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Florida is where free speech goes to die

Florida is where free speech goes to die

Bess Levin writes: One of Florida governor Ron DeSantis‘s favorite little mottos is “Florida is where woke goes to die.” In fact, a better, more accurate motto would be “Ron DeSantis’s Florida is where free speech goes to die, unless you’ve agreed to the governor’s list of preapproved talking points, like that LGBTQ+ people don’t exist, white people are and have always been awesome, and nonwhite people have nothing to complain about.” Defenders of the governor will not like this…

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Russian agents suspected of directing far-right group to mail bombs in Spain

Russian agents suspected of directing far-right group to mail bombs in Spain

The New York Times reports: American and European officials believe that Russian military intelligence officers directed associates of a white supremacist militant group based in Russia to carry out a recent letter bomb campaign in Spain whose most prominent targets were the prime minister, the defense minister and foreign diplomats, according to U.S. officials. Spanish and foreign investigators have been looking into who sent six letter bombs in late November and early December to sites mostly in Madrid, including the…

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MI5 refused to investigate ‘Russian spy’s’ links to Tories, says whistleblower

MI5 refused to investigate ‘Russian spy’s’ links to Tories, says whistleblower

Carole Cadwalladr reports: MI5 repeatedly refused to investigate evidence that an alleged Russian spy was attempting to cultivate influence with senior Conservative politicians and channel illegal Russian funds into the party, a Tory member has alleged in a new complaint lodged with the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT). Sergei Cristo, a Conservative party activist and a former journalist with the BBC World Service, has lodged a complaint with the investigatory powers tribunal, filing the case after corresponding with the chair of…

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American lawmakers urge U.S. to ship Abrams tanks to Ukraine

American lawmakers urge U.S. to ship Abrams tanks to Ukraine

Reuters reports: American lawmakers on Sunday pushed the U.S. government to export M1 Abrams main battle tanks to Ukraine, saying that even sending a symbolic number to Kyiv would be enough to push European allies to do the same. Michael McCaul, the newly installed Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told ABC’s “This Week” that “just one” Abrams tank would be enough to prompt allies, notably Germany, to unlock their own tank inventories for the fight against Russia….

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Supreme Court leak investigation ends with justices appearing as above the law

Supreme Court leak investigation ends with justices appearing as above the law

The New York Times reports: Last spring and summer, employees of the Supreme Court were drawn into an investigation that turned into an uncomfortable awakening. As the court marshal’s office looked into who had leaked the draft opinion of the decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, law clerks who had secured coveted perches at the top of the judiciary scrambled for legal advice and navigated quandaries like whether to surrender their personal cellphones to investigators. The “court family” soon…

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Trump team struggles to consolidate support ahead of S.C. event

Trump team struggles to consolidate support ahead of S.C. event

The Washington Post reports: Advisers to Donald Trump have blanketed South Carolina Republican officials with pleading phone calls in recent weeks in an effort to drum up endorsements and attendees for the former president’s first campaign swing of the 2024 cycle next week. But the appeals have run headlong into a complicated new reality: Many of the state’s lawmakers and political operatives, and even some of his previous supporters, are not ready to pick a presidential candidate. They find themselves…

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Standard model of cosmology survives a telescope’s surprising finds

Standard model of cosmology survives a telescope’s surprising finds

Rebecca Boyle writes: The cracks in cosmology were supposed to take a while to appear. But when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) opened its lens last spring, extremely distant yet very bright galaxies immediately shone into the telescope’s field of view. “They were just so stupidly bright, and they just stood out,” said Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The galaxies’ apparent distances from Earth suggested that they formed much earlier in the history of…

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We can still see these five traces of ancestor species in all human bodies today

We can still see these five traces of ancestor species in all human bodies today

Elia Pellegrini/Unsplash By Alice Clement, Flinders University Many of us are returning to work or school after spending time with relatives over the summer period. Sometimes we can be left wondering how on earth we are related to some of these people with whom we seemingly have nothing in common (especially with a particularly annoying relative). However, in evolutionary terms, we all share ancestors if we go far enough back in time. This means many features in our bodies stretch…

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European leadership on Ukraine comes from smaller nations

European leadership on Ukraine comes from smaller nations

Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: In the weeks leading up to Friday’s conference of the two dozen nations of the Ukraine Contact Group at the U.S.-run Ramstein Air Base in southwest Germany, there has been a steady trickle of information about what military hardware allies were planning to send to the war-torn nation to help bolster its defenses and launch counteroffensives to repel Russia’s invasion. For most participants who attended Friday’s meeting, the most coveted outcome eluded them. No…

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Germany continues standing in the way of effort to supply Ukraine with tanks

Germany continues standing in the way of effort to supply Ukraine with tanks

Politico reports: Germany dashed Ukrainian hopes that Berlin would finally decide on Friday to send modern battle tanks to Kyiv’s forces, with German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius arguing there was no international agreement yet on the topic. Speaking outside a meeting of defense ministers at the U.S. Ramstein military base in Germany, Pistorius said his government had still not agreed to a Ukrainian request for German’s Leopard 2 tanks to aid an expected spring offensive. “We all cannot say today…

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Federal judge rules Trump is ‘the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process’

Federal judge rules Trump is ‘the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process’

The New York Times reports: In a scathing ruling, a federal judge in Florida on Thursday ordered Donald J. Trump and one of his lawyers together to pay nearly a million dollars in sanctions for filing a frivolous lawsuit against nearly three dozen of Mr. Trump’s perceived political enemies, including Hillary Clinton and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey. The ruling was a significant rebuke of Mr. Trump, who has rarely faced such consequences in his long history of…

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In Supreme Court leak investigation, justices were questioned but not asked to give a sworn affidavit

In Supreme Court leak investigation, justices were questioned but not asked to give a sworn affidavit

CNBC reports: Each of the Supreme Court’s justices was questioned — some of them multiple times — as part of an investigation into last year’s leak of a draft opinion of the ruling that ended up overturning the court’s landmark Roe v. Wade abortion decision, the head of that probe revealed Friday. The statement came a day after the Supreme Court refused to say whether the justices were among the nearly 100 court staffers and clerks who were questioned in…

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Jacinda Ardern, the rare politician who knew when to quit

Jacinda Ardern, the rare politician who knew when to quit

Stephen Collinson writes: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it,” William Shakespeare writes of an executed rebel in “Macbeth.” Today’s leaders, however, often struggle to embrace an equivalent vision of a dignified exit from political life when their time comes. Jacinda Ardern is the rare leader who is choosing to leave the stage, not to be pushed off it. New Zealand’s prime minister said Thursday that she had “no more in the tank” after five years in…

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New data show that light pollution is rapidly obscuring the night sky

New data show that light pollution is rapidly obscuring the night sky

Science News reports: The night sky has been brightening faster than researchers realized, thanks to the use of artificial lights at night. A study of more than 50,000 observations of stars by citizen scientists reveals that the night sky grew about 10 percent brighter, on average, every year from 2011 to 2022. In other words, a baby born in a region where roughly 250 stars were visible every night would see only 100 stars on their 18th birthday, researchers report…

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