Researchers say science skewed by racism is increasing the threat of global warming to people of color

Researchers say science skewed by racism is increasing the threat of global warming to people of color

Inside Climate News reports: Black, Brown and Indigenous people have been systematically excluded from earth sciences, magnifying their exposure to the most severe impacts of climate change, said Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, lead author of a recent commentary in the journal Nature Geosciences. That adds to the burden of global warming that people of color already bear more heavily than other populations because the world for centuries has been “geographically delineated based on racism, and resultant slavery and colonialism,” Berhe said….

Read More Read More

‘This should terrify the nation’: Trump ally seeking to run Arizona’s elections

‘This should terrify the nation’: Trump ally seeking to run Arizona’s elections

Ed Pilkington reports: Last September, Donald Trump released a statement through his Save America website. “It is my great honor to endorse a true warrior,” he proclaimed, “a patriot who has fought for our country, who was willing to say what few others had the courage to say, who has my Complete and Total Endorsement.” Former US presidents usually reserve their most gushing praise – replete with Capital Letters – for global allies or people they are promoting for high…

Read More Read More

Got a Covid booster? You probably won’t need another for a long time

Got a Covid booster? You probably won’t need another for a long time

The New York Times reports: As people across the world grapple with the prospect of living with the coronavirus for the foreseeable future, one question looms large: How soon before they need yet another shot? Not for many months, and perhaps not for years, according to a flurry of new studies. Three doses of a Covid vaccine — or even just two — are enough to protect most people from serious illness and death for a long time, the studies…

Read More Read More

A billion years before sex, ancient cells were equipped for it

A billion years before sex, ancient cells were equipped for it

Jake Buehler writes: Most complex organisms engage in a strange bit of genomic math at some point in their lives: To multiply, they subtract and then add. That is, to reproduce through the process of meiosis they create specialized sex cells, or gametes, with half the usual number of chromosomes; they then merge pairs of those gametes to create new individuals with a full, unique genome. Sexual reproduction is nearly ubiquitous among eukaryotes — organisms from kelp to koalas that…

Read More Read More

Putin’s absurd, angry spectacle will be a turning point in his long reign

Putin’s absurd, angry spectacle will be a turning point in his long reign

Shaun Walker reports: Sitting alone at a desk in a grand, columned Kremlin room, Vladimir Putin looked across an expanse of parquet floor at his security council and asked if anyone wished to express an alternative opinion. He was met with silence. A few hours later, the Russian president appeared on state television to give an angry, rambling lecture about Ukraine, a country that in Putin’s telling had become “a colony with a puppet regime”, and had no historical right…

Read More Read More

Putin’s hall of mirrors

Putin’s hall of mirrors

Timothy Snyder writes: Vladimir Putin likes to associate today’s Russian Federation with the old Russian empire, and in one sense he is right. The Russian empire was the most repressive state of its era, with the most refined state police: the Okhrana. Russian revolutionaries, the men and women who would establish the Soviet state, were educated by its methods. It did not simply hunt them down; it ensnared them, often without their knowledge, in a complicated dance of incriminating their…

Read More Read More

Why Putin cannot restore the Soviet Union

Why Putin cannot restore the Soviet Union

Lesia Dubenko writes: Russia’s ultimatum toward the U.S. and NATO alongside its military build-up at the Ukrainian border reignited the talk of Russia wanting to restore the Soviet Union. As proof, multiple journalists and political observers point to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2005 remark that the collapse of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century, and his essay from last year on the so-called historical unity of the Ukrainian and Russian nations. Although this reasoning seems substantiated,…

Read More Read More

Putin’s useful idiots

Putin’s useful idiots

Charlie Sykes writes: By now the cast of Putin’s useful idiots is familiar, ranging from Tucker Carlson and Josh Hawley to Candace Owens, MTG, and Maria Bartiromo. Fiona Hill, the former senior director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council, calls them “the ultimate stooges,” but at least for now, these right wing voices do not speak for most congressional Republicans, who have tended to take a far more hawkish stance. But Putin can be forgiven if he…

Read More Read More

In Afghanistan, Biden has turned a crisis into a catastrophe

In Afghanistan, Biden has turned a crisis into a catastrophe

Ezra Klein writes: Ninety-five percent of Afghans don’t have enough to eat. Nearly nine million are at risk of starvation. The U.N.’s emergency aid request, at more than $5 billion, is the largest it has ever made for a single country. “The current humanitarian crisis could kill far more Afghans than the past 20 years of war,” David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee, wrote recently. And we bear much of the blame. We have turned a crisis into…

Read More Read More

Texas GOP revolts against Trump’s favorite cowboy

Texas GOP revolts against Trump’s favorite cowboy

Politico reports: Maybe it was his move to raise taxes and fees on farmers. Or his regular practice of alienating state lawmakers. Or his decision to pick a fight with the BBQ industry. Or the bribery scandal surrounding his political consultant. Sid Miller has accumulated so many enemies and courted so much controversy in his two terms as Texas agriculture commissioner that even his conservative credentials and Donald Trump’s endorsement might not be enough to save him in the state’s…

Read More Read More

Can rights of nature laws make a difference? In Ecuador, they already are

Can rights of nature laws make a difference? In Ecuador, they already are

Katie Surma writes: Until recently, so-called “rights of nature” provisions that confer legal rights to rivers, forests and other ecosystems have been mostly symbolic. But late last year, Ecuador’s top court changed that. In a series of court decisions, the Constitutional Court translated the country’s 2008 constitutional rights of nature provisions into reality, throwing the future of the country’s booming mining and oil industries into question. The most important of the decisions came in the Los Cedros case, where the…

Read More Read More

Does the U.S.-Russia crisis over Ukraine prove that the Cold War never ended?

Does the U.S.-Russia crisis over Ukraine prove that the Cold War never ended?

Robin Wright writes: In his final State of the Union address, in 1992, President George H. W. Bush sounded almost ecstatic. “The biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: by the grace of God, America won the Cold War.” The ideological struggle between the U.S.-led West and the Soviet-dominated East—which played out in proxy wars around the world over four decades—had not simply ended, the President declared. The U.S. had triumphed….

Read More Read More

Russia extends Belarus military drills for thousands of troops as Ukraine violence escalates

Russia extends Belarus military drills for thousands of troops as Ukraine violence escalates

The Wall Street Journal reports: Russia will extend its military drills with Belarus because of rising violence in Ukraine’s Donbas region, the government in Minsk said, as Russian President Vladimir Putin accepted a new round of talks with Kyiv in the midst of warnings of an imminent Russian invasion. Mr. Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron said after speaking Sunday that they agreed to continue seeking a diplomatic solution. Russia has amassed as many as 190,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders,…

Read More Read More

Former top White House Russia adviser details the sharp contrast between Trump and Biden

Former top White House Russia adviser details the sharp contrast between Trump and Biden

John Harwood writes: Fiona Hill doesn’t know whether President Joe Biden can lead Western allies to ward off Russia’s threat to Ukraine. But unlike his predecessor, he’s trying. Hill has a special vantage point on this slow-rolling crisis that US officials say could bring war in Europe at any moment. As a White House national security aide, she advised then-President Donald Trump on Russia and Ukraine — and became a star witness in impeachment proceedings that resulted from his conduct….

Read More Read More