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Seizure of Aleppo threatens Moscow’s foothold in Syria – and the wider region

Seizure of Aleppo threatens Moscow’s foothold in Syria – and the wider region

Pjotr Sauer writes: The walls of the military office in Aleppo were adorned with pictures of the Kremlin, flanked by Russian and Syrian flags hanging side by side. On the desks, documents detailing the cooperation between the two nations lay abandoned – telltale signs of Bashar al-Assad’s forces’ hasty retreat as rebels closed in on Syria’s second-biggest city over the weekend. The short clip circulating online was recorded in the office of Russian advisers at Aleppo’s military academy after it…

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‘Large head people’: Fossil evidence of a newly discovered form of large brained hominin

‘Large head people’: Fossil evidence of a newly discovered form of large brained hominin

Science Alert reports: A “provocative” new piece in Nature has proposed a whole new group of ancient humans – cousins of the Denisovans and Neanderthals – that once lived alongside Homo sapiens in eastern Asia more than 100,000 years ago. The brains of these extinct humans, who probably hunted horses in small groups, were much bigger than any other hominin of their time, including our own species. Paleoanthropologist Xiujie Wu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and anthropologist Christopher Bae from the University of Hawai’i…

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Pete Hegseth alleged to have been repeatedly intoxicated on the job

Pete Hegseth alleged to have been repeatedly intoxicated on the job

Jane Mayer writes: After the recent revelation that Pete Hegseth had secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017, President-elect Donald Trump stood by his choice of Hegseth to become the next Secretary of Defense. Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, issued a statement noting that Hegseth, who has denied wrongdoing, has not been charged with any crime. “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his administration,”…

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In pardoning his son, Biden echoes some of Trump’s complaints

In pardoning his son, Biden echoes some of Trump’s complaints

Politico reports: Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s. President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade. Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in…

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How Aleppo fell

How Aleppo fell

Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss write: Aleppo was never meant to fall. A stunning offensive waged by two Turkish-backed forces over the space of the last five days has resulted in the conquering of Syria’s second-largest city and industrial hub, doing in under a week what more numerous and well-resourced anti-Assad rebels never managed. Yet Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Syrian National Army (SNA) found themselves the beneficiaries of neighboring conflicts, an opportunistic patron in Ankara, the recent election…

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Bernie Sanders agrees with Elon Musk on slashing the Pentagon’s $886 billion budget

Bernie Sanders agrees with Elon Musk on slashing the Pentagon’s $886 billion budget

Rolling Stone reports: They may not agree on much, but when it comes to Pentagon spending, Sen. Bernie Sanders and billionaire Elon Musk are aligned. Sanders, who usually makes enemies of billionaires like Musk, posted on X Sunday, “Elon Musk is right. The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions. Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of…

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Trump is targeting protections for almost a million legal immigrants

Trump is targeting protections for almost a million legal immigrants

Vox reports: President-elect Donald Trump has long sought to end deportation protections for immigrants with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a program that has significantly expanded under the Biden administration to cover over 860,000 people. He has shown no sign of relenting in a second term — and may try to either revoke those protections or let them expire soon after being sworn in. TPS allows people to temporarily live and work in the US and is currently granted to citizens…

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Dinesh D’Souza finally admits that 2,000 Mules is based on junk information

Dinesh D’Souza finally admits that 2,000 Mules is based on junk information

The New Republic reports: Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative filmmaker behind the election denialist fable 2,000 Mules, revealed that the data that underpinned his supposedly incontrovertible claims of fraudulent voting was actually a complete sham. In the 2022 film, a Texas-based “election integrity” organization called True the Vote claimed to have reviewed cell phone geotracking data from five 2020 battleground states that traced the movements of ballot “mules” who had been paid by liberal nonprofits to stuff ballot boxes. D’Souza’s film…

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John Dean: With a stroke of his pen, Biden could thwart Trump’s revenge plans

John Dean: With a stroke of his pen, Biden could thwart Trump’s revenge plans

HuffPost reports: John Dean, the former White House counsel who helped bring down President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, urged President Joe Biden to go further with his pardons. Biden on Sunday pardoned son Hunter Biden, who was found guilty in June in a firearms case and pleaded guilty in September in a tax case. The president, who had previously vowed not to pardon his son, is facing criticism from both the left and right over the move. But…

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Kash Patel as FBI director would lead to a constitutional crisis greater than Watergate

Kash Patel as FBI director would lead to a constitutional crisis greater than Watergate

The New York Times reports: Several Republican lawmakers fell in line on Sunday behind President-elect Donald J. Trump’s plan to choose Kash Patel to lead the F.B.I., defending the incoming president’s right to install a loyalist who has vowed to use the position to exact revenge on Mr. Trump’s adversaries. Mr. Trump’s announcement on Saturday that he intends to replace Christopher A. Wray, the current F.B.I. director, who still has three years left on his 10-year term, with Mr. Patel…

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Recess appointments could put Trump at odds with conservatives on the Supreme Court

Recess appointments could put Trump at odds with conservatives on the Supreme Court

The Associated Press reports: [In 2014, when the justices unanimously ruled that Democratic President Barack Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were illegal, Justice Antonin] Scalia, an icon of the right, applied his originalist approach to the Constitution to conclude that there was little doubt what the framers were trying to do. The whole point of the constitutional provision on recess appointments, adopted in 1787 in the era of horse and buggy, was that the Senate could…

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In Syria, history is being made on the ground

In Syria, history is being made on the ground

Robin Yassin-Kassab writes: The rebels advanced out of the narrow strip of Idlib in which they and millions of Syrians from around the country had been crammed for over four years. ‘The rebels’ here means a military alliance under the umbrella of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – the greatly moderated and better organised reincarnation of Jabhat al-Nusra. It’s still an authoritarian Islamist militia, but it’s not at all ‘like ISIS’ as the uninformed are saying. It broke definitively from the ISIS…

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How Joe Biden made a mess of Ukraine

How Joe Biden made a mess of Ukraine

Phillips Payson O’Brien writes: Joe Biden filled his administration with geniuses: Rhodes scholars; Ivy League graduates; people with extensive global experience; a national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, whom the president has described as a “once-in-a-generation intellect.” The president himself has been immersed in foreign policy for half a century. Yet despite all of those impressive résumés, the Biden administration has badly mishandled the war in Ukraine, not only hampering a beleaguered ally’s ability to fend off a Russian invasion but…

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Democracy activist Garry Kasparov warns Trump’s next term could see America’s first true oligarchs

Democracy activist Garry Kasparov warns Trump’s next term could see America’s first true oligarchs

HuffPost reports: Elon Musk, rocket and electric car company chief, sometime Internet troll and more recently Donald Trump’s point man for cutting alleged waste from the federal government, may be on the cusp of becoming something else: the country’s first real oligarch. That’s according to democracy activist and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, chairman of the New York-based Renew Democracy Initiative. Kasparov should know. As a celebrity chess prodigy in the 1980s, he tried to use his fame to…

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