Trump threatens Syria before allies are on board

Trump threatens Syria before allies are on board

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The Daily Beast reports: Donald Trump’s tweeted bluster that Russia should “get ready” for American missiles to hit Syria has outpaced a crucial U.S. ally’s current decisionmaking on military action against Damascus, The Daily Beast has learned. Ever since Bashar Assad’s latest alleged chemical attack in Syria on Saturday, the U.S., France and Britain have scrambled to cobble together a concerted response. Russia, Assad’s patron, is taking a harsher stance against their anticipated strikes— substantially raising the prospect of a…

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What Orbán’s third win in Hungary could mean for Europe

What Orbán’s third win in Hungary could mean for Europe

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Der Spiegel reports: For a few days, it looked like the election might actually be close for Viktor Orbán. Pollsters had predicted a tight race and optimism flourished among Hungary’s opposition parties. In the end, though, Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán and his party Fidesz scored a surprisingly clear victory on Sunday, likely obtaining yet another two-thirds majority in parliament — for the third time in a row. Although ballots from abroad are still being counted, it is doubtful they will…

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Facebook is able to ‘collect information from all of us’

Facebook is able to ‘collect information from all of us’

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The New York Times reports: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, went to Capitol Hill this week to explain to members of Congress how the detailed personal information of up to 87 million Facebook users ended up in the hands of a voter-profiling company called Cambridge Analytica. What Mr. Zuckerberg got instead, as he testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday, was a grilling about Facebook’s own data-mining practices. Representative Debbie Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan, for one,…

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Only a tiny fraction of the genes inside our bodies are human

Only a tiny fraction of the genes inside our bodies are human

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James Gallagher writes: Prof Rob Knight, from University of California San Diego, told the BBC: “You’re more microbe than you are human.” Originally it was thought our cells were outnumbered 10 to one. “That’s been refined much closer to one-to-one, so the current estimate is you’re about 43% human if you’re counting up all the cells,” he says. But genetically we’re even more outgunned. The human genome – the full set of genetic instructions for a human being – is…

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Burning coal may have caused Earth’s worst mass extinction

Burning coal may have caused Earth’s worst mass extinction

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Dana Nuccitelli writes: Recently, geologist Dr Benjamin Burger identified a rock layer in Utah that he believed might have formed during the Permian and subsequent Triassic period that could shed light on the cause of the Great Dying [the Earth’s deadliest mass extinction 252 million years ago]. During the Permian, Earth’s continents were still combined as one Pangea, and modern day Utah was on the supercontinent’s west coast. Samples from the end-Permian have been collected from rock layers in Asia,…

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There’s no scientific basis for race — it’s a made-up label

There’s no scientific basis for race — it’s a made-up label

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  Elizabeth Kolbert writes: In the first half of the 19th century, one of America’s most prominent scientists was a doctor named Samuel Morton. Morton lived in Philadelphia, and he collected skulls. He wasn’t choosy about his suppliers. He accepted skulls scavenged from battlefields and snatched from catacombs. One of his most famous craniums belonged to an Irishman who’d been sent as a convict to Tasmania (and ultimately hanged for killing and eating other convicts). With each skull Morton performed…

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It’s Mueller, not Trump, who is draining the swamp

It’s Mueller, not Trump, who is draining the swamp

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Quinta Jurecic writes: Following the investigation of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, is an enduring lesson in humility, and not merely because no one — not the president, not legal analysts or anyone else — has been able to predict what his office will do next. Mr. Mueller is much more than a prosecutor. To many, he has become Mr. Trump’s opposite: an avatar of justice and probity. As special counsel, he’s also a storyteller, unwinding the tale of what…

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The FBI raid on Trump’s lawyer’s office

The FBI raid on Trump’s lawyer’s office

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The Washington Post reports on the FBI raid on Trump’s personal attorney: Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a friend of Trump, called the Cohen raids “a little heavy-handed.” “Is this surprising? Yes,” said Giuliani, also a former U.S. attorney. “Is it extraordinary? No. This is the way prosecutors get information — sometimes to convict and prosecute, sometimes to exculpate.” Criticizing Mueller for veering into “highly personal issues,” such as the alleged Daniels encounter, Giuliani added, “The only thing…

