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Our climate change turning point is right here, right now

Our climate change turning point is right here, right now

Rebecca Solnit writes: Human beings crave clarity, immediacy, landmark events. We seek turning points, because our minds are good at recognizing the specific – this time, this place, this sudden event, this tangible change. This is why we were never very good, most of us, at comprehending climate change in the first place. The climate was an overarching, underlying condition of our lives and planet, and the change was incremental and intricate and hard to recognize if you weren’t keeping…

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The ocean is full of tiny plastic particles – we found a way to track them with satellites

The ocean is full of tiny plastic particles – we found a way to track them with satellites

Plastic fragments washed onto Schiavonea beach in Calabria, Italy, in a 2019 storm. Alfonso Di Vincenzo/KONTROLAB /LightRocket via Getty Images By Christopher Ruf, University of Michigan Plastic is the most common type of debris floating in the world’s oceans. Waves and sunlight break much of it down into smaller particles called microplastics – fragments less than 5 millimeters across, roughly the size of a sesame seed. To understand how microplastic pollution is affecting the ocean, scientists need to know how…

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EPA approved toxic chemicals for fracking a decade ago, new files show

EPA approved toxic chemicals for fracking a decade ago, new files show

The New York Times reports: For much of the past decade, oil companies engaged in drilling and fracking have been allowed to pump into the ground chemicals that, over time, can break down into toxic substances known as PFAS — a class of long-lasting compounds known to pose a threat to people and wildlife — according to internal documents from the Environmental Protection Agency. The E.P.A. in 2011 approved the use of these chemicals, used to ease the flow of…

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‘Surprising amount of death’ will soon occur in U.S. regions with low vaccination rates, expert says

‘Surprising amount of death’ will soon occur in U.S. regions with low vaccination rates, expert says

CNN reports: As the Delta variant rapidly spreads, US hot spots have seen climbing case numbers — and an expert warns a “surprising amount of death” from Covid-19 could soon follow. The US is averaging about 19,455 new cases over the last seven days, a 47% increase from the week prior, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. And a third of those, CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner said, come from five hot spots: Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri and…

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‘Everyone has a tipping point’: Hunger fuels Cuba’s protests

‘Everyone has a tipping point’: Hunger fuels Cuba’s protests

The New York Times reports: Hospitals and pharmacies have run out of medicines as basic as penicillin and aspirin. Blackouts have become maddeningly frequent and agonizingly long. Cubans lucky enough to have foreign currency wait in line for hours for staples like beans and rice. A searing economic decline, leading to hardships Cubans have rarely seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union devastated their country in the 1990s, has stirred the island’s largest protest movement in decades, eliciting a…

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Lawyers retreat from pro-Trump election suit

Lawyers retreat from pro-Trump election suit

Politico reports: The legal reckoning for attorneys who pushed former President Donald Trump’s spurious claims of election fraud advanced on Monday, with a federal court in Detroit holding a hearing on whether to impose sanctions over a suit filed last year seeking to decertify Joe Biden’s victory in Michigan and declare Trump the winner. Two of the most prominent attorneys in the pro-Trump camp — Dallas-based Sidney Powell and Atlanta-based L. Lin Wood — are among the lawyers who brought…

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Experts keep promising the walls are closing in on Trump. Haven’t we learned anything?

Experts keep promising the walls are closing in on Trump. Haven’t we learned anything?

Ankush Khardori writes: You could be forgiven if you experienced a vague sense of bewilderment after the Trump Organization and Allen Weisselberg were charged, depending on what you were reading and watching in the days that preceded it. Just that week, some prominent legal commentators had suggested that Trump himself might be charged (despite days of reporting indicating otherwise), that the charges would extend beyond the tax-fraud scheme that is reportedly at issue (and ultimately alleged), or that the Trump…

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Biden’s ideology is largely invisible

Biden’s ideology is largely invisible

Adam Gopnik writes: The Brooklyn-reared boxing trainer Charley Goldman, who crafted Rocky Marciano, the undefeated heavyweight champ of the nineteen-fifties, once made a wise statement: “Never play a guy at his own game; nobody makes up a game in order to get beat at it.” He meant that there was no point getting into a slugging match with a slugger or a bob-and-weave match with a bob-and-weaver. Instead, do what you do well. Damon Runyon, another New York character of…

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Trump praises mob who assaulted U.S. Capitol: ‘These were great people’

Trump praises mob who assaulted U.S. Capitol: ‘These were great people’

Politico reports: Former President Donald Trump on Sunday widely praised those who attended the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the insurrection at the Capitol, repeatedly using the word “love” to describe the tone of the event. Echoing his rhetoric about the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., Trump said, “These were peaceful people, these were great people.” Speaking on “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo” on the Fox News Channel, he also said the rally participants were patriots, that…

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Biden launches assault on monopolies

Biden launches assault on monopolies

Politico reports: The White House announced a sweeping executive order Friday to promote competition throughout the U.S. economy, in the most ambitious effort in generations to reduce the stranglehold of monopolies and concentrated markets in major industries. The order — whose details POLITICO first reported last week — also includes elements designed to lower the price of prescription drugs, protect consumers’ privacy and increase scrutiny of abusive business tactics in the tech industry. The effort marks a major push by…

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Let’s put community health workers to work

Let’s put community health workers to work

By Miya Barnett, Knowable Magazine It’s no secret that the US health system is less than ideal, and that it is time to think outside the box. Some researchers are starting to evaluate one innovative solution for improving health care — community health workers (CHWs).  In 2017, researchers published the results of a study that included 300 of some of the most disadvantaged patients in Philadelphia — residents of high-poverty neighborhoods who had at least two chronic health issues, such as hypertension and…

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When bacteria kill us, it’s more accident than assassination

When bacteria kill us, it’s more accident than assassination

Ed Yong writes: The classic novel by H G Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898) – a tale of England besieged by Martian conquerors – ends not with a rousing and heroic victory but an accidental one. The aliens subjugate humanity with heat rays and black smoke but, at the height of their victory, they die. Their machines come to a standstill amid the ruins of a deserted London, and the birds pick at their rotting remains. The cause…

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How the white press wrote off Black America

How the white press wrote off Black America

Brent Staples writes: Newspapers that championed white supremacy throughout the pre-civil rights South paved the way for lynching by declaring African Americans nonpersons. They embraced the language once used at slave auctions by denying Black citizens the courtesy titles Mr. and Mrs. and referring to them in news stories as “the negro,” “the negress” or “the nigger.” They depicted Black men as congenital rapists, setting the stage for them to be hanged, shot or burned alive in public squares all…

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Top Biden ally, Rep. Jim Clyburn, pleads with him to scrap filibuster for election reform

Top Biden ally, Rep. Jim Clyburn, pleads with him to scrap filibuster for election reform

Politico reports: After months of setbacks and gridlock on voting rights, one of President Joe Biden’s top allies in Congress is calling for him to support amending the Senate filibuster. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) told POLITICO Biden “should endorse” the idea of creating a carveout to the legislative filibuster in the Senate for legislation that applies to the Constitution. In effect, the reform would make it possible for Democrats to pass their sweeping elections reform bill and another…

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