India’s Supreme Court rules in favor of Ayodhya property claim made by the Hindu god (and ‘legal entity’), Ram

India’s Supreme Court rules in favor of Ayodhya property claim made by the Hindu god (and ‘legal entity’), Ram

  Al Jazeera reports: There was heightened security in Ayodhya, a town in north India, ahead of the Supreme Court’s verdict on a site claimed by both Muslims and Hindus. Early on Saturday, the town looked deserted as residents stayed inside their homes, waiting for the decision to be announced. Some had even stocked up on food in advance, just in case the decision provoked anger, violence and eventually a curfew in this historic town. But when India’s top court…

Read More Read More

Why Twitter so big in Saudi Arabia

Why Twitter so big in Saudi Arabia

The New York Times reports: In Saudi Arabia, where a relatively closed culture leaves citizens few public forums to discuss news and politics, Twitter has become a kind of town square, the place where citizens meet to swap information and debate the latest issues. Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy has not banned the site, but it has taken extensive measures to shape the information that appears there and to silence or drown out dissidents who use it to post critical views….

Read More Read More

‘Noise’ in the brain encodes surprisingly important signals

‘Noise’ in the brain encodes surprisingly important signals

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: At every moment, neurons whisper, shout, sputter and sing, filling the brain with a dizzying cacophony of voices. Yet many of those voices don’t seem to be saying anything meaningful at all. They register as habitual echoes of noise, not signal; as static, not discourse. Since scientists first became capable of recording from single neurons 60 years ago, they’ve known that brain activity is highly variable, even when there’s no obvious reason it should be. An animal’s…

Read More Read More

The psychology of Greta Thunberg’s climate activism

The psychology of Greta Thunberg’s climate activism

Scott Koenig writes: In September 2019, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage activist, excoriated world leaders for their ongoing failure to address the climate crisis. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” she said at one point during her speech at the United Nations. Thunberg has been galvanizing public support for climate action since rising to prominence with her school strike about a year ago, and her latest remarks are no exception. They’ve attracted millions of…

Read More Read More

William Taylor is an ideal witness for House Democrats to begin public impeachment hearings

William Taylor is an ideal witness for House Democrats to begin public impeachment hearings

Noah Feldman writes: It’s no surprise that Ambassador William Taylor is expected to be the first witness to testify when the House of Representatives opens public impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump next week. First, he’s an astoundingly credible witness — straight from central casting, as Trump himself likes to say about some of his appointees. As a matter of prosecutorial strategy, that makes him an ideal first witness for House Democrats to lay out their case for the first…

Read More Read More

Elizabeth Warren isn’t as adversarial and reactive as other candidates and the media would like her to be

Elizabeth Warren isn’t as adversarial and reactive as other candidates and the media would like her to be

Politico reports: Elizabeth Warren has been on the receiving end of an onslaught of jabs, swipes, missives, think-pieces and general bashing from opponents this past week, the likes of which she hasn’t experienced since she jumped into the presidential race. But more surprising than the attacks — Warren, having risen to frontrunner status, had those coming — has been her response. In two words: No comment. Her surrogates and campaign aides aren’t going on cable TV to defend her —…

Read More Read More

Michael Bloomberg’s ego is an agent of socialist change

Michael Bloomberg’s ego is an agent of socialist change

Eric Levitz writes: These are anxious days for Democrats who favor gated communities and unfettered trade. Americans who believe in a woman’s right to choose and private equity’s right to loot, now need a Klonopin with their morning news. Elizabeth Warren — the slayer of Summers, stumper of Stumpf, and all around bane of (finance) capital — boasts comfortable leads in Iowa and New Hampshire. In at least one of those states, a Trotskyist fellow traveler is her closest competitor….

Read More Read More

An uprising in Iraq is the broadest in decades. It’s posing an alarming threat to Baghdad and Tehran

An uprising in Iraq is the broadest in decades. It’s posing an alarming threat to Baghdad and Tehran

The Washington Post reports: From Baghdad to the Shiite Muslim shrine city of Karbala and farther south, Iraqis are pushing for a revolution. They fill central squares to sing and dance from daybreak, and face down riot police when night falls. Iraq’s streets are no stranger to power struggles. They’ve been a stage for sectarian conflict and for the Islamic State’s emergence. But the crowds are different this time, and so is the threat now posed by the largest grass-roots…

Read More Read More

A lack of realism among foreign policy realists in their advocacy of restraint

A lack of realism among foreign policy realists in their advocacy of restraint

Peter D. Feaver and Will Inboden write: The news of the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi during a raid by U.S. special operations forces on Oct. 27 capped a dizzying three weeks in the Trump administration’s Syria policy. The turmoil began on Oct. 6, with President Donald Trump’s peremptory decision to pull back about 100 U.S. soldiers from their positions embedded with Kurdish forces in northern Syria. A few days later, he ordered the withdrawal from the…

Read More Read More

We learn more by trusting than by not trusting

We learn more by trusting than by not trusting

By Hugo Mercier We all know people who have suffered by trusting too much: scammed customers, jilted lovers, shunned friends. Indeed, most of us have been burned by misplaced trust. These personal and vicarious experiences lead us to believe that people are too trusting, often verging on gullibility. In fact, we don’t trust enough. Take data about trust in the United States (the same would be true in most wealthy democratic countries at least). Interpersonal trust, a measure of whether…

Read More Read More

Republicans have to choose between Trump and democracy

Republicans have to choose between Trump and democracy

Fred Kaplan writes: The House impeachment probe has reached a point where continuing to defend President Donald Trump requires a prodigious capacity for denial or self-delusion. Sen. Lindsey Graham, Trump’s denialist in chief, summed up the situation on Tuesday when asked about Gordon Sondland’s revision to his testimony before the committees three weeks earlier. Originally, the hotel tycoon–turned–ambassador couldn’t remember much about a quid pro quo. But now that his memory had been refreshed by other witnesses’ depositions (which may…

Read More Read More

Republican subservience to Trump is based in fear, says former defense secretary, William Cohen

Republican subservience to Trump is based in fear, says former defense secretary, William Cohen

Jennifer Rubin writes: “I think it’s either fear or complicity.” That is how former Maine Republican senator and secretary of defense William S. Cohen tries to explain Republicans’ subservience to President Trump and willful disregard for replete evidence of corruption. “It’s predominantly fear. He will target them,” Cohen tells me in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon. He points to Trump’s public declaration that four congresswomen of color should “fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”…

Read More Read More

State Department officials warned Trump not to revoke protections for immigrants

State Department officials warned Trump not to revoke protections for immigrants

Vox reports: Senior State Department officials and career diplomats repeatedly warned the Trump administration that taking away legal protections for immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti would put national security, foreign relations, and the immigrants’ American-born children at risk, according to internal State Department documents. But Trump did it anyway — and concerns about the 2020 election appear to have helped determine the timeline for requiring immigrants to leave, according to the documents, which will be released in a…

Read More Read More

Paris accord pledges are ‘totally insufficient’ to meet critical climate targets, scientists warn

Paris accord pledges are ‘totally insufficient’ to meet critical climate targets, scientists warn

Inside Climate News reports: While nearly all of the world’s countries have pledged to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, the reductions they’re planning in the short term—over the next 10 years—aren’t nearly enough, leading scientists warn in a new report. Nearly two-thirds of the pledges under the Paris climate agreement are “totally insufficient” to meet critical climate targets, the report by scientists who have been involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found. To keep global warming under…

Read More Read More