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The other cause of January 6: The Electoral College

The other cause of January 6: The Electoral College

Kate Shaw writes: John Eastman. Rudy Giuliani. Donald Trump himself. These people all bear some responsibility for the events of January 6, 2021. But there is another contributing factor—an institution, not a person—whose role is regularly overlooked, and that deserves a focus in the ongoing January 6 committee hearings: the Electoral College. The Electoral College isn’t responsible for President Trump’s efforts to remain in office despite his clear loss. But it was integral to Trump’s strategy, and it has everything…

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Rural America reels from violent crime

Rural America reels from violent crime

The Wall Street Journal reports: Local prosecutor Rebecca McCoy used to think of her home in central Arkansas as a place where the worst crimes were usually stolen tractors and lawn mowers. In March 2020, she was called to the trailer of a 72-year-old man who had been bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. It was White County’s first homicide in almost two years. By that December, there were 11 more. In Marion County, a swampy stretch of South…

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65,000-year-old ‘stone Swiss Army knives’ show early humans had long-distance social networks

65,000-year-old ‘stone Swiss Army knives’ show early humans had long-distance social networks

Paloma de la Peña, Author provided By Amy Mosig Way, Australian Museum Humans are the only species to live in every environmental niche in the world – from the icesheets to the deserts, rainforests to savannahs. As individuals we are rather puny, but when we are socially connected, we are the most dominant species on the planet. New evidence from stone tools in southern Africa shows these social connections were stronger and wider than we had thought among our ancestors…

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Why Russia’s ‘underperforming’ military is still making gains in Ukraine

Why Russia’s ‘underperforming’ military is still making gains in Ukraine

RFE/RL spoke with George Barros, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War: Barros: Moving forward, a major question is whether the Ukrainians will be capable of actually conducting counteroffensives to liberate the territory that the Russians have taken since the beginning of the war. I would say that we’ve not seen a Ukrainian capability to actually retake territory that the Russians are serious about defending. The territory that the Ukrainians recaptured in and around Kyiv and Kharkiv…

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The Black Sea blockade — mapping the impact of war in Ukraine on the world’s food supply

The Black Sea blockade — mapping the impact of war in Ukraine on the world’s food supply

The Guardian reports: Wheat is on the verge of rotting in Ukraine’s warehouses. Piles of it have been stuck in storage since Russia invaded in February and imposed a blockade on Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea, from where the bulk of wheat is exported. This immediately disrupted global wheat exports from the two countries, which together provide 30% of world supply, and completely cut off Ukraine’s 9% share. The blockade sparked global panic about where to buy wheat, particularly…

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John Kerry: ‘We have to push back hard’ on efforts to build new fossil fuel infrastructure

John Kerry: ‘We have to push back hard’ on efforts to build new fossil fuel infrastructure

Time reports: John Kerry, the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate change, warned Tuesday that the war in Ukraine could undermine international progress to cut carbon emissions. “You have this new revisionism suggesting that we have to be pumping oil like crazy, and we have to be moving into long term [fossil fuel] infrastructure building, which would be absolutely disastrous,” Kerry said, speaking on June 7 at the TIME 100 Summit in New York City. “We have to push back,…

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Big Oil is suing countries to block climate action

Big Oil is suing countries to block climate action

The Lever reports: Fossil fuel investors are adopting a bold new legal tactic in response to efforts to limit global warming: They are going to private international tribunals to argue that climate change policies are illegally cutting into their profits, and they must therefore be compensated. Now governments are scrambling to figure out how to not get sued for billions when enacting climate policies. Termed “investor-state dispute settlement” legal actions, such moves could have a chilling effect on countries’ ability…

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A detailed roadmap for cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030

A detailed roadmap for cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030

Inside Climate News reports: Researchers of a new peer-reviewed study say they’ve developed the “first detailed roadmap” for how the United States can achieve its ambitious climate pledge to slash the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. It’s a critical target that, if missed, would likely jeopardize the larger global efforts to prevent devastating runaway climate change. The study, published in Science late last month by some of the nation’s leading research institutions, found that it is both…

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The content that fills discontent with nothing

The content that fills discontent with nothing

Kyle Chayka writes: In the beginning, there was the egg. In January of 2019, an Instagram account called @world_record_egg posted a stock photo of a plain brown chicken egg and launched a campaign to get the photo more likes than any online image had before. The record holder at the time was an Instagram shot of Kylie Jenner’s daughter, Stormi, which had more than eighteen million likes. In ten days, the egg’s like count rocketed beyond thirty million. It remains…

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New theories are taking shape about how planets are made

New theories are taking shape about how planets are made

Rebecca Boyle writes: Start at the center, with the sun. Our middle-aged star may be more placid than most, but it is otherwise unremarkable. Its planets, however, are another story. First, Mercury: More charred innards than fully fledged planet, it probably lost its outer layers in a traumatic collision long ago. Next come Venus and Earth, twins in some respects, though oddly only one is fertile. Then there’s Mars, another wee world, one that, unlike Mercury, never lost layers; it…

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Lessons NATO should draw about Russia’s military capabilities

Lessons NATO should draw about Russia’s military capabilities

Foreign Policy interviews former NATO chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen: FP: What lessons will NATO planners draw from what they’ve seen of Russia’s military? AFR: I think we have made two miscalculations. We have overestimated the strength of the Russian military. Despite huge investments in military equipment and the reopening of old Soviet bases, we have seen a very weak Russian military. It remains to be seen why this is. I think corruption may be one of the reasons. But the…

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Putin isn’t ‘crazy’ but he is absolutely ‘evil’ says Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s former prime minister

Putin isn’t ‘crazy’ but he is absolutely ‘evil’ says Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s former prime minister

The Guardian reports: Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko has described Vladimir Putin as “absolutely rational, cold, cruel, black evil” and claimed he is determined to go down in Russian history alongside Stalin and Peter the Great. In an exclusive interview, Tymoshenko dismissed the suggestion that the Russian president was “crazy”. “He acts according to his own dark logic,” she said. “He’s driven by this idea of historic mission and wants to create an empire. That’s his hyper-goal. It comes…

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Official EU candidacy for Ukraine is unlikely, but even accession status would send a powerful signal

Official EU candidacy for Ukraine is unlikely, but even accession status would send a powerful signal

Andreas Umland writes: At first glance, the status of potential EU candidacy may not sound like much. It would put the three countries [Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia] on par with Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, which are not exactly on a fast track to membership. It would clearly be less than Ukraine and its supporters in the commission want, placing it behind current membership candidates Turkey and Serbia, which has been an EU candidate since 2012. The latter two countries’…

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The war in Ukraine could eventually help save the planet

The war in Ukraine could eventually help save the planet

Tom Friedman writes: [I]f we have a year or two of astronomical gasoline and heating oil prices because of the Ukraine war, “you are going to see a massive shift in investment by mutual funds and industry into electric vehicles, grid enhancements, transmission lines and long-duration storage that could tip the whole market away from reliance on fossil fuels toward renewables,” said Tom Burke, director of E3G, Third Generation Environmentalism, the climate research group. “The Ukraine war is already forcing…

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