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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Trump: ‘we are going back to the Moon’ but ‘NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon.’ Huh?

Trump: ‘we are going back to the Moon’ but ‘NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon.’ Huh?

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May 13, 2019: Under my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars. I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 13, 2019 June 7, 2019: For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon – We did that 50 years ago….

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GOP lawmakers are quietly turning against the death penalty

GOP lawmakers are quietly turning against the death penalty

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Madeleine Carlisle writes: David Welch’s wife died on Christmas Day 2016. He doesn’t remember much of what happened that next year. But in the grips of grief, he came to a fundamental realization, he told me: The death penalty is “just morally wrong.” Welch has served as a Republican in the New Hampshire state House for more than three decades. For most of that time, he had consistently voted to uphold the death penalty. But after his wife’s death, he…

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In secret recording, Pompeo opens up about Venezuelan opposition, says keeping it united ‘has proven devilishly difficult’

In secret recording, Pompeo opens up about Venezuelan opposition, says keeping it united ‘has proven devilishly difficult’

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The Washington Post reports: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered a candid assessment of Venezuela’s opposition during a closed-door meeting in New York last week, saying that the opponents of President Nicolás Maduro are highly fractious and that U.S. efforts to keep them together have been more difficult than is publicly known. “Our conundrum, which is to keep the opposition united, has proven devilishly difficult,” Pompeo said in an audio recording obtained by The Washington Post. “The moment Maduro leaves,…

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Justice Ginsburg says deep divisions on the way, and Supreme Court watchers look for clues

Justice Ginsburg says deep divisions on the way, and Supreme Court watchers look for clues

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The Washington Post reports: When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg turns reporter, reporters and lawyers start searching for clues. In a purportedly just-the-facts speech Friday to the judicial conference of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York, Ginsburg gave plenty to dissect. She teased pending decisions in cases about whether the census may contain a question on citizenship, and if the court would for the first time decide that a state’s electoral maps are…

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Trump’s obfuscation on the climate crisis

Trump’s obfuscation on the climate crisis

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Following Donald Trump’s interview with Piers Morgan on Wednesday where he talked about the weather changing “both ways,” noted that “it used to be called global warming,” then “climate change,” and now “it’s actually called extreme weather,” Eugene Robinson wrote: “it’s breathtaking that anyone could pack so much ignorance into so few words.” Robinson is doing what so many others do: treat Trump’s statements on the climate crisis as though they merely reflect his ignorance on the issue. The remedy…

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The end of the Arctic as we know it

The end of the Arctic as we know it

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Jonathan Watts writes: The demise of an entire ocean is almost too enormous to grasp, but as the expedition sails deeper into the Arctic, the colossal processes of breakdown are increasingly evident. The first fragment of ice appears off the starboard bow a few miles before the 79th parallel in the Fram strait, which lies between Greenland and the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. The solitary floe is soon followed by another, then another, then clusters, then swarms, then entire fields…

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Watching Elizabeth Warren come alive

Watching Elizabeth Warren come alive

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Dahlia Lithwick writes: The photos were all over the internet on election night of 2016. They went viral in the bad way, and they all looked something like this: Women, standing in a crowd of other women, hands over their mouths, tears on their cheeks, as they realized that Hillary Clinton had lost to Donald Trump, the man who bragged about treating women like garbage. Those photos had come immediately on the heels of the other photos, also inescapable, taken…

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