Music: Jazzbois — ‘Mosquitoh’
The criminal charges against Trump aren’t actually helping him in the GOP primary race, research suggests
Russell Berman writes: In the months since Donald Trump’s indictments started piling up, pollsters have noticed something remarkable: The dozens of criminal charges brought against the former president have seemed to boost his standing in the Republican presidential primary. Trump has widened his already commanding lead over his rivals, and in poll after poll, GOP voters have said that the charges make them more—not less—likely to vote for him again. The dynamic has turned an infamous example of Trumpian bravado—his…
Bucks County power struggle could hint at shifting suburban politics for 2024
Politico reports: An obscure race for county commissioner underway here in a suburb outside of Philadelphia could tell us a lot about who will win the presidential election in 2024. Bucks County is one of the swingiest counties in one of the swingiest states in America. President Joe Biden won it in 2020. So did Sen. John Fetterman and Gov. Josh Shapiro two years later. But it’s represented by a Republican in Congress, perennial battlegrounder Brian Fitzpatrick, and conservatives staged…
In talks with prosecutors, Hunter Biden’s lawyers vowed to put the president on the stand
Politico reports: It was Halloween of 2022, and Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Chris Clark, didn’t sound happy. Just three weeks earlier, news had leaked that federal agents believed they had enough evidence to charge his client with illegally buying a gun as a drug user. The leak was “illegal,” the lawyer wrote to the U.S. attorney overseeing the probe. The prosecution, he argued, would be seen as purely political, and it might even violate the Second Amendment. Then he issued a…
White House is torn over Joe Manchin’s fury at climate law he crafted
The Washington Post reports: The obscure federal agency that oversees the nation’s immense tangle of pipelines, power lines and transfer stations is unfamiliar to most Americans. But it has very much been on Sen. Joe Manchin III’s mind. By the end of last year, the West Virginia Democrat had become deeply displeased with how the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was helping the Biden administration advance its aggressive climate goals. Manchin, a staunch ally of fossil fuel interests, was particularly critical…
Environmental activists are fleeing Elon Musk’s Twitter
Quartz reports: Scientists and environmental activists have been fleeing Twitter—now called X—after Elon Musk bought the social platform and took a wrecking ball to its innards. A study (pdf) published in a journal called Trends in Evolution and Ecology on Aug.15 showed, that out of a sample of 380,000 environmentally oriented X users, “nearly 50% became inactive” after Musk’s acquisition. This rate, the researchers found, was “much higher than a control sample.” By April 2023, only 52.5% of sampled environmental activists on X were still active. The study was conducted between Dec. 2022 and May 2023. Days after…
As dead dolphins wash ashore, Ukraine builds a case of ecocide against Russia
The New York Times reports: The victim was found along a stretch of beach near the port city of Odesa in southern Ukraine early this summer, cause of death unknown. As a light rain fell in the open field where the necropsy would take place, law enforcement officials, a representative of the local prosecutors’ office and civilian witnesses gathered to watch. On the beach was a harbor porpoise. They are washing up dead in droves on the shores of the…
Light pollution and drought are pushing fireflies toward extinction
CBS News reports: Fireflies are the romantics of the insect world. In the summer months, they emerge from the ground with love on the brain. They only live for two to three weeks once they’ve become full adults and in that time they don’t even eat. They’re too busy flirting. Fireflies — or lightning bugs, depending on where you grew up — are one of the only insects with elaborate courtship dialogues, said Avalon Owens, a research fellow at Harvard….
Music: Jazzbois — ‘The Sneeze’
The Constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again
J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe write: As students of the United States Constitution for many decades—one of us as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, the other as a professor of constitutional law, and both as constitutional advocates, scholars, and practitioners—we long ago came to the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment, the amendment ratified in 1868 that represents our nation’s second founding and a new birth of freedom, contains within it a protection against the dissolution of the…
How do we fix the scandal that is American health care?
Nicholas Kristof writes: It’s not just that life expectancy in Mississippi (71.9) now appears to be a hair shorter than in Bangladesh (72.4). Nor that an infant is some 70 percent more likely to die in the United States than in other wealthy countries. Nor even that for the first time in probably a century, the likelihood that an American child will live to the age of 20 has dropped. All that is tragic and infuriating, but to me the…
The GOP might be over its war on ‘woke’
HuffPost reports: Jill Connell is sick of hearing the word “woke.” The 66-year-old from Kansas is an undecided Republican voter with a host of concerns about the country, and she knows for sure what doesn’t top that list. “To me, wokeness is, ‘Hey, I woke up this morning,’” Connell said, employing the most literal definition of a word the right uses to describe what it sees as left-wing ideas and political correctness. “I call it goofy — it’s ridiculous. I’m…
They integrated Little Rock’s schools. Now they’re slamming restrictions on AP African American Studies
NBC News reports: Several surviving members of the Little Rock Nine, a group of students who in 1957 integrated Little Rock Central High School under threats of violence from white segregationists, are denouncing the Arkansas Department of Education’s restrictions on an Advanced Placement African American Studies course. The state is not barring students from taking the class but has cautioned that the coursework may not count toward the state’s high school graduation requirements. The Arkansas Department of Education has argued…
Robo-taxis are legal now
Anna Wiener writes: The California Public Utilities Commission—a state agency that regulates power, water, and telecommunications companies, as well as movers, taxicabs, rideshare services, and self-driving cars—is headquartered in a large, curved building on Van Ness Avenue, in San Francisco, that looks a bit like a sun visor. Last Thursday morning, a small group of protesters gathered on the steps in advance of the commission’s vote on whether to allow the autonomous-vehicle companies Cruise and Waymo to expand their fleets,…
What if you knew what you were missing on social media?
Julia Angwin writes: Social media can feel like a giant newsstand, with more choices than any newsstand ever. It contains news not only from journalism outlets, but also from your grandma, your friends, celebrities and people in countries you have never visited. It is a bountiful feast. But so often you don’t get to pick from the buffet. On most social media platforms, algorithms use your behavior to narrow in on the posts you are shown. If you send a…
Have astronomers finally found a meteorite from outside the solar system?
Astronomy reports: After an expedition that spent about 10 days scouring the ocean floor off Papua New Guinea with a magnetic sled, Harvard University astrophysicist Avi Loeb says he has collected more than 700 metallic spherules that are now undergoing detailed examination in his lab at Harvard as well as at least two other independent labs that he asked to help out. Loeb believes that many of these spherules, each less than a millimeter across (about the size of a…