Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

Microbial diversity is under threat — which puts the entire planet at risk

Microbial diversity is under threat — which puts the entire planet at risk

By Muhammad Saleem It’s no secret that our planet is in crisis. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, more than 37,400 species are at risk of becoming extinct. That includes 26 percent of mammals, 36 percent of sharks and rays and 41 percent of amphibians. But the conservation posters that feature cute, fuzzy pandas and majestic elephants don’t feature other species that are no less important and probably no less under threat: microorganisms. These are the viruses, bacteria,…

Read More Read More

Banks produce 700 times more greenhouse gas emissions from loans than offices

Banks produce 700 times more greenhouse gas emissions from loans than offices

Bloomberg reports: It’s through their loan books and investment portfolios that banks and asset managers make their biggest contribution to climate change. The greenhouse gas emissions associated with financial institutions’ investing, lending and underwriting activities are more than 700 times higher, on average, than their direct emissions, according to a report published Wednesday by climate nonprofit CDP. While banks generate emissions from heating their buildings and flying executives to meetings — when pandemic restrictions allow — “almost all climate-related impacts…

Read More Read More

Artificial intelligence is misreading human emotion

Artificial intelligence is misreading human emotion

Kate Crawford writes: At a remote outpost in the mountainous highlands of Papua New Guinea, a young American psychologist named Paul Ekman arrived with a collection of flash cards and a new theory. It was 1967, and Ekman had heard that the Fore people of Okapa were so isolated from the wider world that they would be his ideal test subjects. Like Western researchers before him, Ekman had come to Papua New Guinea to extract data from the indigenous community….

Read More Read More

Cuomo aides spent months hiding nursing home death toll

Cuomo aides spent months hiding nursing home death toll

The New York Times reports: The effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office to obscure the pandemic death toll in New York nursing homes was far greater than previously known, with aides repeatedly overruling state health officials over a span of at least five months, according to interviews and newly unearthed documents. Mr. Cuomo’s most senior aides engaged in a sustained effort to prevent the state’s own health officials, including the commissioner, Howard Zucker, from releasing the true death toll…

Read More Read More

Lessons on free speech and intellectual combat from John Milton

Lessons on free speech and intellectual combat from John Milton

Nicholas McDowell writes: Published at the height of the first English Civil War, Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England (1644), remains a powerful defence of free expression. Printing might now have almost given way to digital media as the form in which beliefs and ideas are proposed, argued with and attacked, but the questions raised by Areopagitica about liberty of thought and speech, and more specifically writing, are…

Read More Read More

Moral failure: India is what happens when rich people do nothing

Moral failure: India is what happens when rich people do nothing

Vidya Krishnan writes: India’s experience of the pandemic will be defined by this enormous second wave. But the chamber of horrors the country now finds itself in was not caused by any one man [Prime Minister Narendra Modi], or any single government. It is the greatest moral failure of our generation. India may be classified as a developing or middle-income country, and by international standards, it does not spend enough on the health of its people. Yet this masks many…

Read More Read More

‘This is a catastrophe.’ In India, illness is everywhere

‘This is a catastrophe.’ In India, illness is everywhere

Jeffrey Gettleman reports: Crematories are so full of bodies, it’s as if a war just happened. Fires burn around the clock. Many places are holding mass cremations, dozens at a time, and at night, in certain areas of New Delhi, the sky glows. Sickness and death are everywhere. Dozens of houses in my neighborhood have sick people. One of my colleagues is sick. One of my son’s teachers is sick. The neighbor two doors down, to the right of us:…

Read More Read More

Abusive Israeli policies constitute crimes of apartheid, persecution

Abusive Israeli policies constitute crimes of apartheid, persecution

Human Rights Watch reports: Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The finding is based on an overarching Israeli government policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians and grave abuses committed against Palestinians living in the occupied territory, including East Jerusalem. The 213-page report, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” examines Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. It presents…

Read More Read More

Why Bitcoin is bad for the environment

Why Bitcoin is bad for the environment

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: Money, it’s often said, is a shared fiction. I give you a slip of paper or, more likely these days, a piece of plastic. You hand me eggs or butter or a White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino, and we both walk away satisfied. With cryptocurrency, the arrangement is more like a shared metafiction, and the instability of the genre is, presumably, part of the thrill. Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that was created as a spoof, has risen in value…

Read More Read More

The GOP is a grave threat to American democracy

The GOP is a grave threat to American democracy

Peter Wehner writes: The hope of many conservative critics of Donald Trump was that soon after his defeat, and especially in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, the Republican Party would snap back into its former shape. The Trump presidency would end up being no more than an ugly parenthesis. The GOP would distance itself from Trump and Trumpism, and become a normal party once again. But that dream soon died. The Trump presidency might have been the first…

Read More Read More

America’s ultra-rich fear Biden will close their favorite tax loopholes

America’s ultra-rich fear Biden will close their favorite tax loopholes

Bloomberg reports: The rich shouldn’t be too afraid of Joe Biden’s tax plans. It’s the really rich who should be getting nervous. The U.S. president is set to unveil a tax package on Wednesday that promises to raise revenues from those earning $400,000 or more a year. But executives and professionals making over $500,000 annually already pay relatively high tax rates. What has potentially far greater ramifications is that Biden and Democrats in Congress are threatening to target a much…

Read More Read More

A radical right-wing dream to rewrite the Constitution is close to coming true

A radical right-wing dream to rewrite the Constitution is close to coming true

HuffPost reports: Six weeks before Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, more than 100 state lawmakers gathered in Williamsburg, Virginia, for a week of Founding Fathers cosplay. Their task, over three days in the town that bills itself as a living museum to America’s colonial period, was to approve a dramatic overhaul of the United States’ foundational text. The lawmakers, nearly all Republicans, ratified six new Constitutional amendments: They imposed term limits on members of Congress, abolished the federal…

Read More Read More

India’s Covid crisis is the world’s crisis

India’s Covid crisis is the world’s crisis

Yasmeen Serhan writes: India considered itself to be “in the endgame” of the pandemic just a few weeks ago. Now it is the global epicenter. The country recently surpassed the devastating milestone of more than 345,000 new COVID-19 cases in a single day, the biggest total recorded globally since the pandemic began. What is taking place in India isn’t so much a wave as it is a wall: Charts showing the country’s infection rate and death toll, which has also…

Read More Read More

Joe Biden’s first 100 days reshaped America

Joe Biden’s first 100 days reshaped America

Jonathan Chait writes: During the first hundred days of Joe Biden’s presidency, it has dawned on Republicans that the man their standard-bearer once mocked as “Sleepy Joe” is a formidable adversary. And the quality that has made him so effective up to this point is, well, his sleepiness. “I think Biden is a disaster for the country, and his ideas are an atrocity. But he’s boring. He’s just boring,” complained alt-media personality Dan Bongino. This frustration is not confined to…

Read More Read More