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Billionaires who once disavowed Trump are coming crawling back

Billionaires who once disavowed Trump are coming crawling back

Bess Levin writes: Once upon a time, some überwealthy individuals who’d previously supported Donald Trump declared that they were done with the 45th president of the United States. After January 6, 2021, billionaire GOP donor Nelson Peltz called the insurrection a “stain on America” and publicly apologized for voting for Trump in 2020. Real estate and aerospace mogul Robert Bigelow said Trump “lost me as a supporter” and showed, during the attack on the Capitol, that “he was no commander.”…

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How Biden boxed himself in on Gaza

How Biden boxed himself in on Gaza

Jonathan Guyer writes: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a knack for making world leaders do the jobs of their subordinates. President Joe Biden had to call Netanyahu himself in October—in the first weeks of Israel’s brutal assault on the occupied territory of Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas attacks of October 7—to urge that Israel allow more than 100 trucks of relief aid a day into Gaza. Normally, that’s a task a low-level economic officer at the embassy might…

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Former State Dept. human rights official: Israel is not engaged in self defense; it is committing war crimes

Former State Dept. human rights official: Israel is not engaged in self defense; it is committing war crimes

“People are shocked & appalled by what the US government is doing.” Annelle Sheline has resigned from the US State Department in protest over the administration’s ongoing support for Israel & the war in Gaza. “I know that I speak for many people” in the department, she tells me. pic.twitter.com/UTX30HWPme — Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) March 28, 2024

Russian actions in Ukraine to pave way for Gaza war crimes case in ICC

Russian actions in Ukraine to pave way for Gaza war crimes case in ICC

The National reports: Allegations that Russia committed a war crime by attacking Ukraine’s water and food supplies could lead the International Criminal Court (ICC) to hear its first starvation case, the lawyer leading the investigation told The National. Catriona Murdoch, a legal consultant to Global Rights Compliance which is examining Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, said the situation in the country had been mirrored in Gaza, where the ICC could also pass judgment on Israel’s tactics in the enclave,…

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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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