Guyana’s government used money from ExxonMobil “to meet the estimated cost in 2018 of presenting Guyana/Venezuela controversy at the International Court of Justice including payment of legal fees.” In mid-2020, the Guyanese paper Kaieteur News’ senior reporter Kiana Wilburg broke the story that the World Bank had paid $1.2 million to Hunton Andrews Kurth, a law firm long associated with ExxonMobil, to revise Guyana’s petroleum laws. More

Donald Trump ought to be convicted by the U.S. Senate, of course: he instigated a mass proto-fascist physical assault on Congress in a last-ditch effort to stop it from certifying his clear defeat in the 2020 presidential election – and to provoke a pretext for martial law. Five people died. Many more could have perished. It was a despicable act driven by Trump’ big fascist “stop the steal” lie. If the Senate can’t take impeachment through conviction over that, what’s the point of having an impeachment process? More

Biden ’s administration faces a host of difficult problems, but in foreign policy its thornist will be its relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). How it handles issues of trade, security and human rights will either allow both countries to hammer out a working relationship or pull the US into an expensive–and unwinnable–cold war that will shelve existential threats like climate change and nuclear war. More