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Vermont becomes first state to enact law requiring oil companies pay for damage from climate change

Vermont becomes first state to enact law requiring oil companies pay for damage from climate change

The Associated Press reports: Vermont has become the first state to enact a law requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a share of the damage caused by climate change after the state suffered catastrophic summer flooding and damage from other extreme weather. Republican Gov. Phil Scott allowed the bill to become law without his signature late Thursday, saying he is very concerned about the costs and outcome of the small state taking on “Big Oil” alone in what will likely…

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2023 set record for U.S. heat deaths, killing in areas that used to handle the heat

2023 set record for U.S. heat deaths, killing in areas that used to handle the heat

The Associated Press reports: David Hom suffered from diabetes and felt nauseated before he went out to hang his laundry in 108-degree weather, another day in Arizona’s record-smashing, unrelenting July heat wave. His family found the 73-year-old lying on the ground, his lower body burned. Hom died at the hospital, his core body temperature at 107 degrees. The death certificates of more than 2,300 people who died in the United States last summer mention the effects of excessive heat, the…

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Pollution paradox: How cleaning up smog drives global warming

Pollution paradox: How cleaning up smog drives global warming

Fred Pearce writes: They call it “The Blob.” A vast expanse of ocean stretching from Alaska to California periodically warms by up to 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees F), decimating fish stocks, starving seabirds, creating blooms of toxic algae, preventing salmon returns to rivers, displacing sea lions, and forcing whales into shipping lanes to find food. The Blob first formed in 2013 and spread across an area of the northeast Pacific the size of Canada. It lasted for three years…

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The North Star has an age-defying secret: stellar cannibalism

The North Star has an age-defying secret: stellar cannibalism

Phil Plait writes: Polaris, the North Star, is one of the most famous stars in the sky, but it’s also quite an enigma. A recent reappraisal of its basics—such as its mass and distance from Earth—suggests that the star is paradoxically youthful, appearing to be only a small fraction of its true multi-billion-year age, like a middle-aged human who somehow passes for a toddler. This is deeply strange; you’d probably assume astronomers have simply miscalculated this star’s age. But in…

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Would Biden deal ‘stop the war,’ or (as Netanyahu’s office says) ‘enable Israel to continue the war’?

Would Biden deal ‘stop the war,’ or (as Netanyahu’s office says) ‘enable Israel to continue the war’?

Politico reports: “The deal does stop the war,” said a senior administration official, who briefed reporters on the situation on condition of anonymity. The official added: “What’s on the table now is very close to the deal Hamas said they would take” in earlier negotiations. Hamas rejected previous cease-fire deals, as they didn’t offer a pathway to end the war for good. The first phase of the three-phase deal would last six weeks and include a “complete” cease-fire, a withdrawal…

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Can Palestinians imagine a future with Israelis after this war?

Can Palestinians imagine a future with Israelis after this war?

Mahmoud Mushtaha writes: “We were free. It was the most beautiful life. We had everything — our heritage, our trade, and our sea.” My grandfather, who is now 85, still remembers life in Palestine before 1948. There were no restrictions on travel, no checkpoints, no sieges, and no curfews. He grew up in a small village in Jaffa, where life was bustling with activity during the day, and filled with social gatherings at night. His was a community rich in…

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Ghent University severs ties with Israeli universities; calls on EU to expel Israel from academic cooperation treaty

Ghent University severs ties with Israeli universities; calls on EU to expel Israel from academic cooperation treaty

VRT News reports: Ghent University (UGent) has said that it is to halt all cooperation and joint projects that it currently has with Israeli research institutes and universities. However, the pro-Palestinian activists that have been occupying a building at the university for over 3 weeks are not satisfied. They are demanding that the university also cease cooperation with Israeli companies. Under pressure from the pro-Palestinian activists and following fresh advice issued by the university’s Human Rights Committee, UGent has decided…

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Off Leash: Inside the secret, global, far-right group chat started by Erik Prince

Off Leash: Inside the secret, global, far-right group chat started by Erik Prince

Ken Silverstein writes: In his book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson cites a cable sent to the State Department in June 1933 by a U.S. diplomat posted in Germany that provided a far more candid assessment of the Nazi leadership than the one that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration was then conveying to the public. “With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality…

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Trump’s guilty verdict isn’t scaring off his donors

Trump’s guilty verdict isn’t scaring off his donors

Business Insider reports: Former President Donald Trump’s conviction Thursday of falsifying business records hasn’t dissuaded high-profile supporters in the world of business — some of whom are newly energized by the historic verdict. In a post Thursday on X, the venture capitalist Shaun Maguire expressed his support for Trump, saying “the timing isn’t a coincidence” as he announced a $300,000 donation to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. “Bluntly, that’s part of why I’m supporting him,” Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, wrote on X about…

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Trump bungled the trial

Trump bungled the trial

Ankush Khardori writes: It may not have been the trial that the country deserves, but it’s the trial that we got. On Thursday, Donald Trump became the first president in U.S. history to become a convicted felon thanks to a jury of 12 New Yorkers. The verdict was swift, coming after less than two days of deliberations in the hush money trial. But a conviction was not inevitable. The legal issues were intricate and in some key respects novel, and…

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Warm water is sneaking underneath the Thwaites Glacier — and rapidly melting it

Warm water is sneaking underneath the Thwaites Glacier — and rapidly melting it

Science News reports: In Antarctica, the warm ocean is stealthily attacking a major glacier through a previously unknown route — undermining its foundation on a daily basis. As each rising tide lifts the coastal terminus of the southern continent’s Thwaites Glacier a tiny bit off the seafloor, warm salty water squeezes in underneath, satellite measurements reveal. This inrush of seawater forces its way many kilometers inland as it melts the ice from beneath. The melt water and seawater are then…

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‘Catastrophic consequences’ in Rafah due to Israel’s actions, bystander Power warns as more staffers resign

‘Catastrophic consequences’ in Rafah due to Israel’s actions, bystander Power warns as more staffers resign

Politico reports: USAID head Samantha Power warned on Wednesday that Israel’s military operation in southern Gaza is having “catastrophic consequences” despite Biden administration efforts to minimize the negative impacts. “Despite currently more limited military operations around Rafah and the Egypt/Gaza border, the catastrophic consequences that we have long warned about are becoming a reality,” Power said during a virtual event with governments that aid the humanitarian response in Gaza. Her comments are one of the harshest assessments yet from the…

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Veteran State Dept. official says she quit over Biden administration ‘twisting the facts’ on Gaza

Veteran State Dept. official says she quit over Biden administration ‘twisting the facts’ on Gaza

HuffPost reports: Veteran State Department official Stacy Gilbert quit the agency because the Biden administration is “twisting the facts” to make a “patently, demonstrably, quantifiably false” claim that Israel is not blocking humanitarian aid for Gaza in order to justify his administration’s continued military support to the country, she told HuffPost on Wednesday in the first interview since her resignation. Gilbert, who has over 20 years experience in U.S. policy toward global crises and conflicts, said she is convinced Israel’s…

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Israeli journalist describes threats over reporting on spy chief and ICC

Israeli journalist describes threats over reporting on spy chief and ICC

The Guardian reports: An investigative reporter with Israel’s leading leftwing newspaper, Haaretz, has said unnamed senior security officials threatened actions against him if he reported on attempts by the former head of the Mossad to intimidate the ex-prosecutor of the international criminal court. Amid growing concern over Israel’s censorship regime, enforced by the military censor’s office and by gag orders issued by the courts, Haaretz published an article on Wednesday with blacked out words and sentences to demonstrate the scale…

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