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As Amazon fires burn, Pope convenes meeting on the rainforests and moral obligation to protect them

As Amazon fires burn, Pope convenes meeting on the rainforests and moral obligation to protect them

Georgina Gustin reports: Pope Francis convened nearly 200 bishops, climate experts and indigenous people from the Amazon on Sunday for an unprecedented meeting in Rome to discuss the fate of the Amazonian rainforests and the world’s moral obligation to protect them. The meeting, or Synod, is the first of its kind to address an ecosystem, rather than a particular region or theme. It comes as fires continue to consume the Amazon rainforest, destroying a critical tool for stabilizing the climate,…

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2nd whistleblower comes forward after speaking with intelligence community’s inspector general

2nd whistleblower comes forward after speaking with intelligence community’s inspector general

ABC News reports: Mark Zaid, the attorney representing the whistleblower who sounded the alarm on President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine and triggered an impeachment inquiry, tells ABC News that he is now representing a second whistleblower who has spoken with the inspector general. Zaid tells ABC News’ Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos that the second person — also described as an intelligence official — has first-hand knowledge of some of the allegations outlined in the original complaint and has been…

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Trump-Barr investigation of the investigators is likely to chill relations with U.S. allies

Trump-Barr investigation of the investigators is likely to chill relations with U.S. allies

The New York Times reports: After a jet carrying Attorney General William P. Barr touched down in Rome late last month, some diplomats and intelligence officials at the American Embassy were unsure why he had come to the Eternal City. They were later surprised, two officials said, to discover that he had circumvented protocols in arranging the trip, where he met with Italian political and intelligence officials. Everything about the visit was unusual — perhaps most of all, the attorney…

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Why violence has spiraled in the Hong Kong protests

Why violence has spiraled in the Hong Kong protests

The Guardian reports: When Hong Kong’s summer of protests began in June, the city was so shocked by police unleashing 150 canisters of tear gas and using their batons, it helped bring two million people into the streets to demonstrate again and denounce police brutality. Four months of rolling protests later, they used nearly 10 times as many tear gas rounds in 24 hours in a futile bid to control the city as China celebrated 70 years of communist rule…

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‘We have nothing to lose’: Iraqis vow to keep up protests

‘We have nothing to lose’: Iraqis vow to keep up protests

Al Jazeera reports: As clouds of white smoke billowed overhead, Showqi had no other option but to flee. Nearby, dozens of people scattered as they tried to outrun a fresh volley of tear gas fired by security forces in Tahrir Square, in the centre of Iraq’s capital, Baghdad. “They’re the lucky ones, [the ones] who were not targeted by government snipers,” Showqi said on Saturday, referring to the men who had run alongside him, some holding masks and pieces of…

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2nd intelligence official considering stepping forward as whistleblower on Trump’s abuse of power

2nd intelligence official considering stepping forward as whistleblower on Trump’s abuse of power

The New York Times reports: A second intelligence official who was alarmed by President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine is weighing whether to file his own formal whistle-blower complaint and testify to Congress, according to two people briefed on the matter. The official has more direct information about the events than the first whistle-blower, whose complaint that Mr. Trump was using his power to get Ukraine to investigate his political rivals touched off an impeachment inquiry. The second official is among…

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Holding Ukraine hostage: How Trump and his allies, chasing 2020 ammunition, fanned a political storm

Holding Ukraine hostage: How Trump and his allies, chasing 2020 ammunition, fanned a political storm

The Washington Post reports: By mid-May, the U.S. relationship with Ukraine was unraveling: The U.S. ambassador had been recalled home for no apparent reason, the country’s new president was anxious about U.S. support, and President Trump’s personal lawyer was hawking Kiev conspiracy theories. Amid this turbulence, an unexpected figure stepped forward to assert that he was now in charge of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, had no apparent standing to seize this critical…

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A Republican senator just made new claims about Trump linking Ukrainian military aid to investigations

A Republican senator just made new claims about Trump linking Ukrainian military aid to investigations

Vox reports: A top US diplomat told Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) that the Trump administration was blocking hundreds of millions of dollars in US military aid to Ukraine until the country agreed to launch investigations Trump was demanding, Johnson told the Wall Street Journal Friday. Johnson said that the US ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, told him in late August that the administration was demanding Ukraine investigate “what happened in 2016,” and that if President Trump had “confidence”…

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The invention of the conspiracy theory on Biden and Ukraine

The invention of the conspiracy theory on Biden and Ukraine

Jane Meyer writes: For nearly two years, conservative operatives have been trying to weaponize the Ukraine-based story that has led Trump to the brink of impeachment. A look back over the coverage of the story—a repeatedly discredited conspiracy theory involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s work in Ukraine—suggests that America’s news organizations continue to be just as susceptible to manipulation by political partisans pushing complicated and hard-to-check foreign narratives as they were in 2016. In fact, several of the…

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Cell-bacteria mergers offer clues about how organelles evolved

Cell-bacteria mergers offer clues about how organelles evolved

Viviane Callier writes: There are few relationships in nature more intimate than those between cells and the symbiotic bacteria, or endosymbionts, that live inside them. In these partnerships, a host cell typically provides protection to its endosymbiont and gives it a way to propagate, while the endosymbiont provides key nutrients to the host. It’s a deeply cooperative arrangement, in which the genomes of the host and the endosymbiont even seem to contribute complementary pieces to each other’s metabolic and biosynthetic…

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For Rachel Carson, wonder was a radical state of mind

For Rachel Carson, wonder was a radical state of mind

By Jennifer Stitt In 1957, the world watched in wonder as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into outer space. Despite Cold War anxieties, The New York Times admitted that space exploration ‘represented a step toward escape from man’s imprisonment to Earth and its thin envelope of atmosphere’. Technology, it seemed, possessed the astonishing potential to liberate humanity from terrestrial life. But not all assessments of Sputnik were so celebratory. In The Human Condition (1958), the…

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The fast track to a life well lived is gratefulness

The fast track to a life well lived is gratefulness

By David DeSteno For the Ancient Greeks, virtue wasn’t a goal in and of itself, but rather a route to a life well lived. By being honest and generous, embodying diligence and fortitude, showing restraint and kindness, a person would flourish – coming to live a life filled with meaning and finding an enduring, as opposed to ephemeral, happiness. Today, that view hasn’t much changed. While we hear plenty of stories of celebrities, politicians and even our neighbours finding fleeting…

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Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions of Russians living on unstable ground

Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions of Russians living on unstable ground

From Zyryanka River in Russia’s Siberia, the Washington Post reports: Andrey Danilov eased his motorboat onto the gravel riverbank, where the bones of a woolly mammoth lay scattered on the beach. A putrid odor filled the air — the stench of ancient plants and animals decomposing after millennia entombed in a frozen purgatory. “It smells like dead bodies,” Danilov said. The skeletal remains were left behind by mammoth hunters hoping to strike it rich by pulling prehistoric ivory tusks from…

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South America’s second-largest forest is also burning – and ‘environmentally friendly’ charcoal is subsidizing its destruction

South America’s second-largest forest is also burning – and ‘environmentally friendly’ charcoal is subsidizing its destruction

The Paraguayan Chaco, South America’s second largest forest, is rapidly disappearing as agriculture extends deeper into what was once forest. Here, isolated stands of trees remain amid the farms. Joel E. Correia, CC BY-NC-ND By Joel E. Correia, University of Florida The fires raging across the Brazilian Amazon have captured the world’s attention. Meanwhile, South America’s second-largest forest, the Gran Chaco, is disappearing in plain sight. The Gran Chaco, which spans from Bolivia and Brazil to Paraguay and Argentina, is…

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