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The dark history of colonialism behind the Thanksgiving myth

The dark history of colonialism behind the Thanksgiving myth

David J. Silverman writes: Generations of Americans have told themselves a patriotic story of the supposed first Thanksgiving that misrepresents colonization as consensual and bloodless. The story goes like this: English Pilgrims cram aboard the Mayflower and brave the stormy Atlantic to seek religious freedom in America. They disembark at Plymouth Rock and enter the howling wilderness equipped with their proto-Constitution, the Mayflower Compact, and the confidence that they are God’s chosen people. Yet sickness and starvation halve their population…

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A detailed account of the record in the Ukraine affair

A detailed account of the record in the Ukraine affair

Lawfare‘s Scott R. Anderson, Margaret Taylor, Benjamin Wittes write: In the Ukraine affair, there is no Robert Mueller. There is no Kenneth Starr. If the House is going to get a detailed report on the conduct of President Trump with respect to Ukraine and the Biden family, it’s going to have to write that report itself. The House has authorized its intelligence committee to do just that. Under House Resolution 660, the Intelligence Committee “is directed to issue a report…

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Richard Spencer: I was fired as Navy secretary. Here’s what I’ve learned because of it

Richard Spencer: I was fired as Navy secretary. Here’s what I’ve learned because of it

Richard Spencer writes: Earlier this year, [Chief Petty Officer Edward] Gallagher was formally charged with more than a dozen criminal acts, including premeditated murder, which occurred during his eighth deployment overseas. He was tried in a military court in San Diego and acquitted in July of all charges, except one count of wrongfully posing for photographs with the body of a dead Islamic State fighter. The jury sentenced him to four months, the maximum possible; because he had served that…

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Light pollution is key ‘bringer of insect apocalypse’

Light pollution is key ‘bringer of insect apocalypse’

The Guardian reports: Light pollution is a significant but overlooked driver of the rapid decline of insect populations, according to the most comprehensive review of the scientific evidence to date. Artificial light at night can affect every aspect of insects’ lives, the researchers said, from luring moths to their deaths around bulbs, to spotlighting insect prey for rats and toads, to obscuring the mating signals of fireflies. “We strongly believe artificial light at night – in combination with habitat loss,…

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Turkey’s motley crew of proxy fighters in Syria

Turkey’s motley crew of proxy fighters in Syria

Elizabeth Tsurkov writes: A small Turkish flag was standing on the desk of the offices of the Turkish-backed faction in a residential area of Şanlıurfa, in southern Turkey. The men in the room, most of them veteran fighters from eastern Syria, were expecting me and did their best to locate a Syrian revolutionary flag in time for our meeting in the summer of 2019. They could not find one. Everything about the meeting, its location, décor, and content, indicated to…

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Concern over rise in ‘dark tourism’ in Syria as war enters ninth year

Concern over rise in ‘dark tourism’ in Syria as war enters ninth year

The Guardian reports: Syria’s almost nine-year conflict is far from over but that is not stopping a new wave of western tourists from visiting. As President Bashar al-Assad tightens his grip on the remains of the opposition in the north-west, a handful of tour companies and travel bloggers catering to English-language customers have started running bespoke trips to the country to “mingle with locals while also passing destroyed villages”, visit archeological sites “shrouded in a coat of destruction” and “experience…

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A molecular connection between the brain and aging

A molecular connection between the brain and aging

Veronique Greenwood writes: A thousand seemingly insignificant things change as an organism ages. Beyond the obvious signs like graying hair and memory problems are myriad shifts both subtler and more consequential: Metabolic processes run less smoothly; neurons respond less swiftly; the replication of DNA grows faultier. But while bodies may seem to just gradually wear out, many researchers believe instead that aging is controlled at the cellular and biochemical level. They find evidence for this in the throng of biological…

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Tipping points signal a climate emergency

Tipping points signal a climate emergency

Timothy M. Lenton, Johan Rockström, Owen Gaffney, Stefan Rahmstorf, Katherine Richardson, Will Steffen & Hans Joachim Schellnhuber write: Politicians, economists and even some natural scientists have tended to assume that tipping points in the Earth system — such as the loss of the Amazon rainforest or the West Antarctic ice sheet — are of low probability and little understood. Yet evidence is mounting that these events could be more likely than was thought, have high impacts and are interconnected across…

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Those least responsible for climate change get hit hardest by its effects

Those least responsible for climate change get hit hardest by its effects

The Washington Post reports: His ancestors were Portuguese colonialists who settled on this otherworldly stretch of coast, wedged between a vast desert and the southern Atlantic. They came looking for the one thing this barren region had in abundance: fish. By the time Mario Carceija Santos was getting into the fishing business half a century later, in the 1990s, Angola had won independence and the town of Tombwa was thriving. There were 20 fish factories strung along the bay, a…

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The war-crimes president

The war-crimes president

Adam Serwer writes: Donald Trump is a war-crimes enthusiast. This is not an exaggeration, a mischaracterization, or a misrepresentation. As a candidate, the president regaled his audiences with vivid tales of brutality, some apocryphal, and vowed to imitate them. On the campaign trail, Trump frequently invoked a false story about General John Pershing crushing a Muslim insurgency in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, declaring, “There was no more radical Islamic terror for 35 years!” He vowed to…

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Trump knew about whistle-blower complaint when he released aid to Ukraine

Trump knew about whistle-blower complaint when he released aid to Ukraine

The New York Times reports: President Trump had already been briefed on a whistle-blower’s complaint about his dealings with Ukraine when he unfroze military aid for the country in September, according to two people familiar with the matter. Lawyers from the White House counsel’s office told Mr. Trump in late August about the complaint, explaining that they were trying to determine whether they were legally required to give it to Congress, the people said. The revelation could shed light on…

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The absurdity of Trump trying to distance himself from Giuliani’s work on Ukraine

The absurdity of Trump trying to distance himself from Giuliani’s work on Ukraine

Philip Bump writes: President Trump certainly wouldn’t be the first employer to retroactively try to designate a staff member as an independent contractor, but he might be the first to do so to aid his fight against being impeached and removed from the White House. His assertion to former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly that his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani was acting independently on Ukraine, perhaps for other clients, has an obvious goal. Giuliani was the point of contact…

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Giuliani privately pursued business in Ukraine while publicly pushing for inquiries for Trump

Giuliani privately pursued business in Ukraine while publicly pushing for inquiries for Trump

The New York Times reports: As Rudolph W. Giuliani waged a public campaign this year to unearth damaging information in Ukraine about President Trump’s political rivals, he privately pursued hundreds of thousands of dollars in business from Ukrainian government officials, documents reviewed by The New York Times show. Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, has repeatedly said he has no business in Ukraine, and none of the deals were finalized. But the documents indicate that while he was pushing Mr….

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‘There’s something terribly wrong’: Americans are dying young at alarming rates

‘There’s something terribly wrong’: Americans are dying young at alarming rates

The Washington Post reports: Death rates from suicide, drug overdoses, liver disease and dozens of other causes have been rising over the past decade for young and middle-aged adults, driving down overall life expectancy in the United States for three consecutive years, according to a strikingly bleak study published Tuesday that looked at the past six decades of mortality data. The report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, was immediately hailed by outside researchers for its comprehensive…

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