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Pope Leo urges news agencies to stand as bulwark against lies, manipulation and post-truths

Pope Leo urges news agencies to stand as bulwark against lies, manipulation and post-truths

The Associated Press reports: Pope Leo XIV encouraged international news agencies on Thursday to stand firm as a bulwark against the “ancient art of lying” and manipulation, as he strongly backed a free, independent and objective press. History’s first American pope called for imprisoned journalists to be released and said the work of journalists must never be considered a crime. Rather, journalism is a right and a pillar upholding “the edifice of our societies” that must be protected and defended,…

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Coral collapse signals Earth’s first climate tipping point

Coral collapse signals Earth’s first climate tipping point

Science News reports: Earth has entered a grim new climate reality. The planet has officially passed its first climate tipping point. Relentlessly rising heat in the oceans has now pushed corals around the world past their limit, causing an unprecedented die-off of global reefs and threatening the livelihoods of nearly a billion people, scientists say in a new report published October 13. Even under the most optimistic future warming scenario — one in which global warming does not exceed 1.5…

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Federal judges warn of ‘judicial crisis’ caused by Supreme Court’s mishandling of emergency orders

Federal judges warn of ‘judicial crisis’ caused by Supreme Court’s mishandling of emergency orders

The New York Times reports: More than three dozen federal judges have told The New York Times that the Supreme Court’s flurry of brief, opaque emergency orders in cases related to the Trump administration have left them confused about how to proceed in those matters and are hurting the judiciary’s image with the public. At issue are the quick-turn orders the Supreme Court has issued dictating whether Trump administration policies should be left in place while they are litigated through…

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Judge rejects ‘unprecedented’ indictment during Trump’s D.C. crackdown

Judge rejects ‘unprecedented’ indictment during Trump’s D.C. crackdown

The New York Times reports: Escalating a standoff with federal prosecutors, a judge in Washington on Thursday formally declined to accept an indictment against a man whose case he said had morphed into an “unprecedented workaround” of the normal system of justice. The highly unusual rejection came from Judge Zia M. Faruqui, a magistrate judge, who refused to accept an indictment that prosecutors secured from a local grand jury in Washington only after a federal grand jury had declined to…

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Oregon’s top military leader: National Guard troops ‘will be protecting any protesters at the ICE facility’

Oregon’s top military leader: National Guard troops ‘will be protecting any protesters at the ICE facility’

  The Oregonian reports: A nine-day-old snippet of testimony in front of Oregon lawmakers is rocketing around social media as Portland awaits word from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on President Trump’s troop deployment plans. Oregon’s top military leader offered some reassuring — or infuriating, depending on one’s political perspective — comments about the role of National Guard soldiers during a proposed federal troop deployment to Portland. Speaking before a state Senate subcommittee, Brigadier General Alan…

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We need to reinvent democracy

We need to reinvent democracy

Reporting from the Athens Democracy Forum, Serge Schmemann writes: Some 60 countries held some sort of election in 2024, noted Neha Sahgal, vice president of research at the Pew Research Center, and the bottom line was that right-wing nationalism was now mainstream. “It doesn’t matter what ‘should be’ in our mind,” she said. “This is the reality right now.” There was no sense in discussing the “defense of liberal democracy,” argued Ivan Krastev, head of the Center for Liberal Strategies…

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Trump causes a $2 trillion loss in U.S. stock market with a single social media post

Trump causes a $2 trillion loss in U.S. stock market with a single social media post

CNBC reports: On Friday morning, the S&P 500 was less than a couple of points from another all-time high. Then, after a single social media post from President Donald Trump, $2 trillion in market value was wiped out. The unraveling shows the sway the president’s one-man trade policy still has over the fate of the global economy. Trump at 10:57 a.m. ET wrote on his Truth Social platform that China was “becoming very hostile” with the rest of the world,…

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BDS: Boycotting Israel has gone mainstream

BDS: Boycotting Israel has gone mainstream

The Guardian reports: For more than a decade Shouk offered an Israeli-inspired, plant-based and kosher menu in and around Washington. Last week the chain was forced to close the last of five locations and lay off the last of 30 staff. It said the war in Gaza had made it impossible to do business; activists claimed the restaurant appropriated Palestinian food and imported Israeli products. “It didn’t let up: boycotts, harassment, you name it,” recalled Dennis Friedman, 46, a Jewish…

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Genes harness physics to help grow living things

Genes harness physics to help grow living things

Anna Demming writes: Sip a glass of wine, and you will notice liquid continuously weeping down the wetted side of the glass. In 1855, James Thomson, brother of Lord Kelvin, explained in the Philosophical Magazine that these wine “tears” or “legs” result from the difference in surface tension between alcohol and water. “This fact affords an explanation of several very curious motions,” Thomson wrote. Little did he realize that the same effect, later named the Marangoni effect, might also shape…

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The social aftershocks from weaponized mass starvation in Gaza will reverberate for generations

The social aftershocks from weaponized mass starvation in Gaza will reverberate for generations

Alex de Waal writes: On August 22nd, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification mechanism, affiliated with the United Nations (UN), reported that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza had officially passed the “famine” threshold. The same day, the United States government’s own Famine Early Warning Systems Network quietly confirmed this finding, noting that there was good evidence to believe that in Gaza, “mortality from the interaction of hunger and disease” was at famine levels. For months, Gaza’s descent into famine had…

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As Trump cancels largest solar project in North America, China advances with largest in the world

As Trump cancels largest solar project in North America, China advances with largest in the world

Politico reports: The Trump administration’s cancellation of what would have been one of the world’s largest solar power projects has some industry observers fretting over the future of renewable energy on public lands. They predicted the Esmeralda 7 project — by far the largest solar project that had moved through the permitting process under former President Joe Biden’s Interior Department — won’t be the last major project in the pipeline to be pulled. It was one of a number of…

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The Zionist consensus among American Jews has collapsed. Something new is emerging

The Zionist consensus among American Jews has collapsed. Something new is emerging

Shaul Magid writes: It has been two years since the mass murder on 7 October 2023, an event that shook world Jewry more than any event since the creation of the state of Israel. For Jews it was shocking. For the state of Israel, it was deeply humiliating. The entire Zionist project was founded on the presumption that the Jewish state would prevent things like this from ever happening again. A response was inevitable. But the response Israel pursued –…

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‘This is deliberate chaos’: Congress erupts at Trump’s shutdown mass firings

‘This is deliberate chaos’: Congress erupts at Trump’s shutdown mass firings

Axios reports: Members of Congress pushed back Friday against the White House announcing layoffs of federal workers as part of the government shutdown. Why it matters: The blowback includes Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who called the layoffs “arbitrary” and said she “strongly” opposes them. “Regardless of whether federal employees have been working without pay or have been furloughed, their work is incredibly important to serving the public,” Collins said. Members of Congress from the Washington, D.C….

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Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

The Guardian reports: Peter Thiel, the billionaire political svengali and tech investor, is worried about the antichrist. It could be the US. It could be Greta Thunberg. Over the past month, Thiel has hosted a series of four lectures on the downtown waterfront of San Francisco philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Thiel, who describes himself as a “small-o Orthodox Christian”, believes the harbinger of the end of the world could already be…

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