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Journalists faced ‘unprecedented’ hostility this year, report says

Journalists faced ‘unprecedented’ hostility this year, report says

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CNN reports: More journalists were killed, abused and subjected to violence in 2018 than in any other year on record, with those in the profession facing an “unprecedented level of hostility,” a new report has found. Murder, imprisonment, hostage-taking and enforced disappearances of journalists all increased compared to last year, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), who criticized politicians and public figures for encouraging disdain for the news media. A total of 80 journalists were killed, including non-professional journalists and…

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The ‘Year of the Woman’ forced us to take a step back for every step forward. That isn’t real progress

The ‘Year of the Woman’ forced us to take a step back for every step forward. That isn’t real progress

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Sabrina Hersi Issa writes: After the midterm elections, 2018 was increasingly hailed as “The Year of The Woman.” But a record number of women heading to Congress as a result of the midterm elections cannot be celebrated outside of the context that it happened mere weeks after the United States Senate chose to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court after credible allegations of sexual assault were made against him. It cannot be a moment of self-congratulation for politicians to…

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Glorified and vilified, Representative-elect Ilhan Omar tells critics: ‘Just deal’

Glorified and vilified, Representative-elect Ilhan Omar tells critics: ‘Just deal’

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The New York Times reports: As a 12-year-old refugee from Somalia adjusting to life in the Virginia suburbs, Ilhan Omar fended off bullies who stuck gum on her scarf, knocked her down stairs and jumped her when she changed clothes for gym class. Her father “sat me down, and he said, ‘Listen, these people who are doing all of these things to you, they’re not doing something to you because they dislike you,’” Ms. Omar recalled in a recent interview….

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More Republicans than you think support action on climate change

More Republicans than you think support action on climate change

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Arlie Hochschild and David Hochschild write: Democrats and Republicans have clashed fiercely on many issues — the Mueller investigation, immigration, gun control — but can the two parties come together on climate change, the biggest issue of all? Most analysts say no. After all, since President Trump took office, the terms “global warming” and “climate change” have been expunged from some government websites. Mr. Trump says his “very high level of intelligence” has led him to reject the findings of…

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Deciphering the patterns in Trump’s falsehoods

Deciphering the patterns in Trump’s falsehoods

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The New York Times reports: President Trump has a well-documented problem telling the truth. Fact checkers have compiled lists of all of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods since he took office (The Washington Post counts over 7,500, and The Toronto Star over 3,900), rounded up his most egregious whoppers in year-end lists and scrutinized his claims in real time with television chyrons. Here at The New York Times, we have also fact-checked countless campaign rallies, news conferences, interviews and Twitter posts. After…

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Boris Birshtein, Trump, and Russia

Boris Birshtein, Trump, and Russia

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Mark MacKinnon reports: There was a joke more than 30 years ago, when immigrants from the former Soviet Union began settling in Toronto’s North York neighbourhood, that they came here because it was as drab and grey as the Soviet cities they’d left behind. That description still fits parts of this vast and occasionally bleak suburb. But not this tidy, manicured avenue, lined as it is with multimillion-dollar houses – one of which, for me, is the end of a…

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Saudi Arabia may have helped citizen in Oregon hit-and-run killing flee the U.S.

Saudi Arabia may have helped citizen in Oregon hit-and-run killing flee the U.S.

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Al Jazeera reports: A senior US senator has called on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to clarify if Saudi Arabia helped a citizen of that country flee the US before his manslaughter trial. In a letter on Friday, Senator Ron Wyden expressed strong concern over a local media report that said the Saudi government may have issued a new passport to its citizen, Abdulrahman Sameer Noorah, in order to help him leave the US and escape justice over a hit-and-run…

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Chinese scientist who claimed to make genetically edited babies is kept under guard

Chinese scientist who claimed to make genetically edited babies is kept under guard

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The New York Times reports: The Chinese scientist who shocked the world by claiming that he had created the first genetically edited babies is sequestered in a small university guesthouse in the southern city of Shenzhen, where he remains under guard by a dozen unidentified men. The sighting of the scientist, He Jiankui, this week was the first since he appeared at a conference in Hong Kong in late November and defended his actions. For the past few weeks, rumors…

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How new data is transforming our understanding of the brain’s navigational place cells

How new data is transforming our understanding of the brain’s navigational place cells

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Adithya Rajagopalan writes: The first pieces of the brain’s “inner GPS” started coming to light in 1970. In the laboratories of University College London, John O’Keefe and his student Jonathan Dostrovsky recorded the electrical activity of neurons in the hippocampus of freely moving rats. They found a group of neurons that increased their activity only when a rat found itself in a particular location. They called them “place cells.” Building on these early findings, O’Keefe and his colleague Lynn Nadel…

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In Yemen, the Saudi-led coalition backed by the U.S. has created the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe

In Yemen, the Saudi-led coalition backed by the U.S. has created the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe

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The Washington Post reports: Three-year-old Abdo Saleh lay on a cot, unable to walk or speak, his tiny body broken by hunger. His face was skeletal, his arms and legs thin as twigs. He weighed 10 pounds. A few miles away, markets were stocked with all kinds of food. But prices have risen so sharply that his parents cannot afford the milk, fruits and vegetables that are in abundance. “Sometimes, we go two days without food,” said his father, Saleh…

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McKinsey tied to Saudi crackdown on political dissent

McKinsey tied to Saudi crackdown on political dissent

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Middle East Eye reports: Omar Abdulaziz says “it could have happened” to him. The Saudi dissident knows he came close to the fate that befell Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was murdered inside his country’s Istanbul consulate in October. Months earlier, two Saudi government agents came to Montreal, the Canadian city Abdulaziz has called home for almost a decade, to convince him to return to the Gulf kingdom. “They said, ‘We have a message from MBS,’” said the Saudi…

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McKinsey’s loyalty to its brutal clients

McKinsey’s loyalty to its brutal clients

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Saudi Arabian officials arrested a partner at consulting giant McKinsey & Co. in the fall of 2017 and have been holding him in detention since then, people familiar with the matter say. In recent months, he has been repeatedly beaten, two of those people said. A McKinsey spokesman said that as of early this year the consultant, Hani Khoja, is no longer a McKinsey employee. Few companies are as involved with the Saudi state as…

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The inevitability of impeachment

The inevitability of impeachment

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Elizabeth Drew writes: An impeachment process against President Trump now seems inescapable. Unless the president resigns, the pressure by the public on the Democratic leaders to begin an impeachment process next year will only increase. Too many people think in terms of stasis: How things are is how they will remain. They don’t take into account that opinion moves with events. Whether or not there’s already enough evidence to impeach Mr. Trump — I think there is — we will…

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The fallacy of obviousness

The fallacy of obviousness

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Teppo Felin writes: Scientific experiments don’t generally attract widespread attention. But the ‘Gorillas in Our Midst’ (1999) experiment of visual attention by the American psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris has become a classic. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman highlights this experiment and argues that it reveals something fundamental about the human mind, namely, that humans are ‘blind to the obvious, and that we also are blind to our blindness’. Kahneman’s claim…

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