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Trump’s anti-Ukraine view dates to the 1930s. America rejected it then. Will we now?

Trump’s anti-Ukraine view dates to the 1930s. America rejected it then. Will we now?

Robert Kagan writes: Can Republicans really be returning to a 1930s worldview in our 21st-century world? The answer is yes. Trump’s Republican Party wants to take the United States back to the triad of interwar conservatism: high tariffs, anti-immigrant xenophobia, isolationism. According to Russ Vought, who is often touted as Trump’s likely chief of staff in a second term, it is precisely this “older definition of conservatism,” the conservatism of the interwar years, that they hope to impose on the…

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Here’s what it would look like to remove Judge Cannon

Here’s what it would look like to remove Judge Cannon

Philip Rotner writes: While a motion to remove a judge generally has to be filed initially with the judge herself, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals—the appellate court that has jurisdiction over Judge Cannon’s court—has “the authority to order reassignment of a criminal case to another district judge as part of our supervisory authority over the district courts in this Circuit”: If a district judge’s continued participation in a case presents a significant risk of undermining this public confidence, this…

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Trump’s unbearable temptation to dump his Truth Social stock

Trump’s unbearable temptation to dump his Truth Social stock

Timothy Noah writes: Remember in Godfather II when the mobster Hyman Roth tells Michael Corleone, his co-investor in President Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba, “Michael, we’re bigger than U.S. Steel”? U.S. Steel is no longer the colossus it was in 1958, when that scene takes place. But it still caught my attention when The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the valuation of Donald Trump’s Truth Social was almost as big as U.S. Steel’s. This was the very first day of trading for the app’s parent company,…

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Memories are made by breaking DNA — and fixing it

Memories are made by breaking DNA — and fixing it

Nature reports: When a long-term memory forms, some brain cells experience a rush of electrical activity so strong that it snaps their DNA. Then, an inflammatory response kicks in, repairing this damage and helping to cement the memory, a study in mice shows. The findings, published on 27 March in Nature, are “extremely exciting”, says Li-Huei Tsai, a neurobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who was not involved in the work. They contribute to the picture that…

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Majority in U.S. now disapprove of Israeli action in Gaza

Majority in U.S. now disapprove of Israeli action in Gaza

Gallup reports: After narrowly backing Israel’s military action in Gaza in November, Americans now oppose the campaign by a solid margin. Fifty-five percent currently disapprove of Israel’s actions, while 36% approve. The latest results are from a March 1-20 survey. The Israel-Hamas war has continued for five months and has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians and over 1,000 Israelis. Major parts of Gaza have been destroyed, complicating efforts to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians…

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Ireland backs bid to include blocking of aid in definition of genocide

Ireland backs bid to include blocking of aid in definition of genocide

The Guardian reports: Ireland is to seek to widen the definition of genocide to include blocking humanitarian aid in a landmark international court of justice (ICJ) case against Israel. The Irish government will intervene in the case taken by South Africa and argue that restricting food and other essentials in Gaza may constitute genocidal intent, the foreign minister Micheál Martin said on Wednesday. “We believe there is a case, given how this war has been conducted,” Martin told the Guardian….

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The children who lost limbs in Gaza

The children who lost limbs in Gaza

Eliza Griswold writes: Just off the acacia-lined highway to the Qatari capital of Doha is a three-story, whitewashed apartment complex built to host visitors at the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Until recently, the gated compound was unoccupied. Yet in the past several months, as part of a deal Qatar struck with Israel, Hamas, and Egypt to evacuate as many as fifteen hundred wounded Gazans in urgent need of medical care, it has begun to fill. The new residents are eight…

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Why I’m resigning from the State Department

Why I’m resigning from the State Department

Annelle Sheline, PhD, served for a year as a foreign affairs officer at the Office of Near Eastern Affairs in the Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor: Since Hamas’ attack on October 7, Israel has used American bombs in its war in Gaza, which has killed more than 32,000 people — 13,000 of them children — with countless others buried under the rubble, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Israel is credibly accused of starving…

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Climate change is changing how we keep time

Climate change is changing how we keep time

Science News reports: Climate change may be making it harder to know exactly what time it is. The rapid melting of the ice sheets atop Greenland and Antarctica, as measured by satellite-based gravitational measurements, is shifting more mass toward Earth’s waistline. And that extra bulge is slowing the planet’s rotation, geophysicist Duncan Agnew reports online March 27 in Nature. That climate change–driven mass shift is throwing a new wrench into international timekeeping standards. The internationally agreed-upon coordinated universal time, or…

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Common plastic additive, BPA, linked to autism and ADHD, scientists find

Common plastic additive, BPA, linked to autism and ADHD, scientists find

Science Alert reports: The number of people being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder ( ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ( ADHD) has risen sharply in recent decades, and research continues to delve into the factors involved in these conditions. A study revealed there’s a difference in how children with autism or ADHD clear the common plastic additive bisphenol A (BPA), compared to neurotypical children. BPA is used in a lot of plastics and plastic production processes, and can also…

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The cell is not a factory

The cell is not a factory

Charudatta Navare writes: When you think about it, it is amazing that something as tiny as a living cell is capable of behaviour so complex. Consider the single-cell creature, the amoeba. It can sense its environment, move around, obtain its food, maintain its structure, and multiply. How does a cell know how to do all of this? Biology textbooks will tell you that each eukaryotic cell, which constitutes a range of organisms from humans to amoeba, contains a control centre…

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The interlocking political fates of Biden and Netanyahu

The interlocking political fates of Biden and Netanyahu

Lisa Goldman and Danny Postel writes: This week’s diplomatic contretemps between the Israeli and American governments is being described as the worst rupture in the “special relationship” in decades. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy remarked to Golda Meir (then Israel’s foreign minister) that America’s bond with the Jewish state was comparable only to the one the U.S. shared with Britain. On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled the trip of a delegation of top officials that was set…

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Genocide foreseen

Genocide foreseen

An analysis Michael Barnett wrote in March 2023: At a conference hosted by Haaretz on Wednesday, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that “the village of Hawara needs to be wiped out. I think that the State of Israel needs to do that—not, God forbid, private individuals.” Hawara has been in the news lately because of an Israeli assault that claimed the lives of ten Palestinians and injured over one hundred. Although Smotrich prefers to see Hawara’s demise through public…

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Israel’s ‘Iron Wall’: A brief history of the ideology guiding Benjamin Netanyahu

Israel’s ‘Iron Wall’: A brief history of the ideology guiding Benjamin Netanyahu

A view of Khan Yunis in Gaza on Feb. 2, 2024, after weeks of continuous Israeli bombardment and bulldozing. Abdulqader Sabbah/Anadolu via Getty Images By Eran Kaplan, San Francisco State University Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has signaled that Israel’s military will soon launch an invasion of Rafah, the city in the southern Gaza Strip. More than 1 million Palestinians, now on the verge of famine, have sought refuge there from their bombed-out cities farther north. Despite U.S. President Joe Biden’s…

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