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Author: From elsewhere

Everyone knew the migrant ship was doomed. No one helped

Everyone knew the migrant ship was doomed. No one helped

The New York Times reports: From air and by sea, using radar, telephone and radio, officials watched and listened for 13 hours as the migrant ship Adriana lost power, then drifted aimlessly off the coast of Greece in a slowly unfolding humanitarian disaster. As terrified passengers telephoned for help, humanitarian workers assured them that a rescue team was coming. European border officials, watching aerial footage, prepared to witness what was certain to be a heroic operation. Yet the Adriana capsized…

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Quantum computers could break the internet. Here’s how to save it

Quantum computers could break the internet. Here’s how to save it

Emily Conover writes: Keeping secrets is hard. Kids know it. Celebrities know it. National security experts know it, too. And it’s about to get even harder. There’s always someone who wants to get at the juicy details we’d rather keep hidden. Yet at every moment, untold volumes of private information are zipping along internet cables and optical fibers. That information’s privacy relies on encryption, a way to mathematically scramble data to prevent any snoops from deciphering it — even with…

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You really are a tick magnet

You really are a tick magnet

The New York Times reports: Most people try, or at least hope, to avoid ticks. The tiny arachnids spread a variety of harmful diseases as they expand their range to new areas. But two scientists recently set out on a counterintuitive mission to collect as many bloodsucking ticks as possible. “We had quite a few nice afternoons of frolicking around forests with bedsheets,” Sam England, a biologist at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, said. “Just dragging them, picking up…

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Homophobic businesses in the U.S. have a powerful ally: the Supreme Court

Homophobic businesses in the U.S. have a powerful ally: the Supreme Court

Moira Donegan writes: On Friday the US supreme court expanded the right to free speech into a right of businesses to discriminate. In a 6-3 decision, with the majority opinion by Neil Gorsuch, the justices declared that a Colorado civil rights statute prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in public businesses violates the first amendment’s freedom of speech. The ruling appears to formalize the right of homophobic business owners to not serve gay people in some situations. 303…

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The Supreme Court will decide if abusive spouses have a right to own guns

The Supreme Court will decide if abusive spouses have a right to own guns

Ian Millhiser writes: Last February, the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that a federal law prohibiting individuals from “possessing a firearm while under a domestic violence restraining order” is unconstitutional. On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it will hear this case. It is fairly likely that the justices will reverse the Fifth Circuit’s extraordinary decision — as many as six current members of the Court have signaled that, while some of them support an expansive…

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an insider posing as an outsider

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an insider posing as an outsider

Rebecca Traister writes: [W]hen you get more granular than Kennedy’s banner ideas about the environment and corporate capture and the forever-wars industry, what you find is not just wrong facts, or even just the “nutcase” or “anti-vaxx” stuff, but inconsistency, hypocrisy, and a deference to the status quo. The candidate’s environmental commitments, for example, go sideways when it comes to cryptocurrency. Kennedy delivered the keynote address at the Bitcoin 2023 conference this year, in which he said he would prevent…

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Putin is divorced from reality

Putin is divorced from reality

Mikhail Zygar writes: The Scarlet Sails festival is one of Russia’s most popular holidays. A celebration of high school graduates held in St. Petersburg, it culminates in a spectacular light show, where ships — including one with scarlet sails — pass along the Neva River, fireworks cracking above them. Teenagers mill about the city and drink on the banks of the river while members of the Russian elite, officials and oligarchs alike, congregate to drink champagne on their luxurious yachts….

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Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, wants shells, planes and patience

Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, wants shells, planes and patience

The Washington Post reports: For Ukraine’s counteroffensive to progress faster, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, the top officer in Ukraine’s armed forces, says he needs more — of every weapon. And he is telling anyone who will listen, including his American counterpart Gen. Mark A. Milley as recently as Wednesday, that he needs those resources now. In a rare, wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post, Zaluzhny expressed frustration that while his biggest Western backers would never launch an offensive without air superiority,…

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Judges ban Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years over ‘appalling lies’

Judges ban Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years over ‘appalling lies’

The Guardian reports: The political future of Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro has been cast into doubt after electoral judges voted to ban him from running for office for eight years for abusing his powers and peddling “immoral” and “appalling lies” during last year’s acrimonious election. Five of the superior electoral court’s seven judges voted to banish the far-right radical, who relentlessly vilified the South American country’s democratic institutions during his unsuccessful battle to win a second term in power….

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Out of the wild

Out of the wild

Samuel Matlack writes: On the Galápagos island of Floreana, a giant tortoise went extinct some 150 years ago, after human settlement. Conservationists are now working to bring its descendants, discovered on nearby islands, back to Floreana. But there is a problem: Rats, which came with the settlers and eat tortoise eggs and babies, run rampant there. If you could help bring back the tortoise by poisoning all of the island’s rats, would you do it? Here is an important detail:…

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How to end Russia’s war on Ukraine

How to end Russia’s war on Ukraine

Chatham House report: As Ukraine continues to fight to liberate its occupied territories and eject Russian invaders, its Western backers debate the likely endgame for the war and its aftermath. The international response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while impressive in many ways, remains inadequate to the task and dangerously wobbly. Russia’s wider threat to the rules-based international order is also insufficiently acknowledged. Many proposals have been put forward for how the conflict could, or should, be brought to…

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U.S. considers ATACMS long-range missiles to bolster Ukraine’s fight

U.S. considers ATACMS long-range missiles to bolster Ukraine’s fight

The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.S. has been considering approving a long-range missile system for Ukraine, American and European officials said, a move that would come as Russia grapples with unrest in its military leadership and uncertainty on the battlefield. The Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, has a range of about 190 miles, enough for Ukrainian forces to strike Russian targets far behind the front lines. President Biden hasn’t signed off on the transfer, in part out of…

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Russian Gen. Sergey Surovikin was secret VIP member of Wagner, documents show

Russian Gen. Sergey Surovikin was secret VIP member of Wagner, documents show

Breaking: Documents shared exclusively with CNN suggest missing Russian General Sergey Surovikin was a secret VIP member of the Wagner private military company. @mchancecnn reports from Moscow pic.twitter.com/HZNe2nHBYK — CNN International PR (@cnnipr) June 29, 2023 CNN reports: Documents shared exclusively with CNN suggest that Russian Gen. Sergey Surovikin was a secret VIP member of the Wagner private military company. The documents, obtained by the Russian investigative Dossier Center, showed that Surovikin had a personal registration number with Wagner. Surovikin…

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Ending affirmative action may be just the beginning

Ending affirmative action may be just the beginning

Aziz Huq writes: It is easy to think of the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill’s affirmative action programs as the end of a long road. A court with a Republican-appointed majority has been chipping away at the legality of using race to allocate state benefits since the Reagan administration. And a young lawyer in Reagan’s White House by the name of John Roberts candidly condemned state affirmative action measures in blunt terms as “highly objectionable.” Now, after…

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