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Category: History/Archeology

Judges whose careers were all forged in the embers of Watergate have had it with Trump

Judges whose careers were all forged in the embers of Watergate have had it with Trump

Politico reports: When Donald Trump moved on his first day back in office to strip birthright citizenship from children born in the U.S. to some immigrant parents, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour called the newly inaugurated president a threat to the rule of law. Days after Trump mass-pardoned Jan. 6 defendants who attacked the Capitol, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth warned that for the first time in his career, “meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream.” And in September,…

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James Watson: Titan of science with tragic flaws

James Watson: Titan of science with tragic flaws

Jon Cohen writes: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” That famous understatement concludes the 1953 Nature article in which James Watson, then just 25, and Francis Crick announced their discovery of the double helical structure of DNA. In his later life, Watson, who died on 6 November at 97, was anything but understated. The son of a Chicago bill collector, Watson shared a…

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Trump is pushing us toward a financial crash. It could be 1929 all over again

Trump is pushing us toward a financial crash. It could be 1929 all over again

William A. Birdthistle writes: President Trump’s Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, set to the theme of “The Great Gatsby,” re-enacted the decadence of that story’s licentious era: befeathered flappers shimmying in the crowd; gilded and onyx décor; scantily clad women posing in an enormous champagne coupe. The revelatory moment says so much about where we stand today — and what we could be lurching into next. Published a century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” captured the culture of an…

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Dick Cheney’s war on terror paved the way for the rise of Trump and the destruction of democracy

Dick Cheney’s war on terror paved the way for the rise of Trump and the destruction of democracy

Spencer Ackerman writes: The week before Dick Cheney died, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, one of the bureaucratic venues through which the most powerful vice president in U.S. history disfigured the country, informed Congress that it would have no say over Donald Trump’s rapidly coalescing military aggression against an oil-rich country. While self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth boasted over social media about treating the Caribbean fishermen that he insists without evidence are drug smugglers “exactly like al-Qaeda,” Office…

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Why the crisis everyone mourns reveals liberal tradition at its most vital

Why the crisis everyone mourns reveals liberal tradition at its most vital

Mike Brock writes: This is, after all, a philosophy blog. And right now, a strange paradox confronts us: at the precise moment when everyone declares liberalism dead or dying, the liberal tradition is displaying more intellectual vitality than I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. The despair is everywhere. Establishment liberals mourn the end of technocratic consensus. Progressives declare the Enlightenment project failed. Conservatives celebrate democracy’s inevitable collapse. Neo-reactionaries publish blueprints for what comes after. Even defenders of liberal democracy often sound…

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Public health professor warns the Trump’s ‘eugenics’ policy echoes Nazism

Public health professor warns the Trump’s ‘eugenics’ policy echoes Nazism

The Daily Beast reports: An eminent ER doctor and health policy expert has warned that President Donald Trump’s government shutdown talk about “deserving” patients mirrors a “eugenics” policy adopted by the Nazis. The shutdown is about to enter its fourth week after Congress failed to pass full-year funding. The White House and Speaker Mike Johnson are demanding spending cuts and immigration concessions, while Senate Democrats insist on extending ACA subsidies and undoing the summer healthcare cuts before reopening agencies. Dr….

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In revolutionary times, it is the talent to stir public imagination that is at the heart of politics

In revolutionary times, it is the talent to stir public imagination that is at the heart of politics

Ivan Krastev writes: Late in life, the 18th-century French liberal thinker Abbé Sieyès was asked what he had done during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. He replied, “I survived it.” Reflecting on Sieyès, Michael Ignatieff counsels that it is through survival that liberals can withstand revolutionary times. They need to work hard to remain politically relevant, so that once the revolution has run its course (if they are lucky enough to have survived it), they can try to preserve…

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Archaeologists discover large-scale prehistoric hunting architecture in Europe

Archaeologists discover large-scale prehistoric hunting architecture in Europe

Arkeonews reports: In a stunning discovery that reshapes our understanding of prehistoric Europe, archaeologists have uncovered monumental stone hunting megastructures hidden in the Adriatic hinterland of Slovenia and Italy. These vast constructions—spanning several kilometers across the rugged Karst Plateau—represent the first known evidence of large-scale, purpose-built hunting architecture in Europe. Revealed through advanced airborne laser scanning (LiDAR), the newly identified sites consist of funnel-shaped stone alignments leading into concealed enclosures, apparently designed to guide and trap herds of wild animals…

