Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

The fake news Russians hear at home

The fake news Russians hear at home

Comments 0 Comment

Anne Applebaum writes: Because it touches us, because it involves the U.S. president, and because it has produced a lot of headlines, the strategy and tactics of Russian government disinformation in the West have lately been big news. Because it’s far away, and because it happens in a different language, we’ve thought a lot less about Russian government propaganda in Russia. But it will eventually matter to us — maybe sooner than we think. The transformation of Russian media hasn’t…

Read More Read More

Muslims recoil at a French proposal to change the Quran

Muslims recoil at a French proposal to change the Quran

Comments 0 Comment

The Atlantic reports: A manifesto published in the French daily Le Parisien on April 21—signed by some 300 prominent intellectuals and politicians, including former President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime Minister Manuel Valls—made a shocking demand. Arguing that the Quran incites violence, it insisted that “the verses of the Quran calling for murder and punishment of Jews, Christians, and nonbelievers be struck to obsolescence by religious authorities,” so that “no believer can refer to a sacred text to commit a…

Read More Read More

Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal

Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal

Comments 0 Comment

The Observer reports: Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal. People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an…

Read More Read More

As ‘King of Debt,’ Trump borrowed to build his empire — then began spending hundreds of millions in cas

As ‘King of Debt,’ Trump borrowed to build his empire — then began spending hundreds of millions in cas

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: In the nine years before he ran for president, Donald Trump’s company spent more than $400 million in cash on new properties — including 14 transactions paid for in full, without borrowing from banks — during a buying binge that defied real estate industry practices and Trump’s own history as the self-described “King of Debt.” Trump’s vast outlay of cash, tracked through public records and totaled publicly here for the first time, provides a new window…

Read More Read More

China-backed Sumatran dam threatens the rarest ape in the world

China-backed Sumatran dam threatens the rarest ape in the world

Comments 0 Comment

By Bill Laurance, James Cook University The plan to build a massive hydropower dam in Sumatra as part of China’s immense Belt and Road Initiative threatens the habitat of the rarest ape in the world, which has only 800 remaining members. This is merely the beginning of an avalanche of environmental crises and broader social and economic risks that will be provoked by the BRI scheme. Read more: How we discovered a new species of orangutan in northern Sumatra The…

Read More Read More

New record carbon dioxide levels show ‘humans are overwhelming nature’

New record carbon dioxide levels show ‘humans are overwhelming nature’

Comments 0 Comment

KQED reports: For the first time in human history, the monthly average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has surpassed the threshold of 410 parts per million. That’s the finding of the Scripps CO2 Program, which tracks carbon dioxide measurements in the Earth’s atmosphere every 10 minutes. That data is then plotted onto the Keeling Curve, a graph that illustrates the rise in carbon dioxide levels. The information is based on continuous measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory…

Read More Read More

Are we ready for an epidemic this summer?

Are we ready for an epidemic this summer?

Comments 0 Comment

Ronald A. Klain writes: Summer is coming. And if you think a warm-weather surge of mosquitoes and ticks is not as frightening as the fictional winter’s White Walkers from “Game of Thrones,” you haven’t read this week’s report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the rapidly escalating danger of infectious diseases spread by insects. The CDC’s key findings: The number of Americans infected with such diseases, including Zika, West Nile and Lyme, has more than tripled in…

Read More Read More

Alaskan sea ice just took a steep, unprecedented dive

Alaskan sea ice just took a steep, unprecedented dive

Comments 0 Comment

Scientific American reports: April should be prime walrus hunting season for the native villages that dot Alaska’s remote western coast. In years past the winter sea ice where the animals rest would still be abundant, providing prime targets for subsistence hunters. But this year sea-ice coverage as of late April was more like what would be expected for mid-June, well into the melt season. These conditions are the continuation of a winter-long scarcity of sea ice in the Bering Sea—a…

