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The sad, desolate scenes of CPAC 2023

The sad, desolate scenes of CPAC 2023

Laura Jedeed writes: “It’s so great to see everyone here, and it’s so great to see a packed house, too!” It is approximately 11:15 AM in Washington DC, and investigative reporter Sara Carter is lying. The house is never crowded this early on the first day of CPAC, but even by those standards the Potomac Ballroom looks grim. The camera responsible for providing close-in crowd shots that CPAC likes to work into their livestream footage is working hard to stay…

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Fox News bosses scolded reporters who challenged false election claims

Fox News bosses scolded reporters who challenged false election claims

The Washington Post reports: As a reporter and an anchor for Fox News watched Donald Trump supporters gather at a rally in Washington, D.C., after his election defeat in November 2020, they both had some questions. Many in the crowd, said correspondent Rich Edson, “are picking up on the president’s unfounded claim that there was widespread electoral interference and that the election was stolen — no proof of that.” “What do these folks want?” wondered weekend anchor Leland Vittert. “Is…

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Ocean treaty: Historic agreement reached after decade of talks

Ocean treaty: Historic agreement reached after decade of talks

BBC News reports: Nations have reached a historic agreement to protect the world’s oceans following 10 years of negotiations. The High Seas Treaty aims to place 30% of the seas into protected areas by 2030, to safeguard and recuperate marine nature. The agreement was reached on Saturday evening, after 38 hours of talks, at UN headquarters in New York. The negotiations had been held up for years over disagreements on funding and fishing rights. The last international agreement on ocean…

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Biden’s triumphant visit to Kyiv gives way to a sober war reality

Biden’s triumphant visit to Kyiv gives way to a sober war reality

Politico reports: Last week, President Joe Biden traveled to Kyiv as an act of defiance meant to mark the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine. This week, back in Washington, grimmer realities are setting in. Biden will host German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the White House on Friday in what will be, on the surface, another display of Western unity with Ukraine as it repels Russia’s punishing invasion. But the show of solidarity comes against a backdrop of growing…

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Race to get last children out of Bakhmut as city becomes ‘hell on earth’

Race to get last children out of Bakhmut as city becomes ‘hell on earth’

Peter Beaumont writes: War breeds euphemism and metaphor. In the battle for the Donbas city of Bakhmut, threatened with a closing encirclement by Russian forces after seven months of bitter fighting, there are “White Angels” and “Dark Angels”, the “road of life” (the Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway, which is anything but) and the “Invincibility Centre”. The White Angels, a police evacuation group, scour the lethal districts of the shell-ruined city to evacuate children and the elderly. Their counterparts, the Dark Angels, take…

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EU is reaching out to other countries for joint ammo-buying scheme

EU is reaching out to other countries for joint ammo-buying scheme

Politico reports: The EU is seeking countries outside the bloc to join its efforts to collectively provide ammunition, with at least Norway already expressing interest, according to one EU official and two diplomats. The push is part of an EU plan to help provide larger quantities of lower-cost ammunition for Ukraine, while also boosting Europe’s capacity to produce and resupply its own dwindling stocks. Canada could also be included in the scheme, added a second EU official, who, like the…

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Democrats want to cut Fox off after lawsuit revelations

Democrats want to cut Fox off after lawsuit revelations

Politico reports: The thunderclap of stories showing Fox News’ role in pushing 2020 election fraud conspiracies and aiding Donald Trump’s campaign has intensified calls among Democrats to black out the network. The revelations, made public as part of a $1.6 billion lawsuit brought against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems, showed that some network hosts and executives endorsed lies about Trump’s loss, hosted conspiracy theorists whom they thought were unhinged, and overtly prioritized the company’s profit over truth. A related deposition…

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Why Biden stabbed Washington D.C. in the back

Why Biden stabbed Washington D.C. in the back

Mark Joseph Stern writes: For the first two years of his presidency, Joe Biden positioned himself as a champion of statehood and home rule in the District of Columbia. The president urged Congress to make D.C. the 51st state—even as the Senate filibuster stood in the way—and vowed to defend District residents’ right to govern themselves through their limited local democracy. Any “denial of self-governance” in D.C., he proclaimed, is “an affront to the democratic values on which our Nation…

