UN human rights chief ‘deeply shocked’ by migrant detention center conditions in Texas

UN human rights chief ‘deeply shocked’ by migrant detention center conditions in Texas

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The Washington Post reports: United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said Monday that she is “appalled by the conditions” being forced upon migrants after they cross the southern U.S. border and admonished the federal government for failing to find noncustodial alternatives. “Any deprivation of liberty of adult migrants and refugees should be a measure of last resort,” she said, adding that where detention is necessary, it should be for the shortest period and under conditions that satisfy…

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Elizabeth Warren shuns conventional wisdom for a new kind of campaign unshackled from self-serving consultants

Elizabeth Warren shuns conventional wisdom for a new kind of campaign unshackled from self-serving consultants

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Politico reports: When Elizabeth Warren said earlier this year she was swearing off fundraisers, many Democratic strategists saw it as a sign of desperation from a flailing candidate. But that gamble against conventional wisdom — which is paying off handsomely, given the $19.1 million she raised in the second quarter — is far from the only way Warren is defying the traditional playbook for running a modern presidential campaign. The campaign has gone without an outside polling firm, and says…

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Ancient humans used the moon as a calendar in the sky

Ancient humans used the moon as a calendar in the sky

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Rebecca Boyle writes: The sun’s rhythm may have set the pace of each day, but when early humans needed a way to keep time beyond a single day and night, they looked to a second light in the sky. The moon was one of humankind’s first timepieces long before the first written language, before the earliest organized cities and well before structured religions. The moon’s face changes nightly and with the regularity of the seasons, making it a reliable marker…

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Trump’s spat with the UK reveals the bottomless depths of his insecurities

Trump’s spat with the UK reveals the bottomless depths of his insecurities

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A+ trolling… https://t.co/mufVj0IoBF — Keerthik Sasidharan (@KS1729) July 9, 2019 The Guardian reports: Theresa May faces a full-blown diplomatic standoff with the US after Donald Trump condemned Britain’s “stupid” ambassador to Washington over leaked memos critical of the White House, as Downing Street insisted Sir Kim Darroch had its full support. [Continue reading…] Richard Wolffe writes: Inept and dysfunctional are two of the more diplomatic words you could choose to describe the Trump administration. Colossally moronic and self-defeating might be…

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Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest shows the power of one newspaper’s investigation

Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest shows the power of one newspaper’s investigation

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Brian Stelter writes: In the past year the Jeffrey Epstein case was catapulted onto the national news radar by one newspaper, the Miami Herald, and by one reporter in particular, Julie K. Brown. The paper’s “Perversion of Justice” series came out last November, and Brown has stayed on the story ever since. As soon as The Daily Beast broke the news that Epstein had been arrested on Saturday evening, fellow journalists and other observers credited Brown and thanked her for…

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The real origins of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory

The real origins of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory

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Michael Isikoff reports: In the summer of 2016, Russian intelligence agents secretly planted a fake report claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton, giving rise to a notorious conspiracy theory that captivated conservative activists and was later promoted from inside President Trump’s White House, a Yahoo News investigation has found. Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin” — disguised to read…

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Trump can’t block critics from his Twitter account, appeals court rules

Trump can’t block critics from his Twitter account, appeals court rules

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The New York Times reports: President Trump has been violating the Constitution by blocking people from following his Twitter account because they criticized or mocked him, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday. The ruling could have broader implications for how the First Amendment applies to the social-media era. Because Mr. Trump uses Twitter to conduct government business, he cannot exclude some Americans from reading his posts — and engaging in conversations in the replies to them — because he…

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Proroguing parliament would be end of democracy in UK, says former attorney general

Proroguing parliament would be end of democracy in UK, says former attorney general

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The Guardian reports: Proroguing the House of Commons to achieve a no-deal Brexit would be “the end of parliamentary democracy” in the UK, Dominic Grieve has said in defending his move to seek to remove the option. Grieve’s amendment, which has cross-party support including from a handful of fellow Conservative MPs, is to the Northern Ireland bill going through the Commons, and would require fortnightly reports on that country’s formation of an executive, which has been vacant since 2017. Speaking…

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It took Jared Kushner 874 days to put together a great big glossy Middle East nothing-burger

It took Jared Kushner 874 days to put together a great big glossy Middle East nothing-burger

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Daniel Levy writes: Jared Kushner’s long-awaited “Peace to Prosperity” gathering at the Manama Four Seasons Hotel in Bahrain generated just about the level of serious coverage that it merited—precious little. For all its borderline pantomime-style imbecility (Kushner himself put in a performance as someone pretending to care about the Palestinians), this convening actually matters. Coming at a time in the region when the U.S. is inching closer to an armed confrontation with Iran and endorsing Israel’s permanent annexation of more…

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What does anthropology say about the emotional lives of others?

What does anthropology say about the emotional lives of others?

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Andrew Beatty writes: In his classic thought experiment set out in ‘What Is An Emotion?’ (1884), William James, pioneer psychologist and brother of the novelist Henry, tried to imagine what would be left of emotion if you subtracted the bodily symptoms. What, for example, would grief be ‘without its tears, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breastbone? A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances are deplorable, and nothing more.’ James’s resonant conclusion that ‘a purely disembodied human emotion…

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News organizations are timidly changing their approach to covering climate crisis

News organizations are timidly changing their approach to covering climate crisis

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The New York Times reports: As Europe heats up, Greenland melts and the Midwest floods, many news organizations are devoting more resources to climate change as they cover the topic with more urgency. In Florida, six newsrooms with different owners have taken the unusual step of pooling their resources and sharing their reporting on the issue. They plan to examine how climate change will affect the state’s enormous agriculture sector as well as “the future of coastal towns and cities…

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Research on honeybees hit by Trump budget cuts

Research on honeybees hit by Trump budget cuts

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CNN reports: The US Department of Agriculture has suspended data collection for its annual Honey Bee Colonies report, citing cost cuts — a move that robs researchers and the honeybee industry of a critical tool for understanding honeybee population declines, and comes as the USDA is curtailing other research programs. It’s also another step toward undoing President Barack Obama’s government-wide focus on protecting pollinators, including bees and butterflies, whose populations have plummeted in recent years. [Continue reading…] WJLA reports: Last…

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Elizabeth Warren has raised more money than any other 100% grassroots-funded campaign

Elizabeth Warren has raised more money than any other 100% grassroots-funded campaign

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The New York Times reports: Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts raised $19.1 million in the past three months, her campaign said on Monday, a total that places her firmly in the top echelon of the Democratic money race and ahead of her main rival for the party’s progressive wing, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The fund-raising haul represents a turnaround for Ms. Warren after she raised just $6 million in her campaign’s first three months, before her strategy of eschewing…

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Trump and the oligarchs against the rest of America

Trump and the oligarchs against the rest of America

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Robert Reich writes: I keep hearing that the Democratic party has moved “left” and that Democratic candidates may be “too far left”. But in an era of unprecedented concentration of wealth and political power at the top, I can’t help wondering what it means to be “left”. A half-century ago, when America had a large and growing middle class, those on the “left” sought stronger social safety nets and more public investment in schools, roads and research. Those on the…

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