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Order returns in Portland after Trump’s stormtroopers retreat

Order returns in Portland after Trump’s stormtroopers retreat

The Washington Post reports: After President Trump ordered federal law enforcement officers into Portland, Ore., earlier this month, the protests largely ended the same way for days: with tear gas, rubber bullets and arrests. On Thursday, the first protest held since the federal agencies agreed to pull back their officers was a markedly more peaceful affair. As the Black Lives Matter-inspired vigil wound down early Friday morning, there was virtually no sign of the Oregon State Police officers who had…

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DHS compiled ‘intelligence reports’ on journalists who published leaked documents

DHS compiled ‘intelligence reports’ on journalists who published leaked documents

The Washington Post reports: The Department of Homeland Security has compiled “intelligence reports” about the work of American journalists covering protests in Portland, Ore., in what current and former officials called an alarming use of a government system meant to share information about suspected terrorists and violent actors. Over the past week, the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis has disseminated three Open Source Intelligence Reports to federal law enforcement agencies and others, summarizing tweets written by two journalists —…

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How the world made so much progress on a Covid-19 vaccine so fast

How the world made so much progress on a Covid-19 vaccine so fast

STAT reports: Never before have prospective vaccines for a pathogen entered final-stage clinical trials as rapidly as candidates for Covid-19. Just six months ago, when the death toll from the coronavirus stood at one and neither it nor the disease it caused had a name, a team of Chinese scientists uploaded its genetic sequence to a public site. That kicked off the record-breaking rush to develop vaccines — the salve that experts say could ultimately quell the pandemic. The colossal…

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Why plants are green

Why plants are green

Rodrigo Pérez Ortega writes: From large trees in the Amazon jungle to houseplants to seaweed in the ocean, green is the color that reigns over the plant kingdom. Why green, and not blue or magenta or gray? The simple answer is that although plants absorb almost all the photons in the red and blue regions of the light spectrum, they absorb only about 90% of the green photons. If they absorbed more, they would look black to our eyes. Plants…

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The city is a lie

The city is a lie

Sam Grinsell writes: The city is a lie that we tell ourselves. The crux of this lie is that we can separate human life from the environment, using concrete, glass, steel, maps, planning and infrastructure to forge a space apart. Disease, dirt, wild animals, wilderness, farmland and countryside are all imagined to be essentially outside, forbidden and excluded. This idea is maintained through the hiding of infrastructure, the zoning of space, the burying of rivers, the visualisation of new urban…

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Countries with levels of police brutality comparable to that in the U.S. are called ‘police states’

Countries with levels of police brutality comparable to that in the U.S. are called ‘police states’

Laurence Ralph writes: Public outcry over the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd earlier this year has ignited mass demonstrations against structural racism and police violence in the United States. The protests have reached every American state and spread to countries around the world; they arguably constitute the most broad-based civil rights movement in American history. Protests against the brutalization of communities of color by the U.S. criminal justice system have been growing for years, but the…

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I couldn’t find Trump’s ‘anarchists’ in Portland

I couldn’t find Trump’s ‘anarchists’ in Portland

Nicholas Kristof writes: I’ve been on the front lines of the protests here, searching for the “radical-left anarchists” who President Trump says are on Portland streets each evening. I thought I’d found one: a man who for weeks leapt into the fray and has been shot four times with impact munitions yet keeps coming back. I figured he must be a crazed anarchist. But no, he turned out to be Dr. Bryan Wolf, a radiologist who wears his white doctor’s…

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Federal forces agree to withdraw from Portland

Federal forces agree to withdraw from Portland

The Oregonian reports: For weeks, it was unclear how Oregon leaders could defuse the increasingly violent standoff between federal officers and protesters in downtown Portland and convince Homeland Security officers to leave. Gov. Kate Brown’s administration says that proved relatively easy in the end because the Trump administration was clearly looking for a way out. Trump administration officials did not demand any concessions or pledges from Brown before they agreed officers would depart, Brown’s chief of staff Nik Blosser told…

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Together, you can redeem the soul of our nation

Together, you can redeem the soul of our nation

Shortly before his death, John Lewis wrote: While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the…

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U.S. economy contracted at fastest quarterly rate on record

U.S. economy contracted at fastest quarterly rate on record

The Washington Post reports: The U.S. economy shrank 9.5 percent from April through June, the largest quarterly decline since the government began publishing data 70 years ago, and the latest, sobering reflection of the pandemic’s economic devastation. The second quarter report on gross domestic product covers some of the economy’s worst weeks in living memory, when commercial activity ground to a halt, millions of Americans lost their jobs and the nation went into lockdown. Yet economists say the data should…

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Trump’s idea of delaying the election is swiftly rejected by congressional Republicans

Trump’s idea of delaying the election is swiftly rejected by congressional Republicans

Reuters reports: President Donald Trump on Thursday raised the idea of delaying the Nov. 3 U.S. elections, an idea immediately rejected by both Democrats and his fellow Republicans in Congress – the sole branch of government with the authority to make such a change. Critics and even Trump’s allies dismissed the notion as unserious and simply an attempt to distract from devastating economic news. Trump’s statement on Twitter comes as the United States is enduring the greatest crises of a…

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Medieval onion and garlic remedy kills antibiotic-resistant biofilms in the lab

Medieval onion and garlic remedy kills antibiotic-resistant biofilms in the lab

Science Alerts reports: As deadly bacteria grow ever more resistant to modern antibiotics, some researchers have turned to ancient medical manuscripts for clues. And it looks like a medieval salve dating back 1,000 years might succeed where many modern antibiotics are starting to fail. The “ancientbiotic”, as the researchers are calling it, was found in one of the earliest known medical textbooks from medieval England, known as Bald’s Leechbook. While many of the remedies included in this tome have not…

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China is what Orwell feared

China is what Orwell feared

Ross Andersen writes: Northwest of Beijing’s Forbidden City, outside the Third Ring Road, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has spent seven decades building a campus of national laboratories. Near its center is the Institute of Automation, a sleek silvery-blue building surrounded by camera-studded poles. The institute is a basic research facility. Its computer scientists inquire into artificial intelligence’s fundamental mysteries. Their more practical innovations—iris recognition, cloud-based speech synthesis—are spun off to Chinese tech giants, AI start-ups, and, in some cases,…

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Forging a right-left coalition may be the only way to end the War on Drugs

Forging a right-left coalition may be the only way to end the War on Drugs

Conor Friedersdorf writes: Nearly 30 years ago, the PBS program Firing Line convened a debate about the War on Drugs, which has contributed more than any other criminal-justice policy to deadly street violence in Black neighborhoods and the police harassment, arrest, and mass incarceration of Black Americans. Revisiting the debate helps clarify what it will take to end that ongoing policy mistake. Congressman Charlie Rangel led one side in the 1991 clash. Born in 1930, Rangel served in the Korean…

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