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Documentary: Wayne Shorter – The Language of the Unknown

Documentary: Wayne Shorter – The Language of the Unknown

  Focusing on a concert performed on November 3, 2012, in the Salle Pleyel in Paris, The Language of the Unknown, explores the genius of Wayne Shorter (at that time 81) through his music and philosophy. Shorter died in Los Angeles on March 2, 2023. Shaun Brady writes: If one were to subscribe to Wayne Shorter’s philosophy — and it’s an expansive one, folding in inspiration from Buddhism, science fiction, literature, comic books and beyond, along a lifetime of boundless…

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What hunter-gatherers demonstrate about work and satisfaction

What hunter-gatherers demonstrate about work and satisfaction

Vivek V Venkataraman writes: I once drove through Peninsular Malaysia with an economist friend to visit the Batek [a small group of hunter-gatherers]. Along the way, we travelled through endless plantations of palm oil. Now and then, we came across gigantic tree stumps, poignant reminders of a former world. Palm oil plantations contain living and breathing trees but, in fact, they are just deserts of green, virtually devoid of life. I bemoaned the staggering loss of biodiversity. Then, to my…

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What’s inside Earth’s inner core? Seismic waves reveal an innermost core

What’s inside Earth’s inner core? Seismic waves reveal an innermost core

The New York Times reports: The inner core of the Earth appears to hold an innermost secret. Geology textbooks almost inevitably include a cutaway diagram of the Earth showing four neatly delineated layers: a thin outer shell of rock that we live on known as the crust; the mantle, where rocks flow like an extremely viscous liquid, driving the movement of continents and the lifting of mountains; a liquid outer core of iron and nickel that generates the planet’s magnetic…

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Attorney General Merrick Garland makes unannounced trip to Ukraine

Attorney General Merrick Garland makes unannounced trip to Ukraine

CNN reports: Attorney General Merrick Garland made an unannounced trip to Ukraine on Friday, according to a Justice Department official, his second trip to the country after Russia invaded a little more than a year ago. The trip was not announced for security reasons, the official said. Garland was invited to Lviv by the Ukrainian prosecutor general, the official said, and joined President Volodymyr Zelensky at the “United for Justice Conference.” The official added that Garland “held several meetings and…

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U.S. intel on China considering lethal aid for Putin’s war was gleaned from Russian officials

U.S. intel on China considering lethal aid for Putin’s war was gleaned from Russian officials

NBC News reports: Initial U.S. intelligence suggesting that China is considering supplying lethal aid to Russia for its war in Ukraine was gleaned from Russian government officials, according to one current and one former U.S. official familiar with the intelligence. U.S. officials then spent weeks corroborating the information from other sources of intelligence, the current and former officials said, and with allies who also brought additional streams of information. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive…

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Die-hard Trump fans make it clear: They want DeSantis

Die-hard Trump fans make it clear: They want DeSantis

Politico reports: If Gov. Ron DeSantis is using his current book tour to soft-launch a likely 2024 campaign, he’ll be very happy with the results. Roughly 250 Florida residents lined up outside a Books-A-Million store in Jacksonville Beach on Thursday morning to meet DeSantis, who started a national book tour this week to sell his autobiography “The Courage to Be Free” — and ostensibly himself. The crowd made it clear they want DeSantis to run, even it means taking on…

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In a climate of fear the defenders of free speech are holding back

In a climate of fear the defenders of free speech are holding back

Russell Jacoby writes: Salman Rushdie’s 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton, closes as its author emerges in 2002 from years in hiding; he bids goodbye to members of the security detail that has guarded him since Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa called for his death. “That was it,” Rushdie writes. “More than thirteen years after the police walked into his life, they spun on their heels and walked out of it.” Still, he wonders whether “the battle over The Satanic Verses” has ended…

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