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Inside Leonard Leo’s campaign to end protections for endangered species

Inside Leonard Leo’s campaign to end protections for endangered species

Rolling Stone reports: Leonard Leo, best known as the architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, is fueling an assault on efforts to preserve the environment and the planet. His dark money network has also been funding campaigns to dismantle the Endangered Species Act (ESA) — 50 years after it was established to protect plant and animal species at risk of extinction. Since its passing, the ESA has been credited for saving 99 percent of its listed wildlife including bald…

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California is showing how a big state can power itself without fossil fuels

California is showing how a big state can power itself without fossil fuels

Bill McKibben writes: Something approaching a miracle has been taking place in California this spring. Beginning in early March, for some portion of almost every day, a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower has been producing more than a hundred per cent of the state’s demand for electricity. Some afternoons, solar panels alone have produced more power than the state uses. And, at night, large utility-scale batteries that have been installed during the past few years are often the…

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AIPAC spent millions to achieve a pyrrhic victory

AIPAC spent millions to achieve a pyrrhic victory

Ben Davis writes: Sometimes, a major electoral victory is a sign of a movement in retreat and a crumbling consensus. Take California’s gay marriage ban in 2008, at the time seen as a major defeat for gay rights advocates. But the victory of Prop 8 hid the underlying shift: the very fact that gay rights, unthinkable even a few years prior, was a polarized electoral issue showed that anti-gay rights forces were losing in the long term. The same is…

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J Street helped transform Jamaal Bowman’s view of Israel but the ‘pro-peace’ group remains soft on genocide

J Street helped transform Jamaal Bowman’s view of Israel but the ‘pro-peace’ group remains soft on genocide

Last week, Politico reported: In late 2021, Jamaal Bowman stepped out of a tour bus into the heat in Hebron. The then-rookie New York congressman was visiting the H2 area of the ancient city in the West Bank, which remains under Israeli military occupation with barbed wire-covered checkpoints every few blocks. Bowman had been in the Middle East for just three days, but he was already seeing sights that were changing the way he understood the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That day,…

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How ‘pro-Israel’ orthodoxy keeps U.S. foreign policymaking white

How ‘pro-Israel’ orthodoxy keeps U.S. foreign policymaking white

In 2020, Peter Beinart wrote: In October, Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who is seeking re-election in Georgia, released an ad called “Birds of Prey” attacking her Democratic opponent, Raphael Warnock. The title refers to a sermon Warnock gave during protests in the Gaza Strip in 2018, in which he accused the Israeli government of shooting “unarmed Palestinian sisters and brothers like birds of prey.” In a statement accompanying the ad, Loeffler called Warnock “the most anti-Israel candidate anywhere in the country.” The next month, she unveiled a…

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Prominent Israelis calling on Congress to disinvite Netanyahu

Prominent Israelis calling on Congress to disinvite Netanyahu

David Harel, Tamir Pardo, Talia Sasson, Ehud Barak, Aaron Ciechanover and David Grossman writes: The leaders of the U.S. Congress have invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to address a joint meeting of the Senate and the House of Representatives on July 24. Normally, we Israelis would consider the invitation recognition of our two nations’ shared values and a welcome gesture from our closest friend and ally, to whom we are deeply and morally indebted. But Congress has made…

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Trump trusted more than Biden on democracy among key swing-state voters

Trump trusted more than Biden on democracy among key swing-state voters

The Washington Post reports: President Biden and his Democratic allies have cast his reelection campaign as a battle for the country’s survival, warning that a second Donald Trump presidency would present an existential threat to American democracy. In speeches and campaign ads, Biden points to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, his incitement of an angry mob that ransacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the former president’s boasts that he will use the…

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Why George Orwell’s classic, 1984, remains more relevant than ever

Why George Orwell’s classic, 1984, remains more relevant than ever

Elif Shafak writes: There is Orwell the human being. There is Orwell the novelist. There is Orwell the intellectual, the critic, the journalist, the essayist, the radical. But lately, George Orwell—who was born Eric Arthur Blair and who never fully abandoned his original name—has increasingly come to be regarded as a modern oracle, a gifted soothsayer who predicted with terrifying accuracy how fragile and fallible our political systems were, how close the shadow of authoritarianism. His body of work has…

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How AI revolutionized protein science, but didn’t end it

How AI revolutionized protein science, but didn’t end it

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: In December 2020, when pandemic lockdowns made in-person meetings impossible, hundreds of computational scientists gathered in front of their screens to watch a new era of science unfold. They were assembled for a conference, a friendly competition some of them had attended in person for almost three decades where they could all get together and obsess over the same question. Known as the protein folding problem, it was simple to state: Could they accurately predict the three-dimensional…

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One in five households in Gaza go whole days without food, draft UN report says

One in five households in Gaza go whole days without food, draft UN report says

The Guardian reports: More than half of households in Gaza have had to sell or swap their clothes to be able to buy food, the UN is to report, as a high risk of famine remains across the whole of the territory after a new round of violence in recent weeks. The latest “Special Snapshot” of Gaza from the UN’s hunger monitoring system, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), that will be published on Tuesday also says that one…

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Jamaal Bowman vs. AIPAC — for the many, not the money

Jamaal Bowman vs. AIPAC — for the many, not the money

  Tuesday is the culmination of the most expensive primary race in U.S. history in New York’s 16th Congressional District. Democratic Congressmember Jamaal Bowman, a former Bronx middle school principal and one of the first to call for a ceasefire in Gaza in October, is being challenged by a former corporate executive, George Latimer, who was encouraged to run by the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC. Outside spending in the race has topped $23 million, much of it from pro-Israel…

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Israel’s top court rules ultra-Orthodox Jews must be drafted into military, in blow to Netanyahu

Israel’s top court rules ultra-Orthodox Jews must be drafted into military, in blow to Netanyahu

CNN reports: Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the government to draft ultra-Orthodox Jews into the military, delivering a blow to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that has the potential to unravel his ruling coalition. The court also ordered the government to withdraw funding from any religious schools, or yeshivas, whose students do not comply with draft notices. “The government wanted to distinguish at the level of law enforcement between individuals based on their group affiliation,” the court said in its…

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Conservative-backed group is creating a list of federal workers it suspects could resist Trump plans

Conservative-backed group is creating a list of federal workers it suspects could resist Trump plans

The Associated Press reports: From his home office in small-town Kentucky, a seasoned political operative is quietly investigating scores of federal employees suspected of being hostile to the policies of Republican Donald Trump, a highly unusual and potentially chilling effort that dovetails with broader conservative preparations for a new White House. Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security….

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Kremlin mouthpieces celebrate Julian Assange victory vs. the U.S. ‘deep state’

Kremlin mouthpieces celebrate Julian Assange victory vs. the U.S. ‘deep state’

The Daily Beast reports: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s release from a British prison could not have made Russia’s top propagandists happier. RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan led the pack early Tuesday with a statement on Telegram paying tribute to the “best journalist of our time.” Noting that she was “awfully happy” to finally see Assange win his freedom, she recalled a one-on-one covert chat she said she had with him once in the “woods outside London.” After asking him why he…

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