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Russia is promoting Islamic moderation in unison with Arab powers

Russia is promoting Islamic moderation in unison with Arab powers

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Hassan Hassan writes: Russia’s Islamic outreach became more visible, at least in the Middle East, in 2016, precisely when anti-Muslim sentiments in Western countries appeared on the rise, and Russian trolls and bots were spewing anti-Muslim rhetoric on American political forums. “Russia is generally investing in the idea that it is not America, it is not against Islam, it is offering a moderate alternative, and their tool in this is Ramzan Kadyrov [head of the Chechen Republic] and the Chechen…

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1.32 million Jews were killed in just three months during the Holocaust

1.32 million Jews were killed in just three months during the Holocaust

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Live Science reports: Operation Reinhard, known as the single largest murder campaign during the Holocaust, was worse than historians imagined. In a mere three months, at least 1.32 million Jewish people died — close to one-quarter of all the Jewish victims who perished during World War II, a new study finds. The finding is based on an old data set that tallied the number of Jews who were forced from their homes onto trains, which then took them to the…

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Genetic data on half a million Brits reveal ongoing evolution and Neanderthal legacy

Genetic data on half a million Brits reveal ongoing evolution and Neanderthal legacy

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Ann Gibbons writes: Neanderthals are still among us, Janet Kelso realized 8 years ago. She had helped make the momentous discovery that Neanderthals repeatedly mated with the ancestors of modern humans—a finding that implies people outside of Africa still carry Neanderthal DNA today. Ever since then, Kelso has wondered exactly what modern humans got from those prehistoric liaisons—beyond babies. How do traces of the Neanderthal within shape the appearance, health, or personalities of living people? For years, evolutionary biologists couldn’t…

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The importance of knowing you might be wrong

The importance of knowing you might be wrong

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Brian Resnick writes: Julia Rohrer wants to create a radical new culture for social scientists. A personality psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Rohrer is trying to get her peers to publicly, willingly admit it when they are wrong. To do this, she, along with some colleagues, started up something called the Loss of Confidence Project. It’s designed to be an academic safe space for researchers to declare for all to see that they no longer believe…

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Despite what Trump says, most Americans want climate action — even if China doesn’t do its part

Despite what Trump says, most Americans want climate action — even if China doesn’t do its part

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Jonathon P. Schuldt and Y. Connie Yuan write: Eighty-nine percent of Democrats — in which we include those who identify as independents but who say they lean toward the Democratic Party ­— said they support climate action, no matter what China does. By contrast, only 53 percent of Republicans (including leaners) say the same. But still, that means a majority of Republicans we surveyed said they want climate action, no matter what. And even among Republicans — a group that…

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A ‘reign of fear’ takes hold in Nicaragua with new crackdown

A ‘reign of fear’ takes hold in Nicaragua with new crackdown

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The Washington Post reports: Reporters for an online news site are writing their stories in secret locations. Editors of the country’s only 24-hour news network have been jailed. And employees of a major human rights organization have escaped into the mountains. Except one. “I am 80 years old, and I am in no condition to go up into the mountains, not even to save my life,” said Vilma Núñez, a well-known lawyer who founded the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights….

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An unbridgeable gap has opened between American Jews and Israeli Jews

An unbridgeable gap has opened between American Jews and Israeli Jews

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Jonathan Weisman writes: The events of the past year brought American and Israeli Jews ever closer to a breaking point. President Trump, beloved in Israel and decidedly unloved by a majority of American Jews, moved the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May, with the fiery evangelical pastors John Hagee and Robert Jeffress consecrating the ceremony. In October, after the murder of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, President Trump went to that…

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Arab states move to reconcile with Syria

Arab states move to reconcile with Syria

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Deutsche Welle reports: Nearly eight years into a devastating war and with victory in sight, Syrian President Bashar Assad looks set to be freed from his isolation in the Arab world in 2019. Syria was booted out of the Arab League seven years ago as Arab states recalled their ambassadors, and Gulf Arab states shuttered their embassies to isolate the Assad regime amid a crackdown on protesters and descent into civil war. Now Arab states are seeking to reconcile with…

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China’s gulag for Muslims

China’s gulag for Muslims

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Mustafa Akyol writes: One of the darkest episodes of the 20th century was the gulag — the Soviet system of forced labor camps where dissidents were imprisoned in terrible conditions, often to perish. The camps were established by Lenin, expanded by Stalin and finally exposed to the world by the great Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, with his 1973 masterpiece, “The Gulag Archipelago.” “Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of Archipelago,” he wrote, and “it is enough…

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Why China’s electric-car industry is leaving Detroit, Japan, and Germany in the dust

Why China’s electric-car industry is leaving Detroit, Japan, and Germany in the dust

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Jordyn Dahl writes: After the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s crippled China’s economy, the country began to open its markets to the outside world. The aim was to bring in technological know-how from abroad that domestic firms could then assimilate. By the early ’80s, foreign automakers were allowed in on the condition that they form a joint venture with a Chinese partner. These Chinese firms, by working with foreign companies, would eventually gain enough knowledge to function independently….

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William Arkin’s farewell memo

William Arkin’s farewell memo

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In his farewell memo, NBC military analyst William Arkin writes: When the attacks of 9/11 came, I was called back to NBC. I spent weeks on and off the air talking about al Qaeda and the various wars we were rushing into, arguing that airpower and drones would be the centerpiece not troops. In the new martial environment where only one war cry was sanctioned I was out of sync then as well. I retreated somewhat to writing a column…

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Paul Whelan probably isn’t a spy. So why did Russia detain him?

Paul Whelan probably isn’t a spy. So why did Russia detain him?

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Siobhán O’Grady and Amie Ferris-Rotman report: According to Russia’s domestic security services, a former U.S. Marine named Paul Whelan was in Moscow on a “spy mission” when he was arrested there last week. But experts say Whelan’s detention doesn’t look like a spying case at all. Whelan received a bad-conduct discharge from the Marines in 2008, according to military records. He is now the corporate security director at BorgWarner, a Michigan-based automotive parts supplier, and his family said he was…

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Large Magellanic Cloud on collision course with Milky Way — in 2.5 billion years

Large Magellanic Cloud on collision course with Milky Way — in 2.5 billion years

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The Guardian reports: As if battered post-Christmas finances, a looming disorderly Brexit and the prospect of a fresh nuclear arms race were not enough to dampen spirits, astronomers have declared that a nearby galaxy will slam into the Milky Way and could knock our solar system far into the cosmic void. The unfortunate discovery was made after scientists ran computer simulations on the movement of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the many satellite galaxies that orbits the Milky…

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