I’m a Conservative. But it is time to vote with your head as well as your heart

I’m a Conservative. But it is time to vote with your head as well as your heart

John Major, a former British prime minister, writes: At elections, political tribes join together to promote their own policies and criticise those of their opponents. That’s the nature of elections. But there are always individuals who enhance parliament. And there are always policies upon which every party can agree. One is democracy, and the right of every adult to vote. At every election the future of our country is at stake. But on this occasion even more than usual. When…

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Could Iran’s revolution unravel over a four-cent price hike?

Could Iran’s revolution unravel over a four-cent price hike?

Robin Wright writes: In mid-November, in a surprise overnight announcement, the revolutionary regime in Iran hiked the price of gasoline. By standards anywhere else in the world, it is still pitifully cheap. A litre of gas increased from eight cents to twelve cents—or to fifty cents per gallon—for the first fifteen gallons each month. That’s about a tankful for a large car. After that, gas went up to ninety cents per gallon. (The U.S. average is around two dollars and…

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U.S. says Iranian forces may have killed more than 1,000 protesters

U.S. says Iranian forces may have killed more than 1,000 protesters

The Washington Post reports: A State Department official said Thursday that 1,000 or more protesters may have been killed during weeks of unrest in Iran and that the United States has received video that shows troops firing machine guns mounted on trucks at protesters in one incident. Brian Hook, the special representative for Iran, said the Trump administration will ask Congress to impose harsh sanctions on officials responsible for the alleged atrocities and mistreatment of thousands of protesters who have…

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Trump’s personal lawyer running the Justice Department

Trump’s personal lawyer running the Justice Department

Andrew Rice writes: Shortly before 5 p.m. on November 15, Attorney General William P. Barr arrived at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., his owlish face wearing a heavy expression. He and his entourage rushed by the lobby bar, where a television was tuned to CNN’s coverage of another day of damning impeachment hearings and raging presidential tweets. Inside a gilded ballroom, hundreds of conservative lawyers — many of them, like Barr, veterans of previous Republican administrations — were gathered…

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Democrats are speeding to defeat on impeachment

Democrats are speeding to defeat on impeachment

Charles Sykes writes: As the rough beast of impeachment races forward, Democrats need to pause for a quick reality check. No matter how compelling the evidence against President Trump may be—and it is quite compelling—they will not ultimately succeed in removing Trump from office. So what remains are more modest but nevertheless worthy goals: Winning over a handful of independent-minded House Republicans (an apparently extinct species), persuading at least a few Senate Republicans to break with the president, moving public…

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Impeachment coverage: How journalists can reach the undecided

Impeachment coverage: How journalists can reach the undecided

Margaret Sullivan writes: The diplomats have been inspiring, the legal scholars knowledgeable, the politicians predictable. After endless on-air analysis and written reporting, pundit panels and emergency podcasts, not much has changed. If anything, weeks into the House of Representatives’ public impeachment hearings, Americans’ positions seem to have hardened on whether President Trump should be impeached and removed from office. So, is the media coverage pointless? Are journalists merely shouting into the void? Columnist Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times…

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Rudy Giuliani makes a surprise visit to Kyiv and nobody there is happy about it

Rudy Giuliani makes a surprise visit to Kyiv and nobody there is happy about it

Christopher Miller reports: Rudy Giuliani has made a surprise visit to Kyiv — but the city isn’t buzzing with his arrival. It’s groaning. Giuliani arriving with his shady band of conspiracy theorists — just as Democrats move to officially file impeachment charges against President Donald Trump — is the last thing Ukrainians who have tried desperately to stay out of the drama unfolding in Washington wanted. Kyiv is trying to focus on upcoming peace talks with Russia to end the…

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Trump’s invisible, but far-reaching, wall

Trump’s invisible, but far-reaching, wall

Rachel Morris writes: In the two years and 308 days that Donald Trump has been president, he has constructed zero miles of wall along the southern border of the United States. He has, to be fair, replaced or reinforced 76 miles of existing fence and signed it with a sharpie. A private group has also built a barrier less than a mile long with some help from Steve Bannon and money raised on GoFundMe. But along the 2,000 miles from…

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How microbiomes affect fear

How microbiomes affect fear

Elena Renken writes: Our brains may seem physically far removed from our guts, but in recent years, research has strongly suggested that the vast communities of microbes concentrated in our digestive tract open lines of communication between the two. The intestinal microbiome has been shown to influence cognition and emotion, affecting moods and the state of psychiatric disorders, and even information processing. But how it could do so has been elusive. Until recently, studies of the gut-brain relationship have mostly…

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Climate change accelerates, bringing the world ‘dangerously close’ to irreversible harm

Climate change accelerates, bringing the world ‘dangerously close’ to irreversible harm

Henry Fountain reports: More devastating fires in California. Persistent drought in the Southwest. Record flooding in Europe and Africa. A heat wave, of all things, in Greenland. Climate change and its effects are accelerating, with climate related disasters piling up, season after season. “Things are getting worse,” said Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization, which on Tuesday issued its annual state of the global climate report, concluding a decade of what it called exceptional global heat. “It’s…

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Carbon dioxide emissions hit record high in 2019, even as coal fades

Carbon dioxide emissions hit record high in 2019, even as coal fades

The New York Times reports: Emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide from fossil fuels hit a record high in 2019, researchers said Tuesday, putting countries farther off course from their goal of halting global warming. The new data contained glimmers of good news: Worldwide, industrial emissions are on track to rise 0.6 percent this year, a considerably slower pace than the 1.5 percent increase seen in 2017 and the 2.1 percent rise in 2018. The United States and the European Union…

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Scholars call Trump’s actions on Ukraine an impeachable abuse of power

Scholars call Trump’s actions on Ukraine an impeachable abuse of power

The New York Times reports: The House Judiciary Committee opened an epic partisan clash over the impeachment of President Trump on Wednesday at a hearing where Democrats and Republicans offered up dueling legal scholars who disagreed over whether the president’s conduct rose to the constitutional threshold to warrant his removal from office. At the start of a new phase in Democrats’ fast-moving push to impeach Mr. Trump, three law professors they invited to testify declared that the president’s move to…

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Trump violates diplomacy’s Golden Rule

Trump violates diplomacy’s Golden Rule

Nicholas Burns writes: During a testy joint press conference at the NATO summit in London yesterday, President Donald Trump and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, argued openly over how the 70-year-old alliance should handle Russia, the Islamic State, and Turkey. When interacting with allied leaders, Trump’s predecessors have generally followed a golden rule: Disagreements with friends are okay—but only behind the scenes, not in public. Trump, in contrast, seems to relish going after the Europeans in full view of the…

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