Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

Russian public appears to be souring on war casualties, analysis shows

Russian public appears to be souring on war casualties, analysis shows

The New York Times reports: Public sentiment in Russia over war casualties has been turning more negative during the intense fighting in recent months in eastern Ukraine, according to a new analysis. U.S. officials have highlighted the huge numbers of Russian troops killed and wounded in Bakhmut, Ukraine, in recent months, which they estimate to be more than 100,000. The city has become the scene of the most intense urban combat in Europe since World War II. Those losses appear…

Read More Read More

Tech layoffs ravage the teams that fight online misinformation and hate speech

Tech layoffs ravage the teams that fight online misinformation and hate speech

CNBC reports: Toward the end of 2022, engineers on Meta’s team combating misinformation were ready to debut a key fact-checking tool that had taken half a year to build. The company needed all the reputational help it could get after a string of crises had badly damaged the credibility of Facebook and Instagram and given regulators additional ammunition to bear down on the platforms. The new product would let third-party fact-checkers like The Associated Press and Reuters, as well as…

Read More Read More

Ancient humans may have paused in Arabia for 30,000 years on their way out of Africa

Ancient humans may have paused in Arabia for 30,000 years on their way out of Africa

Shutterstock By Ray Tobler, Australian National University; Shane T Grey, Garvan Institute, and Yassine Souilmi, University of Adelaide Most scientists agree modern humans developed in Africa, more than 200,000 years ago, and that a great human diaspora across much of the rest of the world occurred between perhaps 60,000 and 50,000 years ago. In new research published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, we have uncovered dozens of distinctive historical changes in the human genome to reveal a…

Read More Read More

Why color is in the eye of the beholder

Why color is in the eye of the beholder

James Fox writes: In February 2015, a Scottish woman uploaded a photograph of a dress to the internet. Within 48 hours the blurry snapshot had gone viral, provoking spirited debate around the world. The disagreement centred on the dress’s colour: some people were convinced it was blue and black while others were adamant it was white and gold. Everyone, it seemed, was incredulous. People couldn’t understand how, faced with exactly the same photograph of exactly the same dress, they could…

Read More Read More

Supreme Court has appointed itself as ‘national decision maker on environmental policy,’ writes Justice Kagan

Supreme Court has appointed itself as ‘national decision maker on environmental policy,’ writes Justice Kagan

The New York Times reports: The Supreme Court on Thursday curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to police millions of acres of wetlands, delivering another setback to the agency’s ability to combat pollution. Writing for five justices, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the Clean Water Act does not allow the agency to regulate discharges into wetlands near bodies of water unless they have “a continuous surface connection” to those waters. The decision was a second major blow to…

Read More Read More

Trump workers moved Mar-a-Lago boxes a day before Justice Dept. came for documents

Trump workers moved Mar-a-Lago boxes a day before Justice Dept. came for documents

The Washington Post reports: Two of Donald Trump’s employees moved boxes of papers the day before FBI agents and a prosecutor visited the former president’s Florida home to retrieve classified documents in response to a subpoena — timing that investigators have come to view as suspicious and an indication of possible obstruction, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump and his aides also allegedly carried out a “dress rehearsal” for moving sensitive papers even before his office received the…

Read More Read More

DeSantis’s launch wasn’t the only thing that crashed

DeSantis’s launch wasn’t the only thing that crashed

David Frum writes: In the aftermath of the debacle, declaring a presidential run in a Twitter chat may appear to have been a miscalculation. Yet it started as a calculation entirely in keeping with DeSantis’s style of campaigning. DeSantis’s ads raise barriers between the candidate and the voters. In his first one, voters again and again encounter the candidate via a screen: They see him on TV, on their phone. In the one scene in which the candidate is inserted among…

Read More Read More

Casey DeSantis is ‘the power behind the throne’

Casey DeSantis is ‘the power behind the throne’

Michael Kruse writes: A telegenic former television personality, a breast cancer survivor and a mother of three young kids, Casey, 42, has a sort of policy portfolio of her own that ranges from hurricane recovery to issues of mental health. In the DeSantis political project, she is unusually important and uncommonly involved, according to hundreds of interviews over the last few years and more than 60 more over the last few weeks — an array of former staffers, current supporters…

Read More Read More

The media has got Ron DeSantis nailed

The media has got Ron DeSantis nailed

Jack Shafer writes: Noting both his rigid demeanor and his deliberate avoidance of the nonpartisan press, the reporters covering DeSantis have gathered these behavioral cues to sew the candidate a straitjacketed image, portraying him as a locked up, frozen and vengeful character whose veins pump bile, not blood. He’s now in a box — likely for his entire 2024 campaign — that will be difficult to break out of, even for the most talented escape artist. Like many press portraits,…

Read More Read More

Russia’s ‘invincible’ hypersonic missiles prove anything but, as Ukraine utilizes U.S. Patriot defenses

Russia’s ‘invincible’ hypersonic missiles prove anything but, as Ukraine utilizes U.S. Patriot defenses

Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: It was meant to be the Russian “wonder weapon,” but it turned out to be just another example of Vladimir Putin’s military over-promising and under-delivering. The Kh-47M2 “Kinzhal” — which means “dagger” in Russian — was billed as a state-of-the-art hypersonic missile, “invincible,” in Putin’s words, to Western air defenses. For the early months of Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine, it seemed to be just that. The missile had been used in the first…

Read More Read More

Is it real or imagined? How your brain tells the difference

Is it real or imagined? How your brain tells the difference

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Those aren’t just lyrics from the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” They’re also the questions that the brain must constantly answer while processing streams of visual signals from the eyes and purely mental pictures bubbling out of the imagination. Brain scan studies have repeatedly found that seeing something and imagining it evoke highly similar patterns of neural activity. Yet for most of us, the subjective experiences they produce are…

Read More Read More

The deepening radicalization of Donald J. Trump

The deepening radicalization of Donald J. Trump

The Washington Post reports: In the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021, President Donald Trump stayed mostly silent, and when he finally delivered his farewell address to the nation, he disavowed the attack on the U.S. Capitol as something that “all Americans were horrified by” and “can never be tolerated.” Now, as Trump seeks to return to the White House, he speaks of Jan. 6 as “a beautiful day.” He says there was no reason for police to shoot the…

Read More Read More

Why aren’t we talking more about Trump’s business with the Saudis?

Why aren’t we talking more about Trump’s business with the Saudis?

Philip Bump writes: The Republican-led House Oversight Committee has spent most of the past five months hard at work trying to link “the Biden family” (read: relatives of President Biden but not Biden himself) to millions of dollars proffered by foreign business interests before Biden became president. With the 2024 presidential campaign already at the top of the political conversation, the idea that some revelation might prove to be politically damaging to the incumbent is obviously a central motivation. It…

Read More Read More

There’s a clear model for how the Supreme Court could solve its ethics problem

There’s a clear model for how the Supreme Court could solve its ethics problem

Norm Ornstein writes: The crisis in legitimacy in American political institutions is palpable. Radical partisan and racial gerrymandering have undermined confidence in legislatures across the country—and contributed to outrages like the expulsion of Black lawmakers in Tennessee. Radical district judges in Texas have abused their authority in order to attempt to force nationwide bans on an abortion medication and on critical parts of the Affordable Care Act. But nowhere is the challenge greater than in the United States Supreme Court. Over the past couple of months, astonishing…

Read More Read More