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Trump organization, already under indictment, faces new criminal inquiry

Trump organization, already under indictment, faces new criminal inquiry

The New York Times reports: Former President Donald J. Trump’s family business, which is already under indictment in Manhattan, is facing a criminal investigation by another prosecutor’s office that has begun to examine financial dealings at a golf course the company owns, according to people with knowledge of the matter. In recent months, the district attorney’s office in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., has subpoenaed records from the course, Trump National Golf Club Westchester, and the town of Ossining, which sets…

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The truth about humanity’s deep past

The truth about humanity’s deep past

David Graeber and David Wengrow write: In some ways, accounts of “human origins” play a similar role for us today as myth did for ancient Greeks or Polynesians. This is not to cast aspersions on the scientific rigour or value of these accounts. It is simply to observe that the two fulfil somewhat similar functions. If we think on a scale of, say, the last 3m years, there actually was a time when someone, after all, did have to light…

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Mapping the heliosphere, which shields our solar system from harmful cosmic rays

Mapping the heliosphere, which shields our solar system from harmful cosmic rays

Virat Markandeya writes: David McComas has a favorite “astrosphere,” the environment created by a star’s stellar wind as it buffets the surrounding interstellar medium. It belongs to a star named Mira. In an image from 2006, Mira is heading to the right, at 291,000 miles an hour, five times the speed our sun ambles through its local interstellar cloud in the Milky Way. You can make out a “bow shock” forming ahead of the star, like one would ahead of…

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Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo

Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo

Phil Torres writes: [O]ver the past two decades, a small group of theorists mostly based in Oxford have been busy working out the details of a new moral worldview called longtermism, which emphasizes how our actions affect the very long-term future of the universe – thousands, millions, billions, and even trillions of years from now. This has roots in the work of Nick Bostrom, who founded the grandiosely named Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) in 2005, and Nick Beckstead, a…

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Democrats scramble for climate Plan C as Manchin dashes their dreams

Democrats scramble for climate Plan C as Manchin dashes their dreams

Politico reports: Joe Manchin is hearing a dire pitch from his colleagues: Don’t blow our chance to save the world. After Manchin rejected a centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s climate plan and rebuffed a separate carbon tax Tuesday, Senate Democrats are urgently pressing their West Virginia colleague for an alternative. Biden and Democrats are trying to clinch a deal on Biden’s larger social spending bill, but the climate plank has become a serious question mark due to Manchin. And some…

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Brazilian leader’s pandemic handling draws explosive allegation: mass homicide

Brazilian leader’s pandemic handling draws explosive allegation: mass homicide

The New York Times reports: A Brazilian congressional panel is set to recommend mass homicide charges against President Jair Bolsonaro, asserting that he intentionally let the coronavirus rip through the country and kill hundreds of thousands in a failed bid to achieve herd immunity and revive Latin America’s largest economy. A report from the congressional panel’s investigation, excerpts from which were viewed by The New York Times ahead of its scheduled release this week, also recommends criminal charges against 69…

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The Trump administration used its food aid program for political gain, congressional investigators find

The Trump administration used its food aid program for political gain, congressional investigators find

ProPublica reports: A $6 billion federal program created to provide fresh produce to families affected by the pandemic was mismanaged and used by the Trump administration for political gain, a new congressional report has found. As a ProPublica investigation revealed last spring and as the new report further details, the Farmers to Families Food Box program gave contracts to companies that had no relevant experience and often lacked necessary licenses. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which released…

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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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