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Talk of ‘civil war,’ ignited by FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, is flaring online

Talk of ‘civil war,’ ignited by FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, is flaring online

The New York Times reports: Soon after the F.B.I. searched Donald J. Trump’s home in Florida for classified documents, online researchers zeroed in on a worrying trend. Posts on Twitter that mentioned “civil war” had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours as Mr. Trump’s supporters blasted the action as a provocation. Similar spikes followed, including on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Parler, Gab and Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform. Mentions of the phrase more than doubled on…

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Pakistan’s ‘End of Days’ 2022 monsoon season

Pakistan’s ‘End of Days’ 2022 monsoon season

  “Terrible devastation.” With those two words, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif summed-up the 2022 monsoon season in Pakistan, home to one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable societies … and one having made only scant contributions to the mounting carbon dioxide emissions at the heart of human-caused climate change. On top of historically damaging flooding in 2010, this year brought a far worse monsoon season to the country, which has the most glaciers (7,253) of any country outside of the…

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What does sustainable living look like? Maybe like Uruguay

What does sustainable living look like? Maybe like Uruguay

Noah Gallagher Shannon writes: Let’s say you live in the typical American household. It doesn’t exist, not in any sense except in a data set, but it’s easy enough to imagine. Maybe it’s your aunt’s, or your neighbor’s, or a bit like your own. Since more than half of us live outside big cities, it’s probably in a middle-class suburb, like Fox Lake, north of Chicago. You picked it because it’s affordable and not a terrible commute to your job….

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We mustn’t be cowed by the bluster of a bully who knows he’s losing

We mustn’t be cowed by the bluster of a bully who knows he’s losing

Mikhail Khodorkovsky writes: When declaring the annexation of Ukraine’s Luhansk, Donetsk, and parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin showed characteristic contempt for the truth. The announcement followed sham referenda reflecting Putin’s brand of democracy — where voting takes place at gunpoint and the outcome is predetermined. Delivered amid deranged bombast regarding the “satanic” West, this was Putin’s latest attempt to regain the initiative and deflect attention from the fact that he’s losing his…

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Russia’s elites are starting to admit the possibility of defeat

Russia’s elites are starting to admit the possibility of defeat

Tatiana Stanovaya writes: When Vladimir Putin launched his war against Ukraine back in February, many believed a Rubicon had been crossed after which the Russian president’s relationship with his elites would never be the same. It was then that Putin began to be seen as a desperate leader, no longer capable of normal interaction with the outside world. Nonetheless, the feelings of despondency and doom that prevailed among the elites didn’t stop them from continuing to demonstrate loyalty to the…

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Ukraine hammers Russian forces into retreat on east and south fronts

Ukraine hammers Russian forces into retreat on east and south fronts

The Washington Post reports: Ukrainian troops on Tuesday accelerated their military advances on two fronts, pushing Russian forces into retreat in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions to the east and Kherson region to the south. The gains showed Kyiv continuing to recapture occupied territory on the same day that President Vladimir Putin and his rubber-stamp parliament sought to formalize their increasingly far-fetched annexation claims of four Ukrainian regions. “The Ukrainian armed forces commanders in the south and east are throwing…

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Woman, Life, Liberty: A slogan one hundred years in the making

Woman, Life, Liberty: A slogan one hundred years in the making

Nahid Siamdoust writes: Of all the videos to surface from the Iran protests following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on Sept. 16th, one in particular has caught the public imagination. In this short clip, we see a large gathering of people around a bonfire when a young woman dressed all in white enters the circle energetically, whirls toward the fire almost joyously and halts in a dramatic pose before throwing her headscarf to the flames. The crowd cheers ecstatically….

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In Trump White House, classified records were routinely mishandled, aides say

In Trump White House, classified records were routinely mishandled, aides say

The Washington Post reports: Aides who had worked in Donald Trump’s White House were not surprised this summer when the FBI found highly classified material in boxes at Mar-a-Lago, mixed with news clippings and other items. They’d seen such haphazard collections before. During his four years in office, Trump never strictly followed the rules and customs for handling sensitive government documents, according to 14 officials from his administration, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss what…

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Election officials confront a new problem: Whether they can trust their own poll workers

Election officials confront a new problem: Whether they can trust their own poll workers

Politico reports: Election officials are growing concerned about a new danger in November: that groups looking to undermine election results will try to install their supporters as poll workers. The frontline election workers do everything from checking people in at voting locations to helping process mail ballots — in other words, they are the face of American elections for most voters. And now, some prominent incidents involving poll workers have worried election officials that a bigger wave of trouble could…

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How blindsight answers the hard problem of consciousness

How blindsight answers the hard problem of consciousness

Nicholas Humphrey writes: The cover of New Scientist magazine 50 years ago showed a picture of a rhesus monkey, with the headline ‘A Blind Monkey That Sees Everything’. The monkey, named Helen, was part of a study into the neuropsychology of vision, led by Lawrence (Larry) Weiskrantz in the psychology laboratory at the University of Cambridge. In 1965, he had surgically removed the primary visual cortex at the back of Helen’s brain. Following the operation, Helen appeared to be quite…

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Lawyer refused Trump request in February to say all documents returned

Lawyer refused Trump request in February to say all documents returned

The Washington Post reports: Former president Donald Trump asked one of his lawyers to tell the National Archives and Records Administration in early 2022 that Trump had returned all materials requested by the agency, but the lawyer declined because he was not sure the statement was true, according to people familiar with the matter. As it turned out, thousands more government documents — including some highly classified secrets — remained at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club. The later discovery…

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Donald Trump is extremely racist

Donald Trump is extremely racist

Jonathan Chait writes: One of the important phenomena of this current era that has been weirdly hiding in plain sight is Donald Trump’s habit of saying racist things in public. These episodes tend to go underanalyzed in part because American intellectuals are riven by disputes over much subtler forms of racism. Progressive intellectuals are debating structural racism embedded in American history and its social systems and tearing each other to shreds over questions like whether journalists should be fired for…

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Kremlin unsure about which parts of Ukraine it has ‘annexed’

Kremlin unsure about which parts of Ukraine it has ‘annexed’

The Guardian reports: The Kremlin is still determining which areas of occupied Ukraine it has “annexed”, Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson has said, suggesting Russia does not know where its self-declared international borders are. The surprising admission came in a phone call with journalists, during which Dmitry Peskov was peppered with requests to clarify to which Ukrainian territory Putin had laid claim at a pomp-filled Kremlin ceremony last week. Putin has vowed to protect Russia’s newly claimed territories using “all means at…

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A whole generation revolts against Iran’s oppressive regime

A whole generation revolts against Iran’s oppressive regime

Kim Ghattas writes: “From Beirut to Tehran, one revolution that does not die,” people chanted on the streets of Beirut during a wave of protests against Lebanon’s corrupt politicians in October 2019. It was catchy, it rhymed in Arabic, and it was an expression of a surprising new sense of solidarity among members of a young generation connected across borders. The protesters were not chanting in support of the revolution that turned Iran into a theocracy in 1979, but against…

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