The U.S. is nearing a deal with the Taliban. But another major threat looms in Afghanistan: ISIS

The U.S. is nearing a deal with the Taliban. But another major threat looms in Afghanistan: ISIS

The Washington Post reports: The official government line here is that the Islamic State has been defeated. The local branch of the extremist Sunni militia, Afghan officials say, has been corralled into a mountainous area near the Pakistani border by Afghan and U.S. forces and can no longer control populated areas. They say it has been reduced to staging suicide attacks against “soft” targets, like the wedding party bombing here on Saturday that killed 63 people and wounded 190. “We…

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Manufacturing woes grip swing states that flipped for Trump in 2016

Manufacturing woes grip swing states that flipped for Trump in 2016

Reuters reports: A slowdown in U.S. manufacturing is hitting jobs in states that flipped to Donald Trump in the 2016 election and that will be key to the Republican president’s re-election prospects in 2020. Trump is telling voters across the country that the economy is booming and jobs are growing. But the blow to factory employment is more pronounced in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin than in the rest of the country. While the overall U.S. economy is still…

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Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times

Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times

NBC News reports: By the numbers, there is no bigger advocate of President Donald Trump on Facebook than The Epoch Times. The small New York-based nonprofit news outlet has spent more than $1.5 million on about 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements in the last six months, according to data from Facebook’s advertising archive — more than any organization outside of the Trump campaign itself, and more than most Democratic presidential candidates have spent on their own campaigns. Those video ads — in…

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Living in space

Living in space

  By Paul Woodward To see things clearly, we often need to break the patterns of habit. The Earth, physically and metaphorically — the ground of human experience — is the stationary foundation that forms the background of movement: our movement across its surface; the terra firma against which the oceans wash and above which birds fly; the horizon that the Sun rises above and then falls beneath. Intellectually, as basic science, most people understand that it is the Earth…

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Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is burning at a record rate, research center says

Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is burning at a record rate, research center says

CNN reports: Fires are raging at a record rate in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, and scientists warn that it could strike a devastating blow to the fight against climate change. The fires are burning at the highest rate since the country’s space research center, the National Institute for Space Research (known by the abbreviation INPE), began tracking them in 2013, the center said Tuesday. There have been 72,843 fires in Brazil this year, with more than half in the Amazon region,…

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How improving tools make it easier to discern climate change’s impact on specific weather events

How improving tools make it easier to discern climate change’s impact on specific weather events

MIT Technology Review reports: A week after heat waves toppled records across Europe late last month, scientists were ready to declare that climate change almost certainly drove the deadly hot stretch. On August 2, while the same heat wave was turning Greenland’s ice sheets into slush, World Weather Attribution reported that decades of greenhouse-gas emissions had raised the odds of such extreme weather by a factor of as much as 100 in some regions. “Over France and the Netherlands, such…

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Migrant families would face indefinite detention under new Trump rule

Migrant families would face indefinite detention under new Trump rule

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration unveiled a regulation on Wednesday that would allow it to detain indefinitely migrant families who cross the border illegally, replacing a decades-old court agreement that limited how long the government could hold migrant children in custody and mandated the level of care they must receive. The White House has for more than a year pressed the Department of Homeland Security to find a way to eliminate the agreement, known as the Flores…

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In Denmark, bewilderment and anger over Trump’s canceled state visit

In Denmark, bewilderment and anger over Trump’s canceled state visit

The New York Times reports: The astonishment in Denmark over President Trump’s apparent desire to buy Greenland turned to bewilderment and anger on Wednesday after the American leader abruptly scrapped a state visit because the Danes have no desire to sell. The cancellation was a rare snub of Denmark’s head of state, Queen Margrethe II, who had extended the invitation to the president and would have hosted him and the first lady. News that Mr. Trump is not coming “came…

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Trump quotes conspiracy theorist claiming Israelis ‘love him like he is the second coming of God’

Trump quotes conspiracy theorist claiming Israelis ‘love him like he is the second coming of God’

The Washington Post reports: President Trump went on Twitter on Wednesday to quote a conservative radio host and known conspiracy theorist who praised him as “the greatest President for Jews” and claimed that Israelis “love him like he is the second coming of God.” In his tweets, Trump thanked Wayne Allyn Root for “the very nice words.” Root has promoted numerous conspiracy theories, including that former president Barack Obama was not born in the United States, that Democratic National Committee…

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On the campaign trail with Elizabeth Warren

On the campaign trail with Elizabeth Warren

Julia Ioffe writes: There is a story Warren has been telling lately, one that explains how she learned the words that have come to define her career—first as a law professor, and more recently as a politician: mortgage, foreclosure, bankruptcy. Long before she encountered them as cold legal terms, those words had a more powerful meaning as the ones whispered late at night by her parents in Oklahoma. This was after her father’s heart attack, when he’d spend long stretches…

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Hand gestures point towards the origins of language

Hand gestures point towards the origins of language

There are few one-offs in life on Earth – rarely can a single species boast a trait or ability that no other possesses. But human language is one such oddity. Our ability to use subtle combinations of sounds produced by our vocal cords to create words and sentences, which when combined with grammatical rules, convey complex ideas.  There were attempts in the 1950s to teach chimpanzees to ‘speak’ some words, but these completely failed. And with no other living relatives…

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Climate change advancing faster than scientists previously thought

Climate change advancing faster than scientists previously thought

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Naomi Oreskes, Michael Oppenheimer, and Dale Jamieson write: Recently, the U.K. Met Office announced a revision to the Hadley Center historical analysis of sea surface temperatures (SST), suggesting that the oceans have warmed about 0.1 degree Celsius more than previously thought. The need for revision arises from the long-recognized problem that in the past sea surface temperatures were measured using a variety of error-prone methods such as using open buckets, lamb’s wool–wrapped thermometers, and canvas bags. It was not until…

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Tiananmen in Hong Kong

Tiananmen in Hong Kong

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Orville Schell writes: At first, when demonstrators began spilling into city streets, citizens were surprised by their audacity and struck by their idealism, openness, and élan as they confronted the might of the Chinese Communist Party. The demonstrators’ demands were limited and answerable, their behavior civil, and their marches orderly. Yet as their numbers grew, they allowed themselves to entertain a heady sense of possibility—a hope that this time they might actually be heard. When they ran into police lines,…

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Facebook and Twitter deployed by China to spread disinformation in Hong Kong

Facebook and Twitter deployed by China to spread disinformation in Hong Kong

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The New York Times reports: China has adopted Russia’s playbook for spreading disinformation on Facebook and Twitter, deploying those tactics in its increasingly heated information war over the protests that have convulsed Hong Kong. In recent weeks, Facebook and Twitter accounts that originated in China acted in a coordinated fashion to amplify messages and images that portrayed Hong Kong’s protesters as violent and extreme, the two social media companies said on Monday. On Facebook, one recent post from a China-linked…

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