Tackling plastic pollution: ‘We can’t recycle our way out of this’

Tackling plastic pollution: ‘We can’t recycle our way out of this’

France 24 reports: The scale of plastic pollution is growing, relentlessly. The world is producing twice as much plastic waste as two decades ago, reaching 353 million tonnes in 2019, according to OECD figures. The vast majority goes into landfills, gets incinerated or is “mismanaged”, meaning left as litter or not correctly disposed of. Just 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled. Ramping up plastic recycling might seem like a logical way to transform waste into a resource. But recent…

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Trump wants to purge the FBI and DOJ of officials investigating his criminal actions

Trump wants to purge the FBI and DOJ of officials investigating his criminal actions

Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump just needs a few names. In recent months, the former president has asked close advisers, including at least one of his personal attorneys, if “we know” all the names of senior FBI agents and Justice Department personnel who have worked on the federal probes into him. That’s according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter and another person briefed on it. Trump has then privately discussed that should he return to the White…

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Mick Mulvaney: Trump mobilizes opponents as much as supporters

Mick Mulvaney: Trump mobilizes opponents as much as supporters

HuffPost reports: Mick Mulvaney thinks Donald Trump will be the GOP nominee in the 2024 presidential election. But in an interview with Sky News Australia on Tuesday, the onetime acting chief of staff in Trump’s White House predicted Trump will lose in the general election. “The Republican primary will be about Donald Trump and he will probably win,” Mulvaney said. “And then the general election will be about Donald Trump and he will probably lose.” Mulvaney described Trump as a…

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U.S. tech mogul bankrolls pro-Russia, pro-China news network

U.S. tech mogul bankrolls pro-Russia, pro-China news network

William Bredderman reports: A slick online media machine has recruited a slew of characters from Russian state-affiliated outlets—and joined a sprawling multinational network of pro-Moscow, pro-Beijing content creators backed by a U.S. businessman reportedly probed in India for ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Since it started posting to Instagram and Youtube in early 2020, nearly all BreakThrough News’ camera-facing personalities have been veterans of Kremlin-backed outfits: former Radio Sputnik host Eugene Puryear; pundit Rania Khalek of video generator ‘In the Now;’ Kei Pritsker, Abby Martin, and Brian…

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Imagine a renters’ utopia. It might look like Vienna

Imagine a renters’ utopia. It might look like Vienna

Francesca Mari writes: When Eva Schachinger married at 22, she applied for public housing. Luckily, she lived in Vienna, which has some of the best public housing in the world. It was 1968. Eva was a teacher, and her husband, Klaus-Peter, was an accountant for the city’s public-transportation system. She grew up in a public-housing complex in the center of the city, where her grandmother, who cared for her from 6 in the morning until 6 at night, lived in…

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Biden is more fearful than the Ukrainians are

Biden is more fearful than the Ukrainians are

Kori Schake writes: “The language of escalation is the language of excuse.” That’s how Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, dismisses anxiety that assistance to Ukraine could provoke Russia to either expand the war to NATO countries or cross the nuclear threshold. The country most concerned about Russia expanding its aggression beyond Ukraine is the country least likely to be the victim of it: the United States. The Biden administration has been unequivocal in its policy declarations. The president has said,…

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Denmark plans $2.6 bln more for Ukraine, Zelenskiy praises ‘major contribution’

Denmark plans $2.6 bln more for Ukraine, Zelenskiy praises ‘major contribution’

Reuters reports: Denmark plans to increase its spending on military aid to Ukraine by 17.9 billion crowns ($2.59 billion) over this year and next, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said on Monday, winning thanks for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Denmark, with a population of less than 6 million, in March established a $1 billion fund for military, civilian and business aid to Ukraine in 2023. Frederiksen, seen as a possible contender to become new NATO chief, on Monday told Danish public…

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Pandemic-era policies reversed the trend toward a widening income gap. Now those gains are under threat

Pandemic-era policies reversed the trend toward a widening income gap. Now those gains are under threat

Politico reports: For the past three years, low-income workers have made historic gains in wages even after inflation, reversing the trend of advances for upper-income workers and stagnating pay for laborers that dominated the previous four decades, according to a POLITICO analysis of data from the U.S. Labor Department. The gains were the product of a series of dramatic changes in the structure of the labor market and government policies to aid the economy during the pandemic. Fueled by the…

