The secret to slowing Guatemalan migration

The secret to slowing Guatemalan migration

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Nicholas Kristof writes: To stop the flow of migrants, Trump has called for a wall at the Mexico border that would cost billions of dollars, has separated children from parents for months, has cut off aid to Central America and, most recently, threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico. The result? The torrent keeps getting bigger, with twice as many migrants seized at the border in each of the last few months as a year earlier. Trump’s strategy so far seems…

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Bellingcat and how open source reinvented investigative journalism

Bellingcat and how open source reinvented investigative journalism

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Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: It’s a brief window into a doomed soul. Clinging to his mother’s back, the child looks twice into the camera held by the man about to kill him. The natural curiosity of a child that fear has failed to extinguish. The smartphone captures the casual cruelty with which both mother and child are killed. Nearby, another mother and daughter are executed. One killer continues to pump bullets into the lifeless bodies with a glee that seems…

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Company part-owned by Jared Kushner got $90m from unknown offshore investors since 2017

Company part-owned by Jared Kushner got $90m from unknown offshore investors since 2017

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The Guardian reports: A real estate company part-owned by Jared Kushner has received $90m in foreign funding from an opaque offshore vehicle since he entered the White House as a senior adviser to his father-in-law Donald Trump. Investment has flowed from overseas to the company, Cadre, while Kushner works as an international envoy for the US, according to corporate filings and interviews. The money came through a vehicle run by Goldman Sachs in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven that…

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Ditch the GPS. It’s ruining your brain

Ditch the GPS. It’s ruining your brain

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M.R. O’Connor writes: It has become the most natural thing to do: get in the car, type a destination into a smartphone, and let an algorithm using GPS data show the way. Personal GPS-equipped devices entered the mass market in only the past 15 or so years, but hundreds of millions of people now rarely travel without them. These gadgets are extremely powerful, allowing people to know their location at all times, to explore unknown places and to avoid getting…

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The biological origins of rhythm

The biological origins of rhythm

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Ferris Jabr writes: There are moments when we witness an animal do something so far outside its presumed repertoire of behavior — something so uncannily human — that we can never look at that animal, or ourselves, the same way again. For Irena Schulz, one of those moments happened on an otherwise ordinary day in August, 2007. Schulz lived in Schererville, Ind., where she managed a sanctuary for abandoned parrots. A man named Dane Spudic came by with a young…

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‘Hell on Earth’ scenario predicted if climate crisis doesn’t trigger immediate drastic action

‘Hell on Earth’ scenario predicted if climate crisis doesn’t trigger immediate drastic action

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Al Jazeera reports: A climate change paper grabbed headlines this week with its terrifying prediction of what the world will be in 30 years’ time – absent drastic and immediate change to human societies. “World of outright chaos,” “Climate apocalypse,” “We’re all gonna die,” the media banners blared. The sobering headlines and equally disconcerting stories beneath described a “scenario analysis” by an Australian think-tank, Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration. The paper portrayed what the year 2050 will look like…

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America’s political mood currently the ‘most liberal ever recorded’

America’s political mood currently the ‘most liberal ever recorded’

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Eric Levitz writes: The American public is in the mood for “big government.” According to the distinguished political scientist James Stimson’s “Public Policy Mood estimate” — a widely respected tool for measuring shifts in ideological opinion across time — the U.S. electorate is more sympathetic to left-wing economic policy today than at anytime in the past 68 years (which is as far back as Stimson’s data goes). Tracking ideological change across decades is inherently difficult, since some policy questions fall…

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Troubling-to-outright-damning episodes lost in the noise around the Mueller report’s release

Troubling-to-outright-damning episodes lost in the noise around the Mueller report’s release

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Quinta Jurecic writes: After two years of silence, the special counsel Robert Mueller recently made his first public remarks — to complain, it seemed, that no one had read his report. “We chose those words carefully,” Mr. Mueller said, “and the work speaks for itself.” But at a dense 440-plus pages, if the report speaks for itself, it takes a great deal of time and focus to listen to what it has to say. Mr. Mueller tells a complicated story…

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In a world full of wars, why are so many of them ignored?

In a world full of wars, why are so many of them ignored?

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Simon Tisdall writes: Cameroon, a central African state of 24 million people on the Gulf of Guinea, is rarely in the news – which is surprising, given the awful things happening there. In a warring world full of conflict, the country’s troubles barely rate a mention. That’s short-sighted. As Yemen shows, today’s local difficulties have a habit of becoming tomorrow’s international crises. Long-running tensions between Cameroon’s French and English-speaking communities came to a head last week with the arrest of…

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U.S. ambassador says Israel has right to annex parts of West Bank

U.S. ambassador says Israel has right to annex parts of West Bank

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The New York Times reports: Israel has a right to annex at least some, but “unlikely all,” of the West Bank, the United States ambassador, David M. Friedman, said in an interview, opening the door to American acceptance of what would be an enormously provocative act. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to begin annexing Jewish settlements in the West Bank, a move that would violate international law and could be a fatal blow to a two-state solution to the…

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Doublethink is stronger than Orwell imagined

Doublethink is stronger than Orwell imagined

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George Packer writes: No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984. The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc—doublethink, memory hole, unperson, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Thought Police, Room 101, Big Brother—they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of…

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Farming may have helped introduce ‘f’ and ‘v’ sounds to language 12,000 years ago

Farming may have helped introduce ‘f’ and ‘v’ sounds to language 12,000 years ago

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The Atlantic reports: Thousands of years ago, small groups of humans across the globe began to transition from hunting and gathering their food to raising and planting it instead. They milked cattle, milled grains to make soft bread, and used new inventions like pottery to preserve meat and vegetables. And once they did that, they could start spicing up their speech by throwing some f and v sounds into the mix. At least, that’s according to a new study published…

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White House blocked intelligence agency’s written testimony warning about ‘catastrophic’ climate change

White House blocked intelligence agency’s written testimony warning about ‘catastrophic’ climate change

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The Washington Post reports: White House officials barred a State Department intelligence agency from submitting written testimony this week to the House Intelligence Committee warning that human-caused climate change could be “possibly catastrophic.” The move came after State officials refused to excise the document’s references to federal scientific findings on climate change. The effort to edit, and ultimately suppress, the prepared testimony by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research comes as the Trump administration is debating how best…

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Trump is giving Americans dirty water, dirty air, and a very dirty climate

Trump is giving Americans dirty water, dirty air, and a very dirty climate

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Michael E. Mann writes: To say that Donald Trump’s jaw-dropping display of environmental ignorance while in the United Kingdom is an embarrassment to all Americans would be an understatement. But the worst part of his ramblings about how we have “among the cleanest climates there are based on all statistics” isn’t that it sounds like the ramblings of a Fox News addict. It’s that his administration is doing everything it can to work towards the opposite: dirty water, dirty air,…

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