Trump’s relentless war against science

Trump’s relentless war against science

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The Hill reports: President Trump is directing all agencies to cut their advisory boards by “at least” one third. The executive order issued Friday evening directs all federal agencies to “evaluate the need” for each of their current advisory committees. The order gives agencies until Sept. 30 to terminate, at a minimum, one-third of their committees. Committees that qualify for the chopping block include those that have completed their objective, had their work taken up by other panels or where…

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How Hong Kong’s leader made the biggest political retreat by China under Xi

How Hong Kong’s leader made the biggest political retreat by China under Xi

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The New York Times reports: Carrie Lam, the chief executive of Hong Kong, has a very loyal majority in the territory’s legislature. She has the complete backing of the Chinese government. She has a huge bureaucracy ready to push her agenda. Yet on Saturday, she was forced to suspend indefinitely her monthslong effort to win passage of a bill that would have allowed her government to extradite criminal suspects to mainland China, Taiwan and elsewhere. Mrs. Lam’s decision represented the…

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The empty promise of Boris Johnson

The empty promise of Boris Johnson

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Sam Knight writes: In the spring of 1989, the Daily Telegraph sent Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson to Brussels to cover what was then the European Economic Community. Johnson, who was twenty-four, knew the city well. His father, Stanley, had been one of the first British bureaucrats appointed to work at the European Commission after the United Kingdom joined the bloc, in 1973. Johnson, his parents, and his three younger siblings moved to Belgium when he was nine years old,…

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Greenland just lost 2 billion tons of ice

Greenland just lost 2 billion tons of ice

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CNN reports: Over 40% of Greenland experienced melting yesterday, with total ice loss estimated to be more than 2 gigatons (a gigaton is equal to 1 billion tons). While Greenland is a big island filled with lots of ice, it is highly unusual for that much ice to be lost in the middle of June. The average “melt season” for Greenland runs from June to August, with the bulk of the melting occurring in July. To visualize how much ice…

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We are more rational than we are told

We are more rational than we are told

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Steven Poole writes: Humanity’s achievements and its self-perception are today at curious odds. We can put autonomous robots on Mars and genetically engineer malarial mosquitoes to be sterile, yet the news from popular psychology, neuroscience, economics and other fields is that we are not as rational as we like to assume. We are prey to a dismaying variety of hard-wired errors. We prefer winning to being right. At best, so the story goes, our faculty of reason is at constant…

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Pope Francis declares ‘climate emergency’ and urges action

Pope Francis declares ‘climate emergency’ and urges action

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The Guardian reports: Pope Francis has declared a global “climate emergency”, warning of the dangers of global heating and that a failure to act urgently to reduce greenhouse gases would be “a brutal act of injustice toward the poor and future generations”. He also endorsed the 1.5C limit on temperature rises that some countries are now aiming for, referring to warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of “catastrophic” effects if we crossed such a threshold. He said a…

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Hundreds of new pesticides approved in Brazil under Bolsonaro

Hundreds of new pesticides approved in Brazil under Bolsonaro

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The Guardian reports: Brazil has approved hundreds of new pesticide products since its far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, took power in January, and more than 1,000 since 2016, a study has found. Many of those approved are banned in Europe. Of 169 new pesticides sanctioned up to 21 May this year, 78 contain active ingredients classified as highly hazardous by the Pesticide Action Network and 24 contain active ingredients banned in the EU, according to the study published on Wednesday by…

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Trump’s fanned the flames in Iran, now the fire risks getting out of control

Trump’s fanned the flames in Iran, now the fire risks getting out of control

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Peter Beaumont writes: The growing confrontation in the Gulf between the US and its Saudi-led allies on one side and Iran and its proxies on the other is now focused on the spate of recent mine attacks on oil tankers, which have been blamed by the US on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. This is a standoff that has been coming. It is incontestable that Iran has been guilty of destabilising overreach in the Middle East in recent years, as it has…

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Trump’s maximum pressure train hits buffers with Abe’s doomed Iran mission

Trump’s maximum pressure train hits buffers with Abe’s doomed Iran mission

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Julian Borger writes: Shinzo Abe’s trip to Tehran this week turned out to be one of the more ill-fated mediation efforts of recent times. What was billed as a grand gesture – the first Japanese leader to visit Iran in four decades – ended in humiliation, with split-screen television pictures showing Abe being told off by a stern supreme leader, while a thick plume of smoke rose from a burning Japanese tanker in the Gulf of Oman. The US has…

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Elizabeth Warren is positioning herself as a pragmatic advocate for the middle class

Elizabeth Warren is positioning herself as a pragmatic advocate for the middle class

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Sheelah Kolhatkar reports: On September 20, 2016, John Stumpf, the C.E.O. of Wells Fargo, appeared before the Senate Banking Committee to defend his company’s role in one of the biggest financial scandals in recent memory. Wells Fargo employees, who were under pressure from senior management to meet overly aggressive sales targets, had opened more than two million bank and credit-card accounts for customers who had never asked for them. The tone of the questioning was initially courteous. Then Elizabeth Warren…

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America’s new concentration camps

America’s new concentration camps

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Esquire reports: Surely, the United States of America could not operate concentration camps. In the American consciousness, the term is synonymous with the Nazi death machines across the European continent that the Allies began the process of dismantling 75 years ago this month. But while the world-historical horrors of the Holocaust are unmatched, they are only the most extreme and inhuman manifestation of a concentration-camp system—which, according to Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration…

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Why Trump remains open to receiving foreign aid during election campaigns

Why Trump remains open to receiving foreign aid during election campaigns

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Following Donald Trump’s reiteration that he would gladly receive electoral assistance from any source, Jack Shafer notes: Had Trump answered the hypothetical about taking campaign information from the Russians in 2020 in any other way than he did, it would have been read as a confession that he and his son did something wrong in 2016, and Trump almost never admits to having been wrong—or to anyone in his family being at fault. Confirming that Trump’s statement now amounts to…

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Fox’s Judge Napolitano: It seems Trump ‘is prepared to commit a felony to get re-elected’

Fox’s Judge Napolitano: It seems Trump ‘is prepared to commit a felony to get re-elected’

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The Daily Beast reports: Reacting to President Trump saying he would accept foreign intel on a political opponent if offered, and that he doesn’t feel it’s necessary to contact the FBI, Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano on Thursday said he worries the president is “prepared to commit a felony.” Napolitano was asked by Fox News anchor Shep Smith if there was any “gray area” or “wiggle room” when it comes to campaigns legally receiving “dirt from a…

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