Planet Earth Keeps Shattering the Most Terrible Record of All

Well, it’s official: 2023 was the hottest year on record, but cheer up, it will likely pale in comparison to the heat waves in years to come, according to a new report by the World Meteorological Organization.

The last year was hotter than both 2020 and 2016, the previous hottest years on record, with a mean surface temperature 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than preindustrial levels. The report’s release coincides with COP28, the United Nations–hosted climate change summit in Dubai, in an effort to inform negotiations among the 198 countries that are both in attendance at the conference and stuck together on a rapidly warming planet. It’s unlikely, however, December’s temperatures will impact this year’s ranking—according to the report, which noted that 2023 is “virtually certain” to be the “warmest year in the 174-year observational record.”

“We are living through climate collapse in real time,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told a crowd of delegates at the conference on Thursday, according to The Guardian.

“This year has seen communities around the world pounded by fires, floods, and searing temperature—and the impact is devastating,” he added. “Record global heating should send shivers down the spines of world leaders. And it should trigger them to act.”

Some of the worst heat was felt across Southern Europe and North Africa in July, thanks to a grueling combination of climate change, an El Niño warming the Pacific Ocean, and what was referred to as a “heat dome” across the Mediterranean—a high-pressure zone that acts like a lid on a pot, trapping hot air inside.

Climate scientists say that climate change, fueled by greenhouse gas emissions, will continue to result in more frequent, severe, and dangerous heat waves, reported Al Jazeera.

“These are more than just statistics,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in a statement. “Extreme weather is destroying lives and livelihoods on a daily basis—underlining the imperative need to ensure that everyone is protected by early warning services. We cannot return to the climate of the 20th century, but we must act now to limit the risks of an increasingly inhospitable climate in this and coming centuries.”

With rising global temperatures also came an alarming and record-breaking drop-off in the Antarctic ice shelf, which recorded a loss of one million square kilometers in its maximum end-of-winter extent—an area larger than France and Germany combined.

“We have the roadmap to limit the rise in global temperature to 1.5C and avoid the worst of climate chaos,” said Guterres. “But we need leaders to fire the starting gun at Cop28 on a race to keep the 1.5C limit alive, by committing to triple renewables and double energy efficiency, and committing to phase out fossil fuels, with a clear timeframe aligned to the 1.5C limit.”

OK, we’ll check back in a year to see how everyone’s doing.

With his expulsion looking more likely by the hour, Representative George Santos has apparently decided that he won’t be going down alone.

The House introduced a resolution Thursday to expel the serial fabulist from Congress. As lawmakers debated the motion, Santos ended up trading barbs with his fellow freshman representative, Ohio Republican Max Miller.

“I myself have been a victim of George Santos, as well as other members of Congress in terms of defrauding through public donations, receiving an ethics complaint from the FEC which I had to spend tens of thousands to defend myself,” Miller said.

“You, sir, are a crook,” he said, addressing Santos directly.

Santos quickly asked that Miller’s comment be stricken from the record; he was just as quickly denied. Santos then accused his colleague of “hypocrisy.”

“My colleague wants to come up here, call me a crook,” Santos said. “The same colleague who’s accused of being a woman beater. Are we really going to ignore the facts that we all have pasts, and we all have the media coming out against us on a daily basis?”

Santos was referring to allegations made against Miller by former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham. Grisham and Miller dated while they were both working as aides to former President Donald Trump.

In 2021, Grisham alleged that Miller physically abused her on the day they broke up. Miller, who was running for Congress at the time, sued her for defamation in response (a trick he may have picked up from his former boss).

Grisham’s accusation is worthy of investigation, and Miller should be held accountable if her claims are found to be true. None of this is an affirmative case for why Santos should get a pass, as Santos seems to imply he should, just because one of his accusers also has had accusations made against him.

Santos seems unusually determined to air everyone’s dirty laundry on his way out. During a three-hour-long X (formerly Twitter) space last week, he accused his Republican colleagues of alcoholism and cheating on their spouses with lobbyists.

On Thursday, Santos also introduced a motion to expel Democratic Representative Jamaal Bowman for pulling a fire alarm in a House office building ahead of a key vote. The resolution is privileged, meaning lawmakers have two legislative days to act on the measure—unless Santos is expelled first, nullifying it.

Almost 50 years after the end of the Vietnam conflict, Americans are still crying out for love, not war. A new Economist/YouGov poll suggests that the vast majority of Americans are in favor of cease-fires in both of the two major U.S.-backed conflicts—Ukraine and Palestine.

In regards to Ukraine, 68 percent of American respondents said they supported a cease-fire between the Eastern European state and Russia, while just 8 percent of respondents answered that they did not support a cease-fire.

A similar number supported a cease-fire in the Middle Eastern conflict between Israel and Hamas, with 65 percent of respondents supporting a cease-fire, while 16 percent said that they didn’t support the peace—the latter number is down nearly half from a Reuters/Ipsos poll that found 32 percent of Americans disagreed with a potential cease-fire earlier this month, before a truce was on the menu.

When it came down to counting dollars and cents, poll results were divided. Thirty-two percent of American respondents said that the current level of aid to Israel should continue, while 23 percent said they want less. An additional 21 percent, which primarily skewed Republican, responded that they wanted to see more aid directed to the U.S. ally, according to the Economist/YouGov poll.

Democrats, meanwhile, were more likely to back supplemental aid to Ukraine, with 35 percent of Democratic respondents in favor of increasing aid. Republican respondents voted in line with their government representatives who are actively working to curtail America’s next aid package to the Eastern European country, with 44 percent of Republican respondents saying they would be in favor of decreasing Ukrainian military aid.

