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Elon Musk bows to pressure from India to censor BBC documentary critical of Modi

Elon Musk bows to pressure from India to censor BBC documentary critical of Modi

The Intercept reports: Twitter and YouTube censored a report critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in coordination with the government of India. Officials called for the Big Tech companies to take action against a BBC documentary exploring Modi’s role in a genocidal 2002 massacre in the Indian state of Gujarat, which the officials deemed a “propaganda piece.” In a series of posts, Kanchan Gupta, senior adviser at the Indian government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, denounced the BBC documentary…

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Archives weighs asking past presidents, VPs to look for classified items

Archives weighs asking past presidents, VPs to look for classified items

The Washington Post reports: The National Archives is weighing whether to ask living former presidents and vice presidents to review their personal records to verify that no classified materials are inadvertently outstanding, according to two people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations. The deliberation comes after the discovery and return of a limited number of records bearing classified markings in recent weeks at President Biden’s home and a think tank bearing…

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Elephants, the gardeners of Africa’s rainforests, play a vital role in promoting carbon retention

Elephants, the gardeners of Africa’s rainforests, play a vital role in promoting carbon retention

Anthropocene magazine reports: Elephants been called a lot of things: the world’s largest land creatures, imperiled, majestic, charismatic. Now scientists have a few more terms for describing them: foresters and climate champions. In the jungles of equatorial Africa, scientists report that forest elephants play an important role in shaping the forest around them as they vacuum up as much as 200 kilograms worth of plants every day. Their appetites influence not just what trees survive but how much carbon the…

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Germany and U.S. poised to send battle tanks to Ukraine

Germany and U.S. poised to send battle tanks to Ukraine

Politico reports: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is set to announce the delivery of German Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine on Wednesday, two officials with knowledge of the matter told POLITICO. That decision is a significant U-turn and potentially a decisive moment in the war as it should pave the way for a broader coalition of countries to send battle tanks to the frontlines against the Russian invaders. As Leopard 2 tanks are made in Germany, Berlin has to give its…

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Pence and Biden demonstrate how to handle mishandled classified documents

Pence and Biden demonstrate how to handle mishandled classified documents

Politico reports: The Justice Department has taken possession of a “small number” of documents with classified markings that former Vice President Mike Pence found in his Indiana residence earlier this month, according to Greg Jacob, the custodian of Pence’s White House records. In a Jan. 22 letter to the National Archives, Jacob indicated that FBI agents came to Pence’s Indiana home on the night of Jan. 19 to retrieve documents that the former vice president had located a few days…

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Former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, gears up for likely 2024 run for president

Former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, gears up for likely 2024 run for president

CNBC reports: Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under former President Donald Trump, has hired key staff and is canvassing potential donors as she explores a presidential run against her former boss in 2024, according to people briefed on her plans. Haley is putting together a national finance committee and communications team in advance of a potential campaign, these people explained. Some of the new hires have been directed to report for work at Haley’s nonprofit…

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Mike Pompeo dismisses murder of Jamal Khashoggi by saying such crimes are ‘routine’ in Middle East

Mike Pompeo dismisses murder of Jamal Khashoggi by saying such crimes are ‘routine’ in Middle East

In response to comments reportedly made by Mike Pompeo in his new memoir, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) issued the following statement: “Pompeo’s crass and craven comments appearing to justify Jamal Khashoggi’s murder by disparaging his political views and falsely associating them with terrorism mirror the same justifications Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and other tyrants use to excuse their crimes,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Executive Director of DAWN. “It is despicable that a senior American official is suggesting…

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Could independents upend U.S. climate politics?

Could independents upend U.S. climate politics?

Alexander Burns writes: A small band of political strategists gathered last September in a restaurant near Dupont Circle to meet a visitor from the other side of the world. Everyone at the table was immersed in the battle against climate change; nearly all had been involved in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, the clean-energy law Democrats enacted over the summer. Their guest was Byron Fay, an Australian operative who had arrived in Washington with an exotic political scheme in mind….

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Has Earth’s inner core stopped its strange spin?

Has Earth’s inner core stopped its strange spin?

Nature reports: Thousands of kilometres beneath your feet, Earth’s interior might be doing something very weird. Many scientists think that the inner core spins faster than the rest of the planet — but sometime in the past decade, according to a study, it apparently stopped doing so. “We were quite surprised,” say Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song, seismologists at Peking University in Beijing who reported the findings today in Nature Geoscience. The results could help to shine light on the…

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How gut bacteria are controlling your brain

How gut bacteria are controlling your brain

Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren write: Your gut is a bustling and thriving alien colony. They number in their trillions and include thousands of different species. Many of these microorganisms, including bacteria, archaea and eukarya, were here long before humans, have evolved alongside us and now outnumber our own cells many times over. Indeed, as John Cryan, a professor of anatomy and neuroscience at University College Cork, rather strikingly put it in a TEDx talk: “When you go to the…

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Former FBI executive allegedly ‘committed the very violations he swore to investigate’ by taking payments from Russian oligarch

Former FBI executive allegedly ‘committed the very violations he swore to investigate’ by taking payments from Russian oligarch

The New York Times reports: A former high-level F.B.I. official has been indicted in New York and Washington, D.C., on charges of taking money from a former foreign intelligence service agent and conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions on Russia by taking secret payments from a Russian oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska, the authorities said on Monday. The former official, Charles McGonigal, who had been the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence division in New York before he retired in…

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UK government helped sanctioned Putin ally sue British journalist

UK government helped sanctioned Putin ally sue British journalist

Open Democracy reports: The UK government helped the boss of Russia’s murderous mercenary army to circumvent its own sanctions and launch a targeted legal attack on a British journalist, openDemocracy can reveal. Yevgeny Prigozhin is the founder of Wagner, a private army that the US government last week announced it would designate a “transnational criminal organisation”, allowing it to impose even tougher sanctions on the group. For years it has been accused of human rights abuses and war crimes in…

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Berlin not blocking export of tanks to Ukraine, EU diplomat says

Berlin not blocking export of tanks to Ukraine, EU diplomat says

Reuters reports: Germany is not blocking the re-export of Leopard tanks to Ukraine, the European Union’s top diplomat said on Monday, after Poland vowed to send some as long as other countries did too. The Kyiv government wants the German-made Leopard 2, one of the most widely used Western tanks, to help it break through Russian lines and recapture territory this year. Germany, which must approve re-exports of the Leopard, has held back, wary of moves that could cause Moscow…

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Depleted under Trump, a ‘traumatized’ EPA struggles with its mission

Depleted under Trump, a ‘traumatized’ EPA struggles with its mission

The New York Times reports: The nation’s top environmental agency is still reeling from the exodus of more than 1,200 scientists and policy experts during the Trump administration. The chemicals chief said her staff can’t keep up with a mounting workload. The enforcement unit is prosecuting fewer polluters than at any time in the past two decades. And now this: the stressed-out, stretched-thin Environmental Protection Agency is scrambling to write about a half dozen highly complex rules and regulations that…

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