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The Collins-Manchin election bill is a deal Democrats should grab

The Collins-Manchin election bill is a deal Democrats should grab

Richard L. Hasen writes: Last week’s announcement by a bipartisan group of senators proposing reforms to the poorly written 1887 law that governs Congress’ counting of the Electoral College votes is a good half-loaf measure against election subversion. This is an opportunity that Democrats should jump at, despite their nervousness, if they have the chance to pass the bill with some Republican support this summer or fall. Any meaningful step that lessens the chances of a stolen presidential election in…

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‘I am not a traitor’: Reality Winner explains why she leaked a classified document

‘I am not a traitor’: Reality Winner explains why she leaked a classified document

Scott Pelley reports: A story about someone named Reality Winner has got to start with the name. Her father, playing on the family name, explained he wanted “a real winner.” And so, Reality. Maybe that still doesn’t make sense, but it is the least baffling fact in this story. Reality Winner became an infamous name in 2017, when she was accused of espionage. She was hit with the longest sentence ever imposed on a civilian for leaking classified information to…

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The mysterious inner life of the octopus

The mysterious inner life of the octopus

Martha Henriques writes: It was a big night for Inky the octopus. The day’s visitors had been and gone, and now his room in the aquarium was deserted. In a rare oversight, the lid of his tank had been left ajar. The common New Zealand octopus had been without female company for some time, sharing a tank with only a fellow male, Blotchy. The loose lid provided Inky with an opportunity. With eight strong suckered limbs and, quite possibly, intimate…

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Climate change is not negotiable

Climate change is not negotiable

In an editorial, the New York Times says: The American West has gone bone dry, the Great Salt Lake is vanishing and water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two great life-giving reservoirs on the Colorado River basin, are declining with alarming speed. Wildfires are incinerating crops in France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, while parts of Britain suffocated last week in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet the news from Washington was all about the ability of a…

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How preventing unwanted pregnancies can help on climate

How preventing unwanted pregnancies can help on climate

Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger write: Every year, some 36 billion tons of anthropogenic carbon enter the atmosphere, mainly as a result of burning fossil fuels. With 8 billion people on Earth, this means that each human adds an average of 4.5 tons of carbon into the air annually. And wealthy people have a far bigger footprint than the poor — by a couple orders of magnitude. Too often ignored in devising solutions to slow global warming is the…

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Trump’s criminal intent is now clear. Merrick Garland’s intentions aren’t

Trump’s criminal intent is now clear. Merrick Garland’s intentions aren’t

Glenn Kirschner writes: For weeks, if not months, leadership at the Department of Justice has repeatedly told us they will follow the facts and the law and will hold Jan. 6 wrongdoers accountable “at any level.” Yet they provide few updates or concrete information. We have seen zero overt law enforcement activity against anyone but the foot soldiers of former President Donald Trump’s insurrection. In substance, the DOJ is asking the American people to trust them. But following the House’s…

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On the docket: Atlanta v. Trumpworld

On the docket: Atlanta v. Trumpworld

The New York Times reports: The criminal investigation into efforts by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn his election loss in Georgia has begun to entangle, in one way or another, an expanding assemblage of characters: A United States senator. A congressman. A local Cadillac dealer. A high school economics teacher. The chairman of the state Republican Party. The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor. Six lawyers aiding Mr. Trump, including a former New York City mayor….

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Understanding why Dobbs is so dangerous

Understanding why Dobbs is so dangerous

David Litt writes: Just a few years ago, a clear majority of Americans trusted the Supreme Court. Now, a month after Roe v. Wade was overturned, poll after poll shows that a clear majority of Americans do not. To which many of the Court’s closest observers would say, “What took so long?” For more than a decade, the Court has issued narrow rulings, decided by slim majorities, that align with Republican political goals. Five Justices unleashed dark money in politics….

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Inside the GOP freakout over J.D. Vance’s senate campaign

Inside the GOP freakout over J.D. Vance’s senate campaign

The Daily Beast reports: When J.D. Vance took the stage at a conservative conference last week, it should have prompted sighs of relief from Republicans hoping to see the Ohio GOP’s U.S. Senate nominee hit the campaign trail harder. There was just one problem: the stage Vance took was in Israel, 6,000 miles away from Ohio. The spectacle of Vance gushing in Tel Aviv about Israel’s high birth rates—to a friendly audience stocked with plenty of conservatives but almost certainly…

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We are moving into an era defined by homesickness

We are moving into an era defined by homesickness

Madeline Ostrander writes: From above, an open-cut coal mine looks like some geological aberration, a sort of man-made desert, a recent volcanic eruption, or a kind of terra forming. When the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht first gazed at a series of such mines while driving through his home region in southeast Australia, he stopped and got out of his car, overcome “at the desolation of this once beautiful place,” he wrote in his book, Earth Emotions. As a scholar, Albrecht…

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The desperate lives inside Ukraine’s ‘dead cities’

The desperate lives inside Ukraine’s ‘dead cities’

Luke Mogelson writes: People in Ukraine sometimes describe the intensity of shelling in simple auditory terms. A place can be “quiet” or “loud.” As the volume increases, so do the chaos, misery, death, and fear. You cannot experience such fatal noise without instinctively grasping its purpose, which is to brutalize psychically as much as physically—to demoralize and stupefy. Nowhere on earth is louder today than the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, where Russia has concentrated its forces and its firepower…

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Russia strikes Odessa port after signing deal to unblock Ukrainian grain exports

Russia strikes Odessa port after signing deal to unblock Ukrainian grain exports

The Wall Street Journal reports: Russia launched a missile attack on Ukraine’s key grain-exporting port of Odessa, officials said, hours after signing an international agreement to ease its blockade of the Black Sea coastline and allow for the safe transport of grain and other foodstuffs necessary to alleviate a looming global food crisis. The attack on Odessa appeared to violate the terms of the United Nations-brokered agreement signed by Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul on Friday, which stipulated that both…

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Panama Papers whistleblower speaks out: ‘Shell companies are Putin’s best friend’

Panama Papers whistleblower speaks out: ‘Shell companies are Putin’s best friend’

Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project: The anonymous whistleblower behind the bombshell leak known as the Panama Papers has emerged anew to warn how offshore companies are enabling Russia’s war machine. John Doe, as the whistleblower insisted on being called, had only spoken out publicly once before, but reached out recently to the two German journalists who had received the leak of documents in 2015 concerning the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. Those two reporters from Suddeutsche Zeitung, Frederik Obermaier…

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WHO declares monkeypox spread a global health emergency

WHO declares monkeypox spread a global health emergency

The New York Times reports: For the second time in two years, the World Health Organization has taken the extraordinary step of declaring a global emergency. This time the cause is monkeypox, which has spread in just a few weeks to dozens of countries and infected tens of thousands of people. Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general, on Saturday overruled a panel of advisers, who could not come to a consensus, and declared a “public health emergency of…

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