Experts call for ban on glass skyscrapers to save energy in climate crisis

Experts call for ban on glass skyscrapers to save energy in climate crisis

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The Guardian reports: Leading architects and engineers are calling for all-glass skyscrapers to be banned because they are too difficult and expensive to cool. “If you’re building a greenhouse in a climate emergency, it’s a pretty odd thing to do to say the least,” said Simon Sturgis, an adviser to the government and the Greater London Authority, as well as chairman of the Royal Institute of British Architects sustainability group. “If you’re using standard glass facades you need a lot…

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Largest opposition protest in Moscow in a decade results in 1,400 arrests

Largest opposition protest in Moscow in a decade results in 1,400 arrests

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The Associated Press reports: Nearly 1,400 people were detained in a violent police crackdown on an opposition protest in Moscow, a Russian monitoring group said Sunday, adding that was the largest number of detentions at a rally in the Russian capital this decade. OVD-Info, which has monitored police arrests since 2011, said the number of the detentions from Saturday’s protest reached 1,373 by early Sunday. The overwhelming majority of people were soon released but 150 remained in custody, OVD-Info and…

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How Arab scholars preserved scientific texts serving as the foundations of modern knowledge

How Arab scholars preserved scientific texts serving as the foundations of modern knowledge

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In a review of Violet Moller’s new book, The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found, Katie Hafner writes: While religion dictated the cultural winds of the Western world, ideas flowed freely through the Middle East, traversing religions and cultures. Knowledge began flowing into Baghdad from every direction as scholars translated Greek manuscripts into Arabic. Book production soared as texts were read aloud to roomfuls of scribes so that many copies could be…

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The Arctic on fire

The Arctic on fire

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BBC News reports: Wildfires are ravaging the Arctic, with areas of northern Siberia, northern Scandinavia, Alaska and Greenland engulfed in flames. Lightning frequently triggers fires in the region but this year they have been worsened by summer temperatures that are higher than average because of climate change. Plumes of smoke from the fires can be seen from space. Mark Parrington, a wildfires expert at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (Cams), described them as “unprecedented”. There are hundreds of fires covering…

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How science got trampled in the rush to drill in the Arctic

How science got trampled in the rush to drill in the Arctic

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Adam Federman reports: Every year, hundreds of petroleum industry executives gather in Anchorage for the annual conference of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, where they discuss policy and celebrate their achievements with the state’s political establishment. In May 2018, they again filed into the Dena’ina Civic and Convention Center, but they had a new reason to celebrate. Under the Trump administration, oil and gas development was poised to dramatically expand into a remote corner of Alaska where it had…

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Trump’s migration pact with the Guatemalan president

Trump’s migration pact with the Guatemalan president

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For The Economist, R.E. writes: Honduras has a little over 9m people—or at least it did. Around 2.2% of the population have been snatched by agents at America’s southern border since October. More still have slipped past; others dream of an escape. Your correspondent is writing this from Tegucigalpa, the capital, where a mood of puzzled gloom prevails among those pondering the exodus. The government, sensing a harsh verdict on its rule, prefers not to mention it. International agencies wonder…

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Trump attacks Elijah Cummings, claiming he represents a rat-infested ‘mess’

Trump attacks Elijah Cummings, claiming he represents a rat-infested ‘mess’

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The New York Times reports: President Trump lashed out at a leading African-American congressman on Saturday, calling him “a brutal bully” who represents a Baltimore-based district that has become a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.” Mr. Trump’s attack on Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland and leading critic of the president, parroted a segment that aired earlier in the morning on “Fox & Friends.” The president suggested that the…

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While Mueller’s team apparently said his acuity was not an issue, some lawmakers privately worry it was

While Mueller’s team apparently said his acuity was not an issue, some lawmakers privately worry it was

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The Washington Post reports: As lawmakers drew closer to the August recess and realized it was now or never to subpoena Mueller, some committee members struggled with whether it was a good idea to bring him in. They talked among themselves about the rumors [that Robert Mueller might not be as sharp as he once was] and whether they could glean any insight from his news conference. There were possible warning signs, some Democrats say privately. For a time, Mueller’s…

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Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset

Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset

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Dana Milbank writes: Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset. This doesn’t mean he’s a spy, but neither is it a flip accusation. Russia attacked our country in 2016. It is attacking us today. Its attacks will intensify in 2020. Yet each time we try to raise our defenses to repel the attack, McConnell, the Senate majority leader, blocks us from defending ourselves. Let’s call this what it is: unpatriotic. The Kentucky Republican is, arguably more than any other American, doing…

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We are not at the center of the microbial world

We are not at the center of the microbial world

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Ed Yong writes: Aside from those of us with access to microscopes, most people will never see microbes with their own eyes. And so we tend to identify microbes with the disease-causing minority among them, the little buggers that trigger the tickling mist of a sneeze or the pustule on otherwise smooth skin. We become aware of their existence when they threaten our lives, and for much of our history, that threat was substantial. Epidemics of smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, and…

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Judge Andrew Napolitano: Trump has raised a ‘terrifying specter’ and ‘unleashed a torrent of hatred’

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Trump has raised a ‘terrifying specter’ and ‘unleashed a torrent of hatred’

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Judge Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News analyst, writes: I have known President Trump personally since 1986. The private Trump I have known is funny, charming and embracing. That is not the public Trump of today. When he loudly called for four members of Congress – women of color who oppose nearly all his initiatives and who have questioned his fitness for office – to go back to the places from which they came, he unleashed a torrent of hatred. The…

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The offshore interests of billionaire oligarchs are being promoted by nativist con artists like Trump and Johnson

The offshore interests of billionaire oligarchs are being promoted by nativist con artists like Trump and Johnson

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George Monbiot writes: Seven years ago the impressionist Rory Bremner complained that politicians had become so boring that few of them were worth mimicking: “They’re quite homogenous and dull these days … It’s as if character is seen as a liability.” Today his profession has the opposite problem: however extreme satire becomes, it struggles to keep pace with reality. The political sphere, so dull and grey a few years ago, is now populated by preposterous exhibitionists. This trend is not…

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The push for impeachment and the risk of a second Trump term

The push for impeachment and the risk of a second Trump term

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The New York Times reports: Robert S. Mueller III’s long-awaited testimony has inflamed divisions among Democrats over impeachment, with some senior lawmakers pushing on Thursday to begin formal impeachment hearings soon, and vulnerable moderates pleading that the party needed to rest its case against President Trump. Liberal House members who have been agitating for impeachment were buoyed by Mr. Mueller’s nearly seven hours of testimony, asserting, despite modest viewership numbers and no dramatic revelations, that the former special counsel’s words…

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Russia targeted election systems in all 50 states, report finds

Russia targeted election systems in all 50 states, report finds

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The New York Times reports: The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded Thursday that election systems in all 50 states were targeted by Russia in 2016, an effort more far-reaching than previously acknowledged and one largely undetected by the states and federal officials at the time. But while the bipartisan report’s warning that the United States remains vulnerable in the next election is clear, its findings were so heavily redacted at the insistence of American intelligence agencies that even some key recommendations…

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