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Category: Politics

Why the World Health Organization took two years to say Covid is airborne

Why the World Health Organization took two years to say Covid is airborne

Nature reports: As 2021 drew to a close, the highly contagious Omicron variant of the pandemic virus was racing around the globe, forcing governments to take drastic actions once again. The Netherlands ordered most businesses to close on 19 December, Ireland set curfews and many countries imposed travel bans in the hope of taming the tsunami of COVID-19 cases filling hospitals. Amid the wave of desperate news around the year-end holidays, one group of researchers hailed a development that had…

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Elon Musk’s arrival stirs fears among some Twitter employees

Elon Musk’s arrival stirs fears among some Twitter employees

Reuters reports: News of Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk taking a board seat at Twitter has some Twitter employees panicking over the future of the social media firm’s ability to moderate content, company insiders told Reuters. Within hours of the surprise disclosure this week that Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” acquired enough shares to become the top Twitter shareholder, political conservatives began flooding social media with calls for the return of Donald Trump. The former U.S. president was banned…

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How many billionaires are there, anyway?

How many billionaires are there, anyway?

Willy Staley writes: In 1981, Malcolm Forbes, the eccentric and fabulously wealthy magazine publisher, came to his editors with a request: Could they pull together a special issue about the 400 richest Americans? The idea was inspired by Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, the doyenne of Gilded Age New York, who regularly hosted the city’s high society in her Fifth Avenue ballroom, which was said to fit about 400 people. It’s quite possible Forbes saw something of himself in Astor. This was…

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Execution of a village mayor becomes a symbol of Russian brutality in Ukraine

Execution of a village mayor becomes a symbol of Russian brutality in Ukraine

The Wall Street Journal reports: Mayor Olha Sukhenko took care of her village like a family for more than a decade, locals say, sprucing up public buildings, organizing concerts and settling disputes. When the Russian army withdrew last week after a monthlong occupation, her neighbors found Ms. Sukhenko’s lifeless body in a shallow grave, her hands bound. Her husband and son lay next to her, dead. Olha, Ihor and Oleksandr Sukhenko are but three of the faces of the brutal…

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The viral ‘Ukrainian biolab’ conspiracy theory hatched in rural Virginia

The viral ‘Ukrainian biolab’ conspiracy theory hatched in rural Virginia

Update: On Tuesday, April 5, 2022, Creech appeared on the Alex Jones Show, where he confirmed his identity — and his role in perpetrating the biolab conspiracy theory. The ADL Center on Extremism has, with a high degree of confidence, identified “Clandestine,” the man behind the viral biolab conspiracy theory, as Jacob Creech, a self-described former restaurant manager and Army National Guard veteran living in rural Virginia. The discovery highlights how a fringe QAnon figure, harnessing the power of social…

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Russia’s stunning failure to seize Kyiv

Russia’s stunning failure to seize Kyiv

The Associated Press reports: Kyiv was a Russian defeat for the ages. The fight started poorly for the invaders and went downhill from there. When President Vladimir Putin launched his war on Feb. 24 after months of buildup on Ukraine’s borders, he sent hundreds of helicopter-borne commandos — the best of the best of Russia’s “spetsnaz” special forces soldiers — to assault and seize a lightly defended airfield on Kyiv’s doorstep. Other Russian forces struck elsewhere across Ukraine, including toward…

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Five Supreme Court justices used the shadow docket to revive a Trump-era pro-pollution rule

Five Supreme Court justices used the shadow docket to revive a Trump-era pro-pollution rule

Mark Joseph Stern writes: On Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued a 5–4 shadow docket order reviving a Trump-era ruling that radically limited the ability of states and tribes to restrict projects, like pipelines, that will damage the environment. With their decision, the majority upended decades of settled law recognizing states’ authority to protect their own waters without bothering to issue a single sentence of reasoning. Just two days earlier, Justice Amy Coney Barrett once again declared that the Supreme Court…

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Wealthy GOP donors form secret coalitions to wield more influence

Wealthy GOP donors form secret coalitions to wield more influence

The New York Times reports: A new coalition of wealthy conservative benefactors that says it aims to “disrupt but advance the Republican agenda” gathered this week for a private summit in South Florida that included closed-door addresses from former President Donald J. Trump and an allied Senate candidate at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, according to documents and interviews. The coalition, called the Rockbridge Network, includes some of Mr. Trump’s biggest donors, such as Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer, and has…

