Anti-Muslim hate crimes soar in UK after Christchurch shootings

Anti-Muslim hate crimes soar in UK after Christchurch shootings

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The Guardian reports: The number of anti-Muslim hate crimes reported across Britain increased by 593% in the week after a white supremacist terrorist killed worshippers at two New Zealand mosques, an independent monitoring group has said. The charity Tell Mama said almost all of the increase was caused by hate incidents linked to the New Zealand attacks last Friday, and there were more recorded in the last seven days than the week following the 2017 Islamist terrorist attack on Manchester….

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Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes

Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes

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Ayal Feinberg, Regina Branton and Valerie Martinez-Ebers write: Using the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate, Extremism, Anti-Semitism, Terrorism map data (HEAT map), we examined whether there was a correlation between the counties that hosted one of Trump’s 275 presidential campaign rallies in 2016 and increased incidents of hate crimes in subsequent months. To test this, we aggregated hate-crime incident data and Trump rally data to the county level and then used statistical tools to estimate a rally’s impact. We included controls for…

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Mueller delivers report on Trump-Russia investigation to Attorney General

Mueller delivers report on Trump-Russia investigation to Attorney General

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The New York Times reports: The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has delivered a report on his inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election to Attorney General William P. Barr, according to the Justice Department, bringing to a close an investigation that has consumed the nation and cast a shadow over President Trump for nearly two years. Mr. Barr told congressional leaders in a letter late Friday that he may brief them within days on the special counsel’s…

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Why Hannah Arendt is the philosopher for now

Why Hannah Arendt is the philosopher for now

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Lyndsey Stonebridge writes: When Hannah Arendt was herded into Gurs, a detention camp in south-west France in May 1940, she did one of the most sensible things you can do when you are trapped in a real-life nightmare: she read – Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Clausewitz’s On War and, compulsively, the detective stories of Georges Simenon. Today people are reading Arendt to understand our own grimly bewildering predicament. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Arendt’s 1951 masterpiece The Origins of Totalitarianism…

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A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality

A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality

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MIT Technology Review reports: Back in 1961, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner outlined a thought experiment that demonstrated one of the lesser-known paradoxes of quantum mechanics. The experiment shows how the strange nature of the universe allows two observers—say, Wigner and Wigner’s friend—to experience different realities. Since then, physicists have used the “Wigner’s Friend” thought experiment to explore the nature of measurement and to argue over whether objective facts can exist. That’s important because scientists carry out experiments to…

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How Theresa May decided she was willing to accept a no-deal Brexit

How Theresa May decided she was willing to accept a no-deal Brexit

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Financial Times reports: In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Theresa May made a momentous choice. After a day of acrimonious debate in her cabinet and inner circle, the prime minister decided that she was willing to take Britain out of the EU without a deal. At Thursday’s European Council meeting in Brussels, EU diplomats wondered whether Mrs May was bluffing, but those close to the prime minister said if she cannot secure her Brexit deal she is determined the…

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Trump gives Netanyahu part of Syria to boost Israeli leader’s flagging reelection campaign

Trump gives Netanyahu part of Syria to boost Israeli leader’s flagging reelection campaign

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Robert Mackey writes: With a tweet posted on Thursday, President Donald Trump dismissed five decades of international consensus on the status of the Golan Heights, Syrian territory seized by Israel in 1967 during a preemptive war, declaring that the United States would recognize Israel’s annexation of the region. Offered without explanation, the move looked to many Israeli, Palestinian and American observers like a transparent attempt to boost the reelection prospects of Trump’s embattled ally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces…

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James Comey: What I want from the Mueller report

James Comey: What I want from the Mueller report

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James Comey writes: The country is eagerly awaiting the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report. Many people know what they want it to say — what they feel it simply must say — namely, that Donald Trump is a criminal who should be removed from office. Or that he is completely innocent of all wrongdoing. But not everyone knows what it “must” say. Even though I believe Mr. Trump is morally unfit to be president of the United States, I’m not…

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A new age of warfare: How Internet mercenaries do battle for authoritarian governments

A new age of warfare: How Internet mercenaries do battle for authoritarian governments

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The New York Times reports: The man in charge of Saudi Arabia’s ruthless campaign to stifle dissent went searching for ways to spy on people he saw as threats to the kingdom. He knew where to go: a secretive Israeli company offering technology developed by former intelligence operatives. It was late 2017 and Saud al-Qahtani — then a top adviser to Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince — was tracking Saudi dissidents around the world, part of his extensive surveillance efforts…

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Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump use private accounts for official business, their lawyer says

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump use private accounts for official business, their lawyer says

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The New York Times reports: The chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee revealed information on Thursday that he said showed Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner used private messaging services for official White House business in a way that may have violated federal records laws. The chairman, Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, said that a lawyer for Ms. Trump, President Trump’s daughter, and Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, told the committee late last year that…

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Teens have less face time with their friends – and are lonelier than ever

Teens have less face time with their friends – and are lonelier than ever

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Teens aren’t necessarily less social, but the contours of their social lives have changed. pxhere By Jean Twenge, San Diego State University Ask a teen today how she communicates with her friends, and she’ll probably hold up her smartphone. Not that she actually calls her friends; it’s more likely that she texts them or messages them on social media. Today’s teens – the generation I call “iGen” that’s also called Gen Z – are constantly connected with their friends via…

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Pro-social religions didn’t kick-start complex social systems

Pro-social religions didn’t kick-start complex social systems

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Scientific American reports: About 12,000 years ago human societies went big; tribes and villages grew into vast cities, kingdoms and empires within just a few millennia. For such large and complex societies to take root, people needed to maintain social cohesion and cooperation, even among complete strangers. What enabled this, many researchers have argued, was religion. Such a religion, the idea goes, would work particularly well if it established standards of morality and behavior—and enforced them with the threat of…

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The EU should not ignore the voices of Britain’s Europeans

The EU should not ignore the voices of Britain’s Europeans

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Timothy Garton Ash writes: Hundreds of thousands of us will be on the streets of London this Saturday, as some 700,000 of us were last October, demonstrating that we are not merely Europeans, but Europeans strongly in favour of the EU. Last autumn’s People’s Vote march was already the biggest pro-European demonstration in recent European history. Will European leaders simply ignore us? Next to individual citizens there are the peoples of these islands. Britain is a nation comprised of three…

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‘Reduced consumption is going to have to be a part of the equation’ for climate action, J.P. Morgan executive warns

‘Reduced consumption is going to have to be a part of the equation’ for climate action, J.P. Morgan executive warns

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Bloomberg reports: The world isn’t cutting carbon emissions anywhere near quickly enough, a senior executive at J.P. Morgan Asset Management told clients this week — and changing that will require far harder choices than most people realize. In his annual “Energy Outlook” report, Michael Cembalest, chairman of market investment and strategy for the asset management group, wrote that the U.S. needs to reduce its use of carbon much faster — a view he shares with the authors of the Green…

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