Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

In Kabul, a former U.S. citizen keeps running the city under Taliban watch

In Kabul, a former U.S. citizen keeps running the city under Taliban watch

The Wall Street Journal reports: After attending the funeral of a fellow United Airlines pilot who was killed in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Daoud Sultanzoy decided to return to his native Afghanistan and help build its post-Taliban government. These days, the 66-year-old mayor of Kabul is the most prominent official from the fallen Afghan republic to remain in his job after the Taliban returned to power on Aug. 15. Every morning, Mr. Sultanzoy, saluted by the municipality’s uniformed guards,…

Read More Read More

DNA offers surprises on how Polynesia was settled

DNA offers surprises on how Polynesia was settled

Science reports: The peopling of Polynesia was a stunning achievement: Beginning around 800 C.E., audacious Polynesian navigators in double-hulled sailing canoes used the stars and their knowledge of the waves to discover specks of land separated by thousands of kilometers of open ocean. Within just a few centuries, they had populated most of the Pacific Ocean’s far-flung islands. Now, researchers have used modern DNA samples to trace the exploration in detail, working out what order the islands were settled in…

Read More Read More

Democrats fear Biden’s domestic agenda could implode

Democrats fear Biden’s domestic agenda could implode

Politico reports: Internal Democratic discord has wounded President Joe Biden’s massive social spending plan, raising the prospect that the package could stall out, shrink dramatically — or even fail altogether. Myriad problems have arisen. Moderate Senate Democrats Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) continue to be a major headache for party leadership’s $3.5 trillion target. The Senate parliamentarian just nixed the party’s yearslong push to enact broad immigration reform. House members may tank the prescription drugs overhaul the party…

Read More Read More

We’re finally catching a break in the climate fight

We’re finally catching a break in the climate fight

Bill McKibben writes: So far in the global warming era, we’ve caught precious few breaks. Certainly not from physics: the temperature has increased at the alarming pace that scientists predicted thirty years ago, and the effects of that warming have increased even faster than expected. (“Faster Than Expected” is probably the right title for a history of climate change so far; if you’re a connoisseur of disaster, there is already a blog by that name). The Arctic is melting decades…

Read More Read More

Trump campaign knew lawyers’ voting machine claims were baseless, memo shows

Trump campaign knew lawyers’ voting machine claims were baseless, memo shows

The New York Times reports: Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump. But there was a problem for the Trump team,…

Read More Read More

U.S. treatment of Haitian migrants discriminatory

U.S. treatment of Haitian migrants discriminatory

Human Rights Watch: The US deployment of border agents on horseback against Haitian migrants on September 19, 2021, stems from abusive and racially discriminatory immigration policies by the administration of President Joe Biden, Human Rights Watch said today. The previous day, the Department of Homeland Security announced a six-step “strategy to address the increase of migrants in [the Texas border city of] Del Rio” that included a “surge” of agents to “improve control of the area” and new expulsion flights…

Read More Read More

The idea of the West has always been in motion and in crisis

The idea of the West has always been in motion and in crisis

Faisal Devji writes: When asked what he thought of Western civilisation, Gandhi apparently responded that he thought it would be a good idea. While this celebrated statement is taken to be an ironic dismissal, Gandhi had in fact given the matter of Western civilisation much thought. In his manifesto of 1909 called Hind Swaraj or ‘Indian Home Rule’, the future Mahatma had described imperial Britain’s desire to spread Western civilisation not as hypocritical so much as suicidal. For he thought…

Read More Read More

The new science on how we burn calories

The new science on how we burn calories

Kim Tingley writes: It’s simple, we are often told: All you have to do to maintain a healthy weight is ensure that the number of calories you ingest stays the same as the number of calories you expend. If you take in more calories, or energy, than you use, you gain weight; if the output is greater than the input, you lose it. But while we’re often conscious of burning calories when we’re working out, 55 to 70 percent of…

Read More Read More

How synchronous firefly flashes illuminate the physics of complex systems

How synchronous firefly flashes illuminate the physics of complex systems

Orit Peleg writes: In the still of the Tennessee night, my colleagues and I are watching thousands of dim little orbs of light, moving peacefully in the forest around us. We try to guess where the next flash will appear, but the movements seem erratic, even ephemeral. This summer, as we set up our cameras and tents, I feel a crippling sense of dread. I had brought us all up here to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, an unlikely…

Read More Read More

How accounting giants infiltrate government to provide their clients with favorable tax rules

How accounting giants infiltrate government to provide their clients with favorable tax rules

The New York Times reports: For six years, Audrey Ellis and Adam Feuerstein worked together at PwC, the giant accounting firm, helping the world’s biggest companies avoid taxes. In mid-2018, one of Mr. Feuerstein’s clients, an influential association of real estate companies, was trying to persuade government officials that its members should qualify for a new federal tax break. Mr. Feuerstein knew just the person to turn to for help. Ms. Ellis had recently joined the Treasury Department, and she…

Read More Read More

U.S. and EU pledge 30% cut in methane emissions to limit global heating

U.S. and EU pledge 30% cut in methane emissions to limit global heating

The Guardian reports: The US and the EU made a joint pledge on Friday to cut global methane emissions by almost a third in the next decade, in what climate experts hailed as one of the most significant steps yet towards fulfilling the Paris climate agreement. The pledge came as the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, warned of a “high risk of failure” at the vital UN climate talks, Cop26, set for Glasgow this November. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas,…

Read More Read More

Peter Thiel’s ideology dominates Silicon Valley

Peter Thiel’s ideology dominates Silicon Valley

Max Chafkin writes: Other Silicon Valley personas may be better known to the general public, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and even a few who don’t regularly launch rockets into space. But [Peter] Thiel is the Valley’s true idol — the single person whom tech’s young aspirants and millennial moguls most seek to flatter and to emulate, the cult leader of the cult of disruption. The blitzscaling strategy he and his employees pioneered at PayPal created the growth playbook for…

Read More Read More

The problem with Facebook is Facebook

The problem with Facebook is Facebook

Siva Vaidhyanathan writes: Many critics of big technology companies have been cheering as their disgruntled labor forces have risen up to challenge the rich, (mostly) white, (mostly) American men who design and run Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, Palantir and others. Labor uprisings have forced bosses to confront their poor treatment of women, their complicity with the military and intelligence establishments, the general threat of surveillance and the political affiliations of the companies and their leaders. This week…

Read More Read More

Six principles can guide your thinking through the second pandemic winter

Six principles can guide your thinking through the second pandemic winter

Katherine J. Wu, Ed Yong, and Sarah Zhang write: For nearly two years now, Americans have lived with SARS-CoV-2. We know it better than we once did. We know that it can set off both acute and chronic illness, that it spreads best indoors, that masks help block it, that our vaccines are powerful against it. We know that we can live with it—that we’re going to have to live with it—but that it can and will exact a heavy…

Read More Read More