and resist the temptations of a…

Read More Read More

Estonia’s PM Kallas calls for new government talks as coalition collapses

Estonia’s PM Kallas calls for new government talks as coalition collapses

The Guardian reports: Estonia’s prime minister, Kaja Kallas, has called for talks on a new government after her ruling coalition fell apart, urging unity because of security concerns over neighbouring Russia. Kallas spoke to reporters after President Alar Karis accepted her request to dismiss seven Centre party ministers from the 15-strong cabinet, including the foreign minister, Eva-Maria Liimets. “More than ever, Estonia needs a functioning government based on common values,” Kallas said on Friday, according to the Baltic news agency….

Read More Read More

Ukraine anger as Macron says ‘Don’t humiliate Russia’

Ukraine anger as Macron says ‘Don’t humiliate Russia’

BBC News reports: Ukraine’s foreign minister has hit out at French President Emmanuel Macron after he said it was vital that Russia was not humiliated over its invasion. Mr Macron said it was crucial President Vladimir Putin had a way out of what he called a “fundamental error”. But Dmytro Kuleba said allies should “better focus on how to put Russia in its place” as it “humiliates itself”. Mr Macron has repeatedly spoken to Mr Putin by phone in an…

Read More Read More

Ukraine isn’t just getting U.S.-made killer drones. It’s getting a whole remote warfare system

Ukraine isn’t just getting U.S.-made killer drones. It’s getting a whole remote warfare system

David Axe reports: The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden plans to offer to Ukraine the General Atomics MQ-1C Gray Eagle, the U.S. Army’s best unmanned aerial vehicle. The possible forthcoming offer, which Reuters first reported, would be subject to approval by the U.S. Congress. But if the president follows through, lawmakers sign off on the deal and the White House can arrange financing—likely via the federal government’s fund for foreign weapons deals—Kyiv’s forces soon could operate one of the…

Read More Read More

Video: Debunking Putin’s propaganda

Video: Debunking Putin’s propaganda

  The Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) is an independent, non-profit social enterprise dedicated to countering disinformation, exposing human rights abuses, and combating online behaviour harmful to women and minorities.

The Kremlin-backed Wagner Group gets rich in Sudan while helping the military crush a democracy movement

The Kremlin-backed Wagner Group gets rich in Sudan while helping the military crush a democracy movement

The New York Times reports: In a scorched, gold-rich area 200 miles north of the Sudanese capital, where fortunes spring from desert-hewn rock, a mysterious foreign operator dominates the business. Locals call it “The Russian Company” — a tightly guarded plant with shining towers, deep in the desert, that processes mounds of dusty ore into bars of semirefined gold. “The Russians pay the best,” said Ammar al-Amir, a miner and community leader in al-Ibediyya, a hardscrabble mining town 10 miles…

Read More Read More

Catastrophe drives evolution, but life resides in the pauses

Catastrophe drives evolution, but life resides in the pauses

Renée A Duckworth writes: In certain places around the world – in the Badlands near Drumheller in Alberta, Canada, in the Geulhemmergroeve tunnels in the Netherlands, or in the Hell Creek formation in eastern Montana – you can touch a thin line of rock, and know you are touching the most famous mass extinction event on Earth. This Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary layer is a seam of clay found all over the world, enriched with iridium – an element that appears…

Read More Read More

Thousands arrested as Kremlin clamps down on war criticism

Thousands arrested as Kremlin clamps down on war criticism

The New York Times reports: Vladimir Efimov, a local politician on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East, was charged with “discrediting the army” and ordered to pay a $500 fine three times in recent months over antiwar images that he displayed on social media. When he continued, reposting battlefield pictures like the wholesale destruction of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol under Russian bombardment, prosecutors ratcheted up the charges and accused him of a felony — punishable by up…

Read More Read More