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Under Elon Musk, Twitter has approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments

Under Elon Musk, Twitter has approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments

EL PAÍS reports: Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in a tumultuous $44 billion deal completed last October, the social network has turned down very few requests for content restriction or censorship from countries like Turkey and India, which have recently passed laws limiting freedom of speech and the press. Although the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla presents himself as a free speech absolutist, the social network he controls has bowed to hundreds of government orders during his first six…

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Stars could be invisible within 20 years as light pollution brightens night skies

Stars could be invisible within 20 years as light pollution brightens night skies

Robin McKie writes: The Herefordshire hills basked in brilliant sunshine last weekend. Summer had arrived and the skies were cloudless, conditions that would once have heralded succeeding nights of coal-dark heavens sprinkled with brilliant stars, meteorites and planets. It was not to be. The night sky was not so much black as dark grey with only a handful of stars glimmering against this backdrop. The Milky Way – which would once have glittered across the heavens – was absent. Summer’s…

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Deliberate ignorance is useful in certain circumstances, researchers say

Deliberate ignorance is useful in certain circumstances, researchers say

Sujata Gupta writes: In 1961, renowned German novelist Günter Grass openly criticized communist East Germany for building the Berlin Wall ostensibly to prevent West Germans from infiltrating the country. In reality, the wall was more effective at preventing East Germans from defecting. From that point on, East German secret police known as the Stasi shadowed Grass, a West German who frequently visited his neighbors to the East. In their notes, the Stasi refer to Grass with the code name “Bolzen,”…

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A day in the life of a woke third-grade teacher, as imagined by a far-right politician

A day in the life of a woke third-grade teacher, as imagined by a far-right politician

Ashley Ingle writes: The alarm blares, and I wake up with a renewed vigor to indoctrinate America’s youth. I ride my bike to work, smugly turning up my nose at real Americans who drive trucks. As I pedal, my thoughts are preoccupied with how I will infect children with my liberal agenda. No other ideas flow in and out of my mind on my commute, like wondering if I should donate plasma this weekend to make some extra cash to…

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You’ve never heard of him, but he’s remaking the pollution fight

You’ve never heard of him, but he’s remaking the pollution fight

The New York Times reports: This spring the Biden administration proposed or implemented eight major environmental regulations, including the nation’s toughest climate rule, rolling out what experts say are the most ambitious limits on polluting industries by the government in a single season. Piloting all of that is a man most Americans have never heard of, running an agency that is even less well known. But Richard Revesz has begun to change the fundamental math that underpins federal regulations designed…

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In pursuit of consensus, did Biden find the reasonable middle or give away too much?

In pursuit of consensus, did Biden find the reasonable middle or give away too much?

Peter Baker writes: After weeks of tense wrangling between the White House and House Republicans, the fiscal deal reached on Saturday to raise the debt ceiling while constraining federal spending bolsters President Biden’s argument that he is the one figure who can still do bipartisanship in a profoundly partisan era. But it comes at the cost of rankling many in his own party who have little appetite for meeting Republicans in the middle and think the president cannot stop himself from giving away…

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How the media is covering ChatGPT

How the media is covering ChatGPT

Columbia Journalism Review reports: With advancements in AI tools being rolled out at breakneck pace, journalists face the task of reporting developments with the appropriate nuance and context—to audiences who may be encountering this kind of technology for the first time. But sometimes this coverage has been alarmist. The linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky criticized “hyperbolic headlines” in a New York Times op-ed. And there have been a lot of them. “Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. ’” “‘Godfather of AI’ says AI could kill…

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A lawyer used ChatGPT to help prepare a court filing. The program fooled him with fiction and lies

A lawyer used ChatGPT to help prepare a court filing. The program fooled him with fiction and lies

The New York Times reports: The lawsuit began like so many others: A man named Roberto Mata sued the airline Avianca, saying he was injured when a metal serving cart struck his knee during a flight to Kennedy International Airport in New York. When Avianca asked a Manhattan federal judge to toss out the case, Mr. Mata’s lawyers vehemently objected, submitting a 10-page brief that cited more than half a dozen relevant court decisions. There was Martinez v. Delta Air…

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