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Crimean Tatar set to become Ukrainian defense minister at critical moment in conflict

Crimean Tatar set to become Ukrainian defense minister at critical moment in conflict

CNN reports: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has tapped Rustem Umerov, a Crimean Tatar, to become his next defense minister, replacing Oleksii Reznikov at a critical time for Ukraine’s counteroffensive. Umerov will have a bulging in-tray if and when the Ukrainian parliament approves his appointment. The change in leadership comes as Ukraine’s relationships with allies and donors enter a new phase. Kyiv is trying to accelerate the training and deployment of F-16 combat planes and acquire a host of other equipment…

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Twitter accused of helping Saudi Arabia commit human rights abuses

Twitter accused of helping Saudi Arabia commit human rights abuses

The Guardian reports: The social media company formerly known as Twitter has been accused in a revised civil US lawsuit of helping Saudi Arabia commit grave human rights abuses against its users, including by disclosing confidential user data at the request of Saudi authorities at a much higher rate than it has for the US, UK or Canada. The lawsuit was brought last May against X, as Twitter is now known, by Areej al-Sadhan, the sister of a Saudi aid…

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Will the universe ever stop expanding?

Will the universe ever stop expanding?

Sarah Scoles writes: From Earth, the night sky looks fairly static. Sure, the stars rotate from evening to evening, and the planets move among them. But from a terrestrial perspective, the celestial sphere appears essentially unchanging. Perception, though, is not reality: our eyeballs don’t hint that beyond nearby planets, stars and galaxies, everything is moving away from us. The universe is constantly expanding—at an ever faster rate. “When we say that the universe is expanding, we mean something pretty literal,”…

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Home insurers cut natural disasters from policies as climate risks grow

Home insurers cut natural disasters from policies as climate risks grow

The Washington Post reports: In the aftermath of extreme weather events, major insurers are increasingly no longer offering coverage that homeowners in areas vulnerable to those disasters need most. At least five large U.S. property insurers — including Allstate, American Family, Nationwide, Erie Insurance Group and Berkshire Hathaway — have told regulators that extreme weather patterns caused by climate change have led them to stop writing coverages in some regions, exclude protections from various weather events and raise monthly premiums…

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Biden tours Florida hurricane damage: ‘Nobody can deny impacts of climate crisis’

Biden tours Florida hurricane damage: ‘Nobody can deny impacts of climate crisis’

The Guardian reports: Joe Biden said that no one can deny the impacts of the climate crisis anymore after he visited Florida on Saturday and surveyed the damage left behind by Hurricane Idalia. Speaking to reporters in front of fallen trees and debris, the US president pointed to this year’s extreme weather events and disasters, saying: “Nobody can deny the impact of climate crisis. There’s no real intelligence to deny the impacts of the climate crisis anymore.” “Just look around…

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Musk’s new Twitter policies helped spread Russian propaganda, EU says

Musk’s new Twitter policies helped spread Russian propaganda, EU says

The Washington Post reports: Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) has played a major role in allowing Russian propaganda about Ukraine to reach more people than before the war began, according to a study released this week by the European Commission, the governing body of the European Union. The research found that, despite voluntary commitments to take action against Russian propaganda by the largest social media companies, including Meta, Russian disinformation against Ukraine, thrived. Allowing the disinformation and hate speech to…

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Racism in online gaming is rampant. The toll on youth mental health is adding up

Racism in online gaming is rampant. The toll on youth mental health is adding up

USA Today reports: Not long ago, Amanda Calhoun, a periodic gamer, considered buying a video game with online multiplayer capability to play with other gamers online. But as she scrolled through the game’s reviews, she found complaints over the frequency with which the N-word was used by some on the platform. She decided not to buy it. For Calhoun, who is Black, the discovery was distressing, not just personally but professionally given her work in child and adolescent psychiatry. With so many…

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The real crime isn’t shoplifting — it’s wage theft

The real crime isn’t shoplifting — it’s wage theft

Jason Linkins writes: Last weekend, I stumbled across a viral tweet thread that provided a rather thorough debunking of one of my big bugbears: the insipid shoplifting panic that’s been coursing through the media the past two years. Over several posts, WBAI radio host Rafael Shimunov punctures what’s become a classic “too good to check” story and discovered that many of the foundational ideas behind what’s been sold as a bona fide crisis were falsehoods—and not particularly well-constructed ones at that. Once the evidence…

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Cats with bird flu? The threat grows

Cats with bird flu? The threat grows

Zeynep Tufekci writes: The global H5N1 avian flu outbreak, already devastating wild birds and poultry, keeps spreading to mammals, bringing it one step closer to a potential human outbreak. Of course, since the coronavirus pandemic taught us the importance of responding early and aggressively to outbreaks … Sorry, I’m joking. We don’t seem to have learned much from the Covid outbreak, and it’s not funny. Not enough has been done about an out-of-control H5N1 outbreak at fur farms in Finland or…

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New analysis suggests human ancestors nearly died out

New analysis suggests human ancestors nearly died out

Ars Technica reports: Multiple lines of evidence indicate that modern humans evolved within the last 200,000 years and spread out of Africa starting about 60,000 years ago. Before that, however, the details get a bit complicated. We’re still arguing about which ancestral population might have given rise to our lineage. Somewhere about 600,000 years ago, that lineage split off Neanderthals and Denisovans, and both of those lineages later interbred with modern humans after some of them left Africa. Figuring out…

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The GOP’s populist wing poses a threat to the North Atlantic alliance and the defense of Ukraine

The GOP’s populist wing poses a threat to the North Atlantic alliance and the defense of Ukraine

Phillips Payson O’Brien writes: Europe and the United States are on the verge of the most momentous conscious uncoupling in international relations in decades. Since 1949, NATO has been the one constant in world security. Initially an alliance among the United States, Canada, and 10 countries in Western Europe, NATO won the Cold War and has since expanded to include almost all of Europe. It has been the single most successful security grouping in modern global history. It also might…

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The alleged election office breach in ‘crooked’ Coffee County was part of a years-long pattern, some locals say

The alleged election office breach in ‘crooked’ Coffee County was part of a years-long pattern, some locals say

CNN reports: The breach of the Coffee County elections office can seem almost out of place in the 97-page Georgia indictment of former President Donald Trump and associates. The sprawling racketeering allegations spread from centers of power with pressure on the vice president to ignore the Constitution, reported calls to secretaries of state to change vote counts, and the creation of slates of fake electors for Congress. They also include the invitation of a tech team to a non-public area…

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Why Biden just can’t shake Trump in the polls

Why Biden just can’t shake Trump in the polls

Ronald Brownstein writes: Like so many bands of wind and rain, hurricane-strength squalls of bad news have battered former President Donald Trump all year. Since April, he’s been indicted four times, on 91 separate felony charges, compared with zero counts for all of his White House predecessors. Trump often likes to claim that anything associated with him is the most spectacular, even when it’s not, but when it comes to accumulating criminal charges, he’s the undisputed champ of former presidents….

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The sleeper legal fight that could define 2024: Is Trump even eligible to run?

The sleeper legal fight that could define 2024: Is Trump even eligible to run?

Politico reports: If Donald Trump wants to be on the ballot next year in all 50 states, he might first have to win an unprecedented courtroom battle over the “insurrection clause” of the 14th Amendment. Under a legal theory that’s gaining traction among Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans, that seldom-used clause arguably disqualifies Trump from ever holding office again due to his attempts to undermine the 2020 election and his role in stoking the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6,…

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