Manchin leads opposition to Biden’s climate bill, backed by support from oil, gas and coal

Manchin leads opposition to Biden’s climate bill, backed by support from oil, gas and coal

The Guardian reports: In the tumult of negotiations over the most consequential climate legislation ever proposed in the US, there is growing scrutiny of the fossil fuel industry connections of the man poised to tear down the core of the bill – the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin. Manchin, a centrist Democrat, has objected to key provisions of a multitrillion-dollar reconciliation bill that would slash planet-heating emissions and help the US, and the world, to avert catastrophic climate breakdown. In…

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How Joe Manchin and Republicans could destroy the world

How Joe Manchin and Republicans could destroy the world

Brian Kahn writes: The United Nations climate conference happening in Glasgow in less than two weeks will essentially chart a course for humanity for generations to come. That’s because this decade is one where the world must start cutting carbon emissions by nearly 8% per year or blow past a key climate guardrail. The U.S. was slated to be a big player, showing up to the meeting known as COP26 with a major new tool to reduce carbon pollution from…

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How chemical companies avoid paying for pollution

How chemical companies avoid paying for pollution

The New York Times reports: One humid day this summer, Brian Long, a senior executive at the chemical company Chemours, took a reporter on a tour of the Fayetteville Works factory. Mr. Long showed off the plant’s new antipollution technologies, designed to stop a chemical called GenX from pouring into the Cape Fear River, escaping into the air and seeping into the ground water. There was a new high-tech filtration system. And a new thermal oxidizer, which heats waste to…

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Trump organization, already under indictment, faces new criminal inquiry

Trump organization, already under indictment, faces new criminal inquiry

The New York Times reports: Former President Donald J. Trump’s family business, which is already under indictment in Manhattan, is facing a criminal investigation by another prosecutor’s office that has begun to examine financial dealings at a golf course the company owns, according to people with knowledge of the matter. In recent months, the district attorney’s office in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., has subpoenaed records from the course, Trump National Golf Club Westchester, and the town of Ossining, which sets…

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The truth about humanity’s deep past

The truth about humanity’s deep past

David Graeber and David Wengrow write: In some ways, accounts of “human origins” play a similar role for us today as myth did for ancient Greeks or Polynesians. This is not to cast aspersions on the scientific rigour or value of these accounts. It is simply to observe that the two fulfil somewhat similar functions. If we think on a scale of, say, the last 3m years, there actually was a time when someone, after all, did have to light…

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Mapping the heliosphere, which shields our solar system from harmful cosmic rays

Mapping the heliosphere, which shields our solar system from harmful cosmic rays

Virat Markandeya writes: David McComas has a favorite “astrosphere,” the environment created by a star’s stellar wind as it buffets the surrounding interstellar medium. It belongs to a star named Mira. In an image from 2006, Mira is heading to the right, at 291,000 miles an hour, five times the speed our sun ambles through its local interstellar cloud in the Milky Way. You can make out a “bow shock” forming ahead of the star, like one would ahead of…

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Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo

Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo

Phil Torres writes: [O]ver the past two decades, a small group of theorists mostly based in Oxford have been busy working out the details of a new moral worldview called longtermism, which emphasizes how our actions affect the very long-term future of the universe – thousands, millions, billions, and even trillions of years from now. This has roots in the work of Nick Bostrom, who founded the grandiosely named Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) in 2005, and Nick Beckstead, a…

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Democrats scramble for climate Plan C as Manchin dashes their dreams

Democrats scramble for climate Plan C as Manchin dashes their dreams

Politico reports: Joe Manchin is hearing a dire pitch from his colleagues: Don’t blow our chance to save the world. After Manchin rejected a centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s climate plan and rebuffed a separate carbon tax Tuesday, Senate Democrats are urgently pressing their West Virginia colleague for an alternative. Biden and Democrats are trying to clinch a deal on Biden’s larger social spending bill, but the climate plank has become a serious question mark due to Manchin. And some…

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Brazilian leader’s pandemic handling draws explosive allegation: mass homicide

Brazilian leader’s pandemic handling draws explosive allegation: mass homicide

The New York Times reports: A Brazilian congressional panel is set to recommend mass homicide charges against President Jair Bolsonaro, asserting that he intentionally let the coronavirus rip through the country and kill hundreds of thousands in a failed bid to achieve herd immunity and revive Latin America’s largest economy. A report from the congressional panel’s investigation, excerpts from which were viewed by The New York Times ahead of its scheduled release this week, also recommends criminal charges against 69…

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The Trump administration used its food aid program for political gain, congressional investigators find

The Trump administration used its food aid program for political gain, congressional investigators find

ProPublica reports: A $6 billion federal program created to provide fresh produce to families affected by the pandemic was mismanaged and used by the Trump administration for political gain, a new congressional report has found. As a ProPublica investigation revealed last spring and as the new report further details, the Farmers to Families Food Box program gave contracts to companies that had no relevant experience and often lacked necessary licenses. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which released…

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Biden bets his agenda on the inside game

Biden bets his agenda on the inside game

Politico reports: Before Joe Biden can fully pitch the public on his solutions to a lingering pandemic and economic rockiness, he’s got to finish the sale to his own party’s lawmakers. As Democrats on Capitol Hill brace in anticipation of a brutal midterm, Biden is spending an extraordinary amount of time and political capital behind the scenes to convince them to rally around a common framework for social and climate spending. His congressional huddles have accelerated, from phone calls on…

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What drove Homo erectus out of Africa?

What drove Homo erectus out of Africa?

By Josie Glausiusz On a searing hot summer day at ‘Ubeidiya, an ancient site in northern Israel, an undulating expanse of dry grasses and thistles stretches into the distance. Far on the horizon, the mountains of Jordan shimmer through the haze; nearby stand cultivated olive groves and a date palm plantation. Just south of the Sea of Galilee, and up a rocky dirt road, ‘Ubeidiya seems like a secret, with no sign to indicate its archaeological riches. About 1.5 million…

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Neuron bursts can mimic famous AI learning strategy

Neuron bursts can mimic famous AI learning strategy

Allison Whitten writes: Every time a human or machine learns how to get better at a task, a trail of evidence is left behind. A sequence of physical changes — to cells in a brain or to numerical values in an algorithm — underlie the improved performance. But how the system figures out exactly what changes to make is no small feat. It’s called the credit assignment problem, in which a brain or artificial intelligence system must pinpoint which pieces…

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A new history of humanity

A new history of humanity

William Deresiewicz writes: The Dawn of Everything [by David Graeber and David Wengrow] is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized today by the likes of Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Steven Pinker; and accepted more or less universally. The story goes like this. Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the…

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