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      Joe Biden’s last-gasp missile decision is momentous for Ukraine – but Putin will retaliate | Simon Tisdall

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      US president Joe Biden’s last-gasp decision to permit Ukraine to fire western-made, long-range missiles at military targets deep inside Russian territory runs the risk of triggering a sharp increase in retaliatory sabotage, such as cyber and arson attacks on Britain and its European Nato partners.Vladimir Putin, who ordered the full-scale, illegal invasion of Ukraine 1,000 days ago tomorrow, has long warned that Kyiv’s expanded use of US-, British- and French-made missiles would be viewed by Moscow as an act of war by Nato, and could trigger catastrophic consequences. Now Putin’s bluff, if it is a bluff, is being called.Much the same may be said of Keir Starmer and the EU. A joint statement by G7 leaders, coinciding with the 1,000-day landmark, pledged “unwavering support for Ukraine for as long as it takes”. Starmer reiterated that commitment en route to this week’s G20 summit in Brazil. Exactly what it means in practice may soon be harshly tested.Biden’s decision is welcome, if overdue. Amid grinding Russian ground advances, EU feuding and Donald Trump’s unpropitious re-election, the war has reached a critical juncture, militarily and diplomatically. The outcome is in the balance as the scales momentarily tip towards more death and destruction, then back towards some form of Trump-imposed land-for-peace sell-out.Russia has the advantage at present. But Kyiv will not and must not give up.Biden was slow to give the missile go-ahead, despite months of pressure from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has argued, with good reason, that Ukraine is fighting with one hand tied behind its back. Russian airfields, military bases and command centres that are used to mount almost daily, lethal missile and drone attacks on Ukraine’s cities and energy infrastructure are out of range.Biden’s tardiness was the product of an excessive caution that has seen the US drag its feet on supplying new weapons from the start. If Ukraine had been armed in 2022 with all the tanks, air-defence systems, missiles and fighter aircraft it has subsequently, belatedly been given, it might not be struggling as it is now.But his hesitation was reportedly reinforced by a recent classified US intelligence assessment. It warned that Putin could respond to the use of the US long-range army tactical missile system (Atacms), and the similarly capable Anglo-French Storm Shadow missiles, AKA Scalp-EG, on Russian soil, with attacks on the US and its allies.Direct, overt Russian armed retaliation against European military bases or territory seems unlikely, although tensions with Poland and other “frontline” Nato countries are running high. Dark threats by Putin cronies such as former president Dmitry Medvedev about using nuclear weapons are dismissed as rhetorical fearmongering.Instead, the intelligence finding suggested, Russia may step up covert, deniable sabotage: cyber, infowar and arson attacks of the type it has undertaken in recent years. This would allow the Kremlin to impose a cost, especially on wavering Nato members such as Olaf Scholz’s Germany, while avoiding all-out east-west war.The GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, and other state organs are said to have been tasked by Putin with preparing asymmetrical responses for exactly the circumstances that are now unfolding. The overall aim: to alarm and disrupt western societies and publics.The GRU is notorious in Britain for carrying out the non-Ukraine-related Salisbury poisonings in 2018. In March this year, it was linked to arson at a warehouse in east London supposedly used to supply Ukraine. Attacks on a factory in Poland and non-military targets in Latvia and Lithuania are also attributed to the GRU. In May, Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, said 12 people had been arrested for beatings, arson and “acts of sabotage on commission from Russian intelligence services”.These may have been mere practice runs. Kaja Kallas, former prime minister of Estonia and newly nominated EU foreign policy chief, says Moscow is waging a “shadow war” on Europe. Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, warns that Russia may target energy producers and arms factories. Europe needed a coordinated approach, Kallas said. “How far do we let them go on our soil?”Nor is the threat confined to land. Last week, in the latest in a series of incidents, a Russian spy ship – officially classed as an “oceanographic research vessel” – was militarily escorted out of the Irish Sea. Its unexplained presence there and around UK coasts has renewed concerns about the security of critical undersea infrastructure, including pipelines and internet cables linking the UK, Ireland, Europe and the US.Described as the latest attempt to probe western defences and vulnerabilities, the incident followed an investigation in Nordic countries last year into suspected Russian state-led espionage ops. Spy ships disguised as fishing vessels were being used to plan future attacks on windfarms and communications cables in the North Sea, it said.However Russia responds – and the initial Kremlin reaction on Monday was wait-and-see – Biden’s decision challenges Ukraine and the European Nato allies, too. Having pressed so hard for so long, Zelenskyy must prove that the missiles make a difference. US officials are sceptical they can change the course of the war. EU officials in Brussels hope they will.What Biden appears to hope is that long-range strikes on North Korean troops newly deployed in Russia’s contested Kursk region will deter Pyongyang from further involvement. That seems improbable, too. Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s ostracised dictator, is Putin’s new best bro. He’s not noted for a caring attitude to human life.With Trump’s advisers threatening a de facto betrayal of Ukraine, Europe’s leaders, including Starmer, must put their money, lots of it, and their weapons where their mouths are – and help Zelenskyy maintain the fight, even without US hardware and financial backing, if need be.The problem is that unity of purpose, and resources, are lacking. Scholz broke with most of the EU last week when he phoned Putin for a chat. The chancellor (who continues to refuse to supply Germany’s Taurus long-range missiles to Kyiv) said he was pursuing peace. But it looked like weakness with snap elections brewing, and it angered other leaders. “No one will stop Putin with phone calls,” Tusk snarled. “Telephone diplomacy cannot replace real support from the whole west for Ukraine.”The “whole west” means France, too. But President Emmanuel Macron, having spoken frequently and passionately about the vital importance for Europe of defeating Russia, now appears to be temporising about actually letting Kyiv fire French missiles. Will Starmer give a green light, or will he also get cold feet?With Ukraine burning, Europe divided, and Biden two months away from oblivion, it’s little wonder that Putin, with a host of dirty tricks up his sleeve, thinks he’s winning the Ukraine missile crisis.

      Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s foreign affairs commentator More

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      How Trump 2.0 might affect the wildfire crisis: ‘The harms will be more lasting’

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      In the days that followed Donald Trump’s election win, flames roared through southern California neighborhoods. On the other side of the country, wildfire smoke clouded the skies in New York and New Jersey.They were haunting reminders of a stark reality: while Trump prepares to take office for a second term, the complicated, and escalating, wildfire crisis will be waiting.As the climate crisis unfolds, communities across the country are spending seasons under smoke-filled skies. Federal firefighters are overworked and underpaid, the cost of fire suppression has climbed, and millions of people are at risk of losing their insurance. Landscapes and homes alike have been reduced to ash as the world continues to warm.The president-elect has offered few plans to address the emergency. Instead, he’s promised to deliver a wave of deregulation, cripple climate-supporting agencies, and clear departments of logistical experts relied upon during disasters.His allies, including the authors of Project 2025, a conservative playbook for a second Trump administration, have recommended privatizing parts of the federal government that now serve the public good.In the past week, Trump’s announcements for key cabinet nominations has already shown he’s begun to solidify an anti-science agenda.“Whatever happens at a broad scale is going to affect our ability to manage risks, respond to emergencies, and plan for the future, “ said University of California climate scientist Daniel Swain. “I don’t see any way there won’t be huge effects.”Here are the challenges ahead:Setting the stakesLooking back at his first term, Trump had a poor record managing large wildfire emergencies – and he had many opportunities. After presiding over the response to destructive blazes that left a devastating toll, including the Camp fire that claimed the lives of 85 people in and around the town of Paradise, in 2020 he told a crowd in Pennsylvania that high-risk fire states such as California, and their residents, were to blame.“I said you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests – there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up,” he said. That year, a record 10.2m acres were charred across the US.In a signal of how politicized disaster management in the Trump era became, he added: “Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us.”Such comments raised fears among experts and officials working to protect these landscapes and the neighborhoods near them that Trump didn’t understand the magnitude of the risks US forests faced.He’s been unwilling to embrace the strategies that the scientists and landscape managers recommend to help keep catastrophic fire in check, including a delicate and tailored approach to removing vegetation in overgrown forests, protecting old-growth stands, and following those treatments with prescribed burning.The risks and challenges have only intensified since his first term.Some in the wildfire response communities are hopeful that Trump will cut red tape that’s slowed progress on important forest treatments, but others have highlighted a blunt approach could do more harm than good.Many have voiced concerns over ambitions set out in Project 2025 to curb prescribed burning in favor of increasing timber sales.Meanwhile, federal firefighters are waiting to see whether Trump and a Republican-led Congress will secure long-overdue pay raises.The US Forest Service (USFS), the largest employer of federal firefighters, has seen an exodus of emergency responders over abysmally low pay and gaps in support for the unsustainable and dangerous work they do.Federal firefighters who spend weeks at a time on the fireline and rack up thousands of hours in overtime each summer, make far less than their state- and city-employed counterparts with paychecks that rival those of fast-food employees. That exodus has hampered its ability to keep pace with the year-round firefighting needs.“Doing less with your resources makes a task like fire suppression and fuels management extremely more challenging,” said Jonathan Golden, legislative director of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters.Joe Biden facilitated a temporary pay raise for federal wildland firefighters, but those expire at the end of the year. With Trump promising large cuts to federal budgets and the bureaucrats who operate them, many fear the Republican leadership in Congress won’t push the legislation needed to ensure these essential emergency responders keep their raise.If the pay raises are allowed to expire, many more federal firefighters will walk out the door – right when they are needed most.