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Month: March 2018

Trump’s choice for new CIA director had leading role in torture

Trump’s choice for new CIA director had leading role in torture

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After firing Rex Tillerson and choosing Mike Pompeo, the current CIA director, as his next Secretary of State, Trump named Gina Haspel as his choice to become the CIA’s next director. In February 2017, the New York Times reported: As a clandestine officer at the Central Intelligence Agency in 2002, Gina Haspel oversaw the torture of two terrorism suspects and later took part in an order to destroy videotapes documenting their brutal interrogations at a secret prison in Thailand. On…

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We’re climate researchers and our work was turned into fake news

We’re climate researchers and our work was turned into fake news

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rawpixel.com / shutterstock By Michael Grubb, UCL Science is slow. It rests on painstaking research with accumulating evidence. This makes for an inherently uneasy relationship with the modern media age, especially once issues are politicised. The interaction between politics and media can be toxic for science, and climate change is a prominent example. Take the recent “deep freeze” along the US east coast. To scientists, it was one more piece of a larger jigsaw of climate change disrupting weather systems…

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After a volcano’s ancient supereruption, humanity may have thrived

After a volcano’s ancient supereruption, humanity may have thrived

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Shannon Hall writes: The Toba supereruption [about 74,000 years ago] expelled roughly 10,000 times more rock and ash than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. So much ejecta would have darkened skies worldwide, causing scientists to speculate that it might have plunged the Earth into a volcanic winter whose chill could be felt far from Indonesia. Climate models suggest that temperatures may have plummeted by as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit. And in such a cold world, plants may have…

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How ‘evangelical’ became synonymous with ‘hypocrite’

How ‘evangelical’ became synonymous with ‘hypocrite’

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Michael Gerson writes: One of the most extraordinary things about our current politics—really, one of the most extraordinary developments of recent political history—is the loyal adherence of religious conservatives to Donald Trump. The president won four-fifths of the votes of white evangelical Christians. This was a higher level of support than either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, an outspoken evangelical himself, ever received. Trump’s background and beliefs could hardly be more incompatible with traditional Christian models of life and…

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‘Being a traitor is one of the most dangerous professions in the world,’ Russian state TV host warns after Skripal poisoning

‘Being a traitor is one of the most dangerous professions in the world,’ Russian state TV host warns after Skripal poisoning

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This is what Russian president Putin said just two days after Skripal was poisoned with a nerve agent: "Those who serve us with poison will eventually swallow it and poison themselves" pic.twitter.com/Qqdz83ElEU — Kremlin Trolls CI (@KremlinTrolls) March 8, 2018 RFERL reports: News of the poisoning of a former Russian military intelligence officer in Britain came slowly to state-run television in Russia. For almost two days after the sudden hospitalization of Sergei Skripal, who has lived in England since being…

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YouTube, the great radicalizer

YouTube, the great radicalizer

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Zeynep Tufekci writes: YouTube has recently come under fire for recommending videos promoting the conspiracy theory that the outspoken survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., are “crisis actors” masquerading as victims. Jonathan Albright, a researcher at Columbia, recently “seeded” a YouTube account with a search for “crisis actor” and found that following the “up next” recommendations led to a network of some 9,000 videos promoting that and related conspiracy theories, including the claim that the 2012 school shooting…

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Xi Jinping promotes China’s one-party system as ready for export to regimes around the world

Xi Jinping promotes China’s one-party system as ready for export to regimes around the world

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Zheping Huang reports: Chinese president Xi Jinping has repeatedly told the world that China is ready to lead on issues like free trade and climate change. Now, he’s ready to extend his leadership to political parties everywhere. At the big annual gathering of Chinese lawmakers and political advisors that kicked off March 3, Xi said that China is offering a “new type of political party system”—a Chinese solution that contributes to the development of political parties around the world, according…

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A summit with a U.S. president is what North Korea has always wanted

