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Trump team kills Arctic accord after cheering on sea ice melt

Trump team kills Arctic accord after cheering on sea ice melt

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Joe Romm writes: On Tuesday, the United States killed an accord with other Arctic nations on how to address regional challenges. Why? The Trump delegation, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, would not accept an agreement that stated climate change seriously threatened the polar region, Reuters reported. Yet, just last year, the White House released a 1,000-page report by top U.S. scientists explaining that Trump’s anti-climate policies would devastate the Arctic. So, for the first time since its creation…

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Once again, the U.S. embarrasses itself on climate change

Once again, the U.S. embarrasses itself on climate change

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Joel Clement writes: The Trump administration is so fearful of acknowledging the reality of climate change that White House negotiators are trying to erase all mention of it and the Paris Agreement from a multinational statement about the Arctic region, The Post reported last week. In doing so, the Trump administration has demonstrated its cowardly denial that the region is warming two to three times faster than the rest of the planet, putting its own people in harm’s way and…

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CIA warns Arab activist of potential threat from Saudi Arabia

CIA warns Arab activist of potential threat from Saudi Arabia

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The Guardian reports: The CIA has warned Norway that a prominent Arab activist who is living in the country under asylum protection is facing a potential threat from Saudi Arabia, the Guardian has learned. The pro-democracy activist, İyad el-Baghdadi, is a vocal critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. El-Baghdadi was alerted to the threat on 25 April, when Norwegian authorities arrived at his doorstep, took him to a secure location, and warned him he was in possible danger from…

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How the courts should handle Trump’s oversight defiance

How the courts should handle Trump’s oversight defiance

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Neil Eggleston and Joshua A. Geltzer write: The Treasury Department, with its Monday announcement that it would not comply with a demand from House Democrats to release President Trump’s tax returns to Congress, has set up a battle that will now go to the courts to be settled. President Trump has already filed a novel lawsuit to block his own accounting firm from complying with a congressional subpoena for financial records. Whatever the case or lack thereof to Mr. Trump’s…

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Are we watching John Bolton’s last stand?

Are we watching John Bolton’s last stand?

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Jason Rezaian writes: Is John Bolton about to get the Iran war he’s always wanted, or is he on the verge of losing his job? Over the past several days, President Trump’s national security adviser has made comments and issued statements about Iran and Venezuela that are usually reserved for the run-up to military campaigns. Yet Bolton’s boss doesn’t seem to be playing along. [Continue reading…]

Facebook gives social scientists unprecedented access to its user data

Facebook gives social scientists unprecedented access to its user data

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Nature reports: Facebook is giving social scientists unprecedented access to its data so that they can investigate how social-media platforms can influence elections and alter democracies. The first group of projects selected for funding involves more than 60 researchers split into 12 teams. They will tackle questions such as how fake news spreads, who distributes it and how to identify it. Their projects, announced on 28 April, will focus on countries including Germany, Chile, Italy and the United States. The…

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Humans are wiping out life on Earth

Humans are wiping out life on Earth

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The New York Times reports: Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded. The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in…

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Loss of biodiversity is just as catastrophic as climate change

Loss of biodiversity is just as catastrophic as climate change

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Robert Watson writes: A colleague recently described how fish would swim into her clothing when she was a child bathing in the ocean off the coast of Vietnam, but today the fish are gone and her children find the story far-fetched. Another recalled his experiences just last year in Cape Town – one of the world’s most attractive tourism and leisure destinations – when more than 2 million people faced the nightmare prospect of all taps, in every home and…

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Trump would have faced ‘multiple felony charges’ were he not president, hundreds of former federal prosecutors assert

Trump would have faced ‘multiple felony charges’ were he not president, hundreds of former federal prosecutors assert

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The Washington Post reports: More than 370 former federal prosecutors who worked in Republican and Democratic administrations have signed on to a statement asserting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings would have produced obstruction charges against President Trump — if not for the office he held. The statement — signed by myriad former career government employees as well as high-profile political appointees — offers a rebuttal to Attorney General William P. Barr’s determination that the evidence Mueller uncovered was…

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What didn’t work for Nixon, shouldn’t work for Trump

What didn’t work for Nixon, shouldn’t work for Trump

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James Reston Jr. writes: On July 30, 1974, nine days before President Richard Nixon resigned, the House Judiciary Committee added a third article to its impeachment charges against the president. The first two had dealt with obstruction of justice and abuse of power; Article III charged that Nixon had failed to comply with eight congressional subpoenas related to the Watergate investigation. Now, with President Trump and William Barr, his attorney general, refusing to cooperate with congressional investigations, the Democrats in…

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The coming generation war

The coming generation war

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Eyck Freymann and Niall Ferguson write: As a liberal graduate student and a conservative professor, we rarely see eye to eye on politics. Yet we agree that the generation war is the best frame for understanding the ways that the Democratic and Republican parties are diverging. The Democrats are rapidly becoming the party of the young, specifically the Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z (born after 1996). The Republicans are leaning ever more heavily on retirees, particularly…

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The forgotten history of how Abraham Lincoln helped rig the Senate for Republicans

The forgotten history of how Abraham Lincoln helped rig the Senate for Republicans

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Ian Millhiser writes: Once upon a time, nobody lived in Nevada. In 1860, the year Abraham Lincoln was elected president, Nevada was a desert wasteland with fewer than 7,000 residents. Indeed, the Silver State didn’t even exist on the day of Lincoln’s election. Two days before the lame-duck President James Buchanan left office, he signed legislation carving off part of Utah Territory, which stretched across most of modern-day Nevada, about a third of Colorado and some of Wyoming, to form…

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Can Kamala Harris beat Trump?

Can Kamala Harris beat Trump?

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Elizabeth Weil writes: Kamala Harris—the Democratic presidential hopeful and 54-year-old junior senator from California—is a prosecutor by training. She knows well that any misstep, anything you say or do, can and will be held against you. Her fundamental, almost constitutional, understanding of this has made her cautious, at times enragingly so. Harris’s demographic identity has always been radical. She was San Francisco’s first female district attorney, first black district attorney, first Asian American district attorney. She was then California’s first…

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A new brain study shows a better way to engage voters on the climate crisis

A new brain study shows a better way to engage voters on the climate crisis

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Joe Romm writes: The phrase “climate crisis” engages voters emotionally better than either “climate change” or “global warming.” That’s the new finding from the brain science startup SPARK Neuro, which used an electroencephalogram (EEG) and other bio-measurements to examine how 120 Democrats, Republicans, and independents responded to different terms for the growing threat we face from rising levels of carbon pollution. According to the study, “climate crisis” got a 60% higher emotional response from Democrats than “climate change.” It triggered…

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