Trump is right, UK must take back ISIS fighters says ex-British army chief

Trump is right, UK must take back ISIS fighters says ex-British army chief

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The Guardian reports: A former head of the British army has said Donald Trump is right to say British Islamic State fighters held in Syria should be brought back to the UK because they are the UK’s responsibility. Gen Lord Dannatt said it was important they are seen to be treated fairly to help prevent others being radicalised and to set an example to the rest of the world. He told Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday: “Usually I disagree with…

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Facebook described as ‘digital gangsters’ in British parliamentary report

Facebook described as ‘digital gangsters’ in British parliamentary report

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The Guardian reports: Facebook deliberately broke privacy and competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation, according to a devastating parliamentary report denouncing the company and its executives as “digital gangsters”. The final report of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s 18-month investigation into disinformation and fake news accused Facebook of purposefully obstructing its inquiry and failing to tackle attempts by Russia to manipulate elections. “Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of…

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Technological change is not an inexorable, impersonal force

Technological change is not an inexorable, impersonal force

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Steven Poole writes: When is the future no longer the future? Only a decade ago, air travel seemed to be moving ineluctably towards giant planes, or “superjumbos”. But last week Airbus announced it will cease manufacturing its A380, the world’s fattest passenger jet, as current trends favour smaller and more fuel-efficient craft. Progress changed course. A more vivid reminder of lost dreams will come in a few weeks: 2 March marks the 50th anniversary of the maiden flight of Concorde….

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Nature needs legal rights

Nature needs legal rights

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The New York Times reports: The failing health of Lake Erie, the world’s 11th largest lake, is at the heart of one of the most unusual questions to appear on an American ballot: Should a body of water be given rights normally associated with those granted to a person? Voters in Toledo, Ohio, will be asked this month to decide whether Lake Erie, which supports the economies of four states, one Canadian province and the cities of Toledo, Cleveland and…

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The necessary idealism of the Green New Deal

The necessary idealism of the Green New Deal

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Michelle Goldberg writes: Amid the unceasing awfulness of the Trump administration, I’ve lately found comfort in the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s concept of “political time,” which has in turn informed my thinking about the almost utopian ambitions of the Green New Deal. Surveying the American presidency, Skowronek sees politics unfolding in cycles. Every so often, insurgent coalitions bring an agenda-setting president to power who sweeps away the verities of the old regime, fundamentally restructuring our politics. These “reconstructive presidents,”…

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Trump pleases Russia as rift between Europe and the U.S. widens

Trump pleases Russia as rift between Europe and the U.S. widens

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The New York Times reports: European leaders have long been alarmed that President Trump’s words and Twitter messages could undo a trans-Atlantic alliance that had grown stronger over seven decades. They had clung to the hope that those ties would bear up under the strain. But in the last few days of a prestigious annual security conference in Munich, the rift between Europe and the Trump administration became open, angry and concrete, diplomats and analysts say. A senior German official,…

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Trump is trying to hollow out the constitutional system of checks and balances

Trump is trying to hollow out the constitutional system of checks and balances

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Peter M Shane writes: When President Donald J. Trump publishes his declaration of a national emergency requiring the construction of a wall on our southern border, that document will bear the formal signs of normal governance. The order will recite findings or at least assertions of fact. It will cite statutes—the act that authorizes its issuance and the statutes the president is triggering by signing his declaration. The same will be true of the complaints and legal briefs inevitably to…

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There’s a ‘crisis of credibility’ at the U.S. Supreme Court

There’s a ‘crisis of credibility’ at the U.S. Supreme Court

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Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse writes: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Chief Justice John Roberts declared last fall in response to President Trump’s jab at an “Obama judge.” In spite of my distaste for Trump’s attacks on our judiciary, on this one, the facts are with Trump. As a former U.S. attorney and state attorney general, I have spent my share of time in the courtroom before state and federal judges whose commitment…

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‘Never again?’ It’s already happening

‘Never again?’ It’s already happening

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Anne Applebaum writes: Because I write books about Soviet history, and because I often speak about them to U.S. or European audiences, I am frequently forced to confront the problem of Western indifference. Why, I am asked over and over, did British diplomats who knew about the man-made Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933 do nothing to stop it? The Catholic Church at that time was also aware that millions of Soviet citizens were dying because Joseph Stalin’s state had confiscated their…

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The species that laughs

The species that laughs

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Chris Knight writes: The central question that anthropologists ask can be stated simply: ‘What does it mean to be human?’ In search of answers, we learn from people around the world – from city-dwellers to those who live by hunting and gathering. Some of us study fossil hominins such as Homo erectus or the Neanderthals; others look at related species, such as apes and monkeys. Something that sets us apart from these ancestors and primate relatives, and should be of…

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The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. It’s time to panic

The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. It’s time to panic

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David Wallace-Wells writes: The age of climate panic is here. Last summer, a heat wave baked the entire Northern Hemisphere, killing dozens from Quebec to Japan. Some of the most destructive wildfires in California history turned more than a million acres to ash, along the way melting the tires and the sneakers of those trying to escape the flames. Pacific hurricanes forced three million people in China to flee and wiped away almost all of Hawaii’s East Island. We are…

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My generation trashed the planet. I salute the children striking back

My generation trashed the planet. I salute the children striking back

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Wow this is really quite something. Thousands and thousands of children protesting against climate change in Westminster. pic.twitter.com/umE5ZtcpS6 — Joey D'Urso (@josephmdurso) February 15, 2019 George Monbiot writes: The disasters I feared my grandchildren would see in their old age are happening already: insect populations collapsing, mass extinction, wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, floods. This is the world we have bequeathed to you. Yours is among the first of the unborn generations we failed to consider as our consumption rocketed. But those…

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Britain needs more time on Brexit, but we shouldn’t entrust it to Theresa May

Britain needs more time on Brexit, but we shouldn’t entrust it to Theresa May

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Gary Younge writes: [W]hen Theresa May asks for more time to negotiate with the European Union over Brexit, we would be wise to be sceptical. Not because Britain doesn’t need more time. It does. Hopelessly out of its depth, the country is neither ready to make a deal nor to crash out without one. As more than 40 former ambassadors argued in a joint statement this week: “We should not leave the EU when we have no clarity about our…

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Democratic party elites silence Ilhan Omar at their peril

Democratic party elites silence Ilhan Omar at their peril

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Trita Parsi and Stephen Wertheim write: This week Democrats plunged into two controversies that portend danger for the party as the 2020 election season begins. Both centered on freshman representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who, not coincidentally, came to America as a Somali refugee and is now one of the two first Muslim women in Congress. Absent an open debate about the party’s values on foreign policy, Democrats are hurtling toward an election more divisive than the one in 2016….

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