Mahathir-led opposition wins historic Malaysian election

Mahathir-led opposition wins historic Malaysian election

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Nikkei Asian Review reports: Malaysia’s opposition coalition, led by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, won a majority of lower house seats in Wednesday’s general election, paving the way for the country’s first change of power since its independence in 1957. Mahathir, 92, is expected to become Malaysia’s seventh prime minister, returning to power 15 years after leaving office. According to the country’s Election Commission, the opposition coalition Pakatan Harapan, or Alliance of Hope, with an affiliate party has secured at…

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Warning signs: how early humans first began to paint animals

Warning signs: how early humans first began to paint animals

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Painting from El Castillo cave (Cantabria, Spain). Early Upper Palaeolithic or older. Photo Becky Harrison and courtesy Gobierno de Cantabria., Author provided By Derek Hodgson, University of York and Paul Pettitt, Durham University Visual culture – and the associated forms of symbolic communication, are regarded by palaeo-anthropologists as perhaps the defining characteristic of the behaviour of Homo sapiens. One of the great mysteries of archaeology is why figurative art, in the form of the stunningly naturalistic animal depictions, appeared relatively…

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Free will, video games, and the most profound quantum mystery

Free will, video games, and the most profound quantum mystery

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David Kaiser writes: The word “predictable” first entered the English language two centuries ago. Its début came in neither a farmer’s almanac nor a cardsharp’s manual but in The Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature, a Unitarian periodical. In 1820, one Stephen Freeman wrote a dense treatise in which he criticized the notion that human behavior—seemingly manifest “amidst the conflicting, boisterous, unreasonable wills of men, all acting, as they feel they do, their various parts with complete freedom of…

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Trump destroys the Iran deal — and a lot more

Trump destroys the Iran deal — and a lot more

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Robin Wright writes: After months of threatening, President Trump withdrew from the historic Iran nuclear deal on Tuesday, unravelling the Obama Administration’s signature foreign-policy achievement and putting the United States on a collision course with allies as well as with Tehran. “This was a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made,” the President said. “It didn’t bring calm, it didn’t bring peace, and it never will.” Trump also announced that the United States is re-imposing economic sanctions…

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Michael Cohen took cash from Russian oligarch after election

Michael Cohen took cash from Russian oligarch after election

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The Daily Beast reports: The Daily Beast can confirm that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a company controlled by Putin-aligned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. The allegations were initially made Tuesday by Michael Avenatti, porn actress Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, and confirmed by a source familiar with the matter. “How the fuck did Avenatti find out?” the source asked The Daily Beast. According to a dossier published by Avenatti on Tuesday evening, “Vekselberg and…

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Dear leftists: Going on Tucker Carlson is not going to stop imperialism

Dear leftists: Going on Tucker Carlson is not going to stop imperialism

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Noah Berlatsky writes: “I just feel like I had my best girlfriend break up with me,” Alex Jones declared in a live rant last month during the American bombing of Syria. “I will tell Trump that you really betrayed your family and your name, and everything you stood for with this horse manure.” Jones’ comments were, as is his wont, more than a little ridiculous. But they weren’t isolated. Many people on the right and far right, including Fox hosts…

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U.S. embassy cables warned against expelling 300,000 immigrants. Trump officials did it anyway

U.S. embassy cables warned against expelling 300,000 immigrants. Trump officials did it anyway

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The Washington Post reports: In the past six months, the Trump administration has moved to expel 300,000 Central Americans and Haitians living and working legally in the United States, disregarding senior U.S. diplomats who warned that mass deportations could destabilize the region and trigger a new surge of illegal immigration. The warnings were transmitted to top State Department officials last year in embassy cables now at the center of an investigation by Senate Democrats, whose findings were recently referred to…

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The fake news Russians hear at home