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The Bridgewater CEO who went full MAGA in a Pennsylvania Senate race

The Bridgewater CEO who went full MAGA in a Pennsylvania Senate race

Bloomberg Businessweek reports: If you were to pick the high point of David McCormick’s career in finance, it might’ve come on a bright summer day in 2019 at the Belle Haven Club, a Gatsby-esque waterside retreat in Greenwich, Conn., that’s popular with local billionaires. Among them on this occasion was McCormick’s boss, Ray Dalio, the founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates. Dalio had gathered the financial elites of Bridgewater and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and brought in…

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IPCC’s starkest message yet: Radical steps needed to avert climate disaster

IPCC’s starkest message yet: Radical steps needed to avert climate disaster

Nature reports: Humanity probably isn’t going to prevent Earth from at least temporarily warming 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels — but aggressive action to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and extract carbon from the atmosphere could limit the increase and bring temperatures back down, according to the latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report makes it clear, however, that the window is rapidly closing, and with it the opportunity to prevent the worst impacts of…

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U.S. blocks Russian debt payments and unveils new sanctions in bid to raise pressure on Moscow

U.S. blocks Russian debt payments and unveils new sanctions in bid to raise pressure on Moscow

Reuters reports: The United States stopped the Russian government on Monday from paying holders of its sovereign debt more than $600 million from reserves held at American banks, in a move meant to ratchet up pressure on Moscow and eat into its holdings of US dollars. Under sanctions put in place after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, foreign currency reserves held by the Russian central bank at US financial institutions were frozen. But the Treasury Department had been allowing…

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How a Russian propagandist justifies genocide in Ukraine

How a Russian propagandist justifies genocide in Ukraine

Mariia Kravchenko has posted a translation of an article by a Russian propagandist, originally published by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti: In this article, the author is describing ways how Russians want to wipe out Ukraine in the same way the Soviet regime did it. ⠀ It’s important to spread this article. The Russian war should be stopped now. It was supposed to be stopped 8 years ago when it only began. 71% of Russians feel proud about…

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Russia’s biggest rappers are going hard against Putin’s war on Ukraine

Russia’s biggest rappers are going hard against Putin’s war on Ukraine

Rolling Stone reports: A blazing-yellow Bentley. Face tattoos. Booming bass lines in a parking garage. The burnt-out husk of a bullet-riddled car. As the rapper, who would look comfortably at home on a Tekashi 69 set, spits bars about Cartier and riches from behind the wheel, a woman and her son are held at gunpoint. Suddenly, blood spatters the car’s glossy yellow contour as the victims are dispatched offscreen. This might look like just another hip-hop video. In fact, the…

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Elon Musk’s Twitter investment might be bad news for free speech

Elon Musk’s Twitter investment might be bad news for free speech

Timothy L. O’Brien writes: Elon Musk just bought a $3 billion stake in Twitter Inc., because when you’re the world’s richest human you can toss billions around like poker chips. This may be just another piece of performance art from Musk, who has alternately endorsed and pooh-poohed Bitcoin to great effect. He’s also taken to Twitter to hype altcoins such as Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, while simultaneously warning followers: “Don’t bet the farm on crypto!” “True value is building products…

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Russian invaders are now treating the whole Ukrainian population as combatants, as dirt to be cleansed

Russian invaders are now treating the whole Ukrainian population as combatants, as dirt to be cleansed

Franklin Foer writes: On the morning of March 4, a teacher was sheltering in a basement in Bucha, an old railroad stop northwest of Kyiv that over the centuries had grown into a verdant suburb. The town lay along the Russian military’s intended path of conquest, leading into the Ukrainian capital. And while the invaders struggled to realize their overarching plan, they gained a toehold in Bucha. At 7 a.m., the teacher, huddled alone with her two dogs, heard a…

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History stokes Putin’s imperial dream of a ‘Greater Russia’

History stokes Putin’s imperial dream of a ‘Greater Russia’

Samuel McIlhagga writes: The Russian invasion of Ukraine has become an exemplary instance of the use of historical ideas to justify invasion. Whereas U.S. President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq was couched in abstract rhetoric about “the power and appeal of human liberty,” Putin has resorted to esoteric historical arguments to explain his choice to invade. Putin, in his information and propaganda war, has repeatedly used certain imperial tropes that make historical claims about how Russia should be…

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