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Biden bets his agenda on the inside game

Biden bets his agenda on the inside game

Politico reports: Before Joe Biden can fully pitch the public on his solutions to a lingering pandemic and economic rockiness, he’s got to finish the sale to his own party’s lawmakers. As Democrats on Capitol Hill brace in anticipation of a brutal midterm, Biden is spending an extraordinary amount of time and political capital behind the scenes to convince them to rally around a common framework for social and climate spending. His congressional huddles have accelerated, from phone calls on…

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What drove Homo erectus out of Africa?

What drove Homo erectus out of Africa?

By Josie Glausiusz On a searing hot summer day at ‘Ubeidiya, an ancient site in northern Israel, an undulating expanse of dry grasses and thistles stretches into the distance. Far on the horizon, the mountains of Jordan shimmer through the haze; nearby stand cultivated olive groves and a date palm plantation. Just south of the Sea of Galilee, and up a rocky dirt road, ‘Ubeidiya seems like a secret, with no sign to indicate its archaeological riches. About 1.5 million…

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Neuron bursts can mimic famous AI learning strategy

Neuron bursts can mimic famous AI learning strategy

Allison Whitten writes: Every time a human or machine learns how to get better at a task, a trail of evidence is left behind. A sequence of physical changes — to cells in a brain or to numerical values in an algorithm — underlie the improved performance. But how the system figures out exactly what changes to make is no small feat. It’s called the credit assignment problem, in which a brain or artificial intelligence system must pinpoint which pieces…

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A new history of humanity

A new history of humanity

William Deresiewicz writes: The Dawn of Everything [by David Graeber and David Wengrow] is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized today by the likes of Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Steven Pinker; and accepted more or less universally. The story goes like this. Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the…

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Amazon copied products and rigged search results to promote its own brands, documents show

Amazon copied products and rigged search results to promote its own brands, documents show

Reuters reports: Amazon.com Inc has been repeatedly accused of knocking off products it sells on its website and of exploiting its vast trove of internal data to promote its own merchandise at the expense of other sellers. The company has denied the accusations. But thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters – including emails, strategy papers and business plans – show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its…

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The wealthiest 10% of Americans own a record 89% of all U.S. stocks

The wealthiest 10% of Americans own a record 89% of all U.S. stocks

CNBC reports: The wealthiest 10% of Americans now own 89% of all U.S. stocks held by households, a record high that highlights the stock market’s role in increasing wealth inequality. The top 1% gained more than $6.5 trillion in corporate equities and mutual fund wealth during the Covid-19 pandemic, while the bottom 90% added $1.2 trillion, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve. The share of corporate equities and mutual funds owned by the top 10% reached the…

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Trump can’t keep his Jan. 6 documents secret. And Biden can help

Trump can’t keep his Jan. 6 documents secret. And Biden can help

Aziz Huq writes: The select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection faces a potentially fatal roadblock: The committee wants to see a wide range of Executive Branch records and communications, presidential papers that could prove or disprove the reports that Donald Trump fully intended to undermine a fair election that he lost. And Trump, ever litigious, is going to court to stop the White House from sharing them. Trump is a master of using the courts to his own advantage,…

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QAnon is becoming even more antisemitic

QAnon is becoming even more antisemitic

Vice News reports: The organizer of a major QAnon conference in Las Vegas later this week, where at least four sitting GOP lawmakers speak on stage, shared a neo-Nazi film with his 70,000 followers on Sunday evening. John Sabal, who’s known online as QAnon John, is preparing for Thursday’s “For God and Country: Patriot Double Down” conference, but on Sunday night he took time out of his busy schedule to share a post about people who had praised “Europa –…

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What Colin Powell’s death really means about the vaccines

What Colin Powell’s death really means about the vaccines

Tim Requarth writes: Colin Powell, the nation’s first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, a four-star general, and Iraq war supporter, has died from complications of COVID-19 at age 84. He was fully vaccinated. Already, right-wing pundits are using Powell’s vaccination status to question the effectiveness of vaccines and rail against mandates. The vaccines are not perfect—particularly at preventing infection. Breakthrough infections, and even hospitalization and deaths, among vaccinated people are real. But, for…

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Is this the beginning of techno-eugenics?

Is this the beginning of techno-eugenics?

Philip Ball writes: The birth of the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, in 1978 provoked a media frenzy. In comparison, a little girl named Aurea born by IVF in May 2020 went almost unnoticed. Yet she represents a significant first in assisted reproduction too, for the embryo from which she grew was selected from others based on polygenic screening before implantation, to optimise her health prospects. For both scientific and ethical reasons, this new type of genetic screening is highly…

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As Manchin protects coal and his investments, his own constituents are at increasing risk of drowning

As Manchin protects coal and his investments, his own constituents are at increasing risk of drowning

The New York Times reports: In Senator Joe Manchin’s hometown, a flood-prone hamlet of about 200 homes that hugs a curve on a shallow creek, the rain is getting worse. Those storms swell the river, called Buffalo Creek, inundating homes along its banks. They burst the streams that spill down the hills on either side of this former coal-mining town, pushing water into basements. They saturate the ground, seeping into Farmington’s aging pipes and overwhelming its sewage treatment system. Climate…

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Democrats weigh carbon tax after Manchin rejects key climate provision

Democrats weigh carbon tax after Manchin rejects key climate provision

The New York Times reports: Some House and Senate Democrats, smarting from a move by Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, to kill a major element of President Biden’s climate plan, are switching to Plan B: a tax on carbon dioxide pollution. A carbon tax, in which polluting industries would pay a fee for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit, is seen by economists as the most effective way to cut the fossil fuel emissions that are…

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‘We’re done’: Immigration advocates stage walkout on Biden administration

‘We’re done’: Immigration advocates stage walkout on Biden administration

Politico reports: Dozens of immigration advocates walked out, virtually, on top Biden officials Saturday in protest of the administration’s decision to continue border policies enacted during the Trump administration, according to several people who were in the meeting. Advocates asked for time before the beginning of a video meeting Saturday morning with several Biden administration officials, including people from the Department of Homeland Security officials and the White House Domestic Policy Council’s Esther Olavarria. The activists read a statement accusing…

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Is Biden doing enough to protect democracy?

Is Biden doing enough to protect democracy?

Peter Nicholas writes: As a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer in the early 2000s, I once received a call from a couple of Republican campaign operatives who said they had something to show me. We met at their office in Washington, D.C., a few days later. They presented printouts of recent election records and pointed to a few cases of what they suspected were people voting illegally. One after another, their examples of voter fraud turned out to be nothing….

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