Shawn McCreesh writes: When former President Donald J. Trump walked onto the stage at his rally in Atlanta on Saturday, fog machines shot white plumes of smoke into the air, heralding his arrival. If you looked closely, you could almost imagine steam pouring out of his ears, too. All week long, something had been giving him the vapors. “Crazy Kamala,” he fumed a minute into his speech. “She was here a week ago — lots of empty seats — but…
Rebecca Boyle writes: Late in the evening of October 5, 1923, Edwin Hubble sat at the eyepiece of the Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory, atop the mountains overlooking the Los Angeles basin. He was observing an object in the northern sky. To the unaided eye, it was visible as a faint smudge. But through a telescope it sharpened into a brilliant ellipse called the Andromeda Nebula. To settle a debate about the size of the Milky Way —…
Teresa Wiltz writes: For most of its history, America decreed that anyone with any African ancestry was Black — and rumors of purported Blackness could derail a career, a marriage, a life. Now, the irony is that some feel comfortable accusing those same people of making up their Blackness altogether — or not being “fully Black” if they come from multiple racial backgrounds. But the problem with trying to decide who qualifies as Black and who doesn’t is that there…
The New York Times reports: In September 2021, JD Vance offered two predictions about former President Donald J. Trump and one piece of advice. Mr. Trump would run again in 2024, Mr. Vance said. He would win. And when he did, Mr. Vance counseled, he needed the right people around him this time. “Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” Mr. Vance said on a podcast. He continued. “Then when…
The Times of Israel reports: US President Joe Biden told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “stop bullshitting me” during their meeting in Washington last week, according to Channel 12 news. The network says the outburst came after Netanyahu told Biden that Israel was moving forward with negotiations on a hostage-for-ceasefire deal. The Times of Israel also reports: According to tonight’s report by Channel 12 news, which first reported on the meeting last night, Halevi said during the heated discussion: “The…
Masha Gessen writes: A few days ago, Russian political prisoners started vanishing from their prison colonies: Their lawyers would come to see them only to be told their clients were no longer there. The disappearance of an inmate is often bad news — it can mean a move to a more remote colony, illness or death. But as the number of “missing” prisoners grew, in the Russian dissident community a mounting sense of anticipation replaced the concern. “A trade,” a…
Carole Cadwalladr writes: The 1996 Dunblane massacre and the outcry that followed are held up in the US as a textbook example of how an act of terror mobilised a country to demand effective gun regulation. The atrocity, in which 16 children and their teacher were killed, provoked a wave of national revulsion that, within weeks, led to 750,000 people signing a petition demanding a change to the law. Within a year and a half, new legislation had outlawed the…
Stella Sandford writes: It was once common, in Western societies at least, to think of plants as the passive, inert background to animal life, or as mere animal fodder. Plants could be fascinating in their own right, of course, but they lacked much of what made animals and humans interesting, such as agency, intelligence, cognition, intention, consciousness, decision-making, self-identification, sociality and altruism. However, groundbreaking developments in the plant sciences since the end of the previous century have blown that view…
Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: Two years ago, Sarah Shomstein realized she didn’t have a mind’s eye. The vision scientist was sitting in a seminar room, listening to a scientific talk, when the presenter asked the audience to imagine an apple. Shomstein closed her eyes and did so. Then, the presenter asked the crowd to open their eyes and rate how vividly they saw the apple in their mind. Saw the apple? Shomstein was confused. She didn’t actually see an apple. She…
The Washington Post reports: Five days before Donald Trump became president in January 2017, a manager at a bank branch in Cairo received an unusual letter from an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service. It asked the bank to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million from the organization’s account — all in cash. Inside the state-run National Bank of Egypt, employees were soon busy placing bundles of $100 bills into two large bags, according to records from the bank. Four…
CNBC reports: If a voter in Michigan performs a search on Google, a somewhat shocking ad might pop up. The ad shows a young man lying in bed late at night when someone else texts him, “Hey you need to vote,” and then sends the man a video of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. The man can hear the gunshots and people screaming in the background. As Trump is rushed off stage with blood pouring down his…
Reuters reports: The Democratic National Committee’s newest advertising campaign, launched on Friday, taunt Republican rival Donald Trump for not committing to a debate with Kamala Harris and is set to follow him on the campaign trail. The DNC has purchased large ads that dominate the digital homepages of major local newspapers in states where Trump plans to campaign in the coming weeks. The ads say “the convicted felon is afraid to debate” and question whether that is due to his…
Politico reports: The stalled criminal case against Donald Trump for seeking to subvert the 2020 election is starting to move. The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on presidential immunity — a breathtaking legal victory for Trump’s bid to sideline his criminal prosecutions — had kept the election-subversion case on ice for months. Even after the July 1 ruling, the high court’s rules required a one-month delay to give prosecutors the chance to ask the justices to reconsider the outcome. On Friday,…
The Washington Post reports: Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris hired a battery of new senior advisers to her campaign this week, moving swiftly to replace lifetime loyalists of President Biden with Democratic campaign veterans, including multiple leaders of Barack Obama’s presidential bids, according to people briefed on the campaign shifts. David Plouffe, a top strategist on both of Obama’s presidential campaigns, joins Harris as senior adviser for strategy and the states focused on winning the electoral college. Stephanie Cutter,…