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The Supreme Court just gave Trump exactly what he wanted

The Supreme Court just gave Trump exactly what he wanted

Mark Joseph Stern writes: The Supreme Court has all but guaranteed that Donald Trump will not face trial for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election before this November’s presidential election. On Wednesday, after more than two weeks’ delay, the court issued an order refusing to lift the stay that’s preventing the Jan. 6 trial, prosecuted by Special Counsel Jack Smith, from moving forward. Instead, the court took up the case, scheduling oral arguments for the week of April 22—nearly…

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Former Rep. Andy Levin and James Zogby from the Arab American Institute discuss Michigan’s ‘uncommitted’

Former Rep. Andy Levin and James Zogby from the Arab American Institute discuss Michigan’s ‘uncommitted’

  President Joe Biden won the Michigan Democratic primary on Tuesday, but over 100,000 voters cast their ballots for “uncommitted” in an organized campaign protesting U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. The major battleground state is home to one of the largest Arab American populations in the country, but the movement to vote “uncommitted” is now expected to spread to other states, including Minnesota and Washington. “I’ve rarely seen such an organic and authentic movement come together,” says former…

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Jan Egeland: People in Gaza are traumatized beyond belief

Jan Egeland: People in Gaza are traumatized beyond belief

“I have never… seen a place… so bombarded for such a long time with such a trapped population without any escape. People are traumatized beyond belief.” Jan @NRC_Egeland of @NRC_Norway is in Gaza for the first time since Oct 7. “I’m pretty shaken, actually, from what I saw.” pic.twitter.com/7MFgRstrJl — Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) February 27, 2024

Aaron Bushnell’s act of political despair

Aaron Bushnell’s act of political despair

Masha Gessen writes: On Sunday afternoon, Aaron Bushnell, wearing a mustard-colored sweater under his combat fatigues, walked up to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. As he approached the building, he filmed himself saying, “I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers,…

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How a solar revolution in farming is depleting the world’s groundwater

How a solar revolution in farming is depleting the world’s groundwater

Fred Pearce writes: There is a solar-powered revolution going on in the fields of India. By 2026, more than 3 million farmers will be raising irrigation water from beneath their fields using solar-powered pumps. With effectively free water available in almost unlimited quantities to grow their crops, their lives could be transformed. Until the water runs out. The desert state of Rajasthan is the Indian pioneer and has more solar pumps than any other. Over the past decade, the government…

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Where do Amazon’s profits come from?

Where do Amazon’s profits come from?

Stacy Mitchell writes: If you read the recently unsealed materials from the federal antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, you’ll see why the company wanted to keep them under wraps. According to the unredacted notes from one meeting, Jeff Bezos directed his team to stuff more ads into search results, even if it meant accepting more ads internally categorized as irrelevant to what users were looking for. Other quoted documents reveal the company working to conceal a mysterious price-hiking algorithm, in part…

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A tech billionaire is quietly buying up land in Hawaii. No one knows why

A tech billionaire is quietly buying up land in Hawaii. No one knows why

Dara Kerr reports: A life-size bronze statue of a cowboy sits at the center of Waimea. The cowboy is riding a horse, lasso in hand, pursuing a wild bull. It’s a monument to Ikua Purdy, a hometown hero, who was the first Hawaiian to become a hall-of-fame rodeo roper. This statue is meant to represent the spirit of the place here on Hawaii’s Big Island, which is wholly different from the tourist-laden beaches of Waikiki. Waimea is primarily an agricultural…

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Inside the Democratic rebellion against Biden over the Gaza war

Inside the Democratic rebellion against Biden over the Gaza war

Reuters reports: The depth of Democratic Party anger over President Joe Biden’s handling of the Gaza war has caught his campaign off guard and could depress support in November’s election, according to Reuters interviews with more than a dozen senior party and campaign officials and five dozen voters and activists. The White House had expected Democratic unrest over Gaza to fade as Biden picked up his campaigning against presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, the officials said. Nine months before the…

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Israeli director receives death threats after officials call Berlin film festival ‘antisemitic’

Israeli director receives death threats after officials call Berlin film festival ‘antisemitic’

Our film “No Other Land” on occupied Masafer Yatta’s brutal expulsion won best documentary in Berlinale. Israel’s channel 11 aired this 30 second segment from my speech, insanely called it “anti semitic” – and I’ve been receiving death threats since. I stand behind every word. pic.twitter.com/2burPfZeKO — Yuval Abraham יובל אברהם (@yuval_abraham) February 25, 2024 The Guardian reports: An Israeli film-maker who won one of the top prizes at the Berlin film festival has said German officials’ description of the…

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Yellen urges world leaders to ‘unlock’ frozen Russian Central Bank assets and send them to Ukraine

Yellen urges world leaders to ‘unlock’ frozen Russian Central Bank assets and send them to Ukraine

The Associated Press reports: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday offered her strongest public support yet for the idea of liquidating roughly $300 billion in frozen Russian Central Bank assets and using them for Ukraine’s long-term reconstruction. “It is necessary and urgent for our coalition to find a way to unlock the value of these immobilized assets to support Ukraine’s continued resistance and long-term reconstruction,” Yellen said in remarks in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where Group of 20 finance ministers and…

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The economy is roaring. Immigration is a key reason

The economy is roaring. Immigration is a key reason

The Washington Post reports: Immigration has propelled the U.S. job market further than just about anyone expected, helping cement the country’s economic rebound from the pandemic as the most robust in the world. That momentum picked up aggressively over the past year. About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data. And even before that, by the middle of…

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If we can learn to speak the language of whales, what should we say?

If we can learn to speak the language of whales, what should we say?

Ross Andersen writes: One night last winter, over drinks in downtown Los Angeles, the biologist David Gruber told me that human beings might someday talk to sperm whales. In 2020, Gruber founded Project CETI with some of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence researchers, and they have so far raised $33 million for a high-tech effort to learn the whales’ language. Gruber said that they hope to record billions of the animals’ clicking sounds with floating hydrophones, and then to decipher the…

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A quantum trick implied eternal stability. Now the idea may be falling apart

A quantum trick implied eternal stability. Now the idea may be falling apart

Charlie Wood writes: It is a truth of both physics and everyday experience that things fall apart. Ice melts. Buildings crumble. Any object, if you wait long enough, gets mixed up with itself and its surroundings beyond recognition. But beginning in 2005, a series of breakthroughs made this death march seem optional. In just the right quantum setting, any arrangement of electrons or atoms would stay put for all eternity — even uneven arrangements thrumming with activity. The finding flew…

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