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Trump’s not even pretending to hide his support for QAnon any more

Trump’s not even pretending to hide his support for QAnon any more

Vice News reports: Former President Donald Trump has now shared his most explicit endorsement of the QAnon conspiracy movement to date. Trump shared a picture of himself wearing a Q lapel pin, overlaid with the QAnon phrases “The Storm is Coming” and “WWG1WGA,” on his Truth Social account on Monday evening. The post was originally shared on Truth Social by an account called “Patriots in Control,” before Trump re-shared it. “How much more obvious can it get?” one QAnon follower…

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Brain fog: One of long Covid’s worst symptoms is also its most misunderstood

Brain fog: One of long Covid’s worst symptoms is also its most misunderstood

Ed Yong writes: On March 25, 2020, Hannah Davis was texting with two friends when she realized that she couldn’t understand one of their messages. In hindsight, that was the first sign that she had COVID-19. It was also her first experience with the phenomenon known as “brain fog,” and the moment when her old life contracted into her current one. She once worked in artificial intelligence and analyzed complex systems without hesitation, but now “runs into a mental wall”…

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‘Timber cities’ might help decarbonize the world

‘Timber cities’ might help decarbonize the world

Inside Climate News reports: Buildings constructed with more wood, and less cement and steel, would help decarbonize the construction and housing industries in line with global goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2030 and reach net zero emissions by 2050, new research shows. The paper, published Aug. 30 in Nature Communications, explains that building mid-rise wood dwellings to meet the demand from rapidly expanding urban populations could avoid about 100 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions through 2100—about…

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The Ukrainians wrote a script, and the Russians played their assigned role

The Ukrainians wrote a script, and the Russians played their assigned role

Phillips Payson O’Brien writes: What happens on the battlefield is rarely the thing that decides a war. Normally, the preparations beforehand determine what happens when the fighting begins—and these preparations are what settle the outcome of the war itself. This truth is playing out along the roads and in the towns of Kharkiv Oblast, the province that includes Ukraine’s second-largest city. The stunningly swift advance of Ukrainian forces, which started around September 1 and sped up soon after, has easily…

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Justice Department issues 40 subpoenas in a week, expanding its January 6 inquiry

Justice Department issues 40 subpoenas in a week, expanding its January 6 inquiry

The New York Times reports: The Justice Department has issued about 40 subpoenas over the past week seeking information about the actions of former President Donald J. Trump and his associates related to the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to people familiar with the situation. Two top Trump advisers, Boris Epshteyn and Mike Roman, had their phones seized as evidence, those people said. The department’s actions represent a substantial escalation of a slow-simmer…

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Trump fights back against DOJ in dispute over classified records

Trump fights back against DOJ in dispute over classified records

Politico reports: Donald Trump urged a federal judge Monday to keep in place her order that blocked the Justice Department from continuing its criminal investigation into the highly sensitive government records stashed in the basement of his Mar-a-Lago estate. The filing, a response to prosecutors’ warning that U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s unorthodox directive— preventing FBI investigators from accessing the files seized in their Aug. 8 search — was harming national security, urges the Trump-appointed judge to stay the course….

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Man murdered wife, shot daughter after becoming obsessed with QAnon

Man murdered wife, shot daughter after becoming obsessed with QAnon

The Daily Beast reports: A Michigan man’s obsession with the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory culminated in a Sunday incident in which he murdered his wife and badly injured one of his children, his daughter told The Daily Beast. Igor Lanis, a 53-year-old resident of the Michigan city of Walled Lake, was killed Sunday by police after he started shooting at them with a shotgun, according to the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office. Inside Lanis’ house, police found Lanis’ wife, Tina Lanis,…

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New book reveals Trump vowed to stay in White House

New book reveals Trump vowed to stay in White House

CNN reports: Former President Donald Trump repeatedly told aides in the days following his 2020 election loss that he would remain in the White House rather than let incoming President Joe Biden take over, according to reporting provided to CNN from a forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. “I’m just not going to leave,” Trump told one aide, according to Haberman. “We’re never leaving,” Trump told another. “How can you leave when you won an election?” Trump’s…

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New study more than triples estimated costs of climate change damages

New study more than triples estimated costs of climate change damages

Yale Climate Connections reports: A peer-reviewed analysis by two dozen experts more than triples – from $51 per ton of carbon dioxide to $185 per ton – the federal government’s estimate of the “social cost of carbon” (SCC). The climate science, economics, and statistics experts’ paper in the prestigious journal Nature updates the best estimate of how much each ton of carbon dioxide costs society as a result of climate change damages. Their conservative best estimate is 3.6 times higher…

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Nick Lane is asking — and answering — vital questions about life

Nick Lane is asking — and answering — vital questions about life

Philip Ball writes: “There is a black hole at the heart of biology,” Nick Lane writes at the start of his 2015 book The Vital Question. “Bluntly put, we do not know why life is the way it is.” It takes some chutzpah to lay down the gauntlet to the life sciences so starkly—to suggest they are engaged more in documenting life than in explaining it. Lane, a professor of evolutionary biochemistry at University College London, doesn’t seem the kind…

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As Russians retreat, Putin is criticized by bloggers who trumpeted his war

As Russians retreat, Putin is criticized by bloggers who trumpeted his war

The New York Times reports: As Russian forces hastily retreated in northeastern Ukraine on Saturday in one of their most embarrassing setbacks of the war, President Vladimir V. Putin was at a park in Moscow, presiding over the grand opening of a Ferris wheel. “It’s very important for people to be able to relax with friends and family,” Mr. Putin intoned. The split-screen contrast was stunning, even for some of Mr. Putin’s loudest backers. And it underscored a growing rift…

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Moscow municipal lawmakers demand Putin’s resignation

Moscow municipal lawmakers demand Putin’s resignation

RFE/RL reports: Municipal deputies in the Moscow district of Lomonosovsky have appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin to resign, saying “everything went wrong” since the start of his second term and they believe a change of power is necessary for the sake of the country. The deputies posted their protocol decision on the Lomonosovsky district’s website, including a 30-minute video of their meeting on September 8. In their appeal, the deputies emphasize that the aggressive rhetoric of Putin and his…

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How Trump supporters came to hate law enforcement

How Trump supporters came to hate law enforcement

Luke Mogelson writes: In early August, after agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida, allies of the former President were quick to villainize the F.B.I. Although the raid had recovered more than a hundred classified documents, at least eighteen of which were labelled “Top Secret,” Republican pundits and politicians questioned its legitimacy and denounced the federal agency as a “gang of dangerous criminals,” “wolves,” the “Gestapo,” “the K.G.B.,” and “the enemy within.”…

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For millions upon millions of Black and brown people, the queen was the symbol of historic oppression

For millions upon millions of Black and brown people, the queen was the symbol of historic oppression

Nayyera Haq writes: My mother, now a New Yorker, grew up speaking the Queen’s English. Her father was an Anglophile who excelled as a lawyer in a British legal system. He dressed in tweed jackets, drank tea with milk and smoked a pipe. He also supported the resistance movement, leaving everything behind in Jallander (now India) to migrate to Lyallpur (now Pakistan) when dissolution of the British Raj created new political boundaries and national identities. With the death of Queen…

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