We must not forget what happened to the world’s indigenous children

We must not forget what happened to the world’s indigenous children

Steve Minton writes: Between 1890 and 1978, at Kamloops Indian Residential School in the Canadian province of British Columbia, thousands of Indigenous children were taught to ‘forget’. Separated from their families, these children were compelled to forget their languages, their identities and their cultures. Through separation and forgetting, settler governments and teachers believed they were not only helping Indigenous children, but the nation itself. Canada would make progress, settlers hoped, if Indigenous children could just be made more like white…

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Climate records tumble, leaving Earth in uncharted territory, say scientists

Climate records tumble, leaving Earth in uncharted territory, say scientists

BBC News reports: A series of climate records on temperature, ocean heat, and Antarctic sea ice have alarmed some scientists who say their speed and timing is unprecedented. Dangerous heatwaves in Europe could break further records, the UN says. It is hard to immediately link these events to climate change because weather – and oceans – are so complex. Studies are under way, but scientists already fear some worst-case scenarios are unfolding. “I’m not aware of a similar period when…

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Before Jan. 6, Mark Meadows joked about Trump’s election claims

Before Jan. 6, Mark Meadows joked about Trump’s election claims

The Washington Post reports: Mark Meadows joked about the baseless claim that large numbers of votes were fraudulently cast in the names of dead people in the days before the then-White House chief of staff participated in a phone call in which then-President Trump alleged there were close to 5,000 dead voters in Georgia and urged Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the 2020 election there. In a text message that has been scrutinized by federal prosecutors, Meadows wrote…

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Inside Biden’s unusual decentralized campaign

Inside Biden’s unusual decentralized campaign

The Washington Post reports: President Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, has spent her first months on the job planning a sweeping national reelection effort by squatting in a borrowed office overlooking an Amtrak commuter line on Capitol Hill. With just three other paid staffers, her entire operation cost $1.4 million from April through June — about an eighth of what President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign spent in the same period in 2011, when it operated out of an imposing…

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Trinity nuclear test’s fallout reached 46 states, Canada and Mexico, study finds

Trinity nuclear test’s fallout reached 46 states, Canada and Mexico, study finds

The New York Times reports: In July 1945, as J. Robert Oppenheimer and the other researchers of the Manhattan Project prepared to test their brand-new atomic bomb in a New Mexico desert, they knew relatively little about how that mega-weapon would behave. On July 16, when the plutonium-implosion device was set off atop a hundred-foot metal tower in a test code-named “Trinity,” the resultant blast was much stronger than anticipated. The irradiated mushroom cloud also went many times higher into…

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Is this the end of Netanyahu?

Is this the end of Netanyahu?

David Remnick writes: Benjamin Netanyahu has been Prime Minister of Israel longer than anyone in the history of the state, longer than F.D.R. was President of the United States. And yet, for all his electoral success, he has always been a known quantity. Twenty-five years ago, during Netanyahu’s first term, I spoke with his predecessor and fellow Likud member Yitzhak Shamir. “Bibi?” Shamir said. “He is not a very trustworthy man.” He added, “I don’t believe he believes in anything….

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Pro-war Russian blogger and former spy, Igor Girkin, who called Putin a ‘lowlife’ arrested in Moscow

Pro-war Russian blogger and former spy, Igor Girkin, who called Putin a ‘lowlife’ arrested in Moscow

CNN reports: A prominent Russian pro-war blogger who has criticized President Vladimir Putin and his military’s mishaps in Ukraine was arrested on Friday, in a move that suggested the Kremlin’s patience with dissent has grown thinner in the wake of the Wagner mercenary rebellion last month. Igor Girkin, a former KGB officer who helped Russia seize Crimea and was convicted of mass murder for his role in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine, was taken from…

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When did humans first occupy the Americas? Ask the sloth bones

When did humans first occupy the Americas? Ask the sloth bones

The New York Times reports: Of all the long-running disputes in archaeology, few roil scholars more than the question of when humans arrived in the Americas. For much of the past century, the reigning theory was that in or around 11,500 years ago big-game hunters from Asia trudged to North America across a land bridge spanning the Bering Strait, hung a right through a corridor between glaciers and, in less than a millennium, reached the tip of South America. Over…

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How college towns across America are decimating the GOP

How college towns across America are decimating the GOP

Politico reports: Spring elections in Wisconsin are typically low turnout affairs, but in April, with the nation watching the state’s bitterly contested Supreme Court race, voters turned out in record-breaking numbers. No place was more energized to vote than Dane County, the state’s second-most populous county after Milwaukee. It’s long been a progressive stronghold thanks to the double influence of Madison, the state capital, and the University of Wisconsin, but this was something else. Turnout in Dane was higher than…

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Fulton county prosecutors prepare racketeering charges in Trump inquiry

Fulton county prosecutors prepare racketeering charges in Trump inquiry

The Guardian reports: The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia has developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter. The racketeering statute in Georgia requires prosecutors to show the existence of an “enterprise” – and a pattern of racketeering activity that is predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes. In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district…

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Texas’s governor put a barrier in the Rio Grande. DOJ just hit back

Texas’s governor put a barrier in the Rio Grande. DOJ just hit back

Greg Sargent writes: One of the more pernicious developments in our politics is the effort by red-state governors to assert outsize power over immigration in their states, in ways designed to appeal to national right-wing audiences. For instance, the state of Texas recently placed a large barrier in the Rio Grande, supposedly to keep migrants out, but actually just to send a message to Fox News viewers that the state is securing the border where President Biden allegedly refused. But…

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Rogue state: Alabama Republicans refuse to draw a second Black congressional district in defiance of Supreme Court

Rogue state: Alabama Republicans refuse to draw a second Black congressional district in defiance of Supreme Court

NBC News reports: Alabama Republicans on Friday defied a U.S. Supreme Court order by passing a new congressional map that includes only one majority-Black district. The GOP-controlled Legislature had called a special session to redraw an earlier map after the Supreme Court reaffirmed a federal court order to include two districts where Black voters make up voting-age majorities, “or something quite close to it.” But on Friday, state Republicans approved a new map with just one majority-Black seat and a…

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Ukraine begins firing U.S.-provided cluster munitions at Russian forces

Ukraine begins firing U.S.-provided cluster munitions at Russian forces

The Washington Post reports: Ukraine has begun firing U.S.-provided cluster munitions against Russian forces in southeastern Ukraine in a push to break up well-fortified Russian positions that have slowed Ukraine’s summer offensive, according to Ukrainian officials familiar with the matter. The munitions debuted as Russian missiles pummeled the country’s Black Sea port region of Odessa for the third night in a row, while an attack on the nearby port city of Mykolaiv left 19 people wounded, including five children. The…

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Reflecting on extinction

Reflecting on extinction

Terry Tempest Williams writes: On the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, I am thinking about extinction and what that means for a creature, a living being, to vanish from existence. Say their names: great auk, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, Steller’s sea cow, Caribbean monk seal, Great Plains wolf, Puerto Rican long-nosed bat, Maryland darter, Utah lake sculpin, Labrador duck, heath hen, Bachman’s warbler, Xerces blue butterfly, Wyoming toad, and Panamanian golden frog—all extinct beginning in the 1800s to…

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