Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

Trump elbows into Britain’s general election campaign

Trump elbows into Britain’s general election campaign

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump has intervened in the UK’s nascent election campaign, calling on Boris Johnson to team up with Nigel Farage to form an “unstoppable force” and claiming Jeremy Corbyn would be “so bad for your country”. Speaking to Farage on LBC Radio, the US president also said Johnson’s Brexit deal could prevent the UK from agreeing a trade deal with the US. Trump said the US “can’t make a trade deal with the UK” under “certain aspects…

Read More Read More

Trump’s support couldn’t save coal giant Murray Energy from bankruptcy

Trump’s support couldn’t save coal giant Murray Energy from bankruptcy

Inside Climate News reports: Murray Energy, the U.S. coal company whose founder’s “wish list” was a virtual template for the Trump administration’s rollback of federal environmental and climate regulations, filed for bankruptcy protection Tuesday. It’s the latest in a wave of bankruptcy filings by coal companies that are struggling to compete in a market where their product—once the lowest-cost fuel for producing electricity—is now more expensive than natural gas and renewable sources. Among them, Murray’s bankruptcy stands out, in part,…

Read More Read More

EPA set to revoke restrictions on toxic metals poisoning drinking water

EPA set to revoke restrictions on toxic metals poisoning drinking water

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is expected to roll back an Obama-era regulation to limit dangerous heavy metals like arsenic, lead and mercury from coal-fired power plants, according to two people familiar with the plans. With a series of new rules expected in November, the Environmental Protection Agency will move to weaken the 2015 regulation by relaxing some of the requirements on power generators and also exempting a significant number of power plants from even those requirements….

Read More Read More

Explaining illness with belief in evil

Explaining illness with belief in evil

Live Science reports: Where did the spiritual concept of evil originate? One possible explanation might be people’s attempts to understand and cope with infectious diseases. Linking diseases and their symptoms to mysterious evil forces is a practice that emerged in traditional belief systems prior to the mid-19th century, when germ theory was introduced, scientists wrote in a new study. Germ theory revealed that microscopic pathogens, rather than malevolent spirits, were the cause of illness. However, the connection between religious convictions…

Read More Read More

Climate change is burning down California

Climate change is burning down California

Michael E. Mann writes: Climate change was long regarded as a distant threat, one happening in far off places and future times. That is unfortunately no longer the case. Climate change is here, and it’s burning through California. I spent five years in the San Francisco Bay Area getting my undergraduate degrees in applied math and physics from UC-Berkeley. To see my campus threatened by the fires is heartbreaking. I can’t even imagine how bad it is for those who…

Read More Read More

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and the questioning of an American Jew’s patriotism

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and the questioning of an American Jew’s patriotism

Julia Ioffe writes: Almost as soon as news of Vindman’s planned testimony broke on Monday night, Trump’s allies seized on Vindman’s birthplace and language abilities as proof of his disloyalty to the United States. John Yoo, architect of the post-9/11 torture program, even went so far as to accuse Vindman of “espionage” on behalf of the Ukrainians. It was an assertion repeated by a former Republican congressman who is now a CNN commentator. Of course, what they meant was that…

Read More Read More

Trump’s baffling plan to pillage Syria’s oil

Trump’s baffling plan to pillage Syria’s oil

Robin Wright writes: President Trump dropped a stunner during his rambling press conference, on Sunday, after announcing the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State leader, in a U.S. raid. In a major policy flip-flop, the President said that he is not only keeping American forces in Syria to “secure” its oil fields, he is willing to go to war over them. “We may have to fight for the oil. It’s O.K.,” he said. “Maybe somebody else wants the…

Read More Read More

Tulsi Gabbard is now working hand in hand with the Republican party

Tulsi Gabbard is now working hand in hand with the Republican party

Jonathan Chait writes: “Hillary Clinton emerged recently to claim, with no basis in fact, that I am being ‘groomed’ by the Russian government to undermine America,” claims Tulsi Gabbard in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today. In fact, as even the conservative Washington Examiner acknowledges, Clinton did not say that. She said Republicans were grooming Gabbard. And far from refuting that charge, everything about Gabbard’s op-ed confirms Clinton was probably right. It is in Gabbard’s interest to conflate the charge…

Read More Read More

Russia tests new disinformation tactics in Africa to expand influence

Russia tests new disinformation tactics in Africa to expand influence

The New York Times reports: Russia has been testing new disinformation tactics in an enormous Facebook campaign in parts of Africa, as part of an evolution of its manipulation techniques ahead of the 2020 American presidential election. Facebook said on Wednesday that it removed three Russian-backed influence networks on its site that were aimed at African countries including Mozambique, Cameroon, Sudan and Libya. The company said the online networks were linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch who was indicted…

Read More Read More

Perceptions of musical octaves are learned, not wired in the brain

Perceptions of musical octaves are learned, not wired in the brain

Elena Renken writes: In the lowlands of Bolivia, the most isolated of the Tsimané people live in communities without electricity; they don’t own televisions, computers or phones, and even battery-powered radios are rare. Their minimal exposure to Western culture happens mostly during occasional trips to nearby towns. To the researchers who make their way into Tsimané villages by truck and canoe each summer, that isolation makes the Tsimané an almost uniquely valuable source of insights into the human brain and…

Read More Read More

I think, therefore I make mistakes and change my mind

I think, therefore I make mistakes and change my mind

Daniel Ward writes: Suppose that error could be abolished. What would someone who never makes a mistake be like? There are two very different responses to this question. One is to think of a superhuman, god-like being. The poet Alexander Pope’s line – ‘To err is human; to forgive, divine’ – is based on that thought. God might pardon but He cannot Himself make mistakes. Infallibility would seem to go hand in hand with omniscience and infinite wisdom. The other…

Read More Read More

Rising seas will erase more cities by 2050, new research shows

Rising seas will erase more cities by 2050, new research shows

The New York Times reports: Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities. The authors of a paper published Tuesday developed a more accurate way of calculating land elevation based on satellite readings, a standard way of estimating the effects of sea level rise over large areas, and found that the previous numbers were far too optimistic. The new…

Read More Read More

This wave of global protest is being led by the children of the financial crash

This wave of global protest is being led by the children of the financial crash

Jack Shenker writes: “I’m 22 years old, and this is my last letter,” the young man begins. Most of his face is masked with black fabric; only his eyes, tired and steely, are visible below a messy fringe. “I’m worried that I will die and won’t see you any more,” he continues, his hands trembling. “But I can’t not take to the streets.” The nameless demonstrator – one of many in Hong Kong who have been writing to their loved…

Read More Read More

‘OK boomer’ marks the end of friendly relations with Gen Z

‘OK boomer’ marks the end of friendly relations with Gen Z

The New York Times reports: In a viral audio clip on TikTok, a white-haired man in a baseball cap and polo shirt declares, “The millennials and Generation Z have the Peter Pan syndrome, they don’t ever want to grow up.” Thousands of teens have responded through remixed reaction videos and art projects with a simple phrase: “ok boomer.” “Ok boomer” has become Generation Z’s endlessly repeated retort to the problem of older people who just don’t get it, a rallying…

Read More Read More