Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

The Hungarian website that shows how a free press can die

The Hungarian website that shows how a free press can die

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: Hungary’s leading news website, Origo, had a juicy scoop: A top aide to the far-right prime minister, Viktor Orban, had used state money to pay for sizable but unexplained expenses during secret foreign trips. The story embarrassed Mr. Orban and was a reminder that his country still had an independent press. But that was in 2014. Today, Origo is one of the prime minister’s most dutiful media boosters, parroting his attacks on migrants and on…

Read More Read More

Could consciousness all come down to the way things vibrate?

Could consciousness all come down to the way things vibrate?

Comments 1 comment

What do synchronized vibrations add to the mind/body question? agsandrew/Shutterstock.com By Tam Hunt, University of California, Santa Barbara Why is my awareness here, while yours is over there? Why is the universe split in two for each of us, into a subject and an infinity of objects? How is each of us our own center of experience, receiving information about the rest of the world out there? Why are some things conscious and others apparently not? Is a rat conscious?…

Read More Read More

U.S. government report says climate change will batter economy, in direct clash with Trump

U.S. government report says climate change will batter economy, in direct clash with Trump

Comments 0 Comment

Reuters reports: Climate change will cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century, damaging everything from human health to infrastructure and agricultural production, according to a government report issued on Friday. The Congressionally-mandated report, written with the help of more than a dozen U.S. government agencies and departments, outlined the projected impacts of global warming in every corner of American society, in a dire warning at odds with the Trump administration’s pro-fossil fuels…

Read More Read More

Wildfire smoke is becoming a nationwide health threat

Wildfire smoke is becoming a nationwide health threat

Comments 0 Comment

An image from the International Space Station captures plumes of smoke from California wildfires on August 4, 2018. NASA Richard E. Peltier, University of Massachusetts Amherst The impacts of recent forest fires in California reach well beyond the burned areas. Smoke from the Camp Fire created hazardous air quality conditions in San Francisco, more than 170 miles to the southwest – but it didn’t stop there. Cross-country winds carried it across the United States, creating hazy conditions in locations as…

Read More Read More

Mueller and the Democrats could bring down Trump

Mueller and the Democrats could bring down Trump

Comments 0 Comment

Joshua Zoffer and Niall Ferguson write: On May 17, 1973, Senator Sam Ervin Jr. opened Senate hearings into the Watergate affair. “It is the constitutional duty of this committee,” he said, to expeditiously investigate allegations that American democracy “has been subverted and its foundations shaken.” Ervin, a Democrat, did not mince words in characterizing the gravity of the accusations leveled against Richard Nixon’s campaign and administration. At stake were “the workings of the democratic process under which we operate in…

Read More Read More

Prominent Syrian opposition activist Raed Fares shot dead in Idlib

Prominent Syrian opposition activist Raed Fares shot dead in Idlib

Comments 0 Comment

Middle East Eye reports: A prominent Syrian opposition activist, whose campaigns were well-known around the world, has been shot dead in Idlib province, according to local activists. Raed Fares, a civil society activist and broadcaster, was shot dead by unknown assailants in the southern Idlib town of Kafranbel on Friday, along with friend and fellow opposition activist Hamoud Jneed. Fares had been a prominent opponent of both President Bashar al-Assad’s government and hardline militant groups such as the Islamic State…

Read More Read More

How long before Trump destroys the rule of law?

How long before Trump destroys the rule of law?

Comments 0 Comment

Harry Litman writes: Tuesday’s revelation that the president had ordered his White House counsel to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey illustrates the fragility of even apparently bedrock political norms in the Age of Trump. The story prompted a new level of stunned outrage among Trump critics, even those already jaded by the president’s weekly onslaughts against the rule of law. Former Department of Justice officials in particular responded with variants of “He’s got to be kidding.” But others claimed…

Read More Read More

Confronted with the bloody behavior of autocrats, Trump, instead, blames the world

Confronted with the bloody behavior of autocrats, Trump, instead, blames the world

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: In fielding questions from reporters about the killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi, President Trump avoided blaming Mohammed bin Salman, despite the CIA’s findings that the Saudi crown prince had ordered the assassination. “Who should be held accountable?” a reporter asked Trump Thursday. Sitting inside his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, the president took a deep breath, seemingly mulling his response. Then he said: “Maybe the world should be held accountable, because the world is…

Read More Read More

Conservative ‘charity’ with shady roots yet promoting ‘accountability’ paid Matthew Whitaker $1.2 million

Conservative ‘charity’ with shady roots yet promoting ‘accountability’ paid Matthew Whitaker $1.2 million

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: In the three years after he arrived in Washington in 2014, Matthew G. Whitaker received more than $1.2 million as the leader of a charity that reported having no other employees, some of the best pay of his career. The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust described itself as a new watchdog nonprofit dedicated to exposing unethical conduct by public officials. For Whitaker, it became a lucrative steppingstone in a swift rise from a modest law…

Read More Read More

Why the Pilgrims were actually able to survive

Why the Pilgrims were actually able to survive

Comments 0 Comment

‘Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor’ by William Halsall (1882). Pilgrim Hall Museum By Peter C. Mancall, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Sometime in the autumn of 1621, a group of English Pilgrims who had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and created a colony called New Plymouth celebrated their first harvest. They hosted a group of about 90 Wampanoags, their Algonquian-speaking neighbors. Together, migrants and Natives feasted for three days on corn, venison and fowl. In…

Read More Read More

Saboteur in Chief

Saboteur in Chief

Comments 0 Comment

Fintan O’Toole writes: We all know that people in power deploy distraction as a professional skill, much as magicians do. We are used to it. In every act of political communication, “Look at this” is always the explicit obverse of an implicit “Don’t look at that.” But Trump confounds us by using as distractions the very things that other politicians want to distract us from. In democracy as we think we have known it, the art of governance is, in…

Read More Read More

Trump launches an unprecedented attack on the American system of government

Trump launches an unprecedented attack on the American system of government

Comments 0 Comment

Politico reports: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and President Donald Trump took swipes at each other Wednesday in an extraordinary exchange over just how partisan federal courts really are. Roberts said Wednesday morning there are no “Obama judges or Trump judges” after the president attacked the judge who ruled against his attempt to restrict asylum seekers at the border earlier this week. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in…

Read More Read More

Washington’s stubborn support for Saudi Arabia is increasingly indefensible

Washington’s stubborn support for Saudi Arabia is increasingly indefensible

Comments 0 Comment

Mark Hannah writes: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared last week that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman should “hold all of those involved in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi accountable.” Over the weekend the CIA concluded the crown prince had himself ordered the murder. Yet earlier this afternoon, President Donald Trump issued a remarkable statement siding with the kingdom over his own intelligence agencies, speculating “we may never know all the facts” about the murder,…

Read More Read More