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Rare and ancient trees are key to a healthy forest

Rare and ancient trees are key to a healthy forest

Science reports: About 800 years ago, a giant oak tree in England’s Sherwood Forest helped shelter Robin Hood from the corrupt sheriff of Nottingham. Though the tale is likely a myth, the tree is not: It still stands as one of the world’s oldest oaks. Such ancient trees—some dating back more than 3000 years—are key to the survival of their forests, new research shows. Rare trees—some so scarce scientists have yet to find them—are also critical to forest health, another…

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How science is uncovering the secrets of Stonehenge

How science is uncovering the secrets of Stonehenge

Tim Adams writes: Among the many treasures in the British Museum’s forthcoming Stonehenge exhibition is a collection of carved and polished spherical stones, each about the size of a cricket ball. The stones are 5,000 years old and have mostly been found singly in Scotland. The most famous of the 400 or so discoveries is a beautiful polished black sphere from Towie, Aberdeenshire, with three bulbous surfaces, tactile as a miniature Henry Moore. The sphere is carved with precise geometric…

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How climate change and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline undergirds the Ukraine-Russia standoff

How climate change and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline undergirds the Ukraine-Russia standoff

Inside Climate News reports: As tensions simmer on the Ukraine-Russia border, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline has become an emblem of the energy and climate issues underlying the conflict—even though it has yet to deliver a molecule of natural gas. Last week, the U.S. State Department vowed that Gazprom’s $11 billion conduit beneath the Baltic Sea to Germany would never open if Russia invades Ukraine. Much of eastern Europe, the environmental movement and even the U.S. oil industry opposed Nord…

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The Rorschach features of the pandemic

The Rorschach features of the pandemic

David Wallace-Wells writes: “Omicron is in retreat,” declared the January 19 headline of the New York Times’ Morning Newsletter, by David Leonhardt, which reaches millions of inboxes each weekday. That same Wednesday, according to Our World in Data, 3,830 new deaths were reported in the country — not just the highest figure in the Omicron wave but, putting aside a one-day post-Thanksgiving reporting anomaly, the highest since January 2021. In the week that followed, the deaths continued: A few days…

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In China, Covid-era controls may outlast the virus

In China, Covid-era controls may outlast the virus

The New York Times reports: The police had warned Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer, not to go to Shanghai to visit the mother of a dissident. He went to the airport anyway. His phone’s health code app — a digital pass indicating possible exposure to the coronavirus — was green, which meant he could travel. His home city, Changsha, had no Covid-19 cases, and he had not left in weeks. Then his app turned red, flagging him as high…

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UN: 2,000 children recruited by Yemen’s rebels died fighting

UN: 2,000 children recruited by Yemen’s rebels died fighting

The Associated Press reports: U.N. experts said in a new report that nearly 2,000 children recruited by Yemen’s Houthi rebels died on the battlefield between January 2020 and May 2021, and the Iranian-backed rebels continue to hold camps and courses encouraging youngsters to fight. In the report to the U.N. Security Council circulated Saturday, the experts said they investigated some summer camps in schools and a mosque where the Houthis disseminated their ideology and sought to recruit children fight in…

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Removing Boris Johnson from power is like ‘fixing the drains,’ says his former senior adviser

Removing Boris Johnson from power is like ‘fixing the drains,’ says his former senior adviser

New York magazine reports: There is a joke in British political circles that Dominic Cummings exists to destroy prime ministers. After his organization Vote Leave won the Brexit referendum in 2016, David Cameron resigned. Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, stepped down when her Brexit deal was derailed. Now it appears to be the turn of Boris Johnson, Cummings’s former boss. Cummings was his most senior adviser — his de facto chief of staff — and the architect of the Tories’ 2019…

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The inner lives of farmed animals

The inner lives of farmed animals

Lori Marino writes: We’ve all heard them and used them – the common references to farmed animals that appeal to the worst part of human nature: ‘pearls before swine’, ‘what a pig’, ‘like lambs to the slaughter’, ‘bird brain’. These phrases represent our species’ view of farmed animals as not particularly bright, uncaring about their treatment or fate, and generally bland and monolithic in their identities. My team of researchers asked: ‘What is there to really know about them?’ Our…

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Coffee may become more scarce and expensive thanks to climate change – new research

Coffee may become more scarce and expensive thanks to climate change – new research

Colombia’s coffee region: the country could lose two thirds of its best coffee-growing land. Javier Crespo / shutterstock By Denis J Murphy, University of South Wales The world could lose half of its best coffee-growing land under a moderate climate change scenario. Brazil, which is the currently world’s largest coffee producer, will see its most suitable coffee-growing land decline by 79%. That’s one key finding of a new study by scientists in Switzerland, who assessed the potential impacts of climate…

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We still can’t see American slavery for what it was

We still can’t see American slavery for what it was

Jamelle Bouie writes: The historian Marcus Rediker opens “The Slave Ship: A Human History” with a harrowing reconstruction of the journey, for a captive, from shore to ship: The ship grew larger and more terrifying with every vigorous stroke of the paddles. The smells grew stronger and the sounds louder — crying and wailing from one quarter and low, plaintive singing from another; the anarchic noise of children given an underbeat by hands drumming on wood; the odd comprehensible word…

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A federal judge canceled major oil and gas leases over climate change

A federal judge canceled major oil and gas leases over climate change

NPR reports: Late last year, just days after pledging to cut fossil fuels at international climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, the Biden administration held the largest oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history. On Thursday, a federal judge invalidated that sale in the Gulf of Mexico, saying the administration didn’t adequately consider the costs to the world’s climate. The administration used an analysis conducted under former President Donald Trump that environmental groups alleged was critically flawed. The decision represents…

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Why can’t we make equality for women the law of the land?

Why can’t we make equality for women the law of the land?

Jesse Wegman writes: Even if you are a political junkie, there’s a good chance you didn’t realize that the United States Constitution grew 58 words longer this week. Those words, which begin, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” are the text of the Equal Rights Amendment. Section 3 of the amendment states that it takes effect two years after its ratification, which…

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The disillusionment of a young Biden administration official

The disillusionment of a young Biden administration official

Jonathan Blitzer writes: In the spring of 2019, Andrea Flores, then a thirty-one-year-old associate at a law firm in Washington, D.C., received an e-mail from the head of an organization called National Security Action. Its mission sounded lofty and urgent, and also typical for the time: “advancing American global leadership” and “opposing the reckless policies of the Trump Administration.” What distinguished National Security Action was that it would soon become a laboratory for the Biden transition. Flores, who’d worked in…

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NATO won’t put troops in Ukraine, but Western foreigners are volunteering to join the fight against Russia

NATO won’t put troops in Ukraine, but Western foreigners are volunteering to join the fight against Russia

BuzzFeed News reports: He walked and talked and dressed like a Ukrainian soldier — and according to a contract with its armed forces, he is one. But Private Aiden “Johnny” Aslin is a British citizen with a Midlands accent and no formal orders from his home government to be fighting on the battlefields of the Donbas. “It was my own decision to come here,” the 27-year-old told BuzzFeed News in this war-ravaged village, just north of the Sea of Azov….

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