A watery lake is detected on Mars, raising the potential for alien life

A watery lake is detected on Mars, raising the potential for alien life

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The New York Times reports: For the first time, scientists have found a large, watery lake beneath an ice cap on Mars. Because water is essential to life, the discovery offers an exciting new place to search for life forms beyond Earth. Italian scientists working on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission announced on Wednesday that a 12-mile wide underground liquid pool — not just the momentary damp spots seen in the past — had been detected by radar…

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Remembering May Scaff, icon of the Syrian revolution

Remembering May Scaff, icon of the Syrian revolution

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Budour Hassan writes: “When the Syrian revolution started, I became like a newborn making her first steps, rediscovering herself and rediscovering her country,” Syrian actress May Scaff told me when we met in Paris on April 28 this year. “Like all Syrians who took to the street, I found my voice for the first time.” May never contemplated the idea that she would breathe her last in a country other than Syria or in a city other than her native…

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How social media became a tool of political oppression

How social media became a tool of political oppression

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Bloomberg reports: Journalist Nedim Turfent was reporting on a brutal counterterrorism operation in Turkey’s Kurdish region when he published video of soldiers standing over villagers, who were face down with their hands bound. Soon, odd messages seeking Turfent’s whereabouts began appearing on his Facebook page. Then, Twitter accounts linked to Turkish counterterrorism units joined in, taunting locals with a single question—“Where is Nedim Turfent?”—as soldiers torched and raided more villages. The threat was clear: Give him up, or you’re the…

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U.S. launches campaign to erode support for Iran’s leaders

U.S. launches campaign to erode support for Iran’s leaders

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To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2018 Reuters reports: The Trump administration has launched an offensive of speeches and online communications meant to foment unrest and help pressure Iran to end its nuclear…

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ISIS makes comeback in Iraq with switch to guerrilla tactics

ISIS makes comeback in Iraq with switch to guerrilla tactics

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Reuters reports: Months after Iraq declared victory over Islamic State, its fighters are making a comeback with a scatter-gun campaign of kidnap and killing. With its dream of a Caliphate in the Middle East now dead, Islamic State has switched to hit-and-run attacks aimed at undermining the government in Baghdad, according to military, intelligence and government officials interviewed by Reuters. Islamic State was reinventing itself months before Baghdad announced in December that it had defeated the group, according to intelligence…

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Loneliness is the common ground of terror and extremism

Loneliness is the common ground of terror and extremism

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Nabeelah Jaffer writes: A few years ago I discovered that my friend Tom was a white supremacist. This put me in a strange position: I am a Muslim and the daughter of immigrants. I am a member of one of the so-called invading groups that Tom fears and resents. He broadcasts his views from his social media accounts, which are a catalogue of aggrieved far-Right anger. One post warns ‘the Muslim invaders to keep their filthy hands off our women’….

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Portugal dared to cast aside austerity. It’s having a major revival

Portugal dared to cast aside austerity. It’s having a major revival

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The New York Times reports: Ramón Rivera had barely gotten his olive oil business started in the sun-swept Alentejo region of Portugal when Europe’s debt crisis struck. The economy crumbled, wages were cut, and unemployment doubled. The government in Lisbon had to accept a humiliating international bailout. But as the misery deepened, Portugal took a daring stand: In 2015, it cast aside the harshest austerity measures its European creditors had imposed, igniting a virtuous cycle that put its economy back…

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Humanity consumes Earth’s resources in ever greater destructive volumes

Humanity consumes Earth’s resources in ever greater destructive volumes

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The Guardian reports: Humanity is devouring our planet’s resources in increasingly destructive volumes, according to a new study that reveals we have consumed a year’s worth of carbon, food, water, fibre, land and timber in a record 212 days. As a result, the Earth Overshoot Day – which marks the point at which consumption exceeds the capacity of nature to regenerate – has moved forward two days to 1 August, the earliest date ever recorded. To maintain our current appetite…

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Trump to seek repeal of California’s smog-fighting power

Trump to seek repeal of California’s smog-fighting power

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Bloomberg reports: The Trump administration will seek to revoke California’s authority to regulate automobile greenhouse gas emissions — including its mandate for electric-car sales — in a proposed revision of Obama-era standards, according to three people familiar with the plan. The proposal, expected to be released this week, amounts to a frontal assault on one of former President Barack Obama’s signature regulatory programs to curb emissions that contribute to climate change. It also sets up a high-stakes battle over California’s…

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The political backlash that grew out of Eastern Europe’s imitation of the West

The political backlash that grew out of Eastern Europe’s imitation of the West

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Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes write: In Mary Shelley’s 1818 horror story Frankenstein, an inventor driven by Promethean ambition creates a monster by assembling body parts drawn from “the dissecting room and the slaughter-house” and even “the unhallowed damps of the grave” into a humanoid creature. Yet the experimenter, Victor Frankenstein, soon comes to regret his overambitious attempt to construct a facsimile of his own species. The monster, bitterly envious of its creator’s happiness and feeling doomed to loneliness and…

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A theory of reality as more than the sum of its parts

A theory of reality as more than the sum of its parts

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Natalie Wolchover writes: In his 1890 opus, The Principles of Psychology, William James invoked Romeo and Juliet to illustrate what makes conscious beings so different from the particles that make them up. “Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they,” James wrote. “But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite…

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George Soros’s embattled cause of an open society

George Soros’s embattled cause of an open society

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Michael Steinberger writes: On a clammy Tuesday morning in Paris at the end of May, George Soros, the world’s second-most-vilified New York billionaire (but worth many billions more than the other one), addressed the European Council on Foreign Relations, an organization he helped found a decade ago. Described by the woman who introduced him as a “European at heart,” the Hungarian-born Soros, who made his fortune running a hedge fund and is now a full-time philanthropist, political activist and freelance…

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