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Constitutional originalism is going to get women killed

Constitutional originalism is going to get women killed

Madiba Dennie writes: American law has not historically been good to women, and whatever progress there once was is now vulnerable to regression. This return is being midwifed into the world by the theory of constitutional interpretation known as originalism—the idea that a law’s constitutionality today is dependent on the Constitution’s purported “original public meaning” when the relevant constitutional text was enacted. Its adherents market originalism as fair and free from favor or prejudice—but its effects are not and will not be…

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Republicans’ widening attack on egalitarianism

Republicans’ widening attack on egalitarianism

Jamelle Bouie writes: Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country. In states led by Republicans, conservative lawmakers have introduced or passed dozens of laws that would give religious exemptions for discrimination against transgender people, prohibit the use of bathrooms consistent with their gender identity and limit access to gender-affirming care. In lashing out against L.G.B.T.Q. people, lawmakers in at least eight states have even…

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Trump campaign paid researchers to prove 2020 fraud but then kept unwelcome findings secret

Trump campaign paid researchers to prove 2020 fraud but then kept unwelcome findings secret

The Washington Post reports: Former president Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign commissioned an outside research firm in a bid to prove electoral-fraud claims but never released the findings because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election, according to four people familiar with the matter. The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud…

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The slow UN earthquake response in northwest Syria is costing lives

The slow UN earthquake response in northwest Syria is costing lives

Tessa Fox reports: It took three days for the U.N. to announce it was readying a convoy of aid to northwest Syria, following the devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake that rocked Turkey and its neighbors in the early hours of Monday morning. While 79,110 search-and-rescue personnel, including international teams, had been deployed to Turkey’s east by Wednesday, according to Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), those struggling for their lives under the rubble of their homes in northwest Syria could…

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Turkey’s earthquake response is as political as the conditions that increased the devastation

Turkey’s earthquake response is as political as the conditions that increased the devastation

Jenna Krajeski writes: When the first earthquake, 7.8 in magnitude, struck just outside Gaziantep on Monday morning, Gürkan Arpaci considered himself lucky. About eighty miles away, in Elbistan, the small Turkish town where Arpaci was born and lives, only three or four buildings had collapsed and there didn’t seem to be too many casualties. Almost everyone he knew appeared on the street in the freezing pre-dawn hour, wondering what to do next. Arpaci’s family has two cars, one belonging to…

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Russia is draining a massive Ukrainian reservoir, endangering a nuclear plant

Russia is draining a massive Ukrainian reservoir, endangering a nuclear plant

NPR reports: Russia appears to be draining an enormous reservoir in Ukraine, imperiling drinking water, agricultural production and safety at Europe’s largest nuclear plant, according to satellite data obtained by NPR. Since early November 2022, water has been gushing out of the Kakhovka Reservoir, in Southern Ukraine, through sluice gates at a critical hydroelectric power plant controlled by Russian forces. As a result, satellite data shows that the water level at the reservoir has plummeted to its lowest point in…

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Moldova names new pro-EU prime minister after government falls amid Russian pressure

Moldova names new pro-EU prime minister after government falls amid Russian pressure

Politico reports: Moldovan President Maia Sandu on Friday nominated a new prime minister to keep her country on a pro-EU trajectory after the previous government fell earlier in the day, following months of rising Russian pressure amid the war in Ukraine. She named Dorin Recean, a noted pro-EU figure and current national security adviser, to replace Natalia Gavrilița, as the new head of government. The Moldovan parliament, where Sandu’s party holds a comfortable majority with 63 out of 101 seats,…

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Ron DeSantis’s New College takeover is just the beginning of the right’s higher ed crusade

Ron DeSantis’s New College takeover is just the beginning of the right’s higher ed crusade

Vanity Fair reports: It took New College president Patricia Okker three attempts to deliver her farewell remarks. She kept being interrupted during last week’s board meeting in Sarasota, Florida, including once by a member of the school’s board of trustees, making a motion to terminate her without cause. Okker had been addressing the dozens of students, faculty, and parents who’d come to defend her record—and the hundreds more outside who weren’t admitted—saying she was sorry to disappoint them, but she…

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Hominids used stone tool kits to butcher animals earlier than once thought

Hominids used stone tool kits to butcher animals earlier than once thought

Science News reports: Nearly 3 million years ago, hominids employed stone tool kits to butcher hippos and pound plants along what’s now the shores of Kenya’s Lake Victoria, researchers say. Evidence of those food preparation activities pushes back hominids’ use of these tool kits, known as Oldowan implements, by roughly 300,000 years, say paleoanthropologist Thomas Plummer of Queen’s College, City University of New York and colleagues. That makes these finds possibly the oldest known stone tools. Several dating techniques place…

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The GOP is starting to plot against Donald Trump

The GOP is starting to plot against Donald Trump

David Freedlander writes: “It is,” he said, “A five-alarm fire. And there is nobody coming to put it out.” “It,” in this case, is the possibility that once again Donald Trump will prevail over a splintered Republican field, getting the same 30-40 percent he received in the early primaries in 2016, enough to win the nomination. “He,” is a Republican donor and bundler, a Wall Street financier who regularly hobnobs with senior Republican officials but who also was, uniquely for…

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Chinese surveillance balloon carried antennas, other equipment to gather intelligence, U.S. says

Chinese surveillance balloon carried antennas, other equipment to gather intelligence, U.S. says

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Chinese balloon that crossed the U.S. carried antennas and sensors for collecting intelligence and communications, administration officials said, laying out the most detailed evidence to date about China’s surveillance program. The new information was described Thursday by a range of officials from the Pentagon, State Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation as the Biden administration prepared to take unspecified action against companies and entities linked to the Chinese balloon program that the U.S. says…

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How the case of arrested FBI agent Charles McGonigal is tied to a Russia-linked influence effort

How the case of arrested FBI agent Charles McGonigal is tied to a Russia-linked influence effort

Mother Jones reports: It was shocking news: Charles McGonigal, a former counterintelligence chief for the FBI, was arrested for his alleged role in two separate schemes. In one, he purportedly accepted $225,000 from an Albanian American businessman, while he was still in the FBI, and did favors for that businessman and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. In the other, McGonigal, after he retired in 2018, allegedly provided investigative services to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was sanctioned in 2018 for assisting the global “malign” activities of Putin’s…

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Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room’ podcast is top misinformation spreader, study says

Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room’ podcast is top misinformation spreader, study says

The New York Times reports: When Stephen K. Bannon, the White House strategist turned podcaster, was explaining the latest Covid-19 developments in 2021, he passed the microphone to a special guest: Clay Clark, an evangelist and anti-vaccine activist. For nearly 10 minutes, Mr. Clark rattled off one false and misleading statement after another. Covid is “100 percent treatable” with hydroxychloroquine and other drugs. (No.) Covid vaccines are filled with fetal tissue. (False.) Concentration camps are coming. (Nope.) Bill Gates owns…

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