Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi and Alex Mierjeski, Staff Writers - ProPublica
Stephan:
After having tea with my wife, and debriefing with her about how hard it is becoming to do SR every day because of how depressing it is to report on what is happening to the United States, I decided I did need to do this corruption story because, I think it finally settles the issue that on 20 January we will cease to be an ethical democracy, and become an authoritarian oligarchy. Donald Trump simply has no ethics, and no interests other than his own self-enrichment. Tomorrow I am going yet again to see if I can find some good news trends. In the United States they are becoming very hard to find.
There have been internal concerns that Trump Media could be misleading investors, a source said. But with its largest shareholder about to be president, experts doubt the SEC is up to the job of investigating Truth Social’s parent company.
Last month a major shareholder of a publicly traded company took to social media to complain that people — perhaps short sellers — were spreading lies that could hurt his firm’s stock price.
“There are fake, untrue, and probably illegal rumors,” the post read. “I hereby request that the people who have set off these fake rumors or statements, and who may have done so in the past, be immediately investigated by the appropriate authorities.”
The Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t typically take its marching orders from shareholders on social media. But in this case, the poster was Donald Trump, who’s just weeks away from being inaugurated and gaining the power to appoint the head of the SEC.
When Trump takes office in January, a president will for the first time be the majority owner of a publicly traded company, Trump Media, which runs Truth Social. Former SEC officials are concerned about how Trump could try to use the agency to go after the foes […]
Climate change is significantly altering the poles. An iceberg bigger than Rhode Island — 1,418-square-miles — has broken free in the Antarctic and is now floating in the Southern Ocean about halfway between the southeast coast of Argentina and the Antarctic continent but more than 1,200 miles east. It will pass by South Georgia Island a British overseas territory inhabited only by scientists who study the Antarctic. As this report describes no one really knows what the environmental effect of such a huge block of melting ice will be.
Iceberg A23a in November 2023. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
After spinning in a vortex for months, the world’s largest and oldest iceberg is on the move again.
Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey announced on Friday that the colossal iceberg, designated A23a, is floating across the Southern Ocean. The iceberg’s journey provides a significant opportunity for scientists to study how giant icebergs impact their surrounding ecosystems.
“It’s exciting to see A23a on the move again after periods of being stuck. We are interested to see if it will take the same route the other large icebergs that have calved off Antarctica have taken,” Andrew Meijers, an oceanographer at British Antarctic Survey, noted in the British Antarctic Survey statement, “And more importantly what impact this will have on the local ecosystem.”
A23a weighs almost a trillion tons, and, as of August, spanned 1,418-square-miles (3,672 square kilometers), making it twice as big as Greater London, or just a bit larger than Rhode Island, according to CNN. It has repeatedly claimed the title of the world’s largest iceberg, outlasting several large contenders.
A23a separated from West Antarctica’s Filchner-Ronne […]
I was a Bernie Sanders delegate for the 2020 Presidential election and I wish he had won, we would be a very different much better country if he had. Now he is crying out to get the attention of Americans exclaiming about the demise of democracy in the United States. What surprises me is the docile response of Americans. I have been studying how nonviolent social movements change the course of their country for over 30 years. It is one of the reasons I started spending dozens of unpaid hours each week doing SR. If you look at how Martin Luther King made the civil rights movement successful, how women got the vote in 1918, how Nelson Mandela ended apartheid in South Africa, how Gandhi got independence from Britain for India without a war, what you see is masses of civilians demonstrating in the streets, so many that the oligarchs and authoritarians have to give way. But where are the Americans today? Sitting in their homes like sheep. How is it possible that women are being turned into subordinate second class citizens, with so little resistance. I don’t understand but that is what is happening.
Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont Credit: Joe Maher / Getty
“My friends, you don’t have to be a PhD in political science to understand that this is not democracy. This is not one person, one vote. This is not all of us coming together to decide our future. This is oligarchy.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is escalating his fight against the U.S. oligarchy with a new campaign directed at the nation’s wealthiest individuals—including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—who he says are key culprits in a global race to the bottom that is stripping people worldwide of political agency while impoverishing billions so that the rich can amass increasingly obscene levels of wealth.
Announcing a new series that will detail how “billionaire oligarchs” in the U.S. “manipulate the global economy, purchase our elections, avoid paying taxes, and increasingly control our government,” Sanders said in a Friday night video address that it makes him laugh when mainstream pundits talk openly about the nefarious oligarchic structures in other places, but refuse to acknowledge the issue in domestic terms.
The science on the negative effects of carbon energy on Earth’s wellbeing is irrefutable. But still, the United States under the worst President in the country’s history is preparing to emphasize its commitment to carbon energy. In contrast the rest of the world’s democracies are going in the opposite direction. Here is the latest from the U.K.
Sheep and lambs graze near wind turbines on Llyn Alaw Wind Farm in Anglesey, Wales, UK. Credit: Andrew Aitchison / Getty
The plan is part of an “ambitious” goal of reaching 95 percent green energy by the end of the decade, reported BBC News.
“A new era of clean electricity for our country offers a positive vision of Britain’s future with energy security, lower bills, good jobs and climate action. This can only happen with big, bold change and that is why the government is embarking on the most ambitious reforms to our energy system in generations,” Miliband said in a government press release. “The era of clean electricity is about harnessing the power of Britain’s natural resources so we can protect working people from the ravages of global energy markets.”
Miliband also wants the country’s energy regulator to have the power to tackle energy projects waiting to be hooked up to […]
So many Americans, including a large number of Republican Congress members, led by Trump, are so poorly educated that they have become convinced environmental science is some kind of conspiracy, not the actual truth. Every scientist I know, including myself, sees this Trumpian war on facts as an ongoing catastrophe for America.
Meteorologist Brian Kyle monitors the area weather at the National Weather Service offices Credit: Brett Coomer / Houston Chronicle / Getty
On Nov. 14, Rep. James Comer (R-KY) — the Republican chair for the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and a longtime climate science denier — sent a letter to the Democrats asking for information about government scientists accused of preventing “views that challenge the existing consensus” from coming out. Less than three weeks later, Comer claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has employees who “hamstring the incoming Trump administration’s ability to implement their own executive agendas.”
