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AIPAC splits with Trump and Netanyahu, backs visit by Omar and Tlaib to Israel

AIPAC splits with Trump and Netanyahu, backs visit by Omar and Tlaib to Israel

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CNN reports: The prominent pro-Israel group American Israel Public Affairs Committee suggested Thursday it opposed a move by Israel — and supported by President Donald Trump — to bar Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering the country. AIPAC, which advocates for a staunch alliance between the US and Israel, has frequently sided with Trump administration policies that have supported Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, making its opposition especially notable. “We disagree with Reps. Omar and Tlaib’s…

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This is how Israeli democracy ends

This is how Israeli democracy ends

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Emma Goldberg writes: Israel’s decision to block Representatives Tlaib and Omar, though shocking, is no surprise. Rather, it is part of a trend just as alarming as it is persistent for a country long hailed as “the sole democracy in the Middle East.” Three years ago, Israel passed the so-called “NGO Law,” a piece of legislation that asked human rights organizations to declare whether they receive the majority of their funding from foreign sources. The effect was to stigmatize pro-peace…

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Dont burn trees to fight climate change — let them grow

Dont burn trees to fight climate change — let them grow

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Bill McKibben writes: Of all the solutions to climate change, ones that involve trees make people the happiest. Earlier this year, when a Swiss study announced that planting 1.2 trillion trees might cancel out a decade’s worth of carbon emissions, people swooned (at least on Twitter). And last month, when Ethiopian officials announced that twenty-three million of their citizens had planted three hundred and fifty million trees in a single day, the swooning intensified. Someone tweeted, “This should be like…

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The coming economic crash — and how to stop it

The coming economic crash — and how to stop it

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Elizabeth Warren writes: I warned about an economic crash years before the 2008 crisis, but the people in power wouldn’t listen. Now I’m seeing serious warning signs in the economy again — and I’m calling on regulators and Congress to act before another crisis costs America’s families their homes, jobs, and savings. I’ve spent most of my career getting to the bottom of what’s happening to working families in America. And when I saw the seeds of the 2008 crisis…

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‘The Supreme Court is not well and the people know it’

‘The Supreme Court is not well and the people know it’

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Ian Millhiser writes: A tone of ritualized obsequiousness pervades most briefs filed in the Supreme Court of the United States. Judges are powerful and at the Supreme Court level, unaccountable. They wield enormous, arbitrary power not just over litigants but over the lawyers who appear in their courtrooms. So when most lawyers speak to a court, they speak with a painful awareness of the arbitrary control separating the bar from the bench. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), however, is not most…

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Could WordPress with Tumblr create an alternative to Facebook?

Could WordPress with Tumblr create an alternative to Facebook?

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Mathew Ingram writes: When Verizon announced earlier this week that it was selling Tumblr, the blogging platform Yahoo acquired in 2013 for $1.1 billion, most of the attention focused on the price: according to Axios, the communications conglomerate sold Tumblr for just $3 million (Vox says closer to $2 million). In other words, Yahoo vaporized about 99 percent of the platform’s theoretical value in the six years it owned the company. But apart from this massive bonfire of value, one…

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Eye-opening discovery: 54 million year old fossil flies yield new insight into the evolution of sight

Eye-opening discovery: 54 million year old fossil flies yield new insight into the evolution of sight

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Eyes surprise: fossil eyes from a 54 million year old cranefly. Lindgren et al./Nature By Mike Lee, Flinders University Fossilised flies that lived 54 million years ago have revealed a surprising twist to the tale of how insects’ eyes evolved. These craneflies, unveiled in Nature today, show that insect eyes trap light the same way as human eyes, using the pigment melanin – yet another example of evolution finding similar solutions to similar problems. Read more: Eye to the past:…

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The nativist banking heiress whose money helped sow the seeds of the Trump anti-immigration agenda

The nativist banking heiress whose money helped sow the seeds of the Trump anti-immigration agenda

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The New York Times reports: She was an heiress without a cause — an indifferent student, an unhappy young bride, a miscast socialite. Her most enduring passion was for birds. But Cordelia Scaife May eventually found her life’s purpose: curbing what she perceived as the lethal threat of overpopulation by trying to shut America’s doors to immigrants. She believed that the United States was “being invaded on all fronts” by foreigners, who “breed like hamsters” and exhaust natural resources. She…

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The latest threat to endangered species: The Trump administration

The latest threat to endangered species: The Trump administration

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Carl Safina writes: Endangered species come on lists. But lists obscure relationships. What can it mean that a few mussels, some snails we’ve never heard of, obscure crayfish in marginal headwaters and some island-confined songbirds are vanishing? Some 1,650 species of animals and plants in the United States are listed under federal law as endangered or threatened. But when they are reduced to a line item on a list, their multimillion-year existences and roles in the complex living communities that…

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Ebola treatment breakthrough highlights Wall Street’s obsession with profit and indifference to saving lives

Ebola treatment breakthrough highlights Wall Street’s obsession with profit and indifference to saving lives

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Barron’s reports: Monday brought a spot of good news in a bleak summer: Scientists testing Ebola drugs in the Democratic Republic of Congo found some that seemed to work. Wall Street shrugged. Scientists cut short a trial of four experimental Ebola drugs after two of them, including one developed by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (ticker: REGN), showed extremely promising results. Ninety percent of patients who took the drugs soon after infection survived. Overall, 29% of Ebola patients dosed with Regeneron’s drug died,…

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New labor rule will weaken civil rights and promote religious bigotry

New labor rule will weaken civil rights and promote religious bigotry

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BuzzFeed reports: The Trump administration on Wednesday formally proposed a new rule to let businesses with federal contracts cite religious objections as a valid reason to discriminate against their workers on the basis of LGBTQ status, sex, race, ethnicity, national origin, and other characteristics — thereby skirting worker protections created by past presidents. The move marks President Donald Trump’s latest effort to weaken the civil rights of minorities with ambiguous rules that grant agencies wide discretion to let companies off…

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U.S. economy ‘may be a lot sicker than people believe’

U.S. economy ‘may be a lot sicker than people believe’

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Politico reports: Wall Street hoisted another hurricane warning on the economy on Wednesday as fear continues to rise that a recession could arrive by next year, potentially crashing into President Donald Trump’s attempt to win a second term. This time, the warning came from the bond market where investors began to demand more interest on two-year Treasury debt than 10-year debt, an “inversion” of a measure known as the yield curve that last happened in 2007 before the financial crisis….

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This is what Latinos think everyone got wrong about El Paso

This is what Latinos think everyone got wrong about El Paso

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Adrian Carrasquillo writes: As a reporter, I’ve talked to immigration activists for the better part of a decade. They don’t often cry, at least not in front of me. But all day on Sunday, the day after the shooting in El Paso, hardened advocates became emotional while explaining what it’s like to live in the United States after a killer drove 10 hours to kill Mexicans, Latinos and immigrants. The next day I still felt restless after a conversation with…

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Why Trump fears women of color

Why Trump fears women of color

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Taeku Lee and EunSook Lee write: Conservatives tacitly recognize the political power of women of color when they try to discredit them through ridicule and harassment. Consider President Trump’s attacks on the members of “the squad” who have proven to be remarkably deft and savvy politicians. Or recall that Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia played referee, scorekeeper and contestant so he could tip the scales in his favor in the 2018 election for governor against Stacey Abrams, whose voter protection…

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