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I’m not sorry for my delay

I’m not sorry for my delay

Joe Pinsker writes: At first, being reachable all the time felt good. To professionals who started using BlackBerries 20 years ago to conduct business on the go, it registered as a superpower. “They felt like masters of the universe,” Melissa Mazmanian, an informatics professor at UC Irvine who studied the devices’ uptake in the early 2000s, told me. But as more people got mobile devices, responding to messages anytime became the norm among co-workers as well as friends and loved…

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Inspired by King’s words, experts say the fight for climate justice anywhere is a fight for climate justice everywhere

Inspired by King’s words, experts say the fight for climate justice anywhere is a fight for climate justice everywhere

Inside Climate News reports: Terms like “environmental racism” or “environmental justice” were not yet part of the national lexicon when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. And while insider records reveal that the nation’s oil and gas lobby was being briefed that same year on the dangers of rising greenhouse gas emissions, the term “global warming” wasn’t credited with being coined until 1975, seven years after the civil…

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How Exxon is using an unusual law to intimidate critics over its climate denial

How Exxon is using an unusual law to intimidate critics over its climate denial

The Guardian reports: ExxonMobil is attempting to use an unusual Texas law to target and intimidate its critics, claiming that lawsuits against the company over its long history of downplaying and denying the climate crisis violate the US constitution’s guarantees of free speech. The US’s largest oil firm is asking the Texas supreme court to allow it to use the law, known as rule 202, to pursue legal action against more than a dozen California municipal officials. Exxon claims that…

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White House warns Russian invasion of Ukraine may be imminent

White House warns Russian invasion of Ukraine may be imminent

NBC News reports: The White House believes Russia could launch an invasion of Ukraine at any moment, press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday, warning that an “extremely dangerous situation” is building along the Ukrainian border. “We believe we’re now at a stage where Russia could at any point launch an attack on Ukraine. I would say that’s more stark than we have been,” Psaki said during her daily press briefing. The assessment comes as Secretary of State Antony Blinken travels…

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The big business of Uyghur genocide denial

The big business of Uyghur genocide denial

New Lines magazine reports: Around the time that [Vijay] Prashad denied the Uyghur genocide in the article for Globetrotter, he also appeared on a YouTube channel called The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow, casting doubt on the plight of the Uyghurs, which human rights monitors had by that time labeled a genocide. “What’s the evidence?” he asked rhetorically. “Well, there’s none, really.” There is plenty, according to Amnesty International. “Amnesty has documented how Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic…

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Tentative Mideast reconciliations may grow with Iran deal

Tentative Mideast reconciliations may grow with Iran deal

Bloomberg reports: The Middle East, long known for rivalries, may be looking at a more peaceful future. Saudi Arabia and Qatar held a summit in January 2021 and ten months later the UAE foreign minister met the Syrian president, while its de facto ruler paid a visit to Turkey. This trend looks set to resume this year, with further tightening of ties between Iran and Gulf states potentially easing regional sectarian conflicts. This past week, a UAE renewables developer struck…

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How sympathy got displaced by scorn

How sympathy got displaced by scorn

Andrea Stanley writes: After Andreea’s mom died of COVID-19 in April, the harassment started. Noxious messages started coming in after she wrote a Facebook post letting friends and family know about her loss. One person messaged her to say they couldn’t believe her mother hadn’t protected herself. Andreea has since deleted most of the other messages, but she remembers people saying things like “I can’t believe your mom was an anti-vaxxer” and “I can’t believe she didn’t understand that COVID…

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Weaving Indigenous knowledge into the scientific method

Weaving Indigenous knowledge into the scientific method

Nature reports: Many scientists rely on Indigenous people to guide their work — by helping them to find wildlife, navigate rugged terrain or understand changing weather trends, for example. But these relationships have often felt colonial, extractive and unequal. Researchers drop into communities, gather data and leave — never contacting the locals again, and excluding them from the publication process. Today, many scientists acknowledge the troubling attitudes that have long plagued research projects in Indigenous communities. But finding a path…

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How long can humans survive?

How long can humans survive?

Tom Chivers writes: In the deep ocean, occasionally, a whale carcass falls to the bottom of the sea. Most of the time, in the state of nature, creatures have just about enough to survive. But the first creatures to find the whale have more food than they could ever eat. These scavengers live lives of extraordinary plenty — some of the smaller, faster-breeding species might do so for several generations. There is enough to go around a thousand times over….

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The left stares into the abyss as Biden’s plans wither

The left stares into the abyss as Biden’s plans wither

The Washington Post reports: Just three years ago, as they vied to lead the country, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates competed to produce novel and dramatic policy proposals aimed at America’s most serious problems. The party’s insurgent liberals, who at times ran at the front of the pack, brought to the national stage dozens of new policy ideas on health care, housing, climate, education and more. The scale of their ambition startled Washington and captivated millions of voters. The establishment…

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School closures were a catastrophic error

School closures were a catastrophic error

Jonathan Chait writes: Recently, Nate Silver found himself in the unenviable role of main character of the day on Twitter because he proposed that school closures were a “disastrous, invasion-of-Iraq magnitude (or perhaps greater) policy decision.” The comparison generated overwhelming anger and mockery, and it is not an easy one to defend: A fiasco that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and rearranged the regional power structure is a very high bar to clear. Weighing policy failures in such…

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How Manchin and Sinema completed a conservative vision

How Manchin and Sinema completed a conservative vision

Ronald Brownstein writes: The decision by Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin to block their fellow Democrats from passing new federal voting-rights legislation clears the path for years of tightening ballot restrictions in Republican-controlled states. It also marks a resounding triumph for Chief Justice John Roberts in his four-decade quest to roll back the federal government’s role in protecting voter rights. Roberts as much as anyone set in motion the events that have led to this week’s climactic Senate confrontation…

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Ukraine needs help preparing for war

Ukraine needs help preparing for war

Alyona Getmanchuk writes: It’s a shame that Ukraine was largely absent from talks last week among American, European and Russian diplomats. Especially since it is our future that is at stake — and Kyiv’s asks might come as a surprise. Our country is not brimming with hope about a Western savior or a NATO rescue in the face of a Russian invasion. What we want from our Western partners that share our desire for us to be a true democracy…

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Arab leader’s gamble to play kingmaker in Israel is paying off

Arab leader’s gamble to play kingmaker in Israel is paying off

The Associated Press reports: Mansour Abbas broke a longstanding taboo when he led his Arab party into Israel’s governing coalition last year. The bold move appears to be paying dividends. Abbas, a once obscure politician, is the linchpin of the shaky union, securing hefty budgets and favorable policies for his constituents and even winning an audience with the king of Jordan. “We are equal partners the whole way, part of the coalition, for the first time in the state of…

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