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McConnell warns Senate Republicans against challenging election results

McConnell warns Senate Republicans against challenging election results

Politico reports: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned Republican senators Tuesday during a private caucus call not to object to the election results on Jan. 6, according to two sources familiar with the matter. McConnell told his caucus that challenging the results would force Republicans to take a “terrible vote” because they would need to vote it down and appear against President Donald Trump. Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) also echoed McConnell’s remarks. Sen….

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Inside the right-wing media bubble, where the myth of a Trump win lives on

Inside the right-wing media bubble, where the myth of a Trump win lives on

The New York Times reports: President Trump’s media criticism is usually binary — there are “good stories,” favorable to him, and then the other category. Most news coverage on Monday fell into that other category. One by one, presidential electors in all 50 states and the District of Columbia formally recognized Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect, the latest and most significant rejection so far of Mr. Trump’s desperate attempts to undo the will of the voters. But inside…

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Facebook is destroying humanity

Facebook is destroying humanity

Adrienne LaFrance writes: The Doomsday Machine was never supposed to exist. It was meant to be a thought experiment that went like this: Imagine a device built with the sole purpose of destroying all human life. Now suppose that machine is buried deep underground, but connected to a computer, which is in turn hooked up to sensors in cities and towns across the United States. The sensors are designed to sniff out signs of the impending apocalypse—not to prevent the…

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Hackers at center of sprawling spy campaign turned SolarWinds’ dominance against it

Hackers at center of sprawling spy campaign turned SolarWinds’ dominance against it

Reuters reports: On an earnings call two months ago, SolarWinds Chief Executive Kevin Thompson touted how far the company had gone during his 11 years at the helm. There was not a database or an IT deployment model out there to which his Austin, Texas-based company did not provide some level of monitoring or management, he told analysts on the Oct. 27 call. “We don’t think anyone else in the market is really even close in terms of the breadth…

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How science beat the coronavirus — and what it lost in the process

How science beat the coronavirus — and what it lost in the process

Ed Yong writes: In Fall of 2019, exactly zero scientists were studying COVID‑19, because no one knew the disease existed. The coronavirus that causes it, SARS‑CoV‑2, had only recently jumped into humans and had been neither identified nor named. But by the end of March 2020, it had spread to more than 170 countries, sickened more than 750,000 people, and triggered the biggest pivot in the history of modern science. Thousands of researchers dropped whatever intellectual puzzles had previously consumed…

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How climate change is ushering in a new era of pandemics

How climate change is ushering in a new era of pandemics

Jeff Goodell writes: Jennifer Jones spent most of her summer at home, as so many of us did, trying to avoid the plague. Jones, 45, lives in Tavernier, a community in the Florida Keys just south of Key Largo, and passed a lot of time in her yard, puttering around with plants. At some point, a mosquito landed on her. That’s not unusual in Florida, and Jones doesn’t remember this mosquito bite in particular. But it was not a garden-variety…

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How the ‘deep state’ scientists vilified by Trump helped him deliver an unprecedented achievement

How the ‘deep state’ scientists vilified by Trump helped him deliver an unprecedented achievement

The Washington Post reports: The timing of the hastily arranged White House “vaccine summit” last Tuesday bewildered many invitees. It was days before the authorization of the first coronavirus vaccine developed by Pfizer and German firm BioNTech — and nearly a week before millions of vaccine doses would be loaded onto trucks bound for every state in the nation. Wouldn’t those milestones and the mass vaccination effort that followed be what the White House would want to spotlight? That was…

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Trump tells allies he will run in 2024, but hints he may back out

Trump tells allies he will run in 2024, but hints he may back out

Politico reports: Donald Trump doesn’t need to run for president again. He just needs everyone to think he is. The president’s recent discussions with those around him reveal that he sees his White House comeback deliberations as a way to earn the commodity he needs most after leaving office: attention. The president has spent days calling a dozen or more allies to ask what they think he needs to do over the next two years to “stay part of the…

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Congressman cites Trump’s efforts to overturn election in announcing decision to quit GOP

Congressman cites Trump’s efforts to overturn election in announcing decision to quit GOP

CNN reports: In an exclusive interview, Rep. Paul Mitchell, Republican of Michigan, told CNN that his disgust and disappointment with President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the election have led him to request that the Clerk of the House change his party affiliation to “independent,” and to notify GOP leaders in a letter that he is withdrawing his “engagement and association with the Republican Party at both the national and state level.” “This party has to stand…

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CNN and MSNBC fret over post-Trump future

CNN and MSNBC fret over post-Trump future

The New York Times reports: CNN and MSNBC thrived during the Trump years, reaching new heights in ratings and revenue while devoting countless prime-time hours to criticizing a White House antagonist their viewers just could not quit. Now faced with a Trump-less future, top executives at the rival cable news networks have summoned star anchors and producers to private meetings in recent weeks, seeking answers to a pressing question: What’s next? People at both networks know that viewers who abhorred…

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DHS is third federal agency hacked in major Russian cyberespionage campaign

DHS is third federal agency hacked in major Russian cyberespionage campaign

The Washington Post reports: The Department of Homeland Security on Monday joined the list of known victims of a months-long, highly sophisticated digital spying operation by Russia whose damage remains uncertain but is presumed to be extensive, experts say. The list of victims of the cyberespionage, which already included the Treasury and Commerce departments, is expected to grow and to include more federal agencies and numerous private companies, said officials and others familiar with the matter, who spoke on the…

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Al Gore: Where I find hope

Al Gore: Where I find hope

Al Gore writes: This weekend marks two anniversaries that, for me, point a way forward through the accumulated wreckage of the past year. The first is personal. Twenty years ago, I ended my presidential campaign after the Supreme Court abruptly decided the 2000 election. As the incumbent vice president, my duty then turned to presiding over the tallying of Electoral College votes in Congress to elect my opponent. This process will unfold again on Monday as the college’s electors ratify…

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The end of a world of nation states

The end of a world of nation states

Jamie Bartlett writes: If you’d been born 1,500 years ago in southern Europe, you’d have been convinced that the Roman empire would last forever. It had, after all, been around for 1,000 years. And yet, following a period of economic and military decline, it fell apart. By 476 CE it was gone. To the people living under the mighty empire, these events must have been unthinkable. Just as they must have been for those living through the collapse of the…

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Wisconsin Supreme Court justices tell Trump lawyer his election suit ‘smacks of racism’

Wisconsin Supreme Court justices tell Trump lawyer his election suit ‘smacks of racism’

Adam Klasfeld writes: Outgoing President Donald Trump and his soon-to-be-former Vice President Mike Pence’s attempt to invalidate Wisconsin’s vote in only Milwaukee and Dane Counties appears to be racially motivated, two of the state’s Supreme Court justice remarked in a brutal Saturday hearing for the lame duck president. Trump’s attorney, James Troupis, had barely begun to address the high court when Justice Jill Karofsky noted that the attack focused on the two counties with the state’s largest number of Black…

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