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Alarm in UK and US over possible Iran-Russia nuclear deal

Alarm in UK and US over possible Iran-Russia nuclear deal

The Observer reports: Britain and the US have raised fears that Russia has shared nuclear secrets with Iran in return for Tehran supplying Moscow with ballistic missiles to bomb Ukraine. During their summit in Washington DC on Friday, Keir Starmer and US president Joe Biden acknowledged that the two countries were tightening military cooperation at a time when Iran is in the process of enriching enough uranium to complete its long-held goal to build a nuclear bomb. British sources indicated…

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Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple vastly higher than reported

Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple vastly higher than reported

The Guardian reports: Big tech has made some big claims about greenhouse gas emissions in recent years. But as the rise of artificial intelligence creates ever bigger energy demands, it’s getting hard for the industry to hide the true costs of the data centers powering the tech revolution. According to a Guardian analysis, from 2020 to 2022 the real emissions from the “in-house” or company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are likely about 662% – or 7.62 times – higher than officially reported. Amazon is the largest emitter…

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How Trump and Vance have mainstreamed neo-Nazi and white nationalist bigotry

How Trump and Vance have mainstreamed neo-Nazi and white nationalist bigotry

NBC News reports: The day after the presidential debate at which former President Donald Trump spread a false story about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, Christopher Pohlhaus, leader of the national neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, took to his Telegram channel to take credit. Pohlhaus, a Marine-turned-tattoo artist known as “Hammer” to his hundreds of followers, wrote Blood Tribe had “pushed Springfield into the public consciousness.” Members of his hate group agreed. “The president is talking about it now,”…

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Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants are another test for America’s Christians

Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants are another test for America’s Christians

Russell Moore writes: The accusation that Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city are abducting and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs relies not on one falsehood but on a web of them. The rhetoric evokes racist tropes about “savages” who do not conform to our civilized Western world. There’s also a religious angle: the idea that Haitian refugees are voodoo occultists who might be worshipping the devil. As an evangelical Christian who actually believes in the existence of Satan,…

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Haitian immigrants helped revive a struggling Ohio town. Then neo-Nazis turned up

Haitian immigrants helped revive a struggling Ohio town. Then neo-Nazis turned up

The Guardian reports: While Donald Trump made baseless, dangerous claims that immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets in front of millions of viewers at Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Johnson Salomon, a Haitian man who moved to Springfield in 2020, was watching cartoons with his kids before putting them to bed. He got a text from a friend telling him to turn on the debate. When he saw the headlines about what the former president and Republican nominee in November’s…

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Neo-Nazi and far right groups seize on Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric

Neo-Nazi and far right groups seize on Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric

The Guardian reports: Neo-Nazi groups and the online far right are latching on to the anti-immigration rhetoric coming from Donald Trump’s campaign for the White House in an effort to recruit new supporters and spread their extremism to broader audiences. After the Republican national convention in July, where supporters waved “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” placards, it became clear that Trump’s xenophobia has become part of the Republican establishment. Upon his return to X, formerly known as Twitter, Trump released a stream…

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Trump Jr. piles on with racist comments about Haitians

Trump Jr. piles on with racist comments about Haitians

The New York Times reports: Amid fallout from Donald J. Trump’s debunked claim about immigrants from Haiti stealing and eating people’s pets in a small Ohio city, the former president’s oldest son weighed in with his own aspersions on Haitians. Donald Trump Jr. suggested on Thursday that Haitian immigrants were less intelligent than people from other countries, and claimed that there was demographic evidence to back this up. He provided none. “You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic…

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Stephen Fry: Musk and Zuckerberg are ‘the worst polluters in human history’

Stephen Fry: Musk and Zuckerberg are ‘the worst polluters in human history’

BBC News reports: Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk are “the worst polluters in human history”, Stephen Fry has said. The actor and comedian made the claim during a lecture at Kings College, London. “You and your children cannot breathe the air or swim in the waters of our culture without breathing in the toxic particulates and stinking effluvia that belch and pour unchecked from their companies into the currents of our world,” he said of the…

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Biobots arise from the cells of dead organisms − pushing the boundaries of life, death and medicine

Biobots arise from the cells of dead organisms − pushing the boundaries of life, death and medicine

Biobots could one day be engineered to deliver drugs and clear up arterial plaque. Kriegman et al. 2020/PNAS, CC BY-SA By Peter A Noble, University of Washington and Alex Pozhitkov, Irell & Manella Graduate School of Biological Sciences at City of Hope Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites. But the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a “third state” that lies beyond the traditional boundaries of life and death. Usually, scientists…

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Trump and Vance foment racial hatred and xenophobia in Ohio and across America

Trump and Vance foment racial hatred and xenophobia in Ohio and across America

Politico reports: Former President Donald Trump used increasingly harsh rhetoric Friday in describing Haitian migrants in Ohio, saying they’re “destroying their way of life” and threatened mass deportations. He made his comments as he and some of his allies, including his running mate JD Vance, have claimed that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats, dogs and geese, sparking a backlash from Democrats, including President Joe Biden. “Illegal Haitian migrants have descended upon a town of 58,000 people, destroying…

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Harris details rural push ahead of battleground barnstorm

Harris details rural push ahead of battleground barnstorm

Politico reports: Vice President Kamala Harris is circulating her first detailed goals for rural America in a bid to woo voters the party has been hemorrhaging support among for decades — and who will help determine the outcome of the November elections. The new document is the furthest Harris has gone in her career to outline how she would approach policy for rural communities and comes as her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, who has been tapped as a sort…

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The New Right has a blueprint for seizing power. Is JD Vance executing it?

The New Right has a blueprint for seizing power. Is JD Vance executing it?

Ian Ward writes: JD Vance’s political career has been defined by an apparent paradox. On the one hand, Vance is a member of the upper echelon of America’s ruling elite — a graduate of Yale Law School, a New York Times best-selling author, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and a United States senator. On the other hand, he has become a vociferous conservative critic of that same elite on behalf of disaffected Middle Americans, a role he can claim by…

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Trump’s obsession with oil could destroy America’s auto industry

Trump’s obsession with oil could destroy America’s auto industry

Robinson Meyer writes: There is a curious cognitive dissonance in how a lot of us think about the last decade’s climate policies and this decade’s economic problems. During the final years of the 2010s, the Trump administration proudly tore up dozens of policies meant to lower American greenhouse gas emissions and build a competitive domestic clean energy industry. It prioritized oil, coal and natural gas businesses over wind, solar and batteries, and as president, Donald Trump often seemed to revel in picking…

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RFK Jr. has sabotaged early voting in a critical swing state

RFK Jr. has sabotaged early voting in a critical swing state

Mark Joseph Stern writes: The North Carolina Supreme Court tossed a grenade into the state’s election on Monday, violating both state and federal law to grant Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s cynical, last-minute removal from the ballot. Its 4–3 decision will compel election administrators to destroy nearly 3 million already-printed ballots that featured Kennedy’s name and redesign 2,348 different ballot styles across the state to accommodate the eleventh-hour change. This complex process will significantly delay the distribution of new ballots—which will,…

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