Professors, beware. A ‘student information officer’ might be watching for signs of disloyalty

Professors, beware. A ‘student information officer’ might be watching for signs of disloyalty

The New York Times reports: With a neon-red backpack and white Adidas shoes, he looks like any other undergraduate on the campus of Sichuan University in southwestern China. But Peng Wei, a 21-year-old chemistry major, has a special mission: He is both student and spy. Mr. Peng is one of a growing number of “student information officers” who keep tabs on their professors’ ideological views. They are there to help root out teachers who show any sign of disloyalty to…

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Iran intervenes to prevent ousting of Iraqi prime minister

Iran intervenes to prevent ousting of Iraqi prime minister

Reuters reports: Iran has stepped in to prevent the ouster of Iraqi Prime Minister Abdel Abdul Mahdi by two of Iraq’s most influential figures amid weeks of anti-government demonstrations, sources close to both men told Reuters. Populist Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr demanded this week that Abdul Mahdi call an early election to quell the biggest mass protests in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. The demonstrations are fueled by anger at corruption and widespread economic…

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New bird species arises from hybrids, as scientists watch

New bird species arises from hybrids, as scientists watch

Quanta Magazine reported (2017): It’s not every day that scientists observe a new species emerging in real time. Charles Darwin believed that speciation probably took place over hundreds if not thousands of generations, advancing far too gradually to be detected directly. The biologists who followed him have generally defaulted to a similar understanding and have relied on indirect clues, gleaned from genomes and fossils, to infer complex organisms’ evolutionary histories. Some of those clues suggest that interbreeding plays a larger…

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Trump’s formal invitation to be impeached

Trump’s formal invitation to be impeached

Joshua C. Huder writes: On Thursday, five weeks after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump, the House adopted a resolution confirming that inquiry. The timing is somewhat confusing: The House has had success in several recent court cases, and there’s nothing in the Constitution or in House rules that requires it to adopt a resolution to conduct an impeachment inquiry. So why now? So far, the impeachment investigation has developed in mostly the same way…

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Women across the U.S. are far more likely than men to consider Trump’s actions worthy of impeachment

Women across the U.S. are far more likely than men to consider Trump’s actions worthy of impeachment

The Atlantic reports: More than a month into the House Democrats’ official impeachment investigation into President Donald Trump, Americans’ support for the inquiry still looks a bit fuzzy. While the most recent national polls show that roughly 50 percent of the country condones the effort, surveys in several key swing states have shown narrower margins of support. But across all the polling, one trend is strikingly clear: Women are much more likely than men to consider the president’s actions worthy…

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Europe can’t keep shutting its eyes to the disaster in Syria

Europe can’t keep shutting its eyes to the disaster in Syria

Natalie Nougayrède writes: These past few days have been a watershed for Europe. I’m not thinking about Brexit, but about Syria – which increasingly looks like our 21st-century Spanish civil war. Western and European defeat in Syria (by which I mean political and moral, not just military defeat) has parallels with the 1930s when democracies were unable or unwilling to stand up to authoritarians when it mattered, or even to play any kind of meaningful role in preventing a catastrophe…

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Trump elbows into Britain’s general election campaign

Trump elbows into Britain’s general election campaign

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump has intervened in the UK’s nascent election campaign, calling on Boris Johnson to team up with Nigel Farage to form an “unstoppable force” and claiming Jeremy Corbyn would be “so bad for your country”. Speaking to Farage on LBC Radio, the US president also said Johnson’s Brexit deal could prevent the UK from agreeing a trade deal with the US. Trump said the US “can’t make a trade deal with the UK” under “certain aspects…

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Trump’s support couldn’t save coal giant Murray Energy from bankruptcy

Trump’s support couldn’t save coal giant Murray Energy from bankruptcy

Inside Climate News reports: Murray Energy, the U.S. coal company whose founder’s “wish list” was a virtual template for the Trump administration’s rollback of federal environmental and climate regulations, filed for bankruptcy protection Tuesday. It’s the latest in a wave of bankruptcy filings by coal companies that are struggling to compete in a market where their product—once the lowest-cost fuel for producing electricity—is now more expensive than natural gas and renewable sources. Among them, Murray’s bankruptcy stands out, in part,…

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EPA set to revoke restrictions on toxic metals poisoning drinking water

EPA set to revoke restrictions on toxic metals poisoning drinking water

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is expected to roll back an Obama-era regulation to limit dangerous heavy metals like arsenic, lead and mercury from coal-fired power plants, according to two people familiar with the plans. With a series of new rules expected in November, the Environmental Protection Agency will move to weaken the 2015 regulation by relaxing some of the requirements on power generators and also exempting a significant number of power plants from even those requirements….

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Explaining illness with belief in evil

Explaining illness with belief in evil

Live Science reports: Where did the spiritual concept of evil originate? One possible explanation might be people’s attempts to understand and cope with infectious diseases. Linking diseases and their symptoms to mysterious evil forces is a practice that emerged in traditional belief systems prior to the mid-19th century, when germ theory was introduced, scientists wrote in a new study. Germ theory revealed that microscopic pathogens, rather than malevolent spirits, were the cause of illness. However, the connection between religious convictions…

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Climate change is burning down California

Climate change is burning down California

Michael E. Mann writes: Climate change was long regarded as a distant threat, one happening in far off places and future times. That is unfortunately no longer the case. Climate change is here, and it’s burning through California. I spent five years in the San Francisco Bay Area getting my undergraduate degrees in applied math and physics from UC-Berkeley. To see my campus threatened by the fires is heartbreaking. I can’t even imagine how bad it is for those who…

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Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and the questioning of an American Jew’s patriotism

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and the questioning of an American Jew’s patriotism

Julia Ioffe writes: Almost as soon as news of Vindman’s planned testimony broke on Monday night, Trump’s allies seized on Vindman’s birthplace and language abilities as proof of his disloyalty to the United States. John Yoo, architect of the post-9/11 torture program, even went so far as to accuse Vindman of “espionage” on behalf of the Ukrainians. It was an assertion repeated by a former Republican congressman who is now a CNN commentator. Of course, what they meant was that…

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Trump’s baffling plan to pillage Syria’s oil

Trump’s baffling plan to pillage Syria’s oil

Robin Wright writes: President Trump dropped a stunner during his rambling press conference, on Sunday, after announcing the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State leader, in a U.S. raid. In a major policy flip-flop, the President said that he is not only keeping American forces in Syria to “secure” its oil fields, he is willing to go to war over them. “We may have to fight for the oil. It’s O.K.,” he said. “Maybe somebody else wants the…

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Tulsi Gabbard is now working hand in hand with the Republican party

Tulsi Gabbard is now working hand in hand with the Republican party

Jonathan Chait writes: “Hillary Clinton emerged recently to claim, with no basis in fact, that I am being ‘groomed’ by the Russian government to undermine America,” claims Tulsi Gabbard in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today. In fact, as even the conservative Washington Examiner acknowledges, Clinton did not say that. She said Republicans were grooming Gabbard. And far from refuting that charge, everything about Gabbard’s op-ed confirms Clinton was probably right. It is in Gabbard’s interest to conflate the charge…

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