In the News
For more than two years, Congress has remained quiet as the United States backed a brutal war in Yemen, supporting a coalition that has killed thousands and starved the country into one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century.
Lawmakers put the finishing touches this week on military funding legislation that contains a provision that stands to significantly benefit Amazon.
The amendment, Section 801 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), would help Amazon establish a tight grip on the lucrative, $53 billion government acquisitions market, experts say.
"We saw people shredded to pieces, some with no head, no hands," a man told a Human Rights Watch researcher two weeks after a Saudi-led coalition airstrike hit a crowded marketplace in Mastaba, Yemen, in March 2016. The strike, allegedly carried out in part with American-made and -supplied bombs, killed nearly 100 civilians, 25 of them children.
All of the sudden our tech giants find themselves in a PR pickle: They are posting record earnings and seem unstoppable in business, but they desperately need to convince the public they're not scarier than a pack of velociraptors on meth.
In the past year, as Silicon Valley has become a lightning rod for public anger over increasing inequality of wealth and power, tech giants have been discreetly supporting a slew of lobbyists to push corporate tax cuts, which may just inflame the very inequality that could turn public opinion against the industry.
Instead of simple tax cuts, tech leaders should deploy their army of lobbyists, policy wonks and economists to reimagine tax policy for a modern economy, where the gains from economic growth are increasingly divorced from working-class jobs and wages.
Although he ran a campaign that emphasized local issues, U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna says there's a reason he has spent much of his first 10 months in office appearing on national television news discussing American conflicts overseas or Republican budget proposals.
Khanna, a Fremont resident, says he wants to be a "thought leader," helping to lay out the national progressive agenda and serve as a Democratic alternative to House Speaker Paul Ryan.
Silicon Valley, once a force for good, is now a threat to democracy. At least that's the impression you'd get from the flood of news and commentary about social media's role in the presidential election. This week, representatives of Twitter and Facebook, along with Google, testified before Congress about how Russia exploited their platforms to interfere with the election.
That four U.S. Army soldiers lost their lives in an ambush in Niger should spark a reckoning. While U.S. news outlets flood us with reports on President Trump's alleged insults to a widow who lost her husband and the congresswoman who defended her, and probe the tactical details of the ambush, the real question is: What are U.S. soldiers doing in combat in Niger and elsewhere across Africa? Under what authority do they operate? Is national security served by risking soldiers' lives in what appears to be an expanding and enduring shadow war in Africa?
Colin Stretch, the general counsel of Facebook, appeared on Tuesday before senators who are investigating how Russia spread misinformation online during the 2016 presidential campaign. Along with Google and Twitter, Facebook has been blamed for helping Russian agents influence the outcome of the election.