“The job isn’t going to get any easier,” Golden said. “My hope is that we continue to have a well-staffed and well-funded professional workforce that can answer the call year-round – because that’s what is required.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEmergencies on the riseBillion-dollar weather and climate disasters are on the rise. There was a historic number in the US in 2023 with a total of 28 – surpassing the previous record of 22 in 2022. With more than a month left, there have already been 24 this year.Trump has a history of stalling in the aftermath of natural disasters, opting instead to put a political spin on who receives aid. For wildfires during his first term, that meant threatening California and other Democratic-majority states with delayed or withheld funding to punish them for their political leanings.This time, some fear he may also reduce the amount of aid provided by Fema. Project 2025 has called for a shift in emergency spending, putting the “majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government” and either eliminating or armoring grants that fund preparedness to push Trump’s political agenda.The framework advises the next president to remove all unions from the department and only give Fema grants to states, localities and private organizations who “can show that their mission and actions support the broader homeland security mission”, including the deportation of undocumented people.These tactics could hamper both preparedness and recovery from wildfires and other disasters, especially in high-risk blue states such as California and others across the west.The administration has also been advised by Project 2025 authors to dismantle or severely hamper the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose forecasting has been essential to warn when dangerous weather arises, and remove all mention of the climate crisis in federal rhetoric and research.Trump’s picks of a former congressman Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum as the Department of Interior secretary – two agencies deeply connected to US climate policy – indicate his strong skepticism of the climate crisis. Zeldin and Burgum have clear directives to oversee rampant deregulation and expedite extraction on public lands.“Folks at federal agencies are already being gently advised to think about the language they use to describe things,” Swain said. He thinks the effects will be far-reaching, especially when it comes to wildfire preparedness and response. Disabling science and weather-focused agencies could reduce important intel that responders rely on, reduce nimbleness and hamper efforts to plan into the future.“A lot of people are thinking this is going to be the second coming of the first Trump administration and I don’t think it’s the right way to be thinking about it,” Swain said.“This time, it’s highly plausible that the disruption and the harms will be a lot deeper and more lasting – it will be much harder to reverse.”Big picture problemsEven before Trump retook the White House, the US was missing the mark on its ambitious climate goals. But scientists and experts have offered clear warnings about how Trump’s policies could accelerate dire outcomes.“Climate change is a huge crisis and we don’t have time to spare,” said Julia Stein, deputy director of the Emmett Institute on climate change and the environment at the UCLA School of Law.Stein pointed to the potential for many of these policies to be challenged in court, much like they were the first time around. States such as California, which is also home to one of the world’s largest economies to back it, are already preparing to challenge Trump’s policies. The directives of the first Trump administration were often legally vulnerable, Stein said, and she thinks they might be again this time around, especially if he attempts to rid the agencies of career bureaucrats and their deep knowledge of how things work.In a state where wildfires are always a risk, California is also bolstering its own approach, doubling down on landscape treatments and investing in preparation, mitigation, and response according to Stein, who noted the $10bn climate bond just passed by voters there that will go toward wildfire prevention and mitigation.Still, fires don’t recognize borders. The threats continue to push into areas that aren’t accustomed to them, and larger swaths of the country will be forced to grapple with smoke. Without partners in federal agencies that manage lands across the US, states will struggle to address the mounting challenges on their own.“Continuing to enforce those laws in California will blunt some of the impact for Californians,” she said. “The unfortunate thing – especially when it comes to climate change – there are going to be national and global consequences for inaction at the federal level.” More

