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Jeff Zucker’s legacy is defined by his promotion of Donald Trump

Jeff Zucker’s legacy is defined by his promotion of Donald Trump

Margaret Sullivan writes: Many questions still swirl around Wednesday’s startling announcement that, after nine years, Jeff Zucker’s reign as CNN president was over. Was his ouster really all about his failure to disclose to his corporate bosses a consensual relationship with another top network executive? How much of a factor was the continuing mess over former host Chris Cuomo’s firing in December? To what extent were the network’s flagging ratings part of the calculation? It will all eventually be revealed…

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A Jewish teacher criticized Israel. She was fired

A Jewish teacher criticized Israel. She was fired

The New York Times reports: Last summer, Jessie Sander had been on the job at a Jewish school in Westchester County for less than a month when a meeting with her boss took an unexpected turn. Was she comfortable working at a Zionist institution? he asked. Her boss, Rabbi David E. Levy of Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, N.Y., had come across a recent blog post she had written that renounced Zionism and sharply criticized Israel, Ms. Sander, 26, said…

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I feel, therefore I am

I feel, therefore I am

Antonio Damasio writes: In the beginning was not the word; that much is clear. Life sailed forth without words or thoughts, without feelings or reasons, devoid of minds or consciousness. Not that the universe of the living was ever simple, quite the contrary. It was complex from its inception, four billion years ago. But living organisms then took several paths. In the branch of life history that led to us, I like to imagine three distinct and consecutive evolutionary stages….

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Extreme heat in oceans ‘passed point of no return’ in 2014

Extreme heat in oceans ‘passed point of no return’ in 2014

The Guardian reports: Extreme heat in the world’s oceans passed the “point of no return” in 2014 and has become the new normal, according to research. Scientists analysed sea surface temperatures over the last 150 years, which have risen because of global heating. They found that extreme temperatures occurring just 2% of the time a century ago have occurred at least 50% of the time across the global ocean since 2014. In some hotspots, extreme temperatures occur 90% of the…

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Europe is ready to pay the cost of Russia sanctions

Europe is ready to pay the cost of Russia sanctions

Nathalie Tocci writes: Too much is being made of divisions in the West over how to respond to Russian aggression against Ukraine. The truth is that there is a broad consensus in the transatlantic alliance about how to proceed if Moscow were to invade its neighbor. The biggest differences aren’t about strategy — they’re about who will have to pay the price of carrying out that strategy. To be sure, disagreements do exist. Recent weeks have lain bare divergences over…

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FBI Director Wray says scale of Chinese spying in the U.S. ‘blew me away’

FBI Director Wray says scale of Chinese spying in the U.S. ‘blew me away’

NBC News reports: Chinese spying in the U.S. has become so widespread that the FBI is launching an average of two counterintelligence investigations a day to counter the onslaught, FBI Director Christopher Wray said in an interview. Wray has become the U.S. government’s most outspoken critic of the Chinese government’s spying. In an exclusive NBC News interview, he said the sheer scale of Chinese efforts to steal U.S. technology shocked him when he became FBI director in 2017. “This one…

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Trump’s words, and deeds, reveal the depths of his drive to retain power

Trump’s words, and deeds, reveal the depths of his drive to retain power

Shane Goldmacher writes: The events of Jan. 6 played out so publicly and so brutally — the instigating speech by Mr. Trump, the flag-waving march to the Capitol, the violent clashes with the police, the defiling of the seat of democracy — and have since been so extensively re-examined that at times it can seem as if there were little more to be discovered about what led up to that day. Then, The New York Times reported this week that…

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Exposure to one nasal droplet enough for Covid infection, study finds

Exposure to one nasal droplet enough for Covid infection, study finds

The Guardian reports: Exposure to a single nasal droplet is sufficient to become infected with Covid-19, according to a landmark trial in which healthy volunteers were intentionally given a dose of the virus. The trial, the first to have monitored people during the entire course of infection, also found that people typically develop symptoms very quickly – on average, within two days of encountering the virus – and are most infectious five days into the infection. The study was carried…

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The great Amazon land grab – how Brazil’s government is turning public land private, clearing the way for deforestation

The great Amazon land grab – how Brazil’s government is turning public land private, clearing the way for deforestation

A satellite captured large and small deforestation patches in Amazonas State in 2015. The forest loss has escalated since then. USGS/NASA Landsat data/Orbital Horizon/Gallo Images/Getty Images By Gabriel Cardoso Carrero, University of Florida; Cynthia S. Simmons, University of Florida, and Robert T. Walker, University of Florida Imagine that several state legislators decide that Yellowstone National Park is too big. Also imagine that, working with federal politicians, they change the law to downsize the park by a million acres, which they…

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Secrets of early animal evolution revealed by chromosome ‘tectonics’

Secrets of early animal evolution revealed by chromosome ‘tectonics’

Viviane Callier writes: Chromosomes, the bundles of DNA that star in the mitotic ballet of cell division, play a leading role in complex life. But the question of how chromosomes came to exist and evolve has long been discouragingly hard to answer. This is due partly to the lack of chromosome-level genomic information and partly to the suspicion that eons of evolutionary change have washed away any clues about that ancient history. Now, in a paper appearing today in Science…

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The makings of a shattering constitutional crisis in 2025

The makings of a shattering constitutional crisis in 2025

Bruce Ackerman and Gerard Magliocca write: Donald Trump is already signaling that he will run for president in 2024. A Biden-Trump rematch risks worsening our country’s already deep divisions. But there’s more to be worried about: The next election will provoke a genuine constitutional crisis, unless decisive steps are taken soon to prevent it. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — the Disqualification Clause — expressly bars any person from holding “any office, civil or military, under the United States”…

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The Marxist academic who challenges liberals and the Left

The Marxist academic who challenges liberals and the Left

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: Since roughly 2015, every part of politics has been pressured by the possibility of authoritarian developments on the right. When I reached [Adolph] Reed [emeritus political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania] on Zoom in Philadelphia, he confessed that he’d been feeling those pressures, too. For his Zoom background he’d chosen a diagram of a mounting tsunami, which he said represented his fears of an imminent surge of authoritarianism and the retreat of American democracy. “I’ve basically…

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Trump had significant role in weighing proposals to seize voting machines

Trump had significant role in weighing proposals to seize voting machines

The New York Times reports: Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit…

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Kyrsten Sinema courted Republican fossil fuel donors with filibuster stance

Kyrsten Sinema courted Republican fossil fuel donors with filibuster stance

The Guardian reports: With a crucial vote pending over filibuster rules that would have made strong voting rights legislation feasible, Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema flew into Houston, Texas, for a fundraiser that drew dozens of fossil fuel chieftains, including Continental Resources chairman Harold Hamm and ConocoPhillips chief executive Ryan Lance. The event was held on 18 January at the upmarket River Oaks Country Club. One executive told the Guardian that Sinema spoke for about half an hour and informed a…

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