MOTHER JONES – Politics | Politics & Government

The United States stopped an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela on Sunday, just a day after the Coast Guard boarded another oil vessel, according to a report from Bloomberg.  The operation, which is not approved by Congress, is part of President Trump’s “blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into, and out of, Venezuela” in a campaign to cut an essential export that accounts for more than half of Venezuela’s revenue. Some international treaties consider blockades as an act of war. Trump has called Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro’s administration a “foreign terrorist organization” that is using sanctioned oil to fund drug trafficking. The US is also continuing its strikes on boats allegedly holding illicit drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. According to the Trump administration, at least 104 people have been killed in 28 boat strikes. House Republicans rejected two Democratic-supported resolutions on Wednesday that would… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Shelton Tucker is part of a novel plan to deal with the waters that are increasingly encroaching on his neighborhood in Hampton, Virginia. Situated at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and afflicted by one of the fastest paces of sea-level rise in the United States, Hampton has long battled flooding.  But while flood-prone coastal cities have historically defaulted to levees, pumps and miles of cement-covered storm drains, Hampton is leaning heavily on rain barrels, rain gardens, declogging creeks, and fortifying shores with oyster reefs.  Hampton residents like Tucker have a part to play, too. The 67-year-old president of the Greater Aberdeen Community Coalition has a spot for a rain garden—a plot designed to collect and absorb stormwater runoff—prepared in the front yard of his father’s house. “I got it all… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

On Friday, the Trump-controlled Justice Department was mandated by a nearly unanimous act of Congress to release all government files related to Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes. “What are they protecting?” But the government has made just a portion of its holdings publically available, and among the 13,000 documents released, some are extensively or virtually totally redacted. While the law permits withholding information to protect victims, obscured portions include the names and faces of numerous Epstein associates, despite the law’s dictate that nothing be withheld “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity…to any government official [or] public figure.” According to Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who broke with his party to champion the Epstein Files Transparency Act, what the government has so far provided “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.” Epstein’s victims have similar complaints. “They are proving everything… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On a mid-November evening, at precisely 7:12 p.m., a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the Florida coast. It appeared to be a perfect launch. At an altitude of about 40 miles, the rocket’s first stage separated and fell back to Earth, eventually alighting in a gentle, controlled landing on a SpaceX ship idling in the Atlantic Ocean. The mission’s focus then returned to the rocket’s payload: 29 Starlink communication satellites that were to be deployed in low-Earth orbit, about 340 miles above the planet’s surface. With this new fleet of machines, Starlink was expanding its existing mega-constellation so that it numbered over 9,000 satellites, all circling Earth at about 17,000 miles per hour.  Launches like this have become commonplace. As of late November,… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays. There are few pop culture stereotypes I despise more than the one about female reporters having sex with their sources. For this reason (also paywalls), I have been less obsessed than some of my colleagues with the ongoing journalism shitshow starring Olivia Nuzzi, the former New York magazine star political reporter; her ex-fiance Ryan Lizza, another former big-deal Beltway-insider-scribe; and RFK Jr., Trump’s secretary of health and human services, now busy destroying the public health system here and abroad. But, like every American journalist capable of reading, I still know way, way too much about how Nuzzi, then covering the 2024 election, became embroiled in a sext and FaceTime affair… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.