A summit with a U.S. president is what North Korea has always wanted

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Ankit Panda writes: North Korea has long sought to be treated as an equal by Washington; nuclear weapons, in addition to the pragmatic survival and deterrence benefits they confer, undoubtedly also bring Pyongyang status. Kim hopes to convert that status into diplomatic capital, sitting down with Trump for a comprehensive discussion about the future of the Korean Peninsula, nuclear weapon state to nuclear weapon state. It’s not clear that the Trump administration has internalized this. I’ve long supported governmental talks…

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Trump officials try to mute scientific warnings on climate change

Trump officials try to mute scientific warnings on climate change

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The Washington Post reports: A U.S. Geological Survey study documenting how climate change has “dramatically reduced” glaciers in Montana came under fire from high-level Interior Department officials last May, according to a batch of newly released records under the Freedom of Information Act, as they questioned federal scientists’ description of the decline. Doug Domenech, assistant secretary for insular areas at Interior, alerted colleagues in a May 10 email to the language the USGS had used to publicize a study documenting…

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MIT project claims nuclear fusion power will be on the grid within 15 years

MIT project claims nuclear fusion power will be on the grid within 15 years

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The Guardian reports: The dream of nuclear fusion is on the brink of being realised, according to a major new US initiative that says it will put fusion power on the grid within 15 years. The project, a collaboration between scientists at MIT and a private company, will take a radically different approach to other efforts to transform fusion from an expensive science experiment into a viable commercial energy source. The team intend to use a new class of high-temperature…

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The depletion of the human microbiome and how it can be restored

The depletion of the human microbiome and how it can be restored

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Tobias Rees and Nils Gilman write: It is a crisis some scientists believe has similar proportions to climate change, but it gets much less coverage: Microbes are disappearing from our bodies. You may have heard that trillions of microbes — bacteria, fungi, viruses, protists — live on every surface of your body as well as inside your mouth, other orifices and your gut. You may have also heard that these microbes make up the majority of your body’s cells. But…

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How to learn more about the news by spending less time following the news

How to learn more about the news by spending less time following the news

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Farhad Manjoo writes: I first got news of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., via an alert on my watch. Even though I had turned off news notifications months ago, the biggest news still somehow finds a way to slip through. But for much of the next 24 hours after that alert, I heard almost nothing about the shooting. There was a lot I was glad to miss. For instance, I didn’t see the false claims — possibly amplified by…

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Women in Iran are pulling off their headscarves — and hoping for a ‘turning point’

Women in Iran are pulling off their headscarves — and hoping for a ‘turning point’

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The Washington Post reports: Iranian women have been raising a new challenge to their Islamic government, breaking one of its most fundamental rules by pulling off their headscarves in some of the busiest public squares and brandishing them in protest. While these guerrilla protesters number only in the dozens, Iran’s government has taken notice of their audacity. On Thursday, planned demonstrations to coincide with International Women’s Day were preempted by a heavy police presence on the streets of the capital,…

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Putin: ‘Those who serve us with poison will eventually swallow it and poison themselves’

Putin: ‘Those who serve us with poison will eventually swallow it and poison themselves’

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BBC News reports: When Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent, collapsed suddenly on Sunday in the sleepy cathedral city of Salisbury, there were unavoidable echoes of a messy, high-profile death in London a little over a decade before. In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, another former Russian agent, was rushed to hospital after collapsing in London. As the world watched, a rare and highly radioactive isotope destroyed Litvinenko’s organs one by one, and he died three weeks later. A British public…

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Why Trump wouldn’t get a security clearance to work in the White House

Why Trump wouldn’t get a security clearance to work in the White House

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Richard Painter and Norman Eisen write: Every day brings a new reason why President Trump cannot meet the standards expected of every single person who works for him (except for the vice president). Take recent reports about the payment Trump attorney Michael Cohen “facilitated” for porn actress Stormy Daniels to help Trump in the waning days of the 2016 campaign. Despite Cohen’s carefully worded denials that he was not reimbursed by the Trump Organization or the Trump campaign, this week…

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