Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

Eric Holder: William Barr is unfit to be attorney general

Eric Holder: William Barr is unfit to be attorney general

Eric Holder, writes: As a former U.S. attorney general, I am reluctant to publicly criticize my successors. I respect the office and understand just how tough the job can be. But recently, Attorney General William P. Barr has made a series of public statements and taken actions that are so plainly ideological, so nakedly partisan and so deeply inappropriate for America’s chief law enforcement official that they demand a response from someone who held the same office. Last month, at…

Read More Read More

EU aims to stir global action with pledge on climate crisis

EU aims to stir global action with pledge on climate crisis

The Guardian reports: The EU will attempt to revive the world’s flagging attempts to tackle the climate crisis with a historic proposal from Brussels to halve emissions by 2030, and reach net zero carbon by mid-century. Wednesday’s announcement is seen as the vital first step towards gathering a “coalition of ambition” among key countries to fulfil the pledges of the 2015 Paris agreement, which is in danger of languishing amid deadlocked UN talks. Ursula von der Leyen, the new president…

Read More Read More

The anatomical ability to speak evolved millions of years before the rise of Homo sapiens

The anatomical ability to speak evolved millions of years before the rise of Homo sapiens

Baboons make sounds, but how does it relate to human speech? Creative Wrights/Shutterstock.com By Thomas R. Sawallis, University of Alabama and Louis-Jean Boë, Université Grenoble Alpes Sound doesn’t fossilize. Language doesn’t either. Even when writing systems have developed, they’ve represented full-fledged and functional languages. Rather than preserving the first baby steps toward language, they’re fully formed, made up of words, sentences and grammar carried from one person to another by speech sounds, like any of the perhaps 6,000 languages spoken…

Read More Read More

Greenland’s ice sheet melting seven times faster than in 1990s

Greenland’s ice sheet melting seven times faster than in 1990s

The Guardian reports: Greenland’s ice sheet is melting much faster than previously thought, threatening hundreds of millions of people with inundation and bringing some of the irreversible impacts of the climate emergency much closer. Ice is being lost from Greenland seven times faster than it was in the 1990s, and the scale and speed of ice loss is much higher than was predicted in the comprehensive studies of global climate science by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to…

Read More Read More

Our oceans brim with climate solutions. We need a Blue New Deal

Our oceans brim with climate solutions. We need a Blue New Deal

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson writes: Our nation has more than 95,000 miles of shoreline, home to 40 percent of Americans who live in coastal counties. Our blue economy, including fishing, ocean farming, shipping, tourism and recreation, supports more than 3.25 million American jobs and a $300-billion annual contribution to our gross domestic product. And, for many, our cultural heritage is tied to the sea. These communities are threatened by rising sea levels, eroding coasts and climate change-fueled storms. Yet the Green…

Read More Read More

The ‘Russia hoax’ is itself a hoax

The ‘Russia hoax’ is itself a hoax

Adam Serwer writes: If you are following mainstream news outlets, you know that in 2016, Donald Trump benefited from a Russian hacking and disinformation campaign designed to help him get elected, even as he sought permission from the Russian government to build a hotel in Moscow. You know that he deflected blame from Russia for that campaign, even as he sought to benefit from it politically. You know that shortly after the election, Trump told Russian officials in the Oval…

Read More Read More

Trump lashes out at FBI director in wake of Justice Department inspector general’s report

Trump lashes out at FBI director in wake of Justice Department inspector general’s report

  The Washington Post reports: President Trump lashed out Tuesday morning at FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, suggesting that “he will never be able to fix the FBI” based on his reaction to a Justice Department inspector general’s report examining the bureau’s investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign. “I don’t know what report current Director of the FBI Christopher Wray was reading, but it sure wasn’t the one given to me,” Trump tweeted. “With that kind of attitude, he will never…

Read More Read More

Trump called for Seoul evacuation at height of North Korea tensions, new book says

Trump called for Seoul evacuation at height of North Korea tensions, new book says

The Guardian reports: Trump had been repeatedly told that US freedom of action against North Korea was constrained by the fact that the regime’s artillery could demolish the South Korean capital in retaliation for any attack, inflicting mass casualties on its population of 25 million. “They have to move,” Trump said, according to Bergen, who adds that his officials were initially unsure if the president was joking. But Trump then repeated the line. “They have to move!” No action was…

Read More Read More

The Millennials vs. Boomers fight divides the Democratic Party

The Millennials vs. Boomers fight divides the Democratic Party

Derek Thompson writes: To many observers, it might seem like young voters have remade the Democratic Party in their image—as a claque of “woke” socialists. In May, the historian Niall Ferguson and Eyck Freymann, a research analyst, wrote in The Atlantic that the U.S. was at the brink of a great generation war, in which older conservative Republicans would do battle with Democrats, who were “rapidly becoming the party of the young.” But upon closer examination, the Democrats aren’t really…

Read More Read More

To decode the brain, scientists automate the study of behavior

To decode the brain, scientists automate the study of behavior

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: The quest to understand what’s happening inside the minds and brains of animals has taken neuroscientists down many surprising paths: from peering directly into living brains, to controlling neurons with bursts of light, to building intricate contraptions and virtual reality environments. In 2013, it took the neurobiologist Bob Datta and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School to a Best Buy down the street from their lab. At the electronics store, they found what they needed: an Xbox…

Read More Read More

The Afghanistan Papers: 18 years of lying about the war

The Afghanistan Papers: 18 years of lying about the war

The Washington Post reports: A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished…

Read More Read More

James Comey: The truth is finally out. The FBI fulfilled its mission

James Comey: The truth is finally out. The FBI fulfilled its mission

James Comey writes: For two years, the president of the United States and his followers have loudly declared that the FBI acted unlawfully in conducting a counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. They repeatedly told the American people that the FBI had done all sorts of bad things, such as tapping Donald Trump’s wires during the campaign, opening an investigation without adequate cause, with the intent to damage Trump, and inserting secret informants into the Trump…

Read More Read More