Read More Read More

Donald Trump’s pursuit of an Oval Office meeting with Vladimir Putin

Donald Trump’s pursuit of an Oval Office meeting with Vladimir Putin

Comments 0 Comment

Susan B Glasser writes: Late on Monday evening, the Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, started making calls to European allies. A few hours earlier, they had got word from sources inside the Trump Administration that the President was poised to impose costly steel and aluminum tariffs by the midnight deadline. No one knew for sure (“The decision lies with the President,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel had said on Friday, standing next to Trump, after flying to Washington to lobby him…

Read More Read More

Anti-war protests 50 years ago helped mold the modern Christian right

Anti-war protests 50 years ago helped mold the modern Christian right

Comments 0 Comment

William Sloane Coffin Jr., followed by his sister, arrives at federal building in Boston on May 20, 1968. AP Photo By David Mislin, Temple University In May of 1968, a high-profile trial began in Boston that dramatically illustrated a larger phenomenon fueling the rise of conservative Christianity in the United States. Five men had been charged with conspiracy for encouraging Americans to evade the draft. One of the prominent defendants in the trial was a Presbyterian minister and Yale University…

Read More Read More

Why do so many people feel their work is completely unnecessary?

Why do so many people feel their work is completely unnecessary?

Comments 0 Comment

David Graeber writes: One day, the wall shelves in my office collapsed. This left books scattered all over the floor and a jagged, half-dislocated metal frame that once held the shelves in place dangling over my desk. I’m a professor of anthropology at a university. A carpenter appeared an hour later to inspect the damage, and announced gravely that, as there were books all over the floor, safety rules prevented him from entering the room or taking further action. I…

Read More Read More

How a Eurasian steppe empire coped with decades of drought

How a Eurasian steppe empire coped with decades of drought

Comments 0 Comment

By Diana Crow The bitterly cold, dry air of the Central Asian steppe is a boon to researchers who study the region. The frigid climate “freeze-dries” everything, including centuries-old trees that once grew on lava flows in Mongolia’s Orkhon Valley. A recent study of the tree-ring record, published in March, from some of these archaic logs reveals a drought that lasted nearly seven decades—one of the longest in a 1,700-year span of steppe history—from A.D. 783–850. Decades of prolonged drought…

Read More Read More

Ancient humans settled the Philippines 700,000 years ago

Ancient humans settled the Philippines 700,000 years ago

Comments 0 Comment

Science reports: In what some scientists are calling a “one-in-a-million find,” archaeologists have discovered a cache of butchered rhino bones and dozens of stone tools on the Philippines’s largest island, Luzon. The find pushes back the earliest evidence for human occupation of the Philippines by more than 600,000 years, and it has archaeologists wondering who exactly these ancient humans were—and how they crossed the deep seas that surrounded that island and others in Southeast Asia. “The only thing missing is…

Read More Read More

We reconstructed the genome of the ‘first animal’

We reconstructed the genome of the ‘first animal’

Comments 0 Comment

Shutterstock By Jordi Paps, University of Essex The first animals emerged on Earth at least 541m years ago, according to the fossil record. What they looked like is the subject of an ongoing debate, but they’re traditionally thought to have been similar to sponges. Like today’s animals, they were made up of many, many different cells doing different jobs, programmed by thousands of different genes. But where did all these genes come from? Was the emergence of animals a small…

Read More Read More

Kim Jong Un’s charm offensive is working

Kim Jong Un’s charm offensive is working

Comments 0 Comment

Robin Wright writes: Since the historic Korean summit last week, Seoul has been consumed with hot gossip—not whether North Korea will abandon the bomb or end a sixty-eight-year-old war but over the quirks of Kim Jong Un, the world’s most mysterious leader. In interviews and conversations, everyone I’ve talked to in the South Korean capital has had a favorite anecdote: the North Korean did not smoke during meetings, despite having a notorious bad habit, photographed in North Korea with a…

Read More Read More