“Ding dong, the climate hoax is dead. Twenty years after Al Gore’s apocalyptic movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ the Trump administration has put the final nail in the coffin of the lie that scared a generation into believing the planet was about to explode in flames if they kept using fossil fuels. In what the White House calls ‘the largest deregulatory action in American history,’ the EPA on Thursday will repeal an Obama-era proclamation that has mandated greenhouse-gas regulations for 17 years. The 2009 ‘endangerment finding’ has been the primary climate handbrake on American industry, forming the legal justification for increasingly punitive greenhouse-gas regulations. Rescinding it ‘would save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations,’ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week, with the EPA projecting an average saving of $2,400 per vehicle and further savings on farm machinery, soon to be freed from the complex extra circuitry required to restrict emissions.” (02/11/25)
“South Korea’s former interior minister was sentenced Thursday to seven years in prison for abetting then-President Yoon Suk Yeol’s brief declaration of martial law in 2024. The verdict for Lee Sang-min came a week before a different judge at the same Seoul court rules on whether Yoon’s actions amounted to rebellion, a crime for which prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Lee, who led the ministry of interior and safety, was convicted for helping carry out the declaration and passing along Yoon’s orders to the country’s police and fire chiefs to cut water and electricity to news organizations that were critical of his policies. The instructions weren’t carried out since martial law was lifted quickly after lawmakers broke through a military and police blockade at the National Assembly and unanimously voted to lift it.” (02/12/26)
“In some of the most beautiful and prosperous places in America, a curious paradox has taken hold: the people who benefit most from capitalism increasingly appear to resent it. They live in high-amenity cities and mountain towns with preserved open space, reliable infrastructure, advanced healthcare, abundant leisure, and the freedom to choose where and how they live. These conditions did not arise spontaneously. They are the cumulative result of markets, private investment, innovation, and long-term economic growth. Yet in these same environments, it has become socially fashionable to describe capitalism as immoral, exploitative, or fundamentally broken. This is often dismissed as hypocrisy. That framing is too simple. What we are witnessing is not merely individual inconsistency, but a structural paradox produced by success itself. Capitalism generates abundance, and abundance reshapes human priorities.” (02/11/26)
Source: Semafor
by Eleanor Mueller & Shelby Talcott
“Nearly six weeks after the Trump administration ousted Venezuela’s leader with plans to effectively run the country, its manner of doing so is increasingly opaque. The first US sale of Venezuelan oil took place 11 days after President Donald Trump’s declaration that the US would rely on Caracas’ oil revenues to control its future. But one month after Semafor reported that proceeds from an initial $500 million sale were held in a Qatari account, there is no sign of a second successful sale. There’s also no clarity on when future proceeds will shift to a US-based Treasury Department account from the Qatari account, which was used to help shield the oil proceeds from Venezuela’s creditors.” (02/11/26)
“For years, public health debate has often fixated on a supposed rise in the prevalence of autism. Various culprits have been named, including the well-investigated but unsubstantiated claim that vaccines cause autism. More recently, additional risk factors have been proposed — many by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — including maternal Tylenol use, food dyes and additives, chemical manufacturing agents and other possible stressors affecting perinatal development. Concerns about autism have been spotlighted within the larger Make America Healthy Again movement, motivated by a well-founded alarm over the nation’s devastatingly high burden of chronic disease and psychiatric illness. But there is a bigger problem with the autism epidemic: It doesn’t exist. Autism diagnoses have indeed risen dramatically in recent decades. However, diagnostic criteria can change even when the underlying health phenomenon remains unchanged.” (02/11/26)
“Martina Navratilova is ‘pissed off as hell.’ She fled totalitarian Czechoslovakia for the United States only to watch too many Americans now give up on freedom without a fight. She is speaking up as part of an ad campaign for an organization that shares the stories of those harmed by Donald Trump. My family and I fled Romania for the West. The contrast between our two countries, during the twilight of communism and in its aftermath, offers a stark lesson for Americans confronting threats to democratic norms today.” (02/11/26)
“When Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez announced plans to ban social media for under-16s earlier this month, Spaniards could be forgiven for suspecting his real objective was not to limit children’s screentime. Indeed, just days later, Sira Rego, the youth and children’s minister, admitted that the next step would be to ‘restrict and ban’ X (formerly Twitter) for all Spanish users, whose ‘fundamental rights,’ she claimed, ‘are being violated’ by the platform. The prime minister and his so-called progressive coalition have long sought to narrow the boundaries of free speech in Spain. … Former vice-president Pablo Iglesias, whose hard-left Podemos is a junior party in Sánchez’s coalition, has openly proposed expropriating major private social-media platforms and replacing them with a state-owned or publicly controlled network. This has been presented as ‘democratising the space in which public communication occurs.’” (02/11/26)
“In January, the CDC cut the number of recommended childhood vaccines from 16 to 10 by essentially adopting Denmark’s schedule. This change was not based on any evidence that the six targeted vaccines were unsafe or ineffective. Furthermore, Denmark’s reduced schedule is an outlier when compared to those of other developed countries. In response to the CDC’s cuts, American Academy of Pediatrics President (AAP) Andrew Racine stated, ‘Today’s announcement by federal health officials to arbitrarily stop recommending numerous routine childhood immunizations is dangerous and unnecessary.’ The AAP reaffirmed and recommended the original evidence-based immunization schedule. Now, the American Medical Association (AMA) is teaming up with the Vaccine Integrity Project at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota to privately evaluate the safety and efficacy of vaccines targeting three viral illnesses for the upcoming 2026–2027 respiratory virus season.” (02/11/26)
“After President Trump’s shocking, illegal attack on Caracas and seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in the early-morning hours of January 3, celebratory Latin America hawks didn’t wait long to turn their attention to Cuba. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, famously of Cuban descent and the nation’s Cuba hawk-in-chief, stood at the White House’s impromptu Mar-a-Lago dais and said: ‘If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.’ Trump himself approvingly shared a Truth Social post proposing Rubio as Cuba’s next president, made various proclamations that Cuba’s socialist government is set to collapse, and most significantly, announced a national emergency over the island of nine million’s ‘unusual and extraordinary threat … to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,’ threatening tariffs on any country that provides oil to Cuba—a measure targeted squarely at Mexico, which has become Cuba’s largest supplier.” (02/12/25)
