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Call U.S. move on Venezuela what it is: Regime change

Call U.S. move on Venezuela what it is: Regime change

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Noah Feldman writes: The U.S. and about a dozen other countries recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela on Wednesday, even as President Nicolás Maduro maintained his grip on the office. But is that even a thing? Under ordinary principles of constitutional and international law, can one country simply declare that someone who manifestly isn’t the president of the country actually is, and act accordingly? Well, no. Not really. Maduro is a terrible president who has…

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Why do so few Aussies speak an Australian language?

Why do so few Aussies speak an Australian language?

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By Laura Rademaker, Australian National University Linguistically speaking, Australia is special. With around 250 languages spoken when Australia was first colonised, Australia was one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world. But few people speak our Indigenous languages. As of 2016, only 10% of Australia’s Indigenous population spoke an Indigenous language at home. Most Indigenous languages are now “asleep”, waiting to be woken up by language revivalists. Australian languages did not simply fade away; they were actively silenced…

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Why I’m suing Max Blumenthal and Benjamin Norton

Why I’m suing Max Blumenthal and Benjamin Norton

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Sulome Anderson writes: Reporting as close to the truth as possible and correcting inaccuracies when they occur are hallmarks of real journalism. Knowingly publishing lies to serve a political purpose is not journalism. It’s propaganda, and people who deal in that kind of information are not journalists. When their lies put others in danger, there should be consequences. That’s why I’m about to do something that makes me uncomfortable, as someone with a healthy respect for freedom of speech. I’m…

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Trump’s wall would be a monument to the white racial hostility surging through this moment in American history

Trump’s wall would be a monument to the white racial hostility surging through this moment in American history

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Jamelle Bouie writes: The wall of Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency has always operated both as a discrete proposal — an actual structure to be built under his leadership — and as a symbol with a clear meaning. Whether praised by its supporters or condemned by its opponents, the wall is a stand-in for the larger promise of broad racial (and religious) exclusion and domination. It’s no surprise, then, that some Americans use “Build the wall” as a racist chant,…

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Trump administration uses U.S. diplomats as pawn in standoff with Venezuela’s Maduro

Trump administration uses U.S. diplomats as pawn in standoff with Venezuela’s Maduro

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The Washington Post reports: The United States and Venezuela were locked in a tense international standoff Thursday as the Trump administration kept embassy staff in the country despite an official order to eject them, and Russia demanded that the Americans cease “intervention” in the teetering oil-rich nation. Moscow and Beijing have propped up the socialist South American state for years, investing billions through loans and energy deals and setting up what is now a dramatic global power play over Venezuela’s…

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Bishop says pro-life activism ‘has become separated from the even more basic truth of the dignity of each human person’

Bishop says pro-life activism ‘has become separated from the even more basic truth of the dignity of each human person’

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Catholic Bishop John Stowe writes: A perennial complaint from participants in the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., is that the secular news media largely ignore this massive protest of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. In light of the viral news story of last weekend, of a group of Catholic high school students from Kentucky in a confrontation with a Native American elder after this year’s march, that claim no longer holds. As the leader of the…

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Older, right-leaning Twitter users spread the most fake news in 2016, study finds

Older, right-leaning Twitter users spread the most fake news in 2016, study finds

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The Washington Post reports: The notion that fake news exists in its own universe turns out to be doubly true: One universe is the realm outside truth. The other is its own seedy pocket of social media. In a new study published Thursday in the journal Science, political scientists surveyed the inhabitants of this Internet pocket around the time of the last presidential election, from Aug. 1 to Dec. 6, 2016. They found that people who shared fake news were…

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Civil penalties for polluters plummeted in Trump’s first two years

Civil penalties for polluters plummeted in Trump’s first two years

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The Washington Post reports: Civil penalties for polluters under the Trump administration plummeted during the past fiscal year to the lowest average level since 1994, according to a new analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data. In the two decades before President Trump took office, EPA civil fines averaged more than $500 million a year, when adjusted for inflation. Last year’s total was 85 percent below that amount — $72 million, according to the agency’s Enforcement and Compliance History Online database….

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Skripal poisoning: Trump admin yet to impose new Russia sanctions required by law

Skripal poisoning: Trump admin yet to impose new Russia sanctions required by law

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NBC News reports: Nearly three months after deeming Russia in violation of a chemical weapons law, the Trump administration has yet to impose tough new sanctions on Moscow required by the law and triggered by the poisoning last year of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal. Even as the European Union moves ahead, punishing four Russian officials this week in connection with the poisoning, the U.S. has not moved forward with its own penalties. The delay comes as the Trump administration…

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This time it’s Russia’s emails getting leaked

This time it’s Russia’s emails getting leaked

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Kevin Poulsen writes: Russian oligarchs and Kremlin apparatchiks may find the tables turned on them later this week when a new leak site unleashes a compilation of hundreds of thousands of hacked emails and gigabytes of leaked documents. Think of it as WikiLeaks, but without Julian Assange’s aversion to posting Russian secrets. The site, Distributed Denial of Secrets, was founded last month by transparency activists. Co-founder Emma Best said the Russian leaks, slated for release Friday, will bring into one…

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Global WEIRDing is a trend we can’t ignore

Global WEIRDing is a trend we can’t ignore

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By Kensy Cooperrider For centuries, Inuit hunters navigated the Arctic by consulting wind, snow and sky. Now they use GPS. Speakers of the aboriginal language Gurindji, in northern Australia, used to command 28 variants of each cardinal direction. Children there now use the four basic terms, and they don’t use them very well. In the arid heights of the Andes, the Aymara developed an unusual way of understanding time, imagining the past as in front of them, and the future…

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As climate warms, plants will absorb less carbon dioxide

As climate warms, plants will absorb less carbon dioxide

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The New York Times reports: The last time the atmosphere contained as much carbon dioxide as it does now, dinosaurs roamed what was then a verdant landscape. The earth’s lushness was at least partly caused by the abundance of CO₂, which plants use for photosynthesis. That has led to the idea that more CO₂ in the atmosphere could create a literally greener planet. Today, plants and soil around the world absorb roughly a quarter of the greenhouse gases that humans…

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Trump’s top economist says shutdown could stall the economy completely; FBI agents warn of threat to national security

Trump’s top economist says shutdown could stall the economy completely; FBI agents warn of threat to national security

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The Washington Post reports: The White House’s top economist on Wednesday said the economy could completely stall in the first three months of 2019 if the government shutdown does not end, drawing a sharp contrast with the rosy economic picture President Trump has tried to paint during the month-long funding lapse. White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Kevin Hassett, in a CNN interview, was asked whether the economy’s growth rate for the first quarter of the year could fall…

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Maduro cuts ties with U.S. after Trump recognizes new leader in Venezuela

Maduro cuts ties with U.S. after Trump recognizes new leader in Venezuela

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The New York Times reports: President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela scrapped all diplomatic ties with the United States on Wednesday and gave American diplomats 72 hours to leave, ordering them out with a derisive “be gone!” and accusing the Trump administration of plotting to overthrow him. Mr. Maduro’s actions came as he faced the most direct challenge yet to his hold on power in Venezuela, a once-prosperous country that has been devastated by years of political repression, economic mismanagement and…

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