‘We’re all embarrassed’: Inside Fox News as Dominion revelations rattle the network

‘We’re all embarrassed’: Inside Fox News as Dominion revelations rattle the network

Brian Stelter writes: Last month Fox News producers in New York, Washington, and other bureaus were summoned for mandatory training sessions. The topic: libel law. With Fox facing down two defamation lawsuits that could cost the company billions of dollars, management decided to set up lengthy meetings about legal concepts like “actual malice.” That’s what Dominion Voting Systems and another voting technology company, Smartmatic, are trying to prove: that Fox aired lies about their firms while the people involved knew…

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Ancient proteins offer new clues about origin of life on Earth

Ancient proteins offer new clues about origin of life on Earth

Science Daily: By simulating early Earth conditions in the lab, researchers have found that without specific amino acids, ancient proteins would not have known how to evolve into everything alive on the planet today — including plants, animals, and humans. The findings, which detail how amino acids shaped the genetic code of ancient microorganisms, shed light on the mystery of how life began on Earth. “You see the same amino acids in every organism, from humans to bacteria to archaea,…

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Why life is not a thing but a restless manner of being

Why life is not a thing but a restless manner of being

Tim Requarth writes: Mike Russell found his moment of inspiration on a warm spring evening in Glasgow in 1983, when his 11-year-old son broke a new toy. The toy in question was a chemical garden, a small plastic tank in which stalagmite-like tendrils grew out of seed crystals placed in a mineral solution. Although the tendrils appeared solid from the outside, when shattered they revealed their true nature: each one was actually a network of hollow tubes, like bundles of…

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New intelligence suggests pro-Ukrainian saboteurs attacked pipelines, U.S. officials say

New intelligence suggests pro-Ukrainian saboteurs attacked pipelines, U.S. officials say

The New York Times reports: New intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines last year, a step toward determining responsibility for an act of sabotage that has confounded investigators on both sides of the Atlantic for months. U.S. officials said that they had no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction…

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Western allies take note: If you want to beat Putin in Ukraine, target Lukashenko in Belarus

Western allies take note: If you want to beat Putin in Ukraine, target Lukashenko in Belarus

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya writes: Last week, residents of Machulishchy were intrigued as soldiers and police swarmed across their small town on the edge of Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Cordons and checkpoints were hastily erected for miles around the local airbase, which has played host to Russia’s forces during its abominable war against Ukraine. It was clear to anyone out and about on that frosty winter morning that Belarusian security services – known as the KGB – were panicking. The Belarusian…

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Clearly identified legal observer hit with domestic terrorism charges after mass ‘Cop City’ arrests

Clearly identified legal observer hit with domestic terrorism charges after mass ‘Cop City’ arrests

The Daily Beast reports: A legal observer with the National Lawyers Guild was arrested and charged with domestic terrorism while monitoring a Sunday night demonstration against an Atlanta police training facility that opponents have dubbed “Cop City.” Thomas Jurgens is an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the civil-rights group confirmed on Monday. Jurgens also works with the National Lawyers Guild, which monitors protests. Jurgens was acting as a legal observer at the time of his arrest in…

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Tucker Carlson used selective January 6 video footage to try and gaslight America

Tucker Carlson used selective January 6 video footage to try and gaslight America

Eric Lutz writes: You know what happened on January 6, 2021. You probably watched it on television that day, when Donald Trump agitated a mob of angry, armed supporters to storm the Capitol. They battled officers, busted through windows, and roved through the halls of Congress, some of them chanting the names of Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. You saw terrified lawmakers, some of whom had helped fan the flames of the insurrection and would later side with it, seeking…

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Indigenous knowledge is key to sustainable food systems

Indigenous knowledge is key to sustainable food systems

Alexandre Antonelli writes: I grew up in Campinas, a city in southeast Brazil. The apples there, cultivated from European varieties since the 1960s, tasted sweet. But, given the choice, I would always pick papayas grown in our garden. My father, who knew that growing a temperate fruit tree in a tropical country seldom worked, instead filled our garden with tropical ones, including two varieties of papaya. Meanwhile, drawing on knowledge from her Indigenous roots, my mother grew all sorts of…

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Rare black hole 1 billion times the mass of the sun could upend our understanding of galaxy formation

Rare black hole 1 billion times the mass of the sun could upend our understanding of galaxy formation

Space.com reports: A rare supermassive black hole found hiding at the dawn of the universe could indicate that there were thousands more of the ravenous monsters stalking the early cosmos than scientists thought — and astronomers aren’t sure why. The primordial black hole is around 1 billion times the mass of our sun and was found at the center of the galaxy COS-87259. The ancient galaxy formed just 750 million years after the Big Bang and was spotted by the…

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America faces a type of extremist violence it doesn’t know how to stop

America faces a type of extremist violence it doesn’t know how to stop

Adrienne LaFrance writes: In the weeks before Labor Day 2020, Ted Wheeler, the mayor of Portland, Oregon, began warning people that he believed someone would soon be killed by extremists in his city. Portland was preparing for the 100th consecutive day of conflict among anti-police protesters, right-wing counterprotesters, and the police themselves. Night after night, hundreds of people clashed in the streets. They attacked one another with baseball bats, Tasers, bear spray, fireworks. They filled balloons with urine and marbles…

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As Trump inquiry continues, Republicans seek oversight of Georgia prosecutors

As Trump inquiry continues, Republicans seek oversight of Georgia prosecutors

The New York Times reports: To Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Atlanta, several bills in the Georgia legislature that would make it easier to remove local prosecutors are racist and perhaps retaliatory for her ongoing investigation of former President Donald J. Trump. To the Republican sponsors of the bills, they are simply a way to ensure that prosecutors enforce the laws of the state, whether they agree with them or not. Two of the measures under consideration would…

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Ukrainian soldiers in Bakhmut: ‘Our troops are not being protected’

Ukrainian soldiers in Bakhmut: ‘Our troops are not being protected’

The Kyiv Independent reports: Russia’s relentless assault on Bakhmut is sacrificing waves and waves of unprepared men being sent to their deaths. But multiple defenders of this embattled city in Donetsk Oblast feel that they are in a similar boat, according to interviews with more than a dozen soldiers currently fighting in or around Bakhmut. During their brief visits to the nearby town of Kostiantynivka, Ukrainian infantrymen told the Kyiv Independent of unprepared, poorly-trained battalions being thrown into the front…

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Inside the suspicion machine making life-changing decisions about millions of people around the world

Inside the suspicion machine making life-changing decisions about millions of people around the world

Wired reports: Every year, the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands gives some 30,000 people welfare benefits to help them make rent, buy food, and pay essential bills. And every year, thousands of those people are investigated under suspicion of committing benefits fraud. But in recent years, the way that people have been flagged as suspicious has changed. In 2017, the city deployed a machine learning algorithm built by consulting firm Accenture. The algorithm, which generates a risk score for…

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Homeland Security has a program gathering domestic intelligence — and virtually no one knows about it

Homeland Security has a program gathering domestic intelligence — and virtually no one knows about it

Politico reports: For years, the Department of Homeland Security has run a virtually unknown program gathering domestic intelligence, one of many revelations in a wide-ranging tranche of internal documents reviewed by POLITICO. Those documents also reveal that a significant number of employees in DHS’s intelligence office have raised concerns that the work they are doing could be illegal. Under the domestic-intelligence program, officials are allowed to seek interviews with just about anyone in the United States. That includes people held…

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