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Americans lost $5.6 billion last year in cryptocurrency fraud scams, the FBI says

Americans lost $5.6 billion last year in cryptocurrency fraud scams, the FBI says

The Associated Press reports: Americans were duped out of more than $5.6 billion last year through fraud schemes involving cryptocurrency, the FBI said in a report released Monday that shows a 45% jump in losses from 2022. The FBI received nearly 70,000 complaints in 2023 by victims of financial fraud involving bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies, according to the FBI. The most rampant scheme was investment fraud, which accounted for $3.96 billion of the losses. “The decentralized nature of cryptocurrency,…

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Do animals know that they will die?

Do animals know that they will die?

Ross Andersen writes: Moni the chimpanzee was still new to the Dutch zoo when she lost her baby. The keepers hadn’t even known that she was pregnant. Neither did Zoë Goldsborough, a graduate student who had spent months jotting down every social interaction that occurred among the chimps, from nine to five, four days a week, for a study on jealousy. One chilly midwinter morning, Goldsborough found Moni sitting by herself on a high tree stump in the center of…

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‘You’re a loser’: DOJ vindicated, says Fuentes, after Trump admits he lost 2020 election ‘by a whisker’

‘You’re a loser’: DOJ vindicated, says Fuentes, after Trump admits he lost 2020 election ‘by a whisker’

The Daily Beast reports: White nationalist Nick Fuentes may have once dined with former president Donald Trump but he has now turned on him for finally admitting that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. “He’s admitting… ‘I lost by a whisker’. So what was the point? What’s the point of any of it you lost in 2020? Seriously? What are we even doing anymore then? You’re a loser… you lost to Joe Biden, you deserve to be charged….

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Trump cashes in on for-profit merchandise during final weeks of his presidential campaign

Trump cashes in on for-profit merchandise during final weeks of his presidential campaign

The Washington Post reports: With less than 10 weeks before the presidential election, Donald Trump had a message for voters in late August: He would be selling more digital trading cards for $99 each. “Fifty all new stunning digital trading cards — it’s really something,” Trump says in the ad. “These cards show me dancing and even holding some bitcoins.” Buy 15 or more of the digital cards, he said, and he would mail a single physical trading card. Those…

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DeSantis’ election police questioned people who signed abortion petitions

DeSantis’ election police questioned people who signed abortion petitions

Tampa Bay Times reports: Isaac Menasche remembers being at the Cape Coral farmer’s market last year when someone asked him if he’d sign a petition to get Florida’s abortion amendment on the ballot. He said yes — and he told a law enforcement officer as much when one showed up at the door of his Lee County home earlier this week. Menasche said he was surprised when the plainclothes officer twice asked if it was really Menasche who had signed…

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The Russian propaganda attack on America

The Russian propaganda attack on America

Tom Nichols writes: When people think of the world of espionage, they probably imagine glamorous foreign capitals, suave undercover operators, and cool gadgets. The reality is far more pedestrian: Yesterday, the Justice Department revealed an alleged Russian scheme to pay laundered money to American right-wing social-media trolls that seems more like a bad sitcom pitch than a top-notch intelligence operation. According to a federal indictment unsealed yesterday [9/4], two Russian citizens, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, worked with a Tennessee company not named in…

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Israeli negotiators said to believe chance of hostage deal ‘close to zero’

Israeli negotiators said to believe chance of hostage deal ‘close to zero’

The Times of Israel reports: The chances of a phased hostage-ceasefire agreement being achieved on the basis of Israel’s May proposal are “close to zero” and there is “very broad pessimism” among the Israeli negotiators, Channel 12 reported Sunday, citing unnamed sources in the Israeli security establishment. The US, which had indicated it was planning to present a new bridging proposal in the next two or three days, is now regarded as unlikely to do so, it added. The report…

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Under cover of war, Israel is demolishing home after home in Silwan

Under cover of war, Israel is demolishing home after home in Silwan

+972 Magazine reports: Younes Odeh and his 3-year-old grandson stand atop the remains of a house in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in the shadow of Jerusalem’s Old City. “This is where he slept,” Odeh says, pointing to a pile of broken drywall and crumbled concrete — all that’s left of his grandson’s bedroom. On Aug. 27, Israeli bulldozers tore apart the house belonging to Odeh’s son, also named Younes, which he built adjacent to his father’s home in 2015. The…

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Surveying trees to better understand how much planet-warming carbon the Amazon actually stores

Surveying trees to better understand how much planet-warming carbon the Amazon actually stores

The New York Times reports: With the help of a small rope tied around his ankles, Eugenio Sánchez, lithe at age 50, shimmied himself all the way up a towering tree like a human inchworm, his chest heaving from the exertion, just to pick a few leaves. The leaves, found only on the highest branches, would help the scientists waiting below identify the species. And that, along with the tree’s exact size (or at least as close as one can…

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The unprecedented grand coalition

The unprecedented grand coalition

Jeff Jarvis writes: As Nicolle Wallace exclaimed on her show Friday, Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have all gathered together around a cause. That cause is democracy and its standard bearer is Kamala Harris. This is a momentous time in the United States, unprecedented at least in this century and likely since long before the Civil War. It is the biggest story in my journalism career. The question is whether our national media will understand…

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Donald Trump gets everything wrong about the climate crisis

Donald Trump gets everything wrong about the climate crisis

Bill McKibben writes: Here is the biggest thing happening on our planet as we head into the autumn of 2024: the Earth is continuing to heat dramatically. Scientists have said that there’s a better than 90% chance that this year will top 2023 as the warmest ever recorded. And paleoclimatologists were pretty sure last year was the hottest in the last 125,000 years. The result is an almost-cliched run of disasters: open Twitter/X anytime for pictures of floods pushing cars…

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Trump refuses to answer questions about the many women he is believed to have sexually abused

Trump refuses to answer questions about the many women he is believed to have sexually abused

Maggie Haberman writes: If any voters had forgotten that Donald J. Trump was accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct, he spent roughly 45 minutes reminding them on Friday, eight weeks before Election Day. At a lectern in the lobby of Trump Tower, Mr. Trump, flanked by seven of his lawyers, laid out years-old allegations from the women in detail as he denied that they were telling the truth. He had just attended a federal appeals court hearing related to…

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Heritage Foundation video ‘stunt’ promotes racist myth of ‘non-citizen voters’

Heritage Foundation video ‘stunt’ promotes racist myth of ‘non-citizen voters’

The New York Times reports: In July, two men went door to door at a sprawling apartment complex in Norcross, Ga., an Atlanta suburb that is a hub for the region’s fast-growing Latino population, asking residents if they were U.S. citizens and whether they were registered to vote. Speaking in Spanish, often peeking from behind half-closed doors, seven people told the men that they were not citizens but that they were registered to vote. Although the two men claimed to…

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Medhi Hasan: Trump isn’t anti-war. It’s time to debunk this dangerous myth

Medhi Hasan: Trump isn’t anti-war. It’s time to debunk this dangerous myth

  “Trump did try and start new wars, expanded old wars, increased drone strikes, and helped do a genocide in the Middle East.” Mehdi debunks the claim that Trump was an anti-war president. Trump almost started a new war in his first year in office, when he picked a fight with nuclear-armed North Korea. He called Kim Jong Un, “little rocket man”, called him “short and fat,” and threatened him with “fire and fury”. When it comes to drones, Trump…

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