131 federal judges broke the law by hearing cases where they had a financial interest

131 federal judges broke the law by hearing cases where they had a financial interest

The Wall Street Journal reports: More than 130 federal judges have violated U.S. law and judicial ethics by overseeing court cases involving companies in which they or their family owned stock. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that judges have improperly failed to disqualify themselves from 685 court cases around the nation since 2010. The jurists were appointed by nearly every president from Lyndon Johnson to Donald Trump. About two-thirds of federal district judges disclosed holdings of individual stocks, and…

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Facebook’s effort to prey upon children goes beyond Instagram Kids, documents show

Facebook’s effort to prey upon children goes beyond Instagram Kids, documents show

The Wall Street Journal reports: Facebook Inc. has come under increasing fire in recent days for its effect on young users and its efforts to create products for them. Inside the company, teams of employees have for years been laying plans to attract preteens that go beyond what is publicly known, spurred by fear that Facebook could lose a new generation of users critical to its future. Internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show the company formed…

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Havana Syndrome attacks widen with CIA officer’s evacuation from Serbia

Havana Syndrome attacks widen with CIA officer’s evacuation from Serbia

The Wall Street Journal reports: The CIA evacuated an intelligence officer serving in Serbia in recent weeks who suffered serious injuries consistent with the neurological attacks known as Havana Syndrome, according to current and former U.S. officials. The incident in the Balkans, which hasn’t been previously reported, is the latest in what the officials describe as a steady expansion of attacks on American spies and diplomats posted overseas by unknown assailants using what government officials and scientists suspect is some…

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Steven Pinker celebrates the status quo and himself

Steven Pinker celebrates the status quo and himself

Alex Blasdel writes: On a recent afternoon, Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist and bestselling author of upbeat books about human progress, was sitting in his summer home on Cape Cod, thinking about Bill Gates. Pinker was gearing up to record a radio series on critical thinking for the BBC, and he wanted the world’s fourth richest man to join him for an episode on the climate emergency. “People tend to approach challenges in one of two ways – as problem-solving…

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Facebook is a lie-disseminating instrument of civilizational collapse

Facebook is a lie-disseminating instrument of civilizational collapse

Adrienne LaFrance writes: In 1947, Albert Einstein, writing in this magazine, proposed the creation of a single world government to protect humanity from the threat of the atomic bomb. His utopian idea did not take hold, quite obviously, but today, another visionary is building the simulacrum of a cosmocracy. Mark Zuckerberg, unlike Einstein, did not dream up Facebook out of a sense of moral duty, or a zeal for world peace. This summer, the population of Zuckerberg’s supranational regime reached…

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Covid’s partisan pattern is growing more extreme

Covid’s partisan pattern is growing more extreme

David Leonhardt writes: During the early months of Covid-19 vaccinations, several major demographic groups lagged in receiving shots, including Black Americans, Latino Americans and Republican voters. More recently, the racial gaps — while still existing — have narrowed. The partisan gap, however, continues to be enormous. A Pew Research Center poll last month found that 86 percent of Democratic voters had received at least one shot, compared with 60 percent of Republican voters. The political divide over vaccinations is so…

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The public continues to underestimate Covid’s age discrimination

The public continues to underestimate Covid’s age discrimination

David Wallace-Wells writes: In mid-September, King County, Washington, in which ­Seattle is located, released an eye-popping slide about vaccine efficacy and breakthrough prevalence: Vaccines had reduced the risk of infection from COVID sevenfold, county data showed, and reduced the risk of hospitalization and death 41-fold and 42-fold, respectively. These ratios, though bigger than those found in other studies released in recent weeks, are nevertheless in line with an obvious emerging consensus in the data: Vaccines do clearly reduce transmission and…

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The fantasy of ‘orderly’ mass migration is having a renaissance

The fantasy of ‘orderly’ mass migration is having a renaissance

Ben Mathis-Lilley writes: Many Americans say they support immigration so long as it’s done legally, by waiting for one’s turn in line, but are alarmed by the idea of people walking into the country through the southwestern desert and going wherever they want. In theory, if you were able to dissuade or disincentivize potential immigrants from massing at the southern border or trying to cross it without authorization, you could gain enough public trust on the issue to expand the…

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The disastrous blindfolded rush to mine the deep sea

The disastrous blindfolded rush to mine the deep sea

Jonathan Watts writes: A short bureaucratic note from a brutally degraded microstate in the South Pacific to a little-known institution in the Caribbean is about to change the world. Few people are aware of its potential consequences, but the impacts are certain to be far-reaching. The only question is whether that change will be to the detriment of the global environment or the benefit of international governance. In late June, the island republic of Nauru informed the International Seabed Authority…

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Clean hydrogen could replace fossil fuels for almost everything. But should it?

Clean hydrogen could replace fossil fuels for almost everything. But should it?

Grist reports: As countries around the world firm up their commitments to cut carbon emissions, many are turning to an emerging solution with an uncertain future: hydrogen gas. This lesser-known fuel has been called the “Swiss Army knife” of climate solutions. It has the potential to replace fossil fuels in industrial processes, transportation, buildings, and power plants, and does not emit any greenhouse gases when it’s burned. But this idea of an emissions-free hydrogen-fueled world is a long way off….

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The transformation of Greta Thunberg

The transformation of Greta Thunberg

Simon Hattenstone writes: Three years ago Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg was an unknown 15-year-old terrified that we were destroying the planet and furious that adults were letting it happen. Her fury was particularly directed at those with power. She decided to take unilateral action, and tweeted her plan. “We kids most often don’t do what you tell us to do. We do as you do. And since you grownups don’t give a damn about my future, I won’t either….

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What if 2020 was just a rehearsal?

What if 2020 was just a rehearsal?

POLITICO Magazine interview: Rick Hasen isn’t getting much sleep these days. One of the nation’s foremost experts on the laws that hold together democracy in America, Hasen used to be concerned about highly speculative election “nightmare scenarios”: the electrical grid being hacked on Election Day, or the pandemic warping turnout, or absentee ballots totally overwhelming the postal service. But now, what keeps him up at night aren’t fanciful “what if” exercises: It’s what has actually happened over that past nine…

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Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA’s secret war plans against WikiLeaks

Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA’s secret war plans against WikiLeaks

Yahoo News reports: In 2017, as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation. Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the…

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Supreme Court observers see trouble ahead as public approval of justices erodes

Supreme Court observers see trouble ahead as public approval of justices erodes

The Washington Post reports: The Supreme Court’s approval rating is plummeting, its critics are more caustic and justices are feeling compelled to plead the case to the public that they are judicial philosophers, not politicians in robes. All of this as the court embarks Oct. 4 on one of the most potentially divisive terms in years. Cases already docketed concern gun control, the separation of church and state, and the biggest showdown in decades on the future of Roe v….

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