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Human noise drowns out communication between dolphins

Human noise drowns out communication between dolphins

The New York Times reports: Mammals in the ocean swim through a world of sound. But in recent decades, humans have been cranking up the volume, blasting waters with noise from shipping, oil and gas exploration and military operations. New research suggests that such anthropogenic noise may make it harder for dolphins to communicate and work together. When dolphins cooperated on a task in a noisy environment, the animals were not so different from city dwellers on land trying to…

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West will likely soon respond to Ukraine’s urgent need for tanks

West will likely soon respond to Ukraine’s urgent need for tanks

The New York Times reports: Western officials increasingly fear that Ukraine has only a narrow window to prepare to repel an anticipated Russian springtime offensive, and are moving fast to give the Ukrainians sophisticated weapons they had earlier refused to send for fear of provoking Moscow. Over the last few weeks, one barrier after another has fallen, starting with an agreement by the United States in late December to send a Patriot air-defense system. That was followed by a German…

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Germany must move past the crossroads

Germany must move past the crossroads

Judy Dempsey writes: Germany’s Ostpolitik, or eastern policy, was not only about trying to use trade to influence the behavior of the former Soviet Union. Germany’s political elites, whether they were the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats, or the liberal Free Democrats, believed Ostpolitik was about maintaining stability during the Cold War. That stability was based on the division of the continent; on the Kremlin occupying Eastern Europe and denying them their freedom and independence. For the architects and ideologues of Ostpolitik, this was a price…

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Furor over handling of classified documents creates unexpected political peril for Biden

Furor over handling of classified documents creates unexpected political peril for Biden

The Washington Post reports: For Democrats traumatized by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 struggle to justify the handling of her own records — with some blaming the media for giving the story outsize influence — Thursday’s furor provided an uncomfortable hint of what might lie ahead, while threatening to muddy Democrats’ criticism of Trump for taking larger numbers of sensitive documents to his home in Mar-a-Lago. “I don’t think Biden has legal worries here, I don’t think he has political worries,” said…

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Biden’s new special counsel

Biden’s new special counsel

Semafor reports: Robert Hur, the new special counsel, had been serving as the U.S. attorney in Maryland until February 2021, shortly after President Biden took office, when he left for the private sector. He was a Trump appointee, but earned bipartisan support for his nomination — including from both Democratic senators representing his state. “He handled himself with real professionalism when he was U.S. attorney in Maryland,” Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md. told Semafor in a phone interview Thursday afternoon shortly…

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Rightwing group pours millions in ‘dark money’ into U.S. voter suppression bid

Rightwing group pours millions in ‘dark money’ into U.S. voter suppression bid

The Guardian reports: The advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative thinktank based in Washington, spent more than $5m on lobbying in 2021 as it worked to block federal voting rights legislation and advance an ambitious plan to spread its far-right agenda calling for aggressive voter suppression measures in battleground states. Previously unreported 2021 tax filings from Heritage Action for America, which operates as the foundation’s activist wing, shows that it spent $5.1m on contracting outside lobbying services….

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America exporting far-right violent extremism in Brazil and beyond

America exporting far-right violent extremism in Brazil and beyond

By Jacob Ware, Council on Foreign Relations, January 10, 2023 Just two days after Americans had marked the two-year anniversary of the horror that visited the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, an eerily familiar scene played out four thousand miles south, in Brasilia, Brazil. Angered by recent election results and perceptions of foul play, supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro stormed the Brazilian presidential palace, Congress, and Supreme Court. “It was an attack on democracy, on the constitution. It…

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‘Judicial reform’ in Israel will make it a ‘democracy in name only but not in substance,’ says attorney general

‘Judicial reform’ in Israel will make it a ‘democracy in name only but not in substance,’ says attorney general

Neri Zilber writes: On the evening of Jan. 5, a politician with the dry manners of a suburban accountant but the inner fury of a steely zealot stepped up to a podium in Jerusalem and declared his intention to end Israeli democracy. In a primetime press conference, Yariv Levin, the new justice minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s two-week-old government, announced a series of far-reaching changes to the country’s judicial system that, if put in place, would hand unchecked power to the…

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Exxon knew: Its scientists predicted global warming, even as company cast doubts, study finds

Exxon knew: Its scientists predicted global warming, even as company cast doubts, study finds

The New York Times reports: In the late 1970s, scientists at Exxon fitted one of the company’s supertankers with state-of-the-art equipment to measure carbon dioxide in the ocean and in the air, an early example of substantial research the oil giant conducted into the science of climate change. A new study published Thursday in the journal Science found that over the next decades, Exxon’s scientists made remarkably accurate projections of just how much burning fossil fuels would warm the planet….

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Rare earth mining may be key to our renewable energy future. But at what cost?

Rare earth mining may be key to our renewable energy future. But at what cost?

Carolyn Gramling writes: In spring 1949, three prospectors armed with Geiger counters set out to hunt for treasure in the arid mountains of southern Nevada and southeastern California. In the previous century, those mountains yielded gold, silver, copper and cobalt. But the men were looking for a different kind of treasure: uranium. The world was emerging from World War II and careening into the Cold War. The United States needed uranium to build its nuclear weapons arsenal. Mining homegrown sources…

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Survey finds ‘classical fascist’ antisemitic views widespread among Americans

Survey finds ‘classical fascist’ antisemitic views widespread among Americans

The Washington Post reports: At points in the past half-century, many U.S. antisemitism experts thought this country could be aging out of it, that hostility and prejudice against Jews were fading in part because younger Americans held more accepting views than did older ones. But a survey released Thursday shows how widely held such beliefs are in the United States today, including among younger Americans. The research by the Anti-Defamation League includes rare detail about the particular nature of antisemitism,…

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The U.S. may finally breach the debt ceiling. Here’s why that would be very bad

The U.S. may finally breach the debt ceiling. Here’s why that would be very bad

The New York Times reports: The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives has Washington and Wall Street bracing for a revival of brinkmanship over the nation’s statutory debt limit, raising fears that the fragile U.S. economy could be rattled by a calamitous self-inflicted wound. For years, Republicans have sought to tie spending cuts or other concessions from Democrats to their votes to lift the borrowing cap, even if it means eroding the world’s faith that the United States…

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Garland appoints special counsel to probe Biden classified documents

Garland appoints special counsel to probe Biden classified documents

The Washington Post reports: Attorney General Merrick Garland, citing what he called “extraordinary circumstances,” appointed a special counsel Thursday to investigate the handling of classified documents found at a former office and the Delaware home of President Biden — ratcheting up the legal stakes and potential political consequences of national security cases ensnaring both the current president and his predecessor. The nation’s top law enforcement official made the announcement Thursday, tapping Robert K. Hur, a former U.S. Attorney in Maryland…

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The mysterious, unregistered fund that raised big money for Santos

The mysterious, unregistered fund that raised big money for Santos

The New York Times reports: A month before George Santos was elected to Congress, one of his large donors received a call asking him to consider making another sizable contribution. The request came from a Republican loyalist calling on behalf of RedStone Strategies, which was described in an email to the donor as an “independent expenditure” group that was supporting Mr. Santos’s bid to flip a Democratic House seat in New York. The group had already raised $800,000 and was…

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