Stephen Fry: Musk and Zuckerberg are ‘the worst polluters in human history’

Stephen Fry: Musk and Zuckerberg are ‘the worst polluters in human history’

BBC News reports: Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk are “the worst polluters in human history”, Stephen Fry has said. The actor and comedian made the claim during a lecture at Kings College, London. “You and your children cannot breathe the air or swim in the waters of our culture without breathing in the toxic particulates and stinking effluvia that belch and pour unchecked from their companies into the currents of our world,” he said of the…

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Biobots arise from the cells of dead organisms − pushing the boundaries of life, death and medicine

Biobots arise from the cells of dead organisms − pushing the boundaries of life, death and medicine

Biobots could one day be engineered to deliver drugs and clear up arterial plaque. Kriegman et al. 2020/PNAS, CC BY-SA By Peter A Noble, University of Washington and Alex Pozhitkov, Irell & Manella Graduate School of Biological Sciences at City of Hope Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites. But the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a “third state” that lies beyond the traditional boundaries of life and death. Usually, scientists…

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Trump and Vance foment racial hatred and xenophobia in Ohio and across America

Trump and Vance foment racial hatred and xenophobia in Ohio and across America

Politico reports: Former President Donald Trump used increasingly harsh rhetoric Friday in describing Haitian migrants in Ohio, saying they’re “destroying their way of life” and threatened mass deportations. He made his comments as he and some of his allies, including his running mate JD Vance, have claimed that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats, dogs and geese, sparking a backlash from Democrats, including President Joe Biden. “Illegal Haitian migrants have descended upon a town of 58,000 people, destroying…

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Harris details rural push ahead of battleground barnstorm

Harris details rural push ahead of battleground barnstorm

Politico reports: Vice President Kamala Harris is circulating her first detailed goals for rural America in a bid to woo voters the party has been hemorrhaging support among for decades — and who will help determine the outcome of the November elections. The new document is the furthest Harris has gone in her career to outline how she would approach policy for rural communities and comes as her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, who has been tapped as a sort…

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The New Right has a blueprint for seizing power. Is JD Vance executing it?

The New Right has a blueprint for seizing power. Is JD Vance executing it?

Ian Ward writes: JD Vance’s political career has been defined by an apparent paradox. On the one hand, Vance is a member of the upper echelon of America’s ruling elite — a graduate of Yale Law School, a New York Times best-selling author, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and a United States senator. On the other hand, he has become a vociferous conservative critic of that same elite on behalf of disaffected Middle Americans, a role he can claim by…

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Trump’s obsession with oil could destroy America’s auto industry

Trump’s obsession with oil could destroy America’s auto industry

Robinson Meyer writes: There is a curious cognitive dissonance in how a lot of us think about the last decade’s climate policies and this decade’s economic problems. During the final years of the 2010s, the Trump administration proudly tore up dozens of policies meant to lower American greenhouse gas emissions and build a competitive domestic clean energy industry. It prioritized oil, coal and natural gas businesses over wind, solar and batteries, and as president, Donald Trump often seemed to revel in picking…

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RFK Jr. has sabotaged early voting in a critical swing state

RFK Jr. has sabotaged early voting in a critical swing state

Mark Joseph Stern writes: The North Carolina Supreme Court tossed a grenade into the state’s election on Monday, violating both state and federal law to grant Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s cynical, last-minute removal from the ballot. Its 4–3 decision will compel election administrators to destroy nearly 3 million already-printed ballots that featured Kennedy’s name and redesign 2,348 different ballot styles across the state to accommodate the eleventh-hour change. This complex process will significantly delay the distribution of new ballots—which will,…

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Elon Musk secretly funded effort to dump Texas prosecutor

Elon Musk secretly funded effort to dump Texas prosecutor

The Daily Beast reports: Elon Musk secretly funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into an effort to turf a Democratic prosecutor in Texas, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The Texas resident and Tesla and SpaceX CEO was the chief financier of Saving Austin, a group that distributed incendiary material attacking District Attorney José Garza during the Democratic primary, including fliers that baselessly accused him of “filling Austin’s streets with pedophiles & killers,” the Journal reports. Alongside…

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The search for what shook the Earth for nine days straight

The search for what shook the Earth for nine days straight

Robin George Andrews writes: On September 16, 2023, the world began to rumble. A gargantuan rock-ice avalanche tumbled into the deep waters of a fjord in eastern Greenland, unleashing a megatsunami whose initial waves reached a height of 200 meters. The waves scoured the walls of the fjord before flowing into the open sea. Even for this avalanche-prone corner of Greenland, the collapse and subsequent megatsunami were shocking for their speed and ferocity. But what followed was considerably stranger. The…

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After Trump and Vance’s baseless claims about pet-eating immigrants, Springfield faces bomb threats

After Trump and Vance’s baseless claims about pet-eating immigrants, Springfield faces bomb threats

Parker Molloy writes: The lie was absurd, and yet it spread like wildfire. A baseless rumor, claiming Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating people’s pets, began as a fringe social media post. In a matter of days, it had evolved into a talking point at the highest levels of Republican politics. Trump mentioned it in a presidential debate, and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, repeated it without a shred of evidence. But the fallout didn’t stay…

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Republicans fear Laura Loomer is influencing Donald Trump

Republicans fear Laura Loomer is influencing Donald Trump

The Associated Press reports: Laura Loomer, a right-wing activist who posted last year that 9/11 was an “inside job,” joined Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in New York and Pennsylvania on Wednesday as he commemorated the anniversary of the attacks. The 31-year-old provocateur and influencer posted photos from ground zero and shared a video of Trump talking with firefighters in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday morning, writing, “They were thrilled to see him.” She also accompanied the former president to Shanksville,…

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Mary Trump says Uncle Donald suffered ‘narcissistic injury’ in debate and won’t recover

Mary Trump says Uncle Donald suffered ‘narcissistic injury’ in debate and won’t recover

HuffPost reports: Mary Trump on Wednesday praised Vice President Kamala Harris for inflicting what she described as a “narcissistic injury” on her uncle, Donald Trump, during the opening minutes of Tuesday’s presidential debate. Democratic nominee Harris’ way of getting under her Republican opponent’s skin just made him “unravel,” the former president’s niece told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “He couldn’t recover and, honestly, he’s not going to,” she added. Harris “so brilliantly” gave both “substantive answers to questions to help the American…

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Matt Taibbi conjures a media consensus into a political conspiracy

Matt Taibbi conjures a media consensus into a political conspiracy

Jonathan Chait writes: In the immediate aftermath of the presidential debate, most reporters and analysts conveyed a similar narrative of what had transpired: Kamala Harris baited Donald Trump into an angry, frequently incoherent performance. Why did so many journalists who witnessed the same event describe it so similarly? To Matt Taibbi, a popular commentator who has migrated from liberal-hating leftist to liberal-hating Trump apologist, there could be only one explanation: The entire news media was taking orders from the Democratic Party. Taibbi’s post-debate column,…

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As Harris campaign rakes in $47 million in donations in 24 hours after first debate, Trump rejects second

As Harris campaign rakes in $47 million in donations in 24 hours after first debate, Trump rejects second

The New York Times reports: Vice President Kamala Harris raised $47 million in the first 24 hours following her debate with former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night, a sum that will likely expand a widening funding gap between the two campaigns. That tally, shared by the Harris campaign with The New York Times, included donations from 600,000 people. It is her largest 24-hour fund-raising period since an initial burst of donations when she entered the race in July…

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