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Zuckerberg gaslights Congress

Zuckerberg gaslights Congress

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Kevin Poulsen writes: Facebook was warned five years ago that the “reverse-lookup” feature in its search engine could be used to harvest names, profiles, and phone numbers for virtually all its users. But the company ignored the red flags until last week, after it happened. In prepared testimony to Congress released Monday, Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that malefactors had used the reverse-lookup “to link people’s public Facebook information to a phone number,” he wrote (PDF). “When we found out about the…

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Israel wages a growing war in Syria

Israel wages a growing war in Syria

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Robin Wright writes: Jihad Mughniyah is buried under the same black marble slab as his father, Imad Mughniyah, the legendary Hezbollah military commander, at a special cemetery created by the Lebanese militia for its “martyrs” in Syria. Life-size posters of both men, dressed in fatigues, stand above it. During a recent trip to Beirut, I counted the number of the graves in the cemetery, a barometer of the price Hezbollah is paying to prop up Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad. Mughniyah’s…

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Russia’s anxious northern neighbors toughen up

Russia’s anxious northern neighbors toughen up

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Politico reports: With relations between the West and Moscow at a post-Cold War low point, Russia’s closest EU neighbors are turning to tougher military and financial measures to send a message to Vladimir Putin. At a White House meeting last week, the presidents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania asked Donald Trump to do more to deter Russia by bolstering U.S. forces in Eastern Europe. Trump didn’t give a clear answer. He praised the Baltic countries’ robust defense spending in recent…

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The logic of Assad’s brutality

The logic of Assad’s brutality

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Thanassis Cambanis writes: This latest [chemical] attack in Ghouta, if it holds to the pattern, makes perfect sense in the calculus of Assad, Vladimir Putin, and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The successful trio wants first and foremost to subdue the remaining rebels in Syria, with an eye toward the several million people remaining in rebel-held Idlib province. A particularly heinous death for the holdouts in Ghouta, according to this military logic, might discourage the rebels in Idlib from…

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Apple now runs completely on renewable energy. Here’s how it got there

Apple now runs completely on renewable energy. Here’s how it got there

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Fast Company reports: You have to see Apple’s Reno, Nevada, data center from the inside to truly understand how huge it is. It’s made up of five long white buildings sitting side by side on a dry scrubby landscape just off I-80, and the corridor that connects them through the middle is a quarter-mile long. On either side are big, dark rooms–more than 50 of them–filled with more than 200,000 identical servers, tiny lights winking in the dark from their…

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Two-thirds of tweets linking to popular websites come from bots, not humans

Two-thirds of tweets linking to popular websites come from bots, not humans

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Pew Research Center reports: The role of so-called social media “bots” – automated accounts capable of posting content or interacting with other users with no direct human involvement – has been the subject of much scrutiny and attention in recent years. These accounts can play a valuable part in the social media ecosystem by answering questions about a variety of topics in real time or providing automated updates about news stories or events. At the same time, they can also…

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In America’s new civil war, one side must win

In America’s new civil war, one side must win

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Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira write: This is no ordinary political moment. Trump is not the reason this is no ordinary time — he’s simply the most obvious symptom that reminds us all of this each day. The best way to understand politics in America today is to reframe it as closer to civil war. Just the phrase “civil war” is harsh, and many people may cringe. It brings up images of guns and death, the bodies of Union and Confederate soldiers….

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Russia threatens ‘gravest consequences’ if U.S. crosses red line by taking military action in response to alleged chemical attack in Syria

Russia threatens ‘gravest consequences’ if U.S. crosses red line by taking military action in response to alleged chemical attack in Syria

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The New York Times reports: Dozens of Syrians choked to death after a suspected chemical attack struck the rebel-held suburb of Douma, east of Damascus, and aid groups on Sunday blamed President Bashar al-Assad’s government for the assault. The attack after dusk on Saturday sent a stream of patients with burning eyes and breathing problems to clinics, medical and rescue groups said. Western governments expressed alarm at the attack, with the British Foreign Office calling for an urgent investigation and…

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