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Trump helped the GOP raise $2 billion. Now former aides and allies are jockeying to tap into his fundraising power

Trump helped the GOP raise $2 billion. Now former aides and allies are jockeying to tap into his fundraising power

The Washington Post reports: One day before the Republican Party’s elite donors are slated to gather for their April retreat in Palm Beach, Fla., a nonprofit group aligned with onetime aides to former president Donald Trump is hosting an “investors meeting” a few miles away for major GOP contributors. The keynote speaker is Trump himself, and his gilded Mar-a-Lago Club is hosting the event. The group, the Conservative Partnership Institute, now has former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows…

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Syria and the ‘anti-imperialism’ of fools

Syria and the ‘anti-imperialism’ of fools

An open letter from a group of Syrian writers and intellectuals and others who stand in solidarity with them, says: Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising ten years ago, and especially since Russia intervened in Syria on behalf of Bashar al-Assad, there has been a curious and malign development: the emergence of pro-Assad allegiances in the name of “anti-imperialism” among some who otherwise generally identify as progressive or “left,” and the consequent spread of manipulative disinformation that routinely deflects…

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The ‘green energy’ that poses a climate threat

The ‘green energy’ that poses a climate threat

Michael Grunwald writes: Here’s a multibillion-dollar question that could help determine the fate of the global climate: If a tree falls in a forest—and then it’s driven to a mill, where it’s chopped and chipped and compressed into wood pellets, which are then driven to a port and shipped across the ocean to be burned for electricity in European power plants—does it warm the planet? Most scientists and environmentalists say yes: By definition, clear-cutting trees and combusting their carbon emits…

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A Biden administration strategy: Send in the scientists

A Biden administration strategy: Send in the scientists

The New York Times reports: More than a decade ago, a woman at a bar near the Columbia University campus turned to Gavin Schmidt and asked if he knew the main component of air. “Yes, nitrogen,” he replied. His answer lost her a bet about whether the average stranger at the bar would know anything about atmospheric chemistry. Two years later, they were married. Sometimes the nerds win. Today Dr. Schmidt is one of the most prominent scientists warning the…

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Georgia’s governor signed voting restrictions into law in front of a slave plantation painting

Georgia’s governor signed voting restrictions into law in front of a slave plantation painting

BuzzFeed News reports: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday signed into law a series of controversial voting restrictions decried by Democrats as “Jim Crow 2.0” — and he did so alongside a group of white men and in front of a painting of a plantation where Black people were once enslaved. In a Twitter thread Friday, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch pointed out that Kemp signed the bill under the image “of a notorious slave plantation in Wilkes County, GA.”…

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Elizabeth Warren’s push to diversify federal judges is finally catching on

Elizabeth Warren’s push to diversify federal judges is finally catching on

HuffPost reports: For years, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been a lonely voice in the Senate on the need to put people with all kinds of different legal backgrounds into lifetime federal judgeships. “We face a federal bench that has a striking lack of diversity,” she said at a 2014 event on this topic, hosted by Alliance for Justice, a progressive judicial advocacy group. “President Obama has supported some notable exceptions but … the president’s nominees have thus far been…

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Africa’s forest elephants are just a step from extinction

Africa’s forest elephants are just a step from extinction

The New York Times reports: While some African elephants parade across the savanna and thrill tourists on safari, others are more discreet. They stay hidden in the forests, eating fruit. “You feel pretty lucky when you catch sight of them,” said Kathleen Gobush, a Seattle-based conservation biologist and member of the African Elephant Specialist Group within the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or I.U.C.N. The threat of extinction has diminished the odds of spotting one of these wood-dwelling elephants…

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The UK professor and the fake Russian agent

The UK professor and the fake Russian agent

A British professor corresponded for months with a man called only “Ivan”, seeking assistance to discredit an organisation that helps bring Syrian war criminals to justice. He also asked “Ivan” to investigate other British academics and journalists. The email exchange, seen by the BBC, reveals how, a decade on from the start of the Syrian conflict, a battle is still being waged in the field of information and misinformation. Chloe Hadjimatheou writes: One chilly December morning there was a ping…

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New data helps clarify how plate tectonics drove the evolution of complex life

New data helps clarify how plate tectonics drove the evolution of complex life

Howard Lee writes: In 2016, the geochemists Jonas Tusch and Carsten Münker hammered a thousand pounds of rock from the Australian Outback and airfreighted it home to Cologne, Germany. Five years of sawing, crushing, dissolving and analyzing later, they have coaxed from those rocks a secret hidden for eons: the era when plate tectonics began. Earth’s fractured carapace of rigid, interlocking plates is unique in the solar system. Scientists increasingly connect it to our planet’s other special features, such as…

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U.S. Covid response could have avoided hundreds of thousands of deaths, researchers conclude

U.S. Covid response could have avoided hundreds of thousands of deaths, researchers conclude

Reuters reports: The United States squandered both money and lives in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and it could have avoided nearly 400,000 deaths with a more effective health strategy and trimmed federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars while still supporting those who needed it. That is the conclusion of a group of research papers released at a Brookings Institution conference this week, offering an early and broad start to what will likely be an intense effort…

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Stop using ‘surge’ and ‘wave’ to describe what’s happening at the border

Stop using ‘surge’ and ‘wave’ to describe what’s happening at the border

Julio Ricardo Varela writes: A flood. A wave. A surge. What’s happening at the U.S.-Mexico border is none of those things, but you wouldn’t know it from watching or reading some of the coverage in U.S. media. In recent weeks, the phrases “surge of migrants,” “migrant surge,” “the surge,” “surge at border” and other variations have all appeared in articles in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, CBS News, ABC News, NBC News, the Associated Press, the New York Times, CNN,…

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‘They are, in effect, supporting racism’: Black leaders zero in on Dems’ filibuster holdouts

‘They are, in effect, supporting racism’: Black leaders zero in on Dems’ filibuster holdouts

Politico reports: Black civil rights leaders, voting rights advocates and elected officials are ramping up their lobbying of Senate Democrats to nix the filibuster, arguing that they can keep the rule in place or pass voting rights legislation, but not both. In a half-dozen interviews, top officials framed the choice as existential for a party that depends on Black and brown voters — and they are planning pressure campaigns privately and publicly to make that clear. Rev. Al Sharpton, the…

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After Trump failed, Georgia Republicans pass bill to make it easier to overturn elections

After Trump failed, Georgia Republicans pass bill to make it easier to overturn elections

Mother Jones reports: During the 2020 election cycle in Georgia, Donald Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state. His efforts to manipulate the electoral process failed after Raffensperger stood up to the president and defended the integrity of the election. But if the Georgia legislature has its way, Republicans could have a much easier time overturning the will of voters in future elections. The Georgia House of…

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‘Israel is experiencing its worst political crisis in decades’

‘Israel is experiencing its worst political crisis in decades’

The Associated Press reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing allies fell short of winning a parliamentary majority in Israel’s latest election, according to a final vote count released Thursday, leaving a political deadlock that put the long-time leader’s future in question. The fourth election in just two years brought a stinging rebuke for Netanyahu, the most dominant figure in Israeli politics in a generation. Adding to the pain, he lost ground to former partners who vowed never to…

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