Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

Justice Dept. sues Texas over voting restrictions

Justice Dept. sues Texas over voting restrictions

The New York Times reports: The Justice Department on Thursday sued Texas over the state’s new voting law, arguing that the Republican-passed measure would disenfranchise Texans who do not speak English, who have disabilities, who are older or who live outside the United States. The Texas voting restrictions, signed into law in September, include measures barring election officials from sending voters unsolicited absentee ballot applications and from promoting the use of vote by mail, as well as further limiting the…

Read More Read More

Secret Israeli dossier provides no proof for declaring Palestinian NGOs ‘terrorists’

Secret Israeli dossier provides no proof for declaring Palestinian NGOs ‘terrorists’

+972 reports: On Oct. 22, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz designated six prominent Palestinian human rights groups as “terrorist organizations,” citing alleged links with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a left-wing Palestinian party and militant movement. Despite the severity of the declaration, which was reportedly based on intelligence gathered by the Shin Bet, Israel has failed to present any documents directly or indirectly linking the six organizations to the PFLP or to any violent activity. So…

Read More Read More

The ‘echo chamber’ of Syrian chemical weapons conspiracy theorists

The ‘echo chamber’ of Syrian chemical weapons conspiracy theorists

Brian Whitaker writes: Hundreds of people died — many of them in their sleep — when rockets laden with the nerve agent sarin struck Ghouta, a rebel-held area on the outskirts of the Syrian capital early one morning in August 2013. It was the deadliest chemical attack anywhere in the world since the 1980s. Considering that Ghouta was under fire from the Assad regime’s forces at the time, that the casualties were on the rebels’ side and that the regime…

Read More Read More

A new species of human ancestor is named

A new species of human ancestor is named

SciTechDaily reports: An international team of researchers, led by University of Winnipeg paleoanthropologist Dr. Mirjana Roksandic, has announced the naming of a new species of human ancestor, Homo bodoensis. This species lived in Africa during the Middle Pleistocene, around half a million years ago, and was the direct ancestor of modern humans. The Middle Pleistocene (now renamed Chibanian and dated to 774,000-129,000 years ago) is important because it saw the rise of our own species (Homo sapiens) in Africa, our…

Read More Read More

Are financiers greenwashing COP26?

Are financiers greenwashing COP26?

Quartz reports: COP26 is nominally about reducing carbon emissions, but in practice it’s largely about capital—namely moving more of it into clean energy and climate adaptation and away from fossil fuels. In the first two days of the UN’s COP26 climate summit, several rich countries promised to do this, pledging more climate finance to poorer countries: $10 billion from Japan, $7 billion from Italy, $260 million from Ireland. Scotland became the first country to officially take responsibility for “loss and…

Read More Read More

Why past international climate talks have proved ineffective

Why past international climate talks have proved ineffective

Bob Berwyn writes: It’s been more than 30 years since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change first warned the world that greenhouse gases were dangerously warming the global climate. Decades of United Nations climate negotiations followed, culminating in the 2015 Paris agreement. Yet, in that time, humans have pumped more carbon dioxide into the air than in the preceding 240 years. Since that first IPCC report in 1990, emissions have increased 60 percent and the average global temperature has climbed…

Read More Read More

What is deforestation – and is stopping it really possible?

What is deforestation – and is stopping it really possible?

Patrick Greenfield writes: Forests and nature are centre stage at Cop26. On the second day of the Glasgow summit, world leaders are announcing a commitment to halting and reversing deforestation. As the second largest source of greenhouse gases after energy, the land sector accounts for 25% of global emissions, with deforestation and forest degradation contributing to half of this. But why do forests matter to the climate, and how can we halt deforestation? What is a forest? There are an…

Read More Read More

Widespread coronavirus infection found in Iowa deer, new study says

Widespread coronavirus infection found in Iowa deer, new study says

The New York Times reports: A new study of hundreds of white-tailed deer infected with the coronavirus in Iowa has found that the animals probably are contracting the virus from humans, and then rapidly spreading it among one another, according to researchers. Up to 80 percent of deer sampled from April 2020 through January 2021 in the state were infected, the study indicated. Scientists said the findings pose worrisome implications for the spread of the coronavirus, although they were not…

Read More Read More

The hatred of America and of American institutions is going to grow

The hatred of America and of American institutions is going to grow

Anne Applebaum writes: All around you are swirling scenes of violence—explosions in Baghdad, ISIS operatives slitting the throat of an infidel, the chaos around the U.S. Capitol on January 6. You see jarring images of blood and brutality; you hear the grating sound of screaming; you feel the rush of fear and rage. But then a calm, sympathetic man steps forward, dressed in a button-down shirt. He explains all of it. He connects the disconnected images; he makes sense of…

Read More Read More

What Youngkin’s win in Virginia means for the rest of America

What Youngkin’s win in Virginia means for the rest of America

Zachary D. Carter writes: Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Tuesday’s Virginia gubernatorial election was about schools. It wasn’t about Donald Trump, or inflation, or defunding the police, or Medicare for All, or President Joe Biden’s infrastructure agenda. It wasn’t really about critical race theory or transgender rights—though those issues shaded the situation a bit by highlighting anxieties surrounding the education system. Fundamentally, the contest was about schools—specifically, how many parents remain frustrated by the way public schools have handled the…

Read More Read More

Scientists debate if cosmic pebbles create rocky planets like Earth

Scientists debate if cosmic pebbles create rocky planets like Earth

Jonathan O’Callaghan writes: Bob O’Dell wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at. It was 1992, and he had just got his hands on new images from the Hubble Space Telescope that zoomed in on young stars in the Orion Nebula. O’Dell had been hoping to study the nebula itself, an interesting region of star formation relatively close to Earth. Yet something else caught his attention. Several of the stars didn’t look like stars at all, but were instead enveloped…

Read More Read More

Biden administration moves to limit methane, a potent greenhouse gas

Biden administration moves to limit methane, a potent greenhouse gas

The New York Times reports: The Biden administration said Tuesday that it would heavily regulate methane, a potent greenhouse gas that spews from oil and natural gas operations and can warm the atmosphere 80 times as fast as carbon dioxide in the short term. For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency intends to limit the methane coming from roughly one million existing oil and gas rigs across the United States. The federal government previously had rules that aimed to…

Read More Read More

Even as Biden pushes clean energy, he seeks more oil production

Even as Biden pushes clean energy, he seeks more oil production

The New York Times reports: President Biden told a global climate summit on Monday that “we only have a brief window before us” to reduce the emissions from burning oil, gas and coal that pose an “existential threat” to humanity. But only days earlier, he was urging the world’s largest oil producers to pump more of the fossil fuels that are warming the planet. The incongruity was on center stage both at the global climate summit currently taking place in…

Read More Read More

The Toxic Ten: Publishers spreading baseless, unscientific climate denial

The Toxic Ten: Publishers spreading baseless, unscientific climate denial

  Center for Countering Digital Hate reports [PDF]: New analysis shows that posts linking to content from ten “superpolluter” publishers spreading climate misinformation account for up to 69% of Facebook interactions with climate denial content. 1) Breitbart, the disinformation site once run by Steve Bannon 2) Western Journal, whose founder claimed President Obama is Muslim 3) Newsmax, a key promoter of election fraud conspiracies 4) Townhall Media, founded by the Exxon-funded Heritage Foundation 5) Media Research Center, a “think tank”…

Read More Read More