Israel and Hamas originally agreed to a four-day cessation in hostilities on November 24; this cease-fire has been extended several times since as the two sides negotiate. So far, 104 Israeli hostages, including 24 foreign nationals, have been freed. In exchange, Israel has released more than 200 Palestinian prisoners, all of whom were women and teenagers, according to a report from The Washington Post, which estimated that 143 hostages still remain in Gaza.

To date, the conflict has claimed the lives of nearly 15,000 Palestinians—most of them women and children—since Hamas’s sudden attack on Israel on October 7, when 1,200 Israelis were killed.

The GOP’s presidential front-runner had himself a bit of an unhinged social media binge over the last couple of days, using Truth Social to air his scattered grievances, attack the wife of the judge overseeing his New York bank fraud trial, and take a wild left turn by claiming sudden allyship with the broader Black Lives Matter movement.

Kicking off the rapid-fire onslaught of posts late Tuesday, Trump called MSNBC’s coverage of the Republican Party “illegal activity,” adding that the “so-called ‘government’ should come down hard” on the news outlet and “make them pay.”

Then the former president revived an old gripe that “Obamacare sucks”—thus reopening the possibility that his campaign will renew the call to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act that has dogged the GOP since that law’s inception. Less than 20 minutes later, he redirected his attention to the sexual assault allegations made against him by columnist E. Jean Carroll, spewing comments eerily similar to the ones that have already lost him two defamation cases brought by the writer, in which he claimed that the allegations were a “made up fairytale” that was “funded by political operatives” to interfere with the 2020 presidential election results.

Over the ensuing hours, Trump also warned that the indictments against him had opened up “pandora’s box,” which he followed by snubbing his Koch-backed GOP opponent Nikki Haley as “a very weak and ineffective Birdbrain.”

In yet another post, Trump said he had done “more for Black people than any other President,” including Lincoln. He also confused the support of Mark Fisher, the founder of Black Lives Matter Incorporated, for that of the larger, national movement, despite statements front and center on BLM INC.’s web page that they’re not affiliated with “any other Black Lives Matter Movement.”

But the pièce de résistance of Trump’s 48-hour digital diatribe was a string of attacks on the wife of the judge overseeing his business fraud trial, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, whose gag order on Trump had been repealed. In five separate posts, Trump uplifted a conspiracy theory that Dawn Engoron and her husband were inherently biased in his case and that Mrs. Engoron had attacked Trump and other “white male politicians” online.

“Judge Engoron’s Trump Hating wife, together with his very disturbed and angry law clerk, have taken over control of the New York State Witch Hunt Trial aimed at me, my family, and the Republican Party,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

In a statement to Newsweek, Engoron denied ownership of the account and any of its content.

“I do not have a Twitter account. This is not me. I have not posted any anti-Trump messages,” she told the outlet.

That may have been enough to convince a New York appeals court that Trump wasn’t capable of playing nice without his recently stayed gag order, which the four-judge panel dutifully reinstated on Thursday, in an attempt to halt the verbal onslaught against the judge, his court staff and, apparently, his family.

A Democratic congressman has come up with a way for Hunter Biden to lay himself bare in front of Congress that might hopefully appease House Oversight Chair James Comer.

On Tuesday, the president’s son offered, via his lawyer, to testify in a public House Oversight Committee hearing—part of an aggressive new defense strategy that his legal team has decided to adopt. Comer, who has spearheaded the probe into the Bidens’ supposed criminal wrongdoing, rejected the offer almost immediately. He said Biden must first sit for a private deposition before he can testify publicly.

Representative Daniel Goldman on Thursday countered Comer’s admonitions with a more, shall we say, stripped-down argument.

“Let me get this straight,” Goldman tweeted at Comer at half-past-midnight. “You welcomed nude photos of Hunter Biden in a public hearing but you won’t welcome the testimony of Hunter Biden in a public hearing.”

“If Hunter testified in the nude, would you then let him appear for a public hearing?”

Goldman is referring to a House Oversight Committee hearing in July, which featured two IRS agents and their accusations that the Justice Department had dragged its feet on investigating Biden for tax fraud. The hearing—like the entire investigation—produced zero actual evidence of wrongdoing.

Instead, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to claim that Hunter Biden had engaged in sex trafficking and had listed payments to sex workers as a tax write-off. To support her argument, she held up poster-size prints of Biden’s nude photos, which she later also posted on X (then called Twitter) and shared in her email newsletter.

Comer did not intercede with Greene during the hearing and has yet to condemn her for using that venue to stage this weird stunt. Instead, the official Oversight Republicans’ Twitter account got in on the dissemination of the nudes game, sharing Greene’s tweet, which included a video clip of her holding up the photos.

Ranking Oversight Member Jamie Raskin tore into Comer for his refusal to either stop Greene or reprimand her after the fact.

“These pictures were displayed across America for purely voyeuristic, sensationalistic, and sadistic purposes,” Raskin said in a letter to Comer a week after the hearing. “Our Committee, which was once chaired by heroes of the public interest like Henry Waxman and Elijah Cummings, is rapidly being reduced to the level of a 1970s-era dime store peep show.”

Biden also hit back at Greene: His lawyer, Abbe Lowell, filed an ethics complaint against her in July, sending a letter to the nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics asking that Greene be investigated and penalized for her “outrageous, undignified conduct.” The office does not appear to have opened an investigation into the matter.