The fake news Russians hear at home

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Anne Applebaum writes: Because it touches us, because it involves the U.S. president, and because it has produced a lot of headlines, the strategy and tactics of Russian government disinformation in the West have lately been big news. Because it’s far away, and because it happens in a different language, we’ve thought a lot less about Russian government propaganda in Russia. But it will eventually matter to us — maybe sooner than we think. The transformation of Russian media hasn’t…

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Muslims recoil at a French proposal to change the Quran

Muslims recoil at a French proposal to change the Quran

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The Atlantic reports: A manifesto published in the French daily Le Parisien on April 21—signed by some 300 prominent intellectuals and politicians, including former President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime Minister Manuel Valls—made a shocking demand. Arguing that the Quran incites violence, it insisted that “the verses of the Quran calling for murder and punishment of Jews, Christians, and nonbelievers be struck to obsolescence by religious authorities,” so that “no believer can refer to a sacred text to commit a…

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Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal

Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal

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The Observer reports: Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal. People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an…

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As ‘King of Debt,’ Trump borrowed to build his empire — then began spending hundreds of millions in cas

As ‘King of Debt,’ Trump borrowed to build his empire — then began spending hundreds of millions in cas

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The Washington Post reports: In the nine years before he ran for president, Donald Trump’s company spent more than $400 million in cash on new properties — including 14 transactions paid for in full, without borrowing from banks — during a buying binge that defied real estate industry practices and Trump’s own history as the self-described “King of Debt.” Trump’s vast outlay of cash, tracked through public records and totaled publicly here for the first time, provides a new window…

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China-backed Sumatran dam threatens the rarest ape in the world

China-backed Sumatran dam threatens the rarest ape in the world

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By Bill Laurance, James Cook University The plan to build a massive hydropower dam in Sumatra as part of China’s immense Belt and Road Initiative threatens the habitat of the rarest ape in the world, which has only 800 remaining members. This is merely the beginning of an avalanche of environmental crises and broader social and economic risks that will be provoked by the BRI scheme. Read more: How we discovered a new species of orangutan in northern Sumatra The…

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New record carbon dioxide levels show ‘humans are overwhelming nature’

New record carbon dioxide levels show ‘humans are overwhelming nature’

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KQED reports: For the first time in human history, the monthly average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has surpassed the threshold of 410 parts per million. That’s the finding of the Scripps CO2 Program, which tracks carbon dioxide measurements in the Earth’s atmosphere every 10 minutes. That data is then plotted onto the Keeling Curve, a graph that illustrates the rise in carbon dioxide levels. The information is based on continuous measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory…

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Are we ready for an epidemic this summer?

Are we ready for an epidemic this summer?

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Ronald A. Klain writes: Summer is coming. And if you think a warm-weather surge of mosquitoes and ticks is not as frightening as the fictional winter’s White Walkers from “Game of Thrones,” you haven’t read this week’s report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the rapidly escalating danger of infectious diseases spread by insects. The CDC’s key findings: The number of Americans infected with such diseases, including Zika, West Nile and Lyme, has more than tripled in…

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Alaskan sea ice just took a steep, unprecedented dive

Alaskan sea ice just took a steep, unprecedented dive

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Scientific American reports: April should be prime walrus hunting season for the native villages that dot Alaska’s remote western coast. In years past the winter sea ice where the animals rest would still be abundant, providing prime targets for subsistence hunters. But this year sea-ice coverage as of late April was more like what would be expected for mid-June, well into the melt season. These conditions are the continuation of a winter-long scarcity of sea ice in the Bering Sea—a…

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Donald Trump’s pursuit of an Oval Office meeting with Vladimir Putin

Donald Trump’s pursuit of an Oval Office meeting with Vladimir Putin

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Susan B Glasser writes: Late on Monday evening, the Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, started making calls to European allies. A few hours earlier, they had got word from sources inside the Trump Administration that the President was poised to impose costly steel and aluminum tariffs by the midnight deadline. No one knew for sure (“The decision lies with the President,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel had said on Friday, standing next to Trump, after flying to Washington to lobby him…

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