Ron DeSantis’s New College takeover is just the beginning of the right’s higher ed crusade

Ron DeSantis’s New College takeover is just the beginning of the right’s higher ed crusade

Vanity Fair reports: It took New College president Patricia Okker three attempts to deliver her farewell remarks. She kept being interrupted during last week’s board meeting in Sarasota, Florida, including once by a member of the school’s board of trustees, making a motion to terminate her without cause. Okker had been addressing the dozens of students, faculty, and parents who’d come to defend her record—and the hundreds more outside who weren’t admitted—saying she was sorry to disappoint them, but she…

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Hominids used stone tool kits to butcher animals earlier than once thought

Hominids used stone tool kits to butcher animals earlier than once thought

Science News reports: Nearly 3 million years ago, hominids employed stone tool kits to butcher hippos and pound plants along what’s now the shores of Kenya’s Lake Victoria, researchers say. Evidence of those food preparation activities pushes back hominids’ use of these tool kits, known as Oldowan implements, by roughly 300,000 years, say paleoanthropologist Thomas Plummer of Queen’s College, City University of New York and colleagues. That makes these finds possibly the oldest known stone tools. Several dating techniques place…

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The GOP is starting to plot against Donald Trump

The GOP is starting to plot against Donald Trump

David Freedlander writes: “It is,” he said, “A five-alarm fire. And there is nobody coming to put it out.” “It,” in this case, is the possibility that once again Donald Trump will prevail over a splintered Republican field, getting the same 30-40 percent he received in the early primaries in 2016, enough to win the nomination. “He,” is a Republican donor and bundler, a Wall Street financier who regularly hobnobs with senior Republican officials but who also was, uniquely for…

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Chinese surveillance balloon carried antennas, other equipment to gather intelligence, U.S. says

Chinese surveillance balloon carried antennas, other equipment to gather intelligence, U.S. says

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Chinese balloon that crossed the U.S. carried antennas and sensors for collecting intelligence and communications, administration officials said, laying out the most detailed evidence to date about China’s surveillance program. The new information was described Thursday by a range of officials from the Pentagon, State Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation as the Biden administration prepared to take unspecified action against companies and entities linked to the Chinese balloon program that the U.S. says…

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How the case of arrested FBI agent Charles McGonigal is tied to a Russia-linked influence effort

How the case of arrested FBI agent Charles McGonigal is tied to a Russia-linked influence effort

Mother Jones reports: It was shocking news: Charles McGonigal, a former counterintelligence chief for the FBI, was arrested for his alleged role in two separate schemes. In one, he purportedly accepted $225,000 from an Albanian American businessman, while he was still in the FBI, and did favors for that businessman and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. In the other, McGonigal, after he retired in 2018, allegedly provided investigative services to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was sanctioned in 2018 for assisting the global “malign” activities of Putin’s…

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Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room’ podcast is top misinformation spreader, study says

Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room’ podcast is top misinformation spreader, study says

The New York Times reports: When Stephen K. Bannon, the White House strategist turned podcaster, was explaining the latest Covid-19 developments in 2021, he passed the microphone to a special guest: Clay Clark, an evangelist and anti-vaccine activist. For nearly 10 minutes, Mr. Clark rattled off one false and misleading statement after another. Covid is “100 percent treatable” with hydroxychloroquine and other drugs. (No.) Covid vaccines are filled with fetal tissue. (False.) Concentration camps are coming. (Nope.) Bill Gates owns…

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Apartheid: Republicans create white-appointed court system for Blackest city in America

Apartheid: Republicans create white-appointed court system for Blackest city in America

Mississippi Today reports: A white supermajority of the Mississippi House voted after an intense, four-plus hour debate to create a separate court system and an expanded police force within the city of Jackson — the Blackest city in America — that would be appointed completely by white state officials. If House Bill 1020 becomes law later this session, the white chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court would appoint two judges to oversee a new district within the city —…

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Syria’s White Helmets work miracles after earthquake

Syria’s White Helmets work miracles after earthquake

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: This is not how editorial discussions normally go. This morning I contacted Fared Al Mahlool over WhatsApp for a potential story on the catastrophic earthquake that hit Turkey and northern Syria on Monday. Fared is an internally displaced Syrian living in Idlib. He’s a photojournalist who has contributed to New Lines in the past. Fared told me that he was willing to take on the assignment, but first had to attend to a more pressing business….

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What the end-Triassic mass extinction tells us about our planet’s current condition

What the end-Triassic mass extinction tells us about our planet’s current condition

Ars Technica reports: The end-Triassic extinction, which happened 201 million years ago, was Earth’s third most severe extinction event since the dawn of animal life. Like today, CO2 rise and global warming were present, but the similarities don’t end there. As with today, it was a time of wildfires, deforestation, downpours, erosion, ocean acidification, marine dead zones, vanishing coral reefs, sea-level rise, and even insect plagues. There was also pollution by mercury, sulfur dioxide, halocarbons, and methane—and possibly even a…

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Putin’s real threat comes from Russia’s ‘turbo-patriots’

Putin’s real threat comes from Russia’s ‘turbo-patriots’

Mark Galeotti writes: Does Vladimir Putin face a challenge, not from cuddly, West-looking liberals, but from even sharper-toothed nationalists? Certainly this is suddenly the message coming from loyalists. Oleg Matveychev, a parliamentarian and spin doctor, who also has a widely-read blog, has made waves by claiming in an online video that ‘2023 will be very dangerous,’ because of the threat of so-called ‘turbo-patriots.’ Discounting the liberals (who ‘have all run away’), he warned that the turbo-patriots had become ‘the only…

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Can Russia learn from its failures in Ukraine?

Can Russia learn from its failures in Ukraine?

Dara Massicot writes: Three months before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, CIA Director William Burns and U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan met in Moscow with Nikolai Patrushev, an ultra-hawkish adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Burns and Sullivan informed Patrushev that they knew of Russia’s invasion plans and that the West would respond with severe consequences if Russia proceeded. According to Burns, Patrushev said nothing about the invasion. Instead, he looked them in the eye, conveying what Burns took…

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Twitter kept entire ‘database’ of Republican requests to censor posts

Twitter kept entire ‘database’ of Republican requests to censor posts

Rolling Stone reports: When the White House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down. That exchange — revealed during Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Twitter by Rep. Gerry Connolly — and others like it are nowhere…

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Biden isn’t too old to successfully bait congressional Republicans

Biden isn’t too old to successfully bait congressional Republicans

David Frum writes: In September 2009, a Republican representative from South Carolina named Joe Wilson inserted himself into history. He interrupted President Barack Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress by shouting, “You lie.” The outburst shocked viewers. Wilson, not Obama, was the top trending item on Twitter in the aftermath of the speech. Wilson apologized, “I let my emotions get the best of me.” Then–Republican Conference Chair Mike Pence expressed regret: “Joe made a mistake.” Wilson was formally…

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