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After 250 years, the beacon of democracy goes dark

After 250 years, the beacon of democracy goes dark

Anne Applebaum writes: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Within weeks of their publication in July 1776, those words spread around the world. In August, a London newspaper reprinted the Declaration of Independence in full. Edinburgh followed. Soon after that, it appeared in Madrid, Leiden, Vienna, and Copenhagen. Before long, others drew on the text in more substantial ways. Thomas Jefferson himself helped draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of…

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Originalist ‘bombshell’ article complicates case on Trump’s power to fire officials

Originalist ‘bombshell’ article complicates case on Trump’s power to fire officials

The New York Times reports: The Supreme Court will hear arguments in December about whether President Trump can fire government officials for any reason, or no reason, despite laws meant to shield them from politics. There is little question that the court will side with the president. Its conservative majority has repeatedly signaled that it plans to adopt the “unitary executive theory,” which says the original understanding of the Constitution demands letting the president remove executive branch officials as he…

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The Zionist consensus among American Jews has collapsed. Something new is emerging

The Zionist consensus among American Jews has collapsed. Something new is emerging

Shaul Magid writes: It has been two years since the mass murder on 7 October 2023, an event that shook world Jewry more than any event since the creation of the state of Israel. For Jews it was shocking. For the state of Israel, it was deeply humiliating. The entire Zionist project was founded on the presumption that the Jewish state would prevent things like this from ever happening again. A response was inevitable. But the response Israel pursued –…

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The Supreme Court is headed toward a radically new vision of unlimited presidential power

The Supreme Court is headed toward a radically new vision of unlimited presidential power

In a series of cases over the past 15 years, the Supreme Court has moved in a pro-presidential direction. Geoff Livingston/Getty Images By Graham G. Dodds, Concordia University President Donald Trump set the tone for his second term by issuing 26 executive orders, four proclamations and 12 memorandums on his first day back in office. The barrage of unilateral presidential actions has not yet let up. These have included Trump’s efforts to remove thousands of government workers and fire several…

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How to save the American democratic experiment

How to save the American democratic experiment

John Fabian Witt writes: As democracy in the United States spirals into a widening gyre of distrust, demagogy and violence, a question has been loosed in minds across America: How does this all end? The historical analogies seem bleak. Germany’s interwar political dysfunction looms largest because of its descent into fascism. Yet there is a more hopeful example, overlooked though much closer at hand: the United States of a century ago. At the outset of the 1920s, a wave of…

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No, Trump doesn’t have the legal authority to deploy troops to wherever he wants

No, Trump doesn’t have the legal authority to deploy troops to wherever he wants

Stephen I. Vladeck writes: President Trump’s escalating efforts to deploy armed troops onto the streets of several American cities run by Democratic officials are raising a question courts have been all but completely able to avoid since the Constitution was drafted: Can presidents unleash the armed forces on their own people based on facts that they contrive? The text of the relevant statutes doesn’t answer that question. But our constitutional ideals, to say nothing of common sense, should — and…

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The destruction of Gaza City is a crime against history

The destruction of Gaza City is a crime against history

Baker Zoubi writes: Palestinians in Gaza City are facing an impossible choice, as the Israeli army works to annihilate what remains of northern Gaza’s last bastion from the air and the ground. Hundreds of thousands of residents have already fled in recent days amid the intensification of Israel’s assault, forced to pay up to $5,000 to relocate in the knowledge that they will likely never see their homes again. Others are staying put, unable or unwilling to flee to areas…

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Authoritarianism feels surprisingly normal — until it doesn’t

Authoritarianism feels surprisingly normal — until it doesn’t

Gisela Salim-Peyer writes: The disintegration of a democracy is a deceptively quiet affair. For a while, everything looks the same. Each authoritarian milestone—the first political prisoner, the first closure of an opposition media outlet—is anticipated with fear. Then the milestone goes by, and after a brief period of outrage, life continues as before. You begin to wonder if things will be so bad after all. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the Venezuela of my childhood, during the…

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