On the Irish border lanes of Fermanagh, the bad old days are returning

On the Irish border lanes of Fermanagh, the bad old days are returning

The Observer reports: Boris Johnson vowed to preserve peace in Northern Ireland during diplomatic forays to Germany and France last week, saying “under no circumstances” would the UK put checks and controls on the border. The prime minister’s reassurance did not reach the narrow lanes and hedgerows of County Fermanagh. Here it felt like the bad old days had already returned. A helicopter and surveillance aircraft criss-crossed grey skies over the village of Newtownbutler, while in the fields below police…

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How Britain has drifted towards a ‘no-deal Brexit’

How Britain has drifted towards a ‘no-deal Brexit’

Helen Lewis writes: Brexit isn’t what it used to be. In the months immediately after Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, two flavors were on offer—“hard” and “soft.” A soft Brexit generally meant leaving the bloc’s political structures but not its economic ones, such as the single market for goods and services. The hard version meant leaving those, too. Crucially, both versions would see Britain formally agree to a new relationship with the EU. “In the summer…

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What have the Romans ever done for us?

What have the Romans ever done for us?

For the entertainment of many, this video has been making the rounds recently:     For those who don’t follow British politics closely or know much about the history of the British Isles, a little background is in order. The voice here comes from John Cleese in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where he plays a rebel leader conspiring against Roman rule in historic Palestine. Since the Romans also ruled Britania (for about 400 years), the joker who crafted this…

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Meditation and yoga practice linked to reduced volume in brain region tied to negative emotions

Meditation and yoga practice linked to reduced volume in brain region tied to negative emotions

PsyPost reports: Meditation and yoga practice is associated with smaller right amygdala volume, a brain region involved in emotional processing, according to research published in Brain Imaging and Behavior. For their study, the researchers analyzed data that had been collected during the Rotterdam Study, an ongoing population-based study that has been conducted in The Netherlands since 1990. The study has recruited more than 15,000 subjects aged 45 years or over. The researchers were particularly interested in a subgroup of 3,742…

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Trump’s command economy

Trump’s command economy

David A. Graham writes: Fate sometimes has an acute sense of irony. This morning, the political donor and philanthropist David Koch died. Koch’s father was an early, prominent supporter of the limited-government, red-baiting John Birch Society. Koch ran for vice president as a Libertarian in 1980, but he and his brother Charles eventually shifted their focus to pushing the Republican Party in an aggressively small-government, low-regulation direction. They had remarkable success, but had serious disagreements with the current Republican president,…

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David Koch escaped the climate hell he helped create

David Koch escaped the climate hell he helped create

Brian Kahn writes: David Koch is dead. The billionaire died this week at age 79 of causes yet unknown. While he certainly enjoyed the fruits of his labors to deregulate U.S. industry and reduce taxes on the super-wealthy like himself, he will never have to experience the consequences of his biggest achievement: putting the entire planet on the brink of crisis in the service of enriching himself and a few other fossil fuel billionaires. And we, the people and future…

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The Amazon is burning because the world eats so much meat

The Amazon is burning because the world eats so much meat

CNN reports: While the wildfires raging in the Amazon rainforest may constitute an “international crisis,” they are hardly an accident. The vast majority of the fires have been set by loggers and ranchers to clear land for cattle. The practice is on the rise, encouraged by Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s populist pro-business president, who is backed by the country’s so-called “beef caucus.” While this may be business as usual for Brazil’s beef farmers, the rest of the world is looking on…

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Global leaders urged to divert Brazilian government from ‘suicide’ path as Amazonian rainforest burns

Global leaders urged to divert Brazilian government from ‘suicide’ path as Amazonian rainforest burns

The Guardian reports: International pressure may be the only way to stop the Brazilian government from taking a “suicide” path in the Amazon, one of the country’s most respected scientists has said, as the world’s biggest rainforest continues to be ravaged by thousands of deliberate fires. The large number of conflagrations – set illegally to clear and prepare land for crops, cattle and property speculation – has prompted the state of Amazonas to declare an emergency, created giant smoke clouds…

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Climate change may change the way ocean waves impact 50% of the world’s coastlines

Climate change may change the way ocean waves impact 50% of the world’s coastlines

By Mark Hemer, CSIRO; Ian Young, University of Melbourne; Joao Morim Nascimento, Griffith University, and Nobuhito Mori, Kyoto University The rise in sea levels is not the only way climate change will affect the coasts. Our research, published today in Nature Climate Change, found a warming planet will also alter ocean waves along more than 50% of the world’s coastlines. If the climate warms by more than 2℃ beyond pre-industrial levels, southern Australia is likely to see longer, more southerly…

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The information war of all against all

The information war of all against all

Peter Pomerantsev writes: “The powerlessness of our enemies is they are still trying to describe and fight us as if we were the old right-wing fringe groups that they faced decades before,” Martin Sellner, a figurehead of the European Identitarian Movement, told me, speaking from his flat in Vienna, Austria. “Our job as the avant-garde from the right is to show the people that the normality of tomorrow doesn’t have to be what is considered normal today. Political normality is…

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Jewish Americans are not temporarily dislocated Israelis

Jewish Americans are not temporarily dislocated Israelis

Talia Lavin writes: The first recorded Jewish resident of North America arrived in 1585. His name was Joachim Gans, and he was a metallurgist from Prague, recruited by Sir Walter Raleigh to accompany would-be colonists to what would become Virginia. But the Roanoke colony was short-lived, and Gans soon departed, leaving behind a few lumps of copper and a goldsmith’s crucible for future archaeologists to discover. For centuries after Gans’s arrival, the Jewish presence in the New World was small…

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Fires in the Amazon, the planet at risk

Fires in the Amazon, the planet at risk

Tierra Curry writes: In Brazil, the Amazon rainforest is now burning at a record rate. The greedy, short-sighted policies of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro are jeopardizing indigenous peoples and countless plants and animals. Indeed, in the midst of a climate emergency, Bolsonaro’s policies to slash environmental protections and develop the Amazon for mining, ranching and farming jeopardize the future of life on Earth as we know it. North America has already lost nearly 300 species to extinction. The toll…

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Bipartisan support for Israel is dead — and that’s a good thing

Bipartisan support for Israel is dead — and that’s a good thing

Peter Beinart writes: It’s become a ritual. Every time Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu do something that outrages Democrats, centrist commentators warn that they are committing a grave offense: They’re making Israel a partisan issue. The accusation has been nearly ubiquitous since the two leaders last week conspired to deny Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar’s request to visit the West Bank. “Trump and Netanyahu are…eroding the bipartisanship that is so critical to the U.S.-Israel special bond,” former Middle East…

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What ‘victory’ looks like: A journey through shattered Syria

What ‘victory’ looks like: A journey through shattered Syria

The New York Times reports: Picking our way around the ruins of the Damascus suburb of Douma, it took a little while to realize what was missing. There were women carrying groceries, old men droning by on motorbikes and skinny children heaving jugs of water home. But there were few young men. They had died in the war, been thrown in prison or scattered far beyond Syria’s borders. Now, it had fallen to survivors like Um Khalil, a 59-year-old, round-faced…

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