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      Uncommitted achieved its goal in making Gaza a mainstream issue | Camonghne Felix

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      In the days following the 2024 election, a cadre of pundits have been eager to call the uncommitted voters’ impact on the presidential race both a failure and a significant factor in Vice-President Kamala Harris’s loss. Despite those contradicting analyses, the movement’s success lies not in its voter count, but rather in the clarity it offered voters, even those who changed their minds and chose to vote for Harris in the end.As with the anti-war campaigns of the 1960s, the Uncommitted National Movement, the more than 500,000-person effort which called on Americans against the genocide in Gaza to withhold their votes, was a representation of the nation’s shifting consciousness around US responsibility in Israel’s war. By asking the public to confront imperialism, the movement opened the door to a confrontation between the people and the Democratic party, awakening its voters to an issue once seen as someone else’s concern.When the uncommitted movement offered to endorse Harris in exchange for having a speaker at the Democratic national convention and were denied, it allowed the movement to more extensively highlight the contradictions that mark the party. If the Democrats weren’t giving marginalized people an opportunity to speak, what does that say to Muslims, Arabs and voters of color who know intimately this kind of erasure and disregard at the hands of the party that purports to represent them?While some in the Democratic party billed Israel’s carnage as an issue that concerned only the left, many liberals across the spectrum, from the far left to centrists, actually consider it a mainstream issue, one that dominates their political perspectives and positions.More and more people, through the activism of uncommitted voters, learned that American democracy is a feature of western imperialism – Republicans and Democrats alike would supply arms to Israel and allow its government impunity on the world stage. Even though more than 60% of US voters supported an arms embargo, including 77% of Democratic voters and 40% of Republican voters, and even though stopping arms transfers polled highly in swing states, the Democratic party ignored demands for an embargo and ceasefire. (The Biden administration has repeatedly said it is pushing for a ceasefire.) That ceasefire has yet to come, and more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, with many more unaccounted for.The anti-war college campus protests also furthered the cause of uncommitted: students across the country were unduly labeled as antisemitic antagonists because they pressed their universities to divest from weapons manufacturers. Democratic voters across the country became more and more sympathetic to the students’ actions, marking an even more pronounced break from the party position. That consciousness only grew once the expansion of the war into Lebanon and Syria underscored the extent of US involvement in the creation and exacerbation of regional warfare.Uncommitted voters in Michigan, which has the largest population of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslim people in the country, helped deliver a loss to the Harris campaign on election night. To be clear: there is no basis to the accusation that Harris losing Michigan was the lone cause of Trump’s win. But it matters that Arab and Muslim voters in cities such as Dearborn rejected the Democrats’ agenda, while Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian representative from Michigan and Ilhan Omar, a representative from Minnesota, held on to their seats. Biden and Harris had room to choose a different approach on Israel, even if it meant appealing to a smaller group of Democrats who would have been happy to campaign and organize for Harris had the party shown any significant steps to end the war.Even those uncommitted voters who decided to vote for Harris were participating in a consciousness-raising effort that revealed existing contradictions within the party and democracy as a whole. Their demands dominated headlines, especially before the Democratic national convention.Uncommitted voters, in the end, are the ones coming away from this election with a win. In raising awareness, the movement has provided an example for future anti-war actions, by redefining the function of the vote as less of a compulsion and more of an opportunity to center morality instead of myopic harm-reductionist tactics meant to maintain the status quo.The movement also offers a useful retrospective on the race: when the party of the people chooses to remain hostile to Palestinian protests and refuses to show any proportional empathy to Palestinian people, the voters they need will reject them. Anger and disappointment took up the space that hope might have, and was the dominant emotion felt by many in the electorate, due in part to the persistence of uncommitted voters in elevating their voices and pushing others to consider the value of their vote.That this was possible was news to many Americans until uncommitted voters began to organize. Because of their activism, the Democrats are learning that the genocide in Gaza is a hard line for more people than they thought, and that chances of winning back the House and Senate in 2026 will remain slim unless some shift is made in the strategy, a shift that requires the party to aggressively pursue an end to the hecatomb of Gaza.America is slowly opening its eyes to the violent truths of American hegemony. Because of uncommitted, more people now have a working criticism of America’s position on the world stage. This is what the seams of Harris’s loss reveal: the Democrats are in trouble, and democracy is in trouble, too. More

