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Claims that Milley made ‘secret’ calls to Chinese leaders exaggerated, sources say

Claims that Milley made ‘secret’ calls to Chinese leaders exaggerated, sources say

Politico reports: Claims in an upcoming book that a frantic Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley made secret calls to his Chinese counterpart are greatly exaggerated, according to two people familiar with the discussions. A forthcoming book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa claims that Milley grew concerned about then-President Donald Trump’s instability and the possibility that he might spark a war with China, prompting him to arrange a pair of secret phone calls with Gen. Li Zuocheng of the…

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Climate change could trigger internal migration of 216 million people says World Bank

Climate change could trigger internal migration of 216 million people says World Bank

Reuters reports: Without immediate action to combat climate change, rising sea levels, water scarcity and declining crop productivity could force 216 million people to migrate within their own countries by 2050, the World Bank said in a new report on Monday. The report, Groundswell 2.0, modeled the impacts of climate change on six regions, concluding that climate migration “hotspots” will emerge as soon as 2030 and intensify by 2050, hitting the poorest parts of the world hardest. Sub-Saharan Africa alone…

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Fears that Trump might launch military strike prompted top U.S. general to reassure China

Fears that Trump might launch military strike prompted top U.S. general to reassure China

The New York Times reports: The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff twice called his Chinese counterpart in the final months of the Trump administration to reassure him that Donald J. Trump had no plans to attack China in an effort to remain in power and that the United States was not collapsing, according to “Peril,” a new book by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. “Things may look unsteady,” the chairman, Gen. Mark A. Milley,…

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Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, internal documents show

Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, internal documents show

The Wall Street Journal reports: About a year ago, teenager Anastasia Vlasova started seeing a therapist. She had developed an eating disorder, and had a clear idea of what led to it: her time on Instagram. She joined the platform at 13, and eventually was spending three hours a day entranced by the seemingly perfect lives and bodies of the fitness influencers who posted on the app. “When I went on Instagram, all I saw were images of chiseled bodies,…

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The fight to resettle Afghans in the U.S. has just begun

The fight to resettle Afghans in the U.S. has just begun

Vox reports: America’s evacuation of Afghanistan is over. But that doesn’t mean the US has fulfilled its obligation to vulnerable Afghans, some of whom are still trapped in their home country. Even if the decision to withdraw from the country was ultimately the right one, the ensuing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is the product of America’s ill-conceived and failed attempts at nation-building. The US therefore has a responsibility to ensure that Afghans facing danger or persecution as the Taliban reassert…

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A million Afghan children could die in ‘most perilous hour,’ UN warns

A million Afghan children could die in ‘most perilous hour,’ UN warns

The New York Times reports: Millions of Afghans could run out of food before the arrival of winter and one million children are at risk of starvation and death if their immediate needs are not met, top United Nations officials warned on Monday, putting the country’s plight into stark relief. Secretary General António Guterres, speaking at a high-level U.N. conference in Geneva convened to address the crisis, said that since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan last month, the nation’s poverty…

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Human gut bacteria could be accumulating our medications without our understanding the impact

Human gut bacteria could be accumulating our medications without our understanding the impact

Science Alert reports: When we take medicine, there are often unintended consequences. In the most common scenarios, these are known as side effects. But ‘side effects’ don’t begin to encompass the multitude of strange things that can happen when various compounds enter our system. Sometimes, these unintended consequences occur after drugs physically exit the body, with medicine finding a second life in animals accidentally exposed to the formulations downstream. Yet even before drugs have a chance to leave your body,…

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Having a concept of death is far from being a uniquely human attribute

Having a concept of death is far from being a uniquely human attribute

Susana Monsó writes: Humans have long thought of themselves as the only animal with a notion of mortality. Our concept of death is one of those characteristics, like culture, rationality, language or morality, that have traditionally been taken as definitional of the human species – setting us apart from the natural world and justifying our boundless use and exploitation of it. However, as I have argued elsewhere, the widespread notion that only humans can understand death stems from an overly…

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Facebook says its rules apply to all. Company documents reveal a secret elite that’s exempt

Facebook says its rules apply to all. Company documents reveal a secret elite that’s exempt

The Wall Street Journal reports: Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said Facebook Inc. allows its more than three billion users to speak on equal footing with the elites of politics, culture and journalism, and that its standards of behavior apply to everyone, no matter their status or fame. In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, according to company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The program, known…

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How Never Trumpers could change the Democratic Party

How Never Trumpers could change the Democratic Party

David Frum writes: Many of the conservatives and Republicans appalled by Donald Trump’s presidency clutched a hope through the bewildering years: Someday this would all be over and politics would return to normal. But normal has not returned. Those elected Republicans who stood for legality when Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election found themselves party pariahs in 2021, on their way to being out of politics altogether in 2022. And it’s not just a few politicians who have been…

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Republicans are settling on a strategy for election loses: It was rigged!

Republicans are settling on a strategy for election loses: It was rigged!

Eric Lutz writes: It’s hard to say exactly when Donald Trump started lying about widespread fraud in the 2020 election because he’d never really stopped lying about it in the 2016 election. But if you had to pinpoint when his outlandish, self-serving conspiracy theories really began to accelerate, it was probably around the late spring of last year, when polls indicated that he could lose to Joe Biden and that his desperate attempts to brand his opponent as a “sleepy”…

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The legacy of America’s post-9/11 turn to torture

The legacy of America’s post-9/11 turn to torture

Carol Rosenberg reports: Mohamedou Ould Slahi is almost clinical as he recalls details of the torture he endured in the summer of 2003 at Guantánamo Bay. There were the guards who menaced him with attack dogs and beat him so badly they broke his ribs. The troops who shackled him, blasted him with heavy metal music and strobe lights or drenched him in ice water to deny him sleep for months on end. The mind-numbing isolation in a darkened cell…

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Most people don’t need a Covid vaccine booster, new review says

Most people don’t need a Covid vaccine booster, new review says

The New York Times reports: None of the data on coronavirus vaccines so far provides credible evidence in support of boosters for the general population, according to a review published on Monday by an international group of scientists, including some at the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization. The 18 authors include Dr. Philip Krause and Dr. Marion Gruber, F.D.A. scientists who announced last month that they will be leaving the agency, at least in part because…

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Our most reliable pandemic number is losing meaning

Our most reliable pandemic number is losing meaning

David Zweig writes: At least 12,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19 this month, as the country inches through its latest surge in cases. But another worrying statistic is often cited to depict the dangers of this moment: The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States right now is as high as it has been since the beginning of February. It’s even worse in certain places: Some states, including Arkansas and Oregon, recently saw their COVID hospitalizations…

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