Trump lies about federal response as he campaigns in area ravaged by Hurricane Helene

Trump lies about federal response as he campaigns in area ravaged by Hurricane Helene

The Associated Press reports: Donald Trump repeatedly spread falsehoods Monday about the federal response to Hurricane Helene despite claiming not to be politicizing the disaster as he toured hard-hit areas in south Georgia. The former president and Republican nominee claimed upon landing in Valdosta that President Joe Biden was “sleeping” and not responding to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who he said was “calling the president and hasn’t been able to get him.” He repeated the claim at an event with…

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The hidden world of electrostatic ecology

The hidden world of electrostatic ecology

Max G. Levy writes: Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a honeybee. In many ways, your world is small. Your four delicate wings, each less than a centimeter long, transport your half-gram body through looming landscapes full of giant animals and plants. In other ways, your world is expansive, even grand. Your five eyes see colors and patterns that humans can’t, and your multisensory antennae detect odors from distant flowers. For years, biologists have wondered whether bees have another grand…

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Devastation in Western North Carolina shows nowhere is safe from climate change

Devastation in Western North Carolina shows nowhere is safe from climate change

Marina Koren writes: When Helene swept through western North Carolina late last week, the rain fell heavy and fast enough to start washing away mountainsides. Rivers overflowed, and a chunk of one of the state’s major highways collapsed, cutting off communities; floods slung mud and muck into buildings. Cars, trucks, dumpsters, entire homes and bridges—these and more were carried away in the floods as if they weighed nothing. Much of what managed to stay in place became submerged in brown…

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U.S. is ‘fully complicit’ in Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Gaza

U.S. is ‘fully complicit’ in Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Gaza

  “Everybody [in Lebanon] is talking about … this $9 billion that the US has just promised the Israelis now in the middle of this invasion.” On this week’s ‘Mehdi Unfiltered,’ American University of Beirut professor Karim Makdisi joins the show to discuss Israel’s latest attacks on Lebanon – including Israel’s explosive pager attacks – and how Israel’s offensive is only increasing Lebanese support for Hezbollah. Also joining the panel discussion is the Center for International Policy’s Matt Duss, a…

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Drunk with power, Israel’s ‘victory’ opens the gates for war without end

Drunk with power, Israel’s ‘victory’ opens the gates for war without end

Lubna Masarwa writes: The media in Israel reacted to the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah with euphoria. On Channel 12’s “Meet the Press”, Amit Segal and Ben Caspit raised a glass of arak to mark Nasrallah’s death. Paz Robinson, Channel 13’s reporter, distributed chocolates in Karmiel. Channel 13 is considered left wing. Channel 14’s flagship programme, The Patriots, opened with singing and celebration led by presenter Yinon Magal. Nadav Eyal wrote in Ynet:”[Nasrallah’s] assassination is an event…

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‘Just not right’: A GOP governor confronts Trump’s lies

‘Just not right’: A GOP governor confronts Trump’s lies

Jonathan Martin writes: Springfield was once a manufacturing hub. Perched on the interstate between Dayton and Columbus, it had tire and farm implement factories. Like a lot of Midwestern towns, that economy declined in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet in recent years, a number of jobs have been created in the area and with that a demand for more workers. It’s the same story in all of Ohio, which is why [Ohio Gov. Mike] DeWine made a point in his…

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An Ohio businessman faces death threats for praising his Haitian workers

An Ohio businessman faces death threats for praising his Haitian workers

The New York Times reports: For Jamie McGregor, a businessman in Springfield, Ohio, speaking favorably about the Haitian immigrants he employs has come to this: death threats, a lockdown at his company and posters around town branding him a traitor for hiring immigrants. To defend himself and his family, Mr. McGregor has had to violate his own vow to never own a gun. “I have struggled with the fact that now we’re going to have firearms in our house —…

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Burying wood in ‘vaults’ could help fight global warming

Burying wood in ‘vaults’ could help fight global warming

Science reports: The discovery of an eastern red cedar log, buried in eastern Canada for millennia and nearly perfectly preserved, illustrates the potential of a new kind of carbon storage scheme in the fight against climate change: wood “vaults.” The log shows how burying wood—rather than letting it decay on the surface—could keep billions of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere, advocates say. The unusual conditions that preserved the log, described today in a paper in…

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In a new manifesto, OpenAI’s Sam Altman envisions an AI utopia – and reveals glaring blind spots

In a new manifesto, OpenAI’s Sam Altman envisions an AI utopia – and reveals glaring blind spots

Ryan Carter Images / Shutterstock By Hallam Stevens, James Cook University By now, many of us are probably familiar with artificial intelligence hype. AI will make artists redundant! AI can do lab experiments! AI will end grief! Even by these standards, the latest proclamation from OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, published on his personal website this week, seems remarkably hyperbolic. We are on the verge of “The Intelligence Age”, he declares, powered by a “superintelligence” that may just be a…

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Republicans lay legal groundwork for election challenges

Republicans lay legal groundwork for election challenges

Reuters reports: In Arizona, one of seven competitive U.S. states that are expected to decide the 2024 presidential election, an advocacy group founded by Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller is advancing a bold legal theory: that judges can throw out election results over “failures or irregularities” by local officials. The lawsuit by the America First Legal Foundation, a conservative advocacy group, says the court in such cases should be able to toss the election results and order new rounds of…

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How Hurricane Helene could have widespread consequences for homeowners

How Hurricane Helene could have widespread consequences for homeowners

The Washington Post reports: When Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida on Thursday night, it made landfall in the state’s sparsely populated Big Bend, far from the glittering cities with expensive waterfront property to the south. But that didn’t stop Helene from becoming another multibillion-dollar superstorm. The hurricane’s massive size and record-breaking storm surge left an equally massive footprint of destruction across the Southeast, from Florida’s Tampa Bay region to Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas. The storm likely caused $15 billion…

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Elon Musk, now one of illegal immigration’s harshest critics, was once of questionable immigration status

Elon Musk, now one of illegal immigration’s harshest critics, was once of questionable immigration status

  CNN reports: The world’s richest man stood steps away from the US-Mexico border, adjusting the brim of his black cowboy hat. “As an immigrant to the United States, I am extremely pro-immigrant,” Elon Musk said, “and I believe that we need a greatly expanded legal immigration system, and that we should let anyone in the country who is hardworking and honest and will be a contributor to the United States.” But in the September 2023 video from Eagle Pass,…

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Israel’s vision of no Palestinians ‘from the river to the sea’

Israel’s vision of no Palestinians ‘from the river to the sea’

Sahar Aziz writes: Words matter. That is the purported principle behind a national campaign by pro-Israel organizations to censor, punish and even criminalize protests on American college campuses demanding a cease-fire to Israel’s unrestrained assault on 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza. University administrators have obliged with draconian restrictions that effectively deny their own students the ability to speak out against what the International Court of Justice has described as Israel’s “plausible” violations of the Genocide Convention in Gaza. Pro-Israel advocates often point…

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How Beirut is responding to Nasrallah’s death

How Beirut is responding to Nasrallah’s death

Robert F Worth writes: As word spread on Saturday that Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah had been killed in his underground Beirut bunker by an Israeli airstrike, people began quietly reckoning with the possibility that Lebanon’s political architecture might be about to shift for the first time in more than three decades. And that, in turn, raised the prospect that locked doors might soon open across the Middle East. Those who have fought against Hezbollah—not just Israelis but also Lebanese from…

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