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      Here’s how to mitigate some of Trump’s most dangerous foreign policy instincts | Kenneth Roth

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      The nightmare has arrived. Trump’s “America First” norm-flouting was bad enough the last time around, when a collection of traditional Republicans in senior positions moderated his worst impulses. No such grown-ups are expected to return.Our only hope may be that Trump no longer must worry about re-election. Instead of pandering to – and promoting – the worst instincts of his base, Trump, long preoccupied by his image, may begin to contemplate his legacy. Will history mock or admire him? The greater his concern with his lasting reputation, the better our chances of averting disaster.Ukraine illustrates the choices ahead. Does Trump really want to be known as the Neville Chamberlain of the 21st century, appeasing a brutal tyrant in the naive hope that he will be sated with a single gulp of ill-gotten territory?For reasons that are not wholly understood, Trump has long harbored an unseemly admiration for Vladimir Putin. Trump is likely to stop sending arms to Ukraine and to insist that Kyiv settle for at best a frozen conflict, in effect ceding its occupied eastern territory to Russia. But with Trump in the White House, Putin is likely to want more.Behind Putin’s self-serving rhetoric about denazifying Ukraine is a desire to de-democratize it. A democratic Ukraine on Russia’s border is a constant reminder to the Russian people of the freedoms that Putin’s dictatorship denies them. He wants another Belarus.No amount of strongman-admiration on Trump’s part will overcome the Ukrainian people’s refusal to become another Kremlin vassal state. Nor will it avoid Ukraine’s understandable distrust of Putin and insistence on western security guarantees if there is to be any formal accord. Trump as Chamberlain would be indifferent to Kyiv’s pleas. A Trump sensitive to his place in history might be more accommodating.Moreover, a humiliating surrender for Ukraine would hardly go unnoticed in Beijing. Trump might try to spin it as enabling greater focus on China, which he rightly sees as a threat, but Xi Jinping is likely to read it as a lack of resolve. If Trump will not defend an aspiring democracy on the threshold of the European Union, why would he prevent Beijing from incorporating Taiwan by threatened or actual force? Even close American allies such as Japan and South Korea would quickly recalibrate their need to accommodate Beijing. Is that what Trump wants to be remembered for?Trump mainly sees China as a commercial threat. Having hiked tariffs during his last presidency (Joe Biden maintained them), Trump now threatens to substantially increase them. He laughably claims that China would pay for the tariffs, ignoring the near-universal view of economists that the cost would be passed on to American consumers.Trump contends that tariffs would force more manufacturing to US soil, but a battle of tit-for-tat tariffs would more immediately fuel inflation. During the campaign, Trump played on many Americans’ mistaken tendency to equate higher prices from past inflation with ongoing inflation, but they would soon appreciate the difference as prices again soared.Biden showed the way toward a smarter trade policy – one built on common values rather than mere competition – that Trump would be wise to continue and expand. Beyond subsidies, many Chinese producers exploit Beijing’s use of Uyghur forced labor, especially in China’s north-west province of Xinjiang. That forced labor infects exports of cotton, tomatoes, aluminum and, significantly, polysilicon, the building block of China’s corner-the-market solar panels.Both the US government and the European Union claim to oppose importing the product of forced labor, but only the United States has created a legislative presumption against any imports from Xinjiang without proof that forced labor was not involved – proof that is impossible to obtain given China’s opaque supply chains. The EU never adopted that presumption, so imports from Xinjiang have surged, while US imports have diminished.A smart policy on trade with China would push the EU to adopt a similar presumption. Trump should also have US customs officials pay more attention to Beijing’s subterfuges, such as shipping from Xinjiang via other parts of China or even third countries to avoid the presumption.Israel’s war in Gaza will demand a rethink from Trump. During his first term, he gave Benjamin Netanyahu whatever he wanted, from recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital to greenlighting rapid expansion of Israel’s illegal (war-crime) settlements and refusing to call Palestinian land “occupied”. Now, Trump says that Biden has imposed too many restraints on the Israeli prime minister – by pushing him to stop bombing and starving Palestinian civilians – even though Biden refused to use the leverage of conditioning US arms sales and military aid to enforce those demands. Trump wants to let Israel “finish the job”, ideally quickly, and told Netanyahu to “do what you have to do”.But an unrestrained Netanyahu might heed the calls of his rightwing ministers to force the mass deportation of the Palestinians of Gaza to Egypt – a trip that, like the Nakba of 1948, is likely to be one-way. That would outrage the world and almost surely yield additional war-crime charges from the international criminal court (ICC).During Trump’s last term, he disgracefully imposed sanctions on the prior ICC prosecutor for opening investigations that could implicate Israeli officials in Palestinian territory as well as US torturers under George W Bush in Afghanistan. Biden lifted those sanctions, and even mainstream Republicans warmed to the court after its prosecutor charged Putin with war crimes in Ukraine. If Trump were to revive sanctions, he would virtually invite the prosecutor to abandon political restraints that keep him from charging senior US officials (soon, including Trump) for aiding and abetting Israeli war crimes in Gaza.Trump’s desire to expand the Abraham Accords, perhaps the most visible foreign policy achievement of his first term, will also founder without a tougher approach to Israel. Although the Saudi crown prince is notoriously indifferent to the plight of Palestinians, Saudi public opinion has forced him to announce that, however much he wants the carrot of US security guarantees against Iran, he will not normalize relations with Israel without a firm path to a Palestinian state. That is anathema to the Israeli government. Trump must decide whether to abandon his reflexive support for Israel in favor of a deal that would indeed be historic.A similar dilemma faces Trump on Iran. His ripping up of Barack Obama’s nuclear deal has put the clerics just a few short steps from a nuclear bomb. Netanyahu is itching for Trump to join him in a military attack on Iran’s nuclear program, but that would risk involving American forces in a regional war that Trump wants to avoid. It would also endanger the Gulf states’ oil supplies, fueling inflation. And it would only encourage Iran to obtain a ready-made nuclear weapon from, say, North Korea. Is that what Trump wants?More broadly, Trump needs to decide whether to continue his professed admiration for the world’s autocrats. He seems to relish their ability to act without the impediments of democratic checks and balances that so frustrated him during his first term.But the autocrats have learned to play him. Trump can hardly trumpet his artful dealmaking when word is out that a round of calculated fawning is all it takes to manipulate his fragile ego. Will Trump be known for dispensing with the national interest in his quest for the sugar high of flattery? Despite his transactional, go-it-alone tendencies, even Trump might come to appreciate how few friends he has if he stands for little beyond a quest for praise.Trump might even reconsider his instinctive opposition to multilateral endeavors. Biden, sadly, has already done him the favor of abandoning the US seat on the UN human rights council. But does Trump really want to defund the World Health Organization again when it is the frontline for our defense against the next pandemic, whether bird flu, mpox, antimicrobial resistance or something as yet unidentified? Does he really want to continue treating climate change as a “hoax” as severe weather decimates the homes of his supporters?On migration, Trump’s threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants would cost billions, create labor shortages that fuel inflation and separate millions of US-citizen children from one or both parents. Yet with the need for an election issue behind him, he could negotiate long-awaited comprehensive legislation that would bolster border enforcement, fund the asylum system to reduce backlogs and introduce a statute of limitations that exempts longtime residents (who, despite his racist claims, typically have families, jobs and constructive lives in America) from the threat of deportation.I recognize this may all be wishful thinking. Trump may be too self-absorbed to think beyond the self-gratification of the moment. But if he has a shred of mental space left to worry about his legacy, that may be our best bet to salvage a potentially disastrous presidency – for America and the world.

      Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022, is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs More

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      Trump nominates big tech critic Brendan Carr to chair telecommunications regulator

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      President-elect Donald Trump will tap Brendan Carr, a critic of the Biden administration’s telecom policies and big tech, as chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), he has said in a statement.Carr, 45, is the top Republican on the FCC, the independent agency that regulates telecommunications.He has been a harsh critic of the FCC’s decision not to finalize nearly $900m in broadband subsidies for Elon Musk’s SpaceX satellite internet unit Starlink, as well as the commerce department’s $42bn broadband infrastructure program and President Joe Biden’s spectrum policy.Last week, Carr wrote to Meta’s Facebook, Alphabet’s Google, Apple and Microsoft saying they had taken steps to censor Americans. Carr said on Sunday the FCC must “restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.“The president-elect has scorned actions by Disney’s ABC, Comcast’s NBC and Paramount Global’s CBS and suggested they could lose their FCC licenses for various actions. Trump also sued CBS over its 60 Minutes interview with vice-president Kamala Harris.Carr criticized NBC for letting Harris appear on Saturday Night Live just before the election.Trump in his first term called on the FCC to revoke broadcast licenses, prompting then FCC Chair Ajit Pai to reject the idea, saying “the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a licence of a broadcast station based on the content.“The FCC issues eight-year licenses to individual broadcast stations, not to broadcast networks.In 2022, Carr, a strong critic of China, became the first FCC commissioner to visit Taiwan. He has been an advocate of the FCC’s hard line on Chinese telecom companies.Carr was a strong opponent of the FCC’s decision in April to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules that were repealed during the first Trump administration. The Biden FCC rules were put on hold by a federal appeals court.Trump nominated Carr to the FCC during in his first administration in January 2017, after he had served as the FCC’s general counsel.The incoming administration will need to nominate a Republican to fill a seat on the five-member commission before it can take full control of the agency.Carr “is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our Economy,” Trump said in a statement on Sunday. More

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      ‘Queen of polling’ J Ann Selzer quits after Iowa survey missed by 16 points

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      J Ann Selzer, the celebrated Iowa election pollster, announced on Sunday that she is moving on “to other ventures and opportunities”, two weeks after her survey in the state wrongly predicted a strong shift to Kamala Harris in the days before the election.That poll, which projected a 47% to 44% lead for the vice-president over Donald Trump on the back of older women breaking for Democrats over the issue of reproductive rights, came three days before the national vote, giving Democrats false hope that Harris could win the White House decisively. When the votes were counted, Selzer was off by 16 points as the former president won the state decisively.Selzer, known as the “queen of polling”, shot to fame in 2008 when she predicted that a virtually unknown senator, Barack Obama, would beat frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses.She told MSNBC before the vote that Harris was leading in early voting in Iowa “because of her strength with women generally, even stronger with women aged 65 and older. Her margin is more than 2-to-1 – and this is an age group that shows up to vote, or votes early, in disproportionately large numbers.”Trump disputed the poll in a post on his Truth Social network at the time.“In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT.”According to unofficial results, Trump ultimately won Iowa by 13 points, 56% to 43%.In a column published by the Des Moines Register on Sunday, Selzer wrote that public opinion polling had been her “life’s work” and had made a decision to step back from it a year ago.“Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course,” she wrote. “It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite.”Seltzer ventured that her strong track record had “maybe that history of accuracy made the outlier position too comfortable”.“Polling is a science of estimation, and science has a way of periodically humbling the scientist. So, I’m humbled, yet always willing to learn from unexpected findings,” she added.A review of Selzer’s final 2024 poll hasn’t revealed a clear reason for missing Trump’s runaway victory in the state, the paper said in a column published on Sunday, adding that it is “evaluating the best ways to continue surveys that will provide accurate information and insight about issues that matter to Iowans”.Editor Carol Hunter wrote that the Iowa Poll “has been an important legacy indicator and we recognize the need to evolve and find new ways to accurately take the pulse of Iowans on state and national issues”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the black eye the polling business has received for failing to predict a strong Trump victory in the electoral college, 312 to 226, and popular vote, taking with him all seven swing states and seeing every state moving Republican, may not be entirely deserved.Most political polls for the 2024 presidential election saw a close race in the electoral college, and a popular-vote victory for Harris. But the election results so far show that Trump added more than 2m votes to his 2020 total, while Harris received millions fewer votes than Joe Biden did four years earlier, in what some are calling the lost “couch vote”.Trump won the electoral college 312 to 226, and currently leads the popular vote by 1.7%. UC Riverside polling expert Andy Crosby wrote that Trump’s margin of victory was within the 2.2% margin of error of most of the final elections polls.After what turned out to be the final Selzer Iowa poll this year, she had offered these words of warning to excited Never Trump podcasters at The Bulwark: “People looked at my methodology … and it’s published in every article in the Des Moines Register, how we do it, but you look at it on paper and you go, It’s too simple, this can’t possibly work. And so far it has, but I’m prepared that one day it will not work and I will blow up into tiny little pieces and be scattered across the city of Des Moines.” More