Russian effort to influence 2016 election targeted African-American

Russian effort to influence 2016 election targeted African-American

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The New York Times reports: The Russian influence campaign on social media in the 2016 election made an extraordinary effort to target African-Americans, used an array of tactics to try to suppress turnout among Democratic voters and unleashed a blizzard of posts on Instagram that rivaled or exceeded its Facebook operations, according to a report produced for the Senate Intelligence Committee. The report adds new details to the portrait that has emerged over the last two years of the energy…

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Trump sounds ‘more like a mob boss than president’

Trump sounds ‘more like a mob boss than president’

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Politico reports: President Donald Trump’s use of the word “rat” to attack his former personal attorney and fixer Michael Cohen is more evocative of a “mob boss” than a president, a Democratic senator said Monday. Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, painted Trump’s claims that the FBI “broke into” Cohen’s office earlier this year — the bureau had a warrant to do so — as a clear attempt to undermine law enforcement and mislead Americans about…

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How Trump made war on Angela Merkel and Europe

How Trump made war on Angela Merkel and Europe

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Susan B. Glasser writes: On November 16, 2016, eight days after Trump was elected, Barack Obama flew to Berlin to meet with Merkel; it was the last foreign trip of his Presidency. Obama and Merkel had not started out as good friends, but they had become as close as two public figures could be. Over dinner in the Adlon Hotel, they discussed the shocking events of the previous few months, particularly Great Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union and…

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Why are Labour’s leaders so quiet on Europe? Maybe it’s the lure of disaster

Why are Labour’s leaders so quiet on Europe? Maybe it’s the lure of disaster

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Nick Cohen writes: For readers bewildered by the indifference of Labour’s leaders to Brexit, let me offer a suggestion: you cannot understand British politics until you grasp that the party has been taken over by men (and the occasional woman) who spent their lives around the fag ends of the 20th-century Marxist-Leninist movement. It’s not that Labour now has a communist programme. Revolutionary socialism is as dead as any idea can be. Rather, Labour has inherited the mental deformations of…

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Texas elementary school speech pathologist refused to sign pro-Israel oath — so she got fired

Texas elementary school speech pathologist refused to sign pro-Israel oath — so she got fired

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Glenn Greenwald writes: A children’s speech pathologist who has worked for the last nine years with developmentally disabled, autistic, and speech-impaired elementary school students in Austin, Texas, has been told that she can no longer work with the public school district, after she refused to sign an oath vowing that she “does not” and “will not” engage in a boycott of Israel or “otherwise tak[e] any action that is intended to inflict economic harm” on that foreign nation. A lawsuit…

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A complete guide to all 17 (known) Trump and Russia investigations

A complete guide to all 17 (known) Trump and Russia investigations

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Garrett M Graff writes: While popular memory today remembers Watergate as five DNC burglars leading inexorably to Richard Nixon’s resignation two years later, history recalls that the case and special prosecutor’s investigation at the time was much broader; ultimately 69 people were charged as part of the investigation, 48 of whom pleaded guilty or were found guilty at trial. After three weeks of back-to-back-to-back-to-back bombshells by federal prosecutors and special counsel Robert Mueller, it’s increasingly clear that as 2018 winds…

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New report on Russian disinformation, prepared for the Senate, shows the operation’s scale and sweep

New report on Russian disinformation, prepared for the Senate, shows the operation’s scale and sweep

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The Washington Post reports: A report prepared for the Senate that provides the most sweeping analysis yet of Russia’s disinformation campaign around the 2016 election found the operation used every major social media platform to deliver words, images and videos tailored to voters’ interests to help elect President Trump — and worked even harder to support him while in office. The report, a draft of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is the first to study the millions of…

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The collapse of political authority is closer at hand than most Britons imagine

The collapse of political authority is closer at hand than most Britons imagine

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Fintan O’Toole writes: Vincent Gookin, the 17th-century English colonist in Ireland, wrote ruefully that “the unsettling of a nation is an easy work; the settling of a nation is not”. One way to understand why the Irish question has been so fatal for the Brexit project is to think about two islands and their degrees of unsettlement. For Britain, the Brexiters have done the easy work of unsettling a nation. Both parts of Ireland, meanwhile, have been involved in the…

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Senior Tories urge free vote on second referendum

Senior Tories urge free vote on second referendum

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The Guardian reports: Theresa May is being urged to give her MPs free rein to vote for a second referendum, with a new group of ministers poised to back another public ballot on Brexit. Cabinet ministers are making fresh pleas for a new approach after the prime minister’s bleakest week in office, which has left her authority seriously damaged and led some Tory MPs to fear it will become impossible for her to govern. Senior figures in the government are…

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At last, divestment is hitting the fossil fuel industry where it hurts

At last, divestment is hitting the fossil fuel industry where it hurts

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Bill McKibben writes: I remember well the first institution to announce it was divesting from fossil fuel. It was 2012 and I was on the second week of a gruelling tour across the US trying to spark a movement. Our roadshow had been playing to packed houses down the west coast, and we’d crossed the continent to Portland, Maine. As a raucous crowd jammed the biggest theatre in town, a physicist named Stephen Mulkey took the mic. He was at…

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While climate talks continue, there is hope

While climate talks continue, there is hope

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In an editorial, The Guardian says: The first thing to say about the compromise struck at climate talks in Poland at the weekend is that it came as a relief. Ever since President Trump’s announcement in 2017 that the US would withdraw from the Paris agreement, the question has been whether the UN process could continue to work. Much like the communique that came out of the recent G20, the agreement on a set of rules to implement promises made…

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Our world and our brains have been profoundly shaped by bees

Our world and our brains have been profoundly shaped by bees

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Tim Flannery writes: According to Thor Hanson’s Buzz, the relationship between bees and the human lineage goes back three million years, to a time when our ancestors shared the African savannah with a small, brownish, robin-sized bird—the first honeyguide. Honeyguides are very good at locating beehives, but they are unable to break into them to feed on the bee larvae and beeswax they eat. So they recruit humans to help, attracting them with a call and leading them to the…

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Climate negotiators reach an overtime deal to keep Paris climate accord alive

Climate negotiators reach an overtime deal to keep Paris climate accord alive

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The New York Times reports: Diplomats from nearly 200 countries reached a deal on Saturday to keep the Paris climate agreement alive by adopting a detailed set of rules to implement the pact. The deal, struck after an all-night bargaining session, will ultimately require every country in the world to follow a uniform set of standards for measuring their planet-warming emissions and tracking their climate policies. And it calls on countries to step up their plans to cut emissions ahead…

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The systemic corruption of the Republican Party

The systemic corruption of the Republican Party

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George Packer writes: Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt? The reason is historical—it goes back many decades—and, in a way, philosophical. The party is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start. I don’t mean the kind of corruption that regularly sends lowlifes like Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic former governor of Illinois, to prison. Those abuses are nonpartisan and always with us. So is vote theft of the kind…

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