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Ecologists are racing to restore the world’s tropical rainforests

Ecologists are racing to restore the world’s tropical rainforests

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Forest restoration is underway in Biliran, Leyte, Philippines led by the local community with support from international researchers and government agencies. Robin Chazdon, CC BY-ND By Robin Chazdon, University of Connecticut The green belt of tropical rainforests that covers equatorial regions of the Americas, Africa, Indonesia and Southeast Asia is turning brown. Since 1990, Indonesia has lost 50% of its original forest, the Amazon 30% and Central Africa 14%. Fires, logging, hunting, road building and fragmentation have heavily damaged more…

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Jeffrey Epstein, associate of Clinton and Trump, arrested for sex trafficking

Jeffrey Epstein, associate of Clinton and Trump, arrested for sex trafficking

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“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” – Donald Trump, 2002 https://t.co/3pbKrcFdn6 — Tim O'Brien (@TimOBrien) July 7, 2019 The Daily Beast reports: Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for allegedly sex trafficking dozens of minors in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005, and will appear…

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How Ilhan Omar discovered a classless America doesn’t exist

How Ilhan Omar discovered a classless America doesn’t exist

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The Washington Post reports: Rep. Ilhan Omar stepped to the edge of the stage in front of about 400 Richfield High School students and squinted into the lights. More than two decades had passed since she and her family fled civil war in Somalia, first for a Kenyan refugee camp and then America. Now she was 36, one of the youngest members of Congress and the first lawmaker to wear a hijab in the legislative body’s long history. She was…

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Tensions flare over Pelosi’s comments about four House Democratic women and border bill

Tensions flare over Pelosi’s comments about four House Democratic women and border bill

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The Washington Post reports: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) faced sharp criticism Sunday from some liberal lawmakers and activists over her latest comments about a group of Democratic women who opposed last month’s House emergency border aid bill that was supported by the leadership and most Democrats. The continued and increasingly charged debate over the House’s approach to what became a $4.6 billion package — and complaints that it failed to set standards for the humane treatment of migrants held…

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Britain’s imperial dream catchers

Britain’s imperial dream catchers

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Erik Linstrum writes: Every state needs to know about the people it rules. Censuses, property surveys and tax records are familiar and tangible expressions of the state’s need to maintain power by accumulating knowledge. This is not just a matter of tedious bureaucratic record-keeping: especially when confronted with unfamiliar problems, states often turn to cutting-edge technologies and forms of expertise to make sense of the populations under their authority. In the early 20th-century Age of Empire, when European colonies stretched…

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While mothers are drinking more than ever, the sober-curious movement challenges ‘wine-mom’ culture

While mothers are drinking more than ever, the sober-curious movement challenges ‘wine-mom’ culture

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The Washington Post reports: The turning point came at an evening soiree in the middle of December, when Mai Trinh spotted a friend’s luminous face amid a crowd of cocktail-quaffing party­goers. “She stood out — she looked absolutely radiant,” recalls Trinh, 44, a corporate wellness consultant and mom of three in Alexandria. “So I asked her, ‘What’s your secret, what are you doing?’ ” The secret, it turned out, was what she wasn’t doing: Trinh’s friend had decided to temporarily…

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In Trump’s American story, immigrants are the enemy

In Trump’s American story, immigrants are the enemy

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Masha Gessen writes: Last year, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services dropped the phrase “nation of immigrants” from its mission statement. That phrase, like most foundational myths and more than some, obscures much of the country’s history: the first immigrants would more accurately be described as settler colonialists, who brought Africans here as slaves. But this was not why the Trump Administration deleted the phrase. Trump has retired the myth of America as a nation of immigrants because he…

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Tim Wu explains why Facebook should be broken up

Tim Wu explains why Facebook should be broken up

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Nicholas Thompson interviewed Tim Wu: Nicholas Thompson: What I’m going to do here is present the arguments that Mark Zuckerberg gave on antitrust yester­day in the fairest way I can, and then, Tim, I want you to respond. So it’ll be a bit like Tim being on stage yesterday. Mark made two arguments, and the company often makes a third. Number one, if you break the large platforms into smaller companies, they will not compete on the stuff you want….

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Google’s onetime hired gun could now be its antitrust nightmare

Google’s onetime hired gun could now be its antitrust nightmare

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Politico reports: When Google needed government sign-off on a 2007 acquisition that would tighten its grip on the digital advertising market, the company turned to antitrust attorney and lobbyist Makan Delrahim to help get the job done. Now, as the Justice Department’s top antitrust enforcer, Delrahim could be the one to undo it all. As U.S. competition enforcers cast a more critical eye on the nation’s biggest technology companies, Delrahim would play the leading role in any DOJ lawsuit accusing…

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Amazon asserts its contribution to climate change is a trade secret

Amazon asserts its contribution to climate change is a trade secret

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The Register reports: Amazon has refused to publish data about the energy consumption and carbon emissions of its business in Australia, including vast server farms, claiming its contribution to climate change is a trade secret. The company has asked the Clean Energy Regulator (CER) – the country’s agency tasked with regulating carbon emissions and encouraging clean energy use – to keep its data from publication, arguing that this involves proprietary information on reducing energy use. Amazon’s cloudy offspring AWS landed…

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Greta Thunberg welcomes OPEC chief’s ‘greatest threat’ label

Greta Thunberg welcomes OPEC chief’s ‘greatest threat’ label

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The Guardian reports: Greta Thunberg and other climate activists have said it is a badge of honour that the head of the world’s most powerful oil cartel believes their campaign may be the “greatest threat” to the fossil fuel industry. The criticism of striking students by the trillion-dollar Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) highlights the growing reputational concerns of oil companies as public protests intensify along with extreme weather. Mohammed Barkindo, the secretary general of Opec, said there…

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How TV fuels ignorance and serves populists

How TV fuels ignorance and serves populists

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Yascha Mounk writes: Until the late 1970s, Italian television was an earnest affair. The only national channels were run by RAI, the state broadcaster. On average, RAI only broadcast for about 10 hours a day. Nearly two-thirds of its content consisted of serious news or educational programming. Even advertising had to meet high moral standards; ads for pet food, for example, were not allowed to show moving images of cats or dogs. Apparently the bosses at RAI thought it was…

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Searching for hope in hell

Searching for hope in hell

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Henry Freedland writes: As climate change extremified wildfires raging through the American West and my native California, and as geoscientists realized the world’s oceans were retaining 60 percent more heat each year than previously thought, I flashed to Hesiod’s view of Tartarus: The fertile earth Being burned, roared out, the voiceless forest cried And crackled with the fire; the whole earth boiled And ocean’s streams, and the unfruitful sea. As lies intensified and accrued, as doublespeak and toxic truthlessness were…

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Evangelical Christians, convinced Trump is God’s man, would rather see America destroyed than see him fall

Evangelical Christians, convinced Trump is God’s man, would rather see America destroyed than see him fall

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Peter Wehner writes: The enthusiastic, uncritical embrace of President Trump by white evangelicals is among the most mind-blowing developments of the Trump era. How can a group that for decades—and especially during the Bill Clinton presidency—insisted that character counts and that personal integrity is an essential component of presidential leadership not only turn a blind eye to the ethical and moral transgressions of Donald Trump, but also constantly defend him? Why are those who have been on the vanguard of…

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