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June extremes suggest parts of the climate system are reaching tipping points

June extremes suggest parts of the climate system are reaching tipping points

Inside Climate News reports: June 2023 may be remembered as the start of a big change in the climate system, with many key global indicators flashing red warning lights amid signs that some systems are tipping toward a new state from which they may not recover. Earth’s critical reflective polar ice caps are at their lowest extent on record in the satellite era, with the sea ice around Antarctica at a record-low extent by far, spurring worried scientists to share…

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Seeing the erosion of our freedoms makes it hard to celebrate this Fourth of July

Seeing the erosion of our freedoms makes it hard to celebrate this Fourth of July

Jill Lawrence writes: Despite the promises of America’s founding documents, on Independence Day 2023, justice, the “general welfare,” “equal protection of the laws” and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are all at risk. The Supreme Court, conservative governors and gerrymandered state legislatures are racing to shrink fundamental rights and freedoms, enabled and empowered by structural inequities built into the Constitution. The result is that tens of millions of Americans are being deprived of rights that other Americans have. The scale of the disparity is frightening and growing, taking…

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Migrant workers flee Florida as new immigration law takes effect

Migrant workers flee Florida as new immigration law takes effect

The Wall Street Journal reports: Florida’s agricultural and construction industries say they are experiencing a labor shortage because a new immigration law that took effect July 1 is leading migrant workers to leave the state. The law, signed in May by Florida Gov. and GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, seeks to further criminalize undocumented immigration in the state. It makes it a third-degree felony for unauthorized people to knowingly use a false identification to obtain employment. Businesses that knowingly employ…

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Federal judge halts new Florida law he calls ‘latest assault’ on voting

Federal judge halts new Florida law he calls ‘latest assault’ on voting

Politico reports: A federal judge on Monday blocked a new Florida election law pushed by Republicans that puts restrictions on voter registration groups, calling it “Florida’s latest assault on the right to vote.” U.S. Chief District Judge Mark Walker granted a preliminary injunction against the law just days after it went into effect. Walker is an appointee of former President Barack Obama who has repeatedly ruled against the state in past legal challenges to election measures put in place by…

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Can John Roberts disarm Democratic threats to overhaul the Supreme Court?

Can John Roberts disarm Democratic threats to overhaul the Supreme Court?

Jonathan Chait writes: The Republican Party has been in desperate need of a pragmatic leader who can gauge public opinion, shrewdly husband political capital, and advance the party’s agenda in sustainable ways. That leader has materialized in the form of John Roberts. The chief justice of the United States is attempting to navigate the disjuncture between voters, who on the whole are sharply divided but have slightly favored Democrats, and the power Republicans have accumulated through the Supreme Court, which is quasi-permanent…

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Biden nominates Iran-Contra convict, Elliott Abrams, to Public Diplomacy Commission

Biden nominates Iran-Contra convict, Elliott Abrams, to Public Diplomacy Commission

CNN reports: President Joe Biden announced Monday his intention to nominate a former appointee under former President Donald Trump with a controversial past in Latin America to the bipartisan United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. Elliott Abrams, who has served in three Republican administrations, most recently acted as the Trump administration’s special envoy to Iran and Venezuela where he was tasked at the time with directing the campaign to replace Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro. The Republican insider’s long history…

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French government refuses to tackle police violence

French government refuses to tackle police violence

Pauline Bock writes: As of this week, a crowdfunding campaign set up by the French far right in support of the police officer who shot and killed Nahel M, a 17-year-old from Nanterre, has now surpassed €1.4m. Around the same time that Nahel’s killer’s fund passed the €1m mark, it was reported that at least 120 young people who had been arrested in the unrest unleashed by his death had already been sent to prison. So far, this “swift, firm…

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No Labels, backed by Clarence Thomas’s sugar daddy, has made ‘a financial and personal decision to destroy Joe Biden’

No Labels, backed by Clarence Thomas’s sugar daddy, has made ‘a financial and personal decision to destroy Joe Biden’

The Wall Street Journal reports: A centrist group is laying the groundwork to run an alternative candidate if the 2024 presidential race becomes a Donald Trump–Joe Biden rematch. It is called No Labels, but many political strategists have their own label for it: spoiler. History and recent polling suggest a third-party candidate has little chance of winning and could tip the election to Trump, the Republican former president who No Labels itself says is too dangerous to return to the…

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The ‘shrinking Baptist convention’ is doubling down on the culture wars

The ‘shrinking Baptist convention’ is doubling down on the culture wars

David Siders writes: “Things have changed in America,” Tim Wilder, the pastor at a church in Osceola County, Fla., near Disney World, told me as we rode alone in a dark shuttle bus back from a day of meetings at the city’s convention center to a nearby hotel one night. “I believe we’re in an anti-Christian nation.” The next day, at the meeting site, Angela Mathews, a retired high school history and English teacher from Murphy, Texas, told me, “It’s…

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Ron DeSantis leans hard into homophobia

Ron DeSantis leans hard into homophobia

Prem Thakker writes: Over the weekend, Ron DeSantis’s rapid response team shared a video railing against twice-impeached and twice-indicted former President Donald Trump for previous expressions of support for the LGBTQ community, proudly contrasting it with DeSantis’s outward crusade against America’s LGBTQ population. To wrap up “Pride Month,” let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it… pic.twitter.com/FT7LdW4vls — DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) June 30, 2023 The video begins by focusing on Trump’s…

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As France burns, the far right rises

As France burns, the far right rises

David A. Bell writes: What the street barricade was to France in the 19th century, the burning car has become in the 21st: a preferred means of violent protest, and a key theatrical symbol of political defiance. In 2005, after two boys named Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré died while running from police, rioters burned close to 9,000 cars across France in unrest that ultimately led President Jacques Chirac to declare a state of emergency. This year, after an officer…

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Israel attacks Jenin in biggest West Bank incursion in 20 years

Israel attacks Jenin in biggest West Bank incursion in 20 years

The Guardian reports: Israel has launched a major aerial and ground offensive into the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, its biggest military operation in the Palestinian territory in years, in what it described as an “extensive counter-terrorism effort”. At least eight Palestinians were killed and 50 injured, 10 seriously, in the attack that began at about 1am on Monday, and the death toll is likely to rise, according to the Palestinian health ministry. On Monday afternoon, Israeli sources suggested…

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Lessons for the next Arab Spring

Lessons for the next Arab Spring

Shadi Hamid writes: On July 3, 2013, the Arab Spring ended. A military coup ousted the democratically elected government of Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian president who was a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood. Today, a decade later, the role the United States played in the events leading up to the coup, and the coup itself, is still contentious. Brotherhood supporters blame the Obama administration for its unwillingness to stop the coup or even to call it one. Coup supporters, meanwhile,…

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Extracting electricity from air

Extracting electricity from air

The Observer reports: In the early 20th century, Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla dreamed of pulling limitless free electricity from the air around us. Ever ambitious, Tesla was thinking on a vast scale, effectively looking at the Earth and upper atmosphere as two ends of an enormous battery. Needless to say, his dreams were never realised, but the promise of air-derived electricity – hygroelectricity – is now capturing researchers’ imaginations again. The difference: they’re not thinking big, but very, very small….

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