Twitter’s rebranding is a meaningless publicity stunt

Twitter’s rebranding is a meaningless publicity stunt

Scott Nover writes: Elon Musk, the mercurial owner of Twitter, announced overnight that he is changing the platform’s name and logo to “X.” In doing so, he’s throwing away the brand name, the bird logo, and maybe even the verb “tweet,” all of which breathe financial value into the company he has bought, stripped, and suffocated. The New York Times reports that Musk spent Monday projecting the letter x in the cafeteria and rechristening conference rooms with names like “s3xy”…

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‘This is barbarism’: Shock at Russian strike on Odesa cathedral

‘This is barbarism’: Shock at Russian strike on Odesa cathedral

The Guardian reports: ‘Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.” The priest dabbed tears from his eyes as his sonorous voice emerged from loudspeakers hastily assembled outside his devastated cathedral, the incantation competing with the crash of debris being loaded into trucks and the drilling of repair works on neighbouring buildings. This was the second time that the vast, sand-yellow Transfiguration Cathedral, which sits in the heart of Odesa’s Unesco-listed historic centre, had been attacked: in the 1930s,…

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Putin tightens grip on Africa after killing Black Sea grain deal

Putin tightens grip on Africa after killing Black Sea grain deal

Politico reports: African leaders have long been reluctant to criticize Russia and now that President Vladimir Putin has killed off a deal to allow Ukraine to export grain, they know they are more dependent than ever on Moscow’s largesse to feed millions of people at risk of going hungry. Having canceled the pact on Monday, Moscow unleashed four nights of attacks on the Ukrainian ports of Odesa and Chornomorsk — two vital export facilities — damaging the infrastructure of global…

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From scorching heat to deadly storms, Europe has no rest from ‘summer of hell’

From scorching heat to deadly storms, Europe has no rest from ‘summer of hell’

Politico reports: Europe is grappling with extreme weather from soaring temperatures in southern Italy to powerful storms in Croatia and Italy, piling pressure on emergency services and residents, and challenging tourists seeking some summer recuperation. Temperatures have consistently topped 40 degrees Celsius this week across southern and eastern European countries, and for some areas like Sicily there remains no respite. The Italian island was baking in 46 degrees Celsius on Saturday, according to the Met Office, with night temperatures of…

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In judicial overhaul protests, Israel’s soldiers face off against Netanyahu

In judicial overhaul protests, Israel’s soldiers face off against Netanyahu

The Washington Post reports: Israel’s year of chaos neared a crescendo Sunday as thousands of military pilots and soldiers threatened not to report for volunteer duty if the far-right government refuses back down from a planned vote on limiting the power of the Supreme Court. Tens of thousands of citizens filled the streets, some spending their sixth night outdoors, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was rushed to the hospital for an emergency cardiac procedure. The 73-year-old premier was still hospitalized…

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Liberal suburbs have their own border wall

Liberal suburbs have their own border wall

Richard D. Kahlenberg writes: The New York City suburb of Scarsdale, located in Westchester County, New York, is one of the country’s wealthiest communities, and its residents are reliably liberal. In 2020, three-quarters of Scarsdale voters cast ballots for Joe Biden over Donald Trump. One can safely presume that few Scarsdale residents are ardent backers of Trump’s wall on the Mexican border. But many of them support a less visible kind of wall, erected by zoning regulations that ban multifamily…

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Who benefited from slavery?

Who benefited from slavery?

The Washington Post reports: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state’s public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved and defending his state’s new African American history standards that civil rights leaders and scholars say misrepresents centuries of U.S. reality. “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis said on Friday…

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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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