The New York Times reports: Two days before a mob of Trump supporters invaded the United States Capitol, upending the nation’s peaceful transition of power and leaving at least five people dead, the right-wing radio star Glenn Beck delivered a message to his flock of 10.5 million listeners: “It is time to fight.” “It is time to rip and claw and rake,” Mr. Beck said on his Jan. 4 broadcast. “It is time to go to war, as the left…
The New York Times reports: Prosecutors in Fulton County have initiated a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn Georgia’s election results, including a phone call he made to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Mr. Trump pressured him to “find” enough votes to help him reverse his loss. On Wednesday, Fani Willis, the recently elected Democratic prosecutor in Fulton County, sent a letter to numerous officials in state government, including Mr. Raffensperger, requesting that…
The New York Times reports: In the final months of the Trump administration, senior Justice Department officials repeatedly sought to block federal prosecutors in Manhattan from taking a crucial step in their investigation into Rudolph W. Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine, delaying a search warrant for some of Mr. Giuliani’s electronic records, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The actions by political appointees at the Justice Department in Washington effectively slowed the investigation as it was gaining momentum last…
Sarah Zhang writes: Let’s begin by defining our terms. Herd immunity is the hazy, long-promised end of the pandemic, but its requirements are quite specific. Jennie Lavine, a biologist at Emory University, likens it to wet logs in a campfire. If there’s enough water in the logs—if there’s enough immunity in a population—“you can’t get the fire to start, period,” she says. To be more technical about it, a population reaches herd immunity when the average number of people infected…
Bill McKibben writes: A couple of weeks ago, I said that the first principle of fighting the climate crisis was simple: stop lighting coal, oil, gas, and trees on fire, as soon as possible. Today, I offer a second ground rule, corollary to the first: definitely don’t build anything new that connects to a flame. It’s obvious, of course, that we’re not going to stop burning fossil fuel tomorrow: there are, for instance, 1.42 billion cars on the planet’s roads,…
The Washington Post reports: Saudi Arabia released Loujain al-Hathloul, one of the country’s most prominent women’s rights activists, from prison on Wednesday in the clearest sign yet that the kingdom’s leaders were taking steps to assuage President Biden’s complaints about human rights violations. Hathloul, 31, has been among the most visible faces of an unrelenting Saudi crackdown on human rights advocates, dissidents and civil society activists. Her imprisonment, which lasted 1,001 days, and her allegations that she had been tortured,…
The Guardian reports: Air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil was responsible for 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, a staggering one in five of all people who died that year, new research has found. Countries with the most prodigious consumption of fossil fuels to power factories, homes and vehicles are suffering the highest death tolls, with the study finding more than one in 10 deaths in both the US and Europe were caused…
The New York Times reports: Dozens of heavily armed militiamen crowded into the Michigan Statehouse last April to protest a stay-at-home order by the Democratic governor to slow the pandemic. Chanting and stomping their feet, they halted legislative business, tried to force their way onto the floor and brandished rifles from the gallery over lawmakers below. Initially, Republican leaders had some misgivings about their new allies. “The optics weren’t good. Next time tell them not to bring guns,” complained Mike…
Dahlia Lithwick writes: [B]eyond the political message that House impeachment managers and Senate Democrats will convey at trial—that Republicans have opted, once again, to be the party of Trump and violent incitement and that his efforts to overturn both the vote and the Constitution are just fine—there is another vitally important message that will be conveyed this week, no matter the outcome. That message is less a political signal about the difference between the two parties so much as it…
Rep. Adam Kinzinger writes: Winston Churchill famously said, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” All Americans, but especially my fellow Republicans, should remember this wisdom during the Senate’s trial of former president Donald Trump. I say this as a lifelong Republican who voted to impeach Trump last month. Virtually all my colleagues on the right side of the aisle took the opposite path. Most felt it was a waste of time — political theater…
ABC News reports: With former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial starting today, Senate Democrats are focused on trying to tie a direct line between Trump’s rhetoric and the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters. An ABC News investigation into the nearly 200 accused rioters facing federal charges for their alleged involvement at the Capitol — based on court filings, military records, interviews, and available news reports– found that at least fifteen individuals who stormed the building…
Politico reports: Three weeks ago may have been the nadir of Donald Trump’s political influence. A meager crowd of supporters gathered to send him off to Florida, he’d lost access to Twitter and the Senate’s most powerful Republican, Mitch McConnell, seemed fully prepared to ghost him out of the party. Now, heading into what could have been an historic bipartisan rebuke, the former president and his team are confident both of his acquittal and that he’ll come out of the…
Time reports: “Let these investigations go forward,” Rudy Giuliani told the presidential headquarters in Kyiv, Ukraine, his voice turning impatient. “Get someone to investigate this.” On the other end of the line, hunched over a speakerphone, two Ukrainian officials listened in disbelief as Giuliani demanded probes that could help his client, then-President Donald Trump, win another term in office. The 40-minute call, a transcript of which was obtained by TIME, provides the clearest picture yet of Giuliani’s attempts to pressure…
Charlie Warzel writes: Michael Goldhaber is the internet prophet you’ve never heard of. Here’s a short list of things he saw coming: the complete dominance of the internet, increased shamelessness in politics, terrorists co-opting social media, the rise of reality television, personal websites, oversharing, personal essay, fandoms and online influencer culture — along with the near destruction of our ability to focus. Most of this came to him in the mid-1980s, when Mr. Goldhaber, a former theoretical physicist, had a…
Manvir Singh writes: The Harvard Kalahari Project propelled the !Kung into anthropological stardom. By 1976, researchers on the team had published more than 100 academic articles, on topics as varied as infant care, trance healing, and blood pressure. The research sparked more interest, which drew in more anthropologists, which produced more research. In a video for the Annual Review of Anthropology in 2012, DeVore speculated that there was no culture ‘outside the West that has as much fine-grained data on…