Music: Marcos Valle & Stacey Kent feat. Jim Tomlinson — ‘My Nightingale’
Climate crisis: Global failure of political leadership is forcing young people to rise up and demand radical action now
Pelosi tells senior Democrats she wants to see Trump ‘in prison’
Politico reports: Speaker Nancy Pelosi told senior Democrats that she’d like to see President Donald Trump “in prison” as she clashed with House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler in a meeting on Tuesday night over whether to launch impeachment proceedings. Pelosi met with Nadler (D-N.Y.) and several other top Democrats who are aggressively pursuing investigations against the president, according to multiple sources. Nadler and other committee leaders have been embroiled in a behind-the-scenes turf battle for weeks over ownership of the…
How Trump could be prosecuted after the White House
Renato Mariotti writes: With Congress enmeshed in a fraught debate over whether to impeach President Donald Trump, Robert Mueller’s brief and dramatic news conference provided a sharp reminder that impeachment is not the only option for addressing the president’s alleged misdeeds. The outlines of a potential civilian prosecution of a former president Trump are already emerging. While there are reports of tax dodges, illegal campaign contributions, and improper foreign contributions to his inaugural committee—among other things—investigations into those claims are…
No-deal Brexit cannot happen without parliamentary consent, says Speaker
The Guardian reports: John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, has said it is “blindingly obvious” that the new Conservative prime minister will not be able to suspend parliament to push through a no-deal Brexit. The Speaker said it would not be an option after outrage across the political spectrum when the leadership hopeful Dominic Raab suggested he might try to take that path. “That is simply not going to happen. It is just so blindingly obvious that…
13 Democrats recorded messages about Israel. Bernie Sanders was the only one to show any courage
Peter Beinart writes: The mantra of Kirsten Gillibrand’s presidential campaign is “Brave Wins.” Yet in her video message to the American Jewish Committee’s Global Forum this week, the New York Senator didn’t even mention the word “Palestinian.” That was typical. The 2020 Democratic hopefuls talk a lot about having the courage not just to challenge Donald Trump but to transform America’s political and economic system. But with the exception of Bernie Sanders, the leading contenders couldn’t muster the nerve to…
Assad urged Syrian refugees to come home. Many are being welcomed with arrest and interrogation
The Washington Post reports: Hundreds of Syrian refugees have been arrested after returning home as the war they fled winds down — then interrogated, forced to inform on close family members and in some cases tortured, say returnees and human rights monitors. Many more who weathered the conflict in rebel-held territory now retaken by government forces are meeting a similar fate as President Bashar al-Assad’s regime deepens its longtime dependence on informers and surveillance. For Syrian refugees, going home usually…
Prehistoric humans invented stone tools multiple times, study finds
The Independent reports: Prehistoric humans invented tools on multiple occasions, according to researchers who have found a collection of 327 stone weapons carved more than 2.58 million years ago. This is the first evidence of ancient hominids sharpening stones to create specific tools, according to new research led by Arizona State University and George Washington University. The collection of “Oldowan” tools – which are created by chipping off bits of stone – were found in the Afar region of north-eastern…
Music: Vinicius Cantuaria — ‘Fugiu’
Can soil solve the climate crisis?
Kenneth Miller writes: When Rattan Lal was awarded the Japan Prize for Biological Production, Ecology in April—the Asian equivalent of a Nobel—the audience at Tokyo’s National Theatre included the emperor and empress. Lal’s acceptance speech, however, was down-to-earth in the most literal sense. “I’d like to begin, rather unconventionally, with the conclusion of my presentation,” he told the assembled dignitaries. “And the conclusion is four words: In soil we trust.” That statement could serve as the motto for a climate…
Climate crisis seriously damaging human health, report finds
The Guardian reports: A report by experts from 27 national science academies has set out the widespread damage global heating is already causing to people’s health and the increasingly serious impacts expected in future. Scorching heatwaves and floods will claim more victims as extreme weather increases but there are serious indirect effects too, from spreading mosquito-borne diseases to worsening mental health. “There are impacts occurring now [and], over the coming century, climate change has to be ranked as one of…
Russia’s manipulation of Twitter was vastly more extensive than previously believed
Politico reports: Russia’s infamous troll farm conducted a campaign on Twitter before the 2016 elections that was larger, more coordinated and more effective than previously known, research from cybersecurity firm Symantec out Wednesday concluded. The Internet Research Agency campaign may not only have had more sway — reaching large numbers of real users — than previously thought, it also demonstrated ample patience and might have generated income for some of the phony accounts, Symantec found. The company analyzed a massive…
Lies pave the way for anti-abortion laws. To defeat the laws we must fight the lies
Rebecca Solnit writes: Anti-abortion laws are built on anti-abortion lies. Lies about things like who has abortions, how abortions work, how women’s bodies work and how fetuses develop. The lies pave the way for the laws. There are the old lies, like the ones suggesting that the women having abortions are careless hussies (51% of abortions are to women who were using contraception; 59% are to women who are already mothers; 75% are to poor and low-income women). Lately, there’s…
People eat at least 50,000 plastic particles a year, study finds
The Guardian reports: The average person eats at least 50,000 particles of microplastic a year and breathes in a similar quantity, according to the first study to estimate human ingestion of plastic pollution. The true number is likely to be many times higher, as only a small number of foods and drinks have been analysed for plastic contamination. The scientists reported that drinking a lot of bottled water drastically increased the particles consumed. The health impacts of ingesting microplastic are…
The dancing species: How moving together in time helped make us human
By Kimerer LaMothe Dancing is a human universal, but why? It is present in human cultures old and new; central to those with the longest continuous histories; evident in the earliest visual art on rock walls from France to South Africa to the Americas, and enfolded in the DNA of every infant who invents movements in joyful response to rhythm and song, long before she can walk, talk or think of herself as an ‘I’. Dancing remains a vital, generative…
We taught bees a simple number language – and they got it
Maybe the differences between human and non-human animals are not as great as we might previously have thought. from www.shutterstock.com By Scarlett Howard, Université de Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier; Adrian Dyer, RMIT University, and Andrew Greentree, RMIT University Most children learn that written numbers represent quantities in pre-school or junior primary school. Now our new study shows that honeybees too can learn to match symbols and numerosities, much like we humans do with Arabic and Roman numerals.