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Southern states energy officials push for as much deregulation as possible while Trump is still in power

Southern states energy officials push for as much deregulation as possible while Trump is still in power

Inside Climate News reports: The contrast could not have been greater between the political and economic conversations at the Southern States Energy Board meeting here Tuesday and Wednesday and the global chorus of urgent calls for action on climate change at the United Nations in New York. While dozens of world leaders committed at the UN to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, here at Louisville’s opulent Seelbach Hilton Hotel, officials from more than a dozen southern states huddled up in…

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NRA was ‘foreign asset’ to Russia ahead of 2016, new Senate report reveals

NRA was ‘foreign asset’ to Russia ahead of 2016, new Senate report reveals

NPR reports: The National Rifle Association acted as a “foreign asset” for Russia in the period leading up to the 2016 election, according to a new investigation unveiled Friday by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. Drawing on contemporaneous emails and private interviews, an 18-month probe by the Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic staff found that the NRA underwrote political access for Russian nationals Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin more than previously known — even though the two had declared their ties to…

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War in Syria a footnote at UN meeting

War in Syria a footnote at UN meeting

The Associated Press reports: As dozens of heads of state convene for the annual U.N. General Assembly in New York this week, the lingering conflict in Syria is taking a back seat while tensions in the Persian Gulf and global trade wars take center stage. Now in its ninth year, many Syrians fear the unresolved war has become a footnote in a long list of world crises, with weary leaders resigned to live with President Bashar Assad ruling over a…

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How image and theater give tyrants their power

How image and theater give tyrants their power

Sue Prideaux writes: Actor, stage manager, orator and self-publicist, Mussolini allowed his ideology to remain vague while spending more than half of his time curating his image. Italy was a newspaper with Mussolini writing the front page every day. He knew that a picture of him taking flying lessons was worth any number of carefully argued editorials. After his first propaganda radio broadcast in 1925, 40,000 free radios were distributed to elementary schools between 1933 and 1938. By the onset…

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Whistle-blower had intel and foreign policy experience to see the gravity of Trump’s apparent abuse of power

Whistle-blower had intel and foreign policy experience to see the gravity of Trump’s apparent abuse of power

The New York Times reports: The whistle-blower who revealed that President Trump sought foreign help for his re-election and that the White House sought to cover it up is a C.I.A. officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity. The man has since returned to the C.I.A., the people said. Little else is known about him. His complaint made public Thursday suggested he was an analyst by…

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Trump insinuates that anyone who exposes his communications should be executed

Trump insinuates that anyone who exposes his communications should be executed

The New York Times reports: President Trump on Thursday morning told a crowd of staff from the United States Mission to the United Nations that he wants to know who provided information to a whistle-blower about his phone call with the president of Ukraine, saying that whoever did so was “close to a spy” and that “in the old days,” spies were dealt with differently. The remark stunned people in the audience, according to a person briefed on what took…

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Full text of the whistle-blower complaint describing evidence of Trump’s flagrant abuse of power

Full text of the whistle-blower complaint describing evidence of Trump’s flagrant abuse of power

In a letter addressed to the chairs of the Senate and House Select Committees on Intelligence, the whistle-blower wrote: In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political…

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Former Ukraine prosecutor says Hunter Biden ‘did not violate anything’

Former Ukraine prosecutor says Hunter Biden ‘did not violate anything’

The Washington Post reports: A former top Ukrainian prosecutor, whose allegations were at the heart of the dirt-digging effort by Rudolph W. Giuliani, said Thursday he believed that Hunter Biden did not run afoul of any laws in Ukraine. “From the perspective of Ukrainian legislation, he did not violate anything,” former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko told The Washington Post in his first interview since the disclosure of a whistleblower complaint alleging pressure by President Trump on Ukraine’s president, Volodymr…

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Trump’s asylum ban will result in the death, kidnapping and torture of individuals seeking safety

Trump’s asylum ban will result in the death, kidnapping and torture of individuals seeking safety

By Sarah F. Rogerson, Albany Law School The Trump administration’s latest restrictive immigration policy, known as the asylum ban, was recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. The ban effectively ends asylum relief for the vast majority of refugees seeking it at the U.S.-Mexico border. It prevents individuals from applying for asylum in the United States if they could have pursued asylum in another country first. There are few exceptions: (1) if you lose your asylum claim in a third…

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Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since census started tracking it, data shows

Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since census started tracking it, data shows

The Washington Post reports: Last year, income inequality in the United States reached its highest level since the Census Bureau started tracking it in 1967, according to federal data released Thursday. In the midst of the longest economic expansion the United States has ever seen, with poverty and unemployment rates at historic lows, the separation between rich and poor from 2017 and 2018 was greater than it has ever been, federal data show. Nine states saw spikes in that divide:…

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Consciousness doesn’t depend on language

Consciousness doesn’t depend on language

Christof Koch writes: The contrast could not have been starker—here was one of the world’s most revered figures, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, expressing his belief that all life is sentient, while I, as a card-carrying neuroscientist, presented the contemporary Western consensus that some animals might, perhaps, possibly, share the precious gift of sentience, of conscious experience, with humans. The setting was a symposium between Buddhist monk-scholars and Western scientists in a Tibetan monastery in Southern India, fostering a…

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The world’s oceans are in danger, major climate change report warns

The world’s oceans are in danger, major climate change report warns

The New York Times reports: Earth’s oceans are under severe strain from climate change, a major new United Nations report warns, which threatens everything from the ability to harvest seafood to the well-being of hundreds of millions of people living along the coasts. Rising temperatures are contributing to a drop in fish populations in many regions, and oxygen levels in the ocean are declining while acidity levels are on the rise, posing risks to important marine ecosystems, according to the…

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In seeking Ukraine favor, Trump was vulnerable to foreign spies, intelligence inspector general warned

In seeking Ukraine favor, Trump was vulnerable to foreign spies, intelligence inspector general warned

Reuters reports: U.S. President Donald Trump potentially exposed himself to “serious national security and counter-intelligence risks” when he pressed his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate a leading political rival, Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden, and his son, the intelligence community’s inspector general warned. The previously undisclosed warning, included in a Justice Department legal opinion released on Wednesday, reflected the concerns of a whistleblower who filed a complaint about a July 25 call between Trump and then newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr…

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Trump’s ‘complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript’ is unlikely to be a transcript or complete

Trump’s ‘complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript’ is unlikely to be a transcript or complete

Reuters reports: Trump said on Tuesday a “complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript” of the July 25 call would be released on Wednesday. In it, the Republican president is alleged to have pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Joe Biden, the U.S. Democratic presidential front-runner. The transcript would show the call was “totally appropriate,” Trump said on Twitter. However, standard practice when a president is talking to a foreign leader is not to make a recording but to have…

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