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How Trump’s war on California tries to paint a progressive state as an environmental laggard

How Trump’s war on California tries to paint a progressive state as an environmental laggard

Inside Climate News reports: As fierce Santa Ana winds whipped the wildfires outside of Los Angeles, stirring exactly the kind of infernos that scientists expect in a hotter, drier California, President Donald Trump was gloating over the new allies he has won in his epic battle to block that state’s efforts to fight climate change. California has been a world innovator in crafting environmental policy, and its pioneering approach to the difficult issue of carbon emissions from cars helped put…

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Trump team plans to make it more difficult for older Americans to visit national parks

Trump team plans to make it more difficult for older Americans to visit national parks

The Los Angeles Times reports: At the urging of a controversial team of advisors, the Trump administration is mulling proposals to privatize national park campgrounds and further commercialize the parks with expanded Wi-Fi service, food trucks and even Amazon deliveries at tourist camp sites. Leaders of the Interior Department’s “Made in America” Outdoor Recreation Advisory Committee say these changes could make America’s national parks more attractive to a digitally minded younger generation and improve the quality of National Park Service…

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How conspiracy theories evolved from our drive for survival

How conspiracy theories evolved from our drive for survival

Jan-Willem van Prooijen writes: The great fire of Notre Dame on 15 April 2019 broke the hearts of culture lovers around the world. Parisians wept in public while the flames reduced large parts of this monumental cathedral to smouldering ashes. The French president Emmanuel Macron Tweeted a sentiment that not only French people felt: ‘Je suis triste ce soir de voir brûler cette part de nous’ (‘I feel sad tonight to see this part of us burn’). According to official…

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NASA’s Voyager 2 sends back its first signal from interstellar space

NASA’s Voyager 2 sends back its first signal from interstellar space

The Guardian reports: Twelve billion miles from Earth, there is an elusive boundary that marks the edge of the sun’s realm and the start of interstellar space. Voyager 2, the longest-running space mission, has finally beamed back a faint signal from the other side of that frontier, 42 years after its launch. The Nasa craft is the second ever to travel beyond the heliosphere, the bubble of supersonic charged particles streaming outwards from the sun. Despite setting off a month…

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The massacre that spawned the alt-right

The massacre that spawned the alt-right

Shaun Assael and Peter Keating write: “Death to the Klan!” On Saturday, November 3, 1979, that chant swept over Morningside Homes, a mostly black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina, as dozens of protesters—some donning blue hard hats for protection—hammered placards onto signposts and danced in the morning sun. The American left had largely given up on communism by then, but these demonstrators were full-on Maoists. Their ranks included professionals with degrees from places like Harvard and Duke. And they…

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Nobody talks about impeachment on the campaign trail

Nobody talks about impeachment on the campaign trail

Edward-Isaac Dovere writes: When I asked Cory Booker about the current crisis in America, he started talking about child poverty. We were standing in the parking lot outside a day-care center for low-income families here on Friday afternoon, and the senator from New Jersey had just finished a roundtable discussion that touched on ways to help young domestic-abuse survivors, parents staying at home with their children, and communities stricken by gun violence. But what about the constitutional crisis that America…

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How Trump reduced the presidency through 11,000 tweets

How Trump reduced the presidency through 11,000 tweets

The New York Times reports: In the Oval Office, an annoyed President Trump ended an argument he was having with his aides. He reached into a drawer, took out his iPhone and threw it on top of the historic Resolute Desk: “Do you want me to settle this right now?” There was no missing Mr. Trump’s threat that day in early 2017, the aides recalled. With a tweet, he could fling a directive to the world, and there was nothing…

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The EPA disbanded our clean air science panel. We met anyway – and found that particle pollution regulations aren’t protecting public health

The EPA disbanded our clean air science panel. We met anyway – and found that particle pollution regulations aren’t protecting public health

Vehicles are a major source of particulate air pollution. Deliris/Shutterstock By H. Christopher Frey, North Carolina State University Since 1980, emissions of six common air pollutants have decreased by 67%, thanks largely to government regulation. At the same time, U.S. gross domestic product has increased by 165%. While some assert that regulation acts as a drag on the economy, this record indicates that environmental protection does not have to undercut economic growth. I have studied air pollution and air quality…

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Buddhism and ecology shed light on the nature of reality and the reality of nature

Buddhism and ecology shed light on the nature of reality and the reality of nature

David P Barash writes: Once, while waiting for a wilderness permit at a ranger station in North Cascades National Park, Washington state, I overheard the following message, radioed into headquarters by a backcountry ranger: ‘Dead elk in upper Agnes Creek decomposing nicely. Over.’ This ranger was not only a practical and profound ecologist, she also possessed the wisdom of a Buddhist master. The ‘over’ in her communication seemed especially apt. For Buddhists, as for ecologists, all individual lives are eventually…

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Is a new particle changing the fate of the universe?

Is a new particle changing the fate of the universe?

Paul Sutter writes: Astronomers around the world are in a bit of a tizzy because they can’t seem to agree about how fast the universe is expanding. Ever since our universe emerged from an explosion of a tiny speck of infinite density and gravity, it has been ballooning, and not at a steady rate, either — the expansion of the universe keeps getting faster. But how quickly it’s expanding has been up for a dizzying debate. Measurements of this expansion…

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Mapping the human oral microbiome

Mapping the human oral microbiome

In an interview with Knowable Magazine, Floyd Dewhirst says: We don’t really know the number of bacteria in an average mouth. But there are something like 1011 [100 billion] organisms per gram of plaque — so we’re looking at a large number. What people usually talk about is how many species are in there. The Human Oral Microbiome Project identified a little over 700 different species of bacteria. (There are also fungi and viruses.) About 400 of the 700 bacterial…

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Constitutional experts and historians of impeachment see solid evidence of high crime in Trump’s abuse of power

Constitutional experts and historians of impeachment see solid evidence of high crime in Trump’s abuse of power

The Guardian reports: Trump’s conduct, according to analysts interviewed by the Guardian, hews more closely than any previous conduct by any other president to what scholars conceive as a concrete example of impeachable behavior. Frank O Bowman III, author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump and a professor at the University of Missouri school of law, said that Trump’s having extorted actions with no legitimate US national purpose from a foreign country…

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Trump’s campaign was already pushing the conspiracy theory that Ukraine was involved in the DNC hack back in 2016

Trump’s campaign was already pushing the conspiracy theory that Ukraine was involved in the DNC hack back in 2016

BuzzFeed reports: In his July 2019 call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, President Donald Trump referenced a conspiracy theory that Ukraine was involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee in 2016, and asked for the “favor” of help investigating it. Trump’s own campaign was floating the theory that Ukraine, and not Russia, hacked the DNC as early as the summer of 2016, according to new documents obtained by BuzzFeed News from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Three years later, Trump’s…

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Trump’s loathing for Ukraine is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry

Trump’s loathing for Ukraine is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry

The Washington Post reports: Three of President Trump’s top advisers met with him in the Oval Office in May, determined to convince him that the new Ukrainian leader was an ally deserving of U.S. support. They had barely begun their pitch when Trump unloaded on them, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the meeting. In Trump’s mind, the officials said, Ukraine’s entire leadership had colluded with the Democrats to undermine his 2016 presidential campaign. “They tried to…

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